Informed Comment

*An exploding mine wounded seven American soldiers in a vehicle that ran over it early Saturday near the border with Syria.

*In Najaf crowds demonstrated in protest of Friday’s bombing. Some anti-American slogans were heard (the US is blamed for not providing enough security.) Najaf police have arrested some 19 suspects in Friday’s massive car bombing. They say that some have confessed, and that some have clear ties to al-Qaeda and/or Saddam’s secret police. I’d take all this with a large grain of salt. Apparently the criterion for arresting people was that they weren’t local Najafis and were different in dress or outward appearance. A couple of Basrans in a coffee house were taken away in handcuffs at first, but the US military expressed extreme skepticism that they were involved. The Najaf police chief appears to have described some Palestinians, Syrians and Jordanians picked up as “Wahhabis.” Only most Saudis and Qataris are really properly so called, which does not increase confidence in the Najaf police’s cultural knowledge of Sunnis. CNN kept talking about 2 Pakistanis arrested, but the UPI and other print articles do not refer to them. It is no doubt a confused scene. As for the alleged confessions, I suspect that a hapless Sunni looking at the furious crowds of Shiites in the street and promised police protection if he will cooperate might well choose to enter the penal system than to try to walk the streets again after having been fingered as a suspect. The Pakistani newspaper Dawn characterized the likely perpetrators as a mix of Saddam loyalists and Sunni radicals, and that is entirely possible. But I would be very surprised if the Najaf police have already cracked the case the way that they claim.

*A good overview of Saturday’s events in Najaf is by Dawn (Karachi). See

2003/08/31/top10.htm

In Arabic, the equally good al-Hayat article is worth looking at.

08-2003/20030830-31p01-01.txt/story.html

*Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, a moderate Shiite cleric with ties to al-Da`wa and the Khoei foundation, announced that he was suspending his membership in the American-appointed Interim Governing Council because the IGC was unable to provide security. He complained bitterly that al-Hakim, the Najaf authorities, and the US all had been tipped that there would be a bombing aimed at assassinating al-Hakim, but that no extra steps had been taken to keep him safe. He maintained that some 600 people had been wounded in the blast. This qualified resignation clearly a protest against American failure to make Iraq secure in the post-war period. It is also a blow to the Bremer administration of Iraq, since Bahr al-Ulum is popular and a more credible liberal than Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. Abdul Aziz, the brother of the late Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, who slain in the Friday attack, is the head of the paramilitary Badr Corps and has spoken about a vision of Iraq as an Islamic Republic in the far future, though it might have a democratic government in the short term. It seems clear that American nation-building attempts in Iraq have been hit by an earthquake.

*It is increasingly clear that the $4 bn. a month the US pays to keep its troops in Iraq is a pittance compared to what the Bremer administration will need for rebuilding Iraq. Although Bernard Lewis and the neocons promised us that Iraqi petroleum would pay for reconstruction, sabotage has made that impossible so far. So, folks, your tax dollars will be used to reconstruct a wealthy petroleum country in the Middle East. In other news, financial analysts are complaining about the complete lack of transparency in the circa $6 bn. Iraqi budget overseen by Mr. Bremer. Wouldn’t we want to start new traditions of open information, democracy and transparency there?

*Bulgarian troops in Karbala have received rocket-propelled grenade fire for the fourth time, according to al-Sharq al-Awsat, and Bulgarian officials in Sophia are begining to worry about their troops being in a highly unsafe environment. Apparently danger was not what they thought they were signing up for when they joined a superpower in a coalition of the willing. It is remarkable that the Western press is almost silent about these attacks in the Shiite south, which clearly is not as stable as Mr. Bremer had claimed it was.

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*Guerrillas near Baquba northeast of Baghdad fired rocket-propelled grenades at a US convoy, killing one US soldier and wounding four others. One of the wounded soldiers will have to lose his leg. A fair-sized bomb went off Friday outside the British military headquarters in the southern city of Basra, destroying two automobiles 100 yards from the HQ. No casualties were sustained from this bomb, which the British communique called “small.”

