Q&A: Iraq’s election row

Q&A: Iraq’s 2010 elections

Timeline: Iraqi Elections

Iraq’s most powerful coalitions

Iraq’s ‘intelligence failures’

Expatriates vote in Iraq election   

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The US this week achieved a goal that has eluded it since Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars programme by knocking out a ballistic missile using a high-powered laser beam mounted on a plane.

The successful test was carried out yesterday in California, the US Missile Defence Agency (MDA) said, making real what had previously been confined to the realms of science fiction.

The plane uses a combination of lasers to lock on to the missile and track its trajectory, and then bring it down with a ­single shot fired from the nose turret, all in less than 12 seconds.

According to analysts, the breakthrough could have an impact on the North Korean and Iranian missile programmes, forcing them to develop faster missiles and adopt measures to counter the laser beams.

The MDA said today: "The revolutionary use of directed energy is very attractive for missile defence, with the potential to attack multiple targets at the speed of light, at a range of hundreds of kilometres, and at a low cost per intercept attempt compared to current technologies."

Work on the laser weapons system has been under way in earnest for at least a decade, at a cost of more than $1bn. In the past, laser beams have been used successfully against stationary targets from stationary platforms, but in this test the beam was directed from a plane against a moving target, a much more challenging feat.

However, some scientists and military analysts expressed scepticism about its long-term viability, saying that other such projects that had been hailed as revolutionary did not work when confronted by all the problems thrown up by war.

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For all the fighting that lies ahead over the next several days, no one doubts that the American and Afghan troops swarming into the Taliban redoubt of Marja will ultimately clear it of insurgents.

And that is when the real test will begin.

For much of the past eight years, American and NATO forces have mounted other large military operations to clear towns and cities of Taliban insurgents. And then, almost invariably, they have cleared out, never leaving behind enough soldiers or police officers to hold the place on their own.

And so, almost always, the Taliban returned — and, after a time, so did the American and NATO troops, to clear the place all over again.

“Mowing the grass,” the soldiers and Marines derisively call it.

This time, in Marja, the largest Taliban stronghold, American and Afghan commanders say they will do something they have never done before: bring in an Afghan government and police force behind them. American and British troops will stay on to support them. “We’ve got a government in a box, ready to roll in,” said Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American commander here.

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Iran first began experimenting with nuclear energy in the 1950s when it received US assistance to build the country’s first nuclear reactor.

At the time, the Eisenhower administration in Washington saw Tehran as a vital ally and pursued a co-operative programme to push US scientific and commercial involvement in Iranian civilian nuclear industries.

In the 1970s, the Iranian government sought – and received – assistance from other western nations such as Germany and France.

Despite US intelligence warnings that Iran could have nuclear weaponisation ambitions, Western assistance continued.

However, the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 and the rise to power of Islamist leaders like Ayatollah Khomeini brought the co-operation to an end.

As the war with Iraq raged until 1988, Iran resumed its interest in a national nuclear programme.

Following the Gulf War in 1991 and the UN sanctions slapped on Iraq for its alleged weaponisation programme, Iran began to dedicate funds to speed up its research and development of nuclear power.

In 1995, Russia signed several nuclear deals with Iran; development of the nuclear programme continued relatively unhindered until an opposition group revealed that Tehran had overcome several technological obstacles in securing nuclear power.

Below are key dates since 2002 when the West and Iran clashed over its disputed nuclear programme.

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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, has instructed Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation to begin enriching uranium for use as nuclear fuel, casting doubt on the prospect of a deal with the West.

Ahmadinejad’s comments on Sunday, carried on state television, were directed at Ali Akbar Salehi, who heads the atomic energy body and who was sitting in the audience at the time of the speech.

"I [ask] Dr Salehi to start work on the production of 20 per cent fuel using centrifuges," Ahmadinejad said.

But he continued: "The doors for interaction are still open."

Iranian officials have repeatedly said their country can make fuel enriched to 20 per cent itself if there is no agreement on obtaining the material from abroad.

But in recent days Iran has seemed close to a deal with the West over shipping its nuclear material abroad to be turned into fuel and then returned.

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A deadly airstrike in Afghanistan’s Kunduz province last September did not comply with Nato’s rules of engagement, according to the military organisation’s own investigators.

In a leaked document published by the German newspaper Der Spiegel this week, it was revealed that crucial information was withheld from US pilots by the German military, who ordered the attack that killed scores of Afghan civilians.

The newspaper says Nato investigators looking into the September 4 bombing, which claimed 142 lives, found that US fighter pilots were inappropriately ordered to attack two fuel tankers that had been hijacked by the Taliban in northern Kunduz.

Civilians from the nearby village of Omarkhail were collecting fuel from the tankers when Nato jets were ordered to drop two 500 pound bombs on the lorries.

