Informed Comment

*The US forces have recently begun bombing the Republican Guards near Baghdad, which some think is a sign that Iraq’s air defenses have now been substantially degraded. Apache helicopters fly low, and are vulnerable to enemy anti-aircraft fire. The Iraqi regime had put in a sophisticated fiber optic system to link its anti-aircraft equipment, and one presumes that the bunker busting bombs recently dropped on strategic buildings in Baghdad aimed at disabling it. Unlike in Basra, the Republican Guards’ tank corps have been drawn up outside the city, presumably because they felt they were under the umbrella of the anti-aircraft defenses. If it is true that the latter are largely disabled, one may see the tanks withdrawn into residential neighborhoods, and/or positioned near hospitals, schools and mosques, as happened at Basra and Nasiriya.

*A big meeting of 300 Iraqi dissidents (Independent Iraqis for Democracy) in London Saturday cheered wildly when Iraqi elder statesman Adnan Pachachi proclaimed that a US military administration of Iraq was “in no way acceptable.” This meeting was an alternative to the Iraqi National Congress identified with Ahmad Chalabi. The Independent Iraqis for Democracy mainly consists of liberals, but the meeting included two prominent Shiite clergymen, Muhammad Bahr al-`Ulum and Husayn al-Sadr. The problem for the US is that the military campaign was planned far more meticulously than the aftermath. The Bush administration seems to be afraid that if it turns Iraq over quickly to a provisional government, one would see a situation similar to Afghanistan, plagued by warlords and lacking central authority. But I think it will find that the proposed alternative, of an American military and then civilian government of the country, is even more problematic–and that it will be targeted by Iraqi suicide bombers and prove extremely unpopular with nationalist Iraqis, even those opposed to Saddam.

*The suicide bombing that killed four US troops near Najaf Saturday is a very bad sign. The US is planning to have a very large footprint in Iraq for many years to come, and so may face such bombings as a constant threat. Worse, civilians here in the homeland may end up being targeted, as threatened by Iraqi Vice President Taha Yasin Ramadan: “I am sure that the day will come when a single martyrdom operation will kill 5,000 enemies. The Iraqi people have a legal right to deal with the enemy with any means.” Actually, such warnings from the Iraqi Baath party are probably empty, since it is about to cease to exist. The real danger remains al-Qaeda and similar radical Islamist organizations. One worries that Iraqi Sunnis, having been disappointed by the failure of nationalist secularism, may turn to radical Islamism as an alternative. That is what happened to some Egyptians after Abdel Nasser was defeated in 1967. In a sense there is a straight line from 1967 to September 11, 2001. Likewise, there is a menace from jihadi volunteers flocking to Iraq to attack the Americans there. Ramadan said, “Thousands of volunteers and fedayeen (martyrdom fighters) are coming into Iraq and major contingents of these volunteers will be seen in the coming days.”

*The Guardian reports that Jay Garner, who is to administer Iraqi reconstruction on behalf of the US, “is president of Virginia-based SY Coleman, a subsidiary of defence electronics group L-3 Communications, which provides technical services and advice on the Patriot missile system being used in Iraq. Patriot was made famous in the 1991 Gulf war when it was used to protect Israeli and Saudi targets from attack by Saddam Hussein’s Scud missiles. Garner was involved in the system’s deployment in Israel.” This background is raising alarums at the UN and elsewhere about his suitability for the high profile post of US Proconsul of Iraq (can the Iraqis really warm to someone who was so closely involved in developing the weapons that have killed so many of them?) I mentioned other reasons for which Garner’s appointment would be a disaster a couple of days ago (scroll down)

*The Islamic Action Council, the ruling party in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province, is going ahead with plans to implement a Taliban-style form of Muslim law as the law of the land in that province. Since its members trained the Taliban, this development is not surprising. One wonders, though, whether the NWFP voters really had this in mind when they voted against the traditionally dominant parties in last October’s election. Personally, I think the Federal government should step in to stop the implementation of a medieval interpretation of shariah (Islamic law) in one province. This must be unconstitutional in some way. It is ironic that the main US response to September 11 has been a) to put the fundamentalist Jami`at-i Islami in charge of Afghanistan; b) to preside over the rise to dominance in NWFP and Baluchistan of the teachers of the Taliban; and c) to destroy one of the few secularist regimes in the region, Baathism in Iraq.

