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NUCLEAR
Experts from four countries to launch inquiry into military campaign
Don't push us on nukes, Iran warns
Iran says it will suspend, not stop enrichment
Iran Threatens Retreat From Inspections
Sharon to Lobby Moscow Against Iran Nukes
Pakistan Says to Sign Nuclear Plant Deal in China
Utah becomes a bargain-basement dumping ground for nuclear waste
Bush Agrees to Furnish Iraq Intelligence
MILITARY
10 Die as Afghan Soldiers Clash With Policemen
Land of Plenty, Lives of Desperation
Iraq skips meeting on fallout of war
WMD hunters switched to security duties
Iraqi Police Now Targets of Choice
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
U.S. Considering Recalling Units of Old Iraq Army
Blueprint for a Mess
Is Israel losing its army?
U.N. warns of land grab from Palestinians
Arafat Willing to Enter Peace Talks
Hamas Sets Truce Terms, Israel Demands Crackdown
Iraq Neighbors Call for Border Control
Report: China Plans to Launch Moon Probe
US Army reviewing case of civilian deaths in Vietnam War
The Art of War vs. the Craft of Occupation
If the News Turns Bad, the Messenger Takes a Hit
Malaysians Test Limits of Press Freedom
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
States Seek Ways to Make Executions Error Free
Car Bursts Through Bush's Security Cordon
Car Rams Into Arena As Bush Is Leaving It
White House to Aid Intelligence Probe, Senator Says
OTHER
More U.S. Families Hungry or Too Poor to Eat, Study Says
ACTIVISTS
Criticism Meets New Exhibit of Plane That Carried A-Bomb
Peace rally remembers Rabin
Malaysia: Police detain Anwar supporters
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
Experts from four countries to launch inquiry into military campaign
By Mustapha Karkouti,
Gulf News
02-11-2003
http://www.gulf-news.com/Articles/news.asp?ArticleID=101833
A group of 'law experts' in the United Kingdom is determined to launch an inquiry into the legality of war campaign and ongoing occupation of Iraq.
Renowned international law experts are set to explore the boundaries of international criminal law following recent events in Iraq and the decision of the UK, US and supporting nations to launch a full-scale military invasion on Iraq.
The inquiry will be launched on November 8 from 10am to 6pm at the London School of Economics. The inquiry which will be open to the public, is to consider whether coalition powers have breached international law in the conduct of military action against Iraq.
A panel of eight leading experts from four countries including Ireland, Canada and France are set to debate pressing issues surrounding the military campaign waged against Iraq and the ensuing actions of the Coalition.
An important topic of the debate is "Was it legal to go to war?", but the focus will be on other vital issues, including the use of weapons such as cluster bombs and depleted uranium, the bombingof civilian targets and the conduct of the ongoing occupation of Iraq.
A leading legal expert, Dr Andrew Williams, from the Department of Law at the University of Warwick, told Gulf News: "We don't know if war crimes have been committed or if global laws have been violated, but there are troublesome aspects that deserve examination and inquiry."
He illustrated some of the questions which the inquiry will be examining. He said: "For example, can acts such as the bombing of civilian targets be considered as within the definitions of war crimes or crimes against humanity? When is the use of cluster bombs against international criminal law? What are the limits of the responsibilities of victorious states after military operations have ceased?"
With the UK having signed up to the jurisdiction of the newly formed International Criminal Court, the coalition's actions may be investigated and responsible persons prosecuted by the ICC.
If the panel of experts finds that they have acted outside international law there may be grounds for the ICC prosecutor to investigate members of the UK government for breaches in relation to crimes against humanity or war crimes.
-------- iran
Don't push us on nukes, Iran warns
Ayatollah Khamenei has final say on all state matters in Iran
Sunday, November 2, 2003
(AP)
http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/11/02/iran.nuclear.ap/
TEHRAN, Iran -- Iran's top leader has warned that Tehran will end cooperation with the UN nuclear agency if it makes excessive demands that undermine the country's nuclear program.
Although Iran agreed last month to allow unfettered inspections of its nuclear facilities, hard-liners have pressured the government not to make further concessions.
"If parties to the talks with us or centers of global power come up with excessive demands and we feel that our interests and values are harmed, we won't hesitate to end this trend (of cooperation)," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said.
"Peaceful nuclear technology is our legitimate right and no country and no organization can deprive us of this right, including the right for production of our own nuclear fuel," Khamenei told a large group of Iran's military brass and government officials after hosting a fast-breaking party. His comments were broadcast by state-run television.
Iran pledged last month to suspend uranium enrichment and sign an additional protocol to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty allowing unfettered inspections of its nuclear facilities by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Iran also handed over to the IAEA a dossier on its nuclear programs, effectively meeting an October 31 deadline to prove its nuclear program is peaceful.
IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei told CNN on Sunday that the agency was in the process of verifying the declaration and said they were making "good and steady progress" with Iran.
If the IAEA decides Iran has not proven its peaceful nuclear intentions, it could refer Iran to the U.N. Security Council, which could impose sanctions.
For now, international pressure on Iran has eased, with focus shifting from Friday's deadline to a November 20 IAEA board of governors meeting.
But the Iranian government has faced growing hard-line pressure not to make further compromises.
On Friday thousands of hard-liners rallied in several cities against the government's decision to cooperate with the IAEA, warning that a signature for the additional protocol will prompt nationwide street protests.
The United States accuses Iran of pursuing nuclear weapons and has pressed for the IAEA to declare Iran in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
Washington, though, does not believe Iran has yet made nuclear weapons, citing a lack of fissile material -- either enriched uranium or plutonium. Iranian officials say nuclear weapons have no place in their defense strategy.
Won't back down
"What happened (Iran's decision to cooperate) was correct and a policy to foil the conspiracy hatched by the U.S. and the Zionists," Khamenei said.
Khamenei, who has the final say on all state matters, said he will, however, intervene to stop the Iranian government from making decisions he may consider as inappropriate.
"So far, nothing has been done against our principles. Wherever I feel that a step has been taken against the directions and goals of the establishment, I will stop it," he said.
Khamenei said Iran will not back down on seeking nuclear technology for peaceful purposes and vowed the country will finally produce fuel for its future nuclear reactors.
Iran has said its decision to suspend uranium enrichment will be temporary and Iran will noty give up its goal to develop a complete nuclear fuel cycle, from mining its own uranium to enriching the ore, without having to rely on any other country.
----
Iran says it will suspend, not stop enrichment
TEHRAN (AFP)
Nov 02, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031102114241.xul941ek.html
Iran reiterated Sunday it remained unwilling to totally halt uranium enrichment, but pledged that it remained committed to answering any new questions from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
"Our uranium enrichment activities are still in their early stages, and it has only been several months since we began. We have said we agree to voluntarily suspend this, but not stop," foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters.
"The use of nuclear technology for peaceful ends is our right, and we do not have the right nor the wish to reject this," he added, asserting that "no country has the right to deprive Iran of this technology."
"We have given a complete report (to the IAEA) and we are ready, as we have already said, to cooperate fully and give other details demanded," Asefi said.
In September the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) imposed an October 31 deadline on Iran to fully disclose details of its nuclear program and urged it to sign the additional protocol to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) allowing tougher inspections by the UN watchdog.
Iran was also urged to suspend uranium enrichment.
After initially rejecting the deadline, Iran agreed to comply with IAEA demands just 10 days before the deadline expired during an unprecedented joint visit by British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin and German Foreign Minister Joshka Fischer.
Iran has also pledged to sign up to tougher inspections, but has yet to implement its agreement to suspend its work on the nuclear fuel cycle.
----
Iran Threatens Retreat From Inspections
November 2, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iran-Nuclear.html
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran's supreme leader said Sunday that ``excessive demands'' from abroad could prompt Tehran to retreat from a recent commitment to give inspectors from the U.N. nuclear watchdog more access to its atomic facilities.
The warning by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei comes as the International Atomic Energy Agency evaluates a dossier on Iran's nuclear program that Tehran supplied to meet an Oct. 31 deadline to prove it is not developing atomic weapons -- as U.S. officials believe.
Iran agreed last month to allow unfettered inspections of its nuclear facilities and to stop enriching uranium -- a process that creates fuel for nuclear plants but also can be used to build weapons.
``If parties to the talks with us or centers of global power come up with excessive demands and we feel that our interests and values are harmed, we won't hesitate to end this trend (of cooperation),'' Khamenei said in a speech on state-run television.
``Peaceful nuclear technology is our legitimate right and no country and no organization can deprive us of this right, including the right for production of our own nuclear fuel.''
Khamenei spoke before a large group of military and government officials at a party marking the daily breaking of the fast for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
Khamenei, who has the final say on all state matters, said he will intervene to stop the Iranian government from making decisions he considers inappropriate.
``So far, nothing has been done against our principles,'' he said. ``Wherever I feel that a step has been taken against the directions and goals of the establishment, I will stop it.''
IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei told CNN on Sunday that the agency still is evaluating Iran's nuclear dossier.
The United States accuses Iran of pursuing nuclear weapons and has pressed for the IAEA to declare Iran in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Tehran, however, insists it is only developing nuclear energy to produce power as its oil stocks decline.
IAEA experts have found traces of highly enriched weapons-grade uranium on equipment at Iranian sites, a discovery ElBaradei has called the most troubling aspect of Tehran's nuclear activities.
Iran insists the traces, found in environmental samples, were inadvertently imported on equipment meant to generate electricity and says it does not know where the equipment originated because it was purchased through third parties.
If the IAEA decides Iran is developing nuclear weapons, it could ask for a review by the U.N. Security Council, which could impose sanctions on Tehran. The IAEA board of governors is scheduled to discuss the issue Nov. 20.
Khamenei said Iran will not back down on seeking nuclear technology for peaceful purposes and vowed the country will eventually produce fuel for its future nuclear reactors so it does not have to rely on other countries for the material.
-------- israel
Sharon to Lobby Moscow Against Iran Nukes
By STEVE WEIZMAN
Associated Press Writer
Nov 2, 2003
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/R/RUSSIA_ISRAEL?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
MOSCOW (AP) -- Prime Minister Ariel Sharon arrived Sunday in Moscow, where he is expected to talk with President Vladimir Putin over Israel's concerns over Iran's nuclear program and a Russian-backed U.N. resolution on a Mideast peace plan.
Iran has pledged to open its nuclear program to unfettered inspections and to suspend uranium enrichment. But Israeli officials fear Iran is continuing to covertly acquire nuclear arms know-how, at least some of it from countries of the former Soviet Union, possibly including Russia.
The head of Israeli military intelligence told a parliamentary committee last week that, if unchecked, Iran would have a self-sufficient nuclear weapons capability by next summer.
Israeli officials said they would also discuss Russia's introduction last week of a resolution asking the U.N. Security Council to endorse the "road map" Mideast peace plan, over opposition from the United States and Israel.
Israel only reluctantly accepted the U.S.-backed plan, which aims to end violence and establish a Palestinian state by 2005.
The Israeli government has attached a list of reservations to the proposal, making its implementation dependent on a Palestinian crackdown on militant groups and stipulating that any monitoring be under U.S. control.
A senior Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Associated Press that Israel considered the United Nations a hostile forum and deepening its involvement would hinder, rather than help, peace efforts.
"We adamantly object to this and we shall try to dissuade President Putin from this idea," he said.
The United States has objected to the timing of the resolution, citing the absence of a stable Palestinian government.
There was also likely to be discussion on counterterrorism and the sales of joint defense projects, such as the recent sale to India of Russian-made surveillance planes outfitted with Israeli-made advanced radar systems, the official said.
A Russian diplomat in Tel Aviv said he had no information on the likely agenda.
Visiting Moscow has become an annual affair for Sharon. He made his first trip as prime minister in September 2001 and visited again in October 2002.
Israeli media say that in addition to Monday's talks with Putin, Sharon will meet Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov and Russian Jewish leaders.
Sharon, born in British-ruled Palestine of Russian heritage, says he has a good personal rapport with Putin. Both men spent years in their country's security services before entering politics; Sharon in the military and Putin in intelligence.
