Photographs of Abused Iraqi Prisoners

Screen captures from the CBS 60 Minutes broadcast of photographs of abused Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghuraib prison are available at memory hole. Others are floating around the internet that are even more explicit. There was also apparently coerced male on male sexual activity. The genteel mainstream news reports of this scandal (which have given it less attention than it deserves or than it will get in the Arab press) have not commented on the explicitly sexual message sent by the abusers, which is that Iraq is f**ked.
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Guest Commentary: Ray Close on 'The Real Meaning of Fallujah'

Guest Commentary

Ray Close


' The proposed plan to turn over control of the Fallujah security situation to an Iraqi force under the command of four retired generals is much more significant than might at first be apparent.

On the strategic level, with regard to overall American policy in Iraq, it represents a defeat for those who have contended all along that the insurgency is being carried on by a small group of thugs who do not enjoy widespread support within the Iraqi population at large. Today Donald Rumsfeld is explaining that he is merely acceding to the recommendations of local American military commanders that this compromise arrangement be substituted for the original plan for an all-out assault ---- weakly shifting from himself to them the responsibility for this sudden abandonment of both tough tactics and tough rhetoric. This represents a humiliating defeat for those who have argued that the United States had no choice but to "pacify" Fallujah, arrest the insurgents, confiscate their weapons, and reestablish the authority of the American military occupation forces. The new plan would accomplish none of those explicit and uncompromising assertions made repeatedly over the past few weeks by the president himself, by US military commanders in the field, and (please note) by politicians in the United States of BOTH PARTIES.

Strangely, George W. Bush does not seem willing yet to acknowledge this obvious defeat for his policies. One cannot attribute this merely to bad advice from his mentors, unless one is to believe that the neocons have a complete monopoly on all in-put to his mental processes. That is not a credible explanation. It seems more likely that his stubborn adherence to simplistic explanations of all anti-American sentiments and actions is another sign of his worrisome inability to comprehend the subtleties of this and other similar international challenges falling within the broad title of "the war on terror". Perhaps his intellectual mind-set ("there is no common ground between freedom and terrorism") simply makes it impossible for him to see the world as anything other than a zero-sum conflict between good and evil. That is very troubling quality, especially in the leader of a superpower.

Another conclusion one may draw from events of the past few days is that the general US strategy for dealing with Iraq, which has been based on predictions and recommendations of the neocon cabal in Washington (especially Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle) is becoming exposed at last as the disaster that informed analysts always knew it would become. As the neocons become more and more discredited, the political currency of their chief Iraqi protege, Ahmed Chalabi, sinks rapidly in value. Hence the efforts of the neocon faction to discredit the United Nations and its principal representative for Iraqi affairs, Lakhdar Brahimi, whose ascendancy they recognize as an obvious measure of their own failure.

This morning, I heard the Iraqi foreign minister vehemently protesting the characterization of the four Iraqi generals in Fallujah by the American media as "former Saddam Hussein generals." They are, he insisted very adamantly, IRAQI generals, not "SADDAM" generals. His message seemed very clear. He was saying to all Americans: "We can handle this ourselves, damn it! We may not have your numbers or your firepower, and we may not yet be adequately trained. But if YOU try to pacify Fallujah and the rest of Iraq by brute force, you will make this country impossible for ANYONE to govern, and that means that when you eventually leave Iraq, (God willing!), you will leave us in an even worse mess than we were in before you arrived. So let us do it by ourselves, please, for better or for worse. "

I take all of this as additional strong evidence supporting the points that I made last week, before the new compromise solution in Fallujah was proposed:

1. The political personalities around whom Lakhdar Brahimi and the United Nations will build a transitional governing authority in Iraq after 30 June (whoever they may be; it doesn't matter) have already privately abandoned any expectation that the United States military will be an appropriate or an effective force on which to rely for the establishment of unity and stability in the country; where there is no such expectation, there can no longer be any real trust, and where there is a lack of trust, there will inevitably be conflict, first political, soon violent;

2. The leadership group on which Lakhdar Brahimi bestows "legitimacy" on 30 June will have the intention (perhaps not publicly expressed at first) of vesting complete responsibility for military and security decision-making to a strictly IRAQI command authority just as quickly as possible; in the short term, this may seem virtually impossible because of insufficient resources, but it has become the clear objective of even the most moderate and reasonable Iraqis of the leadership class; the political imperative of independence may very well trump the obviously high short-term risks of chaos; the Iraqi people place a very high value on stability, and rightly so, but the force of national self-determination can become irresistible in an atmosphere of foreign occupation, and reason is sometimes the loser in that contest. Ask the Hungarians in 1956. Ask the Palestinians today

3. This means that the US Army will probably be obliged to leave Iraq before Bush, Rumsfeld & Company are prepared to manage the retreat as if it were a triumphant event for freedom; the Americans will therefore be seen by the rest of the world, and particularly the Muslim world, in much the same light as were the Israelis when they departed from Southern Lebanon ---as a frustrated and defeated occupation force expelled by victorious nationalists; this will make many Americans who supported the "liberation" of Iraq extremely angry and resentful; the British and other members of the glorious "coalition of the willing" will effectively have to make the best of a bad situation --- if they haven't wisely removed themselves from the scene in the meanwhile;

4. All of which makes the probabilities of chaos and civil war in Iraq next year even higher than we pessimists have been predicting. (UNLESS the "expulsion" of the American "occupiers" serves to unify Iraqis and restore their sense of national unity and common purpose; my fear is that this would be only a temporary triumph at best; historic divisions and rivalries would very soon resurface, and chaos would pick up where it left off.) "

Ray Close is the former CIA Station Chief for Saudi Arabia.

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10 US Troops Killed on Thursday

Between a huge roadside bomb in Baghdad, a rocket propelled grenade attack in Sadr City, and an attack in the eastern city of Baqubah, guerrillas killed 10 US troops on Thursday. There were further airstrikes on the Julan district of Fallujah, but the day ended with a decision not to invade the city. A South African citizen and at least 10 Iraqis were also killed around the country.

Four mortars were fired early Thursday morning near the Japanese base in Samawah, a small Shiite city of southern Iraq. Two mortar shells landed just outside the base. No one was hurt.

The US bombed the Julan quarter of Fallujah heavily on Thursday. The Guardian reports civilian casualties and argues that most of the fighters are not ex-Baathists or radicals, but young Fallujan men defending their city.

The New York Times did a fluff piece on the Fallujah bombings, quoting US military figures about how precise the AC-130 warplanes are. I am highly skeptical of these claims. Even blowing out the windows of a building, which bombing with howitzers would do, creates a hazard of flying glass that can severely injure civilians in the area, including children. The US would not use 500 pound bombs and AC-130s to get at a gang in Los Angeles or New York that had attacked police officers. It shouldn't be using such tactics in a country where it is the Occupying Power, either.
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Stand-Down in Fallujah

The US abruptly decided Thursday not to press the Marine assault on Fallujah. Instead, it is forming a 1000-man Iraqi unit to restore order in the city, led by a former Baath officer. There is controversy about who the commanding officer will be. Al-Hayat named Major General Jasim Muhammad Salih al-Muhammadi. Western wire services said it would be Salah Aboud, former army deputy chief of staff who at one point in the early 1990s had been an aide to the notorious "Chemical Ali," Ali Hasan Majid.

There are everywhere signs that the United States has embarked on a policy of re-baathification, rehabilitating thousands of ex-Baathists and putting them to work. Fifty former Baath officers met with Minister of Defense Ali Allawi on Thursday, expressing their deep disappointment with the current make-up of the new Iraqi army. The policy has two goals. First, it is aimed at mollifying the Sunni Arabs, who have given the US so much trouble in the past year, and from whom the high-ranking Baathists were largely drawn. Second, it serves as a threat to insurgents and Shiites, that if they continue to make trouble, they will be facing the aides of Chemical Ali.

Whoever made the decision to pull back and try to put an Iraqi face on the confrontation in Fallujah had more good sense than has been demonstrated by American leaders recently in Iraq. A bloody invasion of Fallujah had the potential of greatly deepening Iraqi and Arab hatred for the United States. It remains to see whether the new Iraqi force is up to the task of restoring order and quelling the fighters. The police in Fallujah have so far been ineffective, often admitting that they refuse to fight Iraqis on behalf of the Americans.



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Haeri Criticizes Muqtada

Ayatollah Kadhim al-Haeri, now in Qom, Iran, criticized Muqtada al-Sadr, according to AFP/ash-Sharq al-Awsat. Technically, Muqtada is under the authority of al-Haeri, though if Muqtada has managed to finish his studies and is a jurisprudent (mujtahid) he would not have to follow any other cleric blindly. Al-Haeri said that Muqtada had not had the right to declare holy war on the Americans in al-Haeri's name. This according to his brother, Muhammad Husain al-Haeri.

Al-Haeri, of Iranian extraction, had fled back to Iran from Iraq in 1976. He had been a leader of the al-Da`wa Party when in Iraq.

Al-Haeri says that the US must leave Iraq as soon as possible.

I would not get too excited about al-Haeri's comments. He is far from the scene, and Muqtada is well beloved because his father was a leader for so many Shiites. Muqtada has far more influence in Iraq now than does al-Haeri.


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USA Today Poll: 57% of Iraqis say 'US Out Now'

From March 22 to April 2, 60 trained Iraqi pollsters interviewed 3,444 randomly selected Iraqis for USA Today. This is one of the first polls in Iraq that seems to me well weighted statistically, though to be sure we'd have to know more than USA Today told us.

The numbers are negative for the US, and are much more negative than previous such polls. Moreover, the polling ended by April 2, just before the Shiite uprising and the worst of the Fallujah fighting, so that it is highly likely that the present attitudes of the Iraqi public toward the US are much more negative.

Amazingly, 57% of Iraqis say that US troops should leave Iraq immediately. If one subtracted the Kurds, a much higher percentage of Arabic speaking Iraqis say this. And, they say it with their eyes open. About 57% also admit that life would get harder (i.e. there would be a lot of instability) if the US suddenly withdrew. They want the US gone anyway, and will take their chances.

Over half say there are circumstances under which it is all right to attack US troops! A February poll I discussed here had said that only 10% of Iraqi Shiites held that attacks on US troops were ever justified, and 30% of Sunni Arabs felt that way. The number in al-Anbar province (think Fallujah) was 70%, but it was high for Iraq at that time. Again, if the earlier polling was correct, there was a massive shift in opinion on this matter. We went from having about 3 million Iraqis think it was all right to attack US troops to more than 13 million.

[My earlier comment on the Feb. poll: "That is, the poll actually shows that in absolute numbers, there are more Shiites who approve of attacks on Americans than there are Sunni Arabs. The numbers bring into question the official line that there are no problems in the South, only in the Sunni Arab heartland. The other problem is that attitudes change, and sometimes they change rapidly. The US cannot count on the percentage of Shiites who approve of attacks on its troops remaining at 10% if it is strafing Sadr City in Baghdad. Every 1% increase in the number of Shiites who approve of attacks equals 160,000 new enemies.").

For the question, "Has the Coalition invasion of Iraq done more harm than good?", in the USA Today poll 46% say "more harm," whereas only 33% say "more good." But the ethnic breakdown here is startling. Only 2% of Kurds say the invasion did more harm. 56% of Sunni Arabs say it did more harm, and so do 59% of Baghdadis (Baghdad is about 2/5s Shiite but the Shiites there are probably Sadrists in the majority, who agree with most Sunnis about the undesirability of the US presence). Among Shiites, 47% say it did more harm, 28% say it did more good.

More harm: Total 45%, Baghdad 59%, Shiite 47%, Sunni Arab 56%, Kurds 2%

More good: Total 33%

About the Same: Total 16%

To the question of whether coalition military forces are mainly liberators or mainly occupiers, 71% said occupiers. The percentage among Arabs, both Sunni and Shiite, who said this, was about 80%. The Kurds mostly disagreed, which brought the numbers down. (The US never put that many troops in the Kurdish north, depending on the peshmerga fighters, so the Kurds are in fact much less occupied than the Arabs).

An opinion poll done by an Iraqi institute a couple of months ago found that about 47% of Iraqis said that the US invasion was a source of humiliation, and 48% said it was a liberation. If that poll was valid, it means that there was a massive shift in opinion by late March and a big growth in anti-Americanism. Based on my close reading of the Iraqi press and reports of sermons, I believe that the Israeli murder of Hamas clerical leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin on March 22 was the turning point in the big spike in anti-American feeling. There were lots of demonstrations that the Western press did not cover, and a lot of oratory.

Regarding George Bush, 55% of Iraqis have an unfavorable view of him, and if we exclude the 4 million Kurds and just look at the Arabs, his unfavorable rating is above 60% for both Sunnis and Shiites. Since Iraq is now for all practical purposes the 51st state, I say we let the Iraqis vote in the US elections in November.

Oddly, 61% of Iraqis still say that the US invasion and overthrow of Saddam was worth it (though only 28% of Sunni Arabs say it was worth it). That is, the poll does not show that Iraqis have begun regretting the US overthrow of Sadam. It shows that they have begun regretting the continued US Occupation.

And, the bad news is that despite the ballyhooed transfer of sovereignty on June 30, the actual US occupation is likely to last for a decade unless Iraqis throw the US out. And given their present mood, one should not dismiss the possibility that that is what they will do.


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Fallujah and Najaf

al-Hayat reports that the Interim Governing Council continues to attempt to negotiate a settlement at Fallujah between guerrillas and the US Marines. The Marines called down 500-pound bombs and AC-130 howitzers on the Julan neighborhood again on Wednesday, in reply to heavy fire from insurgents based there. Eyewitnesses said 10 buildings were destroyed and others damaged. There is no word on casualties, including civilian casualties. The IGC said that any general US attack on any Iraqi city had the potential to cause thousands of noncombatant deaths. The Sunni Islamist Muhsin Abdul Hamid has taken the lead in conducting negotiations, and he maintained that much of the city had returned to normal (apparently meaning the other neighborhoods beside Julan, which was receiving 500 pound bombs).

With regard to the situation in Najaf, US troops tightened their control of the approaches to it and began searching all vehicles moving between Najaf and Kufa.

An aide to Muqtada al-Sadr warned the Americans that there would be a violent reply if their forces entered Najaf. He also accused the Kurdish peshmerga fighters of helping the American forces. Husam al-Musawi said, "Our response will be violent and unpredictable." He described the erection of a barrier between Kufa and Najaf by the Americans as a laughable step aimed at isolating Kufa from Najaf. He said that any US patrol inside Njaf would be attacked as a form of self-defense. He said there was decisive proof of the participation of Kurdish fighters with the Americans in the siege of Najaf. (-ash-Sharq al-Awsat).

Some teachers in the Najaf seminaries called upon radical young cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to leave the shrine of Imam Ali, just as the Imam Husayn had departed from Mecca (when he led his uprising against the Umayyad empire in 680-81). This according to the Iranian newspaper, Baztab. The seminarians said that it was obvious that Muqtada's bloody confrontation with the US was doomed to fail, and that he should do the right thing and take his fight out of Najaf so as to protect it, just as Imam Husayn had protected Mecca.

In Qom and Mashhad in Iran, each of which has major seminaries, there were strikes and protests on Wednesday against the US siege of Najaf. A major cleric, says al-Hayat, warned the US against moving against southern Shiite cities in Iraq, especially Najaf and Karbala.
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New Executive of Technocrats being Readied for Iraq

Az-Zaman reports that American sources told it yesterday that influential quarters in the Central Intelligence Agency are putting forward as candidate for high office in the caretaker government of Iraq a politically neutral former major general and three prominent court judges and independent attorneys. There will be a president, two vice presidents, and a prime minister, requiring four appointees. One of the vice presidents will be a Kurd. The sources said that the White House had not yet made a decision about the candidates, and that Bush did not request suggestions for candidates from the Department of Defense.

The sources said that the 25 members of the current Interim Governing Council are not candidates for executive posts in the caretaker government, from which they will be formally excluded.

The State Security Council approved the Brahimi plan for a caretaker government on Wednesday.

Deborah Horan of the Chicago Tribune, in contrast, discusses the resistance still being put up to the Brahimi plan by some members of the IGC. (See my post of yesterday, below, "Brahimi Plan Controversial"). The tenor of the az-Zaman report suggests, however, that the IGC has already lost this battle at the level of the White House (presumably meaning the National Security Council). The reporter seemed to take some pleasure in asserting that the US Pentagon had been excluded from the nomination process. The Department of Defense, under Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith, has consistently backed Ahmad Chalabi for high appointed posts in Iraq, but he seems increasingly out of favor. (az-Zaman is close to rival Adnan Pachachi, a Sunni Arab nationalist).

Brahimi, in the meantime, called Wednesday for an end to military hostilities, affirming that there must be a voice for the city of Fallujah in the new Iraqi government. He also said the government might be appointed at the end of May, and that the deteriorating security situation would not be allowed to postpone the transfer of sovereignty.

Meanwhile, the civil administrator of Tikrit, Mark Kennon, admitted in a news conference that American troops would not necessarily withdraw from Iraqi cities when the new "sovereign" Iraqi government came to power on June 30.


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Iraq Corruption at Pentagon

Allegations of corruption have been raised against a Pentagon figure. He is said to have pressured the Coalition Provisional Authority to make a telecom bid private rather than public, so that it could be thrown to an American firm using the Qualcomm CDMA technology and ensure that the European GSM standard was not the only one in Iraq. The most interesting feature of the article, it seems to me, is the revelation of how much the bid process can be manipulated by seemingly innocent procedures like deciding if a contract is private or public.

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Brahimi Plan Controversial

Lakhdar Brahimi spoke further on Tuesday about his ideal plan for a caretaker government in the period June 30 - January 31, the run-up to national elections. It seems clear that Brahimi prefers that a handful of high offices be filled by technocrats with no further political ambitions. He thinks that politicians with parties who want to run for office should start their campaigns instead of serving as caretakers. The unspoken concern here is that incumbents might use the advantages of incumbency to position themselves to win the elections next January.

This plan is running into heavy opposition from the Interim Governing Council, most members of which would be excluded under the Brahimi rules. Salamah al-Khafaji told al-Hayat that it made no sense to have a president and two vice presidents. One vice president would be enough, she implied. And she felt it was not useful to have an expanded advisory committee that had no legislative powers, as Brahimi suggests.

Other members of the IGC, including Ibrahim Jaafari, the leader of the al-Da`wa Party and the most popular politician in Iraq, as well as Ahmad Chalabi, Iyad Allawi, and some others appear to be angling for the position of prime minister. If they succeed, then Brahimi's hopes for a relatively neutral, professional caretaker government will be dashed.

The IGC has in the past also resisted the idea of that body being dissolved on June 30, on which Brahimi insists.

As Bob Dreyfuss points out, these struggles have an international dimension. Ahmad Chalabi, Department of Defense officials like Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, and the Israeli government all oppose Brahimi's role and plans. Secretary of State Colin Powell, some Bush administration centrists, and Saudi Arabia, in contrast, support Brahimi and his approach.

One additional player should be mentioned. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani was the one who insisted on UN involvement in the process. He has been highly critical of the expatriate politicians, like Chalabi, whom he sees as corrupt and as working for foreign interests. Brahimi almost certainly would not be playing his current role had it not been for Sistani's demonstration of Shiite power, which was underlined by the recent uprising led by Muqtada al-Sadr. Although Sistani wanted earlier elections than are now planned, he also wants a limited caretaker government that will do very little other than prepare for elections. The Bush administration turned to Brahimi out of desperation and relative powerlessness, not voluntarily.

Chalabi has carefully larded the IGC and the cabinet with his relatives and cronies, and the Pentagon has given him most of what he wanted, including secret Baath government files that had no business being turned over to a private individual! Rather than democracy, the US has so far brought to Iraq cronyism, nepotism and financial corruption. Brahimi is attempting to move things in a different direction.

The high-handedness of the IGC was again demonstrated on Tuesday, when it issued a new Iraqi flag. It avoided the Arab colors of black and green (both of which have Islamic symbolism) in favor of blue and white, with the Kurdish color of yellow. The phrase "God is Most Great" was also dropped. Many Iraqis rejected the flag, saying an appointed committee of an Occupying power had no authority to change the flag. Some also complained that the new design resembled the Israeli flag.

az-Zaman ran an article quoting Iraqi politicians and intellectuals complaining that the new flag ignores the collective memory of the Iraqi nation, abandoning colors that have been in the flag for 80 years and that tie Iraq to the Arab world.

It seems to me that it is embarrassing for the US-appointed IGC to issue a flag and then just have it overturned by a new parliament next winter, and I cannot fathom why they did this. Like the Bremer administration's hopes of imposing Polish-style economic shock therapy on socialist Iraq, this plan seems likely to be another hangover of the heady days last summer when the US thought it could shape a new Iraq almost unimpeded.

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Muqtada and Fighters Defiant in Najaf

Luke Harding of the Guardian managed to get to Kufa after the big battle there. He writes:

' These days, Mr Sadr, a 30-year-old cleric whose father and uncle were both killed by Saddam, is a hard man to find. But his spokesman, Qais al-Kha'zali, told the Guardian that negotiations with the coalition to end the standoff in Najaf had broken down. "The Americans attacked us yesterday in Kufa using jet fighters," he complained. "They are agitating the situation. Mr Sadr demands that the occupation should end all over Iraq. The Americans hate him because he refuses to bargain with them." Mr Kha'zali said it was unreasonable for the coalition to demand the cleric disband his Mahdi militia without making concessions of its own. "They are demanding something and offering nothing," he insisted. Mr Sadr had also not murdered a rival cleric, he said, something the coalition accuses him of. '

The equally intrepid Dan Murphy has written a fine profile of Muqtada al-Sadr and his father, Muhammad Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, for the Christian Science Monitor. I don't believe the Sadrist movement can be understood or appraised without reference to Sadiq al-Sadr's movement of the 1990s, which Muqtada inherited, but most American observers and officials appear to be ignorant of this recent history.

With Spanish PM Zapatero announcing that Spanish troops have been withdrawn from Najaf and will be out of Iraq by late May, a security gap has opened up in the center-south. For the moment it has been filled by the US. But it is possible that the British will step into the breach. Doing so might give Whitehall more of a say in Iraq policy, and therefore more leverage in Washington, helping Tony Blair respond to the concerns of the British diplomatic community (see below).

But the British theorists of getting more deeply involved as a way of extricating London from Its Iraq dead end should consider that by going into Najaf they risk being on the front lines of any Shiite uprising that does occur. I suppose they think that they will anyway get caught in the crossfire of such a struggle in Basra, so they may as well have more of a say in the matter.

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AC-130s at Fallujah and Najaf (64 Sadrists Killed)

I made the mistake of turning on the television in the middle of the day and was treated to horrific images of part of the Julan quarter of Fallujah in flames. It appears that the Marines took fire from there and called in AC-130 strikes against the points from which the fire originated.

AC-130s were also employed to kill Army of the Mahdi militiamen near Najaf. AP says, ' The first fight came in the afternoon, when Shiite militiamen fired on a U.S. patrol. In the ensuing firefight, seven insurgents were killed. Hours later, an M1 tank was attacked with rocket-propelled grenades. A heavy battle erupted, during which warplanes destroyed an anti-aircraft gun belonging to the militia and 57 gunmen were killed, Kimmitt said. Najaf hospitals listed 37 dead, all young men of fighting age, suggesting they may have been militiamen. Al-Sadr aides said civilians also died, but could not say how many. '

Although some civilians may have been killed at Najaf, as alleged, it seems likely that most of the dead were Mahdi Army fighters loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr. The US has not invaded Najaf or bombed it, because of its sacred character, because of which any frontal assault would risk arousing Shiite religious passions against the US.

And here is the contrast between the two events in Fallujah and Najaf today. AC-130 warplanes are effective against troops deployed on a battlefield, but should not be used against urban targets. They were used effectively against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the field Afghanistan, and against the Republican Guards on the battlefield in the recent Iraq war. They and other such aerial weapons are what make a civil war of any conventional sort in Iraq unlikely, since the first time someone fields 150 men on a battlefield, they can just be taken out by the AC-130s. (Urban riots and alleyway fighting are a different proposition). I'm no expert on military hardware and do not pretend to be, but this makes scary reading even for a layman.

The immense firepower of these warplanes, however, simply should not be being unleashed against the Julan quarter. You cannot do that so precisely that you ensure that innocent civilians are not massacred along with the guerrillas. It is a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Although about 1/3 of Fallujans have reportedly left the city, that would leave 200,000 or so inside.

Given that most of the people living in the poverty-stricken Julan quarter of Fallujah are not guerrillas and are not combatants, calling down AC-130 fire on a neighborhood with civilians in it, in which the civilians are inevitably in harm's way, seems to me to contradict Article 3.

Art. 3. In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each Party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following
provisions:

(1) Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.

To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:
(a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;
(b) taking of hostages;
(c) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment;
(d) the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.

That is, as the Occupying Power in Iraq, the US has a duty to avoid inflicting on innocent civilians in urban areas violence to life and person where that can be avoided. In this case, it could be avoided by using counter-insurgency techniques and clearing Fallujah neighborhood by neighborhood rather than by aerial bombardment.

[Someone challenged me on this, saying that Article 3 refers only to civil wars. Since the Fourth Convention is concerned with Occupied Territories, however, it seems to me that this common article must have been included in part because the framers wanted to cover these issues in regard to Occupied Territories. And, given that Iraq was conquered by the US, and there is no Iraqi government or Iraqi army, the current conflict in Fallujah resembles a civil war much more than it does an international conflict. That is, Fallujah is in rebellion against the Occupying authority within Iraqi territory, which is not inter-national, but intranational. The article clearly governs the treatment of all civilians and other noncombatants in the zone of conflict and not only prisoners, since "detention" is mentioned as only one of a number of causes for persons being hors de combat or outside combat. Some interpretations of Article 3 do exclude guerrilla wars from consideration, while others are more expansive, and the tendency is increasingly toward the expansive approach.

