http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/gaza200804

THE MIDDLE EAST
The Gaza Bombshell
After failing to anticipate Hamas’s victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs. With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, David Rose reveals how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.
by DAVID ROSE April 2008

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President George W. Bush, whose secret Palestinian intervention backfired in a big way.

The Al Deira Hotel, in Gaza City, is a haven of calm in a land beset by poverty, fear, and violence. In the middle of December 2007, I sit in the hotel’s airy restaurant, its windows open to the Mediterranean, and listen to a slight, bearded man named Mazen Asad abu Dan describe the suffering he endured 11 months before at the hands of his fellow Palestinians. Abu Dan, 28, is a member of Hamas, the Iranian-backed Islamist organization that has been designated a terrorist group by the United States, but I have a good reason for taking him at his word: I’ve seen the video.

To hear an interview with David Rose and to see documents he uncovered, click here.
It shows abu Dan kneeling, his hands bound behind his back, and screaming as his captors pummel him with a black iron rod. “I lost all the skin on my back from the beatings,” he says. “Instead of medicine, they poured perfume on my wounds. It felt as if they had taken a sword to my injuries.”
On January 26, 2007, abu Dan, a student at the Islamic University of Gaza, had gone to a local cemetery with his father and five others to erect a headstone for his grandmother. When they arrived, however, they found themselves surrounded by 30 armed men from Hamas’s rival, Fatah, the party of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. “They took us to a house in north Gaza,” abu Dan says. “They covered our eyes and took us to a room on the sixth floor.”
The video reveals a bare room with white walls and a black-and-white tiled floor, where abu Dan’s father is forced to sit and listen to his son’s shrieks of pain. Afterward, abu Dan says, he and two of the others were driven to a market square. “They told us they were going to kill us. They made us sit on the ground.” He rolls up the legs of his trousers to display the circular scars that are evidence of what happened next: “They shot our knees and feet—five bullets each. I spent four months in a wheelchair.”
Abu Dan had no way of knowing it, but his tormentors had a secret ally: the administration of President George W. Bush.
A clue comes toward the end of the video, which was found in a Fatah security building by Hamas fighters last June. Still bound and blindfolded, the prisoners are made to echo a rhythmic chant yelled by one of their captors: “By blood, by soul, we sacrifice ourselves for Muhammad Dahlan! Long live Muhammad Dahlan!”
There is no one more hated among Hamas members than Muhammad Dahlan, long Fatah’s resident strongman in Gaza. Dahlan, who most recently served as Abbas’s national-security adviser, has spent more than a decade battling Hamas. Dahlan insists that abu Dan was tortured without his knowledge, but the video is proof that his followers’ methods can be brutal.
Bush has met Dahlan on at least three occasions. After talks at the White House in July 2003, Bush publicly praised Dahlan as “a good, solid leader.” In private, say multiple Israeli and American officials, the U.S. president described him as “our guy.”
The United States has been involved in the affairs of the Palestinian territories since the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel captured Gaza from Egypt and the West Bank from Jordan. With the 1993 Oslo accords, the territories acquired limited autonomy, under a president, who has executive powers, and an elected parliament. Israel retains a large military presence in the West Bank, but it withdrew from Gaza in 2005.
