Rumsfeld and Saddam make a deal

 

Then and now: Requiem for Baghdad

 

Baghdad was never the prettiest of places. But in the 1970s it sure had life. People flocked to its cafés and markets. The wide boulevards teemed with traffic. Books and paintings proclaimed the wealth of Iraq's cultural heritage. Patrick Cockburn, who witnessed it all, remembers the city that seduced him - and wonders if the great metropolis on the banks of the Tigris can ever rise again

 

Published: 08 August 2006

 

These days, when I drive around Baghdad, I sit in the back seat of the car with gauze curtains drawn down so nobody on the street can see me. I have a second car following 100 yards behind to make sure we are not trailed. We try to avoid police and army checkpoints in case they are death squads. My driver, a Sunni Muslim, is rightly frightened of the overwhelmingly Shia police and police commandos. He has fake identity papers so that it is no longer clear to which religious community he belongs.

 

This may not be enough. Coming from the airport, we avoid most checkpoints by taking a serpentine route through the city. At one moment we roar along a highway and then, still at speed, we abruptly divert down an alleyway, weaving between heaps of rotting garbage. I have always known roughly where Sunni and Shia live in Baghdad, but I am now acquiring detailed knowledge of its sectarian geography. A small mistake could have lethal results. The cemeteries are full of Iraqis who were caught in the wrong district.

 

This vast city of seven million people, almost the size of London, is breaking up into a dozen cities, each one of which is becoming a heavily armed Shia or Sunni stronghold. Every morning brings its terrible harvest of bodies. Many lie in the street for hours, bloating in the 120F heat, while others are found floating in the Tigris river.

 

In June, 1,595 bodies, often tortured with an electric drill or by fire, were delivered to the Baghdad morgue. In July, the violence was far worse.

 

In all of Iraq, in June, 3,149 civilians are known to have been killed, more in one month than the total death toll in Northern Ireland in 30 years of violence.

 

Into this maelstrom, President George Bush is ordering 4,000 extra American troops in a bid to control the civil war in Baghdad (absurdly, Bush and Tony Blair reject the phrase "civil war" despite the all-too-visible sectarian carnage). Many embattled Sunni districts will welcome the Americans, but the majority in Baghdad are Shia and they already see the US as playing sectarian politics in order to shore up imperial control.

 

"The Americans are not honest brokers," one former minister told me. "They switch their support between the Shia, Sunni and Kurds in order to serve their own interests." Already, US forces are attacking offices and arresting officials of the main Shia militia the Mehdi Army, followers of the radical nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The US may be joining, not ending, the civil war.

 

I first came to Baghdad, one of the great cities of the world, in 1978, a year before Saddam Hussein assumed supreme power. It was never a pretty city, but I found it deeply attractive. I'd sit near Abu Nawas Street on the east bank of the Tigris, 400 yards wide at this point, eating mazgouf (river fish) cooked over wood fires and drinking arak, a liquor made from dates.

 

I visited the second-hand book shops in al-Muttanabi Street, where there used to be a market with dusty old volumes in English and Arabic laid out for sale on the ground every Friday. At the al-Baghdadi auction house in the al-Adhamiyah district, I bought richly-patterned carpets and Shia religious art - primitive but striking portrayals of battle, suffering and betrayal.

 

Not any more. The mazgouf restaurants along Abu Nawas, where I used to sit at night drinking arak, are almost all closed. If they re-open, it would be dangerous for them to serve alcohol. In my hotel, inhabited these days solely by foreign journalists, the local police turned up a few weeks ago and, claiming to speak on behalf of the Tourism Ministry, now Islamic-run, demanded that alcohol no longer be served. Even reaching Abu Nawas Street is a dangerous challenge these days since American troops have sealed off one end of it.

 

The last time I was there, I talked to the dispirited owner of one empty restaurant who said he was trying to leave the country. He added that the only customers he had served recently turned out to be gangsters who fired their pistols into the air when asked to pay the bill. He gloomily pointed out the bullet holes in the corrugated iron roof.

 

I suppose the booksellers of al-Muttanabi are still open, though when I last visited the market, part of it had caught fire after being hit by an errant mortar-bomb and was still smouldering. An elderly man, 20 years in the book trade, was weeping because the flames had consumed his entire stock of books on Iraqi folklore.

 

In any case, it is too risky these days for me to go anywhere near al-Muttanabi. The street runs directly off al-Rashid Street, the commercial heart of Baghdad under British rule but now a dangerous slum haunted by criminal gangs liable to kidnap any foreigner foolish enough to appear in their neighbourhood.

 

As for the al-Baghdadi auction house, it has been shut since the US invasion in 2003. Al-Adhamiyah, the district in which it stands, has become a Sunni Muslim stronghold where the mosques call the men to fight if the strongly Shia Baghdad police try to enter it. Messengers race through the streets knocking on doors and asking every family to send one of their sons with a gun and ammunition to fight the Shia incursion. Local people recently held a demonstration demanding the withdrawal of a largely Shia army battalion from al-Adhamiyah and its replacement by a Sunni unit.

 

Baghdad as I knew it is dying. No doubt there will be a city of that name on the banks of the Tigris in the future. But its special magic, the fact that gave the city its peculiar allure, was its complex ethnic and religious mix of Shia, Sunni and Kurds. It is this diversity of cultures that is disappearing. Small Christian sects present in Mesopotamia since the second century after Christ are finally being dispersed. They know they are the targets both of Islamic fundamentalists and kidnappers who see Christians as being rich and defenceless, a fatal combination in present-day Iraq.

 

Baghdad is joining other cosmopolitan cities in the Middle East - Alexandria in Egypt, Smyrna in Turkey and Beirut in Lebanon - which have been torn apart by sectarian and ethnic cleansing over the last century.

 

There are few neat sectarian lines dividing the communities in Baghdad. The Shia dominate the east bank of the Tigris, with the exception of the Sunni stronghold of al-Adhamiyah. The great Shia bastion is al-Sadr City, previously Saddam City and before that al-Thawra, with a population of about two million. This is the impoverished Shia heartland of the Iraqi capital and the base of the Mehdi Army and Muqtada al-Sadr. Saddam Hussein's intelligence service regarded its teeming people with deep suspicion.

