These are the archives for the week ending 18th August 2006
Israeli losses covered by US military aid
Israel's month-long war against Hizbullah has cost the country $1.6bn (£850m), or about 1% of GDP, according to initial government estimates. About a third of that went directly to the army. Most analysts believe the ceasefire arrived just in time to stop the conflict putting a significant brake on Israel's high growth rate, although the economy is vulnerable to any resumption in the fighting.
However, the total bill is unlikely to exceed the approximately $2.5bn Israel receives each year in aid from the US - $2.2bn of that in military grants.
Guardian, 16/8/06
Baghdad area walled in
US and Iraqi forces have sealed off a notoriously violent district of southern Baghdad with massive concrete walls as part of a broader push to quell sectarian violence, the US military said. The military said dozens of concrete barriers have been put up around the homes of residents in the district of Dura since Friday "in an attempt to keep terrorists out".
"All vehicles leaving or entering the neighbourhood are stopped at designated checkpoints manned by Iraqi police looking for known terrorists, bomb-making materials and illegal weapons," the military said. The walls were built as part of Operation Together Forward, an ongoing security plan launched by the security forces in mid-June.
AFP, 15/8/06
Hundreds of police quit in Fallujah
Hundreds of newly recruited police officers in Fallujah failed to show up for work Sunday after insurgents disseminated pamphlets threatening officers who stayed on the job, according to police officials in the restive western Iraq city.
``We will kill all the policemen infidels,'' read the pamphlets, ``whether or not they quit or are still in their jobs.'' Fallujah Police Lt. Mohammed Alwan said that the force, which he estimated had increased to more than 2,000, has now shrunk to only 100.
A Fallujah police major, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to a fear of reprisals, said that at least 1,400 policemen had left their jobs since Friday, 400 of them police officials above the rank of officer. ``During the last three months more than 100 policemen were killed here,'' including a number of senior officers, the police major said.
Los Angeles Times, 14/8/06
US blames Iran for backing insurgency...
Iran must stop supporting armed groups trying to derail democracies in Iraq and Lebanon, President Bush said on Monday, casting the war between Israel and Hizbollah guerrillas as part of a wider struggle against terrorism.
The president has repeatedly blamed Iran and Syria for supporting Hizbollah in Lebanon, but on Monday his emphasis was on Tehran -- saying it must back off supporting fighters in both Iraq and Lebanon. "In both these countries, Iran is backing armed groups in the hope of stopping democracy from taking hold," Bush said.
Reuters, 14/8/06
....or maybe not
There is no evidence the Iranian government is stirring trouble in Iraq, a U.S. general said on Monday, playing down suggestions that Tehran will retaliate for U.S. backing of Israel's war on Hizbollah.
"There is nothing that we definitively have found to say that there are any Iranians operating within the country of Iraq," Major General William Caldwell, the top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, told a news conference.
Reuters, 14/8/06
Iraq speaker may step down
The speaker of Parliament said today that he was considering stepping down because of bitter enmity from Kurdish and Shiite political blocs, revealing the first major crack in Iraq's fragile unity government since it was formed nearly three months ago.
The speaker, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, is the third-ranking official in Iraq and a conservative Sunni Arab. Shiite and Kurdish legislators have banded together to try to push him out, mainly because he is considered too radical. Since taking office in late May, Mr. Mashhadani has publicly praised the Sunni insurgency, called the Americans "butchers" and denounced the idea of carving Iraq into autonomous regions, which the Kurds and some Shiites strongly support.
New York Times, 14/8/06
Rosy US assessment not related to reality
As security conditions continue to deteriorate in Iraq, many Iraqi politicians are challenging the optimistic forecasts of governments in Baghdad and Washington, with some worrying that the rosy views are preventing the creation of effective strategies against the escalating violence. Their worst fear, one that some American soldiers share, is that top officials don't really understand what's happening. Those concerns seem to be supported by statistics that show Iraq's violence has increased steadily during the past three years.
"The American policy has failed both in terms of politics and security, but the big problem is that they will not confess or admit that," said Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish member of parliament. "They are telling the American public that the situation in Iraq will be improved, they want to encourage positive public opinion (in the U.S.), but the Iraqi citizens are seeing something different. They know the real situation."
Othman charges that top American officials spend most of their time in the heavily guarded Green Zone in Baghdad and at large military bases across the country, and don't know what's happening in the neighborhoods and provinces beyond.
San Jose Mercury News, 14/8/06
Two billion pounds a year for Blair's wars
The chancellor, Gordon Brown, has agreed that £1bn a year, the estimated annual cost of the army's operations in Iraq, will come out of the Treasury's contingency reserve. The government has estimated that the deployment of British troops to southern Afghanistan will cost another £1bn, though this figure is certain to rise with last month's decision to send reinforcements there.
Guardian, 14/8/06
Bush 'helped Israeli attack on Lebanon'
The US government was closely involved in planning the Israeli campaign in Lebanon, even before Hizbullah seized two Israeli soldiers in a cross border raids in July.
American and Israeli officials met in the spring, discussing plans on how to tackle Hizbullah, according to a report published yesterday.
The veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh writes in the current issue of the New Yorker magazine that Israeli government officials travelled to the US in May to share plans for attacking Hizbullah.
The Israeli action, current and former government officials told Hersh, chimed with the Bush administration's desire to reduce the threat of possible Hizbullah retaliation against Israel should the US launch a military strike against Iran.
"A successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign ... could ease Israel's security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American pre-emptive attack to destroy Iran's nuclear installations," sources told Hersh.
Yesterday Mr Hersh told CNN: "July was a pretext for a major offensive that had been in the works for a long time. Israel's attack was going to be a model for the attack they really want to do. They really want to go after Iran."
