Informed Comment

*The US Army has launched Operation Sidewinder, storming 20 towns in the Sunni Arab center of Iraq and making dozens of arrests, in a quest to stop sabotage and attacks on US troops. The problem with this sort of operation is that it assumes that resistance to occupation is a zero sum game. There is a pie; it is a particular size; there is only one pie. So if you cut the pie in two and eat half of it, there will be half as much pie. But resistance is not a zero sum game, as Gaza and the West Bank show. Given Sharon’s brutal tactics (which have included deliberately firing rockets into civilian apartment buildings), the pie of resistance should be completely gone by now. But some attempts to stamp out resistance can increase it, by enlarging the recruitment pool of resisters. The Sunni Arabs north, east and west of Baghdad from all accounts hate the US and hate US troops being there. This hatred is the key recruiting tool for the resistance, and it is not lessened by US troops storming towns. I wish Operation Sidewinder well; maybe it will work, militarily. Politically, I don’t think it addresses the real problems, of winning hearts and minds.

*The Najaf religious authority, headed by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, has condemned body searches of Iraqi women carried out by male Coalition troops. The fatwa says that this frisking of women does “not respect the Sharia (Islamic religious law) nor Iraqi traditions and social values.” Such sentiments in part lay behind the conflict in Majar al-Kabir last week between outraged townspeople and British troops, leading to the deaths of six British soldier and at least three of the town’s young men.

*The Sadr Movement continues to be a real contender for political and religious authority among pious Shiites in Iraq, and is getting monetary contributions in large numbers, according to Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post. He discusses in some detail its organization in populous East Baghdad. Shadid is among the best of the Western reporters now in Iraq, in part because he is an Arabist. This simple fact brings into stark question the American journalistic conviction that good reporters should be ignorant of local culture lest they become biased. Of course, this principle applies only to the global South. No major American newspaper would employ a reporter in Paris who did not know French.

*Sometimes you see a news report and it just looks odd, tipping you that something important is going on. Asharq al-Awsat has an item today that Paul Bremer, US Proconsul of Iraq, has dissolved the Pharmacists’ Union and the Veterinarians’ Union, writing letters to their presidents telling them they have no further authority because their organizations are no longer needed. The deputy head of the Arab Pharmacists’ Union, Tahir al-Shakhshir, rejected the decree and said the American civil administration of Iraq had no authority to issue it because the union is an Arab League institution. The deputy head of the Arab Veterinarians’ Union, As’ad Abu Raghib, expressed similar sentiments and said that the union might pick up and move to Amman, Jordan, to continue its work among Iraqi veterinarians. What is going on here? Is the notoriously anti-union philosophy of the US Republican party being imposed on Iraq? Or is this an assault on pan-Arabist, Arab League institutions, aimed at removing any possible source of opposition to the Americanization of Iraq? Or is this move part of de-Baathification? (If the latter, why not just remove the high officers of the unions? Or just make union membership voluntary?)

Note that the organizations may be correct that the US administration has no right to issue such decrees. The Fourth Geneva Convention governing the actions of occupation authorities in militarily occupied territories generally discourages any actions that alter the character or legal status of the occupied territories. International lawyers should be asked to comment on the import of these dissolutions for an article like Section III, Art. 53: “Any destruction by the Occupying Power of real or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons, or to the State, or to other public authorities, or to social or cooperative organizations, is prohibited, except where such destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations.” Would dissolving a union fall under this rubric? Tony Blair’s counsel is said to have expressed worries to him back last March that a bilateral Anglo-American administration of Iraq with no UN sanction would necessarily entail violations of the Fourth Geneva convention. I don’t personally have any answers here. I’m raising the questions. The news item struck me as odd.

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*The civil administration of Iraq under Paul Bremer plans to create a ministry of religious affairs that would promote dialogue among Iraq’s religious leaders, according to az-Zaman. It would also attempt to ensure that any legislation passed does not withdraw from them their religious rights.

