The Next Generation

This news story surfaced a few hours ago from Reuters, it shows, we believe, the undeniable truth that our policy in Iraq is nothing but (like everything else from this Administration) a dismal failure. We have done nothing more than provide a reason for the next generation to continue to fight us and at the end of the day, we have not (and will never be able to) win the GWoT as long as our policy excludes dialogue and real solutions. Here is the news story, read it, then make up your own mind.

Al Qaeda videos show boys in mock attacks: U.S.

By Michael Holden2 hours, 29 minutes ago

Al Qaeda videos seized by U.S. forces show Iraqi children younger than 11 carrying out mock kidnappings and attacks, the U.S. military and Iraqi officials said on Wednesday.

Videos played to media showed about 20 boys, mostly under 11, wearing balaclavas and brandishing AK-47 assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers almost as big as themselves.

“This is not the first time we’ve observed such material but the volume and content was the most significant and disturbing we have found to date,” said U.S. military spokesman Rear Admiral Gregory Smith.

Smith said the videos were meant to spread al Qaeda’s message among the young rather than train the boys for missions.

Five videos of the children were seized during an operation against the Sunni Islamist militants in early December 2007.

Violence has fallen across Iraq, with attacks down 60 percent since last June, but Smith said al Qaeda was still the greatest threat to security in Iraq.

He said the U.S. military did not know exactly where or when the films were made, or how many children were involved.

The boys were seen stopping a man on a bike and taking him hostage, forcing passengers from a car and holding guns to their heads, and practicing assaults on houses as trainers shouted instructions.

MOVIE SCRIPT

Other seized pictures showed a young boy wearing a “suicide vest,” while U.S. soldiers had also found a written proposal for a movie script about training children for warfare.

“The script was to include children interrogating and executing victims, planting improvised explosive devices and conducting sniper attacks,” Smith said, adding al Qaeda had also infiltrated schools to disseminate propaganda.

U.S. commanders say al Qaeda have been using different tactics recently as security clampdowns have hampered their ability to carry out large-scale bomb attacks.

Smith said there had been two recent suicide bombings by 15-year-old boys, while the number of attacks involving women had also increased.

Last week two women, said by the U.S. military and Iraqi officials to be mentally impaired and duped by al Qaeda, blew themselves up at popular pet markets, killing 99 people in the deadliest attack in Baghdad for nine months.

U.S. and Iraqi forces this year have launched offensives across central and northern Iraq where al Qaeda has regrouped after being forced from strongholds in western Iraq’s Anbar province and around Baghdad in security crackdowns last year.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has ordered a “decisive” push in northern Mosul to force al Qaeda fighters from their last urban stronghold in Iraq.

Baghdad security spokesman Major-General Qassim Moussawi said violence in January had plummeted compared with a year ago, when security forces were trying to stave off civil war between majority Shi’ites and minority Sunni Arabs.

According to Moussawi’s figures, 1,958 people were killed in Baghdad in January 2007 compared with 16 last month. However figures compiled by Reuters showed 27 civilians died violently in Baghdad in the last week of January 2008 alone.

Improving security was not the main reason why Iraqi refugees were returning home from Syria, where about 2 million Iraqis had fled to escape sectarian violence, a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) report said.

The report found 46.1 percent of a sample of 110 Iraqis interviewed in Damascus said they could no longer afford to live in Syria while 14.1 percent cited improved security.

(Additional reporting by Paul Tait and Waleed Ibrahim; Editing by Dominic Evans)

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Stand Up for TRUTH!

In his new book, Crimes Against Nature, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. probes the failure of broadcasters to cover the environment, writing, “The FCC’s pro-industry, anti-regulatory philosophy has effectively ended the right of access to broadcast television by any but the moneyed interests.”

Not convinced? Take a look at this short video from Robert Greenwald.

We need to bring back the Fairness Doctrines, to insure that the citizens of this country hear, not only fair and balanced reporting, but all sides of the issues. Additionally, it will end fear mongering by the media and politicians, who are attempting to placate their corporate sponsors or appear to be doing something useful for society. Without the Fairness Doctrine, CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and all other news and information outlets cannot, nor will not be held responsible to provide accuracy and non-biased facts. Until then, the citizens can expect more of the same, propaganda, and misinformation, in place of facts and truth.

Here is what you can do. (1) Stop supporting the sponsors of these news outlets, without advertising dollars, the Board of Directors of these outlets will be forced to re-evaluate their programming choices. (2) Spread the word; tell people about this web site FOX ATTACKS and keep spreading the word to everyone you meet.

It is time for all good Americans to come to the aid of their country. DO IT, before it is too late!

Bush’s Nuclear Apocalypse

The following is from a post on Truthdig -

Chris Hedges: Bush’s Nuclear Apocalypse

Posted on Oct 9, 2006
By Chris Hedges

Editor’s Note: The former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times and author of the bestseller “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” reports on Bush’s plan for Iran, and how a callous war, conceived by zealots, will lead to a disaster of biblical proportions.

The aircraft carrier Eisenhower, accompanied by the guided-missile cruiser USS Anzio, guided-missile destroyer USS Ramage, guided-missile destroyer USS Mason and the fast-attack submarine USS Newport News, is, as I write, making its way to the Straits of Hormuz off Iran. The ships will be in place to strike Iran by the end of the month. It may be a bluff. It may be a feint. It may be a simple show of American power. But I doubt it.

War with Iran—a war that would unleash an apocalyptic scenario in the Middle East—is probable by the end of the Bush administration. It could begin in as little as three weeks. This administration, claiming to be anointed by a Christian God to reshape the world, and especially the Middle East, defined three states at the start of its reign as “the Axis of Evil.” They were Iraq, now occupied; North Korea, which, because it has nuclear weapons, is untouchable; and Iran. Those who do not take this apocalyptic rhetoric seriously have ignored the twisted pathology of men like Elliott Abrams, who helped orchestrate the disastrous and illegal contra war in Nicaragua, and who now handles the Middle East for the National Security Council. He knew nothing about Central America. He knows nothing about the Middle East. He sees the world through the childish, binary lens of good and evil, us and them, the forces of darkness and the forces of light. And it is this strange, twilight mentality that now grips most of the civilian planners who are barreling us towards a crisis of epic proportions.

