electronicIraq.net

Opinion/Editorial
Taking stock before Election Day

David Enders, Electronic Iraq

3 November 2006

The media rarely reflects who really exercises power in Iraq. Referring to the Iraqi government really requires an asterisk -- they would quickly be overrun were it not for the protection of U.S. troops.

Stories about Iraqi Prime Minister Mouri al-Maliki's victory in convincing the U.S. military to end its siege of Sadr City gave scant mention of Moqtada al-Sadr's threats to Maliki (and likely to the U.S.) of the widespread and potentially catastrophic violence that prolonging the operation would have.

A school teacher in the Karrrada district (once generally safe from car bombs and ruled by government militias, Karrada, at the doorstep of Baghdad's fortified Green Zone, is now as much a batttle-zone as the rest of the city) recounts one of the organizing tactics of Sadr's "general strike" on Tuesday protesting the siege of Sadr City:

"The Jeish Al-Mahdi (Mahdi Army) came to offices and even schools in the morning and threatened that they would kill everyone if they stayed...at 10 AM, everything was shut down."
While Iraqis keep a close watch on next week's election, I plan to vote in it. And I'm not voting for anyone who supported the resolution to go to war.

"I called my driver to come pick me up and told all the girls in the school to call their families to come and take them," the teacher said, adding that despite being afraid, she supported the Mahdi Army's actions.

This is not a radical, militant Muslim. She is from a middle-class family with roots in a mixed Shi'ite/Sunni tribe from Balad, about 45 minutes' drive north of Baghdad (in occupation geography, Balad is the site of Saddam's largest air-base, which is now the site of the U.S. miltary base with the largest number of U.S. troops).

The idea that the U.S. military can effectively sweep out a militia like the Mahdi Army is inconceivable at this point -- for a year they have been expanding, and the effectiveness of Tuesday's "strike" indicates growing popularity as well as an increased ability to exert power -- even as the U.S. military has devoted extra resources to containing the militia in its "stronghold" of Sadr City.

In Baladiyat, a neighborhood near Sadr City, Abbas Al-Rubaie, a former spokesman for the movement of Moqtada Al-Sadr, said he had ended his affiliation with the group. He blames the current sectarian violence on the U.S. -- a widely held view within the movement and outside it.

"There is fighting between different sects that have a lot of power and the Americans support it by continuing with the Bremer laws, which are based on sectarian shares and led to the violence between people," Rubaie said.

Rubaie was referring to the power-sharing laws enacted by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the U.S.-led body that governed Iraq during the first year of the occupation. Iraqis of all sectarian stripes blame the CPA for the post-invasion power vacuum, the widespread corruption, and for paving the way to sectarian division and civil war through edicts which are referred to as "Bremer laws," after the CPA's leader, Paul Bremer.

Maliki's constituency effectively believes that the system that gave them their prime minister (Maliki was also part of the CPA-appointed 25-member governing council) is a tool of imperialist power, but that by participating in the elections and in the government they can ensure their vision for Iraq will more or less have the backing of that imperialist power.

I was working as a journalist in Iraq when Maliki was appointed. I remember the reaction of Jeish Al-Mahdi commanders: they were excited, expecting they would be able to act with greater autonomy.

I interviewed Maliki in April 2005, one week before his appointment, in an empty office.

In our interview, Maliki said militias would be dealt with. He offered no specific plan.

He also mentioned U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad: "Khalilzad wants more fighting with the Jeish Al-Madhi," Maliki said. "This is not good for our government now. It is better for Moqtada Al-Sadr and the Sadr movement to not be outside politics. Khalilzad does not understand this."

It can be concluded that, essentially, Maliki was appointed to be a middleman - If you want to put this in other terms: we're being duped.

Maliki is not the sovereign leader of Iraq, he is the appointed intermediary between the U.S. and Sadr's Militia, and, most of the time, he seems barely acceptable to either.

