Informed Comment

Tsunami Toll Nearly 70,000 and Rising
Where’s Bush?

The known death toll from the tsunami keeps rising so rapidly that a daily weblog cannot hope to keep up with it. Early Wednesday am Reuters was giving 68,000. The largest number of dead were in Indonesia, then Sri Lanka, then India and then Thailand.

The horrific stories of corpses piled up on beaches or in trees, the neeed to bulldoze them into mass graves to dispel the spectre of disease, the wailing of relatives, the threat of cholera and other epidemics, finally filled the US media on Tuesday, as some sense of the full scale of the catastrophe finally began sinking in. The audio I heard of the wailing of relatives was the hardest to experience. The dead don’t mourn being dead, that is left to the living.

Such catastrophes can have a political impact and can affect security affairs. The failure of the Turkish government to respond in a timely manner to the 1999 earthquake sounded the death knell for the government of then prime minister Bulent Ecevit, and set the stage for the later victory at the polls of the Muslim reform party, Ak.

As John F. Harris and Robin Wright of the Washington Post cannily note, US President George W. Bush has missed an important opportunity to reach out to the Muslims of Indonesia. The Bush administration at first pledged a paltry $15 million, a mysteriously chintzy response to what was obviously an enormous calamity. Bush himself remained on vacation, and now has reluctantly agreed to a meeting of the National Security Council by video conference. If Bush were a statesman, he would have flown to Jakarta and announced his solidarity with the Muslims of Indonesia (which has suffered at least 40,000 dead and rising).

Indeed, the worst-hit area of Indonesia is Aceh, the center of a Muslim separatist movement, and a gesture to Aceh from the US at this moment might have meant a lot in US-Muslim public relations. Bin Laden and Zawahiri sniffed around Aceh in hopes of recruiting operatives there, being experts in fishing in troubled waters. Doesn’t the US want to outflank al-Qaeda? As it is, the president of the United States is invisible and on vacation (unlike several European heads of state), and could think of nothing better to do than announce a paltry pledge. As Harris and Wright rightly say, the rest of the world treated the US much better than this after September 11.

The Indonesian government itself has an opportunity to gain some good will in troubled Aceh, and appears to have taken a good first step by allowing international aid agencies into the area.

Already the speaker of the provincial parliament in Kerala, India, has been mobbed by angry fishermen. He only escaped by promising to deliver their grievances to the chief minister.

Tamil Nadu, another affected area, is important to the Congress government of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, with five cabinet ministers in his government. How he handles the crisis could be important, since Congress came back to power precisely because it was supported by villagers. As of Wednesday, the Indian government was denying that the tsunami would affect over-all economic growth, which was only about 6.6 percent this year, less than the 8 percent PM Singh has said is necessary for the country to develop properly.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Dozens Killed in Iraq

Early Wednesday morning, a huge explosion rocked West Baghdad, flattening several houses and killing 28, including 7 policemen. Iraqi police were raiding the building, a suspected safe house for guerrilla forces, when it went up in flames (presumably because munitions stored there caught fire).

Dawn estimates the number of dead in Iraq violence on Tuesday at 42 (This was before the house exploded). Al-Zaman says 26 of them were Iraqi police or national guards. Sunni Arab guerrillas launched apparently coordinated attacks on police stations in the Sunni heartland. In Dijla alone, guerrillas killed 12 police. The Baathists and Salafi Muslim fundamentalists fighting the guerrilla war see police and national guards as collaborators with foreign occupation.

In recent days, several members of the Sadr Movement [Arabic] have been arrested, including one sweep of 15 in Hilla on Sunday. A spokesman for Muqtada al-Sadr warned that the arrests threaten to provoke unrest in Shiite areas on the even of the forthcoming elections.

Syria is denying giving aid to the Iraqi guerrillas. Personally, I don’t think it is plausible that Damascus is helping the Salafi Muslim fundamentalists, whom the Allawis (folk Shiites) in charge of the Syrian Baath fear and despise. Some Baath officials or officers might be helping some Iraqi Baath guerrillas. The Syrian Baath is no longer a coherent party, but rather has multiple cliques. But note that the Iraqi Baath and the Syrian Baath seldom got along, and Syria allied against Iraq in the Gulf War.

