*Guerrillas killed at least one US soldier at Diraa Dijla, west of Baghdad, and wounded others, on Weds. according to Reuters/via al-Hayat. Other guerrillas launched a rocket propelled grenade attack on US troops near Samarra, wounding two. The Washington Post reports that such attacks are frequent throughout Iraq, but most fail because the troops are out of range or because the ammunition is a dud. One soldier talked about a grenade bouncing off his helmet that turned out to be a dud. Now, that's what I call a lucky man. The attacks that wreak no damage tend never to be reported in the press.

I think our troops are under a lot more stress and plain anxiety than anyone in the US can imagine. I lived in Beirut during the first years of the civil war, and that was when I learned the meaning of the Arabic phrase, "white fear." It's when the mortar shell or sniper fire could come from anywhere, any time, with total unpredictability. I remember volunteering at the AUB hospital and a physician told me about operating that day on a little boy with a bullet wound in his stomach. His parents had sent him out to buy bread, assuming that a sniper would not shoot a child. He died on the operating table. The US should swallow some pride, get a UN resolution authorizing the rebuilding of Iraq, and transfer a lot of our guys out of there, replacing them with troops more acceptable to the locals or with Iraqi troops. In his testimony yesterday, Wolfowitz all but admitted that we are looking at troop levels of about what we have (nearly 150,000) in Iraq for the next year. Wolfowitz also argued against "the wrong kind" of UN resolution, presumably one that would lessen the US role in reshaping Iraq. It was easier to listen to anti-UN rants before it turned out that the Security Council's skepticism on WMD was entirely justified . . .

*The rotating chairmanship of the Interim Governing Council among nine members is a sad commentary but entirely predictable. You couldn't have Kurdish leader Talabani serve as president without also having his rival Barzani do it. (Barzani is an example of how anything can be forgiven; he collaborated with Saddam as recently as 1995-1996 to take Irbil for his Kurdistan Democratic Party with the help of Baath tanks from Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.) So that's two. Then, you couldn't have the Shiite revolutionary al-Da`wa Party (Ibrahim Jaafari) do it without also having the rival Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Abdul Aziz al-Hakim) do it. That's four. Then you have to balance secular Shiite Ahmad Chalabi with former Shiite former Baathist officer Iyad Allawi. And, of course, the two Shiites have to be balanced by Sunnis Adnan Pachachi (secular) and Muhsin Abdul Hamid (religious) of the Iraqi Islamic Party. And I guess Muhammad Bahr al-`Ulum gets on because he is respected by the others. So with all the balancing of rivals, you end up with nine presidents. Each serves for a month in turn, guaranteeing that little is likely to be accomplished.

They are going in alphabetical order, like divas in a Hollywood blockbuster. (The order is by the Arabic alphabet and by first names. Ibrahim Jaafari in Arabic begins with an alif for Ibrahim, the first letter of the alphabet (alif supports the glottal stop, hamza, which can serve as a chair for any of the three vowels, the equivalents of a, i or u). By my reckoning, next month it should be Ahmad Chalabi, and then Iyad Allawi, then maybe Jalal Talabani. They don't say whether they are going by straight alphabetical order or by the abjad system, which is the letters ordered according to their numerical value, as in the Kabbalah's gematria. Either way, the jim of Jalal follows closely on the alif. Of course, it may taken them a while to decide whether to use the ordinary or abjad order, so Jaafari may get a proper term while they work it out. They kept saying they would appoint a cabinet of ministers to run the government ministries within two weeks, but now it looks like it is slipping to more like six weeks. Since the US can hardly extricate itself until these politicians manage to write a constitution, I am depressed about the pace of accomplishment so far. If they can't decide on a chairman that would serve for, say, 6 months, how are they going to make timely decisions about a constitutional convention? And will it be able to frame a constitution in six months, so that elections can happen in 2004 or early 2005?

*Adnan Pachachi, leader of the Independent Democratic Bloc and member of the Interim Governing Council, denied rumors that he had met with Israeli Labor leader Shimon Peres. He said they were lies and calumnies. He reaffirmed that Iraq would not recognize Israel until there was a Palestinian state.

*Hundreds of Iraqi unemployed continued their sit-in at a building opposite Coalition HQ in downtown Baghdad, according to Al-Sharq al-Awsat. They are said to be organized by the Unemployed Workers' Union. They want jobs or $100 a month in unemployment benefits . . . Al-Jazeera says that hundreds of them protested their economic hardship on Wednesday. Also on Wednesday, 1,000 demonstrators came out in Karbala to protest "increasing drug abuse and distribution of pornographic movies in the governorate." (Drug use and drug smuggling do seem to be an increasing problem).

*The US has cancelled plans to appoint a female court judge in Najaf because of protests by clerics and by lawyers, including women, according to the NYT. Rachel Roe, who is in charge of rebuilding the Najaf court system, said "I don't think that government institutions should be controlled by religious organizations. I was under the impression that Iraq was going to have a secular government. I might have been wrong." Uh, the likelihood that Najaf was going to be secular was rather low. The country, now that's a different matter. Even at a national level, you're likely to see a strong influence of fundamentalist interpretations of Islamic law. Interestingly, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani appears to have issued a fatwa that did *not* exclude the possibility of a female court judge (this appointment would have been to the secular system, anyway). See http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/31/international/worldspecial/31JUDG.html?ex=1060228800&en=261960b254fb6160&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE

*Good news about the partial revival of the southern Iraqi marshlands by good rains and local people's efforts in destroying dams is reported by Richard Hottelet for CSM. Saddam's destruction of those marshes and of the Marsh Arabs or Madan tribes as a people is among his more horrific acts, classed by some international lawyers as a form of genocide. It is unlikely that they can be revived to more than 45% of their original extent, and it is unclear that the scattered Madan will return in any large numbers. Hottelet reports of one fisherman that when he saw the water running again, he said it was like looking on the face of God. See http://www.modbee.com/24hour/opinions/story/956597p-6696672c.html




For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*Here's my post from Gulf2000 today:

What happened in Karbala this past weekend still seems a little murky. I
am amazed that some enterprising reporter hasn't gotten the story out (I
haven't seen a really good account in the Arabic press or the Western).
Although it is murky, it is potentially much more significant than the
deaths of Saddam's sons.

There was a demonstration on Saturday against Marine patrols coming too
close to the shrine of Imam Husayn, among the holiest sites of Shiite
Islam. The demonstration turned ugly. The Marines fired tear gas, and
one cannister hit the shrine itself. Iraqi demonstrators maintained that
the Marines killed one demonstrator. On Sunday the crowd assembled again,
for another demonstration. It also turned ugly. About nine Shiites were
wounded by US gunfire in front of the Imam Husayn Shrine. Another man may
or may not have been killed, depending on which wire service you follow.
The demonstrations were probably provoked by followers of Muqtada al-Sadr.
The Marines maintain that the man who was killed was armed and had fired
on them. I think it likely that someone did fire on them, to provoke them
into injuring protesters. They fell for it.

Syed Saleem Shahzad, writing for the Asia Times, sees the
events in Karbala as part of a pattern of anti-US forces learning ways of
provoking them and encourages popular discontent. He thinks its emergence
in the South is an ominous sign, given the emergence of well coordinated
guerrilla networks in the north. He maintains that the Pakistani jihadi
organization Ansar al-Islam has infiltrated Kurdish regions and is
preparing attacks.

(See
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EG30Ak02.html.

He adds of the Shiites:

"According to US authorities the emerging personality of firebrand Moqtada
Sadr, a Shi'ite imam, is widely seen as a new threat in southern Iraq. The
new administration is skeptical about his real designs as he does not seem
to be interested in politics but to be motivated by extreme religious
obsessions. His followers consider him a mehdi (a promised messiah before
the arrival of Christ, according to Islamic faith) and he seems to
encourage these trends. There are suspicions that he is stirring up
anti-US sentiment with his vehement speeches to further his religious
ends."

This is the first report I have seen of Muqtada being considered the
Mahdi, and it is possible, though I suspect it is a minority view. If
true, it confirms the sectarian character of his movement.

Ned Parker of AFP reports today that some of the problems derive from
misbehaving US troops, who are beating up suspects and over-reacting.
Some are frustrated, others just bullies. But it seems to me
that in Karbala the Marines were just tricked, with someone deliberately
firing on them from the crowd or just beyond them, to produce this result.

http://www.haveeru.com.mv/english/news_show.phtml?id=1916

Shahzad says, ""A US official says: "The Islamic groups in Karbala and
other southern cities have been advised to keep their demonsrations
peaceful and restricted. If these demonstrations continue to be violent
and to be held every day, US forces would consider them as a threat for
them and would be justified in taking action."

If the US military does not know better than to fire on civilian
protesters in front of the Shrine of Imam Husayn, it is a very, very bad
sign for the future. Those nine wounded and one (or two) killed at that
particular site have enormous anti-US propaganda value for the Sadrists,
Hizbullah in Lebanon, and the hardliners in Iran. So far, urban Shiites
have not proved willing to come out in a big way for the repeated Sadrist
demonstrations, which have been 10,000 strong at most and more often have
peaked at 2,500, in Baghdad, Najaf and Basra. But Shiites killed at the
shrine of Husayn, that has the potential to get people out. It would be
as though foreign occupying troops in New York shot down protesters in
front the the Statue of Liberty.

I do not think the reaction will come in the short term. But people are
going to start keeping accounts of grudges against the US if this sort of
thing continues.



*Helena Cobban remonstrates gently with me at her Weblog over my comment, "Look, I want the US to succeed in Iraq, just as I think all responsible Americans do." She asks what I mean by "success" and whether I think it is unpatriotic to hope for failure. Her comments are at: http://justworldnews.org/

The bottom line is that I was very conflicted over the war in the first place. I don't like wars, on principle, and think they should be a last resort. The only wars I've wholeheartedly supported were the US interventions against Milosevic in the Balkans (to stop a genocide against Muslims and Croats), and the Afghanistan campaign, to get rid of those horrific al-Qaeda training camps. Helena accuses me of a bit of American triumphalism. I fear I am far too cynical and critical for that. But I freely admit that September 11 had a big impact on me, and I am a hawk in the war on terror. If I had been a younger man, I would probably have joined the military on September 12. I know all about blowback and the Reagan administration policies that helped set that stage, but the practical task of keeping more buildings from being blown up is in my view a noble and heroic one and I a make no apologies for that much patriotism.

I don't think this Iraq war was a last resort, and I became increasingly uncomfortable with the way the war fever was whipped up with very dubious claims by powerful Iraqi expatriates and the right in Washington. However, and this is the big "H," I have lived with Baathist Iraq since I got into the Middle East field, and being a specialist in Shiism and a friend to Iraqi Shiites meant that I knew exactly what the Saddam regime had done to them. So, I refused to come out against the war. I was against the way the war was pursued--the innuendo, the exaggerations, the arrogant unilateralism. But I could not bring myself to be against the removal of that genocidal regime from power.

Now that the war has taken place and Iraq is under Anglo-American occupation (that is the legal situation according to the UN and even according to US officials), it is important that Iraqis aren't double-crossed yet again by the US. Americans, having caused the old order to collapse, have a responsibility to nurture a new one before they decamp. The new order should be a parliamentary democracy with an independent judiciary and press. (Actually, both of the latter are already showing signs of vigor). It would be unfortunate if Iraq were just delivered to nouveau riche robber barons, as happened in post-Soviet Russia. I am therefore heartened to hear that Bremer is taking seriously the idea of an Alaska-style dividend for ordinary Iraqis from the country's petroleum.

It would be highly irresponsible for the US military simply to suddenly withdraw from the country at this juncture. I have called (on national television, some months ago!) for the US to get a UN mandate for its reconstruction efforts and to conduct them multilaterally. I don't think this way of proceeding would in any way represent a US failure in Iraq, quite the opposite. But internationalizing the effort is different from leaving the Iraqis high and dry and at the mercy of budding militias. Helena and I were both in Beirut, and I can't imagine she wants that fate for the Iraqis. That is the sort of outcome that I called "irresponsible." I didn't bring up anything about patriotism one way or another.

As for the "white man's burden," the fact is that tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, have died trying to overthrow the Baath, and the war was spearheaded by the Iraqi expatriate community (4 million strong). My Iraqi neighbors in Dearborn staged a celebratory march of 100,000 persons when Saddam fell. There is a real sense in which Iraqis convinced the US to wage this war and rebuild their country, at significant expense to the US. So I don't think 19th century binary oppositions of a racial sort are really very helpful to analyzing the situation, and they hold a real potential of depriving Iraqis of their own agency. And, if you listen to Iraqis like Muhammad Bahr al-`Ulum, they don't think that the UN or the 96% were terribly helpful in stopping Saddam's genocide.

The evidence I have been able to gather suggests to me that the Iraqi health system is back to functioning at a basic level, and that the hospitals have been resupplied with medicines and equipment on the whole. No one I know is suggesting that there is a medical health emergency in Iraq. The sanctions regime had been manipulated by the Baath so as to cause enormous harm to the health of Iraqi children, and this harm is now ceasing. Iraq is now pumping over a million barrels of oil a day, and there is reason to hope that it will be back up to pre-war levels in the near future, providing income that can be used to ensure public health, schooling, and so forth.

Helena asks three questions:

*1. He seems to be arguing that a state of affairs in which Iraqis can replicate India's success" would, for him, constitute a US "success" in Iraq. Does he have any reason to believe that that goal is the one that this US administration is actually pursuing there? In particular, does he have any reason to believe that the political empowerment of the Iraqis themselves is what the Bushites are aiming at?

I see camps in the Bush administration. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz seemed to want to just turn Iraq over to corrupt financier Ahmad Chalabi, making him the Karzai of Iraq, without very much evident concern for whether Chalabi would ever conduct free and fair elections. The State Department and the CIA, in contrast, don't like Chalabi at all, and have tried to sideline him. Bremer, who is closer to State, diluted Chalabi's power. The Governing Council Bremer appointed would not even let Chalabi address the UN, giving that privilege to Pachachi and Bahr al-`Ulum instead. Bremer at first was going to try to be proconsul of Iraq for two years, but the outbreak of guerrilla war in the Baathist/ Islamist triangle forced him to give up some power in favor of an Iraqi transitional governing council.

The upshot is that the Bushies are divided as to what they want in Iraq, and that they probably can't have what they want, anyway. The best exit strategy for Bush is now just to hold elections in 2004 before the US elections, and turn power over to an elected Iraqi government. So, yes, I think it now looks as though Bremer, Powell and Bush all favor Iraq having a parliamentary democracy in the short term. I have no illusions as to why they have ultimately tilted in this direction, but I think they have. And if they don't, every evidence is that the main Iraqi political forces will demand it in ways that the Americans will find difficult to resist.

* 2. How does he assess the considerable weight of counter-evidence that there is out there, regarding this administration's policies in Iraq, elsewhere in the Middle East (where "empowerment" of local pro-democracy forces seems nowhere to be on the effective agenda), or at home here in the US (ditto)?

Things are changing, and Iraq policy represents a break with the past efforts to shore up regimes like that of Mubarak in Egypt or the royal family in Saudia. The Washington elite has decided that those regimes are breeding Islamist terrorism that targets the US, and that they have to be reformed in the direction of parliamentary democracy. Thus, it seems to me clear that Musharraf held the Pakistani elections of October, 2002, in large part under pressure from the US, and the recent election in Bahrain was also supported by the US.

Of course, parliamentary governance can be more or less democratic. Domestically, the Bushies favor a form of it that melds it with plutocracy. (This is only possible, however, because the non-rich don't bother to vote in sufficient numbers and so allow themselves to be screwed over). I am not sure an Iraqi haute bourgeoisie unconnected to the Baath even exists, and so it will be difficult for them to play the plutocrat card in Iraq. Bremer had it explained to him that Iraq is a welfare state, and if you just charge in and abolish all that, it will make for trouble. Bremer is said to have been convinced. As I said, I don't think the outcome is entirely his to decide, anyway (it is not clear that Gen. MacArthur was trying to produce a corporatist state in Japan, either).

All I would say is that parliamentary governance is a good start, and it is a system that has the potential to become more democratic if the people become exercised enough about it, whereas the Baath Party was just going to go on producing its mass graves and destroying the Marsh Arabs, etc. If the no-fly zone had been dropped by the US, the Kurds would have been massacred in an instant.

3. Equally or even more importantly: How about the precedent set for Iraqis, for that 96 percent of the world's people who are not US citizens--and for the four percent of us who are US citizens-- if the US administration is seen as "successful" in imposing its will on the actions of a large and distant sovereign nation purely through the force of arms and the waging of a war that was quite unjustified by any criteria of "just war" or international law?

If the US acted illegally in international law, then the international community should punish it. (In fact, the refusal of India, Egypt, France and Germany to send troops despite US pleading is already a form of punishment). But the Iraqi people do not deserve to be punished, and the rebuilding of the country so that it ends up being a parliamentary democracy with a free press and an independent judiciary would be a good thing for Iraqis, the world, and even for the US.