*The British forces ringing Basra have called on civilians to leave the city. Many are walking to Basra, 12 miles away, in search of water. The British would ideally like to empty the city of 1.2 million so as to have a clear shot at the Baathist forces that remain behind. The water situation is apparently become unbearable in the city. It seems to me a little unlikely that over a million civilians can be evacuated under these conditions, and it also seems increasingly likely that a British assault on Basra will be forced to target Baath troops who have nestled in residential areas. This could get very ugly, and the scenarios the Pentago hoped for of joyous Basrans dancing in the streets to be relieved of Saddam are unlikely ever to be realized. Washington though Iraq would be like Afghanistan. The two are not comparable. Iraq is a modern industrialized country, if beaten down by the sanctions, and the Baath is a sophisticated political party, quite unlike the Taliban. One is always fighting the last war, and always making mistakes because of that.

*According to the wire services, the Shiite uprising in Basra was very limited and was quickly repressed by Baath forces. An spokesman for Iraqi Shiites said that “there had been up a civilian uprising in the main southern city of Basra, but said it affected only one working class neighborhood. “The uprising, which was limited to this neighborhood, took place after coalition forces bombed government positions,” Akram Hakim, an official of the Iran-based Supreme Assembly for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SAIRI), told Al-Jazeera. He said the situation remained “explosive” yesterday morning in Basra. ” When Shiites in Basra rose up against Saddam in spring of 1991 after the first Gulf War, the US stood by while the Baath brutally repressed them, so they have reason to hold back this time.

*The heavy fighting by US forces and the Republican Guard near Najaf has all knowledgeable observers worried that the US may accidentally inflict damage on this holy Shiite city, home of the shrine to Imam `Ali, the son-in-law and cousin of the Prophet Muhammad. Such incidents could ultimately affect the attitude toward the US war in Iraq of the Shiite ayatollahs in Iran, not to mention the Shiites of Bahrain (who form a majority of the population there; it is home to the US naval fleet in the Gulf) and Lebanon. Even the Hazara Shiites of Afghanistan, so far allies of the US, could be alienated if things go wrong in Najaf.

*Speaking of Shiites, the 15,000 trained fighters of the anti-Saddam al-Badr Brigade have so far not shown up as a factor in the war. A report out of Pakistan recently suggested that the Iranians, who are the hosts of the Badr Brigade, have thrown up barriers to the infiltration of these troops into Iraq. There had earlier been reports of Brigade fighters slipping into Kurdistan in the north. The Iranians, whose Revolutionary Guards held a rally on the Iran-Iraq border yesterday, so far appear to want to be perceived as neutral. They hate Saddam, who attacked Iran in 1980 and is responsible for hundreds of thousands of Iranian war dead. But they also deeply distrust the US and are afraid they are being surrounded with a view to the eventual overthrow by the US of the current Iranian government. The political wing of the Badr Brigades, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) has had an up and down relationship with the US war effort. They seemed to be supporting it last summer and fall. But when National Security Council point man on Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad began talking about a US military and then civilian administration of Iraq after the war, Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim, a SCIRI leader, called him a bully. Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, the head of SCIRI has recently as much as said that SCIRI would use military force to oppose any long-term US presence in Iraq. I think the Arabic word for quagmire is probably al-mustanqa`. Washington will probably have to learn to pronounce it.

*Mark Sedra in Foreign Policy in Focus is arguing that the lessons of Afghanistan for Iraq policy are depressing. There have been 400 attacks on US and Afghan security in the past year, and most of the country is ruled by warlords. [Reporters without Borders is issuing a report critical of the harsh crackdown on the press in Ismail Khan's Herat.] The donor aid promised at Tokyo has often not actually been forthcoming, and was in any case an vast underestimate of the actual need. It looks increasingly as though Iraq’s infrastructure is going to be severely damaged by the US war. I can only think that the US did not initially use air power to inflict heavy attrition on Iraqi conventional forces outside Baghdad because they hoped against hope that they could decapitate the regime and retain an Iraqi military for the future. Since, however, the Baath and the Republican Guards are standing firm, it seems less and less likely that there will be much salvageable from the bureaucracy and military for reconstruction purposes after the war. So, restoring and maintaining security, and rebuilding the bureaucracy and the country are going to be slow and very expensive.

