Money for Blood

Senator Norm Coleman has called for the resignation of UN Secretary General
Kofi Annan for his role in the maladministration of the U.N. Oil-for-Food
program. Coleman, who chairs the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations
and a member of the Foreign Relations Committee charges that Annan allowed the
Oil-for-Food program to become a covert program for subverting the very
sanctions they were intended to enforce. According to a signed article in the

Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Annan was at the helm of the U.N. for all but a few days of the
Oil-for-Food program, and he must, therefore, be held accountable for the
U.N.'s utter failure to detect or stop Saddam's abuses. The consequences of
the U.N.'s ineptitude cannot be overstated: Saddam was empowered to withstand
the sanctions regime, remain in power, and even rebuild his military. Needless
to say, he made the Iraqi people suffer even more by importing substandard
food and medicine under the Oil-for-Food program and pawning it off as
first-rate humanitarian aid.

Since it was never likely that the U.N. Security Council, some of whose
permanent members were awash in Saddam's favors, would ever call for Saddam's
removal, the U.S. and its coalition partners were forced to put troops in
harm's way to oust him by force. Today, money swindled from Oil-for-Food
may be funding the insurgency against coalition troops in Iraq and other
terrorist activities against U.S. interests. Simply put, the troops would
probably not have been placed in such danger if the U.N. had done its job in
administering sanctions and Oil-for-Food.

But Coleman's next argument is properly directed at the very nature of the
United Nations itself. He argues that it lacks the institutional mechanism to
police itself. This is a far more serious shortcoming, one which the resignation of
Kofi Annan will not address.

As a former prosecutor, I believe in the presumption of innocence. Such
revelations, however, cast a dark cloud over Mr. Annan's ability to address
the U.N.'s quagmire. Mr. Annan has named the esteemed Paul Volcker to
investigate Oil-for-Food-related allegations, but the latter's team is
severely hamstrung in its efforts. His panel has no authority to compel the
production of documents or testimony from anyone outside the U.N. Nor does it
possess the power to punish those who fabricate information, alter evidence or
omit material facts. It must rely entirely on the goodwill of the very people
and entities it is investigating. We must also recognize that Mr. Volcker's
effort is wholly funded by the U.N., at Mr. Annan's control. Moreover, Mr.
Volcker must issue his final report directly to the secretary general, who
will then decide what, if anything, is released to the public.

Therefore, while I have faith in Mr. Volcker's integrity and abilities, it
is clear the U.N. simply cannot root out its own corruption while Mr. Annan is
in charge: To get to the bottom of the murk, it's clear that there needs to be
a change at the top. In addition, a scandal of this magnitude requires a truly
independent examination to ensure complete transparency, and to restore the
credibility of the U.N. To that end, I reiterate our request for access to
internal U.N. documents, and for access to U.N. personnel who were involved in
the Oil-for-Food program.

Edward Mortimer, Kofi Annan's Director of Communications maintained that the
UN could not delegate powers it did not itself possess. Nor could it bring
criminal charges against any malefactors within its ranks maintaining only that
it would not protect its staff from prosecution by member countries.

Mr. Annan responded to allegations about the U.N. oil-for-food program in
Iraq by asking Paul A. Volcker to head an independent inquiry. That inquiry
does not have subpoena power, because the United Nations does not have that
power to pass on to Mr. Volcker, but all U.N. staff members have been ordered
to cooperate with the inquiry on pain of dismissal. If the inquiry finds
evidence of criminal acts by U.N. officials or others, national courts with
the right to subpoena will pursue these people. Also, Mr. Annan has said that
any U.N. official found guilty of wrongdoing will not be allowed to claim
immunity from prosecution.

Coleman hints, but does not wholly pursue the idea that the Oil-for-Food
program tacticly served the agenda of some "permanent members" of the Security
Council. That in turn suggests that the Gulf War and subsequent events, far from
being a purely bilateral struggle between the United States and Saddam's regime,
was really the nexus of a great power struggle involving France, Russia and the
US. French policy in the Security Council prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom;
their determined efforts to prevent the 4th ID from deploying through Turkey and
its hostile attitude toward the Allawie government hints that the real bone of
contention with Paris was not over how to topple Saddam but whether or
not to keep him there.

Alexander and Darius

Victor Davis Hanson reviews Alexander
the Great and finds it bears no resemblance to history.

The film goes on for nearly three hours, but we hear nothing of what either
supporters or detractors of Alexander, both ancient and modern, have agreed
were the central issues of his life. Did he really believe in a unity of
mankind, and were his mass mixed marriages, Persian dress, and kowtowing
cynical, sincere, or delusions of megalomania? We see nothing of the siege of
Tyre, Gaza, much less Thebes or even the burning of Persepolis. Other than the
talking head Ptolemy, none of his generals have much of a character. There is
nothing really in detail about the page purging other than a single reference;
Stone, I would have thought, could have had a field day with Alexander�s
introduction of both crucifixion and decimation. ...

So since Stone omitted the controversial and key issues of Alexander�s
career, what do we get instead for at least over two thirds of the movie?
Mostly sit-com drama, with gay and bi- subplots, in various bedrooms and
banquet halls. Olympias was something out of a teen-aged vampire movie, not
the sophisticated and conniving royal we read about in the sources. It is the
old Dallas or Falcon Crest glossy pulp in Macedonian drag.

A sense of the wealth of information that is omitted -- and which VDH knows
is omitted -- can be glimpsed from the incident of mass mixed marriages.
Some management theorists, going a little deeper than Oliver Stone, have
regarded the incident as the first recorded instance of a merger
in history. Others have characterized it as the first stumbling steps towards
modern multiculturalism.

In quick succession he took Egypt, Babylonia, and then, over the course of
two years, the heart of the Achaemenid Empire--Susa, Ecbatana, and Persepolis--the
last of which he burned. Alexander married Roxana (Roshanak), the daughter of
the most powerful of the Bactrian chiefs (Oxyartes, who revolted in
present-day Tadzhikistan), and in 324 commanded his officers and 10,000 of his
soldiers to marry Iranian women. The mass wedding, held at Susa, was a model
of Alexander's desire to consummate the union of the Greek and Iranian
peoples.

Of course, not every shotgun wedding ends happily. Some historians
have argued the experiment was a failure. "The result was mass desertion
and mutiny, one of many that occurred during his campaign." The siege of
Tyre, which the erudite VDH refers to in a single phrase, was an instance in
which an army defeated a maritime power, always an interesting situation. It was
based on the appreciation that the Persian navy was operationally constrained by
the need to obtain chandlering supplies at Tyre. Therefore he reduced Tyre,
thereby defeating the Persian navy via a land campaign. Of Gaugamela
I will say nothing, other than remark Alexander's oblique advance to the Persian
left created a dynamic battlefield which destroyed Darius' set-piece. The
outnumbered Alexander may not have known precisely where a gap in Darius' line
would open except that he knew it would -- and bet his life on it.

But it is Darius I sometimes feel for. There is evidence
he was a decent man, something in the mold of a Jimmy Carter, and he had no
chance against the dynamic and ruthless Alexander.

The Roman author Quintus Curtius Rufus - who wrote his history of Alexander
around 40 AD - tells us that Darius was of "mild and placid
disposition". He seems to have been an optimist. Before his army set out
to face the Macedonians at Issus, he had a terrible dream in which he saw his
enemy Alexander in the same clothes as he himself wore before his accession.
His seers offered conflicting interpretations. Darius chose to go for the most
tempting explanation: that Alexander would be brought before him defeated, in
the clothes of a commoner. What is highly informative about this passage is
that Darius apparently was dressed very modestly when he became king.

Curtius continues by saying that Darius was "a man of justice and
clemency". He was loyal to those who supported him. He felt responsible
for the well-being of the troops under his command, even if they hailed from
alien nations and practised customs which were culpable to his Persian
courtiers. He appears to have been flexible up to the point of self-denial.
Before Gaugamela he made three peace offerings to Alexander. In the first one
he addresses Alexander as "Alexander" and himself as "His
Majesty". In the third one he is virtually down on hands and knees. Prior
to the final battle Darius in prayer expresses his hopes that after him Persia
will be ruled by his "merciful victor".

Darius' reward was to die like a pursued
animal. While attempting to organize a resistance against Alexander, Darius
was betrayed by one his subordinates, Bessus, and slain. Bessus had calculated
on winning the gratitude of Alexander; but the demi-god understood above all how
treason, now that he was king, had to be rewarded. Bessus was cruelly mutilated
at Alexander's command and executed.