*The black Toyota Land Cruiser (some say it was a Volkswagen bus) was parked at the south entrance of the shrine of Imam `Ali and its attached mosque. Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, 63, and his entourage emerged from the entrance and got into three black Toyota Land Cruisers. Al-Hakim always exited from the south gate after giving the Friday prayer sermon at the Imam Ali mosque. Suddenly the fourth vehicle, which resembled those of al-Hakim, exploded, sending spurts of flame into the sky. The ayatollah’s Land Cruiser was left a tangled and charred mess, as were the other two with his aides. The adobe covering of the shrine entrance collapsed on other worshippers then about to exit. As of Friday evening, 17 corpses had been pulled out of the rubble there, but more were believed trapped beneath it. Two buildings on the other side of the street collapsed, one of which had a restaurant in it, and the other of which had a retail store. The customers were buried under the broken buildings. Ayatollah al-Hakim had delivered a sermon in which he had once again condemned Saddam and the Baath Party. (al-Zaman, al-Sharq al-Awsat)

Al-Hakim’s political rival, the young Muqtada al-Sadr, immediately condemned the bombing and called for a three-day closure of offices to mourn the fallen religious leader. (Some analysts suspect Muqtada’s followers, the Sadrists, in the bombing, but as you will see below I find that not very likely. It is true that there was no love lost between them.) Baqir’s brother, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, serves on the American-appointed Interim Governing Council. He condemned the attack and pledged that their organization, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, would continue. He is now the head of it.

Baqir’s father, Muhsin al-Hakim, had been the highest-ranking Shiite jurisprudent in Najaf in the 1960s. He died in 1970. Baqir was active in the al-Da`wa Party, which aimed at establishing a state based on Islamic law in Iraq, in the 1970s. In the late 1970s, in particular, the Shiites in Iraq were restive (it was the time of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq). Baqir was imprisoned for a time, and survived several (some say 7) assassination attempts. In 1980 he fled to Iran, at a time when Saddam was killing Shiite clerics he feared after the Iranian Revolution. Membership in the al-Da`wa Party was declared a capital crime. Saddam also invaded Iran. Baqir was involved in the establishment of an umbrella group for Iraqi dissidents in Tehran called the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq in 1982. It included al-Da`wa initially. In `1984, al-Da`wa withdrew from SCIRI (or SAIRI), to maintain its independence. In 1984, as well, Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim became the head of the Supreme Council.

SCIRI sent agents over the border to blow up things in Iraq, and developed a paramilitary called the Badr Brigades (later it grew to become the Badr Corps).

The Badr fighters infiltrated into Iraq, often through the swamps in the South, to carry out guerrilla attacks on the Baath government.

In the run-up to the American war on Iraq in 2002-2003, Baqir al-Hakim proved willing to cooperate with the Americans, despite being a hardliner close to Iranian Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei. Al-Hakim believed in Khomeini’s theory of clerical rule, but he was a pragmatist willing to accept a pluralistic, parliamentary government in Iraq initially. He thought the Shiite majority would eventually create an Islamic Republic there on the Iranian model. He met with Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress and other dissident groups, and SCIRI representatives held talks with the Americans.

Al-Hakim had an on-again off-again relationship with the US. He opposed a US occupation of Iraq, and wanted an immediate transition to a new Iraqi government, of which SCIRI would form part. He at one point threatened to have the Badr Corps fire on US troops if they tried to occupy the country. There were in fact firefights between the Badr Corps and the Marines in places like Baquba, and the US eventually insisted on the disarming of the Badr Corps. Al-Hakim initially declined to have SCIRI be part of the Interim Governing Council appointed by Paul Bremer, insisting that such a council should be elected. In this period he gave a sermon in Najaf in which he said that the US had shown its true colors as the Great Satan. In the end, he gave in and allowed his brother, Abdul Aziz, to serve on the IGC, but in return demanded that the US drop several other prospective appointees. He clearly did not like the US or the US occupation, and wanted a quick US withdrawal, but he was pragmatic enough to want his SCIRI to be well positioned to succeed the US as a major political force when they withdrew.

SCIRI probably has no significant grass roots in Iraq. There seems to be some loyalty to it in Baquba and Kut, eastern cities near Iran. It has proselytized in Basra and elsewhere in the South. But it seems a minority taste for most Iraqi Shiites. The Sadrists, who may number 2 million, dwarft SCIRI, which I suspect is just a few tens of thousands.

The U.S. has lost a pragmatic quasi-ally who signalled by his cooperation with the Americans that it was all right for Shiites to work through Bremer for a strong position in the new Iraq. Most other Shiite clerics refuse direct contact with the Americans. This bombing has certainly made Iraq even less governable.

*My reasoning in blaming the Baath Party for the bombing:

I saw Judith Yaphe of National Defense University interviewed by Soledad O’Brien on CNN Friday evening, and she gave an excellent overview of the possible perpetrators: Sadrists, Baathists and Sunni radicals.

In my NPR interview on Friday afternoon with Robert Siegel, I blamed the Saddam loyalists. Here is my reasoning:

I don’t believe that Muqtada al-Sadr or his followers would risk damaging the Shrine of Imam `Ali, among the holiest sites in Shiite Islam, with a huge truck bomb. They are if anything overly sensitive to the holiness of Shiite symbols. I know it is easy for secularized Westerners to be cynical about an argument that “he wouldn’t do that.” But I really do not think someone with his views and context would.

