The New Improved Iraq

My essay about the so-called transfer of sovereignty in Iraq is now available online at In These Times. An excerpt:

The so-called transition to sovereignty for Iraq set for June 30 [actually held on June 28] has been trumpeted as a turning point by the Bush administration. It is hard to see, however, what exactly it changes. A symbolic act like a turnover of sovereignty cannot supply security, which is likely to deteriorate further as insurgents attempt to destabilize the new, weak government. The caretaker government, appointed by outsiders, does not represent the will of the Iraqi people. Some 138,000 U.S. troops remain in the country and the U.S. embassy in Baghdad will be the largest in the world, both of which bode ill for any exercise of genuine sovereignty by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.

The caretaker government faces five key issues, any one of which could be destabilizing. It must jumpstart the creation of an Iraqi army that could hope to restore security. It must find a way to hold free and fair elections by next January, a difficult trick to pull off given the daily toll of bombings and assassinations. It must get hospitals, water treatment plants and other essential services back to acceptable levels. It must keep the country’s various factions from fighting one another or from pulling away in a separatist drive. And it must negotiate between religious and secularist political forces.

The issue of separatism already has arisen. The U.N. resolution that created the new government neglected to mention the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) or temporary constitution passed by the Interim Governing Council under American auspices in February. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the spiritual leader of most of Iraq’s majority Shiite population, had warned U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan against endorsing that document. The TAL calls for a secular legal code and gives the minority Kurds a veto over the permanent constitution, to be hammered out by an elected parliament in spring of 2005. Sistani objects to the Kurds’ veto. The major Kurdish leaders, for their part, worry that the United Nations and the Bush administration might go back on the promises made to the Kurds of semi-autonomy and special minority rights. Some angrily threatened to secede from Iraq if that should happen. The creation of the caretaker government, which was supposed to help resolve problems of instability, instead has provoked a major crisis with one major Iraqi ethnic group.

Early last January a member of the U.S.-appointed Interim Governing Council (IGC) in Iraq, Mahmoud Osman, gave a revealing interview to Al-Hayat of London. He said that officials of the Bush administration in Iraq had been “extremely offended” when the IGC called for U.N. involvement in the transition to Iraqi sovereignty. The administration, he explained, did not want any international actor to participate in this process; rather it wanted to reap the benefits in order to increase President Bush’s political stock in the months leading up to the November election. He added: “The fundamental issue for Iraqis is the return of sovereignty. The Americans are in a hurry for it, as well, though for their own interests. The important thing for the Americans is to ensure the reelection of George Bush. The achievement of a specific accomplishment in Iraq, such as the transfer of power, increases, in the eyes of the Republican Party, the chances that Bush will be reelected.”

In the end, Sistani and other Iraqi politicians forced Bush to involve the United Nations and to seek a Security Council resolution. He also was forced to give away far more actual sovereignty to the caretaker government than he would have liked in order to get the U.N. resolution he had not originally wanted. In particular, the U.S. military must now consult with the Iraqi government before undertaking major military actions.

But is the turnover really much of an accomplishment? All that has happened is that the Bush administration worked with special U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi to appoint the four top officers of state and the cabinet ministers. This group of appointees will then be declared the sovereign government of Iraq.

Iraq already had the U.S.-appointed IGC, consisting of 25 Iraqi politicians, many of them longtime expatriates associated with significant Iraq parties or ethnic constituencies. They had in turn already appointed cabinet ministers. Why is a second appointed government better? Moreover, the overlap between the two is substantial. Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, the leader of the Iraqi National Accord, a group of ex-Baath officers and officials who had fallen out with Saddam, was an influential member of the IGC. Allawi’s group engaged in terrorist actions against the Saddam regime with backing from the Central Intelligence Agency. Consequently, his emergence as prime minister is something of an embarrassment to both countries. And it was Allawi’s Iraqi National Accord that also provided false intelligence to the Bush administration and the Blair government about the dangers of Saddam’s regime.

Read the rest.
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Rashid Khalidi's talk at UCLA, "Government Attacks on Area Specialists Called Disservice to U.S. Middle East Policy," is absolutely essential reading. Khalidi covers the group-think at the Pentagon, the exclusion and intimidation of State Department Middle East experts, the willful disregard by the Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Feith crew of Middle East expertise generally, and the recent attempt to muzzle academic Middle East specialists. Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor at Columbia University and the author of an important recent book,
Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East (Beacon Press, April 2004).
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3 US Marines Killed, 2 Injured; 2 Police Officers Killed in Continued Iraq Violence on Tuesday

The Associated Press reports:

Guerrillas killed three U.S. Marines and wounded two others with a roadside bomb in southeast Baghdad on Tuesday, damaging their Humvee.

Also in Baghdad, guerrillas attacked a US patrol in the upscale Sunni Azamiyah district. They appear not to have hurt any US soldiers, but they killed a civilian bystander, according to an anonymous source in the Iraqi ministry of the interior,

In Mahmudiyah, 20 miles south of Baghdad, guerrillas attacked a police station. They killed one police officer and one civilian, reciting verses from the Koran before firing small arms and rpgs at the police station. This detail suggests that the guerrillas are radical Salafi Sunnis. Salafis are Sunni Muslims dedicated to going back to the practice of the "pious ancestors" (al-salaf al-salih), sort of like Protestants in Christianity. They want to slough off medieval practices and commentaries. Most are peaceful, but some Salafis have turned radical and take up arms, just as there were violent Lutheran peasant rebellions in early modern Europe.

In Kirkuk, guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb as a senior Kurdish policeman was passing. It killed one of his guards and wounded him. The police in Kirkuk are dominated by the Kurds, even though the city is 2/3s non-Kurdish (Turkmen and Arabs make up one third each of the city's population.

In better news, guerrillas released three Turkish captives on Tuesday, saying that they had done so "for the sake of their Muslim brothers." This phraseology reflects the anger among Muslims, Iraqi or otherwise, at the guerrillas in Iraq who have killed Muslims with bombings and attacks. Apparently these radical Islamist fighters feared that killing the Turks, as they had Americans and a Korean, would dry up support for them among the Muslim population. The current Turkish government is the second most pro-Islamic Turkey has had since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, though the army and most Turkish institutions remain dedicated to the secularist principles of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. It appears to have succeeded in appealing to the guerrillas on the basis of Islamic fellow feeling.


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US Soldier Kept Hostage by Guerrillas is Killed

The killing of Spc. Keith Matthew Maupin by guerrillas in Iraq marks the potential beginning of a new tactic in the Iraq war. For the most part, it is hard for the guerrillas to wreak much real damage on US troops in the country, who are well armed and well protected. Ocassionally they manage to kill a US soldier with a roadside bomb or mortar or rpg fire. But these actions do not really wreak significant harm on the US war effort, though the accumulation of such deaths is beginning to alarm the US public.

Taking a soldier hostage, on the other hand, is much easier than killing large numbers of US troops. Since an individual hostage has a name and a face and family members, his story is much more affecting than is the report of a casualty statistic, even when a name is given. With the killing of Spc. Maupin, the guerrillas have initiated a new media campaign aimed at weakening the will of the US public to remain in Iraq. I fear guerrillas may increasingly deploy this tactic.

One thing I admire about John Kerry's approach to Iraq is that he never fails to keep in view the sacrifice of the American soldiers and the positive contributions they have made. The Bush administration has grossly mismanaged post-war Iraq, but that is not the fault of US troops, who are mostly dedicated young people thrust into an unfamiliar situation in which their lives are in danger. They did rid Iraq of a genocidal regime, and they have done a lot of behind the scenes community service work in Iraq. I hope Americans, as they increasingly turn against the Iraq war (with every reason in the world) will not repeat the error of some in the 1970s, who despised Vietnam vets along with the Vietnam war. One officer confessed to me last fall when things were obviously turning bad, "Dr. Cole, I'm in a business where if I'm ordered to shoot over there, I shoot over there." He clearly was unhappy with the policies pursued. But what could he do. The American public owes it to these troops to give them a civilian leadership who will do right by them.

[addendum: Some readers wrote to complain that the stories that Vietnam vets faced hostility from anti-war Americans was a black legend spread in the 1980s and did not reflect the reality. I'm not in a position at the moment to comment on this issue one way or another, but note the objection.]

Also captured, with his fate as yet unknown, is Corporal Wassef Ali Hassoun, a Lebanese-American Marine, His case underlines the service given to the United States by Arab Americans and Muslim Americans. In the wake of September 11, it is especially important that the US public constantly be reminded that Arab Americans are not aliens but a longstanding and essential thread in the great American tapestry. Lebanese began coming to the US in some numbers in the 1880s. That wave of immigration, which was greatly reduced from 1924, also brought the Italians and Eastern European Jews to this country. Although most Lebanese immigrants were Christian, it is estimated that about 10% were Muslim.

Many Arabs took up the peddling trade in the Midwest, trekking long hours to farm houses to supply basic supplies at a time before the Model T and the Sears and Roebuck catalogue made it easy to get them. When the automobile helped kill the peddling business, many Arab Americans flocked to Dearborn to work for Ford, so that ironically the very industry that ended their previous jobs provided them new ones. The "Syrians" were a key element all along in the Detroit automobile industry, and southeast Michigan came to have the largest concentration of Arabs outside the Arab world itself.

The red scare after WW I and the spread of anti-immigrant racism closed off most such immigration from 1924 until 1965, when the Civil Rights Movement impelled Congress to end the quota system installed in 1924 (which had set tiny quotas for Syria and Lebanon and large ones for Germany and Norway). A second wave of large-scale Arab immigration began from 1965 and continues until the present.

Comedian Danny Thomas and his daughter Marlo Thomas (who married Phil Donohue) are among the best-known Arab Americans. But they are legion. They include Dr. DeBakey, who did pioneering work on the artificial heart, Paula Abdul, and Ralph Nader (Arab newspapers most often refer to him as the Arab presidential candidate), among many others.

Cpl. Hassoun has risked his for the United States of America. He is not only a Marine, but an Arab-American Muslim. All Americans owe him and his family a debt of gratitude that cannot be repaid. The next time any American looks askance at someone for having an Arabic accent or appearing Arab, they should remember Cpl. Hassoun. I only hope he can escape his captors so that we can remember his further exploits.

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Bremer Flees Iraq Two Days Early

Paul Bremer suddenly left Iraq on Monday, having "transferred sovereignty" to the caretaker Iraqi government two days early.

It is hard to interpret this move as anything but a precipitous flight. It is just speculation on my part, but I suspect that the Americans must have developed intelligence that there might be a major strike on the Coalition Provisional Headquarters on Wednesday if a formal ceremony were held to mark a transfer of sovereignty. Since the US military is so weak in Iraq and appears to have poor intelligence on the guerrilla insurgency, the Bush administration could not take the chance that a major bombing or other attack would mar the ceremony.

The surprise move will throw off all the major news organizations, which were planning intensive coverage of the ceremonies originally planned for Wednesday.

This entire exercise is a publicity stunt and has almost no substance to it. Gwen Ifill said on US television on Sunday that she had talked to Condaleeza Rice, and that her hope was that when something went wrong in Iraq, the journalists would now grill Allawi about it rather than the Bush administration. (Or words to that effect). Ifill seems to me to have given away the whole Bush show. That's what this whole thing is about. It is Public Relations and manipulation of journalists. Let's see if they fall for it.

Allawi is not popular and was not elected by anyone in Iraq. The Kurds were sullen today. There were no public celebrations in Baghdad. When people in the Arab world are really happy, there is celebratory fire. They are willing to give Allawi a chance, but that is different from wholehearted support.

What has changed? The big change is that Allawi now controls the Iraqi government's $20 billion a year in income. About $10 bn. of that is oil revenues, and those may be hurt this year by extensive sabotage. To tell you the truth, I can't imagine where the other $10 bn. comes from. The government can't collect much in taxes. Some of it may be foreign aid, but not much of that has come in. The problem is that the Iraqi government probably needs $30 billion to run the government properly, and with only 2/3s of that or less, the government will be weak and somewhat ineffective.

Since Bremer was a congenital screw-up, just getting him and his CPA out of the country and out of control may be a good step forward. Allawi won't care about Polish style shock therapy for the economy. Allawi does not have any investment in keeping Iraq weak or preventing it from having a proper army. But how the Iraqi military, if brought back, can operate in a security environment where there are 160,000 foreign troops under US command is unclear.

So that some group of Iraqis now control the budget and can set key policy in some regards may be significant. But the caretaker government is hedged around by American power. Negroponte (the US ambassador to Baghdad who has just arrived in the country) will control $18 bn. in US AID to Iraq. Rumsfeld will go on controlling the US and coalition military. There isn't much space left for real Iraqi sovereignty in all that.

Another danger is that Allawi will overshoot and provide too much security. He is infatuated with reviving the Baath secret police or mukhabarat, and bringing back Saddam's domestic spies. Unlike the regular army, which had dirty and clean elements, all of the secret police are dirty, and if they are restored, civil liberties are a dead letter.

The guerrilla insurgency will continue, perhaps become more active. My wife Shahin, always a keen and canny observer, thinks the guerrillas will make their priority number one the assassination of Allawi.

See also the article by Michael Hill of the Baltimore Sun, where I and others are quoted.

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Fallujah

Nir Rosen's brave and essential reporting from Fallujah in the New Yorker is a must read. A taste:

' A young boy from Najaf wearing a pressed white shirt tucked neatly into bluejeans walked up to the lectern, and the microphone was lowered to accommodate him. The boy raised his right arm, pointing his index finger at the sky. “I came to praise the heroes of Falluja!” he shouted. His poem ended with calls to God—“Ya Allah! Ya allah!”—that he screamed out. Then he began to sob, and he was led away, wiping his tears. The men in the front row of plastic chairs embraced and kissed him, and he returned to the lectern and recited another poem. This time, he brandished a Kalashnikov that was as long as he was tall. '

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10 Killed in Iraq, including a US Soldier; One Marine Held Hostage

A US Marine was taken hostage in Iraq on June 21, and the group that kidnapped him is now threatening to kill Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun.

The fascist US pundits who keep intimating that Muslim-Americans or Arab Americans should be under suspicion after 9/11 should be doubly ashamed of themselves, given what Hassoun risked and what he is suffering for this country (he is Lebanese-American).

The Khaleej Times says, ' Meanwhile, at least 10 people - a US soldier, another American, two Iraqi children and six Iraqi National Guardsmen - were killed in separate attacks across Iraq. '

A US military casualty occurred when a C-130 transport plane came under fire and had to return to Baghdad airport. One soldier on board was killed, but the plane was largely unharmed.

Tarek Tablawi of AP reports that on Sunday, guerrillas launched a mortar attack on the party office of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in Mosul, killing a party member, and injuring nine others. Mosul also saw two drive-by shootings, in which a policeman was killed and a guard at an Iraqi army recruiting center.

Explosions were heard in Fallujah, possibly as a result of a mortar attack on US Marines.

In Baghdad, the Green Zone or American compound took mortar or rocket fire, but no casualties were sustained.

Guerrillas who captured three Turkish hostages threatened to kill them unless Turkey withdraws civlian contractors from Iraq. Turkish PM Erdogan refused. The Turkish hostage situation cast a pall over the NATO meeting in Istanbul, where the Iraq war was enormously unpopular and where Bush is deeply disliked. Some 40,000 Turks protested his visit over the weekend. See below for more on Bush in Istanbul.
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Fahrenheit 9/11

I saw Michael Moore's new film in Ann Arbor at the midnight show last Thursday, thinking I might say something about it over the weekend. But social commitments of a pleasant sort kept me away from the keyboard, and I don't know when I will get to posting extended comments.

The film is inspired polemic, and I enjoyed it (if that is the word--the second half was painful). It has some serious flaws of argumentation. I thought the best parts were where Moore just let the footage speak for itself.

It struck me during the second half how seldom one sees in mainstream US media any extended interviews with Iraqis who vehemently oppose the US occupation. Since these are probably by now a solid majority, according to polls, it is odd that we never hear from that point of view. There is an undertone of patriotism or even nationalism to national American news that is peculiar if one looks at the industrialized democracies in Europe, e.g.

The film has an affecting scene of a woman screaming that her innocent, civilian relatives had been killed, and calling down curses on the US (yikhrib buyuthum, may God demolish their houses). Given the thousands of Iraqis killed in the past 14 months, there must be a lot of persons who feel that way. Moore is the only one showing them to us, to my knowledge.

I thought the point that Bush spent a lot of time away from Washington in his first 8 months in office was well made, and dovetails with the revelations of former anti-terrorism czar Richard Clarke about Bush's unconcern with the terrorism threat. The way in which the Iraq war was a manipulated get-up job was also graphically and well portrayed. Likewise the cynical use of the "war on terror" to erode Americans' basic civil liberties is appropriately presented in canny and strident tones (James Madison would have been strident about this, too).

The interview with Michigan congressman John Conyers in which Conyers reveals that no one in Congress was allowed to read the Patriot Act before voting on it was breathtaking. I recently sat next to Conyers on a plane, and he explained to me that the final version of the bill, which had been very extensively changed, was delivered the night before the vote. He said it wasn't strange for a few minor changes to be made at such a late stage, but that it was his impression that virtually a new bill was dropped on the hapless Congress at the last moment. It is huge, and would have been impossible to read all the way through with attention under those circumstances.

The Patriot Act is so radical a departure from the American Civil Liberties tradition that if its most radical provisions are made permanent, as Bush desires, I think it would be legitimate to date from 2001 the Second American Republic. It is a much impoverished republic compared to the first, and ominously intertwined with Imperial themes. If Moore makes anyone angry about anything, I hope it is this.

I thought the bit connecting Bush to the Saudis was full of illogic. Wealthy people in the oil business are going to have relations with the Saudis, who at their best rates can produce 11 million of the 76 million barrels of oil pumped daily in the world. The Saudis can also get along with pumping 7 million barrels a day, so they are a pivotal swing producer and can affect the price deeply.

Another viewer asked me if it were true that the Saudis own 7% of the US economy, which was the impression the person brought away from the film. I'm not sure that is what Moore asserted, but it in any case cannot possibly be true. I think he said they had invested $700 billion in the US. Actually, total Saudi investments worldwide are about $700 bn., with about 60% in the US, or $420 bn. It is a nice chunk of change (and helps keep the US economy from collapsing from unwise US policies like running $500 bn. deficits--but note that one year of Bush deficits equals the whole value of all Saudi investment!). But even just the goods and services produced every year in the US amount to about $11 trillion. Moore seems to have started out by claiming that the Saudi investment equals 7% of the New York Stock Exchange. But NYSE investments amount to $15 trillion. My back of the envelope calculation is that Saudi investments are actually about 2.8 percent of that. Then Moore truncated that to "7% of the US economy." But the latter is not what he really meant to say. To get that, you'd have to know how much all existing property in the US is worth, and figure the proportion of it represented by $420 bn. The Saudis don't own more than a tiny proportion of the privately held wealth in the US. They are not even the major foreign investor in the US-- The British, Dutch, and Japanese top them.

Moreover, if it is true that the Saudis have so much invested in this country, then it makes no sense for wealthy Saudi entrepreneurs and governing figures to wish the US harm. Can you imagine the bath Saudi investments took here after 9/11? The Saudi royals and the Bin Ladens lounging about in places like Orlando, who were airlifted out lest they be massacred after the attacks, didn't know anything about the apocalyptic plots hatched in dusty Qandahar, and if they had they would have blown the whistle on them with the US so as to avoid losing everything they had.

The Saudi bashing in the Moore film makes no sense. It is true that some of the hijackers were Saudis, but that is only because Bin Laden hand-picked some Saudi muscle at the last minute to help the brains of the operation, who were Egyptians, Lebanese, Yemenis, etc. Bin Laden did that deliberately, in hopes of souring US/Saudi relations so that he could the better overthrow the Saudi government.

The implication one often hears from Democrats that the US should have invaded Saudi Arabia and Pakistan after the Afghan war rather than Iraq is just another kind of warmongering and illogical. There is no evidence that either the Saudi or the Pakistani government was complicit in 9/11.

The story Moore tells about the Turkmenistan gas pipeline project through Afghanistan and Pakistan also makes no sense. First, why would it be bad for the Turkmenistanis to be able to export their natural gas? What is wicked about all that? It is true that some forces wanted the pipeline so badly that they even were willing to deal with the Taliban, but this was before Bin Laden started serious operations against the US from Afghan soil, beginning in 1998 with the East Africa embassy bombings.

In any case, if Bush had been supporting the Taliban, why did he then overthrow them? If it was because they turned out not to be a Mussolini type of government that made the trains run on time, but rather to be supporters of international terrorism, then wasn't it logical for Bush to turn against them? The mid-90s temptation to support the Taliban, who seemed to be bringing order to Afghanistan (albeit the order of the mass grave) was bipartisan. Moore says Afghan president Karzai had been involved in the earlier pipeline plan, and now is president. I still cannot understand why the pipeline is evil. Afghanistans would collect $2 bn. a year on tolls, and the Turkmen would be lifted out of poverty, and Pakistan and India might have a new reason to cooperate rather than fighting. I personally wish it could be built immediately. It doesn't explain the US Afghan war (one thing cannot explain both the temptation to coddle the Taliban and the determination to get rid of them). The US only intervened to overthrow the Taliban reluctantly, and because it was the only way to get at al-Qaeda, which needed to be rooted out.

So, I think the second half the the film, on Bush's Iraq policy, has virtues. He turns out to have been prescient about how fictitious the reasons for the war were. But some of the innuendo about the Saudis and Afghans just seems an attempt to damn by association, and seem to me to be based on faulty logic and innacurate assertions.

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$2 Billion Unaccounted for In CPA Handling of Iraq Finances

The BBC reports that of nearly $20 billion in Iraqi money that the Coalition Provisional Authority had authority over during the past year, some $2 billion is unaccounted for.

The report says, ' Helen Collinson, from Christian Aid, said: "For the entire year that the CPA has been in power in Iraq it has been impossible to tell with any accuracy what the CPA has been doing with Iraq's money." '
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Iraq Haunts Bush in Istanbul

Nabil al-Tikriti, who teaches history part-time at Loyola University New Orleans, writes Sunday from Istanbul:

' Hello:

There are 15 million people in Istanbul who [are extremely hostile to] Bush. So that he could get a private tour of Topkapi and the rest of Istanbul during this NATO summit, they have closed the following for THREE DAYS: coast road from the airport to Dolmabahce, Galata Bridge, Taksim Square, Besiktas stadium valley, Sirkeci ferry terminals, and the first Bosphorus bridge. Last night we couldn't cross the coast road to view the sunrise from the Marmara. Today we can't get to the islands, because the ferry terminals are closed. Surreal. I'm trying to figure out how to leave my Sultanahmet hotel to get over to Beyoglu for the next couple of days. They recommended before the summit that everyone just leave town, and yesterday everyone I tried to contact was on their way to their summer holiday on the beach. It was like Thanksgiving Wednesday in the US.

Anyone who knows Istanbul knows that such a closure literally turns the city into an open-air prison. There are snipers posted on the next building to our hotel, constant military helicopters buzzing around, and naval craft cruising offshore. If only for sacrificing three days of their life for Bush's secure comfort, people here are furious. The trend in the past couple of years has been to hold such summits in remote locations. What brainchild decided to hold this summit smack in the center of one of the world's largest cities, with hostility running so high?

The bilateral meeting between Bush and Turkish PM Erdogan this morning was a thing of beauty. Bush said: "our disagreements in the past year are behind us, it's time to look to the future." That was diplomatic code for "I'm sorry I called you names last year when you stopped us from sending 40,000 troops across your territory to invade your neighbor. Help, for God's sake!" The Turkish reaction was a rather smug and quiet sort of:

"You'll not be taking me for granted anytime soon. Good luck in Iraq, my friend. There's still that matter of billions of USD public debt you promised to forgive. Put up or shut up. Oh, and don't let the door hit you on your way out."

I just spent three days at a conference entitled "A Future for Our Past," which was the opening salvo of a group called "Istanbul Initiative." The goal of the group is to advocate for protection of cultural patrimonies worldwide, starting with Iraq. All the heavy-hitters concerning the Iraq artifacts issue were present: Donny George, McGuire Gibson, and several others. There was a delegation of Iraqis . . . joined by lawyers active in fighting the artifacts dealers, representatives of the British Museum, Yale, Chicago, Dutch military, Turkish Foreign Ministry, and several Turkish scholars.

At the end of the conference, we were asked to submit suggestions for a common declaration. When I suggested that there should be a call for restitution to the Iraqi state by the UK and US governments, as well as criminal prosecution of the individuals responsible for bringing about the conditions leading to the wholesale destruction of Iraq's cultural patrimony (archaeological sites, Baghdad Museum, manuscript collections, provincial museums -- all burned and/or looted), there was a largely positive reaction (although as it was not complete consensus, it probably won't make the final cut).

The Turks and Iraqis, none of whom had ever met, hit it off quite well -- a relationship that should continue well into the future. When the declaration is finalized, I'll forward it . . .

Cheers,
Nabil '

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Clarke: Invasion of Iraq an Enormous Mistake

In a speech in Orlando, former White House counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke said, according to AP:

' The invasion of Iraq was an ''enormous mistake'' that is costing untold lives, strengthening al-Qaida and breeding a new generation of terrorists, former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke said Saturday.

''We did exactly what al-Qaida said we would do invade and occupy an oil-rich Arab country that wasn't threatening us in any way,'' Clarke said before giving the keynote address at the American Library Association's annual convention in Orlando. ''The hatred that has been engendered by this invasion will last for generations. . .'' '

''We won the Cold War by, yes, having good strong military forces but also by competing in the battle of ideas against the Communists,'' Clarke later told the librarians. ''We have to do that with the jihadists.''

He referred to the Abu Ghuraib prison scandal in this regard.


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Attacks Target Party Offices in Iraq

Al-Hayat: Guerrilla attacks on Saturday concentrated on party offices of parties allied with the United States. Gunmen attacked the HQ of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq in Baqubah, killing 4 persons. Others blew up the HQ of the Iraqi National Accord, the party of caretaker Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. In the northern Kurdish city of Irbil, center of the Kurdish Democratic Party led by Massoud Barzani, a car bomb exploded, killing one person and wounding 40 others, including the Kurdish minister of culture, Mahmoud Muhammad.

In the southern Shiite city of Hilla, a car bomb exploded in the center of the city, killing at least 32 and wounding 42, according to AFP.

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Should Cheney be Fined $275,000?

Vice President Dick Cheney shouted "go fuck yourself!" at inoffensive Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, at a photo opportunity on the Senate floor earlier this week. On Friday he told Fox Cable News, "I expressed myself rather forcefully, felt better after I had done it."

Now, it seems to me that the Senate floor is public space, paid for by the public. And in this regard, there is no difference between it and the public airwaves, which the public also owns.

We know what the Republicans in the Senate think about the use of obscenities on the airwaves. The Federal Communications Commission under the chairmanship of Michael Powell, son of the secretary of state, has waged a campaign of harassment and persecution against broadcasters who use colorful language on the airwaves, especially Howard Stern. Clear Channel dropped Stern and had to pay $1.75 million in fines for his and other infractions. The Republican-controlled Senate even attached a rider to a defense bill (!) raising the fine for a single infraction from $27,500 to $275,000. What I take away from all this is that the Republicans in the Senate are against using the word "fuck" in public spaces of discourse, owned by the public.

Personally, I think people who don't want to hear Howard Stern should change the channel. The one thing Reagan was right about is that there are areas where we should get the Federal government off our backs. Speaking as we please is one of them, and Jefferson and Madison thought so, too. If the Powell FCC is going to take public ownership of the airwaves so seriously, then it should restore them to us and take them away from the corporations to whom it is has given them away for practically nothing. They used at least to offer us something like real news in return for this gift, worth trillions, but now some of them take our airwaves and use them to feed us propaganda by persons dressed like news anchors but who are actually professional spinmeisters.

Howard Stern no doubt feels better when he gets some blue language off his chest, too. So I propose that Mr. Cheney be made to pay $275,000 for fouling the air of the Senate in the way that he did. Should he feel the need to feel good again, he should be aware that the second offense in the Senate bill costs $500,000.

And, I propose that the fine go to vocational training for the disadvantaged people that Cheney has made a career of stomping all over.

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US Kills 20 in Fallujah Bombing
Muqtada condemns Thursday's Terrorism

The US air force bombed Fallujah again on Friday, hitting a safehouse of the al-Tawhid and al-Jihad organization of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and killing 20 fighters. Some reports, apparently based on aerial surveillance, suggested that they just missed Zarqawi. I'm not sure, though, how you tell that from the top of someone's head, and remain skeptical about these kinds of claims. We on the outside don't know where they come from or how reliable they are, and it is more convenient for the CPA to claim it almost got Zarqawi than to admit that they tried and missed (i.e failed). The US resort to bombing suggests how weak it is in Fallujah, since it means it could not commit troops to an attack on the safehouse. There is now a plan to set up a security perimeter around Fallujah to curb the activities of the jihadis based there. But I had read several weeks ago that such a security perimeter had already been implemented. Has it lapsed?

The American news media often phrased this bombing as an attack on "al-Qaeda." But these al-Tawhid fighters never pledged loyalty to Bin Laden, and most probably never fought in Afghanistan. Zarqawi, who did, was never part of al-Qaeda and when he was in Germany he refused to share al-Tawhid resources with al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda anyway is not a top-down organization with a flow chart and a CEO. But I think it is downright misleading to call al-Tawhid by that name. Al-Tawhid is al-Tawhid. The Bush administration no doubt likes this shorthand because it reinforces the dubious point that the war in Iraq has something to do with the war on terror.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat: Paul Bremer, the US viceroy in Iraq until June 30, issued arrest warrants for three radical Sunni clerics in Fallujah on Friday. They include Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi, the leader of the "Holy Warriors Front" in the city, Sheikh Zahir al-Ubaidi, and Sheikh Umar Hadid. All three have been accused of leading the resistance to occupation in Fallujah. Al-Janabi and al-Ubaidi in particular had been accused recently of being implicated in the murder of 6 Shiite truck drivers from the al-Rubai'ah tribe near Fallujah, and desecrating their bodies. They have denied the charge, which caused substantial Sunni-Shiite tension.

The Friday prayers leaders in Fallujah condemned the American forces for "engaging in acts of enmity toward the population" of the city.

Hamza Hendawi of AP reports that preachers throughout Iraq have been giving anti-American sermons for the past few weeks. Here are some quotes from his important piece:

' "American soldiers are infidels," said Youssef Khodeir, a Sunni sheik and imam of Saad Bani Moaz mosque in Baqouba, scene of the heaviest fighting Thursday. "The blood that is being shed every day is because we are not closing our ranks. The source of all power comes from adhering to the Qur'an . . ."

[Speaking of America supposedly bringing freedom,]Mohammed Bashar, told worshipers in Mosul that what America really wanted was "the freedom to kill and arrest Iraqis . . ."

"Al-Zarqawi is a myth created by America," sheik Aous al-Khafaji told hundreds of worshipers in Sadr City, where U.S. troops and al-Sadr's al-Mahdi Army have clashed for 2½ months . . .

"We hope that after June 30 Iraqis will be united, loyal to their nation and not allow foreigners to interfere in their affairs," Sunni cleric Niema Hassan told a congregation at the Grand Mosque in Basra.

He also quotes a number of mosque preachers who condemned the killing of Iraqis by the bombings on Thursday (this is a critique of the foreign jihadis), and some who expressed hopes about the caretaker government of Iyad Allawi. (Recent polling in Iraq suggests that Iraqis are largely willing to give the caretaker government a chance, and want it to succeed in restoring security.)

