Fierce Firefight in Fallujah Leaves 13 Dead, 14 Wounded

AP reports that US Marines in Fallujah came under fire late Thursday, starting a firefight that continued through Friday and spilled over into an industrial area of the city. The Marines fired mortar rounds and called in close air support. AP writes, "Many of those wounded, including at least one child, appeared to be civilians injured by U.S. airstrikes, hospital officials said . . . Twelve auto repair shops and two houses were reported destroyed."

A loud explosion also went off late Friday in downtown Baghdad, but no details were available.

AP reports of US casualties:

The latest identifications reported by the Defense Department:

- Army Spc. Joseph F. Herndon, II, 21, Derby, Kan.; died Thursday, in Hawijah, Iraq, when he was shot while on guard duty; assigned to the Army's 1st Battalion, 27th Infantry, 25th Infantry Division (Light); Schofield Barracks, Hawaii.

- Army Pfc. Ken W. Leisten, 20, Cornelius, Ore.; died Wednesday, in Taji, Iraq, when his vehicle struck an explosive; assigned to the Army National Guards 2nd Battalion, 162nd Infantry; Corvallis, Ore.

909 US troops had died in Iraq as of Friday since the beginning of the war.

Did al-Qaeda Game Bush into Iraq War?

Douglas Jehl of the New York Times explains how Ibn al-Shaykh Libi, a high al-Qaeda official of Libyan extraction, was captured in fall of 2001 and alleged to CIA interrogators that Iraq had provided al-Qaeda with training in chemical and biological weapons.

Later on, Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Shaykh Muhammad were captured in Pakistan. Abu Zubaydah was wounded in the course of being captured and was put on heavy duty pain killers, and was interrogated in part while under their influence. Both he and KSM maintained that Bin Laden had forbidden any operational cooperation with Iraq, because it was ruled by an infidel secular Arab socialist regime.

When the CIA came back to Libi with these statements of his colleagues, he folded and admitted he had lied.

What is going on here? It has been suggested that Libi told the CIA whatever they wanted to hear because they tortured him. But there is another possibility, which is that he deliberately misled them. Libi is also the source of a report in January 2002 that al-Qaeda had targeted the US naval base in Bahrain. That allegation was never confirmed, and it is possible that it was also a lie, intended to draw US resources away from Afghanistan, or to make the US cautious about using the base.

I think Bin Laden and his lieutenants wanted to provoke wars between the US and Muslim states. I think they knew that the 9/11 attacks would guarantee a US war on Afghanistan, and that they were confident they could draw the US into the country and defeat it, as they had the Soviets.

That they were trying to provoke a US/Afghanistan war and knew their actions would provoke one is suggested in several ways. First, they made no effort to have the hijackers on 9/11 employ aliases or cover their tracks. A toddler could have traced Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdar back to al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. They made their reservations under their own names! All of the hijackers had. Counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke was astounded that these men had even been let on the planes under those names, many of which were well known to US intelligence. Likewise, Bin Laden hand-picked the Saudi "muscle" that he sent along at the last minute, from among young men personally loyal to him, and who would be known to be his men. September 11 was a way of waving a huge red flag from Afghanistan at the American bull.

Two days before 9/11, al-Qaeda agents posing as Algerian newsmen blew up Ahmad Shah Masoud, the gallant leader of the Northern Alliance. Clearly, Bin Laden had gamed out the aftermath of 9/11 and understood that the US might well try to partner with the Northern Alliance against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and he wanted to reduce the military effectiveness of the NA by eliminating its most talented strategist, Massoud.

Bin Laden, in choosing the "muscle" to be 15 Saudis, also was clearly attempting to alienate the US from the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in hopes of weakening the regime in Riyadh and preparing it for overthrow by radical Islamists.

Libi's story about Iraq training al-Qaeda, delivered after 9/11, is of a piece with the rest of this strategy. It was aimed at instigating a war by the US on Iraq.

All of these wars were intended to stir hatred of the US invader throughout the Muslim world, to weaken the "puppet" governments of the Middle East that were allied with the US and make them ripe for overthrow, and to mire the US in a series of Islamic quagmires that would sap its will and strength and ultimately force its withdrawal from the region.

In form, the Libi strategy resembles the Maoist hope that the rural third world could be brought into a confrontation with the industrialized capitalist countries, one in which contradictions would be sharpened and the capitalist minority ultimately surrounded and overwhelmed by socialist villagers. Substitute "radical Islamist" for "socialist" and you have the Libi plan.

If al-Qaeda wanted wars between the US and Muslim countries, why would Abu Zubayda and Khalid Shaikh Muhammad have told the US the truth? I can only speculate, of course. But Abu Zubayda may have been debriefed while badly wounded and heavily sedated, and may not have had his wits entirely about him, so that he reacted with anger and hatred at the Baathist regime when it was brought up. Khalid Shaikh Muhammad was not arrested until March of 2003, and may have delighted in revealing to the US that it had been duped after the war began on March 19.

Even though Libi recanted his earlier disinformation, Vice President Dick Cheney has continued to rely on his allegations. Note that it should no longer be necessary for the US to depend on a single unreliable source such as Libi, since it has captured the Baath intelligence files and should by now know pretty much exactly what the Baath government was up to with regard to terrorism. If the US does not know, it would be because it irresponsibly gave those intelligence files to Ahmad Chalabi.

Chalabi was playing the US from the other side, feeding it disinformation about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda ties that was just made up out of whole cloth.

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz allowed themselves to be manipulated by Libi and Chalabi because it suited them.

The question is whether letting ourselves be duped in this way suits the American public.

Muqtada warns Muslim Nations

In his Friday prayer sermon on Friday before hundreds of followers in Kufa, radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr warned Muslim nations not to send troops to Iraq, warning that they would be considered collaborators with the US Occupation, and would risk being hit as such by Iraqis.

His warning was echoed by radical Sunni clergymen, as well.

Al-Zaman says that Muqtada also explained his two month long disappearance in part by reference to a schism within the Sadr movement, begun by his father. (He may have been referring to the opposition of many Sadrists, including his former mentor Ayatollah Kadhim al-Haeri in Qom, to the uprising he launched in April against the US in response to Washington's attempt to arrest or kill him.)

Muqtada also vehemently criticized the government of caretaker PM Iyad Allawi for failing to provide services and security.

He complained that the United States had succeeded in globalizing the world (`awlamat al-`alam). He called for resistance not just in Iraq but everywhere people were suffering oppression.

Humanitarian Crisis looms in Basra

Reuters reports that a high UN official has raised the specter of a serious humanitarian crisis (i.e. lots of people dying) in Basra this summer. The problem is that there is only half as much potable water as people need for a population of 1.3 million, and the temperature has soared to 50 C / 122 F. Reuters writes:

"We are confronting a potential serious humanitarian crisis," Ross Mountain, acting special representative of the U.N. Secretary General for Iraq, told Reuters in Amman on Thursday.

"We have no indication that there is anywhere else in the country that is facing this kind of crisis. Nobody is facing 50 degree (Celsius) temperatures with less than half the supply of water required ... There is nowhere as bad as the Basra area."

Lack of potable water in a city like Basra can cause large numbers of deaths in several ways. Simple e. coli bacteria in the water can give babies and small children diarrhea so bad that they can easily die of it if parents don't know how to keep them hydrated (spoonfuls of filtered, boiled water with sugar and salt in it will usually work). You could also get a cholera epidemic and hepatitis. And, if people run out of boiled water because they lack or can't afford fuel to prepare more, they can be driven by the 122 temperatures to risk drinking bad water.

National Congress Postponed
Fighting in Nasiriyah

In a sign that the political situation in Iraq is even worse than anyone had suspected, the caretaker Iraqi government has had to postpone the holding of national congress until mid-August. The complicated selection process for choosing delegates had favored the expatriate parties and politicians, and had stirred up bad feelings by important players who felt excluded. The Sunnis of largely Shiite Basra are among those constituencies that felt shortchanged by the process. So far no press reporting I have seen has given the full details of the floor fights in key cities, but apparently in some cases they have been vicious.

One group that feels shortchanged is the religious Shiites, whose parties have not been given the sort of representation their size and influence would merit. An aide to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, according to NPR, has urged Iraqi Shiites to be patient, and to put their hopes in the January 2005 elections.

The problem is that this postponement is not a good sign for the country's ability to hold one person, one vote parliamentary elections only five months from now.

Meanwhile, Italian troops in Nasiriyah clashed with militiamen who tried to take control of two bridges into the city. The militiamen were not identified but are likely to be followers of Muqtada al-Sadr. These sorts of incidents suggest that PM Allawi really is just the mayor of downtown Baghdad, and that neither the Iraqi government nor the US-led coalition really are in control of Iraq's cities. (-ash-Sharq al-Awsat)

The Kerry Plan on Iraq:
How it Could Work if the UN were Brought In

In his speech to the National Democratic Convention, John Kerry devoted a few passages to Iraq. He said:

"I know what we have to do in Iraq. We need a president who has the credibility to bring our allies to our side and share the burden, reduce the cost to American taxpayers, and reduce the risk to American soldiers. That's the right way to get the job done and bring our troops home.

Here is the reality: that won't happen until we have a president who restores America's respect and leadership - so we don't have to go it alone in the world.

And we need to rebuild our alliances, so we can get the terrorists before they get us."

Media pundits are already charging that these passages are vague and lack specifics. I thought I would try to envision how this plan might work in the real world.

The first problem with involving the international community is that the US effort in Iraq lacks international legitimacy. Moreover, the Bush administration has insisted that the troops of its coalition partners (some of whom, like the Poles, are being paid by the US to be in Iraq) remain under over-all United States military command. This demand is unacceptable to most countries that might plausibly supply troops.

For instance, Colin Powell has been speaking with the Saudis about the possibility of a Muslim military force to help stabilize Iraq. But most Muslim countries would refuse to go under a US military command, as this report from the Scotsman notes:

' In Jakarta yesterday, Indonesian foreign ministry spokesman Marty Natalegawa said: “Our position remains that any possible Indonesian involvement, including dispatching our military personnel to Iraq, has to be within and under a UN framework.”

Yemen had offered earlier this month to help in a UN mission in Iraq, provided all coalition forces withdraw . . .

Commenting on the Muslim force proposal, Arab League envoy to Britain Ali Hamid said in London that the idea could gain international support as long as it was accompanied by a clear US commitment to withdraw from Iraq and was mandated by the United Nations Security Council.

Many Arab countries have indicated they would be willing to get more involved in Iraq if they can do so under the UN, rather than a perceived US, umbrella. '

So the big stumbling block is the US auspices of the foreign occupation of Iraq, and Bush administration insistence on the US leading the over-all military command.

Another problem is that the European Community simply does not have many spare troops to send abroad, so the EU is unlikely to be the solution here. (They are likely to be busier and busier with Afghanistan, anyway).

So here is how the Kerry plan could work, with specifics.

Let us say that Iraq really does hold parliamentary elections in January of 2005, and that the new government elects a prime minister. The resulting Iraqi government would have full international legitimacy, and would be in a position to play a strong role at the UN, on the Arab League, and other international bodies.

Let us say that the new Iraq Prime Minister gets the backing of his cabinet and parliament to go to the United Nations Security Council and ask for a UN peace-enforcing effort. (Bosnia is an analogous precedent). The Kerry Administration ambassador to the UN supports this effort, as do the UK, France, China and Russia, along with the rotating members.

The UN Resolution should specify that UN troops in Iraq have the right to use force to enforce the peace. That is, they would not be mere observers or peacekeepers, but active peace enforcers.

The UN peace enforcing military mission in Iraq would be funded by a special fund, to which the US, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries would contribute, since it is in all their interests that Iraq be stabilized.

The UN Security Council and the Iraqi government would then go the Arab League seeking a commitment from it to support peace-enforcement in Iraq. At this point, Egypt gets on board, and swings the others to support the proposal.

The Iraqi government, the UNSC and the Arab League then go to non-neighbor Muslim and other countries and ask for about 10,000 men from each. Each two such half-divisions would allow the US to rotate out a division of its own. If 10 countries could be convinced to come in, all but two US divisions could leave. If the effort were seen as one of ending the US occupation by supplanting the US with a UN/Arab League force, many governments that now fear to buck their own public opinion by collaborating with the US might be in a much better position to send troops. Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Yemen and Morocco could all easily spare 10,000 troops each, and more such partners could be found. Perhaps under these conditions even the French and the Russians would be willing to come in, as well. The British would stay for as long as necessary, though likely the Poles and others would want to rotate out early in 2005. That would be all right, since under this plan they could be replaced. Some countries might supply police or gendarmes rather than military troops, as needed in the provinces to which they were assigned (Samawah might just need civilian police for a while; al-Anbar probably needs military troops).

Remember that the poorer countries involved would receive substantial reimbursement for coming aboard. They would also be in line to receive "strategic rent" from the US and other wealthy countries--debt forgiveness, favorable trade treaties, etc. Countries like Russia and France would enhance the access of their companies to the Iraqi market once the security situation had settled down.

This genuinely multinational force could intervene wherever order broke down so badly that Iraqi police and security forces could not handle it. They would be backed up where necessary by US air power for as long as the Iraqi government and the UN wanted it.

The UN force would have as its mandate to help negotiate a final settlement with the Kurds and to supervise the integration of the peshmerga and the Shiite militias into the new Iraqi army, which would have mixed units for national cohesion. It would also work to develop safeguards for minority rights so as to mollify the Sunni Arabs in places like al-Anbar. (That there would be a strong Sunni Muslim presence among the UN troops might help in this mollifying process, though it would not change the fact that the parliament is Shiite-dominated).

This UN force, with vastly reduced US participation under a UN general, would give the new, elected Iraqi government time to rebuild its own armed forces and national guard. As effective Iraqi divisions were trained and equipped, they could begin relieving UN troops, allowing all the multinational forces, including those of the US, gradually to rotate out of the country as they were no longer needed. At the end of this process, Iraq would have an army of 60,000 men, able to maintain order in the country but posing no threat to neighbors. It would be an independent country, midwifed by the United Nations. The US would have finally gracefully exited the country, since it is unlikely that an elected Iraqi government would want foreign troops on its soil any longer than necessary.

I would be the first to admit that the plan is not perfect. Sometimes UN troops have not performed very well. Iraq is a complex and highly armed society, and would be the biggest challenge ever faced by the UN. But I think the plan has at least a chance of working. And, it is hard to see how it could produce results worse than those produced by the Bush administration in the past miserable 16 months.

Addendum 2:00 pm Friday 7/30: In response to some of my mail about this post:

1) Someone said that Bush might do this sort of thing if he were elected, anyway. The answer is no. He will not and cannot. My model presupposes a willingness to surrender military command of the multinational force to the UN, which Bush will never, ever do. In the absence of that step, you cannot pick up the Indonesian, Malaysian, etc. troops. They have elections and it would guarantee their governments to be kicked out of office by the voters if they put their troops under US command in Iraq.

2) Someone else said that the Russians and the French are unlikely to come in. That may be so, but we cannot know without trying. The combination of UN leadership and the opportunity to enhance business opportunities for their firms in Iraq and the Gulf, plus the assertion of a geo-strategic role and an American acknowledgment of their necessity as allies could all work together to persuade. Still, their participation would not be absolutely essential.

3) It was asserted that the 3rd world military contingents are likely to be lightweights and not up to the job of facing down the Sunni insurgents. This assertion is unfair. The Pakistani, Egyptian and other militaries are professional and have had experience with counter-insurgency against radical Islamists, and their governments are still there because they have won. The Arabic-speaking units would be in a much better position than the Americans to develop good intelligence on the insurgency. Moreover, my model assumes that the Sunni Arab insurgency will greatly subside, given the legitimacy of a UN military mission and the participation of many Sunni troops. Likewise, it assumes that the Kurdish north and the Shiite south remain relatively stable.

120 Dead in Bombings, Clashes in Iraq
4 US Troops Killed

Wire services report that 120 persons died in separate incidents in Iraq on Wednesday, the one-month anniversary of the "transfer of sovereignty" to the caretaker government of Iyad Allawi.

The NYT says that guerrillas detonated a truck bomb outside a police recruiting station in the eastern city of Baqubah, killing 70 and wounding 55. NPR reported that the mood in the city was condemnatory of the attack, and that many feel that the Iraqi police are not collaborators with the US but rather Iraqi patriots. But NPR uncharacteristically missed the point, which is that the guerrillas do not care with whom people sympathize. The key question is whether they will be afraid to go sign up to serve in Allawi's police, and to cooperate with the caretaker government in general.

In the south-central city of Suwariyah, multinational forces and Iraqi police battled guerrillas, killing 35 of them. The guerrillas killed 7 Iraqi policemen. Rumors swirled that some of the guerrillas had come over from Iran, but the Polish military spokesman said he had no evidence of this. It would matter whether Suwariyah is mainly Sunni or Shiite, not something I was able to find out (the area south of Baghdad is mixed). Why don't reporters ask these questions?

Guerrillas used roadside bombs to kill two US troops, and two others died in small arms fights in al-Anbar province. Their deaths raised the toll to 906 since the war began, according to AP.

Guerrillas killed two Pakistani hostages, saying that the Pakistani government was considering sending troops to Iraq (to guard the UN HQ, to be headed by a Pakistani diplomat).

The Guardian adds, "There were also shootings and clashes in the western city of Ramadi and the northern city of Kirkuk. Central Baghdad descended into chaos after a rocket hit a busy street, killing two people and wounding four, including three children."

Guerrillas kidnapped three sons of the governor of al-Anbar Province, Abdul Karim Burghis al-Rawi, in Ramadi. The provincial governors have largely been chosen in a complicated process over which the Americans and British had a great deal of influence, and many guerrillas consider them puppets.

In an important Australian Broadcasting Co. interview, Anthony Cordesmann explains in some detail why Iraqi forces cannot deal with the guerrilla insurgency, lacking proper equipment and even communications. It is not a pretty picture.

According to Reuters, on Wednesday Iraq weapons inspector David Kay said that

U.S. officials should give up the "delusional hope" that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction so they can move forward with reform . . . "I think it's most important that the president of the United States recognizes that in fact the weapons are not there," Kay told reporters after speaking at The Government Security Expo and Conference. "It's because until you do that you will not take this fundamental reorganization of the intel community on board," he said. Officials such as acting CIA Director John McLaughlin "hold out the delusional hope that eventually you'll find weapons," Kay said.

Cheney Watch

Vice President Dick Cheney gave his stump speech in Utah on Wednesday, attempting to rally the Republican faithful while the national spotlight remained on the Democrats. Rebecca Walsh reports:

Cheney said terrorists are as determined to destroy America as the "Axis powers" of Germany, Italy and Japan during World War II. Borrowing a quote from the 9-11 Commission's report on the terrorist attacks of Sept. 2001, the vice president said the terrorists are "sophisticated, patient, disciplined and lethal."
"This enemy is perfectly prepared to slaughter anyone man, woman and child to achieve its ends," Cheney said. "This is not an enemy we can reason with. This is an enemy we must vanquish."

Although it may be true that al-Qaeda is as determined to destroy the US as the Axis Powers were in World War II, this observation is a Himalayan exaggeration if it is meant to suggest a parallel. Al-Qaeda is a few thousand fanatics mainly distributed in a handful of countries. If Zacharias Moussaoui and Richard Reid are any indication, a lot of them are one step away from from collecting old soda cans on the street in their grocery carts while mumbling about the radios the government implanted in their asses.

So while their determination may be impressive (or just creepy), they are not comparable to the might of three industrialized dictatorships with populations in the tens of millions. Some 13 million men served in the German army (Heer) alone between 1935 and 1945. (And WW II killed 55 million persons, not 3 thousand).

I repeat, al-Qaeda proper only has a few hundred fighters, those who pledged allegiance personally to Bin Laden, and a few thousand if you count other Afghan Arabs and their ideological soul mates. Most of them are not wealthy or trained or competent, and a lot are just crackpots. (Read an account of the misadventures of Richard Reid again). September 11 was possible mainly because Ramzi Bin al-Shibh lucked out and managed to recruit some high-powered engineering Ph.D. students in Hamburg who knew something serious about kinetic energy. The organization does not have a lot of persons of that caliber, though Cheney has done everything in his power to make them easier for al-Qaeda to recruit.

These few thousand scruffy terrorists are not comparable to the Axis in any significant dimension except maybe "determination" (which they share with all kinds of cults around the world, including Aum Shinrikyo).

The question that I have, though, is why, if Dick Cheney is in fact so desperately worried about al-Qaeda, he hasn't done more about it. Of the 1000 or so al-Qaeda operatives who fled to Pakistan, 500 or so have been captured, almost all of them by the Pakistani military. Although there are 20,000 US troops in Afghanistan, they have captured no top al-Qaeda leaders at all to my knowledge. In fact, it is difficult for me to understand what exactly they are doing there. The Pushtun warlords all around them are selling $2 billion of heroin annually to Europe, to which you would have thought the US might object (and isn't it likely some of the $2 billion is going straight to al-Qaeda?)

Usamah Bin Laden and Aiman al-Zawahiri, who sat down in a room and planned out September 11 are still free. They are still plotting against the US and its allies. Chatter suggests that the bombings in Istanbul were encouraged by al-Zawahiri.

So let's get this straight. The US has 138,000 troops stuck in Iraq, which was no danger to the US homeland. They are mainly fighting local clansmen who had never before had any beef with the US, prior to the American invasion of their country.

If Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri are the SS of the age, then why aren't 138,000 US troops combing Waziristan for them? Why haven't they been captured?

If al-Qaeda is the equivalent of the WW II Axis, why didn't the US liaise with Moroccan and Spanish security to prevent the Madrid bombings? How many FBI and CIA operatives do we even have in Rabat and Casablanca? Does Cheney even know the name of the Moroccan minister of intelligence? There is no evidence that he is making the fight against al-Qaeda any sort of top priority.

Cheney is lying again. Iraq is obviously a much greater priority for him than is fighting al-Qaeda. All the country's military resources are being sunk into Iraq. Silly decisions are made on macho grounds like deciding to besiege Fallujah or arrest Muqtada al-Sadr (from both endeavors Cheney had to slink away with his tail between his legs, because political considerations got in the way of mere application of massive force).

Why is Iraq a bigger priority for Cheney than is fighting al-Qaeda? Because there are corporate profits to be made in Iraq. There are virtually none in Afghanistan or the Pakistani tribal regions. Cheney wants to crucify the Bill of Rights on the cross of "national security," but has avoided doing the one thing that would make us both free and safe. That is developing a serious counter-insurgency plan for the Middle East that wins hearts and minds and deals effectively with asymmetrical threats. All his emphasis has been on dealing with governments, like that of Iraq, which can be defeated militarily, and the defeat of which unlocks national resources for American companies to exploit. The problem is that those governments do not pose a threat to the US mainland. To the extent that there is a threat, it comes from a shadowy network of radical Islamist guerrillas. Cheney is doing virtually nothing about them.

Not only has Cheney failed to win hearts and minds, but Bush/Cheney policies have made the US less popular than ever in the Middle East. In the past two years, positive views of America have dwindled alarmingly. The Washington Post reports of the recent Zogby poll,

"In 2002, the single policy issue that drove opinion was the Palestinians; now it's Iraq and America's treatment, here and abroad, of Arabs and Muslims," said James Zogby, who commissioned the report with the Arab American Institute.

In Zogby's 2002 survey, 76 percent of Egyptians had a negative attitude toward the United States, compared with 98 percent this year. In Morocco, 61 percent viewed the country unfavorably in 2002, but in two years, that number has jumped to 88 percent. In Saudi Arabia, such responses rose from 87 percent in 2002 to 94 percent in June. Attitudes were virtually unchanged in Lebanon but improved slightly in the UAE, from 87 percent who said in 2002 that they disliked the United States to 73 percent this year.

