According to the Jewish Agency, Anti-American demonstrators attacked and wounded two young boys Saturday. The boys were participating in an educational activity of the Hashomer Hatsa'ir youth movement, taking place nearby.The Jewish Agency called on the French government "to assume its responsibility for the security of its Jewish citizens, and to prevent violence against Jews or anti-Semitic acts under the guise of pacifist protest".
American special forces were reported to be in Baghdad as thousands of elite troops still loyal to Saddam Hussein prepared for a final bloody showdown in the Iraqi capital.The prospect of coalition forces fighting street by street for control of the city emerged after thousands of Saddam's troops withdrew to the city following a day of sweeping advances by US and British soldiers pushing north from Kuwait. [...]
Earlier American Brigadier-General Vincent Brooks said the US military had entered the capital, and Pentagon sources told The Observer that intelligence paramilitary forces were also inside the city.
The sources said the role of the special forces was to 'help locate targets and monitor defence preparations'. However, they refused to comment on whether the infiltrators planned assassinations or direct engagement with the Iraqi forces.
The infiltration dovetails with US concerns that Saddam is preparing what they call the 'Stalingrad Factor' to defend the capital, seeking to establish an iron ring of defences, possibly involving the deployment of chemical and biological weapons.
The sources said the paramilitary forces were from the CIA, and 'may be' involved in talks between the US, represented by Iraqi dissidents and Kurdish leaders, and Saddam's Republican Guard.
US State Department sources said contacts had 'intensified' in the past 24 hours 'with regard to mass surrenders and surrenders higher up the chain of command'. [...]
In an attempt to put a quick end to the war, the US has been negotiating with Iraqi military commanders using third-country intelligence connections, Iraqi defectors and even straightforward telephone appeals from American officers, according to US and Iraqi opposition officials.
The aim is to persuade the Iraqi military to stage a coup against Saddam or surrender en masse. 'We're trying to get the message across that it's time to give up,' said a State Department official. Across the southern portion of the country, Iraqi army regulars were surrendering to anyone they could find in a military uniform; some even tried to surrender to reporters.
US intelligence officials said there was now a high volume of back-channel communications with officials inside Iraq. American military officers were trying, often by telephone, to coax their Iraqi counterparts into surrendering.
MORE:
Aerial Pounding Intended to Push Iraq's Government TowardBrink: The airstrikes the U.S. military carried out were intended to destroy Saddam Hussein's ability to control his forces. (MICHAEL R. GORDON, 3/22/03, NY Times)
An American Muslim soldier is understood to have carried out a grenade attack on a US military camp, injuring16 soldiers.A second man, who is not a soldier, is thought to be held....
[Sky correspondent Stuart] Ramsay watched as the suspects were held....
"Two men are being held, one of which is a Muslim soldier who is an engineer," Ramsay said.
"It appears he was hiding in a barrack where the attacks happened. A second man, who we believe is not an American soldier, is being held by the military."...
He said fears about the Muslim soldier's behaviour had been raised in recent days by colleagues.
"In recent days they were concerned about his behaviour and were not going to send him up to the front when the soldiers were going to be deployed."
FOR EXAMPLE:
U.S. Soldier Held for Another's Death in Grenade AttackRick Atkinson, , March 23, 2003, Washington Post)
One soldier from the 101st Airborne Division was killed and 13 were wounded this morning when two hand grenades were thrown into the 1st Brigade technical operations center at Camp Pennsylvania in central Kuwait, U.S. Army officials said.A U.S. soldier assigned to the brigade was in custody, the officials said. The soldier who was killed was not idenfitied.
Army sources said that soldiers from the 1st Brigade had loaded their vehicles and were preparing to move from Camp Pennsylvania when the grenades exploded at about 1:21 a.m. local time in the operations center, which is in a closely confined tent and usually manned by a couple dozen staff officers.
A soldier guarding a convoy of engineer vehicles was found to be missing, as were four grenades from the convoy's ammunition supply.
