Iraq Notebook
The Rev. Pat Robertson's comments create stir

AP, 2000 The Rev. Pat Robertson did not back away from comments that he said the president made about U.S. casualties in Iraq.

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Robertson related the conversation during an interview with CNN late Tuesday. He said he spoke to Bush before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and urged him to prepare the nation for heavy casualties.

Traveling with Bush in the Midwest, campaign adviser Karen Hughes said political adviser Karl Rove was in the Feb. 10, 2003, meeting with the president and Robertson in Nashville, but Bush never said there wouldn't be casualties in Iraq.

"He must have misunderstood or misheard it," Hughes said of Robertson's comments.

Robertson did not back away yesterday from his comments. While Bush's response was a mistake, Robertson said, God has blessed the president anyhow.

Sen. John Kerry's campaign pounced on the remarks yesterday.

"We believe President Bush should get the benefit of the doubt here, but he needs to come forward and answer a very simple question," Kerry adviser Mike McCurry said in a statement. "Is Pat Robertson telling the truth when he said you didn't think there'd be any casualties, or is Pat Robertson lying?"

Robertson, a Republican who made a bid for the party's presidential nomination in 1988, has repeatedly suggested on his "700 Club" cable-television show, which has an estimated audience of 1 million, that God favors Bush's re-election.

In January, Robertson told viewers that God had told him Bush would win re-election "in a blowout." In the CNN interview, Robertson said he thinks Bush will win by a "razor-thin" popular-vote margin but by a substantial Electoral College victory.

Sunnis told not to vote if Fallujah is embattled

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraq's largest group of Sunni Muslim clerics ordered their followers yesterday to boycott January's parliamentary elections if U.S. forces don't break off their military campaign in the flash-point city of Fallujah, which is now ringed by U.S. Marines and besieged by daily aerial bombardment.
 
Gathering from across northern and western Iraq at the Umm al Qura mosque outside Baghdad, the clerics in the Muslim Scholars Association, whose followers make up 35 percent of Iraq's population, called on Arab leaders throughout the Middle East to condemn U.S. actions in Fallujah and "end their silence, which brings frustration and anger."

They ruled that Iraqis have a religious duty to fight U.S.-led forces, according to a statement issued from the mosque.

Among the participants at the clerics' meeting were representatives of the Iraqi Islamic Party, whose head was a member of the former U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council and who now sits in the interim national assembly.

The party joined several other influential Sunni groups in boycotting various stages of the political process, saying there can be no democracy as long as 135,000 U.S. troops remain in Iraq.

The clerics' statement was the strongest open opposition yet to pledges by U.S. officials and interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi to retake Fallujah from insurgents who've controlled it since April, underscoring the serious consequences the battle for the city could have.

One airstrike yesterday reportedly killed an Iraqi family, as shown in video footage of rescue workers digging a couple and their four children from the rubble of their home. American officials denied the civilian deaths, blaming the report on a "known Zarqawi propagandist."

The U.S. strikes on Fallujah are intended to root out suspected terrorist mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born Islamic extremist who's accused of many of the grisly bombings and beheadings of recent months.

Poor security called threat to Iraq in poll

More Iraqis say their country is headed in the wrong direction and they blame the poor security situation, a new poll has found.

Forty-five percent of Iraqis said the country is headed for trouble compared with 39 percent when the United States transferred political power to a caretaker Iraqi government in June. Sixty-three percent blamed "poor security" as the reason.

In June, 51 percent said the country was heading in the right direction. That is down to 42 percent.

That number started going down around the time that U.S. and Iraqi forces were fighting to oust insurgents loyal to rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr from Najaf, a city that is holy to Shiite Muslims, who are the majority in Iraq.

The survey was conducted by the International Republican Institute, a U.S.-taxpayer-funded organization that promotes democracy abroad.

It questioned more than 2,000 Iraqis on Sept. 24 to Oct. 4. The poll, which will be released this month, has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.

Al-Sadr, whose militia has battled U.S. forces in Baghdad and the Shiite south, has the biggest name recognition in the country at 88 percent, edging out Ayad Allawi, the U.S.-backed caretaker prime minister, whose name was recognized by 86 percent.

More Iraqis said they would vote for Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of a religious party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, than for Allawi. Of those who would back a religious candidate, 54 percent said they would follow the recommendation of Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the senior Shiite cleric in Iraq.

Two car bombs explode in recaptured city

Two suicide car bombs exploded in Samarra, a city that U.S. and Iraqi forces claimed this month to have recaptured from insurgents. The two blasts, within 15 minutes of each other, killed an Iraqi child and wounded 13 people, including 11 U.S. soldiers and an interpreter, the Army said.

One of the bombs targeted a U.S. patrol that stopped to talk with children in city, said Maj. Neal O'Brien, spokesman for the 1st Infantry Division in Tikrit. Residents said U.S. and Iraqi forces imposed a dusk to dawn curfew in the city, 60 miles north of Baghdad.

U.S. and Iraqi forces seized control of Samarra early this month, and officials have cited Samarra as an example of how to take back towns and cities that have become insurgent strongholds.

A car bomb also shook central Baghdad at sunset, sending a large plume of smoke rising from the western bank of the Tigris River.

There were no reports of casualties among U.S. troops, said Capt. Mitchell Zornes of the 1st Cavalry Division. Bursts of gunfire erupted after the blast, witnesses said, and the smoke could be seen rising north of the Jumhuria bridge and behind the Mansour Hotel.