Wolfowitz of Baghdad?

Rumors are flying around official Washington that the new US ambassador in Iraq as of July 1 will be Paul Wolfowitz. He is currently deputy Secretary of Defense, but probably could not have continued into a second Bush term. He is associated with the worst mistakes of Iraq-- concentrating in 2001 on Saddam rather than on al-Qaeda, hyping Saddam's supposed weapons of mass destruction, insisting that Iraqis would welcome a US occupation with garlands, thinking Iraqi Shiites were "secular" and had no sensitive holy cities in that country, and backing the corrupt financier Ahmad Chalabi and his militia as successors to Saddam and the Baath. He is probably already a liability to Bush in this election. There were earlier rumors that he might step down this spring.

Sending him to Baghdad as ambassador would solve a problem for Bush domestically, perhaps. But having a Likudnik* run the US embassy in Baghdad would be a complete disaster for US policy in Iraq and in the whole region. It would be proof positive to the insurgents in Iraq that the US intends to reshape the country in accordance with a Zionist agenda and make Iraqis the bitches of Ariel Sharon [Mind you, I think this conspiratorial way of thinking illegitimate, but it is already a theme in Iraqi popular political discourse]. It seems unlikely to me that Wolfowitz could get the cooperation of the Shiite clerics.

You also wonder whether Wolfowitz could be a successful ambassador, given the way he has sidelined and badmouthed the State Department. Wouldn't the foreign service officers find ways to sabotage him?

-----------

*the objection to calling Wolfowitz a Likudnik is often raised, that he believes in a Palestinian state. But even Sharon says that. Wolfowitz is probably closer to the Sharansky faction in Israeli politics (which is in coalition with Likud) than to Sharon, but he is still on the Right and would not exactly vote Labor. It is a little unlikely that the Arab street will be interested in these distinctions.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

8% of Iraqi academics have Fled, 1000 Professionals Assassinated in past Year

Ahmad Janabi reports that

' More than 1000 leading Iraqi professionals and intellectuals have been assassinated since last April, among them such prominent figures as Dr Muhammad al-Rawi, the president of Baghdad University. The identity of the assailants remains a mystery and none have been caught. '

Political scientist Dhafir Salman is quoted as saying that although many Iraqi intellectuals fled the country during the sanctions regime in the 1990s, ' under the occupation the rate of emigration has increased. "Iraqi universities have lost 1315 scientists who hold MA and PhD degrees," al-Ani said. "This number constitutes eight per cent of the 15,500 Iraqi academics. "Up until now, 30% of those who were sacked as result of the [de-baathification] campaign have left Iraq." '

In my view, a lot of the assassinations have been carried out by individuals with Baath-era grudges or by radical Shiite militiamen. But some of them could just be personal grudge-settling. (I saw this phenomenon--of personal grudge-settling, not with regard to academic--in Beirut during the Civil War. When there is social chaos, neighbors with rifles who don't like another neighbor sometimes just take a pot shot at him through his kitchen window. It is a little unlikely that the shooter will be caught when there are few effective police and bigger fish to fry).

There has been a struggle during the past year over de-Baathification. Party membership was forced on a lot of capable people. Ahmad Chalabi wants to do massive de-baathification, which means even minor party members would be blackballed. This is apparently what is happening in the universities. Others have suggested only banning or conducting reprisals against the people who committed crimes or held fairly high party or military posts. My impression is that the latter policy was followed in post-war Germany, and that the Nazi high school teachers just went on teaching. Likewise professors like Martin Heidegger were not locked up or killed, even though Heidegger fired his Jewish colleagues and was certainly a fellow traveler of the Nazi regime.

There is a contrast to be made here in revolutionary situations. In 1949 when the Chinese Communists came to power, they actively tried to keep entrepreneurs and professionals in the country, and made special arrangements to allow that. In contrast, in 1979 when Khomeini carried out the clerical revolution in Iran, the hardliners chased most of the really talented professionals out of the country. Iran suffered horribly as a result.

So, the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Interim Governing Council can do things the Chinese way, or the Khomeini way. It looks as though Chalabi is taking them in the Khomeini direction. It can't be good for the future of Iraq to lose nearly 10% of its academics. Some of those may have been involved in Baath Party dirty tricks, but were all? And, the campaign of assassination makes a mockery of the rhetoric about democratization.








For "cont'd" postings, click here.

UN Excluded from Overseeing Elections

Al-Hayat reports that the Interim Governing Council (IGC) is rejecting any role for the United Nations in overseeing Iraqi elections save that of "help and consultation). Iraqi National Congress spokesman Intifadh Qanbar said that the UN delegation was told by the IGC that elections would have to be a purely Iraqi affair,
that Iraqis would have to take the leading role in them, and that there would be no UN role in administering elections. He also said that no interference would be brooked from Iraq's neighbors.

Qanbar and the INC sharply criticized UN special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi for having opposed the first Gulf War (which aimed at forcing Saddam back out of Kuwait), and blamed him for meeting with Saddam in 1998. He also criticized Brahimi's statement that Iraq might face a civil war. Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, a cleric now in the last days of his temporary presidency of the IGC, had also complained two days ago in Kuwait that Brahimi's report on Iraq had lacked balance.

Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress has rejected charges that he had misused American funds, saying that such charges derived from the CIA and that they were false.

Chalabi was supported by the CIA and the State Department around 1992 to 1996 or so, when they dropped him because he could not give an accounting of the millions of dollars they had given him to overthrow Saddam. He was then picked up by the Pentagon instead, and especially once the Bush administration came to power.

The attempt by the INC to marginalize Brahimi and the United Nations reflects Chalabi's fear that he would not be able to win a fair, UN-supervised election. One fears he plans on vote-buying and other corrupt acts to be elected or appointed to a high Iraqi governing post, possibly as Prime Minister. Although the al-Hayat story says that the IGC wants to limit the UN role, if one looks carefully this move seems to be coming mainly from Chalabi and his people.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sistani: Elections must be Held soon

az-Zaman/Wire Services:

A spokesman for Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani says that elections must be held as soon as possible, and that anything done before the people have spoken is illegitimate. He is quoted as saying that "the principal political forces are not calling for an Islamic republic." He said that Iraqis are well aware of the dangers of ethnic conflict and that they "do not call for the establishment of religious government. "

Sistani just wants a government that will respect the universally acknowledged Islamic principles. The state should respect the rights of minorities, he said.

Sistani is portrayed in some quarters as a Khomeini wannabe and as indistinguishable from Muqtada al-Sadr.

Going on what he says, though, he envisages a situation in Iraq analogous to that in Ireland for most of the 20th century. That is, the Catholic church did not rule; there was a secular parliament for that purpose. But the church effectively weighed in on legislation it thought affect it. Likewise, Sistani says he doesn't want ayatollahs actually running the government. But they should intervene with fatwas or rulings when legislation arises that affects Islamic issues.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Is the failure of the Arab Summit a Failure of Bush's Democratization Plan?


Rob Collier of the San Francisco Chronicle examines the issues around the collapse of the Arab League summit that had been planned for Tunis, asking if the "Greater Middle East" plan of the Bush administration, which pushes democratization, is having any effect.

' U.S. officials hoped that the summit would set the region on a path toward Western-style free elections and free markets. But commentators in the United States and the Middle East say the administration has instead made matters worse by appearing to shove democracy down the throats of reluctant Arab leaders.

"The Greater Middle East Initiative is going nowhere fast," said Andrew Apostolou, a Mideast analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a conservative Washington think tank. "The problem is that Arab states are in no mood to agree to any form of externally generated freedoms, and I see no way out of this. I don't think the Bush administration has handled this well." '

I am quoted saying that I thought the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq have if anything caused severe setbacks for civil liberties and democratization in the region. Iraq's chaos is enough to scare anyone in the region into thinking maybe a little authoritarianism is better, as long as you don't have to worry about your kids being kidnapped or your mosque being blown up. The US has encouraged governments like Tunisia and Yemen to take Draconian measures because of the war on terror (it should be recognized that terrorists are mostly only conspirators before they pull off an operation, so the temptation, as in Egypt in the 1990s, is to put thousands in jail for thought crimes). The Iranian hardliners have encaged the reformers. I don't see any positive effect of Bush administration policies in the region. Positive views of the US in the region have fallen to like 10% a lot of places. The US vetoing UN SC condemnation of Sharon's government for firing helicopter gunship rockets at a paraplegic was probably the last straw for a lot of people. I doubt the Bush administration has any credibility anywhere in the region. That it is going to "reshape" anything when its HQ in Baghdad is under routine rocket attack seems to me a little unlikely.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Changing Status of Shiites in Arab World

Hamza Hendawi of AP reports on the implications of a Shiite-majority Iraqi government for Arab world politics. He points to the Shiite majority in Bahrain (though the emir there is a Sunni), and the substantial Shiite populations in Lebanon, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

Hendawi notes that Shiites have no legal right to practice their rituals publicly in Egypt. This fact is breathtaking. It would be as though Protestants could not open a church and worship in Italy or Ireland.

Hendawi interviewed me and others for this piece:

Excerpt:

' " As Iraq's majority Shiites emerge from a history of brutal repression under Saddam Hussein, free at last to speak their minds and practice their religious rituals in public, experts are busy assessing the impact.

''Iraq seems to me now to be creating the first officially multicultural country in the Arab world,'' said Juan R. Cole of the University of Michigan, a prominent American expert on Iraqi Shiites.

''It will be the first Arab country to have an elected Shiite majority in parliament ... if things work out as planned,'' he said.

Sunni Arabs and Kurds, however, point to what they see as sectarian behavior by some Shiite politicians. Shiites are divided among themselves and lack a unified leadership. The more secular among them worry that the clergy could turn Iraq into an Iranian-style theocracy. Iranian clerical influence is already keenly felt in the Shiite south of Iraq.

''If the empowerment goes relatively smoothly and the Shiites handle their new power and more significant role well, it can be a source of both the reassertion of Iraqi Shiism's leadership role and a source of pride for many Shiites, especially those in the Gulf,'' said John L. Esposito of Georgetown University. '
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Shape of Things to Come

UPI is reporting that the Interim Governing Council is considering the form of the Iraqi government to which sovereignty will be handed on June 30.

Previous plans had called for a more representative and expanded body, of 100 or more delegates, with more representation for tribal sheikhs and clerics who had been excluded from the 25-member body currently in place.

UPI reports that, instead, the IGC current thinking is to slim down to a 3-man presidency that will in turn appoint government ministers, presumably mainly from among the current IGC members. That is, the transitional government that will oversee Iraq until elections (scheduled for January 2005) will be no more representative than the current IGC, and power will be concentrated in even fewer hands. Corrupt figures like Ahmad Chalabi may well be in the 3-man presidency.

Such a transitional government will suffer from severe illegitimacy and unpopularity. There is also a danger that people like Chalabi will jerry-rig the election process.

Arnaud de Borchgrave speculates that the three presidents will be Adnan Pachachi, Abdulaziz al-Hakim, and Massoud Barzani, and that they will appoint Chalabi prime minister. He said everyone is afraid of Chalabi because the Pentagon allowed his militia to capture Iraqi intelligence documents that implicate lots of people in taking money from Saddam.

az-Zaman says that some rumors have Chalabi competing with Iyad Alawi for the prime ministership. But it says that its sources in the CPA and the Interim Governing Council assert that Alawi will be head of the national security council or of the interior minister (i.e. domestic intelligence).

Alawi, who has deep links to ex-Baathist officers, really should be kept away from internal security.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Muqtada's Newspaper Closed, 1000 Demonstrate

AP is reporting that the Coalition Provisional Authority has closed the weekly newspaper of radical young Shiite cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, al-Hawzah. It is charged with fomenting violence against US troops. The US military authorities seriously considered arresting Muqtada last October, but in the end decided that would cause more trouble than it was worth (wisely enough). They did however threaten him, and as a result he quietened down and became more conciliatory for a while. In the past two months he has become more and more vitriolic in his public statements, perhaps emboldened by the prospect of a return to Iraqi sovereignty this summer.

The newspaper has carried scurrilous stories accusing the US of being behind some of the bombings of Shiites. I know it is tempting for some analysts to suspect the US military of Machiavellian actions. But it simply is not true that the US is firing missiles into Shiite mosques. It makes no sense. The Shiites are among the few friends they have left.

About 1,000 Sadrists came out to demonstrate in front of the newspaper's offices, and one suspects that such demonstrations may well multiply as the date for the dissolution of the CPA draws near. There is a real question as to whether cracking down on the newspaper like this will make things better or worse. Since Muqtada has a tight network of mosque preachers throughout the south, he is perfectly capable of getting out his views without a newspaper, through the sermons of his lieutenants. Likewise, he gets quoted in Iran-based Arabic language television and radio broadcasts.

Although it is true that al-Hawzah has offered provocations, it is also likely the case that the US is seeking ways of taking away Muqtada's megaphone so that he doesn't do anything to ruin the hand-over of sovereignty on June 30.

Alissa Rubin of the LA Times reports that the CPA has also closed an informal court run by Muqtada in Najaf, and released prisoners who had been sentenced to being held and tortured in its basement. Muqtada's organization is said to maintain such courts and prisons all over the country.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Clarke: Difference Between Clinton and Bush

For readers who don't scroll all the way down, just wanted to draw your attention to my posting late Sunday on what Clarke means when he says fighting terrorism was a more urgent consideration for the late Clinton administration than for the early Bush one. I argue that it isn't a matter of policy, but rather of specific cabinet-level procedures instituted by Clinton and abandoned by Bush.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Mosul: Barwari Escapes Assassination; US MPs wounded, Western Security Guards Killed

Public Works Minister Nasrin Barwari narrowly escaped an assassination attempt while traveling to Mosul on Sunday, , according to AP. She is the only female minister appointed by the Interim Governing Council. She is a Kurd, and a feminist, and led the movement to prevent the abolition of civil personal status law in favor of Islamic codes last winter. Heavily Arab Mosul, where there are strong radical Islamist and Baathist currents, is inhospitable territory for her.

Reuters reports litany of mayhem in Iraq on Sunday.

In Mosul, as well, guerrillas sprayed machine gun fire at two US military police, wounding them. In a separate incident, they took out a Stryker transport vehicle, but did not cause any casualties.

Guerrillas in the city hit the car of two security guards, a Briton and a Canadian, with rpg fire, killing them. They were escorting civilian engineers to a power plant. Other guerrillas had earlier conducted a drive-by shooting against two employees of the US-run Iraqi media network.

Another guerrilla grenade attack wounded an Iraq policeman in the city center. Guerrillas fired an RPG at city hall, missed, and hit a boy's school; luckily the grenade was a dud and did not go off.

Five Iraqi civilians, including three children, were wounded when guerrillas set of a bomb near Baqubah that probably targetted an Iraqi contractor working for the Americans.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sistani will not Launch Street Protests: Aide

az-Zaman/AFP: Refuting reports appearing Saturday in the Kuwaiti press, an aide to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Najaf told the press Sunday that Sistani wishes to avoid chaos and does not intend to call his supporters out for demonstrations, even if his reservations about the interim constitution are not taken into consideration.

The aide, who asked not to be identified, said of Sistani that "He is not thinking about calling for demonstrations in the country, since he does not want chaos. He supports the holding of cultural and intellectual meetings to prepare the street for the coming phase."

If Sistani's reservations about the interim constitution are not taken into account, the aide said, the grand ayatollah "will issue a letter if he does not want the United Nations and the Interim Governing Council in Iraq to recognize this basic law as it is, or to implement it."

He said that Sistani's wilingness to meet with a UN delegation would depend on their attitude to the interim constitution and its controversial clauses.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Israeli Intelligence Blasted by the Knesset over Iraq Failure

A subcommittee of the Israeli Parliament has issued a report sharply critical of Israeli intelligence failures concerning weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It notes that Mossad thought Iraq's programs and stockpiles were a threat, which they were not, and yet seemed unaware of how much progress Libya had made on nukes.

The fact is that Israeli intelligence failures in Iraq contributed to drawing the United States into the war (pace the Knesset report). Undersecretary of Defense for Planning Douglas Feith, a representative of the American branch of the Likud Party, met repeatedly with Israeli generals at the Pentagon (who were not properly signed in, contrary to post-9/11 regulations), and they gave him fodder for his pre-determined insistence on ginning up a war against Iraq, reinforcing what was being said by liars like Ahmad Chalabi. They were conveying Israeli intelligence to a key American policy maker, and it was wrong.

Of course, being wrong is one thing. Deliberately being wrong is another. Although the subcommittee report refuses to consider the possibility, it seems clear that there were conspiracies within the intelligence and military services of the UK, Israel and the US intended to draw the US into war against Iraq. One sees reports in the British press of a "Rockingham Group" in the UK ministry of defense pushing for war, and of British intelligence planting anti-Iraq stories in the US press.

The report very oddly maintains that Mossad did not believe Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear program, unlike the US. This allegation is flat wrong, so wrong that one suspects it must be disinformation. See the citations in my discussion last October.

It seems likely to me that there was a similar clique of conspirators inside Mossad and Israeli military intelligence. Likewise, we know that PM Ariel Sharon had organized an office analogous to Feith's Office of Special Plans, to cherry pick Iraq intelligence so as to paint the situation as much worse than it was.

The Mossad cultivates an air of competence and invincibility in the Western press, but it often has screwed up royally and has been involved in lots of hare-brained operations (encouraging Hamas in the 1970s to offset the PLO, e.g.)

The next time a US policy maker is told that something is known for sure because Israeli intelligence is sure of it, I hope to God she or he takes it all with a grain of salt. Israelis are cut off from the rest of the Middle East in most important ways. Most of them don't understand it, and most of them don't like it. They don't have really good sources for the important things. And, their intelligence estimates are often self-interested, used to promote policy rather than as a basis for it.

Not only is the Iraq debacle proof of all this (they thought Iraqis were going to pump oil to Haifa for them and would exercise a moderating influence on Hizbullah!), but their approach to the Palestinians has been such a huge failure because they are simply incompetent in dealing with other Middle Easterners. Brute force, extortion, and bribery are not a policy, they are the last refuge of a mafioso.




For "cont'd" postings, click here.

The Difference between Clinton and Bush: The Millennium Plot

More on the Clarke conroversy: The pundits and politicians who keep saying that Clinton's anti-terrorism policies and Bush's are the same are missing a key piece of the puzzle. The policy outline was the same, but the implementation was very different.

Hint: The key piece of evidence is the Millennium Plot. This was an al-Qaeda operation timed for late December 1999. Forestalling this plot was the biggest counter-terrorism success the US has ever had against al-Qaeda.

the plot involved several key elements:

*Los Angelese International Airport would be blown up.

*(Possibly: The Needle in Seattle would be blown up).

* The Radisson Hotel in Amman Jordan, a favorite of American and Israeli tourists, would be blown up. A lot of the tourism for the millennium was Christian evangelicals wanting to be in the holy land.

* Bombs would go off at Mt. Nebo, a tourist site in Jordan associated with Moses.

* The USS The Sullivans would be targeted by a dinghy bomb off Yemen.

The story of how the LAX bombing was stopped on December 14 has been told in an important series in the Seattle Times. Extra security measures were implemented by US customs agents, leading to the apprehension of an Algerian, Ahmed Ressam, with a trunk full of nitroglycerin, heading for LAX (he wanted to start his journey by ferry from Port Angeles, Washington).

Ressam grew up fishing in the Mediterranean and going to discos. But like many Algerians, he was radicalized in 1991. The government had allowed the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), an Islamist party, to contest elections. FIS unexpectedly won, however. The military feared that they would never allow another election, and would declare an Islamic state. They cancelled elections. FIS went into opposition, and the most radical members formed the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), which got money from Usama Bin Laden, then in the Sudan. Ressam seems to have been GIA.

Ressam fought in Bosnia in the early 1990s. Then he settled in France and became part of the terrorist Groupe Roubaix, which carried out attacks in that city (pop. 98,000, near Lille in the north). In spring of 1998 he flew to Afghanistan and was trained in two camps under the direction of Palestinian-Saudi Abu Zubaida. Abu Zubaida recruited Ressam into an Algerian al-Qaeda cell headed from London by Abu Doha al-Mukhalif. Ressam was assigned to form a forward cell in Montreal, from which he and several other Algerians plotted the attack on LAX.

What Clarke's book reveals is that the way Ressam was shaken out at Port Angeles by customs agent Diana Dean was not an accident. Rather, Clinton had made Clarke a cabinet member. He was given the authority to call other key cabinet members and security officials to "battle stations," involving heightened alerts in their bureaucracies and daily meetings. Clarke did this with Clinton's approval in December of 1999 because of increased chatter and because the Jordanians caught a break when they cracked Raed al-Hijazi's cell in Amman.

Early in 2001, in contrast, Bush demoted Clarke from being a cabinet member, and much reduced his authority. Clarke wanted the high Bush officials or "principals" to meet on terrorism regularly. He couldn't get them to do it. Rice knew what al-Qaeda was, but she, like other administration officials, was disconcerted by Clarke's focus on it as an independent actor. The Bush group-think holds that asymmetrical organizations are not a threat in themselves, that the threat comes from the states that allegedly harbor them. That funny look she gave Clarke wasn't unfamiliarity, it was puzzlement that someone so high in the system should be so wrongly focused.

In summer of 2001 the chatter was much greater and more ominous than in fall of 1999. Clarke wanted to go to battle stations and have daily meetings with the "principals" (i.e. Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Powell, Tenet). He wanted to repeat the procedures that had foiled the Millennium Plot. He could not convince anyone to let him do that.

Note that an "institution" is defined in sociology as a regular way of getting certain collective work done. Clarke is saying that Clinton had institutionalized a set of governmental routines for dealing with heightened threats from terrorists. He is not saying that Clinton bequeathed a "big think" plan to Bush on terrorism. He is saying that he bequeathed the Bush administration a repertoire of effective actions by high officials.

He thinks going to such a heightened level of alert and concerted effort in 2001 might have shaken loose much earlier the information that the CIA knew that Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi were in the US. As it is, the INS wasn't informed of this advent and did not start looking for them until Aug. 21, 2001, by which time it was too late. Since they made their plane reservations for September 11 under their own names, names known to the USG, a heightened level of alert might have allowed the FBI to spot them.

So it just is not true that Bush was doing exactly the same thing on terrorism that Clinton was. He didn't have a cabinet-level counter-terrorism czar; he didn't have the routine of principals' meetings on terrorism; he didn't authorize Clarke to go to 'battle stations' and heightened security alert in summer of 2001 the way Clinton had done in December, 1999.

The key to understanding Clarke's argument is to understand how exactly the Millennium Plot was foiled.

Meanwhile, the Bush slime machine has thrown up the charge that Clarke admitted that there was an al-Qaeda-Saddam connection in Sudan in the early 1990s. This is such a non-story that it is incredible to me that anyone even bothers with it.

Clarke is straightforward that he suspected an Iraq-Bin Laden link in the very early 1990s in Khartoum. He also admits that Saddam tried to have Bush senior assassinated in Kuwait in 1993. What he told Wolfowitz in spring of 2001 was that there hadn't been any Iraqi terrorism against the US in ten years. Note that he does not say "there never had been." I am personally skeptical that even the early 1990s Khartoum-Baghdad links are based on good intelligence. But Clarke is entirely consistent if you read him knowing the whole story of al-Qaeda in the 1990s. His critics still don't get it.


Appendix: The Ressam take-down:

"
A special report by Hal Bernton, Mike Carter, David Heath and James Neff · The Seattle Times - June 23 - July 7, 2002

The Coho arrived in Port Angeles in the dark, just before 6 p.m., the last boat of the day. Customs inspector Diana Dean stopped each car as it rolled off, asking the drivers a few basic questions and wishing them a good trip.

The last car in line was a green Chrysler 300M with British Columbia plates.

"Where are you going?" "Sattal."

"Why are you going to Seattle?" "Visit."

"Where do you live?" "Montreal."

"Who are you going to see in Seattle?" "No, hotel."

The driver was fidgeting, jittery, sweating. His hands disappeared from sight as he began rummaging around the car's console. That made Dean nervous.

She handed him a customs declaration to fill out, a subtle way of stalling while she took a closer look. He filled out the form and handed it back. By this time, Dean observed, he was acting "hinky."

She asked him to turn the car off, pop open the trunk and step outside. Noris [Ahmed Ressam's alias was Antione Noris] was slow to respond but complied.

At this point, the other customs inspectors were finished and waiting to go home. They came over to help process the last car of the day. Dean told them this might be a "load vehicle" — code for one used for smuggling. Inspector Mark Johnson took over the interrogation.

"Habla español?" he asked.

"Parlez-vous français?" the man replied, handing over his ID. Not a passport or driver's license, but his Costco card.

"So you like to shop in bulk? You know, the 120-roll pack of toilet paper?" Johnson joked. He escorted Noris to a table, where he asked him to empty his pockets.

Inspector Mike Chapman searched the suitcase in the trunk. As he was doing that, inspector Danny Clem reached in and unscrewed the fastener on the spare-tire compartment. He opened the panel, looked inside and called out to Johnson.

Johnson, grabbing Noris by the shoulders, led him over to the trunk. At a hefty 240 pounds, Johnson had no trouble maneuvering the slim Noris. They peered in and saw no spare tire. In its place were several green bags that appeared to filled with white powder, as well as four black boxes, two pill bottles and two jars of brown liquid. A drug dealer, perhaps?

Johnson felt Noris shudder. He escorted Noris back to the table and patted him down for weapons. Inside Noris' camel's-hair coat was a bulge. As Johnson was slipping off the coat to take a closer look, he was suddenly left holding an empty garment. Noris was fleeing.

By the time it sank in, Noris was nearly a block away. Johnson and Chapman took off on foot, yelling, "Stop! Police!"

With his head start, Noris escaped. The inspectors couldn't find him. Then Chapman noticed movement under a pickup parked in front of a shoe store. He squatted down, saw Noris, drew his gun and ordered him to come out with his hands up.

Noris stood up, arms raised, and looked at Chapman, just 20 feet away with his gun drawn. Then he turned and ran. "Stop! Police!"

Johnson joined Chapman on Noris' tail. Noris bounced off a moving car but continued running. When he got to the middle of a busy intersection, he reversed direction, headed for a car stopped at the light and grabbed the driver's door handle. The woman behind the wheel, startled, stepped on the gas, ran the red light and sent Noris spinning. Chapman and Johnson swarmed him. "


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sistani Aide Denounces Interim Constitution

Reuters is reporting that Kuwaiti papers on Saturday discussed the Friday sermon of Muhammad Baqir al-Muhri, a lieutenant of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in that country. Al-Muhri (Mohri) threatened that if key passages of the interim constitution are not amended, Sistani would call for massive street demonstrations against it.

I looked up some Kuwaiti newspapers on line and could not find this report in Arabic, checking both the Saturday and Sunday editions. I think it should be remembered that al-Muhri cannot possibly be in close contact with Sistani, and that there is a tendency for junior clerics to say they are speaking for Sistani when they are not. Earlier reports had said that Sistani does not want to instigate street demonstrations, lest the country fall into chaos.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraqi Oil Exports delayed from both North and South

AFP reports delays in Iraq oil exports in both the north and the south of the country.

Although exports are up to pre-war levels, it should be remembered that the 2.8 million barrels a day typical of the pre-war period were very low in comparison to Iraq's capacity, and that they don't generate enough for the government to run the country properly.

Meanwhile, Jubilee Iraq reckons that the country is saddled with $300 bn. in debt and reparations from the Saddam period, a crushing burden that could delay the country's re-development if there is not substantial debt forgiveness.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Death Toll from Two days of Attacks in Iraq is 21


AP reports that guerrillas fired rockets into the municipal building in Mosul on Saturday, killing two civilians and wounding 14, including 2 policement. In central Baghdad, guerrillas set off a roadside bomb, which wounded 5 Iraqis. In the south, a brigand shot the driver of a truck supplying Japanese troops; the motive was to steal the truck and its cargo.

Early Sunday, guerrillas detonated a bomb near Baqubah that wounded 5 persons.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

US Marine, 13 Iraqis, Killed in Fighting on Friday

AFP reports that 13 Iraqis and a US Marine were killed in separate incidents on Friday. Marines engaged in an extensive firefight with guerrillas in Fallujah, in which 4 Iraqis were killed and 7 wounded, and in which guerrillas killed one US Marine. One of the Iraqis killed was a cameraman for ABC News.

An Iraqi cameraman working for the US television network ABC was killed on Friday by a bullet to the forehead when US troops fired in the direction of journalists during clashes in the flashpoint town of Fallujah, doctors and witnesses said. ' Also on Friday, four Iraqi Civil Defence Corps (ICDC) personnel were killed and four wounded in heavy fighting with insurgents in Tikrit, north of Baghdad, a US military spokesperson said. ' Three guerrillas appear to have been killed at Tikrit.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that most of the Arab population in the northern city of Mosul are still loyal to the Baath Party and Saddam Hussein.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Shiite, Sunni Clerics in Iraq Condemn Israel, US;
Muqtada: 9/11 Divine Retribution on US

AFP reports that both Shiite and Sunni Muslim preachers on Friday continued to protest against the assassination of Hamas clerical leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, "burning Israeli flags and accusing the United States of remaining silent over the killing." (On Friday, the US vetoed an attempt by a majority of the UN Security Council nations to condemn Israel for the murder of Yassin.)