*Large fires burned at three Baghdad sites on Saturday, at a money-printing factory, at a schoolbook repository, and at a warehouse of the electricity service. A conflagration also continued at a sulphur plant near Mosul. Sabotage is suspected. Duh. Baathist remnants (a.k.a. Iraqi nationalists) appear to have planned for guerrilla war and sabotage as a way to getting the US back out of Iraq, and continue to network successfully to carry it out. The kidnapping and brutal execution of Sgt. 1st Class Gladimir Philippe, 37, of Roselle, N.J., and Pfc. Kevin Ott, 27, of Columbus, Ohio, who were taken from their checkpoint at Balad by persons unknown, brings the death toll of US soldiers to over 200 since the war began. Post-April 9 casualties continue to mount for the Anglo-American troops, with many killed in the past week. I don’t think this kind of sabotage and occasional killing of troops can force the coalition out of Iraq, though. What will eventually do that, if it happens at all, will be massive crowd actions. Militaries can put down large numbers of civilian protesters, as Syria did at Hamas in 1982 and as China did at Tiananmen in 1989, but only if the government directing the troops is a dictatorship that does not care about bad PR. If the British and Americans overstay their welcome, the Iraqi populace will be able to force them out, giving them a choice between that and being portrayed back home as soulless monsters. The Jallianwalla Bagh sort of incident was the downfall of many an empire in a modern communications context.

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*Jews who buy land in Iraq should be killed, according to a fatwa or legal ruling issued by Sayyid Kadhim al-Haeri ( -Reuters). Al-Haeri is still in Qom, Iran, but he is said to be contemplating a return home to Najaf, in Iraq. He has been adopted as the elder statesman of the al-Sadr Movement, since that movement’s leader, Muqtada al-Sadr, is not yet a jurisprudent in his own right. Al-Haeri also forbade Muslims to sell land to Jews, saying he had gotten numerous inquiries from followers about how licit it would be, after they were contacted by Jewish businessmen. A lot of countries do have certain restrictions on ownership of national assets by foreigners, and Iraq is vulnerable in this regard right now because there is no Iraqi government that would implement the will of the people. Still, al-Haeri’s sentiments are obviously extremely ugly. To any extent that he is given a platform in the Sadr Movement, it is guaranteed to go in a radical rightwing direction that will contribut to a failure of democracy.

*In his Friday Prayer sermon in Najaf, Muhammad Baqir al- Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, condemned attacks on Coaltion forces in Iraq. He said that violence should be a last resort, and that for now Shiites should employ peaceful means to protest the American occupation. This was a a less hotheaded sermon than lastweek’s, in which he called the Americans the great Satan. It still should not give any of us much comfort, since he still seems to be thinking in terms of a popular movement that would kick the Americans out of Iraq.

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*Someone sent me a link to a fascinating piece on battle fatigue among US soldiers by journalist Bob Graham that appeared back last June 19 in the Evening Standard. I thought I’d share it here. It is very chilling, does not bode well for US peace keeping efforts in Iraq.

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*Muqtada al-Sadr, 30, the leader of the popular Sadr Movement in Iraqi Shiism, gave an interview today to al-Hayat’s Hazim al-Amin in Najaf. He said that in the religious establishment of Najaf, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Sayyid Muhammad Sa`id al-Hakim, Shaykh Bashir al-Najafi, and Shaykh Muhammad al-Fayyad all supported one another and recognized that each was a legitimate object of emulation (marja` al-taqlid) for lay Shiites. He said they were all determined to stay out of secular politics, and that since all were ultimately of Iranian extraction, they had little reason to be concerned with broader Iraqi society. Muqtada insists that the leadership of the Iraqi Shiites should be invested in native Iraqis, not in Iranians living in Najaf.

In contrast to Najaf quietism, it was supporters of Muqtada who organized the protest in Baghdad last Tuesday that demanded clerical oversight over any new Iraqi government. Muqtada said he believed in the general guardianship of the cleric, but said that the supreme jurisprudent would be different in Iraq than in Iran. (That is, he is saying that he accepts Khomeini’s theory of the guardianship of the jurisprudent or theocracy, but does not accept the authority in Iraq of Iranian supreme jurisprudent Ali Khamenei). Muqtada also rejected the idea of cooperating with the Americans in establishing a new government, saying he and the Sadr Movement would have nothing to do with such a process until the Americans left the country. On the other hand, he denounced attacks on American troops as the work of Baathists and as a form of sabotage of the country, and said no permission had been given to engage in them by the [Shiite] religious authority.

