Month: March 2004

CBS/AP reports

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) After a power struggle with the U.S. State Department, the Pentagon has won control over most of a $18.4 billion aid package for Iraq, and rebuilding delayed for a month will start this week, U.S. officials in Baghdad said Sunday.

Much of the enormous aid package funded by U.S. taxpayers will go toward 2,300 construction projects over the next four years. Of these, the State Department will oversee as little as 10 percent. But $4 billion of the aid package has been set aside, and spending authority for those funds is still in discussion.

Congress approved the aid in November, but the bickering delayed contracts expected to be approved Feb. 2. The State Department had pushed for control, because it will become the top U.S. agency here after Iraqis are handed sovereignty June 30.

Officials were so frustrated by the delay that the U.S. head of reconstruction in Iraq, retired Rear Admiral David J. Nash, reportedly threatened to resign in December.

Powell loses again.

Say, anyone know what ever happened to Condoleeza Rice overseeing Iraqi reconstruction?

cross-posted at UnFairWitness

It’s not only soldiers who suffer from PTSD, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which used to be called “battle fatigue,” but anyone who has ever experienced first-hand the terrors of warfare or tragedies of horrific proportion is just as susceptible. In her journal, about halfway down the page, Jo Wilding speaks of the children of Iraq and the psychological damage done to them by this war. Juvenile PSTD is considered to be of such magnitude in the health and well-being of American children that school counselors and psychologists rush into the classrooms when a classmate tragically dies, even as a result of an automobile accident. And yet, in Iraq, the children of war are almost forgotten victims.

The doctors believe there is not a single child in Iraq who isn’t suffering some degree of post traumatic stress, with a wide variety of symptoms. There is virtually no awareness about the disorder and its symptoms, so bed wetting, for example, is a source of shame rather than a warning signal that the child needs help. Parents are in denial, Dr Yousef says, because of the stigma attached to any kind of mental illness. “Parents think that people will think there’s something wrong with the child’s mind and say maybe he inherited it from me.”

The doctors believe that play therapy is the best, perhaps the only, way of diagnosing and rehabilitating kids with PTSD but there are no trainers in Iraq. “There are less than a hundred psychiatrists in Iraq, but more than three hundred Iraqi psychiatrists in the UK.”… read more

I have been away from my computer for the past week and have not been able to keep up with all of the news and opinions already linked to here. If this is a repeat, please forgive. Written by Dan Baum for this week’s New Yorker Magazine, its the story of a young man whose life has changed forever.

Two decorations hold particular fascination for soldiers who are shipping out. The Combat Infantryman Badge, or C.I.B., is awarded for spending at least sixty days under fire. The Purple Heart goes to soldiers wounded by enemy action. Together, they mean that a soldier has experienced the essence of warfare. What soldiers want when they envision the Purple Heart is to get shot, patched up, and returned to their platoons in one piece. When Cain left for Iraq, he knew he’d get his C.I.B. But he also boasted to his mother that he’d win a Purple Heart … read more

Happy talk from Iraqi Shiites is in the news. The “constitution”, they say, will be signed on Monday. Some are saying they’ve struck a deal, but no one is saying who they’ve struck the deal with, exactly. Others say they’re just signing the thing, the heck with Al Sistani. Apparently all the non-signers have met with Sistani and laid out their positions.

From AFP:

“You will hear very good news, very soon, the signing will take place Monday,” Governing Council member Muwaffaq al-Rubaie told reporters two days after his religious bloc withdrew their endorsement and pulled out of a signing ceremony.

Rubaie and Ahmad Chalabi, along with Abdel Adel Mahdi, a representative of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), visited Sistani for 25 minutes as informal talks proceeded on how to break the deadlock on the country’s transitional law.

“We think Sistani does not want to provoke a crisis in the country but, to the contrary, wishes to facilitate our work to make the political process succeed and without any interruption,” Rubaie said.

Both Chalabi and Rubaie later headed to Baghdad.

The Governing Council’s current president also voiced optimism that the body would meet Monday’s crucial deadline.

“We are headed toward an agreement on the unresolved issues. The signing of the provisional constitution must happen today at 2:00 pm (1100 GMT),” Mohammed Barhul al-Uloom told reporters.

