November 15, 2006
General Says More Troops May Be Needed in Iraq

By DAVID STOUT
WASHINGTON, Nov. 15 — The top American military commander in the Middle East raised the possibility today that more United States troops might be needed in Iraq, at least temporarily, to help that country’s security forces and prevent the turbulent nation from tearing itself apart.

“We have every option on the table,” Gen. John Abizaid, the head of the United States Central Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee. The general emphasized that any increases would be temporary and for the purpose of hastening the transition to Iraqi control of internal security.

Pressed by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the committee’s ranking Democrat and soon to be chairman, on whether the American options might include lowering troop levels, he replied, “Yes, senator, it goes all the way from increasing our United States forces to withdrawing.”

But a bit later, under questioning from Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, General Abizaid said, “Under the current circumstances, I would not recommend troop withdrawals.” The general said several times that setting specific timetables, as some Democrats have recommended, would be detrimental.

General Abizaid and David Satterfield, the State Department’s coordinator for Iraq, told the committee that this moment in history is crucial for Iraq, and by extension the United States. The new government and the Iraqi people must seize the opportunity to create a stable, peaceful country of their own, they said.

General Abizaid, who warned recently that the country could slide into full-scale civil war if sectarian violence continued, said that violence was still at an “unacceptable” level, but that it had subsided somewhat in recent weeks.

“I’m very encouraged by my recent trip,” the general said, having just returned from Iraq. But he added, “I would not say we’ve turned the corner.”

Mr. Satterfield offered a similar assessment. While testifying that “much more work remains, and the time for that work is now,” Mr. Satterfield said, “We believe a successful path forward can still be forged in Iraq.”

There was no suggestion that the number of American troops in Iraq, now about 140,000 to 150,000, would be cut sharply soon. For months now, lawmakers in both parties have called for 2006 to be “a year of transition,” by which they meant bringing many troops home by year’s end.

General Abizaid almost provided some vindication for Gen. Eric Shinseki, the former Army chief of staff, who warned early in the Iraq campaign that several hundred thousand troops would be required to impose stability in Iraq once Saddam Hussein was overthrown.

“General Shinseki was right,” General Abizaid said in response to a question by Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina.

General Abizaid and Mr. Satterfield laid out a decidedly mixed assessment of progress in Iraq — professing optimism that progress is being made, that Iraq can still be stabilized, but that the Iraqi people and government must do more than they have to mend sectarian differences and take military initiatives.

And the time is limited, the witnesses acknowledged, conceding that the next several months are crucial in reducing violence, especially in and around Baghdad.

It was clear, too, in the comments of senators from both parties that time is limited in a domestic political sense. Senator John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican who is the outgoing chairman of the panel, noted that the length of time that United States has been involved in Iraq is now about equal to the time it spent in World War II from Pearl Harbor to ultimate victory.

“Last month, when Senator Levin and I returned from Iraq, in press conferences, we both described the situation as we saw it,” Mr. Warner said. “I used a phrase that was given to me by a Marine sergeant in the darkness as we were departing the Al Anbar province. I turned to him and I said how do you think things are doing? And he simply said, ‘Senator, I simply say that Iraq is going sideways.’ ”

