Antiwar.com Blog

“In a morning meeting on Wednesday, Mr. Bremer warned the Iraqi leaders that they risked isolating themselves and their country if they continued to snub the United Nations.”

NY Times

Poland’s president: “That [U.S. officials] deceived us about the weapons of mass destruction, that’s true. We were taken for a ride.”

And yet, this giant walking spleen goes on to dismiss any talk of withdrawing “his” country’s troops from Iraq, adding, “We cannot alter our mission to stabilize Iraq to one to destabilize the country” and “Passiveness will lead us nowhere.” Don’t dust off your Polack jokes yet, warbots, cos’ this guy is your kind of foreign leader: a fatalistic serf.

The anti-imperial Maccabees, that is. Thank goodness the Seleucids were made of sterner stuff than some modern-day Euroweenies we could mention.

(Please don’t send me any pro- or anti-Gibson screeds. I plan to remain one of the last dozen people in all Judeo-Christendom without their knickers in a twist about The Passion.)

WARSAW (AFP) – In a first sign of official criticism in Poland of the US-led invasion of Iraq, President Aleksander Kwasniewski said that his country had been “taken for a ride” about the alleged existence of weapons of mass destruction in the strife-torn country.

“That they deceived us about the weapons of mass destruction, that’s true. We were taken for a ride,” Kwasniewski said Thursday.

“The war may have been a mistake. Perhaps there were ways it could have been avoided,” said European Affairs Minister Rocco Buttiglione in an interview published Thursday by the daily newspaper Il Messaggero.

“What is certain is that it wasn’t the best thing to do,” he added.

“Terrorism cannot be defeated only by the force of arms, and if we give the impression that weapons play the dominant role, we will only stir up nationalist feelings among the Arabs against us,” he added.

The statement, the first apparent crack in the unity of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on Iraq, came two days before the first anniversary of the US-led invasion, which Berlusconi has strongly backed.

And, of course, there’s Zapatero. Dump Bush.

In addition to spinning the organized Albanian pogrom of Serbs as “ethnic clashes,” newspapers and wire services include in their reports a claim that Albanians rose up after three Albanian boys drowned in the Ibar river “because Serbs chased them with dogs.”
The story appeared in Albanian newspaper Wednesday, just as the pogrom began, but UNMIK officials – in the past all too eager to accept Albanian ‘grievances’ – this time issued a clear denial. Two boys did drown, and one is still missing, but there is no indication whatsoever that Serbs or dogs played any role in their death.
According to my sources, UNMIK”s denunciation of this accusation as false has been public knowledge since around 1700 local time Wednesday. So far, none of the agency or newspaper reports have quoted it, though all mention the Albanian allegation.
But if, as many UNMIK officials say, this pogrom is obviously organized and premeditated, then the “drowning story” is just a deliberate piece of inflammatory propaganda, aimed to both incite the mob and create a justification for outside observers. Encountering fertile minds in both instances, it seems to have succeeded splendidly.

How else can this be explained?

ARBIL, Iraq, March 17 (Reuters) – Kurds are digging a huge trench around Arbil to help prevent attacks like last month’s twin suicide bombings that killed 117 people in the northern Iraqi city, a Kurdish official said on Wednesday.

“We have the right to do what we think is suitable to defend our cities from terrorists,” Tariq Ghardi, an official at the Kurdish regional government’s interior ministry, told Reuters.

I fail to see how a 6′ deep trench around a city of a million people is going to deter a suicide bomber. It might stop a tank for a while, though. Or you could fill it with oil and light it. That makes conditions difficult for bomber pilots.

Despite the CPA’s feeble attempts to disband the Kurdish peshmerga, the Kurds have rebuffed every effort to deprive them of their defacto regional army.

Mahmoud Othman, a council member and leader of the Kurdish National Struggle, said he considers the peshmerga a freestanding army, not a militia.

“Almost half of them have been killed and those remaining have always helped the coalition,” Othman said. “You can’t tell them, `Go away, that’s it, your job is done.’ How could the coalition so quickly forget them?”

“Peshmerga” translates as “those who face death” – a label taken seriously by Kurdish fighters whose stories of armed struggle date back more than 50 years. Today, about 60,000 peshmerga remain, funded by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Democratic Party.

The information noted above, combined with recent reports of Kurdish riots in Syria, whose harsh putdown by Syrian authorities sparked a massive protest in Arbil yesterday are ominous, though not unexpected, developments , especially in light of the concessions won by the Kurds in the “interim basic law” signed recently by the Puppet Council in Baghdad.

It is unlikely that KDP leader Mesut Barzani was joking in this statement, reported by AFP today:

Iraqi Kurdistan Democracy Party (KDP) leader, Mesut Barzani, said yesterday that he is pleased with the federalism described in the constitution, but says Kurds have the right to independence as well.

Barzani told French News Agency (AFP) correspondents in Selahattin,where the party is headquartered, that “establishing democracy and protecting the autonomy of Kurds on the way to federalism” is pleasing.

Barzani went on to say, “As a nation, Kurds, have the right to federalism, but also to independence. Because of current realities and conditions, independence has not been on the agenda yet. The KDP Leader defended, “they would not accept any revisions to the interim Constitution about Kurdistan and Kurds.”

The same article reports a survey from Oxford International Research Institute indicating that 79% of Iraqis believe that the country will break up.