Informed Comment

Miller as Chalabi Stenographer

Franklin Foer’s profile of Judith Miller of the NYT and the way in which her over-dependence on the Iraqi National Congress and Ahmad Chalabi besmirched her journalistic career asks an implicit question. It is, “How could she have avoided this disaster?”

I think the problem came about because she started doing a different type of reporting. There is a difference between getting a story about bureaucratic infighting in Washington and getting a story about Iraq’s weapons programs. In the first sort of story, you can rely on principals to some extent, who are actually doing the fighting. You have to take into account that they are principals, of course, and seek some balance by talking to people on the other side. But the principals do have a fight going on, and are eager to put a good light on their role in it, to get out their side of the story. And if the story is their side of the story, then you’ve got it if you have the right people in the rollodex.

But Iraqi weapons programs or internal politics were a different type of story altogether. Miller had no access to the Iraqi principals. And the INC and the US Department of Defense were interested parties and outsiders, who were alleging things not in evidence. It wasn’t like Washington infighting.

Miller’s mistake could have been avoided by going outside the INC circle to other Iraqi experts. For instance, there were Iraqi nuclear scientists in the West unconnected to INC and Chalabi who were disgusted at the propaganda and said openly that the nuclear program was dismantled after the Gulf War. These were insiders of a sort. Miller did not seek them out or listen to them. Imad Khadduri [scroll down after clicking] was such a source, and I wrote about his account at length in February of 2003 before the war. (I.e. I was right and Miller was wrong).

Miller could also have asked around in the Iraq Middle East Studies establishment for academic views outside the beltway. Although some academics are themselves policy advocates, very large numbers are actually trying to see the world as it is, and often offer a good corrective to more self-interested accounts.

Foer does not make much of the fact that Miller co-authored her book about Saddam with Laurie Mylroie, a major purveyor of disinformation to the Washington power elite. Mylroie’s assertions are so bizarre that they in my view raise the question of whether someone somewhere is actually paying her to say these weird things. That Miller has some kind of close association with her raises other questions. The book that Miller and Mylroie co-authored, by the way, at one point professes puzzlement as to why in the world Eisenhower grew angry and made Israel give back the Sinai after the 1956 war. Inability to understand that an American president would be unhappy about a secret neocolonial plot against Egypt sprung suddenly in late October just before an American election points to an ideological hard edge that may explain why Miller got so many things so wrong.

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Kufa Fighting Flares; Bombs in Baghdad

Fighting flared again Sunday and Monday between Mahdi Army militiamen and US troops, who are apparently trying to reconquer the police stations in the city. Fierce fighting continued late Monday. 2 US troops and dozens of Mahdi Army fighters are dead. CNN reports that local US military commanders insist that Muqtada either disavow the Kufa fighters for breaking the ceasefire, or he will be held accountable for the attacks on US troops (no mention of gradual US military encroachment on key points in the city).

Taking the police stations as “anchors” of the Shiite urban communities was a widespread tactic of the Mahdi Army when the insurgency broke out in early April. One US counter-strategy, little reported on in a systematic way, has been gradually to take back these anchor points. The problem for the US is that the real power centers of the Mahdi Army are the slum tenements where the armed youth live and organize, and which are impenetrable to the US military (and they were relatively impenetrable to Saddam’s secret police, too.)

The drum of violence beat on: a big bomb also went off near the Green Zone; two US troops were killed in separate incidents; British civilian contractors were ambushed Sunday; and a woman and her child were killed by a mortar round on Sunday in Mosul.

Bill Safire in his New York Times column today begins with a litany of unreported good news. One item is that attacks on US troops were half in May what they had been in April. This sort of statistic is profoundly dishonest. In April, the US launched assualts on both Fallujah and the Shiite south with specific goals in mind. In both cases, the US military failed for political reasons and had to back off. May saw instead negotiation and background military maneuver, including increased dependence on local proxy fighters. Of course the attacks on US troops were many fewer in May. But that datum is useless in a vacuum. April had seen the greatest violence since the end of the war in April of 2003. Safire’s way of putting makes it seem as though there were a linear, secular improvement of the security situation. There is no such thing (see above), and it is a form of lying to imply that there is.

The Financial Times reported last week that Iraqi petroleum exports were down by 1 million barrels a day in May, much more than initially estimated. Bombings at a facility in the south and of the Kirkuk line in the north have been devastating. The bombings wiped out the entire OPEC increase in production quotas and are part of a new phenomenon in which insecurity is driving prices higher through speculation. (About $10 a barrel of the current $40 a barrel price is estimated to be owing to speculation). The Khobar terrorist incident in Saudi Arabia on Sunday will likewise probably drive prices higher.

