Antiwar.com Blog

Israeli agents in Kurdistan

I first saw this report on a rather unreliable Bulgarian site, but Ha’aretz is now running it, so I’ll just post it as an FYI:

WASHINGTON – Israel operates hundreds of agents in the Kurdish areas in northern Iraq, according to a report published in the upcoming issue of The New Yorker magazine.
In an interview to CNN on Sunday, reporter Seymour Hersh said that hundreds of Israelis, some of them Mossad agents, are operating in the region in order to collect information on Iran’s nuclear program and monitor events in Syria.

According to the report, Israel in the past has had many ties with the Kurds, which with the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime are currently being renewed.

Israel is not confident of the success of the American program for the stabilization of the country, the report says, and that is why it is interested in setting up independent connections in the region.

Israelis operating in the region are also attempting to assist Kurds living in Syria, the report says.

My only comment at this time is that things are not looking bright for the Kurds if the Americans sell them out again. With the furor over the peshmerga involvement in the siege of Fallujah and general collaboration with the Americans during the invasion and now being linked as sponsors of Israeli spies, the tensions are certainly there for a clash between Arabs and the Kurdish minority. The fact that Kurds are now violently displacing Arab Iraqis from lands and homes stolen from them during the Saddam Arabization period is just more dry tinder on the pile awaiting a spark.

UPDATE: The Guardian has an interesting perspective on this story:

Israeli military and intelligence operatives are active in Kurdish areas of Iran, Syria and Iraq, providing training for commando units and running covert operations that could further destabilise the entire region, according to a report in the New Yorker magazine.

The article was written by Seymour Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who exposed the abuse scandal in Abu Ghraib. It is sourced primarily to unnamed former and current intelligence officials in Israel, the United States and Turkey.

Israel’s aims, according to Hersh, are to build up the Kurdish military strength in order to offset the strength of the Shia militias and to create a base in Iran from which they can spy on Iran’s suspected nuclear-making facilities.

“Israel has always supported the Kurds in a Machiavellian way – a balance against Saddam,” one former Israeli intelligence officer told the New Yorker. “It’s Realpolitik. By aligning with the Kurds Israel gains eyes and ears in Iran, Iraq and Syria. The critical question is ‘What will the behaviour of Iran be if there is an independent Kurdistan with close ties to Israel? Iran does not want an Israeli land-based aircraft carrier on its border.”

By supporting Kurdish separatists, Israel also risks alienating its Turkish ally and undermining attempts to create a stable Iraq. “If you end up with a divided Iraq it will bring more blood, tears and pain to the Middle East and you will be blamed,” a senior Turkish official told Mr Hersh.

Read the rest…..

When are the Americans going to stop acting on their bad intelligence? Just as their garbage intelligence led them to bomb a wedding party in their last foray against imaginary “foreign fighters”, so have they now killed over 20 Iraqis by dropping huge bombs on a neighborhood in Fallujah and, as usual, failed to accomplish anything but killing more Iraqis, women and children included.

A senior officer of the U.S.-backed Fallujah Brigade on Sunday disputed U.S. claims that an American airstrike had hit a safehouse of terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s network.

The Health Ministry said at least 16 people were killed in the attack Saturday; witnesses put the number of dead at least 20, including women and children.

Col. Mohammed Awad said members of the Fallujah Brigade had investigated the site and “affirmed to us that the inhabitants of the houses were ordinary families including women, children and elders.”

“There was no sign that foreigners have lived in the house,” Awad said.

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, coalition deputy operations chief, told reporters Saturday that multiple intelligence sources reported that the house was used by the al-Zarqawi network, which U.S. officials believe operates in Fallujah.

Even if they were able to take out “Zarqawi” in the midst of this carnage, what gives them the right to slaughter indiscriminately all these people? Every one of these dead Iraqis had a name, a family, people who loved them. How many new resistance fighters were created in this stupid strike? It isn’t just Fallujans who will now take up arms, either, it will be Iraqis from across the country who are outraged and furious over this indiscriminate slaughter.

Apart from the immoral aspect of the indiscriminate killing of Iraqis, another reason that this bombing is hideously stupid is that it once again fortifies the perception that the American occupation of Iraq parallels the hated Israeli occupation of Palestine. This is an excellent reason to avoid any IDF-like tactics in Iraq, though there is little hope that the heavily Likudnik-influenced Bush administration neocons running the show in Iraq will ever realize or be honest enough to admit that their aping of Israeli tactics has been a major factor in inspiring and sustaining the Iraqi rebellion.

I suppose at least viciously racist neocon ideologues like Bill O’Reilly are happy, along with the bloodthirsty hard-core Republican Bushbots like these. It is quite clear that the reason the American neocon occupation of Iraq resembles the Israeli occupation is because the people running them see themselves as engaged in the same battle against the same “enemy” – never mind the pretense of “Iraqi liberation”. The enemy in their minds is “the arabs” and their profound contempt for the Arab world and the religon of Islam is illustrated in both their actions and their rhetoric.

