Informed Comment

Cat Stevens Deported

I know that it is faintly ridiculous that Cat Stevens a.k.a. Yusuf Islam was deported on Wednesday from the US after the airplane he was on was diverted to Maine, on the grounds that he is a dire security threat to the country. David Letterman in his monologue allowed darkly as how the Feds were no doubt gunning for Gordon Lightfoot next. He also wickedly observed that despite Osama Bin Laden being at large, what with Cat Stevens deported and Martha Stewart in jail, he felt a lot safer.

But I have a hard time rushing to Yusuf Islam’s defense because I never forgave him for advocating the execution of Salman Rushdie in 1989. He endorsed Khomeini’s “fatwa” or death edict against Rushdie for the novel, Satanic Verses. He later explained this position away by saying that he did not endorse vigilante action against Rushdie, but would rather want the verdict to be carried out by a proper court. These are weasel words, since he was saying that if Khomeini had been able to field some Revolutionary Guards in London to kidnap Rushdie and take him to Tehran, it would have been just dandy if he were then taken out and shot for having written his novel. In my view, that entire episode of the Khomeini fatwa showed how sick some forms of Muslim activism had become, and served as a foretaste of al-Qaeda’s own death warrant served on a lot of other innocent people.

And, the disavowal wasn’t even consistent. AP reported on March 8, 1989, that “Cat Stevens Endorses Rushdie Death Sentence Again,” writing:

‘ Former pop singer Cat Stevens reiterated his support for the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s death sentence against Salman Rushdie, saying the author’s treatment of Islam was “as good as stabbing Moslems in the heart.” . . . “It’s got to be seen as a deterrent, so that other people should not commit the same mistake again,” Stevens said in an interview with the television show “World Monitor,” produced by The Christian Science Monitor . . Stevens, who said the novel’s treatment of Islam was “as good as stabbing Moslems in the heart,” suggested that Rushdie should repent writing the book. “If he manages to escape (the death sentence) he still has to face God on the day of judgment,” he said. “So I would recommend to him to sincerely change his ways right now.” ‘

At the time, Rushdie’s life was in imminent danger, and Cat Stevens was skating pretty close to inciting to murder. (What else is the “deterrent” he is talking about?)

So, to steal from Bill Maher:

NEW RULES: If you advocate the execution of novelists for writing novels, you and John Ashcroft deserve one another.

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If America were Iraq, What would it be Like?

President Bush said Tuesday that the Iraqis are refuting the pessimists and implied that things are improving in that country.

What would America look like if it were in Iraq’s current situation? The population of the US is over 11 times that of Iraq, so a lot of statistics would have to be multiplied by that number.

Thus, violence killed 300 Iraqis last week, the equivalent proportionately of 3,300 Americans. What if 3,300 Americans had died in car bombings, grenade and rocket attacks, machine gun spray, and aerial bombardment in the last week? That is a number greater than the deaths on September 11, and if America were Iraq, it would be an ongoing, weekly or monthly toll.

And what if those deaths occurred all over the country, including in the capital of Washington, DC, but mainly above the Mason Dixon line, in Boston, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco?

What if the grounds of the White House and the government buildings near the Mall were constantly taking mortar fire? What if almost nobody in the State Department at Foggy Bottom, the White House, or the Pentagon dared venture out of their buildings, and considered it dangerous to go over to Crystal City or Alexandria?

What if all the reporters for all the major television and print media were trapped in five-star hotels in Washington, DC and New York, unable to move more than a few blocks safely, and dependent on stringers to know what was happening in Oklahoma City and St. Louis? What if the only time they ventured into the Midwest was if they could be embedded in Army or National Guard units?

There are estimated to be some 25,000 guerrillas in Iraq engaged in concerted acts of violence. What if there were private armies totalling 275,000 men, armed with machine guns, assault rifles (legal again!), rocket-propelled grenades, and mortar launchers, hiding out in dangerous urban areas of cities all over the country? What if they completely controlled Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Denver and Omaha, such that local police and Federal troops could not go into those cities?

