VIDEO OF ATTACK SHOWN AT IRAQ GENOCIDE TRIAL. Prosecutors in the
trial of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein for genocide against
ethnic Kurds showed graphic video footage on December 19 of what they
claimed were chemical attacks on Kurdish villages, international
media reported. Grainy footage shot between April 1987 and May 1988
showed helicopters flying low over the mountains, villagers
frantically fleeing in trucks, refugees on foot, white smoke, and
women gathered near tents, crying. It also showed images of dead
civilians, including infants, allegedly killed after a chemical
attack on their villages. "These were different shots of what was
called 'population centers' of the victims of chemical bombing," said
chief prosecutor Munqith al-Farun. Al-Farun also presented the court
with an internal government memo, dated 1992, that praised the role
of Dutch businessman Frans van Anraat in providing the former regime
with chemical weapons. "He provided great services to the country by
providing the country's institutions and the military industry with
chemical and rare materials," the memo read. The Hussein regime
rewarded van Anraat with Iraqi citizenship, but he fled Iraq after
the regime fell in March 2003. On December 23, 2005, he was convicted
by a Dutch court and sentenced to 15 years in prison after being
found guilty of complicity in war crimes. SS

THINK TANK SAYS IRAQ ON THE VERGE OF 'DISINTEGRATION.' The
International Crisis Group released a report on December 19 warning
that Iraq will most probably "collapse into a failed and fragmented
state" unless a radical new strategy is adopted. The Brussels-based
think tank outlined three steps for success in Iraq: sustained
multilateral diplomacy to put pressure on all Iraqi parties to make
compromises; a conference bringing together all Iraqi and
international stakeholders, including militia elements and insurgent
groups, to forge a new political compact; and a new U.S. regional
strategy, including engagement with Syria and Iran. "Polite
engagement of Iraq's neighbors will not do; rather, a clear
redefinition of Washington's objectives in the region will be
required to enlist regional, but especially Iranian and Syrian help.
The goal is not to bargain with them, but to seek agreement on an
end-state for Iraq and the region that is no one's first choice, but
with which everyone can live," the report said. SS

IRANIAN PRESIDENT DENOUNCES 'OPPRESSIVE POWERS.' Mahmud Ahmadinejad
told a gathering in the town of Kermanshah, western Iran, on December
19 that "oppressive powers" that have distanced themselves from
justice and God-worship will thwart and violate Iran's rights if
allowed to, ISNA reported. "Without standing up to oppressive powers
the country cannot be built," he said, praising the "culture" of
"selflessness" and martyrdom in Iran. Iranians have to stand up to
these powers, he said, and not "let them enter the Iranian people's
closed circle to obstruct the construction of Islamic Iran." If "our
enemies have presently taken positions behind the Security Council,
then [the council] will certainly not have legitimacy" for Iranians,
he said. He added that Iranians recognize their enemies, even if they
hide in such bodies as the UN nuclear inspectorate or "behind the
mask of human rights and defense of democracy." He said the world did
not react when "artificial" Israel insinuated that it has nuclear
weapons because Israel is "their trained servant." He asked, "Are you
not worried by your own arsenals, full of destructive weapons, when
you say you are worried by Iran's peaceful activities?" Iran, he
said, is but a "small step" from reaching the "pinnacle" of its
nuclear path, ISNA reported. VS

Op-Ed Columnist
Mideast Rules to Live By
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By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: December 20, 2006
For a long time, I let my hopes for a decent outcome in Iraq triumph over what I had learned reporting from Lebanon during its civil war. Those hopes vanished last summer. So, I’d like to offer President Bush my updated rules of Middle East reporting, which also apply to diplomacy, in hopes they’ll help him figure out what to do next in Iraq.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Thomas Friedman.
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Rule 1: What people tell you in private in the Middle East is irrelevant. All that matters is what they will defend in public in their own language. Anything said to you in English, in private, doesn’t count. In Washington, officials lie in public and tell the truth off the record. In the Mideast, officials say what they really believe in public and tell you what you want to hear in private.

Rule 2: Any reporter or U.S. Army officer wanting to serve in Iraq should have to take a test, consisting of one question: “Do you think the shortest distance between two points is a straight line?” If you answer yes, you can’t go to Iraq. You can serve in Japan, Korea or Germany — not Iraq.

Rule 3: If you can’t explain something to Middle Easterners with a conspiracy theory, then don’t try to explain it at all — they won’t believe it.

Rule 4: In the Middle East, never take a concession, except out of the mouth of the person doing the conceding. If I had a dollar for every time someone agreed to recognize Israel on behalf of Yasir Arafat, I could paper my walls.