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Portrait of a Rebellion

In These Times has made my analysis of the Shiite rebellion of the past two months available online. It came out about a week ago and so before the recent “truce,” but is still valuable for a narrative of the background.

In these Times

May 24, 2004

“Portrait of a Rebellion

Shiite insurgency in Iraq bedevils U.S.”

By Juan Cole

The Great Uprising of early April 2004 boiled along into May, leaving Iraq in continued turmoil. The Bush administration unwisely provoked rebellions in both Fallujah and Najaf (and other southern Shiite towns) by deciding to put down small symbolic acts of defiance with massive force. In Fallujah, Geroge W. Bush ordered the American military to retreat from that Sunni Arab city and to rehabilitate the Baathist forces once associated with Saddam Hussein to help restore order. Yet in Najaf, Bush has been unyielding in his determination to arrest or kill the young radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and destroy his militia. That determination could tip the Shiite south into long-term instability.

Given the drumbeat of bombings and assassinations, most recently of Izzedine Salim, president of the interim government of Iraq, the country cannot take much more instability. The transfer of sovereignty scheduled for June 30 is not in doubt, since it simply requires some appointments and paperwork. But endowing the new government with any popular support and political reality will be difficult if the country is in flames. By mid-May, the Najaf home of the preeminent mainstream Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, was being sprayed by machine gun fire from unknown assailants. This raises the specter of his loss to assassination, as well, which could further radicalize the Shiites.

Al-Sadr, 30, inherited a large and active Shiite dissident movement from his father, who, under the nose of Saddam Hussein, had established it in the Shiite slums of the southern cities. The Baath Party found it difficult to penetrate and control the teeming ghetto of East Baghdad, allowing the Sadrist organization to flourish there. In 1999, Saddam had Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, Muqtada’s father, killed along with Muqtada’s two older brothers. Muqtada Al-Sadr went underground and emerged over the next four years as a new, sectarian leader of Iraq’s dispossessed, guided by an ideology that differed little from that of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, his father’s teacher.

Read the rest here.

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Wrangling over President delays Announcement

Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the WP summarizes the deadlock on the new prime minister among the Iraqi Governing Council, Paul Bremer, and special UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi. The Council opposes the naming of Adnan Pachachi as transitional president, because he is perceived as too complaisant toward the US. It wants Shaikh Ghazi al-Yawer of the Sunni Shammar tribe. Al-Hayat said that Bremer had compromised by giving the Council a choice of 4 outsiders.

The US is clearly maneuvering here, to have the Iraqi government that it can deal with after the June 30 transition. Al-Yawer is known to be nationalistic, and was especially vocal about the siege of Fallujah.

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Sites of the Day

Veteran journalist Helena Cobban’s Just World News site is worth checking out. She writes frequently on the Middle East and knows it well.

Abbas Kadhim, Calling it Like it Is. Viewpoint of an Iraqi Shiite philosopher at UC Berkeley on current affairs and the Iraq crisis.

Joshua Landis has begun a web log on Syria that is very much worth checking out. If David Wurmser, now on Cheney´s staff, gets his way, that one will be our problem, too.

TomDispatch.com always has cogent and fascinating discussions of left politics, and often of Iraq issues.

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Muqtada Misses Friday Prayers; More Violence Near Najaf

Reuters reports Friday that a day after an apparent agreement between the Interim Governing Council and Muqtada al Sadr, his followers were disappointed to find that he did not appear for Friday prayers in Kufa (he has been hiding out in nearby Najaf). Some 5,000 followers had gathered to hear him, and were disappointed and angry, blaming the US for his inability to appear. They chanted, “yes, yes to jihad!” Meanwhile, the US military, which had largely withdrawn to a base outside the city, came under fire on Friday. Although the US had welcomed Muqtada´s truce offer, they had threatened to come back if there was more violence. There seems to be a contradiction in the press reporting, with some saying that the US accepted a provision that the arrest warrant against Muqtada be suspended for the time being, while this Reuters report seems to suggest that the U.S. would still very much like to apprehend him. If the latter is true, it would help explain his reluctance to come out in public at a time when he has agreed to dissolve his militia in the holy cities, and when his fighters in Kufa, in any case, have taken heavy casualties.

Ash Sharq al Awsat/Reuters report that Muqtada was convinced to remove his militia from Najaf by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, and that the final negotiations actually took place in Sistani´s house. Sistani had condemned both the Mahdi Army and the US military for fighting in the holy city. He was convinced that a major US military push into Najaf was not far away, and that it was urgent for Muqtada to back down. Sistani has a great fear of social disorder, and was well aware that the Bush administration was capable of risking massive Shiite riots by fighting into Najaf in a frontal assault if that were the only way to get Muqtada. He also knew that Muqtada´s troops would not shrink from themselves using rpg´s and other potentially damaging weapons in the holy city.

