Informed Comment

They Even Changed its Name?

Nathan Brown, a Middle East expert at George Washington University, writes:

“With little fanfare, the name of Iraq seems to have been changed.

In light of all that is happening, this is hardly the most significant issue facing Iraq at the moment. But in view of the brief flap engendered by the Governing Council’s decision to adopt a new flag, I thought the name change might still be of some minor interest.

The country’s official name in 1920 was the “State of Iraq.” Following the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958, the name was changed to the “Republic of Iraq” (or, more literally, the “Iraqi Republic.”)

At some point last year, the older name–the “State of Iraq”–was restored. I do not know precisely who did this and why, but it seems to have been done by the CPA some time last year. CPA legal documents are now issued for the “State of Iraq.” UN Security Council Resolution 1511 (passed last October) uses the restored term, and the transitional Administrative Law–signed in March 2004 but named (as far as I know) for

the first time in November 2003–is formally the “Law of Administration of the State of Iraq for the Transitional Period.” (However, some internal Iraqi documents still refer to it as a republic.)

Since the current Iraqi political order could hardly be described as a republic, there is some honesty in the new title. But it seems odd that an interim administration would feel comfortable changing the name of the country.

Nathan J. Brown

http://home/gwu.edu/~nbrown

Site of the Day

Christopher Allbritton is back in Iraq, doing independent journalism.

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Abuse of Women Detainees

Iraqi women were also abused at Abu Ghuraib, according to the Taguba report and reports of photographs seen by the US Congress. As this Islamist PakNews story notes, most of the reporting on torture and abuse of detainees at Abu Ghuraib has focused on men. It is clear, however, that Iraqi women were also made to strip naked, were photographed in that compromising position, and it is alleged that some were raped by US military personnel. Although, of course, the soldiers who behaved this way and the officers who authorized or allowed it were not “crusaders,” as the article alleges, the abuse of women was designed to take advantage of Muslim and Arab ideas concerning female honor.

A scandal that has not yet broken in the press is the story of how many women ended up in US prisons. The fact is, few were suspected of having themselves committed a crime or an act of insurgency. Rather, they were taken as hostages or potential informants because their husbands or sons were wanted by the US military. This kind of arrest, however, is a form of collective punishment and not permitted under the Fouth Geneva Convention governing military occupations of civilian populations. The sexual abuse of these women is therefore a double crime.

Eventually these photographs of abused or tortured Muslim women are likely to leak, and the reaction in the Muslim world will be explosive. One shakes one´s head in bewilderment as to what the Bush administration thought they were doing. William Polk´s guest editorial today is all the more a propos in light of these revelations.

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Thoughts on Torture

Guest Editorial

By William R. Polk

Displays of naked Iraqi prisoners being humiliated in American military prisons have shocked not only Arabs and Europeans but also most Americans. They need not have been surprised – torture is not new.

Widely practiced by the Germans during World War II, it was standard French procedure during the Algerian war. One of the most influential books on that war, written by Colonel Roger Trinquier, a French paratrooper, argued that torture is to “modern war” what the machinegun was to World War I. Horrified by what they learned was happening, French critics called torture the “cancer of democracy.” Using it, the French not only destroyed their claim to legitimacy in Algeria but also nearly destroyed French civil life.

If there was a lesson to be learned by the Algerian experience, it certainly was not heeded.

Influenced by the French – Trinquier’s book was translated and made available by the CIA — American soldiers and “special forces” used torture in Vietnam. Israeli troops and security forces have employed it for years against the Palestinians. Routinely, almost casually, it is employed in prison systems throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America. It is more common in Europe than most would admit. From Greece, under the regime of the colonels, came a macabre episode: the men employed to torture prisoners, complaining of long hours at low pay, went on strike.

Studies of torture raise two questions that lie behind the horrifying images in the press in recent days: “does torture work?” and “why do governments do it?”

If the objective of torture is to get information, as is usually said, the answer to the first question is “sometimes.” The French in Algeria found that they could “break” a prisoner and find out where his colleagues were hiding or what kind of an operation was being planned. Often, of course, the person being tortured would just say what he thought his tormentors wanted to hear – anything to get them to stop. He knew that he was likely to be killed after he had been “debriefed.” But they had ways to check what he said and, keeping him alive, increased his pain if he lied.