These men advocate a doctrine of permanent war, a doctrine which, as William R. Polk points out, is a slight corruption of Leon Trotsky’s doctrine of permanent revolution. These two revolutionary doctrines serve the same function, to intimidate and destroy all those classified as foreign opponents, to create permanent instability and fear and to silence domestic critics who challenge leaders in a time of national crisis. It works. The citizens of the United States, slowly being stripped of their civil liberties, are being herded sheep-like, once again, over a cliff.

But this war will be different. It will be catastrophic. It will usher in the apocalyptic nightmares spun out in the dark, fantastic visions of the Christian right. And there are those around the president who see this vision as preordained by God; indeed, the president himself may hold such a vision.

The hypocrisy of this vaunted moral crusade is not lost on those in the Middle East. Iran actually signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It has violated a codicil of that treaty written by European foreign ministers, but this codicil was never ratified by the Iranian parliament. I do not dispute Iran’s intentions to acquire nuclear weapons nor do I minimize the danger should it acquire them in the estimated five to 10 years. But contrast Iran with Pakistan, India and Israel. These three countries refused to sign the treaty and developed nuclear weapons programs in secret. Israel now has an estimated 400 to 600 nuclear weapons. The word “Dimona,” the name of the city where the nuclear facilities are located in Israel, is shorthand in the Muslim world for the deadly Israeli threat to Muslims’ existence. What lessons did the Iranians learn from our Israeli, Pakistani and Indian allies?

Given that we are actively engaged in an effort to destabilize the Iranian regime by recruiting tribal groups and ethnic minorities inside Iran to rebel, given that we use apocalyptic rhetoric to describe what must be done to the Iranian regime, given that other countries in the Middle East such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia are making noises about developing a nuclear capacity, and given that, with the touch of a button Israel could obliterate Iran, what do we expect from the Iranians? On top of this, the Iranian regime grasps that the doctrine of permanent war entails making “preemptive” and unprovoked strikes.

Those in Washington who advocate this war, knowing as little about the limitations and chaos of war as they do about the Middle East, believe they can hit about 1,000 sites inside Iran to wipe out nuclear production and cripple the 850,000-man Iranian army. The disaster in southern Lebanon, where the Israeli air campaign not only failed to break Hezbollah but united most Lebanese behind the militant group, is dismissed. These ideologues, after all, do not live in a reality-based universe. The massive Israeli bombing of Lebanon failed to pacify 4 million Lebanese. What will happen when we begin to pound a country of 70 million people? As retired General Wesley K. Clark and others have pointed out, once you begin an air campaign it is only a matter of time before you have to put troops on the ground or accept defeat, as the Israelis had to do in Lebanon. And if we begin dropping bunker busters, cruise missiles and iron fragmentation bombs on Iran this is the choice that must be faced—either sending American forces into Iran to fight a protracted and futile guerrilla war or walking away in humiliation.

“As a people we are enormously forgetful,” Dr. Polk, one of the country’s leading scholars on the Middle East, told an Oct. 13 gathering of the Foreign Policy Association in New York. “We should have learned from history that foreign powers can’t win guerrilla wars. The British learned this from our ancestors in the American Revolution and re-learned it in Ireland. Napoleon learned it in Spain. The Germans learned it in Yugoslavia. We should have learned it in Vietnam and the Russians learned it in Afghanistan and are learning it all over again in Chechnya and we are learning it, of course, in Iraq. Guerrilla wars are almost unwinnable. As a people we are also very vain. Our way of life is the only way. We should have learned that the rich and powerful can’t always succeed against the poor and less powerful.”

An attack on Iran will ignite the Middle East. The loss of Iranian oil, coupled with Silkworm missile attacks by Iran on oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, could send oil soaring to well over $110 a barrel. The effect on the domestic and world economy will be devastating, very possibly triggering a huge, global depression. The 2 million Shiites in Saudi Arabia, the Shiite majority in Iraq and the Shiite communities in Bahrain, Pakistan and Turkey will turn in rage on us and our dwindling allies. We will see a combination of increased terrorist attacks, including on American soil, and the widespread sabotage of oil production in the Gulf. Iraq, as bad as it looks now, will become a death pit for American troops as Shiites and Sunnis, for the first time, unite against their foreign occupiers.

The country, however, that will pay the biggest price will be Israel. And the sad irony is that those planning this war think of themselves as allies of the Jewish state. A conflagration of this magnitude could see Israel drawn back in Lebanon and sucked into a regional war, one that would over time spell the final chapter in the Zionist experiment in the Middle East. The Israelis aptly call their nuclear program “the Samson option.” The Biblical Samson ripped down the pillars of the temple and killed everyone around him, along with himself.

If you are sure you will be raptured into heaven, your clothes left behind with the nonbelievers, then this news should cheer you up. If you are rational, however, these may be some of the last few weeks or months in which to enjoy what is left of our beleaguered, dying republic and way of life.

AP Photo/Vahid Salemi

Accompanied by armed forces commanders, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reviews Iran’s Shahab-3 missile, a weapon capable of carrying a nuclear warhead and reaching Europe, Israel and U.S. forces in the Middle East.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/200601009_bushs_nuclear_apocalypse/

U.S. Shadow Army in Iraq

 

Published on Monday, April 30, 2007 by TomDispatch.com

Who Will Stop the U.S. Shadow Army in Iraq?
Don’t Look to the Congressional Democrats

by Jeremy Scahill

The Democratic leadership in Congress is once again gearing up for a great sell-out on the Iraq war. While the wrangling over the $124 billion Iraq supplemental spending bill is being headlined in the media as a “show down” or “war” with the White House, it is hardly that. In plain terms, despite the impassioned sentiments of the anti-war electorate that brought the Democrats to power last November, the Congressional leadership has made clear its intention to keep funding the Iraq occupation, even though Sen. Harry Reid has declared that “this war is lost.”

For months, the Democrats’ “withdrawal” plan has come under fire from opponents of the occupation who say it doesn’t stop the war, doesn’t defund it, and insures that tens of thousands of U.S. troops will remain in Iraq beyond President Bush’s second term. Such concerns were reinforced by Sen. Barack Obama’s recent declaration that the Democrats will not cut off funding for the war, regardless of the President’s policies. “Nobody,” he said, “wants to play chicken with our troops.”

As the New York Times reported, “Lawmakers said they expect that Congress and Mr. Bush would eventually agree on a spending measure without the specific timetable” for (partial) withdrawal, which the White House has said would “guarantee defeat.” In other words, the appearance of a fierce debate this week, Presidential veto and all, has largely been a show with a predictable outcome.

