Whenever, to coin a phrase, a war breaks out in a faraway country of which we know little, I am reminded of a news editor I once worked for. He would go to a wall map showing the location of the paper’s correspondents, produce a ruler, and measure the distance of each from the area in question. Regardless of travel links or national boundaries, he decreed that the nearest should go.

It was a bit like that, I imagine, in many media offices when the conflict between Georgia and Russia broke out. Not only was it August, when many reporters are on holiday, it was also the Olympics, and the few still on duty were mostly in Beijing. The Financial Times headline, “Georgia says Russia at war“, may have seemed strange, but it summed up the state of Fleet Street’s verifiable knowledge as the armies moved into action. In the age of 24-hour news, however, the press cannot hang about waiting for reporters to arrive. Readers want bombs, tanks and death tolls. They need to be told who are the goodies and baddies. News, remember, is part of the entertainment industry.

Into the vacuum stepped the Georgian government. Its president, Mikheil Saakashvili, speaks English, wants to join Nato, sent troops to Iraq, got himself educated at Harvard, cultivates a media-friendly style, and sends Georgian university exam papers to be marked in Britain, though whether he expects to get them back is another matter. He took power in the Rose revolution of 2003-04 and professes to be a democrat. He’s clearly an all-round good egg. And he has a PR firm, Aspect Consulting, based in Brussels, London and Paris, which also acts for Exxon Mobil, Kellogg’s and Procter and Gamble.

Almost hourly over the five-day war, press releases landed on foreign news desks. “Russia continues to attack civilian population.” The capital Tblisi was “intensively” bombed. A downed Russian plane turned out to be “nuclear”. European “energy supplies” were threatened as Russia dropped bombs near oil pipelines. A “humanitarian wheat shipment” was blocked. Later, “invading Russian forces” began “the occupation of Georgia”. Saakashvili’s government filed allegations of ethnic cleansing to The Hague. Note the use of terms that trigger western media interest: civilian victims, nuclear, humanitarian, occupation, ethnic cleansing.

It would be unfair to accuse the British press of accepting the Georgian PR uncritically. Most papers dutifully reported that a Georgian attack in the breakaway province of South Ossetia, where most people want to join Russia, started the conflict. But casual readers might have struggled to understand that. The Mail’s headline announced: “‘1,500 die’ as the Russian tanks roll in” [August 9]. Only in the last paragraph of the story did it become clear that the Georgians, not the Russians, were alleged to have killed 1,500.

Russia’s behaviour, newspapers implied, was in a quite different category from Georgia’s. In the Sunday Times, Russian tanks went “rampaging” in South Ossetia, while Georgian tanks merely “moved”. If Georgian forces had bombarded civilians, it was “reprehensible”, the Telegraph allowed. Russia, however, was “offending every canon of international behaviour“. An analysis in the same paper avoided any mention of how Georgia provoked the crisis. Saakashvili was “paying the price” for his pro-western foreign policy. A “resurgent Russia” was “itching to flex its muscles and burning with post-imperial hubris”.

Such comments are illuminated by substituting Britain or America for Russia, and Iraq for Georgia. Try “resurgent Britain … itching to flex its muscles”, etc.

As the conflict went on, press coverage became more balanced, with several commentators noting, to quote the Independent’s Mary Dejevsky, that “it is quite hard to argue that there is one law for assisting Albanians in Kosovo and quite another for Russians and Ossetians in Georgia”. Increasingly, the press portrayed Saakashvili as a self-regarding fool who blundered into a war he was bound to lose.

But Georgia’s actions in South Ossetia went largely unexamined, and it was hard to find, from press accounts, what refugees from the province were fleeing from. Again, the Georgians played the PR game more skilfully. Western correspondents were welcomed into Gori and shown areas apparently bombed by the Russians. Saakashvili held international media phone conferences, got himself on TV news channels and even found time, within hours of war breaking out, to write for the Wall Street Journal. Russia, by contrast, allowed little access to South Ossetia. Its government attempted no comparable media offensive. Though it also has a PR agency, GPlus Europe in Brussels (and Ketchum in Washington), it was not asked to issue press releases. As a source wryly put it, “the press release is not a common tool of the Russian government”.

The brief war in the Caucasus was a classic example of the situation outlined in Nick Davies’s book Flat Earth News. Most newspapers hadn’t a clue what was going on and lacked sufficient resources to find out. So skilfully presented PR was at a premium. Most journalists treated it with at least some scepticism, but it inevitably had an effect. If there was a military war, there was also an information one, and Georgia got the better of it.

1. “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
In September 2002, Rice lies to the world about the Iraqi nuclear “threat”.

2. 9/11 – an “opportunity” for US imperialism
In the days after 9/11, between public displays of grief Rice rounded up senior staff of the National Security Council and asked them to think about “how do you capitalise on these opportunities” to fundamentally change American doctrine and the shape of the world.

3. Ignored 9/11 advanced warnings from CIA
July 2001: CIA director George Tenet knew of the increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the US. The case was so compelling he met Rice, then national security adviser, to demand action. Rice gave him the brush-off.

4. Bush’s closest adviser on the “war on terror”
“During the last four years I’ve relied on her counsel, benefited from her great experience, and appreciated her sound and steady judgment,” says Bush in November 2004.

5. Iraq “was worth it”
December 2006: Rice defends the invasion as eight US marines are charged with a massacre in Haditha.

6. “I know we’ve made tactical errors – thousands of them, I’m sure.”
March 2006: Rice drops her guard on Iraq.

7. The SS Condoleezza Rice
So close to the oil industry she had an oil tanker named after her.

8. Backs bloody crackdown in Uzbekistan
May 2005: Rice refused to censure Uzbekistan over the massacre of hundreds of protestors in Andijan. Uzbek dictator Karimov had allowed the US a military base on the Afghan border.

9. Rejects negotiations with Iran
2003: Iran puts everything was on the negotiating table, including full cooperation on nuclear programs, acceptance of Israel and the termination of Iranian support for Palestinian militant groups. But national security adviser Rice rejects the initiative.

10. Brings back Wolfowitz
January 2008: Rice appoints Paul Wolfowitz to head a State Department arms-control panel. Wolfowitz, the No. 2 official in the Pentagon under Rumsfeld and a key architect of the Iraq war, was ousted last summer as president of the World Bank for giving his lover a well-paid job.

I know we’re here to talk about other things, but all of you know how much the NUJ and many people in this room did with regard to the campaign to secure my freedom last year. I’ve tried to express my gratitude for that in many ways since I have been freed, but I’ll say once more time here that I am immensely grateful it was hugely important, and I am really in the debt of anyone who took part n that campaign in any way.

Moving on to the matters of today, I often think back to a perfect evening in Cairo in the months before 9/11. I remember being at a small gathering of journalists at a big old villa near the Nile and chatting on the lawn to two of my colleagues, Frank Gardner and the former Baghdad correspondent Caroline Horley. Of course all 3 of us were fascinated by the middle east and everything that happens there. That evening we couldn’t know that in the years ahead each of us would be touched very personally by the violence and the rising rage in the Arab world.

As many of you know in 2004 Frank Gardner was chased and gunned down by Islamist militants in the streets of Riyadh and suffered the most appalling injuries. Soon afterwards Caroline was having dinner in a hotel in Jordan when a suicide bomber walked in. In the room above here an entire Palestinian wedding party was devastated and Caroline saw things that I know will stay with her all her life on that night. And of course last year I was kidnapped in Gaza by the Army of Islam.

But at least we three survived. Frank’s cameraman Simon Cumbers lies buried in Ireland and my colleague Kate Peyton was shot dead in Mogadishu. If you look at each of those incidents you can begin to see a rather obvious pattern. Frank and Simon weren’t trying to make contact with Jihadis when they were attacked. They were on the edge of a rougher part of town but they were only filming in the street. Caroline of course was just having dinner. I was driving home when I was ambushed. None of us were looking for trouble at the time, we were targeted because we were westerners or we were in a place linked with westerners.

On the first night of my kidnap in the one face to face conversation I had with the leader of the gang that was holding me he asked me if I was, as he put it, a crusader like George Bush. I said I didn’t feel that I was, that the average crusader wouldn’t have chosen to spend the previous three years telling the stories of the refugee camps of Gaza. But I saw his remark like this. There are unfortunately some people in the west who regard all Arabs as terrorists or potential terrorists and the leader of my kidnapers was a kind of mirror image of that, he saw all westerners as crusaders or potential crusaders.

Those blanket, dehumanising assessments of the other camp are very much part of the current confrontation between the east and the west and perhaps those sorts of views are part of what accounts for the continued captivity of our colleague Sami al-Haj, the Al-Jazeera cameraman who has been held in Guantanamo Bay for some 5 years without trial.

Just the week before last we saw a bomb in the only decent hotel in Kabul killing a Norwegian colleague and afterwards the Taliban said all westerners would be targeted anywhere in the city and the country.

For a long time we have, rightly, put great faith in the argument that as journalists we ought somehow to be immune, that we are non-combatants, merely observers there to try to explain what’s happening and that our work will in the end be to the benefit of some sort of justice

Again and again journalists in the hands of dangerous men at checkpoints or on frontlines around the world have reached for that very reasonable defence. God knows it hasn’t always worked, and at times it has felt very tenuous indeed, I know that myself. But you feel that in recent years the power of our great argument has been eroding. And in some places now it means very little indeed. I can tell you that on the night of March 12, the first night of my captivity in that cell in Gaza, I made our argument for myself and it counted for nothing. The leader of the Army of Gaza said I had made a nice speech but it would not set me free.

All this has an impact on how and what and where we can report. The BBC was the only western media outfit to have a correspondent based permanently in Gaza. But what happened to me convulsed the organisation. For a while it looked like I was dead and gone. And in the real world the BBC is now much more wary about sending people into Gaza. Just as dangers of similar kinds have restricted the way that w e can report in Somalia and Iraq, when you translate that across the board you see that of course other organisations make similar choices and generally much less gets exposed or written about in the most important places than we would all like.

In some ways technology has come to our aid in recent years. It is much easier now via the internet, mobile phones, satellite phones and so on to tap into the work of bloggers, local journalists and others in places like Iraq. If the traditional work of journalists from outside a warzone is more difficult to carry out we still here more readily now from local people living and breathing the conflict, and you might well argue that those kinds of people can anyway bring far more feel and insight into the realities of life in Baghdad than the likes of me ever could, and I absolutely accept that.

But I would still say that there is very much a place for the reporter from outside trying to play the role of a more neutral observer. I know there are limits to anyone’s capacity to claim to be neutral. I am a middle class westerner from a Judeo-Christian society. We all have baggage of that kind from our past and some of it is sometimes difficult to set aside however hard we try. But I think that those on one side or the other in any conflict can have their limitations when it comes to reporting the drama around them. Whether the average journalist in 1945 in this country would have been able to provide the most nuanced, balanced account of the decision to firebomb Dresden say, with all its moral implications, you might have been better to go to a more neutral journalist for that.

And anyway local journalists are in many parts of the world are under the most appalling pressures, often very much worse than those experienced by visiting reporters. Just look at the number of Iraqi journalists who have been killed in recent years. And although Gaza might be less violent in that respect, local reporters there are very conscious indeed of the sensitivities of covering the fight between Hamas and Fatah. They walk a kind of tightrope and it is easy to make very dangerous enemies.

So on many fronts we see the people of our professions struggling to do their job in the places where their work is most needed. So what do we do about it? The one thing that we must do through our newspapers and broadcasting channels is focus attention on it. Since being freed in Gaza I’ve become more aware of the amount of work that organisations like the NUJ, RSF, the CPJ, Amnesty and other do to raise the general awareness of the centrality of the importance of freedom of speech and the work of the media. We’d certainly be in a worse position if it hadn’t been for decades of effort of that kind, and that effort must of course go on.

But it is always going to be hard to make an impact on the ground, I’m talking here about reaching down to the level of the kind of people who really do the damage, the people who threaten or abduct or kill journalists. The angry or drunk soldier on a checkpoint, the party hardman or the extremist kidnapper. These are people who aren’t easily persuaded by reason and the wider moral picture. They move to different rhythms, motivated by ideology or money or the pursuit of power, in their narrow, brutal world.

There are no quick fixes. Sometimes the dangers only really pass with the coming of a degree of order, the coming of some kind of peace or justice. There were times I’m sure when it was very hard to do the best kind of journalism in South Africa, say. I’m sure there are challenges there still, but it is a place that has moved on to something better. And what we must hope is that in many still troubled places policies will change and reason will gradually prevail, even if progress of that kind is almost always painfully slow.

But unless the world’s decision makers or their electorates have a flow of information from places like Gaza and Iraq and Afghanistan and Somalia they won’t know the realities of the situations there, they won’t be equipped with the facts and the understanding that are the basis on which wise choices are made. Of course supplying those facts, providing that understanding, locally and internationally, is the job of us journalists. Our work may be harder and harder to do but it certainly does remain profoundly worth doing.

Background

Pre colonial and colonial Before the 1880s colonial scramble for Africa, Somalia, Muslim since the 9C, consisted of feudal fiefdoms and city coastal states with a well documented history. Colonial occupation and borders, as elsewhere in Africa, created bloodshed which has not since been assuaged. In particular, the Somali-speaking Ogaden region on Somalia’s western border was ’signed away’ by the British to Ethiopia (Abyssinia) in 1957 after 70 years of wheeling and dealing with feudal (clan) leaders.

Independence from both Italian and British colonists was won in 1960. In 1991, Somaliland, the ex-British colony bordering ex-French colony Djibouti, declared independence from the Somali Republic.

Somali is the majority language throughout the country, as Amharic is in Ethiopia. Somali-speaking people live in Kenya, as well as in Djibouti and Ethiopia.

Siad Barre and the Cold War Siad Barre, a military officer trained in the USSR, came to power in a coup in 1969 after the assassination of the elected president. He ensured that Somali was ascribed an orthography (Roman rather than Arabic) and became the medium of education, as opposed to Italian and English. He also established a one party state along Soviet block lines and conducted wide-scale repression of opposition groups. He relied on Soviet aid and advisors.

However, when he invaded the Ogaden region of Ethiopia in 1977, the USSR for strategic reasons switched their support to the Ethiopian dictator Mengistu who in 1974 had overthrown Haile Selassie, a US client. Barre then expelled Soviet advisors, imprisoned former party members – in the process exacerbating clan fractiousness – and accepted US patronage. The USSR and US had effectively swapped sides. Civil war and extreme and brutal repression ensued. Famine turned starvation into a WMD.

Barre visited the US in 1982 and made a military deal with the South African apartheid regime in 1984. The IMF and World Bank insisted on neo-liberal structural adjustment and progressively turned the screws on the Somali state and economy, at the same time as the US made use of military bases built by the USSR.

In 1991, Barre was overthrown and expelled from Mogadishu by General Mohamed Farrah Aidid, a former intelligence chief in Barre’s regime whom he had imprisoned for 6 years on suspicion of coup plotting.

Advent of ‘warlordism’ After Barre switched his allegiance to the US in 1977, many prominent government and party members were imprisoned or sacked. From 1984, the degeneration of the Somali state accelerated. Aidid and other former government members, now without access to state machinery and turned overnight into the opposition, consolidated their clan power bases instead.

Furthermore, prior to 1977, a mass literacy campaign had doubled up as an indoctrination programme into Soviet-style socialism. People could not overnight switch to US allegiance. Left without political direction, they identified instead with their families and clans.

The civil war was precisely the competition between the clan leaders – now called ‘war lords’ by the western media – for control of the country. Multinational arms companies threw fuel, M16 machine guns mostly, on the fire. After 1991, many Somalis who could raise the money began emigrating to the west.

Black Hawk Down 1993 By the time Operation Restore Hope utilising 30,000 US troops was authorised by George Bush Snr in November 1992, food had begun to reach famine-stricken regions. What were the real reasons for US (later UN but US-led) intervention? Academics argue that first, post-cold war US foreign policy was pioneering its global policing stance, which ignored national sovereignty.

Second, the US was seeking to establish a pro-western coalition government in Somalia to safeguard its oil interests. A number of oil companies, including Amoco, Chevron and Conoco, had secured drilling concessions from Barre. A cable from the US embassy in Mogadishu to the State Department, 21 March 1990, reads: “The first prerequisite will be that Somalia achieve internal peace. [President of Conoco Somalia, Raymond] Marchand explains to [Somali government] officials that if there is no peace, then neither Conoco nor anyone else will be able to get the oil out.”

Many Somalis were hostile to the troops because they identified the US with the hated Barre.

Nairobi and Dar es Salam US embassies bombed In August 1998, within five minutes of each other, bombs exploded in the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. At least 80 people were killed and 1,700 injured, the majority Africans. Osamar Bin Laden was held responsible, Islamist ‘extremism’ now a US foreign policy concern. Kenya and Somalia share a border.

Transitional National Government and the 4.5 formula In August 2000, in Arta, Djibouti, a national reconciliation conference formed the Transitional National Government on the basis of the 4.5 formula: equal power sharing between the four largest clans, and the other five clans collectively having a 0.5 stake in government. The 2004 conference in Eldoret, Kenya, created the current Transitional Federal Government (TFG). Neither conference brought peace. Abdullahi Yusuf is the president of the TFG.

Union of Islamic Courts (ICU) The ICU won control of Mogadishu in June 2006 after a two month battle against the US-backed Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism, consisting of war lords and their allies in the TFG. After Mogadishu fell to the ICU, Ethiopian troops started crossing the border into Somalia.
While individuals and militias in the ICU belong to clans, as do all Somalis, their administration sought a non-clan-based modus operandi. They brought some peace and stability to Mogadishu and southern Somalia. Citizens of Mogadishu no longer had to pay clan militias ‘taxes’ at ‘checkpoints’ on street junctions because the warlords had been disarmed; legal processes for the restitution of disputed land and property began. The ICU also opened all Somalia’s major ports. Diasporan Somalis began planning to return home.

Ethiopian invasion Ethiopian troops, backed by US personnel, intelligence and financing, had already invaded Somalia in June 2006. The ICU did not have equal military strength. In December 2006, the Ethiopians took Mogadishu and installed the TFG government there. The TFG government is also backed by the US. Initially the ICU retreated to the south of Somalia near the Kenyan border. Their militias are now among those resisting the Ethiopian occupation and the TFG, largely in Mogadishu.

The UN UN Security Council resolution 1725, 6 Dec 2006, authorised an African Union force to protect the TFG. It prohibited troops from any neighbouring country from joining that force. Neighbouring countries’ military intervention would be compromised by the many conflicts of interest in the region. Ethiopia’s military presence in Somalia is thus illegal. Resolution 1725 also lifted the arms embargo imposed on Somalia in 1992.
Mandated by UN Security Council resolution 1772, 20 Aug 2007, 1,600 African Union troops from Uganda and 100 (1,700 planned) from Burundi are now in Somalia.

Judith Amanthis

The Sunday Telegraph splashed the story on December 9, but after that it was buried by the papers. As a result, the British public knows almost nothing about the sheer scale of this massive assault, and the extent of the inevitable civilian casualties.

The fighting was intense. None other than Jeremy Clarkson witnessed it for the Sun newspaper: “At Camp Bastion I watched the Apache gunships lifting off with Hellfire missiles and rockets slung under their bellies. And half an hour later, they’d be back – empty. … The numbers are astonishing. Our troops have fired 12,000 artillery shells since June. And to put that in perspective, only 6,000 were used in the shock-and-awe invasion of Iraq. What’s more, in the last 15 months, infantry troops have got through 2.7 million rounds of ammunition. That is 6,000 – a day.”

Clarkson’s conclusion? This is “a bloody, horrible and pointless war, in hell”. Well said, Jeremy.

The only two sources of information we have about Musa Qala are journalists embedded with NATO troops, and the intrepid locals employed by the Institute of War and Peace Reporting.

Some embeds have done an amazing job – Nick Meo for the Times and Stephen Grey stand out. Here is Grey’s description of the fighting: “Embedded with a team of British troops and a detachment / ‘A–team’ of U.S. special forces, I watched the Taliban being pounded these last few days with overwhelming force – vapor trails circled in the clear blue sky over the Helmand desert as B1 and B52 bombers backed by A10 tank busters, F16s, Apache helicopters and Specter gunships were used to kill hundreds of Taliban fighters.

Apart from this and Nick Meo’s reports, you will find no other mention of B1s and B52s, the tank-busters, F16s and similar killing machines in the mainstream British media’s coverage of the assault on Musa Qala – not forgetting the use of Mirage 2000 combat fighters.

Almost all other reports in the mainstream media have relied on correspondents in Kabul, Islamabad and London, who have simply repeated MoD press releases. The worst was Richard Norton-Taylor in the Guardian, who reported that “troops were met by cheering locals“. Norton-Taylor was the only journalist to make this observation. Meo’s reports make clear what shameful nonsense this was.

It was truly comical the extent to which the print and broadcast media reported MoD lies. In the first days of the fighting it was widely reported that two senior Taliban commanders had been captured. The Telegraph, BBC, Metro, Times and Guardian carried this news, taken from the Reuters, AFP and UPI news wires. A few days later the Afghan government admitted this was rubbish.

At least the Telegraph bothered to report the Taliban’s reaction to the claim: “I am almost crying, I am laughing so much,” the Taliban’s chief spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi told the paper. “This is just lies. Do you think these are people who are easy to capture?”

On Monday December 10 the wires and mainstream websites were buzzing with the news that Musa Qala had fallen. But as the Telegraph reported two days later, “There was some initial confusion as the Afghan Defence Ministry announced that Musa Qala had been ‘completely captured’, while a UK military spokesman later claimed there had been a misunderstanding in translation, and that forces remained on the outskirts of the town.”

These reports echo the “good news” reporting that accompanied the first days of the invasion of Iraq, much of which turned out to be false. Just as the announcement of an “uprising” in Basra in March 2003 in was timed for the main evening new bulletins, so was the good news from Musa Qala timed for Gordon Brown’s arrival in Helmand on December 10.

From the IWPR, however, we see a very different picture of what happened. Musa Qala is not likely to be a death blow to the resistance. The renewed fighting, with the attendant displacement of families and damage to property, may in fact further inflame local passions against the Afghan government and its foreign allies, in whim the locals’ trust seems to have reached an all-time low.

Thousands of families fled their homes in Musa Qala and are in need of help, especially given the cold winter weather, the IWPR reported. Interviews with people from the district reflected the terror caused by the battle. “I swear I will never forget my little daughter’s screams,” said Zmarai, from the village of Chenai. “She was scared to death of the bombs. There was blood coming out of my son’s ears. I just want one side or the other to control Musa Qala. The government or the Taleban – I don’t care.”

IWPR received several reports from Musa Qala of collapsed buildings, dead bodies that cannot be moved because of the fighting, and civilians caught in the crossfire. Many people mentioned a figure of 40 dead, but this has yet to be substantiated.

“Every single place has been bombed,” said Mohammad Gul, a resident of Toughi village. “I cannot go out, so I don’t know how many people are dead. But a missile landed on my neighbour’s house, killing his five-year-old daughter and his cow.”

“The past five days have been hell,” said another Musa Qala resident. “There has been bombing and more bombing. People are terrified.” The centre of town was closed down, he added, with people afraid to leave their homes, even to obtain basic necessities like food and water. “A neighbourhood called Nabo Aka near the main mosque in Musa Qala was bombed, and 28 civilians were killed just there,” he said. “But the bodies are still lying under the rubble. There were women and children among them, but no Taleban.”

Hajji Ghulam Mohammad, also from Musa Qala, told the IWPR, “The governor promised that he would take the district peacefully. Well, where is he now? The ANA and NATO are bombing us, they are pounding us with artillery. This is not the way to defeat the Taleban. Instead, everybody becomes a Taleb. Please, tell the government that if they want to capture Musa Qala, they have to stop killing innocent people. Otherwise, the civilians will just join forces with the Taleban.”

In the week after the Musa Qala assault, the Telegraph was alone of the UK media to report claims of an atrocity by western troops nearby in Helmand province. The British Army says it is “taking seriously” claims that children were shot and several adult villagers had their throats cut during a secret military operation by unidentified forces in Helmand province, the paper reported. The alleged Nov 18 mission in the village of Toube reportedly involved Afghans and unspecified foreign soldiers.

The IWPR confirms the story, which was echoed by dozens of villagers from Toube whom IWPR interviewed as they underwent treatment in Lashkar Gah or accompanied injured relatives there. All spoke consistently of soldiers breaking down doors, shooting children and cutting throats. They agreed that the raid began at two in the morning with the sound of helicopters bringing in dozens of armed men, both Afghan and foreign.

The question is, why has the huge operation at Musa Qala, and the events leading up to it, been so poorly covered by the media?

Martin Bell says that “now the political commissars appear to be in charge”. He notes that, when a reporter and cameraman for Panorama filmed a recent battle in Afghanistan, they were obliged to have with them a Ministry of Defence “minder” who acted as frontline censor. So in the heat of battle when the troops advanced under fire to a compound with a family of five in it, the censor forbade them to show these terrified people.

News from Afghanistan is tightly managed by the MoD. As a result, this is indeed Britain’s forgotten war.

Dave Crouch

This is, according to British officers quoted in the Sunday Times, one of the biggest British military operations since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, involving as many as 3,000 British troops – almost half the British forces in the country.

It has been five weeks in preparation, and yet the first we learned of it were BBC reports on Friday evening (Dec 7). The Saturday papers ignored the story. BBC news on Sunday night led on Gordon Brown in Iraq, reducing the assault on Musa Qala to a brief mention of the death of a British soldier.

This stunning delay in reporting such a major operation means that all the reports of what is happening appear to be strictly controlled by NATO.

The Sunday and Monday papers make it clear, nevertheless, that this is the biggest British-led operation staged so far in the Afghanistan war. British, Afghan and American forces were advancing all last week towards Musa Qala amid heavy fighting. Backed by several hundred vehicles and dozens of Apache attack helicopters and A-10 Thunderbolt jets, there were violent gun battles as the troops neared the town. British officers said the whole operation was so big that some aircraft were redeployed from combat in Iraq.

The movement began on Tuesday (Dec 4) at first light when Royal Marine commandos stormed across the Helmand river in amphibious vehicles near the town of Sangin. On Thursday, a big Afghan army column began an advance, backed by British and American special forces. The Taliban (the label universally used for the Afghan resistance) have spent months laying anti-personnel and minefields, preparing bunkers and digging trenches in preparation for the attack.

Estimates of the number of troops involved are vague, but the Observer said 4,500 NATO soldiers and Afghan National Army troops were involved, while the Guardian puts it at 6,000. In November 2004, Pentagon officials said 12,000 troops were involved in re-taking Fallujah – a city of 350,000 – from the Iraqi resistance. Given that Musa Qala has a population of about 20,000, you have some idea of the sheer scale of the NATO assault. House-to-house fighting is anticipated.

Like Fallujah, Musa Qala town has become a symbol of the Taliban’s ability to resist NATO and Afghan forces. After very fierce fighting British troops were forced to withdraw in the summer of 2006, after which Afghan forces moved in early this year. Now NATO wants revenge.

Like Fallujah, thousands of civilians are trapped in the town, as reported by embeds who also witnessed US troops open fire on and kill refugees trying to flee the town. Several children have been reported killed in fighting on Saturday. People are staying behind in Musa Qala because they fear their homes will be looted when the town falls. This, by the way, is what “precision” bombing looks like in Afghanistan. This year has been the deadliest in Afghanistan since the US-led invasion in 2001 with more than 6,200 people estimated to have been killed in insurgency-related violence.

British media reports so far have all been framed in terms of Afghan atrocities – right on cue, Afghan president Hamid Karzai accused the Taliban of suspending a 15-year-old boy from a ceiling and lighting a gas stove underneath him, burning him alive. The media are also faithfully reporting British troops’ claim to be fighting for “hearts and minds” (i.e. we’re the nice guys), and to cut heroin production, with no mention that it is the occupation that has abjectly failed to prevent an explosion in poppy cultivation as the only means of subsistence.

The retaking of Fallujah didn’t stop the Iraqi resistance – in fact it fuelled it. Have the British media learned any lessons from Iraq? Their coverage of Musa Qala in the next few days will be a test.

Last week the US Military announced that they planned to seek a criminal complaint against Bilal before an Iraqi court this Sunday, December 8. The court is due to decide whether to drop the case or bring it to trial.

Despite the fact that the US Army had said to media outlets that they have “irrefutable evidence” that Bilal is “a terrorist media operative” who had “infiltrated the AP”, they won’t say what the charges are or what evidence will be presented. After holding Bilal for 19 months without charges, they still will not reveal to AP’s defence lawyer the accusation or the evidence they feel so strongly about. Further, the US Army says that if the Iraqi justice system acquits him they could still throw Bilal back in jail.

A nearly 50-page report by former federal prosecutor Paul Gardephe on behalf of the AP and recently disclosed by the news agency concludes that there is no hard evidence for any of the allegations that the US Military has so far unofficially made about Bilal.

Among the petition’s signatories are Pulitzer Prize winners Al Diaz, David Leeson, Judy Walgren, Anja Niedringhaus, Alexander Zemlianichenko, Oded Balilty, Lucian Perkins, John Moore and Charles J. Hanley. Agency VII photographers Gary Knight and John Stanmeyer, Noor agency photographer Philip Blenkinsop and Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado have also signed the petition. The full list of signatures is available at www.freebilal.org, together with more on Bilal’s incarceration, and links to news coverage of efforts to free him.

Bilal Hussein is not alone. There are eight further cases of prolonged journalist detentions by US troops in Iraq since March 2003.

To contact the Free Bilal Committee:
Annika Engvall: annika.engvall@worldpicturenews.com
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WASHINGTON, Oct 25, 2007 (AFP) – While the US administration insists it is pursuing diplomacy in its disputes with Iran, critics of President George W. Bush see worrying parallels between recent statements on Tehran and the run-up to the war in Iraq. The Bush administration announced new sanctions against Iran on Thursday, accusing the regime of backing terrorists, supporting insurgents in Iraq and working to build an atomic arsenal. The following are recent comments by Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney on Iran’s nuclear program and statements on Iraq made prior to the 2003 US-led invasion.

IRAN “The Iranian regime needs to know that if it stays on its present course, the international community is prepared to impose serious consequences.” — Vice President Dick Cheney speaking to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy on October 21, 2007.

IRAQ “The Council has repeatedly warned Iraq that it will face serious consequences as a result of its continued violations of its obligations.” — UN Security Council Resolution 1441, adopted in 2002, which the Bush administration says authorized the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

IRAN “Iran’s active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust. Iran’s actions threaten the security of nations everywhere. And that is why the United States is rallying friends and allies around the world to isolate the regime, to impose economic sanctions. We will confront this danger before it is too late.” — US President George W. Bush in a speech to the annual American Legion convention on August 28, 2007.

IRAQ “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” — Bush in a speech on Iraq in Cincinnati on October 7, 2002.

IRAN “Our intelligence community assesses that, with continued foreign assistance, Iran could develop an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States and all of Europe before 2015. If it chooses to do so, and the international community does not take steps to prevent it, it is possible Iran could have this capability. And we need to take it seriously — now.” — Bush said in a speech to the National Defense University on October 23, 2007.

IRAQ “If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year. And if we allow that to happen, a terrible line would be crossed. Saddam Hussein would be in a position to blackmail anyone who opposes his aggression. He would be in a position to dominate the Middle East. He would be in a position to threaten America. And Saddam Hussein would be in a position to pass nuclear technology to terrorists.” — Bush in the speech on Iraq in Cincinnati on October 7, 2002.

IRAN “Our struggle is not with the Iranian people. As a matter of fact, we want them to flourish, and we want their economy to be strong. And we want their mothers to be able to raise their children in a hopeful society. My problem is with a government that takes actions that end up isolating their people and ends up denying the Iranian people their true place in the world.” — Bush congratulating General David Petraeus on his confirmation as commander of forces in Iraq on January 26, 2007.

IRAQ “The Iraqi people cannot flourish under a dictator that oppresses them and threatens them. Gifted people of Iraq will flourish if and when oppression is lifted.” — Bush signing the authorization to use military force in Iraq on October 16, 2002.

IRAN “All options are on the table. I would hope that we could solve this diplomatically.” — Bush, meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on June 19, 2007.

“The United States joins other nations in sending a clear message: We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” — Cheney in the October 21, 2007 speech.