What if, during the past year, the Secretary of State (Aqilah Hashemi), the President (Izzedine Salim), and the Attorney General (Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim) had all been assassinated?

What if all the cities in the US were wracked by a crime wave, with thousands of murders, kidnappings, burglaries, and carjackings in every major city every year?

What if the Air Force routinely (I mean daily or weekly) bombed Billings, Montana, Flint, Michigan, Watts in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Anacostia in Washington, DC, and other urban areas, attempting to target “safe houses” of “criminal gangs”, but inevitably killing a lot of children and little old ladies?

What if, from time to time, the US Army besieged Virginia Beach, killing hundreds of armed members of the Christian Soldiers? What if entire platoons of the Christian Soldiers militia holed up in Arlington National Cemetery, and were bombarded by US Air Force warplanes daily, destroying thousands of graves and even pulverizing the Vietnam Memorial over on the Mall? What if the National Council of Churches had to call for a popular march of thousands of believers to converge on the National Cathedral to stop the US Army from demolishing it to get at a rogue band of the Timothy McVeigh Memorial Brigades?

What if there were virtually no commercial air traffic in the country? What if many roads were highly dangerous, especially Interstate 95 from Richmond to Washington, DC, and I-95 and I-91 up to Boston? If you got on I-95 anywhere along that over 500-mile stretch, you would risk being carjacked, kidnapped, or having your car sprayed with machine gun fire.

What if no one had electricity for much more than 10 hours a day, and often less? What if it went off at unpredictable times, causing factories to grind to a halt and air conditioning to fail in the middle of the summer in Houston and Miami? What if the Alaska pipeline were bombed and disabled at least monthly? What if unemployment hovered around 40%?

What if veterans of militia actions at Ruby Ridge and the Oklahoma City bombing were brought in to run the government on the theory that you need a tough guy in these times of crisis?

What if municipal elections were cancelled and cliques close to the new “president” quietly installed in the statehouses as “governors?” What if several of these governors (especially of Montana and Wyoming) were assassinated soon after taking office or resigned when their children were taken hostage by guerrillas?

What if the leader of the European Union maintained that the citizens of the United States are, under these conditions, refuting pessimism and that freedom and democracy are just around the corner?

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The Western Press on Religious Violence in Iraq

Howard LaFranchi of the Christian Science Monitor gives further, searching consideration to the mysterious murder of clerics on Sunday and Monday and sees dangers of sectarian violence increasing in Iraq.

Paul Wood of the BBC reports on the situation in the British-dominated South. It is not a pretty picture, and it should be remembered that this part of Iraq is generally less problematic than areas to its north.

Wood describes the fighting in Amara during the recent US attack on Sadrists in Najaf. Amara and Kut were virtually ignored in the US press. Wood writes:

‘ British officers characterise the August fighting as merely a “spike” in the violence. Some spike. Last month, British troops fired 100,000 rounds of ammunition in southern Iraq. . . The base in Amara sustained more than 400 direct mortar hits. The British battalion there counted some 853 separate attacks of different kinds: mortars, roadside bombs, rockets and machine-gun fire. They say that no British regiment has had such intense “contact” since Korea. ‘

Wood implicitly explains why the British military has generally done a much better job in Iraq than the US forces. Speaking of the occupation of some intersections in Basra by small Mahdi Army units during the assault on fighters at the holy shrine in Najaf, he says:

‘There are lots of moderates here who support you. But if the shrines are touched, I’ll kill you myself.” That was the warning given to a British brigadier by a leading Shia figure in Basra, during the long hot month of August . . . Since the shrines were not touched, it’s thought that only 400 hard-core gunmen joined the fight against the multi-national forces in Basra. Still, in an area which is 99% Shia, the great danger for the British is of a general Shia uprising . . . The British – with tanks, air support and thousands of soldiers – say they could have destroyed the small militia force attacking them. But they were asked by local people not to turn Basra into a war zone. And because they didn’t, the majority still welcome them here . . . But perhaps the most worrying development of the August fighting was that none of Basra’s 25,000 police officers came to the aid of the British soldiers. Some even helped the gunmen.