Israel's relations with Russia are also colored by the presence of 1 million Russian-speaking immigrants, one-sixth of Israel's population and a powerful political force. Putin has said Russia has a responsibility to ensure the security of such a large group of Russian-speakers.
Bilateral trade is strong, running at $720 million a year and expected to hit the billion-dollar mark soon, the senior Israeli official said.
-------- pakistan
Pakistan Says to Sign Nuclear Plant Deal in China
November 2, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-pakistan-china.html
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan is expected to finalize a deal with China for the construction of a nuclear power plant, officials said Sunday, the second such plant to be built with the help of Beijing.
The agreement for the construction of the 300 megawatt nuclear power plant is expected to be signed during the visit of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to China.
``Yes, absolutely there is a possibility,'' Foreign Office spokesman Masood Khan told Reuters when asked whether the agreement would be finalized during the visit.
The nuclear plant will be constructed at Chashma on the banks of the Indus River, around 170 miles south of Islamabad and alongside the first plant that China helped to build, which has a similar capacity.
Khan said China had agreed in principle to build a second nuclear power plant during the visit of Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali to Beijing in March.
He said the financing details of the project had yet to be worked out. Energy experts say the project is estimated to cost $600 million and will take at least six years to complete.
The first Chashma nuclear power plant was built in 1999 and was connected to the national power grid in early 2000.
The United States has repeatedly urged China to halt nuclear cooperation with Pakistan, but both Beijing and Islamabad say they are not working together for military purposes.
Khan said the nuclear power plant would be constructed under the safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
``It will be meant for civilian use of nuclear energy.'' Pakistan set up its first nuclear power station in 1972 in the port city of Karachi with Canadian help. The Karachi plant has a capacity of 137 megawatts.
Western countries, under pressure from the United States, later halted nuclear cooperation with Pakistan, suspecting that Islamabad was clandestinely developing nuclear weapons.
Pakistan vowed to go nuclear after rival India exploded its first nuclear device in 1974. Pakistan conducted five nuclear tests just weeks after India carried out three such tests in May 1998.
Beijing is the main supplier of military hardware to Islamabad. Musharraf's three-day visit to China ending on Tuesday comes on the heels of unprecedented joint naval exercises between the two countries.
The three-day exercises, which ended last month, were China's first with the navy of a foreign country.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- utah
Utah becomes a bargain-basement dumping ground for the nations nuclear waste
by Claire Geddes
Sunday, November 02, 2003
The Daily Herald
Envirocare's favorite strategy is to create doubt and confusion so that people will give up in frustration and look away while Utah becomes a bargain-basement dumping ground for the nations nuclear waste.
With the help of former Envirocare lobbyist and now-U.S.Rep. Rob Bishop, they may succeed.
Bishop helped paved the way for a last minute amendment into the energy bill to reclassify intensely radioactive radium waste from the Fernald, Ohio, nuclear weapons production site.
The mill tailings are from highly concentrated uranium ore brought from the Belgian Congo to the U.S. in the 1950s. Robert Alvarez, former senior advisor to the U.S. Energy secretary stated, "The (Fernald) wastes, by virtue of containing radium, will remain highly toxic for more than 10,000 years. The Fernald wastes have comparable long-term hazards as DOE's high-level and plutonium-contaminated wastes, which are to be disposed of in a geologic repository."
He questioned the wisdom of shallow-burial in a landfill an hour's drive west of Salt Lake City.
Envirocare receives several different waste streams, one of which is byproduct material from uranium mill tailings. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave Envirocare a license to accept this waste. According to regulators, the Fernald waste (even after dilution) is hotter, 25 times hotter than what the NRC license allows.
So why is Utah being targeted? The federal government is offering a $288 million bonus to the primary contractor, Fluor Fernald, if it can clean up the waste by June 2006. This dwarfs the $30 million Bishop claims taxpayers will save. Utah taxpayers share? Pennies per cubic foot.
The original plan for containing this waste was to convert it into glass, a process called vitrification. According to the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, which has evaluated the Fernald silo waste, "This project failed completely, largely as a result of serious technical mistakes by DOE and its contractor, Fluor Daniel Fernald." Vitrification was abandoned in favor of mixing it with cement.
The IEER report went on to say, "Vitrification for this waste was chosen ... because it would reduce waste toxicity, waste volume and radon releases ... Alternative treatment technologies under consideration, including cementation, could be worse on all three counts."
Allowing the government to take the cheap and easy way out will only cause long-term risks. The radium-226 in the waste has a half-life of 1,600 years and gives off radon gas, which is the second-leading cause of lung cancer in the United States.
The IEER report states, "The waste itself emits 50,000 picocuries of radon per square meter per second -- above the EPA regulations covering mill tailings (20 picocuries per square meter per second)."
Envirocare states there will be no exposure to the public because the waste will be mixed with cement, sealed in steel containers and buried. However, according to documents Envirocare provided to the NRC, the containers will break down in 150 to 220 years.
The IEER report "Containing the Cold War Mess" by Arjiun Makhijani states "Laboratory tests indicated that cement stabilization of the K-65 residues (from Fernald) 'does not effectively reduce the radon emission rate from the waste and the tendency of the waste to leach contaminants into the groundwater.'"
A study commissioned by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released in 1996 stated residents near Fernald faced increased cancer risk. The silos were cited as the biggest health risk, rather than uranium dust in the air or groundwater.
Envirocare states it has taken waste 10 times hotter than the Fernald waste. First, much of the material they refer to will decay within a few years. The longest half-life of the waste Envirocare listed as hotter is 96 years. Second, the Envirocare facility has expanded far beyond the three radioactive isotopes it was originally licensed to take, and this has happened with bureaucratic approval, not legislative.
There should be a major re-evaluation of the waste Envirocare is accepting, and an investigation into how this has happened.
Can we put a dollar value on our land, our reputation and our heritage? Apparently to Rob Bishop and Envirocare, it's worth $24,000-$120,000. Yet they call those of us who place a higher value on Utah as "fringe" and "radicals".
Bishop should do the right thing for Utah and join Rep. Matheson in removing this language from the energy bill. We urge Rep. Cannon and our senators to oppose this amendment.
Rebuttal to Barney
This waste under state regulations would be considered "Class C" radioactive waste, which is currently illegal to dump in Utah. Yet, with the stroke of his pen, Rep. Bishop has undermined our state's right to restrict what is dumped in our community.
Independent national experts that worked for the EPA and National Academy of Sciences said, "It's crazy, absolutely crazy" to send this to Envirocare. "It's very close to high-level waste and plutonium."
Far from being "fringe", HEAL Utah is a group of doctors, business leaders, attorneys, clergy, professors, authors, mothers, fathers and other public advocates who have been working to change the pattern of dumping the nation's nuclear and toxic waste in Utah. Our "radical" idea is to protect the health and well-being of Utahns and ensure that Utah is a safe place to raise our families.
Why Utah? Terry Hagen, Fluor Fernald's director of strategic planning, told a Cincinnati newspaper "The populace out there in Utah and the political structure are just a lot more accepting of what Envirocare is doing than perhaps we have seen in Nevada."
It's time for our elected leaders to draw the line and represent Utahns instead of Envirocare.
Claire Geddes is director of Utah Legislative Watch and a member of the advisory council for HEAL Utah.
-------- us politics
Bush Agrees to Furnish Iraq Intelligence
By WILLIAM C. MANN,
Associated Press Writer
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=512&ncid=703&e=1&u=/ap/20031102/ap_on_go_co/congress_iraq_inquiry
WASHINGTON - The White House reversed itself and promised the Senate Intelligence Committee access to all materials requested for its inquiry into prewar intelligence on Iraq, the committee chairman said Sunday.
A White House spokesman remained noncommittal, promising "a spirit of cooperation" but no specifics. Spokesman Trent Duffy reiterated administration doubts about the committee's jurisdiction over the White House.
The CIA and the State Department already turned over large quantities of documents ahead of the committee's deadline last Friday and more material is coming, said Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan.
White House acquiescence, on behalf of the National Security Council, came to committee staff members late Friday along with notification from the Pentagon that it also would cooperate, Roberts said on CNN's "Late Edition."
The committee's top Democrat, Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, said he wants "to see the documentation before ... I'm satisfied. I want to know that we really have it in hand."
Roberts, who was in Kansas, spoke just after Rockefeller, in Washington, had complained that the White House and Defense Department were "being very resistant."
Rockefeller had just finished saying, "We have to have those documents. We're going to get those documents, one way or another," when Roberts was asked if he concurred.
"Well, that's yesterday's story," the chairman said.
Roberts said he had not had the chance to call Rockefeller over the weekend to report the latest development: the White House's agreement "in a spirit of cooperation" to the committee's demands.
Duffy, with President Bush in Crawford, Texas, repeated that phrase in a conference call with reporters but offered no concrete promises. He would not confirm Roberts' assertion that the White House has agreed to turn over the documents the committee seeks.
"We've had productive conversations about ways we can work with and assist the committee," Duffy said. "While the committee's jurisdiction does not cover the White House, we want to be helpful and we will continue to talk to and work with the committee in a spirit of cooperation."
After the deadline passed Friday, both senators accused the White House of ignoring the committee's demand for documents and access to officials for interviews it needed in its work.
The committee is examining the accuracy of intelligence about deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's weapons programs and purported contacts with terrorist groups. That intelligence served as Bush's main arguments for the U.S.-led war.
"It is certainly good news that there is a spirit of cooperation with the White House," Roberts said. "The challenging news is, however, that we have to fold this new information into all of the work that we have done."
He said the committee would like to expedite its final report, "but the most important thing to do is to get an accurate and complete picture." A top White House official had promised every document requested would be surrendered, he said.
On Friday, White House spokesman Scott McClellan promised to cooperate with the committee even though he said it lacked jurisdiction to ask for it.
Rockefeller took issue with that, saying the committee's job involves not only "rigorous oversight of the collection and analysis of intelligence, but also the use of intelligence, and that includes all of the U.S. government. That includes policy-making, defense and national security."
The Bush administration also is in a battle of wills with an independent commission studying circumstances of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The commission, which has a May 27, 2004, deadline to complete its report, has threatened to issue subpoenas unless the requested documents are provided quickly.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
10 Die as Afghan Soldiers Clash With Policemen
November 2, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/02/international/asia/02AFGH.html
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, Nov. 1 (AP) - Fighting between Afghan soldiers and the police in a tense province in southern Afghanistan on Friday killed two military commanders and as many as eight policemen before American troops and helicopters intervened, officials said Saturday.
A local Afghan Army official also said three women and six men who were shop owners were killed when rockets hit their homes and businesses. The report could not immediately be confirmed.
It was not clear why the Afghan soldiers and the police clashed or who initiated fire. Both sides are loyal to the United States-backed government of President Hamid Karzai, but such clashes are common in many areas where the government has limited access and where swaths of territory are controlled by rival warlords.
"So far we only know that the fighting began over a minor dispute," said Hajji Pir Muhammad, a deputy provincial governor.
There was also fighting between warlords in northern Afghanistan, killing at least three fighters, local commanders said Saturday.
The violence began Friday night in the Kohistanat district in the province of Sari Pul and was continuing Saturday, with forces under the Uzbek commander, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, and his Tajik rival, Gen. Atta Muhammad, fighting with Kalashnikov rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.
During the five-hour battle, dozens of men fired rockets and heavy weapons in a residential area of the Geriesh district, 90 miles west of Kandahar, the former stronghold of Afghanistan's ousted Taliban, Mr. Muhammad, the deputy provincial governor, said. He said three policemen were killed in addition to the two army commanders.
However, the police chief, Hajji Abdul Qadoos, said that rockets fired by local soldiers during the clash hit a police headquarters, killing six policemen. He said a total of eight policemen died in the fighting. Seventeen officers were taken away by soldiers, he added.
The local Afghan Army official said that the authorities were negotiating to prevent further clashes.
One of the dead Afghan Army commanders was identified by Mr. Muhammad as a commander who had been working with American-led coalition forces in the province of Helmand to track down Taliban and Al Qaeda fugitives.
The fighting stopped only after American troops and helicopters were requested to help them control the situation, he said.
