Friday, June 24, 2011

Thug Nouri and First Lady Moqtada

11friday

It's Friday and, as the screen snap from Iraqi Revolution demonstrates, protests continue in Baghdad. Meanwhile Tony Clarke is a member of the House of Lords in England (he's Labour Party, for those who wonder) and he's penned "Obama must tackle Iraq's new dictator" (Independent of London):

Few could have expected it. Iraq’s Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, once the darling of bi-Partisan US administrations, today seems engulfed in domestic upheaval as the Arab Spring has shown no sign of abating in Iraq.
But rather than choosing to resign power respectfully like in Tunisia and Egypt, al-Maliki seems to have made up his mind to hold a firm grip on power using deadly force like fellow dictators in Libya and Syria.
No longer able to tolerate the weekly demonstrations by Iraqis in central Baghdad’s al-Tahrir Square, and with widespread arrests failing to subdue the population irate over corruption and lack of basic services, earlier this month al-Maliki sent his thugs under the disguise of ordinary government supporters to brutally attack protestors demanding the resignation of his government.
Iyad Allawi, a former Iraqi Prime Minister and the de-facto leader of the opposition movement, recently launched a stunning televised attack on al-Maliki accusing him of running a new dictatorship in Iraq and owing his Premiership to Iran’s theocratic rulers.

Will the cry for Barack to face reality get larger? Will Nouri continue to be the designated thug of the occupation?

Al Mada reports that Nouri spent yesterday blaming others for his problems including insisting that politicians and the media worked together to malign his 100 Days and that the 100 Days program he implemented was a success. As per usual, Moqtada al-Sadr issues statements of support for Nouri. He did the same when protests were really taking hold last February. Moqtada al-Sadr has apparently cast himself in the role of First Lady of Iraq.


Al Mada also offers a profile of Ayad Allawi based on anonymous sourcing and it paints him as depressed, considering ending political participation, weighing whether to make London home, etc. He is said to be depressed over the continued upheaval in Iraq and Nouri's inability to lead. Al Rafidayn reports on another political player in the mix, Ammar al-Hakim. The Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq president is calling for all participants to continue dialogue and he cautioned against reaching the "point of no return."


David Bacon's latest book is Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon Press) which won the CLR James Award. We'll close with this from Bacon's "SOUTH OF SILICON VALLEY, HUNGER HAUNTS HOLLISTER" (New American Media):

Every year when the spring comes, families get in their big pickup trucks in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, or the Salt River Valley in Arizona, and head for Hollister. Generations of families have made the annual migration to get jobs in the San Benito Foods cannery, or in the local fields on the machines harvesting the tomatoes that get canned there.
This year, say Harley and Emillio Delgado, work has been really slow.
"Last week we were picking apricots. It's the weather - it's been raining a lot, and not really warm," according to Harley. The two live in the migrant worker camp, set up just south of town in the 1940s to house the field labor needed by local ranchers. Today part of the camp consists of trailers, and another part buildings built after the war.
Every Saturday, Israel Banuelos pulls his truck out of a parking lot on the other side of Hollister, behind the warehouse that houses the county food bank. The truck is filled with bags of food, and the camp is his first stop. The Delgado brothers are among the many that line up.
In one of the great contradictions of American poverty, people who spend their working lives producing the food consumed by millions in cities all over the country often don't have enough to eat themselves.




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Muddled 'leaders'

Joe Gould (Military Times -- link has text and video) reports Barack's carefully selected visit to Fort Drum which was supposed to provide excellent spin posing as press has backfired. Speaking to the troops present, Barack prattled on about being able to personally award Jared Monti with the Medal of Honor and how he remembers it because it was the first time he did that where it wasn't posthumously. Gould reports:


Except that Monti was receiving it posthumously. At a White House ceremony in 2009, Obama presented Sgt. 1st Class Monti’s parents with the medal for his heroic actions in Afghanistan. Monti, 30, was leading a scouting mission along the Pakistan border when a resupply helicopter blew the unit’s cover; Monti twice ran into gunfire to retrieve a wounded comrade before he was killed by an enemy grenade.
Obama appeared to have confused Monti with the only living Medal of Honor recipient, Sal Giunta. The president’s got plenty on his plate, to be sure. But if he’s sincere when he says that it’s his greatest honor to be the commander-in-chief, you’d think he’d be able to remember the lone recipient of the military’s highest honor.

There has been no apology as yet but, in an update, Gould notes Jay Carney, White House flack, has said Barack was tired and spoke off the top of his head.

Yesterday, Baghdad was slammed with bombings in what Tim Craig (Washington Post) notes was "the worst [attack] in Baghdad in several months." Xinhua notes a Baghdad home invasion targeting a Sahwa ("Awakening," "Sons Of Iraq") in which the Sahwa was killed and you can relate the two in Nouri's lack of concern about the security situation. Violence continues to get worse and has for months. For months, Nouri's refused to name a Minister of Defense, a Minister of Interior or a Minister of National Security. Those three security positions remain vacant and not even the increased violence has forced Nouri to do what, according to the Constitution, should have taken place months ago. Sahwa were largely Sunni fighters (but not just Sunni according to Gen David Petraeus) who were put on the US payroll so they would stop attacking US service members and equipment and they were supposed to transition to the Iraqi payroll and to Iraqi security jobs. Instead, Nouri became more infamous for not paying them, for issuing arrest warrants on them and for antagonizing them. As Sahwa felt targeted and persecuted and went unpaid, many became less and less concerned with risking their lives to work at keeping Iraq secure. There was concern among the US military brass that this would happen and that, if it did, the security situation would worsen.