IRAQ “All options are on the table, and — but one thing I will not allow is a nation such as Iraq to threaten our very future by developing weapons of mass destruction.” — Bush speaking at a press conference on March 13, 2003, less than a week before military action against Iraq.

Watch the clip here and read background here.

And here are some recent headlines that demonstrate the reality of this threat:

Britain ‘on board’ for US strikes on Iran
Sunday Telegraph. October 7

Secret US air force team to perfect plan for Iran strike
The Sunday Times, September 23

Bush setting America up for war with Iran
The Daily Telegraph, September 17

Israel bombed Syria, Netanyahu admits
Haaretz, September 24

Was Israeli raid a dry run for attack on Iran?
The Observer, September 16

The article starts here: In a series of public statements in recent months, President Bush and members of his Administration have redefined the war in Iraq, to an increasing degree, as a strategic battle between the United States and Iran. “Shia extremists, backed by Iran, are training Iraqis to carry out attacks on our forces and the Iraqi people,” Bush told the national convention of the American Legion in August. “The attacks on our bases and our troops by Iranian-supplied munitions have increased. . . . The Iranian regime must halt these actions. And, until it does, I will take actions necessary to protect our troops.” He then concluded, to applause, “I have authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran’s murderous activities.”

The President’s position, and its corollary—that, if many of America’s problems in Iraq are the responsibility of Tehran, then the solution to them is to confront the Iranians—have taken firm hold in the Administration. This summer, the White House, pushed by the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney, requested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff redraw long-standing plans for a possible attack on Iran, according to former officials and government consultants. The focus of the plans had been a broad bombing attack, with targets including Iran’s known and suspected nuclear facilities and other military and infrastructure sites. Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism.

The shift in targeting reflects three developments. First, the President and his senior advisers have concluded that their campaign to convince the American public that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat has failed (unlike a similar campaign before the Iraq war), and that as a result there is not enough popular support for a major bombing campaign. The second development is that the White House has come to terms, in private, with the general consensus of the American intelligence community that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb. And, finally, there has been a growing recognition in Washington and throughout the Middle East that Iran is emerging as the geopolitical winner of the war in Iraq.

During a secure videoconference that took place early this summer, the President told Ryan Crocker, the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, that he was thinking of hitting Iranian targets across the border and that the British “were on board.” At that point, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice interjected that there was a need to proceed carefully, because of the ongoing diplomatic track. Bush ended by instructing Crocker to tell Iran to stop interfering in Iraq or it would face American retribution.

At a White House meeting with Cheney this summer, according to a former senior intelligence official, it was agreed that, if limited strikes on Iran were carried out, the Administration could fend off criticism by arguing that they were a defensive action to save soldiers in Iraq. If Democrats objected, the Administration could say, “Bill Clinton did the same thing; he conducted limited strikes in Afghanistan, the Sudan, and in Baghdad to protect American lives.” The former intelligence official added, “There is a desperate effort by Cheney et al. to bring military action to Iran as soon as possible. Meanwhile, the politicians are saying, ‘You can’t do it, because every Republican is going to be defeated, and we’re only one fact from going over the cliff in Iraq.’ But Cheney doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Republican worries, and neither does the President.”

Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said, “The President has made it clear that the United States government remains committed to a diplomatic solution with respect to Iran. The State Department is working diligently along with the international community to address our broad range of concerns.” (The White House declined to comment.)

I was repeatedly cautioned, in interviews, that the President has yet to issue the “execute order” that would be required for a military operation inside Iran, and such an order may never be issued. But there has been a significant increase in the tempo of attack planning. In mid-August, senior officials told reporters that the Administration intended to declare Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist organization. And two former senior officials of the C.I.A. told me that, by late summer, the agency had increased the size and the authority of the Iranian Operations Group. (A spokesman for the agency said, “The C.I.A. does not, as a rule, publicly discuss the relative size of its operational components.”)

“They’re moving everybody to the Iran desk,” one recently retired C.I.A. official said. “They’re dragging in a lot of analysts and ramping up everything. It’s just like the fall of 2002”—the months before the invasion of Iraq, when the Iraqi Operations Group became the most important in the agency. He added, “The guys now running the Iranian program have limited direct experience with Iran. In the event of an attack, how will the Iranians react? They will react, and the Administration has not thought it all the way through.”

That theme was echoed by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national-security adviser, who said that he had heard discussions of the White House’s more limited bombing plans for Iran. Brzezinski said that Iran would likely react to an American attack “by intensifying the conflict in Iraq and also in Afghanistan, their neighbors, and that could draw in Pakistan. We will be stuck in a regional war for twenty years.”

In a speech at the United Nations last week, Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was defiant. He referred to America as an “aggressor” state, and said, “How can the incompetents who cannot even manage and control themselves rule humanity and arrange its affairs? Unfortunately, they have put themselves in the position of God.” (The day before, at Columbia, he suggested that the facts of the Holocaust still needed to be determined.)

“A lot depends on how stupid the Iranians will be,” Brzezinski told me. “Will they cool off Ahmadinejad and tone down their language?” The Bush Administration, by charging that Iran was interfering in Iraq, was aiming “to paint it as ‘We’re responding to what is an intolerable situation,’ ” Brzezinski said. “This time, unlike the attack in Iraq, we’re going to play the victim. The name of our game seems to be to get the Iranians to overplay their hand.”

General David Petraeus, the commander of the multinational forces in Iraq, in his report to Congress in September, buttressed the Administration’s case against Iran. “None of us, earlier this year, appreciated the extent of Iranian involvement in Iraq, something about which we and Iraq’s leaders all now have greater concern,” he said. Iran, Petraeus said, was fighting “a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq.”

Iran has had a presence in Iraq for decades; the extent and the purpose of its current activities there are in dispute, however. During Saddam Hussein’s rule, when the Sunni-dominated Baath Party brutally oppressed the majority Shiites, Iran supported them. Many in the present Iraqi Shiite leadership, including prominent members of the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, spent years in exile in Iran; last week, at the Council on Foreign Relations, Maliki said, according to the Washington Post, that Iraq’s relations with the Iranians had “improved to the point that they are not interfering in our internal affairs.” Iran is so entrenched in Iraqi Shiite circles that any “proxy war” could be as much through the Iraqi state as against it. The crux of the Bush Administration’s strategic dilemma is that its decision to back a Shiite-led government after the fall of Saddam has empowered Iran, and made it impossible to exclude Iran from the Iraqi political scene.

Vali Nasr, a professor of international politics at Tufts University, who is an expert on Iran and Shiism, told me, “Between 2003 and 2006, the Iranians thought they were closest to the United States on the issue of Iraq.” The Iraqi Shia religious leadership encouraged Shiites to avoid confrontation with American soldiers and to participate in elections—believing that a one-man, one-vote election process could only result in a Shia-dominated government. Initially, the insurgency was mainly Sunni, especially Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Nasr told me that Iran’s policy since 2003 has been to provide funding, arms, and aid to several Shiite factions—including some in Maliki’s coalition. The problem, Nasr said, is that “once you put the arms on the ground you cannot control how they’re used later.”

In the Shiite view, the White House “only looks at Iran’s ties to Iraq in terms of security,” Nasr said. “Last year, over one million Iranians travelled to Iraq on pilgrimages, and there is more than a billion dollars a year in trading between the two countries. But the Americans act as if every Iranian inside Iraq were there to import weapons.”

Many of those who support the President’s policy argue that Iran poses an imminent threat. In a recent essay in Commentary, Norman Podhoretz depicted President Ahmadinejad as a revolutionary, “like Hitler . . . whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it . . . with a new order dominated by Iran. . . . [T]he plain and brutal truth is that if Iran is to be prevented from developing a nuclear arsenal, there is no alternative to the actual use of military force.” Podhoretz concluded, “I pray with all my heart” that President Bush “will find it possible to take the only action that can stop Iran from following through on its evil intentions both toward us and toward Israel.” Podhoretz recently told politico.com that he had met with the President for about forty-five minutes to urge him to take military action against Iran, and believed that “Bush is going to hit” Iran before leaving office. (Podhoretz, one of the founders of neoconservatism, is a strong backer of Rudolph Giuliani’s Presidential campaign, and his son-in-law, Elliott Abrams, is a senior adviser to President Bush on national security.)

In early August, Army Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, the second-ranking U.S. commander in Iraq, told the Times about an increase in attacks involving explosively formed penetrators, a type of lethal bomb that discharges a semi-molten copper slug that can rip through the armor of Humvees. The Times reported that U.S. intelligence and technical analyses indicated that Shiite militias had obtained the bombs from Iran. Odierno said that Iranians had been “surging support” over the past three or four months.

Questions remain, however, about the provenance of weapons in Iraq, especially given the rampant black market in arms. David Kay, a former C.I.A. adviser and the chief weapons inspector in Iraq for the United Nations, told me that his inspection team was astonished, in the aftermath of both Iraq wars, by “the huge amounts of arms” it found circulating among civilians and military personnel throughout the country. He recalled seeing stockpiles of explosively formed penetrators, as well as charges that had been recovered from unexploded American cluster bombs. Arms had also been supplied years ago by the Iranians to their Shiite allies in southern Iraq who had been persecuted by the Baath Party.

“I thought Petraeus went way beyond what Iran is doing inside Iraq today,” Kay said. “When the White House started its anti-Iran campaign, six months ago, I thought it was all craziness. Now it does look like there is some selective smuggling by Iran, but much of it has been in response to American pressure and American threats—more a ‘shot across the bow’ sort of thing, to let Washington know that it was not going to get away with its threats so freely. Iran is not giving the Iraqis the good stuff—the anti-aircraft missiles that can shoot down American planes and its advanced anti-tank weapons.”

Another element of the Administration’s case against Iran is the presence of Iranian agents in Iraq. General Petraeus, testifying before Congress, said that a commando faction of the Revolutionary Guards was seeking to turn its allies inside Iraq into a “Hezbollah-like force to serve its interests.” In August, Army Major General Rick Lynch, the commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, told reporters in Baghdad that his troops were tracking some fifty Iranian men sent by the Revolutionary Guards who were training Shiite insurgents south of Baghdad. “We know they’re here and we target them as well,” he said.

Patrick Clawson, an expert on Iran at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told me that “there are a lot of Iranians at any time inside Iraq, including those doing intelligence work and those doing humanitarian missions. It would be prudent for the Administration to produce more evidence of direct military training—or produce fighters captured in Iraq who had been trained in Iran.” He added, “It will be important for the Iraqi government to be able to state that they were unaware of this activity”; otherwise, given the intense relationship between the Iraqi Shiite leadership and Tehran, the Iranians could say that “they had been asked by the Iraqi government to train these people.” (In late August, American troops raided a Baghdad hotel and arrested a group of Iranians. They were a delegation from Iran’s energy ministry, and had been invited to Iraq by the Maliki government; they were later released.)

“If you want to attack, you have to prepare the groundwork, and you have to be prepared to show the evidence,” Clawson said. Adding to the complexity, he said, is a question that seems almost counterintuitive: “What is the attitude of Iraq going to be if we hit Iran? Such an attack could put a strain on the Iraqi government.”

A senior European diplomat, who works closely with American intelligence, told me that there is evidence that Iran has been making extensive preparation for an American bombing attack. “We know that the Iranians are strengthening their air-defense capabilities,” he said, “and we believe they will react asymmetrically—hitting targets in Europe and in Latin America.” There is also specific intelligence suggesting that Iran will be aided in these attacks by Hezbollah. “Hezbollah is capable, and they can do it,” the diplomat said.

In interviews with current and former officials, there were repeated complaints about the paucity of reliable information. A former high-level C.I.A. official said that the intelligence about who is doing what inside Iran “is so thin that nobody even wants his name on it. This is the problem.”

The difficulty of determining who is responsible for the chaos in Iraq can be seen in Basra, in the Shiite south, where British forces had earlier presided over a relatively secure area. Over the course of this year, however, the region became increasingly ungovernable, and by fall the British had retreated to fixed bases. A European official who has access to current intelligence told me that “there is a firm belief inside the American and U.K. intelligence community that Iran is supporting many of the groups in southern Iraq that are responsible for the deaths of British and American soldiers. Weapons and money are getting in from Iran. They have been able to penetrate many groups”—primarily the Mahdi Army and other Shiite militias.

A June, 2007, report by the International Crisis Group found, however, that Basra’s renewed instability was mainly the result of “the systematic abuse of official institutions, political assassinations, tribal vendettas, neighborhood vigilantism and enforcement of social mores, together with the rise of criminal mafias.” The report added that leading Iraqi politicians and officials “routinely invoke the threat of outside interference”—from bordering Iran—“to justify their behavior or evade responsibility for their failures.”

Earlier this year, before the surge in U.S. troops, the American command in Baghdad changed what had been a confrontational policy in western Iraq, the Sunni heartland (and the base of the Baathist regime), and began working with the Sunni tribes, including some tied to the insurgency. Tribal leaders are now getting combat support as well as money, intelligence, and arms, ostensibly to fight Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Empowering Sunni forces may undermine efforts toward national reconciliation, however. Already, tens of thousands of Shiites have fled Anbar Province, many to Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad, while Sunnis have been forced from their homes in Shiite communities. Vali Nasr, of Tufts, called the internal displacement of communities in Iraq a form of “ethnic cleansing.”

“The American policy of supporting the Sunnis in western Iraq is making the Shia leadership very nervous,” Nasr said. “The White House makes it seem as if the Shia were afraid only of Al Qaeda—but they are afraid of the Sunni tribesmen we are arming. The Shia attitude is ‘So what if you’re getting rid of Al Qaeda?’ The problem of Sunni resistance is still there. The Americans believe they can distinguish between good and bad insurgents, but the Shia don’t share that distinction. For the Shia, they are all one adversary.”

Nasr went on, “The United States is trying to fight on all sides—Sunni and Shia—and be friends with all sides.” In the Shiite view, “It’s clear that the United States cannot bring security to Iraq, because it is not doing everything necessary to bring stability. If they did, they would talk to anybody to achieve it—even Iran and Syria,” Nasr said. (Such engagement was a major recommendation of the Iraq Study Group.) “America cannot bring stability in Iraq by fighting Iran in Iraq.”

The revised bombing plan for a possible attack, with its tightened focus on counterterrorism, is gathering support among generals and admirals in the Pentagon. The strategy calls for the use of sea-launched cruise missiles and more precisely targeted ground attacks and bombing strikes, including plans to destroy the most important Revolutionary Guard training camps, supply depots, and command and control facilities.

“Cheney’s option is now for a fast in and out—for surgical strikes,” the former senior American intelligence official told me. The Joint Chiefs have turned to the Navy, he said, which had been chafing over its role in the Air Force-dominated air war in Iraq. “The Navy’s planes, ships, and cruise missiles are in place in the Gulf and operating daily. They’ve got everything they need—even AWACS are in place and the targets in Iran have been programmed. The Navy is flying FA-18 missions every day in the Gulf.” There are also plans to hit Iran’s anti-aircraft surface-to-air missile sites. “We’ve got to get a path in and a path out,” the former official said.

A Pentagon consultant on counterterrorism told me that, if the bombing campaign took place, it would be accompanied by a series of what he called “short, sharp incursions” by American Special Forces units into suspected Iranian training sites. He said, “Cheney is devoted to this, no question.”

A limited bombing attack of this sort “only makes sense if the intelligence is good,” the consultant said. If the targets are not clearly defined, the bombing “will start as limited, but then there will be an ‘escalation special.’ Planners will say that we have to deal with Hezbollah here and Syria there. The goal will be to hit the cue ball one time and have all the balls go in the pocket. But add-ons are always there in strike planning.”

The surgical-strike plan has been shared with some of America’s allies, who have had mixed reactions to it. Israel’s military and political leaders were alarmed, believing, the consultant said, that it didn’t sufficiently target Iran’s nuclear facilities. The White House has been reassuring the Israeli government, the former senior official told me, that the more limited target list would still serve the goal of counter-proliferation by decapitating the leadership of the Revolutionary Guards, who are believed to have direct control over the nuclear-research program. “Our theory is that if we do the attacks as planned it will accomplish two things,” the former senior official said.

An Israeli official said, “Our main focus has been the Iranian nuclear facilities, not because other things aren’t important. We’ve worked on missile technology and terrorism, but we see the Iranian nuclear issue as one that cuts across everything.” Iran, he added, does not need to develop an actual warhead to be a threat. “Our problems begin when they learn and master the nuclear fuel cycle and when they have the nuclear materials,” he said. There was, for example, the possibility of a “dirty bomb,” or of Iran’s passing materials to terrorist groups. “There is still time for diplomacy to have an impact, but not a lot,” the Israeli official said. “We believe the technological timetable is moving faster than the diplomatic timetable. And if diplomacy doesn’t work, as they say, all options are on the table.”

The bombing plan has had its most positive reception from the newly elected government of Britain’s Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. A senior European official told me, “The British perception is that the Iranians are not making the progress they want to see in their nuclear-enrichment processing. All the intelligence community agree that Iran is providing critical assistance, training, and technology to a surprising number of terrorist groups in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, through Hezbollah, in Lebanon, and Israel/Palestine, too.”

There were four possible responses to this Iranian activity, the European official said: to do nothing (“There would be no retaliation to the Iranians for their attacks; this would be sending the wrong signal”); to publicize the Iranian actions (“There is one great difficulty with this option—the widespread lack of faith in American intelligence assessments”); to attack the Iranians operating inside Iraq (“We’ve been taking action since last December, and it does have an effect”); or, finally, to attack inside Iran.

The European official continued, “A major air strike against Iran could well lead to a rallying around the flag there, but a very careful targeting of terrorist training camps might not.” His view, he said, was that “once the Iranians get a bloody nose they rethink things.” For example, Ali Akbar Rafsanjani and Ali Larijani, two of Iran’s most influential political figures, “might go to the Supreme Leader and say, ‘The hard-line policies have got us into this mess. We must change our approach for the sake of the regime.’ ”

A retired American four-star general with close ties to the British military told me that there was another reason for Britain’s interest—shame over the failure of the Royal Navy to protect the sailors and Royal Marines who were seized by Iran on March 23rd, in the Persian Gulf. “The professional guys are saying that British honor is at stake, and if there’s another event like that in the water off Iran the British will hit back,” he said.

The revised bombing plan “could work—if it’s in response to an Iranian attack,” the retired four-star general said. “The British may want to do it to get even, but the more reasonable people are saying, ‘Let’s do it if the Iranians stage a cross-border attack inside Iraq.’ It’s got to be ten dead American soldiers and four burned trucks.” There is, he added, “a widespread belief in London that Tony Blair’s government was sold a bill of goods by the White House in the buildup to the war against Iraq. So if somebody comes into Gordon Brown’s office and says, ‘We have this intelligence from America,’ Brown will ask, ‘Where did it come from? Have we verified it?’ The burden of proof is high.”

The French government shares the Administration’s sense of urgency about Iran’s nuclear program, and believes that Iran will be able to produce a warhead within two years. France’s newly elected President, Nicolas Sarkozy, created a stir in late August when he warned that Iran could be attacked if it did not halt is nuclear program. Nonetheless, France has indicated to the White House that it has doubts about a limited strike, the former senior intelligence official told me. Many in the French government have concluded that the Bush Administration has exaggerated the extent of Iranian meddling inside Iraq; they believe, according to a European diplomat, that “the American problems in Iraq are due to their own mistakes, and now the Americans are trying to show some teeth. An American bombing will show only that the Bush Administration has its own agenda toward Iran.”

A European intelligence official made a similar point. “If you attack Iran,” he told me, “and do not label it as being against Iran’s nuclear facilities, it will strengthen the regime, and help to make the Islamic air in the Middle East thicker.”

Ahmadinejad, in his speech at the United Nations, said that Iran considered the dispute over its nuclear program “closed.” Iran would deal with it only through the International Atomic Energy Agency, he said, and had decided to “disregard unlawful and political impositions of the arrogant powers.” He added, in a press conference after the speech, “the decisions of the United States and France are not important.”

The director general of the I.A.E.A., Mohamed ElBaradei, has for years been in an often bitter public dispute with the Bush Administration; the agency’s most recent report found that Iran was far less proficient in enriching uranium than expected. A diplomat in Vienna, where the I.A.E.A. is based, said, “The Iranians are years away from making a bomb, as ElBaradei has said all along. Running three thousand centrifuges does not make a bomb.” The diplomat added, referring to hawks in the Bush Administration, “They don’t like ElBaradei, because they are in a state of denial. And now their negotiating policy has failed, and Iran is still enriching uranium and still making progress.”

The diplomat expressed the bitterness that has marked the I.A.E.A.’s dealings with the Bush Administration since the buildup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. “The White House’s claims were all a pack of lies, and Mohamed is dismissive of those lies,” the diplomat said.

Hans Blix, a former head of the I.A.E.A., questioned the Bush Administration’s commitment to diplomacy. “There are important cards that Washington could play; instead, they have three aircraft carriers sitting in the Persian Gulf,” he said. Speaking of Iran’s role in Iraq, Blix added, “My impression is that the United States has been trying to push up the accusations against Iran as a basis for a possible attack—as an excuse for jumping on them.”

The Iranian leadership is feeling the pressure. In the press conference after his U.N. speech, Ahmadinejad was asked about a possible attack. “They want to hurt us,” he said, “but, with the will of God, they won’t be able to do it.” According to a former State Department adviser on Iran, the Iranians complained, in diplomatic meetings in Baghdad with Ambassador Crocker, about a refusal by the Bush Administration to take advantage of their knowledge of the Iraqi political scene. The former adviser said, “They’ve been trying to convey to the United States that ‘We can help you in Iraq. Nobody knows Iraq better than us.’ ” Instead, the Iranians are preparing for an American attack.

The adviser said that he had heard from a source in Iran that the Revolutionary Guards have been telling religious leaders that they can stand up to an American attack. “The Guards are claiming that they can infiltrate American security,” the adviser said. “They are bragging that they have spray-painted an American warship—to signal the Americans that they can get close to them.” (I was told by the former senior intelligence official that there was an unexplained incident, this spring, in which an American warship was spray-painted with a bull’s-eye while docked in Qatar, which may have been the source of the boasts.)

“Do you think those crazies in Tehran are going to say, ‘Uncle Sam is here! We’d better stand down’? ” the former senior intelligence official said. “The reality is an attack will make things ten times warmer.”

Another recent incident, in Afghanistan, reflects the tension over intelligence. In July, the London Telegraph reported that what appeared to be an SA-7 shoulder-launched missile was fired at an American C-130 Hercules aircraft. The missile missed its mark. Months earlier, British commandos had intercepted a few truckloads of weapons, including one containing a working SA-7 missile, coming across the Iranian border. But there was no way of determining whether the missile fired at the C-130 had come from Iran—especially since SA-7s are available through black-market arms dealers.

Vincent Cannistraro, a retired C.I.A. officer who has worked closely with his counterparts in Britain, added to the story: “The Brits told me that they were afraid at first to tell us about the incident—in fear that Cheney would use it as a reason to attack Iran.” The intelligence subsequently was forwarded, he said.

The retired four-star general confirmed that British intelligence “was worried” about passing the information along. “The Brits don’t trust the Iranians,” the retired general said, “but they also don’t trust Bush and Cheney.”

I was in Riyadh reporting for British Satellite News, a government-funded news agency. We were covering an official visit by Bill Rammell, the minister for lifelong learning. Saudi Arabia is keen to educate and train its own teenagers in order to reduce the country’s dependence on imported labour and skills. The visit was designed to establish potentially lucrative educational ties between the two countries.

In line with UK policy Bill Rammell asked the Saudi ministers about democratic and social reform. Sipping mint tea in the sumptuous majlis, or parliament, the minister’s first attempt to tackle the Saudis on human rights was ignored. Instead, the Saudi ministers emphasised their country’s need for welders. The minister took the stonewalling well, seamlessly praising his hosts for limited reforms in local elections, while coaxing them again: when would women get equal opportunity? And when would the Saudi people get the vote?

At this point, the UK Ambassador, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, who’d been whispering in the minister’s ear throughout, intervened. The Saudi translator, he said, wasn’t up to the mark, and had made several mistakes. The ambassador, a fluent Arabic speaker, announced that he would take over as the minister’s personal translator, whispering in his ear. Fine for the minister, but impossible for anyone else to hear.

I protested quietly that I wouldn’t know what the Saudis were saying, but I was ignored. Later I was told the Saudis had explained that women were being allowed equal employment and education, but would remain segregated for their own good. They would not be allowed into politics or given the vote.

Nor would anyone else get the vote: the Saudi people had shown that they were perfectly happy with the House of Saud in charge, so why on earth would the House of Saud want to impose democracy?

If this was what Bill Rammell heard he was unable to debate it. The meeting was over, we were off to film at the medina and the minister was off to inspect oilwells in Eastern Province.

Returning to London, I wrote my report, including what I had been able to glean from the exchanges at the Saudi parliament. The report was doctored by the editor, Mike Nolan, to remove the Saudi government’s views on democracy and women’s rights.

We now know, what I did not know then, that Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles is the man who warned the UK government that the Saudis would end security co-operation if the police investigation into allegations of £60 million worth of hospitality for the Saudis in connection with British Aerospace’s “Al Yamamah” arms deal went ahead. The inquiry of course was duly dropped.

For me as a journalist the Foreign Office’s editorial influence at BSN was making it more and more difficult to do my job. I reported remarks by Dennis McNamara, the UN’s highly respected adviser on displacement, denouncing the west for flooding Africa with arms. Mike Nolan called me in for a little chat. Did I realise who our client was? Why did I persist in writing critical reports?

I tried to argue that our job was not to report professionally, so that the clients – in my view overseas broadcasters, and not the FCO – would trust us. Mike Nolan told me the UN adviser’s words were “too close to the bone” and they were removed from my report._I no longer work at BSN, but its biased and flawed material is being used by hundreds of TV stations in the Middle East and Asia. All this is funded by the Foreign and Diplomatic Service, courtesy of the British taxpayer, to the tune of some £3 million per year.

Another tale that ran into trouble was when I reported perfectly friendly remarks by Tony Blair about Islam, the war on terror and other contentious issues, made on the record to a world audience. Even these were removed by BSN on FCO orders. If the Foreign Office can censor its own Prime Minister to feed distorted news to the Arab world, how can Britain be trusted there?

Mike Nolan told the Journalist: “Unlike Bruce, I have no intention of breaking my confidentiality on what went on between the two of us. I completely refute his version of events. “It is wrong to suggest I doctor scripts. Bruce was certainly not alone in having his material subbed. When material was reduced I nearly always took the time to explain why. Bruce’s claim he ran into trouble when he reported friendly remarks made by PM Blair about Islam is untrue. I am not censored by the Foreign Office; I did not censor Bruce. BSN prides itself on providing accurate and balanced information on news and developments in the UK.”

The survey, by Opinion Research Business (ORB), asked a representative sample of 1,461 Iraqis how many members of their household had died as a result of the conflict. The survey showed that over 1.2 million Iraqis had died, with the death rate now exceeding the Rwanda genocide of 1994. Almost one in two households in Baghdad have lost a family member.

ORB is about as mainstream as you can get. It has been commissioned by the Tory Party, by the BBC (most recently by Newsnight), and its work is cited frequently in the British media.

When an ORB opinion poll in Iraq earlier this year provided statistics that were supportive of the occupation, it was splashed all over the Sunday Times (here and here) and other newspapers internationally.

So far only the Los Angeles Times has carried this story, although this weekend’s Observer mentioned it prominently within another article.

Why hasn’t the story been picked up elsewhere? If this isn’t double standards, what is?

Media Workers Against the War contacted ORB and spoke to managing director Johnny Heald. Mr Heald said that, although the press release had been on ORB’s website since Friday, the results of the survey will be formally launched on Tuesday (September 18).

He said that ORB has no ideological position: after publishing previous poll results on Iraq it was accused of being right-wing, but now he expects that left-wing media will pick up on the new research.

Mr Heald said that an objection to ORB’s latest findings might be that, with so many deaths, where are all the bodies? He said the organsation’s interviewers in Iraq, led by the respected pollster Munqeth Daghir, say people don’t report many murders for fear of reprisal. Four ORB interviews have themselves been murdered, he said.

Mr Heald also pointed out that the survey showed 48% had died from gunshot wounds, which is significant because car bombs and aerial bombardments usually make the news – gunshots rarely get into the headlines.

This figure tallies with the Lancet research, which found that 56% of violent deaths were a result of gunfire.

1. 70% of Iraqis believe security is now worse than before the surge.
2. There has been no reduction in civilian deaths.
3. Food rations have been cut by 35%.
4. There are fewer doctors and nurses.
5. There has been a sharp rise in Iraqis fleeing Iraq.
   
6. The US is partitioning Baghdad along sectarian lines.
7. The US is arming future militias.
8. The country is awash with US-supplied weapons.
9. The UN says Iraq’s crisis is worse than Darfur.
10. The situation is a bloody stalemate.

The week began with a letter from a Guantánamo Bay officer suggesting that I might have smuggled some Speedo swimming trunks and “Under Armour briefs” to my client, British resident Shaker Aamer. Shaker was apparently caught wearing both “contraband” items in his prison cell.

I was unsure whether to be amused or annoyed. These are serious allegations, yet the notion that I was going to slip a prisoner some Speedos was pretty silly. So I composed a reply that contained every euphemism for underwear that I could conjure up, and relished reminding the officer that I am more concerned with legal briefs than the Under Armour variety.

Surely it would be clear even to the Guantánamo authorities that their own guards must have supplied the offending lingerie. My internet research disclosed that Under Armour does a line of “tactical” underwear for the military. They’re camouflaged, presumably in case a soldier gets caught with his trousers down somewhere in the jungle. Meanwhile, the only pool of water where Shaker could employ his Speedos would be his lavatory, putting me in mind of the hackneyed admonition at the public baths: “We don’t swim in your toilet, so please don’t pee in our pool.”

I had imagined spending the week on something rather more pressing. Sami al-Haj, the Al Jazeera cameraman held in Guantánamo, has been on a hungerstrike for more than 230 days, more than three times as long as the IRA strikers in 1980. Sami was seized when on assignment to Afghanistan, apparently because the US thought he had filmed Al Jazeera’s famous Bin Laden interview. As has so often been the case of late, the US was wrong (though name me a journalist who would turn down a Bin Laden scoop).

Now Sami is being force-fed with a 110cm tube shoved down his nose. The military is doing it in a way that is calculated to be painful – or, to borrow General Craddock’s offensive euphemism, to make it “inconvenient” for Sami and others to continue their peaceful protest. Instead of leaving the tube in – which would be bad enough – they insert it and pull it out again with each feeding. I tried experimenting with this on myself one time and it is excruciating.

Sami began his strike when his patience finally ran out on 7 January of this year, the fifth anniversary of his incarceration without trial. I have just received the unclassified portions of my notes from a recent visit – every word he tells me has to go through the censors, so there is a lot I cannot pass on.

I am very worried about him. His memory has been going, along with his grip on the English language. He has developed a paranoid fear that he will be the next prisoner to die at the island gulag. “My prison number is 3, 4, 5,” he told me, his face serious. “First, in June 2006, there were three prisoners who died. Then, this May, there was a fourth to die. Three, four… five, I am afraid I am going to be the fifth.”

I administered a psychological screening test on Sami when I saw him. I cannot write what he said as (for reasons that are beyond me) that part was not cleared for public consumption. I’ve consulted with various mental health professionals about him. One doctor reminded me not to refer to Sami as paranoid: “His fears of mistreatment at the hands of the Americans are not, unfortunately, paranoid. They are very worrying, but he has more than five years’ experience proving that they are very real.”

Doctors from the US, UK and Middle East all agree that there are urgent concerns about Sami’s health, and that he needs independent medical intervention. He won’t get it, no matter what I do. Sami has already told me what I have to say to his seven-year-old son, Mohammed, if he does not make it out of his prison cell alive. I hope I never have to deliver the message.

When BBC correspondent Alan Johnston was being held hostage by the Palestinian Army of Islam, Sami issued a plea asking them to let his fellow journalist go without conditions. It was broadcast by Sami’s Al Jazeera employers, in the hope that the kidnappers would be watching the Arabic news channel. I wonder how to contact Alan Johnston now, to see if he can return the favour.