In recent months, President Bush has repeatedly stated that the last great ambition of his presidency is to broker a deal that would create a viable Palestinian state and bring peace to the Holy Land. “People say, ‘Do you think it’s possible, during your presidency?’ ” he told an audience in Jerusalem on January 9. “And the answer is: I’m very hopeful.”
The next day, in the West Bank capital of Ramallah, Bush acknowledged that there was a rather large obstacle standing in the way of this goal: Hamas’s complete control of Gaza, home to some 1.5 million Palestinians, where it seized power in a bloody coup d’état in June 2007. Almost every day, militants fire rockets from Gaza into neighboring Israeli towns, and President Abbas is powerless to stop them. His authority is limited to the West Bank.
It’s “a tough situation,” Bush admitted. “I don’t know whether you can solve it in a year or not.” What Bush neglected to mention was his own role in creating this mess.
According to Dahlan, it was Bush who had pushed legislative elections in the Palestinian territories in January 2006, despite warnings that Fatah was not ready. After Hamas—whose 1988 charter committed it to the goal of driving Israel into the sea—won control of the parliament, Bush made another, deadlier miscalculation.
Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.)
But the secret plan backfired, resulting in a further setback for American foreign policy under Bush. Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the U.S.-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza.
Some sources call the scheme “Iran-contra 2.0,” recalling that Abrams was convicted (and later pardoned) for withholding information from Congress during the original Iran-contra scandal under President Reagan. There are echoes of other past misadventures as well: the C.I.A.’s 1953 ouster of an elected prime minister in Iran, which set the stage for the 1979 Islamic revolution there; the aborted 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, which gave Fidel Castro an excuse to solidify his hold on Cuba; and the contemporary tragedy in Iraq.
Within the Bush administration, the Palestinian policy set off a furious debate. One of its critics is David Wurmser, the avowed neoconservative, who resigned as Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief Middle East adviser in July 2007, a month after the Gaza coup.
Wurmser accuses the Bush administration of “engaging in a dirty war in an effort to provide a corrupt dictatorship [led by Abbas] with victory.” He believes that Hamas had no intention of taking Gaza until Fatah forced its hand. “It looks to me that what happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen,” Wurmser says.
The botched plan has rendered the dream of Middle East peace more remote than ever, but what really galls neocons such as Wurmser is the hypocrisy it exposed. “There is a stunning disconnect between the president’s call for Middle East democracy and this policy,” he says. “It directly contradicts it.”
Preventive Security
Bush was not the first American president to form a relationship with Muhammad Dahlan. “Yes, I was close to Bill Clinton,” Dahlan says. “I met Clinton many times with [the late Palestinian leader Yasser] Arafat.” In the wake of the 1993 Oslo accords, Clinton sponsored a series of diplomatic meetings aimed at reaching a permanent Middle East peace, and Dahlan became the Palestinians’ negotiator on security.
As I talk to Dahlan in a five-star Cairo hotel, it’s easy to see the qualities that might make him attractive to American presidents. His appearance is immaculate, his English is serviceable, and his manner is charming and forthright. Had he been born into privilege, these qualities might not mean much. But Dahlan was born—on September 29, 1961—in the teeming squalor of Gaza’s Khan Younis refugee camp, and his education came mostly from the street. In 1981 he helped found Fatah’s youth movement, and he later played a leading role in the first intifada—the five-year revolt that began in 1987 against the Israeli occupation. In all, Dahlan says, he spent five years in Israeli jails.

