peperangan IRAQ - satu penipuan.

Blair and Bush planned Iraq war without second UN vote, letter shows

Five months before invasion, pair agreed to go ahead if weapons breach was revealed, according to newly released letter

Britain and the US were planning to take action against Saddam Hussein without a second UN resolution five months before the invasion of Iraq, a newly released letter from Tony Blair's office shows.

A letter from Blair's private secretary reveals that "we and the US would take action" without a new resolution by the UN security council if UN weapons inspectors showed Saddam had clearly breached an earlier resolution. In that case, he "would not have a second chance".

That was the only way Britain could persuade the Bush administration to agree to a role for the UN and continuing work by UN weapons inspectors, the letter says.

Dated 17 October 2002, it was written by Matthew Rycroft to Mark Sedwill, private secretary to the foreign secretary, Jack Straw. "This letter is sensitive," Rycroft underlined. "It must be seen only by those with a real need to know its contents, and must not be copied further."

He sent it to a number of other senior officials, including Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's ambassador to the UN. There is no indication that it was seen by Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, who at the time was advising that invading Iraq without a fresh UN resolution would be illegal.

Rycroft's letter referred to a Downing Street meeting on the Iraqi crisis attended by Straw, the defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, and the chief of the defence staff, Admiral Sir Mike Boyce. Also present were Blair's chief of staff, Jonathan Powell; his director of government relations, Sally Morgan; his director of communications, Alastair Campbell; and his chiefforeign policy adviser, David Manning.

The meeting concluded, wrote Rycroft, that "the only way to keep the US on the UN route was for there to be a clear understanding that if [chief UN weapons inspector Hans] Blix reported an Iraqi breach of the first resolution, then Saddam would not have a second chance".

In a devastating passage, Rycroft added: "In other words, if for some reason [such as a French or Russian veto] there were no second resolution agreed … we and the US would take action."

The Downing Street letter is particularly significant considering the government's repeated emphasis in public at the time on the need for UN approval before any invasion of Iraq.

The first resolution referred to in Rycroft's letter was number 1441, passed unanimously in November 2002. Goldsmith and most of the government's legal advisers insisted a second UN resolution was needed before military action could lawfully take place.

Blair was put in an even more difficult position with Washington as, in the event, Blix never reported an unconditional breach of the first resolution.

The Rycroft letter also appears to conflict with Straw's actions at the time. A statement recently released by the Chilcot inquiry revealed that in October 2002 Straw told his French counterpart, Dominique de Villepin, that US acceptance of the wording of the first UN resolution "implied" a further one was required.

The statement was written by Sir Michael Wood, the Foreign Office's top legal adviser, who also opposed the invasion. It also disclosed that Greenstock had told his US counterpart that Britain would state publicly after the resolution was passed "that there needed to be a second resolution".

The issue is at the heart of the deep and continuing arguments over the legality of the invasion. Goldsmith originally advised Blair and Straw that the first UN resolution did not provide sufficient legal cover for war.

Goldsmith said he changed his mind in February 2003 after Bush's legal advisers told him on a US visit that they had agreed to the wording of 1441 only because it had not crossed their "red line" – the clear message was that, as far as the US was concerned, no new resolution was needed.

Philippe Sands, professor of international law at University College London, said: "The letter of 17 October 2002 is consistent with the conclusion that the prime minister wanted to proceed to action with the US on the basis of a single security council resolution, irrespective of what the law required, and ignoring the views at the time of the Foreign Office legal adviser and the attorney general."

According to Wood's statement to the Chilcot inquiry, Straw told the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, "that we needed a second resolution and that it was extremely unlikely we could find a legal basis without it".

Sands said: "It reflects the widespread view that what became UNSCR 1441 would not authorise military action without a second resolution. His latest statement shoots a very big hole in the arguments of Messrs Goldsmith and Straw, and one wonders why they ultimately failed to reflect its contents in their words and actions."

Blair and Bush planned Iraq war without second UN vote ...

www.theguardian.com

Iraqi Shoe-Hurling Journalist Said to Ask for Pardon

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS and ATHEER KAKAN

BAGHDAD — The Iraqi television journalist who threw his shoes at President Bush during a news conference this week has apologized to the Iraqi government in a letter to the prime minister and asked for a pardon, an Iraqi government official said Thursday.

The government did not release the letter, and a lawyer for the reporter said that during a conversation with him on Wednesday the reporter did not tell her about it. But the lawyer, Ahlam Allami, also said the reporter, Muntader al-Zaidi, had told her he had never meant to insult the Iraqi government or Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki when he hurled his shoes at the president during a news conference with the two leaders on Sunday.