Even if torture often failed to get the sought-after information, it was still an attractive option. Why? I think there are two answers: first, security officers think it might work and they have few other options. Much more important, I believe, is the second reason. Some circumstances almost demand brutality.

A century of careful medical and psychiatric studies tell us that the juxtaposition of absolute weakness and absolute power provokes violence. The bound and hooded Iraqi prisoners lying naked on the floor of Abu Ghraib prison invited attack.

So shocking is such a statement that few of us have wanted even to consider it. To deal with its implications requires us to reexamine our very concept of our humanity. So to get around that inhibition, some scientists, like the Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz, posed “our” problem to animals. What he found was that those animals that have “weapons systems,” like the lion with its claws and fangs, have evolved to practice restraints. Had they not done so, their species might not have survived. So the winner in a fight among lions will make ferocious noises but will usually stop short of killing the lion he has just knocked down. In contrast, those creatures, like that symbol of peace, the dove, that do not have lethal weapons have not evolved to practice restraint. They did not need to. Lorenz observed a dove actually torturing another to death.

Our evolution, students of violence assert, has made us more like doves than lions. True we have massive weapons systems but they are external; our ancestors were not forced to incorporate them into our behavior. So, when we see in the pictures of the Iraqi prisoners cowering on the floor, bound, hooded and defenseless we notice that the upright, armed and dominant guards do not show compassion. Rather, they feel stimulated to attack.

Surely, we say, these are aberrations. Normal people do not do such things. Alas, there is much evidence to the contrary.

Cultural, religious, ethnic and age ethnic differences do not seem to influence the willingness of human beings to torture others. Torture has been reported almost everywhere among peoples of all religions and historical experiences. It does have a racial or cultural dimension, however: men are more likely to torture people of a different color or culture than their own kind. Setting them apart is often easy. In Vietnam, American soldiers derided “gooks” and in Iraq “ragheads;” Germans despised untermenschen; Israelis treat Palestinians as subhuman and so on. Regarding the victim as unimportant makes it easier to attack him. Remember the phrase, “Asians feel no pain.”

Can ways be found to prevent these horrors?

One that we have found is generally ineffective is education. The Germans of the 1930s were certainly among the most educated people in the world; yet they set up the concentration camps. The French of the 1950s were a model for the rest of the world in their dedication to reason and intellect; yet some of their most cultured people were implicated in their sordid policies. Even more surprising, some Frenchmen who had fought in the underground against the Nazis to preserve French freedom went on to do to the Algerians what the Nazis had been doing to them. They too built concentration camps. Clean-cut, decent American college graduates who felt strongly about civil liberties were prepared to do to Vietnamese what they abhorred in America. We have only to look at photographs of the crowd of White American participants at a lynching to see how thin is the veneer of civilization. So I think that the best we can say is that education is necessary but not sufficient.

Two actions offer some hope to those who wish to stop torture.

The first is to demand “transparency” in whatever prison systems are believed to be necessary everywhere. This means that we cannot close our eyes and ears to abuses as we naturally would prefer to do. Nor can we accept any justification for torture. Those who do it and those who authorize it must both know for certain that they will be held responsible for a crime against humanity. That is, to be clear, a crime against both the humanity of the victims and against us as those whose humanity they thus debase.

The second is much more important because more likely to work. It is that we must make as a major goal of national policy solution of situations that promote the use of torture. An obvious first step is to work toward a world which recognizes that the basic political right is that of self-determination. Unless or until this is at least approached, we can expect others to fight for it with every means at their disposal and that those who oppose them will similarly use the means at their disposal: guerrilla warfare/terrorism will be met with various forms of suppression including torture. Only when it is no longer “needed” will torture be put aside.

We can draw many historical proofs that it then will be put aside. Take just one example. After centuries of severe repression including torture of prisoners, England finally granted Irish independence. Torture then stopped because it was not longer useful.

A policy embodying the quest for self determination will not be easy to implement. Nor will the benefits appear quickly. There will be shortfalls and setbacks. But in evaluating such difficult actions as will be required, we must bear in mind that, however much some people will wish to try the shortcuts that torture will seem to offer to avoid attacks or break terrorist cells, doing so not only will impact upon the victims but also brutalize those who employ or sanction it. That was the real lesson of Algeria. It should also be a lesson of Iraq. That is what the pictures from Iraq show us – not just the anguished faces of the prisoners but the gloating smirks of the torturers. Lest those looks appear in our own mirrors, we simply and finally cannot “afford” torture.

