Informed Comment

New Executive of Technocrats being Readied for Iraq

Az-Zaman reports that American sources told it yesterday that influential quarters in the Central Intelligence Agency are putting forward as candidate for high office in the caretaker government of Iraq a politically neutral former major general and three prominent court judges and independent attorneys. There will be a president, two vice presidents, and a prime minister, requiring four appointees. One of the vice presidents will be a Kurd. The sources said that the White House had not yet made a decision about the candidates, and that Bush did not request suggestions for candidates from the Department of Defense.

The sources said that the 25 members of the current Interim Governing Council are not candidates for executive posts in the caretaker government, from which they will be formally excluded.

The State Security Council approved the Brahimi plan for a caretaker government on Wednesday.

Deborah Horan of the Chicago Tribune, in contrast, discusses the resistance still being put up to the Brahimi plan by some members of the IGC. (See my post of yesterday, below, “Brahimi Plan Controversial”). The tenor of the az-Zaman report suggests, however, that the IGC has already lost this battle at the level of the White House (presumably meaning the National Security Council). The reporter seemed to take some pleasure in asserting that the US Pentagon had been excluded from the nomination process. The Department of Defense, under Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith, has consistently backed Ahmad Chalabi for high appointed posts in Iraq, but he seems increasingly out of favor. (az-Zaman is close to rival Adnan Pachachi, a Sunni Arab nationalist).

Brahimi, in the meantime, called Wednesday for an end to military hostilities, affirming that there must be a voice for the city of Fallujah in the new Iraqi government. He also said the government might be appointed at the end of May, and that the deteriorating security situation would not be allowed to postpone the transfer of sovereignty.

Meanwhile, the civil administrator of Tikrit, Mark Kennon, admitted in a news conference that American troops would not necessarily withdraw from Iraqi cities when the new “sovereign” Iraqi government came to power on June 30.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Iraq Corruption at Pentagon

Allegations of corruption have been raised against a Pentagon figure. He is said to have pressured the Coalition Provisional Authority to make a telecom bid private rather than public, so that it could be thrown to an American firm using the Qualcomm CDMA technology and ensure that the European GSM standard was not the only one in Iraq. The most interesting feature of the article, it seems to me, is the revelation of how much the bid process can be manipulated by seemingly innocent procedures like deciding if a contract is private or public.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Brahimi Plan Controversial

Lakhdar Brahimi spoke further on Tuesday about his ideal plan for a caretaker government in the period June 30 – January 31, the run-up to national elections. It seems clear that Brahimi prefers that a handful of high offices be filled by technocrats with no further political ambitions. He thinks that politicians with parties who want to run for office should start their campaigns instead of serving as caretakers. The unspoken concern here is that incumbents might use the advantages of incumbency to position themselves to win the elections next January.

This plan is running into heavy opposition from the Interim Governing Council, most members of which would be excluded under the Brahimi rules. Salamah al-Khafaji told al-Hayat that it made no sense to have a president and two vice presidents. One vice president would be enough, she implied. And she felt it was not useful to have an expanded advisory committee that had no legislative powers, as Brahimi suggests.

Other members of the IGC, including Ibrahim Jaafari, the leader of the al-Da`wa Party and the most popular politician in Iraq, as well as Ahmad Chalabi, Iyad Allawi, and some others appear to be angling for the position of prime minister. If they succeed, then Brahimi’s hopes for a relatively neutral, professional caretaker government will be dashed.

The IGC has in the past also resisted the idea of that body being dissolved on June 30, on which Brahimi insists.

As Bob Dreyfuss points out, these struggles have an international dimension. Ahmad Chalabi, Department of Defense officials like Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, and the Israeli government all oppose Brahimi’s role and plans. Secretary of State Colin Powell, some Bush administration centrists, and Saudi Arabia, in contrast, support Brahimi and his approach.

One additional player should be mentioned. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani was the one who insisted on UN involvement in the process. He has been highly critical of the expatriate politicians, like Chalabi, whom he sees as corrupt and as working for foreign interests. Brahimi almost certainly would not be playing his current role had it not been for Sistani’s demonstration of Shiite power, which was underlined by the recent uprising led by Muqtada al-Sadr. Although Sistani wanted earlier elections than are now planned, he also wants a limited caretaker government that will do very little other than prepare for elections. The Bush administration turned to Brahimi out of desperation and relative powerlessness, not voluntarily.

