The Observer
'The negotiation is finished and we have a deal,' said the Deputy Prime Minister, Ahmed Chalabi, one of the key movers behind the scenes. 'Everybody made sacrifices. It is an excellent document.' State television showed people rejoicing in the Shia holy city of Najaf. There was just one problem. The Sunnis, the restive minority everybody agreed had to be included to make the constitution a success, were queuing up to denounce the document as a betrayal that would fan the insurgency.
The main objection on the Sunni side was to federalism, which they said would break up the state and sandwich Sunnis in the centre, where there is no oil, between an autonomous Kurdistan in the north and a Shia region in the south. The Sunnis - many of them former ruling Baath party members - also wanted to block attempts to purge from government those who had served the old regime. The Kurds and Shias reportedly offered to delay autonomy for the south and to dilute de-Baathification, but the concessions were not enough. More
The American Conservative
There is increasing evidence that the Iraqi police forces, now under Shi’ite control, are carrying out systematic revenge killings against Sunnis in Baghdad. The bodies now showing up at the morgue have obvious signs of handcuffing and blindfolding and evidence of being tortured before death. U.S. sources indicate that the suspicious killings have reached the rate of almost 700 per month. The police are supervised by the Shi’ite-run Ministry of Interior, which claims that the killings are being carried out by insurgents wearing stolen police uniforms. But American intelligence sources disagree, noting that many of the killers appear to be actual policemen carrying the expensive standard-issue Glock automatics and driving official Toyota Land Cruisers.
August 1, 2005 Issue
Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative
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"Death squads" from both sects now operate. They drive around ridding neighbourhoods of Sunnis or Shi'ites. In recent months, the litany has continued: the brother of the man who buys food for the office was killed by a roadside bomb; the cousin of our Arabic service correspondent was tortured and killed after being taken by the police; the father-in-law of one of our translators was shot by U.S. troops and had to have his leg amputated; the brother of our reporter in Falluja was killed by Iraqi troops.
Last month, a Sunni Muslim politician who had become a regular source was gunned down in Baghdad because he was working on writing the new constitution. His name and number are still in our list of contacts. Emotionally, it's not easy to erase them. That is just one office. Others have similar stories to tell.
The vast majority of those who have died are Iraqis, and a huge number are also innocent victims. There is no definitive record but Iraq Body Count, a U.S.-British non-profit group, estimates 25,000 civilians were killed in just the first two years after the war began. They compiled the figure from media reports, which suggests the total is probably much higher -- far from every death is reported by the media. Almost none of those mentioned above was.
Over the same period, more than 1,850 U.S. troops have also died, 1,400 of them killed in combat, and more than 13,000 have been wounded, many of them horrifically, with the loss of limbs or their sight.
Journalists have not escaped either. More than 50 reporters and their colleagues have died in Iraq since March 2003, making it the most dangerous place in the world for the media to work. Reuters has had two cameramen killed, shot dead by U.S. tank or machinegun fire. Another cameraman, a freelance who worked for Reuters, was shot dead last November during a U.S. Marine offensive in Ramadi. Several other Reuters cameramen have been shot at, barely escaping alive. Marla Ruzicka, a young American woman who ran an aid group that worked to win compensation for the innocent victims of war, and who was a constant presence among the press corps in Baghdad, was killed by a car bomb on Baghdad's airport road.
Sometimes the horror stories come out of nowhere. I met an Iraqi Airways official in northern Iraq two weeks ago and we chatted for a while about his life and family. Last week I called to see how he was doing and he broke down on the phone. "It's too terrible," he said. "I came home from work three days ago and as my son was running to say hello to me, he collapsed on the ground. I went to him and he was covered in blood." His son, 10-year-old Mohammed, had been hit by a stray bullet. It went through his neck, severing his vertebrae, and left him paralysed from the waist down.
One of Iraq's leading psychiatrists, Dr Harith Hassan, believes the country may be the most psychologically damaged in the world, thanks to 25 years of Saddam Hussein's murderous regime and the past 2-1/2 years of violence. "The long-term implications are profound," he told me this month, estimating that up to 70 percent of the patients he sees are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. "What's going on is really a catastrophe from a psychological and a social point of view."
As I predicted before, the US finds it self in the untenable position of finding it's interests most closely represented by its enemies in Iraq, the Sunnis and Sadr are advocating for a united Iraq.
One doesn't have to go far to discover what might be a living model of a people fragmented by generations of constant war: Rwanda, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Insurgencies and civil war in equitorial Africa has led to small bands of armed teenagers roaming free, robbing, raping and killing and serving as mercenaries various conflicts over several decades helping to destabilizing several countries with a history of stability and producing more roaming armed youths.
Is that what we want all over the Middle East? This is bin Ladin's dream come true. Bush has given him everything he's wished for.
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