In the holy city of Najaf just south of Baghdad, Shiites held a street protest outside the Imam Ali mosque, as called for by Shaikh Sadr al-Din al-Qubanji, the local representative of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. He said that they should march to honor the martyrdom of Yassin.

They chanted, "Death to Israel, death to America! Your blood, Sheikh Yassin, will liberate Palestine!"

SCIRI is a putative ally of the United States, promoted by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, which has a seat on the US-appointed Interim Governing Council.

The more radical (!) young cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, also referred to the assassination in his Friday sermon in Kufa, next door to Najaf: "The attack on Sheikh Yassin is an attack on Islam and America is responsible for this aggression by remaining silent."

WorldNet reports that
al-Sadr railed against the U.S. presence in Iraq, urging the worshippers to "seek the spread of freedom and democracy in the way that satisfies God." They have planned and paved the ways for a long time, but it is God who is the real planner - and the proof of this is the fall of the American Twin Towers." Referring to the attacks that killed 3000 innocent Americans, he said, "As we say, 'The rain starts with a drop.'"

Al-Sadr termed Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon the "biggest terrorist of all" for taking out Yassin, a leader of an organization that has massacred innocent Israeli children, women and students with suicide bombings. He added that Sharon "has committed this dirty crime and killed one of the greatest of Islamic mujahedeen . . . This was once again a dirty crime against Islam."

He said the US was an accomplice in the assassination, according to CNN. Then he "led worshippers in chants: "No, no Israel! No, no to the Jews! No, no America! No, no to terrorism!"

AFP adds that also in al-Kazimiyah mosque in Baghdad, hundreds of Sadrists demonstrated, "marching out of the shrine while carrying a symbolic coffin for Yassin wrapped with a Palestinian flag."

' "No, no to Israel. No, no to occupation," shouted the protestors, many carrying portraits of Yassin and Sadr. When they reached Sadr’s nearby offices, a group of youngsters burned two Israeli flags before trampling them, an AFP correspondent said.

'
Muqtada's conviction that September 11 was a divine judgment against a godless United States is eerily similar to the views of American evangelist Jerry Falwell.

With regard to the Sunnis, AFP reports ' At Baghdad's conservative Sunni neighborhood of Aadhamiyah, Sheikh Ahmed Hassan Taha al-Samarrai, told worshippers at Abu Haneefa Mosque that Yassin was "the beating heart of the struggle in Palestine." "Despite the fact that the late Sheikh Yassin was a disabled old man who could not move ... he made the Crusaders -- the US administration -- and its masters (the Jews) feel anxious." At the Umm al-Tubul mosque in southeast Baghdad, Sunni Sheikh Abdel Sattar al-Janabi, said: "The Jews who killed Sheikh Yassin in Palestine are the same group who are killing the Iraqis." "We shall not be afraid from them. No faithful can be afraid from his enemy if his heart was filled with faith," he said. Protests have been held in Iraq on a near-daily basis to denounce Israel's assassination of the Palestinian Islamic leader Monday. Members of Iraq's US-appointed interim Governing Council had expressed fears that the killing of Yassin, who was respected around the Arab world, would fuel violence in their own war-torn country. '

As I argued on Tuesday, Sharon's murder of Shaikh Yassin has stirred up Islamist forces against the US in Iraq in a wholly unnecessary way. The fighting in Fallujah that took so many lives Friday appears to have begun with Sunni insurgents doing operations in memory of Yassin. It is incredible to me that Bush is still willing to meet with Sharon in Washington on April 15, and has protected Sharon from a UNSC condemnation.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Muqtada, Sistani's Rep, Condemn Interim Constitution

Al-Jazeera TV, Doha, in Arabic 1608 gmt 26 Mar 04 via BBC Monitoring, reports that Muqtada al-Sadr also demanded in his sermon that if the Governing Council does not repeal the interim constitution or law of state administration, it should dissolve itself. He called the temporary constitution a "terrorist law." He also charged the Governing Council with treason because it allowed US Secretary of State Colin Powell to visit recently.

Muqtada al-Sadr said, ' The Governing Council should dissolve itself or remain away from the tyrannical US demands. It should also renounce this unjust, terrorist document, or what they refer to as the constitution or the law. They should keep the Iraqi army in Iraqi hands. That would be a move in the interest of the Iraqi people, who suffered a great deal. The United States has called for closing the border. Then, we wonder, from where did this person called Powell come in? What approvals did he get to enter, and what passport did he use? So enough violations against the Iraqi people. O zealous Iraqi people: How do you approve of the entry of such terrorist persons? O council, if he entered the country at your approval, then you have betrayed the Iraqi people. If you were not aware of that in advance of Powell's visit , then the disaster is bigger. '

Meanwhile, an Iraqi expatriate Iran-based radio station, Voice of the Mujahidin, in Arabic 0700 gmt 26 Mar 04 (via BBC world monitoring) reported that a spokesman for Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani had told the German wire service DPA that he ' ' will boycott the UN team, which is due to visit Iraq soon to help in the formation of an Iraqi interim government if the United Nations does not declare a clear stand concerning the controversial State Administration Law interim constitution . The media spokesman said that the interim constitution will only acquire legitimacy after its ratification in the elected national assembly. He added that this law puts obstacles to reaching and drafting a permanent constitution that would maintain the unity and rights of all the Iraqis in all their different sects. He added that the religious authority, which previously demanded the need for the UN Security Council to issue a resolution to set a date for holding general elections in the country, fears that the occupation authority would add the interim constitution to the expected UN resolution in order that it acquires the international legitimacy and becomes binding on the Iraqi people. '

In Karbala, Shaikh Nur al-Din al-Safi said in his Friday sermon from the mosque attached to the shrine of Imam Husayn that the interim constitution is "invalid," according to AFP/ash-Sharq al-Awsat. Al-Safi is Sistani's representative in that city. He said that Sistani has not just expressed reservations about the interim constitution, he "has rejected it."

AFP adds that Safi went on, ' "Despite the respect that Seyyed Sistani has for Brahimi, Seyyed Sistani does not wish to be a party to any meeting or consultation with the UN team. We want the United Nations to respect its promises and the will of the Iraqi people who gave their opinion very clearly." '

Firm Shiite opposition to the interim constitution could well derail the current US plans for elections in January of 2005, and could cause a lot of trouble in the coming months. The Kurds like the interim constitution just as it is, and would probably fight to keep it.



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Basra: Women Coerced to Veil, Shops Attacked

David Delanian writes more on the role of Shiite militias in imposing a mini-theocracy in the southern port city of Basra.

' Menacing groups of men have been stopping cars at the university gates and haranguing women whose heads are uncovered, accusing them of violating Islamic law. Male students have accosted them as they walked to class. As al Asadi spoke to a reporter in a courtyard, a scruffy-looking man handed out fliers that likened uncovered women to prostitutes and murderers. "I fear them," she said simply. '


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Rosen: The Violence is Relentless; Clerics Speak of Jihad against Infidel Americans

Freelance journalist Nir Rosen, who has been living in the real Iraq unembedded, lets loose with what the Sunni heartland of Iraq is actually like under US occupation. It is, clearly, a hellhole that has all the stability of a pressure cooker with the lid on tight and no release valve.

Excerpts:

"The violence is relentless. Explosions from bombs, rocket propelled grenades and artillery as well as guns firing can be heard all day and night, but their locations are usually impossible to determine, even if you are foolish enough to search for them after dark, when gangs and wild dogs own the streets. There are systematic assassinations of policemen, translators, local officials, and anybody associated with the occupiers. The pace of the violence is normal and mundane, so nobody cares . . .

Mosques are attacked every night and clerics killed, leading to retaliations against the opposite sect. Mosques now have armies of young volunteers wielding Kalashnikovs guarding them. Soon neighborhood mosques will unite to form neighborhood armies, to fight rival mosques or rival neighborhoods. (Even many journalists now travel with armed bodyguards; in at least one incident they returned fire, making them combatants) . . .

Though clerics from both sects are assassinated weekly, the culprits are unknown and the leaders exhort their flock to be patient, blaming the "Anglo American Zionist conspiracy." After the March 2 explosions in Karbala and Baghdad, where I saw piles of body parts, scalps, hands, and fly-covered pieces of flesh, the fury was directed at the Americans. Immediately after the three suicide bombs struck in Baghdad, spraying blood even on the mosque's ceiling, the loudspeakers urged people to be calm and accused the Americans and Jews of attacking them. Shi'ite mosques sell CDs of the riot in Kadhim, when thousands of Shi'ite men attacked American military medical vehicles that came to help, and then chased them to the base, throwing shoes, stones and epithets, waving flags and taunting the reviled occupiers. The American retreat into the base was a great victory for the shocked Shi'ites.

Though Shi'ite and Sunni leaders hastened to mouth professions of unity following the attacks in Karbala and Kadhimiya, they hate each other. Sunni and Shi'ite newspapers have grown more brazen in their attacks against each other. The only things they agree on are the need for an Islamic government (though they disagree on what it will look like) and their insistence that the Jews and Americans are to blame for all their woes. The Sunnis are scared, they fear the impending Shi'ite takeover of Iraq if anything resembling a democratic election takes place. Sunnis view Shi'ites the way white South Africans viewed blacks, and now feel disenfranchised, seeing the barbaric heathens threatening to rule their country. Many Sunnis cling to the fiction that they are in fact the majority, and the Shi'ites are all Iranians . . .

But Sunni Arabs don't scare Shi'ites anymore. The threat is America now. Only America can thwart the long-suppressed Shi'ite hope to control Iraq and establish a theocracy. Their expectations are high. Now is their time to inherit Iraq and only America stands in the way. . . [R]adical clerics such as Muqtada Sadr speak of a jihad against the infidel Americans who have come to kill the Mahdi (Shi'ite messiah). Radical Sunnis and members of the resistance hate the compromising Sistani but respect Muqtada for his defiance. In every mosque and religious center in the country one can purchase the DVDs, CDs, tapes and literature of the Islamic revolution that rejects "American democracy" and "American freedom." In Shi'ite stores you can buy books about Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, and in Sunni stores you can buy radical Sunni magazines published in Saudi Arabia.

Sunni and Shi'ite leaders were quick to condemn the new interim constitution for its secularism. They were united in calling the Quran their only constitution . . .

Meanwhile over ten thousand Iraqi men are being held prisoner, and most of them are innocent. Iraqi security guards as well as American soldiers hate the explosive-sniffing dog in front of the Sheraton and Palestine hotels, because they, like the rest of us who live in the area, are subject to its olfactory whims as it imagines every day that it smells a bomb and they must close off the street for several hours. Two of my friends were arrested for not having a bomb last week, when the dog decided their bag smelled funny. They were jailed for four days though they were not carrying a bomb. Unlike the murderous accuracy of the Israeli security forces, who at least speak Arabic, the American security forces are a blunt instrument. They arrest hundreds at once, hoping somebody will know something. One morning in the village of Albu Hishma, the local US commander decided to bulldoze any house that had pro-Saddam graffiti on it, and gave half a dozen families a few minutes to remove whatever they cared about the most before their homes were flattened."

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Against the Three-State "Solution" in Iraq

My review of 2 books on Iraq, Toby Dodge's Inventing Iraq and Anderson and Stansfield's The Future of Iraq, which appeared in The Nation last week, is now online.

Excerpts:

" . . . The League of Nations announced a British Mandate in Iraq at San Remo in the spring of 1920.

Some 100,000 disappointed Iraqis, led by Shiite and Sunni clerics, tribal chieftains and small-town notables, united in a massive anti-British revolt. The British brutally put it down from the air, slaughtering 9,000 Iraqis, both insurgents and civilians, and employing poison gas for the first time in Iraq . . .

In Inventing Iraq, Dodge analyzes what he describes as the failure of British nation-building in the 1920s. He identifies two camps in the British civil administration of the country. One camp--what I call the J.R.R. Tolkien strain of British colonialism--consisted of romantics like Dobbs, who saw the countryside, its "gentry" and the tribes as the repository of all that was noble, and who distrusted the cities and their Westernizing effendis. The other group celebrated the virtues of the rational individual and sought to establish connections between such people and the state. On the whole, the devotees of romantic ruralism won out, seeking to rule Iraq through the tribal sheiks. Dodge, ever attentive to ironies, points out that the British thereby profoundly changed the position of the supposedly "untainted" sheiks and made them conduits of colonial administration . . .

The British used their power to recognize sheiks as a way of rewarding the cooperative, and of punishing those unwilling or unable to keep their clans in line. Where administrators perceived a clan as unruly, they decertified them as tribes and seized their lands, giving them to others. The British were faced then, as the Americans are now, with ruling a huge territory on the cheap because of the disillusionment of the postwar public. To compensate for lack of troops, they relied on air power, conducting bombing raids from the sky against tribes that rebelled or refused to pay taxes. The airplane also allowed a close surveillance of the population in a manner that the supposedly despotic predecessors of the British, the Ottomans, could never have dreamed of achieving. This aspect of British rule in Iraq has long been understood by, among others, the eminent historian of Iraq Peter Sluglett. In his 1976 study, Britain in Iraq, Sluglett quotes Member of Parliament Leopold Amery as saying, "If the writ of King Faisal runs effectively through his kingdom, it is entirely due to the British airplanes."

Yet, as Dodge points out, the airplane quickly demonstrated its limits, in large part because it depended on raw power and fear rather than on legitimate authority. The British used night bombing and incendiary explosives to destroy villages around Samawah in 1923 as a means of forcing the population to surrender its rifles and submit. While the destruction of six villages and the killing of 100 men, women and children terrified the peasants, they simply dispersed from the area and took their rifles with them. The Royal Air Force high command considered following the fleeing Iraqis, but concluded that further bombing would only be a slaughter. According to Dodge, the high command feared that the British public would discover exactly how they were ruling Iraq. His points about the political limits of air power are well taken, but it should be remembered that after 1923 the number of bombing raids actually increased. At that point, Squadron Leader Arthur Harris (who is not mentioned in Dodge's index) invented the heavy bombing techniques he later practiced in Hamburg and Dresden . . .

Unfortunately, Anderson and Stansfield do not survey the full range of implications of their proposal [for a partition of Iraq]. No major indigenous Iraqi political party or actor favors partition. Even the Kurds want a loose federalism. Turkey has threatened to go to war to prevent the emergence of an oil-rich independent Kurdistan, which its leaders fear might entice the Turkish Kurds of eastern Anatolia into a separatism that would fragment Turkey. The Iranians less truculently maintain a similar view, because of sensitivities about their own Kurdish minority.

It is not even clear that an independent Kurdistan in the rugged north is economically viable, assuming that the rest of Iraq does not quietly yield to them Kirkuk's petroleum wellheads or, indeed, the city of Kirkuk itself, which does not have a Kurdish majority. Those wellheads are, in any case, old and being depleted, and the future of Iraqi petroleum lies in the south. An independent Kurdistan could well be doomed as a poor, landlocked country with declining oil revenues.

Likewise, the Saudis are terrified of an Arab Shiite state in southern Iraq, given that they have a significant Shiite majority in their nearby Eastern Province. This province, al-Hasa, is where the Saudi petroleum is, and the Shiites provide many of the workers on the oil rigs. The Wahhabi Saudis, hyper-Sunnis, largely despise Shiites and do not want theirs becoming uppity. A partition opposed to the death by Iraq's three wealthiest and most powerful neighbors seems destined to fail. Moreover, it probably would not be good for Iraqis to be reduced to a set of small, weak and in some cases poor countries. Nor is it clear that Iraqi democracy would be served by partition, as Anderson and Stansfield argue. The corporate solidarity along religious and ethnic lines visible in Sunni Arab Falluja or in Shiite Basra, which sometimes turns coercive or violent, is a less promising basis for democracy than a federal Iraq where parties will over time prosper best if they can find ways of appealing across ethnic boundaries.

The real danger facing working-class Iraqis, the vast majority of the country, is not that they will be forced to coexist with those who pray differently or speak different first languages. The most pressing threat is that the Bush Administration's economic shock therapy and other policies will create a new, small clique of robber barons who monopolize most of the country's resources. That is where we came in.

[Read the whole review at http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040329&c=1&s=cole. ]


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

3 US Troops Killed, 9 Iraqis, 1 Jordanian Killed

al-Hayat: It was announced on Thursday in Baghdad that three American troops and nine Iraqis were killed, along with a Jordanian driver, in separate attacks. In Kirkuk, a fire broke out in an oil well after the explosion of a bomb.

There was a two-hour-long firefight between Marines and guerrillas in Ramadi Wednesday night/ Thursday morning, which left 6 Iraqis dead.

The Washington Post explains:

' On Thursday, a roadside bomb killed a soldier with the 1st Infantry Division and wounded two others around 8:25 a.m. near Baqubah, 30 miles northeast of the capital . . .. In the afternoon, insurgents attacked a military convoy near Fallujah using a roadside bomb, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and guns. One Marine was killed and two were wounded in the attack at 3:48 p.m. . In addition, at around 2 p.m. Wednesday, insurgents attacked a military convoy north of Taji, a northern suburb of Baghdad. One soldier was killed and three were wounded. '
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Stalemate between Sistani and Governor Sfouk in Karbala

Aamer Madhani reports on the stalemate in Karbala between the American-appointed provincial governing council and Grand Ayatollah Sistani. The CPA administrator there, John Berry, had consulted with tribal leaders and called for volunteers in January, when he expanded the membership to 40 from 17. Deborah Amos of NPR had done the best reporting in English on the crisis up to this point. The failure of the Americans to consult with the clerics in a holy city like Karbala seems frankly strange, and it must have been meant as a snub. Sistani and his deputy, Abdul Mahdi al-Karbala'i, took it as such. Sistani called on the council members to resign, and a fair number obeyed him. There is still no resolution. Sistani is insisting that there be elections, and rejects the legitimacy of Coalition Provisional Authority appointees.

The dispute (and the ability of Sistani to get council members to resign) is emblematic of the failures of the American administration of Iraq, which did not begin with cultivating constituencies but rather imagined itself having the ability to appoint leaders by fiat.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Prince Hassan Warns of World War III

Prince Hassan of Jordan has expressed fears that the current Middle East crisis may eventuate in "World War III." He points to the Israeli murder of Sheikh Yassin, the renewed tensions between Hizbullah and Israel, the possibility of Syria and Iran being drawn in, and the general repercussions on countries in the region (Jordan's population is about half Palestinian). He said that extremist voices in the region were rising, and that states were increasingly acting extra-legally.

Hassan has been angling for the vacant throne of Iraq, but appears to have lost out, since the interim constitution specifies that the country is a republic. It is hard to see his speech as any sort of continued campaigning for the job. Rather, it is more likely that he recognizes that the opportunity has passed, and he is free to speak his mind.

Hassan is no radical, and that he is speaking so apocalyptically shows the mood among some in the Arab elite. I don't take it as a good sign.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Israeli Tourism Devastated by Sharon

The murder of Sheikh Yassin, the clerical leader of Hamas, has led to the collapse of what was left of the Israeli tourism industry, wth half of the remaining tours having been suddenly cancelled. (- ash-Sharq al-Awsat).
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Landres: Big Brother Lurks

J. Shawn Landres' "Big Brother Lurks in Higher Education Bill" in The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, makes short work of HR 3077's provisions for an investigatory "advisory board" to oversee international studies. Regular leaders know that I have been urging readers to write their senators to protest this neo-McCarthyism.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Marines Wounded; Sheraton, Green Zone Rocketed

The Washington Post reports that that guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb and then fired weapons at Marines near Fallujah early on Wednesday; two Marines were wounded, 3 civilians were killed.

The Ishtar Sheraton Hotel, a haunt of journalists and contractors, took rocket fire but there were no casualties. A rocket landed in the US coalition HQ, wounding a “contract employee.” It adds, “Also on Wednesday, a local police chief was shot dead on his way to work in the southern province of Babil and an Iraqi translator working for Time magazine was in critical condition after being shot in Baghdad. ”

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Clarke Smeared by Neocon Slime Machine

Dick Clarke's testimony before the 9/11 Commission turned into a political ping pong match, with John Lehman, former secretary of the navy, insisting that Clarke has a "real credibility problem."

I read Clarke's book while traveling the past couple of days, and found it anything but a liberal tract. Clarke comes across as a principled conservative with special expertise. He clearly feels that his expertise was respected by Bill Clinton, who made him a cabinet official and took an intellectual interest in the nature of terrorism. And he clearly feels that George W. Bush lacks that intellectual curiosity, and surrounded himself with anti-Iraq hawks who simply did not understand asymmetrical organizations and the threat they posed. As a result, Bush and the people around him demoted Clarke from the cabinet and paid no attention to his suggestion that the administration go to 'battle stations' as a result of the increased chatter in summer of 2001.

That Clarke, while in office, tried to put a positive face on the Bush administration, in which he was serving, does not detract from the credibility of his memoir, Against all Enemies. Only the most naive observer could fail to be able to distinguish between the discourse of a public servant and that of a private citizen released from such duties, and now able to speak his mind. Washington rhetoric is often so simple-minded that it is insulting to those of us west of the Potomac, as if we are little children who will swallow any tall tale fed us.

Clarke's integrity in standing against the Neocons' and Rumsfeld's outrageous politicization of intelligence and peddling of false charges that Saddam was behind 9/11 or in cahoots with al-Qaeda more generally, is extremely admirable. But, clearly, he was reduced to a second or third tier player, and could not counteract the enormous influence of Feith, Hannah, Libby, and others, who worked through Cheney to get up a phoney case against Iraq.

Clarke was rumored to have been personally targeted for assassination by al-Qaeda before 9/11, and served honorably in the fight against that organization at a time when most high US government officials had no idea what al-Qaeda was. To have his "credibility" now challenged on partisan political grounds, when his book is anything but partisan, is shameful.

John Lehman, by the way, is the one with credibility problems. He tried to blame the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 at Aden on a failure of the CIA and the State Department, and alleged that an anti-US and anti-Israel state was behind it (read: Iraq). In fact, the USS Cole bombing was a purely al-Qaeda affair in which Iraq was in no way involved. And, as Clarke explains, it happened in part because the Navy decided to start refueling at Aden without passing the plan by any of the civilian counter-terrorism officials, including himself.

Lehmann has been wrong all along the way in downplaying al-Qaeda and foregrounding Saddam. That is why he has to now smear Clarke, who has simply told it like it was.

If you read the preface to Clarke's book carefully, you'll see that he predicted the smear campaign against him. Indeed, the word "enemies" in the title of his book refers to the way the Bushies treat anyone who doesn't get with their program.

For more on the anti-Clarke campaign see the always sharp and canny commentary of Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Ministries to become Independent in April; Shiite-Kurdish Disputes Fester (al-Hayat)

Raghida Dergham of al-Hayat : Nasrin Barwari, the minister of public works, affirmed on Wednesday that four ministries will be turned over to Iraqi sovereignty in the beginning of April. These are education, health, water utilities, and public works. She said that “the Coalition advisers will remain in them, but they will be under the authority of the ministries.”

Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, member of the Interim governing Council, told the newspaper that the coming of the team from the UN with regard to Iraqi elections will initiate an atmosphere of dialogue. Rubaie is planning a trip to Kurdistan for consultations with Massoud Barzani concerning suggestions for resolving the objections of Shiites to certain articles in the interim constitution. Al-Rubaie maintained that democracy is the rule of the political majority, not the numerical majority or the sectarian or ethnic majority. There must not be a veto, he said, on the political majority. He admitted that guarantees should be given to religious and national minorities against the dominance of a religious majority, including granting them a veto over the right of the ethnic or religious majority.

Kurdish leaders told al-Hayat that they have issued some quite offended statements recently because they feel that Sistani’s rejection of the interim constitution threatens the “rights of federalism” that the Kurds have won, which are protected by the article giving Kurds a veto over any future constitution.

Al-Rubaie suggested that the veto power could be retained, but narrowed only to a veto over matters affecting their rights and federalism. He seemed unconcerned with the danger of Kurdish separatism.
“If they want to separate, that is their choice, but we do not think it is in their interest.

Visitors to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani reported that he renewed his warning against the “snare” of the interim constitution. They also said that he was insisting that Saddam Hussein’s regime had not been ethnically based, but was a simple dictatorship. He warned against communal conflict, saying “it is forbidden to a Muslim to shed the blood of another Muslim.”

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Brown: CPA Legislation to Shape Iraq's Future

Professor Nathan Brown of George Washington University, a major figure
in the US study of Middle Eastern law and politics, comments on the recent
CPA rules signed by Paul Bremer:

"The CPA has recently issued a series of legal enactments (‘Orders”) that
give a little more sense of the shape of things after June 30. They do
nothing to resolve the issues left unresolved in the Transitional
Administrative Law (i.e., what authoritative structures are in place when
sovereignty is transferred on June 30). But they do something to clarify
the legal and institutional framework and the role of the United States.

First, the CPA has issued some legislation covering very basic economic
matters, most notably the Central Bank Law and the Companies Law. In both
cases, the preamble to the legislation mentions the Governing Council in
general terms, but does not make clear whether or not the legislation was
initiated or approved by the Governing Council. If the Council had in
fact endorsed the measures I would expect that would have been mentioned
in the preamble, so I assume that the CPA has issued these orders without
Council approval.

Second, the CPA has issued laws establishing new bodies to regulate public
and private media. The former is to be run by an “Iraqi Media Network.”
The latter is to be regulated by a “Communications and Media Commission.”
Again, there is no evidence of a Governing Council role in either Order.
The Iraqi Media Network is to be an independent public service
broadcaster. The Communications and Media Commission seems to be based on
the idea that airwaves are public property. The nature of the
Commission’s jurisdiction over print media seems a little bit more murky.
The Order states that “the Commission shall be solely responsible for
licensing and regulating Telecommunications, Broadcasting, Information
Services and other Media in Iraq,” and the Order specifically provides
that “Media” includes “printed material.” Thus, the Commission clearly has
some jurisdiction over print media. However, the Order also states that
“the written press shall not require a license to operate within Iraq.”

However, the most notable feature of the Orders might be the clear role
they lay out for continued American influence. The two media-related
bodies are to be appointed by Bremer; after June 30, it will become very
difficult to remove the members before the expiration of their terms. I
have already noted how the transfer of sovereignty to an Iraqi body will
be limited by the Transitional Administrative Law’s provisions for the
Special Tribunal and the Iraqi military (which will be placed under
American command). This strategy of walling off certain structures is now
extended to the new bodies. The Iraqi Media Network is to have a non-Iraqi
member; the Communications and Media Commission is required to coordinate
with (among others) the American Embassy after June 30.

On the one hand, this might be seen to have a salutary long-term effect.
By establishing some independent bodies, the CPA has instituted some
checks on the authority of the post-June 30 executive.

On the other hand, that is not all the CPA has done. It has made such
bodies autonomous but also created very significant pockets for its
lingering influence to be felt. In the case of the Media Commission, the
body is required by law to continue to coordinate with the US Embassy.
Such steps certainly risks undermining their credibility within Iraq.

Nathan J. Brown
http://home.gwu.edu/~nbrown"

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Demonstrations, Denunciations in Iraq over Sharon Murder of Sheikh Yassin

Xinhua reports that a wide range of Iraqi political forces on Tuesday condemned Sharon's murder of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a religious leader of Hamas, the day before.

The Board of Muslim clerics in Fallujah, 50 km west of Baghdad, "condemned the assassination and promised immediate revenge against the coalition soldiers in Iraq." Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that Fallujah was closed Tuesday in a general strike. US troops there clashed with guerrillas in a fight that left one Iraqi dead. In Ramadi, there was a big demonstration.

Radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr said the attack was "criminal" and that "the Zionists have left only one choice for the Arabs, that of fighting and jihad".

The interim Governing Council issued a communique saying, "It is a proof of the emptiness of the Israeli authority and a destruction of the peace endeavors in the region . . . This operation would only consolidate the terrorist acts in the world and would not bring peace to the region," the message claimed.

Xinhua alleged that "Many of the Iraqis, who suffer the American occupation of Iraq, relate their case with that of the Palestinian people, under the Israeli occupation."

In an apparently unrelated incidents, some eleven Iraqis were killed by snipers on Tuesday, including a group of police trainees in a bus near Hilla and two police in Kirkuk.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sharon's Murder of Yassin Endangers Americans in Iraq and Elsewhere

David R. Sands makes excellent points about the connection between Ariel Sharon's murder of Shaikh Ahmed Yassin on Monday and the security of Americans in Iraq and elsewhere. (I use the word "murder" to refer to extra-judicial killing outside the framework of conventional war between states).