My main concern is that a success in Iraq not encourage further adventurism. I think, however, that the furor over the missing WMD, the outbreak of the guerrilla war, and the unexpectedly high costs of the Iraqi occupation have made it rather unlikely that Congress will give out any carte blanches for going on to Damascus and Tehran. I don't think it is very likely that the neocons are actually going to get what they wanted in Iraq. Pachachi has already said that Baghdad won't recognize Israel until the Arab League does. The forthcoming Iraqi parliament is going to have lots of Sunni and Shiite Islamists in it. The Lebanese Hizbullah is likely to pick up parliamentary allies. This looming failure of the project may disillusion the architects of it, themselves.

I suppose I just think the world is complex, and even wrong-headed actions can sometimes have beneficial outcomes. I don't deny that it is entirely possible that the Iraq adventure will go very badly wrong, and then you get Lebanon 1975-1989 or Iran 1978-79. I just personally hope that doesn't happen.




For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*One US soldier was killed and three others severely wounded on Monday when a guerrilla dropped a grenade on their vehicle as it went under a bridge in the Sunni center of Baghdad.

*The claimant to the Iraqi throne, Sharif `Ali b. al-Husain, visited the Shiite holy city of Najaf on Monday, receiving a mixed reaction there according to AP. He was admitted to an audience with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. The two of them issued a statement calling for an elected Interim Governing Council, rather than the appointed one that is now in place. According to AFP, he statement spoke of the "need for the restoration of national sovereignty in Iraq through free elections" and insisted, "legitimacy comes from the wish of the people and not by designation." (It is actually quite a spectacle--a would-be king and an ayatollah insisting on popular sovereignty! The American and French revolutions are still alive in the world.) Al-Zaman says they also called upon the US to address expeditiously the pressing security and economic problems facing the country.

It is interesting to me that Sistani agreed to see Sharif Ali at all. I don't think most Shiites want a Sunni monarchy. (The enthusiasts in the Najaf crowd were actually tribesmen from the countryside who see the monarchy as an element of their traditionalism). The Shiites did not do very well during the last monarchy, imposed by the British in 1922 and lasting until 1958, when it was overthrown. But Sistani is looking for a Middle Path between the two extremes of Western domination and Khomeinist radicalism. He wants Islamic law or shariah to be the law of the land, but does not want the Shiite clerics to be government officials. He wants the Anglo-American presence ended as soon as possible but does not want it replaced by Sadrist vigilantes. He wants an elected government and an elected constitutional convention. He has been willing to meet with Iraqi politicians who share those goals, but has declined to see American figures such as Paul Bremer and Paul Wolfowitz. It is significant that he joined with Sharif Ali in calling for the Americans to improve the economy. That is quite a different message than the Sadrist one that the US should leave yesterday.

*"I am an enemy to the Americans as long as they remain in Iraq," Muqtada al-Sadr told the al-Arabiyyah satellite television channel on Monday, according to al-Hayat. He characterized the "Mahdi Army" he wants to create as an "unarmed" force that would protect the religious institutions. He continued to reject the idea of cooperating with the appointed Interim Governing Council, calling for a referendum in which the Iraqi people could decide whether or not they want an Islamic government. (Well, if a California governor can be deposed and elected by referundum . . . ). Asked if he would run for Iraqi president, he said it would be up to the Iraqi people to make him president or not.

*Paul Wolfowitz was quoted in the Washington Post insisting that the Iraq campaign is "central" to the "war on terror." He also admitted on Sunday that intelligence about terrorism is "intrinsically murky," as a way of replying to the charge that he hyped a non-existent link between Saddam's Iraq and al-Qaeda before 9/11. My advice to Dr. Wolfowitz would be to give up on this whole line of argument. It will just end up discrediting him and the administration altogether. Saddam and Bin Laden were not in bed with one another, and everyone knows they were not. If anything, the lid that Saddam had kept on Sunni radicalism in Iraq has now been blown off, and US military spokesmen like Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez are openly admitting that Iraq is becoming a magnet for terrorists. The US has given al-Qaeda and its analogs a new arena in which to play.

Look, I want the US to succeed in Iraq, just as I think all responsible Americans do. The war was not justifiable on grounds of an immediate threat to US security. But it still may have been a worthwhile enterprise if it really can break the logjam in the region created by authoritarianism, patrimonial cronyism, creaky national socialism in the economy, and political censorship and massive repression. [Not to mention just ending the US economic sanctions, which were hurting ordinary Iraqis and killing children.] If Iraqis can just do so much as replicate India's success in holding regular elections and in maintaining a relatively independent judiciary and press, they would pioneer a new way of being Arab and modern. (The earlier experiments with parliamentary governance of the 1920s, 30s and 40s were marred by the dominance of very large landlords, a class now largely gone, who did not permit genuine democracy). The US needed to redeem itself from earlier complicity in genocide against the Kurds and the Shiites (first against the Kurds in 1988 when the US was allied with Saddam, and then against both groups in spring of 1991 when the US stood aside and watched it happen even though they could have interdicted Saddam's helicopter gunships).

A little humility, a little seeking of redemption, a little doing good for others. Those things could make a convincing rationale for the current project. But not a war on terrorism.

*The Bush administration nominated Daniel Pipes to the US Institute for Peace, but the nomination has with good justification been put on hold by the Senate and the Jerusalem Post is complaining that the administration is not figting for Pipes. In other words, they are cutting their losses. A lot of Arab Americans vote Republican, and this misstep of Bush had deeply angered them. To see why, look at the entry on the affair at TomPaine.com, which reports that Pipes says there are no differences between radical terrorists and the Islamic people: "It would be like saying there were good Nazis and bad Nazis." My suspicion is that the reporter got him wrong, and he spoke of "Islamists," not "the Islamic people." He has said before that he thinks 15% of Muslims are Islamists, and that the body of ideas borne by Islamists produces terror. This would be like saying that the Southern Baptists are directly responsible for the Branch Dravidians and the killing of abortion doctors, or that Orthodox Judaism is responsible for the terrorist actions of Gush Emunim and other Settler militants on the West Bank. When challenged, Pipes just says you can't compare Muslim fundamentalism to its Jewish and Christian counterparts. He doesn't say why. And, his refusal of comparison contradicts the findings of the Fundamentalism Project done at the University of Chicago, which found broadly similar elements in fundamentalisms in various religions. Pipes is not exactly interested in social science, however. A lot of the Senate opposition to his nomination came from his McCarthyite Campus Watch project. It's a good lesson: if you want to mainstream yourself, you can't do things that make you look like a raving maniac. (Truth in advertising: I was one of the academics Pipes wanted to have everyone spy on.) For the Tom Paine link see Losing Hearts and Minds.

*An excellent profile of the US struggle with Muqtada al-Sadr in Najaf has been written by UPI correspondent Pamela Hess. She, like Anthony Shadid of the WP, refers to the interesting cooperation between Muqtada and Sunni fundamentalist Ahmad Kubeisi, who told his followers to attent Muqtada's sermon last Friday in Kufa. But, I think she has too uncritically accepted some of the things alleged to her about Muqtada by his enemies. For instance, she says he fled to Iran after his father's murder in the late '90s and only came back in April of 2003. All the reporting I've seen, including in Arabic sources, says that he went underground inside Iraq; and, he certainly was there in March of this year. In fact, he taunts Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim for having left, which he couldn't do if he himself had also fled abroad. I also don't think Muqtada is 22. Even just looking at his photos, you can see he is at least in his late 20s. See http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20030728-011659-8800r.



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*5 more US troops were killed over the past weekend in Iraq, bringing the July total to 27. On Sunday, a guerrilla launched a grenade attack on 3 US soldiers guarding a children's hospital in Baquba, killing them. Another US military man was ambushed by a sniper south of Baghdad. Baquba is the capital of Diyala, an ethnically mixed region in the east near Iran. There has been trouble between US troops and the Badr Corps there, and one hopes this grenade attack is not a sign of increased Shiite militancy toward the US. The attacker(s) could well have been Sunni.

*One man was killed and nine people were wounded by US Marines on Sunday at Karbala, a Shiite shrine city and the site of the mausoleum of Imam Husayn (martyred grandson of the Prophet Muhammad). The incident began on Saturday, when crowds gathered to protest a rumor that US troops were encroaching on the Shrine. The Marines at some point fired tear gas at the crowd, and a cannister hit the shrine. The demonstration on Sunday was held to protest this perceived affront to the shrine. It, too, turned violent. The Marines tried firing into the air, but ultimately shot into the crowd. This news is very, very bad. It may be that the rumor of the encroachments was planted by the Sadr Movement, which is trying to whip up opposition to the US among Shiites. The technique of provoking a violent demonstration that results in deaths, and then having that death be the occasion for another demonstration the next day or the next week, with its own potential for casualties, was used in 1978 by Shiite opponents of the Shah in Iran. Ultimately the demonstrations got so big they turned into a revolution. While it is early days for such a movement against the Bremer administration, the US is certainly vulnerable to this technique. And, all Shiites throughout Iraq and throughout Lebanon, Iran, Bahran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc., are going to be deeply angered at the US when they hear of the deaths of nine protesters in front of the shine of Imam Husayn. This particular set of incidents may or may not build toward a movement, but they are windows into the worst case scenario that could face a US military force in Iraq that was widely perceived to have overstayed its welcome.

*The tribal leaders of Hilla, Najaf and al-Diwaniya, according to al-Zaman, have asked Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani to issue a fatwa forbidding the carrying of arms in the shrine of Imam Husayn and in the shrine of Imam Ali. This call is a criticism of Muqtada al-Sadr, whose often armed followers have been jockeying for control of the two shrines.

Muqtada denounced Sistani and the other major ayatollahs in Najaf in his sermon on Friday for declining to call for an end to what he calls the US occupation of Iraq, and for maintaining political neutrality. The Friday Prayer leaders at the al-Ahmadi and al-Muhammadiya mosques, and that of al-Kazimiya (a suburb of Baghdad) rejected Muqtada's call for opposition on the grounds that it is a duty to preserve the lives of the believers.





For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*Iraqi guerillas killed another three US soldiers near Mosul on Thursday in an ambush on an armored convoy. This brings to five the number killed in the past two days in that area, in the wake of the deaths of Qusay and Uday. It seems likely that Baath loyalists have redoubled their efforts, either seeking revenge or seeking to bolster their own morale.

*Cabinet ministers of the new Iraqi transitional government will be appointed within two weeks, according to Interim Governing Council member Muhammad Bahr al-`Ulum. Some ministries may be reconfigured, and some from the Baath era may be abolished. US civil administrator Paul Bremer also pledged that electricity would be completely restored and a new army would be in the process of formation within two months. (Note that Iraq can only produce 2/3s of the electricity it needs without the building of more electrical plants; this is a heritage of the neglect of infrastructure by Saddam).

*Meanwhile, Adnan Pachachi (another prominent IGC member) says that Iraq will recover its sovereignty within 12 to 18 months, according to Asharq al-Awsat. This was at a press conference of 3 IGC members in London, with UK Foreign Minister Jack Straw. Aqila al-Hashimi, another member, confirmed that all the IGC appointees agreed that the most urgent consideration was an early end to foreign occupation. I saw Christopher Hitchens on television objecting to calling it an occupation, and I know US military personnel in Iraq don't like the word. I agree that it is more complicated than a simple occupation. But if that is what the IGC is calling it, and they are the major Iraqi politicians actively cooperating with the British and Americans, then imagine what ordinary Iraqis are calling it. I think the sense of urgency in transitioning to a new Iraqi government felt by the IGC should be taken very seriously. It doesn't seem to me that the US and Britain have very much time to make the transition. Apparently the IGC fear a social explosion if the process is too long and drawn out.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*Iraqi guerrillas mounted three separate attacks in Iraq on Wednesday, killing two US troops and wounding 10. Two of the attacks were launched in Mosul and are therefore likely to be attempts at payback for the killing there the day before of Uday and Qusay. Another of the attacks was launched near Ramadi in the Sunni triangle. Guerrillas also killed one Red Crescent aid worker and wounded another (in Baghdad?). Such attacks on aid workers in some senses are even more politically salient than attacks on US forces, since only a lot of work by many aid workers can hope to put Iraq back on its feet and so drain support from the guerrillas. A similar problem of lack of security for aid workers has set back Afghanistan's reconstruction.

*This piece of mine just appeared in the Daily Star:

Will Sunnis fight Shiites in Iraq?

Juan Cole

The Daily Star, 7/22/03

Some 15,000 angry Iraqi Sunnis marched in Basra Friday and several thousand more rallied at the Umm al-Qura Mosque in west Baghdad. Another 10,000 [demonstrators] came out in Najaf Saturday, when Shiite protests spread to Baghdad and Basra. These rallies signaled both the growing strength of Muslim fundamentalism and a troubling potential for a Sunni-Shiite conflict in Iraq. Either way, they form a black cloud on the horizon of the American project in Iraq. In Basra, Sunni prayer leaders called for rallies Friday against the threat that Shiites loyal to the firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr would seize Sunni mosques in the city.

In Baghdad, disgruntled Sunni clerics said it was shameful for the American-appointed governing council to declare April 9 ­ the day of Baghdad’s fall, which Sunnis regard as the beginning of a foreign occupation ­ a national holiday. They alleged that the apportioning of seats in the council by religious affiliation was an American attempt to divide and rule. In their Friday demonstrations, the Sunnis insisted that the new governing council did not reflect “the Iraqi reality.” They claimed that Sunnis were a majority in Iraq and should not be a minority in the governing council. (Actually, Shiites are estimated by social scientists to comprise 60-65 percent of the Iraqi population). At the Umm al-Qura Mosque, the Sunnis held up placards asserting the governing council had been appointed by dictators. Chillingly, some chanted: “O Baghdad, revolutionary. Let (American civil administrator Paul) Bremer’s fate be that of Nuri.” The reference was to Nuri al-Said, the conservative pro-British prime minister who was torn apart by revolutionary mobs during the republican coup of 1958.

Sadr’s followers staged their own demonstration in Basra Friday, demanding that the governing council be expanded with the addition of elected delegates. Sadr, 30, gave his Friday prayer sermon to thousands at his family’s mosque in Kufa. He called for non-violent non-cooperation with the US civil administration and what he referred to as the “illegitimate” governing council, calling them infidels. He then demanded the establishment of an alternative shadow government for Iraq, in cooperation with other Islamic forces, insisting on an alternative convention to draft a constitution in accordance with Islamic law.

He also announced the formation of a so-called “army of the Mahdi,” a formal militia of Shiites loyal to him. The Sadr movement already has an informal paramilitary force, which controls many east Baghdad neighborhoods. American jeeps were parked close to Sadr’s house Saturday shortly before noon. His people took the move as a sign that US troops intended to arrest him for his Friday remarks. The coalition authorities denied such an intention. Later that day, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz visited Najaf, and the outbreak of the Sadr movement’s demonstrations may have forced him to leave early. An estimated 10,000 Sadr followers marched from the shrine of Imam Ali, their holiest site, to the US military headquarters, chanting: “Long live Sadr. America and the council are infidels. Muqtada, go ahead; we are your soldiers of liberation.”

The protests spread to Baghdad and Basra, where adherents demanded that the US release their leader. In fact, Sadr was never taken into custody and sent out letters to protesters asking them to go home. This weekend of religious demonstrations was barely covered by the Western media, but it was significant. It brought to the fore the plight of Sunnis in the south, many of whom are being targeted for reprisals by militant Shiites. If large-scale Sunni-Shiite disturbances were to break out in Iraq, it would complicate the US task enormously.

The rhetoric of the radical mosque preachers of both branches of Islam pointed to another possibility, however, namely that groups seeking an Islamic state will join together across sectarian lines to challenge the Americans and the governing council. Such cooperation is not unheard of in Iraq, where an estimated 10 percent of the radical Shiite Al-Daawah Party was Sunni in the 1970s. Whether Sunni and Shiite radicals fight one another or forge a political alliance, they pose a significant long-term threat to US plans for the country. Their weapon of choice ­ large urban demonstrations ­ is very difficult for an occupying army to fight. The possibility that Wolfowitz had to be whisked out of Najaf in the midst of his victory lap there symbolizes the uncertainties the US faces in Iraq.

Juan Cole is professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His web address is www.juancole.com. He wrote this commentary for The Daily Star



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*On the question of whether the killing of Uday and Qusay on Tuesday will improve the security posture in Iraq, I doubt it. As Con Coughlin noted, in the short term attacks by Baath loyalists and Sunni radicals on US troops may increase, in order precisely to demonstrate that they have not lost heart. But beyond that, I am a social historian, and I think large groups of people matter, not just leaders. The Sunni Arabs in Iraq were pampered by the Baath regime. They got most of the goodies. They did not on the whole rise against Saddam in 1991. They are like the whites in Apartheid South Africa. They are now presented with the prospect that they will become a small minority, 16% of the population, with no more of the national pie (economic benefits and political power) than that. It seems to me entirely plausible that they would take up arms against what they see as an occupying army threatening to reduce them to such an estate. I think only when there is a new, elected Iraqi state and an army loyal to it can we expect the guerrilla operations to end. And, if they don't end then, they just become a form of criminality to be dealt with by the Iraqis themselves. As long as the US army is in the Sunni triangle, I think there will be trouble. And if it overstays its welcome in the Shiite south, there will be trouble there, too.

