One of Ours

...Arab satellite channels reported today that Al-Mustansiriyah university was under siege by US troops. We have a neighbour who is a professor there, so as expected we raced to his house when we had heard about it. We congratulated him for his safety, but he looked significantly surprised and asked us what was up? We told him about the siege. He chuckled at us and said "Oh, you mean that". It turned out there was no siege at all, there was an American patrol in the vicinity of the university, and they had witnessed someone climbing on the clock tower trying to paste a large poster of Muqtada Al-Sadr. The patrol called for backup, entered the campus and hollered for the fellow to come down. They teared the poster and removed a few others close to the university's main entry gates. According to our friend, the whole process didn't take any more than 20 minutes. Just to show how the Arab media conveniently distort events...

American troops killed hundreds of insurgents in and around Baghdad in fighting over the past week, but have more work to do to fully secure the city and roads to the south and west that are vital for U.S. supply transport...

...“I got to tell you, we’ve killed a lot of people carrying weapons and RPGs (rocket propelled grenades) this week,” [Gen. Mark] Hertling, a deputy commander of the Germany-based 1st Armored Division said Monday. “And when I say a lot, I am talking in the hundreds.”

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said Monday that U.S. troops killed about 700 insurgents across Iraq since the beginning of the month. Around 70 coalition troops - almost all Americans - were also killed...

...Fighting was most intense Saturday and Sunday when, according to Hertling, an average of 42 engagements took place on each day.

“There was a lot of RPG firing and a lot of ambush activities,” he said. At one point late last week, he added, soldiers fought insurgents continuously for 72 hours in Abu Ghraib, a neighborhood near the airport on Baghdad’s western outskirts. An Apache attack helicopter was shot down Sunday and its two crew members were killed.

Most of the fighting in and around Baghdad took place in Abu Ghraib, the eastern Shiite district of Sadr City and the restive Sunni neighborhood of Azamiyah.

Hertling said most of those who fought U.S. troops last week were members of al-Sadr’s al-Mahdi Army and the Sunni Mohammed’s Army, an organization widely suspected to be an umbrella group of former intelligence agents, army and security officials and members of the banned Baath party. In Abu Ghraib, they included Sunni extremists, criminal gang members and unemployed youths.

...The Vietnam War was a battlefield in the global Cold War that pitted the United States against the Soviet Union and its allies. The Soviet defense industry supplied the North Vietnamese with the latest weapons...So long as the Soviets were able to maintain a global balance of power, any local war -- in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Nicaragua -- tended to develop into a quagmire...

...The United States lost more than 60,000 soldiers and 8,000 aircraft in Vietnam...

...In Fallujah, they formed underground armed groups and waited for the Marines to attack. It is possible that the killing of the four contractors was a deliberate provocation intended to lure U.S. forces into the streets of Fallujah, where local armed bands lay in wait...

...The Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah outnumbered the Marines and were armed with Kalashnikov automatic rifles, RPG-7 antitank grenade launchers and mortars. Chechen fighters used the same weapons in Grozny in 1995, 1996 and 2000, killing thousands of Russian soldiers and destroying hundreds of armored vehicles.

Just like the Russians in Grozny, the Marines last week were supported by tanks and attack helicopters, but the end result was entirely different. U.S. forces did not bomb the city indiscriminately. The Iraqis fought well but were massacred. According to the latest body count, some 600 Iraqis died and another 1,000 were wounded. The Marines lost some 20 men.

The Marines are far better trained, of course, but the Iraqis were fighting in their hometown. The decisive difference between the two sides was the extensive use of a computerized command, control and targeting system by the U.S. military. Satellites, manned and unmanned aircraft collected precise information on enemy and friendly movements on the battlefield night and day.

Modern U.S. field commanders have real-time access to this system, allowing them to monitor the changing situation on the battlefield as no commander in the history of war has been able to do. This technology has greatly enhanced the effectiveness of aerial bombardments in the last decade. And now the nature of house-to-house combat has changed as well.

The more accurate historical analogy to the current war in Iraq is not Vietnam but, say, the battle at Omdurman, Sudan, in 1898, when Horatio Herbert Kitchener, a British field marshal, crushed the Sudanese forces of al-Mahdi by bringing machine guns to bear against the enemy's muskets and spears. Today the United States has the capability and the technical superiority to fight and win colonial wars against numerically superior enemies...

