Helena Cobban on the racist, rightest, radicals dominating Israel's new government:

[Lieberman's] desire for a more starkly Jewish-dominated political system in Israel is linked to the calls he has issued for all citizens to be required to take an oath of loyalty to Israel "as a Jewish state." Back in 2006, he openly called for the execution of any Arab Knesset member who meets with Hamas; and at Yisrael Beiteinu rallies young supporters openly shout "Death to the Arabs" without any party elders intervening to quiet them.

Lieberman has described the "loyalty oath" he calls for as similar to the loyalty oaths that many western countries require of new immigrants when they become citizens. (He himself immigrated to Israel from Moldova at age 20, in 1978.)

Dr. Ahmed Tibi, a Palestinian-Israeli member of the Israeli Knesset who has been a frequent target of Lieberman's wrath, rejects that comparison. "In Europe or America, those oaths are required when new citizens come voluntarily into the state. We never ‘came into' Israel. We were here all along, and the state of Israel came forcibly into our lives... Lieberman himself is the immigrant who now comes in and directs his racism against the indigenous people here." READ MORE

Israel's cruel and arbitrary aid regulations dumbfound US Senator Kerry:

Red-faced and unusually tongue-tied Israeli officials were forced to try and explain to U.S. Senator John Kerry during his visit to Israel last week why truckloads of pasta waiting to enter the besieged Gaza strip were not considered humanitarian aid while rice was.

"Although the situation has improved in comparison to several months ago, the amount of aid allowed in is still too little compared to the pre-blockade scenario," said UNRWA spokesman Sammay Mshasha.

"Furthermore, when the delivery of aid is restricted to an argument of pasta vs rice, then the situation becomes a little ridiculous. No security reasons justify a blockade on pasta," Mshasha told IPS.

"Rebuilding Gaza's infrastructure is vital but the Israelis are not allowing glass in to fix shattered windows. No cement or steel is being permitted in either. We have had construction material waiting in warehouses from 22 months ago, long before the war," added Mshasha.

An estimated 15,000 buildings in Gaza were destroyed during Operation Cast Lead, causing 50,000 Palestinians to flee their homes and seek emergency shelter. Thousands have no home to return to, while thousands of others returned to homes extensively damaged. READ MORE

Imagine how immense a tunnel would have to be to accommodate Israel's vast fire-power, including a whole fleet of F16's -- or the number of tunnels required to transport all of the building supplies used in the construction modern day Israel, a wealthy nation with an average annual income of $17,000.

Ann Wright on the 'prison called Gaza':

How do you rebuild 5,000 homes, businesses and government buildings when the only way supplies come into the prison called Gaza is through tunnels? Will the steel I-beams for roofs bend 90 degrees to go through the tunnels from Egypt? Will the tons of cement, lumber, roofing materials, nails, dry wall and paint be hauled by hand, load after load, 70 feet underground, through a tunnel 500 to 900 feet long and then be pulled up a 70-foot hole and put into a waiting truck in Gaza?

The gates to Gaza slammed shut again on Thursday, February 5, the day our three-person group departed Gaza, having been allowed in for only 48 hours. The Egyptian government closed the border crossing into Gaza, continuing the sixteen-month international blockade and siege. The crossing had been briefly open to allow medical and humanitarian supplies into Gaza following the devastating 22-day attack by the Israeli military. The attacks killed 1,330 Palestinians and injured over 5,500. The Israeli government said the attacks were to punish Hamas and other groups for firing unguided rockets into Israeli, rockets that over the past two years have killed about 25 Israelis. Most international observers have called the Israeli response to the rocket attacks disproportionate and collective punishment, elements of war crimes.

Today, seventeen days after the gates swung closed on Gaza, they remain firmly locked. Cease-fire talks in Cairo between the Israeli government and Hamas are stalled. Opening the border with Egypt is a contentious point in the cease-fire negotiations. READ MORE

-mr

The Golden Rule: those with the gold, rule.

What won't be entering our history books:

Straw Vetoes Iraq Minutes Release:

Justice Secretary Jack Straw has vetoed the publication of minutes of key cabinet meetings held in the run-up to the Iraq war in 2003.

The Information Tribunal ruled last month that they should be published.

They had rejected a government appeal against the Information Commissioner's ruling that the papers be published because decisions taken in the run-up to 2003 invasion of Iraq were "momentous" and controversial. READ MORE

-mr

Helena Cobban lauds Amnesty International's call for an Israeli-Hamas arms embargo.

Huge kudos to Amnesty International for having pulled together a well-researched and intelligent report on the international arms suppliers who were complicit in the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity during the recent Israel-Gaza war, and for concluding it with a forthright call to all there arms suppliers to cease their arms shipments to the belligerents forthwith.

The news release about the report is here, and the PDF of the report's full text is here.

(Astute readers of JWN will recall that one of the first things I called for when the recent Gaza war broke out was a complete embargo on all arms shipments to the warring parties.)

Of course, the lethal and destructive capabilities of the arsenals of the two sides are completely asymmetrical. And regarding the shipments of arms to each sides by outside arms suppliers, we can recall Kathy Kelly's poignant recent speculation regarding the sheer size of the "tunnels" that would be required if all Israel's arms imports had to be brought in in such a way.

The Amnesty report does three things particularly well:

1. It pulls together a lot of details about the size, nature, and provenance of the arms transfers made to each side-- and, too, of the effects some of these transferred arms had on the communities targeted. And while it is careful to do this for both sides, the report makes quite clear the stark disparity between the level and lethality of the arms level on each side. In particular, though the report is careful to list all the suppliers of significant amounts of arms to srael, the figures it provides show that the overwhelming majority of these outside-supplied arms-- $7.9 billion-worth in the four years 2004-2007-- came from the United States. The second place was occupied by France, which provided only $59 million-worth.

2. It provides a very clear explanation (p. 19 of the full report) of the duty all states have under international law to avoid aiding or assisting other states in the commission of unlawful acts. This duty is spelled out in Article 16 of the International Law Commission’s Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts (2001), which states: “A State which aids or assists another State in the commission of an internationally wrongful act by the latter is internationally responsible for doing so if: (a) that State does so with knowledge of the circumstances of the internationally wrongful act; and (b) the act would be internationally wrongful if committed by that State.” After the way the Israelis used their foreign-supplied weapons in and against Lebanon in 2006, surely no state officials elsewhere could thereafter argue that "they did not know" that Israel had a propensity to use such weapons in ways that were grossly disproportionate to the military task at hand and often grossly indiscriminate... Also, in addition to the duties states have under international law, most states-- including the US-- also have their own domestic legislation governing the end use of weapons it supplies to others. In the case of the US, such arms can be used only for defensive purposes.

