[Centraal] Irak na de oorlog - deel 35

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Op zaterdag 30 december 2006 13:28 schreef Hurricane1 het volgende:

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Jaja, voor jouw niet. Voor de families van de gedode en verminte Amerikanen wel.

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Op zaterdag 30 december 2006 13:31 schreef Hurricane1 het volgende:
Niet? Oh sorry ik dacht dat dit over de Irak al rafidayn oorlog ging, maar sorry. Oh natuurlijk Amerikanen en Sjiieten willen niet geconfronteerd worden met jullie lichamen die door de leeuwen van Tawheed door de straten van Bagdad gesleept worden, terwijl jullie niks kunnen uitrichten!

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Op zaterdag 30 december 2006 13:31 schreef Hurricane1 het volgende:
Niet? Oh sorry ik dacht dat dit over de Irak al rafidayn oorlog ging, maar sorry. Oh natuurlijk Amerikanen en Sjiieten willen niet geconfronteerd worden met jullie lichamen die door de leeuwen van Tawheed door de straten van Bagdad gesleept worden, terwijl jullie niks kunnen uitrichten!

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Op zaterdag 30 december 2006 13:37 schreef Hurricane1 het volgende:
Dat dachten jullie wel eh dat de Amerikanen joden daar zo maar even de boel komen overnemen en de soennieten uitroeien, de sunni worden sterken dan ooit, al Qaeda is sterker dan ooit, er zijn meer aanvallen op amerikanen en sjiieten o wacht zijn de zelfde dan ooit, tjah logisch dat jullie dat niet willen horen waarheid doet pijn natuurlijk .

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Op zaterdag 30 december 2006 13:37 schreef Hurricane1 het volgende:
Dat dachten jullie wel eh dat de Amerikanen joden daar zo maar even de boel komen overnemen en de soennieten uitroeien, de sunni worden sterken dan ooit, al Qaeda is sterker dan ooit, er zijn meer aanvallen op amerikanen en sjiieten o wacht zijn de zelfde dan ooit, tjah logisch dat jullie dat niet willen horen waarheid doet pijn natuurlijk .

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Op zaterdag 30 december 2006 13:37 schreef Hurricane1 het volgende:
Dat dachten jullie wel eh dat de Amerikanen joden daar zo maar even de boel komen overnemen en de soennieten uitroeien, de sunni worden sterken dan ooit, al Qaeda is sterker dan ooit, er zijn meer aanvallen op amerikanen en sjiieten o wacht zijn de zelfde dan ooit, tjah logisch dat jullie dat niet willen horen waarheid doet pijn natuurlijk .

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Saddam: The death of a dictator

Through the bumbling of the U.S.-backed regime, justice becomes revenge, and a despot becomes a martyr.

By Juan Cole

Dec. 30, 2006 | The body of Saddam, as it swung from the gallows at 6 a.m. Saturday Baghdad time, cast an ominous shadow over Iraq. The execution provoked intense questions about whether his trial was fair and about what the fallout will be. One thing is certain: The trial and execution of Saddam were about revenge, not justice. Instead of promoting national reconciliation, this act of revenge helped Saddam portray himself one last time as a symbol of Sunni Arab resistance, and became one more incitement to sectarian warfare.

Saddam Hussein was tried under the shadow of a foreign military occupation, by a government full of his personal enemies. The first judge, an ethnic Kurd, resigned because of government interference in the trial; the judge who took his place was also Kurdish and had grievances against the accused. Three of Saddam's defense lawyers were shot down in cold blood. The surviving members of his defense team went on strike to protest the lack of protection afforded them. The court then appointed new lawyers who had no expertise in international law. Most of the witnesses against Saddam gave hearsay evidence. The trial ground slowly but certainly toward the inevitable death verdict.

Like everything else in Iraq since 2003, Saddam's trial became entangled in sectarian politics. Iraq is roughly 60 percent Shiite, 18 percent Sunni Arab and 18 percent Kurdish. Elements of the Sunni minority were favored under fellow Sunni Saddam, and during his long, brutal reign this community tended to have high rates of membership in the Baath Party. Although many members of Saddam's own ethnic group deeply disliked him, since the U.S. invasion he has gradually emerged as a symbol of the humiliation that the once-dominant Sunni minority has suffered under a new government dominated by Shiites and Kurds.