-------- africa
Land of Plenty, Lives of Desperation
Congo Is Transformed by Hunger After Years of Devastating War
By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, November 2, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A50911-2003Nov1?language=printer
KAGELYA, Congo -- The gunmen raced through the dense forest with their rusty AK-47 rifles, their footsteps and voices mixing with the jungle's hum of insects and birds. Under a thick canopy of branches and leaves, Fadia Wakengela hid, clutching her family's last bundle of food: cassava and bananas.
But her babies kept crying.
In just a few minutes, the ragtag soldiers from the Mai-Mai rebel group found them. They fired their guns in the air. They told her to lie on her belly. The fighters demanded her food. As a mother with five children, all crying, all cold, all hungry and all clinging to her legs, she refused.
"Then, they beat me with sticks and guns," said Wakengela. "They took the food and left."
She and her children ran the other way that June day. Little Gertrude, 9, with hair braided in a dozen prongs that jut out like a porcupine, carried her 21/2-year-old sister, Yuma, on her back. Muscular Sumailie, 10, held Mary, just five months. And their mother carried two children, Raphael, 5, and the new life growing inside her. Wakengela was nine months pregnant.
For weeks, she recounted, they roamed the forest searching for the path that would return them safely to their village in eastern Maniema province. Her husband had fled the fighters not long before she did. He was also wandering in the forest, and she hoped she might find him. But instead, on a bed of wet leaves, mud and branches, two of her babies died, just days apart. Yuma and Mary didn't lose their lives to gunshot wounds or to disease, but to starvation.
In Congo, one of Africa's most fertile nations, people are starving to death. The majority of the approximately 3.5 million deaths during five years of fighting were not due to combat. They were slower deaths, like those of Yuma and Mary, that have made the Congo war the costliest human conflict since World War II.
Since a peace deal was reached last April, a new government has been taking hold in the capital, Kinshasa, in theory uniting the vast country. Observers say it is an important moment in Congo's sad history. Yet, a week spent in the region around Kalima, a town at the epicenter of the conflict about 800 miles east of the capital and reachable only by bush plane, revealed suffering in every home.
When Wakengela made it back to the village of Kagelya in August, she found it transformed by hunger. Nursing women were so malnourished that their breasts no longer produced milk, and children with bloated bodies and yellowing hair were lying in the dirt.
The entire village was on the verge of starvation, although Congo is a land of abundant rainfall and rich soil, a place with the right growing conditions for some of the world's most prized crops -- coffee, rice and corn. Rice used to be exported to African neighbors; the coffee was once hailed as being as good as Kenya's.
The Mai-Mai -- a group that has been fighting for control of eastern Congo -- is the main reason why there's no food in this fertile village, which used to feed others around it. Unpaid fighters pilfered vegetables from the woven baskets of women who picked their crops in the lush jungle clearings that have fed generations of Congolese. They nabbed chickens, pigs and goats as if they were shopping in a free-for-all market, grabbing whatever they wanted. Roaming the countryside, they kidnapped and raped women who were going out into the fields each day. Soon the fields were empty.
"We are still in the emergency phase even though the war is over," said Robert Dekker, the eastern Congo director for the U.N. food agency. "You still have rebel groups living on top of the population trying to get part of the harvest and take all of the animals. The frightening part is that there are huge areas that we don't know about because of insecurity that still exists."
Humanitarian groups estimate that despite the peace agreement, 70 percent of eastern Congo, the nucleus of this country's war, is still not secure enough for people to farm.
Legacy of Suffering
Congo's history is rich in human suffering. This is where a slave trade began in the early 15th century, where European explorers first laid eyes on the African jungle, where Belgium's King Leopold II extracted diamonds, timber, rubber and gold, and where Cold War politics backed the extravagant dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko.
After Mobutu's death in 1997, the country spiraled further into devastation. War broke out in 1998 between the Kinshasa government and rebel forces, which included armies backed by Rwanda and Uganda. Rebels took control of eastern Congo, while the Kinshasa army maintained its hold on the west.
The country's colonial legacy compounded the food problem, health workers said. For decades, villagers supplied many towns with fresh vegetables and livestock. Residents of those towns lost farming knowledge years ago when they went to work for Congo's many mining companies that were set up at the turn of the century by Europeans.
Many people in Kalima gave up farming when a Belgian mining company called Symaf built a town of brick houses, health centers, schools and volleyball courts for 12,000 miners in 1930. The workers mined a mineral called cassiterite, which is the main ore element of tin, most commonly alloyed with copper to form bronze. It is used for machine parts.
During the company's boom years in the 1940s and '50s, the workers were paid low salaries, but the benefits were generous -- housing, health care, primary education and food. The company flew in smoked fish, rice, peanut butter and cheese, exotic groceries for the African bush. People left their farms to work in the mines.
Former president Laurent Kabila nationalized the company in 1998; today it is under the control of the country's largest rebel group, the Rally for Congolese Democracy.
Production at the mines plunged during the war, and the company stopped doling out benefits. People couldn't feed themselves or pay for health care, said Francois Kitenbele, the mayor of Kalima. And by that time, most of the people living in Kalima had lost their farming know-how.
Food that used to come in from outlying villages, such as Kagelya, stopped, since it was too dangerous to farm. Because of the Mai-Mai attacks, many people in those villages sought the safety of larger towns such as Kalima and the price of food skyrocketed. For the first time that anyone here can remember, people began dying of starvation.
Kitenbele, with the help of Merlin, the only humanitarian agency in the Kalima region, is teaching people basic farming techniques again. But he's advising them to abandon the traditional farms in one- or two-acre jungle clearings outside the village and to cultivate small plots near the center of town, away from the forests where the rebels roam. He helps them select vegetables to fit the composition of the soil. His hope is to have a surplus of food within the next year.
"It's pitiful to see what happened here," he said.
In places as poverty-stricken as Kagelya, people are willing to trade the gold they find in the streams near their homes for bags of salt. The salt is more valuable to them.
But these days, the forests are too dangerous to look for gold.
A man came in a jeep not too long ago looking to trade for gold, but, finding little business to transact here, ventured into the jungle. He has been missing for three weeks now. People say the Mai-Mai kidnapped him.
A Bone Hunger
A thunderous rain beat down on the town. It was a Thursday, much like any other, and Njiaki Machozi, a 50-year-old woman, died of malnutrition. The hospital workers covered her corpse with a white sheet.
She died alone in a ward of Kalima's General Hospital called Phase One, for the most severe cases of starvation. Her legs had swelled with water retention. She had been wandering in the forest for weeks trying to escape the Mai-Mai. She arrived at the feeding center too late.
Her family was missing. Medical workers would have to figure out a way to give her a burial.
Outside the hospital, swarms of children played and giggled. Some of their faces and stomachs were so bloated the children had taken on the appearance of tadpoles, with their puffy cheeks and stomachs, thin legs and bloated feet. According to handwritten logbooks kept in the town's General Hospital, 27 people -- mostly children -- have died because of malnutrition since June. The U.N. World Food Program has given food to a feeding center here and four others operated by Merlin. Without this program in Kalima, health workers said, hundreds of children would die.
"I have never seen anything this bad," said Jane Opiyo, a Kenyan nurse and nutrition coordinator for Merlin who works with the feeding center. "They depend on cassava and leaves and they wind up living for months without any protein."
In Africa, there is an understanding between people about what it means to suffer from something known as hunger of the bones, a feeling far more desperate than hunger of the stomach.
Medical workers here call it kwashiorkor, severe protein deficiency. It's a hunger that can make you feel as if you are going insane, Opiyo said.
Inside Wakengela's hut, her five-month-old baby, Genevita, was crying. Her husband, Gerald, came in from the rain and asked if there was food, and she said there wasn't. Then he asked what he should do. She said she did not know.
He had tried to hunt. But he said the Mai-Mai have taken all of the animals: chickens, monkeys, antelopes, pigs, bush meat and even snakes. All gone.
With what is known here as Congolese coping, his wife fed him less than a spoonful of porridge left in her washing bucket and wrapped a leaf around it to make it a version of a sandwich. The family crowded around some warming charcoal as thunder and lightning made the hut seem cozy. They laughed. They told stories about an earlier, easier life before the war.
With a warm smile and big eyes, Wakengela explained that this is not the life she planned. Her father worked for a mining company as a guard. She even attended school for a few years. At her church, she is one of the only members who can read and write. She had planned to become a teacher.
"I wanted a simple life. Maybe I could have taught in a church or school. My dowry was so big," she said, laughing as she recalled the memory of the payment her husband had to give to her family, a symbol of her worth as a bride and future mother.
"Yes," her husband said. "She was costing three goats and 50 U.S. dollars."
Her husband said he has heard talk from leaders in town that peace is coming. But he doesn't believe that will change life much for his family.
He looked over at his sister, who stood quietly in the doorway, and explained: "Four of her children are still kidnapped by Mai-Mai. If they are starving to death in the forest we may never be able to see them again."
He recited the Congolese proverb about how a problem can persist: "Maybe the elephant is dead. But its tusks and hair remain."
-------- iraq
Iraq skips meeting on fallout of war
November 02, 2003
By Sam F. Ghattas
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20031101-114713-9912r.htm
DAMASCUS, Syria - Iraq's neighbors opened a conference yesterday on the impact of the U.S.-led war that ousted Saddam Hussein, but Baghdad's interim government - insulted by a last-minute invitation - snubbed the talks and vowed to reject any decisions made there.
The U.S.-appointed Governing Council had wanted to attend the meeting of Iraqi border nations to complain about cross-border infiltration of militants, including from Syria.
The two-day gathering aims to discuss the impact of the war in Iraq amid escalating violence there. It brings together foreign ministers from Syria, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Jordan, plus politically influential Egypt, the largest Arab country.
Already divided over the U.S.-led war that ousted Saddam, members of the group had argued over whether to invite the interim Iraqi government to the meeting at all. Some worried the Iraqi presence at the meeting would divert the focus from discussing the war's impact to getting neighboring states directly involved in the process of restoring Iraq's security and stability.
Syria and Iran had strongly opposed the war, while Kuwait was the launching pad for the invading U.S. forces. Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey and Egypt are key U.S. allies in the region.
Apparently keen to make the meeting of Iraq's neighbors a success, Syria late Friday extended a last-minute invitation to Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari to come to Damascus for a session today. Yesterday's first session was to have focused on whether Iraq's representative would be allowed to participate, said Bushra Kanafani, spokeswoman of the Syrian Foreign Ministry.
Mr. Zebari called the Syrian invitation "mysterious and ambiguous." "With the absence of a clear invitation by the Syrian government, it is very difficult for Iraq to participate in this meeting and we will not abide by or accept any decisions taken by this meeting," Mr. Zebari told a news conference in Baghdad a few hours before the meeting was to start.
A Syrian official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Iraq's decision to stay away should clear the air, "consequently facilitating the meeting's mission."
Iraq did not attend the group's previous meetings in Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran, all held before the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam.
The United States has accused Syria of not doing enough to prevent the infiltration of foreign fighters through its eastern border into Iraq to attack U.S.-led coalition forces.
U.S. officials have said foreign fighters may be behind a recent upsurge in attacks against coalition forces, international aid agencies and Iraqis in Iraq.
"The terrorists are coming from all the borders, including Syria," Mr. Zebari said.
"What is required of neighboring countries that care about the unity and sovereignty and security of Iraq is to back Iraqi efforts to bolster security and stability and combating terrorism and barring terrorists from crossing over and protecting the border," he said.
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WMD hunters switched to security duties
Coalition authorities speed up training of local police and army as Bush vows not to leave 'prematurely'
By Raymond Whitaker in London and Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad
02 November 2003
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=459618
Intelligence officers and other military personnel are being pulled off the increasingly futile hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and assigned instead to deal with the worsening security situation - one that claimed another two American lives yesterday.
As a roadside bomb in the northern city of Mosul killed two US soldiers, and an oil pipeline near Saddam Hussein's home town of Tikrit was set ablaze, Paul Bremer, the American pro-consul in Iraq, announced that training of Iraqi soldiers and police would be speeded up.
Mr Bremer added that he believed Saddam was still in Iraq, and that capturing or killing him was a top priority. In Washington there is increasing speculation that the ousted dictator is not merely eluding the occupation forces, but is taking an active part in directing the insurgency against them.