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Author Examines 'War' Against Non-Muslims?By Kevin Mooney?CNSNews.com Staff Writer?November 15, 2006??(Clarifies comments on CAIR-Hamas links and CAIR's response in tenth and eleventh paragraphs.)??Washington (CNSNews.com) - Western policymakers need to "undertake a systematic study" of Islamic theology and law before they can understand the goals and motives of terrorists who are working to subjugate or convert non-Muslim populations, a scholar on Islam told a gathering in Washington on Tuesday.??It would be a mistake to assume that Islam has been "hijacked," argued Robert Spencer, the author of a recent book on the prophet of Islam, Mohammed.??Terrorists and extremists targeting American interests today are making use of the actual text in the Koran and the teachings of their prophet, he said.??Spencer is the director of the Jihad Watch website and the author of six books, his most recent dealing with Mohammed.??"It is untrue that jihadists are a tiny minority of extremists," Spencer said in a lecture hosted by the Heritage Foundation.??"The texts of Islamic jurisprudence say it is incumbent upon the Islamic community to wage war against non-Muslims until they submit or convert. This concept is shared by all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence and is not rejected by anything considered orthodox."??At the conclusion of Spencer's presentation, police were called to the event after several individuals began to chant slogans, expressing their displeasure at the substance of Spencer's talk.??"One hundred thousand Muslims died -- that's like Nazi genocide. Spencer and Cheney want World War III," chanted the protestors, who identified themselves to Cybercast News Service as representatives of former presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche.??Police arrived on the scene following an altercation in the hallway outside of the lecture hall. ??Spencer was particularly critical of the Council on American Islamic Relations and accused CAIR officials of having ties to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. He also charged that individuals in CAIR were working to replace the U.S. Constitution with Islamic law (shari'a).??Invited to respond to the allegations, CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper focused his comments instead on Spencer, whom he called a "leading Islamophobe" whose Jihad Watch website contained "bone chilling" comments that incited unfounded and unjustified hatred of Muslims.??"It is disturbing that a respected institution like the Heritage Foundation would have someone like Spencer," Hooper told Cybercast News Service.??CAIR has launched an educational effort of its own called "Explore the Life of Muhammad," which includes a free book or DVD about the prophet's life and legacy. The campaign followed the worldwide controversy over caricatures of Muhammad, first published in a Danish newspaper.??Two years ago, CAIR launched an online petition drive called "Not in the Name of Islam," which it said was intended to "disassociate the faith of Islam from the violent acts of a few Muslims."?

From: Clarkson, Tommy G GRD
Sent: Wednesday, November 08, 2006 1:56 PM
Subject: A Thought Provokingly Good Read

All:

(The following is personally, not professionally, submitted for your reading and is, in no way to be construed as the opinion, thoughts or points to ponder by any other than me!)

It just goes to show ya' that there are few original ideas/thoughts!

The last several days, Patty and I have been discussing to issues we deemed relevant to our presence and mission here in Iraq:

(1) How, during WWII - though Japan attacked the U.S. - we deemed it strategically best to initially focus our efforts and resolve the war in Europe first and that policy's relevance of our decision to address the problem of Iraq's assisting of terrorists first while still striving to resolve the more difficult finding of the much less accessible "culprit," Bin Laden.

(2) Our observation that in a parallel comparison of the life and maturation of Christianity and Islam, the latter is, today, around the age Christianity was when it experienced the "Dark Ages."

Well, lo and behold, Mr. Kraft has made similar observations. Accordingly, I forward the below (which I've slightly edited) for your perusal and consideration.

Tom Clarkson
LTC, Army (Ret)
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers,
Gulf Region Division
Public Affairs Office
Commercial: (540) 665-5344
Iraqna: 0790-192-5759
Visit: www.grd.usace.army.mil/index.html
"To make a difference, dare to be different."


Thoughts of Historical Perspective and Significance

Sixty-three years ago, Nazi Germany had overrun almost all of Europe, hammered England to the verge of bankruptcy and defeat, and had sunk more than four hundred British ships in their convoys between England and America for food and war materials.

At that time the U.S. was in an isolationist, pacifist mood, and most Americans wanted nothing to do with the European or the Asian war.

Then along came Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and in outrage Congress unanimously declared war on Japan, and the following day on Germany, which had not yet attacked us. It was a dicey thing. We had few allies.

France was not an ally, as the Vichy government of France quickly aligned itself with its German occupiers. Germany was certainly not an ally, as Hitler was intent on setting up a Thousand Year Reich in Europe. Japan was not an ally, as it was well on its way to owning and controlling all of Asia.

Together, Japan and Germany had long-range plans of invading Canada and Mexico, as launching pads to get into the United States over our northern and southern borders, after they finished gaining control of Asia and Europe.