Last Friday, Al Jazeera's English-language Web site reported that Al Jazeera reporters had come under fire in Fallujah, including a bombing raid that came "disconcertingly close to the news channel's office." The story went on to note that "Aljazeera journalists have found themselves at the receiving end of US-aggression often in the past."

To be sure, members of the Bush administration have been heavily critical of the controversial Qatar-based Arab satellite news network, but it seems the operative pattern here isn't the White House's plan to target journalists, but Al Jazeera's habit of claiming they've been targeted.

In Control Room, a documentary film about Al Jazeera that premiered last week in New York at Lincoln Center's New Directors/New Films festival, an Al Jazeera producer says that he's made a point of telling the U.S. military where their reporters are going to be located in Iraq. The suggestion is that if Al Jazeera journalists are harmed—well, the U.S. armed forces knew where they were...

...Al Jazeera, for all its Western production values and its "fair and balanced" motto ("The opinion … and the other opinion"), recognizes that there is a difference between Western journalism and what Al Jazeera considers journalism. Control Room, directed by Egyptian-American filmmaker Jehane Noujaim, appears not to acknowledge that they are different. Rather, the film uses a Rashômon-like approach to tell the story of the war from a variety of perspectives, in order to question ideas like "objectivity." However, leaving those questions to be asked largely by Al Jazeera journalists is a problem; sometimes they are interested in truth and objectivity, and oftentimes they are not...

...the station serves the various political interests, pursuits, and whims of its owner, Qatar's emir, Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani. Among other things, serving those interests means criticizing Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and to a lesser extent Egypt. Another satellite news network, Al Arabiya, the self-styled moderate alternative to Al Jazeera, is a majority Saudi-owned enterprise meant to counterbalance Al Jazeera's criticism of the kingdom. The point of owning an Arab satellite station is not to make money—Al Jazeera does not—but rather to get your own message out. Hence, the U.S.-financed Al Hurra station, with a lot of kinks still to be worked out, makes some sense in the region.

Are there independent Arab journalists interested in truth and objectivity? Yes, and some of them work at Al Jazeera. However, Hassan Ibrahim, a likable Sudanese reporter who's one of the stars of Control Room, oversells his case. In order to prove that his criticism of the United States' war in Iraq is balanced and free from prejudice, Ibrahim makes the apparently uncontroversial observation that no one likes Saddam Hussein. Well, who could like such a villain? The problem, of course, is that many Arab journalists not only liked Saddam Hussein, they also praised him because he paid them. "Saddam got a bigger bang for the buck from journalists than from his army," Dubai-based political analyst Massoud Derhally told me.

Indeed, a specific charge was brought last spring, when the Sunday Times of London reported that three Al Jazeera employees were paid agents of the Iraqi regime. There's no mention of this in Control Room...In the film, one producer suggests that the famous scene of U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians taking down the statue of Saddam Hussein was staged. Why? Among the other reasons she puts forth, she notes that there are no women on hand. If the presence of women on Arab streets were the test for veracity, that would mean that somewhere around 50 percent of all TV coverage dealing with the Arab world, never mind the war, is staged...

...The opportunity should not be now lost to reach a comprehensive agreement especially with the fierce Dulaim tribe, populating the Anbar western province of which Fallujah is part. They have been the main source of trouble and a definitive pact must be made with them in particular, the agreement should be to cease all hostile actions everywhere, and to come on board the democratic process. There are cool heads. See what they really want. Once everybody understand that the U.S. is not going to be shaken, and they are watching the polls anxiously, and that she will stop at nothing to achieve her goals, and can be ruthless, you will start seeing results. The more the U.S. public rallies behind their president, the more the enemy is going to be disillusioned, conversely the best service you can give the terrorists is to give them the impression that they are succeeding in swaying the western public, this will encourage them to escalate their actions. And remember that most Iraqis out there do not have identical agendas with Al Qaeda and Qaeda like groups or any of the other foreign groups (c.f. Zarqawi letter), it is only a temporary alliance of convenience, and can be undone if the right incentives are given...

...The most important thing is that this government adheres to the new rules of conduct, no matter what its composition may be. As far as the Mehdi Army and Al Sadr are concerned, you will soon see how this soap bubble explodes harmlessly into thin air.

Police deployed in the central Shiite Muslim holy city of Najaf Monday following an agreement, involving the US-led coalition, for the pullout of armed militiamen from the streets, police said.
[…]
Across the city, police forces deployed in all police stations which had been taken this week by Sadr’s Mehdi Army militia.
[…]
Police deployed in force in Najaf, taking over police stations and public buildings.
No Mehdi Army militiamen were seen on the streets.

