Informed Comment

Muqtada’s Newspaper Closed, 1000 Demonstrate

AP is reporting that the Coalition Provisional Authority has closed the weekly newspaper of radical young Shiite cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, al-Hawzah. It is charged with fomenting violence against US troops. The US military authorities seriously considered arresting Muqtada last October, but in the end decided that would cause more trouble than it was worth (wisely enough). They did however threaten him, and as a result he quietened down and became more conciliatory for a while. In the past two months he has become more and more vitriolic in his public statements, perhaps emboldened by the prospect of a return to Iraqi sovereignty this summer.

The newspaper has carried scurrilous stories accusing the US of being behind some of the bombings of Shiites. I know it is tempting for some analysts to suspect the US military of Machiavellian actions. But it simply is not true that the US is firing missiles into Shiite mosques. It makes no sense. The Shiites are among the few friends they have left.

About 1,000 Sadrists came out to demonstrate in front of the newspaper’s offices, and one suspects that such demonstrations may well multiply as the date for the dissolution of the CPA draws near. There is a real question as to whether cracking down on the newspaper like this will make things better or worse. Since Muqtada has a tight network of mosque preachers throughout the south, he is perfectly capable of getting out his views without a newspaper, through the sermons of his lieutenants. Likewise, he gets quoted in Iran-based Arabic language television and radio broadcasts.

Although it is true that al-Hawzah has offered provocations, it is also likely the case that the US is seeking ways of taking away Muqtada’s megaphone so that he doesn’t do anything to ruin the hand-over of sovereignty on June 30.

Alissa Rubin of the LA Times reports that the CPA has also closed an informal court run by Muqtada in Najaf, and released prisoners who had been sentenced to being held and tortured in its basement. Muqtada’s organization is said to maintain such courts and prisons all over the country.

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Clarke: Difference Between Clinton and Bush

For readers who don’t scroll all the way down, just wanted to draw your attention to my posting late Sunday on what Clarke means when he says fighting terrorism was a more urgent consideration for the late Clinton administration than for the early Bush one. I argue that it isn’t a matter of policy, but rather of specific cabinet-level procedures instituted by Clinton and abandoned by Bush.

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Mosul: Barwari Escapes Assassination; US MPs wounded, Western Security Guards Killed

Public Works Minister Nasrin Barwari narrowly escaped an assassination attempt while traveling to Mosul on Sunday, , according to AP. She is the only female minister appointed by the Interim Governing Council. She is a Kurd, and a feminist, and led the movement to prevent the abolition of civil personal status law in favor of Islamic codes last winter. Heavily Arab Mosul, where there are strong radical Islamist and Baathist currents, is inhospitable territory for her.

Reuters reports litany of mayhem in Iraq on Sunday.

In Mosul, as well, guerrillas sprayed machine gun fire at two US military police, wounding them. In a separate incident, they took out a Stryker transport vehicle, but did not cause any casualties.

Guerrillas in the city hit the car of two security guards, a Briton and a Canadian, with rpg fire, killing them. They were escorting civilian engineers to a power plant. Other guerrillas had earlier conducted a drive-by shooting against two employees of the US-run Iraqi media network.

Another guerrilla grenade attack wounded an Iraq policeman in the city center. Guerrillas fired an RPG at city hall, missed, and hit a boy’s school; luckily the grenade was a dud and did not go off.

Five Iraqi civilians, including three children, were wounded when guerrillas set of a bomb near Baqubah that probably targetted an Iraqi contractor working for the Americans.

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Sistani will not Launch Street Protests: Aide

az-Zaman/AFP: Refuting reports appearing Saturday in the Kuwaiti press, an aide to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Najaf told the press Sunday that Sistani wishes to avoid chaos and does not intend to call his supporters out for demonstrations, even if his reservations about the interim constitution are not taken into consideration.

The aide, who asked not to be identified, said of Sistani that “He is not thinking about calling for demonstrations in the country, since he does not want chaos. He supports the holding of cultural and intellectual meetings to prepare the street for the coming phase.”

If Sistani’s reservations about the interim constitution are not taken into account, the aide said, the grand ayatollah “will issue a letter if he does not want the United Nations and the Interim Governing Council in Iraq to recognize this basic law as it is, or to implement it.”

He said that Sistani’s wilingness to meet with a UN delegation would depend on their attitude to the interim constitution and its controversial clauses.