Edward Cody of the Washington Post reports that Muqtada al-Sadr and his lieutenants joined in the condemnations. Muqtada ' ordered his followers to lay down their weapons and cooperate with Iraqi police in Sadr City to "deprive the terrorists and saboteurs of the chance to incite chaos and extreme lawlessness. ' The Mahdi Army distributed a pamphlet that said, ' We know the Mahdi Army is ready to cooperate actively and positively with honest elements from among the Iraqi police and other patriotic forces, to partake in safeguarding government buildings and facilities, such as hospitals, electricity plants, water, fuel and oil refineries, and any other site that might be a target for terrorist attacks."

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat: Muqtada's spokesman in East Baghdad, Aws al-Khafaji, affirmed that the Mahdi Army would not attack the US if the US did not attack it. In Najaf, followers of Muqtada prevented Friday prayers from being held for a second week in a row. The conflict has become a little bit bizarre and hard to follow. Earlier, the Sadrists had complained that the sermon was being given by Sadr al-Din al-Qubanji, local leader of their rival, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. But someone replaced al-Qubanji with Khalid al-Numani. A Sadr spokesman said that he talked to the son of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who insisted that Sistani still backed Qubanji for the job and had not appointed al-Numani. The Sadrists then demonstrated against al-Numani on the grounds that he had not been appointed by Sistani. (But they had also not let Sistani's appointee, al-Qubanji, lead the prayers last week!) As with many reports from Iraq that make no sense on the surfance, it is certain that some complex back story has been omitted. (Do the Sadrists suspect that al-Numani has been placed in Najaf as an agent of the Americans?)

The WP also gives a more detailed overview of the attack in Baqubah, northeast of Baghdad. It is still unclear who exactly launched the attack. The WP report says that the US troops counted it as a major victory that they killed a local leader of the Buhriz resistance, Husain Ali Sibti, last week. That is an indisputably Shiite name, which brought me up short. Diyala, where Baquba is located, is a mixed Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish region. If Sibti was leading the fighting in Buhriz, it was a local Shiite uprising of some sort. (But what sort? The Sadrists have largely stood down. The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq is strong in Baqubah,but it is allied for the moment with the Americans. It must be a local Shiite group with local grievances).

If in fact foreign jihadis allied with Zarqawi played a role in Thursday's attacks in Baqubah itself, it means that the action was unconnected to the Shiite uprising in Buhriz. The Sunni jihadis hate the guts of Shiites. Al-Sharq al-Awsat/AFP report that local Fallujans are annoyed by the attacks--mainly on the police--and blame it on foreign Arabs. An eyewitness, Abdul Salam, said "The armed persons who attacked my house and burned it, and who entered it, were Arab terrorists, one of them Egyptian and another Lebanese, and there were Arabs among them of other nationalities . . . The problem is that there are people from among the inhabitants of the city who help and support them and give them refuge in their homes. If it weren't for that, it would be difficult for them to continue with their work."
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Jack Ryan Withdraws from Race

Illinois Senate candidate Jack Ryan withdrew from the race on Friday. It had become increasingly clear to him that the allegations he pressured his then wife, actress Jeri Ryan, to attend sex clubs in the 1990s, would dominate the campaign if he tried to remain in it.

Former senator from Illinois, Republican Peter Fitzgerald, had encouraged Ryan to stay in the race. He said, apparently without a trace of embarrassment,

' "I think the public stoning of Jack Ryan is one of the most grotesque things I've seen in politics," the senator said Friday. He said the party's bigwigs pushed Ryan out: "It was like piranhas. They smelled blood in the water and they just devoured him." '

Can Fitzgerald say, "Bill Clinton's impeachment"?
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Jaafari: Iraqis Must be in Control
Emergency Laws a Possibility

Interim Vice President of Iraq, Ibrahim Jaafari, said Friday that emergency laws might be implemented if the security situation demanded it. Jaafari is a leader of the extremely powerful but under-reported al-Dawa Party, a covert Shiite organization organized by cells. AP's Tarek El-Tablawy is to be congratulated for getting an interview with him, because he could well emerge as prime minister in elections in January. Quotes:

' "Announcing emergency laws or martial law depends on the nature of the situation. In normal situations, there is clearly no need for that . . . But in cases of excess challenges, emergency laws have their place,'' he said, adding that any such laws would fall within a ''democratic framework that respects the rights of Iraqis.'' . . . Al-Jaafari expressed optimism that cooperation with multinational forces following the handover could mitigate the need for emergency laws. ''What we need is support for the security operations,'' he said. But ''under sovereignty, the relevant Iraqi authorities are the ones who would consider such steps.'' . . . Hardline Shiites, who had initially welcomed the toppling of Saddam's government, are increasingly concerned that the new government will be little more than a lackey of the West . . . Al-Jaafari said the United States, and other countries who continue to maintain a military presence following the handover, must ''respect'' Iraq's sovereignty and limit themselves to support and advisory roles that avoid giving the impression of a reversion to the pre-handover occupational stage. ''Security is a paramount concern,'' he said. ''But there must be a balance between achieving sovereignty, on the one hand, and (being aided) by non-Iraqi forces, to back up the security operation, on the other. . . There must be a clear understanding of this by any force that wants to join the Iraqi security forces (in aiding the country). We ask them to respect our sovereignty,'' al-Jaafari said. '

It worries me that Jaafari is talking about imposition of emergency laws (i.e. something like martial law, but the US has high-handedly told the Iraqi government it can't use that terminology.) The al-Da`wa, like most US allies in Iraq aside from the Kurds, does not actually have a history of commitment to democracy. Note also that he is underlining that there must be a perceived Iraqi control over the security situation-- i.e., the US military can't unilaterally go about the country staging operations without Allawi's permission. I predict that there are going to be big clashes between the caretaker Iraqi government and CENTCOM over these issues in coming months.

Radio Sawa in Iraq is reporting that interim Minister of Defense, Hazem al-Shaalan, has drawn up an emergency plan to deal with the "disturbances" (i.e. bombings and guerrilla attacks) in Baghdad. He is looking into the possiblity of imposing a state of emergency there and in other parts of Iraq. (N.B.: governments most often implement extra security in the capital, because government officials are located there). He said that a state of emergency would be declared in any area where there was a sufficient security threat. He emphasized that the authorities had not taken any final decision, and that the state of emergency might cover a limited territory or small stretches of territory. He made the remarks at a joint press conference with Interior Minister Fallah al-Naqib. He said that the measures now being studied enter into the framework of Iraqi law and that any steps taken will involve coordination between the ministries of Justice, Interior and Defense.

I'd say the ongoing guerrilla insurgency in Iraq has made all those nice rights announced in the Transitional Administrative Law late last winter a dead letter. Allawi and his whole crew seem to envisage the caretaker government declaring an emergency, imposing curfews, curbing individual rights of movement, and basically using authoritarian means in hopes of addressing the insurgency. The worst case scenario is that the impose press censorship and deprive people of all kinds of new-found rights, but still fail to stop the ongoing violence.

Hannah Allam on government factions in post-June 30 Iraq and the difficulty the caretaker government of Iyad Allawi will have in dealing with them. Allam covers Sistani (who will play along with Allawi as long as there is clear movement toward elections), Muqtada al-Sadr (who remains a radical wild card), and the Kurds, who want Kirkuk and its oil but face vehement objections from the 2/3s of the city that is Turkmen and Arab.

For a good overview of the Iraqi Shiites, see Janine di Giovanni's "Reaching for Power" in the National Geographic.

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107 Killed, Including 3 US Soldiers:
321 Hurt in 6 Iraqi Cities

Edmund Sanders of the LA Times and AP report that within a six-hour period, guerrillas launched bombings, ambushes and small arms fire in six cities in the Sunni heartland. Three US soldiers were killed, along with 104 others, and 321 were wounded. Those hurt were mostly bystanders at bombings in the northern city of Mosul.

Al-Hayat says Iraqis are calling it "Black Thursday."

Although these attacks have been viewed as "coordinated," I am not sure they really were, or at least that all of them were. There has been serious fighting around the northeastern city of Baquba for the past week, so the violence there has been ongoing and is not the result of a region-wide campaign. Attacks took place, as well, in Mosul, Fallujah, Ramadi, Mahaweel and Baghdad. Again, the fighting in Fallujah has a local history. The al-Tawhid organization of Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi took responsibility for all of them on its web site, but this is grandstanding. Former Saddam Fedayeen seem likely to be the actual responsible party in Ramadi, e.g., as interim PM Iyad Allawi noted. He blamed Zarqawi for the huge carbombs in Mosul. Many of Thursday's attacks were aimed at police stations. Presumably this disruption of policing was aimed at undermining the caretaker government due to take power on June 30.

The violence first broke out in Baquba early Thursday morning, with an ambush on a US patrol. Two soldiers were killed and seven wounded. Guerrillas then attacked the city's municipal building, a police station and Iraqi police. They killed 20 or so Iraqi policeman. Al-Hayat says the US called in airstrikes on the guerrillas. Wire services reported eyewitnesses saying that the guerillas' headbands were inscribed with the words, "Battalions of Monotheism and Holy War." If this were true, it would suggest that Islamists are leading the Baquba insurrection, but Allawi seems to discount it. The group gave out pamphlets saying, "The flesh of those working with the Americans is more delicious than American flesh itself," one read. Guerrillas in Baquba burned down the home of the police chief, who had been attempting to organize a response to their attacks.

The fighting in Fallujah was a breakdown in the truce with the Marines. The mosques of Fallujah called for calm, and a semblance of order returned. The guerrillas in Fallujah are a mix of ex-Baathists and Islamists. From several press accounts, it appears that Islamists now control the city and it is being run after the manner of the Taliban in 1990s Afghanistan.

Police in Mosul announced a curfew in the wake of the horrible car bombing there.

Sanders reported that many Iraqis, fearful of violence, have fled to Jordan or Syria for the time being. US military in Iraq are apparently being kept from going out much until after the so-called transfer of sovereignty on June 30.

It is truly amazing that Iraqis are now fleeing their country again. That so many had been chased out, and that so many Iraqis had been killed under the Saddam regime, were among the justifications for the war. But we seem to be back to the beginning. These attacks are part of a long-term on-going guerrilla insurgency. They may want to make a statement, what with a new prime minister coming in, that the attempt to cause the pro-American government in Iraq ot collapse will not cease with the "transfer" of "sovereignty."


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Iraq

Allawi Threatened; Attacks at Ramadi
Sadr Refuses to Attend National Congress

Guerrillas targeted police stations all around Iraq on Wednesday and early Thursday, killing and wounding tens of Iraqis. Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi threatened to assassinate caretaker Iraqi prime minister Iyad Allawi, calling him an "American agent."

Radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr announced Wednesday that he would not agree to serve on a preparatory committee that will call a national congress of 1000 delegates in late July. Sadr spokesman Ahmad Shaibani said that Muqtada had studied the invitation for 3 days, but had found huge problems with it. He added (al-Hayat) "There are enormous movements such as the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Al-Da`wa Party and the Sadrists, and each of them has only been given one seat [on the preparatory committee]. Then there are ordinary people who only represent themselves, who also have a seat . . . For this reason, we rejected the invitation."

Meanwhile, US troops began pulling out of the holy Shiite shrine city of Karbala earlier this week. Likely the US military knows very well that any Iraqi government will ask it to please leave Karbala, so it is beating them to the punch.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Religion and Ethics

7 of 9 and the Paris Orgy

Science fiction is in the real-world news big time these days. The actress Jeri Ryan, former wife (1990-1998) of currently embattled Republican senate candidate Jack Ryan of Illinois, played the Borg babe 7 of 9 in Star Trek Voyager. For the uninitiated, the plot of Star Trek Voyager is that Captain Kathryn Janeway's space vessel, Voyager, is accidentally thrown to the wrong side of the galaxy, and the crew spends seven years trying to get back to earth (Star Trek is based on the premise that somehow we will find a real-time way around Einstein's finding that things with mass cannot go faster than the speed of light; this premise is unlikely). Among the species the Federation troops battle out there is the Borg, who are cyborgs or hybrids of human and machine. They have a collective mind and lack individuality, and are dedicated to incorporating forcibly all individuals they encounter from other species into their collective. This incorporation appears to be painful and unpleasant, and to involve high-powered buzz saws. When people come out of it they are robotic, lack individuality, and have chrome various places on their bodies.

The Star Trek Voyager creative team hit on the idea of casting Jeri Ryan as a former Borg who has somewhat reverted to being human (she had been born Annika Hansen; the Borg killed her parents). She is therefore the ultimate ice princess, though in hoary science fiction tradition (the genre after all appeals disproportionately to adolescent males), she was made to wear extemely revealing spandex. Viacom (owner of UPN and Paramount Pictures), Jack Ryan, everyone wanted her in leather or spandex or something that left little to the imagination.

Incredibly, Seven of Nine could help throw the Senate to the Democrats. Jeri Ryan was married to multi-millionnaire investment banker turned teacher Jack Ryan, but filed for divorce four years ago. In her filing, she alleged

On three trips, one to New Orleans, one to New York, and one to Paris, Respondent [Jack Ryan] insisted that I go to sex clubs with him. They were long weekends, supposed "romantic" getaways. ... The clubs in New York and Paris were explicit sex clubs. Respondent had done research. Respondent took me to two clubs in New York during the day. One club I refused to go in. It had mattresses in cubicles. The other club he insisted I go to. ... It was a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling. Respondent wanted me to have sex with him there, with another couple watching. I refused. Respondent asked me to perform a sexual activity upon him, and he specifically asked other people to watch. I was very upset. We left the club, and Respondent apologized, said that I was right and that he would never insist I go to a club again. He promised it was out of his system. Then during a trip to Paris, he took me to a sex club in Paris, without telling me where we were going. I told him I thought it was out of his system. I told him he had promised me we would never go. People were having sex everywhere. I cried, I was physically ill. Respondent became very upset with me, and said it was not a "turn on" for me to cry.

The unsealing of this filing, which Ryan fought, has created a huge political scandal in Illinois and has given a big boost to Ryan's Democratic rival, Barack Obama. Most Republicans, who have increasingly tied their political fortunes to an alliance with the evangelical Christians, are defending Ryan, usually by implying that Jeri's charges are untrue and are part of the junk that comes out in any divorce proceeding. Ryan admits, however, to having taken her to the Paris club. Some Republicans have said snippy things like that it was she who committed adultery, not he. The Phyllis Schlaflys should give up this implicit attack on Jeri's credibility. Jeri is popular with the public, more of whom probably know her from a subsequent turn on David Kelly's series about teaching in an urban high school, "Boston Public," than through the niche Star Trek franchise. Ironically, Kelly may have modeled Jeri's BP character, a lawyer who gives up practicing in order to teach, on Jack Ryan, who left Goldman Sachs (having gotten rich when the firm went public in the late 1990s), to teach school.

Obama has taken the high road, and is refusing to attack Jack Ryan on the sex clubs issue. Many Democrats, still boiling mad over what the hypocritical Republicans did to Bill Clinton, seem intent on making an object lesson of him.

Another irony is that Ryan pulled the stunt early in the campaign of having a cameraman follow Obama around everywhere, documenting all his moves. Obama could not even speak to his wife on his cellphone in privacy. Ryan tried to create what French philosopher Michel Foucault called a "panopticon," as a way of intimidating his opponent. This move was despicable, an invasion of privacy, and a form of stalking, and should be illegal. (I think it would be in California, which has proper privacy laws). Now Jack Ryan is going to be the one followed around by cameras, into whose private life strangers are going to poke relentlessly. In that sense, the whole thing serves him right.

But I think Obama is making the right choice in letting the tabloids and the schlock television shows run with this story and keeping it out of his own campaign, which is about issues. For instance, Obama wants to give more tax breaks to companies that keep jobs in Illinois.

The lesson for the Republicans of all this is that the wages of Puritanism are hypocrisy. Henry Hyde, Newt Gingrich, and many other Republicans who tried to nail Clinton had also tried to nail women not their spouses and were no better than Clinton morally. In fact, no one is better morally than anyone else as a matter of ontology or being. Some deeds are better than others, and some people achieve better deeds more often than others. Some people are capable of higher ethical standards than others. But human beings are not in the nature of the case morally perfect beings. Since that is so, it is crazy for the American public to want its politicians to be saints (they aren't), and the desire merely produces hypocrisy, which in turn corrodes ideals and the moral order.

I therefore agree with Jack Ryan that the visits to those clubs should not in themselves disqualify him from public office. Why should we care where he takes his wife? Note that business travelers who stay in nice hotels are known to rent enormous amounts of porn. The travelers, the hotels, and the cable companies involved are all heavily Republican. What is the difference between watching it on celluloid and watching it at a club in Paris? Isn't this the same public that yawned at Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut and complained it was only shocking to a 1950s sensibility? Are we going to get to the point where every guy who has ever been to a strip club is disqualified from public service? Are we doomed to have the French and other Europeans laugh at us hysterically yet again?

Journalists keep asking me if the US can prevent Iraq from becoming a "theocracy." Why are the Americans so worried about Iraqis insisting on strict religious standards in their politics, if in fact that is the public platform of the dominant Republican Party in the United States? I think politicians should be permitted wide lattitude in their private lives, as long as they are good at their jobs-- i.e. use their positions to empower the people, to create jobs and wealth, and improve their states or districts. Jack Kennedy did lots of things that make a married couple's visits to some clubs rather tame in comparison. No one I know holds it against him.

The troubling issue here seems to be that Jeri alleges that Jack tricked her into going to the clubs, so this was a compulsion he had that she did not share. (Star Trek fans will not forgive him for this, especially for making her weep. Everyone remembers how brittle 7 of 9 was about sex and romance, what with being a former automaton and all. Starfleet Ensign Harry Kim tried to romance her, and found he had to go very slow.). If Jack Ryan would trick her that way, he might trick the public. So if what she alleged is true (and the Borg are incapable of subterfuge, it should be remembered), that would be the key issue. On the other hand, this all happened some years ago; he clearly had some sort of sex addiction at the time, which he may have kicked by now, and addictions compel people to do things they would not otherwise do. People change.

The one counter-indication I know of is the dirty trick Jack Ryan pulled of having Obama followed around by cameramen. That sounds coercive and manipulative, and falls within his earlier pattern of enjoying forcing others to exhibit themselves (the postmodernists might call it sado-alter-exhibitionism). In essence, he treated Obama just the way he treated Jeri. That is not a good sign.

Bottom line, the question for the good people of Illinois should not be whether Ryan is kinkier than Obama, but a) whether Ryan still uses people instrumentally to get his rocks off and b) whether Ryan could accomplish something for their state that Obama cannot. Even before the club scandal broke, the increasingly Democratic-leaning Illinois voters had seemed to discount Ryan, who after all doesn't exactly have a thick portfolio to be senator. The club scandal probably finishes off his candidacy (perhaps for the wrong reasons), but he was unlikely to have won anyway.

If Bush gets reelected but does not have the Senate, the Democratic Senators will finally be in a position to establish some investigatory commissions into Bush administration actions of questionable probity. If that happens, the country will have Jeri Ryan, ex-cyborg, to thank for it.


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2 US Troops Killed; Airstrike on Fallujah;
Korean Hostage Killed

The Associated Press reports that guerrillas attacked a US military convoy near Balad north of Baghdad, killing two US troops and wounding another.

After the body of a Korean hostage was found, the US air force launched yet another air attack, allegedly on a safe house for the al-Tawhid group of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. AP reports, ' Fallujah residents said the strike hit a parking lot. Three people were killed and nine wounded, said Dr. Loai Ali Zeidan at Fallujah Hospital. ' An airstrike on Saturday killed 22, including some children and a woman, according to local residents. The US military maintained that the dead were radical Islamists and that the house went on exploding for a while because of the explosives stored there.

Guerrillas holding a Korean hostage killed him when the Korean government declined to withdraw its forces from Iraq (it is planning to send 3,000 more, dedicated to reconstruction and medical tasks, not to peace enforcement).

I don't think a lot of press attention should be given to the capture and killing of a single hostage, since the whole point of the captors is to generate such attention. I think the big stories on Tuesday were the killing of 2 more US troops near Balad and the airstrike on Fallujah. The beheading creates a lurid interest, but it doesn't matter to a dead person how he was killed. And, no, beheading has nothing special to do with Islam, it is just grisly and a good tool for terrorists.

The South Korean government is unlikely to back off its commitments because of this one murder. However, the killings of hostages have caused large numbers of civilian contractors to flee Iraq, according to al-Jazeerah. And, a group of Korean parliamentarians condemned their government for throwing in with what they saw as Bush's unprovoked war in Iraq. The Washington Post contrasts the lively and divisive debate over Iraq in South Korea with the way in which Italians generally closed ranks over killings of their troops and of a hostage in Iraq.

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British Sailors Held by Iran

The Scotsman reports "Foreign Office fury" at Iran's capture of 8 British sailors when they strayed over to the Iranian side of the Shatt al-Arab. The Shatt is a mile-wide body of water created by the union of the Tigris and Euphrates, which then flows into the Persian Gulf. The border between Iran and Iraq lies precisely in the middle of the Shatt al-Arab, which has caused trouble between the two countries for a long time. Control of the Shatt was one of the motives for Saddam Hussein's 8-year war against Iran in the 1980s.

The capture of the Western sailors and the issuing of a videotape of them blindfolded hearken back to the hostage crisis of 1979-1981, when Iranian activists took US embassy personnel hostage.

It is possible that the British did stray a bit over onto the Iranian side of the Shatt. But it is likely that the hardliners in Tehran have engaged in these theatrics for domestic political purposes. The committed Shiites in Iran had been absolutely infuriated by the US troops' desecration of the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala in April and May, which provoked demonstrations in Tehran against the British Embassy. The problem is that the Iranian regime did nothing practical about this outrage to Shiite sensibilities, and did not want to tangle with the US army. Taking these British sailors hostage for a few days is a symbolic act of retribution by Khamenei's government that shores up his support from the Iranian hard right. It seems likely that Iran will release them before too long.

The incident may also be intended to punish the UK for pressing Iran on the issue of nuclear weapons development, most recently in concert with the European Union.

It seems to me very likely that Iran will get a nuclear weapon. Any ruling elite in the global south with bad relations with the US can look at the difference between how the Bush administration dealt with Saddam and how it has dealt with North Korea. The difference seems mainly to be that North Korea already had a couple of nukes, whereas Iraq was not anywhere close. So Khamenei would look at that and decide that his government needs a couple of nukes to avoid being overthrown by the US, especially since Bush telegraphed his intention to do just that. I don't see how it could be stopped militarily; the US is overstretched and in no position to attack and occupy Iran.

This is the point that Senator Edward M. Kennedy made on Tuesday at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

But I would emphasize the ways in which Bush's aggressiveness have probably actually ramped up any Iranian nuclear weapons program, out of which the Iranians might have been argued under different circumstances.

Of course, when one's neighbors, such as Israel, Russia, Pakistan, India and (de facto) the United States all have nukes, that is a pretty powerful incentive to get them, in any case.

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US Has Lost War for Hearts and Minds in Iraq

Guy Dinmore and Alex Barker of the Financial Times report that some military analysts believe that the US has lost the wider war for hearts and minds in Iraq, and that the complex Sunni Muslim insurgency is defeating efforts by the relatively small US military force in Iraq to defeat it. The authors refer specifically to Ahmed Hashim of the Naval War College, Rhode Island, who has advised the US military on counter-insurgency. The authors say that Hashem

' described an "Islamo-nationalist fusion", a binding together of minority Sunnis now out of power and fearing their identity to be under threat. Their infrastructure is the mosques. Tribal elements play a role, as well as Islamist extremists from outside Iraq. Insurgents are growing more proficient and their tactics and techniques more lethal. They lack military resources but they have one key element that the US does not: time. '

Dinmore and Barker add:

Andrew Krepinevich, a veteran military analyst and formerly of the Pentagon, says that the insurgency, being primarily urban, has a "lower probability of success" than rural campaigns, as in China, Vietnam and Laos. But their focus will be to defeat the will of the US, he told the FT. '

Krepinevich is making the wrong analogy. From the point of view of social history, contemporary Iraq is not like China, Vietnam and Laos. It is like Iran in the 1970s. An urban insurgency/ revolution can in fact win, and win quite decisively, as the urban crowds won out over the shah. The shah tried everything to put down the urban crowds. He had them spied on. He had them shot at. Nothing worked. The urban crowds just got bigger and bigger.

The guerrillas in Iraq are hoping to provoke big, frequent demonstrations by the urban crowd. If elections are not held in January, or if they are widely felt to be unfair or stage-managed-- and if US troops overstay their welcome, we could well see the big crowds start coming out. The big threat for the US is if dissatisfaction with the situation and with the US presence becomes generalized in both the Shiite and the Sunni communities. If Grand Ayatollah Sistani and Sunni cleric Hareth al-Dhari both call for the crowds to come out, you could have hundreds of thousands in the streets.

Big, frequent urban demonstrations, in Mosul, Baghdad, Najaf, Basra, etc., would be a trump card. The US and the UK would just have to leave. You can't take the crowds out and shoot them. If you do shoot at the demonstrators, you just grow the crowds the next time. The shah made this mistake with Black Friday (Sept. 8, 1978), when his troops fired into the crowd. It just infuriated everyone.

This worst case scenario will very possibly come to pass if 1) the US troops overstay their welcome and continue to act heavy-handedly (a repeat of April's twin sieges of Fallujah and Najaf would be fatal), if 2) the January elections are postponed or perceived as deeply flawed, and if 3) both Sunni and Shiite leaders beyond the small circle of the guerrillas call for massive demonstrations.

I'd give 50/50 odds of this kind of urban crowd revolution happening in Iraq sometime in the next two years. It would be a huge disaster if the US were tossed out of Iraq by such a phenomenon. Leaving voluntarily and in a phased manner would be far more preferable.

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Neocons can't Spell

A reader asked me to comment on the controversy over whether an Iraqi intelligence agent was detailed to al-Qaeda in Kuala Lumpur to be the guy that picked people up at the airport. It was covered by the Washington Post after the allegation was made by 9/11 Commission member John Lehman, former secretary of the Navy.

The al-Qaeda employee in Malaysia is named Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi.

The Iraqi intelligence agent is named Lt. Col. Hikmat Shakir Ahmad.

Political Scientist Christopher Carney, who was brought in to look at documents by Doug Feith's Office of Special Plans so as to second-guess trained analysts at the CIA who actually know Arabic, first made the mistake of identifying the two. Carney is an Americanist at Penn State and had no business butting in.

The family name (here, nisba) of the al-Qaeda guy in Malaysia is Azzawi.

The family name of the guy in Iraqi intelligence is Ahmad.

Do you notice how they are not the same?

The personal or first name of the al-Qaeda guy is Ahmad.

The personal or first name of the Iraqi intelligence agent is Hikmat.

Do you notice how it is not the same?

So, Ahmad Azzawi is not Hikmat Ahmad. See how easy that is?

Mr. Ahmad Azzawi has a couple of middle names, to wit, Hikmat Shakir. Having a couple of middle names is common in the Arab world.

Lt. Col. Hikmat Ahmad just has one middle name, Shakir. This is the only place at which there is any overlap between them at all. They share a middle name. And, o.k., one of Azzawi's middle names is the same as Lt. Col. Ahmad's first name.

This would be like having someone named Mark Walter Paul Johnson who is a chauffeur for Holiday Inn.

And then you have a CIA agent named Walter Paul Mark.

Obviously, it is the same guy, right? Natch.

Azzawi is a nisbah, a form of last name having to do with a place or occupation or tribe. I'm not sure, but an `azzaw might be someone who specialized in consoling family members over the death of a loved one. It is being used as a family name.

Lt. Col. Ahmad's last name could also be used as a first name. It may well be his father's first name. Some Arab families use a system like that in Scandinavia. Thus, the father is Thor Odinsson and the son is Loki Thorsson. There isn't a stable family name in that case. In the old style, he might be Hikmat ibn Ahmad or the son of Ahmad, but a lot of people drop the ibn nowadays. Most families either have a nisba type family name or they don't. If a guy's last name is Azzawi, that would certainly be in the government records. Lt. Col. Ahmad did not have Azzawi as a family name.

The first name or personal name is called "ism". In this case, the first name of the al-Qaeda guy is Ahmad. This means "the most praised" and is an epithet of the Prophet Muhammad.

The ism or personal name of the intelligence officer is Hikmat. Hikmah in Arabic means "wisdom." Hikmat with a long 't' at the end shows Ottoman influence, which in turn suggests an upper class Sunni background.

There isn't actually any similarity at all between the names of chauffeur Mr. Ahmad Azzawi and intelligence official Lt. Col. Hikmat Ahmad, from an Arab point of view. (For a lot of purposes you would drop the middle names).

Mr. Carney, Mr. Lehman, journalist Stephen Hayes, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, and all the other persons who gave a moment's thought to the idea that these two are the same person, based on these names, have wasted precious moments of their lives and have helped kill over 800 US servicemen, over an elementary error deriving from complete ignorance of Arabic and Arab culture.

Isn't it a shame that we have these key people doing important things who are either incompetent ignoramuses or dumb as posts?

Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard was on Jon Stewart's Daily Show Monday, by the way, peddling his book, which is full of similar nonsense, and at one point Stewart actually told him he thought the book was a load of crap. Stewart's Daily Show is among the best sources of news analysis on television.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

6 US Servicemen Reported Dead in Iraq, 11 Iraqis

Monday's toll (still incomplete but more complete than any one article I saw in any one language):

Guerrillas sent a videotape to Associated Press with views of four US Marines lying dead in a walled compound in Ramadi, west of Baghdad. The bodies appear to have been looted. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt confirmed the deaths.

Regarding these four Marines killed in Ramadi, according to the US military spokesman, "Four US Marines assigned to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force were killed on the 21st of June in the Al-Anbar province conducting security and stability operations."

In Baghdad, guerrillas launched a mortar attack that killed one US soldier and wounded 7 others, according to AP.

At 9:35 am in al-Qayyara near Mosul in the north, a roadside bomb killed 5 Iraqi contractors who were apparently with a US military convoy at the time.

Also in the north, just south of Kirkuk, Arab and Turkmen militias fought a half-hour gunbattle with one another, leaving one dead on each side, at Majma` al-Nahrawan. (This according to al-Hayat. Most Arabs in that area had been settled there by Saddam Hussein in an attempt to Arabize the north, and to marginalize the Kurds and Turkmen who predominated there. Now the latter are returning to their homes and taking back their property, and 10,000 Arabs are said to have been expelled. The local police chief confirmed that the fight was over land occupied by immigrant Arabs, the original ownership of which the Turkmen claim. The incident is more evidence that the Kirkuk region, with its Turkmen, Kurdish and Arab populations, is highly volatile. Arabs and Kurds have clashed. Shiite Turkmen and Sunni Kurds have clashed. And now Arabs and Turkmen are fighting. So far only the Christians and Yazidis haven't fielded militias, and even the Christians are demanding a semi-autonomous zone in Ninevah province.

A huge gang of 50 masked Iraqi guerrillas, among the largest paramilitary forces that has operated in the Sunni areas aside from the siege of Fallujah, blew up a police station at Jurf al-Sakar, south of Baghdad. Kimmitt reported, "Approximately 50 armed insurgents wearing black masks dismounted their vehicle by the Iraqi police station in Djor Askar. . . When coalition and Iraqi security forces approached the station, they saw five vehicles matching the description of the attackers. Forces engaged and destroyed one of the vehicles and pursued another vehicle to a residence, where they found a wounded attacker, an AK-47 shotgun and blueprints of the police station."