To be fair, it seems increasingly clear that George W. Bush keeps ordering the US military to attack in such situations, against the better judgment of his own officers. So if the US had been in Basra, Bush would have in fact insisted on turning it into a war zone and alienating its 1.3 million Shiites. As it is, Wood interviews caretaker PM Iyad Allawi, who admits that he didn’t have the authority with the Basra police to countermand the local commissioner’s instruction to his men not to aid the British. When a prime minister can’t control the police commissioners of his major cities, he is a helpless giant.

Alistair Ryan of Reuters explains that Iran faces severe constraints in intervening in Iraq. He quotes Columbia University Iran analyst Gary Sick as saying that the last thing the Iranians want is a civil war in Iraq. Sick is right. Still, Iran is giving money to various Iraqi factions, including to the Sadrists in Basra, according to British military intelligence.

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Bush Taunts Kerry

I just heard President Bush taunt John Kerry for suggesting that the US was not safer because Saddam Hussein was deposed, and for saying that the US was in fact less safe because of the chaos in Iraq.

Bush attempted to turn this statement around and suggest that Kerry was preferring dictatorship to democracy.

Iraq, however, does not have a democracy, and cannot possibly have a democracy any time soon because of events such as those described below (and they are only 24 hours’ worth)– that is, because of a failed state and a hot guerrilla war.

Moreover, if Mr. Bush abhors dictatorships so much, why hasn’t he overthrown that in China? North Korea? Zimbabwe? Or, say, Egypt? There are enormous numbers of dictatorships in the world. Is the US to overthrow them all? Putin’s decision to appoint provincial governors rather than allowing them to be elected (as though Bush should appoint the governors of US states) is a step toward dictatorship. Shall we have a war with Russia over it?

Surely the conditions under which the Palestinians live in the West Bank are a form of dictatorship (they haven’t voted for their Israeli military rulers). Why not invade the West Bank and liberate the Palestinians?

Obviously, what was obnoxious to the American people about Saddam Hussein was not that he was a dictator. Those are a dime a dozen and not usually worth $200 billion and thousands of lives. It is that he was supposedly dangerous to the US because, as Bush alleged, he was trying to develop an atomic bomb. But whatever nuclear program he had was so primitive as not to be worth mentioning, and there is no evidence that Saddam posed any threat at all to the United States’ homeland, or would have in his lifetime.

I have a sinking feeling that the American public may like Bush’s cynical misuse of Wilsonian idealism precisely because it covers the embarrassment of their having gone to war, killed perhaps 25,000 people, and made a perfect mess of the Persian Gulf region, all out of a kind of paranoia fed by dirty tricks and bad intelligence. And, maybe they have to vote for Bush to cover the embarrassment of having elected him in the first place.

How deep a hole are they going to dig themselves in order to get out of the bright sunlight of so much embarrassment?

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The Case of the Three Dead Clerics

Al-Zaman and Al-Jazeerah.net say that two important figures in the Sunni fundamentalist Association of Muslim Scholars [Board of Muslim Clerics] were assassinated on Sunday and Monday.

Hazim al-Zaidi was found in front of the Sajjad Mosque in Sadr City, a largely Shiite area. Al-Zaidi had been imam to the small Sunni community in East Baghdad. He was kidnapped Sunday, then released, but then showed up dead. Another AMS cleric, Shaikh Muhammad Jadu’, was cut down as he left the al-Kawthar Mosque in al-Bayya’, west Baghdad, a Sunni area.

