Category: Iraq

Meet Professor Juan Cole, Consultant to the CIA

“Democracy Now?”

by JOHN WALSH

Juan Cole is a brand name that is no longer trusted. And that has been the case for some time for the Professor from Michigan. After warning of the “difficulties” with the Iraq War, Cole swung over to ply it with burning kisses on the day of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. His fervor was not based on Saddam Hussein’s fictional possession of weapons of mass destruction but on the virtues of “humanitarian imperialism.”

Thus on March 19, 2003, as the imperial invasion commenced, Cole enthused on his blog: “I remain (Emphasis mine.) convinced that, for all the concerns one might have about the aftermath, the removal of Saddam Hussein and the murderous Baath regime from power will be worth the sacrifices that are about to be made on all sides.” Now, with over 1 million Iraqis dead, 4 million displaced and the country’s infrastructure destroyed, might Cole still echo Madeline Albright that the price was “worth it”? Cole has called the Afghan War “the right war at the right time” and has emerged as a cheerleader for Obama’s unconstitutional war on Libya and for Obama himself.

Cole claims to be a man of the left and he appears with painful frequency on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now as the reigning “expert” on the war on Libya. This is deeply troubling – on at least two counts. First, can one be a member of the “left” and also an advocate for the brutal intervention by the Great Western Powers in the affairs of a small, relatively poor country? Apparently so, at least in Democracy Now’sversion of the “left.” Second, it appears that Cole’s essential function these days is to convince wavering progressives that the war on Libya has been fine and dandy. But how can such damaged goods as Cole credibly perform this marketing mission so vital to Obama’s war?

Miraculously, Cole got just the rehabilitation he needed to continue with this vital propaganda function when it was disclosed by the New York Times on June 15 that he was the object of a White House inquiry way back in 2005 in Bush time.   The source and reason for this leak and the publication of it by the NYT at this time, so many years later, should be of great interest, but they are unknown.   Within a week of the Timespiece Cole was accorded a hero’s welcome on Democracy Now, as he appeared with retired CIA agent Glenn Carle who had served 23 years in the clandestine services of the CIA in part as an “interrogator.” Carl had just retired from the CIA at the time of the White House request and was at the time employed at the National Intelligence Council, which authors the National Intelligence Estimate.

It hit this listener like a ton of bricks when it was disclosed in Goodman’s interview that Cole was a long time “consultant” for the CIA, the National Intelligence Council and other agencies. Here is what nearly caused me to keel over when I heard it (From the Democracy Nowtranscript.):

AMY GOODMAN: So, did you know Professor Cole or know of him at the time you were asked? And can you go on from there? What happened when you said you wouldn’t do this? And who was it who demanded this information from you, said that you should get information?

GLENN CARLE: Well, I did know Professor Cole. He was one of a large number of experts of diverse views that the National Intelligence Council and my office and the CIA respectively consult with to challenge our assumptions and understand the trends and issues on our various portfolios. So I knew him that way. And it was sensible, in that sense, that the White House turned to my office to inquire about him, because we were the ones, at least one of the ones—I don’t know all of Mr. Cole’s work—who had consulted with him. (Emphases mine.)

That seems like strange toil for a man of the “left.” But were the consultations long drawn out and the association with the CIA a deep one?   It would appear so. Again from the transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: Well, the way James Risen (the NYT reporter) writes it, he says, “Mr. Carle said [that] sometime that year, he was approached by his supervisor, David Low, about Professor Cole. [Mr.] Low and [Mr.] Carle have starkly different recollections of what happened. According to Mr. Carle, [Mr.] Low returned from a White House meeting one day and inquired who Juan Cole was, making clear [that] he wanted [Mr.] Carle to gather information on him. Mr. Carle recalled [his] boss saying, ‘The White House wants to get him.’”

GLENN CARLE: Well, that’s substantially correct. The one nuance, perhaps, I would point out is there’s a difference between collecting information actively, going out and running an operation, say, to find out things about Mr. Cole, or providing information known through interactions. (Emphasis mine.) I would characterize it more as the latter.

And later in the interview Carle continues:

On the whole, Professor Cole and I are in agreement. The distinction I make is it wasn’t publicly known information that was requested; it was information that officers knew of a personal nature about Professor Cole, which is much more disturbing.There was no direct request that I’m aware, in the two instances of which I have knowledge, for the officers actively to seek and obtain, to conduct—for me to go out and follow Professor Cole. But if I knew lifestyle questions or so on, to pass those along. (Emphasis mine.)That’s how I—which is totally unacceptable.

It would seem then that the interaction between the CIA operatives and Cole was long standing and sufficiently intimate that the CIA spooks could be expected to know things about Cole’s lifestyle and personal life. It is not that anyone should give two figs about Cole’s personal life which is more than likely is every bit as boring as he claims. But his relationship with the CIA is of interest since he is an unreconstructed hawk. What was remarkable to me at the time is that Goodman did not pick up on any of this. Did she know before of Cole’s connections? Was not this the wrong man to have as a “frequent guest,” in Goodman’s words, on the situation in the Middle East?

This is not to claim that Cole is on a mission for the CIA to convince the left to support the imperial wars, most notably at the moment the war on Libya. Nor is this a claim that the revelation about the White House seeking information on Cole was a contrived psyops effort to rehabilitate Cole so that he could continue such a mission. That cannot be claimed, because there is as yet no evidence for it. But information flows two ways in any consultation, and it is even possible that Cole was being loaded with war-friendly information in hopes he would transmit it.