 

On the other side of the Tigris lies al-Qadamiyah, a venerable Shia area and centre of pilgrimage that was once a separate town north of Baghdad but is now absorbed into the city. The pilgrims travel from across the Shia world to visit the Khadimain, the golden-domed Shia shrine, containing the tombs of two Shia imams. I always enjoyed the streets full of gold and jewellery shops surrounding the shrine, and the pious informality with which poor pilgrims sat down in its vast marble-paved courtyard to sleep or cook their food over little stoves.

 

I do not want to romanticise the old Baghdad that is now passing away as a centre of multiethnic understanding and amity. The city has, on the contrary, an extraordinarily violent past. It was founded as a round city by Abu Ja'far al-Mansour, the second Abbasid caliph, in 762AD, on the fertile banks of the Tigris, where that river comes close to the Euphrates.

 

At the centre of the trade routes between east and west, it soon became one of the richest cities in the world. Its luxurious palaces, merchant quarters and crowded quays were the backdrop for the tales in The Thousand and One Nights.

 

The Mongols sacked the city in 1258, the Ottomans held it for hundreds of years and the British for a few decades. Iraqis have an acute sense of their own history. Different communities have their heroes and villains. Eighteen months ago, 1,200 years after Caliph al-Mansour died, gunmen, probably Shia, attached explosives to his statue near Baghdad railway station and blew it to pieces.

 

At the time I first started to visit Iraq in the late 1970s, the prospects for the city looked good. Oil revenues were soaring and administration was effective. New roads, bridges, hotels, schools and hospitals were being built across the city. I did not immediately recognise the bloodthirstiness of the regime because there was a hiatus in Baghdad's war with the Kurds, and it was only the following year, in 1979, that Saddam executed one-third of his Revolution Command Council and took over supreme power.

 

Foreign journalists were supposedly closely watched, but my minder from the Ministry of Information, a menacing figure in many correspondents' reports from Iraq, had managed to miss me at the airport and we spent several days looking for each other. Iraq was still one of the most secular countries in the Middle East. In Basra, the main complaint among Iraqis about Kuwaitis was that they were crossing the border and drinking the city dry of beer.

 

It turned out that I was not watching a new dawn in Baghdad, but its last days of peace and normality. Two years later, Saddam plunged into a disastrous war with Iran that lasted until 1988. Only a few Iranian bombs and missiles fell on the capital. At first, the manic building boom continued, using borrowed money from Arab oil states frightened by the Iranian revolution. Big new hotels such as the al-Rashid, Meridien Palestine and Ishtar Sheraton opened, their tall towers rising above the palm trees.

 

But the optimistic and well-educated young men I had met when I first visited the country were being forced into the army. The personality cult of Saddam Hussein reached grotesque proportions as pictures and statues of the leader, dressed as everything from Bedouin sheikh to Kurdish mountaineer, were erected in each street.

 

The physical appearance of Baghdad only began to change in 1991, during the six-week bombardment by US bombs and missiles. Explosions tore apart the bridges, power stations and oil refineries. On the morning after the first missiles landed, I walked through the mist to look at a telecommunications centre that at first sight appeared to have survived. As I got closer, I could see that its interior was a mass of wreckage.

 

Missiles has turned the military intelligence headquarters into a concrete pancake. A great column of oil-black smoke rising from the Dohra refinery in south Baghdad was visible 30 miles away to Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait. The city ran out of fuel because Saddam had failed to store any. I bought black-market petrol in a market near Saddam City, but it was so watered down that my car would grind to a halt at times, emitting puffs of black smoke and white steam.

 

On the surface, Baghdad recovered swiftly from the 1991 Gulf War. Reconstruction of bridges, power stations and refineries proceeded surprisingly quickly. Old machinery was cannibalised. One of the four chimneys of the Dohra power station, highly visible from the rest of Baghdad, was rebuilt and painted in the Iraqi colours. Saddam indulged his megalomania by building ornate palaces and giant mosques all over the city.

 

But the recovery was never as complete as it looked. War and United Nations sanctions relentlessly impoverished the people of Baghdad. The currency collapsed. Most people worked for the state, and the government had little money. University professors and teachers in schools were soon earning less than $10 a month. They fled abroad or looked desperately for other jobs.

 

Soon there were millions of people in Baghdad living on the edge of destitution. I saw men standing in the market during the furnace-like summer heat trying to sell a few plates or ungainly gilt furniture. Crime became common. The government started cutting off the hands and ears of thieves and showing the results on television. Iraqi society became like a lump of wet sugar ready to dissolve as soon as Saddam's iron rule was ended.

 

Even so, the ferocity of the looting in April 2003 after Saddam fled was astonishing. Iraqis, both Arabs and Kurds, have always looted when they could get away with it. But the savage destructiveness with which ministries, government offices, museums and even hospitals were torn apart by the poor of Baghdad was like a social revolution. It was as if they were taking revenge against the Iraqi state that had oppressed them for so long.

 

I visited the Iraqi Natural History Museum, where the looters had taken the trouble to decapitate the life-size model dinosaurs in the forecourt. Inside, they used their rifle butts to smash all the glass cases containing examples of Iraqi wildlife in its natural environment. Only a stuffed white horse, given (when alive) to Saddam by the King of Morocco had been spared.

 

Baghdad never really recovered from the looting. For weeks, the Americans made no real effort to stop it. Their generals were believers in their own propaganda, which claimed that the troubles of Iraq all stemmed from Saddam Hussein and foreign "terrorists" despatched by Osama bin Laden or Iranian ayatollahs. A month after the fall of Baghdad, I would still see elderly white pick-ups piled high with loot passing without hindrance through US checkpoints on their way to markets in Fallujah and Ramadi.

 

Baghdad was soon full of burnt-out government buildings. People who thought that occupation meant liberation were rapidly disillusioned when the US took over Saddam's palace complex and renamed it the Green Zone. It instantly became a symbol of foreign conquest, whose inhabitants were notoriously isolated from the grim reality of Iraq. Ghazi al-Yawer, the US-appointed president of Iraq in 2004-05, remarked scathingly: "The difference between the Green Zone and the rest of Baghdad is like that between a safari park and the real jungle."

 

The physical face of Baghdad was changing in another way. In August 2003, the first suicide bombers driving vehicles packed with explosives attacked the Jordanian embassy and the UN headquarters on Canal Street. Nobody was safe. Again and again, queues of young men, desperate for jobs, were targeted as they waited at recruitment centres for the army and police.

