Friday, December 17, 2010

The children, the stalemate, the deals

In Ban's mind, everything was perfect in Baghdad before the civil war. Her family had Internet access and satellite TV, and she could do what she wanted. But her Shiite Muslim family lived in the mainly Sunni neighborhood of Dora, and in early 2007, the country's violence caught up with them.
Her father was wounded when gunmen ambushed his car. Soon after, a neighbor warned her parents that they were on a list of people to be killed. The family fled to Najaf, where they knew they would be safe and Ban's father, a doctor, could find work.
Najaf was a rude awakening. Their neighbors didn't say hello to Ban and her older sister, Dina, the way people did in Baghdad. The girls missed their friends.

The above is from Ned Parker's "Teen angst heightened by war, sectarianism" (Los Angeles Times via San Francisco Chronicle) and maybe at some point Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates (as well as others in the administration) can stop a minute to think about what eternal war has done to a generation of young people who have grown up under it? Though unable to think about the victims, Hillary continues to demand more money for the State Dept despite the nation having yet to emerge from the Great Recession. Someone inform department heads that everyone has to take a hit due to the economy. Isn't that what Barack keeps insisting? So start applying to the administration as well. State needs to quit spending beyond its needs and if Barack or anyone's hungry for what State's been offering in diplomatic cables, Liz Smith provides gossip for free each week day at wowOwow.

Meanwhile the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has announced its objection to Europe's forced returns of Iraqi refugees. Spokesperson Melissa Fleming states, "UNHCR strongly reiterates its call on countries to refrain from deporting Iraqis who originate from the most perilous parts of the country." UNHCR adds, "In the latest incident, Sweden on Wednesday forcibly returned a group of some 20 Iraqis to Baghdad, including five Christians originally from the Iraqi capital. Fleming, speaking to journalists in Geneva, said UNHCR staff in Baghdad had since interviewed three of the Christians and three Arab Muslims among the group. One of the Christian men said he escaped Iraq in 2007 after militiamen threatened to kill him. He travelled through several countries in the Middle East and Europe before reaching Sweden, where he applied for asylum." And as wrong and as bad as that is, The Local reports that the Swedish government deported one 52-year-old male to Iraq . . . but he wasn't from Iraq. He was from Iran.

Over the weekend, KRG president Massoud Barzani spoke of Kurdish independence. Some feigned shock. Hiwa Osman (Rudaw) explores the remarks and context today:

Once again, the people of Kurdistan have realized that neither the media nor those who raised a brouhaha over President Barzani’s statement about self-determination seem to have understood or want to understand what the new Iraq is about.
Barzani has been under fire for publicly stating that Kurds have a right to self-determination, an argument that is not new. He was simply repeating a long-held Kurdish position on self-determination.
This should not have shocked anyone -- but the exaggerated, critical response to Barzani's statement shows that the new reality of Iraq is not accepted by everyone.

Again, this was news when it happened and remains news now. Barzani's party (KDP) won in the July 2009 elections, destroyed Jalal Talabani's party (PUK), due to the fact that Barzani knows not to call Kurdish independence a "dream" that won't and can't come true. It was a signal to Kurds in Iraq and across the globe and it's part of the leveraging that the US press is ignoring but is going on currently as Barzani attempts to play maybe-we-walk to force Nouri to make additional concessions to the Kurds or risk tanking his shot at a second term as prime minister.

