9 Marines among 31 Killed in Iraq

The news from Iraq on the last Saturday before the US elections was truly horrible, with an orgy of death and explosions. More US troops were killed in one day than at any time since last May. The Iraqi national guards behaved in a way that demonstrates they are nowhere near ready to take over security themselves.

The shakiness of the US coalition in Iraq was underlined when tens of thousands of Italians demonstrated in downtown Rome against the Iraq war and the support Italy has given to it. Although the rightwing government of Silvio Berlusconi can easily ignore even such a large demonstration, it seems clear that Berlusconi's government ever fell, the Italians would be out in a flash.

Associated Press reports 31 deaths in Iraq from major violence, including the killing of 9 US Marines.

Near Fallujah, guerrillas used a car bomb to kill 8 Marines. A further Marine combat death was later reported. The car bomb had also wounded 8 Marines.

Guerrillas in Baghdad targeted the Arabic satellite channel, al-Arabiyah, with a car bomb, killing 7 persons and injuring 19.

Near Latifiyah south of Baghdad, guerrillas attacked a US convoy. Iraqi national guards then showed up, furious, and began firing wildly and throwing hand grenades. They hit several civilian vehicles, killing at least 14 persons. It seemed clear that there was a lot of what the US Pentagon calls "collateral damage." The national guards in that region have faced a lot of attacks.

Guerrillas at Fallujah subjected Marine positions outside the city to the strongest artillery barrage seen in recent weeks. The US military responded by bombing Fallujah, attempting to hit a guerrilla mortar emplacement.

Ramadi saw further fighting on Saturday, with clashes between US troops and the guerrillas there. The fighting left two policement dead and 4 Iraqis injured. Al-Jazeerah is reporting early Sunday morning Baghdad time that 3 US Marines have been wounded.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Towers of Beirut

Readers have asked me to what Bin Laden was referring when he said he first conceived the idea of attacking US skyscrapers when the Israelis destroyed the "towers" of Beirut.

Beirut had been among the more advanced cities in the Arab world. I saw it in 1968 and 1974 before the civil war when it was called the Geneva of the Middle East. Although there was fighting in Beirut 1975-1981 by local militias, in fact by the early 1980s the situation had calmed down substantially and the economy was roaring back.

Then Ariel Sharon took it into his head to invade Lebanon in 1982. Sharon always has plots within plots. He wanted to install a far-rightwing government of his liking in Beirut and reshape the Eastern Mediterranean. And he wanted to murder the Palestinian leadership in Beirut, just bomb them all or otherwise rub them out. Although the Palestine Liberation Organization was an annoyance to Israel, it had been substantially defeated by the Syrians in the late 1970s and was extremely weak in 1982. In a way, Sharon's attack was made possible by the Camp David Accords, in which Egypt made a separate peace. Sharon took advantage of the neutralization of Egypt to launch an aggressive war on Lebanon. Egyptians were boiling mad as a result.

The horrible Israeli siege of Beirut in summer of 1982, which lasted for weeks, involved the brutal and indiscriminate bombing of the city. Many of the "towers" that were destroyed contained hundreds of innocent Beirutis. Sharon's proposed puppet ruler, Bashir Gemayyel, used to keep posters of Hitler in his locker at college. He was promptly assassinated and the whole scheme fell apart.

The invasion killed some 18,000 persons, half of them innocent civilians. During this period Sharon turned the task of guarding the disarmed and helpless Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps over to his allies, the fascist Phalangist paramilitary. The latter promptly murdered hundreds of defenseless Palestinians.

One of the 9/11 hijackers, Ziad Jarrah, was a Lebanese Sunni who was 8 when the Israelis invaded his country and wrought so much destruction. He obviously was deeply traumatized by the experience.

The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was a wanton act of aggression and destruction that ended up radicalizing the Lebanese Shiites and leading them to develop the technique of suicide bombing. A majority of Israelis was disgusted with the war, and in the aftermath Sharon was politically marginalized for two decades. Somehow he has managed to rehabilitate himself and now pursues his agenda of killing without any let or hindrance.


Beirut's "towers"


Beirut under Israeli bombardment.

The US has since the late 1970s coddled the Likud Party about its aggression, whether in the Occupied Territories or in Lebanon (part of which it occupied for 20 years!), which has helped to generate anger among Arabs at the United States. A whole generation of Arab politicians and intellectuals was marked by humiliation and helplessness in the face of Sharon's Lebanon war.

None of this justifies the monstrous attack on the US of September 11. As Gandhi pointed out, an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

But it is in the interests of all Americans for our government to find a way for Israelis and Arabs to live in peace and justice with one another. In a world where small numbers of terrorists have enormous power because of new technologies, it is dangerous to let such situations fester.

When Dwight Eisenhower perceived the 1956 war launched against Egypt by France, the UK and Israel to be a threat to US security, he knocked some heads together and made it stop. He ordered the Israelis summarily out of Sinai, and cursed out Anthony Eden "like an old soldier." He also threatened the French with an end to US loans if they didn't settle the Algerian crisis because he was afraid the Algerians would go Communist if it festered along. We need someone in the White House who will do more than ignore Arafat and kiss Ariel Sharon's enormous backside. We need an Eisenhower to reshape the political realities in the region in a positive way. Right now we don't have an Eisenhower in the White House.


(By the way, it is highly unlikely that Bin Laden started thinking about hitting the US in 1982. But once the idea was proposed by Khalid Shaikh Muhammad in 1996, he may well have flashed back to those scenes of Sharon's siege of Beirut.)

The full transcript of Usamah's diatribe is at al-Jazeera.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Elections and Religious Tensions in Iraq

Al-Hayat reports that Shaikh Sadr al-Din Qubanji, a Friday mosque preacher for the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, criticized "religious figures who doubt" everything and "threaten" to boycott the elections, which will "make manifest the rights of the Shiites." He asked the doubters if they wanted "the Shiites to be killed and cut off yet again?" He said, "it is necessary to give the Shiites and the Sunnis their respective rights, in accordance with what they deserve. A If the Shiites rule in accordance with the elections, that is their right. For they are the majority and they have rights that will be made manifest via this election."

The SCIRI leader was probably referring to Muqtada al-Sadr and the Sadrists, who had earlier threatened to boycott the election. When the Shiites in Bahrain boycotted the last election, it threw parliament into the hands of Sunni fundamentalists, and al-Qubanji knows this very well.

At the same time, Shaikh Mahdi al-Sumaid'i of the Association of Muslim Scholars preached before hundreds of worshippers at the Ibn Taimiyah Mosque in Baghdad. He said, "The Assocation of Muslim Scholars and the Consultative Council of the Sunni Community have issued a general call to the members of the group, to specify their position on the elections. With regard to the US attack on Fallujah, he said that a meeting would be called to address the "marginalization of the Sunnis" and the crushing of their personality. He said that during the Najaf crisis they had stood as a single man. He wants the Sunnis to show equal solidarity today.

Dennis Gray of the Associated Press reports that voter registration via food ration cards will begin Monday in Iraq.

Six weeks will be spent registering voters and political parties.

Authorities have used a Saddam-era database for food rationing to create an initial voter roll. Heads of households collect their 2005 ration cards from 548 distribution centers around the country starting Monday, and voter registration clerks will be waiting with fact sheets on each family. If there are mistakes, the voter roll will be corrected.

Combining voter registration with the popular food rationing system is expected to lessen the chances of attacks by insurgents, and it also provides a cover for Iraqis who wish to sign up to vote but might fear being targeted by those seeking to disrupt the election.

U.S. military units like the 3rd Brigade are responsible for protecting the election process, but they also must keep enough distance to counter charges that Iraqi organizers and participants are merely puppets on America's strings.

In Baqubah they are finding that a third of the population is illiterate and 70 percent know nothing about the election. It is likely that the US military will have to preside over the elections, despite the officers' desire to stay in the background.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

The Other Shoe Drops: Bin Laden Weighs in

It is interesting that Usamah Bin Laden explicitly said that it doesn't matter to al-Qaeda whether Bush or Kerry is president. Only the degree to which the US gives "liberty" to the Muslim world matters to al-Qaeda, he says. [I'll have things to say about this diction below, but it is bizarre that a mass murderer who helped run the Taliban state is talking about "liberty."]

Does the appearance of the video help or hurt Bush? It is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it is a painful reminder that Bush dropped the ball, left the fight against al-Qaeda half-finished, and ran off to the Iraq quagmire, so that Bin Laden is still at large 3 years after he killed 3000 Americans and hit the Pentagon itself. That can't be good for Bush. On the other hand, because so many Americans confuse Bush's swagger and aggressive instincts with being "strong on terrorism," any big reminder that al-Qaeda is out there could actually help W. It shouldn't, but it may well.

He begins by addressing the US public directly [this passage is translated by J. Cole]:

On the reason for the war, addressing the US public, Bin Laden says, "I say to you that security is an important pillar of human life, and that free persons do not neglect their own security, contrary to the allegations of Bush that we despise liberty. He should let us know why we did not strike at Sweden, for instance [if that were true]. It is well know that those who despise liberty do not possess lofty-minded souls like the 19, God bless them. We only waged battle with you because we are free persons, and we cannot sleep knowing that injustice is being done. We want to regain freedom for our nation. As you damage our security, we will damage yours."

Some of the rest of the statement is given by The Associated Press:

He said he was first inspired to attack the United States by the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon in which towers and buildings in Beirut were destroyed in the siege of the capital.

``While I was looking at these destroyed towers in Lebanon, it sparked in my mind that the tyrant should be punished with the same and that we should destroy towers in America, so that it tastes what we taste and would be deterred from killing our children and women,'' he said.

``God knows that it had not occurred to our mind to attack the towers, but after our patience ran out and we saw the injustice and inflexibility of the American-Israeli alliance toward our people in Palestine and Lebanon, this came to my mind,'' he said.

Bin Laden suggested Bush was slow to react to the Sept. 11 attacks, giving the hijackers more time than they expected. At the time of the attacks, the president was listening to schoolchildren in Florida reading a book.

``It never occurred to us that the commander-in-chief of the American armed forces would leave 50,000 of his citizens in the two towers to face these horrors alone,'' he said, referring to the number of people who worked at the World Trade Center.

``It appeared to him (Bush) that a little girl's talk about her goat and its butting was more important than the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers. That gave us three times the required time to carry out the operations, thank God,'' he said.

In planning the attacks, bin Laden said he told Mohammed Atta, one of the hijackers, that the strikes had to be carried out "within 20 minutes before Bush and his administration noticed."

Bin Laden has repeatedly said that one of the reasons he hit the US was over the Israeli attacks on the Palestinians. Bin Laden has cared deeply about Palestine since his youth. His partner in Peshawar at the Office of Services for 6 years when he was funding the Mujahidin was Abdullah Azzam, a prominent Palestinian Muslim fundamentalist. When he came back to Jiddah from Pakistan after the Soviets withdrew, Bin Laden gave a guest sermon at the local mosque in which he bitterly criticized Israeli actions during the first Intifadah. He declared war on the Zionists and the Crusaders, and has constantly complained about the Occupation of the Three Holy Cities, which are Mecca, Medinah and Jerusalem. Because he did not use traditional Palestianian nationalist language, it has been possible for some to miss his commitment to the Palestine issue. The 9/11 report notes that he wanted to move the attack up from September to April of 2001 to punish the Israelis for actions against Palestinians. He thought of himself as attacking the US for backing Israel and Israeli aggression and seems to be annoyed at the success of the Bush administration in painting him as a nihilist.

The talk about being "free persons" (ahrar) and fighting for "liberty" (hurriyyah) for the Muslim "nation" (ummah) seems to me a departure. The word "hurriyyah" or freedom has no classical Arabic or Koranic resonances and I don't think it has played a big role in his previous statements.

I wonder if Bin Laden has heard from the field that his association with the authoritarian Taliban has damaged recruitment in the Arab world and Iraq, where most people want an end to dictatorship and do not want to replace their secular despots with a religious one. The elections in Pakistan (fall 2002) and Afghanistan went better than he would have wanted, and may have put pressure on him. He may now be reconfiguring the rhetoric of al-Qaeda, at least, to represent it as on the side of political liberty. I am not saying this is sincere or might succeed; both seem to me highly unlikely. I am saying that it is interesting that Bin Laden now seems to feel the need to appeal to this language. In a way, it may be one of the few victories American neo-Wilsonianism has won, to push Bin Laden to use this kind of language. I doubt it amounts to much.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Pentagon Briefing on Missing Explosives

I just watched the Larry DiRita host a Pentagon briefing on the issue of the missing explosives at al-Qaqaa.

I was disgusted by the political spin DiRita was putting out. The Pentagon should be serving the military needs of the whole United States, not of the Bush administration.

DiRita kept talking about RDX plastic explosives, when the real issue is what happened to the HMX, which is the stuff that can be used to detonate an atomic bomb. At one point DiRita insisted that the Pentagon refers to it all as RDX and doesn't distinguish HMX (!) He brought a poor US army major, Austin Pearson, out to talk about how his unit had destroyed over 200 tons Iraqi munitions, including tons of stuff from al-Qaqaa.

But if DiRita thought that this officer would clear the whole thing up, he was clearly disappointed. The major said explicitly that he had not seen any seals of the International Atomic Energy Commission, which means that he cannot testify that his unit destroyed the HMX. Then he was asked if insurgents could have carried off 150 tons of that stuff in a short period of time as a practical matter. He replied that it seems like a lot, but in fact it could be done really quickly.

Then he let it slip that his unit was at al-Qaqaa on April 13, before the KSTP video was shot of US soldiers examining HMX there. So Pearson's unit could not have removed all the HMX at that time. Since he didn't see IAEA seals, it seems likely that his unit didn't remove any HMX.

No one doubts that the US military has blown up enormous amounts of Iraqi ordnance. The point is that they have also not blown up enormous amounts of Iraqi ordnance, and that the country's 80 major arms depots have gone on being looted throughout the US occupation because the military was not given enough troops by Bush to guard the depots.

Conclusion: The DiRita performance today was embarrassing to Bush. His Pentagon spokesman doesn't know the difference between RDX and HMX and he hasn't debriefed his chief witness, Maj. Pearson, so as to avoid being blindsided when the major says he never saw IAEA seals, that looters could have carted off tons of HMX quickly and easily, and that his unit was at al-Qaqaa before the date of the damning KSTP video!

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

US Has Killed 100,000 in Iraq: The Lancet

The Lancet, a respected British medical journal, reports that the US and coalition forces (but mainly the US Air Force) has killed 100,000 Iraqi civilians since the fall of Saddam on April 9, 2003. Previous estimates for civilian deaths since the beginning of the war ranged up to 16,000, with the number of Iraqi troops killed during the war itself put at about 6,000.

The troubling thing about these results is that they suggest that the US may soon catch up with Saddam Hussein in the number of civilians killed. How many deaths to blame on Saddam is controverial. He did after all start both the Iran-Iraq War and the Gulf War. But he also started suing for peace in the Iran-Iraq war after only a couple of years, and it was Khomeini who dragged the war out until 1988. But if we exclude deaths of soldiers, it is often alleged that Saddam killed 300,000 civilians. This allegation seems increasingly suspect. So far only 5000 or so persons have been found in mass graves. But if Roberts and Burnham are right, the US has already killed a third as many Iraqi civilians in 18 months as Saddam killed in 24 years.

The report is based on extensive household survey research in Iraq in September of 2004. Les Roberts and Gilbert Burnham found that the vast majority of the deaths were the result of US aerial bombardment of Iraqi cities, which they found especially hard on "women and children." After excluding the Fallujah data (because Fallujah has seen such violence that it might skew the nationwide averages), they found that Iraqis were about 1.5 times more likely to die of violence during the past 18 months than they were in the year and a half before the war. Before the war, the death rate was 5 per thousand per year, and afterwards it was 7.9 per thousand per year (excluding Fallujah). My own figuring is that, given a population of 25 million, that yields 72,500 excess deaths per year, or at least 100,000 for the whole period since April 9, 2003.

The methodology of this study is very tight, but it does involve extrapolating from a small number and so could easily be substantially incorrect. But the methodology also is standard in such situations and was used in Bosnia and Kosovo.

I think the results are probably an exaggeration. But they can't be so radically far off that the 16,000 deaths previously estimated can still be viewed as valid. I'd say we have to now revise the number up to at least many tens of thousand--which anyway makes sense. The 16,000 estimate comes from counting all deaths reported in the Western press, which everyone always knew was only a fraction of the true total. (I see deaths reported in al-Zaman every day that don't show up in the Western wire services).

The most important finding from my point of view is not the magnitude of civilian deaths, but the method of them. Roberts and Burnham find that US aerial bombardments are killing far more Iraqi civilians than had previously been suspected. This finding is also not a surprise to me. I can remember how, on a single day (August 12), US warplanes bombed the southern Shiite city of Kut, killing 84 persons, mainly civilians, in an attempt to get at Mahdi Army militiamen. These deaths were not widely reported in the US press, especially television. Kut is a small place and has been relatively quiet except when the US has been attacking Muqtada al-Sadr, who is popular among some segments of the population there. The toll in Sadr City or the Shiite slums of East Baghdad, or Najaf, or in al-Anbar province, must be enormous.

I personally believe that these aerial bombardments of civilian city quarters by a military occupier that has already conquered the country are a gross violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, governing the treatment of populations of occupied territories.

Spencer Ackerman at TNR's online blog on Iraq has a long interview with Burnham about the study, in which Burnham is quite humble about it not being definitive.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Missing HMX: It Really is Missing

The evidence accumulates hourly that deadly HMX explosives were at the al-Qaqaa facility on April 18 of 2003 and subsequently disappeared.

The allegation that the material was moved by the Saddam regime between March 16 and April 9 does not seem to me to get Bush off the hook. First, it is probably groundless. Josh Marshall points out that the photos released by the Pentagon of trucks at al-Qaqaaa are of a different part of the huge facility than where the HMX was stored.

Second, it wouldn't account for all the material that disappeared, since a substantial amount was certainly looted after the US conquest, as television video from embedded reporters demonstrating that the material was there on April 18, suggests. Third, the US had complete control of the skies over Iraq and had al-Qaqaa under surveillance. If they did not want Saddam moving HMX around, all they had to do was take out some trucks that came up to al-Qaqaa, as a warning.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ran away from a lower-level bureaucrat's crackpot conspiracy theory, of Russians moving the stuff to Syria, so fast that he could have been auditioning for a Nike commercial. The Russians rather exasperatedly denied the story. (The Russians haven't been militarily involved in Iraq since the 1980s when they were part of the Soviet Union).

A new low was reached in the Republican Party, out of panic at this story, by Rudi Giuliani, who blamed our troops for the al-Qaqaa catastrophe, saying, ''No matter how you try to blame it on the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough? Didn't they search carefully enough?" So let's get this straight. Bush sends only 100,000 US troops to Iraq, when 500,000 are needed to secure the country. Then when the troops don't have te personpower to do their jobs properly, you blame them? The refreshing thing about Giuliani's remark is its honesty. Surely a lot of fatcat Republicans who are always draping themselves in the flag and exploiting the heroism of US troops actually view them as little more than kitchen help, who can be blamed if the banquet doesn't come off as brilliantly as hoped. Remember the images of Bush in white tie toasting his "base" among the super-wealthy, in Fahrenheit 9/11? It is not the corporals in the US army whom he was toasting.



The Star Ledger reports:

ABC said experts who have studied the images say the barrels seen in the video contain the high explosive HMX, and U.N. markings on the sealed containers were clear.

"I talked to a former inspector who's a colleague of mine. He confirms that, indeed, these pictures look just like what he remembers seeing inside those bunkers," David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq told the network.

ABC said the barrels seen in the video were found inside locked bunkers that had been sealed by inspectors from the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency just before the war began.

"The seal's critical. The fact that there's a photo of what looks like an IAEA seal means that what's behind those doors is HMX," Albright said.

The soldiers were not ordered to secure the facility, ABC reported.

The Pentagon yesterday released an aerial photograph taken two days before the Iraq war of two trucks at the site where nearly 400 tons of high explosives went missing, but it was unable to say they had anything to do with the disappearance.

The image of a small portion of the sprawling al Qaqaa arms storage site, taken on March 17, 2003, showed a large tractor-trailer loaded with white containers with a smaller truck parked behind it, the Pentagon said.

Chief Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita acknowledged that he could not say that the trucks were hauling away the explosives, or had anything to so with the disappearance of the material.

Earlier yesterday, the U.N. nuclear agency said U.S. officials had been warned about the vulnerability of explosives stored at al Qaqaa after another facility -- the country's main nuclear complex -- was looted in April 2003.

The IAEA cautioned American officials directly about what was kept at al Qaqaa, the main storage facility in Iraq for so-called high explosives, spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said in Vienna.

And here is what weapons inspector David Kay had to say about the ABC News video from al-Qaqaa in April, 2003:

BROWN: I don't know how better to do this than to show you some pictures, have you explain to me what they are or are not, OK? First, I'll just call it the seal and tell me if this is an IAEA seal on that bunker at that munitions dump.

KAY: Aaron, as about as certain as I can be looking at a picture, not physically holding it, which obviously I would have preferred to have been there, that's an IAEA seal. I've never seen anything else in Iraq in about 15 years of being in Iraq and around Iraq that was other than an IAEA seal of that shape.

BROWN: And was there anything else at the facility that would have been under IAEA seal?

KAY: Absolutely nothing. It was he HMX, RDX, the two high explosives.

BROWN: OK. Now, I want to take a look at the barrels here for a second and you can tell me what they tell you. They obviously to us just show us a bunch of barrels. You'll see it somewhat differently.

KAY: Well, it's interesting. There were three foreign suppliers to Iraq of this explosive in the 1980s. One of them used barrels like this and inside the barrel is a bag. HMX is in powdered form because you actually use it to shape a spherical lens that is used to create the triggering device for nuclear weapons.

And, particularly on the videotape, which is actually better than the still photos, as the soldier dips into it that's either HMX or RDX. I don't know of anything else in al Qa Qaa that was in that form.

BROWN: Let me ask you then, David, the question I asked Jamie. In regard to the dispute about whether that stuff was there when the Americans arrived, is it game, set, match? Is that part of the argument now over?

KAY: Well, at least with regard to this one bunker and the film shows one seal, one bunker, one group of soldiers going through and there were others there that were sealed, with this one, I think it is game, set and match.

There was HMX, RDX in there. The seal was broken and quite frankly to me the most frightening thing is not only is the seal broken and the lock broken but the soldiers left after opening it up. I mean to rephrase the so-called (UNINTELLIGIBLE) rule if you open an arms bunker, you own it. You have to provide security.

BROWN: That raises a number of questions. Let me throw out one. It suggests that maybe they just didn't know what they had.

KAY: I think quite likely they didn't know they had HMX, which speaks to the lack of intelligence given troops moving through that area but they certainly knew they had explosives.

And to put this in context, I think it's important this loss of 360 tons but Iraq is awash with tens of thousands of tons of explosives right now in the hands of insurgents because we did not provide the security when we took over the country.

BROWN: Could you -- I'm trying to stay out of the realm of politics.

KAY: So am I. BROWN: I'm not sure you can necessarily. I know. It's a little tricky here but is there any reason not to have anticipated the fact that there would be bunkers like this, explosives like this and a need to secure them?

KAY: Absolutely not. For example, al Qa Qaa was a site of (UNINTELLIGIBLE) super gun project. It was a team of mine that discovered the HMX originally in 1991. That was one of the most well documented explosive sites in all of Iraq. The other 80 or so major ammunition storage points were also well documented.

Iraq had, and it's a frightening number, two-thirds of the total conventional explosives that the U.S. has in its entire inventory. The country was an armed camp.

Laura Rozen has more.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

2 US Troops, 15 Others killed

17 persons died in violent attacks in Iraq on Thursday, including two US troops.

Al-Hayat reports that Grand Ayatollah met with the Chaldean Patriarch. The grand ayatollah urged Christian Iraqis to vote, and condemned attacks on Christian churches by what he called "takfiri" forces. The practice of declaring some Muslims to actually be "kafirs" or infidels is controversial in mainstream Islam, since it is often felt that if someone claims to be a Muslim, the claim should be accepted. The militant, radical Muslim fundamentalists often declare other Muslims to be unbelievers. But this is the first time I have seen condemnation of takfiris in relation to non-Muslims. Sistani seems to be implying that it is even wrong for Muslim Iraqis to consider Christian Iraqis "infidels." Of course, mainstream Islam does accept the truth of Jesus as an envoy of God, and the Koran says that Christians are closest in love to Muslims. So perhaps the statement isn't surprising; but it struck me as distinctive.

Britain outlined the precise steps and stages envisaged in the movement of Iraq toward elections in January of 2005. This is the first time many of these steps have been spelled out publicly.

The FBI is investigating how Halliburton got its bids to work on Iraqi petroleum facilities.
Vice President Dick Cheney is the former CEO of Halliburton. The company is also being investigated concerning money that has gone missing.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Breaking News: Film Crew May have Smoking Gun

A US film crew has footage of the explosives at al-Qaqaa that later went missing. This development may be the downside of embedding for the US military. It makes things hard to deny later on if you leave a filmed trail. For instance, the Russians can't have absconded with the explosives before the war if a US camera crew still sees them there in April of 2003.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraqi Officials Deny Early Disappearance of Explosives

Dr. Muhammad Sharaa who leads Iraq's science monitoring department, denies that the 380 tons of high explosives that has gone missing could have been moved in spring of 2003 before or during the war. AFP reports:

"It is impossible that these materials could have been taken from this site before the regime's fall," Mohammed al-Sharaa, who heads the Science Ministry's site monitoring department, said.

"The officials that were inside this facility (Al-Qaqaa) beforehand confirm that not even a shred of paper left it before the fall.

"I spoke to them about it and they even issued certified statements to this effect which the US-led coalition was aware of."

AP's timeline on the explosives shows that an inspection team from the International Atomic Energy Commission visited Iraq in mid-March, 2003 just before the war, and found the seals they had placed on the explosives containers in January untouched.

US military officers are now expressing confidence that the explosives couldn't have been removed in April-May 2003 because there were US vehicles all over the roads it would need to have travelled. But as Nathan Brown notes below, the signs of looting were far more extreme as reported in spring of 2004 than they had been earlier. So the evidence suggests that in fact lots of looting did go on under the nose of the US military. (Again, as John Kerry has pointed out, this wasn't their fault; they didn't have enough troops on the ground to secure the weapons sites). In fact, all the looting of all the weapons depots took place with US military driving all over the country. But they had no instructions to stop random trucks and that was not defined as their mission by the Bush administration.

After all, you wouldn't have thought that seven nuclear facilities in Iraq could have been looted at that time, either, with all the US troops around and US vehicles on the roads. Sorry, nice try but no cigar.

I think the evidence is that the explosives were still there and under seal in mid-March 2003. I find it difficult to believe they were moved during the war. What soldier would have been stupid enough to drive a truck full of that stuff through Iraq as the US was bombing the country? Despite the stability of these explosives under ordinary circumstances, such a truck driver would have been exposed to extreme danger from American fire, if anything sufficiently powerful hit the truck. Plus the Iraqi scientists now confirm that it wasn't moved.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Brown: 2004 Bremer Report on al-Qaqaa Looting

Professor Nathan Brown of George Washington University writes:

In the dispute between the Kerry campaign and the Bush administration over the disappearance of explosives at al-Qaqaa, the core of the Bush defense is that we don’t know when the explosives disappeared; it could have happened before American troops arrived. President Bush stated today: “Our military is now investigating a number of possible scenarios, including that the explosives may have been moved before our troops even arrived at the site. This investigation is important and it’s ongoing, and a political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your commander in chief.”

I have to admit that I am unsure why this is a defense. If the investigation is so important, why is it still ongoing? One CPA document (discussed below) makes clear that the extent of looting has been known—not merely suspected but documented and evaluated—for some time. The reason we don’t know when the explosives disappeared is that we were not securing or monitoring the site. In other words, our lack of knowledge about the date of the disappearance is itself an indication that nobody was watching one of the most important military production sites in the country. Thus, to proclaim now that we don’t know what happened is not evidence of an open mind; it is evidence of an open barn door. Why did Bush wait until October 2004 to look into the matter? The 18 ½-month gap is no more to Bush’s credit than the 18 ½-minute gap was to Nixon’s. It is the absence of evidence that is the problem.

But the absence of evidence is not evidence of absent-mindedness. There were people who said a year and a half ago that this needed attention. In particular, the IAEA was trying to examine the site from the very end of the war. We barred them. In other words, the failure to monitor was not an oversight but a policy decision. It may have been partly based on the size of the American force, but it was also based on an ideological hostility to the United Nations.

Actually, we do know a little bit more than has been reported. But the little evidence we do have hardly supports the Bush case. What has been widely reported is that during and immediately after the war, some American military units and journalists briefly visited the site. What has not been reported is that on 15 April 2004—a year after the war—CPA head Paul Bremer issued a regulation transferring the employees of some military industries to various parts of the Iraqi government. I assume the point was to ensure that these critical people would get paid and not defect to the insurgents. That regulation can be viewed here.

Annex A to the regulation mentions al-Qaqaa (see p. 3 of the annex) and the extent of damage and looting there. 37% of the buildings were destroyed and fully 85% of its machines were destroyed or looted.

In other words, the place was very utterly trashed as of this past April, a year into the Iraqi occupation.

What does this have to do with the flap between Bush and Kerry? Well, it seems to me that if damage to equipment was so remarkably extensive—with the vast majority of the equipment ripped out or destroyed—any of the military units or journalists visiting in April 2003 should have noticed it even in a cursory examination. One of the accounts (by Fred Wellman, a former spokesman for the 101st Airborne Division’s 2nd Brigade) does indeed mention that looting was underway on April 9. This was roughly when the Iraqi regime disintegrated and the looting began, so the observation makes sense. Looting was not mentioned in the accounts of the first American visit to the site, the previous week. I do not know how long it takes to loot such a site so thoroughly (according the original NY Times story, the looting was still going on quite recently), but it seems that almost all of it occurred during the period of the American occupation. When the explosives were taken cannot be ascertained from this. But we seem to have evidence that virtually everything at the site—even the stuff that was nailed down—was taken while it was under our nominal control.

- Nathan Brown

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Qazi tries to Forestall Sunni Boycott of Elections

Az-Zaman: United Nations special envoy to Iraq, Ashraf Jahangir Qazi, held talks on Wednesday with Shaikh Muhammad Bashar al-Faydi, a leader of the Association of Muslim Scholars. They discussed the AMS attitude toward the January elections as well as the situation in Fallujah, which continues to be bombed by the United States. Qazi said that the UN was willing to take a more active negotiating role in Iraq if it might avert a Sunni Arab boycott of the elections. (A Sunni boycott might produce a parliament that was 80% Shiite and 15% Kurdish, leaving the Sunni Arabs out altogether, even though they form 15 percent of the population and are the wealthiest and best educated Iraqis. This result would be a huge disaster, since the parliament would then write the constitution and the Sunni Arabs would not be represented in the process.) So far, AMS is urging a boycott, in contrast to the Iraqi Islamic Party, which wants Sunnis to come out in force.

