Antiwar.com Blog

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.

Media reports coming from Kosovo uniformly refer to what is going on as “inter-ethnic violence” or “clashes.” That is nothing but a transparent attempt to spin the situation and pin the blame anywhere but on the real culprits: Albanian mobs, organized and instigated by the KLA.
Since June 1999, Kosovo has not seen “clashes” or even “fighting,” but a systematic, one-sided persecution of Serbs, Turks, Roma, Goranci and generally all non-Albanians by the KLA-dominated Albanian regime, operating under UN/NATO protection. You need two sides for a fight of any kind; everything else is just a massacre. And ever since June 1999, there’s only been one side with the ability to do so – the KLA.
What is currently happening in the occupied province is a coordinated, premeditated pogrom. Continue reading “Pogrom, not “clashes””

Prime Minister-elect Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero on Wednesday described the U.S. occupation of Iraq as “a fiasco” and suggested American voters should follow the example set by Spain and change their leadership by supporting Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts for president in November.

“I said during the campaign I hoped Spain and the Spaniards would be ahead of the Americans for once,” Zapatero said in an interview on Onda Cero radio. “First we win here, we change this government, and then the Americans will do it, if things continue as they are in Kerry’s favor.”

Here’s the rest…

Well. Probably that puts an end to this, anyway.

Terrorist attacks in Europe have been numerous and ongoing, but the sheer scale of Spain’s “3/11” and the concomittant carnage are new and shaking. Spain is frightened — and lashing out. Remember how badly the US needed to act, to do something, practically anything, after 9/11? Well, what’s happening is a re-direction of anger away from the ever-elusive actual terrorists to a more convenient target: here, the US.

A terrible countenance is emerging in Europe: it is that of a Europe gleeful in its anti-Americanism, guised as anti-Bushism at present — Madrid has provided the catalyst. For those of us opposed to US intervention abroad, but who deeply care about our country, this augers very poorly for the state of the world: the US historically hasn’t responded well to isolation, but over-engages as if in compensation; Spain and Britain and other US allies will suffer as they regress to a time of consolidation with the elderly attitudes of an aging European intellectual elite, who truly do not care about the common citizen or their economic plights, or respect their ability to make decisions. In the past four years, Spain has been making strides toward increased economic growth, cultural revitalization, and improved internal security vis-a-vis ETA — but that is gone now — in the time it takes to cast a reactive ballot. So — another unintended consequence of the US war on Iraq is that of disrupting the somewhat emerging era of greater freedoms in Europe — and precipitated by the US itself lashing out at the wrong party, Iraq, instead of focusing on the terrorists who imminently caused our 9/11.

With love to George, Dick, Donald, Paul and Doug
From Osama and the gang.

Billmon is on a roll….

How refreshing. A politician displaying consistency and adherence to principle. In response to pressure from Bush ” not to yield to pressure from al Qaeda by pulling their troops from the coalition occupying the turbulent country,” Zapatero responds:

“I will listen to Mr Bush but my position is very clear and very firm,” Zapatero told Onda Cero radio. “The occupation is a fiasco. There have been almost more deaths after the war than during the war.”
[…]
“My position is the same. I have explained it throughout the election campaign,” he said. “The occupying forces have not allowed the United Nations to take control of the situation.”
[…]
“Fighting terrorism with bombs, with operations of ‘shock and awe’, with missiles, that does not combat terrorism it only generates more radicalism,” the 43-year-old Socialist leader said.

“The way to fight terrorism is with the rule of law, with international legislation, with intelligence services,” he said. “This is what the international community should be talking about.”

Applause.