 

I went to the shattered Red Cross headquarters, half-protected by a wall of sandbags, where workmen were standing in a water-filled crater trying to mend a broken pipe. Almost every prominent building was targeted at one time or another. The Independent's suite in the al-Hamra hotel was finally destroyed in November 2005 when two suicide bombers tried to breach the concrete blast-wall outside and almost succeeded. I was away, but my colleague Kim Sengupta was cut by flying glass as his room was ripped apart by the blast.

 

The appearance of central Baghdad changed rapidly because of the suicide-bombing campaign. Enormous blast walls, made out of concrete sections looking like giant grey tombstones, snaked across the city. They protected all US and Iraqi government facilities as well as hotels and houses used by foreigners. They sealed off streets and districts, often to the dismay of shopkeepers whose customers could no longer reach them. The concrete blocked so many roads that there was a permanent traffic jam in the centre of the city. Journeys of a few miles could take several hours.

 

American and British officials have often complained over the past three years that the media never report the good news from Iraq. It is therefore worth recording that, by this July, traffic jams in Baghdad were no longer a problem. I used to budget 45 minutes to travel between my hotel and the Green Zone; now I can do it in 15 minutes.

 

The reason, however, is scarcely to the credit of the Iraqi government or the US. The streets of Baghdad are astonishingly empty of cars and vehicles because people are too frightened to go out or cannot afford the high price of petrol - or have fled abroad.

 

Iraq has an oil economy and the lack of fuel is the final insult. Even at the worst of times under Saddam, Iraqis enjoyed almost free petrol, diesel and kerosene. Because of the failure to improve the supply of electricity since 2003, just about everyone in Baghdad has bought a generator, though these are often small. Now, fuel for a medium-sized generator costs $10 to $15 a day - far more than most people can afford. Instead, they must sit in the dark. Water is scarce because the supply pressure is low and it needs to be pumped.

 

I do not know if I will go back to Baghdad. The occupation, sectarian warfare and collapse of the economy have destroyed it. Most of my friends have fled. The few that have stayed tell terrible stories of atrocities.

 

Often, my two cars are the only ones on a once-crowded road. The government in the Green Zone is as remote from its own people as if it was on a separate planet. Baghdad may rise again, but it will be a different city.

 

Patrick Cockburn is the author of 'The Occupation: War, resistance and daily life in Iraq', to be published by Verso in October

 

A history of war and peace

 

100BC

 

Founding of the city of Ctesiphon on the banks of the Tigris, 20km south of modern-day Baghdad, by the Parthian Empire. When it fell to the Arab Islamic armies in 637, Ctesiphon is believed to have been the largest city on earth.

 

762

 

Caliph al-Mansour creates the new city of Baghdad. For 500 years, the Abassid capital is the centre of learning, attracting scholars from around the world. Baghdadis call this the Golden Age.

 

1258

 

In one of the worst wholesale massacres of a single city, the Mongol armies sack Baghdad and kill up to 800,000 people. Its vital irrigation system and world-famous libraries ruined, the city never recovers.

 

1534

 

After nearly 300 years of instability and a second sacking by the armies of Timur in 1401, Baghdad is taken over by the Ottoman Sultan Suleyman I. In the period of peace that follows, the city flourishes.

 

1917

 

Under Lt-Gen Sir Stanley Maude, 600,000 British troops enter Baghdad after defeating the Turkish armies. After just two years, Iraqis rise up and Britain finds itself mired in a violent insurgency.

 

1932

 

With Baghdad as his capital, King Faisal I finally achieves full independence from Britain, despite having been made King of Iraq in 1921. Baghdad becomes a city of political intrigue as military leaders stage a series of coups until the monarchy finally falls in 1958.

 

1970

 

After a ruthless cull of his rivals, Saddam Hussein becomes supreme leader. Oil wealth allows lavish spending on his capital's infrastructure, which he portrays as an example of his regime's success.

 

1991

 

US-led forces bomb Baghdad in response to Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. UN sanctions against the Iraqi regime result in a rapid deterioration in the quality of life in the capital.

 

2003

 

The US-led invasion sees the capital heavily bombed again. After the city's fall, much of its cultural heritage is lost to looting. Baghdad quickly earns the title of the world's most dangerous city.

 

2006

 

After the bombing of a Shia shrine in the city of Samarra, Baghdad's Sunni and Shia communities in effect declare civil war against each other.

 

These days, when I drive around Baghdad, I sit in the back seat of the car with gauze curtains drawn down so nobody on the street can see me. I have a second car following 100 yards behind to make sure we are not trailed. We try to avoid police and army checkpoints in case they are death squads. My driver, a Sunni Muslim, is rightly frightened of the overwhelmingly Shia police and police commandos. He has fake identity papers so that it is no longer clear to which religious community he belongs.

 

This may not be enough. Coming from the airport, we avoid most checkpoints by taking a serpentine route through the city. At one moment we roar along a highway and then, still at speed, we abruptly divert down an alleyway, weaving between heaps of rotting garbage. I have always known roughly where Sunni and Shia live in Baghdad, but I am now acquiring detailed knowledge of its sectarian geography. A small mistake could have lethal results. The cemeteries are full of Iraqis who were caught in the wrong district.

 

This vast city of seven million people, almost the size of London, is breaking up into a dozen cities, each one of which is becoming a heavily armed Shia or Sunni stronghold. Every morning brings its terrible harvest of bodies. Many lie in the street for hours, bloating in the 120F heat, while others are found floating in the Tigris river.

 

In June, 1,595 bodies, often tortured with an electric drill or by fire, were delivered to the Baghdad morgue. In July, the violence was far worse.

 

In all of Iraq, in June, 3,149 civilians are known to have been killed, more in one month than the total death toll in Northern Ireland in 30 years of violence.

 

Into this maelstrom, President George Bush is ordering 4,000 extra American troops in a bid to control the civil war in Baghdad (absurdly, Bush and Tony Blair reject the phrase "civil war" despite the all-too-visible sectarian carnage). Many embattled Sunni districts will welcome the Americans, but the majority in Baghdad are Shia and they already see the US as playing sectarian politics in order to shore up imperial control.

 

"The Americans are not honest brokers," one former minister told me. "They switch their support between the Shia, Sunni and Kurds in order to serve their own interests." Already, US forces are attacking offices and arresting officials of the main Shia militia the Mehdi Army, followers of the radical nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The US may be joining, not ending, the civil war.