Today I can say that Baghdad is back to its normal situation, and to usual crowded streets...

I just met with one of our employees in a site in Abo Ghreeb, which is a small town in between Baghdad and Faluja and he told me that the situation there is calm too and told me many stories about the terrorists and thieves there, straightly reminded me with the stories that our fathers and grandfathers used to tell us about the 1920 revolution happened in Iraq against the British occupation and how the revolution men fought British at that time for nothing but to steal and rob the British camps. It certainly didn’t fit with what was told to us by school history books and I remember that I used to say to my father “you’re either wrong or exaggerating “and he used to answer “you will know the truth by time”...

...Terrorists from all over the world are coming to Iraq to fight Americans, and they are using the simple Iraqi people as battle fuel...

In the wake of Condoleezza Rice's testimony before a national television audience, 50% of American voters have a favorable view of the nation's National Security Advisor. Just 24% have an unfavorable view, while 26% are not sure or do not know who she is...

...Among those who were following the story closely, Rice was viewed favorably by 56% and unfavorably by 28%.

Rice's numbers are far better than those for Richard Clarke, the former Clinton and Bush official whose testimony two weeks ago kicked off a media frenzy. Following yesterday's testimony, Clarke is viewed favorably by just 27% of voters and unfavorably by 42%.

...half of all Americans thought Clarke made his accusations against President Bush in order to help sell books or help the Kerry campaign.

...Today's Presidential tracking poll numbers:
Bush 47%
Kerry 44%

President-elect John F. Kerry's rise to the nation's highest office came as little surprise following almost four years of remonstrations against President George W. Bush for his bizarre attack on the defenseless people of Afghanistan.

Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, was the right man for a nation outraged by the Bush administration's pre-emptive war, which, it now seems clear, was based on highly speculative intelligence that Saudi Arabian-born terrorist Osama bin Laden was planning an attack on the U.S.

Absent absolute proof of such an imminent attack, Bush's Sept. 10 bombing of Afghanistan earned him international condemnation and, in all likelihood, an indictment in coming weeks. United Nations (U.N.) Secretary-General Kofi Annan, appearing last night on Larry King Live, said the U.N.'s International Criminal Tribunal likely would bring charges of genocide against the president.

Bush also faces federal charges at home for his baseless arrest of 19 foreign nationals, many of them native Saudis, whose "crime" was attending American flight schools. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has joined the American Civil Liberties Union in a joint suit against both Bush and former Attorney General John Ashcroft, charging racial profiling, unlawful arrest, and illegal search and seizure.

Kerry's campaign mantra - "You go to war because you have to, not because you want to" - clearly resonated with Americans as they tried to make sense of Bush's September 10 attack on Afghanistan. Neither the president, nor National Security Adviser Dr. Condoleezza Rice convincingly defended their actions during the recent "9/10 Commission" hearings, which Congress ordered in response to public outcry. The commission's purpose was to try to determine what compelled the president to launch a war against Afghanistan. What kind of intelligence suggested that such an act was justified?...

...Even though Bush's military campaign was successful in ending the oppressive Taliban regime, bin Laden apparently escaped and al Qaeda continues to flourish...

...experts say that intelligence about Saddam's WMD program are just as speculative as was the intelligence that prompted Bush to attack Afghanistan. The man credited with sounding the alarm on bin Laden and al Qaeda was Richard Clarke, a counterterrorism expert who has served four presidents, including Ronald Reagan, George H. Bush and William Jefferson Clinton.

In a January 25 memo to Dr. Rice, for instance, Clarke urged immediate attention to several items of national security interest: the Northern Alliance, covert aid, a significant new '02 budget authority to help fight al Qaeda, and a response to the USS Cole.

At Rice's and Clarke's urging, Bush called a meeting of principals and, after "connecting the dots," decided to wage war against Afghanistan. What did the dots say? Not much, in retrospect. Apparently, the president decided to bomb a benign country on the basis of "chatter" that hinted at "something big."

With no other details on the "big," and by weaving together random bits of information from a variety of questionable sources, Bush and company decided that 19 fundamentalist Muslim fanatics would fly airplanes into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon on 9/11.

Under questioning by the "9/10 Commission," Clarke denied that his memo was anything more than a historical overview with a "set of ideas and a paper, mostly." The bi-partisan commission concluded, therefore, that Bush's "dot-connecting" had destroyed American credibility and subjected the U.S. to increasing hostility in the Arab-Muslim world...