The Shadow War in Iraq

While all of this is troubling, there is another disturbing fact which speaks volumes about the Democrats’ lack of insight into the nature of this unpopular war — and most Americans will know next to nothing about it. Even if the President didn’t veto their legislation, the Democrats’ plan does almost nothing to address the second largest force in Iraq — and it’s not the British military. It’s the estimated 126,000 private military “contractors” who will stay put there as long as Congress continues funding the war.

The 145,000 active duty U.S. forces are nearly matched by occupation personnel that currently come from companies like Blackwater USA and the former Halliburton subsidiary KBR, which enjoy close personal and political ties with the Bush administration. Until Congress reins in these massive corporate forces and the whopping federal funding that goes into their coffers, partially withdrawing U.S. troops may only set the stage for the increased use of private military companies (and their rent-a-guns) which stand to profit from any kind of privatized future “surge” in Iraq.

From the beginning, these contractors have been a major hidden story of the war, almost uncovered in the mainstream media and absolutely central to maintaining the U.S. occupation of Iraq. While many of them perform logistical support activities for American troops, including the sort of laundry, fuel and mail delivery, and food-preparation work that once was performed by soldiers, tens of thousands of them are directly engaged in military and combat activities. According to the Government Accountability Office, there are now some 48,000 employees of private military companies in Iraq. These not-quite G.I. Joes, working for Blackwater and other major U.S. firms, can clear in a month what some active-duty soldiers make in a year. “We got 126,000 contractors over there, some of them making more than the secretary of Defense,” said House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John Murtha. “How in the hell do you justify that?”

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman estimates that $4 billion in taxpayer money has so far been spent in Iraq on these armed “security” companies like Blackwater — with tens of billions more going to other war companies like KBR and Fluor for “logistical” support. Rep. Jan Schakowsky of the House Intelligence Committee believes that up to forty cents of every dollar spent on the occupation has gone to war contractors.

With such massive government payouts, there is little incentive for these companies to minimize their footprint in the region and every incentive to look for more opportunities to profit — especially if, sooner or later, the “official” U.S. presence shrinks, giving the public a sense of withdrawal, of a winding down of the war. Even if George W. Bush were to sign the legislation the Democrats have passed, their plan “allows the President the leeway to escalate the use of military security contractors directly on the battlefield,” Erik Leaver of the Institute for Policy Studies points out. It would “allow the President to continue the war using a mercenary army.”

The crucial role of contractors in continuing the occupation was driven home in January when David Petraeus, the general running the President’s “surge” plan in Baghdad, cited private forces as essential to winning the war. In his confirmation hearings in the Senate, he claimed that they fill a gap attributable to insufficient troop levels available to an overstretched military. Along with Bush’s official troop surge, the “tens of thousands of contract security forces,” Petraeus told the Senators, “give me the reason to believe that we can accomplish the mission.” Indeed, Gen. Petraeus admitted that he has, at times, been guarded in Iraq not by the U.S. military, but “secured by contract security.”

Such widespread use of contractors, especially in mission-critical operations, should have raised red flags among lawmakers. After a trip to Iraq last month, Retired Gen. Barry McCaffery observed bluntly, “We are overly dependant on civilian contractors. In extreme danger–they will not fight.” It is, however, the political rather than military uses of these forces that should be cause for the greatest concern.

Contractors have provided the White House with political cover, allowing for a back-door near doubling of U.S. forces in Iraq through the private sector, while masking the full extent of the human costs of the occupation. Although contractor deaths are not effectively tallied, at least 770 contractors have been killed in Iraq and at least another 7,700 injured. These numbers are not included in any official (or media) toll of the war. More significantly, there is absolutely no effective system of oversight or accountability governing contractors and their operations, nor is there any effective law — military or civilian — being applied to their activities. They have not been subjected to military courts martial (despite a recent Congressional attempt to place them under the Uniform Code of Military Justice), nor have they been prosecuted in U.S. civilian courts – and, no matter what their acts in Iraq, they cannot be prosecuted in Iraqi courts. Before Paul Bremer, Bush’s viceroy in Baghdad, left Iraq in 2004 he issued an edict, known as Order 17. It immunized contractors from prosecution in Iraq which, today, is like the wild West, full of roaming Iraqi death squads and scores of unaccountable, heavily-armed mercenaries, ex-military men from around the world, working for the occupation. For the community of contractors in Iraq, immunity and impunity are welded together.

Despite the tens of thousands of contractors passing through Iraq and several well-documented incidents involving alleged contractor abuses, only two individuals have been ever indicted for crimes there. One was charged with stabbing a fellow contractor, while the other pled guilty to the possession of child-pornography images on his computer at Abu Ghraib prison. While dozens of American soldiers have been court-martialed — 64 on murder-related charges — not a single armed contractor has been prosecuted for a crime against an Iraqi. In some cases, where contractors were alleged to have been involved in crimes or deadly incidents, their companies whisked them out of Iraq to safety.

As one armed contractor recently informed the Washington Post, “We were always told, from the very beginning, if for some reason something happened and the Iraqis were trying to prosecute us, they would put you in the back of a car and sneak you out of the country in the middle of the night.” According to another, U.S. contractors in Iraq had their own motto: “What happens here today, stays here today.”

Funding the Mercenary War

“These private contractors are really an arm of the administration and its policies,” argues Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who has called for a withdrawal of all U.S. contractors from Iraq. “They charge whatever they want with impunity. There’s no accountability as to how many people they have, as to what their activities are.”

Until now, this situation has largely been the doing of a Republican-controlled Congress and White House. No longer.

While some Congressional Democrats have publicly expressed grave concerns about the widespread use of these private forces and a handful have called for their withdrawal, the party leadership has done almost nothing to stop, or even curb, the use of mercenary corporations in Iraq. As it stands, the Bush administration and the industry have little to fear from Congress on this score, despite the unseating of the Republican majority.

On two central fronts, accountability and funding, the Democrats’ approach has been severely flawed, playing into the agendas of both the White House and the war contractors. Some Democrats, for instance, are pushing accountability legislation that would actually require more U.S. personnel to deploy to Iraq as part of an FBI Baghdad “Theater Investigative Unit” that would supposedly monitor and investigate contractor conduct. The idea is: FBI investigators would run around Iraq, gather evidence, and interview witnesses, leading to indictments and prosecutions in U.S. civilian courts.