America's only allies then were England, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, Australia, and Russia. That was about it. All of Europe, from Norway to Italy, except Russia in the east, was already under the Nazi heel. America was certainly not prepared for war. America had drastically downgraded most of its military forces after WWI and throughout the depression, so that at the outbreak of WWII, army units were training with broomsticks because they didn't have guns, and cars with "tank" painted on the doors because they didn't have real tanks. And a huge chunk of our navy had just been sunk or damaged at Pearl Harbor.

Britain had already gone bankrupt, saved only by the donation of $600 million in gold bullion in the Bank of England that was actually the property of Belgium, given by Belgium to England to carry on the war when Belgium was overrun by Hitler. Actually, Belgium surrendered on one day, because it was unable to oppose the German invasion and the Germans bombed Brussels into rubble the next day just to prove they could.

Britain had already been holding out for two years in the face of staggering shipping loses and the near-decimation of its air force in the Battle of Britain, and was saved from being overrun by Germany only because Hitler made the mistake of thinking the Brits were a relatively minor threat that could be dealt with later, and first turning his attention to Russia, at a time when England was on the verge of collapse, in the late summer of 1940.

Ironically, Russia saved America's butt by putting up a desperate fight for two years, until the U.S. got geared up to begin hammering away at Germany.
Russia lost something like 24 million people in the sieges of Stalingrad and Moscow alone... 90% of them from cold and starvation, mostly civilians, but
also more than a MILLION soldiers.

Had Russia surrendered, Hitler would have been able to focus his entire war effort against the Brits, then America. And the Nazis could possibly have
won the war.

All of this is to illustrate that turning points in history are often dicey things. And now we find ourselves at another one of those key moments in
history.

Who is our enemy?

There is a very dangerous group of Islamists that either has, wants to and may soon have, the ability to deliver small nuclear, biological, or chemical
weapons, almost anywhere in the world.

The Jihadis, the militant Muslims (this includes the Muslim clerics and mullahs), are basically Nazis in Kaffiyahs. They believe that Islam, a radically conservative form of Wahhabi Islam, should own and control the Middle East first, then Europe, then the world. And that all who do not bow to their will of thinking should be killed, enslaved, or subjugated. They want to finish the Holocaust, destroy Israel, and purge the world of Jews. This is their mantra.

There is also a civil war raging in the Middle East -- for the most part not a hot war, but a war of ideas. Islam is having its Inquisition and its
Reformation, but it is not known yet which will win -- the Inquisitors, or the Reformationists.

If the Inquisition wins, then the Wahhabis, the Jihadis, will control the Middle East, the OPEC oil, and the US, European, and Asian economies. The
techno-industrial economies will be at the mercy of OPEC -- not an OPEC dominated by the educated, rational Saudis of today, but an OPEC dominated by the Jihadis.

Do we want gas for our cars? Heating oil next winter? Do we wish the dollar to be worth anything? If yes, then one had better hope the Jihad, the Muslim terrorist Inquisition, loses, and the Islamic Reformation wins.

If the Reformation movement wins, that is, the moderate Muslims who believe that Islam can respect and tolerate other religions, and live in peace with
the rest of the world, and move out of the 10th century into the 21st, then the troubles in the Middle East will eventually fade away, and a moderate and prosperous Middle East will emerge.

We have to help the Reformation win, and to do that we have to fight the Inquisition, i.e., the Wahhabi movement, the Jihad, Al Qaeda and the Islamic
terrorist movements. We have to do it somewhere. And we can't do it everywhere at once. We have created a focal point for the battle at a time and place of our choosing........in Iraq.

Not in New York, not in London, or Paris or Berlin, but in Iraq, where we are doing two important things:

(1) We deposed Saddam Hussein. Whether Saddam Hussein was directly involved in 9/11 or not, it is undisputed that Saddam has been actively supporting the terrorist movement for decades. Saddam is a terrorist. Saddam had and used weapons of mass destruction and was responsible for the deaths of probably more than a million Iraqis, thousands of Kurds and two million Iranians.

(2) We created a battle, a confrontation, a flash point, with Islamic terrorism in Iraq. We have focused the battle. We are killing bad people, and the ones we get there we won't have to get here. We also have a good shot at creating a democratic, peaceful Iraq, which will be a catalyst for democratic change in the rest of the Middle East, and an outpost for a stabilizing American military presence in the Middle East for as long as it is needed.

