Magpie

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

Earth to Dubya, Earth to Dubya ...

This magpie really has to wonder what planet our Dear Leader is on after reading this account of his arrival in Australia:

"We're kicking ass," he told Mark Vaile on the tarmac after the Deputy Prime Minister inquired politely of the President's stopover in Iraq en route to Sydney. [Emaphsis and incredulity added]

The word 'delusional' doesn't even begin to cover it.

Via Sydney Morning Herald.

Labels: Australia, Cluelessness, Delusions, Dubya, Iraq, Occupation

| | Posted by Magpie at 3:30 PM | Get permalink

Friday, August 31, 2007

The occupation that just keeps on giving (2).

Cholera is on the rise in northern Iraq as sanitation and medical systems break down from the stresses of coping with thousands of internal refugees. So far, 5000 people have been afflicted with the disease.

"The disease is spreading very fast," Dr Juan Abdallah, a senior official in Kurdistan's health ministry, told a UN agency. "It is the first outbreak of its kind here in the past few decades."

Doctors in Sulaimaiyah in Iraqi Kurdistan have appealed for help because of the rapidly increasing number of cases, saying there is a shortage of medicines. Although the city has been less affected by fighting than almost anywhere in Iraq, Unicef says that mains water is only available for two hours a day and many people have dug shallow wells outside their homes.

"There is a shortage of medicines to control the disease and the focal point [the source of the disease] hasn't been identified yet," Dr Dirar Iyad of Sulaimaniyah General Hospital told the UN news agency Irin. Ten people have already died and he expects more deaths to occur "over the next couple of days as victims are already in an advanced stage of illness."

The number of Iraqis fleeing their homes has risen from 50,000 to 60,000 a month, the UN High Commission for Refugees reported earlier this week.

Via UK Independent.

Labels: Epidemics, Iraq, Occupation, Public Health

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:16 AM | Get permalink

Monday, August 27, 2007

Revealed! The secret paymaster for Iraq's insurgents.

Is it Osama? Or Iran? Nope, you're way off the mark.

It turns out that a major source of funding for Iraq's insurgency is the US treasury. According to a report by McClatchy's Hannah Allam, insurgents are financing at least part of their attacks on US forces by shaking down contractors in Anbar province. In return for cash (siphoned from US reconstruction funds), the insurgents allow contractors to move people and supplies, and carry out their projects with a modicum of safety. At minimum, this protection racket has generated hundreds of thousands of US dollars since 2003. It's more likely, say Iraqi government sources, that the figure is actually in the millions.

A U.S. company with a reconstruction contract hires an Iraqi sub-contractor to haul supplies along insurgent-ridden roads. The Iraqi contractor sets his price at up to four times the going rate because he'll be forced to give 50 percent or more to gun-toting insurgents who demand cash payments in exchange for the supply convoys' safe passage.

One Iraqi official said the arrangement makes sense for insurgents. By granting safe passage to a truck loaded with $10,000 in goods, they receive a "protection fee" that can buy more weapons and vehicles. Sometimes the insurgents take the goods, too.

"The violence in Iraq has developed a political economy of its own that sustains it and keeps some of these terrorist groups afloat," said Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh ...

"I put it right in my contracts as a line item for 'logistics and security,'" said one Iraqi contractor who is still working for a major American company with several long-term projects in Anbar. "The Americans think you're hiring a security company, but how you execute it is something else entirely. This is how it's been working since Day 1."

One Iraqi contractor who is working on an American-funded rebuilding project in the provincial capital of Ramadi said he faced two choices when he wanted to bring in a crane, heavy machinery and workers from Baghdad: either hire a private security company to escort the supplies for up to $6,000 a truck, or pay off locals with insurgent connections.

He chose the latter, and got $120,000 for a U.S. contract he estimates to be worth no more than $20,000. The contractor asked that specific details of the project not be disclosed for fear he'll be identified and lose the job.

"The insurgents always remind us they're there," the contractor said. "Sometimes they hijack a truck or kidnap a driver and then we pay and, if we're lucky, we get our goods returned. It's just to make sure we know how it works.

"Insurgents control the roads," he added. "Americans don't control the roads — and everything from Syria and Jordan goes through there."

Despite the widespread and longstanding diversion of American money into insurgents' pockets, the US embassy in Baghdad refused to answer McClatchy's questions about the shakedowns. An embassy spokesperson said only that US contracts contain 'checks and balances' that prevent any 'irregularities' from occurring.

Yeah. Right. And I'm the f'n empress of the universe.

Via McClatchy Washington Bureau.

Labels: Insurgency, Iraq, Occupation

| | Posted by Magpie at 11:11 AM | Get permalink

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Iraqi insurgents = Al-Qaeda = Khmer Rouge.

To most people, the logical leaps needed to make that equation would be impossible, but nothing is too difficult for our Dear Leader.

In a speech given to members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars earlier today in Kansas City, Dubya unloaded some of the most preposterous misunderstandings (and outright lies) about the world's history since the Second World War that this magpie has had the misfortune to hear. For example, the prez said that the US was responsible for the decolonization of Asia and after 1945. (It wasn't.) He likened the 'war on terror' to the war against Japan and the Korean war. (As a historian, I can't think of any significant similarities.) And he attributed the murderous rule of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia to the fact that the US withdrew its troops from Southeast Asia at the end of the Vietnam War. (In fact, the success of the Khmer Rouge was due to a CIA-sponsored coup that replaced a neutralist government with one more sympathetic to US war aims in Vietnam. The Khmer Rouge wouldn't have had a chance without a US-backed enemy to fight against.)