Hollywood may have calculated that none of this was important; that the sole
point of interest of a population weaned on the tabloids was the earth-shaking
question of whether or not Alexander was gay. Jeanne
Reames-Zimmerman convincingly argues the poverty of the question. In her
monograph, Reames-Zimmerman argues that the concept of gayness, as it is
presently understood, did not exist in the ancient world. From her discussion it
is possible to say that Alexander might have been gay in the sense that convicts
in a penitentiary are gay -- an exercise in power by one man over another -- and
if that analogy is inexact so is any other. The world of 320 BC is as distant
from us today as the 19th century, the last point in time when men intuitively
understood the ancient world. It was then then that the explorer and
anthropologist Richard Burton could write these words in his Book
of the Sword and expect them to be widely understood:

The History of the Sword is the history of humanity ... Primitive man ...
was doomed by the very conditions of his being and his media to a life of
warfare; a course of offence to obtain his food, and of defence to retain his
life. ... Peace was never anything to them but a fitful interval of repose.
The golden age of the poets was a dream; a Videlou remarked 'Peace means death
for all barbarian races'

Osama has as often said and we have as often misunderstood: 'peace be unto
us'.

Specks on the Sea

A pacifist writes a polemical eulogy entitled A
Coward's Tribute to Margaret Hassan. Tom Nagy introduced himself to Hassan
when he traveled to Baghdad in the shadow of a "looming American
invasion".

My passport held my credentials: letters identifying me as a reporter for
the Progressive Magazine and as a researcher for the Canadian affiliate of the
Nobel Peace Prize awardee, International Physicians for the Prevention of
Nuclear War. I was travelling to Iraq to estimate the level of child mortality
that would result if the US government unleashed its threatened war of
"Shock and Awe". I had also come to Iraq as a member of a group of
ageing pacifists called the Iraq Peace Team.

Nagy, who wrote "The
Secret Behind the Sanctions: How the US Intentionally Destroyed Iraq's Water
Supply" believed that the US had intentionally targeted Saddam's water
supply system to create "increased outbreaks of disease and high rates of
child mortality". He hoped Hassan would provide further evidence to help
him uncover this diabolical plot.

Margaret confirmed to me that the machinations of the US-dominated UN
Sanctions Committee had denied and delayed many items indispensable for the
rehabilitation of Iraq's water system. But nothing prepared me for what
followed next. Margaret handed me a section of pipe of huge diameter. The
pipe, however, was so clogged that only a trickle of water could pass through
it. What prevented the necessary maintenance of such water treatment pipes?
Margaret explained that any items which the Sanctions Committee did, from time
to time, permit to be imported were paid for in hard currency generated by the
Oil for Food programme. Nevertheless, Iraq was required by the US-dominated UN
to pay 100 per cent of the cost of these shipments at the border, before being
allowed to inspect even these life-saving articles for usability or
completeness. And, according to Margaret, the shipments were almost invariably
incomplete and of unusable quality.

This must have been a remarkable scene, one which would have put the best
efforts of Wile E. Coyote in the shade. But if it happened, then here is
evidence, if any were needed, that the entire Oil-For-Food-Programme
investigation is on the wrong track. Kofi Annan and Saddam had nothing to do
with it. The thing was secretly run by the Pentagon.

Such cruelty by officials of my own country shattered me. That night sleep
was impossible. The next day I could not leave my bed. I recalled the warning
of a Canadian psychiatrist who had worked extensively with ex- refugees like
me, that the experience of the first five years of my life as a
refugee/displaced person increased my risk of "falling apart" in
Iraq. The Canadian doctor warned me that if I could no longer function, I
should leave the country at once. Following this medical advice, I took the
next flight out of Baghdad. In my dazed condition, I mistakenly thought the
Jordanian airliner taking me to Amman was travelling through the "no-fly
zone". I remember looking out the window for US fighter planes and their
heat-seeking missiles. Curiously I felt no fear. I was beyond caring. A part
of me wanted to die.

Fortunately for Nagy, no US fighters were scheduled to shoot down commercial
airliners that day and he lived. But when he came to himself Nagy understood the
true meaning of his entire journey.

Now, I realise that I should have followed Margaret's example and stayed in
Iraq, even if I remained bed-bound, to share the fate of the Iraqi people. ...
If Margaret is dead, then are we not compelled to ask who benefits by her
death? And are we not compelled to memorialise her dauntless heroism by racing
to any country threatened by future invasions and staying there to try and
avert war by sharing the fate of the innocent? Can there be any more fitting
memorial to Margaret than to make wars and invasions impossible by interposing
our bodies between their child-victims and the terror weapons of our own
governments? Let us call future pacifist groups who take on this mission
Margaret Hassan Peace Teams. If the current invasion of Iraq has killed
Margaret Hassan, then may the example of Margaret Hassan inspire us to slay
war itself.

In James Michener's The Bridges of Toko-ri an American naval aviator
comes to the same moment of existential realization as he awaits death from
North Korean soldiers who are closing in on his position as his squadron make
one final protective pass with their F2H-Banshees before their fuel state
compels them to return to the carrier.
Michener rhetorically asks, "Where do we get such men? They leave this ship
and they do their job. Then they must find this speck lost somewhere on the sea.
When they find it, they have to land on its pitching deck. Where do we get such
men?" Nagy would know.

The Beat Goes On

New York Sun

CLAUDIA ROSETT - Special to the Sun November 26, 2004 One of the next big
chapters in the United Nations oil-for-food scandal will involve the family of
the secretary-general, Kofi Annan, whose son turns out to have been receiving
payments as recently as early this year from a key contractor in the
oil-for-food program.

The secretary-general's son, Kojo Annan, was previously reported to have
worked for a Swiss-based company called Cotecna Inspection Services SA, which
from 1998-2003 held a lucrative contract with the U.N. to monitor goods
arriving in Saddam Hussein's Iraq under the oil-for-food program. But
investigators are now looking into new information suggesting that the younger
Annan received far more money over a much longer period, even after his
compensation from Cotecna had reportedly ended.

Reuters

Nov 26, 2004 � By Irwin Arieff  UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The son
of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan got monthly payments more than four years
longer than was previously known from a Swiss firm that won a lucrative
contract under the scandal-ridden U.N. oil-for-food program, the United
Nations said on Friday.

Kojo Annan, the U.N. leader's son, was paid $2,500 monthly � a total of
$125,000 � by Geneva-based Cotecna from the beginning of 2000 through last
February, as part of an agreement not to compete with Cotecna in West Africa
after he left the firm, U.N. chief spokesman Fred Eckhard said.

Associated
Press

"There is nothing illegal in this," Eckhard said of the payments
from the Swiss firm Cotecna. However, it was an embarrassing moment for the
United Nations to have to admit that its earlier information was wrong.
Eckhard said that Kojo Annan's attorney told him that the younger Annan
"continued to receive monthly payments beyond the end of 1999, when we
previously thought they had ceased, through February 2004." Eckhard
acknowledged that the United Nations previously said that Annan had stopped
receiving monthly payments at the end of 1999.

CBC
News

Annan's lawyers say he was paid as part of an open-ended agreement that he
wouldn't set up a competing business after he stopped working for the company
in 1998. Cotecna was contracted to ensure the delivery of goods Iraq bought
through a UN-brokered arrangement that ran from 1996 to this autumn. The
program let leader Saddam Hussein trade $46 billion US worth of Iraqi oil for
food and other essential items the country couldn't acquire itself because of
international sanctions.

UPI

U.N.chief returns to HQ for Iraq biz -- United Nations, United States, Nov.
25 (UPI) -- U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan Thursday left Africa to return
to U.N. World Headquarters in New York to deal with the situation in Iraq. A
U.N. official at headquarters told United Press International he was leaving
Burkina-Faso without attending a meeting of French-speaking nations as
originally planned. She said it was not yet known if he would come into his
office Friday. The official had no further details of why Annan was cutting
short his overseas trip. Chief U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard Wednesday told
reporters in New York Annan was considering curtailing his program "to
deal with pressing business here."

The Ivory Coast Experience: Could Rwanda Have Been Prevented?

The trailer of the Hotel
Rwanda has a scene in which hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina, played by Don
Cheadle is disabused by a UN General, played by Nick Nolte of his illusions that
a "superpower" would come to save his people. Variety
describes a promotional event for the film, sponsored by the UN refugee agency.

Still, star Don Cheadle disliked being trotted out for the chatterati. ...
But the man Cheadle portrays, Paul Rusesabagina, was very social, saying he
felt no ill will toward the superpower that did not intervene. ... Michael
Moore came to support "one of the best films I've seen this year."
He quipped, "My next job is to convince Tom Hanks (news) to run for
president in '08."

