For Faith and Country: Iraqi Resistance Fights On

As a US general conceded Iraqi cells are getting more effective, Rory McCarthy speaks to two fighters

12/16/04 "The Guardian" -- He sat at a plain white table in a deserted building not far from Haifa Street, a stronghold of militancy in the heart of the Iraqi capital. Before him was a tray bearing cups of sweet dark tea and a plate of bananas, and as American helicopter gunships carved circles in the sky above, he described how he had become the commander of a hardline Islamic cell in the Iraqi insurgency. The man, in his mid-30s with a trimmed dark beard, studious black-rimmed spectacles and a red-and-white keffiyeh thrown loosely over his shoulders, gave his name only as Abu Mojahed.

Before the war he had been a labourer in Baghdad and was jailed four times under Saddam Hussein's regime because of his adherence to the Salafi creed of Sunni Islam, a strict and conservative belief. He would gather with friends for secret Salafi classes and discussions.

He did not fight when America invaded last year, but did not welcome the war either. "I didn't fight. I stayed at home. If you fight for Saddam and he wins, you are not winning. If America wins, you are not winning," he said. "They freed us from evil but they brought more evil to the country."

As the weeks passed, the clerics in the mosques instructed him and his friends to take up arms."We fight the Americans because they are non-believers and they are coming to fight Islam, calling us terrorists," he said.

The real resistance

Theirs is a story rarely told, a brief insight into the lives of thousands of Iraqi men who have spent the past 18 months fighting a costly guerrilla war against the most powerful army in the world.

Their motivations vary: some are undoubtedly from Saddam's military and intelligence apparatus, others fight to defend tribal or nationalistic honour, but alongside them a much more extreme Islamic militancy has emerged.

The US military has in the past dismissed the fighters as "anti-Iraqi forces" and "terrorists". Several US commanders announced that the back of the insurgency has been broken by the assault on Falluja.

However, Lieutenant General Lance Smith, deputy chief of US central command, told Reuters yesterday: "[The insurgency] is becoming more effective. They may use doorbells today to blow things up. They may use remote controls from toys to morrow. And as we adapt, they adapt."

The Iraqi fighters, who describe themselves as the "mujahideen", the holy warriors, or for the more secular, the "muqawama", the resistance, insist there is more fighting still to come.

In the past year Haifa Street, in an area full of narrow alleyways in a poor Sunni area on the banks of the Tigris river, has become a focal point - even though it is near the heavily-fortified Green Zone, which houses the US and British embassies and the Iraqi interim government.

Insurgents have laid dozens of bombs beneath the road surface and still appear to be largely in control of the area.

Three groups are understood to operate there: Tawhid and Jihad, the group led by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi; the Islamic Army, another extreme group also responsible for kidnappings and beheadings; and a third group of fighters whose name is unclear. Abu Mojahed said he spoke for all three groups, whom he called the "Haifa mujahideen".

He said his targets were the US military and "those supporting them", and that his men had attacked helicopters, tanks and individual soldiers, although he would not describe specific incidents. Unlike other more secular elements in the insurgency, the Salafis have their own agenda for the future of their country, shaped in a language of anger, revenge and rigid Islamic conservatism.

"We fight for our land, against those who are fighting Islam, for our country and for our women," he said.

"Our goal is to fight whoever fights us and not just the Americans. And we want this country ruled by the Tawhid and Sunna," he said. The two words are fundamentals for the Salafis: Tawhid meaning monotheism and Sunna the ways of the Prophet Muhammad. "If that doesn't happen, that means all of us die because we fight until the last breath," he said.

In a second interview, conducted several miles away, a young fighter from a different group spoke of his motivation. He said he fought for his religion. He used a more secular Arabic vocabulary and, typical of many in the insurgency, appeared to have no clear agenda for his country's future.

He gave his name as Abu Abdul Rahman, and sat with a red-and-white keffiyeh wrapped so uncomfortably tight around his face that his dark brown eyes were only occasionally visible.

"Before the war I was an ordinary person living my life and minding my own business," he said. "After the Americans came and invaded my country there was no war to go to except jihad."

Abu Rahman, 25, had been a student, working occasionally. He said he had not supported Saddam, but had chosen not to fight the regime.

From bad to worse


"You could say we were hypnotised by it," he said. Like others, he was grateful that the war brought the dictator's fall, but was angered by the American occupation that followed. "Thanks to the Americans for getting rid of Saddam, but no thanks for still staying in Iraq," he said.

"The idea of jihad came step by step as I watched what the Americans were doing to our country," he said. "In the beginning we were only cousins and friends, and later other people came to join us, people who were presented to us by the sheikhs."

He appeared undeterred by the strength of the US military arsenal, and spoke keenly of martyrdom. "My group and I, we always race to death, so we may die and go to heaven. Our goal is to get the invaders out of our country, and from all the Arab countries, and I hope that after we get them out we will have a couple of moments of peace in our life."

He fought in Falluja in April, during the first attempt by the US marines to take control of the city. "There are many people who have died in my group," he said. "But only one of them really broke my heart. He was a cousin of mine, but it was written for him to be in heaven." The emir, or commander, of their group was also killed in Falluja in April. "He was a friend from childhood," Abu Rahman said.

Because of the intense fighting, it took five days to retrieve the emir's body. "He was always telling us to pray for him to die that day. He would fight with us, not like those leaders who stay in the back. We made a celebration like a wedding party when he died."

Abu Rahman said that although he belonged to a tribe, his motivation was religious, not tribal. He also said some Iraqi police and soldiers should not be touched, and were "serving for the good of their country". Foreign contractors should not be targeted either, he said.

In the end, he said, it was the lack of reconstruction and the continued occupation that had left people so embittered.

"We don't want them, thanks. We can rebuild our own country, we have a long and ancient history. All we are asking is for them to pull out."

Copyright: The Guardian

The Failed US Face of Fallujah

12/17/04 "Asia Times" -- The chilling reality of what Fallujah has become is only now seeping out, as the US military continues to block almost all access to the city, whether to reporters, its former residents, or aid groups such as the Red Crescent Society. The date of access keeps being postponed, partly because of ongoing fighting - only this week more air strikes were called in and fighting "in pockets" remains fierce (despite US pronouncements of success weeks ago) - and partly because of the difficulties military commanders have faced in attempting to prettify their ugly handiwork. Residents will now officially be denied entry until at least December 24; and even then, only the heads of households will be allowed in, a few at a time, to assess damage to their residences in the largely destroyed city.

With a few notable exceptions, the media have accepted the recent virtual news blackout in Fallujah. The ongoing fighting in the city, especially in "cleared" neighborhoods, is proving an embarrassment and so, while military spokesmen continue to announce American casualties, they now come not from the city itself but, far more vaguely, from "al-Anbar province", of which the city is a part. Fifty American soldiers died in the taking of the city; 20 more died in the following weeks - before the reports stopped. Iraqi civilian casualties remain unknown and accounts of what's happened in the city, except from the point of view of embedded reporters (and so of US troops) remain scarce. With only a few exceptions (notably Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post), American reporters have neglected to cull news from refugee camps or Baghdad hospitals, where survivors of the siege are now congregating.

Intrepid independent and foreign reporters are doing a better job (most notably Dahr Jamail, whose dispatches are indispensable), but even they have been handicapped by lack of access to the city itself. At least Jamail did the next best thing, interviewing a Red Crescent worker who was among the handful of non-governmental organization personnel allowed briefly into the wreckage that was Fallujah.

A report by Katarina Kratovac of the Associated Press (picked up by the Washington Post) about military plans for managing Fallujah once it is pacified (if it ever is) proved a notable exception to the arid coverage in the major media. Kratovac based her piece on briefings by the military leadership, notably Lieutenant-General John F Sattler, commander of the Marines in Iraq. By combining her evidence with some resourceful reporting by Dahr Jamail (and bits and pieces of information from reports printed up elsewhere), a reasonably sharp vision of the conditions the US is planning for Fallujah's "liberated" residents comes into focus. When they are finally allowed to return, if all goes as the Americans imagine, here's what the city's residents may face:



Entry to and exit from the city will be restricted. According to Sattler, only five roads into the city will remain open. The rest will be blocked by "sand berms" - read mountains of earth that will make them impassible. Checkpoints will be established at each of the five entry points, manned by US troops, and everyone entering will be "photographed, fingerprinted and have iris scans taken before being issued ID cards". Though Sattler reassured American reporters that the process would only take 10 minutes, the implication is that entry to and exit from the city will depend solely on valid identification cards properly proffered, a system akin to the pass-card system used during the apartheid era in South Africa.

Fallujans are to wear their universal identity cards in plain sight at all times. The ID cards will, according to Dahr Jamail's information, be made into badges that contain the individual's home address. This sort of system has no purpose except to allow for the monitoring of everyone in the city, so that ongoing US patrols can quickly determine whether someone is not a registered citizen or is suspiciously far from their home neighborhood.

No private automobiles will be allowed inside the city. This is a "precaution against car bombs", which Sattler called "the deadliest weapons in the insurgent arsenal". As a district is opened to repopulation, the returning residents will be forced to park their cars outside the city and will be bused to their homes. How they will get around afterward has not been announced. How they will transport reconstruction materials to rebuild their devastated property is also a mystery.

Only those Fallujans cleared through US intelligence vettings will be allowed to work on the reconstruction of the city. Since Fallujah is currently devastated and almost all employment will, at least temporarily, derive from whatever reconstruction aid the US provides, this means that the Americans plan to retain a life-and-death grip on the city. Only those deemed by them to be non-insurgents (based on notoriously faulty US intelligence) will be able to support themselves or their families.