Mr. Maliki’s chief spokesman, Yassin Majid, said Mr. Zaidi had addressed his letter to the prime minister and apologized for the incident, calling it an “ugly action.”

Mr. Majid said the prime minister had not decided whether to pardon Mr. Zaidi and was leaning toward allowing the Iraqi judicial system to determine his fate.

Ms. Allami said a judge had met with Mr. Zaidi this week, but had not yet indicated whether he would charge him with any crime. She said the judge denied bail to Mr. Zaidi.

The judge who is investigating the case said Friday Mr. Zaidi showed signs of being beaten, The Associated Press reported. Judge Dhia al-Kinani said that the journalist had bruises on his face and around his eyes, according to the report.

Rumors have been swirling that Mr. Zaidi was seriously injured during a beating by Prime Minister Maliki’s security detail after the shoe-throwing incident.

On Thursday, Dana M. Perino, the White House press secretary, said President Bush had urged the Iraqis “not to overreact, because he was not bothered by the incident, although it’s not appropriate for people to throw shoes at a press conference, at any leader.”

Mr. Zaidi, 29, who faces up to seven years in prison if convicted, became a folk hero to many in the Arab world after his actions on Sunday.

As he hurled his shoes at the president — a serious sign of disrespect in the Arab world — he called Mr. Bush a “dog” and blamed him for the Iraqi people’s suffering after the 2003 United States invasion.

Ms. Allami said that during a phone conversation on Wednesday Mr. Zaidi said that the only target of his anger had been President Bush.

The lawyer also said the shoes thrown at the president had been destroyed at a laboratory during an examination to determine whether they contained any explosives or hazardous chemicals.

Mr. Majid said the letter from the reporter to the prime minister had included a reference to an interview Mr. Zaidi had conducted with Mr. Maliki three years ago during which Mr. Maliki had shown him hospitality.

“I remember in the summer of 2005, I had an interview with your excellency and you said that your house is mine,” Mr. Majid said, quoting the letter. “Now, I am asking you as a son asks a father to forgive me.”

Iraqi Shoe-Hurling Journalist Said to Ask for Pardon
New York Times

What Exactly Does a Journalist Throwing a Shoe at Bush Mean?

Media organizations are trying to make sense of the shoe-hurling incident

By Dan Gilgoff

Posted December 16, 2008

Is the so-called shoe insult an Arab custom, a Muslim one, neither, or both?

The question has surfaced as news organizations struggle to make sense of the shoe-hurling Iraqi journalist whom President Bush encountered at a Baghdad press conference over the weekend.

Many of the media's explanations have saddled the episode with cultural and religious meaning, noting that Muslims consider shoes to be ritually unclean and remove them before entering mosques. But Middle East scholars say shoe abuse appears to lack distinctly Muslim or Arabic origins and that some widely disseminated interpretations of the weekend run-in probably go too far.

"It's one of those cases where we're trying to make it a lot more alien and bizarre than it actually is," says Jamal Elias, a University of Pennsylvania religious studies professor who specializes in Islam. "The journalist was disgusted with something Bush was saying, and he acted out. I can't imagine if you go to a press conference with George W. Bush they let you carry too much with you, so he took off the one thing he could hurl—his shoe."

Elias notes that the shoe insult appears in Islamic literature as early as the 12th century. A hagiography of a Sufi saint published around 1600 claimed that the saint showed his spiritual superiority to a levitating person by making his own shoes levitate even higher and whacking the levitator's head with them.

Most Middle Eastern Muslims remove their shoes before entering a house, not just a mosque, suggesting the custom is more practical than religious. "Taking off shoes when entering a mosque or home is not a religious rule," says Jonathan Brown, assistant professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Washington. "It's just the etiquette that's developed around cleanliness, etc. In fact, Muslims can actually pray with their shoes on. But you can imagine what that would do to the carpet of a major mosque."

Shoe insults aren't limited to the Arabic or Muslim worlds. In South Asian countries like India, Hindus—as well as Muslims—have a custom of humiliating people by parading them in public wearing a garland of shoes.

Even more basic shoe etiquette varies throughout the Muslim, Arabic, and Asian worlds. For instance, it's considered rude in Arabian Gulf nations to sit with a leg lifted or folded over one knee, lest one expose others to the soles of his or her shoes. But that custom is much less widely practiced in other nations in the region, like Egypt.