3. Finally, the Amnesty report is quite clear on the policies it advocates. It calls for the immediate imposition of a "comprehensive UN Security Council arms embargo on Israel, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups until effective mechanisms are in place to ensure that weapons or munitions and other military equipment will not be used to commit serious violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, and the establishment of a " thorough, independent and impartial investigation of violations and abuses of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, including the Israeli attacks which have been directed at civilians or civilian buildings in the Gaza Strip, or which are disproportionate, and Palestinian armed groups’ indiscriminate rocket attacks against civilian centres in southern Israel."

So now, let's see what the AI organization in the US, and the US Campaign to End the Israeli occupation can do with this information and this campaign.

She later notes, and responds to, Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum's criticism of the report as "unbalanced and unfair because it equates the criminal with the victim." READ MORE

-mr

Canada's largest union of public employees boycotting Israel; US aid for Gaza reconstruction

The daily digest from Prof. Juan Cole's Informed Comment:

US To Offer Nearly $1 bn. for Gaza Reconstruction

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will announce at the Gaza donor's conference next week that the US will give $900 million to help rebuild the Gaza Strip. That is about a billion dollars.

It is obvious why Clinton is making this gesture. The United States's name is mud in much of the Muslim world because Washington supported to the hilt Ehud Olmert's brutal assault on the people and civilian infrastructure of the Gaza Strip. Gaza was already a blockaded and abused slum before the war, where 15% of the children were undernourished. Bush urged Olmert on, and Obama has been silent.

So at least the US can spend some money to restore to the Gazans the basic prerequisites for a decent life.

Moreover, the US has increasing competition for influence in the area. The Gulf oil states are planning out the rebuilding of Gaza, and Saudi Arabia and Qatar have already pledged $1.25 billion. Qatar stole thunder in Lebanon last spring when it negotiated a peace deal between Hizbullah and the Lebanese government that brought Hizbullah into the government. The Saudis have been trying to bring Fatah and Hamas together. The US has been irrelevant, because under Bush Washington was just a ventriloquist dummy for the Israeli Rightwing. You can only have leverage as a good faith broker if you aren't completely identified with one side of a dispute.

So people are asking where the US government is going to get a billion dollars to give to the Gazans. That's easy. The US should take it out of the over $3 billion a year it gives to Israel. Israel aggressively launched that war, which it planned out for six months beforehand, even while Olmert was ostensibly indirectly negotiating a truce with Hamas. The war was fruitless and accomplished none of its goals. There is no reason for the US government to be giving the Israelis, who have a per capita income of $17,000 a year, money in the first place. But it certainly makes no sense to reward them for bad behavior, especially given that we are living through the great crash and incipient depression of 2009.

Amnesty International is going further and urging that the UN institute a weapons ban on both Israel and the militant Palestinian factions.



Aljazeera English reports on the psychological damage to Gaza children of the war:



The Gaza War was so clearly an unequal contest that involved total war on Palestinian civilians that Canada's biggest union of public employees has called for a boycott of Israel.

-mr

Students Occupy NYU

NYU has been taken over in Solidarity with Palestine. Students are demanding that NYU become economically democratic and fiscally transparent. No joke. Here is the website www.takebacknyu.com with all the demands and a live camera feed.

Take Back NYU! is a coalition of nearly two dozen groups and hundreds of students at New York University demanding budget disclosure, endowment disclosure, and student representation on the Board of Trustees.

We, the students of Take Back NYU! declare our solidarity with the student [sleepovers] in Greece, Italy, and the United Kingdom, as well as those of the University of Rochester, the New School for Social Research, and with future [sleepovers] to come in the name of democracy and student power. We stand in solidarity with the University of Gaza, and with the people of Palestine.

Some of their demands are of specific interest to Evergreen’s TESC Divest group: 8, 9 & 10:

8. That the first two orders of business of the Socially Responsible Finance committee will be:

• An in depth investigation of all investments in war and genocide profiteers, as well as companies profiting from the occupation of Palestinian territories.
• A reassessment of the recently lifted of the ban on Coca Cola products.

9. That annual scholarships be provided for thirteen Palestinian students, starting with the 2009/2010 academic year. These scholarships will include funding for books, housing, meals and travel expenses.

10. That the university donate all excess supplies and materials in an effort to rebuild the University of Gaza.

Check out their website!

-mr, am

Reporting from Baghdad: Dahr Jamail on Iraq

Scott Horton Interviews Dahr Jamail

February 13th, 2009

Dahr Jamail, author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq, discusses the improved security in Baghdad that comes by way of a semi-police state fortified with concrete blast walls, the millions of Iraqi refugees who claim they will never return, the rising discontent among members of Sunni “Awakening” groups, the incredibly high potential for violence in a politically unstable country with armed militias and 50% unemployment and how the numerous U.S. military bases create facts on the ground that make a speedy withdrawal seem unlikely.

MP3 here. (38:20)

Dahr Jamail is an unembedded journalist in Iraq and author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq and Military Resisters: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. His personal website is dahrjamailiraq.com and archives of his articles can be found at antiwar.com/jamail. (posted by Antiwar.com)

Helena Cobban in Ramallah

Also, Helena Cobban is visiting a number of Middle Easter nations and is currently in the city of Ramallah. Her experiences and brilliantly stated insights convey the every-day challenges Palestinians face living under Israeli control, even in what she refers to as the "Club Fed" of the occupied territories where an imagined sense of normalcy is almost possible:

I've never stayed for very long in Ramallah before. I generally preferred to stay in East Jerusalem and then as necessary traverse the ghastly Qalandia crossing point between there and Ramallah, sometimes staying with friends here in Ramallah for a night or two. But this time I decided to make Ramallah my first stop, and to stay here for a week or so, so I can catch up with everything that's been going on here. It is, after all, three years now since I was last in town.

So yesterday morning, I took a car from Amman down to the Allenby/ King Hussein Bridge. There was almost no-one else seeking to cross-- almost as bad a sign as if it had been jam-packed, I think. The deal is you do your Jordan-exit business first, east of the bridge, then take a Jordanian-provided and mandatory shuttle bus across the trickle of water known as the River Jordan, to the Israeli side. But it took nearly an hour for them to gather enough people (ten or so) to justify sending the bus across. I got a bit impatient. But in the bus I found that a fellow-traveler who's a manager with the (Abu Mazen-controlled) Palestine Investment Fund was also hoping to head up to Ramallah, so we shared a taxi and split the cost of some $120.

