1615 GMT: The Iraqi electoral commission is reporting that voter turnout is well above 50 percent in all but one of 11 provinces declared so far.
Strikingly, the turnout in Diyala, a former centre of Sunni insurgency, was more than 90 percent. That’s a sharp contrast from the 2005 national elections, which were boycotted by the main Sunni parties.
1600 GMT: Iraqi security forces have announced a 10 p.m. (1900 GMT) curfew in Baghdad to allow safe transport of ballot boxes to election commission headquarters.
Three weeks has passed since the 22nd of Bahman rally and there have been lots of discussions and comments regarding this rally, what is opinion your about this event?
It is not the first time that the ceremonies of 22nd of Bahman have been held in our country. These ceremonies are in remembrance of rallies in 1979 [and have taken place] in different occasions with more than a million people. Every year people who admire this revolution participate in these ceremonies where traditional institutions such as Mosques or religious assemblies play an important role in organizing the rally. Usually the ceremonies in each year are influenced by important events of the year and the political atmosphere [in the country]. The 10th presidential election and the events that followed it influenced this year’s rally. The government mobilized [large number of people] public employees, using trains and buses from all across the country by spending large sums of money. This was all to neutralize the impact of presence of green movement.
In February 2005, I decided to try my hand at a blog, Rebel Yell: “Better to offer alternative perspectives, not with the certainty of being right but with the hope of unsettling and challenging those who claim a universal perspective and an eternal “right” in the advance of their causes.”
Two weeks later, on 28 February 2005, I wrote about the US, Tony Blair, and Iraq. Almost five years later, and a day after Blair’s testimony to an enquiry into the 2003 Iraq, I stand by every word:
The Independent on Sunday reveals that Comrade Tony and Her Majesty’s Government decided in April 2002 to follow the Bush Administration’s lead for War in Iraq, almost a year before the formal opening of hostilities.
Credit to the Indy for publishing but this isn’t really news to Rebel Yell. The line here has long been that Dick Cheney came to London in March 2002 to tell Comrade Tony that Afghanistan was now out of fashion and today’s look was regime change in Baghdad. Never mind that Osama might still be skipping around the mountains of eastern Afghanistan — in early March, eight American troops (then considered, before 1500 US deaths in Iraq, a massive toll) were killed by an ambush in the botched Operation Anaconda. With the face that democracy had been brought to Kabul, Al Qa’eda was now little more than a diversion from the Bush Administration’s priority since January 2001: Saddam Must Go.
Officially the position was “the US does not target states on a day-to-day basis” but the tip-off was in the British announcement that a dossier on Iraq’s WMDs would be published by the end of March. Ah yes, that dossier. It didn’t beat the March deadline because the intelligence on Saddam’s arsenals of death wasn’t there. Indeed, it would take six more months — after Cheney had proclaimed that Iraq was about to unveil nuclear weapons — for MI6/Alistair Campbell [Blair's influential press advisor]/Comrade Tony to provide the fig leaf of “Saddam Able to Strike in 45 Minutes”.
So while we’re waiting for the unabridged version of the March 2003 legal opinion, which may or may not have been written by the British Attorney General, that told Parliament that the bombing of Baghdad was legit, how about adding a second request: what was the document in March 2002 that persuaded Comrade Tony that Saddam was an “imminent threat” who must be overthrown? Or was it simply Dick Cheney’s charm and winning smile?
Following US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s latest trip to the Middle East and negative Arab reactions to her “positive” statements, Gideon Levy published a provocative article in Haaretz, criticising Washington for its continuing praise of Tel Aviv despite Israel’s inaction over peace talks.
America, stop sucking up to Israel
Barack Obama has been busy – offering the Jewish People blessings for Rosh Hashanah, and recording a flattering video for the President’s Conference in Jerusalem and another for Yitzhak Rabin’s memorial rally. Only Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah surpasses him in terms of sheer output of recorded remarks.
In all the videos, Obama heaps sticky-sweet praise on Israel, even though he has spent nearly a year fruitlessly lobbying for Israel to be so kind as to do something, anything – even just a temporary freeze on settlement building – to advance the peace process. Read the rest of this entry »
It has been thoroughly depressing to watch the spiralling descent of public discussion of the Bush Administration’s policies and operations that put torture into practice from 2002. My fear is that the mounting evidence (much of which we had known years ago, before the advent of the Obama Administration opened up a space for revelation) of a systematic use of “enhanced interrogation” is being swept away by a hyper-active campaign of distortions, excuses, and pretexts.