So, one can rejoice that two tyrants have bitten the dust. But celebration is premature.

*Muhammad Bahr al-`Ulum, a leading member of the transitional Governing Council, has expressed discontent with US military action against the offices of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the arrest of 10 of its members (some of whom have been released), and the damage done to its newspaper operation, which publishes al-`Adala. Bahr al-`Ulum is protesting on behalf of his SCIRI colleague, `Abdul `Aziz al-Hakim. He says that he wants to see a negotiating committee set up to interface with the Americans about such attacks on organizations affiliated with Governing Council members, which he derided as inappropriate to this stage of Iraqi governance.

*For a good analysis of the significance of the recent Shiite demonstrations against the US in Najaf, see http://www.rferl.org/nca/features/2003/07/21072003155835.asp


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*Iraqi guerrillas attacked a US military convoy with rocket-propelled grenades and machine gun fire, killing two soldiers and injuring a third. The attack came near Tel Afar, west of Mosul. All the casualties were from the 101st Airborne Division.

*There was another big demonstration in Najaf on Sunday, several thousand strong, by supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr against the US presence in the city. The NYT maintained that many of the demonstators had been bused in from East Baghdad, but offered no evidence that this was the case. At one point a Sadr cleric read a list of demands to the the US commander, including immediate evacuation of US troops from the holy city. He also wanted an end to US interference in the running of the local television station, according to AFP.

In return, the translator for the US forces told the crowd they would have to show respect or be considered a threat to US forces. He had been instructed to tell them to disband. Sadr Movement leaders promised another demonstration on Monday, and some were talking about bringing their guns. Apparently the helicopters and extra humvees in the city on Saturday had been intended to provide security for Wolfowitz, but the Sadr supporters took them as a sign that the US was about to arrest Muqtada. The local commander says he has no interest in arresting Muqtada. It is interesting that Muqtada assumed after his defiant sermon on Friday that the US would move against him. In part he may have based this expectation on what used to happen under Saddam. But in part it might come from knowing that Sadr Movement preachers have occasionally been detained by the Us briefly, apparently as a sort of warning not to go too far.

*On Meet the Press on Sunday, Paul Bremer responded to a question about Muqtada al-Sadr:

Tim Russert: We had a situation the other day where one of the ranking Shiite clerics in Iraq called for an Islamic army, saying no to America, no to the devil. This was the scene yesterday as many of his supporters were protesting American presence. Would it be helpful, in order to deal with Iraqis like this, and the clerics solder, that there be more of an international flavor to the occupying force, so it would not be perceived by the Iraqis as simply a made in America operation?

Ambassador Paul Bremer: That I don't think is the problem here. What we're seeing is an understandable reaction by the Shia whom he -- he is a Shia cleric. They were crushed by Saddam over a period of really decades, and in fact, for centuries. We had last week, a week ago today, the first governing council established with a majority of Shia. The Shia had never been in the majority today and they're delighted. And I should add that you showed this story, but in the same story in the Washington Post two members of the governing council, who are leading Shia, basically said -- basically distanced themselves from him and said, look, we've got an ability now in the governing council to carry out the desires of the Shia people. And I think that's where the concentration should be now.

It is interesting that Bremer characterizes Muqtada's identification of America with Satan and his call for an Islamic militia as "understandable" given that he is a Shiite clergyman and given that Saddam crushed the Shiites for decades. He sees how the Sadr Movement comes out of Baath brutalization and at times virtual genocide. The problem with quoting members of the appointed Governing Council against Muqtada is that none of them has his following in the country. The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq representative, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, is widely seen as an Iranian pawn by ordinary Iraqi Shiites and only has influence in a few towns in the east near Iran. Ayatollah Muhammad Bahr al-`Ulum is a good man, but he has been in London a long time and does not have a grassroots organization. Nobody among the Sadrists thinks that the Communist or the ex-Baathists on the Council are real Shiites.

*Ibrahim Khayyat writes in al-Hayat that Wolfowitz's visit to Baghdad was in part for the purpose of "closing the file" on the Defense Department's involvement in the civil administration of Iraq. He says that Wolfowitz told his loyalists, seeded in the civil administration earlier, that the State Department is now taking over, and that things may be hard for those who remain behind (many, Khayyat says, are leaving). Also imperilled are some members of the Governing Council who were picks of the Pentagon, like Ahmad Chalabi.

Khayyat speculates, however, that Bush may not leave Bremer himself in place. Bremer is talking about Iraqi elections in late 2004 or early 2005, and Bush is said to want them out of the way before the US presidential election, so it can be portrayed to the American people that the US has handed off Iraqi sovereignty to an elected government. If Bremer looks like he can't get the job done that fast, Khayyat thinks, the Bremer himself may be dismissed in favor of someone more agile.

I haven't seen this sort of report on US infighting in the American press, and it is interesting, but I can't vouch for its accuracy.



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*A U.S. soldier was killed in Baghdad by a sniper on Saturday while guarding a bank. Four U.S. troops were wounded when their convoy was struck by a remote control bomb.

*Over 3,000* Shiite demonstrators came out into the streets of Baghdad on Saturday, according to AFP, to protest the US military's action in surrounding the house of Najaf firebrand Muqtada al-Sadr. Al-Sadr's spokesman, Mustafa al-Ya`qubi, told Agence France Presse that US military forces showed up at Muqtada's house in Najaf shortly before noon on Saturday and surrounded it, while military helicopters hovered overhead. After some time, the Americans departed. Muqtada apparently was not home at the time, anyway.

When word spread of the US action, large demonstrations began in Najaf, Baghdad and Basra, demanding that Muqtada be released. Baghdad crowds chanted "Down with the USA!" and "We are all soldiers of Sadr!" (They really have to get some new slogans.)

US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was visiting Najaf Saturday, and may have almost got caught up in the protests.

Friday had already seen a demonstration by Sadr Movement followers in Basra, who demanded that the appointed Governing Council be expanded through the addition of elected members. These demonstrations in Basra were renewed on Saturday, this time with the added demand that Muqtada be released immediately. AFP thought around 2,000-3,000 protesters showed up in downtown Basra, as well. At one point they felt threatened by an approaching Western vehicle and threw stones at it, assuming it to be British military. It was in fact a civilian vehicle. The Shiites maintain that the persons in the vehicle shot at them, wounding three demonstrators, including a cleric, Sheikh Ali al-Asadi, Muqtada's representative in Basra. The British military denies firing at the crowd, and maintains that the story of the surrounding of Muqtada's house was a misunderstanding.

The US military has promised to clarify exactly what happened in Najaf. It seems to me possible that it was alarmed by the sermon Muqtada gave Friday, urging nonviolent noncooperation with the US and pledging to establish an alternative government and military force to compete with the Governing Council appointed by Paul Bremer. (He also called for the closure of US radio and television stations in Iraq). It may also be that they wanted to immobilize Muqtada during Wolfowitz's visit so as to ensure his safety. If so, Wolfowitz inadvertently caused a lot of unnecessary trouble with this gratuitous victory lap. (I would have advised him against trying to visit Najaf; it is a very holy city for Shiites, and a highranking Defense Department official going there could easily injure local sensibilities).

*Al-Hayat put the number of Baghdad demonstrators at 100,000. I can't explain the discrepancy of 97,000 with the AFP estimate. Two possibilities present themselves. One is that al-Hayat was counting demonstrators out in the neighborhoods of East Baghdad as well as the smaller crowd in downtown Baghdad. Another is that the AFP reporter had more experience estimating crowds (which is not an easy thing to do--the situation is chaotic and few vantage points would let you see everyone, much less count them). But, there are some little tricks for estimating crowds, like trying to estimate the size of the rally in square yards and then counting persons per square yard.

*The Bremer-appointed Governing Council has been unable to select a president from among themselves. They have therefore decided to have a rotating presidency. The three members most likely to fill that role are Adnan Pachachi, an 80-year-old Sunni Iraqi nationalist, Ayatollah Muhammad Bahr al-`Ulum (age given as 78 or 80), a Shi`ite moderate, and Ayatollah Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, deputy head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and leader of its paramilitary, the Badr Corps. Note that the Pentagon's favorite, Ahmad Chalabi, is not apparently in the running (nor could he win an election in Iraq, where he is widely viewed as a corrupt carpetbagger and American puppet).

*The unilateralists in the Bush administration, including Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, are going to have to eat crow and bring the United Nations aboard to help them rebuild Iraq. They can't get India, Russia, Egypt or anyone else to lend troops to the effort of providing security without an explicit UN mandate. The UN Security Council, moreover, is not going to give them such a mandate for free. It would have to make the rebuilding and decision-making about the future of Iraq much more multilateral. (You will note that Wolfowitz has stopped boasting about how France would be "punished" for its opposition to the war). UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has even called for an explicit timetable for US withdrawal. The Washington hawks are openly contemptuous of the UN, and their need for it is extremely humiliating. They never thought Kofi Annan would have *them* by the balls. But the numbers are undeniable. The occupation of Iraq is costing the US nearly $4 bn. a month; Bush's tax cuts provoked a $450 bn. budget deficit (which doesn't even include the Iraq expenses); and there are not enough US troops to cover Korea, Japan, Germany, Afghanistan and Iraq and also provide for frequent troop rotation so that our guys can get home after six months rather than stretching the tour of duty to a whole year. A whole year in a combat zone is a long time.

*All those who read Jim Hoagland's fluff piece on Wolfowitz of Arabia in the WP on Sunday should also look at Jason Leopold's article on Wolfowitz's slanting and politicizing of intelligence to sell the Iraq war. See
http://www.liberalslant.com/jl071903.htm.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*Al-Hayat reported that Adnan Pachachi and another member of the Iraq Governing Council are in Rome for a conference of socialists. Asked about recognizing Israel, Pachachi replied that Iraq is a member of the Arab League and would abide by League policy in this regard. Apparently Ahmad Chalabi, another GC member, had earlier given the US neocons to understand that the first thing he would do if they put him in power was to recognize Israel. Given the disorder into which the country has fallen, the conviction of 41% of Baghdadis that the war was fought for Israel's sake, the fatwas by radical Shiite clerics calling for assassinations of foreign Jews who come to Iraq to buy land, this prospect of a new Iraqi government suddenly embracing and supporting Ariel Sharon seems to have receded dramatically.

*For the possibility that senior Bush administration officials punished Ambassador Joseph Wilson for blowing the whistle on the Bush administration's story about Iraqi uranium by outing his wife as a CIA field officer involved in tracking weapons of mass destruction, see
http://thenation.com/capitalgames/index.mhtml?bid=3&pid=823
Journalist David Corn notes that the punishment for such outing of an intelligence field officer is 10 years in prison, but that no investigation has yet been launched. The Bushies play hardball, and are sending a signal to other potential whistleblowers that bad things will happen to them if they come clean about the Iraq war WMD deception.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*Two American servicemen were killed in Iraq on Friday, AP says. Someone shot and killed a soldier from the U.S. 1st Infantry Division in Baghdad about 5:30 p.m. yesterday according to Corp. Todd Pruden, a spokesman for the military. Also on Friday afternoon, in Falluja a guerrilla set off a remote controlled bomb as a US convoy was nearing the main bridge over the Euphrates, killing a soldier from the 3rd I.D. AP says that a Falluja crowd chanted "America is the enemy of God," while the US Army towed away the burned out hulk of the bombed Humvee. And, the Americans found and demolished yet another bomb in Falluja.

Demonstrators in Falluja defied the US-imposed curfew to shout, "With our spirits, with our blood, we sacrifice ourselves for you, Iraq!" "Iraq" doesn't rhyme as well in this Arabic phrase (al-dam is the Arabic word for "blood") as "Saddam" used to. They need a new chant.

*Then, the Sunni clerics mounted the pulpit in their mosques in Baghdad on Friday and denounced the US occupation and the Governing Council. They said it was shameful for the GC to declare April 9, the beginning of a foreign occupation, to be a national holiday.

After the Friday prayers, Sunni crowds poured into the streets to demonstrate, saying that the new Governing Council did not reflect "the Iraqi reality." They gathered at the Umm al-Qura Mosque in west Baghdad, with placards asserting that the Governing Council was appointed by dictators, and "April 9 is a day of infamy." They came up with a lot of rhymes to chant, though some of them depend on "Baghdad" being the last word, so they don't do the people in Falluja much good. One chilling chant was "O Baghdad, revolutionary! Let Bremer's fate be that of Nuri!" The reference is to Nuri al-Sa`id, the conservative pro-British Prime Minister who was mangled and killed by revolutionary mobs during the republican coup of 1958. (-al-Hayat)

So, we heard from the Sunni Arabs on Friday.

*Now for the Shiites. In his Friday Prayer Sermon in Kufa on Friday, Muqtada al-Sadr, 30, called for nonviolent noncooperation with the US administration and the transitional ("illegitimate") Governing Council it has established, calling them infidels. He said he would oppose them even if it cost him his life. "They have delivered this peaceful Muslim country to the foreign forces." He then called for the establishment of an alternative shadow government for Iraq, in cooperation with other Islamic forces. He also wanted an alternative convention to draft a constitution in accordance with Shiite law. He insisted according to AP, "Eventually, we'll have a referendum separate from the Americans and, God willing, elections separate from the Americans." He also announced the formation of the "Mahdi Army," i.e. a formal militia of Shiites loyal to him (as far as I can see, this militia has actually existed for some time, and it appears to control Kufa, much of East Baghdad, and perhaps some neighborhoods in other Shiite cities such as Najaf, Karbala, and Basra).

Agence France Presse quoted Muqtada as saying, "This government is not legitimate and has no popular support. There can be no justice from an unjust council. We want a government which is Islamic where everyone is represented. It is like this we will build Iraq's unity and draft a constitution." AFP says that 'He disparaged the council as a feeble attempt to cobble together Iraq's mosaic of ethnic groups. The council members "pretend to be Muslims, democrats and pious", but "it would have been better for them to follow the Marjaiyah", the Shiite religious authority.'

I think Muqtada should be taken seriously over the long term (one or two years) but not in the short term. He and his followers got out 10,000 demonstrators in mid-May (on a day that was anyway a holy day commemoration), but since then the crowds have dwindled to 2500 in early June and then just to a few hundred whenever the Sadr Movement has called for anti-US rallies in Baghdad. So, it is not at all clear that most Iraqi Shiites, even in the Muqtada heartland of East Baghdad, are ready to take direct action, even just to come out for protests. Muqtada is arguing to them that they must do so, to strangle the authority of the Governing Council in the cradle, or risk it attaining legitimacy and then sidelining the religious forces down the road. When Muqtada can call for a rally in Baghdad and get 20,000 or 30,000, even 100,000 people to show up, then he will be dangerous to the US presence in Iraq. At the moment, he is a dark cloud on the horizon. I think it would be dangerous for the Coalition to arrest him--that might be precisely the kind of catalyst that would bring out the big crowds or turn the Shiite militias loyal to him violent. Maybe that kind of arrest and symbolic martyrdom is even what he is angling for.

The potential for violence among Shiite factions themselves remains high. Iran Network 1 announced on July 17, "Another news from Iraq is that an attempt was made on the life of Shaykh La'ith, known as Abu Du'a, who is in charge of distributing Ayatollah (Ali) Sistani's stipends for seminarians, by unidentified assassins, today, in Najaf. After this, he was transferred to hospital." (BBC monitoring). Well, if we had to start compiling a list of suspects, the Sadr movement would have to be high on it. Just for Sgt. Friday to interview them, mind you.

*Asharq al-Awsat reports from Kuwait that the Sunnis in Basra have taken back possession of the administrative offices for Sunni pious endowments from the Sadr Movement, which had invaded them on Weds. They found the offices empty but denuded of their extensive files on Sunni religious properties in the city. The Sunni spokesman claimed that 15,000 Sunnis demonstrated against this move by the radical Shiites, in front of Basra's Great Mosque after Friday prayers. They had originally planned then to walk in procession to the British HQ, but decided not to, for fear they might come into violent confrontation with the Sadr Movement. They reported that at the stationary Great Mosque demonstration, they were joined by members of the Shi`ite Al-Da`wa Party, as well as members of the al-Fadilah Party, a breakaway Sadrist group that follows Sheikh Muhammad Ya`qubi instead of Muqtada. These Shiite forces expressed their solidarity with the Sunnis. But the Sunni leaders nevertheless warned of the danger of an outbreak of sectarian violence should the Sadr Movement attempt further expropriations of Sunni property. It is incredible to me that the Western press has so far completely missed this story.

Less and less jumping up and down for joy among the people of Iraq.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*A Sunni group in Basra (pop. 1.3 million) is calling for massive Sunni demonstrations after Friday prayers today, in protest of the occupation on Wednesday by the Sadr Movement of a building housing the headquarters of the Sunni Pious Endowments administration (-al-Hayat). In a telephone call from Kuwait to al-Hayat, the Sunni activist warned of a big sectarian disturbance in Basra if the situation was not rectified. Haqqi Ismail Abd al-Rahman, the Sunni Endowment administrator, told the paper that hundreds of Sadr Movement members invaded the building and occupied the offices, which contain the files for 90% of the Sunni endowment property in Basra.