German Army Withheld Information from US Pilots

Kunduz raid ‘killed 30 civilians’

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Only days after Tony Blair offered an impassioned defense of his decision to take Britain to war in Iraq, a cabinet minister who resigned over the war delivered a blistering condemnation of the former prime minister on Tuesday, accusing him of “conning” her and of deceiving his cabinet, parliament and the public in his resolve to have Britain join the United States in the invasion of 2003.

ppearing before an official inquiry into the conflict, Clare Short provided an electrifying counterpoint to Mr. Blair’s testimony on Friday. The former prime minister called Saddam Hussein “a monster,” said he had no regrets about the war and warned that the same concerns that led to war over Iraq now applied to Iran and Western concerns that Tehran is secretly developing nuclear weapons.

Ms. Short, who quit as international development minister two months after the invasion in 2003, repeatedly accused Mr. Blair of “misleading” her and other cabinet ministers about the advice he was getting from government lawyers who questioned the legality of invading Iraq. She said on that issue, and on her written warnings of a “humanitarian catastrophe” in the invasion’s wake, Mr. Blair effectively circumvented cabinet debate, relying instead on an inner circle of “his mates” in government, having “little chats” with outsiders like herself and plying what she called a “poodle-like” relationship with the United States.

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Missiles fired by suspected US drones have killed at least 17 people and wounded many more in Pakistan, residents and security officials say.

Officials said the missiles rained down on Dattakhel village in the Degan area of North Waziristan, part of Pakistan’s semi-autonomous tribal region near the Afghan border, on Tuesday.

They said the missiles struck suspected fighters’ hideouts and a training centre.

Al Jazeera’s Kamal Hyder, reporting from Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, said there were reports that up to 19 missiles had been fired.

"This would be the first time you get a co-ordinated attack by such a large group of drones since the attacks against targets inside Pakistan began.

"Seventeen people have been reported killed. However, there is mounting fear that the death toll could be at least over two dozen or even cross 30."

Locals were digging dead and wounded out of the debris.

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VÍDEO

More than 500,000 displaced people live along the 20-mile Afgoye Corridor, west of Mogadishu. Many have lost everything, including their families, in their flight from the Shabaab – Somalia’s terrifying Islamist militia

The plaque on the State House building in Hargeisa, capital of Somaliland, is an oblique commemoration to an event that never occurred. It was built in 1952 for a visit to the then British protectorate by the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II. The Queen never came. These days the half-ruined structure is known for another reason than as the former seat of gin-sipping British colonial officials.

The grounds, including parkland once laid out as a golf course, have bred domed shelters – "bool" they are called – thatched with plastic and segments of scavenged cloth. In places, walls have been tiled with panels of flattened cooking oil cans, which in their repetitions resemble Warhol prints. The bools are low, windowless huts through which the harsh light bleeds messily at the sewn seams to illuminate the kicked up dust. The occupants of this camp sit at the far end of the planet’s social spectrum from the State House’s first intended guest. Not a monarch and her retinue but refugees from war.

The huts are so densely packed together they block the State House from sight. It is barely visible when approaching the camp, but the monument marks the centre of a labyrinth of winding, narrow lanes where cockerels scrabble. When I reach it at last, I find the State House is not occupied itself save for a single wing of outbuildings. Its rooms are open to the sky, floors scattered with detritus. Glassless window frames swing in the wind.

But it is far from empty. Children clamber over walls of square-cut honey-coloured stone, partly demolished by fighting in the city in 1988. They sit on the floor of what once was a grand reception room to play complex games with piles of pale round pebbles, tossed and snatched from the air by competing hands. Outside, a few young men sit on a veranda painted with graffiti, listening to music. They pull jackets over their heads to hide their faces at our approach and warn against photography.

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The Obama administration is quietly working with Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf allies to speed up arms sales and rapidly upgrade defenses for oil terminals and other key infrastructure in a bid to thwart future military attacks by Iran, according to former and current U.S. and Middle Eastern government officials.

The initiatives, including a U.S.-backed plan to triple the size of a 10,000-man protection force in Saudi Arabia, are part of a broader push that includes unprecedented coordination of air defenses and expanded joint exercises between the U.S. and Arab militaries, the officials said. All appear to be aimed at increasing pressure on Tehran.

The efforts build on commitments by the George W. Bush administration to sell warplanes and antimissile systems to friendly Arab states to counter Iran’s growing conventional arsenal. The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are leading a regionwide military buildup that has resulted in more than $25 billion in U.S. arms purchases in the past two years alone.

Middle Eastern military and intelligence officials said Gulf states are embracing the expansion as Iran reacts increasingly defiantly to international censure over its nuclear program. Gulf states fear retaliatory strikes by Iran or allied groups such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah in the event of a preemptive strike against Iranian nuclear facilities by the United States or Israel.

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