© William R. Polk, May 6, 2004

William R. Polk is senior director of the W.P. Carey Foundation. A graduate of Harvard and Oxford, he taught Middle Eastern politics and history and the Arabic language at Harvard University until President Kennedy appointed him a Member of the Policy Planning Council of the U.S. Department of State. He was in charge of planning American policy for most of the Islamic world until 1965 when he became professor of history at the University of Chicago and founded its Middle Eastern Studies Center. Later he also became president of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs. Among his many books are The United States and the Arab World; The Elusive Peace: The Middle East in the Twentieth Century; Neighbors and Strangers: The Fundamentals of Foreign Affairs; and Polk’s Folly, An American Family History. His books The Birth of America and Iraq: Out of the past toward an Uncertain Future will be published in New York in the spring of 2005.

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America’s Incompetent Colonialism

Guest Editorial

by Keith Watenpaugh

America’s Incompetent Colonialism: The Failures of the US Administration of Iraq

A year ago, word began to filter out of Baghdad that in addition to the National Museum, the Iraqi National Library and Archive had also been looted, and burned, not once, but twice. Like the current scandal of systematic abuses of human rights by members of the US military, the CIA and its sub-contractors, the burning evoked a host of emotions most notably shame, revulsion and anger. The anger was primarily directed against the civilian leadership of the Department of Defense who failed to heed the near-unanimous warnings of the probability of post-war instability and the vulnerability of Iraq’s cultural heritage and take appropriate preventative measures. Their failure to fully grasp the reality of the situation in Iraq was among the earliest examples of continuing gross and criminal ineptitude of which the gruesome images from Abu Ghuraib are the most recent manifestations.

The destruction so enraged an international group of junior historians of the Arab Middle East, that we organized an assessment visit to the country last June to find out what had happened at Baghdad’s library and archives. What we also sought to do was record the needs of Iraq’s academic and intellectual community as it rebuilds itself in the face of a generation of brutish rule by Saddam Hussein, a decade of debilitating UN sanctions, a brief and humiliating war, and an open-ended American-led military occupation. All of us spoke Arabic, had lived in the region and conducted research in Iraq or in its neighboring countries before. The report of our findings is available for free download from the H-Net (http://www.h-net.org/about/press/opening_doors/) website. Downloaded several thousand times in the last year, our report is still among the only independent assessments of cultural and intellectual conditions in Iraq. Current status of the libraries and museums can be also be accessed from the following: IFLA-Blue Shield (http://www.ifla.org/VI/4/admin/icbs-iraq.htm), Iraq Crisis (https://listhost.uchicago.edu/mailman/listinfo/iraqcrisis) SAFE (http://www.savingantiquities.org/k-safe-resources.htm).

Conducting research for the report required us to meet with civilian and military administrators of the CPA in the Green Zone. Aside from discovering that when American men are overseas they all – including me – wear khaki slacks and blue button-down shirts, I experienced what could only be termed “de ja vue all over again.” My own area of expertise is the interwar Middle East when France and Britain controlled the several states of the Arab Eastern Mediterranean as League of Nation’s Mandates. And while the League imposed humanitarian requirements on both, the Mandates were merely colonialism in drag. Sitting across the table from CPA administrators I listened to the same language of democratization and development being employed as part of a broader, concerted plan to turn Iraq into a dependent and docile American client; and key features of Iraqi society, including higher education, media, culture, and the arts would be subordinated to that program.

What also struck me about those conversations – and the events of the intervening year have confirmed my suspicions – is that the CPA, and here I mean not just the American diplomats and bureaucrats seconded to the DOD and the token representatives of “Coalition Partners,” but also the vast array of civilian contractors and subcontractors, have been infected by the pathologies of colonialism. As I have discussed in an earlier essay for Middle East Report, (http://www.merip.org/mer/mer228/228_watenpaugh.html)

the civilian and military administrators of Iraq have grown contemptuous of Iraq and Iraqis and have convinced themselves of their hosts’ essential incompetence. Blaming the victim has always proved an effective strategy in justifying colonialism.

