Full US control planned for Iraq
Destabilized Mid-East, ‘religious war’ fears ignored

Compiled by Eamon Martin

Feb. 26 (AGR)— The Bush administration plans to take complete, unilateral control of a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, with an interim administration headed by an American civilian who would direct the reconstruction of the country and the creation of a "representative" Iraqi government. According to a now-finalized blueprint, officials in Washington are making clear that Iraq will, for a while at least, be a de facto United States protectorate.

Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of the US Central Command, is to maintain military control as long as US troops are there. Once security was established and any alleged weapons of mass destruction were located and disabled, a US administrator would run the civilian government and direct reconstruction and humanitarian aid.

The initial transition effort, as previously announced, is to be directed by retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay M. Garner. But once he got to Baghdad, Garner would quickly be replaced as the supreme civil authority by an American "of stature," such as a former US state governor or ambassador.

But just a few days after the plan’s disclosure, Iraq’s government-in-waiting held a two-day secret meeting at a Washington military staff college with 100 American officials - plus representatives from Britain - discussing the plans. US officials quietly suggested that Pentagon lawyer, Michael Mobbs, has already been named as the new civil administrator for Iraq after Gen. Garner’s initial stewardship.

Mobbs’s appointment will be viewed as controversial. He came to prominence in Washington for his legal arguments to a US court that an American citizen captured in Afghanistan should be deemed an "enemy combatant" and denied any legal rights in the US.

Although some of the broad strokes of US plans for a post-Hussein Iraq have previously been reported, newly finalized elements include the extent of US control and the plan to appoint a nonmilitary civil administrator. Officials cautioned that developments in Iraq could lead them to revise the plan on the run. The Bush administration has declined to estimate how long US forces would remain in Iraq. Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman told Congress last week that it might be two years before the Iraqis regained administrative control of their country. But "they’re terrified of being caught in a time frame," said retired Army Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, one of a number of senior military and civilian experts who have been briefed by the Pentagon on the plan. "My own view is that it will take five years, with substantial military power, to establish and exploit the peace" in Iraq.

Iraqi opposition leaders were informed this week that the United States will not recognize an Iraqi provisional government.

The head of Iraq’s largest opposition group warned the United States on Tuesday that its military presence in post-war Iraq would not be welcome, and that any attempt to install a Pentagon general in Baghdad could be met with a "religious war." Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim told MSNBC.com in an interview that Muslim fury over a long-term American occupation of Iraq would destabilize the Middle East.

Hakim suggested that even a temporary US military government would undermine the Iraqi opposition’s efforts to transition Iraq to elected rule.

"Iraqi opposition forces can form a democracy," said Hakim. "But if the United States installs an American general, this is against the idea of democracy."

As the leader of Iraq’s Shia Muslim exile community, the ayatollah’s words hold weight. His political organization, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, is influential among Iraq’s majority Shia population. Numbers vary, but most experts believe the Shia make up about 65 percent of Iraq’s population.

Among the half-dozen Iraqi opposition groups, Hakim’s council is the most significant.

"Installing an American general in Baghdad will have very dangerous consequences," the ayatollah continued, "and Muslim countries will refuse any foreign administration of Iraq. This could start a religious war in Iraq and neighboring countries.

"This will open the door to violence and terrorism against the United States. This extremism will be very dangerous to Iraq and its neighbors," he said. "The Americans will not be able to control the social disorder that will arise after installing an American general in Baghdad."

Iranian-backed Iraqi opposition forces have already crossed into northern Iraq from Iran with the aim of securing the frontier in the event of war, according to senior Iranian officials.

The forces, numbering up to 5,000 troops, with some heavy equipment, are nominally under the command of Hakim. Iranian officials insist that force’s role in the north is defensive but its presence will exacerbate the concerns of the US and especially the Arab world that military intervention in Iraq will lead to a permanent disintegration of the country. Through inserting a proxy force, Iran is underlining that it cannot be ignored in future discussions over Iraq’s make-up.

Kurds don’t want to be Iraqis, nor Turks
The destabilizing impact of the impending war is already being felt in the mountains of northern Iraq. According to Kurdish leaders who recently met with American officials, the US, in truth, is abandoning plans to introduce democracy in Iraq after an invasion.

The Kurdish leaders are enraged by the American plan to occupy Iraq but largely retain the government in Baghdad.

"Conquerors always call themselves liberators," said Sami Abdul-Rahman, deputy prime minister of the Kurdish administration, in reference to a Bush speech last week in which he said US troops were going to liberate Iraq.

