These are the archives for the week ending 6th April 2007
Oil prices fall
Crude oil fell in New York after Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that he will release 15 seized Britons, easing concern of a conflict in the Persian Gulf.
Prices surged to a seven-month high last week after Iran seized the sailors and marines in waters separating Iran and Iraq.
Almost a quarter of the world's oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway between Iran and Oman at the mouth of the Persian Gulf.
Iran has the second-biggest proved oil reserves and is the second-biggest producer in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
Bloomberg.com 4/4/07
US backs anti-Iran terror group
A Pakistani tribal militant group responsible for a series of deadly guerrilla raids inside Iran has been secretly encouraged and advised by American officials since 2005, U.S. and Pakistani intelligence sources tell ABC News.
The group, called Jundullah, is made up of members of the Baluchi tribe and operates out of the Baluchistan province in Pakistan, just across the border from Iran. It has taken responsibility for the deaths and kidnappings of more than a dozen Iranian soldiers and officials.
U.S. officials say the U.S. relationship with Jundullah is arranged so that the U.S. provides no funding to the group, which would require an official presidential order or "finding" as well as congressional oversight.
Tribal sources tell ABC News that money for Jundullah is funneled to its youthful leader, Abd el Malik Regi, through Iranian exiles who have connections with European and Gulf states.
Some former CIA officers say the arrangement is reminiscent of how the U.S. government used proxy armies, funded by other countries including Saudi Arabia, to destabilize the government of Nicaragua in the 1980s.
ABC News, 3/4/07
Craig Murray: How I know Blair faked Iran map
I am best known as the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, but from 1989 to 1992 I headed the Foreign Office's maritime section. This included responsibility for territorial sea claims and for negotiating our own maritime boundaries.
For eight months I also worked with Royal Naval and Defence Intelligence Service personnel in the Embargo Surveillance Centre. We analysed information from intelligence and other sources, and could instruct Royal Naval craft in the Gulf to board and inspect individual ships. I was responsible for getting the political clearance for operations just like the one now in question, in this exact location. So I know what I'm talking about.
There is no agreed boundary in the Northern Gulf, either between Iran and Iraq or between Iraq and Kuwait. The Iran-Iraq border has been agreed inside the Shatt al-Arab waterway, because there it is also the land border. But that agreement does not extend beyond the low tide line of the coast.
But what about the map the Ministry of Defence produced on Tuesday, with territorial boundaries set out by a clear red line, and the co-ordinates of the incident marked in relation to it? I have news for you. Those boundaries are fake. They were drawn up by the MoD. They are not agreed or recognised by any international authority.
That is why the instinct of both the Foreign Office and MoD was to play this quietly and negotiate our people back. But the No10 spin doctors stepped in, seeing a propaganda opportunity to portray Blair as fighting evil Iranians.
Navy and Foreign Office experts were horrified at the notion of publishing that map. In doing so we entrenched Blair's ridiculous boast that our 15 Navy personnel were definitely in Iraqi territorial seas, and claimed the right to dictate Iran's boundary.
None of this vindicates Iran's aggressive behaviour in holding the captives or the so-called confessions. For Iran to detain the British sailors in these circumstances was provocative and bellicose. However I have no doubt Blair is delighted at last to have a Middle East issue with popular support before May's elections.
Yes, Iran has a bad government that is behaving stupidly. But perhaps it is not alone. Both sides have to climb down. We have to state that no agreed border exists and that we had no intention of straying into Iranian waters.
Craig Murray, Mail on Sunday, 1/4/07
Privatising the war in Iraq
The UK has spent £165m on hiring private security companies in Iraq in the past four years - the equivalent to around a quarter of the entire Iraq aid budget, it has emerged. A further £43m has been spent on private guards in Afghanistan since 2004.
Five years ago the government published a green paper on regulating private security companies but political action has not been forthcoming. John Hilary, campaigns director of War on Want, which has been pressing for legislation, says there is political resistance at the top.
"As the pressure mounts on Blair and Brown to withdraw troops from Iraq, there is a growing possibility that their role will be increasingly taken up by these private military companies," he said.
"It's easier for the government to allow this privatisation of war and turn a blind eye to regulation. It may be politically expedient but this flies in the face of a more ethical approach to actions of British companies overseas."
Guardian, 2/4/07
Deaths up by 15% in March
The monthly death toll in Iraq rose 15 percent in March, an official revealed Sunday, as insurgents and sectarian militias continue to defy a military crackdown in Baghdad.
At least 2,078 Iraqi civilians, policemen and soldiers died nationwide, 272 more than in February, and grim news for the crackdown launched six weeks ago and billed as a last chance to wrest back control of Baghdad.
Detailed statistics collected by the defence, interior and health ministries show a significant increase in Iraqi civilian, army and police deaths in March, when more than 80 US military deaths were also recorded.