A few typical comments from the link above: Continue reading “Neocons thrilled by bombed Arabs”

Dahr Jamail’s excellent reports from Iraq have graced Antiwar.com over the past few months. They come to us courtesy of The New Standard.

Dahr’s editor, Brian Dominick, is announcing a new feature: “Ask Dahr.” He is asking readers to send email to Dahr, who will do his best to answer your feedback. Additionally, some of the letters and his replies will be published on his Weblog, and may also appear on his Antiwar.com page.

Here is the message from New Standard editor Brian Dominick:

Dahr Jamail has expressed an interest in fielding brief queries from our readers about his work in Iraq, so we’re going to give you an email address below to which you can send all those questions you’ve had rolling around your head about the situation in Iraq.

As his primary editor, I would like to add a request that people who appreciate Dahr’s work send letters expressing that sentiment. Dahr has not made his email public previously in large part because he gets a significant amount of hate mail and death threats for telling the Iraqi people’s side of the occupation story.

But Dahr does appreciate feedback from his readers — including critical feedback — so long as it does not include abusive language, personal attacks or threats. PLEASE feel free to direct any questions (or praise) you have for Dahr to this address:

ask_dahr041@newstandardnews.net

Dahr will do his best to respond to all of the mail over the next few weeks, and some of the responses to questions posed to him will be published on his weblog and/or, in some form, on The NewStandard website. Dahr will also consider questions or suggestions that may lead to a story he can investigate during his remaining days in Iraq, though of course his ability to pursue answers to questions he doesn’t already know will understandably be quite limited.

We do not know how much mail this call will generate, so please be patient if it takes Dahr a while to respond or if you do not get a direct, personal response but one appears in public. The situation is extremely tense in Baghdad, as you all know from having read Dahr’s weblogs and articles — right now, that means sending a letter of praise or affirmation might go a long way toward keeping Dahr’s spirits up.

We will honor any requests to publish questions anonymously.

In an immediate response to 9/11, Robert Fisk noted “the utter, indescribable evil of what has happened in the United States,” but he also warned that

“[T]his is not really the war of democracy versus terror that the world will be asked to believe in the coming days. It is also about US missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and US helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996 and American shells
crashing into a village called Qana and about a Lebanese militia–paid and uniformed by America’s Israeli ally–hacking and raping and murdering their way through refugee camps.”

After the discovery of Mohamed Atta’s will in early October, 2001, Fisk wrote

“So hard did a colleague of mine try, in a radio interview the other day, to unlink the bin Laden phenomenon from the West’s baleful history in the Middle East that he seriously suggested that the attacks were timed to fall on the anniversary of the defeat of Muslim
forces at the gates of Vienna in 1683. Unfortunately, the Poles won their battle against the Turks on 12, not 11, September. But when the terrifying details of the hijacker Mohamed Atta’s will were published last week, dated April 1996, no one could think of any event that
month that might have propelled Atta to his murderous behavior.

“Not the Israeli bombardment of southern Lebanon, nor the Qana massacre by Israeli artillery of 106 Lebanese civilians in a UN base, more than half of them children. For that’s what happened in April, 1996. No, of course that slaughter is not excuse for the crimes
against humanity in the United States last month. But isn’t it worth just a little mention, just a tiny observation, that an Egyptian mass-murderer-to-be wrote a will of chilling suicidal finality in the month when the massacre in Lebanon enraged Arabs across the Middle East?”

Here’s a wild prediction. In the not too distant future, Robert Fisk will have something to say about when the 9/11 plot was hatched, he’ll suggest that the commission’s timeline could have started a few weeks earlier with the events in Lebanon.

In the second article, Fisk also mentioned that bin Laden “has been suggesting that he’s angry about the deaths of Iraqi children under sanctions” and lo and behold, squeezed in between Israel’s Grapes of Wrath operation and the beginning of the 9/11 plotting is the Madeleine Albright moment. But that’s a subject for another day.

Via Media Matters (via pontificator at Kos and Brad DeLong)

From the June 17 broadcast of The Radio Factor with Bill O’Reilly:

O’REILLY: Because look … when 2 percent of the population feels that you’re doing them a favor, just forget it, you’re not going to win. You’re not going to win. And I don’t have any respect by and large for the Iraqi people at all. I have no respect for them. I think that they’re a prehistoric group that is — yeah, there’s excuses.

Sure, they’re terrorized, they’ve never known freedom, all of that. There’s excuses. I understand. But I don’t have to respect them because you know when you have Americans dying trying to you know institute some kind of democracy there, and 2 percent of the people appreciate it, you know, it’s time to — time to wise up.

And this teaches us a big lesson, that we cannot intervene in the Muslim world ever again. What we can do is bomb the living daylights out of them, just like we did in the Balkans. Just as we did in the Balkans. Bomb the living daylights out of them. But no more ground troops, no more hearts and minds, ain’t going to work.
[…]
They’re just people who are primitive.

