Haven't We Done Enough??

Yes. And we should leave Iraq now. Don't expect it though,unless you can get your cowardly Congresscritter or Senatron to listen to their constituency. All that bluster you are hearing about in the news is "non-binding" BS. The budget bruhaha? BS too. Still if you don't raise a stink, you will be part of the problem. Remember, these twits are YOUR representatives, even if you personally didn't voter for them. Consider my bringing this article to your attention as my stink-raising.

Blue Ibis

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Anthony Arnove on the Anniversary from Hell

Anthony Arnove
TomDispatch.com/Truthout
Sun, 18 Mar 2007 18:03 EDT

©n/a
One-year-old Shams was brought to the National Iraqi Assistance Center with her uncle to seek plastic surgery in the US. Her mother was killed in the blast that burned her face.

Four years ago, the United States invaded Iraq. It's the anniversary few want to remember; and yet, for all the disillusionment in this country, getting out of Iraq doesn't exactly seem to be on the agenda either. Not really. Here's a little tip, when you want to assess the "withdrawal" proposals being offered by members of Congress. If what's being called for is a withdrawal of American "combat troops" or brigades, or forces, then watch out. "Combat troops" turns out to be a technical term, covering less than half of the American military personnel actually in Iraq.

Here's a simple argument for withdrawal from Iraq (suggested recently in a reader's email to this site) -- and not just of those "combat troops" either. The military newspaper Stars and Stripes reports that, in January 2007, attacks on American troops surged to 180 a day, the highest rate since Baghdad fell in 2003, and double the previous year's numbers. Let's take that as our baseline figure.

Now, get out your calculator: There are 288 days left in 2007. Multiply those by 180 attacks a day -- remembering that the insurgents in Iraq are growing increasingly skilled and using ever more sophisticated weaponry -- and you get 51,840 more attacks on American troops this year. Add in another 65,700 for next year -- remembering that if, for instance, Shiite militias get more involved in fighting American troops at some point, the figures could go far higher -- and you know at least one grim thing likely to be in store for Americans if a withdrawal doesn't happen. (I first wrote a piece at Tomdispatch, "The Time of Withdrawal" back in October 2003, laying out the full reasons why I thought withdrawal was imperative and, unfortunately, it remains grimly relevant three and a half years later.)

Today, Anthony Arnove considers what that fourth anniversary means in Iraq, offering a few figures and comparisons of his own. Arnove is the author of Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal, a small paperback modeled on a famous volume Howard Zinn wrote way back in 1967, arguing for a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. If you want to make the case -- and it's a compelling one -- to friends, neighbors, workmates, those who disagree with you, your Congressional representatives, or anyone else, this is probably the book you should have in your hands. Tom

FOUR YEARS LATER... AND COUNTING

Billboarding the Iraqi Disaster
By Anthony Arnove

As you read this, we're four years from the moment the Bush administration launched its shock-and-awe assault on Iraq, beginning 48 months of remarkable, non-stop destruction of that country ... and still counting. It's an important moment for taking stock of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Here is a short rundown of some of what George Bush's war and occupation has wrought:

Nowhere on Earth is there a worse refugee crisis than in Iraq today. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, some two million Iraqis have fled their country and are now scattered from Jordan, Syria, Turkey, and Iran to London and Paris. (Almost none have made it to the United States, which has done nothing to address the refugee crisis it created.) Another 1.9 million are estimated to be internally displaced persons, driven from their homes and neighborhoods by the U.S. occupation and the vicious civil war it has sparked. Add those figures up - and they're getting worse by the day - and you have close to 16% of the Iraqi population uprooted. Add the dead to the displaced, and that figure rises to nearly one in five Iraqis. Let that sink in for a moment.

Basic foods and necessities, which even Saddam Hussein's brutal regime managed to provide, are now increasingly beyond the reach of ordinary Iraqis, thanks to soaring inflation unleashed by the occupation's destruction of the already shaky Iraqi economy, cuts to state subsidies encouraged by the International Monetary Fund and the Coalition Provisional Authority, and the disruption of the oil industry. Prices of vegetables, eggs, tea, cooking and heating oil, gasoline, and electricity have skyrocketed. Unemployment is regularly estimated at somewhere between 50-70%. One measure of the impact of all this has been a significant rise in child malnutrition, registered by the United Nations and other organizations. Not surprisingly, access to safe water and regular electricity remain well below pre-invasion levels, which were already disastrous after more than a decade of comprehensive sanctions against, and periodic bombing of, a country staggered by a catastrophic war with Iran in the 1980s and the First Gulf War.