The western media has been too slow to come to Sami’s aid. I am not sure why.
Clive Stafford Smith is the legal director of Reprieve, a UK charity which provides investigation and legal representation to prisoners denied justice by powerful governments across the world, from death row to Guantánamo Bay. He has just published a book about his work, Bad Men – Guantánamo Bay and the Secret Prisons (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). Contact him at info@reprieve.org.uk, or Reprieve, PO Box 52742, London EC4P 4WS, or telephone 020 7353 4640

It was 3 pm on a Thursday afternoon in the small town of Bughni, located in the Baghran district of Helmand province. Hundreds of people has gathered for the traditional weekly market, or “mela,” where locals trade and haggle over everything from cows to carpets.

Suddenly the bombs came, causing panic and reportedly killing upwards of 200 civilians and injuring many more. If the reports are confirmed, it would be the highest single casualty figure in Afghanistan this year.

That is the residents’ version of events in Bughni on 2 August. Eyewitnesses tell gruesome tales of headless bodies piled high waiting for identification. Many say they lost children, brothers, fathers.

“The bombing by foreign forces started when all the villagers were gathered for the traditional mela, where they buy all their requirements for the week,” said Sultan Mohammad, a local man. “This mela is close to a holy shrine. At three in the afternoon, the planes came and dropped bombs on the people, killing more than 200 and injuring 150.

“There were children and old people there. How are we at fault? Why are we being killed?”

But Combined Joint Task Force-82, the US-led Coalition force which carried out the bombing, told a very different story.

“Coalition forces conducted a precision air strike against two notorious Taliban commanders conducting a leadership meeting in a remote area of the Baghran district,” read the press release. “Coalition forces employed precision guided munitions… after ensuring there were no innocent Afghans in the surrounding area.”

The gulf between the two accounts is a telling reflection of the situation in Helmand, where local people and the foreign forces often seem to be inhabit alternate universes.

One problem is lack of local knowledge. While there were reports that the Taliban were carrying out public executions of people they deemed spies that Thursday afternoon, it seems certain that the bulk of the people gathered there had come for the weekly market.

In the absence of normal shops, most communities mount a weekly trade fair, bringing handicrafts, livestock, farm produce and clothing along to barter or sell. In Bughni, market day falls on a Thursday, the start of Afghanistan’s weekend.

NATO has made much of the fact that those assembled were all, or mostly, fighting-age males. But the absence of women in public places is simply a fact of life in the Pashtun-dominated south, particularly in areas under Taliban control. Women are closeted at home while their men go out to do the shopping.

There were, however, children and old men among the dead and injured, as photographs taken at the hospital in the provincial capital Lashgar Gah attest.

But amid the barrage of accusations and counterclaims, the truth remains elusive.

As an obviously frustrated Defense Ministry spokesman told reporters, “They do not carry ID cards to show who they are. While they are fighting they are Taliban, but when they are killed they are suddenly civilians.”

Mohammad Hussein Andiwal, chief of police in Helmand province, confirmed that some two dozen injured had been brought to the Bost Hospital in Lashkar Gah.

“I can’t say whether they are civilians or not,” he told IWPR. “As for those who were killed, they might have been civilians or they might have been Taliban.”

The injured were taken to various hospitals in the area. Some were transferred to Musa Qala, a Taliban stronghold about 100 kilometers from Bughni. Others were taken to Kandahar, about 150 kilometers away, and more still went to Lashkar Gah, over 200 kilometers from the scene of the bombing.

“Many died on the way,” said Abdul Karim, a resident of Baghran. “One of my sons is in Bost Hospital. I don’t think he will survive. Two other sons are in Musa Qala. Two of my cousins were killed, and two more were injured.”

There were so many dead, he added, that the survivors were just stacking the bodies.

“We piled about 50 bodies up for relatives to come and identify,” he said. “Most were missing their heads or other body parts. We hoped their relatives would know them by their clothes, tattoos, shoes or something.”

The scenes he described were horrific. “It was a day of blackness,” he said. “Almost everyone had lost someone. People did not know where their family members were. I saw people just sitting on the ground, staring at nothing. There was mourning everywhere.” “We grew tired of collecting the dead,” said Hafizullah, another resident. “In the hospital in Musa Qala, there was not a single empty bed.”

One young man in hospital in Lashkar Gah was so badly injured he could barely speak. Through burned and swollen lips, he said, “We were at the mela and suddenly the bombs came. They brought us here because there was no space in Musa Qala.”

Gul Wali, 18, was also among the injured. “Bombs were falling from the sky into the trees, and I saw pieces of flesh and bone,” he said. “These were our villagers, they were innocent people. They had just come to the mela to buy food for their families. Instead, they ended up looking for their loved ones among piles of bodies.”

According to Major Chris Belcher, a spokesman for Combined Joint Task Force-82, the strike was an unqualified success.

“This operation shows that there is no safe haven for insurgents,” he said, in an official press release.

An officer with the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), speaking on condition of anonymity, agreed that the strike had been justified.

“We are confident that we hit a high-level meeting of the Taliban,” he told IWPR.

Afghanistan’s Defense Ministry also issued a press release claiming victory.

“At 4:23 in the afternoon of 12th Asad [2 August], terrorists who spread panic among the people wanted to hang six civilians on charges of collaboration with the government. This happened at Bagh-e-Nahi, near the Shah Ibrahim Baba shrine.

“In that meeting were Mullah Dadullah Mansoor, Mullah Abdurahim Akhund, Mullah Bulbul Kajaki, and other high-ranking Taleban warlords as well as some foreign terrorists. They were targeted from the air. According to initial reports, dozens of terrorists were killed or injured.”

Afghan forces, the US-led Coalition and ISAF all claim that several Taliban commanders were among the dead. One of the main targets was Mullah Mansoor Dadullah, brother of commander Mullah Dadullah Akhund, who was killed by foreign forces in May. Others listed among the slain were Mullah Rahim Akhund, the Taleban “governor” of Helmand, his brother Mullah Majid, and Mullah Bulbul Kajaki.

Mansoor Dadullah has, however, given several media interviews since he was declared dead, and insists that the others are also alive and well. According to one report, he claimed to be drinking tea with Mullah Bulbul and Mullah Majid as he spoke to reporters.

Taliban spokesman Qari Yusuf echoed Dadullah’s statements in a telephone interview with IWPR.

“There was not a single Talib in that area,” he said. “There was no hanging, and no big meeting. The Taliban are not so stupid as to gather in such a vulnerable place. It was a Thursday mela, and all of those killed and injured were civilians.”

Despite this, locals said there had been executions under way. “Armed Taliban were hanging three people on charges of spying for foreign forces,” said one man, Khan Mohammad. “Then the planes came, so I ran away.”

Another man, who had come to Lashkar Gah with an injured relative, also told of the executions. Dressed in long traditional Afghan clothes, with eyes red from rage and grief, he was only too eager to open his heart to a reporter.

“We went to watch the execution at the mela place. The Taliban were hanging people. There were seven spies to be hanged, but after the first two, the bombing started.”

It is almost impossible to unravel the contradictory claims of the various sides in the conflict.

ISAF, with the British in the lead, generally get most of the blame when air strikes kill civilians. Its spokespersons insist that ISAF does all it can to minimize civilian casualties. But the peacekeeping force has little control over the American troops in the area.

Coalition troops and US Special Forces, which are not under NATO command, are mentoring the Afghan National Army during what are termed “kinetic” operations in Helmand. Time after time, the air strikes attributed to ISAF have been carried out by American forces.

Over the past few months, in Sarwan Qala, Hyderabad and now Baghran, hundreds of people have been killed or injured in American-led air strikes. Precise figures are hard to obtain, not least because most families bury their dead immediately as custom requires.

All parties – foreign forces, the Taleban, and civilians too – have an interest in advancing their point of view, leading to wildly conflicting claims of casualties.

In this latest incident, the Taliban claim that not a single insurgent was killed or injured, which, given the degree of control they claim to exert over Baghran, seems unlikely. As Qari Yusuf put it, “There are no Afghan forces there. The entire district is controlled by the Taliban.”

But, if the dozens of eyewitnesses are to be believed, it cannot be true that the strike was as precise and clinical as the Coalition claims.

The dispute over basic facts is unlikely to be resolved, and all sides remain entrenched in their positions.

“[The Taliban] are sore that we hit them, which is why they are putting out these claims of civilian casualties,” said the ISAF officer. “But we know what we did there was right.”

De Palma, who is best known for movies like Carrie, Scarface and The Untouchables, has clearly produced a stunning anti-war work. In a detailed and sympathetic review, Time magazine calls it “a cry of national shame“.

Redacted is inspired by a real event, the March 2006 rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the killing of her family and torching of their bodies and their home, by four American soldiers. It is constructed of seemingly real snippets of media: YouTube-like blogs, video posts, picture-phone emails and a daily video record kept by one of the soldiers.

The reaction of the British press to this film reveals much about the corporate media’s attitude to war.

So far, the Guardian’s response has been sadly typical of the newspaper’s overall approach to Iraq, just hoping the war will somehow go away so we can get on with the important news, such as Amy Winehouse’s drug problem and the price of organic food: “Yes, this is a stupid war. Yes, there are lots of media outlets. And people are dying on both sides.”

The Times is even more explicit: “Is the public really ready to pay to see films about nasty, bloody, complicated wars that most wish would simply go away?” All the Mirror can say about it is to pick on the film’s depiction of an Al-Qaeda execution of a US soldier.

But the Telegraph devoted half a page to the film, including this from its reviewer: “There are several references to the shortcomings of the mainstream media in reporting the real horrors of the Iraq war; de Palma makes a telling point with these alternative narrative devices.”

Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times raves about it: “Crafted not just for a new conflict but also for a new age of multiform, open-access image technology, this is a brilliant film with a passionate payload of political conviction.”

See this film if you can, and better still, write us a review.

Walsh writes: “For a chilling display of the awesome power of American air strikes, look no further than the internet.

“A nine-minute clip on YouTube offers a terrifying glimpse of the way the war is being won and lost in southern Afghanistan. The video, filmed from the belly of a Spectre AC-130 gunship, shows an attack on an alleged insurgent camp, rendered through a quivering black and white screen and the pilot’s mechanical monotone.

“The crosshairs wander across a cluster of buildings, seeking out targets and shredding them to pieces. The bombs blitz mud dwellings, turn vehicles into fireballs, and mow down dozens of small white figures – people – as they sprint hopeless for their lives. ‘You are clear to level the building,’ says the voice. The only sop to local sensitivities is that the Americans avoid hitting a mosque.

“This is the death-dealing air power that has allowed Nato and US troops to spread deep into Afghanistan’s most remote and hostile territory.”

Walsh also notes that “Human rights groups estimate that 230 civilians were killed in combat in southern Afghanistan last year; another 300 have died in Helmand this year, according to one estimate. The majority perished in air strikes. Last December Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, wept as he spoke of his frustration to stop coalition forces ‘killing our children’.”

Bush on Iran, Aug 28 2007: Iran has long been a source of trouble in the region. It is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. … Iran funds terrorist groups like Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which murder the innocent… Iran is sending arms to the Taliban in Afghanistan, which could be used to attack American and NATO troops. …

Iran’s active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust. … Iran’s actions threaten the security of nations everywhere. …

Shia extremists, backed by Iran, are training Iraqis to carry out attacks on our forces and the Iraqi people. Members of the Qods Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are supplying extremist groups with funding and weapons, including sophisticated IEDs. And with the assistance of Hezbollah, they’ve provided training for these violent forces inside of Iraq. Recently, coalition forces seized 240-millimeter rockets that had been manufactured in Iran this year and that had been provided to Iraqi extremist groups by Iranian agents. The attacks on our bases and our troops by Iranian-supplied munitions have increased in the last few months — despite pledges by Iran to help stabilize the security situation in Iraq. …

I want our fellow citizens to consider what would happen if these forces of radicalism and extremism are allowed to drive us out of the Middle East. The region would be dramatically transformed in a way that could imperil the civilized world. Extremists of all strains would be emboldened by the knowledge that they forced America to retreat. Terrorists could have more safe havens to conduct attacks on Americans and our friends and allies. Iran could conclude that we were weak — and could not stop them from gaining nuclear weapons. And once Iran had nuclear weapons, it would set off a nuclear arms race in the region. …

The most important and immediate way to counter the ambitions of al Qaeda and Iran and other forces of instability and terror is to win the fight in Iraq.

At least 112 editors, reporters and photographers, and a further 40 media support staff such as translators and drivers, have been killed on duty in Iraq since the war began in March 2003, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

By contrast, the CPJ estimates, 38 journalists died covering Algeria’s conflict between 1993 and 1996, 66-71 died covering Vietnam, and 68 died while reporting on the second world war.

Last year’s death toll in Iraq was the highest the CPJ had recorded in a single country since its foundation in 1981.

The CPJ’s estimate counts only those deaths that its researchers can verify as having been caused by hostile action – such as deliberately targeting a journalist or when a reporter is caught in cross-fire – and excludes accidents such as car and aircraft crashes.

Other estimates put the death toll even higher. Reporters Without Borders, which campaigns for press freedom, calculates that at least 198 journalists and media assistants have been killed in the conflict and scores more have been kidnapped.

The International Federation of Journalists puts the number above 200.
Media workers’ deaths in conflict:
Iraq (since Mar 2003)    112
Vietnam (1955-1975)    66
Korean War    17
World War II    68
World War I    2
Deaths in Iraq 
By nationality
Iraqi    90
European    13
Other Arab countries    3
US    2
All other countries    5
Note: one journalist had dual Iraqi-Swedish citizenship and he is listed in each nationality
By circumstances  

Murdered    73
Crossfire or other acts of war    39
By embedded status  
Embedded    7
Non embedded or ‘unilateral’    105
By job   
Nationality    Deaths
Photojournalists*    28
Reporters and editors    70
Producers    7
Technicians    7
*Includes still photographers and camera operators
Source: Committee to Protect Journalists, Freedom Forum 

The organisations agree, however, that the loss of life has been heaviest among Iraqi journalists. Security fears have prompted many US and European news organisations to restrict their reporters’ travel, leaving them heavily reliant on Iraqi reporting about events outside Baghdad.

According to the CPJ, 90 Iraqi journalists have died covering the conflict, compared with 13 Europeans and two US citizens. Many worked for Iraqi news organisations such as Aswat al-Iraq, a news agency, and Radio Free Iraq, but others appear to have been targeted for working for western news outlets.

Hundreds of foreign reporters, often embedded with US and UK military units, were covering Iraq at the beginning of the war. The spiralling violence has since forced many international broadcasters and newspapers to scale back their operations and rely on Iraqi journalists, says Joel Campagna, Middle East senior programme co-ordinator for the CPJ.

“Over the last three years Iraqi journalists have assumed an indispensable role in reporting this conflict and making local and international news-gathering possible,” he says. “Their increased role has translated into increased risk.”

The violence, coupled with the cost of providing security, has deterred all but Iraq’s own media and the largest international news organisations from maintaining a presence in Iraq. “One thing you don’t see much of is freelancers,” Mr Campagna notes.

The CPJ estimates 84 of the journalists killed in Iraq were victims of insurgent action, either murdered or caught up in suicide bombings or crossfire.

It attributes 15 deaths to US fire, but says its investigations have found no evidence of deliberate targeting of journalists by US troops.

Reuters has lost six journalists in conflict, all killed by US troops.The news agency has asked the US military to investigate last month’s deaths of Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh, a photographer and driver, after its inquiries challenged the US account that they had died in a firefight with insurgents.

“Our preliminary investigation raises real questions about whether there was fighting at the time the two men were killed,” says David Schlesinger, Reuters editor-in-chief.

In a blog entry after the event, Mr Schlesinger commented: “There aren’t many news organisations left in Iraq. The ones that are there take a terrible calculated risk.”

Iraqi journalists such as Khalid Hassan, a reporter and interpreter shot while driving to work for the New York Times in Baghdad last month, run additional risks because the war has invaded the neighbourhoods in which they live, Mr Campagna says. “For Iraqi journalists living in the conflict it is very difficult to escape.”

The threats to Iraq’s journalists have come just as the country is trying to build up its media, he notes.

“Since the invasion, more Iraqis than ever have joined the profession of journalism. [But] many have been forced to leave the profession or seek refuge in other countries because of threats they have received because of their journalism.”

The cameraman, Imad Ghanem, was filming for Hamas’s al-Aqsa television channel when he was fired upon. Ghanem was one of the leaders of demonstrations in Gaza calling for the release of the BBC reporter Alan Johnston. Read John Pilger’s article on the atrocity here.

In video filmed by a colleague he can be seen lying on the ground with his camera by his side. Eyewitnesses said moments before he’d been with a group which included militant gunmen, though he appeared to be unarmed.

Ghanem was later treated in hospital where both of his legs were amputated.

An Israeli army spokeswoman said journalists were at risk if they entered a combat zone but soldiers did not deliberately target them.

Let’s look back at some recent history. In 1988 the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Yasser Arafat, decided to recognise the state of Israel, in other words, he decided to choose the “two state solution”. The Americans accepted this idea, the ambassador in Tunis opened talks and met Arafat. There were still, of course, lots of arguments among the Palestinians.

Arafat made a big error by appearing to support Saddam Hussein in 1990-1991. But as a politician he knew that his constituency was in favour of Saddam.

In September 1993 Yasser Arafat and Yitzak Rabin met with Clinton on the White House lawn, shook hands and signed up to a system, the “Oslo accords”. On paper it looked quite good, and many Palestinians hoped it would offer a way out. But two basic things were wrong with this.

Firstly, the Israelis kept on building settlements on the occupied territories. 1993 passed, then 94, 95, 96 and still they kept building in a way that divided up the remaining territory, it changed the entire geography and was very intrusive.

Secondly, Arafat realised that he had forgotten about the other Palestinians, those living outside the borders of Israel: some 400,000 in Lebanon, 1 million in Jordan, 300,000 in Syria. These were people who had lost their lands inside pre-1967 Israel. At the Camp David summit in 2000, Clinton and Ehud Barack tried to humble Arafat into making a “final status” agreement, but Arafat decided that even if he signed it would be rejected by his constituency.

The talks broke down. The result was another Palestinian uprising, or the “Al-Aqsa” Intifada.

The West tried to institute elections in the occupied territories. But the “wrong” people got elected – the Palestinians were fed up with Fatah (Yasser Arafat’s political party, the dominant organisation in the PLO). In that part of the world you vote for whoever is going to defend you, and Hamas – like Hezbollah in Lebanon – were doing just that. Since Arafat’s death in 2004, Fatah has been led by Mahmoud Abbas, whom I describe as a Petainist figure, like Marshall Petain (whom the Germans allowed to rule an authoritarian regime in the Vichy region of France during World War II).

I was in Beirut recently. I couldn’t understand why the BBC kept going on about “factional fighting”. Any decent reporter or sub knows that the US has been sending finance and arms to Fata for the past year – you can read all about it in Ha’aretz. But this fact was never part of the mainstream reporting. Yet this was why the fighting was taking place – to get rid of Hamas. [For example, see here, here and here]

None of this was reported properly. One or two BBC reporters try their best, such as Jeremy Bowen [and Alan Johnston?]. But we’re getting the wrong information. The Israeli/western case is being put, but not the Palestinian case.

Q. Are Fatah really corrupt? They are constantly accused of it, but is it true?

A. I don’t think that’s the main reason people voted for Hamas, though that was an element of it. Arafat was an ageing leader of a liberation organisation, he was never in charge of a state. So he had debts to repay, emotionally and politically.

The main reason people voted for Hamas was that they were fed up with the system. Fatah was playing games with the Israelis, arresting people and so on. It’s like Hezbollah – a well-run, efficient set-up, none of the thuggery you might expect in the circumstances. The people on the ground adore it because it is looking after them.

Q. Did you yourself ever experience censorship?

A. Just once. An editor called me up and said would I alter a report I had made to include an Israeli denial of an attack on Palestinians. I refused – the Israelis had been firing into a mosque. I said if they want to deny it they can do it in a separate part of the bulletin. And that is what eventually happened: the Israeli denial ran separately from my report, not inside it, as my line-editor had requested. By the way, he told me he was getting a lot of pressure from the Israelis in London.

Things have changed a lot. The Israelis got a shock in 1982 – they got a very bad press when they invaded Lebanon, they realised that their PR was awful. So during the al-Aqsa Intifada they changed their approach, they put a lot more money and organisation into ringing up editors, reporters and so on.

Moreover, I think the BBC has lost its nerve in recent years, it’s afraid. The government funds the BBC, and of course the government is very close to the Americans and the Israelis.

Q. Why did the Palestinians support Saddam in 1990?

A. That’s a very good question. It was a difficult moment. Many Palestinians had family members working in Kuwait, where they were treated like dirt. Saddam was also seen to be standing up to the west. By the way, if you tried to get that across on the BBC it was very difficult. I was in Baghdad then; the Arab governments were backing the coalition against Saddam, but the people didn’t like it.

Q. Who is pulling Fatah’s strings?

A. There are many Fatahs. Their only respected leader, Marwan Barghouti, is in an Israeli jail. There is a long history of Israelis taking out the leaders, for example the time they blew Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin out of his wheelchair.

Q. Wasn’t Hamas at one point funded by the Israelis?

A. In the early 1980s the Israelis built up Hamas. They saw the PLO and Fatah as the main threat, and so they built up alternative leaderships such as the venal “Village Leagues”. But that all blew up with the Intifada. That’s why Hamas became an independent force.

Q. Is it right for the media to use terms such as “the Gaza takeover” by Hamas?

A. This is one of the things that really outrages me. I was sitting in Beirut listening to the BBC, and they kept saying that Hamas had taken over. But it was the other people who were trying to take over, and they got clobbered.

A lot of this was drowned out by the kidnapping of Alan Johnston. Ordinary Palestinian journalists showed the way in terms of campaigning for his release. But the BBC tried to turn him into a kind of Mother Theresa! He’s very embarrassed by it now.

And it was Hamas who freed him. It’s typical of the arrogance of the west that they won’t allow Hamas any credit.

Q. Why are the media so supine?

There’s an acceptance in the British media that our involvement in the Middle East is “helping people to behave better”. But we are not – we are supporting a country that is behaving like a gangster state. It’s not doing us any good.

I’d like to refer you to an excellent article in the New York Review of Books, entitled “Goodbye to newspapers?”

Let’s we look back now at what was said when they went to war in Afghanistan, what were the war aims? They were very basic. If we look back at the speeches by Bush and the pronouncements of the US military, the aim was to destroy Al Qaeda as a force and capture Bin Laden and Mullah Omar (the leader of the Taliban faction that supported al-Qaeda), dead or alive. That was all. Nothing else was said.

In terms of war aims this was (a) extremely limited and (b) very foolish. If you’re going to announce that this is your main aim, then you wait three weeks, then you go into the country and imagine that the people, you want to capture are going to be waiting for you, and then you’re surprised that these people have actually left the country and found new hiding places – it’s slightly bizarre.

In any event, if we accept that these were the war aims, they failed. Far form destroying al-Qaeda they strengthened it. Bin Laden, Mullah Omar and Zawahri – the key people on their list – are still at large. But I think there was another reason. I remember 3 weeks after 9/11 I was debating on TV one of Bush’s most fervent supporters in the American media, Charles Krauthammer. The compere asked me what do you think is the real reason for the war in Afghanistan? I said it as a war of revenge, simple as that, they’ve been hit, there’s no basic war aims, they want to strike back, and it’s just revenge. She then turned to Krauthammer to rebut this but he said I agree, what’s wrong with revenge? The compere was absolutely astonished.

That was the aim for a large chunk of the American military establishment, they had to hit back, and they were backed in this by the entire world. Not a single country opposed it because of the position the USA occupies in the world today. Other countries have been victims of terrorist attacks, before and after 9/11, but no one reacts in the same way. And that in itself is a fact worth understanding. The USA is a very special country because of its strength, it is the only imperial power in the world today, and most governments at the time caved into it, there was no criticism.

Ironically enough there was more criticism in the American media in the first few weeks after 9/11 than in the British media, which became totally servile, just shaken by what had happened. The Los Angeles Times published in the first week a 4-page supplement on US foreign policy in the 20th century, looking at everything the US had done to other parts of the world. But this was not permissible here, the atmosphere was fear, you weren’t allowed to open your mouth. I remember a Cambridge academic in ancient history wrote a piece in the London Review of Books saying what’s the fuss about, all the people I meet in academic circles say they had it coming. She was apolitical, just being honest. All hell broke loose in the liberal media, how dare you even publish it? You can think it but don’t publish it. An atmosphere of fear was created.

And within this atmosphere of fear Afghanistan was invaded and occupied without any big battles being fought. Why? Because the Taliban government basically decided not to fight. Why? Because the Pakistan military told it not to fight. It was very dependent on that army, it was armed by them, in fact the Pakistani general inn charge of the ISI, told them: I have been told by the president of Pakistan and the government don’t fight, withdraw, let them take the country, then we’ll see, don’t lose lives. But my advice to you is to fight back.” He was sacked within 24 hours. I make this point to show the links between these two outfits. Without the support of the Pakistani military the Taliban could not have seized power in the first place. It’s not that they didn’t develop their autonomy – they did. But those three crucial weeks the Americans didn’t attack was to give their Pakistani ally time to withdraw its equipment, air force and officers from inside Afghanistan. They were given Pakistani military bases to use, they couldn’t use these bases to hit Pakistani personnel.

So they took Afghanistan with the Northern Alliance, with the approval of the Pakistani and Iranian governments – the Iranians hated the Taliban. If you look at what these people in Pakistan and Iran are saying now, they say we thought it would be different, we thought that it would be a more democratic dispensation, that the occupying powers would institute power sharing very sharply and transform the country. This last bit is not unimportant. One of the reasons they haven’t been able to get any grip on the country, because they have completely failed to build any social infrastructure. Here it is worth comparing with what the Russians did when they occupied Afghanistan in 1979 for 10 years. Their bad luck was that the Afghan communists were tiny, without a real mass base outside Kabul and consisting of largely of squabbling factions. But what they did do was build an infrastructure. However weak, they built schools, hospitals, they educated women, women teachers and doctors, they did succeed in doing that for a while. Which is why even the Russian troops lasted, that government didn’t fall to the offensive against it. They had some element of support because people could seen what they had done.

Corrupt, iniquitous elite

This occupation has done nothing. It costs less than $5000 to build a cheap home in which an ordinary family can live. Ask anyone in Afghanistan how many have been built, virtually none. Most of the money that has gone into the country has been used by the tiny clique around Karzai to build luxury homes and villas, in the face of the most poverty-stricken people in the world, and all this corruption is being defended by NATO troops, and they are seen now as being defenders of this extremely corrupt, iniquitous elite, a tiny ruling elite that runs the country. Without the backing of foreign troops this little group would collapse.

There is constant confusion of Taliban with Pashtun and Taliban with Afghan. This doesn’t exist only on the level of ignorant journalists. I was told by a senior Pakistani government minister that soon after they took Afghanistan Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, in a meeting with high officials in Pakistan actually said the problem is the Pashtun Taliban, we have to wipe them out. How can we do this? The Pakistani foreign minister said: “Why don’t you ask two members of the Taliban sitting at this table? They are Pashtun. Please try to understand, not every Pashtun is Taliban, it’s very divided. But the way you are operating you are going to antagonise them.”

In February this year there was a senate committee in the US on national security and defence that said the following:

“Afghans have over centuries proven themselves to be fierce fighters, particularly when confronting invaders from outside cultures. They repeatedly defeated the British during the 19th century Afghan wars when Britain was the world’s dominant military power. They routed the Soviets during the 1980s when the Soviet Union was the world’s second most dominant military power. Superior military technology does not always win the day, particularly in an era when suicide bombing and improvised explosive devices have proven themselves to be very effective tools in this kind of war. Afghans are used to killing and being killed. Their society has been in a state of war for most of the last two centuries.”

Now, this is pretty accurate. Seventy per cent of Afghans know how to use weapons. That is part of the culture, they’ve been doing it from a very young age, the men mainly. This means it’s not dificult for them when they join a resistance group to start fighting immediately, they know how to do it.

Secondly, the Taliban now is becoming an umbrella organisation for fighting the occupation. Many people who hate it are fighting underneath its umbrella and that is extremely dangerous for the occupying armies because they are isolated, there is no way they can win the war.

The only way they could have done if they wanted to create a slightly different social infrastructure was to spend billions on completely transforming the country, finding an alternative to poppy production. The sales of heroin have shot right up since the occupation. Ironically the Taliban had put a stop to it in the bulk of the country. Afghanistan is supplying 60-70 per cent of the world’s heroin. And you can’t tell the farmers don’t do it because they have nothing else to do. If you read the surveys conducted by the occupying armies when asked what is the biggest problem you confront, 70 per cent of the population say feeding our families twice a day, and we’re prepared to do anything to do so. This the occupation has been completely incapable of doing. How could they? Many people who initially supported the occupation said the Taliban is a horrible government, anything else is better – including many liberal journalists, not just in Britain but in neighbouring countries such as Pakistan, said that. They are now saying it was a very big mistake, we thought the Americans could do some good in the region. But how can you expect an imperial power and a NATO force that operates in today’s world, a neo-liberal world where they are deregulating and privatising everything in their own countries, to go and build a strong state in Afghanistan and make that state a sort of social-democratic one? It’s just unthinkable! And they are not doing it and it is completely isolating them.

Propaganda and news management

Every single day you read reports: 100 militants dead, 50 dead, 30 – don’t believe it, it is pure propaganda, wartime propaganda that goes back to every war waged by imperial powers, that’s how they report it, they assume everyone they kill is an enemy. Which they may or may not be, but by killing them they are making sure that the bulk of the country now is moving to a stage where they want the occupying forces out.

There’s no doubt about that, because they have failed, they have succeeded in destabilising their ally Pakistan where two provinces are in quite a delicate state. And who knows how this is going to end? One reason we don’t know how this is going to end is precisely because of the way the media have plaid it, Iraq was the bad war Afghanistan was the good war. But it wasn’t a good war ever, and it’s become worse as time goes on. So it has to be seriously analysed, there are very few serious journalists who spend time there and report.

One of the ways in which journalism functions today is as a pillar of the system, not just in times of war. There has been a fundamental shift in journalism in the west, largely in television but also to a certain extent in the print media. Serious coverage of the rest of the world is missing in most newspapers and certainly on the TV. You are given sound bites, there is very little regular reporting from important countries in the world so that when something happens you are surprised, people are deliberately encouraged to have short memories, so you forget, you can’t remember. And now we have this category of embedded journalists, who go in with the army and see what the army wants them to see, and then they report on that, which in itself affects the way they write.

Of course there are exceptions, Robert and Fisk and Patrick Cockburn break these rules. But they are few and far between. When a few journalists on British TV did it during the Balkan wars they were denounced. When John Simpson said he was watching the television station in Belgrade being bombed and he was appalled by it, he was denounced.

News management in all the western countries, but especially in Britain, is reaching the levels of an art form. There is a crisis of this news management thanks to the Iraq war. The fact that you have a majority of the population opposing a war and the majority of politicians in parliament supporting it created a crisis for the system of news management. When the BBC tried to balance it, it wasn’t permitted, even though it was a very strange kind of balancing there was an attempt. But Blair sacked his own placemen at the BBC, Gavin Davies and Greg Dyke, after the bogus Hutton report. As Dyke revealed in his memoirs, the real reason was not Hutton but the constant pressure from 10 Downing Street during the coverage of the demonstrations, the reporting of the war.

University departments teaching journalism have to teach what is the power of journalism. Students have to decide what sort of journalists they want to be, either it’s like selling goods in a shop – that’s one sort of journalism. Or the other sort of journalism is, I’m not saying a biased journalism, but a critical, independent-minded, aware journalism which at least tries to seek the truth.

In Afghanistan this has not existed, with rare exceptions. By and large that country has been written off as a small, poor country. It’s not that small – 29 million people, bigger than many members of the EU, and Scotland. So it’s a country that’s ignored because it’s not covered, and it’s not covered because covering it won’t benefit those who are occupying it. And this is not just a problem with the British media, it’s a European media. The press releases – you can see them in virtually every mainstream European newspaper, the reports are often the same.

I’ll give you another example of how PR dominates journalism. I was travelling two or three weeks ago and could read most of the European papers. There was a story coming out of Saudi Arabia, obviously a PR story, saying we’ve visited a school where those terrorists who supported al-Qaeda are now sitting in a class being re-educated. A total fantasy. Published in the Guardian, the Independent, the Financial Times, Le Monde, El Pais, The Herald tribune. Exactly the same story.