How long the battle?

World War II, the war with the Germans and Japanese, really began with a "whimper" in 1928. It did not begin with Pearl Harbor. It began with the Japanese invasion of China. It was a war for fourteen years before America joined it. It officially ended in 1945 -- a 17 year war -- and was followed
by another decade of U.S. occupation in Germany and Japan to get those countries reconstructed and running on their own again ... a 27 year war.

World War II cost the United States an amount equal to approximately a full year's GDP -- adjusted for inflation, equal to about $12 trillion dollars.
WWII cost America more than 400,000 killed in action, and nearly 100,000 still missing in action.

The Iraq war has, so far, cost the US about $160 billion, which is roughly what 9/11 cost New York. It has also cost about 2,200 American lives,
which is roughly 2/3 of the 3,000 lives that the Jihad snuffed on 9/11. But the cost of not fighting and winning WWII would have been unimaginably greater.

Americans have a short attention span, conditioned by 30 second sound bites, 60 minute TV shows, and 2 hour movies in which everything comes out okay.

The real world is not like that. It is messy, uncertain, and sometimes bloody and ugly. Always has been, and probably always will be.

The bottom line is that we will have to deal with Islamic terrorism until we defeat it, whenever that is. It will not go away if we ignore it.

If the U.S. can create a reasonably democratic and stable Iraq, then we have an "England" in the Middle East, a platform, from which we can work to
help modernize and moderate the Middle East. The history of the world is the clash between the forces of relative civility and civilization, and the
barbarians clamoring at the gates. The Iraq war is merely another battle in this ancient and never-ending war. And now, for the first time ever, the
barbarians are about to get nuclear weapons unless somebody prevents them.

We have four options:

1. We can defeat the Jihad now, before it gets nuclear weapons.

2. We can fight the Jihad later, after it gets nuclear weapons (which may be as early as next year, if Iran's progress on nuclear weapons is what Iran
claims it is).

3. We can surrender to the Jihad and accept its dominance in the Middle East, now, in Europe in the next few years or decades, and ultimately in
America.

4. Or, we can stand down now, and pick up the fight later when the Jihad is more widespread and better armed, perhaps after the Jihad has dominated
France and Germany and maybe most of the rest of Europe. It will, of course, be more dangerous, more expensive, and much bloodier.

Random, but germane, facts

If one opposes this war our children or grandchildren face a real potential of ultimately living in an Islamic America under the Mullahs and the Sharia, an America that resembles Iran today.

The history of the world is the history of civilizational and cultural clashes. All wars are about ideas, ideas about what society and civilization
should be like, and the most determined always win.

Those who are willing to be the most ruthless always win. The pacifists always lose, because the anti-pacifists kill them.

Remember, perspective is everything, and America's schools teach too little history for perspective to be clear, especially in the young American mind.

The Cold war lasted from about 1947 at least until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Forty-two years. Europe spent the first half of the 19th century
fighting Napoleon, and from 1870 to 1945 fighting Germany.

World War II began in 1928, lasted 17 years, plus a ten year occupation, and the U.S. still has troops in Germany and Japan. World War II resulted in
the death of more than 50 million people, maybe more than 100 million people, depending on which estimates you accept.

The U.S. has taken more than 2,000 KIA in Iraq. The U.S. took more than 4,000 killed in action on the morning of June 6, 1944, the first day of the
Normandy Invasion to rid Europe of Nazi Imperialism.

In WWII the US averaged 2,000 KIA a week -- for four years. Most of the individual battles of WWII lost more Americans than the entire Iraq war has
done so far.

But the stakes are at least as high .. A world dominated by representative governments with civil rights, human rights, and personal freedoms ... or a
world dominated by a radical Islamic Wahhabi movement, by the Jihad, under the Mullahs and the Sharia (Islamic law).

It's difficult to understand why the American left does not grasp this. They favor human rights, civil rights, liberty and freedom, but evidently not for
Iraqis or Jews.

