Informed Comment

One US Soldier Killed, Nine Wounded

Iraqi guerrillas in two Sunni Arab towns west of Baghdad, Habaniya and Khalidiya, hit two separate US convoys on Monday with roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades. The attacks killed one US soldier and wounded three others. In response to the Khalidiya attack, which pinned US forces down for a while, attack helicopters and jets were called in. The battle lasted eight hours, and appears to have inflicted substantial harm on local residences, causing civilians to flee.

On Sunday, guerrillas had wounded six soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division in Fallujah with a roadside bombing, a US military spokesman announced. I had reported the explosion at Fallujah but at that time had no word of the casualties.

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Homeland Defense Funding Plundered for Iraq

For those who believe that the Iraq War was a major detour from the War on Terror, there is excellent evidence for it if any investigative reporters wanted the story. Major funding for anti-terrorism science programs in the US, already appropriated and given out in contracts, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, has been diverted to Iraq funding. The US is as vulnerable today to a dirty bomb as it was on September 10, 2001. But a high-tech program that would allow the detection of neutrons could have made us safer. That program has been mothballed for the time being by Tom Ridge; it is being alleged by my correspondent that the money is going instead to prop up the fragile US presence in Iraq.

I received the following from a source I consider impeccable. It is appalling.

“An angry scientist at one of the national laboratories gave me some (non-classified) insight into how the Iraq war is being financed.

Clearly, what has happened is that funds intended for other purposes have been diverted to pay for the Iraq war. None of this is classified, but government scientists are prohibited from using government resources–i.e., their computers or their email account–to make it public.”

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Rove should Resign: President Bush and the Wilson Case

It has for some time struck me that despite all the phony talk about “compassionate conservatism,” the Bush team has just plain mean tendencies. The giddy pleasure Bush took in executions used to disgust even fellow Republicans, and it briefly emerged as an issue in the presidential debates in fall of 2000. Then in response to home made bombs in Iraq making hamburger of our brave men and women under arms, Bush said “Bring it on!” (He wanted more mayhem wreaked on our troops?) This streak of sadism has come into public view with the issue of Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s wife. Wilson, a former Foreign Service Officer who served his country with distinction in difficult postings, including Iraq, was asked by the CIA to go to Niger in spring of 2002 to check out the plausibility of the allegation that Iraq was buying uranium.

The CIA was asked to check the story by Vice President Dick Cheney. Wilson had deep experience with Iraq and with West Africa, and was able quickly to examine the structure of the uranium production in Niger, which is under Western control. He concluded that the story was false and implausible, and briefed the CIA to that effect. He was, of course, entirely correct. At the time, he did not know that the allegations about Niger uranium were based on forged documents that surfaced with Italian intelligence and got passed on to the British. The fraudulent documents seemed to show Niger acknowledgment of Iraqi orders for yellowcake uranium in 2000. But they were signed by persons who had not been in office since the late 1980s, and the signatures were clumsy forgeries. Who forged the documents is not known. But my own prime suspects are Ahmad Chalabi, who wanted the US to overthrow Saddam and hand him Iraq on a silver platter, and Ariel Sharon’s intelligence officers, who wanted the US to overthrow Saddam and hand them Iraq on a silver platter.

The CIA reported Wilson’s negative findings to the National Security Council and to Dick Cheney. Since Condi Rice and Dick Cheney don’t hear anything they don’t want to hear, they somehow construed the report as the mere opinion of an unnamed retired foreign service officer (Wilson’s name was not passed up to its superiors by the CIA, which is now highly ironic). Cheney and Rice have both denied knowing anything about Wilson’s report, but given USG procedures these denials are simply not credible. Nor was Wilson the only one who was skeptical. Secretary of State Colin Powell was apparently urged to include the Niger story in his presentation to the UN before the war, and angrily refused. If Powell knew it was bullshit, then so did Cheney and Rice.

Some reports indicate that it was Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and the Pentagon Office of Special Plans that kept the Niger uranium story in play, and that Wolfowitz urged Bush to put it into his State of the Union address in January of 2003.

See:

jl071703.htm

After the Iraq War, at a time when the Bush administration was still alleging that Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction would soon be found, Wilson wrote an op-ed for the New York Times detailing his mission. Since Bush and Cheney had continued to publicize the fraudulent story about Niger uranium and a post-1998 Iraqi nuclear weapons program (which did not exist), Wilson’s account was extremely damaging to them and deprived them of plausible deniability. Without a public account from Wilson of his mission, Bush administration officials could pretend, as Paul Wolfowitz had, that the intelligence was just murky. But if a retired FSO could put the matter to rest with a brief excursion, and if International Atomic Energy Commission official Muhammad el-Baradei could see the forged Niger documents for what they were immediately, then the intelligence was not murky at all. It was crystal clear. There was a fraud going on.

