Rieff on Iraqi Shiites

David Rieff"s excellent firsthand report from Iraq on the Shiite movements there in the New York Times magazine is now available online (free registration required).

This report seems to me among the more realistic and informed assessments of the situation yet to appear in the Western press. Rieff has done an excellent job of eliciting the views of the major players (Bashir Najafi, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, Muqtada al-Sadr, and Shiites on the street), and conveying the underlying resentments against occupation that are burning slowly beneath the surface.

One reader suggested that it was the Sunni insurgency that brought the US around to seeking an indigenous government, not the Shiites. This is a fair point, but obviously as of Nov. 15 Mr. Bremer believed that the situation could be addressed by stage-managed elections based on appointed "councils." It was Sistani that challenged this procedure and insisted on open, general elections.

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Dutch Embassy Destroyed by Rocket; 4 Policemen gunned down in Mosul

According to wire services, Baghdad was shaken by several explosions late Friday night, including two rocket-propelled grenade attacks on the Dutch embassy in Baghdad that set it ablaze briefly before the fire was extinguished. No one was harmed, since the building was unoccupied. US officials put Baghdad on a major alert. Holland has 1200 troops in southern Iraq as part of the US-led military coalition. It had pulled out its embassy staff last October, citing poor security.

Guerrillas in Mosul sprayed gunfire at four Iraqi policemen at a checkpoint, killing three and wounding a fourth. Over 600 Iraqi policemen have been killed since mid-April.

South of Kirkuk, guerrillas fired on a checkpoint of the Iraqi Civil Defense Forces in a place called Salman Beg. The Iraqi police returned fire, claiming to have killed one of the six attackers and to have wounded another.
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Debate Begins on Constitutional Provisions in Iraq

Alissa Rubin of the Los Angeles Times has a fine piece today discussing debates in Iraq over the Fundamental Law that will govern the country until a constitution is crafted.

She points out that several members of the Interim Governing Council reject the idea of a 3-man rotating presidency, in part on the grounds that it may institutionalize ethnic divisions and will be inefficient (Bosnia is cited as an example of how it can go bad).

She also reveals that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and Abdu'l-Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for Islamic revolution in Iraq, have prepared their own team of census and electoral experts to make the case to the United Nations Commission being sent by Kofi Annan that free and open elections are possible.

[Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that Adnan Pachachi of the IGC says that the UN Commission's recommendations will not be binding on the governing council. Pachachi is angry about the extent of Shiite power and the influence of Sistani, as are many Sunnis.]

The Fundamental Law will have a bill of rights, and will try to ensure representation in parliament of women (some percentage of seats will be set aside for female candidates, as in Pakistan). But it will also specify Islamic law as a principal source of Iraqi law, which worries some observers. (This provision was insisted on by Sistani and seems to be supported by Paul Bremer.)
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MI6 to be Called before Parliament on Weapons Estimates

The London Times reports that "Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, will appear before the Intelligence and Security Committee, headed by Ms Ann Taylor, the former Labour Cabinet minister, to give further evidence on why he believed that the intelligence on Saddam’s weapons was reliable and accurate. It was MI6 that provided the bulk of the intelligence for the Downing Street dossier that underpinned Mr Blair’s decision to go to war."

That is, despite the whitewash carried out by the Hutton Commission, Tony Blair's government will not entirely avoid an inquiry into where in the world it got the idea that Saddam Hussein was a major threat to the UK and had WMD ready to launch "within 45 minutes."

Note that parliamentarians of his own party are carrying out the inquiry, which is a good model for Republicans in the US Congress. The intelligence failures with regard to Iraq were a bi-partisan affair (though only the Bush administration magnified them by making war policy based on them), and Republicans who care about the credibility and security of the US should want to know as much as anyone what went wrong and how to fix it.

A reader helpfully comments:

"It's a committee of Blair placemen meeting in secret and reporting in secret directly to Blair. He then has the power to redact any part of their findings he doesn't like, ask them to do it again, or chuck it in the bin. Not exactly a democratic model for America to follow (but one they'd probably like to)." Oh, well.


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The Islamic Party: Neither US nor IGC Suited to Organizing General Elections

Az-Zaman reports that the Iraqi Islamic Party (the Iraqi branch of the Sunni fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood) has expressed support for the Nov. 15 agreement between the US and the Interim Governing Council, saying that elections based on provincial councils would produce a government capable of restoring Iraqi sovereignty. Party leader Muhsin Abdul Hamid, a member of the Interim Governing Council, argues that the IGC and the Americans are incapable at this point of presiding over direct elections.

Abdul Hamid rejected the idea that has been floated by Ahmad Chalabi and others, of simply expanding the IGC by appointment and turning the governance of the country over to it. He rejected any method of selecting the new government that did not depend on some sort of elections such as would reflect the will of the Iraqis. The party stated its complete faith in the principle of direct elections so as to produce a new legitimacy in Iraqi politics, but seems willing to wait until 2005 to hold these direct elections.

Abdul Hamid, as a fundamentalist Sunni, appears to fear that direct and open elections held in May might produce a government dominated by Shiite hard liners.
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Demonstrations in Halbaniya

Hundreds demonstrated peacefully in the Sunni Arab town of Halbaniya on Friday against US tactics, and against the curfew imposed on the city by the US authorities. (-Ash-Sharq al-Awsat).
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Who is Hasan Ghul?

The Kurdish peshmergas apprehended an Egyptian member of al-Qaeda trying to sneak into Iraq recently, and the US hailed the capture as significant. Ghul was said to have been working directly under Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, one of the planners of September 11. But the London-based moderate Saudi newspaper al-Hayat raised the question today of who he really is. They called an Egyptian expert on the al-Gihad al-Islami organization of Ayman al-Zawahir, and he said the only senior al-Gihad/ al-Qaeda figure named Hasan had been killed in the Afghanistan war. Hani al-Siba'i speculated that "Hasan Ghul" may just be the name on a passport that the fugitive managed to get hold of. I did a quick Nexis search and did not come up with entries for this name before the capture. So, who exactly was captured?

There seemed to me to be a contradiction in the statements during the past couple of days of Gen. John Abizaid and those of Gen. Rick Sanchez about al-Qaeda in Iraq. Abizaid seemed to play this factor down, Sanchez to play it up.

Abizaid expressed security concerns not only about Afghanistan (where he denied that the Taliban are resurgent) and Iraq, but also about US allies Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, both of which have a domestic problem with radical Muslim extremists. (The problem in Pakistan, by the way, was in part created by the Reagan administration during its alliance with dictator Gen. Zia ul-Haq in the 1980s, during the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan).

What I don't understand is why, if you are cataloguing security risks to the US in the region, you would not add in the militant Israeli settler movement in the West Bank, which produces more hatred toward the United States in the Muslim world than any other single factor. If some foreign country had grabbed part of Virginia and was pouring settlers into it, kicking out Americans, and declaring it no longer US soil, don't you think Americans in Maine and California would be upset about that, and resentful toward the foreign invader?


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Is Kerry's Inconsistency on Iraq a Liability?

Mother Jones,, rather unaccountably relying on Max Boot, raises the question of whether Kerry's changing Iraq position will hurt him in the campaign. Kerry voted for the congressional authorization of the war, but then voted against Bush's request for $87 billion more after the war ($20 bn. for Iraq reconstruction).

So far Iraq isn't a big factor in the campaign, and unless things go badly wrong, it may not emerge as such. So it isn't clear that Kerry's position will be relevant one way or another. But the journalists' fixation on "consistency" is anyway not usually shared by the public. After all, Kerry's positions have been pretty typical of most Americans--initial support for the Iraq war, then profound dismay at the Bush adminstration's handling of the aftermath, then sticker shock at the $87 bn. request (which won't be the last).
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Bahr al-Ulum: Federalism can work with 18 Provinces

In a recent interview in al-Siyasah, a Kuwaiti newspaper, Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum implicitly opposed the Iraqi Kurds' demands for a consolidated Kurdish state:

"(Bilal) Do you think federalism is good for Iraq?"

"(Bahr-al-Ulum) First of all we do not accept the division of Iraq or any situation that leads to the division of Iraq. We stress the unity of the homeland and its territorial integrity. We must spare this country anything that might lead to its division or fragmentation. But I believe that we must make a step towards the creation of 18 governorates enjoying some self-rule and not relying on a central government or a regional federation. This could help citizens serve their interests and objectives. But we should not work for a strong federation that might cause problems." (via BBC world monitoring via Lexis Nexis.)

Bahr al- Ulum, a Shiite clergyman close to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and a member of the Interim Governing Council, has thus rejected the idea of "regional federations" of the sort the Kurds advocate. Most Shiite Arabs are opposed to the Kurdish plan, favoring a relatively strong central government, which they plan to control. The Shiite demonstrations of January 20 included among their demands the rejection of the Kurdish demand for an ethnic canton and a very loose federalism. Bahr al-Ulum appears flexible on the second issue, but not on the first, and he probably is a good guide to mainstream Shiite views.

For contemporary views on Iraqi politics among Kurds in the north, Tom Hundley's Chicago Tribune piece is well worth looking at.

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Hilfiker on Army Strong-Arm Tactics in Sunni Heartland

Dr. David Hilfiker of the Christian Peacemaker Team has written an important account, presented by Tom Engelhardt, of the tactics employed by Col. Nate Sassaman in dealing with Sunni Arab Iraqis. Sassaman is alleged to have said several things about Iraqi Muslims that verge on racism, and his tactics, such as imprisoning the entire village of Abu Hishma with razor wire (probably borrowed from the Israelis), have brought notoriety to the United States in Iraq.

Hilfiker doesn't say so, but the Sassaman approach is vehemently contested by the US Marines, who stress winning hearts and minds, and probably were on the verge of making important breakthroughs in places like Fallujah when they were withdrawn and replaced by the army.

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John LeCarre on Iraq Intelligence Failure

From Laura Miller's recent interview in Salon.com with the famed spy novelist David Cornwell and former British foreign service officer:

"I think it's perfectly true that after the Cold War ended and the secret war against terror and the business of spying on terror got going, as always the new war was being fought with the weapons of the old one and it didn't work. It's terribly difficult to spy on a multinational organization that doesn't oblige you by using all the toys you can catch them out with: telephones, cellphones, radio, codes that you can break. It doesn't have a command and control structure that you can penetrate . . .

That's one side of it. The technological revolution in intelligence left people with the notion that the human side of intelligence was of secondary importance. I think that's always been a great nonsense. It was a great nonsense in the Cold War too, even if we did manage to break their codes. I think the CIA and the Brits or whoever else would much rather have had access to Gorbachev's private secretary than to Gorbachev's telegrams. Human sources -- you can ask them questions, they can reply . . .

Your intelligence budget for the CIA alone is, I think, $30 billion a year. The result is a huge proliferation of junk. The art of refining that and turning it into a lucid statement you can write on a postcard and put in front of a busy politician really is very, very difficult stuff. The intelligence business is threatened by exactly the same bad people that your business is threatened by . . . In the intelligence world, with so much money around, there are tremendously sophisticated peddlers who are just making stuff up, feeding information to the empty areas of your head and taking huge sums of money for it and disappearing into the smoke. And I think some of the intelligence services fell for some of that stuff."
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10 Members of Iraqi Civil Defense Force wounded in Blast

Guerrillas in the northeastern town of Baquba donated a big bomb, targeting a patrol of the Iraqi Civil Defense Force, and wounding 10 of them, according to Reuters.
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10,000 Shiites Protest in Nasiriyah, seek Resignation of Provincial Council

Az-Zaman newspaper reports that Muqtada al-Sadr's organization staged a demonstration of 10,000 in the southern Shiite city of Nasiriyah on Wednesday. They were joined by the Fudala' Party, also adherents of the martyred Sadiq al-Sadr, but who follow Muhammad Yaqubi rather than Muqtada, Sadiq's son. Elements from the Sadrist militia, the Army of the Mahdi, also rallied.

They demanded that the appointed provincial council of Dhi Qar province resign, including the governor, Sabri Hamed Badr al-Rumaidh, and be replaced by a popularly elected provincial grovernment. They also wanted the officials and bureaucrats appointed by the current provincial council to be sacked.

AP reported that they chanted, "No to Israel! No to imperialism! No to America!" Nasiriyah, a city of about half a million inhabitants, is 350 kilometers (215 miles) southeast of Baghdad.

Az-Zaman says that there had been an earlier demonstration (presumably the one on Tuesday January 20, held in a number of Shiite towns).

AP says that Coalition authorities are denying that al-Rumaidh has resigned, saying only that he has withdrawn from view.

This demonstration clearly is part of pre-election politics. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has called for open national elections. The US says it wants to use the appointed provincial councils to select an electoral college. Muqtada's followers are hedging their bets. Even if the US sticks to its guns and uses the provincial councils as the electorate, they seem to be saying, they want the provincial councils themselves to have been freely elected beforehand.

Similar demonstrations showing dissatisfaction by Shiites with their Coalition-appointed provincial or municipal councils have broken out in recent weeks in Kut and Amara, two other major southern Shiite towns.



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Pachachi Envisages Triumvirate as Iraqi Executive

AFP/al-Zaman report that Adnan Pachachi, the octogenarian interim president of the Iraqi Governing Council, envisages that the new transitional Iraqi government due to be installed July 1 will have a three-man executive. He said that the transitional parliament will elect the three presidents. He also insisted that the three-man executive would have real powers and would not just be window dressing. The three would appoint the prime minister, and would approve cabinet appointments along with the parliament, and would have the power to sign or veto legislation. He envisaged legislation originating with government ministries and then being ratified by parliament and by the 3 presidents. Another spokesman said that the 3 would not necessarily reflect Iraq's major ethnic groups.

This system is completely unworkable and highly undemocratic. The parliament should be the body that chooses the prime minister. The parliament should be the body that thinks up laws and passes them. Pachachi's scheme seriously blurs the separation of powers, which is a key element in democracy. The 3-man presidency would potentially always be over-ruling the prime minister. Iran after the Revolution initially had both a president and a prime minister, and they fought so viciously and produced so much gridlock that eventually the office of prime minister was abolished.

Pachachi and his backers (possibly the Americans) clearly want to use the 3-man presidency as a brake on Shiite dominance of parliament and the likely Shiite prime minister.

I think such an "executive" would be unable to decide on anything, just as the Interim Governing Council has had trouble making tough decisions. Pachachi and his aides are saying it would prevent the concentration of power in the hands of one man. Uh, Adnan, that's what an independent legislature and judiciary are supposed to be for.

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Hutton Inquiry Whitewashes Blair Government's Exaggerations

Seumas Milne of the Guardian argues that the report by Lord Hutton on the David Kelly affair is biased in favor of the government of Tony Blair.

This affair is extremely complex. Let me see if I can get it basically right, in a concise way. David Kelly, a microbiologist, had worked for the British ministry of defense and served as a UN arms inspector in Iraq.

It is probably unrelated to the story that in the course of his inspections he met a US servicewoman, Sgt. Mai Pederson, an Egyptian-American. She is alleged to have been an undercover US intelligence officer, but denies it. She, incidentally, had become a member of the Baha'i Faith when whe was a teen in the US. She converted Kelly to the religion, which was founded in Baghdad in 1863 by the Iranian notable Baha'u'llah. The Baha'i faith's principles include the unity of the world religions, the unity of humankind, and the desirability of a federal world government. (Truth in advertising: This author joined the religion in 1972 but was forced out of the community in 1996 by fundamentalist elements in the leadership, who try to impose censorship and conformity on vocal intellectuals.) Actually, I think that any serious person from the West who spent a lot of time in the Middle East would find Baha'i, with its scriptures' liberal theology and acceptance of both the Judeo-Christian and the Islamic heritages quite attractive. (The more fundamentalist side of the religion is usually hidden from outsiders and new believers, and is probably more pronounced in the US than in the UK anyway.)

Kelly returned to his home in Oxford. He was convinced that Saddam still had chemical and biological weapons, and appears to have advised the British government of this belief.

But then beginning in the fall of 2002, he had three conversations with Andrew Gilligan, a BBC defense reporter, from which the reporter took away the impression that Kelly thought the case for Iraqi WMD was being exaggerated by the Blair government. One issue was whether Blair's director of communications, Alastair Campbell, had intervened in the wording of a British security report on Iraq to make it seem more alarming than did the original phraseology. The reporter then went public with the charge that the Blairites had deliberately exaggerated or in the quaint British phrase "sexed up" the evidence for Saddam's weapons capability. This was on May 22, 2003.

The Blair government strenuously denied any such intentional tampering with the facts, and put enormous pressure on the reporter and the BBC to retract.

On July 4, Kelly came in from the cold and let the Blair government know that he was one of Gilligan's sources, but denied being the sole source or of alleging all the misconduct that Gilligan did. Blair officials were relieved that Kelly was a relative outsider who wouldn't have had intimate knowledge of cabinet meetings, e.g.; they also knew that Kelly was himself a hardliner on Iraqi WMD, and that it was likely Gilligan had exaggerated Kelly's critique. They made a deliberate decision to out Kelly. Kelly had a security clearance and wasn't supposed to be talking to journalists, and the Blairites considered prosecuting him under under Draconian British law. He was outed on July 10, 2003. Campbell was particularly hard on Kelly, and resigned later that summer.

Kelly was then found dead in the woods on July 18, 2003, having swallowed a lot of pills and with a wrist slit. (Mai Pederson said in the Sunday Mail this past Sunday that Kelly had always complained of difficulty swallowing pills and refused to take Tylenol, and she flatly disbelieved that he would or could have committed suicide in this manner. He had once confided in another friend that if there were an Iraq war, he feared he would be found dead in the woods [though it may have been Saddam's agents he feared.] The British authorities have treated his death as a suicide.)

After his death there were attempts to discredit Kelly on the grounds of his being a Baha'i, with the tabloid press misconstruing the religion as a "cult." The Baha'i faith is a perfectly respectable religion, to which have belonged US poet laureate Robert Hayden, jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, painter Mark Toby, and thousands of other Americans and Britishers. I think there is an authoritarian dark side to the administration of the religion, which practices shunning, but then the same thing is true of the Amish. It doesn't mean they are disreputable. This charge against Kelly was just a smear. The Baha'i angle may have been irrelevant, anyway. The rank and file of Baha'is tend to be peaceniks and most probably disliked the Iraq War. But the leadership is often very conservative and interested in patronage from governments, and it forbade Baha'is to demonstrate against the war, even as individuals, in winter of 2003. Kelly was a relatively new Baha'i and did not even live in a big community, and is unlikely to have been aware of community politics on the issue.

Blair denies having been involved in the decision to out Kelly, but he appears to have chaired the meeting where the decision was made, so either he is lying or he doesn't pay much attention to what is going on around him. About half the British public think he is lying. There is a lot of evidence by now that especially in fall of 2002 the Blair government did in fact exaggerate the intelligence on Iraqi WMD, changing the wording of intelligence estimates so as to make them appear more conclusive than they were (see Milne's piece, above). So the substance of Gilligan's report actually seems unexceptionable, though whether what was done could be characterized as a "sexing up" of the documents may still be in dispute. I suppose what is at issue is whether Blair & Co. were acting in good faith or being dishonest, and their high dudgeon comes in part from a conviction that they were acting in good faith and just "tightening up" the language of the security reports, which they actually believed were dire. But that is a pretty low bar. For all we know even Cheney believes the incredible things that come out of his mouth regarding Iraq. I take it that the phrase "sexing up" has connotations of dishonesty or insincerity. If Gilligan did anything wrong at all, it was to venture into the territory of intentions, which is admittedly an ethical issue for journalists (how can you know an official's private intentions? Shouldn't you avoid imputing intentions?)

In the weird world of commissions, the fault in this affair has mainly been laid on the BBC, the chairman of which has just had to resign. This outcome seems a real shame, since the BBC was among the better sources of news coverage on the Iraq war, and this scandal will be used by some government officials impatient with the Beeb's famous autonomy to rein it in and make it a house organ for the party in power.

Kelly's death is still a bit of a mystery. Whoever outed him really should be made to resign, since it was most improper, but given the tenor of the Hutton report that is unlikely to happen. Ironically, Kelly, like most of the weapons inspectors, probably wasn't suspicious enough of the intelligence on Iraqi WMD or the ways in which the US and British governments spun it.


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Bomb at Baghdad Hotel kills 3; In other attacks, 6 US Troops Killed, 2 CNN Employees, 4 Iraqi Policemen; 6 US troops Wounded

There was so much violence of so many types in so many places in Iraq on Tuesday that it took me some time just to track it all down and summarize it. Kudos to CNN for among the clearest summaries. It made me depressed that 6 of our guys bought the farm.

CNN reports that guerrillas detonated a truck bomb in front of the Shahin Hotel in the ritzy Karada district of Baghdad just before midnight Tuesday. Much of the hotel was occupied by Iraq's interim minister for labor, Sami Azara al-Majun, and his staff. He and other officials were safe, but between one and 3 bystanders were killed.

Tuesday had earlier witnessed 5 attacks that killed 6 US soldiers and 2 CNN employees, along with 4 Iraqi policemen and a civilian.

Guerillas detonated a roadside bomb near Iskandariyah at 8 pm Iraqi time, killing 3 soldiers from the Combined Joint Task Force 7. Another three were wounded.

At 1 pm in Khaldiyah, guerrillas set off a roadside bomb and killed another three US soldiers along with an Iraqi civilian. The explosion wounded 3 US troops and 4 Iraqis.

A CNN crew was ambushed near Baghdad on Tuesday, with the driver of their vehicle and their translator being killed. A cameraman in another vehicle was slightly wounded.

Guerrillas in the holy Shiite city of Karbala drove up to the Polish military HQ and opened fire, killing one Iraqi policeman and wounding two others.

Guerrillas in Ramadi, in the Sunni heartland, killed 3 Iraqi policemen Tuesday outside their police station.

US troops operating in the Sunni Arab region arrested several suspected members of the Jaysh Muhammad, a guerrilla cell operating there (sounds like Sunni fundamentalists).

Members claiming to be from a Muslim party occupied a Red Crescent office in a ritzy Baghdad neighborhood Tuesday, injuring one of the Red Crescent staffers. Iraqi police came to the scene.

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Informed Comment up for Koufax Award

2003 Koufax Award Finalists Best Expert Blog has been announced, with this column as a finalist. Thanks so much to everyone who has supported the site so warmly!
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Humanitarian Grounds for Iraq War?

Re: Human Rights Watch Executive Director Ken Roth, "War in Iraq: Not a
Humanitarian Intervention", 26 January 2004, Keynote essay to Human Rights Watch, "World Report 2004."

My reply, from a discussion list:

I deeply disagree with the way the Bush administration pursued the war
against Iraq. The hyping of unfounded 'intelligence,' the backroom deals
with corrupt or authoritarian expatriates, the spying on the UNSC
ambassadors and then the discarding of them, the disregard for the United
Nations Charter, the undermining of international law and the law of
occupation--all of these steps and policies made our world so much more
shoddy and dangerous and mistrustful.

That said, I simply must disagree with HRW and Mr. Roth that there were no
humanitarian grounds for such a war. I believe that what Saddam was doing
to the Marsh Arabs from the mid-1990s could legitimately qualify as a
genocide. Likewise, the Anfal campaign against the Kurds. Although the
latter was carried out some years ago, the former had been recent and
ongoing. Moreover, there is not in most legal systems any statute of
limitations on murder, so I am not sure why there should be one on
genocide or mass murder.

