March 17 (Bloomberg) — U.S. military spending in Iraq and Afghanistan will average 44 percent more in the current fiscal year than in fiscal 2005, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service said.

Spending will rise to $9.8 billion a month from the $6.8 billion a month the Pentagon said it spent last year, the research service said. The group’s March 10 report cites “substantial” expenses to replace or repair damaged weapons, aircraft, vehicles, radios and spare parts.

It also figures in costs for health care, fuel, national intelligence and the training of Iraqi and Afghan security forces — “now a substantial expense,” it said.

The research service said it considers “all war and occupation costs,” while the Pentagon counts just the cost of personnel, maintenance and operations.
bloomberg.com

LONDON (Reuters) – British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Tuesday will call for a global, interventionist approach to confront terrorism head on and win a battle over values and ideas.

“This is not a clash between civilizations, it is a clash about civilization,” Blair will say in a speech this afternoon, according to extracts released by his official spokesman.

“‘We’ is not the West. ‘We’ are as much Muslim as Christian or Jew or Hindu. ‘We’ are those who believe in religious tolerance, openness to others, to democracy, liberty and human rights administered by secular courts,” he will say.

The speech, due to be given at a Reuters Newsmaker event, is the first of three that Blair plans to deliver on terrorism and the significance of Iraq and Afghanistan. The second will be given in Australia and the third in the United States.

“The only way to win is to recognize this phenomenon is a global ideology; to see all areas in which it operates as linked and to defeat it by values and ideas set in opposition to those of the terrorists,” the speech will say.

Blair will say a belief in an “activist approach” to foreign policy, based on values and interests, is the theme underlying the government’s approach to issues from Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Iraq, Afghanistan, to climate change and poverty in Africa.
netscape.cnn.com

How droll. ‘We’ are not the same imperialist West perpretrating the same crap over the past 500 years. Looks the same, sounds the same, smells the same…

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger offered words of sympathetic support to President George W. Bush, as the administration encounters eroding public support for US military involvement in Iraq.

Kissinger, who served under Republican US President Richard Nixon during the tumultuous Vietnam War years, told CNN television’s “Late Edition” program that his experience facing growing public opposition to that unpopular conflict gives him a unique window into the travails by the Bush White House in Iraq now.

“My heart goes out to the president because I’ve served in an administration that faced a very divided country in a very difficult set of circumstances,” Kissinger told CNN, without invoking America’s military intervention in Vietnam by name.

The former top US diplomat said that the Bush administration deserves the benefit of the doubt as it struggles to find a way to quell mounting sectarian violence in Iraq.

“The president is trying to head out in a direction that avoids civil war in Iraq, and that prevents the insurgents from dominating and establishing some sort of fundamentalist regime,” Kissinger said.

“I think we should attempt to work together on this. I would support the objectives,” he said, adding that for the time being “nobody has yet put forward a better program.”
news.yahoo.com

Poor babies. It is such a hard job day in and day out being the Great Satan.

Get off it. All the carping, belly-aching and complaining about George Bush’s incompetence in Iraq, from both the Left and now the Right, is just dead wrong.

On the third anniversary of the tanks rolling over Iraq’s border, most of the 59 million Homer Simpsons who voted for Bush are beginning to doubt if his mission was accomplished.

But don’t kid yourself — Bush and his co-conspirator, Dick Cheney, accomplished exactly what they set out to do. In case you’ve forgotten what their real mission was, let me remind you of White House spokesman Ari Fleisher’s original announcement, three years ago, launching of what he called,

“Operation
Iraqi
Liberation.”

O.I.L. How droll of them, how cute. Then, Karl Rove made the giggling boys in the White House change it to “OIF” — Operation Iraqi Freedom. But the 101st Airborne wasn’t sent to Basra to get its hands on Iraq’s OIF.
gregpalast.com

Well the oil companies are seeing massive profits due to the crippling of Iraq’s oil output.

Iraq is a country paralysed by fear. It is at its worst in Baghdad. Sectarian killings are commonplace. In the three days after the bombing of the Shia shrine in Samarra on 22 February, some 1,300 people, mostly Sunni, were picked up on the street or dragged from their cars and murdered. The dead bodies of four suspected suicide bombers were left dangling from a pylon in the Sadr City slum.