Abdul-Rahman said the US is already reneging on its promises to promote democratic change in Iraq. "It is very disappointing," he said. "In every Iraqi ministry they are just going to remove one or two officials and replace them with American military officers."

The two Kurdish parties — the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), which rules western Kurdistan, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) — are also at the heart of the Iraqi opposition. Together they rule four million people in an area the size of Switzerland that has been outside Hussein’s control since 1991.

Complicating US war plans further, the Kurds of northern Iraq have warned that there will be clashes if troops from neighboring Turkey cross the border.

Meanwhile, the Turkish government is demanding that their forces should enter the north of the country to secure Turkey’s interests if the US and Britain go ahead with an attack on Iraq.

Kurdish spokesmen have said that their guerrillas who control the north will oppose any Turkish intervention. In the most blunt warning yet, senior officials of the KDP and the PUK -- warned that if Turkish troops cross the border for any reason, trouble will be found in the form of the Kurd’s 25,000-strong militias.

KDP spokesman Hoshyar Zebari said: "We will oppose any Turkish military intervention. This is our decision. Nobody should [think] we are bluffing on this issue. This is a very serious matter. Any intervention, under whatever pretext, will lead to clashes."

Zebari said it would be bad for the image of the Americans and British that two of their allies should be "at each other’s throats" before the main battle against the Baghdad government had even started.

He also presciently warned that if the Turks intervened, other regional powers such as Iran would also feel free to step in. Zebari’s warnings came just days before the revelation of Iranian troop movements.

As part of the price for their own troops to spring off from Turkey, the Americans are believed to have agreed in principle to the Turkish demand for its forces to be involved. The Turks are also said to be demanding that Kurdish guerrillas should be disarmed.

The Kurds insist that Turkish intervention would be an unnecessary violation of Iraqi sovereignty.

The Kurdish spokesmen said they had already agreed that their forces should be dissolved and merged with the Iraqi army and police forces, but not before a democratic federal government has been established in Baghdad.

Zalmay Khalilzad, Bush’s special envoy to the Iraqi opposition, went to Ankara this month and told top Kurdish leaders to accept that a large deployment of Turkish troops -- supposedly for humanitarian relief -- would enter northern Iraq after any US invasion.

He also told the Kurds that they would have to give up plans for self-government.

In addition to billions in cash, Turkey has demanded ironclad assurance from the US that there will not be a separate Kurdish state.

The Kurds did their best to meet Turkish and American concerns. They promised that they would not seek independence, confining their ambitions to a self-governing entity within a federal Iraq. They also promised not to take Kirkuk, an oil-rich city that they describe as their Jerusalem.

However, this proved inadequate for the Turks. They fear that federalism could be a way station to Kurdish independence -- and they may be right. The four million Kurds who live in the self-governing area overwhelmingly do not want to be Iraqis. The younger people have no Iraqi identity and many do not speak Arabic.

In early negotiations with the United States, Ankara spoke of sending in Turkish troops to set up a "buffer zone" perhaps 25 miles deep along the Iraqi border. This would prevent a flood of Kurdish refugees from northern Iraq, the Turks said.

But now, Turkey is demanding that it be allowed to send 60,000 to 80,000 of its own troops into northern Iraq to establish "strategic positions" across a "security arc" as much as 140 to 170 miles deep in Iraq. That would take Turkish troops almost halfway to Baghdad. These troops would not be under US command, according to Turkish sources who say Turkey has agreed only to "coordination" between US and Turkish forces.

The Kurdish parties say the Turkish demand, to which they suspect the US has agreed in return for the use of Turkish military facilities, is the first step in a Turkish plan to advance into Iraqi Kurdistan.

The Kurds fear that a US-led war against Hussein might be the occasion for a Turkish effort to end the de facto independence enjoyed by Iraqi Kurds for more than a decade. One Kurdish leader said: "Turkey has made up its mind that it will intervene in northern Iraq in order to destroy us."

"If the US agrees to these Turkish deployments, there is a real risk that the Kurds will start a guerrilla war against the Turkish troops," said Michael Amitay of the Washington Kurdish Institute.

Turkey has already sent thousands of troops to its southeast border in war preparations on a scale not seen in decades. The only Muslim member of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) now governed by a party with Islamic roots, and the only alliance member bordering Iraq is heading for a war that 97 percent of its people oppose.

