Troop Pullout Not the End of U.S. Presence In Iraq

NPR, All Things Considered, December 13, 2011 Tuesday

Biden: Iraq Will Be A Partner; History Will Judge If War Was Worth It

Iraq and the US are on the same page on Syria?  The US believes yes, the only concern Iraq has over sanction against Syria is adverse impact on poor, ordinary people.

ROBERT SIEGEL: Prime Minister al-Maliki expressed some reservations about sanctions against Syria. He remembers the sanctions against Iraq. With the Iraqis taking a different view of Syria on such a basic question, can the president persuade him, persuade the Iraqis?

JOSEPH BIDEN: It is not a fundamentally different view. Maliki has had overwhelming difficulty with Assad, has had confrontations with him, supports the Arab League's position, but is skeptical about whether or not the sanctions will result in the outcome -- getting rid of Assad and a stable government coming to the fore.  But we have no fundamental disagreement with the Iraqis

After the US pulls out of Iraq, Iran is likely to fill the vacuum?

ROBERT SIEGEL: Since Iraqi Shiites, Prime Minister Maliki among them, have very strong, historic religious ties with the biggest Shiite country, Iran, what is an appropriate limit to Iranian influence on that?

JOSEPH BIDEN:  .. the fact they share a religion, a Shiite religion, does not mean that they are close. .. the fact of the matter is that Maliki has been very tough with the Iranians. .. So there's no indication that Prime Minister Maliki is any other than a nationalist.

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NPR, Talk Of The Nation, December 13, 2011 Tuesday

Troop Pullout Not The End Of U.S. Presence In Iraq

Ted Koppel

The danger of a nation that is supporting terrorism. Oil, which was the great unspoken issue in 2002 and 2003, very much a part of this. The difference, of course, now is that the target is Iran, not Iraq. But the two are very close to one another, and the fact of the matter is that Iran is exercising an enormous influence throughout Iraq. 

And the oil fields, which have under the surface, they have something - I believe it's the second-largest reserves of any country in the world. That's all very close to Iran, and if Iran were to exercise significant political, let alone military, control in that region, together with their own oil and gas, they would have the capacity to wreak havoc on Western economies. 

the U.S. consulate down in Basra is rocketed two or three times a week

The first thing that happens when you arrive there is they give you a security briefing. And the security briefing is brief enough that I can give you here and now: When you hear the alarm, hit the deck face down. Put your hands over your ears, keep your mouth open, cross your legs. 

When you ask how long it is between the time that the alarm goes off and the rockets hit, the answer is .. about two seconds.

16,000 contractors and civilians that we're leaving behind

RICHARD: Yeah, I had a concern with those 16,000 contractors and civilians that we're leaving behind, basically without military protection. Are we setting up for another Iranian hostage crisis? And I don't mean the first one that everybody's forgotten about that was diffused nicely under Ambassador William Sullivan, but the second one that basically started Ted Koppel's fame as the leader of "Nightline," which was essentially to report on the Iranian hostage crisis that brought down a presidency

TED KOPPEL:  To this day, a good deal of Iran's military hardware is American, dating back to the time that we sold all the advanced weapon systems that we could to the shah of Iran.

 

What we have in Iraq today are hundreds, possibly even thousands, of civilian contractors who together with military trainers - the M1A1 tank for example is built by General Dynamics, and the people who are there are General Dynamics personnel who are training the Iraqis.

But that's - in many respects, that's a purely commercial proposition. The Iraqis over this past year or two have purchased $7.5 billion worth of weapons, and we have transferred another $2.5 billion under a foreign aid package.   

Shiite v. Sunni in Iraq

NEAL CONAN: This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I'm Neal Conan. When Ted Koppel visited Iraq recently on assignment for NBC's "Rock Center with Brian Williams," he spoke with one of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's official spokesmen who assured Koppel that the age-old Sunni-Shiite divide in Iraq is no longer an issue in his national forces.

Koppel then asked several uniformed officers about, some Sunni, some Shiite. At least one did not feel comfortable answering what to him was a sensitive question. Tensions have risen since the arrest of hundreds of former Baathists in the last couple of days. Some Iraqis fear the American withdrawal will leave room for divisions between Sunnis and Shiites to destabilize the country.

And I wanted to follow up with you, Ted, on that Shiite-Sunni divide. To call it a civil war is probably not exaggerating.  Back in 2005, 2006, 2007, many were dead. And it is the Shiites who are ascendant. The Sunnis under Saddam Hussein were ascendant. And many fear the withdrawal of the referee, as you will, the Americans, will provide the opportunity for this war to erupt again.

TED KOPPEL: Interestingly enough, back during the height of that fighting, some of the worst of it was down in Basra, Very heavily Shiite.

