US will stand down 'cause they can't stand us

"Contractors shall not be subject to Iraqi laws or regulations in matters relating to the terms and conditions of their contracts… Contractors shall be immune from Iraqi legal processes with respect to acts performed by them pursuant to the terms and conditions of a Contract or any sub-contract thereto… Certification by the Sending State that its Contractor acted pursuant to the terms and conditions of the Contract shall, in any Iraqi legal process, be conclusive evidence of the facts so certified…" CPA Order 17, dated June 27, 2004

David Seaton's News Links
The Blackwater story makes clear that the entire American invasion and occupation of Iraq is not only illegal and immoral, but also futile and absurd because Iraq will finally only be reunited by its desire to expel the Americans. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps over a million, human beings have died, been mutilated or lost their homes to come to this. As the Spanish ask, "did we need so much luggage for such a short trip?" DS

Blackwater Shooting Crisis Rallies Baghdad - Wall Street Journal
Abstract: An escalating controversy over the alleged shooting of Iraqi civilians by a U.S. security firm has triggered the strongest challenge yet to legal immunity for some foreigners in Iraq, while providing a rare rallying cry for the country's polarized factions. But the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has managed to galvanize broad-based opposition to an order issued in the waning days of direct American rule in Iraq that lays out broad immunity from criminal prosecution for U.S. diplomats, troops and private contractors operating in Iraq. It is known as Order 17, issued by the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority in 2004. Iraqi officials have long chafed at the law, viewing it as an encroachment on Iraqi sovereignty. But until now, no serious effort has been made to revise it. The central government, unpopular on the streets and worried about being marginalized, appears to be using the Blackwater crisis to counter U.S. criticism that it is ineffective and to show ordinary Iraqis that it can stand up to Washington.(...) the shooting has brought together Iraq's three biggest and mostly hostile factions -- Sunni Muslim Arabs, Shiite Muslim Arabs and ethnic Kurds. This is a very good point on which everyone agrees," says Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish member of Iraq's Parliament. "We cannot continue to have the Iraqi-American relationship solely on the basis of Order 17," says Mithal al-Alusi, a Sunni member of Parliament. The united front is a surprising turnabout.(...) Iraqis have long been outraged by what they often say is a heavy hand used by security outfits such as Blackwater, and the firms' seeming immunity against repercussions for their actions. "This is really an unfortunate situation, but it happened many times before," says Zuhair Hummadi, an adviser to Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi. "This time it got out of hand." In December, a Blackwater employee shot and killed one of the vice president's guards without provocation, Iraqi officials say. The employee left Iraq and no longer works for Blackwater. Mr. Maliki himself cited six incidents involving Blackwater before the Sept. 16 shooting. "Order 17 supercedes the Iraqi law," Mr. Hummadi says. "What we need now is a new treaty." READ IT ALL

Mark Danner on the Third Act in Iraq - Tom Dispatch

David Seaton's News Links
What has happened in Iraq cannot be explained as simple ignorance or ideology, incompetence or even plain stupidity. This is criminal. I have thought for some time that Iraq must have been destroyed deliberately. Certainly it could not have been done more thoroughly if it had. Why and to whose benefit are the questions we must ask and answer in order to find the guilty and demand accountability. For we are talking about the most serious war crimes since 1945. A country destroyed? Hundreds of thousands of people killed and mutilated, tortured and humiliated? A region on whose resources the health of the entire world economy depends. The prosperity and future of millions and millions of human beings has been and will continue to be put in jeopardy. Why, for what, for whom? There has to an international investigation and those responsible have to be put on trial... Just like at Nuremberg!!! DS

If for some reason you have never heard of Tom Engelhardt's"TomDispatch" it time you did!!

Excerpts: (...) One can make arguments for a "deep de-Baathification" of Iraq. One can make arguments also for dismantling the Iraqi army. It is hard, though, to make an argument that such steps did not stand in dramatic and irresolvable contradiction to the Pentagon's plan to withdraw all but 30,000 American troops from Iraq within a few months. With no Iraqi army, with all Baath Party members thrown out of the ministries and the agencies of government, with all of Saddam's formidable security forces summarily sacked -- and with all of these forces transformed into sworn enemies of the American occupation -- who precisely was going to keep order in Iraq? And who was going to build that "new and fresh army" that Bremer was talking about?(...) Nearly four years into the Iraq war, as we enter the Time of Proposed Solutions, the consequences of those early decisions define the bloody landscape. By dismissing and humiliating the soldiers and officers of the Iraqi army our leaders, in effect, did much to recruit the insurgency. By bringing far too few troops to secure Saddam's enormous arms depots they armed it. By bringing too few to keep order they presided over the looting and overwhelming violence and social disintegration that provided the insurgency such fertile soil. By blithely purging tens of thousands of the country's Baathist elite, whatever their deeds, and by establishing a muscle-bound and inept American occupation without an "Iraqi face," they created an increasing resentment among Iraqis that fostered the insurgency and encouraged people to shelter it. And by providing too few troops to secure Iraq's borders they helped supply its forces with an unending number of Sunni Islamic extremists from neighboring states. It was the foreign Islamists' strategy above all to promote their jihadist cause by provoking a sectarian civil war in Iraq; by failing to prevent their attacks and to protect the Shia who became their targets, the U.S. leaders have allowed them to succeed. LINK TO TOMDISPATCH