The scale of the violence is such that most of it is unreported. Iyad Allawi, the former prime minister, said yesterday that scores were dying every day. “It is unfortunate that we are in civil war. We are losing each day, as an average, 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more,” he said. “If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is.”

Unseen by the outside world, silent populations are on the move, frightened people fleeing neighbourhoods where their community is in a minority for safer districts.

There is also a growing reliance on militias because of fears that police patrols or checkpoints are in reality death squads hunting for victims.

Districts where Sunni and Shia lived together for decades if not centuries are being torn apart in a few days. In the al-Amel neighbourhood in west Baghdad, for instance, the two communities lived side by side until a few days ago, though Shias were in the majority. Then the Sunni started receiving envelopes pushed under their doors with a Kalashnikov bullet inside and a letter telling them to leave immediately or be killed. It added that they must take all of their goods which they could carry immediately and only return later to sell their houses.
independent.co.uk

10 bodies found in Baghdad, including 13-year-old girl
Iraqi authorities today reported finding 10 more bullet-riddled bodies dumped in the capital Baghdad, one of them that of a 13-year-old girl.

The 10 bodies were the latest gruesome discoveries tied to the underground sectarian war being conducted by Shiite and Sunni Muslims as they settle scores in the chaos that grips the Iraqi capital.

Iraqi Insurgents Storm Police Station, Killing 15 Officers
BAGDHAD, Iraq, March 21 — In a bold raid at daybreak, a band of at least 100 insurgents stormed a police station in the town of Muqdadiya northeast of Baghdad today, killing at least 18 police officers, wounding four others and freeing all of the 33 prisoners being held in the station, officials in the Interior Ministry said.

Iraqi president rejects civil war talk
The Iraqi president has discounted the risk of a civil war in response to remarks by Iyad Allawi, the former premier, that the country was in the midst of such a conflict.

“One can completely rule out the threat of a civil war,” Jalal Talabani, the president, told reporters after a meeting of political parties discussing the formation of a unity government.

“The Iraqi people cannot accept a civil war. We are passing through a difficult period right now, but the attachment of Iraqis to their country will prevent such a war,” he said.

“We are a long way from a civil war and we are working towards a formula for a national accord.”

Chalabi blames Bremer for Iraq’s unraveling
WASHINGTON (AFP) – Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi blamed former US civilian administrator Paul “Jerry” Bremer for failing to anticipate the violence in Iraq.

Asked by CNN television’s “Late Edition” program who was responsible for “blunders” in Iraq, Chalabi said: “I will give you a name. I would not have given the name if he had not published a book — Ambassador Jerry Bremer.”

Chalabi slammed Bremer “for not appreciating the situation, appreciating the size of the threat from anti-US insurgents.

“He kept, for months and months on end, to say, those are die-hards who have no coordination and no plan to move forward,” he said.

“He refused to accept the obvious. He refused to believe what was right in front of him,” Chalabi said.

“In general, this is largely responsible for what we are seeing now,” he said, speaking of the sectarian violence between Sunni and Shiite Muslims.

Chalabi also dismissed as “great fiction” a recent book by Bremer which pinned some of the blame for the violence on poor military planning by US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

A CIA flunkie to the end…

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraqi police have accused U.S. troops of executing 11 people, including a 75-year-old woman and a 6-month-old infant, in the aftermath of a raid Wednesday on a house about 60 miles north of Baghdad.

The villagers were killed after U.S. troops herded them into a single room of the house, according to a police document obtained by Knight Ridder Newspapers. The soldiers also burned three vehicles, killed the villagers’ animals and blew up the house, the document said.

Accusations that U.S. troops have killed civilians are commonplace in Iraq, though most are judged later to be unfounded or exaggerated.

A U.S. military spokesman, Maj. Tim Keefe, said that the U.S. military has no information to support the allegations and that he had not heard of them before.
seattletimes.nwsource.com

At the beginning of the Iraq war, the UN entrusted $23bn of Iraqi money to the US-led coalition to redevelop the country. With the infrastructure of the country still in ruins, where has all that money gone?

