Thousands of Sadrists Demonstrate in Kirkuk

AFP reports that nearly 2000 members of the Army of the Mahdi, the militia headed by young Shiite radical Muqtada al-Sadr, demonstrated in Kirkuk on Saturday. The demonstration coincided with a general strike by the city's approximately 300,000 Turkmen residents. Even the police stayed home.

Ibrahim Khayyat at al-Hayat provides further details. Muqtada's representative in Kirkuk, Abdul Fattah al-Musawi, said, "The goal of putting 18 companies, or 1750 men (and 180 women), on parade, was to reinforce the unity of Muslim Iraqis with non-Muslim Iraqis. "Kirkuk," he said, "is for all its inhabitants, not just for a particular group."

The parade lasted for about two hours. The Shiites of Kirkuk and of the surrounding area joined in, raising the Iraqi flag (the Kurds have their own provincial flag), and pictures of Muqtada and of his father, Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr (who was assassinated by Saddam in 1999).

Jalal Jawhar of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan said that there was no objection to the demonstration, since it was part of democracy, but that it had to remain peaceful. He also considered that "the goal of parading troops was to demonstrate the power of Muqtada's supporters and to underline their presence."

One of the issues that has derailed the passage of a fundamental law or interim constitution by the Interim Govering Council is Kurdish demands. The Kurdish parties insist on a very loose federalism, Swiss style, and they also want Kirkuk added to a consolidated Kurdish province. Kirkuk has never been a majority Kurdish city, since the Turkmen predominated there, and since the 1990s Saddam expelled thousands of Kurds and brought in Arab residents. The city is said to be one third, Turkmen, one third Arab and one third Kurdish. Ethnic violence broke out in January in the wake of a public Kurdish call for the city to be added to the Kurdish province. There are many petroleum wellheads around Kirkuk, and the Kurds want control of them. They want, as in Canada, for the provincial government to control petroleum in its province.

The Kurdish demands on Kirkuk are absolutely unacceptable to the Sunni Arabs and Turkmen. A loose federalism has long been rejected by the Shiite al-Da`wa Party. As far back as 1996, al-Da`wa broke with Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress in large part because he had acquiesced to the Kurdish demands for loose federalism. Likewise, the Sadrists want a strong central government.

One question I have is about the ethnicity of Muqtada's supporters in Kirkuk. I've been told that perhaps a majority of the Turkmen are Shiites, and that they have in recent decades given up their unorthodox folk religion for orthodox Twelver Shiism, and that many followed Sadiq al-Sadr. Among the hundreds of thousands of Arabs relocated north by Saddam were, in addition, lots of Shiites. It would be interesting to know if the Army of the Mahdi militia in Kirkuk is mixed ethnically, with both Turkmen and Arabs.

Al-Musawi's statement about reinforcing ties with non-Muslims is also bizarre, and one wonders if the Sadrists are trying to put together a Shiite-Chaldean alliance against the Kurds in the north. If you combined the 600,000 Iraqi Christians, many of whom are in Ninevah province, with the 600,000 Turkmen or so, and added to them all the Arabs relocated to the north by Saddam, it would be a non-trivial alliance against the 4 million or so Iraqi Kurds.



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Sistani's Representative in Karbala Rejects Referendum on Provincial Council>

ash-Sharq al-Awsat/ AFP: Shaikh Abdul Mahdi al-Karbala'i, the representative in Karbala of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, rejected the suggestion by another cleric that the provincial council appointed by CPA official John Berry be submitted to a referendum. He said that an appointed council is by its nature illegitimate, and called on its members to resign.

Shaikh Husain al-Sadr, who is influential in the Kazimiyah suburb of Baghdad, had agreed with Perry that having a referendum was the best path forward. Shaikh Husain's representative tried to convince Berry to reduce the number of women on the council from 11 to 5.
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Vigilanteism in Basra

Scheherezade Faramarzi of AP reports on the Shiite militias of Basra and the way they are imposing both law and order, and a puritan style of life on the population (though sometimes they do some kidnapping or coercion of their own).

The militias pose a long-term problem for Iraqi security, since they violate the state's monopoly on the use of force. And they are depriving persons of rights they have under the law (e.g. to own and operate a video store that purveys a little flesh). They are coercing women into wearing scarves or veils, and it is difficult to see how women's rights can make any progress in Basra under these circumstances.

The question is whether Basra is in an exceptional situation, or whether it is a harbinger of the future of Iraq.

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What a Document Looks like

Jonathan Schanzer, writing in the Weekly Standard, notes that I had asked Bill Safire for even a single "document" that shows that Saddam Hussein's government cooperated with al-Qaeda before September 11. He suggests that we might substitute for such a document his interview with Abdul Rahman al-Shamari, who he says served in Saddam's secret police, the Mukhabarat, from 1997 to 2002, and who is now "in a Kurdish jail."

No, Jonathan. That isn't a document. That is a single-sourced account from a prisoner (assuming he exists and assuming he actually was mukhabarat) who wants to get out of jail and has every reason to tell people what they want to hear. Or for all I know the Kurds have paid or coerced him to say these things, since they want US help against their Islamists.

A document has the following characteristics. It originates close to the time of the event it describes. Typically it is written on paper with ink. It has all the hallmarks of authenticity. So, for instance, a memo from an Iraqi intelligence officer dated January 5, 2000, discussing cooperation with al-Qaeda, written down in black ink and by an officer we actually know was really serving at that time, on paper of the sort used by the Baath government, with all the bureaucratic form of a Baath document--that would be a document. Since the US now has thousands of documents from the Iraqi secret police, if such a document existed we would not be speculating about it--it would have been splashed on the front pages of all the newspapers of the world. It likely does not exist.

Single-source allegations by shadowy Iraqi ex-officers were among the fallacies that pulled us into the war to begin with. And, no, the way to confirm al-Shamari's story is not to find yet another stooge who has been coerced or paid to say the same things. It is to provide the sort of evidence that would stand up in court. I'm a historian. I go by evidence. If I'm wrong, and the evidence surfaces to prove it, I will gladly change my views. Al-Shamari, about whom we know nothing, is useless for that purpose.

In good journalism, by the way, you don't go to print with a single uncorroborated source.

Mr. Schanzer does himself no favors with regard to credibility by associating himself with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which was a major source of disinformation about Iraq before the war, and which should by all rights have lost all credibility by now.


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6 US Soldiers wounded in 24 hours

Wire services quoted by al-Jazeerah report that guerrillas wounded three US soldiers with rocket-propelled grenade fire Thursday night near Tikrit.

On Friday morning, guerrillas in Tikrit lightly wounded another two US troops in a bom blast. A third soldier was seriously wounded in an attack on his convoy in Khallis, northeast of Baghdad.


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Islamists on IGC Defeated on Islamic Law Provision

Raghida Dergham reports in al-Hayat that the representatives on the Interim Governing Council of the Islamist tendency suffered a political defeat on Friday when the IGC abrogated Directive 137, which it had issued in late December, and which put personal status law in the jurisdiction of religious courts. If implemented, the order would have abrogated the uniform civil personal status law of 1959.

An informed source reported to Dergham that IGC member Raja' al-Khuza'i, a maternity physician who missed the first vote, was the one who insisted that the directive be reconsidered in light of the angry public response to it. (Many women's groups had mounted protests). After a heated discussion, the measure went to a vote of the 24-member council, and the directive was voted down 15 to 9. In the late December meeting, held when Raja'i and another woman member, Songol Chapouk, were absent, the directive had passed 11 to 10.

She says that observers maintain that the vote will establish a new dynamic on the council that will be important as the IGC discusses the place of Islam in Iraqi legislation. The special meeting of the IGC called on Friday was to discuss the Fundamental Law or interim constitution it is now drafting, which was supposed to be completed by the end of February (this goal seems unlikely to be met).

The Islamists on the council are said to have left angry, and it was up to Bremer to attempt to conciliate them.

At the same time, according to ash-Sharq al-Awsat, a conference was held of secular parties in Iraq afraid that the country might move toward theocracy when the Americans withdraw. The two main Kurdish parties attended, along with Adnan Pachachi's party, Hamid Majid Musa's Iraqi Communist Party, and Nasir Chadirchi's National Democratic Party.

In Kufa, Dergham reports, the young Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr renewed his threat to lead a rebellion if the US civil administrator Paul Bremer continued to reject the position that Islam be specified is the sole source of legislation in the new constitution. He said he would persevere in this path, "even if I am killed or imprisoned." He said in his sermon, "America only came to harm Islam, but the occupiers will not be able to wipe out Islam . . . I call on the believers to be fully prepared, when the orders come from the religious leadership, to challenge the occupation."

Muqtada added, "I call upon the governing council to announce a rebellion against the decision, and I demand of Bremer personally to retreat from his statement against Islam." He said he would continue on this path even if he were killed or imprisoned.

In the meantime, a spokesman for the United Nations in New York considered it a positive sign that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has indicated a willingness to see elections held late in 2004. He said that if the Iraqis want to hold elections then, they would have to launch themselves into action immediately, and affirmed that the UN was ready to help. He added, "We are still waiting for a sign from the Iraqis demonstrating that they accept Brahimi's recommendations."

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Abdul Hamid Confronted over his Allegation that the Shiites are a Minority

The Kuwaiti newspaper al-Qabas reports that it had a further confrontation with Muhsin Abdul Hamid, leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party and February's president of the Interim Governing council. Al-Qabas and other news sources reported recently that Abdul Hamid maintained that Shiites constituted less than 40% of Iraq's population, i.e. that they are a minority. When Abdul Hamid visited Riyadh recently, he denied having made the statement. Actually, he denied having said that Sunni Iraqis would impose their will on Shiites because Sunnis are the majority.. On his return he stopped off in Kuwait and met with the press. Al-Qabas presented him with an audiotape cassette containing his statement that Shiites are a minority and challenged his allegation that he had been misquoted. (Al-Qabas had not in any case reported that he said Sunnis would impose their will on Shiites; that was some news service.) On the cassette, Abdul Hamid clearly says, "The Sunnis are the majority in Iraq."

When confronted by Nasir al-`Utaybi, Abdul Hamid said, "The press sometimes corners us, but we are a single people, and give each other mutual aid, and we work together on the governing council and off it."

He added that Iraq is erasing the past and building a new relationship of fraternity and good relations with its neighbors first of all.

He denied that the Iraqi Islamic Party has any relationship to the Muslim Brotherhood. "We are not responsible for their past positions, whether negative or positive." He repeated his repudiation of the invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

In fact, the Iraqi Islamic Party did begin as an Iraqi branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, whatever its current relationship to the mother group in Cairo.

Social scientists estimate that Shiites are between 60 and 65 percent of the Iraqi population, but many Sunni Iraqis have trouble coming to terms with this social fact. Abdul Hamid is outgoing as president of the IGC as of March 1.
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Explosions in Baquba, Baghdad

AP reports that ' In Baqouba . . . an explosion occurred Thursday in the city center and witnesses said three police cars were on fire. '. It continues,

' The U.S. command said [a] fuel truck, assigned to the 1st Armored Division, was hit by a roadside bomb in the western Baghdad suburb of Abu Ghraib. "A convoy of U.S. Army trucks was attacked," Mahir Obeid, said. "One of them was blown up by a roadside bomb while another was hit with a (rocket propelled grenade). Both of them caught fire." '
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Army of the Helpers of the Sunnah a Major Insurgent Group

Al-Hayat newspaper in London says it has gotten hold of many memos and videotapes concerning Jaysh Ansar al-Sunnah and pointing to its relationship with the Kurdish radical Islamist group, Ansar al-Islam. The memos say that the Army of the Helpers of the Sunnah (AHS) has carried out 285 attacks against Coalition forces, has killed 1155 persons and wounded 160 [sic], and has destroyed dozens of helicopters, tanks and troop transports.

The memos show that there is a central leadership of the AHS, which follows a leader or "amir" named Abu `Abdullah al-Hasan Bin Mahmud. It refers in numerous places to Ansar al-Islam, the largely Kurdish terrorist group which has some Afghanistan veterans in its ranks. It contains a statement from the organization's leader, and an explanation of its structure (it comprises a number of jihadi groups operating from the north to the south of the country). Its goal is to create an army under a single leader, which can undertake a practical program not imported from abroad, "depending on the teachings of the pure [Islamic] Law." It issues a call to "brothers in Islam and jihad to join this army." (I wonder if the stricture against 'imports from abroad' is aimed at keeping independent of al-Qaeda, which would be perceived by Iraqi guerrillas as non-Iraqi in leadership).

Abu Abdullah led the group from last June, when it appears to have been formed, until January 2. (I am not clear here what al-Hayat is trying to say--was the last memo dated Jan. 2, or is there evidence of him stepping down?)

The memos claim that the organization was behind the 29 November attack on Spanish intelligence agents in the village of Latifiyah, which killed 7 and wounded 1 [the memo says 'wounded 8']. On 5 Jan. they claim to have killed 8 Canadian and British intelligence agents in two Chevrolets, in Yusufiyah in the southwest of Baghdad [no such incident was reported in wire services around this date according to Lexis Nexis].

Cassettes found with the memos list 6 suicide bombers and detail their missions in recent months.

The materials deny a relationship between AHS and the group known as Volcano.

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We may as Well Just Record all our Telephone Calls and send them to Maryland

Philip Knightley and Kim Sengupta describe how the US National Security Agency and the British Government Communications Headquarters eavesdrop on the whole world. The NSA is forbidden from listening in on Americans without a warrant, but the US government circumvents this problem by formally allowing the GCHQ to spy on Americans. The NSA listens in on British calls, and then the two just swap the information.

The NSA is ten times larger with regard to personnel than the CIA, with a budget larger than the other intelligence agencies as well ($8 bn. out of about $30 bn. total). Frankly, after September 11 I think most Americans would be happier if it listens in on calls in Pakistan and Afghanistan and Hamburg a little more intently than in the past. It is not so clear that they would be happy to know it was listening in on Americans not under any suspicion of criminality.

The GCHQ was founded in 1946, but I heard somewhere that the deal on having the US spy on British citizens and the British on US, and then swapping the data, goes back to World War II.

The current row over GCHQ in New York monitoring UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's phone calls was in some sense begun in spring of 2003 when GCHQ employee Katharine Gunn blew the whistle on the US and the British governments, revealing that the US had asked GCHQ to listen in on the phone calls of the UN ambassadors of 6 swing vote countries on the Security Council with regard to the building Iraq war. The British government seriously considered prosecuting Gunn, but backed off just a few days ago. Some have suggested that the British authorities began worrying that if the case went to court, Gunn's attorney would demand to see the memos of Lord Goldsmith, the British attorney general, on the legality of the Iraq war. We know from one leaked memo that he felt that without a UN Security Council resolution, a prolonged Anglo-American occupation of Iraq would likely involve the two in policy making that contravened international law (as it has). Others say that it just seemed highly unlikely a British jury would convict Gunn, given how unpopular the war and occupation have been in the UK.

This week, ex-British cabinet member Clare Short, who broke with Tony Blair over the Iraq war, revealed that while on the cabinet she had seen transcripts of Kofi Annan's telephone calls.

Now it turns out that whenever UN weapons inspector Hans Blix was in Iraq, his cell phone was monitored. That Blix was under surveillance and that transcripts of his phone calls were shared among the US, the UK, Australia and Canada, puts a new spin on the Blix allegation last summer that he had been the object of a smear campaign by officials in the US Department of Defense. If Feith, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld had his personal phone calls, they were in a position to cook up plausible smears against him. Blix maintains that the authority of the United Nations has been perhaps irretrievably damaged by the very countries who should have been supporting it.

The Blix wiretaps raise an interesting question. Did the US and UK know even more about the lack of evidence for weapons of mass destruction than we thought, from what Blix was saying privately in spring of 2003 before the war?

While the GCHQ listening in on phone calls in the US is apparently just a regular occurrence, tapping Kofi Annan's line would be illegal because the UN headquarters is not considered US soil. Whatever deal Roosevelt and Churchill made about each spying on the other's citizens doesn't apply at the UN.

The framers of the US constitution wanted individuals to have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their own homes, and wanted the police to leave them alone unless there was good evidence they had committed a crime. The rise of the National Security State during WW II and in the Cold War has effectively gutted the constitution in this regard for all practical purposes. The Patriot Act more or less repeals the Bill of Rights, which has bedevilled successive US regimes, especially that of Richard Nixon, who now finally has his revenge.

I suppose the real question is whether, when Bin Laden boasted, "I will take away their freedom," it was an empty boast or an accurate prediction.
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Cole Interviews with Chicago Public Radio's Worldview

Those of you with RealAudio can listen to two interviews I did with Chicago Public Radio's Worldview program, hosted by Jerome McDonnell. The interviews are listed under February 26. One treats the Americana in Arabic Translation Library. The other is on the issue of transitional government in Iraq. Thanks to Jerome for excellent questions, and to him and Dave McGuire for seeking the interviews.
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Sistani Reaffirms demand for Elections by end of Year

The NYT reports that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has again said the UN needs to set a date certain for direct elections in Iraq, which Kofi Annan said could plausibly be held in December or January if preparations begin being made now. He clearly wants those preparations to start, and he wants an international guarantee of a date certain. He also reaffirmed what he has said before, which is that the caretaker transitional government that will hold sovereignty from June 30 until the elections should be very limited in its powers and decisions, since it will lack the legitimacy that comes from being popularly elected. What is new here is only that Sistani seems to be saying that his earlier deadline of October 1 for elections could slip to December or January, but no later.
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Two US Soldiers die in Helicopter Crash; Police General Killed

AP reports that two US soldiers were killed in a helicopter crash on Wednesday near Haditha in the Sunni heartland. Guerrillas shot down a police general in the northern city of Mosul, in line with their general attempt to discourage Iraqis from joining or serving in the new American-backed police force.

In Amara, guerillas fired a mortar shell at the local television station, but it landed in a garden outside the station and did no damage to speak of. There have been a number of such attacks on the station in recent weeks (az-Zaman).

AP reports ' And in Baghdad, attackers fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a major Shiite Muslim shrine overnight, officials at the shrine said. The RPG punched a hole in an outer wall of the Kazimiyah shrine in a northern neighborhood of the capital, but caused no injuries. ' The shrine of Imam Musa al-Kazim in Kazimiyah is among the holiest sites for Shiites, and visiting it is part of the Muharram commemorations now beginning in Iraq. This attack would fit with the strategy announced by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of the al-Tawhid terrorist group, of attempting to foment civil war. The emotional impact of this assault on a major shrine at this season cannot be overestimated.
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Mahmoud Uthman: IGC too Weak to be given Sovereignty

In an interview with ash-Sharq al-Awsat, Kurdish Interim Governing Council (IGC) member Mahmoud Uthman (Osman) said that a national congress should be held to elect a transitional parliament, He said that sovereignty should not be handed to the existing IGC because it is weak and lacks unity. He blamed the Coalition Provisional Authority, which has the real decision-making powers, for the weakness of the IGC, saying it had been reduced to an advisory council. He complained that the UN Security Council had erred grievously in allowing one country to rule another directly in the 21st century, quite apart from the good deed the US did in removing Saddam.

Uthman imagines a national congress meeting late this spring, composed of tribal leaders, party heads, clerics, and other notables, who might be able to elect a government that then had some legitimacy. His proposal sounded to me rather like the Loya Jirga in Afghanistan that produced the Karzai government. It did to his interview, Shirzad Shaikhani, as well, and Shaikhani asked Uthman if he meant a sort of Loya Jirga. Uthman replied "To some extent.".
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High Baghdad Official Forced to Resign over Veiling Issue

Az-Zaman reports that Jawad Kadhim al-Anani, appointed to a high position in the Baghdad provincial government just twenty-four hours before, was forced to resign because he had immediately issued a decree requiring enforced veiling of women municipal employees during business hours. He thereby deeply offended hundreds of female government employees. Some employees say there have not been formal actions taken against them for not veiling, but that they receive various forms of pressure to do so. ("Veiling" here probably means wearing a headscarf and modest clothing with long sleeves and hemlines).

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Sunni Clerics Fail to Secure Release of 150 Imprisoned Women

(AFP/az-Zaman): Sunni clerics meeting with US officers failed to secure the release of 150 Iraqi women imprisoned by the American forces. A US spokesman said he had no immediate knowledge of the condition of the jailed women.

Cleric Muhammad Bashshar al-Faydi said, "The Americans must understand that if they continue this way, the violence is going to increase . . . many of these women belong to tribes, and the tribal chieftains want revenge."

The Anglican Church envoy in Iraq, the Rev. Canon Andrew White, also took up the case of the imprisoned women.
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The Passion of Christ in the World Religions

The phenomenon of Mel Gibson's The Passion, about the death of Jesus of Nazareth, has provoked a lively debate about the dangers of anti-Semitism. Historians are well aware that medieval passion plays (which shared the sado-masochistic themes of Gibson's movie) often resulted in attacks on Jews. The concern of American Jewish leaders is therefore entirely valid.

Some of the problem goes back to the Gospel writers, who wrote many years after the fact and depict the Jewish leaders in a frankly implausible way because they had lost contact with Jewish customs. They have the Sanhedrin or Jewish religious council meeting about Jesus on the Sabbath, which just would not have happened. They have it meeting at night, which also would not have happened. Their account accords with nothing of the procedures and laws we know to have been followed at that time. The likelihood is that the Romans arrested and killed Jesus as a potential Zealot or religious radical whom they perceived as threatening, but that the later Christian community strove to have better relations with Rome just as Roman-Jewish relations got very bad. So the Gospel authors soft-pedaled Rome's role and invented nocturnal Sabbath Sanhedrins that have gotten Jews beaten up ever since.

In a post-September 11 world, this controversy has taken on wider significance. Film critic Michael Medved argued that American Jewish leaders were wrong to attack the film as anti-Semitic because they risked alienating Christian allies (of rightwing Zionism, apparently), who were needed to fight the "Islamo-fascists" (his word, on the Deborah Norville show) attacking Jews in Israel.

Although Medved appears in this argument to be taking the more "assimilated" position, basically saying that the rightwing Christians should be allowed to broadcast their historically absurd and offensive images of first-century Jews in peace regardless of the consequences, in fact his is the more reactionary position on several levels.

First, he is saying that a minority that faces many attacks every year in the US and Europe should not speak out about cultural phenomena that might increase those attacks. The United States is a relatively tolerant society in world-historical terms, but the ADL alleges that 17 percent of Americans hold anti-Semitic beliefs, and there are every year too many incidents of vandalism of Jewish property and harassment of Jews. I suspect I differ with the ADL on what exactly anti-Semitism is (it isn't criticism of Israeli policies in the Occupied Territories), but I accept their number as a ballpark figure. And if that is the number, it is way too high. Bigotry is when you stereotype an entire group, and then blame individuals for imagined "group" traits. Individuals are unique, and you can't tar a whole people with a single brush. And, it is by speaking out about the problem that any minority makes progress in the United States. Who would imagine telling African-Americans they should be quiet about films that depict them as villains harming something whites hold dear? No liberals that I know of.

Second, Medved is eager to perpetuate a dangerous political marriage of convenience between the rightwing settler movement in Israel and the American evangelicals. The rightwing Christians in the US don't support the settlers against the Palestinians because they love Judaism. They want to set things up for the conversion of all Jews to Christianity and the return of Christ, i.e., for the end of the Jewish people. (Interestingly, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is aware of this "Christian Zionism" and cites it as one motive for the US occupation of Iraq; it is not making Israel or the US any friends). The Likud may get votes and de facto campaign money from the rightwing Christians in the short term, but it is encouraging Christian anti-Semitism by disguising it as support for Israel. In fact, Israel's best interests lie in a return to the 1967 borders and making peace with Arab and Muslim neighbors, not by a ruthless expansionism and continued colonial occupation that harms Israel's image and debilitates Israeli democracy. (Yitzhak Rabin's policies of Oslo and after, before an ultra-Orthodox Jewish assassin cut him down, would have pulled the rug out from under Zarqawi's argument).

Third, it is hard to see the difference between the bigotry of anti-Semitism as an evil and the bigotry that Medved displays toward Islam. It is more offensive than I can say for him to use the word "Islamo-fascist." Islam is a sacred term to 1.3 billion people in the world. It enshrines their highest ideals. To combine it with the word "fascist" in one phrase is a desecration and a form of hate speech. Are there Muslims who are fascists? Sure. But there is no Islamic fascism, since "Islam" has to do with the highest ideals of the religion. In the same way, there have been lots of Christian fascists, but to speak of Christo-Fascism is just offensive. It goes without saying that a phrase like Judeo-fascist is an unutterable abortion. (And this despite the fact that Vladimir Jabotinsky, the ideological ancestor of Likud and the Neocons, spoke explicitly of the desirability of Jewish fascism in the interwar period). Medved is even inaccurate, since the terrorist attack on civilians in Jerusalem to which he referred was the work of the Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a secular rather than an ostensibly Muslim group.

Interestingly, the Koran, the holy book of Islam, denies that the Jews were responsible for Jesus's death (4:154-159). It appears that some Jews of the ancient Arabian city of Medinah were disappointed when they learned that the Prophet Muhammad had accepted Jesus as a prophet of God, and had put this decision down by observing that he wasn't much of a prophet if the Jews had managed to kill him. The Koran replies to this boast (surely by some jerk in the Medinan Jewish quarter) by saying, "They did not kill him, and they did not crucify him, it only appeared to them so." What exactly the Koran meant by this phrase has been debated ever since. As an academic, I do not read it as a denial of the crucifixion. The Koran talks of Jesus dying, and is not at all Gnostic in emphasis, at one point insisting that Jesus and Mary ate food (presumably against Gnostics who maintained that their bodies were purely spiritual). A lot of Muslims have adopted the rather absurd belief that Jesus was not crucified, but rather a body double took his place. (This is like something out of the fiction of Argentinean fabulist Jorge Luis Borges). Those Muslims who accepted Jesus' death on the cross (and nothing else in the Koran denies it) interpret the verse as saying it was God's will that Jesus be sacrificed, and so it was not the Jews' doing. (Great Muslims like at-Tabari and Ibn Khaldun accepted the crucifixion). Any way you look at it, though, the Koran explicitly relieves Jews of any responsibility for Jesus' crucifixion and death. In this it displays a more admirable sentiment than some passages of the Gospels, and certainly than the bizarre far-rightwing Catholic cult in which Mel Gibson was raised, which appears to involve Holocaust denial, and which deeply influenced his sanguinary film.