It is a shame that Qazi has to play this role, with the Americans having no better policy toward the Sunni Arabs than to bomb the bejesus out of them. Why isn't Colin Powell talking to al-Faydi?

The US bombed Fallujah again on Wednesday, killing 3 persons.

President Ghazi al-Yawir (a Sunni) received a delegation from (Shiite) Karbala on Wednesday. He said a way must be found for Iraqis to prevent a US attack on Fallujah and other Iraqi cities.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Deadly Dual Use Explosives Missing: Part Deux

The politicization of news in the United States has reached such an embarrassing point that what Vice Presidential candidate Dick Cheney thinks about what was going on in Iraq in April of 2003 is being reported by the press in an article on the weapons' disappearance, even though he was not there and knows nothing about it and speaks in the subjunctive. The proper journalistic judgment on such a statement? Treat it on the op-ed page but keep it away from news sections unless the story is on Cheney's claims in his speeches.

Despite the new attempt to defend Bush from charges of incompetence over the disappearance of 380 tons of dual-use explosives (which can be used to detonate nuclear bombs) from the al-Qaqaa facility in Iraq, there is really no excuse. The Pentagon's attempt to maintain that the facility was inspected in early April by US troops has fallen apart. It has 1000 buildings, and the troops had no orders to search them exhaustively. Thus, the statement that they did not see the stickers of the International Atomic Energy Commission does not in fact suggest that the explosives were already gone. It indicates that they didn't have time to see much of the facility.

The gravity of the disappearance of these explosives cannot be underscored enough. Not only can they help in the detonation of a nuclear bomb, they are deadly in their own right. A pound can bring down a jetliner. There are 2000 pounds in a ton. Bush let enough high-power explosives disappear to bring down (God forbid) 760,000 airliners! What if this stuff leaks from Iraq to al-Qaeda?

Initial Bush administration responses to the scandal depended on NBC news reporting which, however, did not say what the administration said it said. The embedded NBC reporter has now clarified that the 101st Infantry did reach al-Qaqaa a week after the 3rd ID, but did not inspect the site. Its commander told CBS he would have needed 4 times as many troops as he had to do that job on top of everything else. Probably the entire US military needed 4 times as many troops as they had in Iraq.

The Bush administration's attempts to pull the wool over the eyes of the American public fails on several grounds. First, there is every indication that al-Qaqaa was not secured and could not have been secured. That is because Bush did not send enough troops to Iraq to do the job that needed to be done. It was Bush's decision, not Rumsfeld. At this late date surely Bush's tendency to farm out blame to his cabinet for his own decisions, and then to decline to hold his cabinet members responsible for mistakes, must be completely rejected. The buck stops with the president. Bush decided to send such a small army to Iraq that the place immediately fell apart in an orgy of uncontrollable looting. This development is not the fault of the Iraqis. The sudden removal of the structures of government regularly produces this result in history. There was looting when the electricity went out in New York in 1977. It is Bush's fault.

Second, although the disappearance of the RDX and HMX is frightening, it is only one of many such scandals. Dual-use equipment and even nuclear material was also looted (most of the nuclear material has thankfully been recovered, no thanks to Bush).

Third, this charade of looking around for lowly GIs to get the blame off Bush about al-Qaqaa is just public relations. The fact is that there are people in the Pentagon and the CIA who know exactly what happened there. This is because al-Qaqaa was certainly under US satellite surveillance in spring of 2003. The United States had extensive satellite surveillance of Iraqi weapons sites, some of the techniques of which Colin Powell revealed at the United Nations Security Council. Although the interpretation of the photos turns out to be more difficult than proponents of the technology admitted, some basic things can be seen. For instance, trucks moving 380 tons of explosives from a sensitive facility could certainly be spotted. An automobile typically weighs two tons, so this is like moving 190 automobiles. It is a big operation and would show up clearly in the aerial photographs. That information like this is still probably classified, even though the Saddam government is long gone and there is no compelling national security need to keep it secret, underlines how easy it is for governments with billions of dollars in high tech surveillance equipment to manipulate a democratic public. It is a shell game, with information being shifted around and then hidden.

And if all else fails, you just muddy the waters with some cock and bull story that you know the party faithful will swallow and which will create doubt in the minds of the independents.

We have seen the debasement of discourse reach the point where George W. Bush can actually deny that he let Bin Laden escape at Tora Bora, and then can use John Kerry's simple statement of that fact as a means of indicting John Kerry. Bush portrayed Kerry in one speech as cocky and too sure of himself for making the charge. Numerous eyewitnesses from among captured Taliban and al-Qaeda confirm Kerry's allegation. The way Bush gets away with this is that the journalists are not calling him on it.

The Bush administration is now using the same rhetorical strategy with regard to al-Qaqaa. You label a true charge false or hasty. And then you use your own lie to impugn the character of your opponent, who is now accused of being hasty in his judgment or of being dishonest or guilty of poor fact checking.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld even tried to dismiss the missing explosives story by comparing to the story of the looting of the Baghdad Museum. He seems to want to say that the museum was not in fact looted. But of course it was. Indeed, as a historian of Iraq I weep every day that apparently the archives of the entire period of the constitutional monarchy (1922-1958) were burned or disappeared. That would be as though the US National Archives records for everything from the Roaring Twenties through the Depression, WW II, and the Eisenhower Administration had completely disappeared off the face of the earth. The rightwing revisionist story that the looting never happened is itself a myth. So Rumsfeld disproves a true charge by comparing it to another true charge that he has incorrectly labeled a myth, thereby discrediting both.

The presidential election of 2004 is a test of Lincoln's assertion that you can't fool all the people all the time. At the very least, if Bush is put back in it will demonstrate that you can fool enough of the people enough of the time.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bush will ask for another $70 Billion
Allawi Slams Bush over Troop Massacre

The Bush administration will ask for another $70 billion for Iraq in another month or two if re-elected. Remember in the debates when Kerry said Iraq had cost $200 billion, and Bush corrected him that it was only $120 billion? Well, it turns out that Kerry was right, but Bush was being dishonest in postponing the further request until after the election. Another example of how the Bush administration is government by "representation" in the sense that Michel Foucault used the term rather than in the civics sense. Foucault said that people have a tendency to represent reality, and then to refer to the representation rather than to the reality. (This is also the way stereotypes and bigotry work.) So Bush represented the Iraq war as a $120 billion effort, and actually corrected Kerry with reference to this representation. But the representation was a falsehood, hidden by a clever fiscal delaying tactic. So Kerry is made to seem imprecise or as exaggerating, when in fact he was referring to the reality. Bush made representation trump reality.

Edward Said in his Orientalism shows the ways in which Western travelers and writers have often invented a representation of the Middle East that then gets substituted for Middle Eastern realities so powerfully that the realities can no longer even be seen by Westerners. Said cites travel accounts by eyewitnesses who report falsehoods that had already entered the literature. So these travelers let the representations over-rule what their own eyes saw.

In a sign that Iyad Allawi finally realizes he needs to distance himself from the Americans if he is to have any political future (or perhaps even just future) in Iraq, he blamed the US military for neglecting to arm and escort the recruits that were found massacred on Sunday. He accused the US military, and by extension the Bush administration, of "gross negligence."

Allawi was contradicted by his Defense Minister, Hazim Shaalan, who blamed the recruits for being too eager to get home after training, for leaving the base at midnight and without arms, and for taking an unprotected route.

The Bush administration is not forgiving about criticism from allies, so although Allawi will get points with the Iraqi public for finally speaking out about US incompetence in this regard, he may well find a long knife in his back if Bush gets back in. And, obviously, Shaalan is angling for Allawi's job by blaming the victims.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

10 Killed in four bombings, Including US Soldier
Charges of Corruption In Halliburton Bids

AP reports that that on Monday, guerrillas bombed four coalition and Iraqi military convoys on Monday, killing 8. Among the dead was one American and one Estonian soldier.

Guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb in western Baghdad, killing 1 US soldier and wounding five other US troops.

On the outskirts of Baghdad, guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb as an Estonian patrol passed, killing one soldier and wounding 5 others.

Near the Australian embassy in Baghdad, guerrillas used a car bomb to attack Australian military vehicles. They eounded 3 Australian soldiers lightly, but killed 3 Iraqis and wounded 6 others.

In Mosul, one suicide car bomber detonated his payload at provincial government offices, killing 3 Iraqi government employees and wounding one. Another car bomber targeted an Iraqi military convoy in the city, wounding an Iraqi general, Mu`tazz al-Taqah.

AP says that guerrilla attacks are up 25 percent since the beginning of the holy fasting month of Ramadan.

Az-Zaman reports the assassination of Dhari Ali Dulaimi al-Ghariri, a tribal chieftain, in Mahmudiyah. He did not hold an official post other than heading up his tribe, and had not held high office under Saddam Hussein. Mahmudiyah is in a mixed Sunni and Shiite area where there has been violence between Sunnis and Shiites.

In Mosul, guerrillas assassinated Shaikh Sahir Khudeir, who chaired an association of tribal chieftains in the north.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat says that hundreds of Kurds demonstrated in Kirkuk demanding that the city be incorporated into a new Kurdish superprovince. The Kirkuk issue remains unresolved, with thousands of Kurds coming back. It is among the issues that could throw Iraq into even worse turmoil

In Najaf, the Shiite clergy issued a joint condemnation of what they called the "massacre" of Iraqi military recruits, most of them poor Shiites from the south. The condemnation signals what a tough time the guerrillas have in building a national consensus, since the Shiite clergy see the victims as poor Shiites and do not see the perpetrators as Iraqi patriots.

Billions of dollars in no-bid contracts for Iraq were let to Halliburton subsidiary Kellog, Brown and Root, sometimes in violation of Pentagon rules. The chief civilian in charge of making sure such contracts are on the up and up says she was marginalized and ignored by military officers who ignored the rules.

Gee, I wonder how Halliburton got to be so powerful inside the Bush White House?

Helena Cobban at Just World News insightfully analyses last Friday's Shiite sermons in Iraq, showing the ways in which the clergy are threatening Shiites with hellfire if they don't vote.

I pretty much feel that way about Democrats who don't vote in 8 days.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bush is Making us Safer?

The complete lack of interest of the Bush administration in actually securing dangerous materials connected to the old, abandoned Iraqi nuclear program has long belied Bush's stated concern with Iraq's alleged weapons as a pretext for the war.

James Glanz, William J. Broad and David E. Sanger with Khalid al-Ansary reveal in the New York Times today that the Bush administration allowed 380 tons of super-powerful explosives to disappear from al-Qaqaa, one of Iraq's sensitive military installations, after the war in spring of 2003. These are not ordinary bombs. This explosive material, HMX and RDX, can be used to detonate atomic bombs, collapse buildings, and form warheads for missiles. A pound of it brought down a passenger jet over Lockerbie, Scotland.

A lot of the roadside bombs that have killed hundreds of US troops and maimed thousands have been made of HMX and RDX, as suggested by how infrequently the guerrillas have blown themselves up in planting them. HMX and RDX are favored by terrorists because they are stable and will only explode via a blasting cap.

Incredibly, the International Atomic Energy Commission and European Union officials warned Bush before the war that these explosives needed to be safeguarded.

Josh Marshall is suspicious that this major screw-up has been known to the Bush administration for some time, and that it may have pressured the Iraqi government not to mention it.

If Bush cannot even protect our troops from explosives at a sensitive facility in a country he had conquered, how is he going to protect the American public from terrorists who have not even yet been identified?

The disappearance of these explosives is yet one more disaster caused by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's mania to send a small military force into Iraq. Rumsfeld over-ruled the officers in the Pentagon, who wanted hundreds of thousands of troops and knew that many would be needed to secure the country after the war. Why hasn't Rumsfeld been fired? He ran Iraq for most of the last 18 months and it is beginning to be as cratered as the dark side of the moon.

Only two weeks ago, The International Atomic Energy Commission reported that not only had dual-use equipment been stripped from an old Iraq nuclear weapons facility, but even the buildings had been stripped and dismantled. Muhammad al-Baradei said that some of the nuclear material stolen from facilities in Iraq has already begun showing up in other countries. But the dual-use equipment, which has applications in nuclear weapons construction, has disappeared. (Hmm. I wonder which neighbor of Iraq might be desperately at work on a nuclear bomb and might be willing to pay top dollar for such equipment?) How bad a job Bush is doing is clear when we consider that we might well be relieved to know that this equipment went to Iran, since that means Bin Laden doesn't have it.

So let me ask this again. Bush is making us safer? The American public trusts him to fight terror more effectively than Kerry? On what record? Bush appears to have all but just called up Usamah and Khamenei and told them where Saddam's old stuff was in case they needed it for their programs. And he politely made sure that no pesky US troops would be around to impede their access.

Bush administration spokesmen are being careful to say that the hundreds of tons of explosives stolen from al-Qaqaa are not themselves useful as fissile material, i.e. they are not enriched uranium or plutonium.

But the fact is that one of the first such "missing deadly weapons" scandals to break in Iraq had to do with the disappearance of radioactive materials from Tuwaitha. This theft was known already in the summer of 2003, and worries were expressed that that material could be used to make a dirty bomb.

So Bush not only failed to have al-Qaqaa guarded against theft of HMX and RDX, not only failed to guard against theft of dual-use equipment from a long-defunct nuclear program site, but also failed to do the elementary work of ensuring that the notorious al-Tuwaitha facility was secured against the theft of radiocative materials!

Since Tuwaitha was the great bugaboo impelling the Iraq war in the first place, you would imagine that Bush would have sent out a unit to secure and search it immediately. But no, he politely let the looters have a look-around first, waiting in line.

I know someone is going to write me asking whether the existence of all this equipment and dangerous explosives doesn't prove that Saddam still had an active weapons program. The answer is a categorical "no." A lot of this stuff was left over from the 1980s when there had been such active programs, but which were abandoned after the Gulf War. Ironically, the bits and pieces Saddam still had were useless to a major state. But they could be stolen and cobbled together by a small band of terrorists to deadly effect.

I just don't feel any safer with Bush in the White House. Maybe it is just me.

Reuters has the main stories of mayhem in Iraq on Sunday. The big one is of the cold-blooded murder of nearly 50 Iraqi army recruits in Diyala province. They were killed mafia-style, a bullet in the back of the head. They were unarmed and being trucked back from their training. This was obviously an inside job, since the guerrillas knew where they were and that they were unarmed. Iraqi al-Qaeda claimed responsibility, which is plausible since Monotheism and Holy War does hate Shiites, and the troops were poor Shiites from the south.

I googled Ed Seitz, the State Department security official killed by a mortar shell on Sunday. The story of his death at the hands of nativist Iraqi guerrillas is even more complicated and poignant if it is true that he was a crusader against the anti-globalization movement who tried to keep Canadian anarchists out of the US and used to ask them where Bin Laden is. The contrast of the demand for open borders for corporate purposes and for closed borders with regard to ideas is striking. In some ways, Iraq is proving highly resistant to the distinction, and is if anything turning it on its head. Companies are being chased out of Iraq, but all sorts of ideas are swirling in from Iraq's nieghbors and from the United States and Europe.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

IRI Suppresses Key Data
Muqtada as Popular as Allawi

In my posting on Sunday, I complained that the International Republican Institute rather unrealistically put a happy face on the results of its most recent poll in Iraq. It is worse. First, the poll is being greeted as a huge joke in Iraq, both because it is widely felt that its methodology was deeply flawed (even a local Baghdad IRI official admitted as much) and because its more positive findings are contradicted by local Iraqi polling. They left out any question about the country's most popular politician, Ibrahim Jaafari!

Second, they have actively suppressed at their web site slides Q27, which reveal the popularity and recognition ratings of major political figures. Here are some selected findings, arranged according to level of support. (Note, I just don't have time to type it all up, but am presenting all the top figures along with some others who are important but scored lower).


Support

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim 51.27%

Ayad Allawi 47.01

Muqtada al-Sadr 45.82

Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum 37.51

Hussein Hadi al-Sadr 35.70

Adnan Pachachi 33.09

Fuad Masoum 31.63

Masoud Barzani 31.06

Jalal Talabani 30.49

Salamah al-Khafaji 28.23

Hareth al-Dhari 25.26

Abdul Karim al-Muhammadawi 17.95

Ahmad Chalabi 15.07

Raja al-Khuzai 11.18



This list is remarkable for the number of clerics at the top. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, Muqtada al-Sadr, Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, and Hussein al-Sadr are all Shiite clergymen. The most popular Sunni aside from Adnan Pachachi on this list (why didn't they ask about President Ghazi al-Yawir? It is bizarre.) is Hareth al-Dhari, the Sunni cleri who leads the Association of Muslim Scholars. AMS is leading a boycott of the elections, though, otherwise al-Dhari is a shoo-in for a seat in parliament.

The other thing that is remarkable about the list is how it is split between anti-American and pro-American figures. Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and his arch nemesis radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr are in a virtual tie for second place, behind al-Hakim. Although al-Hakim earlier cooperated with the Americans, he is increasingly bitter. He spoke out against the US attack on Tel Afar, and today al-Jazeerah reports that he is threatening to reveal the details of Iraqi government torture of prisoners. Al-Dhari is anti-American, as well, though Hussein al-Sadr had dinner with Colin Powell and is a moderate, and Bahr al-Ulum served on the Interim Governing Council.

Anyway, for Muqtada al-Sadr to have a higher recognition rate than Iyad Allawi, and to have about the same level of support, is surely highly embarrassing to the Bush administration. For so many Shiite clerics to be at the top of the list is, likewise. These results were reported in the press (Robin Wright of the Washington Post clearly got access to all the slides or at least to people who had seen them). But it is highly unprofessional that IRI did not post the slides about the relative ranking of politicians to its web site (or at least not to the obvious part of its web site).

Since I am a fan of Dr. Raja' al-Khuzai, I am sorry to see her numbers so low. Less than half of respondents recognized her name, and she did not place well (though perhaps well enough for a seat in parliament). These results are not surprising, since she led the charge last winter to stop the implementation of Islamic law in personal status matters in Iraq. Apparently that stand, though successful on the IGC, wasn't very popular. (She is an obstetrician and headed a women's hospital in Diwaniyah).

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Defending Massad

Those who care anything for freedom of speech and academic integrity should please rise to the defense of Professor Joseph Massad at Columbia University. A concerted campaign has been gotten up against him by the American Likud, aimed at getting him fired.

We don't fire professors in the United States for their views when we are in our right minds. It happens when the US is seized with an irrational frenzy, as during the McCarthy period. A researcher at the University of Michigan was let go in the 1950s for "tending toward Scandinavian economics."

You know, we really need a Political Action Committee for professors. The American Association of University Professors is a wonderful organization, but has mainly moral authority (it can de-certify universities that behave egregiously). There are hundreds of thousands of teachers at community colleges, four-year colleges and universities in this country, and they just let themselves be walked all over by small single-issue constituencies who don't want them teaching this, that or the other thing.

Congress is increasingly a battleground on such matters, and elected representatives tend to cave to special interest groups if there is no money coming in on the other side.

We don't have to be sitting ducks and put up with this. There are lots of forces in US society that would support the researchers. The debate over attempts by creationists on the school board in Kansas to curtail the teaching of evolution has been informed by city council concerns that such moves may damage the city's biosciences initiative. It is increasingly clear to a lot of Americans that they can be ignorant and poor or they can cultivate science and get rich. Likewise, a lot of Americans realize that serious security thinking at the university level requires a free-for-all in which you can't put some subjects off limits for debate.

In the meantime, I urge academics and others to boycott the United States Institute for Peace this year, as long as extremist ideologue Daniel Pipes serves on it. Bush put him on it despite the Senate's refusal to confirm him. Pipes is leading the charge to have US academics censored for daring speak out against Ariel Sharon's odious predations in Palestine. Sharon's state terrorism and expansionism is endangering both Israel and the United States, and puts both Jewish Americans and other Americans at unnecessary risk. Those who attempt to stop criticism of Sharon are in essence giving aid and comfort to extremists of all stripes, who benefit from polarization. In parlous times like the post-9/11 environment, demagogues grow powerful and American values are endangered. Massad is the canary in the mine shaft of American democracy.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

6 US Troops Wounded, More than 28 Iraqis Dead, Over 50 Wounded

On Saturday, Alistair Lyon reported from Baghdad along with David Randall in London that guerrillas wounded 6 US troops; killed at least 24 Iraqi security men and wounded dozens of Iraqi police and national guardsmen; and killed 4 civilians.

Early on Saturday a suicide bomber crashed into an Iraqi police post outside a US Marine base at the small town of Baghadi, 142 miles west of the capital, Baghdad, killing 16 Iraqi policemen and wounding 40 others.

On the road out to the airport from Baghdad, guerrillas set off a roadside bomb as a Bradley Fighting vehicle passed, wounding 6 US soldiers.

In downtown Baghdad, guerrillas fired two mortar rounds. They killed two Iraqi civilians and injured another.

In the village of Ishaqi near Samarra, another suicide bomber set off his payload near a checkpoint maintained by Iraqi National Guards, klling 4 and wounding 6. Guerrillas in Samarra itself set off a roadside bomb, killing two more Iraqi policemen.

Guerrillas near Mosul attacked a Turkish truck convoy, killing two drivers and injuring two other Turks.

Gunmen assassinated the chief of the military police ("police guards") in Irbil, Col. Taha Ahmad, 51. Conflicts among Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen in the far north make it difficult to know who exactly was behind such an assassination (-AS).

Al-Hayat is giving the number killed on Saturday as 50, nearly twice the figures in the early Western wire service reports.

Guerrillas bombed the Khana pipeline northeast of Baghdad, setting it ablaze and damaging 150 yards of it. The pipeline pumps crude petroleum to the Dora refinery at Baghdad, so that this sabotage directly harms Iraq's ability to provide fuel oil and gasoline to citizens.

Guerrillas in Mushahadah, a half-hour drive to the north of Baghdad, also bombed an oil pipeline feeding the Dora refinery.

In Baqubah, an attempt to bomb a pipeline going to Dora was foiled, according to ash-Sharq al-Awsat, so it is pretty obvious that there was a coordinated campaign of sabotage directed at Dora on Saturday.

US forces continued to attack Fallujah, and in a raid captured an emerging leader of the Monotheism and Holy War terrorist organization, along with five others.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Is the IRI Spinning the Poll

I find the cover page at the International Republican Institute web site concerning its recent polling in Iraq to be extremely disturbing. IRI is of course closely linked to the US Republican party and does the polling with US tax dollars (i.e. you and I are paying for it). The web site tries to spin the alarming results of the poll so as to emphasize the positives for the Bush administration. The only positive signs they can come up with, though, are that 64% of Iraqis remain optimistic that next year will be better than this; that 58% of Iraqis believe elections will be held in January; that 2/3s think a civil war unlikely; and that 52 percent of Iraqis believe that religion and state should respect one another but remain separate.

The authors of this screed go out of their way to debunk press reports that a majority of Iraqis favor religious parties, pointing out that few parties polled well. This statement is frankly dishonest; in fact the entire summary is deeply dishonest, and is designed to help Bush win the election. All Americans should be outraged at this misuse of supposed social science and of our tax money.

Before looking at the actual poll numbers, I can signal my disagreements with the summary. Optimism is relative and may or may not tell us much. It is not actually a good sign that over 40% of Iraqis either do not believe that elections can be held in January or don't know if they can.

The question is not how many think civil war likely. It is who thinks civil war is likely. If Kirkuk does, that is alarming, because they are the ones who would fight such a war. Obviously a civil war is far from the thinking of a largely Shiite city like Basra, of 1.3 million deep in the Shiite south.

Western observers are extremely imprecise in their language about religion and state. Many say that Grand Ayatollah Sistani favors a separation of religion and state, which is completely untrue. He wants Islamic law to be the law of the land, and wants his fatwas on "social issues" to be obeyed. He just doesn't want clerics to run the Islamic state-- he wants it to be laypeople. So the model is more like the Sudan (if Sudan had genuine elections) than it is like Iran. So how exactly the question was asked in Arabic would be key to the answer given and to what that answer actually means. If the Iraqis thought you were asking about clerical rule, then a bare majority is against it. If they thought you were asking about implementing Islamic law, the answer might be different. And, the most popular politicians are the ones who most want Islamic law. The poll does not even ask about Islamic law.

Although Iraqis did not strongly identify with parties, they have over and over made it clear in IRI and other polls who the most popular politicians in the country are. The men named for whom Iraqis would vote are Ibrahim Jaafari, leader of the al-Da`wa Party (founded in 1958 as a revolutionary Shiite organization aiming for an Islamic state) and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (the name says it all). Jaafari for some odd reason was not included in this most recent poll (perhaps in hopes that leaving him out of the choices would allow the IRI to deny the clear trend toward theocratic voting). I could not find the slide at the IRI site that gave al-Hakim by far the biggest lead among the rest, but it was reported in the press summaries of the poll.

Some 40% of Iraqis say they would be more likely to vote for a candidate endorsed by a religious leader. About 11 percent say they would vote for a candidate endorsed by a political party. But all the most important political parties in the Arab provinces (Da'wa, SCIRI, the Association of Muslim Scholars) are religious. So this result suggests that at least half of the population will vote as Sistani, Da'wa and so forth instruct them. Another 15% would vote as their tribal leaders say. But a large number of tribal leaders are loyal to particular clerics, so that this may not be such a separate group.

The IRI poll is skewed to begin with. Its sample is only 55% Shiite, whereas the population is almost certainly 65% Shiite. The sample is 34% Sunni and 9.3% "Muslim." Sunnis would be far more likely to represent themselves as just "Muslim" than are Shiites, and therefore the poll is likely to under-count Shiite views significantly. Since, in turn, Shiites are more likely to want a theocracy, given that the Sunni middle classes retain some Baath-era secularism, if Sunnis are over-represented then so would be secularists.

The "optimism" of the Iraqis, which keeps being touted by the US Right in justification of the mess they have made over there, is a more complex issue than they pretend. First of all, we don't know why they are optimistic about next year being better than this. It could be that they have been plunged into such unprecedented misery that they believe it cannot get worse. "Better" is a relative word, not an absolute one. Second, this poll shows 45% of Iraqis saying the country is headed in the wrong direction, a big jump from June. So the optimism is declining fast, and it is no longer the case that a majority is optimistic. Indeed, more are now pessimistic (45%) than are optimistic (41%). The way the question is asked can also influence the answer. What does "headed in the right direction" even mean to Iraqis? Did they use the word ittijah? Would it have made a difference if they had asked a question like, "Are current policies of the US and Allawi in Iraq likely to produce an improved situation over time?"

Not only are people in the Sunni Arab areas pessimistic, which could be expected, but so are people in Baghdad. And confidence in the northern mixed cities of Mosul and Kirkuk has plummeted. Kirkuk is obviously a tinderbox. Indeed, the only places where optimists form a majority are the deep south around Basra and the Kurdish regions. Even Kurdish optimism is declining from previous highs.

Some 34% of people in Mosul and Kirkuk believe that a civil war is possible or imminent! Since those are the likely sites of a civil war, that over a third think it a serious threat is quite alarming. Moreover, the people of a country are not a good guide to how likely civil war is. Virtually no one in Yugoslavia would have predicted a civil war in 1989. People can learn to hate really fast, in a week or two; and then observers later complain about "centuries-old hatreds," when in fact very often people had gotten along just fine for decades before the conflagration.

Suspicion of the United States is so great that 2/3s of Iraqis believe that if a non-neighboring state instigated a civil war, it would be America! And 22% believe that it would be instigated by Israel in that case. (Admittedly, this wasn't thought a highly likely scenario). More Iraqis blamed the US and its allies in Iraq for the current poor security situation than blamed foreign terrorists! And they were four times more likely to blame the US & coalition than to blame armed elements of the former regime!

About 55% say that the current interim government does not represent people like them. Only 8% enthusiastically say it represents them. Half of Iraqis blame the government for being ineffective, and only 44% think that it has been at all effective (the same 8% are enthusiastic). Allawi's effectiveness rating has fallen from 65% last July to 45% now.

Virtually none of the main points made by the IRI at its website about its own poll are valid in context, which does not exactly inspire confidence in the poll takers. The link to the poll results is given at the bottom of their page, in pdf. Go look at the slides yourself. It is not in fact a pretty picture.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Eminem on Bush and Iraq: Comments by Hale and White

Philosopher Benjamin Hale responds to my posting about Eminem on Friday:

' There are more interesting implications of Eminem’s condemnation of the Iraq War. Eminem, if you remember, was at the center of a controversy a few years ago about some extremely homophobic imagery and references in his songs. Because of this, he found a fan base that more or less does not find compelling the arguments of traditionally liberal, civil rights activists. As well, Eminem has actively challenged Moby, a dance track musician who has outspokenly aligned himself with the more hipped out, peace loving, vegetarian crowd. That is, Eminem’s fan base tends to poo-pooh the arguments of the more politically sensitive hip-hoppers, which breaks down as a sort of rap-world street-feud of Hobbesians versus Rousseauvians that has been brewing since at least the mid-eighties. In a way, Eminem’s challenge to Bush suggests that Baptists and Bootleggers in the music industry can also be very good bedfellows. '

Benjamin Hale
Philosophy Department
SUNY at Stony Brook
Stony Brook, NY 11794

Ben White sends in the following perceptive comments:

' Good piece on the Eminem song. Thought I'd share a few thoughts on the anti-war hip hop phenomenon.

Despite the continuing trend for most mainstream rap artists to focus lyrically solely on the standard commercial fare (clothes, jewellery, sex etc), there is a groundswell of anti-Bush/anti-war commentary emerging from the underground scene into the spotlight.

The Eminem song is good proof of this, as was the lyric by perhaps the US' biggest rapper Jay-Z as early as last year, when he rhymed in the track 'Beware of the Boys', “We rebellious, we back home/Screamin' ‘Leave Iraq alone!’”

In terms of an election effect, the fervently anti-Bush sentiment in urban black communities should be acknowledged. In the track 'Down with Us', featuring a whole host of well-respected artists, one line goes, “In the ghetto ‘No War’!/When people all around us are starvin’ and homeless/What is Bush focussed on?”

Even a very mainstream artist, Jadakiss, has released a successful track called 'Why', in which he raps, “Why they let the Terminator win the election? Come on, pay attention!” The video features protestors marching against a 'surveillance' society and war.

From the perspective of this column, this phenomenon is noteworthy, if only
because of the effect it might have on election day. One website urges a vote for Kerry in no uncertain terms - 'Vote or Die!' While the black urban vote might always have been traditionally Democrat, the 'Bush effect' could be interpreted as persuading the non-voter that this time it's worth casting his ballot paper. '

Ben White
Churchill College, Cambridge, UK

Here are the complete lyrics to Mosh (thanks to Chris Thompson):

' [Intro]

[I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America
And to the Republic for which it stands
One nation under God
Indivisible・
people…this is it…It feels so good to be back..]