This is a plan almost certain to backfire, if ever instituted. It raises a slew of questions: Who would protect the investigators? How would Iraqi victims be interviewed? How would evidence be gathered amid the chaos and dangers of Iraq? Given that the federal government and the military seem unable — or unwilling — even to count how many contractors are actually in the country, how could their activities possibly be monitored? In light of the recent Bush administration scandal over the eight fired US attorneys, serious questions remain about the integrity of the Justice Department. How could we have any faith that real crimes in Iraq, committed by the employees of immensely well-connected crony corporations like Blackwater and Halliburton, would be investigated adequately?

Apart from the fact that it would be impossible to effectively monitor 126,000 or more private contractors under the best of conditions in the world’s most dangerous war zone, this legislation would give the industry a tremendous PR victory. Once it was passed as the law of the land, the companies could finally claim that a legally accountable structure governed their operations. Yet they would be well aware that such legislation would be nearly impossible to enforce.

Not surprisingly, then, the mercenary trade group with the Orwellian name of the International Peace Operations Association (IPOA) has pushed for just this Democratic-sponsored approach rather than the military court martial system favored by conservative Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. The IPOA called the expansion of the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act — essentially the Democrats’ oversight plan — “the most cogent approach to ensuring greater contractor accountability in the battle space.” That endorsement alone should be reason enough to pause and reconsider.

Then there is the issue of continued funding for the privatized shadow forces in Iraq. As originally passed in the House, the Democrats’ Iraq plan would have cut only about 15% or $815 million of the supplemental spending earmarked for day-to-day military operations “to reflect savings attributable to efficiencies and management improvements in the funding of contracts in the military departments.”

As it stood, this was a stunningly insufficient plan, given ongoing events in Iraq. But even that mild provision was dropped by the Democrats in late April. Their excuse was the need to hold more hearings on the contractor issue. Instead, they moved to withhold — not cut — 15% of total day-to-day operational funding, but only until Secretary of Defense Robert Gates submits a report on the use of contractors and the scope of their deployment. Once the report is submitted, the 15% would be unlocked. In essence, this means that, under the Democrats plan, the mercenary forces will simply be able to continue business-as-usual/profits-as-usual in Iraq.

However obfuscated by discussions of accountability, fiscal responsibility, and oversight, the gorilla of a question in the Congressional war room is: Should the administration be allowed to use mercenary forces, whose livelihoods depend on war and conflict, to help fight its battles in Iraq?

Rep. Murtha says, “We’re trying to bring accountability to an unaccountable war.” But it’s not accountability that the war needs; it needs an end.

By sanctioning the administration’s continuing use of mercenary corporations — instead of cutting off all funding to them — the Democrats leave the door open for a future escalation of the shadow war in Iraq. This, in turn, could pave the way for an array of secretive, politically well-connected firms that have profited tremendously under the current administration to elevate their status and increase their government paychecks.

Blackwater’s War

Consider the case of Blackwater USA.

A decade ago, the company barely existed; and yet, its “diplomatic security” contracts since mid-2004, with the State Department alone, total more than $750 million. Today, Blackwater has become nothing short of the Bush administration’s well-paid Praetorian Guard. It protects the U.S. ambassador and other senior officials in Iraq as well as visiting Congressional delegations; it trains Afghan security forces and was deployed in the oil-rich Caspian Sea region, setting up a “command and control” center just miles from the Iranian border. The company was also hired to protect FEMA operations and facilities in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, where it raked in $240,000 a day from the American taxpayer, billing $950 a day per Blackwater contractor.

Since September 11, 2001, the company has invested its lucrative government pay-outs in building an impressive private army. At present, it has forces deployed in nine countries and boasts a database of 21,000 additional troops at the ready, a fleet of more than 20 aircraft, including helicopter gun-ships, and the world’s largest private military facility — a 7,000 acre compound near the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina. It recently opened a new facility in Illinois (”Blackwater North”) and is fighting local opposition to a third planned domestic facility near San Diego (”Blackwater West”) by the Mexican border. It is also manufacturing an armored vehicle (nicknamed the “Grizzly”) and surveillance blimps.

The man behind this empire is Erik Prince, a secretive, conservative Christian, ex-Navy SEAL multimillionaire who bankrolls the President and his allies with major campaign contributions. Among Blackwater’s senior executives are Cofer Black, former head of counterterrorism at the CIA; Robert Richer, former Deputy Director of Operations at the CIA; Joseph Schmitz, former Pentagon Inspector General; and an impressive array of other retired military and intelligence officials. Company executives recently announced the creation of a new private intelligence company, “Total Intelligence,” to be headed by Black and Richer.

For years, Blackwater’s operations have been shrouded in secrecy. Emboldened by the culture of impunity enjoyed by the private sector in the Bush administration’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Blackwater’s founder has talked of creating a “contractor brigade” to support US military operations and fancies his forces the “FedEx” of the “national security apparatus.”

As the country debates an Iraq withdrawal, Congress owes it to the public to take down the curtain of secrecy surrounding these shadow forces that undergird the U.S. public deployment in Iraq. The President likes to say that defunding the war would undercut the troops. Here’s the truth of the matter: Continued funding of the Iraq war ensures tremendous profits for politically-connected war contractors. If Congress is serious about ending the occupation, it needs to rein in the unaccountable companies that make it possible and only stand to profit from its escalation.

Jeremy Scahill is the author of the New York Times bestseller Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He is currently a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute.

© Copyright 2007 Jeremy Scahill

 

Iraq’s Newest Graduate School

 

Blog Comment: Many of us are going to be saying, “I told you so,” and rightfully so, because there was NO CHANCE this could have happened had George W. Bush not invaded Iraq. Some may say that this is nothing more than an idle boast or empty propaganda. That would be a very inaccurate perception and saying so would be propaganda itself. The fact of the matter remains that Iraq was NOT a threat to the United States, or anyone else. Now, it serves as a Graduate School for people who WILL DO HARM to citizens around the world.

What is truly egregious is that the American people do not seem to have the will to hold this Administration responsible. The obvious intentional manipulation of facts in the run up to the war, the blatant lies to the public, the Congress, the United Nations; were nothing more than an attempt to deceive us, yet we hold no one accountable. Is the Constitution of the United States now an irrelevant document? It appears so.

