Experts: Iraq verges on civil war

[As we have so clearly said in FTW and in Crossing the Rubicon, the intent of the Neocons has always been to create a civil war in Iraq. Why? With the country eventually carved up like Yugoslavia into much smaller regions the demands on the US military will be greatly decreased. After all, the only thing we really want to protect is the oil which runs in a thin sliver of land from Basra in the south to Kurdish-controlled areas around Mosul in the north. As far as Dick Cheney is concerned, the rest of the "brown" people can kill themselves. We are after all overpopulated aren't we?

The fact is that the civil war is already underway. The dramatic increase in bombings and attacks reflects not just attacks on the US military, but Muslim on Muslim violence. - MCR]

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

WASHINGTON -- An unchastened insurgency sowed devastation across Iraq Wednesday as experts here said the country is either on the verge of civil war or already in the middle of it.

In the course of the day: Four car bombs detonated in Baghdad; a man wearing explosives at an army recruitment center in Hawija, north of Baghdad, blew himself and many others up; a car bomb exploded in a marketplace in Tikrit, north of Baghdad; and the country's largest fertilizer plant was heavily damaged by a bomb in the usually quiet southern city of Basra. Meanwhile, U.S. Marines were winding up a remarkable pitched battle against surprisingly well-equipped and determined insurgents on Iraq's western border. Some 76 Iraqis were reported killed and more than 120 wounded in the one day of violence.

With security experts reporting that no major road in the country was safe to travel, some Iraq specialists speculated that the Sunni insurgency was effectively encircling the capital and trying to cut it off from the north, south and west, where there are entrenched Sunni communities. East of Baghdad is a mostly unpopulated desert bordering on Iran.

"It's just political rhetoric to say we are not in a civil war. We've been in a civil war for a long time," said Pat Lang, the former top Middle East intelligence official at the Pentagon.

Other experts said Iraq is on the verge of a full-scale civil war with civilians on both sides being slaughtered. Incidents in the past two weeks south of Baghdad, with apparently retaliatory killings of Sunni and Shia civilians, point in that direction, they say.

Also of concern were media accounts that hard-line Shia militia members are being deployed to police hard-line Sunni communities such as Ramadi, east of Baghdad, which specialists on Iraq said was a recipe for disaster.

"I think we are really on the edge" of all-out civil war, said Noah Feldman, a New York University law professor who worked for the U.S. coalition in Iraq.

He said the insurgency has been "getting stronger every passing day. When the violence recedes, it is a sign that they are regrouping." While there is a chance the current flare of violence is the insurgency's last gasp, he said, "I have not seen any coherent evidence that we are winning against the insurgency."

"Everything we thought we knew about the insurgency obviously is flawed," said Judith Kipper of the Council on Foreign Relations. "It was quiet for a little while, and here it is back full force all over the country, and that is very dark news."

The increased violence coincides with the approval of a new, democratic government two weeks ago. But instead of bringing the country together, the new government seems to have further alienated even moderate Sunnis who believe they have only token representation.

"That is a joke," said Sunni politician Saad Jabouri, until recently governor of Diyala Province, in an interview here. "The only people they allowed in the government are ones who think like them," he said of the majority Shia faction, who mostly come from Islamic parties.

Military and civilian experts said the insurgency seemed designed to outlast the patience of the American and Iraqi peoples.

"I just think this Sunni thing is going to be pretty hard," said Phebe Marr, a leading U.S. Iraq expert reached in the protected Green Zone in Baghdad. "The American public has to get its expectations down to something reasonable."

Lang said there is new evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime carefully prepared in advance for the insurgency, with former Iraqi officers at the core of each group. They are well coordinated and have consistently adjusted their strategy, he said.

Now the 140,000-plus U.S. troops in the country are mainly "a nuisance" factor in the insurgents' overall goal of preventing the new government from consolidating.

"They understand what the deal is here," Lang said, "to start applying maximum pressure to the economy and the government and make sure it will not work." Their roadside bombs are intended to keep U.S. forces inside their bases, he said.

All the while the insurgents are gaining strength, he said. "The longer they keep going on the better they will get," said Lang, a student of military history. "The best school of war is war."

The Sunni insurgents could win the battle if they persevere long enough to sour U.S. voters, Feldman said.

[This is big. In our series a year ago, we had reports suggesting that this might happen. Now they are saying that it definitely is happening. -DAP]

CLIMATE change researchers have detected the first signs of a slowdown in the Gulf Stream - the mighty ocean current that keeps Britain and Europe from freezing.