Getting in to the West Bank through the Israeli-controlled side was the usual, extremely depressing experience. The Israelis have cadres of young women, presumably doing their national service, whom they use as the "front-line" in many border-control jobs. Many of them love to hang around with each other and with the beefy young guys who also work there, to chat on cell-phones, to stand around admiring each other's make-up and hair-dos, and to really relish the power they have over all these exhausted-looking Palestinian families whom they have to deal with. The main power they have is to harrass and delay, but it's backed up by other much more intrusive or fearsome powers, too.

When our bus with ten people rolled in, there were around 60-70 people in the passport-control waiting area, so some of them may well have been waiting since early morning. Just about all of them looked to be Palestinians, since of course just about every Palestinian family in the West Bank has half or more of its family members now living in Jordan. And guess what, people in these families like to get together!!! But to do so, they have to pass through these border-controls that are totally controlled by the cohorts of bored and faintly malevolent young Israelis. Well, that gives just a first glimpse of what then continues to happen to Palestinians inside the West Bank, any time they want to travel from one town or city there to another, I guess.

... If all the Palestinian communities in the occupied territories can nowadays be described as "open-air prisons"-- and I believe they can-- then Ramallah is probably the "Club Fed", i.e. the top banana, in this extensive system. Provided you don't actually need to go anywhere else, provided you have plenty of money (yes, this Club Fed ain't cheap to live in), and provided you're capable of completely disabling any sense of solidarity or connectedness you might have with family members, friends, or just plain compatriots who happen to live elsewhere, such as Gaza, you could possibly even live a pretty good life here.

Places that most Ramallah people can't ever get to include even Jerusalem, which used to be just 12 minutes away by car along the hilltop road. Ramallah's a historically Christian town, and just about everyone here has family members or close business ties with East Jerusalem. Tough luck. The Wall, with its horrendous-- and oh so evocatively looming-- watch-towers, stands between.

You are reminded nearly everywhere of the tight noose Israel retains around Ramallah. Like the rest of the West Bank, it is literally a captive market for Israeli produce. Many stores are filled with Israeli-produced goods or with other imports that, having come in through Israeli ports and middle-men give them a nice cut of the profits, too. You can get some great Palestinian fresh produce, and a few locally-manufactured products like Taybeh beer, or some Palestinian-processed foods. But even for those Palestinian industries, their scale is small and many or most of their inputs have to brought in from or through Israel.

READ MORE

-mr

A call for aid to Gaza, the stomach-churning reality and significance of the war, boycotts and more . . .

The daily digest from Informed Comment:

The demonstrating crowds have gone home. The blog postings have tapered off. The pundits have moved on. Congress is back to its old tricks, ignoring public opinion in favor of the lobbyists and money men. The US public is worried about losing its job or getting back the one it lost. Gaza here is a dimming memory, a momentary nightmare now past.

But the Palestinian children wounded and charred by Israeli bombings are still screaming, their physicians unable to get hold of enough pain killers to still their yelps of pain. Some 5300 Palestinians, most of them children, women and noncombatants, were wounded in Israel's savage war on the Gaza population.



Please consider donating to UNICEF UK's Gaza children's fund (US UNICEF for Palestinian Children here). In fact, I challenge other bloggers to carry the same appeal for UNICEF, among the best aid groups for this purpose, so that we can see if we can create a cyberspace aid convoy for them.

I suggest that we use this icon:

and put something like "I donated to the Gaza Unicef Convoy and you can too" beneath it above our blogrolls.

Outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has ruled out allowing needed goods into Gaza, which Israel has virtually surrounded from land and sea, until Hamas releases captured Israeli soldier Sgt. Gilad Shalit. Olmert is thereby committing a war crime. You can't collectively punish the general Gaza population if you are the occupying authority. It is not allowed to torture that wailing child in the video above by keeping out painkillers, just because some adult somewhere from the same territory captured an Israeli soldier. But Olmert will get a pass on his war crimes. Apparently you only get punished for them if you are weak or lose; it isn't the crime but the power of the criminal that matters. I heard on LBC satellite news that Hamas replied that they think Shalit was killed by an Israeli bomb during the assault on Gaza. The Israelis and Palestinians are cruel to one another, in their taunts just as in their violence.



The United Nations Security Council again demanded that Israel let in food, medicine and fuel unimpeded. Since Israel is still technically the occupying authority in Gaza, insofar as it controls its borders and airspace, for it to engage in collective punishment on the Gazan population is a war crime forbidden by the 4th Geneva Convention of 1949, which was enacted to prevent Nazi tactics from being deployed against occupied populatoins. UN relief workers, have been impeded from getting into Gaza by Israeli authorities. Those who managed to get through found between 14,000 and 21,000 homes destroyed and 240 of 400 schools badly damaged. The value of the destruction is estimated at $2 billion, and the essential infrastructure of the Strip has been deeply degraded, with potentially severe human health consequences. Much rubble has yet to be cleared away, so there could yet be more dead bodies found, and bomb clearing has not been completed, so people may yet be killed by accidentally setting off unexploded ordnance.

It is often forgotten that about half of Gazans are children, because of the ongoing population explosion, caused by insecurity, which has brought the Strip's population to nearly a million and a half. When Israel made a total war on the Gaza population, it was inevitably targeting large numbers of innocent children.



Susan Taylor Martin of the St. Petersburg Times reports on the bewilderment of Fatah activist as to why the Israelis had blasted his house to smithereens. Fatah and Hamas have poor relations and Fatah has been negotiating peace with Israel.

Peace activists and Muslim groups in the UK are attempting to address the continued Israeli blockade of food and medicine by sending an NGO convoy of trucks to Gaza. They will go down through France and Spain, on ferries across the Straits of Gibraltar to Morocco, and then across North Africa to Egypt and the Sinai, hoping to cross at Rifah.



MP George Galloway is accompanying the convoy part of the way. He told the Independent,

' Anywhere else, there would be a Berlin-style airlift, he says. "Almost every window has been broken but Israel refuses to allow glass across the border. So, in the bitter winter, 61,000 families whose homes have been destroyed are living among the rubble and the rest are freezing because they've got no windows. You could solve that problem in a weekend, but because it is the Palestinians it doesn't happen."
'
The volunteers are taking their own aid. "What we asked people to bring was bedclothes, clothes, nappies, food and medical equipment." Does he really expect to be allowed in? "I do, actually. My prediction is that by the time we arrive in Gaza there will be a 12-month ceasefire." If not, they will wait there until let in.'