In place of “staying the course” with an intense focus on all those responsible for the attacks on 9/11, we are asked to “stay the course” in graduating a whole new generation of people who terrorize our children and grandchildren.

I leave you with the Reuters report and this thought by President John F. Kennedy, it is taken from his remarks to the American University on June 10, 1963;

“What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children — not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women — not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.”

###

Qaeda group says Iraq a “university of terror”

Reuters News Service

Tue Apr 17, 2007 8:25AM EDT

By Firouz Sedarat

DUBAI (Reuters) – The head of an al Qaeda-led group in Iraq said the country has become a “university of terrorism” producing highly qualified warriors since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

In an audio recording posted on the Internet on Tuesday, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, leader of the self-styled Islamic State in Iraq, said his fighters were successfully confronting U.S. forces in Iraq and have begun producing a guided missile called al-Quds 1 or Jerusalem 1.

“The largest batch of soldiers for jihad … in the history of Iraq are graduating and they have the highest level of competence in the world,” Baghdadi said.

He also sought to mend fences with other anti-U.S. insurgent groups in Iraq following reports of tensions between them.

“From the military point of view, one of the (enemy) devils was right in saying that if Afghanistan was a school of terror, then Iraq is a university of terrorism,” said the leader of the group set up last year by al Qaeda’s Iraq wing and some other Sunni groups.

“We would like to inform the mujahideen all over the world, and especially in Iraq, that the Quds (Jerusalem) 1 rocket has gone into the phase of military production,” Baghdadi said, adding that its length, weight, range and precision “matches those of world powers”.

The authenticity of the tape, issued to mark the fourth anniversary of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, could not be verified. But it was posted on Web sites often used by al Qaeda and other insurgent groups in Iraq.

“The fear of the American Marines has disappeared from the hearts of the people of the world, as the mujahideen have become thousands from the few they were after the fall of the infidel Baath regime,” Baghdadi said. “These are just some of the achievements of four years of jihad.”

Baghdadi called on insurgents to maintain their unity, warning that enemies wanted to cause splits in their ranks. “Our friendship is deep … and ties between us are stronger than some believe,” he said.

His comments appeared to confirm reports of a growing rift between his militant group and other insurgent organizations that accused al Qaeda of trying to impose control over them.

Addressing insurgent groups such as the Islamic Army in Iraq and the Ansar al-Sunna, Baghdadi said he strongly opposed any fighting between insurgent groups and vowed to take all necessary measures to prevent bloodshed.

“By God, you will not hear or see but good things (from us),” he said.

Baghdadi’s group has claimed responsibility for mass kidnappings and a series of major attacks.

© Reuters 2006.

 

###

 

 

Truth Comes Out

The truth is finally coming out of Iraq, or perhaps, we should start this out by saying, we now learn about more lies by the Bush Administration.

In a report today filed by Charles J. Hanley, Special Correspondent to the Associated Press, we find a high level Iraqi speaking out about the corruption, incompetence, and mismanagement in Baghdad, all because of the micromanagement of the Administration. We also lay blame at the feet of the mainstream media, for their wholesale willingness to spread the propaganda of lies and deceit.

In place of truth, the Administration continues to delude themselves and the American public; and the press is content to placate their corporate masters with half truths, and fairy tales of successes that just DOES NOT exist.

Here is the report by Mr. Hanley, you can judge for yourself:

Iraqi details ’shocking’ U.S. missteps

In a rueful reflection on what might have been, an Iraqi government insider details in 500 pages the U.S. occupation’s “shocking” mismanagement of his country — a performance so bad, he writes, that by 2007 Iraqis had “turned their backs on their would-be liberators.”

“The corroded and corrupt state of Saddam was replaced by the corroded, inefficient, incompetent and corrupt state of the new order,” Ali A. Allawi concludes in “The Occupation of Iraq,” newly published by Yale University Press.

Allawi writes with authority as a member of that “new order,” having served as Iraq’s trade, defense and finance minister at various times since 2003. As a former academic, at Oxford University before the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq, he also writes with unusual detachment.

The U.S.- and British-educated engineer and financier is the first senior Iraqi official to look back at book length on his country’s four-year ordeal. It’s an unsparing look at failures both American and Iraqi, an account in which the word “ignorance” crops up repeatedly.

First came the “monumental ignorance” of those in Washington pushing for war in 2002 without “the faintest idea” of Iraq’s realities. “More perceptive people knew instinctively that the invasion of Iraq would open up the great fissures in Iraqi society,” he writes.

What followed was the “rank amateurism and swaggering arrogance” of the occupation, under L. Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which took big steps with little consultation with Iraqis, steps Allawi and many others see as blunders:

• The Americans disbanded Iraq’s army, which Allawi said could have helped quell a rising insurgency in 2003. Instead, hundreds of thousands of demobilized, angry men became a recruiting pool for the resistance.

• Purging tens of thousands of members of toppled President Saddam Hussein’s Baath party — from government, school faculties and elsewhere — left Iraq short on experienced hands at a crucial time.

• An order consolidating decentralized bank accounts at the Finance Ministry bogged down operations of Iraq’s many state-owned enterprises.

• The CPA’s focus on private enterprise allowed the “commercial gangs” of Saddam’s day to monopolize business.

• Its free-trade policy allowed looted Iraqi capital equipment to be spirited away across borders.

• The CPA perpetuated Saddam’s fuel subsidies, selling gasoline at giveaway prices and draining the budget.

In his 2006 memoir of the occupation, Bremer wrote that senior U.S. generals wanted to recall elements of the old Iraqi army in 2003, but were rebuffed by the Bush administration. Bremer complained generally that his authority was undermined by Washington’s “micromanagement.”

Although Allawi, a cousin of Ayad Allawi, Iraq’s prime minister in 2004, is a member of a secularist Shiite Muslim political grouping, his well-researched book betrays little partisanship.

On U.S. reconstruction failures — in electricity, health care and other areas documented by Washington’s own auditors — Allawi writes that the Americans’ “insipid retelling of `success’ stories” merely hid “the huge black hole that lay underneath.”

For their part, U.S. officials have often largely blamed Iraq’s explosive violence for the failures of reconstruction and poor governance.

The author has been instrumental since 2005 in publicizing extensive corruption within Iraq’s “new order,” including an $800-million Defense Ministry scandal. Under Saddam, he writes, the secret police kept would-be plunderers in check better than the U.S. occupiers have done.