LETTER FROM SAIGON
Good Evening, Vietnam!
After a string of restaurant successes (Odeon, Indochine, 44, etc.) and at least two midlife crises, the author confronted his worst fear—terminal boredom. Trading the Manhattan–Hamptons–St. Barth’s grind for a neon-lit apartment in Saigon, he is diligently hitting the skids.
by BRIAN McNALLY April 2008

Brian McNally in familiar venues of his new habitat, Saigon. Photographs by John Stanmeyer.

I could not possibly have anticipated, 30 years ago, the moment last summer when I found myself, in my late 50s, stranded in Charles de Gaulle International Airport with six euros in my pocket, unmarried, no girlfriend, abandoned (temporarily) by my children, my cell phone critically low on battery, and my ex-wife screaming obscenities in my ear in really appalling English. Things could have been worse, and in fact they were. I was about to miss my return flight to Saigon, because I had left my passport and wallet at the hotel and my louche and decadent ex-family couldn’t be bothered to interrupt their leisurely midday breakfast to bring it out to me. Add to this gout, male-pattern baldness, and all the other horrors of late middle age circling like vultures in the background and it might be appreciated that this wasn’t my finest hour.
It escapes me exactly how, but I concede there is a possibility that I may have been partially to blame for this state of affairs. My life is marked by a procession of poor choices, but my choice of ex-wife and children has been brilliant. In the end, most ex-wives, while they don’t want you to die, don’t particularly want you to live either. But mine has, for the most part, shown more forbearance and grace than I deserve. On this occasion, though, both of these virtues had deserted her.
And so you might understand what it felt like, after possibly the most depressing 48 hours of my life, having left Paris a deadbeat loser, to finally get back to Saigon and head for Le Duyen barbershop, where I was welcomed as a returning hero by swarms of staggeringly pretty miniskirted girls. Hours of cosseting and fussing followed in the No. 1 V.I.P. room, while the wide-screen TV beamed a soccer game live from England. I vowed then that I would never leave this place, but that if I did I would take the girls of Le Duyen with me.
My trip to Paris was the first outside of Southeast Asia since I had moved to Saigon. I wish I could say my move here was an impulsive act of midlife liberation or a quixotic rejection of the material world (if it were the latter, there are those less charitable who would suggest that the material world rejected me first). But it was neither of these things. I moved here because I was bored to death with New York, because of the sobering realization that even if I live to 80 I still don’t have that long to live, and also to some extent because of a general sense of personal failure. Saigon itself was a more or less random decision. It could have been anywhere.
On the other hand, this was no mere midlife crisis. I had already been through a couple of those, and I know the difference. I am not given much to personal reflection or any desire to be overly familiar with my inner self, partly because the exterior world seems a lot more interesting and partly out of the terrifying prospect that the examined life might not be worth living, either.
It did, however, seem time to take stock and consider the future and what it might have in store. And what it had in store was hair receding on our heads and legs but sprouting everywhere in ears and nose; aching (in the words of the second-greatest living Canadian) in the places where we used to play; the cruel irony of Viagra’s offering hope precisely at the point in life when girls offer none; shuttling around in the triangle of hell that is Manhattan, the Hamptons, and St. Barth’s; waiting for a table at Bar Pitti surrounded by the usual caravan of fops, frauds, and toadies; and sitting in the Mercer lobby watching … well, just watching. It goes on and on, and none of it is good. This might be a crisis of the overprivileged but is no less a crisis for that.
And the smug, self-regarding, solipsistic generation I was born into is particularly ill-equipped to grow old. We were not so much born to be wild as born to be young. Obsessed with youth, we were not prepared for the hyenas of middle age snapping at our heels, not prepared for the inevitable physical decay, and certainly not prepared for not getting it. After dominating both for so long, we are now in a place where we don’t understand the culture and don’t speak the language.
At 16—an age when confusion and doubt are supposed to be part of the rite of passage—it was perfectly clear what you were supposed to do: walk around London in a mohair suit, tab collar, and Hush Puppies, head-butting people while fantasizing about Christine Keeler and listening to the Small Faces. It was simple. Now we spend hours agonizing over whether a certain kind of sneaker is age-appropriate, and frantically trying to stake out the elusive ground between curmudgeon on the one hand and tragically hip oldie on the other.
And I guess in the end that’s a large part of the reason I’m here. If you can’t read the signposts, they may as well be in Vietnamese. At least you have an excuse for not finding your way.
My first apartment in Saigon was one room on the top floor of a five-floor walk-up in a decrepit building on a working-class street. Next door to me, in a room only slightly smaller than mine, were what seemed like several hundred sullen and impoverished students living a Dostoyevskian nightmare. They must have slept stacked up like so many bags of cement on a warehouse pallet. No pawnbroker safe for miles. There were two toilets off the hallway, one for all of them and one for me. I was inclined to feel bad about this, but then I thought, Who cares?, and made sure my own toilet door was locked at all times.

A typical day at the neighborhood barbershop.