In Samawah in the south, guerrillas fired mortar rounds at a Coalition base, wounding one person, and four guerrillas were killed by return fire. Guerrillas that far south are likely to be either Mahdi Army, Marsh Arab Hizbullah, or Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

A US soldier wounded at Buhriz near Baquba on Friday died and his death was reported on Monday.

Corrected 6/22 at 9:33 pm; sorry I misread the al-Anbar report as distinct from the Ramadi one and so double-counted.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraq War not Worth it: 52% of Americans

A new Washington Post/ABC poll shows that a majority of Americans now feels that the Iraq War was not worth it. It cost too many US lives, according to 70% of them, and 51% thought that it had not made Americans any safer. Not only has President Bush's approval rating on the war on terror fallen to 50%, but the public now prefers Kerry to handle terrorism, 48% to 47% (Bush has lost 20% on this issue since March). Three-fourths of Americans say the war has damaged America's image in the world.

A majority of Americans disapproves of Bush's job performance over-all at 51%, while 47% approve. Kerry would win the election if held now by the same margin, even factoring in the Nader vote, the poll found.

Why has Bush lost so much confidence with regard to handling the war on terror? The fall in numbers is precipitate. As late as April, he led Kerry on it by 20 points.

I wish the pollsters had asked "why?" But what makes sense is that Bush hit the trifecta: Fallujah, Najaf and Abu Ghuraib. His brutal siege of a whole city, with some 600 Iraqis killed is one element. His decision to go after Muqtada al-Sadr and the obvious unpreparedness of the US military and the Bush-appointed CPA for the Shiite backlash is another. The revelation of the prisoner torture at Abu Ghuraib and the obvious revulsion it produced throughout the world, including the Muslim world, is the third.

The American public is not so foolish that it cannot see that the Bush administration is infuriating the Muslim world at the US gratuitously. If people thought it had been necessary to take that risk in order to stop Saddam from having weapons of mass destruction, or in order to stop him from colluding with al-Qaeda, they might have soldiered on. But it has become increasingly clear to them that the pretexts for the war were false. And therefore all the subsequent scandals and chaos were both unnecessary and reckless.

These numbers show that Bush has lost a significant number of independents. When his approval rating had sunk to 42% not so long ago, it suggested that he had begun to lose committed Republicans.

After all, a lot of Republicans could not be at all happy to see the US Department of Defense become the major purveyor of sensational internet pornography to the world. And, many Republicans may feel as Gen. Zinni does, that it was unwise to go after Fallujah and Muqtada al-Sadr, but going after them and then backing off made the administration look feeble and invited attack. The trifecta not only hurt Bush with independents, but the way he handled it probably hurt him with hardcore Republicans.

This brings us to the issue of Bush's flip-flops. He tried to hang the charge of flip-flopping on Kerry. But Bush said he wanted heads to roll at Fallujah, and then had to bring in the Baath to run the city. Bush said he wanted Muqtada al-Sadr dead or alive, and now Muqtada is set to be a prominent parliamentarian. Bush said he would bring decency to the White House, and now his DoD is purveying pictures of Arab men being made to masturbate in front of prancing servicewomen.

The American public knows flip-flops when they see them. It is Bush that is engaging in them.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Najaf Calming; Police to be Trained in Urban Warfare

Al-Hayat reports that previous disputes between Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and junior cleric Muqtada al-Sadr have now been completely resolved. One last step has been the appointment of a new prayer leader at the mosque connected to the shrine of Ali, who would be neither a follower of al-Sadr nor a member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. The new incumbent is Sayyid Muhammad Rida al-Ghurayfi, a seminary professor close to Grand Ayatollah Sistani. In summer of 2003 the Sadrists and SCIRI had fought for control of the shrine in Najaf, and SCIRI won. In the past month, the preaching there of Shaikh Sadr al-Din al-Qubanji of SCIRI has caused turmoil with the Sadrists in the congregation, producing at least one major riot at the mosque. On one occasion about three weeks ago, al-Qubanji criticized Iran in his sermon for not condemning Muqtada and his militiamen for fighting at the shrine with the Americans and so desecrating it, and was not allowed to continue. Afterwards shots were fired in his direction. More recently there was a big altercation between SCIRI and Sadr supporters that prevented Friday prayers from being held at all.

An al-Sadr spokesman said Muqtada is considering a proposal that he attend the national congress slated for the end of July. An Iraqi official clarified that no one has yet been invited to the actual congress, where 1000 notables will elect 100 persons to an advisory council to advise Prime Minister Allawi. (This congress was Lakhdar Brahimi's idea--he felt it would give a wide swathe of Iraqi political society a sense of participation in the caretaker government). But there is a preparatory committee planning the congress, and Ali Sumaysim of the al-Sadr movement has been invited to serve on this committee, according to organizer Fuad Masum.

Australian Broadcasting reports that a hard core of Mahdi Army militiamen still holds the shrine of Ali in Najaf, but that the US military has decided against trying to go in and sweep them out. (Good move.) The young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has called on his militiamen to leave Najaf, and substantial numbers have, but the US military fears that some may form sectarian groups and defy Muqtada. (This possibility is real; the Sadrists who follow Muqtada's father already have several sects or parties among them). The hard core Mahdi Army fighters have nothing but contempt for the transitional government of Iyad Allawi, seeing it as a tool of Washington. In response to continued insecurity in Najaf, Lt. Gen. David Petraeus (the one certified hero to come out of the higher ranks of US officers in Iraq) is committing to giving Najaf police training in urban warfare and to providing them with rocket propelled grenades and flack jackets.

Al-Hayat says that Shaikh Ahmad Shaibani, a spokesman for Muqtada al-Sadr, gave the newspaper the following statement: "Sayyid Muqtada will not form a mobile political party, and will not join any of the parties now existing on the Iraqi scene at the present time, nor will he throw his support behind any of them." He rejected the idea of folding the Army of the Mahdi into the Iraqi army, emphasizing that "The Mahdi Army is not an organized army, but rather popular groups that resist the occupation. Its members will return to the pursuit of their daily, natural lives when the Occupation ends." He said he was prepared "to help the forces of the police and army to keep order in Najaf and other Iraqi cities." He said that "The decree dissolving the militias was stillborn" and said he thought it was unlikely that it would be implemented at the present time. Mssrs. Bremer and Allawi have attempted on more than one occasion to dissolve the militias in the country, but with no success.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

US Marine Killed; 23 Iraqis Killed in Separate Attacks;
US Helicopters mistakenly Kill 5 Policemen at Samarra'

Wire services report several violent incidents on Sunday.

Anbar province: Guerrillas fighting US troops in Anbar Province, which covers Ramadi and Fallujah, killed a US Marine on Sunday. The Marines killed 4 of the guerrillas.

Baghdad: Guerrillas ambushed a convoy of American and Iraqi troops on the road to the Baghdad airport, killing two Iraqi soldiers of them and wounding 11. (The Americans had already passed when the bomb went off). In an attack launched near the central bank in downtown Baghdad, guerrillas fired a mortar round that injured 6 police officers and killed 4 Iraqi civilians, including two bank employees, a bank guard, and a passer-by [-az-Zaman]. The attack occurred at al-Rashid Street, an area with lots of shops. Meanwhile, behind the Palestine Hotel, downtown, shots rang out and hotel security returned fire. No casualties were reported. A lot of Westerners stay at the Palestine Hotel.

Samarra': Something happened in this mixed Sunni-Shiite city north of Baghdad,but the reports are very mixed and it is hard to know what. The US military maintains that its base near Samarra' took mortar fire, and that it replied with helicopter gunships to the source, killing at least 4 Iraqi guerrillas. The Bahrain Times says that the mortar fire went into a "residential neighborhood," not a US base. Az-Zaman maintains that the US forces mistakenly targeted Iraqi police guarding the home of interim Interior Minister Faleh al-Naqib, killing 5 of them. Earlier, the US helicopter gunships had destroyed the Samarra' police station. Iraqi police told the newspaper they did not rule out friendly fire on the part of the US. I have no idea which of these stories is correct. Will advise when I can sort it all out.

Tikrit: Assassins killed Sheikh Izzuddin al-Bayati, a leader of the al-Bayat tribe and a member of the provincial governing council for Salahuddin. This killing stands in a line of assassinations of mid-level government officials in the past two weeks. Al-Bayati had been a Baath official in Najaf. His tribe has both Turkmen and Arab branches (which demonstrates once again that a "tribe" is often based on fictive kinship and is a little like a political party, which can be joined or left over time). In Tikrit, a poster was distributed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's group, threatening death to officials who collaborate with the occupying authorities and singling out Jasim Jabbarah, an Iraqi official in Salahuddin working with police intelligence against the insurgents.

Baquba: Guerrillas fired mortar shells into a residential neighborhood. They hit a civilian home and killed a husband and wife.

Fallujah: Residents of Fallujah continue to maintain that the US bombs fell on a popular neighborhood in Saturday's F-16 attack, not on a terrorist safe house. Rescue workers digging through the rubble report glimpsing bodies of women and children below. The Mayor of Fallujah promised residents of the neighborhood that he would cut off relations with the US over the incident. In contrast, Newsday reports that interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi gave his blessings to the strike:

"We know that a house which had been used by terrorists had been hit," Allawi said. "We welcome this hit on terrorists anywhere in Iraq." His comments are likely to generate anger among Iraqis, who already are suspicious of Allawi because of his close ties to the CIA and British intelligence during the more than 20 years he spent in exile.

Sy Hersh is reporting that hundreds of Israeli intelligence agents are operating in and from Iraqi Kurdistan, gathering information on Iran's nuclear program and stirring up Syrian Kurds to make trouble for Bashar al-Asad in Syria. I have talked about the likelihood of such a presence here in the past. The nexus of disinformation about the Saddam government and about terrorist activity in Iraq may lie in tales fed to Mossad by the Kurds, who in turn passed it to Washington. The Kurds have steadily and implausibly alleged a Saddam/al-Qaeda connection.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

National Congress Planned; Muqtada Invited
Chalabi mediates with Kurds

Al-Hayat: On Sunday, the preparatory board met to begin planning a national congress of 1000 notables, politicians, religious leaders and tribal sheikhs to be held in July. It will involve twenty members of the old Interim Governing Council, including Sheikh Abdul Karim al-Muhammadawi, against whom an arrest warrant has been issued in an alleged murder case. An invitation has also been issued to the Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr, who observers thought might well be elected to the advisory council. Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi called on Muqtada to come to the congress.

Iyad Allawi had dispatched Ahmad Chalabi to mediate between him and the Kurdish leadership in the north. Despite Allawi's attempt to dissolve the militias, the Peshmerga or Kurdish militias are refusing to be put under central Baghdad control. Chalabi met with Jalal Talabani. Al-Hayat reports a rumor that the Coalition Provisional Authority had an arrest warrant issued for Chalabi.

The American attempt to destroy Chalabi politically, and to destroy Muqtada al-Sadr physically, has so far failed miserably. Allawi is clearly eager to do business with both, and to pull them into his orbit. Both are now poised to gain seats in the proto-parliament, the national advisory council, and they have made an improbable and wholly cynical alliance with one another, according to an informed Iraqi observer. The two of them could well show up in the government to be formed in January, 2005.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Thousands of Indian Shiites Protest US Policies in Iraq

Thousands of Indian Shiites came out into the streets of New Delhi Sunday to protest harsh US policies in Iraq and to demand that the United Nations take the leading role in putting the country back on its feet. They were supported by Hindu friends. The Indian Shiites were angered at the US because of its desecration of the holy shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala. Indian Shiites have in recent decades been moderate and politically timid, but this issue has clearly galvanized them. Among the many stupid actions undertaken by Mssrs. Bremer and Sanchez (i.e. by Mr. Bush), having US troops fire tank shells and call in air strikes in the vicinity of the shrines of Ali and Husayn has to be right up there at the top.

The Shiite International has turned anti-US, and we will see trouble out of it.
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Controversy at UC Irvine over Muslim Witness to Faith

The Orange County Register reports a controversy over graduation ceremonies at the University of California Irvine, where 11 Muslim students had been planning to wear green stoles with Islamic inscriptions over their robes. One side would say "Lord, increase my knowledge." The other would have the shahadah or Muslim confession of faith: "There is no god but God, and Muhammad is His Messenger." The Register reports that:

' Jewish students and outside groups that have gotten involved in the controversy, such as the American Jewish Congress, say the wearing of a garment with that word implies approval of terrorism and suicide bombings. "I am offended by that," said Larry Mahler, president of the UCI chapter of the Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi. "What they are doing is ratifying the suicide bombing that killed innocent people." '

Rumors also swirled that the inscriptions involved support for Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist organization, the paramilitary wing of which sponsors suicide bombings against Israeli targets as a way of fighting Israeli occupation and annexation of Palestinian land.

I can't say how upset I am by the gross bigotry displayed by anyone in the American Jewish Congress who would attempt to associate the Muslim confession of faith with terrorism.

The shahadah or confession of faith is a universalist statement. It begins by saying "La ilaha illa Allah." "La" means "no" in Arabic. "Ilah" is god with a small "g", a deity of the sort that is worshipped in polytheistic religions like those of ancient Greece and Babylon. It is a cognate of the ancient Hebrew "eloh," which also means "god." One of the names for God in the oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible is Elohim, which literally means "the Gods." Some scholars believe that the use of this plural is an echo of the process whereby a council of gods in ancient Near Eastern religion gradually become merged into a single figure, the one God.

So "La ilaha" means that there are no gods or small deities of the polytheistic sort. The ancient Arabs worshipped star-goddesses such as al-Lat, al-Uzza, and Manat. These are the equivalents of Venus, Hera and Diana in classical mythology. The Muslim witness to faith denies that such deities exist.

"Illa Allah" means "except for God." So there is no deity except The Deity. This part of the shahadah is a pure expression of monotheism. Monotheism's basic characteristic is its universalism. It asserts that one, single divinity underlies all of Being. This point is why it is wrong to insist on using the word Allah in English rather than God. Allah is not a proper name. It is simply the Arabic word for "the God." A god is ilahun. The God is al-Ilahu. The close proximity of two "L's" in al-Ilah caused them to be elided together so that the word became Allah. But it just means "the God," i.e., "God." Christian Arabic-speakers also use Allah to refer to the God of the Bible.

And, the Koran also identifies Allah or "God" as the God of Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, Moses, David, John the Baptist and Jesus, as well as of Muhammad. So, "there is no God but God." There is no difference in sentiment between this statement and the phrase, "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord." (Dt. 6:4).

The other part of the Muslim witness to faith is, "and Muhammad is His Messenger." (Muhammadun rasul Allah [or, transliterating by pronunciation: Muhammadu'rasulu'llah]. The word rasul or messenger is used interchangeably in the Koran with nabi or prophet. The Arabic nabi is cognate to the Hebrew word, which is the same. When Jesus said, "A prophet is not without honor except in his own country," he certainly used the word nabi in his original phrasing. The Koran does not represent Muhammad as the only prophet or recipient of divine revelation. Even the bees receive a form of wahy or revelation from God. God has sent a prophet "to every city," it maintains. Not only are all the biblical figures prophets, but so are John the Baptist and Jesus, and even ancient Arabian prophets are accepted. In India, many Sufi Muslims were perfectly comfortable accepting Krishna and Ram as prophets. Of course, committed Muslims believe that Muhammad is the most recent messenger and the most appropriate one in which to believe, but they don't deny the validity of others such as Moses. And, in traditional Islamic law, it is perfectly all right for human beings to follow other prophets of the one God, whether they be Christians, Jews or members of some other monotheistic religion. This tolerance was implemented for the most part, though there were lapses, and some serious ones. It can be contrasted with medieval Christianity, which often expelled Jews and Muslims or forcibly converted them.

So both elements of the confession of faith in Islam are universalistic. The one God is the God of all being, and Muhammad as prophet exists within a moral universe of many prophets, and comes in a long line of true prophets, with much the same message as they had, concerning the compassion and love of the one God for his creation.

As for the phrase, "Increase my knowledge, " it is literally "increase me in knowledge and make me one of the virtuous." The phrase is from a pilgrimage prayer: Rabbi zidni 'ilman wa alhiqni bi's-salihin. The salihun or righteous in the Koran are those who do good deeds. At one point the Koran says that Jews, Christians and others who are salih or righteous need have no fear in the afterlife.

For these Muslim graduates of the University of California to implicitly sacralize the secular learning they received there by associating it with the prayer that God should increase them in "knowledge" is another universalist sentiment. Many Taliban would have denied that there was any `ilm/knowledge to be had at the University of California.

So, the bigots should back off and stop demonizing the world's 1.3 billion Muslims. In multicultural America, moreover, an atmosphere of religious tolerance is the only safeguard against pathologies like antisemitism.

[A reader wrote in to suggest that the AJC protesters confused shahadah, or "witness to faith" with shahiid or martyr. The former is an abstract noun, the latter is a person. The former is a recitation. The latter is a person killed for his or her faith. "Martyrs" or shuhada' (the plural) have in Islamic tradition most often been non-violent. The use of the term "martyr" for a suicide bomber is a very recent innovation by Islamist radicals. Traditional Islam forbids suicide and a suicide would never have been considered a "martyr" in classical Islam. Anyway, the witness to faith has nothing to do with martyrdom at all. Arabic, like other Semitic languages, including Hebrew, is based on triliteral roots. Sh*h*d has to do with witnessing. By putting the three-letter root into various morphological forms or qalibs, you can create a wide range of supple meanings. The audience for a television show are addressed by hosts as `A'izza' al-mushahidin, "dear viewers." Mushahidun or viewers are also unrelated to martyrs, much less to suicide bombers. You can't interpret a religion with 1.3 billion members that has dominated much of the Old World for 1400 years through the lens of the last 20 years in Gaza-Israeli relations. If you do, it leads you to look like a total idiot and frankly, a fascist.]

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3 Wounded by Bomb at Central Bank;
22 Guerrillas Die in Fallujah Bombing

Guerrillas detonated a bomb outside Iraq's central bank in Baghdad on Sunday, wounding 2 employees and a guard.

Guerrillas blew up another bomb in a crowded market in Baghdad on Sunday, injuring at least 5.

Fighting continued near the eastern city of Baquba between US troops and guerrillas, apparently a mixed Sunni and Shiite force. On Friday, one US soldier and three Iraqis had been killed there. The precise nature of this conflict remains frustratingly vague.

The US dropped two bombs on a poor residential district of Fallujah on Saturday, killing at least 22 and wounding 9. The F-16 destroyed two houses and damaged 6 others. Most of those dead, including 3 women and 5 children, belonged to the extended family of a local farmer, Muhammad Hamadi. The US maintained that the building hit was a safe house for the al-Tawhid terrorist group of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Local Iraqis in Fallujah maintained that most of those killed were innocent civilians.

I don't mean to be a killjoy, but for an Occupying Power to drop bombs on residential neighborhoods is a war crime. The three women and five children killed are not "collateral damage." They are human beings. They were killed by the United States. There are no such things as "precision strikes" in residential neighborhoods. Bombs not only throw off shrapnel themselves, they create lots of deadly flying debris, including flying glass from broken windows, that can kill and maim. Dropping bombs on an tank corps assembled in the desert and intending to do harm is one thing. Dropping bombs on a residential district is another.

We on the outside have no way of judging the various claims made in these sorts of situations. For all I know the Hamadi clan has a lot of blood on its hands and has been blowing up people. But if so, they should have been arrested by a special ops team cooperating with the Fallujah Brigade. You can't go around bombing residential buildings and killing women and children if you are to retain any respect whatsoever from the local population or, indeed, the world community. Remember that when Bush puts pressure on India or Pakistan to send troops to help in Iraq, one of the implications is that he is asking their military officers to be an active party to things like bombing residential complexes. They have publics that are already angry about the US occupation of Iraq and how it has been (mis)managed. They need to be associated with this kind of action like they need a hole in the head. That's the pragmatic argument. The legal argument against carrying out this kind of strike is that the pilots who carried it out could conceivably be charged in some tribunal somewhere in the world, as, indeed, could everyone above them who approved the order to strike.

There were manifestations of public anger over all this in Fallujah, and presumably in the rest of the Sunni heartland. It doesn't do any good to kill 15 guerrillas and their wives and children (if they were in fact guerrillas) if in so doing you create 30 more.

The case of 6 Shiite truck drives killed by a Sunni clan near Fallujah last week, which had threatened to provoke Sunni-Shiite violence, is still being mediated between Fallujah's governing council and the Shiite Establishment. Some progress appears to have been made on defusing tensions.

In a similar conflict, Kurdish militiamen kidpnapped 10 Arab truck drives (from Samarra) in Kirkuk, in revenge for the recent kidnapping of 5 Kurdish soldiers in the region who were serving in the new Iraqi military. Tensions run high between Arabs and Kurds in the Kirkuk area and the place is a tinderbox.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Pepe Escobar's interview with me on Iraq at the Asia Times is available online.

An excerpt:

ATol: Let's start with the credibility of the Iraqi caretaker government vis-a-vis the Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds, more than vis-a-vis the US and the UN. Virtually everyone in the Sunni triangle and also in the Shi'ite south used to refer to the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) as "the imported government". Will the same happen again to this American face of an Iraqi government?

Juan Cole: Everybody knows it's an appointed government. It doesn't spring from the rule of the Iraqi people. Grand Ayatollah [Ali al-]Sistani has issued a fatwa recently in which he openly said that. His view in this matter will be widely shared. It's unfortunate that the Iraqi prime minister should have been a known CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] asset. I don't think that it changes anything. The IGC, as you said, was seen as a puppet council by many people. There's much more continuity between the IGC and this government than most people seem to realize. It's pretty much the same cast of characters - either with regard to people who actually sat at the council and persons who represent factions who had a seat in that council.

ATol: What are the implications of what you're saying for the Iraqi street?

JC: That nothing really has changed. These people are not getting anything like full sovereignty. I think it is a publicity stunt - without substance. The real question for a lot of Iraqis is not so much if it's credible or not, but if it can accomplish anything for them. Since the Americans dissolved the Iraqi army, since it's not entirely clear how do you get an Iraqi army back, one can be pessimistic ...

Army down, racism up
ATol: On the dissolution of the army: Do you think this was a blunder by proconsul Paul Bremer or was it carried out on purpose?

JC: On purpose in the sense of trying to make the Iraqis dependent on the Americans? Well, what Jay Garner said to the BBC [British Broadcasting Corp], I saw it with my own eyes, is that he believed one of the reasons the army was dissolved was that the Bremer team has as one of their primary goals in Iraq the imposition of Polish-style shock therapy. They wanted to transform Iraq into a capitalist state, as quickly as possible. This was part of the general plan to make Iraq a kind of model for the region.

Read more.

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One US Soldier Killed, 3 Injured along with Contractor

AP reports that guerrillas set off a roadide bomb in the Kamalaya district of Baghdad, after which snipers on rooftops fired at US troops, wounding three. The latter returned fire, inflicting some casualties on the guerrillas.

Later in the day, guerrillas fired six mortar shells into a 1st Cavalry Division camp in southern Baghdad. They killed one American soldier and injured a civilian contractor.

In Samarra', guerrillas attacked US troops with rpg's and rifles. Two of the attackers were wounded by return fire.

Clashes in Buhriz near Baqubah northeast of Baghdad between Iraqis and US soldiers have killed 13 Iraqis.

In Amara, British troops traded small arms fire with assailants from the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr. The British killed two guerrillas, but took no casualties. It may well be that the violence was provoked by the attempt to arrest Abdul Karim al-Muhammadawi, who had been mayor of Amarah for the past year.

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Destruction of Key Bridge Halts Southern Rails
Muqtada Aide Declares East Baghdad an American no-go Zone

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat: Guerillas blew up a key bridge just south of Baghdad Friday, halting rail traffic to four southern provinces from the capital, including Hilla, Amara, Nasiriyah, and Basra. Meanwhile, the port of Basra was unable to export any petroleum for the third day running because of pipeline sabotage.

On Thursday night into Friday morning, some Shiite forces were actually firing rockets, mainly aimed at other Shiite factions.

Shaikh Aws al-Khafaji, who is close to Muqtada al-Sadr, declared East Baghdad a no-go zone for the Americans. Addressing hundreds of worshippers at Friday prayers, al-Khafaji said, "I counsel you to take up holy war, and to apply pressure, with all severity, on the Americans. Announce that your city is a no-go zone for the American occupiers."

Another aide to Muqtada, Shaikh Jabir al-Khafaji, the Friday prayer leader in Kufa, criticized interim President Ghazi al-Yawar for shaking hands with US President George W. Bush when al-Yawar visited Washington, DC, recently.

In Najaf, the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr prevented Sadr al-Din Qubanji, local representative of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, from leading Friday prayers at the shrine of Imam Ali for the third week running. Sadr spokesman Ahmad Shaibani justified the action, saying, "The Friday sermon has become politicized" and that "The seminary students have shouldered the responsibility for this issue after they consulted with the clergy." Shaibani said he had earlier been under the impression that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani had ordered that the Friday prayers be held at the shrine of Ali.

On another front, an Iraqi court issued an arrest warrant for Sheikh Abdul Karim Mahoud al-Muhammadawi, "Abu Hatim," with regard to the killing of the police chief in Majar al-Kabir in mid-May.

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Iraqi Impotence in Every Sense

Viagra importation and use is way up in Iraq. Pharmacists say that the violence and tension has reduced Iraqi libido, so more men need help to get interested in sex. The pills are being smuggled or imported.

The psycho-biological effects of national crisis are increasingly easy to trace in this way. Consumption of internet pornography dropped off considerably in the United States in the weeks after September 11, for instance. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the fertility rate plummeted so far Russians were threatened with extinction in a couple of centuries if things continued like that.

The Iraqis seem also to be going through a crisis that depresses libido. Of course, since viagra was not imported under the Baath, we don't really have a control, and don't know if a pent-up normal demand is now being met, or if viagra use is way up in its own right. The subjective sense of the pharmacist quoted here is that it is the former.


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42 Killed, 138 Wounded in 3 Thursday Bombings
Coalition Soldier Among Dead

The LA Times reports that guerrillas detonated two enormous bombs in Iraq on Thursday. A suicide bomber blew up an Iraqi army recruitment office in downtown Baghdad. He killed 35 Iraqis and injured 138, according to Baghdad health authorities. Later on Thursday, a guerrilla detonated a car bomb in Balad, just north of Baghdad. He killed six members of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps.

A third bombing targeted a Coalition military convoy southeast of Baghdad, killing a Hungarian noncommissioned officer.

Bombings of significant magnitude are virtually daily events in Baghad. Interior Minister Fallah Hasan al-Naqib, who is from a prominent Sunni Baath family that fell out with Saddam in the late 1970s, threatened to consider the use of "Martial Law" to fight the wave of bombings. The LA Times (which misspells his name) wonders what in the world he could mean by that. Uh, martial law usually involves strict curfews, armed troops in the streets, and shooting suspected miscreants on sight. Although you might think there are already US armed troops in the streets, in fact from the accounts I have seen they don't actually do much to provide security or policing to the Iraqi public, so al-Naqib's plan would be a real change.

Oh, one other thing about martial law. Often, as in Pakistan, it substitutes military rule for civilian, and indefinitely postpones elections.

Iyad Allawi, the US/UN-appointed "prime minister," has mainly worked with ex-Baath officers trying to make coups in the past decade and a half. This talk of "martial law" is pretty scary. You have to wonder whether those elections scheduled for January will actually happen.

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Bush and Cheney Stick with the Cover Story

On Thursday both President Bush and Vice President Cheney stuck with their assertions of a close tie between Saddam Hussein and Usamah Bin Laden. Cheney even had the nerve to attack the New York Times for daring to report the findings of the 9/11 commission that there was no operational involvement of Iraq in September 11 (something that even Bush had earlier admitted when pushed).

Cheney as much as admitted that he gets his news on these things from the National Review, a rightwing magazine that is not known for having real experts on the Arab world, the sort who know Arabic and have lived there, on the staff.

Bush took cover in the 1994 Sudan meetings between al-Qaeda and Iraqi secret police, which went nowhere.

These two top leaders have been successful in misleading the American public in the past by using innuendo mixed with falsehoods (Cheney said, "We know where the WMD is" and Bush alleged Niger uranium purchases that the CIA knew were false). I suppose they think that mere repetition will somehow hypnotize the public yet again.

I doubt it will work. Before, they had enormous credibility as political leaders with the press, in part because of 9/11. That has begun collapsing. And even the American public, which doesn't pay much attention to foreign news, has started figuring out that it was misled into a misadventure that could still end in catastrophe.

Meanwhile, Donald Rumsfeld admitted that he had a prisoner entered into the Iraqi prison system without recording it, keeping the prisoner anonymous and unknown to the Red Cross. Apparently the prisoner ended up being forgotten in virtual solitary confinement. No doubt he was a bad guy, but it is hard to see how this procedure made anyone safer.

The episode is further fodder for widespread suspicions that Rumsfeld authorized at least in a general way the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghuraib.

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Prince of the Marshes in Legal Trouble

The LA Times has picked up a story that had already hit the London press two weeks ago, having to do with Abdul Karim Mahoud al-Muhammadawi, against whom murder accusations have surfaced. Known by his nom de guerre of Abu Hatim (Abu Hatem), Sheikh al-Muhammadawi began waging guerrilla war against Saddam Hussein around 1986, leading some 7,000 fighters from his Marsh Arab people. The Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq had their own distinctive culture, although they are Shiite Muslims and Arabic speakers. Their names are often distinctive, and their style of life-- raising water buffaloes, fishing in the swamps, smuggling, and piracy, marked them as a unique subculture. There were thought to be some 300,000 to 500,000 of them. Saddam dealt with their insurgency against him by draining their swamps and forcing them, propertyless, into urban slums in southern cities like Majar al-Kabir, Kut and Amara.

Sheikh al-Muhammadawi, from the powerful Al-Bu Muhammad tribe, a sort of aristocracy among the looked-down-upon Marsh Arabs, organized his people into the Iraqi Hizbullah. He and his fighters took Amara on April 7, two days before the fall of West Baghdad, and the Americans and British rewarded him by putting him in charge there. Paul Bremer put him on the Interim Governing Council.

In the past year, a lot of Marsh Arab slum dwellers have gone over to Muqtada al-Sadr and become Sadrists and Mahdi Army. A minority appear instead to have joined the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and its paramilitary Badr Corps. There is tension within the Marsh Arabs, not only between Sadrists and SCIRI (Iraqi Hizbullah as an independent movement seems in decline), but also among various clans that feud with one another. In summer of 2003, two Marsh Arab tribes came into Basra, the Ghamchi and the Basun, and began feuding with one another. At one point they fought a 4-hour gun battle because one group had killed a water buffalo belonging to the other.

When the Americans besieged Fallujah and then came after Muqtada al-Sadr, Sheikh al-Muhammadawi angrily resigned from the Interim Governing Council and deeply criticized the Americans. This move reflected the fact that most of his tribesmen had become Sadrists (indeed, the whole city council of Amara followed Muqtada).

In the insurrection of the Sadrists against the Americans and the Coalition in April-May of 2004, the Marsh Arab followers of Muqtada fought fiercely in Kut, Amarah, Nasiriyah, and elsewhere. Their dislike of central government and non-Shiite rulers caused them to feel the same dislike for the Coalition that they had felt for Saddam. The US military and its allies responded by killing hundreds of them. I remarked at the time that Paul Wolfowitz, who had earlier trumpeted his support for the Marsh Arabs, had ended up killing hundreds of them, and was criticized for pointing this out.