Those engaged in reconstruction work - that is, those who are working at all - in the city may be organized into "work brigades". The best information indicates that these will be military-style battalions commanded by the US or Iraqi armed forces. Here, as in other parts of the plan, the motive is clearly to maintain strict surveillance over males of military age, all of whom will be considered potential insurgents.

In case the overarching meaning of all this has eluded you, Major Francis Piccoli, a spokesman for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, which is leading the occupation of Fallujah, spelled it out for Kratovac: "Some may see this as a 'Big Brother is watching over you' experiment, but in reality it's a simply security measure to keep the insurgents from coming back." Actually, it is undoubtedly meant to be both; and since, in the end, it is likely to fail (at least, if the "success" of other US plans in Iraq is taken as precedent), it may prove less revealing of Fallujah's actual future than of the failure of the US counterinsurgency effort in Iraq and of the desperation of American strategists.

In this context, the most revealing element of the plan may be the banning of all cars, the enforcement of which, all by itself, would make the city unlivable; and which therefore demonstrates both the impracticality of the US vision and a callous disregard for the needs and rights of the Fallujans.

These dystopian plans are a direct consequence of the fact that the conquest of Fallujah, despite the destruction of the city, visibly did not accomplish its primary goal - "to wipe out militants and insurgents and break the back of guerrillas in Fallujah". Even taking American kill figures at face value, the battle for the city was hardly a full-scale success. Before the assault on the city began, US intelligence estimated that there were 5,000 insurgents inside. Sattler himself conceded that the final official count was 1,200 fighters killed and no more than 2,000 suspected guerrillas captured. (This assumes, of course, that it was possible in the heat of the battle and its grim aftermath to tell whether any dead man of fighting age was an "insurgent", a "suspected insurgent", or just a dead civilian.) At least a couple of thousand resistance fighters previously residing in Fallujah are, then, still "at large" - not counting the undoubtedly sizable number of displaced residents now angry enough to take up arms. As a consequence, were the US to allow the outraged residents of Fallujah to return unmolested, they would simply face a new struggle in the ruins of the city (as, in fact, continues to be the case anyway). This would leave the extensive devastation of whole neighborhoods as the sole legacy of the invasion.

US desperation is expressed in a willingness to treat all Fallujans as part of the insurgency - the inevitable fate of an occupying army that tries to "root out" a popular resistance. As Sattler explained, speaking of the plan for the "repopulation" of the city, "Once we've cleared each and every house in a sector, then the Iraqi government will make the notification of residents of that particular sector that they are encouraged to return." In other words, each section of the city must be entirely emptied of life, so that the military can be sure not even one suspect insurgent has infiltrated the new order. (As is evident, this is but another US occupation fantasy, since the insurgents still hiding in the city have evidently proven all too adept at "repopulating" emptied neighborhoods themselves.)

The ongoing policy of house-to-house inspections, combined with ultra-tight security regulations aimed at not allowing suspected guerrillas to re-enter the city, is supposed to ensure that everyone inside the Fallujan perimeter will not only be disarmed but obedient to occupation demands and desires. The name tags and the high-tech identity cards are meant to guard against both forgeries and unlawful movement within the city. The military-style work gangs are to ensure that everyone is under close supervision at all times. The restricted entry points are clearly meant to keep all weapons out. Assumedly kept out as well will be most or all reporters (they tend to inflame public opinion), most medical personnel (they tend to "exaggerate" civilian casualties), and most Sunni clerics (they oppose the occupation and support the insurgency). We can also expect close scrutiny of computers (which can be used for nefarious communications), ambulances (which have been used to smuggle weapons and guerrillas), medicines (which can be used to patch up wounded fighters who might still be hiding somewhere), and so on.

It is not much of a reach to see that, at least in their fantasies, US planners would like to set up what sociologists call a "total institution". Like a mental hospital or a prison, Fallujah, at least as reimagined by the Americans, will be a place where constant surveillance equals daily life and the capacity to interdict "suspicious" behavior (however defined) is the norm. But "total institution" might be too sanitized a term to describe activities that so clearly violate international law as well as fundamental morality. Those looking for a descriptor with more emotional bite might consider one of those used by correspondent Pepe Escobar of Asia Times Online: either "American gulag" for those who enjoy Stalinist imagery or "concentration camp" for those who prefer the Nazi version of the same. But maybe we should just call it a plain old police (city-)state.

Where will such plans lead? Well, for one thing, we can confidently predict that nothing we might recognize as an election will take place in Fallujah at the end of January. (Remember, it was to liberate Fallujans from the grip of "terrorists" and to pave the way for electoral free choice that the administration of US President George W Bush claimed it was taking the city in the first place.) With the current date for allowing the first residents to return set for December 24 - heads of household only to assess property damage - and the process of repopulation supposedly moving step by step, from north to south, across neighborhoods and over time, it's almost inconceivable that a majority of Fallujans will have returned by late January (if they are even willing to return under the conditions set by the Americans). Latest reports are that it will take six months to a year simply to restore electricity to the city. So organizing elections seems unlikely indeed.

The magnitude of the devastation and the brutality of the US plan are what's likely to occupy the full attention of Fallujans for the foreseeable future - and their reactions to these dual disasters represent the biggest question mark of the moment. However, the history of the Iraq war thus far, and the history of guerrilla wars in general, suggest that there will simply be a new round of struggle, and that carefully laid military plans will begin to disintegrate with the very first arrivals. There is no predicting what form the new struggle will take, but the US military is going to have a great deal of difficulty controlling a large number of rebellious, angry people inside the gates of America's new mini-police state. This is why the military command has kept almost all of the original attack force in the city, in anticipation of the need for tight patrols by a multitude of US troops. And it also explains why so many other locations around the country have suddenly found themselves without a US troop presence.

The Fallujah police-state strategy represents a sign of weakness, not strength. The new Fallujah imagined by American planners is a desperate, ad hoc response to the failure of the battle to "break the back of the guerrillas". Like the initial attack on the city, it, too, is doomed to failure, though it has the perverse "promise" of deepening the suffering of the Iraqis.

Michael Schwartz, professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on US business and government dynamics. His work on Iraq has appeared at TomDispatch, Asia Times Online and ZNet and in Contexts and Z Magazine. His books include Radical Politics and Social Structure, The Power Structure of American Business (with Beth Mintz), and Social Policy and the Conservative Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo) . His e-mail address is Ms42@optonline.net.

(Copyright 2004 Michael Schwartz.)

From Britain, a Message to Washington

It is a high tribute to the judicial systems of the United States and Britain that they have not followed politicians in using the threat of terror as a reason to erode fundamental democratic values. First, the United States Supreme Court proclaimed last June that war was not a "blank check for the president," and ruled that prisoners at Guantánamo Bay must be allowed to challenge their detention before a neutral decision-maker. Now the highest legal authority in Britain, the Law Lords, has ruled that international law does not permit the indefinite detention of foreign terrorism suspects. And it sternly declared that laws abridging liberties posed a greater threat to a democracy than terrorism itself.

The law at issue in Britain was the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act passed in 2001 in the aftermath of 9/11, which allows the Home Office to detain indefinitely, without charges, foreigners it suspects of terrorist activities. Nine Muslim men are being held in top-security prisons under the law. But a panel of the Law Lords ruled 8 to 1 on Thursday that the law violated international law, in part because there was no evidence that the threat "strictly required" suspending civil liberties this way.

The ruling does not free the detainees, but it requires the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair and the Parliament to reassess the law. As important was the ruling's message that the very existence of the "draconian" anti-terrorism law was an affront to democracy. The most thunderous indignation came from Lord Hoffmann, who said the law "calls into question the very existence of an ancient liberty of which this country has until now been very proud: freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention."

That sentiment is just as applicable to aspects of the Patriot Act, and to the Pentagon's disgracefully run detention camp at Guantánamo.

After Sept. 11, 2001, it was clear that the authorities needed some new powers to combat terrorism effectively. But President Bush and Mr. Blair have refused to acknowledge that the erosion of civil liberties has been excessive, and that this was undermining the values that Islamist terrorists yearn to destroy. We hope Britain will set an example for the United States and follow Lord Hoffmann's sobering admonition not "to give the terrorists such a victory."

NY Times Editorial

Neo-Cons on the Road to Damascus

Washington - Just when it appeared that Syria was complying in earnest with U.S. demands to secure its border with Iraq, and even making unprecedented peace overtures to Israel, key neo-conservative opinion shapers are calling on President George W Bush to take stronger measures against Damascus, possibly including military action.

The media campaign was launched last week when three analysts associated with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a neo-conservative group that generally backs positions of Israel's right-wing Likud Party, published an article in the Washington Times titled "Syria's murderous role: Assad aides [sic] Iraq's terrorist insurgency".

Then William Kristol, the influential chairman of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and editor of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard, devoted his lead editorial, "Getting serious about Syria", to the same subject, concluding that, despite the stresses on the U.S. military in Iraq, "real options exist" for dealing with Damascus.

"We could bomb Syrian military facilities; we could go across the border in force to stop infiltration; we could occupy the town of Abu Kamal in eastern Syria, a few miles from the border, which seems to be the planning and organizing center for Syrian activities in Iraq; we could covertly help or overtly support the Syrian opposition ... "

On Wednesday the Wall Street Journal followed up in its lead editorial - always a reliable indicator of neo-con opinion on the Middle East - charging, "Syria is providing material support to terrorist groups killing American soldiers in Iraq while openly calling on Iraqis to join the 'resistance'."

The editorial, "Serious About Syria?" accused the Bush administration of responding to these provocations with "mixed political signals and weak gestures", and urged it to at least threaten military action, much as Turkey "mobilized for war against Syria" in 1998 over Damascus' support for Kurdish rebels.