Moreover, it is not his modus operandi. Muqtada’s people have mobbed opponents, have stabbed them, have beaten them up and put them into the hospital, have surrounded their houses, and have threatened them. But they have never set off huge bombs. The most some of the ones in Sadr City (East Baghdad slums) have done is toss a grenade into a liquor store or cinema house, typically when no one is there, to enforce their puritanism.

If Muqtada had wanted Baqir al-Hakim dead, he could have simply sent another Shiite to worm his way into al-Hakim’s confidence and stick a shiv between his ribs. It is the Sunni Baath who could not have gotten close to him in this way so easily (a Tikriti accent can be heard, and there are lots of minutiae about Shiism a Sunni Baathist could not easily know). A remoter way of assassination thus makes sense for the Sunni Baath. This explosion almost certainly killed and wounded persons who have some loyalty to the al-Sadr family, even if they attend Friday prayers at the Imam Ali mosque rather than in Kufa. Why would Muqtada take such a shotun approach?

I also do not believe that Sunni radicals would set off a bomb next to Ali’s shrine. He is the fourth caliph of the Sunnis. Even though some extreme Wahhabis might dislike the idea of a shrine to anyone (and 19th century Wahhabis even targeted the tomb of the Prophet in Medina), it just does not fit their m.o. In all of al-Qaeda’s history, they have bombed embassies and foreign ships and foreign buildings, not Muslim holy places.

In contrast, this move makes perfect sense for Saddam loyalists. They have not scrupled to damage the shrine in the past, when they put down the 1991 uprising. Saddam sent out a videotape around August 15 calling on the Shiite clergy to declare jihad against the Americans. All of the major Shiite clerics, including Baqir al-Hakim rejected and derided this call. I believe that this bombing was the Saddam loyalists’ response to that rebuttal. It also punishes Baqir al-Hakim for cooperating with the Americans and for his years of guerrilla attacks on the Baath from Iran.

The Baathists may also hope that the al-Hakims and their followers will blame the Sadrists, provoking civil unrest that contributes to the country’s ungovernability for the Americans.

The Najaf bombing looks an awful lot like the bombing of the Jordanian embassy and the bombing of the UN headquarters. I now think all three are the work of Saddam loyalists, not of Sunni radicals with al-Qaeda links. All three targeted key de facto allies of the US, and have resulted in isolating it further. The Red Cross, Oxfam, and other aid agencies have much reduced their operations after the bombing of the UN headquarters, and IMF and World Bank officials have left, postponing important economic measures. Major Shiite clerics other than al-Hakim and his brother Abdul Aziz have refused direct contact with the Americans, and this reluctance is likely to have just been reinforced.

My considered opinion is that Saddam and the Baath loyalists have reverted to their old 1960s cell structure and are carefully planning out a series of high-profile attacks that have great strategic yield. The Baath wasn’t much as a military power in the 1990s, but as masters of dirty politics they still have no peer. Ask Abdel Karim Qasim, the Arif brothers, and the thousands of dead among the al-Da`wa Party officers and rank and file.

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*Breaking news. Nearly 100 people have been killed and hundreds more wounded by a hug car bomb blast in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, Iraq. Among the dead is Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, head since 1984 of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. His brother, Abdul Aziz, is a member of the Interim Governing Council appointed by the Americans. The blast occurred in front of the shrine to Imam Ali, which was slightly damaged.

It seems to me clear that this bombing was the work of Saddam loyalists. Baqir al-Hakim had waged a long terrorist and guerrilla war against the Baath. He cooperated with the Americans. When Saddam called on Shiite clergy to declare jihad on the US a couple of weeks ago, Baqir and others rejected the call forcefully and attacked Saddam as a tyrant. No believing Shiite would blow up a huge bomb right in front of Imam Ali’s shrine. The truck bomb has become a signature of the remnants of the Baath, as with the attack on the United Nations HQ. The Saddam loyalists may hope that Shiite factions will blame one another and fall to fighting an internal civil war, adding to the country’s ungovernability for the Americans.

More as details become available.

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*Guerrillas in Falluja set off a bomb that wounded four US soldiers on Thursday. Hundreds of townspeople rallied after the attack for a march through town, chanting slogans in favor of Saddam Hussein and against George W. Bush. In a macabre scene, some displayed charred cloth that they said came from the clothing of some of the wounded soldiers. US soldiers searched part of the town after the attack. In the south on Weds. night, one British soldier was killed and another wounded in the village of Ali al-Sharqi, where they appear to have been ambushed by an angry mob, from which they took rpg fire. This incident recalls the attack at Majar al-Kabir at the end of June. Although the South is quieter than the Sunni Arab triangle, it can be dangerous as well. The reporting does not really give any motive for the attack.