March 7th, Iraq concluded Parliamentary elections. The Guardian's editorial board noted in August, "These elections were hailed prematurely by Mr Obama as a success, but everything that has happened since has surely doused that optimism in a cold shower of reality." 163 seats are needed to form the executive government (prime minister and council of ministers). When no single slate wins 163 seats (or possibly higher -- 163 is the number today but the Parliament added seats this election and, in four more years, they may add more which could increase the number of seats needed to form the executive government), power-sharing coalitions must be formed with other slates, parties and/or individual candidates. (Eight Parliament seats were awarded, for example, to minority candidates who represent various religious minorities in Iraq.) Ayad Allawi is the head of Iraqiya which won 91 seats in the Parliament making it the biggest seat holder. Second place went to State Of Law which Nouri al-Maliki, the current prime minister, heads. They won 89 seats. Nouri made a big show of lodging complaints and issuing allegations to distract and delay the certification of the initial results while he formed a power-sharing coalition with third place winner Iraqi National Alliance -- this coalition still does not give them 163 seats. November 10th a power sharing deal resulted in the Parliament meeting for the second time and voting in a Speaker. And then Iraqiya felt double crossed on the deal and the bulk of their members stormed out of the Parliament. David Ignatius (Washington Post) explains, "The fragility of the coalition was dramatically obvious Thursday as members of the Iraqiya party, which represents Sunnis, walked out of Parliament, claiming that they were already being double-crossed by Maliki. Iraqi politics is always an exercise in brinkmanship, and the compromises unfortunately remain of the save-your-neck variety, rather than reflecting a deeper accord. " After that, Jalal Talabani was voted President of Iraq. Talabani then named Nouri as the prime minister-delegate. If Nouri can meet the conditions outlined in Article 76 of the Constitution (basically nominate ministers for each council and have Parliament vote to approve each one with a minimum of 163 votes each time and to vote for his council program) within thirty days, he becomes the prime minister. If not, Talabani must name another prime minister-delegate. In 2005, Iraq took four months and seven days to pick a prime minister-delegate. It took eight months and two days to name Nouri as prime minister-delegate. His first go-round, on April 22, 2006, his thirty day limit kicked in. May 20, 2006, he announced his cabinet -- sort of. Sort of because he didn't nominate a Minister of Defense, a Minister of Interior and a Minister of a National Security. This was accomplished, John F. Burns wrote in "For Some, a Last, Best Hope for U.S. Efforts in Iraq" (New York Times), only with "muscular" assistance from the Bush White House. Nouri declared he would be the Interior Ministry temporarily. Temporarily lasted until June 8, 2006. This was when the US was able to strong-arm, when they'd knocked out the other choice for prime minister (Ibrahim al-Jaafari) to install puppet Nouri and when they had over 100,000 troops on the ground in Iraq. Nouri had no competition. That's very different from today. The Constitution is very clear and it is doubtful his opponents -- including within his own alliance -- will look the other way if he can't fill all the posts in 30 days. As Leila Fadel (Washington Post) observes, "With the three top slots resolved, Maliki will now begin to distribute ministries and other top jobs, a process that has the potential to be as divisive as the initial phase of government formation." Jane Arraf (Christian Science Monitor) points out, "Maliki now has 30 days to decide on cabinet posts - some of which will likely go to Iraqiya - and put together a full government. His governing coalition owes part of its existence to followers of hard-line cleric Muqtada al Sadr, leading Sunnis and others to believe that his government will be indebted to Iran." The stalemate ends when the country has a prime minister. It is now nine months, nine days and counting. Thursday November 25th, Nouri was finally 'officially' named prime minister-designate. Leila Fadel (Washington Post) explained, "In 30 days, he is to present his cabinet to parliament or lose the nomination." Steven Lee Myers (New York Times) added, "Even if Mr. Maliki meets the 30-day deadline in late December -- which is not a certainty, given the chronic disregard for legal deadlines in Iraqi politics -- the country will have spent more than nine months under a caretaker government without a functioning legislature. Many of Iraq's most critical needs -- from basic services to investment -- have remained unaddressed throughout the impasse." Jane Arraf (Al Jazeera) offered, "He has an extremely difficult task ahed of him, these next 30 days are going to be a very tough sell for all of these parties that all want something very important in this government. It took a record eight months to actually come up with this coalition, but now what al-Maliki has to do is put all those people in the competing positions that backed him into slots in the government and he has a month to day that from today."