An unnamed Pentagon consultant told Hersh: "It was our intention to have Hizbullah diminished and now we have someone else doing it."
Officials from the state department and the Pentagon denied the report.
Guardian 14/8/06
Blair most unpopular Labour PM in history
As Blair completes his third and final term as prime minister, polls show that 67 percent of Britons are unhappy with him - the highest disapproval rating of any Labor prime minister in history. More than half of the respondents said their opinion of him has dropped because of the Iraq war, in which 115 British soldiers have died.
The fact that Blair has continued his Caribbean vacation as thousands of Britons remain stranded at airports during the latest terrorism scare has done little to boost his popularity. "Crisis? Yacht crisis?" read a front-page Daily Mail headline Saturday over a photo of a beaming Blair aboard the $3,000-a-day yacht Good Vibrations.
St Petersburg Times, 12/8/06
Oil shortage worst since invasion
Under a scorching sun, Baghdad taxi driver Sameer Abdul Razzaq wraps a wet towel around his head and waits for gasoline in a line stretching a mile. "I've been here since 6 a.m.," he said Sunday. "If I'm lucky, I'll get to the end of the line by sunset. I actually think I might end up spending the night here."
This is the capital of what should be one of the world's great oil producers, but corruption and insurgent attacks have Iraqis mired in their worst fuel shortage since Saddam Hussein was ousted.
The shortage affects other petroleum products too. A cylinder of cooking gas costs about $18 on the black market - double the price a few months ago. All that causes ripple effects that compound problems facing an Iraqi public weary of bloodshed, sectarian strife, the presence of U.S.-led forces and the government's inability to restore peace.
Associated Press, 13/8/06
British desertion rate more than doubles
The number of soldiers dismissed from the army for desertion or classified as long-term absent without leave has more than doubled since the start of the Iraq war three years ago. New figures released by the Ministry of Defence last week show that 2,030 soldiers went missing from their units between 2003 and 2005 and were later dismissed by the service. A further 740 are on the run but have not yet been kicked out.
Sunday Times, 13/8/06
Reconstruction has little impact
They were just two tribal sheiks from a town so small it does not appear on most maps, and they were meeting two weeks ago in the local police station with an American officer to talk about reconstruction projects. The episode said everything about where the failures of the American reconstruction program in Iraq have had their greatest impact - community by community, block by block, house by house as the lights do not go on and water does not squirt from the taps.
"We meet here a lot and you promise us a lot, and nothing happens," said Abu Jawad. "When I go to my people and say, 'Next week, next week,' they start to say I'm lying."
In the United States, the question of the effectiveness of the roughly $45 billion in rebuilding generally boils down to a statistical debate, with proponents saying that thousands of projects have been completed, and critics pointing to thousands that are incomplete or have not even started.
With most of the American-taxpayer money for rebuilding set to run out this year, that debate has become sharper. But it is beside the point in Iraq, where sentiment on the street is overwhelmingly dismissive of a reconstruction effort prolific in press releases but with little clear impact on people's lives.
New York Times, 13/8/06
Fifty dead and corruption rife
Police found a dozen bodies trapped in a grate in the Tigris River and a roadside bomb killed two US soldiers on a foot patrol south of Baghdad yesterday, as nearly 50 violent deaths were reported across Iraq.
Also yesterday, a commission said nearly 40 top officials of the past two governments have been ordered to appear in court to answer allegations of corruption. They include former ministers of defense, labor, and electricity, the commission said.
Boston Globe, 13/8/06
Open letter accusing PM
Leading UK Muslims have united to tell Tony Blair that his foreign policy in Iraq and on Israel offers "ammunition to extremists" and puts British lives "at increased risk".
An open letter signed by three of the four Muslim MPs, three of the four peers, and 38 organisations including the Muslim Council of Britain and the Muslim Association of Britain, was greeted with dismay in Downing Street. It has courted the MCB and several of the signatories, such as key Labour MPs Sadiq Khan and Shahid Malik, whom it believes can shape Muslim opinion.
Mr Khan told the Guardian that Mr Blair's reluctance to criticise Israel over the Lebanon attacks meant the pool of people from which terrorists found their recruits was increasing.
He said "we simply cannot ignore the fact that our country's foreign policy is being used by charismatic figures to tell British Muslims that their country hates them. Current policy on the Middle East is seen by almost everyone I speak to as unfair and unjust. Such a sense of injustice plays into the hands of extremists"
No 10 is frustrated by the letter. A spokesman said: "Al-Qaida started killing innocent civilians in the 90s. It killed Muslims civilians even before 9/11, which killed over 3,000 people before Iraq. To imply al-Qaida is driven by an honest disagreement over foreign policy is a mistake".
Guardian 12/8/06
Basra spirals out of control
The provincial council in the southern city of Basra has turned down an order by Prime Minister Noouri al-Maliki to dissolve and pass its responsibilities to an emergency committee. Following a meeting, the council issued a defiant statement saying it would not abide by Maliki's order. The council is backed by powerful militias who wield immense power in the province.
The province's security forces and the 10th army division deployed in Basra have declared allegiance to Maliki. However, it is not clear whether the city's police forces and army would move against the council if asked by Maliki, who is also the commander-in-chief. If they do they will risk clashing with the heavily armed militias and causing bloodshed in the city, home to more than 2 million people.
Basra, where most of Iraq's oil output and exports originate, is now one of the most violent places in the country.
Azzaman, Iraq, 10/8/06
British give up in Basra
More than a score of British soldiers have been killed in Basra in the past year, including five in a helicopter crash, the cause of which remains uncertain. Some analysts say the British have given up trying to impose full control and instead are letting some of the militias rule their local roosts, so long as they lay off the British forces.
Economist, 10/8/06