In revenge, two high White House officials started telling journalists in July that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative specializing in tracking Weapons of Mass Destruction. The journalists (six or so according to the WP) declined to run the story because it seemed to them irrelevant to Wilson’s allegations. Of course, it was. Feminists will appreciate a possible subtext here, which is that if Valerie Plame got the CIA to send her husband on the Niger mission, then somehow that downgraded its seriousness–it originated with a woman and could be seen as nepotism. (We won’t bring up Lynn Cheney here).

Only the curmudgeonly and apparently entirely unprincipled columnist Robert Novak ran with the story, outing Valerie Plame as a CIA operative. (“Operative” is what he called her in his column then. Today he said he was told she was just an analyst. This claim cannot be true, because he used “operative” in print, and also in a conversation with Wilson). This was on July 14

robertnovak/printrn20030714.shtml

The outing of Ms. Plame as a CIA operative was an attempt to punish Joe Wilson and to send a strong signal to other potential whistle blowers. It is unpleasant to be outed as working for the CIA. It ends your career and makes it impossible to go on consulting in that field. It also potentially endangers large numbers of friends and associates, who are outed along with you. The vindictive character of the action is clear. One reporter told Joe Wilson that after the Novak piece appeared, Bush political strategist Karl Rove said, “Joe Wilson’s wife is fair game.” Wilson initially thought that Rove’s remark might suggest that Rove himself authorized the leak. But on reflection he now admits that it is not conclusive, and Rove could simply have approved of the action ex post facto.

Since the Iraq War was a get-up job based entirely on fraudulent or shaky intelligence that was further slanted in their public presentation of it by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney and Bush, there must be many US government employees who could tell tales on the administration’s dishonesty and incompetence. The White House officials who outed Ms. Plame were telling them that the full weight of the US government would come down on them like a ton of bricks if they dared do any such thing.

Of course, what those two high White House officials did is highly illegal under the 1982 Intelligence Identities Act

bushinfopolicies/protection.html.

Now CIA director George Tenet has formally requested a Justice Department investigation, and the FBI has been assigned to the case. Some Democrats are demanding a special counsel, since John Ashcroft is highly unlikely to ferret out or punish Bush administration White House officials.

What I would say is that Karl Rove should be made to resign if he said the words attributed to him, “Joe Wilson’s wife is fair game.” He was condoning the breaking of US law and the endangering of US intelligence personnel and assets, especially in the field of Ms. Plame’s specialty, the tracking of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

And that is the greatest irony of all. Ms. Plame, who really was working to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction, has been ruined by persons who only pretended to do so for political gain, and whose invasion of Iraq did nothing to make the US one whit safer.

Meanwhile, Joe Wilson is a genuine hero, who has spoken truth to power and refused to be intimidated. Anyone in the US government who has any admiration for him and any gumption at all, and who cares about our country, should emulate his example if they have further evidence for deliberate Bush administration discounting of solid intelligence in favor of their stock cover story on Iraq. Make it public. Now.

For those who want to follow this story in detail, see Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo at

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/

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Jostling for the Vacant IGC seat of Aqila al-Hashimi

It may seem unseemly, but political forces are already attempting to place their candidate on the IGC as a successor to Aqila al-Hashimi, assassinated last week. CPA head Paul Bremer is said to want an independent professional women with the sort of standing and competency enjoyed by Dr. al-Hahsimi. Many feel that she should be a strong personality committed to feminist principles. The IGC will also probably insist that she be Shiite, so as to preserver the sectarian balance on that body.

Possibilities:

Safiya al-Suhail, whose father was assassinated by Saddam’s secret police in 1993 in Beirut.

The Islamic Democratic Tendency is attempting to push its candidate.

The Women’s League likewise is trying to get the seat.

Another name that is mentioned is Fawziya al-`Atiya, a renouned sociologist.

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Drafting of Constitution and Adopting it may take 18 Months or More

The Constitutional Preparatory Commission in Iraq, which was supposed to make its report on Tuesday recommending how the new Iraqi constitution should be drafted, has failed to reach agreement. The main issues are whether the drafters are to be elected or appointed, and how much the constitution will incorporate Islamic law. The Commission, which has been working on this problem for weeks, consulting with Iraqi notables and holding town hall meetings in various cities, dumped the hard issues back in the lap of the Interim Governing Council (al-Zaman, AFP).

The IGC took weeks to decide that it could not appoint one of its members president, and would instead have a cumbersome 9-man rotating presidency with each incumbent serving for one month. This deeply divided body, which is averse to making tough decisions, is highly unlikely to take the bull by the horns and be decisive in choosing a method.