One authority notes, " For example, in a recent decision by the trial chamber of ICTY [International Tribunal Court for Yugoslavia] in Prosecutor vs. Tadic, it was observed that the common article 3 of the Geneva Convention was declaratory of customary international law. The decision further states: the rules contained in paragraph 1 of common article 3 proscribe a number of acts which: (i) are committed within the context of armed conflict; (ii) have a close connection to the armed conflict, and (iii) are committed against persons taking no active part in hostilities. On the question of existence of armed conflict, the appeal chamber stated that “an armed conflict exists whenever there is a resort to armed force between states or protracted armed violence between governmental authorities and organized armed groups or between such groups within a state. '

The precise applicability of Article 3 in any case is less important than that, in general, the international law of occupation requires the Occupying Power to guarantee as far as possible the safety, security and well-being of civilians under its rule. While the guerrillas in Fallujah are also endangering civilians by fighting from a city, for an Occupying Power to call down AC-130 strikes on civilian apartment buildings seems to me to an unnecessarily cavalier approach to civilian life, and the British officers in Basra agree with me].

It does not matter that some Fallujans are trying to kill Marines. You cannot punish the entire city for that.

Art. 33. No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.

Pillage is prohibited.

Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.


One of the things the city elders now negotiating with the Marines should do is invoke Article 15 of the Fourth Geneva convention:

Art. 15. Any Party to the conflict may, either direct or through a neutral State or some humanitarian organization, propose to the adverse Party to establish, in the regions where fighting is taking place, neutralized zones intended to shelter from the effects of war the following persons, without
distinction:

(a) wounded and sick combatants or non-combatants;
(b) civilian persons who take no part in hostilities, and who, while they reside in the zones, perform no work of a military character.

When the Parties concerned have agreed upon the geographical position, administration, food supply and supervision of the proposed neutralized zone, a written agreement shall be concluded and signed by the representatives of the Parties to the conflict. The agreement shall fix the beginning and the duration of the neutralization of the zone.

If the US can pay Halliburton $3 billion for various tasks in Iraq, it surely can afford to build temporary shelters to which Fallujan civilians could be evacuated during the current operations. It is outrageous for the US to conduct attacks on a city in a country it occupies while there are tens of thousands of women and children in harm's way. Fred Kaplan at Slate argues that to go forward could well derail the transfer of sovereignty on June 30.

It is precisely the kind of unethical and illegal action taken by the US military in Fallujah today against which the British diplomats were protesting (see below), and which they fear will drag the UK down along with the Americans. Nor is there any reason whatsoever to believe that the US can win by bombing Fallujah into ashes. That is attrition, which is poor counter-insurgency.

Gavin Bulloch writes,

' None of the attritional "solutions" is appropriate in a liberal democracy; furthermore it is considered that a "gloves off" approach to any insurgency has a strictly limited role to play in any modern counterinsurgency campaign. It should also be noted that the record of success for the attrition theory in counterinsurgency operations is generally a poor one. Undue emphasis on military action clouds the key political realities, which can result in a military-dominated campaign plan that misses the real focus of an insurgency. An inability to match the insurgent's concept with an appropriate government one--likened by Thompson to trying to play chess while the enemy is actually playing poker--is conceptually flawed and will not achieve success . . .

In an insurgency, the strategic center of gravity will be the support of the mass of the people. Clearly, this is not open to "attack" in the conventional sense, although insurgent strategies often incorporate the use of coercive force. An insurgency is an attempt to force political change, and thus it follows logically that the center of gravity can be reached only by political action. The government response to an insurgency should take as its fundamental assumption that the true nature of the threat lies in the insurgent's political potential rather than his military power, although the latter may appear the more worrying in the short term. Again, in Malaya, the center of gravity was targeted not by jungle patrolling, but by the political decision to grant independence;[3] the military contribution was invaluable, but not of itself decisive. The military campaign should focus upon the insurgents, but it is only one part of a wider solution. '
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Protest Letter of 52 British Former Diplomats to Blair on Iraq Policy


The letter is worth reading in full, and probably it is also worth googling the signatories. It is extraordinary how terrified these experienced diplomats are, and amazing that these men who spent a lifetime practicing discretion would now speak out. I understand that the British special envoy in Iraq, Jeremy Greenstock himself, agreed with the substance but declined to sign because he was too close to the action. This letter is canary in the mine material, and should alarm everyone concerned with the situation in Iraq. They clearly are afraid that the 7500 British troops and administrators in Iraq are in severe danger from Bush/Blair policies, and that Israeli Prime Minister Sharon's policy of "negotiation by murder" has the potential to set the whole region aflame, just as, in some ways, it already has Fallujah.



Dear Prime Minister,

We the undersigned former British ambassadors, high commissioners, governors and senior international officials, including some who have long experience of the Middle East and others whose experience is elsewhere, have watched with deepening concern the policies which you have followed on the Arab-Israel problem and Iraq, in close co-operation with the United States. Following the press conference in Washington at which you and President Bush restated these policies, we feel the time has come to make our anxieties public, in the hope that they will be addressed in Parliament and will lead to a fundamental reassessment.

The decision by the USA, the EU, Russia and the UN to launch a "Road Map" for the settlement of the Israel/Palestine conflict raised hopes that the major powers would at last make a determined and collective effort to resolve a problem which, more than any other, has for decades poisoned relations between the West and the Islamic and Arab worlds. The legal and political principles on which such a settlement would be based were well established; President Clinton had grappled with the problem during his Presidency; the ingredients needed for a settlement were well understood; and informal agreements on several of them had already been achieved. But the hopes were ill-founded. Nothing effective has been done either to move the negotiations forward or to curb the violence. Britain and the other sponsors of the Road Map merely waited on American leadership, but waited in vain.

Worse was to come. After all those wasted months, the international community has now been confronted with the announcement by Ariel Sharon and President Bush of new policies which are one-sided and illegal and which will cost yet more Israeli and Palestinian blood. Our dismay at this backward step is heightened by the fact that you yourself seem to have endorsed it, abandoning the principles which for nearly four decades have guided international efforts to restore peace in the Holy Land and which have been the basis for such successes as those efforts have produced.

This abandonment of principle comes at a time when rightly or wrongly we are portrayed throughout the Arab and Muslim world as partners in an illegal and brutal occupation in Iraq.

The conduct of the war in Iraq has made it clear that there was no effective plan for the post-Saddam settlement. All those with experience of the area predicted that the occupation of Iraq by the Coalition forces would meet serious and stubborn resistance, as has proved to be the case. To describe the resistance as led by terrorists, fanatics and foreigners is neither convincing nor helpful. Policy must take account of the nature and history of Iraq, the most complex country in the region. However much Iraqis may yearn for a democratic society, the belief that one could now be created by the Coalition is naive. This is the view of virtually all independent specialists on the region, both in Britain and in America. We are glad to note that you and the President have welcomed the proposals outlined by Lakhdar Brahimi. We must be ready to provide what support he requests, and to give authority to the United Nations to work with the Iraqis themselves, including those who are now actively resisting the occupation, to clear up the mess.

The military actions of the Coalition forces must be guided by political objectives and by the requirements of the Iraq theatre itself, not by criteria remote from them. It is not good enough to say that the use of force is a matter for local commanders. Heavy weapons unsuited to the task in hand, inflammatory language, the current confrontations in Najaf and Falluja, all these have built up rather than isolated the opposition. The Iraqis killed by coalition forces probably total between ten and fifteen thousand (it is a disgrace that the Coalition forces themselves appear to have no estimate), and the number killed in the last month in Falluja alone is apparently several hundred including many civilian men, women and children. Phrases such as "We mourn each loss of life. We salute them, and their families for their bravery and their sacrifice", apparently referring only to those who have died on the Coalition side, are not well judged to moderate the passions these killings arouse.

We share your view that the British government has an interest in working as closely as possible with the United States on both these related issues, and in exerting real influence as a loyal ally. We believe that the need for such influence is now a matter of the highest urgency. If that is unacceptable or unwelcome there is no case for supporting policies which are doomed to failure.

Yours faithfully,

Brian Barder
Paul Bergne
John Birch
David Blatherwick
Graham Boyce
Julian Bullard
Juliet Campbell
Bryan Cartledge
Terence Clark
David Colvin
Francis Cornish
James Craig
Brian Crowe
Basil Eastwood
Stephen Egerton
Dick Fyjis-Walker
William Fullerton
Marrack Goulding
John Graham
Andrew Green
Vic Henderson
Peter Hinchcliffe
Brian Hitch
Archie Lamb
David Logan
Christopher Long
Ivor Lucas
Ian McCluney
Maureen MacGlashan
Philip McLean
Christopher MacRae
Oliver Miles
Martin Morland
Keith Morris
Richard Muir
Alan Munro
Stephen Nash
Robin 0'Neill
Andrew Palmer
Bill Quantrill
David Ratford
Tom Richardson
Andrew Stuart
David Tatham
Crispin Tickell
Derek Tonkin
Charles Treadwell
Hugh Tunnell
Jeremy Varcoe
Hooky Walker
Michael Weir
Alan White


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

More Violence in Iraq

I was at a conference at Columbia on Monday and then traveling and so was away from news most of the day. When I did get a chance to check in, I found this Boston Globe piece that summarized the now-daily carnage. Renewed fighting in Falluja, including use of air strikes (a problematic strategy in a populated city). One Marine dead, eight wounded, and 8 guerrillas killed.

Renewed fighting around Najaf and Kufa, with the US determined to move into some new positions in Najaf. Al-Hayat reports that a group calling itself "The Youth of the People of Najaf," somethig like a street gang, claimed to have clashed with the Mahdi Army militia, to have killed some militiamen, and to have forced it out of the shrine of Imam Ali (this claim seems unlikely to me). The shrine cities have an old history of street gangs that fight one another, so that this local gang is taking on the Sadrists is plausible.

Since the Badr Corps of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq had control of the shrine of Imam Ali before the Sadrist uprising of early April, and since it still is helping patrol Karbala, my own guess is that Badr has deliberately pulled back in hopes that the Mahdi Army and the Americans will weaken each other. The hope that other Najaf forces will take care of Muqtada al-Sadr for the US seems to me forlorn. The Najafis hate Muqtada and his militiamen, who are not from Najaf on the whole. On the other hand, no Shiite clerical figure can possibly want to see the US drag Muqtada away in chains, since that would inevitably weaken the clerical authorities.

My guess is that the US will gradually encroach on Najaf and will eventually try to capture Muqtada. He gave an interview to the Italian La Repubblica on Monday, in which he predicted that if the US arrests or kills him, the Iraqi people will unleash on them the fires of hell. It seems to me likely that his cadres will in fact launch a long-term, low-grade guerrilla war in the South if the US captures or kills Muqtada. The question is whether, in putting down this insurgency to come, the US will alienate other Shiites, setting the stage for further failures. The US shouldn't have gone after Muqtada to begin with.

Two US troops killed and five wounded in Baghdad when a house blew up as they were trying to inspect it for chemical weapons. Local Iraqis said it was a cosmetics factory but it seems to have been something else.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Shots Fired at Bulgarian President Parvanov
Attacks Kill 9 in Iraq, Including 2 US Military Personnel

Guerrillas directed fire at visiting Bulgarian President Georgy Parvanov as his motorcade moved from the Polish base to the Bulgarian base near the Shiite shrine city of Karbala in south-central Iraq on Sunday. They were repelled, and no casualties are reported.

With the severe insecurity in Iraq, the parade of foreign heads of state to that country has long seemed to me unwise, since they are obvious targets and if they are moving around they cannot be made all that hard. Australia's PM was visiting Baghdad briefly when the boat bombs struck. Parvanov should remember how exactly Bush made his one visit last Thanksgiving, with a great deal of stealth and very quickly. That wasn't cowardice; that was realism. (Australia's John Howard emulated Bush in making a quick trip).

At least nine persons died in violence in Iraq on Sunday. Guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb in Baghdad, killing a US soldier, and an American in the Coast Guard died of injuries suffered during Saturday's boat bombing off Basra in the Persian Gulf. (That attack has stopped Iraq's oil exports from the South for two days). Guerrillas fired Katyusha rockets at a hospital, a hotel and a television station in the northern city of Mosul, killing two hospital workers, two hotel workers, and wounding 13 others. Guerrillas in Kirkuk fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a police patrol (most of the police in Kirkuk are Kurdish peshmerga), killing a policeman and wounding five others.

In Diwaniya, a southern Shiite city, Spanish soldiers killed two guerrillas after taking fire from them.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Ex-Baath Reservist Officers Recalled in Iraq

Az-Zaman: The new minister of defense, Ali Allawi, has called upon all officers in the former Baath military reserves, who have been cleared by US civil administrator Paul Bremer, to report to duty in the Civil Defense Forces.

The move comes after a sharp deterioration of security in Iraq's major cities, according to az-Zaman

The Interim Governing Council will take up with Paul Bremer next week the issue of how former Baath officers with experience can be recalled if they had not been involved in crimes against humanity. A center is being set up in Mosul where they can apply for return to duty. The IGC is very concerned, however, that officers with a criminal past not return to sensitive positions (I suspect they fear some unreconstructed Saddamists will get in, and possibly make a coup down the road).

Meanwhile, ash-Sharq al-Awsat alleges that the US has recently released 2500 Baath detainees, including some former high officials of the fallen regime.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sadrists Stockpile Weapons in Najaf Mosques, Schools

AP reports that a US general has said that he will move US troops into a base just near the holy city of Najaf as Spanish troops depart. He said that US troops would stay away from the shrine of Imam Ali inside the city. Paul Bremer (-az-Zaman) and Coalition spokesman Dan Senor complained that the Mahdi Army was stockpiling heavy weaponry in mosques and schools in Najaf. Az-Zaman says that Bremer is still intent on arresting Muqtada al-Sadr somehow.

Some reports of these troop movements. like that at the CBC seem to suggest that US forces will move into parts of Najaf beyond the base, but that isn't actually clear. It does seem clear that the US military is keeping the pressure on Muqtada al-Sadr and his militia in Najaf. This task is a delicate one, since too much pressure could produce another explosion, or start a trend toward the complete alienation of the Shiite majority from the US.

Meanwhile, a Kurdish member of the Interim Govering Council, Mahmud Uthman (Mahmoud Osman), gave an interview to ash-Sharq al-Awsat in which he said that the Sadrist movement is an important part of Iraqi politics and no attempt should be made to marginalize it, but that it must give up violence and learn to engage in civil politics. He said or strongly implied that the Baathists had used violence to try to shut down political movements, and that Iraqis were tired of that approach. (This statement can only be read as a huge slam at Bremer and other American officials who went after the Sadrists in late March and early April, provoking a massive confrontation.)

He said that Muqtada al-Sadr had refused to allow the IGC to play a mediating role, and had instead requested that the al-Da`wa Party (led by IGC member Ibrahim Jaafari) step in. He said that as a result, the IGC has little knowledge of the current negotiations in Najaf. He contrasted that situation with the Fallujah crisis, where, he said, several IGC members have been very active as mediators (and apparently less close-lipped than Jaafari).

He said that the IGC worried that any further confrontation with the US would delay the return of sovereignty to Iraqis on June 30.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

60% of Documentation for Modern Iraqi History Lost

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat/ AFP have an article on the impact of the looting last April after the fall of the regime on the documentation for modern Iraqi history. The article maintains that 60% of the documents are gone, most of them burned. The loss is especially extensive for the period of the constitutional monarcy, 1921-1958, a period during which there were at least sometimes fairly open parliamentary elections. I hope to find or translate the entire article at some point.

Note that US conservatives like Charles Krauthammer attempted to maintain last summer that the looting and loss of Iraqi history had been exaggerated.

As a historian of Iraq myself, I can't tell you how it hits me in the gut to have so much of the documentation gone. It means that we will never be able to recover the indigenous side of many developments now known only from the British archives, with their colonial biases.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Poll: 57% of Americans Believe Saddam Gave Substantial Support to al-Qaeda

A new poll shows that as of mid-March, 57% of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein had given substantial support to al-Qaeda. Worse, 45% actually say that "clear evidence" has been found in Iraq to support this allegation! As for weapons of mass destruction 45 percent say they believe Saddam had them before the recent war, and 22 percent say that he had a major program for developing them.

There is no documentary or physical evidence for any of these assertions.

The only good thing about the poll is that it showed that a majority of Americans now believes the Iraq war will not bring greater peace and stability to the Middle East (56% did believe it in May 2003), and 51% believe that Iraqis want US troops out of their country (this may actually be overly simplistic).

The poll was commissioned by the ' University of Maryland's Program in International Policy Attitudes, conducted by Knowledge Networks from March 16 to 22, was released yesterday. It surveyed 1,311 adults and had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points. '

Why would so many Americans cling to patently false beliefs? One can only speculate of course. But I would suggest that the two-party system in the US has produced a two-party epistemology. Epistemology is the study of how we know what we know. If it were accepted that Saddam had virtually nothing to do with al-Qaeda, that he had no weapons of mass destruction (nor any significant programs for producing them), and that no evidence for such things has been uncovered after the US and its allies have had a year to comb through Baath documents-- if all that is accepted, then President Bush's credibility would suffer. For his partisans, it is absolutely crucial that the president retain his credibility. Therefore, rather than face reality, they re-jigger it to create a fantasy world in which Saddam and Usamah are buddies (as in the Jimmy Fallon/ Horatio Sanz skits on the American comedy show, Saturday Night Live), and in which David Kay (of whom respondents say they've never heard) never recanted his earlier belief that the WMD was there somewhere.

Of those who maintain that Iraq actually did have WMD, 72% say they are going to vote for Bush.

If 57% of Americans believe that Saddam was supporting Usama in the late 1990s through 2003, it means that not insignificant numbers of Democrats believe this. It shows that the Democratic party leadership has not developed an effective critique of Bush administration approaches to the 'war on terror,' and that in effect the Republicans are poaching on Democratic territory successfully in this regard.

It is bad for the country for policy to be made based on falsehoods, and it is even worse for failed policies not be be recognized as such because the public clings to myths.

I saw how the mythical opinions are generated at the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations where I testified last Tuesday. Former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger testified, and began his testimony with a long quote from Usama Bin Laden about how the US was timid and had easily been chased out of Lebanon and Aden with a few bombs. It was an odd way to begin a hearing on what has gone wrong in Iraq.

I don't have my degree in Neocon studies, but as I thought about this, it occurred to me that Schlesinger must count as one of the early Neocons, having gone over to Nixon at a time when the junior members of the club still clustered around Democrat Scoop Jackson. As a historian, I respect several of Schlesinger's achievements, and I know for a fact that he was very suspicious of Nixon during Watergate and put in safeguards against Nixon going to the officer corps and trying to declare martial law. But it is also clear that Schlesinger has what can charitably be called blind spots on the Middle East. During the oil crisis of the 1970s, British official Lord Cromer became alarmed at his views: ' But it was the substance of Schlesinger's remarks which set alarm bells ringing. "[One] outcome of the Middle East crisis," he told Lord Cromer, "was the [sight] of industrialised nations being continuously submitted to [the] whims of under-populated, under-developed countries, particularly [those in the] Middle East. "Schlesinger did not draw any specific conclusion from this but the unspoken assumption came through ... that it might not ... be possible to rule out a more direct application of military force". ' That is, he was at least talking about invading Saudi Arabia and occupying its oil fields, and he appears to have had rather dismissive views of Middle Easterners. (The area is not under-populated, by the way; the Middle East if we include from Morocco to Iran, and Turkey to Saudi Arabia, surely has a population comparable to that of the US). And, after the recent Iraq war, Schlesinger seemed to argue that no Arab would ever again lift a hand against the United States, since they had been taught a decisive lesson.

So it seems clear to me that Schlesinger was trying to shape his Senate testimony so as to hint around that the Iraq War was somehow connected to al-Qaeda, even though we all know that it wasn't. The only one who challenged Schlesinger on this was Rhode Island Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee:

' SEN. CHAFEE: I know these gentlemen have good opinions, but they don't speak for the administration. Those are the people we're going to get the answers from ultimately. But nonetheless, Secretary Schlesinger, in your opening comments, you quoted some very chilling testimony from Osama bin Laden. Why use that testimony at a hearing on Iraq?

MR. SCHLESINGER: The mention of that is to discuss why it is that the United States is engaged in the Middle East, because we were attacked, because of a declaration of war against Americans.

The question of Iraq, which is what you point to, it may or may not have been, as some stated, central at the time we went in. It may have been secondary or peripheral at the time we went in. But the administration is quite right that it is now the central front in the war against terrorism, because much of what we see in Fallujah today are terrorists who have come from the outside world. They are the ones primarily who have been setting the car bombs and have been doing the training.

So it has now become central, even for those who might, at the outset, not have thought it central.

SEN. CHAFEE: Well, it's become central because we invaded. But certainly I think you'd even agree there's never been any connection between Osama bin Laden and Iraq. They're very, very different issues. And Afghanistan is --

MR. SCHLESINGER: Well, I think you've had --

SEN. CHAFEE: -- a long way from Iraq.

MR. SCHLESINGER: I think you've had testimony, or a letter, at least, from George Tenet talking about the contacts between al Qaeda and Saddam going back at least a decade. But that is -- we are there. We are where we are. And the consequences of not winning, of not being successful, would be disastrous not only for the United States --

SEN. CHAFEE: I agree with that, but I don't think there's any connection with al Qaeda. We're there and now we have to be successful. I agree with that. '

Actually, George Tenet has testified that there was no relation between Saddam and 9/11. What is interesting here is how completely honest and aboveboard Chafee was being, in taking on the Neocon Consensus. That consensus has been adopted by the Right of the Republican Party as its election playbook, and it is repeated on Fox Cable News, on rightwing talk radio, at Republican fundraisers, dinners, and in television interviews all through the Red States. So far the Republican Right has been able to keep its partisans with it on these matters. You might think that a Republican like Chafee standing up for the truth is a good sign. And it is, of course, in some ways. But the Associated Press worries that centrist Republicans like Chafee and Spector are a "dying breed."

Still, that Senator Lugar agreed with ranking minority Senator Biden to hold the hearings at all was clearly an expression of extreme anxiety about where Iraq policy is going and about the potential catastrophe that lies ahead if his party cannot begin facing facts. (Biden has been courageous and straightforward that we are in big trouble; Lugar tends to signal it in more low-key ways). Senator Hagel clearly also has severe concerns. The Democrats, not being obliged to try to reelect a sitting president, in general are more clear-sighted on the problems right now, but many of the Republicans are also clearly alarmed. There wasn't much partisanship at the hearings, since after all, Iraq affects all Americans. The only exception was Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, who seemed angry about the hearings and kept throwing leading questions only at Richard Perle. It seems clear that the momentum of the Republican Party at the moment is in the hands of the Brownbacks and the Santorums, and it is they who are shaping opinion among the rank and file, aided by the Limbaugh megaphone.

If nearly half the country cannot even see that things are going badly wrong in Iraq, one despairs that anyone will work up the political will to try to fix the problems before it is too late.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iranian Diplomat Says a US attack on Najaf will Lead to Widespread Crisis throughout Iraq

From the ISNA website, via by BBC World Monitoring:

Iranian charge d'affaires to Iraq, Hasan Kazemi-Qomi made several statements at the Iranian Students News Agency site on 23 April:

' "If the occupying forces disregard the internal political, social and security situation in Iraq and launch military operations in the holy cities, including Najaf, then this will only lead to increasing clashes and the present crisis will only escalate. In fact, this will also lead to the emergence of serious popular resistance and will confront the occupying forces with serious problems. In that case, one can only predict the increasing lack of security in Iraq and the crisis will escalate to all the other parts of Iraq." ' . . .

' Another achievement of the visit [of the Iranian delegation last week] was that Iran expressed its readiness to contribute in any way possible to the restoration of calm, stability and security in Iraq. This was welcomed. However, the fact of the matter is that the bellicose policies of the occupying forces and their irrational response to the people's demands have increased and escalated the clashes on the domestic Iraqi scene. ' . . .

' Kazemi-Qomi stressed that the international community, the governing council and Iraq's neighbours should exert pressure on the occupying forces to prevent them from continuing to use force and resort to violence. '

' As we saw today, some coalition forces, such as Spanish and Honduran forces, are no longer prepared to cooperate within the framework of the coalition. . . For various reasons, these forces are no longer interested in staying in Iraq. That is because, firstly, those forces have come to Iraq to contribute to reconstruction and the establishment of security, not to deal with the crisis and oppose popular forces. Secondly, the policies that America is currently implementing are incompatible with the policies of other coalition forces in Iraq. In fact, one can even see differences of opinion between political and military sectors in America . . . Public opinion in countries that are members of the coalition have been exerting pressure on their governments and they are not prepared to sacrifice the lives of their own people so as to enable others to achieve their aims. Another reason is that coalition forces have taken account of their own future in Iraq. If they oppose the demands of the people of that country, they will jeopardize their own national interests in Iraq. . . If the crisis continues to escalate, then more countries will try to leave the coalition. '

Source: ISNA web site, Tehran, in Persian 0932 gmt 23 Apr 04

What comes across here is that actually many Iranian officials want Iraq to be a stable neighbor, and are worried that the US is mishandling it and that trouble will spread across the border to Iran. They were perfectly happy to offer their good offices to help resolve the current standoff at Najaf, but clearly no major party to the dispute was interested in having them do that, including especially Muqtada al-Sadr.

The Ledeenist drumbeat on the Brownshirt side of the Republican Party that Iran is behind the recent instability in the Shiite south is directly contradicted by Iranian actions and by Muqtada al-Sadr's refusal to see his supposed patrons. In fact, I suspect Ahmad Chalabi gets more money from Iran than Muqtada does. And, it seems obvious that the US administrators are the ones who provoked the clashes, which were not spontaneous but came in response to a US attempt to arrest Muqtada.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

40 Killed in Another Bloody Iraq Saturday
At Least 5 US Soldiers Dead; Unknown US Casualties in Haswa, Kut
Boat Bombers Strike Basra Vessels, Kill 2

As sun sets on Saturday in Iraq, it pulls a shroud over the charnel house the country has become.