Nizar Latif (The National) explains, "Negotiations continue, with parliament due to discuss the matter in tomorrow's session. Parliament will make the final decision on exactly what status the council is to have, and it will require a constitutional revision. Amending the constitution involves navigating a labyrinth of parliamentary procedure, something likely to take many months. Until all of that is complete, the council will have no powers at all, regardless of any agreements between rival blocs." Parliament's scheduled session for tomorrow was supposed to take place on Tuesday. In a completely no-surprise move, the session was postponed.

Wednesday, Reidar Visser (Iraq and Gulf Analysis) offered his take on US efforts:

First, the Obama administration played a key role in Sunnifying the Iraqi nationalism of Iraqiyya so that it could be more acceptable to Iran: By encouraging Iraqiyya to accept a junior, “Sunni” role in a power-sharing arrangement for the next government where the Iranian-supported Shiite parties clearly have the upper hand, Washington basically gave Iran what it wanted in Iraq in terms of a politics defined in sectarian fronts. To add insult to injury advisers to Obama went on to spin the US involvement in the affair as a triumph of American diplomacy against Iran! Today the US government went a little further: To celebrate the latest “progress”, it decided it was time for the UN Security Council to give up some of what little remains of outside-world leverage in Iraq, including a formal termination of the oil-for-food programme and restrictions relating to weapons of mass destruction.

TV notes. On PBS' Washington Week, Janet Hook (Wall St. Journal), Doyle McManus (Los Angeles Times), Martha Raddatz (ABC News) and Pete Williams (NBC News) join Gwen around the table. Gwen now has a weekly column at Washington Week and the current one is " The Sincerity Test." This week, Bonnie Erbe will sit down with Debra Carmajam. Eleanor Holmes Norton, Nicole Kurokawa and Genevieve Wood to discuss the week's news on the latest broadcast of PBS' To The Contrary. And this week's To The Contrary online extra is a discussion on the topic of our bodies, our health. Turning to broadcast TV, Sunday CBS' 60 Minutes offers:

Editor's Note
A full-length "60 Minutes" program has been prepared, but due to live CBS Television Network programming before and after Sunday's broadcast, whether time will allow a whole hour cannot be determined until Sunday night. Both programs will contain the two-part story listed below.

Endless Memory
Lesley Stahl reports on the recently discovered phenomenon of "superior autobiographical memory," the ability to recall nearly every day of one's life. Stahl interviews the handful of individuals known to possess the skill, which scientists are only now beginning to study. (This is a double-length segment) | Watch Video

60 Minutes, Sunday, Dec. 19, at 7 p.m. ET/PT.


Radio note. The Diane Rehm Show begins airing on most NPR stations (and streaming live) at 10:00 a.m. EST. Her guests for the first hour (domestic news roundup) are Jeanne Cummings (Politico), Ron Elving (NPR) and Greg Ip (Economist). For the second hour (international roundup), Diane's joined by Daniel Dombey (Financial Times), Jay Solomon (Wall St. Journal) and Nancy A. Youssef (McClatchy Newspapers).


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Justice Dept sues city and state

The US Justice Dept has filed a lawsuit against the city of Brockton and the state of Massachusetts over Iraq War veteran Brian Benvie whom they argue was denied a promotion in the Brockton Police due to his service. The Justice Dept issued the following notice yesterday:


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Justice Department Files Complaint Against City of Brockton, Massachusetts, and Commonwealth of Massachusetts for Violating the Employment Rights of an Iraq War Veteran
WASHINGTON – The Justice Department announced today the filing of a complaint against the city of Brockton, Mass., and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, for violating the rights of an Iraq war veteran, under the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act of 1994 (USERRA).