Roughly an hour after the grenade attack, a missile alert sounded and the missing soldier was discovered in a protective bunker. The soldier was arrested and was in the custody of the military police at Camp Pennsylvania.
if it is the case that we can rid peoples of such [evil] regimes and manifestly improve their lives, even save their lives, with such minimal impact, has the moral obligation now clearly shifted . . . to one where we must embrace war because of the suffering and death it so clearly relieves? . . . Isn't the hard question that confronts us all today, but the peace party in particular, whether we behaved decently and responsibly towards fellow human beings when we left the Iraqis to Saddam's mercies in 1991? . . . May we not be in the midst of an unusual and as yet unrecognized epoch in our affairs where war is not the worst but the best option available to us and to captive peoples? Which do we place a higher value on, as a society, our peace or human freedom? And can we love our society if we choose the former?OJ is making three implicit claims:
Why is this pro-war demonstrator dressed up like General Custer? I suppose it could be said that Americans won that battle, but General Custer surely lost. Next thing you know, people will dress as Benedict Arnold.
I recall many times during the 20 years that I knew Yasser Arafat well, trying to explain to him that [America] was a complex society with all sorts of currents, interests, pressures, and histories in conflict within it and that far from being ruled the way Syria was, for instance, a different model of power and authority ought to be studied. I enlisted my late friend, the scholar and political activist, Eqbal Ahmed ... but all to no avail.
Most people throw up their hands in despair like disappointed lovers: America is hopeless, and I don't ever want to go back there, they often say, though one also notices that green, permanent residence cards are much in demand, as are university admissions for the children.
The difference between America and the classic empires of the past is that ... this one [operates] with an astonishing affirmation of its nearly sancrosanct altruism and well-meaning innocence....America is the world's most avowedly religious country. References to God permeate the national life, from coins to buildings to common forms of speech: in God we trust, God's country, God bless America, and on and on. George Bush's power base is made up of the 60-70 million fundamentalist Christians who, like him, believe they have seen Jesus and are here to do God's work in God's country....
All of those things converge around an idea of American rightness, goodness, freedom, economic promise, social advancement that is so ideologically woven into the fabric of daily life that it doesn't even appear to be ideological, but rather a fact of nature. America=good=total loyalty and love. Similarly there is an unconditional reverence for the Founding Fathers, and for the Constitution, an amazing document, it is true, but a human one nevertheless. Early America is the anchor of American authenticity. In no country that I know does a waving flag play so central an iconographical role.
[T]he consensus operates in a sort of timeless present. History is anathema to it, and in accepted public discourse even the word 'history' is a synonym for nothingness or non-entity, as in the scornful, typically dismissive American phrase, 'you're history.' Otherwise history is what as Americans we are supposed to believe about America (not about the rest of the world, which is 'old' and generally left behind, hence irrelevant) uncritically, loyally, unhistorically.
America, by contrast, has an essentially Christian spirit which emphasizes forgiveness. "Forgive us our trespasses, Lord, as we forgive those who trespass against us" -- this is our daily prayer. In the Christian vision, relationships are continually renewed in the present, constantly rededicated to love and affection. "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord" -- we are to renounce all grudges. We let old offenses slip into history, and we are rightfully scornful of those who do not. It is, to us, weakness in the Arabs that they clutch their history tightly, and never let it go.
America [is] embroiled in a serious clash of identities whose counterparts are visible as similar contests throughout the rest of the world. America may have won the Cold War, as the popular phrase has it, but the actual results of that victory within America are very far from clear, the struggle not yet over.
Cultures, specially America's, which is in effect an immigrant culture, overlap with others, and one of the perhaps unintended consequences of globalisation is the appearance of transnational communities of global interests, as in the human rights movement, the women's movement, the anti-war movement and so on. America is not at all insulated from any of this.... There is hope and encouragement to be gained from that view.