*Al-Qaeda has posted a new letter on its site, written by a fallen leader killed in a gun battle in Saudi Arabia recently, which addresses the Iraq situation. Al-Qaeda feels that the fall of the Baath is favorable to the radical Islamist cause, since it discredits secular Arab nationalism. Al-Qaeda is convinced that radical fundamentalism (of course they don’t call it that) will fill the vacuum created by the collapse of the regime. The scarey thing is that if Falluja and Ramadi are any guide, they might be right, at least about the Sunni Arab Iraqis.

view/news/2003,08,29,189885.html

*About 35 Iraqis are murdered in Baghdad alone every day, most in gang-related violence, according to Rosalind Russell of Reuters. That is an annual murder rate of nearly 13,000, for this one city, population 5 million. The murder rate for the United States, a country of over 280 million, in 2000? 16,000! Nor is Iraq just a violent society; physicians at Baghdad hospitals say they have never seen anything like it! Baghdad was quite safe under Saddam as long as you weren’t involved in dissident politics. I’d say that for the US to allow this level of homocide is probably even a violation of its duties under the Fourth Geneva Convention, as an Occupying Power. No wonder women are afraid to go to hospitals for health care. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld likened the homicide rate in Iraq under US rule to that of Washington DC (in 2002 there were 163 murders in this city of 570,000. If DC were ten times as big, i.e., as big as Baghdad, that would only be 1,630 per year.) Nope, Mr. Rumsfeld, the comparison doesn’t work. He was talking, of course only about US military deaths (which are already rather more than the number of murder victims in DC, anyway); I guess Iraqi murder victims don’t count. But guess what? The Iraqi public really minds this crime wave, and it is turning them off to cooperation with the US.

See

reuters08-28-073516.asp?reg=MIDEAST

Al-Zaman led yesterday with a horrifying story of burglars killing two families in Baghdad and attempts at looting a moneychanger’s office and car theft by criminal gangs, if corroboration were needed. AFP says that families with missing members throng to the morgue in fear of finding them there.

*It has for some time been clear that much of the inaccurate information the US and Britain received about alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction came from Iraqi expatriates and defectors. NYT correspondent Judith Miller has been exposed by her colleagues as relying on corrupt financier Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Pentagon-backed “Iraqi National Congress” for her reporting about Iraqi chemical weapons. We all saw former Iraqi nuclear scientist Khidir Hamza come on television all last year insisting that Iraq had a big nuclear weapons program even after 1998 (he was contradicted by other expatriate Iraqi nuclear scientists, but somehow Hardball and O’Reilly and Hannity and Colmes did not have them on. Now the LAT and UPI are reporting a US government theory that some of the expatriates were fed disinformation by Saddam before they left, because Saddam hoped that the US would be afraid to attack him if he had big WMD stockpiles. Well, anything is possible. But Chalabi and Hamza had been outside Iraq for 40 and for 12 years respectively, and their misiniformation wasn’t from the Baath. The US was snookered by these expatriates, all right, but it wasn’t mostly Saddam’s doing. Chalabi has been rewarded for lying to us (not to mention embezzling millions) by an appointment to the Interim Governing Council. I don’t know what happened to Hamza, but I imagine he’ll do all right for himself out of it all. And, of course, there were those forged letters purporting to be from Niger, which presumably came from the expats or from other forces (Israeli PM Ariel Sharon is another potential suspect) who wanted a US war against Iraq.

You can’t blame the expats for wanting the US to overthrow Saddam, really, or for lying to get that result. What is shocking is that high officials of the US government like Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush should have based so much of their policy on the gossip of expats who had no real on the ground intelligence to share. This whole experience should make the US doubly suspicious of Iranians who want Washington to overthrow the mullahs in Tehran, and of those who are allied with these expats, such as the pro-Israeli Washington Institute for Near East Policy, whose deputy director Patrick Clawson has been vocally supporting the terrorist group Mujahidin-e Khalq. (Makes you wonder what kind of deal the MEK has cut).

See also Glen Rangwala and Raymond Whitaker, “20 Lies about the Iraq War”:

http://www.endthewar.org/features/20lies.htm

*US military spokesmen have acknowledged at last that a military helicopter deliberately blew down a Shiite banner from a telecom tower, which resulted in demonstrations in Baghdad. They at first denied it. The helicopter crew will apparently be reprimanded for poor judgment. The banner addressed the Imam Mahdi, or Shiite promised figure analogous to the Return of Christ, and its dislodging was viewed as a slap in the face by the Sadrist sect in Baghdad.