Likewise, on Monday Abu Jihad al-Zamili, a commander in the Badr Corps, the paramilitary of the Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, was killed by assassins along with his wife as he was driving about 20 km. north of Karbala.

In other news, guerrillas detonated a car bomb in Mosul, killing 3 persons. Monotheism and Holy War (al-Tawhid wa al-Jihad) took credit for beheading an American, and for taking 10 Turkish truck drivers hostage. Also in Mosul, guerrillas fired on a Turkish Red Crescent team heading to help victims of the fighting in Tal Afar, wounding five Turks. Guerrillas killed an American soldier near Sharqat in the Sunni Arab heartland. And, as usual, the US used tanks and warplanes to bomb Fallujah, with the number of resulting casualties under dispute (the US says it killed 2, other sources say 3). al-Hayat says that on Sunday evening 3 officers in the Iraqi National Guard were killed by a rocket propelled grenade. In Beiji, two corpses were discovered, of Iraqis who worked at the nearby American military base.

The Association of Muslim Scholars or AMS, headed by Sheikh Hareth al-Dhari, has in some instances been linked to militants, but usually has maintained enough independence of them to act as a broker between them and the Baghdad government. The AMS has announced that it will boycott the elections scheduled for January. It has emerged as the most respected and influential of the Sunni Muslim religious parties in Iraq, and seems to be the Sunnis’ answer to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.

The location of the murder of the Sunni cleric Hazim al-Zaidi, in Shiite Sadr City, might cast suspicion on the Sadr Movement of Muqtada al-Sadr, or at least some militant faction within it. There has in fact been friction between Sadrists and Sunnis in the past year and a half. The Sadrists have occupied Sunni mosques in the Shiite south, for instance, and at one point seemed poised to usurp most Sunni endowment property in Basra, provoking a demonstration some 15,000 strong among minority Sunnis in that southern city in summer of 2003. That Zaidi was the leader of the Sunnis in Sadr City may have made his activities provocative to the intensely nativist Sadr movement.

But since the simultaneous siege of Fallujah and Najaf in spring of 2004 by the US, the Sunni fundamentalists or Salafis and the Sadrist Shiites had appeared to make up. They sent each other food aid, and the Sunnis put up posters of Muqtada al-Sadr in Fallujah (ordinarily Sunni fundamentalists look at Shiites as a sort of polytheistic heresy no closer to true Islam than is Hinduism). So it would be strange if the Sadrists, who are still under pressure from the US, should suddenly decide to pick a fight with the Sunnis. Or at least it would be strange if this murder were ordered by the top clerics of the Sadr Movement.

Since the second victim, Shaikih Jadu’, was killed in a Sunni area west of Baghdad, moreover, whoever did the deed is not based only in Shiite Sadr City, and so the argument for a Sadrist perpetrator is weakened.

Al-Hayat notes that the Sadr Movement leaders roundly condemned the killing of the clerics. They were buried in Baqubah, and Sadrists accompanied the funeral procession. If they did it, they are certainly brazen.

On the other hand, the Sadrists blame the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq for spying on them for the Americans in Najaf (so the Sadrists say), and the Mahdi Army has serious issues with the Badr Corps.

The Baathists have been behind a lot of assassinations of emerging politicians in Iraq who might benefit from the end of the Baath and the emergence of a new Iraq. I personally believe that the Baath got Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim on Aug. 29, 2003. And that is who I would blame for the assassination of Aqilah al-Hashimi, a woman member of the Interim Governing Council, in fall of the same year. So it is possible that militantly secular, ultra-nationalist Baathists might be attempting to make sure that AMS does not benefit from the destruction of the Baath party and the marginalization of former Baathists.

The Baathists hate the Badr Corps, which used to carry out terrorist actions against them from Iran in the 1990s.

Still, the Baathists and the Sunni fundamentalists seem to have forged at least a tacit alliance in places like Fallujah and Ramadi, so it is a little odd that they should take out after Sunni leaders at this juncture. It is less odd that they should have killed al-Zamili, the Shiite Badr Corps commander.