What happens from the Saudi government’s PR agency happens generally because they’ve down-graded serious coverage of the world. Take Somalia – no one knows what’s gong on, it’s just not covered. Afghanistan is not so bad because British troops are being killed, and British politicians go there for a photo-op with the brave boys. But that’s about it.

This is a big, big problem confronting us. We have the problem of Afghanistan and we have the problem of what is happening to journalism. Both have to be fought against because they are both related.

The Guardian’s recent report on armed resistance organisations in Iraq and their plans to form a political front was a fresh and illuminating snapshot of the most dangerous and far-reaching conflict of our times. By eschewing the usual cliches and bundles of distortions about any Muslims bearing arms, the report enriches our understanding of the best organised of the resistance groups active in parts of Baghdad and the areas up to and including Mosul, north of the capital. What they say indicates a major shift in tactics and strategy, but also reveals these groups’ achilles heels.

Politically, one of the most telling statements was from the spokesperson of a faction of the Ansar al-Sunna resistance group:

“Resistance isn’t just about killing Americans without any aims or goals … Our people have come to hate al-Qaida, which gives the impression to the outside world that the resistance in Iraq are terrorists. Suicide bombing is not the best way to fight because it kills innocent civilians. We are against indiscriminate killing – fighting should be concentrated only on the enemy. They [al-Qaida] believe that all Shia are kuffar [unbelievers] – and most of the Sunnis as well … The Americans magnify their role, even though they are responsible for a minority of resistance operations – remember that the Americans brought al-Qaida to Iraq.”

The statement is significant in two respects. One is the fact that al-Qaida is being denounced openly, and the second is that the man making the statement is from Ansar al-Sunna, one the organisations that gained notoriety in its indiscriminate methods of fighting and sectarian ideology. Equally significant is the fact that the other faction of Ansar al-Sunna is being accused of working with al-Qaida.

One of the least sectarian of the seven groups forming the new alliance is the 1920 Revolution Brigades, whose leader, Harith al-Dhari, was assassinated recently by al-Qaida, according to Muthanna al-Thari, spokesperson of the very influential Association of Muslim Scholars. The leader of the AMS, Sheikh Harith al-Dhari, is the assassinated leader’s uncle and the most influential of the anti-occupation Sunni cleric. Reversing earlier statements, Sheikh Dhari, has also become very critical of al-Qaida. His and other recent anti al-Qaida statements are fuelled by the enormous loathing that Iraqis of all sects and ethnicities have for al-Qaida and all sectarian attacks. Indeed, popular opinion in the streets of Iraq habitually accuse the occupation of backing al-Qaida to spread sectarian divisions and split the struggle against the occupation.

The seven groups are not only anti al-Qaida but also keen to distance themselves from the Saddamist wing of the Ba’ath party, led by Izz’at al-Douri, Saddam Hussein’s deputy until the 2003 invasion.

Such political credentials should in theory make the task of unity with Muqtada Sadr’s movement less difficult. However, the resistance leaders who talked to the Guardian accuse Sadr’s Mahdi army of sectarian killings while ignoring the fact that most of the sectarian attacks have been aimed at Sadr City, Najaf, Kufa and Karbala. For his part, Sadr has conceded that his movement has been infiltrated by its enemies, including the occupation authorities. Referring to the climate of chaos and occupation presence, Sadrist spokesmen have often referred to “the ease with which sectarian crimes could be committed by anyone wearing black and claiming to be from the Mahdi army.”

Following the second attack on the Samarra Shia shrine, Sadr accused the occupation of being behind the attack – a position echoed by Sunni clergy and secular forces – and stressed unity with Sunnis. He later accused the US of sabotaging his attempts to unite with Sunnis. While it obviously suits the US to divide the opposition to its occupation of the country, Sadr’s own tactics are attacked for being one of the biggest obstacles to greater anti-occupation unity. These tactics include on-off participation in the government and the Sadrists’ presence in parliament (in the sect-based Coalition List that won most of the seats in the January 2006 occupation-controlled elections).

Though some of the criticisms of Iranian policies by the resistance leaders interviewed by the Guardian are based in fact, the seven groups’ hostility to Iran is still trapped within the old Saddamist-style anti-Iranian chauvinism that fuelled his eight-year war against Iran following the 1979 overthrow of the US-backed Shah regime. Racist propaganda against the Iranian people lasted for a quarter of a century and permeated Iraqi society and its educational system. The US-led propaganda campaign against Iran has thus fallen on receptive ears. The US is happy to see Iraqis directing their wrath against the fictitious “presence of hundreds of thousands of Iranians fighting alongside the US forces to evict Sunnis from Baghdad and replace them with Shia” – in the words of one Iraqi victim of the occupation who, with her daughter, was forced to leave Iraq after the murder of her brother.

The seven resistance groups don’t appear to be facing up to the fact that effectively by far the biggest organised armed resistance group in Iraq is Sadr’s Mahdi army, estimated to be well over 100,000 strong – or that, in the absence of strong non-religious anti-occupation organisations, millions of people across Iraq are supporters of Muqtada Sadr’s anti-occupation message. US jets and helicopters are daily bombarding Sadr City in Baghdad and towns south of Baghdad. Thousands of Sadrists are in jail and the US is acutely aware that the Sadrists remain one of the biggest obstacles to controlling Iraq.

Last but not least, when talking about the resistance in Iraq it’s important to remember that most of the thousands of military operations that the Pentagon reports are carried out monthly against the occupation forces go unclaimed by any organisation. This confirms the impression that I and many Iraqis have that most of the armed resistance to the occupation is conducted by localised groups in the villages and cities of Iraq. Armed resistance to the occupation has much deeper and more popular roots than the politicians in Washington and London dare to admit. For admitting it, at least in public, means abandoning their much trumpeted “exit strategy”, otherwise known as having your cake and eating it. Having a pro-US government in Baghdad, withdrawing most of the troops but keeping military bases in Iraq is not what Iraqis mean by ending the military and economic occupation of Iraq. Such an exit strategy will not stop the resistance and the sea of popular support that feeds and protects it.

For even those who are engaged in anti-occupation political and trade union activities in Iraq do not hide their support for the “al-muqawama al-sharifa” (”the honourable resistance” as distinct from terrorism). And it is these deep Iraqi roots which are likely, sooner or later, to produce the united front that rises above the differences based on religion or ethnicity. A slogan gaining momentum in the streets of Iraq reflects this popular mood:”La lil ihtilal; la lil ta’iffia; la lil irhab”: “No to the occupation; no to sectarianism; no to terrorism.”

The clip — an all too rare honest look at the war from a reporter embedded with the Second Infantry Division’s Apache Company in Baghdad — shows tired and overwrought US troops who are into their 14th month of continuous battle, as they respond to a variety of battle situations.

In one case, after watching six of their comrades burn to death trapped inside a Bradley Armored Vehicle that a roadside bomb has flipped over and ignited, the soldiers break into a house, looking for weapons, only to find themselves terrorising an old woman with a zimmer frame, who dissolves into hysterical tears.

In another scene, the men open fire on a car cruising the neighborhood, which they fear might be a terrorist looking for a target. After killing the driver, they learn from a local woman that it was just a taxi driver she had called, who was trying to locate her address.

An angry GI says: “I challenge anybody in Congress to do my rotation… Because we have people up there in Congress with the brain of a two-year-old who don’t know what they’re doing I challenge the president to ride along with me for 15 months. I’ll do another 15 months if he comes out her and rides along with meThey won’t even have to pay me!”

If the above link doesn’t take you direct to the sclip, try clicking here and scroll down to “Exclusive look at soldiers on the front line”.

The best contemporary example of dominant media taboos at work has to do with the Iraq War. Certain sections of “mainstream” media may have apologized for their power-serving role in propagating the big weapons of mass destruction (WMD) lie (and related deceptions about Saddam Hussein’s alleged connections to al Qaeda and 9/11) that the Bush administration cooked up to justify their invasion of Iraq. But so what? The apology came far too late to matter and dominant U.S. media has subsequently continued to disseminate numerous other administration deceptions, such as the preposterous claim (elevated by the White House public relations machine once the WMD fraud began to be exposed) that the real reason for the occupation of Iraq was the United States’ desire to export “democracy” and to create a free and sovereign Iraq.

Never mind that the preponderant majority of Iraqis have wanted U.S. troops to leave their nation from the start. Never mind that just 1 percent of Iraqis think the U.S. invaded to export democracy or that the great majority of Iraqis think Uncle Sam came to (imagine) grab their oil. Or that a recent poll conducted by “our own” State Department reports that almost three-fourths of Baghdad’s  residents would “feel safer” if U.S. forces left their country. Or that one of the first actions of the U.S. occupation authorities was to open up much of Iraq ’s economy to multinational corporate ownership – an action that would never have been supported by the Iraqi majority and which violated core principles of national independence.

Never mind that 72 percent of Americans surveyed by the mainstream Chicago Council on Foreign Relations in 2004 said that the U.S. should remove its military from Iraq if that’s what a clear majority of Iraqis want. Or that the United States ‘ own regressive, hyper-plutocratic domestic policy is highly unpopular with the U.S. majority.  Or that America ’s “dollar democracy” has long been something of an open corporate plutocracy, raising critical questions about the United States ‘ qualifications to implant something “democracy” abroad.

Never mind that the U.S. is a close ally and sponsor of the feudal, arch-repressive Saudi Arabian regime along with numerous other authoritarian state and political forces (including the Israeli occupation state) in the region and around the world. U.S. policymakers have long been willing to collaborate with the Saudis for one very simple and obvious reason: American access to, and control of, that regime’s unparalleled petroleum reserves.

Never mind that “most U.S. [occupation] soldiers interviewed by NEWSWEEK have long since stopped insisting that their greatest mission is to bring peace and democracy to Iraq .  More and more,” Newsweek reported last month, “they talk about their desire to simply protect their buddies, and to get everyone home alive” (”Manhunt in Mesopotamia,” Newsweek,  May 28. 2007. p.37).

And never mind that the notion of the Iraqi people doing whatever they wish with their own state’s critical petroleum resources – second or third only to those of Saudi Arabia – is completely unacceptable to U.S. foreign policy makers from either of the nation’s dominant two imperial business parties.  The oil and related world-economic and strategic geopolitical stakes in Iraq and the region are simply too high for that. As James M. Lindsay, a vice president at the Council on Foreign Relations proclaimed last year, “it was always hard to sustain the argument that if the United States withdrew from Vietnam there would be immense geopolitical consequences. As we look at Iraq, it’s a very different issue. It’s a country in one of the most volatile parts of the world, which has a very precious resource that modern economies rely on, namely oil.”

As the leading left critic of U.S. foreign policy Noam Chomsky rightly observes, “the U.S. invaded Iraq because it has enormous oil resources, mostly untapped, and it’s right in the heart of the world’s energy system.”  If the U.S. succeeds in controlling Iraq, Chomsky notes, “it extends enormously its strategic power, what Zbigniew Brzezinski calls its ‘critical leverage’ over Europe and Asia . That’s a major reason for controlling the oil resources – it gives you strategic power. Even if you’re on renewable energy you want to do that. That’s the reason for invading Iraq, the fundamental reason,” readily understood, Chomsky adds, by anybody who has “three gray cells functioning.”

Even if the U.S. overcame its gasoline addiction and became fully energy- self-reliant (it currently receives just 20 percent of its oil from the Middle East), something else would still make U.S. officials positively obsessed with Middle Eastern petroleum: the ongoing and ever-worsening loss of America’s onetime supremacy in basic global-capitalist realms of production, trade, international finance, and currency and the related emergence of the rapidly expanding giant China as a new strategic military (as well as economic) competitor.  As the noted Left geographer and world-systems analyst David Harvey argues, the United States’ long decline, reflecting predictable (and predicted) shifts in the spatial patterns of capitalist investment and social infrastructure gives special urgency for the U.S to deepen its control of Middle Eastern oil and use it as a bargaining chip with even more oil-dependent regions like Western Europe and East Asia, homes to the leading challengers to U.S. economic power. That core objective would hardly be attained helping Iraq act in accord with the principles of democracy and national independence.

Dominant (”mainstream”) U.S. media coverage and commentary on Iraq continues to be hopelessly crippled by doctrinal observance of taboos against discussing five basic and intimately interrelated aspects of so-called “Operation Iraqi Freedom”:

1. The monumentally criminal nature of the invasion, which involved (in the words of the 2005 Istanbul Declaration) “planning, preparing, and waging the supreme crime of a war of aggression in contravention of the United Nations Charter and the Nuremberg Principles.”

2. The brazenly imperialist and colonial nature of the occupation, which is richly continuous with earlier U.S. behavior within the beyond the Middle East and provides critical context for understanding why U.S. soldiers die on a regular basis in Iraq (where Americans are understandably seen as unlawful invaders).

3. The racist nature of the occupation, expressed in the false conflation between al Qaeda and a small group of predominantly Saudi hijackers on one hand and the broad Arab and Muslim worlds on the other hand.  This racism has found expression also in U.S. ground forces’ recurrent description of Iraqi civilians and resistance fighters as “hajis” and “towel heads”(among other terrible designations) and in many Americans’ insistence on describing the entire Middle East as a den of primitive, barbarian and enemies of modern “civilization.”

4. The full and overwhelming extent of Iraqi civilian casualties, including more than 700,000 dead by now.  The Iraqi body count dwarfs the U.S. death toll in Iraq, but dominant U.S. media remains primarily and narcissistically obsessed with U.S. fatalities in Mesopotamia . The mostly civilian Arab victims of U.S. imperial violence (a lovely expression of America ’s noble commitment to “civilization”) are unworthy victims of the Iraq War as far as dominant U.S. media is concerned.

5. The critical role of Middle Eastern oil in shaping the decision to invade Iraq and in ensuring that the U.S. will not completely or truly withdraw from that illegally occupied nation or indeed the region anytime soon, whichever corporate-imperial party happens to hold power in Washington.

These basic and unpleasant realities are essentially unmentionable in “mainstream” coverage and commentary of the Iraq War. At the “left” margin of dominant U.S. media’s narrow parameters of acceptable discourse (defined by the likes of the New York Times and militant centrists Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama), the war is at worst a  terrible “mistake” – a “strategic blunder” driven by a sincere but naïve drive to advance noble and democratic ideals and institutions.

It’s simply beyond the pale to note that the occupation is a racist and petro-imperialist crime against the Iraqi people, civilized norms and international law and that this crime is consistent with a long and bipartisan record of U.S. imperial violence.

As a result, dominant coverage and commentary on the war is childish, chaotic and nonsensical.  Reading the leading papers and watching the corporate talking heads speak about “Operation Iraqi Freedom” is like listening to a deranged psychotic talking gibberish. The assumption of benevolent intention, the denial of criminal and imperial intent, the inability to grasp the role of petroleum, and the denial of racist and mass-murderous realities makes taking in “mainstream” war/occupation coverage and commentary like hearing a baseball game being called by a blind man.

According to a Washington Post “news” story (not an editorial) in January 2005, “spreading democracy around the world” was “one of  [the Bush administration's] top foreign policy goals for the new term.”

Right and a strike out is a home run. Two plus two equals five. And the linebacker just stole home.

The Post has joined the Times in claiming to be sorry for its bad call on Iraqi’s WMD.  When will it apologize for claiming to believe that Bush invaded Iraq in accord with U.S. goals to “spread democracy around the world”?

“The American empire is fighting to advance democracy, advance peace and quell violence in the Middle East ?” Sure – and the Chicago Cubs have the best record in baseball.

Since its launch just over a decade ago, the al-Jazeera satellite TV station has transformed the politics of the Middle East. For the first time, people in the region had access to a genuinely free and independent source of news and comment that was neither under the control of dictatorial regimes nor western states or corporations. Under its slogan of “The opinion … and the other opinion”, al-Jazeera gave an Arab world hungry for information and debate the means to talk to itself and shape its future. It spawned imitators across the region and has launched an English language station that is beginning to challenge the western monopoly of international news as a “voice of the global south”. And the station also put Qatar, which sponsors it, on the political map and gave it unprecedented prestige throughout the Arab world and beyond.

But now that achievement is being put at risk. The evidence is clear that the US government is using its influence in Qatar to try to neuter the station’s independence, bring it to heel and shift its coverage in a pro-western direction. If it succeeds, it would be a disaster for the Arab world and its chance to shape an independent and democratic future.

When al-Jazeera was launched in 1996, it was hailed by the US as a brave step towards liberalisation of the Middle Eastern media. But that all changed after September 2001 and the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The US administration could not tolerate a TV station that was popular and trusted in the Arab and Muslim world broadcasting about the reality of western and Israeli policies on the ground – and giving airtime to their enemies. Although US and Israeli viewpoints have always been given plenty of airtime, the freedom enjoyed by al-Jazeera’s editorial staff has clearly been too liberal and democratic for the world’s “leading democracy”. Meanwhile, dictatorial regimes in the region pressed Washington to do something about this “turbulent priest” they believed was stirring their peoples against their despotic rule.

Initially, al-Jazeera had forced other channels in the Arab world to open up their coverage. But the new freedoms were not tolerated for long. And although the US government launched its own Arabic news channel al-Hurra, and Saudi Arabia al-Arabiya, neither succeeded in denting al-Jazeera’s popularity.

But the station has had to pay a high price for its independence and professionalism. Its offices in Kabul and Baghdad were bombed by the US; its Baghdad correspondent Tariq Ayyub was killed; its Kabul correspondent Taysir Alluni was arrested in Spain and charged with terrorism; and its cameraman Sami Alhajj was kidnapped in Kabul and continues to be held in Guantánamo Bay. Most notoriously of all, George Bush even suggested to Tony Blair that they bomb al-Jazeera’s Doha headquarters.

Now the US, which maintains a large military base in Qatar, has adopted a more subtle approach to breaking the Arabs’ voice of independence and diversity. And the signs are that some elements in the Qatari government have yielded to the relentless US pressure. As one source close to al-Jazeera has put it: “You don’t need to bomb a TV station to change its direction.” A recent reshuffle has brought outspokenly pro-US directors on to the board, including a former Qatari ambassador to Washington. Another has boasted publicly that the tone and content of al-Jazeera’s coverage is going to be changed. But these moves have already backfired and caused huge controversy not only in Qatar but throughout the Middle East, and there is every chance that what is in effect an attempted coup at the station will be reversed. It would be a huge loss for independence and freedom in the Arab world if it succeeded.

The war on Iraq won’t be remembered for how it was waged so much as for how it was sold. It was a propaganda war, a war of perception management, where loaded phrases, such as “weapons of mass destruction” and “rogue state” were hurled like precision weapons at the target audience: us.

To understand the Iraq war you don’t need to consult generals, but the spin doctors and PR flacks who stage-managed the countdown to war from the murky corridors of Washington where politics, corporate spin and psy-ops spooks cohabit.

Consider the picaresque journey of Tony Blair’s plagiarized dossier on Iraq, from a grad student’s website to a cut-and-paste job in the prime minister’s bombastic speech to the House of Commons. Blair, stubborn and verbose, paid a price for his grandiose puffery. Bush, who looted whole passages from Blair’s speech for his own clumsy presentations, has skated freely through the tempest. Why?

Unlike Blair, the Bush team never wanted to present a legal case for war. They had no interest in making any of their allegations about Iraq hold up to a standard of proof. The real effort was aimed at amping up the mood for war by using the psychology of fear.

Facts were never important to the Bush team. They were disposable nuggets that could be discarded at will and replaced by whatever new rationale that played favorably with their polls and focus groups. The war was about weapons of mass destruction one week, al-Qaeda the next. When neither allegation could be substantiated on the ground, the fall back position became the mass graves (many from the Iran/Iraq war where the U.S.A. backed Iraq) proving that Saddam was an evil thug who deserved to be toppled. The motto of the Bush PR machine was: Move on. Don’t explain. Say anything to conceal the perfidy behind the real motives for war. Never look back. Accuse the questioners of harboring unpatriotic sensibilities. Eventually, even the cagey Wolfowitz admitted that the official case for war was made mainly to make the invasion palatable, not to justify it.

The Bush claque of neocon hawks viewed the Iraq war as a product and, just like a new pair of Nikes, it required a roll-out campaign to soften up the consumers. The same techniques (and often the same PR gurus) that have been used to hawk cigarettes, SUVs and nuclear waste dumps were deployed to retail the Iraq war. To peddle the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell and company recruited public relations gurus into top-level jobs at the Pentagon and the State Department. These spinmeisters soon had more say over how the rationale for war on Iraq should be presented than intelligence agencies and career diplomats. If the intelligence didn’t fit the script, it was shaded, retooled or junked.

Take Charlotte Beers whom Powell picked as undersecretary of state in the post-9/11 world. Beers wasn’t a diplomat. She wasn’t even a politician. She was a grand diva of spin, known on the business and gossip pages as “the queen of Madison Avenue.” On the strength of two advertising campaigns, one for Uncle Ben’s Rice and another for Head and Shoulder’s dandruff shampoo, Beers rocketed to the top of the heap in the PR world, heading two giant PR houses: Ogilvy and Mathers as well as J. Walter Thompson.

At the state department Beers, who had met Powell in 1995 when they both served on the board of Gulf Airstream, worked at, in Powell’s words, “the branding of U.S. foreign policy.” She extracted more than $500 million from Congress for her Brand America campaign, which largely focused on beaming U.S. propaganda into the Muslim world, much of it directed at teens.

“Public diplomacy is a vital new arm in what will combat terrorism over time,” said Beers. “All of a sudden we are in this position of redefining who America is, not only for ourselves, but for the outside world.” Note the rapt attention Beers pays to the manipulation of perception, as opposed, say, to alterations of U.S. policy.

Old-fashioned diplomacy involves direct communication between

representatives of nations, a conversational give and take, often fraught with deception (see April Glaspie), but an exchange nonetheless. Public diplomacy, as defined by Beers, is something else entirely. It’s a one-way street, a unilateral broadcast of American propaganda directly to the public, domestic and international, a kind of informational carpet-bombing.

The themes of her campaigns were as simplistic and flimsy as a Bush press conference. The American incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq were all about bringing the balm of “freedom” to oppressed peoples. Hence, the title of the U.S. war: Operation Iraqi Freedom, where cruise missiles were depicted as instruments of liberation. Bush himself distilled the Beers equation to its bizarre essence: “This war is about peace.”

Beers quietly resigned her post a few weeks before the first volley of tomahawk missiles battered Baghdad. From her point of view, the war itself was already won, the fireworks of shock and awe were all after play.

Over at the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld drafted Victoria “Torie” Clarke as his director of public affairs. Clarke knew the ropes inside the Beltway. Before becoming Rumsfeld’s mouthpiece, she had commanded one of the world’s great parlors for powerbrokers: Hill and Knowlton’s D.C. office.

Almost immediately upon taking up her new gig, Clarke convened regular meetings with a select group of Washington’s top private PR specialists and lobbyists to develop a marketing plan for the Pentagon’s forthcoming terror wars. The group was filled with heavy-hitters and was strikingly bipartisan in composition. She called it the Rumsfeld Group and it included PR executive Sheila Tate, columnist Rich Lowry, and Republican political consultant Rich Galen.

The brain trust also boasted top Democratic fixer Tommy Boggs, brother of NPR’s Cokie Roberts and son of the late Congressman Hale Boggs of Louisiana. At the very time Boggs was conferring with top Pentagon brass on how to frame the war on terror, he was also working feverishly for the royal family of Saudi Arabia. In 2002 alone, the Saudis paid his Qorvis PR firm $20.2 million to protect its interests in Washington. In the wake of hostile press coverage following the exposure of Saudi links to the 9/11 hijackers, the royal family needed all the well-placed help it could buy. They seem to have gotten their money’s worth. Boggs’ felicitous influence-peddling may help to explain why the references to Saudi funding of al-Qaeda were dropped from the recent congressional report on the investigation into intelligence failures and 9/11.

According to the trade publication PR Week, the Rumsfeld Group sent “messaging advice” to the Pentagon. The group told Clarke and Rumsfeld that in order to get the American public to buy into the war on terrorism, they needed to suggest a link to nation states, not just nebulous groups such as al-Qaeda. In other words, there needed to be a fixed target for the military campaigns, some distant place to drop cruise missiles and cluster bombs. They suggested the notion (already embedded in Rumsfeld’s mind) of playing up the notion of so-called rogue states as the real masters of terrorism. Thus was born the Axis of Evil, which, of course, wasn’t an “axis” at all, since two of the states, Iran and Iraq, hated each other, and neither had anything at all to do with the third, North Korea.

Tens of millions in federal money were poured into private public relations and media firms working to craft and broadcast the Bush dictat that Saddam had to be taken out before the Iraqi dictator blew up the world by dropping chemical and nuclear bombs from long-range drones. Many of these PR executives and image consultants were old friends of the high priests in the Bush inner sanctum. Indeed, they were veterans, like Cheney and Powell, of the previous war against Iraq, another engagement that was more spin than combat .

At the top of the list was John Rendon, head of the D.C. firm, the Rendon Group. Rendon is one of Washington’s heaviest hitters, a Beltway fixer who never let political affiliation stand in the way of an assignment. Rendon served as a media consultant for Michael Dukakis and Jimmy Carter, as well as Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Whenever the Pentagon wanted to go to war, he offered his services at a price. During Desert Storm, Rendon pulled in $100,000 a month from the Kuwaiti royal family. He followed this up with a $23 million contract from the CIA to produce anti-Saddam propaganda in the region.

As part of this CIA project, Rendon created and named the Iraqi National Congress and tapped his friend Ahmed Chalabi, the shady financier, to head the organization.

Shortly after 9/11, the Pentagon handed the Rendon Group another big assignment: public relations for the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan. Rendon was also deeply involved in the planning and public relations for the pre-emptive war on Iraq, though both Rendon and the Pentagon refuse to disclose the details of the group’s work there.

But it’s not hard to detect the manipulative hand of Rendon behind many of the Iraq war’s signature events, including the toppling of the Saddam statue (by U.S. troops and Chalabi associates) and videotape of jubilant Iraqis waving American flags as the Third Infantry rolled by them. Rendon had pulled off the same stunt in the first Gulf War, handing out American flags to Kuwaitis and herding the media to the orchestrated demonstration. “Where do you think they got those American flags?” clucked Rendon in 1991. “That was my assignment.”

The Rendon Group may also have had played a role in pushing the phony intelligence that has now come back to haunt the Bush administration. In December of 2002, Robert Dreyfuss reported that the inner circle of the Bush White House preferred the intelligence coming from Chalabi and his associates to that being proffered by analysts at the CIA.

So Rendon and his circle represented a new kind of off-the-shelf PSYOPs , the privatization of official propaganda. “I am not a national security strategist or a military tactician,” said Rendon. “I am a politician, and a person who uses communication to meet public policy or corporate policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior and a perception manager.”

What exactly, is perception management? The Pentagon defines it this way: “actions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives and objective reasoning.” In other words, lying about the intentions of the U.S. government. In a rare display of public frankness, the Pentagon actually let slip its plan (developed by Rendon) to establish a high-level den inside the Department Defense for perception management. They called it the Office of Strategic Influence and among its many missions was to plant false stories in the press.

Nothing stirs the corporate media into outbursts of pious outrage like an official government memo bragging about how the media are manipulated for political objectives. So the New York Times and Washington Post threw indignant fits about the Office of Strategic Influence; the Pentagon shut down the operation, and the press gloated with satisfaction on its victory. Yet, Rumsfeld told the Pentagon press corps that while he was killing the office, the same devious work would continue. “You can have the corpse,” said Rumsfeld. “You can have the name. But I’m going to keep doing every single thing that needs to be done. And I have.”

At a diplomatic level, despite the hired guns and the planted stories, this image war was lost. It failed to convince even America’s most fervent allies and dependent client states that Iraq posed much of a threat. It failed to win the blessing of the U.N. and even NATO, a wholly owned subsidiary of Washington. At the end of the day, the vaunted coalition of the willing consisted of Britain, Spain, Italy, Australia, and a cohort of former Soviet bloc nations. Even so, the citizens of the nations that cast their lot with the U.S.A. overwhelmingly opposed the war.

Domestically, it was a different story. A population traumatized by terror threats and shattered economy became easy prey for the saturation bombing of the Bush message that Iraq was a terrorist state linked to al-Qaeda that was only minutes away from launching attacks on America with weapons of mass destruction._Americans were the victims of an elaborate con job, pelted with a daily barrage of threat inflation, distortions, deceptions and lies, not about tactics or strategy or war plans, but about justifications for war. The lies were aimed not at confusing Saddam’s regime, but the American people. By the start of the war, 66 per cent of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and 79 per cent thought he was close to having a nuclear weapon.

Of course, the closest Saddam came to possessing a nuke was a rusting gas centrifuge buried for 13 years in the garden of Mahdi Obeidi, a retired Iraqi scientist. Iraq didn’t have any functional chemical or biological weapons. In fact, it didn’t even possess any SCUD missiles, despite erroneous reports fed by Pentagon PR flacks alleging that it had fired SCUDs into Kuwait.

This charade wouldn’t have worked without a gullible or a complicit press corps. Victoria Clarke, who developed the Pentagon plan for embedded reports, put it succinctly a few weeks before the war began: “Media coverage of any future operation will to a large extent shape public perception.”

During the Vietnam War, TV images of maimed GIs and napalmed villages suburbanized opposition to the war and helped hasten the U.S. withdrawal. The Bush gang meant to turn the Vietnam phenomenon on its head by using TV as a force to propel the U.S.A. into a war that no one really wanted.

What the Pentagon sought was a new kind of living room war, where instead of photos of mangled soldiers and dead Iraqi kids, they could control the images Americans viewed and to a large extent the content of the stories. By embedding reporters inside selected divisions, Clarke believed the Pentagon could count on the reporters to build relationships with the troops and to feel dependent on them for their own safety. It worked, naturally. One reporter for a national network trembled on camera that the U.S. Army functioned as “our protectors.” The late David Bloom of NBC confessed on the air that he was willing to do “anything and everything they can ask of us.”

When the Pentagon needed a heroic story, the press obliged. Jessica Lynch became the war’s first instant celebrity. Here was a neo-gothic tale of a steely young woman wounded in a fierce battle, captured and tortured by ruthless enemies, and dramatically saved from certain death by a team of selfless rescuers, knights in camo and night-vision goggles. Of course, nearly every detail of her heroic adventure proved to be as fictive and maudlin as any made-for-TV-movie. But the ordeal of Private Lynch, which dominated the news for more than a week, served its purpose: to distract attention from a stalled campaign that was beginning to look at lot riskier than the American public had been hoodwinked into believing.

The Lynch story was fed to the eager press by a Pentagon operation called Combat Camera, the Army network of photographers, videographers and editors that sends 800 photos and 25 video clips a day to the media. The editors at Combat Camera carefully culled the footage to present the Pentagon’s montage of the war, eliding such unsettling images as collateral damage, cluster bombs, dead children and U.S. soldiers, napalm strikes and disgruntled troops.

“A lot of our imagery will have a big impact on world opinion,” predicted Lt. Jane Larogue, director of Combat Camera in Iraq. She was right. But as the hot war turned into an even hotter occupation, the Pentagon, despite airy rhetoric from occupation supremo Paul Bremer about installing democratic institutions such as a free press, moved to tighten its monopoly on the flow images out of Iraq. First, it tried to shut down Al Jazeera, the Arab news channel. Then the Pentagon intimated that it would like to see all foreign TV news crews banished from Baghdad.

Few newspapers fanned the hysteria about the threat posed by Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction as sedulously as did the Washington Post. In the months leading up to the war, the Post’s pro-war op-eds outnumbered the anti-war columns by a 3-to-1 margin.

Back in 1988, the Post felt much differently about Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction. When reports trickled out about the gassing of Iranian troops, the Washington Post’s editorial page shrugged off the massacres, calling the mass poisonings “a quirk of war.”

The Bush team displayed a similar amnesia. When Iraq used chemical weapons in grisly attacks on Iran, the U.S. government not only didn’t object, it encouraged Saddam. Anything to punish Iran was the message coming from the White House. Donald Rumsfeld himself was sent as President Ronald Reagan’s personal envoy to Baghdad. Rumsfeld conveyed the bold message than an Iraq defeat would be viewed as a “strategic setback for the United States.” This sleazy alliance was sealed with a handshake caught on videotape. When CNN reporter Jamie McIntyre replayed the footage for Rumsfeld in the spring of 2003, the secretary of defense snapped, “Where’d you get that? Iraqi television?”