In an ongoing crisis, in which hundred of thousands of Iraqis have already died, the last few months have proved some of the bloodiest on record. In October alone, more than six thousand civilians were killed in Iraq, most in Baghdad, where thousands of additional U.S. troops had been sent in August (in the first official Bush administration "surge") with the claim that they would restore order and stability in the city. In the end, they only fueled more violence. These figures -- and they are generally considered undercounts -- are more than double the 2005 rate. Other things have more or less doubled in the last years, including, to name just two, the number of daily attacks on U.S. troops and the overall number of U.S. soldiers killed and wounded. United Nations special investigator Manfred Nowak also notes that torture "is totally out of hand" in Iraq. "The situation is so bad many people say it is worse than it has been in the times of Saddam Hussein."

Given the disaster that Iraq is today, you could keep listing terrible numbers until your mind was numb. But here's another way of putting the last four years in context. In that same period, there have, in fact, been a large number of deaths in a distant land on the minds of many people in the United States: Darfur. Since 2003, according to UN estimates, some 200,000 have been killed in the Darfur region of Sudan in a brutal ethnic-cleansing campaign and another 2 million have been turned into refugees.

How would you know this? Well, if you lived in New York City, at least, you could hardly take a subway ride without seeing an ad that reads: "400,000 dead. Millions uniting to save Darfur." The New York Times has also regularly featured full-page ads describing the "genocide" in Darfur and calling for intervention there under "a chain of command allowing necessary and timely military action without approval from distant political or civilian personnel."

In those same years, according to the best estimate available, the British medical journal The Lancet's door-to-door study of Iraqi deaths, approximately 655,000 Iraqis had died in war, occupation, and civil strife between March 2003 and June 2006. (The study offers a low-end possible figure on deaths of 392,000 and a high-end figure of 943,000.) But you could travel coast to coast without seeing the equivalents of the billboards, subway placards, full-page newspaper ads, or the like for the Iraqi dead. And you certainly won't see, as in the case of Darfur, celebrities on Good Morning America talking about their commitment to stopping "genocide" in Iraq.

Why is it that we are counting and thinking about the Sudanese dead as part of a high-profile, celebrity-driven campaign to "Save Darfur," yet Iraqi deaths still go effectively uncounted, and rarely seem to provoke moral outrage, let alone public campaigns to end the killing? And why are the numbers of killed in Darfur cited without any question, while the numbers of Iraqi dead, unless pitifully low-ball figures, are instantly challenged -- or dismissed?

In our world, it seems, there are the worthy victims and the unworthy ones. To get at the difference, consider the posture of the United States toward the Sudan and Iraq. According to the Bush administration, Sudan is a "rogue state"; it is on the State Department's list of "state sponsors of terrorism." It stands accused of attacking the United States through its role in the suicide-boat bombing of the USS Cole in 2000. [a canard. See here.] And then, of course -- as Mahmood Mamdani pointed out in the London Review of Books recently -- Darfur fits neatly into a narrative of "Muslim-on-Muslim violence," of a "genocide perpetrated by Arabs," a line of argument that appeals heavily to those who would like to change the subject from what the United States has done -- and is doing -- in Iraq. Talking about U.S. accountability for the deaths of the Iraqis we supposedly liberated is a far less comfortable matter.

It's okay to discuss U.S. "complicity" in human rights abuses, but only as long as you remain focused on sins of omission, not commission. We are failing the people of Darfur by not militarily intervening. If only we had used our military more aggressively. When, however, we do intervene, and wreak havoc in the process, it's another matter.

If anything, the focus on Darfur serves to legitimize the idea of U.S. intervention, of being more of an empire, not less of one, at the very moment when the carnage that such intervention causes is all too visible and is being widely repudiated around the globe. This has also contributed to a situation in which the violence for which the United States is the most responsible, Iraq, is that for which it is held the least accountable at home.