*

*The British are asserting that there has been a popular revolt in Basra against the Republican Guards and other forces loyal to Saddam. The Iraqi government has denied the report. The British also say that the Iraqi military is firing mortars on the rebels. Since the British can pinpoint the origin of mortar fire, they have been using this activity to target the Republican Guards mortar positions, so as to help the rebellion. I wonder myself if the “rebellion” isn’t being in part led by Special Forces agents infiltrated into the city. It is also possible that elements of SCIRI (the Shiite “Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq) from the Badr Brigade have slipped into the city from Iran. A Basra rebellion would not be impossible. It happened on a large scale in 1991, and there were also disturbances later in the 1990s, especially when Grand Ayatollah Sadr was assassinated by Saddam. But Basrans would also remember that the US hung them out to dry in 1991 and let Saddam crush them. They will be wary, and their friendliness to the British cannot be assumed.

*My analysis of the Iraqi strategy is that it is similar to what Sadat did in 1973. Ariel Sharon left lots of Egyptian forces in his rear as he raced to encircle Cairo. That is similar to what the US forces are doing. But Sadat won the peace by getting the UN security council (especially the Soviet Union, which reportedly threatened to intervene) to insist on a cease-fire. Saddam has already gotten a condemnation of the war from the Arab League and is seeking one from the Security Council. The difference is that this time the Russian successors to the Soviet Union are weak and economically dependent on the US, and won’t go to the mat for Saddam. So, the strategy will almost certainly fail, but the parallel seems to me striking.

From a discussion on a list about how the war in Iraq is going:

Military analysts have for some time been nervous about the Rumsfeld plan to start the war before all units were in place. A lot of analysts, including Wesley Clark, cannot understand why the equipment for the Fourth Army Infantry was left in ships off Turkey long after it seemed obvious that they were not going to be allowed to be positioned on Turkish soil. These are now being moved to Kuwait. They worried that things could go badly wrong in the meantime. They have. It may be that some units are being held in reserve for the north, but if so that still means they cannot be used in the south, which continues as far as I can see to be in a condition of chaos.

Speaking of the Suez Canal, one remarkable development is the widespread

calls among Egyptians, especially leftists and Islamists, for Egypt to deny

use of the Canal to the U.S. Since Camp David in 1978, I have never seen

this degree of rage and anti-US feeling in Egypt, and one worries that the

Canal can probably be stopped up with a well-executed terrorist attack on

an oil tanker.

The good news for the Anglo-American forces that they have completely

secured Umm Qasr, as the British spokesman claims, is surely offset by the

fact that Umm Qasr is a dinky little port town near Kuwait that a massive

invading force should not have had any trouble securing immediately in the

first place. What I read in the press was that the British were being

pinned down by as few as 100 Iraqi soldiers. This is very bad news for the

Anglo-American side, since Iraq has lots of bunches of 100 soldiers.

Likewise, al-Nasiriya has been the site of numerous anti-Saddam uprisings,

and should not have been so hard to take.

This is not to mention the very bad news indeed that Republican Guards

units have positioned their artillery and tanks in civilian neighborhoods

of Basra and have forced the British to withdraw from the city. Despite

earlier Pentagon promises, Basra’s electricity and water purification have

been knocked out, and civilians are getting shelled. Presumably some of

the food shipments coming in to Umm Qasr would be for Basra, which the

British do not hold.

And, what is to stop the same thing from happening in Baghdad? If it does,

what will that do to world public opinion? So far the US and British look

like British redcoats, marching in straight lines and annoyed that the

colonists are not playing fair. If substantial numbers of the 300,000

Iraqi troops turn guerrilla fighters and stand their ground against the

invaders, this could be a disaster.

My analysis is not meant to support an anti-war or pro-war position. Like

most people, I have mixed feelings about all this (I despise the Baath

Party).

Replying to someone who asserted that Iraqi Shiites remained loyal to their clergymen in the 1980s, not to their nation:

The notion that most Iraqi Shiites have the sort of relationship to their “source for emulation” that is common in Iran is erroneous. Rural Iraqi Shiites in the South for the most part have a fairly recent (18th-19th centuries) past as pastoralists and the Iranian type of Shiism that foregrounded trained clerics and jurisprudents was important only in a few urban settings (the Shrine Cities of Najaf and Karbala e.g.) which incidentally had large Iranian heritage populations (most of whom were deported by Saddam).

