‘A matter of credibility’
Fallouja is one of three flashpoint towns in Iraq’s restive Sunnite Muslim heartland, the others being Ramadi and Samarra.
The dogged and deadly 18-month Sunnite rebellion, born from the wreckage of Saddam Hussein’s regime, is at a crossroads -- will disgruntled Sunnites choose to lay down their arms and vote in January or opt to extend their insurrection.
The carrot and stick approach of Allawi’s government aims to draw the Sunnite insurgents back into the mainstream.
The prime minister is gambling that the damage done by military muscle can be smoothed-over and the Sunnites wooed to the ballot box in January through the promise of political power and millions of dollars in reconstruction funds.
The game plan has already been put into play in Samarra where a military blitz on October 1 ended with rebels fleeing the city, some 150 people killed, at least 20 of them civilians, and US and Iraqi forces promising the city 20 million dollars.
But there are questions over whether the strategy will lead a “defeated” insurgency to cast aside its nationalist grievances or regroup angrier than ever.
In Samarra, it is still too soon for an answer as the wounds from the offensive are still fresh, with bitter accounts of relatives killed and corpses buried in the streets.
“The occupying forces in the city have made life more difficult. This risks impinging on the election results and giving an official seal to the Sunnites’ defeat”, explained Sheikh Ahmad Mahdi in Samarra, who represents the Committee of Muslim Scholars, Iraq’s biggest association of Sunnite Muslims.
The association, counting 3,000 mosques nationwide, implicitly blames the US military for forcing the Sunnites from power after generations in power and opening the road for the Shiite majority to rule. Before becoming independent after the First World War, Iraq had since the seventeenth century been part of the Ottoman Empire, a Sunnite-dominated state.
The association has argued that a free and fair election is impossible with American soldiers still in the country, where Sunnites make up about 20 percent of the 25 million population.
“The conditions do not exist to hold free, calm and fair elections and it will produce a parliament almost certain to choose a cabinet that will want to continue the occupation”, the organization’s chief, Hareth Dari, said earlier this month.
Mainstream Sunnite politicians fear they do not have the time to convince their community to turn out for elections. “Over a year, there has been many military operations carried out in areas with Sunni majorities, like Fallouja, Samarra, Mosul and Bakouba. People in these cities are feeling a lack of confidence towards the government”, said Iyad Samarrai of the Iraqi Islamic Party.
“People till now are not able to feel some real changes as they think the whole story is a matter of game played by the Americans”.
Samarrai said he supports the elections but worries that crushing hotspots like Fallouja will not bring Sunnites on board.
“What we have now is suggesting more trouble, I mean the way the government is dealing with people in the restive areas. There are a lot of arrests, raids and detentions being carried out without even paying respect to what was written down in the Basic Law”.
He argued that if Sunnites stay away from the polls, the next government would lack legitimacy. “This could simply mean that the government would not be effective in restoring stability in Iraq”.
A senior American official in Baghdad also gave a bleak assessment for Sunnite participation in the election and admitted until now few inroads had been made into the community, which has proved a thorn in reconstruction efforts.
Many Sunnites “have a world view about [an] occupation in the service of Israel, the US wanting their oil and being here to stay and that... very much... blocks their ability to recognize they have other political choices”.
A failure to convince Sunnites they have a place in the next government could perpetuate their isolation and fuel a continued cycle of violence.
“I’ve told some Sunnites, ‘Look at the Shiites. They made this decision in 1920 to revolt [against the British occupation]. They were out of power for the rest of the century. Don’t make the same mistake’,” the US official counseled.

Blair’s ‘tipping point’?
As the Americans battle the insurgents in the North and West, the situation of the British contingent in the coalition stationed in the mainly-Shiite South is comparatively calm.
It was in this context that British Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed to an American request to redeploy 850 troops of the Scottish Black Watch Regiment to Babil Province south and southwest of Baghdad, freeing US soldiers for the assault on Fallouja
The decision was criticized by Labor MP Robin Cook. Writing in The Guardian newspaper last week, he said Blair’s decision could mark the “tipping point” of his mandate.
“When they come to write the history of the Iraq adventure, the decision to deploy British troops to the US sector may be seen as the tipping point at which the patience finally snapped of many of those who had hitherto given Tony Blair the benefit of the doubt”.
Cook, a former foreign secretary who quit Blair’s government in protest over the Iraq war, said that the cabinet, instead of producing an exit strategy for British troops, was “going to push them even deeper into the insurgent territory”.
Moreover, he said, Britain’s forces would now be “tarred by association” with US troops.
“An inescapable consequence of the decision to embed British troops in the US sector is that our forces will become tarred by association with US methods and held responsible of the civilian casualties that result”.
The troop redeployment, announced by Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon, came amid a storm of speculation about whether it was a purely military move or a political decision aimed at giving Blair’s war ally, US President George W. Bush, a timely boost for his reelection campaign. “It is equally obvious that the [US] request was the product of American politics”, Cook wrote.