The entire deterioration can and should be pinned on Nouri. He was the last prime minister and managed to become the new prime minister. He's been in power since spring 2006. The instability, lack of basic services, lack of jobs and increased violence are all a referendum of sorts on his 'leadership.'

Al Mada reports that drugs are on the rise in Iraq, illegal drug use and illegal drugs are flooding into the country. They note rumors that farms are being groomed to grow poppy (opium) and the denials of that grooming from the Agricultural Ministry which states it is monitoring all the fields. Increased drug use is another thing that's happened under Nouri's leadership. Considering the intolerance of drugs in Iran, no wonder the Iranian leadership is losing confidence in Nouri.
Meanwhile John Chua (New American Media) reports on Iraqi bloggers including those who post on Wahda:


The paucity of Arabic blogs in Iraq motivated us to launch Wahda in 2009. Since then a new wave of online activity has emerged, not just documenting and organizing protests or reporting on grievances, but also blogging about arts, culture and other specific interests.
There’s even a site called Iraqblogcountexp.blogspot.com that catalogs the growing diversity of bloggers. Although many are still blogging in English, a growing number like Iraqistreets.com (by young bloggers in Baghdad) and Ara-ashjian.blogspot.com (about Armenian-Iraqi issues) are also using Arabic. Meanwhile, Wahda remains committed to encouraging people to communicate across sectarian divides and the best way to do so is with the language most Iraqis use—Arabic.
Attracting commentators from all over the country, Wahda is a central site for Iraqis to congregate online. Many of them have their ear to the ground. For example, it was a citizen journalist on Wahda.net who reported recently that the Kurdish Regional Government finally agreed to negotiate with the protestors, a news development largely ignored in the West.
Wahda gets over 18,000 visitors a month, a high figure considering only five percent of Iraqis have Internet at home. Even local mainstream media have taken notice of citizen journalism on Wahda and other sites. This is the general trend in the region.



I was and am unfamiliar with Wahda but the article mentioned former Iraqi bloggers like Riverbend so I checked it out. Today, at least, it's more of a lifestyle section and there's no indication that a war is taking place in Iraq. Only two articles on the main page qualify as news and one is on the KRG, the other is Faizan Aldanek's brief report (3 paragrahps) on Nasiriyah.

The following community sites -- plus Antiwar.com and Jane Fonda -- updated last night and this morning:


And we'll close with this from the Santa Fe New Mexican's "Light? What Light? Bring 'em All Home"

The president couldn't have chosen worse words Wednesday as a framework for announcing a minimal troop withdrawal from Afghanistan: "The light of a secure peace can be seen in the distance."

Shades of Lyndon Johnson, linked forever to the "light at the end of the tunnel" he sought to show a press and public increasingly and properly wary of our war in Vietnam. That war, fought on behalf of a corrupt regime with our military's hands tied, would go on for another half-dozen years after Johnson's public-relations campaign on behalf of futility and 60,000 American deaths before we abandoned the place amid chaos.

I believe the editorial board of the Santa Fe New Mexican is the first to call for an immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan after Barack's speech this week.

The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.

































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Thursday, June 23, 2011

I Hate The War

An Iraq War veteran is in legal trouble. He is 26-year-old Elisha Leo Dawkins. Susannah Nesmith (New York Times) reports Elisha has been "in federal lockup" for a month with the government planning to deport him because of a passport application and his apparently not being a citizen. His attorney explains that Elisha was raised in this country and led to believe he was a citizen. He was never informed he wasn't. The US military considered him a US citizen and gave him a very high security clearance. The State Dept issued him a passport. Kyle Munzenrieder (Miami New Times) adds, "Dawkins applied for a passport in order to serve in Guantánamo. A question on the form asked if he'd ever applied for a passport before. He checked no. That wasn't entirely true. He had begun an application for a passport before deploying to Iraq but never finished the process. That single check on a box is why he now sits behind bars." Carol Rosenberg (Miami Herald) explains, " His lawyer says he grew up fatherless and estranged from his mother, staying with relatives in Miami, believing he was a U.S. citizen. He even obtained a Florida Birth Certificate to get a passport to travel to war as a soldier, with neither the Navy, the Army nor the state of Florida apparently aware of a two-decade-old immigration service removal order issued when he was 8 years old."

He joined the military, the US sent him into war. That should be the end of the story, he should be considered a citizen if he wasn't before. But that's not how the policies work. What actually is required is for him to apply for citizenship. And now that he knows he's not a citizen, he could apply but a conviction -- yes, a conviction on what he's being charged with -- would mean that he would be barred from becoming a citizen.

If anyone in the government really valued the service those being sent to war zones are doing, this wouldn't be happening. Barack Obama should be ashamed that his administration is prosecuting this case.

And he should be ashamed because as much as Elisha deserves to stay in the US and have citizenship, so do many others and Barack's done nothing on that issue despite a lot of pretty words in 2008 about citizenship for immigrants.

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 Thursday, ICCC's number of US troops killed in Iraq since the start of the illegal war was 4466. Tonight it remains [PDF format warning] 4466.



The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.




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