 

I first came to Baghdad, one of the great cities of the world, in 1978, a year before Saddam Hussein assumed supreme power. It was never a pretty city, but I found it deeply attractive. I'd sit near Abu Nawas Street on the east bank of the Tigris, 400 yards wide at this point, eating mazgouf (river fish) cooked over wood fires and drinking arak, a liquor made from dates.

 

I visited the second-hand book shops in al-Muttanabi Street, where there used to be a market with dusty old volumes in English and Arabic laid out for sale on the ground every Friday. At the al-Baghdadi auction house in the al-Adhamiyah district, I bought richly-patterned carpets and Shia religious art - primitive but striking portrayals of battle, suffering and betrayal.

 

Not any more. The mazgouf restaurants along Abu Nawas, where I used to sit at night drinking arak, are almost all closed. If they re-open, it would be dangerous for them to serve alcohol. In my hotel, inhabited these days solely by foreign journalists, the local police turned up a few weeks ago and, claiming to speak on behalf of the Tourism Ministry, now Islamic-run, demanded that alcohol no longer be served. Even reaching Abu Nawas Street is a dangerous challenge these days since American troops have sealed off one end of it.

 

The last time I was there, I talked to the dispirited owner of one empty restaurant who said he was trying to leave the country. He added that the only customers he had served recently turned out to be gangsters who fired their pistols into the air when asked to pay the bill. He gloomily pointed out the bullet holes in the corrugated iron roof.

 

I suppose the booksellers of al-Muttanabi are still open, though when I last visited the market, part of it had caught fire after being hit by an errant mortar-bomb and was still smouldering. An elderly man, 20 years in the book trade, was weeping because the flames had consumed his entire stock of books on Iraqi folklore.

 

In any case, it is too risky these days for me to go anywhere near al-Muttanabi. The street runs directly off al-Rashid Street, the commercial heart of Baghdad under British rule but now a dangerous slum haunted by criminal gangs liable to kidnap any foreigner foolish enough to appear in their neighbourhood.

 

As for the al-Baghdadi auction house, it has been shut since the US invasion in 2003. Al-Adhamiyah, the district in which it stands, has become a Sunni Muslim stronghold where the mosques call the men to fight if the strongly Shia Baghdad police try to enter it. Messengers race through the streets knocking on doors and asking every family to send one of their sons with a gun and ammunition to fight the Shia incursion. Local people recently held a demonstration demanding the withdrawal of a largely Shia army battalion from al-Adhamiyah and its replacement by a Sunni unit.

 

Baghdad as I knew it is dying. No doubt there will be a city of that name on the banks of the Tigris in the future. But its special magic, the fact that gave the city its peculiar allure, was its complex ethnic and religious mix of Shia, Sunni and Kurds. It is this diversity of cultures that is disappearing. Small Christian sects present in Mesopotamia since the second century after Christ are finally being dispersed. They know they are the targets both of Islamic fundamentalists and kidnappers who see Christians as being rich and defenceless, a fatal combination in present-day Iraq.

 

Baghdad is joining other cosmopolitan cities in the Middle East - Alexandria in Egypt, Smyrna in Turkey and Beirut in Lebanon - which have been torn apart by sectarian and ethnic cleansing over the last century.

 

There are few neat sectarian lines dividing the communities in Baghdad. The Shia dominate the east bank of the Tigris, with the exception of the Sunni stronghold of al-Adhamiyah. The great Shia bastion is al-Sadr City, previously Saddam City and before that al-Thawra, with a population of about two million. This is the impoverished Shia heartland of the Iraqi capital and the base of the Mehdi Army and Muqtada al-Sadr. Saddam Hussein's intelligence service regarded its teeming people with deep suspicion.

 

On the other side of the Tigris lies al-Qadamiyah, a venerable Shia area and centre of pilgrimage that was once a separate town north of Baghdad but is now absorbed into the city. The pilgrims travel from across the Shia world to visit the Khadimain, the golden-domed Shia shrine, containing the tombs of two Shia imams. I always enjoyed the streets full of gold and jewellery shops surrounding the shrine, and the pious informality with which poor pilgrims sat down in its vast marble-paved courtyard to sleep or cook their food over little stoves.

 

I do not want to romanticise the old Baghdad that is now passing away as a centre of multiethnic understanding and amity. The city has, on the contrary, an extraordinarily violent past. It was founded as a round city by Abu Ja'far al-Mansour, the second Abbasid caliph, in 762AD, on the fertile banks of the Tigris, where that river comes close to the Euphrates.

 

At the centre of the trade routes between east and west, it soon became one of the richest cities in the world. Its luxurious palaces, merchant quarters and crowded quays were the backdrop for the tales in The Thousand and One Nights.

 

The Mongols sacked the city in 1258, the Ottomans held it for hundreds of years and the British for a few decades. Iraqis have an acute sense of their own history. Different communities have their heroes and villains. Eighteen months ago, 1,200 years after Caliph al-Mansour died, gunmen, probably Shia, attached explosives to his statue near Baghdad railway station and blew it to pieces.

 

At the time I first started to visit Iraq in the late 1970s, the prospects for the city looked good. Oil revenues were soaring and administration was effective. New roads, bridges, hotels, schools and hospitals were being built across the city. I did not immediately recognise the bloodthirstiness of the regime because there was a hiatus in Baghdad's war with the Kurds, and it was only the following year, in 1979, that Saddam executed one-third of his Revolution Command Council and took over supreme power.

 

Foreign journalists were supposedly closely watched, but my minder from the Ministry of Information, a menacing figure in many correspondents' reports from Iraq, had managed to miss me at the airport and we spent several days looking for each other. Iraq was still one of the most secular countries in the Middle East. In Basra, the main complaint among Iraqis about Kuwaitis was that they were crossing the border and drinking the city dry of beer.

 

It turned out that I was not watching a new dawn in Baghdad, but its last days of peace and normality. Two years later, Saddam plunged into a disastrous war with Iran that lasted until 1988. Only a few Iranian bombs and missiles fell on the capital. At first, the manic building boom continued, using borrowed money from Arab oil states frightened by the Iranian revolution. Big new hotels such as the al-Rashid, Meridien Palestine and Ishtar Sheraton opened, their tall towers rising above the palm trees.