Cole is anxious to promote himself as a man of the left as he spins out his rationale for the war on Libya. At one point he says to Goodman (3/29), “We are people of the left. We care about the ordinary people. We care about workers.” It is strange that a man who claims such views dismisses as irrelevant the progress that has come to the people of Libya under Gaddafi, dictator or not. (Indeed what brought Gaddafi down was not that he was a dictator but that he was not our dictator.) In fact Libya has the highest score of all African countries on the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI) and with Tunisia and Morocco the second highest level of literacy. The HDI is a comparative measure of life expectancy, literacy, education and standards of living for countries worldwide.

Whither the Left on the Question of Intervention?

None of this is all too surprising given Cole’s status as a “humanitarian” hawk. But it is outrageous that he is so often called on by Democracy Now for his opinion. One of his appearances there was in a debate on the unconstitutional war in Libya, with CounterPunch’s estimable Vijay Prashad taking the antiwar side and Cole prowar. It would seem strange for the left to have to debate the worth of an imperial intervention. Certainly if one goes back to the days of the Vietnam War there were teach-ins to inform the public of the lies of the U.S. government and the truth about what was going on in Vietnam. But let us give Democracy Now the benefit of the doubt and say that the debate was some sort of consciousness raising effort. Why later on invite as a frequent guest a man who was the pro-war voice in the debate? That is a strange choice indeed.

This writer does not get to listen to Democracy Now every day. But I have not heard a full-throated denunciation of the war on Libya from host or guests. Certainly according to a search on the DN web site, Cynthia McKinney did not appear as a guest nor Ramsey Clark after their courageous fact finding tour to Libya. There was only one all out denunciation of the war – on the day when the guests were Rev. Jesse Jackson and Vincent Harding who was King’s speechwriter on the famous speech “Beyond Vietnam” in 1967 in which King condemned the U.S. war on Vietnam. Jackson and the wise and keenly intelligent Harding were there not to discuss Libya but to discuss the MLK Jr. monument. Nonetheless Jackson and Harding made clear that they did not like the U.S. war in Libya one bit, nor the militarism it entails.

If one reads CounterPunch.org, Antiwar.com or The American Conservative, one knows that one is reading those who are anti-interventionist on the basis of principle. With Democracy Now and kindred progressive outlets, it’s all too clear where a big chunk of the so-called “left” stands, especially since the advent of Obama.   In his superb little book Humanitarian Imperialism Jean Bricmont criticizes much of the left for falling prey to advocacy of wars, supposedly based on good intentions. And Alexander Cockburn has often pointed out that many progressives are actually quite fond of “humanitarian” interventionism.   Both here and in Europe this fondness seems to be especially true of Obama’s latest war, the war on Libya . It is little wonder that the “progressives” are losing their antiwar following to Ron Paul and the Libertarians who are consistent and principled on the issue of anti-interventionism.

Democracy Now, quo vadis? Wherever you are heading, you would do well to travel without Juan Cole and his friends.

John V. Walsh can be reached at [email protected] After wading through Cole’s loose prose and dubious logic to write this essay, the author suspects that the rejection of Cole by the Yale faculty was the result of considerations that had little to do with neocon Bush/Cheney operatives.

www.counterpunch.org,

September 3, 2011
Ex-Bush Official Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: “I am Willing to Testify” If Dick Cheney is Put on Trial

As former Vice President Dick Cheney publishes his long-awaited memoir, we speak to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. “This is a book written out of fear, fear that one day someone will ‘Pinochet’ Dick Cheney,” says Wilkerson, alluding to the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who was arrested for war crimes. Wilkerson also calls for George W. Bush and Cheney to be held accountable for their crimes in office. “I’d be willing to testify, and I’d be willing to take any punishment I’m due,” Wilkerson said. We also speak to Salon.com political and legal blogger Glenn Greenwald about his recent article on Cheney, “The Fruits of Elite Immunity.” “Dick Cheney goes around the country profiting off of this sleazy, sensationalistic, self-serving book, basically profiting from his crimes, and at the same time normalizing the idea that these kind of policies…are perfectly legitimate choices to make. And I think that’s the really damaging legacy from all of this,” says Greenwald. [includes rush transcript]

Guests:

Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005.

Glenn Greenwald, constitutional law attorney and political and legal blogger for Salon.com.

AMY GOODMAN: Today marks the official launch of one of most anticipated memoirs of any top Bush administration official. I’m talking about former Vice President Dick Cheney’s 576-page memoir, In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir. Cheney has begun a publicity blitz to promote his new book, with a string of TV appearances scheduled on Fox News Channel, as well as C-SPAN and the major networks. He appeared on The Today Show this morning. This is an excerpt of his pre-taped interview with Jamie Gangel that aired last night on NBCNews Dateline.

JAMIE GANGEL: In your view, we should still be using enhanced interrogation?

DICK CHENEY: Yes.

JAMIE GANGEL: Should we still be waterboarding terror suspects?

DICK CHENEY: I would strongly support using it again if we had a high-value detainee and that was the only way we can get him to talk.

JAMIE GANGEL: People call it torture. You think it should still be a tool?

DICK CHENEY: Yes.

JAMIE GANGEL: Secret prisons?

DICK CHENEY: Yes.

JAMIE GANGEL: Wiretapping?

DICK CHENEY: Well, with the right approval.

JAMIE GANGEL: You say it is one of the things you are proudest of, and you would do it again in a heartbeat.

DICK CHENEY: It was controversial at the time. It was the right thing to do.

JAMIE GANGEL: No apologies?

DICK CHENEY: No apologies.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Dick Cheney speaking to Jamie Gangel onNBC Dateline. Cheney says his memoir is loaded with revelations. He told Gangel, quote, “There are going to be heads exploding all over Washington.”