Reuters quotes Mohammed Hussein Bahr al-Uloum:

Iraq’s interim constitution will be signed on Monday without changes being made to the text and despite the reservations of the country’s top Shi’ite cleric, Shi’ite politicians say.

“We will sign the interim constitution on Monday as it stands,” Mohammed Hussein Bahr al-Uloum, the son and chief adviser to Mohammed Bahr al-Uloum, the current president of the Iraqi Governing Council, told Reuters on Sunday.

“We told (Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani) our interest is in signing the constitution,” he added.

“We don’t want the rest of the Council to fear that the Shi’ites want to demolish the whole process. We don’t want them to fear that the Shi’ites are trying to control things.”

So, what do we make of all this? On the face of it, they seem to be saying they talked to Sistani and told him they were signing over his objections. I really don’t buy this. They refused to sign Friday, wrecked Bremer’s signing ceremony, kept hundreds of journos sitting around for hours, and left egg dripping off Shrub’s face. Now, just a little over 24 hours later, they’re ready to sign over Sistani’s objections?

On the other hand, to indulge in a bit of tin-foil speculation, it is possible that they’ll make a big to-do over signing Monday and come to the table with one change that will prompt a Kurd walkout, making the Kurds the balkers instead of the Shi’a.

cross-posted at UnFairWitness

Guardian:

Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, who led Britain’s forces to war in Iraq last year, has dramatically broken his silence about the legal crisis which engulfed the Government on the eve of battle.

In an extraordinary interview which will reignite the controversy over the run-up to the conflict, the former Chief of Defence Staff has revealed how Britain went to the brink of a constitutional crisis after he demanded ‘unequivocal… legal top cover’ before agreeing to allow British troops to fight.

continued…..

Rack up another ruined day for Tony.

Tony Karon, Senior Editor for world coverage at TIME.com, in a commentary for The War In Context has an interesting insight on the Shi`a walkout from the “constitution” signing ceremony yesterday in Baghdad.

“Both by some of the issues they’ve raised and by their timing, the Shiite representatives who sabotaged Paul Bremer’s constitution signing ceremony on Friday are making a fundamental point: They see the interim administrative law as nothing more than a temporary set of rules governing the brief interlude between the U.S. handover and Iraqi elections — an interim measured in months. And they are sticking hard by Ayatollah Sistani’s insistence that the constitution of a new Iraq be adopted by an elected body. That accounts, in particular, for their rejection of the provisos inserted at the insistence of the Kurds that a majority veto in any region would prevent the adoption of a new constitution. The Kurds are trying to use the last months of the formal occupation to codify their autonomy and create legal obstacles to reversing it, and the Shiite leadership is plainly having none of it. The fact that the Shiites see the document as nothing more than an interim agreement to facilitate the July 1 handover also explains their very deliberate upstaging of Bremer’s showcase. They appear to want none of the pageantry of chamber orchestras and Founding Fathers-type signing ceremonies which might imply greater historical significance for the document than they’re prepared to grant. For Sistani’s supporters, plainly, the Founding Fathers moment comes only in 2005, when a constitution drafted by an elected body is adopted, and Bremer watches from the audience in his capacity as U.S. ambassador.“

I wondered about this when I first heard of the elaborately staged signing ceremony complete with orchestra and children’s choir in representative native costumes. Juan Cole* describes it as “All Dressed Up With No Place To Go:”

A huge formal signing ceremony had been arranged, attended by hundreds of people and the press, who just kept waiting for hours and hours as the five were holed up with Ahmad Chalabi. Finally the Coalition Provisional Authority announced that nothing would happen, and everyone went home.

The whole performance was a huge embarrassment for the Bush administration, which had counted on enacting the Basic Law as a prelude to finding a way to hand sovereignty over to an Iraqi government of some description on June 30. That deadline seems increasingly shaky.

Is it really worth it to Al Sistani, who was apparently behind the objections which proved insurmountable Friday, to deliver such a slap in the face to Bremer and Bush? Apparently so. It will be interesting to watch when and if a new signing is arranged if it isn’t done in a more low-key way, more in keeping with an interim Basic Law rather than the “New Constitution” as Bush referred to it in his Saturday radio address.

*While you’re at Juan Cole’s informative blog, check out his dossier on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the New Iraqi Osama.

cross-posted at UnFairWitness