Meanwhile, there are all sorts of crazy things shaking loose on the "other side" of the civil war, as Sunni guerillas try to cut Baghdad off from the rest of the country. They have had some success — some roads into and out of the capital are so dangerous that most of the trade in the western Anbar province, itself ravaged by war, is with Damascus, a 10-hour drive, rather than Baghdad, only a half-hour away.

Nizar Al-Samarrai is a political analyst in Baghdad. He says Iraqis are paying close attention to the 2006 US midterm elections, though they figure it will have little effect on their lives in the short-term. Iraqis blame the U.S. for the violence, he says, and, therefore, at least part of the solution still lies with the U.S.

"This will affect [Iraqi] lives and the American plans for their lives," said al-Samarrai," al-Samarrai said, adding that the American government "should listen to the people" and that "it is the responsibility of the people who speak Arabic to tell the American people what [Iraqis] are saying, it would be to the benefit of American policy in Iraq....Right now Iraq is a well of blood."

Al-Samarrai said that all factions were paying attention to the elections, and that recent statements by armed factions were likely timed to coincide with the cycle (Abdullah Suleiman al-Amri, a spokesman for the 1920 Revolution Brigades, an Iraqi insurgent group named after the 1920 Iraqi uprising against British occupation, told Al-Jazeera last month that his group was willing to negotiate with the Americans on the condition of a full US withdrawal).

Sammarai spends most of his time in his house these days because of the fluidity of the political situation and the increasing violence, especially against those who speak out against militia groups battling for control while simultaneously fighting the U.S. military.

These days, Sammarai said, "we are not talking about Iraq 2003 and we are not talking about Iraq 2004 and we are not talking about Iraq 2006." It is a "new Iraq" every day, he says, adding: "I will not say anything else, I do not want to lose my life...I want to avoid being hurt."

Some Iraqis disagree with the notion -- suggested by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, tacitly affirmed by George W. Bush and most recently asserted by Dick Cheney -- that the current surge of violence is aimed at U.S. public opinion as mid-term elections approach. It has simply gotten worse during the last few months, they say, and the U.S. military has been actively putting itself in harm's way in recent weeks, carrying out military operations in an attempt to defeat the guerillas in Baghdad.

Sitting in a café in Amman, Jordan, where Iraqis now make up more than 10 percent of the population (In a country with a near stalled economy, the only significant Iraqi export is people -- a swell time for donor contributions to the regional budget for the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) to drop by half - Iraq was receiving the single largest share), Haidr Said, an Iraqi political analyst, said the U.S. needs to change course not just in Iraq but in the Middle east as a whole.

"The simplest way to stabilize Iraq," he said, would have been for the United States "to neutralize the neighbor countries."

"On the contrary," he said, the United States has "opened all the folders at the same time: the Iraq folder, the reform in Saudi Arabia folder, the Iranian nuclear folder, Lebanon and [former prime minister Rafik] Hariri's assassination, Syria...all the folders were opened."

While Iraqis keep a close watch on next week's election, I plan to vote in it. And I'm not voting for anyone who supported the resolution to go to war.

Happy election day.

Salam Talib and an Iraqi colleague in Jordan contributed reporting for this piece.

David Enders is a freelance journalist and a co-founder of the Baghdad Bulletin, the first post-invasion attempt to set up an English-language news outlet in Iraq. Since the invasion, he has spent more than 14 months in Iraq and has written for Men's Journal, Mother Jones, and The Nation, as well as London's Sunday Times and other newspapers. His first book, "Baghdad Bulletin," is available from the Univesity of Michigan Press.