"Superpower" of course, is a code word for the United States. It
was the United States which let the atrocity which killed nearly a million
people happen, or so the implication goes. The actual events which took place in
1994 are described succinctly by Wikipedia.

between April 6 and the beginning of July, a genocide of unprecedented
swiftness officially left 937,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus dead at the hands
of organized bands of militias known as the Interahamwe. ... For the next
couple of weeks, many questionable decisions were made by the United Nations,
which had a peacekeeping force in the country. Belgium and the UN withdrew
almost all of their forces after ten Belgians were killed, leaving all of
their Rwandans employees, mostly Tutsis, behind. The UN Security Council
unanimously voted to withdraw its troops, with France and Belgium at the
forefront, over the protests of the peacekeepers' top commander Canadian Romeo
Dallaire. The new Rwandan government lead by self proclaimed President
Sindikubwabo worked hard to minimize international criticism. Rwanda at that
time had a seat on the Security Council and its ambassador argued that the
claims of genocide were exaggerated and that the government was doing all that
it could to stop it. Representatives of the Rwandan Catholic Church, long
associated with the radical Hutus in Rwanda, also used their links in Europe
to reduce criticism. France, which felt the United States and United Kingdom
would use the massacres to try to expand their influence in that francophone
part of Africa also worked to prevent a foreign intervention.

The failure of the UN peacekeeping force, led by Canadian
Romeo Dallaire to militarily oppose the massacre has been the subject of
much debate. What is not generally recognized is that aside from UN forces,
which did nothing, French forces were rapidly present in Rwanda in some numbers.
Africa Online quotes French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin as claiming
credit for saving many Rwandan lives.

France's Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin insisted Thursday that
French troops saved hundreds of thousands of lives in Rwanda, during the 1994
genocide. The statement comes as French and Rwandan officials are trading
accusations on who was responsible for the genocide. ... In an interview with
Radio France International, Kagame claimed that not only did French troops
train and command the forces that carried out the massacres, they also had a
direct hand in the killings. Kagame's remarks initially drew a no comment from
French authorities, but on Thursday, Foreign Minister de Villepin offered a
spirited defence of the actions of French troops in Rwanda. In an interview
with the same French radio station, he claimed the French troops saved several
hundred thousand lives. De Villepin called Kagame's remarks uncalled for, and
an untrue version of history.

Exactly what forces were available in Rwanda? Dallaire's
command contained 2,500 lightly armed men composed of different
nationalities.

Gen. Dallaire was allotted only 2548 of the 4500 soldiers he requested to
carry out his mission. To make matters worse, several contingents were poorly
equipped and very lightly armed.

In the first weeks of the fighting, more than 1,000 French and Belgian
paratroopers arrived in Rwanda. Foreign
Affairs notes:

During the crucial first weeks, the U.N., at the behest of the United
States, ordered the more than 2,000 peacekeepers in Rwanda to do nothing to
halt the killing and then withdrew all but a rump force of 400 soldiers. Some
1,000 elite French and Belgian troops (backed by 250 U.S. Marines just across
the border) swooped in to rescue foreign nationals (most of them not at risk)
and then left, ignoring the slaughter of Rwandan civilians. Clinton and other
international leaders said nothing of substance. Seeing the international
indifference, Rwandans became convinced that the genocidal government would
succeed. Those who hesitated at first now yielded to fear or opportunism and
carried the slaughter throughout Rwanda.

U.N. peacekeepers and the evacuation force could have deterred the killings
had they acted promptly. Belgian military records show cases in which they did
just that when permitted to use their weapons. Firm and coherent international
censure could have influenced the organizers of the genocide. On the two
occasions when they received outraged telephone calls from foreign
governments, the organizers halted attacks on hundreds of Tutsi at the Hotel
des Mille Collines in Kigali. Jamming the genocidal radio broadcasts would
have kept the organizers from passing orders directly to the population. The
military radio, the only other channel accessible to the genocide's
organizers, did not broadcast to civilians.

This story is essentially repeated at NathanielTurnerCom.

Heavily armed western troops began materializing at Kigali airport within
hours to evacuate their nationals. Beyond UNAMIR's 2500 peacekeepers, these
included 500 Belgian para-commandos, 450 French and 80 Italian troops from
parachute regiments, another 500 Belgian para-commandos on stand-by in Kenya,
250 US Rangers on stand-by in Burundi, and 800 more French troops on stand-by
in the region. None made any attempt to protect Rwandans at risk. Besides
western nationals, French troops evacuated a number of well-known leaders of
the extremist Hutu Power movement, including the wife of the murdered
president and her family. All non-UNAMIR troops left within days, immediately
after their evacuation mission was completed.

One of the arguments that has often been made by the defenders of the UN
Peacekeeping mission's failure was that only "a superpower" had the
massive wherewithal to stop the genocide. While it is true that the Clinton
administration seems to have turned a blind eye to events in the African
country, recent events in the Ivory Coast suggest that effective military force
did not have to be very large. The scale of the French action in Rwanda itself
when it decided to intervene is indicative. Six weeks into the massacres, the
French deployed
in force.

After 6 weeks of genocide, France, which offered no troops to the UN
mission, suddenly decided to intervene in Rwanda. Within a week of the
decision, Operation Turquoise was able to deploy 2500 men with 100 armored
personnel carriers, 10 helicopters, a battery of 120 mm mortars, 4 Jaguar
fighter bombers, and 8 Mirage fighters and reconnaissance planes---all for an
ostensibly humanitarian operation. The French forces created a safe haven in
the south-west of the country which provided sanctuary not only to fortunate
Tutsi but also to many leading Rwandan government and military officials as
well as large numbers of soldiers and militia---the very Hutu Power militants
who had organized and carried out the genocide.

This force was not only sufficient to stop the massacres but to create a
geographical safe haven in the southern part of the country. The recently
suppressed November, 2004 riots in the Ivory Coast provides another basis for
comparison for the scale of forces required to effect at least a temporary
cessation of unrest. According to Fox
News, French strength, which was sufficient to halt the fighting in a day
was as follows.

It now has 4,000 peacekeeping troops stationed mostly in the center of the
country, between government and rebel forces. The UN has another 6,000
peacekeepers. The French reinforcements arriving yesterday number roughly 300.

This is larger, but not an order of magnitude larger, then the forces
available in Rwanda during the 1994 massacres. Operation Turquoise was a brigade
minus sized deployment. In the Ivory Coast, the French had a brigade plus and
augmented it with a company plus. The UN force available in Rwanda had other
problems, more to do with rules of engagement, mission orders and leadership than its mere size. NathanielTurnerCom
reports:

Only days after the genocide began, 2500 Tutsi as well as Hutu opposition
politicians crowded into a Kigali school known as ETO, where Belgian UN troops
were billeted ... the Belgian soldiers were ordered to depart ETO to assist in
evacuating foreign nationals from the country. They did so abruptly, making no
arrangements whatever for the protection of those they were safeguarding. As
they moved out, the killers moved in. When the afternoon was over, all 2500
civilians had been murdered.

We hear about those Belgian soldiers again from the Canadian
Defence Association website:

Critics claim that against the better judgement of Belgian commanders, Gen.
Dallaire ordered his troops to disperse into a number of weak outposts
incapable of mutual support should trouble arise. The Belgian court-martial
discovered that the opposite had occurred. Based on the original Belgian offer
of a Battalion, Dallaire planned to concentrate the entire unit as a reaction
force. Due to the failure of troop contributing nations to fulfil their
commitments, Dallaire altered his plan somewhat, but still intended to deploy
complete Belgian companies in strong defensible positions in the heart of the
Rwandan capital where Hutu government troops and militias were located.

Belgian commanders refused to comply with Dallaire's orders. Concentrating
soldiers, even in company locations, would require quartering them in tents.
Belgian field living standards demanded that their soldiers be put up in hard
shelters. With no extra UN funds to provide accommodation large enough to
house a Belgian company, they instead dispersed themselves in platoon strength
or less around the city. Each small position required its our security detail
further reducing the already minimal UNAMIR capacity to conduct any kind of
pro-active operations.

The question of whether a minor European or North American power could have
intervened will always be an open one. As for American culpability, the
producers of the Hotel Rwanda can hardly be faulted for insinuating that America
was at fault when President Bill Clinton suggested as much. During a visit to
Kigali in 1998 he apologized
for not acting quickly enough to prevent the massacres. "It may seem
strange to you here, especially the many of you who lost members of your family,
but all over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after
day after day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and speed with which you
were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror."