…In a dilapidated maternity and paediatric hospital in Diwaniyah, 100 miles south of Baghdad, Zahara and Abbas, premature twins just two days old, lie desperately ill. The hospital has neither the equipment nor the drugs that could save their lives. On the other side of the world, in a federal courthouse in Virginia, US, two men – one a former CIA agent and Republican candidate for Congress, the other a former army ranger – are found guilty of fraudulently obtaining $3m (£1.7m) intended for the reconstruction of Iraq. These two events have no direct link, but they are none the less products of the same thing: a financial scandal that in terms of sheer scale must rank as one of the greatest in history.
guardian.co.uk

HANOI – Nguyen Thi Thuy was 22 when she left her village to help build roads for the North Vietnamese army during the war. She remembers crawling into tunnels during the day and covering her mouth with a wet rag when the United States military sprayed the landscape with defoliant.

“I didn’t know what it was then, but it was white,” she recalled. “The sky and earth were scorched. The earth had lost all its greenery. We didn’t know it was Agent Orange at that time.”

And now, more than three decades later, an international conference here on Thursday and Friday, will examine the social impacts of the notorious wartime herbicide. Until now, research on the effects of the chemical has focused primarily on science that proves a link between dioxin exposure and numerous diseases.

Coming, as it does, ahead of April’s appeal proceedings in New York on a lawsuit brought by Vietnamese victims against the manufacturers of the defoliant, the conference has added relevance.
antiwar.com

The BBC asks this morning, “does Iraq qualify for the definition of civil war?” Do five out of seven pundits agree? There is apparently in the minds of UK Defense Minister Reid and Rumsfeld a vast chasm between ‘sectarian conflict’ and ‘civil war’. What’s the dif? Is there a critical mass of carnage–should we be getting out our Final Four-style scorecards?

When Rumsfeld finally figures out the ‘plan’, will he declare civil war? Of all the horrific absurdities of this war, this bizarre debate is way up there. What difference does it make to people on the ground what we call it? Again, it’s a struggle about who gets to call what what. Allawi says it’s a civil war, but this is dismissed as political opportunism. What about Bush and Blair’s political stake in insisting it’s not?

What everybody has to understand is that WE are the namers and the doers, the only legitimate agents on the scene. ‘Clearly defined groups engaged in sectarian warfare…’ that’s the political definition, and since WE have decided that hasn’t happened yet, it isn’t happening period.

Yes it is, no it’s not: how much ink has been spilled on the right and left in the West as they wrangle to characterize Iraq’s long decline?

I always found it crazy that the U.S. appeared to support the Shia for these past three years: they wanted an Islamist theocracy then? Their interests dovetail with Iran’s? I knew that couldn’t be so. Now things have settled into a more comprehensible picture: Saddam’s Baathists are of course our natural allies. Like attracts like after all. Funny what blowing the dome off a mosque can do.

While we engage this burning question of the day with our panels of experts, our Orientalists who have engaged in this sort of prurience for 300 years anyway, tortured bodies are popping up everywhere like dandelions, families are fleeing their homes for their lives, and people are blowing up.

Is ‘Swarmer’ the newest Ninja Turtle?

“We are losing each day as an average 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more – if this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is.”

Iraq is in the middle of civil war, the country’s former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi has told the BBC.

He said Iraq had not got to the point of no return, but if it fell apart sectarianism would spread abroad.

The UK and US have repeatedly denied Iraq is facing a civil war, but Mr Allawi suggested there was no other way to describe the sectarian violence.

Analysts say Mr Allawi’s comments are part of political manoeuvring as talks continue over creation of a government.

UK Defence Secretary John Reid insisted that the terrorists were failing to drive Iraq into civil war.

Speaking to British troops in Basra, he said he thought the political and religious leaders had shown great restraint.

Those trying to turn one community on another were not succeeding, he added.
bbc.co.uk

Rumsfeld: We’re trying to figure out what to do if Iraq falls into civil war
America has begun making plans to deal with a civil war in Iraq, three years after the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

As sectarian violence continues to claim lives every day, Donald Rumsfeld, the American defence secretary, has disclosed that United States military intelligence is holding war games to predict what might happen in such a situation.

Mr Rumsfeld’s admission that “the intelligence community are thinking about this and analysing it” comes despite the White House’s insistence that Iraq is not slipping into civil war.