Omid Safi, an Islamic studies professor at the University of North Carolina, says that the meaning of the recent shoe incident is probably more universal than has been acknowledged. "We saw on CNN and BBC a ton of articles offering instant 'anthropological insights' on how the shoe touches the earth, and is the lowest part of the body," he wrote in an E-mail message. "What if in an American context someone had thrown a shoe at Bush? Would we see that as a sign of great love for the President?"

• Read more on the Iraqi journalist who threw a shoe at President Bush.
• Read more by Dan Gilgoff.

Arabs hail shoe attack as Bush's farewell gift

Zaidi's attack was launched with the words "this is a farewell kiss, you dog"

BAGHDAD (AFP) — Iraq faced mounting calls on Monday to release the journalist who hurled his shoes at George W. Bush, an action branded shameful by the government but hailed in the Arab world as an ideal parting gift to the unpopular US president.

Colleagues of Muntazer al-Zaidi , who works for independent Iraqi television station Al-Baghdadia, said he "detested America" and had been plotting such an attack for months against the man who ordered the war on his country.

"Throwing the shoes at Bush was the best goodbye kiss ever... it expresses how Iraqis and other Arabs hate Bush," wrote Musa Barhoumeh, editor of Jordan's independent Al-Gahd newspaper.

Hundreds of Iraqis joined anti-US demonstrations to protest at Bush's farewell visit on Sunday to Iraq, which was plunged into a deadly insurgency and near civil war in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion.

The Iraqi government branded Zaidi's actions as "shameful" and demanded an apology from his Cairo-based employer, which in turn called for his immediate release from custody.

Zaidi jumped up as Bush was holding a press conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on Sunday, shouted: "It is the farewell kiss, you dog," and threw two shoes at the US leader.

The shoes missed after Bush ducked and Zaidi was wrestled to the ground by security guards. He is currently being held by the Iraqi authorities, a source in Maliki's office said without elaborating.

The US president later laughed off the incident during a surprise visit to Afghanistan, although it highlighted the lingering hostility still felt toward the man who ordered the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Al-Baghdadia issued a statement demanding Zaidi's release "in line with the democracy and freedom of expression that the American authorities promised the Iraqi people."

"Any measures against Muntazer will be considered the acts of a dictatorial regime," it added.

Saddam Hussein's former lawyer Khalil al-Dulaimi said he was forming a team to defend Zaidi and that around 200 lawyers, including Americans, had offered their services for free.

"It was the least thing for an Iraqi to do to Bush, the tyrant criminal who has killed two million people in Iraq and Afghanistan," said Dulaimi.

"Our defence of Zaidi will be based on the fact that the United States is occupying Iraq, and resistance is legitimate by all means, including shoes."

Zaidi's colleagues in Baghdad, where he had worked for three years, said he had long been planning to throw shoes at Bush if ever he got the chance.

"Muntazer detested America. He detested the US soldiers, he detested Bush," said one on condition of anonymity.

Soles of shoes are considered the ultimate insult in Arab culture. After Saddam's statue was toppled in Baghdad in April 2003, many onlookers pelted it with their shoes.

Few ordinary Iraqis expressed much sympathy for Bush but views on the journalist's actions were mixed.

In the Shiite radical stronghold of Sadr City, where anti-American sentiment runs deep, protesters threw shoes at passing US military vehicles while in the central shrine city of Najaf, crowds chanted "Down with America."

However, Baghdad shopkeeper Hamza Mahdi, 30, was critical of the treatment of the visiting US president.

"I don't like Bush, but I don't agree with this action -- it's not civilised," he said. "Journalists should use pen and paper to make their point and not their shoes."

One of his customers, Um Seif, 45, disagreed. "Me, I support him. Everyone should support him," she said. "Don't you remember what the Americans did to us? Have you already forgotten?"

But another woman shopper, Um Mina, said she worried about the impact on the image of Iraqis. "Bush is our enemy. But when you invite your enemy into your home, you don't treat him this way," she said.

An Iraqi lawyer said Zaidi risked a minimum of two years in prison if he is prosecuted for insulting a visiting head of state.

But in Libya, a charity headed by Moamer Kadhafi's daughter Aisha announced it was going to award Zaidi an "order of courage" for his actions and in Lebanon, the Shiite militant group Hezbollah said the journalist should be regarded as a hero.

