Troops Home from Iraq
Don’t Attack Iran

Organised by the Stop the War Coalition

See also ‘Reasons to march’ by Mike Marqusee of Iraq Occupation Focus

Reuters:, 9 March 2006

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Gunmen have killed some 182 Iraqi university professors and academics since the U.S. invasion in early 2003 and a group representing Iraqi academia said on Thursday the killings constituted a war crime.

Another 85 senior academics have been kidnapped or survived assassination attempts, according to the Association of University Lecturers in
Iraq

From the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Report on Science and Human Rights, Fall/Winter 2005 Vol XXV, No. 2:

Since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, academics working at universities and hospitals have been specifically singled out for attack. Dr. Issam al-Rawi, geography professor, member of the Association of Muslim Scholars and chair of the Iraqi Association of University Lecturers, has reported that over 250 academics and professors have been assassinated, and many others have disappeared. The list of those killed includes Arabs, Kurds, Sunni Muslims, Shiite Muslims, Christians: scientists and academics from all backgrounds. In response to these killings and general unrest, it is estimated that an additional 1,000 scientists have fled the country.

AFP: “Bush ties Iran to deadly Iraq bombs”

“Tehran has been responsible for at least some of the increasing lethality of anti-coalition attacks by providing Shia militia with the capability to build improvised explosive devices in Iraq,” the US president said on Monday.

Similar allegations were previously made by British officials.

Saddam’s Delusions: The View from the Inside, from Foreign Affairs, May/June 2006. By Kevin Woods, James Lacey, and Williamson Murray

Summary:

A special, double-length article from the upcoming May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, presenting key excerpts from the recently declassified book-length report of the USJFCOM Iraqi Perspectives Project.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The fall of Baghdad in April 2003 opened one of the most secretive and brutal governments in history to outside scrutiny. For the first time since the end of World War II, American analysts did not have to guess what had happened on the other side of a conflict but could actually read the defeated enemy’s documents and interrogate its leading figures. To make the most of this unique opportunity, the U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) commissioned a comprehensive study of the inner workings and behavior of Saddam Hussein’s regime based on previously inaccessible primary sources. Drawing on interviews with dozens of captured senior Iraqi military and political leaders and hundreds of thousands of official Iraqi documents (hundreds of them fully translated), this two-year project has changed our understanding of the war from the ground up. The study was partially declassified in late February; its key findings are presented here.

AFP coverage of article, “US misinterpreted Iraqi compliance with UN inspectors”:

“US analysts viewed this information through the prism of a decade of prior deceit. They had no way of knowing that this time the information reflected the regime’s attempt to ensure it was in compliance with UN resolutions,” said the article.

The mistaken belief that Iraq posessed weapons of mass destruction, was nurtured in part by former dictator Saddam Hussein, who feared that if it became known Iraq had no such weapons, “it would encourage the Israelis to attack,” the magazine said.

Article by Paul R. Pillar in Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006

Summary:

During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, writes the intelligence community’s former senior analyst for the Middle East, the Bush administration disregarded the community’s expertise, politicized the intelligence process, and selected unrepresentative raw intelligence to make its public case.

Excerpts:

If the entire body of official intelligence analysis on Iraq had a policy implication, it was to avoid war — or, if war was going to be launched, to prepare for a messy aftermath. What is most remarkable about prewar U.S. intelligence on Iraq is not that it got things wrong and thereby misled policymakers; it is that it played so small a role in one of the most important U.S. policy decisions in recent decades.

The Bush administration’s use of intelligence on Iraq did not just blur this distinction; it turned the entire model upside down. The administration used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but to justify a decision already made. It went to war without requesting — and evidently without being influenced by — any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq.

The intelligence community never offered any analysis that supported the notion of an alliance between Saddam and al Qaeda. Yet it was drawn into a public effort to support that notion. To be fair, Secretary Powell’s presentation at the UN never explicitly asserted that there was a cooperative relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda. But the presentation was clearly meant to create the impression that one existed. To the extent that the intelligence community was a party to such efforts, it crossed the line into policy advocacy — and did so in a way that fostered public misconceptions contrary to the intelligence community’s own judgments.

“
US postwar Iraq strategy a mess, Blair was told”.

Senior British diplomatic and military staff gave Tony Blair explicit warnings three years ago that the US was disastrously mishandling the occupation of Iraq, according to leaked memos.

John Sawers, Mr Blair’s envoy in Baghdad in the aftermath of the invasion, sent a series of confidential memos to Downing Street in May and June 2003 cataloguing US failures. With unusual frankness, he described the US postwar administration, led by the retired general Jay Garner, as “an unbelievable mess” and said “Garner and his top team of 60-year-old retired generals” were “well-meaning but out of their depth”.

He wrote: “No leadership, no strategy, no coordination, no structure and inaccessible to ordinary Iraqis.”