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3 Iraqi Contractors Killed, 2 Wounded in Mosul

AFP says that guerrillas sprayed machine gun fire from a car at Iraqi contractors in Mosul working for the Americans, killing 3 and wounded 2 on Tuesday.
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Bremer fails to Resolve Deadlock in IGC over Fundamental Law

ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that Paul Bremer met Tuesday with the nine most powerful members of the Interim Governing Council in an attempt to settle outstanding issues that have delayed passage of the Fundamental Law or interim constitution. A member of the IGC who declined to be named told SA that some powerful members had used new tactics to forestall resolution of some key issues, leaving them as time bombs that would explode in the future. These include the shape of Iraqi federalism, the question of whether there will be a three-man rotating presidency, and the prerogatives of the future governing council. He said that in many instances a provision had been voted on, but that those opposed to it managed to bring it back up and unsettle it later. He expressed skepticism that the most pressing issues would be resolved, saying that the Americans had exerted enormous pressure to have a finished document within a week. He seemed to imply that any such document would dodge all the hard questions, ensuring that they became explosive when the transitional government was forced to take them up later.
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Karbala Provincial Council Row Shows Power of Shiite Clergy in Iraq

Mariam Fam has the best and clearest account I have seen of the recent trouble in Karbala over the provincial council. Apparently what happened is that the Coalition Provisional Authority decided to expand the council from 16 to 40. They asked local tribal leaders and other notables for a list of candidates, and then CPA administrator John Perry simply appointed the ones that he chose from the list.

Several Shiite clergymen, including Abdul Mahdi al-Karbala'i, the representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Karbala, and Muhammad Taqi al-Mudarrisi, leader of the Islamic Action Movement, condemned the council as undemocratically chosen because of the CPA appointments. Al-Karbala'i demanded that it resign, and four did.

Sistani is said to view the council as illegitimate because of the way it was selected.

Then on Sunday, the CPA announced that the new appointments would be subject to some sort of referendum. On Monday the governor of Karbala, Saad Safuk, forbade the holding of demonstrations unless the demonstrators had applied for and received a permit at least 24 hours prior to the rally. This decree strikes me as a violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with regard to freedom of assembly.

One of the appointed council members who resigned is quoted by Fam,

' Saad Nasrawy said he decided to resign because he thought the selection process was arbitrary, but would have done so anyway after the clergy raised objections. "We, the Shiites, believe in our religious authority and consider their orders to be sacred," Nasrawy said. "We consider those who violate their orders to be nonbelievers...I am a Shiite. I have to obey." '

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Muqtada: The UN has Agreed to the Occupation of Iraq

Excerpts from and comments by me on an IRNA (Iran) news agency interview with Muqtada al-Sadr, 23 Feb. 04 (courtesy BBC monitoring) follow. Muqtada al-Sadr, 30, is the son of revered Iraqi cleric Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, who was assassinated by Saddam in 1999. Muqtada has taken a radical stance, demanding the immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.

Sadr: "I will only negotiate with the Americans if their country says that it has come here to liberate us not to occupy us. That is because occupying a country is incompatible with the very principle of holding negotiations. We are not hostile to America, but we are the enemy of occupation." '

Asked about the UN finding that elections could not be held before June 30, he said that the UN did not have the right to interfere in Iraq's internal affairs and added, "The UN has agreed to the occupation of Iraq." He went on:

' The issue of the elections must be considered under the auspices of the Organization of the Islamic Conference and the Arab League and that is because those two organizations are closer to Iraq. At least, they have not declared their agreement to the occupation of Iraq . . . All the parties involved have agreed upon the necessity of holding elections in Iraq. However, they have a difference of opinion over its details . . .

"From the very beginning, I believed that the occupiers did not want Iraq to enjoy either the rule of the people or freedom. . . There is no reaction at present. If there is a reaction, it is going to be manifested through such peaceful means as staging demonstrations or sit-ins. ' He warned that violence would damage Islam and the Shi`ite branch of Islam. . . .

He said that elections could not be held while the country was occupied: ' Holding elections is one of the symbols of the rule of the people. It is not compatible with occupation, which is a symbol of dictatorship . . . '

Muqtada said he was opposed to the postponement of elections until 2005, and that he opposed the Interim Governing Council as collaborators with the occupation.

He said he opposed the division of Iraq along ethnic lines, and opposed a loose federal system that recognized such divisions: " The territorial integrity of Iraq must be preserved from north to south and from east to west." . . .

Of Iraq's future government: "I only want a government based on freedom and the rule of the people. Obviously, such a government will be an Islamic one. "

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Iraqi Women see Window of Opportunity Closing

Scheherezade Faramarzi reports on women's aspirations for Iraq. It sounds as though not only did Mr. Bremer not appoint many women to the Interim Governing Council, but even some of the ones left on it are Islamists who favor or acquiesce in Islamic personal status law. It really is a scandal that the US appointed so few women. One, Aqilah al-Hashimi, was assassinated (she had asked for and been refused US protection). The ones left had no experience or institutional base.
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Iraq as Election issue in Ohio

Leo Shane II reports that many local voters continue to be concerned with the Iraq war as an issue even when it no longer affects them personally. In this sense, the current troop shift, whereby tens of thousands of National Guardsmen are being sent to Iraq for a year, could be a factor in the election.

(Guardsmen typically thought they would be serving weekends and some summer weeks, and if they pulled a tour overseas, it would be for 6 months. The Guards were not sent to Vietnam, but have been sent to Iraq. Many Guardsmen are plunged into poverty by such a tour, losing their small businesses or substantial parts of their salaries, and some even lose their homes because they can't keep up the mortgage payments. Then there is the issue of putting their lives on the line even though no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have been found . . .)

Ordinarily a large majority of the military and the National Guards probably vote Republican. A lot of them are upset over having been given long, dangerous duty in Iraq, at a time when that country turns out not to have posed any threat to the US. If you figure that by October some 200,000 Americans will have served long terms in Iraq, and you extrapolate that out to five close family members each, that would be at least a million citizens directly affected. If even half of them turned against Bush over the issue, that would be 500,000. The country is so evenly divided politically that such numbers may matter.
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Bush started Iraq War Planning in February 2002

The Guardian reports that Rowan Scarborough reveals in his new book, ' On February 16, 2002, Bush signed a secret national security council directive establishing the goals and objectives for going to war with Iraq, according to classified documents I obtained," Scarborough wrote '

This was already pretty obvious, just from the troop movements in spring of 2002. People used to ask me if I thought there really was going to be a war against Iraq. Duh. You don't build up all those troops in the Gulf for nothing.
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Treasury Department attempts to stop Editing of Papers from Iran

Those of you who care about what is left of the First Amendment in this country should read this article at Democracy Now on the Treasury Department's threats to imprison and fine any of us editors who dare edit a paper for publication from a scholar in Iran (also Sudan, etc.). Someone remarked that the legal penalties for most rapists are probably lighter! It is ridiculous that editing a paper by an Iranian contributor in any way is an economic transaction or harms national security. Treasury does this "in consultation" with the Department of Justice. This step, like most of the Bush administration's Draconian moves (most pursued by Attorney General John Ashcroft), disgusts me. Let the eagles fly, indeed. (He can't sing, either.)

I actually edit a journal, The International Journal of Middle East Studies, that receives scholarly submissions from Iran. Unfortunately, so far none of them has gotten past the referees and so none are scheduled for publication. Some editors are planning civil disobedience. This matters. Next we won't be able to write about Iran. And then gradually we won't be able to criticize the decisions of John Ashcroft or John Snow. I had my newspaper articles censored occasionally when I was in Lebanon by the Baath under Hafez al-Asad. I've been censored by the best, and I am not afraid of the yahoos in Washington, D.C. Although Treasury is issuing the threats, my operating assumption is that prosecution would come from Justice. Whenever the Bush administration has been directly challenged on these sorts of illegal steps, it has rapidly backed down. Send protest email to the Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control is ofac_feedback@do.treas.gov. The address to complain to the Dept. of Justice about the issue is AskDOJ@usdoj.gov.


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UN: No Early Elections in Iraq

Kofi Annan released his report on Monday suggesting that direct elections can't take place in Iraq until December of 2004 or early 2005. He made no suggestions about how to establish a government in Iraq to which the US could hand over sovereignty as planned on June 30. He is said to be opposed to the American practice of imposing solutions on the Iraqis, and will send Lakhdar Brahimi back to Iraq to ascertain from its leading political figures how they believe a transitional government could best be chosen.

This way of proceeding seems to me unlikely to be fruitful. Iraq is in its current difficulties in part because the Interim Governing Council has proven incapable of making tough decisions. It could not even elect a president, instead choosing to have a nine-man presidency that rotates once a month, ensuring lack of continuity. IGC member Muwaffaq al-Rubaie told al-Hayat yesterday that it seems to him unlikely that the IGC will succeed in approving a new Fundamental Law (interim constitution) by the deadline of February 28. Some outstanding issues include federalism (how much autonomy, exactly, will the Kurds have?), the place of Islam in Iraqi law, and the role of women in Iraqi society. Al-Rubaie said he thought these problems were so intractable that it was unlikely they would be resolved within a week. Paul Bremer, the American civil administrator of Iraq, has expressed his confidence that the deadline will be met.

Since you can hardly have a sovereign government without at least such a rump constitution, if the IGC proves unable to pass such a Fundamental Law by June 30, it would put in doubt the transition. Al-Rubaie says the Kurds are terrified of a renewed central government with an army, and their terror makes them unable to compromise (the Kurds want an undertaking that the national army won't set foot on their province).

If Kofi Annan is waiting for the IGC to take a decisive stance on how to constitute the transitional government, he will be waiting for a very long time. Brahimi will come back from another trip to Iraq with notes that show deep division and chronic indecisiveness. Whatever Annan decides, it will be an imposition on some major political force in the country, so he may as well just be decisive. He would be the only one acting that way in this whole sorry mess.


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Rumsfeld Warns Iran and Syria

US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had Iran and Syria exactly where they want him. he alleged that Syria accepted Baath escapees from Iraq during the war last spring, and that Iran is "harboring" al-Qaeda and allowing its men to slip through Iraq into Iran.

I personally doubt that Iran is "harboring" al-Qaeda if by that is meant that Iran allows them freedom of movement and lets them launch operations from its soil. The Iranians admit that they have some al-Qaeda personnel in captivity; but then so does the US, at Guantanamo.

The main point is that Rumsfeld can't do anything about Syria or Iran. Half of his active duty military is tied down in Iraq battling a guerrilla insurgency that killed 300 Iraqis last month alone. That is 3600 a year if we extrapolate it out, or something similar to the entire loss of life in Northern Ireland 1969-2001 during the war there!

Syria and Iran know very well that Rumsfeld can't move against them. The US wouldn't dare act publicly against Iran if there was a chance that might anger the Shiite leaders of Iraq and bring hundreds of thousands of protesters into the streets. The US needs the Shiites cooperative and quiet, and attacking Iran openly just won't achieve that aim. Likewise, the US can't attack Hizbullah in Lebanon (the press mysteriously spells the name in Persian as Hezbollah, but there is no short "e" or long "o" sound in Arabic). That might also alienate the Iraqi Shiites. Rumsfeld can talk belligerently, but he's stuck in Iraq and genuinely needs Iran and Syria's cooperation. We all know he can't get it with threats. So why bother, except that it may make him feel good.
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Sistani wants Deep UN involvement

Al-Sabah newspaper in Kuwait, quotes a statement put out by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani on Monday.

DPA summarizes it: Sistani ' said the UN should play a central role in the transfer of power to the Iraqis' and that he wanted the UN to “completely supervise the political process until Iraq reaches a continuous established situation . . . The UN has a great responsibility to the Iraqi people because it legitimised the occupation and gave it international coverage . . ."

The DPA translates the rest of the statement thusly: ' The important elements that should reign in Iraq, al-Sistani said, are pluralism, freedom of opinion, and justice and equality among citizens. “Most Muslim Iraqis will choose a system that respects the pillars of the Islamic law and respects the rights of minorities,” he said. '

But az-Zaman gives the Arabic text and this is what he actually said:

He stressed that it is important that the country be led by "democratic consultation, pluralism, and the peaceful transfer of sovereignty, in addition to justice and equality among the children of the country with regard to their rights and duties." He added, "The majority of Iraqis is Muslim, and they will choose a system that respects the verities of Islamic canon law (sharia), along with protections for the rights of religious minorities."
Note that the Arabic has nothing in it about fredom of opinion that I can see, and the last phrase about sharia or Islamic law is far more unequivocal than the DPA translation suggests.
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Delaying Elections is a Time Bomb: Mudarrisi

Wire services report that Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Taqi al-Mudarrisi speculated that the transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis on June 30 would cause the guerrilla insurgency to decrease and "maybe disappear."

He followed that bit of optimism with a warning that delaying direct elections unduly was "a time bomb that could explode at any minute."

'"Without elections, our national institutions will remain shaken, unrecognized and distrusted by the people," Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Taqi al-Modaresi said in Karbala, Iraq.'

Mudarrisi has long worried about a "Lebanonization" of Iraq, and has argued for a pluralistic society there. He is the leader of the Organization of Islamic Action, a mostly Karbala-based party that he established in 1979 before being forced by persecution to go to Iran.
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About Half the American Public is Terminally Stupid

A new poll shows that 51% of Americans believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the US went to war with it last spring. Some 47% believe that clear evidence that Iraq was supporting al-Qaeda has been found in that country. Both of these allegations are false (whether they are lies is a different matter), and any halfway informed person should know by now that they are false. What do half of Americans believe happened to all that WMD? It is not as if it can just be made to disappear with the wave of a wand; and it certainly doesn't exist in Iraq today.
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Bombing at Kurdish Police Station Kills 13, Wounds Dozens

Reuters now says that a suicide bomber killed himself and 13 policemen in an attack on a police station in a Kurdish neighborhood of Kirkuk, which also wounded over 50 others. Kirkuk, with a mixed Turkmen, Arab and Kurdish population, has been the site of ethnic disturbances in recent weeks.

AP also reported, 'On Sunday, a roadside bomb killed an Iraqi near the northern city of Mosul, while another bomb exploded in Baghdad's al-Washash neighborhood and injured four Iraqi policemen.'

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Oil Pipeline near Karbala Blown Up

Saboteurs have long prevented oil from being pumped from Kirkuk to Turkey through sabotage of the oil pipelines. But on Sunday they struck in the south, as well, at the Baghdad-Basra oil pipeline. The guerrillas are attempting to keep the country from stabilizing with regard to fuel and services, in hopes of making the US and its successor regime unpopular on a continuing basis.

Wire services report, 'In the first attack of its kind in the south since the collapse of Saddam's regime, an oil pipeline was targeted near Karbala, 110km from Baghdad, an official Iraqi source said "An explosion damaged the pipeline and we don't know who the saboteurs are," local Karbala official Hamid Salah al-Shebib said. '
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Al-Hakim to US: Stop Stalling on Elections

AP reports that Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), has demanded that the US stop "stalling" a national election in Iraq. Al-Hakim has been willing to cooperate with the Americans, but is impatient with Paul Bremer's repeated assertions that the country is more than a year away from direct elections. Al-Hakim's diction echoes that of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, to whom he is close.

In Karbala, the Coalition Provisional Authority gave in to popular demand, and said that the new 40-person provincial council recently appointed by the Americans would be subjected to a vote of religious leaders and notables. I'm confused by this story, since US AID had asked the Research Triangle Institute to form these councils in association with local notables. So why was CPA official John Perry appointing a new council now, by fiat?

Some of the impatience Shiite leaders such as Sistani and al-Hakim evince with US "stalling" on elections derives from the high-handed and authoritarian way the US has behaved with regard to governance in the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. The first US-appointed mayor of Najaf was a Sunni Baathist officer, who went on to kidnap Shiite notables and hold them for ransom!

Meanwhile, Shiites began the mourning rituals of the month of Muharram in Karbala. They commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, at the hands of the Umayyad Caliph Yazid in 680 CE (AD). This is an emotionally fraught season, which in some countries has been attended by some Sunni-Shiite violence (Yazid ruled before classical Sunnism took form, but many Shiites see him as a Sunni oppressor of their holy Imam or religious leader).
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Update on Americana in Arabic Project

The project to translate key works of American thought, culture and history into Arabic and have them properly distributed is forging ahead. The first translation will be key works of Thomas Jefferson. The generosity of contributors has overwhelmed me, and we already have some money the kitty after only a week and a half. I have had long conversations by phone or email with several Iraqi intellectuals who are interested in helping with the project. I have sent out the Michigan Articles of Incorporation for the Global Americana Institute, a non-profit 501c3 organization that will carry out the project. That is the first step, and when I hear back I'll be able to go to the IRS. I have also had contact with Fulbright and NEH staffers, and with a kind supporter in the State Department. I have a phone call into a private foundation that might be interested.

I'd say that's some progress for a week and a half.

Some readers have written to remind me to have the translations put on the Web. We will do that, but I regret to report that in my experience, the internet is still an underdeveloped and relatively small phenomenon in the Arab world. What we are aiming at is inexpensive trade paperback editions, with wide distribution to book retailers of various sorts, and placement in libraries.

Others have suggested other authors to translate. I'd love to do a wide range of translations, the full panoply of the American struggle with the ideals of democracy, equality and individual initiative and liberty. Obviously, the more in contributions we receive, the more we'll be able to accomplish. I am really encouraged by the enthusiasm I have met for the project everywhere, and am confident it will see results. Will keep everyone posted here on progress.
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Prominent Sunni cleric Assassinated

The Chicago Tribune reports on the assassination Saturday in the Western Baghdad quarter of Khadra of prominent Sunni cleric Shaikh Dhamir al-Dhari. He had been one of several Sunni clerics to form a board to support Sunni interests, in hopes of offsetting the power of the more hierarchical and organized Shiite clergy. His assailants have not been identified.
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Kwiatkowski on the Neoconservative Coup at the Pentagon

The LA Weekly interviews Karen Kwiatkowsky, retired US Air Force Lt. Colonel, who watched the Neocon network take over Middle East policy at the Pentagon with her own eyes. She says the war aims of this group were threefold: 1) To position US companies to get Iraq oil and other contracts, which would not have happened had sanctions continued to loosen with Saddam in power; 2) to create a new Iraq that would be friendly to the establishment of military bases in that country, given that the basing situation in Saudi Arabia was unsatisfactory [and that many in the Pentagon believe the oil-rich and unstable Persian Gulf needed permanent US bases to guarantee oil security); 3) they were threatened by Saddam's decision in the year 2000 to price oil in Euros, which threatened the stability of the dollar.

I doubt that the Euro issue was that pressing for the Neocons; it sounds more like something Cheney and Rumsfeld would worry about. In fact, all three of the reasons she says were given for the Iraq war would have appealed outside the circle of the Neocons. I am surprised she left out what surely was the Neocons' major concern, which is that Iraq, Iran and Syria stood in the way of Ariel Sharon's continued theft of Arab land in the Occupied territories and potentially elsewhere, by virtue of their willingness to support groups like Hezbollah and the Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. The Neocons wanted to knock down Saddam, Khamenei and al-Asad in hopes that those countries would be so weakened and preoccupied with internal power struggles that Sharon would have an unimpeded opportunity to pursue his dreams of Greater Israel and the final destruction of the Oslo Peace Accords.

As it happens, the emergence of the Iraqi Shiites has immensely strengthened Lebanon's Hezbollah. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani issued a strongly worded condemnation of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians in 2002. In fact, the Sunni clerics in Iraq celebrated Hezbollah's success in forcing Sharon to exchange prisoners. The rise of Sunni nationalist and fundamentalist resistance movements in Iraq may well hold threats to Israel down the road, as well. In all likelihood, the hubris of the Neocons in Washington has actually made Israel less secure than it was with a contained Saddam.


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4 US soldiers Wounded, their Translator Killed

According to Reuters, '''Four US soldiers were wounded and their Iraqi translator was killed in a small arms fire ambush 22 km (14 miles) south of Iskandariya (near Baghdad). Two civilian type SUVs were destroyed in the attack,'' a US military spokeswoman said.'
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Four Members of Karbala's Provincial Assembly Resign under Pressure from Sistani

al-Hayat: Four members of Karbala's American-appointed provincial council yielded to the demands that they resign issued by the representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. All four, including one woman, said they are "suspending" their membership in the body. Abdul Mahdi al-Karbala'i had warned them of dire consequences if they continued to serve. Al-Karbala'i maintains that members appointed by fiat by the American provincial administrator last summer have no legitimacy, and that local notables and Sistani himself should have been consulted about the appointments. The members who resigned asked for a freely elected provincial council. A remaining member of the appointed council said he expected further resignations.

Demands for resignations of undemocratically appointed provincial councils have roiled the southern cities of Kut, Amara and Nasiriyah in recent weeks.

Paul Bremer gave an interview at al-Arabiya satellite t.v. on Saturday, in which, at least as he was translated, he seemed to say that technical considerations would make holding direct elections in Iraq impossible for at least a year to 15 months. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani seems to want them by October. So far if you had to bet on who would get his way, Bremer or Sistani, you'd have to put your money on Sistani. Bremer will be back in Washington, DC on July 2, and Sistani will still be there. If the Americans cannot even keep their provincial council for Karbala in place under the pressure of a few sermons from Sistani supporters, they can't easily overrule Sistani on elections.
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Abdul Hamid Shocks Kuwait and Jordan with Claims on their Territories

Bahrain Daily News reports, The president for a month of the Interim Governing Council, Muhsin Abdul Hamid (leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party, i.e. the Muslim Brotherhood), was asked at a news conference in Baghdad what the future Iraqi government would do about Iraqi territories usurped in the past by Jordan and Kuwait. Abdul Hamid, who is a loose canon and should resign, said, "We need our Arab brothers around us. Now, we cannot discuss this matter with them at all, but in the future, we'll see . . . for every conversation there is an appropriate occasion."

This is one big problem with the Middle East, which is that so few countries want to stay within their present borders. Ariel Sharon's Israel now wants nearly half the West Bank, and says it intends to keep parts of Syria, and regrets having hastily given up on keeping parts of Lebanon, and who knows about the future. Syria is reluctant to withdraw its "peacekeeping" troops from Lebanon, which it has long wanted to annex. Now even liberated Iraqis are hungrily eyeing parts of Jordan and Kuwait! (Adnan Pachachi, a venerable Arab nationalist politician, has in the past also expressed a desire for Kuwait, though he has more recently given that sort of thing up).
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Chinese Excited over Iraq's Free Market Growth

Those capitalist roaders among the Chinese communists in Shanghai appear to be watering in the mouth over the potential profits to be made from a reviving Iraq. The Shanghai Daily estimates that Iraqis have imported 250,000 new cars in the past 10 months, that demand for electronics is strong, and that one can find in Iraqi retail outlets "commodities from Japan, China, and Western and Arab countries." Building materials' prices have soared as new buildings are being put up in Baghdad and elsewhere.

With the influx of reconstruction money, both from the Madrid Donors' conference ($13 bn.) and from the US Congress ($18 bn.), due to begin in a month or two, one Iraqi economist is quoted expecting the unemployment rate to drop from 50 percent presently to 40 percent within a matter of months.

Hisham al-Shama, a professor of economics at Baghdad U., expects Iraq's gross domestic prduct to grow from US $ 25 bn. today to $250 bn. in ten years. (If the Iraqi population grows to about 34 million in ten years, as is likely, that would be a per capita income of about $8,000 per year, the same as Saudi Arabia presently and very nearly the level Korea is at now ($9930), and higher than the present per capita income in Mexico or the Czech Republic. Not paradise, but quite respectable, especially given the country's state for the past ten years; that is, if the prediction holds true).
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Is Iraq an Arab Country?

Islam Online reports a heated debate in Iraq and in the Interim Governing Council over whether Iraq should be identified in the Fundamental Law (the interim constitution) as an Arab state. Iraq's population is about 24 million, probably. Some 65 % or 15.6 million are Shiite Arabs. Another 15% or 3.6 million are Sunni Arabs. That's 80% of the country. The remaining 20% is probably split this way: 2% Chaldeans and Assyrians, many of whom speak Aramaic as their mother tongue; 2% Turkmen who speak a Turkic language; and 16% Kurds. (Iraqi audiences don't like to hear these kinds of social statistics, but this is the best I can do right now, and it is highly unlikely that there are millions of Turkmen, or that Kurds are a fourth of the population, as both claim. If you add all the percentages up according to ethnic claims they come to 160% of Iraq's population!) Anyway, the point is that Iraq is probably 80% Arabophone, and the minorities all speak Arabic as a national language. It would not be strange to have Iraq declare itself an "Arab" country, and it certainly will be a member of the Arab League. (It is very nearly as "Arab" as Israel is "Jewish"--15% of Israelis are Muslim, Christian, and Druze Arabs). But Saddam did so much psychic and political damage in the name of Arabism that the Kurds and Turkmen have come deeply to dislike the concept. We may be witnessing the beginnings of the first multiculturalist politics in an Arab country.

Meanwhile, ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that Sami Donmoz, leader of the Turkmen Islamic Movement in Iraq, issued a statement rejecting and denouncing the current draft of the Fundamental Law on the grounds that it makes no explicit mention of the existence or the rights of the Turkmen people of Iraq.
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2 US Soldiers and an Iraqi Killed near Khalidiyah

Wire services report: 'Two US soldiers and an Iraqi have been killed by a roadside bomb near the city of Khalidiya, west of Baghdad. Earlier, an Iraqi policeman was wounded in an attack on an American convoy in Baquba, northeast of the capital."