If anyone erred in Iraq, we now hear establishment critics of the invasion and occupation suggest, the real problem was administration incompetence or George Bush's overly optimistic belief that he could bring democracy to Arab or Muslim people, who, we are told, "have no tradition of democracy," who are from a "sick" and "broken society" - and, in brutalizing one another in a civil war, are now showing their true nature.

There is a general agreement across much of the political spectrum that we can blame Iraqis for the problems they face. In a much-lauded speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Sen. Barack Obama couched his criticism of Bush administration policy in a call for "no more coddling" of the Iraqi government: The United States, he insisted, "is not going to hold together this country indefinitely." Richard Perle, one of the neoconservative architects of the invasion of Iraq, now says he "underestimated the depravity" of the Iraqis. [From Richard Perle? That's too rich.]Sen. Hillary Clinton, Democratic frontrunner in the 2008 presidential election, recently asked, "How much are we willing to sacrifice [for the Iraqis]?" As if the Iraqis asked us to invade their country and make their world a living hell and are now letting us down.

This is what happens when the imperial burden gets too heavy. The natives come in for a lashing.

The disaster the United States has wrought in Iraq is worsening by the day and its effects will be long lasting. How long they last, and how far they spread beyond Iraq, will depend on how quickly our government can be forced to end its occupation. It will also depend on how all of us react the next time we hear that we must attack another country to make the world safe from weapons of mass destruction, "spread democracy," or undertake a "humanitarian intervention." In the meantime, it's worth thinking about what all those horrific figures will look like next March, on the fifth anniversary of the invasion, and the March after, on the sixth, and the March after that...

Put it on a billboard -- in your head, if nowhere else.

Anthony Arnove is the author of Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal (American Empire Project, Metropolitan) and, with Howard Zinn, of Voices of a People's History of the United States (Seven Stories).

West Bank & Gaza: A Pyschopath's Paradise

Quick, describe the difference between the actions of anti-semitic nazi soldiers and anti-palestinian IDF soldiers. From forcing the oppressed to entertain their oppressors at checkpoints to killing them with beauracracy (see below), it's getting hard to tell the difference. I don't see no moral high ground here folks.

Blue Ibis

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The Twilight Zone/By the book

Gideon Levy
Haaretz
Fri, 02 Feb 2007 14:36 EST

There's no question about it - everything was done by the book. The gate was locked at 7 P.M. and 16,000 people, residents of the villages of Beit Furik and Beit Dajan, were imprisoned behind it until 6 A.M. That's the procedure. A woman who wants to cross the checkpoint at night has to go on foot, to wait until a female soldier comes to do a body check, even if she is about to give birth; that, too, is procedure. And only cars with permits are allowed to enter Nablus, even if dying people are sitting inside them; that is also according to procedure. No soldier deviated from the procedure, everything was done by the book, the book of the occupation.

That is how it happened that a cancer patient was delayed for about an hour and a half at the Hawara checkpoint, until he died in a taxi that was not allowed to enter Nablus, a taxi in which he was trying to get from the hospital to his home, his final request. That is also what happened when the young woman in labor was forced to stand in the cold and the rain for about half an hour and to make her way on foot for several hundred meters while in labor. That's the procedure.

The death of cancer patient Taysir Kaisi was inevitable, but why in such pain, waiting endlessly in a "non-permitted" taxi at the checkpoint? And the young woman from Beit Furik who was about to give birth, Roba Hanani, finally arrived at the hospital in Nablus and successfully gave birth there to her first child, but why with such torture? Why did they deserve it? What would we think if our loved ones were to die or suffer labor pains at a checkpoint separating the city and the village? Life and death are in the hands of the checkpoint: The story of the death of Taysir Kaisi and the birth of Raghad Hanani, between the Hawara checkpoint and the Beit Furik checkpoint, during an easing of restrictions at the checkpoints, less than an hour's drive from Tel Aviv, is a story that should disturb our equanimity.

Taysir Kaisi worked in Hazem Samara's hummus shop in Nablus. He was 45 years old, with seven children, a hummus maker, with two bedrooms and a living room in a house in the Ain Bet Ilma refugee camp in the city. He fell ill a year ago; he was diagnosed with metastasizing liver cancer only a month ago. Dr. Hurani prescribed chemotherapy, which he received at the Al Watani hospital in the city.