Saddam was a symbol of Sunni-Shiite rivalry long before the U.S. occupation. In 1991, while he was in power, he had ferociously suppressed the post-Gulf War Shiite uprising in the south, using helicopter gunships and tanks to kill an estimated 60,000. After the invasion, many Shiites wanted him to be captured, while many Sunnis helped him elude capture. When Saddam was finally caught by U.S. forces in late 2003, Shiites in the Baghdad district of Kadhimiya crossed the bridge over the Tigris to dance and gloat in the neighboring Sunni Arab district of Adhamiya, provoking some clashes. After his capture, students at Mosul University, in Iraq's second-largest and mostly Sunni Arab city, chanted, "Bush, Bush, hear our refrain: We all love Saddam Hussein!" and "We'll die, we'll die, but the nation will live! And America will fall!"

As the U.S. consolidated control over Iraq, meanwhile, Sunni alienation increased. The American occupiers adopted punitive measures against members of the Baath Party, who were disproportionately though by no means universally Sunni Arab. The army was dissolved, sidelining 400,000 troops and the predominantly Sunni officer corps. Thousands of Sunni Arab civil servants and even schoolteachers were fired.

A "de-Baathification" committee, dominated by hard-line Shiites like Nouri al-Maliki (now prime minister) and Ahmed Chalabi, denied large numbers of Sunni Arabs the right to participate in political society or hold government positions on grounds of links to the Baath Party. Sometimes politicians were blackballed simply because a relative had been high in the party.

As Iraq spiraled down into a brutal civil war with massive killing and ethnic cleansing, many Iraqis began to yearn for the oppressive security of the Saddam period. After the destruction of the golden dome of the Shiite Askariya mosque in Samarra last February, Iraqis fell into an orgy of sectarian reprisal killings.

By the time of Saddam's trial, sectarian strife was widespread, and the trial simply made it worse. It was not just the inherent bias of a judicial system dominated by his political enemies. Even the crimes for which he was tried were a source of ethnic friction. Saddam Hussein had had many Sunni Arabs killed, and a trial on such a charge could have been politically savvy. Instead, he was accused of the execution of scores of Shiites in Dujail in 1982. This Shiite town had been a hotbed of activism by the Shiite fundamentalist Dawa (Islamic Call) Party, which was founded in the late 1950s and modeled on the Communist Party. In the wake of Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini's 1979 Islamic Revolution in neighboring Iran, Saddam conceived a profound fear of Dawa and similar parties, banning them and making membership a capital crime. Young Dawa leaders such as al-Maliki fled to Tehran, Iran, or Damascus, Syria.

When Saddam visited Dujail, Dawa agents attempted to assassinate him. In turn, he wrought a terrible revenge on the town's young men. Current Prime Minister al-Maliki is the leader of the Dawa Party and served for years in exile in its Damascus bureau. For a Dawa-led government to try Saddam, especially for this crackdown on a Dawa stronghold, makes it look to Sunni Arabs more like a sectarian reprisal than a dispassionate trial for crimes against humanity.

Passions did not subside with time. When the death verdict was announced against Saddam in November, Sunni Arabs in Baquba, to the northeast of the capital, staged a big pro-Saddam demonstration. They were attacked by the Shiite police that dominate that mixed city, who killed 20 demonstrators and wounded a similar number. There were also pro-Saddam demonstrations in Fallujah and Mosul. Baghdad had to be put under curfew.

The tribunal also had a unique sense of timing when choosing the day for Saddam's hanging. It was a slap in the face to Sunni Arabs. This weekend marks Eid al-Adha, the Holy Day of Sacrifice, on which Muslims commemorate the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son for God. Shiites celebrate it Sunday. Sunnis celebrate it Saturday –- and Iraqi law forbids executing the condemned on a major holiday. Hanging Saddam on Saturday was perceived by Sunni Arabs as the act of a Shiite government that had accepted the Shiite ritual calendar.

The timing also allowed Saddam, in his farewell address to Iraq, to pose as a “sacrifice” for his nation, an explicit reference to Eid al-Adha. The tribunal had given the old secular nationalist the chance to use religious language to play on the sympathies of the whole Iraqi public.

The political ineptitude of the tribunal, from start to finish, was astonishing. The United States and its Iraqi allies basically gave Saddam a platform on which to make himself a martyr to Iraqi unity and independence -- even if by unity and independence Saddam was really appealing to Sunnis' nostalgia for their days of hegemony.

In his farewell address, however, Saddam could not help departing from his national-unity script to take a few last shots at his ethnic rivals. Despite some smarmy language urging Iraqis not to hate the Americans, Saddam denounced the "invaders" and "Persians" who had come into Iraq. The invaders are the American army, and the Persians are code not just for Iranian agents but for Iraqi Shiites, whom many Sunni Arabs view as having Iranian antecedents and as not really Iraqi or Arab. It was such attitudes that led to slaughters like that at Dujail.