In short, I believe that the United Nations Security Council was obliged
to remove Saddam Hussein from power on the basis of egregious violations
of the UN Convention on Genocide

http://www.hrweb.org/legal/undocs.html#CAG.

The proper way for the Bush administration to have proceeded was to apply
to the UNSC under Article 8 of the convention.

"Article 8
Any Contracting Party may call upon the competent organs of the United
Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they
consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide
or any of the other acts enumerated in Article 3."

In so saying, I do not mean to give the Bush administration a pass on its
behavior, since vigilanteism is not the same as lawful prosecution. Bush
lynched Saddam, when in fact his regime should have been put on trial and
removed by the Security Council.

I do not believe most Iraqis would agree with HRW on this one, and they
are the ones who had to live with that regime.


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Sachedina Interview by Cobban: Sistani is Trying to Bring in the UN

Helena Cobban's interview with Shiite thinker Abdulaziz Sachedina of the University of Virginia is a must-read contribution. Sachedina has recently been to Iran and moved among the Shiites. Interestingly, he seems to think that there is more support for Muqtada al-Sadr than for Sistani except in Basra. From a distance, I would say that Sistani has more general, but vaguer authority, whereas the devotees of Muqtada are really devoted. Sachedina doesn't think Sistani has read Gandhi or knows his philosophy, but allows that some of his followers may have. He believes that Sistani wanted to get the UN involved in the Iraqi elections, and that was one of the real goals of his recent activism. I concur entirely.
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Bush: Saddam posed grave threat to US

Bush maintains that despite the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Saddam Hussein posed "a grave and gathering threat to America and the world."

This allegation simply is not true, however much a monster Saddam may be.

Let's look at the issue Harpers style:

US population: 295 million
Iraq population: 24 million
US per capita annual income: $37,600
Iraq per capita annual income: 700
US nuclear warheads: 10,455
Iraq nuclear warheads: 0
US tons of lethal chemical weapons (1997): 31,496
Iraq tons of lethal chemical weapons (1997): 0
Number of foreign troops and civilians US military has killed since 1968: approx. 2 million
Number of foreign troops and civilians Iraqi military has killed since 1968: approx. 250,000


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Breaking News: Kerry Wins New Hampshire

Caught Kerry's victory speech on CNN. With 73% of precincts reporting, he still has 38% of the vote, a 12-point lead over Dean. The race for third place is still tight, with Clark at 13% to Edwards's 12%. [As you know, that is about where it ended, save that Kerry got 39%.]

Kerry's sudden reemergence is remarkable, but on the face of it, it isn't so strange that a long-serving Massachusetts senator should win New Hampshire, nor that a former governor of Vermont should have also done well there. Iowa and New Hampshire are famously not bellwethers for the rest of the country, and are more a Darwinian mechanism for weeding out the weak and unsuited than an indication of who will win the party's nomination.

On February 3, Edwards will probably take South Carolina (with Sharpton doing double digits there too), and Edwards could do well in Oklahoma and maybe Missouri, as well (though Gephardt's endorsement is expected to help Kerry there). If Kerry can finish second in South Carolina, it would be very significant for him. But it will be tough; Clark could do well there, more because he is from Arkansas than because he is a former general.

You'd expect Kerry to take Delaware. Arizona, New Mexico, and North Dakota are probably up for grabs. But the basic fact about next Tuesday is that it probably just won't settle anything, and will keep alive candidacies rather than ending them. I'd say Clark has to win at least one to remain viable, and obviously Edwards has to carry South Carolina and maybe one other to look credible going forward.

A few days later, Michigan and Washington state have their votes, and they are big states that matter, where the victories will tell us something. One thing Michigan will tell us, as the Detroit Free Press has pointed out, is whether Kerry or some other candidate can get out and win the African-American vote. African-Americans are some 12.9% of Americans, but almost all of them vote Democrat. If we say the country is about evenly divided between voters for Democratic candidates and voters for Republican ones, obviously the 52% of the country that votes Democrat in presidential races is about a quarter African-American. This is a problem, since the poor and the young vote in lower numbers than the wealthy and the senior. African-Americans are very disproportionately poor and young. So one key to a Democratic victory is having a candidate about whom African-Americans can get excited, who will actually draw them to the polls (having an honest state election system that ensures their votes are actually counted also helps).

And, I have a theory about Kerry. A key element of his appeal is that he is a Vet. It may help him that he is a prominent Vet who has worked for the interests of veterans (unlike Bush, who wanted to cut veterans' benefits and who waited out Vietnam with a country club assignment in the Texas air national guards [which he tried to get out of, as well]). And being a Vet who is pro-veteran is the one thing that might enable a candidate to appeal to both African-Americans and white Southerners. Because both have a strong military tradition, and both have served in the US military during the past 40 years in numbers disproportionate to their percentages of the general population. It is probably not a primary consideration, but it may be a factor--especially at a time when the families of servicemen and servicewomen, reservists and national guards are upset and worried about Bush's Iraq policy.


Kerry made one Middle East reference in his speech, saying he was going to support US independence from petroleum so that no American young person would have to serve militarily in the Middle East. He implied that the Iraq war was about securing petroleum supplies or about keeping them inexpensive, or something. My advice to Senator Kerry is to drop this particular grace note. There is no near-term replacement for petroleum that is nearly in the same price range or which doesn't have very bad implications for the environment. Coal produces acid rain. Wind generators kill lots of birds and give human beings migraines. Solar is expensive and photovoltaic cells for large-scale production require a lot of exotic metals that are toxic (including cadmium and selenium) and the cells will be hard to recycle [solar is anyway really, really expensive]. Nuclear produces pesky radioactive isotopes that are hard to store safely, can fairly easily be used to make dirty bombs or enriched to become nuclear bombs, and last for thousands of years.

Petroleum costs around $25-$30 per barrel, and is likely to go on doing so for decades. (Those who argue for an imminent shortage ignore the likelihood of further big finds--it is like the old 'Limits to Growth' fallacy of the early 70s that predicted all kinds of metals would be rare and extremely expensive by now, but ignored the simple fact that when metals get more expensive, more of them tend to be mined.) Every other fuel source is 'way more expensive or more damaging to the environment. So, who wants to pay twice as much for their monthly heating and energy bills? Or have their skin corroded by acid when it rains? Moreover, petroleum is plentiful and lots of countries are happy to pump it for the current price, and it is not necessary to do things like invade and occupy Iraq to have inexpensive petroleum. Saddam's petroleum was making its way to the US. No producer could afford to boycott the US long; that way lies bankruptcy. The main problem of OPEC and other petroleum producers in the mid-1990s was that there was an oil glut. Prices dropped to near $10 a barrel for a while in the Clinton era.

So, the promise is unrealistic and the premise is flawed. If Cheney took us to war about petroleum, it was not for our general economic benefit but to open investment and money-making opportunities for US petroleum corporations--opportunities that they could have gained more easily by exploring Pakistan and India more intensively. And, if the US were willing to put the money into insulating and increasing fuel efficiency, it could cut its petroleum consumption by a third easily, which would be good for the environment and economically would benefit the country over the subsequent decade or two (the Europeans pulled this off after the oil price shocks of the 70s). However, the American public does not want to hear about conservation and this is a project that should only be undertaken in the second term of a president, not on the campaign trail.

If Kerry wants to bring this issue up, the right way to do it is to say that international cooperation on security in the Persian Gulf would be a better guarantee of energy security for the country than unilateral American military action.

[Dear Environmentalists: I am one of you; I have been reading and thinking about the environment for 40 years. I helped organize trash pick-up along the road for the first Earth Day. I am not saying that no alternative sources of energy should be used or encouraged. Indeed, I am all for throwing money at research and development, and encouraging environmentally safer energy sources. Better fuel cells would be all to the good. But they would increase gas mileage in automobiles to 60 miles a gallon, not abolish petroleum. I am saying that independence from petroleum is a chimera as long as it and natural gas are 10 times cheaper than solar power. Even if Kerry got two terms, he would not be able to move the country anywhere near independence from foreign petroleum and it is therefore a bad idea for him to suggest that he could. I am talking about real-world economics and political good faith here.]



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Breaking News: Same as Headline Below

Still watching CNN. With 30% of precincts reporting, Kerry has a very impressive lead over Dean still. Kerry is getting in the high 30s, Dean only in the 20s. Blitzer began by saying CNN exit polls were showing a tight race, but unless it is the upper middle class precincts that haven't reported yet, I don't see how it can be that close. Maybe former Dean supporters who switched to Kerry at the last minute just couldn't bear to admit it to the reporters (maybe they were with their Dean-supporting friends at the time).

CNN hints around that New Hampshire has a strong class divide, with a lot of blue collar workers and a lot of upper middle class liberals. Then it reported that the "moderates" are favoring Kerry, the "liberals" Dean. I wonder if we can conclude that the working class is voting for Kerry and the upper middle class for Dean. American news reporting is so nervous about class. I wish they would just come out with it.

Edwards has opened up a small 1-point lead over Clark. It may not be statistically significant, but if it holds a third-place finish for Dean could mean a lot going into South Carolina next week. Clark's earlier high poll numbers in New Hampshire now look like a fluke.
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Breaking News: Kerry Leads, Dean close second, Edwards and Clark tied for Third

I'm watching CNN. With just 13% of precincts reporting, Kerry has the lead over Dean in New Hampshire. The exit polls seem to show that the race is much closer than Kerry supporters had hoped. Edwards and Clark both have 13% of the vote each.

If Kerry and Dean come in very close, it does look as though this is a 4-man race for the next month at least. Clark had earlier done much better in the polls, and one wonders if he can survive a fourth-place finish if Edwards overtakes him.

As Carville noted, this is fun. Maybe on May 31 Iraqis will be seeing whether the Dawa candidate or the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq is doing better in the voting for parliament . . . But at the moment something much more boring and less democratic is being planned for them in Washington.


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Bombs Rock Baghdad on Monday

Powerful explosions rocked downtown Baghdad at 10:35 pm local time on Monday, as a rocket also landed in a parking lot near the American headquarters. It is where Coalition Provisional Authority head Paul Bremer and his aides park, but no casualties were reported. Sirens went off and US officials at the Coalition compound were told to take cover.

A man getting off a bus in Baghdad stepped on and detonated a roadside bomb. He was killed, and three other passengers were wounded.

Later on Monday, guerrillas set off a roadside bomb in West Baghdad neighborhood, wounding a civilian and inflicting damage on three vehicles.

Guerrillas in the Sunni Arab areas west of Baghdad launched two attacks on Iraqi police, killing 7 of them.

Near the Shiite holy city of Najaf, guerrillas blew up bombs outside the Spanish garrison, but, again, no damage was reported.

In the northern oil-rich city of Kirkuk, two small rockets exploded at the US military base there, but no reports of damage.
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Kerry, Edwards surge in New Hampshire; Health Care beats Iraq as Concern

Only 10 percent of the voters in New Hampshire think Iraq is the most pressing issue in the campaign. I was surprised to find that 22 percent put health care as an issue first, as opposed to 16 percent who focused on the economy.

The Washington Post reports of the voters in the New Hampshire primary, "Health care (22 percent) topped the list of issues considered critical by voters in a recent University of New Hampshire Survey Center poll, ahead of both the economy (16 percent) and the war in Iraq (10 percent). "

It seems to me that what is really important in the recent poll figures on the New Hampshire primary is not the absolute numbers or the relative placing, but the graph of movement. I find the tracking numbers at zogby.com over the past week telling. Kerry went from 23% a week ago to 31% on Monday. That's an enormous surge, with him ending at 130 percent of where he began. Unsurprisingly, Kerry's Web Page has a section on health care entitled "Affordable Health Care for Every American." Health care is an area where the 'free market' is clearly not working, but is rather producing 22% inflation that is extremely worrisome to employers and employees. And, of course, the tens of millions of Americans without health insurance of any sort are second class citizens facing penury or death if anything goes wrong. The problem is not, as Bush implies, malpractice suits which account for about 2% of the cost of health care. And, maybe this is an area where the electorate wants something done, and where a Massachusetts liberal can be trusted to do it.

Dean went from 25 to 28 in the same period. Good, but the rate of surge is far less.

Clark actually fell from 16 percent to 13 percent over the week, a bad sign for him. Edwards nearly doubled his numbers from 7 percent to 12 percent. If the Edwards surge continues on Tuesday, and the Clark decline steepens, Edwards could actually tie or beat Clark, setting up a very interesting race among two Southerners for South Carolina.

I saw Jerry Brown, former California governor and current mayor of Oakland on O'Reilly* when I was channel surfing, saying that it could be a 4-way race for a while. Brown may well be right about that.
------------

*P.c. readers should please not send me emails complaining about my watching O'Reilly. Life is hard and I have to get my laughs somehow.

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Annan Will Send UN Election Team to Iraq

Kofi Annan will send an election commission to Iraq, the Washington Post reports. This United Nations commission was the idea of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, and initially the Coalition Provisional Authority headed by Paul Bremer was said to be "deeply offended" by the Iraqi attempt to involve the UN in the electoral process.

Annan has already said in the past that he thought holding open elections was impossible before July 1. But Sistani is convinced that an open-minded commission from the UN would discover on examining the situation on the ground in Iraq that popular elections are possible, after all.

As I mentioned last week, the British military authorities in Basra have come to the latter conclusion, as well, and have not been shy about saying so, even though this conclusion differs from the position of the civilian government of Tony Blair. (The British military felt badly used in Bosnia by the civilians, and many resent the lack of equipment they have to suffer with in Iraq, and they therefore tend to speak out with what seems to me striking candor.)

Sistani's success in involving the UN has guaranteed that, whatever the outcome, Iraqi elections will not be merely a US project, but will have substantial input from the world body. Since this input will help bolster their legitimacy in Iraq and the Arab world, I think it can only be a good thing.
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Iraqi Women's Rights Imperiled

Sarah el Deeb of the Associated Press explores the implications for Iraqi women of the US tendency to appoint men to high office, to exclude women, and to bow to vocal patriarchalists whenever challenged. Western commentators, including George W. Bush, who think women's rights have actually improved in Iraq since the war, have no idea what they are talking about. The attempt of some powerful male members of the Interim Governing Council to impose religious personal status law on Iraqi women still hangs in the balance.
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Controversy over 45 Minute Claim

Nick Theros is denying stories that appeared in Newsweek and theThe Guardian that claim to demonstrate how expatriate networks suckered the United States and Tony Blair into believing exaggerated claims about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction capacitities.

Here's the story: Patrick Theros (an Ann Arborite) is a former US ambassador to Qatar and had been a long-serving State Department diplomat. At one point he was over-all coordinator for anti-terrorism efforts in the US government. He more recently served as president and executive director of the US-Qatar Business Council. Note that the Qataris were most alarmed by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and Qatari pilots flew missions against Saddam's forces in the Gulf War. Many in the Gulf sheikhdoms rightly despise Saddam and his regime and wanted it gone.

Newsweek and the Guardian maintain that Mr. Theros's son, Nick Theros, became a spokesman for Iyad Alawi and his Iraqi National Accord. Alawi himself was a civilian Baathist (a neurologist) who broke with the party and became a successful businessman. In 1990 he founded the Iraqi National Accord, which mainly grouped ex-Baathist officers, mostly Sunni Arabs. The INA attempted to provoke several coups in the 1990s, but failed. It was backed by the CIA when Ahmad Chalabi proved unreliable and unable to account for millions of the dollars given him by the US State Department and the CIA.

Nick Theros denied in a widely circulated email today that he was an INA spokesman. He said:

>First, I am not, as implied in this piece, a representative of the INA. I
>articulated this clearly to Hosenball and added that I and Theros & Theros
>represent Dr. Ayad Allawi's interests -- in his capacity as a member of the
>IGC -- in the United States. I told him I do not / could not speak for the
>INA. His claim that I "confirmed that the INA was the source of a purported
>secret document" is patently false. I merely mentioned that the press
>reports could be accurate because the INA has had a long relationship with
>MI6 and CIA and was active in gathering intelligence prior to the war.

Newsweek and the Guardian reported that Theros passed on to MI 6, British intelligence, the allegation by a former Iraqi air-defense officer named Lt. Col. al-Dabbagh, that Iraq could deploy chemical weapons in as little as 45 minutes. Whatever its source, it is clear that this uncorroborated anecdotal information from a single source was accepted as Gospel by Tony Blair's government, and the Prime Minister even famously quoted it in an over-heated speech and then included it in an influential 2002 government report. The Newsweek article alleged that Nick Theros admitted that it was "a crock of shit."

Theros replies:

"Last week a Newsweek reporter, Mark Hosenball, called me to follow up on
>several stories that appeared in the UK press alleging that Dr. Ayad Allawi
>and the INA were the source for several controversial intelligence claims
>-- namely, the claim that Saddam could have launched WMDs within 45
>minutes; the Niger Yellow Cake controversy; and the recent claim that 9-11
>hijacker Mohammad Atta had trained with Abu Nidal in Baghdad. Further,
>these are not "fresh leaks" as Hosenball states, but old stories. They are
>in fact not "leaks" at all. Both Dr. Allawi and Col. Al-Dabbagh merely
>acknowledged that they had passed on intelligence information to MI6 as
>received. They were not "hyping" or politicizing intelligence, but rather,
>passing raw intelligence reports for analysis by US and UK intelligence
>agencies. End of story -- which is why more responsible reporters haven't
>followed up."

Theros ends,

"Finally, Hosenball actually went ahead and quoted that I had said that the
>"claim now 'looks like it could have been a crock of s--t'" implying that
>Col. Al-Dabbagh'sinformation was dubious. NO. NO. NO. Commenting on
>Al-Dabbagh's statements to the Telegraph, I said that Saddam probably did
>tell / deliver "crates" to his troops claiming that they were "a secret
>weapon" to use against the invading American forces but since no one saw
>what was in the crates, it "could have been a crock of s--t" designed for
>moral purposes."

Informed Comment earlier remarked on the Newsweek and Guardian stories as they appeared, and accepted the allegation that Theros was a spokesman for the Iraqi National Accord. It is apparently more accurate to say that Theros is a publicist for Alawi himself, and I apologize for the inaccuracy.

That said, it seems to me that Theros doth protest too much. It is obvious to me that the Iraqi National Accord and Iyad Alawi passed to British intelligence and to Con Coughlin at the Telegraph a series of patently false reports that bolstered the case for war against Iraq but which were wholly unfounded. (Coughlin is either gullible or disingenuous.) For Alawi now to say that he was innocent because he was only providing "information" to be "evaluated" is an attempt to escape responsibility for his own actions.

All those naive conservatives over at the Weekly Standard and the National Review who practically had an orgasm when they saw the memo Doug Feith leaked full of cherry-picked 'intelligence' about Saddam links to al-Qaeda should go take a cold shower. Turns out that Lt. Col. al-Dabbagh was also a primary source of such allegations. Al-Dabbagh could have sold that crowd the 14th of July Bridge in Baghdad and they would have paid a premium for it. Want to bet that if we could see where Feith's 'information' came from, it would all be single-source unreliable defectors pimped by Alawi, Chalabi and the other fraudsters?



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Mahatma Sistani?

From a European peace worker in Iraq, a week or so ago:

"I have heard that Sistani has promoted among his followers the Gandhian method of disobedience against the occupation power, if the situation seems to go out of hand [i.e. if the US rejects direct elections]."

If this report is correct, it would make sense of Sistani's intransigence on the need for open elections, and his resort for the first time recently to calling mass urban demonstrations.

My wife, Shahin Cole, says that figures such as Sistani who decide to seek to influence society, are like stage magicians. They do not pull out all the stops and perform their most complex and dazzling trick first. They start small, showing only the tip of their wand. Then they wave around the whole wand. Then they reach deeper into their bag of tricks for ever bigger props and effects. Sistani's fatwa or ruling of June 28 on the need for delegates to a constitutional convention to be popularly elected was the first, small demonstration of his powers. The 100,000 in the streets of Baghdad on January 19 was a further such demonstration. But if he does mount a campaign of civil disobedience to force free and fair elections, that will be the time for him to make the elephant disappear.
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6 US Soldiers killed over Weekend, Over a Dozen Wounded; 2 Iraqi police dead, dozens wounded; Helicopter Crash

The low-grade guerrilla war against the US military continued at a heated pace over the weekend..

On Sunday, a soldier died of wounds inflicted by a rocket-propelled grenade attack near Beiji, north of Baghdad..

In a separate incident, according to the WP, a riverboat capsized while on patrol, and one out of the 4 US soldiers on board went missing, in the north near Mosul early on Sunday. The US military then sent a helicopter out to look for the lost soldier, and the helicopter went down with its two crewmen (the cause of the crash is unknown). Then an Iraqi police team secured the region for a search for the helicopter and one of them was killed at a makeshift checkpoint in a drive-by shooting. Arriving US troops met small arms fire. Two Iraqi police and a translator were killed in the same region, either, as the WP says, in the capsizing incident, or, as wire services suggested, in a separate one. This area seems to be like the Bermuda Triangle or something.

On Saturday, guerrillas near Khaldiyah in the west detonated a car bomb, killing 3 US troops and wounding 6; they wounded 8 Iraqis, as well. On the same day, guerrillas drove a car bomb into a military checkpoint, near Fallujah, killing another 3 US soldiers and wounding six. A third attack, at Samarra north of Baghdad, narrowly missed a US convoy but killed 4 Iraqis and wounded 40.
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Sunday Times Alleges Torture, Kidnapping in Basra

The Sunday Times carried a story that members of the Badr Brigade of the Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq are being used as a sort of secret police in Basra with the permission and even oversight of the British authorities there. The article says that the militiamen (who had been trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards) have formed death squads that have engaged in kidnapping and torture, and that the whereabouts and condition of many of the suspects arrested remains unknown even to their close kin. Some eyewitnesses are quoted as saying that the headquarters of this secret police is festooned with posters of Ayatollah Khomeini. The story attempts to implicate in the leadership of this secret unit the British-appointed governor of Basra, Wa'il Abdul Latif.

The report seems to me likely sensationalized, but it is certainly the case that the Shiite militias have a great deal of power in Basra. Whether some of them have been recruited into a formal unit of the Basra police needs more investigation.
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The Question of Elections in Iraq

In the past week, two significant demonstrations were launched by Iraq's Shiites, including one on Monday 1/19 that involved an estimated 100,000 in the streets of Baghdad (including, from all accounts, some Sunnis who support open elections). The other, on Tuesday, was smaller and drawn from the poorer, more radical elements of the community who incline toward Muqtada al-Sadr. I cannot underline strongly enough how significant it is that Sistani was willing to go to the street in this way, and that so many tens of thousands responded.

This move seems to me to signal severe trouble ahead. The US is making intransigent noises, despite a Guardian report last Thursday that Mr. Bremer might give in and hold open elections. Were the US really to insist on sticking to its guns, the Bush administration might well face the prospect of hundreds of thousands of angry Iraqis demonstrating all this summer and into the fall, with the attendant danger of violence breaking out between them and US troops. The US public may not care very much about Iraq, but they certainly won't want to see US troops shoot down innocent civilian protesters because the Bush administration would not allow free and fair elections.

On Friday, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani asked Shiites not to demonstrate. He felt the point had already been made, and that it was time to let Kofi Annan and the United Nations deliberate. (This according to Edward Wong of the NYT.) Again, it is highly significant that, at this stage of the game, at least, he was able to turn off the spigot. But there is a danger that if he accustoms Iraqis to demonstrating in the tens of thousands, he will lose control of them if the US disappoints them.