Chalabi has carefully larded the IGC and the cabinet with his relatives and cronies, and the Pentagon has given him most of what he wanted, including secret Baath government files that had no business being turned over to a private individual! Rather than democracy, the US has so far brought to Iraq cronyism, nepotism and financial corruption. Brahimi is attempting to move things in a different direction.

The high-handedness of the IGC was again demonstrated on Tuesday, when it issued a new Iraqi flag. It avoided the Arab colors of black and green (both of which have Islamic symbolism) in favor of blue and white, with the Kurdish color of yellow. The phrase “God is Most Great” was also dropped. Many Iraqis rejected the flag, saying an appointed committee of an Occupying power had no authority to change the flag. Some also complained that the new design resembled the Israeli flag.

az-Zaman ran an article quoting Iraqi politicians and intellectuals complaining that the new flag ignores the collective memory of the Iraqi nation, abandoning colors that have been in the flag for 80 years and that tie Iraq to the Arab world.

It seems to me that it is embarrassing for the US-appointed IGC to issue a flag and then just have it overturned by a new parliament next winter, and I cannot fathom why they did this. Like the Bremer administration’s hopes of imposing Polish-style economic shock therapy on socialist Iraq, this plan seems likely to be another hangover of the heady days last summer when the US thought it could shape a new Iraq almost unimpeded.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Muqtada and Fighters Defiant in Najaf

Luke Harding of the Guardian managed to get to Kufa after the big battle there. He writes:

‘ These days, Mr Sadr, a 30-year-old cleric whose father and uncle were both killed by Saddam, is a hard man to find. But his spokesman, Qais al-Kha’zali, told the Guardian that negotiations with the coalition to end the standoff in Najaf had broken down. “The Americans attacked us yesterday in Kufa using jet fighters,” he complained. “They are agitating the situation. Mr Sadr demands that the occupation should end all over Iraq. The Americans hate him because he refuses to bargain with them.” Mr Kha’zali said it was unreasonable for the coalition to demand the cleric disband his Mahdi militia without making concessions of its own. “They are demanding something and offering nothing,” he insisted. Mr Sadr had also not murdered a rival cleric, he said, something the coalition accuses him of. ‘

The equally intrepid Dan Murphy has written a fine profile of Muqtada al-Sadr and his father, Muhammad Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, for the Christian Science Monitor. I don’t believe the Sadrist movement can be understood or appraised without reference to Sadiq al-Sadr’s movement of the 1990s, which Muqtada inherited, but most American observers and officials appear to be ignorant of this recent history.

With Spanish PM Zapatero announcing that Spanish troops have been withdrawn from Najaf and will be out of Iraq by late May, a security gap has opened up in the center-south. For the moment it has been filled by the US. But it is possible that the British will step into the breach. Doing so might give Whitehall more of a say in Iraq policy, and therefore more leverage in Washington, helping Tony Blair respond to the concerns of the British diplomatic community (see below).

But the British theorists of getting more deeply involved as a way of extricating London from Its Iraq dead end should consider that by going into Najaf they risk being on the front lines of any Shiite uprising that does occur. I suppose they think that they will anyway get caught in the crossfire of such a struggle in Basra, so they may as well have more of a say in the matter.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

AC-130s at Fallujah and Najaf (64 Sadrists Killed)

I made the mistake of turning on the television in the middle of the day and was treated to horrific images of part of the Julan quarter of Fallujah in flames. It appears that the Marines took fire from there and called in AC-130 strikes against the points from which the fire originated.

AC-130s were also employed to kill Army of the Mahdi militiamen near Najaf. AP says, ‘ The first fight came in the afternoon, when Shiite militiamen fired on a U.S. patrol. In the ensuing firefight, seven insurgents were killed. Hours later, an M1 tank was attacked with rocket-propelled grenades. A heavy battle erupted, during which warplanes destroyed an anti-aircraft gun belonging to the militia and 57 gunmen were killed, Kimmitt said. Najaf hospitals listed 37 dead, all young men of fighting age, suggesting they may have been militiamen. Al-Sadr aides said civilians also died, but could not say how many. ‘

Although some civilians may have been killed at Najaf, as alleged, it seems likely that most of the dead were Mahdi Army fighters loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr. The US has not invaded Najaf or bombed it, because of its sacred character, because of which any frontal assault would risk arousing Shiite religious passions against the US.