As 2007 began, Allawi concludes, “America’s only allies in Iraq were those who sought to manipulate the great power to their narrow advantage. It might have been otherwise.”

###

A final thought, last November, the American people spoke in a loud and clear voice. However, it is apparent our elected representatives did not hear us. For the upcoming election in 2008, I hope all citizens who can vote will. I hope you will join those of us who want to reclaim our country from the corporate robber barons and the spineless Representatives and Senators who obviously represent them, not the citizens. Start now, speak up, and write your Representatives and Senators, demand they put an end to the madness started by Bush, Cheney and their minions. Demand they act now or face the wrath of the voters in November.

I leave you with these pictures, which speak louder than the empty words of our politicians……

The Bush policy is making a whole new generation of people that will hate America!

 

 

The Few, The Proud, The Disillusioned

As the son of a World War II veteran, having grown up on military bases, having volunteered for Viet-Nam (only to be rejected because of being born with holes in my heart), having been in the same hospitals (Water Reed and Brooke General) as those wounded and burned (getting caught in a Napalm strike) in Viet-Nam, I have and will always will support our men and women in uniform.

That said, I am also against war as a means to settle disputes, or nation build, or secure “strategic interests.” War should always be the last resort when threatened with belligerency. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Republican President, Supreme Commander Allied Forces Europe, said in a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”

General Omar Bradley, said in a speech on Nov. 11, 1948, “The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.”

In comments following the surrender of Japan on the USS Missouri (Sept. 2, 1945) General Douglas MacArthur said, “Men since the beginning of time have sought peace. Various methods through the ages have been attempted to devise an international process to prevent or settle disputes between nations. From the very start workable methods were found in so far as individual citizens were concerned, but the mechanics of an instrumentality of larger international scope have never been successful. Military alliances, balances of power, Leagues of Nations, all in turn failed, leaving the only path to be by way of the crucible of war. The utter destructiveness of war now blocks out this alternative. We have had our last chance. If we will not devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door.”

Furthermore, in his Farewell to the Nation at a Joint Session of Congress (April 19, 1951) he said; “It has been said, in effect, that I was a warmonger. Nothing could be further from the truth. I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a means of settling international disputes. … But once war is forced upon us, there is no other alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end. War’s very object is victory, not prolonged indecision. In war there is no substitute for victory.”

One has to doubt if President Bush has ever heard of these men, much less thought about heeding their wise counsel. We are now embroiled in another Viet-Nam.

To Mr. Ergo, I say Semper Fi. (For those who do not know the history of this motto, it is short of for Semper Fidelis – Latin for “Always Faithful” and it was adopted by the U.S. Marine Corps in 1883.) I say Semper Fi because I will always be faithful to the men and women who give so willing of their lives, who return home wounded in body, mind, and spirit. I support them, however, I cannot support killing for any reason, much less one of “nation building,” built on lies and deception, and corporate greed.

Our service men and women deserve better. It is time we join The Few, The Proud, The Disillusioned, and call for Washington to ACT NOW! BRING OUR TROOPS HOME!

###

From the San Francisco Chronicle

 

THE FEW.

THE PROUD.

THE DISILLUSIONED.

 

Conflict in Iraq: Some active duty troops, while proud to serve, are speaking out and signing a petition against the war.

 

Joe Garofoli, Chronicle Staff Writer

 

Saturday, April 7, 2007

Mike Ergo is a 23-year-old honorably discharged Marine who fought in Fallujah. A tattoo on the inside of his left forearm depicts the first insurgent he killed in Iraq. A tattoo on his right arm reads: “Born to Fight.” He loves the Marines, is proud of what he and his colleagues did overseas and is on inactive ready reserve through July 2009.

Yet a few weeks ago, the Walnut Creek native marched near the front of the anti-war demonstration that rolled through San Francisco. Yeah, he said, it felt odd to march among the 9/11 conspiracy theorists and socialists. Still, Ergo said he’d march again to underscore his opposition to U.S. foreign policy in Iraq and would try to bring more than the handful of Iraq War veterans who demonstrated with him last month.

But Ergo knows that the number of soldiers who publicly oppose the war is likely to remain small for now. A chief reason: Unlike the men drafted into military service during the Vietnam War, those fighting in Iraq are volunteers and feel obligated to be patriotic defenders of post-9/11 soil.

Yet a few signs of dissent are appearing in the military aside from conscientious objectors and newly realized pacificists. Last month, a career chief master sergeant in the Air Force wrote an opinion piece in the military newspaper Stars and Stripes opposing the war, and a busload of retired veterans and civilian activists toured military bases in the South, hoping to coax more support from active duty soldiers. Over the past month, more than 1,700 soldiers have signed an online Appeal for Redress — www.appealforredress.org — a legally sanctioned way for members of the military to oppose the war.

A couple of underground publications like GI Special at www.militaryproject.org, have sprung up online, and supportive troops have clandestinely dropped hard copies inside military barracks.

Last week, retired Marine Corps Lt. Col. Andrew Horne, who served in the Persian Gulf two years ago, rebutted President Bush’s weekly radio address.

Said Horne: “The commander-in-chief has failed to properly lead the troops, and previous Congresses didn’t ask the tough questions or demand accountability. The result is the mess we are in today.”

These inside-the-fortress expressions of opposition are almost always prefaced with words of respect for the military, of their comrades’ patriotic service to their country.

This rhetorical approach is far different from the widespread protests and defiant sloganeering of the ’60s and ’70s. By the Vietnam War’s end, more than 100 underground newspapers were published by anti-war soldiers, and thousands of soldiers had participated in peace demonstrations. Peaceniks established a network of off-base coffeehouses in military towns, giving GIs and peace activists a place to interact casually and foment more opposition to the war.

While opinion polls today show that a majority of Americans oppose the war, “95 percent of Americans haven’t been touched by the war. It’s not that they don’t care,” said Air Force Chief Master Sgt. Jeff Slocum, who wrote the Stars and Stripes opinion column supporting the online petition against the war.

But few uniformed opponents have surfaced. Iraq Veterans Against the War, an organization for uniformed opposition, gets only 10 new members a week. The 1,700-plus vets who signed the online petition are a fraction of the 1.5 million who have been deployed in the war on terrorism.

“It would be a tremendous boost to have more active duty demonstrating,” said Cherie Eichholz, a veteran and an organizer with Veterans for Peace, “because they have firsthand knowledge of what’s going on over there on the ground, and they have a credibility with the public because of their service.”