The other possibility is Monotheism and Holy War, the terrorist organization based in Jordan and Germany that began as a rival to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. The letter attributed to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi last January by the CIA spoke of attempting to provoke Sunni-Shiite warfare as a way to ensure that American-dominated Iraq was destabilized. I dislike the US official tendency to blame most violence in Iraq on Zarqawi and other outsiders. I think 99% of it is Iraqi in character. But killing Shaikh al-Zaidi right in front of a Shiite mosque, or dumping his body there, does seem to be a deliberate provocation of the sort Tawhid earlier spoke of.

Likewise, it might have been hoped that the Shiites would blame Sunnis for al-Zamili’s death, just as it would have been obvious that Sunnis would blame Shiites for al-Zaidi’s.

A conspiracy theory might cast suspicion on the Allawi government, which would potentially benefit from driving a wedge between AMS and the Sadrists, and from weakening the Badr Corps. But I don’t think Sunni-Shiite riots would help the stability of Iraq, and can’t imagine Allawi is so foolish as to risk provoking them.

So, I think the murders were either done by more militant Sadrists or by Monotheism and Holy War. Of course, it is possible that the three murders were not all commited by the same group, but I suspect they were. And I would lean toward blaming Tawhid.

Meanwhile, Borzou Daragahi of AP argues that virtually all Sunni clerics, and not just AMS, preach jihad against the Americans. He notes that they do not always come out and say it, but that they are skillful in weaving pro-jihad statements into their sermons through allusion and intimation. He says:

‘ They cite a long litany of American missteps: everything from the stalled reconstruction effort, the killing of innocent Iraqis during combat operations and the abuse and sexual humiliation of prisoners to soldiers entering mosques without taking off their boots, entering women’s quarters during house raids and patting-down of female detainees.

They also say they believe that force is the only language the Americans understand, that Americans refuse to listen to Iraqis’ peaceful demands.

Were it not for the resistance throughout the Sunni triangle following last year’s war, they say, the now-dissolved 25-member Iraqi Governing Council would not have been established; were it not for the April uprisings in Fallujah and the Shi’ite south, Mr Allawi’s interim government would not have been established; and were it not for the ongoing violence in Baghdad and the rest of the country, elections would not be set in January.

‘Those who called for political solutions have been repeatedly embarrassed and outdone by those wanting military solutions,’ says Prof Bashar. ‘

Actually, if what the Sunni militants wanted was only elections, they could have had that without blowing so many things up. It seems to me that they were assured when Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani brought over 100,000 protesters into the streets of Baghdad in January.

I don’t think they primarily want elections, which would bring the Shiites and Kurds to power. I think they want the Americans gone so as to find a way to regain Sunni Arab supremacy in the country. That actually makes them more dangerous, because if that is their motive then they will likely go on blowing up things for a long time to come. It is highly unlikely that they can put the Shiites back in a box. So, even if the Iraqi public rises up and gets rid of the Americans, thereafter they are likely to turn on one another unless the Sunni Arabs can throw up leaders that can deal with the new situation in which they are a minority. They haven’t given good evidence of an ability to do that as yet.

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Bin Laden Doesn’t Care Who Wins

The remark of Speaker of the House Denis Hastert that al-Qaeda would like to manipulate the US election with a terrorist bombing and would be happier with Kerry as president is simply wrong. The Democrats are correct that such comments are a form of fear-mongering aimed at stampeding the American public into voting for Bush out of terror. Indeed, if the US public votes for any candidate because of concern for Bin Laden, then Bin Laden has been handed precisely the victory that Hastert professed to abhor.