Suicide boat bombers drew their dhow up alongside a ship at Basra's offshore oil terminal and exploded it. A Coalition vessel intercepted another boat as it approached the oil terminal. Two US sailors were killed and 4-5 Coalition personnel were wounded: ' "At approximately 5:00 p.m. (1400 GMT), coalition naval personnel observed an unidentified dhow approaching the Khor Al-Amaya Oil Terminal (KAAOT) in the northern Arabian Gulf. Standard Maritime Interception Operations (MIO) procedures required the crew to board the dhow for inspection," it said in a statement. "As the eight-member boarding team approached the dhow in a rigid hull inflatable boat (RHIB), the dhow exploded, flipping the RHIB and throwing the crew into the water, killing two and wounding four," the statement said. Iraq's oil terminals in Basra were attacked by suicide boat bombing on Saturday, official sources earlier said. According to the sources, two of the attacking boats exploded alongside a ship tied up at the terminal and a third boat was intercepted by a coalition ship as it approached an exclusion zone around the terminal and there was an explosion soon after it was boarded. '

Guerrillas used a truck to sneak up on the US base at Taji just north of Baghdad, firing two rockets onto it that killed five US soldiers and wounded six, three of them critically. US helicopter gunships then took out the truck.

The death of a Marine in combat was also announced on Saturday.

The almost daily loss of US life in Iraq has provoked a controversy about the policy of the Bush administration in not allowing the press to cover the arrival of the caskets at Dover Air Force base. The photos have now been released on the Internet as a result of a Freedom of Information request.

The downtrodden slums of East Baghdad, now called Sadr City, were the scene of several discrete rounds of deadly violence. Before dawn on Saturday, US troops attempting to arrest suspected militiamen of the Mahdi Army became involved in a firefight that killed one or two Iraqis. A US shell went astray and landed in the bedroom of a civilian family, badly burning the three young girls sleeping there.

Later Saturday morning, unknown guerrillas shot three rockets into Sadr City, one at the crowded market. Cars went up in flames, and retailers' merchandise swirled through the torrid street, and chunks of human flesh were scattered.

Reuters reported, ' "There was blood and bodies everywhere," said Bassam Abdul Rahim. Angry residents of Sadr City -- a powerbase of rebel Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr who U.S.-led forces have vowed to kill or capture -- held up bloodied human remains to television cameras and said U.S. helicopters had fired at the market. They put a sign on a dead donkey saying: "This is Bush." ' The Star says, ' After the rocket strike, residents chanted: "Long live al-Sadr! America and the Governing Council are infidels!" '. That is, even though the rocket strike was carried out by enemies of the US, Shiites in Sadr City tended to blame the Americans, either for failing to provide security or because a dark conspiracy theories that the US was behind the attack. This reaction was the one intended by the guerrillas who fired the rockets, and who clearly hope to stir up trouble of some sort, either Shiite/ American or Shiite/Sunni. The anti-American interpretation was aided by resentments of the US hot pursuit and clash with local boys early Saturday morning.

This attack killed six Iraqis and wounded 38 according to a local health official.

Three more rockets landed in the quarter during the rest of Saturday, one smashing into a two-storey house and killing a woman, wounding her daughter.

Elsewhere in Iraq:

*Guerrillas set off two roadside bombs in Haswa, an hour or so south of Baghdad. One hit a US military convoy. In response, the US troops engaged in a firefight that caught civilians in the crossfire. Eyewitnesses saw US helicopters taking away US casualties, but no word on specifics. The other roadside bomb hit a civilian bus. It killed 13 Iraqis and wounded 21.

*Polish-commanded forces in Karbala fought gun battles with Mahdi Army militiamen over Friday night in Karbala, killing 5.

*Near a US base at Tikrit, guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb, killing four Iraqis, including civilians and two policemen.

*Guerrillas assassinated an Iraqi woman translator for the US military and her husband as they left a US base (whereabouts not identified).

*Near the Shiite city of Kut in the far south, guerrillas attacked a US convoy and burned an armored vehicle. Eyewitnesses reported seeing US casualties.

The US is increasingly depending on ex-Baathists for security in the Kut area, according to Nicholas Pelham of the Financial Times: ' In Kut, 180km south of Baghdad, US forces replaced the police chief and his deputy with two Republican Guards, at least one of whom was a senior Ba'athist. Former officers in the Republican Guard have also been appointed to police posts in Diwaniya. '


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Muqtada al-Sadr Warns He will Unleash Kamikaze Bombers if Najaf is Attacked
Bulgarian Soldier Killed in Clash at Karbala

ash-Sharq al-Awsat: Muqtada al-Sadr, leader of the Mahdi Army militia, said in his Friday prayers sermon at the Kufa mosque on Friday that he will resort to the use of suicide bombings in confronting the American-led Coalition if they launched an attack on the city of Najaf.

At the same time, his supporters in the city of Karbala clashed with Coalition forces, killing one Bulgarian soldier. Five of the Sadrist fighters were wounded, along with 4 civilians and one Iranian. AP reports, ' Militiamen attacked a military convoy made up of Polish, Bulgarian, Lithuanian and Latvian soldiers near city hall in the center of Karbala around the time of weekly Muslim prayers, said Lt. Col. Robert Strzelecki, spokesman for Camp Babylon, the main Polish base. Gunmen and soldiers exchanged fire . . . On Wednesday and again Thursday, the coalition base in Karbala, known as Camp Kilo, was pounded with rebel mortar rounds. No one was injured, the division reported. ortar attacks on coalition bases throughout south-central Iraq - including those in Karbala, Najaf and Hillah - have grown more frequent in recent weeks. ' [Dutch troops came under mortar fire in Samawah Friday, and such exchanges seem to be routine if under-reported.]

Muqtada said to thousands of worshippers who crowded the mosque that Najaf "will never fall to the hand of the Occupiers." He added, "The men of the resistance will spill their own blood in defending their holy city." He said that numerous men and women had come to him asking permission to implement a suicide bombing.

He went on to say that he had repeatedly requested them to wait, but if an attack on "our cities"or on the Shiite religious authorities took place, they will transform into time bombs and will not stop until they have demolished the forces of "the enemy."

Muqtada likened the situation in Iraq to the condition of the Palestinians, saying that Iraqis "confront the same enemies and they must unite to defeat them." He added that the Iraqis must "unite their ranks for the sake of a common goal, that is, the liberation of their country."

The thronging crowds chanted slogans in support of Muqtada and criticizing not only the occupation forces but also the Interim Governing Council, whom they branded infidels.

Al-Sadr said that Najaf had survived wars all through history but tht it had always "emerged victorious." He observed, "The British were altogether unable to subdue Najaf, and nor had the Ottoman Turks, and nor will the American occupation succeed in razing it."

The Washington Post quoted more of his sermon: ' "My goal is to liberate Iraq," Sadr said, calling on Arab nations to support the insurgency. He equated the plight of Iraqis to that of Palestinians and vowed to avenge Israel's assassination of Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi this month "by act, not speech."

The WP noted that clerics are weighing in on the other big current crisis, as well:

' In prayers at another major mosque in Baghdad, a Sunni cleric warned U.S. commanders not to launch another attack on Fallujah. "We warn you against another massacre in Fallujah," said Ahmed Abdul-Ghafoor Samaraie. "If there will be more bloodletting and more people killed in Fallujah, one hundred Fallujahs will stand against you." '


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Is Chalabi Out? Brahimi Plan advances, Baathists Rehabilitated

The intrepid Robin Wright and Walter Pincus at the Washington Post argue that the Brahimi plan for Iraq could forestall the coronation of Ahmad Chalabi as Iraq's America-installed prince. Brahimi favors appointing four technocrats from outside the Interim Governing Council, leaving IGC members to organize themselves for a political campaign if they like. Some may be appointed cabinet members.

The current IGC is a mixture of warlords with militias, corrupt expatriate politicians, and token independents. When asked to appoint a cabinet full of ministers to run the bureaucracies last summer, they typically put in relatives or cronies. The oil minister, Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum is actually the son of Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, an IGC member, and is related by marriage to Ahmad Chalabi. The recently appointed minister of defense (at first minister of trade), Ali Allawi, is the nephew of Ahmad Chalabi, as well.

Chalabi was behind the dissolution of the Baath army, and an extreme program of de-Baathification that purged even minor members of the party. By the way, no such extreme denazification was attempted in Germany after WW II. Party members who had taught elementary school just went on teaching elementary school after the National Socialists collapsed. Much of Germany's post-war bureaucracy was run by former party members. The important thing was only that they hadn't been guilty of crimes. This point is made well by Billmon.

Given the extreme alienation of Sunni Iraqis from the Coalition (30% believe it is legitimate to do violence against Coalition troops) has forced Bremer and the Coalition to rethink allowing Chalabi to purge so many thousands of technocrats, and to continue to control them politically forever after (the US military handed over to Chalabi large numbers of files on party members, which is outrageous--the files should be under the control of the Iraqi state, not a private citizen).

I don't think anything bad can come of letting former Baath engineers build things in the new Iraq. The US should be careful about putting former Baathists in military and intelligence positions, though.

In any case, the plot to install Chalabi has run into trouble. It is alarming, however, that Brahimi is still worried that Chalabi's cronies such as Doug Feith in the Pentagon may yet succeed in foisting him on Iraq.

By the way, the business relationship of Ahmad Chalabi's nephew Salem with a law firm that has some sort of affiliation with FANDZ, the firm of Mark Zell, a West Bank settler and former and future Feith partner, was detailed by Brian Whitaker. The web site of Salem's firm is registered to FANDZ. This Corpwatch article serves as a follow-up to the Whitaker piece, but does not settle the issue of Salem Chalabi's precise relationship to Jerusalem-based Zell, or the continued relationship of both of them to Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, Zell's sometime partner. Chalabi's Baghdad firm appears to be structured so as to trade on insider influence. Feith says he has cut off all relations with Zell's firm. But then Dick Cheney was thought to have given up all his Halliburton interests, at one time, as well.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

What is to Be Done in Iraq?: Polk

Guest Commentary

By William R. Polk

' While C.I.A. director George J. Tenet struggles in Washington to prove that his agency did not exaggerate the danger Iraq posed to the United States, American forces continue to come under attack on the ground throughout Iraq. Misunderstanding is evident in both situations. Not comprehending similar courses of events in Vietnam cost Americans thousands of lives and billions of dollars. So it is worth attempting to get as precise an interpretation of the issues as is now possible.

Take intelligence first: In his speech at Georgetown University on February 5, Mr. Tenet was candid on what he thought of as the central issue: that the analysis offered by his agency was “generally on target” and its advice to the President was hedged with warnings that all intelligence can be only an “estimate.” He also covered over Vice President Dick Cheney’s widely reported and unprecedented visits to “discuss” their appreciation with C.I.A. analysts. C.I.A. officers regarded these visits as attempts to get them to say what the administration wanted to hear rather than what their analysis supported. This must have been personally embarrassing as well as professionally disturbing for Mr. Tenet, but in his talk, he more or less denied it.

In that talk, Mr. Tenet carefully avoided the central problem. The problem is not that the CIA was wrong but that it was replaced

What replaced the CIA was a new office created in the Pentagon to provide a more “supportive” underpinning for the already agreed direction of policy. This “Office of Special Plans” was created under the aegis of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Under Secretary Douglas Feith. Reporting to Stephen Cambone, as under-secretary of defense for intelligence and the man who took the lead in the campaign to justify the attack on Iraq, was one of the most important but least known of the small band of “Neoconservatives,” Abram Shulsky.

Mr. Shulsky’s organization aimed essentially to supplant the entire American intelligence system. Although never admitted, its task, effectively, was to prove the charge, aggressively pushed by Vice President Cheney, that Saddam Hussein, in conjunction with his ally Usama bin Ladin, was poised to attack the United States with an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. It is that alternative intelligence analysis to which those who made the decisions listened. And it was that alternative which Tenet carefully avoided discussing.

Meanwhile, on the ground in Iraq, there is a more pervasive failure of intelligence analysis which may, in the long run, prove even more costly to Americans. Put simply, it is what is actually happening there. The assumption has been that only a small group of “die-hard Baathists” oppose the Americans and that once they are eliminated by “hunter-killer” squads “security” will be established.

Looking back at America’s most grievous intelligence failure, Vietnam, we can see an analogy. Bluntly put, we thought we could shoot or bomb them into doing what we wanted. We saw what we wanted to see and never managed to ask the fundamental questions about what the people on the other side wanted, how they functioned and how we fit into their world.

During that period, I was a member of the Policy Planning Council. To my dismay, I found that while we had gathered more information on that little country than any government had ever gathered on any nation, we lacked any criteria for separating the merely interesting from the significant. So, being challenged to address the graduating class of the National War College, I read everything I could find on guerrilla warfare as it has occurred all over the world and constructed from those experiences an analytical “model.”

In essence, what I found was that guerrilla warfare is composed of three elements. First, the guerrillas have to establish their credentials, to win legitimacy, because they must demand sacrifices from those they would lead. They usually accomplish this by casting themselves as nationalists who oppose foreign imperialists -- Yugoslavs against the Germans, Greeks against the Germans and Italians, Irish against the British, Algerians against the French, Zionists against the British, Chinese against the Japanese, Vietnamese first against the French and then against the Americans and so on.

Only after they have established their legitimacy can guerrilla movements make the second step, to supplant the administration of those they would overthrow. In Vietnam, during the 1950s, as police reports I dug up showed, the Vietminh eliminated the French-installed administration everywhere outside the main cities and replaced it with their own. In Greece, Yugoslavia and elsewhere guerrillas did the same. Even when guerrillas are too weak to supply services, as they were in Northern Ireland, they assert their right to demand contributions (“taxes”) and protection (police power and justice) so they establish a claim on administration.

By the time they have established their nationalist credentials and assumed at least some attributes of government, the guerrillas have won, by my estimate, about 95% of the campaign. As the American statesman John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson about the American revolution, our guerrilla war against the British, the real revolution occurred long before the actual fighting which “was no part of the revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it.” Military force is the short end of the stick.

Force is important, admittedly, but usually not in the way those who oppose the guerrillas believe. Foreigners regard the use of force as the means to create “security.” But those guerrillas who have won their wars are the ones who have learned how to use the power of their enemies like jujitsu against them. They goad the foreigners into actions that are painful or frightening to the natives and so further undermine the foreigners’ claim to legitimacy. In Vietnam, for example, Vietminh cadres would fire at American aircraft to provoke them into bombing villages. Then they would return to ask the frightened or wounded villagers rhetorically, “are those your friends who destroyed your houses and killed your relatives?”

Models are never exact; there are always exceptions. So the model I constructed for Vietnam cannot pretend to be more than suggestive. But both the similarities and the differences are instructive.

Take first the issue of legitimacy. So far, at least, Iraqis appear deeply divided so there is nothing quite like the single nationalism exhibited in many guerrilla wars. But we would find in most of them, in their early stages, nationalism was divided and weak. Nor is there such a unified leadership as in Vietnam; but in Yugoslavia, Greece and Algeria unified leadership came only at the end of the struggle. All had a major objective – to get the foreigners out. And despite nuances, this is clearly the objective of at least the Sunni Arabs and Shi’a Arabs – who make up about 75% of the population. The Kurds are inhibited by their fear of a likely Turkish invasion if America leaves suddenly, but their fear does not equate to pro-American sentiment. We cannot even dream of acquiring legitimacy for ourselves. Getting the foreigner out is the bottom line of nationalism.

On administration, we have proven unable to recreate the one we destroyed; and so have failed to provide minimal services to the bulk of the Iraqi people.

Finally, we are now disputing, as we did in the Vietnam war, the least significant of the three, military force. And not very successfully: we have suffered more American casualties in the months since the invasion than in the first three years of our involvement in Vietnam. Can anyone really believe it will get better?

So what can we expect? The short answer is defeat.

That is a bitter pill, one no political leader willingly swallows, particularly in an election year. So what are the alternatives?

The first is simply to delay. The expression “not on my watch” comes from naval officers who tried to avoid catastrophe for which they could be personally blamed. There will be a strong and understandable tendency of the Bush administration to try to slow down the tide running against us in Iraq. Bargain, negotiate, equivocate, encourage differences. These may indeed buy time. But if the time is not used constructively, the result will be, as it was in Vietnam, the worse for coming later.

The second alternative is to prop up a hand-picked ruling council. The British did this with reasonable success from 1919 to 1932. But we should remember that during that decade, Iraq had practically no literate, politically active population. In 1920, less than one half of one percent of population was in school; in that year, the government opened two secondary schools. One had 7 and the other 27 pupils. The British were candid about their policy. In their 1923-1924 report to the League of Nations, they wrote that “in this country, it is neither desirable nor practicable to provide Secondary education except for the select few.” Even at the end of the British mandate in 1932, the average pupil outside the main cities spent only 2 years in school and only 14 of the then existing 154 schools had as many as 6 grades. When I first lived in Baghdad in 1951, the whole country had only 5 mechanical engineers.

Today, the situation is entirely different. Iraq has one of the highest rates of literacy in the Middle East and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are highly trained professionals. In my example, it now has thousands of mechanical engineers. In sum, the Iraqis are not an “underdeveloped” people. It should be evident that they cannot be fooled with a façade in place of a government.

The third alternative is not simple and will not be easy, but it is the only one that offers America a chance to get out of Iraq less ignominiously than we got out of Vietnam. This policy can be divided into principles and processes.

Among the principles we will have to make completely clear is that 1) we will get out; 2) we will not so build ourselves into the Iraqi economy that, like the British did from 1932 to 1958, we will run the country behind a native façade; 3) that we will not seize or denationalize Iraqi oil; and (4) that we will, in some transparent fashion, allow a high degree of self-determination.

Among the processes, 1) we will get out with all deliberate speed; 2) we will begin right away to devolve political power in meaningful ways; and (3) we will immediately move to dilute our unilateral role by allowing serious political and commercial activities by other powers and political and “security” activities under UN auspices.

I suggest that, despite pronouncements, a sober view of what is actually happening in Iraq will show that on most of these issues our actions now lead in the opposite direction.

Take one, critical, example: we have spoken with apparent pride of our creation of an interim governing council. But, since we selected all the members and the group has no power, Iraqis see it as an attempt to fool them while we continue to run the country. Some will argue that this is paranoia, but to one who has studied Iraqi politics and history, as I have for the last 50 years, it is understandable: that is precisely what the British did during their rule of the country.

What else might we have done or could we do now? I think the best approach would be to reverse our emphasis on a national council and provide money and other forms of recognition and support to neighborhood groups. They can be helped to provide clean water, dispose of waste, open clinics and schools, provide protection against robbers, etc. and represent their constituents to the higher authorities. If the current situation is to be more than a hiatus between dictators, self-determination must begin there, at the grass roots.

For this, there is an old Middle Eastern – Muslim, Christian and Jewish – tradition. Quarters of towns and cities were expected to be self-governing and to maintain such facilities as schools, markets, public baths, clinics and places of worship. They taxed themselves and paid a lump sum to the government; they had their own police forces; and their leaders represented them to the rulers. That system has been weakened and partly supplanted by modernization, but elements of it remain and could again become vigorous in proper circumstances.

To begin at the neighborhood level also avoids the danger of corrupting the very concept of democratic government as the British did and as we are now doing with the powerless, appointed and manipulated “governing council.”

Wise observers like the late UN representative, Sergio Vieira de Mello, have understood that sovereignty not security is the key to Iraq. Only if we can win the “perception” challenge – the widely held belief in Iraq that we intend to stay, to control their economy, dominate their lives and exploit their oil – will enough Iraqis stop protecting the guerrillas that attacks will be curtailed. Security can be achieved only thus; to try to win Iraq by military force will have the same result as in Vietnam.

Lastly, however we got to where we are in Iraq, by intent or by bad intelligence, we must deal with the likelihood that a precipitous withdrawal will result in chaos; local mafias (as in Afghanistan) will proliferate; intercommunal massacres may follow; and, either in greed or in fear, other Middle Eastern states will almost certainly intervene.

So, it is evident that we must begin implementing an orderly, intelligent and effective policy rather than just trying to beat down opposition, to bolster shams or merely to hang on until after the American election. Time is not on our side. So we had better begin. '


© William R. Polk, February 8, 2004


William R. Polk is the senior director of the W.P. Carey Foundation. After studies at Oxford (BA, MA) and Harvard (BA, Ph.D.) he taught at Harvard until 1961 when President Kennedy appointed him a Member of the Policy Planning Council of the U.S. Department of State. There, he was in charge of planning American policy for most of the Islamic world until 1965 when he became professor of history at the University of Chicago and founded its Middle Eastern Studies Center. Later he also became president of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs. Among his many books are The United States and the Arab World; The Elusive Peace: The Middle East in the Twentieth Century; Neighbors and Strangers: The Fundamentals of Foreign Affairs; Polk’s Folly, An American Family History; and The Birth of America.






For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Commentary on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations Hearing on Iraq: Nathan Brown


Guest Commentary by Nathan J. Brown, George Washington University

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

This week's Senate Foreign Relations hearings--in which you participated--made headlines partly because they revealed the extent to which basic questions about American plans in Iraq have not been settled. They also alerted Senators and journalists to the extent to which the June 30 restoration of Iraqi sovereignty will be far more limited than had been assumed.

But much of this should have been clear already:

· Security: One of the headlines coming out of the hearings was that the US would still oversee Iraqi security and even Iraqi security forces. But this was not news. In Article 59 of the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) the Iraqi armed forces are clearly placed under coalition "unified" (i.e., American) command. More subtly, the TAL cites UN Security Council Resolution 1511, rather than on any decision by the Iraqi government, as the basis for the American presence-obviating the need for the Americans to obtain Iraqi permission for continued presence in the country. A couple journalists did pick up on this at the time, and I tried to point to it in my own commentary on the TAL. But for the most part, the clause escaped notice until this week.

· Elections: Throughout the American occupation, elections keep getting postponed. In the TAL, these are to take place by December 31 of this year, and by January 31 if the December deadline is not met. Brahimi placed great stress on elections in his (still interim) report-he is hardly the first person to do so, but since the Americans embraced his report with such alacrity, there would seem to be little wiggle room. But whatever wiggle room existed has already been used. Bremer (and Brahimi too, by the way) speaks of elections in January 2005, the latest possible date under the TAL (and not the one the TAL favors). And Bremer's comments hint that even meeting that deadline is dependent on the security situation. On 15 April, Carina Perelli (the head of the UN Electoral Assistance Mission) stressed that meeting the deadline would demand that preparatory work begin immediately. There is no public sign of any move to draft the necessary legislation and construct the required bureaucratic bodies. This is not merely a technical matter. If the legal basis for elections is going to be laid before June 30-and Perelli insisted that it would be-then it will have to be done by the CPA, a body with a significant legitimacy problem. The CPA will have to be far more open and consultative than it has been in
the past.

· Detainees: One issue that has received little attention in the US is the large number of people detained by the CPA. Brahimi did raise the issue forcefully, and Bremer responded today by promising faster action and fuller information. But these people are detained by the coalition, and there is no indication that they will be transferred to Iraqi hands by June 30.

· Legal framework: Even as most aspects of the transition remain uncertain, the CPA continues to draft and promulgate significant pieces of legislation. I have analyzed some of these three weeks ago. A British-based organization has also offered some explanation. Since these were written, some significant new orders have been issued, such as one on a stock market (establishing a "Securities and Exchange Commission," adopting the American title) and another on bankruptcy. There are clearly more in the offing. A Forbes article mentioned "up to 100" pieces of legislation. And while the CPA has posted Orders in numerical sequence skipping some (numbers 72, 73, 76, and 77), suggesting that there are some laws that have been signed but not published. And the TAL itself is not complete, but clearly anticipates an annex in order to fill in the significant gaps on the transitional process.

Interestingly, Bremer spoke today of "full sovereignty." Were a foreign army able to operate freely in the United States, detain people without charges, insist on consultation in matters of internal governance, and even command American forces, I do not think that would seem so "full." It may be true (and in fact, I believe it is true) that an immediate American pullout would cause more problems than it would solve. But the obscurity and uncertainty in American plans has clearly done enormous damage to our credibility, as has the reluctance to acknowledge, much less specify, the American role in the country after June 30. It is clear that our leaders do not have answers to all the questions and have not been particularly forthcoming with the answers they do have. Creative ambiguity has its place in politics, but the current confusion serves neither Iraqis nor Americans well."


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Situation Around Najaf remains Tense

Muqtada al-Sadr and his movement remain defiant. In Basra, about 800 Sadrists held a demonstration, led by Shaikh Abdul Sattar al-Bahadili, in which they alleged that the British were responsible for the recent horrific bombings. Many Basrans angry, at the very least, at the UK troops for allowing the bombings to take place (though if the local Iraqi police and militias couldn't stop them, it is difficult to see what the British could have done). The protesters carried signs saying that the people and the police are united under a religious imperative (a reference to Muqtada's desire for a theocracy). (- ash-Sharq al-Awsat).

AP reports that the US troops around Najaf have dug in for the long haul. It notes,

' Senior officers say the order to attack Najaf will be made "at the very highest levels of the U.S. government," an indication that President Bush may have the final word on whether soldiers here fight, or keep on waiting. '

Another reason for which the decision must be made by the President is the severe divisions in the US establishment in Iraq. Civil administrator Paul Bremer is said to have vehement and frequent disagreements with Gen. Rick Sanchez of CENTCOM.

There are also rumors that Bush himself made the decision that Fallujah would have to be massively punished for the desecration of the bodies of the US private soldiers of fortune killed there, and that Gen. John Abizaid strongly agreed.