The debate is now being framed as to whether the US Government going to cripple the dedicated personnel of the Central Intelligence Agency. That is a deliberate screen to hide a bigger goal: to keep Bush Administration officials from facing a reckoning, in public opinion if not criminal court, for their actions.
Thank goodness, therefore, for Dan Froomkin, who has fought diligently for years to keep the story of torture before readers. Pushed out the door by The Washington Post in part because of this effort, he is now writing for The Huffington Postin:
Cheney Still Manipulating People — Now In Public
When he was vice president, Dick Cheney got his way by secretly wielding the instruments of power. Now that he’s no longer in government, Cheney is still pulling levers and pushing buttons – he’s just doing it in plain view. And it’s the media that he’s manipulating.
After years of speaking in whispers, operating by proxy, and leaving as few fingerprints as possible, Cheney has figured out that he can say pretty much anything he wants, the networks will show it on TV, and the newspapers will dutifully print it. And best of all, they will fail to put it in any context whatsoever.
Iraq continues to be a violent and unstable country. Yesterday, bombs exploded near five Shi’a mosques in Baghdad, killing 29 people. British forces have finally been forced to complete their withdrawal, with the Iraqi Parliament refusing to extend an agreement for their stay, leaving the US as a “Coalition of One”. Political tension over the future of Kirkuk, the key city in the middle of Iraq’s oil-producing region, is escalating.
Paradoxically, however, six years after the “liberation” of Iraq, the campaign by some in the US military to turn instability into a rationale for a continued US presence persists. So this leaked memorandum for a high-ranking US officer in Baghdad, published in The New York Times, has caused a stir within Iraq, even if it has not been picked up by many in the “mainstream” media. The official response from the US military is that “the author is conveying that the problem is too hard, and therefore we should quit”; Juan Cole offers his own analysis of the issues for the American occupation:
As the old saying goes, “guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.” Since the signing of the 2009 Security Agreement, we are guests in Iraq, and after six years in Iraq, we now smell bad to the Iraqi nose.
Today the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) are good enough to keep the Government of Iraq (GOI) from being overthrown by the actions of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the Baathists, and the Shia violent extremists that might have toppled it a year or two ago. Iraq may well collapse into chaos of other causes, but we have made the ISF strong enough for the internal security mission. Perhaps it is one of those infamous paradoxes of counterinsurgency that while the ISF is not good in any objective sense, it is good enough for Iraq in 2009. Read the rest of this entry »
Keith Olbermann: “Thank you, Sir, for admitting, obviously inadvertently, that you did not take a serious first look in the seven months and 23 days between your inauguration and 9/11. For that attack, Sir, you are culpable, morally, ethically. At best you were guilty of malfeasance and eternally-lasting stupidity. At worst, Sir, in the deaths of 9/11, you are negligent.”
I am refraining from an analysis of former Vice President Dick Cheney’s comments on national security yesterday, primarily because I hope that his speech — which should be treated at most as self-justification — will just go away. This is hope rather than expectation, however. Despite Dan Drezner’s comment that President Obama has “adversaries more boneheaded than himself”, Cheney’s words will be treated as Tablets from the Mount by his supporters in the broadcast and print media.
So, as a pre-emptive strike against the upholding of Cheney’s views as the thoughtful alternative in US homeland security and foreign policy, here are video commentaries from Lawrence O’Donnell and Keith Olbermann, followed by a thorough exposure of the former Vice President’s distortions and deceptions by McClatchy News Service’s Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay:
Yesterday, I was speaking to British high school students when one asked, “What are President Obama’s three greatest challenges today?” After putting the economy Number One and listing (but dismissing) Republican opposition as a potential Number Two, I said:
But I’m concerned that it will be Afghanistan and Pakistan that will bring him down. I think he’s being overtaken by his own military, especially General David Petraeus [the head of US Central Command] and their ideas of “strategy”.
1615 GMT: The Iraqi electoral commission is reporting that voter turnout is well above 50 percent in all but one of 11 provinces declared so far.
Following US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s latest trip to the Middle East and negative Arab reactions to her “positive” statements, Gideon Levy published 
It has been thoroughly depressing to watch the spiralling descent of public discussion of the Bush Administration’s policies and operations that put torture into practice from 2002. My fear is that the mounting evidence (much of which we had known years ago, before the advent of the Obama Administration opened up a space for revelation) of a systematic use of “enhanced interrogation” is being swept away by a hyper-active campaign of distortions, excuses, and pretexts.
Iraq continues to be a violent and unstable country. Yesterday, 
Entries (RSS)