Georgie Ann Geyer gives evidence that the US military is in denial about how badly the fight against the Sunni Arab guerrillas is going. The US has no Iraqi police in Mosul, a city of a million, and there has been an expansion of the number of guerrilla cells thoughout the Sunni Arab heartland.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Bin Laden votes in Iraq and Shoots himself in the Foot

Usamah Bin Laden’s latest video was broadcast on al-Jazeera on Monday, in which he commanded Muslims to boycott the January 30 elections in Iraq, and expressed his approval of Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Zarqawi had been a rival of Bin Laden’s in Afghanistan and had earlier declined to share resources with al-Qaeda. But in recent months al-Zarqawi changed the name of his group from Monotheism and Holy war to Mesopotamian al-Qaeda, and pledged fealty to Bin Laden.

In declaring “infidels” all who vote under the “infidel” interim constitution negotiated by Iraqi politicians with US civil administrator Paul Bremer last winter, Bin Laden is seeking to counter the decree of grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani that Iraqis must vote in the upcoming elections or they will be consigned to hell. Bin Laden is arguing, according to the Aljazeera.net in Arabic, that the interim constitution that is the framework for elections is artificial and pagan (“jahili”, pertaining to the Age of Ignorance before Islam) because it does not recognize Islam as the sole source of law.

Bin Laden’s intervention in Iraq was hamfisted and clumsy, and will benefit the United States and the Shiites enormously. Most Iraqi Muslims, Sunni or Shiite, dislike the Wahhabi branch of Islam prevalent in Saudi Arabia, and with which Bin Laden is associated. Nationalistic Iraqis will object to a foreigner interfering in their national affairs.

Zarqawi is widely hated in Iraq because the operations of his group often kill innocent Iraqis as opposed to American troops. The Shiites in particular despise Zarqawi, and are aware of his hopes of provoking a Sunni-Shiite bloodbath in Iraq. (The muted Shiite response to the US assault on Fallujah in November and December derived in large part from a conviction that the city had become a base for Zarqawi and like-minded Salafi terrorists). Zarqawi websites have claimed credit for the assassination in 2003 of Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, a respected Shiite leader, which involved descrating the Shiite holy city of Najaf. The mainstream of the Kurds hates Zarqawi, because of his earlier association with the small Kurdish radical Muslim terrorist group, Ansar al-Islam, which targeted the two major Kurdish parties.

Bin Laden as much as declared Grand Ayatollah Sistani an infidel. But Sistani is almost universally loved by the 65% of Iraqis who are Shiites, and is widely respected among many Sunni Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen, as well. Bin Laden, the Saudi engineer, makes himself look ridiculous trying to give a fatwa against the Grand Ayatollah of Najaf. If anything, to have al-Qaeda menacing the Shiites in this way would tend to strengthen the American-Shiite alliance.

If Bin Laden had been politically clever, he would have phrased his message in the terms of Iraqi nationalism. By siding with the narrowest sliver of Sunni extremists, he denied himself any real impact. By adopting Zarqawi, who has killed many more Iraqis (especially Shiites) than he has Americans, he simply tarnishes his own image inside Iraq.

It appears that Bin Laden is so weak now that he is forced to play to his own base, of Saudi and Salafi jihadists, some of whom are volunteer guerrillas in Iraq. They are the only ones in Iraq who would be happy to see this particular videotape.

The only way Bin Laden could profit from this intervention in the least would be if a civil war between Sunni Arabs and Shiites really did break out in Iraq, and if the beleaguered Sunnis went over to al-Qaeda in large numbers. Since the Sunni Arabs are a minority of 20%, they and he would still lose, but for Bin Laden, who is now a refugee and without any strong political base outside a few provinces of Saudi Arabia, to pick up 5 million Iraqi Sunni Arabs, would be a major political victory. His recent videotape calling for the overthrow of the Saudi government suggests that he might hope to use any increased popularity in Anbar province as a springboard for renewed attacks on Saudi Arabia, especially on its petroleum sector.