11.03.2006 Friday - ISTANBUL 18:42

[COMMENTARY]
Divide and Conquer Implied in Proposed Map of the New Middle East
by
Genevieve Cora Fraser

It was meant to be a joke and it got a big laugh from TV host Tavis Smiley when his guest, political pundit Andy Borowitz quipped, “George Bush plans to withdraw all his troops from Iraq – to Iran. That’s the plan - the exit strategy.”
But no one was laughing, least of all Turkish military officers, on September 15th when a map was presented at the NATO’s Defense College in Rome that included a reduced Turkish landmass. The new Middle East map prepared by retired US Col. Ralph Peters and published in the Armed Forces Journal in June featured a “Free Kurdistan” that included additional territory taken from Syria and Iraq. Indeed, Iraq was a fragment of its former self and had been carved up to also include Sunnis Iraq and the Arab Shia State.
Within the proposed new Middle East, Iran was also reduced, not only by Free Kurdistan, but by “Free Balochistan” which had also borrowed heavily from territory currently claimed by Afghanistan and Pakistan. Balochistan, which lies in the southwest corner of Pakistan, is the largest but least populated of the Pakistani regions. Lately the Chinese have invested heavily in the area by expanding the port city of Gwader. Natural gas, coal, copper and gold offer vast wealth and pipelines will be stretched from Iran to India through the province. Balochistan is also rich in opportunities for drug smugglers with its massive border alongside Afghanistan’s most frequented heroin routes. Some political pundits have labeled heroin as the new American Gold Standard - the only thing propping up the bankrupt American economy and the real reason we occupy Afghanistan. Yes, endless war is very expensive for taxpayers but the fat cat international banking and corporate interests in armaments and energy grow wealthier by the minute.
Of course, Pakistan itself was a creation of foreign intervention by the British in 1947. As the British Empire abandoned colonial rule in India they insisted it be broken in two – just as they helped to break Palestine up but in that instance to insert a population foreign to the region, citing religious claims of having occupied the region 2,000 years. The resulting boundary conflicts between India and Pakistan and Palestine and Israel have been a source of unending conflict. Do the Anglo-American and Israeli interests believe that a Free Kurdistan and Free Balochistan would be any different or do they feel establishing military bases there might be a boon for the local population and protect them? Both would be geopolitical assets to the West with their wealth of natural resources. Not only would the oil wells of Northern Iraq in Kirkuk be “freed” from Iraqi control but also the natural gas and oil supplies of Turkey. In addition, the Tigris and Euphrates is one of the most important river systems in the world, with headwaters in Eastern Turkey in the area proposed for a Free Kurdistan. Both rivers flow through portions of Syria and Iraq that would be lost to them if retired US Col. Peters and his backers have their way. Though the lower Mesopotamian section of the river basin would remain in the Arab Shia State, little would remain of the waters. But of course we are discussing hypotheticals.
The West’s latest plans to divide and conquer are very much in evidence if you look at the Iraq War not as a failure of the Neo-Conservative Israeli-First agenda, but as a somewhat qualified success. Much has been made of US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s underestimation of the number of troops needed to stabilize the country from backsliding into a civil war after Saddam’s defeat – and the dismissal of the generals who dared to point the error of his ways. And though there was a clash of Titans within the inner sanctum of the administration, I suspect the overriding strategic Neo Conservative goal was Civil War and the ultimate partitioning of Iraq into three sections. The added benefit, as seen from Neo Conservative and Israeli eyes, is further disintegration of the social and political fabric of the Middle Eastern region.
In the PBS FRONTLINE documentary, “The Lost Years in Iraq,” retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner spoke of his attempts to stabilize postwar Iraq as director of the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (OHRA) following the American invasion in March 2003. He and his office were replaced after only one month by L. Paul Bremer, III and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA).
During an interview conducted on Aug. 11, 2006 by FRONTLINE, Garner stated, “I had lunch with one of the company managers. His company manager was getting ready to pull out of his location, which was in Najaf, and he said, ‘You know, sir, we've got a big problem here.’ I said, ‘Yeah, what is it?’ He said: ‘As we pull out, the real fundamental Shi'a are pulling right in behind us. I'm going to tell you, they're Iranians. They're not Iraqis; they're Iranians. They're filling up everything that has to (do) with quality of life. They're taking over the schools; they're taking over the medical facilities; they're taking over the electricity; they're taking over security; they're taking over everything. Anything that controls the quality of life, they own as soon as we get out of here.’”
“I said, ‘Wow.’ So I had a State Department guy, very good Arabist named Mike Cathor, spoke incredible Arabic. He's been studying the Middle East all his life. I said: ‘Mike, I want you to go down there and spend the day and walk around and talk to everybody. (Find out), is this really happening?’ So he came back that evening; he said: ‘Boy, it's worse than he told you. We're really being infiltrated by an Iranian-influenced Shi'a element that is controlling the quality of life.’
I called Rumsfeld that night and said: ‘Hey, we don't need to do this. Here's what's happening.’ And I told him. And he said: ‘Oh. Well, that's interesting. Thank you very much.’ Now, he never said he wasn't going to stop it; he never said he was going to send more, anything like that. He just said, ‘Thank you very much.’”