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Kurds' demand for Autonomy Roils IGC

The Washington Post reports that the issues of the nature of federalism and the rights of minorities and provinces with regard to Iraq's Kurds are creating a deadlock in the Interim Governing Council as it polishes the Fundamental Law that will serve as a constitution until a new one can be drafted. The Sunni Arabs on the IGC think the Kurds are asking for too much. They want the right to veto domestic legislation affecting them, giving the central government control only over foreign policy. They refuse to allow Iraqi army troops to enter their territory. They want control of the petroleum in their region, as, they say, Canadian provinces retain control such resources found in their province.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that the IGC is also stymied by the demand of the more activist religious parties that the Fundamental Law specify that Islamic canon law, the shariah, be the source of legislation rather than, as at present, only a source of legislation.
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The Annan Plan for Iraq

The London daily ash-Sharq al-Awsat says it has acquired an advance draft of comments UN Secretary General Kofi Annan will make on Monday regarding the future of Iraq and the procedure for elections. It says there are five points:

1) General elections must be held with a guarantee of constitutionality in Iraq. They should be held at the end of 2004 or the beginning of 2005, i.e. between seven to eight months after the transfer of sovereignty July 1.

2) There must be unanimity among the active parties in Iraq that elections be held, to elect the members of an interim parliament after the transfer of sovereignty.

3) The US pledge to transfer sovereignty to an Iraqi government on June 30 must be honored.

4) The instrumentality of the transfer of sovereignty will be decided jointly by the UN, the Coalition authority, and the Interim Governing Council.

5) The UN must be involved in the political process both before the transition process begins and after the formation of a transitional government.

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Al-Zarqawi Rebuffed


The NYT reports that US suveillance of "chatter" among suspected terrorists suggests to them that al-Qaeda has decided not to get involved in Iraq, as Zarqawi had proposed.

al-Hayat profiled Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (i.e. Ahmad Fadl Nizal al-Khala'ilah) today. It says he is from al-Zarqa, a town near the capital of Amman. He is in his late 30s. He went to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets in the mid-1980s (he must have been very young!). He took part in jihad against the Soviets. Afghan sources insisted to al-Hayat that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was seen at Tora Bora (November 2001) during the Afghanistan war, and was probably wounded. He escaped via Iran to Iraq and engaged in terrorist activities there. He visited Zarqa at the beginning of summer 2003.

Zarqawi is said to have been a prime organizer of an attack on the Jewish sites in Jerba, an island off Tunisia, in which Tunisian Jews and German tourists were hurt.


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Demonstrations for Elections in Najaf

The Iranian news agency is reporting that thousands of demonstrators came out in the shrine city of Najaf in Iraq on Friday to demand early elections:

'In Najaf, thousands of demonstrators clamored in the streets for elections, defying the United States and the United Nations. And Sistani's representative in the holy city of Karbala, Sheikh Abdel Mahdi Al-Karbalai, defended the demand for early elections . . . "The Marjaiya (clerical elite) have demanded elections so that the Iraqi people, who have been shut out of the political leadership, will be represented," Karbalai said.'
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Al-Karbala'i calls for Resignation of Provincial Council

AFP/ash-Sharq al-Awsat report that Shaykh Abdul Mahdi al-Karbala'i, the representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in the holy city of Karbala, called on the members of the provincial council there to submit their resignations because "their appointment was by an American decision, and there had been no consultation with the religious leadership [i.e. Sistani]. He complained that the US official (John Perry?) had just appointed the council, without discussing it with the religious and political leadership.

He said, "I call upon the persons in question to withdraw from the council and I remind them that sooner or later the occupying power will withdraw. And if it does not withdraw, its members will face the people, and you must take a lesson from those who confront it."
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Annan: No Direct Elections are Possible before July 1

The Washington Post reports the following: Kofi Annan did as Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani asked, and delivered a considered judgment about whether direct elections can be held before June 30. Annan's answer: No. That is not the answer Sistani wanted (see below). The US plan to hold council-based elections has collapsed--the Iraqis don't want it, Sistani doesn't want it, no one wants it. But Mr. Bremer insisted at a news conference on Thursday that 1) the transfer of sovereignty to an Iraqi government will occur without fail by July 1 and 2) Islamic canon law will not be the law of the land, and the rights of minorities will be guaranteed in the Fundamental Law now being drafted by the Interim Governing Council.

The major issue now is how exactly a government will be erected that will take control of the country from the US this summer, and that will then guide Iraq to open elections by the end of the year or so. Sistani wants the United Nations Security Council to issue a formal resolution regarding the new government and setting a firm timetable for general elections. ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that IGC member Ahmad Shiya` al-Barak consulted with Sistani on Thursday and emerged to say that the grand ayatollah would accept a deadline for open elections of 3 months after July 1 (i.e. October 1). Al-Barak also said that there was no objection to devolving sovereignty for 3 months onto the Interim Governing Council (is he reporting Sistani's views here)? There is some indication that if Sistani feels the elections are postponed for too long, he is willing to call his millions of followers into the streets. It would be interesting for the US political process if those demonstrations are happening in September and October because Sistani felt the delay was becoming intolerable.

In response to Mr. Bremer's news conference, ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that the radical young Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr threatened an armed challenge to the Americans, alluding to the 1920 rebellion against British colonialism and to the "Sha`ban Uprising" against Saddam of spring, 1991, if Islamic law is not made the sole source of Iraqi law. Muqtada's office called Bremer's refusal of Islamic law as the principal source of legislation a sign of "vehement enmity toward Islam." Bremer's statement was also denounced by Sadr al-Din al-Qubanji of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution In Iraq in Najaf, who said, "today, sovereignty is the property of the people, and this means we are not constrained by concepts imported from thousands of miles away." Sistani's chief aide in Karbala, Abdul Mahdi al-Karbala'i, said, "Islam is the basis for legislation, and that is a natural right insofar as we are a majority Muslim society in contrast with the smallness of the other religions." He added, "We must not forget an important point, which is that no one has a right to interfere in the wording of the constitution except the Iraqi people. The supreme Object of Emulation (Sistani) has made clear his insistence that the (final) constitution be drafted by a constituent assembly elected by the people."

WP adds: "Violence continued Thursday as insurgents killed two American soldiers in a roadside bombing near Khaldiyah, 50 miles west of the capital, the U.S. command said. "
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Iran, Iraq and Two Shiite Visions

Veteran Middle East reporter Nicholas Blanford writes in the Christian Science Monitor about Grand Ayatollah Sistani and the implications of his movement for Iran. It is a fine, subtly argued piece. I think that if Iraq is able to hold and sustain regular parliamentary elections, with the Shiite clerics mainly concerning themselves with social and moral issues from outside the government, as Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani envisages, it could help undermine Khomeinism in Iran. (I also make this argument in this week's The Nation, but it isn't online).

The Iranian elections are being held Friday, Feb. 20, but there is widespread apathy and a liberal boycott. The Khomeinists will do well, but will lack legitimacy, and it may be a pyrrhic victory for them. I think President Khatami's political career is finished. He has no credibility left with anyone. I'd say it is safe to predict a fair amount of turmoil in Iran sometime in the next few years.
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Sistani Interview in Der Spiegel

If the article coming out on Saturday in Der Spiegel, the German news magazine, is accurate, it seems to me to portend significant difficulties ahead for the US. Sistani clearly is insisting on a new United Nations Security Council Resolution that would set out the procedures and timetable for free and fair direct elections in Iraq, if these cannot be held before the transfer of sovereignty on July 1 to an indigenous government. The US has resisted having a new resolution passed. Sistani is insisting (contrary to what his spokesman told Nick Blanford, above) that Islamic canon law or Shariah be the basis of the Iraqi legal code. And, Sistani is threatening that if he does not get what he wants on a short timeframe, he is prepared to launch a Shiite uprising against the Americans and their Coalition. The article says that his followers already have the placards for the demonstrations printed up and stored for use. The US so far has resisted both UNSC involvement in the process and adoption of religious law. If the Bush administration defies Sistani on these issues, there could be a lot of trouble looming ahead in Iraq.

This is my translation of the teaser for the interview, which is already online:

Der Spiegel EXCLUSIVE

Shiite leader Sistani insists on general elections

"Shiite leader Sayyid Ali al-Sistani becomes assertive with the USA. The Grand Ayatollah, in a Spiegel interview, presents the UN with an ultimatum insisting with Washington on a rapid transfer of power to a freely elected Iraqi government. He requires, in addition, the introduction of the "Sharia", the Islamic juridical system.

Hamburg - "the UN has authorized the USA to administer Iraq until 30 June 2004 as occupying power", said Sistani, religious leader of the Shiites, and one of the most influential preachers in Iraq, in the interview in Der Spiegel, which appears on Saturday. Now it [the UN] is also obligated to supervise the "transition from the occupation regime to a sovereign Iraq in every detail".

If elections cannot be accomplished any longer in good time before the return of sovereignty "because of delaying tactics of the occupier,” the prominent leader from the Shiite pilgrimage city of Najaf stated his precondition for accepting such a delay: The preparations for elections “would have to be brought about over a short time frame and made dependent on a resolution of the UN security council".

A resolution of the security council must also contain "guarantees that there will be no further delay of the elections". Sistani, 73, who has so far only rarely expressed himself in interviews, insisted to Der Spiegel also on the introduction of the Islamic juridical system ("Sharia") as basis of a future constitution.

The popular cleric, who suffered several years of house arrest under the regime of the fallen despot Saddam Hussein, hopes that the Shiite majority population will have a crucial influence on the political future of his country. "The rights of religious minorities", said Sistani, in a clear acquiescence in a pluralist constitution, “would nevertheless be protected".

Despite these assurances, such positions are a direct challenge of Washington. The US civil administrator in Bagdad, Paul Bremer, had affirmed only the previous week, that he would sign no constitution, that established a theocracy on the Euphrates and Tigris. The superpower fears that - instead of the democracy it wanted, after western model-a Shiite regime hostile to America could develop right next to Iran.

In view of the American attitude, Sistani warned Washington against further maneuvering. "It must not go on for a long time", said the preacher, and threatened, with only a few qualifications, an Iraqi Intifada (uprising): "the people know what they have to do." If America does not deal with his position, he wants to call the Iraqis to rise up. Appropriate posters are printed already and stored throughout the country ready for distribution."

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Zarqawi Issue Still on the Front Burner

Tony Karon at Time's weblog and Jim Lobe in the Asia Times both write interestingly on the letter attributed to Abu Mus`ab az-Zarqawi (i.e. Ahmad Fadil Al-Khalailah), the "Arab Afghan" leader of the al-Tawhid terrorist group that has for some time had a rivalry with al-Qaeda.

A fine, professional Arabist and career diplomat at the Coalition Provisional Authority has now done a complete and more polished translation of the whole letter, , which has been posted.

After talking to some contacts in DC, I have concluded that the letter is authentic and derives from al-Zarqawi. But I maintain that he dictated the basic ideas to a literate scribe, perhaps an Iraqi, who put them in flowery standard Arabic and threw in classical allusions.

I tend to agree with Karon and Lobe that the text of the Zarqawi letter for the most part does not support the use so far made of it by the Bush administration.

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11 Iraqis Killed, 55 Foreign Troops Wounded in Car Bombings

Reuters reports that guerrillas launched two car bomb attacks against a military base near Hilla yesterday, killing 11 and wounding over 100 others, including 55 Coalition troops under Polish command. AP said that "The wounded included 32 Iraqis and 26 Poles, as well as Hungarians, Bulgarians, Filipinos and an American."

Three US troops had been killed by roadside bombs on Monday and Tuesday.
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Bush Contradicted Again

President Bush keeps saying that everyone thought Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the Iraq war, implying that if he was wrong, he was in good company.

But Deutsche Welle reports of UN weapons inspector Hans Blix in February and March of 2003: 'Blix recalled that the inspectors visited nearly 70 sites in Iraq and never found anything substantial that might have justified the war. He admitted that many things had remained unaccounted for, but said more inspections on the ground could have helped answer important questions. "We said that you cannot put an equation mark between 'unaccounted for' and 'existing.' And I said that in a statement to the Security Council quite squarely," Blix explained. "The U.S. side did not really register this; they didn't care. They believed more in the defectors in their own intelligence than they believed in us."

This is not to mention that International Atomic Energy Agency official Muhammad al-Baradei examined US claims that Iraq was importing aluminum tubing to enrich uranium, and had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger, and pronounced both claims false, before the war was launched.

So, there were lots of knowledgeable people who challenged the claims Bush was making. In fact, they were much more knowledgeable on this matter than he was. Which wasn't hard.
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Bremer left Brass out of Loop on Iraqi Army Dissolution

AFP reports that Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace says that the Joint Chiefs were never consulted by Paul Bremer over his decision to simply dissolve the Iraqi army last May. Since actually having an Iraqi army might have made it easier to control the security situation, and since hundreds of US soldiers have been killed and thousands wounded as a result of poor security, you would have thought that the uniformed military deserved a voice in that epochal decision.

This sort of high-handedness has characterized the civilians in the Department of Defense ever since Bush got elected. Gen. Shinseki said you'd need hundreds of thousands of troops in Iraq for some time to keep order. He got slapped down by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, those great military minds and masters of anti-insurgency. Neither has ever offered Shinseki an apology or admission that he was right and they were wrong. The Neocons have been ordering around the generals, and the generals have had no choice but to do as they are told. Their premise is that the American public is populated by fools who can easily be swayed with a few rousing calls to patriotism. One only hopes that the next election proves them wrong.

Why did Bremer dissolve the Iraqi army? It is not true that it had stopped existing. The men would have reported to their barracks if instructed to do so and paid. Rumor has it that Ahmad Chalabi insisted on getting rid of the Baath army, because he wanted to build his own private militia and take over Iraq. But then, there are also rumors that Bremer did not like Chalabi, and did not agree with the Cheney/Garner plan, which had been to hand Iraq over to Chalabi within 6 months. One day we will know. But we won't get back the men and women killed and maimed in Iraq.
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Karbala Affairs

az-Zaman reports that a CPA official* has forced the resignation of the governor and deputy govenor of Karbala province along with several members of the provincial council. No reason was given for the move. On Tuesday, a former Baath official was shot dead in Karbala.

There have been demonstrations against provincial councils and governors in Nasiriyah, Kut and Amara in recent weeks. Although the CPA maintains that their members were not appointed by the Coalition, it was the Coalition or its agents that gathered together hand-picked notables to elect the councils. So they are appointees of appointees. Many Iraqis feel that the councils are often corrupt and nepotistic. This distrust is one reason for which Iraqis generally rejected the idea of having the councils select a national interim parliament.

Meantime, extensive security arrangements are being made in the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala for the start of the Shiite mourning month of Muharram, coinciding with the beginning of March. Karbala residents are already complaining that the city's infrastructure cannot handle the vast influx of Iranian pilgrims.
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*The Arabic looks like "John Perry", but since there are no vowels and there is no "p" in Arabic, I can't be sure.
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Laissez Faire Kaput

Reuters confirms earlier reports that Tom Foley, the Coalition Provisional Authority official in charge of economic policy, has given up on a plan to privatize 150 state-owned companies. The plan, submitted to the Interim Governing Council last fall, was shelved by that body. Many Iraqis feared that the state firms would be sold cheaply to foreign concerns, but Foley insists that the plan all along was to sell them to Iraqis. This statement contradicts the economic plans announced in August, in which the CPA said there would be no licensing or restrictions placed on foreign firms investing in Iraq, and that they would be allowed to own 100% of Iraqi companies and to expatriate profits immediately.

The more extreme laissez-faire projects to which the Washington Consensus supporters in the CPA wanted to subject Iraq were derailed by the guerrilla war and continued instability. Most investors with the money to buy an Iraqi company would be nervous about doing it anyway right about now. As for selling off the state-owned companies, that might not be an easy proposition. The first thing an investor would want to know is if they are profitable or could quickly and cheaply become so. My guess? No.

As I have said in the past, the entire plan contravened the international law concerning occupied territories, which does not permit an occupier to make alterations in the character of the occupied society or to change civil law.

I said this last fall on a radio show where I was a guest with Ruth Wedgewood, a professor of international law at Johns Hopkins. She said I was reading the 1907 Hague Regulations and the Fourth Geneva Accord with a "gimlet eye." I was taken aback that a specialist in international law would disregard the clear text of those treaties. Then later I found out that Wedgewood is not just a law professor. She serves on the Defense Advisory Board with . . . Tom Foley, Richard Perle, Henry Kissinger, James Woolsey, and the other heavies who helped drag the US into the Iraq war on false pretences. That's fine, but you know, she never said anything about this affiliation on the show, and it seems to me that she should have, if not recused herself on grounds of being Foley's fellow board member, at least made known her potential conflict of interest as a commentator.

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Armed Militias of SCIRI, Da`wa Patrol Samawah

AFP via az-Zaman: Security is being provided to the southern Shiite city of Samawah, pop. 350,000, by the paramilitary forces of the Da`wah Party and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. The Dutch and Japanese military contingents appear to be garrisoned outside the city. Samawah has been largely quiet, though it was the site of a rocket propelled grenade attack last Thursday. The Badr Corps leader there, Abdul Hussein Muhammad, boasted that no place in Iraq had security as good as his forces provided in Samawah. The editor of the al-Da`wa Party magazine in the city, however, disagrees, saying that they have just been lucky and the quiet is unlikely to continue.

The Shiite militias of the religious parties have substituted for the collapsed Iraqi army and the inefficient police in a number of southern cities, including Basra, as the NYT today reports.

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Women Demonstrate Demanding Equal Rights

Small groups of women demonstrated in cities all over Iraq on Wednesday, demanding that equal rights for them be specified in the Fundamental Law now being drafted by the IGC, and that 40% of seats in parliament be set aside for women. The set-aside of seats for women has already been implemented in Pakistan. In most Western democracies, few women are elected to parliament. Many Iraqi women feel that they should demand that their rights be spelled out now, because once the CPA is dissolved, conservative Iraqi men will press for restrictions on women. Perhaps they know what happened in Afghanistan.
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Arab-Americans and Bush

I was glad to see Jack Shafer at Slate take on the awful NYT report about "Arab-Americans" giving big donations to Bush. Most of the donors cited were Iranians and Pakistanis.

"Arab" is actually a linguistic category, like "Romance" or "Latin". Most of the people in the arid zone stretching from Morocco east to Iraq speak Arabic and the majority is Muslim. The 2000 spoken dialects of Arabic are quite diverse and until recently not always mutually comprehensible (the adoption of a Modern Standard Arabic for the purposes of writing and public discourse has allowed direct communication throughout the region; it is as though all the Romance countries got together and adopted a modernized form of Latin as their written language, but spoke Spanish or Italian or Romanian at home.)

But the region is linguistically diverse despite the dominance of Arabic. North Africa has a lot of Berbers, who are Muslim but do not speak Arabic as their mother tongue. Berber is an Afro-Semitic language very distantly related to Arabic and Hebrew. Then in Upper Egypt some groups speak African languages rather than Arabic. In Jordan, there is a large community of Circassians, Muslims from the Caucasus whose language may be distantly related to Chinese, who fled Russian persecution (the Russians conquered the Muslims of the Caucasus in the early 19th century and then fought them for decades; some estimate a million were displaced to the Ottoman Empire, and lots were killed; it was a kind of genocide). The Coptic Christians in Egypt and the Maronite and Eastern Orthodox Christians of Lebanon speak Arabic as their mother tongue and so are technically Arabs, but many don't think of themselves that way.

"Arab" is not a racial category. There are anyway no such things as races in the way they are popularly imagined. But even on that level the "Arabs" are just people who speak a language. The northern Sudanese are black Africans but speak Arabic. The Red Sea port city of Massawa in Eritrea (formerly Ethiopia) is largely Arabic-speaking because of historical trading patterns, though the population is African. On the other hand, there are blue-eyed, fair-haired Arabs in the Levant, presumably descendants of the Crusaders. About a third of Israelis are Arab Jews, i.e., Jews from Arabic-speaking countries who traditionally spoke Arabic as their mother tongue. While the term is now rejected by many, it is certainly the case that in 1945 Moroccan and Yemeni Jews were "Arab." All Arabs are not Muslim, and only a minority of Muslims is Arab.

In Iraq itself, many Chaldean Christians speak Aramaic (a Semitic language) as their mother tongue, and of course the Kurds speak an Indo-European language related to Persian and distantly to English. The Turkmen of Iraq, some 500,000 - 700,000 strong, speak an Altaic language related to Mongolian and perhaps very distantly to Korean and Japanese. Probably a majority of Iraqi Turkmen are Shiites, many of them esoteric ("New Age") in orientation, though I'm told there has been a movement among them to become more orthodox, and many of the latter support Muqtada al-Sadr.

So, the Arab world has a good deal of linguistic diversity within it. But then when you move north and east of Iraq, the situation becomes really complicated. Iran is 51% speakers of Persian, an Indo-European language related to Sanskrit and Hindi. It also contains Turkic Azeri, Turkmen and Qashqai speakers, and smaller Indo-European languages like Lur and Baluchi. In Turkey most people speak Turkish but there is a large Kurdish minority and traditionally there were many Armenian and Greek speakers. Central Asia largely speaks Turkic languages (Uzbek, Kazakh, Kyrgyz), which, however, are not that close to the Turkish spoken in Istanbul. I studied some Uzbek and the grammar is slightly different. A very substantial minority speaks a form of Persian called Tajik (about a third of Uzbeks, and the majority in Tajikistan). There are also Chinese speakers and some long-time Korean immigrant communities, along with Russians and German speakers, who are, despite living in Muslim-majority countries, from a Christian background but most often secularists because of the Soviet past. Kazakhstan is some 40% Russian.

Then you have Muslim South Asia. There are four major regional languages in Pakistan: Sindhi, Punjabi, Baluchi and Pushtu. All four are Indo-European. There is also a sliver of Kashmiri speakers on the Pakistani side of the Line of Control. But the national language of Pakistan is Urdu, which was the Muslim lingua franca in Muslim South Asia from the 18th century, and is a Persianized form of what we would now call Hindi. It is taught in schools and spoken alongside the regional languages, though the elite of the country still prefers English and often speaks halting Urdu. Again, it is Indo-European but with a large dose of Arabic, Semitic vocabulary. It is in fact a lot like a Muslim Yiddish. (Historically, "Hindi" is actually a result of a movement of Hindu nationalists to "purify" what was then called Hindustani of the Arabic and Persian words. The Muslims kept the words, and Hindustani came to be called Urdu. Urdu is a Mongolian and Turkish word meaning "military camp" and is the root of the English word "horde." When the Central Asian tribal warriors came into northern India, Urdu is the creole that ended up being spoken in the camps so that Hindu traders could sell the Muslim grandees their goods).

So when the New York Times included "Pakistanis" among the Arab-Americans, this would be like including Arnold Schwarzenegger in the "Latin Wave" of popular culture.

There are 1.3 billion Muslims in the world, and by the time the global population stabilizes around 2050, theirs will be the world's largest religion. Americans had better become more familiar with it.

As for supporting Bush, most of those people are Iraqis happy with the overthrow of Saddam; or Lebanese Christians, many of whom are traditionally Republicans (think Darrell Isa, whom the JDL tried to assassinate, and who got Gov. Gray Davis recalled). Many Iranian-Americans fled clerical rule in Iran and are trying to pull a Chalabi by getting the Bush administration to overthrow them, and they give Bush money. Many Pakistani Americans support the Republican Party because of their interest in family values or because of class reasons. South Asians are the elite of immigrants to the US, including the Pakistanis. They are wealthier than any other immigrant group, including the European immigrants. And are often physicians, engineers, and entrepreneurs who vote Republican for the same reason their European-American colleagues do.

Kerry doesn't offer much to Muslim Americans or Arab-Americans concerned about Middle East policy, since all the senators have had to toe the AIPAC line to avoid being targeted for unelection. My guess is that they will split again, as they did in the last election, but that there will be a marginal move to vote Democrat just because many of them are upset about the Patriot Act and the mishandling of Iraq.



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Sistani opposes Appointed Transitional Government

The Jordan Times reported on the various plans being put forward for the July1 US hand-off to a sovereign Iraqi government. Since direct elections probably cannot be held before that date, the inclination seems to be to hand sovereignty to a perhaps expanded, but still appointed, Interim Governing Council.

This latter plan may run up against severe opposition from the Shiites. The Jordan Times notes,

"Adnan Al Asadi, a senior member of the Islamic Da'wa Party, and other politicians who have met Sistani, say he wants any transitional assembly to be chosen by Iraqis. Asadi said Sistani wanted the Iraqi people to participate in setting up any new body so no one would question its legitimacy as had happened with the US-appointed Governing Council.

The NYT reported on Tuesday that the Shiites and the Kurds on the IGC are pressing to hold direct elections in their regions, and to let the Sunni Arabs hold caucuses to elect their leaders, if security concerns did not allow the Sunnis to hold open elections.

I don't think just handing power over to an expanded IGC will be acceptable to Sistani, and his wide authority and popularity in the Shiite regions make it difficult to simply ignore him.

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Japan invites Samawah Chieftains to Tokyo

The tribal chieftains of the Samawah region have been invited to Tokyo in April for consultations about the best ways to rebuild their city, according to az-Zaman/ DPA.

The Daily Star of Beirut recently published and interesting overview of the dire situation in Samawah.

The assignment of Japanese Self Defense Forces troops in Iraq is a first for the post-war period, and is deeply unpopular in Japan. Recent mortar attacks in Samawah has increased opposition to the mission, which is mainly humanitarian and dedicated to rebuilding.

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Ashura Coming

Nir Rosen has an important piece in the Asia Times on the preparations for Ashura in Iraq. Ashura, the 10th of the month of Muharram, commemorates the martyrdom of the grandson of the prophet, Husayn. It is a time of mourning, sermons, poetry, weeping and processions with self-flagellation. Hundreds of thousands of Shiites from Iraq, Iran and elsewhere in the Shiite world may be expected to converge on Karbala in a little over a month. Because emotions run high during the first ten days of Muharram, it has often been a time of Sunni-Shiite violence in places like Pakistan, though not so much in modern Iraq. If the Coalition Provisional Authority has by then come out against the election plans put forward by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, or has announced steps that most Shiites deeply dislike, it is possible that the commemoration could be politicized. It would be a time when it would be child's play to get hundreds of thousands of Shiites out in the streets protesting American policy.