Within hours, President George W Bush himself was talking tough on Damascus. Asked during a White House photo-op with visiting Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi about accusations by Iraq's defense minister of alleged Syrian and Iranian support for the Sunni insurgency, the president warned the two countries that "meddling in the internal affairs of Iraq is not in their interest".

In some ways, the new campaign against Syria recalls a similar effort that began building in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Then, Washington was seen as an irresistible force in the region, and neo-conservatives and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld appeared to be spoiling for a fight with Syria, which, they charged, was harboring senior members of the formerly ruling Ba'ath Party and Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction.

But, as the insurgency grew more potent in the fall of 2003, Bush's chief political aide, Karl Rove, ordered the hawks to stand down, lest a new military adventure cost the president his re-election. Now that Bush has won a second term, they need not worry about the possible political consequences.

But that fails to explain precisely why the hawks are making such a fuss over Syria at this moment, particularly given the prevailing Washington consensus - including among the hawks themselves - that Iran's nuclear program represents a much more important strategic challenge to the administration.

In contrast to the charges that were made against Damascus 16 months ago, the new campaign appears to be based primarily on alleged statements by unidentified U.S. military and intelligence officials cited in the Washington Times op-ed and a subsequent Washington Post news article, to the effect that the Sunni insurgency in Iraq is being organized, funded and even managed by, as the Post put it, "a handful of Iraqi Ba'athists operating in Syria".

One supposedly critical piece of evidence much cited by the hawks was the reported discovery of a global positioning signal receiver in a bomb factory in the Iraqi insurgents' stronghold of Fallujah, which "contained waypoints originating in western Syria".

These mostly anonymous accounts were recently echoed by visiting King Abdullah of Jordan and Iraqi President Ghazi Yawar, who also charged, as has Washington, that Syria has trained and helped infiltrate its own and other "foreign fighters" into Iraq.

The Post quoted one former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, who said, "There is an increasing view [in the intelligence community] that Syria is at the center of the problem."

While Kristol and others have seized on these reports as proof of Syria's sinister role in Iraq, they have ignored other evidence of increased cooperation by Damascus, particularly in sealing its border.

Indeed, on the same day that Kristol issued his call to arms against Damascus, the Journal's news reporters published an article that began: "Senior military officers and other U.S. officials say Syria has made a serious effort in recent weeks to stanch the flow of fighters moving across its border into and out of Iraq, and has arrested at least one former Iraqi Ba'athist accused by the U.S. of helping to finance and coordinate the insurgency."

At the same time, a number of published accounts about the aftermath of the capture of Fallujah established that the number of Syrian and other "foreign fighters" involved in the insurgency there was far less than had been expected, putting paid to the theory that foreigners from Syria or elsewhere were a major factor in the uprising, as had long been claimed by the Pentagon and its neo-con backers.

As Josh Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma, suggested in his Internet log, or "blog", the hawks want a foreign scapegoat for an insurgency about which they still know remarkably little.

"Post-Fallujah," according to Landis, "the analysts decided that if the resistance was not powered by Syrians, then it was led by Iraqis living in Syria; hence the spate of articles suggesting the defense department had adopted this view. It will be interesting to see if it has more staying power than the last theory."

Moreover, added Landis, the U.S. administration has little to lose. "Washington isn't having much luck with other strategies for defeating the resistance and Syria has been quite cooperative in the past and will probably be so in the future. So why not mount yet another Syria-bashing campaign?"

Bassam Haddad, who teaches Arab politics at St Joseph's University in Philadelphia, told IPS he sees the current campaign as an effort to intimidate Damascus, with two aims in sight.

First, the hawks want to gain more cooperation from Damascus on tightening its borders with Iraq and arresting or expelling Ba'athist exiles in Syria who may indeed - according to both Landis and Haddad - be supporting the insurgency in various ways. Second, pressing Syria could further tilt the regional balance of power in Israel's favor, at a moment when prospects for renewed peace negotiations are brighter than they have been in a very long time.

"There's very little happening in Iraq today that Syria is responsible for ... so, if there is some kind of strategy behind all of this, it is probably to apply pressure for concessions leading to eventual negotiations with the Israelis," particularly with respect to Syrian support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and Palestinian groups operating in Damascus, said Haddad.

The current campaign may also reflect a growing sense of urgency among the neo-cons, in particular, that "a window of opportunity" for pressuring Syria is closing as the situation in Iraq deteriorates. "I think these factions would like to see something done about Syria before it becomes hugely unpopular to take military action," he added.

But both experts suggest a risk in applying too much pressure on the regime of President Bashar al-Assad which, according to Landis, will be extremely reluctant to enter into a major fight on Bush's behalf with many of the 500,000 Iraqis who have come to Syria in the past year, "not to mention with local Islamists and mosque leaders".

"I fear, as do many in the State Department who know Syria," said Haddad, "that the current Syrian regime is far more preferable to both Syrians and Americans than possible alternatives ... the best organized of which are fundamentalist Sunni Muslims."

Jim Lobe
Inter Press Service

A Flood of Troubled Soldiers Is in the Offing, Experts Predict

WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - The nation's hard-pressed health care system for veterans is facing a potential deluge of tens of thousands of soldiers returning from Iraq with serious mental health problems brought on by the stress and carnage of war, veterans' advocates and military doctors say.

An Army study shows that about one in six soldiers in Iraq report symptoms of major depression, serious anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder, a proportion that some experts believe could eventually climb to one in three, the rate ultimately found in Vietnam veterans. Because about one million American troops have served so far in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Pentagon figures, some experts predict that the number eventually requiring mental health treatment could exceed 100,000.

"There's a train coming that's packed with people who are going to need help for the next 35 years," said Stephen L. Robinson, a 20-year Army veteran who is now the executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center, an advocacy group. Mr. Robinson wrote a report in September on the psychological toll of the war for the Center for American Progress, a Washington research group.

"I have a very strong sense that the mental health consequences are going to be the medical story of this war," said Dr. Stephen C. Joseph, who served as the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs from 1994 to 1997.

What was planned as a short and decisive intervention in Iraq has become a grueling counterinsurgency that has put American troops into sustained close-quarters combat on a scale not seen since the Vietnam War. Psychiatrists say the kind of fighting seen in the recent retaking of Falluja - spooky urban settings with unlimited hiding places; the impossibility of telling Iraqi friend from Iraqi foe; the knowledge that every stretch of road may conceal an explosive device - is tailored to produce the adrenaline-gone-haywire reactions that leave lasting emotional scars.

And in no recent conflict have so many soldiers faced such uncertainty about how long they will be deployed. Veterans say the repeated extensions of duty in Iraq are emotionally battering, even for the most stoical of warriors.

Military and Department of Veterans Affairs officials say most military personnel will survive the war without serious mental issues and note that the one million troops include many who have not participated in ground combat, including sailors on ships. By comparison with troops in Vietnam, the officials said, soldiers in Iraq get far more mental health support and are likely to return to a more understanding public.

But the duration and intensity of the war have doctors at veterans hospitals across the country worried about the coming caseload.

"We're seeing an increasing number of guys with classic post-traumatic stress symptoms," said Dr. Evan Kanter, a psychiatrist at the Puget Sound veterans hospital in Seattle. "We're all anxiously waiting for a flood that we expect is coming. And I feel stretched right now."

A September report by the Government Accountability Office found that officials at six of seven Veterans Affairs medical facilities surveyed said they "may not be able to meet" increased demand for treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. Officers who served in Iraq say the unrelenting tension of the counterinsurgency will produce that demand.

"In the urban terrain, the enemy is everywhere, across the street, in that window, up that alley," said Paul Rieckhoff, who served as a platoon leader with the Florida Army National Guard for 10 months, going on hundreds of combat patrols around Baghdad. "It's a fishbowl. You never feel safe. You never relax."

In his platoon of 38 people, 8 were divorced while in Iraq or since they returned in February, Mr. Rieckhoff said. One man in his 120-person company killed himself after coming home.

"Too many guys are drinking," said Mr. Rieckhoff, who started the group Operation Truth to support the troops. "A lot have a hard time finding a job. I think the system is vastly under-prepared for the flood of mental health problems."

Capt. Tim Wilson, an Army chaplain serving outside Mosul, said he counseled 8 to 10 soldiers a week for combat stress. Captain Wilson said he was impressed with the resilience of his 700-strong battalion but added that fierce battles have produced turbulent emotions.

"There are usually two things they are dealing with," said Captain Wilson, a Southern Baptist from South Carolina. "Either being shot at and not wanting to get shot at again, or after shooting someone, asking, 'Did I commit murder?' or 'Is God going to forgive me?' or 'How am I going to be when I get home?' "

When all goes as it should, the life-saving medical services available to combat units like Captain Wilson's may actually swell the ranks of psychological casualties. Of wounded soldiers who are alive when medics arrive, 98 percent now survive, said Dr. Michael E. Kilpatrick, the Pentagon's deputy director of deployment health support. But they must come to terms not only with emotional scars but the literal scars of amputated limbs and disfiguring injuries.

Through the end of September, the Army had evacuated 885 troops from Iraq for psychiatric reasons, including some who had threatened or tried suicide. But those are only the most extreme cases. Often, the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder do not emerge until months after discharge.

"During the war, they don't have the leisure to focus on how they're feeling," said Sonja Batten, a psychologist at the Baltimore veterans hospital. "It's when they get back and find that their relationships are suffering and they can't hold down a job that they realize they have a problem."

Robert E. Brown was proud to be in the first wave of Marines invading Iraq last year. But Mr. Brown has also found himself in the first ranks of returning soldiers to be unhinged by what they experienced.

