One of Ours

An attack by hundreds of Iraqi militia members on the U.S. government’s headquarters in Najaf on Sunday was repulsed not by the U.S. military, but by eight commandos from a private security firm, according to sources familiar with the incident.
Before U.S. reinforcements could arrive, the firm, Blackwater Security Consulting, sent in its own helicopters amid an intense firefight to resupply its commandos with ammunition and to ferry out a wounded Marine..

...Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, and spokesman Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt arrived to survey the battle zone.

Without commenting at a news conference yesterday on the role of the Blackwater guards, Kimmitt described what he saw after the fighting ended. "I know on a rooftop yesterday in An Najaf, with a small group of American soldiers and coalition soldiers . . . who had just been through about 3 1/2 hours of combat, I looked in their eyes, there was no crisis.

"They knew what they were here for," he continued. "They'd lost three wounded. We were sitting there among the bullet shells -- the bullet casings -- and, frankly, the blood of their comrades, and they were absolutely confident."...

...The four men brutally slain Wednesday in Fallujah were also Blackwater employees and were operating in the Sunni triangle area under more hazardous conditions -- unarmored cars with no apparent backup -- than the U.S. military or the CIA permit.

One senior Blackwater manager has described those killings to U.S. government officials as the result of a "high-quality" attack as skilled as one that can be mounted by U.S. Special Forces...

...Blackwater, a security and training company based in Moyock, N.C., prides itself on the high caliber of its personnel, many of whom are former U.S. Navy SEALs. It has 450 employees in Iraq, many of them providing security to CPA employees, including the U.S. administrator, L. Paul Bremer, and to VIPs visiting Iraq.

Blackwater has applied to occupy a former MIG air base near Baghdad as a counterterrorism training facility for Iraqi forces. The training range will mirror the 6,000-acre Moyock site, which is frequented by U.S. law enforcement and military personnel.

Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has turned down an appeal by Iraq's powerful Shi'ite Muslim establishment to renounce violence, a leading cleric said Monday.

An aide to Mohammad Bahr al-Uloum, a member of the U.S.-installed Iraqi Governing Council, said Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, regarded as Iraq's most powerful cleric and a rival of Sadr's, supported the Iraqi seminary's appeal.

"The Hawza (seminary) is unanimous on this," the aide said.

"We asked Moqtada (al-Sadr) to stop resorting to violence, occupying public buildings and other actions that make him an outlaw. He insists on staying on the same course that could destroy the nation."

...The poll was the latest in a series which this overwhelmingly Shia province has held in the past six weeks, and the results have been surprising. Seventeen towns have voted, and in almost every case secular independents and representatives of non-religious parties did better than the Islamists.…

...“This is a free election,” said Jawad Khadum, a teacher in Tar. “We want more of them, for example in our teachers’ union and for the mayor.”

Like many professionals, he was worried by the way some religious parties had been throwing their weight around, trying to close shops which sell alcohol and pressing every woman to wear a veil. He saw the vote as a chance to stop this, he said...

...We have been dealing with the legal issues surrounding contractors for quite a while. In recent years the army has become more and more reliant upon contractors to do almost anything and everything for us when deployed. It really began getting big during Bosnia and Kosovo where all the basecamps and logistics functions were handled by KBR. But that really was a permissive environment compared to Iraq and the contractors were not as much at risk as they are now. We've received a number of requests from contractors to carry weapons. Not all of them are allowed to. International law prevents us from arming civilians accompanying the force. They are non-combatants who are not supposed to carry arms or wear a uniform. If we give them weapons and training then their status is even murkier. There is NO protection under international law for armed civilians in a combat zone, with one minor exception for a Levee en Masse. Otherwise they are unlawful combatants. (Note this is the same rationale applied to the detainees in Guantanamo and the reason they are called unlawful enemy combatants. We caught them in civilian clothes fighting us.) In the case of the four contractors that were killed in Fallujah. They were authorized to carry weapons since they were hired as security contractors. The authorization has to come from very high up the chain of command but they work with no legal authority. They have weapons permits that allow them to carry their weapons but they really are in no way connected with the military. This is a very tricky legal issue since the military really can't do what we're doing without contractors but we really aren't allowed to let them protect themselves.

The Geneva conventions were designed to protect civilians and soldiers on both sides of a conflict. The assumption is that both parties to a conflict will observe the rules and regulations. In Iraq it is patently obvious that our enemies have absolutely zero regard for international law. So it is a bit ridiculous for us, in this circumstance, to prevent the civilians working for us to protect themselves.