Prime Minister Maliki went down there ostensibly to suppress, and indeed ultimately they did suppress.  the Shiite forces who were largely supported by the Iranians.  

But that was done, although not much was made of it at the time, with very heavy U.S. military involvement.  Without that U.S. military involvement, I don't think A, Maliki would have gone down


No U.S. Troops, But An Army Of Contractors In Iraq
by TOM BOWMAN, NPR, December 27, 2011

(As many as 5,000 private security contractors will be protecting U.S. diplomats in Iraq. The U.S. Embassy compound (above) and several consulates will have about 15,000 workers, making it the largest diplomatic operation abroad.)

The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, along with several consulates, will have some 15,000 workers, making it the largest U.S. diplomatic operation abroad. Those diplomats will be protected by a private army consisting of as many as 5,000 security contractors who will carry assault weapons and fly armed helicopters.

Embassy personnel will ride in armored vehicles with armed guards, who work for companies with names like Triple Canopy and Global Strategies Group.

Their convoys will be watched from above. Another company, DynCorp International, will fly helicopters equipped with heavy machine guns.

"The order to fire is given by that U.S. government, State Department security professional," he says. "So the contractors just don't open fire."

But private security contractors did fire back in 2007 while protecting a State Department convoy in Baghdad. Seventeen Iraqis were killed by guards working for the company then-called Blackwater.

The shooting created a major controversy, and a U.S. investigation later found the convoy was not under threat.

The State Department has a shaky record overseeing armed guards. A recent congressional study found that many contractor abuses in Iraq during the war were caused by those working for the State Department, not the military.

The death of Kim Jong-il and Vaclav Havel

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/opinion/news/article.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=10775285

Jared Genser: Two legacies as different as good and evil

By Jared Genser , 5:30 AM Monday Dec 26, 2011

In a strange, and some might say divinely inspired juxtaposition, Vaclav Havel and Kim Jong-il died around the same time about a week ago.

Their lives and their impact on people's lives were extraordinarily different. It is therefore unsurprising that much as Havel was himself deeply concerned about the fate of the 24 million people of North Korea, there is little evidence to suggest Kim had much concern about anyone but himself. But what is troubling is that analysis of the impact of Kim's death by most experts and commentators has ignored Havel's observations about North Korea. Havel suffered under the yolk of oppression in Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia as a dissident playwright, poet, and polemicist. His writings, actions, and years in prison inspired his people to rise up against their totalitarian government, culminating in the Velvet Revolution and his election as President. He spent 13 years in office, being one of a few dissidents who have become effective Presidents.

And in his post-presidential years, he personally provided enormous aid and support to dissident movements and oppressed people around the world who yearned to be free.

But his enduring legacy will be his analysis of totalitarianism, what enables it to succeed, and how to oppose it. In simplified form, he often said "truth and love must prevail over lies and hate". On the other hand, Kim was a man on his own mission - to enrich himself, maintain power at any price, and to crush anyone who stood in his way. He was, in short, his father's son. It is hard to overstate the level of oppression he exerted on the population of the Hermit Kingdom. The abuses in North Korea under his rule were among the most severe in the world in the last 20 years.

As pro bono counsel to Havel, Elie Wiesel and former Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik, I worked with the Committee on Human Rights in North Korea and produced two reports on the human rights and humanitarian situation in the country.

The reports urged the invocation of the responsibility to protect doctrine, the obligation that all states have to prevent mass atrocities.

We concluded that North Korea was committing crimes against humanity against its own people. During its late 1990s famine, some one million people and perhaps many more died, and the population remains at constant risk of starvation with some 37 per cent of children chronically malnourished.

North Korea also operates a vast gulag system, with some 200,000 people imprisoned for real or imagined offences. These camps impose a brutal regimen on their populations, including forced labour, starvation-level rations, and widespread torture.

It is estimated more than 400,000 people have died in these camps in the past two decades. In that context, we urged the United Nations to create a commission of inquiry into crimes against humanity going on in North Korea.

Such an action would both document what has been happening and make recommendations on how the situation could be improved. It would also put pressure on the regime to engage with the United Nations on these critical issues.

Most of the analysis about the impact of Kim Jong-il's death has focused on questions about the stability of the new regime, its nuclear weapons programme, and what all this might mean for China, South Korea, and the world. I suspect this would not have been Havel's focus. I vividly recall a conversation with him about our work on North Korea where he made a simple observation - that the North Korean people's greatest concerns are their own survival and the abuses they suffer, not the country's nuclear programme.

Havel's profound truth should not be forgotten. While the external impact of North Korea on the world is an obvious focus, the international community continues to have an unfulfilled obligation to help ameliorate the suffering of the North Korean people.

* Jared Genser is a human rights lawyer and co-editor of The Responsibility to Protect: The Promise of Stopping Mass Atrocities in Our Times, Oxford University Press, 2011