He served for six months as a Marine chaplain's assistant, counseling wounded soldiers, organizing makeshift memorial services and filling in on raids. He knew he was in trouble by the time he was on a ship home, when the sound of a hatch slamming would send him diving to the floor.

After he came home, he began drinking heavily and saw his marriage fall apart, Mr. Brown said. He was discharged and returned to his hometown, Peru, Ind., where he slept for two weeks in his Ford Explorer, surrounded by mementos of the war.

"I just couldn't stand to be with anybody," said Mr. Brown, 35, sitting at his father's kitchen table.

Dr. Batten started him on the road to recovery by giving his torment a name, an explanation and a treatment plan. But 18 months after leaving Iraq, he takes medication for depression and anxiety and returns in dreams to the horrors of his war nearly every night.

The scenes repeat in ghastly alternation, he says: the Iraqi girl, 3 or 4 years old, her skull torn open by a stray round; the Kuwaiti man imprisoned for 13 years by Saddam Hussein, cowering in madness and covered in waste; the young American soldier, desperate to escape the fighting, who sat in the latrine and fired his M-16 through his arm; the Iraqi missile speeding in as troops scramble in the dark for cover.

"That's the one that just stops my heart," said Mr. Brown. "I'm in my rack sleeping and there's a school bus full of explosives coming down at me and there's nowhere to go."

Such costs of war, personal and financial, are not revealed by official casualty counts. "People see the figure of 1,200 dead," said Dr. Kanter, of Seattle, referring to the number of Americans killed in Iraq. "Much more rarely do they see the number of seriously wounded. And almost never do they hear anything at all about the psychiatric casualties."

As of Wednesday 5,229 Americans have been seriously wounded in Iraq. Through July, nearly 31,000 veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom had applied for disability benefits for injuries or psychological ailments, according to the Department Veterans Affairs.

Every war produces its medical signature, said Dr. Kenneth Craig Hyams, a former Navy physician now at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Soldiers came back from the Civil War with "irritable heart." In World War I there was "shell shock." World War II vets had "battle fatigue." The troubles of Vietnam veterans led to the codification of post-traumatic stress disorder.

In combat, the fight-or-flight reflex floods the body with adrenaline, permitting impressive feats of speed and endurance. But after spending weeks or months in this altered state, some soldiers cannot adjust to a peaceful setting. Like Mr. Brown, for whom a visit to a crowded bank at lunch became an ordeal, they display what doctors call "hypervigilance." They sit in restaurants with their backs to a wall; a car's backfire can transport them back to Baghdad.

To prevent such damage, the Army has deployed "combat stress control units" in Iraq to provide treatment quickly to soldiers suffering from emotional overload, keeping them close to the healing camaraderie of their unit.

"We've found through long experience that this is best treated with sleep, rest, food, showers and a clean uniform, if that is possible," said Dr. Thomas J. Burke, an Army psychiatrist who oversees mental health policy at the Department of Defense. "If they get counseling to tell them they are not crazy, they will often get better rapidly."

To detect signs of trouble, the Department of Defense gives soldiers pre-deployment and post-deployment health questionnaires. Seven of 17 questions to soldiers leaving Iraq seek signs of depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.

But some reports suggest that such well-intentioned policies falter in the field. During his time as a platoon leader in Iraq, Mr. Rieckhoff said, he never saw a combat stress control unit. "I never heard of them until I came back," he said.

And the health screens have run up against an old enemy of military medicine: soldiers who cover up their symptoms. In July 2003, as Jeffrey Lucey, a Marine reservist from Belchertown, Mass., prepared to leave Iraq after six months as a truck driver, he at first intended to report traumatic memories of seeing corpses, his parents, Kevin and Joyce Lucey, said. But when a supervisor suggested that such candor might delay his return home, Mr. Lucey played down his problems.

At home, he spiraled downhill, haunted by what he had seen and began to have delusions about having killed unarmed Iraqis. In June, at 23, he hanged himself with a hose in the basement of the family home.

"Other marines have verified to us that it is a subtle understanding which exists that if you want to go home you do not report any problems," Mr. Lucey's parents wrote in an e-mail message. "Jeff's perception, which is shared by others, is that to seek help is to admit that you are weak."

Dr. Kilpatrick, of the Pentagon, acknowledges the problem, saying that National Guardsmen and Reservists in particular have shown an "abysmal" level of candor in the screenings. "We still have a long ways to go," he said. "The warrior ethos is that there are no imperfections."

Scott Shane
NY Times
Richard A. Oppel Jr. contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article.

Fiddling as Iraq Burns

The White House seems to have slipped the bonds of simple denial and escaped into the disturbing realm of utter delusion. On Tuesday, there was President Bush hanging the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, on George Tenet, the former C.I.A. director who slept through the run-up to Sept. 11 and then did the president and the nation the great disservice of declaring that it was a "slam-dunk" that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

It was a fatal misjudgment.

Another Medal of Freedom was given to Paul Bremer III, the chief civilian administrator of the American occupation, who made the heavily criticized decision to disband the defeated Iraqi Army and presided over an ever-worsening security situation. Thousands upon thousands have died in this unnecessary and incompetently conducted war, yet here was the president handing out medals as if some kind of triumph had been achieved. If these guys could get the highest civilian award, what honor is left for someone who actually does a good job?

A third medal was given to Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the invasion of Iraq, which Mr. Bush, in his peculiar way, has characterized as a "catastrophic success." It's an interesting term. Some people have applied it to the president's run for re-election.

By anyone's standards, terrible things are happening in Iraq, and no amount of self-congratulation in Washington can take the edge off the horror being endured by American troops or the unrelenting agony of the Iraqi people. The disconnect between the White House's fantasyland and the world of war in Iraq could hardly have been illustrated more starkly than by a pair of front-page articles in The New York Times on Dec. 10. The story at the top of the page carried the headline: "It's Inauguration Time Again, and Access Still Has Its Price - $250,000 Buys Lunch With President and More."

The headline on the story beneath it said: "Armor Scarce for Heavy Trucks Transporting U.S. Cargo in Iraq."

This administration has many things on its mind besides the welfare of overstretched, ill-equipped G.I.'s dodging bombers and snipers in Iraq. In addition to the inauguration, which will cost tens of millions of dollars, Mr. Bush is busy with his obsessive campaign against "junk and frivolous lawsuits," his effort to further lighten the tax load on the nation's wealthiest individuals and corporations, and his campaign to cut the legs from under the proudest achievement of the New Deal, Social Security.

So much for America's wartime priorities.

Even domestic security gets short shrift. During the Republican convention, Mr. Bush said, "I wake up every morning thinking about how to better protect our country." Try squaring that with the Bernard Kerik fiasco, in which the administration's background check of its candidate for the nation's ultimate domestic security post was handled with the same calamitous incompetence as the intelligence effort that led to the war in Iraq.

Mr. Bush's pick (at Rudy Giuliani's urging) for homeland security secretary turned out to be a slick character who had once ducked a required F.B.I. clearance, had a social relationship with the owner of a company suspected of business ties to organized crime figures and had rented a love nest that overlooked the ruins of the World Trade Center.

"I'm Not Perfect," said a headline next to Mr. Kerik's picture in Tuesday's New York Post.

You wonder, with so much at stake, where to look in the Bush constellation for the care and competence that the times call for. Colin Powell is heading toward the exit, to be replaced by Condoleezza Rice, who did her best to petrify the nation with loose talk about mushroom clouds. Dick Cheney would still have us believe in a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.

The man who took the lead in vetting Bernie Kerik, the White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, was also the point person in the administration's bid to duck the constraints of the Geneva Conventions, and even to justify torture.

Mr. Gonzales is a favorite of the president, who has nominated him to be attorney general and may someday appoint him to the Supreme Court.

Medals anyone? The president may actually believe that this crowd is the best and brightest America has to offer. Which is disturbing.


E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com

The Risks of the al-Zarqawi Myth

An interesting phenomenon is taking place today in the Iraqi city of Falluja.

For months now, the Bush administration had been building up the image of a massive network of foreign terrorists using Falluja as a base for their terror attacks against targets associated with the interim government of Iyad Allawi and the US military which backs him.

One name appeared in western media accounts, over and over again: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a wanted Jordanian turned alleged "terror" mastermind. Almost overnight, Zarqawi's terrorist group, al-Qaida Holy War for Iraq, expanded its operations across the width and breadth of Iraq.

Al-Zarqawi was everywhere, his bombers striking in Mosul, Baghdad, Samarra, Najaf, Baquba, Ramadi and Falluja. Islamist websites published accounts of al-Zarqawi's actions, and the western media, together with western intelligence services, ran with these stories, giving them credibility. The al-Zarqawi legend, if one can call it that, was born.

The problem is, there is simply no substance to this legend, as US marines are now finding out. Rather than extremist foreign fighters battling to the death, the marines are mostly finding local men from Falluja who are fighting to defend their city from what they view as an illegitimate occupier. The motivations of these fighters may well be anti-American, but they are Iraqi, not foreign, in origin.

There is, indeed, evidence of a foreign presence. But they were not the ones running the show in Falluja, or elsewhere for that matter. As a result, the US-led assault on Falluja may go down in history as the tipping point for the defeat of the US occupation of Iraq. The January 2005 elections are now very much in doubt, and anti-coalition violence has erupted throughout Iraq (including from sources claiming to be aligned with - no surprise - Abu Musab al-Zarqawi).

Reflecting back, one cannot help but wonder if al-Zarqawi was used as a lure to trap the Americans into taking this action. On the surface, the al-Zarqawi organisation seems too good to be true. A single Jordanian male is suddenly running an organisation that operates in sophisticated cells throughout Iraq. No one man could logically accomplish this. But there is an organisation that can - the Mukhabarat (intelligence) of Saddam Hussein.

