Massacre of Spanish Secret Agents

Guerrillas ambushed two vehicles carrying Spanish intelligence operatives in Latifiya, a Sunni town just south of Baghdad on Saturday, killing 7 and wounding another. They used rocket propelled grenades and machine guns. Crowds of young men gathered to celebrate, kicking the bodies and chanting slogans in favor of Saddam Hussein. Four of the agents were due to go home, and were riding with their replacements. The incident is sure to kick off another round of debate in Spain about the presence of Spanish troops in Iraq. A majority of the Spanish public opposes involvement in Iraq, and the opposition Socialists are sure to campaign on a withdrawal of the 1200 or so troops, which are mainly in the Najaf region. Another Spanish intelligence officer was assassinated earlier this year, and one wonders whether the ex-Baath still have sources inside the National Intelligence Center operations in Iraq.

Also, in Tikrit guerrillas ambushed and killed two Japanese diplomats whose car was approaching the city. Likewise, the Japanese public is deeply opposed to the sending of Japanese troops to Iraq, a plan championed by PM Junichiro Koizumi, a rightwinger who wants to begin erasing the taboo around Japanese militarism.
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Sistani Position on New Elections

The office of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani affirmed Saturday in Najaf that he had reservations about the Nov. 15 plan for caucus type elections. Replying to questions from a newspaper, he said (trans. J. Cole):

"First of all, the preparation of the Iraqi State (Basic) Law for the transitional period is being accomplished by the Interim Governing Council with the Occupation Authority. This process lacks legitimacy. Rather the [Basic Law] must be presented to the [elected] representatives of the Iraqi people for their approval.

Second, the instrumentality envisaged in this plan for the election of the members of the transitional legislature does not guarantee the formation of an assembly that truly represents the Iraqi people. It must be changed to another process that would so guarantee, that is, to elections. In this way, the parliament would spring from the will of the Iraqis and would represent them in a just manner and would prevent any diminution of Islamic law." He added, "Perhaps it would be possible to hold the elections on the basis of the ration cards and some other supplementary information."

Ayatollah Muhammad Ali Taskhiri, the representative in Najaf of Iran's Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei, called for an Islamic constitution for Iraq, and said he was sure that Iraq's Shiite leadership was aware of the sensitivity of this historic phase.

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72 US troops killed in Hostilities in November

72 US soldiers were killed by hostile fire in Iraq during November, the highest of any month since the major fighting started last March. And for the Coalition troops as a whole, the number is 107! I was taken aback by the size of the number. I can remember when the death toll seemed to be one of our guys every other day, which was terrible, but that was 15 a month. This is more than two a day. The Coalition deaths per year at this rate would be 1284! This is not to mention the literally thousands of wounded. Although Gen. Sanchez says that daily attacks are down to 22 a day from a high of 50 a day, the attacks that do occur must be more deadly, to explain these numbers. The 22 a day number appears to be attacks only on Americans, so that the massacre of the Spanish secret agents would not even count. From the point of view of US officers commanding 130,000 troops in Iraq, even 700 Americans down a year would not appear to pose a big military challenge. But I just don't think the folks back home are going to be willing to put up with a number like 72 a month. My heart just goes out to those 72 American families. The failure of the Bush administration to level with us all on why exactly we are there and what exactly we are supposed to be accomplishing is all the more galling in the light of these fallen compatriots.
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Sunni walks out of Tourism Conference

AFP reports that Adnan Doulami, the religious director for Sunni Muslims walked out on a tourism conference on Saturday. He was protesting the remarks of Hussein al-Shami, director of Shiite pious endowments. Al-Shami attacked Wahhabis for denigrating shrines and saints, insisting that the shrines of the Shiite Imams are bestowers of wisdom. Sunnis in Iraq are apparently not used to Shiites openly speaking their minds like that.
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Two Us Troops Killed; US kills Sisters

Guerrillas in Mosul killed a soldier with mortar fire that hit the 101st Airborne Division HQ on Friday. On Thursday, a US soldier had been shot to death inside a military base in Ramadi.

The CPA is strongly denying a wire service story (earlier mentioned here) that US soldiers in Baquba shot dead two girls, Fatima and Azra, 15 and 12, on Thursday; the wire services said that they were collecting wood from a field in the middle of the day. The CPA says that the soldiers came into conflict with armed men, and then later found the two girls' bodies in the woods, suggesting that it was guerrillas who killed them.
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Bush to Sistani: Good to Have you Working with Us

It turns out that President George W. Bush did meet on Thursday with four members of the Iraqi Interim Governing Council. All 24 had been invited to a Thanksgiving Day event at the Baghdad Airport, but they were not told the nature of the event. So, only four showed up. One was Mouwafak al-Rubaie, a Shiite member from Basra and an ex-al-Da`wa Party member, who is a follower of Sistani. In al-Hayat, al-Rubaie is quoted as saying that Bush:

"asked us to convey a detailed letter to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, informing him of Bush's appreciation and personal respect for him. In it, he affirmed that 'we share with one another a basic goal, which is to make the Iraqi people happy, to return liberty to it, and to build democracy and achieve economic prosperity for it."

Al-Rubaie said that Sistani was unhappy that two thirds of parliament would be appointed by local city councils that were themselves largely unelected, and which therefore lacked legitimacy and do not really represent the Iraqi people.

Another Shiite IGC member, the female physician, Raja' al-Khuza`i, told al-Sharq al-Awsat that in his letter Bush had agreed that elections must ultimately be held, but said that the June hand-over date must be respected (implying that full elections as opposed to caucuses could not take place by then). She quoted Bush as saying, "It is your country. You are responsible for it. You must work hard to respect the [Nov. 15 transition] Agreement."

Al-Khuza`i also described the remarks of IGC president Jalal Talabani to Bush. Talabani said that direct elections would take so long that the June deadline would be missed. He also dismissed the idea of using ration cards, saying that many Iraqis possessed multiple such cards, whereas others have none.

Mouwafak al-Rubaie told al-Sharq al-Awsat that local elections on a one person one vote basis might be a good idea. He was echoed by Adnan Ali al-Kadhimi, an official of the Shiite al-Da`wa Party, who said local elections were a good idea because "the goal is the participation of the greatest possible number of Iraqis in the process, in order to endow it with the greatest possible degree of legitimacy."

An independent Sunni Arab nationalist on the IGC, Nasir Chadurchi, said that he did not think the Iraqi people were ready for a popular vote. Talabani's spokesman agreed with him, also pointing to the lack of security as an impediment. He did think it might be good to elect more muncipal councils, which now mainly consist of US appointees.

Al-Hayat quotes Imad Shabib, a member of the political bureau of the "National Accord" (ex-Baathist officers), saying that a census to establish electoral rolls would take at least 14 months. He said that the problem with using the food aid rolls prepared for the UN food program was that they excluded the Kurds in the north, as well as the Iraqis who were living abroad in 1997.
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More on SA-14 Missiles

BruceR has further technical analysis of the SAM missile attacks on the DHL cargo plane on Nov. 22. Apparently the guerrillas thought they were hitting a military plane! He also translates the French Paris Match article on the incident.

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Bush Sneaks in and Out of Baghdad

W. must have envisaged his triumphal first trip to Baghdad very differently. Last spring, before the war, he was told by Ahmad Chalabi via Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith, that the Iraqi people would welcome him this November with garlands and dancing in the street. They would regard him as the great liberator, a second Roosevelt or Truman. The US military, having easily defeated the Baath army and wiped up its remnants, would have departed. Only a US division, about 20,000 men, would remain, at a former Baath army base and out of sight of most Iraqis. Engineers and decontamination units, Feith told him, would be busy destroying chemical and biological stockpiles, and dismantling the advanced nuclear weapons program, carefully securing the stockpiles of Niger yellowcake uranium. Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress would be ensconced, running the country and dictating policy to the Baath military (minus its senior officers) and the Baath ministries (minus their ministers and deputy ministers). The educated, secular Iraqi Shiites would be busy stamping out priest-ridden superstition and covertly helping to undermine both the Iranian hardline ayatollahs and the radical Hizbullah militia in South Lebanon. The captured Baath generals would have given up Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, identifying the caves they were hiding in with Iraqi help, in Waziristan. Chalabi would already have recognized Israel and bullied the Palestinians into acquiescing in the loss of the rest of their land, so that Arafat's followers had been reduced to shuffling with their eyes fixed on the ground before their White betters. Air Force One would land in full daylight at Baghdad International Airport. W. would emerge from the plane, waving and smiling, his cowboy boots glinting in the desert sun. He would pass in review of the Iraqi military with its new generals, which might do some goose stepping for him just for show, the now reformed lads smiling warmly under their freshly waxed moustaches. A grateful and obedient country, pacified and acquiescent in Chalabi's presidency for life ("a clear move toward democracy after the brutal dicatatorship of Saddam"), would shout out "Bi'r-ruh, bi'l-dunya, nufdika ya Dubya" (With our spirits and our world, we sacrifice ourselves for you, O W.!).*

Instead, the President had to sneak in and out of Iraq for a quick and dirty photo op, clearly in fear of his life if the news of his visit had leaked. He did not even get time to eat a meal with the troops. He was there for two hours. He did not dare meet with ordinary Iraqis, with the people he had conquered (liberated).

Offstage, the real Iraq carried on. Guerrillas attacked a military convoy on the main highway to the west of Baghdad, near Abu Ghraib. The wire services said, that an AP cameraman filmed "two abandoned military trucks with their cabs burning fiercely as dozens of townspeople looted tires and other vehicle parts." Guerrillas in Mosul shot an Iraqi police sergeant to death.


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Sistani's Fatwa to the Americans

In the meantime, Bush's team at the Coalition Provisional Authority were scrambling to respond to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's critique of their plans for Iraq. Sistani dislikes the plan to base voting on caucuses hand-picked by Iraqis who were in turn hand-picked by the US. Why, the ayatollah wants to know, can't you just let the Iraqi people vote for a government? There are rolls of all Iraqis who received food aid from the UN, and all Iraqis did. You could use them as voter rolls, as well. Why can't you specify beforehand that the new Iraqi government will not do anything contrary to Islam?

Jalal Talabani, the Sunni Kurdish president of the Interim Governing Council, met with Sistani. He had just ratified Bremer's plan last week, but now had gone over to the Shiite ayatollah's. "The agreement can evolve. ... I will take his views to the council and we, God willing, hope to ratify them." Al-Hayat reported him saying that "The Ayatollah expressed one reservation . . . he wants to take into account the opinion of the Iraqi people. He therefore holds it important to hold [general] elections for both the national assembly and the municipal councils."

Shiites on the IGC waxed lyrical. Mouwafak al-Rabii [al-Rubaie] told the Associated Press, "Al-Sistani is our safety valve, and a compass that directs our march. The remarks attributed to him are very important and vital. They serve the interests of the Iraqi people, and I agree with them." Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, a "moderate" Shiite cleric on the IGC, told the Financial Times, "We will not accept a secular state," and he added that "Mr Sistani also believed sovereignty should be vested in a transitional assembly rather than a transitional government."

In contrast, the NYT reported that the Sunni Arabs and the Kurds on the IGC are petrified at Sistani's plan, because it will establish a tyranny of the Shiite majority.

Al-Hayat says tthat key CPA officials have been thrown into bewilderment and have admitted that the whole plan may have to be rethought. The Washington Post suggested that Bremer's team is so desperate to get out of Iraq and turn running the country over to someone that they might just take dictation from the Grand Ayatollah. '"Elections are now a possibility," said a senior U.S. official close to Iraq's political transition. "We're scrambling to find a solution." '

Presumably the thinking of this official is that the US already has a lot of the Sunni Arabs against it, and if the Shiites turn anti-American because the US disrespected the Grand Ayatollah's fatwa, the situation will be irretrievable. Sistani is expected to issue a written ruling momentarily. Mr. Bremer is no doubt waiting for it with bated breath.

The Guardian had reported Mr. Bremer's initial vow in Iraq last July 1, "We dominate the scene and we will continue to impose our will on this country." Many Arab observers found the diction insufferably arrogant at the time.

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2 US troops wounded in Mosul; Italian Embassy in Baghdad Hit by Rockets

Guerrillas fired a rocket or mortar round into the second floor of the Italian embassy in Baghdad on Wednesday. The attack caused structural damage, but no casualties were reported. Two weeks ago, guerrillas killed 19 Italians in suicide bombings at their police HQ in Nasiriya in the South. The Italian public is deeply opposed to Italian troops remaining in Iraq, and many opposition politicians have pressured PM Silvio Berlusconi to withdraw.

It also turned out that UK Foreign Minister Jack Straw had been secretly in Baghdad Monday night when rockets were fired and exploded near his hotel.

It was also revealed Wednesday that 2 US soldiers in Mosul were wounded when guerrillas threw grenades and fired on their Humvee. US return fire killed one of the assailants. The guerrillas had also managed to kill a boy and wound 4 other Iraqis in a car following the Humvee.

Guerrillas near the Tigris also fired on US troops, but failed to inflict any casualties.
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Sistani Raises Objections to Latest Coalition Plan

According to al-Hayat, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and a member of the Interim Governing Council, met with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani on Tuesday, and then held a news conference in Najaf on Wednesday. He revealed that Sistani has substantial reservations about the plan worked out by Paul Bremer and the IGC for moving to some form of elected transitional government. Sistani asked that its provisions be reviewed. Al-Hakim warned of "real difficulties if the reservations are not taken into account."

Apparently Sistani had earlier not been given the full details of the transition plan, and when he saw the Arabic texts of them, he hit the roof. Al-Hakim said that Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Sa`id al-Hakim, Sistani's colleague in Najaf, had the same reservations. "The agreement gives no role to the Iraqi people. It must therefore be revisited."

Sistani is complaining that the caucus elections envisaged by the US will not be democratic. He also complained that there is no guarantee that the Basic Law that will substitute for a constitution until one is hammered out will contain a clause that no legislation can be passed that is contrary to Islamic law. (Such a clause is an Islamist Trojan Horse, since once it is enacted, Sistani would get to decide when to invoke it.) The NYT says he complained in general about the lack of any specified role for Islam in the proposed arrangements. Al-Hakim reported Sistani saying, that "there is no emphasis on the role of Islam and the identity of the Muslim people. There should have been a stipulation which prevents legislating anything that contradicts Islam in the new Iraq."
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Khamenei: 'America Sinking into Quagmire" "

Iran's Supreme Jurisprudent, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said in a radio address that: 'The American nation should know that Iraq is America's quagmire and America is sinking deeper into it by staying longer in Iraq . . . The Americans are so desperate that they are bombing an occupied country...this (Middle East) region does not tolerate occupation . . . 'The Americans should know that any imposed government, constitution and elections would face resistance from the people in Iraq. In free elections the majority of the Iraqi people will choose those who will not allow the Americans to stay one more day in Iraq. The Americans, who entered Iraq in the name of human rights, have oppressed the Iraqis so much that they punched the Americans in the face. The Americans' claim about bringing democracy to the region is a disgraceful lie.'' (Reuters).

I have to admit that the line about the US being reduced to bombing a country it had already militarily occupied was a pretty good zinger. Iranian politics is rough and tumble, and these battle hardened old ayatollahs have the sharp elbow moves choreographed as well as any WWF wrestler. The scarey thing is that Khamenei could turn up the heat on the US in Iraq pretty easily, and it is hard to see what the Bush administration could do about it. It is not as if they have the spare troops to attack and occupy Iran as well (despite Billy Kristol's disturbed daydreams).

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Iraq War damaging US War on Terror

Warren Strobel of Knight Ridder points out that many counter-terrorism analysts are convinced that the real war on terror is being hurt by the drain of resources to the Iraq war.


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Norwegian troops in Iraq fear for safety

Norwegian troops appear to be surprised to find that they are not actually in a peacekeeping role in Iraq, but rather are in a combat role. They nevertheless don't get the combat pay their colleagues receive in Afghanistan.

The Norwegian press reports: "Military Officers' Association have received several letters from Norwegian soldiers who feel threatened, even on the base. All military camps in the region where the Norwegians are stationed have been attacked. Only the Norwegian camp has been spared, according to Forsvarets Forum.. The Norwegian troops think they may well be targetted, as well.

