Informed Comment

Letter to a Marine Reserve Officer

This is a piece of private correspondence with a thoughtful reserve officer who kindly took the time to remonstrate with me about comments he took to be “anti-military” on my web log.

Dear . . .

I can’t thank you enough for your detailed and (under the circumstances) gentlemanly letter, which I read with great attention.

Let me try to clear away what I think is a misconception. I am not anti-US military. My father spent 20 years in Signal Corps and then Sat Com in the army, and I grew up on bases. I have also . . . had interactions with officers here (where they are sometimes detailed to do an MA with us) and elsewhere. I have the greatest respect for the intelligence, culture and initiative of the US officer corps, and I am grateful to the Marines and the other services for defending our country. I thank you for your own service.

There are nevertheless things I don’t like about the way the Iraq war is being prosecuted. I don’t doubt that much of this is at the behest of “General Rove” and is by no means the fault of the military itself. They after all have to shoot where they are told to. Nevertheless, I do feel a need to speak out when I see things going wrong. That is my function as an analyst of the scene, and not to do it would be a dereliction of duty. And, sometimes the only way to make a strong point is to make it rudely.

One reason for my vehemence is that I think the US is walking a tight rope in Iraq. The Americans seem not to realize it, but it is entirely possible that the Iraqis will mount a nationwide urban revolutionary movement aimed at expelling the US. At that point the US military will be faced with a choice of committing massacres (as the Shah’s troops did at Black Friday in 1978) or leaving. Neither eventuality will lead to anything good.

I wasn’t on the scene at Haifa street and found the footage confusing, so I just don’t know what happened there. But whatever it was doesn’t smell right from the eyewitness accounts we have in the European and Arab press. I’d love to have your reaction to the suggestion made to me by one correspondent that the Bradley might have had some sort of intel equipment aboard and that was why it was important that it be completely destroyed before the guerrillas could loot it.

In general, as you can tell, I deeply disagree with using helicopter gunships and warplane bombardment of civilian neighborhoods as key tactics in fighting urban guerrillas. If the LAPD bombed Watts to get at the Cripps and the Bloods, there would be outrage. (In fact, that sort of thing was done in Philly with regard to MOVE and did cause outrage). You can’t attack urban areas that way without killing a lot of innocent people. It isn’t right, and I suspect it is a violation of the 4th Geneva Convention. It is also politically inadvisable, since the people you are bombing in Kut and elsewhere started out only having a few guerrillas amongst them, but are pushed into vehement anti-Americanism by seeing their relatives killed this way.

My angry comments on Najaf derived from several sources. Mostly I was upset by the fighting in the holy city. It really, really angered all my Shiite friends and had geopolitical repercussions as far abroad as my old stomping grounds in Lucknow, India. After 9/11, surely it should by now be apparent that the US cannot act with impunity in the Muslim world, and right now we don’t need Shiite enemies alongside our Sunni and Wahhabi ones.

If it were true, as John Burns alleged, that the most recent round of fighting was set off by local Marine decisions, then that was most unwise. It may be, as you imply, that Burns was wrong, and that the policy was set higher up, and the Marines were only following orders. But it is actually unclear that Washington would have wanted a major fight in a sacred space just before the Republican National Convention, and I am inclined to credit Burns on this.

It seems obvious to me that the US military was perfectly willing to storm the Shrine, and indeed many were itching to do so. The Washington Post quoted one Marine as saying that the shrine “might not be there much longer.”

That was the ignoramus, along with his like-minded colleagues, to whom I was mainly refering.

I know very well that the US officer corps knows about the significance of Najaf and Karbala . . . The problem is that they don’t know about that significance in their *guts*. It is still intellectual for them, as it obviously is for you. The Shrine of Imam Ali is, by the way, not a mosque, though a mosque is attached to it. It is a mausoleum.

That Muqtada’s guys were in the shrine did not necessitate the Marines storming the Shrine of Ali, which was clearly at some points envisaged. First of all, the Mahdi Army did not even control Najaf in March of 2004– it was mainly in the hands of Badr Corps. It was the stupid American decision to “kill or capture” Muqtada in early April that led to his movement ensconcing itself in Najaf. So having caused the problem in the first place, the American solution to it was to piss all over the most sacred mausoleum in Shiite Islam. That is willful ignorance, I am afraid.

I am sure the local Marine commanders were manipulated by Adnan Zurfi and the Najaf elite, and probably Allawi as well. (A . . . State Department official intimated to me that Allawi was mainly behind it and Negroponte’s hands were tied). But, again, if the initiative came as Burns claims from local commanders, then what they did was most unwise (the polite way of putting it).