In his death, as in his life, Saddam Hussein is managing to divide Iraqis and condemn them to further violence and brutality. But the Americans and the Shiite- and Kurd-dominated government bear some blame for the way they botched his trial and gave him this last opportunity to play the spoiler.

Iraq is on high alert, in expectation of protests and guerrilla reprisals. Leaves have been canceled for Iraqi soldiers, though in the past they have seldom paid much attention to such orders. But perhaps the death of Saddam, who once haunted the nightmares of a nation, will soon come to seem insignificant. In Iraq, guerrilla and criminal violence executes as many as 500 persons a day. Saddam's hanging is just one more occasion for a blood feud in a country that now has thousands of them.

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Op zaterdag 30 december 2006 13:31 schreef Hurricane1 het volgende:
Niet? Oh sorry ik dacht dat dit over de Irak al rafidayn oorlog ging, maar sorry. Oh natuurlijk Amerikanen en Sjiieten willen niet geconfronteerd worden met jullie lichamen die door de leeuwen van Tawheed door de straten van Bagdad gesleept worden, terwijl jullie niks kunnen uitrichten!

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Op zaterdag 30 december 2006 17:44 schreef Zero2Nine het volgende:

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Als je ooit nog eens echt wat uit wil richten tegen de "verderfelijke" Joden en Amerikanen kun je je sjiietische broeders maar beter koesteren. Ik nog wel een sjiiet die over een tijdje over hele mooie wapens gaat beschikken.

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A bitter family saga is at an end
By Matt Frei
BBC Washington correspondent

The US said Saddam Hussein was hanged after a "fair trial"
When Saddam Hussein looked in disbelief at the over-sized noose that was fitted by masked volunteers around his neck, the man who helped to put it there by invading Iraq and toppling the dictator was soundly asleep at his ranch in Texas.

It was only nine o'clock in the evening in Crawford but George Bush was already embedded in the land of nod, with orders not to be woken until the morning.

The blithe indifference of deep slumber was the final snub to the dead man who once described himself as "Salahadin II", "the Redeemer of all the Arabs" and "the Lion of Baghdad".

Some might think that George Bush can't afford to sleep soundly these days with his approval ratings in the cellar and his policy towards Iraq in inertia.

But while the world stirred to comment, cyberspace buzzed with applause or condemnation and Cable television hyperventilated, George Bush soldiered on in sleep. He arose only at 4.40am, we are told, which is his usual time of rising.
One hour later he had a 10-minute conversation with his National Security adviser Stephen Hadley about the events in Baghdad

Shortly thereafter the White House issued a pre-prepared written statement: "Today Saddam Hussein was executed after receiving a fair trial - the kind of justice he denied the victims of his brutal regime."
The statement, which will not be complemented by a presidential turn for the cameras, betrayed no hint of gloating or crowing. It went on to say that "bringing Saddam Hussein to justice will not end the violence in Iraq".

On one level, the hanging of Saddam Hussein is the end of a dramatic family saga that has pitted the Bushes of Texas against the Husseins of Tikrit.

Failed alliance

It is a saga that started with a tacit alliance.

When George HW Bush was vice president, Saddam Hussein was still seen as a potential partner thanks to his status as the enemy of America's enemy, Iran.

It was in 1983 that Donald Rumsfeld was dispatched to Baghdad as a friend of the Reagan administration to shake the hand of Saddam Hussein and offer America's help against the ayatollahs during the Iran Iraq War.

Alliance finally turned into animosity when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and President Bush cobbled together an international alliance of Western and Arab states to remove him from Kuwait but not from power.


"The butcher of Baghdad" began to call President Bush "the viper" and George junior, "the son of the viper".

It was at that time that the famous Al Rashid hotel in Baghdad received an elaborate mosaic of President Bush "the criminal", which patrons were forced to stomp across on entering the lobby.

Two years later Saddam Hussein tried to get President Bush assassinated.

The White House has always maintained that personal grudges had nothing to do with the invasion of Iraq.

And yet in September 2002, as preparations for war were well under way, George Bush the younger told a Houston fundraiser: "This is after all the man who tried to kill my dad."

Mafia rule

The personal side of this bitter family saga is over.

But even from his unmarked grave, Saddam Hussein will continue to haunt the Bush administration and define the legacy of the 43rd president of the United States.

Saddam had always promised to lure, fight and defeat the Americans in the cities of Iraq.

No-one thought at the time that this would happen after he had already been deposed.