My guess is that a lot of the little contingents supplied by the Coalition of the Willing may well be withdrawn in March (it will be represented as a normal cycling out after a tour). They did not know they were getting drawn in to a long-term shooting war, and they mostly wouldn't have wanted to be.

If such withdrawals occur, it will stress the US troops in theater even more.
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Marshall: Cheney had Garner Fire Warrick

Josh Marshall has excellent analysis of Jay Garner's BBC interview on the failing of the US in handling post-war Iraq. He confirms what I had suspected, which is that Dick Cheney had State Department Iraq expert Tom Warrick fired from the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance because Cheney wanted to just turn Iraq over to fraudster Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress. Warrick had not been willing to kowtow to the INC and so became persona non grata with Cheney and his PNAC allies in the Pentagon. Marshall comments that Chalabi "played this town like a fiddle." But it is also true that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith managed to hijack Iraq policy from the rest of the country, and Chalabi's success was mainly in getting their ear.

Cheney and the others said they wanted to see democracy in Iraq! What they wanted was to install their corrupt stooge in power. There really isn't a lot of difference between the Cheney vision of the Iraq war and Ariel Sharon's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which had been for the sake of installing Bashir Gemayyel permanently in power. (That did not work out, either).

There probably is enough in all this to launch an impeachment move against Cheney if the Democrats had the mean-spiritedness of their opponents.

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More on Why Partitioning Iraq is a Very Bad Idea

Jack Straw alluded to the dangers of a break-up of Iraq in a news conference in Baghdad on Wednesday, and said the only way to forestall such scenarios was to transfer sovereignty back to the Iraqi people as quickly as possible. (al-Sharq al-Awsat).

Journalist Nir Rosen, writing from Baghdad, replies to Gelb's suggestion that Iraq be divided along ethnic lines in the Asia Times:

"International law prohibits an occupying power from altering the structure of the occupied country, let alone dividing it up. This perhaps is not a good argument because international law was ignored throughout this conflict and continues to be flouted as the occupying powers impose their economic philosophies on Iraq . . . Gelb views Sunnis as the "bad guys" American foreign policy always seems to need and seeks to punish them further until they behave, a course of action sure to fulfill his prophecy and indeed make all Sunnis the enemy. What "ambitions" is he referring to? Shouldn't Sunnis be encouraged to participate in the new Iraq? Shouldn't they feel it is theirs as well? Most of the resistance in Iraq is spontaneous and a reaction to the occupation, not part of some Sunni conspiracy. Iraq's Shi'ites are as eager to see American troops leave as the Sunnis are. Even moderate Shi'ite clerics have recently called for an immediate American withdrawal . . . "

And veteran journalist Helena Cobban argues against it in her Just World News, "For several reasons. The first and most serious one is that the US has no right simply to split up Iraq into three states or make any other such serious changes in the country's administration. No right whatsoever. The Geneva-based International Committee for the Red Cross is the body which, under a series of international treaties, is the international depository for the body of "laws of war" called "international humanitarian law" (IHL). Therefore, the ICRC's commentaries on various aspects of IHL-- including the Hague Regulations, the Geneva Conventions, etc.-- are considered authoritative. In a useful factsheet on the rights and duties of an occupying power, the ICRC notes:
The Occupying Power cannot change the status of the territory it occupies. Though it becomes the de facto administrator of that territory, the Occupying Power must maintain and preserve the economic and social structures and respect the customs. It can amend the laws and regulations in force in the territory only to the extent needed to enable it to meet its obligations under the Fourth Convention, and to maintain orderly government and ensure its own security.
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Bombs in downtown Baghdad; Two Iraqi Police Wounded

Guerrillas fired mortars at US troops in Tikrit early on Tuesday but failed to inflict any casualties. In response, US troops wounded one assailant and knocked out another.

Guerrillas injured two Iraqi policemen with a rocket-propelled grenade attack near a Baghdad gasoline station.

They also fired rockets at the US HQ, and bombs were heard going off in downtown Baghdad. At the US HQ, loudspeakers announced, "Attack. Take cover. This is not a test." No one was injured. (Reuters)

General John Abizaid announced that attacks on US troops were down 50% from highs earlier in November (i.e. they have fallen from 30-35 to 15-17 per day throughout the country). This drop may in part derive from Operation Iron Hammer and other determined military operations in the past couple of weeks. But it may also be that the end of Ramadan and the arrival of Eid al-Fitr (breaking the fast, a joyous holiday) has drawn even the guerrillas into an endless round of socializing. Contrary to what many Pentagon spokesmen and journalists seem to think, Ramadan and other Islamic holy days aren't actually very good times to try to mobilize people for secular activities.
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10 US soldiers wounded each day

Even the fall in attacks does not obscure the bad news for Ken Dilanian of Knight Ridder. He notes that hostile fire had wounded 2,076 US soldiers as of Nov. 24, including 1,200 hurt after May 1. He says, "Although that number is small compared, say, with Vietnam, it's growing at roughly 10 a day, meaning thousands more could be injured before the U.S. occupation of Iraq ends. He notes that the Pentagon does not regularly announce woundings and that the wounded get little airtime on US television. He tells the story of Gunn, who was driving a Humvee when it hit a roadside bomb: ' "Everything was just smoky. I looked at myself - I was still smoking. There was blood all over the place, and I just thought, you know, just, I thought I was going to die." One friend in the Humvee was already dead from the blast of the jerry-built 90 mm mortar round, and one would die later. Those two joined the ranks of the 421 U.S. soldiers who've been killed in action since the Iraq war started. '
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SA-14 used in Attack on DHL Plane

A videotape of guerrillas' attack on the DHL plane at Baghdad airport was given to a French reporter for Le Nouvel Observateur. It was seen by AFP, which reports that it clearly shows the use of an SA-14 Gremlin missile launcher, not an old SA-7 as the US military reported. (The US military was either misinformed or was deliberately attempting to forestall a panic, since it is very bad news for aviators that the guerrillas have anything more than SA-7s). Planes small enough to do so had been having to perform tight spiral landings as it was.

AFP reports, "The shoulder-launched missile is seen shooting up into the sky after being fired by one of the cell and then homing in on the Airbus-300 freighter. The vapor trail makes a sharp U-turn as the missile homes in on the infrared or radio signals from the scheduled Baghdad to Dubai courier flight. , , After a break, the video resumes with footage of the stricken airliner diving back down to Baghdad airport, in clearly amateur footage shot through electricity lines."

SA-14s belong to a family of Russian-designed shoulder-launched missiles called Strela ("Arrow"). SA-7s, or the first Strela, were manufactured in several countries, including Pakistan. The SA-14, called Strela 3, weighs 35 pounds and has a range of 2,000 yards when used against an approaching jet. (Thanks to Tom Collier).

When I first heard this story very early Saturday morning EST, I speculated that something beyond an SA-7 must have been used, and was criticized for doing so by one blogger who is an expert in military technology. I don't claim any expertise in that field, but I do claim several conversations with people who know about it and they have been worried for a while about SA-14 and SA-16 attacks.
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Sistani's Fatwa trumped Bremer

Rajiv Chandrasekharan has a wonderful article in the Washington Post on the way Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's fatwa of June 28 stymied US civil administrator Paul Bremer. .

This was the substance of my remarks on Nightline on Monday night, as well.

Sistani insisted that drafters of a new Iraqi constitution be elected. Bremer wanted to appoint them. Bremer apparently thought right up through October that some way could be found to get around Sistani's ruling. One idea he had was to have other, more pliant pro-US clerics come out with a competing ruling. Another was to send them to Sistani to try to convince him to change his mind.

Just so the CPA knows, here is how Shiite Islam of the Usuli school (which predominates in Iraq) works. Ideally, every Shiite should follow the most learned and the most upright jurisprudent in his rulings on how Islam is to be practiced. He rules only on subsidiary matters about which the laity might have some questions, not about fundamentals like the 5 daily prayers. Typically the most respected and most learned of the ayatollahs at Najaf is considered the marja` al-taqlid or "Object of Emulation." Laypeople without a seminary training must obey his rulings implicitly. The laity also get some say about which Object of Emulation they want to follow (in this respect Shiism is less like Catholicism than like the Baptists, where congregations hire their preacher. But it is more like Catholicism in having a hierarchy.)

The system has become quite hierarchical. At the lowest level, a seminary graduate is a mujtahid or jurisprudent, able to derive the law from the sacred texts with the tools of juridical reasoning he learns at seminary. Muqtada al-Sadr is said to be on the verge of attaining this level. Mere mujtahids in theory really can only interpret the law for themselves. The next rank is Hujjatu'l-Islam or Proof of Islam. The next highest rank is Ayatollah. Then the really senior ayatollahs are Grand Ayatollahs.

Sistani is a Grand Ayatollah. Someone like Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, who serves on the Interim Governing Council, is much junior to him. He is just an ayatollah or maybe even a Hujjatu'l-Islam. Typically the clerics with large followings are Grand Ayatollahs, and they are Objects of Emulation.

Anyway, Bremer's hope that he could have people like Bahr al-Ulum overrule Sistani would be like hoping a bishop could overrule the Pope. Even 5 bishops could not. And then Bremer's hope that he could put pressure on Sistani to change his mind was also in vain. A jurisprudent is bound by his juridical reasoning as long as he doesn't see new evidence or come up with a new argument. It would be seen as completely corrupt to change a ruling merely on pragmatic grounds, and at the behest of the Americans or of more junior jurists! A Grand Ayatollah gives, rather than taking, marching orders.

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IGC Can't Let Go


Some members of the Interim Governing Council, which was set to be dissolved in June on the election of a new transitional government, are now saying they don't want the IGC dissolved. They hope for it to stick around as a sort of Senate. Apparently the Shiites, like Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, are leading the charge on this. I take it as a sign that the IGC members know they have little hope of getting elected by the ordinary Iraqis. Many of them were long-time expatriates with few grass roots. I've all along said that the Sadrists could elect far more members of parliament than could the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

Despite Doug Feith's attempt to paint the IGC as "representative," in fact it wasn't elected by anyone. It was appointed by Paul Bremer. Sistani has already said that as an appointed body it lacks legitimacy. He won't be happy about it trying to remain in power.
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Banning al-Arabiya

The real reason that al-Arabiya satellite television is being banned in Iraq is not that it showed videotapes of Saddam, but that it is a prime source of videotape of damage done to US troops by the guerrillas. Rumsfeld is desperate to stop such footage getting out, and cannot easily move against the Western camera crews. Rumsfeld has charged that the guerrillas tip off al-Arabiya before an attack, allowing its cameramen to get really good footage (which then gets spread all over the air waves).

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Halliburton accused of Gouging

According to AFP, three Democratic leaders in Congress are charging Halliburton with gouging US taxpayers by charging $2.65 per gallon to transport gasoline from Kuwait to Iraq. Local Iraqi concerns do it for just under a dollar, and even the Pentagon folks (they of the $100 hammers) do it for for about $1.12 a gallon.

This is small potatoes. The three should look into that cozy contract Halliburton won to supply "emergency" services to the Pentagon. It transpires that the launching of a war is always going to be an emergency, and every time one is launched it equals billions of dollars for Halliburton. But in fact, the civilian subcontractors often refused to show up in Iraq in May-August, and they were the ones who were supposed to supply our troops with air conditioned quonset huts. Instead the poor guys "looked like hoboes and lived like pigs." You can't actually force civilians into a war zone.

The "emergency contract" should be cancelled and the Pentagon should go back to building quonset huts and feeding the troops themselves. They can be ordered into a war zone, after all.

If Halliburton wrote into its bid to supply "emergency" services to the Department of Defense that it would charge $2.65 a gallon for gasoline that it transports, that would be perfectly legal as long as their over-all bid was lower than the other competing companies.

Let me tell you the story of the summer I worked for the Department of Transportation with an engineer restoring a historic bridge. The company with the low bid, which got the contract, charged suspiciously high rates to supply concrete. Turns out their restoration technique used extraordinary amounts of concrete. My boss decided he had to break the contract once he found all this out. It was a sort of legal fraud. Probably the government had to pay off the company to make it go away.
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al-Hakim: US Troops a Humiliation: Only a UN Resolution Can Authorize Them

AFP reports that the leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and member of the Interim Governing Council, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, has insisted that the presence of US troops in Iraq must be authorized by a United Nations resolution and by a referendum of the Iraqi people.

He said on Monday, "The presence of any foreign force in Iraq is an exceptional state of affairs, there is a diminution of the sovereignty and dignity of the people of Iraq . . . The presence of these forces should be under UN resolution and with the agreement of the Iraqi side and they should take into account the opinions of the Iraqi people about the presence of these forces and the duration of their deployment."

Al-Hakim himself probably does not have the standing to turn these suggestions into a demand that the US would find hard to sidestep. But if fatwas to this effect were issued by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the US might well be forced to seek a UN resolution and a popular referendum in Iraq to justify continued American military presence.

And this is what the allies of the US in Iraq are saying!



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Muqtada: The Only Real Solution is Immediate US Withdrawal

John Daniszewski of the LA Times has an interview with Muqtada al-Sadr about the new plans for a transitional government. Like French President Jacques Chirac, Muqtada thinks it is too little and too far off.

'Sadr dismissed the proposed hand-over of power by July 1 as inadequate, and rejected any role for what he called the "vicious trinity" of the United States, Britain and Israel in Iraq's future. "Whatever is related to occupation must be considered as 'occupation,' and must be refused by any rational and peace-loving person," he said, sitting cross-legged on cushions in a reception room near a residence he uses in this central Iraq city. The only real solution, he said, was for U.S. forces to withdraw immediately.' . . .

'Similarly, he rejected the proposed seven-month timetable for setting up the new government, saying, "Leadership and the presidency must be transferred immediately. No one has the right to interfere."'

Although the author implies that Muqtada has the ability to thwart the new plan if he chooses, I am not sure that is true. His cadres would rally against it, but his sympathizers seem unwilling to take on the US in any large numbers. Again, it is Grand Ayatollah Sistani who could scuttle the plan.



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Why Breaking up Iraq is a Very, Very Bad Idea

Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council for Foreign Affairs and a former NYT editor and columnist, argues in today's NYT that the US should reconcile itself to Iraq splitting into three countries. I don't entirely understand why he is pushing this agenda, and can't see anyone it would help, but the idea is frankly dangerous. All we need is to have the Iraqi nationalists convinced we intend to break up their country. That will produce more blown-up US troops, God forbid.

Here are the reasons this is a bad idea.

The splitting up of Iraq into three countries would be unacceptable to all the neighbors. Turkish officials have repeatedly said that they would go to war to prevent the emergence of an independent Kurdish state, so Mr. Gelb's suggestion seems likely to cause quite a lot of trouble. Saudi Arabia's oil is in a traditionally Shiite area, al-Hasa, and Riyadh is extremely nervous about the possibility of the emergence of an Arab Shiite state in south Iraq, to which the Ahsa'is may well wish to accede, leaving Saudi Arabia penniless. Even Iranian Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei has warned against those plotting to break up Iraq. These three neighboring states are sufficiently powerful to stop any move toward a break-up of Iraq, and all have signalled that they would do so, by force if necessary. Mr. Gelb, we'd like to have fewer wars in the region, not more, please.

Moreover, I do not know of any significant social or political force in Iraq that wants the country broken up into three independent states. The Shiite parties mostly descend from al-Da`wa al-Islamiyah (The Islamic Call), which has had a subtext of Iraqi nationalism since its founding around 1958. In the 1960s and 1970s, it is said that up to ten percent of al-Da`wa members were Sunni. In 1995, al-Da`wa broke with Ahmad Chalabi's INC precisely because Chalabi acceded to Kurdish plans for a loose federation, whereas al-Da`wa wants a strong central Iraqi state (run by Shiites according to Islamic law). The way in which the Shiite Arabs reached out to the Turcoman Shiites recently shows the sort of national linkages that are emerging (even though the Turcoman would be considered ghulat or theological extremists by mainstream Twelver Arabs).

