On Sunday, 13 Iraqis were killed and dozens injured in Baghdad when US helicopters fired on a crowd of unarmed civilians. G2 columnist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, who was injured in the attack, describes the scene of carnage - and reveals just how lucky he was to walk away

The Guardian

It started with a phone call early on Sunday morning: “Big pile of smoke over Haifa Street.” Still half asleep I put on my jeans, cursing those insurgents who do their stuff in the early morning. What if I just go back to bed, I thought - by the time I will be there it will be over. In the car park it struck me that I didn’t have my flak jacket in the car, but figured it was most probably just an IED (improvised explosive device) under a Humvee and I would be back soon.

On the way to Haifa Street I was half praying that everything would be over or that the Americans would seal off the area. I haven’t recovered from Najaf yet.

Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?

By STAN GOFF

These milestones come along, reminding us and the wrath struggles to break free again. The anger is never really absent, just dormant like a sleeping volcano.

Back when the pack of professional liars in Washington DC and their slavish corporate press still had Americans brainwashed that Iraq was a threat to the United States, General Tommy Franks–then the chief military planner of the catastrophe in Iraq–said, “We don’t do body counts.”

He didn’t want anyone to know what might be behind the numbers.

I could say the same thing now, as we arrive almost simultaneously at 1,000 US military fatalities in Iraq and the third anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001.

So I’m saying it. This is not a body count. This is not about the number of dead GIs. This is not about almost 7,000 wounded. It’s not about 14,000 dead Iraqis, or any of the considerable inventory of macabre enumerations we might clinically extract from the orgy of cruelty that is now Iraq.

We won’t do body counts. War is more than a number. This war is an expanding ocean of unanswered pain, and it cannot be reduced to a number.

One thousand times now, people have arrived home or looked out the front door only to see a military sedan, with two troops in their dress uniforms.

Dear Friends,

Minnesota peace activists gathered yesterday to commemorate their esteemed companion, John Maus, who died last week after a brief bout with cancer. John traveled to Iraq with a Minnesota Voices delegation in 2001. To his wife, Joanne, and to all of his colleagues in the peace movement, we extend our
sincere condolences. May the courage, wisdom and love which he embodied abide with all of our efforts to build a better world.

Disgest by David Smith-Ferri, Voices in the Wilderness

This Digest begins with a brief summary, followed by media reports.

“Almost a year after Congress approved a U.S. contribution of more than $18 billion to rebuild Iraq, very little (only $600M) of this money has been spent. Very little has actually been built in Iraq, and most of what has been done has been paid for out of Iraq’s own revenues” (NYT, 8/10/04).

Three U.S. senators have called on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to account for 8.8 billion dollars entrusted to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq earlier this year but now gone missing.

With the “security situation” spiraling out of control, the US is now considering redirecting more than three billion dollars — originally approved by congress for infrastructure repair – toward “training and equipping more than 75,000 Iraqi national guard, police and border patrol officers.” The plan, recommended by US ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte, would also “pump some 225 million dollars into Iraq’s much sabotaged oil sector in an effort to enhance revenue to make up for the diverted US assistance by raising output from about 2.2 million barrels per day to three million” (AFP 8/30/04).

Of the $18.4B approved by the US Congress for Iraq rebuilding, $3.7B was set aside for drinking water, irrigation, and sewage treatment. The cost of providing drinking water alone, however, could cost $10B, according to Iraq Water Resources Minister Abdul Latif Rasheed.

Unclean water is not the only serious pollution problem facing people in Iraq. Lakes of sewage and large piles of uncollected garbage, especially in southern cities, are places where diseases can incubate and from which they can spread.

“Pollution in all its kinds seems to be spreading in Iraq especially with the unstable situation in the country where all eyes are turned to the security and political dilemma ignoring the crucial issue of maintaining a clean environment for people to lead healthy lives” (Mirror, 8/23/04).

In the inescapable face of threats to health haunting Iraqi citizens, and given how little “reconstruction” has actually been accomplished, it would be hard to argue that the architects of the war and the subsequent occupation care about ordinary Iraqi people. It would be equally difficult to explain the lack of reconstruction as simply a result of the degenerating “security situation,” of obvious poor planning, or even of gross incompetence. The almost total lack of provision for people’s basic needs suggests instead what some may have suspected all along: despite rhetoric to the contrary, at the level of US foreign policy decisions, the Iraqi people are incidental. The war and occupation have nothing to do with their welfare.

Articles

by Herbert Docena; Middle East Report; September 03, 2004

While the likes of Halliburton and Bechtel get all the press, other US companies are hard at work trying to refashion Iraq’s legal, economic, political and social institutions-and usher in a US-friendly democracy.

Sheikh Majid al-Azzawi was one proud Iraqi. His office, surrounded by sandbags, barbed wire and tall concrete walls, looked more like a military base than an administrative building. But even the pitch-black darkness that swirled in the corridors most of the day did not dampen al-Azzawi’s spirits.