The lawsuit alleges that the defendants violated Brockton Police Sergeant Brian Benvie’s USERRA rights when they failed to fully recognize the retroactive promotion to sergeant he earned after taking a make-up promotional exam upon his return from active duty military service in Iraq in 2007. Benvie’s score on the exam placed him at the top of the promotional list, and he was promoted to sergeant in July 2008. Benvie subsequently learned that another patrolman with a score lower than his had been promoted to sergeant in October 2007. After initially refusing, the city eventually retroactively adjusted Benvie’s promotion to the date he would have been promoted but for his military service. However, the defendants subsequently failed to give full effect to that promotion by denying Benvie the opportunity to take the lieutenants’ promotional exam.

Among other things, the suit seeks to provide Benvie with a makeup exam for the lieutenants’ promotional exam that he was not permitted to take; place Benvie on the appropriate eligibility list based on his score on the lieutenants’ exam; and, should his score merit it, retroactively promote Benvie to lieutenant with all of the rights, benefits and seniority that he would have enjoyed if he had been permitted to take the exam in October 2008 and had achieved the same score.

"No service member should miss out on opportunities for advancement in the civilian workplace because he or she answered a call to duty," said Thomas E. Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division. "We will use all of the tools at our disposal to protect the rights of those men and women who serve our country and make sacrifices to protect our rights."

U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts Carmen M. Ortiz said, "Our service men and women make the ultimate sacrifice by serving our country. We cannot allow employers to disadvantage them based on their military service or military status."

The Justice and Labor Departments place a high priority on the enforcement of service members’ rights under USERRA. "Our two agencies work closely together to ensure that our service members are treated right when they return from service," said Ray Jefferson, Assistant Secretary of Labor for Veterans’ Employment and Training Service.

This lawsuit arose as a result of a complaint Benvie filed with the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL). After an investigation, DOL determined that Benvie’s complaint had merit and referred the matter to the Justice Department. The case is being handled by the Employment Litigation Section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and the Civil Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts.


In other US government news, Carol Cratty and Pam Benson (CNN) report, "U.S. officials say they have no specific and credible information about planned terror attacks on the United States, but they have issued an intelligence bulletin to state and local law enforcement warning terrorists could target large crowds at holiday gatherings." Happy holidays! And who invited Nouri? Khalid al-ANsary (Reuters) reports that the news or 'news' of an attack comes via the Iraqi government or 'government,' specifically the Ministry of the Interior's Dihya Hussein who claims a suspect provided the details in the midst of a confession or 'confession.' And in an apparent effort to share the seasonal cheer, AFP reports that the Minister of the Interior Jawad al-Bolani, has informed the Iranian government that he will share "his ministry's support and experience in fighting terror" following a suicide bombing in Iran. When someone looks across the globe for a region that's safe and secure, Iraq really doesn't make the top ten or even top 100. In other grab the happy face stamp and grin broadly, Khalid al-Ansary and Waleed Ibrahim (Reuters) report that Iraq's "restarting its nuclear medicine programme" because who wouldn't want Iraq to have nuclear capability right before the potentially upcoming coup that will make Iran's 1979 overthrow of their US puppet look like Holiday On Ice.
The following community sites updated last night:

And we'll close with this from the Senate Democratic Policy Committee's video page, Dick Durbin addressing the topic of earmarks.





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thomas friedman is a great man






oh boy it never ends























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Thursday, December 16, 2010

I Hate The War

"Mr. President, please talk to us!" cried protesters outside the White House this morning after they marched there from Lafayette Park. President Barack Obama didn't speak to them and it's unknown whether he even heard them.

Around the same time, at the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, ABC News' Jake Tapper asked Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates about "the new ABC News/Washington Post poll, 60 percent of the American people say the war in Afghanistan is not worth fighting anymore. That's a high. Considering that the U.S. withdrawal date is not until 2014, how can the Obama administration continue to wage this war with so little public support?" Platitudes were offered by the Secretary of State who seemed decades -- if not centuries away -- from her former self as First Lady in the 90s when she worried about the children. Never in her answer -- possibly in keeping with her new position -- did she mention children -- Iraqi or Afghan or American -- who are growing up in the constant shadow of war and all the fear and doubt that comes with it.