Eichholz, who volunteered for the Army after the Sept. 11 attacks and was discharged after being injured in training, said some vets’ peace groups are changing their strategy.

Last month, she was part of a convoy of 25 activists and retired vets who toured military bases in the South as part of a trial effort to aggressively court uniformed opponents. They handed out 5,000 copies of the Appeal for Redress and got a few dozen returned in days. The document states: “As a patriotic American proud to serve the nation in uniform, I respectfully urge my political leaders in Congress to support the prompt withdrawal of all American military forces and bases from Iraq. Staying in Iraq will not work and is not worth the price.” The numbers might seem minuscule, Eichholz said, but she is encouraged by the hundreds of off-duty conversations she has had with young soldiers — so much so that her organization is planning four similar caravans to tour towns near U.S. militaryinstallations this summer.

But the limited expression of anti-war support among the military “just shows that the overwhelming majority of guys are in favor of the mission in Iraq,” said Navy Lt. Jason Nichols. An information technology specialist stationed in Iraq, Nichols is asking soldiers to sign an online petition called Appeal for Courage, www. appealforcourage.org, that supports the mission and opposes the Redress appeal. “Most of them (who oppose the war) can’t answer the question: So what do we do now?”

Speaking out can be costly, especially for career soldiers. Two weeks after he wrote the Stars and Stripes column, Slocum decided to retire in October, long before he had planned.

“I got to thinking that I don’t know if I can continue to wear two hats,” said Slocum, 41, a veteran of 21 years in the service who is stationed near Fayetteville, N.C. He began opposing the war after disclosures that the United States went to war based on faulty intelligence. His peers told him to find a way to support the war. “That would be OK,” he said, “if I didn’t know what I already know.”

Ergo, the Marine, believes another factor is behind this reticence: Many returning soldiers are still too overwhelmed with the effects of post-traumatic stress syndrome, one of the war’s signature wounds — including him. Ergo was diagnosed with the condition shortly after leaving the service in 2005.

For months after he returned home, a never-ending clip of the men he saw die and of those he killed reeled through his mind. He enrolled in Diablo Valley College, but within months he was missing class. He’d start driving to school, then turn around, afraid of the people he’d have to deal with there.

“It was this impending sense of something big was about to happen,” he said. “The feeling I’d got when we were about to go into combat. I was afraid of dealing with people who would say something against the war, or make me angry. I was afraid of flipping out and maybe hurting someone.”

He began regularly seeing a counselor last fall and began feeling better. At the same time, he began to read more about the government’s reasons for invading Iraq. He started communicating with vets he found on a MySpace page for the Iraq Veterans Against the War.

“It’s hard enough to deal with the experiences that went on in Iraq, let alone to have opinions on it,” Ergo said. “When people come back, they’d rather just move on and not remember all that stuff. And not try to live in the past.

“And if you don’t live by a vet center, you might just sit around, listen to music and drink. It can definitely be a downward spiral,” he said.

His opinion of the war changed shortly after November 2004, when he was involved in fierce house-to-house searches for insurgents in Fallujah. He would kick in doors and often see an insurgent shooting at him from close range. Iraqi women and children would walk down the street, and insurgents would maneuver among the citizens, using them as shields.

The tension was emotionally exhausting.

“You’re spending your days driving around the highways looking for people who are hiding, and they blow you up from a mile away with a remote detonator,” he said. “Or they shoot at you from a building and put their weapon down and walk through the streets. And if you kill someone, you could potentially turn that town against you whether it’s justified or not.”

He came out publicly against the war after returning home.

“I was turned off by the apathy of all the people in this area, Walnut Creek, and other upper-middle-class communities who thought things were going fine or are so removed from the war,” he said. “Like the people I was going to school with (Diablo Valley College) were just worried about what’s on “TRL,” MTV’s “Total Request Live” program.

Ergo plans to talk about his experience in schools and to speak before other organizations. He is not a counter-recruiter; he urges people to “do their research” before they enlist. And he understands that many active duty soldiers won’t speak out.

“They don’t want to be associated with a movement they see as entirely leftist or irrational or hippies from Berkeley or San Francisco,” he said. “But once people see us on the news, maybe they’ll say, ‘Hey, that guy has a short haircut, he looks like he could still be in. He wears tucked-in shirts. He doesn’t have long hair.’ “

Ergo doesn’t have to look far to see his own wounds from the war. The man whose face flashes in his mind is tattooed on his left forearm. It reminds him how much he and other soldiers — and Iraqis — have sacrificed in this war.

“I have to see it,” Ergo said. “So I want everyone else to see it, too.”

E-mail Joe Garofoli at jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/07/MNGTTP4OGN1.DTL

This article appeared on page A – 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

 

 

###

 

I LEAVE YOU WITH TWO FINAL THOUGHTS….

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

“Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels – men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.”

– Dwight D. Eisenhower

 

 

Palestine and the Middle East

In the photo, Palestinian youths look at the blood stains of their friends who died when an Israeli tank fired on their home. Israeli youths have had to look at the same type of scene. Why do we continue to allow this to happen in our world? Where is our humanity? Where is our compassion? Read on to understand why I ask these questions and what I see as a solution.

All of my adult life has seen conflict in the Middle East. From what I know of history, this conflict is rooted in its people and religious beliefs, even between Muslims. Moreover, the events of the last fifty years of the 20^th Century are defining moments that we need to look at. Looking at this short-term history, during World War II, some Arabs sided with the Axis, others with the Allies. After the war, the British withdrew from the Palestine Mandate. This was mostly due to the increasing violence and their unwillingness to commit more resources to a growing volatile situation. With the UN Partition Plan of 1947, a Jewish state was created taking around 55% of the land and the rest was given to the Palestinians. Mind you, the Palestinians had called this their land for the past six centuries. The plan was accepted by the Jewish people and naturally rejected by the Arab League. The immediate aftermath was fighting which brought about what the Jewish people call, the War of Independence. The rest is as they say, history, the Suez Crisis, the Six Day War, the Yom Kippur War, The Lebanon War’s, the First and Second Intifada, all without real resolution or prospects for peace. Why?

 

I believe former President Jimmy Carter has best elucidated the core issue in his recent book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. The Nobel Peace laureate, who will always be remembered for his Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, has drawn sharp criticism for making this analogy. However, I feel his choice of terms to describe the current situation in Palestine is completely accurate. In an interview with Amazon.com, he gave this explanation on why he chose this word.

