UK memo says US, UK readying Iraqi withdrawal-report

LONDON, July 10 (Reuters) - A leaked document from Britain's Defence Ministry says the British and U.S. governments are planning to reduce their troop levels in Iraq by more than half by mid-2006, the Mail on Sunday newspaper reported.

The memo, reportedly written by Defence Minister John Reid, said Britain would reduce its troop numbers to 3,000 from 8,500 by the middle of next year.

"We have a commitment to hand over to Iraqi control in Al Muthanna and Maysan provinces (two of the four provinces under British control in southern Iraq) in October 2005 and in the other two, Dhi Qar and Basra, in April 2006," the memo was reported to have said.

Syrian forces have arrested two fugitives from Jordan who are believed to be former bodyguards of Saddam Hussein and linked to the Iraq insurgency. The manhunt followed a clash between militants and Syrian forces on Qassioun Mountain overlooking Damascus July 4. Condoleezza Rice offered rare praise for the Syrian regime upon news of the arrests. The July 4 clash was but the most recent in a series of skirmishes that come as Washington is pressuring Syria to seal its border with Iraq. (Lebanon Daily Star, July 7) In another sign of the Iraq insurgents' isolation from Damascus, Syria strongly denounced on the killing of an Egyptian diplomat in Iraq as a "horrible criminal action," the official SANA news agency reported. Egypt's Ambassador-designate to Baghdad Ihab el-Sharif was kidnapped near his home in Baghdad on July 3. The group "Al-Qaeda in Iraq" announced his death July 7 in an Internet statement. (Xinhua, July 9) The US and its client regime in Iraq have previously claimed evidence that Syria is supporting the insurgents.

More glowing reports of freedom on the march in Iraq. This from the July 7 New York Times, reprinted the following day in the International Herald Tribune.

Shiite theocracy takes hold in Iraqi oil city
By Edward Wong The New York Times

BASRA, The loudest sounds from musicians' row these days come from explosions.

Ahmed Ali walked through a shop that had sold musical instruments before it was gutted by a bombing a week earlier, the latest in a series of mysterious attacks in this narrow alley in the past six months, he said. The men here, just a block from the Ministry of Religious Affairs, sell instruments by day and perform at weddings in the evening.

As this fairly comprehensive account from The Australian makes clear, the notion that the London attacks were carried out by a heretofore unheard-of "Secret Organization of the Jihad of al-Qaeda in Europe" originates from reports on the websites of Germany's Der Spiegel and the Italian news agency ANSA that a communique claiming responsibility in that name appeared on an unnamed Islamic militant website. The quoted rhetoric is entirely plausible:

In another sign that the administration of Mexican President Vicente Fox is seeking to capitalize on the Zapatista rebels' new political direction to finally resolve the ongoing Chiapas headache, his government announced yesterday that it will release some 800 indigenous prisoners, finding that they were either innocent or had been manipulated into committing a federal crime, the daily El Universal reports July 7.

A large area of downtown Edinburgh was evacuated today when police found a "suspicious package" on a bus, the Scotsman reports. The alert was called off after police conducted what they callled a "controlled explosion" on the bus. Given the London blasts and continuing protests against the G8 summit in the Scottish capital, police are taking no chances. Meanwhile, the Scotsman reports that following yesterday's brief breach of the security perimeter around the Gleneagles resort, police have sealed off the protesters' encampment at nearby Stirling, trapping some 5,000 within the cordon.

Well, the terror blasts in London seem to have done what months of OPEC hyper-production have failed to: bringing down the price of oil. The attacks precipitated the biggest one-day swing since Operation Desert Storm 14 years ago, prices briefly dipping nearly five dollars to $57.20 a barrel, although they recovered somewhat to still hang at over $60 a barrel, which would have been unthinkable just a year ago. What's interesting is that markets reacted to the London attacks in exactly the opposite way than they did to other major terror attacks of recent years such as 9-11 and Madrid's 3-11, which drove prices up. There may be factors other than the London attacks involved in the price plunge, but this still appears a sign of panic in high places. Radical swings almost always are: spikes driven by fear over the security of global reserves, plunges by fear over the stability of the global economy. This from Bloomberg today:

The recent "red alert" and new political declaration by the rebel Zapatista army brought the impoverished and harshly divided southern Mexican state of Chiapas briefly into the news. Then, just as quickly, it disappeared. In the flurry of coverage, Chris Kraul of the LA Times July 2 gloated that many peasants are leaving the Zapatista zones, "to escape the rebels' puritanical ideology, communal land policy, militarism and prohibition of government services." He claimed peasants' children receive no education or healthcare in the rebel zones because of the bar on government aid, apparently ignorant of the fact that the Zapatistas run their own schools and clinics with aid from NGOs. Kraul quotes Pablo Romo of Chiapas' Fray Bartolome Center for Human Rights: "Since 2002 there has been a huge increase of people from Chiapas who have left for the United States. There is a tension created by unfulfilled promises." But Kraul nearly explicitly blames the rebels for these unfulfilled promises, rather than the government which has failed to follow through on its committment to peace accords—a perspective Romo would certainly disagree with.