Informed Comment

2 US Troops, 15 Others killed

17 persons died in violent attacks in Iraq on Thursday, including two US troops.

Al-Hayat reports that Grand Ayatollah met with the Chaldean Patriarch. The grand ayatollah urged Christian Iraqis to vote, and condemned attacks on Christian churches by what he called “takfiri” forces. The practice of declaring some Muslims to actually be “kafirs” or infidels is controversial in mainstream Islam, since it is often felt that if someone claims to be a Muslim, the claim should be accepted. The militant, radical Muslim fundamentalists often declare other Muslims to be unbelievers. But this is the first time I have seen condemnation of takfiris in relation to non-Muslims. Sistani seems to be implying that it is even wrong for Muslim Iraqis to consider Christian Iraqis “infidels.” Of course, mainstream Islam does accept the truth of Jesus as an envoy of God, and the Koran says that Christians are closest in love to Muslims. So perhaps the statement isn’t surprising; but it struck me as distinctive.

Britain outlined the precise steps and stages envisaged in the movement of Iraq toward elections in January of 2005. This is the first time many of these steps have been spelled out publicly.

The FBI is investigating how Halliburton got its bids to work on Iraqi petroleum facilities.

Vice President Dick Cheney is the former CEO of Halliburton. The company is also being investigated concerning money that has gone missing.

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Breaking News: Film Crew May have Smoking Gun

A US film crew has footage of the explosives at al-Qaqaa that later went missing. This development may be the downside of embedding for the US military. It makes things hard to deny later on if you leave a filmed trail. For instance, the Russians can’t have absconded with the explosives before the war if a US camera crew still sees them there in April of 2003.

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Iraqi Officials Deny Early Disappearance of Explosives

Dr. Muhammad Sharaa who leads Iraq’s science monitoring department, denies that the 380 tons of high explosives that has gone missing could have been moved in spring of 2003 before or during the war. AFP reports:

“It is impossible that these materials could have been taken from this site before the regime’s fall,” Mohammed al-Sharaa, who heads the Science Ministry’s site monitoring department, said.

“The officials that were inside this facility (Al-Qaqaa) beforehand confirm that not even a shred of paper left it before the fall.

“I spoke to them about it and they even issued certified statements to this effect which the US-led coalition was aware of.”

AP’s timeline on the explosives shows that an inspection team from the International Atomic Energy Commission visited Iraq in mid-March, 2003 just before the war, and found the seals they had placed on the explosives containers in January untouched.

US military officers are now expressing confidence that the explosives couldn’t have been removed in April-May 2003 because there were US vehicles all over the roads it would need to have travelled. But as Nathan Brown notes below, the signs of looting were far more extreme as reported in spring of 2004 than they had been earlier. So the evidence suggests that in fact lots of looting did go on under the nose of the US military. (Again, as John Kerry has pointed out, this wasn’t their fault; they didn’t have enough troops on the ground to secure the weapons sites). In fact, all the looting of all the weapons depots took place with US military driving all over the country. But they had no instructions to stop random trucks and that was not defined as their mission by the Bush administration.

After all, you wouldn’t have thought that seven nuclear facilities in Iraq could have been looted at that time, either, with all the US troops around and US vehicles on the roads. Sorry, nice try but no cigar.

I think the evidence is that the explosives were still there and under seal in mid-March 2003. I find it difficult to believe they were moved during the war. What soldier would have been stupid enough to drive a truck full of that stuff through Iraq as the US was bombing the country? Despite the stability of these explosives under ordinary circumstances, such a truck driver would have been exposed to extreme danger from American fire, if anything sufficiently powerful hit the truck. Plus the Iraqi scientists now confirm that it wasn’t moved.