They have found that one of the "engines" driving the Gulf Stream - the sinking of supercooled water in the Greenland Sea - has weakened to less than a quarter of its former strength.

The weakening, apparently caused by global warming, could herald big changes in the current over the next few years or decades. Paradoxically, it could lead to Britain and northwestern and Europe undergoing a sharp drop in temperatures.

Such a change has long been predicted by scientists but the new research is among the first to show clear experimental evidence of the phenomenon.

Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at Cambridge University, hitched rides under the Arctic ice cap in Royal Navy submarines and used ships to take measurements across the Greenland Sea.

"Until recently we would find giant 'chimneys' in the sea where columns of cold, dense water were sinking from the surface to the seabed 3,000 metres below, but now they have almost disappeared," he said.

"As the water sank it was replaced by warm water flowing in from the south, which kept the circulation going. If that mechanism is slowing, it will mean less heat reaching Europe."

Such a change could have a severe impact on Britain, which lies on the same latitude as Siberia and ought to be much colder. The Gulf Stream transports 27,000 times more heat to British shores than all the nation's power supplies could provide, warming Britain by 5-8C.

Wadhams and his colleagues believe, however, that just such changes could be well under way. They predict that the slowing of the Gulf Stream is likely to be accompanied by other effects, such as the complete summer melting of the Arctic ice cap by as early as 2020 and almost certainly by 2080. This would spell disaster for Arctic wildlife such as the polar bear, which could face extinction.

Wadhams's submarine journeys took him under the North Polar ice cap, using sonar to survey the ice from underneath. He has measured how the ice has become 46% thinner over the past 20 years. The results from these surveys prompted him to focus on a feature called the Odden ice shelf, which should grow out into the Greenland Sea every winter and recede in summer.

The growth of this shelf should trigger the annual formation of the sinking water columns. As sea water freezes to form the shelf, the ice crystals expel their salt into the surrounding water, making it heavier than the water below.

However, the Odden ice shelf has stopped forming. It last appeared in full in 1997. "In the past we could see nine to 12 giant columns forming under the shelf each year. In our latest cruise, we found only two and they were so weak that the sinking water could not reach the seabed," said Wadhams, who disclosed the findings at a meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna.

The exact effect of such changes is hard to predict because currents and weather systems take years to respond and because there are two other areas around the north Atlantic where water sinks, helping to maintain circulation. Less is known about how climate change is affecting these.

However, Wadhams suggests the effect could be dramatic. "One of the frightening things in the film The Day After Tomorrow showed how the circulation in the Atlantic Ocean is upset because the sinking of cold water in the north Atlantic suddenly stops," he said.

"The sinking is stopping, albeit much more slowly than in the film - over years rather than a few days. If it continues, the effect will be to cool the climate of northern Europe."

One possibility is that Europe will freeze; another is that the slowing of the Gulf Stream may keep Europe cool as global warming heats the rest of the world - but with more extremes of weather.

[The current wave of unrest in Afghanistan coincides with a renewed insurgency in Iraq, suggesting that these energy wars might not lead to a stable environment for American petroleum theft, after all. Afghans are uttering the cry of insulted people around the world, from the Philippines to Yorkshire: take your US military bases apart and get out of my country.

The other side of the Afghan riots - which, like most riots, are self-defeating for the rioters (having resulted in the destruction of communications equipment that could have saved Afghan lives and livelihoods in the future) - is Guantanamo. Interestingly, it seems their major objection is not the torture of Muslim men but the desecration of the Koran. The US Secretary of State has quite properly responded to this with the assurance that "Disrespect for the Holy Koran is not now, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever be tolerated by the United States." Not bad. But if the US were not in the grip of its own theocratic Dominionists, it might be possible to show respect for other cultures without mimicking their doctrinal commitments in transparently bad faith. Holy Koran indeed. -JAH]

KABUL, Afghanistan, May 12 - Anti-American violence spread to 10 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces and into Pakistan on Thursday as four more protesters died in a third day of demonstrations and clashes with the police.

Hundreds of students took part in three separate demonstrations here in the capital, where they burned an American flag, and a provincial office of CARE International was ransacked in a continuation of the most widespread protests against the American presence since the fall of the Taliban government more than three years ago.

In the most violent single incident, the police fired on hundreds of tribesmen from Khogiani, a district in eastern Afghanistan, who were trying to march in protest on Jalalabad, the town where four people died and 60 were wounded on Wednesday.