Although Iraqi Kurds may want loose federalism, they know that independence would provoke Turkish intervention. Moreover, independence is not all it is cracked up to be. Ask the Slovaks, who are sinking into agrarian poverty while Prague gets back on its feet. My understanding is that the Kirkuk oil fields may well be depleted soon, and the future of Iraqi petroleum production lies in the south. If that is true, for the Iraqi Kurds to secede into a landlocked declining economy would be political and economic suicide.

Likewise, the Sunni Arab triangle is simply not a viable state (and would lack petroleum income). Basically, people in Falluja and Ramadi would be seceding to become a second Jordan, only smaller and poorer.

Iraqi nationalism has won. It is likely that both internal and external actors will work to keep the country together. The Middle East suffers from having small countries imposed by Western colonialism, such that the petroleum wealth is in tiny principalities and the human capital in huge but poor countries like Egypt. The region doesn't need any more small poor countries with populations of 4 million each.

The alternative is to build into the new Iraq guarantees against a tyranny of the Shiite majority. Have a bicameral legislature that over-represents the Sunnis slightly. Have a bill of rights. Have elected provincial governors and legislatures with their own local purview that the central state cannot over-rule, and make them key to any amendments to the constitution. In other words, learn something from a success story: the US constitution.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

How We Denied Democracy to the Middle East

Robert Fisk's essay, "How we denied democracy to the ME," coming in response to Bush's new policy statement, is worth reading. I think it is certainly the case that in the Cold War the US and Britain often did things to destroy democracy in the Middle East and to support various forms of dictatorship, because in so doing they hoped to defeat Communism. The problem with Fisk's op-ed is that it stops at pointing to Anglo-British hypocrisy. What would his policy be in the region, and how would he spur democratization?
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Nightline on Iraq 11-24

Those of you in North America who can stay up late may want to watch Nightline tonight. It is on the Coalition Provisional Authority's about-face and plans for elections in Iraq in May. Because of Monday Night Football, I fear the program won't get on until 12:30 or 1 am. I'll be interviewed, and promise to be more entertaining than either Craiggers or Conan.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Shaping the Iraqi Electorate

The election now envisaged by the Americans in Iraq this spring will not be a democratic, one person one vote, affair. The electorate itself will be town notables hand-picked by the US and the US-appointed Interim Governing Council. But how?

An independent Shiite member of the Interim Governing Council, Ahmad Shiya` al-Barak, has been worrying about all this. He is described by the CPA as "General Coordinator for the Human Rights Association of Babel; Graduate of the Law Faculty, Babel University. Graduate of the College Management and Economy, Baghdad University. One of the tribal leaders of Al Bu Sultan tribe in Babel."

Al-Barak told al-Hayat that before elections can be held, the municipal and provincial councils have to be reformed. He pointed out that some municipal councils double as provincial ones (i.e. they have authority over the capital as well as the whole province). They differ in how they were chosen, differ with regard to how many members they have, and there is no standard set of regulations specifying their functions.

Al-Barak has clearly started worrying that this hodgepodge of "councils," many of them American-appointed, will make the local decisions about who will get to vote for the transitional national government due to be elected in June. If the councils are essentially the election commissions, they could be crucial in shaping the electorate and the outcome of the polls. Therefore, their nature is the key to the elections. He wants "vast reforms" in these councils before the elections.

Since he is an independent Shiite, I take his concern to reflect anxieties about the election being rigged, perhaps in favor the of powerful expatriates on the IGC.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraqizing Security

Al-Hayat reports that the US is pressuring the Interim Governing Council to speed up the transfer of responsibility for security to the Iraqi Interior Ministry. Hamam Baqir Hamudi of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq says that it will be necessary to appoint officials approved by each of the major parties to key positions in the ministry. Then liason committees will have to be formed between the security forces belonging to the parties and the leadership of the Interior Ministry. (This last phrase threw me until I realized that he not only intended for the Supreme Council to have officials inside the ministry (which is like our FBI), but also envisaged integrating the Badr Corps paramilitary into its security agents. The Badr Corps was trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and is said to have links to Iran's hardline ayatollahs.) Hamudi affirmed that US military forces are making preparations to withdraw to military bases outside the cities. He said both the Interim Governing Council and the Americans are agreed that US troops should remain in Iraq in order to support the Iraqi security agencies and to guarantee stability and the unity of the country.

I take Hamud's words to suggest that the Shiite SCIRI is afraid of Iraq's Sunnis and Kurds seceding from the new, Shiite-dominated state, and that it wants the Americans to stay for that reason. But it also seems implicit in his remarks that some security functions will be transferred to a Badr Corps integrated into Interior Ministry forces (no wonder he is afraid the Sunnis would try to secede!).
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

US arrests Newspaper Editor

The US forces in Mosul have arrested Dhunun Yunis, the editor in chief of a local weekly newspaper, on charges of cooperating with Baath remnants and with using the newspaper to serve the interests of the former regime. Col. Tariq Hamid of the Mosul police said that Yunis confessed to the charges, saying that he had devoted many pages to the activities that support attacks on US forces.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

3 Turks, 307 other Foreign Fighters in Custody

The Kurdish militias say they have arrested three Turks, with Turkish passports and cellphones, whom they believe responsible for recent bombings in Kirkuk that killed 5, in front of headquarters of Kurdish parties. (al-Zaman). Meanwhile, a US military spokesman said that it had 307 foreign fighters in custody, including 140 Syrians and 70 Iranians, along with a smattering of Yemenis, Saudis and Palestinians. Since altogether there are 11,000 people in custody, the 307 are "just a trickle." High military spokesmen increasingly admit that most armed resistance to the Anglo-American occupation is homegrown.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Civilian Flights in and out of Baghdad Airport Halted

As a result of the missile attack on the DHL plane this weekend, Coalition authorities have decided to halt civilian flights in and out of Baghdad airport, according to al-Zaman and Deutsche Press Agentur. DHL had already decided to cease its flights. Royal Jordanian Airlines' subsidiary "Royal Wings" had been flying charters in (which I had not known), and it will stop, too.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Lebanon's Hizbullah in Iraq

The NYT's James Risen has an article about the Lebanese Shiite group, Hizbullah, "infiltrating" Iraq. If one reads the article carefully, it is clear that 1) there are only thought to be 90 or so Hizbullah agents in Iraq, and they all came last April-May; and 2) they haven't attacked Americans or US interests. One official admitted, '"It's possible that Hezbollah is there to help the Iraqis politically, to work in the Shia community," and have no plans for terrorist attacks against Americans, the official added.'

The article seems to me to bow to conventional wisdom in several ways. It alleges that Hizbullah was behind the 1996 Khobar bombings of a US military compound in Saudi Arabia, when in fact the perpetrators have never been conclusively identified. In retrospect, that bombing looks rather more like al-Qaeda than like the Shiites. And, Risen's sources all insist on seeing Hizbullah solely as an Iran proxy. Of course, it gets money from Iran and has close ties to Tehran. But Lebanese Shiites do have their own history and interests, and these definitely include Shiite Iraq. In the old days most Shiite clergymen in Lebanon who got a higher education did so in the Iraqi seminary cities of Najaf and Karbala, and the clerical families intermarried.

Lebanon's Grand Ayatollah, Muhammad Husain Fadlallah, was born and brought up in Najaf and only went to Lebanon in 1965. He was initially seen as a mentor of Hizbullah but soon distanced himself from it. Fadlallah, by the way, has bucked Iran on many occasions, refusing to call for an Islamic state in Lebanon in the mid-1980s. Relations soured further after the death of Grand Ayatollah Abu al-Qasim Khu'i (Khoei) in 1992, when Fadlallah recognized Ali Sistani as the foremost Shiite jurisprudent. Sistani rejects the Khomeinist theory that the clergy must rule. And, in later years, many Arab Shiites began following Fadlallah himself. He recently had a big tiff with Qom.

Moreover, Fadlallah has often been favored as their clerical leader by the al-Da`wa Party in Iraq. Al-Da`wa is at present in alliance with the US (except for the Tehran branch), and four of the 24 members of the current Interim Governing Council have al-Da`wa ties. Fadlallah is not linked to Hizbullah, but his case demonstrates the complexities here.

There are therefore all kinds of reasons for which Hizbullah members would go to Iraq, even just to network with Iraqi coreligionists from whom they were earlier cut off. Seeing Hizbullah as only an Iranian cat's paw is shortsighted, which is not to deny that they are sometimes a cat's paw for Iran. (The neocons are always intimating that if only the ayatollahs in Iran were overthrown, then Israel would stop having trouble with Hizbullah on its Lebanese border. But Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon helped create Hizbullah, and its nearly two decades of occupying southern Lebanon fueled the organization's growth, and this was mainly a Lebanese-Israeli affair. The geniuses among the Neocons, like Richard Perle and Doug Feith, who urged the Likud to pursue an American war against Iraq in 1996, said in their briefing for Likud that Iraqi Shiites would help pacify the Lebanese ones in the aftermath. As if the poor Shiites of southern Lebanon are going to listen to Ahmad Chalabi!).

If the Shiite majority eventually turns against the US occupation, as the British fear, of course the Hizbullah will probably help them. But that hasn't happened yet.

Addendum: An informed reader writes,

"It might be worth recalling the full logic, if you want to call it
that, of the "A Clean Break" memo for dealing with the Shia of Iraq:

'King Hussein may have ideas for Israel in bringing its Lebanon
problem under control. The predominantly Shia population of southern
Lebanon has been tied for centuries to the Shia leadership in Najf,
Iraq rather than Iran. Were the Hashemites to control Iraq, they
could use their influence over Najf to help Israel wean the south
Lebanese Shia away from Hizballah, Iran, and Syria. Shia retain
strong ties to the Hashemites: the Shia venerate foremost the
Prophet's family, the direct descendants of which - and in whose
veins the blood of the Prophet flows - is King Hussein.'

from:
A Clean Break:
A New Strategy for Securing the Realm

Cole again: In fact, of course, the vast majority of contemporary Iraqi
Shiites has no connection to the Sunni Hashimites, and those Shiites
influenced by Khomeinism (1/3?) are militantly republican. It is the
latter that are most likely to interface with Hizbullah! I continually
marvel at the glib ignorance of Perle, Feith and other Neocons when it
comes to the real Middle East.






For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Allegations about Iran and al-Qaeda

Here we go again. Okaz, the Saudi tabloid, alleged that Saif al-Adil al-Misri,
a high al-Qaeda official, ordered the recent bombings in Saudi Arabia
from Tehran.

The allegations that Sayf al-Adl is in Iranian custody; that he is allowed
by the Revolutionary Guards or the Quds Brigade to have a certain freedom
of movement to launch al-Qaeda attacks from Iran; and that he was behind
the May bombings in Saudi Arabia; have all surfaced before. They came
from the Iranian expatriate press, including Nourizadeh at al-Sharq
al-Awsat (a Saudi newspaper), and are completely unsourced. They also
talk about Ayman al-Zawahiri moving between Iran and Afghanistan freely.
The stories are so detailed as to raise suspicions for me that they are
concocted, since it is unlikely that such things would be known so
completely. Anthony Shadid, who is usually excellent, bought this story
over the summer and put it in the Post.

Now that expatriate Iraqis such as Ahmad Chalabi managed to drag the US
into a war with Iraq on the basis of unfounded allegations of
Baathist-al-Qaeda connections (and were abetted in this by Doug Feith's
Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon, which cherry-picked such reports
and highlighted them to Cheney), I think we have to be very careful about
expatriate Iranian journalism and its allies.

The fact is that US intelligence has no human intelligence assets inside
Iran who can verify that Sayf al-Adl is in Iranian custody, or what his
conditions of confinement are, or what exactly he is up to. The
likelihood that anyone in al-Qaeda would use a satellite phone nowadays
strikes me as very, very low, and if they did I can only think there would
be a Tomahawk missile strike on the position immediately.

Likewise, the likelihood that Khamenei would authorize an al-Qaeda attack
on Saudia from Iran just seems to me so low that I would need airtight
evidence before I would credit it. Al-Qaeda and its offshoots have
assassinated large numbers of Shiites, including Iranian attaches in
Karachi, and is not an obvious ally for Tehran. Saudi-Iranian relations
have thawed.

My own standard of proof in regard to such allegations begins with common
sense. Does the allegation make any sense on the surface? This one does
not, just as the stories of Saddam and Osama being buddy-buddy do not.
Of course, in the covert world all sorts of shadowy and unlikely
relationships are forged, so it is possible. But when a relationship
seems unlikely from a common-sense point of view, then I require a higher
standard of evidence before I can accept it. In this case, there is no
documentary evidence at all, only allegations emanating from Iranian
expatriate journalists and possibly picked up by Wahhabi Saudi officials
for their own reasons.

I am sure Okaz was told all this by its sources, but we don't know
what *their* sources were, and I find the whole scenario frankly
implausible.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

3 US soldiers Dead in Iraq, Bodies Looted

Two US soldiers driving through Mosul were attacked and driven off the road, crashing their vehicle. Either their assailants or crowds of angry youths who gathered slit their throats. Then crowds gathered to loot their bodies and vehicle (which they tried to set on fire), shouting angry slogans. Later reports speak of the soldiers being dragged out of their vehicle and pummeled with concrete blocks. People of Mosul have been upset by recent US military actions in the area. In Baquba, another US soldier was killed by a roadside bomb.

The army is investigating why the vehicle was not in a convoy, but rather traveling alone, according to the NYT.

I know US servicemen in the North, and my gut always wrenches when I hear a story like this, since I am afraid it will be a friend that was killed. But putting those feelings aside for a moment, I just do have to remark that this incident is an alarming indication that the US is losing the battle for hearts and minds. Mosul is not in the Sunni Arab triangle where hostility has run high, though it does have a substantial Arab population, and a long-lived Muslim Brotherhood branch. But my impression from earlier reports was that progress had been made. I guess you can win hearts and minds or you can pound an Iron Hammer, but it is tough to do both.

Wolfowitz argued that the Sunni Arab nationalists who are fighting against the US lack the two ingredients for guerrilla success, popular sympathy and foreign support. This is true only if you see the Iraqi public as monochrome. What percentage of the Sunni Arab population supports the guerrillas? That is the question. (Obviously some proportion of the Mosul Arabs do.) The guerrillas are more like the Communists in British Malaya, who had support from some of the Chinese minority, but not from the Malays. This is not the same as lacking popular support. As for foreign assistance, that does seem unlikely from states; but non-state foreign support is possible.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Franks broaches Military Dictatorship

Friends, the Republic is in real danger. It is not the UN black helicopters that threaten it, but elements of the United States officer corps. That is, if their thinking is in any way exemplified by Tommy Franks. Franks has speculated that in the wake of a major WMD attack, the US will scrap its constitution and adopt a military government. I can't imagine a more fascist, irresponsible thing for him to say. (I am not saying he advocates such a step. I am saying that for such a high-ranking former officer to even speak of this matter is the most irresponsible thing I have ever seen. The responsible thing for him to have done was to urge planning for civilian government under such emergency conditions.)

George Washington, who faced much proportionally much more devastating attacks and loss of life after 1775 (the population was only 4 million then) never threw in the towel on democracy like that. Let's think about the statistics. At 280 million, the US population is now 70 times larger than it was during the Revolutionary War. The US lost 4,435 ordinary soldiers in 1775-1783 in the war against King George III, and the number rises to 25,324 if you include Native American scouts, mercenaries, and civilians who took up arms. Proportionally, that would be like losing between 310,450 and 1.7 million US troops in 2001-2009. And it doesn't count innocent civilians killed in the Revolutionary War. It is highly unlikely that a terrorist WMD attack would inflict as much damage on the contemporary US as the British did in that period, and yet, amazingly enough, Madison, Jefferson, Washington and others were not stampeded by the Redcoats' attacks into resigning themselves to a military government in 1783. Obviously, Tommy Franks is not cut from the same cloth.

What is really alarming is that the British, who lack a Bill of Rights and have all along suffered from Government withdrawal of civil liberties at will (Thatcher sent SWAT teams into the offices of The Guardian once), are already moving in a fascist direction. The only hope of the British public for the retention of what civil liberties it has is that the human rights laws of the European Union might impede the march toward donning jackboots. The Independent even explicitly mentions Franks's scenario as context for this story!