Even once a constitutional convention is called, Iraqis on the IGC are saying that it is highly unrealistic to expect it to finish its work within 6 months, as called for by US Secretary of State Colin Powell. They think more like a year will be necessary. And Adil Abdul Mahdi of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq said that it could take four to seven months just to adopt the constitution! Powell believes that elections could be held six months after the constitution was adopted, which would put us in late summer, 2005. But it seems entirely possible that the process could be delayed into 2006. The Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq belittled Powell’s deadline of six months (it is represented on the IGC by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim).

The IGC is divided about whether the drafters of the constitution should be elected or appointed, with the Shiites tending to favor election (they are 60% of the population and so would dominate the process). Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani issued a fatwa last summer insisting on the election of the drafters. Fuad Masum, a Kurdish member of the PUK and first prime minister of autonomous Kurdistan, is chair of the constitutional committee, and he said that although it would be better to elect the drafters, if that would take too long another method must be found. In contrast, Ibrahim Jaafari, an IGC member from the expatriate London branch of the Shiite al-Da`wa Party said that Sistani’s fatwa was in accordance with Islamic law and was supported by the majority of Iraq’s political parties.

Although the IGC itself is largely secular or moderate, having been appointed by the Americans, many, many Iraqis want the constitution to be based on Islamic law. Izz al-Din Salim, a former member of the Shiite al-Da`wa Party from Basra, called “unlikely” the prospect that the constitution would be based on Islamic law or shariah, according to al-Zaman. (The Basra branch of al-Da`wa is said to have rejected Khomeini’s notion of the rule of the jurisprudent, and Salim may in any case now be an independent). He added that the constitution must recognize the pluralism and religious diversity of Iraq.

Apparently the US wants the constitution drafted while it is still in control, to make sure it reflects the principles the US wants to impose on Iraq, including extreme laissez faire economics, parliamentary democracy, and safeguards for the rights of women and minorities. But if the Iraqis drag the process of drafting the constitution out for a year or more, and if elections are two or three years off, that would leave a highly unpopular Coalition Provisional Government in place for a very long time, trying the patience of the Iraqi public.

The US should just re-adopt a non-monarchical version of the 1925 constitution and hold elections under it, and let the drafting of a new constitution unfold over coming years in accordance with the desires of the Iraqi public. That way, we could have a new, elected, Iraqi government as soon as January, and the severe problems of legitimacy would be solved. The US will lose some control, and will risk having Iraqis elected that it doesn’t like, but the parliament will be diverse enough to make it hard for, say, a pro-Iranian faction to just take over the country.

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One Polish Soldier Killed, Four US Troops Wounded

Guerrillas in the town of Iskandariya, 45 km south of Baghdad, attacked US troops with a home made bomb on Sunday at 11 am, wounding two. (Note that this attack occurred, not in the usual northern Sunni Arab areas, but in a Shiite region on the road to Karbala.) Guerrillas at Taji just north of Baghdad, blew up a similar explosive device at 9:45 am on Sunday, wounding two soldiers who were taken to a combat support hospital. A bomb went off near Falluja as a US military convoy passed, but no word yet of any casualities. In al-Hilla in the south, armed Iraqis refused to be searched by Polish soldiers, who shot and killed one of them when he fired on them. One Polish soldier was reported killed according to al-Zaman. (- AFP). While the discovery by US troops of two big weapons caches over the weekend is in a way good news, it is also very worrying that there were still large weapons depots of this sort still not under US control 5 months after the fall of the regime! SAM-7 surface to air missiles were among the munitions discovered, which can be used against civilian aircraft (as was done by al-Qaeda in Mombasa last year).

In the wake of Saturday’s rocket attacks on Baghdad’s Rashid Hotel (long a place that Westerners congregated), the evacuation of remaining UN personnel appears to have been accelerated. Many aid agencies have now pulled out of Iraq, at a time when malnourishment is widespread and sources of income have dried up.

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Constitutional Committee in Basra

The Preparatory Committee for Drafting the Constitution met Sunday in Basra, chaired by Salah al-Battat. Attending members were Drs. Muhammad al-Muzaffar, Mahdi Jad Mahdi, and Safa’ al-Din al-Safi. Sayyid `Ali `Abd al-Hakim made opening remarks in which it was mentioned that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani had prepared a prototype constitution, which the committee was studying. He said he was sure that the constitution would reflect the spirit of the Islamic legal system, and that it would be an indigenous document. He said the committee was holding serial town meetings, having been in Nasiriya on Saturday. (-al-Zaman). (Note that the reporter’s name is `Abd al-Battat, and he may be a relative of the committee chair). The preparatory committee’s work has so far been insufficiently transparent, and anyway, the Interim Governing Council should just have elections for a constitutional convention and get on with it. They have surely taken enough soundings by now.

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