Iraq war most lethal for Journalists than Vietnam

THE Iraq war has been the most lethal for journalists since World War II, with 230 journalists and media staff killed since the conflict broke out.
The figures, compiled by french-based international press freedom organisation Reporters Sans Frontieres (ReportersWithout Borders) run from March 20, 2003 until the present day.
The figure is more than the number killed in 20 years of the Vietnam War or during the Algerian civil war, RSF said.
The latest fatality was 35-year-old Al Iraqiya TV journalist Riyad Assariyeh, who was shot dead by unidentified gunmen as he left his home in Baghdad this week.
RSF said that "clearly targeted murder'' brought to 15 the number of Al Iraqiya journalists killed since coalition forces removed Saddam Hussein from power.
"Reporters Without Borders calls for a proper investigation capable of identifying and arresting both the perpetrators and instigators of this murder and bringing them to justice,'' the organization said in a statement.
"It would be deplorable it this killing were to go unpunished, which unfortunately has been the case in 99 per cent of the 230 murders of journalists and media workers since the US-led invasion in 2003.''
Two weeks after the US Army withdrew its last combat brigade from Iraq, RSF has released a report examining what impact seven years of occupation by coalition forces has had on press freedom.
Called "The Iraq War: A Heavy Death Toll for the Media", the report also looks at the issue of journalist abductions during the war.
With more than 93 media professionals kidnapped, Iraq was for several years the biggest market for hostages in the world.
The report said about 30 journalists had been arrested by the US Army between March 2003 and August 2010, most of them in 2008.
"By early January 2006, Camp Bucca, the American detention centre in southern Iraq between the cities of Basra and Uum Qasr, had become the biggest prison for journalists in the Middle East,'' it said.

South Asians Left Jobless, Homeless In Iraq

Tens of thousands of poor South Asians have made their way to Iraq since the U.S. invasion, in the hopes of making money to send home to support their families.
Dishwashers, cleaners, drivers and cooks from countries like Bangladesh, India and Nepal form part of an army of contractors that service America's expensive war.
But the system that gets them to Baghdad is riddled with corruption and exploitation, leaving some South Asians living in hovels, jobless and afraid.
Four months ago, Sushil Khadka, 26, left his wife, his two children and his home country of Nepal for Iraq.
"I'd dreamt of a good job, sending home my salary every month to feed my family, to send my children to school. That's why I came here. But that never happened. The opposite happened. It's terrible," he says.
Now Khadka sits in a hut made out of salvaged cardboard, huddled next to a chain-link fence in a dusty corner near Baghdad's international airport. Flies swarm around splattered bits of old food and dirty blankets.
"They made fools of us," he says. "Had we gotten work, it would've been alright but they took our money and ran away."
He sold the family jewelry — all they had in the world — to pay a recruiter in Nepal $5,000. He says the recruiter promised him a job working for American contractor KBR that would earn him $800 a month — a fortune in Nepal. The average income there is $340 a year.
But when he arrived in Iraq he was told there was no work, he says. The agent who was supposed to help him was arrested and the visa in Khadka's passport was ripped out. He was left to his own devices, scrounging around the airport to find shelter and food.
Khadka is not alone. The 40-or-so men who live with him in this makeshift camp tell similar tales.
Upendra Das, 17, sits on the floor chopping vegetables on a dirty plank of painted wood.
"We eat once a day. Sometimes we can't even do that," he says. "I've been here three months so far. To get here I borrowed from the village moneylender. They charge a lot of interest. I can't leave so I'm still waiting, hoping that I will get some work."
Another group of 1,000 South Asians have been held in a nearby warehouse for several months by KBR subcontractor Najlaa Catering Services, a company based in Kuwait. The men say they had their passports taken away and were confined in substandard conditions.
The U.S. military and KBR say they are investigating.
The U.S. State and Defense departments have issued contracting guidelines that are supposed to protect workers in Iraq.
"As in all things, in Iraq there is a policy in place but there is no one really there to enforce it," says investigative journalist T. Christian Miller, who works for Pro Publica and has written a book called Blood Money about the mismanagement of Iraq's reconstruction.
He says that the abuse of South Asian workers in Iraq is common.
"It's definitely a situation of exploitation. You are talking about the most vulnerable people in the world," Miller says. "The U.S. has contracted some of the most dangerous and dirties jobs to some of the poorest people in the world. At this point, five years into the war, there are no excuses for U.S. companies not to be aware of the issue of human trafficking or labor trafficking."
Back at the Baghdad airport, a representative from the International Organization of Migration (IOM) has just showed up offering the homeless South Asians free repatriation. The IOM heard about the men only 10 days ago.
The men crowd around as Thair Issan hands out forms for them to fill out if they want to go home. Issan says the men's plight is desperate.
"Those are victims," he says. "You see the conditions they're living in. It's a very big humanitarian crisis."
Bangladeshi Mohammad Nazrul Islam says he wants to stay here but he's been told he'll be jailed if he does.
"The Iraqi authorities say ... they will jail us if we stay. If we leave right now, it's OK. But we don't want to leave because we've all paid a lot of money to get here," he says.
Where will we find the money to pay off that debt? he asks desperately, adding that he wants to stay but no one will give him a job.
ed note: The scares of a War President.