Sands points out that Iraqis in the north and the south staged protests:

' Protesters at two demonstrations against the U.S.-led coalition — one in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul and the other in the southern city of Basra — chanted in support of Sheik Ahmed Yassin. "Do not worry, Palestine. Iraq will avenge the assassination of Sheik Yassin," protesters in Mosul chanted. '

It is not as if Mosul and Basra were quiet or coalition forces needed more provocations. AP reported that ' In the northern city of Mosul, gunmen shot at three members of Iraq's security forces, killing one and wounding two. ' And in Basra, it said, ' In other violence, two explosions in Basra wounded 13 British troops. The blasts occurred shortly after a demonstration by unemployed men. Rocks, gasoline bombs and a grenade were thrown during the demonstration, and soldiers fired tear gas. It wasn't clear whether the explosions were linked to the clashes. '

Sands also says, ' Several members of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council expressed alarm over the killing. "The terrorist networks will use it as justification for more attacks," said Adnan al-Assadi, a member of the fundamentalist Shi'ite Dawa Party who serves on the council. "This could happen in Iraq because the Israelis are well protected in Israel and the Americans are more vulnerable here in Iraq." '

At a time when American soldiers and civilians throughout Iraq are already daily being targeted by Sunni Muslim guerrillas, for Ariel Sharon to order the murder of Yassin and seven others while they were leaving a mosque is an act of treason against his American ally. It doubles the danger for every American man and woman in Iraq.

Sands then points to the reaction of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, which is reported at greater length by AP :

Sistani said, ' "We call upon the sons of the Arab and Islamic nations to close ranks, unite and work hard for the liberation of the usurped land and restore rights. This morning, the occupying Zionist entity committed an ugly crime against the Palestinian people by killing one of their heroes, scholar martyr Ahmed Yassin." '

Sistani is a man who can at will put hundreds of thousands of demonstrating Iraqis into the streets of Baghdad and Basra, posing a severe threat to US and UK troops and officials. And Sharon has managed to enrage him.

Some readers expressed surprise at Sistani's statement. But someone sent me a fatwa he issued on 9 April 2002, provoked by the Israeli attack on Jenin, which left 4,000 of the 16,000 camp residents homeless and killed tens. He wrote then, "Our Palestinian brothers and sisters in the holy, occupied territories in these days face continuous Zionist acts of aggression, the like of which has not been seen in modern history." All the major Shiite clergy in Iraq agree on this point, which is why it was frankly stupid for those great Arabists, Richard Perle and Doug Feith, to dream that the Shiites of Iraq (under a restored Hashemite monarchy) would moderate the Lebanese Hizbu'llah (Hezbollah). Reinforce it, more likely.

In fact, a lot of Sistani's feistiness and determination that Iraq is not going to end up with a long-term Western occupation derives from his low opinion of the Israeli treatment of Palestinians. The US can to some significant degree thank Ariel Sharon's iron fist for the distrust and suspicion with which their presence in Iraq is greeted.

And, of course, Hamas cadres are now talking about hitting US targets, something they have not usually done in the past.

Sistani is wrong to consider Ahmed Yassin a hero. His ideas were bigoted and hateful, and the tactic of killing civilians is despicable (I'm not favorably disposed in general toward killing anyone at all if it can be avoided). But Middle Easterners all know one thing that the American public, on the whole, ignores: Israel is assiduously stealing Palestinian land, tossing Palestinians out of their homeland, and oppressing Palestinians. Even Sharon's planned unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, which may or may not take place, will just result in more colonization of the West Bank. Israel's policies toward the West Bank are unparalleled in the contemporary world. There are countries that are attempting to annex territories and populations that would rather have independence. There are no other countries that insist on occupying a people whom they do not wish to absorb, but only to steal from. These policies do not justify killing civilians. But they explain why some misguided persons might resort to such a desperate and frankly evil measure. The Israelis engaged in terrorism in the 1940s when it was they who feared losing their homeland.

Everyone should be clear that murdering Yassin bestowed no operational advantage on Israel. Yassin was in the political and religious wing of Hamas. He did not plan or carry out tactical terrorist actions, though he certainly approved of them as a form of national liberation struggle (on the other hand he did sometimes talk of trying to achieve a 100-year truce with Israel; that aspect of this complex figure is gone, opening the way for a new generation of violent young men to come to the fore in Hamas, with no restraint whatsoever on their thirst for vengeance). Yassin was an old half-blind man in a wheel chair. Israel could have arrested him and tried him anytime Sharon chose. Sharon could even have had him executed after a fair trial, staying within the bounds of the rule of law. Who could have objected to a terrorist being tried and sentenced? To take him out, using American missiles, was just a fancy way of murdering him, destined to produce more hatred against the United States at a time when we don't need that. It is a form of state terrorism, designed to instill terror in a civilian population. Sharon is nothing more than a mafia don who rubs out other mafia dons, and doesn't care how many innocent women and children get sprayed by the machine gun fire (were Yassin's 7 companions all guilty of capital crimes? How would we know without a trial?) The lot of them belong in jail.

Sharon has done nothing for the US effort in Iraq. Has Israel offered any monetary aid to the US for the effort? The Israeli per capita income, at $17,000 a year, is higher than that of Spain, but the Spanish managed to contribute. Actually what I remember is that when the Israelis heard there was going to be a war, they came trooping to Washington with their hands out, asking for an extra $4 billion. Yes, folks, the US taxpayer was asked to fork over $4 billion to Ariel Sharon. Why? Because US men and women from Nebraska and Missouri and the other states were being put in harm's way in part to protect Israeli interests in the Middle East? We had to tax ourselves for the privilege of contributing to Israeli security?

So not only has Sharon done nothing for us or the Iraq effort, but ever since September 11 he has behaved with brutal insensitivity toward American interests. The weekend after that horrifying event, Sharon was attacking Palestinian targets, further inflaming anti-American feeling. A decent man would have put off such actions out of respect for the 3000 US dead. Indeed, a decent man would have sought peace and reinvigorated the Oslo process to help the US out. Sharon wouldn't recognize decency if he were served a steaming bowl of it next to the two lambs a day he must devour to stay at that obscene weight.

The most dangerous regime to United States interests in the Middle East is that of Ariel Sharon, not because he fights terrorists, but because he is stealing the land of another people and is brutalizing them in the process--and those are people with whom the rest of the Middle East and the Muslim world sympathizes. A US counter-insurgency fight against Muslim radical extremists requires winning hearts and minds, which is impossible as long as Sharon behaves the way he did Monday, since everyone in the region knows that the US coddles the Israeli Right. Israel once had a proper prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, who knew how to make peace and how to be a good partner for America. Sharon is not good enough to shine his shoes.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

US HQ Receives Rocket Fire; Elsewhere US soldiers Killed, Wounded


Wire services report that the US headquarters in Iraq was targeted by rocket fire Sunday morning, with other explosives landing elsewhere in downtown Baghdad. The attack was remarkable for being launched during the day, and that it could be pulled off at that time is a bad sign indeed on the security front. The rockets killed 2 Iraqi civilians, wounded 5, and wounded a US soldier.

In Fallujah, on Saturday night, guerrillas fired three rockets at the US army base, killing two soldiers and wounding five.

Reuters reports of Abu Ghuraib in Baghdad:

"A Task Force 1st Armored Division soldier and an Iraqi interpreter were killed and three other soldiers were wounded during an (improvised explosive device) attack on March 21," a statement from the U.S. military said.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Clarke: Bush Pressured him to Find Iraq link to 9/11

Dick Clarke's interview on CBS's 60 Minutes struck me as powerful and credible. I was struck by the phrase that the Bush administration officials, like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, were still fighting the cold war and Iraq ("as though preserved in amber") when they came back in power, and had not adjusted to the new threat of al-Qaeda. He says that Wolfowitz was openly dismissive of al-Qaeda in spring of 2001, and talked about the need instead to focus on Iraqi terrorism against the US. Clarke pointed out that there had not been any in a decade. And, the pressure Bush put on Clarke and others after 9/11 to find an Iraq connection is consistent with what else we know about the distortion and politicization of intelligence.

The transcript is at sadlyno.com (a tip of the hat to Swopa for the cite).

I have to say I thought that the Afghanistan war was the Bush administration's finest moment. But it turns out that Rumsfeld and maybe Bush himself went into it somewhat reluctantly, their eyes fixed on Iraq. Clarke's account even raises the question of who beat back Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and insisted that Afghanistan and al-Qaeda be dealt with first.

A kind reader resolved this puzzle for me. It was a combination of Tony Blair and Colin Powell, according to Sir Christopher Meyer, the UK ambassador to Washington at that time. See also the comments at Obsidian Wings, a Web Log, on this British connection.

These revelations in turn make Tony Blair's behavior more understandable. Right after 9/11, it was entirely possible that London should also be hit. MI-6 would have had an excellent appraisal of the jihadi networks in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and would have known that the 40 terrorist training camps in Afghanistan were a seething swamp out of which the mosquitoes kept coming to sting the US and Europe. There were even questions at the time about whether a British subject had trained at one of the flight schools.

So, Blair and the British establishment must have been taken aback at the bizarre early stance of the Bush administration, that they intended hit Iraq and leave Bin Laden alone. Indeed, Blair must have been absolutely frantic that the weird Bush crew might plunge the Middle East into chaos while leaving the main threat still operating. So Blair frantically flies to DC, makes an alliance with Powell, and makes a devil's bargain. The Bushies can have Iraq if they want it. But only at a price: They must take care of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan first. If they do it in that sequence, Blair would provide them a cover against charges of complete unilateral aggression.

The level of cynicism among the anti-Iraq hawks like Wolfowitz, in the wake of a huge national tragedy like September 11, is breathtaking. Even Wolfowitz admitted to Bush that the likelihood Iraq had anything to do with it was between 10 and 50 percent. And, he almost certainly knew that there was no link at all.

For the calculations driving the Necons, see
Eric Margolis's excellent piece in The American Conservative.



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sistani: UN must not Legitimate Interim Constitution

Reuters reports that Grand Ayatollah Sistani sent a letter to Lakhdar Brahimi, special envoy of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, demanding that the United Nations not endorse the interim constitution signed in early March by the Interim Governing Council.

These are the Sistani quotes in the article:

"The (Shi'ite) religious establishment fears the occupation authorities will work to include this law in a new U.N. resolution to give it international legitimacy . . . We warn that any such step will not be acceptable to the majority of Iraqis and will have dangerous consequences . . . This builds a basis for sectarianism. Consensus would not be reached unless there is pressure from a foreign power, or a deadlock would be reached that destabilizes the country and could lead to break-up . . ."

That a calm and cautious figure like Sistani is talking about the potential of the interim constitution's approval of loose federalism to destabilize or even break up Iraq alarms me no end.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bremer enacts new Investment Law for Iraq

ash-Sharq al-Awsat: Civil administrator Paul Bremer signed Law Number 64 on Sunday, altering the Iraqi law of corporations (which had been enacted in 1997), changing the legal climate for commercial enterprises in Iraq. The new law removes obstacles that had prevented the formation of Iraqi commercial institutions, permits capital investments in current Iraqi companies, and in general creates the precondtions for a free economy. The new law complements Law 39, which concerns foreign investment in Iraq, which promised that foreign investors would be treated equally with Iraqi ones.

Reports suggest that the US will attempt to keep its 64 laws (there will be more), which have been enacted by fiat by a foreign occupier, in effect after the supposed transfer of sovereignty to some sort of Iraqi government on June 30. The elected Iraqi government which will come in in January 2005 would be in a position to alter these American-imposed laws, and I suspect that they will. And, just because the political atmosphere is so transitory and unsettled, it seems a little unlikely that many corporations will be able to take advantage of Mr. Bremer's royal decree.

The Hague Regulations of 1907, governing military occupations, strictly forbid the occupying power from making significant changes in local law. But since the Iraq war and everything that followed it was illegal, I suppose that cow was out of the barn long ago. What is tragic is that apparently the return of sovereignty was delayed for a full year precisely so that laissez faire economics could be imposed on the country.

It is incredible that this sort of thing appears not to be reported in the Western press.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Mudarrisi: Loose Federalism in Interim Constitution a Time Bomb

Sayyid Muhammad Taqi al-Mudarrisi, a leading Shiite cleric of Karbala, has warned that there are explosive mines in the interim constitution, in the article on federalism. In an interview with az-Zaman, he said the law could lead to the outbreak of civil war in Iraq. He was referring to a clause that gave the three Kurdish provinces (or indeed any three provinces) the right to veto a new constitution. He said that the provision could lead to a loose federalism being imposed on the Arab majority. He said that an alternative to loose federalism would be a presidential council that included one member each of the Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Shiite Arabs, along with the president and the speaker of the house. The Kurdish member could stand up for Kurdish interests.

Al-Mudarrisi said he had not heard whether he and his brother would be appointed to an expanded transitional assembly. He said he still had reservations about the interim governing council because it was formed in the shadow of a foreign occupation, but he admitted some positive things about the IGC, especially if it eventuated in legitimate elections. He expressed confidence that attempts to sow discord among Iraq's religious and ethnic communities would fail, because Iraqis are one people.

Hesaid that the interim constitution is more a temporary set of rules for administering the state, and no constitution would be truly legitimate until it was crafted b an elected body of Iraqis.

Asked about the possibility of joining th religious leaderships of the two holy cities of Karbala and Najaf, al-Mudarrisi said that this step was unnecessary. He said that pluralism in the Shiite leadership, which reflects the major religious currents in the community, is a good thing. He did think it would be useful to have more consultation among the various Shiite religious leaders.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Reprisals by Assassination against Baathists

az-Zaman: Iraqi sources connected to the ministry of the interior (=FBI in American terms, MI5 in British ones) say that 1,000 Iraqis were assassinated in the months following the fall of Saddam from among the cadres of scientists and artistic and cultural figures, the majority of them physicians, professors, engineers working for military production in the former regime. The Quds press agency reports that there is a new wave of assassinations in Baghdad and other cities, targetting former Baathists. In the past few days, a former Iraqi security official and his wife were assassinated in Hayy al-Bayya` as they were walking in the market with their child. Three members of Baath party factions were shot down by assailants. Another Baathist was killed in Karbala . . . etc. Gunmen also have shot down a teacher in an elementary school in a Baghdad neighborhood.

I've been seeing items like this in the Arabic press about once a month, and you wonder if in the past year there haven't been several thousand such executions by assassination all over the country. The lack of progress toward a South Africa-style truth and reconciliation effort may be partially to blame here. Are any Baathists being tried for their crimes?
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

More on Spain

Check out Bill Scher's well-reasoned opinion piece in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

"Conservatives would like you to think that Spain wants to wimp out on the war against terrorism, and that the rest of Europe wants to follow suit. Why? Because the right doesn't want you to start questioning the merits of President Bush's anti-terror strategy, which is what Europe is really doing."

See also Uri Avnery's thoughtful contrast between the Spanish public, which punished the Right for its lack of progress against real terrorism and its attempts to manipulate public opinion, and the Israeli public, which seems willing to put up with infinite amounts of political corruption and failed 'iron fist' policies from the Sharon government.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

1 Marine killed; Attack on PUK in Mosul, Police in Kirkuk leave 2 Iraqis dead

AFP reports:

' a US marine was killed in an attack during security operations in western Iraq on Friday, the US military said Saturday. ' . . .

' In the latest violence, an Iraqi police officer was shot dead early on Saturday at a checkpoint near Kirkuk while a local Turkmen community leader there survived an assassination attempt. In Mosul an Iraqi civilian was killed and four wounded in a mortar attack on the offices of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), police said. Police, assisted by US troops, foiled a fresh bid to sabotage the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline that carries oil from northern Iraq to Turkey’s Mediterranean Sea terminal. A police officer said a 20-kilogramme bomb was defused after a tip-off from residents in Riyad just west of Kirkuk.

Al-Hayat reports that tensions are running high in Kirkuk, both between the two major Kurdish parties, and among them and the Arabs and Turkmen. The Arab members of the Kirkuk provincial council suspended their membership on Saturday in protest against the bad security situation in the city and the attempt of Kurds to marginalize Arabs and Turkmen.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraqi Minister calls Governing Council no more Democratic than Saddam

In the speech he used to inaugurate his reelection campaign on Saturday, Bush boasted that the US had "liberated" 50 million persons in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It is the problem with political rhetoric that it lacks all nuance or ambiguity. It is true that the Bush administration overthrew two harsh regimes, the Taliban and that of Saddam in Iraq. But in Afghanistan they only overthrew the Taliban because the latter stood in the way of getting at al-Qaeda. They accomplished the task by allying with the Jami`at-i Islami, or "Northern Alliance," the anti-Taliban Islamist movement among Tajiks, with which the pro-Iranian Hizb-i Vahdat of the Hazara Shiites was allied. Two years later, Afghanistan does not have an elected government (the so-called Loya Jirga or tribal council doesn't count for lots of reasons). Elections are scheduled for summer of 2004, but President Karzai is talking of postponing them. Afghans won't be "liberated" until they have an elected government and a sovereign parliament. At the moment, Karzai is the mayor of Kabul. Warlords like Ismail Khan rule provinces like Herat harshly, with Taliban-like restrictions on girls and personal liberties. The Taliban are resurgent in some Pushtun provinces in the south. 2/5s of gross domestic product is generated by drug production, raising fears of narco-terrorism.

As for Iraq, Bush was contradicted on Saturday by the Minister of Electricity, Ayham al-Samarrai. He is in Beirut for a conference, and a Kuwaiti newspaper (as reported by AFP asked him if the Interim Governing Council is an "imposed" body.

He replied "Absolutely . . The members of the Governing Council and the cabinet think they represent 70 per cent of the Iraqi people. How can they be sure? We have been imposed on the Iraqi people by America . . . Of course, most of the members are known in Iraqi society ... by their opposition to the former regime and also by their democratic thinking . . . However, we don't represent the people. No one chose us. Saddam was not chosen by anyone and neither were we." He said that the Governing Council takes few formal votes and is deeply divided. "I think they have applied the vote once or twice when they have made more than a hundred decisions. . . Most of the essential decisions made by the council were cancelled by the (US) civil administrator (Paul Bremer) for lack of harmony among the members."

So, it is just premature to declare Afghans and Iraqis "liberated." Al-Samarra'i is an appointee of the Governing Council which in turn was named by the Americans, and even he is talking this way.

It is disturbing that the Afghan and Iraqi elections may both be postponed past the US presidential elections. The likelihood is that both parliaments will be dominated by Islamists, which would be a public relations problem for Bush in the campaign. By cleverly postpoining the elections, he ensures that no embarrassing poll results emerge from his two "liberated" projects.

I don't deny that the Taliban and Saddam were horrible for their people. It is a good thing they are gone. But the Taliban were removed pursuant to NATO and United Nations resolutions, i.e., with full international legality. The war in Iraq was an illegal one, and weakened international law and institutions, threatening us with the jungle. Ironically, Iraqis seem to me to have a better shot at a representative government with some real liberties than do Afghans, in the near future (assuming the security situation does not continue as it is, or deteriorate). Reality is like that, not black and white but shades of grey. Unfortunately for the next 6 months we are only going to hear the black and the white, not the nuances. I can't imagine that will be good for the people in the Middle East, or for Americans.

Surely we should move the US presidential process forward and start it in June or something, so we don't have all this dead time for half a year, and campaign rhetoric cheapens our discourse.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Muqtada calls for US withdrawal from Iraq

From BBC World Monitoring:

"HEADLINE: Shi'i cleric Al-Sadr denounces US presence in Iraq

SOURCE: Voice of the Mujahidin, in Arabic 1200 gmt 20 Mar 04

BODY:
Text of report by Iraqi Shi'i group's Iran-based radio station Voice of the Mujahidin on 20 March

On the first anniversary of the US-UK led war on Iraq, Al-Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr denounced during his Friday sermon at Al-Kufa Mosque the US presence in Iraq. Al-Sadr said I never thought well of the Americans and will not do so. He added: We are seeing the results of the freedom that America granted, including the blasts in Karbala and Al-Kazimiyah, which took place on 2 March and led to the killing of more than 170 people. Al-Sadr accused the US troops of attacking Sunni mosques. "


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Clarke: I thought Rumsfeld was joking about Bombing Iraq!

Long-time anti-terrorism official Richard Clarke, who served the US government for 30 years, has broken his silence about what he observed in the Bush White House in 2001, in a CBS 60 Minutes interview.

' Frankly, I find it outrageous that the President is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11. Maybe. We'll never know. I think he's done a terrible job on the war against terrorism." '

After September 11, Clarke reports, ' "Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq. And we all said ... no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it.' "Initially, I thought when he said "There aren't enough targets in-- in Afghanistan" I thought he was joking. I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there saying we've looked at this issue for years. For years we've looked and there's just no connection." '

Some of Clarke's outrage is backed up by the account of former NSC member Daniel Benjamin. He points out that the CIA's predator spyplane had Bin Laden in its sites in late 2000, but could not target him because the planes were then unarmed. They could easily have been armed quickly if the new Bush administration had made it a priority, but it dragged its feet (reportedly to the annoyance of Condi Rice):

' By January, there was a new administration. At the urging of the CIA, President Bush decided to arm the Predator with deadly Hellfire missiles, so the next time bin Laden was spotted, the United States could take a shot. But it didn't happen before 9/11. Why? Daniel Benjamin, a member of President Clinton's counter-terrorism team, charges the Bush administration moved too slowly getting armed Predators ready and did not send unarmed Predators back to look for bin Laden. "We tied an arm behind our back,” said Benjamin. “We lost the most promising new tool we had." Part of the problem, everyone agrees, is bureaucratic infighting between the CIA and the Pentagon over who would pay and who would be blamed if something went wrong. After testing in June, the administration's plan was to send the Predator to Afghanistan in September. President Bush had said he was tired of “swatting flies.” Did his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, ever say, “September isn’t good enough — we have got to get this back up there"? '

As a comment on Clarke's experience. In fall of 2002 I taught my course on wars in the Middle East here at the University of Michigan. And I told the class that on September 12, Wolfowitz wanted to bomb Iraq in retaliation. The class laughed. I mean they burst out into giggles. I was taken aback. I was just telling the story as we knew it then. I hadn't been going for a laugh. Out of the mouth of babes . . .






For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Pakistan's Support for Taliban in 1990s: New Documents

The National Security Archives has just published part 3 of the Taliban papers, from the US archives. Document 9 is interesting for the evidence it gives that the Pakistani government under PM Nawaz Sharif was heavily supporting the Taliban financially. It also shows that the Taliban/ al-Qaeda had horrible relations with Iran (contrary to what Joseph Bodansky alleged). It gives evidence that Saudi intelligence director Faisal al-Turki's 1998 visit to Kandahar did involve an attempt to rein Bin Ladin in. (This document will be used by the Saudi defense in the 9/11 lawsuit, for sure).

The author of the cable is Joe Novak, the political counselor (polcouns) at the US embassy in Islamabad. His Afghan interlocutor is Abdul Hakeem Mujahid, later the ambassador designate of the Taliban in New York to the United Nations.


' [Mujahid] stated that the the Taliban simply could not trust any peace report that involved the Iranians-- "Iran does not want peace. We (the Taliban) know they are out to destroy us. They (the Iranians) are providing huge amounts of weapons to our opponents.

5. (c) Polcouns asked [Mujahid] about reports that the Pakistani government recently agreed to provide the Taliban 300 million rupees (USD six million) (ref B). Mujahid said that the information was true; the money was for humanitarian assisstance and road reconstruction. Pakistan had already provided 400 tons of Food assistance to displaced people from the Ghoband area of central Afghanistan who are now living in Kabul. Polcouns rejoined that there were reports that the 300 million rupees was earmarked to go to pay the salaries of Taliban officials and military commanders, not humanitarian activities. [Mujahid] smiled and commented that-- in any case -- Pakistan had not sent the money to the Taliban as of yet. Polcouns asked if the GoP [Government of Pakistan] had promised the Taliban a cash delivery and [Mujahid] said yes.

6 (c) Turning to counterterrorism, polcouns asked [Mujahid] about confidential. The status of terrorist financier Usama Bin Ladin. [Mujahid] responded that Bin Ladin is now "under control" in Kandahar. (Note: In May and early June, Bin Ladin was in Khost province, giving press statements threatening the U.S. -- see Ref. E.) Taliban authorities have "enacted new controls," instructing Bin Ladin that he now must clear all of his activities with the Taliban, including his press interviews. Bin Ladin has told the Taliban that he will from now fully "submit" to their control. (Saudi intelligence) chief prince [Faisal al-] Turki had recently visited Kandahar and made strong points to the Taliban on Bin Ladin, .... [Mujahid] relatied itmy be easier if the Taliban "just forced Bin Ladin out of the country." However, he continued, Taliban leader Mullah Omar had committed himself, and would not turn against Bin Ladin. '

Given the current massive firefight going on in Waziristan, these documents now read as especially ironic. By the way, the fighters pinned down seem to include some "Arab Afghans," but may be mainly local tribesmen loyal to, and defending some big local drug lord.

Meanwhile, the Islamic Action Forum, the Islamist parliamentary coalition in Pakistan, is denouncing President Musharraf for his offensive against the fighters in Waziristan. The party has more or less paralyzed the Pakistani parliament for the past year and a half.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Thousands of Shiites, Sunnis, March Against US in Baghdad

Thousands of Shiites and Sunnis demonstrated in Baghdad after Friday prayers. I caught some of the demonstration on CNN, which reported 7,000 demonstrators, and some of them were carrying pictures of Muqtada al-Sadr. Interestingly, the rallies began at the shrine of Imam Musa al-Kazim in Kazimiyah, a Shiite suburb of the capital, but then the crowds moved to Azamiyah, across the bridge, to meet up with Sunni protesters (Azamiyah is a largely Sunni neighborhood). In the past, there have been occasional ethnic riots between Kazimiyah and Azamiyah, but George Bush has managed to unite them. They demanded an end to the US military presence in Iraq, and the release of Iraqi prisoners being held by the Americans.

The report says

' Human rights have disappeared" said one sign. Another called for the "end to destruction" in Iraq and a third condemned the "indiscriminate" firing of US troops on suspects in the Iraqi capital. "Before the war, Iraq had no links whatsoever to international terrorism," Sunni cleric Jawad al-Khalissi said. "Occupation brought international terrorism to our land," he added, blaming the US presence in Iraq for nearly daily bombings and attacks that have rocked the war-battered country since major combat was declared over last May 1. Khalissi also denounced the US military for detaining thousands of Iraqi and said: "The Americans refuse to allow journalists to visit thousands of Iraqi prisoners and won't allow them (detainees) to have access to lawyers". '
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Garner on Reasons for Delay in Returning Sovereignty to Iraq

I can remember in April of 2003 when I complained on an email list about American plans to run Iraq for a while, when I got a protest message from a member of Jay Garner's staff. Garner, the diplomat said, intended to turn sovereignty over to the Iraqis within 6 months. And he certainly went on to behave as though that was his intention.

I saw him on the BBC world report Friday night, making the same point. And he let slip something very interesting. He said that the reason that Paul Bremer came in and delayed the turnover of sovereignty was that it would have gotten in the way of the Bush administration's economic plans for Iraq.

We know that Bremer is an old-time proponent of laissez-faire economics who wanted to implement a Polish-style shock therapy in the Iraqi economy. If Garner is right, Bremer reversed Garner's plan to hold a national convention in July of 2003 that would elect a sovereign Iraqi government, because the new government might well retain many of the Baath socialist approaches to running the economy. Arab socialism in turn functions as a form of protectionism, keeping out foreign investors.

It is impossible to know if Garner's approach, of a quick turn-over of power to a legitimate Iraqi government, would have pulled the rug out from under the building Sunni Arab insurgency. But there is at least a chance that the Bremer attempt to play General MacArthur-in-Tokyo inflamed anti-imperialist sentiment and made the uprising worse. If so, hundreds of US troops have died and thousands have been wounded so that the Iraqi economy could be wedged open for American corporate investments.

See http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0318-01.htm, which reprints a Guardian article summarizing the interview. The article mentions the "free-market plans" of Bremer but is not as clear as the interview about those being the reason for Garner's removal and for delaying Iraqi elections or the transfer of sovereignty.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Can Iraq Embrace Democracy?

Paul McGeough of the Australian newspaper, The Age wonders thoughtfully whether the US attempt to impose democracy on Iraq will succeed.

He writes, ' The compound is just across the oozy waters of the Tigris River from downtown Baghdad, a commercial district that, superficially, has much of its old bustle back. Petrol queues are shorter than they were in December. A mobile phone system is staggering into life and some of the telephone exchanges bombed by the Americans during the war are expected to come back into service any time now. But there are still power black-outs every day; there is no guarantee about the quality of the drinking water; raw sewage runs in garbage-strewn streets; and unemployment is estimated at between 35 and 60 per cent. Baghdad also remains a city of fear, patrolled by tanks and guns, with kidnappings and murder rife. Any building that is at all important is surrounded by intimidating blast walls made of heavy concrete - living and working behind them are diplomats and aid workers, the Coalition Provisional Authority and local political parties, banks and the foreign media. There is gunfire through most days and nights, punctuated by explosions that seemingly cause little disruption to the city's rhythm. The Americans have started reducing their street patrols, pulling back to bases. But their place has been taken by an anxious, incompetent and ill-equipped new Iraqi police force and dozens of public and private security organisations and politically-backed militias. Many of the new political parties have their own armed militias. The Shiite-backed militias engage in security and policing in neighbourhoods loyal to their party; the Kurdish Peshmerga stand ready to defend their territory in the north; and the Sunni militias are already at war. It could well be that the much-predicted civil war has already begun. '

Nir Rosen in the Asia Times gives an overview of the current state of play with regard to the militant Shiite movement of Muqtada al-Sadr. His militia, the Army of the Mahdi, is running courts and jailing people in the basements of tenement buildings. The Sadrists oppose a loose federalism, citing the failures in Bosnia, and desire a strong central government.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Women's classes at Shiite Mosques

Shiite women in Iraq are attending lessons in mosques, according to Ashraf Khalil, writing in Women's eNews.