Clinton replied, "I’m well aware of the popular concern and I understand it. But I don’t think leaders, and certainly this President, will not make decisions that are matters of life and death and the future security of our nation based on polling. That would not be something that you will see him or any of us deciding. We’re trying to do the very best we can with the leadership that we’ve all been entrusted with to avoid making the mistakes that were made in previous years, where we did not develop the kind of relationship and understanding and coordination with either Afghanistan or Pakistan that would enable us to have a better way of interacting with them and perhaps preventing some of what came to pass, and where, frankly, we walked away at some critical moments in the last 25, 30 years that created conditions that we had a hand in, unfortunately, contributing to." Secretary Gates also played the people-are-too-stupid-we-know-best card declaring, "First of all, let me just add to Secretary Clinton’s response to you that I think if you look at polling in almost all of our 49 coalition partners’ countries, public opinion is in doubt. Public opinion would be majority -- in terms of majority, against their participation. I would just say that it’s obviously the responsibility of leaders to pay attention to public opinion, but at the end of the day their responsibility is to look out for the public interest and to look to the long term." Neither secretary holds a post to which they were elected -- nor has either ever won a national election -- but they seem to hold their own views in higher esteem than the views of the majority of Americans.

While democracy and rule of the people were being kicked aside in the press room, outside in 24 degree weather, activists were chanting "Peace now!" and "Stop the killing! Stop the wars!" and "The war is a lie!" A number of them walked past the barricades and up to the White House fence. Pressing their backs against the fence, they faced the press, the police and many other activists as a police officer walking through the demonstration appeared to tell his partner, "This should be fascinating."

Activist and author David Swanson explained, "I'm here to help those who are doing more than saying the right thing to pollsters on the telephone. A majority of Americans saying we've got to end these wars, the president sitting there saying 4 more years and then we'll rename it non-combat -- that's outrageous, it's unacceptable, it's against the majority will of our people, of the Afghan people, of the people around the world. Veterans for Peace have been asking for a meeting with this president on behalf of the majority for years. We can't get a meeting. we're coming here, we're going to go to jail. The good people are in jail. The people who have not been charged with any crimes are in jail and the criminals are roaming free."

The activists sang "We Shall Overcome" and "Down By The Riverside."

"We have postcards that we want to deliver to the president," declared Veterans for Peace's Mike Ferner. "We have asked him in a letter three weeks ago to meet with us and to hear our concerns as military veterans of this tragedy and the wrong headedness of these wars. We've not been able to meet with him so we have a number of these postcards that have been signed by people around the country."

Since he wouldn't meet with them, they "delivered" the postcards by tossing them over the fence, onto the White House yard in what several present dubbed "airmail."

At War Is A Crime, Bill Hughes offers a slide show of the protest, and there is this video, this video and this video that we noted in the snapshot today and from which I pulled all info on the action when Hilda e-mailed to remind me that no closed captions and no text doesn't help her a bit. Thank you, Hilda. I'm rushing on those snapshots and was almost done dictating it when I was told there was video at David Swanson's site. I wasn't thinking about anything other than where to insert it into that already dictated section and if that was the last thing I needed to include and could call the snapshot "done." My apologies to anyone else who felt short changed. You were right too and it was stupid of me not to have checked to see if there was anything other than video there. I wrote the above to give those who can't stream or who can stream but have hearing issues a sense of the video. Again, my apologies. Thank you, Hilda, for kindly pointing out my stupidity.

It's over, I'm done writing songs about love
There's a war going on
So I'm holding my gun with a strap and a glove
And I'm writing a song about war
And it goes
Na na na na na na na
I hate the war
Na na na na na na na
I hate the war
Na na na na na na na
I hate the war
Oh oh oh oh
-- "I Hate The War" (written by Greg Goldberg, on The Ballet's Mattachine!)

Last week, ICCC's number of US troops killed in Iraq since the start of the illegal war was 4432. Tonight it is [PDF format warning] 4433.



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