In mid-May, fighting broke out between Marsh Arabs and British troops in Majar al-Kabir (scene of a massacre of six British troops by tribesmen last June). The British killed 20 fighters, apparently mainly SCIRI's Badr Corps. Sheikh al-Muhammadawi came down to mediate. But he got into some sort of altercation with the police chief (who was SCIRI), and his body guard (possibly his brother Salam) shot the man down.

A Baghdad court has issued a warrant for Sheikh al-Muhammadawi's two brothers, one his bodyguard and the other the governor of Maysan Province. It hasn't been executed because none of the police in the region want to mess with the powerful Al-Bu Muhammad tribe (arresting leading members would provoke a feud between them and the tribes to which the policemen belonged).

On the other hand, it is a little suspicious that several prominent Iraqi political figures who have criticized the Americans or opposed their policies ends up with an arrest warrant being served against them for some serious crime. The LA Times article phrases the issue as one of the rule of law and accountability of public figures. But it seems to me to ignore the important context of the American punitive policies toward the Sadrists and de facto support instead for SCIRI and Sistani.

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2 US Troops, Oil Official killed;
21 Wounded in Rocket Attack

Reuters reports a string of attacks and mayhem yet again on Wednesday, with the petroleum industry a special target.

Guerrillas attacked a U.S. base near Balad in the Sunni heartland on Wednesday with rockets, killing two US troops and wounding 21 other persons.

Assassins in Kirkuk killed Ghazi Talabani, 70, who worked as a senior adviser in the North Oil Company. He is a second cousin of Kurdish political leader Jalal Talabani. The thinking is that this assassination is part of a set that included two high government officials this past weekend, aimed by insurgents at punishing collaborators with the Americans. But it could also have been aimed at the oil industry.

Then, saboteurs blew another two holes in the southern oil pipeline to Basra, just in case the holes made by bombs on Monday could be fixed in a timely manner.

Guerrillas also detonated a bomb in Ramadi, destroying an Iraqi police vehicle and a civilian automobile transporting foreigners. At least 6 Iraqis are dead, and some foreigners were also probably killed or wounded.

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Muqtada Asks Militiamen to Leave Najaf
Creates Party for January Elections

Az-Zaman: Muqtada al-Sadr asked his supporters who had headed to Najaf to fight the Americans to now leave the city and return to their own cities only hours after US President George W. Bush announced that the United States does not oppose a political role for al-Sadr.

Meanwhile, Liz Sly of the Chicago Tribune reports from Iraq that Muqtada is pressing ahead with plans to turn his faction of the Sadrist movement into a political party to contest the January elections. Informed Iraqi observers believe that the party could do very well, especially now that the Americans have turned Muqtada into a symbol of national resistance to Western colonial control. Sly writes:

' Many Iraqi observers blame the U.S. administration's mishandling of al-Sadr for his surge in popularity. The U.S. initially underestimated the appeal of al-Sadr's radicalism to the impoverished Shiite masses and then enhanced it by turning him into an outlaw, said Saadoun Dulame, whose institute conducted one of the polls. "America created Muqtada Sadr with its mistakes and missteps," he said. "If elections are held tomorrow, Muqtada would win." '

Muqtada's order to his militiamen is considered a powerful indication that the crisis between the Americans and him is coming to an end, with the US dropping demands that Muqtada present himself for trial on charges of complicity in the murder on April 10, 2003, of Shiite clergyman Abdul Majid al-Khoei. Some 745 members of the Civil Defense Force who had entered Najaf on Wednesday took up positions around the governor's mansion and other strategic points in the city to prevent outbreaks of civil turmoil, according to a spokesman for Iraqi government security.

A communique issued by the office of al-Sadr in Najaf was addressed to "Every individual in the Army of the Mahdi, and the faithful who sacrificed so dearly and preciously, and did not fall short before their Lord or before their society." It asked that the militiamen "return to their provinces to undertake their responsibilities, and that which pleases God, his Prophet, and the Family of his House."

Muqtada had undertaken, in a letter dated 27 May, to have his militiamen leave the holy city of Najaf, a promise that led to the truce between him and the US forces (one that often did not hold initially, but which is being solidified with patience and cool heads.)

The office of Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, a moderate cleric close to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, had issued a statement that an agreement had been reached with the Sadrists on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning that would allow the police back into the city. Bahr al-Ulum's spokesman, Ali al-Ghurayfi, said that the police would not only be allowed to return, but would have full authority, including the right to arrest anyone who commits a crime. (I.e. the Sadrists will not be able to use gang tactics and thuggery to prevent their own arrest in future if they commit a crime). He said that the "Shiite Establishment" (Bayt al-Shi`ah), which includes clerics, notables and tribal leaders around Najaf, had engaged in the successful negotiations.

What to make of all this? Muqtada has not really lost anything as compared to the situation before last April 3, when the American suddenly came after him. He did not control Najaf at that time, or the holy city of Karbala, either. His militia was strongest in the slums of East Baghdad. This is still true. The Americans killed perhaps 1500 of his best fighters, and captured or destroyed a lot of ordnance. But Muqtada has thousands of cadres, and they can be rearmed fairly easily (most have not really been disarmed). In the meantime, Muqtada was able to draw to himself the allegiance of a lot of Shiites, including armed fighters, who had not shown any loyalty to him before. I can only imagine that the militiamen in Kut and Amarah who fought for him included a lot of Marsh Arabs, most of whom had not been Sadrists in the past (they had their own Hizbullah organization). And his national standing has vastly improved, as even the Americans admit.

The Americans began with the Spanish in Najaf, and asked the Spanish to kill or capture Muqtada. The Spanish declined, and then withdrew from Iraq altogether (no doubt entertaining a suspicion that Bush was trying to get them killed). The Americans then declared that they were going to kill or capture Muqtada, which they failed to do because he went to ground in the shrine of Imam Ali, which the US could hardly blow up or storm for religious and political reasons.

Muqtada launched an insurgency to teach the Americans a lesson, and it certainly did. They lost control of the south, their supply and communications lines were cut, and they even lost control of most of the capital for a while. It must have been tense times in the Green Zone, with some wondering if the Tehran hostage crisis might be repeated, this time in Baghdad. Although the US military was able fairly easily to roll the ragtag ghetto militiamen back over time, it took a long time in some instances, and the US suffered many casualties, especially woundings.

The US foolishly took the Sadrists' bait and fought them in downtown Najaf and Karbala, the two holiest sites in Shiite Islam. The Shiite world was infuriated. 5000 demonstrated in Bahrain and brought down the Interior Minister. 150,000 demonstrated in Beirut, and many Lebanese Shiites that had begun to moderate their policies turned angry again. Hundreds demonstrated in Islamabad. The Friday prayer leader in Lucknow, India, declared Shiite historic cites off limits to American and British tourists, and now has announced that they Indian Shiites will ritually burn the American, British and Israeli flags.

So, whoever decided to go after Muqtada in such a clumsy and hamfisted way, and then to completely disregard Muslim religious sentiments by desecrating the tombs of the Prophet Muhammad's son-in-law and martyred grandson--whoever made that decision managed to infuriate 130,000,000 Shiite Muslims at the United States. Since al-Qaeda is hyper-Sunni, the Shiites were potential friends and allies of the Americans. But Bush blew that for us, big time.

The episode has made all Americans less safe, and it contributed to a further destabilization of Iraq. And, while I am delighted that President Bush has openly attempted to draw Muqtada into civil, parliamentary politics, I have to say it would have been better if he had done that last March instead of trying to kill him first and failing. Now Bush just looks weak to all those Mahdi Army fighters.

I'd say the entire thing has to be seen as one of the biggest fiascoes in all of US military and diplomatic history.
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Someone Tell Cheney

The 9/11 commission says that there was no link between Iraq and September 11. Duh.

But someone tell Dick Cheney, please. He apparently doesn't read the newspapers, either.

Anyone who followed September 11 knew that the money trail went back to Afghanistan via the UAE and Pakistan, and that not a dime could be traced to Iraq. Likewise there were hardly any Iraqi al-Qaeda-- a handful of scruffy Kurds (not in Saddam's control anyway) and a few strays. Likewise no government official with a return address is crazy enough to be heavily involved in a massive attack on New York. That some shadowy contacts might have taken place between Iraqi security and some guys with al-Qaeda connections doesn't prove anything. There were certainly CIA contacts with al-Qaeda over the years, too. And, the contacts alleged would have to be proven by good documentation now that we know the full extent of Ahmad Chalabi's fabrications.

It's over. Someone tell the National Review and the American Enterprise Institute, too. Or, wait. Let them go on looking silly.
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Iraq's Oil Exports Nixed by Basra Sabotage
US Commits $2 billion of Past Iraq Oil Revenues

The Financial Times reports that Iraqi Petroleum Minister Thamir Ghadban has confirmed that saboteurs twice bombed a pipeline that takes petroleum to storage tanks in Basra, near the Persian Gulf.

Sabotage of the Kirkuk-Turkey pipeline in the north, which can carry 800,000 barrels a day, had already taken nearly a million barrels a day of Iraqi petroleum off the market in May and June. With Monday's explosions in the south, Iraq is down to exporting only 500,000 barrels a day. Given the ramshackle and dilapidated state of its petroleum industry after over a decade of sanctions, Iraq probably can't pump much more than 2.5 million barrels a day at best.

It would take about $30 billion a year in income for the Iraqi state to run the country properly and repair everything that needs to be repaired, as well as servicing its debts and paying reparations. In the past year, Iraq has only been able to generate about $10 billion from petroleum, and I doubt the government is able to collect much in taxes. It is not enough to keep things going. If sabotage goes on being this effective, Iraq looks likely to get only half that in oil income in the coming year, especially if prices come down (trust me, eventually they will. I'll tell you some time about boom and bust cycles in primary commodity markets).

This development is another reason for which "sovereignty" won't mean much on June 30.

Over 20 years with many billions of dollars of investment, Iraq may have an upward capacity of 10 million barrels a day, similar to that in Saudi Arabia. But that rosy scenario would require a return of the country to a condition of normality. If you like nightmare scenarios, consider another possibility: that the instability in Iraq spreads to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. American readers: Can you say, "$5 a gallon gasoline"? (The Europeans already pay that but a lot of it is tax, and aside from the UK they have little petroleum of their own.)

Even for Iraq just to get out 2.5 million barrels a day would have required that the main US contractor in Iraq, Halliburton, had done its job. It hasn't, in part because of the poor security situation.

The FT reports,

' A recent internal oil ministry report, which was leaked to Reuters, criticised the repairs carried out to oil installations under contracts mostly awarded to Halliburton, the US oil company, and its subsidiaries. Work had begun, the report said, on only 119 out of 226 projects due to have been completed by April and none had been finished. '

This result is yet another reason for which the Department of Defense should kick its civilian contractor habit, to which it is hopelessly addicted, with highly inefficient results. (Hint: Pentagon contracts are not the free market; they are a form of state subsidy for big corporations. Although they create jobs, they do it in an extremely expensive way). For more on waste in government contracts, see Eric Eckholm's article in the New York Times:

' Multibillion-dollar Pentagon contracts to support military operations and reconstruction in Iraq have been plagued by "inadequate planning and inadequate oversight," the government's chief budget investigator told Congress on Tuesday, citing management deficiencies that have fostered waste and cost overruns. '

And now, the Iraq Revenue Watch of the Open Society Institute is reporting that the Coalition Provisional Authority (i.e. the Bush Administration in Iraq) is rushing to give away $2 billion in Iraqi oil revenues in reconstruction bids before the so-called turn-over of sovereignty on June 30. This move is obscene. When the US knows very well that an Iraqi government is going to be recognized in only a couple of weeks that will have rightful claim on how that money is used, it is just ethically wrong for the Americans to commit the money now.

' "With so much money available for cash give-aways, and so little planning on how the process will work, it will be all but impossible to avoid corruption and waste" said Svetlana Tsalik, director of OSI's Revenue Watch. '

Yup. See Erik Eckholm's piece in the New York Times again after you've read the Iraq Revenue Watch report. The move is a disgusting piece of American colonialism in the worst tradition of money-grubbing through sheer imperial power. It is unfortunately probably not illegal, just revolting. And, it is another thing for which the Iraqis are going to find it difficult to forgive us.



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Poll: 55% of Iraqis Would feel Safer without US Troops
67% Support Muqtada al-Sadr

Associated Press reports a Coalition Provisional Authority poll of Iraqis taken in the middle of May that had only been used internally by the CPA and not released to the US public. The numbers do not reflect well on Bush administration policies in Iraq. The poll is available at the CPA site.

55% of Iraqis say they would feel safer if the US troops would just leave. And over half thought that all Americans behave the way the accused prison guards at Abu Ghuraib did. AP notes

' The prison scandal has also become fodder in the United States, as Democratic challenger John Kerry accuses Bush of failing to set a proper moral tone. ''I think the president is underestimating the full affect of what has happened in the world to our reputation because of that prison scandal,'' Kerry said Tuesday. '

You betcha.

The poll shows that 59% of Iraqis feel that security is the most pressing need of the country. Some 16% say it is the economy, and a similar proportion say "infrastructure." (I suspect "the economy" and the "infrastructure" are, if not the same thing exactly, at least very similar conncerns). The cities that saw or were close to the Sadrist uprising in April and May were most concerned about security (especially Hillah), whereas Basrans were unusually concerned about infrastructural problems, which they put on the same level as security. (There were riots in Basra last August over lack of fuel and poor services, whereas security has been above average there for Iraq, in part because the British military has taken a less aggressive approach there.)

Only half of Iraqis say they feel safe in their own neighborhoods (probably a lot of these come from Basra), and where they do feel safe, it is because of neighbors, local patrols and family rather than because of the police (only 18% attributed their safety to the police).

Iraqis have increased confidence in their own police and military (what military?). But 78% of them have no confidence in the Coalition Provisional Authority and 81% of them have no confidence in the US and coalition military. The approval rating for Mr. Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority is 11% favorable, down from 47% last November! Mr. Bremer arrived in Iraq last year with a pledge that "we" would "impose our will" on the Iraqis. I guess not so much, actually.

Some 81% of Iraqis had a much improved opinion of Muqtada al-Sadr from 3 months earlier, which tracks with an earlier Iraqi poll's results. And, 67% of Iraqis support or strongly support Muqtada. 61% thought he had made Iraq more unified than before. Most don't want him as president, but I'll say more about that below.

Here is the breakdown of Iraqi politicians with regard to the percentage that say they support or strongly support them:

Ali Sistani: 70%
Muqtada al-Sadr 67%
Ibrahim Jaafari 58%
Ahmad al-Kubaisi 55%
Abdul Aziz al-Hakim 51%
Harith al-Dhari 45%
Muhsin Abdul Hamid 45%
Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum 44%
Adnan Pachachi 41%
Abdul Karim al-Muhammadawi 31%
Muwaffaq al-Rubaie 29%
Iyad Allawi 23%
Jalal Talabani 21%
Massoud Barzani 19%

Sistani gets support because of his vast moral authority, and Muqtada has picked up support because he has become a symbol of Iraqi aspirations for independence from the US. Ibrahim Jaafari, who will be one of two vice presidents, gets support because of his leading role in the al-Da`wa Party, a Shiite party founded in 1958 which is probably the oldest and biggest Iraqi party after the Baath (the Communists are a shadow of their former selves). Likewise Bahr al-Ulum and Muwaffaq al-Rubaie have al-Da`wa connections. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim leads the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Al-Da`wa is likely in my view to be the biggest party in parliament if there are free and fair elections in January.

A surprise for me is how popular the Board of Islamic Clerics (sometimes called in the wire services the Association of Islamic Scholars) is. Its leaders Ahmad al-Kubaisi and Harith al-Dhari come in at 55% and 45% respectively. Another Sunni fundamentalist, leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party-- Muhsin Abdul Hamid -- comes in at 45%. Since Sunni Arabs in Iraq can't be much more than 16% of the population, this result means that some Kurds and Shiites are supporting these Sunni clerical leaders. All three protested the siege of Fallujah and al-Dhari and Abdul Hamid were involved in the negotiations, so some of their celebrity comes from that.

Iyad Allawi, whom the Interim Governing Council forced on Mr. Brahimi, isn't actually very popular in this poll, and if things had been done democratically, Ibrahim Jaafari would be prime minister. He may yet be.

Asked for whom they would vote for president, these over a thousand Iraqis chose in this order among real candidates: Ibrahim Jaafari, Adnan Pachachi, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, and Saddam Hussein in that order. Saddam came in before Muqtada al-Sadr, but with only 3%.

The Americans according to their notes tried to take some comfort from Muqtada's poor showing on this question, but they should not. Sistani also came in low here. It means people don't think of Sistani and Muqtada as secular politicians of a sort who would be plausible presidents. It doesn't mean they don't support them in other ways for other things.

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21 Killed, 62 Injured

Three big bombs went off in Iraq on Monday. One, in Baghdad, targeted foreign civilian contractors. The 13 dead from that bombing included 1 from the US, 2 from the UK, 1 from France, and 1 from the Philippines. Three worked for General Electric at power plants, and 2 were their private security guards. 62 persons were injured, including 10 foreigners, some badly.

Bombs in Mosul and Salman Pak killed another 8 persons, mainly Iraqi police and civil defense forces.

A Baghdad crowd gathered around the bombed vehicles, setting them afire and dancing around them. Some then threw stones at Marines. Some 50 Iraqi police in the area declined to intervene, fearful that the mob would turn on them if they were perceived as helping the Americans.

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Bush's European Allies Punished by their Publics

J. Sean Curtin argues that Bush's European allies have paid a heavy political price for supporting his Iraq war. Labor did extremely poorly in the European Union voting. Berlusconi's Forza Italia party also did poorly in that election, as well as suffering losses in local elections. Bush's friend Aznar was defeated by the socialist candidate, Zapatero in recent Spanish elections. Curtin argues that the Dutch opposition has also been strengthened.

It might be argued against Curtin's analysis that opposition parties did well across the board in the European Union elections. Thus, the German Social Democrats, who opposed the Iraq war, were also trounced, as were the French Gaullists of President Jacques Chirac. But, actually, Breffni O'Rourke seems to say here that exit polls indicated that economic issues produced the poor results for the incumbent party in the case of France and Germany, whereas voters were explicit that Iraq hurt Blair and Berlusconi. It should also be said that turn-out for the European elections was historically low, and that the deeply dissatisfied therefore were more likely to vote.

Among George W. Bush's most important legacies may be a reinvigoration of European socialism and left-liberalism.

Zapatero is a case in point. His Defense Minister, Jose Bono, by the way, openly called the UN resolution in Iraq partially "fiction." In testimony before the Spanish Senate Defense Committee, he asked if anyone doubted it was a fiction that on 30 June the Iraqi government would recover its complete national sovereignty.

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Marines Visit Fallujah, Cut Deal

Az-Zaman: US Marines went into Fallujah on Monday, meeting with General Muhammad Latif, commander of the Fallujah Brigade, and the head of the local governing council, Saadu'llah al-Rawi. They signed an agreement on mutual confidence, with the US undertaking to release 50 Iraqis from Fallujah now in CPA prisons. The US also removed the checkpoint that had been set up to the east of Fallujah. Talks were held in the municipal building that involved several US officers and the highest ranking officers of the Fallujah Brigade.

Meanwhile, some Marine commanders consider the deal worked out with the Fallujah Brigade a failure because it has not made guerrillas give up their heavy arms or arrested those responsible for killing four foreign security guards in March.

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Sistani to Consult with Kurds
US Seeks Direct talks with Muqtada

Az-Zaman: Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has decided to send a representative to Kurdistan to discuss the differences between him and the Kurdish leadership over Kurdish desires for a loose federalism that would give them substantial autonomy within Iraq. Sistani's spokesman said that he wanted to reduce the feelings of anxiety and being slighted expressed by the Kurdish leaders and in the Kurdish street at Sistani's stance. Sistani rejected any endorsement of the Transitional Administrative Law in the recently passed UN resolution, whereas the Kurds wanted the UN to back the TAL.

Veteran diplomat and superb Arabist Christopher Ross, who is in the Coalition Provisional Authority's Outreach Department, has indicated a desire to meet with radical Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr for talks about the fate of the Mahdi Army militia. Previously the CPA had refused to deal with Muqtada directly, accusing him of having had rival cleric Abdul Majid al-Khoei killed in April of 2003.

Ross's request for a meeting may well be a sign that a more pragmatic set of officials from the State Department is beginning to take charge of such policies from the Neocon establishment that had dominated the Coalition Provisional Authority (and which had generally screwed up Iraq royally). On June 30, the real transition will be from Defense Department dominance of Iraq to State Department responsibility for Iraq. Since virtually nobody at the Pentagon knows anything serious about the Arab world, whereas State has fair numbers of Arabists and lots of experienced diplomats this transition is all to the good. The only question is whether it comes too late to do any good (see the item above about crowds dancing in the street around dead foreign contractors.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Debt and Dollars in Iraq

Guest Editorial

David Chambers

Middle East Institute

Thursday's BBC story entitled "Iraqi debt write-off divides G8" hovers over the heart of many inter-related problems concerning Iraq. The Group of Eight or "G8" remain unable to agree on how much of Iraq's tens of billions of dollars in foreign debt should be written off by G8 members. Continued failure to reach agreements means that members of the Paris Club will be left to make decisions.

Proponents of debt forgiveness start with the world's No. 1 expert Dr. Sinan Al-Shabibi, a long-time UNCTAD economic advisor and currently Governor of Iraq's Central Bank, who recently told finance ministers at a G-7 meeting in Boca Raton, FL, in February 2004 (see remarks), that Saddam Hussein had "depleted the nation's assets and plunged the country into a hopeless debt burden," which must be relieved.

And of course he is right, dead right -- insofar as Iraq is concerned, were it alone, in a vacuum.

Iraq's debt cancellation, however, does not lie in a vacuum, and a neo-Conservative Bush II Administration does not call upon the likes of a Reagan Conservative like
Jim Baker to deal with Iraq's debt unless the need is extreme -- like bailing Bush II out of the 2000 election situation. Baker is the top Republican fireman: follow him to find out where the most serious political fires need to be quenched. And when someone like Baker proves unable to solve Iraq's foreign debt problem, then it's time to worry, indeed.

In fact, how could Baker solve this Bush II-created problem? While the US has been pushing for most debt to be written off, it has complete control over Iraqi reconstruction; European nations hold most of the debt notes yet have at best a weak shot at contracts being awarded by the US government or its primary contractors. More simply, the US has been asking Europeans to cancel billions of dollars in debt for no guaranteed reconstruction contracts. Such a background reduces American gains at the UN last week to a slight of hand. Nothing has really improved between the US and its European NATO allies, so how can anything improve in Iraq, still held by Coalition forces?

David Chambers
Director of Programs
Middle East Institute
1761 N Street, NW
Washington, DC 20036
USA
http://www.mideasti.org/about/
about_experts_alpha.html#DChambers
1 (202) 785-1141 x 210
programs a t mideasti dot org

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iranian Influence in Iraq

Robin Wright of the Washington Post discusses the ways that US officials view Iran as seeking influence in Iraq. Her contacts confirm what I have also long suspected, which is that the Iranians are giving money to virtually all the major Shiite groups, and probably some of the Sunni and Kurdish ones, too.

' "Iran is using all instruments available to interfere and be a very active player in Iraq," a senior U.S. intelligence official said. "Within the Shiite orbit, there's a large menu of actors, and Tehran is placing bets on enough of them to ensure it ends up with ties to a winner." With Iraq's political spectrum still taking shape, Iran has covered most major options for the next phase of the transition that begins June 30 by providing various types of assistance to mainstream figures such as Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani as well as radicals such as Moqtada Sadr; former U.S. favorite Ahmed Chalabi; and long-standing ally the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, U.S. sources said. '

I am quoted:

'But U.S. analysts also warn that Washington will have little luck in preventing a growing Iranian role in Iraq. "For the United States to assume that they can stop Iran from being influential in Iraq is silly. It's like worrying that the Vatican might have influence in Ireland," said Juan Cole, a University of Michigan specialist on Shiite Muslims.'

The Iranian ambassador to Jordan as much as admitted Washington's charges of meddling (which are always greeted some mirth in Tehran, since it seems clear to the Iranians that it is the US that is meddling in Iraq). He said that the Iranian government has been "in contact" with various Iraqi religious groups, especially the Shiites.

Meanwhile, AP's Mariam Fam profiles the slums of East Baghdad, "Sadr City," and the unpopularity on the whole of the United States there. Muqtada al-Sadr and his movement are strongest in Sadr City.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Ebadi: US War in Iraq set back Iran Human rights

Barbara Slavin of USA Today profiles Shirin Ebadi, the Nobel prize winner for peace from Iran. Ebadi complains that the US war in Iraq has strengthened Islamic extremism in the region. Slavin reports her saying,

' the toppling of Saddam Hussein has strengthened Islamic fundamentalists in both Iraq and Iran and given her country's theocratic regime a new justification "to keep people silent." "Under slogans such as protecting national security or fighting terrorism, there's always a reason to act against and silence human rights advocates," she says. "So the U.S. military attack on Iraq ... hurt the democracy process in Iran and in the region."

I would argue, given the memos of the counsels to the president, and the policies of John Ashcroft, and the Patriot Act, that a similar statement could be made about the effect of the war on human rights inside the United States. The Bush administration seems determined finally to simply repeal the Bill of Rights, as inconvenient for the administration.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Powers: Internal War between CIA and Pentagon as bad as External Wars

Mark Follman at Salon.com profiles Thomas Powers, author of "Intelligence Wars: American Secret History From Hitler to Al Qaeda." Powers argues that the war between the CIA and the Pentagon is a third war for the US after Afghanistan and Iraq. He gives as an example the CIA raid on the house of Ahmad Chalabi, a Pentagon asset who had been set up in that house by the Department of Defense, which had the effect of destroying Chalabi politically. Powers also sees the Abu Ghuraib prison torture scandal in the context of this internal war. He believes that Rumsfeld authorized military intelligence to "turn up the heat." He also thinks it likely that the Pentagon took Israeli advice on how to humiliate and break Arab prisoners.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Dr. Frank: The Cure for Bush's Neuroses: Get him Out of Office

Psychiatrist Dr. Justin Frank puts George W. Bush on the couch and comes up with disturbing findings.

The findings:

1. Sadism: ' the President has a ""lifelong streak of sadism, ranging from childhood pranks (using firecrackers to explode frogs) to insulting journalists, gloating over state executions ... [and] pumping his fist gleefully before the bombing of Baghdad." '

2. Megalomania: ' The President suffers from "character pathology," including "grandiosity" and "megalomania" -- viewing himself, America and God as interchangeable. '

3. Paranoia ' says President George W. Bush is a "paranoid meglomaniac" '

Dr. Frank reports that after long observations of Bush, he felt "he was disturbed."

' "I was really very unsettled by him and I started watching everything he did and reading what he wrote, and watching him on videotape. I felt he was disturbed," Dr. Frank told Leiby. Bush, he said, "fits the profile of a former drinker whose alcoholism has been arrested but not treated." Dr. Frank's expert recommendation? ""Our sole treatment option -- for his benefit and for ours -- is to remove President Bush from office . . . before it is too late." '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

More on US Refusal to hold Local Elections

Many thanks to readers for the great interest they showed in so serious a subject as the consequences of the refusal of the Coalition Provisional Authority to allow local elections in Iraq last summer. The subject was broached by Roger Myerson of the University of Chicago.

I just received the following from a former US government official of wide experience:

"Many thanks for posting Prof. Myerson's discussion on the failure to allow early local elections, together with your comments. Questions could also be raised as to why national elections were not conducted last year or early this year. Public safety conditions have not substantially changed since the possibility was first vented. To the CPA's excuse that an election can't take place absent a national registration scheme, in itself a complex process, you and others pointed out that the UN food ration rolls, while not perfect, were sufficiently serviceable for the purpose of getting popular democracy rolling.

"My guess--not based on concrete evidence, but on my experience--is that the US wanted to make sure that any electoral process was controllable and returned a malleable and "safe" Iraqi government that still could claim legitimacy. The elaborate Rube Goldberg caucus scheme put forward by the CPA was designed to assure those objectives. Real popular elections were a crap
shoot in which the US was unwilling to join.

"Why? The justification had less to do with democracy than with broader strategic objectives. My guess is that the US wanted to establish a major military base in Iraq and for that needed a compliant Iraqi government. It had nothing to do with terrorism. Such a strategic move would serve three goals: to outflank and largely surround Iran, with Turkey, Afghanistan and
some of the 'Stans on its other flanks; the same for Syria, a candidate member of the axis of evil; and secure long-term oil supplies. (Taking Syria and Iran out of the picture would almost totally isolate the Palestinians; I speculate that is what was implied by routing of the road to Jerusalem through Baghdad).

"In the event, I suspect that if those were the US objectives, then they have at least faded in the light of events. But if I am right, then it might serve to explain a lot of what the US was doing, or not going, over much of the past year and more.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Wave of Assassinations Continues Sunday
Car Bomb at Military Academy kills 12, wounds 13

Guerrillas used a car bomb Sunday to target an Iraqi military academy in southeast Baghdad. There are many US military personnel at the college. It was intercepted by Iraqi police cars, and then detonated, killing 12 Iraqis and wounding 13.

Al-Hayat and AFP: Guerrillas attempting to destabilize the caretaker government have carried out two successful assassinations of high officials and two other failed attempts this weekend.

On Sunday, assassins killed Kamal Jarrah, director of cultural relations for the Iraqi ministry of education. He was shot in front of his home as he was leaving for work.

On Saturday, assassins killed the assistant foreign minister, Bassam Kubbah when he emerged from his home in al-Azamiyah, Baghdad, on Saturday morning. He had just returned from London after having accompanied a foreign ministry delegation to New York. Kubbah had served in the Baath foreign ministry, but appears to have been thought relatively clean, since he was given this high post in the caretaker government. He refused to have guards or take security precautions.

Also on Saturday, the automobile of the assistant secretary of health was sprayed with gunfire, but he and others in the car escaped unscathed. Likewise, the commander of the border guards, General Hussein Mustafa Abdul Karim, narrowly escaped an assassination attempt.

Last weekend a high official of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq was killed.

The Arab nationalist insurgents appear to be concentrating on killing second-tier officials who don't have as good security as the ministers themselves.

Three civilians employed by foreign companies were found with their throats cut Saturday, on the road between Baghdad and Jordan. They had been kidnapped on Thursday. Two were Iraqi and one was Lebanese.

In contrast, 7 Turkish hostages were released.

On Saturday, two US troops and two Iraqi soldiers were wounded by roadside bombs in central Iraq. Another bombing of a US convoy was reported by eyewitnesses near Fallujah.

In Najaf, US troops closed the northern gate of the city and for two hours surrounded the shrine of Imam Ali after there was gunfire and at least one mortar round was fired in Najaf early Saturday morning. Eyewitnesses said that Mahdi Army militiament had taken up positions at checkpoints around the shrine of Imam Ali. Nervous shopkeepers closed their stores, then later reopened them. -ash-Sharq al-Awsat. Al-Hayat reports that Muqtada al-Sadr may be in East Baghad, having fled Najaf because of an assassination attempt against him.

A Sadr spokesman announced Sunday that Muqtada would form a political party to contest parliamentary elections in January, 2005, though he would not run for office himself. It comes as no surprise to my readers; I have been predicting the morphing of the Sadrists into a political party for some time. I also have compared them to AMAL and Hizbullah, the two Shiite parties in Lebanon. For the moment they are more like Hizbullah, but that could change if the right circumstances arise.