The officer corps used to be evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. Now, only 10% of officers vote Democrat. Yet all Americans pay for this officer corps every day. Franks not only has fevered dreams of goose-stepping Amerika, but has smeared Gen. Wesley Clark while offering no evidence (I take it Franks is not one of the 10%, surprise). In their spare time, active-duty officers like Gen. "Jerry" Boykin campaign to gut the First Amendment and make the US into a "Christian" nation (as though Calvinism ever had anything to do with Jesus of Nazareth anyway).

The Republic and the Constitution are what America is about. Without them, we lose our historic mission and identity. They are not in danger from terrorism. They survived the Civil War, which proportionally was massive compared to the small events of our era. (I know Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and arrested thousands, but we did not go to a military dictatorship, and the arrests were almost certainly not necessary anyway). Hell, we lose 30,000 citizens a year to automobile accidents, and we're going to scrap the Constitution over a little dirty bomb? The Constitution can function in emergencies, and we should be educating Americans to think creatively about that. Bin Laden said he was going to "deprive them of their liberties." Seems like he has willing allies in the imaginary of the American Right. And imagine, he got this going with 19 young men and a few hijackings.

The Patriot Act, which is being renewed, is the first chink in the armor of American liberty. And all of these security concerns are fueling a new aggressiveness by the FBI, which has been surveilling anti-war demonstrators. As Billmon points out, this step is eerily reminiscent of COINTELPRO. Some nonviolent anti-war activists ended up on a 'no-fly' list that impeded their travel last spring. (I guess when the military coup comes, it will be handy to have a list of those most likely to mobilize against it. Note: For my more literal-minded readers, this comment is a dark joke, not a sign of terminal paranoia.)

Franks's scenario would make more sense if there were any evidence that military governments are better at stopping terrorism than civilian ones. Judging by CENTCOM's performance in Iraq, the Israeli army's performance in Palestine, and numerous other examples, this allegation would be difficult to substantiate. It is the agility and litheness of elected, democratic government that will permit a timely and effective response to non-hierarchical threats like al-Qaeda.

I was talking to a former high government official recently, who told me that for the first time in his life he was alarmed about the survival of American democracy. I think we all should be.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Police Stations Bombed, Airplane struck by Missile

Powerful carbombs exploded at police stations in Baquba and Khan Bani Saad, northeast of Baghdad, early Saturday morning.

A DHL plane landed back at Baghdad airport with one of its engines on fire after it was hit by a surface to air missile on taking off. It was said to have landed safely. Dozens of such attacks have been launched at aircraft landing at the airport in recent months, but they have usually been foiled by a steep spiral landing technique used by military transport pilots and others. Commercial airliners cannot spiral in closely in that way, which is why they are still not flying into Baghdad. Guerrillas in Iraq appear to have gotten hold of shoulder held missile launchers and missiles more sophisticated than the old SA-7s, possibly SA-14s or SA-16s.

[BruceR did not like this posting on grounds mysterious to me. The plane did land at Baghdad airport, though it was hit on taking off (I reported it immediately as it happened and did not yet have all the details.). Dozens of such attacks have been launched. Not only have I 'read somewhere' that the steep spiral technique is used by military transport pilots, but all my friends who have visited Baghdad have told me about spiralling in that way, and the reasons for it. And the inability of commercial airliners to use the technique is in fact what has prevented them from resuming flights to Baghdad. So I just don't see any inaccuracies in what I said. As for the possibility of an SA-16 being used in recent attacks, well, Chinooks aren't that easy to get with SA-7s. BruceR says this one was an SA-7, and that's fine, but read the notice again and you'll see I did not say it wasn't. I simply said there is some evidence that there are SA-16s out there, too; at the time of posting it wasn't clear what was used, and it was suspicious to me that this attack succeeded whereas dozens of previous SA-7 attacks had all failed.)

Michael Pollack writes, "I think I know what his objection might be, as well as why
it's wrong. Military hardware buffs (which Bruce clearly is) know that
C-130s have been constantly landing at Baghdad. And since the Hercules
C-130 is essentially the military version of the commercial 737, they
reason: well hey, if they can land, why can't 737s?

The answer is: C-130s can't do spiral landings any more than commercial
airliners can. (Only smaller planes can). But they have alternatives
that commercial airliners don't: they have apparatus for throwing chaff
and flares; and they have combat-trained pilots who fly combat evasive
mauneuvers and always at night. It's the same tricks helicopters use and
it usually works. (It's mainly RPGs that are creaming them, which don't
go for chaff.)

So you're right that commercial planes have been limited to small ones who
can do spiral landings. But it's not right that spiral landings are the
only way planes have been landing at Baghdad. Military planes have other
options. That's what it means to make a military version of a plane.


Robert Lyday says, " See the attached recent photo of 2 Iraqi guerillas holding
SAM's. At least one of those is reportedly a -14 or a -16 . . .

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bomb Kills 4, Wounds 20 at Liquor Store

An assailant threw a bomb at liquor stores in south Baghdad on Friday, killing 4 persons and injuring 20 who happened to be in the street of the shopping district, according to officials of Yarmuk Hospital in the capital. One of the dead was an 11-year-old child. Liquor store owners had earlier received warnings to close during the fasting month of Ramadan.

Bombs also went off Friday in front of the Irbil offices of a British organization attempting to remove explosive mines in Iraq, and in front of the British embassy in Tehran. No injuries were reported.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Muqtada: The US is the Great Satan

The radical young Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr accused the American administration in Iraq of pressuring Friday prayers preachers to cease criticizing the occupation. He described the US as "the Great Satan," and referred to the Baath regime as having been the "little satan." Speaking before thousands at his mosque in Kufa (near Najaf), al-Sadr said, "The recent decision issued by America to the leaders of Friday prayers specifies that it is forbidden to make any statement contrary to its policies, and branding any prayer leader who does make statements against the coalition authorities an 'inciter of terrorism.'" He wondered, "When have wars and occupation ever been synonymous with peace, and when has intervening in a country ever been synonymous with peace?" He added, "In general, America wants to imprison all who speak their opinions. That is what the former regime used to do in Iraq. The little satan is gone, and the great satan has come." (al-Hayat).
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Al-Yawir warns of lack of Transparency in Elections

Meanwhile, the leader of the Sunni Shimr tribe, Ghazi al-Yawir [Yawer] (a member of the Interim Governing Council), warned of large-scale protests at the secrecy surrounding the processes for electing the members of the new transitional council. He called for "A de facto end to the coccupation, not just in name alone."

He said that the IGC had discussed the process of elections. It had decided there would be three stages. The first would involve the election of one candidate for every 5000 citizens. Then these would be reduced to 20 %. In the third stage, the candidates would be reduced to 1/4 of the whole. (al-Hayat)

Assistant Secretary of State for Near East, William Burns, said that the Coalition Provisional Authority would be transformed into a big American embassy in Iraq once the new interim Iraqi government is established in June. He denied that the current process was an exit strategy, as some have suggested. He also expressed concern about Syria's role in the Middle East.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Mortar Round lands Near Abdul Aziz al-Hakim

Australia's News.com.au reports that a dud mortar round landed near the mosque hosting preacher Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and a member of the US-appointed Interim Governing Council.

The bomb struck a wall about 100 yards from the mosque, breaking the windshield of a car, around 5 pm on Friday. Al-Hakim was preaching at the Sayyid Idris mosque in the Karrada district of Baghdad at the time. An aide, Haitham Husaini, said "We cannot confirm that he was th target, God knows." Al-Hakim's older brother was killed by a car bomb on August 29, and another Shiite member of the IGC, Aqilah al-Hashimi, was assassinated in September. An assassination attempt was also made in early November on Songol Chapouk, the Turkmen woman member of the IGC, in Kirkuk.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Telecom contracts Under Suspicion of Graft

The Financial Times says that the Pentagon is investigating the interim Iraqi minister of communications and two officials of the Coalition Provisional Authority concerning charges that they had taken bribes in granting licenses to build and operate mobile telephone networks in Iraq. The Orascom contract is the one under suspicion (Asia Cell and Atheer were awarded the other 2/3s of Iraq in their contracts). Orascom denies wrongdoing.

The Iraq telecom contracts have been handled in a very shady way from the beginning. Batelco, a great little Bahrain telecom company, put $5 mn. into Iraq in May and June and started offering mobile phone service on its own. After a few days, Paul Bremer closed it down, saying telecom companies would have to have licenses. Then it was announced that MCI Worldcom would get the contract. Worldcom is under indictment for fraud and by Federal rules shouldn't have been offered such a contract. Besides, it has no experience in wireless telecom.

Then it was announced that no telecom companies with partial government ownership would be allowed to bid on the contracts. Batelco is 40% government owned, so it would be out of the running. In fact, only the US is crazy enough to have privatized its telephone companies completely, so the rule would have led to US companies winning the contracts. There was an uproar over that. Then the CPA seems to have backed off and let local Middle East companies bid after all, but Batelco still didn't get a contract. Now we have some indication of why.
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Poor US Military Intelligence in Iraq


The Associated Press did a story on Friday on the US military's lack of good human intelligence skills and assets in Iraq. This lack of Arabists and analysts familiar with Arab politics and culture helps explain the morass into which the US has fallen in the past six months.

The articles says, 'Most Army intelligence specialists, both officers and enlisted soldiers, were unprepared for the job when they reached Iraq, said that report, from the Center for Army Lessons Learned. Written by experts who visited in June, the report found the specialists "did not appear to be prepared for tactical assignments" and often exhibited "weak intelligence briefing skills" and "very little to no analytical skills." '

The military is trying hard to get up to speed, but obviously has a long way to go. A general in Baghdad admitted, "we don't have the best intelligence in the world" .

I think an investigation should be launched into the degree to which Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith and his Office of Special Plans actually interfered with Pentagon preparations for the Iraq occupation in ways that detracted from US intelligence operations. Certainly there are persistent reports that the civilians in the Pentagon stopped experienced Arabists from going to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority on the civilian side. The Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Feith had some sort of shady plans to turn Iraq into a dictatorship run by their crony Ahmad Chalabi, and they actively excluded from the whole operation anyone with the background to recognize and object to what they were doing.

As a result, they bear a big responsibility for getting so many of our guys killed in Iraq, since they in essence blinded the US operation there for the sake of their crackpot political schemes.

Karen Kwiatkowski, a now-retired officer in the Pentagon, has explained how she watched the RWF group hijack US Iraq policy.
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Powerful Explosions Rip through Palestine, Sheraton Hotels

Guerrillas fired rockets into the Palestine Hotel and the Sheraton in downtown Baghdad on Thursday. Several persons were injured. According to CNN staff, who are based in the Palestine, there was damage to the 12th, 15th and 16th floors of the 18-story building. The attack took place at 7:10 am Baghdad time. Some reports said that the Iraqi oil ministry was also hit.
On Wednesday, guerrillas had struck at a police station in Mosul, wounding two policeman along with a translator.

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Al-Hakim Faults Plan for Transition to Sovereignty

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and a member of the Interim Governing Council, complained this week about the US plan for handing over sovereignty to an Iraqi government by June. He said the process whereby this plan was worked out was rushed, and was largely dictated to the Iraqis. The Associated Press quotes him as saying, "The Americans were insisting that they wanted to end this matter quickly. There was rushing and although there were reservations by other council members ... regrettably (the Americans) did not stop or give more time for unanimous consent to be reached. The Iraqi people were pushed aside and the Iraqi people should play an important role. This contradicts the principles of democracy."
He also hinted that when the new government is elected, the issue of the presence of US troops will have to be revisited.

In late August after his brother Muhammad Baqir was killed in a huge truck bomb in Najaf, Abdul Aziz had called for an immediate US military withdrawal from Iraq on the grounds that they had not been able to keep order. The subtext here is that Abdul Aziz heads his own paramilitary, the Badr Corps, which the US forbids from conducting armed patrols, and Abdul Aziz chafes under this restriction. Asked why the Shiites have been less troublesome for the US than the Sunni Arabs, Abdul Aziz said that it was because the Shiite religious leaders had instructed them to oppose the Americans only nonviolently.

Michael Georgy of Reuters argues that many in the Shiite South are despairing that the US will ever leave Iraq, and distrust the new plan for a transitional government this summer. Some are calling for jihad to get the Americans out. Others despair of Iraq having any future.
(Georgy no doubt encountered these attitudes among Shiites in the South, but several opinion polls suggest he was talking to minority who want the US out now and who are pessimistic about the future).

The NYT reported on Thursday that the Bush administration has made peace with the prospect that Iraq will be a Shiite-dominated country. They are convinced the Iraqi Shiites won't be under the influence of Iran's hardline ayatollahs, and will be relatively moderate. They still seem determined to put mega-crook Ahmad Chalabi in charge of Iraq if they can. What I can't understand is why Chalabi isn't being impeached for massive embezzlement or sidelined after all the lies he told the US about WMD etc.
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Khafaji added to IGC

Salma al-Khafaji has been added to the Interim Governing Council, succeeding the slain Aqilah al-Hashimi, who was assassinated. Al-Khafaji is a Shiite woman dentist, and joins other technocrats on the council. She was chosen by the Shiite caucus on the IGC, which is now back to having a majority of 13 out of 25 members. Az-Zaman is arguing that she was selected for her technocratic credentials, not because she is a Shiite woman. The announcement of her appointment will be made in a few days.
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Gunmen trade fire with Guards of Japan's Embassy

Gunmen began firing on Wednesday night near the Japanese embassy in Baghdad. The embassy guards got into a firefight with them, after which they fled. The Japanese spokesman at the enemy said it was unclear whether they had been guerrillas intentionally targetting the Japanese embassy, or whether they had simply been thieves. (AFP/al-Zaman). Japanese PM Junichiro Koizumi has in the meantime ruled out sending Japanese troops to Iraq in 2003.
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Season of Bombs

The 8 people killed in Iraq since Wednesday by various guerrilla bombings and attacks are dwarfed by the disaster in Istanbul. A US soldier was killed and two wounded by a bomb attack in Ramadi. Another bomb went off outside the house of the pro-US mayor of Ramadi. Guerrillas blew up a bomb outside the offices of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in Kirkuk, a party headed by Jalal Talabani, the president of the Interim Governing council. Gunmen killed an Iraqi policemen when they opened fire on the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad (guerrillas had blown up a bomb there last summer. Jordan is training the new Iraqi police).

Then, of course, there were the bomb blasts in Istanbul outside the British consulate and the branch of a London bank, which killed 27 and wounded an astonishing 450 on Thursday morning. Presumably the British targets were chosen because Bush is currently in London and because of the UK's support for the Iraq war and the war on terror more generally. Istanbul wa likewise being punished because the Turkish government, especially the military, is close to the US.

The culprits are probably the Turkish Hizbullah (no relation to the Lebanese Shiite group of the same name), who may have hooked up with some al-Qaeda cells.

The Turkish Hizbullah originated in the radical Kurdish struggles of Eastern Anatolia. Its leader was a classmate of Abdullah Ocalan of the Marxist militia/party, the PKK, which carried out terrorist attacks especially in southeastern Turkey. Some of its members were also former PKK. But Hizbullah aimed at establishing an Islamist state instead, and for a while mainly targetted the PKK. There are rumors that it received Turkish government support in this bloody campaign of assassination. Then it turned against the Turkish government, especially as the PKK subsided. See for background the Al-Ahram Weekly piece by Gareth Jenkins from a couple of years ago.

See also the Human Rights Watch report on Hizbullah. It appears that the Istanbul bombings may be yet another instance of blowback, where anti-communist religious movements promoted by rightwing governments ultimately became major threats in their own right.

I wonder if Hizbullah has hooked up with Ansar al-Islam, the Iraqi Kurdish terrorist group, which has shadowy links to al-Qaeda?

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Vatican Denounces Islamist Attacks on Christian Schools in Mosul

Radical Muslims sprayed machine gun fire at properties of the Assyrian Antiochan church in Mosul and planted hand grenades in schools maintained by the church. The attacks brought a condemnation from the Vatican. Iraqi police found the hand grenades, which could have injured school children, and removed them. (az-Zaman)

The attacks on US allies in Iraq such as the UN, the Italians, the Ukrainians, the British, and NGOs, by the Sunni Arab nationalists and Islamists who make up the guerrilla forces have been meant to punish anyone who aids the US occupation and reconstruction efforts. I have been worried that at some point Iraq's small Christian community might begin being tagged as cultural collaborators (even though Christianity in Iraq rather predates the United States). Radical Muslims have attacked Christians in Pakistan, as well, to protest Gen. Musharraf's alliance with the US after September 11.