Iraqi Shiites most certainly did stay loyal to the Iraqi nation during the Iran-Iraq war. They were throughout the 20th century among the main proponents of an *Iraqi* nationalism as distinct from pan-Arabism (in which they would have been swamped in a sea of Sunnis). I suspect that a lot of the Marsh Arabs (500,000 of the Shiites until the ethnic cleansing and swamp-draining of the 90s) couldn’t have told you which jurisprudent they emulated, and if they named one it would have been pro forma–they wouldn’t actually know his rulings.

The late Hanna Batatu actually figured out the ratio per person of mullas in Iran and Iraq, and found it vanishingly small in Iraq.

from a discussion on a list about the origins of radical Islamism:

The strain of thought we are considering is properly thought of as

neo-Kharijism. The Kharijite sect in early Islam was trigger-happy about

declaring people who did not agree with their ways of doing things to be

non-Muslims. A Kharijite declared Ali, the first Imam of the Shiites and

the Fourth Caliph of the Sunnis, to be a non-Muslim and assassinated him

as such. In contrast, the Sunni tradition frowned on kicking anyone out of

the Muslim community for any but the most egregious crimes or heresies.

If one acknowledges the 4 Orthodox Caliphs and a few other simple principle,

you can be an ex-con and still be a Sunni Muslim. The Kharijites tolerated

no slight deviance from their orthodoxies and ideas of morality.

The temptation to revive a Kharijite mindset (I am not arguing for actual

historical influence) was particularly strong in British India, where many

Muslims were converts from Hinduism and/or retained Hindu usages, and

where many Muslims learned English and/or worked for British firms or the

British government. In addition, 18th and 19th century South Asian Islam

was highly influenced by Shiism via the impact of Safavid and Qajar Iran.

Those hardline Sunni Muslims threatened by what they saw as departures

from pristine Islam were thus tempted to declare the hinduized or iranized

or britishized Muslims to be actually non-Muslims altogether. Among the

major such streams in North Indian Islam with this attitude was that of

Sayyid Ahmad Rai-Barelvi in the 1820s and 1830s, whose movement the

British dubbed “wahhabism” by analogy. This British confusion has

confused generations of researchers; the two are not related and are very

dissimilar in many ways.

Maududi in my view simply gave a modernist cast to Sayyid Ahmad

Rai-Barelvi’s approach. Sayyid Qutb imported many of Maududi’s ideas into

Arabic. So there is a complex international Islamist web of neo-Kharijism

going back to the 19th century, which is highly intertwined with the

history of Western colonialism in the Muslim world.

The connection between Sayyid Qutb and Saudi Arabia goes right back to the

1960s. The Saudis clandestinely gave aid to the Muslim Brotherhood,

including its Qutbist wing, as a way of undermining their enemy, the

secular nationalist & socialist Abdel Nasser. Abdel Nasser succeeded in

cracking back down on the revival of the Brotherhood in the early to

mid-1960s, which had militant overtones and openly discussed assassinating

him. In 1965-66 the plot was busted up, with hundreds (some say

thousands) of arrests, and that was the occasion of Sayyid Qutb’s

execution. There is every reason to think that the would-be assassins of

Abdel Nasser were at the least inspired by his work, and the connection

could have been even tighter.

Some of the survivors of the 1965-66 crackdown among the Muslim

Brotherhood in Egypt managed to escape to Saudi Arabia–which had been

their patron–where they became prime conduits for the spread of Qutbist

ideology. As Dick Norton notes, Sayyid Qutb’s brother was among these.

Thus, the mere conservative Machiavellianism of the Saudi leadership in

using the Muslim Brotherhood and its more radical wings against Abdel

Nasser blew back on them insofar as those chickens came home to roost.

Nowadays Saudi ministers and princes (well, I’ve been redundant) routinely

denounce the Muslim Brotherhood as political in a way the Wahhabis never

were.

*I saw an interview by a journalist with some Kurds in the North of Iraq who were complaining about the US invasion of Iraq and bombardment of Baghdad. They said Bush had not gotten UN backing for the war, and so it was illegitimate. They also said they did not like seeing Muslims die at the hands of foreigners. Now, these Kurds were the victims of a virtual genocide in the late 1980s and again in 1991 by Saddam. They only have what freedom and prosperity they have because of the US no-fly zone. Yet, even they are finding this war hard to stomach. Their mention of the UN is remarkable. President Bush and his coterie, who despise the United Nations, have no idea what political legitimacy consists of, and are unable to imagine how much they lost in not working harder at diplomacy with the Security Council members.