[Verse1]

Scrutinize every word, memorize every line
I spit it once, refuel, reenergize, and rewind
I give sight to the blind, mind sight through the mind
I ostracize my right to express when I feel it's time
It's just all in your mind, what you interpret it as
I say to fight you take it as I’m gonna whip someone's ass
If you don't understand don't even bother to ask
A father who has grown up with a fatherless past
Who has blown up now to rap phenomenon that has
Or at least shows no difficulty multi task
And juggling both, perhaps mastered his craft slash
Entrepreneur who has held long too few more rap acts
Who has had a few obstacles thrown his way through the last half
Of his career typical manure moving past that
Mister kiss his ass crack, he's a class act
Rubber band man, yea he just snaps back

[Chorus]

Come along, follow me as I lead through the darkness
As I provide just enough spark, that we need to proceed
Carry on, give me hope, give me strength,
Come with me, and I won't stear you wrong
Put your faith and your trust as I guide us through the fog
Till the light, at the end, of the tunnel, we gonna fight,
We gonna charge, we gonna stomp, we gonna march through the swamp
We gonna mosh through the marsh, take us right through the doors..cum
on.

[Verse2]

To the people up top, on the side and the middle,
Come together, let's all bomb and swamp just a little
Just let it gradually build, from the front to the back
All you can see is a sea of people, some white and some black
Don't matter what color, all that matters is we gathered together
To celebrate for the same cause, no matter the weather
If it rains let it rain, yea the wetter the better
They ain't gonna stop us, they can't, we're stronger now more then ever,
They tell us no we say yea, they tell us stop we say go,
Rebel with a rebel yell, raise hell we gonna let em know
Stomp, push up, mush, fuck Bush, until they bring our troops home come
on just . . .

[Chorus]

Come along, follow me as I lead through the darkness
As I provide just enough spark, that we need to proceed
Carry on, give me hope, give me strength,
Come with me, and I won't stear you wrong
Put your faith and your trust as I guide us through the fog
Till the light, at the end, of the tunnel, we gonna fight,
We gonna charge, we gonna stomp, we gonna march through the swamp
We gonna mosh through the marsh, take us right through the doors, come
on

[Verse3]

Imagine it pouring, it's raining down on us,
Mosh pits outside the oval office
Someone's trying to tell us something, maybe this is God just saying
we're responsible for this monster, this coward, that we have empowered
This is Bin Laden, look at his head nodding,
How could we allow something like this, Without pumping our fist
Now this is our, final hour
Let me be the voice, and your strength, and your choice
Let me simplify the rhyme, just to amplify the noise
Try to amplify the times it, and multiply it by six
Teen million people are equal of this high pitch
Maybe we can reach Al Quaida through my speech
Let the President answer on high anarchy
Strap him with AK-47, let him go
Fight his own war, let him impress daddy that way
No more blood for oil, we got our own battles to fight on our soil
No more psychological warfare to trick us to think that we ain't loyal
If we don't serve our own country we're patronizing a hero
Look in his eyes, it's all lies, the stars and stripes
They've been swiped, washed out and wiped,
And Replaced with his own face, mosh now or die
If I get sniped tonight you'll know why, because I told you to fight

[Chorus]

So come along, follow me as I lead through the darkness
As I provide just enough spark, that we need to proceed
Carry on, give me hope, give me strength,
Come with me, and I won't stear you wrong
Put your faith and your trust as I guide us through the fog
Till the light, at the end, of the tunnel, we gonna fight,
We gonna charge, we gonna stomp, we gonna march through the swamp
We gonna mosh through the marsh, take us right through the doors

[Outro]

[Eminem speaking angrily]
And as we proceed, to mosh through this desert storm, in these closing statements, if they should argue, let us beg to differ, as we set aside our differences, and assemble our own army, to disarm this weapon of mass destruction that we call our president, for the present, and mosh for the future of our next generation, to speak and be heard, Mr. President, Mr. Senator

[End] '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Eminem on Bush

I don't know what Marshall Mathers's politics are. But I do know that they could be of consequence for the youth vote, and his loud pleas for everyone to vote may also have an impact at the margins (this election is about the margins).

That he is issuing a song, Mosh, which directly attacks Bush on the Iraq war may be a sign of the times:

Rebel with a rebel yell, raise hell/
We gonna let him know/
Stomp, push, shove, mush, fuck Bush!/
Until they bring our troops home . . .

Let the president answer on higher anarchy/
Strap him with an AK-47, let him go fight his own war/
Let him impress daddy that way . . . No more blood for oil."

In a forthcoming Rolling Stone interview, Mathers says:

"[Bush] has been painted to be this hero, and he's got our troops over there dying for no reason . . . I think he started a mess . . . He jumped the gun, and he fucked up so bad he doesn't know what to do right now . . . We got young people over there dyin', kids in their teens, early twenties that should have futures ahead of them. And for what? It seems like a Vietnam 2. Bin Laden attacked us, and we attacked Saddam. Explain why that is. Give us some answers."

The themes of the lyrics above and the interview are interesting. Mathers obviously had a difficult time in his relations with his parents. His mother was only 15 when she had him St. Joseph, Missouri, and his father was absent. At one point his mother was suing him over his constant insults to and cursing of her. He once told her "You only loved me until I was 8 years old."

So it is interesting that he reads Bush as merely attempting to please a somewhat distant and perhaps often absent father. And he critiques Bush's attempt to impress the old man insofar as W. used other young men's lives up in the process, instead of strapping on an AK-47 himself. Eminem knows about packing heat, and was accused of pistol-whipping a rival from the rap group Insane Clown Posse. (Actually, this would be a good epithet for Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Cheney and Bush).

The other interesting thing about the lyrics above is their invocation of the icon of lower middle class white identity, the "rebel yell." The appeal of the Confederate South for most of them lies not in its horrible race politics or slavery, but in a resistance to the intrusion of the Federal government into their lives.

Eminem cannily turns the Republicans' Southern Strategy against them, calling for a revolt against Bush policies by the guys Howard Dean referred to as having Confederate flags on their pickup trucks. (Although most listen to Country, some of the youngsters are Eminem fans.) Bush now becomes a symbol of grasping, stupid Federal interference, and Iraq is reconceived as a carpetbagging operation. "Until they bring our troops home" is a lyric that makes a moral claim. Bush & Co. have kidnapped US young persons in uniform and are holding them prisoner in an Iraqi cauldron for no good reason. The soldiers are not just soldiers but teenagers, Eminem's constituency.

The song is important as a development in popular culture. But I am arguing that it may also be important in class terms. If any significant number of lower middle class white youth are thinking like this, it could make a difference in some races.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

7 Iraqis Killed, 9 more Die of Previous Injuries

Al-Hayat:

Guerrillas fired mortar shells at caretaker Prime Minister Iyad Allawi as he was leaving the northern city of Mosul on Thursday. Journalists accompanying him heard five explosions as his entourage was on the verge of departing the city. From the helicopters used by Allawi and his delegation, one could see a small fire and columns of smoke rising in the sky of the city.

The journalists around him asked Allawi if the mortar shells had been meant for him, and he replied, "My visit to Mosul had been announced publicly, and I was surprised that this did not happen at the beginning of my visit, but only at the end."

Needless to say, a situation in which the Prime Minister visiting one of his major cities actively expects an assassination attempt every time he sets out is not a good one. On Wednesday, a leading member of Allawi's party, the Iraqi National Accord, was assassinated in Samarra.

Guerrillas fired from a car at two Iraqi national guardsmen in the toney Mansurah district in Baghdad, killing them, along with a woman.

On the outskirts of Baghdad, guerrillas fired at a van carrying 25 administrative employees to work at the airport, killing at least four persons and wounding others, including the driver (-ash-Sharq al-Awsat). Al-Yarmuk Hospital in Baghdad reported receiving several injured, some serioiusly.

In Baqubah, guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb, wounding two policemen and two national guardsmen. Eyewitnesses say that they swerved to miss a roadside bomb but then hit another.

On Wednesday evening, Iraqi police had arrested the preacher at a Baqubah mosque for urging on the resistance and for funding it. His mosque lay in the Zira`ah District of the city, and his name is Shaikh Muhammad Ali Samarra'i. Eyewitnesses in the district admitted that Shaikh Samarra'i regularly called in his Friday prayers sermons for resistance, and for a rejection of American presence in the country. They said he enjoys enormous respect and popularity and that "everybody loves him." I wonder if his sermons meet, however, the US Supreme Court's "clear and present danger" standard, or whether his arrest violates the Temporary Administrative Law crafted via the Americans, which guarantees freedom of speech. One wonders, too, if the charge of funding the resistance was thrown in to make the arrest more palatable.
(-ash-Sharq al-Awsat).

If the US and Allawi are going to arrest all the clergymen in Iraq who object to the US presence, then they'll just have to arrest virtually all the clergymen.

In Samarra, 9 more Iraqis wounded in an attack on Tuesday have now died.

The clerics and notables in the city of Fallujah urged the caretaker Iraqi government Thursday to halt the American airstrikes on the city, in the aftermath of a large convention they held. The Association of Muslim Scholars,the Consultative Council of Fallujah, the mayor, the delegation of negotiators with the government, and "the League of al-Anbar Clerics" had all assembled in the town hall to discuss renewing negotiations with the Iraqi government so as to halt military actions against it. The meeting revealed a conflict concerning the prerequisites for returning to the negotiating table.

Those who met came up with a list of five conditions for renewing negotiations:

1. Bombing of the city must cease.
2. Families forced out must be allowed to return
3. and they must be paid compensation.
4. US troops must withdraw from the city and from its main entryways.
5. Iraqi National Guardsmen must be the ones who provide security.

Those assembled did not agree, however on how exactly the national guardsmen would enter the city. The majority of these notables insisted that at least one third of the national guardsmen be local Fallujans.

US fighter planes and tanks again bombarded Fallujah late on Thursday, striking the Martyrs and Industry districts in the south of the city, where US troops engaged in fierce firefights with gunmen. On Thursday morning, Marines had called in precision air strikes on a building said to be used by the Fallujah resistance for "command and control," demolishing it. (-ash-Sharq al-Awsat).

The Iraqi Islamic Party warned the Sunni Arab community against any move to boycott the forthcoming elections, since it would result in direct loss of political power.

The US and the Allawi government had on Wednesday rejected a French suggestion to include opponents of the interim Allawi government in the international conference on Iraq. (The US sidestepped this suggestion, which recalls the ways De Gaulle ended the Algerian conflict, by insisting that only governments, not parties, would be allowed to attend the Cairo conference scheduled for November.)

On Thursday, the Chirac government expressed its "interest" in an Egyptian suggestion that a balanced conference be organized that would include "representatives of Iraqi civil society."

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

In Memory of Maude

Meanwhile, The Scotsman reports on the British government's agreement to deploy 850 British troops in the area southwest of Baghdad.

Here's my lay guess as to what this is about: Bush wants to flatten Fallujah as soon as the US elections are over. Flattening Fallujah requires moving another battalion or so to that western city. But that battalion is now tied down fighting the guerrillas in Latifiyah and environs. So the British are being brought in to keep a lid on the insurgency there, so as to free up forces for the assault on Fallujah.

Latifiyah is more dangerous than Fallujah, according to one US soldier in a recent interview. So the British are not coming north for a picnic.

If my interpretation is correct, it demonstrates how completely overstretched the US military is in Iraq. With over 130,000 troops on the ground, with stop loss orders in effect kidnapping troops far beyond the time they signed up for, the US doesn't have 1,000 troops to spare for a Fallujah campaign. It is completely tied down. So Bush needed Blair once again to save his behind.

The British military does not approve, on the whole, of American flattening operations, and declined to be involved in any. So the British brass only acquiesced if they could keep British rules of engagement, which are far less Draconian than US ones. (The US military replies with overwhelming force to an attack, even if doing so would cause indiscriminate harm to civilians.) The British will likely therefore not attack Latifiyah, but will just try to implement their Basra-type brand of community policing, learned in Belfast.

The guerrillas in Latifiyah, however, may not cooperate. If the Sunni areas become inflamed by the Bush assault on the city of Fallujah, however, all bets are off, and the guerrillas will target the British troops for suicide bombings and drive-by shootings, in hopes of turning Labour backbenchers decisively against Blair. (Public opinion doesn't matter in a parliamentary system, or Blair would already be out; it just matters that a Prime Minister can survive a vote of no-confidence and that the movers and shakers in his party don't dump him, as happened to Maggie Thatcher).
Will Labour put up with American-scale casualties in Iraq, say 25 dead every week or two?

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraq Losing Billions in Petroleum Revenues

AFP reports that interim Iraqi Minister of Petroleum Thamer Ghadban says that sabotage and lack of refining capacity has cost Iraq $7 billion since March, 2003.

Iraq's production has fallen to such low levels that it actually has to import oil, paying $200 million per month for it, or nearly two and a half billion dollars a year!

Iraq's current upward production capacity is about 2.8 million barrels per day, with 700,000 bpd coming from the northern Kirkuk fields, and 2.1 million bpd coming from Rumayla and the south.

But pipeline sabotage by guerrillas have cut production so significantly that Ghadban now admits that his goal is to "bring our exports up to 1.8 million bpd . . ."
Obviously, Iraq isn't actually producing much oil if this is his target for now.

Any hope that Iraqi exports will make much of a dent in the current shortage of petroleum (leading to $50 a barrel prices not seen in real terms since the Gulf War), is in my view misplaced.

For one thing, Saudi Arabia is producing to near capacity at 10 to 11 million barrels per day, and they would love to cut back. If they cut back to 7 million bpd, they would single-handedly wipe out all the extra oil Iraq could conceivably pump in the near to medium term, and then some.

Also Iraq will consume much of the new petroleum it produces for one thing. Ghadban points out that Iraq now needs 5.2 million extra gallons of gasoline just to keep the 700,000 automobiles imported since the fall of Saddam on the road. If Iraq can get enough security to pump oil, it will also get enough security to build factories and buy goods that use a lot of petroleum.

Iraq also lacks refining capacity, and refineries can't be built overnight nor are they cheap. The one good thing here is that probably the Iraqi government will pay for the refineries to be built, since private industry has been skittish about new refineries (one of the reasons for the current crunch).

Ghadban notes,

"The current capacity of refineries is only 14 million litres (3.7 million gallons) per day in the best of scenarios and this could fall to nine million (2.4 million gallons) due to power cuts and sabotage."

A lot of Iraqi petroleum is also smuggled out of the country, which still brings money into the country, but it goes to the smugglers and mafias rather than to the government, strengthening criminal elements.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Washington Whodunits and the Iraq War

Evangelist Pat Robertson has ignited a firestorm by telling CNN that President Bush alleged in March of 2003 that "there will be no casualties" in the Iraq war. Robertson said he had pressed the president to prepare the public for casualties.

White House spinmeister Karl Rove is denying that Bush said any such thing. But actually I think the conversation recounted is entirely plausible. A lot of Bush supporters were proclaiming that the Iraq war would be a "cakewalk" and Iraqis would greet the US soldiers with garlands. Robertson, a former Marine and a rightwinger, may well have been alarmed that all this cakewalk talk could harm the Republican Party if the war was harder-fought than advertised.

So you can imagine Robertson warning Bush to tone down the over-optimistic talk and to ready the public for casualties.

Bush would have been thinking about the war itself, and would have known that many Iraqi officers had already made a deal with the CIA to just leave the barracks and go home, ordering their men to do the same. And plus Bush knew about the US military's overwhelming air superiority, and ability to make mincemeat of the Iraqi tank corps from the air.

So Bush expected few or no casualties. And March 19-April 9, during the period the US was overthrowing the Baath regime and actively attacking the Iraqi military, only a litle over a hundred US servicemen were killed, as I remember. That is not "no casualties," especially for them and their families, but it is a small number. The US and its allies lost 6,000 men at the Battle of Guadalcanal in World War II, and that was just one battle (the Japanese lost 24,000).

Clearly Bush did not foresee further casualties as the result of a guerrilla war after the main war. There were other US government analysts who did fear that kind of trouble, especially at the CIA and in the State Department, but they were actively ignored.

It may well be that the real significance of Robertson's statement is an indication that the US evangelicals are rethinking their support of the Iraq War. If that were true, it would signal big problems for Bush in the forthcoming election.

Michael R. Gordon has given us a long account of the decision to disband the Iraqi military, taken by Paul Bremer on May 23, 2003. Maddeningly, the article does not actually tell us how the decision was made or why.

We get lots of denials. Bush denies being the one who made the decision. Condi Rice says it was not discussed in the National Security Council. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and other officers, including John Abizaid, were against this step. Jay Garner and Col. Paul Hughes of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, the first American civil administration of Iraq, were against it.

It is even revealed that Douglas Feith, the number three man in the Defense Department, assumed as late as March, 2003, that the Iraqi army would be maintained but that the high officers would be retired or vetted.

So, over the next two months, thinking on this matter changed radically. Feith appears to say that by May, 2003, he was also in favor of dissolving the Iraqi army.

A decision like this should have been made by President Bush. That he and Condi farmed these things out to the Department of Defense is shameful. What way is that to run a country? Or two countries, for that matter? Do we really want this Absent President fumbling through world politics for another four years?

Garner said on the BBC last spring that Bremer made this decision because he was afraid that the Iraqi military, as a Baathist institution, might remain powerful enough to block his project of economic liberalization for Iraq.

That is, Bremer wanted to do economic shock therapy, on the model of Poland, suddenly transforming Iraq's Arab Socialist command economy into a free market.

But the question remains of who told Bremer to take this step, or who authorized it. It seems to me that it has to come at least from Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith. Very possibly it was coming from Dick Cheney.

Like many bad decisions in Iraq, including the idea to wage unilateral war, this decision to get rid of the Baath army was probably over-determined. That is, it probably had many causes.

Economic shock therapy was probably part of the reason for it, but is unlikely to be the whole story.

There are other important players here, who could have intervened with Cheney and the Neocons. One is Ahmad Chalabi, who we know wanted extreme de-baathification. He was afraid of the Baathists and would have supported the dissolution of the army if he did not initiate it. Chalabi was in alliance both with the Kurds, who hated the Baath Army for good reason, and who have issued a demand that no Federal troops should ever set foot on their soil. They would clearly have liked to see the old Baath Army evaporate. Chalabi was also close to the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which likewise hated the Baath Army. And, Chalabi also instituted extreme debaathification of the bureaucracy and schoolteaching, throwing thousands out of work. Chalabi was a pet of Wolfowitz and Feith, and he may have convinced them to dissolve the army.

The neoconservatives are also close to the Likud Party in Israel, which may also have wanted the Baath Army dissolved. The Iraqi army was one of the few credible deterrents in the region to Israeli military aggression, and the Likud supported the war wholeheartedly.

It is no wonder that Feith, who is at the nexus of extreme laissez-faire thinking, Chalabi and the Israelis, suddenly changed his mind. Did he give Bremer the order to do it?

In other news, Pakistan captured two al-Qaeda members. One was a Yemeni, Salih Nu`man, who is said to be important in the new or second-generation al-Qaeda leadership. The other was a low-level computer communications expert.

It is not exactly the October surprise Bush was hoping for, but the Pakistanis are doing the best they can given that they don't want to risk the possible social explosion that might occur if they arrest Bin Laden and hand him over to the US. Bin Laden has warm supporters in the United Action Council, which holds 17 percent of the seats in Parliament and has effectively campaigned to deadlock that body and block Musharraf from accomplishing much, as it is. Likewise, jihadis have tried to kill Musharraf twice in the past year, and he will raise the bounty on his head if he captures Bin Laden.

So a Yemeni and a computer geek is all that can be scraped up for Bush. Hope it is worth $3 bn.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

11 US Soldiers Wounded in Samarra
Car Bombs & Assassinations

On Wednesday,
clashes in Samarra left 11 US soldiers wounded, with 8 civilians killed and 12 wounded. Reuters naughtily notes that the US had claimed to have pacified the town earlier. Also in Samarra, guerrillas detonated two car bombs, killing one child and wounding a translator.

In Fallujah, US warplanes struck the city again. An eyewitness stringer for Reuters saw a man, a woman and four children being pulled from the rubble of one of the buildings the US planes had demolished. The US military denied the report, attributing it to a disinformation campaign by the followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

You know, it is inevitable that if you bomb a populated city downtown, you will kill families. I wish the US military would just admit that they are doing so, virtually every day. They could go on to say that they think this cost is worth it if they can actually conquer the city and clean out the Muslim fundamentalist militiamen who control it and use it as a base to engage in terrorist bombings. It would be controversial, but at least it would be honest. And maybe we in this country could have a public debate about whether it is legitimate to bomb civilian cities that we have already conquered.

Reuters has tape:

"Is this the gift that (interim Iraqi Prime Minister) Iyad Allawi is giving to the people of Falluja?" asked one man, pointing to the small bodies of two of the children lying in the trunk of a car. "Every day they strike Falluja."

Az-Zaman reports that also on Wednesday, in the al-Durah district of southern Baghdad guerrillas detonated a car bomb outside an Iraqi police station, wounding 10 persons, including 5 policemen, according to preliminary reports.

Guerrillas detonated a car bomb on the road to the airport, attempting to hit US humvees, but appear to have missed.

On Wednesday, a leading member of the Iraqi National Accord was assassinated. Mazin al-Samarra'i, a prominent member of the political party of caretaker Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, had played a role in the negotiations between the government and the people of Samarra during the recent clashes there.

This news is more alarming than will be generally recognized. Here we have someone from the Prime Minister's own party, and who was a prominent negotiator at Samarra' (also the home town of Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib). If such an individual can be killed easily and with impunity, then no one is safe, including Allawi himself.

Also assassinated was the president of the Veterinarians' Union, Turki Jabbar al-Sa`idi. He was killed in Abu Ghuraib district on his way back home from work.

Az-Zaman reports that extremist Muslim student groups in the University of Mosul, the second biggest in the country, have issued death threats to Christian students at the university. As a result, 1500 Christian students have been prevented from attending classes. The extremist student groups have established an iron control over the campus. The Chaldo-Assyrian Student association has issued a protest.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bush would Accept Islamic Iraq
Bush fundamentalizes the Middle East

President Bush has said that he would "accept" an "Islamic Iraq," according to AP.

If free and open Iraqi elections lead to the seating of a fundamentalist Islamic government, "I will be disappointed. But democracy is democracy," Bush said. "If that’s what the people choose, that’s what the people choose."

Given that Bush has ensconced the Christian right in many of his administration's policies, I suppose we should just check with Iyad Allawi as to whether "if free and open American elections lead to the seating of a fundamentalist Christian government," he would be willing to "accept" that.

Really, the president cannot help patronizing the Iraqis. A while ago he talked about them taking off their "training wheels," as though high-powered Iraqi physicists, lawyers and physicians were somehow reduced to little children just because the US has 138,000 troops in their country.

I think it can be fairly argued that the Bush "war on terror" has actually spread Islamic fundamentalism. (Bush coddling of Ariel Sharon's harsh policies in Palestine has also contributed).

Since Bush began acting aggressively in the region, the United Action Council of (often pro-Bin Laden!) fundamentalist parties in Pakistan has come to power by itself in the Northwest Frontier Province, in coalition in Baluchistan, and has 17% of the seats in parliament! Despite Pakistan's unwarranted reputation for "fundamentalism," in fact most Pakistanis are Sufis or traditionalists who dislike fundamentalism, and the latter parties seldom got more than 2-3% of seats in any election in which they ran. Until Bush came along.

In Iraq, a whole series of Muslim fundamentalist parties-- al-Da`wa, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Sadrists, the Salafis, and now al-Qaeda, have been unleashed by Bush. They seem likely to win any election held in Iraq, since the secularists remain disorganized.

In the parliamentary elections in Afghanistan now slated for spring 2005, the Taliban or the cousins of the Taliban are likely to be a major party, benefiting from the Pushtun vote.

We could go on (a similar story of new-found fundamentalist strength could be told for Indonesia, e.g.) The real legacy of Bush to the Muslim world will likely not be secular democracy, but the provocation of Muslim publics into voting for the Muslim fundamentalists on a scale never before seen in the region.

But then since Bush wants to subvert the separation of religion and state in the United States, with his theologically (!) driven stem cell policy and his hand-outs to cults like the Moonies, at least he is being consistent when it comes to his Middle East policy.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

10 Dead, 109 Wounded

Warren Strobel of Knight Ridder has an excellent retrospective on the damage done to the US effort in Iraq by the Department of Defense's lack of planning for the post-war, Phase IV period.

Actually, I know that serious thought was given to Phase IV in some areas of the military, especially at National Defense University in Washington, DC, but the ideas that came out of NDU were deep-sixed by Rumsfeld and his neoconservative consiglieres, or were ignored by or unknown to the commanders on the ground in Iraq.

Strobel puts to rest the myth propagated by Bush that the military commanders had everything they asked for. They asked for over 300,000 troops! Rummy wanted to give them 40,000!

Tuesday's harvest of death in Iraq:

In Mushahadah, a small town just north of Baghdad, some 550 national guardsmen were standing in line at their base to receive their pay. Guerrillas took advantage of the situation to fire mortar shells into the crowds. They wounded 89 persons and killed 5. Among the dead were a US contractor and four Iraqi national guards.

In Baghdad, guerrillas fired mortar shells at a US military compound, killing a US contractor for Halliburton and injuring 7 persons, including one US soldier.

In Iskandariyah south of Baghdad, Iraqi security forces and US Marines made a sweep of a particularly troublesome area, arresting 130 suspected militants. The operation came in preparation for the transfer to that part of Baghdad of a unit of the British military.

In Mosul, guerrillas detonated three car bombs, which could have been devastating, but in fact only killed 2 Iraqi civilians and wounded three. One may conclude that they missed. One car bomber was trying to get at the current governor of Ninevah, who was thought to be in a convoy near Mosul. In fact, he was not present. Another car bomber had aimed at a US military convoy, but only managed to inflict minor injuries on one US soldier.

In Dulu'iyyah in the north, Iraqi national guardsmen and US forces clashed with guerrillas. The clashes left 2 Iraqis dead, 10 wounded, and 18 incarcerated.

In Habbaniyah, a Sunni Arab stronghold west of Fallujah, a suicide car bomber targeted a set of US military vehicles. There was no word of casualties as of this writing, but eyewitnesses spoke of seeing three burned-out vehicles.

The northern Kirkuk oil fields dropped from producing 450,000 barrels a day to only 150,000 b/d after guerrillas blew up part of the pipeline to Turkey, and another pipeline near an important refinery.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reported via Reuters that US troops in Beiji in the Sunni Arab center-north burst into internet cafes and confiscated the computers. Angry young computer users complained that this was the second such raid. Residents of Samarra confirmed that similar sweeps had been conducted in that city last month. Obviously, the US military thinks the guerrilla resistance is using the internet to coordinate attacks. Saddam forbade the internet, and figures in the Bush administration took some pride about expanding it after the fall of the Baath Party. Now I suppose they are finding out why Saddam also used to confiscate Iraqis' computers.

Norimitsu Onishi estimated that 208 Iraqis and 23 US troops died in Iraq in the past week. Many Iraqis complain about the foreign jihadis whose operations kill more Iraqis than Americans.

Jim Krane of AP reports that Maj. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, commander of the Army's 1st Cavalry Division, believes that "The Iraqi capital is still far short of the numbers of Iraqi policemen needed to secure it and the force won't be up to strength in time for national elections in January, the U.S. general in charge of security in Baghdad said Tuesday." Chiarelli says that Baghdad only has 15,000 policemen, the majority of whom have only 8 weeks of training. The capital needs at least 25,000 well-trained policemen, including 7000 just to patrol the slums of East Baghdad or "Sadr City." The shortfall of 10,000 policemen cannot be filled before spring or summer of 2005, he admitted.

The report also reveals that right now Sadr City has only 500 policemen. In past fights with the Mahdi Army, moreover, the police tended to defect to the guerrillas. It appears that the Mahdi Army has laid large numbers of roadside bombs in Sadr City, which the US military is demanding they clear if the ceasefire is to hold.

AP reports from jihadi internet sites that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has changed the name of his organization from Monotheism and Holy War to something simply. I it is now . . . "al-Qaeda." OK, so it is "Mesopotamian al-Qaeda" (Al-Qaeda in the land between 2 rivers). But I fear this move says something about where the Sunni Arab regions of Iraq may be heading.

Al-Hayat reports that President Ghazi al-Yawir has approached Iyad Allawi about the possibility of reviving peace talks between the US military and the leaders of the guerrilla resistance in Fallujah.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan commented on the Fallujah operations Tuesday at a press conference in London, saying

"On the question of Fallujah, obviously this is a judgment for the Iraqi government and the multinational force to make, but I think in these kinds of situations you have two wars going on."

"You have the war for minds and hearts of the people, as well as the efforts to try and bring down the violence, and the two have to go together.

"It has to be calibrated in such a way that you are able to move the people along with you, whilst at the same time you improve the security environment, and I hope that approach is also the one that is being pursued by the government and others in Iraq."

Al-Hayat misunderstood him as endorsing the military actions against places like Fallujah. What Annan was saying was that any military action against the guerrillas is futile unless efforts are made at the same time to win over local people.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Democracy and Iraqi Universities

Nancy Youssef of Knight Ridder gives us an excellent piece on the democratic process and debates at Iraq's universities. An excerpt:

' Students hold protests and sit-ins, sign petitions and go on marches, all new since Saddam Hussein fell. This week, a group of students from al Mustansiriya University protested Iraqi national guard officers using their dormitories, saying that space should be reserved for students.

The debates are steeped in religion. Most universities have only two major political student associations: a Shiite Muslim one and a Sunni Muslim one. Each group from Iraq's historically rivalrous Islamic traditions is advocating a different style of university life, and how much religion should shape it.

Should women be forced to wear head scarves and should they be allowed to wear pants? Can students put up posters of their favorite candidates or would that offend others? Can a Shiite student be treated fairly at a school administrated by a Sunni president, and vice versa? . . .

At Baghdad University, students are debating whether women should be forced to wear uniforms: long gray skirts and white shirts. Last year, students largely tossed out the idea of a uniform. But when the school year began earlier this month, it appeared to make a comeback.

At al Mustansiriya, women are forbidden from wearing pants on the grounds. Guards monitor those entering the main gate, and any woman in pants who attempts to enter will be required to leave. '

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports a telephone interview with the interim Minister of Higher Education, Dr. Tahir al-Buka'. Iraq has 20 universities and more than 24 technical institutes, with a total population of enrolled students of 360,000, according to Dr. al-Buka'. He said that all the universities are up and running, including those in the Kurdish areas, with the sole exception of the university at Ramadi in Anbar province (a center of the Sunni Arab insurgency). The president of the university in Ramadi, Dr. Abdul Hadi al-Hiti, had been kidnapped and held hostage for 2 months before being released. He is recuperating at home, with a broken arm and a broken thigh. His family paid $100,000 for his release.