But his prophetic threat is becoming reality, triggering a multi-headed insurgence that no longer fights on his behalf, and a vortex of sectarian violence that makes a conventional civil war look organised and coherent.


The former Iraqi leader is likely to haunt the Bush administration

The brutal bloodletting, ethnic cleansing and viscous fragmentation, in which American troops now find themselves embroiled, is also a legacy of Saddam's regime.

A quarter of a century of his mafia rule, in which tribal loyalties were lavishly rewarded and anything less was severely punished helped to rot the cohesion of a young and artificial country.

The extent to which Iraq is disintegrating has taken many Iraqis by surprise. It was grossly under-estimated by the officials who planned the occupation.

President Bush and his advisers have always liked to compare the birth pangs of Iraqi democracy to the emergence of a free Germany after the World War II.

Bloodletting

But what they were dealing with was not Germany 1945 but Germany in 1648 emerging from the feudal bloodbath of the 30 years war.

Another example would have been Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

So not even the few beleaguered optimists in the Bush camp, including the president himself, believe that the execution of Saddam Hussein will stem the bloodletting and allow America to plan for a graceful exit.

The sectarian violence in Iraq has reached its own alarming momentum, in which Saddam Hussein had been reduced to a walk-on part.


Nearly 3,000 US servicemen and women have already been killed

The White House may boast about the new rule of law but for many ordinary Iraqis justice comes in the form of death squads, torture gangs and rogue police road blocks.

These days the wrong identity card can get you executed. This is not the kind of justice that George Bush had in mind.

So now the noose has done its deed the Pentagon is, if anything, expecting a spike in the sectarian violence.

The US State Department has put its embassies on a security alert "to prepare for demonstrations and possible attacks".

And the American public, which had long expected the execution of Saddam Hussein is waiting with growing impatience to see how exactly the president will execute his heralded "new Iraq strategy".

More troops? More money? More hope? For American soldiers December 2006 proved to be the bloodiest month of a bloody year.

Sometime in the next 10 days 3,000 US servicemen and women will have been killed by a war that was declared "accomplished" in May 2003.

Saddam Hussein is dead. His legacy lives on.

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Op zaterdag 30 december 2006 21:10 schreef klez het volgende:

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De BBC over de dood van Saddam. In ieder geval ben ik niet de enige die Saddam grotendeels verantwoordelijk houdt voor de hedendaagse puinhoop in Irak.

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Op zaterdag 30 december 2006 21:19 schreef Godslasteraar het volgende:

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waarom maak je je toch zo druk om Saddam en Irak? Persoonlijk betreur ik het dat Saddam destijds uit Koeweit is getrapt. Ze hadden hem Koeweit moeten laten houden, had hij zijn leger met Koeweits olie-inkomsten verder kunnen uitbreiden, om vervolgens bijvoorbeeld Saoedie Arabië binnen te marcheren, of een 2e offensief tegen Iran.
Maar goed, die totale oorlog in de regio komt er met een beetje mazzel alsnog, maar dan langs sektarische scheidslijnen. En met nóg een beetje extra mazzel krijgen die gore Saoediërs eindelijk na eeuwen gestook en gekanker, hun fundamentalistische waanzin terug in eigen land in de vorm van een geweldig bloedbad. Ik gun het ze van harte.

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Op zaterdag 30 december 2006 13:37 schreef Hurricane1 het volgende:
Dat dachten jullie wel eh dat de Amerikanen joden daar zo maar even de boel komen overnemen en de soennieten uitroeien, de sunni worden sterken dan ooit, al Qaeda is sterker dan ooit, er zijn meer aanvallen op amerikanen en sjiieten o wacht zijn de zelfde dan ooit, tjah logisch dat jullie dat niet willen horen waarheid doet pijn natuurlijk .

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Five Iranians detained by US forces in Baghdad last month were senior intelligence officers engaged in a covert political mission to influence the Iraqi government, the BBC said.

"There were five senior officers in various intelligence organisations... It was a very significant meeting... These people have been collared, relatively speaking, up to no good," one unnamed British official told the broadcaster.

(...)

"There was discussion of whether the Maliki government would succeed, who should be in which ministerial jobs... It was a very significant meeting," one official said.

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Op zondag 31 december 2006 14:45 schreef Hurricane1 het volgende:
Dapper Iraaks verzet vernedert amerikaans terreurleger

Vandaag officeel meer dan 3000 Amerikaanse doden, en meer dan 8.000 voor het leven verminkt.

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Op vrijdag 5 januari 2007 14:49 schreef popolon het volgende:

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Er bestaat geen 'Iraaks' verzet (meer).