Flag-waving questions beg patriot's reply | courier-journal |

As America gears up for its Fourth of July birthday party without all the birthright optimism of its past, much less being able to afford the ice cream and cake, I'm thinking about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the presidential race -- and the price of gasoline.
Today's flag-waving questions for all automatic patriots:
Unless you have family or friends in the military, what kind of real sacrifices have you made to support the men and women fighting these wars -- as in at least being willing to pay for them?
If it turns out our presence in oil-rich Iraq will help feed America's selfish energy needs, does that help justify its cost in tax dollars and lives?
For those with mixed feelings about the war, is there now a tiny part of you saying, yes, we now need to do whatever it takes to boost our steadily slipping standard of living?
Was this war, as many have charged, really about access to oil all along? Since there were no weapons of mass destruction, and democracy in Iraq remains an ethnic-charged illusion, are you willing to rationalize our permanent presence there if it will help keep gasoline under $5 a gallon?
With four giant oil companies -- Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP -- hovering over no-bid Iraqi oil concessions, have all those soldiers died in part to help keep oil company profits at obscenely high levels?
Just something to think about as you drive to the lake.
The presidential race of late has become bogged down in military rhetoric and symbolism -- but what else is new?
The symbolism thing comes way too easily. Barack Obama never served in the military -- the great majority of Americans do not these days -- but John Wayne never did, either. So which one would be your first choice to lead the country into war -- and why?
Gen. Wesley Clark, an Obama supporter who was seriously wounded and won a Silver Star while a company commander in Vietnam, took some verbal shots at John McCain, who was a tortured POW in Vietnam for 5½ years, by saying, "I don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president."
Nobody wins at that level of argument -- and Obama backed away from it. But if military record and experience is so important, how did we end up with our present commander in chief?
He used family influence to get into the Air National Guard during a time when that mostly insured not seeing any combat -- and ended up fighting the Vietnam War in Alabama.
Granted, he is now the lamest of ducks, but where was all the military argument -- unless you consider "swiftboating" military patriotism -- the last time around?
Just something to think about on the way to see the kids.
Which brings us to the cost of gasoline to get there. The news headline that most brought that chicken home to roost went, "Energy experts puzzled over oil prices."
They are not alone. From what I've read, the nation's demand is down just a tad, the availability of oil is steady -- and the price at the pump jumps 20 cents a day.
My fully unscientific theory is that we are being had by oil companies -- who will again reap enormous profits -- cynical politics, market manipulators and greed.
Just something to think about while driving to the Fourth of July parade.
Bob Hill's column appears on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach him at (502) 582-4646 or bhill@courier-journal.com. Comment on this column, and read his blog and previous columns, at http://www.courier-journal.com/bobhill