His situation deteriorated, his pains increased, Kaisi wanted a second opinion. Someone recommended the Hadassah Hospital, but in the end he only managed to go to the Al Mutla hospital in East Jerusalem. On Monday, January 15, he went to Jerusalem accompanied by his cousin Hussein Kaisi. They had four permits, that is the only way one can travel to receive a second opinion, a permit for two days, one for each day, for two people, one for "the purpose of medical needs" and the other "for the purpose of accompanying a patient," all properly stamped, all after they showed the doctor's appointment from the hospital in Jerusalem, and that is also according to the rules. Kaisi was still in reasonable shape when he left his house on Monday, and he did part of the long trip to Jerusalem walking from one taxi to another, between the checkpoints. At the Qalandiyah checkpoint, they asked him to pull down his pants - security - and he managed that too.

At Al Mutla they decided to hospitalize the patient for four days. He and his cousin had permits for only two days. After several examinations the doctors recommended that Kaisi return home and continue to receive chemotherapy in Nablus, near his family and his children. On Thursday morning Taysir and Hussein left the hospital on their way home. That was Taysir's final journey.

We are now sitting with the cousin Hussein on a rock overlooking the improvised taxi stand at the Hawara checkpoint, exactly where he left Taysir to die in a taxi that was not permitted to cross. The taxi drivers that the two stopped when they left the hospital in East Jerusalem refused to take them, because their permits for medical purposes and for the purpose of accompanying a patient were no longer valid, because of the hospitalization that had lasted two days beyond the permits. That is why the two, the patient and his cousin, traveled by bus to the Qalandiyah checkpoint, after waiting a long time at the bus stop. They crossed the checkpoint on foot, Taysir was still able to walk, and there they took a taxi from Ramallah to bring them to Nablus. Taysir screamed with pain during the entire trip, asking his cousin, "When will we get to Nablus already?"

When they reached the Hawara checkpoint, the checkpoint at the entrance to Nablus, Hussein asked the driver to enter the checkpoint and drive them home. The soldier at the checkpoint asked for permits. Hussein, who speaks Hebrew, explained to him that Taysir was a critically ill man who was returning to his home. The soldier asked for a permit from the taxi driver, but the taxi driver from Ramallah did not have a permit to enter Nablus. "Go back," ordered the soldier. Hussein tried to explain to the soldier that Taysir was incapable of going on foot, and that all he wanted was to get home, but the soldiers insisted. Those are the procedures. They said that Hussein and Taysir could enter Nablus, but only on foot.

Taysir was no longer in any condition to walk even one step. The pains in his stomach had increased during the course of the uncomfortable trip and he was no longer capable of standing on his feet. "This is a cancer patient," Hussein tried to explain, to no avail. The soldiers, he says, did not pay attention. For lack of any other choice, they turned back, doing the soldier's bidding.

The driver parked his taxi at the improvised taxi stand at the front of the checkpoint, Taysir groaned with pain and Hussein asked him to set out with him on foot. Taysir was incapable of doing so. So Hussein went out to look for a taxi with a permit to enter Nablus, leaving his cousin in the taxi. "Take care of my wife and the children," Taysir asked Hussein, apparently his last words.

The desperate Hussein tried to find a driver who would agree to take them through the checkpoint. In an UNRWA vehicle that just passed there was no room, no other car came. One of the taxi drivers suggested that he call the ambulance in Nablus. Only in an ambulance will you be able to cross, the driver advised him. Hussein called the Red Crescent in Nablus, another 15 minutes passed until the ambulance arrived at the checkpoint. The ambulance driver didn't find the two, Hussein ran to him and directed him to the taxi where Taysir was dying.

The paramedic got out of the ambulance and approached Taysir, asking him how he was, but Taysir didn't reply. He was sitting in the back seat of the taxi. The driver of another taxi that was standing at the taxi stand, Jihad Hareb, says that he saw Taysir sitting in the taxi for about an hour and a half, his yellow skin slowly turning black, "as though someone had choked him." The paramedic checked his pulse and respiration and determined that Taysir was dead. Hussein also says that about an hour and a half passed from the moment they arrived at the checkpoint until the ambulance arrived. With the help of two taxi drivers, they removed Taysir from the taxi and carried him to the ambulance, and drove to the hospital in Nablus, where his death was determined. The doctors estimated that Taysir had died about 45 minutes before arriving at the hospital.