 

But the optimistic and well-educated young men I had met when I first visited the country were being forced into the army. The personality cult of Saddam Hussein reached grotesque proportions as pictures and statues of the leader, dressed as everything from Bedouin sheikh to Kurdish mountaineer, were erected in each street.

 

The physical appearance of Baghdad only began to change in 1991, during the six-week bombardment by US bombs and missiles. Explosions tore apart the bridges, power stations and oil refineries. On the morning after the first missiles landed, I walked through the mist to look at a telecommunications centre that at first sight appeared to have survived. As I got closer, I could see that its interior was a mass of wreckage.

 

Missiles has turned the military intelligence headquarters into a concrete pancake. A great column of oil-black smoke rising from the Dohra refinery in south Baghdad was visible 30 miles away to Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait. The city ran out of fuel because Saddam had failed to store any. I bought black-market petrol in a market near Saddam City, but it was so watered down that my car would grind to a halt at times, emitting puffs of black smoke and white steam.

 

On the surface, Baghdad recovered swiftly from the 1991 Gulf War. Reconstruction of bridges, power stations and refineries proceeded surprisingly quickly. Old machinery was cannibalised. One of the four chimneys of the Dohra power station, highly visible from the rest of Baghdad, was rebuilt and painted in the Iraqi colours. Saddam indulged his megalomania by building ornate palaces and giant mosques all over the city.

 

But the recovery was never as complete as it looked. War and United Nations sanctions relentlessly impoverished the people of Baghdad. The currency collapsed. Most people worked for the state, and the government had little money. University professors and teachers in schools were soon earning less than $10 a month. They fled abroad or looked desperately for other jobs.

 

Soon there were millions of people in Baghdad living on the edge of destitution. I saw men standing in the market during the furnace-like summer heat trying to sell a few plates or ungainly gilt furniture. Crime became common. The government started cutting off the hands and ears of thieves and showing the results on television. Iraqi society became like a lump of wet sugar ready to dissolve as soon as Saddam's iron rule was ended.

 

Even so, the ferocity of the looting in April 2003 after Saddam fled was astonishing. Iraqis, both Arabs and Kurds, have always looted when they could get away with it. But the savage destructiveness with which ministries, government offices, museums and even hospitals were torn apart by the poor of Baghdad was like a social revolution. It was as if they were taking revenge against the Iraqi state that had oppressed them for so long.

 

I visited the Iraqi Natural History Museum, where the looters had taken the trouble to decapitate the life-size model dinosaurs in the forecourt. Inside, they used their rifle butts to smash all the glass cases containing examples of Iraqi wildlife in its natural environment. Only a stuffed white horse, given (when alive) to Saddam by the King of Morocco had been spared.

 

Baghdad never really recovered from the looting. For weeks, the Americans made no real effort to stop it. Their generals were believers in their own propaganda, which claimed that the troubles of Iraq all stemmed from Saddam Hussein and foreign "terrorists" despatched by Osama bin Laden or Iranian ayatollahs. A month after the fall of Baghdad, I would still see elderly white pick-ups piled high with loot passing without hindrance through US checkpoints on their way to markets in Fallujah and Ramadi.

 

Baghdad was soon full of burnt-out government buildings. People who thought that occupation meant liberation were rapidly disillusioned when the US took over Saddam's palace complex and renamed it the Green Zone. It instantly became a symbol of foreign conquest, whose inhabitants were notoriously isolated from the grim reality of Iraq. Ghazi al-Yawer, the US-appointed president of Iraq in 2004-05, remarked scathingly: "The difference between the Green Zone and the rest of Baghdad is like that between a safari park and the real jungle."

 

The physical face of Baghdad was changing in another way. In August 2003, the first suicide bombers driving vehicles packed with explosives attacked the Jordanian embassy and the UN headquarters on Canal Street. Nobody was safe. Again and again, queues of young men, desperate for jobs, were targeted as they waited at recruitment centres for the army and police.

 

I went to the shattered Red Cross headquarters, half-protected by a wall of sandbags, where workmen were standing in a water-filled crater trying to mend a broken pipe. Almost every prominent building was targeted at one time or another. The Independent's suite in the al-Hamra hotel was finally destroyed in November 2005 when two suicide bombers tried to breach the concrete blast-wall outside and almost succeeded. I was away, but my colleague Kim Sengupta was cut by flying glass as his room was ripped apart by the blast.

 

The appearance of central Baghdad changed rapidly because of the suicide-bombing campaign. Enormous blast walls, made out of concrete sections looking like giant grey tombstones, snaked across the city. They protected all US and Iraqi government facilities as well as hotels and houses used by foreigners. They sealed off streets and districts, often to the dismay of shopkeepers whose customers could no longer reach them. The concrete blocked so many roads that there was a permanent traffic jam in the centre of the city. Journeys of a few miles could take several hours.

 

American and British officials have often complained over the past three years that the media never report the good news from Iraq. It is therefore worth recording that, by this July, traffic jams in Baghdad were no longer a problem. I used to budget 45 minutes to travel between my hotel and the Green Zone; now I can do it in 15 minutes.

 

The reason, however, is scarcely to the credit of the Iraqi government or the US. The streets of Baghdad are astonishingly empty of cars and vehicles because people are too frightened to go out or cannot afford the high price of petrol - or have fled abroad.

 

Iraq has an oil economy and the lack of fuel is the final insult. Even at the worst of times under Saddam, Iraqis enjoyed almost free petrol, diesel and kerosene. Because of the failure to improve the supply of electricity since 2003, just about everyone in Baghdad has bought a generator, though these are often small. Now, fuel for a medium-sized generator costs $10 to $15 a day - far more than most people can afford. Instead, they must sit in the dark. Water is scarce because the supply pressure is low and it needs to be pumped.

 

I do not know if I will go back to Baghdad. The occupation, sectarian warfare and collapse of the economy have destroyed it. Most of my friends have fled. The few that have stayed tell terrible stories of atrocities.

 

Often, my two cars are the only ones on a once-crowded road. The government in the Green Zone is as remote from its own people as if it was on a separate planet. Baghdad may rise again, but it will be a different city.

 

Patrick Cockburn is the author of 'The Occupation: War, resistance and daily life in Iraq', to be published by Verso in October

 

A history of war and peace

 

100BC

 

Founding of the city of Ctesiphon on the banks of the Tigris, 20km south of modern-day Baghdad, by the Parthian Empire. When it fell to the Arab Islamic armies in 637, Ctesiphon is believed to have been the largest city on earth.