Galloway is pilloried by the British establishment as an exhibitionist, but he has a knack for speaking uncomfortable truths eloquently. He points out that given the magnitude of the humanitarian disaster in Gaza, the whole world would be doing an airlift if the victims were not Palestinians. As it is, aid for Gazans has arrived in Jordan from Chile and Pakistan. And the government of Scotland has voted to send substantial civilian aid.

Again, I say we create a cyberspace Gaza convoy via UNICEF.

Some American peace activists are beginning to organize for boycotts of and divestment from Israeli companies.



Boycotters maintain that some Israeli diamond enterprises selling in the US are morally compromised in two ways-- they import diamonds from West Africa (which can be blood diamonds, implicated in violence and human rights abuses), and use profits on selling the cut diamonds to support the illegal colonization by the Zionist far right of the West Bank. (All Israeli colonization of the West Bank is illegal, since it is occupied territory and falls under the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, which forbids the occupier to settle its own people in militarily occupied territory or to substantially alter the lifeways or conditions of the occupied population).

I think organizing an effective For America Peace PAC would be a thousand times more effective in putting pressure on Israel to cease its daily violation of basic Palestinian rights. But I also predict that Israeli Apartheid policies toward the Palestinians will deepen under the new, far-right government now being assembled, and that these policies will increasingly attract economic boycotts from the rest of the world. I think Israel is pretty vulnerable to such boycotts, though I think it will take 20 years for them to build up to the point where they have a practical effect. It is likely the next big thing.

On another cautionary note, the multinational audience in Qatar for the BBC Doha Debates (supported by the Qatar Foundation) voted that the Gaza war demonstrated that Arab unity is dead. The governments of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia deeply dislike Hamas, especially since it decided to play footsie with Iran, and those governments weren't exactly effective in protesting what was done to Gaza.

I don't think the big significance of the Gaza War, however, was political. It changed nothing politically. Netanyahu and the far right were ahead in the Israeli elections. They won. Hamas was in control of Gaza. It still is, and is now more popular in the West Bank and the Arab street, too. What has changed? The rockets still get fired at Israeli towns. Israel still occasionally bombs Gaza.

The big significance was humanitarian. So as to avoid negotiating with Hamas, the Olmert government made total war on Gazans, which is to say, on Palestinian children. They need our cyberspace aid convoy to begin healing and recovering. As things now stand, the Israeli blockade remains in place. Children in hospitals are screaming. (posted by Juan Cole @ 2/16/2009)

-mr

Israel's Crappy Valentine's Day Present

'Israel lets Gaza export Valentine's Day flowers:'

Israel is relaxing its blockade of the Gaza Strip to let through 25,000 carnations headed to Europe for Valentine's Day. But the head of the Gaza flower growers' association said that was "nothing" compared to the 40 million flowers a year that came out of the territory before the blockade.

Democracy Now video: Former Speaker of the Israeli Parliament Avraham Burg: "The Holocaust is Over: We Must Rise From Its Ashes:"

As Israeli leaders continue talks on assembling a coalition, we’re joined now by a former Israeli politician who’s emerged as one of his government’s biggest critics. Avraham Burg is a former Speaker of the Israeli Parliament and former Chairman of the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization. His new book is called “The Holocaust Is Over: We Must Rise From its Ashes.”

Dr. Haidar Eid interrogates the role of the Palestinian intellectual class in resisting Israeli dominion:

The principled critical legacy of the likes of Ghassan Kanafani, Edward Said and Frantz Fanon is no longer the guiding torch of the NGOized left -- the secular democratic left which is supposed to be, as Said would argue, "someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations [or donors], and whose raison d'etre is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug." A fascinating, and timely, remark by Hungarian philosopher George Lukacs points the way that the NGOized left should be talking right now: "When the intellectual's society reaches a historical crossroads in its fight for a clear definition of its identity, the intellectual should be involved in the whole sociopolitical process and leave his ivory tower."

Conn Hallinan explores Gaza as death's personal laboratory, and the gruesome weapons illegally deployed in the latest assault:

Erik Fosse, a Norwegian cardiologist, worked in Gaza hospitals during the recent war. "It was as if they had stepped on a mine," he says of certain Palestinian patients he treated. "But there was no shrapnel in the wound. Some had lost their legs. It looked as though they had been sliced off. I have been to war zones for 30 years, but I have never seen such injuries before."

The famous Iraqi Shabandar Cafe is reopened sans the owner's five sons and wife - testament to Mohammad al-Khashali's resilience and Iraq's longstanding intellectual traditions.

Shabandar Cafe, a landmark on a street famed for its bookshops, has reopened two years after a massive bomb gutted the cultural heartland of Iraq's capital and brought tragedy to the owner's family.

On Iraqi elections: 'Iraq's Teflon Don: The New Fallujah Up Close and Still in Ruins' by Dahr Jamail and Tom Engelhardt.

Driving through Fallujah, once the most rebellious Sunni city in this country, I saw little evidence of any kind of reconstruction underway. At least 70% of that city's structures were destroyed during massive U.S. military assaults in April, and again in November 2004, and more than four years later, in the "new Iraq," the city continues to languish.

Prof. Cole on Iraq:

After attacks on Shiite pilgrims killed 20 on Wednesday, Thursday saw another violent day in Iraq, with bombings in Mosul, a gas cylinder explosion in Karbala and other violence that left 12 dead.

McClatchy discerns a return of the Baath Party in new guises in Iraq, with Salih Mutlak's National Iraqi Project, which did well among Sunni Arab voters in the recent provincial elections, as exhibit A.

Dahr Jamail reports from Fallujah at Tomdispatch.com and finds that it is still in ruins and that the American-funded Awakening Councils were more about security for US troops in al-Anbar than about reconstruction of the war-torn province.

Iranian Foreign Minister Manochehr Mottaki was in Baghdad Thursday to initial a trade agreement that set a target of $5 billion annually between Iran and Iraq. Three Iranian consulates were also opened in the Iraqi cities of Arbil, Karbala and Sulaimaniya.

Mottaki said that there was no longer any reason for Iran and the US to hold bilateral talks on Iraq suecrity, given the stability and relative security in the Shiite South of Iraq where Iran has influence.