There is also a danger that the Zarqawi sort of terrorist might attempt to use violence to spark Sunni-Shiite clashes or Shiite-Coalition ones.

On the other hand, there were attempts to politicize the Arba`in or the mourning held 40 days after the death anniversary of Hussein last April, and they generally came to naught. A lot of Iraqi Shiites are happy enough just to be able to practice their religion again, and some people dislike its politicization.

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Informed Comment wins 2003 Koufax Award for Expert Blog

Many thanks to all the kind readers who voted for Informed Comment, and to the authors of the progressive "Wampum" site for hosting the "awards ceremony" in cyberspace.
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Bremer Pledges to Block Islamic Law

Paul Bremer appointed Muhsin Abdul Hamid, the leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party (i.e. the Muslim Brotherhood) to serve on the Interim Governing Council. One could argue about whether this appointment was wise, but it is ironic that Bremer is now having to overrule his own appointee. Abdul Hamid is February’s president of the Interim Governing Council at a time when it is drafting Iraq’s Fundamental Law, which will serve as an interim constitution and may well end up the basis for the permanent one. Abdul Hamid wants shari`ah or the medieval codification of Islamic law to be “the principal” source of Iraqi law, rather than, as in the current draft, “a basic source.” Bremer has indicated that he would veto the change in language. But what he doesn’t say is that his veto power expires on July 1.

Meanwhile, 5 persons, including 3 US soldiers were killed in bombings in Iraq on Monday.
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Brahimi Warns Iraqis of Civil War

UN envoy to Iraq Lakhdar Brahimi knows whereof he speaks when it comes to civil war. He is Algerian, and watched his own country descend into a downward spiral of violence between secularists and Islamists in the 1990s. He has been intimately involved in diplomacy in Lebanon, helping end the civil war that devastated that country 1975-1989, and in Yemen and Afghanistan (also a site of civil conflict on a massive scale). So when Brahimi warns Iraqi leaders that their selfishness risks plunging Iraq into a civil war, he should be taken seriously indeed. I am personally alarmed that he felt the need, after visiting the country for a week and widely consulting with its leaders, to issue this warning! AP reports, ‘ At a press conference, he appealed to the members of the Governing Council and to Iraqis in every part of the country to be 'conscious that civil wars do not happen because a person makes a decision, 'Today, I'm going to start a civil war' '. He told Iraqis that civil wars erupt 'because people are reckless, people are selfish, because people think more of themselves than they do of their country'. ‘

Talk of civil war in the Lebanese sense seems to me inappropriate for Iraq. I saw the first years of that war, and the militias mobilized for set piece battles over key real estate like the tall tourist hotels. (You could put mortars on top of them and dominate the surrounding area, so they were like Hamburger Hill). I don’t think militias can fight set piece battles in Iraq because the US could just mow them down with AC-130s, the way they did the Taliban and the Baath army to begin with.

On the other hand, the really troubling possibility is large urban ethnic or political clashes of the sort that occurred on a small scale in Kirkuk in January. The US military would be useless to control that sort of phenomenon; you can hardly have Specters fire into a civilian crowd, without risking fatally bad publicity. So if that is what Brahimi means, then it is a real possibility and we should all be nervous about it.

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Interim Governing Council Rethinks its Shape

It seems increasingly likely that the national elections in Iraq scheduled for May 2004 will be pushed to December, but that the delay will not affect the handover of sovereignty to an Iraqi government by the US. The US will surrender sovereignty to an expanded Interim Governing Council, which will preside over the subsequent elections. az-Zaman and ash-Sharq al-Awsat both report that this prospect has spurred extensive rethinking. The Assyrian and Chaldean Christians have long been dissatisfied with their level of representation on the IGC, and they are pressing for more of a role in any expanded body. Some are suggesting that Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite leader who has the sympathy of between a fourth and a third of Iraqi Shiites, be given a seat. The expanded IGC may also appoint a prime minister to represent it as executive, and to make tough decisions that so far the collective body has avoided. The IGC appointed ministers to head the major ministries last summer, but never appointed a prime minister.

In ash-Sharq al-Awsat, Shiite IGC member Muwaffaq al-Rubaie said that Iraqis are agreed on three principles. 1) The sole solution to restoring the structure of Iraqi governance is (open, direct) elections; and they told Brahimi as much. 2) Sovereignty must be transferred to the Iraqis on schedule at the end of June and the occupation must end, since it cannot last longer than that. 3) A law must be issued regarding the administration of the Iraqi state that guarantees the construction of a modern, contemporary, civilized nation. The NYT reports that Rubaie has actually called for a smaller IGC to guide the transition to an elected government.



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Controversy over Whodunit in Fallujah

The Scotsman has a balanced article on speculation concerning the identity of the attackers in Fallujah on Saturday. It notes that Iraqi police and Paul Bremer have tried to blame outsiders, but US military spokesmen say they doubt it was outsiders. They say that 'Such a complex undertaking involving separate bands of co-ordinated troops points to local Iraqis with intimate knowledge of Fallujah’s terrain and residents. "The likelihood of outsiders coming in and doing that is very slim," the official said. '

So, the civilian Paul Bremer is being contradicted by the US military. The NYT had reported Sunday that Fallujah police suspected two of the four dead were Iranians. But al-Hayat did not mention anything about Iranians, and said two of the four were Lebanese. An AP article said Fallujah police heard a foreign language spoken during the attack. The NYT story seems to indicate that they concluded it was Persian. But the reports are all contradictory, and the CPA has not released any of the alleged identity papers that might point to Iranian involvement. People in Fallujah don't necessarily know what Persian sounds like. The fighters might have been speaking any number of languages. Today the Scotsman reported that some in Fallujah are blaming the Shiite Badr Corps, which the US military seems to dismiss.

The allegation about Iranians fails the common sense text. What would they be doing in Fallujah? Why would the Sunni Arab nationalist or fundamentalists cooperate with Shiite Iranians? It makes no sense. That does not mean it is not true. It does mean that the assertion cannot be accepted without firm evidence. I haven't seen any.

Meanwhile, ash-Sharq al-Awsat and wire services are reporting that the US arrested the mayor of Fallujah only hours after last Thursday's attempt on the life of Gen. John Abizaid, then visiting the city.

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Shiites have Alternative Plans

AFP reports that the Shiites say they have alternative plans for elections if direct elections are declared impossible by the United Nations. They say they will not reveal them at the moment. Some Shiites warned of violence if the community is too deeply disappointed by the UN or US way of proceeding.
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The Dangers of Economic Shock Therapy in Iraq

Nobel Laureate, economist Joseph Stiglitz, sagely warns against Bush administration plans for economic "shock therapy" (rapid and radical liberalization and privatization) in Iraq. He points out that successful transition to democracy has often been actively hindrered by such an approach. Proponents of shock therabpy in the Coalition Provisional Authority point to Poland, but one semi-success isn't actually all that encouraging.

It seems to me that anyway the time is passing when the "Washington consensus" crowd will be in a position to impose economic policy on Iraq. In about 4 months there will be some sort of indigenous government and the CPA will be gone, and most Iraqis are frankly socialists.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Zarqawi Letter and Fear of Democracy

Matthew Yglesias asks at his thoughtful blog:

"Something a bit curious in the (purported) Zarqawi letter:

[I]f we fight them [Sunni Arab policemen working for the new Iraqi government, I think, the context isn't 100% clear to me], that will be difficult because there will be a schism between us and the people of the region. How can we kill their cousins and sons and under what pretext, after the Americans start withdrawing? The Americans will continue to control from their bases, but the sons of this land will be the authority. This is the democracy, we will have no pretext.

Would a hardened terrorist killer really refer to the regime against which he's fighting as "democracy" and speak of his own movement's need for a "pretext"? That doesn't sound at all like a person convinced of his own rectitude. Of course, perhaps that just means that the author of the letter isn't convinced of his own rectitude, but that seems to cut against everything we think we know about the psychology of terrorism. One possible explanation is translation error. Or rather, not "error" per se but some kind of ambiguity in the text where the translator is projecting his own take on the situation into the translation."

Cole replies: The problem lies with the translation, which is insufficiently attentive to the rhetorical strategies of the author, and which is trying (admirably) to hew very close to the Arabic text. But Arabic style depends on allusion and implying things much more than Englisn.

Here is my rendering of the passage.

"When the Americans withdraw from these regions, and they have already started doing so, and their place has been taken by these agents [the Shiites], and by those who are fatefully connected to the people of this land, what will our situation be if we fight them [the Shiites] ("and it is necessary to fight them")? There will only be two possibilities before us.

1. We could fight them. This step is attended with difficulty because of the gap that would open up between us and the people of this land, for [they will say] how could we fight their sons and nephews, and with what justification?-- given the [apparent] withdrawal of the Americans, [even though in actuality they are] the ones who [will] guide the reins of affairs via their hidden bases; and [the Shiites will say], "Isn't it right that that the children of this land are the ones who rule over affairs with experience? This is the advent of democracy!" After this, there will be no excuse [for violence].

2. Or we could pack our things and seek another land, as is the repeated sad story of the arena of jihad . . ."

That is, I believe the author is employing rhetorical devices, such as imagining what the Shiites will say and adopting their "voice" temporarily. Arabic did not classically use punctuation to make these distinctions, depending on style and syntax, and the author does it the old-fashioned way. The phrase "this is democracy, coming," is not Zarqawi's sentiment, it is what he imagines the Shiites will be suckered into thinking by those wily Americans, who will still actually be running things. The translation misses these nuances; it is typical of US government translation of Arabic texts in just not being very satisfactory for any but the most basic purposes. Because Doug Feith excluded most real Arabists from the CPA, the few who are there are probably worked to death and under severe pressure.

I may eventually make an attempt to translate the whole document (the CPA has posted only the second half), but it is difficult and time-consuming, and I may not get to it for a while.



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Fallujah: Phase II, Guerrilla War?

Reuters reports on the impressive coordinated tactical strike by guerrillas at Fallujah on Saturday. Some forty masked, armed men were involved, and the attack was brazenly launched in broad daylight. Late reports put the number of dead at at least 27, with dozens wounded. The London daily al-Hayat reports that four of the attackers were killed, two of them of Lebanese nationality. (There are a number of small radical Sunni Lebanese Islamist and nationalist movements, often based in Tripoli in the north, including al-Jama`ah al-Islamiyyah, Harakat al-Tawhid al-Islami and Usbat al-Ansar. One of the freed prisoners was a Lebanese captured early last week, according to al-Hayat.

My colleague, military historian and former Green Beret Tom Collier referred to it as "Phase II, Guerrilla War." This kind of operation is beyond the ambushes, sniping and grenade and bomb attacks we have been seeing, he says.

Apparently the half-hour-long attack on the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps by one group of guerrillas was a feint, since it did not produce any significant casualties on the pro-American side. At the same time, 15 guerrillas came at the police station with rocket-propelled grenades and machine gun fire, managing to free 22 prisoners.

The attack comes in the wake of a similarly large operation, with many snipers in place, during the visit to Fallujah Thursday of US military commander in Iraq Gen. John Abizaid. From all accounts, Abizaid and others were lucky to have escaped injury, and it seems to me certain that disloyal elements in the Iraqi police informed the guerrillas of his visit. Abizaid has admitted that the Fallujah police are "not ready," and some of them are talking about quitting. Collier wonders if the US "puppet forces" will collapse into ineffectiveness, as happened in Vietnam.

Fallujah is an almost completely Sunni Arab city of about 300,000 west of Baghdad and has been a scene of persistent violent opposition to the US presence. Some of the guerrillas are Arab nationalists, others Sunni Muslim fundamentalists, though little seems to be know about the latter.

The Scotsman says that "according to aid agency USAID there were more attacks during January than any month since September. These included 642 organised assaults involving mortars, hand-grenades and small-arms, 522 ‘random’ incidents from drive-by shootings to rock-throwing, and 11 attacks on coalition aircraft. Little wonder that, as we report today, there is a growing demand for British machine-guns and other weaponry from security firms in Iraq."

On the positive side, it is worth reading an Associated Press piece on the returning 101st Airborn Division and Maj. Gen. Petraeus. They fought courageously against the Baath fascists, and I have formed a favorable impression of the contribution Petraeus and his troops made to post-war Mosul. Unlike some other commanders in Iraq, he came across in the press and in the emails I got from people in the north as genuinely concerned, humane and a problem-solver. He is also a straight shooter. He told AP, "There were few easy days in Iraq."

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Arab, Kurdish Chieftains Visit Sistani

Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish leader, met with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani on Saturday, and emerged to say he was confident that the Coalition Provisional Authority would turn over sovereignty to an Iraqi government by July 1.

Speaking of Sistani, I received by email a fascinating account by a participant of a recent joint visit to Sistani of Kurdish and Sunni Arab clan leaders. I was given permission to quote from it by the person who sent it to me, on condition that I guard the confidentiality of the persons involved. I thought that as an educated Sunni Arab impression of Sistani, the account has historical significance.
Impressions of Sistani:

"He had a heavy (and I mean really heavy) Persian accent which he didn't (and couldn't) hide. He used classical Arabic, but the structure of his sentences was not perfect . . .

. . . he went on and on about Sunnis and Shia saying that these were doctrines differing on how to interpret Islam and they were all decent and good-intentioned. They were definitely no reason for bloody strife. He talked about the ancient pillars of the sunni doctrine and praised them all in detail and said how he respected them as men of faith and as scholars. The difference between the Shia and Sunna, he believed, was far less significant than the danger facing the Iraqi nation at present. Well, personally that put him on my right side!

Then [one Kurdish chieftain] . . . sounded his fear that through democracy the Shia would dominate Iraq and consequently the Kurds.

He said that he didn't believe there was much danger of that happening. The Shia were not a single political entity. Some are atheists, some are secular; even religious Shia did not all follow the same leader.

He said that he firmly believed that the clergy should not interfere with the running of people's lives, with government or with administration. He had forbidden his followers from putting their noses into the state's affairs. He said that clearly and categorically (several times to stress the point!) . . .

Some of the other things he said (This is a rather loose translation!):

"The most important thing at this time is unity. Division of the people is treason! Even silence, in these turbulent times, is evil."

"Give my regards to your tribes and to the Sunna clergy and tell them that Sistani "kisses their hands" and begs them to unite with all Iraqis, Shia, Kurds, Christian, Turkmen. You just unite, and count on me to stand up to the Americans! The worst that could happen is that I die! That doesn't worry me!"

. . . He mentioned the "Arab Nation" so many times! He evidently viewed himself as an Arab. Being born Persian did not affect the fact that he was a Sayyed [descendant of the Prophet Muhammad]. He made that perfectly clear . . .

He was extremely humble in his talk, his attire and his mannerisms.

He was much younger than I had thought; looked like early seventies but quite agile and healthy-looking."

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bush and Service in the Texas Air National Guard

I have not said anything about the controversy concerning George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard. The controversies have mainly centered on whether he lied about some minor arrests (one for a prank involving stealing a wreath at Yale) or tickets when he applied; or whether he received a special favor in getting into the national guard at a time when a lot of guys were being drafted and sent to Nam; or whether he was absent without permission when he went to Alabama in 1972 to help with the political campaign of Winton Blount.

I don't think these issues are really that important. A lot of guys in the national guard report that their duties were often ill-defined and that it wasn't that unusual for some of them to gradually lose touch without necessarily being disciplined. On the other hand, sometimes a guardsman was severely disciplined by being transfered to the active military and shipped off to the war.

I can't criticize Bush for being AWOL because I was a bona fide Conscientious Objector during the Vietnam War. I wrote my draft board that I didn't believe in killing people, and in rural Loudoun County Virginia they must have been so stunned that they just folded and gave me the card. Had they not done so, I was contemplating my options, which included jail (I used to listen to Joan Baez's comments about her imprisoned husband, David Harris, wondering if I would get to meet him on the inside) or Canada. I think I remember being inclined toward jail if it came to it. I have a dear friend who went to Canada and never came back. I used to read Gandhi and King and try to pronounce Satyagraha.

I struggled almost daily in 1968-1975 with these issues. I was upset and depressed about it. I argued with my father, a 20-year man in the army signal corps. (What comes around goes around; he was diehard opposed to the Iraq war, whereas I had more ambiguous feelings about the whole thing). I joined a hunger strike at Northwestern and subsisted on liquids for almost a week, but went off it when I almost fainted.

What I can criticize Bush for is that he doesn't seem to have cared about the war one way or another. That is what bothers me. An eminent diplomatic historian, once told me the story of being at Harvard when Pearl Harbor hit. Those young men were from privileged families. He maintained that the vast majority of them immediately joined the military to fight for their country. They had, he maintained, a sense of honor about it. Note that Kerry enlisted in 1966. He went on to be wounded three times, getting 3 purple heart medals. He also won a silver star for a daring raid, and a bronze star for pulling a crew member back on the boat (he had fallen overboard) during a firefight. The chart here says it all about the lives of Kerry and Bush in that period.

So, W. either believed in the war effort or he did not. If he believed in it, he should have gone to fight. If he didn't believe in it, he should have joined those of us protesting against the goddamned thing. He did not do either one. He doesn't seem to have been interested. From all accounts he was partying pretty heavily, and then he wanted to get Winton Blount elected, so it wasn't conveeeenient to be stuck in the Air National Guard in Texas. Almost 60,000 young men were killed in that slithering python of a war, their bones ground to dust. They were my contemporaries. And it is alleged that 2 million Vietnamese died. (The apologists for the war on the Right, who no doubt will eventually start reenacting it on weekends, keep complaining that we weren't allowed to go all out to win the war; what are they arguing for--outright genocide?)

And that is why I don't think Bush is wise to try to slander Kerry as a fellow traveler of Jane Fonda. Because John Kerry was the sort of man who cared about principle. When he was in the Navy, he fought bravely for his country. When he got out, he exercised his right as a civilian to campaign against the continuation of a rotten war. He cared. He cared deeply, to the core of his soul, and he risked everything in both cases. In both cases he stood up for what he thought was right and best for America. (Just to show how fair I am, let me point out that Bill Clinton at that very time was trying to figure out how to "stay politically viable" and be against the war; his ambition at that early age is both admirable and a little frightening. There is no evidence that Kerry worried about his anti-war activities hurting his political viability in the future, even though he had political ambitions and his stance did prove a liability).

When I teach military history, I make it a principle not to criticize an officer in a war zone for things like being overly timid. I lived in Beirut during the first years of the civil war there, insisting on being there to do community service for my religious group, so I know something about war. But I haven't fought in a war, and have no idea how I would react under that kind of pressure. It should be remembered that even a hero like John McCain, about as far from a pushover as you could imagine, did crack under North Vietnamese techniques and signed a denunciation of the war.

So it is all right if Bush wants to debate Kerry on social issues like who gets how many tax cuts. But I'd advise Bush to drop the Vietnam issue with regard to Kerry on similar grounds. Bush never fought in a war. We don't know how he would do on a real battlefield. He may or may not have been as distinguished a warrior as Kerry. For all we know, the experience of seeing his buddies die uselessly in the mud might have driven him so to speak into Jane Fonda's arms, as well. Bush and his spinmeisters have no standing to criticize Kerry in this regard. You have to take a stand on principle and suffer for it before you get that right.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

"Zarqawi" Letter

I have had a chance to examine the letter the Coalition forces say they found on a Compact Disk on the person of al-Qaeda courier Hasan Ghul.

The fax of the letter that I received, unlike the version published in the Arabic newspapers has "from" after the invocation of God, and three ellipses showing that the name has been deleted. If the original said Zarqawi there, it is odd that it is deleted, because the CPA announced Zarqawi as the author.

I cannot confirm that the letter was written by Zarqawi. For instance, it calls the Americans "Amrikan", whereas in the Levant the colloquial plural is Amrikiyin. Amrikan is an Iraqi and Gulf way of referring to Americans. Likewise, the letter's attitude to the Kurds seems strange if the author actually had trained dozens of them to fight the secular parties in Kurdistan. The letter puts the Kurdish issue on the back burner, in a way I can only suspect Zarqawi would not have. Finally, Zarqawi is said to have not finished high school, whereas this letter is extremely literate, using a high-flown vocabulary and chaste classical literary style. It would be like finding a letter purportedly written by a Mafioso who dropped out of high school that sounded as though it were written by Paul Theroux.

I can, however, confirm that it was written by a radical Sunni Muslim, who hates Shiites and wants to fight the Coalition troops in Iraq in the most effective way. I did not see any false notes in it that might suggest it is a fraud. The author suggests attacking Shiites so as to provoke an ethnic civil war that would amake it easier to push the US out.

As I suggested in my refutation of Safire's calumn, the letter is very contemporary and does not refer to Saddam, and does nothing to suggest a Baath-al-Qaeda link.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sistani considers the Meeting with the UN Envoy a Success

az-Zaman reported today that informed sources affirmed that Lakhdar Brahimi's report for the United Nations will include a consensus about the importance of holding (direct) elections, and the specification of a new deadline for doing so after the surrender of sovereignty to the Iraqis. This plan implies acceptance of the idea of an enlarged Interim Governing Council to which power could be handed over by the Coalition Provisional Authority in preparation for 2005 elections. The new council, according to wire services, would be considerably expanded beyond the current 24 members and would be far more representative of Iraqi political groupings and clans than is the current council.

Yesterday, Sistani's office issued a communique calling his 2 1/2 hour meeting with Brahimi a "success."

Meanwhile, a board of (Sunni) Muslim clerics suggested that the UN be the body that appoints the extended IGC.

The original November 15 plan for council-based elections by May 31 had striven to arrive at a government with more legitimacy than the US-appointed Interim Governing Council. It now seems clear that such a government, chosen by councils that were elected by notables that were gathered (hand-picked?) by a private Research Triangle firm, would not in fact be more legitimate. Therefore, the US may just as well hand sovereignty over to an expanded IGC on July 1, and allow it to conduct the planning for 2005 elections. Having the UN at least involved in appointing the Iraqi government would make it more legitimate than if it were solely the appointees of the United States.

In his Friday prayers sermon, the radical young rival of Sistani, Muqtada al-Sadr said, "We ask the nations to pay attention to the people in the elections and not to the Occupation forces. I call upon the Islamic Conference Organization and the Arab League to preside with the UN over elections."

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Abizaid Escapes Unharmed from Fallujah Attack

The poor security situation in the Sunni heartland was eloquently underlined Thursday when US military commander in Iraq, Gen. John Abizaid, visited Fallujah, which has been a hotbed of anti-American violence and demonstrations. His party came under rocket propelled grenade fire, but the US incurred no casualties. The NPR reporter said that two of the guerrillas were thought to have holed up in a mosque, and the US military wanted local Iraqi police to go in after them. (Avoiding a US assault on a mosque in Fallujah was good thinking). But he said it took an hour of cajoling to convince the Iraqi police to enter the mosque. They arrested two unarmed men inside. The lack of responsiveness of the Fallujah police is an icon of the difficulties the US faces in standing up Iraqi security forces that could do the job. And, of course, the likelihood is that someone in the Fallujah police who knew of Abizaid’s visit had tipped the guerrillas off.

In another incident, a roadside bomb killed on US soldier and wounded two others in the Abu Ghuraib section of Baghdad.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Ibrahimi, UN, see consensus on Direct Elections

UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi met with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani on Thursday. On emerging from the meeting in Najaf, he said he agreed on the need to hold (direct) elections, but he asked for “careful preparations” to be made for them. Ash-Sharq al-Awsat noted that Brahimi’s statement came as Interim Governing Council Member Nasir al-Chadirchi came out against direct elections. He is a Sunni Arab nationalist. Nevertheless, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said Thursday that a broad consensus is emerging in favor of direct elections.

Brahimi said that Sistani was insistent on direct elections, and that he, Brahimi, agreed with the ayatollah that they are the best means to solve the problems of the Iraqi people. He said, “We also agree with his excellency that these elections must be very well prepared for, so that they deliver the results that the Sayyid [Sistani] and the people desire.”

Brahimi said in a news conference in Arabic, “Sayyid Sistani continues to insist on his position, and we are with him in that view, 100 percent, since elections are the only way to deliver Iraq from its trials.”

Asked if the UN was being pressured by the great powers [i.e. the US], Brahimi stressed the UN’s independence and said that neither Kofi Annan nor he would yield to pressure. As Brahimi exited from Sistani’s modest home in Najaf, dozens of Iraqis chanted, “No, no to appointment! Yes, yes to elections! Yes, yes to Sistani!”

I personally suspect that Brahimi's stance must be influenced by his being an Algerian. In 1991 Algeria's elite allowed open elections, and the Muslim fundamentalists gained a majority in parliament. The military, fearful of a parliamentary coup a la the Reichstag fire, stepped in to revoke the election results. As a result, Algeria was plunged into a civil war that has cost over 100,000 lives. What I don't know is what lesson Brahimi draws from the episode. Is it that open elctions are dangerous, or that repressing them is dangerous?

In an interview with Chadirchi in ash-Sharq al-Awsat, he complained that Sistani’s call for elections had been “transformed into a fatwa” or formal religious ruling, and said that many Iraqi notables who had embraced it did so for fear of “terrorism from the street.” He said that Sunni Arabs and Kurds on the IGC opposed direct elections at this time.

Brahimi’s pronouncements in the Arabic news conference seem to me more strongly pro-Sistani than was indicated by the way the wire services translated them. On the other hand, it is not clear what he and Sistani mean by the need to prepare carefully for the elections. Is this an acknowledgment that they cannot be held by May 31?

I heard a report on National Public Radio that suggested that some of Sistani’s supporters are prepared to boycott the elections if they are held on the basis of the provincial councils, as the US wants. The provincial councils weren’t exactly appointed, but for the most part were selected by notables gathered by the US for the purpose, and it is widely felt that they are not truly representative.

If the US insists on proceeding with the council-based elections, it seems possible that there will be a lot of trouble from the Shiites, so much trouble that the resulting process may lose legitimacy.

