Saddam Is Dead - So Are 3,000 Americans
Saddam Hussein is dead. So are three thousand Americans. why 3,000 dead is such a landmark ?
The regime in Iraq has been changed. Yet victory will not be declared: not only does the war go on, it's about to escalate. Obviously the turmoil in Iraq is worse than ever, and most Americans no longer are willing to tolerate the costs, both human and economic, associated with this war.
Many more Americans have been killed in Iraq than were killed in the first 45 months of our war in Vietnam. The election is over and Americans have spoken. Enough is enough! They want the war ended and our troops brought home. But the opposite likely will occur, with bipartisan support. Up to 50,000 more troops will be sent. The goal no longer is to win, but simply to secure Baghdad! So much has been spent with so little to show for it.
Yes, Saddam Hussein is dead, and only the Sunnis mourn. The Shi'ites and Kurds celebrate his death, as do the Iranians and especially bin Laden – all enemies of Saddam Hussein. We have performed a tremendous service for both bin Laden and Ahmadinejad, and it will cost us plenty. The violent reaction to our complicity in the execution of Saddam Hussein is yet to come.
Three thousand American military personnel are dead, more than 22,000 are wounded, and tens of thousands will be psychologically traumatized by their tours of duty in Iraq. Little concern is given to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed in this war
More Americans have now died in Iraq than in the attacks of 9/11. On the last day of 2006, America recorded the 3,000th soldier to die in action in Iraq. The statistic is hardly acknowledged by the US administration and media, still wallowing in Saddam's execution.
Its significance is not lost on the American public, however. The figure surpasses the 2,997 who died - or went missing, presumed dead - on 9/11.
But for the huge improvements in battlefield surgery in the past decade, the death toll in Iraq would have been much higher. Experts suggest that if combat recovery conditions were the same now as they were in Vietnam, the death toll might have been ten times greater – around 30,000 for the Americans and approaching 1,500 for British forces, who by the end of 2006 had lost 127 troops (half the 255 dead in the three-month Falklands War).
Iraq's massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.
The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.
So was this what the Iraq war was fought for, after all? As the number of US soldiers killed since the invasion rises past the 3,000 mark, and President George Bush gambles on sending in up to 30,000 more troops, The Independent on Sunday has learnt that the Iraqi government is about to push through a law giving Western oil companies the right to exploit the country's massive oil reserves.
Now, unnoticed by most amid the furore over civil war in Iraq and the hanging of Saddam Hussein, the new oil law has quietly been going through several drafts, and is now on the point of being presented to the cabinet and then the parliament in Baghdad. Its provisions are a radical departure from the norm for developing countries: under a system known as "production-sharing agreements", or PSAs, oil majors such as BP and Shell in Britain, and Exxon and Chevron in the US, would be able to sign deals of up to 30 years to extract Iraq's oil.
PSAs allow a country to retain legal ownership of its oil, but gives a share of profits to the international companies that invest in infrastructure and operation of the wells, pipelines and refineries. Their introduction would be a first for a major Middle Eastern oil producer. Saudi Arabia and Iran, the world's number one and two oil exporters, both tightly control their industries through state-owned companies with no appreciable foreign collaboration, as do most members of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Opec.
Critics fear that given Iraq's weak bargaining position, it could get locked in now to deals on bad terms for decades to come. "Iraq would end up with the worst possible outcome," said Greg Muttitt of Platform, a human rights and environmental group that monitors the oil industry. He said the new legislation was drafted with the assistance of BearingPoint, an American consultancy firm hired by the US government, which had a representative working in the American embassy in Baghdad for several months.
Britain and the US have always hotly denied that the war was fought for oil. On 18 March 2003, with the invasion imminent, Tony Blair proposed the House of Commons motion to back the war. "The oil revenues, which people falsely claim that we want to seize, should be put in a trust fund for the Iraqi people administered through the UN," he said.
"The United Kingdom should seek a new Security Council Resolution that would affirm... the use of all oil revenues for the benefit of the Iraqi people."