A critical element of this resistance was to generate chaos and anarchy that would destabilise any US-appointed Iraqi government

According to former Iraqi intelligence personnel I have communicated with recently, the Mukhabarat, under instructions from Saddam Hussein, had been preparing for some time before the invasion of Iraq on how to survive, resist and defeat any US-led occupation of Iraq. A critical element of this resistance was to generate chaos and anarchy that would destabilise any US-appointed Iraqi government.

Another factor was to shift the attention of the US military away from the true heart of the resistance - Saddam's Baathist loyalists - and on to a fictional target that could be manipulated in an effort to control the pace, timing and nature of the US military response.

According to these sources, the selection of al-Zarqawi as a front for these actions was almost too easy. The Bush administration's singling out of al-Zarqawi prior to the war, highlighted by Colin Powell's presentation to the Security Council in February 2003, made the Jordanian an ideal candidate to head the Mukhabarat's disinformation effort.

The Mukhabarat was desperate for a way to divert attention from the fact that it was behind the attacks against Iraqi civilians. Iraqis killing Iraqis would turn the public against the resistance. It needed a foreign face, and al-Zarqawi provided it. A few planted CD disks later, and the al-Zarqawi myth was born.

In its attempts to use the al-Zarqawi myth to distract and defeat the US military and the interim government of Iyad Allawi, the Mukhabarat is engaged in a dangerous game. In embracing the al-Zarqawi myth, the Mukhabarat has engaged the forces of Islamist activism to a degree never before seen in modern-day Iraq.

Having created a fiction, there is a potential danger of it becoming a reality

According to my contacts, the goal in creating a foreign Islamist face for the violence taking place in Iraq is to get the Iraqi populace to turn away from Iyad Allawi and the US military as a source of stability, and endorse the return of the Baathists (under a new guise, to be sure), who would then deal with the Islamists by shutting down an operation the Mukhabarat thinks they control.

But engaging these activists may not be without cost. Having created a fiction, there is a potential danger of it becoming a reality. Al-Zarqawi may not be the real force behind the anti-US resistance in Iraq, but many now, in Iraq and throughout the Muslim world, believe him to be.

Having created this giant the Mukhabarat may not be able to control it. The real danger in Iraq is not the inevitable defeat of the United States and the interim government of Iyad Allawi, but the fact that the longer it takes for the United States to realise that victory cannot be achieved, the more emboldened the Islamists become.

Right now, the Mukhabarat controllers of the al-Zarqawi network think themselves clever as they watch the US military play into their hands through the destruction of Falluja, and the futile search for a phantom menace.

But the tragedy that is the war in Iraq is far from over, and it may very well be that it is al-Zarqawi and his followers, and not the Baathist Mukhabarat, who will have the last laugh. And, as always, it will be the people of Iraq who will pay the price.

Scott Ritter was a senior UN arms inspector in Iraq between 1991 and 1998. He is now an independent consultant.


Aljazeera
By Scott Ritter

You can find this article at:
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/9FA18AFB-F2C9-4678-8E6A-3595D91B83A1.htm

Read Your Newspaper While You Still Can

...the greatest weakness of the American press is moral. Our media are relentlessly, grindingly, hermetically controlled or, as we say, politically correct. Everyone with the brains of an aspirin tablet is aware of it. Newspaper do not so much report the news as avoid it. The taboos are endless and rigid. What reporters know, they do not write; what they write, they do not believe. We all understand exactly what the media can say, can’t say, and will say. Sheer dishonesty rubs shoulders with poor content. For example, the coverage of the war in Iraq amounts to crafted acquiescence in lying. Why bother?



Whither the competition between the mainstream media and the Internet? It sharpens. The big papers still rule the roost, but they hemorrhage readers and credibility, perhaps more than they know or understand. People move to the web, spend more time online, hold the usual media in decreasing regard. The bright and the young switch effortlessly.

Until recently the paper press, in a display of self-satisfied unalert lordliness, pretty much ignored the web. Imagination has never been newspapering’s strong suit. Ah, but we now have competing snobberies: The established press still looks uneasily down on the Web as mere bloggery. Meanwhile the web, brash and assertive and seeing the brass ring within reach, ignores the media, or perhaps more precisely fails to take them seriously while outmaneuvering them. The trend line does not favor newspapers.

Why are print publications in trouble?

To start with, you can’t delete a newspaper. Suppose that in a fit of madness I bought the Washington Post—the daily or, worse yet, the Sunday edition. I would begin (and frequently did begin) by throwing out the bundles of advertising flyers. Then the sports pages. Then, probably, the business section, not because business bores me but because it is so badly done in the Post. Next, the Style pages would hit the trash, being cutesy, saccharine, badly written political correctness. Then the classifieds. Then the Metro section, since I don’t care about car crashes in Montgomery County or heartwarming but pointless things done by hopelessly correct welfare mothers.

I would end with the A section, in which I would read perhaps two stories and none of the columnists, who are tiresome, predictable, and correct. That’s a buck fifty (I think) for two stories, and then I have to carry the refuse to the dumpster. How much sense does that make?

And newspapers wonder why they lose circulation.

Now, it is important to distinguish between the paper-and-ink version and the online version. The Washington City Paper recently reported that the Post was losing 4,000 subscribers a month--subscribers, not readers: they were switching to the online version. The young, accustomed to the web, decreasingly subscribe at all. What are the economics of a readership tipping more and more to the web? We are about to find out.

Crucially, newspapers have lost control of the means of distribution. Before the web, you pretty much had to use the classified ads in the paper to sell your broken lawnmower, the personal ads to find someone to divorce, and the real-estate section to look for a burdensome mortgage. Now eBay is the national classifieds. Online dating services offer unlimited space for photos, text; online reality sites can carry far more information than a paper. These are important revenue streams. No revenue, no newspaper.

Nowadays papers face a new kind of competition. Before, you read your local paper or, at best, one of a very few. You had no choice. Today people bookmark papers across the globe. What does this do to ad revenue? I’m not going to buy lettuce on special as advertised in The Jerusalem Post.

But the greatest weakness of the American press is moral. Our media are relentlessly, grindingly, hermetically controlled or, as we say, politically correct. Everyone with the brains of an aspirin tablet is aware of it. Newspaper do not so much report the news as avoid it. The taboos are endless and rigid. What reporters know, they do not write; what they write, they do not believe. We all understand exactly what the media can say, can’t say, and will say. Sheer dishonesty rubs shoulders with poor content. For example, the coverage of the war in Iraq amounts to crafted acquiescence in lying. Why bother?

The media can’t change. They are too close to being part of the government they purport to cover, too steeped in the artificial egalitarianism of the newsroom, too afraid of each other, of advertisers, of being racist or sexist, too big and smug and ossified. They cannot report anything that might disturb blacks, women, homosexuals, Jews, Latinos, or mental defectives. Although the rosy-fingered dawn may now be penetrating the hitherto intractable darkness, too many journalists live in the past. Like IBM when it thought that the personal computer was a funny little typewriter, they stare into the tiger’s maw and think that it’s a closet. They would probably invest in slide rules.

How are these hobbled organs going to compete with the wild west of the web, with its limitless well-argued sites espousing or denouncing every imaginable point of view? Compete with people who document things that the majors can’t even talk about? A conceit of the usual media is that the web consists of inaccurate vanity sites run by teenage bloggers in garages. These exist. So do very researched sites by people who know their fields and are not afraid to talk about them. The difference is stark. The intelligent know it.

Moreover, newspapers cannot specialize. The web can. This isn’t critical, but it is another of the countless nibbles of the web at the sagging flesh of newspapers. If you care about planetary exploration, for example, why read a newspaper when you can go to the sites of NASA, the European Space Agency, and Astrobiology magazine? Newspapers by deliberate policy provide dimwitted coverage. A reader invariably finds that he knows more than the reporter about anything that interests him. (Well, sometimes. Often reporters know a lot, but they have to write for the eighth grade. The effect is the same.)

It isn’t just information. Newspapers have to pander to the dull political center. Web sites don’t. If you want a libertarian view of things, there is LewRockwell.com; left-wing, Counterpunch.org; against the war, Antiwar.com. Many of these sites link to the established media, but only to stories that suit them. Thus the majors do the work, and the blog reaps the benefits.

Finally, websites are not the only competitors facing papers. There are list-serves. For example, I am interested in what is sometimes called human biodiversity, taboo in the media. Invariably the papers peddle the notion, obviously wrong as a matter of daily observation, that people and races are equally intelligent, the sexes identical in their capacities.

The field is fascinating, important, virtually illegal, and studied by exceedingly bright people. Their work is available on the net in the form of list-serves, often by invitation only. These amount to global discussions, by researchers across the whole earth, of what is actually known. Many such lists exist, dealing with everything from weird lapdogs to cryptography.

Newspapers? Why?

Fred Reed | December 14 2004

Corporate Media Ignores US Hypocrisy on War Crimes

During the first week of December 03, US corporate media reported that American forensic teams are working to document some 41 mass graves in Iraq to support future war crime tribunals in that country. Broadly covered in the media, as well, was the conviction of General Stanislav Galic by a UN tribunal for war crimes committed by Bosnian Serb troops under his command during the siege of Sarajevo in 1992-94.

These stories show how corporate media likes to give the impression that the US government is working diligently to root out evil doers around the world and to build democracy and freedom. This theme is part of a core ideological message in support of our recent wars on Panama, Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Governmental spin transmitted by a willing US media establishes simplistic mythologies of good vs. evil often leaving out historical context, special transnational corporate interests, and prior strategic relationships with the dreaded evil ones.