Al-Sadr’s spokesman, Adnan al-Shahmani, was even more open and vehement about the need for an Iraqi object of emulation. He said there has been rapid turnover in the Najaf leadership in the recent period, and most objects of emulation have been Iranians. Iraqis, he said, need a leadership attuned to their specific circumstances. He also admitted that the Sadr Movement in Baghdad and elsewhere had been involved in forcibly shutting down video stores, liquor stores and other establishments (which offended the puritan moralism of the movement). But he said that such actions had been spontaneous and local, and were not being directed from the Sadr office in Najaf.

The Sadr Movement is by far the most widespread and popular among religious Iraqi Shiites. The reporter, al-Amin, contends that Sistani and Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, the spiritual leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), have moved closer to one another. Both are Iranians, and both wish to oppose the Sadr Tendency in Iraq. Al-Amin’s analysis seems to me to take ethnicity too seriously and at too much of a face value. Lots of Iraqi Shiites have deep respect for Sistani and al-Hakim. Sistani and al-Hakim don’t appear to me to agree on much, given that Sistani is a political quietist and al-Hakim is a political activist. It may be that they have talked about how to rein in the Sadr Movement, which limits the power of both.

*The NYT is alleging that the militia in Majar al-Kabir is made up of Badr Corps (the paramilitary of SCIRI). I am not entirely convinced that this is the case. The main pieces of evidence instanced were that they were trained by Revolutionary Guards and that they said they acted under orders from the religious establishment in Najaf. But Iraqi Hizbullah of the Marsh Arabs were also often trained in Iran, and all Iraqi Shiites would at least claim to be under the authority of Najaf. If the Badr Corps really do have this kind of position in Majar, then they are very likely to have been involved in the rpg attacks on British paratroopers on this past Tuesday.

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*Reporters on the ground in Majar al-Kabir, southern Iraq, have begun to piece together what may have happened there Tuesday when 6 British troops were killed and several more wounded in two distinct attacks. The story as I see it goes this way: Paul Bremer set a deadline of June 16 for Iraqi militiamen to turn over their machine guns and other heavy weapons. (Ordinary Iraqis are allowed to keep a pistol or a rifle at home, but not to carry it on the street). When Tony Blair was in Basra, Paul Bremer told him that the British in the south were being too permissive and that the Badr Corps of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq was taking advantage of the British to establish its hegemony in the Shiite south ( – The Scotsman, 26 June). The current American administration in Iraq sees SCIRI as linked heavily to the hardliners in Iran and as a Trojan Horse for Iranian influence in Iraq. As a result of the American pressure, The same policy of confiscating weapons was adopted in the South by British Maj. General Wall, with a June 16 deadline.

Majar al-Kabir is a sort of frontier town bristling with weapons. It is one of the places that the Marsh Arabs settled when Saddam’s forces drained their swamps and reduced them to poverty. The Marsh Arabs were organized politically and paramilitarily by the Iraqi Hizbullah Party. A Marsh Arab sheikh rules nearby Amara. Because of the Bremer/Wall policy of disarming Iraqis, British troops were committed to Majar al-Kabir to do house to house searches. As you all know, Middle Eastern men are very touchy about their women and about incursions into private, domestic space. The British troops in Majar appear occasionally to have been harsh in these incursions. Besides, the heavily persecuted Marsh Arab men would not want foreigners coming and taking their weapons away from them. They have learned that they need to protect themselves. One rumor circulated that a British soldier clowned around with a woman’s underwear during one of the searches.

So, by Monday afternoon the townspeople were fed up, and a crowd gathered to demonstrate. It got out of hand. The British troops, who were accompanied by some Iraqi police that they were training, initially fired rubber bullets. The Iraqis thought they were being shot at for real, and returned fire. They killed two British soldiers. The other four retreated to the police station, where one was killed in a hallway. At some point they became so threatened that they switched to live ammunition. The townspeople insist that the British shot down four young men of Majar. The crowd then closed on the ramaining three British troops and killed them. They may have captured them first and then executed them. (- Peter Almond, UPI). This was a classic anticolonial crowd action, deriving from the occupiers’ attempt to disarm the population.