Over those 20 years, active duty deaths from all causes plummeted, from 2391 (116.6 per 100,000) in 1980 to 761 (54.9 per 100,000) in 1999. Accidents (411, down from 1577) and illness (126 v. 401) fell particularly sharply. At this point, there are almost as many self-inflicted deaths (110 in 1999) as deaths from illness. I was also surprised to see that, during those 20 years, there were only four years without any deaths from hostile action. The Marine Corp is the most dangerous service (70.1 deaths per 100,000 in 1999), the Air Force the least dangerous (32.4 per 100,000). There is a lot of fascinating information here (the Air Force is also the least suicidal service) and if you're at all interested in this sort of thing, I highly recommend it.
From Napoleon's drive into Egypt through Britain's rule of Iraq in the 1920s to Israel's march into Lebanon in 1982, Middle East nations have tempted conquerors only to send them reeling.Little wonder that even many Arabs who revile Saddam Hussein view the prospect of a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq with trepidation. "Unless the Americans are far more subtle than they've ever had the capacity to be, and more subtle than the [colonial] British, it's going to end in tears," predicts Faisal Istrabadi, an Iraqi-born lawyer in Michigan who has worked with the State Department on plans to rebuild Iraq's judiciary. "The honeymoon will be very brief."
Again and again, Westerners have moved into the Mideast with confidence that they can impose freedom and modernity through military force. Along the way they have miscalculated support for their invasions, both internationally and in the lands they occupy. They have anointed cooperative minorities to help rule resentful majorities. They have been mired in occupations that last long after local support has vanished. They have met with bloody uprisings and put them down with brute force.
"We tend to overlook a basic rule: that people prefer bad rule by their own kind to good rule by somebody else," says Boston University historian David Fromkin, author of a 1989 classic on colonialism's failures in the Mideast called "A Peace to End All Peace."...
With the passion of a convert to nation-building, he spoke movingly of confronting totalitarianism, of spreading "God's gift" of liberty "to each and every person," and of how "Iraqi lives and freedom matter greatly to us."
Napoleon proclaimed a similar new era of equality and respect for "true Muslims" as he marched into Cairo in 1798, killing a thousand members of Egypt's ruling caste. He was accompanied by 100 French scientists, researching an encyclopedia and spreading European "enlightenment" to bemused Egyptian intellectuals.
"Peoples of Egypt, you will be told that I have come to destroy your religion," said Napoleon as he entered Cairo. "Do not believe it! Reply that I have come to restore your rights!"...
Resentment grew as hundreds of unveiled women paraded around town with the French interlopers, flouting Islamic ideals of modesty. "One saw low-class women mixing with the French because of their liberality and their liking for the female sex," wrote Egyptian historian Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti.
Months after the French arrival, Islamic clerics stirred a mob to rebellion, killing 300 Frenchmen. In revenge, the French bombarded Cairo. French troops stormed the city, killing 3,000 Cairenes and ransacking the chief mosque of al-Azhar on horseback. "The people of Cairo were overwhelmed with disdain, abasement at the despoiling and looting of wealth by the French," Mr. al-Jabarti observed.
The French left within three years.
Much has changed since the early 1800s: notably, the rewards to freedom. Even the most advanced nations in 1800 grew at 0.5% per year, meaning that for the average adult, living in a static society would cost the average 40-year-old 5% of his lifetime earnings -- hardly a factor that would weigh against cultural preferences. Now, advanced nations grow at 3% per year, and developing nations like Iraq can easily grow at 10% per year. This means that being in a dictatorship like Iraq or Iran, rather than a free society, will cost the average 40-year-old 65% of his future earnings, and the average 20-year-old 90% of his future earnings. Today, the cost of living in a socially and politically backward country is immense, especially for the young.
Non-economic factors have changed too: the value of freedom is much more clear after two centuries of experience; and modern business, more than commerce of a hundred years ago, provides a cultural training that supports freedom.
I believe that, if we are tenacious, Arab freedom will flourish. I hope President Bush works hard to prove the skeptics wrong.
He is group editor at Energy Intelligence, a company that publishes news and provides data and analysis about international energy issues. Ibrahim is also a senior fellow on the Council on Foreign Relations. Previously, Ibrahim was a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, and Tehran Bureau Chief. He also covered energy for The Wall Street Journal.