It is a desperate, crackpot hope. The narrow, sectarian and politically unskilfull character of this speech is the most hopeful sign I have seen in some time that al-Qaeda is a doomed political force, a mere Baader-Meinhof Gang or Red Army Faction with greater geographical reach.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Iraqi Islamic Party Withdraws
Dispute over Theocracy among Iraqi Shiites

The near assassination on Monday of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, a leading Shiite cleric and politician, raised new fears of sectarian strife in Iraq. Al-Hakim himself, however, urged Shiites to concentrate on winning the January 30 elections and to avoid doing anything that would derail them. (I.e. he knows that anti-election Sunni extremists are baiting the Shiites, and he is urging them not to fall for it).

Muhsin Abdul Hamid of the Iraqi Islamic Party withdrew his party ticket from the January 30 elections. He said he was not calling for a boycott, but his party was simply declining to participate because the Sunni Arab minority will be disadvantaged in any polls because of the poor security conditions in their provinces. The IIP withdrawal is a huge blow to the electoral process’s legitimacy, since there are now no major Sunni Islamic groupings in the race, and only small, old-style 1960s Arab nationalist parties are competing for the Sunni Arab vote. The popular Association of Muslim Scholars has called for Sunnis to boycott the elections, a call taken up on Monday by Usamah Bin Laden as well.

Secretary of State Colin Powell said the US would “urge” Iraqi Sunnis to turn out to vote. He also said that any post-election scheme for ensuring proper Sunni participation, such as increasing the number of seats in parliament and awarding the extra ones to Sunnis as a quota, would have to await the election of the Iraqi parliament itself, since only it could make such new rules. Powell at one point seemed to me to suggest that ensuring Sunni representation at the cabinet level in the executive of the new government would be a sufficient step. But that is simply not true. Since parliament will craft the new permanent constitution, it is essential that Sunni Arabs have a proportionate role in drafting it. (See Andrew Arato’s essay below for one possible solution to this problem.)

Hannah Allam of Knight Ridder reveals that the United Iraqi Alliance, the mega-Shiite list put together under the auspices of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, nearly collapsed because of an internal dispute among the Shiite parties over theocracy.

The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) has long backed rule by clerics. The Dawa Party is more lay in character, but does want an Islamic Republic that is ruled by Islamic law and Islamic economics. The Sadr movement claims to be a third way between Khomeinist theocracy and Najaf’s quietism. Many important candidates on the UIA ticket come from these movements. They are opposed by more secular-leaning Shiites, who share the ticket with them.

In his book “Islamic Government,” which originated as lectures in Najaf in the late 1960s, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had put forward his theory of the “Guardianship of the Jurisprudent” (in Arabic, wilayat al-faqih). He held that in the absence of a Prophet or appointed vicar of the Prophet (an Imam), the clerics should rule in Islam. Khomeini’s idea was, in this form, a complete innovation in Islamic thought, similar to Lenin’s transformation of Marxism when he posited the intellectuals as the vanguard of the proletariat. Khomeini may indeed have been influenced by Leninism via Iraqi Baathism, as Ervand Abrahamian has speculated. In Khomeini’s system, the clerics are the vanguard of the Imam (Shiites believe the Imam is absent, in a supernatural realm, but will someday return–rather as Christians believe of Christ).

Although Abdul Aziz al-Hakim now denies it, he has long supported Khomeini’s ideology.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani rejected the rule of the jurisprudent in political affairs, for which he is disliked by hardliners in Iran. But he affirms the guardianship of the jurisprudent in “social affairs.” That is, he feels the clerics should intervene through their rulings (fatwas) to ensure that Islamic law and Islamic principles are upheld by any Muslim-majority parliament. Obviously, this stance is not the same as a separation of religion and state. Rather, it is simply an insistence that clerics influence the state indirectly, rather than ruling themselves.

SCIRI has for many years accepted the guardianship of the jurisprudent in political affairs. Dawa’s position is closer to that of Khomeini, but the party does hope to implement Islamic law or shariah as the law of the land.

A big victory for the largely Shiite United Iraqi Alliance probably will not lead to clerical rule, though Abdul Aziz al-Hakim said in spring of 2003 that he hoped the Shiite majority would eventually make its will felt. But it is likely to lead formerly rather secular Iraq toward greater implementation of Islamic law or shariah. If the Sunni Arabs boycott in large numbers and end up underrepresented, this situation would magnify the power of the Shiite parties, including the theocratic ones.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Arato Guest Editorial: The Iraqi Constitution

The Iraqi Constitution: A Modest Proposal

Andrew Arato

Iraq is on the verge of a disaster that is ultimately of our making. The United States has imposed a political process on Iraq characterized by the exclusion of the main representatives of militant, and organized actors fully capable of acting on their own behalf. If elections are held now the constitution-making National Assembly will dramatically under-represent Sunni Arab minority, many of whom are already “negotiating” with weapons in hand.