AFP, 1/4/07
US expects increase in violence
A short-term prognosis of the security situation in Baghdad could provide a grim view, but a realistic one, U.S. Rear Adm. Mark Fox, a spokesman for Multi-National Force - Iraq, said Sunday during a news briefing
"We expect to see a high level of violence over the next month," he told a gathering of mostly Iraqi media representatives attending an update of Operation Fardh al-Qanoon, or Operation Enforcing the Law.
The recent spate of bombings and attacks in the capital serve only to further drive the Iraqi-led operation, said Iraqi Brig. Gen. Qassim Atta al-Moussawi, an operation spokesman.
"These will not deter us from carrying out missions," said al-Moussawi, who sat alongside Fox. "It only made us more determined to carry out peace and stability. "We need time, patience and sacrifices," al-Moussawi said through a translator.
Stars and Stripes, 2/4/07
US toll in March twice that of Iraqi army
The U.S. military death toll in March, the first full month of the security crackdown, was nearly twice that of the Iraqi army, which American and Iraqi officials say is taking the leading role in the latest attempt to curb violence in the capital, surrounding cities and Anbar province, according to figures compiled on Saturday.
The Associated Press count of U.S. military deaths for the month was 81, including a soldier who died from non-combat causes Friday. Figures compiled from officials in the Iraqi ministries of Defense, Health and Interior showed the Iraqi military toll was 44. The Iraqi figures showed that 165 Iraqi police were killed in March. Many of the police serve in paramilitary units.
Racine Journal Times,USA, 1/4/07
Forced evictions continue despite surge
The two men showed up on Tuesday afternoon to evict Suaada Saadoun's family. One was carrying a shiny black pistol. Ms. Saadoun was a Sunni Arab living in a Shiite enclave of western Baghdad. A widowed mother of seven, she and her family had been chased out once before. This time, she called American and Kurdish soldiers at a base less than a mile to the east.
The men tried to drive away, but the soldiers had blocked the street. The Americans shoved the men into a Humvee. Neighbors clapped and cheered as if their soccer team had just won a title. The next morning, Ms. Saadoun was shot dead while walking by a bakery in the local market.
The final hours of Ms. Saadoun's life reveal the ferocity with which Shiite militiamen are driving Sunni Arabs from Baghdad house by house, block by block, in an effort to rid the capital of them. It is happening even as thousands of additional American troops and Iraqi soldiers have been sent to Baghdad as part of President Bush's so-called "surge" strategy.
"The forced evictions started up again this month," said Capt. Benjamin Morales, 28, a Bronx native who commands a company of the 82nd Airborne Division that oversees a swath of western Baghdad taken over by Shiite militias last year. "In my area, that's the biggest thing that's going on."
Captain Morales heard the news about Ms. Saadoun the next day around noon. "What can you do?" his first sergeant said to him. "It's their problem. This is their country, and they need to work it out among themselves. There's nothing we can do about it."
New York Times, 30/3/07
Iraq needs more judges and prisons
They're things most societies take for granted: courts, mail delivery and banking. But in Iraq, the farther west a person travels from Baghdad the less likely they are to be found.
Major General Walt Gaskin, the commander of coalition forces in western Iraq, says the lack of judges is the biggest problem as Iraqi police continue making more arrests. He says foreign and al-Qaida fighters need to be dealt with legally and put away for a long time, but there just isn't the capacity for that right now.
Gaskin tells A-P Radio a deal has been reached with the Iraqi justice ministry to provide a "traveling judges-type arrangement" that has worked in other Iraqi areas. After that, Gaskin says there's a big need for more prisons.
NBC3, New York, 30/3/07
Attacks are carefully calibrated
More than 300 people have been killed in Iraq this week alone in a series of devastating car bombs and suicide attacks. To television viewers this apparently endless violence seems senseless and abhorrent. Abhorrent it certainly is - particularly to the many innocent Iraqi victims.
However, it is important to understand it is not senseless or gratuitous - these attacks are carefully calibrated in their size and location, all carried out with specific goals in mind. In the grim realpolitik of Iraq today, where violence has become the language of politics, an infernal logic guides each murderous car bomb to its destination.
This is the way Sunnis see it: Sunnis have the car bombs, Shiites have the power. The question is how many car bombs will it take for the Shiites to share some of the power? The way Shiites see it: Sunnis oppressed Shiites in Iraq for 80 years. Shiites won power in the elections, so why should they give anything to their former oppressors? Until those two positions are reconciled, violence will continue to be the obscene lingua franca of Iraq.
ABC News, 30/3/07
US equipment shortage could last for years
The military is so short of equipment that it will take years after the war in Iraq ends to bring it up to authorized levels, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs told a House subcommittee today.
"It will take end of war plus two years to work off the backlog," Gen. Peter Pace told the House Appropriations defense subcommittee. "Without being able to give you a definite end of war [date], I can't tell you exactly how long." He defined the end of war in Iraq as the "end of major combat operations."
Pace said that 40 percent of Army and Marine Corps equipment is deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan or being repaired in depots, with the remainder spread out among the other forces.
Air Force Times, 29/3/07