However, all that pseudo-history pales when compared to Dubya's main contention: If the US withdraws from Iraq, Al-Qaeda will not only wreak destruction on the Iraqi people like that suffered by Cambodians in the Khmer Rouge years, but Osama bin Laden will bring a similar reign of terror here to the US.

Bin Laden has declared that "the war [in Iraq] is for you [the US] or us to win. If we win it, it means your disgrace and defeat forever." Iraq is one of several fronts in the war on terror -- but it's the central front -- it's the central front for the enemy that attacked us and wants to attack us again. And it's the central front for the United States and to withdraw without getting the job done would be devastating.

If we were to abandon the Iraqi people, the terrorists would be emboldened, and use their victory to gain new recruits. As we saw on September the 11th, a terrorist safe haven on the other side of the world can bring death and destruction to the streets of our own cities. Unlike in Vietnam, if we withdraw before the job is done, this enemy will follow us home. And that is why, for the security of the United States of America, we must defeat them overseas so we do not face them in the United States of America.

This, of course, completely ignores the facts that 1) there was no al-Qaeda threat in Iraq prior to the US-led invasion; 2) Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11; and 3) the US occupation of Iraq is what has turned that country into a terrorist magnet and training ground. But hey, facts never get in Dubya's way when he's trying to support some stupid policy that he's already committed himself to.

If you have a strong stomach, I strongly suggest reading Dubya's whole speech. I'm sure the GOP is already sending out talking points based on what he said, so you might as well get a good handle on the arguments for the occupation that the 30-percenters will be tossing at you between now and when the administration has to make its Iraq progress report to Congress next month.

Labels: 'War on Terrorism', al-Qaeda, Dubya, Ignorance, Occupation, Surge

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:05 AM | Get permalink

Thursday, August 9, 2007

The US occupation of Iraq just keeps on giving.

In this case, that gift is the millions of refugees who've fled Iraq for neighboring countries. About 1.4 million of those refugees have landed in Syria, and they now make up 8 percent of that country's population. The presence of the refugees is 'pushing Syria to the edge,' according to a report by freelance journalist Hugh Naylor.

"The situation is starting to scare a lot of people," said Samir Taqqi, a political analyst at the Orient Center for Studies, a Damascus think tank.

Public services are deteriorating. State-run hospitals, inundated by tens of thousands of Iraqis seeking free medical care, are short on staff and medical supplies. Unable to afford serving cafeteria food, many are asking patients to bring their own.

At public schools across Damascus, the capital, overwhelmed teachers are forced to work double shifts to accommodate Iraqis pushing class sizes to as high as 70 students. Meanwhile, rolling power blackouts blanket the city for up to five hours a day because the country's electrical grid can't meet increasing energy demands during one of the warmest summers on record. Blackouts in some suburbs reportedly last up to 12 hours.

"The Syrian economy doesn't have the resources to sustain current subsidies for food and energy," said Taqqi.

One way to understand the magnitude of Syria's refugee crisis is to try to imagine what things in the US would be like if, over the course of 4 years, more than 28 million Mexican refugees poured into the country as the result of a civil war. Both the sheer magnitude of the immigration and the presence of a large, unstable country next door would wreak havoc on the US economy and political institutions. While I doubt that Dubya's administration had any idea of the refugee problem that would result from the US-led invasion of Iraq, this magpie is certain that Syria's refugee-related troubles aren't causing anyone in the White House to shed even crocodile tears.

As Naylor's report points out, however, Syria is not the only country dealing with a huge influx of Iraqi refugees. Jordan is hosting 700,000 Iraqis — in other words, more than 1 in 10 residents of Jordan have fled Iraq. This situation is no doubt reminding Jordanian officials (and probably the Syrian government as well) of an earlier influx of Palestinian refugees that resulted in armed battles between government forces and armed Palestinian militants in the early 1970s.

Addition: I didn't quite complete my thought there at the end. The reason I brought up the experience of the Jordanians in dealing with a large Palestinian refugee population was to draw an analogy between the regional results of the Israel/Palestine conflict and the current occupation of Iraq. In the latter confict, action — or lack of action — by the US created and perpetuated a state of affairs (lack of a viable Palestinian state) that has kept the region in an uproar for the last 40 years or so. And which, arguably, led to the 9/11 attacks. My suspicion is that the refugee crisis in Syria and Jordan may be one of the first signs that the Iraq occupation is causing similar regional problems — and that no one in the White House gives a sh*t.

Via SF Chronicle.

Labels: Iraq, Occupation, Refugees, Surge, Syria

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:30 AM | Get permalink

Monday, August 6, 2007

About those 190,000 weapons missing in Iraq.

This magpie wasn't surprised to hear the news, given that Dubya's military has this longstanding problem with keeping tabs on armaments.

If our Dear Leader couldn't see that arms were kept out of the hands of Iraq's insurgents in 2003 and 2004, why should his minions be doing anything different now?

Labels: Dubya, Incompetence, Insurgency, Iraq, Occupation

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:35 PM | Get permalink