L. Paul Bremer III served as the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq from May 2003 to June 2004, and is considered by some to be one of the world’s leading experts on crisis management, terrorism and homeland security. From 1989 to 2000, he was Managing Director of Kissinger Associates, a strategic consulting firm headed by former Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. Bremer was approached by leading Neo Conservative Paul Wolfowitz, who at the time was deputy secretary of defense, and Scooter Libby, the vice president's chief of staff now under indictment for obstruction of justice, to take on the Provisional Authority leadership position.
“I was deeply concerned about terrorism and homeland security and felt that it was important that we had defeated Saddam Hussein who, as far as we knew, was (the head of) a state which supported terrorism,” Bremer stated. One of the interesting points here is that it was clearly understood that Osama Bin Laden and his minions were not welcomed into Iraq by Saddam, however the terrorism Saddam did support was against Israel – to end the occupation of Palestine.
Bremer was in charge of the de-Baathification of Saddam’s regime which he now admits went too far. “The implementation is where I went wrong. I knew that we, the foreigners --- whether it was Americans or British or Australians or Romanians or Poles -- we were going to have a hard time making the kind of fine distinctions that de-Baathification policy required. Did (a person) join the party because he was a real believer, or did he join it because he wanted to be a teacher, and to be a teacher you had to join the party? I said: ‘We're not going to be able to make those distinctions. I need to turn it over to Iraqis,’” Bremer commented to FRONTLINE.
“The mistake I made was turning it over to the Governing Council. I should have turned it over instead to a judicial body of some kind. The Governing Council, in turn, turned it over to Chalabi. I did not turn it over to Chalabi. It is true that once the Governing Council took it over, they started interpreting the policy, implementing the policy much more broadly, and we had to walk the cat back in the spring of 2004.” Bremer continued.
Bremer also chose to disband the Iraq army believing that “to recall the army would have been a clear signal to Iraqi people that while we got rid of one terrible man, Saddam Hussein, we were prepared to see the Sunni elite come back in the form of the officer corps.” However, many military people felt “this fundamentally cuts away the force that they were hoping to rely on.” Garner claimed that “he had a lot of guys lined up who were ready to come back to work on the 15th of May. ... Bremer wouldn't even listen to me about this; that this was really, of all the things, the most fundamental error the guy made during that time.”
In contrast, Bremer insists, “I think the decision not to recall Saddam's army, from a political point of view, is the single most important, correct decision that we made in the 14 months we were there.” However, “the the interim constitution is the primary legacy of the CPA in Iraq,” Bremer claims. It was in this constitution that Bremer introduced the concept of three political parties representing three distinct groups – the Kurds, Sunnis and Shia – which still may serve as the blueprint for the ultimate outcome, the break-up of the country, despite the wishes of the average Iraqi.
Whether or not the Insurgency is led by Iran or by Iraquis themselves, it would appear the Anglo-Americans are on their way to counter Iran by force. But is the real issue the assertion of Iran’s right to nuclear technology. Might it instead be to manhandle Israel’s nemesis and prevoke a coup, and to get rid of Iran’s influence in Iraq? Whatever the motivations, according to a number of published reports the build-up of naval forces in the Persian Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean is formidable.
As Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya writing for Alarab states, “It must be noted that the Iranian Armed Forces are characterized by well structured military organization, with advanced military capabilities, when compared to Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon. Moreover, Iran has been preparing for a scenario of war with the Anglo-American alliance for almost a decade. These preparations were stepped up following the NATO-U.S. led attack on Yugoslavia (1999).”
Meanwhile, “the types of military units and weapons systems being deployed in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea by the United States are considered to be best suited for combat against Iran, also with a view to keeping the Straits of Hormuz open for oil tankers. This also includes forces that would be able to secure bridgeheads on the Iranian coastline. These U.S. forces consist of early warning units, recognizance, amphibious elements, maritime search and rescue units, minesweepers, and rapid deployment units.
According to Alarab and other sources, “The U.S.S. Enterprise, a U.S. Navy flagship is under deployment to the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea. This includes all the warships and vessels that compose Carrier Strike Group 12 (CSG 12) Destroyer Squadron 2 (DESRON 2), and Carrier Air Wing 1 (CVW 1). The stated objective for the deployment of the U.S.S. Enterprise, a nuclear powered aircraft carrier, and other U.S. Navy vessels is to conduct naval security operations and aerial missions in the region. The deployment does not mention Iran, it is said to be part of the U.S.-led “War on Terror” under “Operation Enduring Freedom,” Nazemroaya reported.
“The Eisenhower Strike Group, based in Norfolk, Virginia, has also received orders to deploy to the Middle East. The strike group is led by the U.S.S. Eisenhower, another nuclear battleship. It includes a cruiser, a destroyer, a war frigate, a submarine escort, and U.S. Navy supply ships. One of these two naval strike groups will position itself in the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea while the other naval strike group will position itself in the Persian Gulf, both off the Iranian coast.” According to the Alarab report,
Canada is also contributing to the American-led naval build-up in the Persian Gulf as well as NATO forces stationed in Lebanon and around the region.
As Henry Kissinger sardonically stated in reference to the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s that resulted in one million casualties, “Our policy was to get them to kill each other.” I suspect the same American policy applies today, and true to form Anglo-American forces, Israel and their other allies will be around to help get things started.