Arabs hail shoe attack as Bush's farewell gift
AFP

other news:
Bush shoe-ing worst Arab insult
BBC News, UK
Bush shoe thrower cools his heels in jail CNN International
Saddam lawyer to defend Bush shoe attacker Capital FM
Ten Reasons the George Bush Shoe Attack Was Completely Awesome New York Magazine
Bush Shoe-Throwing Incident Has Colorado Connection
TheDenverChannel.com, CO
Bush shoe incident goes viral
FierceOnlineVideo, DC
Bush hails shoe attack as win for democracy
The Age, Australia
Transcript: Bush seeks new shoe jokes Times Online
Shoes Stay On For Bush In Afghanistan CBS News
CBS: Bush Shoe Attack Same As Iraqis Beating Saddam Statue With Shoes
NewsBusters
Who throws a shoe? Honestly. News Groper (satire)
Bush's record and the shoes heard around the Arab and Islamic worlds
Daily Star - Lebanon, Lebanon
Asia Day Ahead: US Stocks Rise; Bush Ducks Shoe Throw in Iraq
Bloomberg
President Bush in Iraq: If Only He Had Caught Those Shoes…
FOXNews

Bush may have underestimated Putin

What to do when Russia flexes its muscles?

August has surely been a strange month for Russians of a certain age.

Less than 48 hours after former KGB operative, erstwhile president and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin cried at the state funeral of former Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn -- a scene unthinkable 20 years ago -- he started bombing Georgia in Russia's first foreign incursion since the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan 20 years ago.

The war in Georgia, which last week became so prominent a campaign issue in the U.S. presidential race that you'd have thought it started in South Atlanta and not South Ossetia, has been a violent reminder of what Putin, through his puppet President Dmitry Medvedev, is capable of when he feels dissed, provoked and flush with oil.

In the United States, the messages from the campaign trail were that John McCain is channeling Tom Clancy and that Barack Obama is damned if he acts presidential and damned if he doesn't, which is why he was asking for ceasefires, mediators and international peacekeepers while remaining in Hawaii instead of flying back to Washington.

This is the first 3 a.m.-phone-call foreign policy crisis test of the campaign, and the intensity of the diplomatic dueling reflects the increasing pressure on both candidates from their parties to break out of the statistical dead heat in the polls.

If it weren't for the reigning conventional wisdom that Russia is a friend and ally of the United States, you could be forgiven for thinking it's displaying all the swaggering, impulse control-challenged aggression of a classic petro-rogue state like Libya before Gadhafi went straight, or Iraq before the troubles.

But the crisis is also the product of a larger U.S.-Russia bilateral problem that the Bush administration will be leaving behind for whoever moves into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in January.

Presidents have the resources to set, at most, a handful of predetermined foreign policy priorities based on a range of factors including, among others, national security (which, in America, can cover a wide range of issues), trade and military commitments.

Because the president can meaningfully focus on only so many fronts at once, diplomacy through the State Department and other channels takes on added value when priorities are suddenly realigned, as they were in Washington on Sept. 12, 2001.

What is happening in Georgia is, in some ways, the product of this administration's diversion from the previous one's post-Cold War engagement with Russia to the overwhelming foreign policy priorities in Iraq, Afghanistan and the war on terror.

The relationship required particular fixing after NATO, over Russia's objections, rightly used air strikes in 1999 to stop Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansing campaign in Kosovo, whose recent U.S.-backed accession to statehood only further infuriated Putin.

Not only has former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, a Democrat, questioned in the past few days whether President Bush underestimated Putin as a belligerent, McCain himself said Tuesday of Bush, "I don't know if the president quote, 'missed the boat,' but I do believe that the president probably had a higher opinion of Vladimir Putin than I do."

In a recent tour d'horizon of Bush foreign policy in Foreign Affairs magazine, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who lectured on Soviet issues at Stanford University, lumped Russia in with China under the heading Great Powers, Old and New (Putin must have loved that) and devoted 236 words to the troubled relationship with Russia before shifting to China and then spending nearly 3,000 words on the Middle East, and that was before she got into a section titled The Transformation of Iraq.

This may be one of those weeks when the outgoing president is cursing his contempt for diplomacy.

How did French President Nicolas Sarkozy know so little about his interlocutors that he got snowed into agreeing to a ceasefire Wednesday that gave Russian tanks permission to move deeper into Georgia by Thursday?

How did Washington get so heavily invested in former New York lawyer and current Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili that the United States is seen as a party to a predictable escalation it didn't have the leverage to defuse?

Churchill wasn't kidding when he said, "Russia is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." Any place that complex requires the same level of attention as an ally that it did as an enemy. Maybe that's the moral of this classically enigmatic Russian August.

By LISA VAN DUSEN

click here: Bush may have underestimated Putin London Free Press