Khalil does not know it, but there is a long tradition of women's literacy based on religious classes in Iraq. Elizabeth Fernea discovered literate women actually leading other women in ritual commemorations in Iraq in the 1950s (see her classic, Guests of the Sheikh). So this phenomenon is not new, but it may be being started back up on a large scale after a hiatus in the late Saddam period.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Most of them are People who Come from the Area and have certain Sympathies . . .

Barbara Ferguson reports that ' Major Jewish organizations are lobbying the Senate to approve a bill that would authorize federal monitoring of government-funded Middle East studies programs throughout US universities. '

Ori Nir of the Forward gives a similar report. (Registration required).

[I have been pleading with readers to write their senators to knock this neo-McCarthyism down.]

The essentially racist attitudes among some of the Zionist activists that are driving their concern are apparent in the utterly appalling remark of Lois Waldman of the American Jewish Congress, quoted by Nir:

"It is very hard to change attitudes within the Middle East centers," said Lois Waldman, co-director of the Commission on Law & Social Action at the AJCongress. "Professors there, most of them, are people who come from the area and have certain sympathies created by their own ethnicity and their own family background."

I cannot begin to say how offensive this way of thinking is, and how much it argues against an AIPAC-backed "advisory committee," which apparently is intended to purge professors based on their "ethnicity." That spokespersons for a major American Jewish organization should have adopted this way of speaking is chilling. I hardly need point out that if one applied her statement to Judaic Studies Centers it would be incredibly offensive. It is incredibly offensive any way you look at it.

I object absolutely to categorizing my colleagues by their "ethnicity." But just because Ms. Waldman's remarks are so wrong, I will list the faculty of the Middle East Center at the University of Michigan according to its web site. I'll let you decide if "most of them" "come from" the Middle East, or whether the conclusions Ms. Waldman draws from such origins are reasonable.

Babaie, Sussan. Art History.
Babayan, Kathryn. Persian History and Literature.
Bardakjian, Kevork B. Armenian literature.
Bardenstein, Carol. Arabic literature.
Boccaccini, Gabriele. Early Rabbinic Literature.
Gary Beckman. Ancient Near East.
Bonner, Michael. Medieval Islamic History.
Cole, Juan. Modern Middle East History.
Frieda Ekotto, French literature (including N. Africa)
Yaron Z. Eliav, Rabbinic Literature
Todd M. Endelman, Modern Jewish Hitory
Amal Fadlalla, Afromamerican and African Studies and Women's Studies
John VA Fine, Professor of Balkan and Byzantine History
Kent Flannery, James B. Griffin Professor, Archaeology
Elliot Ginsburg, Associate Professor of Jewish Thought
Gocek, Fatma Muge. Sociology.
Hagen, Gottfried. Turkish literature.
Jarrod L. Hayes. French Literature.
Jeffrey G.Heath, Linguistics
Peter Hook, Linguistics
Inhorn, Marcia C., Public Health (Center Director)
Jackson, Sherman. Islamics.
Knysh, Alexander. Islamics.
Larimore, Ann Evans. Women's Studies.
LeGassick, Trevor. Arabic literature.
Lindner, Rudi Paul. Ottoman history.
Naber, Nadine C. Arab-American Studies.
Rammuny, Raji. Arabic Linguistics.
Janet Richards, Egyptology
Margaret Root,Ancient Near Eastern and Classical Art & Archaeology
Ilan Rosenberg. Lecturer of Modern Hebrew
Brian Schmidt. Hebrew Bible & Ancient Mediterranean West Asian Cultures
Anton Shammas. Modern Middle Eastern Literature and Comparative Literature
Shachar Pinsker. Hebrew Literature & Culture
Shryock, Andrew J. Anthropology.
Stefanie Siegmund, History and Judaic Studies
Amr Soliman, School of Public Health
Mark Tessler, Political Science
Thelma Thomas, History of Art
Ruth Tsoffar. Hebrew Literature, Language & Culture
Paula Weizman. Lecturer of Hebrew Language
Robert Whallon, Jr. Anthropology
Terry Wilfong, Egyptology
Mark Wilson, Epedimology
Gernot L. Windfuhr, Iranian Studies
Henry Wright, Anthropology
Norman Yoffee, Mesopotamian Studies and Anthropology

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Our Oil is Sweet, but They Let the Terrorists Kill Us

Newsday reports that 9 more Iraqi civilians were killed in attacks throughout Iraq on Thursday, including four dead at the hotel in Basra and a cameraman for al-Arabiyah satellite television who was killed by US troops by accident.

It quotes an Iraqi, ' "The Americans eat up our oil as if it were a sweet dessert, but they let the terrorists kill us," Muhaissen said yesterday as he kicked a singed shoe out of the yard. "No one is safe in Iraq anymore." '

Among the attacks on Thursday were two rocket assaults on two hotels in Baghdad, which appear not to have resulted in casualties. Raghida Dergham of al-Hayat reports that one of the hotels, Sudair, was known as a place that businessmen and Israeli spies hung out. (Hint to Mossad: If journalists and terrorists know where your spies are hanging out, they aren't very good spies).

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraq One Year Later: Welcome to the Quagmire

My essay "Welcome to the Quagmire" is at Salon.com today.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Attention: Readers of Soldiers of Fortune Magazine

Walter Pincus writes for the Washington Post about a new contract being let by the US government for a private mercenary force to guard the Green Zone, the headquarters of the American administration of Iraq in Baghdad.

' The threats that the private security force will be asked to meet provide a summary of the dangers facing U.S. and coalition personnel 10 months after President Bush declared the main fighting over. The contractor, according to the bid proposal, must be prepared to deal with vehicles containing explosive devices, the improvised explosives planted on roads, "direct fire and ground assaults by upwards of 12 personnel with military rifles, machine guns and RPG [rocket-propelled grenade], indirect fire by mortars and rockets, individual suicide bombers, and employment of other weapons of mass destruction . . . in an unconventional warfare setting." To meet that challenge, the bidders' personnel must have prior military experience, and those involved directly in force protection must have "operated in U.S., North Atlantic Treaty Organization or other military organizations compatible with NATO standards." '

Since the US army will still have 110,000 troops in Iraq at the end of the current rotation, it is very odd that this sort of task should be being contracted out to civilian mercenaries. My guess is that this is another cosmetic change made for US domestic political reasons. The mercenary guards are certainly going to be targeted and some will be killed, but the Bush administration spinmeisters may be hoping that such deaths of contractors will not generate the same degree of bad press and negative views in the American public as the death of US troops.

The creeping privatization of the military seems to me to pose severe dangers to US democracy.



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Zawahiri Cornered?

I know that the mass media is concentrating on the firefight in Waziristan, where the Pakistani army has pinned down some 400 fighters, who are putting up fierce resistance. Although they are said to be al-Qaeda, I doubt it is known for sure who exactly they are. There is speculation that Ayman al-Zawahiri is among them. He is Bin Laden's second in command and the leader of the radical al-Jihad al-Islami organization of Egypt.

It is suspicious to me that earlier this week the Bush administration recognized Pakistan as a "non-NATO ally" (it joins Egypt, Jordan, Israel and Bahrain in that category). Such allies have access to high-tech US weaponry. (The relationship does not, despite the word "ally," involve any mutual defense pact, so apparently the arms deal is the most important aspect of it). Then as soon as the Pakistani army got what it has long wanted from the US, erasing the humiliation of never having received the F-16s it had earlier bought because of sanctions imposed by Congress over its nuclear weapons program--all of a sudden it has 200 fighters surrounded. One wonders if someone in the Pakistani military didn't at least suspect they were there, but dragged his feet until a better deal was offered . . .

By the way, dear friends who have to speak on television about all this: It is al za-WA-hir-I .

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Rosen: "Furious Survivors Attacked Cameramen"

Nir Rosen, intrepid Baghdad-based reporter has thoughtful reflections in the Asia Times on the huge car bombing of the Mount Lebanon Hotel on Wednesday.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Moroccan Radical Cell suspected in Madrid Bombing

ash-Sharq al-Awsat: The Madrid bombings shed new light on persons wanted before, on suspicion of being involved in the Casablanca bombings of 16 May. Among them is Ammar Azizi, whose name has already been mentioned in the list of top al-Qaeda suspects compiled by Spanish judge Balthazar Garzon. Azizi's nom de guerre is Uthman al-Andalusi (Andalus refers to the Arab-dominated area of Spain, from which Muslims were expelled in 1492 by the forces of the Catholic Reconquista). Garzon believes that Azizi was assigned to recruit new members for al-Qaeda in Spain, and that he fled to Iran, where he was seen in the company of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. (now suspected of organizing bombings in Iraq).

The Moroccan authorities had previously issued an international wanted notice for 16 of the suspects in the Casablanca bombing, among them five perons they describe as "dangerous." At their head is Abdul Aziz Binya'ish, known as "Abdul Aziz," also listed by Garzon. According to the Spanish documents, he is close to an organization called "Troops of God." The Moroccans say he is part of the Moroccan terrorist group, "al-Muqatilah." (The Fighting [organization]), which was founded in Afghanistan during the Taliban period. He has been in Spanish custody since last summer. A warrant for his arrest issued last June also names Adil "Abu Turab" Fiyash and Mustafa Barakati, known as "al-`Umari" and al-Sabbagh (the Dyer); and Hisham al-Tamsamani Jad, known as Duwaym. Jad was turned over to Morocco by the Spanish authorities on 12 March, just one day before the 11 March train bombings in Madrid.

Altogether, 16 Moroccans were wanted in connection to the Casablanca bombings. They are suspected of belonging to the financial arm of a radical cell founded by Pierre Robert Antoine, a French convert to Islam. Antoine was sentenced to 10 years in prison in Morocco after the Casablanca bombing. Other names mentioned in the list are Ibrahim Hamdi, Abdul Salam Dishrawi, Rashid Ahariz, Said al-Shidadi (a merchant in Madrid suspected of belonging to the organization of Abu al-Dahdah the Syrian, now in Spanish custody, and considered a representative of al-Qaeda in the Iberian peninsula. Also Najib Shuhaib Muhammad, called "Najib," also suspected of belonging to the Abu al-Dahdah organization; and Idris al-Shibli, of the same organization, who was assigned to recruit new members in Madrid (he is now in custody). The fifth Moroccan listed by Garzon is Salah al-Din Binya'ish, the brother of Abdul Aziz Binya'ish. Salah al-Din is doing time for the Casablanca bombing.

That some suspects in the Casablanca bombing are being looked at for the Madrid one suggests that the same group was behind both. For this reason, Moroccan sources blamed Spain for having not cooperated in earnest with Rabat after the 16 May bombings in Casablanca. Nor had they offered real cooperation when an al-Qaeda sleeper cell had been discovered in Morocco.

Now, of course, security cooperation between Spain and Morocco has been accelerated.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bombings in Baghdad and Basra

The Washington Post reports Thursday, in the wake of the huge car bomb in Karrada, Baghdad, on Wednesday that demolished the Mount Lebanon Hotel and surrounding buildings::

"Near Baqubah, a machine-gun toting man opened fire on a small bus carrying employees of a U.S. funded radio and TV station, killing three and injuring at least ten. A hotel in the southern city of Basra, which is under British control, was hit by a car bomb that claimed five lives, according to early reports from wire services. And in Fallujah, west of Baghdad, guerrillas with rocket-propelled grenades exchanged fire with U.S. troops at the municipal council building. At least two Iraqis were killed, wire services reported. "

What is going on here? The incidents in Baqubah and Fallujah are probably local Iraqi guerrillas, and targeted Americans an their employees. The bombings in Baghdad and Basra, however, are different. The Basra hotel that was hit on Thursday had been used by the British authorities in that city for briefings and meetings. The Mount Lebanon Hotel was not associated with the CPA or its Western contractors, but rather was mainly a place where Egyptian and other contractors stayed. (There is a chance that the hotel was not actually the target of the bombing, since the vehicle was in the middle of the street; but any 1000-pound bomb set off anywhere in Baghdad would instill a sense of profound insecurity).

The recent bombings seem to me driven by a strategy of harming the investment climate in Iraq. This strategy becomes important to the insurgency precisely because the Coalition Provisional Authority is gearing up to spend $5 billion of the $18 billion in reconstruction money that Congress authorized last fall. Many CPA officials are convinced that this huge influx of cash will turn the situation around in Iraq, providing employment and stimulating the economy, and draining support from the guerrillas. But the CPA can't disburse the money into the economy if contractors and subcontractors are afraid to operate in Iraq. The al-Jihad al-Islami of Ayman al-Zawahiri had pursued a similar campaign in Egypt in the 1990s, aimed at destroying the tourist industry, which is a big source of foreign exchange for the Mubarak government. The similarity in methods does not prove that the hotel bombings are being done by foreign jihadi fighters, since it is an obvious strategy for anyone who wanted to disrupt Iraq. Whoever is behind it is using terror to wage economic warfare against the CPA and its Iraqi allies.

The strategy did not work in Egypt, though it occasionally hurt the tourist trade pretty badly. The 1997 al-Jihad al-Islami attack on tourists in Luxor horrified the Egyptian public and turned them against the jihadis. The Egyptian government jailed some 20,000 to 30,000 Islamists and killed 1500 or so in street battles in the 1990s. In the end, even the leadership of the radical al-Gamaa al-Islamiyah, which was in jail, decided to give up violence. It was rebuked for this decision by the blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman, and by Ayman al-Zawahiri.

The difference between Iraq and Egypt in this regard, however, makes me reluctant to predict that the Iraqi government can repeat Hosni Mubarak's relative success. Mubarak had a powerful military and secret police, whereas Iraq's army was dissolved. Iraq is occupied by a Western power, whereas Egypt's regime could plausibly claim to be a champion of Arab nationalism. There are many more arms depots in Iraq than there were in Egypt, and the Sunni Arab ex-Baath elite is a powerful and numerous force for instability, whereas in Egypt the dissidents were mainly students, lower middle class neighborhoods, and persons from provincial cities like Asyut-- i.e. they were socially marginal people, not key elements of the Egyptian elite. The ex-Baathists and Sunni fundamentalists probably cannot stage a Sunni Arab return to power, but they could act as spoilers for a good long time.



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Kurdish Demonstrations in Irbil on Behalf of Kurds of Syria

Reuters reports that some 5000 Kurds demonstrated in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil, waving Kurdish flags, in support of the Kurds of Syria. There was a soccer riot in the northeastern town of Kameshli last Friday, which sparked Arab-Kurdish fights that later spread to other cities like Aleppo. The Kurds in Irbil demand that the United Nations intervene to ensure the human rights of Syria's Kurds, who may form 11% of that country's population.

Turkey, which also has a huge Kurdish minority in eastern Anatolia, has been worried about the prospect of a semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan that might establish political ties with other Kurds in the area and encourage political separatism that would tear Turkey apart.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

New Government will not be "Expansion" of Governing Council

The Iraqi newspaper az-Zaman managed to get an interview with an unnamed Coalition Provisional Authority official who sketched in some ideas about the shape of the new Iraqi government to which the US and the UK will transfer sovereignty on June 30. He expected a large body of technocrats, businessmen, and tribal leaders to be chosen jointly by the CPA, the United Nations and the current 25-member Interim Governing Council. He said that the current IGC would be dissolved before the transfer of sovereignty. Asked if the new government will be an expansion of the Interim Governing Council, he replied, "I don't know what that would mean." I take it he is declining to promise that the current members will be carried over.

The admission that the UN will have a role in choosing the transitional government is extremely interesting. If this step is actually taken, it will certainly add to the legitimacy of the government, which is only supposed to last for 6 months before new elections. Of course, many of us feel that the UN Security Council should appoint the transitional government itself.

I am disturbed at the list given, of "technocrats, businessmen and tribal chiefs." That's the closest the Iraqis come to a bourgeoisie. Why should such a conservative and unrepresentative group be given power (and a good platform for running for the subsequent election)? Why not include labor leaders? Is there a farmers' association of any sort? I hope that the commission that forms the transitional government can manage to dump the expatriate politicians with no real grass roots in Iraq, such as Ahmad Chalabi and Iyad Alawi.

Meanwhile, the IGC has agreed to invite UN Secretary General to send a team back to Iraq to continue discussions about how transfer of sovereignty will be arranged.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is denying that he sent a letter to the UN, and wants clarification from Lakhdar Brahimi.

The UN is denying that Sistani opposes its playing a bigger role in Iraq.

ash-Sharq al-Awsat/ AFP reports that Mahdi al-Hafidh, the minister of planning in Iraq, affirmed Wednesday that the UN would play a fundamental role in the political reconstruction of Iraq. He pointed to th international organization's extensive experience in presiding over such reconstruction and development efforts. Al-Hafidh here was clearly attempting to offset criticisms of Brahimi's report that issued from 12 of the Shiite IGC members, especially Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

"Coalition" Forces in Iraq: Tomdispatch.com

Gavan McCormick writes about the Japanese and other supporting troop contingents in Iraq. He says of them that they. . . "have added up to a strange imperial legion of occupation. Almost all of these forces, ranging from the symbolic to the microscopic, represented interests that had absolutely nothing to do with Iraq itself or even a commitment to any sort of new Middle East. Some of these forces were there based solely on imperial arm-twisting and bribery; some on the urge of lesser leaders of "lesser" states to please the American hyperpower, and some, of course, on pathetic hopes that, as moneys flooded back to the imperial yachts of Halliburton, Bechtel, and their ilk, in the distinctly trickle-down economy of Iraqi reconstruction (and future oil contracts), a few rowboats might be lifted off the sandbars as well."


Tod McAvoy also writes informatively from Japan:

"Mr Cole,

In your blogpost "Role of the United Nations in dispute"
of 17 Mar 04, you write:

***
> some other Bush political allies are skating on thin
> ice. I am told by an expat in Japan that Koizumi's
> majority in parliament depends in part on a Buddhist
> party that is strongly pacifist and could get cold feet
> about the Self Defense Forces being sent to Iraq.
***

Speaking as another American expat in Japan, let me
say that this is indeed relevant but misses two
important nuances.

The first is that especially since getting a taste of
power, the "Buddhist party" in question (Komeito,
sometimes aka "Clean Government Party") has shown
itself to be more opportunist than pacifist. Komeito
is in fact the political expression of the lay Buddhist
group Soka Gakkai (active internationally as SGI),
which is in turn associated with the Nichiren sect of
Japanese Buddhism but which has also been in bitter
conflict with the priesthood of that sect, largely due
to the political, financial and Nobel-prize ambitions
of Soka Gakkai Honorary Chairman Ikeda Daisaku, who
has vilified the Nichiren priests more often than he
has encouraged members of his organization to pay
attention to them. Komeito publicly claims to be
independent of Soka Gakkai, but the fact remains
that every one of its MPs and its parliamentary
candidates is a member of that group.

The second is that Koizumi in fact had to reckon
with considerable resistance from within his own
Liberal Democratic Party (of which the old joke is
that it is neither liberal nor democratic nor a party)
militating against deployment to Iraq. Some LDP
members had pacifist motivations, others saw that
it had nothing to do with terrorism (with which the
Japanese, like many Europeans, have more experience
than Americans) and were loth to give Bush political
cover. Others just like an opportunity to poke America
in the eye.

My personal view is that the latter is more dangerous
to Koizumi than the former. While it is true that he
famously threatened to tear down the LDP if it would
not let him govern as he pleased, it is also important
to remember that this was in reference to structural
economic reforms and also that he has time and again
balked at doing so despite old-guard obstruction. He
is highly unlikely to force the issue over Iraq, which
is a relative sideshow . . .

Regards,
Tod McAvoy "

Several readers suggested that the politician most likely to face voter backlash over Iraq is John Howard of Australia, who has admitted as much himself.

Andreas Strasser writes of the implications of a Spanish withdrawal:

"there was in interesting article in DER SPIEGEL online about the role of the Spanish troops. that article suggested that the entire Polish sector in Iraq depends on Spanish logistics and would be inoperative without them. the Polish have also complained loudly about Zapatero's announcements. it is said, they cannot afford to send more troops themselves and their population is now very critical about the whole iraq affair, mostly because all those goodies they had envisioned (huge contracts, lots of cash, etc.) to show up have failed to do so. oh, and they are also afraid of terroristic attacks and claim to have arrested three individuals from 'high risk' countries at their border. in other words, the article suggests that without Spain there would be no coalition of the willing anymore."




For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Comments on ABC Iraq Poll

David Patel, in Basra responds with some thoughtful comments on the recent ABC News poll from Iraq.

Some readers have asked me about the finding that Iraqis generally think they are better off than during the Saddam era, but are very worried about the security situation. This finding doesn't surprise me. Not only was life hell under Saddam, but the UN/US sanctions regime made Iraqis' lives miserable. Insofar as the removal of Saddam also entailed the end of sanctions, most Iraqis have a double benefit. But it should not be forgotten that Iraqis are also generally quite annoyed that the US hasn't done a better job on the security front.

I know that the subtext in US politics is always the politics around going to war. But it should be remembered that this consideration is irrelevant to Iraqis. The vast majority of Iraqis welcomed the end of the Baath regime. This simple fact does not justify the US invasion and occupation (or at least does not make clear why we don't invade the Congo and the West Bank as well). It is just a reminder that world political realities are complex and ambiguous.

It is not necessary, in order to criticize the way the Bush administration prosecuted the Iraq War, to deny that the Baath regime was murderous. Murderous regimes need to be dealt with through international law and institutions. If you just grabbed an unconvicted murderer off the street and lynched him, you would be a murderer in your own right. Vigilanteism is not permitted to individuals; it should not be permitted to individual states, either.



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Role of the United Nations in dispute

az-Zaman has been reporting that 12 of the Shiite members of the Interim Governing Council, including expatriate Ahmad Chalabi, are opposed to the return to Iraq of special UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi. They are angry that he certified that open, direct elections could not be held before June 30, as the Shiites had wanted. And they are suspicious of his loyalties, since he is himself a Sunni Arab.

Today Brahimi struck back, saying that the UN had received a letter from Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani requesting it to remain involved in Iraq. Brahimi knows that Sistani trumps Chalabi every time. Sistani's main concern appears to be to help Iraq escape from any kind of neo-colonial American domination, and he sees the UN as a wedge in that effort. Also, just on principle, he believes that a UN Security Council resolution has legitimacy in a way that the Anglo-American Coalition Provisional occupying authority does not.

Sistani's views seem to accord with those of the new Spanish president, Jose Luis Rodrigues Zapatera, who says that he needs a new UN Security Council Resolution if he is to keep Spanish troops in Iraq. (This is another thing those critics of his got wrong when they charged "cowardice." He hadn't said he would run away from Iraq. He said he would only keep troops there if international law could be upheld, i.e., if the UN SC authorized it. Even the chief British legal adviser had expressed worries that without a Security Council resolution, occupation authorities in Iraq would diverge farther and farther from the Hague Regulations and the Geneva Accords as time went on.)

Ironically, the Bush Administration, after having worked so hard for the past year to marginalize the UN in Iraq, has now made an about-face and wants a new UN resolution. Just three months ago, the Coalition Provisional Authority was reportedly "deeply offended" when the Interim Governing Council decided to approach the UN about getting involved in the transition to Iraqi sovereignty. Gone are those days.

The Bush administration is clearly petrified that its ad hoc coalition in Iraq will fall apart in the next six months. The US military is stretched extremely thin, and is reducing forces in Iraq from 130,000 to 110,000 simply because it has no more to spare. Some commentators have suggested that Spain's 1300 troops are not militarily significant. I disagree. All it would take is a handful of such countries to withdraw, and the US would be down another division. It cannot afford that. But of course the real cost of such withdrawals would be political. If it looks as though Bush's coalition of the willing is collapsing, he will risk looking like a failure in international affairs.

It would not take anything dramatic for a lot of coalition partners with small troop contingents to pull out. Some have already talked about not staying beyond mid-summer. And, some other Bush political allies are skating on thin ice. I am told by an expat in Japan that Koizumi's majority in parliament depends in part on a Buddhist party that is strongly pacifist and could get cold feet about the Self Defense Forces being sent to Iraq. There have also been controversies in Bulgaria, e.g, when their troops have been killed or wounded, about whether it makes sense for them to be there.

It turns out that Bush all along needed the United Nations and its mantle of legitimacy for the Iraq adventure much more than he realized.

Meanwhile, evidence is mounting that Zougam, one of the Moroccans suspected in the train bombings in Madrid, is close to both Imad Yarkas and a Moroccan religious leader called Fizazi, who head the Salafiyah Jihadiyah organization. It is suspected in last year's bombings in Casablanca. Yarkas appears to have played a logistical role in the September 11 attacks and met with Muhammad Atta.

Newsmen in Spain are beginning to reveal that defeated Spanish leader Jose Maria Aznar had called them and told them after the bombings that the Basque separatists were behind it. He apparently feared that if it were known to be al-Qaeda, he would be blamed for diverting Spain's energies into Iraq.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Did al-Qaeda Win the Spanish Elections?

This silly question is being asked by billionnaire Rupert Murdoch's and Conrad Black's media outlets all over the world in blazing headlines. For some strange reason, the billionnaires aren't happy that the Socialist Workers' Party won the elections in Spain, and are trying to portray the outcome as cowardice on the part of the Spanish public.

The entire argument is specious from beginning to end. First of all, the Iraq war had nothing to do with the battle against al-Qaeda. Nothing whatsoever. Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and others were pressing for a war against Iraq in the 1990s before al-Qaeda had even become much of a threat to the US (certainly, they do not bring it up in their writings of the period). There is no evidence for any significant collaboration between the secular socialist Arab nationalist dictatorship of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the neo-Caliphate hyper-Sunni fundamentalist movement of al-Qaeda. (Az-Zaman is reporting that Saddam proposed Bin Laden for "Man of the Year" in 2002; I believe the report is a fraud, but even if it were not, it would have been nothing more than a publicity stunt. It wasn't a terrorist operation or proof of one).

So, Jose Maria Aznar, in supporting Bush on the war against Iraq, was not standing up to al-Qaeda.

I believe that the Spanish public just recognized the correctness of the "opportunity cost" argument about the Iraq War and anti-terrorism efforts. Let's say you are in business. If you put your capital, which is limited, into expanding one part of your business ("X"), you may make money--say 7% percent on your investment. But you had another opportunity to put your money into expanding a different part of the business ("Y">, and that would have given you a 25% percent return (which you did not know at the time). Giving up the 25% return is an opportunity cost of doing X rather than Y.

The Iraq War represents an enormous opportunity cost in the counter-insurgency struggle against al-Qaeda and its constituents. After the Afghanistan War, the Bush administration forgot to ask Congress for any money for Afghanistan reconstruction, and Congress helpfully put in $300 million. This year, the Bush administration will put $1 billion into Afghanistan, an immense country devastated by 25 years of war (for which the US bears some responsibility), in which the Taliban is having a resurgence. It is a tiny amount. The US has 10,000 troops in Afghanistan, but has not caught Bin Laden or al-Zawahiri, and some of the major successes in capturing al-Qaeda figures have been achieved by the Pakistani military. Afghanistan's poppy cultivation is expanding and the drug trade is creating opportunities for narco-terrorism. The Afghanistan GDP is $5 billion a year; $2 bn. of that comes from poppy cultivation for heroin production.

Since the end of the Afghanistan War, al-Qaeda has struck at Mombasa, Bali, Riyadh, Casablanca, Istanbul, Madrid and elsewhere. Some chatter suggested that Ayman al-Zawahiri himself ordered the hit on Istanbul. The attack on a Spanish cultural center in Casablanca in May of 2003 now appears to have been a harbinger of the horrible Madrid train bombings last week. How much did Spain spend to go after the culprits in Casablanca? How much did Bush dedicate to that effort? How much did they instead invest in military efforts in Iraq?

Instead of dealing with this growing and world-wide threat, the Bush administration cynically took advantage of the American public's anger and fear after September 11 and channeled it against the regime of Saddam Hussein, which had had nothing to do with September 11 and which never could be involved in such a terrorist operation on American soil because its high officers knew exactly the retribution that would be visited on them. Only an asymmetrical organization could think of a September 11, because it has no exact return address. Even for a state to give aid to such an operation against a super power would be suicide-- how could you be sure the superpower would not find out about the aid?

The initial outlay for the war against Iraq was $66 billion. Then Bush came back and asked for another $87 billion. He will ask for a similar amount again after the November election if he is reelected. It is outrageous that Congress allows him to postpone this request instead of being held accountable for it. The Iraq adventure is likely to have cost the US nearly $250 billion by next year this time. The US is no safer now than it was before the Iraq war, since Iraq did not have any weapons that could hit US soil and would not have risked using them even if it did.

Let me repeat that. A few billion for Afghanistan. $250 billion for Iraq. Bin Laden and his supporters are in Afghanistan. What is wrong with this picture?

