* KIRKUK – The U.S. military said in a statement that the head of the Iraqi armed forces was in a convoy struck by a roadside bomb near Kirkuk on Thursday, but escaped injury. In the initial report on Thursday, Iraqi police said General Babakir Zebari, Iraq’s chief of staff, was not in the motorcade, although it was comprised of vehicles he normally used. Three Iraqi soldiers were wounded in the attack, the U.S. military said on Saturday.
BAGHDAD – The bodies of 16 victims of shootings were found in different areas of the capital, police said.
BAQUBA – Two gunmen were killed and 18 suspects arrested when the Iraqi army launched a search operation near Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) north of Baghdad, the Iraqi military said.
DUJAIL – Two civilians were found dead inside their car near Dujail, 50 km north of Baghdad on Saturday. The bodies of two brothers were also found in the same area on Friday, police said.
BAIJI – A police officer and his brother were killed by gunmen in Baiji, 180 km north of Baghdad, police said.
TIKRIT – Two U.S. soldiers were killed and another wounded in an attack northwest of Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown, on Thursday, the U.S. military said.
BAGHDAD – Five Iraqi soldiers were wounded when a roadside bomb exploded near their patrol in Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD – Three policemen were wounded when a roadside bomb struck their patrol in northern Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD – Two pilgrims walking to the Shi’ite holy city of Kerbala were killed and eight wounded by a roadside bomb in southern Baghdad, police said.
alertnet.org

Bombs, bullets meet Shiite pilgrims in Iraq
BAGHDAD, Iraq — The Muslim pilgrims’ road to the holy city of Karbala was a highway of bullets and bombs for Shiites on Friday.

Drive-by shootings and roadside and bus bombs killed or injured 19 people, ratcheting up the sectarian tensions gripping Iraq.

Security forces, including U.S. armored reinforcements, girded for more bloodshed leading up to Monday’s Shiite holiday. And north of Baghdad, in the Sunni Triangle, a two-day-old operation involving 1,500 U.S. and Iraqi troops swept through an area near Samarra in search of insurgents.

It was in Samarra that the insurgent bombing of a Shiite shrine last month ignited days of violence between Shiite and Sunni Muslims. More than 500 people died.

Authorities had feared new attacks as tens of thousands of Shiites, many dressed in black and carrying religious banners, converge on Karbala, 50 miles south of the capital, for Monday’s 40th and final day of mourning for Imam Hussein, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson.

The U.S. military announced this week it was dispatching a fresh battalion of the 2nd Brigade, 1st Armored Division, about 700 troops, to Iraq from its base in Kuwait to provide extra security for Shiite holy cities and Baghdad during this period.

Friday’s bloodshed in Baghdad began as groups of faithful, many of them parents with children in tow, trekked down city streets headed for the southbound highway to Karbala.

Four U.S. Soldiers Die, Four Others Wounded in Explosion in Iraq

03/18/06 “The Independent” — — It is a bright winter morning and I am sipping my first coffee of the day in Los Angeles. My eye moves like a radar beam over the front page of the Los Angeles Times for the word that dominates the minds of all Middle East correspondents: Iraq. In post-invasion, post-Judith Miller mode, the American press is supposed to be challenging the lies of this war. So the story beneath the headline “In a Battle of Wits, Iraq’s Insurgency Mastermind Stays a Step Ahead of US” deserves to be read. Or does it?

Datelined Washington – an odd city in which to learn about Iraq, you might think – its opening paragraph reads: “Despite the recent arrest of one of his would-be suicide bombers in Jordan and some top aides in Iraq, insurgency mastermind Abu Musab Zarqawi has eluded capture, US authorities say, because his network has a much better intelligence-gathering operation than they do.”

Now quite apart from the fact that many Iraqis – along, I have to admit, with myself – have grave doubts about whether Zarqawi exists, and that al-Qai’da’s Zarqawi, if he does exist, does not merit the title of “insurgency mastermind”, the words that caught my eye were “US authorities say”. And as I read through the report, I note how the Los Angeles Times sources this extraordinary tale. I thought American reporters no longer trusted the US administration, not after the mythical weapons of mass destruction and the equally mythical connections between Saddam and the international crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001. Of course, I was wrong.
informationclearinghouse.info

Saddam Was Trying to Capture Zarqawi
The Bush administration repeatedly made the presence in Iraq of Abu Musab Zarqawi a pretext for invading the country and overthrowing Saddam Hussein. They implied that he was a client of Saddam and that Saddam had arranged for hospital care for him.

Newly released documents from the captured Iraqi archives show that Saddam had put out an APB for Zarqawi and was trying to have him arrested as a danger to the Baath regime!