"Peace Activists" always seem to demonstrate here in America, where it's safe. Why don't we see Peace Activist demonstrating in Iran, Syria, Iraq, Sudan, North Korea, in the places that really need peace activism the most?

The liberal mentality is supposed to favor human rights, civil rights, democracy, multiculturalism, diversity, etc., but if the Jihad wins, wherever the Jihad wins, it is the end of civil rights, human rights, democracy, multiculturalism, diversity, etc. Americans who oppose the liberation of Iraq and the support of Israel are coming down on the side of their own worst enemy.

(This was written by: Raymond S. Kraft is a writer living in Northern California.)

Media Consumption, Conformity and Resistance: A Visual Ethnography of Youth culture in Iranian Kurdistan- Part VII

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

KurdishMedia.com - By Kameel Ahmady

Analysis of the Images

It is clear from a studied analysis of the projects that the young people are influenced by a number of cultural forces, which sometimes enter their lives as contradictory processes. For example, stereotypical images of ‘western culture’, with its inclusive democracy and gender equality, are discussed and emulated, but with mixed sentiments. There seems to be a genuine ambivalence about the west, as a symbolic device against which these young people measure their own society, and as a source of emancipation and privilege versus immorality and loss of values. This is not a dilemma that has been exclusive to Iranian society, but it may be increasingly at issue with the perceived rise in drug use and alcoholism in contemporary Iran and Kurdistan. As Jones and Wallace (1992) have pointed out, there is a general sense of youth behaviour and socialisation as being understood in terms of ‘risk’ and ‘pathology’ in European countries as well in recent years

revitalized under the ‘new right’, who have quoted rising numbers of births to teenagers, increased delinquency and violence, or teenage drinking and drug-taking, as indicators of a moral decline which has its roots in the breakdown of the traditional values, normally inculcated in traditional family life through parental authority. The ‘logic’ of this argument has led to policies designed to uphold ‘traditional family values’, to prevent family breakdown, and to maintain the authority and family obligations of parents (1992:45).

In light of this, practices that may be considered ‘traditional’, including the increased restrictions on youth or especially female freedom of movement outside the domestic sphere, can be seen not as any assertion of traditional family values but as a new and growing response to the perceived threat of modernity in youth culture. Even though in the Kurdish areas of Iran parental controls on youth and in particular on girls have always tended to be stronger and more direct, they are now on the rise for exactly this reason. During my time in Mahabad, when I had the opportunity to chat with some parents as they escorted their teenagers to my classes during the day, there was always much discussion about the spiralling problems of drug and alcohol abuse in kurdish society. This is seen as a new phenomenon, and many I spoke with believed that it was an active policy of the Iranian state to import cheap drugs to the Kurdish areas in order to control the feared uprising by the young population in the region.

Political conspiracy theories aside, with the exception of youth pregnancy, the issues facing teenagers as discussed by Jones and Wallace (1992) are now emerging in Iran as well, although they may in social discourses continue to be presented as problems of ‘modern’, ‘western’ immorality. Discussion programs on local news media are also devoted to this topic, contributing to a ‘culture of fear’ mentality which is bound to rub off on the young people themselves, particularly those whose self-perception is of mature and socially critical young adults. This is evident, for example in the work dealing with female freedoms in public space, (particularly Fig. 7), in which the young girl describes the lack of safety perceived in an empty street, and in her own depictions of young men who spend time hanging around in public spaces as turning into shady ‘night prowler’ figures. In the piece dealing with girls and their boyfriends, all of whom ended up being ‘lied to’ and ‘exploited’ by boys, (see Fig. 6, Appendix 11) it is the opposite sex itself that is perceived as posing the greatest threat, though again in the context of ‘modern’ gender relations outside marriage. As LeBlanc (2000) shows us, the relationship between domination of /exclusion from public space and gender entitlement becomes ‘encoded’ in ideas about fear and ‘public safety’ for women (2000:201).