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Brown: 2004 Bremer Report on al-Qaqaa Looting

Professor Nathan Brown of George Washington University writes:

In the dispute between the Kerry campaign and the Bush administration over the disappearance of explosives at al-Qaqaa, the core of the Bush defense is that we don’t know when the explosives disappeared; it could have happened before American troops arrived. President Bush stated today: “Our military is now investigating a number of possible scenarios, including that the explosives may have been moved before our troops even arrived at the site. This investigation is important and it’s ongoing, and a political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your commander in chief.”

I have to admit that I am unsure why this is a defense. If the investigation is so important, why is it still ongoing? One CPA document (discussed below) makes clear that the extent of looting has been known—not merely suspected but documented and evaluated—for some time. The reason we don’t know when the explosives disappeared is that we were not securing or monitoring the site. In other words, our lack of knowledge about the date of the disappearance is itself an indication that nobody was watching one of the most important military production sites in the country. Thus, to proclaim now that we don’t know what happened is not evidence of an open mind; it is evidence of an open barn door. Why did Bush wait until October 2004 to look into the matter? The 18 ½-month gap is no more to Bush’s credit than the 18 ½-minute gap was to Nixon’s. It is the absence of evidence that is the problem.

But the absence of evidence is not evidence of absent-mindedness. There were people who said a year and a half ago that this needed attention. In particular, the IAEA was trying to examine the site from the very end of the war. We barred them. In other words, the failure to monitor was not an oversight but a policy decision. It may have been partly based on the size of the American force, but it was also based on an ideological hostility to the United Nations.

Actually, we do know a little bit more than has been reported. But the little evidence we do have hardly supports the Bush case. What has been widely reported is that during and immediately after the war, some American military units and journalists briefly visited the site. What has not been reported is that on 15 April 2004—a year after the war—CPA head Paul Bremer issued a regulation transferring the employees of some military industries to various parts of the Iraqi government. I assume the point was to ensure that these critical people would get paid and not defect to the insurgents. That regulation can be viewed here.

Annex A to the regulation mentions al-Qaqaa (see p. 3 of the annex) and the extent of damage and looting there. 37% of the buildings were destroyed and fully 85% of its machines were destroyed or looted.

In other words, the place was very utterly trashed as of this past April, a year into the Iraqi occupation.

What does this have to do with the flap between Bush and Kerry? Well, it seems to me that if damage to equipment was so remarkably extensive—with the vast majority of the equipment ripped out or destroyed—any of the military units or journalists visiting in April 2003 should have noticed it even in a cursory examination. One of the accounts (by Fred Wellman, a former spokesman for the 101st Airborne Division’s 2nd Brigade) does indeed mention that looting was underway on April 9. This was roughly when the Iraqi regime disintegrated and the looting began, so the observation makes sense. Looting was not mentioned in the accounts of the first American visit to the site, the previous week. I do not know how long it takes to loot such a site so thoroughly (according the original NY Times story, the looting was still going on quite recently), but it seems that almost all of it occurred during the period of the American occupation. When the explosives were taken cannot be ascertained from this. But we seem to have evidence that virtually everything at the site—even the stuff that was nailed down—was taken while it was under our nominal control.

- Nathan Brown

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Qazi tries to Forestall Sunni Boycott of Elections

Az-Zaman: United Nations special envoy to Iraq, Ashraf Jahangir Qazi, held talks on Wednesday with Shaikh Muhammad Bashar al-Faydi, a leader of the Association of Muslim Scholars. They discussed the AMS attitude toward the January elections as well as the situation in Fallujah, which continues to be bombed by the United States. Qazi said that the UN was willing to take a more active negotiating role in Iraq if it might avert a Sunni Arab boycott of the elections. (A Sunni boycott might produce a parliament that was 80% Shiite and 15% Kurdish, leaving the Sunni Arabs out altogether, even though they form 15 percent of the population and are the wealthiest and best educated Iraqis. This result would be a huge disaster, since the parliament would then write the constitution and the Sunni Arabs would not be represented in the process.) So far, AMS is urging a boycott, in contrast to the Iraqi Islamic Party, which wants Sunnis to come out in force.