‘ However, one of the documents, a letter from an Iraqi intelligence official, dated August 17, 2002, asked agents in the country to be on the lookout for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and another unnamed man whose picture was attached. ‘

The September 29, 2002 Denver Post paraphrased Cheney, “He said the evidence presented against Iraq will be long and persuasive, including more details of a relationship between Hussein’s forces and the al-Qaeda terrorist network.”

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Middle East policy is not in America’s national interest and is motivated primarily by the country’s pro-Israel lobby, according to a study published yesterday by researchers from Harvard University and the University of Chicago.

Observers in Washington said yesterday that the study was liable to stir up a tempest and spur renewed debate about the function of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobby. The Fatah office in Washington distributed the article to an extensive mailing list.

“No lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are essentially identical,” write the authors of the study.

John J. Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago’s political science department and Stephen M. Walt from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government do not present new facts. They rely mainly on an analysis of Israeli and American newspaper reports and studies, along with the findings of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.

The study also documents accusations that American supporters of Israel pushed the United States into war with Iraq. It lists senior Bush administration officials who supported the war and are also known to support Israel, such as Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith and David Wurmser. The authors say the influence of the pro-Israel lobby is a source of serious concern and write that it has even caused damage to Israel by preventing it from reaching a compromise with its neighbors.
haaretz.com

ALGIERS, Algeria (AP) – Up to 200,000 Algerians have died in a 15-year Islamic insurgency, the head of the government human rights body said Saturday – the highest official toll ever given.

The fighting started in 1992 when the army canceled a second round of voting in Algeria’s first multiparty legislative elections, to thwart a likely victory by the now-banned Islamic Salvation Front.

Between 150,000 and 200,000 had died since the violence began, Farouk Ksentini said.

The number killed has never been clear, but Ksentini’s figure was the highest estimated toll given by anyone representing the state. The dead also included security forces, he said.
guardian.co.uk

American liberals, even left-liberals, just don’t get United States (U.S.) imperialism.

For an excellent case in point, see a recent opinion-editorial titled “Stop Bush’s War” by Bob Herbert, who is probably the “liberal” New York Times’ leftmost columnist (Hebert, “Stop Bush’s War, New York Times, 16 March 2006, p. A23).

The column makes some excellent points. Herbert is right to say that “an ocean of blood has been shed” in the criminal occupation of Iraq whether the total Iraqi body count is as low as president Bush says (30,000) or (as numerous responsible investigators say) well into six figures.

Herbert is right to say that “there’s no end to this tragic [blood] flow in sight.” He’s right to observe that many of the war’s supporters hold a fundamentally “deprav[ed]” thought: “that the best way to fight [the current Iraq war] is with other people’s children.” He’s right to remind us of “the formerly healthy men and women who have come back to the United States from Iraq paralyzed or without their arms or legs or eyes or the full use of their minds.” He’s right to quote David Halberstam to the effect that U.S. foreign policymakers’ desire to be seen as “tough” and “strong” is part of the reason for the continuing bloodshed in Iraq.

But Herbert is wrong to call “Bush’s war” “mindless” and to see little more than the timeless “madness” and “folly” of blind and power-mad elites in the making of both the U.S. assault on Vietnam and the current U.S. occupation of Iraq. He’s wrong to think it is telling, relevant, and useful to quote Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam-era special assistant Jack Valenti on “how difficult it is ‘to impress democracy’ on other countries.” He’s wrong to take the Bush administration seriously when it says it wants a free and democratic Iraq, as he does when he says that “the democracy that was supposed to flower in Iraq and then spread throughout the Middle East was as much a mirage as the weapons of mass destruction.”

The notion that the White House wants “democracy in Iraq and the Middle East” has never been anything more than a childish fairly tale concocted to cover imperial machinations. Herbert is engaging in wildly wishful thinking and whistling in the wind of imperial arrogance when he says that “the White House should be working cooperatively with members of both parties in Congress to figure out the best way to bring the curtain down on U.S. involvement.”
zmag.org

A BBC-funded film about the Rwandan genocide billed as an ‘authentic re-creation’ of a real-life story, is facing criticism for exacerbating the trauma experienced by genocide survivors.
Backed by the Rwandan government, shot on location in the country and to be premiered there this week, Shooting Dogs was intended to raise awareness of the conflict. Aid organisations are now saying that it was a shot with a lack of sensitivity so soon after the events.