 

762

 

Caliph al-Mansour creates the new city of Baghdad. For 500 years, the Abassid capital is the centre of learning, attracting scholars from around the world. Baghdadis call this the Golden Age.

 

1258

 

In one of the worst wholesale massacres of a single city, the Mongol armies sack Baghdad and kill up to 800,000 people. Its vital irrigation system and world-famous libraries ruined, the city never recovers.

 

1534

 

After nearly 300 years of instability and a second sacking by the armies of Timur in 1401, Baghdad is taken over by the Ottoman Sultan Suleyman I. In the period of peace that follows, the city flourishes.

 

1917

 

Under Lt-Gen Sir Stanley Maude, 600,000 British troops enter Baghdad after defeating the Turkish armies. After just two years, Iraqis rise up and Britain finds itself mired in a violent insurgency.

 

1932

 

With Baghdad as his capital, King Faisal I finally achieves full independence from Britain, despite having been made King of Iraq in 1921. Baghdad becomes a city of political intrigue as military leaders stage a series of coups until the monarchy finally falls in 1958.

 

1970

 

After a ruthless cull of his rivals, Saddam Hussein becomes supreme leader. Oil wealth allows lavish spending on his capital's infrastructure, which he portrays as an example of his regime's success.

 

1991

 

US-led forces bomb Baghdad in response to Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. UN sanctions against the Iraqi regime result in a rapid deterioration in the quality of life in the capital.

 

2003

 

The US-led invasion sees the capital heavily bombed again. After the city's fall, much of its cultural heritage is lost to looting. Baghdad quickly earns the title of the world's most dangerous city.

 

2006

 

After the bombing of a Shia shrine in the city of Samarra, Baghdad's Sunni and Shia communities in effect declare civil war against each other.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

uruknet.info

اوروكنت.إنفو information from occupied iraq

informazione dall'iraq occupato

 

 

An Open Letter to America

 

Ibrahim Ebeid...Are we responsible for the acts of our government? Yes we are responsible because we allow such people to hold office; we have elected them and now we are paying the price. People around the world hate us. Our young men and women are being killed, and we are creating more enemies. We do not have enough jobs; our senior citizens cannot afford to buy medicine; we pay high prices for gasoline; and we pay heavy taxes to supply the costs of wars committed by our government an! d by our Zionist allies. We became the butchers of the world instead of the advocates of peace. We should stop supplying "Israel" with weapons of destruction. We should stop wasting our billions on the "Israeli" war machine. We should stop all the wars that we are launching around the world, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq...

 

 

 

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25401

 

 

 

 

Israel: Blackmailing the world

William BowlesI’ve spent the last couple of days doing (almost) nothing but reading, trying to get a handle on events. Firstly, it’s obvious to anyone who knows anything about Lebanon and the place of Hizballah in Lebanese society realises that the idea of destroying Hizballah is ridiculous regardless that it’s Israel’s stated objective. Therefore what are the real objectives of the US/Israeli onslaught? Firstly, Israel is in no position to occupy Lebanon, either militarily or even! more importantly, economically, thus it needed to create the right conditions for some kind of foreign occupation force, ideally a NATO-led force (this explains why Israel is so opposed to the UN) to move in...

 

 

 

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25396

 

 

 

 

After Qana massacre

U.S.-Israeli war crimes exposed to the world

 

Sara Flounders...Israel has a history of using massacres to intimidate a population under occupation. In 1982 after Israel invaded and occupied Lebanon all the way up to Beirut to force the withdrawal of Palestinian resistance fighters, it sent death squads into the disarmed Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Hundreds of defenseless refugees were executed. Ariel Sharon’s role in this massacre was so well known that ev! en the Kahan Commission set up by the Israeli Knesset, or parliament, found him guilty of war crimes. He was then dismissed as Israeli defense minister. This hardly hurt his support among hard-core Zionists. He never served a day in prison and went on to become prime minister. Zionist military policy has drawn on tactics, including massacres to drive out indigenous people, that have been used by the U.S. ever since its wars against the Native peoples in North America. Massacres of civilians who supported resistance to U.S. imperialism were used extensively in Washington’s wars in the Philippines, Korea and Vietnam...

 

 

 

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25397

 

 

 

 

IOF War Crimes: HRW Issues a Meaningless Report

Kurt NimmoOnce again, in predictably worthless fashion, Human Rights Watch has complained about "serious violations of international humanitarian law (the laws of war) by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Lebanon between July 12 and July 27, 2006, as well as the July 30 attack in Qana. During this period, the IDF killed an estimated 400 people, the vast majority of them civilians, and that number climbed to over 500 by the time this report went to print. The Israeli g! overnment claims it is taking all possible measures to minimize civilian harm, but the cases documented here reveal a systematic failure by the IDF to distinguish between combatants and civilians." It should be common knowledge Israel is an outlaw, criminal state and has violated every humanitarian law on the books since its inception in 1948. It should be, but in fact it isn’t, as the corporate media continues to portray Israel as a poor besieged state, the only democracy in the Middle East, and increasingly the Arabs of the area are vilified as Hezbollah dupes deserving to be bombed and slaughtered...

 

 

 

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25398

 

 

 

 

Son of Osama: Demonizing Hezbolla

Kurt NimmoLike father, like son. Or maybe the acorn does not fall far from the tree. "A son of Osama bin Laden has gone from Iran to Lebanon with the mission to organize terror attacks against Israel," reports the New York Post, a reliable source for neocon nonsense. If we are to believe the latest in a long line of absurd fairy tales, Saad bin Laden "was released by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard" and tasked with killing Israelis. "From the Lebanese border, he has the task of ! building Islamist terror cells and preparing them to fight with Hezbollah," according to the German daily Die Welt. "Apparently, Tehran is counting on recruiting Lebanese refugees in Syria for the fight against Israel, using bin Laden’s help," never mind that it was reported bin Laden the Younger was purportedly arrested in Iran, a natural occurrence considering the numerous threats issued by "al-Qaeda" and its dead lieutenant, Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi, against Shi’ites, regarded as heretics and infidels by fanatical Wahhabi Sunni Muslims...

