Informed Comment

Rieff on Iraqi Shiites

David Rieff”s excellent firsthand report from Iraq on the Shiite movements there in the New York Times magazine is now available online (free registration required).

This report seems to me among the more realistic and informed assessments of the situation yet to appear in the Western press. Rieff has done an excellent job of eliciting the views of the major players (Bashir Najafi, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, Muqtada al-Sadr, and Shiites on the street), and conveying the underlying resentments against occupation that are burning slowly beneath the surface.

One reader suggested that it was the Sunni insurgency that brought the US around to seeking an indigenous government, not the Shiites. This is a fair point, but obviously as of Nov. 15 Mr. Bremer believed that the situation could be addressed by stage-managed elections based on appointed “councils.” It was Sistani that challenged this procedure and insisted on open, general elections.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Dutch Embassy Destroyed by Rocket; 4 Policemen gunned down in Mosul

According to wire services, Baghdad was shaken by several explosions late Friday night, including two rocket-propelled grenade attacks on the Dutch embassy in Baghdad that set it ablaze briefly before the fire was extinguished. No one was harmed, since the building was unoccupied. US officials put Baghdad on a major alert. Holland has 1200 troops in southern Iraq as part of the US-led military coalition. It had pulled out its embassy staff last October, citing poor security.

Guerrillas in Mosul sprayed gunfire at four Iraqi policemen at a checkpoint, killing three and wounding a fourth. Over 600 Iraqi policemen have been killed since mid-April.

South of Kirkuk, guerrillas fired on a checkpoint of the Iraqi Civil Defense Forces in a place called Salman Beg. The Iraqi police returned fire, claiming to have killed one of the six attackers and to have wounded another.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Debate Begins on Constitutional Provisions in Iraq

Alissa Rubin of the Los Angeles Times has a fine piece today discussing debates in Iraq over the Fundamental Law that will govern the country until a constitution is crafted.

She points out that several members of the Interim Governing Council reject the idea of a 3-man rotating presidency, in part on the grounds that it may institutionalize ethnic divisions and will be inefficient (Bosnia is cited as an example of how it can go bad).

She also reveals that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and Abdu’l-Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for Islamic revolution in Iraq, have prepared their own team of census and electoral experts to make the case to the United Nations Commission being sent by Kofi Annan that free and open elections are possible.

[Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that Adnan Pachachi of the IGC says that the UN Commission's recommendations will not be binding on the governing council. Pachachi is angry about the extent of Shiite power and the influence of Sistani, as are many Sunnis.]

The Fundamental Law will have a bill of rights, and will try to ensure representation in parliament of women (some percentage of seats will be set aside for female candidates, as in Pakistan). But it will also specify Islamic law as a principal source of Iraqi law, which worries some observers. (This provision was insisted on by Sistani and seems to be supported by Paul Bremer.)

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

MI6 to be Called before Parliament on Weapons Estimates

The London Times reports that “Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, will appear before the Intelligence and Security Committee, headed by Ms Ann Taylor, the former Labour Cabinet minister, to give further evidence on why he believed that the intelligence on Saddam’s weapons was reliable and accurate. It was MI6 that provided the bulk of the intelligence for the Downing Street dossier that underpinned Mr Blair’s decision to go to war.“

That is, despite the whitewash carried out by the Hutton Commission, Tony Blair’s government will not entirely avoid an inquiry into where in the world it got the idea that Saddam Hussein was a major threat to the UK and had WMD ready to launch “within 45 minutes.”

Note that parliamentarians of his own party are carrying out the inquiry, which is a good model for Republicans in the US Congress. The intelligence failures with regard to Iraq were a bi-partisan affair (though only the Bush administration magnified them by making war policy based on them), and Republicans who care about the credibility and security of the US should want to know as much as anyone what went wrong and how to fix it.

A reader helpfully comments:

“It’s a committee of Blair placemen meeting in secret and reporting in secret directly to Blair. He then has the power to redact any part of their findings he doesn’t like, ask them to do it again, or chuck it in the bin. Not exactly a democratic model for America to follow (but one they’d probably like to).” Oh, well.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

The Islamic Party: Neither US nor IGC Suited to Organizing General Elections

Az-Zaman reports that the Iraqi Islamic Party (the Iraqi branch of the Sunni fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood) has expressed support for the Nov. 15 agreement between the US and the Interim Governing Council, saying that elections based on provincial councils would produce a government capable of restoring Iraqi sovereignty. Party leader Muhsin Abdul Hamid, a member of the Interim Governing Council, argues that the IGC and the Americans are incapable at this point of presiding over direct elections.

Abdul Hamid rejected the idea that has been floated by Ahmad Chalabi and others, of simply expanding the IGC by appointment and turning the governance of the country over to it. He rejected any method of selecting the new government that did not depend on some sort of elections such as would reflect the will of the Iraqis. The party stated its complete faith in the principle of direct elections so as to produce a new legitimacy in Iraqi politics, but seems willing to wait until 2005 to hold these direct elections.

Abdul Hamid, as a fundamentalist Sunni, appears to fear that direct and open elections held in May might produce a government dominated by Shiite hard liners.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Demonstrations in Halbaniya

Hundreds demonstrated peacefully in the Sunni Arab town of Halbaniya on Friday against US tactics, and against the curfew imposed on the city by the US authorities. (-Ash-Sharq al-Awsat).

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Who is Hasan Ghul?

The Kurdish peshmergas apprehended an Egyptian member of al-Qaeda trying to sneak into Iraq recently, and the US hailed the capture as significant. Ghul was said to have been working directly under Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, one of the planners of September 11. But the London-based moderate Saudi newspaper al-Hayat raised the question today of who he really is. They called an Egyptian expert on the al-Gihad al-Islami organization of Ayman al-Zawahir, and he said the only senior al-Gihad/ al-Qaeda figure named Hasan had been killed in the Afghanistan war. Hani al-Siba’i speculated that “Hasan Ghul” may just be the name on a passport that the fugitive managed to get hold of. I did a quick Nexis search and did not come up with entries for this name before the capture. So, who exactly was captured?

There seemed to me to be a contradiction in the statements during the past couple of days of Gen. John Abizaid and those of Gen. Rick Sanchez about al-Qaeda in Iraq. Abizaid seemed to play this factor down, Sanchez to play it up.

Abizaid expressed security concerns not only about Afghanistan (where he denied that the Taliban are resurgent) and Iraq, but also about US allies Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, both of which have a domestic problem with radical Muslim extremists. (The problem in Pakistan, by the way, was in part created by the Reagan administration during its alliance with dictator Gen. Zia ul-Haq in the 1980s, during the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan).

What I don’t understand is why, if you are cataloguing security risks to the US in the region, you would not add in the militant Israeli settler movement in the West Bank, which produces more hatred toward the United States in the Muslim world than any other single factor. If some foreign country had grabbed part of Virginia and was pouring settlers into it, kicking out Americans, and declaring it no longer US soil, don’t you think Americans in Maine and California would be upset about that, and resentful toward the foreign invader?

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off