 

 

“Forced segregation in the West Bank and terrible oppression of the Palestinians create a situation accurately described by the word. I made it plain in the text that this abuse is not based on racism, but on the desire of a minority of Israelis to confiscate and colonize Palestinian land. This violates the basic humanitarian premises on which the nation of Israel was founded.”

 

 

 

From what I can find on the internet, here is a breakdown of deaths, for both Palestinians and Israelis, during the six-year period of 2000 to 2006¹. (Note: these figures are not entirely accurate, but are close enough to get an idea of the real problem.)

 

Total Number of Palestinian deaths = 4209

 

* Children: 892

* Women : 273

* Men : 3044

 

Palestinians killed by Jewish settlers = 72

Palestinians killed as a result of Israeli shelling = 83

Deaths as a result of medical prevention at Israeli checkpoints = 117

* Of them stillbirths (born dead at checkpoints) = 31

Number of Palestinians extra-judicially assassinated = 561

* Of them bystanders killed during extra-judicial operations: 253

 

Total Number Israeli deaths = 1113

 

* Children = 113

* Women = 305

* Men = 603

* Settlers = 213

* Soldiers = 322

 

A UN study declares the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip “intolerable”, with 75% of the population dependent on food aid², and an estimated 80% of the population living below the poverty line³. The Palestinian economy had largely relied on Western aid and revenues, which has been frozen since Hamas’s victory. The situation can also be attributed to Israeli closures, for which Israel and the EU cite security concerns, specifically smuggling, possible weapons transfers and uninhibited return of exiled extremist leaders and terrorists; as well as an extremely high birth rate.

 

Until we find the moral courage to level the playing field, to support the Palestinian people the same way we support Israel, we will never find peace, nor will we find a solution to the terror question.

 

 

Put yourself in the shoes of a young Palestinian man. Most likely, he either is unemployed or under employed, working for literally a few dollars a day. He does not have the opportunity to further his education. He does not have the ability to take his girlfriend on a real date. He does not have a chance to change his life. He does not have hope for the future. He sees young Israeli and western men doing these things and he naturally feels animosity for them. By leveling the playing field, economically and politically, we will reduce overall animosity for United States policy and Israelis in general. Folks, this is not rocket science, it is just plain common sense.

 

 

I cannot find a way to see peace in the Middle East as long as we, the United States and Europe, have two very separate and disparate support of ALL the people there. The Arab-Israeli conflict is the linchpin to the problem. Solve this quandary and you will solve the rest of the dilemma.

 

If human kind is to avoid a “clash of civilizations”, then we must find it within ourselves to understand the dynamics of the Middle East problem, we must find it within ourselves to recognize the humanity of all the peoples there. We must engender dialogue, open honest discussion, and keep the lines of communication open between all parties to the region.

 

We need the leaders of the United States, the European Union, and the Arab League to come to the negotiating table. It is time for humanity to tell the radical fundamentalist, of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, we have had enough! It is time for mankind to put an end to this 60-year-old conflict. I fear that if we fail to do this, the human race is not long for this world.

 

 

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Israeli-Palestinian_conflict

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Israeli-Palestinian_conflict#September_2006

Iraq’s Other Surge

How can we win the hearts and minds of the people in the Middle East, let alone the people of Iraq, if we fail to step up to the plate and do the right thing?

I offer you the following report, found the other day on the Internet.

From Human Rights Watch

By Bill Frelick, published in The Wall Street Journal

February 15, 2007

Najah worked as an interpreter for the U.S. military at the Falcon base in Baghdad. One day as he left base, a car sprayed him with bullets, hitting him in both legs and his abdomen. Najah left the hospital after two days, fearing insurgents would find him there and kill him: “After the shooting, everyone knew I was working for the Americans.” After recovering sufficiently, he fled to Jordan, where he is stuck without papers, and could be deported at any time.

While Washington debates the surge of troops to Iraq, it has only recently begun to acknowledge the surge in refugees leaving Iraq. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that 50,000 per month are fleeing Iraq and that their numbers in neighboring countries may soon reach two million. Yet last year the U.S. admitted only 202 Iraqi refugees, and has done next to nothing since the war began to assist neighboring countries to bear the refugee burden. Condoleezza Rice unveiled a new plan on Wednesday to resettle 7,000 Iraqi refugees. After three years of ignoring the refugee fallout from the war, this is a welcome first step. But will it be enough to convince Syria and Jordan to keep doors open?

While America has a special obligation to rescue Iraqis who have been specifically persecuted because they helped U.S. troops or Americans working in Iraq, it is central to U.S. interests to address the destabilizing effects and humanitarian needs in the region of a much larger group of refugees — Sunnis and Shiites fleeing mixed areas, members of the professional classes, religious minorities, and people perceived as Western in orientation.

This week the crisis worsened when Syria tightened residency rules for a million Iraqi refugees there, raising fears that mass deportations will begin. Jordan has started barring single men between 17 and 35 at the border and is unwilling to recognize 700,000 Iraqis living there as refugees. Neither country has received more than token assistance from the international community that might convince them to keep their doors open. International donors provided only $14 million of UNHCR’s $29 million request last year for refugees in the region. The U.S. provided 27%.

First, the U.S. needs to make sure that neighboring countries have resources to provide for the refugees’ basic needs. The total UNHCR request of $60 million for this year is what the U.S. spends every five hours to fight the war. The U.S. shouldn’t waste precious weeks quibbling with the Europeans on their contributions. The sum is modest, part of the price of the war: Just pay it. Second, assistance should have strings attached. Jordan and Syria must keep their doors open to refugees. They must allow Iraqi children to go to school. Humanitarian aid should enable refugees to stay in the region in conditions of safety and dignity until it is safe for them to go home.

Finally, the U.S. needs to move quickly to resettle significant numbers of Iraqi refugees, particularly those who risked their lives to help Americans, who cannot go home. Resettlement not only fulfills a moral responsibility with deep roots — Hungary, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam. It also shows the Middle East that the U.S. is committed to helping with the most difficult part of any refugee emergency — where to put the people themselves. Resettlement ultimately shows solidarity both with the people who put their lives on the line in the U.S. war effort and with the countries who need to be convinced that they will not be left to bear the burden alone.

Mr. Frelick is the refugee policy director for Human Rights Watch.