But Hastert is just wrong. Al-Qaeda does not care who wins the elections. If the US withdraws from Iraq (which could happen willy-nilly under Bush as easily as under Kerry), that would be seen as a victory by al-Qaeda. If the US remains in Iraq for years, bleeding at the hands of an ongoing guerrilla insurgency, then that is also a victory for al-Qaeda from their point of view. They therefore just don’t care which candidate wins. They hate general US policy in the Middle East, which would not change drastically under Kerry. To any extent that al-Qaeda is giving serious thought to the US elections, it would see no significant difference between the candidates. But given its goal of creating more polarization between the US and the Muslim World, it is entirely possible that the al-Qaeda leadership would prefer Bush, since they want to “sharpen the contradictions.”

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McCain vs. Iraqi Public

The rather bloodthirsty demand launched by Arizona Senator John McCain that the US military conquer Fallujah and other Sunni Arab cities of al-Anbar Province will not in fact enhance the possibility of free elections in January.

There are bad characters in those al-Anbar cities, without any doubt. There are persons responsible for the massive bombs that killed Kurds last winter and Shiites during Muharram rituals last spring. There are old-time Baath fascists and there are Sunni fundamentalists with a mindset not much different from that of al-Qaeda (even if they are, unlike al-Qaeda, mainly concerned with Iraqi independence of the US). I don’t doubt that finding ways to combat them or convince them to turn to civil politics is crucial to the future of Iraq.

But for the US military to frontally invade those cities, inevitably killing large numbers of innocent civilians, and potentially pushing even more of their inhabitants into joining the guerrilla war will not be without a political cost. During the US siege of Fallujah last April, several key Iraqi politicians resigned or threatened to, and even the Shiites of Kazimiyah (who ordinarily despise Sunni fundamentalists) sent them truckloads of aid. Even Coalition Provisional Authority polling that May found that Iraqi politicians who opposed the US action and attempted to negotiate an end to it had become national figures with high favoribility ratings. Hareth al-Dhari of the Association of Muslim Clerics is an example. His influential Association, by the way, has already said it will not contest the elections now set for January because they are being held under the shadow of a foreign Occupation. Razing Fallujah will not earn the US any good will with the Sunni Muslim clerics.

What does McCain think the election would look like, with Ramadi, Fallujah and other Sunni cities reduced to rubble? Does he think the sullen Sunni Arabs will actually just jump on a US bandwagon in the wake of such brutality? Does he have any idea of the sheer number of feuds that will have been incurred with the Sunni tribes?

Some much more subtle and effective form of counter-insurgency strategy is necessary.

It seems almost certain that most candidates for high office in Iraq will run against the US. I.e., their platform will probably include a promise to get US troops out of the country ASAP. Others will boycott the elections. The number of such boycotters, and the number of those running against the US, would be even greater in the wake of a bloody and indiscriminate US campaign against the townspeople of al-Anbar.

At the end of this misadventure, it seems more and more likely that a US soldier will report to his general, “We had to destroy the country to save it, sir!”

Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, visiting London, reaffirmed Sunday that his government will hold elections as scheduled, to the incredulity of Kofi Annan and other UN officials.

In bad news for the Allawi government, which had trumpeted the political settlement it had achieved with clan chieftains of Samarra, guerrillas blew up a roadside bomb there on Sunday, kiling an Iraqi soldier and a civilian, and wounding four American and three Iraqi troops.

Late Saturday and early Sunday, US warplanes and artillery struck Fallujah repeatedly. The bombardments killed four persons and wounded six. Although the US military typically points to the guerrillas it kills in such operations, it makes no accounting of the innocent civilians it kills and injures when bombing residential neighborhoods.

In Suwayrah, the Darwin Prize goes to four guerrillas who accidentally blew themselves up while planting a roadside bomb Saturday night.

Also over the weekend, US talks with the Shiite leaders of East Baghdad broke down over American demands that the Mahdi Army be disbanded in Sadr City and that the militiamen turn in their weapons.

Some 300 Iraqis were killed in violence during the past week.

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