The hypocrisy of US policy and corporate media complicity is evident in the coverage of Donald Rumsfeld's stop over in Mazar-e Sharif Afghanistan December 4 to meet with regional warlord and mass killer General Abdul Rashid Dostum and his rival General Ustad Atta Mohammed. Rumsfeld was there to finalize a deal with the warlords to begin the decommissioning of their military forces in exchange for millions of dollars in international aid and increased power in the central Afghan government.

Few people in the US know that General Abdul Rashid Dostum fought alongside the Russians in the 1980s, commanding a 20,000-man army. He switched sides in 1992 and joined the Mujahidin when they took power in Kabul. For over a decade, Dostum was a regional warlord in charge of six northern provinces, which he ran like a private fiefdom, making millions, by collecting taxes on regional trade and international drug sales. Forced into exile in Turkey by the Taliban in 1998, he came back into power as a military proxy of the US during the invasion of Afghanistan.

Charged with mass murder of prisoners of war in the mid-90s by the UN, Dostum is known to use torture and assassinations to retain power. Described by the Chicago Sun Times (10/21/01) as a "cruel and cunning warlord," he is reported to use tanks to rip apart political opponents or crush them to death. Dostum, a seventh grade dropout, likes to put up huge pictures of himself in the regions he controls, drinks Johnnie Walker Blue Label, and rides in an armor-plated black Cadillac.

A documentary entitled Massacre at Mazar released in 2002 by Scottish film producer, Jamie Doran, exposes how Dostum, in cooperation with U.S. special forces, was responsible for the torturing and deaths of approximately 3,000 Taliban prisoners-of-war in November of 2001. In Doran's documentary, two witnesses report on camera how they were forced to drive into the desert with hundreds of Taliban prisoners held in sealed cargo containers. Most of the prisoners suffocated to death in the vans and Dostum's soldiers shot the few prisoners left alive. One witness told the London Guardian that a US Special Forces vehicle was parked at the scene as bulldozers buried the dead. A soldier told Doran that U.S. troops masterminded a cover-up. He said the Americans ordered Dostum's people to get rid of the bodies before satellite pictures could be taken.

Dostum admits that a few hundred prisoners died, but asserts that it was a mistake or that they died from previous wounds. He has kept thousands of Taliban as prisoners-of-war since 2001 and continues to ransom them to their families for ten to twenty thousand dollars each.

Doran's documentary was shown widely in Europe, prompting an attempt by the UN to investigate, but Dostum has prevented any inspection by saying that he could not guarantee safety for forensic teams in the area.

During the recent meeting with Dostum, Donald Rumsfeld is quote as saying, "I spent many weeks in the Pentagon following closely your activities, I should say your successful activities." (Washington Post 12/5/03) The Post wrote how General Dostum was instrumental in routing Taliban forces from Northern Afghanistan in the early weeks of the war two years ago, but said nothing about General Dostum's brutal past. Nor has US broadcast media aired Doran's documentary.

It seems that the US government's interest in addressing mass graves and war crimes extends only to our opponents and that we tolerate such inhuman behavior among those who support our political agendas. The corporate media's complicity in this hypocrisy is a glaring example of the need for widespread media reform in the US.

Peter Phillips is Department Chair and Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and director of Project Censored; a media research organization.

Adult Stem Cells 'To Treat Liver Harm'

Excessive drinking can lead to cirrhosis

UK researchers are pioneering tests of the use of adult stem cells which could reverse cirrhosis of the liver.
London's Hammersmith Hospitals team will use a patient's own bone marrow stem cells to treat the disease.

New Scientist magazine also reports on a Japanese team looking at using the treatment for liver fibrosis.

Currently, the only hope for many patients is a transplant - but there are too few organs available, so other treatments are urgently needed.

In the UK, the waiting list for a transplant more than doubled between 1994 and 2003, from 101 to 239, although around 600 people a year receive a transplant.

Cirrhosis kills around 4,000 people in the UK each year.

Usually, these patients will need a liver transplant, but there are very long waiting lists

Professor Nagy Habib, Hammersmith Hospitals NHS Trust
The UK research involves taking blood from the patient and separating it into its component parts.

Stem cells are isolated from the white blood cells and injected into the hepatic artery in the liver, while the red blood cells are returned to the body through the arm.

Laboratory tests have shown the treatment can improve the function of the liver by repopulating it with stem cells.

In chronic liver disease, cells are lost, reducing the effectiveness of the liver and leading to ill health.

Patients are currently being recruited to the Hammersmith study so the treatment's safety and efficacy can be treated.

Professor Nagy Habib, head of liver surgery at the trust, who is leading the research, told the BBC News Website: "Usually, these patients will need a liver transplant, but there are very long waiting lists. They may not be able to have a transplant.

"And there is no option of dialysis, as there is with kidney disease.

"If this research is successful, it would be a very good option for those people."

Jellyfish gene

In the Japanese study, mouse livers were damaged by injecting them with a chemical which causes fibrosis, where scar tissue develops in the liver.

It can go on to develop into cirrhosis when nodules of cells form at the junctions of the fibrous strands.

After four weeks, they took bone marrow cells from donor mice that had had been treated with a jellyfish gene to make their cells glow green.

This allowed the researchers to track the progress of the cells.

After a few weeks, it was found that all the cells had migrated to the liver.

By the eighth week of the study, also published in Heptology, it was found that the proportion of fibrous tissue in the liver had shrunk significantly.

The bone marrow cells appeared to change into liver cells and make large amounts of an enzyme which is thought to play a role in dissolving fibrotic tissue.

Mice whose livers had been damaged, but who were not given the treatment, did not show any reduction in fibrous tissue.

'People drinking more'

The team now plan to give the same treatment to humans, using the patient's own stem cells to avoid problems of rejection of donor cells.

However, Inder Verma and Yoshiyuki Kanazawa, of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, told New Scientist a similar study they had carried out showed hardly any evidence of healed liver tissue after the infusion of bone marrow cells.

They said they believed "bone-marrow derived cells cannot generally lead to a cure of liver damage".

Alison Rogers, chief executive of the British Liver Trust, said liver diseases were on the rise, and treatments were needed.

"People are drinking more, and younger than they used to, and women are drinking more," she said.

BBC News

US Military Sees Sharp Fall in Black Recruits

"Bush has two daughters. Let them go over and fight," she added, to a chorus of "That's not our war" from the others.


Dolly Wilson's father proudly served in the Second World War and her husband in Vietnam. But her children will not join the military if she has any say in it.

"We don't want our kids to go into no war for nothing," said Mrs Wilson, snatching a cigarette with colleagues outside her Washington office.

"Bush has two daughters. Let them go over and fight," she added, to a chorus of "That's not our war" from the others.

James Golladay served in the US coastguard, but would discourage his two teenagers if they came home talking about enlisting. "I wouldn't want them to experience anything like that," he said, as he passed a US army recruiting office on 14th Street, Washington.

Constance Allen's husband, grandfather, uncle and son all served, but she would "never" let her grandson join up.

Mrs Wilson, Mr Golladay and Mrs Allen are not typical of America as a whole. But their views are enough to give the Pentagon cause for alarm. The reason? All three of them are black.

For years, black Americans have formed the backbone of the all-volunteer US army, filling a quarter of its ranks, though blacks account for only 13 per cent of the population. Blacks are more likely to treat the army as a lifelong career; a third of senior sergeants and non-commissioned officers are black. Suddenly, that is changing.

Apart from a sudden fall in the past two months in recruiting for the part-time National Guard, army recruitment as a whole has held more or less steady this year, with the help of increased enlistment bonuses and an early call-up for some youths originally due to enter basic training next year.

But the proportion of black recruits into the army was only 15.6 per cent, down from 22.3 per cent in the fiscal year 2001. In the part-time army reserve, the drop is sharper.

Army officials decline to speculate about the collapse in black recruiting, instead noting what they call a positive development, that army numbers will now reflect the make-up of society better.

Behind the scenes, there is more concern, according to Prof David Segal, a military sociologist at the University of Maryland.

"If there are fewer blacks coming in - and it is blacks who stay in and become NCOs - then six, seven, eight, nine years down the road, you can anticipate a shortage of sergeants," he said.

Prof Charles Moskos, an expert on the military and race at Northwestern University in Chicago, said the drop-off began even before the Iraq war, with the election of President George W Bush in 2000 in the face of overwhelming black antipathy, an attitude that lingers to this day.

That hostility increased exponentially with the invasion of Iraq, which was opposed by a large majority of black Americans, amid suspicion over the reasons given for toppling Saddam Hussein and anger at billions of dollars spent overseas, rather than at home.

Mrs Allen pointed to the rain-lashed streets of Washington, a large, poor, mainly black city that also happens to be the nation's capital.

"You've got so many homeless people here, they were in the military, half of them. You look at that, people ask, 'Why should I go fight the white man's war when there's nothing for us here?' " she said.

Mr Golladay said blacks tended to join the military for stable employment, college scholarships and the chance to learn valuable skills.

Pentagon statistics from 2003 back him up, showing that 67 per cent of black soldiers served in support or rearguard units, working as technicians, medical assistants, clerks or cooks. Only 16 per cent of black soldiers were in combat units.

Asked why blacks chose rear-line units, Mr Golloday answered: "People looked to the military as a way of receiving benefits. People want to transition into a civilian life later. Being a chief gunner isn't something that people will pay a lot for." Then he laughed, and added: "And they don't want to die."

Crucially, among older generations there are also sharp memories of the Vietnam War, in which blacks were seen as bearing an unfair burden of casualties. Martin Luther King spoke of it being fought by people of colour against people of colour in the interests of whites.