Update

The
Washington Post has a long article on the movie mentioned above, Hotel
Rwanda, which describes the efforts of a hotelier credited with saving the
lives of 1,200 people in 1994. Paul Rusesabagina is played by Don Cheadle in the
movie. The Post says the real life character -- who may have saved more lives
than the entire UN Peacekeeping operation -- used a Rolodex as his principal
weapon.

The tools of his trade were nothing unusual: the keys to the hotel's
storage rooms and cellars and a Rolodex of important people, including
Rwandans, U.N. officials and employees at Sabena, the Belgian firm that owned
the hotel. ... One morning, a phalanx of soldiers appeared at his door.
"Are you the hotel manager?" one of them barked. "If so, tell
all the cockroaches to leave in 30 minutes." Rusesabagina rushed to the
roof and looked down on a sea of spears, guns and machetes. "This is the
end, I told myself," he said. But then "I started calling. The
director of Sabena in Brussels, he called the king of Belgium, the president
of France, to weigh in."

Eventually, Rusesabagina, his family and two nieces whose parents had been
killed were evacuated by the United Nations to a camp in Tanzania. Today,
Rusesabagina lives in Brussels.

But the people he called must have kept his confidences to themselves. The
official story is that nobody knew. The UN was surprised, the Canadians
nonplussed, the Europeans unaware and President Clinton was shocked, positively
shocked that such a thing could be happening. The Canadian General in charge of
the peacekeeping force was given a Peace Medal; the director of UN Peacekeeping
Operations went on to become the Secretary General and President Clinton went on
to express his regrets in Kigali four years later. "It may seem strange to
you here, especially the many of you who lost members of your family, but all
over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after
day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and speed with which you were being
engulfed by this unimaginable terror."

The United Nations

UN peacekeeping personnel have recently been accused of using their positions
to coerce sex, often from minors, in impoverished African countries. The
perpetrators have included relief workers according to the BBC:

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has sent a team of
investigators into refugee camps in west Africa following the revelation that
large numbers of children have been sexually exploited by aid workers there.
The scale of the problem - revealed in an overview of a report by the UNHCR in
conjunction with the British-based charity Save the Children - has surprised
relief personnel. ... Over 40 aid agencies - including the UNHCR itself - were
implicated, and 67 individuals - mostly local staff - named by the children.
Some under-age girls said United Nations peacekeepers in the West African
region were involved.

But it said that poverty was the principle cause, with parents feeling
compelled to offer their children to aid workers for sex in order to survive.
"They want us to love to them (sic) so they can give us money," one
refugee told the BBC.

The unstated implication was that the problem was limited to 'local staff' in
Africa and therefore understandable (wink-wink) though this last conclusion had
to remain unsaid. But then it transpired that the problem was not limited to
Africa, but present in many places where the UN had a peacekeeping mission. The Scotsman
described the widening extent of the sexual predation problem:

Linked in the past to sex crimes in East Timor, and prostitution in
Cambodia and Kosovo, UN peacekeepers have now been accused of sexually abusing
the very population they were deployed to protect in Congo. And while the 150
allegations of rape, pedophelia and solicitation in Congo may be the UN�
worst sex scandal in years, chronic problems almost guarantee that few of the
suspects will face serious punishment. ...

In the case of Congo, the accusations seem as bad as anything the UN has
ever seen. Women and children have reportedly been raped, and there is said to
be video and photographic evidence of crimes. Similar allegations have been
directed at UN peacekeepers and officials in East Timor. And, in Cambodia and
Kosovo, local officials and human rights group charge that the presence of UN
forces has been linked to an increase in trafficking of women and a sharp rise
in prostitution.

Archival research suggests the problem has neither been confined to Africa
nor to 'local' staff. It has involved personnel from First World countries
perhaps contracting security companies. Global
Policy carried this article in the summer of 2001.

A former United Nations police officer is suing a British security firm
over claims that it covered up the involvement of her fellow officers in sex
crimes and prostitution rackets in the Balkans. Kathryn Bolkovac, an American
policewoman, was hired by DynCorp Aerospace in Aldershot for a UN post aimed
at cracking down on sexual abuse and forced prostitution in Bosnia.

She claims she was 'appalled' to find that many of her fellow officers were
involved. She was fired by the British company after amassing evidence that UN
police were taking part in the trafficking of young women from eastern Europe
as sex slaves. She said: 'When I started collecting evidence from the victims
of sex trafficking it was clear that a number of UN officers were involved
from several countries, including quite a few from Britain. I was
shocked, appalled and disgusted. They were supposed to be over there to help,
but they were committing crimes themselves. When I told the supervisors they
didn't want to know.'

DynCorp sacked her, claiming she had falsified time sheets, a charge she
denies. Last month she filed her case at Southampton employment tribunal
alleging wrongful dismissal and sexual discrimination against DynCorp, the
British subsidiary of the US company DynCorp Inc. DynCorp has the contract
to provide police officers for the 2,100-member UN international police task
force in Bosnia which was created to help restore law and order after the
civil war.

The extent and duration of the problem suggests that far from being isolated
instances, the United Nations has longstanding and fairly widespread
institutional defects which allowed these crimes to take place. How high these
defects went was illustrated by a sex scandal in Geneva involving a former Dutch
Prime Minister, Ruud Lubbers. The BBC
again:

A senior UN official was cleared of sexual harassment earlier this year
because the secretary general rejected the verdict of an internal watchdog.
High Commissioner for Refugees Ruud Lubbers, 65, a former Dutch prime
minister, escaped censure in July when Kofi Annan dismissed a complaint. But a
revised report issued by UN watchdogs on Thursday revealed that investigators
supported the allegation.

Mr Annan refused to take action, saying the allegations were "not
sustainable". Mr Lubbers was cleared of improper conduct after a
51-year-old woman on his staff claimed he had groped her. The UN's Office of
Internal Oversight Services investigated the complaint and backed the woman's
complaint, it has now been revealed.

 The plaintiff will likely wait years before her accusations are
reinstated. According to Reuters:

A senior U.N staffer has appealed against Kofi Annan's decision to dismiss
her sexual harassment accusations against refugee agency chief Ruud Lubbers,
but the case could take years to conclude, her lawyer said on Monday. The
woman, a 51-year-old American, accused Lubbers earlier this year of groping
her as she left a meeting at the agency's Geneva headquarters in late 2003.
...

The appeal will be heard by the Geneva office of the U.N.'s Joint Appeals
Board, a five-member tribunal made up of two representatives of U.N.
employees, two from management and a chairman appointed by Annan. But the
board's backlog of work is such that it could be two to three years before any
conclusion is reached and its findings can in their turn be referred to a
higher U.N. tribunal. "The internal U.N. system is in the Dark Ages. This
could take four or five years," Flaherty said.

The possible existence of an institutional problem was practically
articulated by disgruntled UN employees. CBS
News reported:

Angered at Secretary-General Kofi Annan's dismissal of allegations against
the U.N.'s top investigator, union leaders representating over 5,000 U.N.
employees met for a second day on Friday to decide what action to take. A
statement from the United Nations Staff Union said a draft resolution proposed
by one group of employees that was discussed Thursday expresses a "lack
of confidence" in the U.N.'s senior management.

American diplomat-bloggers
with knowledge of UN operations have concluded that corruption is a way of life
in the 'world organization'. (Via Instapundit)

On its official website, the UN modestly states, "United Nations. It's
Your World." We at The Diplomad are here to ask you to forget all that
misty-eyed blather. Our Diplomads have served at the UN, in New York, Vienna
and Geneva, and worked with the UN in a variety of other posts, and can tell
you from experience that the UN is a massive, expensive hoax that needs to be
ended once and for all. ... The "oil-for-food" scam, huge as it is,
flows logically from the ruling ethos at the UN. The UN system is built on
corruption, on the principle of the shake-down; whatever lofty objectives
might have existed at its creation, for the UN corruption now provides the
means and reason to exist.

The institutional nature of the problem means even a zealous and reforming
Secretary General, such as Vaclav Havel, would be hard pressed to clean it out.
The root of the problem may be that the UN bureaucracy reports only to itself.

The UN as an institution is the purest of pure bureaucracy: it is the
thirty-year single malt of bureaucracies. ... It exists to exist. To do that
it has going one of the best scams imaginable. While most media and ordinary
folks focus on the occasionally contentious UNSC resolutions and debates on
Iraq or Iran, in fact, 99% of UN "work" has nothing to do with such
high-visibility issues. No, it deals with scores, hundreds, in fact, of
resolutions passed every year in the UN General Assembly, its main Committees,
and in bodies such as the Human Rights Commission. It lives off those
resolutions.