That decision backfired badly from a political point of view, both in Iraq and the region, and the British in particular have signalled hard that it is time for the US to negotiate.

The negotiating mood may not last. The Marines have given the people of Fallujah just "days" to negotiate a final settlement, with an implied "or else."

The continued lack of security and possibility of further big military operations have frightened many NGOs and contractors out of Iraq. Siemens and General Electric are leaving for the time being. A number of countries with small contingents in Iraq are seriously considering pulling them, in the wake of the Spanish withdrawal.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Hitchens Questions on Iraq

A reader sent me these questions that he said Christopher Hitchens had posed. I then found them at his web site. They are:

1) Do you believe that a confrontation with Saddam Hussein's regime was
inevitable or not?

2) Do you believe that a confrontation with an Uday/Qusay regime would
have been better?

3) Do you know that Saddam's envoys were trying to buy a weapons
production line off the shelf from North Korea (vide the Kay report) as
late as last March?

4) Why do you think Saddam offered "succor" (Mr. Clarke's word) to the
man most wanted in the 1993 bombings in New York?

5) Would you have been in favor of lifting the "no fly zones" over
northern and southern Iraq; a 10-year prolongation of the original "Gulf
War"?

6) Were you content to have Kurdish and Shiite resistance fighters do all
the fighting for us?

7) Do you think that the timing of a confrontation should have been left,
as it was in the past, for Baghdad to choose?

My reply would be simple. If you are arguing for war, you don't have to ask all these fancy questions. There are really only two questions you have to answer. The first is, would you yourself be willing to die fighting for this cause you have espoused? The second is, would you be willing to see your 18-year-old son or daughter killed for this cause? (I do not ask if you would be glad or satisfied; I ask if you would be willing).

My answer with regard to the aftermath of September 11 and defeating al-Qaeda in Afghanistan is, yes, I would have been willing to go fight and die myself to protect my country from another such attack. And, had my son been of age and had he enlisted after September 11, I could have accepted that and everything it entailed.

With regard to Iraq, the answer to both questions in my case is "no." I would not have been willing to risk my own life to dislodge Saddam Hussein from power. And, I would certainly not have been willing to see my son risk his, nor would I like to see him ever sent to Iraq as a draftee, because I believe the entire aftermath of the war has been handled with gross incompetence, and I certainly don't want my flesh and blood mauled by the machinations of Richard Perle and his buddies.

With regard to Mr. Hitchens's questions, most of them are logical fallacies, of the same form as "have you stopped beating your wife?" There are some questions that are traps. For instance, there are many reasons for which Saddam might have harbored one person wanted in connection with the first world trade center bombing that are not particularly sinister. It certainly is untrue that Saddam had anything to do with that bombing. It was done by al-Qaeda. The question is a trick because it tries to lead the reader in a particular direction, even though the evidence does not.

Likewise, ' Do you think that the timing of a confrontation should have been left, as it was in the past, for Baghdad to choose? ' is further instance of beging the question. The question is posed in such a way as to make the reader accept that there must have been a "confrontation" between the Baath military and the US. Gen. Zinni thought there would never have been any such thing, and that Saddam was contained. Gen. Zinni is not a milquetoast. Iraq had a weak army, a paralyzed command structure, rusting equipment, and could not even hold out in its own country against the US for more than a few days when the US launched a "confrontation." So the question can be rejected, since there may never have been such a confrontation. And, if there was, it seems obvious that the US could always win it hands down. That being the case, the US was never in any danger from the Saddam regime, which was a toothless old lion with rheumatoid arthritis and bad breath.

These word games are inconsequential. Do you, Abraham-like, offer up your first-born at this altar? That's what nearly a thousand US military families have done with regard to deaths, and thousands more with regard to permanent maimings and cripplings, and what yet thousands more are likely to be asked to do. If it had been me, I wouldn't have ordered them to do it, not in Iraq.

Another question we could throw back at Mr. Hitchens (who, it seems to me, isn't actually doing much for the war effort in Iraq), is whether, if you could only capture one, would you rather have Saddam Hussein in custody, or Usama Bin Laden? Given what we know Usama is planning, I opt for putting all our efforts and I mean all our efforts into capturing him tout de suite. Chasing around Iraq after Salafis and Mahdists doesn't make the homeland even one whit safer.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

More on Senate Foreign Relations Committee Testimony: Cole and Dodge


Here are oral comments of myself and Toby Dodge last Tuesday at the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.


Senator Lugar: . . . Dr. Dodge.

MR. DODGE: Well, thank you very much for the invitation to present here today. It's a great sorrow that it's against such a pessimistic background in Iraq. And I think the current wave of violence sweeping the country is not merely a one-off spike in attacks on coalition forces. It is instead a symptom of three longer-term dynamics that have dogged the occupation since the liberation of Baghdad on April 9th of last year.

The first of these problems, the legacy of Saddam Hussein's rule, could have been anticipated, but could not have been avoided. The other two problems -- the nature of the Coalition Provisional Authority's interaction with Iraqi society and then the character of the violence faced by coalition forces -- are partly the result of decisions taken since the liberation of Baghdad.

A different long-term strategy and short-term tactics could have avoided these and could possibly still avoid these problems.

Overall, these three problems mean that the occupation either on a de facto or de jure basis will have to last a great deal longer than June 30th. The continued presence of large numbers of foreign troops is essential for the successful creation of order.

International oversight is also key for the stability of Iraq. It's role would be to manage the Iraqi polity while the Iraqi population negotiates amongst itself the terms of a national pact.

Before these things -- these things are crucial for the medium- term stability of the country, and need international oversight.

Any attempt to understand the problems faced by the Coalition Provisional Authority today and any future government of Iraq has to understand the legacy of Saddam Hussein they are striving to overcome. Before the liberation of Baghdad last year, it was impossible to talk about civil society in Iraq. The regime had reshaped or broken all intermediate institutions that sat between the population and the state. For the Iraqi population, politics only began on April 9th last year. The Iraqi political organizations that the CPA are trying to liaise with have either been in existence for little over a year or have been imported into the country in the aftermath of regime change. This means that they have had a very short period of time to gain the attention of the population, and more importantly to win their trust and allegiance. So Iraqi politics today are extremely fluid. Liberation has led to political mobilization, but at the present junction this process is both tentative, unstable and highly fractured. No one individual or party has managed to rally any significant amount of support from the population. This was starkly borne out by the largest opinion poll ever conducted in Iraq, in February 2004. Although some of the results were broadly positive for the CPA, others highlighted distinct problems for the medium-term political stability of the country. When asked which organization they would vote for in a national election, the Shi'a party Al-Dawa received the highest polling figure. But I think it's crucial to recognize the support that Al-Dawa registered was extremely low, at only 10 percent of those questioned.

Other parties that also claim a national base registered even lower polling figures. The largest percentage of those polls, 39.2 percent, answered that they did not know whom they were going to vote for, with 34.5 percent refusing to answer the question at all.

A similar very low response resulted to the question, Which national leader in Iraq, if any, do you trust the most? Again, Al- Dawa's leader, Ibrahim Jafferi, got the highest rating, but again it was only 7.7 percent of those questioned. The more indicative result was 21.1 percent of those questioned who answered they didn't trust any political figures, and 36.7 percent who answered they weren't sure.

In Iraq today the CPA faces a highly mobilized by largely atomized society that is unrestrained by effective state institutions or by political parties. The Iraqi people that the politicians speak so freely about have not yet given their allegiance to any individual party. They clearly feel unrepresented at a national level. They have little or no affinity with the parties who claim to speak for Iraq. With this in mind, handing sovereignty back to Iraqis would be dangerous and could, if anything, further increase the alienation of the Iraqi population from the CPA or its successive body and the governing structure it's trying to build.

Against the background of increased violence and insecurity, plans for rebuilding the political and administrative structures in Iraq appear to have become largely reactive. As policy has moved to meet a series of challenges, it appears that little attention has been paid to the long-term consequences of each new initiative.

The key problem damaging the occupation and hindering state building is the difficulty in communication between American civil servants stationed in the Green Zone in downtown Baghdad and the vast majority of ordinary Iraqis. It is this inability to have meaningful interaction with Iraqi society that is a core problem facing the occupation today.

A second problem hampering the occupation is the CPA's continuing lack of expert knowledge about the country they are trying to control. Within the CPA's headquarters there are very few experts on any aspect of Iraqi society, politics or economy. With this limited expertise on Iraq, the coalition became waryingly dependent upon a small group of Iraqi exiles they brought back to Baghdad in the aftermath of the liberation. They were meant to provide several functions. First, they would become the main channel of communication between the wider Iraqi population and U.S. forces. Secondly, they would also, in spite of being absent from the country for many years, become the chief source of information and guidance for the American administrators struggling to understand and rebuild a country. And, finally, and most importantly, they were set to become the basis of the new political elite. The heavy reliance on organizations like the Iraqi National Accord and the Iraqi National Congress has further exacerbated the divide between Iraqi society and U.S. forces. Despite setting up numerous offices around Baghdad, publishing lots of party newspapers and spending large sums of money, the two main exiled groups -- the INC and the INA -- have so far failed to put any substantial roots into Iraqi society. This is borne out by the opinion poll conducted during February 2004. Ahmed Chalabi and Ayad Alawi both respectively registered 0.2 percent of those questioned when asked, Which national leader, if any, in Iraq do you trust?

The inability of the exiled parties to develop significant constituencies within Iraq has not stopped the CPA from using them as the cornerstone of new governing structures. This is heralded as we know by the CPA setting up the Iraqi Governing Council in July 2003. This body was heralded by the CPA as, quote, "The most representative body in Iraq's history." The representative nature of the Iraqi Governing Council does clearly not come from the method of its formation, but instead supposedly the balanced nature of its membership. The politicians were chosen to approximate the supposed ethnic makeup of Iraq.

The confessional basis to choosing the Iraqi Governing Council caused much heated debate in Iraqi political circles, and across the newly-liberated press in Baghdad. Arguments focused on the way members were chosen for their sectarian affiliation, not their technical skills, and the dangers of introducing divisive confessional dynamics into the highest levels of Iraqi politics.

The lack of communication between American civil servants and military personnel, their hand-picked allies on the Iraqi Governing Council and the wider population of Iraq, is one of the key problems undermining the occupation and the CPA's attempts to build a state. From this inability to interact with Iraqi society springs the core problems facing the U.S. and those who will inherit the Iraqi state after the 30th of June. Many Iraqis, aware of the increasing unpopularity of the U.S. presence in their country, and believing it to be temporary, are still sitting on their hands, eschewing involvement in government institutions, political and administrative, until the situation becomes clearer and the risks of political involvement become fewer.

Overcoming this problem is clearly the chief concern of Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N. envoy in Iraq. Early indications suggest that Brahimi may well be trying to reproduce an Afghan model. This would involve a caretaker government made up of a prime minister, president and two vice presidents. Before elections, scheduled sometime for late 2004 or early 2005, this ruling triumvirate would gain legitimacy from a national conference to be convened a short time after June 30th.

It is unclear how this plan would overcome the problems that have undermined the various approaches of the CPA. Firstly, where is Mr. Brahimi going to pick the president and the prime minister from? It seems very likely that he will be forced to choose from the core of the Iraqi Governing Council that has to date formed the revolving presidency of the council. If he does succumb to this temptation, then all the problems that have dogged the Iraqi Governing Council -- it's lack of legitimacy, its inability to forge meaningful links with the population, and the criticisms of it being appointed and not elected -- are likely to resurface.

Secondly, because Mr. Brahimi, like his predecessor Sergio Vieira de Mello, is working under the auspices of the CPA, he runs a distinct danger of being perceived of as merely an appendage to the occupation.

Finally, with the current poor security situation, the proposed national congress may find it very difficult attracting a large and representative sample of the Iraqi population. If this were the case, it would be very difficult for it to fulfill its dual roles as a forum for national consultation and a source of legitimacy for the new caretaker government.

The failure of a national conference to gather momentum and bring together a broad cross section of the population would leave the caretaker government proposed by Mr. Brahimi dangerously exposed and open to similar criticisms and suspicions as those that have been leveled at the Iraqi Governing Council since its formation. The only way to avoid such pitfalls would be to totally internationalize the creation of the governing institutions and democratic structures. This would not mean a partial or token role for the United Nations organizing national conferences or overseeing elections; instead it would involve bringing the whole occupation and state-building under U.N. management. This would reduce the suspicion felt toward the CPA by sections of the Iraqi population. The organization overseeing the move and the creation of a new state would then not be the United States but the international community. Accusations of double standards or nefarious intent would be much harder to sustain. Arguments about the occupiers' willingness to relinquish power -- both economic and political -- would be negated. It will be the Security Council in New York, not the U.S. government in Washington, that would have the ultimate responsibility for Iraq's transition.

This would result in many more Iraqis doing the whole exercise with a great deal more legitimacy. The U.N. could then utilize expertise and troops from across the international community. Those involved in the reconstruction, both Iraqis and international civil servants, would not run the danger of being labeled as collaborators.

Now, I think the third problem that I'll briefly touch on is the severe lack of troops on the ground in Iraq at the moment. I think RAND Corporation in its book on state-building argued that there should be at least 400,000 or 500,000 troops on the ground. I think it's one security personnel for every -- it's 20 for every 1,000 I think. Now, clearly the United States isn't and can't be in a position to supply that number of troops. Also, I'm afraid NATO can't. The basic estimates of spare troops for NATO to deliver is about 10,000, as far as I understand it. So it has to be much broader coalition of the international community that would deliver a great deal more troops so to fill what is at the moment, what is today a security vacuum. So that's why I say there hasn't been a spike in violence. What this has been is a cumulative thing towards a tipping point that we saw over the last two weeks, where Iraq is growing cynical and alienated from the occupation. And those who choose to resort to violence -- and let's not forget that Iraq is a highly-armed society, with nearly most men of military age having done some form of military service, and a lot of them seek military action. So therefore these individuals move towards violence because there is a security vacuum. And that security vacuum, as Professor Cole has alluded to, has produced something much more worrying in Iraq today, and that's the growth of militias. It doesn't take much to get a group of armed men together and dominate your neighborhood because the occupation can't do it for you. Those militias are now increasingly organizing along sectarian lines, and are claiming to deploy order on the basis of political -- they're repaying in political affiliation. I think that's one of the most dangerous long-term dynamics that we face in Iraq today. And the only way you can do that is by building -- circumvent that -- is by building sustainable democratic links between the Iraqi population and government. That's going to take a lot of time. And before you do that, as the first desperate thing you need to do, establish security across the whole of the country. Thank you very much.

SEN. LUGAR: Well, thank you very much, Dr. Dodge.

Once again we'll have a seven-minute limit on our questions. We'll try to adhere to that as best we can.

Let me start by saying that Mr. Perle has mentioned that Iraqis will finally have to settle the issue, and his suggestion was that we should have brought in thousands of Iraqis at the outset -- both for security purposes as well as for governance purposes. Dr. Cole, you've mentioned that in fact the overthrow of Saddam liberated the Iraqis, liberated the religious groups, including the Shi'ites who may have been affiliated with Iran, but may not have been, may have had an indigenous movement -- may be interested in democracy, may be not. May be interested really in theology and what they were about.

And, Dr. Dodge, you've added the disquieting thought that whether the Iraqis came in from the outside, or whether they are indigenous and stay all at home, very few have captured the attention or the support of other Iraqis -- very, very small numbers for any particular person or party or movement.

Now, all of this comes to a head June 30 or before then when Mr. Brahimi, Ambassador Brahimi and his group apparently are going to make some selections. And you suggested, Dr. Dodge, that probably, all things considered, he will select some of the leaders -- perhaps the top leaders, the president or the two vice presidents, the prime minister -- from members of the Governing Council. But, if so, this is a group, at least as you have described it, were imposed to begin with by the coalition and do not have the support of Iraqis, so that, from the beginning, this group has some problems in terms of executive leadership.

Now, granted, the advisory group may ameliorate that somewhat, but then, since many of these people will not have high recognition either, or great popularity, they may not be able to add a great deal of support to this.

So the group that we're about to cede authority to, on the face of it, is not well-known, not well-supported, at least as you would describe from the polling that you have there. On the other hand, there is at least anecdotal evidence that Iraqis who were exiles who have come in are not particularly well-supported either, although they may be knowledgeable.

And as Mr. Perle has said, perhaps our policy with the liberation of Iraq never had the follow-through from administrations or Congress in the past, or maybe pragmatically it was impossible for this group to overthrow Saddam militarily. Maybe that simply was a non-starter.

But in any event, we're faced, it appears to me, pragmatically in this situation, if June 30 is to be the time, with somebody naming people. And Mr. Brahimi appears to be the one designated to do this now. And so maybe Iraqis, all things considered, since it comes from a United Nations commission, accept the fact that this is an interim group and that they are setting up the conditions for elections, which particularly Ayatollah Sistani has called for. So maybe they get by. But, then again, maybe they don't. This is why, in my initial questions, I raised an issue I would like to raise from you, because it's not been touched upon.

What happens if, for example, the governing group decides that the security we are providing, which all of us believe today is really essential, and we would like others to be helping us, but at minimum no one has suggested the 130,000 Americans ought to leave, because that seems to be the (glue?) factor, at least, however well they're handling it.

But let's say this government really takes things seriously and the new president or the vice president or so forth indicates that they have some serious qualms about our tactics, whether it be in Fallujah or with regard to Najaf or other places. In other words, they would say to the American commander, "You may be commander of 130,000 Americans, but we don't want you to go to Fallujah" or "We want to prescribe how the security is done these days in our country."

Now, perhaps the U.N. resolutions that have been passed -- and we hope, at least, that they will be to give a certain amount of legitimacy to all of this structure -- still say the American commander is in charge until the training occurs, until there is a pass-off.

But one of the reasons I'm raising this question is, in the same spirit as you've raised the question, how do you select the people, and how are they given at least some strength, given the numbers that you've cited, really how do we establish the relationship on security between this government, that some people blandly say just has civil sovereignty and not the other, but maybe so, maybe not, if Iraqis, in fact, decide to take seriously the whole problem of governance.

Now, finally, just for any of your comments, at the end of the day there still are the technical questions of these elections. In Afghanistan, this has been formidable, for a variety of reasons. Barely 20 to 25 percent of the population has been registered, even though there is an agreement that the election should have been held at a certain point; it's been pushed back. It may be pushed back some more.

But who does the nitty-gritty political work in Iraq, as you perceive it -- registering valid voters, setting up security for some legitimacy, so that after these elections are held, there are not cries of foul ball, that in essence this is a flawed situation in which we didn't get what we wanted?

Well, each of you give a comment, and that will exhaust my time, and I will turn to Senator Biden. Mr. Perle, do you have any overall thoughts about this situation? . . .

SEN. LUGAR: Dr. Cole?

MR. COLE: Well, I agree that there are sets of very difficult issues here that have yet to be negotiated. And indeed, we don't know with whom we will be negotiating them.

With regard to the military situation, I'm a little bit more optimistic about the relationship of any Iraqi government with CENTCOM insofar as the Iraqi army is gone. Iraq is a small country of 25 million surrounded by very large countries like Iran and Turkey, each of which have nearly three times as many, and which have very powerful militaries. Iran fought an eight-year war with Iraq not so long ago. Turkey has made noises occasionally about invading the north of Iraq.

So I think that whether they like it or not, most responsible Iraqis are going to want a U.S. security umbrella. They may have severe differences of opinion. And indeed, the interim governing council that we appointed didn't like the strategy used at Fallujah and said so on Al Arabiya satellite television. But they may have differences of opinion about particular tactics and so forth. I'm fairly optimistic that they're not going to want to be left in the lurch, regardless of their feelings about being occupied. So I think those things can be negotiated.

I would say, with regard to the issue of holding elections, it should be remembered that Iraq was a constitutional monarchy from the 1920s through the 1950s. There were occasionally military coups in that period. But, on the whole and by and large, they had elections and parties came to power and prime ministers were elected.

And so this is not an unprecedented thing to happen in Iraq. And it ended in part because that was a game of large landlords in that period and didn't have popular support. I think there are already now city councils and provincial governing councils in place. They haven't been exactly democratically put in place, but they are there. There are people who would be in charge of voter registration. The voter registration can be kept honest in some ways because it can be compared to the food ration roles that the U.N. had prepared.

So I think that, in principle, there's not a reason for which Iraq can't go to the polls in January. I think Grand Ayatollah Sistani desperately wants this. He doesn't want the country to fall into chaos. He will exercise his considerable moral authority in this regard.

I think there will be people who will attempt to disrupt this process. There will be guerrilla forces that attempt to disrupt it. And that's why I say that elections should be held anyway. Even if some polling booths are bombed, the elections should go forward. Twenty-five million people should be allowed to vote in their government. It won't be perfect. The first government that is elected may be contested. But it will have a great deal more legitimacy than anything that can be appointed, and it's the only way forward.

SEN. LUGAR: Dr. Dodge.

MR. DODGE: Thank you. I think we have two problems. We have the date of the 30th of June, which is shooting towards us with increasing speed. And you or I or the vast majority of Iraqis don't know what that will deliver, because so much of it is unworked out. So we have that very narrow political timetable. But on the other hand, we have a society ravaged by 35 years of dictatorship, which has no institutions, which is highly mobilized, but isn't coalescing around political forces. And that's the great tension.

So I guess your question is, how do we overcome that question? What's the best compromise we can find? Well, I think it's a hybrid. Firstly, clearly, in the run-up to elections, whenever they come -- and they may well or may certainly, I suspect, be postponed -- we need to build local democratic structures.

We need to build on the limited work that's been done on local town councils and regional councils and pump money and oversight into that, because that will clearly be the structures which -- the architecture which democracy will finally be built through. I think there's been too much emphasis on grand conferences in Baghdad and not enough on the nitty-gritty, unglamorous work of building local democracy.

And secondly, I agree with Professor Cole, you desperately need a national election, because what that will do is force these parties to develop a national base. And those that can't develop a national base won't get national votes.

It will also force, to a certain extent, these parties to shape the policy, the very diverse and fractured policy, and explain to the Iraqi population or negotiate with the Iraqi population what is a valid manifesto. So you'll have a dialogue between the parties and the population which will be mutually transforming and then will channel political mobilization, anger as well as hope, through democratic institutions. So an election is desperately needed. But my great worry is that, like nearly everything else with this occupation, it will be postponed and postponed.

Now, that's a pessimistic prediction. But while that may well be happening, it's desperate that much more emphasis is put on the local level, building up local democracy.

SEN. LUGAR: I thank all three of you. I'd just make an observation that much seems to depend upon the Ayatollah Sistani and his desire for an election to occur, for democracy to happen, for at least the Shi'ite majority to become a government, so that, pragmatically, as Mr. Perle has said, things may muddle through because, if they get off-track, the elections, the democracy, whatever may be manifested there, will get off-track likewise.

Senator Biden.

SEN. BIDEN: There seems to be an agreement among the three of you that elections should take place as rapidly as feasible. Is that right? Do you all agree with that? And that's essentially what Chirac has been arguing for for the last year, that there should have been elections almost immediately. He wanted to have them this spring. Was it feasible to have them this spring? Anyone.

MR. COLE: Yes, it was feasible. The British command in Basra actually has been a little bit insubordinate in being very open that they thought such elections were entirely feasible. The CPA would say, "Well, the election rolls are incomplete." They would say, "No, they've been updated." They would say, "Well, they didn't include the Kurds." The British commanders said, "Well, yes, they do."

And so Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani wanted to have the elections this spring. There was substantial international support for such an idea. And at least the British military command in Basra thought that it was feasible.

I mean, as a historian, I try to have a balanced view of these things. And I also do understand the reasons for which perhaps Mr. Bremer was not eager to go forward with such elections at this time. It's a risk. You don't know who exactly is going to be elected. And they did this in Bosnia. They had early elections after the violence ended there, and people got into power, quite frankly, who later were thugs and who later on posed obstacles to then, down the road, further good things happening.

So I think, you know, one must remember that a lot of the American military and State Department and other personnel involved in Iraq, their recent history has been in the Balkans. And coming from that Balkans background, you could understand how they felt, "Well, we went too early to elections in the Balkans and it had this" --

SEN. BIDEN: I was one who shared that view, by the way.

MR. COLE: Yeah. Well, so I'm sympathetic --

SEN. BIDEN: I know no-one else acknowledges having made any mistake anywhere where that applies but I will never -- (inaudible).

MR. COLE: I'm sympathetic to the reservations that they had. However, I think Iraq is not the Balkans. The Iraqi situation is different. I think there would have been a value in going to early elections in Iraq. I think it might have forestalled the recent blow- up, had they done that.

I also think it was a mistake not to have early municipal elections. People were planning municipal open elections in Najaf last June and everything was set to go, and Mr. Bremer decided not to do it. What was reported in the press -- and I don't know if it's true -- is that he was afraid that pro-Iranian parties would win in Najaf. I hesitate to say this, but there are no parties that would win an election for the mayoralty of Najaf which wouldn't be favorable towards Iran. So if that's a consideration, you could never have elections there.

I think it was a mistake to cancel those elections. I think it made a bad impression on Sistani and other Shi'ite leaders that the United States was maybe not serious about democracy. So I agree completely with Dr. Dodge that as soon as you can have free and open municipal elections, that would be a good base for the national scene.

And John Bourne, for instance, who is a Coalition Provisional Authority figure in the Nasiriyah area, has been going around having open elections in the towns and villages around Nasiriyah with great success. So in some parts of Iraq it's been done. In other parts it's been the local colonel lieutenant who sort of appointed a council. It's diverse. But the more local choice can be there, the better.

MR. DODGE: Just a brief point. The feedback from the local elections organized around Nasiriyah were quite intriguing and surprising. They threw up a much larger secular vote than would have been anticipated; that secular parties and secular independents got a much larger share of the vote than anyone would have predicted . . .