Meanwhile, the Coalition Provisional Authority on Saturday had welcomed indications in the text of Muqtada's Friday sermon that he might be willing to give up the militia business and try to become a force in parliamentary politics. The CPA's concern for democracy is touching, but isn't this the guy they said they intended to "kill or capture," where by "capture" they meant "kill"? And didn't Bremer just try to ensure that Muqtada was not eligible to play the game of parliamentary politics for three years? Was that just a bargaining ploy? If so, wouldn't it have been better to say that Muqtada and his lieutenants would be excluded from political offense unless they did X by such and such date? Why issue a blanket statement as a bargaining ploy? Isn't there a danger it would be misunderstood as unchangeable policy?

Mahmud Uthman, the independent Kurdish member of the Interim Governing Council gave an interview in ash-Sharq al-Awsat on Saturday in which he said it was extremely frustrating to work with the Americans because their policy emphases seemed to change on almost a daily basis--and then they would blame the Iraqis for being slow to implement policy!

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

California and Florida: Polls and Demographics work against Bush
Has W. morphed from Neo to Smith?

Ron Fournier of the Associated Press has a fascinating article on the changes in Florida's political geography since the last election. He points out that over 700,000 voters have moved into Florida, which now has over 9 million voters, and the immigrants are disproportionately African-American and Latino. His sources think this non-trivial population movement could well throw Florida to Kerry. The Iraq quagmire appears to loom large for Floridians as a reason to vote against Bush, even among voters who supported him the last time.

It seems to me that there is a bottom line for presidents. They have to at least look like they are in control or getting control. One of the reasons Dwight Eisenhower was so angry at the Israelis, French and British for attacking Egypt in late October, 1956, was that they had not told him about the plot and it made him look like he was not in control, on the eve of an election. Ike knew about the Control factor. He called up British PM Anthony Eden and cursed him out "like an old sailor." Jimmy Carter looked like he wasn't in control because of the Iran hostage crisis, and he was thrown out. Voters can forgive momentary lapses in control. Most people don't hold September 11 against President Bush the way former security czar Dick Clarke does. But to rally around the president in a crisis is a temporary sentiment. After the first bloom is off the problem, he has to show that he is in control again. Bush did that well in Afghanistan, though apparently reluctantly, since he wanted to go after Iraq first but Tony Blair dissuaded him. But now Bush is stuck in Iraq and he looks like he is not in control. The charade of a "transfer of sovereignty" (when there is no Iraqi army and there are 138,000 US troops in Iraq) is not going to restore the sense of control. As long as you have that kind of troop strength in Iraq, I don't believe most Americans will buy the argument that it is now Allawi's show.

A new Los Angeles Times poll indicates that a majority of Americans now thinks it was not worthwhile going to war in Iraq (53%). This is up from 43% in March. And over 60% of Americans think the US is bogged down in Iraq. This Reuters article says that 52% of Americans still thought that the US was winning the war and less than a quarter thought the insurgents were winning. But you could read that statistic the other way around and conclude that almost half of Americans do not believe that the US is winning, even if they are reluctant to admit that the insurgents are. If over half think the enterprise not worthwhile and nearly half think we are losing, it becomes clearer why Iraq shows up as so important in Floridians' attitudes toward Bush. The two taken together equal A President Not in Control.

The poll also found that Kerry leads Bush nationwide by 51 to 44 percent. By 51% to 16%, they felt that Bush is "too ideological and stubborn." Over half of Americans think Bush is too ideological and stubborn? This is a remarkable statistic. It is important because it helps explain why they think he is not in control. He is perceived as having a tragic flaw, like a Greek or Shakespearian tragic protagonist, which prevents him from being in control and gets him into messes. Hamlet was indecisive, Macbeth over-ambitious, etc. OK, for Americans probably one should think in terms of a flawed character in some recent film. But my rhetorical analysis would remain the same.

(Here's a try: Neo and Smith in The Matrix are actually similar in many ways. Both of them want to overturn the Matrix status quo, both of them use violence, both of them are seeking to become something more than they are, are seeking to escape the trap of the pods in which the machines have imprisoned them. But Neo is open to reality, is willing to question, to go where the leads take him. Perhaps most Americans saw Bush as like Neo in the months immediately after September 11. Smith is "too ideological and stubborn," and as a result over-reaches at a crucial moment. It seems to me that his Iraq misadventure, Abu Ghuraib, Torturegate, the proto-fascist memos of the counsels to the president--all this has made Bush look increasingly Smith-like. If you are running for office, you want to be seen by the young people as like Neo, and not at all like Smith.)

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Riot at Imam Ali Shrine; Clashes in Sadr City

al-Hayat and ash-Sharq al-Awsat:

Sadr City: A Sadrist spokesman said late Friday that one Mahdi Army militiaman was killed and several others were wounded in clashes with American forces in Sadr City, Baghdad. Reuters television footage showed Muqtada's fighters firing machine guns and tossing hand grenades at American troops, who replied by calling in attack helicopters to open fire on insurgent positions in the Shiite slum. All this happened early morning on Friday. A Sadrist clergyman, Shaikh Nasir al-Sa'idi, preaching at the al-Hikmah mosque, warned nations considering joining the multinational force in Iraq that they will be treated the same way the present occupiers are treated. "We will not permit any state to send its troops to Iraq, and we will deal with any state that supports the occupation as an occupier." He attacked the caretaker Iraqi government for asking that Coalition troops stay in the country, saying that even some European countries had called for their withdrawal. He asked whether this government is actually capable of holding free and fair elections. He also cast doubt on the loyalty of the Kurdish ministers and officials to PM Iyad Allawi, saying that they still looked for guidance to the Kurdish leadership, so that this government has multiple centers of power.

Kufa: At the Friday prayers at the Kufa Mosque, Shaikh Jabir al-Khafaji preached in the stead of Muqtada al-Sadr, reading the latter's prepared sermon for the third week in a row. During the sermon, he mentioned that Muqtada al-Sadr would support the caretaker government if it demanded a timetable for the withdrawal of Occupation forces from Iraq. He emphasized his "refusal to kowtow to the Occupiers." He advised the Mahdi Army to make themselves a firm shield for the Shiite religious leadership, and Shiism, and Islam, and for all of them to turn to God. He said, "America has injured minority rights in appointing the caretaker government." (This last sentence seems to be a play for Kurdish sympathy, which is odd since Muqtada has often atacked Kurdish plans for semi-autonomy and for annexing Kirkuk. )

The wire services are misinterpreting this statement as an about-face on Muqtada's part. It is not. It is a piece of bargaining. He is saying that he will swing the Sadrist movement around to support the transitional government if it will commit to throwing the Americans out of Iraq on a strict timetable. That is what Muqtada has wanted since the fall of Saddam. He started calling for a US withdrawal in April, 2003. It seems probable that one reason the Americans came after Muqtada in early April, intending to kill him, was fear that he will become powerful enough after June 30 to lobby effectively for the expulsion of the Americans. (It has now come out that the "Ministry of Justice" printed up broadsheets announcing that Muqtada had been killed resisting arrest, and that someone jumped the gun and actually put some of those out in early May even though in fact, Muqtada eluded his would-be murderers. All this can only have been done at the behest of the Bush administration and the US military.) Paul Bremer's recent attempt to ensure that the major Sadrist leaders are not allowed to run for parliament has the same goal. The civilians in the Department of Defense such as Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz probably went to war against Iraq in part precisely to get bases there. The realization that they might be tossed out at the instance of a few million Shiite slum dwellers has so infuriated them that they attacked the movement without provocation, killed about a thousand of them, and are now trying to disenfranchise several million Iraqis by disallowing Sadrists from holding office.

Muqtada has so far cleverly outwitted and outflanked this American attempt to marginalize him on the political stage. Although his ghetto youth gangs, which are not really a Mahdi Army or army of any sort, are easily defeated by US troops in firefights, they cannot be made to disappear permanently by this kind of foreign pressure. If foreigners occupied Los Angeles and engaged in some clashes with ghetto gangs like the Crips and the Bloods, do you really think the gangs could be wiped out by these foreign military incursions? Of course not. The foreigners don't have a prayer of uprooting a phenomenon even local police could never crush.

Najaf: Before noon on Friday, a procession left the "1920 Revolution Square" in Najaf, consisting of hundreds of persons, who then headed for the shrine of Imam Ali. They chanted for the unity of Muslims (i.e. in support of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and his ally, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq [SCIRI]). The march had been called for by Sadr al-Din al-Qubanji, the Najaf head of SCIRI. When the procession arrived at the entrance of the shrine, they were met by a group of Mahdi Army militiamen, who advanced on the protesters, chanting "Yes, yes, Muqtada!" and "Yes to al-Sadr . . . Muqtada is here to stay and powerful!"

Both groups entered the shrine, then fell to fist fights, leaving a number of persons wounded, among them Fattah al-Musawi, a SCIRI official, and Baqir al-Qubanji, brother of Sadr al-Din, who is an adviser to SCIRI (he was wounded in the head by a stone). The Sadrists then destroyed the pulpit from which the prayer leader preaches, and tore up posters of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim (the SCIRI leader killed by a truck bomb last Aug. 29 outside the Najaf shrine). They ripped up the canopies set up to provide shade to the worshippers in the courtyard. They then used the debris to beat the SCIRI demonstrators and the worshippers who were waiting to perform Friday prayers at the mosque attached to the shrine.

The Sadrists at one point pelted the SCIRI supporters with stones and shoes. In the end, SCIRI clerics called on their followers to depart. Friday prayers had to be cancelled. Although it is said this is the first cancellation since the fall of Saddam, in fact al-Qubanji was on a recent occasion unable to complete his sermon because of Sadrist heckling.

Shaikh Ahmad Shaibani, from the Najaf office of Muqtada al-Sadr, said that "ignorant persons from both sides harassed one another to the reverberation of shouts."

Qais al-Khaz`ali, Sadr's spokesman, explained Friday evening that "We received a warning from the governor of Najaf on Thursday via the Shiite House that some had the intention to attack the old city and to reach the shrine of Ali, with the support of the Occupation Forces, within 24 hours."

The Sadrists have suspected for some time that the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and its supporters are doing espionage work for the Americans against Muqtada. If rumors were flying that the US was going to make one last attempt to arrest Muqtada before the turn-over of sovereignty, and that SCIRI was helping them, it would help explain the outbreak of fisticuffs in the shrine.

On Thursday and early Friday, Mahdi Army militiamen looted and burned a Najaf police station after the police attempted to arrest an aide to Muqtada al-Sadr. Although US-installed Najaf governor Adnan Zurufi accused the Mahdi Army of breaking the truce, it is hard to see how the attempted arrest was consistent with a truce. Zurufi is probably egged on in these matters by Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority, but note that the US offered him no help on Friday. I think it is a legitimate demand that militias not appear in the streets armed. I'm not sure trying to arrest Muqtada's aides is so legitimate.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Samarra'i calls for Military Resistance

Sunni preacher Shaikh Ahmad al-Samarra'i accused Prime Minister Iyad Allawi of being an American agent in his sermon on Friday. He addressed Allawi from the pulpit, saying, "Have all noble persons disappeared, that you have come and sought assistance from foreigners?"

AFP adds:

' And in one of Baghdad's largest mosques, a Sunni Muslim cleric implored veterans of Saddam Hussein's military to join the insurgency against the United States.

"Where are the military? They have indisputable experience and their silence means they keep their knowledge to themselves," Sheikh Ahmed Hassan al-Taha al-Samarai told worshippers at Abu Hanifa mosque in the capital's Sunni stronghold of Adhamiyah.

"The absence of combat experts from the battlefield is treason, in all senses of the word. It's treason against God, the prophet and the nation the experts belong to," he said. '

Meanwhile, Edward Cody of the Washington Post reports that 80% of Iraqis now have a negative view of American troops. (This figure is probably also the same proportion who want US troops out of the country). He quotes a sly sermon by a Sunni preacher on the meaning of liberty in American-occupied Iraq:

' "It was discovered that the freedom in this land is not ours. It is the freedom of the occupying soldiers in doing what they like, such as arresting, carrying out raids, killing at random or stealing money," Sheik Mohammed Bashir declared in his sermon Friday at Um al-Oura, a Sunni Muslim mosque in the middle-class Ghazaliya neighborhood.

"No one can ask them what they are doing, because they are protected by their freedom," he continued. "No one can punish them, whether in our country or their country. The worst thing is what was discovered in the course of time: abusing women, children, men, and the old men and women whom they arrested randomly and without any guilt. They expressed the freedom of rape, the freedom of nudity and the freedom of humiliation." '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraqis working for the US Live in Fear

AFP continues its excellent tradition of covering Iraq from the ground up(in this case the eastern city of Baqubah) with a fine piece about the fear in which Iraqis live who work for the Americans. Many translators have been killed, and others are getting death threats. Many feel forced to live on US military bases. Local municipal and provincial officials, most of them put into power by the Americans or their proxies, are also receiving threats.

The danger extends, of course, to US civilian contractors. This report says that 39 employees of Kellog, Brown and Root have been killed in Iraq. It isn't forestalling down on their luck Americans from signing up, but it is a remarkable statistic.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Did Prohibiting Local Elections Derail Iraq?

Professor Roger Myerson of the University of Chicago earlier authored a prescient paper, ,"How to Build Democracy in Iraq." He now writes:

"In recent weeks, political reporters have done much to clarify the development of prisoner-interrogation policies in Iraq. I hope that similar efforts might clarify the decision-making process that led the occupation authorities in June 2003 to reject any plans for early local elections in Iraq.

How important was this policy? Its consequences may be seen in the problems that we face today. Your 6/19/2003 report [1] on the cancellation of planned municipal elections in Najaf is particularly painful to reread from today's perspective. (See also the 6/28/2003 article by W. Booth and R. Chandrasekaran in the Washington Post [2].) You reported then that local US officials believed "Najaf was ready for elections and that the theocrats would have done poorly." But even if the Sadrists had won the election, their movement may have developed very differently over the past year if they could have built their political power by spending public funds for local reconstruction, rather than by recruiting soldiers for armed resistance.

What do we know about how this policy decision was made? Jay Garner suggested in a March 2004 Guardian interview [3] that he may have been fired because of his plans to hold local elections, which he believed to be opposed by proponents of "free market" economic reforms. Clearly there was some highly-connected opposition to local democracy in Iraq. But the suggestion of a free-market motivation seems implausible to me (and I am professor of economics at the University of Chicago, where advocating free markets is a local specialty). Even those who hoped to buy Iraqi public assets for bargain-basement prices should have recognized that, for long-term enforcement of their property rights, these transactions would need more legitimacy than occupation officials alone could provide. It seems clear that the only people who really stood to profit from a policy of denying elections were emigre political leaders who did not want competition from the home-grown political factions that these local elections would have cultivated.

The decision not to allow local democracy in Iraq during the past year might be defended by an argument that Iraq lacked the basic internal security that democracy requires. But such arguments are difficult to fit with our Administration's expressed optimism that elections will be feasible in January 2005. If all the power of America's armed forces could not make Iraq safe enough for democracy in July 2003 or January 2004, then it is hard to see how a weak interim government can make Iraq safer for democracy in January 2005. Furthermore, if the interim leadership actually does prove strong enough to gain secure control of Iraq by January 2005, then they may themselves be severely tempted to prevent free elections. Our only hope is that the end of foreign political control might itself create the conditions for peace and security in Iraq. But if so, then local democracy should have been recognized as a prerequisite for peace and security during the occupation period.

The decision to not permit local elections in occupied Iraq seems to have been made at the highest level of this government. Beyond its unfortunate consequences for Iraqi society, this policy decision has fundamentally tarnished America's good name. After all our promises to bring democracy to Iraq, our refusal to allow any free democracy during our occupation period may be as obscenely un-American as the Abu Graib horrors.


[1]
http://www.juancole.com/
2003_06_01_juancole_archive.html
June 19, 2003
[2]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/
wp-dyn/A42905-2003Jun27?language=printer
[3]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/
0,3604,1171689,00.html



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

Cole: Yes, it was a great mistake.

The reason Bremer is said to have given for cancelling the Najaf elections at that time was that the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq candidate seemed likely to win, and he was too close to the hardliners in Tehran. There was some language about not wanting a "pro-Iranian" mayor of Najaf. (I'm not sure how you would get an elected mayor of Najaf that was not pro-Iranian). I think Garner is right, that the dissolution of the Baath army and the refusal to allow local elections, were policies adopted to ensure that there would be no domestic forces in Iraq capable of standing against Neocon social engineering projects like Polish-style shock therapy for the economy, and just more generally, direct US rule. Bremer's project was to be MacArthur in Tokyo except in Baghdad. Local elections would have gotten in the way. Ironically, it was the very steps Bremer took to weaken Iraqi civil society that threw the country into chaos and made it impossible for him to stay for the two or three years initially envisaged.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Mahdi Army Takes Police Station in Najaf

Fighting continued in Najaf on Thursday, though US troops stayed out of it and let the Najaf police chief handle the situation. The Mahdi Army appears to have done severe damage to the police station. There was attendant fighting in Sadr City between the US and radical Shiites loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Chirac Politely takes on Bush

AFP reports that on a number of occasions French president Jacques Chirac exhibited independence from the Bush agenda. He wore a coat and tie at Sea Island, Georgia, despite President Bush's request for informality. He refused to see NATO troops sent to Iraq.

On NATO, according to AP he said in part:

I do not think that it is NATO's job to intervene in Iraq," Chirac told reporters in a videoconference from Sea Island, the private resort where the leaders have gathered. "Moreover, I do not have the feeling that it would be either timely or necessarily well understood," said Chirac, adding that he had "strong reservations on this initiative."

On June 8, Chirac took on the idea of democratizing "the Greater Middle East." He admitted that it could "contribute, in a strong and useful way for the region, to the progress of reforms engaged in by the countries of the region." But he affirmed that the Israeli-Palestinian and the Iraq conflicts were "the primary obstacles" to the success of reforms in these countries, because of "the resentments and frustrations" that they engender, according to the text of his declaration made public by the French president's office.

He said, "The countries of the Middle East and North Africa do not need missionaries of democracy." He added tht "There is no already-made democratic formula that one could transpose from one country to another. Democracy is not a method, but a culture. If one wants to see liberty, respect for human rights, and the rule of law impose themeslves on a country, it is necessary first of all to respect the liberty and independence of that country . . . reform cannot be decreed from the outside. It is accomplished from the inside." He insisted that progress on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute was key to making advances in the area of reform.


Chirac spoke forthrightly about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a way that is not allowed to a US politician bacause of pro-Israeli special interest lobbies that punish anyone who steps out of line. (That is why Senator Fritz Hollings had to wait until he was about to retire before speaking out on the issue).

He said, "It is self-evident that all joint approaches to the problem of what one today calls "The Greater Middle East and North Africa" presuppose that there will have been progress--something we cannot see today--in returning to peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis. For one cannot de-link a certain number of phenomena which are taking place in the world today from the impetus that was given them from the beginning of the conflict."


The Washington Post reported,

"The conflicts ravaging the region are today the paramount obstacles to its development," Chirac said. "We must take measure of the resentments and frustrations from one end of the Arab world to the other, fueled by the daily spectacle of violence and humiliation in places so laden with history and symbols."

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Violence in Iraq

Insurgents killed 12 Iraqi soldiers of the Fallujah Brigade in Fallujah on Wednesday. This is the first time that insurgents targeted the indigenous Iraqi brigade.

It has now been revealed that 10 US troops were wounded in carbomb attacks on Tuesday.

Likewise, Mahdi Army irregular attacked Najaf police on Wednesday and Thursday.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Kurdish Anger Rising

Update: Although the New York Times alleged Thursday morning that Prime Minister Iyad Allawi had tried to defuse the crisis with the Kurds by committing his government to the TAL or interim constitution, all was still not well in Kurdish-Shiite relations. Deputy PM Barham Saleh got in a snit and went home to Kurdistan in protest over the lack of definition of his official duties. The Kurds say they are tired of being given token posts in Iraq with no real power, a pattern they maintain has been consistent since the formation of modern Iraq in the early 1920s. The rest of the press does not, by the way, seem to be taking Allawi's statement as seriously as NYT did, suggesting that most reporters do not think it has resolved the crisis.

The Associated Press reports substantial Kurdish anger in Iraq over the failure of the UN Security Council resolution on Iraq's caretaker government to provide any guarantees of protection of the minority rights of the Kurds. A senior UN official said off the record that he hoped "it will not develop into anything ugly." Key quotes from Kurdish leaders:

' Barham Salih, 44, of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and an American favorite, announced he would not accept the post of deputy prime minister for national security unless the powers were spelled out "appropriate to the position, sacrifice and important role of the Kurdish people," the PUK's KurdSat television reported.

' "We do not accept that the Shiites would have the lion's share of any Iraqi government because any Iraqi government should be composed of the representatives of all Iraqi people," Mulaha Bekhtiyar of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan said Wednesday. '

' Now our future is ambiguous," said Nesreen Berwari, a Kurd who serves as minister of public works. "The interim constitution would have been the clear and bright road map to all the components of the Iraqi people." Berwari said she would resign from the government if asked to do so by the Kurdish leadership. '

Karbalanews.net quotes Barwari as saying that for the UN not to endorse the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) or interim constitution (which recognizes Kurdish claims explicitly) is a "usurpation of democracy." She added that the UN resolution, in failing to mention the TAL, "ensures that all the sacrifices of the Kurdish people have been in vain."

According to ash-Sharq al-Awsat, Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani said that he would announce the Kurdish position after studying the contents of the resolution. He implied that it was possible that he would ask the Kurdish ministers in the caretaker government to resign in protest (Barwari has already indicated her willingnes to do so). In a letter to President Bush, Barzan and Jalal Talabani, the other paramount Kurdish leader, threatened to boycott the forthcoming Iraqi elections and perhaps even declare an independent state if they feel their demands are being ignored.

Mahmud Uthman (Osman), an independent Kurdish politician who served on the Interim Governing Council, told the newspaper that he thought it unlikely that the Kurdish ministers would withdraw from the new government. He said that the Kurds have now noticed that the final draft of the UNSC resolution affirmed the "federal" character of the Iraqi state, and that this phraseology might be enough to hang their hopes on. The Kurds want a decentralized Iraqi government with substantial "states rights."

Sistani spokesman in Europe, Murtada al-Kashmiri, said that the Kurds had threatened to withdraw in the past, and that they should "consider what is best for all Iraqis."

Songul Chapouk, the Turkmen woman on the old Interim Governing Council, also expressed impatience with Kurdish threats to withdraw. She said she had opposed the loose federalism implied in the TAL because it was produced by an unelected body. The Turkmen have complained about not being represented in the UN-appointed government and are rivals of the Kurds in northern regions.

My remarks on the Lehrer News Hour on Tuesday concerning the UN Security Council Resolution on Iraq are now online.

I said in part: "the Kurds very much wanted the resolution to endorse the interim constitution that was hammered out last February between the interim governing council and the coalition provisional authority. It did not do so. That interim constitution recognizes the status quo of semi-autonomy for the Kurdish regions, gives them a veto over the permanent constitution that is to be drafted next year this time. Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani on the other hand wrote a letter to Kofi Annan warning the United Nations against endorsing that document which Sistani does not like. He fears that it contains the seeds of a break-up of Iraq. He wants more central authority. He doesn't think it's fair for the rule of the majority to be overruled by a minority of Kurds. So these two political forces in civil society came out differently. Sistani won basically. The Kurds lost and they're very upset about it."

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Political Obituary for the Neocons

Paul Richter of the Los Angeles Times has done another political obituary of the neoconservative movement, which has fallen on hard times. He notes that it is highly unlikely that Congress would now confirm Paul Wolfowitz or Douglas Feith for higher office (Wolfowitz had once been rumored as a candidate for Secretary of State in a second Bush term). Richard Perle's credibility is shot both because of a financial scandal and because of his close association with Ahmad Chalabi, who has now been disgraced as an Iranian intelligence asset.

The other scarey thing about the Neocons is their warmongering. David Wurmser and Scooter Libby would have dragged us into wars with Syria and Iran if they could have. If American supporters of the Likud want to take down Bashar al-Asad, they should get Ariel Sharon to do it with Israeli troops, not put American soldiers at risk for no good reason. Al-Asad is not a threat to the United States, and he is not even a threat to Israel (Israel could be in Damascus tomorrow if it wanted to).

Richter also notes that the Neocons cry 'anti-semitism' about all this. What a crock. There are many prominent Jewish Americans in the Bush administration who are not philosophically aligned with the neocons and whom I have never seen attacked in the press. Marc Grossman, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, for instance, is from all accounts an excellent diplomat and has received no unfavorable press of the sort Wolfowitz and Feith and Perle have. I conclude that critics are objecting to the political philosophy of the neocons, not to their Jewishness. Moreover, it isn't even exactly their political philosophy that is attacked, though Doug Feith's hatred of the Palestinians and desire to ensure they never get a state is odious. It is their sneaky methods, of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of intelligence. And here the guiltiest party of all is Dick Cheney. So it is nothing to do with ethnicity at all.

The American Likudniks are attempting to hitch a ride on political correctness and trying to equate criticism of Likud party policies in Israel with anti-semitism. It would be as though Pinochet supporters implied that his critics hate Latinos, or as though supporters of Chinese President Hu Jintao tried to paint his critics as anti-Asian. It is a stupid argument and no one is going to fall for it, so they may as well just give it up.

There is, by the way, a throwaway line in Richter's piece from a Neocon lamenting that Bush may come to be seen as the worst president since Carter. That is ridiculous. Jimmy Carter was a far better president than W. can ever hope to be. Carter made peace between Israel and Egypt. He resolved the Panama Canal issue to everyone's satisfaction, and we've never heard any more about it because there haven't been subsequent problems. He avoided a potentially disastrous US attempt to prevent or roll back the Islamic Revolution in Iran. He used the foreign aid carrot to begin the process of pushing the Latin American military regimes to democratize (a process that has been wildly successful). He raised human rights as a foreign policy issue. Carter is a quick study and a bright engineer. He was president at a time of post-Vietnam and post-Watergate doldrums, at a time when Iran and Afghanistan spun out of control, at a time of high petroleum prices, continued stagflation, and high inflation. I am not entirely sure what he could have done about any of these problems, most of which were beyond his control (and most of which remained beyond the control of his successors).

Reagan did not overturn Khomeini, rather he sold him arms. Although Reagan got the Soviets out of Afghanistan, he did it at the cost of creating a radical Islamist international and destabilizing Pakistan and Afghanistan--i.e. Afghanistan continued to spin out of control, with fateful consequences. The price of petroleum declined from $40 a barrel in 1980 to less than $10 a barrel in 1986, helping Reagan quite a lot, but it had nothing to do with any policy pursued by Reagan. (Europe cut its energy consumption by a third after the 1970s oil shock, and OPEC has a tendency to overproduce over time). After Carter retired, he spent his time building houses for disadvantaged people. He also was key to the elimination of a painful and debilitating parasite in Africa, improving the lives of millions. The vilification of Carter and the hero worship of W. is a sign of how morally warped the American Right really is. Carter's political and economic environment made it impossible for him to be a great president, but he was a damn sight better than W. any day of the week.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Torturegate Sources

The Wall Street Journal story that set off the furor about White House counsels advising Bush that he could torture people if he wanted to (indeed, that he can do whatever he damn well pleases because he is the king-emperor), is now on the Web. Information wants to be free.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Torturegate, G8, and the Greater Middle East

The Wall Street Journal's revelation of White House counsels' memoranda permitting what most people would consider torture-- on the basis of the president's position as commander in chief in wartime-- is among the most chilling things we have seen from a Bush administration not lacking in chills for civil libertarians. It seems clear from the anger expressed by senators like Joe Biden in the hearings addressed by Attorney General John Ashcroft on Tuesday that they now suspect Bush himself authorized the Abu Ghuraib torture routines. And, they are helpless to do anything about it.

The revelations about the torture memos have cast a cloud over Bush's presentations at the G8 summit in Georgia. Since the Bush centerpiece at that conference was supposed to be promoting democracy in the Middle East, the Torturegate revelations pointed to US feet of clay. Wire services noted Bush's complete failure with Middle Eastern leaders at the summit:

"In an effort to demonstrate engagement with Arabs on the issues, Mr Bush invited the leaders of a number of Islamic countries to attend a lunch on Wednesday with G8 leaders, at their own expense. But leaders of some key nations, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Morocco, turned down the invitation, and Qatar was purposely snubbed because of administration anger at al-Jazeera's coverage of the Iraq war. Ms Rice cited scheduling issues as the reason Morocco and Egypt - one of the effort's harshest critics - will not appear."

That sounds pretty sad.

With regard to the memos themselves, As usual, Josh Marshall is on the case. And, Billmon has an amusing treatment of the hypocrisy of Mary L. Walker, the US Air Force general counsel who led the team of lawyers that wrote the torture memos. (She claims to be a Christian. On the other hand, we cynical lefties should remember that it was Christian soldiers who blew the whistle on Abu Ghuraib, out of stricken consciences.)

A Republican Congress is most unlikely to impeach George W. Bush, even if it does become clear that he is the torturer in chief and that Lynddie England is not the mastermind behind Abu Ghuraib. But he could be prosecuted, even after leaving office, for breaking US law against torture.

United States Code Title 18. Section 2340. Definitions

As used in this chapter -
(1) ''torture'' means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control;
(2) ''severe mental pain or suffering'' means the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from -
(A) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering;
(B) the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality;
(C) the threat of imminent death; or
(D) the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality; and
(3) ''United States'' includes all areas under the jurisdiction of the United States including any of the places described in sections 5 and 7 of this title and section 46501(2) of title 49.

Section 2340A. Torture

(a) Offense. - Whoever outside the United States commits or attempts to commit torture shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both, and if death results to any person from conduct prohibited by this subsection, shall be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life.
(b) Jurisdiction. - There is jurisdiction over the activity prohibited in subsection (a) if -
(1) the alleged offender is a national of the United States; or
(2) the alleged offender is present in the United States, irrespective of the nationality of the victim or alleged offender.
(c) Conspiracy. - A person who conspires to commit an offense under this section shall be subject to the same penalties (other than the penalty of death) as the penalties prescribed for the offense, the commission of which was the object of the conspiracy.

As Steve Rendell noted in a piece a couple of years ago,

' Citing Title 18, Section 242 of the United States Code, legal writer Karen L. Snell notes (The Recorder, 10/31/01): "The use of pressure tactics, including torture by proxy, not only renders evidence obtained inadmissible in court. It's also a crime. And it is not just the person who physically or mentally assaults a suspect who is guilty. Any person who aids, abets, counsels or conspires to commit such acts is a criminal." '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

UN Resolution Passes Unanimously
Sistani the Big Winner; Kurds Furious

The United Nations Security Council on Tuesday unanimously approved a new resolution on Iraq granting legitimacy to the caretaker government of Iyad Allawi. The resolution gives the new Iraqi government substantially more sovereignty than had been envisaged by the US in the initial draft, and the Bush administration essentially compromised in order to have an achievement for the election season.

The resolution will make it easier for the Allawi government to gain the Iraq seat at the UN and at organizations like the Arab League. It also constrains the US from undertaking major military actions (think: Fallujah) without extensive consultation with the Iraqi government, and establishes a joint committee of US and Iraqi representatives to carry out those discussions. This military "partnership" was substituted successfully for a stricter French proposal that the Iraqi government have a veto over US military movements in Iraq. Still, the language went far beyond what the US had wanted.