*It is amazing how little of the war one can see on the US networks and cable news. The US public is being carefully sheltered from the more gruesome scenes of civilian dead that are splashed all over the Arab media. While I don’t urge it for its own sake, an adult acknowledgment that these bombs are killing someone and blowing the tops of heads off would just be fair journalism. I watch a lot of the cable news, and it is antiseptic. This outcome is ironic because Fox Cable News in particular is always huffing and puffing and warmongering, but when it comes to actually covering war they give us safe retired colonels pointing at maps. The difference in the images being shown the audiences is widening the gap in perceptions of the war. The US audience thinks it is pretty fireworks on Saddam’s palaces. The Arabs think it is about little boys lacking the back of their heads.

*Reuters says that as of early morning 3/25 the port of Umm Qasr is still not secure. There are lots of Iraqi soldiers running about in guerrilla fashion shooting at the British troops there. One report I saw seemed to say that only 100 Iraqi troops were holding down the British force allotted to Umm Qasr. This ratio does not sound promising to me, since Iraq still probably has 3000 such groups of 100. The way in which Iraqi forces are employing guerrilla tactics is unexpected, at least to me–one always thought of them as a Russian-style tank army with little battlefield flexibility. I have to say that I am a little surprised that no Shiite units have come over to the US side to fight the Republican Guard. Apparently the Shiite conscripts are just going home and changing into civilian clothes, in some numbers.

*The water situation in Basra is becoming dire. Shelling has knocked out its electricity and thus its water treatment plants. (The Pentagon said they were going to avoid doing this to the urban population this time.) We could see outbreaks of cholera there if the people don’t get access to clean water soon. British troops are said to have withdrawn from Basra altogether, “to regroup.” They had at one point surrounded the city, but were pushed away by mortar fire and fire from soldiers in civilian dress. The Iraqi soldiers have moved their artillery batteries and tanks into residential districts, using innocent Iraqi civilians as shields. The British have been astonished at the fight the people of Basra have put up against them. To be fair, it is not clear that it is the people of Basra who are fighting so much as the Republican Guards stationed there. People in Safwan near the Kuwaiti border are saying that the British decision not to enter the town has left them at risk for reprisals from Saddam’s agents inside it. At Zubayr, as well, there was rocket fire. And al-Nasiriya has not been cleared of snipers. Some reports coming from the ranks suggest that British and American casualties at al-Nasiriya are higher than the 10 admitted.

*What is to stop the Republican Guard at Baghdad from using the same tactics that have proved so successful in Basra? If they did that, the US would face the choice of inflicting very heavy civilian casualties or of backing off.

*As usual in war reporting, I already have to take back some of what I said yesterday. It seems increasingly clear that the Bush administration rushed into war with Iraq before its military was really ready. All the forces have been thrown against Baghdad, to which they have raced, leaving the Shiite south insecure. Rear-guard battles have had to be fought at Umm Qasr, Basra and al-Nasiriya even after those cities were thought to have been neutralized. Looting and internal fighting between Saddam loyalists and locals appear to have become endemic in these cities. US forces had to fight two “sharp” battles at al-Nasiriya, a city they have now decided to skirt. We lost nine of our boys there, probably to Republican Guard units positioned to keep the Shiites down. The British are still only at the southern outskirts of Basra. The Rumsfeld plan of “rolling’ deployment, such that further reinforcements are on their way to Kuwait even after the war began, seems to have gone badly astray, denying the US anything like effective control of the South.

Quite apart from the deleterious military implications of this vacuum, it has potentially severe humanitarian implications. The Fourth Geneva Convention requires the US to provide security to areas under its military occupation, which is obviously cannot do at the moment. And, Iraqi food stocks are reportedly down to only 6 weeks worth. Unless Umm Qasr can be quickly secured and the roads be made safe, so that food aid can be shipped in, one could see hunger develop in some parts of Iraq. The war is already interfering with the harvesting of winter crops and the planting of spring ones. Some 60% of Iraqis are dependent on outside food aid because of the “food for oil” program under UN sanctions against Saddam.