11.03.2006

November 3, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
As Bechtel Goes

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Bechtel, the giant engineering company, is leaving Iraq. Its mission — to rebuild power, water and sewage plants — wasn’t accomplished: Baghdad received less than six hours a day of electricity last month, and much of Iraq’s population lives with untreated sewage and without clean water. But Bechtel, having received $2.3 billion of taxpayers’ money and having lost the lives of 52 employees, has come to the end of its last government contract.

As Bechtel goes, so goes the whole reconstruction effort. Whatever our leaders may say about their determination to stay the course complete the mission, when it comes to rebuilding Iraq they’ve already cut and run. The $21 billion allocated for reconstruction over the last three years has been spent, much of it on security rather than its intended purpose, and there’s no more money in the pipeline.

The failure of reconstruction in Iraq raises three questions. First, how much did that failure contribute to the overall failure of the war? Second, how was it that America, the great can-do nation, in this case couldn’t and didn’t? Finally, if we’ve given up on rebuilding Iraq, what are our troops dying for?

There’s no definitive way to answer the first question. You can make a good case that the invasion of Iraq was doomed no matter what, because we never had enough military manpower to provide security. But the lack of electricity and clean water did a lot to dissipate any initial good will the Iraqis may have felt toward the occupation. And Iraqis are well aware that the billions squandered by American contractors included a lot of Iraqi oil revenue as well as U.S. taxpayers’ dollars.

Consider the symbolism of Iraq’s new police academy, which Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, has called “the most essential civil security project in the country.” It was built at a cost of $75 million by Parsons Corporation, which received a total of about $1 billion for Iraq reconstruction projects. But the academy was so badly built that feces and urine leak from the ceilings in the student barracks.