It is a shame that Qazi has to play this role, with the Americans having no better policy toward the Sunni Arabs than to bomb the bejesus out of them. Why isn’t Colin Powell talking to al-Faydi?

The US bombed Fallujah again on Wednesday, killing 3 persons.

President Ghazi al-Yawir (a Sunni) received a delegation from (Shiite) Karbala on Wednesday. He said a way must be found for Iraqis to prevent a US attack on Fallujah and other Iraqi cities.

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Deadly Dual Use Explosives Missing: Part Deux

The politicization of news in the United States has reached such an embarrassing point that what Vice Presidential candidate Dick Cheney thinks about what was going on in Iraq in April of 2003 is being reported by the press in an article on the weapons’ disappearance, even though he was not there and knows nothing about it and speaks in the subjunctive. The proper journalistic judgment on such a statement? Treat it on the op-ed page but keep it away from news sections unless the story is on Cheney’s claims in his speeches.

Despite the new attempt to defend Bush from charges of incompetence over the disappearance of 380 tons of dual-use explosives (which can be used to detonate nuclear bombs) from the al-Qaqaa facility in Iraq, there is really no excuse. The Pentagon’s attempt to maintain that the facility was inspected in early April by US troops has fallen apart. It has 1000 buildings, and the troops had no orders to search them exhaustively. Thus, the statement that they did not see the stickers of the International Atomic Energy Commission does not in fact suggest that the explosives were already gone. It indicates that they didn’t have time to see much of the facility.

The gravity of the disappearance of these explosives cannot be underscored enough. Not only can they help in the detonation of a nuclear bomb, they are deadly in their own right. A pound can bring down a jetliner. There are 2000 pounds in a ton. Bush let enough high-power explosives disappear to bring down (God forbid) 760,000 airliners! What if this stuff leaks from Iraq to al-Qaeda?

Initial Bush administration responses to the scandal depended on NBC news reporting which, however, did not say what the administration said it said. The embedded NBC reporter has now clarified that the 101st Infantry did reach al-Qaqaa a week after the 3rd ID, but did not inspect the site. Its commander told CBS he would have needed 4 times as many troops as he had to do that job on top of everything else. Probably the entire US military needed 4 times as many troops as they had in Iraq.

The Bush administration’s attempts to pull the wool over the eyes of the American public fails on several grounds. First, there is every indication that al-Qaqaa was not secured and could not have been secured. That is because Bush did not send enough troops to Iraq to do the job that needed to be done. It was Bush’s decision, not Rumsfeld. At this late date surely Bush’s tendency to farm out blame to his cabinet for his own decisions, and then to decline to hold his cabinet members responsible for mistakes, must be completely rejected. The buck stops with the president. Bush decided to send such a small army to Iraq that the place immediately fell apart in an orgy of uncontrollable looting. This development is not the fault of the Iraqis. The sudden removal of the structures of government regularly produces this result in history. There was looting when the electricity went out in New York in 1977. It is Bush’s fault.

Second, although the disappearance of the RDX and HMX is frightening, it is only one of many such scandals. Dual-use equipment and even nuclear material was also looted (most of the nuclear material has thankfully been recovered, no thanks to Bush).

Third, this charade of looking around for lowly GIs to get the blame off Bush about al-Qaqaa is just public relations. The fact is that there are people in the Pentagon and the CIA who know exactly what happened there. This is because al-Qaqaa was certainly under US satellite surveillance in spring of 2003. The United States had extensive satellite surveillance of Iraqi weapons sites, some of the techniques of which Colin Powell revealed at the United Nations Security Council. Although the interpretation of the photos turns out to be more difficult than proponents of the technology admitted, some basic things can be seen. For instance, trucks moving 380 tons of explosives from a sensitive facility could certainly be spotted. An automobile typically weighs two tons, so this is like moving 190 automobiles. It is a big operation and would show up clearly in the aerial photographs. That information like this is still probably classified, even though the Saddam government is long gone and there is no compelling national security need to keep it secret, underlines how easy it is for governments with billions of dollars in high tech surveillance equipment to manipulate a democratic public. It is a shell game, with information being shifted around and then hidden.