Opposite, the neon lights of the Rona, a 24-hour massage-and-karaoke emporium, flickered through threadbare curtains in a limp parody of a bad noir movie. This sustained me for a while, but without the cameras and voice-over from Joseph Cotten it eventually became depressing. And, outside, the April heat of Saigon was unrelenting, oppressive, and dizzying. It was a weird month or two. Often felt like going to the beach and shooting an Arab.
Not an auspicious beginning, but Saigon is an accessible city in the way that New York is and London is not. A hustle here and a hustle there and pretty soon—and with the help of some extravagant tipping—I had ingratiated myself with enough clip joints, barbershops, and cafés to cobble together some sort of social life. And by that time the sweltering heat had given way to the relative cool of the rainy season, and despite the occasional inconvenience of getting caught in some fetid tiers monde market—humming with avian flu and thronged with expectorating peasants (at least it seems like that when you’re waiting for the torrential rains to let up)—the rhythm of the rainy season has its own strange, hypnotic appeal.
While the barbershops may be sexy, they are in fact almost primly innocent. However, this is not the case with every service establishment in Saigon, and when I’m not working, which at the moment seems to be most of the time, a substantial part of my day is devoted to helping those poor creatures toiling in the grayer areas of the hospitality industry. They may look carefree enough, dancing on nightclub tables and drinking expensive champagne until dawn, but it is not widely known that they are routinely denied basic rights such as a guaranteed 40-hour workweek. And their health benefits are often quite inadequate. There are, as always, those godless cynics, skeptical of any human impulse to do good, who would question my motives, but if they don’t appreciate my efforts, the girls certainly do and demonstrate their gratitude in the most touching ways.
A downside to living in New York is that after a two-hour flight from La Guardia you find yourself in Canton, Ohio, or Raleigh, North Carolina. One of the attractions of living in Southeast Asia is that the same flight from Saigon will take you to Vientiane, Chiang Mai, Bali, Malaysia, and dozens of other exotic locations. And so, when not engaged in noble Gladstonian efforts to help those less fortunate than myself, I take as many side trips as I can.
Recently I spent a few days in Phnom Penh, where it seems tourists outnumber the locals by about eight to one. Everybody cast to type, the tourists mostly loud and fat, the locals sweet and humble—the loud and fat ones, though, rather less inclined to torture and murder one another. On the one hand, on the other hand. I was forced by my companion on the trip—the Librarian, as she is known (for reasons too obvious, and too thrilling, to go into now)—to revisit the former interrogation camp S-21 and the Killing Fields, and this grim expedition once again colored my image of the serene and smiling Khmer while reinforcing the Librarian’s conviction that the Vietnamese are the master race. Not an attractive point of view, but if you could see her when she gets all stern and nationalistic, you too might forgive her a few ideological quirks.
The French used to say that the Vietnamese grow the rice, the Cambodians watch it grow, and the Laotians listen to it grow. This is, as generalizations go, an obviously broad but nevertheless reasonable description of the character of the three countries, and generally the Cambodians, when not engaged in brutal internecine slaughter or the sex trafficking of children, are a laid-back, cheery, and hospitable bunch, and Phnom Penh is a relatively pleasant city, its center all sidewalk cafés, wide tree-lined boulevards, and French-colonial architecture.
Unfortunately, this gives way all too soon to dusty suburbs of corrugated-tin slums and appalling poverty. But in the same way you wouldn’t visit Scarsdale on a trip to Manhattan, you can pretty much skip all that stuff.
Some tourists I met complained that an annoying amount of one’s time in Phnom Penh is spent kicking small homeless orphans and horribly disfigured beggars back into the gutter while at the same time beating overly insistent tuk-tuk drivers with one’s riding crop. They claim that it may appear cruel, but it’s for the driver’s own good. This seems a little harsh to me, but I can see that if foreigners stop coming because they can’t enjoy a hard-earned martini in a promenade café without having to be harassed by starving street urchins and the twisted and gnarled bodies of Agent Orange victims, then the tourist industry will simply dry up—with devastating consequences for some rather remarkable and resourceful young people with whom it was my privilege to become acquainted. Go back and forth on this one.
A couple of months before I was in Cambodia they finally arrested Pol Pot’s right-hand man and also dragged Duch, the commandant of S-21, into court. Some people in Cambodia and elsewhere were suggesting that after all this time there was no point in bringing these aging apparatchiks to justice and that perhaps some sort of South African–style “reconciliation” process was preferable. I personally think the bastards—and until their dying day—should be waterboarded while having their genitals wired permanently to the electrical grid and their fingernails pulled out with pliers. And I would wish them a long life.
There you are, a visit to S-21 has the paradoxical effect of turning the mild tourist into a violent avenger, dreaming up lurid and exotic tortures for feeble octogenarians. Even while I was at the camp, I was so infuriated by two Frenchwomen who spent most of their time—in this ineffably sad memorial to murdered women and children—giggling about something or other that I felt like taking one of the bamboo poles that were used to beat prisoners to death and crushing their skulls with it. But thought in the end that even in the age of irony that would have been a little rich.

“A substantial part of my day is devoted to helping those poor creatures toiling in the grayer areas of the hospitality industry.”