But then there was a separate attack on a British paratroopers convoy in the same area, using rocket propelled grenades. That attack wounded one British soldier and destroyed two vehicles. This attack may be related to the town riot, but it wasn’t the same kind of phenomenon. Townspeople do not have and know how to use rocket propelled grenades. This was done by a trained paramilitary or military force. It might have been Iraqi Hizbullah Marsh Arabs from Majar, who had at some point received arms and training from Iran to fight Saddam. It might have been Badr Corps, working for SCIRI. Or it might even have been a surviving Baathist unit trying to foment trouble between the Coalition and the Shiites of the south.

By the way, I gave an interview to AP’s Borzou Daragahi in which I said about searching females and domestic space: “Rather than preventing violence, the practice could spark more clashes, said Juan Cole, a history professor and Mideast specialist at the University of Michigan. “Many riots have been set off in colonial history by heavy-handed Western interventions in private life,” said Cole.” Check out Mr. Daragahi’s web site at http://www.borzou.com/. In response to my remarks, posted at Fox News, I received several angry emails from readers insisting that coalition troops were not being heavy handed and that crowd control is not a problem. The bad news is that this incident could be only the beginning.

*US-trained Yemeni special forces attacked the Aden-Abyan Islamic Army in the mountains of Hadhramawt on Wednesday, killing 6 of the militants. The Islamic Army has been linked to al-Qaeda. They had assaulted a medical convoy on Saturday. In 1998 they took tourists hostage.

*Three members of the terrorist Khalidi Faction were arrested in Mecca by Saudi authorities. Apparently the faction was behind the Riyadh bombings, for which 12 other arrests have already been made. The bomb maker himself has eluded capture.

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*The ambush of British troops near Amara that killed six of them on Tuesday was probably the work of bandits, according to Kim Sengupta and Patrick Cockburn of The Independent. The south of Iraq has been plagued by banditry for years. Under Saddam, some of it may have been social banditry, in which Shiite tribesmen or desperadoes defied the Baath regime with their robberies and were hidden by peasants or Marsh Arabs. Organized crime, a sort of Iraqi Mafia, seems clearly responsible for the theft of cable, which is stripped to the copper wiring and melted into blocks for sale in Iran. The lost cable makes it difficult for the US and Britain to restore electricity, which no doubt pleases the mafias. After all, crime is best carried out in the dark, and chaos and public discontent can abet it. The neocon hawks in Washington thought that in taking over Iraq they were getting a sort of Arab Germany, brutal but disciplined. In fact, the brutality of Baath rule came from the country’s near ungovernability, not from success in imposing order. It will be no easy matter to impose order on Iraq. The British and Americans had been talking about a quick reduction in force of their militaries in Iraq, but now such measures are on hold. Indeed, more troops may have to be sent.

*An eyewitness account appears in az-Zaman today of a running street battle in Baghdad between the US army and an armed group of bandits. So much for things returning to “normal.”

*Journalists continue to bring into question the American assertions that things are returning to normal in Iraq. AFP reported that Baghdad was without electricity for a full 24 hours a couple of days ago. According to Charles Clover of the Financial Times for 25 June: “Life in Baghdad often seems at variance with the optimistic pronouncements coming out of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) . . . Police have returned to work but are seldom seen on Baghdad’s streets, where cars are stolen in broad daylight and traffic jams are constant. Heaps of rubbish lie in the street – closing even the entrance to the central bank – yet sporadic clean-up campaigns seem designed more for publicity than for effect. Power seems to be off far more than the average of four hours a day that the CPA says is the case.” A similar article for the Independent notes that a shopkeeper laughed when he hear Paul Bremer’s assertion that things were returning to normal. He said he doesn’t open his shops because the banks are closed and he has no place to put the money– if he kept it in the shop or at home it would just be stolen. Clover worries that if things go on like this for a few more months, public disenchantment with the CPA will grow to dangerous dimensions.

*Hundreds of Iranian students have been arrested for the recent protests, not only in Tehran but also in Mashhad, Yazd and elsewhere. The Iranian government has banned any further demonstrations off university campuses, but says it will not interfere with gatherings at universities. Some clerics have called for harsh penalties to be imposed on student leaders of the demonstrations. According to AFP via Asharq al-Awsat, Iranian officials are claiming that a large proportion of those arrested were actually high school students.

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