There is not and cannot be such a thing as a "war on terror." Terror is a tactic. There can be a global counter-insurgency struggle against al-Qaeda and kindred organizations. But a large part of such a struggle must be to deny al-Qaeda recruitment tools and propaganda victories. The way the Bush administration pursued the war against Iraq, as a superpower-led act of Nietzschean will to power, simply made it look in the Middle East as though al-Qaeda had been right. Biin Laden's message was that Middle Easterners are being colonized and occupied by the United States.

There is no evidence at all that the Spanish public desires the new Socialist government to pull back from a counter-insurgency effort against al-Qaeda. The evidence is only that they became convinced that the war on Iraq had detracted from that effort rather than contributing to it. This is not a cowardly conclusion and it is not a victory for al-Qaeda.

The Aznar government dragged Spain into the war against Iraq and the subsequent occupation even though 91% of Spaniards opposed it. It is only logical that the voters would take the first opportunity to rebuke the Popular Party for ignoring popular opinion. Although it keeps being said that the conservatives were leading in the polls before the Madrid bombings, polls are notoriously unreliable. Polls once suggested Dewey would beat Truman, too. I think the conservatives were doomed all along, and the polling just wasn't showing how unhappy people were.

Here is what Zapatero said about all this, according to the Washington Post:

' "The war [in Iraq] has been a disaster; the occupation continues to be a disaster," Zapatero told a radio interviewer. At a news conference later, he called the Iraq war "an error." He added, "It divided more than it united, there were no reasons for it, time has shown that the arguments for it lacked credibility, and the occupation has been poorly managed." He pledged to continue to combat international terrorism, but said the fight should be conducted with "a grand alliance" of democracies and not through "unilateral wars," a clear reference to Iraq. '

and here is Reuters:

' The European Union (EU) called emergency counter-terrorism talks in response to the Madrid attacks and Spain said it would host a meeting of anti-terrorist services from across the bloc in the next few days. A memorial service for people killed in the attack was scheduled to be held at a Madrid cathedral on Tuesday evening. Zapatero, expected to take office in about a month, said his immediate priority would be "fighting terrorism" and promised to improve relations with France and Germany that were chilled by their disagreement with Aznar's support for the Iraq war. '

Here's my rough rendering of Zapatero's full statement, which Fox Cable News will not read out in its entirety

"Tonight I commit myself to commence a tranquil government and I assure you that power is not going to change me," affirmed Zapatero between the applause of hundreds of people who congregated to celebrate the triumph. . "My most immediate priority is to fight all forms of terrorism (Mi prioridad mas inmediata es combatir toda forma de terrorismo). And my first initiative, tomorrow, will be to seek a union of political forces to join us together in fighting it. " After defining himself as "prepared to assume the responsibility to form the new government", Zapatero described his priorities. . "I will set out to strengthen the prestige of democratic institutions . . . to move Spain into the vanguard of European development and to guide myself by the Constitution at every moment" . . . "the government of change - he added - will act from the dialogue, responsibility and transparency. It will be a government that will work by cohesion, concord and peace."

After nearly four years of White House rhetoric stolen from old Clint Eastwood spaghetti Westerns, the determination in this speech to pursue anti-terrorism with an eye to establishing social peace and creating the conditions of human development hits me as a gale of fresh air.

So this is what al-Qaeda was going for with the train bombs? To create a "grand alliance" of democracies against it? Zapatero's speech is a victory for Bin Laden?

No, it is a defeat only for the Bush administration and the Neoconservative philosophy of Perpetual War. They hold that the US, the UK and Turkey are the only permanent allies and shifting coalitions "of the willing" are put together for particular wars, depending on who can be cajoled, bribed or bamboozled into joining up. This system of US-led shifting coalitions removes all restraint on US militarism. If you have permanent allies, like Germany and France, you might have to pay attention to them. If all you have is a shifting coalition, you can do what you please when you please. Multilateralists are like a set of married couples who are old friends; the Neocons' unilateral superpower is like Hugh Hefner, surrounded by a constantly changing bevy of hand-picked "girlfriends."

Unfortunately for this adolescent power fantasy, the real world does not reward naked power and action solely in self-interest. NATO and the United Nations have hung the US out to dry in Iraq, ensuring that its troops take the brunt of the ongoing insurgency. The Turks decided early on that they wanted nothing to do with this dangerous adventure in a place that they saw as a hotbed of religious and ethnic radicalism barely contained by the ramshackle Baath structures of repression. So that "permanent" ally turned out to be no such thing.

With the secession of Spain from the "coalition of the willing," the rug has been pulled out from under the Bush doctrine of preemption, the Bush commitment to US military action without a proper UNSC resolution, and the Bush conviction that you can fool all the people all the time. Since Bush administration militarism and desire to go about overthrowing most of the governments in the Middle East actually was highly destabilizing and created enormous numbers of potential recruits for al-Qaeda, the Spanish actions are a great victory for the counter-insurgency struggle against al-Qaeda.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sunnis of Iraq "Apprehensive, Defiant"

A British reporter recently in Baghdad kindly sent me the following impressions:

"1. I didn't get out of the city at all because of the security situation, and I concentrated mainly on talking to Sunnis. The ones I met were both apprehensive and defiant: apprehensive about "what the Americans are planning" -- one cleric told me they want to hand Iraq over to the Shi'a, because an Israeli study has proved that it's easier to persuade the Shi'a to do what the West wants. He also denied that the Shi'a are in a majority in Iraq. He told me the Sunnis suffered just as much under Saddam as everyone else (and I met a woman whose husband and brother had been summarily executed by Saddam's people for allegedly over-charging in their candy store). Yet on the walls of the Islamic university in Adamiya there are freshly drawn pro-Saddam slogans ...

2. The educated middle-class Sunnis (and indeed one highly articulate Shi'a doctor) I met were deeply apprehensive about this thing called democracy. They didn't at all like the idea that one day a government might be chosen by ill-educated people who knew nothing of what might be at stake. "We are not ready for this" was the refrain -- and I had the impression that these were people who had learned to cope, even to thrive, under Saddam, and who now fear that their privileged position is about to be washed away.

3. A former Iraqi army officer told me that he and a small group of colleagues had spent months discussing what they would do if the US attacked, and all agreed that they wanted Saddam to be overthrown. (No way of checking, of course, if this is true!) But he did say that the army was a genuinely non-sectarian institution, and was bewildered that it had been swept aside in the post-war Iraq. He said some former generals are now talking about going into politics, and perhaps presenting themselves if/when elections are held as representing the possibility of a non-sectarian Iraqi future."



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Shiite Account of Visitation ('pilgrimage') to Holy Shrines of Iraq

This is a fascinating account of an expatriate Shiite's return to Iraq for religious visitation to the shrines. The narrative of bribing his way past the guards at the Syrian border for $200; the images of chaotic, heavy traffic and drivers driving on the wrong side of the road; the terrifying anecdote about children being kidnapped; the meeting with Grand Ayatollah Sistani; and the heart-rending descriptions of the explosions on Ashura, all make it gripping.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Assassination attempt on head of Iraqi Turkmen Front

This just came in:

"IRAQI TURKMEN FRONT WASHINGTON REPRESENTATION

On Sunday, March 14,th, 2004, there has an assasination attempt on the president of the Iraqi Turkmen Front Dr. Farouk Abdullah at Khalis, 50 Km north of Baghdad while on his way to Kirkuk.

A remotely controlled roadside bomb exploded, Dr, Farouk escaped with light injuries at his leg while two of his bodyguard had several injuries.

We strongly condemn this act of terror which is aimed at silencing the Turkmen voice in Iraq, on the contrary it will strengthen the Turkmen will to work much harder so that all Turkmen rights in Iraq be fulfilled.

Orhan Ketene
ITF-USA Representative "

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

6 US Soldiers Killed over Weekend, Shiites Protest Killing of Qazwini

The Associated Press reports that 6 US soldiers were killed in Iraq in roadside bombings over the past weekend. Guerrillas also detonated a bomb on the Khalis - Kirkuk road that killed two Iraqi civilians. Nine US servicemen have been killed in the past 5 days.

The same report notes that about 1000 mourners came out for the funeral in Baghad Sunday of Haidar al-Qazwini, a Shiite shopkeeper. A man had come into his shop, leaving behind a bag of explosives, which later exploded. Al-Qazwini was the brother-in-law of Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the leader of the Shiite al-Da`wa Party, who also serves on the Interim Governing Council. AP quotes Adnan Asadi, al-Jaafari's representative, as saying, ' "The aim of this criminal act is to ignite sectarian strife in the country." '
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Heydemann Slams "Big Brother" Committee for Middle East Studies

Steve Heydemann writes in the Chicago Tribune against "Warping Middle East Judgments," referring to the Neocon campaign to get Congress to set up a Big Brother Committee to monitor professors of Middle East and International Studies. (Registration required).

Heydemann writes, 'The threatening intent of critics is not an exaggeration. Martin Kramer, a Middle East scholar who has made a second career out of attacking Middle East studies, told his academic colleagues to start worrying. Invoking tactics more common to the former Iraqi regime than to a democracy, he warned professors that their Web sites would be "visited late at night" to police their content. "Yes, you are being watched," Kramer wrote on his Web site, telling faculty to "get used to it." Intimidation is the aim of these critics, not accountability. The very real prospect that Congress will impose political litmus tests on funding is troubling. Though modest, Title VI funds have helped sustain our nation's capacity to teach and conduct research about a part of the world that is central to American interests. The program has been crucial for ensuring instruction in all the major and minor languages of the Middle East. '

As regular readers know, I agree entirely with Heydemann and have issued an appeal to readers to lobby their Senators to stop this insidious neo-McCarthyism.

Note to Marty Kramer: My Web site is generating nearly 200,000 page views a month. I cannot report on how many of these are "late at night," but just so he knows, it is not necessary to keep his spies up until 4 am. The web page can be viewed all day long. Maybe things were different when he was reporting to Israeli intelligence (I heard he was fired for being bad at "making predictions.") Anyway, as long as he stays out of my shrubs and away from my windows, he is welcome to look in on the Web site at a more civilized hour. And, he has messed with the wrong person; we may lose this one. But he should be in no doubt about the public relations damage he will have done to his own weird causes over the long term by picking on me.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Spain's voters Reject Aznar's Popular Party

I was struck by the comment of a Spaniard in Charles Sennot's Boston Globe piece on the Spanish elections. He quoted a voter who was disturbed by the way Aznar had manipulated information and public opinion, accusing him of lying about the threat posed by Iraq. He said that these tactics reminded him of the ones the dictator Franco used to use.

It reminded me that most of the publics in countries with fascist pasts--Spain, Germany, Italy--rejected the way the Iraq war was gotten up by Bush and his European partners. They sniffed something wrong with the manipulation that was clearly employed. They had been sensitized to such techniques by their suffering under fascism in the past.

And, it strikes me that the techniques that they minded so much are those of the Neoconservatives. What does that say about the latter? Maybe they don't deserve Leo Strauss as an intellectual ancestor. Maybe their real genealogy is rather more sordid.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sistani-Linked Groups begin Popular Campaign Against Interim Constitution

AFP/az-Zaman On Sunday, Shiite clergymen, cultural figures and notables began an organized campaign against the newly signed interim constitution. It is believed that they are supported in this movement by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. They are encouraging Iraqis to reject the document, and to sign petitions that protest its illegitimacy insofar as it was issued by an unelected body. The petitions will be sent to the Coalition Provisional Authority and the United Nations. The Lawyers' Guild in Najaf is planning to gather 2 million signatures throughout Iraq. The al-Qadir and al-Murtada Organizations are working to get Iraqis in Najaf to write protest letters. Both are close to Sistani.

Meanwhile, Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, the temporary president of the Interim Governing Council, has travelled to Iran and met Sunday with President Mohammad Khatami. He brought with him two other IGC members and representatives of the ministries of petroleum, trade, health and interior. (- ash-Sharq al-Awsat).

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Blix: Iraq War Strengthened Terrorism

Former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix told the Italian newspaper La Stampa, “The fact is that the war on Iraq, sought by the United States following (the) September 11 (2001 attacks), has not put an end to terrorism in the world . . . On the contrary, the result of this iron-fisted approach has been to give it a boost.” “It is now clear that terrorism must not be tackled through repression alone, but also through an understanding of its root causes . . . By waging unilateral pre-emptive war, the United States violated international principles to show its strength to the Islamic world after September 11, and by doing so has weakened the United Nations.”
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

British Muslims Abandoning Labor;
In Poll Show Mainstream European Attitudes

The Guardian reports that British Muslims are turning against the Labor Party, which they traditionally supported, presumably over the Iraq War.

How hard it is to interpret statistics in a vacuum is demonstrated by James Lyons's story about the new poll of British Muslims (who are about 1.6 million strong in a population of 59 million or nearly 3 percent). The two most sensational findings are that about 12% of British Muslims say they support the attack on the US of September 11 (and think further such attacks could be justified) and that 47 % of them said that if they were Palestinians they would consider becoming suicide bombers. And, 80 % were against the Anglo-American war on Iraq.

You could imagine the British tabloids having a field day with statistics like this. But if one looks at them in any sort of general context, they actually show how mainstream British Muslim views are in a European setting. (Of course the views of the 13% on attacks on the US are disturbing and I don't mean to downplay their danger; but it would be wrong and dangerously blindered to see them as peculiar to this community or to exaggerate the numbers who hold such views or would act on them).

Look at the rest of the article. 73 % of British Muslims opposed the strikes on the US and another 15% fell into the "not sure" category. Anyone who has ever watched US comedian Jay Leno's "Jay Walking" segment-- when he goes out on the street and asks the public elementary questions about politics and history and gets blank stares and silly wrong answers-- knows exactly what that 15 % represents. A lot of British Muslims are semi-literate workers in menial jobs, and I'd bet you some large proportion of the "not sure"'s have never heard of September 11.

Now some context. Rightwing Italian journalist and anti-Arab polemicist Oriana Fallaci wrote an angry article a couple of years ago because, she said, a poll had shown that 25% of Italians "could understand" the reasons behind the September 11 attacks. The NYT corrected her and observed "The [Fallaci] article said one-quarter of all Italians could not only understand the reasons behind the Sept. 11 attacks but could also "justify" them - although the actual polling data showed that 27 percent found the attacks completely wrong, 22 percent thought them mostly wrong and only 6 percent considered them mostly right."

I read this to say that only 49% of Italians in general condemned the attacks outright, and 6 % strongly supported them. It is hard to compare two polls, especially on such fragmentary reporting of them, but it appears that a much higher percentage of British Muslims (73 %) unreservedly condemn 9/11 than did Italians (49 %). And, the percentage of the two populations that approved of the attacks may not be so far apart, depending on how the questions were worded.

Given that most British Muslims are poor immigrant laborers who face enormous discrimination from whites in a highly class-conscious society, these attitudes are actually remarkably sympathetic with the US against al-Qaeda. The real question is what in the world is wrong with so many Italians?

It should also be remembered that 55% of white residents of Louisiana voted for white racist politician David Duke. About a 10% proportion of political extremists is par for the course among Western democracies. In recent elections, about 15% of the French vote for far rightwing fascist Jean-Marie LePen.

Some 43% of British Muslims condemned Palestinian suicide bombings unreservedly. Again, this finding shows how Muslims are not at all monolithic. Here you have a major Muslim community and nearly half are agreeing with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon about this. It is true that the poll found that 47% could imagine themselves becoming suicide bombers if they were Palestinians.

But this is a trick question. They don't say they want to become suicide bombers. They say they could imagine it if they were Palestinians. British Labor MP Jenny Tonge said the same thing.

I'll tell you what. Blindfold Ariel Sharon. Then pose to him a hypothetical: "What if Syria occupied all of Israel, and stationed its troops at checkpoints throughout the entire country? What if a quarter of Israelis were reduced to dire poverty and its children were malnourished? What if the Syrians had begun busing Syrian colonists into Israel, settling them on land they took away from Israeli farmers? What if Syrian troops routinely used excessive force against Israelis, and killed hundreds of children over a two year period in so doing? Under such a condition, could you imagine strapping on a bomb belt, sneaking into the Damascus bazaar, and exploding it?"

I know my own answer to any analogous question, which is a categorical "no." I am more or less a Gandhist (if one remembers that Gandhi did not oppose all wars). But I really can't assure you that Ariel Sharon, who is an extremely violent man and has killed thousands of innocent civilians during his career, would answer no. And that is actually the question the British Muslims were being asked, since they know very well what the Palestinians are living through.

As for the 80% opposition to the Bush-Blair Iraq war among British Muslims, it is low by European standards. In March of 2003 polling found that 91% of Spaniards opposed the war on Iraq. Spain, of course, sent troops in after the war was over, but the rightwing government was acting against the wishes of its people, and has now been punished for it.

Even most Americans were opposed to the Iraq war if it was to be waged without UN approval, and Bush more or less tricked the American public into thinking that a Security Council resolution would be forthcoming (or had been, as 1441). Soon after the Iraq War began, opinion polls were already showing that 2/3s of Americans were opposed to any more wars without UN backing. That is 66 %. Which is to say that if Americans were consistent, their degree of opposition to the Iraq war would be nearly as great as that of British Muslims. (Why "no more wars"? Why not "no wars at all" without UN backing?)

A recent poll shows that almost 60% of Texans think the Iraq thing isn't going that great.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Seeds of Gridlock in Iraq

My op-ed, "How the US is sowing gridlock in Iraq" is available online at the San Jose Mercury News. I worry in it about the Rube Goldberg executive in the Basic Law or interim constitution, with its three presidents and a prime minister (the presidents have to make all decisions unanimously as a council!). I worry about the single-chamber legislature, with its assured Shiite majority (have you ever been in a parliamentary minority and tried to stand against the majority? You just get voted down every time). I worry about the small ethnically-based parties with militias that have the real political momentum in Iraq. I am skeptical that this system is going to be a beacon to the worldly Syrians and the urbane Egyptians, as Richard Perle (that great Arabist) insists.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

3 Moroccans and 2 Indians Arrested in Spain Bombing

Al-Qaeda is increasingly emerging as the chief suspect in the Madrid bombings, against which 12 million persons protested on Saturday.

The LA Times points out that the Spanish cultural center in Casablanca was targeted by an al-Qaeda affiliate in May of 2003. John Davies also surveys the al-Qaeda links with Spain and the reasons for which it might want to hit Madrid.

Norwegian terrorist experts following Arabic jihadi web sites found a document that talks about hitting Spain in conjunction with its election and trying to pry Spain apart from its alliance with the Bush administration in Iraq. If the Norwegian account is true, the main motivation for Thursday's attack may have been to defeat Aznar's rightwing party in Sunday's elections, and help the left get in, in hopes of weaking the Spanish-American alliance in Iraq.

[Exit polls on Sunday suggest that the Socialists have in fact defeated the Popular Party. Will the Socialists withdraw the Spanish contingent from Iraq? This is a demonstration that the Iraq war was not part of any war on terror. Imagine how much better off Spain would have been to put the resources it put into Iraq into tracking terrorists and increasing cooperation with Morocco.]

But it should be remembered that in general al-Qaeda is convinced that the Western economies and transportation systems are vulnerable to terrorist attacks, and that enough such attacks if spectacular enough will cause the system to collapse, allowing an al-Qaeda take-over of the Middle East and the reestablishment of the medieval caliphate. (All these assumptions are wacky, but then, this is a cult we are dealing with).
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Hundreds of Students Strike in Baghdad, Najaf and Mosul

ash-Sharq al-Awsat: Hundreds of universty students organized protests Saturday against the Basic Law or interim constitution, in accordance with the call of Shiite cleric Shaikh Muhammad Ya`qubi of the Virtue Party.

Some students gathered in front of al-Mustansiriyah University in Baghdad, carrying placards. Those in Najaf headed for the Shrine of Imam Ali, calling on the people to make a "revolution against America and the constitution." In Mosul, AFP reported that around 250 students demonstrated quietly against the interim constitution, chanting "No the the constitution, yes, yes to national unity, yes yes to Islam, no no to the Occupation!"
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Black on Iraq, One Year Later

Eric Black of the Minneapolis Star Tribune contributes among the better entries in the "War in Iraq: One year later" genre of which we will see so much this week. (Truth in advertising: I'm quoted).

Black writes ' "The ability of these Shiite leaders to quickly demonstrate that they can get thousands of people into the street on their call was something the U.S. planners hadn’t anticipated, and it shows us there were religious and political movements of great scope and importance that organized covertly in the late Saddam period that we didn’t know about," said Cole . . . Events have also shown that U.S. planners had underrated the level of Iraqi nationalism, Cole said. Iraqis may have hated Saddam and been glad to see him go, but as nationalists they could not be expected to be happy about foreign troops controlling their country, he said. '


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraq's Divided Loyalties and Bremer Walls

Phil Smucker writes perceptively from Baghdad in The Scotsman about the discontents of Iraqis and their ethnic divisions.

I thought his characterization of the difference between US and British patrol strategies interesting, and also had not heard the neologism "Bremer walls" for the concrete barricades behind which Americans have withdrawn.

"Security, not democracy, is the dominant concern of most Iraqis struggling to make ends meet in the post-Saddam era. Whereas British forces remain on constant patrol in the south of the country, in the central regions American forces have largely withdrawn behind massive concrete barriers, nicknamed "Bremmer Walls," after the top US administrator ambassador Paul Bremmer. When mayhem erupts in the form of a car-bombing or an assault on an Iraqi police station, US and British forces are often nowhere to be seen. "

He interviews Hosam, a young Sunni man from a pro-Saddam family who now serves as a policeman with the Americans. I thought the bit about fisherman tossing grenades in the water instead of patiently waiting for a nibble was priceless. How could you establish security in a country where the fishermen have grenades to spare?

' "We want an Islamic commander in this country," [Hosam] says, sitting alongside the Tigris River as fishermen toss their nets across an inlet, while others simply toss grenades in the water, hoping for better results. "Though we have a proud history, Iraq has been a great historical loser." Another brother in the same family served in one of the Iraqi president’s elite militias . . . He believes that, by serving in the US sponsored force, he is forsaking both Islam and his own nation. "We are in the service of an occupier and so we are betraying our nation," he says . . . '

And this on Sistani's ability to "finish" the Americans, from a Shiite:

' "If America tries to prolong its occupation and upsets Sistani, I think they’ll be finished here," says Ahmed al-Moussaoui, whose family owns a hotel in the southern Shiite city of Karbala. "He has never expressed any gratitude towards the US presence or intervention here." '

The whole piece is well worth reading.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Engelhardt: Follow the Money in Iraq

Tom Engelhardt at TomDispatch.com has very suggestive insights this week on Iraq, especially with regard to the role of money, of corrupt expatriate politician Ahmad Chalabi, and Pentagon control of US reconstruction aid in that country. I saw all the individual items Tom cites, but he has put it together in a clear picture.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Threat of Hyper-Inflation

The Guardian reports that the British head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Basra, Patrick Nixon, is warning about the dangers of inflation. The economy is heating up. Rents and housing costs in Basra are way up. Unemployment in Basra has fallen to 15%, in Baghdad to 30%, and in the country as a whole to 33%, according to this article. The prospect of the CPA injecting $18 billion into the still weak Iraqi economy all of a sudden could spark an inflationary spiral. Inflation is defined as too much money chasing too few goods.

Hyper-inflation could be extremely destabilizing for Iraq. It will hurt those on fixed incomes and the ghetto poor, who are already politically radical. Some groups, in contrast, will become extremely wealthy. This phenomenon occurred in Iran in the 1970s because of the oil boom, and contributed to the outbreak of the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Muhsin Abdul Hamid: The Sunnis are the Majority

ash-Sharq al-Awsat: The leader of the [Sunni] Iraqi Islamic Party, Muhsin Abdul Hamid, gave a long interview in Cairo in which he reiterated his allegations that Sunnis have been unfairly "marginalized" in Iraq by the US occupation authorities. He maintains that if you count all Sunni Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen, they are the majority of the population (he doesn't seem to know that lots of Turkmen are Shiites or that there are Shiite Faili Kurds). In fact, the country is probably 65% Shiite, 15% Sunni Arab, 15% Kurd, 3% Turkmen, and 2% Christian. Abdul Hamid expresses confidence that a new census and open elections will reveal the Sunni majority. I worry that he and his like may turn to violence when they realize that there is no escaping Shiite demographic and political dominance.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

More US Soldiers killed

The steady and depressing drumbeat of US deaths and woundings in Iraq continues unabated. At 5 am on Saturday in Tikrit, guerrillas detonated a bomb in Tikrit that killed two US soldiers and wounded 4, several seriously.

On Thursday, two soldiers had been killed by a roadside bomb at Habbaniyah.

On Wednesday, guerrillas blew up a home made bomb that killed one US soldier and wounded two others.

Since the US military is going to be in Iraq in force for at least a couple of years, one worries that we really are going to lose thousands of our young men and women in this occupation, and that the number of wounded could mount to nearly 10,000 before it is all over (and they are often very badly wounded).



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Shiite Crowds, Preachers, Denounce Interim Constitution

az-Zaman, ash-Sharq al-Awsat; wire services: The Shiite clerical leader Muhammad al-Ya`qubi called on high school students and students in institutes and colleges throughout Iraq to announce a strike on Saturday, in protest against the contents of the Basic Law or interim constitution. Over 1,000 Shiites demonstrated Friday in the center of Baghdad against the basic law. They also held Friday prayers in the open at Firdaws Square.

They belonged to Ya`qubi's Virtue Party, an offshoot of the Sadrist movement of the late Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr. They criticized the Interim Governing Council, and article 61 of the interim constitution. Placards warned the Interim Governing Council that future generations of Iraqis would curse them if they squandered their rights.

They carried slogans like "We don't want an American Constitution; the Governing Council sold Iraq!" and "Islam is threatened by a time bomb planted in the Interim Constitution."

AFP reported that some demonstrators chanted, ""They want Iraq to split into many countries, and they want us to be their subjects," they chanted. "We will never accept a constitution written by the Jews."

AP reports, "Protesters hurled stones at a passing pair of armored civilian SUVs, of the type often used by coalition workers or plainclothes security officials, forcing the vehicles to back away. There were no injuries. "

Shaikh Ali al-Sa`idi, a representative of Ya`qubi, told Agence France Presse that "This people's will was thwarted for 35 years in the era of Saddam, and now it is unable to express its will again in the shadow of the American occupation of Iraq."

Ya`qubi's statement was read at Friday prayers, calling on the governing council "not to take fateful decisions such as granting citizenship citizenship to foreigners, privatizing vital sectors, and signing treaties regading security and strategy, since it is merely an interim council lacking any real legitimacy."

In Kufa, Muqtada al-Sadr, the other major Sadrist leader, gave a sermon before thousands of worshippers in which he said, "This law resembles the Balfour Declaration, which sold off Palestine. We are on the way to selling Iraq and Islam. It is a bad omen."

In Najaf, Sad al-Din al-Qubanji of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq preached at the mosque attached to the shrine of Imam Ali. He said that there were weak points in the law, especially the issue of its legitimacy. Since the Iraqi people had not voted on it, and nor had the religious jurisprudents, it really has no standing, he said. He also complained again about the three Kurdish provinces having a veto over the new constitution to be fashioned in 2005.

In Kazimiyah, Shaikh Ra'id al-Kazimi questioned the legitimacy of the occupation, of its appointed interim governing council, and of any document produced by the latter.

In Karbala, Shaikh Ahmad Safi, the representative of Grand Ayatollah Sistani, condemned the interim constitution as "a farce of history."

In general, the Shiite mosque preachers didn't seem to like it very much. The comparisons of it to the Balfour Declaration and the suspicion that it was "written by the Jews" invokes the fate of the other main Arab population living under occupation, the Palestinians, whom the Israelis have robbed of their civil liberties and much of their land. It is an inaccurate description of the Coalition intentions, but it may well be effective in street protests.

Had the United States and the UK involved the United Nations from the beginning and made sure to have UN Security Council resolutions authorizing their actions, they would be in a better position to respond to the charges of illegitimacy. As it is, all we can say is that Dick Cheney wanted it this way.

In other news, AP reported that "In Baghdad, a prominent supporter of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr was shot and killed in Baghdad's al-Shawafa district, movement spokesman Adnan al-Safi said Friday. Thursday's shooting of Kazim al-Sayed Musa al-Ghoriebi came hours after a Sunni Muslim cleric was wounded in what he claimed was an assassination attempt. His son and son-in-law were killed. '

The killing came after the assassination of a Sunni cleric in Baghdad.




For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Wave of Killings at Sunni Mosques

Reuters reports on a wave of killings at Sunni mosques. Both worshippers and Sunni clerics have been killed. Some of the mosques attacked are in poor, largely Shiite neighborhoods, and some suspect Shiite militias are the culprits. (The more radical Sadrists are being spoken of without being named, I suspect).

az-Zaman says that the wave of killings has been condemned by Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, himself a Shiite cleric, who is the current president of the Interim Governing Council.

The day before yesterday, the Mosque of Badriyah al-Dulaymi in Sadr City was targetted by heavy gunfire and a rocket propelled grenade, killing one of the worshippers. Two days before that, the mosque had been attacked and a worshipper killed, as well. The mosque of Fandi al-Kubaysi in the al-Shurtah al-Khamisah district, the Amiriyah Mosque in Fallujah, the al-Hajjah al-Badriyah mosque in the Awr quarter, and the Qiba' mosque in the Sha`b quarter have all been attacked.