There are 16,500 instructors at these institutions of higher learning, but most of them only have Master's degrees, not doctorates. Dr. al-Buka' complained that this was a huge defect that he intended to remedy. Since the ministry does not have money to pay for Iraqi students to do Ph.D.s abroad, it is dependent on the scholarships offered Iraqi students by foreign universities.

Dr. al-Buka' said that education through the Ph.D. in Iraq is free (this is common in petroleum producing countries).

He said security was the biggest problem his ministry faced, and that a large number of security guards had been placed on campuses.



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Sistani Calls for Independent Slate

AFP/ ash-Sharq al-Awsat report that a spokesman for Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani said Monday that the spiritual leader supports the formation of a committee of "independents" to form a party ticket to contest the elections scheduled for January.
Hamid al-Khaffaf said at a gathering at the Sadr Center in Najaf that "A committee of independents has been formed, the mission of which to to help everyone be represented on a unified list that would gain the confidence of the supreme Shiite leadership."

The election is now slated to be held in accordance with the principle of proportional representation, such that if a party get 20 percent of the vote it gets 20 percent of the seats. Since no indpendent candidate is likely to get more than a fraction of a percent, this way of proceeding disadvantages independents.

Al-Khaffaf admitting that no ideal parliament could be elected under such an election system. He warned that the grand ayatollahs would not hesitate to bring people into the streets for the sake of a good result in the elections such that the righteous win their rights.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

15 Dead, 52 wounded in Iraq Violence

Al-Zaman says that violence killed 15 and left 52 persons injured in a series of explosions and attacks on Sunday and Monday, in Baghdad, Mosul, Baqubah, al-Hillah and Tikrit.

AP reports that In Mosul on Monday, a car bomber ran into a civilian convoy, leaving one dead and four wounded.

On Sunday in Mosul, guerrillas detonated a car bomb on a bridge. They killed five Iraqis and wounded 15 others.

In western Baghdad late on Monday, guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb, wounding three US soldiers.

In Baghdad late on Sunday, guerrillas detonated a car bomb next to a police convoy in Jadiriyah. The explosion left six people dead, including 3 policemen, and injured 26. Also, a commander in the Shiite paramilitary, the Badr Brigade of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, named Qasim al-Ma`muri, was assassinated with a pistol that had a silencer attached.

In the eastern city of Baqubah, according to az-Zaman, police fought guerrillas, with 7 police being wounded, along with a woman and a child.

In Balad near Tikrit, a headless body (probably a Turk was discovered). Elswhere, guerrillas killed two Macedonian hostages.

Muhsin Abdul Hamid, leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party and a member in the National Council, complained that US forces had killed a commander of the IIP on the road three days before. This according to al-Zaman. He said that everyone had to admit that the US military had committed atrocities against civilians in Iraq. He and others in the National Council put forward a demand that US forces be kept out of Iraqi cities and garrisoned in the countryside. (Muhsin Abdul Hamid served on Bremer's Interim Governing Council). Abdul Hamid has also been critical of the US demand that Fallujah hand over Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, saying that the latter moves around a great deal and the Fallujans just did not know where he was.

At the urging of caretaker Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, the US released from custody Sheikh Khalid al-Jumaili, who had engaged in peace talks with the guerrillas in Fallujah. Bizarrely enough, the US arrested this negotiator and interrogated him. It is true that al-Jumaili leads his own militant group, but the arrest appears to have been a simple mistake, as the US military now admits. Al-Jumaili now says that the city's insurgent leadership has instructed him to cease a ttempting to negotiate.

As the US positions itself for a major attack on Fallujah in November, clerics in Fallujah called for a campaign of civil disobedience in various Iraqi cities to forestall an American attack. Almost daily US bombing of the city has left much of it in ruins and killed many innocent civilians.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Over a Dozen Police Killed, Nearly 2 Dozen Wounded

Reuters reports that guerrillas detonated a car bomb on Sunday near a Baghdad cafe frequented by Iraqi police, killing seven persons and wounding 20. The police were having their evening meal to break the fast during Ramadan.

On Saturday, guerrillas had opened fire south of Baghdad on nine Iraqi policemen in a convoy that was returning from training classes in Jordan.

On Sunday morning in Baghdad, guerrillas fired a mortar round at an office where weapons had been collected from the Mahdi Army militiamen. Caretaker Prime Minister Iyad Allawi had been scheduled to visit the site, but changed his itinerary hastily. He did meet with Sadrist leaders in the vast slum of East Baghdad. US military sources complain that the weapons turn-in program for the Mahdi Army has so far yielded only a few old guns and has not been a real success.

In Fallujah, US warplanes bombed the Jolan district again, with US military spokesmen saying that the target was a checkpoint established by the fighters of Monotheism and Holy War. Fallujah hospital officials reported four civilians wounded by US bombing of this residential district, one of them a child.



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Tawhid Joins al-Qaeda

On the internet site of Monotheism and Holy War (al-Tawhid wa al-Jihad), the group allegedly declared, "We announce that the Tawhid and Jihad Group, its prince and soldiers, have pledged allegiance to the sheikh of the mujahideen Osama bin Laden." This pledge is a new development. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his group are said to have been bitter rivals of al-Qaeda during the Afghan resistance days. One witness at the Moutasaddiq trial in Germany alleged that Zarqawi had not allowed Monotheism and Holy War to share resources with al-Qaeda in the early zeroes of the 21st century. If the statement is true, it is a worrying sign that even the divided small radical guerrilla groups are being "picked up" by al-Qaeda. This consolidation is obviously a result of Bush's aggressive invasion of Iraq and of the botching of the aftermath. It is a setback for the war on terror.

Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was a group of only a few hundred "Afghan Arabs" who pledged personal loyalty to Usamah Bin Laden. It could notionally be expanded to encompass the 5,000-strong "55th Brigade" of the Taliban regime, though this is not the technical definition. Because Usamah is Saudi, my guess is that they were especially influenced by an extremist form of the Wahhabi school of Islam that predominates among Saudia's some 15 million citizens. In 1998 they were joined by Egyptians from the al-Jihad al-Islami group of Ayman al-Zawahiri (many of these were from Upper Egypt, especially Asyut and environs). After that point, al-Qaeda was a joint enterprise between the Egyptian extremists and the polyglot Arabs around Bin Laden, only some of whom were Saudi.

Zarqawi is a Jordanian, and his Monotheism and Holy War group in Afghanistan probably had a distinctive coloration as mainly Jordanian, Palestinian and Syrian. They also had a special connection to some extremists in Jordan and Germany. They are probably especially oriented toward the Salafi school of modern Islamic thought, which has a Protestant-like emphasis on going back to the original practice of the early companions of the Prophet Muhammad. (Most Salafis are not militant or violent, though they tend to be rather narrow-minded in my experience, on the order of Protestant Pietists). Monotheism and Holy War obviously does have a violent interpretation of Salafism, rather as the the leaders of the so-called German Peasant Rebellion among early Protestants did.

Another worrisome sign is that local Iraqi Sunni fundamentalists opposed to the US presence in Iraq have begun joining Monotheism and Holy War, and wearing its distinctive orange and black insignia. These have been sighted among Iraqi crowds on Haifa Street in Baghdad and in Samarra. So now there are hundreds of al-Qaeda members in Iraq where there had been none before.

The consolidation of smaller local radical fundamentalist groups with al-Qaeda can also be seen in the case of the Fizazi group in Tangiers that morphed into the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group, had members who met with September 11 ringleader Muhammad Atta, and ultimately was in part responsible for the Madrid train bombings.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Will Tested of Coalition of the Willing

Between 20,000 and 75,000 protesters came out in London to march against US presence in Iraq.

The Bush Administration appears to have asked the British to deploy some 650 troops up from relatively quiet Basra to the hot spot of Baghdad, where they would serve under a US command. This request has put the British government of Tony Blair in difficulty. It is controversial to have the British troops be under direct US command. It is also controversial for British troops to be moved up into the Sunni Arab danger zone. And it is controversial for the request to come 3 weeks before the US elections, so that it looks as though Karl Rove, Bush's campaign manager, crafted the request in hopes of reducing news stories about American troop casualties (US papers do not, sadly, put British casualties on the front page). An AFP report insists that the British defense ministry has ruled out British troops going to Baghdad or Fallujah. But I am suspicious of this report, which seems to contradict what British Defence Secretary Geoffrey Hoon said on Sunday. Besides, would the issue be any different if the troops were being sent to Mahmudiyah just south of Baghdad?

Meanwhile, Poland plans to reduce its troop presence in Iraq in early 2005, as it faces increasing costs for the enterprise. The Poles have also been disappointed that their companies have not won any significant contracts in Iraq.

At the same time, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who has described the Iraq War as "illegal" because it lacked Security Council sanction, said that the world is no safer in the aftermath of that war.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Suskind on Bush: "I can Fly!"

Ron Suskind's profile of George W. Bush reminded me eerily of Mao Zedong, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party. Suskind portrays Bush as filled with unwarranted certainty, sure that God is speaking and working through him, and convinced that decisive action shapes reality in ways that make it unnecessary to first study reality.

This approach to policy-making, it seems to me, should be called Right Maoism. The History Learning Site reminds us that in 1958 Mao initiated what he called the "Great Leap Forward" with the aim of boosting both Chinese industry and agriculture, through the reorganization of China into over 25,000 communes.

' Mao had introduced the Great Leap Forward with the phrase "it is possible to accomplish any task whatsoever." By the end of 1958, it seemed as if his claim was true . . . However, in 1959, things started to go wrong. Political decisions/beliefs took precedence over commonsense and communes faced the task of doing things which they were incapable of achieving. Party officials would order the impossible and commune leaders, who knew what their commune was capable of doing or not, could be charged with being a "bourgeois reactionary" if he complained. Such a charge would lead to prison.

Quickly produced farm machinery produced in factories fell to pieces when used. Many thousands of workers were injured after working long hours and falling asleep at their jobs. Steel produced by the backyard furnaces was frequently too weak to be of any use and could not be used in construction – it’s original purpose. Buildings constructed by this substandard steel did not last long.

Also the backyard production method had taken many workers away from their fields – so desperately needed food was not being harvested. Ironically, one of the key factors in food production in China was the weather and 1958 had particularly good weather for growing food. Party leaders claimed that the harvest for 1958 was a record 260 million tons – which was not true. '

In 1960 alone, as a result of Mao's faith-based initiative, 9 million persons starved to death. The total toll from famine, hunger, and illness in 1959-1962 was around 20 million dead.

The above description of the way in which China fell apart under Mao sounds eerily like contemporary Iraq under Bush, since both situations were produced by the same mantra. Reality doesn't matter. Power creates reality. Suskind says that a senior Bush official told him, "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." This official may as well have been quoting Mao's Little Red Book: ""it is possible to accomplish any task whatsoever."

Let's look at other areas on which Bush's "we're an empire now and we make the reality" doctrine has been a miserable failure.

The news from Bush's major project, Iraq, on Saturday and Sunday continued to be disastrous: "Saturday, the U.S. command said four more American troops and an Iraqi interpreter were killed the day before by car bombs in the west and north of the country." In addition, five churches were blown up Iraq's Christian community, 2-3% of the population, is in danger of disappearing through migrations spurred by fear of Muslim fundamentalism. It is ironic that a fanatical Christian like Bush overthrew the secular nationalist Saddam Hussein, unleashing Muslim fundamentalists who then went on to endanger and target Iraq's Christians. Bush's evangelical friends in the "we make the reality" school of thought once dreamed of converting all the Iraqis into Protestants, and had revved up to deliver millions of Bibles last year. I could have told them that this Ann Coulter vibrator fantasy for evangelicals was doomed from the beginning. The days when colonized and enslaved peoples meekly accept the religion of their conquerors are long gone. And, besides, the Muslim Middle East was resistant to Christian mission even in the heyday of British colonialism, which was rather stronger than the current American version.

It turns out that the idea to let the Israeli-Palestinian issue just drift and fester, and to let Ariel Sharon commit crimes against humanity in Gaza and the West Bank, was also Bush's:

' at the Bush administration's first National Security Council meeting, Bush asked if anyone had ever met Ariel Sharon. Some were uncertain if it was a joke. It wasn't: Bush launched into a riff about briefly meeting Sharon two years before, how he wouldn't ''go by past reputations when it comes to Sharon. . . . I'm going to take him at face value,'' and how the United States should pull out of the Arab-Israeli conflict because ''I don't see much we can do over there at this point.'' Colin Powell, for one, seemed startled. This would reverse 30 years of policy -- since the Nixon administration -- of American engagement. Such a move would unleash Sharon, Powell countered, and tear the delicate fabric of the Mideast in ways that might be irreparable. Bush brushed aside Powell's concerns impatiently. ''Sometimes a show of force by one side can really clarify things." '

So I guess "things" have been "clarified" in the Mideast, after three years of shows of force on both sides. What is now clear is that there is not going to be a Palestinian state, and that the Israeli "democracy" now owns three million Palestinian plantation slaves indefinitely. It is to the point where a major Israeli newspaper runs a piece today on how killing children is no longer a big deal for the Israeli military. This disastrous outcome, which harms Israel, devastates the Palestinians, and makes America hated, is in large part the result of a deliberate policy decision to disengage taken by George W. Bush

I was talking to an Arab-American friend recently about what Bush would do in a second term, and I mentioned that I thought Syria and Iran were on a White House hit list. He said, "Don't forget the third." I said, "What third?" He said, "Saudi Arabia." He may well have been right. At a recent luncheon Bush expressed concern about the possibility that al-Qaeda might make a coup in Riyadh. Suskind says,

"According to notes provided to me, and according to several guests at the lunch who agreed to speak about what they heard, he said that ''Osama bin Laden would like to overthrow the Saudis . . . then we're in trouble. Because they have a weapon. They have the oil."

But what would Bush do about this threat? I can only think there are now even more detailed contingency plans for a US invasion of the Saudi oil fields than were drawn up in the 1970s at James Schlesinger's insistence.

The rest of the Bush agenda reported by Suskind is domestic, and it is chilling:

" He said that there will be an opportunity to appoint a Supreme Court justice shortly after his inauguration, and perhaps three more high-court vacancies during his second term.

Bush said: ''I'm going to push nuclear energy, drilling in Alaska and clean coal. Some nuclear-fusion technologies are interesting.'' He mentions energy from ''processing corn . . . Do you realize that ANWR [the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge] is the size of South Carolina, and where we want to drill is the size of the Columbia airport?''

The questions came from many directions -- respectful, but clearly reality-based. About the deficits, he said he'd ''spend whatever it takes to protect our kids in Iraq,'' that ''homeland security cost more than I originally thought . . .''

''I'm going to come out strong after my swearing in,'' Bush said, ''with fundamental tax reform, tort reform, privatizing of Social Security.''

Bush's America will in the next four years foment more war in the Middle East and more violence in Palestine and Israel. At home, social security will be destroyed by being privatized and the phenomenon of vast numbers of the elderly poor, last seen in the 1930s, will return. Government monies will be given away to conservative religious organizations, including cults like the Moonies. Citizens will see their right to sue a company for damages abolished. The right of a woman to choose to have an abortion will be deeply curtailed and possibly abolished. I shudder to think what further tax reform Bush has in mind. Perhaps it will be that the rate on people making a million a year or more will go down to zero (Note to the humorless: This is sarcasm). As for promoting nuclear energy, Bush doesn't seem to realize that nuclear plants produce as waste material that can be used by terrorists to make dirty bombs. He wants more nuclear plants.

Right Maoism could not ordinarily succeed in the US. But at the moment the US has a one-party state, with Republicans controlling all three branches of the Federal government along with a majority of statehouses. And the trauma of 9/11 has left the American public more willing than usual to turn power over to an imperial presidency.

The consequences will not be, as in China, a great famine. But the downstream consequences could be disastrous in their own way, and likely many lives will be lost or ruined one way or another.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Is Bush Shortchanging our Troops?

The refusal of 19 reservists of the 43rd Quartermaster Company in Tallil to take fuel up to Taji north of Baghdad sheds significant light on issues that have come up in the presidential debates. As Eric Brunner-Williams notes, "It appears that they disobayed an illegal order, to conduct routine logistics ops [by] delivering fuel known to be water contaminated to combat units (sabotage) and doing so without combat support and draw casualties (standing orders on force protection)."

One of the reservists, Amber McClenny, managed to get a phone call through to her mother, leaving a message that said, ""We had broken-down trucks, nonarmored vehicles and, um, we were carrying contaminated fuel. They are holding us against our will. We are now prisoners." (The Army denies that anyone is being detained in the case.)

That is, there are three separate elements to the order that the reservists refused to obey. The first was that they were being sent to deliver contaminated fuel that shouldn't have in fact been delivered up to the hot war front in Anbar province. The second is that they were being sent to do it in old barely operational vehicles that not only were not armored properly against roadside bombs, but might break down, stranding the soldiers and exposing them to a guerrilla attack. The third was that they were being denied the customary escort by humvees and helicopter gunships, key to scaring off potential small-band guerrilla attacks.

In other words, they were ordered to do something illegal in a way that might well have gotten them killed for no good reason.

Kerry said in the first presidential debate,

' KERRY: The president just talked about Iraq as a center of the war on terror. Iraq was not even close to the center of the war on terror before the president invaded it.

The president made the judgment to divert forces from under General Tommy Franks from Afghanistan before the Congress even approved it to begin to prepare to go to war in Iraq.

And he rushed the war in Iraq without a plan to win the peace. Now, that is not the judgment that a president of the United States ought to make. You don't take America to war unless have the plan to win the peace. You don't send troops to war without the body armor that they need.

KERRY: I've met kids in Ohio, parents in Wisconsin places, Iowa, where they're going out on the Internet to get the state-of-the-art body gear to send to their kids. Some of them got them for a birthday present.

I think that's wrong. Humvees -- 10,000 out of 12,000 Humvees that are over there aren't armored. And you go visit some of those kids in the hospitals today who were maimed because they don't have the armament. '

Bush's only response to the charge that the troops are not properly equipped has been that Kerry voted against the $87 bn appropriation bill submitted last fall. But this is just playing for the camera, since he knows very well that Kerry's "no" vote on that bill had nothing to do with equipping the troops, and that there was never any question that the military appropriation for Iraq would go through.

The real issue is that the bill passed, but that the money doesn't seem to have gotten to the troops on the ground. The incident at Tallil sheds a flood of light on the continued problems of lack of proper equipment that US troops face. Zell Miller came before the Republican convention with a litany of all the weapons programs that had proved useful in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the fact is that really fancy equipment, aside from the ability to laser-target objectives, was never very useful in Afghanistan. As Donald Rumsfeld noted, there were "no good targets in Afghanistan." In Iraq after the war, what would have been useful was just armored transport vehicles that had some chance of surviving a grenade attack.

At Tallil, apparently the reservists are being ordered into old broken down army trucks to go out and face the guerrillas without even a modicum of protection. This incident suggests that Kerry's view of the situation is more realistic than that of Bush.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Jailed for Blogging

I received this message from on an email network I subscribe to.

' Omid Memarian, Iranian writer and journalist, weblogger and social activist was arrested on Sunday. According to his brother, who provided a report to ISNA, Omid was arrested in his work place and then taken to his home, where his computer and hand written notes were also confiscated. Omid was mentioned in the editorial by Hossein Shariatmadari published in Keyhan, which accused western governments of supporting a web (or network) of Iranian reformist journalists and webloggers who are working to overthrow the regime. It is worth mentioning that many of those accused of political crimes in recent years have been arrested based on false allegations which first appeared in the ultra conservative daily Kayhan.

According to a report published by Rooydad Omid was arrested by the Office of Amaken (clandestine security police force). Three other journalists, also mentioned in this editorial, were arrested in the past month, including, Hanif Mazroi, Shahram Rafihzadeh and Rozbeh Mir Ebrahimi. Omid is the fourth journalist to be arrested in association with this false accusation by Kayhan. '

Please complain about this to the Iranian government via their interests section in Washington, DC or via the Iranian embassy if you have one in your country. I know it seems hopeless to complain, but I used to write Amnesty International letters to the Communist government of Czechoslovakia complaining about intellectual repression, and maybe that sort of activity wasn't a waste of time in retrospect. I sometimes wonder where the apparatchik is now, who received them . . .
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

More Bombs, and a Minor Mutiny

Did they or didn't they? Contradictory reports fly about the apparent mutiny of some troops in Iraq. Apparently they were ordered to take a convoy north with no air cover, and thought this was a very bad idea.

Violence continued in Iraq on Friday, with a spectacular car bomb detonated in Baghdad. Plus, the US heavily bombarded Fallujah on Friday, the first day of the fasting month of Ramadan.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Arab-American Swing Vote Up for Grabs

Gary Younge has a truly excellent article in the Guardian on the Arab-American community and the way they are leaning toward Kerry this time, after a majority supported Bush in 2000.

The Arab-Americans are a significant minority in several swing states, including Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. At a point in American history when several state races may hang on a few thousand votes (or even a few hundred), minorities like the Arab-Americans can make a crucial difference.

Younge notes the disappointment in the community over John Edwards' remarks in the vice presidential debate:

during the vice- presidential debate, Mr Edwards was asked: "What would your administration do to try to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?"

Mr Edwards said: "First, the Israeli people not only have the right to defend themselves, they should defend themselves. They have an obligation to defend themselves. What are the Israeli people supposed to do? How can they continue to watch Israeli children killed by suicide bombers, killed by terrorists?"

In a week in which Israel launched its bloodiest incursion into Gaza in four years, he did not mention Palestine once. "After I heard that I thought I'm not going to go out and cheer for him," says Ms Judeh, who attended the Democratic national convention this year.

"I was a loyal Democrat. I distributed the tickets. But I wasn't going to go. We don't expect them to be pro-Palestinian. But they won't even say 'We support a just peace in the Middle East'." '

I watched al-Jazeerah after the Edwards-Cheney debate, and they were interviewing a focus group of Arab-Americans in Cleveland. Everyone was outraged by Edwards's remark. You could see how it hurt the Democratic ticket with the Arab-Americans, just because it was so egregious.

I don't even know what the remark was supposed to mean. Is it that the Likud isn't doing a good enough job of expropriating and killing Palestinians? They aren't fulfilling their obligations well enough?

What if Edwards had said this:

"First, the Palestinian people not only have the right to defend themselves, they should defend themselves. They have an obligation to defend themselves. What are the Palestinian people supposed to do? How can they continue to watch Palestinian children killed by aerial bombers, killed by state terrorists?"

If his remark about Israel is meaningful, on what grounds would the above not be equally meaningful? Although Edwards is a good man, who genuinely cares about working people (he may be the most passionate national candidate for a major party we have had on such issues since Walter Mondale), his statement was far more unbalanced than it needed to be, even just for cynical electioneering purposes.

A majority of American Jews is closer to the liberal "Americans for Peace Now" than to AIPAC, the American Jewish Congress, and other such rightwing single-issue advocacy groups. American Jews naturally want to be assured that the United States will continue to be a close ally of Israel and will work to ensure the security of Israelis.

But most American Jews know that Sharon's policies, which clearly are aimed at preventing the emergence of a Palestinian state, aren't actually good for Israel. A stateless person (which is what West Bank Palestinians are) may as well be a slave. The stateless have no civil rights, no recognition as persons in the law. Their lives are spent petitioning for things other people take for granted. Their property and lives can be taken at will. Is Sharon going to keep 3 million people in that state indefinitely? Edwards could have found some formulation, such as "We will work harder than this administration has on getting a peace process going, since peace and an end to terrorism are the best guarantors of Israel's security in the long term."
I know that AIPAC and AJC hate phrases like "mutually acceptable," since they are jingoistic chauvinists. Maybe they even hate a phrase like "peace process." But the neoconservative Jews aren't going to vote for Kerry-Edwards anyway, and they are probably only 10 percent or so.

Kerry and Edwards have to decide if they want to try to get the neoconservative vote (which they probably can't have) and alienate the Arab-Americans, or whether they want to give up on the neoconservative Jews and try for the Arab-Americans, who actually can be won over.

There are about 7 million self-identified Jews in the US, although only about 4 million of them say they believe in God. Only about nine percent are self-identified, reliable conservatives.

The number of Arab-Americans is tough to know, because so many of them are second and third generation Lebanese, and many do not think of themselves as Arabs. If you counted everyone with at least 1/8 Arab descent (and these will include large numbers of Lebanese Americans) it would probably come to five million. I'd guess no more than 2 million or so are self-conscious about it, though.

On the other hand, there are probably on the order of 3 million Muslim Americans, only a minority of which are Arab-Americans. Both groups probably vote in far fewer numbers than the general population, though it is possible that September 11 and Iraq have caused them to register to vote in higher than usual numbers.

The Muslim Americans are now starting to mobilize for Kerry.

With just a slight change in rhetoric, Kerry and Edwards could probably avoid alienating most of these Arab Americans and Muslim Americans, and could at the same time get the vast majority of the Jewish vote. They'd be trading a small number of pro-Likud voters for hundreds of thousands of Arab- and Muslim-American voters.


It would be the smart thing to do.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Kerry, Gay Daughters and Blue Hairs

Christopher Manion, a conservative critic of the neoconservatives, is the author of among the more trenchant Christian critiques of Bush's approach to Christianity and of the Iraq war. He writes for the conservative site LewRockwell.com, and yesterday upbraided me for my analysis of the Kerry-Cheney contretemps over the Cheneys' gay daughter. He writes

' . . . having worked 45 years in Republican politics, permit me to tell you why Kerry brought up the Cheney girl: he is reminding the “little old ladies in tennis shoes” (remember them? Goldwater days) that Cheney is culturally opposed to their notion of life, sex, and marriage. Bill O’Reilly to the contrary, not everybody knows the Cheney situation.

We call these millions of folks the “blue-hairs” – they never forgive. Remember Phil Crane’s Brother? Dan? Representative of Illinois? . . . Crane was trounced after a 17-year-old intern testified that she’d tried (and eventually succeeded) to seduce him [while other candidates on the left have survived far more damaging allegations.] They never forgive.

And remember Bush’s DUI conviction revelation 4 years ago? It almost sunk him.

These are the blue-hairs. Kerry was talking to [them]. Deft. Daring. Very Clintonian.

Manion is saying, as I read him, that one important constituency of the Republican Party is very uptight moral conservatives who will relentlessly punish Republican candidates for what they see as peccadillos. He is saying that some percentage of these "blue hairs" still did not know that Cheney had a gay daughter as of the third presidential debate, and that the Kerry campaign wanted to make sure they did know, so as to ensure that they punished Bush-Cheney for it at the polls.

I am not sure this analysis actually contradicts what I said yesterday, which is that for Kerry and other liberals, gayness is not anything to be ashamed of, while conservatives either see it as akin to pedophilia or bestiality (e.g. Pa. Sen. Rick Santorum) or at best see it as a sort of physical disability. We currently have a moral economy on this issue. From Kerry's point of view it would not be wrong to mention the fact of someone's gayness where it was already well known, whereas from a rightwing point of view, bringing it up is either gauche or a horrible insult. That the mention was an attempt to game the blue hairs is entirely plausible, and I thank Manion for the suggestion. But my answer to the ethical question of whether Kerry was in Lynne Cheney's words "not a good man" for doing so is that by his lights, he was doing nothing morally wrong. If Cheney has people in her party who are bigots, she should tell them they are not good people.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Neo-Baath v. the Shiites

Brig. Gen. Muhammad Abdullah Shahwani, the head of the Iraqi secret police, has charged 27 employees in the Iranian embassy in Baghdad with espionage and sabotage. He blames them for the assassination of over a dozen members of the Iraqi secret police in the past month. He claims to have seized from "safehouses" Persian documents that show that the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and its militia, the Badr Corps, served as Iranian agents in helping with the assassinations.

SCIRI is represented in the caretaker government by Adil Abdul Mahdi, the Finance Minister, and the party has been an ally of convenience of the US against the Sadr Movement. The party was formed in Tehran by Iraqi exiles in 1982 and was close to Iranian hardliners. SCIRI officials vigorously denied Shahwani's charges on Thursday. They said that the neo-Baath network in the Allawi government is seeking to discredit Iraqis who fought against Saddam from Iran in the 1980s.

SCIRI is close to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, and there is some danger that if the neo-Baathists attack this Shiite party they will push Sistani into opposition to the government. Indeed, insofar as most of the neo-Baath are Sunnis, this sort of campaign could finally produce the kind of Sunni-Shiite violence many feared before the war, but which has largely so far been avoided.

Shahwani's allegations are disturbing, coming when they do, because they may be an attempt to damage SCIRI's prospects in the January elections. If the secret police are manipulating documents to tie a major Iraqi party to foreign intrigue and domestic assassination, this move would bode badly for Iraq's development as a democracy.

Personally, I find Shahwani's allegations fantastic.

It was clear as soon as Allawi and the neo-Baath faction was put in power by the US in late June that they wanted to target Iran. Defense Minister Hazim Shaalan decried Iran publicly as Iraq's number one enemy this summer.

Shahwani is an old-time Baath officer. In 1990 he broke with Saddam, who is said to have killed three of Shahwani's children in revenge. Shahwani came out of Iraq and to join US efforts to overthrow the dictator. This summer, he was appointed head of the Mukhabarat or Iraqi secret police, which the US Central Intelligence Agency is rebuilding with $3 billion. Shahwani is alleged to be a long-time CIA asset who is being groomed as a replacement for caretaker Prime Minister Iyad Allawi should the latter be assassinated.

Shahwani is part of a network of ex-Baathists (or perhaps neo-Baathists) around Iyad Allawi, including Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib and Defense Minister Hazim Shaalan. As Ed Wong and Erik Eckholm of the New York Times recently reported, the Allawi government has been bringing large numbers of former Baathists into the government. This step reverses the extreme de-Baathification measures implemented at the behest of Ahmad Chalabi begining in June of 2003.

On 21 September, al-Sabah reported that Judge Zuhair al-Maliky had opened an investigation into Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib and the head of the Iraqi secret police, Muhammad al-Shahwani for their harassment of members of the Hizbullah Movement of Iraq headed by Hassan al-Sari in Baghdad. Sari's HMI was established in the early 1980s, and is very close to the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. (Later on the "Iraqi Hizbullah" hived off from it to organize the Marsh Arabs displaced by Saddam from the south (headed by Abu Hatem al-Muhammadawi. The HMI remained separate. Neither the Hizbullah Movement of Iraq nor the Iraqi Hizbullah is related to the Lebanese organization of the same name, which Western news sources inexplicably transliterate in Persian as Hezbollah). The two ex-Baath officials had reportedly ordered the secret police to raid "the office of Hizb Allah Movement in Baghdad and arrested some members, including the movement's general-secretary Hassan Al Sari, without any arrest warrant." [Thanks to Nicholas Blanford for information about HMI].

Complaints began surfacing about Shahwani in August. Iraqi Shiite leaders visiting London this summer contacted the Deccan Herald, a south Indian newspaper, among others, to express concern about the secret police chief:

' Despite earlier promises that no one in Iraq would be arrested without due process, Shahwani’s critics say he is using ex-criminals to round up suspects and hold them without charge in secret prisons.