And here is the contrast between the two events in Fallujah and Najaf today. AC-130 warplanes are effective against troops deployed on a battlefield, but should not be used against urban targets. They were used effectively against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the field Afghanistan, and against the Republican Guards on the battlefield in the recent Iraq war. They and other such aerial weapons are what make a civil war of any conventional sort in Iraq unlikely, since the first time someone fields 150 men on a battlefield, they can just be taken out by the AC-130s. (Urban riots and alleyway fighting are a different proposition). I’m no expert on military hardware and do not pretend to be, but this makes scary reading even for a layman.

The immense firepower of these warplanes, however, simply should not be being unleashed against the Julan quarter. You cannot do that so precisely that you ensure that innocent civilians are not massacred along with the guerrillas. It is a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Although about 1/3 of Fallujans have reportedly left the city, that would leave 200,000 or so inside.

Given that most of the people living in the poverty-stricken Julan quarter of Fallujah are not guerrillas and are not combatants, calling down AC-130 fire on a neighborhood with civilians in it, in which the civilians are inevitably in harm’s way, seems to me to contradict Article 3.

Art. 3. In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each Party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following

(d) the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.

That is, as the Occupying Power in Iraq, the US has a duty to avoid inflicting on innocent civilians in urban areas violence to life and person where that can be avoided. In this case, it could be avoided by using counter-insurgency techniques and clearing Fallujah neighborhood by neighborhood rather than by aerial bombardment.

[Someone challenged me on this, saying that Article 3 refers only to civil wars. Since the Fourth Convention is concerned with Occupied Territories, however, it seems to me that this common article must have been included in part because the framers wanted to cover these issues in regard to Occupied Territories. And, given that Iraq was conquered by the US, and there is no Iraqi government or Iraqi army, the current conflict in Fallujah resembles a civil war much more than it does an international conflict. That is, Fallujah is in rebellion against the Occupying authority within Iraqi territory, which is not inter-national, but intranational. The article clearly governs the treatment of all civilians and other noncombatants in the zone of conflict and not only prisoners, since "detention" is mentioned as only one of a number of causes for persons being hors de combat or outside combat. Some interpretations of Article 3 do exclude guerrilla wars from consideration, while others are more expansive, and the tendency is increasingly toward the expansive approach.

One authority notes, " For example, in a recent decision by the trial chamber of ICTY [International Tribunal Court for Yugoslavia] in Prosecutor vs. Tadic, it was observed that the common article 3 of the Geneva Convention was declaratory of customary international law. The decision further states: the rules contained in paragraph 1 of common article 3 proscribe a number of acts which: (i) are committed within the context of armed conflict; (ii) have a close connection to the armed conflict, and (iii) are committed against persons taking no active part in hostilities. On the question of existence of armed conflict, the appeal chamber stated that “an armed conflict exists whenever there is a resort to armed force between states or protracted armed violence between governmental authorities and organized armed groups or between such groups within a state. ‘

The precise applicability of Article 3 in any case is less important than that, in general, the international law of occupation requires the Occupying Power to guarantee as far as possible the safety, security and well-being of civilians under its rule. While the guerrillas in Fallujah are also endangering civilians by fighting from a city, for an Occupying Power to call down AC-130 strikes on civilian apartment buildings seems to me to an unnecessarily cavalier approach to civilian life, and the British officers in Basra agree with me].

It does not matter that some Fallujans are trying to kill Marines. You cannot punish the entire city for that.

Art. 33. No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.

Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.

One of the things the city elders now negotiating with the Marines should do is invoke Article 15 of the Fourth Geneva convention:

Art. 15. Any Party to the conflict may, either direct or through a neutral State or some humanitarian organization, propose to the adverse Party to establish, in the regions where fighting is taking place, neutralized zones intended to shelter from the effects of war the following persons, without

When the Parties concerned have agreed upon the geographical position, administration, food supply and supervision of the proposed neutralized zone, a written agreement shall be concluded and signed by the representatives of the Parties to the conflict. The agreement shall fix the beginning and the duration of the neutralization of the zone.

If the US can pay Halliburton $3 billion for various tasks in Iraq, it surely can afford to build temporary shelters to which Fallujan civilians could be evacuated during the current operations. It is outrageous for the US to conduct attacks on a city in a country it occupies while there are tens of thousands of women and children in harm’s way. Fred Kaplan at Slate argues that to go forward could well derail the transfer of sovereignty on June 30.