 

 

 

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25407

 

 

 

 

Hassan Nassrullah's Speech Highlights: If Israelis Attack Beirut, Hizbullah Will Attack Tel Aviv

Aljazeerah.infoThe following is a summary of the main points of a speech made by the Hizbullah leader, Shaikh Hasssan Nassrullah, which was aired by Al-Manar TV and several TV stations around the world today, Augsust 3, 2006.

I. Battlefield: 1. Hizbullah resistance fighters are still fighting the Israeli invading forces all over south Lebanon after 23 days of hostilities. This has been the real surprise for the Israeli leaders who expected to occupy south Lebanon and destroy Hizbullah in few days. 2. Hizbullah destroyed two Israeli naval warships, one off Beirut coast, the other off Saida coast. On both cases, Israelis denied the Hizbullah story. The first one was later confirmed. The Israelis are still in denial to hide the facts from their people about the second. 3. Hizbullah fighters follow a guerilla warfare. They do not keep geographical territory. Their goal is attacking the enemy quickly, then disappearing quickly, so the war can last forever or until the enemy leave south Lebanon...

 

 

 

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25406

 

 

 

 

Making the Rubble Bounce in Lebanon

Kurt NimmoAccording to a report posted on the Reuters site, Israel has threatened to "destroy Lebanon’s infrastructure if Hizbollah fires rockets at Tel Aviv as Hizbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah threatened on Thursday, a senior Israeli defense source told Israel’s Channel One television." Excuse me, but it seems Israel has already done a mighty effective job of destroying Lebanon’s infrastructure. I guess the 60 bridges and 70 roads destroyed, the taking out of Beirut’s ! airport, the destruction of power plants, the fuel tanks and gas stations bombed, the food warehouses, dams, schools, television and radio stations, churches, mosques, hospitals, ambulances, and the thousands and thousands of homes targeted and destroyed are not, according to the Israelis, part of Lebanon’s critical infrastructure. In essence, what Israel is saying here is that if Tel Aviv is touched by Hezbollah’s tinker-toy rockets they will make the rubble bounce in Lebanon...

 

 

 

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25405

 

 

 

 

Freedom to Fascism - A Must-See Film by Aaron Russo

Stephen LendmanAaron Russo has produced an important documentary film titled Freedom to Fascism that should be must viewing for everyone. It's now playing in theaters in selective cities around the US and hopefully will be shown abroad as well as what happens in the most powerful country on earth affects all others for better or worse. No one seeing this film will doubt it's frighteningly for the worst. The film focuses mainly on the US Internal Revenue Ser! vice proving that the federal income tax on an individual's wage-paid labor is illegal and unconstitutional because there's no law written requiring that anyone pay it. It also exposes the US Federal Reserve System as a private for-profit banking cartel owned and run by its member banks for their benefit and at the expense of the public forced to pay them interest on money they have no legal right to print, put in circulation and control...

 

 

 

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25403

 

 

 

 

Eight Palestinians killed; 29 injured in overnight invasion of Gaza Strip

Ma'an NewsEight Palestinians, among them a child, have been killed and a further 29 injured, since midnight, in armed confrontations between the Israeli military and members of Palestinian resistance during an Israeli invasion to the town of Al Shokeh, near the 'President Yasser Arafat' Gaza international airport, south-east of the city of Rafah. Ma'an's correspondent said that the body of one of the Palestinians admitted to the morgue had! been cut into pieces by the Israeli weapons used. Our correspondent made clear that this victim's name was Ziad Sleman Shekh El-Eid, 23 years old...

 

 

 

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25402

 

 

 

 

UN Dithering on Qana and Meaningless Resolutions

Hassan Hanizadeh, PalestineFreevoiceAlthough we are in the third week of the Zionist regime’s savage attacks on residential areas of Lebanon, the United Nations Security Council is still silent about these atrocities. The massacre of innocent Lebanese children in Qana is one of the most terrible atrocities committed by the savage Zionist. However, the international community has only been a bystander to these terrorist crimes without taking any appropriate measure! s. The silence of the United Nations as well as its failure to issue a resolution condemning the Zionist atrocities indicates that the neocolonial powers are determined to lead the world into chaos, institutionalize state-sponsored terrorism, and impose rule by the law of the jungle on the world.

 

 

 

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25400

 

 

 

 

De-Arabization of Arab League

Nicola Nasser, www.dissidentvoice.orgThe Israeli bombardment of Lebanon and Palestine as well as the ongoing U.S. process of abruptly and forcibly delivering to life a lifeless new US-modeled Iraqi regime are crushing the Arab League "system" in a life-or-death test and again pushing it into a collision course with the people. Almost all the constitutions and basic laws of the Arab League’s twenty-two states, including the stateless Palestinian Authority, stipulate that their people! s and countries are an integral part of the "Arab nation" and some explicitly pronounce Pan-Arab unity as a national goal. Yet almost all of them in practice pursue policies that flagrantly violate their constitutional stipulations, enveloping their contradiction in Pan-Arab rhetoric Jargon...

 

 

 

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25399

 

 

 

 

US-Israeli onslaught on Lebanon intensifies

Mike HeadBacked by the Bush administration, Israel has poured thousands more troops into Lebanon and escalated its aerial bombardment in its bid to crush all resistance and take control of the south of the country. With the US blocking all calls for an immediate ceasefire—to give the Israeli military more time to complete the job—Israeli leaders have openly declared that the offensive will continue for weeks. Aided by the lack of any opposition from the UN and the Euro! pean Union, the objectives set by the US and Israel from the outset of the war are being pursued methodically and with barbaric devastation. Hezbollah’s capture of two Israeli Defence Force (IDF) soldiers has been used as a pretext to attempt to kill or drive out the population of south Lebanon and bring the entire country under its political sway...

 

 

 

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25394

 

 

 

 

Mass Murder in Qana

Charles Jenks, Traprock Writers Blog...The US has been crystal clear that it wants to give Israel time to clear out Hezbollah from the south of Lebanon. These are the "birth pangs" of the new Middle East, after all, per Rice. Once Israel has accomplished its goals, it would have no reason to object to an international force to occupy and pacify the area. It’s own occupation of Lebanon was a disaster - let someone else do it this time. And Bush and Rice will look like peacemakers to many in th! e US, if CNN, FoxNews and the rest of government/corporate controlled can obscure the truth long enough...