Rule 5: Never lead your story out of Lebanon, Gaza or Iraq with a cease-fire; it will always be over before the next morning’s paper.

Rule 6: In the Middle East, the extremists go all the way, and the moderates tend to just go away.

Rule 7: The most oft-used expression by moderate Arab pols is: “We were just about to stand up to the bad guys when you stupid Americans did that stupid thing. Had you stupid Americans not done that stupid thing, we would have stood up, but now it’s too late. It’s all your fault for being so stupid.”

Rule 8: Civil wars in the Arab world are rarely about ideas — like liberalism vs. communism. They are about which tribe gets to rule. So, yes, Iraq is having a civil war as we once did. But there is no Abe Lincoln in this war. It’s the South vs. the South.

Rule 9: In Middle East tribal politics there is rarely a happy medium. When one side is weak, it will tell you, “I’m weak, how can I compromise?” And when it’s strong, it will tell you, “I’m strong, why should I compromise?”

Rule 10: Mideast civil wars end in one of three ways: a) like the U.S. civil war, with one side vanquishing the other; b) like the Cyprus civil war, with a hard partition and a wall dividing the parties; or c) like the Lebanon civil war, with a soft partition under an iron fist (Syria) that keeps everyone in line. Saddam used to be the iron fist in Iraq. Now it is us. If we don’t want to play that role, Iraq’s civil war will end with A or B.

Rule 11: The most underestimated emotion in Arab politics is humiliation. The Israeli-Arab conflict, for instance, is not just about borders. Israel’s mere existence is a daily humiliation to Muslims, who can’t understand how, if they have the superior religion, Israel can be so powerful. Al Jazeera’s editor, Ahmed Sheikh, said it best when he recently told the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche: “It gnaws at the people in the Middle East that such a small country as Israel, with only about seven million inhabitants, can defeat the Arab nation with its 350 million. That hurts our collective ego. The Palestinian problem is in the genes of every Arab. The West’s problem is that it does not understand this.”

Rule 12: Thus, the Israelis will always win, and the Palestinians will always make sure they never enjoy it. Everything else is just commentary.

Rule 13: Our first priority is democracy, but the Arabs’ first priority is “justice.” The oft-warring Arab tribes are all wounded souls, who really have been hurt by colonial powers, by Jewish settlements on Palestinian land, by Arab kings and dictators, and, most of all, by each other in endless tribal wars. For Iraq’s long-abused Shiite majority, democracy is first and foremost a vehicle to get justice. Ditto the Kurds. For the minority Sunnis, democracy in Iraq is a vehicle of injustice. For us, democracy is all about protecting minority rights. For them, democracy is first about consolidating majority rights and getting justice.

Rule 14: The Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi had it right: “Great powers should never get involved in the politics of small tribes.”

Rule 15: Whether it is Arab-Israeli peace or democracy in Iraq, you can’t want it more than they do.

