Antiwar.com Blog

Jo Wilding’s commentary while traveling inside Iraq creates a brief but valuable glimpse of what is happening inside the country and how the war has affected the lives of Iraq’s people. Here, the circus performers, traveling past minefields, watch the celebrations in Kurdish Erbil on the signing of Iraq’s interim constitution.

Whatever it means for the rest of Iraq, in Kurdistan the interim constitution was celebrated, giving the Kurds a federal state of their own for the first time ever. Drums announced the coming of the parade, men and boys, the red, white and green of the Kurdish flag, with a many-pointed gold star in the middle, the placard featuring Mustafa Barzani, the murdered Kurdish leader. The Kurds have been stateless people in the empires of others more or less forever, ruled by the Ottomans, the British, the puppets of the British and, until 1991, the Baathists. Winston Churchill authorised the crushing of their demand for an independent state in Kurdistan in the 1920s with poison gas.

Sinan and Selim are studying English at Salahudin University in Erbil. It’s a strange thing, but a lot of Kurdish people are unaware that the weapons they talk about, the weapons Saddam used against them, were sold to him by the UK, the US, Germany, France and so on, paid for with funding granted by the US in the full knowledge of what he was doing to the Kurds. We talked about the war, why it happened. Kurdistan wasn’t the target of much bombing and there are no troops on the streets, no house raids, no detentions without charge, no random shootings. People here know as little about what’s going on in Baghdad and the rest of Iraq as people in Jordan do. It’s another country … read more

Be sure to stop by Jo’s photo gallery as well.

What is the Circus2Iraq? In their own words: “A small group of performers and activists currently in Iraq performing and running circus skills workshops for the kids. People are traumatised, tired and worn down by years of war and sanctions and are still without many basic necessities. We are not aid workers. We think the best thing we can do is bring a bit of colour, a bit of normality, a bit of playfulness and make people smile.” Visit the Circus2Iraq website for more information about this great group of caring people.

What happens when you send Republican neocons to oversee writing a “New Constitution” for Free Iraq?

You get stuff like this:

The individual has the right to security, education, health care, and social security. The Iraqi State and its governmental units, including the federal government, the regions, governorates, municipalities, and local administrations, within the limits of their resources and with due regard to other vital needs, shall strive to provide prosperity and employment opportunities to the people.

No kidding, that’s in Article 14.

How about a right to bear arms? Republicans believe in that, right? Apparently not:

It shall not be permitted to possess, bear, buy, or sell arms except on licensure issued in accordance with the law.

Wow, how Jeffersonian! That ought to go over big with the Badr Brigades and the Kurdish Peshmerga, not to even mention the fact practically every Iraqi household is armed.

….Bush’s first major advertisement blitz loudly evokes details from the 2001 terrorist attacks that left 3,000 people dead — including firefighters carrying a flag-covered stretcher out of smoldering New York rubble, sirens blaring in the background — it is mute on the campaign in Iraq.

In fact, the commercials mention the 2001 recession, corporate scandals, the popping of the technology-stock bubble, job losses, the need to improve schools and health care, but not one word about the US-led occupation.

I think this is because of the “Not My Fault” theme of George Bush’s campaign. Notice that every item he does mention in his ad has been blamed on someone else. The guy just cannot admit that he ever did anything wrong or accept responsibility for any failure. Since there isn’t any aspect of the Iraq invasion or occupation that is either going right or turned out anything like Bush said it would, it has to be ignored.

cross-posted at UnFairWitness

• NY Times: Greg Powell, a lawyer for one of the freed men, Ruhal Ahmed, 21, from Tipton, said Thursday that Mr. Ahmed was on his way to meet his family. Mr. Powell said he had met his client in a London jail and found him in good health, but said the treatment by the Americans had amounted to “torture.”

  “What I have learned from him is, Guantánamo Bay is a kind of experiment in interrogation techniques and methods,” he said. “And they do have extremely interesting stories to tell about what went on there.”

• USA Today: Dergoul was freed first Wednesday night. Max Clifford, spokesman for his family, said he would be taken to a private place to be reunited with his family.

  He said Dergoul was in a mentally fragile condition and was having difficulty walking.

  “Physically he is not in a very good condition,” said Clifford. Clifford said Dergoul had told his family he had been traveling in Afghanistan when he was captured and was in “the wrong place at the wrong time.”

• Reuters: Speaking for two of the men, Gareth Peirce, a lawyer, said that the police had been “compounding two years of injustice”.

  Ms Peirce said she was concerned that her clients could suffer long-term trauma
  as a result of their experience. She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “Their story is an extraordinary one. They have emerged from an extraordinary and terrifying ordeal that would profoundly affect the strongest individual.”

LA Times: All four men who were arrested on their return to Britain from U.S. military detention at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were released Wednesday without charge, police said.

A fifth man, Jamal Harith, had not been arrested when the group arrived Tuesday at Northolt Royal Air Force Base west of London, and he was freed within hours. The four released Wednesday had been identified as Rhuhel Ahmed, Tarek Dergoul, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul.

Tony Blair will undoubtedly be expected to explain why these British citizens were allowed to languish for two years in Camp X-Ray when an interrogation of a few hours duration in Bitain was sufficient to convince prosecutors that they were not “security risks.” Over 600 prisoners remain in the American gulag in Cuba.

The European Parliament, which passed a resolution yesterday calling for the release of some 20 Europeans held in the Guantánamo Bay facility without charges, had this to say: ….relations with the United States were “invaluable and could be a force for good in the world,” but said President Bush’s decision to detain prisoners outside U.S. territory risked damaging those ties.

It said Washington’s fight against terrorism “cannot be waged at the expense of basic shared values, such as the respect for human rights and civil liberties – a situation that is currently happening at Guantanamo Bay.” (Guardian)

So low have the Americans sunk under this administration that they are lectured about human rights and civil liberties on the world stage. Pathetic.

cross-posted at UnFairWitness

From Editor & Publisher:

A new study of how the media has covered the issue of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), released today, concludes, “Many stories stenographically reported the incumbent administration’s perspectives on WMD, giving too little critical examination of the way officials framed the events, issues, threats and policy options.”

The other three main conclusions of the study conducted by the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM) and the University of Maryland: Too few stories offered alternative perspectives to the “official line” on WMD surrounding the Iraq conflict; most journalists accepted the Bush administration linking the “war on terror” inextricably to the issue of WMD; and most media outlets represented WMD as a “monolithic menace” without distinguishing between types of weapons and between possible weapons programs and the existence of actual weapons.

Will the Bush-hating, Osama-loving press stop at nothing in its lust for appeasement?

I’m skimming the report [PDF], and it looks worth a read.

Left and Right are moribund designations, but so far as the policies of the self-identified go, I must disagree with Gus diZerega’s assertion that Leftists oppose the draft. Though most (not all) on the Left presumably oppose a military draft, many have a fondness for other forms of conscription. Of course, the Republican party favors both kinds, which brings up a more important point: The mainstream Right has either surrendered to or co-opted almost every bad Leftist idea in American history. Interventionist foreign policy, the welfare state, trade restrictions, the centralization of political authority, the militarization of law enforcement, the politicization of virtue… You name it, they push it.

That said, much of this forget-the-Right/befriend-the-Left drive has culture war overtones that do nothing but alienate potential allies. Professor Long has warned libertarians against the quodcumque ostendis mihi sic incredulus odi approach to Leftists; let’s extend this courtesy to conservatives, too.