In addition to unequivocally defending what he calls “tough interrogations” on captured terrorism suspects, Cheney writes he argued against softening the president’s speeches on Iraq. He says he sees no need for the administration to apologize for erroneously claiming Iraq hunted for uranium in Niger. Cheney also reveals he tried to have former Secretary of State Colin Powell removed from the cabinet for expressing doubts about the Iraq war. And Cheney notes he unsuccessfully urged President George W. Bush to bomb Syria in June 2007.

One of those to come under the most scrutiny in the book is Bush’s former Secretary of State, Colin Powell. This is an excerpt of Cheney’s interview with Jamie Gangel, again from Dateline.

JAMIE GANGEL: The portrait you paint of Colin Powell makes it sound as if he was disloyal and undermining the administration.

DICK CHENEY: Well, those are your words. I don’t think I say it as harshly as you have presented it. I did feel that the State Department did not serve the president well. I would hear discussions, for example, that General Powell had objected to or opposed our operations in Iraq. But that never happened sitting around the table in the National Security Council. It was the kind of thing that seemed to be said outside to others.

AMY GOODMAN: To discuss former Vice President Dick Cheney’s version of history as outlined in his book In My Time, we’re joined from Washington, D.C., by Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Lieutenant Wilkerson. Can you respond to what Cheney just said on NBC, Colonel Wilkerson?

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Amy, listening to your recitation—yeah, listening to your recitation of events at the head of the show and then your in-depth interview with the gentleman from Vermont, particularly the deaths in Afghanistan of American and allied troops and the devastation of Hurricane Irene, I think I could characterize Cheney’s book as singularly insignificant. That said, I think his use of phrases like those that were quoted — “exploding heads all over Washington” — as my former boss and former Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Face the Nation on Sunday, is more of a grocery store tabloid, and certainly not the kind of language that a former vice president of the United States of America should be using. Again, like Brent Scowcroft, I think in 2003 or 2004 in an interview with The New Yorker magazine, I simply don’t recognize Dick Cheney anymore.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what he had to say about your boss, about General Colin Powell and his views on the Iraq war.

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: The most inciteful thing—with a C, not an S—that the Vice President apparently has put in his book, due to excerpts I’ve seen and so forth—I have not read the book, I have to say that; I do not have a copy of it, not sure I’m going to buy a copy of it—was that he had something to do with Colin Powell leaving in January 2005. That’s utter nonsense. Colin Powell had told the president of the United States, the president-elect of the United States, that he’d be a one-term secretary. He had told all of us that, “us” being his inner team and also the team that he used most confidentially and most often within the State Department. In fact, when he asked me to be his secretary—to be his chief of staff in August of 2002, he was very kind to me. He said, “Look, you can stay on beyond the turn of the year and so forth when I leave, because you’ll be working for Ambassador Haass, which I know you enjoy, in policy planning, and you could stay on for eight years, if the president is reelected, or as long as you wish. But if you come to work for me as my chief of staff, you will have to leave. You will have to leave very soon, and no later than December-January, ’04-’05.” So this contention by Cheney is utterly preposterous.

AMY GOODMAN: In his memoir, Cheney accuses Colin Powell of trying to undermine President Bush during the run-up to the Iraq war and tacitly allowing his deputy to leak the name of a covert CIA agent. Speaking on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, Powell defended his approach to the Iraq war.

COLIN POWELL: Mr. Cheney may forget that I’m the one who said to President Bush, if you break it, you own it. And you have got to understand that if we have to go to war in Iraq, we have to be prepared for the whole war, not just the first phase. And Mr. Cheney and many of his colleagues did not prepare for what happened after the fall of Baghdad.

AMY GOODMAN: And let me turn to, again, Vice President Cheney’s interview on NBC News Dateline with Jamie Gangel last night. In this clip, Gangel talks to Cheney about discovering there were no WMDs in Iraq.

JAMIE GANGEL: In his book, President Bush wrote he had, quote, “sickening feeling.” But you don’t seem to express the same reaction or regrets.

DICK CHENEY: Well, I didn’t have a sickening feeling. I think we did the right thing.

AMY GOODMAN: Your response, Colonel Wilkerson?

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: I, unfortunately—and I’ve admitted to this a number of times, publicly and privately—was the person who put together Colin Powell’s presentation at the United Nations Security Council on 5 February, 2003. It was probably the biggest mistake of my life. I regret it to this day. I regret not having resigned over it. So I fully support his contention that he was hardly undermining the positions of the president of the United States, particularly with regard to Iraq. He put his reputation on the line. And he has said publicly that he will be always remembered as the man who gave that presentation at the U.N. in 2003. So, again, the Vice President’s contentions are preposterous.

Furthermore, the Vice President seems to find fault with Condi, Condi Rice, the secretary after Powell, with Powell, with Armitage, with the President himself. The only person Cheney does not seem to find fault with is Cheney. I think we have a word for that kind of person. I won’t use it here on television. But I think Mr. Cheney’s view is totally, utterly, completely Mr. Cheney’s view. I doubt there are very many people in America, other than the cheerleading squad for people like Cheney, who love torture and the like, who will even read his book. Or if they do read it, they’ll read it in order to increase their revulsion of him, rather than their respect for him. And that’s a pity, because he is a former vice president.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you, Colonel Wilkerson, talking about your having written that speech for Colin Powell, how you put it together. And at that time, because there was so much skepticism, did you have doubts about what you were writing?