Maj. Gen. Michael Oates, who is in charge of US troops in the Shiite south of Iraq, said Thursday that in his view the security gains there were permanent. He cited the decline of Shiite radical groups (read: the Mahdi Army) and "al-Qaeda" (though Sunni fundamentalist guerrillas did not operate much in the Shiite South in recent times). USA Today says that the situation there is so calm now that some US troops wonder why they are still being deployed to the region. Still, there are two attacks on US GIs every day. (I suspect that a lot of the decline in such attacks derives from the Status of Forces Agreement concluded by the al-Maliki government with the US, which stipulates all US troops out of Iraq by the end fo 2011. Shiite militias that have as a main goal the end of what they see as the US occupation no longer have a reason to fight. If the US reneges and overstays its welcome, however, that violence could come back big time.

Basra in particular has the potential to emerge as an advanced Persian Gulf port, as the British troops leave.

The US kept blaming Iran for attacks and poor security in the Shiite south. Would not we have to conclude, if we accepted that premise, that the new and better security situation of today is owing to Iranian efforts, too?

In any case, the agreement between Mottaki and Oates is remarkable, and perhaps another subtext to Mottaki's comments is that the scheduled US military departure is another element making it unnecessary for the two sides to talk about Iraq. (The Iraqis in any case always found it humiliating to have the US and Iran conduct bilateral discussions of Iraq, as though the two could make decisions that interfered in Iraq's national sovereignty.

The minister of women's affairs in the al-Maliki government, Nawal Samarra'i, resigned last week because her ministry was receiving almost no money from the government and she did not feel she could run it properly on those paltry resources. This is a little reminder that the new Iraqi government is dominated by Shiite fundamentalist parties uninterested in liberating Iraqi women.

-mr

Hampshire College becomes first college in U.S. to divest from Israeli Occupation! Students for a Just Peace-"The six corporations, all of which provide the Israeli military with equipment and services in the Occupied West Bank and Gaza are: Caterpillar, United Technologies, General Electric, ITT Corporation, Motorola, and Terex .. Furthermore, our policy prevents the reinvestment in any company involved in the illegal occupation. " READ MORE Democracy Now: The Board of Trustees at Hampshire College has agreed to divest from six companies because of their involvement in the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Hampshire is believed to be the first US college or university to divest from companies tied to the Israeli military. The companies are Caterpillar, United Technologies, General Electric, ITT Corporation, Motorola and Terex. The board agreed to the divestment following a two-year campaign by the campus group Students for Justice in Palestine. Thirty-two years ago, Hampshire College became the first school to divest from apartheid South Africa. READ MORE -mr

Israeli Election Results

Latest from Informed Comment on the Israeli elections:

Right Wing Sweeps Israel;
Racialist Avigdor Lieberman Kingmaker
Two State Solution Dead, Challenge to Obama

The outcome of the Israeli election has sounded the death knell for the two-state solution. There are not 61 votes for it in the new Knesset of 120 seats. A good 64 of the just-elected and/or re-elected Members of Parliament favor accelerated Israeli colonization of the West Bank and oppose Palestinian statehood. Most militant of all is Avigdor Lieberman, a former bouncer from Moldova who has risen in Israeli politics on a platform of racial hatred for Israeli-Palestinians (20% of the population), whom he has urged be "executed" or made to take loyalty oaths, stripped of their citizenship and possibly transferred to the Palestine Authority.

With Lieberman emerging as kingmaker in the new government, logically speaking, there are only three other plausible future relationships of Israel and the Palestinians:

1. Apartheid, with Israeli citizens dominating stateless Palestinians and controlling their borders, land, water and air. Apartheid would be accelerated under Lieberman's baleful influence. Over time, this outcome would break down, since it will be unacceptable to the rest of the world over the coming decades).

2. Expulsion. The Israelis could try to violently expel the Palestinians (and possibly Israeli-Palestinians as well), creating a massive new wave of refugees in Jordan or Egypt's Sinai. (This option would almost certainly end the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan and might well push the Arab states into the arms of Iran, creating a powerful anti-Israel military coalition and a huge set of threats to the United States.)

3. One State. The Israelis could be forced over time, by economic and technological boycotts, to grant citizenship to the Palestinians of the occupied territories.

Some Neoconservatives have proposed that Jordan could take back part of the West Bank and Egypt could take back the Gaza Strip. However, the Jordanian and Egyptian regimes will absolutely not do so, leading back to option (2) above. Jordan's government is based on the East Bank, Bedouin-origin population and has anxieties about the 60 percent of the population that is already of Palestinian origin. Egypt's relatively secular elites are afraid of Muslim radicalism and would not want to have Hamas become part of Egypt. Both Egypt and Jordan bought into the Arab League position that the PLO is the only legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and they cannot go against this principle without enormous trouble, even from their own populations, who engaged in huge protests during the recent Gaza war against these governments continuing to have diplomatic relations with Israel.

Since President Obama sent out George Mitchell to attempt to kickstart the peace process and get back on track to a two-state solution, both have now had the rug pulled out from under tham by an Israeli public moving to the far right.

Despite the vote tallies being in, it still is not clear who will form the next government in Israel.

Estimates of the seats won by leading parties in the Israeli elections pointed to a huge shift rightward.

Kadima: 28
Likud: 27
Beitenu: 15
Labor: 13
Arabs 9

According to AFP N. America service, Kadima leader Tzipi Livni said, "Today the people have chosen Kadima . . ." She called on Binyamin Netanyahu of the Likud Party to join in a government of national unity (with herself as prime minister). It may be sort of like when Hillary Clinton offered Obama vice president.

Livni's problem is that if she tries for a right-of-center coalition with the left, she can only get 47 seats. The 9 Arab representatives would not formally join her coalition and now hate her because she was among the leaders of the great Gaza Massacre.

Last week, the Arab Members of the Knesset (parliament) let her have it:

' Livni will not be able to count on the support of the three Arab factions, whose MKs are still upset at her for her role in Operation Cast Lead and for saying in December that in the event of the formation of a Palestinian state, the national aspirations of Israeli Arabs "lie elsewhere."

"What Livni said about us is worse than Lieberman," United Arab List-Ta'al MK Ahmed Tibi said on Saturday night. "That's why we won't recommend to Peres that Livni form a government."

Hadash chairman Muhammad Barakeh said that "Tzipi Livni is not an option for us and neither is Barak or Netanyahu. I don't see us recommending someone who supported the war."