The film, which stars Hugh Dancy and John Hurt, tells the story of a massacre at a school, L’Ecole Technique Officielle, during the genocide in 1994. It includes scenes in which machete-wielding Interahamwe militia close in on the building, hacking women and children to death. It was filmed where the atrocity took place, using many local people, including genocide survivors, as extras and members of the crew.

Aid workers have expressed concern that some local people were traumatised by witnessing the reconstruction. On one occasion, students from a nearby school had to be taken to hospital and sedated when they suffered flashbacks after overhearing the chants and whistles of the angry mob. One member of the crew suffered a breakdown when he was taken back to the street where he had been forced to hide down a manhole for three months to escape the killers.

‘In Rwanda, if you see a machete being wielded it doesn’t matter if it’s for a film – it seems real,’ said Mary Kayitesi Blewitt, director of the UK-based Rwandan charity Survivors’ Fund. ‘When the shoot was over, we had to step up trauma counselling. It took some people six months to overcome the anxiety, fear and paranoia.’
guardian.co.uk

Real-life horrors served up as entertainment for the Europeans, an old story. There is something psycho-sexual voyeuristic about so much of Western ‘culture.’ Then they step in to do ‘trauma conseling. Yow.

…Venezuela is reaching out to Africa, says Foreign Minister for African Affairs Reinaldo Bolivar.

During a meeting with African diplomats in Brazil, Mr Bolivar said Venezuela would this year be offering technical and legal know-how in the oil sector.

He said his country’s state-owned oil company PDVSA was studying the possibility of entering oil exploration partnerships with a string of African governments.

Security Council bid

Last year, Venezuela started imposing joint venture agreements and higher taxes on multi-national oil giants operating in its oil fields.

Venezuelan diplomats may advise African energy ministers to go down that road.

The South American country is currently pushing for a more visible presence in Africa.

It wants to open diplomatic missions in 12 African nations, including the oil-rich Sao Tome and Principe, Democratic Republic of Congo and Central African Republic.

The Venezuelan foreign ministry has also announced plans to set up health and education projects in Africa together with Cuba.
bbc.co.uk

QUITO, Ecuador (AP) — The leader of Ecuador’s main Indian movement on Thursday rejected President Alfredo Palacio’s call to end protests against free-trade talks with the United States.

”We will continue to mobilize and radicalize the protests in favor of life and against the free-trade agreement,” Luis Macas, leader of Ecuador’s main Indian movement, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, said in a statement. ”There will be neither dialogue nor contact with the government.”

Police, however, said the protest was slowing as provincial governors called for an end to the protest following government pledges to invest more on social spending and public works in their areas.

In the face of the unrest, Palacio went on national television Wednesday and urged Ecuadorans to ”close ranks” to defend the country’s democracy. The president said the protests were ”the culmination of deceptive politics that seeks to perversely tear apart the nation.”
nytimes.com

Offer Made to Settle Ecuador Oil Dispute
QUITO, Ecuador, March 17 (Reuters) — The Occidental Petroleum Corporation is offering Ecuador up to $1 billion in disputed taxes, investments and extra revenue from its crude output to resolve a legal dispute.

The Energy Ministry is studying whether to carry out a recommendation to revoke Occidental’s contract over charges it transferred part of an oil block to EnCana, a Canadian company, in 2000 without government authorization.

Occidental denies the charges and has proposed renegotiating the disputed oil field, investing to develop areas where it has operations and financing new projects for the state oil company, Petroecuador.

Petroecuador said it had received the proposal and had until next week to respond to Occidental.

Occidental’s proposal foresees renegotiating the block to hand the state at least an extra $600 million in oil revenues over the next 13 years if Ecuador abandons its legal challenge and extends the contract life seven years, to 2019.

PARIS (AP) – Police loosed water cannons and tear gas on rioting students and activists rampaged through a McDonald’s and attacked store fronts in the capital Saturday as demonstrations against a plan to relax job protections spread in a widening arc across France.

The protests, which drew 500,000 people in some 160 cities across the country, were the biggest show yet of escalating anger that is testing the strength of the conservative government before elections next year.

At the close of a march in Paris that drew a crowd of tens of thousands, seven officers and 17 protesters were injured during two melees, at the Place de la Nation in eastern Paris and the Sorbonne University. Police said they arrested 156 people in the French capital.
guardian.co.uk

School rules on the uniforms children wear could be thrown into chaos this week by the final law lords judgment in the case of Shabina Begum, the Muslim girl who was banned from wearing full Islamic dress at school.

Headteachers have told The Observer that if the judgment goes in her favour, making it unlawful to exclude children for refusing on religious grounds to wear proper uniform, it would ‘undermine the authority of schools’.
guardian.co.uk