What is remarkable about Brahimi’s visit with Sistani today is that Sistani made it happen. He was the one who asked the UN to send such a commission to Iraq. In essence he summoned Brahimi to hear his views. The US was reportedly “deeply offended” by the idea of involving the UN. But it appears from Brahimi’s and Annan’s statements that they are increasingly siding with Sistani against the Bush administration.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

British Official: Basra Shiites who Oppose Sistani and Muqtada Keep Quiet

According to the London daily ash-Sharq al-Awsat, an informed Brtish diplomat says that Muqtada al-Sadr and Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani have wide support in the southern, largely Shiite port city of Basra. He said it is to the extent that those who disagree with them avoid publicly stating their position. He said most demonstrations in the city have been for the sake of higher wages (i.e. they are driven by material and not ideological concerns). The official, who was posted to Basra for several months, denied that there are daily disturbances there, and said that the city is beginning to incline toward peace and calm. He pointed to the need for Iraqis to do their own administration. He compared the demonstrations in Basra to those organized by labor unions in the UK in the 1960s.

The official noted that the recent demonstrations of mid-January were peaceful, and asserted that they would remain so because Sistani has asked his followers to avoid violence. He said Sistani enjoys enormous respect and that it is important to listen to what he says. He denied, however, that there is unanimity about Sistani’s stances, admitting that those who disagree with him tend to keep their own counsel. He said that when these dissenters are asked about Muqtada, they maintain that “His father was an excellent man, but he is just a boy.”

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Americana Translation Project

More on the new project I've launched, to translate works of American thought, history and culture into Arabic and have them printed, probably in Baghdad, and properly distributed.

Some kind readers are already donating to the project, and I am deeply grateful for their generosity. Someone suggested that if any Michigan lawyer or CPA were willing to donate some time to help me set it up as a 501c charitable foundation, that would be a wonderful gift to the project.

I should explain more why I chose the area of Americana. It is partially because, unlike France and many other countries, the United States has no ministry of culture. There is no agency, except the rump United States Information Agency that limps along inside the State Department, that has such projects as its purview. The USIA has done some nice little translations over the years. But I have never seen any of them in an actual Arabic bookstore and I think they are poorly distributed. What I have in mind really requires a private foundation, since government efforts are often mistrusted in the Middle East.

Another reason is that I lived in the Muslim world for nearly a decade, and it often pained me how few resources my Middle Eastern friends had for understanding the outside world if they did not know English or French. I have devoted my own life to trying to understand Middle Eastern and South Asian culture and history. I've done a lot of translating from Arabic and Persian, and have written lots of articles and books about the history of these regions. Most of my academic friends engage in similar pursuits. But I freely acknowledge how lucky I am to be able to spend my time this way. The US has many academic and other institutions that enable Americans to pursue such studies. Even some of my British academic friends complained that they weren't supported for the language study they really needed for their dissertations.

I read on one chat site that the project struck the reader as imperialist or something. That isn't my intent, of course, and it hasn't been my life. I've been interested in what I could learn from other cultures. I have benefited enormously from translations done into English of, e.g., the Buddhist canon, Taoism, and so forth. I don't Know Sanskrit or Chinese. I am grateful for what access I can get. I assume that there are people like me in the Middle East, who would be grateful to have similar opportunities. And, it seems to me in the wake of 9/11 and the Iraq war that it is really, really important that the US and the Middle East begin understanding each other better. I want to work on both sides of the problem.

Finally, I am influenced in all this by the Japanese model. American studies are ubiquitous in Japanese universities. And, the Japan Foundation promotes study of Japan in the US and elsewhere, without strings (i.e. the research doesn't have to result in only flattering books). I'd like to see chairs of American studies founded at places like Baghdad university, with money for graduate students. And having translated texts of American classics would be necessary for any such programs to teach undergraduates.

The rule is that a translator should translate into his native language, so I will definitely seek out qualified Arab translators and editors. I am making contact with Baghdad intellectuals about all this.

Some readers have suggested other works besides Thomas Jefferson, including everything from Mark Twain to Gore Vidal. I'd like to see the project eventually do it all. Susan B. Anthony and Martin Luther King are also candidates. (Twain is actually probably available, since more literature gets translated than political thought or history). But I had to start somewhere, and I think Jefferson would be especially interesting for Iraqis right now.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has supported the principle of one person, one vote, and admitted to having read a translated Western work on democracy, from which he learned to appreciate such principles. If the haphazard and spotty such literature that now exists in Arabic influenced such an important man in such a significant direction, then I'd say doing more of that kind of thing is worthwhile. It doesn't mean we don't have things to learn from the Iraqis. Of course we do. Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi's al-Imta' wa'-mu'anasa (Enjoyment and Conviviality) is one of my favorite books, and it hasn't been translated into English.



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Guerrilla War continues in Iraq

The London Times reports that another 48 were killed and dozens wounded in a bombing of a police recruitment center in Baghdad on Wednesday. This comes after a similar and even more devastating bombing in Iskandariyah.

The Times report has a fascinating aside: 'It is quite bizarre, but many Iraqis openly accused the US Army of being directly involved, which also happened after yesterday's car bomb attack in Iskandiriyah. A US Army officer came out from the compound to speak to the media after today's attack. He was quickly surrounded by a crowd of very emotional young Iraqi men, who were convinced that the Army was in some way complicit in the attack. Many Iraqis approached me to say that America orchestrated the attack, some even said with the support of Israel. They cite as evidence the fact that US soldiers were around before the attack, then they left, only to arrive back at the scene once the bomb had gone off. They believe that the attacks today and yesterday are part of a conspiracy to ensure that American troops continue remain in Iraq, because the US authorities can say the situation is not stable enough for them to leave.'

I take this report of attitudes in the street to reveal a profound psychological conflict among Iraqis, who do not at all like the idea of being occupied (that is the term they use) by Westerners, but who know deep down they need US and Coalition troops to keep order from breaking down altogether. This cognitive dissonance is resolved by conspiracy theories like the one reported, such that the need for the US troops is created by the US troops themselves, thus closing the circle of causality.

Wire service reported other attacks on Wednesday as well: Guerrillas in Kirkuk detonated a bomb as a US convoy passed, wounding 3 US troops. Another roadside bomb in Ramadi slightly injured a US soldier and damaged an SUV.

Guerrillas threw an explosive device at Spanish soldiers walking to their headquarters in the southern Shiite town of Diwaniyah, lightly injuring 5 of them.

In Mosul, there was a drive by shooting of the office of the Democratic Assyrian Party, a Christian group, in which a security guard was injured.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraq to Participate in "Conference of the Neighbors"

Interim Iraqi foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari told the Kuwaiti daily al-Qabas Wednesday that Iraq will for the first time participate in a conference of Iraq's neighbors to be held this Saturday in Kuwait. He said Iraq will be a full and equal participant. The last meeting of the conference in Damascus was held without Iraq attending (the invitation was only issued at the last minute, presumably because the neighbors did not consider Iraq to have a sovereign government). Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia all have a keen interest in the fate of Iraq. Such conferences of the neighbors can sometimes be very useful for helping address diplomatic and military problems. A set of neighbors met frequently about Afghanistan in the 1990s and have been of help since the fall of the Taliban.

Zebari said that it was extremely important to demonstrate that all enmity and hatred between Iraq and Kuwait had been put behind them. He said Iraq had made proposals to Kuwait about resolving outstanding issues and that the Kuwaiti response has been promising.

With regard to elections in Iraq, he said no one disagrees there should be (open, direct) elections, the only issue is when. he said he did not know why there was such a hurry. (The Kurd leaders for the most part are not eager for direct elections, which will return a Shiite majority in parliament. Kurds are Sunnis).
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Unemployed plan Protests

Al-Zaman reports that the Union of Unemployed Workers has decided to begin its demonstrations outside the headquarters of the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Interim governing Council again on the coming Sunday. These demonstrations were common last fall, and sometimes turned a bit violent. Although estimates for Iraqi unemployment have fallen, the rate is still extremely high. (In the Great Depression in the US, 25 percent of workers were unemployed. In Iraq now it is probably 45 percent).

In the meantime, the Iraqi ministry of labor has issued a report saying that 5 million Iraqis, or 20 percent of the population, are living in dire poverty.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Safire gets it wrong: Zarqawi

William Safire's piece, 'Finally, a smoking gun,' provoked a lot of dissent among my readers, who asked me to say something.

I am waiting to see the Arabic text of the Abu Musab al-Zarqawi letter before commenting on it; I am told it was released today in Baghdad but I haven't seen it on the Web yet. But what is reported of it seems to me plausible.

Safire is close to Ariel Sharon and has all along misreported the situation in Iraq to help get up the war that Sharon wanted against the Baath regime. He has on several occasions alleged things that he almost certainly knew were not true. You have to read Safire as an ideologue, not as a journalist. He is far, far into the Spin Zone.

The letter does not prove the things Safire alleges.

1) Ansar al-Islam was a small, mainly Kurdish little group operating under the protection of the US no-fly zone. Its radical Islamism would not have been allowed in Baath-controlled territory. Even the Iraqi Islamic Party (Muslim Brotherhood) was banned by Saddam, and it was not nearly as radical. Although the US did not sponsor Ansar al-Islam, it was the no-fly zone that made it possible. It was not "Iraq" that harbored the group, but the US no-fly zone. Ansar al-Islam destroyed Naqshbandi shrines and attacked traditional, Sufi Islam in the Kurdish regions. Much of what Safire alleges about it is said to come from Kurdish villagers who were fighting it. I'd take whatever they said with a grain of salt. The likelihood is that his source is not Kurdish villagers at all, though. Did they have a fax machine in their village? His source is more likely Mossad, Israeli intelligence, which probably had agents observing the situation in Kurdistan. Mossad, of course, has been wrong about Iraq all along and may be the source of some of the bad intelligence given to the United States.

2) A Jordanian who had fought in Afghanistan, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, hooked up with Ansar al-Islam, and there were probably some other Afghanistan veterans among them as well, though only a couple or a handful. (Certainly not all 400, as Safire says; and note how tiny the group is, upon which such monumental arguments are being hung!) They were mostly home-grown Kurdish fundamentalists. There is no evidence that al-Zarqawi is al-Qaeda in the strict sense of having pledged fealty to Bin Laden and having carried out a terrorist mission for him. But he was an "Arab Afghan" and had tenuous ties to Bin Laden's group.

3) I have seen no documentary evidence that Ansar al-Islam received direct support from Saddam Hussein. Safire says Saddam armed and supported them, but offers not even one document to prove it. Thousands and thousands of Baath documents were captured in northern Iraq when the no-fly zone was established, and have been being transcribed at Harvard. Why do none of them refer to supporting Ansar al-Islam? What we have found in Iraq is that lots of things are asserted. Where's the proof?

Moreover, even if it could be established that the Baathists passed some money to Ansar al-Islam to make trouble for the Kurdish parties, KDP and PUK, that would be in the context of local Iraqi politics, not a sign of support for al-Qaeda per se. The Kurdish parties had defied Saddam, and he wanted revenge on them. As I say, this scenario is pure speculation, but even it would not prove what is alleged. When, in 1996, the two main Kurdish parties fell to fighting one another in a mini-civil war, Saddam did give support to Massoud Barzani's KDP, helping it take Irbil from Talabani's PUK. One could use Safire's logic of guilt by contiguity to prove that therefore Massoud Barzani is a supporter of al-Qaeda!

4) George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and others have asserted that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was at one point treated in a Baghdad hospital, and have alleged that this medical treatment demonstrates that Saddam was supporting him. However, with so much bad intelligence floating around, we cannot be sure of the Baghdad hospital story. Haven't we captured the relevant hospital records by now? Can't they be cited? And, we now know that Saddam was not running a tight totalitarian society but rather a ramshackle dilapidated one. Cheney alleged that al-Zarqawi could not have been treated in Baghdad without Saddam knowing about it. That is ridiculous. Of course he could have been. His presence did not require the permission of the secret police! The secret police were clueless or easily bribed.

5) Zarqawi's recent letter does not demonstrate a pre-existing relationship of the Saddam regime with al-Qaeda, in any way shape or form. It even suggests that al-Qaeda hasn't had much presence in post-war Iraq, which Zarqawi laments. He is making a proposal to Ayman al-Zawahiri to get up an al-Qaeda effort in Iraq. Al-Qaeda is like a venture capitalist holding company. It funds projects that terror entrepreneurs bring to it. If al-Zarqawi is only at this late date applying for an al-Qaeda project, he can't be considered to have been close to the organization in the past few years.

Abu Zubaida and Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, two high al-Qaeda officials in US custody, told the CIA that Usama Bin Laden forbade al-Qaeda to cooperate with Saddam's regime because it was an infidel socialist nationalist one. The Baathists themselves hated Islamists and persecuted them. There is no evidence whatsoever of tactical collaboration between the Baath and al-Qaeda, not even the bad cherry-picked, single-sourced kind. This letter certainly is not such evidence.

There is a major sin in history writing, that of anachronism. You assume that a later fact was also true at an earlier time, when it was not. The Baathists and al-Qaeda may now be so desperate that they are cooperating. It is anachronism to project that situation back in time, as Safire does.

Safire concludes:

"Of the liberation's three casus belli, one was to stop mass murder, bloodier than in Kosovo; we are finding horrific mass graves in Iraq."

Most of those mass graves were dug in the spring of 1991, when George Bush senior had called on the Shiites to rise up, and then did, and then Bush allowed the Baath to massacre them. The Shiites have not forgiven the US for that betrayal. It is difficult to see this as a reason for the US to go to war, killing some 7000 Iraqi civilians and wounding 20,000, over a decade later.

"Another was informed suspicion that a clear link existed between world terror and Saddam; this terrorist plea for Qaida reinforcements to kill Iraqi democracy is the smoking gun proving that."

Zarqawi's letter is no such thing. It contains no reference to 'how we used to get such good support from our buddy Saddam in the old days.' The English paraphrases of it don't even mention Saddam or the old days. It is about the future.

Charge against Safire: Anachronism.
Verdict: Guilty as charged.

"The third was a reasoned judgment that Saddam had a bioweapon that could wipe out a city; in time, we are likely to find a buried suitcase containing that, too."

Actually, I can't remember anyone in the administration making a big deal out of bioweapons. The biggest danger cited by Bush was nukes, and that entire story was false, as Joe Wilson had already shown in spring of 2002.

You can't have bioweapons buried in a suitcase unless you have laboratories and factories actively producing them. These labs and factories cannot easily be hidden, and there is no reason for the Iraqi scientists to conceal them now anyway. They don't exist, Bill. Get over it. In any case, since you were wrong about everything else, why should we believe you on this one?


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Americana in Arabic: Translation Project

I was talking yesterday about the tragedy that American culture is so little known (except through bad television shows) in the Arab world. One of the problems is that so few books of American thought, literature and history have been translated into Arabic and published accessibly, and kept accessible through attention to distribution. There are some simple reasons for this sad state of affairs. Probably the most important set of reasons is that Arabic books sales are typically low, commercial distribution is spotty, and copyright laws are little honored, so that royalties are often not paid. Book piracy is a big problem. Beyond these issues, authoritarian governments have put up barriers to book imports, which further limits the market. It may be that Thomas Jefferson, a revolutionary, is still too radical for many regimes in the area.

The lack of accessible, inexpensive books on the subject is an important limitation on the ability of Arab universities to teach about the United States. There is only one America specialist at Cairo University to my knowledge. God knows what this person uses as texts. Most Arab universities have no specialist in American studies, and most university libraries in the region have almost no Arabic language books on the subject. This situation then ensures that normal schools or teacher training colleges do not produce high school teachers who know much solid about the US. Of course, many Arab intellectuals know French or English and some have lived in the US, but they constitute a tiny sliver of these societies, which are mainly Arabophone.

So, I'm going to try something. As my own tiny contribution to helping resolve this problem, I have therefore decided to begin a project to translate important books by great Americans and about America into Arabic, and to subsidize their publication so that they can be bought inexpensively. This is a non-profit project, but until it grows large enough to become a proper foundation, it will not be tax-deductible. I will try to ensure that almost all of the money goes to actual translation, publication, and distribution. If the office work becomes a burden, some money may have to be spent on overhead here, though I'll see if I can't get some University or extramural support for that.

The project will begin with a selected set of passages and essays by Thomas Jefferson on constitutional and governmental issues such as freedom of religion, the separation of powers, inalienable rights, the sovereignty of the people, and so forth.

Contributions will allow me to locate and fund qualified Arab translators, to arrange for printing (possibly in Baghdad), to subsidize the printing so as to ensure the book is affordable and that there is a paperback version, and to subsidize and ensure wide distribution, to bookstores, street vendors and libraries.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

57 Killed in Separate Incidents; Iraqi Police Targeted

Wire services report that:

About 57 people were killed yesterday in separate incidents in Iraq. A powerful truck bomb exploded yesterday outside a police station [in predominantly Shiite Iskandariyah] south of Baghdad, killing up to 53 people and wounding scores of others, apparently all of them Iraqi including would-be recruits lined up to apply for jobs on the force. In Baghdad, four Iraqi policemen, one of them a major, were killed in an ambush yesterday in the capital's Baladiyat district, the Interior Ministry announced. The assailants escaped.

Some 150 persons were wounded in the Iskandariyah attack, as well.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sistani in a Secure Location; Annan worries about Partition of Iraq

az-Zaman and Deutsche Press Agentur report that UN Secretary General gave a speech Tuesday expressing concern about ethnic tensions tearing Iraq apart.

Murtada Kashmiri, a spokesman for Sistani, announced to az-Zaman that the UN team in Iraq to advise on elections will meet this week with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Najaf.

The Coalition Provisional Authority announced that Sistani has been moved to a secure location to protect his life and to forestall any assassination attempt on him, and that trusted, sincere Iraqi forces are guarding him. No Americans are involved as his guards, the CPA stressed.

Kashmiri, however, denied that Sistani had been transported to a new location.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Tens of Thousands of Pilgrims Flock to Najaf, Support Sistani

Wire services report that tens of thousands of Shiites thronged to the holy city of Najaf yesterday to celebrate a holy day. Many of them also took the occasion as an opportunity to show banners and chant slogans in favor of direct elections, which Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has called for.

The opportunity for such melding of religion and mass politics will occur on a much larger scale in about a month during the holy month of Muharram, when enormous numbers of Shiites will come to Najaf and Karbala from all over Iraq (and all over the world). Should the United Nations and the US have announced by then a refusal to hold direct elections, these masses of pilgrims could turn the religious events into a political protest. Many Shiites would find such actions distasteful, but Khomeinist radicalism authorized this technique. Khomeini tried to use the pilgrimage to Mecca itself for political purposes.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraqi Muslim Brotherhood Seeks to Islamize the Constitution

Muhsin Abdel Hamid, the leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party (Muslim Brotherhood), is this month's president of the Interim Governing Council. He has weighed in on the need for the Fundamental Law now being drafted to govern Iraq until a new constitution can be written to reflect the Islamic character of Iraq. AP reports that although President Bush has said he was assured there would be freedom of religion in Iraq, in fact powerful members of the American-appointed IGC are striving to enshrine a conservative interpretation of Islamic law as the law of the land. That would detract from women's rights and the rights of religious minorities, inevitably.

I have no confidence whatsoever that Bush knows enough about the subject to understand what he was told, or to avoid being tricked by clever wording. Ahmad Chalabi's son is helping to draft the Fundamental Law, and AP quotes him as ready to throw in the towel and just give in to the shari`ah or the medieval jurisprudence of Islam.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sunni Cleric in Iraq: Resistance against Occupation is Licit in International Law

Muhammad Bashar al-Faidi, official spokesman for the Sunni Board of Muslim Clerics, gave an interview in ash-Sharq al-Awsat in which he strongly opposed Sistani's proposal for direct elections. "Cooking on a fast fire ruins the food," he said. He alleged that the plan aimed at "marginalizing the Sunnis."

He accused the US of favoring Shiites so as to divide and rule Iraqis, and suggested that the Americans had deliberately left weapons stockpiles unguarded so as to ensure public disturbances and fighting among the major ethnic and religious groups. He said the Americans want to marginalize the Sunnis even though they are actually the majority in the country [this is not true but many Sunni Arabs believe it].
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Basra's Security Endangered by Drug Smugglers, Terrorists

Az-Zaman conducted an interview with the Iraqi police chief in Basra about security there. He said the city's security was threatened by al-Qaeda terrorism and by criminal gangs. The latter are involved in drug smuggling and in looting the materials being used for reconstruction and reselling them elsewhere. He said that drug smugglers had set up a number of unauthorized docks along the Shatt al-Arab waterway that feeds into the Persian Gulf.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Scott Taylor reports on his bad experiences with the security situation in Iraq, painting a pretty scary picture of the situation in Baghdad and points north.

But just to underline how ambiguous the situation is, note that even some wounded Iraqi war veterans are insisting that the US military and the Coalition Provisional Authority are accomplishing an enormous amount of good in Iraq that goes unreported. I am sure that is true, and to tell you the truth I am puzzled at what a bad job the US and the UK are doing in getting out the word. My own perception is that the CPA is tightly controlling the information that gets out to the US, for political reasons, and that procedure has the side effect of throwing a blanket over any real achievements. Another problem is the fixation on reciting statistics about numbers of schools painted, etc. Iraqis reply that the schools were functioning until just before the war last year, so getting them back up and running is not really a net gain (I'm sure the renovated ones are nicer, though there may still be problems with school supplies, and at least some of the renovation jobs have been shoddy). The point is that the US could not possibly have invaded Iraq to paint its schools. What else is going on? I follow this story obsessively, and I couldn't tell you.

A lot of CPA people think that when, in mid-March, they can start spending some of the $18 billion the Congress voted for reconstruction, that will turn the situation around altogether. There will be a massive government-led jobs program at that point, they believe, and lots of construction that will spur investment, buying, and further employment. I have to say that it is ironic that Jerry Bremer went into Iraq determined to impose laissez faire on it, and now his great hope is to get the job done with a New Deal government jobs program instead.

This positive scenario is not impossible. But they should be careful about accidentally setting off an inflationary spiral (too much money chasing too few goods). And, as someone who has been observing the Middle East closely for over thirty years, I just have to remind everyone that the Islamic Revolution in Iran of 1978-79 occurred in the midst of a massive influx of petroleum money into that country. Iran's annual income from oil went from a few hundred million in 1970 to like $30 or $40 billion in 1978. And yet Iranians grew angry with the shah and threw him out, despite the increased prosperity. Money isn't everything, and, more importantly, it matters how exactly money circulates and to whom.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Failure of US Public Diplomacy in the Middle East

Michael Pan and Jeremy Weinstein argue in "Forfeiting the War of Ideas" that the US government has failed to fund public diplomacy efforts that might help the US win the war of ideas in the Middle East. They are absolutely right. Goddamned Jesse Helms did irreparable damage when he succeeded in rolling the United States Information Agency into the State Department. State is always short on funds, and then security had to be beefed up at the embassies, and the USIA got starved. USIA used to have American libraries in the major cities of the Middle East. They were all closed and the books remaindered. Even the libraries that had existed were flawed, since they were English-only.

You know, if you were an Arab intellectual in Cairo, Amman or even Baghdad, and you wanted to read a book that collected some central writings of Thomas Jefferson in Arabic, you almost certainly could not get hold of such a book. I repeat: The major classics of American thought either have not been translated into Arabic, or were published in tiny editions and are now impossible to find. I just checked. Bernard Mayo's Jefferson Himself appeared in Cairo in 1959 and 1960. Nobody now could find a copy, I am sure. I searched for the Federalist Papers in Arabic and got nothing. Abbas Mahmud al-`Aqqad's book on Benjamin Franklin was published in 1955, and appears to be the last word on the subject.

There is no good book distribution in the Arab world, no jobbers like Ingram or Baker & Taylor. Often bookstores publish a book, in a run of 500 copies, and if you want the book you have to go to that bookstore. I've tramped all over Cairo looking for obscure little bookstores that had put out a volume I wanted. A lot of the time, authoritarian governments keep books published in other Arab countries out. I can remember how shocked I was at how small and understocked the Arabic-language bookstores were in Tunis (the bourgeoisie could buy all the French books they liked).

Not only is American print culture largely unavailable in Arabic, but the media situation has gone downhill. The highly professional and provacative Arabic service of the Voice of America has been shut down. It has been replaced by Radio Sawa, a pet project of US radio mogul Norman Pattiz, which broadcasts Britney Spears and Arab pop to the young people but which has almost no intellectual content. There are short news headlines, AM radio style, that are given in language that is obviously and heavy-handedly biased toward the US and Israel. Most important Arab states, like Egypt, won't allow Radio Sawa to broadcast in their countries (it uses local FM frequencies). Pattiz is contemptuous of the old Voice of America operation because it was on shortwave and only reached 1% of Arab listeners. But there was no reason VOA couldn't have been broadcast on FM if the US had wanted that. Closing it down and replacing it with pablum and propaganda is no way to win a war of ideas.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

2 US Soldiers Killed in Blast; 2 Ramadi Sheikhs Assassinated

AP reports that a man wearing an explosives belt showed up outside the compound of brothers Majid and Amer Ali Suleiman in Ramadi and blew himself up. Three Iraqi guards outside the compound were killed. The brothers were accused of cooperating with the Americans.

US soldiers in Sinjar near Mosul were moving a stockpile of mortar shells and grenades to a demolition point so they could be destroyed when there was an explosion. Two US troops were killed, and five injured.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sunnis Opposed Early Direct Elections

Both az-Zaman and Reuters highlight the opposition of many Sunni Arab leaders to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's demand for open, direct elections in Iraq this may. It quoted "Sunni tribal leader Shaikh Abd al-Wahab al-Zawbaai" as saying direct elections are unrealistic: "We see the conditions now as totally unsuitable for elections. People are in a state of chaos and there is no respect for the law." A spokesman for the Iraqi Islamic Party (Muslim Brotherhood), Hashim al-Hasani, seemed to warn of Sunni-Shiite violence if direct elections are held: "It's the nature of human beings: when you corner a man, he will react and defend himself. There are lots of weapons in this country... If people are pressured they will use these weapons to defend themselves."

