strange bedfellows

If you have an allegiance with someone whom you think of as a trustworthy person, you can “wake up” and find that you have been “sleeping with a strange bedfellow” when it comes to dealing with problems of terrorism.

Now we have pre-emptive war.  We just hope none of our enemies will strike us pre-emptively.  Surely our allies would never do that, or would they?  They would surely use diplomatic channels first.   We can’t be struck first because we are so powerful, our own familiar fail-safe scenario.  But that only works with “nation-states”:  it is not so simple with terrorist groups that span countries and ideologies. 

Now we are selling and giving weapons to insurgents who we only a year ago viewed as Al-Qaida’s strong supporters in Iraq.

We can pre-emptively go to war in Iraq, but Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan are to mind their fences carefully or we will attack them.  If they have an issue with Iraq, or allies in Iraq, we have declared that it is a “no man’s zone” and we will control who will give support to its sectarian factions and they cannot help fellow Shi’as, for example. 

We are appalled by terroism, but not appalled by CIA “semi-torture” techniques that are used against prisoners we suspect of aiding and abetting terrorists. 

We use heavy air power as a means of protecting our troops, even though civilian casualties are significantly increased by such tactics.

We sell weapons to countries who are enemies with one another so that our political allies can make profits and we can feel assured of a continued fearful détente.  We know that some of the weapons we lose or sell will be used against civilian targets by militant groups who are carrying out cleansing campaigns or mindlessly aim at civilians who for want of a job, an air-conditioner, or food, step outside of the walls that are being erected to “keep the peace” and “keep them in their place”. 

Sometimes the image of these strange bedfellows could remind us of a youth dance in which young people are made to “change partners” rapidly to ensure inclusion of everyone.  No one is to be left out.  But then, again, if you join the dance, you are sure to come close to carefully disguised sadistic killers and rapists.  When you are in the theater of war, you never know who your next dancing partner will be…perhaps we should call it the “Neo-con Dance”.  It has  strange bedfellows:  the Christian right, the Zionists, the Knights Templar, the secular Saudis, the apocalyptic planners and Armeggaden engineers, and of course the jihadists and the profiteers of the U.S. military industrial complex.

For this dance, they are our friend.  Next dance, they become our enemy.  This dance, we kill them.  Next dance, they kill us?

The dance works best if the dance floor is floating on a pool of oil….

And it reminds me of a bumper sticker that I keep on the bulletin board in my office:

  We Are Making Enemies Faster Than We Can Kill Them

collision course on Iran: Bush vs. Congress

Bush, Congress could collide on Iran

By Matt Stearns | McClatchy Newspapers

Karim Kadim/AP

Mourners carry coffins in the Shiite enclave of Sadr City on Aug. 8 after a raid and airstrike by U.S. troops targeting smuggled weapons and fighters from Iran.

WASHINGTON — Taking military action against Iran could put President Bush on a collision course with Congress, leading Democrats and a Republican lawmaker cautioned Friday following Bush’s threat of unspecified consequences for alleged Iranian meddling in Iraq.

It’s been the consensus for months among the Democrats who hold the majority that Bush must get congressional authorization before any military strike.

But the authorization would be no easy sell. Two knowledgeable U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because intelligence on Iran is highly classified, said that the administration so far doesn’t have “smoking-gun” evidence that could be used publicly to justify an air attack.

The presumed target of an attack would be camps in Iran where officials believe the Iranians are teaching Iraqi Shiite fighters how to fashion bombs that can destroy American armored vehicles.

The U.S. officials refused to discuss whether such evidence exists but can’t be made public because doing so would betray intelligence sources and methods, or whether it hasn’t been uncovered. Even with such evidence, however, the Democratic-controlled Congress could be hard to convince five years to the month after Vice President Dick Cheney kicked off the administration’s public relations campaign against Saddam Hussein with a speech in Cincinnati.

Given the hindsight about the intelligence that led to the invasion of Iraq, “I think you’ll find a lot of skeptical Republicans, no less Democrats, on the Hill,” said Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

At a press conference Thursday, Bush warned of unspecified “consequences” if Iran’s alleged interference in Iraq continues. Several administration officials said that Vice President Cheney has advocated launching air strikes against targets in Iran if there’s clear evidence of Iranian support for Shiite Muslim militants in Iraq.

Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., the vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, appeared Friday to steer the administration toward requesting authorization.

“I doubt the President could or would do so without coming to Congress,” he said. “Nevertheless, there are a number of wide-ranging actions he could be taking, primarily focusing on expanding diplomatic efforts to increase pressure on Iran.”

Highlighting Democratic wariness of Bush, Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia introduced a bill earlier this year that would prevent money from being used for a strike against Iran without congressional approval. Among the supporters of the bill is Reid, who’s been saying for months that Bush doesn’t have authority to strike Iran.

“If the opportunity arises to attach this legislation (to another bill), he would do it,” said Kimberly Hunter, Webb’s spokeswoman.

Should Bush simply pursue a strike against Iran without seeking congressional authorization, it would cause “an uproar over here. It would be a serious breach of (the limits on) executive power,” said a military affairs aide to a Democratic senator.

Nevertheless, Bush and Vice President Cheney take a broad view of executive power, and it’s unclear what consequences Bush would face if he were to take action without authorization.

Many on Capitol Hill said the reaction would depend largely on the provocation used as a rationale for an attack.

“We cannot and we must not allow recent history to repeat itself,” Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, said of a potential strike against Iran in a February speech, citing the distrust stemming from the administration’s push for war with Iraq, which was based on exaggerated claims and faulty intelligence.

An advisor for Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), like Clinton a candidate for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, called for “tough, sustained, and direct diplomacy” with Iran. “While military force must remain an option, we must combine diplomacy with an aggressive effort to implement stronger sanctions to isolate Iran,” said Susan Rice, a foreign policy advisor.

In Baghdad, meanwhile, some wonder why Washington is escalating its allegations of Iranian meddling.

“They (the U.S.) want to put the blame on Iran . . . for what’s happening in Iraq,” said Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish legislator,” adding that the harsh rhetoric is hindering Iraq’s efforts at stability. “Even Syria they don’t talk much about these days.”

Othman also criticized his own government’s Iran policy. While Iran espouses support for Iraq’s Shiite-led government, Othman said, it also helps militias that act against the government. He criticized Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki for traveling to Baghdad when his own government is in crisis.

Waleed al Hilli, a leading member of Maliki’s Dawa party, said Iraq is trying to “build a bridge” between the U.S. and Iran.

“We refuse any involvement from any side about our relations with Iran or any other country,” he said. “We’ve worked hard to avoid making Iraqi a base to attack Iran. We won’t accept such a thing.”

Even so, Hilli said, American accusations against Iran for supporting militiamen that attack U.S. troops are valid.

“These bombs kill their soldiers, and they have the right to defend,” Hilli said.

is it genocide? and do we care more when it is Christians? from a 7/27 blog by Julia Duin

A depressing press conference

I usually don’t mention much about my work on this blog – I try to keep things lighthearted but I attended a press conference Wednesday that was one of the most depressing I’ve ever been to. It was about the ongoing slaughter of Christians and other religious minorities in Iraq and how the U.S. military is doing nothing to stop it. Some 2.2 million Iraqis, half of whom are not Muslim, have fled the country and are languishing in Jordan and Syria, thanks to our horrific immigration policy, which has let only a trickle of these people into the country.

One of the worst testimonies, which I didn’t have room to include in my article, came from Donny George, chairman of Iraq’s state board of antiquities and director of the country’s museums. He said:
“At my parents’ place in Dora (a Christian neighborhood in Baghdad), we started hearing the Muslim extremists will do to the Christians exactly what they did to the Jews in 1948. This meant complete cleansing of people from the country. We receive a letter in an envelope together with a bullet of a Kalashnikov. The letter threatened my younger son, Martin, accusing him of cursing Islam and teasing Muslim girls. They mentioned that they suspect his father, myself, works with the Americans, so he was ordered to write a letter of apology to them (the Brigades of the martyr Zarqawi) with a fine of $1,000 to be put in an envelope and dropped in a certain place in Dora, otherwise the next day he will be kidnapped and beheaded immediately.

“When I heard that, I asked my elder son to get my mother, my two sisters and Martin and bring them to our flat in another part of Baghdad and in the afternoon I arranged for the letter and the money to be dropped for them, so they will not come after my son. In the coming few days, I heard the same thing had happened to 12 Christian families in the same area of Dora…they all paid and left the ara, leaving eerything behind, houses and properties. Now Dora is completely empty of any Christian Assyrians and almost all the churches there had been bombed or burnt.”