Meanwhile, Salama Khafaji, a Shiite woman who has served in the Interim Governing Council, barely escaped assassination on Thursday as she returned to Baghdad after taking part in the negotiations with the Sadrists that produced the truce. She is all right, but one of her bodyguards is dead, another severely wounded, and her son, Ahmad Fadel, is still missing (he dove into the river to avoid the machine gun fire directed at their car). It is incredible that members of the IGC are not safe; if they aren´t, it is likely that nobody is. Khafaji replaced Aqila al Hashemi, another Shiite woman, who was assassinated last September. Khafaji has been among the most effective and outspoken of the women on the IGC. She followed Rajaa al-Khuzai’s lead in helping reverse the plan of the clerics on the IGC to implement Islamic personal status law in the place of civil law. And, she had been active in the negotiations with the Sadrists.

Friday had been declared a day of mourning in Iran for the desecration of the holy city of Najaf by the fighting in it (which Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei blamed on the U.S.) and the consequent damage to the shrine of Ali.

Guerrillas killed two Japanese journalists as they were returning from Samawah, where the Japenese Self Defense Forces are stationed, to Baghdad.

Hussain Shahristani, the favored candidate for post of prime minister by special UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, withdrew because he could not gain the support of powerful Iraqi politicians who had been expatriates and who now want the job for themselves, according to the WP. Ali Allawi of the Iraqi National Congress (a nephew of Ahmad Chalabi), Ibrahim Jaafari of the al Da´wa Party, and Adel Abdul Mahdi of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq all want the job themselves. Al Da´wa has the biggest grass roots, and Jaafari is the third most popular political-religious figure in Iraq, according to a recent poll (behind Sistani and Muqtada). But Brahimi does not want the PM to come from a party with grass roots, lest he use the advantages of incumbency to stay in power.

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Wedding Party Bombing Controversy

The controversy on the US bombing of what appears to have been a wedding party near Syria continues to boil, with this al Jazeerah editorial taking the con side to the story, while Gen. Kimmit sticks to his guns. I thought readers might be interested in an assessment by an academic with long experience in the region.

McGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago writes:

As someone who has worked for more than 35 years in Iraq, and for several years in Syria, right up against the Iraqi border, I can add some information on the situation there. All along both sides of the border are small settlements of people, who make their living by herding. Any village or encampment on either side will have in it a mixture of people who were born on the other. Many women from villages in Iraq marry relatives who live in Syria, and vice versa. In fact, in the village of Hamoukar where I was digging from 1999 until 2001, probably half of the families have close relatives in Iraq or were born there. The border is relatively undefended and unfenced, and in the past people could cross, but they took risks in doing so. There was a certain

amount of smuggling, usually consumer goods, and I would be very greatly surprised if there has not been a greatly enhanced degree of trading across the border, given the demand for products that exists in Iraq now. A few years ago, Iraq and Syria both thawed relations and allowed visits, and a lot of villagers in Syria went to Iraq to see relatives whom they had not seen in years, and some Iraqis were allowed to visit Syrian relatives. Iraqi taxi cabs, easily identifiable by their orange and white colors, were numerous on the roads of Syria in the past five years. In the current situation, with the Iraqi secret police no longer getting reports from agents among the populace, the visits by Syrians would have been greatly increased. As far as I have been able to find out, there were some attempts to control the border points at Tell Kochek,Abu Kemal and on the superhighways to Syria and Jordan, but I would be surprised if the long desert border has been much controlled. That there were men from Syria in the Iraqi village that was attacked would not be at all surprising, given the fact that there was a wedding

and that there was and is commerce across the border. The arrival of the guests might have looked very suspicious on satellite images That there should be foreign money is also not surprising. There is a lot of foreign money in Iraq and there has been for years.

Everything you have been saying about the Shia also rings true. I have worked most of my career in the south of Iraq, at Nippur (near Afak, Diwaniyah area). What I know to be the case is that most people would have preferred a secular government, that the Shia do not want to split the country up, and that the US and British blunders in the south have been based on no information, outdated WW I concepts, or distorted information from self-serving people who have been outside the country for many years. The Occupation authority has made it almost impossible to have a political base other than religion or ethnic community, and we are thus creating splits and tension between Iraqis that have not been very noticeable in the past.

McGuire Gibson

Professor of Mesopotamian Archaeology

Oriental Institute, University of Chicago

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