The current crop of Iraq hawks also saw Saddam much differently then. Take the writer Laura Mylroie, sometime colleague of the New York Times’ Judy Miller, who persists in peddling the ludicrous conspiracy that Iraq was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

How times have changed! In 1987, Mylroie felt downright cuddly toward Saddam. She wrote an article for the New Republic titled “Back Iraq: Time for a U.S. Tilt in the Mideast,” arguing that the U.S. should publicly embrace Saddam’s secular regime as a bulwark against the Islamic fundamentalists in Iran. The co-author of this mesmerizing weave of wonkery was none other than Daniel Pipes, perhaps the nation’s most bellicose Islamophobe. “The American weapons that Iraq could make good use of include remotely scatterable and anti-personnel mines and counterartillery radar,” wrote Mylroie and Pipes. “The United States might also consider upgrading intelligence it is supplying Baghdad.”

In the rollout for the war, Mylroie seemed to be everywhere hawking the invasion of Iraq. She would often appear on two or three different networks in the same day. How did the reporter manage this feat? She had help in the form of Eleana Benador, the media placement guru who runs Benador Associates. Born in Peru, Benador parlayed her skills as a linguist into a lucrative career as media relations whiz for the Washington foreign policy elite. She also oversees the Middle East Forum, a fanatically pro-Zionist white paper mill. Her clients include some of the nation’s most fervid hawks, including Michael Ledeen, Charles Krauthammer, Al Haig, Max Boot, Daniel Pipes, Richard Perle, and Judy Miller. During the Iraq war, Benador’s assignment was to embed this squadron of pro-war zealots into the national media, on talk shows, and op-ed pages.

Benador not only got them the gigs, she also crafted the theme and made sure they all stayed on message. “There are some things, you just have to state them in a different way, in a slightly different way,” said Benador. “If not, people get scared.” Scared of intentions of their own government.

It could have been different. All of the holes in the Bush administration’s gossamer case for war were right there for the mainstream press to expose. Instead, the U.S. press, just like the oil companies, sought to commercialize the Iraq war and profit from the invasions. They didn’t want to deal with uncomfortable facts or present voices of dissent.

Nothing sums up this unctuous approach more brazenly than MSNBC’s firing of liberal talk show host Phil Donahue on the eve of the war. The network replaced the Donahue Show with a running segment called Countdown: Iraq, featuring the usual nightly coterie of retired generals, security flacks, and other cheerleaders for invasion. The network’s executives blamed the cancellation on sagging ratings. In fact, during its run Donahue’s show attracted more viewers than any other program on the network. The real reason for the pre-emptive strike on Donahue was spelled out in an internal memo from anxious executives at NBC. Donahue, the memo said, offered “a difficult face for NBC in a time of war. He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.”

The memo warned that Donahue’s show risked tarring MSNBC as an unpatriotic network, “a home for liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.” So, with scarcely a second thought, the honchos at MSNBC gave Donahue the boot and hoisted the battle flag.

It’s war that sells.

There’s a helluva caveat, of course. Once you buy it, the merchants of war accept no returns.

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest book is End Times: the Death of the Fourth Estate, co-written with Alexander Cockburn.

An experienced British officer serving in Iraq has written to the BBC describing the invasion as “illegal, immoral and unwinnable” which, he says, is “the overwhelming feeling of many of my peers”. In a letter to the BBC’s Newsnight and Medialens.org he accuses the media’s “embedded coverage with the US Army” of failing to question “the intentions and continuing effects of the US-led invasion and occupation”.

He says most British soldiers regard their tours as “loathsome”, during which they “reluctantly [provide] target practice for insurgents, senselessly haemorrhaging casualties and squandering soldiers’ lives, as part of Bush’s vain attempt to delay the inevitable Anglo-US rout until after the next US election.” He appeals to journalists not to swallow “the official line/ White House propaganda”.

In 1970, I made a film in Vietnam called The Quiet Mutiny in which GIs spoke out about their hatred of that war and its “official line/White House propaganda”. The experiences in Iraq and Vietnam are both very different and strikingly similar. There was much less “embedded coverage” in Vietnam, although there was censorship by omission, which is standard practice today.

What is different about Iraq is the willingness of usually obedient British soldiers to speak their minds, from General Richard Dannatt, Britain’s current military chief, who said that the presence of his troops in Iraq “exacerbates the security problem”, to General Michael Rose who has called for Tony Blair to be impeached for taking Britain to war “on false grounds” – remarks that are mild compared with the blogs of squaddies.

What is also different is the growing awareness in the British forces and the public of how “the official line” is played through the media. This can be quite crude: for example when a BBC defence correspondent in Iraq described the aim of the Anglo-American invasion as “bring[ing] democracy and human rights” to Iraq. The Director of BBC Television, Helen Boaden, backed him up with a sheaf of quotations from Blair that this was indeed the aim, implying that Blair’s notorious word was enough.

More often than not, censorship by omission is employed: for example, by omitting the fact that almost 80 per cent of attacks are directed against the occupation forces (source: the Pentagon) so as to give the impression that the occupiers are doing their best to separate “warring tribes” and are crisis managers rather than the cause of the crisis.

There is a last-ditch sense about this kind of propaganda. Seymour Hersh said recently, “[In April, the Bush administration] made a decision that because of the totally dwindling support for the war in Iraq, they would go back to the al-Qaeda card, although there’s no empirical basis. Most of the pros will tell you the foreign fighters are a couple of per cent and they’re sort of leaderless… there’s no attempt to suggest there’s any significant co-ordination of these groups, but the press keeps going ga-ga about al-Qaeda… it’s just amazing to me.”

Ga-ga day at the London Guardian was 22 May. “Iran’s secret plan for summer offensive to force US out of Iraq”, said the front-page banner headline. “Iran is secretly forging ties with al Qaeda elements and Sunni Arab militias in Iraq,” wrote Simon Tisdall from Washington, “in preparation for a summer showdown with coalition int- ended to tip a wavering US Congress into voting for full military withdrawal, US officials say.” The entire tale was based on anonymous US official sources. No attempt was made to substantiate their “firm evidence” or explain the illogic of their claims. No journalistic scepticism was even hinted, which is amazing considering the web of proven lies spun from Washington over Iraq.

Moreover, it had a curious tone of something-must-be-done insistence, reminiscent of Judith Miller’s scandalous reports in the New York Times claiming that Saddam was about to launch his weapons of mass destruction and beckoning Bush to invade. Tisdall in effect offered the same invitation; I can remember few more irresponsible pieces of journalism. The British public and the people of Iran, deserve better.

Somalia consists of five territories where people of the same language and religion live. During the colonial period it was partitioned into territories claimed by the British, French, Italians, Kenyans and Ethiopians.

In 1960 the former British and Italian territories were united to form the independent Somali Republic. The French territory of Djibouti won independence in 1977. Other territories remain under Ethiopian and Kenyan control.

In 1969, General Mohammed Siad Barre led a coup and created a military government. For 21 years Somalia was under a dictatorship. In 1991 President Barre was overthrown. The Hawiye clan led the uprising. But the opposing clans failed to agree and there was a power struggle for 16 years.

In 1993 the United Nations intervened. Actually it was US interventions with UN helmets on. They said they would confiscate the guns. But they clashed with the factional leader Aidid. It ended with 18 US servicemen being killed in a battle for Mogadishu, including the famous “Black Hawk down incident”. The US troops pulled out.

After that neither the US nor the UN cared about Somalia. The warlords ruled, and there was chaos. Some Somalis called for EU intervention, but no one was interested. Women were raped and children died. The situation grew worse.

Religion – Islam – began to unite people and overcome the factional infighting between the clans. People said: If the clan system is causing chaos, we should unite around our religion. The “Islamic Courts” that took power in 2006 stood for Islam – bringing people together and overcoming tribal loyalties – and for bringing killers to justice.

For a brief period there was relative peace. The warlords fled to Ethiopia. The Islamic Courts ensured that no one could carry a gun, no one could rape a woman. So the Islamic Courts spread.

US supported the invasion

That’s when the warlords turned to the CIA and accused the Islamic Courts of harbouring Islamic terrorists, including the people who planted bombs in the US embassy in Kenya in 1998, in which hundreds were killed.

The US backed the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in January 2007. Ethiopian forces killed thousands, raping women. US helicopters and C130 gunships bombarded the south.

They did not capture or kill anyone involved in the Kenyan embassy bombings. And in any case, why launch a hunt for these people now, 9 years after the bombings? For 16 years they weren’t bothered about catching the bombers. The Ethiopian ambassador to London himself says the invasion was about clan interests, not terrorists.

In March and April there were clashes between the occupying Ethiopians and the Hawiye. Ethiopian tanks shelled Mogadishu, a city of 2.5 million people. The UN says 1,380 people did in two days. The bodies were left to rot in the street. It was genocide. The Somali resistance say the Ethiopians have used chemical weapons.

The Red Cross said it was the worst situation in Somalia for 16 years. 400,000 have fled Mogadishu.

The occupying government and the warlords have closed Al-Jazeera and three radio stations. Women have no rights, they can’t take part in society. The government banned a women’s conference on June 13 called by the Italians, saying that Somalia is a Muslim country so women can’t take part!

Addis Ababa is now a new Guantanamo: anyone they aren’t happy with is taken there, imprisoned and tortured. People trying to flee to Kenya have been forced back.

We appeal to the UK government, to the media, to see what is happening, to broadcast what is happening. We need human and democratic rights. But no one is paying attention.

During the discussion part of the meeting, the following points were raised:

The US currently relies on Africa for 10% of its oil imports; by 2020 Africa will supply 25% of US oil.

The “war on terror” is active in Africa, and Somalia is the main front. Somalia reveals so clearly that the “war on terror” has nothing to do with fighting terrorism. The are no “terrorists” in Somalia, although the US-backed intervention could well attract Al-Qaeda, just as in Iraq. The US and its allies label any resistance “terrorist”.

During the Cold War the US and Russia fought proxy wars in Africa. The same thing is going to happen with the US and China as they battle for resources. Somalia is strategic. It is also the weakest country in Africa, and therefore the easiest to control.

The Ethiopian dictator Mengistu now lives on a luxury mansion in Zimbabwe. Yet we don’t hear about US demands for him to be extradited!

Every conflict in Africa has something to do with imperialist intervention.

The Lebanese government accuses Fatah al-Islam of having ties with al-Qaeda and the Syrian government. Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh joins us to talk about another theory of who is backing the militant group – the Lebanese government itself, along with the United States.

Last March, Hersh reported the U.S. and Saudi governments are covertly backing militant Sunni groups like Fatah al-Islam as part of an overarching foreign policy against Iran and growing Shia influence. [includes rush transcript] Lebanon’s defense minister has said Islamist militants entrenched in a Palestinian refugee camp must surrender or face further military action. The ultimatum followed three days of fierce fighting between the army and the Fatah al-Islam group. The army has laid siege to the Nahr al-Bared camp since the fighting erupted on Sunday, bombarding it with tank fire and artillery shells. At least eighty people have died with dozens more wounded.

On Wednesday, an informal ceasefire enabled thousands of residents to flee the camp. Some headed for another Palestinian refugee camp nearby, while others traveled to the neighboring city of Tripoli. The International Committee of the Red Cross estimates between thirteen and fifteen thousand refugees have left Nahr al-Bared. The camp is home to thirty thousand people. The internal conflict is the bloodiest in Lebanon since the civil war ended 17 years ago.

The Lebanese government accuses Fatah al-Islam of having ties with al-Qaeda and the Syrian government. But there’s another theory of who is backing the militant group – the Lebanese government itself, along with the United States. Last March, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker that the U.S. and Saudi governments are covertly backing militant Sunni groups like Fatah al-Islam as part of an overarching foreign policy against Iran and growing Shia influence. Seymour Hersh joins us now on the line from Washington DC.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Lebanon’s defense minister has said Islamist militants entrenched in a Palestinian refugee camp must surrender or face further military action. The ultimatum followed three days of fierce fighting between the army and the Fatah al-Islam group. The army has laid siege to the Nahr al-Bared camp since the fighting erupted on Sunday, bombarding it with tank fire and artillery shells. At least eighty people have died, with dozens more wounded.

On Wednesday, an informal ceasefire enabled thousands of residents to flee the camp. Some headed for another Palestinian refugee camp nearby, while others traveled to the neighboring city of Tripoli. The International Committee of the Red Cross estimates between 13,000 and 15,000 refugees have left Nahr al-Bared. The camp is home to 30,000 people. The internal conflict is the bloodiest in Lebanon since the civil war ended seventeen years ago.

AMY GOODMAN: The Lebanese government accuses Fatah al-Islam of having ties with al-Qaeda and the Syrian government. But there’s another theory of who’s backing the militant group: the Lebanese government itself, along with the United States. Last March, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker magazine that the US and Saudi governments are covertly backing militant Sunni groups like Fatah al-Islam as part of an overarching foreign policy against Iran and growing Shia influence.

Seymour Hersh joins us now on the phone from his home in Washington, D.C. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Sy.

SEYMOUR HERSH: Good morning.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain what you learned?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, very simply — this is over the winter — the government made — I think the article is called “The Redirection.” There was a major change of policy by the United States government, essentially, which was that we were going to — the American government would join with the Brits and other Western allies and with what we call the moderate Sunni governments — that is, the governments of Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt — and join with them and with Israel to fight the Shia.

One of the major goals for America, of course, was the obsession the Bush White House has with Iran, and the other obsession they have is, of course — is in fear — is of Hezbollah, the Party of God, that is so dominant in — the Shia Party of God that’s so dominant in southern Lebanon that once — and whose leader Hassan Nasrallah wants to play a bigger political role and is doing quite a bit to get there and is in direct confrontation with Siniora.

And so, you have a situation where the Sunni government, pretty much in control now, the American-supported Sunni government headed by Fouad Siniora, who was a deputy or an aide to Rafik Hariri, the slain leader of Lebanon, that government has — we know, the International Crisis Group reported a couple years ago that the son Saad Hariri, the son of Rafik Hariri, who’s now a major player in the parliament of Lebanon, he put up $40,000 bail to free four Sunni fundamentalists, Jihadist-Salafists — which you will — who were tied directly to — you know, this word “al-Qaeda” is sort of ridiculous — they were tied to jihadist groups. And God knows, al-Qaeda, in terms of Osama bin Laden, doesn’t have much to do with what we’re talking about. These are independently, more or less, you can call them, fanatical jihadists.

And so, the goal — part of the goal in Lebanon, part of the way this policy played out, was, with Saudi help, Prince Bandar — if you remember him — we remember Prince Bandar, the Saudi prince, as a major player in Iran-Contra and also in the American effort two decades ago — if you remember, we supported Osama bin Laden and other jihadists in Afghanistan against the Russians, and that didn’t work out so well. Well, we run right back to the well again, and we began supporting some of these jihadist groups, and particularly — in the article, I did name Fatah al-Islam.

The idea was to provide them with some arms and some money and some basic equipment so — these are small units, a couple hundred people. There were three or four around the country given the same help covertly, the goal being they would be potential enemies of Hezbollah in case of warfare; in case Nasrallah decided to do something physical, get kinetic, in Lebanon, the Sunni Siniora government would have some very tough guys on its side, period. That’s the policy.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Sy Hersh, if that is true, then what has led to the current fighting now? If the Lebanese government had been backing the group, why is it now attacking it?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, first of all, the Lebanese army is very distinct. Let me begin by saying nobody really knows anything right now. I mean, there’s a lot — one of the things about crises is you learn that you really get to play much later. But based on common sense and what I’m reading, the Lebanese army has maintained an amazing sort of neutrality, which is surprising. The army has not been a pawn of the Siniora government.

As you know, the American government — the American position right now — there’s a stand-off politically. You cannot discuss what’s going on without discussing the overall politics. There’s a stand-off politically right now, a very serious one, in Lebanon. The government is polarized. The government in power really has no legal basis to make any changes in cabinet positions, etc., because it’s not a constitutional government, because Hezbollah, which had five members of the parliament — five members of the cabinet and a dozen or so members in the parliament, Hezbollah pulled out months ago. And there were street protests, protests against Siniora. And right now, you have Hezbollah in league with a Christian leader named Aoun, a former chief of staff for the army. Aoun and Nasrallah are in an amazing partnership against the Siniora government. And where this breaks down and who’s going to win this stand-off — it’s been going on since last December — isn’t clear. America clearly supports Siniora. But there’s a big brutal fight going. And the Lebanese army stayed out of it and was pretty much, very much, independent, in the sense that when there were street demonstrations, they did not beat up on the Nasrallah people. They were very impartial.

So I think the story that we have is that there was a crime, and they were chasing people into one of the Palestinian camps, which are always hotbeds. God knows the Palestinians are the end of the stick, not only for the West, but also for the Arab world. Nobody pays much attention to them and those places. I’ve been to Tripoli and been into the camps, and they are seething, as they should be. You know, rational people don’t like being mistreated. And in any case, so what you have is, what seems to me, just a series — the word you could use is “unintended consequences.” I don’t think anybody in the Siniora government anticipated that the people they were covertly supporting to some degree — I got an email the other day, and I have not checked this out, from somebody who was in the community, in the intelligence community and still consults with the community, he says, “Why don’t we ask more about the American arms that the fighters of Fatah al-Islam have, are brandishing?” I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I did get that email. And so, that could be true. Both Saudi money and American money, not directly, but indirectly, was fed into these groups.

And what is the laugh riot and the reason I’m actually talking to you guys about this — I usually don’t like to do interviews unless I have a story in The New Yorker — the reason I’m talking about it is because the American government keeps on putting out this story that Syria is behind the Fatah group, which is just beyond belief. There’s no way — it may be possible, but the chances of it are very slight, simply because Syria is a very big supporter, obviously, of Nasrallah, and Bashar al-Assad has told me that he’s in awe of Nasrallah, that he worships at his feet and has great respect for him. The idea that the Syrians would be sponsoring Sunni jihadist groups whose sole mission are to kill the apostates — that is, anybody who doesn’t support their view, the Wahhabi or Salafist view of Sunni religion — that includes the Shia — anybody who doesn’t believe — support these guys’ religions are apostates and are killable, that’s basically one of the crazy aspects of all this, and it’s just inconceivable. Nothing can be ruled out, but that doesn’t make much case, and I noticed that in the papers today there’s fewer and fewer references to this. The newspapers in America are beginning to wise up, that this can’t be — this isn’t very logical. The White House is putting it out hot and heavy as part of the anti-Syria campaign, but it’s not flying, because it doesn’t make sense. So there we are. It’s another mess.

You might think that one of the reasons — I think I wrote about this in The New Yorker — one of the things that the Saudi Bandar had promised us was that we can control the jihadists. We can control them, he assured us. Don’t worry about getting in bed with these bad guys, because, as we remember, the same kind of assurances were given to us in the late 1980s, when we supported, as I said, bin Laden and others in the war against Russia, the Mujahideen war, and that, of course, bit us on the ass. And this is, too. So there we are.

AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh, what about the role of Vice President Dick Cheney, the Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams?

SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, you always — any time you have violent anti-Iran policy and anti-Shia policy, you have to start looking there. Look, clearly this president is deeply involved in this, too, but what I hear from my people, of course, the players — it’s always Cheney, Cheney. Cheney meets with Bush at least once a week. They have a lunch. They usually have a scheduled lunch. And out of that comes a lot of big decisions. We don’t know what’s ever said at that meeting. And this is — talk about being opaque, this is a government that is so hidden from us.

So I can’t — I can tell you that — you know, the thing that’s amazing about this government, the thing that’s really spectacular, is even now how they can get their way mostly with a lot of the American press. For example, I do know — and, you know, you have to take it on face value. If you’ve been reading me for a long time, you know a lot of the things I write are true or come out to be more or less true. I do know that within the last month, maybe four, four-and-a-half weeks ago, they made a decision that because of the totally dwindling support for the war in Iraq, we go back to the al-Qaeda card, and we start talking about al-Qaeda. And the next thing you know, right after that, Bush went to the Southern Command — this was a month ago — and talked, mentioned al-Qaeda twenty-seven times in his speech. He did so just the other day this week — al-Qaeda this, al-Qaeda that. All of a sudden, the poor Iraqi Sunnis, I mean, they can’t do anything without al-Qaeda. It’s only al-Qaeda that’s dropping the bombs and causing mayhem. It’s not the Sunni and Shia insurgents or militias. And this policy just gets picked up, although there’s absolutely no empirical basis. Most of the pros will tell you the foreign fighters are a couple percent, and then they’re sort of leaderless in the sense that there’s no overall direction of the various foreign fighters. You could call them al-Qaeda. You can also call them jihadists and Salafists that want to die fighting the Americans or the occupiers in Iraq and they come across the border. Whether this is — there’s no attempt to suggest there’s any significant coordination of these groups by bin Laden or anybody else, and the press just goes gaga. And so, they went gaga a little bit over the Syrian connection to the activities in Tripoli. It’s just amazing to me, you guys.

AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh, I want to thank you very much for being with us, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, writes for The New Yorker magazine, speaking to us from Washington, D.C.

Clashes in recent weeks at opposite ends of the country signal a widening of the conflict and increasing confusion among western military officials over the enemy they are confronting.

The worst fighting to strike Afghanistan this year erupted in the western province of Herat leaving 136 people dead after two days of clashes which culminated in a 14-hour-long battle on Sunday, the US military said.

The US military initially said all of the dead were militants but a UN investigative team who visited the battle site “found credible reports of 49 civilian deaths” including unconfirmed numbers of women and children, spokesman Adrian Edwards said.

A US soldier was also killed in the operation by US special forces and Afghan troops in Herat against what a US military statement described as ground operations and air strikes targeting Taliban positions.

President Hamid Karzai warned US and Nato generals and other senior western officials in a meeting on Wednesday that “the patience of the Afghan people was wearing thin”, with heavy-handed army tactics.

Mr Karzai’s warning came after four days of protests in the eastern city of Jalalabad over what locals claim were the deaths of six civilians in a raid on a compound suspected of housing a suicide bomber. The US military said a woman and a teenager were killed in clash that erupted when US forces raided the compound.

The Jalalabad protest coincided with similar demonstrations in western Herat’s Shindand district in which scores of locals chanted “Death to America” in the wake of Sunday’s airstrikes.

Violence in Afghanistan has sharply increased in recent weeks with pitched battles between insurgents and government troops in areas of the country far away from the traditional Taliban strongholds in the south and east.

A western diplomat estimated that some 2,250 insurgents, foreign troops and civilians had been killed in the first four months of this year compared with under 5,000 casualties for the whole of 2006. Yesterday, the UK defence ministry said a British soldier was killed in fighting with militants in southern Afghanistan.

Nato spokesman Nicholas Lunt said that as the Afghan army and Nato troops moved into areas where there had been no government presence they were clashing with anti-government militias.

These clashes could easily be exploited by the Taliban, Joanna Nathan, Kabul-based analyst with the International Crisis Group, said. “The Taliban are very clever about using local rivalries and conflict and appealing to the side that feels disenfranchised,” she said.

In one of their boldest moves, Taliban militants seized control of a highway just 70km outside the capital Kabul in the Tagab district of central Kapisa province on April 18. Government forces retook the road in 24 hours but the clash marked a new frontier for the Taliban – who were able to stage the heaviest battle in the region of the capital since 2001.

Nato troops have launched a string of offensives around the country with the heaviest fighting continuing in the southern province of Helmand where British troops are based. More than 2,000 Nato and Afghan troops were deployed over the weekend in the Helmand’s Sangin valley aimed at driving the Taliban from the heart of the opium-producing province. Officials said the effort involved some 1,100 British troops, 600 US soldiers and more from the Netherlands, Denmark, Estonia and Canada as well as more than 1,000 Afghan government troops.

His beheading was the culmination of a harrowing month in captivity for Ajmal, a 24-year old journalist from Kabul. He was taken hostage in Helmand province on March 4, together with La Repubblica reporter Daniele Mastrogiacomo, and their driver Sayed Agha. They had travelled there for a rendezvous with the Taliban; Ajmal was working as the Italian’s fixer, as he had done for other foreign reporters in the past.

But the meeting that had been arranged for them was a trap. Instead of granting Mastrogiacomo an interview, the Taliban took him and his companions hostage, and proceeded to use them as expendable pawns in a horrifying game of death. Sayed Agha, the young driver, was the first to die. He was beheaded by the Taliban shortly after the group was abducted. The Taliban posted a video on the internet showing the three blindfolded men seated on the ground at the feet of their captors.

Then one of the Taliban spoke to the camera, condemning Sayed Agha to death for being a spy. He then slit Sayed Agha’s throat, and cut off his head. A weeping Mastrogiacomo was shown pleading for his life and begging for his captors’ demands to be met. And they were. A few days later, on March 19, the Italian was freed in exchange for five senior Taliban prisoners held by the Afghan government.

Afterwards, President Hamid Karzai haplessly explained that he was pressured by the Italian government – which has 1,800 troops in Afghanistan – to make the exchange. After Mastrogiacomo’s release, however, Ajmal remained in Taliban hands. Supposedly, he was being held until the government handed over two more Taliban prisoners.

But then, two days before the expiration date they executed him. Government officials gave unconvincing explanations as to what had gone wrong, but the damage was done. To Afghans, it appeared that their own government cared more about an Italian than one of its own citizens.

There are several theories floating around as to why Ajmal was really killed, but, whatever the truth, it was a watershed event in Afghanistan. On the one hand, it was a sign that the Taliban were prepared to take their terror tactics to a new level, and that the Afghan government was weak and indecisive. Most importantly, for journalists, it meant that henceforth, similar rendezvous with Taliban fighters in the field might be fatal.

It also means that the handful of savvy, experienced and reliable “fixers” like Ajmal no longer want to risk death by arranging such meetings for foreign reporters.The bottom line: Since the Taliban got what they wanted by kidnapping Mastrogiacomo, it now means that all Westerners, including journalists, have become potentially valuable commodities in the Afghan war – just as they have become in Iraq.

Understandably, the episode has raised the tension levels in Afghanistan to a new high, and raises serious questions about how journalists can accurately report the war here. The killing of Ajmal, above all, highlights the vital and sensitive role local fixers play for all of us who report here and elsewhere. It raises the question of what our responsibility is towards such people when they are victimized for assisting us.

Most reporters who come to Afghanistan do not speak Dari or Pashto, the country’s principal languages, and do not possess the contacts to move around and report unassisted. Whether our published stories reflect it or not, most of us are dependent on fixers, translators, and drivers here in order to do our work -people like Sayed Agha and Ajmal Naqshbandi.

A couple of weeks ago, I visited Ajmal’s family in Kabul and his father told me that, so far, he’d received no offer of help or compensation from either the Afghan or the Italian governments.He is a former aviation mechanic for Ariana airlines, but lost his job after losing a leg in a land mine explosion back in the Nineties.

He was very proud of Ajmal and the work he had been doing, he told me. He pointed to his two surviving sons, both teenagers, who were sitting in the room with us. He said: “Ajmal was the sole breadwinner of our family; he wanted them to go to college. Now I don’t know what we are gong to do for them.”

Ajmal’s father wasn’t insinuating anything, he didn’t have his hand out, he was merely stating the facts, and he uttered his words with great dignity. After a time, I got up to leave. He thanked me for coming and I said goodbye, leaving him to his grief. His two sons saw me to the door and smiled and waved as I left.

In the past several weeks, journalists in New York and London have been trying to raise funds for Ajmal’s and Sayed’s families. Hopefully they will raise enough to show both families that we – all of us – really do care about them.

It will not only provide real help to their families; it will also send proof of our compassion throughout Afghan society. We could go even further. There can be no better moment than this one to establish a special compensation fund for the indispensable, underpaid and often unnamed Ajmals and Sayeds who pull us through and help us get our stories around the world, and who, increasingly, are paying the ultimate price for doing so. It could be called The Ajmal Fund.

The omens were bad: Mastrogiacomo’s driver, Sayed Agha, had already been beheaded, and a week later 25-year-old Nakshbandi was also dead, his throat slit and his body dumped in the desert.

The brutal slaying last month shook Afghanistan’s fledgling media, sparked recriminations and highlighted how young local reporters were becoming caught in the crossfire of an increasingly vicious conflict.

All sides consider news as a weapon of war, even those professing to defend press freedom. On March 4 American soldiers ripped cameras from local reporters in Nangarhar and deleted their pictures after a convoy of marines shot at least 10 people and wounded 33 in the aftermath of a suicide attack.

A US commander later justified the deletions on the basis that “untrained” Afghans might “capture visual details that are not as they originally were”. A preliminary military inquiry, publicised last week, suggested what those sensitive details could have been: contrary to the soldiers’ earlier claims, investigators found that all of the killed civilians had been unarmed.

Faced with a swelling insurgency and mounting criticism, Afghanistan’s government has also taken a tougher line with the media. Last week three journalists with Tolo, a popular television station, and four from the Associated Press, were detained on orders from the attorney general, Abdul Jabar Sabet, who claimed he had been misrepresented by a reporter.

“We are coming under fire from all sides,” said Rahimullah Samander, president of the Afghan Independent Journalists’ Association. “Before everyone wanted to be a journalist. Not any more.”

The Afghan media has altered beyond recognition since the Taliban regime, when there was one state-controlled radio station and a handful of religion-obsessed newspapers. Now there are eight TV stations, 400 publications and more than 2,000 journalists, according to Mr Samander.

The media explosion is fuelling social change and a spirit of accountability. Editorials harshly criticise the government of the president, Hamid Karzai, and TV stations feature women presenters, foreign films and racy music videos.

Foreign donors encouraged the local media with a flood of funding before the elections in 2004 and 2005. But over the past year the foreign money has started to dry up. Six daily newspapers have folded, journalists have been laid off and wages have plummeted.

There has been a three-fold increase in suicide attacks this year alone. As the Taliban stepped up its attacks, the government’s commitment waned. Last year the state intelligence agency tried to curtail reporting of the insurgency by issuing a list of restrictions to local journalists. A public outcry caused the directive to be withdrawn, but public anger was again stoked over the handling of Mastrogiacomo’s release.

Mastrogiacomo, a correspondent for La Repubblica, was freed in exchange for five “high-value” Taliban prisoners and $2m (£1m), said an Afghan official. President Karzai agreed to the controversial deal because he feared Italy would withdraw 1,800 troops from Afghanistan if the journalist died. The Taliban expedited negotiations by beheading his driver then making the panicked Italian record a video plea for help.

But Afghans say that once Mastrogiacomo was safe, Mr Karzai had allowed the Afghan, Nakshbandi, to die in the desert. “Why didn’t the government strike a deal for both of them? It didn’t take Ajmal seriously,” said Farida Nekzad, managing editor of Pajhwok news agency. “In this country we have two policies – one for the internationals, the other for locals.”

But the Afghan official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the story was more complicated, and that the Taliban had never made demands for the release of Nakshbandi, who was killed to “humiliate Mr Karzai”. He added: “It was political, just to make the government’s name bad.”

Journalists also directed their ire at the Italian journalist and La Repubblica for failing to save Nakshbandi. The Union of Italian journalists has offered money to his family, said Mr Samander.

This week the media debate has focused on the Tolo TV controversy. Mr Sabet, a strident conservative, told the Guardian he had been offended by a television report that took his words out of context. “They are not journalists, they are liars,” he said. He insisted he was within his rights to detain whoever he wished. “These laws give me the power to summon any person in this country, even the president,” he said, waving a book of legislation.

Since being appointed last year as attorney general Mr Sabet has cultivated a reputation as a crusader against corruption and vice, arresting crooked officials and shutting down brothels. But critics say that he sometimes breaks the law or applies it selectively and can be unpredictable.

On Monday a government commission adjudicating on the Tolo dispute ordered the station to apologise to Mr Sabet. Its management refused to back down. “We come under illegal attack and they demand we apologise – how ridiculous is that?” said its director, Saad Mohseni.

There is greater peril in the provinces. Young and poorly paid reporters are vulnerable to intimidation and bribery from local strongmen, usually governors and warlords wanting to stop unfavourable coverage of corruption, human rights abuses and drug trafficking.

But the most potent danger remains the Taliban.