Slightly simplified, this is how it often works. A UN bureaucrat gets hold
of a delegate from a sympathetic country and gets that country's delegation to
propose some often innocuous sounding resolution ... Normally such a
resolution gets adopted by consensus by the appropriate committee, and then
goes to the UNGA where its hammered through ASAP. Under the Reagan
Administration, the US delegation made a specialty of finding these little
gems and trying to kill them or at least make clear that they would not pass
by consensus. That is tough and frustrating work; it takes up incredible
amounts of time and effort and burns up lots of political capital. Such
efforts offend the MSM, powerful US NGOs and other lobby groups. The UN
bureaucracy knows that at most only the US will fight these resolutions; the
UN uses its allies in the MSM and the NGO "community" to savage the
US and make the US look uncaring about deforestation and poverty, etc. As a
result, often the US will back off as the politicial costs are seen as too
great to be alone and on the "wrong" side of such an issue.

The air of UN sanctity has in the past been so high that whatever its
bureaucracy wanted was ipso facto desirable, a clarion signal for Oxfam
to go out and solicit  and for 'concerned' individuals swarm out onto the
streets and rally for it. But even if the UN is swept off its pedestal it hard
to imagine what mechanisms of accountability could be brought to bear on it. The
problem was illustrated by the Oil For Food scandal investigations. The Washington
Post carried a fascinating riposte from Edward Mortimer, Kofi Annan's
Director for Communications, chiding columnist Robert Novak for criticizing the
Oil For Food Programme because nothing has been proved and nothing could be
proved because no one could be subpoenaed -- even by the UN's own investigators.
It was an instance of a bureaucrat unwittingly proving a point he wished to
refute.

Robert D. Novak was mistaken when he said that I "sneered" at the
letter to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan from Sens. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.)
and Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.). I said that I found it "awkward and
troubling" that two distinguished legislators thought the United Nations
was trying to cover up corruption or obstruct justice.

Mr. Annan responded to allegations about the U.N. oil-for-food program in
Iraq by asking Paul A. Volcker to head an independent inquiry. That inquiry
does not have subpoena power, because the United Nations does not have that
power to pass on to Mr. Volcker, but all U.N. staff members have been ordered
to cooperate with the inquiry on pain of dismissal. If the inquiry finds
evidence of criminal acts by U.N. officials or others, national courts with
the right to subpoena will pursue these people. Also, Mr. Annan has said that
any U.N. official found guilty of wrongdoing will not be allowed to claim
immunity from prosecution.

Mortimer's entire argument may be fairly summarized in four words: 'come and
get us'.

Al- Janabi Redux

The Associated
Press presents a radically different picture of Abdullah al-Janabi, the
Fallujah chieftain described in a previous post. In the AP's version of events,
Fallujah was a sleepy little town until it was transformed into a Frankenstein
place by heavy-handed American intervention and Al-Janabi a man of peace driven
to the brink by events.  According to the Associated Press account:

Religious fervor and hatred of Americans brought Omar Hadid and Abdullah
al-Janabi together in a partnership that played a major role in transforming
Fallujah from a sleepy Euphrates River backwater into a potent symbol
of Arab nationalism. Their rise to prominence provides insight into
contemporary Iraq, where the U.S. presence sparked a religious backlash that
gave radical Muslim leaders major roles in filling the void created by the
ouster of Saddam Hussein's regime and its replacement by a weak U.S.-backed
government.

Hadid is described as ordinary tradesman and al-Janabi a dreamy Sufi mystic.
"Fallujah residents and Iraqis with close family ties to the city said al-Janabi
was more a spiritual leader -- deeply respected ... ", though it does allow
that he sullied his hands on occasion. "al-Janabi, in his 50s, headed the
Mujahedeen Shura Council, which set up Islamic courts that meted out Islamic
punishments, executed suspected spies and enforced a strict Islamic
lifestyle." But he was a good guy gone bad.

Al-Janabi, on the other hand, is a Sufi, a mystical version of the faith
that seeks closeness to God through the cleansing of one's soul. Sufis abhor
violence, but al-Janabi found in Hadid a like-minded partner as Salafis and
Wahhabis began to prevail over Sufis in Fallujah. ... In 1998, al-Janabi,
married with five children, was suspended by Saddam's government from
delivering Friday sermons because of his public criticism of government
policies. ... Residents said al-Janabi never carried a weapon in public, but
was frequently seen during the April fighting talking to front-line mujahedeen,
exhorting them to fight on and telling them that those who died fighting
Islam's enemies would be rewarded with eternity in paradise.

The contents of al-Janabi's home were extensively described by Robert Worth
of the New
York Times, which paints a contrasting picture.

On a table were stacks of documents, including passports (the only country
he had traveled to recently was Syria, a translator who read the document
said) and other identification papers for Mr. Janabi and members of his
family. There were letters, including one dated Oct. 20 from the clerical
council of Baghdad asking him to negotiate the surrender of Falluja. In a box,
there was a Bronze Star, an American military decoration awarded for valor -
in all likelihood, the general said, stolen from a convoy. There was also Mr.
Janabi's personal name stamp, used for letters, and a white hat signifying
that he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca that is expected of devout Muslims at
least once in a lifetime, if they can afford it.

Also found in the house were files showing the names of people who had been
tortured and executed for cooperating with the Americans and their allies,
military officials said. There were also more than 500 letters from the
families of insurgents who had been killed or wounded, asking for compensation
from Mr. Janabi, said a military translator on the scene. They included the
families of fighters from Lebanon, Jordan, Yemen, Syria, Algeria, and about
100 native Fallujans.

When Fallujah was captured, the Marines found 60 mosques and 3 hospitals
converted into fighting positions, 203 weapons caches and at least 3 hostage
slaughterhouses and torture chambers.  A slideshow
detailing these facilities can be found at this link. (Hat tip: Reader Tritons's
Polar Tiger) How these hundreds of tons of munitions found their way into
this "sleepy Euphrates River backwater" is intriguing.  The Chicago
Tribune describes some of the other things that mysteriously materialized in
the previously pacific locality of mystical Al-Janabi. (via Powerline)

As the Marine officers visited the two houses Sunday, accompanied by a few
reporters, they carried maps, documents and photographs that itemized
materials found in earlier inspections. While intermittent gunfire rattled
nearby and the occasional thunder of arms caches being destroyed by American
forces could be heard, the group viewed the homes in jaw-clenched silence.

The reporters walked through rooms littered with the paraphernalia of torture
and the werewithal to capture it on video. At the last stage they saw this:

In a yawning black doorway off one of the clay-walled rooms was another
chilling find: a dungeon-like room, pitch-black except for the flashlights of
the Marines as they focused on a bloody fingerprint and cryptic etchings.
Scratched into the clay were words:

"Put . . . "

"Kept . . . "

"Plan . . . "

" . . . to pass on."

All were written in both English and Arabic. Beside those words was one
more, written only in giant Arabic loops:

"Hope."

Hope that the Associated Press gets it.

A Fallujah Mosque

The

New York Times' Robert Worth has a fascinating article on the battlefield archaeology of Fallujah centering
on the contents of a mosque just to the north of the main east-west road through
the city, Highway 10. (Hat tip:
FreeRepublic) The murdered Blackwater contractors must have driven just
yards from it on their way to the bridge.

The mosque, in a residential area just north of the main east-west artery
known as Highway 10, included at least a dozen brick outbuildings packed with
bombs, guns, rocket-propelled grenades, and ammunition. The diversity of the
weapons surprised the officers here: in the street outside, a ship mine stood
in a puddle. Just inside the mosque compound was an aluminum shed full of
mortars and TNT. Like many weapons depots in Falluja, it had been wired to
explode, and had to be carefully dismantled by an American explosives team.
Inside the compound was a document explaining how to destroy tanks using
rocket-propelled grenades. General Natonski picked up a white pilot's helmet
among the mortars and gazed wonderingly at it. "Did you find any Darth Vader
helmets?" he asked the marine captain next to him.

One of the more interesting artifacts was a very special kind of ice-cream
truck, probably driven by a laughing, mustachoied gentleman of the sort one
would never suspect.

In the back of the compound was an ice cream truck, its sides colorfully
decorated with orange, red and blue popsicles. Inside it was packed with
rocket-propelled grenades and bomb-making materials. "This was probably a
traveling I.E.D. factory," General Natonski said, using the military term for
improvised explosive devices, or homemade bombs.

Near the mosque was the empty home of Abdullah Janabi, the insurgent leader
of this city's mujahedeen council. Like the archives of some unfamiliar
civilization, Janabi's correspondence provided a glimpse into the methods
through which the insurgency was controlled, motivated and disciplined.