Az-Zaman says that the Communist representative on the Interim Governing Council, and most of the Kurdish members, are also against direct elections. Since the Shiites form 60 to 65 percent of Iraqis, direct elections to a unicameral parliament could produce a tyranny of the Shiite majority, which terrifies the Sunnis. Under all Iraqi regimes of the 20th century, Sunnis were highly favored and given disproportionate wealth and power.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bush appointeee Silberman has History of Scandal

The Guardian complains today about Bush appointing Laurence Silberman to head up the commission looking into intelligence failures regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Since this commission has no subpoena powers and won't report until 2005, it is anyway window dressing.

The Guardian story details Silberman's role, when a court judge, in letting Oliver North off the hook for shredding the US constitution during Iran-contra. What it doesn't say so clearly is that Silberman himself is widely thought to have played a role in kicking off Reagan's warm relations with the Khomeini regime. It is alleged that Reagan sent Silberman in fall of 1980 to make sure the Iranians weren't planning to give up the US hostages taken at the American embassy, thus creating an "October surprise" that would help reelect Jimmy Carter. Gary Sick wrote a book suggesting that Reagan's people (i.e. Silberman) may actually have conspired with the Iranians to keep the hostages in Tehran for a few extra months to ensure a Republican victory. There were lots of possible quid pro quos, including Israeli provision to Khomeini of weapons and American spare parts for the war with Iraq.

Silberman was rewarded for his role in Iran with the judgeship that later allowed him to essentially pardon Ollie North for his role in Iran.

Viet Dinh used to clerk for Silberman, and is considered the principal author of the Patriot Act, which seeks to gut the US Bill of Rights.

The Guardian says, "Viet Dinh, a former clerk in Judge Silberman's chambers, and former justice department official, came to his defence, telling the Chicago Tribune: "I think Judge Silberman is one of the most, if not the most, knowledgeable person on the federal bench about the intersection of law and national security."

Indeed.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Provincial Election in Iraq

According to az-Zaman, the 40-person provincial council of the province of Salahuddin has elected a new governor, Falah Hasan Mustafa al-Naqib.

This story is of course a minor one, but I am paraphrasing it here because I think it sheds great light on provincial Iraqi affairs about which those of us here in the West hear only rarely.

The previous governor resigned just before going on pilgrimage to Mecca. Eleven of the 40 council members were also on pilgrimage, so al-Naqib was elected with only 29 present. One of al-Naqib's rivals in the election, Abdullah Ijbarah, got 8 votes,and Thamar Sultan received 5. Al-Naqib won with 16 votes.

Al-Naqib's father had been a major general in the Iraqi army in the 1970s and then the Baath government's ambassador to Sweden at the end of the 1970s. He broke with the Saddam regime and became a political refugee in Syria. Al-Naqib himself has an engineering B.Sc. He is the 10th governor of Salahuddin in modern Iraq, and the article calls him the first to be elected. He is the first to hail from Samarra'.

The province (or "governorate") of Salahuddin includes the city of Samarra and falls in the north-central Sunni heartland of Iraq.

The story raises many questions for me. Why was the vote held while over a quarter of the provincial council members are on pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia? Wouldn't it have been better to wait until their return? Why did the previous governor resign? Did he and the 11 others go on pilgrimage as a way of extricating themselves from an unpleasant political situation? Was this house-keeping in preparation for the national elections at the end of May? What was the size and shape of the electorate that selected the 40 provincial council members to begin with? How representative are they of Salahuddin, really?

One can only imagine what a Shiite leader like Sistani would think of this entire arrangement. Americans gathered "notables" [who might not have been representative] and had them select a 40-person council, and then part of that council elected al-Naqib, whose father was a major general in the Baathist army until he fell out with Saddam.

If the Bremer plan for Iraqi elections holds, it is this same council in Salahuddin that will choose 10 delegates to the electoral college that will in turn elect a transitional parliament.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

One US Soldier killed, 5 Wounded on Sunday; Iraqi police Major among Insurgents

AP reports that a roadside bomb exploded in a median in a highway south of Baghdad, killing one US soldier on Sunday afternoon.

Earlier Sunday, a rocket propelled grenade attack at Mosul wounded three US soldiers, according to eyewitnesses who also saw the bloody humvee. In Fallujah, guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb near a US army convoy, injuring two soldiers.

US troops on a search and find mission in Qaddisiyah south of Tikrit came under fire on Saturday evening. The returned fire at a house under surveillance, and toss a grenade in, killing one guerrilla and wounding two. Imagine their surprise to find that the dead man was a major in the reconstituted Iraqi police force trained by the US! This problem is the same one the US faced in Vietnam--a lot of the South Vietnamese officers turn out actually to have been working for the Viet Cong for nationalist reasons. The next time you hear Donald Rumsfeld boast that the US has "trained" 200,000 Iraqi police and security forces, remember two things. They can't have been trained very well in that period of time; and there is no way to know where their loyalties really lie.

On Saturday, the police station in Suwayrah was blown up, killing 3 Iraqi police officers and wounding 8. Cable news in the US suggested it was an inside job, and that another officer had set the bomb. (See item just above).
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Chalabi meets with Sistani: "UN can be Convinced"

Ahmad Chalabi, a secular Shiite member of the Interim Governing Council, met for 90 minutes with Grand Ayatollah Sistani and emerged to declare that he was sure the United Nations team now in Iraq could be convinced of the feasibility of direct elections. Chalabi had initially opposed such open elections when Sistani initially insisted on them, but gradually he came to support them. He also insisted that sovereignty would be turned over on schedule by the US to an Iraqi government, on June 30.

Chalabi, a multimillionaire dogged by charges of massive fraud in the past, may have concluded that he could use his wealth to ensure his election if open polls took place.

Meanwhile, the UN team met for three hours with the Interim Governing Council. Muhsin Abdul Hamid, the leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party [Muslim Brotherhood], said the mission was welcome, according to the London daily al-Hayat, attempting to reverse the impression his statement of two days ago had given, when he insisted that the IGC would not be bound by the team's recommendations. The newspaper also revealed that Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani now supports direct elections. The issue is therefore not just a sectarian one, between Sunnis and Shiites, though most of the Shiites support direct elections and several of the Sunnis (including Abd al-Hamid) oppose them.

Abdul Mahdi al-Islami al-Karbala'i, Grand Ayatollah Sistani's representative in Karbala, insisted to al-Hayat that Iraq must have a strong central government. If he represents Sistani's thinking, this stance could presage a battle between the Shiites and the Kurds, who want a weak Switzerland-type federation.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Militias and Terrorism; Terrorism and Militias

The news from Iraq in the New York Times focuses Monday on terrorism and militias. Edward Wong of the NYT surveys the persistence of Shiite and Kurdish paramilitaries. I was struck by the tone of resignation on the American side; they appear to have given up on disarming these militias, even though last June they were trying to close their offices and take away their weapons.

As someone who lived in Lebanon during part of the civil war, I have to say that the persistence of the militias (indeed, what appears to be a massive expansion of them) bodes ill for the future of Iraq. But the point that Kurds and Shiites make, that the US is unable to provide security, is also well taken. Based on Bosnia and other experiences, the US National Security Council estimated before the war that it would take 500,000 US troops to provide security to a country the size of Iraq. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz ridiculed this idea, but their notion of just sending 100,000 or so American troops (and then of abolishing the Iraqi army!) has resulted in the country being highly insecure. (The Americans who come back from Iraq and say things are just dandy are all embedded and don't get out among the people much. Whenever I see reporters on television live from Baghdad, I hear machine gun fire in the background and occasionally explosions. I remember that sort of thing from Beirut and know exactly what it means about the state of "security.")

Then Dexter Filkins reports that the US has captured a document purported to be written by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian with ties to al-Qaeda who has been active in nothern Iraq, which proposes the instigation of an artificial Sunni-Shiite civil war in Iraq as a way of turning the Sunnis against the US. Some of the bombings and attacks already launched on Shiites, including the August 29 bombing of Najaf, may have been intended to help provoke a Shiite backlash against Sunnis. So far most Shiites have declined to take the bait.

It is in this context that I cautiously (caveat emptor!) transmit an item from az-Zaman, the Baghdad daily run by the Sunni liberal, Hasan al-Bazzaz. It comes ultimately via Deutsche Press Agentur, and alleges that Iraqi police in Fallujah have captured five men who say they are from the Badr Corps, the militia of the Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and who admit to having engaged in bombings and other military actions against the Americans. This item fails the common sense test, since SCIRI leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim is allied with the United States; since very few Shiites have taken up arms against the US; and since a Shiite unit would find it difficult to operate in heavily Sunni Fallujah (who gives them a safe house? Food? Information? Shiites are not liked in those parts, and it would be easy for them to slip and give away their sect; even the exact form of prayer is slightly different). There are two possibilities, if the report is accurate. One is that these are Baathists who are attempting to drive a wedge between SCIRI and the US by claiming to be Badr Corps. The other is that this is a cell within the Badr Corps directed by hardline Revolutionary Guards in Iran, which is engaged in a rogue operation. (The Revolutionary Guards trained the Badr Corps when it was in exile in Iran during the Saddam period).

Meanwhile, the Washington Post profiles the situation in Fallujah more realistically, showing the ways that militantly anti-American Sunni groups are attempting to position themselves to take power when the US civil administration withdraws on June 30.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bush on MEET THE PRESS

BUSH: I expected to find the weapons. Sitting behind this desk, making a very difficult decision of war and peace, and basing my decision on the best intelligence possible — intelligence that had been gathered over the years — intelligence that not only our analysts thought was valid, but analysts from other countries thought was valid. '

Bush should consider the possibility that he was lied to, not by the CIA or the DIA, who included caveats, but by Dick Cheney and the Neocons and Mossad and Ahmad Chalabi and Iyad Alawi, who peddled rather fantastic stories to him.

What I remember is that former US Marine and UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter said that 85-95 percent of Iraq's chemical weapons had been destroyed. He was pilloried by Rupert Murdoch's news organs as a Baathist lackey. Will W. now call Ritter to the White House to give him a personal apology?

By the way, Reuters reports, ' French Defence Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said France had not reached the same conclusions as ``the Anglo-Saxons'' on the basis of available intelligence such as satellite photographs. She said that was why Paris had argued against last year's U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and in favour of letting U.N. inspectors keep searching for the alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD). ``It's true that intelligence...has its limits. Knowing how to recognise its limits and find other means is the way to avoid committing mistakes,'' she told a news conference.'

So, it just isn't true that other countries necessarily thought the US intelligence was valid. That countries like Spain and Portugal and Denmark bought the Cheney version is unremarkable; they get their intelligence on issues like Iraq from . . . the United States.

BUSH: . . . And I made the decision obviously to take our case to the international community in the hopes that we could achieve a disarmament of Saddam Hussein peacefully.

Actually, the UN did achieve the disarmament of Saddam Hussein peacefully. By 1998, when the United States ordered the weapons inspectors out so that it could bomb Iraq. When the US demanded that the UN put the inspectors back in, it did so. Bush went to war a month after they arrived, giving them no time to do their jobs. His administration then attempted to smear UN inspector Hans Blix for objecting to this odd procedure.

BUSH: . . . And so we expected — I expected — there to be stockpiles of weapons. But David Kay has found the capacity to produce weapons. In other words, David Kay goes in and says we haven't found stockpiles yet . . .

The "yet" is misleading. Kay has expressed the most severe skepticism as to the very existence of any remaining stockpiles: "Let me begin by saying, we were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself here . . . It turns out that we were all wrong . . . and that is most disturbing." Kay did not find "the capacity to produce weapons" if by that is meant factories and laboratories set up to begin production. There are no such factories or laboratories. If Bush means that the Iraqis have the capacity to produce chemical weapons, well, sure. All societies do. These are all weasel words of the most contemptible sort.

and there's theories as to where the weapons went. They could have been destroyed during the war. Saddam and his henchmen could have destroyed them as we entered into Iraq. They could have been hidden. They could have been transported to another country. . . .

No, George. First of all, there were no military nuclear materials or programs at all. As for chemical and biological weapons, they couldn't have been been destroyed during the war. Destruction of any significant numbers of chemical or biological weapons would have been noticed by the extensive US surveillance of the country conducted as part of the war effort. They can't be hidden. The US has captured all the people who know where they would have been hidden, and they would certainly reveal the information to avoid being executed. Ask Tariq Aziz. They were not transported to another country. That also could have been tracked. Besides, George, your whole argument was that Saddam intended to use those weapons. If he had them but refused to use them when facing a frontal military attack, when exactly would he have used them?

Bush: . . . Saddam Hussein was dangerous with the ability to make weapons.

OK, this is just nonsense. The word "dangerous" is being used here as a sort of metaphysical attribute. If someone said that a garter snake was "dangerous," we would want to know why. In what way is it dangerous? Garter snakes do not have poisonous fangs. So although they are snakes, they are not dangerous in the way a rattlesnake is dangerous. In the absence of the poison, what sense would it make to say that garter snakes are "dangerous?"

If it is alleged that Saddam was "dangerous," that cannot be because he is intrinsically dangerous. He isn't dangerous the way an banana is yellow. It isn't possible that it is something essential. He would be dangerous because he had weapons that could do harm. If he did not have the weapons, he was not dangerous. He did not in fact have the "ability to make weapons." US sanctions and surveillance had deprived him of that ability. He was contained.

Bush: . . . He was a dangerous man in a dangerous part of the world.

OK, now this is just racism. Not only is Saddam "dangerous" the way Satan is Evil, but now the Middle East is essentially "dangerous." Is Qatar "dangerous"? I've been to Qatar. It is a wonderful little society. People like to go for picnics at midnight in the desert and sing songs and eat fish. It is the least dangerous place I think I've ever been. I guarantee you could walk anywhere in Doha at 3 am and you would never ever be robbed. Most American cities are far more dangerous than most Middle Eastern ones.

Bush went to war because the entire Middle East is "dangerous"?

BUSH: . . . And I made a decision to go to the United Nations — by the way, quoting a lot of their data — in other words, this is unaccounted-for stockpiles that you thought he had — because I don't think America can stand by and hope for the best from a mad man. And I believe it is essential — I believe it is essential that when we see a threat we deal with those threats before they become imminent. It's too late if they become imminent. It's too late in this new kind of war. And so that's why I made the decision I made.

We've been over this. You did not have to "hope for the best." You had Iraq surrounded. Saddam could not even send soldiers into parts of his own country. By late February of 2003 the country was crawling with UN weapons inspectors, the same sort of teams that had ensured that Saddam was completely disarmed of WMD in the 1990s before the US yanked them out. And, Saddam's sanity or lack thereof cannot be the reason for a war against him, just as his "dangerousness" cannot.


BUSH: We thought he had weapons. The international community thought he had weapons. But he had the capacity to make a weapon, and then let that weapon fall into the hands of a shadowy terrorist network. It's important for people to understand the context in which I made a decision in the Oval Office. I'm dealing with a world in which we have gotten struck by terrorists with airplanes, and we get intelligence saying that, you know, we want to harm America. And the worst nightmare scenario for any president is to realize that these kind of terrorist networks have the capacity to arm up with some of these deadly weapons, and they strike us. And the president of the United States' most solemn responsibility is to keep this country secure.

1. Saddam could not have given any terrorists chemical or biological weapons because he did not have any.

2. Saddam would not have given dangrous weapons to radical Islamist terrorists who wished to overthrow his regime.

3. When the US invaded Iraq, it did not bother to secure the (non-military) nuclear materials at Tuwaitha, which were stolen. If you were so worried about WMD and it getting spread around, why did you have your army behave in this odd way?
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2 US Soldiers wounded Friday in Roadside Bombing

AP says, "A roadside bomb exploded in Baghdad on Friday, wounding two U.S. soldiers. The explosion that wounded the soldiers took place about 3 p.m., the U.S. command said, without providing further details." US forces captured 6 men they said were closely tied to the Baathist regime.

On Saturday, US helicopter pilots from the 10th Cavalry Regiment of the 4th ID foiled a rocket attack on them near Tirkrit, killing one guerrilla and wounding another in a counter-attack.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Candidates Discussed for 3-Man Presidency

Al-Qabas (Kuwait) reports that Iraqi sources close to the Interim Governing Council say that the IGC is now negotiating with the Americans about forming a three-man presidential council and announcing a new interim government. The sources say the prime candidates for the tripartite presidency are Adnan Pachachi, Jalal Talabani and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. They represent secular Sunni Arab nationalists (Pachachi), Kurds (Talabani), and religious Shiites (al-Hakim). They also envisage that Ibrahim Jaafari, leader of the Shiite al-Da`wa party, would play a leadership role (perhaps as speaker of the house?) in the transitional government. The sources also said that the intensification of terrorist acts in the past month has underlined that it is impossible to hold general, direct elections at this time.
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'Imminent Threat' and 'We know where they are' becomes "Intent" (Cheney)

I am so naive that I still read items like this with my jaw on my keyboard:

AP reported that US Vice President Dick 'Cheney, the keynote speaker at the Republicans' annual Lincoln Days, said the evidence indicates that Saddam Hussein had the intent to use weapons of mass destruction, even though inspectors have not found any massive stockpiles. "We know that Saddam had the capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction," Cheney told the crowd of roughly 800 Republicans at the Renaissance Grand Hotel. "He had the science and technology, and we know that he had the necessary infrastructure because we found the labs." Cheney also said that American forces had found delivery systems for ballistic missiles in Iraq. "We know that Saddam Hussein had the intent to arm his regime with weapons of mass destruction," Cheney said.'

Then U.S. Sen. Kit Bond said, "This was a country like honey attracting ants - the terrorists were coming into Iraq."

Saddam did not have the capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction, because he did not have active laboratories doing so. He had no "capacity" whatsoever to produce nukes. His country may have had a capacity to produce some chemical weapons, but then so could a twelve year old little boy in Iowa with a bottle of chlorine and a lab set. The point is that they did not have any active production facilities at the time the war was launched. As for "intent," well, Saddam's WMD was destroyed under UN pressure by the mid-1990s, and he never reconstituted the programs or the facilities, so his "intent" was not exactly urgent or being implemented on a relevant timescale. Besides, in military strategy you do not worry about vague abstracts such as the over-all "intent" of your enemy. You worry about his actual, existing, concrete capabilities. These in Iraq's case were obviously null, nada, laughable. As for the delivery systems, this means he had missiles. There is no evidence that he had missiles that could hit anything outside Iraq that had been prepared with chemical warheads and readied for use. That is what Tony Blair says he misunderstood.

As for Bond, the fact is that so little terrorist activity originated from Iraq in the late 1990s that the State Department did not bother to list the country as a major terrorist threat.

The main terrorist organization active on Iraqi soil was the Mujahidin-i Khalq Organization, which is supported by Washington Neoconservatives like Daniel Pipes and Richard Perle along with some congressmen.

A small terrorist group, Ansar al-Islam, operated in the part of Kurdistan that was under United States control as a result of the no-fly zone. It wasn't in the Baath-controlled part of the country.

These lies could not be contested last year because of September 11, but it is interesting that the presidential contest appears to have opened up the discourse and allowed the American public to begin questioning what people like Cheney say.

As for the support expressed for the so-called Patriot Act at the Republican fundraiser, it is obscene. See ACLU's fact sheet on it. And write your senators and congressmen urging them to protect the US constitution from John Ashcroft. Despite promises made by the Bush administration that the act would only be used against terrorists, the FBI is already using it in ordinary criminal cases, to evade the need for court orders for electronic surveillance. I'm all for catching criminals, but I'm also all for the Fourth Amendment, which the Bush administration is attempting to repeal.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

John Hannah Allegedly Focus of Plame Probe

Richard Sale, respected intelligence reporter for UPI, has given credibility to a story that had been rumored for several weeks . It is that the FBI investigation into the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame is increasingly focusing on two officials in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, Lewis "Scooter" Libby and John Hannah. Sale assures me that the information is solid.

Last summer, former ambassador Joseph Wilson went public about his 2002 report refuting the allegation that Saddam tried to buy Niger uranium. Someone in the Bush administration attempted to punish him by identifying his wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA operative involved in trying to prevent proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The information was given to the press, but only one reporter, CNN commentator Robert Novak, was sleazy enough to publish it. (Outraged readers should please email CNN demanding that they fire Novak for having wilfully damaged US national security). Novak did not commit a crime. But whatever Bush administration official leaked the information to him did.

Libby and Hannah form part of a 13-man vice presidential advisory team, sort of a veep NSC, which helps underpin Cheney's dominance in the US foreign policy area. Hannah is a neoconservative and old cold warrior who is really more of a Soviet expert than a Middle East expert. But in the 90s he for a while headed up the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a think tank that represents the interests of the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC). Hannah is said to have been behind Cheney's and consequently Bush's support for refusing to deal with Yasser Arafat. But he was also deeply involved in getting up the Iraq war.

If Hannah and Libby initiated the outing of Valerie Plame, why? Of course, both their involvement and their motives can only be speculated about at this point. But on December 9, Newsweek reported that:

"a June 2002 memo written by INC lobbyist Entifadh Qunbar to a U.S. Senate committee lists John Hannah, a senior national-security aide on Cheney's staff, as one of two 'U.S. governmental recipients' for reports generated by an intelligence program being run by the INC and which was then being funded by the State Department. Under the program, 'defectors, reports and raw intelligence are cultivated and analyzed'; the info was then reported to, among others, 'appropriate governmental, non-governmental and international agencies.' The memo not only describes Cheney aide Hannah as a 'principal point of contact' for the program, it even provides his direct White House telephone number. The only other U.S. official named as directly receiving the INC intel is William Luti, a former military adviser to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich who, after working on Cheney's staff early in the Bush administration, shifted to the Pentagon, where he oversaw a secretive Iraq war-planning unit called the Office of Special Plans."

It is possible that Wilson posed a special danger to Hannah, since Hannah was at the center of the "cherry-picking bad intelligence" effort that led Cheney to maintain that Saddam and Bin Laden were Siamese twins and that Iraq was floating in biological and chemical weapons and within 3-5 years of having an atomic bomb. (All of these positions, which Cheney has repeatedly alleged, are completely false and were known to be in 2002 by anyone not wearing ideological blinders). Hannah had fingers in all three rotten pies from which the worst intel came--Sharon's office in Israel, the Pentagon Office of Special Plans (for which Hannah served as a liaison to Cheney), and fraudster Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. Hannah had probably been the one who fed Cheney the Niger uranium story, triggering a Cheney request to the CIA to verify it and thence Joe Wilson's trip to Niamey in spring of 2002, where he found the story to be an absurd falsehood on the face of it.

The WINEP pro-Likud network, which includes Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith in the Pentagon as well as Libby and Hannah at Cheney's office, has virtually dictated Bush administration Middle East policy. Wilson's debunking of one of its central claims might well have led Cheney to fire Hannah or to disregard his opinion. The WINEP crowd takes no prisoners and is very determined, over decades, to get its way. (Josh Marshall notes that they are already trying to protect Hannah with denials he could possibly have been involved, presumably meaning that they would be willing to throw Libby to the dogs.) Wilson had to be punished, from their point of view, and if possible marginalized, to protect Hannah's position. Being male chauvinist pigs, they appear to have hoped to show that Wilson's trip was the result of nepotism or of female influence, and that Plame had recommended her husband for the job (an unfounded charge). Somehow they seemed to think that this allegation would help discredit Wilson, but to this day I haven't figured out their weird reasoning on the matter.

It is also possible that they were worried that Wilson's opinion piece might encourage more whistle blowers to step forward. Hannah and the Iraqi National Congress are being accused of peddling patently false "intelligence." This is a criminal enterprise, and there was always the danger that others in Plame's department at the agency, which specializes in preventing weapons proliferation, might be tempted to find ways of revealing the extent of Hannah's bad faith. Hannah may have wanted to send a clear signal that whistleblowers would have their careers ruined, as Valerie Plame's was, as a way of ensuring that the details of his operation did not become public.

Sale is digging. Stay tuned.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sadrists occupy Provincial HQ in Nasiriyah, force Resignation of some Members of Provincial Council

Sat. 8:30 pm. Just checked my email and am getting some information indirectly from a CPA source in Nasiriyah that challenges the al-Zaman story below on some particulars. The source claims that although there was a demonstration last Wednesday, the governor did not leave his offices and the Sadrists did not occupy them. Also alleges that Sadrist calls for a further demonstration on Friday only brought out a few hundred protesters.

al-Zaman reports Muslim religious groups took over the provincial government offices of Dhi Qar in the city of al-Nasiriyah on Wednesday and forced the governor, Sabri Hamed Badr al-Rumaidh, to leave the building with his personal guard. The occupation of the building came after numerous warnings from the Fudala group, led by Shaikh As`ad al-Nasiri, and the Sadr II movement, led locally by Shaikh Aws al-Khafaji (and nationally by Muqtada al-Sadr). They had repeatedly demanded that the local provincial council be dissolved, since it had been appointed by the Coalition Provisional Authority, and which had elected the governor. Under popular pressure, several of the members of the provincial council resigned, but the governor just departed.

The incident came after a demonstration called for by the religious political parties in the city last Wednesday. The demonstrators began at the al-Hububi square and wound their way to the offices of the governor. They surrounded the building from 10 am until 2 pm. The demonstrators increased their numbers by calling out members of the Jaysh al-Mahdi militia from surrounding suburbs and districts. After a long shouting contest between the two sides with loudspeakers, the governor left the building, allowing the protesters to enter it. Some protesters then went to the HQ of the Coalition Provisional Authority in the city, seeking to force it to acquiesce in the new status quo.

Oddly, the Iraqi police in Nasiriyah declined to intervene in these events one way or another, and stood aside as spectators. Then in another striking development, the representative of Paul Bremer in the city, John Bourne, went on local television to explain that direct elections could not be held to select a new provincial council. He called on everyone to remain calm. Despite having announced the resignation of some members of the current provincial council "for private reasons," he declined to question its legitimacy, and merely promised to add other members to replace the ones who had resigned. (This has all been a close paraphrase of the al-Zaman article).

The Italians provide the military force in Nasiriyah, a large town of half a million, but they are probably garrisoned outside the city and the report does not mention them as a factor. (They suffered from a bomb attack on November 12 that killed a large number of their troops.)