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Op vrijdag 5 januari 2007 15:38 schreef Hurricane1 het volgende:

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Jawel hoor. Het word sterker dan ooit. Vooral nu de grote fracties in Majlis shura Mujahideen fi al-Irak (incl. al-Qaida) & Jaish al-Islami fi al-Iraq (wat compleet uit alleen maar Irakezen bestaat) in regios als Anbar hun krachten hebben gebundeld in de Islamitische staat.

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Iraq Vets Come Home Physically, Mentally Butchered
by Aaron Glantz

On New Year's Eve, the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq passed 3,000. By Tuesday, the death toll had reached 3,004 – 31 more than died in the Sep. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

But the number of injured has far outstripped the dead, with the Veterans Administration reporting that more than 150,000 veterans of the Iraq war are receiving disability benefits.

Advances in military technology are keeping the death rate much lower than during the Vietnam War and World War Two, Dr. Col. Vito Imbascini, an urologist and state surgeon with the California Army National Guard, told IPS, but soldiers who survive attacks are often severely disabled for life.

"If you lost an arm or a leg in Vietnam, you were also tremendously injured in your chest and abdomen, which were not protected by the armor plates back then," he said. "Now, your heart and chest and lungs and heart are protected by armor, leaving only your extremities exposed."

Dr. Imbascini just returned from a four-month deployment to Germany, where he treated the worst of the U.S. war wounded. He said that an extremely high number of wounded soldiers are coming home with their arms or legs amputated. Imbascini said he amputated the genitals of one or two men every day.

"I walk into the operating room and the general surgeons are doing their work and there is the body of this Navy SEAL, which is a physical specimen to behold," he told IPS. "And his abdomen is open, they're exploring both intestines. He's missing both legs below the knee, one arm is blown off, he's got incisions on his thighs to relieve the pressure on the parts of the legs that are hopefully gonna survive and there's genital injuries, and you just want to cry."

According to documents obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, 25 percent of veterans of the "global war on terror" have filed disability compensation and pension benefit claims with the Veterans Benefits Administration.

One is a Jul. 20, 2006, document titled "Compensation and Pension Benefit Activity Among Veterans of the Global War on Terrorism," which shows that 152,669 veterans filed disability claims after fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan. Of the more than 100,000 claims granted, Veterans Administration records show at least 1,502 veterans have been compensated as 100 percent disabled.

Pentagon studies show that 12 percent of soldiers who have served in Iraq suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. The group Veterans for America, formerly the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, estimates 70,000 Iraq war veterans have gone to the VA for mental health care.

New guidelines released by the Pentagon released last month allow commanders to redeploy soldiers suffering from traumatic stress disorders.

According to the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, servicemembers with "a psychiatric disorder in remission, or whose residual symptoms do not impair duty performance" may be considered for duty downrange. It lists post-traumatic stress disorder as a "treatable" problem.

"As a layman and a former soldier I think that's ridiculous," Steve Robinson, the director of Veterans Affairs for Veterans for America, told IPS.

"If I've got a soldier who's on Ambien to go to sleep and Seroquel and Qanapin and all kinds of other psychotropic meds, I don't want them to have a weapon in their hand and to be part of my team because they're a risk to themselves and to others," he said. "But apparently, the military has its own view of how well a soldier can function under those conditions and is gambling that they can be successful."

Robinson said problems with the policy are already starting to arise.

On Christmas, for example, Army Reservist James Dean barricaded himself in his father's home with several weapons and threatened to kill himself. After a 14-hour standoff with authorities, Dean was killed by a police officer after he aimed a gun at another officer, authorities told the Washington Post.

Veterans for America's Robinson told IPS that Dean, who had already served 18 months in Afghanistan, had been diagnosed with PTSD. He had just been informed that his unit would be sent to Iraq on Jan. 14.

"We call that suicide by cop," Robinson said.

After his death, Dean's friends told the Washington Post that the reservist enjoyed hunting and fishing but had lost much of his enthusiasm for life when he found out that he was being deployed to Iraq.

"When Congress comes back in session we're looking forward to accountability hearings," Robinson said. "We want to see veterans helped in the first 100 hours of the new session. We want to see the word 'veteran' somewhere in that first hundred hours."

Robinson says his organization has also documented the existence of at least 1,000 homeless veterans of the Iraq war.

"We need to get on top of the problem of homelessness," he said. "It's too soon to be seeing homelessness. I want to be seeing a commitment from the Democratic Congress to dealing with the war and the needs of the soldiers in the first hundred hours of them coming to power."

(Inter Press Service)