*The rector of al-Azhar seminary in Cairo, Dr. Muhammad Tantawi, has repudiated a fatwa or legal ruling given by one of his colleagues, which forbade Muslims to cooperate with the Iraqi Interim Governing Council appointed by the Americans. Tantawi said that the ruling was merely the opinion of a private individual and did not represent the views of al-Azhar as an institution, which concerns itself in any case only with Egyptian affairs. -Al-Hayat. This backtracking almost certainly comes as a response to severe pressure from the Egyptian government, which in turn was probably pressured by the US embassy in Cairo. That the Hosni Mubarak regime does favors like this for the US is one reason that there is no US pressure on it to democratize, in contrast to Iraq. The US is still a status quo power in the Middle East, despite all the neocons’ talk about democratization, and Egypt is a pillar of the status quo, what with its peace treaty with Israel and military alliance with the US.

story.html

A debate has broken out in Bulgaria about whether to send 15-20 civilians to help administer the city of Karbala, now under military control of the Bulgarian contingent. Some fear that the civilians’ lives will be put in danger.

view_news.php?id=25618

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*Two US soldiers died in Iraq on Wednesday and nine were wounded. US Central Command said that “One soldier was killed and three injured in an explosive device attack in Fallujah.” Another was killed in Baghdad when guerrillas attacked a military convoy; two of his colleagues were wounded. Guerrillas also attacked a convoy near Baqubah, wounding two US soldiers and an Iraqi worker, and killing another Iraqi. Guerrillas in Ramadi wounded two US soldiers. In Baghdad, two Iraqi policemen died in a running gun battle with car thieves that left a looter and a moneychanger dead, as well.

*The Shiite Da`wa Party in Iraq has strongly condemned the guerrilla attacks and sabotage that have plagued the post-Saddam era. In an interview with al-Sharq al-Awsat, the party spokesman, Abdul Karim al-`Anzi said that these acts damaged Iraq and were being committed by left-over Baathists. He wanted to know where these guerrillas were when Saddam was killing Iraqis all those years. He said that his party, like all Iraqis, rejected Occupation, and implied that he wanted a hand-off to an elected Iraqi government as soon as possible. He said that his party is cooperating with the “good believers” of the Interim Governing Council, even though it had severe reservations about that body being appointed rather than elected in some fashion by the Iraqi people, and about the American veto over its decisions. He also severely criticized the IGC for concerning itself with bureaucratic minutiae that are meaningless to most Iraqis, while doing nothing about the lack of water, electricity, gasoline and security. Although the August president of the IGC, Ibrahim Jaafari, is a leader of the London branch of al-Da`wa, al-`Anzi seems to deny that Jaafari is in any way representing the party. Asked about the differing responses to the Occupation of the southern Shiites and the guerrillas of the Sunni Arab triangle, al-`Anzi insisted that all the major Shiite clergy had rejected the Occupation.

Al-`Anzi was not terribly clear as to why, if the Occupation is rejected, it is so terrible to fight it. He seems to imply that violence against the US at this juncture will harm Iraqis, and that political groups must work with the IGC to get a transition to a new Iraqi government on a short timetable. (The IGC is saying that they will appoint a government within two weeks and have a new constitution ready within a year).

(Arabic:

view/news/2003,08,28,189713.html

The tone this major party leader takes should give no comfort to the US administration. al-Da`wa has some grass roots in Iraq. And, it is clear that they are holding their nose about the Occupation only because they hope it will be brief. The US shouldn’t dawdle about handing civil administration over to an Iraq government as soon as elections can be held.

And that’s another thing. Mr. Bremer seems to think you can’t have elections until you have a constitution. But that’s not how it happened in Afghanistan. Surely you could pass a basic Organic Law governing national governing offices and elections, and then work out the details of the Constitution after the elections? In some sense, isn’t that what happened in the US, which already had a government under the Articles of Confederation before the Constitution was drafted in 1789? French Foreign Minister Villepin’s suggestion that elections be scheduled for later this year sounds good to me.

*Richard Perle, powerful member of the Defense Advisory Board that counsels the Pentagon, has “admitted” that the US “made a mistake” in not working more closely with the “Iraqi opposition.” The press even seems to be buying this load of horse manure and reporting it with a straight face. All Perle is doing is criticizing the State Department and the CIA for refusing to work with the corrupt expatriate financier Ahmad Chalabi, who seems to have struck some sort of shady deal with the Defense Department that if they would only put him in power, he’ll give them everything they want (including Iraqi recognition of and provision of oil to Israel). Actually, refusing to preside over the coronation of Chalabi, who has no support whatsoever inside Iraq, was among the few things the US got right. The CIA and State called this one.

*Incidentally, the Defense Department neocons seem to have floated a trial balloon about an Iraqi oil pipeline to Israel, which the State Department promptly shot down.