That the US and the UK had to give away so much to get the resolution shows how weak they are in Iraq. The problem is that they have created a failed state in Iraq, and this new piece of paper really changes nothing on the ground (see the next news item, below).

The resolution did not mention or endorse the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) or interim constitution adopted last February by the Interim Governing Council and based on the notes of Paul Bremer. The Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani had written Kofi Annan forbidding the UN from endorsing the TAL, on the grounds that it was illegitimate and contained provisions harmful to majority rule.

The Kurds on the other hand were absolutely furious that the UN did not mention the TAL, which they see as their safeguard against a tyranny of the Arab majority. It stipulates that the status quo will obtain in Kurdistan until an elected parliament crafts a permanent constitution next year this time, and that the three Kurdish provinces will have a veto over that new constitution if they do not like it. The Kurdish leaders threatened in a letter to President Bush on Sunday to boycott the elections this coming winter if there is any move to curtail their sovereigny or to rescind or amend the interim constitution. Ash-Sharq al-Awsat's Shirzad Abdul Rahman reports today that the Kurdish street is anxious about the future, feeling that it has been left up in the air.

This entire process is a big win for Sistani. It is now often forgotten that the Bush administration had had no intention of involving the UN in this way in Iraq. The original plan was to have stage-managed council-based elections in May, producing a new government to which sovereignty would be handed over by the US directly. It was Sistani who derailed those plans as undemocratic. When the involvement of the UN was first broached last winter by Interim Governing Council members, the Americans were said to have been "extremely offended." It was Sistani who demanded that Kofi Annan send a special envoy to Iraq. It was Sistani who insisted that free and fair elections must be held as soon as humanly possible. It was Sistani who insisted that the UN midwife the new Iraqi government, and not the US and the UK alone. It was Sistani who insisted that the UN resolution not mention the Transitional Administrative Law.

Al-Hayat reports demonstrations in favor of Sistani on Tuesday. Likewise there were rallies for the new prime minister, Iyad Allawi.

Readers have frequently asked me for a thumbnail sketch of Sistani's political philosophy, and the issue came up on one of my lists today. I reproduce here what I wrote.

Sistani's conception of the new Iraq is that it should have an elected parliament, which will represent the will of the Iraqi people. His language on this is almost a translation of Rousseau (one might have wished for more Locke or Jefferson and less Rousseau, of course). The parliament should consist of laypersons, not clerics. And, it should be pluralistic and represent politically all Iraqis, including Kurds and Sunnis.

This elected, lay parliament is one basic element in the good society according to Sistani.

The other is the approval of parliament and its legislation by the Marja`iyyah or Shiite religious leadership. Legitimacy thus has dual roots, in the will of the people and in the approval of the clerics.

I have compared Sistani's vision of Iraq to Ireland in the 1950s. There was an elected, lay parliament. But if it took up a matter such as divorce, which affected the interests of the Church, the Bishops intervened and usually were able to get their way. Likewise, Sistani expects a majority of members of parliament to be lay Shiites, and he expects them to conscientiously heed his fatwas on social issues. These rulings, however, will be issued from the seminaries of Najaf and come from outside the government. Sistani expects to have no official post, and discourages clerics from seeking such posts. The clerical role is played out in civil society, not within the state, for the most part.

Sistani rejects Khomeini's theory of the guardianship of the jurisprudent (vilayat-i faqih) in governmental affairs. He does not want to see a faqih or supreme jurisprudent in Iraq similar to the position of Ali Khamenei in Iran. But he does speak about wilayat al-faqih fi al-masa'il al-ijtima`iyyah, or the guardianship of the jurisprudent in social affairs. The mechanism for such a guardianship is the issuance of fatwas or considered jurisprudential rulings.

Sistani would also like to have shariah or Islamic canon law form the basis for as much as possible of Iraqi civil law. Certainly he wants personal status law to be shariah for Muslims. This was the system in Iraq under the monarchy, and obviously it does create a shariah bench for clerical judges appointed by the state, where the clerics can have a voice in civil affairs. (This system was introduced in Pakistan under General Zia ul-Haq, of which Sistani is well aware because one of his key colleagues is Bashir Najafi, a Pakistani grand ayatollah).

So, Sistani is not a secularist by any stretch of the imagination. If he gets what he wants, religious law will have a vast influence on Iraqi society and politics, and women's rights will be rolled back. The ayatollahs in Iraq will have as big a megaphone as the Catholic bishops did in 1950s Ireland.

On the other hand, Sistani is not a dictator or a Khomeinist. He is much more analogous to Jerry Falwell in the US-- a major religious voice who wants to move the society in a certain direction through weakening the separation of religion and state, without himself seeking political office.

I don't actually think there is anything "immoderate" about Sistani's vision in a contemporary Middle Eastern context. It is not what the Bush administration wants, or what most educated Iraqi women want, or the Kurds (and probably most Sunni Arabs for that matter) want. Attempting to implement the second part of it (ayatollah influence on legislation and social issues) will cause trouble with the other communities, potentially. But Sistani has all along been a Najaf pragmatist. He has constantly spoken of the need to assuage the feelings of the Sunni Arabs and Kurds. He will try to accomplish as much of his vision as seems practicable, and no more. His tools are not militias, guns, and bombs, but persistent persuasion and discourse. Occasionally he may bring peaceful crowds into the streets to demonstrate for some law or policy. It is in that discursive practice that his "moderation" lies.

My estimation of Sistani's potential influence is that it is generally positive given the situation of contemporary Iraq. It is important for traditionalist and even activist Shiites to hear praises of parliamentary governance and communal harmony. His potential impact on social legislation is reactionary, of course. But even he admits that the religious Shiites are likely to form less than 50% of parliamentarians, and that it is a little unlikely that he can get everything he wants any time soon. And, he is willing to be patient about his goals, as long as they are met minimally.

The one point on which Sistani's stance raises some alarms in my mind is that he seems completely unsympathetic to Kurdish demands for safeguards as a minority, and wants to remove their veto on the new constitution to be hammered out next year this time. The potential for Kurdish-Shiite violence is substantial in the coming years.

Al-Hayat quoted Sistani's letter to Kofi Annan about the just-passed UN resolution on Iraq as follows: "It has reached us that some are attempting to insert a mention of what they call 'The Law for the Administration of the Iraqi State in the Transitional Period' [i.e. the interim constitution] into the new UN Security Council resolution on Iraq-- with the goal of lending it international legitimacy. This "Law", which was legislated by an unelected council in the shadow of Occupation, and with direct influence from it, binds the national parliament, which it has been decided will be elected at the beginning of the new Christian year for the purpose of passing a permanent constitution for Iraq. This matter contravenes the laws, and most children of the Iraqi people reject it. For this reason, any attempt to bestow legitimacy on it through mentioning it in the UN resolution would be considered an action contrary to the will of the Iraqi people and a harbinger of grave consequences."

This is the exact opposite of what the Kurdish leaders wrote to Bush.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

16 Killed, 144 Wounded in Iraq Violence

az-Zaman estimates that 16 persons died in bombings and attacks on Tuesday, and 144 were wounded. Among the dead was a US soldier in Baquba and another in Anbar province. The bombings and attacks took place in Baquba (reported here yesterday), Mosul and Kirkuk. AP's estimates were somewhat lower but still depressing.

Ukrainian troops reported capturing cars full of 40 Iranian irregulars trying to sneak in to Iraq to join the Mahdi Army and defend the holy sites in Najaf and Karbala from the Americans. Ayatollah Jannati had called for such direct action recently. For the moment I am taking this report with a grain of salt, since previous sightings of Iranian infiltrators have often been proven inaccurate later on. It is not as if the Ukrainians can tell Persian from Arabic. But if it is true, it shows how wrong-headed the US was to conduct military operations in downtown Najaf and Karbala, an action guaranteed to stir up Shiites against the US.

Another bombing of the Kirkuk pipeline to Turkey hurt Iraq's oil exports.

Saboteurs are hitting power plants, according to the NYT, in hopes of destabilizing the caretaker government.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Muqtada Emerges Strengthened; Allawi calls for Dialogue

Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder argues from anecdotal evidence in Iraq that Muqtada al-Sadr has emerged from his battle with the Americans stronger than ever, despite the military defeat inflicted on his Mahdi Army.

According to ash-Sharq al-Awsat, Allawi called on Muqtada al-Sadr to resort to "the language of rational, civilizational dialogue." Allawi said on Iraqi television, "The remedy for this problem is concord among the various sectors of the Iraqi people, through a central, civilizational dialogue that depends on respecting one another's opinions. Without that we will return to the days of Saddam, and to days even darker than those." He added that there was a necessity to employ "the language of rational, civilizational dialogue in order to prove victorious. This is what we hope of al-Sadr." He added, "I had hoped that al-Sadr would resort to democratic methods through political work, and that he would mobilize the streets, the people, the channels and points of view that he needs." He added, "We have said repeatedly that this situation is transitional, and will be followed by a phase of elections. At that time, both the people and the street will put in their two bits and will elect the leadership that they want, whether it be al-Sadr or another." He expressed his sorrow that "Affairs have worked out in a way that is not correct and does not serve the iraqi people." He affirmed, "The Iraqi government will act in accordance with laws, and will not permit anything outside the law . . . Our work will concentrate on the need to respec the law and its sovereignty in Iraq . . . We will not permit any militia outside the framework of the state and of official institutions, internal security forces, and national police and army." Allawi called for strong United Nations involvement in Iraq, and for its authorized multinational force to include more Arabs and Muslims.

The "dialogue of civilizations" is a project of Iran's reformist president Mohammad Khatami. Its use shows that Allawi is attempting to put himself in the framework of reformist Shiism so as to engage with Muqtada al-Sadr, whose ideas are closer to those of Iran's hardliners. But in Iraq, it is the hardliners who are at a disadvantage, for the moment, with regard to governmental power.

I don't see how Allawi can expect Muqtada to engage in a rational dialogue if he has been excluded from running for parliament on arbitrary grounds. My common sense rule is that if you can't do something in the United States, Bremer shouldn't be allowed to do it in Iraq. There are no grounds that I can see that would prevent Muqtada from running for office in the US (he hasn't actually been convicted of any felony). If you want to draw the Sadrists into rational dialogue, let them run for office and learn to trade horses.

But it is just possible that Allawi's remarks were intended to signal to Muqtada that if he disbands his militia, he can hope to stand for parliament and perhaps even attain high office. If so, Allawi is already distancing himself from Bremer's decree on Monday making Muqtada ineligible to run for office.

A reader challenged me on the comparison to Lebanon and the idea that the Sadrists would trade horses in parliament. I replied:

The Baghdad government will have an oil income. In the past, East Baghdad has been stiffed and not given its fair share. Everything from sewerage to schools are substandard. Sadrist representatives from East Baghdad
will want to prove they can bring home that patronage. To get it, they will have to persuade Kurds and Sunnis to support them.


Hizbullah trades horses with the Phalangists all the time. Lebanon is a fair comparison to Iraq.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Black Humor

A friend in Baghdad sent me this. It is to laugh, it is to weep.

Why Did the Chicken cross the Road?

Coalition Provisional Authority:

The fact that the Iraqi chicken crossed the road affirmatively demonstrates that decision-making authority has been transferred to the chicken well in advance of the scheduled June 30th transition of power. From now on the chicken is responsible for its own decisions.

Halliburton:

We were asked to help the chicken cross the road. Given the inherent risk of road crossing and the rarity of chickens, this operation will only cost the US government $326,004.

Muqtada al-Sadr:

The chicken was a tool of the evil Coalition and will be killed.

US Army Military Police:

We were directed to prepare the chicken to cross the road. As part of these preparations, individual soldiers ran over the chicken repeatedly and then plucked the chicken. We deeply regret the occurrence of any chicken rights violations.

Peshmerga:

The chicken crossed the road, and will continue to cross the road, to show its independence and to transport the weapons it needs to defend itself. However, in future, to avoid problems, the chicken will be called a duck, and will wear a plastic bill.

1st Cav:

The chicken was not authorized to cross the road without displaying two forms of picture identification. Thus, the chicken was appropriately
detained and searched in accordance with current SOP's. We apologize for any embarrassment to the chicken. As a result of this unfortunate incident, the command has instituted a gender sensitivity training program and all future chicken searches will be conducted by female soldiers.

Al Jazeera:

The chicken was forced to cross the road multiple times at gunpoint by a large group of occupation soldiers, according to eye-witnesses. The chicken was then fired upon intentionally, in yet another example of the abuse of innocent Iraqi chickens.

Blackwater:

We cannot confirm any involvement in the chicken-road-crossing incident.

Translators:

Chicken he cross street because bad she tangle regulation. Future chicken table against my request.

U.S. Marine Corps:

The chicken is dead

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Cole on the Lehrer News Hour

For those who like advanced warning, I will be on the Lehrer News Hour this evening discussion the new UN Resolution on Iraq.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Blast in Baquba Kills at least 5, Wounds 11;
US troops among the wounded

A suspected car bomb detonated at the gates of a US military base near the eastern city of Baquba early Tuesday. It killed one US soldier and four Iraqis, wounded at least 11, and also inflicted wounds on some US troops.

The Arabic press is reporting a string of recent assassinations, including a member of the Sunni Board of Muslim Clerics on Saturday (Shaikh Khalil al-Mashhadani), an ex-Baath official in Kirkuk, and a leader of the Badr Corps paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Shahir Faisal Shahir) in Baghdad. The string of assassinations has contributed to a sense of insecurity and uncertainty in Iraq.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bremer Bars Muqtada from Holding Office

The Guardian reports that US civil administrator Paul Bremer signed an order Monday banning Muqtada al-Sadr and his lieutenants from running for elective office for 3 years because of their membership in an illegal militia. Muqtada and his lieutenants rejected this decree and said that the CPA and the caretaker government had no right to make such decisions.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that Muqtada's representative in Baghdad, Shaikh Abdul Hadi al-Darraji, said Monday, "The Mahdi Army does not recognize any decrees or agreements decided on by the transitional Iraqi government, insofar as we do not recognize it, because it is not an Iraqi institution, but rather was formed by Lakhdar Brahimi, who represented the powers of arrogance and the authority of the Occupation." He said that the Sadrists would never recognize any government until there was an elected one.

Darraji was pessimistic that the current truce in Najaf will hold. So too is the chief of police in that city, Ghalib al-Jaza'iri, who says that if the Mahdi Army in Najaf has not disarmed or departed by Tuesday at midnight, he will gather up 100 policemen and "finish them off."

Bremer's action in excluding the Sadrists from parliament is one final piece of stupidity to cap all the other moronic things he has done in Iraq. The whole beauty of parliamentary governance is that it can hope to draw off the energies of groups like the Sadrists. Look at how parliamentary bargaining moderated the Shiite AMAL party in Lebanon, which had a phase as a terrorist group in the 1980s but gradually outgrew it. AMAL is now a pillar of the Lebanese establishment and a big supporter of a separation of religion and state. The only hope for dealing with the Sadrists nonviolently was to entice them into civil politics, as well. Now that they have been excluded from the political process and made outlaws in the near to medium term, we may expect them to act like outlaws and to be spoilers in the new Iraq.

Mr. Bremer is bequeathing to Iraq a large number of poison pills, which will go on contributing to chaos for years after he retires to a comfortable sinecure in Washington, for all the world like Robert Clive and his bought seat in the British parliament. (Clive was the first British governor of Bengal, from 1765).

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

UN Security Council Vote expected Tuesday;
Sistani Weighs in Against Interim Constitution

The final details of the UN Security Council resolution, on the caretaker government to which the Bush administration maintains it will surrender sovereignty on June 30, have been worked out. The final draft will include a provision for a joint committee of high ranking Iraqis and Americans to make decisions about sensitive military operations in the country. The US had balked at giving control over the US military to the Iraqi government.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani wrote a letter to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the text of which was released on Monday, in which he argued strongly against any mention in the UN resolution of the interim constitution passed by the US-appointed Interim Governing Council in February. As quoted by al-Hayat, Sistani wrote:

"It has reached us that some are attempting to insert a mention of what they call 'The Law for the Administration of the Iraqi State in the Transitional Period' [i.e. the interim constitution] into the new UN Security Council resolution on Iraq-- with the goal of lending it international legitimacy. This "Law", which was legislated by an unelected council in the shadow of Occupation, and with direct influence from it, binds the national parliament, which it has been decided will be elected at the beginning of the new Christian year for the purpose of passing a permanent constitution for Iraq. This matter contravenes the laws, and most children of the Iraqi people reject it. For this reason, any attempt to bestow legitimacy on it through mentioning it in the UN resolution would be considered an action contrary to the will of the Iraqi people and a harbinger of grave consequences."

Sistani's intervention, which appears to have been successful, has infuriated the Kurds, who see the Interim Constitution as their only real guarantee against the return of a heavy-handed Baghdad in their provinces.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Kurds Threaten Boycott

The distribution of posts in the caretaker government disappointed the religious Shiites and the Kurds, both of whom felt stiffed. The Kurds only got one vice presidency and the foreign ministry, along with a couple of other lower-profile positions (Nasrin Barwari stayed on as Minister of Public Works, which is actually potentially an important position). They wanted the presidency or vice presidency, and consider their share of government posts disproportionately small, marking them as second class citizens. The Kurdish leaders are clearly afraid that Iyad Allawi, the new prime minister, will attempt to recentralize the country under Baghdad's direct rule, and that the Americans will back him in it. They are threatening to boycott the January elections if any such moves toward centralization are taken (i.e. if the interim constitution's compromises are broken). The Kurds are also upset that the interim constitution is not mentioned in the UN resolution. As we saw above, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani forbade its mention. The interim constitution guarantees the Kurds that the status quo will not change until a new constitution is approved by an elected parliament, and further gives them a veto over the new constitution. The letter is worth reading:

"Letter from Barzani and Talabani to President Bush

04 June 2004
KurdishMedia.com
June 1, 2004

His Excellency President George W. Bush
President of the United States of America
The White House
Washington, D.C.

Dear Mr. President:

We are writing this letter to your Excellency to present our views and concerns on the new Iraqi Interim Government, the Kurdish position and the future of the country.

America has no better friend than the people of Iraqi Kurdistan. A year ago, our peshmerga forces fought side by side with the American forces for the liberation of Iraq, taking more casualties than any other US ally. Today, Kurdistan remains the only secure and stable part of Iraq. We note that, in contrast to the Arab areas of Iraq, no coalition soldier has been killed in the area controlled by the Kurdistan Regional Government.

The people of Kurdistan continue to embrace American values, to welcome US troops, and to support your program for the liberation of Iraq. Our Kurdistan Regional Government has given up many of its current freedoms in the interest of helping your administering authorities reach compromises with other Iraqis. We were therefore bitterly disappointed when your special representative advised us that a Kurd could be neither Prime Minister nor President of Iraq. We were told that these positions must go to a Shiite Arab and Sunni Arab respectively.

Iraq is a country of two main nationalities, Arabs and Kurds. It seems reasonable that the Arabs might get one of the top jobs (of their choice) but then the other should go to a Kurd.

We also believe the decision to use sectarian quotas for the top two jobs directly contradicts the Coalition’s repeatedly stated position that democratic Iraq’s government should not be based on ethnic or religious criteria, a position the US wrote into the Transitional Administrative Law.

The people of Kurdistan will no longer accept second-class citizenship in Iraq. In Saddam’s time and before, Kurds were frequently given the Vice President or deputy positions, which were window dressing without power. We had hoped the new Iraq would be different for the Kurdish people.

Ever since liberation, we have detected a bias against Kurdistan from the American authorities for reasons that we cannot comprehend. At the outset of the occupation, the coalition seized the oil-for-food revenues that had been specifically earmarked for Kurdistan and redistributed them to the rest of Iraq--in spite of the fact that Kurdistan received far less of these revenues per capita than other Iraqis and notwithstanding the fact that our region was the one most destroyed by Saddam Hussein. CPA actively discouraged the equality of the Kurdish and Arabic languages, and repeatedly tried to “derecognize’ the Kurdistan Regional Government (Iraq’s only elected government ever) in favor of a system based on Saddam’s 18 governorates. US officials have demeaned the peshmerga, calling this disciplined military force that was America’s battlefield comrade in arms, “militia”. In official statements, it is rare for the US government or the CPA even to refer to Kurdistan or the Kurdish people.

We will be loyal friends to America even if our support is not always reciprocated. Our fate is too closely linked to your fortunes in Iraq. If the forces of [un?]freedom prevail elsewhere in Iraq, we know that, because of our alliance with the United States, we will be marked for vengeance. We do ask for some specific reassurance for this transitional period so as to enable us to participate more fully in the interim government. Specifically, we ask that:

The Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) be incorporated into the new UN Security Council Resolution or otherwise recognized as law binding on the transitional government, both before and after elections. If the TAL is abrogated, the Kurdistan Regional Government will have no choice but to refrain from participating in the central government and its institutions, not to take part in the national elections, and to bar representatives of the central Government from Kurdistan.

The United States commit to protect the people and government of Kurdistan in the event insurrection and disorder lead to a withdrawal from the rest of Iraq.

The Coalition carry through on commitments to reverse the Arabization of Kurdish lands and move forward to settle the status of Kirkuk in accordance with the wishes of its people, excluding settlers but including those ethnically cleansed by Saddam Hussein.

The oil-for-food revenues unfairly taken from Kurdistan last year be restored in the entirety, and that Kurdistan receive its per capita share of the $19 billion in reconstruction assistance appropriated by the Congress.

The United States support our plans to own and manage Kurdistan’s natural resources, and in particular our efforts to develop new petroleum resources in the Kurdistan Region, where the previous regime sought to block all exploration and development that might benefit the Kurdistan people.

The United States open a consulate in Irbil, and that it encourage other coalition partners to the same. For the people of Kurdistan, it is vital that we maintain our direct links to the outside world and not solely dependant on a Baghdad where we are not considered fully equal citizens.

The United States and the United Nations state clearly that the use of ethnic and confessional criteria for the selections of the interim government does not set a precedent for a future Iraqi government, and that Kurds are eligible for the posts of Prime Minister and President.

If ethnic criteria are to be used to exclude Kurds from the top two positions in the interim government, we think it fair that Kurdistan be compensated with a disproportionate share of relevant ministries in the interim government.

Mr. President, we know that these are difficult days for all of us who believe the cause of Iraq’s freedom was worth fighting for. The Kurdish people continue to admire your confident leadership, your vision of a free Iraq, and your personal courage. We are certain that you will agree that Kurdistan should not be penalized for its friendship and support for the United States.

Sincerely yours,

Masoud Barzani
Kurdistan Democratic Party

Jalal Talabani
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan"

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Dissolution of Militias Announced

Transitional PM Iyad Allawi announced Monday that nine militias would be dissolved. Their members would receive pensions or would be merged into the police or new Iraqi military. This announcement should be seen as a pious hope rather than as a political reality. I can't say how many times I have reported here plans for the dissolution of the militias. The article I am linking to even openly acknowledges that the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq is not completely on board with this plan yet. I am sure there are wrinkles with regard to the Kurdish peshmerga, as well. The bottom line is that until a new Iraqi military can be reconstituted, the militias will be a reality on the ground.

The article also reports a mosque explosion in Kufa, apparently the result of Mahdi Army stockpiles accidentally exploding.
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Bush in Italy

A reader writes from Italy:

"The Italian administration's scare tactics about the June 4 anti-Bush demonstrations reached the US media. All the world believed them. The center-left political leaders decided not to participate and abandon the scene to the crazies. Roman residents stayed home: subway traffic was down 60%, car traffic was so light that it seemed like a Sunday in August, parking was available because everyone moved their cars far from the parade route. They didn't even bother to hang their peace flags from their windows. Some store owners closed.

Bush's cortege probably didn't see a single Roman resident the whole day, just official participants.

It would have been a good day for a jail break or a bank robbery, because much of the available law enforcement resources in the country were in Rome.

According to the authorities, there were 6-7000 demonstrators; according to the organizers, about 200,000. Not more than a few dozen crazies, who of course got most of the media attention. The whole scene was quite peaceful, which is why you probably didn't see anything at all on English-language media. The few provocative acts got a measured and professional response from the police.

The government called the demonstration a flop. The opposition, that was elsewhere, tried to take credit for its obvious success.

Il Manifesto outright accused Berlusca of wishing for violent demonstrators. Many people suspect that some of the trouble in Genova was deliberately provoked by phony crazies working for the police. So in one sense it was a flop, because Berlusca didn't get the urban warfare that he warned about that would have discredited the entire opposition."

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraqi Electoral Commission Announced

Nathan J. Brown of George Washington University writes:

"On 31 May, Bremer signed an order creating an Iraqi electoral commission. The order was not published until today, and then only in English.

The electoral commission order gas several interesting features:

It is based very much on the the interim constitution (TAL), which I therefore assume is not being quietly buried. Unlike many of Bremer’s orders, it is explicitly for the transitional period. The body does not look like it is designed to survive past 2006, but it seems designed to oversee all elections until then (i.e. not merely the election of the Assembly in December/January, but also the referendum over the constitution and the first elections held under the permanent constitution, I think).

Oddly, there seems to be some sloppiness in drafting. The “definitions” section explains what references to the elections and the parties laws mean—but there are no such references to either of these laws in the body of the law. This may suggest, however, that the CPA is intending to rush out such laws. At least it was probably planning to do so when part of the law was drafted. If it does in fact issue such laws, they may be regarded as having questionable legitimacy both domestically and internationally.

The omission of a party law is problematic given the fact that the electoral commission is granted the authority to oversee the registration of parties. Without a law (or perhaps only with the Ba`thist-era law), it is not clear how this function will be carried out.

The omission of an electoral law is also problematic. Unless the CPA issues one in the next three weeks, the legislative framework will have to be issued by the interim government (or, less plausibly, by the electoral commission). It is not clear whether either body has the authority to issue laws, and Sistani and others have made quite clear that they don’t want the interim government to be issuing laws that have any permanent effect. American officials have used more qualified wording to the same effect. So that may mean that the electoral framework is likely to be a series of “regulations” rather than laws. Such a step would raise some legal difficulties since a regulation cannot supersede a law, and there are Ba`thist-era laws on the books in this area.

Some of this confusion over the legislative authority of the interim government may be clarified in the UN Security Council resolution (though I doubt it, since earlier drafts said nothing on the subject of legislation). It might also be clarified by the annex to the TAL that was supposed to govern the interim period. But I’m not sure that the annex—referred to in the TAL and promised since last March—is getting anywhere. There was some work done on a draft, but that was done by the IGC and CPA—with the dissolution of the IGC, it’s not clear that anybody is working on this (especially since the IGC member taking the lead on the annex was apparently Adnan Pachachi).

While the whole matter of the legislative basis for elections is very murky, as I read it Perelli is taking the lead here in designing a system. But it’s unclear to me how her recommendations will be legally enacted. The question may not be that important since nobody has questioned her actions thus far. But if she comes up with a plan that somebody in the interim government does not like, this could get very complicated.

The Administrator—that is, Bremer—has an extensive appointment role on the electoral commission. But it was Perelli who announced the members last week. It is not clear if Bremer formally enacted her recommendations or not. There are also roles for the UN and—very oddly—the IGC. I think that means that the CPA did NOT expect the IGC to issolve itself with such alacrity. Bremer signed the order the day prior to the dissolution of the IGC. Presumably the required consultations with the IGC had already been completed, but that means they were done prior to the issuance of Bremer’s order requiring them.

Bremer also has issued a series of enactments on some other subjects—one allows him to appoint a chief advisor to the National Assembly of Iraq. What Assembly, you may ask? The one that doesn’t exist yet—not the interim body that Ibrahimi proposed, but the provisional parliament/constituent assembly. It may make sense to set up an office to help make preparations for the Assembly, but I would guess that the intent is to have an American-appointed advisor in place so that the US can assist in setting up the administrative and research arms of the Assembly.

Finally, Bremer also issued a money-laundering law with a significant anti-terrorism component.

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

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

28 Killed, 88 Wounded in Iraq on Sunday

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat estimates that bombings, drive-by shootings and other acts of guerrilla violence took 28 lives in Iraq on this weekend, and left more than 88 wounded.

A car bomb outside a US base killed nine Iraqis and wounded 30; 3 US troops were among the wounded. Mahdi Army insurgents in East Baghdad attacked police stations on Sunday. In one instance they took the station, commanded the police to depart, and then planted explosions and blew the station up. This tactic was a new development in the 'war of the police stations' that has been being fought for the past two months.

13 were killed and 10 wounded in a car bomb blast at a police station at Musayyab on Saturday. Guerrillas using explosives and small arms fire virtually destroyed the police station.

There were also explosions near Kirkuk, in Taji, and in Kut (the latter accidental).

Also, four Blackwell USA private security guards were killed in an attack near the airport by guerrillas. Threse security guards got away.

Because the security guards, who are most often former soldiers, are dressed in civilian clothing and drive civilian vehicles, and because the guerrillas consider them prime targets, they have come to endanger a lot of ordinary Westerners in Iraq. Guerrillas often attack the latter thinking they are the former. They whole idea of using hundreds or thousands of private security guards (some would say mercenaries) in Iraq should be rethought.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iranian Hardliners and Iraq

Informal Irainian volunteers have come forward in the thousands for suicide bombings against the Americans in Iraq. They say, however,that they await the command of Supreme Jrisprudent Ali Khamenei. Ayatollah Jannati had also preached strongly against the US and the UK last Friday. He is not in the exective really and is not supported in these sentiments by the elected president, Khatami. Now on Monday news comes that Iran may recognize the new Iraqi government. It is as though the place suffers from multiple personality disorder. (Even worse than that of the Bush administration).
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Reagan's Passing

I did not say anything yesterday about Ronald Reagan's death. The day a person dies he has a right to be left alone.

But yesterday is now history, and Reagan's legacy should not pass without comment.

Reagan had an ability to project a kindly image, and was well liked personally by virtually everyone who knew him, apparently. But it always struck me that he was a mean man. I remember learning, in the late 1960s, of the impact Michael Harrington's The Other America had had on Johnson's War on Poverty. Harrington demonstrated that in the early 1960s there was still hunger in places like Appalachia, deriving from poverty. It was hard for middle class Americans to believe, and Lyndon Johnson, who represented many poor people himself, was galvanized to take action.

I remember seeing a tape of Reagan speaking in California from that era. He said that he had heard that some asserted there was hunger in America. He said it sarcastically. He said, "Sure there is; they're dieting!" or words to that effect. This handsome Hollywood millionnaire making fun of people so poor they sometimes went to bed hungry seemed to me monstrous. I remember his wealthy audience of suburbanites going wild with laughter and applause. I am still not entirely sure what was going on there. Did they think Harrington's and similar studies were lies? Did they blame the poor for being poor, and resent demands on them in the form of a few tax dollars, to address their hunger?

Then when he was president, at one point Reagan tried to cut federal funding for school lunches for the poor. He tried to have ketchup reclassified as a vegetable to save money. Senator Heinz gave a speech against this move. He said that ketchup is a condiment, not a vegetable, and that he should know.

The meanness was reflected, as many readers have noted, in Reagan's "blame the victim" approach to the AIDS crisis. His inability to come to terms with the horrible human tragedy here, or with the emerging science on it, made his health policies ineffective and even destructive.

Reagan's mania to abolish social security was of a piece with this kind of sentiment. In the early 20th century, the old were the poorest sector of the American population. The horrors of old age--increasing sickness, loss of faculties, marginalization and ultimately death--were in that era accompanied by fear of severe poverty. Social security turned that around. The elderly are no longer generally poverty-stricken. The government can do something significant to improve people's lives. Reagan, philosophically speaking, hated the idea of state-directed redistribution of societal wealth. (His practical policies often resulted in such redistribution de facto, usually that of tossing money to the already wealthy). So he wanted to abolish social security and throw us all back into poverty in old age.