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Talabani: Muqtada Welcome in Transitional Government

Muqtada al-Sadr, the heretofore radical Shiite cleric of Kufa, would be welcome in the Iraqi government, according to Interim Governing Council president Jalal Talabani. So reports Howard LaFranchi of CSM. Al-Sadr had earlier been a harsh critic of the US and had urged nonviolent resistance to the occupation (though sometimes recently his followers came into violent confrontation with US troops). Muqtada has moderated his tone, apparently in part because of threats by the American military that he risked being arrested. Some have speculated that the religious authorities in Najaf have also exercised pressure on him.


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Cordesman: Attacks on Americans will continue "until the day the US leaves"

CPA under Fire

According to Knight-Ridder, the US will double the number of State Department personnel in Iraq to 110, including a large number of the Department's 402 Arabic speakers. (The State Department only has 402 Arabists??) The new team will oversee the transition to a sovereign Iraqi government scheduled for this June. One wonders whether this development isn't too little, too late.

When the Coalition Provisional Authority was first set up, Donald Rumsfeld and Douglas Feith kept out a lot of qualified State Department personnel, including most people in the government who actually knew Arabic. The civilians in Defense wanted to just hand the country over to Ahmad Chalabi. But Chalabi could not have run Iraq, especially once its military and police had collapsed, and Rummy's fond daydream that he could shows that the Crusty One is perfectly capable of the woollyheaded nonsense he decries in others. (He likes to poke people in the chest with his finger and try to get them off balance as he bullies them).

How the Pentagon and the CPA thought it was going to govern Iraq without Arabists just baffles me. They brought in a lot of inexperienced conservatives and neoconservatives who had nothing going for them but loyalty to Rumsfeld or Feith. You can't tell what is going on in Iraq unless you know Arabic. The Americans are stuck in that bunker of a headquarters, and don't even interact with Iraqis much. Reporters go out on tours embedded with US troops and come back and tell the Wall Street Journal everything is great. They don't know about the 3,000 murders in Baghdad in the past few months. They don't know about the ongoing insecurity, or the grinding poverty and unemployment. They don't know about the covert Shiite cells like the Revenge of God assiduously being planted in Basra.

A recent report by Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic Studies "suggests the Coalition Provisional Authority should abandon its heavily fortified headquarters in Saddam's old Republican Palace in central Baghdad. [Dr. Cordesman] says: 'The CPA's image is one of a foreign palace complex replacing Saddam's and far too many CPA Americans in Baghdad are talking to Americans who should be working with Iraqis." He says, after extensive talks with US officers in the main combat divisions, that the CPA is seen as an over-centralised bureaucracy, isolated from the military, relies too much on contractors 'and is not realistically evaluating developments in the field.'" Cordesman is also critical of the Interim Governing Council, which he says, has delayed "nation-building" attributing the problems to lack of a local following, divisions, and personal ambitions.

Cordesman says US soldiers are dying because "four years into office, the Bush national security team is not a team". (I.e. Rumsfeld does not play nicely with the other children, like Condi Rice and Colin Powell). Cordesman sees the real possibility of the Bush team facing "a defeat by underplaying the risks, issuing provocative and jingoistic speeches, and minimising real-world costs and risks." (Can you say "Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz"?) Cordesman, like top military commanders in Iraq, underlines that the opposition to the US presence is coming mainly from Iraqis, especially mid-ranking former officers in the Baath military.

Cordesman is not the only critic here. The CPA has been extremely ineffectual from many accounts, except that it does seem good at getting schools painted. The British in Basra complained bitterly last August when rioting broke out over lack of services that the money for services had been allocated to painting schools, and that the British had been told, not asked, how to spend it. There is almost an obsessive-compulsive quality to the school-painting and other similar, purely cosmetic activities, at a time when the hospitals are not functioning properly and lots of other needs are paramount.

The US press gave scant coverage to the resignation last week of Marco Calamai, after the truck bombing that killed Italian soldiers and gendarmes in Nasiriya. He had been a special counselor to the Coalition Provisional Authority for Dhi Qar, a southern province. He called Iraq "one enormous Somalia," referring to the Horn of Africa country that has suffered through chaos and a failed state for decades. An Australian broadcast quoted him as saying,

"MARCO CALAMAI (translated): The setting up of a provisional government is suffering from the general situation of uncertainty and failure surrounding the wider Coalition-sponsored Iraqi process. I believe the situation is in a state of complete paralysis."

In an earlier interview, he had said of the US relations with the Italians, "They don't consult us, they don't involve us." He maintained that only a UN interim authority could rescue the situation. According to wire services, he said that the CPA failure to understand Iraq had caused "delusion, social discontent and anger" to beset Iraqis, and had permitted terrorism to "easily take root."

Vita (link above) quotes him as saying, "the provisional authority . . . is neither fish nor fowl. The announced plans for promoting reconstruction and finance turn out practically to be null . . . In the health sector and in schooling, for example, many contracts have expired and have not been renewed by the order of Bremer because of serious budgetary problems. . . . Here in Dhi Qar, in the province where the the Italian soldiers are located, we theoretically would have had $400,000 available to us . . . but because of the muddled organization of the Cpa, only a fraction has been spent."



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Supposed al-Qaeda links with Saddam

People have asked me what I thought about the memo of Undersecretary of Defense for Planning Douglas Feith detailing 50 instances of contacts between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi Baath, published last weekend in the Weekly Standard to a huge yawn in most US media (Fox Cable News was peeing its pants over it all Saturday, though). Former CIA director James Woolsey said that only an "illiterate" would now question the Saddam-al-Qaeda link. Uh, Mr. Woolsey, I read fairly well, and in more languages than you do.

It is impossible for a historian to evaluate such a memo. We would need to know from whom exactly the information came, when, under what circumstances, and for what possible rewards. We would also have to weigh these reports against all the other available information, some of which might contradict the allegations in the memo. These instances of contacts are merely allegations. We don't know who is making them. It might well be Ahmad Chalabi, the greatest liar of the 21st century. This stuff has been cherry-picked from mountains of classified intelligence. We haven't seen the mountains. We do know that the CIA, the DIA and other intelligence professionals declined to accept Douglas Feith's findings, and they are the ones who saw the whole record.

The leak of the memo proves nothing. The memo is merely the details of the allegations Feith has been making for some time. It does not bolster the allegations. It simply fleshes them out. None of the details are themselves dispositive.

Many of the alleged contacts themselves prove nothing even if they occurred. Secret police conduct secret meetings with all sorts of groups. We know that Saddam reached out to Israel for a new relationship after the Iran-Iraq war, in the late 1980s. How do you think that happened? Surely the Iraqi intelligence agents met with Mossad. The US almost certainly had intelligence contacts with Bin Laden and his Bureau of Services in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Such contacts in and of themselves mean nothing. The question is, what do they mean in any time and place? To what practical results do they lead? I am not aware that the Feith memo shows any particular thing Saddam and al-Qaeda are supposed to have done together.

In this regard, I think the memo is irrelevant even if any of its substance is correct (which we cannot know). The only real questions are these:

1) Did Saddam have anything to do with September 11? The answer is no. There is no evidence for it, as President Bush has admitted. The money trail leads to the UAE and Pakistan, not to Baghdad, and the money trail is decisive. All the extensive investigations of al-Qaeda's finances have never turned up a single dime that came from Iraq. (Saddam may have tactically supported the tiny Kurdish Ansar al-Islam, of 150 fighters, but they were in the US no-fly zone, not harbored by Saddam; there may have been shadowy links between Ansar and al-Qaeda, but only a simpleton could say this sort of thing amounts to Saddam supporting al-Qaeda).

Moreover, Khalid Shaikh Muhammad and Abu Zubaida said in their interrogations by the US that Usamah Bin Laden had forbidden al-Qaeda officers to cooperate with Saddam, because he is an infidel. These statements directly contradict allegations in the Feith memo.

The Czech report that Muhammad Atta may have met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague is false. The FBI can document Atta's presence in Florida at the time the meeting is alleged to have taken place. The Iraqis were meeting with someone else, not Atta. The FBI has been vocal in knocking this urban legend down, but it continues to be promulgated by Dick Cheney for his own mysterious reasons.

2) Would Saddam have given weapons of mass destruction to al-Qaeda?

No. That is ridiculous. Al-Qaeda wanted to overthrow Saddam. Saddam persecuted radical Muslims. As late as last spring Bin Laden was denouncing Saddam as an infidel. Saddam is a control freak. He is not going to give weapons to friends, much less to enemies.

Moreover, terrorism of the 9/11 sort is never engaged in by states, because they have a return address. Only an asymmetrical organization, which could hope to disperse and survive a riposte, would carry out such a thing. The only time a state attacks another state that way is when it thinks it can win the subsequent war. Saddam had no illusions about his ability to fight the US.

I don't know what WMD could be effectively given to a terrorist organization for such purposes, anyway. Chemical weapons are battlefield weapons, and almost impossible to deliver for terrorism, as Aum Shinrikyo found out when it released Sarin into the Tokyo subway in 1995. They wanted to kill thousands, but only killed 12. Biological weapons like small pox carry the danger that the epidemic will blow back on the country that released it. Iraqis weren't vaccinated against small pox, and therefore the Iraqi government couldn't risk releasing it, even if it had it, which it did not. The only plausible scenario here is a dirty bomb, i.e. a conventional explosive laced with enriched uranium or with plutonium. But that would get you into the problem of the return address. A state could never be sure the bomb was not traceable back to its labs, and such a trace would spell certain doom for the government that gave the terrorists the dirty bomb. No one would risk it. Plus, Saddam would not give al-Qaeda a dirty bomb for the simple reason that Saddam did not and could not trust al-Qaeda.

Finally, Iraq had no deliverable weapons of mass destruction to give anyone. He didn't even have active programs. The whole thing was a fevered nightmare of Washington paranoia.


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3 US Troops dead

Guerrillas killed two American soldiers Monday in two different attacks. They ambushed on soldier while he was patrolling. They blew up a roadside bomb and killed another. A third soldier died from "nonhostile gunfire." It is not clear if this is a euphemism for suicide, or for "friendly fire."


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US destroys Houses

According to Jeff Wilkinson of Knight Ridder, the US military in its most recent shock and awe campaign has destroyed fifteen houses in and around Tikrit, which it said were used by guerrillas to plan attacks on Americans.

Alas, it is unlikely that the houses were only inhabited by guerrillas. I saw on Nightline an old woman complaining that she had been left homeless by the destruction of one of the houses. Destroying those houses was a form of collective punishment, which is strictly forbidden by the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949. I support our troops, but they ought not to be ordered by their officers to do things that are illegal.

Shock and awe does not work. Period. No enemy army has ever been cowed by mere firepower alone. Especially in a guerrilla war, what counts is getting people on your side. If you try to scare them (i.e. terrorize them) into cooperating, you will only alienate them. I remember seeing footage in Vietnam of carpet bombing. And then after it was over, the Viet Cong just got out of their tunnels and resurfaced. All that bombing in Afghanistan a couple of years ago did not destroy the Taliban or al-Qaeda, either.

That people in Iraq are now comparing US tactics to those of Sharon on the West Bank is truly scarey. Occupation is an ugy word in the Arab world, but Sharon's kind of occupation is evil itself. That comparison should not be what we are going for.

I conclude that the Army had developed a feud with Tikrit. Whenever feuding blinds commanders to the bigger mission, it ends in disaster for the occupying authorities. They really should rethink this thing.




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Haeri rejects Transitional Authority

The San Francisco Chronicle's Robert Collier has pulled off a coup, landing an interview with Grand Ayatollah Kadhim al-Haeri, a leading Iraqi religious authority still resident in Qom. Al-Haeri is a Khomeini style radical, unlike Najaf's Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the leading religious authority in Iraq.

Collier reports, "Haeri said Sunday that the latest U.S. plan is unacceptable and only a strict Islamic government would do. "The Iraqi constitution should be drafted only under supervision of the just mushtahids[mujtahids]," he said, using a term for the holiest religious scholars. "It must be an Islamic government. Other forms of government are not Islamic. They may be elected by people or anything, but they are not accepted." ... Haeri called the current Iraqi authority, the Governing Council, "puppets of the Americans. ... The American administration in Iraq is not legitimate. So we are not obliged to obey the Americans." '

Haeri did say that Iraqis could not offer resistance to the US until they had an Islamic government in place, a face-saving move that allows him to avoid calling for violence despite his rejection of the current situation.

Al-Haeri has been a mentor to Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical young son of the martyred Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr (d.1999). Sadiq al-Sadr had appointed al-Haeri his successor.

Collier quoted a Western diplomat in Iran as saying of al-Haeri, "If he returns to Iraq, he will strengthen Sadr and will open a real battle with Sistani for the soul of Iraqi Shiites. It will be very dangerous for the Americans. It will be like throwing a match onto gasoline."





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Khatami recognizes IGC

According to AFP, Iran's President Mohammad Khatami met with Interim Governing Council president Jalal Talabani on Monday. In a surprise announcement, Khatami said he recognized the legitimacy of the IGC in Iraq. “We recognise the Iraqi Governing Council and we believe it is capable, with the Iraqi people, of managing the affairs of the country and taking measures leading toward independence,” he said. Since the Supreme Jurisprudent in Iran, Ali Khamenei, just denounced the US in Iraq as worse than Saddam was, this statement demonstrates once again the duality in Iranian government between the reformists and the hardlineras. Khatami's statement goes beyond even what Najaf's own Grand Ayatollah, Ali Sistani, has been willing to say (he maintains that only an elected Iraqi government can be legitimate).

Iran is rumored to give money to several figures on the IGC, though, and the statement could be meant to shore up Iran's favorites on the body. It could also be that Khatami views the IGC, especially the Shiite members such as Ibrahim Jaafari of al-Da`wa, as potential allies for Iran's reform movement vis-a-vis the hardliners. Even Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, once close to the Iranian theocrats, has at least in public committed to a more democratic sort of government (if only in the short term).




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String of Assassination Attempts in Kirkuk:
IGC member Shongol Chapouk escapes; Deputy Mayor Wounded

The deputy governor of Kirkuk, Ismail Rajab al-Hadidi, was wounded along with his driver in an assassination attempt on Sunday. That incident was only one of a number in the past few days. In some instances, reprisal killings have been launched against former Baath Party members. But members of other parties have also been targetted. Shongol Chapouk [Sunkul Habibullah] , the Turkmen representative on the Interim Governing Council, revealed that she had escaped assassination last week when her car was hit by bullets. US forces in Kirkuk have responded to the outbreak of assassination attempts by chasing the suspects through the streets, causing further uproar. (al-Zaman)
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Shiite Leaders Cautious, Critical of New Plan for Iraqi Government

Stories in the Christian Science Monitor and the Washington Post have some reaction from Shiite leaders to the new plan for moving to a sovereign Iraqi government in June of 2004. Howard LaFranchi and Anthony Shadid both seem to report that Shiites are suspicious of the new plan insofar as it delays genuine, democratic elections in favor of town meetings dominated by handpicked notables. Many Iraqis want an earlier transition to sovereignty than now envisaged. It seems clear, as well, that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has the authority to undermine the new plan were he to issue a fatwa critical of it. Adel Abdul Mahdi of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq maintains that Sistani orally "blessed" the plan, and there may not be a formal fatwa or ruling. Most Shiites would follow Sistani's lead. He stands in a quietist Najaf tradition of not intervening in day-to-day politics. He has, however, been willing to address big questions of the nature of legitimate governmental authority and its rootedness in the political will of the Iraqi public.
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Stages for New Government

The precise stages envisaged in the new plan for Iraqi sovereignty by June, 2003, are available at the Web site of the Coalition Provisional Authority. The Fundamental Law laying out basic rights and the structure of the state must be completed by Feb. 28, 2004. (Dara Nuruddin, a member of the IGC and a court judge, told AFP Sunday that the governing council had already begun crafting the Fundamental Law). By March, 2004, the IGC would complete some bilateral treaties with the US regarding troops in the country.