Meanwhile, members of the Interim Governing Council who earlier had favored the US approach to carefully controlled elections, based on the Coalition-appointed provincial councils, defected to Sistani. Over the weekend Ahmad Chalabi told a skeptical audience at the arch-conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, that he now favored open elections and believed they could be held. And Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq with its 15,000-strong Badr Corps paramilitary, told Reuters the same thing this weekend: "It can be done, if we want it and make the effort. I believe they can be run."

Az-Zaman reported that al-Hakim admitted, "Ideally elections would depend on the existence of a census, an electoral law, and a law governing parties . . . There are problems . . . But I believe that [elections] will express the opinion and the will of the people . . . will give a voice to all, and holding them is feasible."

Sistani initially portrayed his initiative to press for open elections as a blow struck for indigenous Iraqi political figures against expatriate carpetbaggers, but now even the carpetbaggers are saying they think it is a good idea. Chalabi, Alawi and the others must have thought at first that it would be easier for them to ensure their election and power with the stage-managed American plan (under which the expatriate-dominated Interim Governing Council would choose a third of the electoral college in each province).

In the above-cited article, Wong maintains that Sistani only pressed for the open elections after being privately assured that they were feasible by UN figures behind the scenes. This tidbit of information accords with my own view, that Sistani's appeal to the UN is not so much a request for help as a demand that it do the right thing. Kofi Annan will decide in the next couple of days whether and when to send an election feasibility commission to Iraq. He has a two-man team on the ground now.

Meanwhile, Rory McCarthy reports from Baghdad for the Guardian that a council of (fundamentalist) Sunni clerics has denounced the plan to hold elections, saying that Sunnis would boycott them if held under Coalition auspices. This rejectionist stance seems unlikely to be widely shared among Iraqi Sunnis, most of whom are nationalists rather than religious fundamentalists. If they did boycott the elections, they would just increase Shiite dominance. (It would be a mirror image of what happened in the recent elections in Bahrain, a Shiite-majority country where the Shiites boycotted the elections and allowed Sunni fundamentalists to dominate parliament.)

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Kay, Powell, Backtrack on WMD

It seems to me that David Kay's resignation as weapons inspector in Iraq and his open admission that there simply are no "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq of any significance, has settled the issue. Kay snarkily went out suggesting that there may have been "programs" (read: vague plans and worthless offices).

He also hinted around that a lot of goods had been transfered to Syria last winter before the war, implying that these may have included chemical stockpiles. Kay offered no proof for this speculation, which comes out of the same Western and Israeli intelligence sources that said Saddam was 3-5 years from having a nuclear bomb. The Syrians have denied it. (Bashar al-Asad would have had to be brain dead to take delivery of Iraqi WMD on the eve of a US invasion of Iraq that had been hyped as grounded in Iraq's possession of WMD!) [I now hear that Kay has retracted even this insinuation, saying he was misunderstood.]

So, the case has completely collapsed, and Kay is left with nothing but vague and unproved insinuations even in the small matters to which he continues to cling for whatever odd reason. Even Colin Powell is backtracking. Only Tony Blair seems so unwise as to try to maintain the case, and it is the sort of intransigence that may get him dumped by the Labor Party as an increasing liability.

Kay is trying to blame the US intelligence services and to protect the Bush administration. This, like much of Kay's past work, is disingenuous.

It is true that the US had no human intelligence assets of any significance in Iraq, who could have done a simple site check of things that had looked suspicious in the satellite photos. Since the US spread around millions to Iraqi tribal sheikhs and others, the problem was not money. There is no good reason for the failure to develop such intelligence, except that it would have required that somebody go out and do recruiting in dangerous conditions and be able to speak Arabic, etc.

But Bush and his officials were the real problem. They were determined to go to war regardless of the intelligence. Neoconservatives in the Pentagon and the Rockingham Group in the British military cherry-picked and politicized vague "intelligence" (i.e. unsupported anecdotes) fed to them by figures like corrupt expatriate Iraqi businessman Ahmad Chalabi and very likely Israeli intelligence. The groups that wanted the war, wanted it so badly that the shakiness of the "intelligence" did not matter. The intelligence was just spun.

For a good account of how US intelligence got into this mess, seeRobert Parry's "Why US Intelligence Failed".



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3 US soldiers Wounded in Mosul Blast

AP is reporting that "A roadside bomb exploded Wednesday near the northern city of Mosul, wounding three U.S. soldiers and seven other people, the military and local police said. The explosion occurred as three American vehicles were passing, but the force of the blast hit two civilian cars behind, said a witness, Alaa Mohammed Hanash."

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5000 Sadrists March in Baghdad

The Financial Times reported that the demonstrations in Baghdad on Tuesday were smaller than the approximately 100,000 who came out on Monday, and that they were also poorer. That is; they seem to have been mainly followers of Muqtada al Sadr. They not only marched in favor of free and open elections, but also against plans put forward by the Kurds for a very loose federalism and a consolidated Kurdish ethnic province. Crowds also came out in Karbala; Najaf, qnd Basra. The Australian press is reporting that the British have been convinced of the case for open elections, and that the United States is close to accepting it, as well.

The Sadrists also called for the execution of Saddam Hussein and complained about the Pentagon classifying him as a prisoner of war, according to Anthony Shadid of the Washinton Post.

I have long argued that were the Iraqis to mount really large urban demonstrations, it would be trump card for the occupying authorities. Either you let them alone, in which case they occupy that political space; or you shoot unarmed demonstrators, which would just cause more trouble.

It is alarming that Muqtada is using the demonstrations to confront the Kurds. Once crowd mobilization gets going, it can be put to lots of purposes. Can Sistani remain in control of the phenomenon he has unleashed?

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The Independent reports that 100,000 demonstrators marched through the streets of Baghdad on Monday, as part of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani s bid to put pressure on Kofi Annan and the United Nations to certify that free and fair elections can be held: This situation reminds me more and more of Algeria; where mass protests played a similar role in involving the UN.
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British Say Open Elections Feasible

The Financial Times is reporting that British authorities in Basra now believe that there are no procedural obstacles to holding open elections in Basra of the sort that Grand Ayatollah Sistani has called for: Whether this is true or not, it is hard to see the British announcement as anything but payback for the way the CPA has ordered them about like lackeys since the fall of Saddam. The statement puts Mr. Bremer in a very difficult situation.

The British may in part been driven to this announcement by pure fear. The demonstrations in Basra last Thursday were huge.
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Gone Fishin'

Just a warning to regular readers that for personal reasons I may find it difficult to post regularly the week of Jan. 19-25. It is possible I am exaggerating the difficulties, so do check in. But it is also possible the site will be less active this week. It will certainly be back to normal the following week.
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US and UN: Caught between Shiites and Sunnis

Two parallel reports from Baghdad, one from Alissa Rubin of the LA Times and one from Hamza Hendawi of AP, point to the increasing difficulties the US is having in satisfying the Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Shiites in Iraq.

Rubin [reg. req.] emphasizes the dissatisfaction of the Sunni Arabs, and the ways in which the UN might step in to mollify the Shiites. I am quoted expressing pessimism about Sistani's flexibility.

Hamza Hendawi of AP reports from Najaf that an anonymous administration official told him that "there will be no new plan" on Iraqi elections. He says, however, that the present plan will be tinkered with in hopes that will make it acceptable to Grand Ayatollah Sistani.

Hendawi, who quotes me on Sistani, reports enormous anger among Sunni Arabs about the prospect of Shiite rule. But that is what any sort of democracy would produce.

What I don't understand is why they don't just have elections for two houses of parliament. Go back to the old Saddam scheme of 19 provinces (he had created an extra one for Sunnis) and give each province 2 senators. Such a senate would slightly over-represent Sunnis and might help mollify them and convince them that the Shiite-dominated lower house would not be able to excercise a tyranny of the majority. Another benefit of such a province-based senate is that it would give Kurds an incentive to want several provinces instead of just one.

I am hearing rumors, purportedly coming out of Najaf, that there will be big Shiite demonstrations throughout Iraq this coming Friday. One reason I am pessimistic that Sistani will back down is precisely that he has gone to the streets. He must have known that crowds will be hard to rein in if some basic modicum of his demands are not met, even if he himself is willing to compromise.


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Bomb Blast Rocks Shrine City of Karbala; 13 Injured

AFP is reporting that guerrillas left a bomb in a package in the center of the Shiite holy city of Karbala, near the shrine of Abbas, the brother of Imam Husayn. They detonated it around 10 pm Sunday night, injuring 13.

The largely Sunni Baath remnants have been extremely frustrated at the rise of Shiite power and have often targeted Shiite leaders and shrines. In addition to attempting to demoralize the Shiites, they may also hope to turn Shiite anger about such incidents toward the Coalition.

Karbala is under Polish command, and local troops are Bulgarians. The city was the site of a wave of mortar attacks Dec. 27 that killed 19 persons.

Given the political mobilization of Shiites by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, demanding free and fair elections, this sort of incident weakens the US hand. The Shiite leaders can say that present US arrangements do not even protect the holy shrines.
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23 Killed (2 Americans), 130 Injured (including 6 Americans) in Baghdad Car Bombing

AFP has raised the casualty count to as many as 23-25 killed and 130 wounded in the Baghdad car bombing of the US headquarters there.

"The huge explosion turned the busy central Baghdad street outside into a battlefield inferno but the headquarters buildings inside the heavily-fortified area known as the Green Zone were unaffected. The blast came the day before Iraqi and US officials, including US civilian administrator Paul Bremer, are to meet with a wary UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in New York to discuss a future UN role in Iraq. "At least 20 people have lost their lives and almost 60 were injured," US Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt told reporters. "It would appear from all the indicators this was a suicide bomb. We have confirmation some of those killed were US citizens, US contractors. We believe the current number is two. We are waiting for final confirmation," Kimmitt said. Another five people were reported dead and 71 wounded at Baghdad hospitals. Witnesses claimed US soldiers opened fire in panic on Iraqis moments after the blast, but a military spokesman denied this."

Earlier AP had reported,

Officials said more than 60 people, including six Americans, were injured in the blast on a mist-shrouded morning near the north entrance -- known as the "Assassin's Gate'' -- to Saddam's former Republican Palace complex, now used by the U.S.-led occupation authority for headquarters.

I'd say there is increasing evidence that the US is not in control in Iraq, and that the place may well be headed toward being a failed state for the near term. When, 9 or 10 months after an army conquers a place, its HQ is not safe from attack, this is always a bad sign. For those who keep making Germany and Japan analogies, I ask you if MacArthur's HQ was getting blown up in Tokyo in April of 1946.
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Whistle-Blower on US Dirty Tricks at UN to be Tried in UK

The Guardian reports that Britain's Katherine Gunn may face two years in prison for whistleblowing on American dirty tricks at the United Nations. She made public a memo that reveals US intentions to spy on the UN delegations of the six "swing vote" nations in the run-up to a vote on the Iraq war.

Apparently her disclosure itself, which apears to have come last spring, may have dissuaded some of the swing vote nations from further considering an Iraq war resolution.

"The leaked memorandum - dated 31 January 2003 - from Frank Koza, chief of staff of the NSA's Regional Targets section, requested British intelligence help to discover the voting intentions of the key 'swing six' nations at the UN. Angola, Cameroon, Guinea, Chile, Mexico and Pakistan were under intense pressure to vote for a second resolution authorising war in Iraq. The disclosure of the 'dirty tricks' memo caused serious diplomatic difficulties for the countries involved and in particular the socialist government in Chile, which demanded an immediate explanation from Britain and America. The Chilean public is deeply sensitive to dirty tricks by the American intelligence services, which are still held responsible for the 1973 overthrow of the socialist government of Salvador Allende. In the days that followed the disclosure, the Chilean delegation in New York distanced itself from the draft second resolution, scuppering plans to go down the UN route."

Chile can't catch a break from Republican administrations, can it? First Nixon and Kissinger overthrew an elected president and instituted a reign of terror that involved the disappearance, killing and torture of thousands. And then W. was having someone spy on their ambassador to the UN in hopes of finding ways to influence his vote at the Security Council.

(Kissinger used to protest the inexplicable bad press military dictator and mass murderer Gen. Augusto Pinochet got, attributing it to mere anti-Americanism. Is he really so much worse than other Latin American rulers? he kept demanding of his staff at State. Their answer: Yes).

As for the UK, I love you guys, but it really is time to get yourselves a First Amendment. This Official Secrets Act business is very ancien regime.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Benny Morris on the Arabs

There is an interesting discussion going on over at H-Mideast-Politics about a recent interview given by Israeli "New Historian" Benny Morris, who is increasingly a neoconservative.

See especially the comment of Alan Fisher, professor of Middle East History at Michigan State University.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

3 US Soldiers Killed North of Baghdad

Guerillas in the cane fields north of Baghdad detonated an enormous bomb on Saturday as a US military convoy went by, turning a 30 ton vehicle upside down and killing 3 US soldiers. Their deaths took the death total to over 500.

The press has concentrated on the significance passing the 500 mark (346 from hostile fire) with regard to deaths. But in this war, the injuries that have been survived have been horrific. Thousands of US soldiers are coming home with their faces blown off, or missing limbs, facing a lifetime in a wheel chair. The military medicine is good, and swift, and saves more lives. But the result is large numbers of permanently maimed vets. These have largely been hidden away from public view, and they haven't even always been treated very well on their return by the military.

The other complaint I have is the fetish about daily number of attacks (down to 18, the military says, from a high of 50 a few months ago). But the rise to 15 attacks a day had once seemed intolerable, in the aftermath of the military victory. And the "reduction" to 18 a day appears to have been achieved over and over again. The important statistic is the number of our guys getting killed or wounded. That isn't down appreciably in the past month, so fewer attacks that are more deadly seem to me to be just as bad as more attacks that are less efective.

[Several readers wrote in to point out that Newsweek says the number of US military sorties was cut to 500 in December from 1500 in November, and that the reduction in numbers of daily attacks may just mean the US soldiers are in their barracks and not so exposed to attack. Given the instability in the country, however, such a hunkered down posture may not be sustainable. If sorties were so drastically cut, this is surely for US domestic political purposes, since the casualties are unpopular and that means something in an election year.]

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Latest Tomgram on Chalmers and the US Military

Tom Engelhardt's Tomdispatch.com at the Nation Institute is always entertaining and insightful. For anyone interested in the debate on the new American empire (which actually doesn't seem to be going very well, since it is being overruled by Kurdish militiamen and grand ayatollahs), his comments and quotation of Chalmers Johnson are key reading.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Cobban on CPA Laws and Transition to new Iraqi Government

Veteran journalist and blogger Helena Cobban wrote in with further remarks on the issue of whether Coalition Provisional Authority regulations in Iraq are likely to survive the transition to an Iraqi government. I quote her below with kind permission.

"Nathan Brown says this:

"My impression is that such regulations [as those already enacted by the CPA] are likely to survive the CPA. In the closest local precedents we have, the PNA [Palestinian National Authority] actually retained almost all legal enactments issued by the Israeli militarygovernment and civil administration (though it was loathe to admit that it had done so)."

I would suggest that actually this is not at all a "close precedent", since the PA was only ever regarded by the Israelis as a transitional body, and never as the sovereign government of an independent state. Israeli government lawyers argued at the time--with complete justification under international law-- that despite the creation of the PA, Israel still exercized broader authority over ALL of the areas of the West Bank and Gaza by virtue of their position as occupying power. Hence, for example, when they went back into the areas of "Area A", that was NOT under international law an aggression against Palestinian sovereign territory; and their relentless recent campaign against Arafat's regime and the organs of PA power like police, security forces, etc., have NOT constituted aggression against a sovereign power.

Obviously, what we all want to see in Iraq in the long term (and preferably as soon as possible) is not a feeble "transitional" body like the PA (or indeed, the IGC) but rather an independent government exercizing real national sovereignty. Such a government should, ideally, follow its people's wishes in all acts of choice regarding what constitutional basis it adopts and which precedents from past administrations of the country it chooses to keep, and which to reject. The problem, right now, bviously is how such a truly self-governing leadership is to be formed. CoDeSa in S. Africa provides one model (took two years or more). The UN transitional arrangements in East Timor and Namibia provide much more closely analogous precedents--transitions from rule by foreign occupying forces to rule by a democratically constituted independent national government... But Israel's very partial and in practice aborted quasi-'transition' to the PNA doesn't provide a precedent at all.

(I'm just writing about Namibia and East Timor for Hayat-- I may put something up on the blog, too.)"

-----------

Chris S. kindly recommended this link for informed legal/military commentary on the trial of Saddam and the implications of his POW status.




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Bomb in Baghdad Kills 1, Wounds 3

AP reports, "The bloodshed persisted in Baghdad Friday, as a roadside bomb missed American troops but killed one Iraqi boy and wounded three others as they played soccer along a busy street. The U.S. command also announced an investigation into alleged abuse of Iraqi prisoners."
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Shiite Preachers throughout Iraq support Sistani, Slam US Plans as "Colonialism."

al-Hayat reported that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's representative in Karbala, Shaikh Abdul Mahdi al-Karbala'i, warned that the coming days will witness demonstrations and strikes, and possibly confrontations with the occupation [Coalition] forces if they insist on "their colonialist plot and in designing the politics of this country in ways that serve their interests." Al-Karbala'i called everyone in his Friday sermon before hundreds of worshippers "to support the religious leadership," affirming that "the Shiite leadership in Najaf takes a great interest in the process of transferring sovereignty to the Iraqi people through general elections."

He added that it would "never henceforth allow the rights of the Iraqi people and the oppressed religious community [the Shiites] to be stolen from them, and would never compromise on their rights." He said that "The religious leadership is intent proceeding with this battle until the end. What is asked of you now is not to abandon [Grand Ayatollah Sistani] to himself, since leaving him in the lurch would expose us to the wrath of God and the curses of history." He asked the worshippers to "forget your disputes and to unite for the sake of the greater cause," pointing out that "apathy and negligence will lead to more long years of repression." He warned of enemies of the Shiites who were meeting behind closed doors to plot the political future of the Iraqi people.

In Basra, Hujjat al-Islam Ali Abd al-Hakim al-Safi [al-Musawi], the representative of Sistani in that city, called for the holding of general elections in Iraq on the basis of ration card rolls drawn up by the former regime. Support for the idea of free and open elections also came from Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Hussain Fadlallah of Lebanon.

Charles Clover in Najaf for the Financial Times reports that Shiite clergymen throughout Iraq, including the shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala and the slums of East Baghdad (Sadr City) mounted their pulpits on Friday and asked their congregants to support Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's call for general elections in May. It is interesting that many of these clergymen in East Baghdad are probably followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, and are supporting Sistani's position. The issue of open, one person one vote elections, serves to unite Shiites across the board, even bitter rivals like the Sadrists and the mainstream followers of Sistani. That seems to me bad news for the Coalition Provisional Authority and its plans to have the new government elected by hand-picked provincial councils.
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Democratic Candidates in Iowa Differ on Iraq, and it Probably Doesn't Matter

I think the Iraq War as an issue has probably been overblown as a factor in the US elections, and don't personally think much will turn on it barring a major social revolution or major hostage-taking or something dramatic in fall of 2004.

Journalist John Wagner gives a good thumbnail sketch of the basic positions of the leading Democratic candidates on the Iraq war. They play this way:

Hawk: Dick Gephardt - wholeheartedly supported war and $87 bn. appropriation.

Dismayed Hawks: John Kerry and John Edwards voted for the war, but don't like how Bush went in unilaterally and don't like the mishandling of the aftermath. Voted against the $87 bn. Want to get UN involved.

Dovish Hawk: Wesley Clark admitted that Saddam was a problem; but felt the US had some time before Iraq became a front-burner issue; he celebrated the US victory in Iraq but says that the war was a detour from the effort against terrorism. Rather than focusing on the UN, Clark wants to involve NATO so as to bring some US troops home. (Controversies have swirled around Clark's positions on Iraq since Matt Drudge manipulated texts to manufacture false impressions of Clark's statements; the best place to find them unravelled is Josh Marshall's superb Talking Points Memo.

Dove: Howard Dean opposed the Iraq War altogether; says Saddam's capture has made the US no safer, and wants to internationalize the rebuilding effort so as to bring half of the 130,000 US troops in Iraq home on a short timetable.

Super-Dove: Dennis Kucinich holds that the war was wrong and US troops should be withdrawn in 90 days, and replaced with 130,000 UN peace keepers. (This position seems to me wildly unrealistic; if the UN member nations don't come forward, would he still just bring the troops home? Wouldn't that risk chaos in Iraq?)

The polling I've seen suggests that right now Iraq is not a burning issue for Iowans or most Americans who do not have direct family serving over there. Pro-Administration US television reporting has often obscured the difficulties in the post-war aftermath. So most US voters think things are going really well, when in fact the CPA is piloting between Scylla and Charybdis. So I very much doubt that much hangs on the stance toward Iraq of the candidates, though it could become an issue in the general campaign.

The central issues are domestic politics--jobs, health insurance, etc., where classic Democratic liberals like Kerry and Gephardt (both, ironically, probably to the left of Dean with regard to their actual domestic records) have an advantage, which is showing up in the 4-way split in Iowa. That is, despite being the most hawkish on the war, Kerry and Gephardt are doing very well in the Iowa polls, so that issue isn't driving that primary.

What must be worrisome for Dean is that he hasn't been able decisively to break out of the pack according to the polls, so that Kerry and Gephardt, and maybe even Edwards remain in play (indeed, Kerry is surging according to Zogby). If Dean can't establish himself as the frontrunner in Iowa and New Hampshire, he will face difficulties when the race turns to the south, where Clark and Edwards will run well.

Being from Virginia originally, I can't imagine Dean carrying any Southern states, and a Democratic candidate typically needs 5 of them to win in national elections. Kerry is handicapped in this regard, as well, though his being a Vet might help him there a little bit. This is the February schedule after New Hampshire:

February 3
Arizona
Delaware
Missouri
New Mexico
North Dakota
Oklahoma
South Carolina

February 7
Michigan
Washington
February 8
Maine
February 10
Tennessee
Virginia
February 14
District of Columbia
Nevada
February 17
Wisconsin
February 24
Hawaii
Idaho
Utah

As I think about it, I surprise myself by concluding that if Kerry can win Iowa and get momentum into a first or second place in New Hampshire, and can come in second behind Clark or Edwards in the South and the West, he could survive Feb. 3 to go on to do well in Michigan, Washington and Maine. It will quickly become apparent whether Clark or Edwards is going to get most of the southern and western votes, and my suspicion is that through February there will really be two Democratic primaries running concurrently, an urban one and a rural one. (I am not counting out Dean, at all, simply speculating about the viability of a Kerry run).

A Kerry/Clark or Clark/Kerry ticket could be pretty powerful. You'd have two military men who could call Bush on his politicization of intelligence and the military, and on the way the administration has fallen down in the struggle against al-Qaeda because of the Iraq imbroglio. But more important, they might by virtue of their social policies be able to hold on to the progressives mobilized, ironically enough, by Dean, and nevertheless pull from undecided centrists (which is where the election will be decided).

It's just speculation, and may be outmoded by Monday.