Many shops were closed and schoolchildren kept at home in Baghdad yesterday after leaflets warning of a "day of resistance" created fears of attacks similar to the bombings earlier last week which targeted the Red Cross and police stations in the capital, killing more than 30 Iraqis. The commander of coalition forces, Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, said he did not believe that the security situation was a failure, but there is growing criticism of the inability of the occupation authorities to prevent a spate of attacks that have driven away aid agencies and caused the United Nations to withdraw all international staff from Baghdad.
President Bush insisted in his weekly radio address yesterday that the upsurge in violence would not drive coalition forces out. "Leaving Iraq prematurely would only embolden the terrorists and increase the danger to America. We are determined to stay, to fight and to win."
Critics believe, however, that Washington's failure to plan for the occupation is creating a vacuum into which foreign elements are being drawn: the very situation the invasion was meant to prevent. One US source told Jane's Intelligence Digest: "If al-Qa'ida wasn't operating in Iraq under Saddam, it surely is now."
Since the Bush administration claims that what is needed in Iraq is not more troops but better intelligence, the leak of a highly critical internal army report last week was an embarrassment for the White House. The report said younger intelligence officers and soldiers in particular were poorly prepared and possessed "very little to no analytical skills". There is a major shortage of interpreters, and the report complained they were often misused for errands, such as being sent "to buy chicken and soft drinks".
These handicaps compound the problems of penetrating a society which outside the main cities is tribal, with intense village, district and family loyalties. Betrayal leads to blood feuds and killings: in one case a farmer was forced to shoot his own son for acting as an informer for the Americans; if he didn't, the villagers said they would kill the whole family.
One temporary solution has been to divert resources from the WMD hunt to counter-insurgency duties, but with an election year looming, the US wants to hand over responsibility for security as quickly as possible to Iraqis. Ivo Daalder, a former member of Bill Clinton's National Security Council and now with the Brook- ings Institution, Washington's leading liberal think-tank, predicted in London last week that the US presence in Iraq would be sharply scaled down within three to six months.
Mr Bremer said yesterday that the Iraqi Civil Defence Force would be doubled in size by March. The aim was to have more than 200,000 Iraqi security personnel by September. As part of the plan to accelerate army training, 27 battalions would be organised and trained in one year instead of two as expected.
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Iraqi Police Now Targets of Choice
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, November 2, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A50899-2003Nov1?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Nov. 1 -- The two-story police station where Lt. Arkan Mohammed works has been shielded from the street with seven-foot-tall concrete barriers. A sentry trains an AK-47 assault rifle at visitors until they have been frisked in the parking lot. Patrol units spend much of their shifts circling the building to look for suspicious cars.
Mohammed, a former undercover officer, said his family knows all this. He has told them about the security measures again and again, to reassure them after car bombings destroyed three other police stations in Baghdad last Monday. Still, he said, his mother and sisters cry every time he heads to work.
"Going to the police station now is like going to war," he said as he gazed at the cement blocks. "You never know if you'll return home alive or not."
For Baghdad's police, these are dangerous times. With U.S. soldiers quartered in highly fortified bases around the capital, the police have become the target of choice for fighters seeking to disrupt the U.S.-led reconstruction of Iraq.
The assaults have sparked deep unease among the police, threatening to unravel what has been regarded by Americans and Iraqis alike as one of the biggest accomplishments of the U.S.-led occupation and a key element of the Pentagon's exit strategy.
Before the attacks last Monday, more than 7,000 policemen had returned to work across the capital, conducting patrols and setting up checkpoints that have led to a marked drop in crime over the past few months. Long reviled by residents as corrupt, incompetent and repressive, the police had been slowly starting to win the trust of Iraqis and their American occupiers.
At Mohammed's precinct house, the Muthana Police Station, which had been gutted by looters in the days after President Saddam Hussein's government fell, the number of policemen has almost doubled since before the war. Officers are conducting patrols -- on foot and in pickup trucks -- for the first time in their careers. The commander has set up his own emergency hotline so that nearby residents can summon help. Those accomplishments prompted a squad of U.S. military police officers, who had been babysitting the station since April, to pull out a few weeks ago.
"After the Americans arrived, we were very proud to be policemen," warrant officer Mudhaffar Mozan said. "We worked very hard."
Now, he said, he does not dare wear his uniform on the bus to work or tell strangers what he does for a living. When he is on duty, he prefers to go on patrol, even it means staying up all night, because he fears a car bomb attack on the station. Several officers he knows at other stations have stopped reporting for duty.
"Before, when people saw us, they were afraid," Mozan said. "Now we're afraid of them."
The concerns of the police are rooted not just in threats of car bombs but in broader questions about what kind of force the Americans are creating and the level of assistance they are willing to provide to Iraq. New pistols that U.S. soldiers promised to hand out have not arrived at Muthana, forcing officers to use their own guns or those confiscated from criminals. More significantly, officers worry about the Bush administration's plan to give them a more active role in fighting assailants, a task they fear will expose them to even more attacks.
"This is a very uncertain time for us," Mozan said as he steered a white Nissan pickup truck out of the station for an all-night patrol. "Being a policeman in Iraq today is a very risky thing to do."
Pausing for a moment, he corrected himself. "It's not just risky," he said. "It's crazy."
A Bomb Scare
At 8 p.m. one night, as Mozan and other officers pulled out of the station for a 12-hour shift in Baghdad's Zayuna neighborhood, the walkie-talkie in Lt. Mohammed Saleh's hand crackled with the first of a flurry of calls: The occupants of a minibus had been spotted dropping a suspicious package on the median of Rubaie Street.
Concerned that it could be one of the numerous roadside bombs that have bedeviled U.S. troops, Mozan flipped on a flashing blue light, cranked up the siren and barreled toward the site of the incident.
As his truck -- code named Mobile Six -- neared the scene, he ran into a traffic jam. With the public less concerned about crime, more Baghdad residents have been venturing out at night, frequenting restaurants and shops that are staying open later.
Trying to push through the crowd, Lt. Emad Adnan, the third officer in the truck, used the bullhorn. "Friend," he shouted at the driver of a sport utility vehicle, "move your car!"
The driver, waiting for a parking spot, refused to budge. He stuck his hand out the window with his fingers upturned -- a gesture in the Arab world that means be patient.
"They don't listen to us," Adnan grumbled. When Hussein was in power, he said, traffic offenders could be arrested for three days. "The Americans won't let us do that," he said. "They think it's too harsh. But being harsh is the only way the Iraqis will respect the law."
When Mobile Six finally caught up with the minibus, which had curtains obscuring its windows, Adnan fretted. "This could be dangerous," he said, urging Mozan to stop well behind the bus. None of the three officers in the truck wanted to be the first to approach.
"It could be filled with terrorists," Saleh said. "What if they start shooting?"
Eventually, the passengers of the minibus exited on their own. They approached the officers and asked whether they were being stopped. Confident none of the half-dozen men in the bus had guns or grenades, Adnan began grilling them.
Ten minutes later, satisfied that the suspicious object was an empty can of Pepsi and the men were simply out cruising, he ordered them to remove their curtains and then let them go.
"You can't be too careful," Adnan said. "Any of these cars could be filled with people who want to kill us."
Over the past few weeks, he said, he has been more reluctant to stop suspicious vehicles or arrest Baath Party members out of concern their cohorts will seek revenge. "Fear limits the job we are doing," he said. "There are people who we cannot arrest."
When Hussein was in power, an officer who arrested an influential Baath Party member could be fired or reassigned. "Now, his friends will look for your house and blow it up the very next day," Adnan said.
Although he said his family has repeatedly urged him to quit, his $120-a-month salary draws him back to the station. Despite his belief that it is too low, it is more than he thinks he would make in the private sector. "The Americans really should pay us double," he said. "There's still a war going on."
The next stop for Mobile Six was the back of the police station, which does not have concrete barriers, for the first of a dozen inspections. "We can't forget about the safety of the people inside the station," Mozan said.
As soon as they were satisfied the back was clear, the radio blared with the news that a suspicious package had been found on a pedestrian walkway near the front of the station. When Mobile Six arrived at the walkway, several officers walked out of the station to examine the scene.
The duty officer in the station, Capt. Faisal Mekki, took one look and shook his head. "Probably it will blow up and we'll all be dead," he said. He then scurried back behind the concrete barriers.
Unable to tell what was inside the package, the senior officer on duty, Maj. Riad Kadhim -- a hulking man nicknamed Tyson because he resembles boxer Mike Tyson -- called for bomb specialists. Then he suggested everyone move on. "We don't need to be here if it explodes," he said.
An hour later, the specialists reported on the contents: The package was filled with women's undergarments.
"That's the first good news I've heard all night," Kadhim chortled.
'Be Suspicious of Everyone'
At 1:25 a.m., with Baghdad's roads deserted and the three policemen in Mobile Eight eager for a catnap in the precinct house, Arkan Mohammed's walkie-talkie squawked with an order to check out a report of shots being fired near the house of the neighborhood's most important resident, a member of Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council.
"Check everything carefully," the dispatcher said to Mobile Eight, Mobile Six's companion in Zayuna. "Be suspicious of everyone. God bless you."
By the time Mohammed's truck made it to the scene -- after stopping twice to ask for directions -- the gunmen had fled. The only people on the street were a dozen bleary-eyed, pajama-clad men who chased away the suspected thief with their pistols and assault rifles.
If there were five or six cars on patrol in the area instead of just his pickup truck -- the men in Mobile Six were snoozing at the station -- perhaps the neighborhood could be sealed off and searched, Mohammed mused. If they had bulletproof vests and better weapons, he said, they could raid a few nearby homes "just like the Americans do."
But Mohammed still has not received one of the new 9mm Glock pistols the Americans promised to distribute. He holsters an old Browning that he owns. His patrol truck, seized from Hussein's army, has a bad battery. If it shuts off, it needs a push to get going again.
"We were the first to cooperate with the Americans, but until now, we haven't received what they promised," he grumbled. "Can you imagine police officers pushing their truck to get it started? It's humiliating."
U.S. officials advising the police acknowledge that shoddy equipment is hindering law enforcement, but they contend the bigger problem is a lack of adequate training. Policemen in the Muthana station, like their counterparts across Baghdad, never patrolled before the war. They just sat in the precinct house and waited for people to lodge complaints. Then only would they deign to get in cars and investigate.
"We used to be lazy," Saleh said.
Security was maintained through intimidation -- convictions for petty crimes could result in lengthy prison sentences -- and a complex web of internal security agencies handled cases important to Hussein's government. The police were relegated to dealing with minor crimes.
"The challenge for us is to train tens of thousands of police officers how to be real police officers, how to investigate crimes, how to respect human rights, how to do things as simple as walking the beat," said a senior official with the occupation authority. "It's not easy."
Compounding the problem is the need to hire not just new officers but new commanders as well. Most of the force's senior ranks have been disqualified from employment by the authority because of high-level membership in the Baath Party.
Although nearly 50,000 police officers have been hired by the occupation authority -- almost all of them were involved in some form of law enforcement before the war -- only about 1,000 have been put through a three-week course at the police academy intended to teach them how to investigate, use firearms properly and operate in a democratic society.
To accelerate that process, the Bush administration intends to devote more than $1 billion of an $87 billion supplemental budget request that is nearing final approval in Congress to pay for a police academy in neighboring Jordan that would provide basic training to 20,000 new recruits and re-training to the 50,000 existing officers over the next year.
"The training is the bottleneck," one official said, who noted that while 10,000 new Glock pistols have arrived, they will not be handed out until officers undergo firearms training. "It would be foolish to distribute more guns in this country without adequate safeguards."
But officers in the Muthana station scoff at that logic. All of them have served in the military and know how to use pistols, Mohammed said.
As they bolted down breakfast in the station at 4:30 a.m. because of Ramadan -- a month when Muslims fast during daylight hours -- Mohammed and his colleagues worried that the Bush administration's desire to increase the involvement of the police in combating resistance activity will put them at greater risk.
"We want fight the terrorists," he said. "But we are not equipped for it."
Four hours later, after several uneventful loops through Zayuna, he parked his truck in front of the station. His shift was over. He would not have to report back for another 24 hours.
"I'm glad to be going home," he sighed. "Nobody will try to kill me there."