If elections were postponed however, it is the the Shi’ite Arab majority that might very will explode, and with considerable justification. They too, led by the Grand Ayatollah Al-Sistani, have regarded the imposed process and the delay of free elections with anger and suspicion.

The obvious problem is that a legitimate, new constitution in a divided society cannot be made except with the full participation of all major, potentially contentious groups of the country. Iraq missed out on a Hungarian- or South African-type Round Table that could prepare such participation, and now free elections alone can produce the partners in constitution making. But the results of the elections are likely to be seriously distorted because of the insurrection, even assuming that the Shi’ite majority is capable of guarding against electoral fraud and manipulation on the part of the interim government.

Changing the mistaken, single district electoral law might have been the most useful suggestion for avoiding catastrophe, but it is now unfortunately too late. There are, however, alternatives once a constitutional National Assembly is elected that would deal with the same problem of regional or ethnic or party-political under-representation as long as that representation does not drop to zero. The most obvious one is setting up a constitution drafting committee based on party parity, and a qualified majority rule. Constitutions are not actually drafted by plenary sessions, here the probable locus of misrepresentation, but parliamentary committees where that representation can be corrected. I worked on constitution-making in Hungary 1994-96, and in particular on a scheme by which a 75 % governmental majority was greatly reduced to give real participation rights to the opposition, on the drafting committee level. Parliament could only vote on drafts that came out of a committee in which there was almost parity among 5-6 parties. Something like this, less formally but more successfully was done in Spain in 1977.

Let us assume for the sake of argument a National Assembly with 60% for the Shi’ite led block (The Iraqi United Alliance), 20% for the Kurdistan List and 10% for a combination of various authentic Sunni Arab lists, 5% for the governmental list of Allawi, and 5% for various other groupings. In this case, a 15-person committee could be set up having 3 expert members for each of these groupings, with the requirement that positive decisions (preferably on single clauses) be taken by 12 out of 15 members. The majority would still be protected, since nothing could be adopted without its plenary votes. The Kurdish minority could be protected too if in addition the rule were adopted that a final draft requires the support of 80% of the members of the National Assembly.

The combination of these provisions would be preferable even for the Kurds to the three-province veto available in the current interim constitution, the Temporary Administrative Law. As that poorly drafted and hastily imposed document is written, a simple parliamentary majority can apparently adopt a new constitution, while the negative vote of 2/3 of merely three provinces–hence possibly as few as 1/10 of the populatio–can block ratification. This arrangement is entirely unstable, and the leaders of the Shi’ite majority have never accepted it. They could very well repudiate it along with all other restrictions originally imposed by the occupying power.

There is a desperate need therefore to negotiate new and legitimate but less crippling counter-majoritarian limitations in constitution making. There is an even more obvious need for the leaders of the majority to clearly signal their intentions right now to undertake such negotiations after the elections.

Andrew Arato

Professor

The New School University

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Tsunami a Foretaste of Global Warming

The horror of waves caroming across the Indian ocean at 500 miles an hour (the speed of a commercial jet liner!) and then crashing into beaches and shorelines at a height of as much as 30 feet, for all the world like liquid Godzilla, crushing sunbathers and carrying hapless villagers off deep into the sea, can scarcely be guessed at for those of us who only see a bit of rubble and ankle-deep flooding, in the aftermath, on the cable television news feeds. On Sunday at least 12,500 to 14,000 lives were abruptly snuffed out in India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia and elsewhere in the path of the enormous waves, called tsunami. [ 1/27/04 2:33 pm: The toll is now 22,000 and rising]. It was caused by a massive earthquake in the Pacific off Indonesia, of nearly 9 on the Richter scale–the fourth largest measured in the past century. On the east coast of India, some 500,000 persons were left without electricity or sewerage, surrounded by dead animals and human corpses, some of the latter in trees or atop surviving houses.