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The Paul O'Neill Controversy: Smith on the Iraq War Planning and the PNAC

The allegation by Paul O'Neill that Bush wanted people to get him a
justification for an Iraq war already in January of 2001 has provoked a
lot of controversy about the origins of the war. ("?It was all about
finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it . . . The President saying, ?
Go find me a way to do this.? ) Bush denies he determined
to go to war so early, though note that as late as November of 2002 he was
saying he had not made up his mind on whether to go to war, which was
an out-and-out lie. So if he was lying then, we can't be sure he isn't lying
now.

My friend and colleague Charles Smith, a Mideast expert and historian at
the University of Arizona, recently sent out what I think is a remarkably clear
account of the main figures involved in getting up the Iraq war, and he
graciously allowed me to share it, below.

Smith:
"It is not clear just what the Clinton administration actually intended for
Iraq beyond the intensified air strikes from late 1998, but I can
contribute to the record for what subsequent administration appointees
intended from the same period.

First we can recall
"Clean Break" and its vision of Saddam's overthrow as
the precursor to ensuring Israel's strategic dominance in the region,
coupled with the undermining of the Oslo process - all discussed here
previously. Then there were two letters sent to Clinton, in February and
May 1998 (in advance of his stepped-up military approach to Saddam). Both
called for an attack on Iraq and Saddam's overthrow. Both referred to the
dangers of Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction.

I want to mention each letter and list the signatories in order to suggest
that Paul O'Neill may be right about plans being underway to go after
Saddam very soon after Bush took office. To put it another way, if such
plans didn't really start until after 9/11, what were some of these people
doing for nine months after Bush took office?

1. The first letter, 2/19/98, was an "Open Letter to the President." It
mentions the Iraq National Congress and calls for a "comprehensive
political and military strategy for bringing down Saddam and his regime"
as in "the vital national interests of our country."

Richard Perle, author of "Clean Break," co-authored the first letter
with former congresman Stephen Solarz.. Signatories were, as listed,
Elliott Abrams, Richard V. Allen, Richard Armitage, Jeffrey Bergner, John
Bolton, Stephen Bryen, Richard Burt, Frank Carlucci, William Clark, Paula
Dobriansky, Douglas Feith (Clean Break signer), Frank Gaffney, Jeffrey
Gedmin, Fred Ikle, Robert Kagan (Project for New American Century), Zalmay
Khalilzad, Sven Kramer, William Kristol, Michael Ledeen, Bernard Lewis
(more on him later), Rear Admiral retired Frederick Lewis, Maj General
Jarvis Lynch, retired, Robert McFarlane, Joshua Muravchik, Robert Pastor,
Martin Peretz, Roger Robinson, Peter Rodman, Peter Rosenblatt, Donald
Rumsfeld (**), Gary Schmitt (Project for New American Century), Max
Singer, Helmut Sonnenfeldt (ID'd as tied to Perle on suspicion of spying
in 1970s by Seymour Hersh), Casper Weinberger, Leon Wienseltier, Paul
Wolfowitz(**), David Wurmser (Clean Break signer and author of second memo
to Netanyahu in 1996), and Dov Zakheim.

Bernard Lewis's presence here causes me to wonder if his book "What Went
Wrong" which has gained so much attention might have been written with
some eye to the view of many of his co-signers on this list to be the ones
to make things right in the Middle East.

2. The second letter, 5/29/98, was addressed to Newt Gingrich and Trent
Lott as Speaker of the House and Senate Majority Leader respectively. It
repeated the arguments of the first letter but stressed that failure to
overthrow Saddam would greatly harm U.S. leadership and credibility
because we would have failed to limit the spread of weapons of mass
destruction. This in turn could "make Saddam the driving force of Middle
East politics, including on such important matters as the Middle East
peace process." (This statement is very interesting in light of the goals
of "Clean Break"). The signers called on Gingrich and Lott to insist that
the U.S. make the removal of Saddam's regime and its replacement by a
"peaceful and democratic Iraq" an "explicit goal." There is no indication
of authorship as in the February letter but the signers as listed are:
Elliott Abrams, William J. Bennett, Jeffrey Bergner, John Bolton, Paula
Dobriansky, Francis Fukuyama (I thought the "end of history" had already
happened!), Robert Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, William Kristol, Peter Rodman,
Donald Rumsfeld, William Schneider, Jr., Vin Weber, Paul Wolfowitz, R.
James Woolsey, Robert Zoellick.

There are many notable repeats here from the first letter, Abrams,
Bolton, Perle, Dobransky, Kagan, Khalilzad, Kristol, Rodman, Rumsfeld, and
Wolfowitz. Quite a lineup of those high up in DoD (Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz,
and Feith from first letter make up the top three posts), State Dept
(Bolton, and Armitage from first letter), NSC Middle East head (Abrams),
Defense Policy Board (Perle and Woolsey), plus the pundits such as
Kristol.

So do we think these people twiddled their thumbs about Iraq until 9/11
woke them up? Or does O'Neill's statement seem more plausible?"

Charles Smith
University of Arizona
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Nathan Brown on the Trial of Saddam

Nathan Brown, an eminent political scientist at George Washington University, shared with me the
following with regard to issues around the trial of Saddam and Coalition Provisional Authority
attitudes to the law of occupation. He kindly permitted me to reprint his comments here.

Brown:

"You have speculated about the intentions of the US and the CPA with regard to the IGC and a trial for Saddam Husayn. In one sense, there is not that much of a need to speculate. [Before] the Pentagon classified him as a POW, the CPA [had] issued a regulation allowing it to deputize its authority to try war criminals to the IGC: http://www.cpa-iraq.org/regulations/20040110_CPAORD48_IST.pdf Of course, the relevant Iraqi statute had already been issued by the IGC. I cannot believe the timing of the CPA regulation was coincidental, though I've seen no comment on it. Rumsfeld's comments yesterday seem to be in line with an American inclination to turn him over to the IGC but perhaps to keep a finger in the trial.

Incidentally, I see that you also subscribe to a fairly strict reading of the 1907 Hague convention. The language of the convention does appear to be fairly confining with regard to civil law; Article 43 provides "The authority of the legitimate power having in fact passed into the hands of the occupant, the latter shall take all the measures in his power to restore, and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety, while respecting, unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country." But I would say that the CPA seems to subscribe to a broader interpretation of what it means to be "absolutely prevented" from respecting laws in force. Not only has it issued fiscal and financial regulations that are potentially far reaching in their implications, it has also issued regulations on the judiciary and NGOs. There should be a snippet on these in the upcoming Arab Reform Bulletin. My impression is that such regulations are likely to survive the CPA. In the closest local precedents we have, the PNA actually retained almost all legal enactments issued by the Israeli military government and civil administration (though it was loathe to admit that it had done so). And if the Americans follow British precedent, they will seek some explicit language on the matter when sovereignty is restored to an Iraqi government."

Cole: Other experts in international law have told me that the Third Geneva Accord does not absolutely require the occupying power to try the POW, but allows it to do so. The US apparently may hand Saddam over to an Iraqi government without violating international law.

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Cole on Lehrer 1/16

Some readers have kindly asked me to let them know about these things in advance. I'll be on Jim Lehrer's show on PBS Friday 1/16 talking about Iraq and Sistani. This program airs at different times in different markets so check listings. It will also be available early next week in streaming video from the Lehrer website.

[The Segment on Sistani on the Lehrer News Hour can be seen here, with Ray Suarez interviewing and co-guest Mary Jane Deeb. 1/17/04).
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US HQ in Kirkuk comes under Fire; Civilians killed by bomb near Tikrit

al-Hayat: Guerrillas launched an RPG attack in Karbala, with no casualties reported. Guerrillas fired a Katyusha rocket at the US HQ in Kirkuk.

"TIKRIT, January 16 (Online): An anti-tank mine planted along a road in Tikrit blew up when a passenger bus went over it Thursday, killing at least three people and injuring one, the US military said. In other violence in the area, US troops killed seven alleged insurgents in three separate clashes on Wednesday, the military said.'
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30,000 Shiites march in Basra demanding Free and Fair Elections

British troops estimated that 30,000 Shiites demonstrated in Basra on Thursday, with massive crowds beginning at two separate points and wending their way to the al-Abila mosque. Al-Hayat reported that they were demanding that the elections scheduled for late May be held on a one person, one vote basis. Mainly from the al-Da`wa Party and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the crowds shouted, "No to America! We're coming to you, Sistani!" "Colonialism is not liberty!" and "Yes, yes to Sistani, No, No to Appointment!" (i.e. they demanded free elections, not political appointments by hand-picked bodies).

The Bush administration rather cynically made providing democracy in Iraq its fallback justification for an Iraq war. First, the primary justification, of weapons of mass destruction, fell through. Now the fallback position is creating its own problems, since from an administration point of view the Iraqis are taking it 'way too seriously!

Placards at Thursday's demonstrations read, "The Object of Emulation [Sistani] is the true Iraqi Leadership," and "We want a Constitution Drafted by Elected Delegates!" Another said, "Do not give your Votes to those Who Do Not Deserve Them!"

The rally was organized by Sistani's Basra representative, Sayyid Ali al-Safi Abd al-Hakim [al-Musawi], who addressed the demonstrators when they assembled at the mosque, through a microphone. According to al-Hayat, he complained about the current plans for stage-managed elections in May, saying that the November 15 agreement "Was reached in haste, is not just" and does not reflect the pluralism of Iraqi society. He told the crowd, according to an eye-witness, that they should not let Bush and Blair choose their government. He defended the feasibility of holding open elections.

Interim Governing Council member Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, himself a Shiite clergyman now visiting Bahrain, told al-Hayat in Manama that Sistani's demands are "right" and "in accord with the welfare of the Iraqi people and what they demand at this juncture." He said that free elections would remove any taint from the transitional parliament, of having been appointed by the Americans, a lack of legitimacy that has plagued the current IGC. (Sistani is also supported by al-Da`wa Party leader Ibrahim al-Jaafari, also a member of the IGC and by Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, another Shiite member and former al-Da`wa member from Basra).

Many of those who marched were tribespeople and students (tribal banners were much in evidence according to an eyewitness.) This is the largest demonstration in post-war Iraq. The previous largest in Basra was an estimated 10,000, on June,

Press reports and eyewitnesses said that Iraqi police were everywhere and British helicopters hovered above the demonstration. British troops averted a potential disaster when they found and defused a large artillery shell positioned as a roadside bomb. Someone was attempting to cause real trouble between the demonstrators and the Coalition.

The Guardian's Rory McCarthy in Baghdad reported that a representative of Sistani, Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Muhri, told Abu Dhabi television, "If Bremer rejects Ayatollah Sistani's opinion, he would issue a fatwa depriving the US-appointed council of its legitimacy. After this, the Iraqi people will not obey this council. This US plan is not in line with Sistani's views."

US civil administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, rushed back to Washington for secret consultations with his direct superior, now National Security Adviser Condaleeza Rice, with an eye to seeking a compromise with Sistani. In a supreme irony, he will also seek consultations with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan about how to defuse the crisis (the Neocons in the Bush administration had pissed all over the UN and Annan last spring).

The LA Times [reg. req.] quoted one US official as saying, "We are neither so stupid nor so reckless as to want to make an enemy of Ali Sistani." Alissa J. Rubin in Baghdad also quoted a SCIRI supporter of Sistani's, Adil Abdul Mahdi, giving one of his motivations for opposing the US plan to have the transitional government elected by the appointed provincial councils: ' Underpinning Sistani's objections to the current plan is a fear that the United States or established political parties may try to manipulate the votes of the caucus members or even buy votes outright, undercutting both the power of the Shiites and the credibility of the transitional government among all Iraqis. "We have a fear that something, someone, would try to manipulate the whole process, and that is not in the interests of Iraqis, of Muslims and of Shiites," Mehdi said.'

Sistani thus appears to fear that the council members will be easily bribed and that the election will be bought. (This worry seems to me most naturally interpreted as a concern about Ahmad Chalabi, an indicted embezzler accused of stealing $300 million from a bank in Jordan. Even if he has spent a lot of it, what is left would buy a lot of votes in Iraq. Sistani may also be worried about wealthy Sunni Arabs who got rich from Saddam's patronage being able to buy politicians to ensure they keep their ill gotten gains.)

The Scotsman reported that UK PM Tony Blair said, "The demonstrators are a small minority of the local Iraqi population. They now have the freedom to demonstrate. They never had it under Saddam, but they?ve got it now." Some 30,000 demonstrators can't be dismissed this way, especially in a city that was so politically repressed and cautious as Basra. This demonstration seems to me a historic turning point.

The previous largest demonstrations in Basra had 10,000 participants, last June. On June 16 I reported that "A crowd of 10,000 angry Shiites led by Sheikh Khazraj Saadi in Basra demanded self-government and pelted British military vehicles with stones on Sunday, according to the Daily Telegraph. The British had appointed a tribal leader mayor at first, then removed him in favor of a council of appointed technocrats. The British authorities have promised to reply to the demands by Tuesday. " A later, June 16, call for demonstrations in favor of clerics having a veto over civil legislation, only produced a crowd of 2000, probably mainly Sadrists. Sistani can clearly mobilize far more ordinary Shiites than Muqtada al-Sadr. And, Sistani is fast erasing the old distinction between the quietists and the political activists in Najaf.


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One US Soldier Wounded, Several KBR Employees Killed, Samarra Guerrillas killed

AP reported a flurry of attacks on US forces on late Tuesday into Wednesday, including "three road ambushes and a hand grenade assault." Altogether 14 people died in various acts of violence. In one ambush incident near Samarra Tuesday night, US troops returned fire and killed 8 Iraqis. Guerrillas fired on vehicles of Kellog, Brown and Root, a civilian contractor to the US army in Iraq, kiling two Pakistanis and a Turk, on the road between Tikrit and Samarra. The guerrillas in that attack also managed to wound a US soldier and an American civilian.

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Dean Calls Clark a "Republican."

As Wesley Clark increases his poll numbers despite not running in Iowa, Howard Dean has attacked his credentials as a Democrat, saying, "I truly believe he's a Republican." Dean pointed out that Clark had voted for Nixon and Reagan and had earlier supported some Bush administration officials.

I doubt that this particular sort of attack will do Dean much good in the primaries. Eisenhower wasn't much of a Republican, and Taft supporters would have said he was an out and out Democrat. Reagan was originally a Democrat. People change, and change their parties. If Clark wins, it will be because he appeals to a lot of former Democrats who have now started leaning Republican, and could get them back in the party. As for the Democratic Left, we'd have nowhere else to go. It isn't as if Dean is that far left, either, you know; his policies as governor* were close to those of the Clinton-Lieberman Democratic Leadership Council, and some the Clintonites only somewhat jokingly described themselves as reduced to being Eisenhower Republicans. Clark has to be judged on the program he puts forward in 2004, not how he voted in the 1970s.

Ironically, Dean's attack on Clark isn't that damaging if Clark emerges as the Democratic candidate, and might even help him.
In contrast, Gephardt's attack on Dean as hostile to workers because he was pro-NAFTA could be damaging.

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I earlier said he had been as governor in the DLC but was challenged on this and couldn't find proof of it.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Kennedy's attack on Bush

Senator Ted Kennedy's speech attacking Bush was a good summation of the liberal Democratic case against the administration. One allegation caught my eye, concerning Iraq:

"He said Bush officials had failed to account for $1.5 billion of the $4 billion the war costs each month, citing a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office. "My belief is this money is being shuffled all around to these political leaders in all parts of the world, bribing them to send in troops," he told the AP."

That's an interesting idea. We know that a lot of the so-called Coalition of the Willing are actually being bribed to be in Iraq, and the money has to come from somewhere. But I also wonder whether a lot of people inside Iraq aren't being bribed not to make trouble. A lack of transparency that comes to $18 bn. a year unaccounted for is pretty breathtaking.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sistani Plays the Tribal Card; Demonstration in Basra

According to al-Hayat newspaper, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani held a meeting in Najaf at which he encouraged visiting clan ("tribal") leaders of Rumaitha and Samawah (az-Zaman adds other middle Euphrates areas) to insist on general elections as a means of achieving a new, sovereign Iraqi government. He promised the sheikhs of that region that they would exercise power, not "those who came from abroad." He was referring to the members of the Interim Governing Council, many of whom returned from long years of exile in the West or in Iran after the fall of Saddam. Raghida Dergham quotes him in as saying, "Authority must be yours, and the coming parliament must be composed of elected children of the people."

The tribal leaders from these areas had allied with the Shiite clergy in the spring, 1920, Great Rebellion against the British Mandate, which the British put down with difficulty and which led to a brief British colonial experiment in Iraq, ending in 1932, much earlier than hawks such as Churchill had desired.

Astonishing, Sistani invoked this history. He said, "We want you to be revolutionaries, just as we want you to exercise sovereignty." He added, "You must play a great role, just as you played a role in the 1920 Revolt."

In rural areas, the sheikhs still have substantial authority, though most Iraqis are now urban. Sistani appears to be determined to undermine the Interim Governing Council and the new transitional government that the US wants to hand-pick, as well. He demands free and open elections.

In Basra, a demonstration in favor of free elections was organized by the representative of Sistani in that city, Sayyid Ali al-Safi Abd al-Hakim. This is the first demonstration I know of staged by a close representative of Sistani. (Thanks to David Patel in Basra).
On the other hand, Muhammad Taha al-Husaini, a representative of Sistani, told seminary students in Kufa on Tuesday evening that Sistain felt that an opposition to the occupation of the country should be peaceful "at this time." (-ash-Sharq al-Awsat).
I would not have thought Sistani, being a political quietist, would be stirring up clan leaders by invoking memories of 1920 or having urban demonstrations staged. He is emerging as a major political figure, and showing himself unafraid to play politics.
He is much more formidable than I had thought (during the late Saddam years he was painted as quite timid, though to be fair he survived a Baath assassination attempt in 1996). The game is afoot.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Wave of Demonstrations against Abrogation of Civil Personal Status Law

az-Zaman reports a "storm" of street protests again on Thursday against the Interim Governing Council's abolition of the 1958 civil personal status laws in favor of religious law. Az-Zaman, a modernist Arab nationalist newspaper close to Adnan Pachachi, ran several essays Thursday by Iraqi intellectuals denouncing the move as harmful to Iraq.

The Financial Times, to its credit, picked up the story for Thursday (most of the Western press had ignored it initially). It looks to me as though IGC members tried to deceive Nicolas Pelham and Charles Clover with claims such as that the IGC decree implementing religious law was "voluntary" and anyway would not be implemented because it needed Paul Bremer's signature. You don't need a government law to have voluntary compliance with shariah or Islamic law. If someone wants to write a will in accordance with literalist approaches to Islamic law, they already can. What is objectionable is the government imposing religious law on people who may or may not want it, and that is what the IGC is trying to do. As for the claim that Bremer won't implement the law, just issuing the decree gives vigilante militias a pretext to pry into the private affairs of Iraqis and to impose religious practices on them.

So, the response of the Bush administration to the September 11 attack on the United States by a group of radical Islamist extremists has been to abolish secular law for Iraqi women and impose a fundamentalist reading of Islamic law on them. Yes, it all makes perfect sense.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Kidnappers have Private Prisons

Patrick Cockburn reports from Iraq that the wave of kidnappings that began last summer has not subsided. Rather, it has become a crime of choice among Iraq's many gangsters (estimated to number tens of thousands), and Cockburn say some now maintain their own private prisons to keep the hostages until ransom is paid.

Unemployment is a big contributor to the continued crime wave sweeping Iraq. Some estimate the rate as high as 70%, according to az-Zaman.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Saddam Warned Baathists against Cooperating with Radical Islamists

The New York Times revealed on Wednesday via a leaked document found with Saddam Hussein that the Iraqi dictator forbade his followers in recent months from cooperating with foreign radical Islamist fighters who had infiltrated the country. Saddam appears to have seen the resistance as a way for the Baath to return to power, and feared that the jihadis had different ideas.

Well, folks, if Saddam wouldn't cooperate with the al-Qaeda and other radical Islamists when he was reduced to hiding in a spider hole, he sure as hell wasn't going to give them WMD when he was in his palace in Baghdad!

The thing that makes me weep is that some GIs actually went to war against Iraq with pictures of the Twin Towers in their backpacks, thinking they were avenging September 11. If they wanted to avenge September 11 they should have gone to Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, ash-Sharq al-Awsat reported that US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said it was a little unlikely that the US would try Saddam itself, but he would not rule it out. Since the US has declared Saddam a POW, it has the prerogative of trying him in a military court.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Hero of the Day

Our hero of the day is Rabbi Arik Ascherman, who put himself in front of a bulldozer in a protest against the Israeli government's razing of the home of the Maswada family in Beit Hanina. The Israeli government has demolished an estimated 9000 or so homes in the West Bank and Gaza since 1967, more than 90% of them just because they got in the way of some Israeli project.* The government has demolished about 600 homes of families where it alleged that their members were implicated in terrorism or in resistance to the Israeli occupation. House demolitions are illegal for an occupying power, whether for the former reason or the latter. Collective punishment is strictly forbidden by the law of occupation as laid out in the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, article 33 of which says, "no protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited."

Rabbis for Human Rights issued statistics initially gathered by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, indicating that the Israeli government has demolished 2,500 homes in eastern Jerusalem and the West Bank since 1987, a process that has left 16,000 Palestinians homeless.

Rabbi Ascherman said he thought of Rachel Corrie as he stood there. Corrie was killed by an Israeli bulldozer under similar circumstances; the driver came from some distance but later maintained he could not see her. Rabbi Ascherman was not killed, but the Israeli government did arrest him, and he faces fines and up to three years in jail.

You can make a donation to Rabbis for Human Rights here.

Human Rights Watch has alleged that in four cases, the US army in Iraq has demolished homes as a form of collective punishment, contravening the Geneva Conventions. An army spokesman denied the allegation.

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*Thanks to Diane S. for this correction and the Halper cite.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Another Helicopter Shot Down; Bomb in Baqubah; 4 Killed at Fallujah Protests

In the eastern city of Baqubah, guerrillas detonated a car bomb outside a police station, killing several people.


The US lost yet another helicopter to hostile fire near Habbaniyah in the Sunni heartland, but this time the crew was safe. In Fallujah, hundreds of demonstrators came out against US troops when they briefly arrested a yound newlywed bride. (I hope that the US army got an enormous amount of information from her relatives, because otherwise this move was a bad, bad tradeoff). The US troops fired into the hostile crowd, killing 4.

It seems clear to me that the manhunt for high Baath officials in the Sunni heartland is being done wrong, or at least in ways that are bad for US standing with local Iraqis.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Continued Demonstrations in Kut: Ukrainians kill 1, wound 2 Demonstrators;
Kut Governor resigns

Demonstrations against unemployment and the poor economic situation in Kut continued for the fourth day on Tuesday. Demonstrators traded gunfire with the Iraqi police. Ukrainian forces fired at the crowd, killing one demonstrator and wounding two others.

az-Zaman reports that the governor of al-Wasit Province, whose HQ is in the southern city of Kut, has resigned with two of his deputies as a result of the unemployment riots that have gripped the city for four days. Ni`mat Sultan Pasha and two aides, Daud Salman and Hussein Ali, submitted their resignations to the Coalition Provisional Authority.

On Tuesday, a crowd of about 1,000 surrounded the governor's mansion in the city, and some threw sound grenades, breaking the windows. All the government employees fled the building in fear. The sound grenades blew the windows out of several downtown government buildings.