Flag-waving questions beg patriot's reply courier-journal The Courier-Journal

What John McCain didn't learn in Vietnam

July 4, 2008 Nobody has denigrated the service of John McCain or his suffering in captivity as a prisoner of North Vietnam, as much as his supporters wish to pretend that someone did. Nobody has denied that his valor in captivity offers insight into his character. But so far almost nobody has asked the most important question about McCain's military experience, which is how his past might influence his future as president.
The most pertinent issue is not what McCain did or didn't do during the war in Vietnam, but what he learned from that searing, incredibly bloody and wholly unnecessary failure of U.S. policy. Clearly he learned that torture is morally wrong, illegal and counterproductive, and he has spoken with great moral authority on that issue. But listening to him now and over the past decade or so, he also seems not to have learned why that war itself was a tragic mistake -- and why we needed to leave Vietnam long before we did.
Indeed, what is most striking about McCain's attitude toward Vietnam is his insistence that we could have won -- that we should have won -- with more bombs and more casualties. In 1998, he spoke on the 30th anniversary of the Tet Offensive. "Like a lot of Vietnam veterans, I believed and still believe that the war was winnable," he said. "I do not believe that it was winnable at an acceptable cost in the short or probably even the long term using the strategy of attrition which we employed there to such tragic results. I do believe that had we taken the war to the North and made full, consistent use of air power in the North, we ultimately would have prevailed." Five years later, he said much the same thing to the Council on Foreign Relations. "We lost in Vietnam because we lost the will to fight, because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting, and because we limited the tools at our disposal."
Very few military historians agree with McCain's bitter analysis, which suggests that a ground invasion and an even more destructive bombing campaign, with an unimaginable cost in human life, would have achieved an American victory. But perhaps because he is obsessed by the humiliation of defeat -- which fell directly on his father, Adm. John S. McCain Jr., who served as the commander in chief of Pacific forces during the Vietnam conflict -- the former prisoner of war seemingly can formulate neither a rational assessment of that war's enormous costs nor of its flawed premises and purposes.
To reach such an assessment requires, at the very least, a review of the relevant statistics, although such data can scarcely convey the war's horror. Numbers are useful, however, because they provide perspective on the assertions of politicians like McCain, whose rhetoric of "victory" is otherwise meaningless.
More than 58,000 Americans were killed in action between 1965 and 1973. More than a million and a half Vietnamese died during that same period, including hundreds of thousands killed by American bombs like those dropped by McCain during the mission that led to his capture, imprisonment and torture. Prosecution of the war diminished American prestige, as did our eventual defeat -- and the price paid by our armed forces and the returning veterans is still painful to recall. The economic cost of the war, calculated in current dollars, may have been as high as $1.7 trillion.
In McCain's mind, those lives and that treasure were expended in a "noble cause." Presumably he believes that we were seeking to preserve the freedom of the South Vietnamese from North Vietnamese communist oppression. But the politics of Vietnam and the geopolitics of the war were at once more complicated and simpler. Complicated because South Vietnam was a corrupt dictatorship that had forfeited the loyalty of most of its citizens, who regarded the United States not as a liberator but as the latest invader in a long procession that dated back centuries and included the French and the Chinese as well.
What vital American interests required so many deaths and so much suffering? There were none, but presumably, again, McCain thinks that we were forced to push back against communist expansion in Asia. That too was an awful misconception, based on cultural ignorance, since the Vietnamese accepted Russian and Chinese assistance only to expel the American occupation. Within the decade that followed the American defeat in Indochina, our diplomats were opening a new relationship with China while the Soviet Union, along with communism as an ideological threat, was on the verge of disintegration.
If the Vietnam War was premised on strategic misconceptions and cultural stupidity, it was also based on plain old lies, as the true history of the Tonkin Gulf incident has long since revealed. There was no reason for the United States to enter a colonial war that the French had abandoned. Ultimately there was no basis for American hostility toward Vietnam, as McCain wisely acknowledged when he led the effort to normalize our diplomatic and trade relations with the government that defeated us. Now that we live in peace and reconciliation with that same regime, what justifies the war that led to more than a million deaths?
Whenever McCain tries to explain what lessons he drew from the Vietnam tragedy, he cites a simple doctrine. We should not send troops into foreign conflict unless there is a vital American interest at stake, and once we go to war, we must deploy sufficient force to win. It is difficult to see how McCain has applied that logic to Iraq, which we invaded on a fraudulent excuse and where the definition of "winning" remains murky five years later.
But it is easy to understand why a man who thinks that we should have escalated the Vietnam War after 10 futile years would talk about occupying Iraq for a century. And it is hard to imagine why voters would elect a president who still believes that 60,000 American dead and more than 300,000 wounded in Vietnam were not quite enough.

Vietnam ready to take part in Iraq reconstruction

Within its capacity and if conditions permit, Vietnam is ready to join the collective efforts of the international community to help the Iraqi people rebuild their country, said Ambassador Le Luong Minh, Permanent Representative of Viet Nam.

At a UN Security Council debate on the situation in Iraq in New York on June 13, Ambassador Minh praised the progress that the country has achieved over the past five years under extremely difficult conditions in political and socio-economic fields, its improved relations with neighboring countries and its reintegration into the international community.

While firmly supporting the joint efforts of the Iraqi Government and concerned parties in consolidating peace and security, promoting sustainable development and strengthening national reconciliation, the Vietnamese representative stressed the important role that the United Nations, regional countries and the international community can play to help Iraq in its political process, regional dialogue, economic reconstruction and humanitarian relief work.