Think about it. We want the Iraqis to stand up so we can stand down. But if they do stand up, we’ll dump excrement on their heads.

As for how this could have happened, that’s easy: major contractors believed, correctly, that their political connections insulated them from accountability. Halliburton and other companies with huge Iraq contracts were basically in the same position as Donald Rumsfeld: they were so closely identified with President Bush and, especially, Vice President Cheney that firing or even disciplining them would have been seen as an admission of personal failure on the part of top elected officials.

As a result, the administration and its allies in Congress fought accountability all the way. Administration officials have made repeated backdoor efforts to close the office of Mr. Bowen, whose job is to oversee the use of reconstruction money. Just this past May, with the failed reconstruction already winding down, the White House arranged for the last $1.5 billion of reconstruction money to be placed outside Mr. Bowen’s jurisdiction. And now, finally, Congress has passed a bill whose provisions include the complete elimination of his agency next October.

The bottom line is that those charged with rebuilding Iraq had no incentive to do the job right, so they didn’t.

You can see, by the way, why a Democratic takeover of the House, if it happens next week, would be such a pivotal event: suddenly, committee chairmen with subpoena power would be in a position to investigate where all the Iraq money went.

But that’s all in the past. What about the future?

Back in June, after a photo-op trip to Iraq, Mr. Bush said something I agree with. “You can measure progress in megawatts of electricity delivered,” he declared. “You can measure progress in terms of oil sold on the market on behalf of the Iraqi people.” But what those measures actually show is the absence of progress. By any material measure, Iraqis are worse off than they were under Saddam.

And we’re not planning to do anything about it: the U.S.-led reconstruction effort in Iraq is basically over. I don’t know whether the administration is afraid to ask U.S. voters for more money, or simply considers the situation hopeless. Either way, the United States has accepted defeat on reconstruction.

Yet Americans are still fighting and dying in Iraq. For what?

November 3, 2006
Congress Tells Auditor in Iraq to Close Office

By JAMES GLANZ
Investigations led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr. in Iraq have sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected companies like Halliburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces.

And tucked away in a huge military authorization bill that President Bush signed two weeks ago is what some of Mr. Bowen’s supporters believe is his reward for repeatedly embarrassing the administration: a pink slip.

The order comes in the form of an obscure provision that terminates his federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, on Oct. 1, 2007. The clause was inserted by the Republican side of the House Armed Services Committee over the objections of Democratic counterparts during a closed-door conference, and it has generated surprise and some outrage among lawmakers who say they had no idea it was in the final legislation.

Mr. Bowen’s office, which began operation in January 2004 to examine reconstruction money spent in Iraq, was always envisioned as a temporary organization, permitted to continue its work only as long as Congress saw fit. Some advocates for the office, in fact, have regarded its lack of a permanent bureaucracy as the key to its aggressiveness and independence.

But as the implications of the provision in the new bill have become clear, opposition has been building on both sides of the political aisle. One point of contention is exactly when the office would have naturally run its course without a hard end date.

The bipartisan opposition may not be unexpected given Mr. Bowen’s Republican credentials — he served under George W. Bush both in Texas and in the White House — and deep public skepticism on the Bush administration’s conduct of the war.

Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who followed the bill closely as chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, says that she still does not know how the provision made its way into what is called the conference report, which reconciles differences between House and Senate versions of a bill.

Neither the House nor the Senate version contained such a termination clause before the conference, all involved agree.

“It’s truly a mystery to me,” Ms. Collins said. “I looked at what I thought was the final version of the conference report and that provision was not in at that time.”

“The one thing I can confirm is that this was a last-minute insertion,” she said.

A Republican spokesman for the committee, Josh Holly, said lawmakers should not have been surprised by the provision closing the inspector general’s office because it “was discussed very early in the conference process.”