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Absolutely, Amy. My whole team had doubts. In fact, we asked the question early on, why wasn’t this our ambassador at the United Nations, John Negroponte, as Adlai Stevenson had done for Kennedy during a far more serious crisis in October 1962, the so-called Cuban Missile Crisis? And we all laughed and answered our own question immediately. It was because no one in the Bush administration had high poll ratings, amongst the American people or the international community. Colin Powell’s ratings were up there with Mother Teresa at the time, in the low seventies, sometimes even going up into the high seventies, low eighties. So this is the reason they put him in New York.

And I didn’t write the speech. That belongs to his speechwriters. I actually orchestrated the entire team—the White House team, the CIAteam and so forth—out at Langley at CIA headquarters. And the way we did that was under the leadership and under the respect for and really the umbrella of George Tenet, the director of Central Intelligence/head of the CIA. And George was constantly asked by me, by Colin Powell, by Rich Armitage, by Condoleezza Rice and others—she was national security adviser at the time—in front of everyone on that team, “You stand by this, George? You corroborate to the Secretary of State that you have multiple sources independently determining each one of these facts that we’re giving?” And we threw lots of the facts out. We threw literally a third of the presentation out. The unfortunate thing is that we left in what George was most convincing on, and that was the mobile biological laboratories, the existing stocks of chemical weapons, and worst of all, an active nuclear program. And as I said, I will regret that to my grave.

AMY GOODMAN: How did the intelligence get so contaminated, manipulated? How was it so wrong?

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: In my view, you have to look at each one of the so-called pillars of the presentation, the three that I just named being the most prominent. “Curveball,” we didn’t even know that term when George Tenet was presenting us the information about the mobile biological labs. Curveball, as we all know now, was an agent being run by the BND, the CIA’s equivalent in Germany. And the Germans, as well as the CIA station chief in Germany—or in Europe, actually, Tyler Drumheller, had expressed their dismay with and lack of reliability of Curveball. And yet, we went ahead and used that information. George Tenet or John McLaughlin, his deputy, never said a word about Curveball to us. They simply gave us four independently corroborable sources for the existence of the labs. They even gave us drawings, and so forth, of those labs, that had supposedly come from an Iraqi engineer who was injured in an accident that occurred in one of the labs that actually kill people, testifying to the lethality of the ingredients being used in the labs. So, we had all of this prima facie, circumstantial, if you will, evidence that George Tenet and his team presented to us, indeed representing the entire 16—at that time, 16-entity U.S. intelligence community.

The same on the chemical stocks, the same on the active nuclear program, aluminum tubes of which was a big aspect of. Colin Powell doubted them so much that John McLaughlin actually brought one of them in and rolled it around on the DCI’s conference table and explained to the Secretary of State how the metal in that tube was so expensive that it was impossible to believe that Saddam Hussein would be spending that much money on tubes that were simply for rocket shielding, which was the other explanation of what the tubes were for. So, the DCI and the deputy DCI spent a lot of time and effort trying to convince the Secretary of State not to throw things out of the presentation. Unfortunately, we left enough in that made us really sort of the laughing stock of the world afterward.

AMY GOODMAN: You said in 2009—I think this is what you’re getting to now—in the Washington Note, an online political journal, you talked about how finding a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qaeda became the main purpose for the abusive interrogation program that the Bush administration authorized in 2002.

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: In summer of 2002, my FBIcolleagues, my CIA colleagues, who will speak the truth to me, have told me that. I’ve also gleaned it from other methods that I can’t talk about here on the television. Someday they will come to light, and historians will record them. But let me explain to you how Colin Powell dealt with that in his presentation, to return to that infamous moment again. We were throwing out—he had pulled me aside in the National Intelligence Council spaces in the CIA, put me in a room, he and I alone, and he told me he was going to throw all the presentation material about the connection between Baghdad and al-Qaeda out, completely out. I welcomed that, because I thought it was all bogus.

Within about an hour, George Tenet, having scented that something was wrong with the Secretary vis-à-vis this part of his presentation, suddenly unleashes on all in his conference room that they have just gotten the results of an interrogation of a high-level al-Qaeda operative, and those results not only confirm substantial contacts between an al-Qaeda and Baghdad, the Mukhabarat and Baghdad, the secret police, if you will, but also the fact that they were training, they were actually training al-Qaeda operatives in the use of chemical and biological weapons. Well, this was devastating. Here’s the DCItelling us that a high-level al-Qaeda operative had confirmed all of this. So Powell put at least part of that back into his presentation.

We later learned that that was through interrogation methods that used waterboarding, that no U.S. personnel were present at the time—it was done in Cairo, Egypt, and it was done by the Egyptians—and that later, within a week or two period, the high-level al-Qaeda operative recanted everything he had said. We further learned that the Defense Intelligence Agency had issued immediately a warning on that, saying that they didn’t trust the reliability of it due to the interrogation methods. We were never shown that DIA dissent, and we were never told about the circumstances under which the high-level al-Qaeda operative was interrogated. Tenet simply used it as a bombshell to convince the secretary not to throw that part, which was a very effective part, if you will recall, out of his presentation.

AMY GOODMAN: Colonel Wilkerson, we also have Glenn Greenwald on the line with us from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is a constitutional law attorney, political and legal blogger for Salon.com. His recent article on Cheney’s book is called “The Fruits of Elite Immunity.” Glenn, explain.