That suggestion came to nothing. In May 2003, just after President Bush declared major combat operations at an end, under a banner boasting "Mission Accomplished", Britain co-sponsored a resolution in the Security Council which gave the US and UK control over Iraq's oil revenues. Far from "all oil revenues" being used for the Iraqi people, Resolution 1483 continued to make deductions from Iraq's oil earnings to pay compensation for the invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
That exception aside, however, the often-stated aim of the US and Britain was that Iraq's oil money would be used to pay for reconstruction. In July 2003, for example, Colin Powell, then Secretary of State, insisted: "We have not taken one drop of Iraqi oil for US purposes, or for coalition purposes. Quite the contrary... It cost a great deal of money to prosecute this war. But the oil of the Iraqi people belongs to the Iraqi people; it is their wealth, it will be used for their benefit. So we did not do it for oil."
Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Defense Secretary at the time of the war and now head of the World Bank, told Congress: "We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."
But this optimism has proved unjustified. Since the invasion, Iraqi oil production has dropped off dramatically. The country is now producing about two million barrels per day. That is down from a pre-war peak of 3.5 million barrels. Not only is Iraq's whole oil infrastructure creaking under the effects of years of sanctions, insurgents have constantly attacked pipelines, so that the only steady flow of exports is through the Shia-dominated south of the country.
Worsening sectarian violence and gangsterism have driven most of the educated élite out of the country for safety, depriving the oil industry of the Iraqi experts and administrators it desperately needs.
Read : " Blood and oil: How the West will profit from Iraq's most precious commodity" - In just 40 pages, Iraq is locked into sharing its oil with foreign investors for the next 30 years
Before Hanging, a Push for Revenge and a Push Back
As US-Iraqis disagreed, Saddam still believed he might cheat hanging in the end because of crucial negotiations. NY Times.
Jan 7, 2007
By John F. Burns
Baghdad — When American soldiers woke Saddam Hussein in his cell near Baghdad airport at 3:55 a.m. last Saturday, they told him to dress for a journey to Baghdad. He had followed the routine dozens of times before, travelling by helicopter in the predawn darkness to the courtroom where he spent 14 months on trial for his life.
When his cell lights were dimmed on Friday night, Mr. Hussein may have hoped that he would live a few days longer, and perhaps cheat the hangman altogether.
According to Task Force 134, the American military unit responsible for all Iraqi detainees, Mr Hussein “had heard some of the rumors on the radio about potential execution dates.”
But never one to understate his own importance, he had told his lawyers for months that the Americans might spare him in the end, for negotiations to end the insurgency whose daily bombings rattled his cellblock windows.
As Mr. Hussein prepared to walk out into the chill of the desert winter, dressed in a tailored black overcoat, that last illusion was shattered.
After being roused and told that he was being transferred to Iraqi custody, a task force statement e-mailed to The New York Times a week later revealed, “he immediately indicated that he knew the execution would soon follow.”
“As he left the detention area, he thanked the guards and medics for the treatment he had received,” Lt Col Keir-Kevin Curry, spokesman for the task force, said.
Mr Hussein was then driven to a waiting Black Hawk helicopter for a 10-minute flight to the old Istikhbarat prison in northern Baghdad, where a party of Iraqi officials awaited him at the gallows.
“During this brief period of transfer, Saddam Hussein appeared more serious,” the task force said.
The time as the helicopter took off was 5:05 am, and Mr Hussein had 65 minutes to live. But as he flew over the darkened suburbs of a Baghdad enduring another winter with only flickering electrical power, he can have known little of the last-minute battle waged between top Iraqi and American officials — and among the Americans themselves — over whether the execution, fraught with legal ambiguities and Islamic religious sensitivities, should go ahead.
American opposition to executing him in haste centered partly on the fact that the Id al-Adha religious holiday, marking the end of the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, began for Sunnis at sunrise on Saturday.
In Baghdad that day, the sun was to rise at 7:06 am Iraqi government officials had promised the hanging would be over before the dawn light began seeping through the palm trees that shade the capital’s streets.