Bahr al-Ulum strongly condemned "these sinful and cowardly actions against God's houses and his servants." He added, "We know very well that their purpose is to shake the national unity and to provoke public turmoil among the children of our one country and our one religion."

This is a language of Islamic ecumenism that is more unusual than you might think. For a major Shiite cleric to refer to "our one religion" as between Shiites and Sunnis, and to speak of Sunni mosques as "God's houses" is very different from the kind of rhetoric one hears from the more radical Sadrists, condemning Sunnis for supporting Saddam or for demoting the Shiite Imams by favoring the early companions of the Prophet.

Although such attempts to provoke religious violence are nowadays often blamed on the al-Tawhid organization of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, it seems more plausible that these are local neighborhood faction fights.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Red Herrings on Discount at Washington Post

Poor Dana Priest at the Washington Post caught the frankly shitty assignment of summarizing Undersecretary of Defense for Planning Doug Feith's self-defense against Democratic critics. The article is a mere repeat of statements made to the press by Feith on June 4, 2003, and contains nothing new. It is uncritical journalism at its very worst.

The article denies that Feith's office engaged in intelligence gathering. I'm not aware that anyone ever accused them of intelligence gathering. In fact, the problem with them was that they cherry-picked other people's intelligence for reports that the professional analysts had already seen and discounted. By allowing Feith to defend himself from a charge no one is making, the article becomes complicit in a cover-up.

The article tries to take the spotlight off the dozen Neocons appointed to the Office of Special Plans, highlighting a couple of minor players instead. It completely ignores the report of a group of retired CIA officers about OSP and revelations of Karen Kwiatkowski (cited below in my piece on Chalabi). It also ignores the repeated interviews given by Greg Thielmann of the State Department, about how the OSP managed to make an end run around the intelligence pipeline that is supposed to go from analysts to policy makers. Instead, Feith and the OSP had a direct line to Scooter Libby and John Hannah in Cheney's office, and Cheney had the ear of the president. (These people are like medieval courtiers. To get the ear of the king, you get the ear of the vizier!)

It also ignores the fact that Feith earlier lied when he assured everyone that his office had never briefed the White House on intelligence matters. It turns out that it did. This procedure was so irregular that CIA Director George Tenet didn't know how to respond to it, saying he had never been in such a situation before. This article quotes Rumsfeld and Feith trying to make it look perfectly normal for the Undersecetary of Defense for Planning to usurp the intelligence analysis and briefing functions of the CIA and the DIA!

The article fails to mention that the OSP has failed to produce a single reliable document showing significant Saddam-al-Qaeda collaboration!

Rumsfeld is quoted as saying that those of us who think we were had by the Pentagon have a conspiratorial point of view. It seems the American people were never misinformed that Iraq was close to having nukes, had thousands of pounds of chemical and biological weapons, and was Usama Bin Laden's old college roommate. None of these things was alleged in spring of 2003, and the allegations had no effect on the American public's willingness to suppor the war. Gee, glad to be corrected, Mr. Rumsfeld. Nobody but us chickens around here.

You know, when you take a country to war on particular grounds, and those grounds prove baseless, the ethical thing to do is to resign.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

ETA or al-Qaeda? Madrid Bombing's Significance Unknown

As Steve Komarow argues, the full implications of the sanguinary bombings in Spain on Thursday depend on who did it. If it was ETA, the Basque separatist organization, then it would tend to be seen by the rest of the world as of mainly local significance. If it was al-Qaeda or a similar group, then this was their biggest operation in a Western country since September 11, and can only be compared to the Bali bombings and to Lockerbie in terms of loss of life and numbers wounded, as the Spanish newspaper Cinco Dias noted.

Al-Quds al-Arabi reports that credit for the bombing was taken by the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, a small terrorist group linked to al-Qaeda. It is named for the ex-policeman Muhammad Atif [Atef] of Egypt, who was a member of Ayman al-Zawahiri's al-Jihad al-Islami and who helped plan the shooting of dozens of Western tourists at Luxor in 1997. Atif was killed by American bombardment in Afghanistan in fall of 2001.

The group named after him claimed responsibility for the Istanbul synagogue bombings last fall, and also for the bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad last summer. Note that the Turkish authorities blamed the Turkish Hizbullah for the synagogue bombings, and the forensics of the UN HQ attack point to Baathists. So it may be that the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades just likes to increase its reputation for terror attacks by claiming those of other people. (It claimed the Jakarta hotel bombing, too, which was certainly instead Jemaah Islamiya, a Southeast Asian group). Al-Quds al-Arabi used to be paid for by Saddam, and I don't know who pays for it now, but it might also be being used by someone to take claim for something that the Basques are actually behind.

The Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades did threaten a number of Western countries last fall, in a communique sent to al-Quds al-Arabi: "We say to the criminal Bush and his valets among the Arabs and foreigners, in particular Britain, Italy, Australia and Japan: you will see the cars of death with your own eyes in the centre of the capital of tyranny. They will not be limited to Baghdad, Riyadh, Istanbul, Djerba, Nasiriyah, Jakarta." What is strange is that they forgot to mention Spain in this statement.

The discovery of a van near the train station, with detonators and Arabic material in it, has provoked an investigation by the Spanish authorities. But at this point no conclusive evidence has been found that proves who committed this horrible act.

The possibility that the bombings were reprisals against Spain for supporting the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq this time last year has led some Spaniards in the Opposition to come out to protest against rightwing Prime Minister Aznar.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sistani doesn't Want Brahimi to Come Back

al-Hayat newspaper maintains that it was told by a high Frendh official that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani opposes the return to Iraq of special UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi. He is said to be happy with the Shiite majority on the Interim Governing Council, and to fear that Brahimi will toss aside that body rather than expanding it and keeping a Shiite majority.

The French source also said that the Americans have, behind the scenes, given secret undertakings to the Kurds that they can have Kirkuk and will be able to enjoy a semi-independence from the government in Baghdad. He sources these promises to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.

He further revealed that the Sunni Arabs are in high political gear and are busily organizing themselves for political action.

The French diplomat said that the situation in Iraq was "explosive" and that he worried about what will happen if it goes on like this.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

US Intelligence Follies: Why Haven't Cheney, Feith and Chalabi been Impeached?

While everyone is beating up on John Kerry for letting it slip he thinks the Bushies are crooked, we might ponder the sort of thing that might have led him to this impression.

It seems fairly obvious by now that the Bush administration likes being lied to. It is even paying for the privilege of being screwed over. This is sort of reverse crooked. It is to crookedness as sado-masochism is to sex. But there are grounds for suspicion of out and out crookedness, too. Reuters reports (as will all the major newspapers today) that the Defense Intelligence Agency is paying Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress $340,000 per month for "intelligence." The INC is the organization that lied to the US until it was blue in the face, falsely claiming it knew for sure that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction stockpiles and weapons. It supplied single-source reports from defectors that were full of tale tales.

Chalabi, who has gotten the US into a quagmire in Iraq, is completely unrepentant. "We're in Baghdad," he says. That makes all the lies all right. He even went so far, in a 60 Minutes interview, as to blame the US intelligence agencies for actually believing the cock and bull stories his people fed them. 'Don't they have fact checkers?' he seemed to say.

Most recently, Chalabi joined a 5-man Shiite dissident group that tried to derail the signing of the interim constitution. This is a man whose organization is getting $4 million a year from the US, and he was screwing Bremer and Bush over royally! It came out that in the 1970s the CIA had put King Hussein of Jordan on its payroll. But in comparison, he turns out to have been a cheap date, and a rather more reliable one than Chalabi. Although the Defense Intelligence Agency is saying that the Iraqi National Congress supplies it with good intelligence, I find it difficult to believe that you couldn't get even better intelligence in Iraq by having DIA agents on the ground just use the $4 million for local informants. You worry about the disinformation Chalabi may be supplying them with. Have any of his personal enemies been picked up?

This revelation follows testimony by CIA director George Tenet that he has had to run around asking high Bush administration officials like Dick Cheney to please not hype intelligence to make it say things that are not in evidence. It turns out that Cheney has been recommending the highly questionable Feith dossier on supposed pre-war links between Saddam and al-Qaeda to people. (Wanna bet Chalabi and his people supplied all those supposed anecdotes in the first place?).

And, it turns out that Feith's Office of Special Plans, a Neocon Pentagon operation linked to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's similar rogue office, briefed high White House officials without the presence or knowledge of George Tenet. What intelligence did it supply them? Why, red-hot reports directly from . . . the Iraqi National Congress.

It turns out further that Chalabi's nephew Salem works for the same Israel-based law firm as Doug Feith (when Doug is not in office), and has set up a Baghdad branch of it. All parties concerned deny influence-peddling, but if Doug Feith has any authority at all over the payment of $4 million a year to the uncle of the partner of his law firm, this smells bad.

More recently it transpires that Nour USA, run by Chalabi friend A. Huda Farouki, probably low-balled the Pentagon with a bid to provide military equipment to the new Iraqi army, which it won. The company had no experience with such provisioning, and its bid was denounced by competitors as unrealistically low. (In US government bidding, the lowest bid usually wins, but it has to be clear that the bid is realistic.) In this case, the Pentagon appears not to have visited the companies competing with Nour to explore their pricing, which is usually done. Poland and Spain were royally pissed off that their companies lost out to Nour USA, and they suspected cronyism. Finally the Pentagon cancelled the contract.

So, my question is, why isn't Ahmad Chalabi impeached? He was appointed to the Interim Governing Council by the United States government. He presumably serves at its pleasure. He has more or less openly admitted to providing it grossly inaccurate "intelligence." He is still being paid for intelligence provision, nevertheless. His nephew seems to be trading on a personal relationship with the Undersecretary of Defense for Planning, Douglas Feith. His friend seems to be involved in sharp business practices with Pentagon contracts. And, he is still wanted in Jordan, where he was indicted over a decade ago for having embezzled $300 million from a bank he was running in Amman in the 1980s. Would a person around whom there were all these questions get appointed to a high government post in a democratic country that practiced the principle of accountability? If not, why should he be foisted on the poor Iraqi people?

And, why isn't Feith impeached? Why was he allowed to usurp Tenet's role? Why isn't Cheney impeached? Either they lied or they were so gullible that neither should still be in office.

Cheney's own dishonesty comes out in Ron Susskind's book, based on interviews and documents from former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill. The anecdote is that Cheney wanted to go for a second gargantuan tax cut on his billionnaire buddies. Even W. balked, and asked whether it wasn't time to do something for the middle class. Cheney roared back, no! this is our due! we won the mid-term elections. Cheney didn't say, "A second tax cut will benefit the middle class." He doesn't care about the middle class. The "our" in "our due" is people making seven figures and up. Now, of course, the Bush administration keeps saying that its tax cuts on the super-wealthy are making us all rich. But then Alan Greenspan came along and revealed that the way they were going to be paid for was actually to cut social security payments for the middle and working classes. (Before social security, the elderly were the poorest group in America, and we are heading back that way under this administration).

The answer to the question about impeachment, of course, is that the Republicans control all three branches of government. In such a virtual one-party state, accountability goes out the window. One worries that that is the real lesson the new rulers of Iraq will take from their American mentors.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sistani warns of his own Assassination, Civil War

al-Hayat: Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, March's president-for-a-month of the Interim Governing Council, revealed in a news conference on Wednesday that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani had warned late last week that "the enemies of Iraq" were "plotting to kill him [Sistani] in order to spark a civil war in the country." He said that "regional, international, and local parties are working to light this fuse," and he called on the Iraqis to avoid falling for it. Sistani remarked, "The enemies of Iraq have been working day and night, for a long time, to create an atmosphere encouraging of sectarian civil war, which will devour everything, the verdant with the barren, and will end the unity of the people and the nation." He expected these enemies to kill him, to provoke the Shiites into a reaction that would lead to communal warfare. He announced that he knew of the existence of someone trying to assassinate him, which frightens him. He emphasized that he "forbids everyone to use his murder as a means of lighting the fuse of hateful sectarian warfare."

Meanwhile, the Sunni cleric who administers that community's pious endowments, Dr. Adnan Muhammad Salman, said he feared that the "usurpation of tens of Sunni mosques might lead to the kindling of public disturbances." He called on the Shiite clerical leadership to denounced persons who attack Sunnis and their women, and who disrespect the companions and wives of the Prophet Muhammad.

There have been lots of instances where Sunni mosques have been taken over by angry Shiites in the south, on the grounds that Saddam built them there to plant Sunni influence. The Sadrist movement has been especially active on this front. Sistani has denounced the practice. Shiites view many of the early Islamic figures holy to Sunnis as traitors to the family of the prophet, and during their Muharram mourning ceremonies they often ritually curse them. Objects of their ire include the caliphs Abu Bakr and Umar, and A'isha, the wife of the Prophet Muhammad, all of whom they feel did not do right by Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, of whom they are partisans.

Then, British special representative in Iraq, Jeremy Greenstock, waxed especially blunt. Speaking of the Iraqis, Greenstock said, "They've got an opportunity. There are things that can go wrong. We will be here to make those things more difficult to go wrong. The resources will come in. The oil will start flowing faster. The investment will come in. The neighbours will want to co-operate with the new Iraq." But the former British ambassador to the United Nations acknowledged that dangers were rife in the post-Saddam Hussein era and that success was not guaranteed. He bluntly addressed the spectre of civil war haunting Iraq's Shi'ites, Sunnis, Kurds, Christians and Turkmen.
Between Sistani and Greenstock, one comes away today with a song on one's lips and a spring in one's step.

Finally, al-Hayat received a communique from the "Council of Shiite Turkmen" in Kirkuk, complaining bitterly about the Basic Law or interim constitution, calling it "ill-omened." It made Arabic and Kurdish the two state languages, ignoring the Turkmen. The Turkmen are marginalized (none of their party members is on the Interim Governing Council). The US is strongly allied with the Kurdish militias, and 70% of the police in Kirkuk are Kurds even though Kurds are a minority in the city. Then they want their own Turkmen province, of which Kirkuk must be the capital.

Bahr al-Ulum told the paper that he wants to satisfy the Turkmen. Good political answer, but I don't see how you do that and avoid an explosion with the Kurds. (Turkmen are probably 2% of the population, Kurds more like 15-17%).

In other news, men disguised as Iraqi police ambushed and killed two US civilian contractors and their Iraqi translator on Wednesday, near the southern Shiite city of al-Hilla.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Wave of Kidnappings Continues in Baghdad

Jack Fairweather of the Independent reports that the wave of kidnappings that has racked Baghdad continues, at an average of 2 a day. The typical ransom is $25,000. If we extrapolate out that rate, it is 720 abductions per 5 million people per annum (.014 percent of the population is abducted each year).

Colombia has the world's highest criminal kidnapping rate, with 3,000 abductions a year. That is 3,000 abductions per 38 million people per annum, or .0008 percent of the population being kidnapped each year. Obviously, Baghdad's rate is higher. This conclusion should be repeated. The wave of criminal kidnappings in Baghdad makes it a world leader in abductions, outstripping even Colombia.

Fairweather writes of Abbas Jassim, who was recently abducted. ' On entering Baghdad he was blindfolded. He remembers being led into a house and put in a small room beneath stairs. He was then bound and gagged. That night the kidnappers beat him for 20 minutes on his stomach and legs. His ransom had been set at a million dollars. Abbas was allowed a tearful call home the next morning. "We were powerless to do anything," said Mohammed Mehsen, his cousin. "The women of the family were weeping in one corner, the men shouting angrily. None of us could see why they were hurting the kindest and most well-liked man in the neighbourhood." Over the next few days, friends and family began arriving at Abbas' house . . . Within a week the family had raised $250,000. In daily conversations with the kidnappers the family held their nerve and brought the price down. A night for the handover was set. Captain Feroz Mohammed, of the Special Crimes unit, has worked on hundreds of kidnap cases since the summer. Unfortunately, few Iraqis have so far trusted him and his men - Abbas' family among them. "People are very scared," the policeman said yesterday. "They don't trust our ability to catch criminals. If people worked with us we would be able to bring kidnapping to an end." '
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

More on Interim Constitution

Roger Myerson, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, shared with me the following on the Interim Constitution, and has kindly consented to my reprinting it here:

"Article 55 . . .may be a key to the evolution of power in Iraq. This article
specifies that any group that has taken control of a Governate Council
before 1 July 2004 under the CPA can retain control "until free, direct,
and full elections, conducted pursuant to the law, are held." There is no
indication of when such Governate elections may occur. In particular,
these Governate elections are not linked to the National Assembly
elections, nor is it clear whether the National Assembly has the power to
call Governate elections (since "no member of any region government,
governor, member of any governate... may be dismissed by the federal
government"). As I read it, the suggestion is that local elections may not
be generally required until a final constitution is approved. Article 56
also promises that these Governate councils will get a significant role in
administering the country.

"So if an aspiring national leader can develop a factional network that has
widespread control of Governate councils (established without elections
under the CPA), then that leader may be able to control local elections to
the National Assembly in these Governates and may dominate the national
political process thereafter.

"I have written essays and professional articles [2, 3, below] arguing that, to
promote democracy in occupied Iraq, local elections should have been held
first and then local councils should have be given leading roles in the
constitution of the provisional government. But if local elections are
indefinitely postponed, then the establishment of a system of autonomous
and unelected Governate leaders could instead seriously jeopardize the
development of democracy in Iraq. Many people may be thinking only of
Kurdish concerns for autonomy when they read Articles 55 and 56. But we
should recognize the power of local authorities throughout the country to
administer and control the elections to the National Assembly. These local
councils hold the keys to national power in the new Iraq.

The Basic Law's ambiguity about the timing of local elections may give
some hope. For example, if the CPA before June were to administer free
democratic elections for local councils in all Governates, then the
significance of these articles would be reversed.

Sincerely,
Roger Myerson "

References
[1] http://www.geocities.com/nathanbrown1/interimiraqiconstitution.html
[2] http://home.uchicago.edu/~rmyerson/iraq.pdf
[3] http://home.uchicago.edu/~rmyerson/research/federal.pdf



Roger B. Myerson
W.C.Norby Professor of Economics
Department of Economics
University of Chicago
1126 East 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
http://home.uchicago.edu/~rmyerson/

N.B. A reader challenged this reading of Article 55, noting that it does in fact provide for provincial elections concurrent with national ones. On that point, Professer Myerson retracts.

Cole says: I still think the point that free and fair municipal and provincial elections should ideally have been held before the national one is a good one.
- 3/11/04 7:23 pm.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

1 US Soldier killed, 1 Wounded; Spanish Base Shelled

Wire services say that one US soldier was killed and another wounded Tuesday in a roadside bombing by guerrillas near Baquba north of Baghdad. Also, on Monday night three mortar shells hit the Spanish base at Diwaniyah, but produced no casualties. Diwaniyah is in the south, and there are many more such attacks there than is commonly realized. Last I knew, only about 60% of attacks occur in the so-called "Sunni Triangle." Some of the most spectacular bombings, as at Najaf and Karbala, have been in the south.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sistani: No Demonstrations Over Interim Constitution

az-Zaman: Ibrahim Jaafari, leader of the al-Da`wa al-Islamiyah Party in Iraq, who is close to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, revealed Tuesday that the ayatollah had pledged not to call for street protests against the Fundamental Law signed Monday.

The son of Grand Ayatollah Ali Bashir al-Najafi, a Pakistani close to Sistani, told al-Hayat that Sistani's reservations had to do with the place of Islam in the Fundamental Law and with the issue of how loose Iraq's federalism would be. He said that the clerics of Najaf do not reject the law altogether, out of fear of "chaos" should they do so.

al-Zaman: Meanwhile, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, said the document would not be legitimate until voted on by a general referendum of the Iraqi public. He restated his opposition to a provision that would allow three Kurdish provinces to veto any new constitution.

Radical young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr dismissed the Fundamental Law as “an illegitimate document”. His office complained that it had ignored the Sadrists, and did not represent the aspirations of “our people” and certainly “did not derive from its will.” (The Rousseauan language that legitimacy derives from the will of the people was first used by Sistani, and now seems to be being picked up by Muqtada. Actually, it would be better if they were reading Jefferson than Rousseau, since his ideology can lead to corporatism and authoritarianism, not just democracy). Sadr’s communiqué also complained about it shortchanging the role of Islam, which represented an impudent rejection of the will of the Muslim majority.

Also, al-Hayat reports that US Secretary of State Colin Powell called up his Turkish counterpart, Abdullah Gul, and promised to send an envoy to Ankara to reassure the Turks, who had objected strongly to the degree of autonomy granted Iraqi Kurds. The Turks do not want their own Kurds to seek a similar arrangement.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Can We all Get Along?

My op-ed, Conquering the divide (about Sunni-Shiite divisions), appeared in the Guardian yesterday.

I conclude, Iraq's future very much depends on whether the Sunni Arabs and Kurds will prove able to accommodate themselves to it, and whether the Shia can and will allay their fears of a tyranny of the Shia majority. Although the interim constitution, with its major concessions to the Kurds and other minorities, has been signed, the wrangling is not over. The issue of a minority veto over constitutional amendments will be revisited when the permanent constitution is written in 2005, by the elected parliament. As big a threat as the bombs posed to communal harmony in Iraq, any inability to make the necessary political compromises would be far more fatal.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Impressions from Iraq: 'It was Kind of Scary'

USC's Daily Trojan profiles Sharif Ossayran, an Iraqi expatriate who went back to his home country and then returned to report on its condition. He did not like what he saw, and has switched from supporting Bush to supporting Kerry because he believes Kerry will bring in the United Nations.

Among the quotes: ' "The war itself was great, but the post-war was a disaster. They had no planning for after the war. Whatever planning they had was just Mickey Mouse planning . . . After seven months there is still no electricity . . . The electricity will come on maybe three or fours hours a day. That's it." He described the streets of Baghdad as plagued by traffic, sewer water, and masses of people waiting in line for everything from gas to money. In addition, Ossayran disapproved of the "iron fist" policy adopted by the U.S. Army which states that military person[nel] are required to shoot anyone acting suspiciously or anyone not following orders. "I can tell you that this iron fist policy has backfired." Ossayran said that this policy has "created a kind of friction between the citizens and the American army" because the Americans ignored the people's traditions and customs. While in Iraq, he did not feel safe because of the constant bombings, shootings and inspections. "It was kind of scary," he said. "I did not feel safe at all." Despite the numerous problems, Ossayran said he saw positive improvements in food supply and American consumer goods and the availability of health care and education. '


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

US Press as "Stenographers" for Bush War

Reuters reports that the University of Maryland's Center for International and Security Studies released a report on Tuesday slamming the US press for not questioning the arguments put forward by the Bush administration for war, and acting as a virtual stenographer for the White House.

Interestingly, Susan Moeller, the author of the report, argued that "The 'inverted pyramid' style of news writing, which places the most 'important' information first, produced much greater attention to the administration's point of view on WMD issues at the expense of alternative perspectives."

I suppose she means that in an American context, whatever the president says would always go in the first paragraph, and Scott Ritter's comments would come several paragraphs down--even though Ritter knew what he was talking about with regard to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, and Bush did not.

The inverted pyramid style is favored in US journalism, but is not necessarily used in other countries. French news columns often are more essayistic, and likewise Arabic news. I spent a year one time mainly putting Arabic-language wire reports into English and arranging them in inverted pyramid form, which is not how they arrived.

While it may be appealing to journalists to try to blame the form of their writing for such lapses, however, there are many better explanations in my view.

1) The US print press is largely a capitalist press, which means you are trying to sell newspapers. (The old saw was that "Anyone can own a newspaper, all you need is a million dollars.) That makes it a reader's press, not a writer's. You have to give readers what they want, or else they won't plunk down their 50 cents. If the mood of the country is such that 85% of the people are supporting a war in Iraq, challenging the need for that war could make the newspaper unpopular and its sales might plummet. Advertisers could also pull their ads from an "unpatriotic" rag.

2) Journalists thrive on access. If you anger the Bush administration, then you are likely to be completely cut off from leaks. There is a strong incentive not to call Bush administration officials liars, if you have to deal with them every day and hope to get more than platitudes from them. This is why Paul Krugman, who is in Princeton and writes abstract analysis of policy that does not depend on insider sources, is such a brilliant dissector of the dishonesty and hypocrisy of the Bushies. He can tell them to jump in the lake.

3) Journalists are mostly generalists. They are talented at pulling information about a new subject out of the experts and putting it together coherently. I worked for a newspaper once and so know a little about how hectic their lives are, and what new challenges they face every day. But the fact is that most American journalists in the fall of 2002 had no idea what Iraq was like, or what a Shiite was, or the difference between an ayatollah and a grand ayatollah. They had no independent means of gauging whether Iraq had a nuclear weapons program or not, and had to go by what the experts said. If you don't follow a place like Iraq for thirty years, as I have, you don't have a good sense of what is plausible and what is not. Then, how do you tell what an expert is? Judith Miller of the NYT thought Ahmad Chalabi looked like an expert--he was a major expatriate Iraqi politician. Khidir Hamza, a former Baathist nuclear scientist looked like an expert. I think the journalists' preference for powerful "insiders" as sources is a problem with the trade. In this case, Scott Ritter was the better source, and even he exaggerated Iraqi WMD.

4) Journalists are often part of the political establishment themselves. Judith Miller is a Neocon who co-authored with the highly unreliable Laura Mylroie, and so was predisposed to buy the nonsense she was fed by Chalabi and his contexts. (The NYT seems to have a fair number of Neocons on its staff, for a supposedly liberal newspaper).

5) Journalism does not practice, or sometimes sufficiently respect, peer review. As editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies for Cambridge University Press, when I receive an article on Iraq I send it out to five or so of the major experts on Iraq in universities. If they all come back and say it is weak in evidence and argument, I don't publish it. This way of proceeding ensures that articles in my journal are solid. There is no time to referee newspaper articles, though some national magazines, like The Nation, do excellent fact checking. We can contrast academic peer review to the practice at think tanks. The American Enterprise Institute just publishes the book, without peer review. It publishes books that push or support policies to which the think tank is dedicated. This is why silly books like those of Mylroie or Khidir Hamza can see print, and sometimes even sell well. Some journalists do not know the difference between a solid book by Peter Sluglett on Iraq, published by a major academic press, and some screed put out of a Washington think tank by someone who does not know Arabic and has never been in an archive. (I hasten to add that there are lots of real intellectuals in the ranks of journalists, and there are even many former academics, who know these distinctions all too well, but I believe they are a minority). Lee Bollinger at Columbia University is thinking seriously about how this sort of problem could be solved by tinkering with the degree program in journalism there.

I have to say that often when I watch television or read the mainstream press, and I see this parade of self-proclaimed "experts" who say the damnedest things, I feel like Alice in Wonderland. No such shoddy rhetoric or posturing could be gotten away with in my department, but here are people who make literally hundreds of thousands of dollars from peddling unsound information.

The rise of expert and journalistic blogging, and the way it is interacting with professional journalism, may well change these dynamics a bit. Blogging needn't be a capitalist enterprise, and where it is not, it can afford to be more writerly. It can tell readers things at some length that are too complex or controversial for the print media. It can allow voices to be heard that contradict whoever the White House spokesman is that year. It should not be overestimated as a force for change. It is still a relatively minor phenomenon. But at the margins it may begin making a difference.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Cobban on Interim Constitution

Veteran journalist Helena Cobban has more discussion of the Fundamental Law signed Monday, its implications for Iraq, and the continued reservations about it coming from the Shiites.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

3 Killed, 20 wounded as Tens of Thousands of Kurds March in Joy in Kirkuk

The Guardian reports that tens of thousands of Kurds marched in Kirkuk to celebrate the signing of the interim constitution. They incorrectly believed that it accepted a consolidated Kurdistan and gave Kirkuk to the Kurds. Oil-rich Kirkuk, with a population of about 800,000, is divided a third each between Arabs, Turkmen and Kurds. Rioting broke out last December between the ethnic factions at the very suggestion that it be joined to Kurdistan.

al-Hayat says that three Iraqis (including a woman) were killed, and 20 were ounded in clashes that ranged Kurds against Arabs and Turkmen. The clashes followed the Kurdish demonstrations of joy. Police Chief Turhan Yusuf explained that after tens of thousands of Kurds came out into the streets, "Some of them began firing into the air, and the demonstration evolved" into clashes." About 12 of the 20 wounded were seriously hurt and were taken to hospital. He added that the city had been put under night curfew.

Newsday explains that ethnic tensions were anyway running high in the city lately.

In other news, AP reports:

' In the northern city of Mosul, gunmen fled after firing on the car. Akram Mahmoud Nijim, a member of a local council, was killed and another councilor was wounded. In Khaldiya, west of Baghdad, a bomb exploded under the car of the police chief, Ismail Turki, as he left his home Monday morning. Turki's driver and a bodyguard were wounded, said a neighbor, Khaled Fayyad."

AP also says, ' Attackers opened fire Monday on a car carrying two local council members in Mosul, killing one and wounding the other, police said. Insurgents also tried but failed to assassinate the police chief in a central Iraqi town. In Baghdad, insurgents fired mortar shells at two police stations in central Baghdad, injuring four people, including one policeman, Iraqi officials said. The attacks occurred shortly before the Iraqi Governing Council signed an interim constitution. '



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Turkey on Interim constitution: "It Increases our Concerns."