GLENN GREENWALD: One of the most significant aspects of the rollout of Dick Cheney’s book is that he’s basically being treated as though he’s just an elder statesman who has some controversial, partisan political views. And yet, the evidence is overwhelming, including most of what Colonel Wilkerson just said and has been saying for quite some time, and lots of other people, as well, including, for example, General Antonio Taguba, that Dick Cheney is not just a political figure with controversial views, but is an actual criminal, that he was centrally involved in a whole variety not just of war crimes in Iraq, but of domestic crimes, as well, including the authorization of warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens in violation of FISA, which says that you go to jail for five years for each offense, as well as the authorization and implementation of a worldwide torture regime that, according to General Barry McCaffrey, resulted in the murder—his word—of dozens of detainees, far beyond just the three or four cases of waterboarding that media figures typically ask Cheney about.

And yet, what we have is a government, a successor administration, the Obama administration, that announced that there will be no criminal investigations, no, let alone, prosecutions of any Bush officials for any of these multiple crimes. And that has taken these actions outside of the criminal realm and turned them into just garden-variety political disputes. And it’s normalized the behavior. And as a result, Dick Cheney goes around the country profiting off of this, you know, sleazy, sensationalistic, self-serving book, basically profiting from his crimes, and at the same time normalizing the idea that these kind of policies, though maybe in the view of some wrongheaded, are perfectly legitimate political choices to make. And I think that’s the really damaging legacy from all of this.

AMY GOODMAN: Colonel Wilkerson, do you think the Bush administration officials should be held accountable in the way that Glenn Greenwald is talking about?

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: I certainly do. And I’d be willing to testify, and I’d be willing to take any punishment I’m due. And I have to say, I agree with almost everything he just said. And I think that explains the aggressiveness, to a large extent, of the Cheney attack and of the words like “exploding heads all over Washington.” This is a book written out of fear, fear that one day someone will “Pinochet” Dick Cheney.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I thank you very much for being with us, both, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005, and Glenn Greenwald, speaking to us on that crackly phone line from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, constitutional law attorney and political and legal blogger forSalon.com. We’ll link to your article there.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, there’s another Bush administration official on a book tour. He’s Donald Rumsfeld. And he got quite a surprise as he was traveling through Washington State. The widow of a soldier who committed suicide questioned Donald Rumsfeld. He had heard taken out. Stay with us.

www.democracynow.org, 30 August 2011

September 2, 2011
Ex-MI5 chief admits Iraq was no threat

Paddy McGuffin, Home Affairs Reporter

Iraq posed no threat when Tony Blair led the country into war in 2003, Britain’s former top spy admitted at the weekend.

Former MI5 boss Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller made the comment in an interview with the Radio Times before the broadcast of a series of BBC lectures this week.

It is not the first time that the former MI5 chief has spoken out about the conflict.

In evidence to the Chilcot inquiry in 2010 she said she had warned senior government figures that the war had the potential to increase radicalism at home and abroad.

The invasion of Iraq “undoubtedly” increased the terrorist threat in Britain, she said.

In her most recent interview, she said: “Iraq did not present a threat to the UK.

“The service advised that it [the war] was likely to increase the domestic threat and that it was a distraction from the pursuit of al-Qaida.”

She added that it was “for others to decide” whether the war was a mistake.

“Intelligence isn’t complete without the full picture and the full picture is all about doubt. Otherwise, you go the way of George Bush.”

Stop the War Coalition convener Lindsey German said: “It may well be that, in advance of Chilcot, which is due to publish its findings in the autumn, various people are distancing themselves from the decision to go to war.

“I’m glad she has said what she has as it is a vindication of the anti-war campaign but the decision to go to war was a failure not just of Blair but the whole Establishment including the security services and Parliament itself.

“There was no serious attempt by any of them to stop Blair. The only attempt came from the streets.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Ms Manningham-Buller defended MI5 against suggestions that it could have prevented the July 7 bombings.

“In intelligence, you can know of someone, without knowing exactly what they are going to do.

“The next time there is an attack, the same could be true – though I hope it won’t be.”

Regarding the likelihood of further bombings in Britain in the future, she said: “I assume there will be. This isn’t a ‘war’ you win in a military sense, and you can’t anticipate everything.”

[email protected]

www.morningstaronline.co.uk, 28 August 2011

September 1, 2011
Iraqi diplomat: “Turkey’s security is Iraq’s security”

TURKEY-COUNTER-TERRORISM – Iraqi diplomat says Turkish cross-border crackdown on PKK fine by Baghdad

Iraqi ambassador in Ankara has said the Baghdad government would sanction a cross-border operation by the Turkish ground forces to hunt down PKK terrorists in Iraq’s north, which the terrorist organization uses as a launchpad to attack targets inside Turkey.

“This is not an easy question to answer but as you know everything between the two countries must happen in line with the agreements we signed earlier. If it is by the book, anything is fine by us. Turkey’s security is Iraq’s security,” Abdul Amir Kamil Abi-Tabikh told reporters Wednesday in a meeting with Mustafa Kamalak, chairman of Felicity Party. Turkey last entered into northern Iraq in February 2008 to crush PKK with as many as 10 thousand troops backed by warplanes and artillery.(İMB-MS)

AA

24 Aug 2011

August 24, 2011
US interests in Iraq: Like a good neighbor, Turkey is there

Iraqis often remind Americans that the US presence in their country is only temporary, while the country’s neighbors are permanent. This long view is important to remember in the midst of the drama surrounding Defense Secretary Panetta’s recent visit to Baghdad. Mr. Panetta visited last week to express “tremendous concern” regarding increased Iranian arms in Iraq and push forward discussions with the Iraqi government on whether American troops will be asked to stay on after the end of this year.

A small US troop presence would probably provide a psychological confidence boost to Iraq’s messy democracy, but even if requested, will be limited in scope and duration. America also clearly faces sharp constraints in fully resourcing its military and civilian missions in Iraq.