Hussein called Taysir's wife, Nawal, and informed her: "Taysir died at the checkpoint, on the way home." He says that it was hard for him to give the news over the phone, Taysir had so much wanted to get home. A B'Tselem investigator, Salma al-Debai, also took testimony from Hussein, in order to prepare a report about the incident on behalf of her organization.

The IDF Spokesman's Office, for its part, responds with a total denial: "An investigation regarding a claim that a Palestinian cancer patient was delayed at the Hawara checkpoint found the claim to be incorrect. An investigation carried out by the Civil Administration's coordinator of health showed that the Palestinian died on the way, during a taxi ride from the hospital in Jerusalem to the Hawara checkpoint."

Some people die at the checkpoint and some are born there: Wrapped in a woolen blanket, an electric heater warming her well-appointed room, lies the infant Raghad Hanani, 25 days old, in her bed. When she grows up, maybe her parents, Roba and Derar - he a Palestinian policeman and she a 25-year-old housewife - will tell her about her mother's travails when she was about to give birth.

It was Roba's first pregnancy. On Friday, December 7, she went into labor. An act of the devil - evening had already fallen on their village, Beit Furik, east of Nablus; an act of the devil - the IDF had locked the iron gate. The coordinator of ground operations of Rabbis for Human Rights, Zacharia Sadeh, says that for months this gate has been locked every night, from 7 P.M. to 6 A.M., imprisoning behind it the 16,000 residents of the two neighboring villages, Beit Furik and Beit Dajan.

It was 8:30 P.M., about an hour and a half after the gate had been locked; the couple ordered a taxi and drove toward the iron gate intending to reach the hospital in Nablus, a few minutes' drive away. There are two roads to Nablus; one is short and is open to Jews only, and one is longer and passes through the Beit Furik checkpoint. Access to both roads passes first of all through the iron gate, and it was locked, as we have said.

The taxi driver, Mahmoud Melitat, approached the iron gate and began to flash his car lights in the direction of the IDF guard tower, which is located a few hundred meters from the gate. Derar says that it was cold and rainy outside. After about 10 minutes, a Hummer arrived. The driver, Melitat, tried to explain to the soldiers that there was a woman in labor in his taxi, but the soldiers insisted that she had to get out and cross the gate on foot.

[any woman who has ever experienced hard labor will know the depth of this cruelty]

The couple got out of the taxi, Roba was crying, holding her stomach, scared about her first birth, leaning on her husband's shoulders. They walked from the gate in the direction of the checkpoint, a distance of several hundred meters, and there the soldiers ordered them to wait until a female soldier came to do a body check on Roba - maybe she was carrying a bomb on her way to Nablus. On the other side of the checkpoint a Palestinian ambulance that had been ordered by Derar was waiting, and the soldiers did not let its driver pass to the other side of the checkpoint, which is closed at night. Derar says that the soldiers did not even allow Roba to get into the ambulance and to wait inside. They said that these were the orders.

So they stood outside until the female soldier arrived, Roba was examined and the permit to go to the hospital was finally given. The IDF Spokesman responded that he was not familiar with this case.

In the end, Raghad was born in the hospital in Nablus. Mother and baby are doing well. Grandma and grandpa, Roba's parents, have seen their granddaughter only once so far, in the hospital. The residents of their village of Salem, which can be seen on the opposite hill, are not allowed to enter Beit Furik.

And nevertheless the Hananis were lucky: Late in 2003 Rula Ashateya, who was also in labor, tried to cross that same accursed checkpoint. The soldiers prevented her from crossing at the time, and Rula crouched to give birth on the ground, hiding behind one of the cement blocks of the checkpoint, with her husband serving as midwife. The newborn apparently hit the rock and died. Her parents had intended to call her Mira, I wrote here at the time, since all their children's names begin with M. Then, too, the IDF Spokesman said that "the soldiers are instructed to allow crossing at the checkpoint in humanitarian cases, at any time and in any situation."

Now and Again, a Reality Check