“On the day the National Assembly was appointed three members were arrested, along with another 57 others, all this on the orders of Shahwani,” one prominent Iraqi visitor told Deccan Herald on condition he was not quoted by name.

“When we heard of this we approached Prime Minister Allawi and they managed to get one man released. All the others remain under arrest.

“Shahwani only responds to the orders of the Americans, he was forced on Allawi. That’s why this is occupation, you can draw your conclusions.” '

Hyderabad, in South India, was ruled by the Golconda Shiite state in the 1500s and 1600s and has an old Shiite community that is connected to the Gulf through immigration and study. Presumably it is this Hyderabad connection that explains why the Iraqi Shiites complained to the Deccan Herald in particular about Shahwani.


Appendix I (1:35 pm)

Bartle Bull has an excellent opinion piece in the NYT today on the turn of the Sadr movement toward civil politics, the formation of the Patriot Party, and its possible alliance with Ahmad Chalabi.

Appendix II

Chalabi's office just put out this news release:

' Muhammad Shahwani has violated the charter of the Iraqi intelligence service, the Transitional Administrative Law and the bill of rights of the Iraqi people by spying on Iraqi citizens, falsely arresting and imprisoning Iraqis, and fanning the flames of sectarianism. He continues to act without authority while making false accusations against Iraqi parties
and personalities who led the struggle against Saddam and are leading the struggle against terrorism today.

He has filled the ranks of the intelligence service with Baathists and Saddam loyalists and he has failed to protect the Iraqi people from terrorism."

"The Iraqi National Assembly and the Iraqi judicial system are discussing what action to take to prevent Shahwani abusing the rights of Iraqis in the same way that Saddam's regime did." '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Green Zone Hit by Suicide Bombers

Two suicide bombers wrought havoc inside the Green Zone in Baghdad on Thursday, killing at least four Americans. Al-Jazeerah suggested that the bold attack on the heart of US presence in the capital came in response to continued US bombing of Fallujah and recent American demands that Fallujans turn over Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other foreign fighters. (The US has offered no evidence that al-Zarqawi is actually in the city).

Scott Peterson of the Christian Science Monitor argues from Baghdad that despite the continual bombings and insecurity, Allawi and the Americans have made some progress in their bid to hold elections in January. He points to so far successful negotiations with Sadrists in Sadr City, which has resulted in surrender of heavy arms for money and a promise of massive economic aid for the vast slum. Likewise the US managed at least for the moment to take back Samarra, a predominantly Sunni city of some 200,000 north of Baghdad.

Iraq News notes,

' Thursday, two bombs went off at 1:00 p.m. local time in Baghdad's Green Zone which killed 10 people, four of whom were Americans. The Green Zone houses the U.S. and U.K. embassies and government officials. The area is the most protected area in the Iraqi capital. One bomb went off in area known as the Vendors' alley while another went off by the Green Zone Cafe. Monotheism and Holy War, the group run by Iraq's most wanted man, the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, said it had carried out the bombings. In Fallujah, coalition forces carried out three strikes on sites linked to Zarqawi, the military said in separate e-mailed statements. The city of west of Baghdad is a suspected base for insurgents led by Zarqawi. Also, the U.S. struck a weapons depot in southern Fallujah, and a suspected safe house used by Zarqawi's network at 1:05 p.m. Thursday. '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Why the Cheneys are Angry

Why are Lynne and Dick Cheney so angry that John Kerry mentioned their daughter Mary's lesbianism in the third presidential debate?

The difference of opinion on whether the mention was appropriate is rooted in two different worldviews, and on two different metaphors for gayness.

The behavior of the Cheneys demonstrates that they view being gay as like being disabled. Or rather it is like being disabled in the William F. Buckley conception of disabled people as not just different from ordinary persons but actually inferior in their enjoyment of life.

Michelle Cottle of the New Republic pointed out:

' in explaining his position, Cheney went all Oprah on his audience, noting that same-sex marriage is an issue his family "is very familiar with" because he and Lynne have a gay daughter. Now, such public confession might not seem like a big deal to you or me. But back in 2000, when ABC's Cokie Roberts made some on-air remark to Lynne about daughter Mary being "openly gay," Mrs. Cheney freaked out and nearly took Cokie's head off with the fierce -- and utterly false -- avowal that "Mary has never declared such a thing." God only knows what kind of domestic wrath Dick might incur by destroying his wife's carefully maintained shroud of denial . . . No one doubts that the Vice President's apostasy on this issue is entirely personal. If Mary weren't a lesbian, Cheney would at this very minute be somewhere deep in the red states, warning voters in that scowling, brook-no-arguments way of his that gay marriage is exactly the sort of fuzzy-headed liberal nonsense that gives aid and comfort to al Qaeda . . . As near as I can figure, Cheney's approach to public policy seems to be that he believes in a basic set of rules that everyone should live by -- except in those cases where doing so would prove inconvenient for him or his family. '

If daughter Mary's condition were viewed at least subconsciously by Dick and Lynne as a disability, then it would be rude for strangers to bring it up. It would be all right for a politician to go before an audience and talk about his love for his blind daughter and say that although his party is against mandating disabled access to public buildings, he himself favors it because he has seen the challenges his daughter faced.

But obviously if a rival politician suddenly said, "Well, Cheney, your daughter is blind as a bat," that would be rude beyond belief. And Lynne's charge that Kerry is "not a good man" would be precisely the sort of reaction one might expect to such an indelicate reference.

But right-thinking Americans don't believe that being gay is a disability or anything shameful. It is like being left-handed or red-headed. It is just the way some people are, and probably has a complex base in genes and proteins. So if in a debate, the issue came up that some school teachers make left-handed students write with their right hands, and Kerry were to say, "Well, Dick Cheney's daughter knows how unfair this is because she is left-handed," nobody would think that was rude or inappropriate. Because Kerry wouldn't be instancing it as a stigma or a disability, but just a neutral fact of life.

So I think the sheer fury of Lynne and Dick Cheney in reaction to this harmless remark actually demonstrates that they both still have an unfaced prejudice toward gay people, and are still ashamed that this "disability" exists in their family. Kerry thought nothing of the remark because he doesn't share that prejudice, and doesn't consider being gay in any way shameful.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bush v. Kerry: The Persian Gulf Empire and Perpetual War

The visions for the American future laid out by George W. Bush and John Kerry differ starkly on matters of war and peace, and the shape of American power in the Middle East.

Bush has put enormous resources into the Iraq war compared to those he has committed to fighting al-Qaeda. Kerry pledges to concentrate on stamping out al-Qaeda. The American public has a clear choice between a continued US push into the Middle East, with bases and very likely further wars, and between a calmer, more patient foreign policy that makes room to address the problem of practically fighting terrorism.

As Barbara Slavin of USA Today noted after the first debate, Kerry differs strongly from Bush on the issue of a long-term US military presence in Iraq:

' Kerry charges that the war has further alienated other Muslim countries and diverted the United States from its main target, the al-Qaeda network. In the debate Sept. 30, Kerry said Bush sent the wrong signals to Iraqis and other countries in the region by establishing 14 military bases in Iraq that appear to be permanent.

"I will make a flat statement," Kerry said. "The United States has no long-term designs on staying in Iraq. Our goal ... would be to get all of the troops out of there with the minimal amount you need for training and logistics ... to sustain the peace." '

If elected, that is, Kerry might not be able to bring the troops home immediately, in order to avoid chaos. But he is willing to say up front that he will bring them home in relatively short order.

In contrast, if he is reelected, Bush will almost certainly attempt to retain bases in Iraq, and to ensure a long-term US military presence in that country on the analogy of Japan, Korea and Germany. If elections can be held in Iraq and if the political crisis there subsides, he will be in a position to draw down troops eventually to about a division (say 20,000 men). The Pentagon already speaks of 12 enduring bases in Iraq.

Unlike John Kerry, Bush has never even talked about having US forces leave altogether when security returns. The US under Bush will likely be a permanent Persian Gulf Power, succeeding the Portuguese, Safavid, Ottoman, and British Empires in that role. At the moment, the US lacks a big permanent land base in the region, though it has a de facto naval base in Bahrain and an air base in Qatar. These are small countries that can host only small facilities. With 12 enduring bases in Iraq, the US posture in the Gulf becomes dominant for perhaps the entire twenty-first century. Being an Iraq power would bring the US into permanent and active diplomatic and military contact with Iraq's neighbors, including Syria and Iran. In all likelihood, the Bush path of Iraq bases leads inexorably toward further US military conflict in the region.

The dark cloud over this scenario is that in recent polls the Iraqi public evinces no enthusiasm for a long-term US military presence in their country (between 44% and 56% want the US out now, and 80% are opposed to the US troops remaining in the long term). If Iraqi democracy starts to look incompatible with Bush's bases, and he has to choose between them, might he not be tempted to send parliament home and put in a strong man?

In the second debate, Bush said,

It is naive and dangerous to take a policy that he suggested the other day, which is to have bilateral relations with North Korea. Remember, he's the person who's accusing me of not acting multilaterally. He now wants to take the six-party talks we have -- China, North Korea, South Korea, Russia, Japan and the United States -- and undermine them by having bilateral talks.

That's what President Clinton did. He had bilateral talks with the North Koreans. And guess what happened?

He [Kim Jong-Il] didn't honor the agreement. He was enriching uranium. That is a bad policy. Of course, we're paying attention to these. It's a great question about Iran. That's why in my speech to the Congress I said: There's an Axis of Evil, Iraq, Iran and North Korea, and we're paying attention to it. And we're making progress.

I read this remark as an indication that Bush would continue to address North Korea through multi-lateral diplomacy (essentially acquiescing in its nuclear weapons program, since it is too late to do anything about it except appeal to Pyongyang to be reasonable).

But Bush pairs Iraq and Iran toward the end, suggesting to me that he intends to overthrow the ayatollahs in Tehran just as he overthrew Saddam. Certainly, as Tom Barry argues in In These Times, there are strong voices in the Bush administration that desperately want to go on to Tehran. I disagree with those who say Bush's military is too overstretched for that option. Given these constraints, they could always attempt to foment a coup, as the US did against the elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in 1953. Of course, a coup could go wrong, reqauiring a military follow-up. It is also not impossible that Iraq will go well enough in the medium term to allow a draw-down there, freeing troops for use in Iran.

As Joshua Landis has cogently argued, there are also strong voices in the administration urging military action against Syria. [See also his column on Thursday]. Aside from the threat of more social turmoil, there is no obvious reason for Bush to leave Damascus alone. An attack on Damascus would make both the Turkish and the Israeli hawks happy. Syria's only patron is Iran, which could do little about it except foment guerrilla resistance. Europe and Russia would complain, but would do nothing. The one brake on such a move might be Egypt and the Arab League, which don't hate Bashar al-Asad the way they hated Saddam and may finally find ways diplomatically to intervene with Washington to stop the Bush demarche.

Although the Bush administration will frame any aggression against Syria and Iran as a means of removing weapons of mass destruction (neither government has any), and as a way of spreading democracy, in fact it will be aimed at strengthening the US position as the Persian Gulf hegemon.

The Iraq war was never about an attempt to control Iraqi petroleum. Petroleum is fungible or freely exchangeable, and cannot be "controlled." Once pumped, it goes where the market wants it to go. But a plausible argument could be made that the Iraq war was in part about securing control of the Persian Gulf petroleum infrastructure (security, access to oil exploration and refining rights, distribution, and assurance that local powers could not disrupt supplies). Michael T. Klare at Tomdispatch.com makes a disturbing and extended argument about "Oil Wars and the American Military."

The likelihood that Bush can accomplish his military goals without a renewed draft seems to me close to zero, despite his protestations to the contrary. Thousands of young people will be involuntarily inducted into his crusade, and the US economy and society will be warped in favor of war industries.

Bush is a risk-taker in the high stakes game of global blackjack. His recklessness and aggressiveness could well turn the eastern marches of the Middle East into an active chain of political volcanoes. The bad news is that the last time we had this sort of adventurer in the White House, it was Ronald Reagan. He and his administration helped create what became al-Qaeda to fight the Soviets, setting up the conditions for the blow-back of September 11. If Bush gets back in, can we really be sure the chickens of his Middle East policy won't eventually come home to roost?

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

6 US Troops Killed
Mass Grave Exhumed

A suicide bomber and guerrillas who detonated several roadside bombs killed 6 US troops on Wednesday.

Caretaker Prime Minister Iyad Allawi threatened the inhabitants of Fallujah with a massive US military assault if they did not turn over Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other foreign fighters suspected of being holed up in Fallujah. Since US attacks typically kill large numbers of civilians, Allawi appears to have been threatening collective punishment, which is a war crime.

Allawi's president, Ghazi al-Yawir, complained bitterly only two weeks ago about the use of collective punishment against the inhabitants of Fallujah, likening it to Israeli policies in Gaza.

I have also just published an opinion piece on the subject.

Investigators delved into the contents of one of 40 mass graves identified in Iraq, discovering 300 bodies of Kurds killed in 1987 or 1988. The victims appear to have included a large number of women and children.

In the face of such horror (one little boy's skeletal hand still grasped a plastic ball), it is hard to remember history dispassionately. But the context for this barbarous crime is part of the crime itself. The Kurds had sought greater autonomy from Baghdad for decades. In the later years of the Iran-Iraq War, some Kurdish groups sided with Iran against their own government, in hopes of winning independence. The Baath regime of Saddam Hussein replied with a virtual genocide, killing large numbers of Kurds, and employing in some instances poison gas, as at Halabjah. The sheer vindictiveness of the Anfal Campaign is demonstrated by the fact that so many of the villages targeted were far from the Iranian border and not obviously part of the war effort.

The Reagan administration, then strongly allied with Saddam, did not so much as issue a condemnation of the regime's vicious attacks on the Kurds. Some congressmen spoke out. In 1983, Secretary of State George Schultz had sent Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad to meet with Saddam and explore an alliance. The meeting went well. But then later in 1983, the State Department issued a condemnation of Saddam for using chemical weapons at the front against Iran. Saddam was furious and almost called off the deal. Schultz then sent Rumsfeld back to Baghdad a second time, in 1984, this time with the message that the State Department condemnation was pro forma. So Donald Rumsfeld and George Schultz are guilty of having winked at the only major use of weapons of mass destruction in the modern Middle East. See "Rumsfeld, Bechtel and Iraq."

So the Kurdish mass grave is not only a testament to Saddam's monumental brutality. It is also a sad commentary on the immorality of US policies in the region in the 1980s under Reagan. It is not a legacy over which Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and other figures on the Right can take any pride in, or political comfort from.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

They may as Well have Voted in May

Hamza Hendawi draws aside the strange curtain that had fallen over election preparations in Iraq.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat also reports on the issue, saying the the registration of voters and parties will begin on November 1 and last until December 15. Some 12 million voters will be eligible to take part in elections for a 275-seat parliament.

Parties must register between Nov. 1 and Nov. 30, and must pay a $5,000 registration fee. Their top officers may not be high-ranking former Baathists. They must submit national party tickets with at least 12 candidates and at most 275. One-third must be women (last I knew it was one fourth, but maybe Raja' al-Khuza'i has won a round recently).

Cole: The tickets are arranged so that every third name is a woman. Seats will be apportioned according to the proportion of the vote the party achieves. As I understand it, if 10% of Iraqis vote for the al-Da`wa Party, it would get roughly 27 seats, so that the top 27 persons listed on its ticket would serve. 8 of them would be women. I fear that this system penalizes independents and members of small local parties, probably fatally. For this reason, parties are trying to form larger coalitions, which have a better chance of garnering a significant percentage of votes.

Hendawi reveals that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's plan of using the old United Nations food rolls has been revised, but that there will be a voter registration process that hopes to double-check the rolls. The ration rolls had been criticized by US proconsul Paul Bremer, who refused to allow elections to be held in May, 2004, as Sistani had proposedl, on the grounds that voter registration could not be accomplished in that time frame. In fact, Bremer and the Bush administration were terrified that elections would bring radical Shiites and Sunni fundamentalists to power.

The real reason elections were postponed was so that they would not embarrass Bush by their results. As it is, the US election will be decided before we can see the shape of the Iraqi parliament, which may not be to Bush's liking. In the meantime, US military might has been used in an attempt to break the power of the Sadr movement in the south, as well as to break the grip of Sunni fundamentalists and ex-Baathists on the north-central provinces. It remains to be see if military tactics actually produced the desired result.

If elections had been held in May, 2004, they might have forestalled a good deal of the violence we have seen since April 1.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Quotes of the Day

Sy Hersh in the UC Berkeley News:

"How could eight or nine neoconservatives come and take charge of this government?" he asked. "They overran the bureaucracy, they overran the Congress, they overran the press, and they overran the military! So you say to yourself, How fragile is this democracy?"

.

Apparently you just need 8 positions to take over the US government: Chief, Near East and South Asia division of the Department of Defense; Undersecretary of Defense for Policy; Deputy Secretary of Defense; Secretary of Defense; Undersecretary of State for Arms Control; Chairman, Defense Policy Board; Vice President; Chief of Staff to the Vice President; and Deputy National Security Adviser. Of course, it only works if you have a president who needs radio signals to be told what to say and do (see below). If you don't know who held the positions mentioned during 2002-2003, do look them up on google.com, and then compare the holders of these offices to the members of the Project for a New American Century and the signers of the 1996 policy statement done for Israel's Likud Party, "A Clean Break." Both "A Clean Break" and the PNAC documents insisted back in the 1990s on a war against Iraq.

(Tiny Revolution has more chilling details on Hersh's description of massacres by US troops in Iraq.)

David Lindorff, Salon.com:

"a technical expert who designs and makes such devices for the U.S. military tells Salon that he believes the bulge is indeed a transceiver designed to receive electronic signals and transmit them to a hidden earpiece lodged in Bush's ear canal."

(Referring to the apparent use by Bush of a wireless device to allow him to be coached during the Kerry debates. If true, this development is horrifying for several reasons. It means that Bush's disastrous performance in the first debate was the best he could do while cheating. It also means that there is something seriously wrong with Bush's mind, which must be apparent to those close to him. You begin to wonder if the rules laid down for the September 11 Commission, whereby Bush and Cheney were interviewed together, wasn't the first sign of a dirty little secret in official Washington: Nice White House, nobody home.

Mohammad Elbaradei of the International Atomic Energy Commission concerning the disappearance from Iraq of equipment and materials that have application to the making of nuclear weapons:

' The IAEA continues to be concerned about the widespread and apparently systematic dismantlement that has taken place at sites previously relevant to Iraq's nuclear program," Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the Vienna-based nuclear watchdog agency, wrote in a three-page report to the U.N. Security Council. "The disappearance of such equipment and materials may be of proliferation significance." '

Naomi Klein in the Guardian:

' President Bush's special envoy, James Baker, who has been trying to persuade the world to forgive Iraq's crushing debts, is simultaneously working for a commercial concern that is trying to recover money from Iraq, according to confidential documents.

Mr Baker's Carlyle Group is in a consortium secretly proposing to try to collect $27bn (£15bn) on behalf of Kuwait, one of Iraq's biggest creditors, by using high-level political influence. It claims Mr Baker will not benefit personally, but the consortium could make millions in fees, retainers and commission as a result.

Other countries, including Britain, have been urged by Mr Baker to relieve the new Iraq regime of its $200bn debt burden. Iraq owes Britain approximately $1bn.

One international lawyer described the consortium's scheme as "influence peddling of the crassest kind".

Jerome Levinson, an expert on political and corporate ethics at American University in Washington, told the Guardian: "The consortium is saying to the Kuwaiti government, 'Through us you have the only chance to realize a substantial part of the debt. Why? Because of who we are and who we know'." '

It is little surprise that Bush, who is close to Enron criminal CEO Ken Lay and several other criminal CEOs that looted the country, should have employed for this purpose a person whose company stood to benefit. After Cheney arranged for a war that he knew would benefit Halliburton economically, the Baker scandal is just par for the course.

Mark Hyman of Sinclair Broadcasting, on why his company is making affiliate television stations carry far rightwing agitprop against John Kerry just before the election:

' However, the accusations coming from Terry McAuliffe and others, is it because they are some elements of this that may reflect poorly on John Kerry? That it's somehow an in-kind contribution of George Bush?

If you use that logic and reasoning, that means every car bomb in Iraq would be an in-kind contribution to John Kerry. Weak job performance ratings that came out last month would have been an in- kind contribution to John Kerry. And that's just nonsense.

This is news. I can't change the fact that these people decided to come forward today. The networks had this opportunity over a month ago to speak with these people. They chose to suppress them. They chose to ignore them. They are acting like Holocaust deniers, pretending these men don't exist. '

Jewish groups are understandably upset about Hyman's trivialization of the Holocaust, and most fair-minded Americans are upset about Sinclair's continual flouting of US laws governing private exploitation of the airwaves. It should be remembered that the American public owns the airwaves, and that the US government only licenses them temporarily for use by private businesses like Sinclair. (Personally, I don't think the US public is getting a proper return on its licenses; I'd like to get a check for my share of the profits the broadcast media make annually from my 290 millionth of the airwaves.)

Josh Marshall is giving good instructions as to how viewers in Sinclair markets can put pressure on advertisers and local affiliates to punish this behavior. Every time someone at the top of Sinclair speaks publicly it reminds me of the impassioned speeches of General Jack Ripper in Dr. Strangelove denouncing commie attempts to pollute his "precious bodily fluids."

650 US experts in foreign affairs and national security write in an open letter to Bush:

' American actions in Iraq, including but not limited to the scandal of Abu Ghraib, have harmed the reputation of the U.S. in most parts of the Middle East and, according to polls, made Osama Bin Laden more popular in some countries than is President Bush. This increased popularity makes it easier for al-Qaida to raise money, attract recruits, and carry out its terrorist operations than would otherwise be the case.'

The letter makes good points about the disaster that post-war Bush administration policy has been in Iraq. I was offered the opportunity to sign it and declined, however, because I am disturbed by its suggestion that the US should have instead have been taking an aggressive posture toward Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. The authors may not have intended to sound as hawkish as they did to me, but I think this trope on the Left, of Bush having attacked the wrong country, is very dangerous and will ultimately play into the hands of the Neocons, who have further wars they want to fight. Richard Perle and David Frum, for instance, have already urged the forcible break-up of Saudi Arabia. When Pakistan was given a choice of siding with the Taliban or with the US, its government chose the US. The Saudi government does all sorts of favors for the US behind the scenes, and the Saudi elite is so heavily invested in the US stock market that it would be crazy for them to support an attack on New York. Iran is in the throes of an internal battle between hardliners and liberals, and it is not in a position to make a nuclear bomb at this time in any case. So, I quoted the part of the letter with which I agree.

The letter was the lead of the al-Jazeerah news broadcasts all day Tuesday. Often al-Jazeerah is intellectually more serious than any US satellite news channels. I saw a great debate there recently between Muhammad Arkoun and Rachid Ghanouchi, an Algerian secularist and a Tunisian Islamist. No American news program would lead with the letter of 650 mere academics.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Mosque Arms Stockpiles Targeted in Ramadi

Alexandra Zavis of AP reports that US troops raided 7 mosques in Ramadi on Tuesday and arrested a leading Sunni clergyman, Abdul Alim al-Saadi, and his son. The move came after the outbreak of fighting between US troops and local guerrillas at Ramadi. On Monday night, guerrillas had fired mortar shells at city hall, starting the fighting, and leaving three policemen and a civilian dead.

Al-Saadi is a leader of the Provincial League of Anbar Clergy, according to al-Sharq al-Awsat. Some local sources alleged that the US dynamited the doors of some of the mosques. Shaikh Abdullah Abu Omar of the Ramadi Mosque is quoted as saying, "This cowboy behaviour cannot be accepted. The Americans seem to have lost their senses and have gone out of control."

Shaikh Muhammad Bashar al-Faydi, a spokesman for the Association of Muslim Scholars, to which al-Saadi seems to be linked, launched an appeal to Pope John Paul II to condemn the attacks on the city's mosques, according to al-Jazeerah.

The Marine spokesman replied, "The First Marine Division respects the religious and cultural significance represented by mosques. However, when insurgents violate the sanctity of the mosque by using the structure for military purposes, the site loses its protective status."

While the Marine spokesman is certainly correct in the law, there is no way that the US can hope to win hearts and minds in the Sunni Muslim areas if it launches frontal assaults on mosques. There just is not a way to put a good spin on that for most Muslims.

US warplanes stuck Fallujah twice on Tuesday, attempting to target guerrilla safe houses. They appear to have destroyed a popular kebab restaurant in the downtown area, along with another house. The stikes killed five and wounded two, according to the Fallujah hospital. The US military insisted that there were powerful secondary explosions at the building, suggesting it had been used as a place to store explosives.

Although the stated reason for the US operations in Ramadi and Fallujah is to restore order in preparation for elections in January, this reprinted New York Times article raises severe questions about whether the Sunni Arabs will feel enthusiastic about voting in American-sponsored elections any time soon. The legacy of bitterness likely to be generated by the further conquest of the Sunni Arabs seems likely to be destabilizing into at least the medium term.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sistani Rules that Believers Must Register to Vote
Barzani threatens to Fight for Kirkuk

KarbalaNews.net reports that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has issued a formal legal ruling requiring believers to register to vote in the voter registration drive set to begin on November 1. The ruling says, "It is incumbent upon all citizens eligible to to vote, both men and women, to register their names correctly in the voter registration lists." He said that voters are responsible for making sure their names are correctly recorded. He asked his aides to form popular committees in their regions to help citizens to accomplish this task, so that all might be enabled to participate in the elections, "which we hope will be held at the scheduled time, and which we hope will be free and fair." See also the AP report on this fatwa.

Al-Hayat reports that the weapons collection program in Sadr City, the sprawling Shiite slum of east Baghdad, was markedly more successful on Tuesday, with the pace of weapons turn-ins picking up substantially. Militiamen in the ghetto are thereby seeking an end to US attacks on them and their neighborhoods.

The very positive attitude toward the coming elections by Grand Ayatollah Sistani will certainly contribute to what success they have in the majority Shiite areas of the south. To the extent that the less militant leaders of the Sadr movement join in the elections and seek seats in parliament, they may well moderate their views and learn to trade horses. This is all assuming, of course, that guerrilla attacks don't make the elections impossible or create so low a turnout as to bring their legitimacy into question.

Erich Marquardt of PINR explains Muqtada al-Sadr's temporary stand-down from confrontation with the US. Excerpt:

' Washington has not bowed to al-Sadr's pressure and has continued to pound his Mehdi Army militia, inflicting on it a high casualty rate. Washington's persistence in this matter successfully prevented al-Sadr's movement from spreading to Iraqi Shi'a as a whole. Furthermore, Washington's continued pressure caused al-Sadr to realize, at least momentarily, that there is only so much he can accomplish from guerrilla attacks against U.S. troops.

This realization is evident by al-Sadr's willingness to direct his forces to lay down their weapons and let Iraqi and U.S.-led security forces take back control of rebellious areas. Indeed, beginning October 11, Mehdi Army forces handed over medium and heavy arms -- such as grenade-launchers, mortars, machine guns and artillery shells -- to Iraqi and U.S.-led forces; in exchange for their weapons, they were given money for each item that they relinquished. While it may be impossible to judge the extent of the weapons handover, as long as the Mehdi Army is participating in this endeavor, it is a sign of stability.

However, al-Sadr's recent decision to resort to diplomacy should not be taken as a sign of weakness. On the contrary, if Washington decision makers wish to stabilize Iraq, they must not underestimate al-Sadr again. His pronouncement to resort to diplomacy actually demonstrates the strength he has acquired by resisting the United States; that al-Sadr is even able to dictate terms means that he is in a much more superior position than he was in the early days of the invasion. '

The political process in Iraq still faces potentially severe obstacles. Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani said in Ankara on Tuesday that the Kurds will fight to protect Kirkuk, especially from any further "Arabization". In recent decades Saddam had expelled Kurds from the city and installed there large numbers of Arabs. Many of the latter are now fleeing back south, strengthening the Kurdish position in the city. Kirkuk is claimed by Turkmen, Sunni Arabs, and Kurds. Both Turkmen and Kurds insist that they were the dominant population in the city in earlier decades. Turkmen, a small but significant ethnic group, constitute about a third of Kirkuk's residents, and the potential for massive urban strife in the city is high.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

3 US Soldiers Killed, 5 Wounded
2 Iraqis Killed, 27 Wounded

wire services report that guerrillas killed at least three US soldiers in separate attacks on Monday.

In Mosul, a guerrilla detonated his car bomb in front of a US military convoy, killing at least one US soldier and two Iraqis, and injuring 27 persons with the explosion and in small arms attacks afterwards. (Other guerrillas fired at the convoy from the mosque after the explosion, then disappeared).

In southern Baghdad, guerrillas fired rockets, killing two American troops and wounding five other US soldiers.

Loud explosions shook Baghdad once the sun went down.

In Heet (Hit), a western Iraqi city near Ramadi on the smuggling route to Syria, a major clash broke out between US troops and dozens of local guerrillas. In the course of striking at the guerrillas, the US damaged either a mosque or the shrine of Ali al-Hiti, which caught fire (press reports weren't clear what exactly was hit). Setting shrines and mosques on fire generally makes a bad impression among a Muslim public.

Az-Zaman reports an attack in Baqubah which, however, the US military has not confirmed at this writing.

There were also explosions in Fallujah. The city's elders had gone to Baghdad to negotiate an end to violence with interim Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan.

Guerrillas beheaded a Turk and an Iraqi Kurdish translator on Monday.

Iraq News summarizes an AFP article:,

' The Iraqi government has made an agreement with the Radical Shite cleric Moqtada Sadr`s militia to slowly turn over weapons. This agreement came after a bloody six months which has devastated Sadr City which is home to 2.5 million people. The agreement is described as a loose verbal pact between both sides. There will be a a five-day test period for weapons surrender after which the Iraqi army will move in and patrol Sadr City, where the Shiite militia has ruled by the gun for months, while the government has offered to free some detained Sadr supporters. At one station in the district there has been a surrender of about a dozen machine guns, 12 mortar rounds, 38 mortar launchers and a sniper rifle. The U.S. and Iraqi government hope this will lead to the end of resistance in Sadr so they can concentrate on other areas such as Fallujah where violent resistance continues. The iraqi government has promised $500 million for the rebuilding of Sadr City, with $150 million coming from the United States.
- AFP

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Cheney Pressured CIA

Philip Sherwell's article for the Telegraph about the bad feeling between the Bush administration and the old guard at the CIA has an interesting tidbit buried in the middle of it.

' In the latest clash, a senior former CIA agent revealed that Mr Cheney "blew up" when a report into links between the Saddam regime and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist behind the kidnappings and beheadings of hostages in Iraq, including the Briton Kenneth Bigley, proved inconclusive. '

That is, Cheney asked the CIA to look into links between al-Zarqawi and Saddam. The CIA did so. It couldn't nail anything down. Then he blew his top, which in Washington is always a way of trying to intimidate subordinates into retracting their statements.