The new Iraqi basic law deeply angered the Turkish government by offering what it saw as a dangerous degree of autonomy to the Kurdish regions.

AFP reported, ' "The interim law does not satisfy us, it increases our concerns," Justice Minister Cemil Cicek said. "We see it as an arrangement that will not help the establishment of permanent peace in Iraq and one that will allow for the continuation for a long time of unrest and instability there," he said. '

One could imagine a number of provisions in the law that might annoy Turkey. It clearly envisages a process whereby Iraq's 18 provinces may wish to gerrymander themselves into ethnic enclaves. The Kurds clearly want to pursue such a refashioning of Iraq's provinces. Turkey is afraid that the formation of a specifically Kurdish province with great autonomy from Baghdad will become a beacon for separatist elements in Turkey's own large Kurdish community of eastern Anatolia, relatively near Iraq. On another point, the document officially makes Iraq a multicultural rather than a purely Arab state, giving Kurdish and Arabic both the status of official languages. This move may be seen as embarrassing to Turkey, where the percentage of the population that is Kurdish is probably only slightly less than in Iraq. The prevailing Kemalist ideology in Turkey, however, would never countenance two official languages there, since it is committed to a vision of all inhabitants of Turkey as somehow Turkish.

In contrast, Iran seems happy at the deal, because it promises Shiite dominance of parliament and a quick turn-over of sovereignty from the Americans and British to the Iraqis.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's Fatwa

This is what was at the site of Sistani:

" In the name of the Most Exalted

Grand Ayatollah Sistani has already clarified his observations on the agreement of November/15th (and maintains) that any law prepared for the transitional period will not gain legitimacy except after it is endorsed by an elected national assembly. Additionally, this law places obstacles in the path of reaching a permanent constitution for the country that maintains its unity and the rights of its sons of all ethnicities and sects.
16th Muharram al-Haraam
1425"

Remember that Sistani believes that the US occupation is illegal, and that everything the Interim Governing Council does is illegitimate, on the Rousseauan grounds that it does not reflect the will of the Iraqi people (no one has been openly elected to do these things in Iraq). Moreover, this interim documents, produced by mere appointees, attempts in many ways to tie the hands of the later elected members of parliament who will fashion the final constitution. He also doesn't like giving the three Kurdish provinces a veto over the final constitution.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Saddam never asked for Nukes to be Reconstituted: Top Iraqi Scientist

AP reports that Jafar Dhia Jafar, father of Iraq's nuclear program, is denying that Saddam ordered the program started back up after 1991.

Contrast this report with Vice President Dick Cheney's statement on 3/16/03, "We believe Saddam has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." Now, what Cheney said is clearly false. He said it on the even of war, as a way of whipping up war fever. In a nation with political accountability, I think it is sufficiently serious enough an error that he ought to just resign. When a high political leader makes claims of this magnitude, which had the effect of grossly misleading Congress and the American people (and of frankly scaring them into doing things they might otherwise not have done), it is wrong for him to remain in office after that.

Lest anyone think that it is Jafar's word against Cheney, the Center for American Democracy notes that ' Voice of America reported on 9/16/03 that, a senior official in Iraq's new science ministry says the country never revived its nuclear program after U.N. inspectors dismantled it in the 1990's. The scientist, who is an official of the new U.S.-backed administration in Baghdad, says Iraqi scientists had no way to re-start the program because the inspectors took away all the necessary resources. '
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Kaplan on Chalabi and Sistani

Slate's Fred Kaplan has an interesting article on the recent gyrations of Ahmad Chalabi, who has been aligning himself lately with Grand Ayatollah Sistani, though he initially defied Sistani after the later challenged the November 15 agreement. I speculate, as quoted in the piece, that the turning point was when Sistani demonstrated that he could bring tens of thousands of people into the streets at will.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Cole and Astrabadi on Lehrer Newshour

Head's up, I'll be on the Lehrer Newshour this evening 3/8 (many of you have asked for such alerts).
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Mogadishu and Deja Vu All Over Again

The 7 rocket strikes at the al-Rashid Hotel and the Baghdad Headquarters of the Coalition Provisional authority wounded an American contractor, but otherwise managed to do relatively little damage if the press is to be believed. Some buildings did get set on fire and sent up black towers of smoke. I think the real issue is that the Coalition Provisional Administration's HQ can apparently be struck at will by the guerrillas. It is a situation familiar to readers of Black Hawk Down, and seeing pictures of Baghdad on cable news Sunday afternoon made me wonder if the whole center-north of Iraq wasn't just one big Black Hawk Down. I remember one special ops soldier boasting about how smartly the US handled the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. He observed that al-Qaeda had wanted to get US boots on the ground in large numbers and "pull a Mogadishu on us." They failed in Afghanistan. But lots of Mogadishu's are being pulled on the US and its allies in Iraq these days.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Basic Law Signing: "Fallout from Crisis Remains

Hamza Hendawi of AP reports today on the signing of the Basic Law in Baghdad. The five Shiite hold-outs decided to sign "for the sake of national unity" despite severe reservations about some of the clauses. In particular, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani had signalled to them his objection to a provision that allowed any three provinces to reject a new constitution when it is crafted. In other words, the new constitution will have to be approved by an enormous supermajority of 90 percent of Iraq's provinces. This is more than the already rigorous 75% of states that are needed to pass constitutional amendments in the US. Grand Ayatollah Sistani is concerned that this 90% rule will allow small minorities to take the constitutional process hostage. Shiites have pointed out that provinces in Iraq are not equally propulated, with some only having a few hundred thousand inhabitants. Theoretically, less than a million persons could reject a constitution passed by all the other 24 million. (The provision seems to allow for a popular referendum, such that if a 2/3s majority rejects the constitution in three provinces, it fails). The provision was put in for ths ake of the Kurds, who worry about a tyranny of the Arab majority.

Sistani is now demanding that when there is an elected parliament, planned for January 2005, it will have to affirm the Basic Law to make it legitimate, thus hinting that it might be tinkered with at that point. But the leaked drafts of the Basic Law in Arabic contain a provision that it can't be amended, and can only be superseded by a new constitution. It may also be possible for Shiite Interim Governing Council members to add a few amendments to it in coming weeks, somehow weakening the 90% rule.

The always perceptive Hamza Hendawi of AP, however, points out that regardless of the signing ceremony, the damage has been done. After last Tuesday's massive bombings at Karbala and Kazimiyah, and the failure to sign the Basic Law on Friday, tensions among Iraq's main ethnic communities is running high. Hendawi says, ' The squabble exacerbated sectarian tensions and reinforced fears of Shi'ite domination over the Sunni Arab and Kurdish minorities, politicians and observers said. Shi'ite politicians say they want to build Iraq's democracy on a sound basis. "To say that the Shi'ite religious leadership is now meddling in politics is to understate the case," said senior politician Naseer Kamel al-Chaderchi, a Sunni Arab on Iraq's Governing Council. "The majority must not be allowed to usurp the rights of others." '

Az-Zaman explains that 13 Shiite members of the IGC approach Grand Ayatollah Sistani over the weekend, and that 7 of those who supported the Basic Law made promises to him that caused him to relent. He had reportedly been worried about a provision that would allow the 3 primarily Kurdish provinces (Irbil, Dahuk, Sulaymaniya) to veto the permanent constitution once it is drafted, if they found anything in it objectionable. There had been substantial anxiety on Sunday about whether the signing would take place.The Toronto Globe and Mail explained the continued controversy over the Basic Law. Reuters was less cautious and correctly predicted that the signing would occur Monday.

An expert analysis of the most recently-leaked draft of the Basic Law, by Middle East expert Nathan Brown, can be found at: http://www.geocities.com/nathanbrown1/interimiraqiconstitution.html.

The CPA has now posted an English text of the Basic Law.



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

McCarthyite Advisory Committee Threatens International Studies

Just a reminder to everyone that I had asked over the weekend for help in fighting the Advisory Committee provision of HR 3077. Please fax your senator if she or he is on the HELP committee (see the hyperlinked posting just cited in "I had asked"), or the senate in general if not, asking that the Advisory Committee be excised from the final bill.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Zabriskie on Iraq: "There is Anger Everywhere"

Time Correspondent Phil Zabriskie let down his hair with a high school classroom, and let them know exactly what he felt about Iraq after 10 weeks there.

' “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before. It is easily the most unpleasant place I’ve been. There is anger everywhere.” Iraqis are angry for many reasons, Zabriskie said. They’re angry because they’ve been oppressed for so many years. They’re angry because the dictator they feared didn’t fight back when captured. And they’re angry that American troops haven’t done more to keep the peace since Saddam’s regime fell, Zabriskie said. “The U.S. leadership has not had a consistent plan . . . In my opinion, it should not be as bad as it is right now.” He believes U.S. leaders ignored warnings and were not adequately prepared to deal with Iraq after the initial war. As a result, they have left room for Iraqi religious leaders to organize support and have left the American troops in a bad position. “They have been put in a terribly difficult situation, made worse by political decisions in Washington,” Zabriskie said. “There was not a whole lot of love for Americans to begin with.” The biggest fear expressed by Iraqis now, he said, is civil turbulence among religious groups. '

Sometimes I talk to or read a correspondent who spent a few weeks in Iraq, and I don't recognize the Iraq he or she reports back. Max Boot went embedded last summer and came back with tales of bustling bazaars and a quick return to normal. Since he had not seen the bazaars the year before, he had no grounds for judging whether they were more or less bustling. Nor do bustling bazaars mean everything is hunky dory. (When I was in Beirut during the civil war, people shopped. It was just that some of them got sniped at while they were in line.) One reporter told me last fall that Iraqis are not very nationalistic; that if you just make their tribal leaders happy everything will be fine; and that the capture of Saddam meant the end of the insurgency. But Iraqis are very nationalistic; tribal leaders are less important than they used to be; and the insurgency was never about Saddam; it probably isn't even about the Baath party in any meaningful way.

In contrast, Zabriskie's Iraq sounds like the one I read about in Arabic and hear about from people outside the green zone who are not embedded.

There is still a wave of assassinations going on in Baghdad. The streets are unsafe at night. People get murdered. Children, especially girls, are kidnapped and held for ransom. Actually it sounds to me like it is actually worse than Lebanon in the first years of the civil war, at least in Beirut. The US has managed to induce a failed state in Iraq. Although many cities in the South have more security than Baghdad, it sometimes comes at the price of the erection of a mini-theocracy. Geoffrey York's report from Basra gives the flavor of rule by religious militia that has several times been reported on by correspondents.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Women's Rights in Iraq

The opinion piece by my wife, Shahin Cole, and myself in the LA Times on Sunday on women's rights in Iraq is available for the moment at google's news service. This is part of what we say:

"The adoption of the new Fundamental Law, or interim constitution, by the Governing Council raised many questions about the future treatment of women. A recently published Arabic draft of the document contains many passages supportive of women's rights. These paragraphs, however, may conflict with other provisions. The law says that Islam is the official religion and that it is "a fundamental source" of legislation. It also bars laws that would directly contradict the Muslim legal code, or Sharia. The prominence of Islam need not undercut women's rights, but if the Fundamental Law is interpreted in a fundamentalist or patriarchal way, women could be harmed.

Also of interest is another recent op-ed on the condition of women, which looks more at the economic and security issues than we do (our charge was to consider the impact of the interim constitution). See Houzan Mahmud, "An empty sort of freedom".

She writes " From the start of the occupation, rape, abduction, "honour" killings and domestic violence have became daily occurrences. The Organisation of Women's Freedom in Iraq (Owfi) has informally surveyed Baghdad, and now knows of 400 women who were raped in the city between April and August last year. A lack of security and proper policing have led to chaos and to growing rates of crime against women. Women can no longer go out alone to work, or attend schools or universities. An armed male relative has to guard a woman if she wants to leave the house. Girls and women have become a cheap commodity to be traded in post-Saddam Iraq. Owfi knows of cases where virgin girls have been sold to neighbouring countries for $200, and non-virgins for $100. "


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Three US Soldiers Wounded in Habaniyah Saturday

AP reports . . . U.S. soldiers were wounded after opening fire on a truck packed with explosives in Habaniyah, west of Baghdad. The driver of the truck was killed by the American fire, but three U.S. soldiers were wounded when the truck crashed on a bridge and exploded. '
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

7 British Soldiers wounded in Battle with Badr, Demonstrators in Amarah


Ash-Sharq al-Awsat: The police chief in the province of Maysan announced yesterday that two Iraqi civilians, one of them a woman, were killed Friday in confrontations and an exchange of fire between demonstrators and elements belonging to the Badr Corps on the one hand, and between British troops on the other, in the province of Amarah in southern Iraq. A Coalition spokesman confirmed the confrontations, which led to the wounding of 7 British soldiers, but said he had no information on civilian casualties.

Capt. Isma`il Kadhim said that "Someone opened fire on a British patrol, before it took cover in a site belonging to the Badr Corps." This is the militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq in the town of Qala Salih (40 km south of Amarah). He continued, "The British entered the building and took everyone inside prisoner, confiscating weapons. But a crowd was around the building, which confronted them and damaged military equipment."

In contrast, AP reported, ' "The patrol returned fire after receiving fire from heavy machine guns and a rocket-propelled grenade," a British Ministry of Defense spokeswoman said. "They were extracted by a quick reaction force and whilst the incident was happening, four of the patrol members received non-life threatening injuries." '

And here is how a later AP report itself described the incident: ' In Amarah, seven British soldiers were wounded after being fired on with handguns and rocket-propelled grenades during a three-hour firefight in southern Iraq, coalition officials said. Three Iraqis were killed, British officials said. The soldiers from the 1st Battalion, Light Infantry were arresting a man when a crowd gathered around their convoy. The British came under fire by machine guns and a rocket-propelled grenade and returned fire, a military spokeswoman said. '

Kadhim said that the troops asked for reinforcements, so a military helicopter was sent to support them. Likewise, the road between Amarah and Basra was cut, and guns were fired, killing two, a man and a woman.

An American military spokesman said that a single bullet was fired at the British and that the crowd confronted them after the arrest of a suspect. When the troops later came under rocket fire, they call for reinforcements.

AP adds ' Britain was the United States' main ally in the Iraq conflict and has lost 58 soldiers since the war started on March 20. Some 8,000 British forces are currently stationed in Iraq. Some 410 Danish troops are based near Qurnah, between Qalah Salih and the city of Basra.

The strength of the Badr Corps throughout the south is no secret. But the dangers of having a paramiliteray force running about were illustrated by this incident. If there is a new Iraqi army, it will have to contend with the Badr Corps. It was supposed to be disarmed and merged into some sort of Iraqi military unit, but neither thing has happened and now it won't at all. After last Tuesday's horrific bombings, the Shiites demanded that Badr Corps be reinvigorated.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Shuttle Diplomacy in Najaf

Efforts continued Saturday to iron out differences on the Interim Governing Council about two provisions of the Basic Law, says ash-Sharq al-Awsat Seven Shiite members consulted with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Najaf. The ayatollah is said to be unhappy with a provision that would allow any three provinces, by a two-thirds majority, to reject the constitution scheduled to be crafted in 2005. This provision would clearly allow Sunni Kurds or Sunni Arabs to stop implementation of any constitution they felt was too favorable to Shiite law. Sistani also objected to the current plan to have a president and two vice presidents. He wants 5 presidents, 3 of them Shiites, and one each for the Kurds and Sunnis, according to al-Hayat.

I can't understand why Sistani wants 5 presidents, and I actually suspect that it is Shiite IGC members who came up with this formula and put it in Sistani's mouth. As Borzou Daragahi reports, Sistani is a quietist and doesn't believe that clerics should rule. The main beneficiaries of a 5-man presidency are people like Ahmad Chalabi, who probably could not get selected president, but who want to ensure for themselves some sort of high executive post.

al-Hayat: It was striking that the Iraqi foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, affirmed that the Shiite reservations about the text of the constitution served "foreign parties." He rejected a Shiite demand that the presidential council be expanded to five members, emphasizing that the Kurds would cling to their veto over any permanent constitution in order to prevent a "dictatorship of the majority." AP said 'a Kurdish official said his side would not consent to changing the clause, which was agreed to by the entire council when it approved the constitution on Monday after several days of intense debate. “We are sticking to it because it’s a legitimate demand,” Kosrat Rasul, an official in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of two main Kurdish parties on the council, said. '

In contrast, Hamid Bayati of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq objected to the current provision where by any three provinces can, by a 2/3s majority vote, veto any new constitution crafted next year. He said that some of the Iraqi provinces only have a few hundred thousand inhabitants, and it wasn't right that they could veto the constitution of 25 million persons.
March's president of the IGC, Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, insisted that an agreement would be signed by Monday, but many observers were skeptical.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat quoted anonymous American sources saying that a third delay in the signing might be disastrous. In its wake, the IGC members may feel everything is now up for renegotiation.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

All Dressed up with No Place to Go: Setback for Basic Law

az-Zaman: On Friday, five Shiite members of the Interim Governing Council suddenly pulled out of signing the Basic Law they had agreed to, with the rest of the IGC, last Monday.

A huge formal signing ceremony had been arranged, attended by hundreds of people and the press, who just kept waiting for hours and hours as the five were holed up with Ahmad Chalabi. Finally the Coalition Provisional Authority announced that nothing would happen, and everyone went home.

The whole performance was a huge embarrassment for the Bush administration, which had counted on enacting the Basic Law as a prelude to finding a way to hand sovereignty over to an Iraqi government of some description on June 30. That deadline seems increasingly shaky.

The renewed determination to have their way among the more hardline Shiite figures on the council may have been sparked by the massive bombings on Tuesday, which fell on the holiest day of the Shiite calendar. A feeling of vulnerability could well have impelled them to rethink the concessions they had made to Kurds and women.

The dissidents included Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, and Ahmad Chalabi. Jaafari is the head of the Shiite al-Da`wa Party, and Rubaie is ex-Da`wa from Basra. Al-Hakim heads the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which for decades was close to Iran's hardliners. Bahr al-Ulum is close to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Ahmad Chalabi has said that he is a secularist, but is rumored actually to have become personally pious. The five met repeatedly at al-Hakim's house, and appear to have received instructions from outside the IGC to refuse to sign the law at the last minute.

The issues over which the five revolted were: the presidency, federalism, women's rights, and the permanent constitution. The Basic Law had stipulated that there would be a president and two vice presidents. It said that the constitution could be annulled if any three of Iraq's provinces objected to it (a provision inserted by the 5 Kurdish representatives). They also withdrew their support for a provision that 25% of seats in parliament should ideally go to women.

A member of the IGC told az-Zaman that this sort of to and froing was par for the course in the negotiations over the basic law. Members would agree to something in camera, then when they got home and contacted persons or groups outside the IGC, they would receive contrary instructions, and would come back in and want to renegotiate the entire issue. This member said that the time had come to abolish the practice of apportioning IGC seats by sect, as the Americans had done initially, and to rely more on expertise and ability in making the appointments. He also said that the 5 hold-outs don't even represent a consensus of Shiites on the council.

The Washington Post reported that the five rebelled at the instigation of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Az-Zaman was more circumspect, merely speaking of "forces outside the Interim Governing Council."

Eight other Shiite members of the IGC who did not join them (though they tried to recruit them), including Raja al-Khuzaie, a woman maternity physician who opposed them on the issue of Islamic personal status law and her colleague, Salama al-Khufaji, a dentist at Baghdad University. Likewise, Iyad Alawi, an organizer of ex-Baath officers. Abdul Karim Mahoud al-Muhammadawi, the leader of the Marsh Arab Hizbullah, and Ahmed Barak were willing to sign. Wa'il Abdul Latif, a court judge from Basra, was committed to the basic law, as was Hamid Majid Mousa, the Communist leader that the Western press oddly keeps counting as a "Shiite."

The CPA evinced hope that the problems could be resolved through further negotiation. Maybe. But remember that this Basic Law is only a temporary document, and all the issues in it will be broach again when the constitution is drafted next year. At that point compromise will be even more difficult, and the US will no longer be in authority in Iraq. Not an optimistic scenario.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Zarqawi Dossier

I have begun putting together a dossier on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (a.k.a. Ahmad Fadil Nazzal Al-Khalayleh). It will include US government documents in the public domain and excerpts from press accounts for non-profit, academic use. If Zarqawi has emerged, according to Gen. John Abizaid, as a major threat to US national security, it seemed worthwhile to try to get some reliable information on him pulled together in one place. I will also include some documents that strike me as weak, just for the sake of completeness. Anyone who reads through the whole dossier can see for themselves what seems to fit and be plausible. I have been asked by a number of journalists what we know about Zarqawi's al-Tawhid organization and his reputed rivalry with Usama Bin Laden. The material is all there, especially in summer of 2003 entries.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sistani Fatwa: No Entering Iraq Illegally

Informed that thousands of Iranian pilgrims came into Iraq every day, by-passing the official checkpoints, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sitani issued a legal ruling on Friday insisting that such illegal entry was religiously forbidden. He said that good Shiites would cross only at official checkpoints. He also forbade smuggling.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Major Censorship Action Alert for Middle East Studies

Some of you know that some unsavory political forces have convinced the House of Representatives to create a Big Brother committee to police the thought of university professors who write about world affairs. The bill is HR 3077. The main goal of this legislation is to impose an ideological agenda on university teaching, research and writing about issues like the Middle East. The point of the committee is to warp academic study and ensure that independent researchers are not allowed to be heard. But it was precisely the imposition of such ideological litmus tests in Washington that led to the case of the missing Weapons of Mass Destruction and the conviction that Iraq was 3 years away from having a nuclear bomb, both propositions completely false. It would not be doing the United States any favors to muzzle the academics, as well.

I plead with all the thousands of you who have expressed interest in this site and read it frequently, to FAX your senator, or the senate generally, expressing your conviction that this advisory committee be excised from the final bill. Repeat: The message should be that HR 3077 is OK in general, but the "Advisory Board" stinks. The contact information is below. An email is better than nothing, but the FAX is what would get the job done.

The fact is that international studies in the United States is extremely underfunded. Probably Federal spending on it annually is about equivalent to buying two F-16e fighter jets. In the entire country, at all universities and colleges. It is nothing compared to the need. Among the main programs is Title VI, which funds over 100 area studies centers at major universities. But it funds just 15 or so fully fledged Middle East Centers, in the entire country! (A Middle East center typically has 20-30 faculty members who study the Middle East proper since 600 A.D., in various disciplines, though if you add in the scholars who work on the ancient Near East and the people who work on the Caucasus and other related areas, it might come to 60). Actually, usually a lot of the money goes to language fellowships for graduate students. But since nowadays it costs around $20,000 to pay tuition and a stipend even at a state university, you can see that not many students can be funded for Arabic or Persian language study at that rate.

When I came to the University of Michigan in 1984, we were able to give about 20 such fellowships annually. The Reagan administration annually zero-budgeted Title VI, which is to say that Reagan tried to abolish Federal support for things like Middle East Studies altogether, every year for 8 years. Congress always put the money back, but it did not increase it at the rate of inflation. By the late 1990s, the University of Michigan had been denied funding for its Center altogether, and only 2 or 3 graduate students were being supported to study Arabic, Persian, or Turkish. Now, these same old-time Reaganites are coming and saying that we haven't done our jobs and need to be watched.

Although the Middle East is a huge policy concern for the US now, we probably don't have more than about 1,000 full time faculty members who specialize in the area, know the languages, and write mainly about it. That is a tiny group for a region stretching from Morocco to Afghanistan, and needing to be covered for the past 1400 years.

The Neocons would have you believe that the Middle East specialists at universities have fallen down on the job by not all becoming terrorism experts. But none of the Neocons who did Middle East or South Asian studies wrote their dissertations on anything to do with US security, and most still have not contributed to its security--often quite the opposite. Many of them were hand in hand with creating the Afghan Mujahidin and al-Qaeda by throwing billions of dollars at such groups in the 1980s. University professors mainly research in the areas they teach, and most teaching jobs are for history or cultural studies. This is what the students want, and nowadays universities pay attention to student demand. These positions are largely at small liberal arts colleges or private universities, and most are not supported by the Federal government, so I should think those institutions can shape the positions as they please. If the US government wanted lots of Arabists at lots of security studies programs in universities, it should have spent some money on that goal. It did not.

But it is also true that a significant part of the US government is now busily reading the books and articles about the Middle East produced by Middle East academics at US universities. Without that corpus of literature, these brave and dedicated men and women would be flying blind. Doing anything to gut this academic establishment would be extremely self-defeating for a US that is going to be increasingly engaged with the Middle East. The tack of trying to intervene in the region without knowledge of it has been shown to be a disaster.

Frankly, the Federal government doesn't make use of the experts it has. There are only a handful of us who write professionally about Iraq, because for most of our lives it was hard to do field work there or get access to primary sources. I could mention Peter Sluglett at Utah, Yitzhak Nakash at Brandeis, and a handful of others. I don't know about them, but I have never, ever even once been invited to a State Department conference on Iraq. And, as we all know, even if I had been it would not have mattered, since the Neocons at the Pentagon threw all the work Tom Warrick at State had done on the Future of Iraq project into the trash can and prevented Tom himself from going to join the CPA! This is what I would have told anyone who had asked me a year and a half ago about the pros and cons of going to war in Iraq.


So here's the alert:

The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee is hoping to take up the Higher Education Act reauthorization in the next two-three weeks. [Note that there is no separate subcommittee on higher education on the HELP Committee, so the bill will be considered by the full committee and then go to the floor.]

Opponents and proponents of the controversial Advisory Board provision have been vigorously lobbying the Senate on this issue. If you have not already written a letter to the Senate or telephoned a message, NOW is the time. Write to your Member on the Senate HELP Committee (see list below), or if your state is not represented on the committee, write to Senators Gregg and Kennedy with a copy to your two Senators. Faxing your letters will ensure timely receipt due to the recent ricin scare. E-mailing is not recommended.

If you want to visit the real world instead of the rarefied atmosphere of K Street, you can get a sense of what an actual Middle East center is and does here.

A. The people who support the "Advisory Committee" argue that there is extreme ideological bias in the teaching about Middle East studies and other area studies fields at US universities. I have addressed many of these charges in my article for the History News Network. Here is what I wrote about Political Science:

Last spring Kurtz implicitly attacked the political scientists at the Middle East Centers at American universities for being postmodernist, leftist, anti-American terrorist-coddlers. The 14 or so tenured professors of Middle East political science at the federally funded National Resource Centers, however, include Leonard Binder of UCLA (who fought on Israel's side in the 1948 war); Joel Migdal and Ellis Goldberg at the University of Washington, Seattle (exponents of the New Institutionalism and Rational Choice, respectively); Mark Tessler of the University of Michigan (with a Ph.D. From Hebrew University, who analyzes survey data quantitatively), Lisa Anderson and Gary Sick of Columbia (comparative politics and policy studies, respectively; Sick is a former naval officer and served on the National Security Council), and so on. Of the fourteen, only one (Timothy Mitchell at New York University) could be considered a postmodernist, and his work on the Middle East from that framework has been illuminating. None of the fourteen has ever to my knowledge supported any sort of terrorism.

That is to say, Middle East political science is an ideologically highly diverse field, with lots of approaches represented. It is not dominated by a single methodology or school, as was falsely charged. The same thing is true for the other disciplines.

HR 3077 mandates that Title VI programs must "reflect diverse perspectives and represent the full range of views on world regions, foreign language, and international affairs."

This language is potentially disastrous.

As Stanley Fish has said, university teaching and research is not about "balance." Our cancer institute isn't required to hire at least a few biologists who believe smoking is good for your health. In research, it is all right to be partisan for the evidence. It is in fact one of the things wrong with journalism and political discourse that there is so much emphasis on "telling both sides of the story." This is a bad approach because many stories have many more than two sides, and some stories only have one true side. Appointing a professor at each major university who would have insisted in early 2003 that Iraq was only 3-5 years away from having a nuclear bomb would not have been an academic advance, but it is the sort of thing the framers of HR 3077 had in mind when they urged "balance."

I teach a course on War in the 20th Century Middle East at the University of Michigan, and as a historian I have to admit that it is a biased course, especially when we get to the 1990s. It is biased because I despise the Taliban and al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, and I certainly do not properly give their side of the story. If what the Senate wants is "balance," then we shall have to hire some of those unemployed ex-Baathists to teach Iraqi history at the University of Michigan, to offset my jingoistic pro-American approach. "Reflecting" "the full range of views" would also require us to have more Communist, Nazi, Holocaust-denying and Hamas professors. The Senate should be very careful about putting into statute this language about "balance," because although the committee's supporters want to use it mainly as affirmative action for Republican academics, there are lots of extremist groups in US society that may find ways to use the language perniciously. (Contrary to the hype, there are plenty of Republican academics, and try to find a leftist in any major Economics Department or Business School in the country).