The CPA’s colonial culture has limited its effectiveness on behalf of the Iraqi people and thus the US taxpayer is not getting a good value for its billions of dollars. And while unique elements of the CPA have made significant contributions to the rebuilding of Iraqi society, here I note especially the work of John Russell in the recovery of Iraq’s ancient heritage, those successes are not balanced by the abuses, corruption, cronyism and incompetence on the other side of the ledger. In part this has been caused by the exportation of domestic US politics to the Green Zone and the appointment of individuals whose sense of Iraqi, Arab, and Islamic cultures (if they have any at all) is shaped by a narrow partisan, cultural or religious agenda – and in some cases the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. This was reinforced recently by the discovery that the CPA’s massive press/propaganda office is peopled primarily by Republican Party activists, lead by Dan Senor, himself a former American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) intern, as well.

An exemplary token of this phenomenon is the civilian contractor John Agresto, appointed last year as senior advisor to the Ministry of Higher Education. Senior advisors play a paternalistic role in the CPA akin to colonial administrators of the inter-war French and British Mandates and exert a tremendous amount of power over Iraqi institutions and agencies through the control of budgets, security and as gatekeepers to the upper echelons of the Department of Defense. Prior to going to Iraq, Agresto was briefly the president of St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, an institution known for its Eurocentric “Great Books” curriculum and he now runs his own educational consulting firm, Agresto Consultants. Agresto has no training in Middle Eastern society or culture and no experience in the region. He served briefly as interim chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, to which he was appointed by Ronald Reagan. Along with William Bennett, and Lynne Cheney, the wife of the current Vice President Dick Cheney, Agresto was one of the leading right-wing figures in the “culture wars” of the 1980s.

More problematic for the future of higher education in Iraq, the ostensible reason he is there, is that his appointment signaled that the CPA was intent on peopling its bureaucracy with politically loyal agents, rather than those most objectively qualified to assist Iraq. The clearly political nature of Agresto’s position sent a chilling signal to those academic institutions interested in working in Iraq that their efforts – regardless of how disinterested, or how much they believe that they could change the system from within – would be part and parcel of the administration’s current policy objectives and cronyism. And in the short-term, while these programs have the potential to aid Iraqis as they rebuild their educational structures, in the long run they will tar all American educational initiatives and American academics with the same neo-colonialist brush. Being perceived as, or in fact being, allied to the military occupation of Iraq or as agents of American domination will hinder the creation of permanent, collegial and productive relations between the US and Iraqi academic communities as equals. The ultimate cost of failing to create viable and permanent relationships and of confusing what appears to be voluntary cooperation with a strategy to survive is that the core values of open exchange, freedom of inquiry, women’s participation in higher education and faculty self-management may all be dismissed as “American” values and moreover as anti-Muslim despite our assertion of their inherent universality.

While the CPA is supposed to go out of business on June 30, what elements of it will persist in the next iteration of the American role in the civil administration of Iraq is unclear. Dan Senor recently used the euphemistic construction “close partnership” to describe that relationship as he dismissed the possibility that an independent Iraqi government might ask us to leave. Fear of being asked to leave may be the leading factor in the administrations rejection of the technocratic solution suggested by the UN’s Lakhdar Brahimi. While US diplomats will in all likelihood occupy a role similar to that played by current administrators, what I suspect will also be the case is that a significant portion of American policy in Iraq will be implemented by contractors. At this juncture, Congress should exercise due diligence and mount an independent audit and investigation of the CPA; it should also introduce legislation that would hold contractors liable to US and Iraqi law and moreover give the FBI enforcement powers and responsibilities. In other words, US citizens should enjoy no extraterritorial rights in Iraq, nor should the contractors simply be allowed to police themselves.

As a rule historians should avoid the use of history to predicate the future. Yet, in an essay I wrote shortly before the war for Logos, I opined that thinking about the exit strategies of the various interwar colonial powers could shed light on what the US would do in Iraq. At the time, I argued that the way the British left Iraq – install a loyal client leadership backed by a strong military, gain basing rights and oil concessions – would be repeated. I was convinced that the US would not leave Iraq like the British left Palestine in 1948: merely abandoning it to the UN and laying the groundwork for a half century of ongoing and unremitting war and suffering. I think I was wrong.