State says no such project can be discussed for two years, after which it will be up to the Iraqi people to decide, though it seemed to petroleum experts unlikely that a) the northern Kirkuk fields, which are declining, could support another pipeline in addition to the existing one to Turkey or b) that it would make economic sense to try to have a pipeline from the new southern fields all the way up to Israel. And, by the way, if the pipeline to Turkey is vulnerable to terrorism (it was hit again Weds.), imagine what would happen to an Iraqi pipeline to Israel. Finally, even if this idea were practicable, it wouldn’t be helpful to US policy goals in the Middle East to talk it up right now. The thing I mind most about the neocons aside from their rigid ideology is there complete lack of tact.

*The US has caught a handful of Saudis who slipped across the border to attack US forces. But apparently there are more fighters from other countries, such as Yemen and Syria. The Saudis say they have no information on the matter and that policing the Iraq-Saudi border (over 400 miles long) is a US responsibility now. Earlier press reports talked of some 3,000 Saudi youth gone missing and suspected of having gone off to Iraq to fight a jihad. Some of the foreigners may also have come for the looting. See

StoryID=20030827-042903-9490r.

*Index (with apologies to Harper’s). According to Jim Sciutto of ABC

World/iraq030827_reconstruction.html:

-Number of 27 major Iraqi cities where water is dirtier and less often available now than under Saddam: 12

(includes Baghdad, Najaf & Tikrit)

-Cost of providing clean, reliable water to Iraqis: $16 billion.

-Percent by which Saddam’s regime outproduced the current American administration in electricity: 28

-Cost of modernizing the electricity grid: $2 billion

-Amount of money Bremer administration in Iraq has left: $10 million

-Percentage of the former 3 mn. barrels of oil per day that is now being pumped by the US in Iraq: 55

-Number of times the oil pipeline to Turkey has been set ablaze: 2 (the second time was 27 August).

-Number of 240 Iraqi hospitals that have reopened: 240

-Percentage of women who are too afraid of being kidnapped to leave their homes to go to a hospital: 100

-Percentage of Iraqis unemployed: 60

-Percentage of Americans who were unemployed in the Great Depression of the 1930s: 25

-Number of troops in the Iraqi army in March, 2003: 400,000

-Number of troops in the Iraqi army now: 12,000

*President Shaikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates (a small Gulf federation) said Wednesday that his government had closed down the office of an Arab League Center that had been accused of promoting religious bigotry, especially anti-semitism. It had received government money and was called the Shaykh Zayid Centre for Coordination and Follow-Up. Shaikh Zayed’s statement said that the Center “had engaged in a discourse that starkly contradicted the principles of interfaith tolerance, directives were issued for the immediate closure of the centre.” It added that Shaikh Zayed “has always been a strong advocate of interfaith tolerance and harmony among religions, as constantly reflected in his words and actions. This respect for all faiths is a basic principle of Islam.”

The closure appears to come in large part because of a student campaign waged at Harvard University that argued that Shaikh Zayed’s gift of $2.5 million should be returned to him, given the activities of this center. The campaign, headed by Rachel Fish, was called MoralityNotMoney and its statement said that “The Centre published a book claiming that the American government masterminded the September 11 attacks, hosted notorious Holocaust deniers, and featured a lecture by a Saudi professor who claimed that Jews use gentile blood for holiday pastries. The Los Angeles Times quoted the Centre’s director as saying the “Jews are the enemies of all nations.” “

Congratulations to Ms. Fish and the other Harvard students for forcing this change, which seems to me quite a significant victory against bigotry in the Middle East.

On the other hand, Ms. Fish now works for the David Project, the Web site of which doesn’t appear to be as upset about anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab sentiments. I guess at 50 I should just give up looking for fair-minded heros and be satisfied with the few flawed ones we have. Maybe if some Palestinian analogues to Ms. Fish can accomplish something with regard to the racism directed against them in the US, it will all even out. But it would be nobler if people also cared about bigotry not directed at their own ethnicity.

StoryID=20030827-042903-9490r.

*My remarks about the unwisdom of putting Bulgarians in charge of Karbala yesterday elicited the following response:

Dear Professor Cole:

Los Angeles, CA 90045-2659

I’m glad to be corrected about current government attitudes to Muslims. But I remain skeptical of putting the Bulgarians in charge of Karbala.

The US State Department Human Rights report for Bulgaria is at:

hrrpt/2002/18358pf.htm

It isn’t as awful as I feared, but there are significant problems. 17 major properties belonging to Muslims have still not been returned to them. As for “ethnic” versus “religious” persecution, I don’t think a clear distinction can be made in the Balkans. Muslim converts intermarried with immigrant Ottomans of various ethnicities. Anyway, Saddam also sent “Persian” Iraqis out of the country, but everyone knew it was also a way of hitting the Shiites. Religious and ethnic hatreds are usually intertwined, and a clear distinction between Slav and “Turkish” Muslims could never be maintained. The Serbian extremists viewed all Bosnian Muslims as alien Turks, after all.