Kayla Roach, a black woman, said: "I know families whose kids want to join the military, and their parents are saying no. Maybe they have just one or two children and it's scary to them."

The perception has spread among black Americans that in the war on terrorism, rear-line units are as vulnerable as front-line infantry squads.

Prof Moskos defended the US military as one of America's most racially integrated large institutions.

"The army is not a utopia but it is the only place where whites are routinely bossed around by blacks," he said.

To Mr Golladay, the military is not the problem. "People join understanding that they might go to war," he said. "But this war now, I feel it's unnecessary."

GOP Leaders Join Chorus of Rumsfeld Detractors

Washington - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is accustomed to the barbs of public life. Any number of people, for the most part Democrats, have been complaining about him since 1969, when he joined the Nixon administration.

But a different roster of A-list critics is now finding fault with Rumsfeld's management of the military and the war in Iraq. And the sharpest jabs are coming from noteworthy Republicans, including Sens. John McCain of Arizona; Trent Lott, the former Senate majority leader from Mississippi, and Susan Collins, the Maine senator who just helped shepherd intelligence reform through Congress.

McCain said he has lost confidence in Rumsfeld, Lott said he should quit sometime in the next year and Collins wrote him a letter asking him about armor on vehicles in Iraq, or the lack of it.

Outside government, William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, called for Rumsfeld to resign, writing that the soldiers "deserve a better defense secretary than the one we have."

He was joined by Thomas Donnelly, a defense analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, who called Rumsfeld "an arrogant and isolated Beltway bigwig."

Taken together, Rumsfeld's critics are voicing pent-up frustrations over the conduct and cost of the war in Iraq, its effect on an overtaxed military, and a series of Pentagon scandals and investigations that include the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, the use of prewar intelligence and ties to an Iraqi opposition group, and federal convictions linked to a no-bid contract for Air Force tanker planes.

'Days are Numbered'

"This is a trend," said analyst Loren Thompson, president of the Lexington Institute, a Washington-area defense think tank. "What's happening now is that, with the problems in Iraq appearing not to improve, all the reservations about Rumsfeld are becoming more acceptable to voice in public. It is so rare for senior senators from the secretary's own party to say they have no confidence in him. The fact of the matter is, his days are numbered now."

Not so, says the White House. President Bush's aides have been buffeted for more than a week with questions about Rumsfeld's comments and his future in the Cabinet, and at every turn they've offered assurances that Rumsfeld is staying.

"The president believes Secretary Rumsfeld is someone who is an important member of our team and someone who is helping us to move forward as we defeat the ideology of hatred that leads to terrorism," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Friday.

Rumsfeld spokesman Bryan Whitman said, "There are comments from [Capitol] Hill criticizing him and comments supporting him. The secretary has nothing new to say about this."

The impetus for the calls for Rumsfeld's resignation was the secretary's Dec. 8 meeting with troops in Kuwait, and his answer to a soldier's complaint about the lack of armored vehicles for duty in Iraq.

Rumsfeld bluntly replied: "You go to war with the Army you have. They're not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time."

The soldier's unit went safely into Iraq, the Army said later, with the final installation of armor on its vehicles completed within 24 hours of the complaint. Rumsfeld, on the other hand, returned to a free-fire zone in Washington, where his comments became a touchstone for the ill will that has been building in both parties.

Some of the frustration within the GOP is motivated by complaints that members of Congress hear from constituents whose sons and daughters are driving in unarmored Humvees, or whose spouses have been held over in Iraq or are returning there for a second tour. For National Guard members, that means leaving behind careers and families and household finances.

Few Answers

Others are angry over lending support to the war based on the promising postconflict scenarios that Rumsfeld and his aides predicted. Now those same politicians need answers that will satisfy voters. And good answers are hard to find.

"While Bush doesn't have to run again, these guys have to in 2006," said Lawrence Korb, a former Pentagon official and now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. "I think that Rumsfeld, and that infamous meeting [in Kuwait], became a metaphor for the American people about what's going wrong there."

If so, that would help explain the visceral reaction that Rumsfeld's performance drew from Senate GOP leaders. Rumsfeld, despite his years of Washington experience and his service in the House during the 1960s, has not fared well on the Hill during the last four years. The reason, staff members say, is simple: Rumsfeld, a natural glad-hander, hasn't worked hard enough to satisfy those who would be his allies, or to disarm those who were his known enemies.

With elections in Iraq scheduled for Jan. 30, few would expect a change at the top of the Pentagon before then. How those elections are conducted, and whether they push Iraq's nascent government forward and help reduce the daily cycle of violence, could influence Rumsfeld's prospects.

But odds that the vote will go well are not good. U.S. military commanders in Iraq have predicted increased violence as the election approaches.

"Right after the election Rumsfeld will probably resign," Korb predicted. "He'll say, 'I've done my job, I've seen the election through, produced a new defense budget.' Whatever else people may think about Bush, he's a good politician. ... He knows that if he forces Rumsfeld out, it's an admission that the war was wrong."

Though a politician at heart, Rumsfeld was kept out of the 2004 presidential campaign, with Bush advisers recognizing how difficult the war issue might be on the campaign trail. During the next month, after time off for the holidays, the installation of a new Congress with bigger Republican majorities in both houses and Bush's second inauguration on Jan. 20, the boiling anger over Rumsfeld could be reduced to a simmer.

But calls for his resignation could just as easily pick up again in late January, as the new Congress takes up defense spending issues and the Senate Armed Services Committee convenes hearings to examine the Pentagon's prewar planning.

"There's no question that Rumsfeld is a man of courage and conviction," said analyst Thompson. "But the problem is he will stick with a position long after the rest of the world has concluded it's wrong. If you're going to be a man of conviction, you're going to have to live with the verdict of the marketplace."

Stephen J. Hedges
The Chicago Tribune

Westerner Beheaded on Mosul Street as American Forces Lose Control of Key City

Gunmen raked a car with machine-gun fire in the northern city of Mosul yesterday, killing three foreigners and their driver. They then cut off the head of one of their victims.

The killings show that at the same time as the US was recapturing Fallujah in a heavily publicised assault it largely lost control of Mosul, Iraq's northern capital. Though US troops launched a counter-attack, their grip on the city remains tenuous. The four men who died yesterday were travelling in a white sedan when it was attacked with automatic weapons and set on fire at a traffic intersection in Mosul.

One of the foreigners was briefly captured by the insurgents, according to an eyewitness. When he tried to escape they cut his head off and left his body in a pool of blood.

A photographer for Reuters news agency saw four bodies lying beside the burning car. Three of those who died appeared to be foreigners, one of whom looked Turkish and the other two European. The fourth body, possibly of the driver, was partly burnt, but appeared to be that of an Arab.

The men were carrying small automatic weapons, indicating that they may have been working for one of the private security companies in Iraq.

Mosul, a city on the Tigris river with a population of 1.2 million, is largely populated by Sunni Muslims but has a large Kurdish minority. It has increasingly fallen into the hands of Sunni insurgents over the past six weeks.

Insurgents launched an uprising on 10 November, two days after the US Marines started their attack on Mosul, and stormed 10 police stations. Out of a local police force of 8,000, all but 1,000 have deserted and only 400 of those remaining are considered reliable.

Earlier in the year, the US occupation of Mosul by the 101st Airborne was presented as a model of what the occupation should have been in the rest of the country. Several thousand army officers publicly renounced Baathism. The local police force was being built up. The unpopular political parties of returned exiles in Baghdad were kept at bay.

Until the past few months, guerrilla attacks in Mosul were both less frequent and less effective than further south around Baghdad. This may have been because Mosul and Nineveh province, of which it is the centre, was never seen as a bastion of support for Saddam Hussein. But the city was always a nationalist centre and a recruiting ground for the officer corps of the Iraqi army. The defence minister under the old regime was usually from Mosul.

Unlike Fallujah, the guerrillas did not contest the recapture of Mosul by US and Iraqi forces in November. Leaflets were issued instructing fighters to hide their weapons and stay in the city. Since then 150 bodies have found, many of them members of the National Guard or other security forces. US forces in Iraq are being built up from 138,000 to 150,000 men and are already stretched trying to hold Sunni Muslim cities and towns around Baghdad. They were never able to surround Fallujah, even at the height of the battle last month, and many fighters escaped.

Much of the US Army in Iraq is tied down providing support services, guarding fixed positions or protecting convoys that are frequently attack. US patrols often seem to serve no particular purpose but severely disrupt traffic because Iraqi drivers do not want to get close to the American vehicles in case they are attacked.

In Fallujah, the mayor, Mahmoud Ibrahim, said the first families would start to return to the south of the city yesterday. But this may be in doubt because there is shelling is continuing in northern Fallujah.

There are more than 250,000 refugees who fled the city to seek shelter in Baghdad 35 miles away or the nearby city of Ramadi. Others are in camps on the city outskirts or in neighbouring villages. Fallujah has had no power or water since the US assault and these will take time to restore.


Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad
19 December 2004 04:50

The Failed US Face of Fallujah

The chilling reality of what Fallujah has become is only now seeping out, as the US military continues to block almost all access to the city, whether to reporters, its former residents, or aid groups such as the Red Crescent Society. The date of access keeps being postponed, partly because of ongoing fighting - only this week more air strikes were called in and fighting "in pockets" remains fierce (despite US pronouncements of success weeks ago) - and partly because of the difficulties military commanders have faced in attempting to prettify their ugly handiwork. Residents will now officially be denied entry until at least December 24; and even then, only the heads of households will be allowed in, a few at a time, to assess damage to their residences in the largely destroyed city.