Kadima officials responded that such speculation did not matter, because the factions would reconsider their views if Livni won the election. '

But Kadima leaders may hope that the Arabs will vote with them because they have no place else togo. (Israel is 20% Arab, which should yield 24 seats in the Knesset, but only 9 were apparently elected, down from 12. Attempts were made to disqualify some Arab parties from running, but the Supreme Court struck them down)

Even if the Arabs changed their minds and tacitly supported Livni, that still only gets her, de facto, to 56. But she would need at least 61 to form a government and govern, meaning she'd have to attract at least one small rightwing party into her coalition. But that party would then have a veto because its defection would cause the government to fall. Livni said, at least, that she wanted to stop the Israeli settlement of the West Bank and even move some of the more exposed settlers back to Israel, by force if necessary. None of the small rightwing parties that might join her government and get her over 61 would accept this platform.

CBS explains Livni's difficulties going forward.

(Juan Cole @ 2/11/2009)

-mr

Gaza Justice Action Center

You're just one click away from telling Congress to lift the Gaza siege and support UNRWA . . .

CLICK HERE TO TELL CONGRESS TO END THE SIEGE AND TO SUPPORT UNRWA

Farhana writes:

While the world's attention is on the Economic Stimulus debate, Israel continues to dominate and starve the people of Gaza.

The right-wing pro-Israel Lobby is applying all pressure on congress to tighten the Gaza blockade. AIPAC and their friends are working overtime to make sure the Gaza border continue to be closed.

They've gone as far as introducing a new house resolution that attacks the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) alleging it supports terrorists. Introduced last week and referred to the U.S. Congress House Foreign Affairs Committee, H. Con. Res. 29 states in part:

[Whereas schools administered by UNRWA have reported to have produced several graduates that have gone on to careers affiliated with terrorism, including Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, and Abd al-Azis Rantisi, the former Hamas chief;

Whereas United States taxpayer dollars should never be used for purposes of supporting terrorist cells or activities that support terror or promote a culture of hatred at any of its locations: ] READ THE FULL TEXT HERE

What twisted logic. How can UNRWA possibly know what their students will grow up to be? Instead of pumping more money into educating and feeding Palestinians, some in Congress would rather cut off all humanitarian aid starving young children so they don't grow-up to be terrorists. That's not a solution.

Thank you again, please spread the word to all your friends.

(thanks Janae)

-mr

LET'S HAVE A DEBATE!

SESAME is proposing a formal debate on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and is searching for student or faculty debaters ready and willing to represent the Israeli point of view.

We believe that vigorous and interactive discussion deepens the quality of discourse on campus and is essential in fulfilling the ideals of a democratic republic. A formal debate is a healthy place to express honest disagreements and challenge individual and collective assumptions.

We have yet to finalize any format or the parameters of the topic - so we are soliciting any and all suggestions!

We have already volunteered the idea at a recent Zionist meeting and were declined.

If you have strong and clear opinions on what we view as the Israeli occupation of historic Palestine, please contact us ASAP. We need your help in elevating the public discourse!

If you’re interested please contact Michelle @ SESAME or respond on tesccrier:

Phone: (360)867-6724
Email: sesame@evergreen.edu

-mr

Understanding Iraq's Elections

The latest polling results reveal a sharp drop in Baghdad's Sunni population indicating the triumph of years of ethnic cleansing in the capital's Sunni and mixed neighborhoods. This militia-led slaughter was decisive in lowering the catastrophic levels of violence plaguing Iraq in 2006, working in tandem with Bush's so-called surge. Prof. Cole described this devastating dialectic in summer '08:

"As best I can piece it together, what actually seems to have happened was that the escalation troops began by disarming the Sunni Arabs in Baghdad. Once these Sunnis were left helpless, the Shiite militias came in at night and ethnically cleansed them. Shaab district near Adhamiya had been a mixed neighborhood. It ended up with almost no Sunnis. Baghdad in the course of 2007 went from 65% Shiite to at least 75% Shiite and maybe more. My thesis would be that the US inadvertently allowed the chasing of hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arabs out of Baghdad (and many of them had to go all the way to Syria for refuge). Rates of violence declined once the ethnic cleansing was far advanced, just because there were fewer mixed neighborhoods. Newsrack was among the first to make this argument, though I was tracking the ethnic cleansing at my blog throughout 2007."

Few Sunnis still reside in Baghdad, a once vibrant metropolitan center hosting a commingling of faiths and ethnicities. Majority Sunni or mixed enclaves in the capital have since been refashioned into exclusively Shiite neighborhoods. Many of Iraq's four million internally and externally displaced peoples fled this sectarian bloodshed and even if they felt secure enough to return they would have little to return to. Their former homes have been re-occupied, and the current Baghdadi balance of power guarantees that the days of mixed neighborhoods are long gone for now.

Lasted on Iraq's provincial elections from Informed Comment:

Religious Parties Sweep Shiite South; Sunni Arabs fragmented, mainly Secular.

The Iraqi provincial election results are out. They confirm what I said last Monday, that the parties who want a strong, united Iraq have come to the fore in these elections. Although Nuri al-Maliki's Da'wa Party got over a third of the votes in Baghdad and Basra, they clearly did not achieve a commanding position, and its share in the more rural Shiite provinces was signifcantly less..

The big story here is that the Shiite religious parties (and yes, the Da'wa or Islamic Mission Party is among them) again swept the Shiite south. However, those Shiite parties that won out this time want a strong central government, not a Shiite mini-state.

There is nothing here to give comfort to those Americans who fear Iranian influence in Iraq. The Islamic Mission Party or Da'wa is just as committed to warm relations with Tehran as is the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. The Da'wa leaders were in exile in Tehran for years just like ISCI. Da'wa is more "lay" and less clerical than ISCI, but being "lay" means non-clerical, not secular. Da'wa wants an Islamic State.

These election results raise severe questions about the viability of the Biden plan, which foresaw three decentralized super-provinces overseen by a weak central government. Most of the victors in this election are strong believers in a centralized civil bureaucracy.

On the whole, I think these results are encouraging for Obama. The Sunni Arab ex-Baathist secular elites have reentered polities in the Sunni Arab areas. These election results put paid to the fantasies of Dick Cheney and John McCain that Sunni Arab Iraqis are pro-"al-Qaeda." Most of them would not even vote for a religious party, much less for a radical fundamentalist terrorist group. Cheney said that if the US left, al-Qaeda would take over Sunni Arab Iraq. That is highly unlikely given these election results.