In this era of limited means, reinforcements need to be found to complement investments of American blood and treasure. This requires a revamped regional strategy that starts by asking which of Iraq’s neighbors share US interests in a strong and stable Iraq that can contribute to peace and stability in the Middle East. At present, Turkey stands out as the only neighbor that has the incentive to actively work toward this outcome.

This approach would be different from past appeals to Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia to recognize their interest in averting the all out collapse of Iraq. Not wanting to deal with the fall-out from a failed Iraqi state is different from wanting to see Iraq succeed. In the long-term, Iraq obviously needs positive relations with all its neighbors.

The problem is, at this point, Syria is in the throes of a domestic crisis. And it is hard to see how the regional heavyweights to Iraq’s east and west, Iran and Saudi Arabia, have an interest in Iraq reemerging as a confident regional actor. Baghdad’s plan to achieve this goal hinges on expanding oil and gas production.

Competing Saudi and Iranian interests in Iraq – From the Iranian perspective, a strong Iraq has since ancient times been a check on its influence in the Gulf and the wider region. More recently, Iraq was a direct conventional military threat that invaded and sought to stifle the newborn Islamic Republic in 1980. As a result, Tehran pursues the goal of a passive, divided Iraq with an explicitly sectarian political system guaranteed to generate friendly Shiite-dominated governments.

Saudi Arabia has its own trepidations about the new Iraq. Before 2003, Sunni-led Iraq loudly proclaimed itself as the guardian of the Arab world’s eastern gate with Persian Iran. The Saudis are dismayed that democracy in Iraq has empowered its Shiite majority, which Riyadh simplistically views as Iranian proxies. As the ultimate enforcers of the now shaky regional status quo and sectarian balance of power in the Gulf, the Saudis are reluctant to fully recognize Iraq’s new government. Riyadh fears Iraq’s political leadership could inspire Shiite populations in eastern Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

Finally, as oil and gas producers themselves, Tehran and Riyadh look askance at Baghdad’s plans for major hydrocarbon production increases as possible competition for their own oil exports.

Turkey has the right influence and incentives – Fortunately, the other major regional power bordering Iraq has different incentives. As a secular democracy, Turkey supports a robust Iraqi political process in which no single group dominates. It certainly seeks a major role for its mostly Sunni political allies in Iraq, but has also developed working relationships with the major Shiite political parties.

The above article was published in csmonitor.com on July 13th, 2011 (11:41a.m.).

via Lebanon news – NOW Lebanon -US interests in Iraq: Like a good neighbor, Turkey is there.

July 15, 2011
A visit to Iraq for fun, curiosity and business

Erbil, the capital of Kurdish Iraq, effectively an independent country for twenty years, safe to visit, democratic sort of, in the midst of an economic boom and dreaming of being another Dubai in a decade.

Clean lines of a brand new airport. The mildly Islamist Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan officially opened it the week after we arrived. Tony is not waiting for us but then I remember this is because we need a 2 km bus ride to the area where he is allowed to be. There he is, stocky and shortish and energetic, waving.

The countryside is usually, Tony says, parched and brown, but in March a down of an almost unnaturally bright green covers the ground for a moment.

Lidl, our driver, speaks some English. Just enough. He is not a Kurd, he says, but a Christian. Even though he is that rare thing in Iraq: an atheist. Tony tells me there are two kinds of Christians, Assyrians and Chaldeans, speaking different languages. This is the British Museum made flesh.

Off to the mountains, stopping in a place called Shaklawa which Tony describes as the Kurdish Sinaia, but seems a place of little interest. We try to find a hermitage and glimpse a chapel in a cemetery. A Christian church, modern, bare interior like a church hall rather than a church. Heart-warming to see Christians in a part of the world I think of as Muslim. A ramshackle town built of breeze blocks is a bazaar straggling along the main road. Here we buy Turkish delight and halva and then we turn back just as the scenery becomes interesting. A very slow crawl through many military road blocks in to Ankawa. This is not usual at all, says Tony, even though Friday is the Muslim Sunday and Saturday is Monday. The jam is caused by Nowruz, the festival of the spring equinox, a pre-Islamic festival which has become a symbol of Kurdish national identity since the 1950s. It was banned in Turkey and under Saddam. Every Kurd leaves town for the day and picnics. Plus the road we were on leads to the Kurdish President’s home town and is guarded jealously. And of course we are here at a time of political unrest in Kurdistan and upheaval across the region. There were bonfires at the side of the road, Kurds were dancing in the evening light and flags were waved.

Marina, a large gloomy restaurant where we can only get a table in the gallery. Noemi is one of only two women in the place. The rest are men with Saddam moustaches drinking beer, not looking joyous. Good Lebanese food, good Lebanese wine, a group of musicians with Saddam moustaches strike up Kurdish music and I think they could be a lithograph from a mid 19th century travel book. Everything in this sub fusc place seems to be in sepia.

Tony’s house in Ankawa, which is penetratingly cold, as he had warned. The kind of cold that comes from never having been anything else than cold.

I have a stamped Iraqi visa in my passport, therefore I am. One travels to prove one objectively exists. Does one ever quite succeed?

Iraq has British three-prong plugs which I suppose are iconic. Proud-making.