He expressed the fear that their long-term goal was to usurp the mosques and properties of the Sunni community and to add them to their Hawzah (Shiite religious establishment). A meeting of three hundred men at the Sunni Grand Mosque in Basra on Thursday morning to consider the situation was harassed by Sadr Movement hecklers, who shouted sectarian slurs, with one sermonizing at them that they were infidels. Haqqi Ismail said his group had complained to the city council and to the British authorities, so far without effect. They had also contacted the office of Muqtada al-Sadr in Najaf but had heard back nothing. Thus, the plans for a big demonstration, which will draw on the congregations of the city's 150 Sunni mosques.

Shiites have reportedly usurped large numbers of Sunni mosques in South Iraq, seeing them as attempts by the Baath regime to plant Sunnism in Shiite soil, a plot that can now be safely reversed. These usurpations have been condemned by Grand Ayatollah `Ali Sistani, but the radical Sadr Movement clearly feels differently about the matter. Especially in Basra, some minority Sunnis loyal to Saddam brutalized and terrorized the Shiite population, and for some Sadrists this move may be the beginning of payback.

Just to explain the "endowments." It is a custom in Muslim societies to dedicate the proceeds of land or other forms of wealth to religious purposes, such as the building and upkeep of a mosque. Property dedicated to a pious endowment is theoretically alienated for this purpose in perpetuity. Families often retain oversight rights, and fees, from the endowments, or give these to clerics. Many Sunni clergymen in Basra may depend for their livelihood on endowment income, especially given the collapse of the Sunni state, so that usurping it would bankrupt the Basra Sunni religious establishment. Usurping mosques leaves believers with nowhere to gather and pray publicly, which is a way of denying them a place in the public sphere.

There is, of course, a grave danger that Sunnis and Shiites in other parts of Iraq will hear about this dispute and become polarized over such issues, so that the fighting could spread. The British authorities should move quickly to resolve this problem. The problem, of course, is that if they come into armed conflict with Sadrist militias, that could also be destabilizing.

*The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies say that armed criminal gangs pose a severe threat both to Coalition troops in Iraq and to international aid workers. The spokesman in Amman, according to Al-Sharq al-Awsat, maintained that there were 100,000 persons in these gangs throughout the country and that they came largely from the hardened prison population released by the Baath regime and the war. They engage in looting, burglary, kidnapping, etc., and began by concentrating on government buildings and institutions but have now branched out.

*AFP reports an opinion poll taken in Baghdad by a British concern: "And an opinion poll released in Britain found that half the people of Baghdad believe the US and Britain were right to invade Iraq, but most say the city is a more dangerous place since Saddam's regime fell on April 9. The YouGov survey, commissioned by Britain's independent Channel 4 News network and The Spectator magazine, found:

50 percent thought the war was right
27 percent said it was wrong.
47 percent said that they thought the conflict was about oil
41 percent said it was to help Israel
23 percent who said it was to liberate the Iraqi people a
6 percent who thought it was to deal with Iraq's pursuit of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.
47 percent expressed no preference for rule by the Americans or rule under Saddam Hussein,
29 said they preferred to be ruled by the US
9 percent favored being ruled by Saddam.
75 percent said that Baghdad was more dangerous since the US invasion.

See
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/
2003/07/18/2003059884.

One can always read statistics in various ways, but it could be concluded that only 29 percent of Baghdadis are positively happy to be ruled for any length of time by the Americans; that 75 percent don't think the Americans are doing a very good job of providing security; that most people are cynical about American motives, and less than a quarter think the war was fought for the sake of liberating the Iraqi people; and that only half are even glad the war was fought at all.

*This news item from IRNA seemed to me awfully weird: "AFTAB-E YAZD:
"Police calls on people not to visit Iraq"
Police Wednesday called on Iranians not to visit Iraq due to the
ongoing sensitive and critical situation in the neighboring country,
adding that 34 Iranians, who had ventured into Iraq, were killed
during the recent days there."

Some 34 Iranians were killed in Iraq in "recent days"?? Doing what? Are they getting in the middle of firefights between the Badr Brigade and Sadrist militias? Idle visitors cannot be being killed at this rate!

*The continued lack of security in Iraq is severely impeding the movement of women, who fear going out because they might be kidnapped or raped.
See
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/
0717IraqWomen17-ON.html .
This article is an excellent corrective to the US conservative line (by white males) that things are getting better every day in Anglo-American Iraq.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*Another rocket propelled grenade attack killed one American soldier and wounded three others on Wednesday, near the Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad. Also, in West Baghdad a guerrilla tossed a grenade into a US military vehicle that was guarding a bank, killing an 8-year-old Iraqi child and wounding the American driver. Yet more assailants sprayed machine gun fire at the car of the pro-American mayor of Haditha (150 mi. northwest of Baghdad), Mohammed Nayil al-Jurayfi, killing him and his son. Another guerrilla fired an anti-aircraft missile at an AC-130 landing at Baghdad airport, but missed. This is an al-Qaeda tactic, used in Mombasa, and I wonder if it was another one of those 1972 Soviet-made SA-7s (they don't seem to work that well any more). But, let's say that Baghdad airport won't be open to civilian airliners for a bit. Gen. John Abizaid, who has an MA in Middle East Studies from Harvard and so is one of Us, has bitten the bullet and admitted that we are faced with a guerrilla war.

*The Germans are really worried about NATO members pulling troops out of Afghanistan under US pressure so that they can be sent to Iraq. Afghanistan is in a fragile state and could easily collapse back into Talibanism and Qaedism. I always said that starting this Iraq business when they did was a bad idea, given that the Bush administration has left the job in Afghanistan half done. (Less).

*According to the Iranian Webzine Baztab on Weds. 7/16, Sadr Movement notable Sheikh Muhammad Ya`qubi of Najaf has finally declared himself an Object of Emulation, making formal the split of his al-Fadilah group from the Muqtada al-Sadr loyalists. His followers demonstrated against threats to him in Najaf, though the Muqtada group maintained that he had no local support and just brought in some armed tribesmen to stage the demonstration. Ayatollah Kazim al-Ha?iri is said to have blessed Ya`qubi?s schism, saying he had the prerequisites for being an Object of Emulation. Al-Ha'iri is pretty obviously now sidelining Muqtada, and wants to become the Ali Khamenei (Supreme Jurisprudent or Wali Faqih) of Iraq. Al-Ha'iri is an awful person, and were he to get that kind of power he would run Iraq right into the ground. Muqtada and Ya`qubi don't sound very nice, either, to say the least. My guess, though, is that the Sadr Movement, which is dedicated to the memory of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, Muqtada's martyred father who was killed by Saddam, will tend to remain loyal to Muqtada in the main. And, even if the movement splits with regard to leadership, it seems that all three potential leaders agree on the need for a rigid, puritanical, exclusivist, and intolerant Iraq. Ugh.

*Employees at the Iran offices of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq are fuming at being told to come back to Iraq with their families immediately for face being cut off without a cent, according to al-Zaman. Those who want to stay have complained that they are in effect being denied a pension, and have protested to Ali Khamenei, whom they are styling "Guardian (Wali) of the Muslims" (i.e. they accept his authority over Iraqi as well as over Iranian Shiites), and to Chief Justice Mahmud al-Hashimi al-Shahrudi, who is an Iraqi and former head of the Supreme Council. Many of these employees fought against Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and have prices on their heads in Baghdad, and apparently they are still afraid to return for fear of Sunni reprisals. When Iraqi Shiites are afraid to be in Iraq, I'd say it is a bad neighborhood for the stationing of US troops.

*A group of former intelligence officers has called for Dick Cheney's resignation. But it is Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith they should be after. Cheney played a role, but all he had was behind the scenes influence. This distortion of intelligence for political aims was carried out by the top civilians in the Defense Department.

*Julian Borgess deconstructs Douglas Feith's Office of Strategic Plans inside the Pentagon for the Guardian. His explains of how this "open and largely unfiltered conduit to the White House" allowed Israelis to just walk into the Pentagon without being cleared, on Feith's say-so, along with the Iraqi opposition, and to funnel "information" to Bush that performed an end-run around the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. OSP coordinated with its counterpart in Ariel Sharon's office. '"None of the Israelis who came were cleared into the Pentagon through normal channels," said one source familiar with the visits. Instead, they were waved in on Mr Feith's authority without having to fill in the usual forms. The exchange of information continued a long-standing relationship Mr Feith and other Washington neo-conservatives had with Israel's Likud party.' Meanwhile, our NATO allies who were pointing out that US Iraq intelligence was deeply flawed were being vilified as venal cowards. But, the Likud connection to the Iraq debacle will have no traction in the US, where the media and Congress have been properly subjected to party discipline.

*For an excellent analysis of the limitations of the US in facing a determined Iraqi guerrilla war see Col. Dan Smith in Counterpunch..


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*US forces were ambushed while leaving an ammunition depot between the cities of Ramadi and Habbaniya on Tuesday, but took no casualties. They fought back, killing five Iraqis and capturing one.

*There have been five attacks on US troops in the largely Shiite town of Miqdadiya (pop. 300,000), 50 miles north of Baghdad, in recent days, including ones using anti-tank weapons, hand grenades, and one suicide attack (AFP via al-Zaman). They don't appear to have produced US casualties. One wonders how much of this sort of thing is going on in the towns of the Sunni triangle without our hearing much about it (although the town might be majority Shiite, it is in the Sunni area and the attacks are likely Fidayee Saddam or Sunni radicals). Miqdadiya is in Diyala province, where a new regional council was set up on Monday, including Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds and Turkmen. Diyala is a mixed province on the border with Iran. The regional council has just appointed a new governor, Abdullah Hasan Rashid al-Juburi, a notable of the Sunni Juburi tribe of northern and eastern Iraq who had been in exile in London (-Agence France Presse). I hadn't seen anything in the US newspapers about regional councils; are they being formed by the US military, or in consultation with the Iraqi Governing Council? It is a refreshing break from most Middle Eastern political custom to have the governor chose from the province, rather than from the center, and I hope that can be institutionalized.

*Egypt has joined India, France, and Germany in refusing to send troops to Iraq, rebuffing an American request (-az-Zaman). Robert Reid of AP pointed out that the daily attacks on US and Iraqi forces have helped deter other countries for volunteering to make their men sitting ducks in Iraq. The justice of the US cause has also been badly damaged by the inability to find weapons of mass destruction or even significant programs to produce them, which also discourages others from wanting to get involved. US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted recently that we may need to send more men to Iraq in addition to the 140,000+ who are already there, and that they would be there some time. (He earlier rebuked Gen. Shinseki when the latter suggested we would need 200,000 troops in Iraq for some years to rebuild and provide security).

France made explicit that French troops could only be involved after a period of United Nations trusteeship over Iraq. US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld shot his mouth off last spring about the "old Europe" and pointed to the support for the Iraq war from the former Soviet bloc. But Lithuania and Estonia aren't sending many troops now that we need them, and with all due respect, they aren't capable of what the French are capable of (the French have a mobile gendarmerie with extensive experience in the global South, which would be very useful at this point). Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was boasting about how France would be "punished" for failing to support his trumped up charges against Iraq. When the whole record is examined, it seems increasingly clear that France was objectively right, and Rumsfeld was wrong about almost everything.

What I dislike most about these two is that they are bullies. When they were after al-Qaeda, I was happy about it, because al-Qaeda is made up of bullies, and who better to take them on? But they endangered us all by taking the focus off al-Qaeda. And, the way in which Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz villified everyone who disagreed with them about Iraq and tossed aside NATO and the United Nations as a framework of international action sickened me. The horrible thing is that the people who are paying for this arrogance and disregard for the truth are our poor troops on the ground. The 3rd ID is stuck in Iraq for the foreseeable future because India declined to send a division after all. Poetic justice would be for Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz to have to man checkpoints in Falluja.

*Mourners at the funeral of Shaikh Ahmad al-Wa'ili in Kazimiya employed the procession to protest against the Governing Council that announced itself July 13, saying it was unacceptable because it was unelected. I presume these protesters are part of the Sadr Movement, which refuses to cooperate with the US presence. It was a tacky thing to do at a funeral. (Newsday via al-Zaman).

*Ayatollah Muhammad Taqi al-Mudarrisi of Karbala warned against the Lebanonization of Iraq and called for a pluralistic government in Iraq on Tuesday. He said it must respect the rights of minorities in a national framework. He said it should be an advanced state, but retain moral values, it should be a state characterized by liberty but within the framework of the law. He cautioned against Iraqis dividing along ethnic and political lines and falling into civil conflict of the sort Lebanon underwent 1975-1989. He said that the various political factions and activities require greater consultation and cooperation among themselves in order to exit from the crisis. He emphasized that the problems of the country were not limited to just one, such as the American occupation, the continued existence of Baathist elements, or the collapse of national institutions. Rather, all of them had to be faced, and required a "public reason" (`aql jam`i) that could think them through with profound wisdom. He rejected the idea of attempting to force Coalition troops out of the country, saying that he wanted that outcome eventually very much, but not in a way that would plunge the country into a new war it might not survive. He said, "We want to build a modern country, but not at the price of losing our independence. We want the return of our institutions, but without the dominance of a single sectarian group; we want pluralism without chaos; we want unity without oppression." He ended by saying that it would not be right to have a silent majority and a vigorous minority, since that would be fertile ground for dictatorship.

Mudarrisi is the leader of the Organization of Islamic Action, which is a largely Karbala-based party. He founded it in 1979 before being forced by persecution to go to Iran. It was briefly part of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, but split over differences. It is accused of sending agents over into Iraq to blow things up (i.e. of terrorism) during the 1980s. It also had a Damascus branch, though, and wasn't as close to Ayatollah Khamenei as the Hakims of SCIRI were. He came back to Iraq in April with a retinue of 60 men, and was arrested by the Mujahidin-i Khalq, who turned him over to the US. His brief incarceration provoked demonstrations in Karbala. He was released after 12 hours. Karbala has been roiled in recent weeks by a fight over the right to give the Friday sermon from the mosque attached to the shrine of Imam Husayn, between followers of Muqtada al-Sadr and followers of Grand Ayatollah Sistani (in the end they have decided to alternate). The OIA doesn't seem to be involved and may lack the strength of these two other tendencies.

Al-Mudarrisi also told al-Hayat on Tuesday that it would be "suicide" for Shiites to launch attacks on the Americans, and he clearly thinks they are needed to provide order for the time being. It is not clear whether he fears the reestablishment of the Baath if they suddenly leave, or whether he is afraid that Muqtada al-Sadr will behave like a Lebanese warlord with militias, and plunge the country into civil war. His speech on Tuesday quoted by al-Zaman sounds moderate and almost Rousseauan, appealing to reason rather than primarily to revelation, and stressing Iraqi pluralism as an antidote to dictatorship or social chaos. It resembles a speech made by Muhammad Bahr al-`Ulum in Baghdad a couple of weeks ago, which also stressed pluralism. (Bahr al-`Ulum is now serving on the new Governing Council). But al-Mudarrisi appears to be terrified that the security situation in the country could deteriorate rapidly and decisively.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*The Sadr Foundation issued a statement saying that the Shiite community cannot be entirely satisfied with the new governing council, since the US fears the establishment of a Shiite state and works against it. The spokesman expressed hope that the Governing Council would appoint ministers that would benefit the country rather than for their own selfish purposes. He admitted that the Council had no choice, in establishing security, but to work with the US (AFP via Asharq al-Awsat). According to the Christian Science Monitor for July 14, Muqtada al-Sadr said after Friday prayers in Kufa last Friday, "The Americans will not establish a just government."

*A donnybrook broke out Sunday between the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr and those of Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim. The latter had a covering built over the courtyard of the shrine of Imam `Ali in Najaf, and then the Sadrists tore it right back down. A power struggle also appears to have broken out between Muqtada and his supposed mentor, Sayyid Kazim al-Haeri. Al-Haeri has urged the closing of offices commemorating Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr except in Najaf itself. Rather, he says, affairs should now be conducted by the Guardian (wali) of the Muslims, i.e., himself (al-Haeri). Al-Haeri appears to be setting himself up to the the Supreme Jurisprudent of Iraq, rivaling Ali Khamenei (the Supreme Jurisprudent of Iran), and he has to sideline Muqtada and the memory of Muqtada's father to do so.

*Muqtada al-Sadr has issued a fatwa forbidding Iraqis to do business with Kuwaitis, causing a number of important Kuwaiti business deals in the South to fall through. The Kuwaitis say he wants to throw the business to Iran instead. It is plausible that he might want to reduce Sunni economic dominance over Iraq.

*India has announced that it will not send peace-keeping troops to Iraq except under a United Nations banner. The unilateralists in Washington maneuvered us into a situation where we are paying $4 bn. a month for our presence in Iraq, with no hope of substantial help from other countries. You know what? If Bush had put off the war 45 days, he could have gotten a majority of the Security Council to approve the war. And, if he had put it off until September, he might well have gotten the French and Germans and Russians aboard. Either way, he'd have more hopes now of off-loading some of the burden of rebuilding Iraq onto the international community. I think they thought Iraqi petroleum would pay for it, but that won't happen for a while. The Indian papers are pointing out that this decision now puts pressure on Pakistan to reconsider its pledge of two brigades. Gen. Pervez Musharraf hopes to find an umbrella under the Organization of the Islamic Conference (foreign ministers of the Muslim countries) or some such internaitonal organization under which the troops could be sent to iraq. The idea of sending troops is highly unpopular in Pakistan, the people of which largely opposed the war.