“They want to control our words. They say ‘if we kill one person, you should write [that it was] two’,” said Ms Nekzad, of Pajhwok, who likened the worsening situation to Iraq.

Refusal to comply can lead to an early grave. Mr Samander pulled out a “night letter” that a colleague in Nangarhar had received last week accusing him of working for the CIA. Several journalists had already left, he said.

He sighed. “It is not our job to take sides but this is very difficult. We will surely lose other Ajmals.”

Backstory

Fighting continues in southern Afghanistan but elsewhere the struggle to control the country’s cultural future is being played out on the small screen. TV stations showing Bollywood movies and looking at previously taboo subjects such as child sex abuse are highly popular with young, urban Afghans. Tolo TV is at the vanguard of this wave, but the fledgling media is staunchly resisted by many older Afghans who are sceptical about western influences. A media law now in parliament will give the government greater control. But the freedom that has been acquired might not be readily surrendered. Last week disabled athletes blocked protesters from reaching the Tolo building, in an upmarket area of Kabul. One disabled man said the athletes were involved because it was “good TV”.

There have been almost daily protests and rallies by journalists across the Palestinian territories demanding his release, including a 24-hour journalists’ strike on March 20.

A week ago an advert placed in the Media Guardian was signed by 300 leading journalists. The NUJ has written to the Palestinian government, which has condemned the abduction as an “unacceptable criminal act”.

As one of the few Western journalists still based in Gaza, Johnston brought much-needed attention to the deteriorating situation in the territory.

Yet he is a victim of the Western/Israeli boycott of the Hamas government, the consequences of which have been almost totally overlooked by the media.

Last year the US and the European Union imposed an economic blockade of the Hamas government, elected in January 2006, accusing it of being a “terrorist” organisation and demanding it recognise the state of Israel. Last week’s meeting of a senior British diplomat with Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh was therefore the first between Haniyeh and a western diplomat since the new government was formed.

The boycott has tipped the Palestinian territories into chaos, bringing about a wave of kidnapping and lawlessness amid appalling poverty – poverty that Johnston himself documented.

A UN human rights envoy recently said Israel is imposing a policy of “controlled strangulation” that is helping to give rise to a failed state on its doorstep. Some 75 percent of Palestinians live in poverty; there is a 65 percent unemployment rate.

Meanwhile Israel has kept up its military assaults and assassinations inside the Palestinian territories. Two Israeli offensives last summer saw four hundred Palestinians killed and some 1,500 injured; three Israeli soldiers were killed. Israel continues to hold between 8,000 and 10,000 Palestinians in its jails.

The turmoil in Gaza has to be seen in this context. The kidnapping and lawlessness are a direct result of criminal western policy to smash Palestinian independence and crush the national movement (just as Russia provoked a similar crisis in Chechnya in 1996-1999 to help justify a new invasion).

Alan Johnston must be freed to carry on his valuable work. And The Palestinian territories must be freed from the boycott, freed from Israeli attacks, and helped to rebuild after the years of occupation, repression and neglect.

Dave Crouch

April 5 saw the brutal assassination of Khamaail Mohsin, a mother of three and journalist with Radio Free Iraq, the US funded Radio station in Arabic, and the bombing of the Iraqi satellite channel Baghdad TV, killing the station’s Deputy Director, Thaer Ahmad Jaber, himself the father of seven daughters, and trainee journalist Husain Nizaer. The television station blast – a suicide bombing involving a garbage truck packed with explosives – also injured 11 staff, three of whom remain in a critical situation.

Further news emerged on April 6 of the killing of a fourth journalist, Othman al-Mashhadani, a reporter for the Saudi newspaper Al Watan, who had been kidnapped on Wednesday. His body was found in Baghdad. These deaths bring to 23 the number of Iraqi media killed in 2007 alone. At least 196 journalists and media workers have died in Iraq since the US invasion four years ago.

The deaths cast a shadow over celebrations organised by Iraqi Journalists Syndicate in solidarity with the victims of violence. The syndicate handed over more than 80,000 US$ to 120 families of media victims. The government donated 40,000 US$, matching 33,000 US$ raised by member unions of the International Federation of Journalists through a special Iraqi Humanitarian Fund set up last year. A further 8,000 US$ contribution came from the Oil Ministry.

Prime Minister Maliki paid tribute to the sacrifices made by Iraqi journalists. He said: “National media outlets that are committed to serve the truth have turned into a spearhead against terrorists.”

Meanwhile, the IFJ and its national journalists unions around the world renewed calls for the United States to provide credible reports over a number of media deaths at the hands of US soldiers in Iraq and, in particular, the killing of three journalists on April 8th 2003.

Sunday marks the fourth anniversary of the attack by US troops on the Palestine Hotel, which housed scores of media personnel, killing Taras Protsyuk of Reuters and Jose Cuoso, of the Telecinco network in Spain. On the same morning, journalist Tareq Ayyoub was killed when the Baghdad offices of the Arab satellite channel Al Jazeera were attacked by US fighter planes.

“Four years on still no credible reports have been produced to explain these attacks and no one has been held to account for the killings,” said IFJ General Secretary Aidan White. “The United States must answer questions that are still asked over these deaths and many others at the hands of their troops in Iraq. With the number of media casualties growing daily, impunity becomes intolerable, particularly when it concerns the actions of those who speak in the name of democracy and human rights.”

In December 2006, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1738, a measure championed by the IFJ and its member unions that protects journalists in conflict zones and says killing them can be considered a war crime.

The IFJ has also demanded action over the deaths of British ITN reporter Terry Lloyd and his colleagues Fred Nérac and Hussein Osman, whose bodies are still missing, in a fire fight between US and Iraqi troops near Basra, in March 2003 as the invasion of Iraq gathered pace and has raised questions over the shooting by US soldiers of Reuters cameramen Mazen Dana.

In October last year the IFJ demanded the United States “tell the whole truth” media deaths in Iraq at the hands of US troops after a British coroner ruled that the death of ITN reporter Terry Lloyd in the Basra fire-fight was an “unlawful killing.”

“The US military has never owned up to its responsibilities in Iraq,” White said. “We hope the UN resolution will help stop this trend of attacks on journalists but we must continue to fight to make sure that all past cases are investigated and the killers brought to justice. If not, we not only run the risk of more journalists being killed, but that these people will kill journalism as well.”

The IFJ’s support for its two affiliates in Iraq – the Kurdistan Syndicate of Journalists in Irbil and the Iraqi Syndicate of Journalists based in Baghdad – will continue next month with a visit to the country by the Federation’s General Secretary to attend a safety training event and to meet with government officials over the media crisis in the country.

For more information contact the IFJ at 32 2 235 2207
The IFJ represents over 500,000 journalists in more than 100 countries worldwide

The drop mirrors public perceptions about how the war is going overall. In 2003, days after the invasion began, 90 percent said it was going well. Now just 40 percent believe its is going at least fairly well.

In March 2003, 40 percent of the public had a great deal of confidence that the U.S. military was giving it an accurate picture about how the war was going in Iraq. Another 45 percent said they felt a fair amount of confidence the miltary gave an accurate picture, according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

That number dropped to 15 percent and 31 percent respectively. About 52 percent said they have little to no confidence in information provided by the military.

The press has experienced a similar drop. In March 2003, 30 percent said they had a “great deal of confidence” in the media’s information about how the Iraq war was going. Fifty-one percent had a “fair amount of confidence.” Those numbers have dropped to 7 percent and 31 percent, respectively.

The most dramatic jump occurred in those who report no confidence in press information about the war. In 2003, 1 percent said they had no confidence. That number is now 27 percent. The number of those with “not too much” confidence in press information jumped from 14 percent in 2003 to 31 percent in March 2007.

The drop in confidence follows a partisan divide. In 2003, 94 percent of Republicans believed the military. That has dropped 21 points. The drop among Democrats and independents is much more stark, with 46 and 44 percent losing confidence in the military’s information.

Republicans report a much higher drop in confidence in the media’s depiction of the war. More than 80 percent of all Americans trusted the media on the war in 2003. Now just 29 percent of Republicans have confidence in the media, compared with 51 percent of Democrats.

Emergency, an Italian humanitarian organisation, played a key role in the liberation of the Italian journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo, who was kidnapped in Afghanistan on March 6th and released on the 18th. Three days later, Emergency says, Rahmatullah Hanefi, one of their staff was arrested by the Afghan security service and may be being tortured.

The Italian media always react strongly against kidnapping of Italian citizens, but this time the reaction was enormous. First, Mastrogiacomo was a reporter of the second most important Italian newspaper, La Repubblica. The newspaper waged a strong campaign to free him, supported across the media.

Second, Prodi’s government collapsed some weeks ago because the upper chamber couldn’t agree to back Italy’s military presence in Afghanistan. (The government was eventually re-established and the mission approved a few days ago).

Last but not least, the Taliban was convinced that Mastrogiacomo had been collaborating with western intelligence services. The Taliban said they found a satellite mobile phone and a laser hidden in a shampoo bottle, both provided by western intelligence services. That was enough for them to execute Mastrogiacomo’s driver — and for Italians to fear that Mastrogiacomo was the next on the list.

Mr Matrogiacomo was released in exchange for five Taliban prisoners, including the brother of the top Taliban military commander Mullah Dadullah. NATO allies raised concerns about the deal, but it is hard to believe that Taliban prisoners could be released without the authorization of NATO forces.

However, there was friction between Emergency and the NATO/Afghan forces, and on March 20 the Afghan government decided to arrest Mr Hanefi, the Afghan manager of Emergency’s hospital in Lashkargah. (Emergency has run hospitals in Afghanistan since before the NATO forces arrived.)

Indeed, Emergency played an important role, through its contacts, in freeing Mr Mastrogiacomo, who was eventually handed over to the organisation. Emergency says it has information that Mr Hanefi is being tortured.

Please read the petition and sign the petition for Hanefi’s release here. It can be signed by clicking at the end of this page, under “subscribe”.

For America’s fighting forces, this is their darkest hour. The U.S. military, the most powerful fighting force on Earth, is facing a collapse in morale far more devastating even than that experienced in the toughest days of the Vietnam War.

The troops are bogged down in the occupation of Iraq, where they are trapped on a murderous front line in an urban guerilla war for which they had little preparation, and for which support at home has all but disappeared.

Faced with hostility abroad and indifference to the war at home, the soldiers are fast degenerating into an out-of-control force consumed by drink, drugs, sex crimes and mental collapse.

An appalling picture emerges from the daily headlines – the latest revealing that nearly one third of the injured coming home are suffering from the mental scars of war.

New figures show that of 104,000 who had sought medical help by the end of 2005, some 32,010 were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, drug addiction or alcoholism – three times as many, proportionally, as those who returned from Vietnam.

At home in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, the latest military murder trial into an Iraqi atrocity has opened with the prosecution alleging that Staff Sgt Ray Girourd, of the legendary 101st Airborne Division, ordered soldiers to slaughter male prisoners.

The incident took place last May during a raid on a suspected camp of insurgents outside Samarra. Two soldiers have already admitted to the killings. They have been sentenced to 18 years in a military jail and will testify for the prosecution.

Specialist William Hunsaker and Private Corey Clagett say Girourd, 24, ordered them to cut the prisoners free, let them run and then shoot them down, covering up the crime by making it look as if the prisoners were attacking and died in a firefight.

In his defence, Girourd’s lawyers claim he was obeying orders from a senior officer, Colonel Michael Steele, commander of 3rd Brigade, to “kill all military-age men”. If that proves to be true, President Bush’s Iraqi adventure has brought America to an unprecedented new low of atrocity. So how has it come to this?

Perhaps part of the answer lies in the ‘haji hooch’ or ‘haji juice’, a locally-made, 90 per cent proof moonshine whisky regularly sold to American troops by Iraqi merchants and often smuggled into their bases by colleagues from the newly-formed Iraqi army.

It is swilled along with prescription drugs such as amphetamines, distributed by medics ordered to keep troops sharp for extended patrols and flight missions, and tranquilisers meant to calm nerves.

The American military, on ships as well as in army camps, has long been ‘dry’, with an official ban on all alcohol. But this has not stopped an Apocalypse Now-style dependency on drugs and booze in a crazed ’self-medication’ that gets only worse with worsening fighting conditions, tightening an already depressing downward spiral.

Figures forced from the Pentagon by the New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act make shocking reading: 240 of the 665 cases of military indiscipline in Iraq and Afghanistan involved drugs and alcohol.

Seventy-three of those 240 cases were the most serious yet known from these two wars: murder, rape, robbery and assault.

To get an idea of how deep into depravity some of these men have sunk, here is just one of the sex offences: in March, 2006, a group of men – again from the 101st Airborne Division – gang-raped a 14-year-old girl, and then murdered her and her family.

They had been manning a road block in Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, and drinking ‘hajji juice’ supplied by Iraqi soldiers for most of the day.

According to the prosecution evidence presented when he was charged with murder in a civilian court, Private Steven Green planned and led the attack.

He and at least three others broke into the house after changing into civilian clothes. They forced two adult women and a man into a separate room, and then took turns in raping the girl, and were still violating her when Green went into the other room and began shooting.

He returned to the rape scene saying that he had “shot them all”, and then raped the girl himself before killing her with two bullets to the head. For all the murders, he used a Russian AK-47 rifle he had found in the house, and then casually dumped it in a canal.

Private Green, who was discharged from the army with a ‘personality disorder’, faces the death penalty.

In one case as long ago as May 2004, when President Bush was declaring ‘victory’ and the vast majority of Americans were still cheering him on, Private Justin Lillis got drunk on illicit whisky on his base in Balad, stole a Humvee and went on a rampage, shooting up a residential neighbourhood with his M16 rifle, before taking pot shots at the guards on the entrance to his own base.

Six months later, Private Chris Rolan of the Third Brigade got into a drink-fuelled argument with a fellow soldier and shot him dead with his 9mm service pistol.

Another remarkable statistic can be no co-incidence: a record number of women soldiers – as many as one-third of the total returning from tours in Iraq – are coming home pregnant.

Lyndie England, for example, the private who became the disgraceful face of torture at Abu Ghraib prison, photographed making sexual taunts at naked Iraqi prisoners, gave birth to the child of the ringleader of those disgraced torturers as she was about to be led off to a military jail.

There was already controversy over the role of women in combat as America marched to war in the Middle East. These figures suggest that the critics were right when they said that putting women soldiers on the front line would be a mistake.

But the women were never there on the front line because the Pentagon and White House believed in women’s equality; they were there because President Bush launched this most irresponsible war when America was chronically short of combat troops.

The draft ended with the Vietnam War, too loathed by American voters for any politician to maintain, and so did a great many of the attractions of life in the armed forces. America switched to the kind of lean ‘professional’ army long before adopted by Britain, but it did so with much less success.

By 2000, America was enlisting pretty much anyone its recruiters could drag in off the streets. First they filled the vacancies with women, promising ‘pride’ and education for jobs which would last a lifetime.

Then they dropped the academic standards. Then they even lowered the standards for physical stature and fitness.

The idea was that smart-bombs and technological superiority would win wars on the ground anyway. Small, fast forces of overwhelming technological might would secure the world for American freedom and commerce. Boots on the ground, whether worn by male or female soldiers, belonged to the past.

This policy failed, of course, to be replaced by the ’surge’ in extra troops, not to mention the everextended tours of duty by soldiers, thousands of them from the parttime National Guard, who never really expected to have to leave home at all.

But the worst aspect of all this is the scandal about the Bush administration’s treatment of its dead, wounded and suffering.

As any soldier will tell you, there is nothing so crucial as the treatment of casualties and traditions of honouring the dead.

This is sacred turf to fighting men: you are rescued from the battlefield at any price, you are mended if possible, you are honoured in death, and you take comfort from knowing that your loved ones will be cared for, come what may.

Did no one at the White House bother to read a little history?  History tells us why the Royal Navy built the first of Britain’s hospitals at Greenwich and why Lloyd George promised ‘homes fit for heroes’. America has just been waking up to the scandal of the Walter Reed military hospital, where returning wounded were left unattended in rooms while rats scurried below their cots and doctors cut down on pain killers to save money.

For years, the Pentagon has banned the taking of photographs of returning coffins, while President Bush has refused to attend funerals because honouring the dead was deemed bad for public relations. Already, there is a new crop of veterans joining the old lags from Vietnam on the streets of American cities, begging, robbing to support their drug addictions and lining-up outside the overnight shelters and the charity soup-kitchens.

It all points to another shocking statistic: almost one in three of troops returning from the Iraq and Afghan fronts in need of health care are wounded not in the body, but in the mind.

The younger the soldiers, the greater the incidence of post traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, alcoholism and drug addiction. This third compares with 10 per cent of Vietnam veterans – survivors of a war so far considered to have produced an unprecedented number of mental casualties.

The upshot of all this? If President Bush wants to know the full cost of his adventure in the Middle East, he must look beyond the bloody carnage in Iraq every day, to his own cities in America.

There he will see the shattered remains of many of the men – and women – he sent off to war and perhaps, just perhaps, realise what a dreadful mistake he has made.

The first catastrophe relates to the political and moral consequences of the war in the US and UK, and its resolution is the urgent task facing the American and British peoples. The second concerns the devastation wrought by the war and subsequent occupation, and the lack of a unified political movement within Iraq that might overcome it.

Bush and Blair are in a state of denial, only offering us more of the same. They allegedly launched the war at first to save the world from Saddam’s WMD, then to establish democracy, then to fight al-Qaida’s terrorism, and now to prevent civil war and Iranian or Syrian intervention.

Four years after declaring “mission accomplished”, the US government is sending more combat troops to add to the bloodbath – all in an effort to impose its imperial will on the Iraqi people, and in the process plunging its own country into its deepest political-moral crisis since Vietnam. Under heavier pressures, Blair, the master of tactical subterfuge, is redeploying Britain’s forces within Iraq and Afghanistan, under the guise of withdrawal. He has long known that British bases in Basra and the south were defenceless against attacks by the Sadr movement and others.

Bush, on the other hand, is escalating Iraq’s conflict and threatening to launch a new war, this time against Iran. It is hard not to presume that what he means by an exit strategy is to install a client regime in Baghdad, backed by US bases. The Iraqi people will not accept this, and the west should be alerted to the fact that US policy objectives will only lead to wider regional conflicts, rather than to full withdrawal.

In attempting to achieve their objective, the occupation forces will escalate their war with the resistance forces within and north of Baghdad, as well as clashing with the popular Sadr movement in the capital and the south. The latter is, despite the ceasefires and political manoeuvrings, Iraq’s biggest organised opposition force to the occupation.

Meanwhile, the destruction of Iraq continues apace and its people are subjected to levels of sustained violence unknown in their history. Overwhelmingly, the violence is a direct or indirect product of the occupation, and the bulk of sectarian violence is widely known in Iraq to be linked to the parties favoured by Washington. For example, forces in control of the various ministries, including the interior ministry, clash regularly.

It is not difficult to see how this violence is linked to the occupation, for it has spawned a multitude of violence-makers: 150,000 occupation forces; 50,000 and rising contracted foreign “mercenaries“; 150,000 Iraqi Facilities Protection forces, paid by the Iraqi regime, controlled by the occupation and engaged in death-squad activities, according to the prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki; 400,000 US-trained army and police forces; six US-controlled secret Iraqi militias; and hundreds of private kidnap gangs. Pitted against some or all of these are tens of thousands of militias and resistance forces of various political hues. In total there are about 2 million actively organised armed men in the country. There are about 3,000 attacks on occupation forces every month, while tens of thousands of Iraqis languish in prison, where torture is widespread and trials considered an unnecessary formality.

The success of the occupation’s divide-and-rule tactics and their insistence on basing the new political and military structures on sects, religions, and ethnicities is threatening the communal cohesion that was once the country’s hallmark. This is a factor in the absence of a united movement, capable of leading the struggle to end the occupation. The occupation has sown divisions where there were none and transformed existing differences into open warfare.

And is it any wonder that the long-suffering Iraqi people find themselves at an impasse. Try catching your breath after decades of brutal dictatorship, 13 years of economic sanctions and four years of an obscene war.

But even in the absence of a unified anti-occupation front, the resistance of the Iraqi people has managed to thwart the world’s greatest military empire. And there are signs of a mass rejection of these sectarian forces, and the possibility that public anger will translate into the very unity that is so desperately needed. Rage against corruption and the collapse of public services is sweeping the country, including Kurdistan. Similarly, the proposed corporate occupation of Iraq, disguised as a legal document to tie the country to the oil companies for decades to come, has reminded the population of one of the main reasons for the US-led invasion. It has also reminded them what a self-respecting, sovereign Iraq looked like in 1961, when the government nationalised Iraq’s lands for future oil production.

In an opinion poll released by the BBC on March 19, 86% of people are opposed to the division of Iraq. This and other polls also show majority support for armed resistance to the occupation. Four years into this terrible adventure, both the US and Britain must realise that it is time to pack up and leave.

Sami Ramadani was a political exile from Saddam’s regime and is a senior lecturer at London Metropolitan University.

This confirms previous allegations of Israel preparing for a premeditated war long before Hezbollah’s kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers, and using the kidnappings as a convenient excuse to launch the invasion of Lebanon.

Such allegations were reported last summer by the New Yorker, the Guardian, the San Francisco Chronicle, the New Statesman, the Daily Mail, CNN and the BBC, among other media outlets. Further details are available here.

Certain columnists and editorials in much of the British media have suggested, during and since the conflict, that the blame lies with Hezbollah for instigating a conflict that would not have otherwise happened.

On 8 March 2007, the Israeli daily Ha’artez reported a leaked testimony by Olmert to the Winograd Commission, the body charged with investigating the 34-day war, in which he admits he first discussed the possibility of war in January 2006 and asked to see military plans in March.

Now that the matter is beyond dispute, AMW is discouraged to note that those who were so quick to lay the blame for war on Hezbollah have remained completely silent when Israel, the instigator, has owned up to its actions.

Will the US bomb Iran? To be honest I don’t know. I have a daughter and granddaughter in Iran, and every night I go to bed fearing that I will wake up in the morning and they’ll all be dead.

The logic is that they won’t bomb, but they did it in Afghanistan and they did it in Iraq. It is a dangerous situation. I remember the Vietnam war. Only afterwards did we discover that a lot of the infighting among the Vietnamese had been manufactured by the CIA. Even Saudi Arabia has suggested that the entire region will be in chaos if there is an attack on Iran.

The US wants to control resources from North Africa to China. So their logic is to attack Syria and Iran.

Before the 1979 revolution some 60-70,000 US advisers were working in the government ministries and big companies, there were CIA and Mossad headquarters in the country. Now they are gone. That’s one reason why the US wants war – they want them back.

They are talking about a massive bombing campaign, nothing would be left. The result would be millions dead across the region.

Some of Iran’s nuclear installations are near centres of population. Take Esfahan’s Nuclear Technology Research Centre – it is close to the ancient city of millions of people.

And Iran is capable of retaliating, which means regional as well as global economic and environmental disaster.

Ahmadi-Nejad has made rhetorical comments about Israel. His comments about “wiping Israel off the map” were a miss-translation. He was talking about regime change, like when the Soviet Union collapsed and the end of fascism in Europe.

The British media plays an important role in misrepresenting Iran. For example, we heard lots about Ahmadi-Nejad’s conference denying the holocaust. But we heard much less about the Jewish MP in the Iranian parliament who challenged him on this, and he retracted. We didn’t even hear that Iran has a Jewish, Armenian (i.e. a Christian) and Zorastrian MPs.

Many Jewish Iranians have returned to Iran from Israel because they find the racism is worse in Israel. The minorities would rather be in Iran than in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, let alone Iraq.

The issue of nuclear power unites the country – everyone is in favour. Regarding a nuclear weapon it’s much les clear-cut. But the experts say Iran is anywhere between 2 and 10 years from a bomb.

The real danger to peace are the US neocons and Israel, both of whom have nuclear weapons and both of whom have the real option of attacking Iran. How do we stop them? The media can play an important role by telling the truth about Iran: namely, the fact that there is a growing democracy movement headed by a strong women’s movement, but also student movement and trade union movement.

Last week Channel 4 broadcast Rageh Omaar’s excellent documentary on Iran (watch it here). But even in Omaar’s film we only see two groups of women – those who queue up for plastic surgery and to have nose jobs, and the others who burn US and Israeli flags. He didn’t show the majority, who are in between these two extremes.

Under the Shah, there was 30% literacy in Iran; now there is 94% literacy — more than the US and UK. There are criticisms of this post-revolutionary system. But the schools and universities were none the less opened to women (as long as they wore the hejab); 64% of university students are women. The 1980s saw a flourishing of women in Iranian society, access to employment and education increased.

Iran’s parliament has just 13 women MPs. But so does Turkey! Yet Turkey is supposed to be a “democracy” while Iran has to be bombed…

Women in Iran are fighting for their rights and have gained hugely – they have won access to divorce, custody of their children, the right to stop the man marrying a second wife. Recently it became law that a woman married to a non-Iranian can claim Iranian nationality for her children – this is unknown in other Muslim majority societies. One million people have signed a petition against execution by stoning to death.

Women have a bumpy road to travel – 31 leading members of the women’s movement were arrested before March 8, international women’s day. Nevertheless they continue their struggle.

Then there are the student organisations. They are Islamic, but they don’t see this as a problem: they want change, they want reform. But we don’t hear about them in the Western media.

A third group are the trade union organisations, they play and important role. The journalists’ union in Iran is one of the oldest. But the Iranian diaspora hijack these workers’ protests: they use them to demonstrate how bad the regime is, they even use the struggle of these movements to justify war on Iran.

So it is very important to tell the truth about Iran and not only concentrate on the negative issues. The question is not whether there will be a war or sanctions on Iran. The question is that Iran is a dynamic society and is changing for the better and we must not allow sanctions or war on Iran.

For Israel and the US, maintaining pressure on Iran is a balancing act. While talking up the threat posed by the Islamic Republic’s government – the two allies are also trying to play down the likelihood of military action.

“As the president, Condi Rice and Bob Gates have said numerous times, we’re not looking for a pretext for war with Iran, nor do we desire war with Iran,” a White House spokesman told the Financial Times, responding to reports of alleged US attack plans to wipe out Iran’s military installations. US diplomats meanwhile insist the dispatch of a second US aircraft carrier group to the Gulf is intended to reinforce the diplomatic effort, not prepare for a widening of the Iraq conflict. Activities by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in arming and aiding anti-American factions in Iraq will be dealt with inside Iraq, Washington officials say.

Democrats now in control of Congress are not persuaded, however. “The president does not have the authority to launch military action in Iran without first seeking congressional authorisation,” declared Harry Reid, Senate Democratic leader.

Legal experts say the White House has another view of executive power – that the president has the constitutional authority to respond to an attack on the US without congressional approval. Recent accusations levelled against Iran’s alleged actions in Iraq could be seen to justify a claim of self-defence under article 51 of the United Nations charter, says Tom Farer, dean of the graduate school of international studies at Denver University.

Although a large number of military analysts in the US argue that strikes against Iran’s scattered, buried and hidden nuclear facilities do not make sense and would most likely result in serious retaliation, they also concede that this might not stop President George W. Bush.

“The ‘making sense’ filter was not applied for over four years for Iraq and it is unlikely to be applied in evaluating whether to attack Iran,” Sam Gardiner, a retired Air Force colonel and planning expert, wrote for the Century Foundation, a think-tank. In fact, he says, military operations have already begun, citing reports that US and Israeli commandos started penetrating Iran in 2004 and that covert aid has been supplied to anti-regime militants.

That Iran heads up Washington’s list of international threats is due in part to Israel’s relentless diplomacy on the issue. The Islamic Republic has been at the top of Israel’s strategic agenda since long before the war in Iraq.

In recent months, however, the spectre of a nuclear Iran has turned these long-standing concerns into a national obsession. “It’s startling to talk to people who say they are actually losing sleep over when the Iranians will attack,” says one Israeli businessman.

In a country constantly attuned to the emergence of threats, the intention of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad to “wipe Israel off the map” – whether or not his comments have been mistranslated or misinterpreted, as Tehran claims – are not easily dismissed. As the threat posed by the Palestinian uprising has receded, Israelis have turned their attention to external dangers, particularly after a Lebanon war that delivered a smarting blow to the concept of Israeli deterrence.

Support for an early pre-emptive strike against Iran has so far been confined to ex-generals and rightwing academics and was reflected in the hawkish tone of many of the presentations at this year’s Herzliya Conference, Israel’s annual forum for right-of-centre strategic analysis.

The government, however, shows no inclination to undertake unilateral action that would be militarily even more challenging than Israel’s successful strike on Iraq’s nuclear facility in 1981.

But it is facing increasing pressure from an Israeli right wing eager to capitalise on the weaknesses of a government undermined by the Lebanon war. Latching on to Mr Ahmadi-Nejad’s rhetoric and his hosting of a Holocaust-denial conference last year, Benjamin Netanyahu, Likud opposition leader, has accused the Iranian president of preparing a second Holocaust.

“It’s 1938 and Iran is Germany,” he told a Jewish audience in Los Angeles in November. Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state, last month chastised Mr Netanyahu for his alarmism. Asked about his comments by Ha’aretz, the Israeli daily, she said: “I am fond of historical analogies, but not that fond.”

Ehud Olmert, Israel’s prime minister, has also been more measured, perhaps anxious not to raise public expectations of an Israeli unilateral first strike to liquidate the perceived Iranian menace. He insists Iran is an international concern and that world pressure is still capable of solving the crisis and avoiding military action.

He told foreign journalists recently: “My personal view is that the sanctions that were already applied and other measures taken by the international community, including financial measures, are effective.” He added: “I think that the Iranians are not as close to the technological threshold as they claim to be and, unfortunately, they are not as far as we would love them to be.”

In the weeks leading up to George W. Bush’s January 10 speech on the war in Iraq, there was a brief but heady moment when it seemed that the president might finally accept the failure of his Middle East policy and try something new. Rising anti-war sentiment had swept congressional Republicans out of power. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had been tossed overboard. And the Iraq Study Group (I.S.G.), chaired by former secretary of state James Baker and former congressman Lee Hamilton, had put together a bipartisan report that offered a face-saving strategy to exit Iraq. Who better than Baker, the Bush family’s longtime friend and consigliere, to talk some sense into the president?

By the time the president finished his speech from the White House library, however, all those hopes had vanished. It wasn’t just that Bush was doubling down on an extravagantly costly bet by sending 21,500 more American troops to Iraq; there were also indications that he was upping the ante by an order of magnitude. The most conspicuous clue was a four-letter word that Bush uttered six times in the course of his speech: Iran.

In a clear reference to the Islamic Republic and its sometime ally Syria, Bush vowed to “seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies.” At about the same time his speech was taking place, U.S. troops stormed an Iranian liaison office in Erbil, a Kurdish-controlled city in northern Iraq, and arrested and detained five Iranians working there.

Already, hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on the war in Iraq. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of people have been killed. Countless more are wounded or living as refugees. Launched with the intention of shoring up Israeli security and replacing rogue regimes in the Middle East with friendly, pro-Western allies, the war in Iraq has instead turned that country into a terrorist training ground. By eliminating Saddam Hussein, the U.S.-led coalition has sparked a Sunni-Shiite civil war, which threatens to spread throughout the entire Middle East. And, far from creating a secular democracy, the war has empowered Shiite fundamentalists aligned with Iran. The most powerful of these, Muqtada al-Sadr, commands both an anti-American sectarian militia and the largest voting bloc in the Iraqi parliament.

“Everything the advocates of war said would happen hasn’t happened,” says the president of Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist, an influential conservative who backed the Iraq invasion. “And all the things the critics said would happen have happened. [The president's neoconservative advisers] are effectively saying, ‘Invade Iran. Then everyone will see how smart we are.’ But after you’ve lost x number of times at the roulette wheel, do you double-down?”

By now, the story of how neoconservatives hijacked American foreign policy is a familiar one. With Vice President Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld leading the way, neocons working out of the office of the vice president and the Department of Defense orchestrated a spectacular disinformation operation, asserting that Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction posed a grave and immediate threat to the U.S. Veteran analysts who disagreed were circumvented. Dubious information from known fabricators was hyped. Forged documents showing phony yellowcake-uranium sales to Iraq were promoted.