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Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
November 2, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
FALLUJAH, Iraq (AP) -- Targeting American forces with new audacity, insurgents hiding in a date palm grove shot down a Chinook helicopter carrying dozens of American troops Sunday, killing 15 and wounding 21 in the deadliest strike against U.S. forces since they invaded Iraq in March.
Witnesses said the attackers used missiles -- a sign of the increasing sophistication of Iraq's elusive anti-U.S. fighters.
Three other Americans were killed in separate attacks Sunday, including one 1st Armored Division soldier in Baghdad and two U.S. civilians working for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Fallujah. All three were victims of roadside bombs, the military said.
It was the deadliest day for U.S. troops since March 23 -- the first week of the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein -- and a major escalation in the campaign to drive the U.S.-led coalition out of the country.
The giant helicopter was ferrying the soldiers on their way for leave outside Iraq when two missiles streaked into the sky and slammed into the rear of the aircraft, witnesses told The Associated Press. It crashed in flames in farmers' fields west of Baghdad.
``It's clearly a tragic day for America,'' Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in Washington. ``In a long, hard war, we're going to have tragic days. But they're necessary. They're part of a war that's difficult and complicated.''
Like past attacks on U.S. forces and a string of suicide bombings that killed dozens in Baghdad the past week, U.S. coalition officials blamed either Saddam loyalists or foreign fighters for the strike outside Fallujah, a center of Sunni Muslim resistance to the U.S. occupation.
President Bush was at his Texas ranch, out of public sight Sunday. ``Our will and resolve are unshakable,'' said a White House spokesman traveling with him.
L. Paul Bremer, the head of the occupation in Iraq, repeated demands that Syria and Iran prevent fighters from crossing their borders into Iraq.
``They could do a much better job of helping us seal that border and keeping terrorist out of Iraq,'' he told CNN. The ``enemies of freedom'' in Iraq ``are using more sophisticated techniques to attack our forces.''
U.S. officials have been warning of the danger of shoulder-fired missiles, thousands of which are now scattered from Saddam's arsenals, and such missiles are believed to have downed two U.S. copters since May 1. Those two crashes -- of smaller helicopters -- wounded only one American.
The loaded-down Chinook was a dramatic new target. The insurgents have been steadily advancing in their weaponry, first using homemade roadside bombs, then rocket-fired grenades in ambushes on American patrols, and vehicles stuffed with explosives and detonated by suicide attackers.
In the fields south of Fallujah, some villagers proudly showed off blackened pieces of the Chinook's wreckage to arriving reporters.
Though a few villagers tried to help, many celebrated word of the helicopter downing, as well as a fresh attack on U.S. soldiers in Fallujah itself. Two American civilians working under contract for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were killed and one was injured in the explosion of a roadside bomb, the military said.
``This was a new lesson from the resistance, a lesson to the greedy aggressors,'' one Fallujah resident, who would not give his name, said of the helicopter downing. ``They'll never be safe until they get out of our country,'' he said of the Americans.
The downed copter was one of two Chinooks flying out in formation from an air base in Habbaniyah, about 10 miles from the crash site, carrying troops to Baghdad on route for rest and recreation -- R&R.
The missiles semed to have been fired from a palm grove about 500 yards away, Thaer Ali, 21, said. At least one hit the Chinook, which came down in a field in the farming village of Hasai, a few miles south of Fallujah, witnesses said.
The missiles flashed toward the helicopter from the rear, as usual with heat-seeking ground-fired missiles. The most common model in the former Iraqi army inventory was the Russian-made SA-7, also known as Strelas.
Hours later, thick smoke rose from the blackened, smoldering hulk as U.S. soldiers swarmed over the crash site, evacuating the injured, retrieving evidence and cordoning off the area.
Yassin Mohamed said he heard the explosion and ran out of his house, a half-mile away.
``I saw the helicopter burning. I ran toward it because I wanted to help put out the fire, but couldn't get near because of American soldiers,'' he said.
The U.S. military would not confirm that the aircraft was struck by a missile, but a spokesman, Col. William Darley, said witnesses reported seeing ``missile trails.''
In Baghdad, Darley said the CH-47 helicopter belonged to the 12th Aviation Brigade, a Germany-based unit that supports the 82nd Airborne Division Task Force operating west of Baghdad.
The two Chinooks were carrying a total of more than 50 passengers to the U.S. base at Baghdad International Airport, from which they were to fly out on leave, U.S. officials said. Darley said some of the casualties were from medical units, but officials did not provide a breakdown of their units.
A spokesman at Fort Carson, Colo., said the Chinooks were carrying soldiers from Fort Carson; Fort Sill, Okla.; Fort Campbell, Ky.; and Fort Hood, Texas.
Lt. Col. Thomas Budzyna said some Fort Carson troops were among the injured but he did not know the units or bases of the other casualties.
``Many were looking forward to a break in the action,'' Budzyna said. ``Unfortunately, they faced something else.''
The Pentagon announced Friday it was expanding the rest and recreation leave program for troops in Iraq. As of Sunday, it said, the number of soldiers departing daily to the United States via a transit facility in neighboring Kuwait would be increased from 280 to 480.
Fallujah lies in the so-called ``Sunni Triangle,'' a region north and west of Baghdad were most attacks on American forces have taken place. The downing and the soldier's death in Baghdad brought to at least 138 the number of American soldiers killed by hostile fire since President Bush declared an end to combat on May 1.
Around 376 U.S. service members have died since the beginning of military operations in Iraq.
The death toll Sunday surpasses one of the deadliest single attacks during the Iraq war: the March 23 ambush of the 507th Maintenance Company, in which 11 soldiers were killed, nine were wounded and seven captured, including Pfc. Jessica Lynch. A total of 28 Americans around Iraq -- including the casualties from the ambush -- died on that day, the deadliest for U.S. troops during the Iraq war.
Meanwhile, in Abu Ghraib on Baghdad's western edge, U.S. troops clashed with townspeople Sunday. Local Iraqis said U.S. troops arrived in the morning and ordered people to disperse from the marketplace. Someone then tossed a grenade at the Americans, who opened fire, witnesses said.
The newest deaths capped a week of extraordinary carnage in and around Baghdad. On Oct. 26, a rocket slammed into a hotel housing hundreds of coalition staffers, killing one and injuring 15.
A day later, four coordinated suicide bombings in Baghdad killed three dozen people and wounded more than 200. Daily attacks against U.S. forces have increased in the last three weeks from an average of the mid-20s to 33.
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U.S. Considering Recalling Units of Old Iraq Army
November 2, 2003
By THOM SHANKER and ERIC SCHMITT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/02/international/middleeast/02ARMY.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Nov. 1 - Some American military officers in Iraq are pressing to reconstitute entire units of the former Iraqi Army, which the top United States administrator in Baghdad disbanded in May. They say the change would speed the creation of a new army and stabilize the nation.
Proposals under consideration would involve identifying former Iraqi officers and weeding out any still loyal to Saddam Hussein. Those who pass the vetting could then track down the troops who had served under them in order to re-assemble complete companies and battalions rapidly.
"We feel we could contact a midlevel officer - say, the rank of captain or major - who knows where all the members of his unit are today," said a senior military officer at the occupation's military headquarters in Baghdad.
The talks are at an early stage and do not represent an actual plan. At a news conference in Baghdad on Saturday, the American administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, spoke merely of the need to welcome back former members of the Iraqi Army into the small replacement army now being formed.
But the talks tacitly acknowledge that some officers view Mr. Bremer's decision to dismantle the defeated 500,000-member Iraqi Army as a mistake, one that has contributed to the instability and increasing attacks against United States forces in Iraq.
Mr. Bremer's decision, which his advisers say was made after deliberations with senior Pentagon, White House and other administration officials, was a defining moment in the American-led occupation.
Pentagon policy makers continue to say the Iraqi military had to be dismantled before a democratic Iraq could be built, and they point out that the force had already melted away under intense attack.
But the decision reversed the approach of Mr. Bremer's predecessor, Jay Garner, a retired Army lieutenant general who advocated paying members of the former Iraqi Army as a way to keep their units intact for possible construction tasks and to prevent them from turning against the Americans.
Senior military officers in Iraq and Washington say they are now considering ways to make up for lost time and lost opportunities, in order to put an Iraqi face on the occupation forces' efforts to plug the security gaps in volatile areas of the country.
"We don't see a solution without co-opting the former military to some degree," said a senior military officer in Baghdad who has reviewed what needs to be done to field a new Iraqi Army quickly.
Former Iraqi officers chosen for service would be carefully screened to make sure there are "no hard-line Baathists tucked up in there" or others who had taken part in acts that might warrant war crimes prosecution or otherwise were unworthy to serve, one military officer said.
The talk of reformulating some full units of the Iraqi Army began "in the last couple of weeks," a senior officer said, and were under way during the visit to Iraq by Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, who returned to Washington on Monday.
"There is no prejudice against hiring officers of the former army if they have clean records," Mr. Wolfowitz said when asked about the proposals.
Military officers said their discussions preceded statements this week from the White House and Pentagon about revamping and accelerating plans for putting Iraqi security forces on the streets of Baghdad and other areas where American forces and Iraqi citizens have been attacked.
Under one possibility described by a senior officer in Baghdad, former army transportation and engineering units might be reconstituted first. Known in the military as combat support and combat service support, such units perform important logistical missions, and the American effort in Iraq has required the mobilization of tens of thousands of reservists for those duties.
Iraqi combat units, in particular Republican Guard and tank units, would not be among those reconstituted, officers said. But armored and infantry soldiers of the former Iraqi military would be allowed to apply for retraining and membership in the new army, an effort led by Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton, previously the United States Army's chief of infantry training.
The first 700-man battalion of the new Iraqi Army took the field in early October under the command of Maj. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno of the Fourth Infantry Division, based in Tikrit.
Mr. Bremer said Saturday that about 60 percent of the enlisted soldiers and all of the sergeants in the new Iraqi Army had been members of the former army.
Mr. Bremer said that "we have always said they are welcome to join" the 27 battalions that eventually are to make up the new Iraqi Army.
"We are also welcoming former army members into the civil defense corps," he said. "I don't know if we have figures on what percent are from the army, but I'm sure it's a majority. They've also been encouraged to join the police, the facilities protection service and the border police."
Mr. Bremer's decision to disband the army caused an early clash with General Garner, the man he replaced in May.
"It was our view that we needed to pay the army and get them back to work as quickly as we could," said Jared Bates, a retired three-star Army general who was General Garner's operations deputy. "You didn't want them on the other side of the fight."
But General Bates said the view of some civilian policy makers at the Pentagon was, "Why in the world would we pay an army we just spent blood and treasure to defeat?"
Walter B. Slocombe, the civilian in charge of rebuilding Iraqi security institutions, defended Mr. Bremer's decision on grounds of principle and practicality. He said planting democratic roots in Iraq required disbanding an institution that was hated by the population as an instrument of Mr. Hussein's control.
He said the decision was also dictated by facts on the ground because the Iraqi Army no longer existed as a coherent force and bases were unusable.
"The Iraqi military under Saddam Hussein was a part of the system, and when the major fighting ended, say, in early April, major maneuver operations ended, the old army simply disintegrated," Mr. Slocombe said. "Everybody went home. And so the old army, which we formally dissolved as an institution, no longer existed when we did it."
He said that even after Baghdad fell, the Iraqi military could not have been invited back to barracks because "the degree of the looting in military installations in Iraq is really hard to imagine."
He continued: "They didn't just steal stuff that was not nailed down. They stole the toilet fixtures, and they stole the pipes and the tile in the latrines."
But Mr. Bremer's announcement contradicted the plan as described at an official Pentagon briefing on March 11, a week before General Garner's departure for Iraq.
"One of our goals is to take a good portion of the Iraqi regular army - I'm not talking about the Republican Guards, the special Republican Guards, but I'm talking about the regular army - and the regular army has the skill sets to match the work that needs to be done in construction," a senior Pentagon official said at the briefing.
"So our thought is to take them and they can help rebuild their own country," he said, adding that their tasks would not be combat but "things like engineering, road construction, work on bridges, remove rubble, de-mine, pick up unexploded ordnance, construction work."