SEN. LUGAR: Senator Corzine.

SEN. CORZINE: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I truly appreciate your holding this set of hearings. I apologize for not being here earlier this morning, with work on the floor. And some of the questions may be repetitive. But, one of the things -- the assumption that I'm hearing here, which I'm actually quite troubled by, is that we have consistently set out game plans, I'm not even sure how effective those plans have been laid down, then had to change, because circumstances on the ground pragmatically led to different responses than the current situation. We were suppose to have a status of force agreement put in place three or four months ago.

Given the fact that there has been this enormous shift, different people can categorize it however they want, the fact is American men and women are losing their lives in this process in untold numbers in the last three weeks, and it certainly catches the public's attention, it catches the Senate's attention, and it has a great human element to it. Why are we so committed to a timetable that apparently was pulled out of the air more than -- I've been involved in business plans, and sometimes you work your way through, and then you get t a point and you say, we're not prepared to go. We don't know what the status of forces are, we don't know who we're going to transfer this to, we don't know what the civil sovereignty means versus military sovereignty is about. We have a rough justice view of the direction of this. We're arguing about whether it should be internationalized or it shouldn't be internationalized. I think we are not in prepared state -- it doesn't seem to me, now I don't have all the information that I'd like to be asking the administration why they think we're in a period of preparation. You know, we're still arguing about whether we should have more forces on the ground or we shouldn't have more forces on the ground. How do we create security? No one would disagree with Mr. Perle's argument in the long run that we'd like to have an Iraqi face on this. That's just not possible right now, or if it was, then we have really not prepared ourselves for this moment in time.

So, why -- the simple question is why June 30th, when in fact the most important thing, which I think was generally agreed by the panel, was getting to an election that actually has Iraqi legitimacy to it as opposed to this mad rush towards June 30th with all kinds of unanswered questions. You know, in the Afghani model, which by the way, at least to my mind, looked like an international -- I thought they had an international conference in Bonn, they had people on the ground, we have the United Nations sort of supervising how the thing worked, I see international troops fighting alongside the America side -- maybe that's not internationalization, maybe it's just Afghani, I don't really believe that. But the fact is, we need to make decisions that will allow for the reality of creating security and political arrangements that we'll set up this election, that I think all of us agree ultimately are the appropriate things.

What's so magic about June 30th? . . .


MR. COLE: Could I just say that the reasons for which this date was set have to do with the crisis of last October, when it became increasingly clear that Mr. Bremer could not, as initially envisaged, continue to rule Iraq virtually by fiat for an extended period of time. He flew back to Washington. He negotiated with the interim governing council. And initially his plan was to have council-based elections and to have a more legitimate government come into power on June 30th that at least had some electoral input from some proportion of the Iraqi public. Those council-based elections were viewed by Grand Ayatollah Sistani and many other Iraqi actors as stage managed and not genuine representatives -- representations of the Iraqi public will, and so that element of it had to drop out, but the transition remained. So, there is a kind of natural history of how this thing has happened.

But I have to say that I read the Iraqi press in Arabic every day. My firm impression is that this is enormously popular among the Iraqis. That is to say they want a transition on June 30th. There's no faction in Iraq, on any part of the political spectrum, that would be at all happy with any kind of delay in this date. And I think we have to recognize that the way things have turned out, it is largely going to be a symbolic moment. I mean, the U.S. is still going to make a lot of important decisions in Iraq. There's going to be a weak caretaker government which may have, you know, some U.N. influence in its appointment.

But, the big date now is next winter's election. And if the security situation can be stabilized to the point, and if preparations can be made for those elections actually to occur, that, for me, would be the light at the end of the tunnel. That's the one glimmer of hope I see in this situation.

I don't understand how someone can look at what happened in the last two weeks and say it's not a popular uprising. The United States lost control of much of Baghdad. Its supply lines and communications lines to the south were lost. A rag-tag bunch of militiamen in Kut chased the Ukranian troops off of their base and took control of it. This was an uprising. And how much popular support it had is hard to know. It's true that when pushed these people took back off their uniforms and went home, but there are real problems here.

SEN. CORZINE: I would only say, though, that if you create a structure that is a problem for getting to the elections, then you may have satisfied public opinion, so-called public opinion in the short- run and ended up creating one hell of a mess when you get to -- getting to what I think all the voices I hear, both those that were in favor of this, and weren't in favor of it, and none of us want cut- and-run, but we want to get to a positive conclusion -- that is -- (inaudible) -- elections, and it seems to me, just one person's observation, we're on a mad rush with regard to a whole lot of unanswered questions, and that we feel pressure about it, but I'm curious --

MR. DODGE: I think that's the great danger that you've both hit upon, that there is a sense that something's going to change on June 30th in Iraqi popular opinion. And when we look at what's -- (inaudible) -- aren't state institutions in Iraq that run from Baghdad to the periphery of the geographical area of Iraq. The polity, as it seems, is not ready for elections, so there'll be an interregnum before elections come, and security is absolutely dreadful, and when pushed, the indigenous security structures -- the police and the army -- ran away or refused to fight when they were asked to impose security. So, there is a build up of aspiration around June 30th that I suspect, in a pessimistic prediction, will then, when they -- when that popular opinion realizes nothing changes after June 30th, and things may well get a lot worse in the run up and the aftermath of that date, that exactly as you say, Senator, that goodwill or hope will be then frittered away, and the next dates will be even more difficult to move towards. That's the great danger that nothing about this handover has been nailed down, nothing that -- you can't say the ink has not dried yet, the ink -- the document hasn't been written yet. There is so much uncertainty in a very uncertain and disturbed country that June 30th may well add to our problems, not detract from them.

SEN. CORZINE: Thank you.

SEN. LUGAR: Thank you very much, Senator Corzine. I thank each of you for your patience, and your longevity, and your wisdom. And the hearing is adjourned.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Perle at the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations

It was quite an experience to be on the same panel on Tuesday with Richard Perle and Toby Dodge, before the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Perle wasn't added until the last minute, and it is mysterious why he was there, since ours was supposed to be an "expert" panel. Dodge has an important book on Iraq. Originally Ahmad Hashim was going to be on with us (he came Wednesday instead), and then we heard Perle had been put on. Perle, of course, is no Iraq expert. He doesn't know a word of Arabic, and has never lived anywhere in the Arab world.

Perle's entire testimony was a camouflaged piece of flakking for Ahmad Chalabi. He complained that the State Department and the CIA had not created a private army for Chalabi and had not cooperated with him. Perle did not mention Chalabi's name, but it was clear that was who he was talking about (State and CIA famously dropped Chalabi in the mid-1990s when they asked him to account for the millions they had given him, and he could not).

In fact, Perle kept talking about "the Iraqis" when it was clear he meant Chalabi. He said the US should have turned power over to "the Iraqis" long before now.

But here's an interesting contradiction. I said at one point that I thought Bremer should have acquiesced in Grand Ayatollah Sistani's request for open elections to be held this spring, and that if they had been, it might have forestalled the recent blow-up. I had in mind that Muqtada al-Sadr in particular would have been kept busy acting as a ward boss, trying to get his guys returned from East Baghdad & Kufa, etc.

Perle became alarmed and said that scheduling early elections would not have prevented the "flare-up" because the people who mounted it were enemies of freedom and uninterested in elections. Perle has this bizarre black and white view of the world and demonizes people right and left. A lot of the Mahdi Army young men who fought for Muqtada are just neighborhood youth, unemployed and despairing. Some are fanatics, but most of them don't hate freedom-- most of them have no idea what it is, having never experienced democracy.

But anyway, what struck me was the contradiction between Perle's insistence that the US should have handed power over to Iraqis months ago, and his simultaneous opposition to free and fair elections. The only conclusion I can draw is that he wants power handed to Chalabi, who would then be a kind of dictator and would not go to the polls any time soon.

Perle also at one point said he didn't think the events of the first two weeks of April were a "mass uprising" and said he thought Fallujah was quiet now. (Nope).

It is indicative of the Alice in Wonderland world in which these Washington Think Tank operators live that Perle could make such an obviously false observation with a straight face. Even a child who has been watching CNN for the past three weeks would know that there was a mass uprising. (Even ten percent of the American-trained police switched sides and joined the opposition, and 40% of Iraqi security men refused to show up to fight the insurgents.)

I replied, pointing out that the US had lost control of most of Baghdad, its supply and communications lines to the south were cut, and a ragtag band of militiamen in Kut chased the Ukrainian troops off their base and occupied it. It was an uprising. I suppose Perle hopes that if he says it wasn't an uprising, at least some people who aren't paying attention will believe him. It is bizarre.

It reminded me of the scene in Ladykillers where the fraudsters set off an explosion in a lady's basement, and she hears it while outside in a car, and is alarmed, and the Tom Hanks character says in a honeyed southern accent, "Why, Ah don't believe Ah heard anything at all." I could just see Perle in a Panama hat at that point playing the character.

It is deeply shameful that Perle is still pushing Chalabi, and may well succeed in installing him. Chalabi is wanted for embezzling $300 million from a Jordanian bank. He cannot account for millions of US government money given him from 1992 to 1996. He was flown into Iraq by the Pentagon (Perle was on the Defense Advisory Board, a civilian oversight committee for the Pentagon) with a thousand of his militiamen. The US military handed over to Chalabi, a private citizen, the Baath intelligence files that showed who had been taking money from Saddam, giving Chalabi the ability to blackmail large numbers of Iraqi and regional actors. It was Chalabi who insisted that the Iraqi army be disbanded, and Perle almost certainly was an intermediary for that stupid decision. It was Chalabi who insisted on blacklisting virtually all Baath Party members, even if they had been guilty of no crimes, effectively marginalizing all the Sunni Iraqi technocrats who could compete with him for power. It was Chalabi who finagled his way onto the Interim Governing Council even though he has no grassroots support (only 0.2 percent of Iraqis say they trust him).

Now Chalabi's nephew Salem has been put in charge of the trial of Saddam Hussein. Salem is a partner in Zell and Feith, a Jerusalem-based law firm headed by a West Bank settler, in which Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of Defense for Planning, is also a senior partner when not in the US government. You can be assured that the trial will be conducted on behalf of the Bush administration and the Neocons, and on behalf of the Chalabis. Since the Chalabis have been trying to overthrow Saddam for decades, it is hard to see how this can have even the appearance of an impartial tribunal.

Anyway, Perle was just a one-note Johnny, with his whole message being "We must give away Iraq to Ahmad Chalabi yesterday! That will solve all the problems."

If the Bush administration listens to Perle and puts Chalabi in as a soft dictator, it will be the final nail in the coffin of the Iraq enterprise. The whole thing is already going very badly wrong. Chalabi will play iceberg to the Iraq/Bush Titanic.

It would be really interesting to know the list of secret promises Chalabi has given Perle (and presumably the Israelis through Perle) that would explain this Neocon fervor for the man.

By the way, that Jordanian bank that Chalabi embezzled from in the 1980s? There has been speculation that he was using it to launder Iranian money for the Khomeini war effort against Saddam. So perhaps from his point of view, he hadn't so much embezzled $300 million at the end, but rather collected his retainer from Tehran.

Since Perle was the source of most of the rotten advice that got the US into its current quagmire in Iraq, and since he was forced to resign as chairman of the Defense Advisory Board under a cloud of scandal, it was doubly inappropriate for him to be testifying before the Senate about what to do in Iraq.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Brahimi Criticizes US Bias Toward Israel

Al-Hayat reports that UN special envoy to Iraq Lakhdar Brahimi remarked on Wednesday that it was unjust for the US to show such a strong bias in favor of Israeli repression, and that it was making his job in Iraq more difficult.

Roula Khalaf also describes in the Financial Times the ways in which the two occupations, Israel's in Palestine and America's in Iraq, are becoming linked in the minds of the Arab public.

The US official who said that an anti-occupation movement in Iraq makes no sense, since the Occupation ends on June 30, is surely joking. It is clear to everyone that the Americans will still be actually in charge in Iraq after June 30-- in charge of all the military forces in the country including the Iraqi ones, and still wielding enormous influence on the decisions of the caretaker government.

The British also tried to rule Iraq from behind their embassy after its independence in 1932, and they had a good run all the way to 1958, when a revolution put Iraq on a path of radical nationalist anti-imperialism. Do the Americans have to learn all over how these things can backfire?

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Jaafari Suggests to Muqtada that he go into Exile

az-Zaman reports from Najaf that informed sources are saying that the chief intermediary between the Coalition and Muqtada al-Sadr right now is the leader of the al-Da`wa Party, Ibrahim Jaafari, who is presently in Najaf. The sources said that Jaafari met al-Sadr on Wednesday and suggested to him that he leave Iraq. The sources said Jaafari had shared with the grand ayatollahs in Najaf a copy of an agreement he intends to show to Muqtada later. His militia, the Mahdi Army, would have to be given a new form or melted into other forces. As for the Coalition insistence that Muqtada present himself to a court in connection with the April 9, 2003, murder of Abdul Majid al-Khu'i (Khoei), the sources said that Muqtada has no objections to doing so, but insists that it be a sovereign Iraqi court (i.e. after June 30).

Reports say that Najaf is relatively calm, but there is still a high level of tension in the city.

Cole: I myself suggest Baku, Azerbaijan for Muqtada's exile until June 30. It is a Shiite society so he wouldn't feel that alien, but it has strong secular traditions and is largely Turkic speaking. Iran would be all right, but it is apparently refusing to take him for fear it will later give the US a pretext to attack Iran militarily.

Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson of Knight-Ridder provides a first-hand profile of some of Muqtada al-Sadr's militiamen (and one militia woman). They are not the mere criminal enemies of freedom that they are often depicted by the Neocons, but rather care deeply about Iraqi independence, and they are from the wrong side of the tracks and impatient.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Cole Testimony at Senate Foreign Relations Committee, April 20

US Mistakes in Iraq

by Juan Cole

Testimony before Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, April 20, 2004

This brief addresses three areas. First, what mistakes have been made in the Coalition administration of Iraq, and why? Second, what is the current situation? Third, what steps can be taken to ensure the emergence of a stable and democratic Iraq?

Mistakes

The biggest US failure in Iraq to date lay in American inability to understand the workings of Iraqi society. Many US administrators and military commanders appeared to believe that once the Baathist state of Saddam Hussein was overthrown, they would be dealing with an Iraqi society that was docile, grateful and virtually a blank slate on which US goals could be imprinted.

In fact, Baathist Iraq was a pressure-cooker, consisting of a highly mobilized, urban and relatively literate population that had organized clandestinely to oppose the weak and ramshackle Baath state. Although the clan-based political parties and militias of the Kurds in the north were well known because they had emerged as autonomous under the US no-fly zone, similar phenomena in the Sunni Arab center and the Shiite south were obscured by the information black-out of Baath party censorship. In al-Anbar Province, lying on the road between Amman and Baghdad, local populations came under the influence of Salafi or Sunni fundamentalist movements and ideas that were also growing popular in Jordan. In the late Saddam period, the secular Baathist state allowed more manifestations of Sunni religiosity than it had earlier, allowing these groups to establish beachheads in Fallujah, Ramadi and elsewhere.

Many books and articles were published in Arabic in the 1990s, that should have made clear that the Shiite south in particular was a lively arena of contention between the Baath military and the religious parties and their militias, some with bases in Iran to which they could withdraw. Shiite guerrillas in the south, springing from the clandestine al-Da‘wa Party, Iraqi Hizbullah, Sadrists, or Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, conducted bombings, raids, assassinations and other acts of defiance against the Baath, often sheltering in the swamps of the south or retreating, if pursued, to Iranian territory. The followers of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr (d. 1999) in particular were militantly anti-Baath, anti-American and anti-Israel, and aspired to an Islamic state in Iraq on the Iranian model. Given the US role in calling for, and then allowing the crushing of, the Shiite uprising of spring, 1991, after the Gulf War, the idea that Shiite Iraqis would be "grateful" to the United States and now willing to forgive altogether that earlier betrayal, was fanciful. Moreover, US officials appeared to be ignorant of the important role of Iran in Iraqi Shiite politics, a role that goes back to 1501, and kept talking about the need of Iran to avoid "interfering" in Iraq (which is rather like telling the Vatican to stop interfering in Ireland). In addition to dissident groups, figures existed within Iraqi society like Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who have enormous moral authority, about which American administrators were ignorant or skeptical into winter, 2004, to their peril.

These covert political parties and clandestine guerrilla groups were curbed by the Baath secret police and by the Fidayee Saddam. What the Americans did in March and April of 2003 was to remove that apparatus of repression, and allow the religious parties and militias freely to organize, canvass for new members, and spread their ideas and structures freely throughout the country. The Salafi Sunnis and the various Shiite religious parties had a vision of post-Baath Iraq, for which they had been planning for over a decade, that differed starkly from United States goals in Iraq. But because the US was unable to assemble in post-war Iraq anything like the 500,000 troops it had had in the first Gulf War, it and its Coalition allies often were forced actively to depend on the good will and even the security-providing abilities of the religious militias in the post-war period.

Although the US did wisely choose to attempt to incorporate some grass-roots Iraqi political organizations into the Interim Provisional Government, it excluded others. Thus, the London branch of the Shiite al-Dawa Party was given a seat, but the Tehran branch was not (both groups had come back to Iraq after the fall of Saddam, linking back up with local party members who had remained and organized covertly). The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which had a Badr Corps militia of perhaps 15,000 trained men, was given a seat, but the Sadrist organization was not. The Islamic Party of Iraq, a Muslim Brotherhood-derived party from Mosul, was given a seat, but the Salafis of al-Anbar Province were excluded. Of course, some of the excluded groups were hostile to the US occupation, and might have refused to serve, but it is likely that some representative of those tendencies could have been found who would serve. Worse, the US gave special perquisites and extra power to a handful of expatriate politicians with whom it had cut backroom deals. These expatriate politicians had often been involved in scandals, had no grassroots inside the country, and were widely disliked. Many Iraqis feared that the US would shoehorn these expatriates into power as a sort of new soft dictatorship, and that they would betray Iraqi national interests in preference to personal and American ones for years to come.

One strategy that might have forestalled a lot of opposition would have been to hold early municipal elections. Such free and fair elections were actually scheduled in cities like Najaf by local US military authorities in spring of 2003, but Paul Bremer stepped in to cancel them. A raft of newly elected mayors who subsequently gained experience in domestic politics might have thrown up new leaders in Iraq who could then move to the national stage. This development appears to have been deliberately forestalled by Mr. Bremer, in favor of a kind of cronyism that aimed at putting a preselected group of politicians in power. In Najaf, the US appointed a Sunni Baathist officer as mayor over this devotedly Shiite city. He had turned on Saddam only at the last moment. Since Sunni Baathists had massacred the people of Najaf, he was extremely unpopular. He took the children of Najaf notables hostage for ransom and engaged in other corrupt practices. Eventually even the US authorities had to remove him from power and try him. But the first impression the US made on the holy city of Najaf, and therefore on the high Shiite clerics such as Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, was very bad.

The United States made a key strategic error in declining to post enough US troops to Iraq in the post-war period to establish good security. A country the size of Iraq probably required 400,000 to 500,000 troops to keep it orderly in the wake of the collapse of the state. The US compounded that error by dissolving the Iraqi army altogether, which deprived the US of informed potential allies in restoring security, created enormous discontent among the 400,000 men fired, and provided a recruitment pool to religious militias seeking to expand. The US also failed to send in enough experienced, Arabic-speaking civil administrators at the Coalition Provisional Authority. The CPA, with only a thousand employees for much of the post-war period, most of whom could not speak the local language and did not understand local customs, much reduced its own effectiveness by remaining relatively insular and cut off from Iraqi society. The lack of security ensuing from the thinness of the military force on the ground increased the danger to CPA employees and reinforced this insularity. There has been no transparency in US decision-making in Iraq, so that we do not, and the Iraqi people do not know why these steps, so injurious to the common good, were taken.

The security situation in post-Baath Iraq has not been good in much of the country, though the Shiite south was for a long time somewhat quieter than the centernorth.

The problem area encompassed Baghdad, Samarra, Baqubah (and Diyalah province more generally), Mosul, Kirkuk, and al-Anbar Province (Fallujah, Ramadi, Habbaniyah). Nevertheless, guerrillas did mount significant attacks occasionally in the south, as with the huge August 29 truck bombing at Najaf, and in the far north, as with the bombing at Irbil in January. These bombings targeted highly charged political and religious symbols and greatly undermined Iraqi confidence in the ability of the US to provide security. Coalition troops routinely came under fire in the South, though not nearly with as much frequency as in the center-north. The US official and press tendency to speak of the problems as having concerned a relatively small portion of the country, mistakenly termed the "Sunni triangle," obscured the scope and seriousness of a security collapse that encompassed perhaps half of the geographical area of Iraq and affected a good third of its population on an ongoing basis and at least half at some point.

Even in the quieter areas, they were quiet for all the wrong reasons. In the north, the Kurdish peshmerga or paramilitary fighters provided much of what urban security there was, and they had come to dominate the police in multi-ethnic, oil-rich Kirkuk. These paramilitary fighters constituted a law unto themselves and Kurdish leaders vowed that Federal Iraqi troops would never again set foot on Kurdish soil. In the Shiite south, Coalition forces were spread exceedingly thin and were staffed by inexperienced troops from countries like Bulgaria and the Ukraine, who had no local knowledge and who had apparently been assured that they would not be involved in warfare but rather in peacekeeping. Local townspeople tended to turn to Shiite militiamen to police neighborhoods, according to press reports, in places like Samawah, and even in large urban neighborhoods in East Baghdad and Basra.

Although hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on reconstruction, and there have been some genuine successes, as with the restoration of electricity, the poor security situation has detracted from those successes in the minds of most Iraqis. Moreover, the successes have been partial and often unsatisfactory. Hospitals are open, but often strapped for cash and lacking in equipment, medicine and personnel. Electricity provision before the war was highly inadequate, so returning to pre-war levels does not solve the problem. The preference for American and British contractors has often cut Iraqi businesses out of the lucrative contracts, except at lower bid levels, which in turn has prevented the US from making a big dent in massive unemployment rates. The massive unemployment in turn has contributed to poor security, in a vicious circle.

The Current Problems

The US administration of Iraq has suffered from lack of consistency, from infighting among major bureaucratic organizations such as the Department of Defense and the State Department, and from an apparent desire strongly to shape Iraqi society in certain directions, which has the effect of contravening international law on military occupations, specifically the Hague Regulations of 1907 and the Geneva Conventions of 1949. One example is the determination to impose on the Iraqi economy the kind of shock therapy or very rapid liberalization tried in Russia, with disastrous results. It is one thing for a sovereign Iraqi government to ask for help in liberalizing the economy, it is another for an American civil administrator to take such a decision by fiat. American announcements on economic policy have often been opposed by local Iraqi merchants and entrepreneurs, by the Iraqi-American Chamber of Commerce, and even by the American-appointed Interim Governing Council itself.

The US has gone through four major plans for Iraqi governance and it is unclear as of this writing to whom sovereignty will be handed on June 30. Jay Garner, the first civil administrator, planned to hold a national congress in July, 2003, and then to hand over Iraq to the resulting government by October of that year. He was replaced by Paul Bremer, who initially planned to run Iraq himself by fiat for two or three years. He was unable to do so, and then appointed an Interim Governing Council which, however, suffered problems of legitimacy insofar as it was a committee of a foreign occupying power. On November 15 Mr. Bremer made a 180 degree turn and announced councilbased elections for spring of 2004 and a turn-over of sovereignty to the resulting government. Those elections were deemed undemocratic by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, and were not held, leaving Bremer with a turn-over date but not a government to turn over to. Most Iraqis, who have yet to experience anything like democracy in the post-Baath period, are confused and suspicious at these high-handed and frankly somewhat dictatorial proceedings.

The US has faced serious opposition from Iraqi paramilitaries in al-Anbar province and elsewhere, and has sometimes even clashed with the Kurdish Peshmerga. In late March and early April, it came into severe conflict with Sunni tribesmen in Fallujah and with the Army of the Mahdi, a Shiite militia in East Baghdad and the southern Shiite cities, led by Muqtada al-Sadr. Both conflicts were initially mishandled. The US military responded to the killing of four American civilian security guards, and the desecration of their bodies, by surrounding, besieging, and bombarding the entire town of Fallujah. While it was a hotbed of guerrilla activity, the entire town was not implicated in that activity. Many observers, including the former president of the Interim Governing Council Adnan Pachachi, and United Nations special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, have accused the US military of engaging in collective punishment of Fallujans and of failing to take due account of the need to avoid civilian casualties.

While Fallujah was poorly handled from a political point of view, the crisis grew out of an attack on US citizens. In contrast, the decision to go after Muqtada al-Sadr was wholly elective. His movement had been militant since the days of Saddam, and it is true that he was organizing a militia. But he had repeatedly instructed his people to avoid clashing with US troops, and seems mainly to have been organizing for the future. Measures could have been taken to forbid his militiamen from training or appearing in uniform in public. But by attempting to arrest his key aides, the Coalition Provisional Authority telegraphed to him its determination to arrest and imprison him. Muqtada had seen his father killed after similar warnings from Saddam, and reacted by launching an insurgency throughout the south, making the point that he would not go quietly. The CPA grossly underestimated the organizational capacity of his movement. It was able to expel Iraqi police from their stations in many places in the south, and in some instances Iraqi police and military either declined to fight the Army of the Mahdi or even switched sides and joined it. The US military gave up on trying to maintain a presence in East Baghdad. Ukrainian troops were chased off their base at Kut, and Nasiriyah fell to the Sadrists, as did Kufa, Najaf, and parts of Karbala. While the US and its allies were able to contain and then roll back this insurrection, it demonstrated that the Coalition did not really control Iraq, and was only there on the sufferance of powerful social forces that could effectively challenge it when they so chose.