*AFP points out that Cold Warrior Paul Bremer is turning out to be a progressive in Iraq. He talks about giving ordinary Iraqis dividends from the oil wealth, appointed a communist and several de facto socialists to the Governing Council, and has abolished the death penalty in Iraq. The latter is ironic, since Bush and the Republicans are so attached to the death penalty in the US (even though the evidence is mounting that it kills a lot of innocent and falsely accused inmates). Given that Saddam bulldozed so many into mass graves, it is entirely appropriate that the death penalty be abolished in Iraq. I can only hope the idea spreads back to the US.





For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*Reuters & Australian News: A rocket propelled grenade badly wounded a US soldier early Monday morning as he drove his vehicle toward the Baghdad Airport. (By the way the airport's opening has been postponed a month). Either in this incident or in another one, a US soldier was killed, and four were wounded. The news services are not sure whether the US military spokesman was reporting two incidents or one. That is, perhaps there was a second attack somewhere in which someone was killed and others wounded. Or perhaps the "badly wounded" soldier of the initial report later died. It seems to me as though the US military has a duty to clarify things like this so that the reporters at least understand what is being said. It isn't irrelevant whether we had one man seriously wounded and another dead early Monday, or just one person who was so badly hurt he then died.

On Sunday, US soldiers came under fire at a checkpoint in Baghdad. When an Iraqi policeman tried to come to their aid, he was killed. Also, someone set off a bomb in Baghdad near a police station, killing at least one and perhaps two Iraqis. A group claiming to be linked to al-Qaeda took credit for this bombing.

*Shiite cleric Muhammad Bahr al-`Ulum, member of the new Governing Council in Iraq, spoke out at the initial session against the satellite news networks, including the BBC, for failing to support the Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein, saying they treated the dissidents like "firewood for their fire." Reporters present commented that the session had turned into an opportunity to bash the BBC (-az-Zaman). AP has put out a useful set of thumbnail sketches of the members of the Governing Council. By my count, at least 9 of the 25 are from religious parties or tendencies. That seems disproportionate. It is ironic that the US went to war to put into power in Iraq a ragtag group of Muslim activists, some of them with a terrorist past, along with the Communist Party.

*Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security advisor, was great on Wolf Blitzer's show on Sunday. He said right out loud that it was increasingly "ludicrous" for the US to claim that the Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction were there, but had been "hidden." He argued that the US told the world that it had incontrovertible proof that the weapons were there, and that Saddam was dangerous and had to be removed for that reason. They even specified particular buildings. But the Iraqis used no such weapons in the war, and after months in Iraq, the US still hasn't found either stockpiles or firm evidence of large programs. Now the Bush administration is saying that they are "hidden" and will eventually be found. Brzezinski thinks the entire line of reasoning is simply ridiculous and that US credibility has suffered an enormous blow. The next time the US goes to the world community about a threat, he says, it will be seen as crying wolf. I guess the unilateralists in Washington believe they won't ever need the world community, and will go on doing as they please.

*Patrick Seale's incisive comments about the origins and politics of the recent Iraq war, disguised as a review of Bass's new book on John F. Kennedy and the beginnings of the US-Israeli alliance, is just out in The Nation. It has just been reprinted on the Web by Gulf News and is well worth reading.

*Iranian historian Hashem Aghajari was sentenced to four years in prison for the speech he gave last summer advocating individual religious conscience. He had originally been sentenced to death, but the appeals court has reduced the sentence. This outcome is less tragic than the hardliners initially wanted, but it is an outrage nevertheless. People are always asking me if I have been back to Iran. Since I am a historian who believes in individual religious conscience, I don't think it is a system I would do well in.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*Breaking news (revised):

The members of the new Iraqi Governing Council, which declared itself Sunday, are as follows, according to CNN. I have changed the presentation to make the breakdown clearer, and also added some information from az-Zaman and other Arabic sources. Note that I don't include the Communist in the "Shiite" column. That's a bit of a stretch, don't you think? And, it is odd that there is no Chaldean Christian, only an Assyrian.


Sunni Arabs:

Adnan Pachachi, 80, former foreign minister (1965-1967), Sunni
Nasir Chaderchi, National Democratic Party (Arab nationalist) Sunni
Ghazi Mashal Ajil al-Yawer, northern tribal chief, Sunni [Shimr Tribe]
Mohsen Abdel Hamid, Iraqi Islamic Party, Sunni
Samir Shakir Mahmoud, (Independent); businessman and tribal chieftain in Haditha north of Baghdad

Kurds:

Jalal Talabani, 67, Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, Sunni Kurd
Massoud Barzani, 56, Kurdistan Democratic Party, Sunni Kurd
Mahmoud Ali Othman, 60, Sunni Kurd from Sulaimaniya, physician. Former KDP.
Founded the Kurdish Socialist Party in London in 1975, then withdrew
from politics.

Salaheddine Bahaaeddin, 53, Kurdistan Islamic Union, Sunni Kurd. Close to the
Muslim Brotherhood.

Dara Noor Alzin, 50, Baghdad court judge and Islamist originally from Kirkuk.

Shiites:

Ahmed Chalabi, founder of Iraqi National Congress
Abdelaziz Al Hakim, a leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic
Revolution (and head of the paramilitary Badr Corps)

Ibrahim Jafari, 56, Al-Da'wah Islamic Party (which he joined in 1966).
Was active in Karbala 1970-79, when he was forced to flee to Iran.
In 1989 he went to London. Note that the London branch of
al-Da`wa has been willing to deal with the US, but the Iranian
branch as been more standoffish.

Izzeddin Salim [Western press gives him as Abdel-Zahraa Othman
Mohammed, but Shiites are seldom named Othman!], a historian
and leader of the Al-Da'wah Party in Basra. The Basra al-Da`wa or
Tanzim al-Da`wa tended to reject Khomeini's theory of clerical rule.

Abdel-Karim Mahoud al-Mohammedawi, member of Iraqi political party
Hezbollah, (fought guerrilla war against Saddam--is a leader of the
Marsh Arabs and helps administer city of Amara in South)

Iyad Alawi, leader of the Iraqi National Accord (ex-Baathist officers), Shiite
Ahmed al-Barak Al-Busultan, human rights activist, Shiite (Iraqi Lawyers' Union)
Aquila al-Hashimi, a woman, foreign affairs expert; member of an
administrative committee overseeing the post-Baath Foreign Ministry.
Has a Ph.D. in French literature. Had been close to Tariq Aziz
and was a Baath party member with a minor post in the Foreign
Ministry under Saddam.

Raja Habib al-Khuzaai, a woman, maternity hospital director in south,
Mohammed Bahr al-Uloum, cleric from Najaf. Former head of Ahl Al-Bait
Center in London. A liberal cleric close to Majid Khoie, who was
killed by a mob on April 10.

Mouwafak al-Rabii, Dentist and someone who split from al-Da`wa
Wael Abdul Latif, 50, Basra governor and secular court judge


Miscellaneous others:

Hamid Majid Moussa, 62, Communist Party (Shiite ethnicity). Economist;
family from Babil. Lived in Kurdistan from '91.

Younadem Kana, 50, Assyrian Christian, engineer. In 1981 founded the
Democrtic Assyrian Movement, which he still leads.

Sondul Chapouk [Shunkul Habib `Umar], 35, a woman, Turkmen, art teacher and
artist at the School of Fine Arts in Mosul.



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*Assailants launched rocket propelled grenades at US MPs guarding a prison near Baghdad early Saturday morning, wounding a U.S. soldier. CNN reported that three explosions were heard by the 400th military police battalion at the prison (- UPI). Later on Saturday or early Sunday, anti-US forces threw a home made bomb from a pick up truck at US troops guarding a hospital in the center of Baghdad. One of them was slightly wounded. When the guys guarding the prisons and hospitals aren't safe themselves, that is a bad sign.

*Donna Abu-Nasr's report for AP about what life is like now in Baghdad for the middle class friends she had made a few years ago sheds loads of illumination on the hardships and depression assailing Iraqis under US rule. Very little dancing in the streets.

*The scale of the deception of the American people by the Bush administration about the reasons for going to war with Iraq is breathtaking. Not only are severe questions arising about the repeated claims by administration officials that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program after 1998, but the bogus link they attempted to establish between Iraq and al-Qaeda is now also being put under scrutiny: "There was no significant pattern of cooperation between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist operation," former State Department intelligence official Greg Thielmann said this week. Duh. Anyone who knew anything about the Middle East knew that Saddam and al-Qaeda weren't in bed with one another. It was ridiculous. And, it was pushed by Laurie Mylroie and James Woolsey in a book published by the American Enterprise Institute, which was simply a Big Lie. Mylroie appears to be some sort of shill for the Likud Party, and Woolsey is a former (very inept) CIA director. That the AEI purveyed a load of horse manure to the American people should remind them of the integrity and usefulness of university presses. That book couldn't have gotten past a double blind refereeing process by real experts. Remember, buy your books on foreign policy from a university press.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*Attacks on US forces continued Thursday and Friday. In Samarra, four mortar rounds were launched at a US military base late Thursday, and three of our boys were wounded in that attack. The base in Ramadi was luckier--it received two mortar rounds Friday morning, but no one was injured. As a result of the constant attacks on US forces in Falluja, they are largely withdrawing from this Sunni Arab city west of Baghdad and leaving it in the hands of the Iraqi police they had trained. Many of the police were threatening to resign if the US troops did not withdraw, because they were afraid of being caught in the crossfire. This move seems to me wise, but of course it carries the risk that anti-American forces inside the city, whether Baath loyalists or Sunni fundamentalists, might now be freer to organize further attacks on US forces. The Falluja police will have to forestall that if they are to avoid having the Americans feel as though they are forced to come back in.

*The civilians at the top of the Defense Department did no planning for post-war Iraq other than hoping to hand it off to corrupt businessman Ahmad Chalabi, according to Jonathan Landay and Walter Strobel of Knight-Ridder. In an excellent, probing piece, they show that Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith & Co. froze out the CIA and the State Department, and even disregarded the opinions of seasoned US military officers. I know for a fact that the State Department did very extensive planning for the post-war period, in which Iraqi intellectuals who are friends of mine wasted enormous amounts of time, since Feith just threw it in the garbage can. Likewise there were military conferences that gamed the post-war situation, but none of their recommendations were taken seriously. I couldn't bring myself to be against the war because I warmly welcomed the removal of the genocidal Saddam Hussein. But the smallness of the troop force sent in and the clumsy and disastrous way the Defense Department has handled the post-war period has outraged me, and this article confirms many of my own impressions. The hawks just wanted to defang Iraq as a favor to Ariel Sharon in Israel, and appear not even to have known much about who lived in Iraq or what it is actually like. Paul Wolfowitz appears not to have known about the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala! The likelihood that ordinary Iraqis were going to suddenly become pro-Israeli Tories under American tutelage was always just a video game fantasy of these nerds at the top of the DoD.

*The Iraqi Governing Council of 30 is expected to declare itself Saturday in Baghdad. Some members, like the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, had objected to being appointed to the council by Paul Bremer, the American civil administrator. So they have decided to do as Napoleon did, and just crown themselves. Of course it is all a legal fiction--they are there because Bremer appointed them. Though it is true that the council includes groups like the Shiite al-Da`wa Party that have long standing as indigenous opposition organizations fighting the Baath, and they can't have been the Americans' first choice for inclusion. So there has been input into membership on the council from Iraqis, and from the Iraqi political reality. It is good news for the Bremer administration that SCIRI has decided to come aboard rather than to go into the opposition. But neither al-Da`wa or SCIRI is nearly as popular as the Sadr Movement, which is not represented, by its own choice. This gap may become a problem.

*Hazim al-Amin continues his excellent series on Shiite firebrand Muqtada al-Sadr in al-Hayat. I noted his impression that it is the young people in East Baghdad who follow Muqtada, with older folks devoted to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Also his impression that there are a lot of street ruffians and other disreputable characters, including lower-level ex-Baath elements, in the movement. He notes the paradox that the Sadr movement has imposed a lot of puritanical rules in East Baghdad, making women veil and threatening cinemas and video shops and liquor stores. Yet so far the Sadrist cadres have not clashed with the US forces even once, and they are safer in Sadr City than in most other parts of Iraq. He mentions that the Sadr Movement is still fragile, and that Ya`qubi, one of Muqtada's father's students, has founded al-Fadilah, a political party aimed at organizing the Sadr Movement as a voting bloc. Al-Fadilah is not loyal to Muqtada but to the principles of his late father, Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr. It was also fascinating to see the hints of a rift between Muqtada and Sayyid Kazim al-Haeri, whose appointed agent he supposedly is. Al-Haeri has so far declined to return to Najaf from Iran, though he sent his brother to open an office, and this failure to return appears to have annoyed Muqtada.

*Sheikh Tantawi, Rector of al-Azhar Seminary in Cairo, has condemned all suicide bombings and radical extremism, at an Islamic conference in Malaysia. For the first time, his condemnation extended to suicide bombings against Israelis. He had earlier maintained that such operations were licit insofar as they aimed at liberation of Muslims from foreign rule. Now he seems to be at last issuing a blanket condemnation of terrorism, and urges that radical books be suppressed. A lot of Muslim authorities appear to have been shaken by the Casablanca and Riyadh bombings of May, which underscored that the terror was likely to encompass the Middle Eastern countries that initially bred it. But, I wish he wouldn't play up censorship as the answer. It isn't. More open discourse and political freedom in places like Egypt is.

*Anwar Mu'awiya al-Umawi, leader of the Yazidi sect in Mosul and Dohuk provinces, has demanded that the new Iraqi constitution recognize his religion as equal to the others in Iraq (az-Zaman). He also wants the largely Yazidi areas to be their own state rather than under Kurdistan (Kurds are mostly Sunni Muslims). Mainstream Iraqi Muslims see the Yazidis, who follow a folk religion, as satan-worshippers. Esoteric folk religion in the Middle East depends on symbolic reversals. Thus, the Islamic story is that the Fallen Angel Iblis fell because God ordered him to bow down before Adam, and he pridefully refused. The Yazidis say that bowing down to anyone but God is anyway wrong, so Iblis was being tested and passed the test. It is probably not politically feasible to have the constitution recognize Yazidism as equal to Sunnism and Shiism in Iraq. But if it recognizes freedom of religion and speech, then the Yazidis would have the same rights as everyone else.

*US troops arrested Mulla Ali Baber, leader of the al-Jama`ah al-Islamiyyah in Kurdistan, along with members of his entourage, on the road out of Sulaimaniya to Dukan.

*A Saudi truck caravan of 30 vehicles delivered food aid for children to Baghdad. This sort of thing is another reason for which the Americans are just unlikely to be as influential in Iraq as Gulf neighbors in the long run.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*Three US troops were killed on Wednesday, according to a military spokesman. In Tikrit, assailants hit a US convoy, killing one soldier and wounding another. In Mahmudiyah (which lies to the south of Baghdad), two soldiers were killed in an ambush by small arms fire on Wednesday evening. This must be a one-day record since the supposed end of hostilities on May 1. If it got so this was a regular thing (God forbid), you'd be looking at a thousand combat deaths a year, and General Franks now says this may go on for 4 years. I very much doubt the patience of the American people will extend that far.

*Muhammad Bazzi of Newsday did an excellent piece for Newday in which he interviews an Iraqi insurgent who says the Fedayee Saddam are far more organized than the US realizes. "Khaled" said, ""We have many more people and we're a lot better organized than the Americans realize. We have been preparing for this kind of guerrilla war for a long time, and we're much more patient than the Americans. We have nowhere else to go." The Fedayee Saddam are a special death squad unit organized by Saddam's son Udayy in 1995, and they were extremely effective in brutalizing the Shiites of the south into a kind of dazed, terrified submission. They are now calling themselves the Iraq Liberation Army. All this raises the question, is this situation like Algeria 1956 for the French? If so it is very bad news for the US occupation authority; the French got kicked out of Algeria.

*The newly installed Iraqi police in Falluja are threatening to resign if the US troops that trained them don't leave the city. They say US forces in the city are a threat to their own lives. The people of Falluja (pop. 256,000) really despise the Americans and offer them resistance on several fronts. Some are Saddam loyalists, others Sunni fundamentalists and al-Qaeda wannabes, yet others want the US out for reasons of clan autonomy; still others have a feud with the US troops over earlier incidents in which their relatives were killed. I keep remembering all those talk shows on Fox Cable News on which Frank Gaffney, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Ken Adelman, Bill Kristol, and so on kept assuring us that "the Iraqis" would be jumping up and down for joy if the US overthrew Saddam. I thought to myself at the time that, well, the Shiites and the Kurds might be happy to see Saddam go, but the Sunni Arabs under Saddam were like the whites in South Africa in the 1950s. They benefited from that system, which threw the country's resources to them. They, I thought, are highly unlikely to be happy to see GIs stomping around in their neighborhoods, setting up a government in which the Shiites would dominate the Sunnis. But to be fair, it is not as if any of the people I just named knew the slightest thing about Iraq. They just wanted to have our troops invade it and take it over. Why would you need to know anything to do that?