Cheney has been using Zarqawi's occasional presence in Iraq in the Saddam period as a proof of Iraq's ties to al-Qaeda for years. This line of reasoning is typically squirrelly and does not hold up. First, Zarqawi was in that period a bitter rival with al-Qaeda and would not share the resources his Monotheism and Holy War organization in Germany with Bin Laden's group. In Iraq, Zarqawi was said to be associated with the Ansar al-Islam group, which consisted of 200-400 Kurdish members who were radical fundamentalists, and some of whom had fought in Afghanistan. Ansar al-Islam was a deadly enemy of the Saddam regime. The US declined to take out its base on more than one occasion in spring of 2003. Some think Rumsfeld was afraid of removing a pretext for the Iraq war. I myself suspect that Ansar was at that point seen as a potential ally against Saddam.

Cheney used to allege that Zarqawi could not have gotten treatment at a Baghdad hospital for his leg wound without Saddam's knowledge. But now there is doubt that Zarqawi had a leg wound. And it should be obvious that the Iraqi regime was so dilapidated that an argument from its totalitarian efficiency is just ridiculous. Some informed observers think Zarqawi is dead, and that the Bush administration has a black psy-ops game going to build his ghost up as a threat in Iraq. (It is painful to admit that the US is actually mainly fighting the Iraqis it said it came to liberate.)

It is Cheney's display of anger at the CIA findings that is disturbing here. How long has this been going on? Cheney even went to visit the CIA headquarters in Langley at one point before the war. Was he growling at the analysts and trying to make them say what he wanted them to say? In the intelligence business, an analyst who tells politicians what they want to hear rather than the truth is called a "weasel." How many CIA analysts were turned into weasels by Cheney's bluster and implied threats? Why would the US electorate want a man in office who is so out of touch with reality that he "blows up" when someone speaks the truth around him?

The Telegraph had earlier said,

' Former senior CIA officials argue that so-called "neo-conservative" hawks such as the vice president, Dick Cheney, the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, and his number three at the defence department, Douglas Feith, have prompted the ill-feeling [among CIA analysts] by demanding "politically acceptable" results from the agency and rejecting conclusions they did not like. '

Sherwell here names some interesting names in addition to Cheney in the weasel factory. Donald Rumsfeld and Douglas Feith, the no. 1 and no. 3 men at the Department of Defense, are here accused of having rejected conclusions that they did not like and demanding politically acceptable results. And the US public wonders how the CIA could have gotten the weapons of mass destruction issue so wrong!

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Women's Issues in Iraq

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that Safiya al-Suhail, the shaykha or female tribal leader of the Banu Tamim tribe, has been appointed Iraqi ambassador to Egypt, and that Egypt has accepted her credentials.

On Monday the first national women's conference in the new Iraq was held, with panels on security issues and women, among other subjects. I could not find anything in the Western press about either of these items, which seem to me significant.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Al-Qaeda, Baader-Meinhoff and the Patriot Act

David K. Moore writes:

" I have to bring something up about the analogy to the Red Army Faction. I was in college in Germany 75-76, when Baader and Meinhoff were killed (or committed suicide). What happened to Germany due to their actions is a cautionary tale for America. Part of their philosophy was to create a fascist government backlash through oppression, which in turn would lead to the fall of the Federal German Republic. Quite a miscalculation, seeing as how Germans have a history of putting up with oppression--think of the saying Zucht und Ordnung.

The government passed the law Gefahr in Verzug, which gave them the right to search, detain and seize for being a "threat in the making." Sound familiar? Germans had to register with the local police where they worked and lived. Quite a few laws like this were passed but, interestingly, the terrorists never violated them. They created false names and registered under them. They also had the help of the East German Stasi. I lived in Berlin and people are unaware Germans could get off the subway in East Berlin. The third largest Turkish population was West Berlin and you could always spot the illegals coming in through the subway. Kind of like how the
Mexicans keep infiltrating unchecked.

One last analogy is the personal information the Germans collected. They had the world's largest computer dedicated to tracking down the RAF. Information on their favorite cars, cigarettes, etc., were kept and run against other people buying these products.

In other words, I experienced the PATRIOT Act in the original 1970s German version. "

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

How Would Cheney Complete the "War on Terror"?


Vice President Dick Cheney today attacked John Kerry.

" Cheney and two other speakers at the rally also criticized Kerry for saying in a recent interview in The New York Times Magazine that, "We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance."

"This is naive and dangerous," Cheney said Monday. "

Cheney went on to say that he and Bush intend to prosecute the war on terror to completion, and that Kerry doesn't understand what it is or what that would entail.

I have to confess that I have never understood what Bush and Cheney mean by the "war on terror," either. It is because they use the term in alarmingly vague and comprehensive ways.

It is clear that they do not mean a war on "terror." They are completely uninterested in "terror" in general. What has the United States done about Basque terrorism in Spain? About Israeli settler terror against Palestinians? Or for that matter about Hamas terror against Israel? As I argued Friday, Bush hasn't even bothered to do anything serious to Ayman al-Zawahiri and al-Jihad al-Islami, which was part of the 9/11 attack and hit Taba.

James Woolsey and John Podhoretz have suggested that the US enter a World War IV against the Muslim world. While this is a nice daydream for the American Likud, it has the disadvantage of bearing no relationship to the real world.

Almost all the governments in the Muslim world are strong allies of the United States. Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Turkey, Indonesia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, etc., etc. Even Libya has at least correct relations with the US now. Virtually no Muslim government is in an active posture of enmity toward the US with no qualifications. Even Iran is divided on the issue.

So the US simply is not at war with the sultan of Morocco or the king of Jordan or the president of Egypt.

The publics of the Muslim world have a poor opinion of US policy in the region, especially the extreme bias in favor of Israeli expansionism against the Palestinians, and the disaster in Iraq. But the same Muslim publics admire America and Americans on other grounds, and express more support for democracy than does the US public in similar polls.

So if the Bush administration is not at war with terrorists like ETA, not at war with Muslim governments, not at war with Muslim publics, then with whom exactly is it at war, and why?

Bush and Cheney are cynically using the trauma of September 11 as a pretext to fight a series of elective wars against weak governments that are inconvenient for hawkish goals and some US corporate interests. Iraq was a poster child of this policy. It had no weapons of mass destruction, was ramshackle, and had no significant ties to terrorism. It was invented as a dire threat to Peoria by Karl Rove and Rupert Murdoch, the latter-day Wizards of Oz.

Syria's government acts as a brake on Israeli expansionism and hegemony, and the Bush-Sharon axis would like to overthrow it. Syria poses no threat at all to the US, and is only a minor irritant to the Likud Party. Its support for Hizbullah in southern Lebanon is "terror" only in the sense that Israeli support for Gush Emunim in the West Bank is "terror." Indeed, the Likud policy in the West Bank is far worse than the policies of Hizbullah, since the Lebanese Shiites just want their own territory to be free of foreign occupation--they aren't expanding into other people's back yards.

Bush and Cheney would like to overthrow the government of Iran. This is not because poor, weak Iran is a threat to the US. It is not because Iran may want a nuclear capacity, like that of its neighbors - Israel, Russia, Pakistan, India, etc. It is because it is a major petroleum producer and they want to get their hands on its resources and install a pliant puppet regime there.

The scenario of Cheney, whereby "terrorist groups" get nuclear weapons, is at the moment ridiculous. Terrorist groups do not have the capability to build football-arena size facilities to enrich uranium. And contrary to what Cheney keeps alleging, no government is going to give a terrorist group an atomic bomb. Governments with atomic bombs don't like to share with civilians, for fear of their own safety.

The "war on terror" of Bush-Cheney is a smokescreen for naked American imperial aggression. The sad story of how Iraq posed no threat either to the US or to any of its neighbors, despite high-decibel claims to the contrary for two years by Bush, Cheney and their acolytes, will be repeated in the case of Syria and Iran if Bush and Cheney are reelected. They hope that their project of overthrowing governments in the region will go smoothly, but they do not really care, since even an Iran and a Syria in chaos is a net gain from their point of view. Chaos creates "terror" and justifies further US involvement, aggression and control. It is inconvenient for the rest of us, but then they insist, unlike John Kerry, that we live with the nuisances they are creating.

In actual fact, al-Qaeda is just a somewhat more successful version of Baader Meinhoff. It is a small terrorist group that has been created by a particular juncture in history. It is not a reason to abolish the US Bill of Rights, as Bush, Cheney and Ashcroft are doing. It is not a reason to invade three or four countries (precisely the few countries where it does not operate!) It is a nuisance to a free society, and should be curbed.

Bush and Cheney keep shouting that Kerry doesn't understand the war on terror. They mean he doesn't want to overthrow the governments of Syria and Iran. As for themselves, if the war on terror is so important to them, why are Bin Laden and Zawahiri at large? Why can al-Qaeda still strike at will? We now have the worst of both worlds, with a quagmire in Iraq and Palestine, and more quagmires planned, while al-Qaeda morphs and grows and continues to form a threat.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

21 Dead, 16 Injured in Car Bombs

2 US Soldiers announced Killed

Associated Press reports that 2 car bombs killed 11 and wounded dozens on Sunday in Iraq, and that heavy fighting broke out in the western Sunni city of Ramadi. The Iraqi newspaper al-Zaman put the death toll at nearly double this estimate.

Guerrillas detonated the two car bombs in Baghdad virtually at the same instant. They set off one in the vicinity of a police academy in east Baghdad or Sadr City. Ten dead bodies, including three cadets at the police academy and a femaile officer, were brought to Kindi hospital, along with 15 injured. Az-Zaman is reporting a total number of dead in the two incidents of 21.

They set the other off at a market as a US convoy went by. This bomb killed one US soldier and one Iraqi civilian, and one person was injured.

Az-Zaman reported heavy fighting on Haifa Street in the capital, between guerrillas and US troops.

Also in Baghdad, guerrillas assassinated an Iraqi intelligence officer on his way to work on Sunday monring.

Guerrillas mounted a rocket attack on Baghdad International Airport, and az-Zaman says that eyewitnesses reported that guerrillas took out a US military vehicle, killing three US troops, near the airport, as well. There was no confirmation of the report from US sources.

Monotheism and Holy War, the terrorist group originally based in Afghanistan, Jordan and Germany, but which now has Iraqi members, claimed credit for the two car bombings.

In al-Anbar province, guerrillas ambushed a Marine patrol near the town of Hit, but the Marines struck back, killing three and wounding 5.

In Ramadi, guerrillas launched a major attack with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns. Residents told AP by telephone that four enormous explosions had shaken the city Sunday evening.

The US military announced that a Marine had been killed on Saturday.

There was also fighting south of Baghdad, in and around Yusufiyah.

In Baghdad, members of the Sadr II Movement in Sadr City began turning over heavy weapons to the US in exchange for a cessation of hostilities and a promised $500 mn. in aid. After a 5-day weapons turn-in program, Iraqi national guards are said to be prepared to patrol neighborhoods in the slum.

Cole: The likelihood that the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr will actually disarm seems to me low, though they may turn in some weapons. It is possible that they will avoid appearing in the streets armed to the teeth for a while, at least.

Prime Minister Allawi is also said to be negotiating for a return of central government control to the city of Fallujah.

Az-Zaman says that Washington has given the Department of Defense the green light to attack 30 Iraqi cities where guerrillas rule, beginning after the Nov. 2 US election.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Walbridge: Bush War on Terror Discounted in Bazaar

John Walbridge of Indiana University, who has long experience in the Middle East and Pakistan, writes:

" Your readers might be interested in my private index of the progress of the War on Terror: the exchange rate of the dollar against the euro and the Pakistani rupee:

On Sept. 11, 2000, while Clinton was in office the euro traded at about $.86. By Bush's inauguration it had gone up to about $.96, but it had declined to $.91 by Sept. 11, 2001. On Sept. 11, 2002, the euro had risen to $.97, a year later in 2003 to $1.12, and by Sept. 11, 2004, it was trading at $1.23, over a third above where it was at the time of the attacks--in other words, a 26% devaluation of the dollar in the course of the War on Terror. This devaluation is the dog that didn't bark in
the current presidential campaign.

A more telling index of the progress of the War on Terror is the exchange rate between the dollar and the Pakistani rupee. The rupee tends to be pretty closely tied to the US dollar, in good part because Pakistanis like to keep their savings in US hundred dollar bills. When I first encountered the Pakistani rupee in September 1997, it was trading at a little over 41 to the dollar. On Sept 11, 2000, it traded
at 55 to the dollar, which had fallen to 59.5 by Bush's inauguration, and 64.2 by 9/11/2001. The rupee rose to 59.6 by Sept. 11, 2002 and 57.8 by Sept. 11, 2003. It has since dropped slightly to 59.5 to the dollar.

Therefore, during the course of the War on Terror, the Pakistani rupee has risen about 8% against the U.S. dollar, despite having lost 20% against the euro in the same period.

In other words, if the money changers of Pakistan are to be relied upon--and they are nobody's fools in my experience--the prospects for economic stability in Pakistan are shaky, as witness the decline against the euro, but the prospects for the United States economy are worse.


--
John Walbridge
Chair, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures
Director, Middle East and Islamic Studies Program
Goodbody 222
1011 East Third Street
Indiana University
Bloomington IN 47405-7005
jwalbrid _ a _ t indiana d o t edu "

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Shopping in Iraq

An informed observer writes:

" The thrust of the Farnaz Fassihi email, now, if not before, in the mainstream, and Dexter Filkins’ addendum in the NY Times today, was apparent before, but not in confirmed and undeniable detail. Among other things, those two reports render the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz complaints about the press beyond the absurd (surely any idiot knows that if DOD cannot protect the reporters, it is not their fault that they do not render “fair and balanced” reports; but then, too, any idiot knows that that is not what Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz had in mind, among other things, but, in any event, it is highly unlikely that even they, with all their assumed intelligence input, have a “fair and balanced picture” of what is in fact happening in Iraq).

A vital element in the democratic “beacon light” program, if that is what Iraq is intended by current US policy to be, is publicity, which in turn raises the question, whose news matters. There is substance and Public Relations, and whose news reports (Reuters/AP/ and the English speakers v al-Jazeera, et al in Arabic) matter, most especially because few Iraqis and few others in the Region read the NY Times or Washington Post.

Yet, there are things that can be covered in English and have reverberations throughout the global business and financial communities, which, even under the circumstances, should be deemed as important, one would have thought, as the bombings and the occasional speech or press conferences by Allawi et al.

In addition, a main “center-piece” of any such program must be economic development.

Exhibit A is a piece in the Guardian by Rory McCarthy. Forget the Guardian bias and all the rest, if all we Americans have been able to give one clearly not unimportant company manager is $500,000 – no restructuring plan, no marketing plan, no ideas about immediately available efficiencies, no technology and no other apparent assistance, except to tell him that his employees’ salaries have now been doubled – and he is surely one of hundreds, if not thousands, the unreported story of the day would seem to be how abysmally far from prosperity Iraq is in fact and what little is being done about it.

Put bluntly: did anyone say, ok, let’s see what you can be produce, where can it be sold and if we can support your new payroll and salary levels with expanding sales, and, if it all depends on reconstruction projects, we’ll get you in touch with x and y? And, of course, you need all new machinery and equipment, and we will see that you get it, but let’s see what we can do for the moment. Bremer had no idea how to do that, nor did Foley, nor any of the rest of the President-loyal hacks who were sent over there. We have all kinds of people in America, some literally standing by, who could help in real-world ways, but would not touch Iraq at the moment with a barge-pole as things stand now, not entirely because of security conditions, but also because they do not know what the rules of the game are and are going to be. We proclaim that we are the guardians of the rule of law, not men, but company lawyers worldwide are tasked with minimizing economic risk and relied upon for their legal opinions to the effect that any risks are not legal or political, but commercial. Even if, miraculously, Iraq were a weaponless nirvana tomorrow, there would be little non-government guaranteed investment in Iraq, because of the legal mess the Bush administration has made.

What we have said to the Iraqis loud and clear, among other things, in the case of gasoline, cement and wheat (and all the consumer goods now in the shops), no problem, the imports are on the way. The obvious and elementary point is that, in a situation like Iraq, you cannot simply pass 100 laws, of dubious legality, and open the borders to “free competition,” and leave it at that, which is what, in the main, we have done to Iraq from the standpoint of economics and “prosperity.” Indeed, such a policy is a predictable prescription for Iraq to become an irrevocably poor country, with a rentier class at the top.

There is inevitably (given the Election Law, based upon the Perelli recommendation) going to be an “establishment” coalition “party list” in the January elections, if held. But a pseudo-parliamentary, in all events, again, temporary and provisional government, establishing policy for and supervising a cabinet of ministers, who administer somewhere north of 60-70% of the entire Iraqi economy, without an announced or even cabinet-wide coherent economic program or party discipline is a prescription for, at a minimum, gross inefficiency.

The Bush “beacon light” policy appears to be based, at least in significant part, upon the quintessential notion that “terrorism” can be defeated by freedom, democracy and prosperity in at least one country in the Middle East, if it spreads from there to the rest of the Arab/Muslim world. (Note that that should be deemed an affront to Egypt, but we Americans seem to have written Egypt off once they signed you know what, although $billions in compensation payments disappear there.)

Prosperity derives from production, not consumption (because anything consumed must be produced), notwithstanding the phony emphasis placed upon GDP, which now reflects only consumption. Unless one has inherited wealth, is in retirement, with a cash or equivalent bundle, or has won a lottery, there is little consumption unaccompanied by at least some production.

In short, the elections are only notionally half the story, and, I would argue, the lesser half. There was a “privatize, privatize, privatize” mindset in DOD and the CPA. But who would “own” that which was privatized, and who would at least attempt to get some things done to deal with the prosperity portion of the ostensible US policy, until that happened?

No one should forget that among President Bush’s first “leadership” acts after September 11 was to tell us all to go out and shop. "

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Bombs in Taba, Multan, Baghdad Signal Failure of War on Terror

Three major bombs went off between the Nile and the Indus rivers on Thursday. Do they have anything in common, and what do they tell us about the world that Bush has made?

In Baghdad, guerrillas fired Katyusha rockets into the Sheraton Hotel, frequented by foreign contractors. They don't appear to have killed anyone, but we may be assured that they succeeded in their aim of scaring at least some of the contractors away from investing in the new Iraq.

In Multan, a Pakistani city in southern Punjab with a rich Shiite heritage, an unknown group attacked a gathering of radical Sunni Muslims early on Thursday with a car bomb, killing 40 and wounding dozens. The group, Millat-i Islamiyyah, had been known as the Sipah-i Sahabah or The Army of the Prophet's Companions. It was commemorating the death of its leader, Maulana Azam Tariq. The Army of the Prophet's Companions originated as an anti-Shiite organization in Jhang Siyal, an area of northern Punjab long dominated by wealthy Shiite landowners, often from Sufi lineages, but which Tariq took over. It developed a death squad arm and assassinated Shiites. It allied with the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and received training in al-Qaeda terror camps. Yet Maulana Azam Tariq, although briefly arrested, had been allowed by military dictator Pervez Musharraf to sit in the Pakistani parliament until Tariq's assassination last year.

The bombing in Multan almost certainly comes in revenge for the explosion at a Shiite mosque in Sialkot only a few days earlier, and signals that the long-running conflict between radical Sunni Muslim groups with al-Qaeda ties and radical Shiite groups aligned with Tehran is heating up.

At the Egyptian resort town of Taba, car bombs collapsed ten floors of the Hilton Hotel, as well as hitting less upscale backpacker resorts. They killed at least 35 and wounded at least 160. (Unfortunately, the toll is likely to rise as bodies are pulled from rubble). A spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization said that the bombings were not the work of Palestinian organizations, which where committed to waging their struggle in Palestine rather than abroad. Israeli officials speculated that the attacks were the work of al-Qaeda. The organization's number two man had called recently in a videotape for those countries to be punished, that supported Israel, and Egypt has long been blamed in this regard.

The bombings at Taba almost certainly came in response to Israeli military actions in Gaza, which targeted militants who had fired many rockets into Israel but killed many civilians. The UN Security Council was unanimous in condemning the indiscriminate Israeli attacks, except for the US, which vetoed a resolution supported by virtually all the other countries in the world.

If we analyze these violent, destabilizing attacks, one thing becomes abundantly clear: The Bush administration is losing the war on terror. If, 3 years after September 11, Ayman al-Zawahiri can arrange for al-Qaeda to blow up yet another building, this time in Egypt, killing scores, that is a sign of failure. If an al-Qaeda-aligned group like the Army of the Prophet's Companions is permitted by the Pakistani state to gather freely in Multan, to blow up Shiite mosques, and to incur a violent Shiite counter-strike, that is a sign of failure. If radical Sunni groups, or ex-Baathists aligned with them, are able at will to fire Katyusha rockets into the Baghdad Sheraton at a time when the US has militarily occupied Iraq, that is a sign of failure.

By taking his eye off the ball and failing to finish the fight against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Bush perpetuated dangerous instability in South Asia. By giving in to the Likud Party's aggressive settlement of the West Bank and encroachment on Palestinians there, which end any chance of a Palestinian state ever being established--and by failing to pursue a just peace that would bestow security on both Israelis and Palestinians-- Bush perpetuated dangerous instability and virulent anti-Americanism in the Mideast. By creating a failed state in Iraq, and mismanaging the aftermath of the war so as to allow the rise of an audacious guerrilla war there, Bush perpetuated dangerous instability in the oil-rich Persian Gulf. All three bombings on Thursday spoke eloquently of the Bush administration's failure to create a safer world with less terrorism.

The Bush administration announced a "war on terror" in fall of 2001, but it has never been clear what exactly a war on terror was. Terror is not itself a concrete enemy. It is a tactic. As horrible as the tactic of inflicting deliberate harm on noncombatants is, it has been widely used in world history in all sorts of struggles. Warring on a tactic is a meaningless phrase.

The actual wars fought by the Bush administration have only been two. The first was against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, with mixed results. The Taliban regime was overthrown, but Afghanistan was not substantially rebuilt and remains unstable. The top leadership of al-Qaeda escaped capture and has continued to encourage terrorist actions. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the number two man in the organization, is said to have suggested the bombings in Istanbul last winter, and is probably behind Taba.

The second was against the Baath regime in Iraq. It was not a purveyor of anti-American international terrorism and was so weak and ramshackle as to pose no conceivable threat to the United States. That war was won handily, but the subsequent guerrilla war and political struggle continues and appears to be growing in scope and influence. Bush opened the floodgates to terrorism in Iraq.

This is a poor record for Bush to run on. Half of Afghanistan's gross national product derives from opium sales, creating the threat of major narco-terrorism. The Taliban are resurgent in some Pushtun areas of the south. The Afghan vice president was nearly assassinated earlier this week. National parliamentary elections were postponed nearly a year and only a presidential election is being held on Saturday.

Usamah Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are at large, along with several other important leaders. Worse, al-Qaeda has morphed into a headless set of asymmetrical terrorist organizations, such as the Fizazi group based at al-Quds mosque in Tangiers, which hit both Casablanca and Madrid.

The Bush administration thinks the problem is rogue states. But the real problem is radical terrorist groups. Bush has done all too little about the latter. Most of the al-Qaeda officials captured have been taken by the Pakistani military, so that this vital task has actually been outsourced. But where the Pakistani military wants to coddle an al-Qaeda-linked group, like the Army of the Prophet's Companions, it does, and Bush seems too weak to stop it. Bush and Cheney want now to overthrow Syria and Iran, pushing them into the sort of instability we have seen in Iraq.

If you were a company that brought in terror consultants to work on this problem, and after 3 years you saw the sort of results we saw on Thursday, would you really rehire them?


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Conditions in Iraq

Zaid al-Ali, an Iraqi attorney who has practiced in New York and Paris, returned to his native land recently and wrote about what he saw.

Excerpts:

" [HOSPITALS]: As we walked through the hospital, I spoke with some of the staff and soon realised that all the things that I had read during the embargo years relating to the status of Iraq's hospitals -- about the lack of investment, the inability to replace defective equipment, the lack of basic medicines, and the general inadequacy of the treatment available -- is still true today, and that there is no prospect of this changing soon. I visited a large number of departments, including the X-ray department, the children's unit, the radiology and cardiology departments. Only one in five of all the machines in these departments was in working order . . .

[INFRASTRUCTURE]: The shift in public opinion against the occupation probably has several causes, but judging from the conversations that I have had, nothing irritates Iraqis more, nothing has served to prove to them that the occupation is not designed to serve their interests or improve their living standards than the constant failures in the electricity supply, the incessant problems relating to corruption, as well as the failure to establish security and the rule of law. Iraqis cannot accept that the continuing problems in relation to these issues are unavoidable, and from that starting point inevitably reach the conclusion that the Bush administration is secretly plotting to keep Iraqis in a position of poverty and insecurity. Several factors have caused ordinary Iraqis to lose faith in the current political process. Firstly, the high unemployment levels have a very depressing effect on the population. Most Iraqis remain economically inactive. Although there has been an upturn in several business sectors, the vast majority is still unable to secure employment. I saw engineers, construction industry experts, teachers, journalists, former members of the armed forces, who were incapable of findings jobs, and many of whom asked me if I could help them leave the country. I also met several businessmen who told me that although they had been contacted by foreign investors in the first days after the war, most of the would-be investors abandoned their projects out of fear. . . .

[EDUCATION:] To say that public universities and schools lack facilities is an understatement and this is something that is felt by all those involved in the education system. The staff is discontented, constantly complaining of everything from the services provided to them by the State to their level of remuneration. The standard response that the president of Tikrit University offers in response to complaints of this nature is: "The country is poor. Nothing can be done." Teachers and professors are demoralised and students have been quick to take advantage of the situation -- to successfully complete all the exams in a given year costs only $100 in some universities. The physical establishments are not better. During my stay in Iraq, I visited a number of educational institutions in both Baghdad and Tikrit. If one were not told beforehand, it would be impossible to guess that these were educational facilities at all. I did notice that there were computers in some of the offices, but they were actually very primitive and cheaply manufactured machines (with the power switch marked "powre"). To make matters worse, universities were ransacked in the period immediately following last year's war, and their libraries burned. A visit to a law faculty in Baghdad revealed that there are no books in the libraries from which students may study their country's legal system. There are very few new books, despite greatly publicised donations from Western institutions -- there is not anywhere near enough to go around. The same is also true of a great many schools in both Tikrit and Baghdad. Teachers complained to me of how post-war programmes that were designed to "rehabilitate" their schools merely involved a fresh coat of paint on the walls, and that in fact teaching standards and facilities have not improved in any way . . . "

ETC.
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At Least 19 Killed in Violence, over 2 Dozen Wounded

Reuters reports that guerrillas detonated a car bomb at Anah near the Syrian border, targeting recruits to the national guard. They killed some 16 persons and wounded 24. The geographical breadth of the guerrillas was demonstrated when they also planted a road bomb in the southern port city of Basra, which was detonated, killing a civilian and wounding four policement.

Negotiations continued between the Allawi government and the forces of Muqtada al-Sadr in Sadr City, east Baghdad. The US military had been using air strikes and tank fire to attack Mahdi Army positions in the city, wreaking havoc in the densely populated slum against civilians, as well.

I saw Allawi on al-Arabiyah speaking in Arabic, and he actually corrected himself, referring to the east Baghdad slums as "Thawrah City" after he began by calling it "Sadr City"--as though he were correcting himself. The inhabitants had renamed the area after the fall of Saddam, to honor the slain Shiite leader Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, Muqtada's father. I'm not sure what Allawi thinks he can accomplish by refusing to recognize that the Sadrists are a powerful force in east Baghdad and certainly influential enough to determine the name of the place. It seemed to me just one more indication that he lacks any popular touch or political good sense.

There was also fighting again in Falllujah, despite the attempts of President Ghazi al-Yawar to negotiate a ceasefire though his influence with local clan elders.

In Mosul, two Kurdish leaders were shot dead.

Ma`d Fayyad of ash-Sharq al-Awsat today does an informal survey of the views of Iraqi politicians about the desirability of holding the January 2005 elections despite the poor security situation. The old-style Sunni Arab nationalists, Adnan Pachachi and Nasir Chadirji both said they should be held. Pachachi pointed out that countries in the midst of civil war had had elections. Shiite leader Bahr al-Ulum concurred, as did the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Likewise the Iraqi Communist Party and the Turkmen female politician Songol Chapouk. Only a couple of independent politicians said ti would be better to postpone the elections.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

WMD Myth Meant to Deter Iran

First, the CIA comes out and says it can't find any convincing evidence that Saddam Hussein harbored Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Zarqawi's presence at certain points in Iraq has long been argued as a proof of his links to terrorism and al-Qaeda (even though Zarqawi's Monotheism and Jihad is a bitter rival of al-Qaeda rather than part of it). It was always argued by the Right in the US that Iraq was a tightly controlled totalitarian state and that Zarqawi couldn't have slipped in and out unnoticed. But this was always a silly argument. Saddam's state was ramshackle, and Badr Corps fighters slipped in an out of Iraq all the time (they are supposedly on our side; has the administration bothered to debrief them?) The Zarqawi story was so important as a casus belli that the Bush administration even deliberately avoided attacking the small Ansar al-Islam base in northern Iraq when it had the chance before the war.

Now the Iraq Survey Group report finds no evidence of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons or weapons programs in Iraq since the mid-1990s. True, he was having a tiny amount of rat poison made to drop into the drinks of his enemies. The most menacing they can paint Saddam is that he would kind of have liked to, you know, have some weapons of mass destruction, sometime in the future. This is not a threat, it is a daydream. So why in the world did Saddam not just announce the fact to avoid being invaded by the US?

Well, of course, he did announce the fact, in the materials submitted to the UN in fall of 2002. But the paperwork did not explain how exactly all the chemical weapons were destroyed, and actually fueled the Bush administration attack rather than forestalling it.

The Guardian reports an Iraq Survey Group Report that is based in part on interviews with Saddam after he was captured. They reveal that Saddam feared using chemical weapons against Coalition troops in 1990-1991 because he was convinced that this move would cost him the support of all his backers. He said, "Do you think we are mad? What would the world have thought about us? We would have completely discredited those who had supported us."

Of course, he may have been lying about his motives. The US had threatened him with regime change if he used those weapons, whereas he knew he might well survive if his forces were just tossed out of Kuwait. Also, he had to be at least a little afraid of US retaliation, and it actually does have nuclear and biological weapons.

The main reason for which he would not provide proof of the destruction of chemical weapons stockpiles, he told the group, was that he was worried about Iran. Apparently he never got over the trauma of the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988, when he came close to being defeated by his much bigger neighbor. (Only the Reagan Adminsitration alliance of convenience with him saved him). And, of course, his anxiety about Iran was in part a code for fear of a Shiite uprising.