Those polled said their opinions were shaped by U.S. policies, rather than by values or culture. When asked: "What is the first thought when you hear 'America'?" respondents overwhelmingly said: "Unfair foreign policy."

And when asked what the United States could do to improve its image in the Arab world, the most frequently provided answers were "Stop supporting Israel" and "Change your Middle East policy."

Those people being polled are the recruitment pool for al-Qaeda. You want to get them on America's side, not drive them further away. Bush/Cheney have completely alienated them. And, no, you can't just scare them or beat them into submission. Cheney's plan to conquer Iraq has been implemented. After defeating the Iraqi army hands down and pouring a sixth of a million of troops into the country, the US still hasn't managed to scare or cow the Iraqis into submission. The lesson the other Arabs take away from the mounting toll of dead and wounded US troops is that America can be taken on, if not on the battlefield, then with guerrilla tactics.

Hey, we were trying to convince them that we can't be taken on with those methods, and that there isn't any need to do so anyway since the US poses no danger to them. Instead, Bush/Cheney have actually managed to convince the few Muslims who had positive views of us to change their minds!

Four more years of this kind of "success," and we really will be in danger.

Iraqi Economy in Travail

Ken Dilanian reports on the woes of the Iraqi economy. His general impression is that unemployment remains between 28 percent and 50 percent; that foreign investment is not coming in; that expatriate Iraqis are not investing; and that among the biggest setbacks was the stupid American decision to besiege Fallujah and attack Muqtada al-Sadr in April (Dilanian doesn't put it that way, of course). Virtually the only bright spEot is that government employees have had pay raises and are buying consumer goods (though a lot of that money goes abroad).

I was driving in Florida last week, and someone had put the radio on a rightwing talk station. This glib announcer did a quick interview with some US official in Baghdad, and asked him leading questions about what great news it was that the Iraqi stock market had opened. He obviously had an ideological agenda and wasn't actually interested in what Iraq is really like.

Dilanian reports,

"Even the bright spots have a dark underside. Iraq's stock exchange finally reopened in June, and the start of trading is heralded with the ringing of a small brass bell donated by the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, bearing the words, "Let Freedom Ring." But exchange officials are so worried about security that they have scarcely publicized the reopening. Trading is two days a week, by appointment only. Armed guards keep out members of the public."

My anecdote about the rightwing radio station in Florida sheds a little light on all those poll numbers showing that 45 percent of Americans still have an optimistic view of the situation in Iraq.

Henry T. Azzam makes some similar points, though he is mysteriously more upbeat about the stock market (trading is $10 million a day, which does not impress me.)

It seems obvious that the security situation is determining the economy, and nothing good can be expected until security is restored. That is, successful counter-insurgency will be everything.

Arguing with Cheney

Reuters reports that Dick Cheney was doing some counter-programming to the Democratic National Convention by speaking on the West Coast at Camp Pendleton.

He said, “Terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength. They are invited by the perception of weakness.”

This statement is half right and half wrong. Some terrorist attacks are caused by the use of strength. For instance, the Shiites of southern Lebanon had positive feelings toward Israel before 1982. They were not very politically mobilized. Then the Israelis invaded Lebanon in 1982 and occupied the South. They killed some 18,000 persons, 9,000 of them estimated to be innocent civilians. The Shiites of the South gradually turned against them and started hitting them to get them back out of their country. They formed Hizbullah and ultimately shelled Israel itself and engaged in terrorism in Europe and Argentina. So, Hizbullah terrorist attacks were certainly caused by Sharon's use of "strength."

On the other hand, it is the case that a perception of weakness can invite terrorist attacks by ambitious and aggressive enemies. Usamah Bin Laden recites a litany of instances in which the United States abruptly withdrew when attacked, and takes comfort in the idea of the US as a paper tiger. He instances Reagan's 1983 withdrawal from Beirut after the Marine barracks was bombed and Clinton's departure from Somalia after the Blackhawk Down incident.

The lesson I take away from all this is that the US should not get involved in places that it may get thrown out of, because that projects an image of weakness and vulnerability to the country's enemies. There was no way the United States could possibly have maintained a presence in Lebanon in the early 1980s, and Reagan was foolish to put those Marines in there, and even more foolish to put them in without pilons around them to stop truck bombs. The country was embroiled in a civil war, and it would have taken a massive commitment of troops to make a difference. In the wake of the Vietnam failure, the American public would not have countenanced such a huge troop build-up. Likewise, Bush senior was foolish to send those troops to Somalia in the way he did (which became a poison pill for his successor, Bill Clinton).

The question is whether the quagmire in Iraq makes the US look weak. The answer is yes. Therefore, by Cheney's own reasoning, it is a mistake that opens us to further attacks.

Reuters reports, "Cheney said Americans were safer and he stood by prewar characterizations of Iraq as a threat despite the failure to find weapons of mass destruction and new warnings by Cheney and other administration officials that another major terrorist attack may be coming."

Iraq was not a threat to the United States. Period. Let me repeat the statistics as of the late 1990s:

US population: 295 million
Iraq population: 24 million

US per capita annual income: $37,600
Iraq per capita annual income: $700

US nuclear warheads: 10,455
Iraq nuclear warheads: 0

US tons of lethal chemical weapons (1997): 31,496
Iraq tons of lethal chemical weapons (1997): 0

While a small terrorist organization could hit the US because it has no return address, a major state could not hope to avoid retribution and therefore would be deterred. Cheney knows that Baathist Iraq posed no threat to the US. He is simply lying. I was always careful not to accuse him of lying before the war because who knows what is in someone else's mind? Maybe he believed his own bullshit. But there is no longer any doubt that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, no active nuclear weapons program, no ability to deliver anything lethal to the US homeland, and no operational cooperation with al-Qaeda. These things are not matters of opinion. They are indisputable. Ipso facto, if an intelligent person continues to allege them, he is prevaricating.

“President Bush is determined to remove threats before they arrive instead of simply awaiting for another attack on our country. So America acted to end the regime of Saddam Hussein . . . Sixteen months ago, Iraq was a gathering threat to the United States and the civilized world. Now it is a rising democracy, an ally in the war on terror and the American people are safer for it.”

I have never understood the phrase "civilized world." To what exactly does it refer? How do you get into it? Can you drop out of it? Is Germany in it? How about 1933-1945? Is Egypt in it? (Surely it helped invent "civilization"?)

But the more important point is that a) there was no threat to the United States from the regime of Saddam Hussein, and there certainly was no gathering threat. The Iraqi military was more dilapidated by the hour; and b) It is obvious any situation that kills and maims thousands of US servicemen and women every year is not "making us safer" (the troops are part of "us", Mr. Cheney).

Even sections of the Republican Party are openly questioning Cheney's claims. Sen. Lincoln Chafee said that Iraq is more dangerous now than when he visited last October. He clearly fears that the Bush administration is planning to go after Iran, and suggests seeking cooperation from Tehran instead. (It worries me no end that Washington insiders like Chafee should be apprehensive about White House policy toward Iran, and confirms my suspicions that Tehran is next.)

14 US Troops wounded by Mortar Fire in Baghdad
3 Iraqis die in Violence

Paul Garwood of AP reports that on Tuesday, guerrillas successfully launched four or five mortars at the Green Zone in Baghdad that houses the caretaker government and the British and American embassies, wounding 14 US troops. Eleven were returned to duty. Another mortar round fell on a nearby neighborhood, Salhiya, killing one Iraqi garbage collector and wounding another.

Guerrillas sprayed the automobile of Dr. Qassem Obaidi with gunfire, killing him late Monday. He was the assistant director of the Mahmoudiya Hospital about 25 miles south of Baghdad.

A suicide bomber detonated his car in the eastern city of Baquba, but did not manage to harm anyone else.

There have been two spectacular arrests of persons driving vehicles packed with mortars, mortar rounds and other deadly weaponry in the past two days. One vehicle was stopped by Iraqi police at Kut, and the other by Marines in al-Anbar province.

Sunni Iraqis adopt Religious Radicalism
Others Support Saddam

Dan Murphy of the Christian Science Monitor reports on the way in which Sunni Iraqis are turning toward Salafi Islam. Salafis are sort of militantly Protestant Sunnis who reject the canons of medieval scholarship and strive to go back to the practice of the Prophet and his companions in early Islam. In recent decades Salafis have become a key recruitment pool for radical groups with a violent bent. The Sunni middle classes in Iraq had been relatively secular until recently, but the American conquest has caused many of them to turn to religion, some to radical religion.

Meanwhile, Ken Dilanian of the Philadelphia Inquirer, meanwhile, reports that substantial numbers of Sunnis in the upscale Adhamiyah quarter of Baghdad continue to support Saddam Hussein. He worries that this support for the fallen dictator bodes ill for the future of the country, given how much most Shiites and Kurds hate Saddam.

Preoccupation with Iraq Slowed US, UK Response to Darfur Crisis

The Foreign Policy Centre in the UK is issuing a report that blames the Iraq War for the inability of the US and the UK to respond in a timely way to the genocide in Darfur, Sudan. Although the US has applied diplomatic pressure and threatened sanctions against Khartoum, the report maintains that the situation in Darfur developed at a time when London and Washington were preoccupied with Iraq and either disinclined or unable to intervene.

The UK and US are looking into whether the killing of 30,000 persons and the displacement of a million can be categorized in international law as genocide. Arabic-speaking nomads called Janjawid have targeted members of the farming Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa tribes. Most of the principals on both sides of the conflict are Arabic speaking Muslims, demonstrating that such ethnic markers do not explain everything, or sometimes very much, in the Middle East. In this case a traditon of provincial autonomy and conflicts between herders and settled farmers are more important.

Margaret Cho and an Iraq Blog

I have been a fan of comedian Margaret Cho for years, and so was happy and surprised to see traffic coming from her site to mine. I found her appreciation of an Iraqi family's blog touching. As someone who has been interested in Iraq for more than 30 years, it is still surreal for me to find so many Americans now concerned with the place. What is refreshing about Margaret's comments, however, is her contrast between knowing about Iraqis in the abstract and encountering them on a human level.

There has been controversy over the gay and lesbian Human Rights Campaign's decision to rescind its invitation to Cho to preview some material from her "State of Emergency" tour at the Democratic National Convention. Their loss. And, luckily for her, there is no such thing as bad publicity in show biz.

Clinton's Low-Key Dissing of Bush

Bill Clinton is perhaps the most gifted political orator of our generation, so it is worth considering how he dealt with Bush and the Iraq War issue in his speech Monday evening to the Democratic National Convention.

He and the other Democrats went out of their way to avoid appearing angry. They were full of regret at missed opportunities and wrong-headed policies, but they were not angry. They had hope, and a vision of an alternative future, which they implied was a much more comforting one than the Clint Eastwood Spaghetti Western into which W. has plunged us.

Clinton avoided looking as though they he was lukewarm in support of US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. He began by saying, "My friends, we are constantly being told that America is deeply divided. But all Americans value freedom and faith and family. We all honor the service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform, in Iraq, Afghanistan and throughout the world."

So the message is, pro- US troops. Nobody brought up Abu Ghuraib or the brutal siege of Fallujah.

The critique of Bush's Iraq war was made only subtly, with references to Clinton's presidency as an era of "peace and prosperity" (Hillary), and Clinton's own "We all want good jobs, good schools, health care, safe streets, a clean environment. We all want our children to grow up in a secure America leading the world toward a peaceful and prosperous future . . ."

The implication is that Bush is likely to lead us into more wars and further economic hard times. The Democratic Party in contrast is the party of peace and prosperity. (I.e., Clinton has cleverly once again stolen an old Republican line to use against the Republican Party).

What about the "turmoil in the Middle East," as Clinton put it? He spoke of the future as full of "amazing opportunities" "for people all across the world and to create a world where we can celebrate our religious, our racial, our ethnic, our tribal differences because our common humanity matters most of all . . ."

Clinton's message is that difference (race, religion, nation) need not be polarizing, that these sectional identities can be transcended by an appeal to common humanity. If Bush's world is Manichaean, characterized by a division of human beings into Good and Evil, the Democrats' world is organic, capable of being molded into a smoothly functioning whole. The Manichaean world-view implies warfare, the vision of organic unity allows for peace.

Clinton contrasted the cooperative and idealistic vision of the Democrats with what he depicted as a selfish and cynical opportunism among Republicans:

"We Democrats want to build a world and an America of shared responsibilities and shared benefits. We want a world with more global cooperation where we act alone only when we absolutely have to. We think the role of government should be to give people the tools to create the conditions to make the most of their own lives. And we think everybody should have that chance.

On the other hand, the Republicans in Washington believe that America should be run by the right people — their people — in a world in which America acts unilaterally when we can and cooperates when we have to . . ."

Clinton points to a moment of betrayal, when Bush failed to live up to the expectations of national unity and altruism raised by September 11:

"The president had an amazing opportunity to bring the country together under his slogan of compassionate conservatism and to unite the world in the struggle against terror. Instead, he and his congressional allies made a very different choice. They chose to use that moment of unity to try to push the country too far to the right and to walk away from our allies, not only in attacking Iraq before the weapons inspectors had finished their work, but in withdrawing American support for the climate change treaty and for the international court on war criminals and for the anti-ballistic missile treaty and from the nuclear test ban treaty. Now, now at a time when we're trying to get other people to give up nuclear and biological and chemical weapons, they are trying to develop two new nuclear weapons which they say we might use first."

The attack on Bush is not that he went to war against Iraq. It is that he did so virtually unilaterally, "walking away from our allies." This is a genteel way of saying that the Bush administration humiliated and demeaned France, Germany and later Spain, for not going along with the war or for later withdrawing from it in the case of Spain. Note that Clinton or his speech writer keep the focus on Bush, not foregrounding the allies (France is not popular). The crime is to "walk away" from old friends. Although complaints about this abandonment of old Europe would have had no resonance a year ago, by now it is obvious that it would be awfully nice to have a division each from France and Germany in Iraq, and that the Bush administration's gratuitous insults made it highly unlikely that such help will be forthcoming.

Likewise, the timing of the war rather than the war itself is criticized. The Bush administration orchestrated a UN resolution that put the weapons inspectors back in Iraq, but then attacked "Iraq before the weapons inspectors had finished their work." This impatient unilateralism also led, Clinton said, to the repudiation of Kyoto and other important international treaties. Bush is depicted as rash, hotheaded, impatient, and a dangerous loner.

Now Clinton ties the foreign misadventure to the domestic economy: "At home, the president and the Republican Congress have made equally fateful choices, which they also deeply believe in. For the first time when America was in a war footing in our whole history, they gave two huge tax cuts, nearly half of which went to the top 1 percent of us."

Clinton is saying that you were cheated out of your fair share of the tax break, a tax break that probably shouldn't have been given in the first place because of the extra demands of the war that shouldn't have been fought. The cumulative effect is to raise fears that a series of grave policy errors has been committed and that, worse, it has deleteriously affected you in the pocket book. It is one thing to have the US government mucking things up overseas. It is another for it to cheat you out of your fair share of a tax break.

I suspect that the Kerry-Edwards campaign will pick up on Clinton's themes. Not the war but the rush to war and unilateralism will be critiqued. Not the troops but the Bush administration officials will be faulted. The criticism will be subtle rather than blunt, and the theme will be hope rather than fear.

8 Killed in Iraq Violence
3 US Soldiers Wounded in Mosul Bombing

Mark Turner of the Financial Times in Baghdad reports that the violence continues in Iraq. He writes, "The spate of post-transition violence in Iraq showed no sign of let-up yesterday, as insurgents bombed an airfield in Mosul, a senior interior ministry official was assassinated in Baghdad, gunmen opened fire on five women cleaners working for the US company Bechtel in Basra, and kidnappers seized two Jordanian drivers."

In Mosul guerrillas detonated a carbomb outside the gate of the airport, wounding 3 US soldiers and two Iraqi security men, and killing three bystanders along with the bomber.

A guerrilla assassinated Musab al-Awadi, an Interior Ministry deputy minister in charge of tribal affairs, who had been attempting to smooth relations with Sunni tribal chieftains in the strife-torn Sunni heartland.

Bloomberg also reports that guerrillas fired on a bus in Basra that was carrying workers for a Western company to the airport, killing two women and wounding three others. The employer is variously reported as Hart Security, a British company, and Bechtel.

Guerrillas continued to kidnap foreign guest workers in Iraq, having taken some 70 hostage in the past few months. The kidnappings have a dual purpose, serving as a means of extorting money from the hostages' families and employers, and as a way of forcing the employers out of the Iraq market. The extortion then funds the further activities of the terror cell. (This technique was pioneered by the tiny Abu Sayyaf terrorist group in the Philippines).

But his captors released an Egyptian diplomat on Monday.

Shiite Parties Seek Power in National Assembly
Defense Minister slams Iran

Ashraf Khalil writes for the Los Angeles Times that the Shiite al-Da'wa Party is making an alliance with the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq in hopes of having significant influence in the 100-person Iraqi National Assembly to be elected at a convocation of 1000 notables to be held next week.

So far the religious parties are the main representatives of the Shiite majority in Iraq, and they seem likely to dominate any fairly elected parliament this winter.

Actually, the national congress will only elect 80 representatives. The other 20 will be members of the US-appointed Interim Governing Council. It is of course undemocratic that these appointees should be grandfathered into a body that is otherwise elected, and this undemocratic element is another example of the long arm of US proconsul Paul Bremer and his bosses in the Department of Defense.

Meanwhile, Minister of Defense Hazem Shaalan told al-Zaman he had evidence that Iran had given further training to militant Muslims who had fought in Afghanistan and then had given them free passage into Iraq. He cited in particular an Iran-backed Sudanese guerrilla who had been captured with a large amount of poison that he had intended to dump into the water supply of the southern town of Diwaniyyah. He said Iran had infiltrated spies into Iraq and had penetrated every part of the Iraqi government. Shaalan was contradicted by Iraqi ambassador to Washington, Rend Rahim Franke, who maintained that the Iranians had detained some 200 radical fighters trying to transit to Iraq from Afghanistan.

Shaalan's charge of Iranian infiltration of the government is reminiscent of McCarthy-era fears in the US of Communist infiltration. He seems more excercised by the issue than virtually anyone else in the government. I wonder if, as a secular Iraqi Shiite, he is worried about the coming potential dominance of religious Shiite parties, supported by Tehran. If so, charges of an Iran connection could be employed to exclude some Shiite parties or figures from the political process on grounds of treason.

Al-Zaman also reports that an official in the Secret Police protested rumors that the reconstituted security service had hired back large numbers of Baathist agents. He said that ex-Baathists were no more than 5% of the new Secret Police, and that they had not been Saddam's men nor did they have blood on their hands.

Personally, I find it implausible that there were agents of the Iraqi secret police that were not Saddam's men and who did not have blood on their hands.

Brahimi: Iraq War Caused More Problems than it Solved, Brought Terrorism to Iraq

Deutsche Press Agentur reports that former UN special envoy to Iraq, Lakhdar Brahimi, expresed deep criticism of the Bush administration's Iraq war in an Austrian newspaper interview. Excerpts:

' [Brahimi] said Iraq would no doubt recover from the chaos in which it was presently. ''The question is only, how long will it take? And what will the normalization cost?'' The price up till now had already been very high . . . Brahimi said the resistance in Iraq was difficult to analyze. Alongside the old cadres of the Baath regime of Saddan Hussein, there was a strong group of Iraqis which for patriotic reasons attacked any form of occupation. . .

Here, action was needed by the Interim Government of Iyad Allawi.

''It must prove that it has real sovereignty, and that it's not just a puppet of the Americans. But that's difficult with 150,000 foreign soldiers in the country.'' . . .

Asked whether the Iraq war had harmed the ''war on terrorism'', Brahimi said: ''The Iraq war was unnecessary. It created more problems than it solved - and it brought terrorism to Iraq.''

Brahimi, who was formerly U.N. envoy for Afghanistan, warned that the country was on a dangerous course. The regional warlords had too much power and influence. ''There are presently developments similar to those events of 1992 which led the Taliban to success.'' At that time, Afghans had welcomed the Taliban as liberators from the chaos and arbitrary rule of the regional warlords, said Brahimi.

Brahimi clearly worries that Iraq may be headed toward major civil disturbances of the sort that have wracked his own country (and left over 100,000 dead). That is what he means by his remark that the Iraq war created more problems than it solved.

Brown: Israel-Palestine: Walled In

Kenneth L. Brown gives us a guest editorial on the Israeli security wall being built in the Occupied West Bank. A form of it earlier appeared in an Italian newspaper, Europa. It is worth revisiting in the light of the light of the finding of the World Court in the Hague that the Wall is illegal, and in light of the subsequent UN General Assembly denunciation of it. Jeremy Pressman and Joel Beinin earlier weighed in on the subject here.

Israel-Palestine: Walled In

At the end of last year, the UN General Assembly had passed a resolution requesting the International Court of Justice in the Hague to render an urgent opinion regarding the legality of the construction of the separation barrier.

Eyal Weizman, an Israeli architect based in Tel-Aviv, argues that the border between Israel and Palestinians is no longer a single continuous line, but a sequence of convoluted boundaries, security apparatuses and internal checkpoints---a series of unstable pockets. (see "Ariel Sharon and the Geometry of Occupation" at www.opendemocracy.net.) The Sharon government is preparing a fragmented Palestinian state by establishing facts on the ground,––– scattered and separated territorial islands surrounded and perforated by Israeli territory. A state without borders to the outside world. These islands will be, strung together by tunnels and bridges under and over Israeli territory and they will have no jurisdiction over water resources or airspace.

Israel has periodically launched major operations in cities like Nablus "to strike at terrorists," deploying soldiers, snipers military vehicles, tanks, and bulldozers. In the view of a radio journalist from Nablus, the purpose of this siege of the city was to turn attention away from Israel's construction of its "Wall" across the West Bank, its policy of strangulation.. The true aim of this stranglehold, as John Berger has phrased it, is the destruction of the Palestinians' sense of temporal and spatial continuity so that they leave the country or become indentured servants.

As a result of the 1967 war Israel, by occupying the West Bank ,the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights, tripled the territory under its control. Military and government considered the pre–1967 borders , the Green Line drawn in the cease–fire agreements of 1949 and recognized as an international border, "indefensible"; Abba Eban called it "the Auschwitz line", In their euphoria of victory, the Israelis claimed that the West Bank and Gaza were "disputed territories" which had never been under the control of a sovereign state, and that they were now occupied legally, for reasons of self–defense and until permanent borders could be determined by final peace agreements.

Since 1967 Israel ,considering the borders between the state and the occupied Palestinian territories fluid and elastic, has incorporated an increasing number of settlements. (Since 2002 when A. Sharon was elected, 56 officially recognized settlements have been added to the previous 145 settlements., a total population of some 400,000 settlers , including the Jewish neighborhoods created in East Jerusalem). At the same time many factors encouraging creeping agoraphobia among Israelis––––demographic expansion of the Palestinian population in the territories, insurrections, terrorism, international pressure, economics and public opinion ––– have made the existence of a Palestinian state inevitable. The Israeli government is determined to determine the form and nature of that inevitable state..

Most Israelis want a physical separation from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Over the past year their government has set about establishing that separation unilaterally by the construction of a serpentine course of fences, barriers, walls. A new, effective border, not the Green Line, but a "seam line" is being drawn and constructed. It includes the unilateral annexation of 6% of the land of the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority sees this as a policy of Bantustanisation, the creation of isolated cantons instead of the viable state which has long been promised.

For the Haaretz correspondent D. Rubenstein these constructions are becoming a "wall of strangulation". Over 350 kilometers of barriers are projected at an estimated cost of two million dollars per km; one–third, the northern section, has been completed.already, and the rest is planned for by the end of 2005. According to a UN report these constructions will isolate some 274,000 Palestinians in small enclaves. An additional 400,000 will find themselves west of the wall with restricted access to their agricultural land, jobs, schools, hospitals.