——————

Keith Watenpaugh is Assistant Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern History at Le Moyne College; he also serves as the college’s Associate Director of Peace and Global Studies. In the Fall he will be a visiting fellow at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. He is the third generation of his family to have lived and worked in the Middle East. He speaks and reads Arabic and Modern Turkish. Dr. Watenpaugh has written extensively on Arab intellectual history, the formation of the Baath and urban and communal violence. His book Being Modern in the Middle East: Colonialism, Modernity and the Middle Class will be published by Princeton University Press.

In June of 2003 he led a multinational team of Middle Eastern historians to Iraq to assess the conditions of Baghdad’s libraries, archives and universities * and more broadly observe the emergence of civil society and intellectual life in Iraq. The group’s findings are included in the report Opening the Doors: Intellectual Life and Academic Conditions in Post-war Iraq. Copies are available at h-net.org. The report is the first comprehensive account of Iraq’s intellectual and cultural scene after the war and provides the most detailed study of Iraq’s university system as it begins to rebuild in the wake of the war.

Dr. Watenpaugh has spoken on humanitarian issues confronting Iraq at Harvard, the University of Michigan, the University of Texas, the University of Utah, as well as the annual meetings of the American Historical Association, the Middle East Studies Association and the College Art Association. His work has been covered by The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Boston Globe, The Syracuse Post-Standard and National Public Radio.

Keith D. Watenpaugh

Associate Director

Peace and Global Studies

Assistant Professor

Eastern Mediterranean and Islamic History

Department of History

Le Moyne College

Syracuse NY 13214

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Zinni on What Went Wrong

In the wake of Gen. Anthony Zinni’s 60 Minutes appearance, it is worth looking in detail at his recent essay on what went wrong.

The Center for Defense Information has put up a concise diagnosis of the follies of the Bush administration Iraq policy by Gen. Zinni has presented a concise diagnosis of the follies of the Bush Administration’s Iraq policy. A summary by way of excerpts (I’ve omitted ellipses, but these grafs are not continuous with one another):

“And I think that will be the first mistake that will be recorded in history, the belief that containment as a policy doesn’t work. It certainly worked against the Soviet Union, has worked with North Korea and others.

“The second mistake I think history will record is that the strategy was flawed. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing about the benefits of this strategic move. That the road to Jerusalem led through Baghdad, when just the opposite is true, the road to Baghdad led through Jerusalem. You solve the Middle East peace process, you’d be surprised what kinds of others things will work out.

“The third mistake, I think was one we repeated from Vietnam, we had to create a false rationale for going in to get public support. The books were cooked, in my mind.

“We failed in number four, to internationalize the effort.

“I think the fifth mistake was that we underestimated the task . . . You are about to go into a problem that you don’t know the dimensions and the depth of, and are going to cause you a great deal of pain, time, expenditure of resources and casualties down the road.

“The sixth mistake, and maybe the biggest one, was propping up and trusting the exiles, the infamous “Gucci Guerillas” from London. We bought into their intelligence reports.

“The seventh problem has been the lack of planning . . . And I think that lack of planning, that idea that you can do this by the seat of the pants, reconstruct a country, to make decisions on the fly, to beam in on the side that has to that political, economic, social other parts, just a handful of people at the last minute to be able to do it was patently ridiculous.

“The eighth problem was the insufficiency of military forces on the ground. There were a lot more troops in my military plan for operations in Iraq.

“The ninth problem has been the ad hoc organization we threw in there. No one can tell me the Coalition Provisional Authority had any planning for its structure.

“And that ad hoc organization has failed, leading to the tenth mistake, and that’s a series of bad decisions on the ground. De-Baathifying down to a point where you’ve alienated the Sunnis, where you have stopped having qualified people down in the ranks, people who don’t have blood on their hands, but know how to make the trains run on time . . .

“Almost every week, somebody calls me up, if it’s not Mark Thompson it’s somebody else, and says “What would you do now?” You know, there’s a rule that if you find yourself in hole, stop digging. The first thing I would say is we need to stop digging. We have dug this hole so deep now that you see many serious people, Jack Murtha, General Odom, and others beginning to say it’s time to just pull out, cut your losses. I’m not of that camp. Not yet. But I certainly think we’ve come pretty close to that.