 

 

 

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25404

 

 

 

 

Half of all Christians have fled Iraq since 2003, says Baghdad bishop

Simon Caldwell, Catholic News ServiceHalf of all Iraqi Christians have fled their country since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, said the auxiliary bishop of Baghdad. Chaldean Catholic Auxiliary Bishop Andreos Abouna of Baghdad said that before the invasion there were about 1.2 million Christians in the predominantly Shiite Muslim state. Since then the overall number has dropped to about 600,000, he said. "What we are hearing now is the alarm bell ! for Christianity in Iraq," the bishop said. "When so many are leaving from a small community like ours, you know that it is dangerous -- dangerous for the future of the church in Iraq."...

 

 

 

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25408

 

 

 

 

Haditha report 'will back up US execution allegations'

Julian Borger, The GuardianA criminal investigation into the deaths of 24 Iraqis in the town of Haditha last year is close to completion and will support allegations that they were deliberately killed by a group of US marines, it was reported yesterday. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which is investigating the killings in Haditha last November, was not allowed to exhume bodies but interviewed survivors and members of the marine company involved...!

 

 

 

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25393

 

 

 

 

Lebanon: some media observations

Eli Stephens, Left I on the NewsI have heard on numerous occasions now, from various anchors and pundits, about "Hizbollah's sophisticated PR operation." I don't recall hearing once about "Israel's sophisticated PR operation." This despite the fact that, as I've written previously, I can hardly watch TV for 15 minutes without seeing an Israeli government spokesperson, and if I include American apologists for Israel, the time is even shorter. Aside from a few brief clips of Hassan! Nasrallah, I don't believe I have ever seen someone speaking on behalf of that "sophisticated PR operation."...

 

 

 

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25392

 

 

 

 

Israel, not Hizbullah, is putting civilians in danger on both sides of the border

Jonathan Cook, GlobalResearch.caHere are some interesting points raised this week by a leading commentator and published in a respected daily newspaper: "The Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert embeds his soldiers in Israeli communities, next to schools, beside hospitals, close to welfare centres, ensuring that any Israeli target is also a civilian target. This is the practice the UN's Jan Egeland had in mind when he lambasted Israe! l’s 'cowardly blending ... among women and children’. It may be cowardly, but in the new warfare it also makes macabre sense. For this is a propaganda war as much as a shooting one, and in such a conflict to lose civilians on your own side represents a kind of victory."...

 

 

 

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25391

 

 

 

 

Qana and Israel's "full investigation"

Lenin's TombIt was sickening enough watching the initial news reporting, in which phrases like "another attack that will enter Arab folklore about the Zionist oppressor" were ubiquitous. I quote directly, by the way, in this instance from Sky News. Arabs have "folklore" - that's the kind of people they are. Kosovars did not have "folklore" about the "Serb oppressor", and - quite obviously - Americans do not have "folklore" about 9/11 or Pearl Harbour. "Folklore" is a nomadi! c discourse, the kind of knowledge passed on around desert fires by noble savages, with ever mounting accretions. Yes, we know those Arabs alright. Subsequent headlines included such nonsense as "Israel vows to end Terror Threat". Israel is forever vowing this and that. The use of the word 'vow' connotes earnestness, a solemn promise, perhaps one made before God. This is its sense in common usage. Will we hear of how Hezbollah "vows" to end "Zionist Threat" (which is, after all, more real)? At least we didn't have to hear that it was a beauty pageant...

 

 

 

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25390

 

 

 

 

Lobbying for Armageddon

Sarah Posner, AlterNetIn a perfect world, a reporter at last week's press conference with George Bush and Tony Blair would have asked Bush, in the presence of his principal European ally, if he believes the European Union is the Antichrist. Although it sounds like the kind of Pat Robertson lunacy that makes even the wingnuts run for the nearest exit, it's a question Bush should be forced to answer. Bush and other leading Republicans have lined up behind a growing movement of Christian Zio! nists for whom a European Antichrist figures prominently in an end-times scenario. So they should be forced to explain to the rest of us why they're courting the votes of people who believe our allies are evil incarnate. Could it be that the central requirement for their breathlessly anticipated Armageddon -- that the United States confront Iran -- happens to dovetail so nicely with the neoconservative war agenda?...

 

 

 

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25389

 

 

 

 

Democratic Party leaders rally behind pro-war Senator Lieberman

Patrick Martin, WSWSThree-term US Senator Joseph Lieberman, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate in 2000 and a candidate for the party’s presidential nomination in 2004, is trailing in his bid for renomination in the August 8 Democratic primary in Connecticut. A poll published July 20 showed a four-point lead for Lieberman’s challenger, multi-millionaire businessman Ned Lamont, whose campaign is fueled mainly by anger over the war in Iraq. Lie! berman is notorious not only as an adamant supporter of the war in Iraq, but as an ally of the Bush administration in its incessant efforts to smear opponents of the war as unpatriotic or endorsing appeasement of terrorists. He became a potent symbol of the collaboration of the congressional Democrats with the Republican administration, particularly after Bush planted a kiss on Lieberman’s cheek as he entered the Capitol in January 2005 to deliver his State of the Union speech...

 

 

 

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25388

 

 

 

 

As Lebanon burns, Blair, Bush Sr. and Schultz will be at Bohemian Grove this weekend

Jerry Mazza, Online Journal Associate EditorAs Israel shoves thousands of troops into Lebanon’s face to trash as much of the country as it can before a cease-fire, Tony boy Blair swept into Frisco to attend George and Charlotte Shultz’s swanky pad for a cocktail party. He kicked off his five-day West Coast tour rubbing shoulders with America’s richest men. Olive, Tony? The bash was arranged by George Schultz, who served Presiden! ts Nixon and Reagan, was adviser to the Bush II 2000 campaign and continues to be a GOP strategist. Mrs. Schultz provided the gush and glitz. Among the 90 guests, were "Call Chuck Schwab" stockbroker tycoon, Phil Bronstein (Sharon Stone’s media baron ex), and heavies from Chevron, Yahoo and Wells Fargo Bank, to mention a few...

 

 

 

 

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=25387

 

www.uruknet.info: a site gathering daily information concerning occupied Iraq: news, analysis, documents and texts of iraqi resistance available in Italian and English.


Page Information

  • Changed 1 year ago [show history]
  • View page source
  • You're not logged in
  • No tags yet learn more

Wiki Information

Recent PBwiki Blog Posts