The taunts Mr Hussein endured from Shiite guards as he stood with the noose around his neck have made headlines around the world, and stirred angry protests among his fellow Iraqi Sunnis.
But the story of how American commanders and diplomats fought to halt the execution until midnight on Friday, only six hours before Mr Hussein was hanged, is only now coming into focus, as Iraqi and American officials, in the glare of international outrage over the hanging, compete with their versions of what happened.....(Read the story HERE)
Ban Ki-moon urges Iraqi Government not to execute those on death row
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today urged the Government of Iraq to grant a stay of execution to those whose death sentences may be carried out in the near future.
His Chef de Cabinet, Vijay Nambiar, in a letter to Iraq's UN ambassador, today reiterated the Secretary General's endorsement of the call made earlier this month by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, for restraint by the Government in carrying out death sentences imposed by the Iraqi High Tribunal.
The letter also refers to the Secretary-General's view that all members of the international community should pay due regard to all aspects of international humanitarian and human rights laws, according to a spokesman for Mr. Ban said.
On 3 January, reacting to the Government's plans to execute two high-ranking co-defendants of former president Saddam Hussein, who had already been hanged, Ms. Arbour pointed out that international law “only allows the imposition of the death penalty as an exceptional measure within rigorous legal constraints.”
The High Commissioner had previously voiced concern about the fairness and impartiality of Saddam Hussein's trial.
RIGHTS:
Saddam Hanging Boosts Case for Int'l Criminal Court
The manner in which former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was hanged has provoked revulsion and criticism in many countries around the world including India, home to 120 million Muslims.
Those who oppose the death penalty on principle were joined by critics of the trial process and those appalled by the timing of the execution on the first day of Eid-al-Adha, which marks a holy period in the Muslim calendar.
They point out that numerous governments have criticised Hussein's hanging as an instance of "victor's justice". The United Nations has had to correct the first response of the new Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon by recalling the organisation's opposition to capital punishment....(more)
Mid East Saddam Hussein Iraq US Malaysia Europe
The regime in Iraq has been changed. Yet victory will not be declared: not only does the war go on, it's about to escalate. Obviously the turmoil in Iraq is worse than ever, and most Americans no longer are willing to tolerate the costs, both human and economic, associated with this war.
Many more Americans have been killed in Iraq than were killed in the first 45 months of our war in Vietnam. The election is over and Americans have spoken. Enough is enough! They want the war ended and our troops brought home. But the opposite likely will occur, with bipartisan support. Up to 50,000 more troops will be sent. The goal no longer is to win, but simply to secure Baghdad! So much has been spent with so little to show for it.
Yes, Saddam Hussein is dead, and only the Sunnis mourn. The Shi'ites and Kurds celebrate his death, as do the Iranians and especially bin Laden – all enemies of Saddam Hussein. We have performed a tremendous service for both bin Laden and Ahmadinejad, and it will cost us plenty. The violent reaction to our complicity in the execution of Saddam Hussein is yet to come.
Three thousand American military personnel are dead, more than 22,000 are wounded, and tens of thousands will be psychologically traumatized by their tours of duty in Iraq. Little concern is given to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed in this war
More Americans have now died in Iraq than in the attacks of 9/11. On the last day of 2006, America recorded the 3,000th soldier to die in action in Iraq. The statistic is hardly acknowledged by the US administration and media, still wallowing in Saddam's execution.
Its significance is not lost on the American public, however. The figure surpasses the 2,997 who died - or went missing, presumed dead - on 9/11.
But for the huge improvements in battlefield surgery in the past decade, the death toll in Iraq would have been much higher. Experts suggest that if combat recovery conditions were the same now as they were in Vietnam, the death toll might have been ten times greater – around 30,000 for the Americans and approaching 1,500 for British forces, who by the end of 2006 had lost 127 troops (half the 255 dead in the three-month Falklands War).
Iraq's massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.
The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.