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Israeli Intelligence Blasted by the Knesset over Iraq Failure

A subcommittee of the Israeli Parliament has issued a report sharply critical of Israeli intelligence failures concerning weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It notes that Mossad thought Iraq’s programs and stockpiles were a threat, which they were not, and yet seemed unaware of how much progress Libya had made on nukes.

The fact is that Israeli intelligence failures in Iraq contributed to drawing the United States into the war (pace the Knesset report). Undersecretary of Defense for Planning Douglas Feith, a representative of the American branch of the Likud Party, met repeatedly with Israeli generals at the Pentagon (who were not properly signed in, contrary to post-9/11 regulations), and they gave him fodder for his pre-determined insistence on ginning up a war against Iraq, reinforcing what was being said by liars like Ahmad Chalabi. They were conveying Israeli intelligence to a key American policy maker, and it was wrong.

Of course, being wrong is one thing. Deliberately being wrong is another. Although the subcommittee report refuses to consider the possibility, it seems clear that there were conspiracies within the intelligence and military services of the UK, Israel and the US intended to draw the US into war against Iraq. One sees reports in the British press of a “Rockingham Group” in the UK ministry of defense pushing for war, and of British intelligence planting anti-Iraq stories in the US press.

The report very oddly maintains that Mossad did not believe Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear program, unlike the US. This allegation is flat wrong, so wrong that one suspects it must be disinformation. See the citations in my discussion last October.

It seems likely to me that there was a similar clique of conspirators inside Mossad and Israeli military intelligence. Likewise, we know that PM Ariel Sharon had organized an office analogous to Feith’s Office of Special Plans, to cherry pick Iraq intelligence so as to paint the situation as much worse than it was.

The Mossad cultivates an air of competence and invincibility in the Western press, but it often has screwed up royally and has been involved in lots of hare-brained operations (encouraging Hamas in the 1970s to offset the PLO, e.g.)

The next time a US policy maker is told that something is known for sure because Israeli intelligence is sure of it, I hope to God she or he takes it all with a grain of salt. Israelis are cut off from the rest of the Middle East in most important ways. Most of them don’t understand it, and most of them don’t like it. They don’t have really good sources for the important things. And, their intelligence estimates are often self-interested, used to promote policy rather than as a basis for it.

Not only is the Iraq debacle proof of all this (they thought Iraqis were going to pump oil to Haifa for them and would exercise a moderating influence on Hizbullah!), but their approach to the Palestinians has been such a huge failure because they are simply incompetent in dealing with other Middle Easterners. Brute force, extortion, and bribery are not a policy, they are the last refuge of a mafioso.

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The Difference between Clinton and Bush: The Millennium Plot

More on the Clarke conroversy: The pundits and politicians who keep saying that Clinton’s anti-terrorism policies and Bush’s are the same are missing a key piece of the puzzle. The policy outline was the same, but the implementation was very different.

Hint: The key piece of evidence is the Millennium Plot. This was an al-Qaeda operation timed for late December 1999. Forestalling this plot was the biggest counter-terrorism success the US has ever had against al-Qaeda.

the plot involved several key elements:

*Los Angelese International Airport would be blown up.

*(Possibly: The Needle in Seattle would be blown up).

* The Radisson Hotel in Amman Jordan, a favorite of American and Israeli tourists, would be blown up. A lot of the tourism for the millennium was Christian evangelicals wanting to be in the holy land.

* Bombs would go off at Mt. Nebo, a tourist site in Jordan associated with Moses.

* The USS The Sullivans would be targeted by a dinghy bomb off Yemen.

The story of how the LAX bombing was stopped on December 14 has been told in an important series in the Seattle Times. Extra security measures were implemented by US customs agents, leading to the apprehension of an Algerian, Ahmed Ressam, with a trunk full of nitroglycerin, heading for LAX (he wanted to start his journey by ferry from Port Angeles, Washington).

Ressam grew up fishing in the Mediterranean and going to discos. But like many Algerians, he was radicalized in 1991. The government had allowed the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), an Islamist party, to contest elections. FIS unexpectedly won, however. The military feared that they would never allow another election, and would declare an Islamic state. They cancelled elections. FIS went into opposition, and the most radical members formed the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), which got money from Usama Bin Laden, then in the Sudan. Ressam seems to have been GIA.

Ressam fought in Bosnia in the early 1990s. Then he settled in France and became part of the terrorist Groupe Roubaix, which carried out attacks in that city (pop. 98,000, near Lille in the north). In spring of 1998 he flew to Afghanistan and was trained in two camps under the direction of Palestinian-Saudi Abu Zubaida. Abu Zubaida recruited Ressam into an Algerian al-Qaeda cell headed from London by Abu Doha al-Mukhalif. Ressam was assigned to form a forward cell in Montreal, from which he and several other Algerians plotted the attack on LAX.