December 18, 2006
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
A War That Abhors a Vacuum
By BEN CONNABLE
Washington
THE niceties are up for debate: phased or partial withdrawal from Iraq would entail pulling troops back to their bases across the country, or leapfrogging backward to the nearest international border, or redeploying to bases in nearby countries.
But whatever the final prescription, the debate must include a sober look at the street-level impact of withdrawal. What will become of Iraqi villages, towns and cities as we pull out? Although past is not necessarily prologue, recent experience in Anbar Province may be instructive.
American units have already withdrawn from the western Euphrates River valley — twice, in fact. As the insurgency heated up in early 2004, the Seventh Marine Regiment pulled up stakes and went to fight insurgents in eastern Anbar, leaving the rest of the province in the hands of a battalion of troops. The Marines balanced obvious risk against the possible reward of overwhelming some of the insurgent groups in the east.
The consequences were immediate and bloody. Insurgents assumed control of several towns and villages. They tortured and executed police officers, local politicians, friendly tribal leaders and informants. They murdered contractors who had worked with the Americans or the Iraqi government. They tore down American-financed reconstruction projects and in a few cases imposed an extreme version of Islamic law. Many Iraqi military units collapsed in the absence of United States support.
The insurgents celebrated their self-described victory and exploited the withdrawal for propaganda purposes. Baathist-led insurgents used the opportunity to establish training camps and weapons caches in the farmland and along the river banks while other groups, including Al Qaeda, smuggled in fighters, suicide bombers and money to support operations in Ramadi, Falluja and Baghdad. Western Iraq became a temporary haven for criminals, terrorists and thousands of local thugs who made up de facto mini-regimes in the absence of a stabilizing force.
When the Seventh Marines returned to western Anbar it was essentially forced to retake some of the towns it once controlled. Many local Iraqis were openly hostile; the battle for the hearts and minds of the population was set back months, if not years. With the politicians murdered, local civil administration was almost nonexistent and any influence held by the central government was lost.
The Seventh Marine Regiment pulled up stakes again in November 2004 to join the second fight for Falluja. Conscious of the damage done by the earlier withdrawal, the Marines left behind more troops in an effort to stem the inevitable surge of insurgent and criminal gangs; Iraqi forces were not yet ready to assume control.
Despite this Marine presence, the results were similar. What had been rebuilt in the summer crumbled in the fall.
The two withdrawals left the western Euphrates River valley in a shambles. At the end of 2005 the Marines were forced to conduct sweep and clear operations from Anbar’s capital, Ramadi, to the Syrian border town of Husayba. As they pushed west they uncovered hundreds of weapons caches, elaborate insurgent propaganda centers, carefully camouflaged training camps, suicide vehicle factories and complex criminal networks that were feeding a steady stream of money to insurgents and terrorists across the country. Marine units settled back in, spread out and brought attack levels to unprecedented lows.
Since 2005, the situation in Anbar has significantly deteriorated. But as bad as things have become, American and Iraqi forces retain some degree of control in even the most turbulent areas. The border cities of Husayba and Qaim are relatively stable and have effective security and government. Falluja, also stable, is a model for Iraqi-American military cooperation. Advisers are embedded with Iraqi units across the province. American-supported tribes are beginning to combat Al Qaeda in Iraq in the east. Anbar is down but not out, thanks to the American troops along the Euphrates River.
American presence might be likened to a control rod in a nuclear reactor: Leave it in place and the potential energy of the insurgents and criminals is mostly kept in check; remove it and the energy becomes kinetic. Withdrawal of United States presence from any town or city in Anbar will almost certainly lead to the creation of safe havens for western Iraq’s impenetrable snarl of foreign fighters, nationalist insurgents and local thugs. Many abandoned cities and towns would come to closely resemble the Falluja of mid-2004.
If American forces conduct even a phased withdrawal before the full certification of Iraqi Army battalions, those units incapable of sustaining independent operations would be forced to pull back alongside their minders, or collapse as their logistics and fire support lifelines disappeared. Most local police forces would scatter, be co-opted or slaughtered wholesale, as they were in 2004.
Insurgents of all stripes would make the most of the combined American and Iraqi withdrawal, harassing the departing convoys with homemade bombs and small-arms fire. Videos of insurgents dancing in the streets would become prevalent on the Internet and international television. No public relations campaign could succeed in painting an early phased withdrawal as anything but a strategic defeat.
“Redeployed” in large bases far from the enemy centers of gravity, American troops wouldn’t be able to keep insurgent groups from forming semi-conventional units. This pattern has repeated itself countless times across Iraq and follows historic guerrilla-warfare models: insurgents exploit any safe haven to strengthen and train their forces. The longer they are left alone, the stronger they become. As our presence in the countryside diminishes, our ability to gather intelligence and to protect valuable infrastructure, communications lines and friendly tribal areas will deteriorate rapidly.
Should the Iraqi Army stay in place as American units withdraw, the American advisers embedded within these units probably would have to be removed, leaving nobody to control air support, coordinate unit pay from Baghdad, supervise the monthly convoys to take troops home on leave, prevent gross violations of the Geneva Convention or shore up shaky leadership. Given patient support, most of these units eventually will develop the capacity to conduct independent operations. However, some adviser teams already report that their Iraqi counterparts have said they intend to desert if the Americans leave too soon.
Although Anbar may be the most violent province in Iraq per capita, it is relatively free of the sectarian tensions found in Baghdad and the center. The confusion caused by withdrawal would be compounded as religious, militia and political loyalties divided inadequately prepared military and police units. Full-scale ethnic killing would become a very real possibility.
For some, the collapse of Iraqi society into Hobbesian mayhem is inevitable no matter how many American troops remain on the ground. A few argue that disintegration of the Iraqi state actually would bring about the national catharsis that seems so elusive today — that absolute civil war would be a greater good.
This cold calculus ignores the very real impact of an American withdrawal on the people we now protect. Any debate that does not consider the bloody reality we would leave in our wake does a disservice to the people of Iraq and the troops who have fought so hard to defend them.
Ben Connable is a major in the Marine Corps