Using the Iraqi army in that way, the official said, "allows us not to demobilize it immediately and put a lot of unemployed people on the street."
Mr. Bremer's decision also collided with recommendations from a group of former Iraqi military officers recruited last year by the State Department to advise the government on how to carry out the occupation.
"It was a big mistake," Muhammad al-Faour, a former major in the Iraqi Special Forces who headed the State Department project's defense working group, said in a telephone interview. "You put half a million people with their families, with their experiences, on the streets, and if just half a percent of those people turn against you, you're in trouble."
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Blueprint for a Mess
November 2, 2003
By DAVID RIEFF
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/02/magazine/02IRAQ.html?pagewanted=all&position=
In the streets of Baghdad today, Americans do not feel welcome. United States military personnel in the city are hunkered down behind acres of fencing and razor wire inside what was once Saddam Hussein's Republican Palace. When L. Paul Bremer III, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, leaves the compound, he is always surrounded by bodyguards, carbines at the ready, and G.I.'s on patrol in the city's streets never let their hands stray far from the triggers of their machine guns or M-16 rifles. The official line from the White House and the Pentagon is that things in Baghdad and throughout Iraq are improving. But an average of 35 attacks are mounted each day on American forces inside Iraq by armed resisters of one kind or another, whom American commanders concede are operating with greater and greater sophistication. In the back streets of Sadr City, the impoverished Baghdad suburb where almost two million Shiites live -- and where Bush administration officials and Iraqi exiles once imagined American troops would be welcomed with sweets and flowers -- the mood, when I visited in September, was angry and resentful. In October, the 24-member American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council warned of a deteriorating security situation.
Historically, it is rare that a warm welcome is extended to an occupying military force for very long, unless, that is, the postwar goes very smoothly. And in Iraq, the postwar occupation has not gone smoothly.
I have made two trips to Iraq since the end of the war and interviewed dozens of sources in Iraq and in the United States who were involved in the planning and execution of the war and its aftermath. It is becoming painfully clear that the American plan (if it can even be dignified with the name) for dealing with postwar Iraq was flawed in its conception and ineptly carried out. At the very least, the bulk of the evidence suggests that what was probably bound to be a difficult aftermath to the war was made far more difficult by blinkered vision and overoptimistic assumptions on the part of the war's greatest partisans within the Bush administration. The lack of security and order on the ground in Iraq today is in large measure a result of decisions made and not made in Washington before the war started, and of the specific approaches toward coping with postwar Iraq undertaken by American civilian officials and military commanders in the immediate aftermath of the war.
Despite administration claims, it is simply not true that no one could have predicted the chaos that ensued after the fall of Saddam Hussein. In fact, many officials in the United States, both military and civilian, as well as many Iraqi exiles, predicted quite accurately the perilous state of things that exists in Iraq today. There was ample warning, both on the basis of the specifics of Iraq and the precedent of other postwar deployments -- in Panama, Kosovo and elsewhere -- that the situation in postwar Iraq was going to be difficult and might become unmanageable. What went wrong was not that no one could know or that no one spoke out. What went wrong is that the voices of Iraq experts, of the State Department almost in its entirety and, indeed, of important segments of the uniformed military were ignored. As much as the invasion of Iraq and the rout of Saddam Hussein and his army was a triumph of planning and implementation, the mess that is postwar Iraq is a failure of planning and implementation.
1. Getting In Too Deep With Chalabi
In the minds of the top officials of the Department of Defense during the run-up to the war, Iraq by the end of this year would have enough oil flowing to help pay for the country's reconstruction, a constitution nearly written and set for ratification and, perhaps most important, a popular new leader who shared America's vision not only for Iraq's future but also for the Middle East's.
Ahmad Chalabi may on the face of it seem an odd figure to count on to unify and lead a fractious postwar nation that had endured decades of tyrannical rule. His background is in mathematics and banking, he is a secular Shiite Muslim and he had not been in Baghdad since the late 1950's. But in the early 90's he became close to Richard Perle, who was an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, and in 1992, in the wake of the first gulf war, he founded the Iraqi National Congress, an umbrella organization of Iraqi opposition groups in exile.
In the mid-90's, Chalabi attended conferences on a post-Hussein Iraq organized by Perle and sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute. There he met a group of neoconservative and conservative intellectuals who had served in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, who later formed the core group that would persuade President George W. Bush to go to war with Iraq. As a number of Iraqi exiles have since related, Wolfowitz, then the dean of the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, was particularly appalled and shamed by the first Bush administration's failure to help the Kurds and the southern Shiites in the aftermath of the first gulf war. Encouraged by President Bush to ''take matters into their own hands,'' these groups had risen against Saddam Hussein, only to be crushed by his forces while America did nothing. Wolfowitz and his colleagues believed that removing Saddam Hussein would have been the right way to end the first gulf war, and during their years out of power they lobbied the Clinton administration both publicly and privately to make the overthrow of Saddam Hussein a priority.
In the mid-90's Chalabi fell out of favor with the C.I.A. and the State Department, which questioned his popular support in Iraq and accused him of misappropriating American government funds earmarked for armed resistance by Iraqi exile groups against Saddam Hussein. He remained close with Perle and Wolfowitz, however, as well as with other neoconservative figures in Washington, including Douglas Feith, a former aide to Perle, and regularly appeared with them on panels at conservative policy institutes like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. Chalabi lobbied senators and congressmen to support action against Saddam Hussein, and a coalition of neoconservatives, including Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Perle, sent a letter to President Clinton calling for a tougher Iraq policy. Together they succeeded in persuading the Republican-controlled Congress in 1998 to pass the Iraq Liberation Act, signed into law by President Clinton, a piece of legislation that made regime change in Iraq the official policy of the United States.
After George W. Bush assumed the presidency, Chalabi's Washington allies were appointed to senior positions in the defense establishment. Wolfowitz became deputy defense secretary, Feith under secretary of defense for policy and Perle head of the Defense Policy Board. Chalabi and the neoconservatives in the Pentagon were united by a shared vision of a radically reshaped Middle East and a belief that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was the essential first step in the realization of that vision. The Iraq Chalabi envisioned -- one that would make peace with Israel, have adversarial relations with Iran and become a democratic model for (or, seen another way, a threat to) Saudi Arabia -- coincided neatly with the plan of the administration neoconservatives, who saw post-Hussein Iraq as a launching pad for what they described as the democratization of the Middle East. (Wolfowitz, Perle and Chalabi all refused or did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this article.)
Bush had come into office strenuously opposing ''nation building,'' and in the early months of his presidency the neoconservatives' interventionist view was by no means dominant. But the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, gave the movement new energy. Within days of the attacks, Wolfowitz was spearheading efforts to put on the table a plan to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Initially these efforts seemed to go nowhere. There was the war in Afghanistan to fight first, and many senior officers within the military feared that a war in Iraq would stretch American military capabilities beyond their limit at a time when the threat of war loomed on the Korean Peninsula. But the war in Afghanistan was a quick success, and in early 2002 a vigorous lobbying effort by the neoconservatives, both in public and inside the White House, succeeded in moving the idea of Hussein's overthrow to the center of the administration's foreign policy agenda.
Planning began not only for the war itself but also for its aftermath, and various government departments and agencies initiated projects and study groups to consider the questions of postwar Iraq. As Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld would put it later, planning ''began well before there was a decision to go to war. It was extensive.''
Chief among these agencies was the so-called Office of Special Plans, set up after Sept. 11, 2001, reporting to Douglas Feith in the Pentagon. It was given such a vague name, by Feith's own admission, because the administration did not want to have it widely known that there was a special unit in the Pentagon doing its own assessments of intelligence on Iraq. ''We didn't think it was wise to create a brand-new office and label it an office of Iraq policy,'' Feith told the BBC in July.
The office's main purpose was to evaluate the threat of Saddam Hussein's nuclear, chemical and biological warfare capabilities; its mission reflected the Department of Defense's dissatisfaction with the C.I.A.'s conservative estimates of Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons of mass destruction. Chalabi provided the Office of Special Plans with information from defectors ostensibly from Saddam Hussein's weapons programs -- defectors who claimed to be able to establish that the Iraqi dictator was actively developing weapons of mass destruction.
Through such efforts, Chalabi grew even closer to those planning the war and what would follow. To the war planners, the Iraqi National Congress became not simply an Iraqi exile group of which Chalabi was a leader, but a kind of government-in-waiting with Chalabi at its head. The Pentagon's plan for postwar Iraq seems to have hinged, until the war itself, on the idea that Chalabi could be dropped into Baghdad and, once there, effect a smooth transition to a new administration.
At the insistence of the civilian administrators in the Pentagon, Chalabi and 500 of his fighters in the Free Iraqi Forces were flown to Nasiriya in southern Iraq in April, in the first weeks of the war. At the time, American military officials were continuing to stress the importance of Chalabi and the Free Iraqi Forces. Gen. Peter Pace, then the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described them as the ''core of the new Iraqi Army.'' But to the surprise and disappointment of American military leaders on the ground, Chalabi failed to make much of an impression on the people he tried to mobilize.
Timothy Carney, a former American ambassador to Sudan and Haiti who served in the reconstruction team in Iraq just after the war, says that there was, in the Pentagon, ''a complete lack of grasp of Chalabi's lack of appeal for ordinary Iraqis.'' In the end, Chalabi sat out the war in the Iraqi desert and was taken to Baghdad only after the city had fallen and the Americans had moved in.
Many Iraqis outside the Iraqi National Congress felt marginalized by the Pentagon's devotion to Chalabi. According to Isam Al Khafaji, a moderate Iraqi academic who worked with the State Department on prewar planning and later with the American reconstruction office in Baghdad, ''What I had originally envisioned -- working with allies in a democratic fashion'' -- soon turned into ''collaborating with occupying forces,'' not what he and other Iraqi exiles had had in mind at all.
Carney agrees. ''There was so much reliance on Chalabi in those early days,'' he says.
2. Shutting Out State
In the spring of 2002, as support for a war to oust Saddam Hussein took root within the Bush administration, the State Department began to gather information and draw up its own set of plans for postwar Iraq under the leadership of Thomas Warrick, a longtime State Department official who was then special adviser to the department's Office of Northern Gulf Affairs. This effort involved a great number of Iraqi exiles from across the political spectrum, from monarchists to communists and including the Iraqi National Congress.
Warrick's Future of Iraq Project, as it was called, was an effort to consider almost every question likely to confront a post-Hussein Iraq: the rebuilding of infrastructure, the shape Iraqi democracy might take, the carrying out of transitional justice and the spurring of economic development. Warrick called on the talents of many of the best Middle Eastern specialists at State and at the C.I.A. He divided his team into working groups, each of which took on one aspect of the reconstruction.
David L. Phillips, an American conflict-prevention specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and a former adviser to the State Department, served on the project's ''democratic principles'' group. In his view of the project, ''Iraqis did a lot of important work together looking at the future.'' But however useful the work itself was, Phillips says, the very process of holding the discussions was even more valuable. ''It involved Iraqis coming together, in many cases for the first time, to discuss and try to forge a common vision of Iraq's future,'' Phillips says.
There were a number of key policy disagreements between State and Defense. The first was over Chalabi. While the Pentagon said that a ''government in exile'' should be established, presumably led by Chalabi, to be quickly installed in Baghdad following the war, other Iraqis, including the elder statesman of the exile leaders, Adnan Pachaci, insisted that any government installed by United States fiat would be illegitimate in the eyes of the Iraqi people. And the State Department, still concerned that Chalabi had siphoned off money meant for the Iraqi resistance and that he lacked public support, opposed the idea of a shadow government. The State Department managed to win this particular battle, and no government in exile was set up.
There was also a broader disagreement about whether and how quickly Iraq could become a full-fledged democracy. The State Department itself was of two minds on this question. One prewar State Department report, echoing the conventional wisdom among Arabists, asserted that ''liberal democracy would be difficult to achieve'' in Iraq and that ''electoral democracy, were it to emerge, could well be subject to exploitation by anti-American elements.'' The C.I.A. agreed with this assessment; in March 2003, the agency issued a report that was widely reported to conclude that prospects for democracy in a post-Hussein Iraq were bleak. In contrast, the neoconservatives within the Bush administration, above all within the Department of Defense, consistently asserted that the C.I.A. and the State Department were wrong and that there was no reason to suppose that Iraq could not become a full-fledged democracy, and relatively quickly and smoothly.