On a table were stacks of documents, including passports (the only country
he had traveled to recently was Syria, a translator who read the document
said) and other identification papers for Mr. Janabi and members of his
family. There were letters, including one dated Oct. 20 from the clerical
council of Baghdad asking him to negotiate the surrender of Falluja. In a box,
there was a Bronze Star, an American military decoration awarded for valor -
in all likelihood, the general said, stolen from a convoy. There was also Mr.
Janabi's personal name stamp, used for letters, and a white hat signifying
that he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca that is expected of devout Muslims at
least once in a lifetime, if they can afford it.

Also found in the house were files showing the names of people who had been
tortured and executed for cooperating with the Americans and their allies,
military officials said. There were also more than 500 letters from the
families of insurgents who had been killed or wounded, asking for compensation
from Mr. Janabi, said a military translator on the scene. They included the
families of fighters from Lebanon, Jordan, Yemen, Syria, Algeria, and about
100 native Fallujans.

Here was a man who could offer you paradise, money or excruciating torture,
expert in the kind of governance still common in some parts of the world, a
minor Saddam Hussein or a royal prince writ small. Robert Worth noted that "a
fridge stood open in the kitchen, with a plate of rice visible inside, three
yogurt containers, a half-rotten apricot", proof if anything that the evanescent
insurgency; the unkillable idea of popular journalism was tangible after all,
requiring physical weapons, logistics and money. It ate and drank; wrote and
read; could kill and be killed; and knew both triumph and defeat.

Triangle of Death 3

This story
from CNN links to Zarqawi's despairing accusation of Muslim scholars for
having 'abandoned' the Jihad in Afghanistan and Iraq to the United
States. He seems to be alleging that he has been thrown to the wolves. This
story was reported by several readers in the Comments section of the Triangle
of Death 2.

"Instead of implementing God's orders, you chose your safety and
preferred your money and sons," said the voice, which could not be
independently confirmed as al-Zarqawi's. "You left the mujahedeen facing
the strongest power in the world." The message was posted on Islamist Web
sites. "Are not your hearts shaken by the scenes of your brothers being
surrounded and hurt by your enemy?"

The same text was included or perhaps was the same source as Zarqawi's
denunciation of an Arab
Cairo conference which failed to condemn the coming January elections in
Iraq. Zarqawi said:

"We are committed to intensifying armed attacks against coalition
forces and their spies and agents... in response to the Sharm al-Shaikh
conference - a sordid and suspect farce," said Wednesday's statement
signed by groups including the al-Qaida Group in the Land of Two Rivers
(Iraq). ...

It also accused Egyptian President Husni Mubarak of wanting to use
"plotters and mediators" at the forum for US benefit. "Numerous
Arab regimes neighbouring Iraq, following the lead of Mubarak's regime... took
part, along with the puppet power [Iraqi interim government], in the massacre
of Iraqis, the destruction of their property, as well as the training and
arming of [Iraqi] policemen and national guardsmen," the statement said.

"Oh scholars of the nation... you have betrayed us in the darkest
circumstances. You have delivered us to our enemy... you have left the
mujahidin to confront [alone] the greatest world power," said the voice
attributed to al-Zarqawi, who has a $25 million US bounty on his head.
"Until when will you abandon the nation to the tyrants of the east and of
the west, who are inflicting the worst suffering, cutting the throats of the
mujahidin, the best children of the nation, and taking its riches?" said
the recording.

Then Zarqawi unequivocally takes the side of the Ba'ath Party.

Al-Zarqawi's group said it backs the call of Saddam Hussein's Baath party,
which issued a previous statement calling for action against US-led forces in
Iraq. The signatories said they signed "the statement written by the
Iraqi Baath party, not because we support the party or Saddam, but because it
expresses the demands of resistance groups in Iraq".

In one of the strangest twists, the Jordanian authorities arrested several of
Zarqawi's relatives including his brother-in-law and nephew.

The tape surfaced as Jordanian security forces detained the husband of al-Zarqawi's
sister in Amman. Relatives of Salih Ilhami told Aljazeera that the authorities
arrested him after storming his home on Tuesday night. The authorities also
detained al-Zarqawi's nephew. Sources from Ilhamy's family added that al-Zarqawi's
first wife and his sons left their home in al-Zarqa, near Amman, and
dissappeared about three months ago.

A report
from Jordan, which may be related, gives Zarqawi ten days to capitulate or
else his money will be confiscated. From the context, it appears the Jordanians
are holding some of his property in connection with an earlier Zarqawi attack
mounted inside Jordan. The interesting tidbit is that Zarqawi's money is within reach of the US.

The Jordanian Security Court has given 10 days for the Jordanian
fundamentalist leader, Abu Musab Zarqawi and three other men to turn
themselves in for plotting attacks in Jordan. According to Jordanian papers
publishing the Court's ultimatum, if Zarqawi and the three men, each of whom
have a $25 million bounty on them from the United States, do not capitulate,
the US administration will confiscate their property holdings.

Interestingly enough some of Yasser Arafat's $1.9 billion fortune has been traced
to Canada. Arafat also appears to have invested in at least one gambling
casino on the West Bank through an Austrian bank.

Quoting a Central Intelligence Agency report, it said yesterday the CIA had
conducted inquiries after receiving information that a holding company of the
Palestinian Liberation Organisation had invested $11.6 million in a small
pharmaceutical company in the Canadian town of Belleville, Ontario. Format
said investigators had "stepped on an anthill" when they uncovered
the stake held by the Palestinian Commercial Service Corporation in Bioniche
Life Sciences. They uncovered a whole network of PLO funds such as Chalcedony,
Onyx, Evergreen, SilverHaze and Avmax International, the latter based on the
Caribbean island Aruba.

The Ukraine

Breaking news is now riveted on events in the Ukraine, where a Prime
Ministerial candidate (Viktor Yanukovich) supported by Moscow is being accused
to

trying to steal the election from pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko.

The Central Electoral Commission said Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych won
49.4 percent of the vote in the election and Yushchenko had 46.7 percent.
European and U.S. monitors said vote counting was flawed. The future of the
former Soviet republic of 47 million people, sandwiched between the European
Union and Russia, is in the balance 13 years after it declared independence,
with Yushchenko advocating a free-market economy and closer links to the
European Union and Yanukovych urging the country foster deeper ties with
Russia.

The announcement of Yushchenko as a "so-called people's president, and
calls not to fulfill decisions of legitimate power, are enormously dangerous
and may lead to unpredictable consequences," President Leonid Kuchma said in
his first statement, posted on his official Web site.

Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators are in the streets surrounding
Yanukovich's headquarters; Russian Special Forces have been reported by former
US Congressman

Bob Schaffer as guarding the Kremlin's candidate. Schaffer is an election
observer. (Via
Instapundit)

Russian special forces dressed in Ukrainian Special forces uniforms are in
Kyiv. Ukrainian militia have been instructed by the mayor to protect the
people from the Russian troops. Ukrainian militia have established a hotline
for Ukrainians to report any incidents with the Russians and pledged to
protect Ukrainians. These Russians flew into Ukraine this morning. They're now
surrounding the administration buildings they say "to protect Kuchma (the
outgoing president and his PM Yanukovich). Following is a chain of email
messages I've been sending by blackberry. Please pass along to others. Bob
Schaffer.

... A representative of the Greek Catholic Church (a man who appeared to be
a priest -- dressed as one) announced at the demonstration that he was
speaking on behalf of the Greek Catholic Church, the Kyiv Patriarchiat and
several Protestant denominations (Lutheran was the only specific one I heard
but there were several others). He said this coalition of churches recognizes
Yushchenko as president.

Yuschenko is now leading one million people from the square and surrounding
streets to the administration headquarters of the Ukrainian government. He is
in front of the column and many fear he is vulnerable to getting shot. They
should be at the steps in 15 mins. Keep in mind, this is where the Russian
special forces are stationed, dresses in Ukrainian garb.

Yushchenko declared himself the victor and took an oath of office and act
which Yanukovich's allies described as a "farce".

Vaclav Havel has issued a statement in support of Yushchenko (via
Instapundit again), according to Radio Free Europe, but the statement is couched
in very general terms. (Again via
Instapundit)

Allow me to greet you in these dramatic days when the destiny of your
country is being decided for decades ahead. You have its future in your hands.
All trustworthy organizations, both local and international, agree that your
demands are just. That is why I wish you strength, perseverance, courage and
good fortune with your decisions.

Yours truly,

Vaclav Havel

American, European and Canadian diplomats all expressed concern at the
Kremlin's actions, creating remarkable psychological solidarity which is in
stark contrast towards the wrangling over Iraq. The

Guardian intoned (The Guardian!)