Reagan hated any social arrangement that empowered the poor and the weak. He was a hired gun for big corporations in the late 1950s, when he went around arguing against unionization. Among his achievements in office was to break the air traffic controllers' union. It was not important in and of itself, but it was a symbol of his determination that the powerless would not be allowed to organize to get a better deal. He ruined a lot of lives. I doubt he made us safer in the air.

Reagan hated environmentalism. His administration was not so mendacious as to deny the problems of increased ultraviolet radition (from a depleted ozone layer) and global warming. His government suggested people wear sunglasses and hats in response. At one point Reagan suggested that trees cause pollution. He was not completely wrong (natural processes can cause pollution), but his purpose in making the statement seems to have been that we should therefore just accept lung cancer from bad city air, which was caused by automobiles and industry, not by trees.

In foreign policy, Reagan abandoned containment of the Soviet Union as a goal and adopted a policy of active roll-back. Since the Soviet Union was already on its last legs and was not a system that could have survived long, Reagan's global aggressiveness was simply unnecessary. The argument that Reagan's increases in military funding bankrupted the Soviets by forcing them to try to keep up is simply wrong. Soviet defense spending was flat in the 1980s.

Reagan's aggression led him to shape our world in most unfortunate ways. Although it would be an exaggeration to say that Ronald Reagan created al-Qaeda, it would not be a vast exaggeration. The Carter administration began the policy of supporting the radical Muslim holy warriors in Afghanistan who were waging an insurgency against the Soviets after their invasion of that country. But Carter only threw a few tens of millions of dollars at them. By the mid-1980s, Reagan was giving the holy warriors half a billion dollars a year. His officials strong-armed the Saudis into matching the US contribution, so that Saudi Intelligence chief Faisal al-Turki turned to Usamah Bin Laden to funnel the money to the Afghans. This sort of thing was certainly done in coordination with the Reagan administration. Even the Pakistanis thought that Reagan was a wild man, and balked at giving the holy warriors ever more powerful weapons. Reagan sent Orrin Hatch to Beijing to try to talk the Chinese into pressuring the Pakistanis to allow the holy warriors to receive stingers and other sophisticated ordnance. The Pakistanis ultimately relented, even though they knew there was a severe danger that the holy warriors would eventually morph into a security threat in their own right.

Reagan's officials so hated the Sandinista populists in Nicaragua that they shredded the constitution. Congress cut off money for the rightwing death squads fighting the Sandinistas. Reagan's people therefore needed funds to continue to run the rightwing insurgency. They came up with a complicated plan of stealing Pentagon equipment, shipping it to Khomeini in Iran, illegally taking payment from Iran for the weaponry, and then giving the money to the rightwing guerrillas in Central America. At the same time, they pressured Khomeini to get US hostages in Lebanon, taken by radical Shiites there, released. It was a criminal cartel inside the US government, and Reagan allowed it, either through collusion or inattention. It is not a shining legacy, to have helped Khomeini and then used the money he gave them to support highly unsavory forces in Central America. (Some of those forces were involved after all in killing leftwing nuns).

Although Reagan's people were willing to shore up Iranian defenses during the Iran-Iraq War, so as to prevent a total Iraqi victory, they also wanted to stop Iran from taking over Iraq. They therefore winked at Saddam's use of chemical weapons. Reagan's secretary of state, George Schultz, sent Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad twice, the second time with an explicit secret message that the US did not really mind if Saddam gassed the Iranian troops, whatever it said publicly.

I only saw Reagan once in person. I was invited to a State Department conference on religious freedom, I think in 1986. It was presided over by Elliot Abrams, whom I met then for the first time. We were taken to hear Reagan speak on religious freedom. It was a cause I could support, but I came away strangely dissatisfied. I had a sense that "religious freedom" was being used as a stick to beat those regimes the Reagan administration did not like. It wasn't as though the plight of the Moro Muslims in the Philippines was foremost on the agenda (come to think of it, perhaps no Muslims or Muslim groups were involved in the conference).

Reagan's policies thus bequeathed to us the major problems we now have in the world, including a militant Islamist International whose skills were honed in Afghanistan with Reagan's blessing and monetary support; and a proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, which the Reagan administration in some cases actually encouraged behind the scenes for short-term policy reasons. His aggressive foreign policy orientation has been revived and expanded, making the US into a neocolonial power in the Middle East. Reagan's gutting of the unions and attempt to remove social supports for the poor and the middle class has contributed to the creation of an America where most people barely get by while government programs that could help create wealth are destroyed.

Reagan's later life was debilitated by Alzheimer's. I suppose he may already have had some symptoms while president, which might explain some of his memory lapses and odd statements, and occasional public lapses into woolly-mindedness. Ironically, Alzheimer's could be cured potentially by stem cell research. In the United States, where superstition reigns over reason, the religious Right that Reagan cultivated has put severe limits on such research. His best legacy may be Nancy Reagan's argument that those limitations should be removed in his memory. There are 4 million Alzheimers sufferers in the US, and 50% of persons living beyond the age of 85 develop it. There are going to be a lot of such persons among the Baby Boomers. By reversing Reaganism, we may be able to avoid his fate.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sistani Meets Muqtada; Ceasefire Taking Hold

Fighting continued Saturday in East Baghdad. A roadside bomb killed two US soldiers and wounded two others. Mahdi Army militiamen attacked a police station and the police were supported by US troops in returning fire. They killed at least one militiaman.

In contrast, Najaf began returning to normal on Saturday, as Mahdi Army militiamen made themselve scarce except at the shrine of Imam Ali. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani met with Muqtada al-Sadr and commended him for his cooperation in ending the crisis, which had plunged the Shiite shrine cities into fierce combat with the American military. Sistani had earlier declined to meet Muqtada, and the two had earlier made no secret of their disdain for one another. Reuters speculates that the meeting demonstrates Muqtada's substantial increase in stature as a result of the American attempt to arrest him.

The US military announced that the Mahdi Army had been defeated. While this assertion is technically true, it is not an accurate assessment of the situation. The Mahdi Army is just Shiite slum boys with guns. They may have melted away in the face of US firepower, but they aren't really gone. They just went home and stored their guns in the basement. They could come back out at any moment, which is a problem for the caretaker government.

Al-Hayat says that there may be a loophole in Iraqi law that will permit the caretaker government to back off trying to arrest Muqtada. Other Iraqi sources suggest that Mahdi Army fighters will be integrated into the police and army and an attempt will be made to convince the Sadrists to become an ordinary political party.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi is talking seriously about attempting to bring back elements of the Baath Army, saying that dissolving it was a huge error.


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5 US Troops Killed, 5 wounded
New Accord in Najaf

Five US troops were killed and five wounded on Friday while patrolling near East Baghdad (Sadr City) when their humvees were rocketed. It seems likely that they were targeted by the Mahdi Army, which US troops have been fighting for the past two months.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat: A new accord was accepted by the US military in Najaf on Friday, which allows the Iraqi police to take over security duties there and in Kufa. In return, the Mahdi Army is supposed to stop carrying arms publicly within two days. A similar deal was announced last weekend but went nowhere. The US military and the Mahdi Army has been engaging in heavy firefights in Kufa all this past week during the so-called truce.

Shaikh Jabir al-Khafaji stood in for Muqtada al-Sadr in reading his Friday sermon at the mosque in Kufa. Muqtada said, "I announce that I wash my hands of this government until the Judgment Day, since the people reject it." He added, "It is necessary that our governments be elected in accordance with Islamic law. The Iraqi people will never accept a government appointed on behalf of an Occupation Authority. I do not imagine that any rational person or any high religious authority will accept such an appointment." The Washington Post quoted Muqtada's statement as adding, "There is no freedom or democracy without independence."

In Sadr City at the al-Hikmat Mosque, Shaikh Nasir al-Sa'idi preached to hundreds of worshippers, saying: "The media are preoccupied with the surrender of the keys of authority to the Iraqi government. But the reality is that this government was appointed, not elected. It is a mere copy of the Interim Governing Council with a new title." He added, "It is a government that does not represent any of the holy warriors who struggled in Iraq. We find no names in it from the ranks of the holy warriors." In response to criticisms that have been made of the Mahdi Army, he said, "The Mahdi Army is lifting up the heads of the Shiites, and is defending the holy sites, as well as land and honor. But we find unfortunately that there are those who speak of it in this or that way. But they prefer to remain hidden and they fear death. We announce that we are innocent of terrorism and the terrorists. When the holy sites and red lines are violated, are we the terrorists or are the aggressors terrorists?" The WP quotes him as saying, as well: "If the new government wants to show its good intentions, it should demand [that the] occupation . . . pull out from Iraq; this is the demand of all Iraqis . . . The case is not a Sadr case, or a Mahdi Army case. It is a general case. Defense does not need a fatwa. The assignment is general. We must fight."

In Najaf, according to al-Hayat, Shaikh Sadr al-Din al-Qubanji attempted to preach the Friday prayers sermon at the mosque attached to the shrine of Ali. Al-Qubanji, a member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, has been critical of Muqtada. On Friday, he launched an attack on the Shiite authorities in Iran for having remained silent about Muqtada's activities. At that point an uproar erupted in the mosque, with the Sadrists bitterly objecting, and al-Qubanji was forced to get down from the pulpit without finishing.

The "Shiite House," or the collectivity of Shiite tendencies and political personalities, has been negotiating in Najaf with Muqtada, including Ahmad Chalabi. They called on Najaf governor Adnan al-Dhurufi to make Najaf police available to police the city in the stead of militiamen. (This call ignores that of 4000 security and police forces in Najaf, all but 100 went over to Muqtada when the insurrection began in early April.) In a statement it also called on the American Occupation Forcs to cease invading homes and imprisoning persons in Najaf and Kufa.

Meanwhile, UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi said Friday that he thought the Sadrists and other groups that oppose the US occupation should be allowed to participate in the advisory assembly to be called in July.

Despite the poor security conditions, Dr. Mahdi Hafidh, the minister of planning, told ash-Sharq al-Awsat Friday that unemployment had fallen to 28% from highs last year after the fall of the regime of 50-60%. He said that inflation had also fallen, and that the value of the dinar had risen on expectations that the caretaker government can lead the country to turn a corner.

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Al-Haeri's Conditions

ash-Sharq al-Awsat: Old-time al-Da`wa leader in exile, Ayatollah Kadhim al-Haeri, issued a statement Friday from Qom, Iran, on the caretaker government in Iraq. He said there were 6 things it needed to do to demonstrate its patriotic credentials and gain acceptance. These were

1. To recover complete sovereignty that is unconstrained and the return of Iraqi wealth to the country from any other hands.

2. Safeguarding the unity of Iraq's land and people

3. The government must enroll itself in providing security and opportunities for a good life to the people.

4. It must defend general liberties, within the limits set by divine law, and must offer all citizens the opportunity to participate in the political process.

5. It must immediately conduct a census, in order to put an end to the disputes over the relative strength of the ehtnicities that make up united Iraq.

6. It must create an atmosphere conducive to general elections and give all citizens equally the opportunity to participate in shaping their future.

Al-Haeri is a Khomeinist who attempted to dissolve the al-Da`wa Party into Khomeini's Party of God, and he has said numerous extremist things in the past year. He initially authorized Muqtada al-Sadr to be his representative in Iraq, but the two are said to have a cooler relationship now. His stated concern for democracy in this statement is disingenuous, since what he means by "within the limits of the divine law" is that a top cleric like himself should actually rule, and act as a brake on democracy, as in Iran.
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The situation in Iraq acutely threatens Israeli security

From Friday's Daily Star

By Juan Cole

Friday, June 04, 2004

As the American public gradually wearies of the Iraq crisis, some have begun worrying that the war could blow back on the US by creating the conditions for anti-American terrorism. Israel, however, is much closer to Iraq and is likely to suffer from Iraqi instability much more acutely than will the United States. Ironically, among the strongest proponents of war in Iraq were Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his neoconservative supporters in the US. Have they, however, actually weakened Israeli security?

The biggest threat Israel faces is not from conventional armies but from the asymmetrical tactics of Palestinian national liberation movements. The derailing of the Oslo peace process by the hard-line policies of Sharon and the Palestinian intifada has encouraged suicide bombings. This, in turn, has discouraged international investment in Israel and has made it less likely that immigrants to the country will actually remain there.

Although Israel withdrew from Lebanese territory in May 2000, the radical Lebanese Shiite party, Hizbullah, has not been mollified. It is estimated to have some 5,000 armed fighters, and they have pursued attacks against Israeli forces to compel them to withdraw from the Shebaa Farms, a sliver of Syrian territory that Israel annexed after the 1967 war.

Any thorough assessment of the impact of the Iraq war and its aftermath on Israel's security environment must, therefore, closely examine its likely effect on the conduct of asymmetrical warfare. Although it is often alleged (without much evidence) that Saddam Hussein gave money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers and so encouraged asymmetrical warfare, it is not clear that he actually posed a danger to Israel. The Palestinians who have been willing to kill themselves to end the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank were not driven by economic considerations.

Saddam never did anything practical to help the Palestinians. At some points, as in the late 1980s, he reportedly made behind-the-scenes overtures to the Israelis to arrive at some sort of a deal. He did not allow Palestinian radicals to launch operations against Israel from Iraq. By the late 1990s, Iraq had no nuclear or biological weapons program, and had destroyed its chemical weapons stockpiles. Its ramshackle army had virtually collapsed before the American invasion in 2003.

If it is hard to see how Baathist Iraq posed any real threat to Israel, it is not so difficult to see a menace in the current instability. The bungling of post-war Iraq by the Bush administration created a weak and failed state. Armed militias, many staffed by former Iraqi military men with substantial training and experience, have proliferated. The US chose to ally itself with such groups as the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, whose 15,000-strong Badr Corps paramilitary was trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

Anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian feeling is strong among several major Iraqi ideological groups and currents. The more radical Shiites, who generally follow the theocratic notions of Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, routinely chant and demonstrate against Israel. They vehemently protested the Israeli assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the leader of Hamas, last March. Worse for Israel, the assassination drew a denunciation even from the moderate and cautious Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who wields enormous moral authority over Iraqi Shiites.

These Shiite movements had been suppressed by Saddam Hussein's regime, but have now organized and armed themselves. They have also reestablished their historical links with Lebanese and Iranian Shiites. It is inevitable that most Iraqi Shiites will side with their Hizbullah coreligionists against Israel, and it seems likely that Iraqi Shiites will get rich enough from Iraqi petroleum sales in the future that they will be in a good position to bankroll Lebanese Shiite radicals.

Sunni Arab fundamentalists deeply sympathize with the Palestinians and with Hamas, and those in Iraq have deep historical inks with fundamentalists in Jordan and Palestine. Iraqi cities such as Fallujah and Ramadi were on the truck route from Amman to Baghdad, and so came under the influence of the Salafi movement, which is popular in Jordan. Secular Arab nationalist groups also universally sympathize with the Palestinians, and those in post-Saddam Iraq are no exception.

Whereas Saddam Hussein's dictatorship ensured that such populist currents were kept firmly under control, they are now free to organize. An Iraq in which armed fundamentalist and nationalist militias proliferate is inevitably a security worry for Israel. If even a modicum of normality and security can be returned to Iraq, its citizens will be able to benefit from the country's petroleum reserves. That private wealth can easily be funneled into aid for the Palestinians and for Lebanese Shiites.

Israel's security interests are best served by peace with its neighbors, which can only be achieved by trading land for peace with the Palestinians. Ariel Sharon's aggressive near annexation of almost half of the occupied West Bank and his indefinite postponement of any Palestinian state have created unprecedented rage and violence. The anger has spread throughout the Muslim world, including Iraq. The promotion by the pro-Zionist right of twin occupations - in the West Bank and in Iraq - has profoundly weakened, not strengthened, Israeli security.


Juan Cole (www.juancole.com) is a professor of modern Middle East history at the University of Michigan and author of "Sacred Space and Holy War" (I.B. Tauris, 2002). THE DAILY STAR publishes this commentary in agreement with Agence Global


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Iran Leader Slams Caretaker Government in iraq

Iran's supreme jurisprudent, Ali Khamenei, spoke out Thursday against the new Iraqi government, saying that it was filled with puppets of the Americans, who remained in charge. He said that American home invasions and other irregularities only came about because the Shiite learned men had fallen silent. He thus implicitly challenged grand ayatollah Ali Sistani. Sistani rejects clerical activism except in what he calls "social issues," as opposed to "national" or "political issues." In short, he rejects Khomeinism. So far the Iranians have been tacitly backing Sistani, but that could change, and they have enormous resources to funnel to his opponents among the more radical clerics.
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Iraq as failed State

The Fund for Peace has an important new study on Iraq that warns it has become a failed state. . Newsday says:

' Dr. Pauline H. Baker, author of the report, describes a failed state syndrome as a condition in which a number of trends reinforce each other to produce spiraling conflict that the country has little or no independent capacity to stop. The report concludes that, a year after the invasion, Iraq is as shattered as it was the day that Saddam Hussein was overthrown, the main difference being that organized militias and terrorist groups have gained a foothold they did not have before.

"We have to get the facts straight before we can get the policy straight," said Dr. Baker. "Currently, there are three major fictions that are being used to describe the transition in Iraq. The first is analytical - that Iraq could become a failed state, when, in fact, it already has failed. The second is legal - that the occupation will end on June 30, when, in fact, the occupation will end when foreign troops are withdrawn and capable Iraqi security forces take over. And the third is political - that after June 30, the sovereign government of Iraq and the people will be allied with the United States. In fact, the interim government will not have full sovereignty and the people are increasingly fearful and resentful of the U.S. presence." '

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Clancy on Wolfowitz

I just heard Tom Clancy on Deborah Norville's show. She asked him about some persons he had met in the Defense Department. When she brought up Paul Wolfowitz, and asked his impression, Clancy said "Is he working for our side?" Clancy said he was involved in a red team exercise in the Pentagon and Wolfowitz came in a briefed them, and he just did not seem to Clancy as though he were "working for our side."

I'm not entirely sure what Clancy means by this. He is no liberal, though, so it is interesting that he says it.
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Sistani's Fatwa on the New Government

Fatwa of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani on the New Government
trans. J. Cole

"In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.

From the office of his excellency Grand Ayatollah Sistani, may God extend his shadow.

Peace be upon you, and the mercy and blessings of God.

Many of the believers have asked about his position toward the new Iraqi government, which was constituted yesterday through the efforts of Mr. Lakhdar Brahimi, the envoy of the secretary general of the United Nations:

---

In His Name, May He be exalted.

His excellency the Sayyid had previously and repeatedly affirmed the necessity for the Iraqi government to possess a sovereignty that derives from free and honest elections in which the children of the Iraqi people participate in a general way.

But, the option of holding [early] elections was rejected, for many well known reasons--procrastination and delay, opposition and intimidation. The time fled, and the appointed date of 30 June approached, on which it was supposed that Iraqis would regain sovereignty over their country.

Thus, the process has become one of appointment, in order to form a new government, without achieving the legitimacy of having been elected. Moreover, it does not represent all slices of Iraqi society and all political forces in an appropriate way.

Even so, if it is to be hoped that this government will establish its worthiness and probity and its unwavering determination to shoulder the immense burdens now facing it, it must:

1. Obtain a clear resolution from the United Nations Security Council on the return of complete sovereignty over their country to the Iraqis, unconstrained in any regard, whether political, economic, military, or security-related. Every effort must be made to efface all signs of occupation in every way.

2. Provision of security in every part of the country and putting an end to organized criminal activities, as well as all criminal actions.

3. Provision of public services to the citizens and reducing the effort necessary for them to pursue their everyday lives.

4. First-rate preparation for general elections, and keeping to the appointed date, which is at the beginning of the coming new year according to the Christian calendar, so that a national assembly can be formed that is not bound by any of the decisions issued in the shadow of the Occupation, including what they call the Law for the Administration of the Transitional State [i.e. the Interim Constitution].

The new government will never obtain popular acceptance save if it demonstrates through actual and practical steps that it is striving with earnestness and sincerity to fulfill the above mission. May God enable all to do as He wills and as pleases Him.

14 Rabi II, 1425
The Office of Sayyid Sistani"

There is now a printed text on the Web at Karbala News, which enabled me to make some final revisions at 2:43 pm EST.


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Tenet Resigns

I have no inside sources on why George Tenet just resigned as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. But I can think of three reasons for which he ought to have resigned.

First, it was announced on Wednesday that President George W. Bush had retained counsel with regard to the Plame investigation. Last summer someone in the White House or close to it leaked to the press that Valerie Plame was a secret operative for the CIA, specializing in countering proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

This leak aimed at punishing her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, for having gone public about his mission to Niger in spring of 2002, in which he disproved the story that Iraq tried to buy yellowcake uranium from that country. Despite Wilson's report to the CIA, requested by VP Dick Cheney, and against Tenet's strong advice, Bush put the allegation into his 2003 State of the Union address.

Tenet should have resigned when Bush insisted on trumpeting an Iraqi nuclear weapons program at a time when Tenet was denying there was any such thing. (Tenet did think Iraq had chemical and biological programs, about which he was wrong). The nuclear claim helped convince the country to go to war. It was false. Tenet knew it was false. He told Bush that. Bush either knew it was false and said it anyway, or he disbelieved Tenet. Either thing should have produced Tenet's resignation.

That Bush retained counsel suggests that he intends to continue to cover for the slime who outed Plame, thereby endangering the lives of dozens of key contacts in the Third World who had been seen hanging out with her over the years when she had a cover as an energy consultant. Bush can produce the perpetrator if he wants, but has decided not to.

So Tenet should resign over that.

Then, someone leaked to Ahmad Chalabi sensitive details of the the cryptography operations of US intelligence against Iran. The leaker is probably a neocon with Defense Department links. Bush could also produce this person if he wanted to. He has not.

So Tenet should resign over Bush's shocking disregard for national security.

Note that Plame's portfolio was fighting the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Someone in Bush's circle set that effort back years by outing her. And note that having broken Iran's code, the US was in a better position to monitor any Iranian efforts to develop WMD. Now that capability has been lost.

With all this brouhaha about fighting weapons of mass destruction proliferation, the Bush administration has actually set back those efforts horribly, for the purposes of petty political gain. It took us to war in Iraq on a WMD pretext. But that turns out to have been a scam on someone's part, and we are much less safe now than before.


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Shiites Disgruntled with Caretaker Government

James Drummond reports for the Financial Times that al-Da`wa and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) have expressed dissatisfaction at how the caretaker government was formed. These two major Shiite political groupings just got one post each. Ibrahim Jaafari of al-Da`wa is one of two vice presidents, and SCIRI's Adil Abdul Mahdi is Minister of Finance. An al-Da`wa spokesman had said on Tuesday that the government was formed "behind closed doors."

Still, Drummond says that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani had been given a veto over candidates for prime minister, and had ok'd the list, which included Iyad Allawi (a secular ex-Baathist of Shiite background).
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14 Dead in Iraq; More Fighting between Sadrists and US Troops;

Between a huge car bomb in Adhamiyah in Baghdad (which killed 4 and wounded many others) and new clashes with US troops, some 14 Iraqis died in violence on Wednesday. Guerillas also targetting a big US military arms depot in Kirkuk, setting off a huge set of explosions.

Az-Zaman: Fighting broke out again on Wednesday between the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr and US troops on a number of fronts in the Shiite south. There were clashes in Kufa when US armored vehicles entered the city from Najaf. The Mahdi Army militiamen opened fire on them. There did not appear to be any casualties in this battle.

There was also fighting in East Baghdad, as US armored vehicles rolled into that area. Two Mahdi Army militiamen were killed in these clashes. Shaikh Kadhim Jamal said, "Two of our militia fighters from the Mahdi Army were killed in the course of clashes in Sadr City . . . The reason for the clashes was that a number of US military vehicles entered the city, which was viewed as extremely offensive by the inhabitants . . . Mahdi Army elements attacked these forces that entered the city, and a clash occurred, involving an exchange of fire." He added, "There is no cease fire between us and the American forces . . . If these forces again entered the city, we would confront them and resist them.

Nagem Salem has an informed treatment of the relationship between Muqtada and Sistani. Likewise, Daniel Williams of the Washington Post has profiled Muqtada as a leader of the poor.
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Chalabi Spy Case

James Risen and David Johnston have a story in the New York Times on Wednesday about the spying charges against Ahmad Chalabi. He is accused of passing to Iran the highly classified information that the US had broken Iranian codes. Although the Iranians use a number of cyptographic systems, and couldn't know which the US had penetrated, obviously they would be tempted to change them all in the light of this information.

Some observers have speculated that the entire Iraq war may have been an Iranian plot, with the Iranians using Chalabi to feed false information about Iraq's weapons programs to the US. They would then have used one enemy, the US, to get rid of another, Saddam, and would as a result have liberated the Iraqi Shiite community.

I want to intervene on this meme. It is impossible. Chalabi and the other Iraqi expatriates certainly gamed the Bush administration. But it is not credible to me that Iranian intelligence actively sought a US invasion of Iraq.

In 2002, the US occupied Afghanistan, to Iran's east. The hardliners in Iran did not like this development. They certainly would not have wanted US troops in Iraq to their West, as well. That they would manufacture fairy tales about Iraqi weapons to lure the US to Baghdad is inconceivable. And the hardliners are in charge of Iranian intelligence.

The hardline clerics objected strenuously in summer, 2002, when the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, then based in Tehran, openly admitted to having conducted negotiations with US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's office about an alliance against Saddam. Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim received great heat for this alliance. Then when Abdul Majid Khoei went to Iran in winter, 2002-2003, he spoke to conservative clerics about the need to ally pragmatically with the US against Saddam, and it caused an uproar. His talk was at one point actually cut off by the tumult and he had to leave the hall.

That the Iranians reluctantly accepted that the US was determined to go to war against Iraq is obvious. But that they connived at it is ridiculous.

Indeed, the likelihood is that the Iranians were also victims of Chalabi's lie factory. The INC peddled the story to the US that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program. It must have peddled the same story to the Iranians. In fact, what if the lies of Chalabi & Associates about the non-existent nuclear program so alarmed Iran that it redoubled its efforts to get a nuclear weapon, conducting an arms race against a phantom? If so, Chalabi and his group have single-handedly destabilized the entire Persian Gulf region. And for what? So that Ahmad could be president for life. And now that will not even happen.

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Making Americans Safer

The frankly idiotic US battles fought near Shiite shrines in Najaf and Karbala have created a new, seething rage toward the US in many Shiite Muslim communities throughout the world. The riots in Karachi on Tuesday, protesting a bombing at a Shiite mosque in Pakistan's major port, involved setting fire to American fast food outlets. This sort of attack had previously been common among radical Sunnis, but it is ominous that now the Shiite mobs are asking for very extra crispy KFC. Now I find that in my old stomping grounds of Lucknow, India, where the Shiite community had been so kind to me in the early 1980s, Americans are now unwelcome. Why, if the Bush administration has any more successes in the War on Terror, I just don't know how we'll be able to survive them.

TUESDAY, JUNE 1, 2004
THE TIMES OF INDIA CITY SUPPLEMENTS: LUCKNOW TIMES


TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ WEDNESDAY, JUNE 02, 2004 02:16:26 AM


' "Americans should not venture anywhere near imambaras, mazaars or other places of religious importance. For if they do, the responsibility of their security would lie with the tourism department or themselves..." Shia cleric Maulana Kalbe Jawwad who issued this veiled threat before a 20,000 strong crowd in Lucknow says Americans or Britons are not welcome in holy Muslim shrines. "With anti-US sentiments running so high, anything can happen to the tourists. What if some individual decides to settle scores on his own? We can't do anything about that," Maulana Jawwad told Lucknow Times. "By closing our doors on US and UK nationals we are sending out a very strong message. We want these tourists to tell everybody back home that they were unwelcome in India because of their leaders who are killing innocent Muslims and and destroying our shrines," Jawwad reasons. "In fact, most of our imambaras are replicas of shrines in Iraq . How can the Americans bomb the original sites and visit their replicas! Where is the logic in that? The bottomline is that Americans should stay away from the imambaras and similar places, because we would be very uncomfortable with their presence," he adds. '

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New Proposal for Mahdi Army in Najaf

A new proposal has emerged for dealing with the stand-off in Najaf, whereby the US troops will withdraw from the city to their bases and Mahdi Army fighters will be amnestied for 72 hours to allow them to leave Najaf. This plan is intended to salvage a cease-fire announced over the weekend, but which has fallen apart, with heavy fighting in Kufa between the Mahdi Army and US troops.

Al-Zurufi said, "The Mahdi Army must relinquish its positions. As for its members who do not live in the city (Najaf), they must depart it." (al-Hayat).

On Tuesday, according to az-Zaman, the US positioned several tanks near the grand mosque, in response to which the Mahdi Army launched heavy mortar rounds. Veteran US diplomat and Arabist Christopher Ross informed the Najaf governor, Adnan al-Zurufi, of the plan. There is also a provision for US purchase of the militiamen's arms. Although Al-Zurufi was told that Muqtada al-Sadr agreed to the new plan, it is not at all clear that it will have more success than previous such plans.

Meanwhile, one of the new vice-presidents of the caretaker government, Ibrahim Jaafari, admitted that the al-Da`wa Party, to which he belongs, has reservations about the Yawar/Allawi government. (-al-Hayat).