Flew back via the Vietnamese hill town of Dalat on some dodgy Tupolev, which against all odds failed to do what Russian planes do best—which is crash—and then on to Saigon. Immediately back to my apartment to stay up until five a.m. watching England succeeding against all odds in doing what they do best, which is lose football matches. The English soccer team and the circus that surrounds it are especially depressing because they embody the absolute awfulness of certain aspects of the English and of English life. But then, as is my habit on these all too frequent occasions, I turned to the obituary pages of The Guardian for consolation. And was not disappointed, because halfway through a sober and respectful (and fortuitously appropriate) eulogy to a famous and widely respected footballer, who later went on to an illustrious career as a national coach, was this paragraph:
In March 1987 his wife, Isa, left him for a wealthy meat trader. In July 1988 he married Elaine Allister—an event marred by a brawl involving his brother Billy and his father, Jack, both of whom were ejected from the reception.
The obit then continued in the same dignified tone as before. England redeemed! Not just left him. Not merely wealthy. But a wealthy meat trader! And not just the gratuitous inclusion of the brawl—conjuring up as it does the typical working-class English wedding—but the inclusion of the names Billy and Jack, and the recording of their ejection.
If that paragraph of the obituary was carelessly intended humor, the Vietnamese DVD I bought on the street was not. It was a boxed set of six De Niro movies with three other random films thrown in. Excellent quality, and cost me $4. If the price didn’t tip me off to the possibility that this might be a knockoff, the cover blurb pretty much confirmed it. After the headline gangster robert de niro came “Black helped eldest brother to come, the fire exploded a condition imminent!”
Along similar lines I have kept all my text messages from the lovely My (pronounced Me), a nightclub hostess—and we use the term loosely—who could well have written the above blurb. She works at a popular Saigon café, where an aging Vietnamese Beatnik sings the same half-dozen 50s French pop songs over and over again. She learned her English from Japanese and Korean customers, and not one of the text messages makes the slightest bit of sense. But they are poetry in their own way, and I cherish them.

We are drawing to the end of the holiday season in Vietnam, an extended secular celebration of any religious, pagan, or political event that comes to hand from late November to mid-February, when it all culminates in the biggest bacchanal of them all, Tet, the lunar new year.
Christmas in Saigon is an extraordinary affair. Little time for the sort of peaceful contemplation that I, for one, normally find so rewarding. The Vietnamese celebrate the birth of the baby Jesus by happily ignoring the religious aspect completely, instead concentrating on the potential for commercial advantage and 24-hour partying. Fewer than 7 percent of the population are Christian—and many of them only nominally—while more than 80 percent are “without religion,” though it seems that 100 percent of this godless people celebrate the birthday of Our Savior by dancing the night away on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City in a fantastic (and, to some, wonderfully encouraging) display of atheistic appropriation. Religion and ideology no match for making money and having fun.
Nevertheless, it was comforting to bathe in the glow of fairy lights and the general atmosphere of seasonal goodwill, having just returned from a (literally) misguided and harrowing trip to the remoter and stunningly beautiful regions of Ha Giang Province, in the northwest of Vietnam. We traveled on vertiginous, crumbling mountain roads with 1,000-foot sheer drops and no guardrails, in an ancient Land Cruiser piloted by a 14-year-old (I’m guessing here) driver-guide who spoke no English and possessed little sense of direction. Nor, apparently, much grasp of the concept of mortality. And all of this spent driving through thick fog and clouds. Terrifying, absolutely rigid with fear most of the time. We didn’t see another foreigner or tourist for three days, which should have tipped us off to something.
Despite all this I would have continued—after all, what’s a few extra years of drooling senility tacked onto a useless life—but I was with my children, and, thinking that they still probably had something to live for, I decided to turn back. A pity, really, because this is an amazing part of the world, inhabited by several ethnic Montagnard tribes who are shy, charming, and friendly in equal parts.
Wonderful to have the children here, of course, but after three weeks I wasn’t entirely unhappy when I was able to resume with the general unraveling of my life, an enterprise that had been gathering such splendid momentum before their visit, although the life, it must be said, wasn't bound too tightly in the first place.
Former restaurateur Brian McNally is Vanity Fair’s “man in Saigon.