International reactions to the presidential elections in Ukraine have been
remarkably uniform. From the US, through the European parliament, to Nato, the
view is that serious irregularities and worse marred Sunday's second-round
run-off. Expressions of concern and dismay might have little practical effect
if it were not for the fact that the opposition candidate, Viktor Yushchenko,
yesterday claimed victory over the official winner, Viktor Yanukovich, raising
the stakes both at home and abroad. Demonstrators massing dramatically in
freezing temperatures in Kiev have invoked the example of Georgia last year,
when the "rose revolution" overthrew Eduard Shevardnadze in favour of a
pro-westerner.

Both Yanukovich and Yushchenko are negotiating to avoid an open breach.
Although the Kremlin has deployed some Special Forces units to the Ukraine, it
seems highly unlikely that Russia would risk an all out military campaign to
bring the Ukraine within the fold. Although there are no explicit NATO security
guarantees to the Ukraine, there have been many half-promises and partial
arguments. The

NATO website summarizes the situation thus:

NATO-Ukraine relations were formally launched in 1991, when Ukraine joined
the North Atlantic Cooperation Council (later renamed the Euro-Atlantic
Partnership Council), immediately upon achieving independence with the
break-up of the Soviet Union. A few years later, in 1994, Ukraine became the
first of the Commonwealth of Independent States to join the Partnership for
Peace � a major programme of practical security and defence cooperation
between NATO and individual Partner countries. ...

Relations between the Allies and Ukraine hit a low point in 2002, when the
Alliance expressed grave concerns about reports of the authorisation at the
highest level of the transfer of air-defence equipment from Ukraine to Iraq.
Yet NATO remained engaged in its cooperation with Ukraine, demonstrating the
strength of the Allies' commitment to develop strong NATO-Ukraine relations
and to encourage Ukraine to work towards closer Euro-Atlantic integration. 
In May 2002, just before the fifth anniversary of the Distinctive Partnership,
President Leonid Kuchma boldly announced Ukraine�s goal of eventual NATO
membership. In response, at a meeting in Reykjavik later that month, NATO
Foreign Ministers agreed with their Ukrainian counterpart to explore ways to
take the NATO-Ukraine relationship to a qualitatively new level. This paved
the way for the adoption of the NATO-Ukraine Action Plan by Ukrainian and
Allied foreign ministers at their meeting in Prague in November 2002.

The tug-of-war between Russia and NATO now in evidence was discernible even
then. In this crisis, the counterweight of NATO is effectively the power of the
United States, which has slowly been positioning itself not only on the western
marches of the former Soviet Union but also in Central Asia. A

list of US allies in Iraq illustrates this dramatically. These include the
Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Mongolia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Latvia,
Lithuania, Slovakia, Albania, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Moldova and Armenia; almost
as if the entire former Warsaw Pact had come under CENTCOM control. If that were
not enough, the United States has acquired a

network of military bases at Khanabad in Uzbekistan, and at Manas in
Kyrgyzstan.

Triangle of Death 2

A glimpse into the post-Fallujah world of the Sunni insurgency may have been
provided by an evanescent web posting used to communicate between the
insurgency's leadership, its cells and external supporters.
ABC News
reports:

The new message opens with a plea for advice from Palestinian and Chechen
militants as well as Osama bin Laden supporters in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
"We face many problems," it reads in Arabic, "and need your military guidance
since you have more experience."

The problems, the message says, are the result of losing the insurgent safe
haven of Fallujah to U.S. troops. It says the insurgency was hampered as
checkpoints and raids spread "to every city and road." Communications broke
down as insurgents were forced to spread out through the country. The arrest
of some of their military experts, more "spies willing to help the enemy," and
a dwindling supply of arms also added to the organizational breakdown, it
reads. But the message also lists new "advantages," claiming insurgent groups
are spreading -- to Mosul, Tikrit, Baghdad, and as far south as Basra.

It would be unwise to conclude that the insurgents are on the run without
further collateral evidence because effective disinformation is often pitched to
what we want to believe. With that caveat in mind, the message claims the
insurgency faces "many problems" due to command and control and logistical
problems. The dispersal of enemy fighters, largely as a result of the loss of
Fallujah, has made secure communications between cells slow and difficult. The
new gaps have provided the US with opportunities to insert spies or surveill
couriers. A second major factor has been the tourniquet applied on their lines
of communication from 'checkpoints and raids to every city and road'.

The earlier

River War post suggested that Fallujah was the opening US move in a campaign
to roll up the insurgency's lines of communication; specifically to detach it
from its strategic rear in Syria and to push back its principal logistical
attack base to points further from Baghdad. The web posting reported by ABC
News, if accurate, suggests the enemy is well aware of the danger they face and
are attempting to adapt to new conditions. The appeal to their jihadi
comrades in Afghanistan and Pakistan is intriguing because it suggests that the
Taliban's style of fighting may now be viewed as the relevant model by the Iraqi
insurgents. From their previous position of pre-eminence, the Taliban have been
forced to adopt a very dispersed and low intensity fight against a US force
allied to an increasingly established government. It is a position which the
Sunni insurgents, unless they can reverse their fortunes, may soon find
themselves in.

The Triangle of Death

The Los
Angeles Times reports the onset of a new American offensive against Sunni
antigovernment forces in the "Triangle of Death", a Ba'ath Party
stronghold and the recent site of the execution of tens
of  Iraqi policemen.

U.S. Marines accompanied by Iraqi security forces launched a new offensive
early today aimed at regaining control of northern Babil province, a region
just south of Baghdad beset by kidnappings, shootings and carjackings for more
than a year. ...

Terming it their first major post-Fallouja campaign to regain control of an
insurgent-riddled area outside Baghdad, officials said they would continue a
series of preplanned raids in towns and farming areas largely within a
so-called "death triangle" of cities bordered by Latifiya,
Mahmoudiya and Yousifiya. U.S. troops have also engaged in a series of
counterattacks to quell resistance in Mosul, Baghdad and other towns in the
wake of their offensive to regain control of the rebel stronghold of Fallouja.

"We are going to push the fight back out to the enemy while he's
reeling," said Capt. Tad Douglas, 28, who led an elite reconnaissance
platoon of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit in the raids. "We've seen
fighters from Fallouja filtering down here, and we're going to take the
offensive while they're still licking their wounds."

Explosives are believed to be plentiful in the area, the site of the Al Qa
Qaa munitions depot and numerous arms caches. "Marines have uncovered
several weapons caches in northern Babil province buried in dirt fields. The
arms include mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and 500-pound bombs. At this
point, though, they believe they have made only a dent in the supply."

Just how much explosive may have been salted away in the months prior to OIF
was underscored in a separate find far to the north, 45 kilometers south of
Mosul when soldiers from the 25th Division found a very
large cache of buried weapons.

During their patrol, Soldiers from 2nd Battalion, 8th Field Artillery
Regiment discovered huge stockpiles of weapons and munitions, including: an
anti-aircraft gun, 15,000 anti-aircraft rounds, 4,600 hand grenades, 144
VOG-17M anti-personnel grenade launchers, 25 SA-7 surface-to-air missiles, 44
SA-7 battery packs, 20 guided missile packs, 21 120mm mortar rounds, two 120mm
mortar tubes, 10 122mm rockets, six 152mm artillery rounds and two 57mm
artillery rounds. Soldiers also discovered a building full of explosive-making
materials. The three-acre site is secure and still under investigation with
more weapons and munitions discoveries expected, Task Force Olympia officials
said.

The "Triangle of Death" has become an obstacle course for Shi'ites
attempting to travel through the belt of Sunni towns to Baghdad. The Washington
Post describes the butchery of Shi'ite travelers by men sometimes described
by the press as 'militants' or 'freedom fighters'.

A particularly militant strain of Sunni Islam within the insurgency,
Wahhabism, has chilled many Shiites. ... Each driver had a story: Abdullah was
following a van carrying a coffin that was stopped at a checkpoint last month,
destined for the vast Shiite cemetery in Najaf. The men at the checkpoint
tossed the body on the street, doused it with gasoline and set fire to it, he
said. ...

They forced the young men to get out, then ordered them to insult Ali (a
figure revered by Shi'ites). Two men refused, he said, and were bundled off
and apparently killed. "They act according to their own religious edict:
If you kill a Shiite, you go to paradise," he said. "It's like
they're bringing chickens from the market and slaughtering them," said
another driver, Haider Abdel-Zahra.