Iraqis ‘indifferent to NGOs’ plight’
Iraqis generally shrugged when they heard the news last week that the international relief agency CARE was suspending operations in Iraq after its local director had been kidnapped.
It was just another sign things were getting worse in the chaos and tumult of post-Saddam Hussein Iraq.
CARE announced it was suspending operations after its local head, Margaret Hassan, a dual British and Irish national who married an Iraqi and has lived in the country for 30 years, was kidnapped on her way to work.
CARE Australia chief executive Robert Glasser said the charity’s operations in Iraq had been suspended. The remaining staff are all Iraqis.
“Our staff are not operating currently there. They’re certainly not working there now in light of the current situation”, Glasser told the national broadcaster, ABC.
Tahsin Ali Hassan, the Iraqi husband of the kidnapped aid worker, issued an appeal to her kidnappers on Arabic television.
“My wife has no involvement in political affairs. Her activities are purely humanitarian and are aimed at helping the Iraqi people, people she has helped for the last 30 years”, he said on Dubai-based Al-Arabiya television from Baghdad.
The motive behind Hassan’s abduction was still unclear although there was speculation it could have been staged by criminals seeking a financial windfall or insurgents trying to put pressure on the occupying coalition in Iraq.
In the Jamiaa district in Baghdad, where CARE has its offices, the local schools and social service centers were too busy trying to function to worry about one more aid agency shutting down.
Aid groups started to become invisible in Baghdad with the August 2003 car bombing of the United Nations offices in the Canal Hotel, in which a senior UN official, Sergio Vieira de Mello, was killed. The exodus was only given new impetus by the car bombing last October of the International Committee of the Red Cross offices in the capital.
At a Jamiaa center for the handicapped, its director, Najla Ali Ahmad, complains: “We need assistance to get our activities moving, but nothing has come through”.
An official of the Iraqi Red Crescent Society was too worried about those desperately in need to think too much about Hassan.
“So far we’ve relied on our own limited resources but also the International Committee of the Red Cross”, said Dr. Jamal Karboli
He worried about those displaced in Fallouja from the current round of air strikes and fighting and he expressed concern over unemployment in Baghdad’s Sadr City. For him aid from humanitarian relief groups has been a “drop in the sea”.

Pentagon ‘exaggerated risk posed by Iraq’
In a fresh blow to the Bush Administration’s attempts to justify the invasion of Iraq, a senior Democratic senator last week released a report alleging that the US Defense Department exaggerated the military risks posed by Iraq before the invasion in order to support a decision already taken by the White House to attack the country.
In a statement, Senator Carl Levin, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said a months-long probe conducted by his staff of pre-war intelligence showed that the Defense Department tailored its analysis to the Administration’s liking, after “assessments of the intelligence community did not make a sufficiently compelling case” for invasion.
Levin, who began his inquiry in June 2003, concluded that defense officials had found only “a relatively weak” relationship between Saddam and the Al-Qaeda terrorist network, rather than the substantial one that the Bush Administration cited as a justification for a war against Iraq.
Levin said the Pentagon analysis presented to the White House -- and in particular intelligence supplied by the office of Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith -- inflated the risks “to support the policy goal of removing Saddam Hussein”.
Levin called for tougher congressional legislation and better legislative oversight of intelligence assessments, the reliability of which he said had been undermined.
The Pentagon released a statement noting that the Senate “found no evidence that Administration officials tried to coerce, influence or pressure intelligence analysts to change their judgments about Iraq’s WMD capabilities or links to terrorism”.

LeCarré: ‘Give us back the America we loved’
The policies of the Bush Administration, particularly in regard to Iraq, continue to arouse intense criticism amongmany in the fields of literature and the arts.
One of the latest is writer John LeCarré, the British novelist, who has branded Bush as America’s most “universally hated” leader, urging US voters to turn him out of office next month.
Writing in The Los Angeles Times last week, Carré, author of such bestsellers as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and A Small Town in Germany, launched the stinging attack on the US leader and his war in Iraq.
“Probably no American president in history has been so universally hated abroad as Bush: for his bullying unilateralism, his dismissal of international treaties, his reckless indifference to the aspirations of other nations and cultures”, LeCarré wrote in the online article.
He also accused Bush of having “contempt for institutions of world government, and above all for misusing the cause of anti-terrorism in order to unleash an illegal war -- and now anarchy -- upon Iraq.
“Maybe there’s one good reason -- just one -- for reelecting George W. Bush, and that is to force him to live with the consequences of his appalling actions and answer for his own lies”.
The editorial also denounced Blair for supporting the war in Iraq and lashed Bush for eroding US civil rights through the Patriot Act.
In the piece, which appeared less than two weeks before the closely-contested November 2 presidential election, the author urged Americans to come in from the cold by kicking out Bush.
“Give us back the America we loved, and your friends will be waiting for you”, he wrote.