The last phase of the Sharon plan for separation will be the "Eastern Barrier", a projected wall of 700 kilometers. In effect then, the Palestinian state and its population will have no contact with the outside world that is not under Israel's control.

Last winter, I attended a conference on Oral History at Birzeit University in the occupied Palestinian territory. The hotel I stayed in in Ramallah was about ten kilometers from the university normally a fifteen minute drive away. However since Intifadah II, the Israeli army has separated the two towns by placing a substantial mound of earth along the road making it impossible for vehicles to pass. Students and teachers and whoever else wants to go from one side to the other must leave their car, taxi or bus, climb over the mound and then find a ride in a taxi or bus to their destination. Usually, there is a checkpoint at the mound and documents have to be presented to the Israeli military to be allowed to pass. Hours may be spent crossing these ten kilometers. The occupation has made time and space uncertain, unpredictable.

The scene of the crossing viewed from afar looked like nothing so much as a massive movement of refugees in a war zone; one can easily understand the fear of Palestinians that the Israelis want by such practices to humiliate them and to expel them from the land.

On the second day of the conference the Israeli soldiers were not at the checkpoint, and the mound of earth had been partly cleared away by Palestinians so that some vehiclescould pass through. Nonetheless, outside the entrance to the university, Israeli troops had appeared , lined up about 30 students and were agressively checking their identity papers. Another form of harassment. By the next day, the mound of earth had reappeared, been reconstructed by Israeli tractors during the night.

When we left the university at the end of the day, one of our hosts offered me a ride back to Ramallah. He wanted to show me the 'scenic' route, 30 kilometers over back roads to circumvent mounds and checkpoints. Unfortunately, we had an accident, a collision with a mini-bus in which several people were injured and needed hospital care.

First to arrive at the scene was an Israeli command car. Several boyish–looking soldiers approached , aiming their machine guns at us, and wanting to know what was going on. They seemed frightened and confused, victors fearing the defeated Luckily we managed to calm them, to convince them that it was only an accident. They cursed us and drove off. Eventually, a Palestinian ambulance arrived and managed to transport the injured to hospital.

Such absurd situations are 'normal' and indeed undramatic in the occupied territories of Palestine. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), there are 65 staffed checkpoints in the West Bank of which only nine separate it from Israel ; the rest control traffic between West Bank communities. There are 607 physical roadblocks preventing passage of vehicles---457 mounds of dirt, 94 concrete blocks, 50 trenches. The name of the game is fragmentation.

Israel rejected the Court's authority on the issue and justifies the barrier in terms of its needs for security. The government's assessment of the U.S. position, the only one that counts for it, is that the Americans understand Israel's security needs and accept the construction and the route of the barrier. Nonetheless, Washington rejects Sharon's idea of an "Eastern Barrier" which it sees as a means to annex the Jordan Valley and the ridges dominating it in order to close the Palestinians into a holding pen. At the end of the day, however, the Israelis find encouragement in the lack of enthusiasm in the U.S. for respecting or strengthening international institutions.

---
Kenneth Brown, Emeritus professor of Sociology, University of Manchester (U.K.), Director of the review Mediterraneans, Paris, France: medit a t msh-paris d o t fr .

Washington Post Weblog Contest

The Washington Post is running a contest for the best weblogs on politics this fall, including international politics. They are now taking nominations and will then do voting online. Another sign that blogging has arrived. I hope the Blogistan community will take the time to make its preferences known, now that big media is inquiring.

Democratic Convention Will not Denounce Iraq War

Stewart Powell of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that there won't be much difference between the policies on Iraq to be adopted by the delegates of the Democratic National Convention and those already pursued by the Bush administration. Powell writes:

Delegates at the Democratic National Convention are expected tomorrow night to approve an Iraq policy that's hardly distinguishable from the course that the Bush administration is now pursuing.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, chairman of the convention, insisted there would be no fights inside the hall over the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

"The ... Iraq section, was adopted with strong language on multilateralism, respecting alliances, having an exit strategy," Richardson told reporters, summing up the bland approach that the platform adopts on the war.

Democratic platform writers purposely left out any specific timetable for the withdrawal of American forces.

The platform language stands in sharp contrast to the anti-war viewpoints of many rank-and-file Democrats.

A New York Times/CBS News poll earlier this month showed 72 percent of Democrats believe the United States should never have invaded Iraq.

Party leaders appear hopeful of attracting centrists and independents by sidestepping a strong anti-war plank. That leaves liberal Democrats attending the convention in the position of having to bite their tongues over Iraq.

I fear this realism is warranted. If John Kerry wins, he will inherit the Iraq morass and will not have good options there. He can't just pull out the troops and leave oil-rich Persian Gulf to fall into chaos. The idea that the international community can be persuaded to come in and rescue us seems far-fetched. We'll just have to muddle through. This outcome is a kind of poison pill bequeathed all Americans by the jingoist party in Washington (both so-called realists and neoconservatives). We broke it, we own it, as Powell warned (threatened) Bush.

[I have gotten several complaints about this paragraph from readers who dream of a different Iraq policy. Believe me I wish I could see an alternative. But if the US troops withdrew tomorrow, I'd give Allawi and his "government" about two weeks to live, after which the Deluge. And the Deluge really would endanger US energy security (say, $10 a gallon gasoline, which equals de-industrialization, if the Persian Gulf region were destabilized) and possibly open us to further terrorist attacks, with a disheveled Iraq as a base. And France, Russia, Germany, India, etc. are not coming, folks. There are no "international troops" to replace US ones. Even if it were inclined, which it is not, the EU only has a spare capacity of 12,500 troops for service abroad, given its commitments in the Balkans and Afghanistan.

The only way for the US and UK and other foreign troops to get out of Iraq is for an Iraqi army to be reestablished pronto. The only way to do that pronto is essentially to bring back the Baath army. I'd say bringing back the non-dirty Baath regular army may be the best near-term solution, if the politics of it can be resolved; it isn't happening with any rapidity. Allawi may be trying to do that, but remember that the Kurds and the Sadrist Shiites won't exactly be elated, and the country could break up over it. To repeat, this is not Bush's mess. This is America's mess. It is not going away, there are no good options, and it may go terribly wrong on Kerry if he is elected. It is not my job to give you good news or make you feel better about the future. My American readers may as well understand that their country is caught in quicksand in Iraq and Afghanistan, and nobody is there to throw us a rope. - addendum 2:09 pm 7/26]

The most wideranging statement I have seen by the Kerry-Edwards campaign on security issues is "Defeating Global Terrorism." These are the main points:

# Directing Military Action to Destroy and Disrupt Terrorist Networks. Under John Kerry’s leadership, American military operations will be precise and deadly.

# Keeping Weapons of Mass Destruction Out of Terrorist Hands. John Kerry and John Edwards will launch a new initiative to prevent the world's deadliest weapons from falling into the world's most dangerous hands. They have a plan to secure vulnerable bomb-making materials, prevent the production of new materials for nuclear weapons, and work to end nuclear weapons programs in hostile states like North Korea and Iran.

# Strengthening America’s Intelligence Capabilities. John Kerry and John Edwards will restore the credibility of our intelligence community, strengthen accountability and leadership by creating a true Director of National Intelligence, maximize coordination and integration of resources and information, and transform our intelligence services to deal with today’s threats.

# Leading Relentless Efforts to Shut Down the Flow of Terrorist Funds. America will crack down on nations or banks that fail to act against money laundering by strengthening our anti-money laundering laws and imposing tough financial sanctions against violators.

# Preventing New Terrorist Havens. John Kerry and John Edwards will work with our allies and the international community to stabilize and secure Iraq and Afghanistan to ensure that these newly freed nations and other weak states around the world do not become havens for terrorists.

# Preventing Recruitment of New Terrorists. John Kerry and John Edwards will work to win the war of ideas and the future of a young generation with a strategy to break down economic and cultural isolation in Arab and Muslim countries and support local efforts to promote democracy, trade, tolerance, and respect for human rights. The strategy includes a major initiative in public diplomacy and an international effort to improve education.

The most important of these points in my view is the last. So far I haven't seen anything worthy of the name being done with regard to public diplomacy by the Bush administration. They tried some slick ads, which failed miserably since they did not address the US policies to which most Muslims object. I think the Democrats should promise to bring back an independent United States Information Agency, with all its libraries and programs. The UK's British Council and Germany's Goethe Institute are both far more extensive and impressive than US public diplomacy efforts at the moment. That idiot Jesse Helms destroyed the USIA and inflicted enormous harm on the US as a result. We need to bring it back to get the word out in the Muslim world about the good aspects of the U.S. (we do have some). Do you know that almost no one in the Middle East gives the US any credit for intervening to help the Bosnian Muslims and for saving the Kosovars from Milosevic? Is there even a book on the subject in Arabic? Why is the US government so clueless about communicating itself to publics outside the US? Doesn't anyone realize that this cluelessness endangers us all?

Heavy Fighting at Buhriz Kills 15

Paul Garwood of AP reports that "the carnage" continued in Iraq over the weekend.

US troops made a sweep of Buhriz, northeast of Baghdad near Baqubah, which is a radical Salafi ("Sunni fundamentalist") stronghold, which has mounted numerous rebellions in recent months. Its nearby date palm groves were suspected of affording cover to guerrillas.

The US soldiers were supported by Iraqi National Guard troops, who came into direct conflict with guerrillas in the southern part of the city. The US gave air support to the Iraqi National Guards, levelling at least one building. The firefight lasted 5 hours, and left 15 Iraqis (guerrillas?) dead, with no US or Iraqi National Guard casualties. (The latter statistic suggests to me that the deaths were probably mainly the result of firing by US artillery, helicopter gunships and US fighter jets. If the Iraqi National Guard had advanced into the city and engaged in close combat with the guerrillas, it seems a little unlikely that they would have been entirely unscathed.

The BBC showed footage of the fighting, and the guerrillas looked to me as though they were imitating Saudi dress.

Other violence:

Assistant Deputy Minister of the Interior Col. Aidan Khalid Qadir was attacked in al-Hillah on Sunday but narrowly escaped assassination. Guerrillas killed two of his bodyguards. (az-Zaman).

Guerrillas killed five persons in Kirkuk.

Someone assassinated a former Baath district head, Brig. Khaled Dawoud, in Baghdad. His son was also killed in the drive-by shooting. (This assassination was unlikely to be the work of insurgents-- more likely it is a revenge killing by Dawoud's victims).

A roadside bomb killed a US soldier near Beiji and injured another.

The various hostage crises continued, with two Pakistanis having been added to the list of those held.

Some in the US military are arguing that US troops should adopt a less visible posture in Iraq, since their presence (and home invasions) provokes a good deal of the violence in the country. If it is militarily possible to get the US military out of sight except when being actively deployed to face guerrillas, that would be an excellent idea. The question is whether the Iraqi National Guards are up to substituting for them on routine patrols, etc.

200,000 Israeli Fascists Demand Colonization of Gaza

Tens of thousands of rightwing Israeli imperialists formed a human chain aimed at stretching between Jerusalem and Gaza to protest plans of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to withdraw Israeli colonists from Gaza.

Let's just talk a little bit about Gaza. The Palestinians are largely descendants of people who have lived there for literally thousands of years. Male Palestinians and male Jews are very closely related according to DNA research. Gaza was not given to Israel by the United Nations in the 1948 partition, and it was never a site of significant Jewish population. It was conquered by Israel in the 1967 war, but the United Nations charter forbids the acquisition of territory by military force. This is a place where hundreds of thousands of people face severe poverty and even hunger, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Palestinians in general are facing unprecedented poverty and malnutrition, including the children. So this is the place you choose to insert 7500 Israeli colonizers? While we are at it, why not steal some land from starving Ethiopians and colonize Ethiopia (oops, that was the 1930s)? I mean, it is one thing to lack compassion for people who are suffering. It is another to want to kick them while they are down.

The justifications given by the fascist protesters in Israel for colonizing Gaza included the conviction that God had given them the Palestinians' land, that Palestinians did not educate their children to want "peace" (i.e. to accept being stolen from?), and that failing to colonize Gaza would somehow endanger Israel itself (hunh?).

Of course I am being provocative in calling the protesters fascists. Fascism, unlike other mass ideologies such as Communism, is not easily defined (and for definitional purposes it is better to look at Spain, Italy and Japan in the 1930s rather than Germany, whose ideology was in many ways peculiar and the scale of whose atrocities, including the Holocaust, make almost all comparisons invidious). The Likud Party is deeply influenced by the thought of Zeev Jabotinsky, a Zionist extremist deeply influenced by 1930s fascism. Fascism remains a useful analytical tool for understanding modern politics. Each country's fascism has been different, since fascism is more a style than a specific ideology. Among its attributes is

1) Radical nationalism. Fascism celebrates a cult of the nation, seeing it as the ultimate human value, trumping all others. Thus, one may lie, cheat, steal, spy and murder for the nation without shame.

2) Militarism and aggressiveness. Fascist political movements are expansionist, dissatisfied with their national boundaries and seeking to colonize the territory of neighbors. Thus, Franco got his start by oppressing Muslims in the Rif and Ceuta, Spanish Morocco. Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. Japan annexed Korea and much of China.

3) Racism. Fascist movements, because of their extreme nationalism, tend to demonize ethnic groups considered outside the nation. Racism becomes a justification for violence, since groups of people are defined as essentially demonic or threatening, and therefore deserving of being repressed in order to prevent them from doing evil. Milosevic justified his killing of Bosnians on the grounds that they were disloyal to the Serbian nation and easily seduced by Muslim fundamentalism. (Before Milosevic attacked them, Bosnian Muslims were the most secular in the world).

4) Favoring the wealthy, punishing the poor. Franco put down miners in Asturia and the workers of industrially advanced Barcelona. Mussolini drove Italian peasants further into poverty. Both favored wealthy elites with their policies. They despised the poor and drove them deeper into poverty. In all the territory dominated by Israel, the poorest subjects are the Palestinians, who have been made dirt poor by Israeli policies.

5) Dictatorship. Fascists disliked open democratic elections. Here the Likud fascists depart from the profile, but only slightly. Although they participate in elections in Jewish-majority Israel, they do not want Palestinians to have independence. They have long favored Israeli military rule, which is to say, dictatorship, over the Palestinian population. That is, over 9 million people live under Israeli rule, but only somewhate over 6 million of them get to engage in democratic self-governing (fewer if one considers how many obstacles have been placed in the way of democratic participation by Arab Israelis). The Oslo process would have given Palestinians a democratic nation of their own; the Likud Party and its American acolytes conspired to keep the Palestinians from ever having that status, which has meant more years of living under Israeli military rule, not significantly different from Ceuta under Franco.

No American media will report the demonstrations in Israel as fascist in nature, and no American politicians will dare criticize the Likud. But the fact is that the Israeli predations in the West Bank and Gaza are a key source of rage in the Muslim world against the United States (which toadies unbearably to whatever garbage comes out of Tel Aviv's political establishment), something that the 9/11 commission report stupidly denies. If the United States is hit again, as seems likely, the fascist Likud demonstrators will be in the chain of causality. If their cause were just, the US should stand with them and risk taking the hit. But although the cause of Israel's own peace and security is just, the cause of colonizing Gaza and the West Bank is fascist. That shouldn't be defended by the US, and the loss of even one American life in defense of Israeli aggression and expansionism is intolerable.

Sadrists Boycott National Congress
As US Troops Surround Muqtada's House

Az-Zaman is reporting that US troops surrounded Muqtada al-Sadr's house on Sunday for several hours before withdrawing. It was not known if he was in the house. He had come out of hiding to deliver the Friday prayers sermon in Kufa this weekend. He delivered a blistering attack on the US occupation forces and on the caretaker government of Iyad Allawi.
The US has been trying to arrest or kill him since early April, but the government of PM Iyad Allawi had seemed to seek some accommodation, allowing his newspaper, al-Hawzah al-Natiqah, to reopen after the Americans had closed it. The American siege of Muqtada's home on Sunday seems a reversal of the new policy. (I take the al-Zaman report with something of a grain of salt until I see other corroboration).

Muqtada al-Sadr and his radical Shiite followers boycotted elections on Sunday that prepared the way for a national congress. On Sunday, Iraqis began choosing 1000 delegates to the national congress, which will in turn elect 80 out of 100 members of a National Assembly. This largely ceremonial body will have veto over some decisions of Iraqi prime minister Iyad Allawi, but is not empowered to make new laws or to repeal the laws passed by fiat by US viceroy Paul Bremer before June 30, 2004. According to AP, Sadrist spokesman Ali al-Yasseri said, ``We originally supported the idea, and agreed to take part because we know in the rest of the world, such an assembly would be considered the nation's parliament . . . But this assembly will have no legislative authority. ... This body will have no powers. We see this as a trick on the Iraqi people. It's a sad joke." The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution In Iraq, a Shiite rival of the Sadrists, were also critical of the national assembly elections.

The elections Sunday were generally problematic, according to James Tarabay of AP. Basra, Kut and Kirkuk were having trouble electing their delegates because of factional disputes. There were also questions about how fair the election process was. As with all the elections so far held in Iraq since the US occupation began, they are not one person, one vote elections but rather some complicated expression of consensus by handpicked notables.

Robin Wright of the Washington Post explains: "The selection process, which began last week, used a complicated formula to come up with 548 delegates from Iraq's 18 provinces, including 130 from Baghdad; 140 from political parties; 70 tribal leaders; 170 intellectuals and prominent Iraqi figures; and 100 from the preparatory committee . . ."

The selection process has exercerbated ethnic conflict and inter-party disputes. The site of the 3-day national congress is being kept secret for fear it will be targeted by the resistance to the US occupation and its Iraqi allies.

Muqtada's group is a major one, and the decision to boycott the national congress is a blow to the legitimacy of the process. He made headlines this weekend by forcefully condemning the beheading of foreign hostages, a practice he said was contrary to Islamic law.

9/11 Commission report in HTML

Thanks to Jason Kottke's Documents Page for making the 9/11 commission report available in html, which I find generally easier to use than pdf.

Ooops. That was only the executive summary. The whole thing is at Vivisimo.

and

PDF Hacks.

Black Banners and Economic Warfare in Iraq

Claude Salhani of UPI reports that the recent kidnappings of truck drivers in a bid to force the companies that employ them out of the Iraq market are being claimed by a shadowy group called "the Black Banners." He speculates that this phrase has a Shiite ring to it, but quotes one observer who doubts that. Salhani writes:

The "war" in Iraq is suddenly taking a very different turn, and regrettably, not one for the better. After first targeting the military, then changing tactics by kidnapping hostages and holding them in exchange for the withdrawal of Coalition troops -- and one may add with some success -- the "insurgents" are now going after the soft underbelly of Iraq, its fragile economy.

A new rebel group, hitherto unknown, calling themselves the "Black Banners" is the latest to surface. They join the plethora of armed groups opposed to the presence of foreign forces, particularly American soldiers, in Iraq. The Black Banners have detained six hostages: three Indians, two Kenyans and an Egyptian, all nationals from "neutral" nations.

The tactic of attacking the civilian employees of companies doing work in Iraq is actually not new, and is only one of a number of current guerrilla tactics. Another is to assassinate municipal, provincial and federal officials. A significant percentage of municipal council members has been assassinated, though only The Guardian has reported on this deadly campaign at the local level.

As for the trucker kidnappings, the Black Banners are a symbol of revolution in Islamic history, and not only among Shiites. The corrupt Umayyad kingdom was overthrown by the Abbasids around 750 CE when revolutionaries raised black banners in the East. The Abbasid dynasty, which created Baghdad and ruled for centuries, is seen by Iraqis generally and by Muslims generally, including Sunnis, to have created a Golden Age when the Muslim world was more glorious than Europe. So the term "Black Banners" could have a Shiite implication, but does not necessarily do so. Even secularists or Marxists could adopt black banners as a revolutionary symbol, with reference to the Abbasid revolution.

The tactic of economic warfare aimed at multinationals and at their workers, drawn from the global market, is working at an official level. The Philippines has withdrawn from Iraq and has called for Filipinos not to work there (it is a major source of guest workers throughout the world, several million, and they are a political force, which helps explain the government's solicitude for them). Now Kenya has asked it citizens not to work in Iraq. But every indication is that both in the US and elsewhere, workers eager to participate in the Iraq bonanza and make a lot of money are still heading for Iraq. Certainly, Filipinos are. Unfortunately, some of these guestworkers are likely to fall victim to the spiral of violence in Iraq.

What does seem clear is that Donald Rumsfeld's peculiar idea that Iraq is "calming down" is ridiculous on the face of it.

Two US soldiers were killed in Samarra on Thursday by a roadside bomb, and there was more fighting in Fallujah on Friday, and sundry other violence.

Guest Editorial: Penn on the Fall of Pacifist Japan

Michael Penn examines the impact of the Iraq crisis on Japan.

Ending the “Irresponsible Peace”—The Fall of Pacifist Japan

by Michael Penn

More than two centuries ago James Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers that “the mild voice of reason, pleading the cause of an enlarged and permanent interest, is but too often drowned, before public bodies as well as individuals, by the clamors of an impatient avidity for immediate and immoderate gain.” To put it in less-poetic modern language: In politics, short-term interests often win out over long-term interests. These are thoughts that are brought to mind by the recent turn in Japanese foreign policy, and by the forces in Washington that have so assiduously promoted this change.

In the immediate aftermath of the Pacific War, the Supreme Command of the Allied Powers (SCAP) was determined to ensure not only that Japan was really defeated, but that it would never rise again as an aggressive military power to challenge the American-dominated order in the Pacific. One of the main instruments that SCAP used to enforce its policy was Japan’s “Peace Constitution.” The Preface of the Constitution noted that the Japanese people were “resolved that never again shall we be visited with the horrors of war through the action of government.” The crucial Article Nine of the Constitution continued on as follows:

1) Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.

2) In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.

However, with the onset of the Cold War, the priorities of the U.S. government began to change, and the Eisenhower Administration began to pressure the newly-sovereign Japanese government to take more “responsibility” for Japan’s own military defense. As a result, in 1954 the “Self-Defense Forces” (SDF) were created to help fulfill the perceived need for the defense of the Japanese home islands.

For decades afterwards, Japan’s opposition parties argued convincingly that the very existence of the SDF was a violation of the Constitution. However, as a practical matter the SDF received public acceptance so long as the “spirit” of the Constitution was maintained. The SDF was kept at home and kept quiet. Throughout the Cold War, Japan maintained an uneasy equilibrium between the actual text of the Constitution and its general intent by pretending not to notice that the SDF was really there.

It was the Persian Gulf Crisis of 1990-1991 that upset the equilibrium. At that time, the first President Bush was eager to assemble as broad a coalition as possible to challenge the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Japan responded quickly with sanctions and its traditional offers of financial support, but soon found itself reeling under a barrage of American criticism for engaging in “checkbook diplomacy” and avoiding the “dirty work” of military action. Major U.S. newspapers like the New York Times assaulted Japan’s dilatory performance and Congress even made open threats aimed at Tokyo. Japanese elites were stung deeply by this kind of criticism, but their hands were tied by the constitutional restrictions and by the fact that a large majority of the Japanese public was simply opposed to any major expansion of Japan’s military role. In the end, Japan paid about US$13 billion and sent minesweepers to the postwar Persian Gulf.

The Japanese government’s reaction to September 11 has stood in sharp contrast to that of the Persian Gulf War. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is far more popular and politically secure than Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu, his Gulf War predecessor. He is also among the most determined of Japan’s leaders to restore the full legality and acceptance of Japan’s military service. His appointee as head of the Defense Agency was the rightwing military buff Shigeru Ishiba. Furthermore, his main foreign policy advisor on Iraq policy has been, until recently, Yukio Okamoto, a strong proponent of strengthening the U.S.-Japan alliance and establishing “responsible pacifism” (which is far more concerned with “responsibility” than “pacifism”).