Sources: Associated Press, BBC News, Financial Times (UK), Guardian (UK), Independent (UK), International Herald Tribune, Inter Press Service, MSNBC.com, Newsweek, Sydney Morning Herald, Washington Post

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Bush admin. considers anti-abortion
conditions for AIDS money

By Jim Lobe

Washington, DC, Feb. 20 (IPS)— Population and women’s reproductive-health groups are calling on US President George W. Bush not to impose strict, anti-abortion conditions on his $15 billion five-year plan to fight HIV-AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean.

They are currently drafting letters to the administration bashing recommendations contained in a leaked State Department document that, in their view, would make it much more difficult for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in the field that receive the AIDS money to provide comprehensive health services to needy people, especially women.

According to presentations last week by US officials, as well as the document, which was submitted by the department’s senior population official to Secretary of State Colin Powell Feb. 11, the administration appears likely to bar anti-AIDS funding to groups that provide or counsel their patients on abortion service, unless they "administer AIDS programs separately from their family planning" and reproductive-health services.

As described in the document, the rule amounts to an "expansion" of the so-called Mexico City policy, often referred to by opponents as the "Global Gag Rule," which bars groups and agencies abroad that perform abortions, provide abortion counseling, or lobby their governments to ease abortion laws from receiving US aid.

The same memo recommends applying the Mexico City policy to NGOs and clinics that not only provide HIV-AIDS services, but that also fight other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) or offer programs to prevent violence against women or counsel victims of spousal abuse. In order to receive US assistance, they, too, would have to certify that any abortion services or abortion-related counseling they do would be administratively segregated.

Population and reproductive-health groups have been trying to clarify if the recommendations have been adopted and what they will mean in practice.

"This expansion of the gag rule threatens to add further to the administrative burden faced by NGOs in some of the world’s poorest countries," noted Sally Ethelston, a spokesperson for Population Action International (PAI), a Washington-based research and advocacy group.

"What will they have to do to receive US funds? Maintain separate accounts? Separate clinics? Separate staff’?"

"As always, the devil is in the details, and the details have not been forthcoming," she added, noting that groups like hers were calling for the administration to reconsider the recommendations.

But Kirsten Sherk, a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), called the policy "unworkable" in any case because the costs of establishing even separate accounting systems, let alone separate facilities, were beyond the means of many cash-strapped NGOs in the 14 African and Caribbean countries targeted by Bush’s new HIV-AIDS program.

The plan, which was unveiled in the president’s State of the Union address last month, is supposed to provide a total of $15 billion, beginning with $2 billion next year, for programs designed to prevent the spread of HIV-AIDS, provide extra help to millions of AIDS orphans in sub-Saharan Africa, and provide people living with HIV-AIDS victims with life-saving drugs.

Public-health advocates and HIV-AIDS groups have hailed the amount of money pledged by Bush as a major breakthrough in the fight against the disease, already the most devastating in recorded history in terms of the millions of lives it has taken.

At the same time, they have complained that the money should be front-loaded given the urgency of the situation and that too little — only $1 billion — is being provided to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria, a multilateral initiative designed in part to ease the bureaucratic burden of recipients having to report to many different national aid agencies that in turn impose different conditions on their aid.

If the proposed Mexico City policy is now applied to the AIDS program, it will be another condition for recipients to satisfy, and one that could force them to disrupt their normal operations.

"It is unconscionable that President Bush is attaching strings to these funds," said Katherine Hall-Martinez of the Washington-based Center for Reproductive Rights. "Our president is dangling foreign assistance in front of HIV-decimated populations, only to yank the funding away unless health care organizations agree not to provide their patients with full and compassionate medical care in accordance with legal and ethical standards in their countries."

She cited the example of many girls and young women in Africa, including AIDS orphans, who are forced to form sexual relationships with much older men to survive. They are often subjected to sexual abuse, become HIV-positive, are forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, and then become responsible for caring an infant who may also become infected. Integrated health services, including abortion counseling, are the best way to help them, Hall-Martinez said.

"At a time when health care providers are looking for ways to make their programs more comprehensive in order to better meet the needs of those whom they serve, this policy will reinforce the segregation of services," noted Ethelston. "Rather than tearing down walls, this policy would build them up."

"It is ludicrous to expect that organizations in Africa can or should establish separate HIV-AIDS programs in order to receive US funds," said Paul Zeitz, executive director of the Global AIDS Alliance, a non-partisan advocacy group. "From a public health perspective, the best approach is to fully integrate AIDS programs into family planning programs, not separate them."