Saturday

Lidl’s morose cousin, a devout Christian unlike Lidl, knows a way to the Mar Matei monastery which does not leave the Kurdish Regional Army’s remit where all is safe. We do it in only 90 minutes. Mar Matei (St Matthew, named after its founder, a monk who sought refuge from the persecution of Julian the Apostate) is a fourth century monastery mostly rebuilt in 1845. It is very close to the border between the safe Kurdish region and the unsafe Iraq held by the federal army. I had found it with some searching in Google images and only one person I spoke to in Iraq had heard of the place. It stands in the mountains commanding a ravine. No sign posts and, once there, no explanations. This is tourism, to use Roland Barthes’ pretentious Marxist jargon uncooked. This I like. Like all tourists I am chasing authenticity which by definition cannot be chased. Two coaches made my heart sink but they had brought a party of pilgrims from Erbil who were on a three-day pilgrimage. No signs explaining the history of the place, but it is always best to be told history not to read it. I found a monk who spoke English who explained the story of the place. They are Assyrians. Many Christians had taken refuge in Kurdistan from the Arab South, he said. He agreed sadly that things had been better for the Christians under Saddam.

The monastery is large and I later found on the net (where there is not much to find) that the lower parts of the church are old but the monastery was left in ruins after the Mongols sacked it, was rebuilt in the 18th century and then in 1845.

Women wander around in jeans and it is good, said Tony, to be with one’s own people. Benign monks. Christianity is very beautiful and the ancient churches of the East so much more so than the recent Protestant heresies. I suppose the Church of England is a teddy bear with its stuffing falling out. Here as among the Catholics and the Orthodox is the real thing.

The Christian Middle East. The Middle East is not only Muslim and Christianity is Middle Eastern, not European, despite Belloc’s ‘Europe is the Faith and the Faith is Europe’.

Lalish. Our devout Christian driver got terribly lost looking for Lalish though he asked people repeatedly. He finally insisted that a brand new building standing empty in a field was the temple and we had to call Lidl to get him to keep looking. The total lack of curiosity of people about anywhere outside the town they grew up in. It is we who are the odd ones with our love of travelling around.

An extraordinary and very moving place. There is something very spiritual (over-used word) about the temple and its setting.

The boys who live beside the temple are the temple servants, we were told. The snake emblem by the main door (the Muslims and others accuse the Yazidis of devil worship). Fire inside a little shrine. Fire worship? The dark interior. The hanging cloths which we are told it is lucky to tie, make a wish, then untie. This seems a religion of superstitions rather than St Thomas Aquninas. The underground cave which is forbidden to us. The sound of water. I thought: where Alph the sacred river ran, through caverns measureless to man, down to the sunless sea.

The temple is surrounded by ruined and semi-ruined buildings, a sense of decay and untidiness, but the hills that surround the place have a moving and strange quality. They really do feel very spiritual. This place has a very moving and eerie but attractive atmosphere. And all unexplained. Even the net has little.

An arch decorated with a symbol of the sun leading seemingly to nowhere. Strange and touching. I wanted to evacuate my bladder a mile away but Tony wisely told me we were on sacred ground.

A birthday party for a handsome Lebanese Christian businesswoman at Speed Centre, a go-karting place with pizza restaurant attached where foreigners go and women are normal. This is one of two expat places. Gloomy, depressing. Lots of nice intelligent Lebanese here to make money but very bored in the evenings. Missing Beirut. So would I.

We rather drag Tony to it and the crowd in their late 20s are, he says, too young for him. I hadn’t noticed they were younger than me and I am seven years his senior. I tell him this. I suppose I am immature, I say. No, eccentric, he replied.

Everyone bar us is Lebanese and only one is Muslim and he, I am told, is ‘modernized’ but the man sitting next to me, when I ask him if he is a Christian or a Muslim, says I don’t mind this question but it could be considered racist.

A man shows me his Phalange membership card and says no-one at this table knows I have this. He tells me his father told him Muslims cannot live in a country where they are not the government.

Sunday

A third day driving. Tony has to work.

A reservoir built by Saddam, very beautiful, as is all the road. A tiny ancient church which looks as if it were built by a child from clay this year, but has been carefully preserved. Lidl does not know how old it is and the bodyguard does not either. But both know that it is very old.

Sulamaniya, the second city of Kurdish Iraq. Lidl takes us to his favorite restaurant where we eat Kurdish food. Much like Arab food but with soups and pickled vegetables – Kurds are a mountain race. The lamb soup was heavenly and I drink Noemi’s too. Beside us a table of women in peasant costume seem very like Romanian gypsies but are I am told villagers. They do, I think, have gypsies here and I should love to meet some.

Sulamaniya – the prison where political prisoners were kept is closed. They open it for us but it has bad karma. The archaeological museum is closed because today is a holiday. The streets are impassable because of the unofficial anti-government Nowruz festival/protest. This is the centre of the opposition, a tribe which is excluded from the coalition that rules the Kurds.

We pass through Koya which is clearly old, and I tell Lidl to stop when I see a castle. It looks almost like a fort in a Western. The castle is locked up but I hear a noise and an old man who looks after the place opens it for me and lets us in. The old man was wearing what looked like a dressing gown. A wide grass square described by thin white battlements. From one corner I look over the town and bonfires lit for Nowruz. The old man who speaks little English says this is 700 years old.

Monday

A morning to relax, two business meetings in the afternoon and a couple of hours in the drizzle in the old center of Erbil which, like Jericho Damascus and Aleppo, vies for the distinction of being the oldest continuously inhabited town in the world. When Rome was seven hills covered in forest, Erbil was a sizeable place. The old city is a hill on which towers the citadel, a vast building. Two years ago the inhabitants, the poorest of the poor, were moved out, except for one family who remain so that the citadel remains inhabited. When the UNESCO-approved works are completed the citadel will be inhabited again, but not by the people who did live there. It will become a place for prosperous people to live and Tony, who is a bourgeois, relishes the idea that it will contain restaurants. As it is the citadel is, save for the central street, closed to visitors, only by ribbon, but this being Iraq and a time of turbulence in Nowruz, I decided to take Tony’s advice not to hop under the striped ribbon and explore. This is not uncooked. The museums of course are shut for the holidays. The ancient minaret is visible some way off. The town beneath the citadel walls is charmingly decrepit. The bazaar for which Tony apologizes is a good, unpretentious bazaar. Tony prefers the one in Istanbul.