April 1, 2008
Microcredit Raises Hopes For India's Farm Widows

By REUTERS
Filed at 8:23 p.m. ET

SUNNA, India (Reuters) - Savita Jiddewar is a rare success story on the cotton fields of central India, the epicenter of an agrarian crisis that has seen 150,000 farmers commit suicide since 1997 because they could not pay back loans.

Her home stands out strikingly in this small village of dirt lanes and pale blue brick houses. She has a television set, a DVD player and a comfortable sofa. A mobile phone rings intermittently and the aroma of cooking wafts from the kitchen.

Clearly, she is well off in a farming village where most people struggle to make ends meet and where at least four people have killed themselves unable to repay crop loans.

While her neighbors borrowed heavily, entangling themselves in a never-ending cycle of debts, Jiddewar, a widow whose husband and daughter died in a road accident, made her moves smartly.

She joined a microcredit programme last year, saving tiny amounts that she ploughed back into her cotton fields, and earning a life of relative comfort.

After the agrarian crisis broke out in the early 1990s when India began privatizing its economy, several voluntary organizations and banks in the region began microcredit schemes for women.

But women are only now joining in large numbers and the benefits are showing.

"Initially I wasn't sure what this is all about but then I saw other women who were doing well," Jiddewar said as she walked around her village, the air heavy with the smell of cow dung and animal feed.

BUSINESS ACUMEN

Jiddewar then joined the Annapurna women's self help group, one of around 60,000 such groups in the region known as Vidarbha. Here, the microcredit model is benefiting some 500,000 women and widows of farmers.

A farmers' lobby in the area estimates there are about 20,000 widows in Vidarbha whose husbands committed suicide after crops failed and they could not pay moneylenders and banks.

The women form groups of 10 or 12 to start a business and approach a bank for tiny credits. The banks encourage the women to save with them, with each member depositing amounts starting from $1 every month.

The next loan to the group depends on how fast they repay the initial credit after making a saving.

There are a variety of banks offering microcredit and the women are careful not to choose the wrong option.

Jiddewar's group chose the one that gave them $2,500 for community farming. Within months of borrowing her group had managed to pay back half the amount. Now the group is considering setting up a stationery shop.

Once left without hope after their sons and husbands died, many windows are picking up the pieces again.

"There was a time when we didn't know where the next meal was going to come from," said Mirabai Shyamrao Martawar, whose husband killed himself by jumping into a river after moneylenders pestered him for payment.

"Now I save fifty rupees (a little over $1) every month after providing for 10 members in the family."

The women are into a variety of businesses such as goat farming, community farming, running corner shops, bamboo handicrafts and glue making.

Without an income, life for these women and their children was a constant struggle for survival. Young widows were particularly vulnerable.

"This is a revolution," said Manoj Bhoir, whose voluntary group Village Development and Education Society facilitates microcredit for 650 self help groups.

"These women are determined to repay not only the debts of their families but also provide a better life for their children."

In many cases widows were thrown out by their in-laws. Only a small number were given $2,500 in compensation by the government after proving their husbands committed suicide.

But there is criticism as well of the microcredit model in Vidarbha. Although defaults are almost nil, many women are repeat borrowers and have become dependent on loans for household expenditures rather than capital investments.

But for tens of thousands of women in Vidarbha, microcredit seems their best chance of breaking from a life of debt.

"In a group we are safe," said Martawar. "When one is in trouble the others will come forward to help."

(Editing by Simon Denyer and Megan Goldin)

April 1, 2008
Britain Delays Cutting Troops in Iraq

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:41 p.m. ET

BAGHDAD (AP) -- Britain froze plans Tuesday to withdraw about 1,500 soldiers this spring after the faltering effort to drive Shiite militias from Basra raised doubts whether the Iraqis are capable of maintaining security in oil-rich southern Iraq.

The British decision was announced in London one week before the top U.S. commander in Iraq appears before Congress to offer his recommendation on how fast America should draw down its own forces.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Monday in Copenhagen, Denmark that last week's violence in Shiite areas had not changed American plans to withdraw more combat forces by July.

But second thoughts about Iraqi security capabilities emerged as Iraq's government reported a 50 percent rise in the number of people killed in March over the previous month.

Much of the increase was a result of the fighting between Iraqi government forces and Shiite militiamen in the southern city of Basra. The conflict quickly spread, engulfing Baghdad and major cities throughout the Shiite south.