This particular tsunami was caused by an earthquake and was unrelated to climate change.

Since some readers have been confused by skimming, let me repeat this sentence: This particular tsunami was caused by an earthquake and was unrelated to climate change.

But everyone should realize that global warming contributes to extreme weather events, causing more hurricanes and typhoons and stronger ones.

Even in the year 2004 extreme weather events caused on the order of $100 billion in damage– an unprecedentedly high figure and one due to rise.

Giant waves are only one potential problem with global warming.

A recent documentary on the effects of global warming in Maryland showed:

“According to CCAN, global warming may ultimately damage coastal property, destroy freshwater aquifers and eliminate entire towns and islands. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the altered precipitation patterns associated with climate change could reduce Maryland’s major agricultural crops by 24 to 42 percent. Other negative changes may include a decline in Chesapeake Bay crab and fish harvests, and increases in deaths from urban heat stress and mosquito-borne diseases, according to CCAN.”

As Naomi Oreskes pointed out in the Washington Post on Saturday, the scientific literature for the past decade has expressed no doubts about the reality of global warming or of human responsibility for some large portion of it. Although not all scientists are convinced, the scholarly literature where this matter is debated technically is characterized by broad consensus. The main doubts that are raised are in the mass media, for ulterior motives, by non-scientists. Moving to cleaner energy as soon as possible is the only way to prevent future tsunamis that will hit closer to home for Americans.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Suicide Bomber Kills 9, Wounds 39 Outside Home of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim

A carbomber detonated his payload Monday morning outside the home in Baghdad of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, killing at least 9 persons and wounding 39. Al-Hakim’s mansion, taken over from former senior Baath official Tariq Aziz, is in the Jadiriyah quarter, and serves as party headquarters for the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). This party, which was based in Tehran 1982-2003, has joined the group slate, the United Iraqi Alliance, put together under the auspices of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, and al-Hakim places high on the list. This attempt to assassinate al-Hakim seems likely the work of Baathists determined to derail the elections scheduled for January 30.

On August 29, 2003, a huge car bomb in Najaf killed al-Hakim’s older brother, Muhammad Baqir, who had headed SCIRI since 1984. I said at that time that I thought the likeliest perpetrators were Baathists. The al-Hakims directed what the Baath government would have seen as terrorist actions against the regime for nearly two decades from a hostile country, and the Baath is damned if it is going to watch an al-Hakim now become prime minister of the country.

Guerrillas set off another bomb in the Shiite shrine city of Karbala southwest of Baghdad, killing a family of 7 when it destroyed their home.

On Sunday, some 14 Iraqis had been killed in assassinations and bombings around the country.

Guerrillas bombed another pipeline on Sunday, running between Kirkuk and Baiji. The northern pipelines to Turkey have been closed for weeks. They usually pump about 200,000 barrels of petroleum a day.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat: In Baqubah, Iraqi National Guards prevented hundreds of students from holding a peaceful demonstration. Eyewitnesses say they waded into the students and beat them. The Temporary Administrative Law guarantees Iraqis freedom of assembly, but many of its provisions have been suspended by the caretaker Allawi government.

In other news, Iraq’s highest-ranking general rejected on Sunday President Bush’s allegations that Iraqi armed forces deserted from Fallujah. He did admit that some refused to report for duty in the first place. (This latter is not cowardice by the way; many Iraqi soldiers say they dislike the idea of fighting other Iraqis on behalf of the US).

It also seems clear that the suicide bomber that attacked the cafeteria at the US military base near Mosul on Tuesday was a radical fundamentalist who disguised himself in an Iraq National Guard uniform. Some bloggers had been alleging that the incident showed that the US had been right to dissolve the Iraqi army. But the facts belie this claim. Had the army not been dissolved, so many ex-soldiers would not have joined the insurgency out of despair, anger or lack of funds. And the Iraqi army could have been deployed against the Army of Ansar al-Sunnah, whom they then hated.

The New York Times reported on Sunday that the Bush administration has been exploring with Iraqi figures like Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and the election commission the possibility of a set-aside for Sunni Arabs in the parliament to be elected on January 30. The American overtures have met substantial resistance, but not complete rejection, writes Steven Weisman.

Of course, I heartily endorse this initiative, and had proposed it myself in early December.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off