But like several other members of the House and Senate who were contacted on the bill, Ms. Collins said that she feared the loss of oversight that could occur if the inspector general’s office went out of business, adding that she was already working on legislation with several Democratic and Republican senators to reverse the termination.

One of those, John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican who is chairman of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that Mr. Bowen was “making a valuable contribution to the Congressional and public understanding of this very complex and ever-changing situation in Iraq.”

“Given that his office has performed important work and that much remains to be done,” Mr. Warner added, “I intend to join Senator Collins in consulting with our colleagues to extend his charter.”

While Senators Collins and Warner said they had nothing more than hunches on where the impetus for setting a termination date had originated, Congressional Democrats were less reserved.

“It appears to me that the administration wants to silence the messenger that is giving us information about waste and fraud in Iraq,” said Representative Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat who is the ranking minority member of the House Committee on Government Reform.

“I just can’t see how one can look at this change without believing it’s political,” he said.

The termination language was inserted into the bill by Congressional staff members working for Duncan Hunter, the California Republican who is the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and who declared on Monday that he plans to run for president in 2008.

Mr. Holly, who is the House Armed Services spokesman as well as a member of Mr. Hunter’s staff, said that politics played no role and that there had been no direction from the administration or lobbying from the companies whose work in Iraq Mr. Bowen’s office has severely critiqued. Three of the companies that have been a particular focus of Mr. Bowen’s investigations, Halliburton, Parsons and Bechtel, said that they had made no effort to lobby against his office.

The idea, Mr. Holly said, was simply to return to a non-wartime footing in which inspectors general in the State Department, the Pentagon and elsewhere would investigate American programs overseas. The definite termination date was also seen as helpful for planning future oversight efforts from Bush administration agencies, he said.

But in Congress, particularly on the Democratic side of the aisle, there have long been accusations that agencies controlled by the Bush administration are not inclined to unearth their own shortcomings in the first place.

The criticism came to a head in a hearing a year ago, when Representative Dennis J. Kucinich, an Ohio Democrat, induced the Pentagon’s acting inspector general, Thomas Gimble, to concede that he had no agents deployed in Iraq, more than two years after the invasion.

A spokesman for the Pentagon inspector general said Thursday that Mr. Gimble has worked to improve that situation, and currently has seven auditors in Baghdad and others working on Iraq-related issues in the United States and elsewhere. Mr. Gimble was in Iraq on Thursday, the spokesman said.

Mr. Bowen’s office has 55 auditors and inspectors in Iraq and about 300 reports and investigations already to its credit, far outstripping any other oversight agency in the country.

But Howard Krongard, the State Department inspector general, said that the comparison was misleading, because many of those resources would probably flow to State and the Pentagon if Congress shuts Mr. Bowen’s office down.

“I think we are competitive to do what they ask us to do,” Mr. Krongard said, referring to Congress.

Mr. Kucinich and other lawmakers said that Iraq oversight could also be hurt by the loss of Mr. Bowen’s mandate, which allows him to cross institutional boundaries, while the other inspectors general have jurisdictions only within their own agencies. Mr. Krongard said that issue could be handled by cooperation among the inspectors general.

Officials at the State Department and the Pentagon made it clear that in general terms they supported Mr. Bowen’s work and would abide by the wishes of Congress.

While the quality of Mr. Bowen’s work is seldom questioned, he is sometimes accused of being a grandstander who is too friendly with the news media. Mr. Bowen has responded that it is standard procedure to publicize successful investigations as way of discouraging other potential wrongdoers.

Among the disagreements on the termination language in the defense authorization bill was exactly how much it would have shortened Mr. Bowen’s tenure. An amendment in the Senate version of the bill actually expanded the pot of reconstruction money his agents could examine.

Because the tenure of his office is calculated through a formula involving the amount of reconstruction money in that pot, the crafters of that amendment figured that it would have extended Mr. Bowen’s work until well into 2008 — or longer if Congress granted further extensions.