Many commentators from the American political establishment have heaped praise upon Koizumi for his more active role, and this, together with the North Korea issue, have helped Japan’s Right stage a remarkable rise in political influence. It is now open season on the postwar pacifist tradition in Japan as all the old red lines are being crossed one-by-one. First, the MSDF was allowed to send Aegis warships to support U.S. operations in Afghanistan. Next, Japan actively lobbied on the Bush Administration’s behalf to support the “preemptive” invasion of Iraq. Then, Japan actually sent its own SDF units to Samawa for the purpose of “humanitarian reconstruction support.” Now, Japan’s main business lobby has just asked permission to begin arms export sales abroad.

The fact that all of this is clearly contrary to Japan’s Constitution has been waived aside by the government as a matter of little importance (The official line is that there are “other ways” to interpret the Constitution). The fact that about 80% of the Japanese public opposed the American attack on Iraq at the time it began was also irrelevant. The salient point is that the government forced it through and thus made it a reality. As this new reality has set in, the Japanese public has been showing an increasing acceptance of the new status quo.

The Bush Administration and the Japanese Right have thus succeeded in bringing about a sea change in Japanese politics. Japan’s age of “irresponsible pacifism” and avoiding the “dirty work” of war is clearly at an end. However, before U.S. leaders uncork the champagne, there are yet a few unsavory points to take into account:

1) Japan has been effectively ruled by a single right-leaning political party for almost half a century with only one short lapse in the early 1990s. In other words, Japan is not a very mature democratic country in spite of its free elections.

2) Real power in Japan tends to lie with a bureaucracy that is not accountable to the public and tends in fact to operate above the law. The infrastructure of a genuine civil society remains weak in Japan.

3) The SDF is already showing signs of discomfort with civilian political control. In late 2001, Japanese officers secretly asked the Pentagon to pressure their own government to allow them to send Aegis warships to the Indian Ocean. Also, Admiral Koichi Furusho in early June 2004 requested that the new position of Joint Chief of Staff not be under the authority of any civilian in the Defense Agency. The Constitution hasn’t even been revised yet and already the old military-civilian conflict that plagued prewar Japan is beginning to reappear.

In his recent book on Japan’s destruction of its own natural environment, Alex Kerr, a lifelong resident of Japan, made an interesting observation about the workings of Japanese government and society. He noted that “many an admiring book tells of how subtle [Japanese] bureaucrats gently guide the nation, magically avoiding all the discord and market chaos that afflict the West. But while the experts marveled at how efficiently the well-oiled engines were turning, the ship was headed toward the rocks. Japan’s cleverly crafted machine of governance lacks one critically important part: brakes. Once it has been set on a particular path, Japan tends to continue on that path until it reaches excesses that would be unthinkable in most other nations.”

The Bush Administration—in alliance with the re-born Japanese Right—has now helped Japan shed its excesses of peace. If Kerr’s analysis of Japan is correct, then what Japanese excesses are waiting for us now in this age of an eternal “War on Terror”? When future generations of Americans look back upon what has been done in these days—to abuse and castigate the Japanese for being too peaceful until they finally began to accept the “responsibility” of war once again—will they say that we have “plead the cause of an enlarged and permanent interest” (that is, a happy and peaceful Japan), or that we have forsaken our own long-term interests in favor of “an impatient avidity for immediate and immoderate gain”? As Madison may have said: Let Reason be the Judge.


Michael Penn
The University of Kitakyushu
mep1071 a t hotmail d o t com

September 11 Report Due Today

The September 11 Panel will issue its findings on Thursday. It notes 10 points at which the US made key mistakes that might have stopped Bin Laden's plot. Four of these were under Clinton and 6 under Bush.

Bush came out today and said that if he had known what was coming, he would have expended every effort to stop it, and that so would have Clinton. This statement is, despite its facade of fair-mindedness, so many weasel words. Of course Bush would have tried to stop 9/11 if he had known it was coming.

The question is, "Should he have known it was coming?"

The answer is, "Yes!"

We now know that Bush and his administration came into office obsessed with Iraq. Cheney was looking at maps of Iraq oil fields and muttering about opportunities for US companies there, already in January or February of 2001. Wolfowitz contradicted counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke when the latter spoke of the al-Qaeda threat, insisting that the preeminent threat of terrorism against the US came from Iraq, and indicating he accepted Laurie Mylroie's crackpot conspiracy theory that Saddam was behind the 1993 World Trade Towers bombing. If you believe crackpot theories instead of focusing on the reality--that was an al-Qaeda operation mainly carried out by al-Gamaa al-Islamiyyah, an Egyptian terrorist component allied with Bin Laden-- then you will concentrate on the wrong threat.

Even after the attacks on September 11, Bush was obsessing about Iraq. Wolfowitz lied to him and said that there was a 10 to 50% chance that Iraq was behind them. (On what evidence? The hijackers were obviously al-Qaeda, and no operational links between al-Qaeda and Iraq had ever been found). Rumsfeld initially rejected an attack on al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan, saying there were "no good targets" in Afghanistan. (What about 40 al-Qaeda bases that had trained the 9/11 hijackers and other terrorists gunning for the United States??) The Pentagon did not even have a plan for dealing with Afghanistan or al-Qaeda that it could pull off the shelf, according to Bob Woodward.

Bush did not have his eye on the ball. Neither did Cheney, Rumsfeld, or Wolfowitz. They were playing Captain Ahab to Saddam's great white whale.

Imperial Hubris makes the case that lots of people in the CIA and counter-terrorism divisions elsewhere in the US government knew all about Bin Laden and the threat he posed. They were from all accounts marginalized and not listened to. Bush demoted Dick Clarke, among the most vocal and focused of the al-Qaeda experts, from his cabinet. Dick could never thereafter get any real cooperation from the cabinet officers, who outranked him, and he could not convince them to go to battle stations in the summer of 2001 when George Tenet's hair was "on fire" about the excited chatter the CIA was picking up from radical Islamist terrorists.

As for the Clinton administration, let me say one thing in its defense. Clinton had worked out a deal with Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in summer of 1999 that would have allowed the US to send a Special Ops team in after Bin Laden in Qandahar, based from Pakistan. I presume you need the Pakistan base for rescue operations in case anything went wrong. You also need Pakistani air space. The plan was all set and could have succeeded.

But in fall of 1999, Gen. Pervez Musharraf made a coup against Nawaz Sharif. The Pakistani army was rife with elements protective of the Taliban, and the new military government reneged on the deal. Musharraf told Clinton he couldn't use Pakistani soil or air space to send the team in against Bin Laden.

Look at a map and you try to figure out how, in fall of 1999, you could possibly pull off such an operation without Pakistani facilities. Of course, you could just go in by main force. But for those of you tempted in that direction, please look up Carter's Tabas operation. It should be easily googled.

Clinton tried, and tried hard. The gods weren't with us on that one.

US Military Death Toll in Iraq Reaches 900
Some Two Dozen Iraqis Killed in Baghdad, Ramadi, Baquba, Samarra Violence

AP reports that a roadside bomb killed a 1st Infantry Division soldier in Duluiyah, 45 mi. north of Baghdad when his Bradley fighting vehicle struck it. He was the 900th US soldier to die in Iraq since the beginning of the war. The author, Paul Garwood, interviews US troops who have fought at Baqubah, a persistent site of guerrilla resistance northeast of Baghdad, and found mixed feelings -- an increasing sense of mortality on the part of some, a determination to make sure their dead comrades did not die in vain among others.

The roadside bomb in Duluiyah also wounded 6 other US soldiers.

AFP says that guerrillas fired a missile that tore through the 7th floor of the Adnan Khairallah hospital in Baghdad, killing two persons and wounding four.

AP also reports that guerrillas in southeastern Baghdad detonated a car bomb, killing at least 3 persons and wounding one.

In Ramadi, guerrillas fought US forces and the US military called in a helicopter gunship to fire at a building in the city. The fighting resulted in 25 Iraqis killed and many more wounded.

Guerrillas took hostage more foreign truck drivers, in a bid to drive the Kuwaiti company that employed them out of the Iraq market.

Police discovered the mutilated body of an Iraqi scientist and one other corpse in Samarra. There has been a wave of assassinations of Iraqi academics and scientists in the past few months.

AFP reports that guerrillas in Kirkuk fired rocket-propelled grenades at a police patrol, killing one policeman and wounding three.

In the eastern city of Baquba, a roadside bomb went off, wounding four Iraqi security men who were protecting electrical installations.

Garwood's point about the toll on US military morale is underscored by Tom Lasseter of the Philadelphia Inquirer. An excerpt:

Scaling back the military and political goals in Iraq's Anbar province has hurt morale among U.S. soldiers stationed there, and some have begun to question openly not only their mission but also the leaders who sent them to Iraq in the first place . . .

"I'm tired of every time we go out the gate, someone tries to kill me," Staff Sgt. Sheldon Rivers said.

Asked whether most Americans had an idea of how bad the security situation was in Ramadi, Sgt. Maj. John Jones said . . . "It's just like the West," Jones said, "when we were trying to settle it with the Indians." . . .

Staff Sgt. A.J. Dean [said] . . . "I don't have any idea of what we're trying to do out here," he said, "... and I don't think our commanders do either. I feel deceived personally. I don't trust anything Rumsfeld says, and I think Wolfowitz is even dirtier" . . .

Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz recently alleged that Western reporters writing on Iraq are negative because they sit in the Green Zone safe in Baghdad and report "rumors."

Lasseter, in contrast, asked Sgt. Maj. John Jones if most Americans had any idea whatsoever how bad things were in Ramadi. He replied, "When people come over here, where do they stay? In the Green Zone. I call it the Safe Zone . . . They miss the full picture."

That is, Sgt. Maj. Jones has the same analysis of the press reporting as Wolfowitz does, only in reverse. Jones thinks the journalists and politicians don't have a clue as to how difficult the situation is because they mainly stay in the Green Zone.

If I have to choose who to trust on this one, I'll take Sgt. Maj. Jones any day of the year. And, not only are those men brave to be out there in Ramadi, they are brave to talk to the press under their own names. They clearly have had it with Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and don't care what happens to their careers. Bravo, guys.

The low opinion some of these men have for Wolfowitz is widespread in the military. One Special Ops officer once told me he thinks Wolfowitz and the Neocons are "rabid." A lot of Marines aren't tough enough to get into Special Ops, so when one of those guys thinks you are rabid, you are really rabid.

Naylor on Iran/al-Qaeda Red Herring

Professor Thomas Naylor of McGill writes:

This is certainly not the the first time these tales about Iran cooperating with al-Qa'idah have surfaced. About two years ago US spooks floated via the Washington Post and other outlets some silly stories about al-Qa'idah involved in the underground traffic in gold. Since no one could find any other trace of the alleged bin Laden billions, the covert gold market was the choice-of-the-month. The main instrument for getting the story into the public domain was the same Washington Post reporter who had already given the world the fantasy about bin Laden running the conflict diamonds trade out of Sierra Leone. The result was a story that, when US bombs started to fall on Afghanistan, bin Laden and the Taliban secured the cooperation of prominent Iranian clerics to move the gold to the Sudan, that well known international financial haven, in planes the Iranians provided. (How this was supposed to be happening after Taliban forces slaughtered so many Shia' Hazara or
ousted Iran's man from Herat, was never explained.) The story was mixed up with other nonsense that had al-Qa'idah and the Taliban running gold through the "historic" route that smuggles gold "from Pakistan to the Gulf" - this must have been a big surprise to all the dhow operators who were convinced they had been moving gold in the other direction for centuries. Anyway the story made a brief media splash, then seemed to magically vanish once U.S.-Iranian relations started to thaw. Further details on this are going to be published in the paperback reissue of a book of mine called "Wages of Crime," Cornell UP autumn 2004.
--
Professor R. T. Naylor
Department of Economics
McGill University
855 Sherbrooke St. West
Montreal H3A2T7 Quebec

4 US Servicement Killed
Bombing in Baqubah leaves 6 dead


AP reports that guerrillas killed two US Marines and two US soldiers in Anbar province on Monday and Tuesday. The two Marines were killed Tuesday. One soldier was killed and another wounded on Monday, and the wounded soldier died on Tuesday. The total toll for US military deaths in Iraq now stands at 899 according to this article.

Guerrillas detonated a bomb on a civilian bus in Baqubah on Tuesday, killing as many as 6 persons. Baqubah, the capital of Diyala province, is a mixed city with both Sunnis and Shiites, and has been the site of persistent fighting against US troops and Iraqi security forces by elements in both groups.

In Samarra, a largely Sunni city north of Baghdad where there has been some sort of insurgency (neo-Baathist or Islamist) that has at times taken over the city, the guerrillas engaged in fierce firefights with US troops. Four Iraqis were killed and five wounded in the fighting. The US forces destroyed two houses from which they were taking fire, one being destroyed by a 500 pound bomb from a warplane they called in.

AP said that as of Wednesday, 899 U.S. service members had died since the beginning of the Iraq War. Although over 200 of these are classified as non-combat deaths, many in fact were related to combat (e.g. if a jeep overturned the soldiers killed were not categorized as having died in combat, even though some sort of violence may have been a proximate cause of the accident). As of Tuesday, the number of troops wounded as a direct result of hostile action was 5,804. Again, the true number of those wounded as a result of hostilities is higher.

Meanwhile, the Boston Globe reports that

"Nearly as many U.S. soldiers lost their lives in Iraq in the first half of July as in all of June, even as Iraqi insurgents seemed to have shifted their focus from attacking U.S. targets to aiming instead at Iraqi security forces and government officials. The relatively high rate of U.S. military casualties has dimmed hopes that the handover of power to the Iraqi government would help stabilize the country and reduce pressure on U.S. soldiers . . . Since the June 28 handover of power, the 160,000 coalition forces have lost averaged more than two deaths a day, among the highest rates of loss since the war began 15 months ago. By Saturday, 36 U.S. soldiers had died this month, compared with 42 last month, according to an analysis of official statistics by The Boston Globe."

Az-Zaman: On Tuesday, unidentified gunmen assassinated Laith Husain Ali, an official of the Turkmen Front, in Mosul. They sprayed his car with machine gun fire. Mosul is a largely Arab city in the north surrounded by Kurds and Turkmen, and there have been ethnic tensions in that area. Many Iraqi Turkmen believe that their numbers are underestimated and that they deserve a province of their own. Their cause is championed by Turkey. Two suspected guerrilla fighters were arrested in Mosul on Tuesday.

The Danish camp in south Iraq came under rocket fire at the beginning of the week, but there were no casualties.

A man was arrested in Karbala by police late Tuesday for stockpiling an enormous amount of explosives, rockets, grenades and other weaponry. The police say he confessed to being a terrorist with ties abroad, but did not provide specifics.

Deputy Governor of Basra Assassinated

AFP reports that guerrillas shot and killed Hazem Ainachi in Basra on Tuesday morning as he got in his car to go to work. Ainachi, acting governor of Basra and a member of the governing council in the southern city, had earlier held the posts of coordinator of the Basra Provincial Council and deputy governor of Basra. The guerrillas killed two others with him, and wounded another person. Provincial governor elections are being held, and the candidates have received death threats. Guerrillas had made a failed attempt on the life of one other councilman on Monday.

The assassination of Mr Hazim al-Ainachi, according to an informed source with experience in Basra who emailed me, "is very significant."

"The Governorate in Basra has the support of the majority of the Basra people and so is not seen as an anathema to the will of population. Judge Wael Abdul Latif is a highly respected and accepted leader. Hazim was the de-facto Chief of Staff or co-ordinator for almost everything the Governorate did. He was central to all decision making and activity and worked tirelessly without a salary for the benefit of the Iraqis. The assassins struck the most important person from the Interim Governing Council of Basra and thereby dealt them a severe blow. Hazim was able to move freely between the insular conservative world of Shaykh Ali al-Musawi the Grand Shaykh of Basra and the British Authorities, he was a shrewd politician and an effective political leader. This has now brought the policy of targetted assassination into the political Shia south. Basra is a city where one can move very freely and ambushes are easy to plan execute and retreat from, one can only guess at how things may deteriorate before they improve."

The guerrilla insurgencies in Iraq are clearly attempting to destabilize not only the Federal Iraqi government (hence the failed assassination attempt on the Minister of Justice Saturday and the successful assassination of a high Defense Department official on Sunday), but also the provincial governments. Basra's had been much more effective and widely accepted than most others, though the province has witnessed violence and bombings from time to time. Taking out Ainachi was intended to deprive the province of one of its most effective politicians. The aim is to encourage chaos, ultimately a popular uprising in the city of Basra, and to create the conditions under which guerrillas could take over and become the government.

Iran in Bush's Sights

The same techniques used to get up the Iraq war are now being applied by the political Right in the United States, including President Bush, to Iran. These include innuendo, guilt by association, vague fears, and hyped capabilities. If Bush gets a second term, it seems very likely that his administration will make war on Iran.

The current round of sabre rattling by Washington against Tehran began with some passages in the report of the 9/11 commission, leaked to Time magazine, that revealed that 8 to 10 of the largely Saudi "muscle" or "newskin" hijackers sent by Bin Laden (to help control the flight attendants and passengers for the al-Qaeda pilots) had passed through Iran on their way to the United States over a period of several months. This passage would be unremarkable in and of itself.

The 9/11 commission maintains, however, according to Time magazine, that Iranian officials had issued specific instructions to facilitate the passage of al-Qaeda members across Iranian borders, beginning in October, 2000.

The commission also alleges that Iranian officials came to al-Qaeda after the bombing of the USS Cole and suggested they team up to attack the US, but that Bin Laden turned down the offer for fear of alienating his Wahhabi supporters in Saudi Arabia by associating himself with Shiite Iran.

One problem with all these allegations is that they are sourced only to al-Qaeda detainees, Iranian defectors, and NSA electronic intercepts. It is the same as with Iraq in 2002. For all we know, there is an Iranian Chalabi who is behind these reports, hoping to get the US to overthrow the regime in Iran so that he can take over. As for the al-Qaeda detainees or those under electronic surveillance, the letter of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has already made it clear that some radical Sunni elements that fought in Afghanistan dream of provoking a Shiite-American struggle. Al-Qaeda detainees are notorious for providing the US with disinformation aimed at furthering their plots. Iran is a notorious enemy of Wahhabism and al-Qaeda and the Taliban. How sweet it would be to provoke a war between the US and Iran by hanging 9/11 on Tehran! (It should be remembered that NSA intercepts also showed that Saddam had biological and chemical weapons, presumably because Saddam ordered his officers to talk them up in the vain hope of deterring a US attack).

Acting CIA Director John McLaughlin has already admitted that a) the US has known for a long time that al-Qaeda operatives travelled through Iran, and b) that there is no evidence that Iran knew beforehand about the 9/11 plot.

Iranian officials have acknowledged that the al-Qaeda men passed through its territory, but point out that Iran's borders are long and porous, and insisted that the al-Qaeda operatives came through "illegally." Iran’s intelligence minister, Ali Yunesi, said on Saturday that "The Intelligence Ministry has identified and dismantled all the Iranian branches of the Al Qaeda movement . . . We have stopped the terrorist acts of Al Qaeda. If we had not done so, we would have had security problems.”

Another problem is that Iran does not have a tight, unified government. The Iranian state consists of a number of competing power centers. In recent years the president, Mohammad Khatami, has supported more civil liberties and an opening to the West. The Supreme Jurisprudent, Ali Khamenei, is an old-style Khomeinist who revels in puritanical theocracy and hates the US. Even Khamenei, however, is not implicated in ever having planned direct action against US soil. Then there are the Basij and Revolutionary Guards and Quds Brigade paramilitaries, and it is unclear how much central control the state has over them. So even if some official in the Revolutionary Guards did let al-Qaeda operatives in (and this is by no means proven), it would not necessarily say much about the stance of the Iranian government(s).

Some close US allies assert that Iran's role in fighting terrorism has been positive. Iraq's current ambassador to the United States, Rend Rahim Franke, said recently that Iran had prevented some 200 fighters from transiting its territory from Afghanistan to flood into Iraq and carry out terrorist attacks in her country, according to the Boston Globe:

' Iran so far has had a positive role in Iraq, and the Iraqi government recently asked it to cooperate even more on security, including sharing more intelligence, Rend al-Rahim Francke, chief of Iraq's diplomatic mission in Washington, said in an interview with the Associated Press. Rahim said she believes these overtures prompted Iran recently to capture 200 Afghan fighters who were trying to enter Iraq from Iran. She offered few details about the detentions, which had not been previously known. Last week, Iraq's human rights minister said only one Afghan was in custody -- one of 99 foreign fighters held in the country . . . Rahim rejected any suggestion that Iran supports terrorism in Iraq. ''It is not in Iran's interest for Iraq to be in turmoil," she said. ''If Iraq turns into a haven for terrorists, not only Iraq but all countries in the region will be affected." . . . '

The rightwing media in the US used to hang on Franke's every word when she was promoting a war against Iraq, but now that she is serving as witness for Iran's good behavior, they are completely ignoring her important testimony. (Franke seemed to be contradicted Tuesday by the Sunni ex-Baathists in the caretaker government, who worry about Iran supporting militant Shiite militias).

Iran has admitted to having taken some al-Qaeda operatives captive after September 11, but it is holding them for some quid pro quos from the United States. In particular, Iran wants to ensure that the US does not allow the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) terrorist organization to continue to hit Iran from its bases in Iraq, and the al-Qaeda detainees are among its only bits of leverage over Washington in this regard. (Amazingly enough, there are political forces in Washington, including the Neocon-dominated, pro-Israeli "Washington Institute for Near East Policy," that support the MEK terrorist organization and want the Bush administration to, as well. Even scarier, WINEP, this supporter of a notorious terrorist group, is highly influential in Washington and US military and State Department personnel are actually detailed there to learn about the Middle East!).

Iran's claim that the pre-9/11 al-Qaeda agents that came across its territory did so illegally should be easy to prove, right? If the operatives had come through Iran legally, there would have been Iranian stamps in their passports. But there weren't. If there had been, that would have triggered Immigration and Naturalization Service interviews with them and made it more difficult for them to get into the US. Ipso facto, Iran did not officially allow them through its passport control.

But, as usual with these things, there is a counter-argument.

Ali Nourizadeh, an expatriate Iranian journalist in London, published a piece in the London Saudi daily, Ash-Sharq al-Awsat, claiming that al-Qaeda fighters were given safe passage through Iran and allowed to avoid passport stamps by a sympathetic general of the Revolutionary Guards. Thus the lack of Iranian passport stamps in their passports, which would seem to exonerate Iran, is here used as proof of Iranian collusion!

Nourizadeh in the past has attempted to play up an Iran - al-Qaeda connection, going so far as to allege that Iran's Revolutionary Guards allow al-Qaeda operatives like Sulaiman Abu Ghaith and Saif al-Adl to move freely in the country and to plan and carry out attacks on neighbors like Saudi Arabia. Nourizadeh's sources are always shadowy dissidents in the Iranian Foreign Ministry whom he declines to name, and he never gives any evidence for his assertions, many of which seem highly unlikely to be true, to say the least.

As always in Middle East politics, we should begin with the Common Sense test and then go on to the "In who's Interest is this Odd Allegation?" test.

Here is the Common Sense test: Usama Bin Laden is a fanatical Sunni Muslim surrounded by other fanatical Sunni Muslims and was nested in the Taliban, who are fanatical Sunni Muslims. Iran is Shiite, a branch of Islam that fanatical Sunni Muslims absolutely hate. In Afghan politics, 1996-2002, at the time it was dominated by the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Iran was allied with the Northern Alliance against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Iran was trying to overthrow the Taliban and crush them and al-Qaeda.

Iran's allies in Afghanistan were the Tajiks, the Uzbeks and especially the Hazaras. The Hazaras are Afghan Shiites. They form about 15% of the Afghan population. The Hazaras' main political vehicle was the Hizb-i Vahdat or Unity Party, which was and is closely allied with Iran. Tajik warlords in the Northern Alliance like Ismail Khan, who are Sunnis, also have strong ties of language and patronage to Iran. Basically, Persian speakers in Afghanistan tended to side with Iran, especially Shiite Persian speakers. Whereas Pushtu speakers and immigrant Arabs tended to side instead with Pakistan.