What Needs to Be Done

In order to defuse the violence, the US military needs to adopt a much more narrow and targeted approach to dealing with guerrillas, and stop "using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut" (in the words of a British officer in Basra). US troops have repeatedly used disproportionate force to reply to guerrilla attacks, and in the process have created new guerrillas by harming innocent civilians. The tactics used at Fallujah have been seen by most Iraqis, and indeed, by many Coalition partners and Interim Governing Council members, as an outrage and a direct flaunting of the Geneva Conventions governing military occupations. Even the ordinary search and find missions conducted in al-Anbar province and elsewhere have often involved male troops invading the private homes of Iraqis, going into the womens’ quarters, and visiting humiliation on tribesmen for whom protecting their women is the basis of their honor. Unless these operations are yielding consistently excellent intelligence and results, they should be curtailed. The Coalition Provisional Authority must cease attempting to "take out" dissident leaders like Muqtada al-Sadr before the hand-over of sovereignty. It was precisely the attempt to cut Muhammad Aidid out of the political process in Somalia that caused the Mogadishu disaster. The US will simply have to accept that there are political forces on the ground in Iraq that it views as undesirable. It cannot dictate Iraqi politics to Iraqis without becoming a frankly colonial power. If it does become a mere colonist in Iraq, it will be mired in the country for decades and be forced to spend hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of servicemen’s lives on the endeavor. Rather, it must draw those less savory political forces in Iraq into parliamentary politics so that they can learn to rework their goals and conflicts in the terms of democratic procedure. Groups like the Sadrists cannot hope to dominate parliament, and so must learn to trade horses to get part of what they want.

The main problem for the United States in Iraq is a lack of popular legitimacy. Neither the Coalition Provisional Authority nor the Interim Governing Council has much popular support, with a few exceptions. Neither grew out of any Iraqi democratic process, and neither was formed with significant involvement of the United Nations Security Council, which even Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has said he respects. In a recent poll, about half of Iraqis felt that the US invasion had been a humiliation, and the other half felt it had been a liberation. Even those who felt liberated, however, are impatient for a government they can call their own.

The US must now move with all due deliberation to holding free and fair, oneperson, one-vote elections in Iraq. Only such a process holds any hope of deflecting faction-fighting into more a more peaceful reworking of political conflict into parliamentary processes. The elections should be held even if the security situation remains poor. Indian and other elections in the global south are often attended by public disturbances and even loss of life, but they nevertheless produce legitimate governments. The recently-released Brahimi plan should be adopted, as President Bush has indicated. It calls for the dissolution of the Interim Governing Council on June 30, for the temporary appointment, under United Nations and Coalition auspices, of a handful of high government officials (a president, two vice presidents and a prime minister) who would form a limited, caretaker government to oversee the transition to elections this winter. It also provides from the election of a broad advisory council that would represent a broader range of Iraqi actors than did the old Interim Governing Council. For the legitimacy of the new government, it is absolutely essential that the United Nations Security Council be deeply involved in its formation and in authorizing it. Indeed, the very presence of US troops and other Coalition troops in Iraq beyond June 30 must be authorized by a new United Nations Security Council resolution if their mission is to remain legal in the bounds of international law.

In the interim, militias should be curbed at the local level and where possible integrated into the Iraqi military. Emphasis should not be placed on attacking the top leaders of the militias, but on dealing with the phenomenon. The pace of the formation of the new military, and the amount of money spent on it, must increase rapidly. This approach would reduce unemployment, reduce the recruitment pool for militias, and provide forces that could help with at least local security.

The giving of reconstruction bids has been structured so that all small bids of $50,000 or less automatically go to Iraqi firms. This ceiling should be raised, to ensure that more Iraqis are involved in reconstruction and more local jobs created. Shipping the money back to the US by employing mainly American firms will not greatly benefit Iraq or address the deep unemployment problems there.

As it is phased out, the Coalition Provisional Authority must reach out to all sections of the Iraqi public to reassure them that they will not be crushed by a new tyranny of the majority, or looted by a handful of cronies of America. The Sadrists in East Baghdad, Kufa and elsewhere must be convinced that they can best exercise their influence by becoming ward bosses and electing their delegates to parliament. Attempting to exclude the Sadrists will only ensure that they remain violent. They should be encouraged to do what the Shiite Amal Party did in Lebanon, trading in its militias for a prominent role in the Lebanese parliament. The Sunni Arabs of Anbar province must likewise be convinced that they can form alliances in parliament that protect them and achieve their goals.

It was a mistake to configure the new Iraqi parliament so that it had only one chamber. In Shiite-majority Iraq, this way of proceeding ensures that Shiites will dominate the legislature. A way should be found to create an upper house, and to so gerrymander the provinces that it over-represents the Sunni minority. This two-house parliament could then serve as a check on any tyranny of the Shiite majority. Such a check is preferable to giving the Kurds a veto over the new constitution to be written in 2005, since giving a minority a veto seems unfair, whereas insisting that the constitution pass the upper house of parliament with a two-thirds majority is unexceptionable.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Basra Toll rises to 68 Dead, 238 Wounded, Including Children
Riyadh Shaken by Blasts, As Well

The horrific series of bombings at police stations in Basra have also killed or injured large numbers of civilians, including children, and cast a pall of dread over the southern port city. Basra had been spared major violence during the recent Shiite uprising, in part, apparently, because the British commanders did some sort of deal with the Sadrists. But Iraqi hyper-nationalist and ex-Baathist elements appear still to be at large, targeting institutions such as the police that are viewed as collaborating with the Coalition Provisional Authority and aiding the transition to a new government. Wael Abdul Latif, the governor of Basra, tried to blame the bombings in al-Qaeda. This is not impossible, especially since al-Qaeda does like multiple simultaneous attacks, and Riyadh was hit, as well. But my suspicion is that the Basra attacks were done by Iraqi Sunnis.

On the other hand, al-Qaeda did strike Riyadh, Saudi Arabia today, hitting a building associated with private security provision (probably for the royal family).


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Has the al-Khoei Family Intervened on Muqtada's Behalf?

Received the following from an Iraqi reader:

' My uncle in Baghdad who is absolutely not a supporter of Moqtada tells me that the Al-Koei family has jointly written a letter to the CPA stating that they do not hold Moqtada responsible for the mob that killed Sayid [Abdul Majid] Al-Koei and that even if we were involved they do not want to press charges against him. Furthermore, the Al-Koei foundation web site blames pro-saddam elements for his death.

I realize that they might be doing this to avoid intra-Shia conflict and still harbor ill will toward Moqtada. Nonetheless if you can corroborate the existence of this letter (it has been widely publicized in Iraq) and its authenticity I think it is an important piece of news.

I hope you will also understand that I am not a partisan of Moqtada in any way, but I want the truth to come out and I think he has been unfairly maligned for essentially what amounts to his political views about theocracy and the presence of US troops in his country. His followers may be uncouth and he may have a militia, but as you point out this is a characteristic of at least a dozen nascent political movements in Iraq.

The only way to defeat Moqtada and theocracy is at the ballot box, if is movement is banned from the electoral process they will go underground and bring a lot of the disenfranchised shia with them. '

If this news is true, it rather pulls the rug out from under the Coalition Provisional Authority case against Muqtada al-Sadr.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Whitaker on Progressive Islam

Brian Whitaker looks at the struggle in the Muslim world between progressives and authoritarians.

He makes the good point:

'Before jumping to conclusions about why this might be, it is worth noting that the same could have been said of Roman Catholic countries about 35 years ago. A look at the world map then would have shown numerous countries, in Latin America, eastern Europe and elsewhere, that had predominantly Catholic populations ruled by authoritarian regimes. It might have been tempting at the time to suggest a connection between their religion and their politics, but it was more a matter of history and circumstances, and events since then have shown that Catholic countries are as capable of adapting to democracy as any others. '

Also do check out Omid Safi's fine edited book on Progressive Muslims, which Whitaker cites.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

40 Dead as Blasts Rip Basra Police Stations; Renewed Fighting at Fallujah

AP is reporting that three huge bombs went off at 3 different police stations in the southern city of Basra almost at the same time on Wednesday and that "many casualties were reported.'

' At one station in the Saudia district of Basra, four vehicles were seen destroyed including two school buses. At least one of the school buses appeared to have been full of passengers, an Associated Press reporter at the scene said. The facade of the Saudia station was also heavily damaged. Police Maj. Ouda al-Jabiri, at Saudia, said the cause of the blasts was not immediately known. There was a hole two yards deep and three yards wide in front of the Saudi station. '

Reuters just came in with the story, estimated 40 dead and dozens wounded.

Fighting also broke out again in Fallujah, according to Reuters: ' U.S. forces and Iraqi insurgents traded machinegun fire, mortars and grenades in the restive town of Falluja on Wednesday despite a tentative cease-fire, witnesses said. They said the clashes erupted in the town's Golan district at around 6 a.m. (10 p.m. EDT Tuesday) and were continuing three hours later. U.S. military aircraft were flying over the area, the witnesses said. '


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Corruption and Graft

Jason Vest of the Village Voice has gotten hold of a juicy Coalition Provisional Authority memo that details political corruption among American-appointed Iraqi politicians, the actual lack of electricity, the ways in which Iranian money is flowing into the country, and the proliferation of militias and dependence of Interim Govering Council members on them.

Sounds about right to me.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Loya Jirga on the Tigris?

US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said Weds. that a "Loya Jirga" could be held in Iraq. He seems to me to be grasping at straws.

The loya jirga or tribal council was never an elective or decision-making body in Afghan history. Typically, the kings of the Durrani dynasty only called a loya jirga to rubber stamp a policy they had already decided on. The loya jirga held in Afghanistan was thus an American invention of a tradition, and everyone knows that anyway it was stage managed by the US.

Iraqis are largely urban, industrialized and highly literate compared to Afghans, and nothing like a loya jirga would work in Iraq. They'd like free and open elections.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Muqtada vs. the Grand Ayatollahs

Ed Wong of the NYT has a canny read on the stand-off between Muqtada al-Sadr and the Grand Ayatollahs of Najaf.

' by choosing to make his stand in Najaf, one of the holiest cities in Shiite Islam, Sadr has cast the war in the south as a struggle between infidels and all Shiites. Perhaps most boldly, he has challenged the authority and methods of more senior religious leaders, especially Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most respected cleric in Iraq . . "Moktada can't have recognition from the religious establishment as a cleric, but he can gain general power as a politician and sectarian leader, making the grand ayatollahs back off their trenchant and open critiques of him," said Juan Cole, a professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan and an expert on Shiite Islam. '.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Holds Iraq Hearings

I didn't post much on Tuesday because I was testifying in Washington at the Senate Foreign relations commitee hearing on Iraq.

The Senate CFR began three days of hearings on Iraq on Tuesday. I'm told it wasn't on C-Span, which is a great shame (maybe it will be played later). Senators Biden and Lugar among others are doing the country a great service by getting the legislature involved in this major foreign policy area, which is going to consume American energies, lives and money for perhaps the next decade.

HEARING
before the

COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED EIGHTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tuesday, April 20, 2004

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Time: 9:30 AM
Place: 216 Hart Senate Office Building
Presiding: Senator Lugar
Senator Lugar's Opening Statement
Senator Biden's Opening Statement Witnesses:
Panel 1
The Honorable James R. Schlesinger
Senior Advisor
Lehman Brothers
Washington, DC
The Honorable Samuel R. Berger
Chairman
Stonebridge International, LLC
Washington, DC
Panel 2
The Honorable Richard N. Perle
Senior Fellow
American Enterprise Institute
Washington, DC
Dr. Toby Dodge
International Institute for Strategic Studies
Consulting Senior Fellow for the Middle East
London, England
Dr. Juan Cole
Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan.

My own prepared remarks are posted in pdf format to the Senate web site.

One aspect of the bad news at this and another hearing was covered by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (i.e. it is on the ball)-- which is the wide agreement that the US is stuck in Iraq militarily for at least 5 years, and can't expect really substantial help from allies. I personally thing it is even worse than that. I have said I think this generation of young Americans will be the Iraq generation.

AP in its coverage focused on the questions raised about US military troop levels and whether the Bush administration can still get Iraq right, as well as whether the June 30 turn-over of sovereignty is realistic. (I say, why not? It is a publicity stunt anyway, and the papers can be signed; the Iraqis say they want them signed.)





For "cont'd" postings, click here.

22 Killed, 92 Injured at Abu Ghuraib

AP reports that a bombardment by guerrillas of the Abu Ghuraib prison resulted in 22 deaths of inmates and about 92 injured. The prison has been attacked in the past. Since it houses captured insurgents, the US military speculates that the attacks are aimed at creating chaos and inspiring a prison uprising or breakout. The particular strategy here, of guerrillas bombing their own, is hard to understand. But I myself suspect that it is a propaganda ploy. What comes through in the Arabic news is not that guerrillas killed their own but that Iraqis got killed while in American custody. It is in a sense just another soft target, and another way of giving the US a black eye.

Gen. Richard Sanchez is quoted as boasting that 1,000 Iraqis were killed in the recent uprisings in Fallujah and the Shiite South, and that "They've seen the might of the American military unleashed." I understand that this sort of talk is part of warfare (the equivalent of wearing scary war paint), but I really think Gen. Sanchez has recently started going over the top in his public comments. Those 1,000 dead Iraqis contained at least dozens and maybe hundreds of innocent civilians, and in that light his statement won't go over well in Iraq or the Arab world. Also, it isn't really a surprise that the US military can kill 1000 Iraqis. The surprise is that a year after the fall of the Baath, Iraqis could and would kill over 100 US soldiers, and injure hundreds more. Given that as I write, the US military almost certainly does not have control of East Baghdad, one wonders about the might of the American military where it counts.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

30 Iraqis, 12 US Troops Killed over Deadly Weekend

5 US troops were killed Sunday in fighting near the Syrian border at Husayba, but various other incidents on Saturday brought the weeked total to 12 killed. About 30 Iraqis were killed in clashes. The Husaybah fight appears to be an extension of Fallujah, with some fighters from that city having moved over to Husaybah and having ambushed the Marines. This narrative contradicts the impression given by Gen. Myers that the problem is infiltration of foreign fighters from Syria. Rather, looks like infiltration of Iraqi fighters from Fallujah.

Despite the constant drumbeat about alleged Syrian complicity in infiltration of foreign fighers into Iraq, there is not any good proof of it. The fighters that have been captured are mostly Iraqi (some 10,000, I think), with only a few foreigners among them. And, Syria is lambasted for having massacred the Sunni Arab radical fundamentalists, so it is a little unlikely to be supplying them deliberately to Fallujah, which has lots of its own. Rather, if there is infiltration, it is mostly because Syria has a long desert border that can't be controlled (the US should talk--look at its border with Mexico, which is like a sieve). I think this ritual invocation of Syria in connection with infiltration is just a way of attempting to intimidate and bully Syria, which some in the Bush administration would like to topple. If they think Iraqi instability is bad, wait until they see Syria without a proper government in Damascus. It won't be pretty; and remember, as Colin says, if you break it, you own it. Doesn't the US have enough responsibilities right now? Anyway, remember that the most powerful policy makers in Washington right now are warmongers. They don't think Iraq is a catastrophe, and they have several further wars they want to fight before they sleep. The rest of us should try to make sure they don't pull the country down into a further quagmire or two.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Najaf: Muqtada, Myers, and Zapatero

A spokesman for Muqtada al-Sadr, Qais al-Khaz'ali, said Sunday that his forces would extend their truce with the Coalition for two further days, Monday and Tuesday, in honor of the anniversary of the death of the Prophet Muhammad. He also said that the Army of the Mahdi was gradually withdrawing from a military role in Najaf itself. But his said that were the Americans to launch an attack, it would be ready to defend the city.

He also called for the immediate dispatch to Iraq of United Nations forces to replace US ones. Although the Sadrists are just grandstanding, the convergence of the views of radical Shiite Iraqis with those of the US Democratic Party is remarkable.

Gen. Richard Myers, US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in an interview on CNN Sunday that he did not anticipate an attack on Najaf, and that it was unnecessary, since Muqtada no longer posed a military threat and his militia did not control a single city. (Well, maybe Kufa and parts of Najaf, but who is counting?) I can't say how relieved I am to hear Gen. Myers talking sense like this intead of that 'Muqtada wanted dead or alive' rhetoric that was coming from CENTCOM.

But, I am not sure the crisis has entirely passed. What will happen on Wednesday? Will the US eventually insist on capturing or killing Muqtada (could they really just let him go back to preaching at his mosque after he launched a major insurgency against them)? Might not that tip the South into long-term instability? When will Grand Ayatollah Sistani take a stand? Stay tuned.

And, by the way, the uncertainty of this Najaf situation almost certainly goes a long way toward explaining why Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriquez Zapatero suddenly announced the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq. He had earlier suggested they would be withdrawn July 1 if there were not a new UN resolution authorizing the military occupation of Iraq by then, and substantial UN military involvement in the Coalition. But he has now declined to wait to see if any of those developments will take place. ' The officials said the new government made its announcement on its first day to avoid being drawn into a debate and to avoid possible complications in the field. They did not want any future event, like taking of hostages or the deaths of any soldiers, to be used to misinterpret Spain's motives.

It should be remembered that the Spanish troops aren't just anywhere in Iraq. They are around Najaf. And Najaf at the moment has a Coalition bull's eye painted on it in all the satellite photos. This could be the epicenter of a vast earthquake if fighting should escalate between the Coalition and the Army of the Mahdi, because of the city's central religious importance. Zapatero knows all this and will have been getting briefings from Spanish officers in the field who know they are perched on the lip of an active volcano.

Thus, the key element in the Spanish withdrawal is no longer the longstanding public opposition to the force in Iraq or the (overly hyped as a motive) Madrid bombings. Zapatero might have kept the troops in Iraq nevertheless, since it does seem that Bush is being forced by circumstances to go back to the UN Security Council. The key issue now is Muqtada al-Sadr's Shiite movement, and whether Spanish troops would stick around to help put it down, and risk getting mired in a colonial anti-insurgency effort. The answer: No.

A problem for the US: A lot of other countries may well decide to follow suit. Most "Coalition partners" signed up for peacekeeping or reconstruction, not to fight against guerrillas (there is a difference between peacekeeping and peace-enforcing). The US could well lose half a division this way, and it doesn't have half a division to spare.

If the US were to provoke a struggle with the Shiites, the British in Basra might well leave, as well, rather than risk being overwhelmed. In the midst of such a Shiite revolt, with British commanders frantically signalling they didn't have the manpower to handle it in the South, if Tony Blair wouldn't finally come to grips with reality, he might well be unceremoniously dumped by his own party, the way Maggie Thatcher was. That is, the Spanish model, of a Bush/Cheney induced move to the left might not stop, among US allies, with Madrid.

Which also doesn't make it very likely that Muqtada will get his blue helmets in Najaf.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

An Attack on Najaf "Will be Zero Hour of a Massive Popular Uprising": al-Khaz'ali

ash-Sharq al-Awsat:

Hundreds of members of Muqtada al-Sadr's Army of the Mahdi rallied in the streets of Najaf on Saturday, carrying arms and chanting slogans of support for him. They thronged to his office so as to kiss his hand and receive blessings before returning to their chanting. On Friday, his followers had pledged to launch a general war if the US invaded Najaf. Gen. Mark Kimmit announced that a US soldier who had received wounds in a clash with Mahdi Army militiamen on Friday died. Two militiamen also died in that fight.

The negotiations between Muqtada al-Sadr and the Coalition ceased on Saturday, and it looked to some observers on the ground as though a US attack on Najaf might begin any moment.

Qais al-Khaz'ali, a spokesman for Muqtada, said that the negotiators alleged that the US had made demands that formed insuperable obstacles to the talks, and that as a result tensions were escalating. He added, "We expect the American forces to assault the city of Najaf at any moment." Gunfire was heard in the northeast of the city, in the area known as Bahr al-Najaf, where it appears that American troops have gathered in strength.

Al-Khaz'ali said, "We are prepared for a confrontation, and we believe that this attack will represent the zero hour for the launching of a massive popular revolution."

For their part, American officials stressed their intention to disarm the Army of the Mahdi, which they blame for the bloody clashes in the south of the country and in Baghdad in the first week of April.

al-Hayat in a breaking story says that Coalition spokesman Dan Senor denied al-Khaz'ali's pessimistic account, and said that numerous parties had stepped forward to try to negotiate a peaceful settlement, and that that was what the Coalition Provisional Authority also wanted.

Back to ash-Sharq al-Awsat

In contrast, Abdul Karim al-Anzi, the negotiator for the grand ayatollahs in this matter, said he expected a response from the American side momentarily, and continued negotiations. Another negotiator, Khudair al-Khuza'i, from an offshoots of the al-Da`wa Party, said "No new meeting has taken place with the Americans for three days, and we expect them to set a new date for talks . . . I hope that the logic of truth prevails over the logic of the rifle. I am by nature an optimist, and I believe that the last thing the politicians are considering is a war, especially since such a war would spread widely and would be in no one's interest."

(Al-Anzi hasn't read enough about the outbreak of World War I, which could have been similarly described. The US civil administration in any case seems to underestimate the dangers of an attack on Najaf, and the military has to do what Rumsfeld says. Rummy now says he was surprised at the loss of US life in the recent April uprising. It is the problem with wearing rose tinted glasses that reality comes as a shock when someone knocks them off.)

The negotiators had met the Americans for 5 hours on Wednesday, and then met on Thursday with the grand ayatollahs and with al-Sadr. One of the US demands seemed to the Shiites "crippling" to negotiations, and they have now lapsed.

The Board of Muslim Clergymen (a Sunni group) announced its support for Muqtada and asked all Iraqis "to the expel the Occupation," on a day of relative calm in Fallujah. (The Board of Clergymen, led by Abdul Salam al-Kubaisi, has played an important role in negotiations between the city leaders of Fallujah and the US, but it has been consistently opposed to the US presence in the country). Muhammad Ayyash al-Kubaisi, the Board's representative outside Iraq, told al-Arabiya satellite television that all Iraqis who oppose the forces of Occupation, including Muqtada al-Sadr, are working for the same goal. He said that the Board had issued fatwas requiring an end to US occupation. He said Iraqis would not allow themselves to be divided along religious lines and ruled, and that the Shiite resistance has stiffened the resolve of the Board.

The Scotsman also reported on the breakdown of negotiations with some pessimism, and noted that ' The pressures appeared to be taking their toll on US Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, who appeared to briefly lose consciousness during a press conference yesterday. Kimmitt left the podium, apparently feeling unwell, but returned a short time later. '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Najaf Crisis and International Implications
Iran: US Will Pay a 'Heavy Price'

Iran warned the American government that it would "pay a heavy price" if its forces attacked the cities of Najaf and Karbala. Ayatollah Muhammad Taskhiri, the representative of Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei, told al-Hayat, "The American forces will have committed the biggest act of stupidity in their entire lives if they took this vile step."

In Riyadh, Abdul Rahman al-Atiyah, the secretary general of the Gulf Cooperation Council, blamed the occupation authorities for the current events, including the deterioration of the security situation. He called on the Coalition forces to cooperate with all political forces in Iraq in seeking an end to the downward spiral. He said it was unlikely that any Gulf countries would provide peacekeeping troops in Iraq.

Meanwhile, the British military is extremely concerned about the possibility of a general Shiite uprising in Basra, according to the Telegraph:

' the commander of British troops in southern Iraq, Brig Nick Carter, admitted that he would be powerless to prevent the overthrow of Coalition forces if the Shia majority in Basra rose up in rebellion. Brig Carter, of the 20 Armoured Brigade, who has been in Iraq for four months, said British forces would stay in Basra with the consent of local Shia leaders, or not at all. Last month, 14 British soldiers were injured in Basra, at least three seriously, when they came under attack from demonstrators armed with petrol bombs, rocks and a grenade. "A crowd of 150,000 people at the gates of this barracks would be the end of this, as far as I'm concerned," Brig Carter said. "There would be absolutely nothing I could do about that . . ." During an interview in Basra last week Brig Carter acknowledged that the Coalition's presence in southern Iraq was entirely dependent on the goodwill of the local Shia Muslim leader, Sayid Ali al-Safi al-Musawi. He represents Ayatollah Sistani, Iraq's leading Shia cleric. "The moment that Sayid Ali says, 'We don't want the Coalition here', we might as well go home," Brig Carter said. '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Rantisi and Najaf

The Sunday Herald correctly points out that the Israeli murder of Abdul Aziz Rantisi, the head of the political wing of the Hamas party, on Saturday, will cause further trouble in Iraq.

With al-Anbar province tense and US troops surrounding Najaf, one could not imagine a worse time for Bush to give a green light to Sharon for further provocations. One can only conclude that neither Ariel Sharon nor Bush and his Neocon advisers give a fig about the lives of US and Coalition servicemen in Iraq. Otherwise, they'd stop with the theatrics. If the Israelis had wanted to arrest Rantisi, they could have. They pulled off Entebbe. This extra-judicial murder of political opponents is just showing off, and it is of course ethically despicable and a war crime for which one only wishes Sharon could be made to stand trial in the Hague. If Rantisi could have been proved to have committed an act of terrorism, he should have been arrested and tried in Gaza for murder. I condemn violence by Palestinian leaders just as I do that done by Israeli ones, and do not have a problem with terrorists being punished for killing innocent people. I do have a problem with political rivals whacking one another unnecessarily, especially when it is likely to get some of my friends killed.

I feel like something of a fool for bothering to say all this, since it is obvious that Sharon is behaving like a Mafia don--Arik Soprano--not a head of state. But the commentary I saw on US cable television was all about who could fall over themselves more quickly to praise this 'decisive action against terrorism.' The state of public discourse in the US (and Israel) is deplorable when it is not even possible publicly to criticize extra-judicial killing in the mass media.