I guess O’Reilly missed Shock and Awe and the siege of Fallujah just for starters.

Oh, wait. He wanted to bomb Fallujah more, too: “Problems continue for the U.S. Military in Fallujah. Why doesn’t the U.S. Military just go ahead and level it?”

Does this mean the “liberation” thing is no longer a justification for the invasion? What was that invasion called? Oh, right. Operation Iraqi Freedom. Well, screw that, the ungrateful, primitive bastards. Just bomb the living daylights out of ’em.

Josh Marshall is on vacation for a few days, but he leaves us with this tantalizing claim:

I’m going to be taking a breather from TPM for a few days. I’ll be away tucked away on some island somewhere far, far away. If something truly earth-shattering happens I may pop my head up. But I’m going to try mightily to resist (and you’ll be in good hands while I’m away.)

A few points before signing off, though. You may have noticed a slight down-tick in the frequency of posts of late. And that’s for a few different reasons. But a principal one is that I and several colleagues have been working on a story that, if and when it comes to fruition — and I’m confident it shall — should shuffle the tectonic plates under that capital city where I normally hang my hat. So that’s something to look forward to in the not too distant future. And that’s taken some of my time away from TPM and prevented me from sharing with you some delectable tidbits which otherwise I would have loved to have done.

Shuffling tectonic plates in DC can only be a good thing and we can always hope some of the rotten structures there fall into rubble. Meanwhile, Spencer Ackerman of TNR’s Iraq’d is filling in so TPM is still a good read while we wait for Marshall’s revelations.

In an effort to lighten the gloomy atmosphere created by the rafts of bad news from Saudi Arabia, Alhamedi of The Religious Policeman treats us to this amusing bit of Saudi Arabian Camel trivia. Did you know that there were camel overpasses in KSA?

Here’s tristero on the debacle at Berkeley triggered by Berkeley Hillel having the infamous intellectual zero and logic-impaired Daniel Pipes to speak.

In short, you wanna prevent the sheer awfulness of what happened at Berkeley from happening again? First, remove from power the kinds of people who think Danny’s a legitimate voice. And be sure to keep Danny and his ilk from having any kind of influence over American foreign policy (note to rightwingers: by “Danny and his ilk,” I’m not talking about Jews, you schmucks! I’m talking about ignorant rightwing ideologues. There’s a helluva difference, y’know.).

Next, increase funding and provide more attention to legitimate scholars of Islam and the Middle East who will, as a matter of course, rapidly displace Danny’s Islamist doppelgangers, the pricks who are presently teaching the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a genuine Jewish text. (Oh yes, indeed: there are some major league slimebags in Islamic Studies right now. But Danny’s not the boy to be casting stones at ’em.)

After that, I dunno what to do. But hey, that’s a pretty good start.

Jim Henley, softy: “Hey, you know me, Loyal Reader – I just can’t stay mad at people. Heck, if Glenn Reynolds himself suddenly slapped himself on the forehead and said, ‘Hey! How did I, a libertarian, succumb to a freaking cult of personality for a politician? And George W. Bush, yet?’ I’d want to drive to Tennessee and give him a big ol’ hug. That’s just the kind of sweet guy I am.” And who has Jim gone soft on? Christopher Hitchens, of all people. “I have hopes for this guy.” Read all about it.

Jim also points out an excellent (as always) Arthur Silber post:

Arthur Silber puts our present pass down to worship of the State. He’s close, but there’s one further level. Our real god is Perfect Safety, whom we have elevated in our pantheon above its divine siblings Freedom and Dignity. The State is Perfect Safety’s high priest. It preaches from the altar and whispers in the agora that it will bring the blessings of the god if we but bend the knee now and do the spastic dance of the flails when the oracles are propitious. The high priest is not innocent in this, but unless we remove the god to a humbler altar we shall remain under his sway.

There is much wisdom here, though I would say reject the god and his High Priest and smash the altar entirely. I’m for pulling evil weeds out by the roots.

Micah Holmquist on Horowitzwatch: “Moral equivalence,” a term that is basically just a more subtle way of saying DO NOT COMPARE US, THE GOOD GUYS, TO THE BAD GUYS.

The Libertarian Jackass has hired an intern, “Efficient E.” His duties are described as “….making LibertarianJackass.com a dynamic, entertaining, radical, and highly informative Internet experience.” One might wonder why an intern would be expected to achieve what LJ himself h…..well, never mind. Anyway, LJ is soliciting ideas for how poor Efficient E should attack this monumental task. Help him out. Participate in the “WHAT SHOULD MY INTERN DO NEXT?” CONTEST. I’m sure that not posting the prize list is simply an oversight, soon to be corrected.

Great post by Brian Hunter at Common Prejudice on Bush’s Bizarro World. Of course, the Medium Lobster dissents because he believes, along with GDuhbya, “Where there is desire for smoke, there is conceptual fire.”