The new government was ushered in by further tragedy, when some 14 Iraqis were killed and over 50 wounded by a truck bomb at the HQ of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in Baghdad.
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Revised text of U.N. draft resolution on Iraq proposed by United States and Britain

(Via Associated Press):

"The United States and Britain circulated the following revised draft U.N. resolution on Iraq to Security Council members Monday:"

The Security Council,

Marking a new phase in Iraq's transition to a democratically elected government, and looking forward to the end of the occupation and the assumption of authority by a fully sovereign Interim Government of Iraq by 30 June 2004,

Recalling its previous relevant resolutions on Iraq,

Reaffirming the sovereignty, unity, and territorial integrity of Iraq,

Reaffirming the right of the Iraqi people freely to determine their own political future and control their own natural resources,

Recognizing the importance of international support, particularly that of countries in the region, Iraq's neighbors, and regional organizations, for the people of Iraq in their efforts to achieve security and prosperity,

Welcoming the ongoing efforts of the Special Advisor to the Secretary-General to assist the people of Iraq in achieving the formation of a sovereign Interim Government of Iraq,

Taking note of the dissolution of the Governing Council of Iraq, and welcoming the progress made in implementing the arrangements for Iraq's political transition referred to in resolution 1511 (2003),

Stressing the need for all parties to respect and protect Iraq's archaeological, historical, cultural and religious heritage,

Affirming the importance of the rule of law, respect for human rights including the rights of women, fundamental freedoms, and democracy including free and fair elections,

Recalling the establishment of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) on 15 August 2003, and affirming that the United Nations should play a leading role in assisting the Iraqi people in the formation of institutions for representative government,

Recognizing that international support for restoration of stability and security is essential to the well-being of the people of Iraq as well as to the ability of all concerned to carry out their work on behalf of the people of Iraq, and welcoming Member State contributions in this regard under resolution 1483 (2003) of 22 May 2003 and resolution 1511 (2003) of 16 October 2003,

Recalling the report provided to the Security Council on 16 Apri1 2004 under resolution 1511 (2003) on the efforts and progress made by the multinational force authorized under that resolution,

Recognizing the request of the incoming Interim Government of Iraq [as conveyed XX] to retain the presence of the multinational force,

Recognizing also the importance of the consent of the sovereign government of Iraq for the presence of the multinational force and of close coordination between the multinational force and that government,

Welcoming the willingness of the multinational force to continue efforts to contribute to the maintenance of security and stability in Iraq in support of the political transition, especially for upcoming elections, and to provide security for the UN presence in Iraq, as further described in the letter to the President of the Security Council on XX XX 2004,

Noting the commitment of all forces promoting the maintenance of security and stability in Iraq to act in accordance with international law and cooperate with relevant international organizations,

Affirming the importance of international assistance in reconstruction and development of the Iraqi economy,

Recognizing the benefits to Iraq of the immunities and privileges enjoyed by the Iraqi oil revenues and by the Development Fund for Iraq, and noting the importance of providing for continued disbursements of this fund by the Interim Government of Iraq and its successors upon dissolution of the Coalition Provisional Authority,

Determining that the situation in Iraq continues to constitute a threat to international peace and security,

Acting under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations,

1. Endorses the formation of a sovereign Interim Government of Iraq as outlined XXX, that will assume responsibility and authority by 30 June 2004 for governing Iraq until a Transitional Government of Iraq assumes office as envisaged in paragraph three below;

2. Welcomes that, also by that date, the occupation will end and the Coalition Provisional Authority will cease to exist;

3. Endorses the proposed timetable for Iraq's political transition to democratic government including:

(a) formation of a sovereign Interim Government of Iraq that will assume governing responsibility and authority by 30 June 2004;

(b) convening of a national conference; and

½c) holding of direct democratic elections by 31 December 2004 if possible, and in no case later than 31 January 2005, to a Transitional National Assembly which will, inter alia, have responsibility for forming a Transitional Government of Iraq and drafting a permanent constitution for Iraq leading to a constitutionally elected government;

4. Calls on all Iraqis to implement these arrangement peaceably and in full, and on all States and relevant organizations to support such implementation;

5. Decides that in implementing, as circumstances permit, its mandate to assist the Iraqi people, the Special Representative of the Secretary General and the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), as requested by the Interim Government of Iraq and its successors, shall:

(a) play a leading role to:

(i) assist in the convening, no later than XX XX 2004, of a national conference to select a Consultative Council;

(ii) advise and support the Interim Government of Iraq and the Transitional National Assembly on the process for holding elections;

(iii) promote national dialogue and consensus-building on the drafting of a national constitution by the people of Iraq; and

(b) and also:

(i) advise the Interim Government of Iraq in the development of effective civil and social services;

(ii) contribute to the coordination and delivery of reconstruction, development, and humanitarian assistance;

(iii) promote the protection of human rights, national reconciliation, and judicial and legal reform in order to strengthen the role of law in Iraq; and

(iv) advise and assist the Interim Government of Iraq on initial planning for the eventual conduct of a comprehensive census;

6. Welcomes efforts by the incoming Interim Government of Iraq to develop Iraqi security forces, which will operate under the authority of the Interim Government of Iraq and its successors, and which will progressively play a greater role and ultimately assume responsibility for the maintenance of security and stability in Iraq;

7. Noting that the presence of the multinational force in Iraq is at the request of the incoming Interim Government of Iraq, reaffirms the authorization for the multinational force under unified command established under resolution 1511 (2003), having regard to the letter referred to in preambular paragraph XX above;

8. Decides that the multinational force shall have the authority to take all necessary measures to contribute to the maintenance of security and stability in Iraq including by preventing and deterring terrorism, so that inter alia the United Nations can fulfill its role in assisting the Iraqi people as outlined in paragraph five above and the Iraqi people can implement freely and without intimidation the timetable and program for the political process and benefit from reconstruction and rehabilitation activities;

9. Welcomes that arrangements are being put in place to establish a partnership between the multinational force and the sovereign Interim Government of Iraq and to ensure coordination between the two;

10. Decides further that this mandate for the multinational force shall be reviewed at the request of the Transitional Government of Iraq or twelve months from the date of this resolution, and that this mandate shall expire upon the completion of the political process set out in paragraph three above and declares its readiness to terminate this mandate earlier if requested by the elected Transitional Government of Iraq;

11. Notes the creation of a distinct entity under unified command of the multinational force with a dedicated mission to provide security for the UN presence in Iraq, and requests Member States and relevant organizations to provide resources to support that entity;

12. Recognizes that the multinational force will also assist in building the capability of the Iraqi security forces and institutions, through a program of recruitment, training, equipping, mentoring and monitoring;

13. Requests Member States and international and regional security organizations to contribute assistance to the multinational force, including military forces, to help meet the needs of the Iraqi people for security and stability, humanitarian and reconstruction assistance, and to support the efforts of UNAMI;

14. Emphasizes the importance of effective Iraqi police, border enforcement, and Facilities Protection Service, under the control of the Interior Ministry of Iraq and, in the case of the Facilities Protection Service, other Iraqi ministries, for the maintenance of law, order, and security, including combating terrorism, and requests Member States and international organizations to assist the Interim Government of Iraq in building the capability of these Iraqi institutions;

15. Condemns all acts of terrorism in Iraq, reaffirms the obligation of Member States under resolutions 1373 (2001), 1267 (1999), 1333 (2000), 1390 (2002), 1455 (2003), and 1526 (2004) and other relevant international obligations with respect, inter alia, to terrorist activities in Iraq or against its citizens, and specifically reiterates its call upon Member States to prevent the transit of terrorists to Iraq, arms for terrorists, and financing that would support terrorists, and reemphasizes the importance of strengthening the cooperation of the countries of the region, particularly neighbors or Iraq, in this regard;

16. Welcomes efforts by Member States to support the Interim Government of Iraq through the provision of technical and expert assistance;

17. Recognizes that the Interim Government of Iraq will assume Iraq's national responsibility for coordinating international assistance to Iraq;

18. Decides that the prohibitions related to the sale or supply to Iraq of arms and related materiel under previous resolutions shall not apply to arms or related materiel required by the multinational force or the sovereign government of Iraq to serve the purposes of this resolution, calls upon the multinational force and the sovereign government of Iraq each to ensure appropriate implementation procedures are in place, and stresses the importance for all States, particularly Iraq's neighbors, to strictly abide by them;

19. Reiterates its request that Member States, international financial institutions and other organizations strengthen their efforts to assist the people of Iraq in the reconstruction and development of the Iraqi economy, including by providing international experts and necessary resources through a coordinated program of donor assistance;

20. Notes that upon dissolution of the Coalition Provisional Authority the funds in the Development Fund for Iraq shall be disbursed at the direction of the Interim Government of Iraq and its successors, and decides that the Development Fund for Iraq shall be utilized in a transparent manner and through the Iraqi budget including to satisfy outstanding obligations against the Development Fund for Iraq, that the arrangements for the depositing of proceeds from export sales of petroleum, petroleum products, and natural gas established in paragraph 20 of resolution 1483 (2003) shall continue to apply, that the International Advisory and Monitoring Board referred to in resolution 1483 (2003) shall continue its activities in monitoring the Development Fund for Iraq and shall include as an additional member of Iraq a duly qualified representative of the sovereign government of Iraq, that the provisions above shall be reviewed at the request of the Transitional Government of Iraq or twelve months from the date of this resolution, and that appropriate arrangements shall be made for the continuation of deposits of the proceeds referred to in paragraph 21 of resolution 1483 (2003);

21. Decides that, in connection with the dissolution of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the Interim Government of Iraq and its successors shall assume the rights, responsibilities and obligations relating to the Oil for Food Program that were transferred to the Authority pursuant to Resolution 1483 (2003), including all operational responsibility for the Program and any obligations undertaken by the Authority in connection with such responsibility, and responsibility for ensuring independently authenticated confirmation that goods have been delivered, and further decides that, following a 120 day transition period from the date of adoption of this resolution, the Interim Government of Iraq and its successors shall assume responsibility for certifying delivery of goods under contracts prioritized in accordance with that resolution, and that such certification shall be deemed to constitute the independent authentication required for the release of funds associated with such contracts;

22. Further decides that the provisions of paragraph 22 of resolution 1483 (2003) shall continue to apply, except that the privileges and immunities provided in that paragraph shall not apply with respect to any final judgment arising out of a contractual obligation entered into by Iraq after 30 June 2004;

23. Welcomes the commitments of creditors, including those of the Paris Club, to identify ways to reduce substantially Iraq's sovereign debt, calls on the Member States, as well as international and regional organizations, to support the Iraq reconstruction effort, urges the international financial institutions and bilateral donors to take the immediate steps necessary to provide their full range of loans and other financial assistance and arrangements to Iraq, recognizes that the Interim Government of Iraq will have the authority to conclude and implement such agreements and other arrangements as may be necessary in this regard, and requests creditors, institutions and donors to work as a priority on these matters with the Interim Government of Iraq and its successors;

24. Recalls the continuing obligations of Member States to freeze and transfer certain funds, assets and economic resources to the Development Fund for Iraq in accordance with paragraphs 19 and 23 of resolution 1483 (2003);

25, Calls upon all Member States to take appropriate steps within their respective legal systems to stay for a period of 12 months from 30 June 2004 all legal and other similar proceedings before their courts or other tribunals involving claims by or against the State of Iraq, its Government, or any of its agencies or instrumentalities, including its State-owned enterprises or similar bodies;

26. Requests the Secretary-General to report to the Security Council within three months from the date of this resolution on UNAMI operations in Iraq, and on a quarterly basis thereafter on the progress made toward national elections and fulfillment of all UNAMI's responsibilities;

27. Requests that the United States, on behalf of the multinational force, continue to report to the Security Council on the efforts and progress of this force as appropriate and not less than every six months;

28. Decides to remain actively seized of the matter.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

More on Ghazi al-Yawar

From an informed Iraqi reader:

I thought I'd tell you a little bit about Ghazi Al-Yawer's background. He's a very good guy, and highly educated by Shammar standards. He is, however, only the nephew of the paramount shaykh (his uncle Muhsin) and not a big shaykh on his own. His uncle Muhsin spent the better part of thirty years in London, and never visited Iraq. He's married to the sister-in-law of Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia which is why the Shammar are so favored in Saudi Arabia, that, and of course, the historic ties of the Shammar of Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Now Ghazi was nominated to the Governing Council by his other uncle, Humaidi, now deceased. This aroused strong enmity between himself and his cousins, Humaidi's sons. Humaidi was the acting shaykh and it was widely thought that, upon his death, one of his sons would take over his position. But they have been eclipsed by their cousin, Ghazi who was neither the son of the paramount nor acting shaykh. So now the Shammar are in limbo. In theory, Muhsin is still the paramount shaykh and did in fact visit Iraq after the US entry. But he is not very active. Meanwhile, the unknown Shammari, Ghazi, is set to become president of Iraq! No wonder Ghazi did not defer to Adnan al-Pachachi, as he reportedly deferred to the older Saleem who was later blown up. Even if Pachachi is his senior, we are talking about the Presidency of Iraq! This would put Ghazi, the Shammar and all educated, secular men on the map. What a great opportunity for this young man who never dreamed of being the paramount shaykh, let alone President of his country.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Washingtonpost.com: Iraq: New Government Takes Over

The Washington Post online kindly had me on for an online discussion of the developments in Iraq today.

For those who've asked for advance notice, I'll be on the Lehrer News Hour Tuesday evening.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

New Iraqi Government Announced

How weak the Americans have become in Iraq became clear in Iraq on Tuesday when their choice for the ceremonial post of president of the transitional government had to withdraw in favor of Ghazi al-Yawar, the choice of the Interim Governing Council. Special UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi announced Pachachi as president with the blessing of lame duck American proconsul Paul Bremer. But almost immediately, Pachachi stepped down in favor of al-Yawar, feeling that he lacked the support on the IGC that would be necessary.

Al-Yawar was resisted by the Americans on a number of grounds. They were not sure of his commitment to the Interim Constitution hammered out by the IGC with Mr. Bremer in February. (I suspect he is viewed as insufficiently secular by the U.S. He lived in exile a long time in Saudi Arabia and is supported by the religious Shiite parties, which may suggest he favors shariah or Islamic personal status law--though he doesn't want religious law to be the only law of the state because of Iraq's pluralistic population). Al-Yawar also vocally criticized the American-crafted UN resolution now before the Security Council as being insufficiently clear about Iraqi sovereignty and control of military movements on Iraqi soil. Al-Yawar was critical of the US siege of Fallujah and served as a mediator in resolving that stand-off. He is therefore not a secular, pliant, pro-American sort of Iraqi president, and the CPA control freaks were wary of him.

I reported in November concerning the original Nov. 15 plan put forward by the Americans for elections based on the US-fostered provincial councils: ' Meanwhile, the leader of the Sunni [Shamar] tribe, Ghazi al-Yawir [Yawer] (a member of the Interim Governing Council), warned of large-scale protests at the secrecy surrounding the processes for electing the members of the new transitional council. He called for "A de facto end to the coccupation, not just in name alone." ' He is now in a prime position to press for such a de facto end to occupation, and that is presumably what the Americans fear.

The new government has two vice presidents. One is Ibrahim Jaafari, leader of the powerful Shiite al-Da`wa Party, the oldest and best organized party in Iraq now that the Baath is gone. Jaafari is now well placed to emerge as prime minister in the January elections. Lakhdar Brahimi had initially desired to avoid giving such posts to people like Jaafari, who will now try to use the advantages of incumbency to come to power. The other VP is the speaker of parliament of the Kurdish assembly, Rowsch Shaways, from the KDP of Massoud Barzani.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Ghazi al-Yawar on Iraqi Politics

Here are some documents on the new Iraqi president.

Some flavor of the new president can be gathered from this recent FNS interview.
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Federal News Service

May 27, 2004 Thursday

LENGTH: 489 words

HEADLINE: INTERVIEW WITH GHAZI AL YAWAR, CURRENT PRESIDENT OF THE IRAQI GOVERNING COUNCIL, DISCUSSING THE EVENTS AT ANNAJAF AL ASHRAF (ABU DHABI TV, 10:00 (GMT+2) MAY 27, 2004)

BODY:


(Note: The following was translated from Arabic)

QUESTION: Would you be willing to intervene personally in trying to stop the fighting at Annajaf al Ashraf?

GHAZI AL YAWAR: I think that the issue of Annajaf al Ashraf is more difficult than that of al Faluja. Mr. Muqtada al Sadr has a large following. I am present on behalf of the Governing Council, and on my social standing to deal with this issue. But any work should be a part of group work for the sons of the region to pave the way for any involvement, and not a one person's involvement.

But it will honor me to undertake such an initiative in order to end the bloodshed of our dear families in this sacred city. Annajaf, al Faluja, Zakho, Basra, al Moussil, and Kirkuk are all like parts of a beautiful face. If one of these parts is disfigured, the entire face would be disfigured.

QUESTION: Once the authority is given to the new provisional government, who will be in charge of the new multinational forces in Iraq?

GHAZI AL YAWAR: I would assume that the leader of these forces, who will work with the Iraqis, would probably be American. Battalions of the Iraqi army will participate alongside this multinational force once the UN resolution is issued.

The important thing is not who will be in command of this force. The Iraqi armed forces will be under Iraqi command, but some battalions have to be under some foreign leadership irrelevant of who that leadership is.

QUESTION: Would you call for an Arab participation in these forces?

GHAZI AL YAWAR: We would welcome the Arab countries participation in these forces, as a part of the multinational forces in Iraq.

QUESTION: Do you have any idea as to the schedule or the time that these forces should stay in Iraq?

GHAZI AL YAWAR: There is no schedule, and we can't put a time limit because there are some bad elements who would wait for this date to come to restart their attacks. That's the reason why we did not have a time limit for the multinational forces.

But when the Iraqi leadership is ready to take the responsibility, we will not hesitate to thank our friend and request from them to leave Iraq. This, however, won't be any soon because its presence is a necessity.

QUESTION: There are some reports that after the transfer of power, the new American Embassy will relocate to the Republican Palace. Is this true?

GHAZI AL YAWAR: The Republican Palace, which was built in the 1950s is a symbol of sovereignty of Iraq, and many Iraqi leaderships used it. We will not accept the embassy relocating there and they have not asked.

QUESTION: Could you comment on President Bush's decision to raze the Abu Ghraib prison?

GHAZI AL YAWAR: President Bush was very clear in what he said. He asked if the Iraqis wanted it destroyed, and we, in the Governing Council said no. But the decision will be left for the new provisional government to make.

QUESTION: Thank you Mr. Ghazi Al Yawar, current President of the Governing Council.

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UPI, May 25, on al-Yawar's reaction to the UN resolution submitted by the US and the UK: "Rotating President Ghazi al-Yawer said Tuesday the draft disregarded Iraqi demands for granting the transitional government control over a national development fund and a multinational peacekeeping force that might be deployed under a United Nations' resolution."

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April 10, on al-Jazeerah, via BBC world monitoring:

' SOURCE: Al-Jazeera TV, Doha, in Arabic 1306 gmt 10 Apr 04

BODY:
Text of live telephone Interview with Ghazi Ajil al-Yawir, member of the interim Iraqi Governing Council in charge of negotiations with the representatives of the Al-Fallujah residents, in Baghdad, by Al-Jazeera TV presenter Fayruz Zayyani in the Doha studio, broadcast by Qatari Al-Jazeera satellite TV on 10 April

Zayyani Are there any details about the negotiations which you held in Al-Fallujah?

Al-Yawir In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. The negotiating delegation is still in Al-Fallujah city. It has concluded a round of negotiations and it is holding now another round, but the most serious thing present there is the fact that the cease-fire has not been respected by both sides the US forces and the Al-Fallujah residents . The most serious issue is the intervention of the US Air Force and the F-16 jet fighters, which are raiding the city. We called the coalition parties and informed them about our condemnation and we expressed our surprise at these acts . We held them responsible for what they are doing and also for the safety of the delegation. We informed them that this situation would not allow calm negotiations to proceed.

Zayyani We heard that the Al-Fallujah residents were rejecting the arrival of any delegation that represented the Iraqi Governing Council IGC in the city. What changed these conditions and let you enter Al-Fallujah?

Al-Yawir This is not true. They did not reject us, but they blamed us for not making any moves towards them. We are moving as parties and in our capacity as having acquaintances and being well-known inside Al-Fallujah within tribal, religious and political circles. We are acceptable parties and we have with us the Muslim Ulema Council and many other benevolent parties. The situation is very serious and should come to an end peacefully.

Zayyani What about the humanitarian conditions in Al-Fallujah? You we were able to see the situation for yourself there. What is going on in the Al-Fallujah and what about your efforts there from the humanitarian viewpoint, in addition to the political efforts you are exerting now?

Al-Yawir The humanitarian situation is very bad and heartbreaking. We, with the benevolent forces, are doing a lot in collecting donations, but we hold the occupation forces, which are occupying Iraq - and according to the UN resolution - completely responsible for Iraq and responsible for allowing humanitarian and medical aid to enter into Al-Fallujah. These are Iraqi people and they the US forces are responsible, before international law, for their safety and for delivering the food stuff and aid to them.

Zayyani Ghazi Ajil al-Yawir, IGC member in charge of negotiations with the representatives of the Al-Fallujah residents, thank you.'

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In February al-Yawar spoke out about the weakness of the Sunni Arabs on the Interim Governing Council to ash-Sharq al-Awsat (via BBC world monitoring):

'In their statements, Al-Yawar and Al-Chadirchi talked about the weakness of the Sunni voice in the political arena and in the Governing Council and the strength of the Shi'i and Kurdish voice.

Al-Yawar said that this went back to the period that accompanied the change of regime. During that period, he said, the Kurdish and Shi'i figures were closer to the coalition authority while the Sunnis were the weak link in this relationship. In several instances, he said, several Sunni figures were brought closer to the coalition authority following nominations or consultations with the other sides. He added that the interim Governing Council is not the only body that has political weight in the Iraqi arena. There are other Sunni religious and political parties and movements that should be relied upon and with whom alliances should be formed to strengthen the position of the Sunnis. We should blame ourselves for not coordinating our positions among ourselves both inside and outside the Governing Council, he said.

"Suspicions" about federation

Al-Yawar added, "The Iraqi Kurds have unified their voices and efforts and they are in agreement on their stands and demands. That is why we see them these days insisting on federal rule for their regions. This demand is something new and strange to Iraqi politics and to politics in the whole region. It is a vague demand that is subject to rumours and that entails doubts, suspicions and vagueness and that denotes a hard-line stand by the brother Kurds. They want to impose a federation on the Iraqi people despite the lack of census statistics and before any elections or general elections are held. They want to consecrate an ethnic federation whether the Iraqi people like it or not".

Al-Yawar said: "The Shi'is and Sunnis should work together to salvage what can be salvaged. They should not ignore the big issues, such as the issue of a federation. We have to sit with the brother Kurds and come to a frank understanding. This is a major problem; it is not an easy one. We have to understand what they really want and what they are planning for the future. Even Lakhdar Brahimi sensed this Iraqi problem and said that if the Iraqis did not wish to save their own country, no power on earth could help them. This is a fact." Al-Yawar added: "The Kurds are insisting on a federal rule while the brother Shi'is are insisting on elections although all the other forces insist that such elections are not feasible at present. The United Nations will adopt a similar stand; in other words, the current conditions are not suitable to hold such elections. What worries us most is the sectarian problem in Iraq. The issue of nationality between Arabs and Kurds is simple and can be surmounted. Sectarian sedition, however, is extremely dangerous, particularly since some neighbouring countries or some regional and international forces are encouraging such sedition".

"Misperception" of Sunni ties to former regime

Al-Yawar stated: "There is a misunderstanding that is lumping the Arab Sunnis in Iraq with Saddam Husayn. The misperception is that the Arab Sunnis were in the service of the former regime and that they enjoyed huge privileges under Saddam's rule. However, we all know that Saddam did not believe in any religion or sect. His injustices were inflicted on Sunnis, Shi'is, Kurds and all other national groups and sects. He did not differentiate between one Iraqi and another. Moreover, the Arab Sunnis of Iraq are the last people to think of sectarianism. All our ideas are purely Iraqi and nationalist ones. We can become a link between the Kurds and the Shi'is since we have nationalist links with both the Sunni and Shi'i Kurds. The Kurds are the most successful in coordinating their stands while the Shi'is understand one another the most. They hold periodic meetings called the "Al-Bayt Al-Shi'i" The Shi'i House whereas we have failed to hold such meetings due to personal or other reasons."

The member of the Governing Council added that it never crossed his mind that the configuration of the council would be formed on ethnic or sectarian bases and quotas. He said, "one week after the council was formed, I understood this was a process that the brothers had agreed upon in the London conference of the Iraqi opposition. I do not understand how a conference held in London two years ago could impose its will on 25 million Iraqis. I do not know how the quotas were determined. I believe that an accurate, scientific and neutral census under the supervision of the United Nations will reveal the real figures and ratios on condition that it is a fair census without armed militias." '

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January 22 in ash-Sharq al-Awsat via BBC world monitoring, on elections and Sistani:

' Ghazi Ujayl al-Yawir said Ayatollah Al-Sistani's view "is very important. He is the source of authority for a broad sector of the Iraqis. I am not saying Shi'is and Sunnis because we are all Muslims and the authority is the authority for Sunnis as it is for the Shi'is".

He added: "This religious leader is searching for the ideal solution for the issue of handing power over to the Iraqis. I do not believe there is any Iraqi who rejects holding free and honest elections. But how can these elections be free and honest when there are five armed militias affiliated to parties and political movements? Who will ensure the people's safety and how can the elections be held when there are the militias of the two Kurdish parties, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Al-Da'wah Party, National Congress and the Accord? How can the elections be free and honest when there are irregular armed forces? Security should be provided for the voter and we must ensure that no pressures are exerted on him. The presence of these militias sends a bad message to the Iraqi people confirming that the security situation in the country is out of control.. . "

Al-Yawir called for "amalgamating these militias in the Iraqi army and for their loyalty to be for Iraq and not a party, a political movement or a specific person" . . .

Al-Yawir went on to say . . . "Some want to stoke up the fire of sectarian sedition between the Shi'is and Sunnis. I say that there is not such a division in Iraq. We must say that the Iraqis are Arabs and Kurds and not Sunnis and Shi'is. It is odd that we do not hear anyone who says Iraq and demands Iraq's unification."

He concluded his statement by saying: "The important thing now is to restore Iraq's sovereignty and take over power from the occupiers. Any party delaying this causes us pain. The occupation is a wound to our dignity, at least morally. If we delay the hand-over of power, then everything will be delayed and this is not in the country's interest. The calls to rush the elections does not reflect the true image of what Iraqis want." '

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On December 10 al-Yawar gave an interview with a Kurdish newspaper, Hawlati, opposing decentralization and purely religious law (via BBC world monitoring):

' In an interview with Hawlati, the chief of Shammar tribe and member of the Iraqi Governing Council, Ghazi Ujayl al-Yawar, said he does not support the devolvement of governorates into a federal system because he fears that in place of one dictator we would get 25 in Iraq one for each of the 25 governorates. In the interview, he rejected religious governing system for Iraq. He said: "The Iraqi people are made up of a number of diverse national and religious groups. They should be taken into consideration. Our era is not the era of religious states." He expressed his support for federal status for Iraqi Kurdistan region . . .'

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Last December when a short-lived US plan was announced to retain several militias and meld them under Iyad Allawi into a new security force, al-Yawar went ballistic, according to Ed Wong of the NYT:

'The composition of the militia has raised concerns among some council members. Ghazi Yawar, a council member who does not represent any political parties, said forming a militia of soldiers from different parties could lead to violent factionalism. He added that the Governing Council was not consulted about this, and that only council members representing the five largest parties -- ones that would contribute soldiers -- took part in talks on the matter with General John Abizaid, the senior American military commander. "I am very outraged; this is stupid," Yawar said. "How many people are running Iraq? I'm very upset. This can lead to warlords and civil war. Should I form my own militia? I can have 20,000 people or more here. But that is not what I want to do." Yawar said the council members not involved in planning the creation of the militia had only learned about it on Saturday, after Talabani informed them of the proposal. His understanding of the militia differed somewhat from that of Mustafa's. Yawar said only five parties would contribute to the militia, with 160 to 200 people picked by each party.'

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On November 25, Joel Brinkley of the NYT reported Yawar's opposition to a plan to retain the IGC as a sort of senate even after a caretaker government was elected. One gets a sense that a lot of al-Yawar's complaints really had to do with Ahmad Chalabi and his clique.

' "This is from people who have a fear of losing a grip on things," said council member Ghazi Ajil al-Yawar, an important tribal sheik. "If we do this, we will be another Yasser Arafat," the Palestinian leader whose enemies accuse him of routinely reneging on agreements. Among the proponents of keeping the council intact in some manner are leaders of its most important factions, including the two major Kurdish parties, powerful Shiite clerics and prominent exile leaders including Ahmed Chalabi. '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Maneuvering over Transitional Government Continues

Al-Hayat reports that Paul Bremer has put enormous pressure on the Interim Governing Council not to vote on its candidate for president, which might have had the effect of ensconcing the candidate. It is thought that 22 of the 25 IGC members favor Ghazi al-Yawer, a civil engineer and prominent member of the powerful Sunni Shamar clan.

Al-Hayat says that Ghazi al-Yawer was the candidate of the Shiite establishment and the Kurdish parties, while UN special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi objected to him and preferred Adnan Pachachi as an independent candidate, or some other independent chosen by Brahimi himself.

Some sources said that UN special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi had boycotted Monday's meeting in protest at the way the Interim Governing Council had just announced on Friday that Iyad Allawi would be prime minister, thus usurping a prerogative that had been granted to the United Nations to choose the candidates. The agreement stipulates that the IGC is only one of three parties, and that it cannot act alone.

Kurdish IGC member Mahmud Uthman (Osman) on the other hand implied that Brahimi had become so weak that he was represented by Bremer at IGC meetings, suggesting that he is nothing more than an American puppet. (Since the IGC has been accused of the same thing, it must have been satsifying to Uthman to be able to make that charge).

An American source at the Coalition Provisional Authority leaked to Agence France Presse the statement that "It is just a complete fabrication that the competition for the post of president is confined to al-Yawer and Pachachi. We are seeking to ensure that the president and a third of the new ministers are political personalities not serving on the Interim Governing Council."

al-Hayat learned that the foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, will retain his post, as will Planning Minister Mahdi al-Hafidh, Culture Minister Mufid al-Jaza'iri, and the minister of science and technology (Rashad Omar ). The power post of Interior Minister, sort of like US Homeland Security Secretary combined with director of the FBI, will probably go to Fallah Hasan al-Naqib, the governor of Salahuddin (al-Hayat says Tikrit) and a close friend of Iyad Allawi. The ministry of finance may go to Adil Abdul Mahdi, a member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. The Minister for Women's Affairs will probably be Nermin Mufti (a Kurdish name). (The only Nermin Mufti I could find on the internet seemed fairly angry about the US occupation and appears to have been deeply involved in Occupation Watch. But it may be a common name for all I know and not the same person.).

The four current candidates for president are Ra'd Mawlud Mukhlis, a surgeon and head of "The Bloc for the Sake of Iraq;" Muhsin al-Yawer, chieftain of the Shamar tribe and uncle of Ghazi al-Yawer; Ibrahim Faisal al-Ansari, former head of the joint chiefs of staff in the mid-1960s; and Shakir Mahmud Shakir, the former minister of defense in the mid-1960s.

Iyad Allawi as Prime Minister and Fallah al-Naqib as Interior Minister are obviously strong wins for the CIA and the State Department in Iraq, and further signs of the decline of Pentagon political power, which will be reduced to the uniformed military on June 30. Although the Allawis are also related to Pentagon-backed (and now disgraced) Ahmad Chalabi, they are his rivals and form a distinctive clique (Ali Allawi, currently defense minister, is some sort of cousin to Iyad; he is a nephew of Chalabi but disagreed with him on dissolving the army and punishing all Baathists). Note that Chalabi's close friends are being replaced. Thus, the old minister of finance was Kamel al-Gailani, a close Chalabi associate who supported unbridled robber baron capitalism. It is also significant that his successor is from the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shiite religious party with strong ties to Iran. Bloomberg has done a useful but completely uncritical profile of Iyad Allawi.

Colin Powell at State has gotten control of the $18 billion in reconstruction aid voted by Congress, very little of which the Pentagon managed to disburse. The CIA will reportedly put $3 billion into building up a new Iraqi secret police. Iyad Allawi, who is called "Iyad al-Baathi" on the streets in Iraq, has long had an interest in rebuilding the secret police which seems to me sinister. It is a little shocking that Brahimi should have been willing to be party to this appointment. But I suspect he believes that Allawi cannot be elected to anything important in January, since he has no grassroots support and is widely disliked for his 1970s Baath background before he broke with the party. He had organized ex-Baath officers in the 1990s, some of whom were even more recent converts from the Baath ideology.

Al-Naqib became governor of Salahuddin under suspicious circumstances, which I reported last February. I later learned from CPA sources that the previous governor, whom he replaced, had been accused of extensive corruption. I wrote of Naqib, "Al-Naqib's father had been a major general in the Iraqi army in the 1970s and then the Baath government's ambassador to Sweden at the end of the 1970s. He broke with the Saddam regime and became a political refugee in Syria. Al-Naqib himself has an engineering B.Sc. He is the 10th governor of Salahuddin in modern Iraq, and the article calls him the first to be elected. He is the first to hail from Samarra'."

For "cont'd" postings, click here.