What’s less understood is that the same tactics have been in play with Iran. Once again, neocon ideologues have been flogging questionable intelligence about W.M.D. Once again, dubious Middle East exile groups are making the rounds in Washington—this time urging regime change in Syria and Iran. Once again, heroic new exile leaders are promising freedom.

Meanwhile, a series of recent moves by the military have lent credence to widespread reports that the U.S. is secretly preparing for a massive air attack against Iran. (No one is suggesting a ground invasion.) First came the deployment order of U.S. Navy ships to the Persian Gulf. Then came high-level personnel shifts signaling a new focus on naval and air operations rather than the ground combat that predominates in Iraq. In his January 10 speech, Bush announced that he was sending Patriot missiles to the Middle East to defend U.S. allies—presumably from Iran. And he pointedly asserted that Iran was “providing material support for attacks on American troops,” a charge that could easily evolve into a casus belli.

“It is absolutely parallel,” says Philip Giraldi, a former C.I.A. counterterrorism specialist. “They’re using the same dance steps—demonize the bad guys, the pretext of diplomacy, keep out of negotiations, use proxies. It is Iraq redux.”

The neoconservatives have had Iran in their sights for more than a decade. On July 8, 1996, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s newly elected prime minister and the leader of its right-wing Likud Party, paid a visit to the neoconservative luminary Richard Perle in Washington, D.C. The subject of their meeting was a policy paper that Perle and other analysts had written for an Israeli-American think tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic Political Studies. Titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” the paper contained the kernel of a breathtakingly radical vision for a new Middle East. By waging wars against Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, the paper asserted, Israel and the U.S. could stabilize the region. Later, the neoconservatives argued that this policy could democratize the Middle East.

“It was the beginning of thought,” says Meyrav Wurmser, an Israeli-American policy expert, who co-signed the paper with her husband, David Wurmser, now a top Middle East adviser to Dick Cheney. Other signers included Perle and Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy during George W. Bush’s first term. “It was the seeds of a new vision.”

Netanyahu certainly seemed to think so. Two days after meeting with Perle, the prime minister addressed a joint session of Congress with a speech that borrowed from “A Clean Break.” He called for the “democratization” of terrorist states in the Middle East and warned that peaceful means might not be sufficient. War might be unavoidable.

Netanyahu also made one significant addition to “A Clean Break.” The paper’s authors were concerned primarily with Syria and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, but Netanyahu saw a greater threat elsewhere. “The most dangerous of these regimes is Iran,” he said.

Ten years later, “A Clean Break” looks like nothing less than a playbook for U.S.-Israeli foreign policy during the Bush-Cheney era. Many of the initiatives outlined in the paper have been implemented—removing Saddam from power, setting aside the “land for peace” formula to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon—all with disastrous results.

Nevertheless, neoconservatives still advocate continuing on the path Netanyahu staked out in his speech and taking the fight to Iran. As they see it, the Iraqi debacle is not the product of their failed policies. Rather, it is the result of America’s failure to think big. “It’s a mess, isn’t it?” says Meyrav Wurmser, who now serves as director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Hudson Institute. “My argument has always been that this war is senseless if you don’t give it a regional context.”

She isn’t alone. One neocon after another has made the same plea: Iraq was the beginning, not the end. Writing in The Weekly Standard last spring, Reuel Marc Gerecht, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, made the neocon case for bombing Iran’s nuclear sites. Brushing away criticism that a pre-emptive attack would cause anti-Americanism within Iran, Gerecht asserted that it “would actually accelerate internal debate” in a way that would be “painful for the ruling clergy.” As for imperiling the U.S. mission in Iraq, Gerecht argued that Iran “can’t really hurt us there.” Ultimately, he concluded, “we may have to fight a war—perhaps sooner rather than later—to stop such evil men from obtaining the worst weapons we know.”

More recently, Netanyahu himself, who may yet return to power in Israel, went as far as to frame the issue in terms of the Holocaust. “Iran is Germany, and it’s 1938,” he said during a CNN interview in November. “Except that this Nazi regime that is in Iran … wants to dominate the world, annihilate the Jews, but also annihilate America.”

Like the campaign to overthrow Saddam, the crusade for regime change in Iran got under way in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. One of the first shots came in The Wall Street Journal in November 2001, when Eliot Cohen, a member of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC), declared, “The overthrow of the first theocratic revolutionary Muslim state [Iran] and its replacement by a moderate or secular government … would be no less important a victory in this war than the annihilation of bin Laden.”

Then, as now, the U.S. had no official diplomatic communications with Iran, but a series of back-channel meetings from 2001 to 2003 put unofficial policy initiatives into action. The man who initiated these meetings was Michael Ledeen, an Iran specialist, neocon firebrand, and Freedom Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. During the Iran-contra investigations of the late 80s, Ledeen won notoriety for having introduced President Ronald Reagan’s chief intriguer, Oliver North, to Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms dealer and con man.

Ghorbanifar helped set up the first meetings, in Rome in December 2001. Among those attending were Harold Rhode, a protégé of Ledeen’s, and Larry Franklin, of the Office of Special Plans, the Pentagon bureau that manipulated pre-war intelligence on Iraq. (Franklin has since pleaded guilty to passing secrets to Israel and has been sentenced to 12 years in prison.) Ghorbanifar reportedly arranged an additional meeting in Rome in June 2002. This one was attended by a high-level U.S. official and dissidents from Egypt and Iraq. Then, in June 2003, just three months after the invasion of Iraq, Franklin and Rhode met secretly with Ghorbanifar in Paris at yet another gathering that was not approved by the Pentagon.

According to Ledeen, Ghorbanifar and his sources produced valuable information at the 2001 meetings about Iranian plans for attacking U.S. forces in Afghanistan. But it is also likely that there was some discussion of destabilizing Iran. As the Washington Monthly reported, the meetings raised the possibility “that a rogue faction at the Pentagon was trying to work outside normal U.S. foreign policy channels to advance a ‘regime-change’ agenda.”

Also in attendance at the first meetings, according to administration sources who spoke to Warren P. Strobel, of Knight Ridder Newspapers, were representatives of the Mujahideen e-Khalq, or MEK, an urban-guerrilla group that practiced a brand of revolutionary Marxism heavily influenced by Mao Zedong and Che Guevara.

Having expertly exploited phony intelligence promoted by the Iraqi National Congress (I.N.C.), a dubious exile group run by the convicted embezzler Ahmad Chalabi, the neocons were now pursuing an alliance with an even shadier collection of exiles. According to a 2003 report by the State Department, “During the 1970s, the MEK killed US military personnel and US civilians working on defense projects in Tehran.… The MEK detonated bombs in the head office of the Islamic Republic Party and the Premier’s office, killing some 70 high-ranking Iranian officials.… In 1991, it assisted the Government of Iraq in suppressing the Shia and Kurdish uprisings in southern Iraq and the Kurdish uprisings in the north.” In other words, the MEK was a terrorist group—one that took its orders from Saddam Hussein.

To hear some neocons tell it, though, the MEK militants weren’t terrorists—they were America’s best hope in Iran. In January 2004, Richard Perle was the guest speaker at a fundraiser sponsored by the MEK, although he later claimed to have been unaware of the connection. And in a speech before the National Press Club in late 2005, Raymond Tanter, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, recommended that the Bush administration use the MEK and its political arm, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (N.C.R.I.), as an insurgent militia against Iran. “The National Council of Resistance of Iran and the Mujahedeen-e Khalq are not only the best source for intelligence on Iran’s potential violations of the nonproliferation regime. The NCRI and MEK are also a possible ally of the West in bringing about regime change in Tehran,” he said.

Tanter went as far as to suggest that the U.S. consider using tactical nuclear weapons against Iran. “One military option is the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, which may have the capability to destroy hardened deeply buried targets. That is, bunker-busting bombs could destroy tunnels and other underground facilities.” He granted that the Non-Proliferation Treaty bans the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states, such as Iran, but added that “the United States has sold Israel bunker-busting bombs, which keeps the military option on the table.” In other words, the U.S. can’t nuke Iran, but Israel, which never signed the treaty and maintains an unacknowledged nuclear arsenal, can.

Shortly after the invasion of Iraq, when the U.S. mission there seemed accomplished or at least accomplishable, Iran came to fear that it would be next in the crosshairs. To stave off that possibility, Iran’s leadership, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, began to assemble a negotiating package. Suddenly, everything was on the table—Iran’s nuclear program, policy toward Israel, support of Hamas and Hezbollah, and control over al-Qaeda operatives captured since the U.S. went to war in Afghanistan.

This comprehensive proposal, which diplomats took to calling “the grand bargain,” was sent to Washington on May 2, 2003, just before a meeting in Geneva between Iran’s U.N. ambassador, Javad Zarif, and neocon Zalmay Khalilzad, then a senior director at the National Security Council. (Khalilzad went on to become the U.S. ambassador to Iraq and was recently nominated to be America’s envoy to the U.N.) According to a report by Gareth Porter in The American Prospect, Iran offered to take “decisive action against any terrorists (above all, al-Qaeda) in Iranian territory.” In exchange, Iran wanted the U.S. to pursue “anti-Iranian terrorists”—i.e., the MEK. Specifically, Iran offered to share the names of senior al-Qaeda operatives in its custody in return for the names of MEK cadres captured by the U.S. in Iraq.

Well aware that the U.S. was concerned about its nuclear program, Iran proclaimed its right to “full access to peaceful nuclear technology,” but offered to submit to much stricter inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.). On the subject of Israel, Iran offered to join with moderate Arab regimes such as Egypt and Jordan in accepting the 2002 Arab League Beirut declaration calling for peace with Israel in return for Israel’s withdrawal to its pre-1967 borders. The negotiating package also included proposals to normalize Hezbollah into a mere “political organization within Lebanon,” to bring about a “stop of any material support to Palestinian opposition groups (Hamas, Jihad, etc.) from Iranian territory,” and to apply “pressure on these organizations to stop violent actions against civilians within borders of 1967.”

To be sure, Iran’s proposal was only a first step. There were countless unanswered questions, and many reasons not to trust the Islamic Republic. Given the initiative’s historic scope, however, it was somewhat surprising when the Bush administration simply declined to respond. There was not even an interagency meeting to discuss it. “The State Department knew it had no chance at the interagency level of arguing the case for it successfully,” former N.S.C. staffer Flynt Leverett told The American Prospect. “They weren’t going to waste [Colin] Powell’s rapidly diminishing capital on something that unlikely.”

Iran had sent the proposal through an intermediary, Tim Guldimann, the Swiss ambassador to the U.S. A few days later, Leverett said, the White House had the State Department send Guldimann a message reprimanding him for exceeding his diplomatic mandate. “We’re not interested in any grand bargain,” said Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton, who went on to become interim ambassador to the U.N. until his resignation last December.

If the MEK has been cast as the Iranian counterpart to the I.N.C., there are more than enough Iranian and Syrian Ahmad Chalabis to go around. Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late Shah, has been shopped around Washington as a prospective leader of Iran. And Farid Ghadry, a Syrian exile in Virginia who founded the Reform Party of Syria, is the neocon favorite to rule Syria. Ghadry has an unusual résumé for a Syrian—he’s a member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the right-wing pro-Israel lobbying group—and he has endured so many comparisons to the disgraced leader of the I.N.C. that he once sent out a mass e-mail headlined, “I am not Ahmad Chalabi.”

Nevertheless, according to a report in The American Prospect, Meyrav Wurmser last year introduced Ghadry to key administration figures, including the vice president’s daughter Elizabeth Cheney, who—as principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs and coordinator for broader Middle East and North Africa initiatives—plays a key role in the Bush administration’s policy in the region. According to the Financial Times, Elizabeth Cheney, who has been on maternity leave since May, had supervised the State Department’s Iran-Syria Operations Group, created last spring to plot a strategy to democratize those two “rogue” states. One of her responsibilities was to oversee a projected $85 million program to produce anti-Iran propaganda and support dissidents.

By the end of 2002, MEK operatives had provided the administration with intelligence asserting that Iran had built a secret uranium-enrichment site. As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, David Albright, a former I.A.E.A. weapons inspector in Iraq, said that the data provided by the MEK was better than that provided by the I.N.C. But he added that it was possible Iran was enriching the uranium for energy purposes, and cautioned that Saddam’s former mercenaries could not be relied upon to provide objective intelligence about Iran’s W.M.D. “We should be very suspicious about what our leaders or the exile groups say about Iran’s nuclear capacity,” Albright said. “There’s a drumbeat of allegations, but there’s not a whole lot of solid information. It may be that Iran has not made the decision to build nuclear weapons.”

The MEK wasn’t the administration’s only dubious source of nuclear intelligence. In July 2005, House intelligence committee chairman Peter Hoekstra (Republican, Michigan) and committee member Curt Weldon (Republican, Pennsylvania) met secretly in Paris with an Iranian exile known as “Ali.” Weldon had just published a book called Countdown to Terror, alleging that the C.I.A. was ignoring intelligence about Iranian-sponsored terror plots against the U.S., and Ali had been one of his main sources.

But according to the C.I.A.’s former Paris station chief Bill Murray, Ali, whose real name is Fereidoun Mahdavi, fabricated much of the information. “Mahdavi works for Ghorbanifar,” Murray told Laura Rozen of The American Prospect. “The two are inseparable. Ghorbanifar put Mahdavi out to meet with Weldon.”

More than a year later, in August 2006, Peter Hoekstra released a House-intelligence-committee report titled “Recognizing Iran as a Strategic Threat: An Intelligence Challenge for the United States.” Written by Frederick Fleitz, former special assistant to John Bolton, the report asserted that the C.I.A. lacked “the ability to acquire essential information necessary to make judgments” on Tehran’s nuclear program.

The House report received widespread national publicity, but critics were quick to point out its errors. Gary Sick, senior research scholar at the Middle East Institute of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and an Iran specialist with the N.S.C. under Presidents Ford, Reagan, and Carter, says the report overstates both the number and range of Iran’s missiles and neglects to mention that the I.A.E.A. found no evidence of weapons production or activity. “Some people will recall that the IAEA inspectors, in their caution, were closer to the truth about Iraqi WMD than, say the Vice President’s office,” Sick remarked.

“This is like pre-war Iraq all over again,” David Albright said in The Washington Post. “You have an Iranian nuclear threat that is spun up, using bad information that’s cherry-picked and a report that trashes the inspectors.”

Curt Weldon’s 20-year career in Congress came to an end on November 7, 2006, when he lost his seat to Democrat Joe Sestak, a navy vice admiral who’d served in Iraq. Two weeks later, Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker that a classified assessment by the C.I.A. had found no conclusive evidence as yet that Iran had a secret nuclear-weapons program.

To Israel, however, it didn’t matter whether a secret weapons program existed. For a state as antagonistic as Iran even to know how to make nuclear weapons was unacceptable. Long before the Iraq invasion, Israeli officials had told the Bush administration that Iran was a far greater threat than Iraq. “If you look at President Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ list, all of us said North Korea and Iran are more urgent,” says former Mossad director of intelligence Uzi Arad, who served as Netanyahu’s foreign-policy adviser. “Iraq was already semi-controlled because there were sanctions. It was outlawed. Sometimes the answer [from the neocons] was ‘Let’s do first things first. Once we do Iraq, we’ll have a military presence in Iraq, which would enable us to handle the Iranians from closer quarters, would give us more leverage.’”

Instead, the Americans got bogged down in the Iraqi quagmire, and Iran elected a frightening new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in 2005. His anti-Israel tirades and aggressive pursuit of nuclear technology led Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to say that Iran threatened not just Israel but the entire world. Outside the administration, neocon ideologues responded with bolder calls for military action against Iran. In The Weekly Standard, Gerecht threw down the gauntlet: “If the ruling clerical elite wants a head-on collision with a determined superpower, then that’s their choice.” (In January, Iran’s parliament responded to new U.N. economic sanctions with a rebuke of Ahmadinejad that raised doubts about his political future.)

But just as the neocons put Iran on the front burner, opposition to the Iraq war began to mount within the U.S. As the 2006 midterm elections approached, one Republican after another began to back away from Bush’s war. That March, former secretary of state James Baker and Lee Hamilton, the former chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, joined forces to found the Iraq Study Group and search for an exit strategy.

Baker’s realpolitik is anathema to neocons, but it is worth remembering that Bush, despite pursuing a neoconservative agenda in Iraq, is not a dyed-in-the-wool member of their group. “The president is a true believer in the policies the administration has been engaged in,” says one former N.S.C. staffer. “When it is applied to the policies regarding the Palestinians, Hamas, or Iran, there is a common thread. It is not pure neoconservatism, nor is it the pragmatic realism we saw under Bush One.”

Bush showed his willingness to depart from the neocon line a year ago, when he received an unusual proposition from Israeli officials together with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud “Abu Mazen” Abbas, and a top administration neoconservative, Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams. According to a Middle East expert, the Israelis and Abbas had determined that Hamas was positioned to fare strongly in the upcoming Palestinian elections, so they came to the administration with a plan to postpone them. “The Israelis and the Palestinians together had worked out a way to do it,” says the expert. “The Israelis were going to say that Hamas candidates could not run in Jerusalem, which was under Israeli jurisdiction, because they did not recognize Israel’s right to exist. And Abu Mazen was going to say if they can’t run in Jerusalem, then we can’t have an election now, [because] it wouldn’t be fair to Hamas. It was all worked out.”

There was just one problem: Bush, whose enthusiasm for spreading democracy had led him to actively lobby for the elections, didn’t want to go along. “The president said no,” the expert says. “He said elections will be good for Hamas. They would have to be responsible. They expected Hamas to do well, but not get a majority. Now they’ve become the government and it’s a big mess.” If anything, Bush had shown himself to be less pragmatic than his neocon advisers.

Reached via e-mail, a spokesperson for the National Security Council responded, “When the elections were rescheduled for January 2006, after earlier being postponed by the [Palestinian Authority], the United States took the position that they should be held and not postponed yet again We were advised during the campaign by some of our Palestinian interlocutors that Hamas would win. We do not believe in cancelling elections because we may not like the outcome.”

Martin Indyk, the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, at the Brookings Institution, and former U.S. ambassador to Israel, says Bush’s decision reflects a mistaken belief that “elections are the most important way to promote democracy.” Indyk explains, “It would have been better to build up the rule of law, establish independent judiciaries, promote freedom of religion and the press, and insist on the principle of a monopoly of force in the hands of the elected government. Ignoring that last principle in favor of elections was Bush’s biggest mistake. As a result, in Palestine, Iraq, and Lebanon, parties with militias have moved into the government. Hamas, Muqtada al-Sadr, and Hezbollah have taken advantage of elections to promote their policies, which are antithetical to democracy.”

Baker’s entry onto the scene didn’t just raise new questions about Bush’s openness to pragmatic solutions; it also introduced an Oedipal element into the drama. Baker and Bush’s father, after all, were best friends. Tennis partners. More than 40 years earlier, when George W. was a 16-year-old student at Andover, Baker had given him a summer job as a messenger at Baker Botts, his Houston law firm. Now, along with Brent Scowcroft, the elder Bush’s former national-security adviser, Baker was leading a coterie of multilateralists and realists who found themselves aghast at the radical direction the younger Bush was taking American foreign policy, and desperate to reverse it.

In July 2006, after Israel’s disastrous attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon, Scowcroft offered the administration some foreign-policy advice on the opinion page of The Washington Post, arguing that the crisis in Lebanon provided a “historic opportunity” to achieve a comprehensive settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Resolving that conflict, Scowcroft argued, was crucial to stabilizing the region—including Iraq.

According to an article in Salon by Sidney Blumenthal, who was a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, Scowcroft, with the assent of Baker and the elder Bush, sought and found support for this notion from the rulers of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Even Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Scowcroft’s former protégé, seemed receptive, so he asked her to help open the president’s mind to the forthcoming I.S.G. report.

As the November congressional elections approached, there were a number of indications that foreign-policy realists such as Scowcroft were gaining favor. Key neoconservative architects of the war in Iraq—Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Richard Perle—were no longer part of the Bush foreign-policy team, and the State Department, all but inoperative during the run-up to the Iraq war, was showing new signs of life. “My sense is that the Iran portfolio has been shifted to State,” Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran specialist for the nonprofit International Crisis Group, told me last fall. “Secretary Rice and her deputies are more influential than the vice president and the secretary of defense. It’s an about-face in U.S. policy after two decades of not talking to Iran.”

Meanwhile, more than a month before its report was due to be released, sources close to the Iraq Study Group had begun talking to the press, and word quickly leaked out that its recommendations would be largely aimed at achieving stability rather than democracy in Iraq. When it came to Iran, a source told me, the I.S.G. might recommend “comprehensive and unconditional talks with the regime” in Tehran—something Bush had already ruled out.

On November 7, the Democrats won both houses of Congress. The next day, Rumsfeld resigned. Bush vowed to “find common ground” with the Democrats. At last, the moderates seemed to have prevailed over the neocons.

On December 6, the Iraq Study Group finally released its report, “The Way Forward—A New Approach.” Bipartisan reports tend to be bland affairs, but this one was different. Describing the situation in Iraq as “grave and deteriorating,” the I.S.G. report did not shy away from pointing out that the new Iraqi Army, the police force, and even Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki often showed greater loyalty to their ethnic identities than to the ideal of a nonsectarian, democratic Iraq. Ultimately, the report concluded that sending more American soldiers to Iraq would not resolve what were fundamentally political problems. The subtext was clear: America’s policies in Iraq had failed. It was time for the administration to cut its losses. A Gallup poll from December 12 showed that, among people who had an opinion on the subject, five out of six supported implementing the report’s recommendations.

The only American whose opinion mattered, however, was not impressed. Bush, Salon reported, slammed the I.S.G. study as “a flaming turd.” If Rice even delivered Scowcroft’s message, it had fallen on deaf ears.

Just eight days later, on December 14, Bush found a study that was more to his liking. Not surprisingly, it came from the American Enterprise Institute, the intellectual stronghold of neoconservatism. The author, Frederick Kagan, a resident scholar at the A.E.I., is the son of Donald Kagan and the brother of Robert Kagan, who signed PNAC’s famous 1998 letter to President Bill Clinton urging him to overthrow Saddam Hussein. According to Kagan, the project began in late September or early October at the instigation of his boss, Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at A.E.I. She decided “it would be helpful to do a realistic evaluation of what would be required to secure Baghdad,” Kagan told Vanity Fair.

The project culminated in a four-day planning exercise in early December, Kagan said, that just happened to coincide with the release of the Iraq Study Group report. But he rejected the notion that his study had been initiated by the White House as an alternative to the bipartisan assessment. “I’m aware of some of the rumors,” Kagan said. “This was not designed to be an anti-I.S.G. report.… Any conspiracy theories beyond that are nonsense.

“There was no contact with the Bush administration. We put this together on our own I did not have any contact with the vice president’s office prior to … well, I don’t want to say that. I have had periodic contact with the vice president’s office, but I can’t tell you the dates. If you are barking up the story that the V.P. put this together, that is not true.”

Kagan’s report was sharply at odds with the consensus forged by the top brass in Iraq. Iraq commander General George Casey and General John Abizaid, the head of Central Command (CentCom), had argued that sending additional troops to Iraq would be counterproductive. (Later they both reversed course.) Kagan’s study, on the contrary, suggested that with a massive surge of new troops America could finally succeed. It cites the military’s new counter-insurgency manual, which suggests that a nation can be secured with a force of one soldier for every 40 to 50 inhabitants. That calculus would call for stationing more than 150,000 troops in Baghdad alone (there are currently 17,000 there), far more than is politically feasible today. But Kagan skirts this issue by asserting that “it is neither necessary nor wise to try to clear and hold the entire city all at once.” Focusing instead on certain areas of Baghdad, he concludes that the deployment of 20,000 additional troops would be enough to pacify significant sections of the city. Even the title of Kagan’s report must have been more appealing to Bush: “Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq.” Soon, it would be announced that Casey and Abizaid were being replaced with more amenable officers: Lieutenant General David Petraeus and Admiral William J. Fallon, respectively. The escalation was on.

In one sense, the neoconservative hawks—including the authors of “A Clean Break”—have been kept aloft by their failures. The strategic fiasco created by the Iraq war has actually increased the danger posed by Iran to Israel—and with it the likelihood of armed conflict. “[Bush's wars] have put Israel in the worst strategic and operational situation she’s been in since 1948,” says retired colonel Larry Wilkerson, who was Colin Powell’s chief of staff in the State Department. “If you take down Iraq, you eliminate Iran’s No. 1 enemy. And, oh, by the way, if you eliminate the Taliban, they might reasonably be assumed to be Iran’s No. 2 enemy.”

“Nobody thought going into this war that these guys would screw it up so badly, that Iraq would be taken out of the balance of power, that it would implode, and that Iran would become dominant,” says Martin Indyk.

As a result, many Israelis believe that diplomacy is doomed and that Iran will have to be dealt with sooner or later. “Attacking Iraq when it had no W.M.D. may have been the wrong step,” says Uzi Arad, the former Mossad intelligence chief. “But then to ignore Iran would compound the disaster. Israel will be left alone, and American interests will be affected catastrophically.”

Even critics of the White House say that Iran’s nuclear program poses a grave threat to Israel. “They correctly fear the Iranian nuclear program as an existential threat to Israel,” says retired colonel W. Patrick Lang, who served as an officer for the Middle East, South Asia, and terrorism at the Defense Intelligence Agency. “They are not being silly about this. It really is a threat to Israel.”

But waging war against Iran could be the most catastrophic choice of all. It is widely believed that Iran would respond to an attack by blockading the Strait of Hormuz, a 20-mile-wide narrows in the eastern part of the Persian Gulf through which about 40 percent of the world’s oil exports are transported. Oil analysts say a blockade could propel the price of oil to $125 a barrel, sending the world economy into a tailspin. There could be vast international oil wars. Iran could act on its fierce rhetoric against Israel.

America’s 130,000 soldiers in Iraq would also become highly vulnerable in the event of an attack on Iran. “Our troops in Iraq are supplied with food, fuel, and ammunition by truck convoys from a supply base in Kuwait,” says Lang. “Most of that goes over roads that pass through the Shiite-dominated South of Iraq. The Iranians could cut those supply lines just like that—the trucks are easy to shoot at with R.P.G.’s,” or rocket-propelled grenades.

In hopes of avoiding that, the Iraq Study Group advised Bush to open direct talks with Iran. Members of both parties in Congress have publicly given similar advice, as have former secretary of state Colin Powell and Robert Gates, the new secretary of defense. Still, it would be naïve to think that either a wall of opposition or the possibility of dire consequences would necessarily deter this president. Even before his January 10 speech, many inside the military had concluded that the decision to bomb Iran has already been made. “Bush’s ‘redline’ for going to war is Iran having the knowledge to produce nuclear weapons—which is probably what they already have now,” says Sam Gardiner, a retired air-force colonel who specializes in staging war games on the Middle East. “The president first said [that was his redline] in December 2005, and he has repeated it four times since then.”

In April, Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker that U.S. troops were already on the ground in Iran, negotiating alliances with the Azerbaijanis in the North, the Kurds in the Northeast, and the Baluchis in the Southeast. In September, Time reported that a U.S. campaign to wipe out Iran’s nuclear program could entail bombing up to 1,500 targets. More recently, Paul Craig Roberts, a former assistant secretary of the Treasury under Ronald Reagan, asserted in the Baltimore Chronicle that Bush “will attack Iran with tactical nuclear weapons, because it is the only way the neocons believe they can rescue their goal of U.S. (and Israeli) hegemony in the Middle East.” Adds former C.I.A. officer Philip Giraldi, “I’ve heard from sources at the Pentagon that their impression is that the White House has made a decision that war is going to happen.”

According to Sam Gardiner, the most telling sign that a decision to bomb has already been made was the October deployment order of minesweepers to the Persian Gulf, presumably to counter any attempt by Iran to blockade the Strait of Hormuz. “These have to be towed to the Gulf,” Gardiner explains. “They are really small ships, the size of cabin cruisers, made of fiberglass and wood. And towing them to the Gulf can take three to four weeks.”

Another serious development is the growing role of the U.S. Strategic Command (StratCom), which oversees nuclear weapons, missile defense, and protection against weapons of mass destruction. Bush has directed StratCom to draw up plans for a massive strike against Iran, at a time when CentCom has had its hands full overseeing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Shifting to StratCom indicates that they are talking about a really punishing air-force and naval air attack [on Iran],” says Lang.

Moreover, he continues, Bush can count on the military to carry out such a mission even without congressional authorization. “If they write a plan like that and the president issues an execute order, the forces will execute it. He’s got the power to do that as commander-in-chief. We set that up during the Cold War. It may, after the fact, be considered illegal, or an impeachable offense, but if he orders them to do it, they will do it.”

Lang also notes that the recent appointment of a naval officer, Admiral William Fallon, to the top post at CentCom may be another indication that Bush intends to bomb Iran. “It makes very little sense that a person with this background should be appointed to be theater commander in a theater in which two essentially ‘ground’ wars are being fought, unless it is intended to conduct yet another war which will be different in character,” he wrote in his blog. “The employment of Admiral Fallon suggests that they are thinking about something that is not a ground campaign.”

Lang predicts that tensions will escalate once the administration grasps the truth about Prime Minister Maliki. “They want him to be George Washington, to bind together the new country of Iraq,” says Lang. “And he’s not that. He is a Shia, a factional political leader, whose goal is to solidify the position of Shia Arabs in Iraq. That’s his goal. So he won’t let them do anything effective against [Muqtada al-Sadr's] Mahdi army.” Recently, a complicated cat-and-mouse game has begun, with Maliki’s forces arresting hundreds of Mahdi militiamen, including a key aide to Muqtada al-Sadr. But there are many unanswered questions about the operations, which could amount to little more than a short-term effort to appease the U.S.

Gary Sick is slightly more optimistic that the Bush administration’s Iran strategy entails more than brute force. “What has happened is that the United States, in installing a Shiite government in Iraq, has really upset the balance of power [in the Middle East],” Sick says. “Along with our Sunni allies—Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt—[the administration is] terribly concerned about Iran emerging as the new colossus. Having created this problem, the U.S. is now in effect using it as a means of uniting forces who are sympathetic [to us].”

In order to do that, Sick says, the administration must reassure America’s allies that it is serious about protecting them if the conflict spreads throughout the region—drawing in Shiite Iran, Sunni Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, which would resist any attempt by the Kurds to create an independent state. “That means providing Patriot missiles, if Iran goes after the Saudi oil ports,” he says. “One of the prices we will have to pay is a more active role in the Arab-Israeli dispute. Then there is fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon. The president has signed a covert-action finding that allows the C.I.A. to confront and counter Hezbollah in Lebanon. So this is a very broad strategy. It has a clear enemy and an appeal to Saudis, to Israelis, and has a potential of putting together a fairly significant coalition.”

For all that, Sick acknowledges, this policy carries a significant risk of provoking war with Iran: “Basically, this is a signal to Maliki that we are not going to tolerate Shiite cooperation with Iran. This could lead to the ultimate break with Maliki. But once you start sending these signals, you end up in a corner and you can’t get out of it.”

Whatever the administration’s master plan may be, parts of it are already under way. In mid-January, the U.S. sent a second aircraft-carrier strike group to the Persian Gulf. According to Gardiner, by the end of February the United States will have enough forces in place to mount an assault on Iran. That, in the words of former national-security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, would be “an act of political folly” so severe that “the era of American preponderance could come to a premature end.”

The Bush White House has already built the fire. Whether it will light the match remains to be seen.

The news director of the public radio station in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has directed his staff to “ignore national stories quoting unnamed sources.” He also called on other news outlets to join this policy.

Bill Dupuy sent the following to his news staff:

Effectively immediately and until further notice, it is the policy of KSFR’s news department to ignore and not repeat any wire service or nationally published story about Iran, China, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia or any other foreign power that quotes an “unnamed” U.S. official.

What we have suspected and talked about at length before is now becoming clear. “High administration officials speaking on the condition of anonymity,” “Usually reliable Washington sources,” and others of the like were behind the publicity that added credibility to the need to go to war against Afghanistan and Iraq.

Our news department covers local news. But, like local newspapers and others, we occassionally are taken in by national stories that we have no way to verify.

This is a small news department with a small reach. We cannot research these stories ourselves. But we can take steps not to compromise our integrity. We should not dutifully parrot whatever comes out of Washington, on the wire or by whatever means, no matter how intriguing and urgent it sounds, when the source is unnamed.