Saddam was fighting several Shiite revolutions, being mounted by the Sadrists, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the al-Da`wa Party, and the Marsh Arab Hizbullah. He was barely able to keep a lid on them, using secret police and brutal repression. They were being backed by Iran (or at least all but the Sadrists were), and he was admitting that he feared that if the Iranians and the Iraqi Shiites thought he would not be able to gas them, he might be open to another invasion or a popular Shiite uprising. The group report says Saddam used chemical weapons on the Shiites to put down the rebellion of spring, 1991. (What it does not say is that the United States, which was in a position to stop this use of WMD on civilians, as well as the use of conventional weapons to massacre thousands, declined to so much as fire a missile at a helicopter gunship).

Ironically, the Sadrists and Marsh Arabs have gone on to pose a dire threat to order in post-Saddam Iraq, and the US has also treated them harshly as a result.

Saddam also was appears to have been convinced that the US would not attack his regime after September 11, because of its secular character. Saddam is often caricatured as a madman (and it is true that there is something wrong with the man), but in this remark he shows himself thinking rationally and expecing Bush to do the same.


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Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bremer: Deserting a Sinking Ship

How to understand the sudden outbreak of candor among Bush administration officials (or former officials) about Iraq in the past couple of days?

In the vice presidential debate on Tuesday evening, Dick Cheney said, "I have not suggested there's a connection between iraq and 9/11." Well, maybe not in so many words, but Cheney hinted around about this sort of thing relentlessly.

E.g. consider this from an appearance on Meet the Press:

"Cheney: "If we're successful in Iraq, if we can stand up a good representative government in Iraq, that secures the region so that it never again becomes a threat to its neighbors or to the United States, so it's not pursuing weapons of mass destruction, so that it's not a safe haven for terrorists, now we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11." [NBC, Meet the Press, 11/14/03]

It is hard to read this statement in any other way than that Cheney mistakenly thought Iraq was the "geographic base" of al-Qaeda. Although he later went on in the same interview to deny an Iraq/9/11 connection, I fear I believe his tactics in this regard were deliberately dishonest. Cheney typically made these inflammatory associations up front, then quietly denied their full implication later, sure that the first, bold statement was what would stay in people's minds. This is the way that at one point a majority of Americans were bamboozled by the Bush administration into thinking that Saddam was somehow connected to 9/11, which he was not. So why is Cheney backtracking more explicitly now? It is because before, he could get away with saying these things despite their falsehood, because no one was seriously challenging him and the press did not want to get out ahead of a major political figure. But now it is the election season, such that the press can always find a legitimate counter-voice. In this situation where you cannot depend on a monopoly over official information, it starts to become dangerous to lie outright, because you know an opponent will call you on it and maybe weaken your credibility.

On Monday, remarks of L. Paul Bremer were released AP reports that he said of the looting in April-May 2003,

"We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness," Bremer said during an address to an insurance group. It released a summary of his remarks in Washington. "We never had enough troops on the ground," Bremer said, while insisting that he was "more convinced than ever that regime change was the right thing to do."

CNN notes some backtracking:

"Bremer attempted to clarify his comments in a statement released Tuesday, saying his remarks referred only to "the situation as I found it on the ground, when I arrived in Baghdad in May 2003, and when I believed we needed either more Coalition troops or Iraqi security forces to address the looting."

The problem is that a statement like "we never had enough troops on the ground," if it is what he said, cannot possibly refer only to May, 2003. It seems to be a more honest evaluation of Bremer's year in Iraq. And, it is rich that Bremer should complain about the need for more Iraqi security forces on the ground. This is the man who dissolved the Iraqi army in the first place!

Bremer's remark clearly puts the blame for the Iraq quagmire squarely on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the two architects of the new Pentagon policy of "small force wars." Both were harsh to Gen. Shinseki for daring to suggest that pacifying Iraq would require 300,000 troops. Actually, this is already a low estimate. Calculating on the basis of the situation in the Balkans, some security specialists at the National Security Council estimated in spring of 2003 that 500,000 troops would be needed. In contrast, Rumsfeld forced the Joint Chiefs of Staff to accept an invasion force of only 100,000, which was good enough to win the war but not enough to secure the peace.

Why did Bremer speak out now in the middle of the election season? It may just have been an error of judgment on his part. He was speaking to an insurance association in West Virginia, and may not have intended his remarks to become public. I have been told that he spoke at DePauw U. in mid-September and said the same thing. A "no-recording rule" had been announced to the audience, presumably for deniability's sake. As for the substance of his original statement, it is clearly an attempt on his part to begin shifting some of the blame for the Iraq debacle from himself onto other players, chiefly Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. Bremer's place in history, not to mention any future career in Washington, depends on his ability to convince analysts that he was not principally at fault for how things went bad in Iraq.

The Philadelphia Inquirer had reported on July 2, 2003:

U.S. overseer in Iraq seeks reinforcements

By Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel

Inquirer Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON - The top American administrator in Iraq, confronting growing anti-U.S. anger and guerrilla-style attacks, is asking for more American troops and dozens of civilian officials to help speed up the restoration of order and public services.

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld was reviewing the request from L. Paul Bremer, U.S. officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

So Bremer could be settling scores on that rebuff. For more see Poynteronline run by Jim Romenesko.

Then there was this amazing admission by Rumsfeld at a news conference:

QUESTIONER: My name is Glenn Hutchins. Mr. Secretary, what exactly was the connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda?

RUMSFELD: I tell you, I'm not going to answer the question. I have seen the answer to that question migrate in the intelligence community over the period of a year in the most amazing way. Second, there are differences in the intelligence community as to what the relationship was. To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two.

Why did Rummy suddenly have this episode of conscience? It may well be a sign of a rift with the Neoconservatives in the Pentagon. They made him look like a fool, and he seems happy to repudiate them. I suspect he is setting up the Neonservatives to take the fall, after the election, when he will ask for their resignations. And it won't be pro forma.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Kerry on Iraq: Guest Editorial by Joseph White

Professor Joseph White, Director of the Center for Policy Studies at Case Western Reserve University, has kindly agreed to share the following guest editorial here.

Iraq Then and Now
or:
Why invading Iraq was the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time, but, once the U.S. is there, trying to win may be the best among bad choices.



In the current presidential campaign, Senator Kerry has been criticized for being inconsistent or flip-flopping because he supposedly supported the war and now criticizes it. This little essay is an attempt by a non-specialist, writing from very much an American perspective, to summarize the merits of the case.

Dick Cheney and George Bush say we had to invade Iraq to protect ourselves against terrorism. That shows they totally misunderstood the enemy.

The Wrong Enemy

The U.S. was attacked by Al Qaeda, not Saddam Hussein. That’s a truism, though apparently unrecognized by the Vice President. The larger context is that Al Qaeda is part of a Sunni fundamentalist movement that, for lack of an agreed term, I’ll call the jihadis. This movement believes the Arab world would be restored to greatness if it was governed by a medieval vision of Islam. It has tried to seize power in many countries across the Arab and Muslim worlds. But it had been defeated everywhere except Afghanistan – partly because of repression by regimes allied with the U.S., and partly because, though many people in those countries hate their governments, they also did not want such an extreme Islamic government.

So Osama bin Laden decided to change the subject. By attacking the U.S., he wanted to turn widespread resentment of the U.S., a feeling of humiliation by the westerners, into a reason to support the broader jihadist agenda. His message was that fundamentalists were standing up to the western infidels, so all good Muslims should support them.

Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with that. Saddam Hussein is a Baathist, an Arab Nationalist. Osama bin Laden called Saddam an “infidel” and Saddam brutally repressed the Sunni fundamentalists, along with everyone else. Saddam was one of a bunch of people in the Middle East who didn’t like us but didn’t like Al Qaeda either. The Iranian Mullahs, for example, are Shiite fundamentalists. Sunni extremists like Osama view the Shia as heretics or schismatics. It’s much like how Catholics viewed Protestants during the Reformation – which led to over a century of religious wars in Europe. Even in Iraq some of the bombings have been Sunnis blowing up Shia.

So attacking Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with attacking Osama. In fact, it was exactly what Osama would want. First, it got rid of one of his enemies in the Arab world. More important, the American invasion of Iraq gave him an opportunity to get allies in the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Before we invaded Iraq, we were fighting Sunni jihadis. Lots of other people didn’t like us, for all sorts of reasons, but were not trying to kill Americans. Now, in Iraq, the Al Qaeda types are joined by Baathist Arab nationalists; by the radical Shia led by Muqtada al-Sadr; by Iraqi nationalists who don’t like having the U.S. occupying their country; and by tribal groups that just don’t like having any foreigners around, and who feel they have to take revenge if any of their members are killed. The rest of the Arab world sees the conflict on Al-Jazeera, where brutality based on a medieval distortion of Islam is presented as the way to overcome humiliation, be strong, and drive out the infidels. So by invading Iraq, Bush and Cheney took our conflict with jihadis into the worst possible conditions. Definitely the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. It would have been much better, for example, to put more effort into catching Bin Laden and turning Afghanistan into a decent place to live.

How Could They Get It So Wrong?

There’s a lot of theories, but one thing is clear: Bush and Cheney were not focused on Al Qaeda and the larger jihadist movement at all.

Look at what Cheney said on August 26, 2002, when he made the case for invading Iraq to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Nashville:

“We now know Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons… Armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror, and seated atop 10 percent of the world’s oil reserves, Saddam Hussein could then be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of a great portion of the world’s energy supplies, directly threaten America’s friends throughout the region, and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail.”
(New York Times October 3, 2004, p17)

Ignore the fact that Cheney and the rest of the administration vastly exaggerated Saddam’s nuclear threat, badly distorting the facts. Cheney’s rationale has nothing to do with Al Qaeda. As Bob Woodward’s book, Plan of Attack, makes clear, Cheney and others in the administration wanted to eliminate Saddam Hussein before 9-11 happened. The very first National Security Council meeting of Bush’s Presidency, on January 30, focused on Iraq. As Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill recalled, Condi Rice said the main agenda item was “How Iraq is destabilizing” (her words) the Middle East, and argued that, in O’Neill’s summary, “Iraq might be the key to reshaping the entire region.” (Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty, 72). As many other sources, such as Richard Clarke’s book and reporting in The New Yorker show, this administration paid little attention to Al Qaeda before 9-11, and President Bush immediately focused on Iraq after 9-11.

If you were worried about Muslim radicals getting The Bomb, you would worry more about the prospect of radicals taking over Pakistan. After all, those radicals are a lot stronger in Pakistan than they were in Iraq, and Pakistan already has The Bomb. So people who seriously worried about Osama’s brand of radical Islam would at least ask whether invading Iraq might destabilize Pakistan. But there is no evidence in Plan of Attack that Bush and Cheney considered those kinds of issues at all.

Some people in the administration, known as the “neocons” (neoconservatives), believed that we could create a democracy in Iraq, and that the example of that democracy would transform the Muslim (especially Arab) world, and so defuse the threat from Muslim fundamentalist movements. President Bush makes that his main argument now. Even George F. Will calls the idea that we can build democracy in other countries a “lethal idea” (Newsweek, Sept 27 2004) based on fantasy. At a minimum, we should expect our leaders to think about what could go wrong if we tried. But Bush and Cheney appear to have paid no attention at all to the risks. Instead, they sold the idea of the war on false data about “weapons of mass destruction,” especially nuclear weapons. In Thursday’s debate President Bush said:

“My opponent says we didn’t have any allies in this war. What’s he say to Tony Blair? What’s he say to Alexander Kwasniewski of Poland?”

But even Kwasniewski, asked about weapons of mass destruction in March, said:

“They deceived us about the weapons of mass destruction, that’s true. We were taken for a ride.” (taken from the Newsweek website Sunday, October 03, 2004)

The facts are obvious. This administration came into office determined to overthrow Saddam Hussein. That was a goal long before 9/11. Attacking Iraq had nothing to do with Al Qaeda and nothing to do with radical Sunni fundamentalism. Cheney wanted to attack Iraq because he thought Saddam would dominate the Middle East with nuclear weapons that Saddam did not have. The administration grossly distorted intelligence to make that case. What attacking Iraq did do was play directly into Osama bin Laden’s hands. Bush and Cheney show no signs of even understanding the issue.

Now What?

But now the U.S. is occupying Iraq. Actually, “occupying Iraq” may be a bit too positive a term; part of the problem in terms of security is that the U.S. is not doing much of a job of occupying significant portions of the country. What should be done now?

Senator Kerry’s position is that, once there, the U.S. can’t afford to lose. Ignore for the moment what “lose” and “win” might mean. An outcome that would be viewed as defeat for the U.S. would be seen by the Arab world and much of the Muslim world as a victory for jihadi’sts. Bush and Cheney turned Iraq into a giant recruiting poster for Al Qaeda. But it will be much worse if the fundamentalists can say they won, so that Iraq is proof that their approach can restore the pride and power of Arab and Muslim peoples.

The question then is whether Senator Kerry has a better chance of avoiding such a loss than President Bush does. That gets translated politically into whether Kerry has a better “plan” than Bush, but demanding a “plan” is plain dumb. Iraq is past the opportunity for planning. Kerry can’t possibly know what the situation on the ground will be on January 20, so what he will do then, should he be elected. Instead, Kerry can legitimately argue that he offers a more promising approach.

His first argument would be that Bush has already shown that he doesn’t deserve trust on the issue. Bush has had lots of “plans” for Iraq, all of which have failed. At a minimum, Kerry can and has said that you can’t solve a problem if you aren’t willing to figure out what it is, or even to acknowledge it. So one advantage of Kerry’s approach would be realism.

But what then? Kerry can’t legitimately promise that he will get a lot of help from allies and international organizations. They must calculate their own national interests and domestic politics (or, for international organizations, where they’ll get staff willing to risk going to Iraq), and the costs may exceed the benefits. What Kerry can argue is that he has a better chance of getting help from allies and international organizations than Bush does. Consider the situation of the French:

The French government opposed invading Iraq for very good reasons: that invading Iraq was a diversion from the real task, fighting jihadis, and that Saddam could be kept in a box by inspections. They were right. But, as noted above, now Iraq IS a front in a conflict with jihadis. There is a French interest in avoiding jihadist victory in Iraq, because, expanded beyond Iraq, the movement is highly likely to have nasty effects on French interests. But it has to be very hard for the French to turn around and support the U.S. with Bush as president: partly because of personal feelings among leaders and partly because Bush has proven that his judgment in operational decisions cannot be trusted. There is a further problem, to which Kerry had referred. The Bush administration has been so focused on keeping contracts for American corporations, using contract decisions to punish the French and others, that it would be very hard for any French government to cooperate unless it could show that the French were no longer being discriminated against in economic terms. I suspect that the material value of contracts in the short run is not the major issue. After all, the average French contractor, like all others, must have serious doubts about sending their staff to Iraq at the moment. But the French must care about both the principle and the long run, whether there would be any business prospects if Iraq is ever stabilized. So Kerry makes a good substantive point when he talks about contracts.

Hence Kerry can offer realism, some practical measures to enlist others, and simply the advantage of not being Bush, so making a fresh start. Beyond that, however, he and Bush would face much the same constraints. Everybody is for training more Iraqi soldiers and policemen; the challenge is to ensure they’re competent and don’t go over to the other side(s). Kerry is more likely than Bush to admit a need for more force, and has called for a larger Army. But it’s not clear where the extra volunteers could be found under current conditions, and the political constraints against deploying more troops in Iraq are strong. Neither Kerry nor Bush has evident ways to make the Shia trust the Sunnis, or the Turks accept Kurdish autonomy. Kerry may be seen in most of the world as very different from Bush, so have a better chance of winning cooperation from forces outside Iraq. Unfortunately, it is not at all clear that the contending forces inside Iraq will make the distinction between Kerry and Bush. If Kerry wins he has a better chance of some sort of “success” than Bush does, but it’s still going to be very difficult.

A Note on the Politics

Readers will note that everything I’ve said here is compatible with the substance of Senator Kerry’s campaign positions, but somewhat different from what he has said.

The Bush campaign charges it is inconsistent to say Iraq was the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time, yet still say we need to win. Their position ignores the fact that the conflict in Iraq is now far wider than a conflict with Saddam Hussein.

The Bush campaign also says Kerry “backed” the war when he voted for the resolution giving Bush authority. As an observer, I find it fair to say that many Democrats made a political calculation to back that resolution. They knew they could be blamed for opposing it, and surely assumed that, if there were a war, and it turned out badly, Bush would get more of the blame than they would. But Kerry does have a substantive point. Bush and Cheney and their advisers greatly exaggerated the evidence about the potential threat from Saddam. Yet most outsiders thought Saddam had some sort of WMD, and thought he harbored aggressive intent. Under these conditions it made sense to resume inspections, and it is highly unlikely that Saddam would have allowed the inspections without the threat of an invasion. It is reasonable for a Senator to expect a normal President to threaten force, when that is useful, yet use force only when necessary. We now know better – that Bush meant to invade Iraq all along. But Kerry could not, and even if he did, he could not have proved it at the time.

Bush also says Kerry does not “support our troops.” That charge has two components. One is Kerry’s series of votes on the famed $87 billion supplemental appropriation. Anyone who knows Congress knows that votes are framed as packages, amendments are offered, and sometimes a legislator wants one version but not another, so votes against the final version of legislation. Kerry may have made a mistaken political calculation (in this case, to object to how the reconstruction of Iraq would be financed), but to say he did not “support our troops” is a distortion (though one Kerry made possible). A more fundamental part is Bush’s argument that, in order to support the troops, you have to support the war.

Many liberals or peace advocates find Bush’s position incomprehensible. The best thing that could happen to the troops would be to come home, unharmed. If opposing the war means ending the war, then it would get the troops out of Iraq, giving them the help they need most. Bush’s argument has a lot of political resonance because “support” in this case means emotional support. If you were stuck in Iraq, you would want to believe you were there for a good reason. It’s hard enough to be in a hellhole, having to kill or be killed, continually wondering who just wants to be your friend and who wants to blow you up, without suspecting that you shouldn’t be there in the first place.

Kerry can give three answers to this criticism. One would be that at least some of who the troops are fighting are the right enemy, even if they should not have been fighting on this ground. A second would be that having a leader who recognizes reality makes it more likely that their efforts will make us more secure. Finally, he can argue that we just should not lie to soldiers; that they can recognize the truth for themselves, and being lied to just makes them feel their government is selling them out.

Kerry can make the final argument from experience. That is how he felt in Vietnam. Yet a whole lot of other soldiers – the kind whose views are represented in the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” – felt very differently. Their need to feel their sacrifices were justified is so great that even 30 years later they can’t let go.

The average voter understands the feelings of soldiers who need to believe what they’re doing is worthwhile. Perhaps that explains why Kerry can’t make some other points as strongly as an analyst would wish.


Joseph White, Ph.D.
Luxenberg Family Professor and Chair
Department of Political Science
Director, Center for Policy Studies
Case Western Reserve University
Mather House 111
11201 Euclid Avenue
Cleveland OH 44106-7109
joseph.white _a_t_ case d o t edu

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Sistani's Threat: January Elections are a Must

Al-Zaman/DPA: The office of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has issued a demand that free and clean elections be held in every area of Iraq in January. He said that all necessary preparations must be taken to allow them to proceed in security. He warned that the supreme religious leadership would not take it lightly if the elections were postponed. He added that every vote is important, and that it is a religious duty laid upon every adult Muslim (mukallaf) to vote. (This last is the language of Shiite law, which requires that laypersons obey implicitly the Object of Emulation among the grand ayatollahs with regard to religious and ethical obligations. Believers who turn 15 are responsible (mukallaf) for obeying religious law. Sistani is saying that it would be a sin not to vote).

Meanwhile, Muqtada al-Sadr is now indicating once again that he will boycott the elections, since he views them as being held under the auspices of the American occupation.

Sistani's threat should be taken very seriously. If at any point he despairs of getting what he wants from the Americans, he can single-handedly start an urban revolution against them (see below).

If the elections are held, they will be bloody and turnout will be light, unless the security situation improves markedly. It is a tough one.

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41 Dead, over 100 Wounded
2 US soldiers Killed Sunday

Al-Jazeerah is reporting heavy fighting in the Shiite slums of East Baghdad between US forces and the Mahdi Army of young Shiite clergy Muqtada al-Sadr on Tuesday morning. This follows on US military operations in the ghetto Monday, into Monday evening, as AC-130 howitzers struck repeatedly and tanks rolled in. Sadr City, with over 2 million Shiites, is a major center for the Sadr II Movement, the major leader of which is Muqtada al-Sadr. He has developed a significant paramilitary capacity, though it remains ragtag and poorly trained.

It seems to me that the likelihood that the US can defeat the Sadrists in Sadr City with tanks and AC-130s is extremely low, and that they are almost certainly driving more Shiites into Muqtada's arms. Since the "Mahdi Army" is really just poor Shiite young men with guns and rpg's, and since most poor young men have weapons, there are probably a good hundred thousand potential Sadrist fighters in the slum. The US cannot kill more than a small fraction of them if it isn't going to commit genocide, and the ones it doesn't kill are probably going to remain angry and take up arms themselves.

Patrick Kerkstra reports that some 40 persons were killed in violence in Iraq on Monday. Guerrillas blew up two massive car bombs in Baghdad, killing 21 and wounding 96. One bomb targeted recruits to the Iraqi army and police, who were lined up near the Green Zone, the barricaded fortress of government offices. Guerrillas detonated the other near the nice hotels that foreigners usually stay in.

Also in Baghdad, guerrillas shot to death two persons working for the Ministry of Science and Technology.

In Mosul, guerrillas used suicide bombs to kill 3 persons.

The US military bombed Fallujah again on Monday, killing 11. Richard Whittle of the Dallas Morning News courageously dares broach the question of whether bombing Iraqi cities is really the best way to win a guerrilla war. There have been few mainstream journalists who have dared raise this question.

I have never understood why it isn't possible simply to surround Fallujah and prevent the guerrillas there from carrying out operations elsewhere. If what is objectionable is that there are Salafi fundamentalists and Baathists in positions of influence in the city, well, what in the world did the US expect to find in Fallujah?
They certainly cannot all be bombed to death if anything is to remain of the city.

A US military spokesperson said that guerrillas directed small arms fire at two American soldiers at a traffic checkpoint on Sunday, killing them.

Jim Krane of UP divides the insurgency into four groups: Neo-Baathists who want to get power back, radical Islamists influenced by foreign groups like Tawhid wa Jihad, Sunni conservatives, and the Shiite Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr. He notes that they are not united on any policy goals except the expulsion of the US, and puts their number at 20,000. I would dispute that last. The 20,000 guerrillas are the Sunnis. The Mahdi Army is a wild card and cannot be estimated, since it is just however many slum Shiite youth are willing to pick up a gun at any one time. That is, there could be tens of thousands of them under the right circumstances.

I wouldn't put as much emphasis on Zarqawi as Krane does. Iraqi Muslim radicals don't need that much coaching. And in an important article by Adrian Blomfield for the Telegraph that has gotten no play in the US, Zarqawi is plausibly portrayed as a "myth" promoted for political purposes by US officials. One US intelligence field officer told Blomfield, "We were basically paying up to $10,000 a time to opportunists, criminals and chancers who passed off fiction and supposition about Zarqawi as cast-iron fact, making him out as the linchpin of just about every attack in Iraq . . ." (Blomfield calls him an "agent," but the agents are the local people that the field officers recruit).

Ahmad Hashem at the Naval War College in Newport, RI has a more extended and detailed analysis of the insurgency.

What I miss in these discussions of the guerrillas, however, is an understanding of their ultimate goal. It is to mobilize the urban masses against the occupation. They cannot win militarily, and can never be more than mosquitos to the US military behemoth in their midst. Only when 70% of Baghdad, Basra, Nasiriyah and other major cities decides that continued US presence is intolerable, and only when they are willing to act on their outrage with huge demonstrations and other crowd actions, will the American position become untenable. All of the guerrillas' actions are aimed at hastening that urban revolution. It is why they target infrastructure, and all the businesses that support it. They want people to be miserable. It is why they blow up big bombs in civilian crowds. They want the masses to decide that the US presence is a constant incitement to violence and therefore must be ended for the sake of ordinary civilians in the country.

Neither the insurgency nor an urban crowd movement would require a single, unified command. As sociologist Charles Tilly has argued, all revolutions are actually multiple revolutions. It is only after the Americans are gone that these various movements would then likely fall upon one another.


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Corruption in the Interim Government
"The Planet's Supreme Kleptocracy"

An informed reader writes:

' One aspect of the Iraqi reconstruction which hasn't received sufficient attention is the effect of placing so many exiles and their families and friends in positions of authority through the CPA's wholesale substitution of these "friendly" Iraqis in place of Baathist professionals throughout the Iraqi government. A former Jordanian taxi driver now holds a senior position in the Ministry of Finance!

My involvement in Iraq through contracts and contacts over the past year has led me to the sad conclusion that the United States has created the planet's supreme kleptocracy in record time. The exiles have no legitimatacy among native Iraqis, but have the support of our troops. They are using their appointed positions in the ministries to extort enormous bribes either to finance a rapid return to London and New York or to secure enough finance to buy legitimacy in coming elections. Many contracts being awarded in reconstruction programs are to friends and family who invoice for large staffs of non-existent employees and never deliver anything of value.

The elections themselves may well be rigged by recognising overseas Iraqis as being entitled to vote while disenfranchising large segments of the native population.

I wish I could be less pessimistic, but Iraqis are reporting that the situation is ten times worse now that it was even under the CPA in July. The Iraqi interim government accomplishes nothing unless it lines its own pockets. Professionals who survived under Saddam fear the assassination squads serving the rival exile political wannabes in carrying out their jobs.

Meanwhile an Iraqi friend who was recently in Baghdad sadly reported, "The most lasting contribution of the United States will be hundreds of miles of concrete barriers." '

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The Iraqi Political Campaign has Opened

Scheherazade Faramarzi of AP has an excellent piece on the jockeying of Iraqi political parties with regard to the forthcoming elections.

She crucially points out that the party ticket system that has been adopted rewards parties with a percentage of seats in accordance with the percentage of votes they get. This system will hurt independents, since any one candidate can obviously only get a very small percentage of the vote. On reflection, I now think Grand Ayatollah Sistani's opposition to the ticket system is probably rooted in his alliances with local Iraqi independents, such as tribal chieftains, who lack the backing of a national political party. Likewise, the big parties are dominated by expatriate politicians. Because the Baath banned other political parties, Iraqis who stayed inside the country aren't likely to have a party and are disproportionately independents.

She also says that the Shiite parties, Da'wa and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, are trying to form an alliance and hope to attract the votes of the Sadr movement. If the latter becomes a party in its own right, I think it will be a major party in parliament, much bigger than SCIRI though perhaps smaller than Da'wa.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports on the doubts of local politicians and experts about whether elections will actually be held in January. Shaikh al-Daraji of the Sadr movement said that elections must be held in all provinces simultaneously and under UN auspices, in contradiction to what US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld recently suggested. Experts consulted in Iraq said that they had not heard anything about judges having been selected to oversee the elections. Issues in who has Iraqi nationality have not been ironed out, and must apparently be judged by the old Baathist law. Because of the millions of Iraqi expatriates and their children born abroad, this issue is non-trivial. There still has not been a proper census, and it is not clear how voter rolls will come into existence. (One expert consulted maintained that the voting rolls already exist, but if so it is unclear how that happened).

Looking forward to the parliament, if one can be formed, I think there will be more Sunni-Shiite cooperation than is usually now expected. Patrick Seale is arguing that we are now seeing an outbreak of Pan-Islam in the region as a whole. You could easily imagine the Shiite hardliners and the Sunni fundamentalists in Iraq voting together on replacing civil law with Islamic canon law or shariah, e.g. The Sunnis would probably want a guarantee that they would be under Sunni personal status law. Having gained that, they might well vote with Muqtada al-Sadr's group on implementing Islamic law. In my own view, however, Sunni-Shiite unity will be fragile and mainly encouraged by opposition to the US presence. If the US withdraws, it is possible that the two sorts of fundamentalists will then clash with one another. Sunni-Shiite strife in Iraq is scary because it would become internationalized, with Iran supporting the Shiites and Saudi Arabia supporting the Sunnis.

Meanwhile, KarbalaNews.net reports that the council of Shiite Turkmen sent a letter to the Shiite leaders in Najaf asking that they reject the "racist" Temporary Administrative Law, which, they say, damages the interests of Shiites and Turkmen. (Presumably they are upset about a provision that gives the Kurds a veto over any new constitution hammered out by the elected parliament.)

Patrick Kerkstra of the Philadelphia Inquirer explores the reasons for which the large southern port city of Basra, under British military command, has been much more peaceful and prosperous than the cities of the north. Savvy British peacekeeping technique is obviously part of the answer. At least some British personnel got training in Arabic. But personally I think the difference is that Tony Blair is not intervening in Basra for narrow political purposes, whereas George W. Bush is making a lot of military policy in the north for the purposes of his reelection campaign.


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Bombings and other News

Associated Press reports the latest developments in Iraq. Highlights include the killing of 5 Iraqis in the Shiite ghetto of East Baghdad by US tank fire. Meanwhile, Muqtada al-Sadr is reportedly negotiating with the US for an end to military operations in Sadr City, a part of Baghdad named after his father, where he has many followers.

US warplanes and tanks also struck in Fallujah again on Sunday, leaving an estimated 4 persons dead, including one couple, and some 14 wounded.

Near Tikrit, guerrillas shot a Turkish truck driver to death.

Guerrillas blew up a roadside bomb at Abu Ghuraib on the western rim of Baghdad, killing one Iraqi and wounding 3.

Guerrillas in Baqubah set off a roadside bomb as a police car drove over it, injuring one policeman.

Near Ramadi, a US military vehicle struck a roadside bomb, but there is no word on casualties.

In Samarra, where a recent join US and Iraqi National Guards attack cleared guerrillas from the center of the city, local hospital authorities report that 70 corpses were brought in during the fighting, and that 23 of them were children and 18 were women.

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Larkin against Horowitz's Neo-McCarthyism

Graham Larkin of Stanford has penned an important article arguing against David Horowitz's sinister proto-Stalinist social engineering project of "balancing" universities ideologically. See also my "Are Professors Too Liberal?".

Larkin's essay is especially good in pointing out that there are no obvious evaluation mechanisms for ideological balance.

If we go by opinion polls, about half of Americans reject Darwin, so Horowitz's proposal would require that half of all biologists would have to be creationists. Then, with regard to party preference, opinion polls show that at some points in the past 8 months Ralph Nader has been favored by 6% of the electorate. At other points it has been 2%. So presumably between 2% and 6% of the professors would have to be Nader supporters. Indeed, we might have to put people on monthly contracts so that we can adjust the percentage in accordance with the latest polls. About 10% of Americans support radical fringe groups, so of course there would have to be a place for the American Nazi Party on the faculty, Horowitz seems to be arguing. Maybe we could have the supremicist teach modern German history; that seems to be the sort of thing that would make Horowitz happy. How sad that at present the Nazi period in Germany is usually taught by some wimpy liberal, Horowitz seems to be saying.