A new Transitional National Assembly will be elected from each of Iraq's 18 provinces. It won't be an expansion of the IGC, though IGC members can run for office. The electorate will be chosen by handpicked committees, so the process is anything but democratic. The TNA will be elected no later than May 31, 2004. The assembly will in turn elect a prime minister or president, who will appoint cabinet officers. The current Interim Governing Council will hand over power to the new government by June 30 and will be dissolved, as will the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Riverbend gained the impression from their recent speeches that Ahmad Chalabi and Jalal Talabani weren't entirely aware that the Transitional National Assembly won't be an extension of the IGC. Of course, Talabani will easily be elected anew from Sulaimaniya. Chalabi clearly thinks that he will be elected to the TNA, as well, though I'm not sure what constituency would return him. West Baghdad is Sunni. East Baghdad is pro-Muqtada al-Sadr. Maybe he could get elected from Basra. But he is not very popular from all accounts. One worries that he will use some of the millions he stole from that bank he ran in Jordan, and from the CIA and the State Department, to finance a campaign with bought votes. It would be a horrible thing if this crooked millionnaire subverted budding Iraqi democracy by buying himself the presidency of the country.
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Cole Article on Sadr Movement among Iraqi Shiites

Those of you who have followed this site for any length of time will already know the details. But I have just brought out a journal article on the Sadr Movement and Iraqi Shiites in post-war Iraq:


Juan Cole, "The United States and Shi‘ite Religious Factions in Post-Ba‘thist Iraq," Middle East Journal,
Volume 57, Number 4, Autumn 2003, pp. 543-566

is available courtesy the Middle East Institute in PDF format at:


http://www.mideasti.org/pdfs/
543-566mejCole5704.pdf




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Interview with Todd Mundt on Michigan Public Radio

Via Michigan Radio

" 11/13/03

Iraq Update

Todd Mundt


Paul Bremer is returning to Iraq with a new set of marching orders from the Bush administration.
The Washington Post reports this morning that the administration plans to support the creation
of a reconstituted governing body in Iraq. It’s expected to assume a large degree of control
over the country by next summer. Juan Cole is a history professor at the University of Michigan
and an expert on the Arab world. Todd Mundt asked him what went wrong with the current Iraqi
Governing Council.


Hear Audio Story
(requires Real Player)"

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17 US soldiers Dead, 5 Injured, One Missing

Eyewitnesses near Mosul say that they saw a low-flying Black Hawk helicopter take ground fire and turn ablaze before trying to gain altitude and crashing into another Black Hawk above it. The collision killed 17 US troops, injured 5, and left one missing. Over 400 US troops have now died in the Iraq war and its aftermath from all causes.
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Cheney Ignored British Warnings on Post-War Instability in Iraq

Former British ambassador to Washington Sir Christopher Meyer has revealed to the Guardian that the British repeatedly pressed US Vice President Dick Cheney and the Pentagon on planning for the chaotic situation in post-war Iraq. They got no satisfaction from either, even though the State Department and the CIA welcomed that way of thinking. Meyer also said that UK PM Tony Blair had requested Bush to delay the invasion, and had hoped for a UN Security Council resolution authorizing the war. Blair had felt that the British military was not ready to go in mid-March. Apparently Blair was paid no more attention than a lap dog would be, since that was the role he had determined to play.

One question I have after reading Meyer's comments is, "Cheney?" I mean, we knew that Dick has been playing a more important role in foreign affairs than most vice presidents do. But Meyer makes it sound as though Cheney was virtually running the war planning.

If so, it would make sense of something Jay Garner, the first US civil administrator in Iraq, said in an interview in mid-October on PBS's Frontline. He said that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had instructed him not to use the post-war planning materials generated by Tom Warrick's project at the State Department. (Warrick had run 17 working groups over a year, with a $5 mn. budget, including many Iraqi technocrats who knew the country and what the problems would be). Then Garner said that it seemed to him at the time that this instruction was not actually coming from Rumsfeld himself, but rather had been imposed on Rummy from above.

I thought at the time that Garner must have meant Bush himself. But now it seems more likely to me that Dick Cheney was personally responsible for tossing the Warrick project in the trash can. It follows that the chaos of post-war Iraq can in some large part be laid at Cheney's door.

Some smart Democrat candidate should pick this issue up and run with it. They have all been twisted around by the Republicans on the war, because taking a stance on it is so tricky. But there is no down side at all to taking a stance on the disaster of the post-war planning.

You have several identifiable screw-ups in this regard, including Doug Feith, the undersecretary of defense for planning, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and maybe Cheney himself. And if you hit on the failures of post-war planning, you don't have to say whether the war itself was worthwhile or not. You focus on all of our guys and gals that this SNAFU has killed, all the Iraqi deaths, the devastation to the Iraqi cultural heritage (yes, the Krauthammer line that it wasn't damaged after all is a bald faced lie), etc. It's the Aftermath, Stupid.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Istanbul Synagogue Bombing Kills 22, wounds 242

My money is on al-Qaeda as the culprits in the two massive car bombs that went off in Istanbul's Galata district on Saturday, the Jewish sabbath, outside two synagogues. Because the street was bustling, many or most of the killed and wounded were apparently Muslims. Istanbul is one of my favorite cities, and I have several dear friends among Turkish Jews, so I have been very upset by this news.

Al-Qaeda has an obsession with Jerusalem being under Israel occupation, as they think of it, which has often misled Westerners into thinking they don't care about the Palestine issue. They probably don't care so much about Palestinians' welfare per se. But they consider Jerusalem to be Islam's third holiest city, and they consider it under foreign, infidel occupation. (They also consider Mecca and Medina under foreign, American occupation because of the Saudi royal family's tight alliance with Washington). Al-Qaeda, being a fundamentalist religious movement, focuses on religious symbols, not secular political ones.

In order to signal its outrage over Jerusalem, al-Qaeda has hit Jewish targets repeatedly. The World Trade Center was almost certainly chosen in large part because al-Qaeda believed it was dominated by Jewish capital. Al-Qaeda also hit at a synagogue at Djerba island off Tunisia, killing German tourists, and at Israeli tourists in Mombasa. It specializes in hitting Jews who are soft targets. The only major planning we know of for an al-Qaeda attack on Israel itself was Richard Reid's dry run on an El Al flight. The El Al security tagged him as suspicious, so he tried his shoe bomb routine on a US carrier instead.

The theme of attacking what they see as invading infidels in Muslim lands also ties into last week's bombing in Riyadh, which appears especially to have targeted wealthy Lebanese Christian entrepreneurs, though many Muslims were killed or injured, as well.

Of course, when I say al-Qaeda I mean something more shadowy than the word now implies. The old al-Qaeda was defined as the some 5,000 fighters who had pledged fealty to Bin Laden personally. That pledge is no longer possible. The small cells around the world are probably afraid to be in much contact with one another. They may get some marching orders from Sa`d Bin Laden, Osamah's son, and from Ayman al-Zawahiri, the head of the militant faction of the Egyptian al-Jihad al-Islami. Al-Qaeda really has just become a McGuffin, a shorthand for "Sunni radical terrorists."

One also has to wonder if al-Qaeda is attempting to unseat the moderate "Muslim Democrat" sort of government now in power in Turkey. Al-Qaeda likes to sharpen contradictions, and would be much happier with a fight between secularist extremists in the army and fundamentalist extremists in the street.

I'd like to see the Saudi royal family get out in front on this issue by forcefully condemning the Istanbul attacks, and by linking them to the Riyadh one, and by coming out against the anti-Jewish bigotry that has become so widespread in the Muslim world. Arabs are always saying they are against Zionism, not against Jews. Well, Turkey's 25,000 remaining Jews are in Turkey because they did not want to be ingathered. The front page of the Saudi daily al-Watan covers the Istanbul bombing. It then quotes President Bush at the end of the article condemning it. But this is a Saudi paper. What are Saudi high officials saying? They are not quoted to my knowledge. The bottom link on the first page is to the campaign by US Zionist organizations to discredit Saudi Arabia and to attempt to link the royal family to terrorism. Well, what better way to change that image than by video of a forceful condemnation by Crown Prince Abdullah of this attack on Jews? Saudi Prince al-Waleed bin Talal has recently said that the Saudi authorities have cracked down on preachers making anti-Jewish comments, since Islam respects the right of Jews to practice their religion. That is a start, but it isn't enough. And, it isn't visible in the West.

Al-Qaeda cannot be defeated until this ugly dispute between the Arabs and the Israelis is resolved. Ariel Sharon's iron fist and settlement expansion isn't helping. A viable Palestinian state that had offices in Old Jerusalem and could fly a flag there and have authority over the Mosque of Omar, would pull the rug out from under al-Qaeda recruiters on the Jerusalem issue. But neither is behind-the-scenes bigotry against ordinary Jews in the Middle East helpful in resolving the problems. Riyadh and Istanbul should demonstrate that mainstream Jews and Muslims are in this fight against terrorism together.

[N.B. Pakistan denounced the Istanbul bombings as "dastardly" according to wire reports on Sunday.]

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

4 Americans Killed in Iraq

Guerrillas killed two soldiers and wounded three with an explosive charge aimed at their convoy north of Baghdad on Friday.

Friday morning, guerrillas launched a similar bomb attack in central Baghdad, wounding a 1st Armored Division soldier, who later died from shrapnel.

Late Thursday, attackers opened fire on US civilians working for the US army, killing one and wounding another man.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

US moves to Hand Sovereignty to Iraqis by June; Well, Sort of

We now know what the anonymous Arab diplomat meant when he told the New York Times that he had met with Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and that all of them were focused on an "exit strategy" for Iraq.

ABC News seems to have been the first to get the details Friday of the plan presented by Paul Bremer to the Interim Governing Council. My concise paraphrase is as follows:

1. The Interim Governing Council will craft a Basic Law allowing a transitional government to be elected and operate.

2. By the spring, each of Iraq's 18 provinces will hold conventions made up of notables, elders and tribal chieftains. These conventions will elect altogether 200-300 members of the interim parliament, based on proportional representation. This interim parliament would in turn elect a prime minister. This process would be complete by June, 2004.

3. Mr. Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority would hand over power to the new government. and close up shop. The US and UK military would remain in Iraq, however, and the new government could invite other international contributors of troops and other help.

4. The Interim government would hold elections for delegates to a constitutional convention to draft the new constitution, in accordance with the fatwa or legal ruling of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.

5. Formal elections on the basis of one person, one vote, will be held to install a new government, to which the interim government will hand power.

IGC member Mahmud Othman said that the US may seek a new UN security council resolution blessing this plan (-al-Hayat). The new US vision is close in form if not in timetable to plans put forward by the French this fall calling for a new sovereign Iraqi government to be created by the end of 2003, leaving the drafting of the constitution until later. In essence, the French have won, though the process will be slower than they had wanted.

This plan is intended to achieve the beneficial result of the restoration of sovereignty to the Iraqi people without risking that they will elect an anti-American government. Obviously, if genuine elections were permitted right now, there is some risk that extreme Arab nationalists and radical Sunni and Shiite Muslims might have undue influence in the parliament.

This sort of outcome occurred in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province when the US pressed General Musharraf to hold elections last year this time. The Pakistani Pathans (Pushtuns) put the religious parties in power in that province, and helped them capture 17 percent of seats in the national parliament. Some of those same religious parties had trained the Taliban! These religious parties have essentially paralyzed the parliament for the past year.

It is to avoid this outcome that the US is stage-managing the election by controlling the electorate. It will not be Iraqis at large, but rather pre-screened relatively pro-American notables. This process will be controversial, and may well over-represent rural elements like the tribes over urban ghettoes like East Baghdad (home to a lot of radical Shiites). The Washington Post noted, While there appears to be broad public support for a fast handover of sovereignty, there also is a strong desire among many Iraqis to choose their new leaders -- even interim ones -- through an election.. It quoted IGC member Samir Sumaidy (a Sunni from Diyala) as saying, "It will be difficult, in some places, to determine who will be the best people to attend such meetings. Selection is a process that is open to challenge."

On the other hand, the Shiites seem to like the plan. Adil Abdul Mahdi of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq said that he met with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani on Thursday and "He blessed the whole process . . . This is a very good achievement, taking into the account the real situation in the country. This is a real achievement." But he also wanted, according to the NYT, a pullback of US forces from the cities: "The occupation itself is a source of insecurity."

A Shiite member of the old preparatory commission for the constitution (who was almost assassinated in September), Shaikh Jalal Uldin Saghir, told the NYT, "Of course we want a constitution, but it is not as much a priority as sovereignty . . ."I think we can have elections by the end of 2004 . . . But, before that, we must go through a process of transferring authority and a transitional period."

There has been widespread dissatisfaction with the old, purely appointed Interim Governing council. According to the Associated Press, Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Taqi al-Mudarrisi (Modaresi) warned that an attempt by the US to solve the Iraq crisis by military means "will only make things worse." He complained, "Seven months have passed and there hasn't been one serious election. Coalition forces have chosen the Governing Council, distributed ministries the same wrong way and did not hold elections for the provincial councils. They chose them randomly and for this reason many Iraqi are suspicious about the intentions of these forces."
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Muqtada al-Sadr Praises New Transition to an Iraqi Government

Young Shiite radical Muqtada al-Sadr, in his Friday Prayers sermon at Kufa, also praised the new program, saying that any step that restored sovereignty to Iraqis was a step in the right direction. He said that the decision of the US to move in this direction more swiftly was a response to his announcement of a shadow government on October 10. According to AFP/ al-Sharq al-Awsat, he continues to be a severe critic of the US.

He complained that the US was increasingly drawing on the talents of the former Baath secret police, saying it was wrong for the CPA to hire as policemen people with blood on their hands. "The United States is using intelligence officers who have blood on their hands. You cannot fight terrorism with terrorists." (AFP)

Meanwhile, Iranian Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei attacked the US in his Friday sermon, saying its rule in Iraq was worse than Saddam's had been and that it was thwarting democracy. He also said that Iranian reformers were tacit allies of US corruption, whether they knew it or not. (I guess we all have our Joe McCarthys in this world.)

Khamenei probably just lost any popularity he had in Iraq, since most Iraqi Shiites are glad Saddam is gone and don't feel more oppressed, and Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's position rejecting the rule of the clerics is actually closer to that of Iranian reformers than to the hardliners in Tehran.
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Riot in Samawah

AP reported that demonstrators threw rocks in downtown Samawah, protesting alleged police corruption. Iraqi police tried to deal with the rally by firing into the crowds, wounded at least one man. The hostilities died down when Dutch soldiers appeared.
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Fateful US Choices in Iraq

Rory McCarthy, writing for the Guardian from Baghdad, has outlined the new policy options facing Paul Bremer now that his original 7-stage plan has been abandoned.

"Plans now being considered include:

· Letting an enlarged governing council immediately take over the responsibilities of a transitional government

· Enlarging the governing council by choosing several hundred Iraqis from trade unions, tribes and professions, as well as other community leaders

· Closing down the governing council and holding general elections to find candidates for a new transitional government

· Choosing one Iraqi to emerge as president of the new transitional authority

· Drawing up an electoral law under a new transitional government to prepare for general elections

· Delaying the drafting of a constitution until after an election."

Let me just comment on some of these. Letting the Interim Governing Council take over the responsibilities of a transitional government is not really a new policy. This step is gradually being implemented. The problem is that the IGC is illegitimate, since it was appointed by the Occupying Powers. It does not derive its sovereignty from the Iraqi body public.

Enlarging the IGC to become a sort of parliament would be fine, but the delegates must be elected in some way if they are to be legitimate. They could select a president or prime minister from among themselves. (I am not suggesting the "Afghan model" here, since Iraq is a largely urban, literate society and must conduct elections in a more sophisticated way).

Appointing one Iraqi as president of the new transitional authority is likewise unrealistic. He would just be seen as an American puppet and would lack legitimacy and authority.

Obviously, some sort of basic electoral law will have to be in place for any sort of new political process to proceed.