When the Taliban took Mazar-i Sharif, they massacred Iranian intelligence ("diplomatic") personnel in that city. Iran mobilized for war against the Taliban at that point, and a war was narrowly averted.

Pakistan's Sunni fundamentalist-dominated military, especially its Inter-Services Intelligence or military intelligence, had more or less created the Taliban and heavily supported them with equipment, training, fuel and other goods.

Iran and Pakistan were engaged in a regional struggle for influence in Afghanistan and Central Asia, in which Iran's Shiism and Pakistan's Sunnism were ideological tools. This struggle spilled over into Pakistan itself. The radical Sunni Sipah-i Sahabah or Companions of the Prophet, originating in Jhang Siyal in northern Punjab, has conducted a terrorist campaign of assassination against Shiites in Pakistan. Sipah-i Sahabah was one of the jihadi groups that got training in al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and was allied with al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Several other radical Pakistani jihadi groups were in the same position. They killed hundreds of Shiites in Pakistan, especially Karachi and the Punjab. At one point Iranian attaches at the Karachi embassy were assassinated, probably by these same groups.

So in 1996-2002 there was a behind the scenes war between Shiite Iran and Sunni jihadis, with Afghanistan and Pakistan being the main battlefields. At one point in the late 1990s, it almost became a real, hot war.

So then you come to me and say that in 2000 and 2001, Iran was actively helping al-Qaeda and was trying to ally with it. And I say, that sounds to me like complete gibberish and I would only accept it if you show me excellent documentary proof.

It would be like saying that you had evidence that Roosevelt let German Nazi agents cross the United States to carry out an operation against Mao's forces in China during World War II. Well, on the face of it, the fascists would not have wanted the Communists to get China, so such a covert operation wouldn't be out of the question. And the US would certainly have in principle welcomed anything that would have helped the Nationalists. So you could argue yourself into thinking that the proposition isn't completely crazy. But if you just step back, you can see that geo-political speculation doesn't carry much weight in such a situation, and the whole idea is obviously crazy. That is how I feel about the idea that Khamenei cozied up to Bin Laden.

The second test is Who is Helped by these Crazy Allegations?

- The Likud lobby in Washington, especially Michael Ledeen, Michael Rubin and other warmongers. They want the Tehran regime overthrown in part because it stands in the way of an Israeli annexation of southern Lebanon, with the Litani river as the long-sought prize. Iran is allied with Hizbullah in southern Lebanon, which forced the Israelis back out of Lebanon with a nearly 20-year long guerrilla struggle. They also want to force Hizbullah to pull back its support of the Palestinian uprising. Since Iran has substantially cut back on its support for Hizbullah, however, overthrowing Tehran would have little effect on such local political dynamics. (The Likud's Ariel Sharon should never have invaded Lebanon in 1982, which is what created Hizbullah, suicide bombings as a tactic, and radicalized Lebanese like 9/11 hijacker Ziad Jarrah).

- Old-time US intelligence and diplomatic officials who have a grudge with Iran over the Hostage Crisis and other Iranian actions against the US in the 1980s

- The US military-industrial complex, which is frustrated at not being able to extract money from the potentially wealthy Iranian market

- Iranian expatriates from families formerly allied with the deposed Shah of Iran, who are enormously wealthy and influential and are eager to play Chalabi in Tehran. Watch them as key sources of disinformation.

- Al-Qaeda, which is seeking to "sharpen contradictions" by provoking serial fights between the US and Muslim powers. It would especially like to see a US- Shiite struggle, so that its two major enemies would both be weakened and pre-occupied with each other rather than Bin Laden.

These five forces are, obviously, disparate and in other regards at odds with one another. But all would like to see a US war against Iran. We will see a process whereby any lie issuing from any of them is amplified by the others, creating a multiplier effect. In particular, AIPAC and the military-industrial complex have enormous weight with Congress and the White House, and can push for the war domestically even as the other forces feed US intelligence disinformation abroad.

Iran is 3 times more populous than Iraq, however, and its population is highly mobilized and nationalistic. A US invasion force there will be greeted in a way that will make Iraq seem tame. Moreover, the fallout from Shiites in Lebanon, Bahrain and Iraq itself (who will almost universally side with Iran against the US in any war) will put US troops and citizens in enormous danger. And that, my friends, is a scenario we are very probably looking at if Bush gets back in.

Fresh Wave of Violence in Iraq Leaves 10 Dead, 62 Wounded

Reuters reports that a suicide bomber set off a massive explosion by targeting a fuel tanker near a police station in Baghdad on Monday, killing 9 and wounding 62. There have been five such bombings of police or national guards in recent days, and several violent incidents in the capital.

Late Sunday night, 3 guerrillas assassinated a high official of the Defense Ministry, Issam Jassem Qassim. On Saturday, guerrillas had attempted but failed to kill Iraq's minister of Justice, though they succeeded in killing or wounding a number of other persons.

Guest Editorial: Pressman on The Wall

Today we feature two guest editorials on the Israeli security wall, which is being built largely on Palestinian territory and involves a de facto unilateral annexation of that territory, hurting innocent Palestinian townspeople and farmers who see their property bifurcated. The World Court at the Hague has now ruled against the Wall, with the main objection being that it hasn't been built on Israeli soil. The United Nations General Assembly had been expected to take the matter up on Monday but the discussion was postponed until Tuesday. The first of our comments below is by Jeremy Pressman of the University of Connecticut.

The Wall

by Jeremy Pressman

Since the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued its ruling on the separation fence on July 9, 2004, Israel has emphasized one central point: the court failed to focus on the central problem, Palestinian terrorism. This was the approach in the official statement from Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs: "the Advisory Opinion fails to address the essence of the problem and the very reason for building the fence - Palestinian terrorism. If there were no terrorism, there would be no fence."


Benjamin Netanyahu was even more dramatic on the New York Times op-ed page (July 13):

In the last four years, Palestinian terrorists have attacked Israel's buses, cafes, discos and pizza shops, murdering 1,000 of our citizens. Despite this unprecedented savagery, the court's 60-page opinion mentions terrorism only twice, and only in citations of Israel's own position on the fence. Because the court's decision makes a mockery of Israel's right to defend itself, the government of Israel will ignore it. Israel will never sacrifice Jewish life on the debased altar of "international justice."

Is that a fair reading of the court opinion? I don't think so.

I think Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians are both immoral and counter-productive. (The Court opposed them as well: "The Court would emphasize that both Israel and Palestine are under an obligation scrupulously to observe the rules of international humanitarian law, one of the paramount purposes of which is to protect civilian life.") The day Palestinians put aside violence and engage in mass civil disobedience to the exclusion of violence, a genuine two-state solution will be at hand (let me leave aside the complex Israeli-Palestinian story as to why that has not happened).

That said, the ICJ ruling accepts Israel's right to fight terrorist attacks. In
fact, it explicitly calls on Israelis to defend themselves within the bounds of
international law: 141. The fact remains that Israel has to face numerous indiscriminate and deadly acts of violence against its civilian population. It has the right, and indeed the duty, to respond in order to protect the life of its citizens. The measures taken are bound nonetheless to remain in conformity with applicable international law.

One would not know that from Netanyahu's op-ed - and there are other examples too, like this letter to the editor in the Hartford Courant on July 15: "I don't understand how the International Court of Justice could rule that the wall is illegal while barely addressing the terrorism that caused it." Some procedural aspects are worth noting. International bodies do tend to be wary about using the word terrorism (thus opening the door to Netanyahu scoring debating points by noting that the word only appeared twice in the ruling), most likely because one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter.

In addition, perhaps Israel was mistaken in its refusal to send representatives
to appear before the ICJ. If Israel wanted to ensure that the proper data on the barrier and security reached the ICJ, what better way than to appear before the court? Contrary to what some have suggested (including the Court itself on my reading of section 54), I think the question put to the Court by the UN General Assembly would have allowed for more details on Israeli security:

What are the legal consequences arising from the construction of the wall being built by Israel, the occupying Power, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,
including in and around East Jerusalem, as described in the report of the Secretary-General, considering the rules and principles of international law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, and relevant Security Council and General Assembly resolutions?

Most importantly, the central difference is not over Israel's right to self-defense. As noted, both Israel and the ICJ accept that right. Instead, the central difference is over how a state may exercise that right in occupied land. The ICJ did not concern itself with parts of the wall built on land in pre-1967 Israel: "some parts of the complex are being built, or are planned to be built, on the territory of Israel itself; the Court does not consider that it is called upon to examine the legal consequences arising from the construction of those parts of the wall." (section 67) The ICJ repeatedly emphasized it was rejecting the "route chosen" - implying that choosing a different route, say inside Israel or along the Green Line, would be acceptable to the court. Taken together, this means the problem is where the barrier has been built (on occupied land) not the whole idea of a barrier to enhance security, an idea accepted by the ICJ, the Israeli government, and Palestinian leaders. (The Court should have stated this point more explicitly)

Nor surprisingly, this is hard to compute for Israelis or Israeli supporters who do not believe that the West Bank is occupied land. If it is not occupied, it is easy to see no difference between the West Bank and pre-1967 Israel ('Israel proper' to those who do see a difference). Continuing with this logic, if there is no difference, it makes sense to argue that a rejection of the wall on its current route is actually a rejection of any and all walls and ipso facto a rejection of Israel's right to defend its citizens.

One sticky, unstated part of the ruling is the issue of Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Although Israel has clearly mapped the wall in such a way so as to take additional land and greatly complicate the lives of 100,000s of Palestinians, the fence will also provide greater protection to many Israeli settlements. (I will leave aside the wall-breeds-hatred-and-resentment-which-then-fuels-Palestinian-militancy argument) If Israel has a right to self-defense and the Israeli occupation
is illegal, does Israel have the right to defend settlers illegally placed in the
occupied land? One of the two arguments must fall (self-defense or illegal occupation).(The only Judge to vote against the opinion, Thomas Buergenthal of the US, addresses this issue in section nine of his "Declaration")

I am reminded, too, that Palestinian quality of life issues will always seem minor compared to Israeli life/death. When the question is phrased as he arrived late to work but she lost her son in a terror attack, the answer is always clear. ("The fence may not be convenient, but it doesn't kill people," said Ehud Olmert, Israel's deputy prime minister) I think that is the wrong question to frame the issue. Better to look at the loss of life on both sides in order to understand the meaning of the wall, the occupation, and the continuing conflict.

- Jeremy Pressman

Beinin Guest Editorial: The US Congress Defies the World Court

Our second guest editorial on the issue of the Wall is by the distinguished academic Joel Beinin of Stanford University.

The US Congress Defies the World Court on Israel’s Separation Barrier

by Joel Beinin

Today the United Nations General Assembly is likely to vote to insist that Israel comply with the ruling of the International Court of Justice and dismantle the separation barrier it is constructing largely inside the West Bank. The ICJ, or World Court, is the judicial arm of the UN and the highest court in the world. On July 9 the court, by a 14-1 vote, delivered an Advisory Opinion declaring that the trajectory of the separation barrier is illegal and that it must be removed. Palestinians whose lands have been confiscated to construct the barrier or who have suffered other damages must receive compensation.

The court recognized that Israel “has a right, and indeed the duty” to defend its civilian citizens against acts of violence and acknowledged that it faces a serious security problem. It did not say that the barrier cannot be built at all, only that it must be built on Israel’s own territory, not on Palestinian territory occupied in the 1967 war.

Although advisory opinions are not binding, they are the most authoritative statement of international law on a given issue. This is all the more so in this case because a large and diverse group of judges agreed on the legal questions at stake. The single negative vote, cast by the American judge, Thomas Buergenthal, was based on his opinion that the court did not have sufficient evidence to justify its sweeping conclusion, not on the view that the barrier is legal. Moreover, Judge Buergenthal concurred with the other members of the court that Israel is obliged to uphold the Fourth Geneva Convention, which regulates the conduct of occupying powers. Israel has always rejected the notion that it is occupying the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

The ICJ’s overwhelming opinion on the illegality of the separation barrier has been accepted as an authoritative legal decision everywhere but in Israel and the United States. Both governments denounced the Advisory Opinion. Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, announced that although he rejected the ICJ ruling, Israel would abide by the decision of its own Supreme Court, which ruled on June 30 that a twenty-five mile segment of the barrier must be relocated nearer to the internationally recognized border between Israel and the West Bank, known as the Green Line, to avoid imposing undue hardship on the Palestinians.

The Israeli court accepted the government’s rationale for building the wall and did not challenge the principal that it may be built on Palestinian land if Israeli security authorities deem it necessary. This decision avoids reaching the conclusion that the ICJ reached: that the trajectory of the barrier is designed to protect Israel’s settlements in the West Bank and to effectively annex them, along with large swaths of additional territory, to Israel proper. Since the settlements are illegal according to the Fourth Geneva Convention, any barrier erected to defend them is also illegal.

On July 15 the House of Representatives adopted HRES 713 by a vote of 361-45 (with 13 present, 14 not voting), a resolution that “deplores” the ICJ decision. Such lopsided votes on matters relating to Israel and Palestine are commonplace in Congress. They are largely symbolic and have little or no operative force.

On this occasion several members spoke out clearly and forcefully on the question, delineating the issues involved with unusual clarity. Jim McDermott (D-WA), a self-proclaimed “true friend of Israel,” said, “We can hurt the cause for peace by passing a resolution that would seem to place the world on one side, and Israel and the United States on the other. A political wall divides just as much as a stonewall or an iron fence.” In other words, condemning the opinion of the World Court exacerbates the international political isolation of the United States as a consequence of our Middle East policy.

Many Democrats with generally liberal voting records voted for HRES 713. Most of them – for example Anna Eshoo, Mike Honda, Tom Lantos, Nancy Pelosi, and Lynn Woolsey, all of the San Francisco Bay Area – criticized the Bush administration for abandoning the Kyoto Protocol on global warming or the renouncing its signature on the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court. Apparently, it is bad for the United States to be internationally isolated on those issues. But it is fine if the United States is isolated because of our Middle East policy. That isn’t likely to have any consequences for our national security or personal safety.

Joel Beinin
Professor of Middle East History
Stanford University
beinin@stanford.edu

Muqtada's Newspaper Reopens

Al-Hawzah, the newspaper of the radical young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, will be allowed to publish again. The decision was taken by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi after the newspaper's staff approached his government. The Americans had closed the newspaper in March, as a prelude to their failed attempt to arrest Muqtada and crush his movement. (They did kill some 1500 of his fighters and pushed them back out of control of some key cities, but Muqtada's cadres are still numerous and his movement continues to thrive).

Quotes from The Guardian from al-Hawzah's editor, Ali Yasseri on the US closing of the newspaper and the attitude of the current caretaker Iraqi government:

[Of the Americans:] "I told them that they were making a mistake, and that if you close al-Hawza you will open 10 voices in its place."

Asked if he feared the new Iraqi government might also ban the weekly, Mr Yasseri replied: "I didn't expect the American administration would be so stupid. We have seen American freedom and democracy and we don't think the Iraq government will do the same thing. They have to have the consent and blessing of the Iraqi people."

Allawi is clearly attempting to bring Muqtada and his movement in from the cold, and have them play a role in Iraqi civil and political society. The hope is that since the stick failed, perhaps carrots will be more successful. But if Muqtada continues to think of his group as rejectionist, and continues to rely on violence and thuggery as his main political tools, there could well be a showdown between him and Allawi (or Allawi's successor) in the future.

Addendum 7/19/04 12:35 pm: Ash-Sharq al-Awsat: Other observers saw the move to reauthorize the newspaper as part of a negotiation with Muqtada's movement aimed at deterring them from attacking US forces. Some among the Sadrists have been arguing that now is the time to strike at the US military, in a bid to end the occupation and force it out of Iraq. Reuters got hold of a tape recording of a small armed group of Sadrists speaking of the need to hit the US, along with planning for attacks on liquor and video stores, so as to end the state of chaos-- with bombings, kidnappings and other criminal acts--into which the US had plunged Iraq. Officials of the US and the caretaker Iraqi government are apparently holding the threat of prosecution over Muqtada's head as a way of deterring such a course of action, but apparently small groups of armed Sadrists are planning out such operations without close consultation with him.

Addendum 7/19/04 6:06 pm: Karbalanews.net reports that Muqtada al-Sadr appeared in public in Najaf for the first time in two months on Friday. He was escorted by his militiamen in a procession from his office in the city to the shrine of Imam Ali.

Muqtada dissociated himself from the sentiments of his Friday prayer leader at the al-Muhsin Mosque in Sadr City, which were sharply critical of Iran. Shaikh Aws al-Khafaji had lambasted Iran as one source of instability in Iraq. Muqtada said that he did not share Khafaji's views, and that Iran was among the supporters of the Iraqi people.

Iran's government tends to support the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, headed by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who made a visit to Tehran recently. SCIRI is a competitor of Muqtada's for influence among Iraq's Shiites.

Rockefeller on Feith

UPI runs a guest editorial by Greg Guma that signals a long-delayed outbreak of public candor in the US print press about the sinister role of Undersecretary of Defense for Planning Douglas Feith in a disinformation campaign aimed at provoking a US war on Iraq, primarily for rightwing Israeli purposes. Sen. Jay Rockefeller provoked a furor by naming Feith as a culprit, in his expression of dissatisfaction that the Senate Intelligence Report crucified the CIA but more or less let the White House off the hook-- even though it is clear that the Bush politicos wanted an Iraq war much more than the CIA did.

Excerpts:

' In the 1990s, Feith churned out anti-Arab diatribes in Israeli newspapers, Bamford reveals. In those articles, he urged Israel to establish more settlements and end the Oslo peace process. When George H.W. Bush was president, he organized a group to denounce the elder Bush for his "mistreatment of Israel . . ."

Once back in government, Feith created an Office of Strategic Influence after 9/11. Senior officials have called it a disinformation factory . . .

But the worst was still to come: Feith's Office of Special Plans. Officially, its job was to conduct pre-war planning. But its actual target was the media, policy-makers, and public opinion. Feith's partner, Abram Shulsky, liked to call their operation "the cabal."

According to London's Guardian newspaper, the OSP's job was to provide key people in the administration with "alarmist reports on Saddam's Iraq." In particular, holdouts like Powell needed to be persuaded. To do that, the OSP obtained cooked intelligence from its own unit and a similar Israeli cell. There was also a close relationship with Vice President Dick Cheney's office. In the end, the public heard what Feith's unit wanted them to hear.

How did it work? According to Bamford, OSP's intelligence unit cherry-picked the most damning items from the streams of U.S. and Israeli reports. "Then the OSP would brief senior administration officials," he writes. "These officials would then use the OSP's false and exaggerated intelligence as ammunition when attempting to hard-sell the need for war to their reluctant colleagues, such as Colin Powell, and even to allies like British Prime Minister Tony Blair." Senior White House officials received the same briefings . . . '

Airstrike on Fallujah Leaves 14 Dead
Bombing in Tikrit, Kidnappings in Kirkuk

AP reports that 14 died and 7 were wounded in an American airstrike on an Al-Tawhid facility in Fallujah that was supporting a trench line for radical Sunni fighters. Al-Tawhid has vowed to assassinate Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and has put a bounty on his head, and Allawi pointedly announced that he had authorized the airstrike. Local Fallujans maintained that those killed were civilians working in support of the Fallujah Brigade, the force that supplies security to the city. Meanwhile, Allawi left for Amman, Jordan, for his first consultations as PM outside Iraq with foreign leaders friendly to his regime.

In Tikrit, guerrillas detonated two car bombs in an attack on a police checkpoint. They killed two policemen and wounded five others.

Az-Zaman: Kurdish and Arab security officials in Kirkuk appear to be engaged in a dangerous game of kidnapping each other's children or allies. The son of the deputy commander of the National Guards in Kirkuk, Gen. Jasim Khalil, who is an Arab, was kidnapped. Then the son of Abdul Karim Barzinji, the Kurdish labor leader, was kidnapped. Another Kurdish man, who is involved in guarding the oil pipes in southern Kirkuk, was also kidnapped. This happened just before Hassan al-Ubaydi, an Arab former employee of the Iraqi secret police, was taken hostage. Ethnic tensions remain high in the oil city of Kirkuk, with its potential vast wealth and nearly 1 million inhabitants, divided among Turkmen, Arabs and Kurds.

15 Killed, including a US Soldier; Dozens Wounded
Minister of Justice Narrowly Escapes

Guerrillas attempted but failed to assassinate the Iraqi Minister of Justice, Malik Dohan al-Hassan, 83, with a suicide bomb on Saturday. The powerful explosion did kill 3 of his bodyguards and two civilians, including his nephew, and wounded 8 others. Credit for the attack was claimed by al-Tawhid, the organization of Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which castigated al-Hassan as an "apostate," i.e. a former Muslim who had renounced Islam. Radical Islamists consider Muslims who cooperate with the West to be apostates, and in medieval Islamic jurisprudence, apostasy was a capital crime.

Al-Hassan had served as Minister of Education in the late 1960s before the 1968 Baath coup, in an Arab nationalist government. He was one of the ministers tapped by Allawi to announce the 'state of emergency' law recently that was decried by many civil libertarians, apparently in hopes that his stature would help deflect those criticisms (-ash-Sharq al-Awsat).

Prime Minister Iyad Allawi on Saturday denied a report in the Sydney Morning Herald that he had personally executed prisoners in late June.

Al-Hayat reports that Allawi is considering increasing the strength of the Iraqi civil defense forces in al-Anbar, Salahuddin and Diyala provinces, where most of the guerrilla violence takes place.

Hareth al-Dhari, leader of the Board of Islamic Clerics, a Sunni fundamentalist organization, warned against sending Federal forces into al-Anbar, saying that they would be met with fierce resistance.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reported that Shaikh Akram Abid Fareeh, the Sunni imam of the Fatimah Zahra' Mosque in Ramadi, pledged in his Friday sermon that if the US troops did not withdraw from Iraq, Ramadi would become their "graveyard."

Guerrillas near Beiji north of Baghdad detonated a roadside bomb as a US military convoy passed, killing one US soldier and wounding another. 656 US troops have been killed in military action is the beginning of the war.

Guerrillas also struck at the National Guard Headquarters in Mahmudiya, 30 km south of Baghdad, with a suicide bombing. They killed at least one person and wounded more than 30.

They also ambushed the police chief of Iskandariyah, Lt. Col. Rahim Ali, who was driving to work, killing him.

Police and self defense forces throughout the country faced numerous attacks on Saturday.

In Hawija, just west of Kirkuk, guerrillas attacked the police station, killing two policemen and two civilians. One of the guerrillas was killed in the firefight.

In the capital, guerrillas assassinated a cleric who belonged to the Iraqi Islamic Party, Sheikh Abdul Samad Ismail al-Adhami. He is the brother of Abdul Wahab al-Adhami, also a Sunni cleric, who fought Saddam's regime. The party's headquarters in Baghdad was recently firebombed. Although the pary is a Sunni fundamentalist one, it has cooperated with the US and the caretaker government of PM Allawi, drawing down on it the ire of Sunni Arab nationalists and more hardline fundamentalist groups. Old-time Baath guerrillas would also blame it for its anti-Baath activities.

An Iraqi guard from Kirkuk, Farhat Abdullah, who watching over the oil pipelines in the north, was kidnapped by assailants as he headed home.

A Jordanian truck driver who had been taken hostage was found dead. Truckers are key to bringing in and out the goods that will allow the new government to survive, and several have been targeted.

Mahdi Army Evicted in Diwaniyah
Sistani Reassures Kurds

Iraqi National Guards evicted Mahdi Army fighters from a building that they had occupied in Diwaniyah on Friday.

Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder discusses the ways in which the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr retains its hegemony in East Baghdad despite American rules that its militiamen cannot appear in public armed. His local sources tell him that the militiamen do not need to carry weapons in the streets because they are already in control of the teeming ghetto.

Jeffrey Gettleman of the NYT supported Lasseter's point in his own piece on Saturday, saying that at Friday prayers mosques, Mahdi Army militiamen boasted of having cracked down on crime in East Baghdad.

reported that Sadrist clerics continued to denounce the US in their Friday prayers this weekend. He wrote:

At Friday Prayer, many imams continued to inveigh against the American presence. "We will not let the ill-omened trinity rule our country," Sheik Jaber al-Khafaji said at a Shiite Muslim mosque in Najaf, referring to the United States, Britain and Israel.

It turns out that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's meeting earlier this week with Sunni clerics was with a delegation of Kurds, who were requesting that he issue a fatwa. The Kurds wanted him to weigh in on the issue of Kurdish property usurped by Saddam and given to Arabs that he brought into the north to "Arabize" it.

Sistani did issue a statement saying that everyone who has a rightful claim should be given his due. He also said that such matters should be judged by Islamic courts, and that no one should take matters into his own hands or resort to violence.

Haug Interview with Cole

Rob Haug's interview of me for the University of Michigan publication, Michigan Today, is now on the Web.

Allawi Accused of Murdering Prisoners

Paul McGeough, Chief Sydney Morning Herald Correspondent, in Baghdad reports that eyewitnesses are saying Iyad Allawi personally executed several prisoners in late June just before the Americans turned the country over to him. Of the eyewitnesses, he says:

They say the prisoners - handcuffed and blindfolded - were lined up against a wall in a courtyard adjacent to the maximum-security cell block in which they were held at the Al-Amariyah security centre, in the city's south-western suburbs. They say Dr Allawi told onlookers the victims had each killed as many as 50 Iraqis and they "deserved worse than death" . . . Iraq's Interior Minister, Falah al-Naqib, is said to have looked on and congratulated him when the job was done. Mr al-Naqib's office has issued a verbal denial.

Allawi was once a Baathist hit man in London who fell out with Saddam and then directed terrorist operations against Baghdad. Some reports suggest that one of his operations once resulted in the bombing of a schoolbus in which school children died.

32 Killed in Separate Incidents, Dozens Wounded
Foreign Ministry Security Chief Assassinated

Wire services report that 32 Iraqis died in violence on Thursday.

Guerrillas assassinated the chief of security for the Iraqi foreign ministry as he and colleagues traveled north from Baghdad toward Kirkuk. Two other officials were injured, as their car was sprayed by machine gun fire from a grey Opel about 110 km. north of the capital.

The resistance in Haditha, a city northwest of Baghdad, detonated a car bomb at the police station, killing 10 Iraqi policemen and wounding 40 other persons, including more than five police. (-Al-Hayat).

In Kirkuk, guerrillas aiming mortar fire at a police station overshot and hit a civilian dwelling, killing four members of the family that lived there, including three children. The oil pipeline between Kirkuk and Ceyhun in Turkey was sabotaged with an explosion, stopping exports from that route.

Two guerrillas who appear to have been planning to detonate a car bomb at the Bulgarian garrison near Karbala accidentally set off the bombs prematurely, killing themselves.

The Iraqi security forces continued their sweeps of Haifa Street in Baghdad, an area dominated by Sunni fundamentalists and Arab nationalists. They arrested 9 suspected criminals or guerrillas, and engaged in firefights with others, killing 15. Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan is quoted as saying, “You have all heard about the notorious Haifa Street, where there are criminal cells of salafists (Islamists) and those loyal to the previous regime . . . A joint operation by the national guard and elements of the Defence Ministry led to the killing of 15 people and the arrest of nine.”

In Najaf, police captured a Libyan national who confessed to having a relationship with al-Qaeda and to having been involved in the bombings of Shiite worshippers at Karbala and Kazimiya on Ashura in early March. (-Al-Hayat) (There have been numerous previous reports of foreigners being arrested in the wake of such bombings, but one has to take them with a grain of salt, since usually the arrestees have been found innocent after a careful investigation).

Alissa Rubin of the Los Angeles Times has an excellent piece on the divisions between the Sadrists and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq in Najaf. Her high-placed Shiite informants explained that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has decided not overtly to attack the young radical cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, fearing that it might provoke a decisive split within Iraqi Shiism. In the meantime, however, the de facto split has left Najaf without its Friday prayer services and signalled a severe weakness in Shiism, anyway.

Thousands of Iraqis demonstrated Thursday in Baghdad, Najaf, Karbala and Basra, demanding the execution of Saddam Hussein and protesting the return of former Baathists to administrative positions in the Allawi government and the Iraqi army. They also condemned the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. They chanted slogans against the United States and Zionism and "terrorism." The demonstration held in downtown Baghdad was organized by Shiite parties and by Ahmad Chalabi. The demonstration in Najaf, which included women, had been organized by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. (-al-Sharq al-Awsat)

Jordanian sources admitted that Saddam's daughter, Raghad, who lives in Amman, had been the victim of a failed assassination attempt in May.

Also in Baghdad, 7 liquor shops were firebombed with hand grenades and received machine gun fire during the past two days (- al-Hayat). Ian Fisher of the New York Times has a longer piece on the phenomenon, attributing most of it to the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr. He reveals that the decree forbidding liquor sales was signed by 28 tribal chieftains loyal to Muqtada, and drafted by Malek al-Muhammadawi, whose name suggests he is a chief of the Al-Bu Muhammad Marsh Arab tribe. Muqtada's increasing sway with tribal chieftains isominous, since tribes are a natural cavalry and can supply tribal levies to fight in various causes. If they have given fealty to Muqtada, that could mean trouble down the road.

Robert Fisk reports on a wave of assassinations of Iraqi academics, over a dozen of whom have been assassinated in recent months.

A headless body believed to be that of a Bulgarian hostage was found on Thursday.

Interim Prime Minister Allawi announced that he was going to create a new secret police, raising alarums among some Iraqis who had suffered at the hands of Saddam's secret police and who had been hoping that the new Iraq would only have ordinary police.

Iraqi Boys Sodomized at Abu Ghuraib: Hersh

Sy Hersh, the journalist who broke the Abu Ghuraib prison torture scandal, told an American Civil Liberties Union audience that film exists of young Iraqi men at Abu Ghuraib being sodomized by US troops. He said, "The boys were sodomised with the cameras rolling, and the worst part is the soundtrack, of the boys shrieking. And this is your government at war."

Hersh believes that President Bush and Vice President Cheney are guilty of trying to cover up war crimes.

Does anyone else see an irony here? Isn't this the same administration that just tried to tinker with the United States constitution in order to prevent government sanction for sodomy?

Some 22 Killed, Dozens Wounded in Bloody Day in Iraq

A suicide bomber detonated a huge car bomb at the Green Zone in Baghdad Wednesday, killing 11-12 persons and wounding 40.

Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi maintained that the attack came in retaliation for the arrests of over 500 suspected criminals and terrorists in Baghdad the day before.

Guerrillas assassinated Ninevah Governor Usama Yusuf Kashmula, killing him and two body guards in their car with hand grenades and machine gun fire as it moved between Beiji and Tikrit on his way to Baghdad. He is the highest-ranking official to be killed in July. Several of his attackers are also believed to have been killed.

On Tuesday, guerrillas had assassinated an auditor in the Ministry of Industry, Sabir Karim as he left his office in Baghdad.

Violence broke out in Ramadi when guerrillas attacked a US Marine convoy. The Marines counter-attacked, killing several of the gunmen. A Ramadi hospital official maintained that the fighting left three people dead and wounded 19.

Iraqi police in Karbala forestalled a terrorist attack in that city when they arrested five suspects implicated in a plot. - Ash-Sharq al-Awsat

Al-Hayat reports that Allawi plans to travel to neighboring countries next week. He is hoping in particular for a new relationship with Syria.

How Clean has Blair Come?

Although John Edwards argued Wednesday that President Bush had not taken responsibility for the intelligence failures about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction the way that Tony Blair had, there is some question as to how clean Tony himself has come. Bruce Anderson of the Scotsman suggests some ways in which Tony's statements do not add up or are incomplete. He says,

' One damaging passage deals with Cabinet government, or rather the lack of it. Ministers were merely given oral briefings; they were not allowed to see background papers. There was no proper discussion in Cabinet or in Cabinet committees. In effect, it was made clear to ministers that if the PM wanted their opinion, he would tell them what it was. The decisions to go to war were taken on Tony Blair’s sofa . . .

.

Although there appears to be a misprinted date in the Scotsman text, Anderson argues that Bush told Blair already in spring of 2002 that he was going to war against Iraq, but that Tony continually dissimulated. As late as the end of August, 2002, he was maintaining, according to the Butler report, that the decision had not yet been made. But as Anderson says, this contention is ridiculous. Of course it had.

Among Blair's most egregious errors was to claim that Iraq could launch a WMD attack "within 45 minutes" (with the implication of being able to hit targets outside Iraq) That was always ridiculous, and it was was based on a misunderstanding by Blair, a misunderstanding that is inexcusable. His military told him that Iraq could mobilize its WMD on the battlefield in 45 minutes. Blair somehow interpreted that to mean that the Iraqis could mount it on missiles in 45 minutes. Even then the Iraqis could not have hit Europe.

So, Edwards is being too charitable to Blair. Neither he nor Bush has truly dealt with the full degree to which he deeply misled the public.

Sadr's Mahdi Army Regrouping

Ann Scott Tyson of the Christian Science Monitor has a fine piece today on how Muqtada al-Sadr's militia is regrouping and continuing to engage in vigilante practices. There is also an allegation that Iranians are helping re-arm the militia, though the numbers mentioned in Najaf (80) don't seem to me to be significant. Moreover, one doesn't know whether these are Iranian intelligence agents, Revolutionary Guards, or just jihadi volunteers (even pilgrims caught in Najaf when the fighting broke out who decided to take up arms with the Mahdi Army). I wouldn't make too much of it. The Mahdi Army is overwhelmingly local, and it helps Iraqi Shiites politically to blame its excesses on Iran rather than admitting that Iraqi Shiites themselves are deeply divided and capable of squalid acts. Tyson writes:

' heavily armed Sadr militiamen are waging fear tactics, kidnapping local Iraqi police and family members, occupying buildings, and arresting Iraqis deemed critical of Sadr or in violation of Islamic law, residents and officials say.

Signs that the Sadr militia is regrouping after heavy losses in April and May come even as Iraqi leaders are attempting to nudge the firebrand cleric into the political arena. Uncertainty remains over whether the militia activity is unified and sanctioned by Sadr or primarily the work of factions of his lieutenants, the officials say. Both Iraqi and US officials are concerned about signs of significant Iranian influence with Sadr's forces. '

Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder also recently did an interesting overview of the way in which the Mahdi Army has reasserted itself in the vast slums of East Baghdad (Sadr City). He writes:

' In any case, said Sadoun al Dulame, the head of an independent Baghdad think tank, "that city belongs to al Sadr."

The area is one of Baghdad's poorest. Originally designed to house 300,000, it now holds 10 times that number. At most, there are 12 hours of electricity a day -- usually there's half that amount -- and sewage and garbage cover many side streets, where goats and donkeys graze.

Last month, the commander of the U.S. Army division in charge of the area, the 1st Cavalry Maj. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, said he had been concentrating on reconstruction projects -- not combat missions -- in Sadr City, where he's assigned a battalion of about 500 men.

"I've got a battalion in Sadr City, and there's 3 million people in Sadr City," he said. "I can't fight 3 million people with a battalion."

On Sunday, Mahdi troops walked down the road a few blocks from a group of U.S. military police attached to the 1st Cavalry, who were parked outside of a police station on the edge of Sadr City.

Members of the Mahdi Army direct traffic at most intersections of Sadr City while Iraqi police watch. At night, the streets are filled with militiamen who wear identification cards bearing al Sadr's picture. They have been carrying out raids of suspected kidnapping and drug gangs in the neighborhood, and they either detain suspects or hand them over to the police.

In addition to its patrols, the group has been conducting blood drives and trash pickups, partly to compete with 1st Cavalry projects. '

Al-Zaman reports that Iraqi police in Najaf are now fighting, conducting inspections, and making arrests in various areas in the province. They are seeking out outlaw elements that have committed attacks on police. An atmosphere of caution prevails in the city in the wake of reports that the Shiite Establishment (al-Bayt al-Shi`i) has given up attempts to mediate between the followers of radical young cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and the Iraqi police with regard to implementing the truce and disarming the Mahdi Army.

Al-Hayat: Meanwhile, the caretaker Iraqi government is attempting to outflank Muqtada politically by reaching out to rival leaders of the Sadrist tendency. (The Sadrists all revere Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr (d. 1980) and his cousin Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, Muqtada's father, but not all follow Muqtada). Fuad Masoum, head of the commission that is preparing the national congress, maintains that the greater Sadr movement will be represented even though Muqtada and his followers are boycotting the congress. Among the Sadrists is the Da'wah Iraq Organization, a splinter group that broke off from the al-Da'wah Party and which reveres the two maryred Sadrs, a representative of which will attend. Masoum is also inviting individual prominent lieutenants of Muqtada, in hopes that some will attend so as to avoid political marginalization, and that this peeling away of his major followers will isolate Muqtada or force him to rethink his participation.

National Security Adviser Muwaffaq al-Rubaie distributed a letter recently to prominent Shiite personalities and parties in which he warned that Sunni parties were taking advantage of the recent fighting between the Americans and the Shiite Mahdi Army to improve their position. He said that Shiite influence in Iraqi politics would decline if Muqtada refused to cease confronting the US.

Hamza Hendawi reports on the rivalry for the leadership of Shiism between Najaf in Iraq and Qom in Iran. Which city wins will have a big impact on the religion, since Najaf tends to be quietist and opposes clerical rule.

American Islam

David Crumm, religion correspondent of the Detroit Free Press, has written a highly significant portrait of Sheikh Hasan Qazwini, a key Shiite cleric in Dearborn near Detroit. Qazwini comes across as a complex and innovative figure, struggling to mediate between his tradition (he was born in Karbala, Iraq) and contemporary Michigan modernity. Although he, like most Iraqi Shiites, supported Bush in getting rid of Saddam in 2003, his concerns about the Patriot Act and its severe curtailment of civil liberties has him rethinking that support this year. Muslim Americans and Arab Americans could be important swing votes in several midwestern states, including Michigan.

A CAIR poll (which sounds to me somewhat unscientific in methodology) finds that Muslims are leaning overwhelmingly to Kerry and Nader and that most planning to vote against Bush. In the past, both Muslims and Arabs in the US tended to be fairly evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats. Concerns about the War on Terror turning into a war on ordinary Muslims, and fears of the Patriot Act, as well as the quagmire in Iraq, appear to have pushed them to the left.

Muqtader Khan reports preliminary findings of surveys being done among Michigan Muslims. He says that they tend to be progressive on economic issues, preferring government support of health care and community needs. But they are conservative on social issues, tending to oppose abortion, homosexuality, and libertine media. If this is true, it helps explain why they have previously been split with regard to the party they support. But it appears that the economic issues, and disaffection with Bush's foreign policy, may be pushing them toward the Democrats. He writes of this survey of mosque-going Muslims, who are probably more conservative than most Michigan Muslims:

' The survey provided some scientific basis for a claim that moderate Americans have been making all along - that the vast percentage of American Muslims are liberal and their presence in America is economically, politically and culturally beneficial. Allegations that American Muslims may constitute a fifth column are beginning to look increasingly shallow . . .

The study provides an interesting profile of the active Muslim in the Detroit area. The average respondent is 34 and married with children, well educated, an immigrant or born of immigrants, and earns over $75,000 a year (while being a tad stingy when it comes to giving to mosques). He or she is either progressive (38 percent) or traditional (25 percent), rarely conservative (8 percent), politically conscious (68 percent are registered to vote), very discerning (85 percent disapprove of President George W. Bush's performance), a bit ethnocentric (there is some evidence of clustering around mosques) and politically liberal (supporting affirmative action and universal healthcare), but also socially conservative (worrying about sexual promiscuity) . . .

The study's most important contribution is the survey of attitudes toward Islam. According to the survey, 38 percent of Detroit Muslims adopt a flexible approach to understanding Islam . . . According to the study, only 8 percent identified themselves as Salafi - extreme conservatives who practice gender discrimination and segregation as divine law, and believe that all non-Muslims will go to hell unless they embrace Salafi Islam . . .

The combination of 28 percent traditionalists (a category many Salafis may be hiding in) and 8 percent Salafis make Detroit mosques equally as conservative as they are progressive. It is fair to assume that 36 percent conservative and 38 percent progressive Muslims could make Detroit mosques a battleground for the proverbial soul of Islam. The character of the mosques, therefore, will be determined by the influence exercised by those who are theological free lancers (25 percent). If they lean to the past, the conservatives dominate, and if they look to the future, the progressives will prevail.

Finally, Muslims who advocate participation in American mainstream society and politics achieved a decisive victory over anti-American Muslims, who advocate an isolated existence for Muslims in America. According to the survey, 93 percent of mosque-goers believe Muslims must engage in US politics. '

This kind of research demonstrates how insipid is the book mill about 'radical Islam' 'in America.' Only a handful of American Muslims can be categorized as radical. Most have political attitudes very little distinguishable from recent Catholic immigrants, e.g.

Arguing with Bush yet Again

President Bush gave a speech on Tuesday in which he made specific claims about how the United States is safer as a result of his military action. I dispute assertions about particular Middle Eastern or South Asian countries.

' "The world is changing for the better because of American leadership. America is safer today because we are leading the world. Afghanistan was once the home of al-Qaeda. Now terror camps are closed, democracy is rising, and the American people are safer," he said. '

Cole: The Afghanistan war was the right war at the right time, and it did break up the network of al-Qaeda training camps from which terrorists would have gone on hitting the United States. But the fact is that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld did not want to fight that war after September 11. Rumsfeld sniffed that "there were no good targets" in Afghanistan. Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney all wanted to leave al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and attack Iraq first. At first Wolfowitz was leaked as the proponent of this crazy idea, and although he did back it, it is now clear from insider accounts like that of Richard Clark that the three top leaders just mentioned wanted Iraq first. The UK ambassador to the US maintains that it was Tony Blair who talked Bush into going after al-Qaeda in Afghanistan first, with a promise that he would later support an Iraq war. MI6 would have been briefing Tony about the dire threat coming from Afghanistan, and he, unlike the Bush team, could see the dangers of getting bogged down in an Iraq quagmire while al-Qaeda and the Taliban were still in control of Afghanistan. (Can you imagine the full scope of that disaster that Bush had planned for us?)

Even after Bush was dragged kicking and screaming into doing the right thing by Blair, he did it half-heartedly. He let Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri escape. (I'll repeat that. He let Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri escape). Instead of rebuilding and stabilizing Afghanistan, as he promised, he put almost nothing into reconstruction for that country.

Then he let the poppy growing industry come back with a vengeance. Afghanistan's GNP is $5 billion a year. At least $2 billion of that is poppies, and Afghanistan has become the top source for heroin in Europe. With al-Qaeda and the Taliban still powerful in the country or its borderlands, Afghanistan is on the way to becoming a terrorist's dream-- a place worse than Colombia from which narco-terrorism can be funded and launched. This looming disaster will certainly blow back on the American homeland. Yet Bush is doing nothing to avert it.

As for democracy and liberating 50 million people, neither the people of Afghanistan nor that of Iraq have elected national governments by popular sovereignty. It is not entirely clear when they will be able to do so. For the moment, there hasn't been any introduction of anything like democracy. The US invaded each and installed a government of its choosing. That isn't democracy. In Iraq, Paul Bremer repeatedly blocked democratic municipal elections. That was a great lesson for the people in democracy, all right.

' The dictator in Iraq had the "capability of producing weapons of mass murder. And now, the dictator is a threat to nobody, and the American people are safer." '

Bush must think we are a nation of retards if he believes we will buy this language of Saddam having the "capability" to produce weapons of mass destruction. All countries have the "capability." The point is that Iraq had given up its WMD programs and destroyed the stockpiles. The US was not in any danger from Iraq, and so cannot be safer because it was invaded.

Worse, the American invasion of Iraq is a major recruitment poster for al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda's message was that the Americans are coming to Muslim lands. 'They will invade your countries, expropriate your property, rape your women, and humiliate your men,' al-Qaeda screams. What does Bush do? He proves al-Qaeda right. More angry young Arab men are ready to fight the United States now than ever before. Bush is less popular than Bin Laden in most Muslim countries according to polls.

Not only has the Bush administration angered the Sunni Muslim world with its invasion and hamhanded occupation of Iraq, but it has managed to turn the Shiites against us too, by desecrating the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala this past spring.

The US is arguably much less safe because of the invasion of Iraq.

' He said Pakistan used to be a safe transit point for terrorists on missions of murder. "Now Pakistani forces are rounding up terrorists, and the American people are safer." '

This is a nice sound bite but bears no resemblance to reality. The major jihadi groups in Pakistan are still operating, and the Pakistani government has been largely unable or unwilling to stop them. The Pakistanis did arrest some 500 al-Qaeda Arabs, but Pakistani courts have not cooperated with its attempts to subject the jihadis to mass arrests. A major jihadi leader was sitting in parliament until he was assassinated recently!

Moreover, Pakistan remains virtually a military dictatorship, where parliament is not sovereign and where Gen. Musharraf basically appoints and removes prime ministers by fiat (PM Jamali was recently forced out).

' In Saudi Arabia, terrorists were meeting little opposition, but today the Saudi Government is taking the fight to al-Qaeda, and the American people are safer, he said. '

In Saudi Arabia, Americans were relatively safe before the Iraq war. Now Americans are in danger in Saudi Arabia, and are fleeing the country. This is an improvement?

' Not long ago, Libya was spending millions to acquire weapons of mass destruction. "Now, thousands of Libya's chemical munitions have been destroyed. Libya has given up nuclear processing equipment, and the American people are safer," he claimed. '

Oh, give it up. Libya had been trying to make that deal for years. (The European pressure and boycott was what had done the trick). What really changed was that the Americans became more receptive to such a deal. But then right in the middle of Qaddafi coming in from the cold it surfaced that he had gotten up a plot to assassinate a Saudi leader! Made it hard to crow too loud about rehabilitating him.

Plus Bush does not mention that the entire Muslim world is royally pissed off at the United States for coddling Ariel Sharon while he gobbles up nearly half of the West Bank, expropriating and brutalizing the Palestinians in the process. Even the World Court has condemned his greedy fence, which annexes massive amounts of Palestinian land. Bush has just lain down on the ground and pleaded with Sharon to walk all over him with hobnail boots, and then smiled for the privilege. Arab satellite television shows Israelis repressing Palestinians every day. The Bush administration has actually endorsed the forcible Israeli annexation of Palestinian land, which violates the United Nations Charter and the Geneva Accords!

Pursuing a policy that makes us highly unpopular with 1.3 billion people is not a means of making us safer.

So, no, Americans are not safer, Mr. Bush. They face the threat of substantial narco-terrorism from Afghanistan. Iraq is a security nightmare that could well blow back on the American homeland. Pakistan remains a military dictatorship with a host of militant jihadi movements that had been fomented by the hardline Pakistani military intelligence. Saudi Arabia is witnessing increased al-Qaeda activity and attacks on Westerners. And the Israeli-Palestine dispute is being left to fester and poison the world.

These are not achievements to be proud of. This is a string of disasters. We are not safer. We face incredible danger because of the way the Bush administration has grossly mishandled the Middle East.

7 Die in Green Zone Bombing
Olympic Head Avoids Assassination

Reuters reports that guerrillas killed at least 7 persons with a car bomb at the entrance of the Green Zone (which houses US and interim Iraqi government personnel.

The head of Iraq's Olympic committee, Ahmad al-Hajiya, barely escaped being killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad on Tuesday.