Last week, residents traded stories about a young man with long hair who
was forced into a car by insurgents. His body showed up at his father's house
a few days later, with a gunshot to the chest and some of his hair pulled from
his scalp. A letter left on top of his corpse warned that death was the fate
of those who disobey Islamic injunctions. Residents also spoke of a woman
whose body was left in the street. Though she was wearing a veil, they said,
she was apparently killed for wearing pants, which some deem un-Islamic. In
several Shiite mosques, prayer leaders have denounced the killings in their
sermons, and the bloodshed has unleashed fears of sectarian strife.

The Strategy
Page suggests that the former Ba'athists are somewhat off balance and the US
is pressing its advantage.

For the last 18 months, coalition intelligence forces, and Special Forces
units, have been developing informer networks. Tips from informants inside
Fallujah were responsible for the rapid progress of the coalition attack, and
the failure of many of the defenders ambushes and boob-traps. Now the
coalition money is being spent all over central Iraq. With nearly 2,500
anti-government gunmen dead or captured in Fallujah, those who fled are
shorthanded, out in the open, and a source of quick money for sharp eyed
Iraqis.

This view is very similar to that put forward by a Marine spokesman
interviewed by the Los
Angeles Times.

In undertaking the operation, Marine Col. Ron Johnson said the aim was to
squeeze the insurgents by taking territory and freedom of movement from them.
Johnson's 2,200 Marines at Forward Operating Base Kalsu have already increased
their presence in the province through more aggressive patrolling of towns and
back roads. The heightened tempo is aimed at the insurgents or criminals who
had grown accustomed to moving through the province with near-impunity.
Marines have detained more than 600 Iraqis in raids or at roadblocks since
early August. "There are multiple factions competing for power with a
multitude of interests � some of them are no more than thugs � and they
want to take advantage of the chaos," said Johnson, who declared that
"there will be no place my men won't go" in north Babil. ...
"You can't have a functioning country where Shiites cannot drive from
their cities to the capital," said a senior military officer at Kalsu.
"The insurgents know it. And everyone in Baghdad knows it."

The indiscriminate terrorist attacks on Shi'ites and Kurds may be erecting a
counter "Triangle of Death" against them with American firepower and
Shi'ite and Kurdish enmity at the three corners. Many of the Iraqi troops who
fought in Fallujah were of Kurdish extraction. Another story from the LA
Times reports:

Staff Sgt. Adel Ahmed led a reporter to a spot outside a yellow schoolhouse
in central Fallouja. There, he said, his troops had finished off a fighter
carrying Syrian identification. The Iraqis pointed to a protruding mound of
earth behind the school where, they said, the Syrian was buried. "We are
fighting to save our Iraq from foreigners and terrorists," Ahmed
declared. Most Iraqi troops here appear to be either Shiite Muslims or Kurds.
Both groups are rivals of the minority Sunni Muslim Arabs who have long
dominated Iraq and constitute the majority of Fallouja's population. ...

But the preponderance of Shiites and Kurds also points to one of the Iraqi
army's potential weaknesses: The failure to attract sufficient recruits from
Sunni cities, where hostility toward America runs high and many young men
choose to enlist in guerrilla forces instead.

Although the Sunnis are minority in Iraq, they were dominant under Saddam
Hussein and the habit of command among some former Ba'athists may be hard to
break. MSNBC
describes Kurd-baiting baiting by the terrorists.

Insurgents battling U.S. and Iraqi forces in the northern city of Mosul
have been trying to drag the Kurdish minority into their fight and set off a
sectarian war, Kurdish and Arab officials say. ... Violence against Kurds has
escalated in recent days, officials say. The offices -- and officials -- of
Kurdish political parties have been attacked. Insurgents fired on a truck
carrying Kurdish peshmerga fighters. And at least one Kurd was said to have
been beheaded in Mosul, a largely Sunni Arab city. �They are trying to
ignite the flames of sedition between Arabs and Kurds,� Khasro Gouran, Mosul�s
Kurdish deputy provincial governor, said by telephone from Mosul. �They want
the Kurds to react and the peshmerga to come in (from outside Mosul) so there
would be sectarian strife in the city.�

Attempts to inflame the Kurds may eventually succeed.. The Associated
Press reports that two Sunni clerics opposed to elections called by the
interim government have been gunned down.

Sheik Ghalib Ali al-Zuhairi was a member of the Association of Muslim
Scholars, an influential Sunni clerics group that has called for a boycott of
nationwide elections scheduled for Jan. 30. He was shot as he was leaving a
mosque in the town of Muqdadiyah and died in the local hospital, said police
Col. Raisan Hussein. Muqdadiyah is about 60 miles north of Baghdad. A day
earlier, unknown gunmen assassinated another prominent Sunni cleric in the
northern city of Mosul Sheik Faidh Mohamed Amin al-Faidhi, who was the brother
of the group's spokesman. It as unclear whether the two attacks were related.

The former Ba'athists may still have plenty of money, weapons and explosives.
But they have plenty of enemies too.

No Anti-Semitism in Antwerp Death

The death of Orthodox Jew Moshe Na'eh, discussed in an

earlier post turns out to be unrelated to anti-Semitism or the Jihad.
According to the

Jerusalem Post:

Belgian police have ruled out an anti-Semitic motive in last Thursday's
shooting death of Moshe Na'eh, 26, a British citizen who worked at a synagogue
in Antwerp. A source involved in the investigation said Na'eh was not shot by
a Muslim. No suspects have yet been arrested, the source said.

Although Na'eh was not robbed � at the time of his shooting, he was
carrying more than 1,500 � police are checking whether financial reasons could
have played a part. The source added that Internet reports of threatening
messages on Na'eh's cellphone voice mail were "not true."

The Fugitive

Sites'
description of the shooting of a Jihadi in a Fallujah mosque by a
Marine (featured in an earlier
post) is now being used by the Associated
Press to substantially advance the claim that the Marine fired without
provocation.

The NBC correspondent who filmed the fatal shooting by a Marine of an
apparently injured and unarmed Iraqi by a U.S. Marine inside a Fallujah mosque
has written on his Web site that the wounded man made no sudden movements
before the Marine opened fire on him. ...

In the video, as the cameraman moved into the mosque, a Marine can be heard
shouting obscenities in the background, yelling that one of the men was only
pretending to be dead. The Marine then raises his rifle toward an Iraqi lying
on the floor of the mosque and shoots the man. Two other men are seen slumped
by a wall. Sites' account said the men, who were hurt in the previous day's
attack, had been shot again by the Marines. Earlier in the footage, as the
Marine unit that Sites was accompanying approached the mosque, gunfire can be
heard from inside.

Although Kevin
Sites' weblog posting can be read, at one level, as a defense of a
journalist's duty to report what he sees, it is now being used to convey the
impression that a Marine now under investigation is guilty of shooting an
inoffensive and wounded man. Sites himself does not say the Marine is
guilty: he carefully avoids that; but was well aware that a journalist's story
could easily be put to uses beyond his control. Describing his own video, Sites
said:

We all knew it was a complicated story, and if not handled responsibly,
could have the potential to further inflame the volatile region. I offered to
hold the tape until they had time to look into incident and begin an
investigation -- providing me with information that would fill in some of the
blanks. ...

I knew NBC would be responsible with the footage. But there were
complications. We were part of a video "pool" in Falluja, and that
obligated us to share all of our footage with other networks. I had no idea
how our other "pool" partners might use the footage. I considered
not feeding the tape to the pool -- or even, for a moment, destroying it. But
that thought created the same pit in my stomach that witnessing the shooting
had. It felt wrong. Hiding this wouldn't make it go away. There were other
people in that room. What happened in that mosque would eventually come out. I
would be faced with the fact that I had betrayed truth as well as a life
supposedly spent in pursuit of it.

When NBC aired the story 48-hours later, we did so in a way that attempted
to highlight every possible mitigating issue for that Marine's actions. We
wanted viewers to have a very clear understanding of the circumstances
surrounding the fighting on that frontline. Many of our colleagues were just
as responsible. Other foreign networks made different decisions, and because
of that, I have become the conflicted conduit who has brought this to the
world.

Sites had "no idea how our other 'pool' partners might use the
footage"; he regrets that while NBC covered the story responsibly "other
foreign networks made different decisions". Sites may now even regret that
his explanatory web posting is being used by the Associated Press in ways that he
did not originally intend. His story might indeed "further inflame the
volatile region"; now his well-meant comments might bear on a political
atmosphere that may send a man to jail. We can accept his sincerity, but who
will accept the consequences?

I wrote in the earlier post that "we need the truth, however ugly. There
is due process to protect the innocent from arbitrary punishment." I still
believe in the former but can only hope for the latter.