Appendix 17: Complimentary comments in Kurdish and Persian for the Mahabad Town Hall exhibition. The Kurdish comments are patriotic and nationalist in nature: ‘Freedom for Kurdistan’
In relation to material consumption the tensions between ‘modernist’ and ‘traditional’ influences also emerge, as mediated by the awareness of a distinct Kurdish minority identity and cultural influence. This is evident in the projects dealing with clothing (traditional Kurdish as well as orthodox Muslim), and local celebrities in Mahabad. For example, girls in one of the projects (see Appendix 4) advocate for the use of hijab but in conjunction with western style dress, rejecting traditional Kurdish attire, even though it might give a rare opportunity to free oneself from the dress restrictions of Islamic attire. In photos (see Appendixes 12-14, Fig. 7), the work is again a critique of the restrictions of Islamic dress and appropriate female behaviour, but alongside this we see a sense of disapproval for the perhaps too liberal attitudes of boys and men as they display accessories of modernity (motorcycles and monster masks). With reference to Iranian society, Tohidi (1994) shows how presumed ‘traditional’ aspects of society, and particularly with opportunities for women’s emancipation, have in fact been introduced and forwarded since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. She suggests that the resistance to forms of western interference make reference to ‘Westoxication’ (Garb Zadagi), an excess of too-liberal or foreign values that leads to moral degradation. This was introduced as a part of political rhetoric by the Ayatollah. The fact that such ideas have only been furthered in recent years leads us to question straightforward oppositions between east/west, tradition/modernity, and helps us to understand the ambiguous attitudes of many of the young people when they presented their photographic projects and the themes they raise. This idea is countered in the vernacular concept of ‘mahwarai girls’, a term which can have both complimentary and denigrating implications for the description of young women. The word mahwara means ‘satellite’, and mahwarai girls are those whose personal style seems inspired by the modern and global influences of satellite television. They are seen as chic and sophisticated, but also more open, and ‘easier to get’ among young boys. There was much use of this slag term in conversations between young people I overheard.

However, ideas about gender in Iranian society are inevitably influenced by ideas about the treatment of gender in a sometimes idealised ‘west’. In the current situation this also happens to be juxtaposed with beliefs about the ‘freedom loving peoples’ of the US and UK in relations to international media discourses about the War on Terror. An example of this can be seen in the comments of a young boy who attended the exhibition:

“In my point of view in Iranian society women = slave and in a society when there is no democracy you can’t actually call this a country. I believe that you have to separate religion from the state and this will allow us to have equality between the genders”
(See appendix 16)

In his comments we can see the parallel drawn between ‘democracy’, which alludes to the west, and more specifically the US, and ideas that secular states enjoy gender emancipation. Such statements are certainly informed by news media to which young people are exposed in Iran, particularly in the case of young Kurdish people, who may receive Kurdish diasporic satellite media in the home, and whose parents are far less likely than the majority population to be critical of western or ‘American’ values in light of recent headway made by their fellow Kurds in Iraq.

The project on celebrities in Mahabad also shows the hybrid influences of various media forms. Although Persian popular music is the most common form consumed by young people, (Shay, 2000:69), even in the Kurdish regions, the celebration of Kurdish successes which are both local in nature and also consumed transnationally through satellite media shows the mixing of regional, national, and international cultural forms. In referring to the relationship between consumption and local culture “we are in effect speaking about a space that is crossed by a variety of different collective sensibilities each of which imposes a different set of expectations and cultural needs upon a space. In doing so, such sensibilities also construct the local in particular ways

….which begin by utilising the same basic knowledges about the local, its social and spatial organisation, but supplement such knowledges with their own collectively held values to create particular narratives of locality. From the point of view of the young, one of the key resources in the facilitation of such narratives is popular music and its attendant stylistic resources” (Bennett, 2000:66).

For the Kurdish youth I worked with, some of these ‘knowledges’ were about Kurdish identity combined with admiration and occasional resistance to western influence, with relations to Iranian state polity, and with more hybrid influences. For example, young people are more attracted by Persian popular music. It is only in the context of communal events such as family weddings that they would listen to Kurdish music. If you ask young people about whether they will attend a local wedding, one of their primary concerns is which of the local musicians (teap is Kurdish for band), will be performing. This is a big source of discussion prior to such community events. Events of communal Kurdish identity provide momentary forms of resistance to and freedom from the hegemony of Persian (Iranian) state ideologies, such as the public sanctions on wearing of hijab for women. Having said that, the state rarely needs to enter into enforcing conservative ‘Muslim’ values, since with few exceptions, the role of the family, particularly in relation to the idea of protecting family honour, ensures through social pressures that people ‘behave appropriately’.