So was this what the Iraq war was fought for, after all? As the number of US soldiers killed since the invasion rises past the 3,000 mark, and President George Bush gambles on sending in up to 30,000 more troops, The Independent on Sunday has learnt that the Iraqi government is about to push through a law giving Western oil companies the right to exploit the country's massive oil reserves.
Now, unnoticed by most amid the furore over civil war in Iraq and the hanging of Saddam Hussein, the new oil law has quietly been going through several drafts, and is now on the point of being presented to the cabinet and then the parliament in Baghdad. Its provisions are a radical departure from the norm for developing countries: under a system known as "production-sharing agreements", or PSAs, oil majors such as BP and Shell in Britain, and Exxon and Chevron in the US, would be able to sign deals of up to 30 years to extract Iraq's oil.
PSAs allow a country to retain legal ownership of its oil, but gives a share of profits to the international companies that invest in infrastructure and operation of the wells, pipelines and refineries. Their introduction would be a first for a major Middle Eastern oil producer. Saudi Arabia and Iran, the world's number one and two oil exporters, both tightly control their industries through state-owned companies with no appreciable foreign collaboration, as do most members of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Opec.
Critics fear that given Iraq's weak bargaining position, it could get locked in now to deals on bad terms for decades to come. "Iraq would end up with the worst possible outcome," said Greg Muttitt of Platform, a human rights and environmental group that monitors the oil industry. He said the new legislation was drafted with the assistance of BearingPoint, an American consultancy firm hired by the US government, which had a representative working in the American embassy in Baghdad for several months.
Britain and the US have always hotly denied that the war was fought for oil. On 18 March 2003, with the invasion imminent, Tony Blair proposed the House of Commons motion to back the war. "The oil revenues, which people falsely claim that we want to seize, should be put in a trust fund for the Iraqi people administered through the UN," he said.
"The United Kingdom should seek a new Security Council Resolution that would affirm... the use of all oil revenues for the benefit of the Iraqi people."
That suggestion came to nothing. In May 2003, just after President Bush declared major combat operations at an end, under a banner boasting "Mission Accomplished", Britain co-sponsored a resolution in the Security Council which gave the US and UK control over Iraq's oil revenues. Far from "all oil revenues" being used for the Iraqi people, Resolution 1483 continued to make deductions from Iraq's oil earnings to pay compensation for the invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
That exception aside, however, the often-stated aim of the US and Britain was that Iraq's oil money would be used to pay for reconstruction. In July 2003, for example, Colin Powell, then Secretary of State, insisted: "We have not taken one drop of Iraqi oil for US purposes, or for coalition purposes. Quite the contrary... It cost a great deal of money to prosecute this war. But the oil of the Iraqi people belongs to the Iraqi people; it is their wealth, it will be used for their benefit. So we did not do it for oil."
Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Defense Secretary at the time of the war and now head of the World Bank, told Congress: "We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."
But this optimism has proved unjustified. Since the invasion, Iraqi oil production has dropped off dramatically. The country is now producing about two million barrels per day. That is down from a pre-war peak of 3.5 million barrels. Not only is Iraq's whole oil infrastructure creaking under the effects of years of sanctions, insurgents have constantly attacked pipelines, so that the only steady flow of exports is through the Shia-dominated south of the country.
Worsening sectarian violence and gangsterism have driven most of the educated élite out of the country for safety, depriving the oil industry of the Iraqi experts and administrators it desperately needs.
Read : " Blood and oil: How the West will profit from Iraq's most precious commodity" - In just 40 pages, Iraq is locked into sharing its oil with foreign investors for the next 30 years
Before Hanging, a Push for Revenge and a Push Back
As US-Iraqis disagreed, Saddam still believed he might cheat hanging in the end because of crucial negotiations. NY Times.
Jan 7, 2007
By John F. Burns
Baghdad — When American soldiers woke Saddam Hussein in his cell near Baghdad airport at 3:55 a.m. last Saturday, they told him to dress for a journey to Baghdad. He had followed the routine dozens of times before, travelling by helicopter in the predawn darkness to the courtroom where he spent 14 months on trial for his life.