There are some things that the US should not do, period. Besieging Najaf and bombing the sacred cemetery is one of them. The whole city and its environs are holy, not just the shrine. It is very nice for Zurfi and Allawi if they can get us to do it, but we should resist being used that way.

Not only were all the Shiites in southern Iraq outside Najaf itself angered by the fighting in Najaf, but so were the Lebanese, Bahrainis, Iranians, Pakistanis, and Indians. An operation would have to be really important and urgent to make it worthwhile alienating 120 million people. I didn’t see the urgency. Most of the cities in Iraq are not under US control and are patrolled by militias. If you were going to pick a fight, Ramadi or Kut would have been preferable, because they lack the “gut” factor.

And, it is precisely by injuring these religious feelings that the US hastens the day when the Iraqi public comes out into the streets in the hundreds of thousands and begins the revolution for Iraqi independence.

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Sharon Repudiates the Road Map

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in remarks on Wednesday repudiated the American-sponsored “road map” to a peace process between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Sharon insists on acting unilaterally, intends to occupy the Palestinian population indefinitely, and intends to permanently incorporate much of the West Bank, conquered in 1967, into Israel, while leaving the Palestinian population stateless. They lack so much as a passport or a country, many of their children are hungry, unemployment is astronomical, and their lives are ruined by a dense network of Israeli roads and checkpoints that make it difficult even just to go to the hospital.

I am sure that most Americans are not even aware that Palestinians live under Israeli military occupation and that every day Palestinian territory shrinks as it is stolen by fanatical Israeli colonists. These fanatics do not differ in any obvious way from the French colonists in Algeria, which the French also proclaimed “French soil.” But colonialism is just another word for grand larceny. (Most Americans would be appalled if the United States suddenly chased all the Iraqis out of Baghdad and brought in Americans to permanently take over their apartments and other property, instead. But that is an exact analogy for how the Israelis are behaving.)

There are several examples in the contemporary world of land-hungry states attempting to incorporate neighbors’ territory into their own. You have the Chinese in Tibet, the Moroccans in the Western Sahara . . . and, well it is actually hard to think of a lot of recent such engorgements. But in each of these cases, the conquering state wants the people along with the territory. Tibetans have Chinese passports, and Saharans have Moroccan ones. But Israel isn’t giving the Palestinians Israeli passports. It just wants their land, not them, and sets things up to try to force the Palestinians out of their homeland. It is an ongoing injustice, with Israeli colonization creeping forward. Even if Sharon does remove the small number (8000) of Israeli colonists from Gaza, he intends to resettle them in the West Bank, which is nicer real estate.

Charles Smith’s Guest Editorial on Sept. 1 is worth revisiting in the light of these recent admissions.

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Aladdin’s Genie Run over by Humvee

The US military announced that a marine had been killed in Anbar province on Tuesday.

Wire services report that on Wednesday in Iraq

*In Ramadi, running gun battles broke out between local Sunni nationalists and US Marines. Guerrillas set off a bomb, killing 1 person. Altogether the fighting killed 13 and wounded 17.

*In Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb, killing 4 policemen and one civilian.

*In Samarra, due north of the capital, Sunni nationalists fired a rocket-propelled grenade at US and Iraqi troops who were guarding a city council building. The action imperilled that agreement reached between the US and local clan elders, which had allowed US troops back into the city.

*In Suwayra, to the south of the capital, guerrillas detonated a car bomb at the base of the Iraqi National Guard, killing two persons and wounding 10.

*Near the southern Shiite shrine city of Karbala, an unknown assailant assassinated Labib Mohammadi, an employee of Iran’s pilgrimage commission in Iraq.

Kim Housego of AP argues that the Iraqi nationalist guerrillas fighting the US presence are becoming more sophisticated and interlinked over time.

Stephen Farrell‘s piece, reprinted in an Australian paper, contains a clear-eyed summary of the security situation in Iraq. He notes, ” In the first two weeks of September alone, 291 Iraqi civilians have been killed. The number of foreigners taken hostage last month soared to 31. The average number of attacks on US soldiers reached 87 a day.”

But the saddest thing in his article comes at the end, where he tells us about the Iraqis’ loss of faith even in the 1,001 Nights:

“. . . this week Iraqis sat down to watch a wicked television satire updating the legend of the genie and the lamp. Summoned to a darkened flat to grant his customary wishes, the hapless blue-bearded genie is asked to repair the electricity supply, but can only attach the wires to the neighbours’ generator, which promptly breaks down.