Appendix 18: A comment in the Guest Book written in Kurdish: ‘I was unhappy to see that some of the written Kurdish was full of mistakes, and this is an insult to Kurdish the language. Also, your views on women are one- sided’.
There are other cross-cutting influences at work which reorient our perspectives from a straightforward comparison between ‘east’ and ‘west’, even if stereotypes of these are present at the visual level in the youths’ work. For example, particularly in the project dealing with Kurdish dress, and that dealing with the maintenance of parks, (see Appendixes 3, 9&10, Fig. 2), we can see an undercurrent of identity formation from the perspective of a minority population in a repressive Iranian state that subdues ethnic identity. The discussion about parks shows a burgeoning feeling of a peripheral ethnic population having been forgotten or discriminated against by central authorities, while the work on hijab (see Appendix 15, Fig. 8) and the reference to the Iraqi Kurdish mother who migrated to Iran, conversely indicates a sense of oppression of distinct ethnic ways by the central authority. Thus, the influences and pressures to conformity come not only from a dichotomised east/west divide, but equally from a pervasive sense of politically constructed ethnic minority status. Recent work on the social and political significance of the veil as an indigenous symbol of resistance to ‘western’ hegemonic influences overlooks the plurality of meanings the practice holds for various groups within Muslim societies. Appendix 2:

The demure gesture and the hidden identity of the portrait gives a conventional view of feminine behaviour
Although analyses such as el-Guindi’s The Veil (1999) rightly point out that the use of the veil within Islamic revivalist movements in recent decades is informed by “liberation from imposed, imported identities, consumerist behaviours, and an increasingly materialist culture” (1999:189), this can be true only for people who were empowered within the centre of such a movement. For young Kurdish women whose perception of their place in society is informed by political statements about Kurds as a minority in Iranian society, there might be a subtle hypocrisy in women ‘at the centre’ critiquing western materialism when they themselves are beneficiaries of this privilege. Kurdish women, on the other hand, are peripheral and do not enjoy the same material privilege as their Persian Muslim ‘sisters’. In any case, the use of hijab is largely enforced, and not voluntary in Iranian society, and amongst Kurds the form of resistance to this is to wear the veil in the loosest possible way, with little respect for convention of dress, or to divest it altogether in unwatched communal settings of Kurdish cultural expression, such as the wedding (see Fig. 2).

Kameel maintains a website at: www.kameelahmady.com

Part VIII is coming………

November 15, 2006
Military Analysis
Get Out Now? Not So Fast, Experts Say

By MICHAEL R. GORDON
WASHINGTON, Nov. 14 — One of the most resonant arguments in the debate over Iraq holds that the United States can move forward by pulling its troops back, as part of a phased withdrawal. If American troops begin to leave and the remaining forces assume a more limited role, the argument holds, it will galvanize the Iraqi government to assume more responsibility for securing and rebuilding Iraq.

This is the case now being argued by many Democrats, most notably Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the incoming chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who asserts that the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq should begin within four to six months.

But this argument is being challenged by a number of military officers, experts and former generals, including some who have been among the most vehement critics of the Bush administration’s Iraq policies.

Anthony C. Zinni, the former head of the United States Central Command and one of the retired generals who called for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, argued that any substantial reduction of American forces over the next several months would be more likely to accelerate the slide to civil war than stop it.

“The logic of this is you put pressure on Maliki and force him to stand up to this,” General Zinni said in an interview, referring to Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister. “Well, you can’t put pressure on a wounded guy. There is a premise that the Iraqis are not doing enough now, that there is a capability that they have not employed or used. I am not so sure they are capable of stopping sectarian violence.”