"Even in this modified form, the restrictions represent a Washington-imposed mandate that’s unrealistic and costly in the African context," he added.

Administration officials described the proposed policy as a "compromise" that may prove acceptable to a majority in Congress, especially the House of Representatives, where anti-abortion forces are dominant.

The Powell document indeed predicts that anti-abortion forces on Capitol Hill are likely to oppose the policy because it carves out an exception to the blanket aid ban on NGOs that perform or support abortion services. But so far, most anti-abortion groups, who were worried that the anti-AIDS initiative would poke a big hole in the Mexico City policy, have been supportive.

The policy, which was initiated under former President Ronald Reagan in 1984, was repealed by former President Bill Clinton in 1993. As one of his very first acts on taking office, Bush reinstated it in 2001 and applied it last year to bar all US aid earmarked by Congress for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and reproductive health research at the World Health Organization in Geneva.

By extending the Mexico City policy in this way, Bush has spurred charges from population groups, notably the world’s largest, London-based International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) that he is engaged in a "secret war" against women’s health and reproductive rights.

Most recently, for example, the US delegation stunned a UN-sponsored population conference in Bangkok in December when it tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to change the language of the landmark 1994 Cairo Declaration by deleting or amending all references to "reproductive health services" and "reproductive health" on the grounds that such words implied support for abortion.

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US announces troop deployment
to the Philippines

Compiled by Nicholas Holt

Feb. 25 (AGR)— Philippine Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes says he wants the deployment of US forces in his country to be delayed until their exact role can be determined.

Baliktan 03-1, a joint exercise in Sulu province involving US and Philippine forces, was approved last week by President Gloria Arroyo.

US officials had said that about 750 ground troops, including 350 Special Forces soldiers, would work with Philippine forces hunting members of Abu Sayyaf and that an additional 1,000 Marines would be stationed on two US warships, prepared to serve as a "quick reaction force."

The announcement sparked political turmoil in the Philippines, with opposition lawmakers threatening to take action against Arroyo or Reyes if they were found to have secretly forged an illegal arrangement with Washington.

The confusion was partly exacerbated by Arroyo’s failure to categorically deny Washington’s announcement.

An unnamed Defense Department official had told the Los Angeles Times that "all of [the troops’] activities will be in direct support of the armed forces of the Philippines" but that US forces would remain under US command.

However, Reyes said today that "we don’t envision US forces being in charge, calling the shots," adding that he would discuss the terms of the US deployment with US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Friday.

The role played by US troops is a sensitive issue because of constitutional limitations on non-Philippine troops engaging in combat in the country, a former US colony.

Last year, protesters gathered almost daily outside the US embassy while US troops conducted six months of training near a combat zone in the southern Philippines.

Also last year, the Philippine Supreme Court ruled that US soldiers could shoot only in self defense.

"To unleash American GI’s to subdue [the Abu Sayyaf], even under the cover of expanding the US-led war against global terror, is not only an unmitigated insult against the Filipino soldier, but a negation of our respect as a people and a mockery of the Philippine Constitution," the court said.

The Bush administration considers Abu Sayef to be a terrorist organization.

A decade ago, when the group was founded with the goal of creating an Islamic state, Osama bin Laden sent a brother-in-law to coordinate with the group. He provided money and sought to arrange a merger between Abu Sayyaf and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, a much larger group in the Philippines.

US and Philippine intelligence officials have said the relationship never developed.

Abu Sayyaf is now known primarily for kidnapping for ransoms. The group has kidnapped several Americans, including a missionary couple, one of whom was killed last summer in a botched rescue by Philippine soldiers.

Analysts warn that the combined US and Philippine forces will have to tread lightly to avoid antagonizing a broad array of other Muslim groups in the southern Philippines and that such action could prompt the groups to unify against them.

Since 1996, the Philippine government has maintained a fragile truce with the main rebel group in the region, the Moro National Liberation Front, that allows the group to oversee small swaths of autonomous territory.

Philippine troops, with the advisory backing of US forces, already have regained control of Basilan Island, once a stronghold of Abu Sayyaf. The US and Philippine troops would now take their campaign to the Sulu islands further south, a largely lawless region rife with piracy and kidnapping.

Angry over the lack of economic development in the impoverished region, many residents continue to support the rebels.

Sources: Associated Press, BBC, CNN, Gulf News, Hartford Courant, Los Angeles Times, New York Times

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