The liberation of the Iraqi people has begun, after the slaughter of 2 Million Iraqis, countless wars and aggression against his neighbors, decades of abject oppression of the most fundamental human rights, untold violations of the Geneva Convention and UN Resolutions, the end of Saddam and his regime of terror is at hand. US and British forces once again bring liberty to the oppressed.One would think after the untold death and oppression of the late 19th and early 20th century the lessons of appeasement would be learned. One would also think the complete and total failure of communism would also be widely universally accepted. Fortunately in America largely these lessons have been learned, our troops have had to mop up the messes, including the HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF CORPSES, created by these failed ideologies. Europe doesn’t care about the clean up their failed policies, because its been a long time since they have had to clean them up, that’s a job they leave for us Yanks.
Sadly much of the world has not learned this lesson and it appears that the nations that have learned the least about dealing with despots are the same nations that created the 3 antichrists of Europe. The nations that unleashed Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin upon the world have been the most vociferous advocates of leaving Saddam and his regime in power.
I guess in a way I can see their side, I mean, why worry about Saddam slaughtering 2 million, after all, their past leaders butchered nearly 200 Million, É. I guess in the face of that, what is a paltry 2 million souls? What is cutting out the tongue of those who speak against the dictator in the face of the Gulags and Concentration camps? What is raping a 4 year old girl, or gouging out her eyes, in front of her parents in comparison to this? What is rounding up those who oppose you and making them disappear in the face of French collaboration with Hitler’s Holocaust? At least the Iraqis rounding up those souls who will die, are doing so at the orders of another Iraqi, not a German. What’s to care about Saddam’s desire to control a few desert countries in the middle east? When your actions have destroyed CONTINENTS. I guess to the nations who unleashed these horrors upon the world, Saddam is just a want to be.
PHOTOGRAPHER Terry Richards, 52, has been with The Sun since 1980 and has previously covered the Afghan war.This time Terry, of Essendon, Herts, joined 40 Commando Royal Marines on HMS Ocean and followed their attack on Al Faw in Southern Iraq. Here is his amazing report and pictures.
IRAQI troops shot their own commanders with Kalashnikov rifles — so they could surrender.
I overheard a Marine reporting to an officer what the captives had admitted to him. And I don’t blame them for it.
Not when you have just witnessed the awesome sight of 40 Commando Royal Marines capturing a key oil refinery — and seen doomed Iraqi fighters crumble at their gunposts.
Faced with the astonishing firepower and determination of these elite Marines, even hardened soldiers would crack.
As for this poorly-equipped Iraqi force, it takes just two hours for Our Boys to blast a devastating hole through their shattered morale.
Scores of demoralised men with fear in their eyes and white flags waving above their heads capitulate under a barrage of bullets at the Al Faw refinery.
MORE (PAJ): Conscripts shoot their own officers rather than fight (Times of London, 3/22/2003)
IRAQI conscripts shot their own officers in the chest yesterday to avoid a fruitless fight over the oil terminals at al-Faw. British soldiers from 40 Commando’s Charlie Company found a bunker full of the dead officers, with spent shells from an AK47 rifle around them.Stuck between the US Seals and the Royal Marines, whom they did not want to fight, and a regime that would kill them if they refused, it was the conscripts’ only way out....
Two [prisoners] were a general in the regular Iraqi Army and a brigadier. They came out from the command bunker where they had been hiding after 40 Commando’s Bravo Company fired two anti-tank missiles into it. With them was a large sports holdall stuffed with money. They insisted that they had been about to pay their troops, to the disbelief of their captors.
These were the men who had left their soldiers hungry, poorly armed and almost destitute for weeks, judging by the state we had seen them in, while appearing to keep the money for themselves....
Every time you turned around, a new trickle of silhouettes emerged from the horizon walking slowly towards us. One Marine joked: “Oh no. They’re surrendering at us from all sides.”