Hamza Hendawi of AP has a great profile of the radical young Shiite clergyman of Kut (pop. 369,000), Abdul Jawad al-Issawi, 22. An already influential figure who supports Muqtada al-Sadr of Kufa, the fiery 30 year old heir to a major Shiite clerical dynasty. Muqtada's influence is strongest in the Shiite slums of East Baghdad, and in some poor neighborhoods of Basra. He did not initially have that much support among the tribal, recently urbanized populations of the middle to lower Euphrates, such as Kut and Amara. But I have heard a lot of stories by now, similar to the one Hendawi tells, of the Sadrists successfully organizing and recruiting in the smaller cities of the tribal south. The Sadrists want clerical rule and an immediate US withdrawal, and someone like al-Issawi would be more popular in Kut these days, given the unemployment riots, than ever before.

In contrast, according to Pamela Constable of the WP a more mainstream Shiite preacher, Laith Rubaie, intervened Tuesday to draw a big crowd of 1000 protesters to his mosque, discouraging them from throwing grenades at Coalition troops and Iraqi police. He promised to intercede with the authorities about their demands.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Mass demonstrations by Women, Others, against Sudden Islamization of Law

The Baghdad/London daily az-Zaman reports that there were widespread demonstrations on Tuesday by women against the order decreeing abolition of Iraq's uniform civil codes in favor of religious law, which they say "repeals women's rights" in Iraq. This story appears to have been completely missed so far by the Western news media, which is a great shame. Women are important, too, guys.

Women activists representing 80 women's organizations (including the female Interim Minister of Public Works!) gathered at Firdaws Square in downtown Baghdad to protest the IGC decree, issued three days ago. Minister of Public Works Nasreen Barwari complained to az-Zaman about the lack of "transparency" and of "democratic consultation" in the promulgation of the decree by the IGC. Protesters carried placards with phrases like "No to discrimination, No to differentiating women and men in our New Iraq." and "We reject Decree 137, which sanctifies religious communalism." Activist Zakiyah Khalifah complained that the law would weaken Iraqi families.

US observers, including US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, have continually worried in public about Iraq becoming a theocracy, and have rejected that option. But the American-appointed Interim Governing Council has suddenly taken Iraq in a theocratic direction that has important implications for women's rights. As reported here earlier, the IGC took a decision recently to abolish Iraq's civil personal status law, which was uniform for all Iraqis under the Baath. In its place, the IGC called for religious law to govern personal status, to be administered by the clerics of each of Iraq's major religious communities for members of their religion. Thus, Shiites would be under Shiite law and Chaldeans under Catholic canon law for these purposes.

The IGC has ceded to the religious codes jurisdiction over marriage, engagement, suitability to marry, the marriage contract, proof of marriage, dowry, financial support, divorce, the 3-month "severance payments" owed to divorced wives in lieu of alimony, inheritance, and all other personal status matters.

For the vast majority of women who are Muslim, the implementation of `iddah or the obligation of a man to support a woman for 3 months after he divorces her (a term long enough to see whether she is pregnant with his child) has the effect of abolishing the divorced woman's right to alimony. This abrogation of alimony was effected for Muslims in India in the mid-1980s with the Shah Banou case, as the Congress Party's sop to Indian Muslim fundamentalists. The particular form of Islamic law that the IGC seems to envisage operating would also give men the right of unilateral divorce over their wives, gives men the right to take second, third and fourth wives, and gives girls half as much inheritance from the father's estate as boys.

Since the Interim Governing Council was appointed directly by the United States, it is in effect an organ of the Occupation Authority. As such, it is a contravention of the 1907 Hague Regulations for it to change civil law in an occupied territory. The US appointed a number of clerics and leaders of religious parties to the IGC, almost ensuring that this sort of thing would happen.

The US is now in the position of imposing on the Iraqi public, including the 50% who are women, a theocratic code of personal status. The question is whether this step is just the first in the road to an Iraqi theocracy.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Clark Gains on Dean in New Hampshire

Wesley Clark is gaining on Howard Dean in New Hamphire, at least in the polls. Clark has raised $10 mn. in a short period of time, and if he can win big in any of the southern states in February, he would attract more money.
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1 US Soldier Killed; Ukrainian Troops fire over Heads of Kut Protesters

Nadia Abou al-Magd reports for AP that guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb on Monday in Baghdad that killed one US soldier and wounded two. Late on Monday, explosions shook the downtown hotel district, but caused no casualties. Near Ramadi on Monday, guerrillas exploded a roadside bomb but missed a US army convoy. The US soldiers responded to the attack with gunfire, which killed two Iraqis.

Unemployment demonstrations were stagd in Amara for a third straight day. In the nearby city of Kut, on Monday, 400 Iraqis marched demanding jobs. Someone in the crowd is alleged to have tossed a grenade at police and at the Ukrainian soldiers. Ukrainian troops fired above the heads of the protesters.to disperse them.

These are Shiite towns. The mood of the Shiites may worsen if Grand Ayatollah Sistani continues to question the legitimacy of the American plans for transitioning to a sovereign Iraqi government. Although their main discontents are now economic, economics and politics are hard to separate.

Although the US military authorities are claiming that the absolute number of attacks has declined since the capture of Saddam, in fact the numbers of US troops killed or wounded in the month before the capture and in the month after the capture are similar.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bremer Will seek Compromise with Sistani

The Arabic press on Tuesday morning mostly reported that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani had been rebuffed by the Interim Governing Council and by US civil administrator Paul Bremer in his demand for an open, transparent, general election.

In contrast, Steven R. Weisman of the New York Times reports that Bremer has decided to alter his election plans somewhat, in a bid to seek a compromise with Sistani. Initially the electoral base of the new government was to have been the Coalition-appointed provincial councils. Bremer is said to now be open to widening that base so as to make the elections more democratic, in hopes of mollifying Sistani.

Weisman said that Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority were caught flat-footed by Sistani's statement over the weekend.
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International Law still Allows the US to hand Saddam over to Iraqis for trial

Ma`d Fayyad of ash-Sharq al-Awsat filed a story on Tuesday in which he quoted several experts in international law to the effect that the US military's declaration that Saddam is a POW would not prevent him from being turned over for trial to the Interim Governing Council. INternational law is "soft," having to mechanisms of enforcement, and it seems to me that Rumsfeld will turn Saddam over to the IGC, Geneva Accords or no Geneva Accords.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sistani Insists on General Elections

After weeks of silence and rumors that he might back down on his demand that free and fair elections be held in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has come out and reiterated the demand. Reuters reports that Sistani said, ""The ideal mechanism...is elections which a number of experts confirm can be held within coming months with an acceptable degree of credibility and transparency. If the transitional assembly is formed by a mechanism that doesn't have the necessary legitimacy, it wouldn't be possible for the government to perform a useful function."

az-Zaman quotes Sistani has having said that the transition plan "does not possess the required legitimacy" and "the formation of the transitional national assembly does not at all guarantee the representation of the Iraqis in a just manner." It said he also wanted the elected transitional assembly due to take power on June 30 to ratify the Fundamental Law being crafted by the Interim Governing Council so that it would be legitimate until the new constitution can be crafted.

Sistani is clearly worried that the stage-managed elections envisioned by Paul Bremer, where the lowest level of the electorate is Coalition-appointed provincial councils, will produce an unrepresentative and unpopular government that may well face popular protest and become in itself a source of instability. He is probably also afraid that the Coalition has favored Sunni ex-Baathists in its appointments (these are Baathists who turned against Saddam at the last minute and who are owed something by Coalition forces.

Hamza Hendawi of AP reported, 'But al-Sistani, who met Sunday with officials from the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council in the holy Shiite city of Najaf, said the U.S. plan would give birth to an illegitimate Iraqi government. "This will, in turn, give rise to new problems and the political and security situation will deteriorate," al-Sistani said in a statement released by his office Sunday.'

The first US-appointed mayor of Najaf was such a Sunni Baathist, who had to be sacked for extortion, kidnapping and other corruption two months after the US installed him. This episode almost certainly left a bad taste in Sistani's mouth, and may be one of the reasons he fears a US-installed national government. I can't imagine what damn fool appointed a Sunni (barely) ex-Baathist officer mayor of the Shiite holy city of Najaf, but this kind of FUBAR has been typical of the post-war Bush administration follies in Iraq.).
But Sistani is also taking on the IGC itself, the members of which have been happy to play along with US plans to stage-manage the elections, because they hope such a process might get them reelected. If they have to run for office in popular elections, only the Kurdish members of the IGC and a few of the Shiites would likely be returned to office--i.e. maybe 7-8 out of 24.

In the southern Shiite city of Amara, protesters rallied for the second straight day, demanding employment, fuel, electricity, jobs, and the dismissal of the Coalition-appointed municipal council (precisely the kind of council that will elect the electoral college that will select the transitional government on May 31). Az-Zaman said that the protesters also demanded compensation from the British for the 6 protesters shot and the 11 wounded on Saturday. It said that it was rumored that 3 members of the clan of Abd al-Karim Mahoud* al-Muhammadawi were involved in shooting at the protesters (al-Muhammadawi's Hizbullah tribal militia has been important in providing security and police functions in Amara and surrounding villages. He serves on the Interim Governing Council). At one point British troops charged demonstrators to disperse them from in front of the mayor's mansion, but not further civilian casualties were reported.

Between the potential for Shiite unrest implicit in Sistani's stance (he is the most respected figure in Iraqi public life), and the building tensions over the question of the place of the Kurds in a federal Iraq, the transition to a new government in Iraq looks increasingly fraught. This is not good news for Karl Rove, Bush's campaign manager, who probably has been apoplectic about how the Iraq thing has been dragging on.


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*I had thought "Mahoud" must be a typo for Mahmoud, but the Arabic really is Ma:hu:d with a long a and a long u, according to az-Zaman.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Questions about Clark's "Consistency" on Iraq and al-Qaeda

Edward Wyatt of the New York Times paints Gen. Wesley Clark as "inconsistent" for saying in October, 2002, that there were links between al-Qaeda and Saddam's Iraq, but for later saying that there were no such links. Then he brings up the early interview in which Clark said that he would have voted for the Iraq war resolution, but then later clarified that he thought the war unjustified.

This sort of article annoys the hell out of me. It is again that black and white simplistic thinking and demand for absolute consistency, which allows journalists to play "gotcha." I have been told by US government folks in counter-intelligence that they think there were low-level exploratory contacts between al-Qaeda and Baath intelligence. This allegation is plausible, and it is the sort of thing Clark was probably referring to in Oct. 2002. It is also meaningless. The contacts, if they existed, would only be important if they had gone somewhere or were at all likely to have gone somewhere. They weren't, which is what Clark means when he says now that there were no (significant) Iraq-al-Qaeda links. Mukhabarat or secret police talk to all the thugs in the world. But al-Qaeda officials like Abu Zubaida and Khalid Shaikh Muhammad say that Bin Laden forbade them from cooperating with the secular infidel Baath. Nor would Saddam have been willing to trust al-Qaeda with anything really important or powerful. Hell, the Iraqi secret police probably talked to Israeli intelligence, too. So what? Nothing came of it and by 1992 the Israelis were trying to assasinate Saddam.

As for the Iraq war resolution, look at it again. It says that Congress authorizes Bush to pursue the War on Terror. Many in Congress wanted Bush to come back to them for a separate resolution authorizing an Iraq war, which by the Constitution he should have had to (the president can't declare war all on his lonesome, even though the Imperial Presidency tradition has allowed presidents to do so de facto). Iraq was not in fact a bona fide part of the War on Terror. So it is not inconsistent to have supported the War on Terror resolution but to have been unhappy with what Bush did with it.

And why is consistency only being demanded of Clark, anyway? I remember W. campaigning on a platform of "no nation-building." Now he has more state orphans to raise than the old woman in the shoe. As Don Rumsfeld, that
Buddhist sage, has said, "Things change."

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Mahmud Osman: We don't want to Kurdify Kirkuk

Kurdish politician and IGC member Mahmud Osman gave a long interview to the London daily ash-Sharq al-Awsat in which he maintained that the Kurds do not wish to visit any injustices on Turkmen and Arabs in the city of Kirkuk. They simply wish to bring back to the city the estimated 250,000 persons expelled from it by Saddam. (Saddam had tried to Arabify oil-rich Kirkuk, which traditionally had a majority of Turkmen and Kurds). Osman pointed out that the future municipal council in Kirkuk, to be elected May 31 at the same time as the national government, will be democratically elected and so will afford Arabs and Turkmen ample opportunities to be represented.

Osman's statements are not entirely, well, complete. He leaves out the question of where the returned Kurds will live in Kirkuk; Saddam often gave their houses to Arabs moved there. Thousands of Arabs have been chased out by returning Kurds. So their repatriation is not painless unless someone builds about 50,000 new dwellings fast. And, Kurdish leaders have asked that Kirkuk be included in a consolidated Kurdish canton, against the wishes of the majority of the present population.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

What does it mean that Saddam is a P.O.W.? IGC Annoyed

Just when you think you've got Rumsfeld figured out, he throws a spit ball that loops around your elbow. I thought Iyad Alawi's declaration that the Interim Governing Council would try Saddam in a secret trial was probably the last word on the subject. Bush had said Saddam would be turned over to the Iraqi for trial. But now the Department of Defense lawyers have designated Saddam Hussein a prisoner of war (a no-brainer since he was the commander in chief of the Iraqi army!). The US military pays a lot more attention to the Geneva Conventions than do a lot of law professors.

It is worth reading The Third Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, especially articles. 99-108 on judicial proceedings. It requires that the prisoner be tried immediately in a kind of court-martial by the occupying power, and not be confined for more than 3 months.. The experts in international law quoted in most news sources on Saturday said that it would be illegal now for the US to simply turn Saddam over to the Iraqi Interim Governing Council!

The IGC is alarmed at this turn of events.

AFP reports, "Kurdish Governing Council member Dara Nuraddin told AFP Saddam could be tried in six months time before an Iraqi war crimes tribunal, but he expressed irritation that the Pentagon did not consult Iraqis about his legal status. "Maybe you will see Saddam on trial in the next six months or possibly more," said Nuraddin, an independent judge who heads the Governing Council's judicial committee. "There will be Iraqi judges and we might take some assistance from international judges," said Nuraddin, who helped craft Iraq's war crime laws. Saddam would most likely be tried for the 1988 gassing of some 5,000 Kurds in Halabja, as well as the mass expulsion of Kurds from their homes during his 24-year rule, the judge said. Nuraddin added that Saddam would also likely be tried for the persecution of the Shiite Marsh Arabs in southern Iraq in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as for war crimes against Iran and Kuwait. On December 10, Iraq adopted a war crimes tribunal statute, setting up five-man tribunals to judge those members of Saddam's regime suspected of such crimes. Still, the judge expressed dismay about the Pentagon's latest decision. "We are shocked and are in talks with the Coalition Provisional Authority about it because we were not consulted," Nuraddin said, referring to the US-led occupation administration. Nuraddin had previously said it would take no less than six months to investigate the former regime's crimes, with around 20 investigative magistrates working on the dossier."

James Paul of the Global Policy Forum had earlier made good comments about what international law requires with regard to trying Saddam, which are worth reviewing. He refers to the Amnesty International statement on the issue.

I had also weighed in on how the trial of Saddam in Iraq by the IGC might backfire.

The Pentagon mysteriously said that Saddam's status might yet "change." I don't personally see how it could be legally changed from POW. The US captured him. He is an enemy combatant. He is the US's POW. By the 3rd Geneva Accords, the US now has to court-martial him.

It is baffling why the Department of Defense has made this ruling. Who pressured it to do so? The State Department? A foreign government that offered a quid pro quo? The UN? Does the Pentagon nevertheless still intend to hand Saddam over to Dara Nur ad-Din? If not, was it afraid that the Iraqi government itself might extract information from Saddam that it could use later against the US somehow? Is it afraid that Ahmad Chalabi and his cronies would ferret out the location of the $40 bn or so that Saddam is said to have squirreled away in secret accounts, and just grab it for themselves as private persons? Is the US trying to protect old allies like Jordan and Saudi Arabia from the airing of dirty laundry by trying Saddam itself? Are the Americans afraid, as I was, that a trial of Saddam might provoke ethnic violence as the old wounds are reopened and the full horror of Sunni Arab troops' actions against Kurds and Shiites are revealed. Darned if I know. Makes no sense. And government actions that do not obviously make sense mask hidden intentions.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bremer Opposes Kurdish Canton; Talabani insists on it

In an interview with the London daily al-Hayat, US civil administrator of Iraq Paul Bremer has come out against the idea of consolidating the provinces of Iraq into ethnic cantons. He said, ''The US president did not send young American men and women half way across the world to die for an Iraq that is not united. There should be a recognition of the Kurdish situation because the Kurds lived in a special situation in the past 13 years.''

AFP/ash-Sharq al-Awsat reported on Sunday that Bremer in a recent news conference admitted that federalism per se did not threaten Iraqi unity, and he cited India and Switzerland as positive examples. But he said that the issue of the status of oil-rich Kirkuk was so important that it would have to be decided by an elected Iraqi government.

Meanwhile, Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani told the al-Sabah newspaper in Iraq that the Kurds did not insist on including the oil city of Kirkuk in an Iraqi Kurdistan. He said that non-Kurds were welcome to join the province voluntarily, but that Kirkuk was not something the Kurds would make a stand over. They do still want a Kurdish canton, which Bremer's remarks in al-Hayat seemed to rule out.

Talabani said that the unsettled nature of the debate about the precise form of Iraqi federalism ''is very worrisome for the Kurds who have made many sacrifices.'' He added, ''We were promised that we will get our rights but after the fall of the Saddam regime, these promises were forgotten.''

Babak Dehghanpisheh of Newsweek summarizes the increasing evidence of ethnic fissures in Iraq that could split the land if American military power is withdrawn.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Situation in Basra

David Patel kindly writes from Basra with more information about the situation there, some of it contradicting the report in ash-Sharq al-Awsat that I summarized recently:

"I noticed you have a few posting on Basra. Here are some observations:

Sayyid Ali al-Mussawi is not Sistani's rep in town (as you say in your
post). Sayyid Ali al-Mussawi is the preacher and leader of Hussawiyya
mosque, the big Shaikhiyya mosque in the center of town!!!! Sistani's rep in
town is Sayyid Ali Abdul Hakim, based in Al-Abilah mosque. [Later clarification:
The full name of Sistani's rep in Basra is: Sayyid Ali Sayyid Abdul Hakim al-Moosawi
al-Safi, but people in town refer to him as either Sayyid Ali or Sayyid Ali Abdul Hakim.
I have never heard his tribal affiliation (al-Moosawi) used when referring to him.
The Shaykhi leader, on the other hand, is commonly known in town as Sayyid
Ali al-Moosawi. I now understand why someone you cited called Sistani's rep
'Sayyid Ali al-Moosawi', although people in Basra know him by Sayyid Ali
Abdul Hakim. ]

Yes, sellers of alcohol have been systematically attacked and killed. All
public sellers of alcohol, mostly Christians, closed in early Sep after
several were attacked (400 is a massive overstatement). The man we bought
beer from was pistol-whipped and told his son would be kidnapped if he did
not close his shop. The men said they were from 'al-Hawza.' Just before
Christmas, the (Shii) man I indirectly bought whisky from in Old Basra was
shot in the face 3 times and killed. No one will openly say who did it, but
most people believe it was 15th Shabaan Movement. These guys cause a lot of
problems. I do NOT think this is an attempt by Muslims to capture the market
for themselves, they have also been attacked. The simple fact is that there
are NO stores publicly selling alcohol and only one hotel, the al-Ayoon.
Alcohol is around, but you need to know someone to get it and it is all
under the table.

I spent a few days camping and hunting with friends from Amarah very close
to the Iraqi-Iranian border. In fact, we lunched in an old Iraqi border
patrol site. There is nothing at all on the border (except hunters trying to
kill gazelle and catch birds...) and it is possible to cross into Iran
without difficulty. The Iranians still man their side of the border, but the
Iraqi side is open and crossing is easy. A British helicopter flies along
the border once or twice a day, but my hunting companions tells me that the
British have deals with locals living near the border to keep an eye out of
odd groups coming across. There are a number of abandoned Iraqi military
sites near Amarah and these locals looted all the sites. They have dozens of
RPGs and guns inside their homes and repainted former Iraqi army trucks
outside. The British know about these and probably have a deal with them to
keep these weapons until they can be traded in for cash in exchange for
information. That said, buses of Iranian pilgrims cross daily. I often see
busloads of Iranians at the rest stops along the Amarah-Basra road . . .

I met Dep Gov Abdul Hafiz al-Ati. He appears to have done a good job in
difficult circumstances getting local councils to work together. He is most
definitely not a theocrat. There are other people in Basra local government
who are fundamentalists trying to Islamicize the system (such as al-Maliki,
the guy who seized the education post after the war and systematically fired
females teachers who refused to wear the hijab, Islamicized the curicculum,
and transferred secular minded teachers to remote schools - the Ministry of
Education in Baghdad finally got rid of him 3 weeks ago, despite protests
from his supporters and 3 days of no school...)."
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Higher 2-day Casualty Totals

I had written on Friday,

"(More troops have been killed on a single day in the past, but 44
killed-and-wounded must be the highest 2-day total since May 1; maybe since
March 19?)"

Reader Robert Lyday replies:

"Nope.

Looking more like 42 casualties that day, not 44, but anyway........on
December 9 there were 63 troops wounded, mostly in a suicide bombing attack
on a US base in Tal Afar . . .

40 US troops were wounded and 3 were killed on October 27, the day of the
massive coordinated car bombings of Baghdad police stations.

18 soldiers killed, 31 wounded on November 2, the day of the downing of the
Chinook in Fallujah. That makes 49 casualties. In addition, 2 US Army
Corps of Engineers employees were killed and 2 more wounded. Not sure if
you want to count civilians? You throw those in and you get 53 casualties,
20 killed and 33 wounded.

Robert Lyday"


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

A Cheney Coup D'Etat? And the Death of Crassus in Iraq

I knew that Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of Defense for Planning, came into office in January of 2001 intending to get up a war against Iraq. But I had long assumed that they were frustrated to be serving under George W. Bush at first, since he campaigned as an isolationist. I had assumed that only after September 11 could they bring Bush around to their project of taking Baghdad.

Now former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill is revealing that Bush may have also been on board with an Iraq war as soon as he got into office. Wolfowitz and Feith are part of the largely Neoconservative Project for a New American Century, which, includes US Vice President Dick Cheney. Presumably Cheney was the one who got Bush to appoint his old pal Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense, and to allow the latter to bring Wolfowitz and Feith in.

I saw Wesley Clark say last Monday on Chris Matthews' Hard Ball that it was his impression from Washington insiders that Bush basically lets Cheney tell him what to do on a lot of issues.

I now begin to think that Cheney came into office determined to have an Iraq war, as a piece of unfinished business. The PNAC had laid all this out and put pressure on Clinton via the Republicans in Congress as early as 1998. (Some members of the PNAC, including Douglas Feith and Richard Perle, had written a position paper for the Likud Party in Israel in 1996 calling for Israel to pressure the US into a war on Iraq).

O'Neill presents Bush as so detached from policy-making that he makes Ronald Reagan look like a hands-on policy wonk! Bush apparently had virtually no comment directly to O'Neill on Treasury Department policy during his 2-year tenure! It was, O'Neill seems to say, like speaking to a brick wall, to brief W.

And then O'Neill reveals that even W. had doubts about the second huge tax cut. ""Haven't we already given money to rich people ... Shouldn't we be giving money to the middle," Suskind says the president uttered, according to a nearly verbatim transcript of an Economic Team meeting he says he obtained from someone at the meeting." But who convinced him to go ahead? Could it have been Cheney, again?

