LAT: Iraqis Said to Plan Wide Amnesty to Quell Insurgency

Part of Prime Minister Maliki's soon to be released national reconciliation plan, the proposal also calls for committees to promote dialogue and negotiation.

BAGHDAD — The Iraqi government has crafted a far-reaching amnesty plan for insurgents, officials close to Prime Minister Nouri Maliki said Saturday, even as guerrillas killed at least 34 Iraqis in a barrage of bombs and rockets in the capital and the U.S. military hunted for two missing soldiers.

The Americans may have been captured after an attack Friday evening on a checkpoint south of Baghdad that left at least one soldier dead, the military said.

U.S. forces dispatched helicopters and surveillance planes over the area as well as teams of divers to scour the river and nearby canals for the missing soldiers.

The amnesty plan, which apparently would include insurgents alleged to have staged attacks against Americans and Iraqis, calls for the creation of a national committee and local subcommittees to woo rebels and begin a "truthful national dialogue in dealing with contradicting visions and stances," according to a version of the plan published Saturday in an Iraqi newspaper.

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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iraq18jun18,1,6666610.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

promise that they'll be good from now on.

W, as a corporatist, will accept this plan.

Provided it is limited to those who have attacked US troops. That would make it easy to weed out the true terrorists from the patriots, find people who you want in the army to put down those threats, and take the wind out of the insurgency's sails, provided Bush doesn't quash it, which he will.

should be allowed freedom? Pretty sick logic.

Look at it from their position. There are people over there, rightly so, who feel that we invaded their country. People who are going after US troops under that mindset are defending their country. If we were invaded by another country and had a provisional government forced down our throats and said government offered amnesty to guerillas across the political spectrum who attack the occupying army out of love of country, what would you say to that?

Both the side our government favors and the "insurgents" are all citizens of Iraq, (except a very small percentage of outsiders, who weren't there before we invaded and occupied the country").

The word "insurgents" is just loaded language from the White House propagandists. The word "insurgents" even sort of sounds like it means "outsiders", when it doesn't mean that at all. A more familiar word for them would have been "guerrillas".

One side attacks the other and people get killed. That is the nature of war.

They're fair game. Sorry.

Except that WE'RE STILL OCCUPYING THE COUNTRY!!!!!!! This is the kind of thing that the Iraqis should do, once we've withdrawn and the local government is working again.

Not the kind of thing you do now, at least, not if you want the fighting to stop. I mean, they are basically shouting from the rooftopes that it's not illegal to kill American soldiers. Assuming an insurgent survives attacking American troops, the Iraqis won't help look for him/her, and won't arrest or detain even if they accidently do capture one of them.

Whoop-de-do,now the boots on the ground are screwed. Just like after the "bring'em on" and Abu Gharib.

Shit.

Not at all.

See www.icasulaties.org

You send soldiers into a combat zone, chances are some of them will be wounded or possibly even killed. Last time I checked it's not a war crime to kill enemy soldiers in battle.

The problem is that as long as we are the occupying force, insurgents are our problem. But we've gone and declared Iraq a soviegn nation when it is clearly not capable of being one because it has no functional government. So now the insurgents are the Iraq government's problem for the Iraqi internal security forces.

Except that the internal security forces don't really seem to exist. So where does that leave things? We have to act as the internal security forces for Iraq, except that people who attack us are immune from prosecution.

Can you imagine the chaos in any major American city if you could shoot a cop and not be prosecuted for us? God, the cops would shoot anything that moves and would start dispensing field justice (bullets to the backs of skulls) rather than let cop-killers go free.

And that sounds like what is happening to our troops right now.

Perpetual war? The thing about war is that killing between combatants is put aside as a crime. Would you suggest that we arrest all of our soldiers who have killed Iraqis too? Or is the punishment to be entirely one sided?

Remember, WE are the invaders. They are defending their country from US.

I think the negotiation stage has passed.

The insurgency won't stop until we leave, no matter what they promise them.

So why not leave, and let the Iraqi government do whatever they want after?

It's just a chicken fight until then.

So I suspect you think we ought to stay in Iraq and win our glorious war, eh?

I'm stunned by the utter lack of understanding of those who think this is a bad idea. What would you have us do? Go on fighting ad infinitum?

I read--from Democrats!--that we're "Appeasing the Beheaders!" and "Letting American Troop Killers Get Away Scott Free!" Is that so? You think we have any right to be there to begin with?

The one I like best (least) is the charge that it's like Letting Cop-Killers Off the Hook. Hey, I've got news: WE AREN'T COPS! We're soldiers. We don't direct traffic and go to homes when there's a domestic dispute, and arrest speeders, and guard against looters, and search for extortionists. We are an ARMY.

We invade cities. We force the citizens out of their communities. We bomb whole communities. We break into homes in the middle of the night and haul husbands and sons off to "prison" where they will remain for perhaps years without so much as a hearing.

We are the jack-booted thugs. Not because our GIs want to be. But because the people making the big decisions have never spent a day in combat, have never surveyed the bombed out remains of the homes in, say, Fallujah, have never talked to an average Iraqi whose been at the receiving end of our insane efforts to bring peace through war, and have the ludicrous notion that we can bring those who oppose us into submission through shock, awe and brute force.

Here we have people who--out of one side of their mouth--preach platitudes about how noble and honorable it is to fight ceaselessly and valiantly for one's freedom, and out of the other side speak of bringing those who oppose invaders of their own homeland into submission by ever more massive military forays into the civilian areas deemed to be "hotbeds of the insurgency."

I propose a different test. I say that anybody--especially a freedom-loving, red-blooded, God-fearing American--who can't grasp the anger and determination of an Iraqi citizen who wants us out of his/her country fails the litmus test for human understanding.