The Zarqawi group took credit for beheading a Bulgarian hostage.

Iraqi Police Arrest 527 in Dragnet
Sistani calls for National Unity

Al-Zaman: Iraqi police swept the al-Rusafah quarter of Baghdad on Tuesday, arresting 527 persons suspected of having committed violent crimes or of having been involved in weapons smuggling. They also made arrests of foreigners in the Bab al-Shaikh Quarter.

This set of mass arrests appears to be the first practical result of the hard line policies announced by interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. Recent emergency decrees in Iraq have weakened civil liberties.

Al-Hayat Likewise, a joint Kurdish and US military task force operating in the north of Iraq arrested 17 suspected members of the Ansar al-Islam terrorist organization in Mosul, Kirkuk, Samarra and Baquba.

Meanwhile, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani met at his office in Najaf with a delegation of Sunni Kurdish clerics from the Union of Islamic Clerics of Kurdistan. He condemned terrorism, condemened the attempts of some evil persons to sow dissension between Sunnis and Shiites, and called for Iraqi national unity across cleavages of religion, province, and so forth. He said that Iraq is for all Iraqis.

60% of Iraqi Historical Records Gone

Valentinas Mite of Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty tells us more about the destruction of a substantial portion of Iraq's archives.

Saad Iskandar, Director of the Iraqi Archives, is quoted as saying, ' "We lost about 60 percent of our state records and documents -- they were either burned or damaged by water. [The lost documents belonged] to all the ministries, all departments of the state from the late 19th century up to Saddam's period. As concerns books, I think we lost some 25 percent of them, mostly rare books, the most valuable books." '

Abu Ghuraib Shelled; Roadside Bombs in Baghdad

Wire services report that

Guerrillas fired mortar rounds at Abu Ghuraib prison outside Baghdad on Monday, lightly wounding a civilian "contractor" (likely a private security guard or translator, but the report is not specific). This attack marked the sixth time the prison has been attacked in this way. In April 22 prisoners were killed by mortar fire.

In central Baghdad near Haifa street, guerrillas detonated five roadside bombs as US military vehicles passed by, but only managed to put some dents in a Humvee; there were no casualties.

There were more explosions in Baghdad in the mid-afternoon local time, but the cause was unclear.

Voice of America Imperilled

Alan Heil, author of an important history of the Voice of America, sends along dire news about the service.

For Arabic broadcasting, this development is rather as if the government abolished National Public Radio and replaced it with Mr. Pattiz's Westwood One pablum and top 40 list. Americans should please communicate with their members of Congress about this fiasco in American public diplomacy.

Radio, if it is to serve and survive, must hold a mirror up to the nation and the world. The mirror must have no curves, and be held with a steady hand."
---Edward R, Murrow

Murrow's statement as warclouds gathered over Europe in the late 1930s might well apply today to the nation's largest overseas network, the Voice of America (VOA). The situation at the Voice is deteriorating quickly, despite steadfast efforts on the part of its professional staff to retain its place as a globally respected source of news and information about Middle East, U.S. and world events.

VOA News Director Andre de Nesnera was transferred from his position to senior diplomatic correspondent of VOA July 1 by VOA Director David Jackson. This was no routine personnel move. De Nesnera is an award-winning journalist who had been a steadfast shield against efforts of the presidentially-appointed director over the past two years to second guess VOA news copy, particularly on Iraq. No VOA chief executive has taken such a hands-on approach to the newscasts in at least half a century.

De Nesnera's removal occurred just four days before 450 employees of the Voice (managers, journalists, producers and engineers---about half its staff) circulated a petition on Capitol Hill calling for an investigation of the Voice's oversight board, the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors. The BBG since 2002 has:

--Closed VOA Arabic and replaced it with Radio Sawa, a 24/7 pop music service aimed at youth, rather than intellectuals, government leaders, educators and movers and shakers in Arab society,

--Reduced VOA's global English service from 24 to 19 hours a day, with more cuts to come next October on the eve of the U.S. presidential election. VOA can barely be heard in the Middle East in English as a result of these cuts and it will get worse: there will be only 14 hours on the air daily next winter.

--Abolished ten VOA language services to central and eastern Europe last February 14: Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Hungarian, Romanian,
Bulgarian, Czech, Slovak and Slovene.

The inevitable consequence of these reductions (some of which were made to reprogram funds for the Board's new Radio Sawa and Alhurra TV services) is to weaken significantly the Voice of America's reach around the world.

In technical as well as programming terms, VOA is being reduced to a shadow of its former self --- especially in the Middle East. Board member Norman J. Pattiz, chairman of its Middle East subcommittee, wasted no time after Sawa went on the air on March 20, 2002 in ordering reallocation of VOA frequencies in the region to enhance his pet project. He directed the powerful 500-kilowatt Kuwait and Rhodes medium wave relay stations to serve only Sawa in Arabic, 24/7. That meant that VOA English, Persian, and Kurdish had to rely solely (at least for nearly a year) on less accessible shortwave transmissions to reach their listeners. This was also the case on the Kuwait facility for RFE/RL's Persian Service and its in-depth Arabic language program, Radio Free Iraq. In 2003, however, a much weaker medium wave transmission (105-kilowatts) was added in Kuwait to broadcast parts of VOA Persian, VOA English and Radio Free Iraq.

The Board, meanwhile, abolished RFE's widely listened to Persian Service (Radio Azadi) on December 1, 2002, and replaced it with a Persian language pop music sibling of Radio Sawa named Radio Farda. Farda also was given a place on the weaker Kuwait medium wave frequency, and has gradually been able to increase its substantive news content. But unlike the old RFE Persian Service, it was given a 24/7 schedule on shortwave which still consists of about two thirds music. (The Board decided, in launching Farda, to retain VOA Persian, but only three hours daily --- strengthened a year ago with daily hour long TV transmissions including call-in programs to Iran.)

Now, the Board is abolishing Radio Free Iraq, the U.S. government's last really substantive radio voice in Arabic to the Arab world. RFI will go off the air on September 30, at a time of great uncertainty in Iraq's transition and three months before the deadline for holding the first elections there.

It is true that VOA Arabic used to be on what Pattiz has called "scratchy shortwave" as well as medium wave facilities before the service was abolished in 2002. The big (and costly) innovation has been in leasing terrestrial FM facilities in the Arab world to get Sawa's signals out there in FM and medium wave --- much more popular among listeners than shortwave. VOA Arabic was on the air 7 hours a day. Sawa is on 24/7. VOA Arabic cost the taxpayer $4 million dollars in its final year; Sawa cost $34 million in its first year. Most surprisingly perhaps, Pattiz insisted on the reallocation of many of those "scratchy shortwave" frequencies to Sawa, which devotes about three quarters of its airtime to pop music. The Board also negotiated a contract for a 500-kilowatt medium wave transmitter in Cyprus, greatly enhancing Sawa's reach during nighttime hours into Egypt. (Egypt, unlike Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Djibouti and many of the Gulf emirates, so far has refused to permit Sawa to broadcast on a local FM frequency.)

In terms of expenditures though, these radio initiatives are dwarfed by Pattiz's investment in U.S.-originated satellite TV in Arabic. The Board launched Alhurra TV last February 14, entering a field of more than 170 mostly indigenous channels in the Arab world. The first year cost of Alhurra (The Free One, in Arabic) exceeds $100 million, including $40 million from a Department of Defense supplemental. Thus, in the current budget year, the Board is spending more than a fourth of its total budget for worldwide broadcasting on Sawa and Alhurra-TV.

The early returns on Alhurra are mixed. Although e-mails and some surveys have been favorable, there also have been criticisms of its professionalism in the region and in the West. As one Lebanese-American editor in Washington noted: "The training wheels came off when Alhurra carried cooking and fashion shows during live coverage by Al Jazeera, Al-Arabiya and others of violence in Fallujah and during the Israeli assault on Rafah. It's ridiculous," the editor added, "and Alhurra was not being taken seriously during a recent visit I made to the region. There's nothing worse than not being taken seriously when you are a journalist."

Small wonder, then, that the VOA staff has called for a Congressional investigation of the Board and its oversight of the Voice. That seems overdue. In the post 9/11 world, with anti-American sentiment at its peak, the nation has not a moment to lose in getting its international broadcasting to the Arab and Muslim worlds right. It can do so by reinforcing--- rather than destroying---the time honored principles of timely, accurate, objective and comprehensive reportage and programming to reformers in those countries yearning for a brighter day.

Alan L. Heil Jr. is a former VOA deputy director and author of "Voice of America: A History" (Columbia University Press, 2003)'

Iraqi Economy: Setser Replies

Reader and economist Brad Setser responded to my comment on the Financial Times article on the Iraqi economy last weekend.

I . . . have tried to follow Iraq closely (both the debt restructuring forgiveness debate, the use of oil revenues, the loans v. grants debate and more generally the pace of economic reconstruction). I share your amazement and frustration that the CPA seemed to prioritize doctrinaire conservative economics (low marginal taxes, openness to foreign investment) rather than practical steps to manage the enormously difficult transition from a state dominated economy to a more mixed economy without generating massive hardship, and the as difficult challenge of managing the oil curse.

I also agree with the main thrust of your commentary on the FT posting -- Iraq's economy now is one based on taking the funds resulting from the distribution of oil revenues through the state (mostly) and any CPA reconstruction that trickles down (plus any savings) and buying imported consumer goods. In many ways, imported consumer goods seem to be the preferred form of savings. Iraq also is at risk of Dutch disease -- indeed, I worry that the combination of higher than expected oil revenues with oil at 40 (assuming the pipelines function) and the eventual disbursement of the $18 billion aid package will create an economy temporarily swimming in dollars (with a strong real appreciation of the currency). all fine if it lasts -- Iraq should have an economy a lot bigger than $20 billion even if it does little more than sell its existing oil production capacity and spend the proceeds. But also risky if oil falls just when the aid package is finished off -- Iraq needs steady external revenues from oil/ aid of $25-30 billion a year, not $40 billion one year and $15 billion the text.

One small point of disagreement though. I don't see why Iraq is at risk of hyperinflation. Hyperinflation (weimer style, or argentine style) usually occurs when a government spends more than it takes in, and runs the printing presses (borrows from the central bank) to make up the difference. As inflation accelerates, the government has to run the presses faster and faster to continue to fill its coffers. Iraq should not have that problem -- higher oil revenues = higher external reserves, so any domestic money creation ought to be backed by a solid external asset (it won't be printing more dinars and thus spreading the same set of dollar reserves ever thinner). The budget should be fully funded out of revenue/ aid. that should limit the risk of hyper-inflation, as it is normally defined. I do think there is a risk that higher than expected oil revenues will lead to a real appreciation of the currency, whether through a change in the nominal dinar/ dollar rate or a one off increase in dinar prices (a burst of inflation), as more dollars (or dinars, if iraq converts dollars to dinars) are chasing the same set of local goods (I have not thought this through enough to have a sense of which is more likely). But some inflation as the economy grows is not the same as hyperinflation (an ever increasing rate of inflation), and indeed, the substitutability of foreign goods for local goods ultimately will act as a break on the increase in local prices. That's a long winded way of saying I think the concern about dutch disease (real appreciation due to oil windfall making local production of many goods uncompetitive) is there, but that there is little short-term risk of hyperinflation.

(My hyperinflation scenario would involve the government making up a gap in revenues created by an unexpected fall in oil revenues by running the printing presses -- not today's problem) . . .

Brad Setser

Cole replies: I'm very grateful to Dr. Setser for taking the time to respond. O.K., I shouldn't have said hyper-inflation. But sudden big influxes of oil wealth, as occurred in Iran in the mid-1970s, have historically caused high rates of inflation that in turn created social problems. In Iran's case, we social historians think the high inflation rate contributed to the outbreak of revolution in 1978-79. It may be, as Dr. Setser says, that this kind of inflation would moderate in the long run, unlike the spiral of hyperinflation caused by the government being trapped into needing to print more and more money. But in the long run, as Keynes said, we are all dead. The question is whether the inflation rate would rise fast enough and far enough to cause major social disruptions in Iraq of the late Pahlevi sort. (It is true that the smaller Gulf monarchies weathered the 1970s better than Iran, but they typically lack absorptive capacity in the first place, having small populations, so I would argue that the oil receipts mainly got recycled into foreign investments.)

3 US Troops Killed, 4 Wounded

Guerrillas near Samarra detonated a roadside bomb as a US convoy passed on Sunday, killing two US soldiers and wounding 3 others.

In Mosul, guerrillas set off another roadside bomb, killing one US soldier and injuring another, along with an Iraqi civilian. US troops killed one guerrilla in response.

BBC monitoring reports that Dar Al-Salam radio says the Iraqi Islamic Party HQ in Baghdad suffered huge damage in an explosion, apparently from an explosive charge, on Sunday. No one seems to have been wounded. The IIR of Muhsin Abdul Hamid has cooperated with the Americans, but it is close ideologically to the Muslim Brotherhood and one wonders who had a motive to blow up its HQ. Perhaps Abdul Hamid is being punished by Iraqi nationalists for serving on the Interim Governing Council?

The hostage crises continued, with a Filipino hostage in particular danger. The Philippines will not renew its troop commitment beyond August.

The gradual peeling away of the Coalition of the willing in Iraq has been little reported because it is happening piecemeal. But after the Spanish left several of the Central American contingents did as well, and the Norwegians are gone, too. It would be interesting to tally up the number of countries that left or are leaving Iraq May-September this summer. The hostage taking probably is not responsible, but the poor security situation explains both the hostage taking and the reluctance of small peace keeping countries to remain involved.

Junichiro Koizumi of Japan appears to have been punished by the Japanese electorate for his strong pro-Bush stance on Iraq. He won't be forced to resign after a poor showing in Sunday's Senate elections, but he has been weakened and humiliated.

Bush's Iraq war may be the biggest setback for the international Right in decades.

Demonstrations over Saddam in Baqubah, Baghdad

Al-Hayat reports that hundreds of Iraqis demonstrated in the eastern city of Baqubah on Sunday in favor of Saddam Hussein. They carried placards ridiculing his trial as "staged." Some in the crowd were masked gunmen. They chanted, according to the BBC, "We will never give up on Iraq or Saddam. Saddam is the pride of my country in spite of Allawi."

In contrast, in downtown Baghdad demonstrators burned Saddam in effigy and shouted that any lawyers who defended him would be defending barbarism and savagery.

The article does not say so, but obviously the pro-Saddam crowd in Baqubah is Sunnis, whereas the demonstration in Baghdad was made up of Shiites. Baqubah Sunnis live in a mixed province. A lot of Shiite Arabs and Shiite Faili Kurds have come back into it from exile in Iran, and the Sunnis no doubt fear being displaced or reduced to minority status. Saddam therefore means something to them far beyond his mere political rule. He is a symbol for them of their own high status and perquisites, which are now threatened.

The demonstrations, though relatively small, suggest the ways in which the trial of Saddam is likely to be extremely polarizing in Iraq and may well cause a good deal of trouble.

Shiites and the US Army in Karbala and Sadr City

Ken Dilanian of Knight Ridder has a piece on how the 37th Armored Regiment's 1st Battalion fought an ideal battle in the Shiite holy city of Karbala against the Mahdi Army, defeating them without damaging the shrines of Imam Husayn and Abu'l-Fadil Abbas.

The article depends very heavily on interviews with the battalion's commander, Lt. Col. Garry Bishop. It is not wrong as far as it goes. But the article is an example of how the US military has lost Iraq. They just don't understand.

Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army were never popular in Karbala and had no local grass roots to speak of. The Mahdi Army fighters there were mostly outsiders from East Baghdad or other Shiite cities. They had made a concerted effort to take over the shrine of Imam Husayn last summer, but were checkmated by forces loyal to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.

The strange decision of the Americans to try to arrest Muqtada provoked his people to launch an insurgency throughout the south, and it is my suspicion that their Shiite enemies, like the Badr Corps and some tribal levies, stepped aside at that point.

So, the Americans wouldn't have had to fight the Mahdi Army in Karbala at all if they hadn't foolishly tried to arrest Muqtada. Once they did that, a lot of Shiites rallied to Muqtada's side, including a lot of local police.

The US military fairly easily wiped the mat with a bunch of untrained ghetto youths who had little more than machine guns and some rocket propelled grenades. They killed about 400 in Karbala. But they were lucky to be fighting the Mahdi Army in a place where it lacked deep support to begin with. Unlike in Fallujah, they did not have to take on the entire city to take on the Mahdi Army. Sistani and his supporters were implicitly on Lt. Col. Bishop's side.

While it is true that the US resisted the temptation to destroy the shrine of Imam Husayn (the beloved, martyred grandson of the Prophet Muhammad), they did major damage to an old and revered mosque that the Mahdi Army had made a base. The US military doesn't seem to understand that it gets no points for not destroying the shrine of Imam Husayn. That would be like our being grateful to some Muslim army in Rome that it forebore to level the Basilica of St. Peter. The deed is unthinkable, especially at the hands of foreign troops, and so the avoiding of it inspires no gratitude.

On the other hand, the US troops did get graded down by Shiites for fighting in Karbala at all (they even called down air strikes on the city). The fighting there was a form of desecration that inspried rage at the US among Shiites throughout the world, as well as in Iraq. Moreover, even though local Karbala'is don't have the time of day for poor ghetto youth gang members like Mahdi Army, no Iraqi Shiite wants to see American Christians and Jews (that is how they think of them) killing Iraqi Shiites and threatening to kill a scion of the House of the Prophet.

In the PR battle, the odds were so stacked against the US military that it could never have won in Karbala. The military victory there cost the US enormous good will among Shiites in Iraq and abroad. I don't know when the raw feelings will subside. As for it being orderly now in Karbala, sure. The US called off its hit on Muqtada, and it killed 400 fighters. But it was orderly in Karbala on March 31 before Mr. Bremer stupidly went after Muqtada. So all that was achieved was a status quo ante from a security point of view. And the public relations losses were colossal.

The article would have been better if the author had remembered about the air strikes and the destruction of the Mukhayyam mosque, or the big demonstrations in Bahrain, Lebanon and Iran by outraged Shiites. In other words, the piece lacked a larger context in which the operation was not a model success but a massive political failure, If you don't have a yardstick for what is a success and what is a failure, you can't make any progress.

A much better sense of the situation for the US army among the Shiites can be had from Philip Robertson's piece in Salon.com (it is worth the day pass for anyone who does not subscribe). A couple short quotes:

' Now, after months of continuous fighting, young men in the 1st Battalion, 5th Regiment have experienced some of the highest casualties of any unit in post-invasion Iraq, with a number of soldiers receiving multiple Purple Hearts. Two are still on duty. There's a fatalistic joke going around the barracks that goes, "If you get five Purple Hearts, you get to go home." More than 30 members of Alpha Company have been wounded in action, and those who haven't been describe miraculous near-misses outside the base. For Alpha Company soldiers, these are bad odds, and they get worse in light of the current administration's policy -- fewer U.S. soldiers in Iraq means greater stress for those sent into it, soldiers out on constant patrols, working vast areas of operation . . .

The vehicles in the Camp Eagle graveyard tell part of the Alpha Company story: Humvees with blown-out windshields, direct hits with rocket propelled grenades on windshields and doors, two burned Bradleys, other Humvees destroyed by roadside bombs. Rocket impacts give the steel a moth-eaten look. The million-dollar equipment is ragged, pushed to the edge from overuse. A number of the soldiers from Alpha Company who were in them during the attacks talk about recurring nightmares, trouble sleeping. Butler said he still had dreams about April 4 and the other bad days that followed. I asked Butler if Iraq was what he expected. "I didn't think it would be like this. No one is going through what we are going through," he told me.

On the morning of June 28, the Coalition Provisional Authority announced the transfer of sovereignty to Iraq, dissolving itself. It didn't amount to much beyond a political abstraction for Butler. The only development that matters to him is the cease-fire. Nothing else has changed -- he still has to take his platoon out on patrol, he still has to worry about an armed insurgency and ambushes. "They just don't want us here," Butler said. "I hope that all of us make it back. I pray that we all do, but I don't think it could get any worse. This is worse. I'll do everything I can to bring all the soldiers back. Anything." '

Al-Haeri Breaks with Sadr

An informed reader writes from London:

Sayyid Muqtada Al-Sadr has now been officially renounced by Ayatullah Kadhim Al-Haeri. He has been stripped of his "wukala"(representation) and also denied the right of accepting and using any religious dues on behalf of his father as well as Ayatullah Haeri. This is a
big turnaround, although it has been sometime coming. You can read it on Ayatullah Haeri's official site (http://www.alhaeri.org/iraq.html) where there are a few questions posted regarding Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Iraq situation in general. It is also to be noted on that page that Ayatullah Haeri remarks that Shaykh Muhammad Al-Yaqoobi is not a Mujtahid (Yaqoobi claims he is a Mujtahid and a Marji') and is not to be followed. This is quite a big move, since it now leaves Ayatullah Haeri without much support among the grass-root followers from the Sadr movement, be it from Muqtada Al-Sadr's group or that of Shaykh Yaqoobi.

Secondly, there are strong rumours circulating around the streets of Najaf that Muqtada Al-Sadr has had a fallout with some of his top lieutenants and officials from the Sayyid Al-Shaheed office over his recent moves to make some deals and political maneouvering with Iyad Allawi and the new Iraqi government. My relatives in Najaf told me over the phone that it seems he has acted without consultation over a few issues and has been trying to
improve his relations with the interim government. Another rumour is that he was actually attacked by one of his aides, but this seems rather unlikely. The only source of this I could find was on (
http://www.alnajafnews.net/news/
news.php?action=fullnews&id=550, but all info from this site is to be viewed sceptically, since it belongs to the office of Jawad Shahristani, Sayyid Seestani's son-in-law and top representative, who absolutely loathes Muqtada Al-Sadr.

Finally, there is a big struggle happening here in London between some influential expatriates, politicians in the Iraqi interim government and officials from the UN. The expatriates are demanding the right for postal voting, to allow them to take part in the forthcoming elections. The problem is many of them do not have official Iraqi citizenship (either it was rebuked, or they never received it) and many inside Iraq are reluctant to
allow moves for the accomodation of postal voting to happen. The conspiracy theorists are saying that is because of the estimated 5 million Iraqis living outside Iraq, roughly 4 million of them are Shia, which would heavily influence the result of any election. I can't help but feel there is some truth to this, but then again, the logistical difficulty of such a large scale process should not be underestimated.

4 Marines, 5 Iraqis Killed

Guerrillas operating near Fallujah killed four Marines on Saturday.

AFP reports other incidents:

US Marines in Ramadi engaged in a firefight with 7 black-costumed guerrillas, killing two of them. Five Iraqis were wounded in the incident. The US military spokesman explained, "Those seven fired on the marines from the taxi stop. The marines returned fire, killing two of the attackers and seized the vehicle they used, which had a machine gun mounted on the back."

Guerrillas set off a roadside bomb north of Baqubah as a US military convoy passed, but they missed it and wounded three Iraqis instead.

The guerrilla resistance to the American new order in Iraq sabotaged a gas pipeline near Kirkuk. The pipeline fed the Beiji power plants.

Assassins stabbed to death a Kurdish translator for the US troops north of Kirkuk. Also in the Kirkuk area, guerrillas fired on the offices of the largely Arab Union of Farming Cooperatives, and killed a guard. Arab farmers in that region are most often transplants from further south, brought in by Saddam as part of a campaign of Arabization.

Vigilantes firebombed four liquor stores in the turbulent city of Baqubah. Although the stores were closed at the time, the bombs did kill one passerby.