Meanwhile, the Shiite establishment's attempt to mediate between Muqtada al-Sadr and the Americans appears to have broken down. The Iranian mediation attempt was abandoned altogether, presumably both because of the assassination of the Iranian cultural attache and because of the opposition of Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei.

Anyone who doubts that events in various places of the Muslim world are related should consider that the siege of Fallujah even appears to have provoked a firefight between Jordanian and US peacekeepers in the UN contingent at Mitrovica, Kosovo. So much for the UN saving the US in Iraq. Who's going to keep peace among the peace keepers?



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Story of the Arrest Warrant for Muqtada

More on the back story of the warrant for Muqtada's arrest.

' According to the brief, Juhy has found an eyewitness who is willing to testify that Sadr, who saw Khoei as a threat to his ambitions, became aware of Khoei's visit and planned with his associates to kill him.

A second eyewitness says that when Sadr and a group of followers entered the mosque and saw Khoei's group, Sadr's followers said; "Just say the word, master, and we will attack."

The brief says: "Sadr replied, 'Just wait, just wait'."

A funeral procession then came into the mosque, and using this distraction, Sadr called to his followers to attack.

"(The) witness reported that Sadr said, 'By the will of God, attack'."

Sadr then left the mosque and returned to his office, whereupon his followers drew AK-47s from their robes and started firing in the direction of Khoei and his group in the Khaladaria, an area in which the offices of the mosque clerics are located. '


I am very suspicious about all this. I have looked at the eyewitness accounts published last year in the Arabic press, and I was unable to find any eyewitness account of Muqtada actually ordering the hit. Crowds and mobs are not completely irrational, but they have their own logic. I would reserve my judgment here. Whether there is enough for an American-style grand jury to indict on I cannot say.

But I continue to maintain that politically, the way the Americans came after Muqtada was ill advised.



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Clashes outside Kufa; Situation Tense in Shrine Cities

ash-Sharq al-Awsat: A series of explosions shook the city of Kufa on Friday, and eyewitnesses saw dozens of armed militiamen hurrying to various parts of the city. Reports spoke of clashes with the foreign troops. At least four troop transport trucks full of Mahdi Army fighters left for the east of Kufa. Others were carrying rifles and rocket propelled grenade launchers. After a few minutes, dozens returned, crossing the bridge over the Euphrates, heading into the city. Some militiamen said that a US convoy had been attacked, and had been crowned with success. One militiaman claimed to have hit two trucks and left them burning. He said, however, that the Mahdi Army began receiving mortar fire and therefore withdrew.

In East Baghdad, Reuters reports that ' tens of thousands of Shi'ites chanted support for Sadr in his main power base, the Baghdad slum district of Sadr City. "Rivers of your blood will flow," Sheikh Nasser al-Saedi told the crowd in a warning to U.S. forces not to attack Najaf. '

Back in Najaf (about an hour's drive south of Baghdad), the US increased the number of Polish and Spanish troops around Najaf in preparation for a possible battle for the city. A physician at Kufa hospital said that at least 5 persons had been killed and 20 injured, many of them seriously.

Hope for a negotiated settlement ebbed Friday. On the one hand, Muqtada seemed to go back and forth between saying he would negotiate and then refusing to. On the other, the US put stipulations on the mediation effort that were unacceptable to the grand ayatollahs in Najaf.

Khidhir Jafar al-Khuza'i, from a splinter group of the Shiite al-Da`wa Party, said that the day before yesterday "we had laid out the American point of view for the grand ayatollahs and Mr. al-Sadr, but the religious leadership considered one of the conditions set by the Americans to be crippling." He refused to give any details about the condition.

He said that the intermediary chosen by the Grand Ayatollahs was Abdul Karim al-Anzi, who met with Muqtada, and the son of Grand Ayatollah Sistani, and who met with a number of other leading religious scholars in Najaf.

A local medical source in Karbala said that two Iraqi police had been killed near a mosque in that city controlled by the Army of the Mahdi.

Abdul Mahdi Karbala'i, Sistani's representative in Karbala, said that his city and Najaf are "considered a red line that the Coalition forces may not cross." He intimated that the inhabitants of Iraq could be called upon to rebel and take up arms. In his Friday sermon at Karbala, he said, "The situation has reached a serious juncture in past days, and reports indicate that the Occupation Forces will violate the sanctity of Karbala and Najaf, shedding in them much blood, and destroying what the people of those two cities have built. He said the religious leadership could forestall such a move, and that if the Coalition forces moved on the cities it would have grave consequences. He said that after so many years of state terror, every effort should now be made to find a peaceful way forward, and one that the US could not refuse. He said these peaceful methods must be used to end the occupation and return sovereignty to competent persons who represent the independent national will. He warned that if the religious leadership concluded that there was no escape from launching an armed uprising, it would not hesitate to do so. (And this is the representative of the moderate, Sistani!)

In another blow to the hope of a negotiated settlement, Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi backed off earlier statements that Iran was willing to mediate between Muqtada and the Coalition. He now says it would be better if the US just left Iraq as soon as possible. Kharrazi's boss, President Mohammad Khatami, has probably been over-ruled (yet again) by Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei, who clearly did not like the idea of Iran saving the US from a disaster of its own making.




For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Muqtada's Friday Sermon: Marines should Surrender

Muqtada al-Sadr announced in his Friday prayers sermon at Kufa on Friday that "truce negotiations [with the American forces] are useless," and that he will not dissolve the Mahdi Army. He called on the nations that have forces in Iraq to desert the United States "to battle by itself." He demanded that occupation troops surrender themselves and their weapons.

At the same time, mediators announced that the negotiations have stumbled because the Coalition forces have put conditions on them that the religious leadership in Najaf considers "crippling."

In the first sermon he has preached in the Kufa mosque since the outbreak of hostilities between his Mahdi Army and Coalition forces, he said that "These events have brought to light dirty tricks, and have made it possible to distinguish between the truth and falsehood. I say that they intend to stay for many long years and are strengthening their positions, and there is no use to truce negotiations with them." He added, "America does not distinguish between small and large [sins?] under the pretext of freedom and democracy, but what democracy is this, and what liberty? Do not let their words seduce you, for they claim that they are going to surrender sovereignty and form an [Iraqi] government . . . Some accuse me of having delayed the transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis and the formation of a transitional Iraqi government. I say, yes, I have delayed the sale of Iraq and the planting of a lackey government . . . We shall never permit these forces to enter this city of Najaf or the holy sites, for they are forbidden to them."

Muqtada addressed the congregation, "I seek martyrdom, but they have prescribed for me patience and steadfastness. Know that this war is a war against our religion, and this politics is not the one you demand . . . I want to register my exceptional regard for the heroic Mahdi Army.

He said that some Muslims had asked him to dissolve the Mahdi Army, saying, "I will not dissolve it under any circumstance." He said he had not formed the militia by himself, but rather with the cooperation of the Iraqi people. He called on America's Coalition allies to desert it. He singled out Japan for criticism, saying, "Did you learn no lessons from what the United States did at Hiroshima?", a reference to the dropping of the atomic bomb on a Japanese city in 1945. He said he would give safe passage guarantees to any Coalition troops that surrendered themselves and their weopons.

Well, I would not want psychiatric medicine to be abused by employing it to deal with Iraqi dissidents. But I do think Muqtada's statements and behavior are so erratic that we may conclude he has some sort of fairly severe personality disorder. This should not be surprising, insofar as he grew up under extreme Baath repression, and his father and older brothers were machine-gunned down only 5 years ago. His wife's father, Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, had been hanged in 1980, when both Muqtada and the girl who later became his wife were children. It is hard to know what living with constant terror and the death of loved ones does to a young mind. He is afflicted with grandiosity and a great deal of aggression, and he may think he is the Mahdi or Islamic promised one.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Clergy of Najaf to Mahdi Army: Go fight outside the City

ash-Sharq al-Awsat: The clerics of the Najaf seminaries have called upon the Army of the Mahdi to go fight the Americans outside the city if they must, so as to avoid the spilling of innocent blood. They called on the militia to pursue peaceful methods and to avoid violence, whatever the motivation. "If you reject our advice and decide to confront them, then remove yourselves from the city of Najaf, and take on the Occupier out there where there are no human beings or buildings, so that you do not burden others with the consequences of your decision, which is foreordained to be a failure."

They said Najaf has had enough martyrs in the past few decades. Saddam killed tens of thousands in the city in 1991 alone, in crushing the uprising after the Gulf War. Then, the clerics say, the terrorist Zarqawi hit the city on August 29 with a huge carbomb.

They said Iraqi Shiites would never again accept being second class citizens in their own country.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Mortar Shells Kill 8 in Mosul

Things are so bad in Iraq, and so many people have been killed lately, that what would once have been my headline for today was barely picked up by the wire services. ash-Sharq al-Awsat says that guerrillas in Mosul accidentally launched their mortar shells into a civilian crowd, when presumably they were aiming for Iraqi police or Coalition troops. They killed 8 civilians and wounded 17.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Negotiations over Muqtada al-Sadr

al-Hayat:

The Iranian delegation to Najaf is continuing its attempts to calm the situation, despite the assassination in Baghdad of the Iranian cultural attache, Khalil Na`imi. The Iranian delegation left for Najaf on Thursday to meet with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. It has decided not to meet with Muqtada al-Sadr after all, in the wake of the killing of Na`imi. The delegation said its role was that of a "fact-finder." Some result of the negotiations is expected within a day or two. The Iranian delegation again denied that they would permit Muqtada al-Sadr to go into exile in Iran.

Gen. Rick Sanchez would not rule out the use of force against the supporters of Muqtada. Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, held talks at Baghdad airport with Gen. John Abizaid. Myers came away with the impression that Muqtada al-Sadr did not have much support in the Shiite community, and concluded: "It may well be that if he is captured, violence could increase for a bit," Myers said. "But I think it would be very temporary. But in the end you can't have an Iraq of the type that the Iraqi people say they want, when somebody like Sadr is there, working his own priorities."

Something like Muqtada's support in the Shiite community is a complex subject. He has many devoted supporters, especially in Kufa and East Baghdad, but also in other cities. Beyond supporters, he has sympathizers. The number of each can increase or decrease over time. But you can't assume that making a martyr of him will cause them to decrease; Saddam did that to Muqtada's father, and Sadiq al-Sadr's picture is everywhere in the Iraqi South. I'm not sure how many you need, moreover, for them to be a problem. If 100,000 Shiites in Iraq suddenly decided that they not only disliked the US and its policies (which they have all along), but were so angry about the capture or killing of their leader that they were willing to become active guerrillas, mounting attacks, wouldn't that be a bad development right about now? Well, Muqtada certainly has the support of at least that number of young men, and my informed guess is that they would turn into guerrillas if the US captured or killed their leader. Even if there were only 10,000 of them or only 10,000 of them conducted a campaign of violence, wouldn't that further destabilize Iraq?

And, since they are Sadrists the way some Americans are members of the white supremicist Christian Identity movement, why would you expect their anger over a thing like that to subside any time soon? (Think Timothy McVeigh, and how Oklahoma City was in his mind in part payback for Waco and Ruby Ridge--see Gary Kamiya's excellent insights in this regard at Salon.com). I am often highly impressed with the intelligence and learning of the military officers I meet at security conferences. But I confess myself deeply puzzled as to how, after being in Iraq for over a year, these bright and well-informed persons could have gotten the Sadrist movement so wrong.

1) It is a longstanding social movement, not just a fly by night militia
2) It is not tiny in numbers of adherents, though not all adherents are willing to put themselves out for it at the moment; that could change.
3) It has lots of potential leaders besides Muqtada
4) Its cadres can easily become guerrillas, as the Army of the Mahdi shows.

So you can't wipe it out, and you can't hope that it will just go away, and it is highly unwise to start a decades-long (yes) feud with it. If you were worried about the militia, just make rules and enforce them-- that the militia can't march in public, can't wear uniforms, can't bear arms. Address the problem at its root in Kut and Nasiriyah. Going after the leadership in a way that seems trumped up will just provoke a steady drumbeat of violence into the future. Think Indira Gandhi and the Sikhs. Or the Baath Party and Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, for that matter.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bluster and Begging: The Duality of US Foreign Policy in the Middle East

The Bush administration requested Syria's participation in "calming the situation" in Iraq. Bashar al-Asad received letters from Bush and Colin Powell concerning bilateral relations and Iraq.

al-Hayat:

At the same time, Gen. Myers insisted that foreign fighters continued to infiltrate from Syria and Iran, criticizing the two countries for seeking their interests or protecting themselves.

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage announced that he would undertake a tour of Gulf countries to seek their help in dealing with the "problems in the Sunni area" of Iraq, and asking them to play a political role in containing the situation there. He said he just wanted them to reassure the Sunni Arabs that they would have a place in the new Iraq, but was not asking for the dispatch of Gulf troops. Since Armitage has just had the rug pulled out from under him with regard to Arab diplomacy by Bush's formal induction into the Likud Party on Thursday as a back bencher for his party leader Ariel Sharon, it is a little unlikely that Arab diplomats are going to want to do any favors for the US right about now.

I have concluded that the Bush administration is like Iran. The Iranian government has two of everything. It has a relatively liberal president, and a hardline supreme jurisprudent. The reformists control the foreign ministry, the hardliners control the military. The reformists have some parliament representatives, the hardliners control the Guardian Council, which has the power of judicial review over parliament. You never know with the Iranian government who is on top or what a policy means, since it could be coming from either competing section of the same government.

Likewise, in the Bush administration, the Pentagon has its own foreign policy, which competes with and often trumps the foreign policy of the State Department and the National Security Council. Thus, Gen. Myers is pointing fingers at Iran and Syria and making all sorts of wild accusations at them, darkly hinting they will be overthrown if they don't shape up. And Colin Powell is writing them polite letters about bilateral relations and could they please use their good offices to help the Americans in Iraq. It is bizarre, and the urbane, canny leaders in Damascus and Tehran (who have long experience of residence in the UK and Germany respectively), must be scratching their heads in wonder at this Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde American hyperpower that rages about an axis of evil and goes about preemptively invading countries on the one hand and then comes politely, hat in hand, to request selfless assistance on the other.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Salon.com Article on Fallujah

My piece on Fallujah and its connection to the Palestine issue is online at Salon.com.

Readers interested in this angle will also benefit from Tom Engelhardt's "The American Legacy in Iraq at Tomdispatch.com.

See also the always essential Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo for the important point that the US has abandoned the principle of a negotiated settlement in favor of unilateral action by the stronger party.

The credibility of the US in the Middle East as a broker is finished, kaput, nada, zero. And the problem is that there is no other credible broker.

You know, my colleague Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University got slammed by the Neocons for having predicted that the Arab street would come out during the Gulf War and threaten the region with instability. Actually, there were huge demonstrations, especially in North Africa. But his critics pointed out that there were no real changes as a result. The power of the urban crowd in the Middle East cannot be sneezed at (see: the Islamic Revolution in Iran, 1978-79). But it is true that most governments in the Middle East have muddled through even if they have been associated with unpopular US or Israeli policies.

Rashid was right, though, about the danger of doing things that cause anger to fester in large numbers of people. And, it occurs to me that the very inability of those huge crowds to change anything (or even to go to the streets in most countries of the region, given the controls put in place by the secret police) gave rise to the frustrations that eventuated in the wave of terrorism we are now seeing. That is, the Arab street has not so much admitted defeat as ramified, into radical social movements with a religious cast, and (on the part of a small number of the really angry and frustrated) into terrorist cells.

The Neocons are convinced that parliamentary elections would fix this problem, or at least that's what they say. But that would only be true if the urban crowds were angry about the parliamentary issues. If they are angry because they think a large-scale, long-term injustice is being done, then elections won't assuage their anger. Doing the right thing would. And the right thing was an Israeli withdrawal back to 1967 borders and the erection of a Palestinian state. Neither thing is going to happen, and there is going to be more anger, and the anger is going to circulate and come out in rage and terrorism. Elections won't fix that, and main force can't forestall all effective such operations.

Sharon and Bush just painted big red targets on us all.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Lone on How to Fix It

Salim Lone's op-ed in the Toronto Globe and Mail gives an experienced UN hand's view of the unfolding disaster in Iraq. He was communications director in Baghdad for Sergio Vieira de Mello before the bombing last summer.

His point is an interesting one, now that so many Democratic politicians in the US are urging that America turn to the UN to help resolve its Iraqi quagmire. He says that the UN itself has suffered an enormous fall in prestige in the Middle East because it is seen as a mere tool of the US. He is particularly critical of Kofi Annan and Lakhdar Brahimi for, he says, bowing to US pressure not to authorize May, 2004, direct elections in Iraq.

It does seem in retrospect that holding those elections would have resolved a lot of problems, and maybe even forestalled the recent blow-up.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Brahimi Plan unveiled

The full text of the Brahimi plan is at the UN Observer.

Here are the main points:

' 2. Let me emphasise from the outset that in this political process in Iraq, the elections scheduled to take place in January 2005 are the most important milestone. There is no substitute for the legitimacy that comes from free and fair elections. Therefore, Iraq will have a genuinely representative Government only after January 2005.

3. What the aim should be, at present, is to put in place a caretaker Government that will be in charge from 1st July 2004 until the elections in January 2005. We are confident that it will be possible to form such a Government in a timely manner, i.e. during the month of May 2004. We see it as a Government led by a Prime Minister and comprising Iraqi men and women known for their honesty, integrity and competence. There will also be a President to act as Head of State and two Vice-Presidents.

4. According to both the 15 November 2003 Agreement and the Transitional Administrative Law, the Governing Council, along with the CPA, will cease to exist on 30 June 2004. Some of its members are already assuming other responsibilities. Other members will no doubt be called upon to participate in various State institutions.

5. During our consultations, a very large number of our interlocutors suggested that a large National Conference should be convened. We see merit in this suggestion. It would serve the all-important aim of promoting national dialogue, consensus building and national reconciliation in Iraq. A preparatory Committee should be established soon to start the preparatory work and the Conference could take place soon after the restoration of sovereignty, in July 2004.

6. The National Conference would elect a Consultative Assembly to serve alongside the Government during the period leading to the elections of the National Assembly which, it is agreed, will take place in January 2005.

7. To return to the subject of elections, a U.N. electoral team has been in Baghdad for some time now. They are working diligently to help with the preparatory work for the January 2005 elections. They have visited some cities in the North and in the South. Like us, their movements are somewhat restricted at present by the prevailing security situation. But they remain confident that they can help out. But it is important and urgent that, on the Iraqi side, the necessary steps are taken, so that elections can take place at the appointed time in January 2005. Naturally, the security situation has to improve significantly for these elections to take place in an acceptable environment. '

This plan is a compromise. There were two main factions. One wanted to keep the Interim Governing Council but expand it to 100 from 25. This way of proceeding would benefit the current appointees, who would keep the advantages of incumbency as they transitioned to elections in January '05. Another group wanted to go narrow, disband the IGC altogether, and appoint a president and prime minister, who would appoint an interim cabinet and preside over the transition to elections. This way of proceeding would only benefit a handful of politicians, the ones who got the top appointments, but it would benefit them even more than the first plan. After all, the transitional president would have a good shot at being the elected president, and perhaps likewise with the prime minister.

The Arabic press was reporting a plan to make Adnan Pachachi president, one of the Kurdish leaders vice president, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim also a vice president, and then have the three of them appoint a prime minister, a post for which Ahmad Chalabi and Iyad Allawi were jockeying.

Brahimi's plan in a way combines the two. He does suggest a handful of top appointments, and wants the United Nations to have a strong hand in making them. But then he also suggests the election of a Consultative Assembly that would be more broadly based and would advise the government during the transition.

The danger in Brahimi's plan for a corrupt Pentagon-supported expat like Chalabi is that Brahimi is saying that the UN doesn't want him in a high appointive post because of all the questions that swirl around him regarding embezzlement and playing fast and loose with other people's money. This UN opposition to Chalabi is what provoked his counter-attack on Brahimi and his plan: ' Chalabi's spokesman, Entifadh Qanbar, said the nomination or selection of an interim government by the United Nations would not be acceptable to many Iraqis. "Our position is that this process has to be led by Iraqis and not by the U.N.," Qanbar said. "The U.N. should have the role of consultation -- no more than that." '
For more on this see TomPaine.com.

Brahimi seems to be saying that the appointed high officials--a president, two vice-presidents, and a prime minister-- should have genuine grass roots in Iraq and be respected as upright. I think Barzani and Talabani among the Kurds fit this bill, and so do Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and Ibrahim Jaafari among the Shiites. I don't know, however, to whom you would turn among the Sunni Arabs for a politician with substantial grass roots.

In any case, Brahimi's plan would interfere with the Pentagon shoe-horning Chalabi into power as its "democratically minded strong man" (as if such a phrase made any sense). I don't think Chalabi can win a popular election in Iraq unless he buys enormous numbers of votes. But it should be remembered that Barzani, Talabani, and al-Hakim all defend Chalabi and seem to owe him somehow, and if they are at the top of government they may find a way to bring him back in from the cold.

The frustrating thing for a historian is that when you craft narratives of 19th century power struggles, you have the memos of the principals in the archives, and you have some sense of who supported whom and why. Reading current Iraq events through the dark glass of the Arabic press and hints coming out of the CPA is a much chancier endeavor.

A reader asked me to comment also on Point 8 of Brahimi's speech:

' 8. Last but not least, during our consultations, in February as well as at present, we heard of many grievances which need to be addressed. Detainees are held often without charge or trial. They should be either charged or released, and their families and lawyers must have access to them. The issue of former military personnel also needs attention. Furthermore, it is difficult to understand that thousands upon thousands of teachers, university professors, medical doctors and hospital staff, engineers and other professionals who are sorely needed, have been dismissed within the de-Baathification process, and far too many of those cases have yet to be reviewed. '

This point seems to me to be a plea from the Sunni middle and professional classes for some sort of amnesty for their complicity in the Baath Party. Ahmad Chalabi and the people around him have been particularly militant about excluding and punishing all Baath Party members. Bremer's administration appears to have given in on Chalabi's demands in this regard. While in part this emphasis comes out of Shiite grievances, it seems likely that Chalabi also does want to clear the decks so that he can rule unopposed if he can get into power, without a lot of pesky informed technocrats second-guessing him and even thwarting some of his policies. Since the CPA is a creature of the Neocon-dominated Department of Defense, it may well be that punitive measures against former Baath Party members is designed to punish them for their hostile attitudes to Israel or to ensure that Iraq is able to conclude a Camp David-style peace treaty with Ariel Sharon down the road.

Brahimi's plea makes sense to me. If you were a professor under the Baath and wanted to go to a conference in Dubai or London, you had to join the party first. Party membership alone tells us nothing about a person's real attitudes, and assuming the individual was not complicit in spying on other Iraqis or committing crimes, it seems to me foolish to take a vindictive attitude toward low-ranking party members.

As for the pleas for information about and due process for those taken prisoner by the US, this also used to be a mainly Sunni Arab request, but now the Shiites of the South are saying the same things.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Muqtada Agrees to Dissolve Militia, May go into temporary exile in Iran

az-Zaman reports that Muqtada al-Sadr has accepted a solution of the problems between him and the Coalition on the basis of a deal. It would provide for the senior ayatollahs to issue a ruling or fatwa dissolving the Army of the Mahdi, Muqtada's militia. Muqtada surrender to the grand ayatollahs and agree to have Abdul Karim al-`Anizi (an official of the Da`wa Party) negotiate for him with the Americans, in the name of the top religious leaders. Muqtada would accept the outcome of those negotiations without condition. Iran would offer him temporary asylum, until June 30 and the formation of a sovereign Iraqi government, at which time he could report to Najaf for his trial. In return, the US would withdraw its forces from the environs of Najaf.

A slightly different account is offered by John Burns of the NYT.

The Iranian delegation, led by Hossain Sadeqi, the director general of the Iranian Foreign Ministry, is heading to the shrine cities from Baghdad. Sadeqi should be seen as a man of President Mohammad Khatami, the reformer.

Meanwhile, Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei of Iran complained that the Americans said they were bringing democracy to Iraq, but that they have begun butchering people in that country. (Khamenei probably felt the need to put down the US to divert criticism for cooperating with them in helping resolve the Sadr case).

Thursday pm: According to Newsday, an Iranian delegation is on its way to Najaf.

But the bad news is that ' Khalil Naimi, the first secretary of the Iranian Embassy, was shot in the head in his car near the embassy, Foreign Ministry official Mohammad Nouri told The Associated Press in Tehran. ' This assassination is certainly a protest by hardliners of some sort, Sunni or Shiite, against Iran's wilingness to help resolve the standoff between Muqtada al-Sadr and the United States. Embassies and embassy personnel helpful to the US have been repeatedly targetted by the guerrillas during the past year, including Jordan, Spain, the Netherlands, and others. Now it is Iran.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Muqtada Will Negotiate without Preconditions: Iran Involved

Reuters is reporting that radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has ceased demanding a US pullback from Najaf as a precondition for negotiating. He gave in under enormous pressure from the senior Shiite establishment in Najaf, which wants to avert a US invasion of the city a la Fallujah. Despite his bluster, Muqtada has in the past often backed down and even said obsequious things about the US under pressure.