Moreover, there is no obvious reason that "balance" should be conceived only along the narrow US spectrum. A fifth of human beings lives under Chinese Communism, so the logical conclusion is that Horowitz is insisting that 1/5 of all US university professors be believers in Chinese communism. And, of course, the Muslim Brotherhood and Jama'at-i Islami would have to have its faculty representatives in proportion to the popularity of those fundamentalist parties in the world.

If we limited the political spectrum to just US Republicans and Democrats, then hiring faculty 50/50 by party affiliation would have ethnic implications as Horowitz envisions it. He argues that virtually all faculty in the liberal arts are Democrats. Outside the academy, we know that most Jews vote Democrat, and that 66% of Latinos, and almost all African-Americans do. If, as Horowitz desires, we must ensure that half of all university posts go to members of the Republican Party, then we'd have to fire those nasty democrat-leaning minority members and hire Republicans instead, most of whom would, proportionally speaking, be white Protestants. That is, the full implications of Horowitzism are a purge of higher education in the United States of African-American, Catholic and Jewish faculty members.

And, as I argued in my piece for the History News Network, why shouldn't the same rules apply to other professions? Military officers and CEOs, for instance?

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What does "Global" Mean?

Detractors of John Kerry are making much of this passage in his Thursday debate with George W. Bush:

KERRY: The president always has the right, and always has had the right, for preemptive strike. That was a great doctrine throughout the Cold War. And it was always one of the things we argued about with respect to arms control.

No president, though all of American history, has ever ceded, and nor would I, the right to preempt in any way necessary to protect the United States of America.

But if and when you do it, Jim, you have to do it in a way that passes the test, that passes the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you're doing what you're doing and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons.

Here we have our own secretary of state who has had to apologize to the world for the presentation he made to the United Nations.

KERRY: I mean, we can remember when President Kennedy in the Cuban missile crisis sent his secretary of state to Paris to meet with DeGaulle. And in the middle of the discussion, to tell them about the missiles in Cuba, he said, "Here, let me show you the photos." And DeGaulle waved them off and said, "No, no, no, no. The word of the president of the United States is good enough for me."

How many leaders in the world today would respond to us, as a result of what we've done, in that way?

The attack ads and pundits are accusing Kerry of saying that any US military action must in his view meet a "global test" in the sense of being approved by the world community. George W. Bush has taken up this line and castigated what he calls a "Kerry doctrine" that you can't go to war without global permission. Dr. Condaleeza Rice, who rather amusingly suggested she was staying above the political fray, said on Wolf Blitzer that Kerry intended to constrain US policy by making it dependent on the concord of countries like Cuba. (The fact that Cuba and Libya are in the UN is often used by unilateralists to denigrate it, even though neither country is typically on the Security Council and only five countries have the veto, including the US).

Kerry very clearly meant no such thing. He started by saying that he would not give up the prerogative of going to war preemptively. How much clearer could he have been? Bush has invented a so-called "Kerry doctrine" out of the air. Obviously, Kerry's critics need a better dictionary. They don't know what "global" means. Let us look, for instance, at Merriam-Webster Online.

Main Entry: glob·al
Pronunciation: 'glO-b&l
Function: adjective
1 : SPHERICAL
2 : of, relating to, or involving the entire world : WORLDWIDE (global warfare) (a global system of communication); also : of or relating to a celestial body (as the moon)
3 : of, relating to, or applying to a whole (as a mathematical function or a computer program) (a global search of a file)
- glob·al·ly /'glO-b&-lE/ adverb

Kerry said, "that passes the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you're doing what you're doing and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons."

What does "global" mean in this sentence? Well, let's work down. It clearly does not mean "spherical," so that is out.

But it clearly also cannot mean "worldwide," which is what the attack ads, and Condi Rice, are implying. The "global test" Kerry speaks of relates in his mind to convincing "your countrymen" of the legitimacy of what you are doing, first and foremost. Convincing your own citizens cannot possibly be a "worldwide" matter. It is only in the last clause of the sentence where the rest of the world comes up. And there, Kerry is not suggesting that it be asked its opinion beforehand. He used the past tense. He is saying that only by first passing the global test with Americans could the US hope, after the fact, to prove to the world that what had been done was legitimate. W. from all accounts was never much good with things like tenses of verbs.

So, if "global" here does not mean "spherical" and does not mean "worldwide," then what does it mean? Kerry was obviously using the word in the third sense above, of "complete." Military action has to pass a complete test, in order to gain the entire confidence of the US public, in preparation for making a convincing case in the aftermath of the war to other countries.

Kerry is saying that Bush's reasons for going to war were flawed and incomplete, so that in some polls less than half of Americans now say it was justified. And if less than half of Americans can justify it, you can hardly expect that the Spanish should go on giving gold and lives for its sake. This unfortunate situation, Kerry is saying, is because the rationale for the war was deficient, incomplete, and less than global in the sense of thoroughgoing.

W. probably couldn't get out a word like "thoroughgoing" without tripping all over it, so Kerry did him a favor in using the shorter word "global." Unfortunately, W.'s dictionary doesn't seem to go all the way down to the third meaning of the word, which is the one Kerry used. Misunderstanding Kerry's "global" to mean "worldwide" is just as bad an error as misunderstanding it to mean "spherical." If Bush came out attacking Kerry for proposing a "round test," and insisting the test must be square, it wouldn't be less silly than what he is doing. Dr. Rice, who was provost at Stanford, knows better, but some persons with "Dr." before their name--one thinks of Faustus-- have long ago signed away their souls.

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Of Fallujah and Kirkuk

The US forces declared they had taken Samarra back away from the guerrilla resistance, though they admitted there there were still "pockets" of guerrillas. Although the US forces should be able to defeat the guerrillas in Samarra fairly handily, it is not clear that they can learn the language of diplomacy in time for that to make a difference in the political battle. In a guerrilla war, the real struggle is over popular support, a struggle that the Bush administration is badly losing in general. Whether it can achieve a genuine victory in Samarra, such that the guerrillas don't come back in two weeks, remains to be seen.

Dexter Filkin of the New York Times reports that Muqtada al-Sadr appears to be weighing a run for parliament. It seems to me more likely that some of his aides will run for parliamentary seats, but that he will stay behind the scenes.

The Kurds mounted big demonstrations Saturday, demanding much more provincial automony. They want a popular referendum, and they want the oil-rich city of Kirkuk to be turned over to their "Kurdistan" province. Most Iraqi Arabs resist these moves. Although the US has been concentrating on security challenges in places like Fallujah and Najaf, it seems to me that the situation in Kurdistan and especially Kirkuk is explosive, for demographic and other reasons.

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Samarra Campaign

Sistani Aide Insists on Elections

Some 3000 US soldiers and 1000 Iraqi national guardsmen advanced into downtown Samarra on Friday, engaging in heavy fighting with the guerrilla resistance in that city. Thousands of residents fled north, and the city was shaken with constant explosions. Electricity and water were cut off. Although the US troops and their Iraqi allies took the city center and the major government offices, guerrillas appear to have continued to control some city quarters. The Iraqi spokesman, Qasim Da'ud, castigated the guerrillas as highway robbers and other undesirables, but they appear just to be angry young men from the city who reject the new American-dominated status quo.

Some 47 bodies were brought to the local morgue, and dozens were wounded. Some estimates put the number of dead at over 100.

Although Samarra is a largely Sunni city, it has a small Shiite population, who tend to live near the shrine of the 11th Imam. One report said that US fire struck the shrine, sending black plumes of smoke from it, and doing some damage.

Fighting in Sadr City killed 9 Mahdi Army militiamen. (al-Hayat)

An aide to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Karbala said on Friday that elections must be held in January.

In al-Qurnah in the deep south, clashes broke out earlier this week between tribal factions. The Iraqi police intervened, and four of them were killed. Four tribesmen were also slain in the fighting. No announcement was made about what was really going on in al-Qurnah. (-Ash-Sharq al-Awsat).

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Debate and Chalabi

I wonder if more could not have been made about Bush's constant zigzags on Iraq policy. First he was going to send Jay Garner. Then he suddenly switched off and sent Paul Bremer. First Bremer was going to be proconsul for years. Then he suddenly was going to hand off power to a new government elected through caucases in May 2004. Then Sistani asked for open and free elections, and they were postponed until January 2005 and power was handed to an appointed caretaker government.

Moreover, some of this zigzagging reflected very poorly on Bush's judgment. I have it from insiders that in April, 2003, Jay Garner let it slip to some of his staff that his charge was to turn Iraq over to Ahmad Chalabi within six months. The staffers were shocked and some contacted the State Department to see if this was known there. It was not. So they blew the whistle on Bush with Colin Powell. I was told that Powell then made a coalition with Tony Blair and that the two of them went to Bush and got him to change his mind.

The plan to put Chalabi in charge of Iraq was frankly idiotic. Chalabi had no grass roots. He was the one who had the bright idea to throw thousands of ex-Baathists into unemployment (which encouraged them to join the guerrilla resistance). It later came out that some of the Neoconservatives in the Pentagon had let it slip to him that the US had broken the Iranian diplomatic codes. Chalabi is chummy with Tehran and let his friends among the Ayatollahs know this tidbit. As a result, the US can no longer closely track the Iranian nuclear program.

This is the man to whom Bush-- and I underline Bush-- was planning originally just to hand Iraq over. An Iranian asset. This was why, as Kerry noted on Thursday night, Bush had done no real planning for the period after the war. He thought he had everything sewn up because Chalabi would handle it.

You judge a president in part by the people he chooses for the tasks before him. Bush has consistently chosen very poorly. In the first campaign, he sometimes came close to admitting that he wasn't knowledgeable or competent, but said he would surround himself by capable people.

The problem is that if you begin by not being knowledgeable, you surround yourself with people like Ahmad Chalabi.

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Debate

The one new thing I noticed in the debate was Kerry's explicit reference to getting help for the US in Iraq from the Arab world. Maybe I just hadn't been paying attention, but I hadn't heard him make that explicit before.

The Arab League meeting in mid-September was a mixed bag in this respect. On the one hand, it finally offered Iraq some recognition and assistance. AFP reported on Sept. 15,

Iraq's US-backed government emerged as the main beneficiary of Tuesday's Arab League session, with members being called on to restore full diplomatic relations and bring Iraq out of the isolation it has suffered since the 1991 Gulf war . . .

The league unanimously adopted a resolution urging Arab states to end their isolation of Iraq that began with deposed president Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of neighbouring Kuwait.

It "reaffirmed the importance of an Arab presence in Iraq, including restoring diplomatic relations with Iraq to a normal level in support of efforts being exerted by the interim Iraqi government in this field." . . .

The text also called on Arab nations to "offer help to the Iraqi government in the field of training Iraqis in various fields, including training the police, armed forces and providing them with the necessary equipment."

It urged "the Arab League, in cooperation and coordination with the United Nations, to provide all forms of assistance to Iraq in the different fields, especially in the political process and reconstruction in Iraq."

The league "condemned all acts of terrorism in Iraq that target civilians, security personnel, police, humanitarian and religious institutions and abductions that are being carried out by terrorist organizations."

It particularly denounced the abduction of "civilians employed by Arab and foreign companies that are involved in the reconstruction of Iraq and employees of international and humanitarian organizations providing aid to the Iraqi people and of officials of diplomatic missions and journalists".

On the other hand, Arab League Sec. General Amr Mussa said "It is natural to resist occupation, but this does not mean cutting off heads . . ." which shows his sympathies for the guerrilla resistance though not for their tactics. Moreover, the report said, ' "Ministers also censured US-led troops in Iraq for carrying out operations that endanger innocent lives. They "condemned the aerial bombardments and other military operations that target Iraqi civilians in the various towns and villages and result in the deaths of many innocent people". ' So the Arab states are unlikely to send troops in to raze Fallujah.

I don't know if it is possible to get Arab League troops for Iraq. They'd have to be convinced to walk with their eyes open into a guerrilla war. But they are now offering training and other help, and should be taken up on it. It is not clear that despite the attempts of Colin Powell, the Bush administration still has the credibility in the Arab world to get the cooperation of the League in Iraq. Unlike Kerry, Bush did not even mention wanting to try. Kerry's strategy, of announcing that the US will leave Iraq and does not want bases, would certainly go a long way toward mollfying the regional Arab powers.

Meanwhile, real-time political blogging became an element in the public reception of the debate. The Republican Party attempted to spin the debate using large numbers of real-time web logs:

"The "Debate Feed" will provide the GOP spin in real time to as many as 5,000 conservative Web outlets, according to Wired News. "Our rapid response effort is based on the premise that no attack or no misstatement will go unchallenged," Michael Turk, director of the Internet campaign, told the Web site. A "war room" is outfitted with 15 computers and two TVs, monitored by two dozen staffers, ready to send out a Republican response or comment, Wired added.

The Kerry campaign is not so well organized. It has e-mailed supporters who work with local newspapers and media, telling them the Kerry campaign will provide a response after the debate, Wired reported."

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Some 50 Dead, 145 Wounded

Guerrillas useda coordinated series of car bombs to kill around 50 persons, mostly children, and to wound 145 on Thursday.

The biggest number of casualties came from the bombing of the ceremonial opening of a new water pumping station in West Baghdad. The injured included at least 10 US soldiers.

Iraqi guerrillas killed at least 76 US troops in September, and attacks rose to over 80 per day. Both statistics are higher than in June before Allawi took office.

In the aftermath, the US military launched a major attack on guerrillas in Samarra. Unfortunately, this procedure actually means that they launched a major attack on the city of Samarra. Residents reported by telephone being shaken by a series of massive explosions. Samarra was captured by insurgents early in the spring or summer. The US had attempted to combine force with negotiations to end the rebellion, but the truce broke down when guerrillas launched new attacks on US forces. The guerrillas in Samarra appear to be local youth gangs, whether Arab nationalist or Sunni fundamentalist. Some have recently adopted the colors of Monotheism and Holy War, the terrorist group that originated in Afghanistan and was established mainly in Germany and Jordan after 1989. These clothes and insignia (orange on black) seem to be being adopted by the Samarra street gangs rather as US urban gangs have colors and symbols that show up in their graffitti.

President Bush and caretaker Prime Minister Allawi keep insisting that elections will be held in January, but what I mainly thought about when I heard the news of the powerful bomb going off at the water pump inaugural, is how similar voting at polling stations and ceremonial water pump openings are. Both occur in public. Both involve large numbers of people milling around. Both are soft targets. If the morning of voting day, January 15 (or whatever) looks anything like this, most people will just stay home and the turnout will be so light as to raise questions about the legitimacy of the result.

The notion that members of the caretaker government like Barham Saleh have, that razing Fallujah will end the carbombings and restore security, is most likely nonsensical. Major fighting in Anbar province in November is likely simply to further radicalize the Iraqi population and turn it even more against the Americans and the interim government. Nor would taking Fallujah have stopped the carbombings today.


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Rebuilding Iraq's Universities

Guest Editorial by Keith Watenpaugh

Keith Watenpaugh kindly permitted me to reproduce some of his talk here. JRIC.

Rebuilding Iraq’s Academic Community: Civil Society in a Time of Civil War

How Should America’s Academic and Humanitarian Communities Respond to Iraq’s Coming Civil War and the Rise of Arab-Islamist Nationalism?

Keith Watenpaugh


Talk delivered at the Villanova Center for Arabic and Islamic Studies 9/29/2004

When Professor Magan Keita first asked me to speak on issues of higher education, academic conditions and intellectual life in Iraq just a few months ago, one of the first things I had to do was come up with a title. “The Rebuilding of Iraq’s Academic Community” was the easy part: a generation of brutish Baathist rule, a decade-long cruel, indifferent and corrupt UN sanctions regime and a brief, humiliating war followed by a period of mass looting has left Iraq’s once-remarkable higher educational system in a state of collapse. “Rebuilding,” is quite frankly, all it can do. But the second part of the title left me stumped “In a time of what?” And I had to do so something historians should never do: predict the future. That’s better left to soothsayers and their modern equivalent, the legions of “political analysts” of the 24-hour news cycle. I had to ask myself what would Iraq look like in a couple months’ time. And I choose the term “civil war.”

The daily car-bombings and drive-by shootings, the assassinations, kidnappings and beheadings, the guerilla attacks on coalition and pro-US Iraqi forces, the establishment of no-go areas in central Iraq, precise and not-so precise bombing raids on civilian urban centers, intense ethnic tensions in those areas bordering Syria and Turkey and the cold-war between the Kurds and the rest of Iraq may not as yet fulfill the normative definition of civil war employed by political scientists, but it must be close. Militias have been formed and armed, and most Iraqis being killed are being killed by other Iraqis, though large numbers are also being killed by Americans. Lines are being drawn in anticipation of an American withdrawal, and US forces are fighting elements of the Iraqi body politic that welcomed us a year ago, primarily the Shia of Sadr City. Clearly, the status quo in Iraq is much more than a mere insurgency pitting a rag-tag guerilla force against an occupational army in the way America’s Vietnam war was more than just a conflict with the Viet Cong, in the way France’s Algerian war was more than just about protecting their pied-noirs colonists, even in the way Britain’s war in North American in the late-18th century was more than the mere suppression of a New England tax rebellion.

We are at war with Iraqi society and Iraqi society is a war with itself.

This statement should be the central principle for understanding what is happening in Iraq and contribute how we respond to the needs of Iraq’s people.

The invasion, the insurgency and America’s less than competent administration of post-war Iraq has caused crucial pre-exiting divisions in Iraqi society – and here I don’t mean merely Sunni-Shia or Kurd-Arab – but rather divisions of class, urban/rural and those that divide the conservative, religiously-minded from secular modernists to emerge in a rapid, explosive and uncontrolled manner. These differences had been suppressed by the authoritarian and divide-and-rule style of Baathist rule and ironically, by the UN sanctions that starved the countryside and impoverished Iraq’s middle class alike. One of the most significant outcomes of the explosive decompression of those strains of conflict is that the genie of radicalized Arab-Islamism, which had rested furtively at the margins of Arab society — al-Qaeda and Islamic Jihad, in particular – is out of the proverbial bottle in a very big way. And that ideology has the potential to move to the very center of a viable mass, authentic political movement as the war in Iraq continues. This amorphous, rather indistinct ideology, which we in the West are only now beginning to try to understand and take seriously brings hope to the disaffected and proletarianized middle-class young people of big Arab cities like Baghdad, Cairo and Damascus, as well as a measure of dignity to their poorer brothers and sisters who live in the slums south of Beirut, the refugee camps in Gaza and the Sadr City ghetto. America’s invasion of Iraq has handed this new ideology its greatest victory – regardless of the outcome of the next few months or even years: if the US withdraws unilaterally having Iraqified the war or if it stays and retakes the no-go areas with a brutal combination of airpower and “boots on the ground,” this movement will survive, prosper and spread.

Understanding Iraq’s civil war, what it will do to Iraqi society and to the larger Middle East is a daunting question; this evening I want to address just one element of that larger society: Higher Education. And while it may seem superfluous to think about universities and colleges, research institutions and foreign exchange programs while Iraq seems to be going to hell in a hand basket, it is precisely higher education’s role as a fundament of civil society, as a device in ameliorating forms of economic and class difference, and as a tool for building national community that should put it a the very center of all of our efforts in Iraq and the Middle East, at large.

Large-scale, free (or almost free), merit-based secondary and higher education, combined with strategic and directed programs of economic development, is the only way to lessen the magnetic attraction of radicalized Arab-Islamist nationalism. And while analysts often point to the corrosive asymmetries of the Arab-Israeli conflict or the American occupation and support of Saudi Arabia as the chief causes for this radicalism, these are merely symptoms of a more pernicious disease that wastes the human capital and potential of the Arab world.

This is not to say that Higher Education is a cure all or that if the Arabs just had an educational system more like ours then all would be well. Rather if the US is prepared to make a multi-generational commitment to investing in education in the Middle East (not just Iraq), to opening our college campuses to young people from the region, to sending American students and professors there to study, to learn and to teach, and, at home, to expanding the teaching of Middle Eastern languages, cultures and history beyond research universities and integrating those topics into standard core curricula and offerings throughout the US, then we and the peoples of the Middle East have a fighting chance; certainly a better chance than with a military option. What I’m advocating isn’t cheap, in fact it will cost a great deal. But it’s much less expensive than the alternative.

….

I have detailed elsewhere the prevailing conditions in Iraqi higher education, primarily in “Opening the Doors: Intellectual Life and Academic Conditions in Post-War Baghdad,” The Iraqi Observatory (15 July 2003)


Current Situation in Iraq

What has happened to Higher Education in Iraq since I last visited in June 2003? To paraphrase a conversation with a group of professors from several of Baghdad’s universities I met with last month while they were visiting Cambridge: the year since the invasion has been a total waste in terms of rebuilding and redevelopment. They were highly critical of the IGC appointed Minister of Higher Education Ziad Abd al-Razzaq Aswad, (Petroleum engineer, Sunni Arab and very close to the Iraqi Islamic Party) who served for much of last year and whom they labeled an “Ikhwanji” – an Islamic fundamentalist. Among his worst insults, and a highly symbolic one, was his failure to shake hands with women. Equally they saw the CPA’s advisor to Ministry of Higher Education, John Agresto, as a man of “little knowledge.” Though called a “good man” the current Minister of Higher Education, former president of al-Mustansiriyya and rehabilitated Baathist, Tahir al-Bakaa’ is considered a political opportunist. Asked if al-Bakaa’’s recent announcement that the ministry will be kept out of the affairs of the universities, the consensus was that this was what is always said, and is pure “haki fadi” (empty words).

Funding sources are still unclear, physical rebuilding has not kept pace, and yet 120,000+ students of Baghdad’s several campuses continue to come to class and the faculty, though diminished by attrition, emigration and assassination continues to teach. US Department of State sources confirm that almost none of the funding promised by the CPA as redevelopment aid for Baghdad’s universities has materialized; though several of the smaller programs sponsored by the USAID that link US and Iraqi universities have had some positive results; this includes al-Sharaka, a program headquartered at the University of Oklahoma.

Understanding why John Agresto was there and was a failure, and exploring why USAID grants have taken the form they have and worked and not worked is crucial to reformulating the way the US should approach higher education in Iraq. I’ve written about Agresto elsewhere. In brief, Agresto, was senior advisor to the Ministry of Higher Education, one of the leading right-wing figures in the “culture wars” of the 1980s and a friend of the Secretary of Defense’s wife, Joyce Rumsfeld.

His appointment was an act of cronyism. He has an admitted lack of knowledge of Iraq’s history, languages, culture, or empathy for Iraqis themselves. He has no experience in the administration of large, public, graduate higher educational systems, no background whatsoever in international education or the role of higher education in developing nations, and no understanding of how higher education can emerge from totalitarianism. Unfortunately, however, Agresto has emerged as an “expert” on higher education in Iraq and is giving speeches about “what went wrong” at colleges and universities around the country . . .

USAID programs are another issue. These have tremendous potential if they are formulated in coordination with Iraqis and meet Iraqi needs – not ours. Ironically among the largest grants made was for archaeology, museum conservation and the teaching of ancient Mesopotamian languages. Something of incredible importance to us – as we often identify with Iraq’s ancient past rather than the Arab Islamic present - but of less relevance to Iraqis; but millions of dollars are going to this effort and almost none to contemporary arts, humanities, social sciences or Islamic studies. The other problem is the USAID programs are subcontracted and those dedicated to community building initiatives/ democratization programs, usually go to those companies with Republican-party connections or sympathies (think Halliburton, but on a very small scale). And there is no body of evidence that top-down democratization programs of this kind even work. This old-fashioned style of corruption allied to neocom utopianism is cataloged at-length in a recent article for Harper’s Magazine by Naomi Klein.

And while there is something criminal about turning Iraqis into playthings of American partisan politics and paternalism, the real problem is that in the current formulation, aid, development and reform all first must pass through the prism of American national interests in Iraq and the Middle East. As the security situation in Iraq collapses altogether, and the American occupation continues, reform programs closely allied to these American interests will prove problematic and a focus for resistance. This fact must be part of the thinking of institutions seeking to cooperate with US government initiatives in Iraq. These organizations should be conscious of the fact while they may consider themselves as distinct from the US government, disinterested and benevolent, Iraqis will conflate them with the occupation and see them as complicit actors in the forwarding of American interests and thus legitimate targets – both political and armed — in the coming civil war.

New Problems

This conclusion points to a cluster of larger problems facing Iraqi higher education, problems which will have significant implications for among other things, the near term possibility of elections in Iraq.

As I’ve noted in my recent essay for Academe, of more pressing concern is the overt politicization of campuses that threatens to suppress open exchange and freedom of thought. Incidents involving harassment of nonveiled women students and teachers, student-on-student violence, and assassinations of administrators occur often.

Conservative estimates place at thirteen the number of academics murdered in Iraq since the start of the U.S. occupation. The most gruesome killing was the June 2004 beheading of Layla Abdullah Said, dean of the College of Law at Mosul University and one of the few women in positions of academic leadership. Her murder highlights the fact that Iraqi intellectuals who work with the United States or Western nongovernmental organizations have been increasingly targeted for death by the guerilla insurgency. Women faculty note that their position in higher education has changed for the worse over the past decade, and they worry that it will continue to decline despite the fact that, historically, women have held positions of prominence in Iraqi higher education and female students make up at least 50 percent of the student population.

In the same recent conversation with the visiting delegation of Iraqi academics, the head of the delegation acknowledged that the assassination of Iraqi university professors has taken place for political reasons. Estimating that at least 60% of incidents of violence (200+), up to and including murder, have political motivation: robbery was usually not the motive as, “these are professors, what do they have?” He divided these attacks into vendetta against high-profile Baathists, and into this group he placed the murder of the dean of law at Mosul University. Most current attacks are now mounted by what he termed “Saddam’s men” on professors critical of the old régime. He referenced the assassination of a dean at al-Mustansiriyya U. who had been murdered after appearing on television denouncing Saddam. The dean was killed in a drive-by shooting. In a side note, he mentioned that this is why he does not make public pronouncements or talk with newspapers or TV reporters.

He did not indicate a “religious” vector for attacks. That is, unlike reports of violence against women “immodestly” dressed, the burning of liquor stores and video outlets, professors have not been attacked by religious extremists, although this does not discount intimidation by other means. In his opinion the possibilities of violence have hindered free-exchange of ideas, the connection between the universities and society at-large, but he registered a certain resignation that this was just part of life in post-war Iraq. Asked if there were any actions the US military could take to increase protection of academics, it was indicated that were a professor to receive individual protection s/he would be seen as a traitor. They all noted a reduced military profile on the campus; though most violence against academics has not taken place on campuses, but rather off-campus at their homes or private offices.

We also know that at Mosul University, there is some degree of support for more radical student groups from the administration itself. The Youth and Student Union is controlled by Islamists alleged to be linked to the Arab-Islamist resistance and inform on faculty who are then marked for death. In the last couple months there has been a marked increase of professors at the English Department and Law School receiving death threats and at least one, the Chair of the Translation Department, Dr. Iman Abd al-Munim, was killed in a drive-by shooting on August 28.

Clearly, Iraq’s campuses are set to become radicalized loci. Professors are afraid of being denounced by their own students for political and personal reasons – the ultimate student evaluation; one could also imagine South American-style “death squads” of all stripes being formed to discipline professors. More troubling is the fact that they are too afraid to take on the important social role of “public intellectual.” Silencing this portion of Iraqi society will be consequential.

Honestly, I don’t know how or even if the increased radicalization of these campuses can be prevented without massive violations of political freedoms – al-Mustansiriyya, where I spent a great deal of time in June 2003 is now “off limits” to American diplomats because of its nearness to Sadr City, so even getting a full picture of what is happening is difficult. It is also possible to overreact to student activism – just like administrators have been known to do in America. The real question is whether or not this “testing of the waters” can remain in the realm of politics and not migrate to violence.

The situation on the campuses indicates, on a smaller scale, what national elections in Iraq would look like if they were to be held in the near future. They would be marked by intense violence, assassination of candidates, and the monopolization of the media and public sphere by agents of the government or the insurgency. The vast majority of Iraqis would remain silent out of fear – and probably at home on the polling day. It’s not a very pretty picture.

Where to go from here

In the final few minutes I will outline a few key steps that could be taken by American colleges and universities and those parts of the federal government involved in issues of education and culture. Let me restate my observation at the beginning and note that those seriously interested in making a difference in Iraq and solving underlying problems in the Arab world should ignore the largely inaccurate statements about Iraq made by the president and the appointed interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, about the status quo, and begin to seriously prepare for civil war. The problem seems so big; and it is. In the face of the enormity of this crisis it is easy to lose hope and give up. I contend, however, that giving up hope is luxury we can ill afford. What I am outlining below are small, but doable steps; and many of these steps are already being taken.

1) The US academic community must be ready to create and maintain bi-lateral and multi-lateral relationships with Iraq’s universities even as the security situation deteriorates. These should be replicated throughout the Arab world. Creative solutions to the security situation can be made, using electronic communication, third countries, and other means. These relationships must not be monopolized by those schools receiving USAID grants — lessening real or possible conflicts of interest and diversifying the US presence in the Arab world.

2) Professional societies should mobilize their memberships to catalog human rights abuses, murders and kidnappings of students and professors in Iraq and violations of intellectual freedom by the Interim Iraqi government, the US military or other organizations. The AAUP, Human Rights Watch, Scholars at Risk and Amnesty International and other similar groups can be apprised of these issues and keep track of what is happening. For example, the American Crystallographic Association should adopt their Iraqi counterparts, find out how they are doing and what they need. We must be ready to assist large numbers of political refugees and others fleeing the disorder.

3) The American academic community must take the lead in opposing the highly restrictive and ham-fisted visa requirements that often cloud with the language of national security, objections to somebody’s politics. The high profile cases of Yusuf Islam née Cat Stevens and Tariq Ramadan are perhaps the best known; hundreds, if not thousands of students from all over the world are being denied visas, facing interminable delays of their paperwork and are prevented from coming to America to study for no other reason than they are young, Arab or male.

4) The American academic community, the government and private foundations need to invest in Middle East studies in the US. A figure no less than John Kerry made this plea at Temple University last week. Villanova is rare in its commitment to teaching and research in this field, and quite frankly can serve as a model. However, just as an example, less than 2% of all employed historian in the United States teach either as a main or sub-field Islam or the Middle East, far fewer study the Arab world.

Sometimes I think we are, as a community of humane scholars sleepwalking through the most important crisis of our lifetimes and we will look back on the legal, civil and moral outrages committed in the name of the War on Terror with the same embarrassment we now view the internment of Japanese Americans or the communist Witch Hunts of the 1950s. Elements of the so-called War on Terror and certainly the war in Iraq have been predicated on purposeful misinformation, rank ethnocentrism, bad language skills and poor analysis – the things we college professors are supposed to be good at counteracting and helping students and society overcome. Where have we been? Preparing for the coming civil war in Iraq and making the kinds of commitments to the peoples of the Middle East that the current situation demands can begin to redress that absence.

Keith Watenpaugh
History
Le Moyne College

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