When his cell lights were dimmed on Friday night, Mr. Hussein may have hoped that he would live a few days longer, and perhaps cheat the hangman altogether.
According to Task Force 134, the American military unit responsible for all Iraqi detainees, Mr Hussein “had heard some of the rumors on the radio about potential execution dates.”
But never one to understate his own importance, he had told his lawyers for months that the Americans might spare him in the end, for negotiations to end the insurgency whose daily bombings rattled his cellblock windows.
As Mr. Hussein prepared to walk out into the chill of the desert winter, dressed in a tailored black overcoat, that last illusion was shattered.
After being roused and told that he was being transferred to Iraqi custody, a task force statement e-mailed to The New York Times a week later revealed, “he immediately indicated that he knew the execution would soon follow.”
“As he left the detention area, he thanked the guards and medics for the treatment he had received,” Lt Col Keir-Kevin Curry, spokesman for the task force, said.
Mr Hussein was then driven to a waiting Black Hawk helicopter for a 10-minute flight to the old Istikhbarat prison in northern Baghdad, where a party of Iraqi officials awaited him at the gallows.
“During this brief period of transfer, Saddam Hussein appeared more serious,” the task force said.
The time as the helicopter took off was 5:05 am, and Mr Hussein had 65 minutes to live. But as he flew over the darkened suburbs of a Baghdad enduring another winter with only flickering electrical power, he can have known little of the last-minute battle waged between top Iraqi and American officials — and among the Americans themselves — over whether the execution, fraught with legal ambiguities and Islamic religious sensitivities, should go ahead.
American opposition to executing him in haste centered partly on the fact that the Id al-Adha religious holiday, marking the end of the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, began for Sunnis at sunrise on Saturday.
In Baghdad that day, the sun was to rise at 7:06 am Iraqi government officials had promised the hanging would be over before the dawn light began seeping through the palm trees that shade the capital’s streets.
The taunts Mr Hussein endured from Shiite guards as he stood with the noose around his neck have made headlines around the world, and stirred angry protests among his fellow Iraqi Sunnis.
But the story of how American commanders and diplomats fought to halt the execution until midnight on Friday, only six hours before Mr Hussein was hanged, is only now coming into focus, as Iraqi and American officials, in the glare of international outrage over the hanging, compete with their versions of what happened.....(Read the story HERE)
Ban Ki-moon urges Iraqi Government not to execute those on death row
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today urged the Government of Iraq to grant a stay of execution to those whose death sentences may be carried out in the near future.
His Chef de Cabinet, Vijay Nambiar, in a letter to Iraq's UN ambassador, today reiterated the Secretary General's endorsement of the call made earlier this month by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, for restraint by the Government in carrying out death sentences imposed by the Iraqi High Tribunal.
The letter also refers to the Secretary-General's view that all members of the international community should pay due regard to all aspects of international humanitarian and human rights laws, according to a spokesman for Mr. Ban said.
On 3 January, reacting to the Government's plans to execute two high-ranking co-defendants of former president Saddam Hussein, who had already been hanged, Ms. Arbour pointed out that international law “only allows the imposition of the death penalty as an exceptional measure within rigorous legal constraints.”
The High Commissioner had previously voiced concern about the fairness and impartiality of Saddam Hussein's trial.
RIGHTS:
Saddam Hanging Boosts Case for Int'l Criminal Court
The manner in which former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was hanged has provoked revulsion and criticism in many countries around the world including India, home to 120 million Muslims.
Those who oppose the death penalty on principle were joined by critics of the trial process and those appalled by the timing of the execution on the first day of Eid-al-Adha, which marks a holy period in the Muslim calendar.
They point out that numerous governments have criticised Hussein's hanging as an instance of "victor's justice". The United Nations has had to correct the first response of the new Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon by recalling the organisation's opposition to capital punishment....(more)
Mid East Saddam Hussein Iraq US Malaysia Europe
Labels: Opinion- Mid East
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