But Thomas Warrick, who has refused to be interviewed since the end of the war, was, according to participants in the project, steadfastly committed to Iraqi democracy. Feisal Istrabadi, an Iraqi-American lawyer who also served on the project's democratic principles group, credits Warrick with making the Future of Iraq Project a genuinely democratic and inclusive venture. Warrick, he says, ''was fanatically devoted to the idea that no one should be allowed to dominate the Future of Iraq Project and that all voices should be heard -- including moderate Islamist voices. It was a remarkable accomplishment.''
In fact, Istrabadi rejects the view that the State Department was a holdout against Iraqi democracy. ''From Colin Powell on down,'' he says, ''I've spent hundreds of hours with State Department people, and I've never heard one say democracy was not viable in Iraq. Not one.''
Although Istrabadi is an admirer of Wolfowitz, he says that the rivalry between State and Defense was so intense that the Future of Iraq Project became anathema to the Pentagon simply because it was a State Department project. ''At the Defense Department,'' he recalls, ''we were seen as part of 'them.''' Istrabadi was so disturbed by the fight between Defense and State that on June 1, 2002, he says, he took the matter up personally with Douglas Feith. ''I sat with Feith,'' he recalls, ''and said, 'You've got to decide what your policy is.'''
The Future of Iraq Project did draw up detailed reports, which were eventually released to Congress last month and made available to reporters for The New York Times. The 13 volumes, according to The Times, warned that ''the period immediately after regime change might offer . . . criminals the opportunity to engage in acts of killing, plunder and looting.''
But the Defense Department, which came to oversee postwar planning, would pay little heed to the work of the Future of Iraq Project. Gen. Jay Garner, the retired Army officer who was later given the job of leading the reconstruction of Iraq, says he was instructed by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to ignore the Future of Iraq Project.
Garner has said that he asked for Warrick to be added to his staff and that he was turned down by his superiors. Judith Yaphe, a former C.I.A. analyst and a leading expert on Iraqi history, says that Warrick was ''blacklisted'' by the Pentagon. ''He did not support their vision,'' she told me.
And what was this vision?
Yaphe's answer is unhesitant: ''Ahmad Chalabi.'' But it went further than that: ''The Pentagon didn't want to touch anything connected to the Department of State.''
None of the senior American officials involved in the Future of Iraq Project were taken on board by the Pentagon's planners. And this loss was considerable. ''The Office of Special Plans discarded all of the Future of Iraq Project's planning,'' David Phillips says. ''I don't know why.''
To say all this is not to claim that the Future of Iraq Project alone would have prevented the postwar situation from deteriorating as it did. Robert Perito, a former State Department official who is one of the world's leading experts on postconflict police work, says of the Future of Iraq Project: ''It was a good idea. It brought the exiles together, a lot of smart people, and its reports were very impressive. But the project never got to the point where things were in place that could be implemented.''
Nonetheless, Istrabadi points out that ''we in the Future of Iraq Project predicted widespread looting. You didn't have to have a degree from a Boston university to figure that one out. Look at what happened in L.A. after the police failed to act quickly after the Rodney King verdict. It was entirely predictable that in the absence of any authority in Baghdad that you'd have chaos and lawlessness.''
According to one participant, Iraqi exiles on the project specifically warned of the dangers of policing postwar Iraq: ''Adnan Pachaci's first question to U.S. officials was, How would they maintain law and order after the war was over? They told him not to worry, that things would get back to normal very soon.''
3. Too Little Planning, Too Late
The Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) was established in the Defense Department, under General Garner's supervision, on Jan. 20, 2003, just eight weeks before the invasion of Iraq. Because the Pentagon had insisted on essentially throwing out the work and the personnel of the Future of Iraq Project, Garner and his planners had to start more or less from scratch. Timothy Carney, who served in ORHA under Garner, explains that ORHA lacked critical personnel once it arrived in Baghdad. ''There were scarcely any Arabists in ORHA in the beginning'' at a senior level, Carney says. ''Some of us had served in the Arab world, but we were not experts, or fluent Arabic speakers.'' According to Carney, Defense officials ''said that Arabists weren't welcome because they didn't think Iraq could be democratic.''
Because of the battle between Defense and State, ORHA, which Douglas Feith called the ''U.S. government nerve center'' for postwar planning, lacked not only information and personnel but also time. ORHA had only two months to figure out what to plan for, plan for it and find the people to implement it. A senior Defense official later admitted that in late January ''we only had three or four people''; in mid-February, the office conducted a two-day ''rehearsal'' of the postwar period at the National Defense University in Washington. Judith Yaphe says that ''even the Messiah couldn't have organized a program in that short a time.''
Although ORHA simply didn't have the time, resources or expertise in early 2003 to formulate a coherent postwar plan, Feith and others in the Defense Department were telling a different story to Congress. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Feb. 11, shortly before the beginning of the war, Feith reassured the assembled senators that ORHA was ''staffed by officials detailed from departments and agencies throughout the government.'' Given the freeze-out of the State Department officials from the Future of Iraq Project, this description hardly encompassed the reality of what was actually taking place bureaucratically.
Much of the postwar planning that did get done before the invasion focused on humanitarian efforts -- Garner's area of expertise. Through the U.S. Agency for International Development, Washington was planning for a possible humanitarian emergency akin to the one that occurred after the first gulf war, when hundreds of thousands of Kurds fled their homes in northern Iraq and needed both emergency relief and protection from Saddam Hussein. This operation, led by Garner, had succeeded brilliantly. American planners in 2003 imagined (and planned for) a similar emergency taking place. There were plans drawn up for housing and feeding Iraqi refugees. But there was little thought given to other contingencies -- like widespread looting.
Garner told me that while he had expected Iraqis to loot the symbols of the old regime, like Hussein's palaces, he had been utterly unprepared for the systematic looting and destruction of practically every public building in Baghdad. In fairness to Garner, many of the Iraqis I spoke with during my trips were also caught by surprise. One mullah in Sadr City observed to me caustically that he had never seen such wickedness. ''People can be weak,'' he said. ''I knew this before, of course, but I did not know how weak. But while I do not say it is the Americans' fault, I simply cannot understand how your soldiers could have stood by and watched. Maybe they are weak, too. Or maybe they are wicked.''
One reason for the looting in Baghdad was that there were so many intact buildings to loot. In contrast to their strategy in the first gulf war, American war planners had been careful not to attack Iraqi infrastructure. This was partly because of their understanding of the laws of war and partly because of their desire to get Iraq back up and running as quickly and smoothly as possible. They seem to have imagined that once Hussein fell, things would go back to normal fairly quickly. But on the ground, the looting and the violence went on and on, and for the most part American forces largely did nothing.
Or rather, they did only one thing -- station troops to protect the Iraqi Oil Ministry. This decision to protect only the Oil Ministry -- not the National Museum, not the National Library, not the Health Ministry -- probably did more than anything else to convince Iraqis uneasy with the occupation that the United States was in Iraq only for the oil. ''It is not that they could not protect everything, as they say,'' a leader in the Hawza, the Shiite religious authority, told me. ''It's that they protected nothing else. The Oil Ministry is not off by itself. It's surrounded by other ministries, all of which the Americans allowed to be looted. So what else do you want us to think except that you want our oil?''
As Istrabadi, the Iraqi-American lawyer from the Future of Iraq Project, says, ''When the Oil Ministry is the only thing you protect, what do you expect people to think?'' And, he adds: ''It can't be that U.S. troops didn't know where the National Museum was. All you have to do is follow the signs -- they're in English! -- to Museum Square.''
For its part, the Hawza could do little to protect the 17 out of 23 Iraqi ministries that were gutted by looters, or the National Library, or the National Museum (though sheiks repeatedly called on looters to return the stolen artifacts). But it was the Hawza, and not American forces, that protected many of Baghdad's hospitals from looters -- which Hawza leaders never fail to point out when asked whether they would concede that the United States is now doing a great deal of good in Iraq. The memory of this looting is like a bone in Iraq's collective throat and has given rise to conspiracy theories about American motives and actions.
''The U.S. thinks of Iraq as a big cake,'' one young Iraqi journalist told me. ''By letting people loot -- and don't tell me they couldn't have stopped the looters if they'd wanted to; look at the war! -- they were arranging to get more profits for Mr. Cheney, for Bechtel, for all American corporations.''
4. The Troops: Too Few, Too Constricted
On Feb. 25, the Army's chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, warned Congress that postwar Iraq would require a commitment of ''several hundred thousand'' U.S. troops. Shinseki's estimate was dismissed out of hand by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and other civilian officials at the Pentagon, where war plans called for a smaller, more agile force than had been used in the first gulf war. Wolfowitz, for example, told Congress on Feb. 27 that Shinseki's number was ''wildly off the mark,'' adding, ''It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and secure the surrender of Saddam's security force and his army.'' Shinseki retired soon afterward.
But Shinseki wasn't the only official who thought there were going to be insufficient troops on the ground to police Iraq in the aftermath of the war. The lack of adequate personnel in the military's plan, especially the military police needed for postconflict work, was pointed out by both senior members of the uniformed military and by seasoned peacekeeping officials in the United Nations secretariat.
Former Ambassador Carney, recalling his first days in Iraq with ORHA, puts it this way, with surprising bitterness: The U.S. military ''simply did not understand or give enough priority to the transition from their military mission to our political military mission.''
The Department of Defense did not lack for military and civilian officials -- men and women who supported the war -- counseling in private that policing a country militarily would not be easy. As Robert Perito recalls: ''The military was warned there would be looting. There has been major looting in every important postconflict situation of the past decade. The looting in Panama City in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion did more damage to the Panamanian economy than the war itself. And there was vast looting and disorder in Kosovo. We know this.''
Securing Iraq militarily after victory on the battlefield was, in the Pentagon's parlance, Phase IV of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Phases I through III were the various stages of the invasion itself; Phase IV involved so-called stability and support operations -- in other words, the postwar. The military itself, six months into the occupation, is willing to acknowledge -- at least to itself -- that it did not plan sufficiently for Phase IV. In its secret report ''Operation Iraqi Freedom: Strategic Lessons Learned,'' a draft of which was obtained by The Washington Times in August, the Department of Defense concedes that ''late formation of Department of Defense [Phase IV] organizations limited time available for the development of detailed plans and pre-deployment coordination.''
The planning stages of the invasion itself were marked by detailed preparations and frequent rehearsals. Lt. Col. Scott Rutter is a highly decorated U.S. battalion commander whose unit, the Second Battalion, Seventh Infantry of the Third Infantry Division, helped take the Baghdad airport. He says that individual units rehearsed their own roles and the contingencies they might face over and over again. By contrast, the lack of postwar planning made the difficulties the United States faced almost inevitable. ''We knew what the tactical end state was supposed to be at the end of the war, but we were never told what the end state, the goal was, for the postwar,'' Rutter said. (Rutter was on active duty when I spoke to him, but he is scheduled to retire this month.)
Rutter's unit controlled a section of Baghdad in the immediate postwar period, and he was forced to make decisions on his own on everything from how to deal with looters to whether to distribute food. When I asked him in Baghdad in September whether he had rehearsed this or, indeed, whether he received any instructions from up the chain of command, he simply smiled and shook his head.
Rutter's view is confirmed by the ''After Action'' report of the Third Infantry Division, a document that is available on an Army Web site but that has received little attention. Running 293 pages and marked ''official use only,'' it is a comprehensive evaluation of the division's performance during the war in Iraq, covering every aspect of operations, from the initial invasion to the postwar period. The tone of the report is mostly self-congratulatory. ''Operating considerably beyond existing doctrine,'' it begins, ''the Third Infantry Division (Mechanized) proved that a lethal, flexible and disciplined mechanized force could conduct continuous offensive operations over extended distances for 21 days.''
If the report contains one pre-eminent lesson, it is that extensive training is what made the division's success possible. ''The roots of the division's successful attack to Baghdad,'' the authors of the report write, ''are found on the training fields of Fort Stewart'' -- the Third Infantry Division's Georgia base. ''A direct correlation can be drawn between the division's training cycle prior to crossing the line of departure and the division's successful attack into Iraq.''
