Author: Carol Watson

After decades of Saddam’s manipulative ethnic policies, is there a chance for this city to live in peace, or will divisiveness, revenge and greed for oil be the pattern here…and for the rest of Iraq?

Down a potholed road, past a cemetery where her ancestors are buried, Farida Said sits on the floor of a darkened tent in the pouring rain, 10 feet from an open latrine. Farida, a Kurd, was born in Kirkuk as was her father and grandfather. Before being expelled in 1991, she once owned a house here.

Across the street in a modest home sits Riyadh Hasan, a soft-spoken geography teacher and ethnic Arab who came to Kirkuk in 1978 as part of Saddam Hussein’s effort to Arabise the city.

Both Farida and Riyadh have become political footballs in a highly emotional, sometimes violent contest between Kurds, Turkmen, Arabs, Christians and even foreign states, over who should live in Kirkuk and who should control the oil-rich city from which half of all Iraq’s oil exports flow.

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As Ft Campbell, KY eagerly awaits the return of the 101st Airborne Division from Iraq, some won’t share that joy.

The widows living in the military community 50 miles north of Nashville have until now been able to blend in with the other spouses living without a loved one. Some spouses go weeks without hearing from their soldiers in Iraq. It can be awkward and painful for the widows, however, as others excitedly plan reunion parties and resume life with their military spouses. Already, the first planeloads of an expected 20,000 soldiers from the 101st have started to return.

Christine Bellavia, whose husband, Sgt. Joseph Bellavia, 28, was killed Oct. 16 in Karbala, acknowledges she’s ”a little jealous” of the other spouses. She looks forward to talking to her husband’s buddies but still dreads the homecomings. ”That’s going to be the hardest thing for me,” said Bellavia, 32, of Clarksville, Tenn…

The enormity of the emotions associated with seeing others return hit her last year at an airport as she was returning from her husband’s funeral at Arlington National Cemetery. A crowd at the airport applauded when a group of soldiers walked by, and tears welled up in Bellavia’s eyes. She was holding the box with the American flag from her husband’s burial inside. ”It was like they got to come home,” said Bellavia, who is studying to be a nurse. ”It was like, not fair.”
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Once more, our troops have been “misled” about the length of their deployment. They were assured they would serve no longer than one year in Iraq, which is a very long time when you are a target in an unnecessary war “chosen” for you by the Bush Administration. During an October 2003 interview with Stars & Stripes, prompted by reports of morale problems among military personnel serving in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, in response to questions about troop rotation stated, “At this point there’s still a lot of discussion going on. But I think that the message is clear to American military forces that they’ll be on the ground for a year. That’s for (U.S. Central Command) and Washington – with, of course, input from me – to figure out how we’ll replace them.”

Now it turns out the message wasn’t clear and that some are not going to be allowed to leave Iraq even after their year on the ground is up, much to the anger and dismay of their families. This is in addition to a series of stop-loss and stop-movement orders issued over the last several months, effectively changing military service from voluntary to compulsary, the most recent order on 1/9/2004. Not being able to trust the words of your superiors must be the ultimate morale breaker. Our troops all deserve far better than this; they deserve to come home, and immediately would not be too soon.

“This is the worst news,” said Jessica Corey, 29, whose husband flies Black Hawk helicopters for the unit. “Besides being absolutely stunned, we’re completely heartbroken, too.”

The Pentagon announced this week that 1,500 soldiers, National Guardsmen and reservists would be forced to stay in Iraq beyond their one-year rotation dates…

Other U.S. Army Europe units from Germany affected include: the 19th Combat Support Center from Wiesbaden; the 27th Transportation Battalion, with units in Hanau and Bamberg; the 71st Corps Support Battalion, from Bamberg; and the 181st Transportation Battalion, from Mannheim. All of them deployed to Iraq between January and March 2003.

Thousands more soldiers just missed a similar fate. A Pentagon spokesman, who requested anonymity, said U.S. Central Command at first sought permission to extend at least 50 units beyond their first anniversary. The Department of Defense pared the list by more than three-fourths.…..Read more

The Japanese Defense Ministry has made clear that criticism of the upcoming deployment could result in a “news blackout.” However, the Japanese news media does not seem to be willing to fall into lockstep with government propaganda and censor themselves as so many of America’s media outlets have sadly done since 9-11.