And if all else fails, you just muddy the waters with some cock and bull story that you know the party faithful will swallow and which will create doubt in the minds of the independents.

We have seen the debasement of discourse reach the point where George W. Bush can actually deny that he let Bin Laden escape at Tora Bora, and then can use John Kerry’s simple statement of that fact as a means of indicting John Kerry. Bush portrayed Kerry in one speech as cocky and too sure of himself for making the charge. Numerous eyewitnesses from among captured Taliban and al-Qaeda confirm Kerry’s allegation. The way Bush gets away with this is that the journalists are not calling him on it.

The Bush administration is now using the same rhetorical strategy with regard to al-Qaqaa. You label a true charge false or hasty. And then you use your own lie to impugn the character of your opponent, who is now accused of being hasty in his judgment or of being dishonest or guilty of poor fact checking.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld even tried to dismiss the missing explosives story by comparing to the story of the looting of the Baghdad Museum. He seems to want to say that the museum was not in fact looted. But of course it was. Indeed, as a historian of Iraq I weep every day that apparently the archives of the entire period of the constitutional monarchy (1922-1958) were burned or disappeared. That would be as though the US National Archives records for everything from the Roaring Twenties through the Depression, WW II, and the Eisenhower Administration had completely disappeared off the face of the earth. The rightwing revisionist story that the looting never happened is itself a myth. So Rumsfeld disproves a true charge by comparing it to another true charge that he has incorrectly labeled a myth, thereby discrediting both.

The presidential election of 2004 is a test of Lincoln’s assertion that you can’t fool all the people all the time. At the very least, if Bush is put back in it will demonstrate that you can fool enough of the people enough of the time.

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Bush will ask for another $70 Billion
Allawi Slams Bush over Troop Massacre

The Bush administration will ask for another $70 billion for Iraq in another month or two if re-elected. Remember in the debates when Kerry said Iraq had cost $200 billion, and Bush corrected him that it was only $120 billion? Well, it turns out that Kerry was right, but Bush was being dishonest in postponing the further request until after the election. Another example of how the Bush administration is government by “representation” in the sense that Michel Foucault used the term rather than in the civics sense. Foucault said that people have a tendency to represent reality, and then to refer to the representation rather than to the reality. (This is also the way stereotypes and bigotry work.) So Bush represented the Iraq war as a $120 billion effort, and actually corrected Kerry with reference to this representation. But the representation was a falsehood, hidden by a clever fiscal delaying tactic. So Kerry is made to seem imprecise or as exaggerating, when in fact he was referring to the reality. Bush made representation trump reality.

Edward Said in his Orientalism shows the ways in which Western travelers and writers have often invented a representation of the Middle East that then gets substituted for Middle Eastern realities so powerfully that the realities can no longer even be seen by Westerners. Said cites travel accounts by eyewitnesses who report falsehoods that had already entered the literature. So these travelers let the representations over-rule what their own eyes saw.

In a sign that Iyad Allawi finally realizes he needs to distance himself from the Americans if he is to have any political future (or perhaps even just future) in Iraq, he blamed the US military for neglecting to arm and escort the recruits that were found massacred on Sunday. He accused the US military, and by extension the Bush administration, of “gross negligence.”

Allawi was contradicted by his Defense Minister, Hazim Shaalan, who blamed the recruits for being too eager to get home after training, for leaving the base at midnight and without arms, and for taking an unprotected route.

The Bush administration is not forgiving about criticism from allies, so although Allawi will get points with the Iraqi public for finally speaking out about US incompetence in this regard, he may well find a long knife in his back if Bush gets back in. And, obviously, Shaalan is angling for Allawi’s job by blaming the victims.

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