I am also calling on our colleagues in other local news departments — broadcast and print — to take the same professional approach.

Iraq is experiencing the largest movement of civilians in the Middle East since the exodus of Palestinians after the creation of Israel, the United Nations says, but the rest of the world is failing to step up to the plate, the Financial Times reports.

Two million Iraqis have become refugees in other countries, with most heading to neighbouring Jordan and Syria, while another 1.8m have become displaced within their own country.

Assuming a total population of around 26m that is a “staggering” amount, says Gonzalo Vargas Llosa from the UNHCR refugee agency, and the numbers “are rising every day”.

Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state, yesterday revealed plans for the US to allow 7,000 Iraqi refugees – who have already fled to neighbouring countries – to settle in the US over the next year. Until now the US has allowed only 463 Iraqi refugees into the country since the war began in 2003.

The announcement came after Ms Rice met António Guterres, the head of the UNHCR, who has recently returned from a tour of the Middle East where he had complained that the burden of the refugee crisis meant that “a very limited number of countries is paying a very heavy price”.

The UN last month issued a $60m appeal, warning that there was “currently no end in sight to the massive and escalating displacement in the face of extreme violence”. The US yesterday pledged $9m for a worldwide resettlement and relief programme but the UN effort remains seriously underfunded.

Without that money, the UN says, “UNHCR and other humanitarian agencies lack the resources to cope”, even as increasing numbers of people are cut off from social networks and struggling to subsist.

“Large numbers of Iraqi refugees are poor and live in low-income areas,” the appeal warned. “There are reports of women and young girls forced to resort to prostitution . . . and children forced into labour or other forms of exploitation in order to survive.”

A UN assessment in Syria found that 30 per cent of Iraqi children were not attending school and the appeal cited growing reports that Syria, Jordan and Lebanon had reached “saturation point”.

The UN on Tuesday said the number of Iraqis wanting to register with the UNHCR in Damascus and Amman had “dramatically increased over the past few days”. It added that many Iraqis were afraid of being deported under newly reinforced Syrian immigration regulations, despite Syrian government assurances that it would not force them across the border.

At the same time, most of the displaced inside Iraq “are now running out of resources”, Mr Vargas Llosa says, but security problems meant they were cut off from outside help.

“I am not sure if there is a crisis today in Africa where there are basically 4m displaced,” he said. “But the issue has not been given the prominence and visibility it deserves. It’s very important for the international community to recognise the enormity of the problem.”

Despite the renewed attention, the UN appeal remains mostly empty. It has received $6m from the UN’s Central Emergency Response Fund, and a further $1m from the UN-managed International Trust Fund for Iraq.

But the only donor country to contribute directly has been Sweden, with $2m. Some others have pledged funds but the money has not yet arrived, while the UK, for example, has not even pledged. The UNHCR says it had to dig into its emergency reserve just to pay this month’s salaries for its Iraq operation staff.

The UN also wants rich countries to be more generous in offering resettlement. “This is not a solution for the vast majority,” says Mr Vargas Llosa, but “certainly you could resettle more than has been the case so far”.

In the meantime, the UN says Iraq’s neighbours – with outside help – must continue to offer social services. “We understand this is a great burden on them, but the fact is for many Iraqis there is no option but to cross borders,” it says. “They should be able to lead dignified lives in Jordan and Syria.”

The International Federation of Journalists has backed new calls from Sudanese and Arab world journalists for the release of Sami al-Haj, a cameraman working for Al-Jazeera, who has been held for five years, tortured and accused of terrorism offences at the notorious Guantanamo detention centre in Cuba. He has never been charged or brought to trial.

“We understand that our colleague is in poor health as a result of his inhuman treatment,” said Aidan White, IFJ General Secretary. “It is time for this ordeal to end.”

The IFJ says that Sami al-Haj is being victimised for working for the Arab satellite channel Al-Jazeera. He was captured by the Pakistani Army on the Afghan border in December 2001 then handed over to United States troops before being transferred to Guantanamo in June 2002.

According to his lawyers he was forced to confess alleged links between al-Jazeera and the terrorist group al-Qaeda. He has undergone regular torture, has been sexually assaulted and has been subject to more than 150 interrogation sessions.

“This case represents a singular injustice that casts a shadow over journalism worldwide,” said White. “It is a shocking and shameful case that makes a mockery of American democracy.” The IFJ is supporting new calls from journalists in the Sudan and around the Arab world for al-Haji’s release. The IFJ is backing appeals this week from its German affiliate the Deutsche Journalistinnen- und Journalisten-Union in ver.di to German Chancellor Angela Merkel to intervene in the case.

Sami al-Haj has been accused without proof of having interviewed Osama bin Laden and to have been involved in arms trafficking for Islamic terrorists is typical of the fate suffered by many of his fellow detainees. Al-Haj is the only confirmed journalist now imprisoned at Guantanamo.

The US alleges that he worked as a financial courier for Chechen rebels, and that he assisted al-Qaeda and extremist figures But he has been held on the basis of secret evidence; he has not been convicted or even charged with a crime. And until last year the military would not even acknowledge he was in custody.

Al-Haj’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, says there is no credible evidence against him. “There is absolutely zero evidence that he has any history in terrorism at all,” he says contending that al-Haj is a political prisoner and that the focus of US questioning has not been alleged terrorist activities but obtaining intelligence on Al-Jazeera and its staff.

The allegations against Iran are similar in tone and credibility to those made four years ago by the US government about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction in order to justify the invasion of 2003.

Senior US defence officials in Baghdad, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they believed the bombs were manufactured in Iran and smuggled across the border to Shia militants in Iraq. The weapons, identified as “explosively formed penetrators” (EFPs) are said to be capable of destroying an Abrams tank.

The officials speaking in Baghdad used aggressive rhetoric suggesting that Washington wants to ratchet up its confrontation with Tehran. It has not ruled out using armed force and has sent a second carrier task force to the Gulf.

“We assess that these activities are coming from senior levels of the Iranian government,” said an official in Baghdad, charging that the explosive devices come from the al-Quds Brigade and noting that it answers to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. This is the first time the US has openly accused the Iranian government of being involved in sending weapons that kill Americans to Iraq.

The allegations by senior but unnamed US officials in Baghdad and Washington are bizarre. The US has been fighting a Sunni insurgency in Iraq since 2003 that is deeply hostile to Iran.

The insurgent groups have repeatedly denounced the democratically elected Iraqi government as pawns of Iran. It is unlikely that the Sunni guerrillas have received significant quantities of military equipment from Tehran. Some 1,190 US soldiers have been killed by so-called improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in Iraq since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But most of them consist of heavy artillery shells (often 120mm or 155mm) taken from the arsenals of the former regime and detonated by blasting caps wired to a small battery. The current is switched on either by a command wire or a simple device such as the remote control used for children’s toys or to open garage doors.

Such bombs were used by guerrillas during the Irish war of independence in 1919-21 against British patrols and convoys. They were commonly used in the Second World War, when “shaped charges”, similar in purpose to the EFPs of which the US is now complaining, were employed by all armies. The very name – explosive formed penetrators – may have been chosen to imply that a menacing new weapon has been developed.

At the end of last year the Baker-Hamilton report, written by a bipartisan commission of Republicans and Democrats, suggested opening talks with Iran and Syria to resolve the Iraq crisis. Instead, President Bush has taken a precisely opposite line, blaming Iran and Syria for US losses in Iraq.

In the past month Washington has arrested five Iranian officials in a long-established office in Arbil, the Kurdish capital. An Iranian diplomat was kidnapped in Baghdad, allegedly by members of an Iraqi military unit under US influence. President George Bush had earlier said that Iranians deemed to be targeting US forces could be killed, which seemed to be opening the door to assassinations.

The statements from Washington give the impression that the US has been at war with Shia militias for the past three-and-a-half years while almost all the fighting has been with the Sunni insurgents. These are often led by highly trained former officers and men from Saddam Hussein’s elite military and intelligence units. During the Iran-Iraq war between 1980 and 1988, the Iraqi leader, backed by the US and the Soviet Union, was able to obtain training in advanced weapons for his forces.

The US stance on the military capabilities of Iraqis today is the exact opposite of its position in four years ago. Then President Bush and Tony Blair claimed that Iraqis were technically advanced enough to produce long-range missiles and to be close to producing a nuclear device. Washington is now saying that Iraqis are too backward to produce an effective roadside bomb and must seek Iranian help.

The White House may have decided that, in the run up to the 2008 presidential election, it would be much to its political advantage in the US to divert attention from its failure in Iraq by blaming Iran for being the hidden hand supporting its opponents.

It is likely that Shia militias have received weapons and money from Iran and possible that the Sunni insurgents have received some aid. But most Iraqi men possess weapons. Many millions of them received military training under Saddam Hussein. His well-supplied arsenals were all looted after his fall. No specialist on Iraq believes that Iran has ever been a serious promoter of the Sunni insurgency.

The evidence against Iran is even more insubstantial than the faked or mistaken evidence for Iraqi WMDs disseminated by the US and Britain in 2002 and 2003. The allegations appear to be full of exaggerations. Few Abrams tanks have been destroyed. It implies the Shias have been at war with the US while in fact they are controlled by parties which make up the Iraqi government.

The article’s main allegations come from “People Without Names” or PWN, described as “civilian and military officials from a broad range of government agencies.” A “still classified American intelligence report that was prepared in 2006″ is also cited.

An “American intelligence assessment “is quoted as saying that “as part of its strategy in Iraq, Iran is implementing a deliberate, calibrated policy – approved by Supreme Leader Khamenei and carried out by the Quds Force – to provide explosives support and training to select Iraqi Shia militant groups to conduct attacks against coalition targets.”

While it is plausible that Iran might be providing weapons to its allies in Iraq, it is not so obvious that Iran actually has any incentive to support attacks on US troops – since Iran is allied with the Iraq’s Shiite government and wants it to succeed. A careful report in the Los Angeles Times indicated that top Iranian officials are not so eager for U.S. forces to withdraw (“Iraq Pullout Talk Makes Iran Uneasy,” Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times, November 16, 2006.)

The New York Times article provides no evidence for its reported allegations that Iran is seeking to promote attacks on U.S. forces.

The 1900-word article offers no quotes from any experts who might question the allegations made by PWN, although there are many who would.

Some readers might remember the author of the article, Michael R. Gordon, from the reporting prior to the Iraq war. His most notorious contribution was an article of September 8, 2002 entitled “U.S. Says Hussein Intensified Quest for A-Bomb Parts,” co-authored with Judith Miller. It began:

“More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administrations officials said today. In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium.”

Vice-President Dick Cheney cited this September 8th, 2002 article the following Sunday on “Meet the Press,” to make his case that Iraq was a nuclear threat. The aluminum tubes were later determined to be unrelated to nuclear fuel production, and Iraq’s nuclear program to be non-existent.

The New York Times cited the September 8th, 2002 article and subsequent reporting on the aluminum tubes in its apology for the newspaper’s reporting leading up to the Iraq War.

It is not clear, however, how much the newspaper has learned from its mistakes.

[See also Juan Cole's demolition of the NYT's claims: "It is obvious that if Iran did not exist, US troops would still be being blown up in large numbers. Sunni guerrillas in al-Anbar and West Baghdad are responsible for most of the deaths. The Bush administration's talent for blaming everyone but itself for its own screw-ups is on clear display here."]

By these robust standards George Bush is doing a moderately competent job in suggesting that if balked by Iran on the matter of arming the Shi’a in Iraq or pursuing its nuclear program he’ll dump high explosive, maybe even a couple of nukes, on that country’s relevant research sites, or tell Israel to do the job for him.

In Washington there are plenty of rational people in Congress, think tanks and the Pentagon who think he’s capable of ordering an attack,– albeit not a nuclear one — with bombers carrying conventional explosive and with missiles from US ships in the Persian Gulf.

Colonel Sam Gardner, who’s taught at the National War College recently sketched out on this site the plan as it could unfold: already the second naval carrier group has been deployed to the Gulf area, joined by naval mine clearing ships. “As one of the last steps before a strike, we’ll see USAF tankers moved to unusual places, like Bulgaria. These will be used to refuel the US-based B-2 bombers on their strike missions into Iran. When that happens, we’ll only be days away from a strike.”

Gardiner cautioned that “It is possible the White House strategy is just implementing a strategy to put pressure on Iran on a number of fronts, and this will never amount to anything. On the other hand, if the White House is on a path to strike Iran, we’ll see a few more steps unfold.

“First, we know there is a National Security Council staff-led_group whose mission is to create outrage in the world against Iran. Just like before Gulf II, this media group will begin to release stories to sell a strike against Iran. Watch for the outrage stuff.”

As regards “the outrage stuff”, here on cue comes the New York Times’ Michael Gordon with a front page story today, February 10, headlined “Deadliest Bomb in Iraq is Made by Iran, US Says”, and beginning “The most lethal weapon directed against American troops in Iraq is an explosive-packed cylinder that United States intelligence asserts is being supplied by Iran.”

It’s no doubt true that Iran has been arming the Shi’a. What Gordon fails to mention is that over 90 per sent of the IEDs used against US troops in Iraq have been detonated by the Sunni insurgents , who of course are not supplied by Iran. More generally, the prime point of interest of the intelligence briefings given to Gordon and other journalists is the timing. At any point in the past couple of years the US could have gone public with roughly the same accusations.

Shades of the Ho Chi Minh trail! Year after year first Johnson then Nixon would claim that the resistance in south Vietnam was not indigenous but created and armed by North Vietnam, backed by the Soviet Union and China–which these days has flourishing economic ties with Iran, particularly in the field of energy.

Another tripwire for escalation would be the UN Security Council Feb 21 deadline for Iran to suspend “all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development, to be verified by the IAEA,” the International Atomic Energy Agency.

There’s certainly disquiet in Congress, particularly after Bush’s State of the Union address January 17 where he reprised his notorious “Axis of Evil” address of January 2002, identifying Iran as the number one troublemaker and fomenter of terror in the region.

“Is it the position of this administration that it possesses the authority to take unilateral action against Iran, in the absence of a direct threat, without Congressional approval?” the Virginia Democrat, Senator James Webb recently asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Rice said she’d get back to him.

The Bush administration is capable of almost any folly, but is it likely that it would bomb Iran’s nuclear research labs? Would it really prod Israel into taking on the job?

Israel of course has been making plenty of quite predictable hay out of President Ahmadinejad’s crack about how “the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the pages of time.” Of course the let’s-stay- calm types say it was just a stale old one-liner from the Ayatollah Khomeini and please to note he used the word “regime”, not “Israel”. Plant that one in the graveyard of wimpy rationalizations. Along with the recent”holocaust conference”, it’s probably the biggest leg-up for Israeli bond drives since the Yom Kippur war. Prime minister Olmert quotes it on an almost daily basis, echoed by his rival, Netanyahu.

Aside from the rhetorical haymaking, the notion of Israel nuking Iran’s N-plants is very far-fetched. Indeed, the military wisdom here is that as a practical enterprise, it can’t, since among many technical limitations Israel’s bombers would require refueling over hostile territory.

Aside from this, Israel still won’t officially admit to having a nuclear arsenal. It would a stupefying jump, from that disingenuous posture to being the first power in the region to explode a nuclear device. The point of having a nuclear deterrent is to deter, not to use. Iran is well aware that in 1999 and 2004 Israelis bought Dolphin submarines from Germany reportedly capable of carrying nuclear-armed cruise missiles. As President Chirac asked in his recent press conference, what good it would do Iran to have a nuclear bomb, or even two. “Where would it fire that bomb? At Israel? It wouldn’t have traveled 200 meters through the atmosphere before Tehran would be razed.”

(Reservations among Irael’s elites about attacks on Iran are the topic of an excellent piece by Gabriel Kolko on this site today.)

So the job of attacking would fall to the US Air force and US Navy and there are certainly generals, particularly in the Air Force, telling Bush it would be a snap, just as Curt LeMay, at that time head of the Strategic Air Command, told President Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis that SAC could “reduce the Soviet Union to a smouldering irradiated ruin in three hours”.

But Air Force credibility is low at the moment. LeMay’s heirs told Bush that “shock and awe” bombing in 2003 would prompt Saddam to run up the white flag. It didn’t. US ground forces carried the day–at least at the outset. But there aren’t any US ground forces available to invade a country many times bigger than Iraq, filled with a large population mostly loyal to the regime. After sorties against Iran with bombs and missiles what would the US do?

The problem is that brinkmanship suits everyone’s book. Ahmadinejad, facing serious political problems, can posture about standing up to the Great Satan. Olmert can say Ahmadinejad wants to finish off Israel and kill all the Jews. Bush sees Iran as a terrific way of changing the subject from the mess in Iraq and putting the Democrats on the spot.

The Democrats take the lead of their presidential hopefuls, who have no intention of being corralled by the Republicans as symps of holocaust deniers who want to destroy Israel. These days, to be a player, any candidate for the US presidency has to raise about $100 million, of which a large tranche will come from American Jews. Barack Obama and John Edwards call for swift withdrawal of US forces from Iraq. When it comes to Iran they roar in unison with Hillary Clinton that no option can be left off the table. In other words, if it comes to it, nuke ‘em .

Is there room for sanity here? The best hope will be for Iran to finish its testing cycle, declare mission accomplished and figure out some sort of face-saving halt in its program by February 21. Can we hope for prudence from the White House? Who knows? Bush is a nutty guy. It was his insistence on democratic elections in Iraq that put the Shi’a in control. Now he’s blaming Iran for trying to capitalize on the consequences. This is not a regime that thinks things through very sensibly.

Since the first six months of the invasion we have had hardly any independent reporting in Iraq. At the beginning there was euphoria — some 260 publications sprang up. Under the sanctions no one had had access to publishing, even the official Baath newspaper “al Thawra” was cut from 24 pages to four.

So just looking at newspapers again was a real pleasure for Iraqis. People wanted a place to breathe again; after the Iraq-Iran and Gulf wars and sanctions, they were too exhausted for another war. People in general were ready for political resistance, not armed resistance — although the armed resistance was born in embryo immediately in the aftermath of the invasion. There was a feeling that things might get better.

People started organising political parties, women’s groups, student unions. The started demonstrating, particularly for the US army to leave the schools and colleges they had taken over to use as military bases during the invasion. That was how the Fallujah confrontation began — soldiers opened fire on such a demonstration and 17 people were killed.

Then Paul Bremer’s administration began closing newspapers for “inciting violence” — i.e. for opposing what’s called the political process. The assassinations began of anybody who criticised the occupation. That is why academics were targeted, and journalists. Over 150 journalists have died, including some of our most prominent women journalists.

It seems like there has been a systematic process of silencing the opposition. The Arab satellite stations al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya were closed down. The latest TV station offices in Baghdad to be closed is Al Sharqiya (based in the United Arab Emirates) for criticizing the Iraqi constitution. Only two remaining TV stations actually call the occupation an “occupation”: one is Al Baghdadiya, which broadcasts from Egypt, and one from a lorry that moves around constantly — just like the “weapons of mass destruction” that Iraq was supposed to have!

[For more detail on the Iraqi media, see Dahr Jamail's report here]

Who is targeting journalists and academics? Of course there are gangs. Kidnapping is an easy way to earn money. But this is only a small part of the violence. In the case of the academics and journalists, they are approached in the street, asked for their names, and then executed — in other words, they are targeted for who they are and what they say, not to make money.

So there are very few critical voices left in Iraq. Iraqis refuse to give interviews in Arabic — only to foreign-language media — so they can’t be so easily identified by the militias. There have been cases of people targeted immediately after they have said something on the TV or radio.

Occupation smears the resistance

The consequences for people’s lives are summed up by the fact that only 30% of children started primary school this year. This takes us back to the 1930s. Medical supplies are minimal. Women are losing all their rights — how can they compete with the militias for scarce jobs, for example? We have women members of parliament, they have not been elected but appointed by the sectarian and ethnic parties according to a specific quota. All of them represent their parties’ agenda, they hardly speak to highlight Iraqi women’s plight, most of them are covered in black from head to foot and wear black gloves, something unheard of in Iraqi society before the invasion.

In fact one of them doesn’t even speak, because she believes in Sawt Al Ma’ra A’wra — that a woman’s voice should not be heard in public, it is something to be ashamed of.
The occupation has been based on sectarianism from day one. Iraq became a black hole for corruption. When you shake hands with someone now you say I am a “Shiite” or a “Sunni”, or a “Kurd” — you have to if you want to get a job, official jobs are allocated according to the sectarian divide. And what about the occupation? The occupation is watching from a distance — who will be left standing when the fighting is over, so we can use them?

Whenever there is a successful attack on foreign troops by the resistance, however — and the Brookings Institute says there are 120 every day now — immediately there will be a huge car bomb in the middle of a crowded market in Baghdad. There is a definite sense of the occupation taking revenge — there is a definite connection in people’s minds.

We know from Vietnam and Algeria that this is counter-insurgency — you smear the reputation of the resistance.

The Zarqa massacre in January

Take the Zarqa massacre last week, near Najaf. Out of the blue we found out about a new sect, the Soldiers of Heaven (or Army of Heaven), which had never been heard of before. The US and the British committed a massacre, and they had to justify what happened — there were some 300 dead, including many women and children.

The story became more and more fantastic, like science fiction. These Soldiers of Heaven were supposed to have thousands of members and be heavily armed. Then the officials started claiming they were Saudis, Yemenis, Egyptians and Afghans. It was reported like this in the Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, the International Herald Tribune.

[Here's how the Guardian reported it on its front page on January 29: "Iraqi troops backed by US helicopters and F-16 jets fought one of the fiercest battles since the end of the 2003 war yesterday… Iraqi officials said 250 members of a messianic Islamic group had been killed in a day of fighting..."

On January 30 it again described the confrontation with "mystery fighters", uncritically repeating the official explanation: "US and Iraqi forces had fought hundreds of fighters from an obscure Islamic splinter group suspected of planning attacks … A defence ministry spokesman said: "The victorious Iraqi forces, with US help, have smashed the group of terrorists who were planning to disrupt the holy day of Ashura.'"]

We rang people there and asked what really happened.

There were two tribes on their way to the Ashura festival in Nejaf. Two people were shot at a checkpoint — it happens in today’s Iraq, it’s a usual occurrence. Shooting broke out as people from the tribes retaliated. The Iraqi soldiers at the checkpoint called in US airstrikes. There was a huge massacre.

The Soldiers of Heaven is a tiny sect, a cult. He has no army of thousands. But it turns out its leader is anti-occupation and also asks what is happening to the oil wealth and why it is not going to the Iraqis. [Read alternative accounts of what really happened here, here and here, or informed but sceptical opinion here]

The role of the media

What really bothers me in all this is the elephant in the living room that nobody mentions — the resistance. The media say “insurgents”, “Baathists”, “terrorists” — but not resistance. They are denying our right to resist the occupation.

Sometimes I get angry about it. But they are bound to leave sooner or later.

What happens when the troops leave? Most Iraqis believe strongly that the minute the troops leave it will be alright. It’s like the troops arrived with a virus and they will take it away when they leave. Iraq has no history of civil war. Occupation is an industry. People provide uniforms, services etc. There is the growth of a class of Iraqis who feed on this, and therefore fuel the conflict.

The Independent’s correspondent Patrick Cockburn was one of the few to start talking about the “Sunni-Shia divide”. I didn’t like it. In fact I was shocked. If they want a civil war they’ll have to divide our bedrooms — we are very mixed. Baghdad itself is one-third Kurdish. Ordinary people don’t have the feeling that there is a civil war.

But it’s being encouraged. It’s convenient to have these labels. Read Paul Bremer’s book about the first year of the occupation — he loved reminding people about which sect or ethnicity they “belonged” to.

The source of the conflict isn’t a Sunni-Shia divide. We never had one. Resistance to the Baath was never sectarian. In the 1940s-50s when we fought the British it was never because they were Christian. It’s different from Northern Ireland — there was never any segregation in Iraq.

The majority of the resistance are former officers of the Iraqi army, which points to the possibility of a military regime. Also there are the jihadists, who we never used to have in Iraq, but with the occupation people are despairing and religion is very powerful: there might be an Islamist government.

But there is also political opposition, such as the Iraqi National Foundation Congress (which I support), formed in 2004 as an umbrella organisation of 22 parties and groups. This could become the political face of the resistance.

“Washington, D.C. — In a massive showing of public opposition to the Iraq war, 500,000 people filled the streets around the Capitol today, completely surrounding the building. Participants converged on the National Mall from all over the country to voice their support for an end to the conflict in Iraq.

Three hundred buses rolled in early this morning, coming from more than 40 states and including at least 20 buses filled by New York City trade unions. United For Peace & Justice, the march coordinator, called this one of the the largest and most diverse demonstrations since the war began. According to UFPJ National Coordinator and veteran peace and justice leader Leslie Cagan, “This is a decisive moment in the history of this country and of our peace movement. In November, the people of this=nation voted for peace. We are here today, all ages, from all walks of life, to hold our elected officials to the mandate of the people.”

Add in protests in the rest of the country and it was even bigger.

But is that the picture most of America received? I didn’t see any report Saturday night on the front page of the Sunday NY Times online but, by the morning , the print edition of the Times wrote:

“Tens of thousands of protesters converged on the National Mall on Saturday to oppose President Bush’s plan for a troop increase in Iraq in what organizers hoped would be one of the largest shows of antiwar sentiment in the nation’s capital since the war began.”

The story was carried as headline at the bottom of the page, not exactly prominent positioning. No Photo. A story about tennis got bigger play. The story was actually placed on p 21 (although it said p 22 on page l.) The story itself by Ian Urbina was well done. And the Times had two other reporters on the scene. The picture caption said thousands, not tens of thouands and certainly not a half-million. Low down in the story, it reported a March claim of 400,000 and then an unnamed police source suggesting that there were less than 100,00. Bloomberg News reported 500,000, one of the few media outlets to do so.

This was not the coverage “organizers hoped” for. Actually the organizers said it WAS the largest show of force since the war began with 500,000 present. The Times only acknowledged “tens of thousands.” Does this matter? It doesn’t if the numbers game doesn’t matter. Years, ago the National Park Service which initially always underreported crowd sizes and then began having aerial photos taken that were analyzed by experts using grids, decided not to provide police estimates which were routinely reported. Perhaps that’s why the march did its own count.

Yesterday, the March claimed a half million—which, if true, IS “one of the largest shows of anti-war sentiment” (although I seem to remember the number of 750,000 used to quantify how many showed up in the big pre-war march of 2003). But the papers, seem to have followed the AP’s earlier in the day estimate of “tens of thousands.” True to form, the Washington Post online edition only reported “THOUSANDS.” The Huffington Post headline: “Why The Anti-War March Won’t Change Anything…”

Was this right on Or right off? I wasn’t there this time. My first anti-war march was in l965 so I have burned up my share of shoe or sneaker leather over the years as well as energy cheering some of the same speakers who turned up Saturday. I wasn’t feeling well enough to make the trip this time, but reported on it anyway.

I support marches as PART of a bigger strategy, not as THE strategy. And at least this time, many activists were planning to lobby Congress.

As readers know by now, I think its kind of important to get this message out to the people through the media, and not just the message that there’s opposition to the war but that there’s a movement opposing it. We need to show activism in action as a way for citizens to try to hold politicians accountable and participate in the process. Did that double message get through?

This approach requires a media strategy–and a challenge to the media— beyond sending out press releases and getting on Pacifica radio outlets.

It also requires a commitment to forging a stronger movement by ON GOING organizing and efforts to democratize and INVOLVE member groups and individuals in independent action outside of the Democratic Party. There needs to be some discipline too and a better presentation. Personally I think Dennis Kucinich has a strong message–but he shouldn’t be given time on the program just to hype his campaign. That shows no respect for the movement. We need some independent journalists to really analyze this movement’s strengths and weaknesses, a former peace movement organizer told me. In that sense the numbers issue is not necessarily the only issue even if it does deserve comment. Another criticism I heard was that indy media was not represented with no blogger speaking.

On Saturday morning, the United For Peace and Justice website announced “(Watch live on C-SPAN!) Wow, I thought, you could see the March and Rally LIVE on CSPAN. At l:30, I tuned in just before the march was slated to start, and sure enough several cameras were in the crowd. The only commentary I heard then was that there were “thousands” there. Sounded small. All we saw was a rapper on the stage and people milling around, No interviews. No explanation. I guess I missed it.

Soon, a notice appeared on screen that CSPAN would switch away from the March to cover Hillary Clinton’s first speech in Iowa. And so they did, off to East High School for a stump speech. I expected them to come back while the march was happening. They didn’t. Instead they rebroadcast last Friday’s coverage of a National Review Institute conference on conservatism. Was CSPAN that nervous, that they had to preemptively “balance” the anti-war march?

Instead of the ongoing march, we heard righter than right columnist Michelle Malkin complaining that the media didn’t show the “throngs” at a right to life march, but only a few counter demonstrators. (CNN showed the 15 counter demonstrators and, for balance, had an interview with a conservative critic—but also a song by the raging grannies and a sound bite or two from well-known speakers like Jane Fonda.) It was superficial at best.

CSPAN promised to show it later, but when I tuned in, CSPAN l was running a session from the Memphis Media Conference earlier this month at 9:30 PM. (Later, I received an email saying I was in it so I can’t criticize that, can I?)

I am sure the anti-war rally will be rebroadcast but the format with its endless parade of speakers and torrent of rhetoric is not exactly a media or audience turn on.

My point is that there was no real ‘live” coverage on the main CSPAN channel that I saw in a culture with news channels that can’t wait to go live. (When I worked at ABC, there was a term called SLR for Silly Live Remote referring to someone on freeway overpass “reporting live” on an ordinary rush hour where nothing was happening.) We have a media that will go “live” to the opening of an envelope. Just not to an anti-war march!

Coverage is more than just showing it; it is reporting on it, commenting on it, interviewing people there etc.

I flipped to Fox. If there was coverage I missed it. They were spinning a statement by John Kerry to the effect that world public opinion does not support the US war. This was being presented as “anti-American.” What do you expect from Faux News?

CNN did have a report with a journalist who had been at the march discussing it, saying there were “tens of thousands,” not a half million. He was in the studio, not on the Mall, with an anchor who patronizingly referred to protesters as “the kind of people we’ve seen before.” The march was treated as ho-hummer with the only interest expressed about whether active duty soldiers were marching. The CNN man said he heard about there were but didn’t see them.

It was then time for a standup from the White House lawn with a reporter discussing how the White House would respond to Congressional criticism of the war, as if the marchers didn’t exist. And then there was a replay of a soundbyte from President Bush under a graphic banner that said, can you believe, “THE SOUNDS OF DISSENT.”

AP reported “tens of thousands” not half a million.

Convinced this is their moment, tens of thousands marched Saturday in an anti-war demonstration linking military families, ordinary people and an icon of the Vietnam protest movement in a spirited call to get out of Iraq.

Andrea Hsu of NPR turned tens of thousands into: “Thousands of protesters gathered Saturday on the Mall in Washington, D.C.” Thousands!

NPR reported January 27: “While some citizens have protested against the Iraq war ever since the invasion of March 2003, the movement has failed to mobilize large numbers of people in public spaces. Has that changed now that a majority of Americans oppose the war?”

For some reason, there seemed to be more movie stars speaking than usual. What signal does that send? Of course CNN ran image of Jane Fonda now and in North Vietnam in l973. There was a photo of Sean Penn marching.

Headline in a newspaper in Komo Washington: “Middle America meets celebrity glitter in anti-war march.”

Some outlets, but mostly on the West coast noted that there were protests there too: “WASHINGTON — Anti-war protesters from around the country converged on Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco and other cities today, …”

Don’t the anti-war organizers see this as a problem? Don’t they think they should try to do something about it and take it as a challenge, and protest this ritualistic treatment? Shouldn’t they make the media coverage a issue? Are they only listening to themselves?

I was on Air America in LA on Saturday afternoon and host Bree Walker, a feisty former TV anchor agreed. But the anti-war movement continues to pay lipservice to this problem, perhaps for fear of “alienating” the press. Give me a break! Back in 2003, the Washington Posts own omsbudsman Michael Getler indicted his own newspaper for “downplaying protests.” He now works for Public Television.

This coverage is deplorable but worse: the anti-war movement had not made it an issue. With more than half the country opposing the war, the movement is still being under reported and marginalized! And, naively, not doing anything about it.

We still need a march on the media. Anyone with me?