What Clarke’s book reveals is that the way Ressam was shaken out at Port Angeles by customs agent Diana Dean was not an accident. Rather, Clinton had made Clarke a cabinet member. He was given the authority to call other key cabinet members and security officials to “battle stations,” involving heightened alerts in their bureaucracies and daily meetings. Clarke did this with Clinton’s approval in December of 1999 because of increased chatter and because the Jordanians caught a break when they cracked Raed al-Hijazi’s cell in Amman.

Early in 2001, in contrast, Bush demoted Clarke from being a cabinet member, and much reduced his authority. Clarke wanted the high Bush officials or “principals” to meet on terrorism regularly. He couldn’t get them to do it. Rice knew what al-Qaeda was, but she, like other administration officials, was disconcerted by Clarke’s focus on it as an independent actor. The Bush group-think holds that asymmetrical organizations are not a threat in themselves, that the threat comes from the states that allegedly harbor them. That funny look she gave Clarke wasn’t unfamiliarity, it was puzzlement that someone so high in the system should be so wrongly focused.

In summer of 2001 the chatter was much greater and more ominous than in fall of 1999. Clarke wanted to go to battle stations and have daily meetings with the “principals” (i.e. Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Powell, Tenet). He wanted to repeat the procedures that had foiled the Millennium Plot. He could not convince anyone to let him do that.

Note that an “institution” is defined in sociology as a regular way of getting certain collective work done. Clarke is saying that Clinton had institutionalized a set of governmental routines for dealing with heightened threats from terrorists. He is not saying that Clinton bequeathed a “big think” plan to Bush on terrorism. He is saying that he bequeathed the Bush administration a repertoire of effective actions by high officials.

He thinks going to such a heightened level of alert and concerted effort in 2001 might have shaken loose much earlier the information that the CIA knew that Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi were in the US. As it is, the INS wasn’t informed of this advent and did not start looking for them until Aug. 21, 2001, by which time it was too late. Since they made their plane reservations for September 11 under their own names, names known to the USG, a heightened level of alert might have allowed the FBI to spot them.

So it just is not true that Bush was doing exactly the same thing on terrorism that Clinton was. He didn’t have a cabinet-level counter-terrorism czar; he didn’t have the routine of principals’ meetings on terrorism; he didn’t authorize Clarke to go to ‘battle stations’ and heightened security alert in summer of 2001 the way Clinton had done in December, 1999.

The key to understanding Clarke’s argument is to understand how exactly the Millennium Plot was foiled.

Meanwhile, the Bush slime machine has thrown up the charge that Clarke admitted that there was an al-Qaeda-Saddam connection in Sudan in the early 1990s. This is such a non-story that it is incredible to me that anyone even bothers with it.

Clarke is straightforward that he suspected an Iraq-Bin Laden link in the very early 1990s in Khartoum. He also admits that Saddam tried to have Bush senior assassinated in Kuwait in 1993. What he told Wolfowitz in spring of 2001 was that there hadn’t been any Iraqi terrorism against the US in ten years. Note that he does not say “there never had been.” I am personally skeptical that even the early 1990s Khartoum-Baghdad links are based on good intelligence. But Clarke is entirely consistent if you read him knowing the whole story of al-Qaeda in the 1990s. His critics still don’t get it.

Appendix: The Ressam take-down:

”

Johnson joined Chapman on Noris’ tail. Noris bounced off a moving car but continued running. When he got to the middle of a busy intersection, he reversed direction, headed for a car stopped at the light and grabbed the driver’s door handle. The woman behind the wheel, startled, stepped on the gas, ran the red light and sent Noris spinning. Chapman and Johnson swarmed him. “

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Sistani Aide Denounces Interim Constitution

Reuters is reporting that Kuwaiti papers on Saturday discussed the Friday sermon of Muhammad Baqir al-Muhri, a lieutenant of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in that country. Al-Muhri (Mohri) threatened that if key passages of the interim constitution are not amended, Sistani would call for massive street demonstrations against it.

I looked up some Kuwaiti newspapers on line and could not find this report in Arabic, checking both the Saturday and Sunday editions. I think it should be remembered that al-Muhri cannot possibly be in close contact with Sistani, and that there is a tendency for junior clerics to say they are speaking for Sistani when they are not. Earlier reports had said that Sistani does not want to instigate street demonstrations, lest the country fall into chaos.

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