On January 10, US President George Bush unveiled his government聮s new plan for prosecuting Washington聮s almost four-year-old counterinsurgency war in Iraq, which in a December 20 interview with the Washington Post he for the first time acknowledged the US was 聯not winning聰.
Iraq
Saddam Hussein was rushed to the gallows as 2006 ended 鈥 a former dictator put to death under instructions from his one-time supporters in the US government.
As was widely expected, the year-long Cole inquiry, while finding that Australian monopoly wheat exporter AWB Ltd deliberately concealed from the UN $290 million in bribes it paid to Iraq in 2000-03 to secure wheat contracts, cleared PM John Howard and his ministers of any wrongdoing.
A closely guarded review of the US war in Iraq being conducted by a Pentagon commission has outlined three basic options: send in more US troops, shrink the US occupation force but stay longer, or pull out, the November 20 Washington Post reported.
The day after a US-created Iraqi tribunal sentenced former president Saddam Hussein to death, a senior Iraqi official heading a committee set up by the US authorities in 2003 to purge members of the former ruling Baath Party from public life announced that it will recommend allowing most of them to take back their government jobs or get pensions.
鈥淭he central message of the 2006 election was so unmistakable that even George Bush couldn鈥檛 miss it. Get. Out. Of. Iraq.鈥 This was how the November 17 US Socialist Worker weekly summed up the results of the November 7 US mid-term congressional elections, in which the Democrats won control of both houses of the US Congress for the first time since 1994.
鈥淚n practice, it has been a shabby affair, marred by serious flaws that call into question the capacity of the tribunal, as currently established, to administer justice fairly, in conformity with international standards鈥, Amnesty International spokesperson Malcolm Smart told journalists in London after the Supreme Iraqi Criminal Tribunal (SICT) imposed the death sentence on Saddam Hussein and two of his seven co-accused on November 5.
An Iraqi prisoner cowering naked and terrified as a US soldier sics a dog on him. This photo 鈥 along with others, for example, showing a hooded prisoner hooked up for electric shocks 鈥 exposed the barbarism of the US occupation of Iraq for the world to see.
In the face of a general strike called by Shiite militants in Baghdad聮s northeastern Sadr City district, home to 2.5 million people, US troops ended their week-long siege of the district on October 31.
On October 16, the UN Office of Humanitarian Assistance聮s IRIN news service reported that electricity and clean water are now 聯luxuries for most Iraqis聰. For example, Baghdad, a city with 6 million residents, gets no more than four to six hours of electricity a day.
On October 11, a team of Iraqi physicians, whose work was overseen by US epidemiologists at the Johns Hopkins University聮s Bloomberg School of Public Health, published a study in The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal, estimating that the US-led occupation of Iraq has cost the lives of 655,000 Iraqis.
聯A strong majority of Iraqis want US-led military forces to immediately withdraw from the country, saying their swift departure would make Iraq more secure and decrease sectarian violence, according to new polls by the State Department and independent researchers聰, the September 27 Washington Post reported.
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