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*Two US soldiers died in Iraq in the past 36 hours. Guerrillas attacked a US convoy between Falluja and Ramadi, killing one soldier and wounding two others. Another soldier died when an Iraqi automobile struck him as he was changing a flat tire near Tikrit.

*Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has issued a strongly worded condemnation of the failure of the US to provide security in Iraq. “The Iraqi people have, since the fall of the previous regime, suffered from bad secuirty conditions and an increase in crime, to which citizens have been exposed throughout Iraq.” He condemned as “sinful” the latest of these breaches of security, the bombing of the office of his colleague Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Sa`id al-Hakim in Najaf on Sunday. He called on “those concerned” “to put an end to this dangerous phenomenon and to take the necessary steps to improve the security situation, including a strengthening of national Iraqi forces charged with providing security and stability, and supporting them with sufficient personnel and materiel.” In a related story, the son of Grand Ayatollah Sa`id al-Hakim, Muhammad Hussein al-Hakim, rebuffed an American request to meet with them. He said “We do not want direct contact with the Americans. What we need is for the national forces to be free to act.” He called on the Americans to increase the number of border outposts, suggesting that foreigners may have been behind the bombing. -Al Zaman

(

articles/2003/08/08-26/995.htm

*Ahmad Safi, a key aide to Grand Ayatollah Alis Sistani gave an interview yesterday to al-Hayat newspaper. Al-Safi told journalist Ibrahim Khayyat in Najaf that the American occupation is unacceptable, and that there might be a resort to arms by Shiites as a last resort if it isn’t ended in a timely manner.

Asked about Sistani’s preferences with regard to the drafting of a new constitution, Al-Safi said that the chief religious leaders of the Iraqi Shiites want the whole people to be able to choose. He regretted that both under the monarchy and in the republic, a sigificant proportion of the people had been left voiceless. He stressed that the religious leadership viewed the constitution as an absolutely central issue. He insisted that all Iraqis be able to see in the constitution safeguards against their being tyrannized. Al-Safi said that there were three camps on the issue of the constitution. One wanted it written by foreigners outside Iraq, another wanted it written by expatriate Iraqis, and a third wanted it written by Iraqis inside Iraq. He said that the important thing is that it be written by Iraqis, and by Iraqis with a strong sense of the Iraqi nation, such that the drafters can be objective and set aside their sectarian or sectional interests. “For this reason,” he added, “the religious leaders believe that a committee must be formed, and that a group of people must be elected to draft it, such that the people have confidence in the drafters. After it is drafted, it must be voted on in a popular referendum.”

Asked about Hussein Khomeini’s recent call for a separation of religion and state, al-Safi said no one in Iraq wanted to repeat in Iraq the mistakes of the Islamic Republic of Iran. He implied that in Khomeini’s Iran, religion had been politicized. In contrast, he said, politics needed to be infused with religion, as did economics and the wider society. The tool for this infusion of religion was the fatwa or legal ruling, which would be given with regard to certain key issues. [Al-Safi is saying that the clergy needn't rule, as in Iran, but that religion should have a major influence, through the mechanism of the fatwa].

The Arabic interview is at

20030826-27p10-01.txt/story.html.

*Polish troops moving in to replace the US Marines in the Shiite holy city of Karbala have already come under mortar fire, according to Andrew England of AP. The Monday night incident resulted in no casualties, according to Defense Minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski in Warsaw. He said, “Those were warning shots indicating that there are still people ready to fight for Saddam Hussein’s ideas.” Maybe; but it seems to me that there are few Baathists left in Karbala, and it is more likely that the fire came from radical Shiites seeking to set the right tone in a new relationship with the Poles. The Poles have put the Bulgarians in charge of Karbala city itself, and the US Marines have just handed the city over to Lt. Col. Petko Marinov and his 250 Bulgarian troops. There has already been a roadside bombing of one of their vehicles; again, no casualties.

I find all this Coalition of the Willing business troubling. Bulgarians are 83% Christian and only 12% Muslim, and the government has very bad relations with Muslims they consider ethnic Turks, chasing a lot of Bulgarian Muslims out of the country in recent years. Are these really the people you want in charge of one of the holiest shrines in the Muslim world? They are unlikely to have any Arabists. And, what are they speaking when communicating to the Americans? Russian? I wouldn’t say cultural sensitivity to the sensibilities of Muslims is their strong suit, and that is what we desperately need in Karbala of all places.