In short, has there been a Cheney coup-by-default? Is W. so disengaged that he is taking dictation from the former CEO of Halliburton? And, we now know that LBJ used to spend his mornings on the phone to business cronies doing private business. How much of Cheney's time is spent on the phone to old business associates in the corporate world (seeking to know what legislation they would like to have)? Who pushed Bush into the second, disastrous round of tax-slashing, which was a way of selling our children into indentured servitude?

It may well be that the US has not a presidency but a Duumvirate a la ancient Rome.

Senator Robert Byrd addressed the American Historical Association when I was in DC last Thursday evening, and he invoked the dangers, with reference to Roman history, of republics degenerating into dictatorships. It set me to thinking. The Roman Triumvirate of the 60s-50s BC consisted of Julius Caesar, Pompey and Crassus. Crassus led a campaign into Mesopotamia against the Iranian Parthian Empire. The Iranians killed Crassus in what is now Iraq in 53, leaving a Duumvirate. And then Caesar and Pompey fell out . . . A duumvirate created by a Western invasion of Iraq was an intermediate stage between republic and empire.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

British Kill 6, Injure 11 in Amarah Unemployment Riots

Crowds gathered in Amara Saturday to protest continued joblessness and also to indicate their displeasure with the mayor of the city. Although the BBC calls him "elected," few open elections have been permitted in Iraqi cities, which has caused protests in several of them in past months by factions opposed to the Coalition-installed officials. The Western press has tended not to cover these urban disturbances. (Amara, a largely Shiite city, many inhabitants of which have a recent tribal background, has a current estimated population of 362,000.)

The Amara demonstration got press today because the British accused some demonstrators of trying to toss grenades at them, and fired into the crowd as a result, along with local Iraqi police, causing 6 deaths and 11 injuries. (CNN reported this incident all day Saturday as having been one where "Iraqi police" fired at demonstrators--no mention of the British troops, about which the BBC is explicit. I don't know whether it was just that they only had footage of the Iraqi police, and tailored the commentary to the footage, or whether Time Warner wants to de-emphasize the neocolonial aspect of all this.)

The unemployment rate in Iraq is hard to know, but many still peg it at 60%, a cause of deep dissatisfaction for Iraqis with rule by the US and its allies.

In Tikrit, US soldiers said they accidentally killed two Iraqi policemen, provoking further tensions between them and the Tikrit townspeople.

Amara, a major city in the south of Iraq, has been relatively quiet. It is the base of Interim Governing Council member Abd al-Karim Mahmoud al-Muhammadawi, leader of the Iraqi Hizbullah, a tribal militia (not connected to the Lebanese group of the same name). But there have been occasional disturbances in the south. On November 14, townspeople in nearby Samawa staged a riot against police corruption. On October 25 in Amarah, gunmen shot the Coalition-appointed police chief, Brig. Hamid Hadi Hassan al-Abe. In early October there were repeated unemployment riots in Baghdad and Basra.

In mid-August there were riots in Nasiriyah and Diwaniyah against the Coalition-appointed municipal councils.

The only thing I could find on short notice about Amara's city council came from a Financial Times piece by Charles Clover from 6 September: "Sheikh Rahim, head of the town council of Amara, Iraq, decided it was time to show his western visitors who would be calling the shots from now on. As the British delegation took their seats at a recent town hall meeting, a loud demonstration against the coalition erupted. Resplendent in a white turban and blue robe, Mr Rahim raised his voice over the demonstrators, nodded to his 21 fellow council members, and began his sermon in exquisite Arabic. "The coalition has had a negative role from the beginning," he said, beginning with a tirade against last Friday's car bomb that killed scores in the nearby city of al Najaf. Notching his voice up another octave, he lamented the power shortages, the water shortages, the unemployment, the lack of security, the empty promises of George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and the United Nations. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the hurricane of invective finished. Mr Rahim paused, and looked a little embarrassed. "Pardon me, I didn't catch your name. Who did you say you were with?" he asked. Sir Hilary Synnott, a balding, distinguished-looking British career diplomat, introduced himself through his translator. It was only his tenth day on the job as Britain's chief civilian administrator for four southern provinces in Iraq, and the meeting was not going as planned. "I am here because I want to listen, but I also want to ask you some questions," Sir Hilary's voice boomed over the demonstration. "Everyone who comes here asks us questions," scoffed Mr Rahim. "But here is a question for you: what has been built in the past five months on the basis of these questions?" . . . Sheikh Mohammed al Ibadi, a senior cleric from Amara, told Sir Hilary in the same meeting: "Mujaheddin who fought for 20 years against the former regime have been dumped from the security services and they have been usurped by Ba'athists. The town council needs to have the authority to reverse this situation." . . .




For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bombing Wounds 37, Kills 5 at Shiite Mosque in Baqubah

The WP reports that on Friday in the eastern city of Baqubah, guerrillas detonated a bicycle bomb in front of a Shiite mosque as worshippers were leaving. Another huge car bomb had been found and deactivated in front of the city's other major Shiite mosque. Shiites reported anger with Sunnis, who they said had more than once targeted them. Iraq is majority Shiite but has been dominated by Sunni Arabs, probably 15% of the population.

AP speculated that this action might be a sign of growing sectarian strife in Iraq, along with the communal riots in Kirkuk. I suspect however, that instead it was an attempt by Baath remnants to foment sectarian strife. Baqubah is the capital of the mixed Diyala province and is near to Iran. If the Sunni nationalists and Baathists could provoke major Sunni-Shiite violence there, they could make another part of Iraq ungovernable and also perhaps draw the hardline Iranians in. That is, I don't think the bombing was the work of fundamentalist Sunnis who just don't like Shiites. It was a strategic act, aimed at producing political consequences that are unpleasant for the US Coalition Provisional Authority and for its appointed Interim Governing Council.

The Shiites will probably decline to take the bait in part because local Iraqis suspect the "Americans and Israelis" of attempting to divide and rule them. How ironic, if the Baath remnants can't succeed in producing communal violence because they had earlier spend decades fostering a conspiratorial mindset that displaced all problems onto American and Israeli plots!
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Kurds win on Loose Federalism in IGC's Fundamental Law

Kurdish Interim Governing Council member Dara Nour Eddine announced that the IGC had agreed to put language in the Fundamental Law it is now crafting that permits the status quo to continue in the Kurdish regions.

Earlier, the IGC had proposed simply declaring that the status quo would continue. But a mere declaration was rejected by Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani, who insisted with Paul Bremer in three recent meetings that the principle of Kurdish semi-autonomy be explicitly mentioned in the Fundamental Law that the IGC is now crafting to govern Iraqi elections and the functioning of a transitional government until a new constitution is fashioned in 2005. (az-Zaman 01/09/04)

These Kurdish areas have for some time had a quasi-independent government, first under the US no-fly zone, and then since the April 9 fall of the Baath party, and the two main Kurdish parties have recently announced that they will attempt to form a national unity government over the whole. The Kurds dominate 3 of Iraq's old 18 provinces (Sulaimaniyah, Dohouk, Irbil), and want to erase the provincial lines between them and just have a Kurdistan province. That is essentially the status quo that Nour Eddine (Nur al-Din) is saying the IGC has recognized. He also said that a final determination about the status of the Kurdish regions will be postponed until a new constitution is written. Of course, anything now put in the Fundamental Law has a good chance of continuing in the constitution, which is one reason that the Kurds have insisted on inserting their demands now.

The Kurds want more than just the three provinces. Ideally they'd like to add in to Kurdistan parts of three other provinces where Kurds have substantial presence [Mosul, Ninevah and Diyala], as well as annexing the oil-rich city of Kirkuk from al-Tamim province. The latter plan has caused communal riots, deaths, and dozens of injuries in the past two weeks in Kirkuk, a city of about a million where Kurds are presently about third of the population. The Turkmen and Arabs, who make up the other 2/3s of the city object to it becoming part of Kurdistan. The final disposition of Kirkuk and also the Kurdish claims on parts of other provinces will have to be dealt with in the negotiations later this year for a new constitution. For a sense of how intransigent the Kurds are with regard to their demands that Iraq be gerrymandered on ethnic lines, see "Iraq's Kurds Uneasy over Future despite Autonomy Guarantees".

I have a feeling of deep unease about all this. The new, transitional Iraqi government will not be popularly elected, and will inevitably itself be deeply divided on these issues. How it can come to a compromise with the Kurds about the future is unclear, and any final decision made about Kirkuk could provoke major ethnic fighting. The Americans seem likely to run out without resolving the issue, leaving it to be resolved by a weak state they install.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

al-Hakim: IGC will Invite UN Election Commission to Iraq

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim met Thursday with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Najaf, and afterwards announced that the Interim Governing Council will write to Kofi Annan asking that the UN send a commission to Iraq to deal with election issues. Sistani wants the commission to make a determination as to whether Iraq can mount open elections by May 31. It seems to me he knows that the Americans will not allow this, but is trying to involve the UN as a lever to make the elections more representative than Paul Bremer now envisages.


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IGC Will Implement Islamic Law in Personal Status

Earlier this year, the Interim Governing Council abolished secularism. This is an item I hadn't come across at the time, and it doesn't seem to have attracted much press. The IGC has allowed Iraqis to follow religious law in personal status matters. This practice is common in the Middle East. For instance, in Lebanon, Maronite Christians are married and buried according to Catholic law, whereas Muslims are under their Islamic law or shariah. Religious personal status law can, however, extend to issues such as inheritance and other property matters. Having diverse religious laws govern such matters can create inequities.

I remember when a Coptic man in Egypt sued to be allowed to take a second wife, just as Muslim Egyptian men can. He was told "no" by the courts, since he was under Coptic personal status law, which requires monogamy.

If the personal status law is extended to inheritance, it will hurt Sunni Muslim women, who get only 1/2 the amount that their brothers receive from the estate of a deceased father. Actually, Shiite law is slightly better on female inheritance than the Sunni, since Shiites supported the property claims of the Prophet's daughter Fatimah, against the Caliph Omar. But either way, women are not treated as equal to men. If religious law goes further and influences things like court procedure, Muslim fundamentalists will use it to ensure that women's testimony is worth only half that of a man (their literalist and decontextualized reading of the Koran). This rule, common in places like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, makes it virtually impossible for a woman to get her rapist convicted unless she has a male witness.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

9 US Soldiers Killed in Helicopter Downing

AP reports that the Blackhawk helicopter downed on Thursday near Fallujah was hit by a rocket. It was a clearly marked medical helicopter, and all 9 US servicemen aboard were killed.

Given the mortar attack on Wednesday and this attack on Thursday, a two-day record for US troops killed and wounded must now have been set. (More troops have been killed on a single day in the past, but 44 killed-and-wounded must be the highest 2-day total since May 1; maybe since March 19?)

It hits me in the gut when our guys get hit like this. But analytically, I think we may conclude that the argument about whether capturing Saddam Hussein would end the low-grade guerrilla war is over. As I suggested at the time, the answer is "no."

Did anyone else notice that earlier this week the US cable news media tried to push Iraq out of the headlines, as they had Afghanistan earlier? Even the 35 wounded (one of whom died) on Wednesday did not seem to get reported that much on t.v., though of course it was mentioned as a one-liner. I think editors may have hoped that they could stop covering Iraq now that there was a transition to Iraqi sovereignty. The helicopter attack on Thursday brought the story back, though.

It is amazing to me that the US public puts up with these so-called "news" channels, which have almost no real news. Half the stories are human interest and the other half scandals. It is a scandal in itself.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Pachachi: Fundamental Law to be Drafted by Jan. 31

This month's president of the Interim Governing Council, Adnan Pachachi, said in a Thursday news conference in Baghdad that he hoped the IGC would finish drafting in January the Fundamental Law that would govern the forthcoming Iraqi elections, and that in February it will be presented to the Iraqi people for their approval. It will be discussed in town hall meetings and in the media, so that the IGC can get feedback. (Note that no referendum is planned, which is convenient for the IGC, since it can respond to feedback or not). He said the Fundamental Law would allow provincial councils to elect a parliament of 250 members.

Pachachi also met with local Iraqi entrepreneurs and investors eager to get contracts for rebuilding Iraq. They complained bitterly about "a second foreign invasion," referring to Western firms getting these contracts, and raised the call, "Iraq for the Iraqis." This slogan was met with great all-around approval, including from a minister appointed by the US appointed Interim Governing Council! (The Iraqi bourgeoisie seems rather miffed by US economic policies since the fall of Saddam; since the Iraqi bourgeoisie ought to have been a key US ally, this mood points to a potentially severe problem).
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

No WMD. Nada. Bupkes*.

A message of mine replying to the argument that Iraq did have some
WMD but that its nuclear program was not as far along has had been
thought (!!)

(See also the Carnegie report at [warning: pdf] WMD in Iraq,
which is particularly critical of Colin Powell's UN speech.)

I think a lot of conceptual unclarity could be undone if we avoided the
phrases "weapons of mass destruction" and "war on terror."

Chemical weapons are not weapons of mass destruction. They are
battlefield weapons. They have primarily been used in battlefield
situations, or against civilian insurgents (as with the RAF in IRaq in the
1920s or Saddam against the Kurds in the 1980s). The major attempt to use
Sarin for terrorism failed, though it killed a handful of people and
sickened others to one extent or another (Aum Shinrikyo and the Tokyo
subway in 1995). The patterns of urban airflow make them extremely
difficult to deliver for small groups lacking a military.

Iraq at one point had chemical weapons stockpiles. Does not appear to
have had any recently. That it once had them was not a casus belli in
2003.

Nuclear weapons are weapons of mass destruction. Iraq did not have
nuclear weapons. It did not have the wherewithal to make nuclear weapons.
It has had no active nucear weapons program for a decade. We were told by
the pundits that Iraq could have nuclear weapons in 3-5 years, i.e. by
2006 or 2008. This was not true. It wasn't even remotely true. A
facility big enough and sophisticated enough to make nuclear weapons would
have been huge and impossible to hide. Kahuta in Pakistan was an open
secret, because it had to be. It couldn't be a closed secret.

Most members of Congress say that it was the thought of Saddam having
nuclear weapons that impelled them to vote for the war. They were had.
We were all had.

Had sanctions weakened, there is no reason to think that deterrence would
have become impossible in the nuclear area. The case of Libya shows how
non-violent sanctions and interception of equipment like centrifuges can
foil such a program.

The war need not have been fought on national security grounds.

As a friend of Iraqi Shiites and Kurds, I cannot regret that Saddam is out
of power. But I do regret the violence done to international law and to
the US constitution (Bush usurped the power to declare war from Congress
by stampeding the members with this nuclear weapons scare, which was
empty).

---------------------
*Thanks to all Yiddish knowing friends who corrected my original spelling
error. I found a
web site that alleged that "Experts suspect that bupkes
derives either the Russian for "small beans" or the Yiddish for "goat turd" - or
perhaps a combination of both. " Ugh.



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

36 US troops Wounded in Mortar Attacks

Guerrillas launched some six mortar rounds at Logistical Base Seitz west of Baghdad on Wednesday, wounding 36 US soldiers. (Reuters initially gave the toll as 35, but a late report in the Financial Times said 36).

The U.S. military said that in the latest attack on Wednesday night, an estimated six mortar rounds struck in or near Logistical Base Seitz and wounded troops were given first aid or evacuated for medical treatment. The wounded soldiers came from the 541st Maintenance Battalion of the 3rd Corps Support Command.

This toll seems to me a one-day record for an attack on US troops. No details were available at the time of writing as to how many were seriously wounded. At least a few had only light wounds and were able to return to duty.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sistani, Kofi Annan, Consult by Phone

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan had a telephone conversation Wednesday about the transition to an Iraqi government this summer, according to sources close to Sistani, as reported by the Baghdad daily az-Zaman. Sistani has renewed his call for general elections this spring instead of the elections based on American-appointed provincial councils. Sistani said that the latter "does not guarantee at all the representation of the Iraqis in a just fashion in the interim national parliament." Sistani told CNN that he had been assured that fair and transparent elections could be held this spring. He still wants a UN commission to come to Iraq and to work toward free general elections. Failing that, he said that the UN commission should work with Iraqis to find a viable, and still democratic, alternative.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Kurdish official Calls for Campaign of Civil Disobedience

Nushirvan Mustafa, the number 2 man in the Kurdish Patriotic Union, has demanded that the Interim Governing Council recognize Kurdish plans for a loose federation and a Kurdish super-province by February. If it refused to do so, he called on the Kurdish leadership to announce a campaign of civil disobedience and resignation from the Interim Governing Council, along with refusal to serve in the interim ministries and a boycott of the forthcoming elections. (-az-Zaman.)
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iranians more Favorable on Iraq

The Financial Times reports that Britain's special representative in Iraq, Jeremy Greenstock, has said that he finds a big change in the Iranian attitude toward the Iraq situation. Ever since the US announced the November 15 accord that promises a sovereign Iraqi government by July 1, the Iranians have been much more positive. Greenstock says he does not believe Iran wanted to created a sister Islamic republic in Iraq.

Why speak of what "the Iranians" want? Iranians are deeply divided. I guarantee you that there are some hardline ayatollahs and basij members who are hoping to tip Iraq toward Islamic theocracy in the Khomeinist mode. Khatami's people and the more secular groups, obviously, are not. But if it is Khamenei and his representatives who are happier now that Iraqi sovereignty is on the horizon, it is certainly because they hope it will mean more influence for them in Baghdad.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Clark Blames Cheney, Sees Bush as Cipher

From Greg Pierce's Inside Politics

"Wesley Clark, interviewed by Chris Matthews on MSNBC's "Hardball," was asked, "Tell me what you think about the performance of Dick Cheney, vis-a-vis the president. Is he calling the shots, or is the president calling the shots?"
Clark replied: "Well, my information, and it's based only on limited inside information, is that he's called a lot of the shots."
When asked why the administration chose to go to war in Iraq, . Clark replied: "I think it was purely political. I think it started with a Republican Party pledge, an effort to embarrass the Clinton administration. It swelled and just grew out of control.
"And finally, they decide that, after 9/11, they needed to do something. They needed to look really strong. And Afghanistan looked problematic. ... I think they just decided this was the opportunity. Let's go for Saddam Hussein."
Matthews asked: "Would you say the president of the United States traded American lives for electoral votes?"
Clark: "Well, I can't say that. ... "
Matthews: "You just did." "
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Pigeonholing Cole

I've been concentrating in this Web Log in recent months on Iraq, though I continue to follow al-Qaeda, Pakistan, Iran and other big Middle East developments. I've noticed that others in Blogistan are sometimes puzzled at where exactly I stand on matters. This puzzlement derives in part, I think, from the analytical nature of my enterprise here. I am not a politician. I am not running for office. Good analysis is not black and white. In politics, you are inconsistent if you say you are anti-Bush and then you praise him for something. But in a more dispassionate kind of analysis, it would be foolish to put forward the proposition that W. has done nothing right. Actually I thought many of his initial reactions to 9/11 were well considered, including the Afghanistan War and his determination not to allow Islam per se to be demonized (something he has been criticized for by the Neocons and the Christian Right). Politically, I am probably opposed to 90% of what he has done, including further skewing the tax structure toward the super-rich, gutting political rights with the Patriot Act, etc., etc.. But unlike a politician running against him, I am willing to admit the 10%.

1) I hate Saddam Hussein, the Baath Party, and everything they did to Iraq, including invading Iran, gassing the Kurds, invading Kuwait, and putting tens of thousands of Shiites in mass graves. Because of my friendships with Iraqi Shiites, I lived through the pogroms as they happened, and they got me in the gut. I also have Iranian friends who suffered from the Iran-Iraq War. One puzzled observer said I sounded like a war blogger when I started celebrating the US defeat of the Fedayee Saddam. Probably I did. I hate them. They were the SS of Iraq. Our brave men and women who are out there risking their lives to make sure the fascists can't harm anyone else deserve our praise and support.

2) Because of 1), I declined to come out in opposition to the war. As late as February, 2003, I thought it was still possible that the UN Security Council would authorize the war, which would have made it legitimate in my view. I now think that the terms of the Genocide Convention could have been effectively invoked to justify the war at the UN.

3) When the Bush administration dumped the UNSC and acted unilaterally, it put me in a difficult position. I felt the war lacked legitimacy in international law, thenceforth. Then when Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith grossly mismanaged the aftermath of the war (I have never, ever, seen such an amateurish, ineffective and frankly screwed up effort in a major foreign policy arena), I grew increasingly disgusted.

4) I think there is a 60% chance that the whole situation in Iraq will go south, and am therefore worried about the consequences.

5) I think the US owes the Iraqis. The US overthrew the Iraqi government and disbanded the Iraqi army, and therefore is responsible for putting the country on a sound footing before just walking away.

So, my position is that getting rid of Saddam was a good thing; and that US troops deserve credit for the efforts they are making to restore security and root out Baath remnants in Iraq; but at the same time, I believe the war was illegitimate in international law and contravened the UN Charter, and that many of the actions of the US in Iraq contravene the international law of occupation. In the end, I think the war was unwise and not justified by the arguments that Bush put forward. But now that it has been fought I want to hold the administration's feet to the fire about not creating a mess and just walking away from it. (That was tried in Afghanistan by Bush senior and it gave us the Taliban and al-Qaeda).

I was struck, when I spoke at MIT, by how one speaker stood up and made the CIA the fount of all evil. Well, I don't think there is any doubt that the CIA has done some bad things from time to time, from the 1953 Iranian coup to the overthrow of Allende, to the sorts of rogue operations that the Church Commission exposed in the 1970s. But the CIA was acting as an arm of the executive for the most part, so one might as well say that the elected presidents were responsible for a lot of bad things. After September 11, I can't tell you how glad I am we have a CIA, and how much I hope the field officers and analysts get up to speed on Arabic and radical Islamism, and are able to prevent further major acts of terrorism against innocent US citizens.

I'd never get elected to anything, even if I wanted to, because I dislike the kind of "consistency" that is based on a black and white view of the world. I think ethics and reasoned analysis require us to have a complex view of the world, not a simplistic one. And, I think ethics always requires us to balance competing and contradictory values (I agree in this with Isaiah Berlin).
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2 Frenchmen Shot; 4 Protesters Die

Four Iraqi protesters were killed by Iraqi police in Basra. They were veterans demonstrating because they had not received their monthly stipends, promised by the CPA. Two civiian French contractors were shot near Fallujah when their car broke down.

American nationalists who dislike the French so much may be put in a difficult position by this latter, since there are now French martyrs to the cause of Iraqi liberation from Saddam.
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Syria, Turkey agree on Kurds

Syria's Bashar al-Asad, in Ankara for talks with the Turkish government, has come out strongly against Kurdish autonomy from Iraq or the break-up of the country. Syria, Turkey and Iran all have Kurdish populations, and the three have been drawn together by the prospect of semi-autonomy for Iraq's Kurds.

Bashar is probably also looking for regional allies against the hawks in Washington and Tel Aviv, and sees that this is an issue that brings him and his Iranian allies close to powerful, populous Turkey.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

New Opinion Poll Results in Iraq: 48% View US Positively

The results of an opinion poll done in 5 of Iraq's provinces (Baghdad, Basra, Diwaniyah, al-Hillah, Kirkuk), with 1300 respondents late fall, 2003, have been announced by a Baghdad social research institute and reported in az-Zaman newspaper.