Some 10,000 Sadrists had demonstrated on January 28 in Nasiriyah, following similar unrest in the nearby cities of Amara and Kut. This Shiite dominated area of the middle to lower Euphrates had not traditionally been a stronghold of the Sadrist movement. With the prospect of national elections sometime this year, popular dissatisfaction with the US- and British-appointed provincial councils has been used by the Sadrists in their attempt to force direct elections at the provincial level before national elections are held.

Recent press reporting from Nasiriyah paints it as a desperate city with high unemployment and some 8000 demobilized and penniless former soldiers in Saddam's army. Both branches of the radical movement founded by Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, the Sadrists and the Fudala, appear to have made substantial numbers of converts to in the past 8 months. Nasiriyah is also a stronghold of the secretive al-Da`wa party founded around 1958, which aims at establishing an Islamic state.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Jaafari of al-Da`wa Calls for Shiite Unity Plan

The London daily al-Hayat says today that after being roiled by divisions after the fall of Saddam, the Shiites are now seeking a way to unify. Ibrahim Jaafari, a physician who leads the al-Da`wa Party and serves on the Interim Governing Council, has been in the forefront of calling for unity. He is abroad at the moment but appears to have planned a unity campaign for his return. Other spokesmen also affirmed that Shiite unity was a primary goal of al-Da`wa now.

The article quotes Hamid Musawi, a member of the Badr Corps paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), as saying that talks are being held by Shiite leaders in a quest for a unified stance. Clearly, this movement is taking place with an eye to national elections later this year. Musawi admitted that there is bad blood between SCIRI and the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, which goes back to the 1990s and the time of his father, Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr (d. 1999), and that the dispute continues to this day. Some say Muqtada al-Sadr himself called for a rapprochement among the Shiites in one of his Friday prayers sermons in Kufa.

The article quoted Salah al-Miyami, a member of a neighborhood council in Shiite Sadr City (East Baghdad), as saying that if the Shiites cannot close ranks, they will be "the biggest losers in the coming phase." He also expressed severe reservations about whether Sunnis and Shiites will be able to get along, given what he termed their long history of enmity.

The making of noises about Shiite unity clearly is being driven by the prospect of elections later this year. But it seems to me highly unlikely that the religious Shiite parties will be able to put up a united front. More likely, they will run against one another, diluting their power somewhat, and then will have to forge compromises in parliament.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Disputed Assassination attempt on Sistani

Alissa Rubin of the LA Times reports that there are conflicting stories about whether Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani was the victim of an attempted assassination attempt on Thursday. Two Shiite members of the Interim Governing Council told her that they were briefed that there was such an attack. On the other hand, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq denied that an attack took place.

The office of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is also denies the report, broadcast Thursday by Saba, the US-sponsored news agency in Iraq, that his car was sprayed by machine gun fire as he was leaving his office to return home.

I should think that whether there is a car in Najaf near Sistani's office full of holes made by machine gun fire would be possible to verify.

But I think the bottom line is that Sistani would know whether the attempt was made or not. Either it simply did not happen, or he is lying about the incident to forestall ethnic violence or to avoid giving the impression of vulnerability, given his attempt to intervene in the shape of Iraqi elections.

I believe in Occam's Razor, and the simplest explanation that accounts for all the known facts is that the assassination attempt was an urban rumor that got going in Najaf and was unfounded, but circulated to the IGC and thence to Saba News.

[A reliable eyewitness who was in Najaf on Thursday writes me from Iraq: " I did not hear anything about Sistani being attacked, and this certainly would have been news. I actually went by Sistani's house Thursday evening (around 6:30pm) and things were very calm."]


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Rumsfeld: We never said it!

Tony Blair admitted Thursday that he had not understood what was being claimed in British intelligence estimates that Iraq could launch weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes. The intelligence claim, which was anyway wrong, was speaking of battlefield weapons. Blair confessed that he thought the report referred to a long-range ballistic missile capability. I had always wondered how in the world Blair had gotten the idea that Iraq was a threat to Europe. Now I understand. He just had no idea what he was talking about!

George Tenet defended the CIA Thursday on Iraq intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction, and underlined that the agency never said Iraq posed an imminent danger. I think that is right, that the intelligence agencies were careful about that issue. I think the agency also put in caveats to its reports on Iraq that got washed out by the Bush administration. But Tenet was also insufficiently repentant about how badly the US intelligence agencies erred thinking Iraq still had programs and remaining stockpiles as late as early 2003. The argument that everyone else in the world also erred does not carry water. As Brzezinski has pointed out, most of the world got its intelligence on Iraq from the US!

But Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were not nearly so careful as the CIA, and neither was Bush. Rumsfeld Thursday slyly attempted to deny having said what he said without specifying what he was denying. Rumsfeld also insisted that small amounts of very deadly stockpiles could still be effectively hidden in Iraq and undiscovered. But this argument is, like much of what Rumsfeld is saying nowadays, just pure obfuscation. You can't have stockpiles of biological weapons without active production facilities, and there are no such facilities, and haven't been for along time. Without fresh production, biological stockpiles wouldn't be much good. Likewise chemical. And there was no nuclear program. And no fissionable material (never had been the latter, anywhere within a light year). So Rummy's argument that there might be (presumably old) stockpiles is silly, besides which most of this stuff degrades over that kind of time.

2004: ' "Asked about his own unequivocal prewar assertions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, Rumsfeld acknowledged he had perhaps gone too far in the first days of the war when he said he knew where Iraq's banned weapons were. He said he was referring to "suspect sites" that had been identified in areas to the north of the advancing US forces. But, he added, "There are a lot of things being said about what the administration said which the administration did not say." "I've read the critics comments and I cannot find where I've said those things," he said.'

If Rummy is saying he also didn't say the threat was imminent, that would just be a falsehood:

2002:
"We do know that he (Saddam) has been actively and persistently pursuing nuclear weapons for more than 20 years. But we should be just as concerned about the immediate threat from biological weapons." - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Sept. 18, 2002, before House Armed Services Committee.
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"There are a number of terrorist states pursuing weapons of mass destruction ... but no terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people than the regime of Saddam Hussein and Iraq." - Rumsfeld, Sept. 19, 2002, Senate Armed Services Committee.
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"On its present course, the Iraqi regime is a threat of unique urgency." - Bush, Oct. 2, 2002, after reaching agreement with House leaders on Iraq resolution
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Kurdish Parliament Rejects Islamization of Personal Status Laws

Late last December, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and some allies on the US-appointed Interim Governing Council issued an executive order abrogating Iraq's secular personal status laws and putting each Iraqi under the personal status laws of his or her religious sect. This step had clearly negative implications for women's rights, and produced women's demonstrations. The decision was so controversial that it appears to have been withdrawn for the moment, though the issue will arise again when a new constitution is written.

Just to complicate things, not only did many women not like the change, but it has now been formally rejected by the Kurdish parliament in the north, according to ash-Sharq al-Awsat. The Kurdish parliament issued a statement saying that it is abiding by the civil, uniform personal status law passed in 1959, as amended by the Kurdish administration since 1992. (Because of the American no-fly zone and Kurdish semi-independence from Saddam, the Kurds have been conducting their own administration for over a decade).

A Kurdish representative on the IGC, Mahmoud Osman, himself rejected the IGC decree (which was never implemented). He said yesterday that "The 1959 law guaranteed many just rights to women and affirmed their equality with men. The decision of the Governing Council turns over family law to religious laws for a decision, rather than to civil courts . . . If we employed religious systems of law, matters such as inheritance and polygamy would not be just with regard to women."

Osman's secular mindset is typical of middle class Iraqi Sunnis, both Arabs and Kurds, and differs starkly from the attitude in the Shiite south, where probably a slight majority would support religious law. Whether such issues can be negotiated in the new constitution and the transitional parliament without provoking ethnic conflict remains to be seen.

In a related story, Kurdish leaders acknowledged receiving a letter of condolence from Sistani about the Irbil bombings on Sunday, which they said was heartfelt and appreciated. But they contrasted the grand ayatollah's response to that of the "Shiite parties," especially the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which they characterized as "tepid." Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani complained that they had vigorously spoken out when Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim and about 100 others were killed by a car bomb in Najaf on August 29.

What is behind this Shiite-Kurdish tiff is not entirely clear. But it may be that SCIRI was annoyed by Kurdish opposition to the implementation of Islamic law and by Kurdish demands for loose federalism, and has allowed these political differences to affect the way its officials address the Kurdish leadership even over a tragedy like February 1.
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Honduras Protests against Iraq War, US Imperialism

Thousands of protesters, including students, union members and leftists, thronged the streets of five major cities in Honduras on Thursday to protest the Iraq war and US imperialism. Some 370 Honduran troops are serving in Iraq under the Spanish command around Nasiriyah.
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Reformers implore Sistani to Intervene in Iran Crisis

Ali Nourizadeh of the Saudi newspaper ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports today that more than 400 Iranian writers and cultural figures, along with some members of parliament, have penned a letter to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani of Najaf, requesting that he express his opinion on the "massacre of democracy and the transformation of parliamentary elections into a mere stage play."

They wrote, "We have followed with appreciation your courageous positions in calling for the holding of free, fair, and direct elections in Iraq, where the population did not have, until the fall of the Baath regime, the right to own a shortwave radio. That is, holding free elections that can escape foreign influence is a difficult matter if not an impossible one. Nevertheless, your excellency is insisting that the first and last word in the matter of choosing rulers and representatives belongs to the Iraqi people. How wonderful it would be if your excellency would express your opinion regarding the farce that some in your native land of Iran are attempting to impose on its people, who are wide awake, under the rubric of "elections." Najaf has always been a support for freedom lovers in Iran, for in the Constitutional Revolution [of 1905-1911], your righteous predecessors such as Mirza Na'ini, Akhund Khurasani, and Allamah Mazandarani, supported the devotees of liberty in Iran. Without their famous fatwa, the people would not have been able to bring down the tyrant Muhammad Ali Shah."

They refer as well to the positive role of the Najaf clerics in Iran's oil nationalization movement under Prime Minister Mosaddegh. They then complain that Iran is presently one big prison and that major clerics such as Ayatollahs Montazeri and Tabataba'i Qomi are under house arrest. [Montazeri is in trouble for rejecting the Khomeinist doctrine of the Guardianship of the Jurisprudent, which says that clerics must directly rule the state. Sistani also rejects this doctrine, and would be under house arrest if he were in Iran.] They describe the exclusion of more than 2500 reformist candidates from running as a [political] "massacre", and pointedly say that many of those excluded are followers of Sistani in religious affairs [rather than of Khamenei]!

Iran is currently undergoing a constitutional crisis. The clerical Guardian Council excluded some 4000 of 8000 announced candidates from running in the February 20 elections, including large numbers of sitting members of parliament, on the grounds that they were insufficiently faithful to the ideals of Ayatollah Khomeini. Once elections are actually held, they appear to have been relatively free in Iran in recent years, but the ability of clerical conservatives to exclude candidates and to overturn legislation has crippled the once-flourishing reform movement in parliament. On appeal, some of the exclusions were reversed.

Still, a third of the Iranian parliament has resigned in protest against the Guardian Council's power play. President Khatami has threatened to postpone the elections.

On Wednesday, Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei intervened, saying that elections would be held, if necessary under the armed supervision of the Revolutionary Guards, on the scheduled date, thus slapping down Khatami. But he also permitted the Ministry of Intelligence, where Khatami supporters have some influence, to review the candidate exclusions and overturn those it wished, and promised that the ministry's decision would be final. Reformers are unconvinced that the Feb. 20 elections can possibly be fair, nevertheless.

The reformers' reference to the Constitutional Revolution, which instituted the first elected parliament in Iran and first challenged absolutist rule, is extremely provocative, since it casts Khamenei in the role of the tyrant Muhammad Ali Shah. And the call for another intervention on the side of constitutionalism and the rule of law from Najaf is striking for its invocation of historical parallels.

I don't know if Sistani will respond to this appeal. He has his hands full with the situation in Iraq, after all. But this could get very interesting indeed.

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Al-Hakim: Presidential Council OK

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and a member of the US-appointed Interim Governing Council, has according to AFP given his assent to the presidential council proposed by Adnan Pachachi and the Sunnis.

Pachachi had suggested a rotating 3-man presidency, which would appoint the prime minister and the cabinet, and would have a veto over laws passed by parliament. In essence, the presidential council would function as a sort of small Senate, but confusingly placed in the executive branch. It would itself be elected by the transitional parliament. It would be expected to have a representative from each of the three major ethnic groups, Shiites, Sunni Arabs, and Kurds.

Al-Hakim said, "The idea of a sovereignty council is not rejected from our side." He is further quoted as saying, "The reason to have this council is to solve a problem. If we want to talk more frankly, the Iraqi people have concerns. The Kurds suffered from injustice, they have fears and they would like to occupy different [government] positions." He continued, "Everyone should be reassured, we want to reassure them all and we want everyone to participate actively in this period until a constitution is drafted and elections are held . . . The number of members [in the presidential council] should be studied. If the problem can be solved by three members, let it be three; if it's five, then it should be five, and if more are needed, then there should be more."

I think this idea of a multi-person rotating presidency is a horrible idea, guaranteed to cause gridlock in the executive branch. If they want a senate to over-rule the Shiite majority in the parliament, they should just create a senate. One executive is enough.

Meanwhile, the London daily al-Hayat quoted Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani as warning on Wednesday, "A difficult confrontation is coming next, with the forces of evil that wish to prevent Iraqis from enjoying their right to a free and democratic life." The article gives no context for this statement, so it is hard to know what exactly he is warning against, but it may be a reference to the Sunni radicals, of the sort who seem to have been responsible for the massive Irbil bombings on Sunday.

The same newspaper said that Iraqi Islamic Party leader Muhsin Abdul Hamid said that he finds the prospect of a civil war in Iraq unlikely.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sistani Aide: Loose Federalism not in Iraq's Interests

BBC Monitoring picked up a radio interview in Cairo on Sawt al-`Arab on Wednesday with an aide to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani named Ayatollah Abu al-Qasim Bidali, conducted by Fawzi al-Jundi. Some brief excerpts:

Bidali "With respect to the issue of elections, His Eminence Grand Ayatollah Al-Sistani says they should be held before the date they had chosen [May 31] - within the coming days. That is Ayatollah Al-Sistani's opinion . . . "

Al-Jundi But many members of the Governing Council oppose early elections in Iraq, at least at this stage, because the security situation is deteriorating?

Bidali They have finally been convinced that the meeting of UN envoys and Iraqi experts is an excellent idea.

Al-Jundi If the United Nations decides that elections should be held at a later stage, how will you react?

Bidali "There would be contacts and discussions on various issues. We see the situation on the ground and we will seek alternatives if they rejected this proposal. However, we cannot say at this point what we will do then. We must wait for the report of the UN envoy and then we will decide . . . "

Al-Jundi There are reports circulating about proposals to establish a federation based on ethnic or sectarian division. What sort of federal system do you support?

Bidali We have no specific opinion on the issue of an [loose] Iraqi federation, but we do not believe that it would be in the interests of Iraq . . . "

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Tension in Najaf between SCIRI and Sadrists

Hamza Hendawi of AP recently reported on the rising tensions between the followers of young radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and other Shiite factions in Iraq.

In my own view, such tension is a side effect of the rise of the Shiites to political prominence. As the community becomes a prime source of power, the struggle to control it will intensify.

Hendawi's report is borne out by a piece in Xinhua on Tuesday 2/3, which says that tensions are high in Najaf because of disputes between the Sadrist militia and the Badr Corps of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, in part over control of the shrine of Imam Ali. Its reporter wrote, '"The shrine of the Imam Ali (the forth caliph at the Islamic State) is closed to visitors for days now, and the situation is very tense," [Aswad] Al Abayachi said and advised us to return immediately to Baghdad.'

The word on the street in Najaf, according to Xinhua, is that Muqtada al-Sadr, 30, has lost the political spotlight to Sistani, 73, recently and wants to regain it. Also, it was alleged that Sadr was using his office inside the Imam Ali Shrine complex at Najaf as a court in which to try people. Followers of Sistani demanded that the office be closed, provoking the tension.

Xinhua said, "Some Iraqi newspapers mentioned lately that the IGC gave Al Sadr a 48-hour deadline to cancel the court that he formed and close the prison that came with the court and hand the detainees to the government. They pointed out that the Council had decided to send a special delegation to Najaf to mediate between the two disputing parties.

Many observers expect tensions among Shiites to peak during the upcoming Ashura mourning ceremonies, in which emotions run high and tens of thousands of pilgrims will come to Najaf and Karbala.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

1 US Soldier Killed, 1 Wounded, by Roadside Bomb; Kurdish toll rises to 100

BAGHDAD, Feb. 3 (Xinhuanet) -- "A US soldier was killed and another injured on Tuesday by a roadside bomb in Iraq, the US military said in a statement. The roadside bomb exploded at about 10.30 a.m. (0730 GMT) when the US soldiers were carrying out an operation to clear such weapons near Iskandariya, 56 km south Baghdad, it added. The death brings to at least 367 the number of US soldiers killed in combat in Iraq since the start of the US-led war on Iraq."

Despite the capture of Saddam, more US troops were killed in January (47) than in December.

Meanwhile, the deaths from Sunday's massive suicide bombings in Irbil have mounted to about 101, as those gravely wounded have died. Kurds are shocked and angry, and the outcome of the tragedy has yet to unfold. Jeffrey Gettelman of the NYT cannily suggests, based on an interview with Joost Hilterman, that some of the high Iraqi officials killed were among the more pragmatic in recognizing the need for restraint in demands for Kurdish autonomy. If so, the bombing may have helped radicalize the Kurds.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Kerry Slams Bush on Iraq

On winning 5 of 7 primaries on Tuesday, John Kerry immediately came out swinging at Bush over Iraq, Dean-style (without the growl): '"They obviously misused information and misled the American people," said Kerry in an interview on MSNBC television. "The administration itself promised us they would build an international coalition, that they would honor the United Nations inspections and they would go to war as a last resort. They did none of those things, I intend to hold the president accountable for that in the course of this race."

Rick Perlstein of the Village Voice argues that the Dean campaign, despite its likely failure, will nevertheless bequeath to the Democratic party a number of important themes that will survive Dean's faltering candidacy.

Although few Democrats say Iraq is their most pressing concern, dissatisfaction with the situation in Iraq was cited in Bush's recent fall in approval rating below 50 percent, and this is a good reason for Kerry to take up this theme. I don't think most voters will care that he voted for the war initially. His vote against the $87 bn. Bush further authorization establishes his disgust with how the aftermath of the war was handled.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

United Nations will Decide on Election Mechanism for Iraq

AP reported of Bush's meeting with Kofi Annan Tuesday that, Kofi said, "The Iraqi Governing Council ... indicated that they would accept the conclusions of the U.N. team, so we do have a chance to help break the impasse which exists at the moment and move forward."
But Mr. Annan said the president pledged to support whatever agreement the United Nations can achieve for elections of a transitional Iraqi government, which the United States wants to take full control on July 1. "We are going to help them work out this problem, and hopefully, they will come to some consensus and agreement as to how to move forward," Mr. Annan said.
Say what? W. has pledged essentially to turn decision-making about the shape of Iraqi elections over to . . . the United Nations?

Dick Cheney and Richard Perle must be sitting at some bar on K street, haggard, and throwing back shots. "A year ago, the UN was history," they commiserate. "How did this happen?" (A tip of the hat to blogger Swopa, who was prescient about all this.

When Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani initially slammed the Nov. 15 agreement between the US and its appointed Interim Governing Council, which called for elections based on Coalition-appointed provincial councils, he left himself an out. He said that he insisted that direct elections be held unless the United Nations sent a commission to Iraq to investigate the situation thoroughly and then reported back that general elections simply could not be held. Sistani and his aides later made it clear that they expected the UN commission to recommend something much closer to democratic elections than envisaged by the Americans, in any case.

Paul Bremer's first instinct was to defy Sistani this time. He had the IGC take a vote, which rejected the Sistani plan. When some IGC members brought up the possibility of the UN commission, they reported that the Americans were "deeply offended" that the Iraqis now wanted to bring in the UN. One of the entire points of the Iraq war from the point of view of Cheney and Co. was to demonstrate the uselessness of the UN and authorize American multilateralism. Sistani and the IGC now seemed to be placing that achievement of the US Right in doubt.

Sistani has on several occasions since April employed his religious office to pursue secular aims. His repeated calls for direct elections, of members of any constituent assembly that drafts a new constitution, and then of the transitional parliament to be formed this spring, are not grounded in Islamic religious texts (though the Qur'an does recommend shura or consultation as a means of carrying out the community's affairs, and modernist Muslims have glossed shura as democracy). When he says, "legitimate government derives from the will of the people (iradat ash-sha`b)," he is just giving his imprimatur to an Enlightenment ideal.

His call for a United Nations commission was also a contribution to secular politics. He knew very well that once a UN team came into Iraq to make recommendations on how the elections should be held, it would in effect take the direct decision-making out of Mr. Bremer's hands. He could be "deeply offended" all he liked. Sistani has never approved of the US occupation, and has long felt that the United Nations would be a more legitimate midwife of the new Iraqi state, so that it could escape the taint of being a creature of American neocolonialism.

Then Bremer started losing the IGC. Its members liked the idea of re-involving the United Nations, realizing that an IGC-UN-American triangle would give them more power and more room for maneuver than a straight American-IGC relationship, which was inevitably somewhat patronizing.

Then Sistani demonstrated, on January 15 and 19, that he could put tens of thousands of Shiites into the streets of Basra and Baghdad at will. The Americans were already bogged down in a guerrilla war in the Sunni Arab areas. They did not really control the restive Kurdish north. If the Shiites turned against them, they were doomed, and they knew it.

The British military felt even more strongly about the dangers of a Shiite revolt, and took the unusual step, according to the Financial Times, of announcing from Basra that they saw no bar at all to implementation of Sistani's plan. One of my correspondents wrote recently, "My British army friend currently in Iraq says "the sky will fall in" in the south if they don't get elections soon,which is why the brit army backed them recently." Since Jeremy Greenstock and other Blair spokesmen were much more ambivalent about direct elections, there was a bit of insubordination going on here. I was told that the British army felt badly used by the civilians in Bosnia and had determined thenceforth to speak out on pressing issues affecting them.

So, Bremer must have felt isolated on all sides. The IGC was going to meet with Kofi Annan over his objections. Sistani had shown a willingness to call out the urban masses. Even the British army in Basra had gone over to the ayatollah.

The June 30 deadline for handing over sovereignty to some sort of indigenous Iraqi government loomed. Karl Rove, Bush's campaign adviser, wanted a tangible sign of progress in Iraq, and this transition was to be it. If it were delayed, the Democrats could portray Bush as trapped in a quagmire in Iraq. Worse, as long as the Americans were more or less ruling Iraq directly, the US press remained interested in the story in a way they would not be if there were a legitimate Iraqi government. This June 30 transition is designed to get Iraq off the front pages of the major newspapers and out of the cable television news cycle.

Defying Sistani altogether carried the risk that there would be big urban demonstrations into the fall. US soldiers might have to fire into unarmed civilian crowds. The steady drumbeat of bombings in the Sunni areas would probably continue, as well, despite Saddam's capture.

And so, Bush and Co. have no choice but to obey the Grand Ayatollah's fatwa, for all the world like flagellating devotees, and let the UN decide about elections. For arrogant unilateralists, it is a dramatic reversal. They could not have even foreseen who the sides would be, that would impose on them this multilateralism.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

German Aid for Iraqi Higher Education

Every indication is that as soon as they get their independence, the Iraqi politicians will immediately invite France, Germany and Russia into Iraq as investors and advisers, so as to offset American dominance. At that point it is difficult to see what the US could do about it, since the Iraqis will increasingly have an oil income that will make them wealthy and autonomous. They will soon leave behind their need for American aid.

A harbinger of all this is the trip of Iraq's interim education minister to Berlin, where, according to AFP/al-Sharq al-Awsat, he received assurances of German aid to Iraq in rebuilding its higher education infrastructure. Iraqi universities were once among the more advanced in the Arab world.

This development cannot help but have resonances for historians. German thought was key to early twentieth century Iraqi educational reform.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Inquiry Must cover Cheney, Feith

The Bush Administration will probably attempt to dump all the blame for the WMD fiasco on the CIA. As many are saying, this move is highly ironic. Every evidence is that Doug Feith and his Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon made an end run around the CIA and the DIA, cherry-picked intelligence, and funneled it to Cheney, who then manipulated Bush with it. (W. admits to not reading the newspapers, so he is at the mercy of his close advisers for information, for all the world like an illiterate medieval king with crafty ministers!)

To make George Tenet take the fall for all this, when his analysts were relatively careful in their assessments, and to let Feith and Cheney off the hook, would be the height of injustice. Ironically, Feith leaked some of the most damaging evidence against him to the The Weekly Standard, a listing of implausible cherry-picked reports about supposed Saddam-al-Qaeda links. If this is the sort of thing that was being given to Cheney and pressed on Bush, no wonder the administration made such faulty policy.

See the excellent summary in Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest, "The Lie Factor," Mother Jones, January/February 2004, January 26, 2004

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Supreme Council Denounces Terrorism

In his sermon in Najaf for the Eid al-Adha, Sadr al-Din al-Qubanji of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) said that terrorism must be exterminated from Iraq, referring to the massive bombings in Irbil. "With regard to security in Iraq, we must battle and eliminate terrorism in order to put an end to the tragedies that it causes for our people." He said the fight against terrorism had to be "the most important demand" of the Shiites from the Coalition, along with maintenance of the unity of the country and "hastening the process of transferring sovereignty" to an independent Iraqi government.

SCIRI itself lost its leader, Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, to a massive bombing in Najaf on August 29, which also killed about 80 others.

The irony here must be mentioned. SCIRI, while based in Tehran as an exile political group in 1982-2003, carried out large numbers of bombings and other attacks on Baathist facilities and personnel in Iraq, which the former regime termed terrorism. (AFP/ al-Sharq al-Awsat).
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Were the Irbil Bombings Revenge for the Capture of Hasan Ghul of al-Qaeda?