Ahead of its most sensitive dispatch of troops abroad since World War II, the Japanese government has warned media not to “obstruct” its mission in Iraq or face a news blackout, a stance that has local critics fuming. A letter to the media from the Defence Agency last week was labelled by critics as a reminder of Japan’s wartime censorship, and an affront to the freedoms it pledged to help restore in war-battered Iraq.

“Japan’s militant nationalism has gone, but the methods for controlling the Japanese media have remained,” Teruo Ariyama, a journalism professor at Tokyo Keizai University, told AFP. “The Japan Defence Agency will decide what information is safe or not and no one can inspect what the standard is,” Ariyama said.

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi told reporters the requests “just means that we want you to report while taking security issues into consideration.” But analysts said the intention was just the opposite. “This is no different than the (wartime propaganda) ‘Announcement from Imperial General Headquarters’,” wrote Rikkyo University mass media professor Takaaki Hattori in the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper. “The brazen, anachronistic attitude of the Defence Agency is nothing short of amazing,” he wrote.

News outlets insisted they would exercise their own judgment as to what to report. Publicly funded network Japan Broadcasting Corp. (NHK) said it would continue to report developments on the ground “as they happen”. “It is the role of news organisations to answer the public’s right to know,” it said in a statement to AFP. “Even if we take into consideration the safety of troops, we cannot accept the Defence Agency’s request as it is.”

First article

UPDATE: An additional article from The Japan Times covers this matter as well as security leaks believed to be coming from the Defense Agency. (Note their banner motto: “All The News Without Fear or Favor.”)

Second article

That possibility has been brought up by a close aide to the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani:

KUWAIT, Jan 15 (Reuters) – Iraq’s most revered Shi’ite cleric could issue an edict that would ban Iraqis backing a U.S.-appointed council and spark mass protests if Washington does not hold direct elections, a close aide said on Thursday.

“The imam insists on his opinion that general and comprehensive elections should be conducted in all regions of Iraq so that the Iraqi people will have the final say,” Ayatollah Mohammad Baqer al-Mohri, a Kuwait-based aide to Sistani, told Reuters.

“He (Sistani) also says we don’t accept letting people from outside rule, and by that the imam means the coalition forces.”

…Mohri earlier told Abu Dhabi television Sistani would issue a religious edict if the U.S. administrator in Iraq ignored his opinion. “If Bremer rejects…Ayatollah Sistani’s opinion, he would issue a fatwa depriving the U.S-appointed council of its legitimacy,” he said.

“After this, the Iraqi people will not obey this council, as it will be a caricatural council named by Americans.”

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While enjoying my breakfast coffee this morning, my day was further brightened upon reading an entry by Lew Rockwell at his blog referencing the following New York Times book review by Michiko Kakutani of David Frum and Richard Perle’s new warmongering little classic. Bravo, Ms. Kakutani, for telling it like it is, even at the risk of being thought “unpatriotic.”

The title of this new book by David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, says it all. It captures the authors’ absolutist, Manichaean language and worldview; their cocky know-it-all tone; their swaggering insinuation that they know “how to win the war on terror” and that readers, the Bush administration and the rest of the world had better listen to them…

Making its points with all the subtlety of a pit bull on steroids, An End to Evil is smug, shrill and deliberately provocative. Which might not be so surprising given the authors’ track records. Mr. Frum, a former White House speechwriter who helped coin the “axis of evil” phrase that President George W. Bush used in his 2002 State of the Union address, adopted a similarly bellicose manner in his 2003 book The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush. Mr. Perle, a hawkish member of the Defense Policy Board and an assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration, acquired the Washington nicknames Prince of Darkness and Darth Vader in the 1980’s for his combative, take-no-prisoners pronouncements…

Throughout An End to Evil they purvey a worldview of us-versus-them, all-or-nothing, either-or, and this outlook results in a refusal to countenance the possibility that people who do not share the authors’ views about the war in Iraq or their faith in a pre-emptive, unilateralist foreign policy might have legitimate reasons for doing so. Instead, Mr. Frum and Mr. Perle accuse those who differ with their foreign-policy beliefs of failing to support the war against terrorism: of being cowardly, delusional or defeatist…Read full review