*An estimated 70,000 marched against the US war in Lahore, Pakistan (vastly exaggerated numbers ten times that were floated by the organizers, though AP said it was 200,000. Crowds are easy to over-estimate). The fundamentalist religious leaders denounced the Iraq war as a crime against humanity and a plot against Islam. The Iraq war is universally unpopular in Pakistan, as in most of the Muslim world. The difference is that with the return to quasi-parliamentary government, Pakistan has not attempted to prevent these demonstrations, which so far have been peaceful. If 200,000 Egyptians or Jordanians could come out for rallies, they certainly would. There are two big dangers here. One is that the fundamentalists will parlay their leadership of the protests into genuine national political standing and ultimately manage to come to power. (These people are unrepentent supporters of the Taliban and al-Qaeda). The other is that anti-Americanism will become so widespread and vehement that the Pakistani government will find it difficult to continue cooperating in the war on terror. The Rumsfelds and Wolfowitzes think you can have your cake and eat it, too. I am not so sure.

*Basra fell early Sunday morning EST, Sunday afternoon Baghdad time. Actually what appears to have happened was that the largely British force surrounding the city negotiated its surrender with the Iraqi army officials. The bulk of the British forces, supported by US Marines, has now headed north for Baghdad. Had the Baathist military put up a fight, it could have tied the British down and made them shell the city even more extensively than they did, maybe even entice them into deadly house to house fighting. By surrendering they gave a huge lift to the Anglo-British war effort. We all expected that the Shiite South would not be so hard to take, but the speed with which it has fallen, and the relative lack of fight it has put up, exceeds expectations. There have been a few “decent” firefights, at Umm Qasr, Nasiriya, and around Basra. But all three urban areas have fallen, despite pockets of resistance. Indeed, the victory has been so fast and so extensive that some worry it will leave chaos in its wake. Apparently there has already been a good deal of looting and disorder inside Basra, and this disorder could spread as the bulk of the US and British forces head to Baghdad. According to the Washington Post, however, some in the administration welcome the civil turmoil, hoping it will initiate an era of de-Baathification. I just hope we don’t have another Panama on our hands, when the mission to capture Manuel Noriega was so badly thought out that it plunged the city into a paroxysm of looting. In contrast to the occasional fighting in the South where the British are, the fighter jets bombing Saddam’s palaces and other targets have reportedly been astonished at how little resistance they have encountered.

*From a message I sent to a list that was discussing the charge that

the Iraq war is a “Jewish” war.

I agree that it is wrong to profile an entire ethnic group with regard to

a particular political issue. Only a small group of US Jews identifies

with the policies of the Likud Party in Israel or votes Republican in US

elections (nor do all the voters for the Republicans idolize Ariel

Sharon).

Even some Bush appointees like Marc Grossman, Undersecretary of State for

Political Affairs, are career USG employees who are far more liberal than

the Perle group. And, if the neoconservatives in the Bush administration

had been the only ones advocating a war on Iraq, while it was opposed by

Cheney, Bush, Rice and other key players, then it would not have happened.

It is overly “neat” and therefore sloppy thinking to put the entire onus

on one group (which are a small minority even within their over-all

[constructed] ethnicity). That the neocons are a significant part of the

mix is not in dispute, but it is not as if Bush is their ventriloquist’s

dummy. And, the neocons derive their power in part from a conviction on

the part of people like Karl Rove that they can articulate ideas appealing

to the core cosntituencies of the Republican Right, including the

Christian Coalition. I think it is indisputable that the ideas of Perle,

Wolfowitz and Feith have far more resonance with rightwing Christians than

with other Jews. So why not blame the second Gulf War on Jerry Falwell

and Pat Robertson, i.e. on fundamentalist Christians? . . .

Unfortunately, the unwise Bush administration decision to appoint Jay

Garner as the pro-consul of a defeated Iraq will probably fan the flames

of this sort of prejudice. Garner has for a long time been close to the

Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a far rightwing outfit

that is part of the Perle and Pipes network, and he was among signatories

to a statement praising the Israeli army for its “restraint” in the

Occupied Territories during the second intifada.

I don’t personally think the idea of a US pro-consul is a good one to

begin with. If there has to be one, it should not be someone like Garner,

whose views are extreme and whose appointment will appear to confirm the

worst conspiracy theories circulating in the Middle East . . .

*Joschka Fischer, the Foreign Minister of Germany, warned against the possibility that the Bush administration intends to pursue a whole series of wars after Iraq, aimed at disarming one country after another. He said a way had to be found between complacency toward the threat of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and the impulse to go to war to stop such proliferation.