Listening to this, I felt lightheaded. What if someone gave me one afternoon to pack up and leave my home in Virginia? What would I do? Fortunately this man managed to get his family into the States, thanks to the State University of New York, where he was given a visiting professorship. But most people in his position – who managed to make it out of Iraq alive, are not allowed to hold jobs nor educate their children while they rot away in refugee camps.

“I think the future is very bleak,” said Pascale Warda, Iraq’s former minister for migration and deplacement. “My people said to me the other Saturday, ‘We’ve never had it so bad since the Mongols.’ “  For those of you unfamiliar with Central Asian history, she’s referring back to 1258, the year the Mongols sacked Baghdad. Tamerlane came in 1401 and razed the city again, creating even more massacres. These folks have long memories.  All the people who testified Wednesday kept on saying the word “genocide.” And that’s what it is.
Here is my article:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070726/NATION/107260064/1002

Iraq’s perils dire for minority faiths

By Julia Duin
July 26, 2007

Iraq’s outnumbered Christians and other religious minority groups are targets of a terror campaign and are facing a dire situation where killings and rapes have become the norm, a panel of witnesses testified yesterday on Capitol Hill.

In a hearing convened by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, Canon Andrew White, vicar of St. George’s Anglican Church in Baghdad, and four other panelists unfolded tales of horrors overtaking Christians, Yezidis (angel worshippers) and Mandaeans, members of a pacifist faith that follows the teachings of John the Baptist.

 

“The situation is more than desperate,” said Mr. White, who described how Christians in Baghdad have been told to convert to Islam or be killed. Hundreds of those who could not afford to flee the country are living in churches without adequate food or water, he said.

“In the past month, 36 members of my own congregation have been kidnapped,” he said. “To date, only one has been returned.”

Iraq’s eight remaining Jews, now hiding in Baghdad, are “the oldest Jewish community in the world,” he said, referring to the 597 B.C. Babylonian conquest of ancient Judah that brought the Jews to the region as captives.

“The international community has done nothing to help these people,” Mr. White said, explaining that the group is trying to emigrate to an Iraqi Jewish enclave in the Netherlands, which won’t admit them.

Michael Youash, director of the Iraq Sustainable Democracy Project, called the situation “soft ethnic cleansing.” The “de-Christianization of Iraq” is not far off, he predicted, saying that Washington has refused to help Iraqi Christians, whose common faith with many Americans has made them loathed by Muslim radicals.

“The State Department just dismisses this as part of an overall conflict,” he said. “But Christians are being disproportionately targeted. The attacks are purely vindictive and vicious. They are meant to give a message.”

Religious minorities have no militias to protect them, Mr. Youash said. “If someone attacks a Shi’ite, there are consequences. If someone attacks a Yezidi or a Mandaean, there are none.”

Pascale Warda, president of the Iraqi Women’s Center in Baghdad, said more than 30 churches have been destroyed; priests have been fatally shot, kidnapped and beheaded; a 14-year-old boy was crucified in Basra; and Baghdad’s once-famous Christian neighborhoods have been emptied of thousands of residents.

“That’s because of fatwas issued by Islamic fundamentalists who give them three choices,” she said. “Convert to Islam, pay the jizya [a tax imposed on non-Muslims] or leave with no personal possessions.”

Suhaib Nashi, general secretary of the Mandaean Associations Union, said that in the past week alone, several Mandaean families in Baghdad were given one hour to leave their homes or be killed.

On Feb. 26, Rena Al-Zuhairy, a 20-year-old Mandaean student, went to school merely to pick up her college degree. “The last voice her mother heard was her crying over the cell phone to save her,” Mr. Nashi said. “The police force is corrupt, often helps attackers and has little to no role in protecting minorities.”

Several panelists criticized Kurdish militias in northern Iraq for joining the persecution.

“Christians flee one dictatorship only to arrive to another dictatorship,” Mr. Youash said. During the January 2005 elections, Kurdish soldiers stole many ballot boxes from areas populated by Christians and Yezidis, he added, but the U.S. government did not respond.

“Minorities learned that standing up for their right to vote only exposed them to greater persecution,” he said.