Beseeched to improve the nation’s security, he disappears only to reappear bruised and battered, having been run over by US tanks. The message is clear. In the land of the Arabian Nights, even the genie can’t fix Iraq. ”

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Sistani Insists on Elections

Al-Zaman: Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani called on Wednesday for general elections to be held at the scheduled time (January 2005). He made the statement during a meeting of the Shiite leadership held in his office in Najaf. Present were Muhammad Said al-Hakim, Bashir Najafi, and Ishaq al-Fayyad in adition to Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Sistani underlined the necessity of “tossing out conflicts and emphasizing a closing of ranks, as well as intensifying efforts to create complete national unity in order to confront the danger that menaces the country.” Sistani called on the caretaker Iraqi government to take measures to release prisoners whose guilt has not been established, and to work to rebuild the cities that were damaged by the acts of violence and clashes. He asked for compensation to be given to those harmed, especially in the city of Najaf. He also called on the government to “treat problems with calm and wisdom instead of resorting to violence.” (All this according to Deutsche Press Agentur). Al-Hayat says Sistani called on Allawi to “stop the bloodbath.” He further insisted on more popular participation and on “filling in the gaps in the laws governing elections and parties” that were enacted by US civil administrator Paul Bremer and his appointed Interim Governing Council.

There are rumors that PM Iyad Allawi had wanted to storm the shrine of Ali in late August, and had been displeased with Sistani’s intervention to promote a non-violent end of the crisis.

In fact, the Iraqi government did let 750 prisoners go from Abu Ghuraib Prison as part of a commitment to process the prisoners there one way or another.

Sistani’s quite resonable demand for elections is nevertheless among the greatest dangers facing the Allawi government and the Americans. It will be extremely difficult actually to hold the elections on time. But Sistani believes only such elections can produce a legitimate government, and he already accepted a six-month delay. If the elections are not held, and if Sistani begins to fear they won’t be held soon, he may well call the masses into the streets. That could lead to an overthrow of Allawi and an expulsion of the Americans. Keep your eye on February and March of 2005.

Incidentally, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan predicted that it would be impossible to hold the elections on time. He also went on record that the Bush administration’s war against Iraq had been illegal, contravening the UN charter that forbids the launching of wars without UN Security Council authorization. Annan insists that there should have been a second UNSC vote.

The inclusion of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim in the meeting of the Grand Ayatollahs strikes me as extremely significant. Al-Hakim is probably only a Hujjat al-Islam, the stage below ayatollah, and so would not ordinarily be at a senior meeting. But because he heads a major political party, SCIRI, as well as its paramilitary, the Badr Corps, he seems to be being consulted by his seniors.

Al-Hakim lived in Tehran from the early 1980s until 2003 and has excellent relations with the hardliners in Iran, even though he has been cooperating with the Americans for the past two years. From summer of 2003, Sistani began allying with the al-Hakims and implicitly with SCIRI as a way of combatting the Sadrist movement, which has long had ambiguous feelings toward Sistani. The Sadrists maintain that al-Hakim and SCIRI spied on them for the Americans and encouraged the recent attack on them in Najaf. Although the Badr Corps was trained by the Revolutionary Guards in Iran and had been reputed to be formidable, so far it seems to have come off badly in any fight with the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr. It also seems to be the case that the Sadr movement has attracted far more followers in the past year than its rival, SCIRI, which remains a smaller movement. It is therefore not entirely clear how valuable Sistani’s tacit alliance with SCIRI is to him.

Al-Hakim has most recently been in the news because he denounced the US operation in Tal Afar (a largely Shiite Turkmen city).

Meanwhile, Sorayya Sarhaddi Nelson reports that the multi-million dollar Najaf reconstruction plan involves a provision to raze buildings considered too near to the Imam Ali Shrine. Among these are the HQ offices of the Sadr Movement, i.e. of Muqtada al-Sadr. These offices had been used by Muqtada’s father, revered by almost all Iraqi Shiites, Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr. On these grounds, the Sadrists are voicing strong opposition to the plan, as a desecration of Sadr II’s memory. They say only the decree of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani would convince them.

The plan to get rid of those buildings appears to originate with US-appointed Najaf governor, Adnan al-Zurfi, whom the Sadrists view as an American agent.

Al-Hayat reports that Basra police closed a political office of Muqtada al-Sadr in the Shatt al-Arab district and arrested four of his supporters.