Instead of taking troops out, General Zinni said, it would make more sense to consider deploying additional American forces over the next six months to “regain momentum” as part of a broader effort to stabilize Iraq that would create more jobs, foster political reconciliation and develop more effective Iraqi security forces.

The debate over American troop levels in Iraq was raging well before the establishment in March of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group led by James A. Baker III, a former secretary of state, and Lee H. Hamilton, a former congressman. Initially, it centered on Mr. Rumsfeld’s stewardship at the Pentagon and whether the United States had deployed sufficient forces and taken the requisite nation-building steps to defeat, or at least contain, a virulent insurgency.

But as the character of the Iraq conflict has changed over the past year, so has the debate. The primary worry for American commanders now is preventing the bloody cycle of drive-by shootings, kidnappings and bombings from spiraling into an all-out civil war.

With more American than Iraqi soldiers in Baghdad, there has been mounting frustration on the part of American officials over the failure of the Iraqi government to send sufficient reinforcements to the Iraqi capital, to establish a genuine “unity government” and to effectively challenge the power of the militias, some of whom have infiltrated the very Iraqi Army and police units that the American military is working with.

In essence, the current debate turns on whether Iraqi leaders would be susceptible to the sort of blunt American pressure entailed by troop reductions. Arguing that such pressure was necessary, Senator Levin joined forces with another Democrat, Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, to offer an amendment in June calling for a phased reduction of American troops, a measure he stressed has been supported by all of the potential Democratic presidential candidates. The proposal is less sweeping than most other Democratic proposals, which have called for the withdrawal of all American forces over a fixed time frame. Senator Levin’s plan has assumed more political importance following the Democratic gains in the midterm elections.

“There is no purely military solution here,” Mr. Levin said in an interview. “They have got to reach a political compromise in Iraq. The leaders have got to make concessions involving power sharing and resource sharing or else this insurgency and the violence continues to spiral.”

While Mr. Levin’s plan calls for beginning troop reductions over the next six months, it does not stipulate a time-frame for completing the withdrawal, or spell out precisely how many troops should be removed in the initial phase. The plan, however, does call for shifting the American military role to more limited missions like protecting the American Embassy, training the Iraqi forces and engaging in counterterrorist operations against cells of Al Qaeda.

“The point of the proposal is to force the Iraqis to take hold of the situation politically,” Mr. Levin said.

But some current and retired military officers say the situation in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq is too precarious to start thinning out the number of American troops. In addition, they worry that some Shiite leaders would see the reduction of American troops as an opportunity to unleash their militias against the Sunnis and engage in wholesale ethnic cleansing to consolidate their control of the capital.

John Batiste, a retired Army major general who also joined in the call for Mr. Rumsfeld’s resignation, described the Congressional proposals for troop withdrawals as “terribly naïve.”

“There are lots of things that have to happen to set them up for success,” General Batiste, who commanded a division in Iraq, said in an interview, describing the Iraqi government. “Until they happen, it does not matter what we tell Maliki.”

Before considering troop reductions, General Batiste said, the United States needs to take an array of steps, including fresh efforts to alleviate unemployment in Iraq, secure its long and porous borders, enlist more cooperation from tribal sheiks, step up the effort to train Iraq’s security forces, engage Iraq’s neighbors and weaken, or if necessary, crush the militias.

Indeed, General Batiste has recently written that pending the training of an effective Iraqi force, it may be necessary to deploy tens of thousands of additional “coalition troops.” General Batiste said he hoped that Arab and other foreign nations could be encouraged to send troops.

Some military experts said that while the American military is stretched thin, the number of American troops in Iraq could be increased temporarily — by perhaps 10,000 or more, in addition to the 150,000 or so already there — by prolonging combat tours.

Kenneth M. Pollack, an expert at the Brookings Institution who served on the staff of the National Security Council during the Clinton administration, also argued that a push for troop reductions would backfire by contributing to the disorder in Iraq.

“If we start pulling out troops and the violence gets worse and the control of the militias increases and people become confirmed in their suspicion that the United States is not going to be there to prevent civil war, they are to going to start making decisions today to prepare for the eventuality of civil war tomorrow,” he said. “That is how civil wars start.”