Nowruz to be honest a little bit of a bore – not even the tribal uprising I had perhaps irresponsibly hoped for. Still got taken by the crowd and involved in dancing and flag waving. I put down my umbrella but was wearing my good suit. I secretly hoped they might ask me to be their king but I was not to be a second Auberon Herbert.

The houses of prosperous Ankawa Christians are built in a fantastic style which as Noemi says looks good here but would not elsewhere. They merit a coffee table book but I did not take pictures (I never seem to get round to using cameras). The nearest thing I ever saw to it is the palaces of Romanian gypsies in villages like Buzescu. Near Tony’s house are a number of mutually schismatic new built churches, magnificent in the Arab-Kurdish modern vernacular style. In every case the interior is not quite as bare as a low church place.

Dinner with Tufan at the dark cavernous Hotel Chakra is a success. There is something of 90s Romania about the gloomy heaviness of the hotels and restaurants. The Chakra is built in a strange, rather funny Kurdish taste like Lord Leighton’s idea of the East or the Turkish Bath in Jermyn Street. I dreamed I dwelled in marble halls. Tufan is a man. And badly injured because of a moment of inattention on his motorbike in Elbesan Albania. He is a Communist and admirer of Kemal. Saddam he says gave the people land. Noemi is enchanted by him platonically. I like him very much too. He has a velvet voice and thinks.

Tuesday

With Noemi towards the Iranian border, we having otherwise rather exhausted Kurdish Iraq’s tourist potential. Idyllic scenery. Waterfalls. Mountains. Noemi thinks they resemble the Carpathians in Transylvania but I think they are very different and very beautiful. A stop for a strange Kurdish lunch beside the road. Chicken kebab and bread cooked in a tomato broth as I gazed at stunningly beautiful mountain scenery through the window. And then further on the Hamilton Road built by a New Zealander in the 1920s and one of the great road journeys. But the time comes when, without reaching the Iranian border, it is later than we thought and we turn round.

Thursday

Business meeting at the mall. The future of the world is already here and it is one mall from Vladivostok to Patagonia.

Friday

I get Lidl to take me to the one old church in Ankawa. I guessed there must be one and there was but the only words about it on the net were a little hard to understand.

Other historical evidence confirming the historical depth of Ankawa “Alhjeran” which is found in 1995 in the church of Mar Gourgis sculpted by the writings in Syriac. Here are some information on these stones: The first stone: yellow stone was introduced by 40 cm and 80 cm length. Text carved on the stone says that the church of Mar Gourgis was re-built in the 816. Stone II: the text is also engraved in Syriac and it has the date of death of the priest in 917 m of Hormuz.

A mustached Christian refugee from Baghdad with a rifle guards it. The church, renovated a few years ago, looks modern and unlovely from the outside. The inside is bare with pews, stations of the cross and almost nothing else but Lidl points out above the entrance to the chancel a small wall painting of St George slaying the dragon which he said dated from 935. Near the church everything has been rebuilt but Lidl shows me one brick wall of venerable antiquity which was, he says, what the whole little place was like when he was a boy. He is only 28 now, I remind myself (he looks 38 – one’s twenties in Iraq are not the prolonged adolescence they are in England). Across the road from the church are the foundations of a building which Lidl says is very old indeed and I wonder, looking at the grass swards covered in rubbish, what it could have been.

A simple Kurdish lunch with Tony, soup and then kebab with rice and zacusca and beans.

Istanbul. Kitchenette, a restaurant in the Hotel Marmora in Taksim Sq seems a wonderful antidote to Iraq. I like imperial cities. Paulius takes us first to a restaurant. The food was normal but the view across the Bosporus was quite stunningly beautiful. Then an expensive fashionable place high up with another great view and then fortunately we were flagging and came home. Lina quoted me saying many clever things the next day which I did not recall and do not recall now.

Saturday

Wonderful breakfast of cheese and ham and rye bread brought from Vilnius and of course Paulius’s incomparable view of the Bosporus. For the first time I find myself liking Istanbul, modern and comfortable and Western though it is. Perhaps one has to come from Kurdish Iraq, not Romania. Both because Istanbul is exciting, buzzy and full of beauty (Erbil is none of these things) but also because Kurdish Iraq reminds one that Istanbul, Western though it is, is still the Orient.

On Paulius’s and Lina’s advice I go to Cora, a church with wonderful mosaics made into a museum.

Lunch. We find a place to eat Turkish food in the sun. I like these two foodies. I intend to take food seriously and wine too. Paulius, whose favorite country is Germany, thinks a Chinese-dominated world will be a good thing. Turkey is now looking Eastward, will resume its Ottoman role and lead the region to democracy.

I found this on the net by Bernard Lewis in a debate with the insufferable bore Edward Said: the Roman Empire and the medieval Islamic Empire were not conquered by more civilized peoples, they were conquered by less civilized but more vigorous peoples. But in both cases what made the conquest, with the Barbarians in Rome and the Mongols in Iraq, what made it possible was things were going badly wrong within the society so that it was no longer able to offer effective resistance.

Paul Wood is the director of executive search firm Apple Search.

July 5, 2011