*Journalist Hazim al-Amin is writing a six-parter for al-Hayat about radical Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr and his background. Today's installment focuses on East Baghdad, which he says is generally called Thawrah City, though many call it Sadr City (it was Saddam City under the Baath). He says most of the Shiites there are conscientious about choosing a cleric to follow, and that they speak in remarkably religious terms about law and everyday life. He says most follow Muqtada al-Sadr, and only a minority follow Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. He says that Thawrah City was founded by Iraq's military dictator Abdu'l-Karim Qasim (who came to power in a coup in 1958), and that Shiite tribespeople from the south settled it by chain migration. He talks about the ways in which tribes in particular neighborhoods retain tribal customs and loyalties, rather than having merged into a melting pot. He suggests that the triangle of tribe, state and Shiite clerical authority will determine the future of politics in East Baghdad. Note that Muqtada al-Sadr has not finished his higher studies and is not an independent jurist, so people have no business following him according to Shiite law, but they are doing so anyway. The legal fiction is that he is the agent of Ayatollah Kazim al-Haeri, who lives in exile in Qom. Muqtada refuses to cooperate with the US administration and reportedly turned down an offer to serve on Bremer's appointed council. If the situation is as al-Amin describes it, Bremer's council simply will not represent the slums of East Baghdad, and it is probably a bad idea for him to let them feel politically disenfranchised. Some less rigid Sadrist should be found who would serve (some of the Sadrist clerics in East Baghdad are cooperating with US community projects).

*Oh, great. Now Kurdish militiamen have driven 7,000 Arab Shiites out of Kurdistan. They had been driven from their own homes in the south by Saddam and forcibly relocated in places like Khaniqin. All we need is bad blood between Kurds and Shiites.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*The US mounted an unprecedented house to house search in Azamiya and Karada, quarters of West Baghdad, on Wednesday, closing off streets and sealing the region, according to az-Zaman. Iraqi police helping in the operation engaged in a running battle with an armed force, which some reports described as looters. The police were supported by US soldiers. In another report, az-Zaman says that US troops used heavy weaponry at Amiriya, another Baghdad suburb, though no details were given. Then there was the incident at the building owned by the Iraqi Manufacturers' association. The association has elected a new governing council, and it was meeting with the old (Baath-dominated) one to transfer power. A guard for the old council, who also had served as a secret police spy for Saddam, opened fire at the new members. Two were wounded, but US soldiers and the new Iraqi police flooded into the building and arrested three men. Hadi Hasan, 52, owner of a furniture making factory, said that the Coalition had presided over elections for the new council on June 19, but that the Baathists dominating the old one had dragged their feet in turning over power. Nothing in the Western press about any of these incidents, as far as I can see. (On Tuesday, Daoud Salman, the governor of Iraq's central bank, was the victim of an assassination attempt--gunmen drove by and riddled his car with bullets, wounding two aides. UPI says he himself took a bullet in the leg, but az-Zaman denies that he was hurt). Nope, no sign of security yet.

And, there more attacks on US troops in Fallujah on Wednesday. One rocket-propelled grenade fired toward the US military exploded mid-air, and the other landed outside a US barracks or office building
(-Paul Haven, AP). The assailants got away. Thank God, none of our boys was hurt by either. But that this sort of thing is still going on daily is a bad sign indeed--especially since Fallujah has been a trouble spot and presumably the US has tried extra hard to get security there. The scale of the problem is indicated by the weapons caches seized by the US on Wednesday. Nearly 500 rocket propelled grenades were found in a truck near Ramadi west of Baghdad (four men in the truck were arrested). When you've got trucks alongside the road with that kind of munitions in them, you've got trouble in River City. The report that a US soldier may have taken his own life at Balad on Monday may be an indication of the kind of pressure our troops are under.

Haven adds: "Meanwhile, the U.S.-led occupation government announced it would begin recruiting members of a new Iraqi army on July 19. Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, in charge of training the new army, said the coalition hoped to have 1,000 soldiers training by August, and 12,000 by year's end. They hope to train 40,000 by an unspecified date in 2004."

*A national conference of about 90 notable Iraqi women, the first of its kind in post-Baathist Iraq, is being held in Baghdad. The women seek to project a "collective voice" representing half the Iraqi population. They want to find ways to have a role in the new Iraqi government. Narmin Othman, in charge of higher education in Kurdistan, said in her opening remarks, "Logic dictates that half of society should not be kept away from areas they should be a part of." US undersecretary of state for world affairs, Paula Dobriansky attended and spoke at a closed session, as did Britain's secretary of state for trade and industry, Patricia Hewitt. Dobriansky, to her credit, has taken a special interest in the situation of Iraqi women, though some of her rhetoric about the situation under Saddam Hussein is a bit propagandistic. Baathists have been better on women's issues than most other Arab governments, and if Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite leader, ever gets a real say, 1970s Iraq will look like a golden age for Iraqi women. US civil administrator Paul Bremer has pledged that women will be appointed to the governmental council he is forming, but it remains to see if they can win elections when Iraqis finally go to the polls (they don't do that well in parliamentary regimes in the West, and certainly not in the US). Pakistan and some other countries have tried to solve this problem by having allotted seats for women, often filled on a proportional basis by party. It isn't something that would appeal to Americans, who generally focus on fair process rather than on fair outcome, but Bremer should think about it for Iraq. Iraqi women could be bulwarks against al-Qaeda- or Khomeini-style fundamentalism if they were guaranteed a third of the seats in the legislature.

*Bremer announced in a visit to Najaf province that he had allocated $7.15 million to improving water purification and other services in the holy city of Najaf (az-Zaman). This is always a winning strategy, and is a very old one. The Nawabs of Awadh and Sindh in 19th century India spent millions of rupees on canal digging and providing water to the holy cities for the pilgrims and seminary students there. Iranian shahs and Ottoman sultans attempted to curry favor with the local population by spending money on Najaf. Bremer as Protector of the City of Ali; it would make for a great painting in the 19th century Orientalist style. Only, the money pledged seems a little chintzy, given the needs, and the precedents.

*Veteran journalist Helena Cobban argues that the US should turn nation-building in Iraq over to the United Nations, which would have more legitimacy. The UN has a mixed record with nation-building, but then so does the US. Certainly, it is the perception of my contacts who have been to Iraq recently that there is less and less respect for the US there. The Bremer administration seems to think it can get an elected Iraqi government in place within 15 months. If it cannot, then the US lacks an exit strategy, and may have to turn to the UN anyway.

*Sheer repression appears to have put an end to the student demonstrations in Iran, which were expected to crest on Weds., July 9, but which subsided in the face of massive arrests and threats of execution by the hardliners. As I said in The Nation, the students were relatively isolated in their protests, with some support from middle class families from north Tehran who came down in their cars and honked their horns in solidarity. The movement won't amount to anything unless the workers and small businesspeople and a significant number of reformist clergy join in. But the students' often radical rhetoric alienated a lot of those groups.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*In a staccato burst of attacks on Tuesday, 7 US troops were wounded in Baghdad and Kirkuk. In Baghdad insurgents waited on a bridge until a US convoy was passing and then lobbed a homemade bomb at it. In Kirkuk, assailants fired a rocket propelled grenade at US military vehicles. In another incident in Baghdad, a military vehicle ran over a mine. A British soldier was wounded by a sniper. Two Iraqi policemen in training were wounded by a grenade tossed at them in the Shaab quarter of Baghdad. Al-Hayat calls all this a "war of nerves" against the occupation, which is maybe a more nuanced way of saying 'low grade guerrilla war.'

*Some 500 protesters in Kabul stormed the Pakistani embassy on Tuesday, and Pakistan closed its mission until security can be restored. The Kabulis were angry about what they saw as Pakistani army incursions into Afghan territory in hot pursuit of Taliban and al-Qaeda residents. The Afghans who demonstrate objected to such pursuits. Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf are attempting to paper over the problems, but it is true that there is a lot of ill-will toward Pakistan in the public. The Pakistanis after all had supported the Taliban before September 11.

*In a message posted to his web page, Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council, has backed down from his earlier opposition to serving in an appointed political council. He was apparently convinced to join Bremer's appointed governmental council by Ahmad Chalabi, and finally accepted that elections could not be held any time soon in Iraq. This is very good news for the Bremer administration, since SCIRI is among the few religious Shiite parties with strong grass roots. I haven't heard, but I assume that the al-Da`wa party, another Shiite group, is also aboard. Only the Communists are holding out and refusing to cooperate. Bremer appears to have gained this acceptance only by substantially increasing the power of the appointed governmental council and making it less of a debating society. He insists on retaining a veto over its decisions, though. The "Group of Seven" (Chalabi, Hakim, the two Kurdish leaders, al-Da`wa and a couple of others) called on the US to depart from Iraqi cities and to set up an Iraqi security force to take their place. (Quite a lot of US troops in Iraq would love to do just that, and come home). One dark cloud: The Sadr movement is not represented on the Council, and they are probably the majority of religious Shiites.

*Now the American-appointed governor of the Shiite holy city of Karbala has had to resign over corruption charges. He steps down in the wake of his counterpart in Najaf. From the point of view of Shiites in these towns, they have not been well served by American appointees. In Najaf the US had even installed a Sunni Baath officer! That was offensive to the Shiite townspeople, in the first place, even if he hadn't embezzled and kidnapped people. At least these resignations show that the Marines are trying to keep tabs on the situation and correct mistakes.

*Shirzad Shaikhani reports for Asharaq al-Awsat that he was told by a high Kurdish official that the Turkish military had infiltrated Kirkuk in order to destabilize Iraqi Kurdistan by assassinating the governor of Kirkuk. The Turkish government has vehemently denied this allegation. But what were Turkish Special Forces doing in Kirkuk. Shaikhani says that initially even the Americans hadn't known of their presence!

*The new Iraqi mayor of Basra, Judge Wa'il Abdul Latif, said in a press conference that there is no resistance to the Coalition forces in his city. He said that it was unrealistic to expect order to have been returned to the country in only two months. He also said that looting used to go on under the Baath regime of Saddam, but that no one dared speak of it. I doubt the looting was on the same scale, but it occurs to me that Judge Abdul Latif may have a point. It could be that Iraqi society was not as regimented as it seemed from the outside. If the gangs of looters predated the invasion, that would explain some of their success.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*Two US soldiers and two Iraqis were killed on Monday as violence against the US-led coalition escalated . . . - (SA). And . . . At the same time, sabotage against Iraq's oil and electric power grids is increasing, a British official in Iraq has said. Andrew Bearpark, director of regional services, asked for Iraqis to turn in those responsible, saying it was impossible for soldiers to protect hundreds of miles of pipelines and power cables.

*People in Ramadi are furious at the Americans, who killed an apparently innocent man on Sunday evening after they were attacked (four American troops were injured). "You will see what will happen to the Americans now. You will see what we will do to them," hospital administrator Taha Hussein said to Reuters. The degree of anger at Americans in the Sunni belt of north-central Iraq is from all accounts at an all-time high. One wonders how it could be assuaged. After all, the US is removing their perks, to which they had gotten rather attached, and is setting up a democratic government with Shiites in the majority. People in Ramadi don't much like Shiites, either.

*The Group of 7 Iraqi parties met in Salahu'd-Din on Monday and affirmed that they would in fact serve on the appointed governmental council to be formed next week by US civil administrator Paul Bremer. The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), one of the 7, had earlier suggested it might not be willing to serve in a purely appointive body. The seven include the two main Kurdish parties, SCIRI, al-Da`wa, a group of ex-Baathist officers, and an old Sunni nationalist party, along with Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi. The group appears to feel that Bremer is open to granting the governmental council more power than he initially had indicated. Bremer has started calling it a government council, not just a political council as at first. (Apparently inside Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi is popularly known as Ahmad Harami or Ahmad the Thief--he is wanted in Jordan on embezzlement charges. And Iyad Allawi, leader of the ex-officers, is known as Iyad al-Baathi.) I want to see an explicit statement from Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim before I believe he is really on board.

*A convention of Iraqi tribal leaders was also held, representing the rural Shiite tribes of the center and south of Iraq, called "The Bloc of Democratic Iraqi tribes." They aim at ensuring they have a voice in the governance of Iraq. (The rural tribes are not as oriented toward scholastic religion as are the Shiites in cities such as Najaf). - al-Hayat. The convention chair, Ghalib al-Rikabi, insisted that Iraqi natives would have to draft the Iraqi constitution (thus echoing last week's fatwa by Grand Ayatollah Sistani). They demanded early elections for an Iraqi government. I once suggested to a Europeanist colleague of mine that tribes in the Middle East might form elements of civil society, and he remonstrated with me that that was not what [German sociologist Jurgen] Habermas was talking about! But, well, here you have the Bloc of Democratic Iraqi Tribes. So Habermas will just have to get used to it.

*And, the newly selected Baghdad city council met for the first time (see yesterday's entry for cautions about seeing it as "democratic.").

*An opinion poll was published in az-Zaman on Tuesday that shows that 52% of Iraqis want a straight democracy. That seems low until you realize that another box they could tick was for a "Federal" government (i.e. one less centralized than is apparently implied by "democratic" in Iraqi Arabic). But both "democratic" and "Federal" would be "democratic" in US terms. 20% supported constitutional monarchy; 10% supported a Federal government; 10% supported a Republic; and 8% wanted an Islamic government. (These other choices come to 48%, with 52% supporting straight democracy.) From a US/UK point of view, it is therefore more fair to say that 92% supported some form of parliamentary democracy, with only 8% opting for an "Islamic government" (and maybe some of those are the equivalent of Christian Coalition democrats, too).

The pollster, Dr. Harith Abdul Hamid, claims that the poll was scientifically weighted, and that those polled included persons from various Baghdad neighborhoods, social classes, age groups, and both genders. Abdul Hamid is dean of the Center for Psychological and Parapsychological Research! It doesn't sound like a reputable outfit from the name, but it should be remembered that many Soviet and Soviet-allied scientific establishments took the paranormal more seriously than is common in the US. Being materialists, they wanted to acknowledge such phenomena and also explain them away.

Other findings: 49% said they thought the future would be bright, but 35% feared it would be unstable.

Priorities: 47% said security and stability; 26% said food and medicine; and 25% said basic services (electricity, clean water, etc.) Most appeared to think that an independent Iraqi government was not as urgent a priority as these basics.

I thought the percentage of those desiring an Islamic state would be higher than 8%, and I am suprised that 92% want some form of parliamentary democracy. I am not surprised that only 20% want a constitutional monarchy (which I suspect would be very unwelcome to the vast majority of religious Shiites.)




For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Despite Paul Bremer's earlier opposition to municipal elections, some form of urban self-government is being arranged by the British and American militaries. On Sunday it was reported by AFP that the Basra governing council of 31 delegates had elected a new interim mayor of Basra, Iraq's second-largest city by secret ballot. The electee is Shiite judge Wail Abdul Latif, a former Iraqi judge and port administrator who was imprisoned for a year by Saddam. The security situation in Basra seems to be a bit better than Baghdad's, though Danish Muslim administrator of the area Ole Wohlers Olsen had criticized the US for not helping in security issues there. Some 10,000 Basrans came out for self-rule last month. A similar process of building up the basis for elections from neighborhood councils is going on in Baghdad, where an interim Baghdad council has been elected. The LA Times reports that "Together, the Iraqis, the colonel and other U.S. military and civilian officials have formed 88 neighborhood "advisory councils." The neighborhood councils in turn elected the members of nine district councils, who then elected the members of the Baghdad City Council."
Unfortunately, in the absence of telephones or media, and given the appointive and elite character of the neighborhood councils, not many Iraqis seem to even know they exist. It is hard to know the significance of these moves right now. Are they window-dressing or the tentative beginnings of municipal democracy? How will Iraqis perceive them a year from now? A lot probably hangs on whether the US can convince Iraqis that they are gradually gaining self-rule.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*Sunday evening witnessed another grenade attack on US troops in the Sunni belt, according to AFP: "Unknown assailants fired rocket-propelled grenades at a US patrol in the Iraqi town of Ramadi west of Baghdad Sunday night, witnesses said. Powerful explosions were heard in the town, located 100 kilometers (60 miles) west of Baghdad, said the witnesses, contacted by AFP from Fallujah, which lies midway between Ramadi and the Iraqi capital." Some early reports said that 4 US troops were injured in the attack. Poor guys. Three US soldiers were killed over the weekend, including one who was essentially assassinated in Baghdad while providing security at Baghdad University. Nearly 30 US troops and 6 British troops have been killed in Iraq since May 1, and over two dozen more US personnel have died in accidents. It seems clear that Operation Sidewinder and other military attempts to stop attacks on the US in the Sunni belt have not so far succeeded. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Richard Myers, played down the seriousness of such attacks on Sunday, saying that they are mostly a problem in the Sunni Arab areas (accounting for 15% of the population) and are fragmented. Myers is not wrong about the substance, but he seems unaware of the morale and Public Relations implication of this daily litany of mayhem. Proponents of the war probably did not do the US any favors by their repeated insistence that the Iraqis would be jumping up and down for joy to have the US on their soil. Some are, some aren't. But it was always unlikely that the Sunni Arabs would be that happy about the US troops being there, and I tried to tell people this last winter.