Iraq voted as several distinct demographic zones.

In the two provinces with very large Shiite cities, the Islamic Mission Party (Da'wa) of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki took over a third of the vote. Another 15-20% of the vote went to Shiite fundamentalist parties such as the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq or the Sadrists. Contrary to what a lot of observers are saying, the Da'wa Party is not secular and it is not anti-Iran. It is Iraq's oldest Shiite fundamentalist party, founded in the late 1950s, and it explicitly works for an Islamic republic. Its leaders consult with and tend to defer to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Since these parties will have to make post-election coalitions to rule, given that none gained a majority, the resulting provincial governments will resemble those formed by the United Iraqi Alliance, which grouped as allies these same Shiite religious parties. The major difference in this election in the big urban areas is that in Baghdad, the Shiite middle class gave the Iraqi List of Iyad Allawi nearly 10% of the vote, and the Sunni fundamentalists got a similar percentage. Of course, some Sunnis may have voted for Allawi's Iraqi List. But the election returns suggest that Sunnis are no no more than ten to fifteen percent of the Baghdad population, and that Iraq's capital is now a largely Shiite city. In Basra province, the Sunni proportion seems even smaller, tiny, even. This is odd because Zubayr near Baghdad is a largely Sunni city of 300,000. The Basra middle classes, once fairly secular, returned the big religious parties overwhelmingly.

The second zone is the medium and smaller Shiite cities of the south. There, Da'wa did not do nearly as well, receiving between ten and twenty-three percent of the vote. The other 90 to 77 percent of the seats went to other fundamentalist Shiite parties in the main. The Sadrists showed substantial strength in some provinces, garnering 14% and 15% of the vote. Although the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq suffered a massive reversal, insofar as it had dominated the provinces of the south from 2005, it still often ranged from 8% to 15% of the seats in these provincial councils. Other small Shiite parties, including former PM Ibrahim Jaafari's National Reform Trend and the Islamic Virtue Party, both small Shiite fundamentalist parties, often got between three and eight percent of the vote.

The final zone is the four Sunni Arab provinces, which did not vote similarly to one another.

The ethnically mixed Diyala Province in the east split its vote, with about a quarter going to secular parties with a Baathist background; about a fifth going to the Sunni fundamentalist bloc; a fourth going to the Kurdistan alliance, and about 15 percent going to Shiite fundamentalist parties.

In al-Anbar, the secular and tribal parties won big, with the religious parties marginalized (15% of the vote).

In Ninevah, a big, secular, centralizing party, al-Hadba', got nearly 50% of the seats, sweeping away the Kurdish representatives that were once prominent on this provincial council.

Salahuddin returned so many small parties that seeing a trend thare is beyond me. The over all picture of the Sunni Arabs is that contrary to the last administration in Washington, the Sunni Arabs of Iraq are mostly secular nationalists and are uninterested for the most part in fundamentalists or "al-Qaeda."

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the Iraqi High Electoral Commission announced 90 percent of the results in the provincial elections held Jan. 31. More results are given in Arabic in this al-Hayat article. The New York Times has a fairly complete list of results in English. (Juan Cole @ 2/05/2009 )

-mr

Obama's Hopelessly Lopsided Humanity

"Obama: What if this happened to your girls?"

Posted by Helena Cobban
February 4, 2009 4:33 PM EST | Link
Filed in Gaza08-09 , Obama presidency

When he was on the campaign trail, Pres. Obama gave Israel nearly "carte blanche" to act as it wanted against Gaza by saying-- in southern Israel-- that if his daughters were threatened by rocket attack in the same way that kids in southern Israel were, then he couldn't imagine what he would do in response.

So I hope he reads this piece by Ethan Bronner and Sabrina Tavernise in the NYT today, about what happened to Sabah Abu Halima's family in Atatra, Gaza during the recent war:

The phosphorus smoke bomb punched through the roof in exactly the spot where much of the family had taken refuge — the upstairs hall away from the windows.

The bomb, which international weapons experts identified as phosphorus by its fragments, was intended to mask troop movements outside. Instead it breathed its storm of fire and smoke into Sabah Abu Halima’s hallway, releasing flaming chemicals that clung to her husband, baby girl and three other small children, burning them to death.

But that's not all. Later on,

Omar Abu Halima and his two teenage cousins tried to take the burned body of his baby sister and two other living but badly burned girls to the hospital on that Sunday.

The boys were taking the girls and six others on a tractor, when, according to several accounts from villagers, Israeli soldiers told them to stop. According to their accounts, they got down, put their hands up, and suddenly rounds were fired, killing two teenage boys: Matar Abu Halima, 18, and Muhamed Hekmet, 17.

An Israeli military spokeswoman said that soldiers had reported that the two were armed and firing. Villagers strongly deny that. The tractor that villagers say was carrying the group is riddled with 36 bullet holes.

The villagers were forced to abandon the bodies of the teenage boys and the baby, and when rescue workers arrived 11 days later, the baby’s body had been eaten by dogs, her legs two white bones, captured in a gruesome image on a relative’s cellphone. The badly burned girls and others on the tractor had fled to safety.

Matar’s mother, Nabila Abu Halima, said she had been shot through the arm when she tried to move toward her son. Her left arm bears a round scar. Her son came back to her in pieces, his body crushed under tank treads.

Bronner and Tavernise's piece is tragic. (Though the NYT gave it an inappropriate headline, I think.)

It's also notable because they make a point of noting how many Palestinians were killed by Israel's security forces in the 39 months between the IDF's supposed withdrawal from Gaza in September 2005, and the outbreak of the hostilities last December: about 1,275.

Israeli hasbaristas have argued throughout this time that the siege the Israeli government has maintained around Gaza has been the main (or sometimes, the only) Israeli "response" to the rockets launched against Hamas and other militants in Gaza over this time. I have always argued that this was never a simple situation of "rockets versus siege" but that during this period, in addition to the siege, the Israelis maintained very lethal military ops against Gaza, as well.

Also, few if any of Israel's actions against Gaza have been undertaken solely "in response to" Palestinian rocketings. There has always been a cycle of violence; and very frequently (including, most notably, last December 27) Israel has been the one to initiate a new round or significantly escalate an existing round. The number of Israelis killed by the Gazans' for the most part extremely primitive, home-made bottle rockets has been very low. Certainly, far fewer than 100 killed over that same time. (Though Bronner and Tavernise somehow omit to mention the number. I believe it's available at B'tselem's site.)