Britain had planned to drawn down its 4,000-strong military force in southern Iraq to 2,500 over the next few months, handing over more security responsibility to the Iraqis.

In the wake of the Basra fighting, however, Defense Secretary Des Browne told the House of Commons that ''it is prudent that we pause any further reductions while the current situation is unfolding.''

''At this stage we intend to keep our forces at their current levels of around 4,000 as we work with our coalition partners and with the Iraqis to assess future requirements,'' Browne said, promising to update lawmakers later this month.

Browne offered no criticism of the Iraqi effort in Basra, launched March 25 to regain control of the country's second-largest city from Shiite militias and criminal gangs which have effectively ruled the streets for nearly three years.

The operation faltered in the face of fierce resistance from the Mahdi Army of anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, forcing the Iraqi military to turn to U.S. jets and British tanks and artillery to try to dislodge the gunmen from their strongholds.

Britain's opposition Conservative party defense spokesman, Liam Fox, complained that the Iraqis had not fully consulted their coalition partners before launching the operation.

Fox said it was ''not acceptable for us to end up mopping up if we don't have a say in what operations are being carried out and how they are being carried out.''

''It appears that our commanders had just 48 hours notice and they yet had to deploy more than one battle group with tanks, armored vehicles and artillery,'' Fox told the Commons. ''Is this an acceptable model for the future?''

A British Foreign Office spokesman called Fox's 48-hour claim ''nonsense'' and said U.S. and British commanders had been consulted. The spokesman made the comment on condition of anonymity under Foreign Office rules.

Nonetheless, Iraqi officials have acknowledged they underestimated the fury of the militia resistance, which included rocket and mortar attacks against the U.S.-controlled Green Zone in Baghdad and armed assaults against government and political party offices throughout the south.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, flew to Basra last week and took personal command of the crackdown, promising he would remain in the city for ''a decisive and final battle'' to crush the militias.

Fighting eased after al-Sadr called his fighters off the streets Sunday under a deal brokered by Iran. But al-Sadr's fighters refused to surrender their weapons -- a development which left the cleric in a position of power and al-Maliki politically battered.

Al-Maliki returned Tuesday to Baghdad, declaring the operation a success although several Basra neighborhoods appeared to remain under militia control. Al-Sadr, meanwhile, thanked his fighters for ''defending your people, your land and your honor.''

U.S. and Iraqi officials have insisted the target of the crackdown was not the Sadrist political movement but criminals and renegade militias. But the Sadrists believed the operation was aimed at weakening their movement before provincial elections this fall.

The recent carnage threatened to reverse the security gains achieved in Iraq since President Bush ordered 30,000 U.S. reinforcements to Iraq early last year.

Figures compiled by the ministries of health, interior and defense showed that at least 1,720 people were killed in politically motivated violence in March. That was up sharply from the 953 figure for February.

Figures tabulated by The Associated Press from police and U.S. military reports put the March death toll as of Monday at 1,247 -- nearly double the February figure and the biggest monthly toll since August, when 1,956 people died violently.

The latest bloodshed and Iraqi military capabilities are expected to draw attention next week when the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, briefs Congress about prospects for further troop cuts.

The Pentagon is expected to reduce U.S. troop levels from about 158,00 to about 140,000 by the end of July.

Petraeus has repeatedly warned that security gains are fragile and has already indicated that he wants a ''period of assessment'' for at least several weeks after July before deciding on the timing of further withdrawals.

Sporadic fighting continued Tuesday in Baghdad and Basra, but the cities were generally calm. Several rounds were fired late Tuesday toward the Green Zone, but there were no reports of damage or casualties.

Before dawn Tuesday, a U.S. helicopter fired a missile at gunmen attacking American ground forces in the Baghdad militia stronghold of Sadr City, killing six militants, the U.S. military said. Iraqi police and witnesses said three civilians were killed in the strike.

The Iraqi Red Crescent Society, the Muslim world's equivalent of the Red Cross, complained Tuesday that U.S. forces prevented its relief convoy from getting into Sadr City.

A Red Crescent official, Ammar Khalid Saied, told AP Television News that his convoy tried to deliver food, medical supplies and water to Sadr City but could not get permission from the U.S. to enter the area.