*As you all know, President Bush replied to the attackers in Iraq, saying "Bring it on!" Senator Carl Levin commented on Meet the Press Sunday, "I think that it's perfectly proper for the president to say that he has confidence in our troops. But it seems to me unwise to engage in this kind of cocky rhetoric, because it's not going to be helpful ... either with our troops or in bringing in other countries into this issue." {Truth in advertising: Levin is my senator and I always vote for him.} As most of you know, I'm from a military family and still have a lot of friends and contacts in the US military, and most of them are much more pissed off at Bush for that piece of bravado than Levin is, though they can't say so publicly. It didn't help that the Sunni insurgents "brought it on" and shot that poor US soldier who was buying a soft drink at Baghdad U, right after Bush's remark. Bush was never in the real military and never lived in a war zone, and can't stop talking like a rich spoiled drunk frat kid at Yale instead of like a commander in chief of living breathing men and women who are putting their lives on the line for this country.

*US ruler of Iraq, Paul Bremer, says he will retain a veto over the decisions of the transitional Iraqi government that he plans to appoint in mid-July. The liberal Iraqi newspaper az-Zaman insisted that he thereby reneged on a promise that the transitional government would have real authority, and says that most Iraqi politicians are furious at him. The time-table is apparently for a constitution to be written this winter, and for elections to be held within 18 months. I worry that this is too long to go with no indigenous Iraqi government (the appointed council won't be taken seriously by Iraqis), and that in the meantime Bremer is setting himself up to take the blame for everything that goes wrong in Iraq over the next 18 months. This step seems to me unwise. It is being bruited about that the council will have a Shiite majority, though the religious Shiite parties will not be allowed to dominate it. Somehow I don't think that the 2-3 million Shiites in Sadr City are going to be that enthusiastic about being represented by corrupt expatriate Shiites and ex-Baathist Shiites, etc.

*Retired US diplomat Joseph Wilson has all but called US Vice President Dick Cheney a liar with regard to Iraq's nuclear program. In a New York Times op-ed, Wilson recounts how the VP's office asked him to go to Niger early in 2002 to check out stories that Iraq was buying processed uranium from that country. He went, and satisfied himself that the intelligence was false, and reported that back to Washington. The "documents" on which the charge was based, incidentally, are clumsy forgeries. As soon as they were provided to Muhammad Baradei of the International Atomic Energy Commission in spring of 2003, he blew the whistle on them as fraudulent. But these documents kept being cited by Blair and Bush administration officials as reliable, including in the President's State of the Union Address! Cheney certainly got Wilson's report, and if Baradei could so easily prove the documents a fraud, so could the CIA. Not only did Cheney lie in spring of 2003 when he alleged that he had good evidence that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program, but it seems highly likely that Bush and National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice also spoke insincerely.

A big question is where the forged letters came from. They were passed from Italian intelligence to MI6, and from there to the CIA. Of course, we just don't know their provenance yet, and maybe we never will. High on my list of suspects in this monumental fraud (which took me in until Baradei exposed it) are: 1) Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi expatriates who were trying to get the US to go to war against Saddam so that they could take over Iraq and get access to $13 bn. a year in oil revenues; and 2) Ariel Sharon's personal intelligence unit, which was also working to get the US to take out the Baath in Iraq. I identify them only as suspects, persons with means, motive and opportunity. Sharon thinks that the American take-out of Saddam spells the end of Palestinian resistance to his plan to gobble up 40% of the West Bank and some of Gaza. The American public, enraged about September 11, allowed a motley crew of neocons and Iraqi would be carpet baggers to dupe them into thinking attacking Iraq would be "pay back" for what al-Qaeda did to us!


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*The Mail on Sunday in the UK reports that the UK Foreign Office has concluded that there just weren't any chemical or biological weapons in Iraq: 'Senior Government sources have told The Mail On Sunday that the Foreign Office has given up hope of finding chemical and biological weapons in Iraq. The source said: 'We live in hope but we just can't find them. Most people at the Foreign Office don't think we ever will. The Prime Minister still thinks they will be found - perhaps he has more information.' The disclosure is a major embarrassment to Mr Blair on the eve of tomorrow's publication of a Commons report into the row over whether the Government lied in the run-up to the war with Iraq.'

*7 US trained Iraqi policemen were blown up in Sunni Arab stronghold Ramadi on Saturday. I saw someone on Fox News going on about how 25,000 Iraqi policemen have already been trained and deployed. I find this assertion incredible. Trained? What must really be going on is that the old Baath police are being rehired and given a couple of days of sensitivity lessons on not torturing just everyone they arrest. You couldn't train 25,000 policemen in a month or two! And, the estimates are that 50,000 are needed. And, there is still no security in major urban areas, with running gun battles at night, kidnappings, robbings, etc. still going on. And, some of the newly trained police are bing blown up and killed. Many such attacks apparently go unreported.

*Hizbullah in Lebanon refuses to disarm and evolve into a regular political party, according to Asharq al-Awsat. The question arises whenever there is a vigorous Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Hizbullah, probably correctly, doesn't think there is much of a real peace process. Hizbullah also denies any relationship to events in Iraq. Since most of the violence in Iraq has been coming from Sunnis or from spontaneous crowd action by Shiites, this denial is plausible so far.

*The liberals lost big in the Kuwaiti elections, in which only men can vote or run for office. About a third of seats went to Sunni and Shiite fundamentalists, a big increase. But the government still has the majority of seats, and may succeed in ramming through a provision that would allow women to vote henceforth.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*One US soldier was killed by a sniper in Baghdad on the US Independence Day, and 17 were wounded by a mortar attack in Balad. A little later Iraqi insurgents ambushed a US convoy near Balad, and the US took out 11 of the attackers. The low grade guerrilla conflict thus continued unabated. Indeed, it looks like the Sunni opposition is getting better organized and having more successes, according to the Washington Post.

*There was a big attack on a Hazara Shiite mosque in Quetta, Pakistan, on Friday, where 2000 congregants were worshipping. The Hazara Shiites, from the center of Afghanistan, had been especially targetted by the Taliban and their allies among Sunni extremist groups. They form part of the Karzai government. There are still a lot of Afghan refugees in northern Pakistan, and this incident appears to be a case of their carrying on feuds from the old country in their host environment. That is, the Taliban have struck from beyond their supposed grave. The attack provoked rioting in Quetta, as it was no doubt intended to. The Taliban are still attempting to disrupt Pakistani society as an adjunct to their efforts to disrupt Afghan society. Shiites are probably about 13% of Pakistanis, amounting to some 18 million persons. This sort of incident is likely to make them stronger supporters of the Musharraf government, which has been cracking down on the Sunni radicals, and so may backfire on the perpetrators.

* Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, called Friday from Najaf for greater United Nations involvement in rebuilding and reconstructing Iraq. Al-Hakim has been increasingly unhappy with American-governed Iraq, so in a way it is not strange that he should turn to the international community. But the Iraqi Shiites mostly despise the UN for doing nothing to help them against Saddam, so actually this call may be a sign of growing desperation on his part. It should be read as, even the UN would be better than Bremer.

*Agence France Presse reports that "US troops on Friday released a Shiite Muslim leader [Sheikh Ali Abdul Karim Madani] in this town northeast of Baghdad, a day after his detention sparked a protest by thousands of his supporters, according to an AFP correspondent at the scene." The some three thousand protesters were scattered by a bomb of unknown provenance, which killed one of their number.

This release follows a pattern of arrests of radical Shiite clerics by US forces in the past month or so, wherein they are taken in, detained, and when thousands of supporters gather to protest, they are released. Typically they are more circumspect after their release. But I have complained before that this pattern may make it look to the protesters as though it was their protests that secured the release. I suspect it would be better to give the man a good talking to before actually detaining him, though perhaps that is being done.

*Christian women in Basra are having to veil themselves from head to toe when they go out for fear of harassment from hardline Shiites, according to an eyewitness report from a worker for the Vatican there. Here's part of the interview:

Q: What is the effect of this Shiite pressure on the life of the Christian minority in Iraq?

Siebrecht: I myself saw how Christian women cover themselves from head to toe for their own safety when going out into the street, otherwise they might be attacked or suffer abuses. This is the reality in Basra. We didn't see this in Baghdad or in the north, in Mosul. The situation is better there. The Shiites are stronger in the south and that is why they try to exert pressure.

Q: Are the fundamentalists' demonstrations of force an attempt to impose a radical Islamism?

Siebrecht: It's hard to say. None of the people with whom we spoke -- nuncio, bishops, priests -- could tell us what might happen. All hope that the present situation will not serve to strengthen Muslim fundamentalism. But no one can exclude this possibility, at least in the south.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

My opinion piece in the Daily Star covers some of the same ground as postings here earlier in the week, but also makes some new points:

Sistani throws down a gauntlet

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has intervened forcefully in Iraqi politics. In a fatwa, or legal ruling, issued on July 1, he denounced US civil administrator L. Paul Bremer's plan to appoint a committee to draft a new Iraqi constitution. He insisted that Bremer had no such authority, and that the Iraqi people themselves must elect delegates to any constitutional convention. Moreover, he said, the constitution should be subject to a popular referendum before being implemented.

The US sees itself as the liberator of Iraq, one that must patiently oversee the transition to a new government for an Iraqi people still incapable of governing itself. Iraqis like Sistani, however, insist that Iraqi sovereignty must be part of the process.

The problem is that Bremer plans to rule Iraq himself, through Western and Iraqi appointees, for at least two years. He has announced he will form a political committee of 25 to 30 individuals that will, according to the liberal Iraqi newspaper Al-Zaman, advise the civil administrator and help oversee ministries. It will also prepare the way for an Iraqi constitution, to be drafted by a gathering of 125 appointees who will be called together in a month or two.

Bremer has reversed America's course. In the past year, the US Defense Department gave the impression to the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a group largely made up of expatriate parties, that it would hand over power to it in an orderly fashion after Saddam Hussein's regime was removed. Bremer's predecessor, Jay Garner, appointed INC members, including its leader, Ahmed Chalabi, to a seven-man political council charged with calling a national congress to elect a transitional government in July.

Bremer, a former State Department official, canceled these plans and has largely sidelined the INC. He even opposed the holding of municipal elections. The State Department and the CIA are opposed to Chalabi and the INC. They believe that Chalabi is corrupt and suspect Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, of being an Iranian Trojan horse. Finally, after the experience of Bosnia, the State Department has argued it is unwise to hold elections too soon, since hard-liners may win and obstruct real change for years thereafter.

Enter Sistani. His fatwa was issued after he met with Chalabi. It may well be that Chalabi and Hakim have decided that the best way to push Bremer back toward the original Defense Department plan is to enlist the aid of Sistani, a towering religious and moral authority for most Iraqi Shiites. The ayatollah, a quietist, would not have ordinarily wanted to get involved in day-to-day politics. But he is in competition with more radical clerics like Muqtada al-Sadr, who have rejected American rule altogether, and he is willing to address foundational issues like the constitution.

Sistani's fatwa burnishes his anti-imperialist credentials by appealing to the primacy of national self determination. He said of Bremer's 125 appointees: "There is no guarantee that this council would grant a constitution that accorded with the highest interests of the Iraqi people and express their national identity, among the pillars of which is the foundation of the pure Islamic religion and noble social virtues." His main worry appears to be that the constitution will enshrine a seperation of religion and state and a liberalism that weakens Iraq's moral fabric.

So far, ordinary Iraqi Shiites, grateful for the end of Saddam's reign, have provided the US with a grace period. Calls by radical followers of Sadr for demonstrations against the US occupation have elicited little support. Sistani's fatwa, however, signals that the patience of even quietist Iraqi Shiites is not unlimited. It also raises the question of whether a government fashioned mainly by the US can ever achieve true legitimacy. Without such legitimacy, Iraq could become a cauldron of instability.

Sistani has thrown down a heavy steel gauntlet. Will Bremer pick it up? He ignores the fatwa to his great peril.



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

* A happy Fourth to all the Americans in Iraq, where I know I have some readers. Hope you can all be back home soon, safe and sound. And to my Iraqi friends, I wish you well with the sentiments we celebrate on the Fourth - We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . .

*The Badr Corps will not fight against the next government of Iraq, said Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), in an interview published in SCIRI's al-`Adalah on Thursday. He said the Corps was formed to fight Saddam. He said there was no point in attempts to disarm it [by the Americans], since it had not entered Iraq from Iran with any heavy weaponry to begin with. He said its soldiers would be dedicated to national development projects. He said there was no need to maintain an armed such corps now that Saddam was gone, and that there was no excuse for it to raise its weapons against any government chosen by the Iraqi people. - AFP/Asharq al-Awsat.

This statement is, of course, a pledge to keep the Badr corps from being disarmed (it would retain "light" weapons), and a threat that it will be used against the new government if it is not chosen by the Iraqi people. Hakim is always trying to sound reasonable even when he is making outrageous demands and launching threats.

*Thursday was another awful day, with US troops falling as casualties in more than one incident. In one instance, a team brazenly drove a civilian vehicle with a sun roof beside a humvee. An enemy combatant stood up through the sun roof with an rpg launcher and fired beneath the humvee, then the vehicle sped off. In another incident, the Marines arrested Shaikh Ali Abdul Karim al-Madani, the leading Shiite cleric in Baaquba, leaving his books scattered around as they carted him off. This arrest provoked a demonstration. A bomb was tossed into the middle of the demonstration (presumably by a left over Baathist provocateur trying to make trouble between the US and the Shiites). The US has been cracking down on SCIRI and its Badr Corps fighters in Baquba, and presumably saw al-Madani as a backer of these two. It is unwise to go about provoking demonstrations and giving the impression that we are arbitrarily arresting Shiite clerics. But maybe al-Madani really was involved in some bad business that needed to be nipped in the bud. Whatever the rationale, his arrest may have been unwise; at the least, things don't seem to be going well in Baquba, a large Shiite town near the Iranian border.

*The US has a brief window of opportunity to get the major Shiite clerics on its side, according to Trudy Rubin of the Philadelphia Inquirer, just back from Iraq. She says the moderate ayatollahs of the religious establishment in Najaf are largely favorable to the US, but they do not want the occupation to drag on. She quotes Ayatollah Muhammad Sa`id al-Hakim as saying, "The Americans have promised that the period of their occupation is limited....The Americans must give the Iraqi public the opportunity to elect a new Iraqi government as soon as possible. There is no other reason for them to be here in Iraq." In other words, the hawza has limited patience with proposals for a long-term occupation, or current U.S. plans to postpone Iraqi elections. Thanks to Ms. Rubin for risking so much to go to Najaf and get the story from the principals for us.



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*The US is bogged down in a low-intensity guerrilla war in Iraq, with daily attacks that for the most part go unmentioned in the Western press, including grenade, mortar and rocket propelled grenade assaults on Anglo-American military and on Iraqi police personnel and facilities. So reports Richard Sale, the intrepid terrorism correspondent of UPI. He says that US proconsul in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, began asking for more troops 10 days ago, and that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld reviewed the request. It seems unlikely to be granted. The US military is already stretched thin in Iraq, and the army doesn't have much more to give. Reservists are being kept out there, away from their jobs, already.

Sales writes, A former very senior CIA official commented: "There is a deep foreboding spreading across (Washington) about Iraq. Bremer can't win without another 100,000 troops, and he isn't going to get them. U.S. troops on the ground are almost used up, and literally tens of thousands of active duty and reservists are blocked from leaving the Army. We've got trouble, and we're in Vietnam-era denial." But there is agreement on one matter. Several administration officials and serving U.S. intelligence agents said they believe the United States is now involved in a guerilla war in Iraq, also despite the Defense Department's denials. "It's what I would call a long-term, low-intensity conflict," an administration source said, adding: "There is a high degree of concern at the White House."

The problem is acute. The US does not have the troops on the ground to provide security, even to key facilities such as electrical plants. One of Sales's interviewees thought Bremer needs another 100,000 troops to get the job done. (I am suspicious of such assertions; it may just be that the job is too big to get done at this scale at all). Bush and Rummy are afraid to admit that they are now bogged down in a guerrilla war, castigating their foes as "terrorists" and "Baath remnants." But there is evidence, Sale says, in radio intercepts of coordination among groups, and all the groups are not Baathists. The guys who blew themselves up in the al-Hasan Mosque in Falluja during a bomb making class are more likely to be Iraqi Muslim Brotherhood than Baath.

The basic problem for the real terrorists, i.e., al-Qaeda and its sub-contractors, was that the US was an awfully difficult target. It has limited exposure. The few loopholes that existed in its security, as with the unforeseen tactic of hijacking a plane and using it for suicide bombings, have largely been closed since September 11. But the Iraq War was a godsend to Sunni radicals, since it placed 160,000 American troops right in the middle of the Arab world, where they could be gotten at easily. Al-Qaeda likes symbolic targets, and now it has thousands of them. Although foreign al-Qaeda fighters may represent a small number of the insurgents striking at US troops now, the danger is that as the occupation drags on, there will be more of them, and more of the Sunni Arab Iraqis will give them cover. The Bushies have Bin Laden exactly where he wants them.