“We commend the efforts of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq and encourage it to further assist the Government of Iraq to address key priority issues as mandated by Security Council resolution 1770 (2007),” the ambassador said. He added that Vietnam hoped the International Advisory and Monitoring Board (IAMB) would continue to enhance its audit and oversight capacity to ensure that all resources from the Development Fund for Iraq are transparently and efficiently disbursed for the best interests of Iraq and its people.

Minh said: “Viet Nam participated in the two conferences on the International Compact with Iraq in Sharm-el-Sheikh and Stockholm in 2007 and 2008. We look forward to continuing to support the work of the Compact in moving the country forward.”

He recommended Iraq to continue resolving urgent matters concerning security, humanities, reconstruction and national reconciliation. Vietnam is desirous to see Iraq to achieve further concrete improvements in ending the outbreak of sectarian violence, resolving disputed internal boundaries, strengthening poverty reduction and social welfare development, reinforcing the rule of law, curbing illicit use of weapons and combating organized crimes, promoting disarmament, demobilizing and reintegrating ex-combatants, clearing a substantial amount of foreign debts, and providing assistance to more than 4 million refugees and internally displaced persons, the ambassador said.

The McCain Doctrines - John McCain - Iraq - Profile

Whatever their disagreements on policy, United States senators, even in today’s hyperpolitical climate, are reluctant to impugn one another’s motives or integrity.

That’s doubly true among those who experienced combat in the Vietnam War, a group that now includes four sitting senators — the Republicans John McCain and Chuck Hagel and the Democrats John Kerry and Jim Webb — as well as former colleagues like Bob Kerrey, Max Cleland and Chuck Robb. These men share an obvious bond, and over the years they have more readily crossed partisan lines than other senators, constituting, in some ways, a party unto themselves. To outsiders, they give the impression of having seen things in their youth that confer a different kind of perspective on mere politics; they seem to know that there are worse things in life than losing an election and having to go home. In contrast to the insecurities of the many boomer politicians who avoided service in Vietnam or marched against it, the Senate’s former soldiers exude a confidence that goes beyond military matters.
The war in Iraq has tested some of these friendships, however. Last year, after House Democrats voted to set a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, McCain and Webb — both of whom were featured heroes in a classic book on the era, Robert Timberg’s “Nightingale’s Song” — became embroiled in an unusually public disagreement. After McCain pointedly said the enemy in Iraq was celebrating along with Democrats, Webb accused him of unfairly questioning other people’s patriotism. When Webb and Hagel (a close personal friend of McCain’s) proposed a bill to give troops leaving Iraq and Afghanistan more time at home before redeploying, McCain, whose 19-year-old son has served with the Marines in Iraq, forcefully opposed them, saying the troops were needed in the theater. More recently, McCain has found himself on the opposite side of Webb and Hagel again, this time over their “G.I. bill” that would offer education money to every returning veteran. McCain and others want a more limited bill that would encourage rank-and-file soldiers to re-enlist rather than return to civilian life.
In these skirmishes, McCain is the outlier. Among his fellow combat veterans in the Senate, past and present, he is the only one who has continued to champion the war in Iraq; by contrast, Kerry, Webb and Hagel have emerged in the years since the invasion as unsparing critics of American involvement there. (In a new book, Hagel, who voiced deep concerns about Iraq even as he voted for the war resolution in 2002, predicts that the war will turn out to be “the most dangerous and costly foreign-policy debacle in our nation’s history.”) This divide among old allies may be the inevitable result of a protracted war that has cleaved plenty of American households and friendships. But it may also be that the war is revealing underlying fractures among the Senate’s Vietnam coalition.
There is a feeling among some of McCain’s fellow veterans that his break with them on Iraq can be traced, at least partly, to his markedly different experience in Vietnam. McCain’s comrades in the Senate will not talk about this publicly. They are wary of seeming to denigrate McCain’s service, marked by his legendary endurance in a Hanoi prison camp, when in fact they remain, to this day, in awe of it. And yet in private discussions with friends and colleagues, some of them have pointed out that McCain, who was shot down and captured in 1967, spent the worst and most costly years of the war sealed away, both from the rice paddies of Indochina and from the outside world. During those years, McCain did not share the disillusioning and morally jarring experiences of soldiers like Kerry, Webb and Hagel, who found themselves unable to recognize their enemy in the confusion of the jungle; he never underwent the conversion that caused Kerry, for one, to toss away some of his war decorations during a protest at the Capitol. Whatever anger McCain felt remained focused on his captors, not on his own superiors back in Washington.

more of this article-->>The McCain Doctrines - John McCain - Iraq - Profile - New York Times