“I would do several things now. But clearly the first and most important thing you need is that UN resolution. That’s been the model since the end of the Cold War, that has given us the basis and has given our allies the basis for joining us and helping us and provided the legitimacy we need.”

Other Zinni links:

Before the war: ‘What Planet are They Living On? – Salon.com”.

September 2003 – Lehrer News Hour

May 15, 2004 – Abu Ghraib and other issues.

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Zinni on What Went Wrong

In the wake of Gen. Anthony Zinni’s 60 Minutes appearance, it is worth looking in detail at his recent essay on what went wrong.

The Center for Defense Information has put up a concise diagnosis of the follies of the Bush administration Iraq policy by Gen. Zinni has presented a concise diagnosis of the follies of the Bush Administration’s Iraq policy. A summary by way of excerpts (I’ve omitted ellipses, but these grafs are not continuous with one another):

“And I think that will be the first mistake that will be recorded in history, the belief that containment as a policy doesn’t work. It certainly worked against the Soviet Union, has worked with North Korea and others.

“The second mistake I think history will record is that the strategy was flawed. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing about the benefits of this strategic move. That the road to Jerusalem led through Baghdad, when just the opposite is true, the road to Baghdad led through Jerusalem. You solve the Middle East peace process, you’d be surprised what kinds of others things will work out.

“The third mistake, I think was one we repeated from Vietnam, we had to create a false rationale for going in to get public support. The books were cooked, in my mind.

“We failed in number four, to internationalize the effort.

“I think the fifth mistake was that we underestimated the task . . . You are about to go into a problem that you don’t know the dimensions and the depth of, and are going to cause you a great deal of pain, time, expenditure of resources and casualties down the road.

“The sixth mistake, and maybe the biggest one, was propping up and trusting the exiles, the infamous “Gucci Guerillas” from London. We bought into their intelligence reports.

“The seventh problem has been the lack of planning . . . And I think that lack of planning, that idea that you can do this by the seat of the pants, reconstruct a country, to make decisions on the fly, to beam in on the side that has to that political, economic, social other parts, just a handful of people at the last minute to be able to do it was patently ridiculous.

“The eighth problem was the insufficiency of military forces on the ground. There were a lot more troops in my military plan for operations in Iraq.

“The ninth problem has been the ad hoc organization we threw in there. No one can tell me the Coalition Provisional Authority had any planning for its structure.

“And that ad hoc organization has failed, leading to the tenth mistake, and that’s a series of bad decisions on the ground. De-Baathifying down to a point where you’ve alienated the Sunnis, where you have stopped having qualified people down in the ranks, people who don’t have blood on their hands, but know how to make the trains run on time . . .

“Almost every week, somebody calls me up, if it’s not Mark Thompson it’s somebody else, and says “What would you do now?” You know, there’s a rule that if you find yourself in hole, stop digging. The first thing I would say is we need to stop digging. We have dug this hole so deep now that you see many serious people, Jack Murtha, General Odom, and others beginning to say it’s time to just pull out, cut your losses. I’m not of that camp. Not yet. But I certainly think we’ve come pretty close to that.

“I would do several things now. But clearly the first and most important thing you need is that UN resolution. That’s been the model since the end of the Cold War, that has given us the basis and has given our allies the basis for joining us and helping us and provided the legitimacy we need.”

Other Zinni links:

Before the war: ‘What Planet are They Living On? – Salon.com”.

September 2003 – Lehrer News Hour

May 15, 2004 – Abu Ghraib and other issues.

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Continued Fallout of War of Holy Cities

Even though Karbala has fallen quiet, there were clashes on other fronts. 20 people were killed and 50 wounded in clashes between the US and the Mahdi Army militia in Kufa, the stronghold of radical cleric Muqtada al Sadr.

In the fourth such incident in a week, angry Islamist students in Tehran attempted to attack the British embassy in protest over the fighting in the holy cities of Iraq. They clashed with riot police and were eventually forced back.

Iran also demanded formally that the United States withdraw altogether from Iraq, and expressed its anguish over the desecration of the holy cities. The BBC reports that sympathy may be growing among Iran´s hardliners for Muqtada.

Even the chief ally in Iraq of the US, the United Kingdom, produced an internal memo harshly critical of US heavy handedness in Iraq, instancing the prison torture scandal, Fallujah, and Najaf.

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