B. The people who argue for the Advisory Board charge "anti-Americanism" in the classroom. But actually what they mean by that if you pin them down is ambivalence about the Iraq war, or dislike of Israeli colonization of the West Bank, or recognition that the US government has sometimes in the past been in bed with present enemies like al-Qaeda or Saddam. None of these positions is "anti-American," and any attempt by a congressionally-appointed body to tell university professors they cannot say these things (or that if they say them they must hire someone else who will say the opposite) is a contravention of the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

c. The "Advisory Committee" that HR 3077 sets up is unneeded. The Department of Education already does oversight of the area studies centers, and gives or withholds money according to whether they meet government goals. Funding a whole extra committee is a waste of taxpayer money and a clear duplication of effort. The Committee explicitly has "investigatory" powers, which it is hard to see as anything other than McCarthyism. Given Republican dominance of all three branches of government, the committee is going to be highly politicized, and some ideologues will probably be shoe-horned onto it.

Most troubling of all, the "advisory board" will have "investigative" powers. These powers are clearly meant to intimidate US academics and administrators, and some institutions are already talking of turning down Federal money rather than submit to such tactics. You decide if the country would be well served by a law that made it impossible for the best universities to even take Federal funds for international studies.


Polite, accurate and thoughtful letters will be useful. Testimonials and anecdotes based on fact can convey a lot. If you are unsure of HR 3077 details, go to:
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=108_cong_bills&docid=f:h3077rfs.txt.pdf

You can follow proposed revisions by searching on HR 3077 through the "Bill Search" function on the Senate web site.

Also a google search on HR3077 will bring up many sites with many points of view.

For those interested: a recent article in the Village Voice about HR3077?s advisory board:
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0408/solomon.php

A fairly recent op-ed in USA Today:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2004-02-16-our-view_x.htm



SENATE HEALTH, EDUCATION, LABOR AND PENSIONS COMMITTEE
For more info, go to http://health.senate.gov/committee_members.html
For all senators: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
(unfortunately, you have to telephone to get the FAX number)

REPUBLICAN MEMBERS

Judd Gregg, NH
Chairman
Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions
TEL (202) 224-3324
FAX (202) 224-4952
mailbox@gregg.senate.gov

Bill Frist, TN
TEL (202) 224-3344
FAX (202) 228-1264

Michael B. Enzi, WY
TEL (202) 224-3424
FAX (202) 228-0359
senator@enzi.senate.gov

Lamar Alexander, TN
TEL (202) 224-4944
FAX (202) 228-3398

Christopher S. Bond, MO
TEL (202) 224-5721
FAX (202) 224-8149
kit_bond@bond.senate.gov

Mike DeWine, OH
TEL (202) 224-2315
FAX (202) 224-6519
senator_dewine@dewine.senate.gov

Pat Roberts, KS
TEL (202) 224-4774
FAX (202) 224-3514

Jeff Sessions, AL
TEL (202) 224-4124
FAX (202) 224-3149
senator@sessions.senate.gov

John Ensign, NV
TEL (202) 224-6244
FAX (202) 228-2193

Lindsey O. Graham, SC
TEL (202) 224-5972
FAX (202) 224-1189

John W. Warner, VA
225 Senate Russell Building
US Senate
Washington, DC 20510-4601
TEL (202) 224-2023
FAX (202) 224-6295
senator@warner.senate.gov

DEMOCRAT MEMBERS

Edward M. Kennedy, MA
Ranking Minority Member
Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions
TEL (202) 224-4543
FAX (202) 224-2417
http://kennedy.senate.gov/contact.html

Christopher J. Dodd, CT
TEL (202) 224-2823
FAX (202) 224-1083

Tom Harkin, IA
TEL (202) 224-3254
FAX (202) 224-9369
tom_harkin@harkin.senate.gov

Barbara A. Mikulski. MD
TEL (202) 224-4654
FAX (202) 224-8858

Jeff Bingaman, NM
TEL (202) 224-5521
FAX (202) 224-2852
senator_bingaman@bingaman.senate.gov

Patty Murray, WA
TEL (202) 224-2621
FAX (202) 224-0238
senator_murray@murray.senate.gov

John F. Reed, RI.
TEL 202) 224-4642
FAX (202) 224-4680
jack@reed.senate.gov

John R. Edwards, NC
TEL (202) 224-3154
FAX (202) 228-1374

Hillary Rodham Clinton, NY
TEL 202) 224-4451
FAX (202) 228-0282

INDEPENDENT MEMBER

James M. Jeffords, VT
TEL (202) 224-5141
FAX (202) 228-0776
vermont@jeffords.senate.gov


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

US Soldier Wounded, 9 Iraqis Killed

AFP reports that a US soldier was injured and nine Iraqis were killed Thursday in separate attacks throughout the country.

Guerrillas set off a bomb near Baquba to the northeast of Baghdad, injuring one US soldier.

Guerrillas fired a rocket in southwest Baghdad, near a US military base, killing 3 Iraqis and wounding 5. The rocket also went off near a telephone exchange, and some say that was the real target. In Mosul, guerrillas fired a rocket and employed small arms fire, killing three policemen and 2 civilians.
Assailants killed a policeman in Kirkuk.

On Wednesday, a rocket attack on a telephone exchange in Baghdad knocked out long distance service, soon after it had been restored.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Knight-Ridder Questions Saddam-al-Qaeda Links

Warren Strobel et al. of Knight Ridder have looked at the case for Saddam-al-Qaeda links and found them lacking.

1. Although it is true that Abdul Rahman Yasin, a suspect in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, was attempting to hide out in Iraq, Saddam offered to turn him over to the FBI in 1998 in return for US acknowledgment that Iraq was not involved in that incident. The Clinton administration declined the deal. Cheney cited the continued "harboring" by Iraq of Yasin as one "proof" of an Iraq-al-Qaeda connection. Yeah, Saddam and Yasin were obviously really tight.

2. Bin Laden is said to have refused an offer in 1998 to go to Iraq, made by Iraqi intelligence officer Farouk Hijazi. A report made available to the CIA, however, said that Bin Laden declined the offer because he did not want to have Saddam's agenda dictated to him. The Knight-Ridder team does not point this out, but if you read this item in conjunction with # 1 above, it seems entirely possible that Saddam thought the US wouldn't deal for Yasin because he wasn't a big enough fish, and went looking for a more important terrorist to trade them for the US favors he wanted.

3. Cheney tried to tie Saddam to Abu Mus`ab Zarqawi. Such ties haven't been proven, but even if they were, it seems clear from the Zarqawi letter that he was not part of Bin Laden's group and only lately tried to get money from Bin Laden.

4. The US charged that Saddam was training terrorists at Salman Pak. The US military has found no evidence of such a training facility at Salman Pak, according to Seymour Hersh. There certainly were no chemical weapons there.

5. Then there was the canard about Iraqi intelligence offical al-Ani meeting with Muhammad Atta in Prague. CIA director George Tenet has flatly denied this report, and the FBI discounted it long ago.

6. Bin Laden/Iraq contacts in Sudan in the early 1990s, even if they did occur, led to no operational cooperation whatsoever.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Haykel on Zarqawi Letter

US Officials are denying the allegation by Sunni radicals in Iraq that Abu Mus`ab al-Zarqawi was killed during the US invasion of Iraq in April of 2003. They say they have proof that Zarqawi was active in Iraq later that spring. Meanwhile, wire services report that Zarqawi's mother died in Jordan. His sister denies the US charges against him. I was struck in this report that Zarqawi is said by the US to be a chemical and biological weapons specialist. This must be a reference to the ricin allegedly produced at the Ansar al-Islam base near Sulaymaniya. But Zarqawi ran away to fight in Afghanistan while just a teenager, and I fail to see how he possibly could have become a chemist or biologist. If he exists and is important, he can't be more than an imaginative and poorly educated thug. Even the letter attributed to him could not possibly have actually been composed by him, though he could have dictated the main points, because it was far to flowery.

For some definitions of Salafism, which comes up below, see Guilain Denoeux's article, especially under 'jihadi salafism.'

Speaking of which, I am very grateful to my colleague, Bernard Haykel, a Middle East expert at New York University, for permitting me to reprint here his analysis of the Zarqawi letter, posted at a discussion list on Thursday:

" . . . on Abu Mus`ab al-Zarqawi's alleged letter to UBL which
was found in Iraq and has now been translated on the CPA's website[:] I
first read it in Arabic on two Jihadi websites (Abd al-Mun`im Halima's
(aka Abu Basiir) and Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi's Minbar al-Tawhid
wa-l-Jihad). Both sites did not claim the letter as an authentic piece,
but rather stated explicitly that the US authorities were claiming it to
be Abu Mus`ab al-Zarqawi's. I will return to this last point in a moment.

I believe the letter to be either a forgery or one that was written by a
radical Sunni neophyte, perhaps even a sympathizer of al-Qaeda's, but not
someone associated directly with the movement. When I first read it, the
letter's language struck me as odd and not entirely in line with Jihadi
Salafi rhetoric and ideology. For example, the letter refers to the Kurds
in disparaging terms and this is inconsistent with Jihadi ideology for the
simple reason that the term Kurd (an ethnic or national designation) is
not an analytical category for the Jihadis--they simply don't use this
language. One must remember that a number of Kurds are Jihadis themselves
and certainly the majority of Kurds are Muslim.

A second point that baffled me was the negative talk about the Muslim
Brotherhood (MB) and what bad things they had done in Syria! What have
they done in Syria? In 1982 they rose up in Hama against what all Salafis consider
to be a heretical (Nusayri) regime in Damascus: surely a good thing from
al-Qaeda's perspective, though the MB were crushed and all the survivors
either fled into exile or were imprisoned. Since then some Brothers have
returned to Syria, having cut deals with the Damascus regime and abjuring
political activity, and this is perhaps what is being alluded to in
Zarqawi's letter. I don't think so, however. Many if not most of the
Brothers have refused to return to Syria and some, such as Abu Mus`ab
al-Suri (not the same as the abovementioned al-Zarqawi) who resides in
Yemen, threw his lot in with the Jihadis while still retaining his Muslim
Brotherhood identity.

The relationship between the Brotherhood and al-Qaeda is complex and
often very negative (al-Qaeda, for example, vilifies all Brothers who agree
to participate in the political processes of states ruled by the "Hypocrites" (i.e.,
lapsed Muslim rulers), but in the letter we get language that is not in keeping with
anything I've encountered before in Jihadi Salafi writings. Finally, the fact that the
Jihadi Salafis have not claimed the letter to be written by one of their
own, and the fact that today al-Qaeda has allegedly disassociated itself
from the `Ashura attacks (all the while still excoriating Shii beliefs),
lead me to think that someone else's hand is at work in "Zarqawi's
letter". The argument that the language in this letter is too difficult
to forge, is not a compelling since any well-educated graduate of any
Shari`a college could have written it, and there are thousands if not tens
of thousands of such people floating around these days. I know that both
Mike Doran and Juan Cole commented on this letter earlier, confirming it
as Jihadi-Salafi. While I have the utmost respect for their work and
analysis, I have to respectfully disagree with what they've said about
this letter."

Bernard Haykel
New York University


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Mosul Police Station, US Base Take Mortar Fire

Al-Hayat reported a large explosion in Baghdad on Wednesday, but no word of any casualties.

Reuters reports that guerrillas launched five mortar rounds at a police station and a mosque in the northern city of Mosul, wounding at least three persons.

AP also reported that the 4th Infantry Division base at Tikrit came under mortar fire Wednesday. On mortar round landed near the mess hall but proved to be a dud and did not go off. Two others exploded, but in unoccupied areas.

On Tuesday, a US soldier, Specialist Michael Woodliff, was killed by a guerrilla explosives attack on his humvee in Baghdad, AP reports.

Also on Tuesday, cars carrying senior Kurdish officials in the north were fired on as they were leaving Mosul. Senior PUK leader Jalal Jawhar was in one of the cars, but he was unhurt.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

The Aftermath

AP reports that Shiite and Sunni clerics jointly led a big procession from East Baghdad to Kazimiyah on Wednesday, attempting to emphasize communal harmony in the face of the Ashura' bombings. Since the perpetrators were almost certainly Sunni Arabs, there was some danger of anguished Shiites lashing out at Iraqi Sunnis. Shiite leaders, however, have blamed outsiders and have deflected some blame onto the US for not supplying better security. Some angry Shiite crowds chanted against the US and burned a facsimile of an American flag. Az-Zaman said that Iraqi police report no instances of reprisals or communal violence, saying that Iraqi cities are calm. US authorities revealed that they had evidence that the bombings were planned to coincide with attacks on leading Shiite clerics, but that this part of the plot was foiled (al-Hayat).

The Washington Post reports the worrisome development that the Shiite political parties have deployed their paramilitaries in force in Kazimiyah. There is a growing conviction among the party leaders that they can provide better security if allowed to than either the Coalition troops or newly-trained Iraqi police. The problem is that this attitude may spur the growth of these militias, who in the long term may pose threats to the safety of Iraqis themselves. (I saw this happen in Beirut).

Meanwhile, US military commander in Iraq John Abizaid told Congress that the attack was certainly masterminded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the "Arab-Afghan" leader of al-Tawhid. He said the modus operandi, and the sophistication of the multiple attacks (one was planned for Basra, as well, but was foiled) pointed to Zarqawi. He also said the US forces had found leaflets saying that the US had fired mortars into the Shiite processions, suggesting that the terrorists had hoped to blame the US for the violence itself, and not just for the lack of security that allowed it to happen.

My own perception is that Abizaid, an Arabist with an excellent reputation as a commander, has been much less prone to blaming the guerrilla attacks in Iraq on foreign forces than some other generals. If he is now blaming Zarqawi so confidently, I find that persuasive. He has a hell of a lot more credibility than whatever anonymous neocon hack in the CPA tried to implicate Iran (see below).

For a profile of Zarqawi see Walter Pincus's piece in the Washington Post. (Truth in advertising: I am quoted.)

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

CPA Official Launches False Allegations against Iran

In a desperate attempt to redirect anger away from the Coalition Provisional Authority, one of its officials told the newspaper az-Zaman that he believed Iranians were behind the attacks. This allegation strikes me as completely implausible, and, indeed, as almost certainly a lie put out by a CPA ally of neocon fraudster Michael Ledeen, who helped the Khomeini regime via Iran-contra in the 1980s but has more recently advocated overthrowing it.. Iranians were among the major victims of the explosions. AFP says that Iran has forbidden its citizens to go on pilgrimage to the Shiite shrines in Iraq until the security situation improves., and blamed the US for poor provision of security. The Iranian news service reports that 'the Iranian Foreign Ministry has launched investigations on the attacks and has made efforts to identify, through the Iraqi organizations, the agents behind the assaults.'
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Rooting for the Company

The Washington Post also has an interesting article by Dana Priest on why the 300 CIA case officers in Iraq haven't been able to prevent events like that on Tuesday. As someone who cares about the welfare of my Shiite and other Iraqi friends, I have to say I wish the CIA could in fact succeed in tracking down the perpetrators and in preventing further such attacks. In the post-9/11 world, the agency is on the front lines in the struggle against terrorism. It is a shame that it is taking the fall for the bad intelligence about Iraqi WMD, since it was much more cautious than the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans or Cheney's foreign affairs advisors, who between them purveyed the most rotten intel.

In my youth I was ambivalent about the CIA because of its unwise covert operations against Mosaddegh and Allende, and its interventions in places like Lebanon (where it helped provoke the 1958 civil war by backing the far rightwing Chamoun in elections). The Agency seemed to see Communists under every bed and to over-react to mere Third World nationalists (Mosaddegh and Iraq's Abdul Karim Qasim) as somehow Communist proxies. I fear I think it did an enormous amount of damage that way, harming several potential democracies. Imagine what the Middle East would be like now if Iran had continued along the relatively democratic path of the period 1941-1953, instead of veering off into royal dictatorship under the shah, which in turn made the US and the CIA hated in that country. The CIA's fostering of the Mujahidin and probably of the predecessors of al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the war against the Soviets was also extremely unwise in my view. I know there is a lot of dislike of the Agency on the American left for these reasons, and I understand.

But the fact is that with the rise of al-Qaeda and kindred organizations, we all need the CIA to protect us from them. No matter what caused al-Qaeda (and Brezhnev's Soviet adventurism is the main culprit), it is a deadly threat to American society. If Bin Laden and Zarqawi could destroy us, they would do it in a second; and these troglodytes are really fascists. The American left is as much in their sights as the rest of the US, and, despite the small size of al-Qaeda, because of its excellence in asymmetrical tactics, we on the left haven't faced such an enemy since Franco, Mussolini and Hitler. Al-Qaeda and even less radical fundamentalism are movements of the far right, and they are focused on taking over governments. They've tried in Algeria and Egypt and had succeeded in Afghanistan, and hitting the US was part of a long-term strategy for pushing it out of the region so they could take it over. It won't be the last such attack at least attempted against the US, which they paint as a purveyor of decadent liberal individualism. If Kerry is elected, I hope he will revamp the agency to emphasis human intelligence gathering, and reverse the Bush/Cheney policy of misusing the Department of Defense and the US military for intelligence tasks that the Agency is much better suited to. (And, of course, abolish the Office of Special Plans, which Doug Feith set up to purvey dubious stories to the American people).

So, I'm hoping our men and women in Baghdad get Zarqawi and his like ASAP. Good luck guys, and stay safe out there.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

US Allies: Iraq War Increased Terror Threat

Not only are Shiites in Iraq upset with poor US provision of security, but the publics in major US allies and neighbors are now afraid that the Iraq war as increased the terrorist threat in the world, according to an AP poll..

The report says, ' The AP polls were conducted by Ipsos, an international polling firm, in Britain, Canada, France, Italy, Germany, Mexico, Spain and the United States.

While a majority in each of the countries polled except the United States said the terrorism threat was greater now, fewer than one in 10 in any of the European countries said the terror threat had been decreased by the war.

In Canada and France, just over half felt it had been increased, whereas in Germany, three-fourths thought the Iraq war has made the terror problem worse.
Concern about terrorism was very high in Italy and Germany, where about seven in 10 said they were very worried or somewhat worried, and especially in Spain, 85 percent, where residents also have to contend with domestic terrorism by Basque separatists. The high levels of concern about terrorism are probably linked to the recent history of terror in those countries, one public opinion analyst said.'

The publics in these countries also do not like President Bush at all. Since much of what the US accomplishes in the world depends heavily on the cooperation of allies, this poll raises a severe question about whether Bush has become a liability to US foreign policy goals and global influence.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sectarian Strife in Iraq?

AP's Hamza Hendawi has a good piece today on the way in which the Ashura bombings "strain the Iraqi social fabric." He quotes me as saying that I don't think civil war is likely, but that urban turmoil could break out. My point is that in Lebanon, where I saw the civil war with my own eyes, you had militias that marched in formation and engaged in set piece battles (often over tourist hotels, atop which you could position mortars and command the surrounding territory). The US and the Coalition armed forces can stop such militia battles. Even just a few AC-130s could. But if you got rioting between Sunnis and Shiites in Baghdad, Basra and Kirkuk, those urban byways would be extremely difficult to police and that could be a major setback. The initial indications are that it is unlikely to happen, because all the Iraqi leaders are taking a very mature position, calling for national unity, and blaming outsiders. The problem is that there will be more attacks and sooner or later one may provoke rioting that spreads, at the level of the street, and becomes hard to control.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Al-Hakim: "Fix Date for Elections!"

az-Zaman: Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) has said that the date for elections in Iraq should now be fixed. He preached on the holy day of the 10th of Muharram, which commemorates the martyrdom of the Imam Husayn, grandson of the prophet. He said, that the Iraq people, who have expressed a desire for early elections, should not be ignored. He also urged that the US turn power over to an expanded Interim Governing Council on June 30. He said there should be a guarantee of general liberties for Iraqis. He argued that Iraq should not have a strong central government (most Shiite leaders have insisted on one.)

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sunnis Donate blood to Shiites

Az-Zaman: In the Sunni city of Fallujah, mosque officials with microphones urged citizens to donate blood to the victims of the bombing at Kazimiyah. In in the Sunni district of Azamiyah in Baghdad, where the bridge was blocked that leads over the river to the Shiite quarter of Kazimiyah, appeals were also made over microphones for the Sunni inhabitants to save their brethren in Kazimiyah by donating blood. Hundreds of youth heeded the call and volunteered. Drivers volunteered to transport more than a thousand such volunteers. (The Shiites of Kazimiyah and the Sunnis of Azamiyah have an old rivalry and their youth gangs have often fought in the streets. There was trouble between the two last fall when Saddam was captured).

Although these Sunnis showed unwonted enthusiasm for helping the Shiites, they placed the blame for what happened solidly on the Coalition. They fear that the US intends to partition Iraq.

If az-Zaman is right about the sentiments of national unity generated by the bombing, it may have been the biggest mistake yet of the guerrilla insurgents.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iranian VP Condemns al-Qaeda as force behind Ashura Bombings

America Political Enemy, Shiism Ideological Enemy, of al-Qaeda

Mohammad Ali Abtahi, Iranian Vice President for Parliamentary and Legal Affairs, at his Persian Weblog, Webnevesht, blames al-Qaeda for the bombings in Karbala and Kazimiyah, as Tarek al-Issawi and Hamza Hindawi note.

Abtahi writes: "Around noon today during the mourning rites, I heard my fax machine working. I looked, and saw that one of the ISNA reporters had sent a message: "Explosions in Karbala and Kazimain." Involuntarily, I exclaimed, "Ya Husain!" The news that I tracked down was even more horrifying than I could have believed.

A little while ago, I heard that the backward and petrified group, al-Qaeda . . . had reached the conclusion that "Islam" as they recognize it has two basic enemies. One is the political enemy, America, and the other is the ideological enemy, which is Shiism--and that the ideological enemy is the more dangerous.

The explosions today in Karbala and Kazimain, which led to the deaths of dozens of poor Iranians and non-Iranians in revenge against those mourning Husain--and which, in its bloodshed against pilgrims will remain the most painful historical event--is a direct result of this petrified religious way of thinking."

Abtahi is a partisan of reformist President Mohammad Khatami, who was rebuffed by clerical hardliners in the recent elections, who excluded most of his followers from running for office. Abtahi's remarks appear to me to suggest that he would like to see a rapprochement with the US on the grounds of a joint Shiite-US confrontation with al-Qaeda.

Given the Bush administration's deep hatred of the Iranian regime, Abtahi's implicit overture seems highly unlikely to be reciprocated, more especially given that the reformists are now in the political wilderness anyway. The Bush administration has accused Iran of "harboring" al-Qaeda and allowing its operatives to hit Saudi Arabia from Iranian soil. This unsourced accusation, which probably originates in the expatriate Iranian community, strikes me as completely implausible. Iran certainly has al-Qaeda captives, but it is not going to let them operate from Iranian soil; that would be dangerous to Iran.

The clerical regime in Iran is an odious theocratic dictatorship, which has worsened in the past two months. But the US is unwise to intervene heavy-handedly in Iran's lively and evolving political process. People are better off when they find their own way forward.

Meanwhile, the US may have to think hard about whether an alliance with the Shiites against al-Qaeda and its affiliates makes sense, not only for Iraq and Iran, but also for Afghanistan and Pakistan (dozens of Shiites were also killed Tuesday in the Pakistani city of Quetta, probably by Taliban or by Sipah-i Sahabah, both al-Qaeda allies).



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

The Bombings at Kazimiyah and Karbala

The day of Ashura' is the holiest in the calendar of Shiite Islam, commemorating the brutal martyrdom of the Imam Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. In many ways, the tradition of Shiite mourning of this "passion" is similar to that witnessed in Mel Gibson's recent film. For Shiites, Tuesday was analogous to Good Friday. And Karbala and Kazimiyah for them are like Rome and Jerusalem. One can only imagine the psychological impact of, God forbid, a huge truck bombing at the Vatican on Good Friday.

Veteran Middle East correspondent Nick Blanford has immediate reactions from Iraqis in Karbala and elsewhere. The blame is being put on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his al-Tawhid group. Forensic evidence from the 11 persons captured in connection with the coordinated attacks may well settle the identity of the group behind it fairly quickly. Given Zarqawi's plans for a Sunni-Shiite civil war in Iraq, he has to be a prime suspect. But it should be remembered that this strategy of destabilizing Iraq would be useful to all the guerrilla forces, including Baath remnants and Iraqi Sunni radicals, and that it is far too simplistic to blame all such violence in Iraq on outside forces and al-Qaeda (Zarqawi isn't exactly al-Qaeda anyway).

Will have more to say, but am spending the day talking to the press so don't have time to blog right now. Will be on NPR All Things Considered, the Lehrer Newshour and BBC World Report (radio) this evening.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

IGC Approves Interim Constitution

The Washington Post reports that the Interim Governing Council finally approved the Fundamental Law it has been working on, on Monday. It will be signed Wednesday after the holy day of Ashura' or the 10th of Muharram. The WP article is celebratory, and quotes a Chalabi aide as representing the "Shiites."

The Fundamental Law was apparently drafted from notes of Paul Bremer by Salim Chalabi and others (nephew of corrupt financier Ahmad Chalabi)--according to a Feb. 29 LA Times op-ed by Brendan O'Leary.. Its final form was negotiated by the IGC, but there was much dissension on the role of Islam, federalism, women's rights, etc. Why has this dissension been overcome? Not because there is a genuine political compromise. Because not reaching a deal on this temporary law would manifestly delay the return of sovereignty to the Iraqis on June 30. No one on the IGC wants the Coalition Provisional Authority to be in power a second longer than necessary. So why should they risk a delay by making an obstinate stand on a law that will anyway be revised a year from now?

What has happened is merely that the big fights have been postponed for the constitutional convention next year. At that point there will be no reason to compromise, no urgency, and there will be every reason to poison the well for ideologues who don't get their way.

Al-Hayat: The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, led by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, showed a willingness to compromise over whether Islam was "a" source of Iraqi law in the interim constitution or "the" source. Dr. Hamam Hamudi, the chief advisor to SCIRI, indicated to al-Hayat that the reason for its flexibility was that al-Hakim felt it was unwise to do anything that would delay the transfer of sovereignty from the Coalition Provisional Authority back to Iraqis--"especially since the law at issue is temporary, and can be changed after a year." He added that "the insistence of the Americans, and of the parties who are trying to please them, on making a confrontation with Islam the means of implementing democracy in a country that venerates Islam, has negative effects. Especially if it is desired for Iraq that it become a model for democracy in the region." He accused the US of wanting to impose a Turkish-style secularism on Iraq.

Others were not as conciliatory, even temporarily, as SCIRI, al-Hayat says. The cleric Hadi al-Mudarrisi gave a sermon on the occasion of the eighth day of Muharram (a holy mourning period for Shiites) at the shrine of Kazimiyah (a suburb of Baghdad) in which he called for "denying any opportunity to enemies that try to impose an unelected government that is contrary to Islamic law in Iraq." Ominously, he demanded "the defense of the truth even if it requires the shedding of blood." He told the crowd not to accept any political plan in which the masses do not participate. "The law is the leader, the leader is not the law," he said, in a reference to the despotism of the Baath regime.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Disturbances in Kirkuk

(AFP/ az-Zaman): Tension gripped the northern city of Kirkuk Monday after armed clashes betwen Kurds and Turkmen.

There have been a number of violent incidents lately. On Saturday, 92 Turkmen returned from Baghdad after having protested the marginalization of their ethnic group. There was celebratory fire on their arrival on Saturday night, which killed a Turkmen woman and wounded 10. Celebrators unfurled the Turkmen flag. The two major Kurdish parties asked the provincial governor to restore order in the city.

The same night (Saturday into Sunday) there were attacks on the police academy at the center of the city, and the airport (which is US base). On Sunday, some police were killed and others wounded when unknown assailants attacked an inspection checkpoint in Kirkuk. And, on Sunday two civilians were killed in a Katyusha rocket attack at the airport.

CNN had reported Saturday, "In a statement issued Saturday, the Turkmens said they have decided to go on a hunger strike to protest what they say are inequities in the process; most importantly, they are seeking official recognition as a national minority in the proposed interim constitution and feel they are being excluded. Dozens of Turkmen people, some wrapped in chains and duct tape, staged a protest in Baghdad. "The draft of the constitution shows superiority of some forces to achieve profits at the expense of the Turkmen people and the others of the Iraqi people," the statement said."
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

US Permits Iraq Oil pipeline to Iran

The Financial Times reports that the Interim Governing Council has concluded an agreement with Iran to build a pipeline across the Shatt al-Arab. The US civil administrator, Paul Bremer, is said to have approved the plan. The US has faced severe financial problems in Iraq, slowing the rebuilding process and permitting continued high unemployment. Stabilizing Iraq has to be the highest priority of the Bush administration before Nov. 2, and so obviously they won't stand in the way of any step that will bring in big money at this point. The pipeline from Kirkuk to Turkey is still closed because of repeated sabotage, but the south has been more secure in this regard.

What burns me is that the IGC is not an independent government, but is rather an appointed organ of the Bush administration. In allowing the Iran pipeline, Mr. Bremer is de facto contravening the US economic boycott on Iran. It is as part of that boycott that the Department of the Treasury is threatening to lock up American editors who edit scholarly submissions from Iran for publication in the US! It is all right for an organ of the Bush administration to sell Iran billions in petroleum, but God forbid a penniless editor should strike out a comma from an Iranian scholarly paper.

Hypocrites.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.