But if you can understand how and why many Iraqis are furious with our invasion and continued occupation, and routine destruction of their country and its citizens, then surely you can see why the "Insurgents" deserve the benefit of the doubt, and that if we can get them to agree to a cease-fire, we are all the winners.

I completely understand the mentality of the insurgents. 90% of them are fighting an unwelcome foreign invader. Us. I don't blame them at all for fighting back and hitting us when they can, especially when the Western military powers have been playing MidEast countries for decades in order to keep world access to crude petroleum. We're not 'rescuing' the Iraqis because Saddam was a home-grown nutjob in a part of the world not known for democracy and freedom. If Iran had conquered Iraq and we had pushed Iran out, then maybe they would be happier to see us.

But we didn't. The common world perception is that Bush wanted to finish doing what his daddy did for the purpose of keeping the oil in Western hands. That is the simplest, most resonate reason that people will believe. And no amount of "we're freeing you from the tyrant Saddam" rhetoric will fix that. So, yeah, the people of Iraq are now fighting a guerrilla war against us, and I can't find fault with them for doign that. If Clinton was in charge, well, Clinton was not a war-monger, and the Iraqis might have actually believed we were going to leave sometime in the near future. But not with Bush.

The problem here is that, as an American, I don't want our troops killed. We've lost enough, and at this rate we're gonna hit the September 11th fatality total (2,986) just in time for the 5-year anniversary. It doesn't matter that our troops are there for all the wrong reasons following policies that don't usually make sense; I don't want any more of them killed or maimed. And this talk of amnesty works against that.

The current US-approved government in Iraq is suppose to be protecting its citizens from violence, and that includes official cooperation with the occupying authorities until they (in this case, us) leave. Then they can have a revolution or whatever and make their own government. Oh, sure, I know that many of the Iraqi government functionaries will publically cooperate and privately resist, but that's the name of the game.

We as a nation have 65% of the civilian-owned firearms in the world, some 230 million of them. If China invaded and occupied us, do you think that we wouldn't be using them against our occupiers?

You say:
"I don't want any more of (our troops) killed or maimed. And this talk of amnesty works against that."

How does a rationally conceived amnesty "work against that?"

According to the LAT article, "The plan... calls for the pardon and release of prisoners
'not proven guilty in crimes and clear terrorist activities.'"

The obvious next-step goal of such a plan is to achieve a cease-fire. You can't have that unless all sides meet, talk, and agree. You can't have that without amnesty. Everybody needs to give something.

If there had been a VC amnesty, for the purpose of establishing a dialog and achieving a ceasefire while I was in the jungles of Vietnam, that would have been terrific. (But we never wanted the two sides to get together, as evidenced by our assassination of Diem when we thought he was negotiating with the North.)

There are two critical elements to getting our nuts out of the Iraq vice:

1) We have to stand down from routine offensive operations. We need to keep to our encampments, patrolling supply lines, maintaining intelligence, continuing training of Iraqis, but engaging in combat only where there are crucial situations. (We should have done this long, long ago.)

2) We need to encourage the kinds of negotiations necessary to achieve a ceasefire between the factions. Such a dialog will benefit all sides permanently. It will get the combatants talking to each other.

The militant Shiites need to grasp the fact that the militant Sunnis won't be dominated to the point of tyranny by them. That means constitutional guarantees. And it means amnesty all around. It means a cessation of vengeance. Both sides have to give. Each has to understand that the other can not be defeated.

The difficult part comes later, after the Iraqi opponents come together whereupon even our "friends" will begin to realize that there can be no sufficient level of cohesive, indigenous, Iraqi entreaties to us that can cause the oil-mongering Bushites to bring our troops home. The Neocons are not there for the Democracy. They're there for the oil. And they're there forever.

That's the real fly in the ointment. But I'd rather see the Iraqis united in public opposition to our permanent presence, than continued daily mayhem of civil war.

The amnesty must be after we leave, not before. That's what I'm saying. At some point we must bury the hatchets and let go, or the cycle of violence will never end.

The point is that we can't have it done now, not with our troops actively conducting combat operations. Until we leave, any person killing an American soldier must be pursued and prosecuted as a murderer, and this must be done by both American and Iraqi authorities. If they aren't, things will worsen for us, and the soldiers in the field will become increasingly violent and trigger-happy.

I personnally think the over-the-horizon force is the way to go. Hell, those Wasp-class amphibious assault ships carry damn near two thousand Marines and enough helicopters to move a thousand at a time. As part of a carrier task force, with dozens of F/A-18 Hornets and hundreds of land-attack cruise missiles, this force be able to quickly rescue anybody's ass that's caught in a crack.

Like Thom Hartmann says, we have to re-frame the debate as not "winning the war" but as "ending the occupation". Winning a war involves toppling a government and conquering its land. Ending an occupation involves creating a govnerment and withdrawing from its land. So simple, it took a genious to see it!

And we may possibly have break up Iraq into other nations if the violence does not end. I hate to say it, but maybe the planet needs a new nation named "Kurdistan". And perhaps even an "East Iraq" and "West Iraq", as well. East of the Tigris is the Suunis, west is the Shi'ites.

I still remember, the Iraqis got their scribbled paper napkin with their sovereignty back!

The amnesty plan, which apparently would include insurgents alleged to have staged attacks against Americans and Iraqis, calls for the creation of a

How the fuck will they know? Or is it to be assumed that all Iraqis labeled 'insurgents' have staged attacks on Merkans?

'the iraqi government' my ass. there is no 'iraqi government', only appointed puppets. i guess they are gonna pretend this is an 'iraqi internal matter'.

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