Perspective: On This Day In Iraq -- May 13th edition

May 13, 2006: A Marine scans a street while conducting security on a rooftop in Ar Ramadi


May 13, 2002:

Talks With Iraqi Opposition Intensify

Senior U.S. officials have been stepping up discussions with Iraqi opposition groups, including several newly prominent in U.S. thinking, as the Bush administration proceeds with plans for toppling Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

In one unpublicized meeting, a U.S. team, including a senior CIA official, met secretly in Germany last month with Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, leaders of two Kurdish parties based in northern Iraq that allied with the United States after the Gulf War in 1991, according to sources familiar with the session.

The meeting, which one source said was also attended by retired Gen. Wayne A. Downing, the White House's deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism, was one in a series Downing and other officials have held with Iraqi exiles as the administration tries to determine what role they can play in any attempt to oust Hussein.

The meetings are part of an effort by the Bush administration to develop ties with opposition groups in addition to the Iraqi National Congress, a London-based umbrella organization that for a decade has been at the center of U.S. policy toward Iraq.

Read the rest at the Washington Post


May 13, 2003:

Civil turmoil greets Iraq's new U.S. leader

Amid mounting anxiety over the wave of lawlessness and violence sweeping through Baghdad, America's new civilian administrator for Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, arrived here Monday to spearhead a sudden overhaul that has rattled Iraqi political leaders.

With Bremer's predecessor, retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, and his team preparing to leave during the coming weeks, Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani, who will play a critical role in the formation of the interim government, said in an interview that the United States risked squandering its victory over Saddam Hussein by allowing chaos and anarchy to run unchecked in the country.

Barzani said he had been close to Garner ever since they worked together a decade ago when Iraq's minority Kurds fled by the hundreds of thousands to the Turkish border region to escape the wrath of Hussein after an unsuccessful uprising following the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

"His departure will have a very negative effect," Barzani said. "The rapid change of officials is not very helpful because we need focus."

"We are paying the price for the political conflicts in Washington. Time is of the essence, speed is of the essence -- we must get some form of government."

Read the rest at the SF Chronicle


May 13, 2004:

Pentagon says next request for Iraq, Afghanistan will push total beyond $50 billion

WASHINGTON – The Bush administration's next request for financing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will push next year's total beyond $50 billion, a top Pentagon official told Congress on Thursday.

The remark by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz put a partial price tag on operations in both countries for the budget year that begins next Oct. 1. The administration has long insisted it will not be able to accurately estimate those costs for many months because of uncertainties over conditions in Iraq and possible contributions by allies.

President Bush had formally sought an initial $25 billion for next year's military activities in Iraq and Afghanistan on Wednesday. Administration officials notified congressional leaders about the request a week earlier, abruptly reversing earlier declarations that they would not seek the money until after the November elections.

On Thursday, Wolfowitz told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the administration's second request for funds will come early next year.

"It will surely be much larger than $25 billion," he said.

That would bring the total requested so far for next year to over $50 billion. Many lawmakers of both parties have said they believe even that figure will ultimately prove short by many billions of dollars.

Read the rest at the San Diego Tribune


May 13, 2005:

The Pentagon's Secret Iraq Stats

The morning news from Iraq today brought fresh chronicles of slaughter. Yes, even more than usual. American troops are waging an offensive they call Operation Matador in a remote stretch of desert near the Syrian border, while suicide bombs are going off in Iraq’s towns and cities, including the capital. Who’s winning? Who’s losing? Who knows?

The military and political future of Iraq remains so uncertain that the Pentagon in recent months has gone back to the Vietnam-era practice of citing bodycounts as measures of success. We’re told, for instance, that “as many as 100” insurgent fighters have been killed by the Matador forces. But of course that’s just a guesstimate, while the toll on the Americans and their Iraqi allies is all too concrete. Today alone, the insurgents managed to kill more than 60 would-be Iraqi military recruits and civilian bystanders in urban Iraq. The Americans are drawing lines in the sand, it would seem, while Tikrit and Baghdad are bathed in blood. Meanwhile, the total number of American dead in this war is now more than 1,600. And the Iraqi civilians killed by U.S. troops? Well, we’ll get back to that.

If there’s good news, it’s that while the Pentagon may obscure this grim reality in public presentations, it doesn’t seem to be kidding itself, as it did in Vietnam. An accidentally declassified Pentagon report about a killing on the road to Baghdad airport at the beginning of March shows quite clearly how much worse the overall situation is than the Bush administration would like us, or even its allies in the Coalition forces, to believe.

“The U.S. considers all of Iraq a combat zone,” says the report, which was wrapped up at the end of April, three months after the elections that were supposed to have turned the tide in this conflict. “From July 2004 to late March 2005,” says the document, “there were 15,527 attacks against Coalition Forces throughout Iraq.” Then comes one of several paragraphs marked S//NF (secret, not for distribution to foreign nationals): “From 1 November 2004 to 12 March 2005 there were 3306 attacks in the Baghdad area. Of these, 2400 were directed against Coalition Forces.” In a span of four and a half months, which included the election turning point, that’s not only a hell of a lot of hits in the capital city, it’s just pure hell.

Read the rest at Newsweek


May 13, 2006:

Pentagon's covert arms links shown

THE Pentagon has secretly shipped tens of thousands of small arms from Bosnia to Iraq in the past two years, using a web of private companies, at least one of which is a noted arms smuggler blacklisted by Washington and the UN.

According to a report by Amnesty International, which investigated the sales, the US Government arranged for the delivery of at least 200,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles from Bosnia to Iraq in 2004-05.

But although the weaponry was said to be for arming the fledgling Iraqi military, there is no evidence of the guns reaching their recipient.

Senior Western officials in the Balkans fear that some of the guns may have fallen into the wrong hands. A NATO official described the trade as the largest arms shipments from Bosnia since World War II.

The official told Amnesty: "NATO has no way of monitoring the shipments once they leave Bosnia. There is no tracking mechanism to ensure they do not fall into the wrong hands. There are concerns that some of the weapons may have been siphoned off"...

The international administration running Bosnia repeatedly sought to impose an arms export moratorium but, under US pressure, it was suspended several times to enable the arms shipments to go ahead...

Via a complex web of private firms, arms brokers and freight firms, the guns, as well as millions of rounds of ammunition, were shipped to Iraq at "bargain-basement prices", according to Hugh Griffiths, Amnesty's investigator.

Some of the firms used in the Pentagon-sponsored deals were also engaged in illegal arms shipments from Serbia and Bosnia to Liberia and to Saddam Hussein four years ago...

The US shipments were made over a year, from July 2004, via the American Eagle base at Tuzla, and the Croatian port of Ploce by the Bosnian border.

A Moldovan air firm, Aerocom, is said to have carried 99 tonnes of Bosnian weaponry, almost entirely Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles, in four flights from the Eagle base in August 2004, even though, under pressure from the EU, the firm had just been stripped of its operating licence by the Moldovan Government because of "safety and security concerns".

Amnesty said there was no available record of the guns reaching their destination.

Mr Griffiths contacted the coalition authorities in Baghdad, who denied all knowledge of any weapons purchases from Bosnia.

Read the rest at the Age