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MARK COLVIN: Peter Cave joins me now on the line from
Baghdad.
Peter, I said in the intro to that interview that the, since you recorded that interview obviously, the US Army's just announced tonight that it's reducing the size of its force outside Najaf, and now says it's prepared to wait before moving against Moqtada al-Sadr. That's a shift in policy, or certainly in tone, even from what you were hearing from General Sanchez there, isn't it? PETER CAVE: I suspect, I suspect it may not be, because basically they're moving the 2,500 strong Third Brigade taskforce out from Najaf and they're putting in 2,000 soldiers from the First Armoured Division who are actually, have a lot more punch behind them. They have tanks and heavy armour. So, even though they're reducing the number of forces, they are putting the armoured division in there, so it doesn't really, really change much. In a lot of ways it reinforces the siege. It does tend to suggest� MARK COLVIN: So from inside, from inside the city the perspective might be a much more threatening one with a lot of tanks and artillery pointed at you? PETER CAVE: I think what it suggests is that they're preparing for a longer siege. They're not prepared to, they're not preparing to go in immediately, but they do seem to be settling in for a longer siege. The latest word we've had from Sadr's supporters inside is that negotiations had broken down and that they expected the soldiers to come in at any time. Certainly the negotiations haven't been going well over the last couple of days. MARK COLVIN: Now, I know that you had difficulty getting this interview. The first time you were due to go in there and interview General Sanchez, you couldn't get in there because there were mortar attacks, and I noticed that just in the last hour or so, there's been another very loud explosion at the US headquarters. To what extent is he being extraordinarily optimistic in his tone in that interview with you? PETER CAVE: Well yes, there were three mortars went into the green zone yesterday, and as you say, one this morning. Look, I don't think he was being overly optimistic. I think he has the forces to control the limited area that he does control, but really, I think as he said in that interview, that their urgent task is to do something about training. I spoke to Ahmed Chalabi from the Governing Council over the weekend and he said that the security arrangements the Americans had made had collapsed. That they'd basically wasted their time for a year and they had to completely rethink, and his point of view, and it was a view I think shared in some ways by the General, was that they've really got to do something about training Iraqi troops to take over because the troops they've trained so far have been a bit of a failure. They've deserted their post, they've joined the enemy, they're under-trained, they're under-equipped and have no morale. MARK COLVIN: Yeah, that was interesting though coming from Ahmed Chalabi, wasn't it? Because so much reporting of what the US has done there has suggested that Ahmed Chalabi has really been in the ear of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, all those people all the way through. So, to what extent was he just now shifting his own ground, and pretending that it was nothing to do with him? PETER CAVE: Well perhaps it's slightly cynical, but he's going to be out of a job in a couple of months, when the Interim Governing Council is disbanded in favour of the government to be set up by the United Nations to take them through to elections in January. So I think Mr Chalabi who has been seen right along by a lot of Iraqis as being a little bit too close to the Americans, has been working fairly hard, certainly over the last week or so, to distance himself from them. He's criticised the way that they went in hard on the city of Fallujah. He's criticised the way they handled Moqtada al-Sadr. He's now said that they've mucked up the security situation, and he also told me at the weekend that he thought they haven't really been paying enough attention to getting elections organised. MARK COLVIN: Peter Cave, our Foreign Affairs Editor on the line from Baghdad there. The Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Uganda is in anarchy" Groupe de communication Mulindwas "avec Yoweri Museveni, l'Ouganda est dans l'anarchie" |