See

worldlatest/story/0,1280,-3074257,00.html

and

/1989/WR89/Bulgaria.htm

*Al-Azhar seminary in Cairo, Egypt, among the preeminent Sunni Muslim religious institutions in the world, has issued a fatwa or legal ruling forbidding Muslims from any cooperation with the appointed Iraqi Interim Governing Council, according to IslamOnline. It gives the text as saying, ““The council lacks religious and secular legitimacy, as it had been imposed on the Iraqis under the power of occupation and does not conform to Islam’s established principle of shura (counseling).” The ruling argued for popular sovereignty: “Iraq is an Islamic country whose government should be legitimate and set up in accordance with the principle of Shura.” This language echoes the ruling of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani saying that the delegates to the constitutional convention must be elected rather than appointed by the Americans. Popular sovereignty appears to have become a key legitimizing idea even among conservative clerics in the Middle East.

*The words of Paul Bremer, the civilian administrator of Iraqi, at a recent news conference, according to Australian Broadcasting Co. reporter Geoff Thompson were as follows:

Ambassador Bremer was asked whether it might be more accurate to say that perhaps it was the presence of American forces in Iraq which had turned Iraq into a new battleground in the United States war on terror.

PAUL BREMER: No, it would be completely inaccurate because Iraq under Saddam Hussein for 20 years was identified as a state sponsor of terrorism, correctly in my view. This was a state which sponsored terrorism, it is no longer a state which sponsors terrorism, I don’t sponsor terrorism, I try to defeat it.

Thompson contrasts this denial to the statements made to him in Baghdad of two members of the Interim Governing Council appointed by Bremer:

YOUNADEM KANA: Yeah, for sure it’s a magnet for terrorists, yeah. For sure it’s a magnet for terrorists and especially the most fanatic extremists, let’s say, bin Laden’s group al-Qaeda, for example – yes, it’s a magnet. . . . It’s more easy for them to reach . . . Americans, not only for Americans, for all Coalition forces, even allies. (Kana is the Christian representative on the IGC).

Thompson then quotes Muhyi al-Kateeb [former Iraqi ambassador and more recently proprietor of a gasoline station in the US]:

MUHYI AL-KATEEB: Because we have no control of our borders yet, so it is heaven for terrorism.

MUHYI AL-KATEEB: It is ironic. But this is the reality of it. I mean, our borders are open and they’re very long ones too, and we have a lot of neighbours that don’t like what is going on inside Iraq. So I assume that they are going to use that to, maybe to send some signals to the Americans on the Iraqi soil, unfortunately.

The entire piece is online at:

content/2003/s932829.htm

*For the illegal pilgrim trade of Iranians to the Iraqi shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala, see James Hider’s smart piece in CSM. He points out that this illicit pilgrim trade poses severe security problems. But Iraqi border police and US forces at the moment are unable to do anything about it.

/0827/p17s01-woiq.html

*The Shiite custom of temporary marriage is reappearing in Iraq, according to Hannah Allam of Knight-Ridder. In Islam, marriage is a contract between husband and wife. In Sunni Islam, the contract is for life except if terminated by divorce. In Shiite Islam, there are two kinds of marriage–the lifetime contract, and mut`a (Persian: sigheh) or temporary marriage. In temporary marriage, the contract specifies a time period during which the marriage is valid, after which it lapses. A lot of Western (and Sunni) observers deride temporary marriage as a form of prostitution, but this charge is at least somewhat inaccurate. Children born during a temporary marriage have full rights, and during the term of the marriage the woman is a recognized wife. Americans who shack up with one another for a few months and then move on are basically engaged in mut`a, common-law style, except that US law is usually far less kind to the offspring of these unions. All that said, as it is practiced in contemporary Iran and Iraq, mut`a socially disadvantages women and reinforces patriarchy. I say socially rather than economically because both societies have a lot of war widows, and polygamy and mut`a are ways for them to have husbands in societies where many of the eligible men in their age range were killed in the Iran-Iraq war or other violent conflicts. (The medieval European solution to the problem of there being more women than eligible men was to get them to a nunnery. In contemporary America, there is also a surplus of women, especially in the Vietnam generation; a lot of women are just left without mates.) Of course, in a welfare state where women were truly equal to men, the women would not need to contract temporary marriages or become a second wife to ensure financial survival. But that anyway does not describe Iraq at the moment. I think the practice is on the whole a bad one, but I am just suggesting we not be too quick to condemn the women who adopt it, for most are pretty desperate. See

mld/krwashington/6623752.htm.

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*Today I fulfilled my sad duty to Navy Lt. Kylan Jones-Huffman of putting up an archive of his email messages to me. Kylan was shot dead in al-Hilla while with the Marine expeditionary force on August 21. The archive is large (400 k) and so may load slowly for those with slow connections. I apologize in advance about that. The archive is at [Removed at request of Kylan’s family].

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