Gavin's Blog

Fascinating graphic. Watch it.

Al-Qaeda are now apparently claiming that they were the ones to snatch the Egyptian’s top diplomat in Iraq:

“We announce, al Qaeda in Iraq, that the Egyptian ambassador had been kidnapped by our mujahedeen, and he is under their control,” said a statement on an Islamic Web site linked to the group. CNN could not confirm the statement’s authenticity. The posting said al-Zarqawi is expected to issue a longer announcement soon.

Armor Geddon has posted a 60Mb video(the bottom one marked IED) of a patrol in Iraq, and how to deal with a suspected IED. Here is his account of the day.

Fred Kaplan with a good piece on the Downing Street memo:

The key passage of the memo—which lays down the minutes of a July 23, 2002, British Cabinet meeting and was obtained and published by the Times of London just last month—is also the one that’s gained the greatest notoriety:

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.

“C,” as is now well known, was the code name for Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, the British foreign-intelligence service. Most discussion of this passage has focused on its final sentence and the meaning of the phrase “fixed around.” But the most interesting part, for purposes of this discussion, is the second sentence: “There was a perceptible shift in attitude.” When Dearlove had been in Washington some time before, war was not a certainty; yet during this most recent visit, the whiff of gunpowder was distinctly in the air.

It would be useful to know the precise timing of Dearlove’s “recent talks in Washington”—and of his most recent visit before that. Still, if his perception (or, perhaps, his American source, who would have been then director of the CIA George Tenet) is to be trusted, the Bush administration seems to have firmly decided on war sometime in the late spring of 2002.

This inference is bolstered by an article that Nicholas Lemann wrote in the March 31, 2003, issue of The New Yorker, shortly after the war began. In it, he quotes Richard Haass—then the State Department’s director of policy planning—recalling a meeting with Condoleezza Rice, then Bush’s national security adviser, in the first week of July 2002:

Condi and I have regular meetings, once every month or so—she and I get together for thirty or forty-five minutes, just to review the bidding. And I raised this issue about were we really sure that we wanted to put Iraq front and center at this point, given the war on terrorism and other issues. And she said, essentially, that that decision’s been made, don’t waste your breath. And that was early July. … For me, it was that meeting with Condi that made me realize it was farther along than I had realized.

This is a long and interesting take on some of the more ‘elite’ members of the Iraqi security forces.

General Adnan, as he is known, is the leader of Iraq’s most fearsome counterinsurgency force. It is called the Special Police Commandos and consists of about 5,000 troops. They have fought the insurgents in Mosul, Ramadi, Baghdad and Samarra. It was in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad in the heart of the Sunni Triangle, where, in early March, I spent a week with Adnan, himself a Sunni, and two battalions of his commandos. Samarra is Adnan’s hometown, and he had come to retake it. As the offensive to drive out the insurgents got under way, the only area securely under Adnan’s control was a barricaded enclave around the town hall, where he grimly presided over matters of war and peace, but mostly war, chain-smoking Royal cigarettes at a raised desk in the mayor’s office. With a jowly face set in a permanent scowl, Adnan is perfectly suited to the grim realities of Iraq, and he knows it. When an admiring American colonel compared him to Marlon Brando in ”The Godfather,” Adnan took it as a compliment and smiled.

Sad news indeed. Is it me or does it always come across as more tragic when it’s an air accident? Same goes for commercial airlines too, somehow I think one can more closely related to it.

Following reports of ethic tensions, kidnappings, threats of mass-killings, it appears that the whole thing was exaggerated just a little. The NY Times reports:

Anyone in Baghdad this morning could have been forgiven for thinking the country was on the verge of civil war.

Three Iraqi Army battalions had surrounded the town of Madaen, just south of the capital, where Sunni kidnappers were said to be threatening to kill hundreds of Shiite hostages unless all Shiites left the town. As the national assembly met, Iraq’s top political figures warned of a grave sectarian crisis. Iraq’s most revered Shiite cleric issued a plea for restraint. Even the outgoing prime minister released a statement decrying the “savage, filthy, and dirty atrocities” in Madaen.

But as the army battalions arrived in Madaen, they saw streets full of people calmly sipping tea in cafés and going about their business. There were no armed Sunni mobs, no cowering Shiite victims. After hours of careful searches, the soldiers assisted by air surveillance found no evidence of any kidnappings or refugees at all.

By this afternoon, Iraqi army officials were reporting that the crisis in Madaen, which had been narrated in a stream of breathless television reports and news agency stories, was nothing but a tissue of rumors and politically motivated accusations.

The hysteria over Madaen was one vivid illustration of the way Iraq’s daily violence and sectarian tension, which are real enough, can be easily twisted into fantasy here. In a country where phones are unreliable and roads between cities often blocked, facts can give way to a fast-running engine of rumor. And most people have good reason to believe the worst.

Crazy stuff.

Dan Drezner has a good post on current efforts in Iraq, drawing from a number of sources. Encouraging stuff. I would have added John Simpson’s first column on the BBC site to the list too. He, as ever, has a good take on the situation.

Yet the basic problem remains: the Sunni population is as angry, resentful and resistance-minded as ever.

As the supporters of the invasion are finding two years on, you cannot step in, change the structure of a nation fundamentally and make everyone happy. There is a ferocious price to be paid, and on average two coalition soldiers and 20 Iraqi civilians pay it daily.

Or better yet, have a read of Husayn:

I dont care what your news tells you, what your television and newspapers say, this is how we feel. Despite all that has happened. Despite all the hurt, the pain, blood, sweat and tears. These two years have given us hope we never had.

All this while Yglesias raises the issue of having permanent military bases in Iraq:

…the elephant in the corner of American Iraq policy, the fact that near as anybody can tell the administration is still trying to finagle some kind of permanent military basing agreement in Iraq. That the administration has managed to hew consistently to this agenda without ever stating that this is one of their major policy goals is astounding, and that the American media is consistently unwilling to discuss the point is appalling. What’s even more astounding about it is that one regularly hears and reads in expert commentary that we ought to “make clear” that this isn’t what we’re doing. Apparently, it’s impolitic to note that Bush isn’t making it clear that we don’t want permanent bases because we do, in fact, want permanent bases.

Kevin Drum also weighs in on the issue.

Kieran Healy writes a good post on the Iraqi elections, and loosely compares it to the foundation of the Irish State. [Via Dan]

Let’s hope that Sunnis will also be happy with the new assembly. Importantly:

Electoral officials estimated that up to eight million Iraqis voted – more than 60% of those registered.

Some other sources are giving figures as high as 72%