But as the report makes clear, no such intensive training was undertaken for postwar operations. As the report's authors note: ''Higher headquarters did not provide the Third Infantry Division (Mechanized) with a plan for Phase IV. As a result, Third Infantry Division transitioned into Phase IV in the absence of guidance.''
The report concludes that ''division planners should have drafted detailed plans on Phase IV operations that would have allowed it'' -- the Third Infantry Division -- ''to operate independently outside of guidance from higher headquarters. Critical requirements should have been identified prior to'' the beginning of the war, the report states. The division also should have had ''a plan to execute'' a stability-and-support operation ''for at least 30 days.''
The report says that such an operation should have included ''protecting infrastructure, historic sites, administrative buildings, cultural sites, financial institutions, judicial/legal sites and religious sites.'' It notes, with hindsight, that ''protecting these sites must be planned for early in the planning process.'' But as the report makes clear, no such planning took place.
Without a plan, without meticulous rehearsal and without orders or, at the very least, guidance from higher up the chain of command, the military is all but paralyzed. And in those crucial first postwar days in Baghdad, American forces (and not only those in the Third Infantry Division) behaved that way, as all around them Baghdad was ransacked and most of the categories of infrastructure named in the report were destroyed or seriously damaged.
Some military analysts go beyond the lack of Phase IV planning and more generally blame the Bush administration's insistence, upon coming into office, that it would no longer commit American armed forces to nation-building missions -- a position symbolized by the decision, now being reconsidered, to close the Peacekeeping Institute at the Army War College in Carlisle, Penn. According to Maj. Gen. William Nash, now retired from the Army, who commanded U.S. forces in northern Bosnia after the signing of the Dayton peace accords: ''This is a democratic army. If the national command authority tells it that it doesn't have to worry about something anymore'' -- he was talking about peacekeeping -- ''it stops worrying about it.''
It is hardly a secret that within the Army, peacekeeping duty is not the road to career advancement. Civil-affairs officers are not the Army's ''high-fliers,'' Rutter notes.
Nash, understandably proud of his service as commander of U.S. forces in postconflict Bosnia, is chagrined by the way American forces behaved in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Baghdad. ''I know they expected to be greeted with flowers and candy,'' he says, ''or at least the civilians in the Pentagon had assured them they would be. But we know from experience that this kind of welcome lasts only a few days at most. You are welcomed with roses -- for one day. Then you have to prove yourself, and keep on proving yourself, every succeeding day of the mission. There are no excuses, and few second chances. That was why, when we went into Bosnia, we went in hard. The only way to keep control of the situation, even if people are initially glad to see you, is to take charge immediately and never let go of control. Instead, in postwar Iraq, we just stood around and responded to events, rather than shaping them.''
5. Neglecting ORHA
In his Congressional testimony before the war, Douglas Feith described General Garner's mission as head of ORHA as ''integrating the work of the three substantive operations'' necessary in postwar Iraq. These were humanitarian relief, reconstruction and civil administration. Garner, Feith said, would ensure that the fledgling ORHA could ''plug in smoothly'' to the military's command structure on the ground in Iraq. But far from plugging in smoothly to Central Command, ORHA's people found themselves at odds with the military virtually from the start.
Timothy Carney has given the best and most damning account of this dialogue of the deaf between ORHA officials and the U.S. military on the ground in Iraq. ''I should have had an inkling of the trouble ahead for our reconstruction team in Iraq,'' he wrote in a searing op-ed article in The Washington Post in late June, ''from the hassle we had just trying to get there. About 20 of us from the Organization for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance showed up at a military airport in Kuwait on April 24 for a flight to Baghdad. But some general's plane had broken down, so he had taken ours.''
Carney stressed the low priority the military put on ORHA's efforts. ''Few in the military understood the urgency of our mission,'' he wrote, ''yet we relied on the military for support. For example, the military commander set rules for transportation: we initially needed a lead military car, followed by the car with civilians and a military vehicle bringing up the rear. But there weren't enough vehicles. One day we had 31 scheduled missions and only nine convoys, so 22 missions were scrubbed.''
More substantively, he added that ''no lessons seem to have taken hold from the recent nation-building efforts in Bosnia or Kosovo, so we in ORHA felt as though we were reinventing the wheel.'' And doing so under virtually impossible constraints. Carney quoted an internal ORHA memorandum arguing that the organization ''is not being treated seriously enough by the command given what we are supposed to do.''
The lack of respect for the civilian officials in ORHA was a source of astonishment to Lieutenant Colonel Rutter. ''I was amazed by what I saw,'' he says. ''There would be a meeting called by Ambassador Bodine'' -- the official on Garner's staff responsible for Baghdad -- ''and none of the senior officers would show up. I remember thinking, This isn't right, and also thinking that if it had been a commander who had called the meeting, they would have shown up all right.''
Carney attributes some of the blame for ORHA's impotence to the fact that it set up shop in Saddam Hussein's Republican Palace, where ''nobody knew where anyone was, and, worse, almost no one really knew what was going on outside the palace. Some of us managed to talk to Iraqis, but not many, since the military didn't want you to go out for security reasons unless accompanied by M.P.'s.''
Kevin Henry of CARE, a humanitarian organization active in Iraq, says that he still has similar concerns. ''One of my biggest worries,'' he says, ''is the isolation of the palace.''
Garner disputes these complaints. He is adamant that he managed to talk with many Iraqis and strongly disagrees with claims that officials in the palace were out of touch.
Still, ORHA under Pentagon control was compelled to adhere rigidly to military force-protection rules that were anything but appropriate to the work the civilians at ORHA were trying to do. Larry Hollingworth, a former British colonel and relief specialist who has worked in Sarajevo and Chechnya and who briefly served with ORHA right after Baghdad fell, says that ''at the U.S. military's insistence, we traveled out from our fortified headquarters in Saddam's old Republican Palace in armored vehicles, wearing helmets and flak jackets, trying to convince Iraqis that peace was at hand, and that they were safe. It was ridiculous.''
And Judith Yaphe adds, ''In some ways, we're even more isolated than the British were when they took over Iraq'' after World War I.
Kevin Henry has described the Bush administration as peculiarly susceptible to a kind of ''liberation theology in which they couldn't get beyond their own rhetoric and see things in Iraq as they really were.''
As the spring wore on, administration officials continued to insist publicly that nothing was going seriously wrong in Iraq. But the pressure to do something became too strong to resist. Claiming that it had been a change that had been foreseen all along (though it had not been publicly announced and was news to Garner's staff), President Bush replaced Garner in May with L. Paul Bremer. Glossing over the fact that Bremer had no experience in postwar reconstruction or nation-building, the Pentagon presented Bremer as a good administrator -- something, or so Defense Department officials implied on background, Garner was not.
Bremer's first major act was not auspicious. Garner had resisted the kind of complete de-Baathification of Iraqi society that Ahmad Chalabi and some of his allies in Washington had favored. In particular, he had resisted calls to completely disband the Iraqi Army. Instead, he had tried only to fire Baathists and senior military officers against whom real charges of complicity in the regime's crimes could be demonstrated and to use most members of the Iraqi Army as labor battalions for reconstruction projects.
Bremer, however, took the opposite approach. On May 15, he announced the complete disbanding of the Iraqi Army, some 400,000 strong, and the lustration of 50,000 members of the Baath Party. As one U.S. official remarked to me privately, ''That was the week we made 450,000 enemies on the ground in Iraq.''
The decision -- which many sources say was made not by Bremer but in the White House -- was disastrous. In a country like Iraq, where the average family size is 6, firing 450,000 people amounts to leaving 2,700,000 people without incomes; in other words, more than 10 percent of Iraq's 23 million people. The order produced such bad feeling on the streets of Baghdad that salaries are being reinstated for all soldiers. It is a slow and complicated process, however, and there have been demonstrations by fired military officers in Iraq over the course of the summer and into the fall.
6. Ignoring the Shiites
It should have been clear from the start that the success or failure of the American project in postwar Iraq depended not just on the temporary acquiescence of Iraq's Shiite majority but also on its support -- or at least its tacit acceptance of a prolonged American presence. Before the war, the Pentagon's planners apparently believed that this would not be a great problem. The Shiite tradition in Iraq, they argued, was nowhere near as radical as it was in neighboring Iran. The planners also seem to have assumed that the overwhelming majority of Iraqi Shiites would welcome American forces as liberators -- an assumption based on the fact of the Shiite uprisings in southern Iraq in 1991, in the aftermath of the first gulf war. American officials do not seem to have taken seriously enough the possibility that the Shiites might welcome their liberation from Saddam Hussein but still view the Americans as unwelcome occupiers who would need to be persuaded, and if necessary compelled, to leave Iraq as soon as possible.
Again, an overestimation of the role of Ahmad Chalabi may help account for this miscalculation. Chalabi is a Shiite, and based on that fact, the Pentagon's planners initially believed that he would enjoy considerable support from Iraq's Shiite majority. But it rapidly became clear to American commanders on the ground in postwar Iraq that the aristocratic, secular Chalabi enjoyed no huge natural constituency in the country, least of all among the observant Shiite poor.
The Americans gravely underestimated the implications of the intense religious feelings that Iraqi Shiites were suddenly free to manifest after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Making religious freedom possible for the Shiites was one of the great accomplishments of the war, as administration officials rightly claim. But the Shiites soon demonstrated that they were interested in political as well as religious autonomy. And although the Americans provided the latter, their continued presence in Iraq was seen as an obstacle to the former -- especially as the occupation dragged on and Secretary Rumsfeld warned of a ''long, hard slog ahead.''
After the war, American planners thought they might be able to engage with one of the most moderate of the important Shiite ayatollahs, Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim. He was rhetorically anti-American and yet was willing (and urged his followers) to establish a detente with the occupiers. Had he lived, he might have helped the Americans assuage Shiite fears and resentments. But Hakim was assassinated during Friday prayers in the holy city of Najaf on Aug. 29, along with more than 80 of his followers. At this point, it is not clear who the current American candidate is, although there are reports that American planners now believe they can work with and through Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
Meanwhile, in the streets the anger of ordinary Shiites grows hotter. Every reporter who has been in Iraq has encountered it, even if administration officials think they know better. As Robert Perito argues, ''One of the things that has saved the U.S. effort is that the Shiites have decided to cooperate with us, however conditionally.'' But, he adds, ''if the Shiites decide that they can't continue to support us, then our position will become untenable.''
Although they are, for the most part, not yet ready to rebel, the Shiites' willingness to tolerate the American occupation authorities is growing dangerously thin. ''We're happy the Americans got rid of Saddam Hussein,'' a young member of the Hawza in Sadr City told me. ''But we do not approve of replacing 'the tyrant of the age''' -- as he referred to Hussein -- ''with the Americans. We will wait a little longer, but we will fight if things don't change soon.''
Or as his sheik told me later that afternoon at the nearby mosque, so far they ''have no orders'' from their religious superiors to fight the Americans. Still, he warned, ''we have been very nice to them. But the U.S. is not reciprocating.'' Last month, in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, the first firefights between American forces and Shiite militants took place, suggesting that time may be running out even more quickly than anyone imagined.
The Next Steps
In Iraq today, there is a steadily increasing disconnect between what the architects of the occupation think they are accomplishing and how Iraqis on the street evaluate postwar progress. And as the security situation fails to improve, these perceptions continue to darken.
The Bush administration fiercely denies that this ''alarmist'' view accurately reflects Iraqi reality. It insists that the positive account it has been putting forward is the real truth and that the largely downbeat account in much of the press is both inaccurate and unduly despairing. The corner has been turned, administration officials repeat.
Whether the United States is eventually successful in Iraq (and saying the mission ''has to succeed,'' as so many people do in Washington, is not a policy but an expression of faith), even supporters of the current approach of the Coalition Provisional Authority concede that the United States is playing catch-up in Iraq. This is largely, though obviously not entirely, because of the lack of postwar planning during the run-up to the war and the mistakes of the first 60 days after the fall of Saddam Hussein. And the more time passes, the clearer it becomes that what happened in the immediate aftermath of what