Some results:

80% of Iraqis believe that bringing back, employing, and training members of the old Iraqi police and army would produce greater security.

91% of Iraqis believe that returning sovereignty to the Iraqis will be an essential factor in stabilizing the security situation.

48% said that the current role of the US in Iraq is positive.

38% said that the British role is positive.

15% said that they thought Iran was playing a positive role in Iraq.

75% say that they would feel a lack of security were the American forces to decide to leave the country.

On the other hand, 75% said that the US should leave once an independent is established.

55% disagreed with the proposition that the attacks are aimed at liberating Iraq.

80% agreed that the guerrilla attacks aim at destabilizing the country.

65% have confidence in the Interim Governing Council.

48% have confidence in their local governing councils.

47% say that the Western form of democracy cannot be implemented in Iraq, and 45% of respondents disagreed with them, saying democracy is not a monopoly of the West.

48% say that clergy should be involved in establishing stability.

47% say that clergy should stick to purely religious functions.

88% say that political leaders must be elected by the people.

58% of the sample said they were unemployed, and 98% said that government welfare raionts were essential to their livelihood.

As usual with Iraq, this is a glass half full story. Some will see it as a glass half empty story. Less than half of Iraqis are convinced that Western style democracy can be implemented, but nearly 6 in 10 demand open elections. About half approve of the US role, but a large majority wants US troops out once there is an independent government. About half of Iraqis have theocratic tendencies (and the percentage is probably higher among Shiites alone).

One hopes that they are right, that the restoration of sovereigny on July 1 will contribute to the country's security.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

4 US Soldiers wounded

Guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb as a US military convoy passed west of Baghdad, wounding three US soldiers on Monday. Other guerrillas ambushed a US soldier northwest of Baghdad, wounding him.

Outside the troubled city of Kirkuk, guerrillas blew up a roadside bomb, killing an Iraqi and wounding three others.

.
AP reported that overnight, guerrillas launched two mortar shells at the Coalition headquarters in the southern, Shiite city of Nasiriyah. They caused no damage or injuries, according to a military spokesman.

In Mosul, assailants shot Muhammad al-Jawadi, a lawyer, and his son. The US had appointed him prosecutor in a new court aimed at fighting corruption. Al-Jawadi was in critical condition, but his son was stable. Mosul has seen a number of such assassinations in recent months, often targetting judicial officials investigating the old Baath party and its crimes. (Mosul is a majority-Arab city despite being in the north).
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Clark Prescient on NATO

Democratic Presidential candidate Wesley Clark has been urging that NATO be given larger responsibilities in Iraq. AP reported that 'Clark said he would try to rapidly establish an Iraqi government, and start funneling U.S. troops though an international agency, run by NATO, not the United Nations. Clark said If U.S. troops are reporting to the alliance, it will encourage more European allies to help stabilize Iraq. This plan would reduce costs, reduce risks and ease the transition of handing Iraq back to Iraqis, he said. "When I am President, I will go over to Iraq," Clark said. "And it won't be to deliver turkeys in the middle of the night.'

Dutchman Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the new head of NATO, has not ruled out a wider role for the organization in Iraq. He implied that nothing would happen before this summer, however. For the moment, NATO is busy with its plan to move out of the capital of Kabul in Afghanistan and begin patrolling the rest of the country.

Wire services reported that the former Dutch foreign minister said that, 'Any decision on a U.S. proposal for NATO to take on a military role on the ground in Iraq will have to wait. ``It is certainly not be excluded of course ... that will depend on the political developments as they take place and as they take shape in Iraq over the coming months,'' De Hoop Scheffer said. '
I think De Hoop Scheffer may be implying that once a new, sovereign Iraqi government is established, on July 1, it may approach NATO about taking over some of the military tasks from the US and the UK. Even the American-appointed Interim Governing Council has offended the Americans by seeking greater UN involvement in the election process. NATO might be attractive to Iraqi leaders seeking to avoid being dominated by the US.

Clark points out that it would be a good deal for the US, since being bogged down in Iraq has weakened US ability to reply to threats elsewhere, and is hugely costly in military equipment He said a few days ago, according to AP, "We know now this war in Iraq is consuming the United States Army's readiness to respond to another crisis somewhere else in the world."

Clark has also pointed out that it makes no sense for the US to occupy Iraq for its oil, if that is what is going on. Iraq's oil is useless unless it is pumped, and if it is pumped then it goes on the world market for sale, and anyone, including the US, can buy it. It is not necessary for the US to put its troops through the Triangular meat grinder to get oil.

Why would NATO want to get involved in Iraq? Well, first of all, much of NATO is already in Iraq. Plus, they have interests there. It is near to Europe, and turmoil in the Middle East/ Persian Gulf region poses a big threat to them. Many Europeans don't like the idea of a unipolar, US-dominated world, and getting involved in Iraq would stress the continued importance of Europe. It would be unpopular with European publics, but one could easily imagine Chirac's France joining Spain, Italy and other key NATO players. Maybe not Germany, though. One problem: The Iraqis don't want Turkish troops in Iraq, yet Turkey is a member of NATO.

Clark's suggestion is hugely preferable to Bush's dogged unilateralism (130,000 out of 150,000 foreign troops in Iraq are American, and many of the others are actually being paid to be there by the US!). For Bush (read: Cheney), the US being in Iraq is about American nationalism and control, i.e. imperialism. But neo-imperialism in a nationalistic Arab country is a tightrope walk, and NATO would have far more legitimacy with Iraqis.

Remember, fellow US citizens: Iraq cost you $572 apiece last year, and you have to decide if you want to spend another half a grand on a potentially wealthy Persian Gulf oil state again next year. Wouldn't it be nice to have NATO take up some of the slack here?

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IGC Complains about Announcement that Coalition Troops will Stay

The British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has now said that UK troops are likely to be in Iraq until at least 2007. Interim Governing Council member Mahmoud Osman, in a telephone interview with Cairo radio, complained that this announcement contravened the November 15 accord between the Coalition Provisional Authority and the IGC, which stipulated that US, British and other troops would remain at the pleasure of the new Iraqi government. (ash-Sharq al-Awsat)
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Baathists being Rehabilitated (to offset Shiites?)

AFP (via az-Zaman) is reporting that Paul Bremer issued an order three weeks ago allowing Baath Party members to regain their posts and reenter civil society if they agreed to turn over their weapons. About 60 senior ex-Baath officers surrendered their weapons near Mosul at the Tel Afar base of the US 101st Airborne Division.

My interpretation of these moves is that they are designed to offset the possibility of overly strong Shiite dominance of Iraq as the US moves out of civil administration. High Baathists were mostly Sunni, and had extensive patronage networks. Allowing them back into the bureaucracy and civil society inevitably creates rivals for the Shiite religious leaders. Shiite expatriate Ahmad Chalabi, the main proponent of punishing and excluding the Baathists, must have lost some sort of major battle with Bremer for this to be happening. It is also possible that with Saddam captured, Bremer assumes that the ex-Baathists just aren't that dangerous to the Coalition any longer, and he can risk bringing them back in from the cold. Not all Baathists were personally involved in crimes, and presumably those who committed atrocities are not covered by the new agreement.
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Kirkuk Issue Made Complex by Turkmen, Kurdish Ethnic Nationalism

The Turkmen representative on the Interim Governing Council, Songul Chapouk, called Monday for her hometown of Kirkuk to be demilitarized and for weapons to be collected from all the militias. In an interview with Agence France Presse (via az-Zaman), she said that Kirkuk is "a special case, in the current Iraqi situation," and said that the solution to the city's problems is a representative, pluralistic and balanced approach. She said that there is "social coexistence in Kirkuk," which currently is experiencing ethnic tension. She added, "We [Turkmen] give our children in marriage to Kurds and Arabs, and we take theirs in marriage to ours." She said, "The Kurds consider that federalism constitutes the best solution to the guarantee of their rights. We do not reject federalism in and of itself, since it is an excellent system. But we reject the dominance of an official clique over others, just as we do not accept any change in the demography of the region and the social reality of the city." She complained about names of streets and hospitals being changed from Arab or other names to Kurdish ones.

She also complained that a recent Kurdish demonstration in favor of Kurdish annexation of Kirkuk included armed paramilitary, whereas when Arabs and Turkmen staged a counter-demonstration they were instructed to come unarmed. She said all demonstrations should be unarmed. She also warned that if the Kurds insisted on having a loose federal system and a consolidated Kurdistan province, the Turkmen would also insist on having a "Turkmenistan" province in Iraq.

Most specialists think there are about 500,000 Turkmen in northern Iraq. Turkmen make up about a third of Kirkuk's population of about 700,000 (some say it is larger). They are important beyond their numbers, however, because neighboring Turkey takes a keen interest in their welfare (they speak a language related to Turkish), and Ankara takes a dim view of Kurdish nationalism subordinating Turks. Given how mixed populations are in the north, a territorial Iraqi "Turkmenistan" would raise ethnic tensions to the boiling point. (Christians in the north, who mainly live in Ninevah governorate, have also sometimes spoken of wanting their own province).

The Guardian confirms earlier reports that the CPA will leave the semi-autonomous Kurdish parliament and government intact in the north as Iraq moves toward self-rule. The transitional Iraqi government and the constitutional convention will have to hammer out a compromise on Kurdish semi-autonomy. (This process will be fraught with dangers for the new Iraqi state.)
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Resistance to US Military Presence Continues Unabated in Iraq

A reader asked me about my claim that the pace of attacks on US troops hasn't slowed since Saddam's capture. The phrase is the title of a recent report by
Tom Lasseter of Knight-Ridder. He reveals that top US generals in Iraq do not think Saddam was directing the resistance; do not think it is under a unified command; and do not think that capturing Saddam will cause it to subside. He also says that Saddam has denied any links to al-Qaeda in his responses to US interrogation. He gives figures for the attacks since December 13, many of which were large and coordinated (e.g. Christmas Day, Karbala).

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

US Soldier Shot, wounded in Tikrit

On Sunday, a guerrilla in Tikrit managed to shoot and wound a US soldier while he was on foot patrol. He is in stable condition.

Alaskan journalist Dahr Jamail has a column today from Baghdad questioning the accuracy and fullness of US military reports of casualties. He says that the rate of casualties has increased since Saddam's arrest; that the US military admits that the number of attacks is back up to 25 a day, and that the US authorities and the press play down the seriousness of many wounds received. He gives an example of undercounting: He maintains that eyewitnesses saw five US soldiers medically evacuated by land and two by helicopter last Thursday after a roadside bombing, whereas the military reported two dead and only 3 wounded.

The US military doesn't always report woundings unless a soldier is also killed that day. I think this is wrong, and they should report all casualties. Also, I have repeatedly said that I think their report of "attacks" against Coalition forces is low, perhaps because of some technical way that they define what an "attack" is. It is possible, to give the US military the benefit of the doubt, that some of the medevacs were only in shock and not actually wounded. I'd hate to think they are cooking the numbers of wounded, which would be a real slap in the face of the wounded troops.

Jamail's larger point, that US troops are getting their legs blown off, and their faces blown off, and that many of the wounded will never be right again, is well taken. It is also true that the US authorities and the press seldom display to the public what all this really means for the Vets. If you take everyone wounded during the war and since in hostile action, add in everyone who's had a nervous breakdown and had to be shipped back, everyone who has fallen so seriously ill they had to be sent home, and everyone who has had a serious work-related accident or committed suicide, the numbers are breathtaking. UPI is reporting nearly 11,000 medical evacuations. This number is not entirely meaningful, since it includes some number of persons who would have gotten ill had they never gone to Iraq (130,000 individuals have a certain rate of natural disease and even death). But the number of wounded and war-related ill is certainly in the thousands. This war has not been without cost, or at small cost, as the Neoconservatives are still pretending to themselves.

For those who care about our disabled Vets, please think about contributing to them at: Disabled American Veterans.
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Democratic Presidential Debate: Lieberman, Kerry slam Dean

In the Democratic debate yesterday, Sen. Joe Lieberman slammed Howard Dean for saying that the capture of Saddam Hussein had made America no safer: "I don't know how anybody could say that we're not safer with a homicidal maniac, a brutal dictator, an enemy of the United States, a supporter of terrorism, a murderer of hundreds of thousands of his own people ... in prison instead of in power."

This statement is pure demagoguery. Actually, none of the attributes given to Saddam by Lieberman implies that Saddam was able or seeking to harm the US directly. He was closely allied with the US in the 1980s, and most of those things could have been said about him then, too. By 2003, he had no weapons of mass destruction, nor any serious programs, and had not had since the early 1990s. There has been no proven link between Saddam and terrorist actions against the US, and the US State Department did not even list Iraq as a major supporter of terrorism in recent years. I have never been able to understand how anyone thought Saddam, the clearly addled leader of a small, weak, battered third world country, who did not even have the support of his own people, posed an active threat to the world's sole remaining superpower. The US even used to bomb Iraq at will, while the Baath was in power, and did so repeatedly. If Saddam was a threat to us, then so is the Congo (and the Kabilas have not been nice rulers, either).

In addition, there is another way in which Dean's statement can logically be true without it implying what Lieberman took it to imply. If the main threat to the US comes from al-Qaeda, and Iraq was merely a secondary nuisance, then it was madness to spend $166 billion on Iraq and tie up half our active military there, instead of going after al-Qaeda in a big way and seeking to stabilize Afghanistan and Pakistan (on which relatively paltry sums have been spent). If the main threat is from al-Qaeda, then the Iraq war was a detour that did not substantially increase the safety of Americans.

Leaving Bin Laden at large and virtually ignoring Afghanistan has allowed a Taliban resurgence, and has allowed major terrorist attacks in Bali, Mombasa, Casablanca, Riyadh, Istanbul and so on. These were attacks on US allies and detracted from the safety of us all.

Dean was also attacked (by Kerry, I think) for saying that even Osamah Bin Laden deserves a fair trial if he is caught. I don't see why that is controversial. George W. Bush has said that even Saddam should receive a fair trial. And, isn't the plan that the al-Qaeda detainees at Guantanamo will be tried by military courts? Wouldn't the same apply to Bin Laden if captured? What is the difference between Bush and Dean on this issue?

We can't be sure who the Democratic standard bearer will be in November, but it may be Dean. If it is Dean, he will face an uphill battle. But the Iraq situation could go very bad by next fall, and if it does, Dean could look attractive to voters. Even then it will be a very close race. The Democratic contenders are crazy to try to wound a man who might turn out to be their party's leader. They clearly want to knock him out of the race; but if they fail, they will only have hurt their own party. You get to be a respected member of a party by agreeing to support its candidate, whoever that turns out to be. If you don't like the candidate you can refuse to vote, or you can resign from the party. But you can't in good conscience make a bid to lead the party while making it clear that some of its other potential leaders are completely unacceptable to you if chosen by the party faithful. I think Lieberman and Kerry have come close to such bad faith with their own party.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

US arrests Kurdish official but Acquiesces in Continued Kurdish Semi-Autonomy

On the one hand, US troops have moved decisively to arrest a high official of the Kurdistan Democratic Party in Kirkuk, apparently on suspicion of having ordered the shooting of Arab and Turkmen protesters by pershmerga militiamen last week, which has led to dozens of persons being wounded and a number of deaths. The US raided KDP offices and those of its rival, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, and confiscated armaments. Al-Zaman says that US military commander pledged to treat Arabs, Turkmen and Kurds equally in Kirkuk, of which it has taken control. It said that US soldiers also arrested 5 Arabs and accused them of instigating civil disturbances.

On the other hand, Steven Weisman of the NYT reports that the Coalition Provisional Authority under Paul Bremer has given up on trying to alter the status quo in Iraq much before it goes out of business on July 1. This new stance implies acquiescing in the status quo in the Kurdish areas of the north, which have a semi-autonomous government established under the American no-fly zone in the 1990s. Meanwhile, wire services reported that this month's president of the Interim Governing Council, Adnan Pachachi, has counseled patience to the Kurds, saying that the IGC is dedicated to federalism, but that this system can take many forms, and the exact details would have to be worked out by the elected transitional government beginning this summer. Pachachi is an old-time Arab nationalist. The Kurds have been seeking an up-front commitment to an ethnic Kurdish enclave or super-province in the north.

Weisman, interestingly, also reveals that the CPA has given up on trying to privatize Iraq's public sector companies. In part, it just doesn't have time to see the project through any more; in part, the security situation does not encourage investment; and in part, there have been no buyers because the legality of the US occupying power selling off Iraqi companies is in doubt (it violates the Hague Regulations of 1907 and the Fourth Geneva Convention), and potential buyers fear legal challenges once the Americans leave.

I have been a critic of the US occupying authority's meddling in the Iraqi economy that way, and am pleased to see that realities on the ground got in the way of it going forward. My guess is that, in fact, serious economic and other reform won't effectively take place until free and fair general elections have been held and something like a truly representative government has been achieved.

One gets the sense that the CPA has suddenly headed off in a totally new direction, like a Vin Diesel movie where the driver manipulates clutch, emergency brake and steering wheel to pull of a 180 degree "bootleg" turn. All the attention seems to be on making a transition to Iraqi self-rule ASAP and getting out of the business of civil administration within months. Make no mistake, this reversal is a sign of a major political defeat. The CPA came in last May determined to "impose" its "will on the Iraqis," and to rule directly for years. The low-grade guerrilla war and the obvious political mobilization of even the friendly populations clearly put paid such ambitions. And the neo-imperialists were arguing that the US should be an empire in the old British mold! The only British Indian administration that looked like this was Mountbatten's (and it wasn't pretty). I only hope that Mr. Bremer, unlike Mountbatten, can set things up so as to avoid a bloody Partition. One worries about where Kirkuk had been going before the US military stepped in this weekend. What will happen when they are not around to step in.
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New Sunni Fundamentalist Militia Announced;
al-Kubeisi Exiled by US, will not Join other Sunnis

The London daily al-Hayat reports that the "Clear Victory Movement," a Sunni group, has formed a militia to offset the "Mahdi Army" of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. It pledges to oppose the American occupation forces if they continue to marginalize Sunnis in Iraq. The vice chairman, Shaikh Salih Muhammad al-Dulaimi, told the newspaper that his movement "Has made the transition from covert operations to public action during the past month, in order to defend Sunni interests, to ensure a role to what they call the "Sunni Triangle," and to establish a military parity with other communities." He said most supporters were in al-Anbar province, and that they had formed in response to the American refusal to give Sunnis from the triangle representation on the Interim Govering Council. That's all we need, another communally based militia.

In another development, Jasim al-Isawi, official spokesman for the "United National Movement," a Sunni fundamentalist group headed by Ahmad al-Kubeisi, told al-Hayat newspaper on Sunday that his group did not attend the recent meeting of the Sunnis (in a mosque in the Yarmouk quarter of Baghdad). He added, "We have reservations about creating a consultative council out of that meeting because we do not want such a council to create a reaction among the Shiite community in response."

He accused Iran of interfering to strengthen the power of the "extremist Shiite tendency inside the country," and affirmed that hundreds of Iranian agents had slipped into Iraq to support this tendency. He also accused the Iranian secret police of having an interest in assassinations targetting both Sunni and Shiite elements.

Al-Isawi revealed to al-Hayat that the Americans had informed al-Kubeisi, who is based in Dubai, that he would not be allowed to enter Iraq, and affirmed that cliques inside Iraq had connived at that decision.

Al-Kubeisi has been based in Dubai for many years, and has gone back and forth between Dubai and Baghdad. His ability to do so in the late Saddam years raised questions in the minds of some about whether he had done a deal of some sort with the dictator. Al-Kubeisi was involved in staging Islamist demonstrations in Baghdad last spring, sometimes in collaboration with Shiites. Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post at one point reported accusations that his followers were giving crowd support to demonstrations by anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and that al-Kubeisi himself was channeling Saudi money to Muqtada. He then fell off the radar. It is now clear that he went back to Dubai at some point and then couldn't get permission to reenter Iraq! It is not clear to me on what grounds an Iraqi citizen could be kept out of his own country, though maybe they just threatened to arrest him if he came. (For my two cents, I don't find the allegation of him funneling Saudi money to an extremist Shiite like Muqtada plausible. Saudi Wahhabis don't generally like any kind of Shiite).

Ahmad al-Kubeisi should not be confused with the Sunni clerical leader Abdul Salam al-Kubeisi; I have been unable to find out if the two are related. Al-Kubeisi is a common Iraqi name.
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Basra: Ward Leader Assassinated; Labor Riot against al-Khorafi Construction Co.

The British-appointed leader of one of Basra's city quarters, an attorney, was assassinated over the weekend. the announcement was made as British PM Tony Blair paid a surprise visit to the city.

The Guardian reports that the CPA has given up on trying to disarm all of Iraq's militias before withdrawing on July 1, but that British forces in Basra have not been targeted by Shiite militias because the Shiites are playing a waiting game, hoping to take over when the British withdraw.

Ewa Jasiewicz, an independent journalist in Basra, reports on under-reported events in Basra. She mentions a major labor riot against the Kuwaiti al-Khorafi construction company; attacks on British troops, and a major carbombing averted, in the past week.
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3 US soldiers killed Friday, 3 wounded

AFP reports that guerrillas in Balad (45 miles north of Baghdad) fired a mortar shell at the US base there around 5:00 pm Baghdad time on Friday, killing a soldier from the 4th Infantry Division.

Guerillas in the south of Baghdad detonated a roadside bomb as a US military convoy passed around midnight Friday, killing two US soldiers and wounding 3.

The US arrested 128 suspects and seized many weapons and munitions on Saturday. Near Baqubah, US troops took 6 suspected guerrillas into custody, including a Yemeni and an Afghan.

The Reuters news agency continued to maintain that the US army had mistakenly arrested several of its cameramen at the site of the downing of a US helicopter on Friday.
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Kurdish Ethnic Conflict leaves 6 Wounded; Curfew imposed by US

Six persons were injured on Saturday in ethnic violence in Kirkuk, and US troops imposed a night time curfew on the city. Paul Bremer visited the city and appealed for calm.

Al-Hayat said that in Kirkuk, three Iraqis (two Arabs and a Turkmen) were wounded in two separate incidents. Shirzad Rifaat Qadir of the Kirkuk police said that "two Iraqi citizens of Sunni Arab heritage were wounded by gunshots from a police patrol when they attempted to attack the patrol in the al-Urubah Quarter." He added, "They opened fire on the patrol, which led the police to reply in kind." Seven Arabs have been killed and many more wounded in clashes with police or Kurdish militias since Wednesday, and Qadir suggested that resentment over these deaths had led to the attack on the patrol. In another incident, police officer Khitab Abdullah Arif said that "unknown assailants opened fire in the direction of the headquarters of the National Turkmen Party, wounding the guard, Awad Muhammad." The assailants then threw a grenade toward the house of Sabah Zaydan, an Arab member of the provincial council, but failed to cause any casualties. Police Chief Turhan Yusuf said that American soldiers were now in complete control of Kirkuk, undertaking regular patrols alongside Iraqi police.

AFP said that two former members of the Fedayee Saddam fired on a car carrying a Kurdish man, wounding him, but that its passengers managed to fire back, wounding the assailants.

The two leading Kurdish politicians, Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani, continued talks that began on Friday with CPA head Paul Bremer and Jeremy Greenstock near Irbil. (Presumably they are continued to press for a consolidated Kurdish superstate).