The London daily al-Hayat raised the question today of whether Sunday's twin bombings of Kurdish party headquarters in Irbil (in which the death toll has risen to 67) were in revenge for the Kurdish role in capturing "Hasan Ghul," said to be an Egyptian courier for al-Qaeda mastermind Khalid Shaikh Muhammad. It seems to me that to any extent a small al-Qaeda contingent is operating in Iraq, though, the goal is to destabilize the country and punish allies of the US, so the bombings might well have taken place even without Ghul's capture.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Brown Translation, Commentary on Draft of Iraqi Fundamental Law

Professor Nathan Brown of George Washington University, among the foremost US experts in Middle Eastern law, has kindly translated and commented on the draft of the Iraqi Fundamental Law published in the newspaper al-Qabas on Saturday. His commentary is informed and well worth reading. Our thanks to him for alerting us to this important posting.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Patel on Grand Ayatollah Kadhim al-Haeri as a possible Sistani Successor

David Patel, in Basra, brings up the question of who would succeed Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who is 73 (some say 75) if he died. He suggests that one not underestimate the chances of Kadhim al-Haeri, a long-time ayatollah and political activist associated with the Da`wa party who is based in Qom and has declined to return to Iraq until the American occupation ends. Al-Haeri is a hard liner with Khomeinist views who was once aligned with Muqtada al-Sadr, but the two are said to have fallen out.

My own guess is that Grand Ayatollah Bashir Najafi (a Pakistani) should not be discounted as a possible successor. The Najaf establishment is uninterested in nationality, and Najafi is a forceful personality. Najaf will increasingly depend on the pilgrim trade from points east economically, which would be a support to Bashir. He is close to Sistani, which will count for something. And he has anti-American credentials.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Reply to Yglesias on Palestine

Matthew Yglesias, a philosopher who runs a very interesting web site, cited my piece on 2/2/04 about Muqtada al-Sadr's objecting vehemently (and, characteristically, vulgarly) to Iraq selling electricity to Israel. Matt then quoted my last sentence "Most Shiite clerics view Israel negatively because of its treatment of the Palestinians, fellow Muslims" and objected to it.

Yglesias asks, "How reasonable is that, really?" And goes on to ask several more questions.

I am going to reply to his points, even though quite frankly I consider it a waste of my time to do so, not because Matt doesn't deserve it (he is bright and thoughtful and dialoguing with him would always be worthwhile) but because the Arab-Israeli stuff is a Black Hole that sucks up time and energy with no obvious positive result, ever. I once compared having anything to do with it to "tangling with the Church of Scientology while living through someone else's nasty divorce." The problem is that everything one says about it is dissected to death until it doesn't mean anything anymore. And, most people in public life have frankly been intimidated into just being quiet about it (including every single sitting member of the US Congress, not one of which ever criticizes any action of the Sharon government (and survives the next election); this is an incredible degree of political intimidation).

We historians mostly do not believe that nations are natural or inevitable or "right." In this we differ from most of our contemporaries, and have done since at least Renan (who rightly remarked that when a historian studies a nation he must first betray it). Nationalists do not like us to question their pieties, especially their essentialism and attempt to justify the nation as always necessary and always right.

Zionist Revisionists, who are the most illiberal arm of Zionist nationalism, are relentless in attempting to impose their rhetorical vision on everyone who speaks about the subject, and if that fails, then to marginalize and demean them as bigots or terrorists or something. When you are in the Middle East, the Arab nationalists are just as annoying and even more ruthless, but the latter have little leverage in the US. In contrast, the heirs of Jabotinsky are ubiquitous and often powerful over here. They are, like all ideologues, intellectually dishonest. (One typical ploy is to insist that one cannot criticize Israel without also criticizing all 189 other countries in the world, which, of course, would guarantee that the critics didn't end up having much time to criticize Israel. I call this the "189 Case Studies Fallacy." This sort of trick is an obvious logical error. The proposition, "Action A, Committed by Country B against C, contravenes International Law," can be a valid proposition even if one did not repeat it for all other countries for which it is true. And in some respects, in any case, the situation in the West Bank and Gaza is unique in the contemporary world.)

So, on to Matt and the electricity boycott and the reasons for its proposal. If Matt wants to know whether the grounds mentioned are reasonable ones upon which Shiite clerics might object to selling electricity to Israel, he will have to ask them and analyze their arguments. I haven't claimed that it is reasonable, only that it is so.

If he means to say that my statement of causality is not reasonable, then he has to offer another explanation for which most Shiite clerics (both Arabs and Iranians, by the way) support a boycott of Israel.

He asks, "Doesn't it seem that someone concerned primarily with disliking governments that mistreat Muslims would be able to split its outrage more equitably against Israel, to be sure, but also also Russia, against India, against Uzbekistan."

I'm sorry to say that this is just ignorance on Matt's part. Activist Muslims do speak out against and denounce Russia's treatment of its Muslims in Chechnya, India's its, and Uzbekistan's its. "Shuravi" or the Soviet Union was a constant bugabear in the sermons of Shiite clerics throughout the Cold War. Many al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda-related fighters cut their teeth in Chechnya and Kashmir. My lord, you barely hear anything from Pakistani Islamists but what a big threat Hindu fundamentalist India is. But Matt's question here is another instance, it seems to me, of the "189 Case Studies Fallacy."

To be fair, I think there is something special about the case of Israel and the Palestinians in the minds of activist Muslims, and that is the question of occupation and settler colonialism. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are not citizens of Israel. And yet they have spent most of the period since 1967 under Israeli military rule, their lives shaped by Israeli policy. When the Israeli government plunks down a new settlement in the West Bank and gives it the wherewithal to dig a deep well, it lowers the water level in the aquifer underneath the Palestinian village and causes its wells to go dry, and hurts the agriculture of the pre-existing Palestinian village. When the Israelis criss-cross the West Bank with Israeli-controlled roads that Palestinians cannot cross except at checkpoints, they turn a half-hour journey to a traditional market into an all-day ordeal. They delay women rushing to the hospital to have a baby, sometimes causing tragedies.

Occupation is especially objectionable because it contravenes the basic principle of self-determination.

The United States has conquered Iraq, fair and square. By Israeli logic, the United States would be within its rights to send American colonists in the millions to Basra to settle it. Let's say 1.3 million Americans would kick Iraqis out of their apartments and just move in. Let the Iraqis go to Baghdad. They're all Iraqis, aren't they? Why would it matter where they live in Iraq? The Iraqis invaded Iran and Kuwait and kicked people out of their homes, so surely, an American imperialist could argue, the Iraqis can't complain if now the same thing is done to them. Iraqi terrorists have threatened the US and killed US troops. The US, it would be argued, needs a permanent colony in Iraq to safeguard its interests into the future.

I think virtually everyone in the contemporary world would find such a project morally monstrous. And yet, it is hard for me to see the difference between such a project and what the Likud is doing in the West Bank.

The case of the Muslims in Chechnya is different. They were conquered in the nineteenth century and have been Russian citizens for a long time. Many of them now want independence, but they have what Anthony Smith would call a sub-nationalism, of Russian citizens seeking to form a nation on primordial claims. Kashmiris are also Indian citizens, and polls show that few of them want to be Pakistani citizens. Some want independence. Again, this is a sub-nationalism (analogous to that of the Scots in the UK).

The Palestinians are not Israeli citizens. Few Israelis want to claim them as Israeli citizens. And yet they are under Israeli military control, their lands and resources being expropriated by a foreign power. Theirs is not a subnationalism seeking to escape Israeli nationalism. It is the nationalism of an occupied people seeking self-determination. (Actually about a third of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories have given up on Palestinian nationalism ever amounting to anything and say they'd accept Israeli citizenship if offered; of course, it won't be offered. But this is really remarkable, and doesn't sound like people who want to destroy Israel. Perhaps a plurality has met the enemy and decided it might as well be us.)

So, anyway, there is no analogy to the Chechens, the Kashmiris and the Uzbeks.

If you can find me a country in the modern world that is occupying another people to whom it has no intention of granting full citizenship but which it also won't let go, that would be the analogy to Israel in the West Bank and Gaza. I can't think of any such situation. I don't think such a situation has existed since the colonial era. I think it is essentially a racist situation, and that failure to recognize the injustice here causes racist thinking in the West.

After all, if only "some mistreatment" of Palestinians is going on, of an unremarkable nature precisely analogous to other political situations that do not cause such ire, then one can conclude that the Muslims (and it is not just Arabs) are being completely unreasonable.

Maybe they are just nervous, excitable people. (That is how the 19th century French racist imperialists explained the unreasonable revolts in Algeria against enlightened French rule there. The Semites, the French Aryans sagely proclaimed, are just a high strung, irrational race).

Or maybe they are just unreasonable bigots who hate all Jews for no reason, the imperialist could argue. After all, why else would they object to seeing their fellow Muslims expropriated and oppressed?

Any time, in a political argument, one side resorts to essentialism and ontology, you are in the presence of propaganda. Human beings are all exactly the same. They all laugh, smile, and have the same emotions. Their cultures have different rules for the games they play, but the games are all recognizable. How one gets honor differs, the quest for honor does not. An entire people (and let's just be honest and say "race"--even though there is no such thing, most people think in these terms) is not characterized by any essential attribute such as "evil" or "violent" or "fanatical," etc. Individuals and groups within the people can commit deeds that are evil, violent or fanatical. When one departs from the deeds of a specific group into speaking of the vices of a whole race or a people, one is descending to demonization and engaging in pure propaganda.

"This proposal [electricity boycott], for example, like many anti-Israel initiatives from the Arab world, doesn't really seem well-calculated to make Palestinians any better off."

Boycotts of one's political enemies are common in the world, and seldom make anyone better off. The US boycott of Cuba, on behalf of trying to free the people of Cuba from the grip of Communism, definitely does not make the Cuban people better off. I am against most boycotts, and have written against boycotting Israel. But Matt's charge is invidious.

"Certainly the '67 war wasn't a boon to Palestinian well-being or self-determination."
I don't know what this has to do with anything. the 1967 war was not instigated by the Palestinians nor for them. Apparently Nasser was convinced by bad Soviet intelligence that Israel was about to attack Damascus. His best divisions were bogged down in Yemen, so he was in a weak position, and he rattled sabers hard as a bluff. Israeli hardliners like Moshe Dayan were alarmed and felt Israel had no choice but to launch a preemptive strike, calling the bluff. (It was a lot like the recent Iraq war in being something of an intelligence SNAFU on both sides). The Palestinians and their fate were not the issue for any of the major players in that war, and only became so afterwards.

"The recent Saudi peace proposal, to take another example, links the un-occupation of the West Bank, clearly a legitimate human rights concern, to the un-occupation of the Golan Heights, which is a fairly parochial strategic concern of Syria's. If the Saudis were really primarily concerned with helping Palestinians they would make diplomatic recognition dependent on that and that alone."

What the Saudis proposed was complete and full recognition of and diplomatic relations with Israel by the Arab League and all its members in return for Israeli withdrawal from the territories it occupied in 1967. This is an unprecedented offer from the Saudi government (and from the Arab League) and should have been greeted with optimism and joy. Because the Sharon government intends to keep so much of the lands Israel took by military force, quite in violation of the UN Charter and international law, Sharon pissed all over the Saudi offer. Sharon thereby guaranteed continued political tension in the Middle East, tension that produces terrorism that may well come over here and bite Americans in the ass.

And, this situation is then blamed by Fox Cable News on . . . Saudi Arabia!

(By the way, the Saudis are in the majority Wahhabis and have a low opinion of Shiites and their clerics, so we are by now very far afield from Muqtada al-Sadr.)

"More broadly, they (and other local states) might even want to consider (as might the US vis-a-vis a number of countries) that a policy of engagement might serve that end better than a policy of de jure war by eliminating concern among moderate Israelis that a Palestinians state is merely a stalking horse for the goal of destroying Israel a goal that, one would do well to remember, was the avowed policy of the Arab world for most of Israel's existence."

Much of the Arab world has a formal peace treaty with Israel (including Egypt, the largest Arab country and Jordan, Israel's closest neighbor). Turkey, a Muslim country, is a close ally of Israel. The countries with which tension is highest are those where Israel until recently occupied their territory (Lebanon) or still does (Syria, the Palestinian Authority). One could hardly expect them to make peace wholeheartedly while that wound to national pride still stands. Sharon's occupation of Lebanon, by the way, was a naked act of aggression that backfired badly, and contributed to the invention of Hizbullah and of suicide bombings as a tactic.

The countries that have not recognized Israel are typically small and weak and can't do it any real harm, much less destroy it. Israel has several hundred nuclear warheads, an air force that can fly more missions than the US air force in the same period of time, and a well-equipped, highly trained, high-tech army that has repeatedly made mincemeat of its much more numerous foes. This idea that Israel, the big kid on the block, is in danger of being destroyed by a puny little backward country like Syria is frankly weird. The Israelis can have Damascus for lunch any day of the week, every week of the year.

The only political force that has managed to kill an Israeli prime minister (Yitzhak Rabin) in recent years is ultra-Orthodox Israeli extremism. And that is a threat to us all, not in its own right but in the backlashes its policies against the Palestinians create.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

At least 56 dead, over 200 Wounded in Irbil Blasts

Suicide bombers blew up the headquarters of the two major Kurdish political parties in Irbil northern Iraq, on Sunday. The number killed is now being given by wire services as about 56, with about 235 wounded. The HQs were the being used for receptions in honor of Eid al-Adha (the Day of Sacrifice commemorates God's sparing of Abraham from sacrificing his son).

When I think "suicide bomber" and "Kurdistan", I think Ansar al-Islam, the small, shadowy Kurdish radical group, some members of which have ties to al-Qaeda. They desire to punish the two major Kurdish parties for supporting the US presence in Iraq, and to take revenge for the destruction of their headquarters and their marginalization in Kurdistan.

Close observers of Kurdistan were speculating that the incident, which killed a number of important Kurdish politicians, would bring the two main parties closer together; and might stiffen their insistence on greater autonomy within Iraq.

Iraq's Interim Foreign Minister, Hoshyar Zebari, concurs in placing the blame this way.

The Cox News service reported, "an American soldier was killed and 12 were wounded in a rocket attack on a logistics base in Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad, the U.S. command said. Two soldiers were in serious condition, six in stable condition and four soldiers were treated for superficial wounds."

Kurdish Press release

I got this by email from a Kurdish list:

Kurdistan Regional Government
Sulaimani, Iraq

Press Statement

February 1, 2004

Irbil Bombings

Dr. Barham Salih, Prime Minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Sulaimani, issued the following statement on the terrorist outrage in Irbil:

“The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) is saddened by the death of dozens of innocent Kurdish government officials and ordinary citizens as a result of two suicide bombings in the Kurdistan city of Irbil earlier today. The KRG has sent its condolences to the families and friends that lost loved ones in these deplorable acts of terrorism. Those killed included members of both the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) celebrating the Muslim Eid feast with the larger community in Irbil. The KRG sends its wishes for a quick recovery to those injured in the attacks. The entire Kurdistan community stands together during this difficult time.

The fact that the terrorists chose to attack Muslims during these sacred days shows the killers' utter disregard for the basic tenets of Islam and humanity. The terrorists, be they loyalists of the former regime, local affiliates of al-Qaeda or foreign terrorists, seek to derail Kurdish social and political advancements of the past decade as well as disrupt our joint efforts with our Iraqi compatriots to build a peaceful democratic nation. They will not succeed.

Terrorist tactics such as those employed in Irbil today will not impede Iraq's social, political and economic progress just as they have failed to do so in other cities such as Baghdad, Najaf, Karbala, Kirkuk and Mosul. Iraqis will fight terrorism in partnership with the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq.

The KRG, will use all the powers available to it to find and prosecute those behind today's terrorist incidents. It will spare no effort to keep Iraqi Kurdistan safe and secure from such terrorism in the future. At the same time, the Iraqi Kurdish leadership will continue working with other Iraqi democrats, inside and outside the Governing Council (GC), and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) toward establishing a democratic, federal and free Iraq. "


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Muslim Brotherhood Heads up Iraq under Americans

AFP reports that the president of the Interim Governing Council for February is Muhsin Abdul Hamid, the leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party, the Iraqi branch of the Sunni fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood.

The party was founded, according to Islam Online, in 1944 when Hasan al-Banna (founder of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood) sent Husayn Kamal al-Din to Iraq. The Iraqi government at that time had been taken back over by the British and disallowed the name "Muslim Brotherhood" (the Brotherhood in Egypt at that time was attacking British soldiers and Egyptian government figures who cooperated with the British). The Muslim Brotherhood has often had a local character, and has followed different policies at different times. In the 1940s in Egypt it had a covert apparatus that was violent. Hamas in Palestine is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Mr. Abdul Hamid had initially announced last April that the Iraqi Islamic Party would not cooperate with the US occupation, but he reversed himself and joined the Interim Governing Council in July.

He clearly still has issues with the Americans. Jim Hoagland reported in the Washington Post for Jan. 26, 2004, of his recent visit to the United States: "Mohsen Abdul Hamid, head of the Iraqi branch of the Sunni-based Muslim Brotherhood, left the Governing Council delegation in New York rather than come to Washington and be photographed visiting the White House."

He had earlier stressed his party's cooperation with Shiites in opposing Communism back in the 1960s. (Since the Communists have a representative on the IGC, one wonders how he gets along with them now).

He was among the IGC members who accepted the principle of federalism recently for the three Kurdish-majority provinces, which would allow them to have a single provincial government.

Abdul Hamid is opposed to the holding of direct elections, as called for by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. He would want Islamic law to be the law of the land, though presumably the Sunni rather than the Shiite version.

Since the IGC will spend February working on the Fundamental Law that will serve as Iraq's constitution for the next two years, which is to include a bill of rights, it is a little unfortunate that the Muslim Brotherhood has the presidency this month.

AP reports that Abdul Hamid "was born in the northern city of Kirkuk has authored more than 30 books on interpretation of the Quran. A former professor at the College of Education in Baghdad, he was detained in 1996 on charges of reorganising his party. It is not clear when he was freed."

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Muqtada to Electricity Minister over Israel: "Go to Hell!"

According to AFP, Aiham al-Samarrai, interim minister of electricity in Iraq, has said that although Iraq would not buy electricity from Israel (as it does from Turkey and Syria), at some future time it might be willing to sell electricity to Israel ""at three times the price. We will extract money from Israel for the benefit the Iraqi people . . ."

On hearing of al-Samarrai's position, radical Shiite preacher Muqtada al-Sadr said in his Friday sermon in Kufa, "We have been told that the electricity minister has said that we have no objection to selling electricity to Israel. We won't have any objection at all once we send you and your followers to hell."

Most Shiite clerics view Israel negatively because of its treatment of the Palestinians, fellow Muslims.
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Details of Iraqi Draft Fundamental Law

The Kuwaiti newspaper al-Qabas ["Firebrand": Arabic URL] has published a draft of the Fundamental Law on which the Interim Governing Council is working. It will function as Iraq's constitution until a new one can be fashioned, and will allow a transitional government to be installed this summer.

I thought some of the provisions were noteworthy or ironic.

To wit: The "system" of Iraq is said to be "democratic, parliamentary, pluralistic, and federal; the Kurdistan region remains with its current arrangement in the transitional phase."

(The Kurds had been pressing for a consolidated Kurdish province instead of being spread through 6 or so current provinces. They have been given the three provinces where they form a clear majority, and have been allowed to consolidate governance in these three. The issue of Kurds in the other three provinces will be taken up by the transitional government or the constitutional convention.)

The Fourth Article, says, "Islam is the official religion of the state and is considered a fundamental source of legislation. This Law respects the Islamic identity of the majority of the Iraqi people and guarantees the complete freedom of the other religions and their practice of their rites."

This article had been insisted on by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, and its insertion was one of the first attempts by Bremer and the IGC to compromise with him. It is similar to a provision put into Egyptian law to mollify the Muslim Brotherhood there. The Egyptian constitution initially recognized Islamic law as "a" source of legislation. After the MB agitated (and after splinter groups now related to al-Qaeda engaged in violence), the government changed the phraseology to "Islamic law is the principal source of legislation" and reviewed thousands of laws to ensure they did not contradict Islamic law. It is not entirely clear that fundamentalist forces in Iraqi society do in fact interpret Islamic law in such a way that they would protect the rights of the religious minorities.

Article six recognizes Arabic as the official language, but says the situation in Kurdistan will be respected. Why have an "official language" anyway? Or why not have two?

Article 7 recognizes "the people" as the "source of authority."

Article 9: "Iraqis are equal in rights and duties regardless of race (al-jins), national origin, sect, or ethnicity (al-`irq), and all are equal before the law."

Article 11: "An individual has a right to education, well-being, work and security, and the right to a just and open trial."

(I hate to disillusion them, but the Bushism into which the poor dears are being inducted doesn't provide any of those things.) Seriously, it is amazing that a creature of this administration should stipulate "open trials"! Ashcroft should take a lesson.

Article 16: "It is not permitted to carry a weapon for self-defense without a permit issued in accordance with the law."

Aw, how come the Iraqis get the good laws? Let's hope the NRA doesn't hear about this one.

Article 18, point 1: "No Iraqi citizen may be deprived of Iraqi citizenship."

But, but, I thought the Patriot Act II envisaged stripping some Americans of their citizenship. You mean the Iraqi Fundamental Law has more protections in it than the Ashcroft constitution?

Article 20: The transitional parliament will have one member for every 100,000 citizens, i.e., about 250 seats at the moment.

Several later articles create a "presidential council" (with 3 rotating presidents!) that will appoint the prime minister and his cabinet (!) and have the power to veto the parliament's legislation. This is an extremely cumbersome executive.

Article 41, point 5: The transitional parliament will specify the decentralized prerogatives of the provinces, which are not included in the Federal purview.

point 6: "The guarantee of the rights of women to political and other participation in a manner that is equal to the rights of men in the entire society."

And the Republicans stopped the Equal Rights Amendment in the United States!
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14 Dead in Iraq Attacks, including 3 US Soldiers

Guerrillas used a roadside bomb to kill 3 US troops near Kirkuk on Saturday. Another group car-bombed an Iraqi police station in Mosul on payday, killing 9 and wounding dozens.

al-Hayat reports that guerrillas killed one leader of the Turkmen Front and wounded another by spraying their car with bullets in south Kirkuk. Another man died in a bomb blast in Baquba. Local police say they suspect he may have been preparing the bomb for use in an attack.

Meanwhile, the same newspaper says, 12 fundamentalist Sunni Muslim groups distributed a astatement outlining their plans to take over Iraq's cities when the US departs, and threatening retribution against "collaborators." The statement was signed by "The National Islamic Resistance of Iraq," "The Salafi Movement for Missionizing and Jihad," Tanzim al-Qari`ah," "the Army of the Helpers of the Sunnah," and "the Army of Muhammad."
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Shiites Seek Something Close to Free Elections

A glimpse of the likely strategy of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and his chief aides can be found in an Iranian news report quoting this week's Friday sermon of Shaikh Abdul Mahdi al-Karbala'i, Sistani's representative in the holy city of Karbala.

"Karbalai told reporters after the prayers that if the UN team believes elections are not possible for a transitional government, due to be appointed by June 30, the Shiite clergy "will insist on a formula closer to elections than designations."

That is, Sistani and his followers view the current Bremer plan as a form of appointment or "designation," rather than being a free and fair election. If the latter is found impossible by the UN, they will press the world body to suggest a compromise that will at least retain some ability to reflect the popular will (Sistani actually speaks in these Enlightenment terms).

The important Iranian cleric and ex-president of Iran, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, preached a Friday sermon in which he praised Grand Ayatollah Sistani. According to BBC world monitoring, he said,

"You can see what is happening in Iraq. The strong and acceptable position adopted by Shi'ites, Muslims and clergy, particularly Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq has put America in a bind. They are transparent and correct in demanding that the people of Iraq should decide their own fate from now on. They believe that the people should play a major role in forming a parliament, drafting a constitution, establishing a new government and holding elections. No-one can object to this demand. It is very difficult to deny this mandate in today's world . . .

They the Americans claim that elections cannot be held at the present. But Iraqis believe that elections can be held. And they will prove their case. The last 10 months have proven that Americans and the occupiers would not be able to stabilize the situation in Iraq without the support of the people. They cannot export as much oil as they did during Saddam's regime - oil that is their beloved and the main reason for their presence in Iraq. Therefore, no other solution is available in Iraq but the one proposed by Ayatollah Sistani."

Rafsanjani's remarks are notable because Iran itself does not hold the kind of open elections for which Sistani has called. Iran is roiled at the moment by an attempt of the hard line clerics to exclude thousands of candidates from running, including sitting members of parliament. Are Rafsanjani's remarks a tacit critique of the hardliners? Or is he just being hypocritical?

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Senior US Officials Knew in May there was no WMD in Iraq

The Observer reports that "US military survey teams sent to visit suspected sites of WMD, and intelligence interviews with Iraqi scientists and officials, had concluded" . . . as early as last May that there were no chemical or biological weapons stockpiles in Iraq, and nothing nuclear, either.

The Observer interviewed someone it identified as "a very senior US intelligence official" who served during the war against Iraq, and knew the WMD issue thoroughly. He said, "We had enough evidence at the beginning of May to start asking, 'where did we go wrong?' . . . We had already made the judgment that something very wrong had happened [in May] and our confidence was shaken to its foundations." The source asserted that the intelligence community had "suppressed dissenting views and intelligence."

This allegation directly contradicts the repeated assertions by the Bush administration and by the intelligence services themselves that no pressure was exerted on analysts.

The account was confirmed by former UN nuclear inspector David Albright: "It was known in May that no one was going to find large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. The only people who did not know that fact was the public."
Actually, some of the "public" wasn't unaware of at least some of these facts either. See the first entry for the Informed Comment column of June 11 and the March 18 email by moi cited there.

One obvious conclusion is that the Bush administration has known since May that its assertions that WMD may yet be found in Iraq were false or highly unlikely, and this is another area in which they have been willing to deliberately mislead the public. If you know that each time a coin is tossed there is a 50/50 chance it will come up heads, and you tell people the chance is 10/90, you are in effect lying to them.

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