The police blocked the tribesmen, many of whom were armed, 20 miles from the city and had orders to fire into the air to disperse the crowd, said Fazel Muhammad Ibrahimi, the director of health in the province.

The Afghan authorities and Kabul residents said the spate of violence was the fault of outsiders, who they said were seeking to capitalize on student protests stirred up by reports, most recently in the May 9 issue of Newsweek, that Americans had desecrated the Koran during interrogations at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Islamic fundamentalist political parties, remnants of the former Taliban government and a renegade anti-American commander, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, are all possible sources of the violence, said Lutfullah Mashal, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry.

The American military is still trying to analyze whether the violence is politically driven, instigated by outsiders or a sign of general public frustration with the slow pace of reconstruction in the country, said a spokesman, Col. James Yonts. Students interviewed in Kabul pointed to the presence of American troops in the country as another source of resentment.

Local governors might also be encouraging protests against the central government and its American backers to improve their own standing before parliamentary elections in September, said Jandad Spinghar, head of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission in Jalalabad.

Seeking to calm the passions raised by the desecration report, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice expressed regret for the loss of life and promised a full investigation of the allegation against Americans at Guantánamo. "Disrespect for the Holy Koran is not now, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever be tolerated by the United States," Ms. Rice said in a surprise statement issued before an appearance at the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Protests erupted throughout the country on Thursday, spreading south from the capital region.

In the town of Chak in Wardak Province, south of Kabul, a high school student was killed and five were wounded when the police opened fire on demonstrators who marched on the provincial capital, said the provincial police chief, Basir Salangi.

"The people claim the police did it, and the police say it was the demonstrators," he said, reflecting the confusion over many of the clashes that broke out. The protesters set fire to the administration building, in anger at the shooting by the police, the official Afghan news agency, Bakhtar, reported, quoting one of the student demonstrators.

In Logar, another province south of Kabul, protesters toppled a mobile telephone tower and destroyed equipment at its base overnight, local officials said. High school students then gathered at their school in the town of Muhammad Agha at 7:30 a.m. Thursday to protest the report from Guantánamo. Protesters broke the windows of a new foreign-financed district administration office that was opened just last Saturday by President Hamid Karzai.

The rioters then attacked the offices of CARE International, the American aid group, and of another aid organization next door, scaling the walls, breaking windows and smashing computers and beating some of the local staff. The crowd returned three times to the compound during the day, Paul Barker, the country director of CARE, said.

The high school students did not instigate the violence, Mr. Barker said. "They were the majority," he said, "but our staff feels someone else was the instigation." He cited the demolition of the telephone tower and a roadside explosion that wounded a policeman as proof that the violent acts required more sophistication than could be expected from teenagers.

A prominent local political figure was killed in Ghazni Province, south of Kabul, in an attack that the governor, Asadullah Khan, attributed to Taliban insurgents. Two of the attackers were killed and seven arrested, the Bakhtar news agency reported.

Three people were killed and two injured by another roadside bomb, further south in Zabul Province, on Wednesday, said an official in the governor's office, who added that Taliban insurgents were suspected there as well.

Hundreds of students from Kabul University and Kabul Polytechnic demonstrated in the capital, Kabul, but with a heavy police presence, their protest remained peaceful. They blocked traffic for an hour outside the university as they chanted anti-American slogans and burned an American flag.

Some of the students demanded that the United States interrogators, who are alleged to have placed copies of the Koran in a toilet to upset detainees and in one case to have flushed the holy book down the toilet, be arrested and tried by a Muslim court. Desecration of the Koran is punishable by death in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Others said they wanted President Bush to make a formal apology to all Muslims for the sacrilege. Protesters also complained about the continued presence of United States troops in Afghanistan. "The students are calling in one voice: we don't want American bases in Afghanistan," said a medical student, Layek Zakim.

"Those Americans who come to our country and killed students should be arrested and executed," he said, apparently referring to the death of four protesters in Jalalabad on Wednesday, the day after the protest there began. American troops were in the town during the unrest and were blocked from entering their base by an angry crowd.

The soldiers fired into the air to break up the crowd, as did the Afghan police, Colonel Yonts said, but he denied that the soldiers had harmed any of the protesters.

Demonstrations were reported in nine or 10 Afghan towns, including several in northern part of the country, and in the northwest Pakistani city of Peshawar. More protests were announced for Friday and Saturday.