*Bremer brushed off Grand Ayatollah Sistani's demand for an elected constitutional convention, according to the Financial Times: 'Mr Bremer brushed off a religious edict issued on Monday by Ayatollah Ali Sistani, a leading Shia Muslim jurist. He said his call for an elected convention to draw up a constitution was impractical. "There is no way to conduct national elections," said Mr Bremer. "There is no census. There is no voting register. There are no constituency boundaries. There is no electoral law, and there is no law governing political parties." Mr Bremer reaffirmed that the administration would by mid-July announce a political council of 25-30 people "representative of the broad strata of Iraqi society", which would exercise "political responsibility . . . [including] responsibility for appointing ministers and making recommendations on how they spend money".'
All this talk about the lack of electoral rolls and so forth is not completely irrelevant, since one wants elections to be fair. But the US held a Loya Jirga in Afghanistan to elect Karzai, and it could hold some sort of consultative elections if it wanted to in Iraq. My guess is that the US civil administration isn't confident that they could orchestrate elections in Iraq the way they did in Afghanistan, and they don't want Shiite firebrand Muqtada al-Sadr elected head write of the Iraqi constitution. This is a case where I am a typical intellectual and can see both sides of the issue. Bremer is doing what he thinks is for the best in the long run. Sistani is insisting on the preservation of Iraqi national sovereignty, which is also a legitimate concern. I guess I think the Washington crowd has become awfully arrogant, talking about imposing their will on Iraq, and about "writing their constitution for them the way we did with Japan and Germany." I wonder if some sort of political solution could not be had that would satisfy both Bremer's concerns and those of Sistani, if that Washington arrogance were not getting in the way.

Asharq al-Awsat ran an unsourced item today claiming that the US civil administration intends to give pride of place to the Shiite community because they are the majority and have suffered more than anyone else, and will in fact acquiesce in Sistani's demand that the delegates to any constitutional convention be elected. This looks to me like planted disinformation for the Arabic reading public. I'd say it is unwise to raise unrealistic expectations in people in a short term attempt to mollify them.

*In fact, Hamid Bayati of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq is already complaining that his organization was misled by the US into thinking it would hand off power to the Iraqis soon after Saddam was overthrown. The AP article notes, 'During war preparations, the U.S. special envoy to the Iraqi opposition, Zalmay Khalilzad, promised the government would be handed over to Iraqi representatives once the war ended, al-Bayati said. "They have swallowed all their promises, and from now on we should ask them for written statements of pledges because they always back down," he said. I think the Iraqi expatriates were led on by the US. On the other hand, the expatriate politicians were the ones who blew smoke up our asses about all those Iraqi nuclear programs and weapons of mass destruction and Saddam-al-Qaeda links, and who promised clueless Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz that Iraqis were nice secular people who would be friendly to US soldiers. SCIRI was using Rumsfeld to install a Khomeini-style government in Iraq, which they knew the US did not want, just as the US was using SCIRI and others to gain legitimacy for the invasion. It is not as if there was good faith on all sides here.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

For some odd reason, my July 1 posting of Sistani's fatwa is not being archived by the new blogger software, so I am attempting to repost it here so it can be linked to.

Tuesday, July 01, 2003

*Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has entered Iraqi politics in an unexpectedly big way. He has denounced US administrator Paul Bremer's plan to appoint a large constitutional committee to write a new Iraqi constitution. He insists that Bremer has no such authority, and that delegates to an Iraqi constitutional convention must be elected by the Iraqi people. Moreover, he says, the constitution itself should be subject to a popular referendum before it is implemented.

I reproduce below my translation of the article on this from the liberal Iraqi newspaper az-Zaman, which quotes a good deal of the fatwa itself.

It is very suspicious to me that this fatwa was issued after Sistani met with Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress. Chalabi had been hoping for some time that the US would just hand Iraq over to him and walk away after Saddam fell. Jay Garner, the first American proconsul, seemed inclined to do just that. This seems to have been what passed for a plan for post-war construction at the Defense Department. The State Department and the CIA were opposed to this plan for a number of reasons. They believe Chalabi is highly corrupt (they gave the INC $4 million, and Chalabi cannot account for $2 million of it). He is wanted on bank fraud charges in Jordan. If you can't trust a man with $4 million, how can you trust him with a whole country, that has an oil income of some $13 billion? They also did not like that the INC includes the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which they see as a Trojan Horse for Iranian influence in Iraq. Finally, their experience in Bosnia was that it is unwise to hold elections too soon, since hardliners may get in who obstruct real change for years thereafter.

Garner tried to hand power over to the INC before he was deposed, but he was reversed in this by Paul Bremer, who is the State Department's man even if he ultimately reports to Rumsfeld. Bremer nixed the idea of early elections, an early handover to an Iraqi government, or an unsupervised constitutional convention. Bremer thinks he is going to rule Iraq himself, personally, through his appointees--Westerners and Iraqis--for at least two years. Bremer seems determined to sideline both Chalabi and SCIRI.

My guess is that Chalabi and SCIRI spiritual leader Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim have decided that the best way to push Bremer back toward the Garner (aka Wolfowitz/Rumsfeld) plan is to enlist the aid of Sistani, the towering religious and moral authority for most Iraqi Shiites. Sistani is basically a quietist and would not have wanted to get involved, but somehow they have convinced him to do so.

What is remarkable to me is how little his fatwa appeals to principles of Islamic law. It cites no holy text or principle, at least as quoted in az-Zaman. It is a simple statement of the primacy of national self-determination. It echoes Jefferson and Wilson.

It was announced today that Bremer has decided to allow local US military authorities to hold municipal elections if they deem it best, though they can appoint governments if they choose. Bremer had earlier intervened to stop such local elections. But the outbreak of violence at Majar al-Kabir last week, along with the problems of the appointed government of Najaf, seem to have changed his mind. The appointed mayor of Najaf was an ex-Baathist officer and turns out to have been corrupt as hell. Najaf residents have been protesting against him for weeks. It was poor judgment of the US to appoint a Sunni officer only recently out of the Baathist army to rule the Shiite holy city of Najaf in the first place. (See earlier columns of mine on this). But to have his administration be so shot through with embezzlement, kidnapping, etc., is a real black eye for the US.

As if all this were not enough, SCIRI leader Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim just issued a call for the formation of an Iraqi government that would peacefully move the US back out of Iraq, according to AP. Hakim said, ""Our demand is that a government be formed by the Iraqis and work to end the occupation by peaceful means." His statement seem coordinated with Sistani's fatwa, and with Chalabi's visit to Najaf.

Sistani has thrown down a very heavy steel gauntlet. Lets see if Bremer picks it up. He ignores this fatwa to his very great peril.

Here's the article, translated by moi, from az-Zaman:

1 July 2003
Az-Zaman
Najaf

Ali Sistani, the most senior of the Shiite religious authorities in Najaf, affirmed in a new fatwa that he issued yesterday (of which az-Zaman obtained a copy by fax) the necessity of holding general elections so that all Iraqis would be represented in a founding convention. It would have as its mission the fashioning of a new draft constitution. He stipulated that the constitution would have to be voted on by the Iraqis before its implementation could be authorized. Sistani issued this fatwa based on a question concerning the legitimacy in Islamic law of the Occupation Authority?s appointment of members of a founding convention authorized to produce a new constitution after consultations with political parties and movements. Sistani said in the fatwa itself, ?The Occupation Officials do not enjoy the authority to appoint the members of a council that would write the constitution.?

He added, ?There is no guarantee that this council would grant a constitution that accorded with the highest interests of the Iraqi people and would express their national identity, among the pillars of which is the foundation of the pure Islamic religion and noble social virtues.? He affirmed that ?the proposal referred to is fundamentally unacceptable.? The American ruler of Iraq, Paul Bremer, broached at the beginning of June a plan that specifies the formation of a political council of 25 to 30 members. The chief mission of this council will be to present discussions to the occupation administration in the economic and political spheres. One of its purposes, as well, is to appoint counselors in the ministries that will achieve at a later point the rank of deputy minister. Another purpose of the political council will be to prepare a referendum on the new constitution that will be fashioned by a convention of 125 members that will be formed in a month or two. Calling for general elections, Sistani said, ?general elections must be held so that every eligible Iraqi can choose someone to represent him at the constitutional convention that will write the constitution. Then there must be a public referendum that will be called by this convention.?

Sistani affirmed that ?It is incumbent upon all believers to demand the realization of this important matter, and to join together in achieving it in the best manner possible.?

In other news, a spokesman for the Iraqi National Council said that the president of the INC, Ahmad Chalabi, visited Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Najaf yesterday.

One source said that Sistani affirmed during this meeting, which lasted more than an hour, the necessity for a constitutional council that would undertake to write a new Iraqi constitution, be ?a purely Iraqi council that would be chosen by the children of the Iraqi people.?

He added that Sistani and Chalabi discussed ?the necessity for the American government to issue a political proclamation affirming that the American forces present in Iraq are forces of liberation and not forces of occupation.?

Chalabi and his delegation also visited Ayatollah Ishaq Fayad, one of the chief Shiite religious authorities in Najaf, according to the same source.

- Juan, 8:58 AM

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*Here is what Tuesday's events in Iraq looked like to Kuwait's Arab Times: "Six more American soldiers were wounded in Iraq on Tuesday and a fatal blast at a mosque fuelled Muslim anger toward US forces, all within hours of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld insisting Iraq was no new Vietnam. Three soldiers were hurt near Baghdad's university when a makeshift bomb exploded by their vehicle, a military spokesman said. Their Iraqi interpreter was missing. Bystanders saw troops drag four seemingly badly wounded people from the burning wreck. Three others were wounded in two separate grenade attacks."

The daily litany of US casualties is extremely depressing, and apparently unlikely to stop any time soon. The recent news of 30 Iraqi looters being blown up accidentally while looting a weapons' depot was shocking to me. You mean the US and Britain are still leaving major weapons depots unguarded and open to systematic looting?? Those arms then end up in the hands of angry Sunni Baathists, fundamentalists and other opponents of US presence. The mosque explosion at Falluja, which killed the prayer leader and several seminary students, was almost certainly a Baathist ploy to get the US in further trouble with the people there. It seems to be working, and US denials that their missile landed on the mosque are being dismissed.

*The good news is that only 56 percent of Americans think things are going well for the US in Iraq, down from the 70s a month ago. The bad news is that 56% of Americans should have their eyes examined if this looks to them like anything but a growing disaster.

*The British in Basra are working with the 15 sheikhs who head the major tribes/clans in the city, to find a solution to the massive unemployment gripping the area.

*The Kurds have found a document from Iraqi intelligence dating back to the late 1980s during the Anfal (chemical weapons) campaign against the Kurds, who had allied with Iran in the Iran-Iraq War. It has long been known that the Iraqi army kidnapped thousands of Kurdish men at that time, presumably in preparation for their burial in mass graves. It now turns out that young Kurdish women were also kidnapped in some numbers, and sent off to work on the estates of Baath loyalists in the Sunni Arab center or even sold into sexual slavery abroad. Some 17, according to the document, ended up in Cairo night clubs. - Asharq al-Awsat.

*In at least a little vindication of Kurdish womanhood, a Kurdish woman has been made head of the qada' of Dukan in the governorate of Sulaimaniya. This is is the first time a woman has risen so high since the founding of the modern Iraqi state in 1921. - az-Zaman.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

*Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has entered Iraqi politics in an unexpectedly big way. He has denounced US administrator Paul Bremer's plan to appoint a large constitutional committee to write a new Iraqi constitution. He insists that Bremer has no such authority, and that delegates to an Iraqi constitutional convention must be elected by the Iraqi people. Moreover, he says, the constitution itself should be subject to a popular referendum before it is implemented.

I reproduce below my translation of the article on this from the liberal Iraqi newspaper az-Zaman, which quotes a good deal of the fatwa itself.

It is very suspicious to me that this fatwa was issued after Sistani met with Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress. Chalabi had been hoping for some time that the US would just hand Iraq over to him and walk away after Saddam fell. Jay Garner, the first American proconsul, seemed inclined to do just that. This seems to have been what passed for a plan for post-war construction at the Defense Department. The State Department and the CIA were opposed to this plan for a number of reasons. They believe Chalabi is highly corrupt (they gave the INC $4 million, and Chalabi cannot account for $2 million of it). He is wanted on bank fraud charges in Jordan. If you can't trust a man with $4 million, how can you trust him with a whole country, that has an oil income of some $13 billion? They also did not like that the INC includes the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which they see as a Trojan Horse for Iranian influence in Iraq. Finally, their experience in Bosnia was that it is unwise to hold elections too soon, since hardliners may get in who obstruct real change for years thereafter.

Garner tried to hand power over to the INC before he was deposed, but he was reversed in this by Paul Bremer, who is the State Department's man even if he ultimately reports to Rumsfeld. Bremer nixed the idea of early elections, an early handover to an Iraqi government, or an unsupervised constitutional convention. Bremer thinks he is going to rule Iraq himself, personally, through his appointees--Westerners and Iraqis--for at least two years. Bremer seems determined to sideline both Chalabi and SCIRI.

My guess is that Chalabi and SCIRI spiritual leader Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim have decided that the best way to push Bremer back toward the Garner (aka Wolfowitz/Rumsfeld) plan is to enlist the aid of Sistani, the towering religious and moral authority for most Iraqi Shiites. Sistani is basically a quietist and would not have wanted to get involved, but somehow they have convinced him to do so.

What is remarkable to me is how little his fatwa appeals to principles of Islamic law. It cites no holy text or principle, at least as quoted in az-Zaman. It is a simple statement of the primacy of national self-determination. It echoes Jefferson and Wilson.

It was announced today that Bremer has decided to allow local US military authorities to hold municipal elections if they deem it best, though they can appoint governments if they choose. Bremer had earlier intervened to stop such local elections. But the outbreak of violence at Majar al-Kabir last week, along with the problems of the appointed government of Najaf, seem to have changed his mind. The appointed mayor of Najaf was an ex-Baathist officer and turns out to have been corrupt as hell. Najaf residents have been protesting against him for weeks. It was poor judgment of the US to appoint a Sunni officer only recently out of the Baathist army to rule the Shiite holy city of Najaf in the first place. (See earlier columns of mine on this). But to have his administration be so shot through with embezzlement, kidnapping, etc., is a real black eye for the US.

As if all this were not enough, SCIRI leader Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim just issued a call for the formation of an Iraqi government that would peacefully move the US back out of Iraq, according to AP. Hakim said, ""Our demand is that a government be formed by the Iraqis and work to end the occupation by peaceful means." His statement seem coordinated with Sistani's fatwa, and with Chalabi's visit to Najaf.

Sistani has thrown down a very heavy steel gauntlet. Lets see if Bremer picks it up. He ignores this fatwa to his very great peril.

Here's the article, translated by moi, from az-Zaman:

1 July 2003
Az-Zaman
Najaf

Ali Sistani, the most senior of the Shiite religious authorities in Najaf, affirmed in a new fatwa that he issued yesterday (of which az-Zaman obtained a copy by fax) the necessity of holding general elections so that all Iraqis would be represented in a founding convention. It would have as its mission the fashioning of a new draft constitution. He stipulated that the constitution would have to be voted on by the Iraqis before its implementation could be authorized. Sistani issued this fatwa based on a question concerning the legitimacy in Islamic law of the Occupation Authority’s appointment of members of a founding convention authorized to produce a new constitution after consultations with political parties and movements. Sistani said in the fatwa itself, “The Occupation Officials do not enjoy the authority to appoint the members of a council that would write the constitution.”

He added, “There is no guarantee that this council would grant a constitution that accorded with the highest interests of the Iraqi people and would express their national identity, among the pillars of which is the foundation of the pure Islamic religion and noble social virtues.” He affirmed that “the proposal referred to is fundamentally unacceptable.” The American ruler of Iraq, Paul Bremer, broached at the beginning of June a plan that specifies the formation of a political council of 25 to 30 members. The chief mission of this council will be to present discussions to the occupation administration in the economic and political spheres. One of its purposes, as well, is to appoint counselors in the ministries that will achieve at a later point the rank of deputy minister. Another purpose of the political council will be to prepare a referendum on the new constitution that will be fashioned by a convention of 125 members that will be formed in a month or two. Calling for general elections, Sistani said, “general elections must be held so that every eligible Iraqi can choose someone to represent him at the constitutional convention that will write the constitution. Then there must be a public referendum that will be called by this convention.”

Sistani affirmed that “It is incumbent upon all believers to demand the realization of this important matter, and to join together in achieving it in the best manner possible.”

In other news, a spokesman for the Iraqi National Council said that the president of the INC, Ahmad Chalabi, visited Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Najaf yesterday.

One source said that Sistani affirmed during this meeting, which lasted more than an hour, the necessity for a constitutional council that would undertake to write a new Iraqi constitution, be “a purely Iraqi council that would be chosen by the children of the Iraqi people.”

He added that Sistani and Chalabi discussed “the necessity for the American government to issue a political proclamation affirming that the American forces present in Iraq are forces of liberation and not forces of occupation.”

Chalabi and his delegation also visited Ayatollah Ishaq Fayad, one of the chief Shiite religious authorities in Najaf, according to the same source.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.