A U.S. spokesman, Maj. Mark Cheadle, said American soldiers were not blocking humanitarian convoys but were checking vehicles because ''criminal and terrorist groups'' sometimes hijacked them to transport weapons and fighters.

Elsewhere, police and Mahdi militiamen exchanged gunfire early Tuesday in Nasiriyah, police and residents said. Three policemen were killed, and a desk to dawn curfew was imposed on the surrounding province, officials said.

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Associated Press correspondents David Stringer and Tariq Panja in London contributed to this report

April 2, 2008
Mugabe’s Control of Zimbabwe Weakens

By THE NEW YORK TIMES
HARARE, Zimbabwe — President Robert G. Mugabe’s decades-old control of Zimbabwe seemed to erode further on Tuesday, as diplomats, analysts and opposition members contended that negotiations were underway for Mr. Mugabe to step down after trailing in the race for the country’s next president.

In a nighttime address on Tuesday, Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition candidate who appeared to be the front runner in the election, strongly denied that his party had been in discussions over Mr. Mugabe’s resignation, saying that he would await for the official results of the voting to be announced.

But in an atmosphere of confusion and recrimination, in which the government has still not released the outcome of Saturday’s voting, a Western diplomat and some prominent analysts here and abroad said that Mr. Tsvangirai was in talks with advisers to Mr. Mugabe, amid signs that some of those close to Mr. Mugabe may encourage him to resign. The negotiations about a possible transfer of power away from Mr. Mugabe began after he apparently concluded that a runoff election, which seemed likely given projections of the voting, would be demeaning, the diplomat said.

A resignation by Mr. Mugabe, one of Africa’s longest-serving leaders, would be a stunning turnabout in a country where he has been accused of consistently manipulating election results to maintain his lock on power.

There is no guarantee the negotiations will succeed, and the situation could still deteriorate. But the diplomat and political analysts said the opposition was negotiating with Zimbabwe’s military, central intelligence organization and prisons chief.

“The chiefs of staff are talking to Morgan and are trying to put into place transitional structures,” said John Makumbe, a political analyst and insider in local politics who has spoken in the past in favor of the opposition.

“The chiefs of staff are not split; they are loyally at Mugabe’s side,” Mr. Makumbe said. “But they are not negotiating for Mr. Mugabe. They are negotiating for themselves. They are negotiating about reprisals and recriminations and blah blah blah. They are doing it for their own security.”

A spokesman for Mr. Tsvangirai, George Sibotshiwe, said, “I don’t know anything about such meetings.”

The diplomat who spoke anonymously because of the sensitivity of the discussions, said the joint chiefs had entered the negotiations after receiving feelers from Mr. Tsvangirai. The Western diplomat then said the leaders of the armed forces advised Mr. Mugabe on Monday to engineer a second-round runoff in the presidential race after the election Saturday, but Mr. Mugabe responded that a runoff would be a humiliation to him.

Marwick Khumalo, head of the Pan-African Parliament observer mission, indicated in an interview on South African radio that the ruling ZANU-PF party was considering the possibility of defeat, the Associated Press reported Tuesday.

“I was talking to some of the big wigs in the ruling party and they also are concerned about the possibility of a change of guard,” he told South African Broadcasting Corp.’s SAfm radio.

More than three days after the vote, the government had still not released any results of the presidential balloting. Under Zimbabwe’s election rules, a runoff would be required if no candidate got more than 50 percent.

The Electoral Commission has slowly published the first results in the separate parliamentary race, showing a lead for Mr. Tsvangirai’s party, the Movement for Democratic Change.

Out of 132 parliamentary seats so far announced, M.D.C. had won 68, including six for a breakaway faction, according to The Associated Press. Mr. Mugabe’s party had 64.

Mr. Mugabe, 84, has led Zimbabwe since 1980. Crafty and ruthless, he is not a man likely to easily give up his hold on power, analysts, diplomats and Zimbabweans have long contended.

That has left this nation, and a good bit of the world, wondering how he will survive what seems a repudiation by his countrymen, most of whom have become unemployed under his rule. The nation now suffers from an inflation rate of 100,000 percent.

Graham Bowley contributed reporting from New York