It is precisely the kind of unethical and illegal action taken by the US military in Fallujah today against which the British diplomats were protesting (see below), and which they fear will drag the UK down along with the Americans. Nor is there any reason whatsoever to believe that the US can win by bombing Fallujah into ashes. That is attrition, which is poor counter-insurgency.

Gavin Bulloch writes,

‘ None of the attritional “solutions” is appropriate in a liberal democracy; furthermore it is considered that a “gloves off” approach to any insurgency has a strictly limited role to play in any modern counterinsurgency campaign. It should also be noted that the record of success for the attrition theory in counterinsurgency operations is generally a poor one. Undue emphasis on military action clouds the key political realities, which can result in a military-dominated campaign plan that misses the real focus of an insurgency. An inability to match the insurgent’s concept with an appropriate government one–likened by Thompson to trying to play chess while the enemy is actually playing poker–is conceptually flawed and will not achieve success . . .

In an insurgency, the strategic center of gravity will be the support of the mass of the people. Clearly, this is not open to “attack” in the conventional sense, although insurgent strategies often incorporate the use of coercive force. An insurgency is an attempt to force political change, and thus it follows logically that the center of gravity can be reached only by political action. The government response to an insurgency should take as its fundamental assumption that the true nature of the threat lies in the insurgent’s political potential rather than his military power, although the latter may appear the more worrying in the short term. Again, in Malaya, the center of gravity was targeted not by jungle patrolling, but by the political decision to grant independence;[3] the military contribution was invaluable, but not of itself decisive. The military campaign should focus upon the insurgents, but it is only one part of a wider solution. ‘

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Protest Letter of 52 British Former Diplomats to Blair on Iraq Policy

The letter is worth reading in full, and probably it is also worth googling the signatories. It is extraordinary how terrified these experienced diplomats are, and amazing that these men who spent a lifetime practicing discretion would now speak out. I understand that the British special envoy in Iraq, Jeremy Greenstock himself, agreed with the substance but declined to sign because he was too close to the action. This letter is canary in the mine material, and should alarm everyone concerned with the situation in Iraq. They clearly are afraid that the 7500 British troops and administrators in Iraq are in severe danger from Bush/Blair policies, and that Israeli Prime Minister Sharon’s policy of “negotiation by murder” has the potential to set the whole region aflame, just as, in some ways, it already has Fallujah.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

More Violence in Iraq

I was at a conference at Columbia on Monday and then traveling and so was away from news most of the day. When I did get a chance to check in, I found this Boston Globe piece that summarized the now-daily carnage. Renewed fighting in Falluja, including use of air strikes (a problematic strategy in a populated city). One Marine dead, eight wounded, and 8 guerrillas killed.

Renewed fighting around Najaf and Kufa, with the US determined to move into some new positions in Najaf. Al-Hayat reports that a group calling itself “The Youth of the People of Najaf,” somethig like a street gang, claimed to have clashed with the Mahdi Army militia, to have killed some militiamen, and to have forced it out of the shrine of Imam Ali (this claim seems unlikely to me). The shrine cities have an old history of street gangs that fight one another, so that this local gang is taking on the Sadrists is plausible.

Since the Badr Corps of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq had control of the shrine of Imam Ali before the Sadrist uprising of early April, and since it still is helping patrol Karbala, my own guess is that Badr has deliberately pulled back in hopes that the Mahdi Army and the Americans will weaken each other. The hope that other Najaf forces will take care of Muqtada al-Sadr for the US seems to me forlorn. The Najafis hate Muqtada and his militiamen, who are not from Najaf on the whole. On the other hand, no Shiite clerical figure can possibly want to see the US drag Muqtada away in chains, since that would inevitably weaken the clerical authorities.

My guess is that the US will gradually encroach on Najaf and will eventually try to capture Muqtada. He gave an interview to the Italian La Repubblica on Monday, in which he predicted that if the US arrests or kills him, the Iraqi people will unleash on them the fires of hell. It seems to me likely that his cadres will in fact launch a long-term, low-grade guerrilla war in the South if the US captures or kills Muqtada. The question is whether, in putting down this insurgency to come, the US will alienate other Shiites, setting the stage for further failures. The US shouldn’t have gone after Muqtada to begin with.

Two US troops killed and five wounded in Baghdad when a house blew up as they were trying to inspect it for chemical weapons. Local Iraqis said it was a cosmetics factory but it seems to have been something else.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off