Mr. Holly agrees that the Senate language would have expanded that pot of money, but he says that in the Republican staff’s interpretation of the formula, Mr. Bowen’s tenure would have run out sometime in 2007 whether the money was added or not.

In any case, as the bill came out of conference, the termination date of Oct. 1, 2007, had been inserted, effectively meaning that Mr. Bowen would have to start working on passing his responsibilities to other agencies by early next year.

Hill staff members said that after House Democratic objections were overridden, Senate conferees agreed to the provision in a bit of horse-trading: the amount of money Mr. Bowen could look at would be expanded, but only with the hard termination date.

Mr. Bowen himself declined to comment on the controversy surrounding his office, saying only that he was already working with the other inspectors general to develop a transition plan in accordance with the defense authorization act. “We will do what the Congress desires,” Mr. Bowen said.

Microsoft considers China policy
By Darren Waters
Technology editor, BBC News website, Athens

A senior executive for Microsoft has said the firm could pull out of non-democratic countries such as China.
Fred Tipson, senior policy counsel for the computer giant, said concerns over the repressive regime might force it to reconsider its business in China.

"Things are getting bad... and perhaps we have to look again at our presence there," he told a conference in Athens.

"We have to decide if the persecuting of bloggers reaches a point that it's unacceptable to do business there."

"We try to define those levels and the trends are not good there at the moment. It's a moving target."

Selling to China

Earlier in the day, speaking at the Internet Governance Forum, Mr Tipson had defended the work Microsoft was doing in China.

At a session about openness he denied that some big businesses were "colluding" with certain governments.

He was joined in the debate by Art Reilly, senior director at Cisco Systems.

I don't think we should make corporations responsible for securing our freedoms.
Anriette Esterhuysen, Executive director APC
As the only two representatives of major business sat on the panel, they were the focus of accusations from some delegates that the companies were not doing all they could to enable freedom of expression.

Cisco was attacked at the forum for selling equipment to police in China, while Microsoft has been criticised for allegedly censoring blogs in the country.

Mr Tipson said: "We are maximising access to information to users in governments that Amnesty is targeting for its criticism.

"It's those users we have to keep our focus on."

Mr Reilly, senior director of strategic technology policy at Cisco was asked if the firm had any ethical problems with an alleged sale of router equipment to the Chinese police.

Human rights activists are concerned that the technology is being misused by some governments to track the online activities of people and to filter dissident comment.

He said: "We do not sell a different product in one country to another.

"It is essential that there are security and network management capabilities in a network that enable the free flow of information - it is the same technology used by parents and libraries to prevent children from accessing pornography for example."

He added: "We are not colluding with any country to do any specific filtering."

He said that he was not familiar with the sale of "any product to any particular entity in China".

Mr Tipson said it was a condition of companies to abide by the local laws in countries with whom they do business.

Mr Reilly said that here had been a "substantial increase in use and ability for information to flow in China" since Cisco entered the Chinese market in 1994.

There are now 120 million people online in China, up from 80,000 in 1994.

Advancing human rights

"The economic value in the internet is driving growth and development in educational opportunities [in China]," said Mr Tipson.

"Openness is often too segmented too narrowly into a discussion around freedom of speech," he added.

Mr Tipson said it was "critical not to portray the internet as a threat to governments".

"The internet is transforming the political culture of China. There is no question about it."

Fellow panellist, Anriette Esterhuysen, executive director of professional body APC, said: "I don't think we should make corporations responsible for securing our freedoms."

She said governments should be enforcing ethical policies on companies that are doing business with foreign governments.

There was also a feeling expressed by some that the internet was making progress as a tool for advancing human rights.

Andrew Puddephatt, who has worked for various human rights organisations, said: "Where access exists you can definitely get information and ideas on the net that you cannot get on conventional media. That is progress."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/technology/6102180.stm

Published: 2006/11/01 09:10:21 GMT