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Kurdish Settlement in Kirkuk and Geopolitics

Jim Krane of AP has an excellent piece today on the demographic struggle taking place in Kirkuk, Iraqi’s northern oil city of some 750,000. In April of 2003 one reporter estimated that the population was 250,000 each, Turkmen, Arab and Kurd. The Arabs were settled there by Saddam and are disproportionately Shiites from the South. The Turkmen are mixed, but include a strong Shiite contingent, many of whom have given up the Turkmen folk Shiism in favor of the urban, clerical religion common among the Arabs of the south. Kirkuk is therefore one stronghold of the Sadr Movement, but the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq also has supporters there. My guess is that it was about half Shiite.

The Kurds are largely Sunni. They had come to predominate in the city in the 1960s and 1970s, but then Saddam deported a lot of them and brought in the Arabs.

Krane cites estimates that 72,000 Kurds have come into Kirkuk during the past 17 months, and 50,000 Arabs have fled back south. If the original estimates were true, then there would now be more like 320,000 Kurds and 200,000 Arabs in this city of 750,000, with Turkmen (who had dominated earlier in the 20th century) also adding small numbers of reimmigrants to their 250,000. Recently, as many as 500 Kurds a day have been coming to the city. That is, another 15,000 could be added by the time the quick and dirty census planned for October is carried out. That census in turn will be the basis for proportional representation in the planned January elections.

Turkmen and Arabs are afraid that the Kurds are using this demographic movement to engorge Kirkuk and ensure that it is added to the Kurdish super-province they are planning, which in turn would be at least semi-autonomous from Baghdad. When Kurdish leaders announced that they wanted Kirkuk in their proposed Kurdistan late last December, it provoked riots and gunplay between Kurds on the one hand and Turkmen and Arabs on the other. Much of the petroleum is in the north

Turkmen appear to be suspicious that the recent US assault on dissidents in the Turkmen city of Tal Afar was in part provoked by Kurdish misinformation and was aimed at reducing the autonomy of the Turkmen, who are the main opposition to the formation of the Kurdish super-province.

Political reporters who only pay attention to Barzani, Talabani and Allawi are missing this big story, which Krane has intelligently laid out. The struggle is social.

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Carbomb Kills 47, Wounds 114 in Karkh

Luke Harding writes for The Guardian in Baghdad that a huge car bomb killed 47 and wounded 114 at the al-Karkh Police station. Targeted were prospective recruits to the police force.

In Baqubah, guerrillas attacked a mini-bus full of police, killing 11 along with a civilian, as they headed home to their base.

US troops fought guerrillas in Ramadi, and the fighting left 8 dead and 18 wounded.

Although the shadowy Monotheism and Holy War (MAHW) organization tried to take credit for the Baghdad bombing, it most likely was committed by Iraqi nationalists. It is not clear whether these post-Baath nationalists are using MAHW as a screen, or whether MAHW is grandstanding and just taking credit, or whether American intelligence organizations are using MAHW as plot device that allows the Bush administration to continue to link Iraq and al-Qaeda. (Actually, anyway, Monotheism and Holy War is a rival to al-Qaeda that refuses to share resources with it, so even if it exists it doesn’t prove an al-Qaeda link to Iraq).

Colin Freeman of the Scotsman offers a clear-eyed assessment of what a farce the “turn-over of sovereignty” has come to be.

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Ethnic Conflict in Tal Afar?

A correspondent in Europe sent me the following from the Turkish press.

This very abridged story from a Turkish newspaper could be of interest. The Talafar case is VERY serious in fact, Foreign Minister Gül openly is threatening the USA to end cooperation. Guess what the opposition says: They are shocked and criticize the government of Turkey for cooperating with US on Iraq. I know how anti-American the Turks are, the government just has a good position since its backed by all the press including liberals. By the way perhaps you hear other numbers, but the Turkish press reports 60.000 inhabitants out of 450,000 have fled and are in a critical situation.

Gül and Gen Chief of staff are in Lithuania (for different reasons) and evaluate the situation in Telafer from there

The US wanted the Türkmen security forces of Telafer [obviously they are governing themselves] to make searches in some houses. The Türkmen security forces rejected this since they knew the people, who were also Türkmen. Upon US insistance on the operation, the security chief of Telafar stepped back and the US appointed a Kurd, Hurshit Hasso as security chief, who immediatley started the operation using support of Kurdish troops from Zaho and Erbil. These troops participated as Iraqi Security forces. Now much of the civilian population is in the Kamber valley and are afraid that the Kurds will bring their families along, settle for good and thus change the balance for the national census in Iraq, which is to be held on Oct 12.

The author is Fikret BILA, the newspaper Milliyet.

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