Meanwhile, big thoughts are being thought about reorganizing Iraq for elections. Edward Wong of the NYT reports, "Mowaffak Rubaie, a Shiite member of the Governing Council, said his preference was to split Iraq into five states: the Baghdad area; the Kurdish region; the largely Sunni Arab northwest; the Shiite holy area that includes the cities of Najaf and Karbala; and the far south, where the culture is rooted in the nomadic traditions of the Arabian peninsula. A joint government would rule Kirkuk. "This system has a tacit acceptance of the ethnic confessional divide of Iraqis," Mr. Rubaie said. "If Najaf and Karbala want to ban alcohol, so be it. But the Kurdish people like their bottle, so let them vote for it."

This is the first time I have seen Rubaie's plan laid out so clearly. I personally think it is a bad idea. Democracy flourishes where you set things up so that politicians have to please more than one constituency in order to get elected. Right now, a Diyala politician would have to try to satisfy Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Shiites. She would have to seek common denominators that would draw people together. Rubaie's plan would make it possible for a Shiite politician in Najaf or Basra to ignore the non-Shiites, and to ratchet toward Shiite extremism if that played well with his constituents. Rubaie doesn't realize it, but the effect of his plan will be to weaken Iraq's unity over time.
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Iraqi MI5 in the Works, funded at $3 bn

According to the Telegraph Dick Cheney has managed to put through a plan to have the US CIA train an Iraqi secret police (mukhabarat) and fund it at $3 bn., as part of the "black" CIA budget. The article claims that this secret police apparatus will allow the US to continue to control Iraq even after a civilian Iraqi government is supposedly installed on July 1.

I have to say that this plan worries me. At a time when the CIA is all that stands between al-Qaeda and several tall US buildings, I think the Agency should be concentrating its efforts on tracking down Bin Laden and other persons of similar mindset. Does it have a spare $3 bn. in its budget for that?

It would have been nice to see an Arab country without a secret police. Why aren't ordinary police enough? I remember when, after the CIA overthrew elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, it then trained the notorious SAVAK, an Iranian secret police that went on to terrorize ordinary Iranians for decades under the increasingly repressive and megalomaniacal shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Eventually, SAVAK tactics helped sour the people on the shah to the extent that they overthrew him in the 1978-79 Revolution.

Cheney has been dealing with the Middle East for at least 15 years now. He is a bright man, and in his youth did work toward a Ph.D. in political science. Surely he knows what happened in Iran, and how unwise it would be to put a strongman in power in Baghdad, backed by a US-trained secret police? It has Yogi Berra's phrase, "deja vu all over again," written all over it. I wouldn't give such a government even odds of surviving a decade, much less two. But, well, Cheney gets to decide these things. The rest of us will just have to live with the consequences of his unwisdom, 10 or 20 years down the road.
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Responses to 'Top Five Tasks in War on Terror for 2004'

On Jan. 2, I presented "Top 5 Tasks Remaining in 2004 in the War on Terror". I received in response some thoughtful and informed replies, and gained permission to share them here.

Military historian and former Green Beret Tom Collier writes,

"I very much agree with your five top tasks, and wish that Sec State Powell had listed all five in his recent NYT op-ed.

As for SecDef Rumsfeld's leaked memo last Fall, his complaint that we lack measurements of success in the "war against terrorism" shows how little he understands that "war." For starters, it is *not* a war, no more than LBJ's War on Poverty was a war. Using that emotive label clouds the reality of the struggle. The reality is that, unlike wars or football games, there will be no victory, no clock running down, no final score in this struggle against terror -- and therefore no measurements of success in reaching victory.

We should have goals - the collection of intelligence, the penetration of terrorist cells, the capture of leaders, the confiscation of funds, the protection of our citizens - but not measurements and not scores and not the pursuit of victory. This struggle is a process to be prosecuted with intelligence and vigor and to be endured with patience, but it is not a game to be won or lost by a date certain [read "Election Day, 2004]. Even as we continue to maintain intelligence agencies and armed forces in peacetime, so will we have to maintain our counterterror apparatus indefinitely -- smaller, maybe, as time passes but active and well oiled.

The famous leaked memo is one more indicator that we have given the leadership in countering terror to the wrong department, the one we used to call accurately the " War Department." Countering terror is not a war; it is in Gen Barry McCaffrey's words a threat to be managed, and it should be managed under the leadership of our intelligence agencies."

Middle East expert and historian John Walbridge of Indiana University writes,

"I read your list of terrorism dessiderata with interest. To it I might add

6) fixing the terrorism watchlist (see the article in today's Wall Street
Journal) so it doesn't pick up babies and everybody named Muhammad.

7) Having some central hot line that officials can call when dealing with
something culturally sensitive, as in deciding whether or not to detain ulama [clerics].

However, I would mostly add to your comments on Pakistan:

a) Kashmir can indeed be dealt with, preferably by a plebescite--which, the
Kashmiris being reasonable people disgusted with both sides, would probably opt
for independence. Anyway, both sides have hinted that if the US intervened,
they would--much against their will, of course--be forced to go along. We
should not neglect the value of the prestige of the United States in helping
Third World leaders agree to inconvenient necessities. It may not be palatable
for the Pakistani and Indian prime ministers to meet in Lahore or Delhi to
compromise. It's quite another thing to huddle with the President of the
United States at Camp David and then emerge on either side of him into the Rose
Garden with the glare of the world's TV cameras upon them and the prospect of a
reprise at the Nobel ceremonies. Anyway, while most Pakistanis wish the
Kashmiris well, they are sick and tired of the whole business.

b) If the US doesn't want madrasas educating anti-American mujahidin, it should
do something about making alternatives available. Every Pakistani parent I
have ever met, of whatever class, is keenly aware that the key to their
children's future is education, and they will make any sacrifices necessary to
get the best education possible for their children, preferably an education
that teaches them English. Unfortunately the possibilities are not usually
very good. Poor parents send their sons to madrasas because, occasionally, the
boys are genuinely religious or, more often, because madrasas, like American
military schools, have a reputation for being able to straighten out
troublesome boys. Mostly, however, they send their sons to madrasas because
they are free and provide room, board, and a small stipend and there are no
better alternatives, and often no other alternatives. If there were
Urdu-medium schools available and parents could afford the fees, they would
send their sons there in preference to madrasas. If there were English schools
available, that would be even better. Even in madrasas, the boys flock to
computer and English classes when they are available. If the US wants a stable
progressive Pakistan, it would behoove us to make a massive investment in
education there. It's a lot cheaper in the long run than military intervention
in a nuclear-armed failed state. You can run a lot of schools for the four
billion a month we are spending in Iraq."


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Mars Rover "Spirit" Lands Safely!!

NASA announced around 1 am Sunday 1/4 that the Mars Rover, Spirit, had landed safely on the surface and sent a signal showing that it was undamaged. This is a great relief. Mars is called the "death planet" by space aeronautics experts, since 2/3s of missions there have failed. Spirit was put into a crater that may have once held water, and if it goes on functioning, it will tell us a lot about whether Mars once supported life (i.e. microbes). Also about whether there still might be undergound water on Mars. That would be good news, if we are ever to have colonies there. (Hint: It is dangerous for a species to inhabit only one planet, since planets are so vulnerable to meteor strikes and other catastrophes).

You may complain that this item has nothing to do with the Middle East. But I beg to differ. Here is what yahoo.news said: ""Mars is a favorite target," says Dr. Firouz Naderi, manager of the Mars Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory." Firouz Naderi is an Iranian name, and his obvious contributions to the American space program (the rovers are a JPL project) should give pause to all those afficionados of phrases like 'axis of evil,' whenever they are tempted to fall into anti-Iranian and anti-Middle Eastern bigotry. Dr. Naderi's name, by the way, means literally a "rare triumph." And so it is. Congratulations to NASA and JPL!
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1 US soldier Killed, 4 wounded

A US helicopter was shot down on Friday, killing one US soldier and wounding another. There are confusing reports from the scene. The US military asserts that its soldiers took fire from assailants dressed as journalists, and apprehended some. Reuters says that the people in custody are just innocent cameramen. It is not impossible that the original assailants dressed as civilian journalists precisely in order to provoke such a US army reaction against the real journalists, so as to make bad publicity. It is also possible that the assailants fired at the US from behind the Reuters' camera crew, and the soldiers just assumed that the camera crew was involved. It is also possible that the Pentagon just doesn't want footage of wreckage showing up on cable tv back in the States; but that is speculation.

Near Ramadi, guerrillas attacked a US convoy that included a 5,000 gallon oil tanker, and managed to set off a conflagration, wounding three US soldiers.
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Sunnis Protest Mosque Raid

There was a large (1000 to 1500 strong) demonstration in the Yarmouk quarter of Baghdad against a US raid on two mosques in the district on Friday. The Guardian reported that Iraqi police and US troops raided the Ibn Taimiyah Mosque in the southwestern Yarmouk quarter of Baghdad on Thursday and arrested its prayer leader, Shaikh Mahdi Salah al-Sumaidi, a member of the Supreme Council for Religious Guidance along with 20 of his helpers. The US military spokesman maintained that they found a large weapons cache in the mosque, not only machine guns but also rocket propelled grenades.

The US says that it had received many tips over the past few months that the mosque was being used as a weapons storehouse by guerrillas. The siege and operation lasted 7 hours. On Friday, US troops carried out a similar raid on the Umm al-Tubul Mosque in Yarmouk, arresting the shaikh and 34 others. The mosque was the site of a meeting of the religious Sunni Arab leadership. Many machine guns and other munitions were found. The US maintained, according to az-Zaman /AFP that some of those arrested were not Iraqis. Abd al-Sattar al-Janibi, deputy head of the Supreme council for the Sunnis, admitted that there had been weapons in the mosque, but said that all Iraqi mosques had weapons in them intended for self defense given the poor security situation. Rifles, I could believe. But an anti-aircraft missile and grenades?

Still, the US Army could have done itself a favor here by just sending in Iraqi police to do this job and not having GIs invade a mosque.

Ibn Taimiyah (1268-1328). (for whom one of the mosques was named), by the way, was a horrible person and an important source of intellectual bigotry in the subsequent Sunni tradition, who has been revived and made a hero by Sunni Islamists in modern times. If I were involved in counter-insurgency I'd pretty much have all buildings named after Ibn Taimiyah searched. But let Iraqis do it.


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More Ethnic Violence in Kirkuk

AP reported that in the northern, mainly Arab city of Mosul, on Wednesday assailants kidnapped and killed Adel Jabar Abid Mustafa, a Baathist whom Saddam had appointed dean of the faculty of political science at Mosul University. Thursday morning his body was found; he had been killed Mafia-style, two bullets in the head. There have been a number of unsolved assassinations in Mosul lately, with some victims having been anti-Baathists and others former Baathists. This pattern suggests that underground gangs or clans are engaged in vendettas about the past.

AP said that in Kirkuk on Thursday night, armed Arabs killed one Kurd and wounded another as they strolled through an Arab quarter of the city, according to Police Chief Gen. Turhan Youssef.

Az-Zaman reported that Shirku Shakir, a high police official in Kirkuk, said that an Arab protest was held late Thursday that resulted in an exchange of fire with the police, who took one wounded Arab gunman prisoner. Shakir said another body was found in the vicinity of the protest and the shoot-out, but declined to give his ethnicity. Jalal Jawhar, local head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party, said that two Arabs were killed and several wounded in this incident, according to AP.

All of these incidents follow on the Kurdish parties' demand that Kirkuk be incorporated into an expanded Kurdish ethnic enclave in the north, which would enjoy substantial states' rights from a loose federal government in Baghdad.

Thursday night, representatives of the Coalition Provisional Authority met with ethnic community leaders in Kirkuk and asked them to strive to reduce tension (al-Zaman).

AP also noted that ' At Friday prayers, firebrand Shiite cleric Muqdata al-Sadr spoke against any federal system, saying it "is meant to divide the country according to their interests." He apparently was referring to Kurdish interests when he spoke at Kufa mosque, just outside the southern city of Najaf. ' The hostility to loose federalism and the devotion to a strong central government is characteristic of the major Shiite parties across the board.

Daniel Senor of the CPA dismissed the events in Kirkuk as "isolated incidents," and said that reprisals against Baathists had been relatively few. He pointed out that thousands of Fascists had been killed in reprisals in Italy after World War II.

It is always a bad sign when political spokesmen try to schmooze journalists into thinking that anything less than 20,000 deaths is not significant. I certainly hope the press corps can see through that ploy. But in addition, Senor's point does not even make any sense. The events in Kirkuk were not reprisals against Baathists. They were ethnic fighting over the future of the city. Historical analogies are always misleading, but if you had to compare them to something, it would to post-Soviet Eastern Europe, and the question is whether we are dealing with Bratislava, Slovakia (peaceful splitting from the Czech Republic)) or with Bosnia in spring of 1992. In the latter, a multiethnic society was subsequently torn apart.

The reason the events in Kirkuk may be significant is that something will have to be done with the city. Either it will be left as the capital of at-Tamim Province and the 250,000 Arabs transplanted to it will be allowed to stay in the homes Saddam stole from the Turkmen and Kurds to give to them; or it will, as the Kurds demand, be transferred to a new Kurdistan province that will unite in itself at-Tamim, Dahuk, Arbil, Sulaimaniya, and Diyala (Diyala is a stretch). Either decision, to leave things as they are or to change things, is going to make some part of the population fighting mad, and they all have guns (a lot of them seem to have rocket propelled grenades).

So the fact that there haven't been large scale reprisals against the Arabs in Kirkuk is certainly positive, but the fact is that Kurds have been streaming back into the city and it is early days. That ethnic conflict came to a low boil as soon as the Kurds so much as mentioned their plan to annex Kirkuk is a very bad sign for the future Iraqi government's stability (the CPA will carefully avoid taking a decision before July 1, so as not to risk provoking major violence on its watch). Though, since the US plans to have an embassy in Baghdad with 3,000 personnel, even decisions of the new Iraqi government will in a way be on its watch.


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30 Bulgarians Refuse to Serve

AFP reports that 30 Bulgarian soldiers in a 500-man battalion scheduled to go to Iraq have refused to serve there. A recent attack by guerrillas in Karbala wounded 64 Bulgarian troops and killed 4. AFP said, "Members of the replacement battalion on Friday demanded that a clause be written into their contracts stipulating that they can at any time pull out of the mission and return home, the radio reported." Service in Iraq is voluntary. There are likely to be growing such controversies among the coalition of the willing should there be further attacks like that in Karbala.

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6 US troops wounded Weds.; Bomb blast in Baghdad Kills 8 Iraqis

AP reported that on Wednesday, a bomb hidden in foliage outside a Baghdad restaurant exploded as a US army convoy passed. The guerrillas wounded 3 American soldiers and 3 Iraqi civilians, and killed an Iraq bystander. On Wednesday, as well, guerrillas set off a roadside bomb, inflicting minor injuries on 3 US troops, and killing an Iraqi boy.

Also on Wednesday, a huge car bomb went off in front of the posh Nabil's Restaurant in the upscale Karrada neighborhood, killing 8 Iraqis and wounding 35 persons (three LA Times reporters were cut by flying glass). Although many Western observers speculated that this bombing was a new tactic by the guerrillas, insofar as it concentrated on a soft, wholly Iraqi target, this tactic is not new. There have been attacks on Shiites, in, e.g. Najaf. Guerrillas have killed dozens of Iraqis when it suited their purpose, which is to raise the cost of cooperating politically with the US. Karrada was probably hit because it was seen as full of pro-American compradors.
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Top 5 Tasks Remaining in 2004 in the War on Terror

US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld worried in a memo last fall that the US lacks a "metric" or a means of measuring success in the war on terror. If he does not have one, then I certainly do not. But as someone who has studied the Middle East and the Muslim world for over thirty years, and who first lived there 38 years ago, I have a good idea of what would help.


5. The US must work harder to stabilize Pakistan and to achieve peace between India and Pakistan. A stronger Pakistani democracy will lessen US dependence on one man, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, against whom two major assassination attempts have recently been launched. The Kashmir issue is a major source of terrorism, and is now a nuclear flashpoint. The safety of all Americans is imperilled by the continued boiling of ethnic conflict there. If India and Pakistan were at real peace with one another, their borders and roads would open. Truckers could take merchandise from New Delhi to Islamabad, and thence to Kabul and Tashkent. A Central Asian cross-continental trade between Korea and China in the East, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in Central Asia, and Pakistan and India in South Asia could reinvigorate the economies of the region, benefitting Afghanistan and helping stabilize it. In contrast, allowing the Kashmir issue to remain unresolved threatens terrorism, war, and possibly even a nuclear exchange.

4. The US must invest more heavily in stabilizing and rebuilding Afghanistan. The Taliban are resurgent, the government weak and divided, and most of the country in the hands of regional clan leaders. The standard of living is among the lowest in the world. The Bush administration forgot to ask Congress for an Afghanistan appropriation for 2003, and some savvy Senators ensured it got at least $300 mn. Worried about the 2004 elections, the Bush administration has now pledged $1 bn. for reconstruction. But Bush spent $166 bn. and climbing on Iraq! Instability and extremism in Afghanistan are proven threats to the safety of Americans, whereas Iraq never directly hit the US. Letting Afghanistan fall apart or limp along as a fourth world nation is most unwise.

3. Iraq must be given a stable and united government. Allowing it to split up into three parts would guarantee future terrorism. The Sunni Arabs would be left poor and without a petroleum income, and would watch as the Kurds (1000 wellheads) and Shiite Arabs (500 wellheads) got rich. They would have every reason to try to take Kirkuk, where they are about a third of the population or more, by force, to get its 100 wellheads and its pipelines. If they failed, they would be left without a visible means of income, and would quickly become poorer than Jordanians. Their resentments would fuel massive terrorism in the Middle East that would almost certainly eventually touch the US.

2. The US must capture Osama Bin Laden, Saad Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Saif al-Adil, and other top al-Qaeda leaders, of both the older and the younger generations. This task was far more important for the immediate security of those of us who live in the US than conquering Iraq, and it was highly irresponsible to undertake the latter before accomplishing the former.

1. The US must step in to settle the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. The festering violence in the Mideast produces anti-Americanism and anti-American violence throughout the region. Most Americans have bought Likud party propaganda about the nature of the conflict.

In fact, Israelis are gobbling up Palestinian land at an alarming rate, and have more than doubled the number of their settlers in the West Bank and Gaza since they signed the Oslo Accords (which had implied that they would give back most of the Palestinian territories and allow the Palestinians their own state). Muslims all over the world identify with the Palestinians, and feel humiliated that the Israelis can piecemeal destroy their hope of living in dignity as a people with impunity (indeed, with the de facto acquiescence of the US).

That a small number of Palestinians has replied to the Israeli assault on them with violence against Israeli civilians is both morally wrong and bad political strategy. It does not change the fact that the Israelis are the ones who are gaining territory at the Palestinians' expense. It also does not excuse a series of Israeli war crimes in the Occupied Territories, which include using US-supplied F-16s to fire missiles into a civilian, occupied apartment building in order to assassinate a Hamas leader (both the pilot and Ariel Sharon should be tried for this heinous act and others like it, which killed many civilians, including a baby).

Americans all know how much US citizens identified with the little band at the Alamo back in the 1830s, and how much they despised Mexico for opposing them. For the Muslim world, Palestine is the Alamo, and the Israelis and the US together play Santa Ana. Would it have done any good for the president of the Mexican Republic to have sent performers across the border to explain how well Americans were treated in Mexico, or to point to Mexico's progressive laws? A Public Relations campaign could never have made Santa Ana popular after he abolished states' rights and attacked San Antonio.

September 11 was deeply intertwined with the expulsion of the Palestinians from their land and the resentments it has fostered. The idea that the hijackers did not care about the Palestine issue is pure propaganda. The occupation of Jerusalem by the Israelis is a constant, recurring theme in al-Qaeda communiqués. We Americans are friends of Israel and will stand by it in the face of aggressors who want to destroy it. But Israel does not own the West Bank and Gaza. The UN never granted them to it. They are mere spoils of war, and territorial conquest is forbidden in the United Nations Charter. We don't need any more US buildings blown up because our government is coddling cuckoo settlers who are stealing other people's land to fulfill some weird religious power fantasy.

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Bremer and CPA "Extremely Offended" at Call for UN Role

A member of the Interim Governing Council, Mahmoud Osman, told al-Hayat newspaper that the Coalition Provisional Authority was extremely offended by the IGC's call for the United Nations to play a role in the transition to Iraqi sovereignty. He said that Washington id not want any international actor to participate in this process. It wants to reap the benefits in order to increase President Bush's stock on the eve of the US presidential elections.

He told the London daily, "The fundamental issue for Iraqis is the return of sovereignty. The Americans are in a hurry for it, as well, though for their own interests. The important thing for the Americans is to ensure the reelection of George Bush. The achievement of a specific accomplishment in Iraq, such as the transfer of power, increases, in the eyes of the Republican Party, the chances that Bush will be reelected."

Osman, himself a Kurd, denied that the IGC had given guarantees to the Kurds in support of their demand for a loose federation. He also rejected the idea of keeping the Interim Governing Council and turning it into a senate. He admitted that the IGC was not fully representative, and insisted that Sunnis were under-represented, a fault he hoped the forthcoming elections would correct. (The IGC currently is split 50/50 Sunni and Shiite, whereas in actuality the Shiites are probably 65% of the population). He also said he did not have a problem with Baathists serving in the new parliament, as long as they had not committed crimes.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has repeatedly called for a UN role in Iraqi elections, and plans are being made for representatives of the IGC to meet with UN officials on the issue.

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Ethnic Violence in Kurdistan Boils Over; 3 Dead on Thursday, 5 Dead on Wednesday

On Thursday, Kirkuk Police Chief Turhan Yusuf said, "Unknown attackers stabbed two Kurds to death and threw their bodies near a bridge in the centre of the city." This act was presumably in revenge for the shooting of 3 Arabs by Kurdish militiamen on Wednesday (see below). His deputy, Shirzad Rifaat Qadir, reported that Kirkuk police killed an Arab man and wounded two others in an attempt to prevent them from attacking Kurds.

Al-Hayat said that the head of the general hospital in Kirkuk, Hashim Muhammad, announced that on Wednesday three Iraqis were killed and 31 wounded (6 of them gravely) by gunfire from Peshmerga Kurdish militiamen. The militiamen fired on Arab and Turkmen demonstrators, said to number about 1,000, protesting Kurdish demands that Kirkuk be absorbed into a Kurdish super-province. Demonstrator Ali Husain Muhammad, one of those wounded, said, "The reason the peshmerga opened fire is that the demonstrators began shouting slogans containing slurs against the Kurds . . ." Among the chants was "There is no god but God; Kurdistan is the enemy of God!" Arab and Turkmen political groupings demanded that the US civil administration open an investigation into the incident.

Kirkuk, with an estimated population of 730,000, is among Iraq's 5 largest cities. It is a center of the oil industry, has light textiles, and is a local agricultural entrepot. The city has Kurds, Sunni Arabs, Sunni and Shiite Turkmen, and Chaldean and Assyrian Christians. Some 100,000 Kurds and Turkmen were expelled from the city in recent years by Saddam. Last spring, Preston Mendenhall in his War Diary from Iraq maintained that the city was comprised as of April 2003 of one third Arabs, one third Turkmen and one third Kurds. It is not clear, however, how many Kurds have returned to Kirkuk in the past 8 months, and how many Arabs have been quietly expelled south (the number is reported to be in the thousands).

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