...We were issued malaria pills yesterday. I remember a while ago when they were blaming the deaths in Fayetteville on malaria medicine. I honestly don't know whether there's any truth to that allegation. They took blood from all of us before the deployment to check if we could take the malaria medicine safely and apparently I'm good to go. I have to take one pill of chloroquin once a week. They had us read a packet describing the reasons for the pills and the possible side effects. Malaria will cause nausea, headaches, sweating and fevers. They said the possible side effects of the pills are nausea, headaches, stomach cramps and fever. Now, this just seems a bit odd to me, taking medicine that creates the same symptoms as the disease. I pointed this out to the medic but she just told me to take the pill with food to decrease the risk of symptoms and stop being a smartass.

A coup d'etat is taking place in Iraq a the moment. Al-Shu'la, Al-Hurria, Thawra (Sadr city), and Kadhimiya (all Shi'ite neighbourhoods in Baghdad) have been declared liberated from occupation. Looting has already started at some places downtown, a friend of mine just returned from Sadun street and he says Al-Mahdi militiamen are breaking stores and clinics open and also at Tahrir square just across the river from the Green Zone. News from other cities in the south indicate that Sadr followers (tens of thousands of them) have taken over IP stations and governorate buildings in Kufa, Nassiriya, Ammara, Kut, and Basrah. Al-Jazeera says that policemen in these cities have sided with the Shia insurgents, which doesn't come as a surprise to me since a large portion of the police forces in these areas were recruited from Shi'ite militias and we have talked about that ages ago. And it looks like this move has been planned a long time ago.

No one knows what is happening in the capital right now. Power has been cut off in my neighbourhood since the afternoon, and I can only hear helicopters, massive explosions, and continuous shooting nearby. The streets are empty, someone told us half an hour ago that Al-Mahdi are trying to take over our neighbourhood and are being met by resistance from Sunni hardliners. Doors are locked, and AK-47's are being loaded and put close by in case they are needed. The phone keeps ringing frantically. Baghdadis are horrified and everyone seems to have made up their mind to stay home tomorrow until the situation is clear.

Where is Shitstani? And why is he keeping silent about this?

I have to admit that until now I have never longed for the days of Saddam, but now I'm not so sure. If we need a person like Saddam to keep those rabid dogs at bay then be it. Put Saddam back in power and after he fills a couple hundred more mass graves with those criminals they can start wailing and crying again for liberation. What a laugh we will have then. Then they can shove their filthy Hawza and marji'iya up somewhere else. I am so dissapointed in Iraqis and I hate myself for thinking this way. We are not worth your trouble, take back your billions of dollars and give us Saddam again. We truly 'deserve' leaders like Saddam.

Sorry for the depressing note. It seems like everything is back under control, at least from what I can see in my neighbourhood. There is an eerie silence outside, only dogs barking. Until about an hour ago, it sounded like a battlefield, and we had flashbacks of last April. I don’t know what happened, but there were large plumes of smoke from the direction of Adhamiya and Kadhimiya. I wanted to take some pictures but my father and uncle both said they would shoot me on the spot if I tried, they were afraid the Apaches would mistake us for troublemakers and fire at us. I’m dreading tomorrow.

...One of the darkest marks on this country and the world is the 1994 slaughter of almost one million Tutsi Rwandans. After swearing "NEVER AGAIN!" in reference to the Holocaust (a U.N. Convention for all countries to stop genocide), the world stood by and simply watched. We. Simply. Watched.

Well, everybody just watched except for France. That's right. France.

But it's not what you think. France armed the Hutu's who were committing the genocidal murders. Then, the French government sent troops to create a safe zone. And the genocide continued in the French safe zone.

There is plenty of blame to go around. Too many lawyers in our own government prevented anyone from using the word "genocide" because it would legally cause us to commit troops to stop the violence. Too many politicians used words like "not in our national interests" and failed to commit immediate resources to the U.N. Director of Peacekeeping, Kofi Annan. Canadian General Dallaire begged, BEGGED, for armed troops. Instead, he received tens of unarmed observers - observers that were killed whenever they tried to stop the maddness. Observers that were ordered by the U.N. to not intervene (ten Belgian soldiers were mutilated, tortured and killed trying to stop the murder of a moderate politician).

We promised fifty armored personnel carriers and took three months to deliver them. By that time, over 800,000 were dead (new estimates are about 930,000).

A good friend of mine was working for the war planners in the Pentagon. The warriors had estimated that three infantry battalions from the 82nd Airborne or the Marines could have saved, at least, half of the victims. That means that the Pentagon believed that, by the time we could put boots on the ground, we would have been able to stop the genocide. Of course, we would then be committed to send more troops to maintain the peace and provide medical and logistical support (total troop strength was tagged at about five thousand). Still, we did nothing.

The people that I believe are most responsible:
Kofi Annan who after this stellar performance in Rawanda as Director of Peackeeping became the U.N. Secretary General.
Madeleine Albright, our spineless U.N. Ambassador, who became our Secretary of State.
Bill Clinton, our President who said, in a speech at the Naval Academy in reference to Rwanda, that we would not get involved in conflicts outside of our national interests (due to Moghidishu).
François Mitterand, President of France.