' Sadr's spokesman, Qays al-Khazali, said the cleric, bowing to pressure from senior Shi'ite religious authorities, was now ready to negotiate without insisting that U.S.-led forces first leave residential areas of Najaf and free detainees. Sadr himself told the German news agency DPA: "We want to free holy Najaf from the claws of the occupiers." He said he was willing to die in the struggle, but left the door open to "well-meaning" negotiators who wanted to help end the violence. Iran said Washington wanted its help. "Naturally, there are demands by Americans...that we help to resolve the crisis in Iraq. And we are acting," Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said. '

The Iranians also seem pleased to be drawn into a role in resolving the issue. I am frankly amazed that the US is willing to countenance this, and it seems a sign of real desperation on the part of the Bush administration to turn to the Axis of Evil for help. I am also amazed that Khamenei agreed to it on the Iranian side, and can only imagine that he thinks that it is a good thing to have the Americans owe him one so that he can continue to crush the reformists and reconsolidate conservative control of Iran. But once Iran is drawn into a formal role in Iraqi Shiite politics, the Bush administration should be aware that it will not be easy to push them back out. There is a story about the desert camel that is cold and its master lets it put its nose under the tent. But then it slides in its head, slowly slowy. Then its hump. And finally there is only a camel in the tent and the hapless owner has been pushed out into the cold night. We may be witnessing the insertion of the camel's nose.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Mediation with Muqtada and the Limits of Tolerance

The Scotsman reports that the standoff between the American forces and those of Muqtada al-Sadr in Najaf continues. Muqtada appears to be seeking a compromise.

I thought the following anecdote typical of the dry humor of the ayatollahs, even in parlous times. It concerns Muqtada's negotiations with the sons of two of the grand ayatollahs in Najaf (Muhammad Ridha Sistani & Ali Bashir Najafi, joined by Shaikhs Ali al-Sabzavari, Mahdi al-Qusayfi, and Baqir al-Ayrwani):

' Sources close to the delegation said Sadr has proposed that he will disband his Mehdi Army if told to do so by the religious authorities. "The delegation answered that as he did not ask the Najaf elders before forming his militia, why is he asking for an edict to disband it now? But the negotiations are ongoing," an aide to leading cleric Mohammad Bahr al-Uloum said. '

az-Zaman says today that the delegation whill choose a representative who does not serve on the Interim Governing Council to conduct negotiations aimed at bringing the crisis to an end; the appointee would have to be acceptable to the IGC and to the Coalition Provisional Authority. An unnamed official of the al-Da`wa Party said that the US had accepted the principle of mediation with Muqtada. He said that any agreement reached would necessitate that Muqtada recognize the rule of law and cease using his militia to inspire fear and coerce consciences. He proposed that Muqtada demonstrate his sincerity by calling for these things in his next Friday sermon. Then the members of the militia would be asked to vacate their positions and surrender their weapons. Another element of the settlement would be for an Iraqi court to undertake an inquiry into the charges against Muqtada, of instigating murder. The al-Da`wa official said that the results of the inquiry will inevitably be postponed until after the transfer of sovereignty on June 30, since such investigations take that sort of time. (The point seems to be that Muqtada might object less to being investigated and tried if it were done when Iraq is not formally under foreign occupation).

Al-Qabas, the Kuwaiti daily, says that mediators report getting mixed signals from the Americans. They say that military figures appear to want to "kill or capture" Muqtada, whereas civilians like Paul Bremer say they want to "restore calm." Is a power struggle going on over Muqtada between the generals and the viceroys?

Jonathan Steele of the Guardian has a thoughtful report on the negotiations. He says the Coalition Provisional Authority is trying to justify having cracked down on Muqtada on the grounds that he was planning an uprising even before the closure of his newspaper. I do not agree. Muqtada was the leader of a sectarian movement, and it was certainly proselytizing, coercing, and organizing. But all the indications are that he was being careful not to confront the CPA with violence, until he became convinced that they were coming after him. He may have planned violence or at least political coercion for next year, but we do not know that. We only know that he was organizing, including organizing a militia. In that he was no different from pro-American figures like Abdul Aziz al-Hakim (who heads the Badr Corps militia), Ibrahim Jaafari, whose Dawa Party has a militia, or even Ahmad Chalabi, whose militia was flown into Iraq by Rumsfeld on Pentagon aircraft and given perquisites by the US.

Az-Zaman also reports that Dawa Party leader Ibrahim Jaafari, who is in Tehran for talks with President Khatami and Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei, has sought and received Iranian support for the arrest of Muqtada. In return, Washington would stop accusing Iran of supporting him (an accusation intended by the Neocons to lay the groundwork for a US war on Iran), and would allow the Iranian ambassador to return to Baghdad. (This report seems to me shaky. I don't think the quid pro quo is commensurate, and don't see why Khamenei would cooperate in such a thing.) What does ring true is the report that the Iranians are absolutely refusing to take Muqtada as a political exile. Sending him into exile in Iran would be one way of resolving the current crisis, but apparently the Iranians, already surrounded by the US and suspicious that it plans a conquest of Tehran, view Muqtada as a sort of Trojan Horse that the US might later use as a pretext to harass them. High US military officials keep saying Iran backs Muqtada, but it is not clear that they back him more than they do other figures; even Ahmad Chalabi is rumored to get money from Tehran.

Jack Fairweather of the Telegraph notes the strong class divisions over Muqtada in Iraqi society, with the poor often supporting him but the educated middle class despising him.

Anyone who wants to understand the discontents of the poor Shiites who support Muqtada should read Tod Robertson's report on Shiite attitudes toward the American occupation and the ways in which they have soured.

The problems should be obvious. The unemployment rate is still very high among Shiites in the south. The Great Depression in the US was defined by an unemployment rate of about 25%. That among Iraqis is much higher, perhaps still twice that in a lot of places. Those who complain about the proliferation of militias should remember that militiamen get stipends, and joining one is often a way to make some desperately needed money. Higher employment would make such dangerous work less appealing. Despite the bright promises of American rule, sewage still flows in the streets in the Shiite slums, and there often is not clean drinking water. Most important of all, the Americans promised democracy, but have consistently shut down attempts to have free and fair elections, even (for the most part) at the municipal level. (John Bourne's experiment with open municipal elections in the small towns around Nasiriyah is a praiseworthy exception, but it is an exception). There is a growing fear that the Americans intend to turn the country over to their corrupt cronies, such as fraudster Ahmad Chalabi, and there will be a new, neo-colonial "soft" dictatorship like that in Egypt (also a regime propped up by the Americans).

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Arguing with Bush

I saw President Bush's news conference Tuesday evening. He said many things that disturbed me, not in any partisan sort of way (and I continue to maintain that simple partisanship makes for bad analysis), but on grounds of ethics and clear thinking and democratic values. I got the transcript and began arguing back, but could see it could go on for hours. And probably others would do a better job. But, since bytes are cheap, I may as well post what I put down; this is a diary of sorts, after all.

On the analogy between Iraq and Vietnam:

' THE PRESIDENT: I think the analogy is false. I also happen to think that analogy sends the wrong message to our troops, and sends the wrong message to the enemy. '

If a historical analogy is offered as a cautionary tale or a form of analysis of a contemporary situation, it has to be judged on its own merits. Making such analogies is a form of democratic discourse, and it is the sort of thing that the Bill of Rights meant to protect when it said that the government shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. To say that bringing it up "sends the wrong message to our troops" and to "the enemy" is to attempt to prevent democratic discourse on the grounds that it affects the morale of the democratic country's fighting forces and that it might give encouragement to those they with whom they are at war.

But the troops are either fighting for democratic values or they are not. If they are, then it is illogical to demand that the Republic forsake democratic discourse because they are fighting for it. It would be like saying that all Americans should turn in their firearms during the war, or that Americans should cease worshipping in the religion of their choice during the war. It is precisely the ability of American citizens to analyze the nature of the war freely that the troops are defending. Moreover, the "enemy" (though who exactly that is is unclear at the moment) is fighting for his own reasons, and can hardly take any real comfort from the existence of free and democratic discourse in the United States.

' A secure and free Iraq is an historic opportunity to change the world and make America more secure. A free Iraq in the midst of the Middle East will have incredible change . . . '

This premise is not necessarily true. Turkey has had relatively democratic elections since 1950, but this development had no resonances in the rest of the Middle East. Iran went theocratic in 1979, and Khomeini expected everyone in the Middle East to follow suit. No one did. Saudi Arabia is among the world's richest monarchies, but it has not spread monarchy in the mainly republican Middle East. Middle Eastern countries are often fairly insular with regard to politics, and every tub is on its own bottom. There is no guarantee that a "free" and democratic Iraq will have any real influence on the rest of the region.

At the moment, moreover, Iraq is a poster child for dictatorship. Any Egyptian who looked at what has transpired there in the past year might well decide that the soft dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak is altogether preferable to taking the risk of opening up the system and possibly causing a similar social breakdown!

' There's no question it's been a tough, tough series of weeks for the American people. It's been really tough for the families. I understand that. It's been tough on this administration. But we're doing the right thing. . .. '

I find the equation of the way in which the loss of nearly 80 US troops and the wounding of dozens has been "tough" on the American people, and the way in which these events have been "tough" for the Bush administration to be in bad taste.


Saddam Hussein was a threat.

It is difficult to see how a ruler whose army was so easy to defeat, and who was reduced to hiding in a spider hole, was a threat to the United States.

' He was a threat because he had used weapons of mass destruction on his own people. '

I should think this proves he was a threat to his own people.

' He was a threat because he coddled terrorists. '

I don't know what this means, to "coddle" terrorists. Either he sponsored terrorist actions aimed at harming the United States directly, or he did not. He probably did not, after 1993. The State Department did not even list Iraq as a terrorist threat in recent years.

' He was a threat because he funded suiciders. '

Saddam Hussein never gave any real support to the Palestinian cause, and he did not pay suicide bombers to blow themselves up. It is alleged that he funneled money to the orphans of such suicide bombers, but I have never seen any documentation for the claim. Supporting orphans is in any case not the same as funding terrorism.

' He was a threat to the region. He was a threat to the United States. '

I can't see how, given the state of his military in 2003.

' That's the assessment that I made from the intelligence, the assessment that Congress made from the intelligence; that's the exact same assessment that the United Nations Security Council made with the intelligence. '

Key figures of the Bush administration, including the President, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condi Rice consistently misled the Congress by intimating or stating over and over again that Iraq was close to having nuclear weapons, that it had weapons of mass destruction, and that it was responsible for September 11 and had strong ties to al-Qaeda.

All of these allegations were completely false. Having stampeded Congress into a hasty vote on the war in Iraq with this farrago of phantasies, to now use Congress's acquiescence as proof that Iraq was dangerous is frankly dishonest.

' I went to the U.N., as you might recall, and said, either you take care of him, or we will. Any time an American President says, if you don't, we will, we better be prepared to. And I was prepared to. I thought it was important for the United Nations Security Council that when it says something, it means something, for the sake of security in the world. '

So then would it not be equally important, if the Security Council said "no" to a war, for that decision to be upheld by the United States? When it says something, after all, it should mean something, for the sake of security in the world.

' See, the war on terror had changed the calculations. We needed to work with people. People needed to come together to work. And, therefore, empty words would embolden the actions of those who are willing to kill indiscriminately. '

I can't understand what this string of Bushisms could possibly mean. If Bush needed to work with people, why did he blow off the Security Council in March of 2003? If people needed to come together to work, wouldn't they need to come together about launching a major war that affected the entire world? Why then did Bush go to war virtually unilaterally (bilaterally at most)? That wouldn't represent much in the way of "people" "coming together." If empty words would embolden killers, wouldn't turning the entire United Nations Charter, which forbids unilateral wars of aggression without Security Council permission, into so much scrap paper be a way of "emboldening" such killers?

' He also confirmed that Saddam had a -- the ability to produce biological and chemical weapons. In other words, he was a danger. '

Saddam did not have any stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons at all, and had no nuclear weapons program. Iraq has the same ability to produce "chemical weapons" as all other industrializing societies do, no more and no less. But Iraq did not have such weapons, and it is hardly a casus belli that they had the potential to make them. So does Brazil, but we haven't invaded it lately.

' Finally, the attitude of the Iraqis toward the American people -- it's an interesting question. They're really pleased we got rid of Saddam Hussein. '

About half say the US presence in Iraq is a form of liberation. About half say it is a form of humiliation..

' And they were happy -- they're not happy they're occupied. I wouldn't be happy if I were occupied either. They do want us there to help with security, and that's why this transfer of sovereignty is an important signal to send, and it's why it's also important for them to hear we will stand with them until they become a free country. '

What? I thought they were happy. Now you say they aren't happy. Which is it?


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Shadid: "It's Pretty Bad Here."

It isn't often that one gets to hear a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist speak in his own voice from the field, but that's what you get at the Washington Post with the Tony Shadid question and answer session. Shadid is one of the best, and being an Arabist with long experience in the region has served him very well.

A taste:

' Anthony Shadid: This is my own opinion, but I think it's pretty bad here. From my own experience, we're dealing with the greatest insecurity since the fall of Saddam. Is it a crisis? It feels that way. Can the U.S. administration recover? Probably. But you definitely hear Iraqis calling for a decisive change in the approach -- perhaps less of a military response, more of a political one, and a greater reliance on Iraqi voices than those embodied by the Governing Council. '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Cole and Gerecht on Shiites of Iraq (Lehrer Newshour)

The text of my appearance on the Lehrer News Hour is available at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/jan-june04/alsadr_04-13.html.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Shiite Negotiators Warn US

The report about Sistani's strongly-worded message to the US warning them against attacking Najaf is now available in English. I haven't seen an Arabic text. Some 2500 US troops surround Najaf, and Muqtada al-Sadr says he is willing to sacrifice himself for Iraq. CNN says that those clerics negotiating with Sadr have warned the US not to come into Najaf, and have darkly intimated that the ones who caused the crisis "must pay." It is not clear if they mean the Army of the Mahdi or Paul Bremer, or both.

Head's up: I'll be on the Lehrer Newshour today, Tuesday 4/13.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

6 US Troops' Deaths Announced; 4 Police Killed

ash-Sharq al-Awsat/AFP:

The US military authorities announced Monday that guerrillas had killed 6 US troops in the past three days in separate incidents, deaths that had not previously been announced.

With regard to Iraqi deaths, Iraqi guerrillas concentrated their attacks Monday and the previous day on individuals in the Iraqi police, leaving four of them dead, including an officer, and eight wounded.

In separate incidents, guerrillas killed 9 US soldiers and wounded four.

Near al-Hillah in the south, gunmen opened fire on a police car, killing one and wounding two. The assailants drove off in the police car.

In Baqubah in the east, guerrillas killed two policemen, one an officer, and wounded two others seriously with a roadside bomb. The policemen had been heading to the General Hospital in the city to give blood for the besieged people of Fallujah. (For those who like tragic ironies, here you go: these policemen were giving blood to help Fallujah, which is not exactly an act of solidarity with their American overseers; but then they got blown away by guerrillas who saw them as proxies for the Americans, and the two who survived ended up needing the transfusions themselves.)

In Kirkuk, guerrillas killed a policeman and wounded four civilians with a mortar shell near a checkpoint.

Two huge explosions shook downtown Baghdad early Tuesday morning. Although the CPA tries to suggest that these were "controlled explosions" of leftover Baath ordnance being carried out by US troops, that cover story seems awfully thin. I can't imagine they are carrying out controlled explosions at 6 in the morning in downtown Baghdad. These are guerrilla strikes, and it is embarrassing to the US that they can get so close to their HQ, so they try to muddy the waters with this 'controlled explosions' malarkey.

Meanwhile, 9 Americans, including 2 soldiers, are being held hostage in Iraq. The Chinese taken earlier were released (it seems they were mistaken for Koreans or Japanese), but now 11 Russians have been captured, and 2 Czechs. Danish NGOs are leaving, and it seems likely that most civilian aid workers will now flee the country, setting back reconstruction immeasurably. The new hostage crisis should raise serious questions about whether the privatization of war in the US has gone too far.

Although the situation in Fallujah is still tense, and a "cease-fire" is probably the wrong thing to call it, negotiations continued Tuesday in hopes of ending the US siege of the city of some 300,000, a third of the inhabitants of which have fled. al-Sabaah, an Iraqi newspaper, reports continued mediation efforts by Ghazi al-Yawir, a Sunni member of the Interim Governing Council, and by the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni fundamentalist group, the head of which also serves in the IGC.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Shiite Leaders Negotiate with Muqtada

The London daily ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that attempts to mediate between radical Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr and the US are continuing in Najaf, even as there were further clashes on Monday between armed Shiite groups and Polish and Bulgarian troops in the other holy city, Karbala. The gunbattles came despite a ceasefire declared over the weekend in honor of the holy day of Arba'in.

It says that the mediators deny that any possibility of Muqtada going into exile in Iran has been broached. Likewise, they say, they have not brought up any dissolution of the Army of the Mahdi, Muqtada's militia. Rather, they focused on reaching an understanding that the militia would obey the law and respect the institutions of the state, and would surrender its weapons to the Coalition forces. In return, the prosecution of Muqtada in connection with the murder of Abdul Majid al-Khoei on April 10, 2003, would be turned over to Iraqi courts only once sovereignty was regained by Iraq on June 30.

Adnan al-Asadi, the number two man in the al-Da`wa Party (a longstanding Shiite group), has participated in the attempt at mediation. He said, "We have not arrived so far at a complete agreement. We expect that the Coalition will agree to a plan to resolve the issue through negotiations either today [Monday] or tomorrow [Tuesday]." He said he expected a positive response, and that the Americans had concurred with the dispatch of mediators in this case.

Al-Asadi said that he continues to stipulate that the US must approve the agreement announced by Najaf police chief Ali al-Yasiri, whereby Muqtada's Army of the Mahdi has relinquished three police stations back into the hands of the police. The agreement said that US forces must remain outside the city of Najaf, because of its sanctity. Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) spokesman Dan Senor denied knowledge of any such agreement.

Al-Asadi revealed that the agreement required Muqtada to order his militia to be law-abiding, in the course of his Friday prayers sermon.

A campaign has been launched with the al-Khoei family, which is extremly bitter toward Muqtada, to convince them to give up their demand that he be prosecuted immediately, and to let the process start rather in a few months, when Iraq is again an independent country [at least de jure].

Muhsin al-Hakim of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq said that SCIRI and other groups were involved in the mediation effort. Al-Hakim said from Tehran, where he was visiting, "So far, five sessions have been held with a team appointed by [SCIRI leader] Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. Discussions took place with al-Sadr's officials." He added, "We hope to arrive at an agreement in the near future." He declined to reveal the demands being made by the two sides. He denied reports that Muqtada was seeking exile in Iran.

The NYT reports that the son of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Ridha, and Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Sa`id al-Hakim, have also been involved in negotiations with Muqtada.

Cole: I think it most unlikely that the terms of the negotiations reported above will be acceptable to the United states. Coalition spokesmen continued to talk about capturing or killing Muqtada. The tough talk may be intended to put pressure on him to surrender, but if so it is a miscalculation. Muqtada is a millenarian who thinks the world is about to end, and for the foreigners to discuss killing him might well drive him to seek the advent of the apocalypse through a call for more violence.

Meanwhile, 3,000 US troops are massing around Najaf and US military commanders are talking about invading the city and capturing or killing Muqtada al-Sadr.

The problem with this approach is that the Sadrists are a widespread social movement whose history goes back over a decade, and killing Muqtada will not end the movement. There are lots of potential successors to Muqtada. The chief characteristic of the Sadrists is their cheekiness. They were cheeky to Saddam, and they will be cheeky to Gen. Abizaid. They are desperately poor ghetto dwellers, they don't like The Man, and they think they have nothing to lose in taking Him on. If the US military thinks this is a military problem with a military solution, they are just clueless. Someone on a discussion list said that Iraq is not Vietnam because this time the generals are in charge, and they know what they are doing. The US officers in Iraq are bright, dedicated persons, but they don't know squat about Iraq (even Abizaid, a Lebanese Christian, is hardly an Iraq expert), and it also isn't at all clear that they are setting the agenda. Going after Muqtada, for instance, almost certainly was the idea of the civilian politicians in the CPA and the Department of Defense. Once the mission was defined, the military wants to carry it out militarily. If they go into Najaf, there will be hell to pay (see below).




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Sistani Threatens Shiite Resistance if US Invades Najaf

The Iranian newspaper Baztab is reporting that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has sent a strongly-worded message to the Coalition forces, in which he warned them against attacking the Shiite shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala after the end of Arba'in.

According to this report, in this letter Sistani warned the US that were the Occupation forces to wage a campaign against Karbala and Najaf, the religious leadership of the Shiites would fight to its last breath for the rights of the Shiites.

Since the fall of the Saddam regime, Sistani has called upon Shiites to be cautious about opposing the US troops, despite his clear distaste for their presence. He has instead attempted to hasten elections for a popularly elected, legitimate Iraqi government. ( Persian link here. )
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More 'What went Wrong?'

Carol Giacomo quotes an array of policy experts on the problem with the current US strategy in Iraq:

' What's really needed is a viable political process and the building of a consensus - internationally, regionally and locally - to work our way out of this mess," said retired Army General William Nash, a US commander in the Gulf War. "That's what I don't see anybody doing," said Nash, now with the Council on Foreign Relations. '

Michael O'Hanlon ' of the Brookings Institution said US counter-insurgency strategy in the so-called "Sunni triangle" has been "pretty poor because we have rotated so many units through there and (have) so many philosophies for applying military force." '

Anthony Cordesman ' of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies said . . . "The problem is that this is a political war...(and) the political outcome of Fallujah matters far more than getting more insurgents or pacifying the city," he said. If the Americans and Iraqi mediators "find no one in Fallujah to compromise with, then we can pursue a military solution, but we have to understand that the military situation will create as many insurgents as it captures," he added. '

' Still, one US official said Fallujah should be "flattened" and prominent Republican, William Kristol, wrote in his Weekly Standard magazine: "We trust that US troops will soon move to uproot what seems to have become a kind of terrorist sanctuary in Fallujah."

Kenneth Pollack, ' author of a book on Iraq, said the US decision to move against Sadr was a "mistake," especially when UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi is trying to organise a June 30 political transition in the country. '

So guess who gets listened to? The Flattener and Billy Kristol (the unfunny one).



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Cole on Fresh Air

I've long been a fan of Terry Gross's NPR show, "Fresh Air." So am happy to report that I am interviewed in Tuesday's edition. Just a head's up for those who asked for one.
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Pentagon Announces Death of 17 US Troops in Iraq; 5 Killed Sunday

Nicholas Riccardi of the LA Times (reg. req.) reports that Iraqi guerrillas killed 5 US troops on Sunday, including three in a firefight west of Baghdad and two in a helicopter that they managed to shoot down. The US military also reported 12 other troops dead in engagements on Friday and Saturday, including a major battle in Baqubah with, presumably, ex-Baathist forces (which has been little noted in the Western press). Since April 4 alone, when the US launched its assaults on Fallujah and on the Army of the Mahdi, guerrillas have killed about 60 US troops.

Other news: Spanish troops near Diwaniyah came under fire early Monday, but took no casualties.

Clashes broke out in the northern city of Kirkuk between guerrillas and US forces, leaving 4 Iraqis dead.

In Nasiriyah, Italian troops used explosive charges to level the office building of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi had visited the day before.

Xinhua reported,

BAGHDAD, April 12 (Xinhuanet) -- Three loud explosions rocked Monday a large compound in central Baghdad of the headquarters of the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq. Smoke was seen rising from the heavily fortified "Green Zone." The cause of the explosions was not known immediately. Sirens could be heard shortly after the blasts.

Chinese interest in Iraq increased dramatically when insurgents there took 7 Chinese citizens prisoner on Sunday, adding to a rash of hostage-taking. The hostage-taking has caused development work in Iraq to grind to a standstill, a big blow to US hopes that development would pour money into the country and pacify it.
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US Turns to Negotiations with Insurgents

As Riccardi points out, the Bush Administration has abruptly ceased its cowboy rhetoric and says it is willing to consider negotiated settlements to its problems in Sunni Arab Fallujah and in the Shiite south with the militia of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. This approach has surely been forced on the yahoos in the Department of Defense by political considerations. Perhaps it has penetrated to even Karl Rove (Bush's campaign manager) and the National ("Nobody told me what to do") Security Council that the punitive assault on Fallujah, in which there were significant civilian deaths, was making the Marines look like fascists and that the talk about "destroying" the Sadrist movement seemed rather grandiose for an administration that hadn't even been able to deal with tiny Sunni Arab groups that continue to harass it.

Hamza Hendawi of AP points out that the US offensives in Fallujah and the Shiite south have been extremely costly politically. Interim Governing Council members grew openly critical, and one suspended his membership on the council. The minister of human rights resigned in protest. The appointment of a minister of human rights in Iraq was treated as a great propaganda victory by the Bush administration when it happened. But there has been virtually no reporting about the resignation, which is a dramatic critique of US policy. Hendawi quotes me, ' "No Iraqi likes to see an imperial power like the United States beating up on people who are essentially their cousins,'' said Juan R. Cole, a University of Michigan lecturer and a prominent expert on Iraqi affairs. ``There is a danger that the vindictive attitude of the Americans ... will push the whole country to hate them. A hated occupier is powerless even with all the firepower in the world,'' he said. '

What is going on now in Fallujah and Najaf is called in Arabic wasta or mediation. With a painless registration, readers who are interested can consult the valuable paper by George E. Irani entitled "Islamic Mediation Techniques for Middle East Conflicts". The Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni fundamentalist organization cooperating with the US, appears to have taken the lead in negotiating with the resistance in Fallujah. A number of Interim Governing Council members are trying to talk Muqtada back from the brink, though he certainly is not going to allow himself peacefully to be arrested. In wasta procedures, it is important that a) both sides are seeking a way to save face and do want to back off from a confrontation and b) that the persons doing the mediating have the necessary social standing with both parties to be credible. That is, only if the US administrators give sufficient respect to their Iraqi colleagues is it likely that the mediation will be successful. Likewise, Arab conceptions of mediation require that all outstanding issues be resolved at once, since the party that feels victimized will be very suspicious if victimization is continuing in one sector even as it ceases in another.

Irani notes, summarizing the conclusions of a conference on the subject:

' Religious beliefs and traditions are also relevant to conflict control and reduction, including the relevant resources in Islamic law and tradition? Different causes and types of conflicts (family, community, and state conflicts) need to be considered, as do in