Here is what I wrote on October 7, 2003, and it has a lot of application to the decisions the US has to take. Remember that Grand Ayatollah Sistani's fatwa has stymied the move toward calling a constitutional convention, since he insisted that it be elected (the Kurds and the US don't want that method used). Sistani has enormous moral authority. And he has already made it clear that a new Iraqi government that is not elected will not be legitimate:


The Interim Governing Council issued a new law on Iraqi nationality in September, allowing dual citizenship. A number of the IGC members have dual citizenship, which was prohibited under the Baath regime, and holders of dual nationality were forbidden to hold office. The new law also allows someone to become an Iraqi citizen even when his or her parents are unknown.

The law has drawn a sharp rebuke from the office of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and his colleagues in Najaf, who issued a fatwa or ruling denouncing the new law. The fatwa reminds the IGC that it has no legitimacy, since it has neither been recognized by the Najaf religious authorities nor been recognized by the Iraqi people through any sort of election. It says that the IGC should stick to issues such as security and services, and that it has no business attempting to legislate broadly, more especially when its legislation contradicts Shiite law. (-al-Sharq al-Awsat).

The fatwa is not so important for its stance on the nationality law as for what it says about the Interim Governing Council's standing. Sistani has for the first time openly said that the IGC lacks legitimacy and that he has declined to give it his approval. He has also indicated that any Iraqi government could become legitimate only if it were both elected and approved by the religious institution.


The point is that Sistani can make life miserable for a new government that is only appointed by the US, not in some way selected by the Iraqis. (I know that the US will try to manipulate the results of the election, but most elected bodies would be better than rule by US fiat).

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Blackwill, NSC tapped to take over Iraq from Rumsfeld

Reliable diplomatic sources in New York have told al-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper that the Bush administration has decided to reduce the role of the Department of Defense in Iraq and to gradually give that responsibility to the National Security Council and the White House. They said that one outcome of the recent consultations at the White House with Ambassador Paul Bremer was the decision to appoint Robert Blackwill, head of the political section in the National Security Council, as Bremer's deputy. Blackwill is a former ambassador to India, and is presently in Iraq. He will have the same prerogatives as Bremer does, and will oversee political affairs in Iraq.

UPI had reported on Nov. 11, "The future of the Iraq governing council will be on the agenda of talks that U.S. National Security Council official Robert Blackwell will be conducting with Bremer soon. According to sources in Baghdad Blackwell will visit Iraq to explore the possibility of enlarging the Iraq council, or dissolving it and setting up a new body."
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New Poll Shows Public thinks it was Misled on Iraq

From The Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland:

"No Clear Consensus For or Against Decision to Go To War
Support for Iraq Reconstruction Undaunted

For Release: Nov. 13, 2003, 12:15 pm Contact: Steven Kull (202) 232-7500

College Park, MD: According to a new PIPA-Knowledge Networks poll, a majority of
Americans (55%) believe that the Bush administration went to war on the basis of
incorrect assumptions. An overwhelming 87% said that, before the war, the Bush
administration portrayed Iraq as an imminent threat, while a majority (58%) believes that
the administration did not have evidence for this and only 42% believe that it was the
case. . .

A majority of Americans believe that the evidence that the US had on Iraq did not meet
the proper international standards for going to war without UN approval. While most
believe that countries have the right to go to war if they have evidence they are in
imminent danger of being attacked with WMD, only a minority also believes that the US
had such evidence (32%) or, given what is known now, that Iraq in fact posed such a
threat (35%) . . .

A strong majority (67%) believes that countries have the right to overthrow governments,
without UN approval, if they have strong evidence that the government is providing
substantial support to a terrorist group that has attacked them. However only 38% both
believe this and think the US had strong evidence that Iraq was providing substantial
support to al-Qaeda."



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Move to Early Turnover of Civil Authority in Iraq?

One outcome of Paul Bremer's frantic consultations in Washington on the rapidly deteriorating Iraq situation appears to have been a decision to move to some sort of sovereign Iraqi government quickly, and to worry about the writing of a constitution later.

Although this decision is long overdue, how it is done will be extremely important. Power cannot simply be handed over to the existing Interim Governing Authority. Its inability to get anything done helped to produce the crisis in the first place.

A politician appointed by the US would have no legitimacy.

The US must go back to the Garner plan, of calling a national congress of about 250 delegates from all over the country, chosen by their townships or clans. They must elect an interim president, who could appoint a cabinet. Holding such a national congress is risky, since the outcome is unpredictable. But it is the only way to get a legitimate government.

Observers keep pointing to the fatwa of Grand Ayatollah Sistani in which he demanded that delegates to any constitutional convention be elected, as having derailed any compromise on the IGC about how to select the drafters of a constitution. But it doesn't seem widely known that Sistani issued another fatwa in which he said that any interim government could only be legitimate if it were elected by the Iraqi people, and were approved by the Najaf Grand Ayatollahs.

So, just appointing Ahmad Chalabi president, or imposing a new Hashimite monarchy won't do the trick. Neither would have any legitimacy, locally or internationally. The US is going to have to bite the bullet and let a sovereign leader emerge from post-war Iraq on the basis of some sort of vote.

That shouldn't be so hard. In fact, that's what I thought the Bush administration had been saying it was aiming for in removing Saddam. Any other way of proceeding will make the political and military situation worse, not better.

Nota bene: An Iraqi president elected by the people in some transparent and above-board process might at last be able to get countries like Egypt to commit troops to help provide security. An American appointee never could.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Japan Pulls Out; S. Korea Reduces Planned Force

The car bombing of the Italian police station at Nasiriyah has had the results the guerrillas were aiming at. Japan has now formally announced that it won't send peacekeeping troops to Iraq. South Korea had been being pressed by the US to send 10,000 troops, including combat units. Its government now says it will send only 3,000, and has not committed to including any peace enforcers. S. Korea has a few hundred non-combat troops in Iraq now.
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US Army Confiscates Journalists' Videotape

Some thirty media outlets are protesting that the US military on the ground in Iraq is interfering with their coverage of the ongoing military operations there, in contradiction of the Pentagon's own guidelines. They say equipment, including cameras and videotapes, have been confiscated, and journalists have been harassed.

Since the ordinary troops almost certainly couldn't care less about the journalists covering them, one can only imagine that these actions result from secret orders given by officers concerned that the image of the US army is being harmed, and its war aims threatened, by the constant video on US television of guerrilla strikes against the US. If so, the tactic will certainly backfire on them. A public conviction that it isn't being told the whole story and is being lied to is even more damaging than that constant video of the attacks.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Two US Soldiers dead

Guerrillas killed a US soldier with a roadside bomb near Taji on Wednesday. Another soldier died of wounds incurred in a roadside bombing in Baghdad. The American military compound in the northern city of Mosul took rocket-propelled grenade fire Wednesday. An Iraqi paramilitary was killed in Mosul during the attacks.
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US almost Kills Ayatolah Bahr al-Ulum

Ayatollah Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, a member of the US-appointed Interim Governing Council, barely avoided being killed by a US soldier on Wednesday. The soldier opened fire by mistake on the ayatollah's automobile as it was entering the grounds of the US headquarters, wounding Bahr al-Ulum's driver in the thigh. The US apologized for the incident, and is conducting an investigation. A US spokesman said that the soldier had only fired "one round" of ammunition into the car.

This incident is about the sorriest ass SNAFU I have seen in the whole war and its aftermath. It is absolutely inexcusable that safe procedures have not been put in place to allow the members of the Interim Governing Council to come and go freely to the US HQ. There have been constant problems of this sort, with important Iraqis excluded from meetings because they couldn't get through security. But nothing compares to almost killing our own guy.

Let me explain why this is so serious. First of all, the Shiites are the majority in Iraq. Most of them don't want the US to leave immediately, but probably a quarter to a third do. All of them, every last person, deeply dislike being occupied by a Western country, and they do want to see the US leave in a timely fashion. Since significant groups among the Sunni Arabs are fighting a deadly insurgency against the US, it desperately needs for the Shiites to be on its side. Mostly they have been so far.

But the Shiites were royally ticked off that the US allowed the assassination of Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim on August 29. Bahr al-Ulum temporarily withdrew from the IGC about it. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and a member of the IGC as well, also appears to have toyed with resigning.

If the US soldier had killed Bahr al-Ulum, a moderate close to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, he could well have accidentally set the Shiite community on a path of opposition to the US. All you need is daily demonstrations to grow and some issue that has legs, and a Shiite rabble rouser could cause the US enormous trouble.

Mr. Bremer, the US civil administrator, has been complaining that often only 5 or so members of the IGC show up for meetings at the US HQ. Yuh think? If they risk life and limb just driving in, it is a wonder that so many as 5 show up.

For an Iraqi point of view on why the IGC members do not show up to meetings, see Riverbend's Baghdad Burning.





For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Talabani foresees Provisional Government preceding a new Constitution

Interim Iraqi president Jalal Talabani conceded Wednesday that it might be better to establish a provisional Iraqi government before producing a constitution. Talabani said, "I think it is very reasonable and necessary to have a provisional government before having a constitution."
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Breaking News: 16 Italians, 8 Iraqis dead in Nasiriyah Police Station Attack

On Wednesday guerrillas launched a well-coordinated bombing attack against an Italian military police compound in Nasiriyah, a city in the largely Shiite south. First, a lead truck crashed through the entrance, then another car followed through and was detonated, according to a British military official. The attack was a suicide bombing, and some analysts felt that the technique pointed to al-Qaeda. Secular groups such as the Tamil Tigers, however, have used suicide bombings as a technique, and the modus operandi itself does not tell us who did it.

The press as of Wednesday afternoon is reporting 16 Italians (including several carabinieri or gendarmes) and 8 Iraqis dead. Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi has rejected calls by his opposition to withdraw the 2300 Italian troops from Iraq. Many observers, however, believe that such incidents may make US allies like Italy less willing to renew their commitment when their term ends in the spring.

The Telegraph reported that 'Cesare Salvi, a Left-wing democrat senator, warned that "fresh unnecessary deaths must be avoided". "Italy must change its line," he said. "This confirms the Italian government's tragic error in supporting a war desired by Bush against the will of the vast majority of Italians."'

It also may well be that allies on the fence about sending troops or more troops, such as Japan and South Korea, will be dissuaded by such attacks. Sending military contingents to Iraq is often highly unpopular with the local publics. Japan has already announced, in the wake of the attack, that it will delay sending its Self Defense Forces troops to Iraq.

In a recent op-ed, former CIA field officer Milt Bearden, who helped drive the Soviets from Afghanistan, explained the strategy being pursued by the Iraqi guerrillas. He points out that one of the classic aims of such insurgencies is to deprive the occupier of allies, and that this tactic is working in Iraq. The UN and most of the major NGOs have withdrawn. One wonders if the Italians and Ukrainians, both of whom have now taken hits, will stay beyond March or so.

Guerrillas have attacked fair numbers of police stations, and even managed to bomb and damage a US military police HQ in the North late last summer.





For "cont'd" postings, click here.

US Rule in Iraq Collapsing?

US civil administrator Paul Bremer's sudden, rushed trip to Washington earlier this week signalled that the White House is considering a radical rethinking of Iraq policy. As Josh Marshall notes, Rumors are flying that he himself may resign or be fired.

He and his colleagues in Washington are also clearly thinking of abolishing the Interim Governing Council and resorting to an Afghanistan model. This step would require some sort of Iraqi selection process for a Karzai-like president, who could appoint a cabinet and establish a legitimate government while the new constitution is being written. Az-Zaman newspaper, which is close to IGC member Adnan Pachachi, describes the plan as a "purge of the Interim government."

Although the military situation is not ideal, the level of attacks on US troops is not a military challenge yet. I suspect that this frantic anxiety is mainly political, and is fueled in part by Karl Rove's realization that if Iraq is still in the headlines next summer, it will sink Bush's presidency. The US press is not interested very much in other governments, nor even in US troops serving in countries that have their own government. Note that attacks on US troops in Afghanistan seldom make the front page, even when there are casualties. This lack of press interest in Afghanistan was a by-product of creating the Karzai government.

Rove thus needs to move Iraq off the front page. By leaving Bremer in charge of the country, the Bush administration created a 51st state as far as the US press was concerned, and they covered it the same way they do New York. Moreover, this 51st state had a lot of newsworthy things going on in it, like daily attacks on US troops. Of course, the danger is that the US will fob rule of the country off on a failed state and the whole thing will blow up in the face of the Bush administration.

Which is not to deny that the dire security situation is also fuelling the panic. The Australian Broadcasting Company reported Wednesday, "The Coalition is facing attacks in various parts of the country. The Coalition headquarters in Baghdad has come under mortar fire at least five times in the past week. There've also been repeated ambushes in the volatile towns of Fallujah and Tikrit."

The Washington Post reported that guerrillas hit the US HQ in Baghdad with rockets or mortars yet again on Tuesday, sending "leaders of the U.S.-installed Iraqi government running to basement shelters." There were no injuries. "One source, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said at least eight projectiles had landed in the area hit but only three exploded. At least one landed in a parking lot near the helicopter pad, and close to where U.S. contractor Bechtel Corp. is based."

Not only are CPA officials forced to the basement for their own safety, but the number of attacks on US troops has risen to an average of 30-35 per day. The numbers are actually increasing month by month, and a new CIA AARDWOLF or special field assessment says that growing numbers of Iraqis are joining the resistance and concluding that the US can be defeated.

The US has started bombing the increasingly organized guerrillas in the Sunni Arab triangle, admitting that it is still at war in Iraq. The bad news is that small guerrilla bands can't effectively be bombed, so it is mainly for show. It could also backfire against the US if they bomb innocent civilians.

Most challenges cannot be dealt with by air power. An angry mob in the Sunni town of Haditha set fire to the police station and another building on Tuesday (az-Zaman). What could US planes have done about that? They could hardly just strafe the civilian demonstrators.

I am suspicious of the number of daily attacks given out by the US spokesmen in Iraq. I see lots of reports in the Arab press of attacks in the south of the country, on Bulgarians, Ukrainians, and other troops, and wonder if they are even being counted. For some reason the attackers in the south appear to be very poor shots, and seem mostly to miss the target, failing to inflict any real damage. (Presumably they were low-level Shiite conscripts and did not get good military training, unlike the Sunnis further north). But the attacks in the South are ongoing, and sometimes they succeed (a Polish officer died and 6 Ukrainians were wounded last Friday). I suspect that the threshold for defining an "attack" in the publicly announced statistics may be raised artificially high, and lots of things we civilians would consider an "attack" are not being reported because they were clumsily executed.

So it simply is not true, as President George W. Bush alleged Tuesday, that "The violence is focused in 200 square miles known as the Baathist Triangle, the home area to Saddam Hussein and most of his associates." First of all, the Sunni areas bounded by Fallujah, Baghdad and Tikrit are several thousand square miles, as the WP noted. But second, the attacks occur in Kirkuk, Mosul, Karbala, Basra and elsewhere in the country, as well.

Nor is Bush giving much of the real picture when he says "Foreign jihadists have arrived across Iraq's borders in small groups with the goal of installing a Taliban-like regime" There are tens of thousands of ex-Baath Sunni Arab nationalists and Sunni radicals in Iraq, who are the real source of the opposition. A couple of hundred international volunteers are responsible only for a small number of the attacks. The Bush administration doesn't want the US public to know that they are fighting the Iraqi people. That would not be as palatable as fighting al-Qaeda.
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Armitage: We need to bring the Iraqi Sunnis into the Political Process

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage in Cairo said that the US wishes to bring the Iraqi Sunnis back from being marginalized and to engage them in a political process. He said the US wants to turn power over to an Iraqi government as soon as possible, but did not want to rush the process, risking the creation of an artificial solution and a failed state unable actually to shoulder the burdens laid on it. (Reuters, az-Zaman).