But anyway, main point of post: Pres. Obama, what would you do if your family members got treated the same way Sabah Abu Halima's family got treated? I am assuming, of course, that you and everyone else agrees that a Palestinian life is every bit as valuable as an Israeli life...

(Helena Cobban - JUST WORLD NEWS )

-mr

White-Lies Israeli Style

Gazans Seek Answers on White Phosphorus:

Gaza City, Gaza - When Nafiz Abu Shabam received a 5-year-old patient at the Shifa Hospital early in the war between Israel and Hamas, he dressed her burns and sent her for tests. Three hours later, when he and other medical staff redressed the wound, they saw smoke coming from it.

"We found small pieces of foreign material in her body, and even when we picked it out, the wound was still smoking," he says. "We were later told [by foreign doctors and human rights workers who arrived after the war started] that it was white phosphorus."

As white phosphorus is highly incendiary, can reignite when exposed to oxygen, and causes painful chemical burns, it is not intended – or legal under international law – for use in civilian areas.

Israel initially denied that white phosphorus munitions were used in its 22-day war with Hamas. It now says, "there was no illegal use of phosphorus or any other material," according to the spokesman for Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Amid the allegations that white phosphorus shells were used in populated areas, Israel announced an investigation. READ MORE

-mr

Iraq's Elections

I have scanned several major mainstream news sources and they all fail to mention that al-Maliki's Da'wa party, which won most of the provinces in last week's local election, is a religious Shiite party. The Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and candidates backed by Muqtada as-Sadr are regularly branded as 'Shiite,' but never Da'wa. This is a deliberate omission to paint the most recent Iraqi elections as a victory for the 'secular West' and a defeat for the 'fundamentalist East.' It is as insincere in its intentions as the narrow worldview inspiring such fabrications in the first place. Prof. Juan Cole clarifies:

Iran did not Lose the Provincial Elections

It is being alleged by US pundits that the outcome of the provincial elections in Iraq, as far as it is known, indicates a defeat for the religious parties and for Iran.

This allegation is not true. In the Shiite provinces, the coalition of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and the Islamic Mission Party (Da'wa) will continue to rule. Both parties are close to Tehran, and leaders of both spent time in exile in Iran. Da'wa appears to have become more popular than ISCI. But Da'wa was founded in the late 1950s to work for an Islamic republic in Iraq, and current leader Nuri al-Maliki has excellent relations with the Iranian leadership.

Da'wa is more "lay" in the composition of its leadership, which is made up of lawyers, physicians and other white collar types. ISCI has more clerics at the top, though it also comprises technocrats such as VP Adil Abdul Mahdi. But Da'wa will need Iranian economic and development aid just as much as previous governments did.

In the Sunni provinces there appears to have been a turn to more secular parties, but neither the Sunni fundamentalists nor the Arab nationalists have much use for Iran to begin with.

The Kurdish leadership is also quite close to Iran. They will have elections in May.

Juan Cole @ 2/05/2009

-mr

Robert Fisk asks us when we stopped caring about civilians deaths in wartime.

McClatchy reports on Iraq's meager voter turnout:

Voter turnout in Iraq's provincial elections Saturday was the lowest in the nation's short history as a new democracy despite a relative calm across the nation. Only about 7.5 million of more than 14 million registered voters went to the polls.

Interviews suggest that the low voter turnout also is an indication of Iraqi disenchantment with a democracy that, so far, has brought them very little.

Since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 and the fall of a brutal dictator, Iraqis witnessed unprecedented violence in their nation and what they believe is humiliation under a foreign occupation. Even on Saturday, U.S. tanks could be spotted across Baghdad on largely empty roads. READ MORE

Prof. Cole offers some insight on the election:

There was a lockdown of the whole country, in which US troops assisted, with no private automobiles allowed to run. Given this datum, the breathless newspaper headlines that the elections came off without any major attacks are reporting a given. Guerrillas can't detonate a car bomb if they can't drive a car to their target.

Glitches prevented thousands of voters from casting their ballots McClatchy says, causing big demonstrations and protest rallies to be held. The Iraqi government electoral high commission said that the main problem was that some Iraqis had not registered and then just showed up expecting to be able to vote anyway. There were widespread reports of vote-buying.

American corporate media will report the Iraqi provincial elections as a vindication of the 2003 US invasion of that country, and as a sign that Iraqis are eager to be like Americans. In places like Sadr City, the teeming slums of East Baghdad, many Iraqis voted as a protest against continued US military presence. Likewise, Sunni fundamentalists saw the vote as an assertion of Iraqi sovereignty. The elections come in the wake of the Status of Forces Agreement that pledges all US troops will be out of the country by 2011, and in the wake of the election of Barack Obama in the US, who has committed to having most US troops out in 16 months. The sharp fall in deaths of civilians and security personnel in January, to 189, is not a sign that Bush won but rather that the Iraqis have. No point in blowing things up if the US is leaving anyway, and less reason to resist the new federal Iraqi government if Sunni Arab elites can rule their own provinces.

It is not the US presence in Iraq that Iraqis are celebrating in this election but Washington's imminent departure.

The USG Open Source center translated the sermon Fiday of Muzaffar al-Musawi, Friday prayer leader in Sadr City is observed to carry a report on a Friday sermon Shaykh Muzaffar al-Musawi delivered in the City of Al-Sadr:

' In his sermon, Al-Musawi urges citizens to participate in the elections "intensively so that others will not fill the voting forms." He denounces those whom he termed the "climbers of the ladder of Al Al-Sadr." He says: "We call on the sons of the City of Al-Sadr to vote lest others fill the forms or rig the elections. The one who does not participate in the elections will be betraying Martyr Al-Sadr and Muqtada al-Sadr."

He adds: "Some politicians and parties speak in the name of the two religious authorities, Sayyid Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr and Sayyid Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, may God sanctify their secret. We tell them that we, the sons of the two Al-Sadrs suffered from the torture and evil of Saddam. Beware, do not let anyone to climb the ladder of Al Al-Sadr."

Al-Musawi says: "Our bloc is the Independent Free Men Trend bloc, for which the Al-Sadr Trend announced its support a week ago."

Al-Musawi adds: "We have seen humiliation and deprivation from the authority and the occupier. What the occupier did was more heinous than what Saddam did."

Concluding, Al-Musawi says: "Elect the Independent Free Men Trend list so that your suffering will end. Make them hear your voice tomorrow. Say yes, yes to the Free Men List in order to prove to them that we are still present in the arena, the street, and Iraq."

-mr