With a few notable exceptions, the media have accepted the recent virtual news blackout in Fallujah. The ongoing fighting in the city, especially in "cleared" neighborhoods, is proving an embarrassment and so, while military spokesmen continue to announce American casualties, they now come not from the city itself but, far more vaguely, from "al-Anbar province", of which the city is a part. Fifty American soldiers died in the taking of the city; 20 more died in the following weeks - before the reports stopped. Iraqi civilian casualties remain unknown and accounts of what's happened in the city, except from the point of view of embedded reporters (and so of US troops) remain scarce. With only a few exceptions (notably Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post), American reporters have neglected to cull news from refugee camps or Baghdad hospitals, where survivors of the siege are now congregating.

Intrepid independent and foreign reporters are doing a better job (most notably Dahr Jamail, whose dispatches are indispensable), but even they have been handicapped by lack of access to the city itself. At least Jamail did the next best thing, interviewing a Red Crescent worker who was among the handful of non-governmental organization personnel allowed briefly into the wreckage that was Fallujah.

A report by Katarina Kratovac of the Associated Press (picked up by the Washington Post) about military plans for managing Fallujah once it is pacified (if it ever is) proved a notable exception to the arid coverage in the major media. Kratovac based her piece on briefings by the military leadership, notably Lieutenant-General John F Sattler, commander of the Marines in Iraq. By combining her evidence with some resourceful reporting by Dahr Jamail (and bits and pieces of information from reports printed up elsewhere), a reasonably sharp vision of the conditions the US is planning for Fallujah's "liberated" residents comes into focus. When they are finally allowed to return, if all goes as the Americans imagine, here's what the city's residents may face:


Entry to and exit from the city will be restricted. According to Sattler, only five roads into the city will remain open. The rest will be blocked by "sand berms" - read mountains of earth that will make them impassible. Checkpoints will be established at each of the five entry points, manned by US troops, and everyone entering will be "photographed, fingerprinted and have iris scans taken before being issued ID cards". Though Sattler reassured American reporters that the process would only take 10 minutes, the implication is that entry to and exit from the city will depend solely on valid identification cards properly proffered, a system akin to the pass-card system used during the apartheid era in South Africa.

Fallujans are to wear their universal identity cards in plain sight at all times. The ID cards will, according to Dahr Jamail's information, be made into badges that contain the individual's home address. This sort of system has no purpose except to allow for the monitoring of everyone in the city, so that ongoing US patrols can quickly determine whether someone is not a registered citizen or is suspiciously far from their home neighborhood.

No private automobiles will be allowed inside the city. This is a "precaution against car bombs", which Sattler called "the deadliest weapons in the insurgent arsenal". As a district is opened to repopulation, the returning residents will be forced to park their cars outside the city and will be bused to their homes. How they will get around afterward has not been announced. How they will transport reconstruction materials to rebuild their devastated property is also a mystery.

Only those Fallujans cleared through US intelligence vettings will be allowed to work on the reconstruction of the city. Since Fallujah is currently devastated and almost all employment will, at least temporarily, derive from whatever reconstruction aid the US provides, this means that the Americans plan to retain a life-and-death grip on the city. Only those deemed by them to be non-insurgents (based on notoriously faulty US intelligence) will be able to support themselves or their families.

Those engaged in reconstruction work - that is, those who are working at all - in the city may be organized into "work brigades". The best information indicates that these will be military-style battalions commanded by the US or Iraqi armed forces. Here, as in other parts of the plan, the motive is clearly to maintain strict surveillance over males of military age, all of whom will be considered potential insurgents.

In case the overarching meaning of all this has eluded you, Major Francis Piccoli, a spokesman for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, which is leading the occupation of Fallujah, spelled it out for Kratovac: "Some may see this as a 'Big Brother is watching over you' experiment, but in reality it's a simply security measure to keep the insurgents from coming back." Actually, it is undoubtedly meant to be both; and since, in the end, it is likely to fail (at least, if the "success" of other US plans in Iraq is taken as precedent), it may prove less revealing of Fallujah's actual future than of the failure of the US counterinsurgency effort in Iraq and of the desperation of American strategists.

In this context, the most revealing element of the plan may be the banning of all cars, the enforcement of which, all by itself, would make the city unlivable; and which therefore demonstrates both the impracticality of the US vision and a callous disregard for the needs and rights of the Fallujans.

These dystopian plans are a direct consequence of the fact that the conquest of Fallujah, despite the destruction of the city, visibly did not accomplish its primary goal - "to wipe out militants and insurgents and break the back of guerrillas in Fallujah". Even taking American kill figures at face value, the battle for the city was hardly a full-scale success. Before the assault on the city began, US intelligence estimated that there were 5,000 insurgents inside. Sattler himself conceded that the final official count was 1,200 fighters killed and no more than 2,000 suspected guerrillas captured. (This assumes, of course, that it was possible in the heat of the battle and its grim aftermath to tell whether any dead man of fighting age was an "insurgent", a "suspected insurgent", or just a dead civilian.) At least a couple of thousand resistance fighters previously residing in Fallujah are, then, still "at large" - not counting the undoubtedly sizable number of displaced residents now angry enough to take up arms. As a consequence, were the US to allow the outraged residents of Fallujah to return unmolested, they would simply face a new struggle in the ruins of the city (as, in fact, continues to be the case anyway). This would leave the extensive devastation of whole neighborhoods as the sole legacy of the invasion.

US desperation is expressed in a willingness to treat all Fallujans as part of the insurgency - the inevitable fate of an occupying army that tries to "root out" a popular resistance. As Sattler explained, speaking of the plan for the "repopulation" of the city, "Once we've cleared each and every house in a sector, then the Iraqi government will make the notification of residents of that particular sector that they are encouraged to return." In other words, each section of the city must be entirely emptied of life, so that the military can be sure not even one suspect insurgent has infiltrated the new order. (As is evident, this is but another US occupation fantasy, since the insurgents still hiding in the city have evidently proven all too adept at "repopulating" emptied neighborhoods themselves.)

The ongoing policy of house-to-house inspections, combined with ultra-tight security regulations aimed at not allowing suspected guerrillas to re-enter the city, is supposed to ensure that everyone inside the Fallujan perimeter will not only be disarmed but obedient to occupation demands and desires. The name tags and the high-tech identity cards are meant to guard against both forgeries and unlawful movement within the city. The military-style work gangs are to ensure that everyone is under close supervision at all times. The restricted entry points are clearly meant to keep all weapons out. Assumedly kept out as well will be most or all reporters (they tend to inflame public opinion), most medical personnel (they tend to "exaggerate" civilian casualties), and most Sunni clerics (they oppose the occupation and support the insurgency). We can also expect close scrutiny of computers (which can be used for nefarious communications), ambulances (which have been used to smuggle weapons and guerrillas), medicines (which can be used to patch up wounded fighters who might still be hiding somewhere), and so on.

It is not much of a reach to see that, at least in their fantasies, US planners would like to set up what sociologists call a "total institution". Like a mental hospital or a prison, Fallujah, at least as reimagined by the Americans, will be a place where constant surveillance equals daily life and the capacity to interdict "suspicious" behavior (however defined) is the norm. But "total institution" might be too sanitized a term to describe activities that so clearly violate international law as well as fundamental morality. Those looking for a descriptor with more emotional bite might consider one of those used by correspondent Pepe Escobar of Asia Times Online: either "American gulag" for those who enjoy Stalinist imagery or "concentration camp" for those who prefer the Nazi version of the same. But maybe we should just call it a plain old police (city-)state.

Where will such plans lead? Well, for one thing, we can confidently predict that nothing we might recognize as an election will take place in Fallujah at the end of January. (Remember, it was to liberate Fallujans from the grip of "terrorists" and to pave the way for electoral free choice that the administration of US President George W Bush claimed it was taking the city in the first place.) With the current date for allowing the first residents to return set for December 24 - heads of household only to assess property damage - and the process of repopulation supposedly moving step by step, from north to south, across neighborhoods and over time, it's almost inconceivable that a majority of Fallujans will have returned by late January (if they are even willing to return under the conditions set by the Americans). Latest reports are that it will take six months to a year simply to restore electricity to the city. So organizing elections seems unlikely indeed.

The magnitude of the devastation and the brutality of the US plan are what's likely to occupy the full attention of Fallujans for the foreseeable future - and their reactions to these dual disasters represent the biggest question mark of the moment. However, the history of the Iraq war thus far, and the history of guerrilla wars in general, suggest that there will simply be a new round of struggle, and that carefully laid military plans will begin to disintegrate with the very first arrivals. There is no predicting what form the new struggle will take, but the US military is going to have a great deal of difficulty controlling a large number of rebellious, angry people inside the gates of America's new mini-police state. This is why the military command has kept almost all of the original attack force in the city, in anticipation of the need for tight patrols by a multitude of US troops. And it also explains why so many other locations around the country have suddenly found themselves without a US troop presence.

The Fallujah police-state strategy represents a sign of weakness, not strength. The new Fallujah imagined by American planners is a desperate, ad hoc response to the failure of the battle to "break the back of the guerrillas". Like the initial attack on the city, it, too, is doomed to failure, though it has the perverse "promise" of deepening the suffering of the Iraqis.

Michael Schwartz, professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on US business and government dynamics. His work on Iraq has appeared at TomDispatch, Asia Times Online and ZNet and in Contexts and Z Magazine. His books include Radical Politics and Social Structure, The Power Structure of American Business (with Beth Mintz), and Social Policy and the Conservative Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo) . His e-mail address is Ms42@optonline.net.

(This report appeared on TomDispatch and is used with permission.)

(Copyright 2004 Michael Schwartz.)