I certainly hope this isn't a sign that momentum is building for a restoration of the Hashimite monarchy in Iraq. The Shiites would immediately recognize that as a way of marginalizing them. (That is what it was in the 1920s during the British mandate, and after). Probably a quarter to a third of Iraqi Shiites are deeply imbued with Khomeinist ideas, and Khomeinism says Shiism is anti-monarchical. There would be enormous trouble over a restored Sunni monarchy eventually. Since the Shiites are 65% of the population, the US should be careful not to infuriate them in a vain attempt to make people in Fallujah like the US. It is unlikely to happen, and you'd end up being hated by both.
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Iraqi Analyst: Resistance is Nationalist, Not Foreign

According to al-Jazeera, Baghdad U. Political Scientist Salman al-Jumaili reports that the majority of attacks on Coalition forces in Iraq are carried out by Iraqi nationalist and Muslim radical groups. He adds, "It is important to mention nationalist resistance - among the dead we have found Turkmen and Iraqi Christians as well as Muslims." Al-Jumaili is crunching the numbers on the backgrounds of guerrillas killed in combat with coalition forces. Almost all of them are Iraqi Muslims, and they come from both Sunni and Shiite families. Their only goal is to expel the US from Iraq. Almost none are properly called "Saddam loyalists" or al-Qaeda, he maintains. Local Iraqi Muslim radicals, he says, form the majority of guerrillas, but the fighters are diverse. There are lots of different militias, who have not much coordinated among themselves. Al-Jazeera notes, "there is some evidence to suggest a few Islamist groups have began to coalesce in recent weeks." Al-Jumaili says, "There are many differences between the different groups, even between different Islamist resistance forces, but the unifying cause for the struggle is the American occupation."

Fox Cable News quoted Shiite Ayatollah Abdul Aziz al-Hakim on Tuesday saying that the guerrillas are mainly al-Qaeda. But al-Hakim has self-interested reasons for saying that. He is cooperating with the Americans (he serves on the IGC), so it is in his interest to paint the guerrillas as foreign terrorists who cannot impugn his patriotism. Likewise, the Shiite leaders have to constantly convince their fighters not to engage in reprisal killing of Sunnis, so blaming attacks on foreigners has the effect of reducing communal tension in Iraq. Al-Hakim doesn't have independent intelligence on the Sunni areas, anyway. Fox Cable News frequently overwhelms reporting with a highly biased editorial slant that misinforms the public.
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Medact: Iraqi Health Situation Deteriorating

Medact, a health professionals service organization, has issued a new report on the Iraq war and its aftermath. It alleges that between 21,700 and 55,000 people have died since the US/UK invasion, and that the casualties continue to mount. It estimates that at least 7,800 Iraqi civilians have been killed, and 20,000 wounded.

The report reveals a deterioration of health conditions among the Iraqi people since the war ended. Before the war, 1 in 8 Iraqi babies died before reaching the age of 5, and 25% of babies were born underweight. The war has made things worse, putting new stresses on people already suffering. Many of the 20,000 wounded do not have access to good health care or rehabilitation. Clean water is scarce, and poverty and malnutrition are widespread. There still is not good medical access, and conditions in many hospitals are very bad.


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References


http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/
archives/week_2003_11_09.html#002196


http://www.washingtonpost.com/
wp-dyn/articles/A28318-2003Nov11.html


http://www.foxnews.com/story/
0,2933,102823,00.html


http://www.medact.org/tbx/pages/


http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2003/s987254.htm

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/
61180572-880F-4712-AC8E-CCC0E16BFDBE.htm"
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Further instability in Iraq

Guerrillas hit a convoy at Iskandariya, killing one American soldier.

Guerrillas exploded an improvised bomb along the side of the street in Basra, killing 3 civilians at least.

In Mosul, guerrillas killed a petroleum official and his son with machine gune fire on Monday.
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Wave of Assassinations in Basra

Dozens of prominent Iraqis have recently been assassinated in Basra, according to az-Zaman. The paper says that a few of these may be reprisal killings of former Baath officials. But many of those being mown down are just physicians or technocrats with no obvious Baathist past. Other assassinations may be the results of feuds among clans. Az-Zaman implies, however, that the wave of murders has some sinister pattern to it, which has not yet been discerned. Possibilities, it says include the emergence of mobster gangs involved in the city's extensive smuggling trade, who are fighting over turf. Another possibility is that existing political parties are jockeying for position behind the scenes, employing violence in an attempt to deprive rivals of wealthy contributors and capable candidates.

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British Fear Uprising after One Year

The British authorities in the Iraqi south are desperately afraid that the Americans are going to dawdle around so long in creating an Iraqi government that they will provoke a massive uprising. The British want a return of sovereignty to Iraqis by summer of 2004 at the latest. The US civil administrator, Paul Bremer concurs.

A long article on this issue in the Telegraph does not specify who among the Americans wants a longer US occupation. At one point it was alleged that forces in the State Department wanted a 2 year period of direct rule by the US. Rumsfeld and the Neocons seem to have wanted an even quicker turn-over of sovereignty to Iraqis, but the Iraqis they had in mind were named Ahmad Chalabi (a corrupt financier in their hip pocket).

One problem is the 7 stage plan issued by Mr. Bremer. It requires that a constitutional convention be chosen or elected and produce a new constitution before there are elections for a new government. The Interim Governing Council has not even been able to decide on a method of choosing the delegates (Shiites want them to be elected; Kurds want them to be appointed, and the Americans are siding with the Kurds).

A constitution would take at least a year to hammer out, maybe more (it took a year in Afghanistan). That puts us into early 2005, and into a stage of the crisis where the British fear we may begin to see organized Shiite resistance to the occupation forces.

As I have said before, you could just go back to a modified pre-Baath constitution and elect a temporary government under it, and then let it preside over a longer constitution-writing process, as in Afghanistan. That way you'd formally end the occupation and cease the illegal attempts of the Coalition Provisional Authority to reshape Iraqi society and the economy. The new Iraqi government would get its UN seat. The only ones inconvenienced would be US carpetbaggers, who might not be viewed with as much favor by an Iraqi government as they are by the American authorities.

The Americans have recreated in Iraq the late colonial period. As Fred Cooper has argued, late colonialism was different from earlier versions in adopting a developmentalist rhetoric. The colonial authorities were making lives better and contributing to literacy, schooling, industrialization, etc. The late colonial transition to local sovereignty followed various paths. In Algerian and Vietnam it went badly wrong and produced enormous violence and death. In Senegal, it was fairly smooth. There was even a French member of the Senegalese cabinet for decades after independence, as I recall.

The Coalition must aim for a Senegal outcome, not an Algerian one. But one of the ways you get Algeria is if you have a big constituency for prolonged colonialism in the home country. One worries that the Neocons and the Halliburtons could come to play the role of the colons or French settlers who opposed quick Algerian independence and so produced a disaster.

In any case, the British are the ones thinking about this right. Wolfowitz tells people that Muqtada al-Sadr has no "traction." But degrees of traction change. What will his be next year this time?


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml
=/news/2003/11/11/wirq11.xml&sSheet=
/portal/2003/11/11/ixportal.html
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Hundreds demonstrate in Sadr City Against US

American troops appear accidentally to have killed a municipal leader of a neighborhood in East Baghdad whom they themselves had put in power. In response, outraged Iraqis staged a demonstration of several hundred activists.
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Islamic Party puts hopes in Syria

Muhsin Abdul Hamid, leader of the Islamic Party of Iraq, gave an interview to al-Hayat about his meetings in Damascus with Bashar al-Asad. A member of the US-appointed Interim Governing Council, Abdul Hamid said his group had chose "peaceful opposition" to the US occupation. (It always takes me aback when I see IGC members talking like that, though many have before. It shows how illegitimate the US occupation is, when even a hand-picked American appointee feels he has to stress his opposition.)

Abdul Hamid put a lot of hopes in the potential contribution of Syria to Iraqi stability. He pointed out that both major Kurdish leaders and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Abdul Aziz al-Hakim) have longstanding excellent relations with Damascus. Temporary IGC president Jalal Talabani will be going to see Bashar in a week or so. The interview shows how differently the Iraqis view Iraq's neighbors. The US sees Syria as virtually sending terrorists into the country (this is Bill Safire's line, though there is no good proof for it).
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US Ignorance Created the Quagmire in Fallujah

Journalist Hazim al-Amin reports in al-Hayat that Fallujah and Ramadi strike him as almost identical in most ways. The same extended clan networks dominate both cities, both are Sunni, etc. Yet Ramadi hasn't given the US nearly as much trouble as Fallujah. He thinks the difference is that the US military was simply ignorant and went about incurring clan feuds by its actions in Fallujah, but happened to do better in Ramadi. This approach strikes me as more likely correct than US VP Dick Cheney's fixation on al-Qaeda as the root of all Iraq's problems. (I kid you not, he actually implies this. The US still has not one al-Qaeda operative in custody in Iraq, despite thousands of arrests).
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US Clashes with PKK in Iraq; Turks Complain of Lack of Influence

Turkish Chief of Staff Hilmi Ozkok has complained that the US is showing favoritism to Iraqi Kurds. He said in an interview with Radikal, "The United States favours the group in the north a little too much. We don’t know what shape Iraq will take, because we don’t know the internal situation. They are doing some things. We don’t have the right to a say in the matter because we are not there."

He expressed worries about Kurdish autonomy, which would threaten Turkey (it has a large Kurdish population in Anatolia), and about potential Iranian influence in the Shiite south.

Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, meanwhile, has announced that US forces, supported by peshmerga, have clashed with Kurdish PKK fighters. The Kurdish Workers' Party or PKK waged a long and bitter guerilla war against Turkey, and 5,000 of its fighters are said to be in Iraq. The peshmerga are Kurdish paramilitaries generally loyal to either Massoud Barzani or Jalal Talabani, both of whom serve on the Iraqi Interim Governing council. They have clashed with the PKK in the past.

Presumably this limited US operation against the PKK was intended to mollify Turkish public opinion.
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Israel Connections to the Iraq Occupation

Delinda Hanley charges that there is a strong Israeli connection to US plans for Iraq, citing three developments. One is the Israeli demand that an oil pipeline be built from northern Iraq to Haifa. The second is the opening in Baghdad of an office of MEMRI, an Israeli propaganda project that translates only articles that make Arabs look bad or that advance Likud agendas. The third is Ahmad Chalabi's pressing for a peace treaty with Israel. Most other members of the Interim Governing Council have said Iraq will not recognize Israel until the Arab League does.

(Informed oil economists I have read say that the oil pipeline plan is not economically feasible, and that the northern fields are anyway declining. Turkey is extremely upset by the plan.)


http://www.wrmea.com/archives/
October_2003/0310006.html
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Muqtada's Softer Side

A more extended analysis of Muqtada al-Sadr's recent softening toward the US presence and his turn to playing ordinary politics instead of appealing to a kind of radical politics of theater and, to be frank, thuggery, has appeared by Hamza Hendawi. He argues that Muqtada is now reaching out to other Shiite groups. He has recently urged peaceful coexistence with the US forces in Iraq, though earlier he had demanded that they leave immediately. His Friday sermon last week did, however, include chanting against Israel and condemnations of colonialism.


http://www.bayarea.com/mld/
mercurynews/news/special_packages/
iraq/7222328.htm
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Klein: Not Just "Troops Out Now" but "Contractors Out Now"

Journalist Naomi Klein says, "It's too late to stop the war, but it's not too late to deny Iraq's invaders the myriad economic prizes they went to war to collect in the first place . . Bring Halliburton home. Cancel the contracts. Ditch the deals. Rip up the rules. Those are just a few of the suggestions for slogans that could help unify the growing movement against the occupation of Iraq. So far, activist debates have focused on whether the demand should be for a complete withdrawal of troops, or for the United States to cede power to the United Nations. But the "troops out" debate overlooks an important fact. If every last soldier pulled out of the Gulf tomorrow and a sovereign government came to power, Iraq would still be occupied: by laws written in the interest of another country; by foreign corporations controlling its essential services; by 70% unemployment sparked by public sector layoffs. Any movement serious about Iraqi self-determination must call not only for an end to Iraq's military occupation, but to its economic colonisation as well.”



http://www.democracynow.org/
article.pl?sid=03/11/10/159203
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Iraq faces Bitter Winter without enough Kerosene

Iraq will need half a billion liters of kerosene this winter, according to a Reuters report, but only has managed to accumulate a quarter of a billion. The US has the responsibility to ensure the welfare of the Iraqi people, and the Coalition Provisional Authority is making arrangements to import more kerosene, but many informed observers worry that there still won't be enough.

An earlier plan for Syria to provide electricity to northern Iraq in return for petroleum was nixed when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon bombed Syria and the US declined to condemn the action, angering Damascus.


http://www.gulf-news.com/
Articles/news.asp?ArticleID=102529
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Alnasrawi: Privatization is Wrongheaded

The eminent Iraqi-born economist Abbas Alnasrawi of the University of Vermont has written a wide-ranging argument against the immediate privatization of state-owned industries by the American administration of Iraq.

He argues that such policies should have waited for an elected Iraqi government, which would have the legitimacy to implement them thoughtfully, rather than being imposed from Washington. He points out that the managers and workers at state owned enterprises are now seized by uncertainty about the future. This anxiety is likely to get in the way of the smooth functioning of the companies.

He argues that the moves will facilitate foreign ownership of Iraqi concerns without really bringing in foreign investment in new industries that might increase productivity. Moreover, since local Iraqi businessmen won't be able to compete with the foreign carpet baggers, they will tend instead to send their money out of Iraq, speeding capital flight, which will be bad for the Iraqi economy. The whole thing is worth reading. If the US had any sense it would have talked to Iraqi economists like Alnasrawi before formulating an economic shock therapy plan of the sort that turned Russia into an economic basket case.


http://www.menafn.com/
qn_news_story_s.asp?StoryId=33849
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You will all be following in other news sources the story of the downed Blackhawk helicopter and further US casualties. I’m at a conference and so I’ll just report here some items that might not make the US newspapers or might not be highlighted.

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Multinational Troops Hit in Iraq; Polish Officer, 6 Ukrainians Wounded

The Polish military announced Friday that the multinational force under its command, which includes Bulgarians, Kazakhstanis, Spanish, Ukrainians, Dominicans, etc., patrolling the south-center part of the country, was the target of 36 attacks on Thursday, resulting in the killing of a high Polish officer and the wounding of six Ukrainians. Another spokesman admitted there had been a machine gun attack on a multinational force helicopter in late October that had not resulted in casualties.

As I noted earlier, the multinational support in Iraq is soft, and the publics of those countries are often deeply unhappy about the deployments. Some countries, like Thailand, are leaving. If casualities rise, the 9,000 multinationals may well pull out, leaving the US even more over-stretched in Iraq.

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Number of Iraqi Pilgrims to Mecca will Double

The Islamic Foundations Board of Iraq announced that it would double the number of Iraqis permitted to undertake the pilgrimage to Mecca this year. It is authorizing 50,000 pilgrims to go this year, as opposed to 25,000 last year under the Baath. The Board also removed the age restrictions on the pilgrims that Saddam had imposed. Iraqis of all ages will be eligible. A package is being offered, including travel, room, board and visa, for $500.

The pilgrimage will fall in late January this year. Although the movement of large numbers of people has raised security concerns for the US in Iraq, it seems a little unlikely that there will be much of a problem. It is hard to see how Iraq is a logical route for anyone else to Mecca in West Arabia, and the Iraqi contingent is relatively small and anyway made up of people who want to perform an innocent act of piety.

In fact, that Iraq is now a place where more and more people can practice their religion freely is good publicity, if the IGC and the Coalition know what to do with it.


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Sunni Fundamentalists Protest arrests of Clergy

500 Sunni Islamists demonstrated in the streets of Baghdad on Friday, representing the Higher Islamic Institute and other Muslim groups, and demanding the release of Sunni clergymen imprisoned by the Americans. They prayed on the street before the Coalition HQ. Shaykh Abd al-Sattar al-Janabi announced after he had sought a meeting with a Coalition official, “We want them to release the persons who are in charge of our mosques and then they should leave the country.” Sunni clergymen also tried to tell the Coalition, “Release Sunni clergy, and instead imprison those assassinate Sunni clerics!”
They accused the US of repressing Iraqi Sunnism.

The Higher Islamic Institute is based at Um al-Tubul Mosque in West Baghdad.

The prayer leader of the Hayy al-Washash Mosque in the capital, Ibrahim al-Mashhadani and his brother and a friend were cut down by machine gun fire as they left the mosque after dawn prayers recently. Al-Sharq al-Awsat.

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