Iraqi Economy Limping Along Because of Poor Security

The Financial Times has a suggestive story on the Iraqi economy and its continued woes. One conclusion I draw from it is that a lot of the new money in people's hands is going right out of the country for the purchase of electronics and automobiles from abroad. If there is a huge consumer-driven balance of trade deficit with the outside world, that would be negative in a number of ways. It would weaken the value of the Iraqi dinar. And it would limit the circulation, and the velocity of circulation, of capital inside Iraq itself. Combine that trend with continued sabotage of oil and gas pipelines (thus limiting Iraqi exports of these fuels and cutting down on receipts), with undercapitalization of Iraqi banks, and with skittishness among foreign investors about putting money into Iraq, and you get a deflationary situation.

The bad news is that many of the fixes for these problems could create more problems of their own. If Iraq could pump more petroleum, that would harden its currency and make manufactured and primary commodities from Iraq more expensive to neighbors like India and Pakistan, which lack much petroleum. Petroleum wealth can be a curse, causing the "Dutch disease" and hurting producers of other goods. Moreover, a big petroleum income combined with an influx of foreign aid could create hyper-inflation.

Getting the Iraqi economy right will be no easy task. Just having a lot of money sloshing around is not the same as development. Ask the Shah of Iran.

Anti-Occupation Forces Reject National Congress

A National Congress of 1,000 notables will be held for 3 days later in July. It will elect an advisory body of 100, which will have a veto power over some decisions of Prime Minister Allawi. This weak, Duma-like council was proposed by UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi as a means of involving a wide spectrum of the Iraqi political forces in the transitional government.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that some significant political figures and forces have announced that they will boycott the congress, holding that it is an institution of the on-going Occupation. They say they will run for office when Iraq is truly independent. Among the rejectionists are Muqtada al-Sadr and many members of his movement, which is important in East Baghdad's slums. Another Shiite cleric, Muhammad al-Khalisi, has also refused to be involved. Likewise Jawad al-Sari, leader of the Arab National Party, and the prominent political scientist at Baghdad University, Wamidh Nadhmi.

On the other hand, Fuad Masoum, who is organizing the congress, says that former Baath Party members who do not have blood on their hands will be welcome to participate. He also complained to the Saudi-backed London daily that many Iraqis had wanted to hold the national congress in May, but that plan had been vetoed by Paul Bremer. Masum counts that move as a major mistake.

Iraqi Women Being Dragged Backwards

Trudy Rubin of the Philadelphia Inquirer brings back grim news about the situation of women from her recent trip to Iraq.

She writes,

'during my recent trip to Iraq, middle-class women spoke to me about their fears of moving backward after the U.S. invasion. A temporary code of law drafted by American lawyers guarantees women's rights in coming months. But an elected Iraqi government could cave to growing religious pressures to curb those rights.

"I think women are left naked after July 1" when sovereignty reverted to Iraqis, said Manal Omar of Women for Women International. Her group, based in Washington, helps women in post-conflict societies. "In Afghanistan, you saw a bit of easing [on women's rights], but in Iraq we're going backward. We are fighting for the status quo." '

She notes that women are trying to organize in Baghdad, and hope to get out the vote.

Feith Cell Under Attack from Senate

The Telegraph points out that the annex to the Senate Intelligence report on failures leading to the Iraq war takes singular aim at Undersecretary of Defense for Planning, Douglas Feith, for having set up a cell in the Pentagon that briefed the White House on Iraq without the knowledge of CIA director George Tenet. It may actually have broken the law by gathering intelligence.

This story won't be a surprise to regular readers. What is remarkable is that the Democrats in the Senate apparently are beginning to get their footing and are actively gunning for Feith. He has strong support from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the main think tank of the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC), both of which have moved increasingly close to Israel's far-right Likud Party, and it will be interesting to see if the senators prove willing to buck this influential lobby. If so, and if it is done successfully, such a move could damage the myth of AIPAC's invincibility and open up American politics to a wider range of views on Mideast policy.

Fatal Mortar Duels in Baghdad, Samarra
Senate Tries to Make CIA the Fall Guy

Correpondents in Iraq report that guerrillas launched mortar fire at the area around Sadeer Hotel, a favorite of foreigners on Friday. They killed a child and wounded three hotel guards. In Samarra to the north of Baghdad, mortar fire took the lives of two Iraqis and wounded a third. Local residents accused the US of firing the mortars. Near Fallujah, guerrillas fired reocket propelled grenades at a US military convoy, managing to set one truck afire.

The Senate intelligence committee (which is dominated by Republicans) released a report on Friday that blames the CIA for the bad intelligence on Iraq that led to the war. It appears to have aimed at exonerating George W. Bush, who is presented as having been deceived by poor intelligence and bad judgment calls inside the Agency.

But the CIA wasn't as irresponsible as the Bush administration and the Pentagon. For instance, CIA director George Tenet refused to sign off on the Niger uranium purchase story that Bush wanted in his 2003 State of the Union address. Because of Tenet's opposition, Bush had to source the story to British intelligence instead. Stephen Hadley, deputy national security adviser and a Trojan Horse working with Scooter Libby of Dick Cheney's staff to get up an Iraq war, signed off on the inclusion of the passage.

This story tells me that the rush to war was not coming from the CIA, which does not make policy, but from elements in the Bush administration and from the president himself. The anecdote is telling because it reveals the fault lines. There were things Tenet would not sign onto, but which Bush and Hadley and Libby would. Ipso facto, the morass is their fault, not solely or even mainly Tenet's.

Muqtada thanks Iran, Syria;
Sumayd'i Criticizes Emergency Law as Undemocratic

az-Zaman: Muqtada al-Sadr expressed his gratitude Friday to Iranian President Muhammad Khatami and Syrian President Bashar al-Asad for rejecting foreign presence in Iraq. He also criticized Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, in his Friday sermon, read for him at the Kufa mosque by Shaikh Jabir al-Khafaji. He said, "For these multinational forces to remain means instability in the entire world, not just in Iraq."

The New York Times reports of Muqtada's sermon and its criticisms of Allawi:

' At Friday Prayer on July 9 in Kufa, Najaf's twin city, a statement delivered on behalf of Mr. Sadr characterized the Allawi government as having been "installed by the occupier" and issued this defiant warning, "Any attack to any member of the resistance, be it Sunni or Shia, will be considered an act of aggression against the entire Iraqi people." '

He also called on the Jordanian government, according to ash-Sharq al-Awsat, to prevent the committee for the defense of Saddam Hussein from transiting its territory in order to come to Baghdad to defend the former Iraqi president. He warned Jordan that it had intervened in Iraqi affairs enough, and that it was quite enough that it had allowed terrorists to infiltrate into Iraq to spread chaos in the country. He called for Saddam to be executed before the Iraqi people.

A Sadr supporter, Shaikh Abdul Mahdi al-Daraji, said in his Friday sermon at the al-Hikmah Mosque in East Baghdad before hundreds of worshippers, "the transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqis is something superficial and formal . . . a close observer of events will see that the American patrols still penetrate Iraqi cities and enter areas of habitation. That means that the Occupation remains in place, and sovereignty is mere words on paper."

Shiites from the al-Hikmah congregation in East Baghdad gathered for a rally after prayers, where they chanted for the execution of Saddam and chanted in support of Muqtada al-Sadr.

The Sunni Shaikh Abd al-Ghafur al-Samarra'i called in his sermon at the Umm al-Qura mosque in Baghdad on the Allawi government to "refuse to work to imprison the people or to strike at our people in Fallujah and Samarra." He added that the Americans were prolonging their presence in Iraq on the pretext of "the Jordanian Islamist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi." He added, "A poor family has been completely wiped out in Fallujah for the sake of al-Zarqawi. That is enough. We should have true sovereignty or a mass resignation (of the government)."

Shaikh Mahdi al-Sumayd'i, the Sunni Imam of the Ibn Taymiyah Mosque in the center of Baghdad, criticized the newly announced Emergency Law, saying that it "contravenes and contradicts the democratic passages espoused by the peoples of the world."


Plus, don't miss Hannah Allam's important profile of the radical Sunni Arab cleric Hareth al-Dhari, among the more important political and religious figures in contemporary Iraq. An excerpt:

' In a series of interviews with Knight Ridder in the past month, al Dhari said he's not the insurgent mastermind his critics portray. He said he doesn't finance insurgents or issue commands. He said he's never met with foreign guerrillas, although he unabashedly supports Iraqis who take up arms against U.S.-led forces. His newspaper publishes flowery obituaries of fallen insurgents from Anbar province.

"The heroes are the ones fighting," al Dhari said in his most recent interview. "I'm just an assistant."

The cleric became a hero in Fallujah, the heart of the Anbar insurgency, for running aid convoys and ushering refugees to safety as U.S. Marines pounded the city during a siege in April.

The siege was the springboard for al Dhari's newfound status as Sunni Islam's loudest voice in Iraq. He issued a fatwa, or religious edict, ordering followers to boycott American and British products and preached fiery sermons.

"Fire on every traitor, and everyone who pushed towards occupying this country," al Dhari said in April, condemning U.S.-appointed Iraqi leaders. "Woe to all of them ... because of what they are doing against their people."

Al Dhari's scholarly background and rebellious spirit make him a Sunni combination of his two best-known Shiite counterparts, the venerated Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani and the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. His association is the umbrella group for more than 6,000 Sunni mosques, nearly 80 percent of that sect's religious institutions in Iraq.

The sheik's detractors say he must be stopped before he steers Iraq into an oppressive, Taliban-style regime. Supporters say he's the only viable political hope for Sunnis, whose fortunes were reversed when Saddam Hussein fell.

"He represents the Sunni opposition voice in Iraq and this opposition is supported by outsiders who have no business here," said Sheik Homam Hamoodi of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the dominant Shiite group.

So far, al Dhari has avoided arrests or raids. Some officials say he's too useful as a conduit to guerrilla groups; others say U.S. actions against him would only make him a martyr and provoke more attacks. Al Dhari said he's done nothing wrong. '

Voice of America Staff Petition to Congress

I received the following from Alan Heil regarding the Voice of America and the continued sinister attempts to abolish it in favor of an AM radio format. This gutting of intelligent US debate and self-presentation to the rest of the world is being spear-headed by the Broadcasting Board of Governors and especially by Norman Pattiz. They have already destroyed the Arabic service of the Voice of America, which was among the best radio programming in that language. They have replaced it with Radio Sawwa, which mainly broadcasts Britney Spears and Umm Kulthum to Arab audiences, along with at tiny bit of news and interviews. Most important Arab countries are not even letting it be broadcast (it only is received on FM frequencies). It has a fair listernership among teeny boppers in Jordan, e.g. But that is not a fair trade for the movers and shakers who used to listen to the Voice of America. The BBG would like to axe the Urdu and Persian services of the Voice of America, as well.

In the post-9/11 world, this policy is a huge catastrophe for the United States. That Congress can't hear the difference in what is now being broadcast (pablum) and what used to be broadcast (substance) makes it difficult for members to appreciate the scope of the disaster.

' Friends and followers of VOA and other US publicly-funded overseas networks,

U. S international broadcasting is seriously threatened at a time when strong and substantive American voices to other countries are more important than ever. Although broadcast hours have been increased to the Middle East and Islamic world, taxpayer funded, pop-music networks have replaced comprehensive news reporting and analysis there. Language broadcasts to most of Central Europe have been abolished, and during critical hours, the Voice of America is silent in English. After four years of fighting to maintain VOA's high journalistic standards and comprehensive reporting, the highly respected director of VOA Central News, Andre De Nesnera, was removed from his position this past Thursday.

Since 9/11, actions taken by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (the oversight entity for U.S international broadcasting) have limited the scope and effectiveness of the Voice of America and its sister grantee radios. Friends of the Voice of America, mainly former staff and VOA retirees, have attempted to bring attention to the systematic dismantling of this important public diplomacy instrument. Now, some 450 current VOA employees, in a petition being circulated on Capitol Hill today, are calling on Congress to investigate the actions of the BBG. The BBG assumed sole oversight of U.S. overseas broadcasts in 1999, so a fifth anniversary review of its functions is timely, if not overdue.

Write your representatives in the House and the Senate, and complain bitterly about the Broadcasting Board of Governors and their wrong-headed policies, which are harming the interests of the United States abroad.

5 US soldiers Killed, 20 Wounded at Samarra
4 Iraqis dead, 24 wounded

AP reports that the chaos in Samarra spilled over Thursday onto the nearby US base. Guerrillas attacked the base with a car bomb and nearly 40 rounds of mortar fire. They killed 5 US soldiers, 1 Iraqi guardsman, and 3 civilians. Some 44 persons were wounded, including 20 US soldiers and 4 Iraqi guardsmen.

The US riposted with helicopters, which fired missiles in the city at suspected guerrilla hide-outs.

Earlier on Thursday, guerrillas wounded a US soldier by detonating a roadside bomb as a military convoy passed. In another incident, guerrillas raked a Turkish truck with machine gun fire, killing the two Turkish drivers.

Assailants used a car bomb to assassinate Ali Abbas, a former high Baath official, in southern Baghdad. (- ash-Sharq al-Awsat)

Al-Tawhid took two Bulgarians hostage and threatened to execute them.

Al-Hayat says that the Iraqi Ministry of Health released statistics showing that some 400 Iraqis have been killed and over 1600 wounded in violence since Prime Minister Iyad Allawi came into office on June 28.

When I read these numbers in the Arabic, I did a double take and could barely believe them. I thought I must have missed some key phrase. But no, that's what the article says.

Turkey insisted that the northern oil city of Kirkuk retain its current ethnic mix (probably 1/3 each Turkmen, Arabs and Kurds), and expressed worries that ethnic tensions in and over the city could eventuate in civil war.

Marine Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun came into the US embassy in Beirut after allegedly being kidnapped and held hostage and is going to a US base in Germany. The entire story has become so murky that I am reluctant to say anything at all about it. A firefight broke out among Hassoun's clansmen and others in Tripoli, northern Lebanon, with enemies charging that the Hassouns are collaborators because he is in the Marines. The Marines are not entirely sure whether the hostage incident was real or staged.

Guerrillas number over 20,000

Some honest US officials in Iraq are finally admitting that US forces are not meeting a vanguard of international terrorism there but rather some 20,000 angry Baathists who fear for the fate of Sunni Arabs in the new regime.

This way of putting the problem suffers from conceptual problems, too. The number of guerrillas is not stable. It can grow or shrink easily. When the US besieged Fallujah, it turned virtually all able-bodied male tribesmen into guerrillas (I'd say that would come to 50,000 right there). The sheer size of the defending force in Fallujah is among the few rational explanations for the failure of the US Marines there (the disastrous political fallout of the siege was more decisive, probably). Once the siege ended, a lot of the defenders put down their weapons, though significant cells continued to be active in plotting car bombings and other acts of resistance from the city.

Likewise, when the US attempted to arrest Muqtada al-Sadr, it enraged the ghetto Shiite youth, many of whom took up arms against the US forces for the first time. When the US backed down and left Muqtada alone, thousands of Shiites stood down. (East Baghdad is relatively quiet now, and the US patrols can even pass through again).

As the article notes, many guerrilla leaders could potentially be coopted by a new Iraqi government. If there are elections in January, it seems likely that they (or their cousins) will gain seats in parliament.

So, anyway, I just cannot understand why the US military continues to think in such a static and unimaginative way about the resistance. In a country with so many armed clans and urban youth gangs, it cannot so easily be nailed down. But it certainly is very large, and at some points significantly larger than 25,000.

Iraqi and Arab Press Critical of Emergency Laws

The BBC surveys reaction in the Iraqi and Arab press to the announcement of emergency laws by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi that could gut civil liberties in Iraq.

Typical excerpts:

The government has no option other than to declare a state of emergency through the national security law. Terrorists have gone too far. They revel in slaughtering Iraqis and destroying their infrastructure. No Iraqi has been safe from their evil. This law is the last resort.

Iraq's al-Adalah

People view with suspicion any new emergency laws, fearful they could continue indefinitely. Despite their support for the new measures taken to curb violence and organised crime, they still expect the new government to show commitment to applying the minimum provisions of the emergency law, without increasing restrictions on people's freedoms.

Iraq's al-Bayan

Zarqawi not al-Qaeda: Comment by David Wright

David Wright, a former Defense Department analyst and former Army Reserve strategic intelligence analyst has sent the following letter to the Washington Post and shares it here as a guest commentary:

' In some of your reporting (but happily not all) you refer to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as "a top Al Qaeda operative", etc.

There is no evidence that Zarqawi, a Jordanian operating in Iraq, has ever been an Al Qaeda member - although Cheney and a few others in the Bush administration continue to try to paint him that way, apparently for political reasons.

Zarqawi is a dangerous, highly effective militant Islamist. His tactical and strategic abilities have been behind perhaps 50% or more of the most effective attacks against the U.S. and Coalition forces (and the UN, Red Cross and peaceful Iraqis) over the past year. Zarqawi makes common cause with Osama Bin Laden (UBL) and Al Qaeda in some respects.

So far, however, there does not appear to be any evidence whatsoever that Zarqawi has received ANY money, personnel, direction, or support of any nature from UBL or Al Qaeda. In the past year he is known to have twice tried to get support from UBL, without success. In one intercepted letter he said that if UBL and Al Qaeda would support him and his resistance group in Iraq, he would accept UBL as his leader and support him in turn. No sign, however, of any response.

And consider: Despite Zarqawi’s dozens of actions within Iraq against the U.S. and Coalition forces, and Iraqis who are seen as supporting the Coalition -- many of which have been devastatingly successful such as the boat attacks on the Basra oil shipment points, and last year’s bomb attacks against UN and Red Cross headquarters - UBL and Al Qaeda have NEVER taken credit for those attacks in their own press releases.

Please consider your editorial policy, as to how the Post will refer to Zarqawi in your various articles and broadcasts. This is a rather important point, since repetition by the Post of the Bush administration “Big Lie” connecting Zarqawi to Al Qaeda appears to be a callous effort to influence U.S. public opinion without any factual basis. It is factual to mention (as often as you feel appropriate) that a few members of the Bush administration contend that Zarqawi is related to Al Qaeda. (One senior member of Congress indeed conflates Abu Musab al Zarqawi with Ayman al Zawahiri, an Egyptian physician who is indeed UBL’s senior surviving assistant.) But it is important to recognize that neither the U.S. military, the CIA nor Colin Powell make this claim.

Thanks for listening.

Ironically, Zarqawi did go from Jordan to Afghanistan for training back in the Eighties, in the days when the U.S. wanted help in pushing the Soviets out - guess who provided the money for his training! But Zarqawi thereafter created camps separate from those of UBL; and has ever since been seen as a competitor, not a member of UBL’s team.

PS: Wouldn’t it be a good idea if THE WASHINGTON POST.com updated its profile on this important man, and provided links to that profile in your articles that mention him?

Finally: I’ll go out on limb, and predict that Zarqawi will be captured or killed within the next 60 days. The U.S. military has figured out that it was a mistake to allow Fallujah to become a sanctuary for Zarqawi and the
scores of resistance fighters that he leads. If and when he is neutralized, my guess is that 2/3 of the successful militant attacks will cease right away - and the resistance thereafter may fade to nothing.

David C. Wright
Santa Monica CA USA

Former (long ago!) Defense Department analyst, former Army Reserve strategic
intelligence analyst '

Kenny Boy and W.

Eric Boehlert of Salon.com quotes approvingly two major newspaper leads that did not shy away from mentioning explicitly the close ties between George W. Bush and Enron's Ken Lay (now defending himself from criminal conspiracy charges):

Los Angeles Times: "Lay lent Enron's corporate jet to the younger Bush eight times during the 2000 campaign, was co-chair of a gala tribute to him and was one of his top campaign contributors. Enron was also a major patron of Bush and the Republican Party."

San Francisco Chronicle: "Lay was co-chairman of President George H.W. Bush's 1992 re-election campaign and was a leading fund-raiser for the current president's 2000 campaign. Enron and its executives contributed more than $3 million to GOP causes between 1998 and 2002."

Since we're doing Enron quotes, it is as well to remember these, as well:

Enron Traders Caught On Tape

LOS ANGELES, June 1, 2004

ENRON'S INTERNAL MEMOS
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission released two Enron memos describing company plans to inflate energy prices during California's energy crisis of 2000.
The practices were considered so outrageous, that an attorney with the California Public Utilities Commission dubbed them a "smoking gun memo."

(CBS) When a forest fire shut down a major transmission line into California, cutting power supplies and raising prices, Enron energy traders celebrated, CBS News Correspondent Vince Gonzales reports.

"Burn, baby, burn. That's a beautiful thing," a trader sang about the massive fire.

Four years after California's disastrous experiment with energy deregulation, Enron energy traders can be heard – on audiotapes obtained by CBS News – gloating and praising each other as they helped bring on, and cash-in on, the Western power crisis.

"He just f---s California," says one Enron employee. "He steals money from California to the tune of about a million."

"Will you rephrase that?" asks a second employee.

"OK, he, um, he arbitrages the California market to the tune of a million bucks or two a day," replies the first.

The tapes, from Enron's West Coast trading desk, also confirm what CBS reported years ago: that in secret deals with power producers, traders deliberately drove up prices by ordering power plants shut down . . ."

Children Detainees in Iraq?

"Save the Children" is intervening with Coalition members in Iraq in an attempt to secure the release of an estimated 100 Iraqi children being held as detainees.

The US military and possibly Coalition partners have in many cases taken women and children hostage in order to force their male relatives among the guerrillas to surrender. Since this practice is a form of collective punishment and was undertaken while the Coalition occupied Iraq, it is a war crime.

The German press broke the story on Monday. The German news magazine Der Spiegel writes:

IRAQ: US soldiers are said to have abused arrested children.

More than hundred children have been detained in Iraqi prisons--including the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, according to information provided by the international red cross. According to the TV magazine show "Report" Coalition troops are may also have abused children and young people. "Between January and May we registered altogether 107 children, during 19 visits at six different prisons", the spokesman of the International Red Cross (IKRK), Florian Westphal, said in a Geneva interview with the SWR magazine "Report Mainz". She said that these places of detention were controlled by coalition troops. The number of the children imprisoned held could also be higher, according to Westphal. In addition, the TV magazine reported references and testimonies, according to which US soldiers in Iraqi prisons also abused children and young people.

The report continues, "Samuel Provance, a staff sergeant stationed in the now infamous Abu Ghraib prison said that interrogating officers had pressured a 15 or 16 year old girl. Military police had only intervened when the girl was already half undressed. On another occasion, a 16 year old was soaked with water, driven through the cold, and then smeared with mud."

Nir Rosen, who has reported from the field in Iraq for the past year and is an expert Arabist, noted that

' It is common practice for soldiers to arrest the wives and children of suspects as "material witnesses" when the suspects are not captured in raids. In some cases the soldiers leave notes for the suspects, letting them know their families will be released should they turn themselves in. Soldiers claim this is a very effective tactic. '

Bush says Edwards lacks Experience

George W. Bush alleged Thursday that John Edwards lacks the experience necessary to be president.

The problem with this argument is that Bush lacked the experience necessary to be president when he ran in 2000, so this sort of cheap shot just hoists him by his own petard. Let's just remember a seminal Bush moment in 1999:

' Bush fails reporter's pop quiz on international leaders

November 5, 1999
Web posted at: 3:29 p.m. EST (2029 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Texas Gov. George W. Bush is enduring sharp criticism for being unable to name the leaders of four current world hot spots, but President Bill Clinton says Bush "should, and probably will, pick up" those names.

The front-runner for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination faltered Thursday in an international affairs pop quiz posed by Andy Hiller, a political reporter for WHDH-TV in Boston.
Bush

Hiller asked Bush to name the leaders of Chechnya, Taiwan, India and Pakistan. Bush was only able to give a partial response to the query on the leader of Taiwan, referring to Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui simply as "Lee." He could not name the others.

"Can you name the general who is in charge of Pakistan?" Hiller asked, inquiring about Gen. Pervaiz Musharraf, who seized control of the country October 12.

"Wait, wait, is this 50 questions?" asked Bush.

Hiller replied: "No, it's four questions of four leaders in four hot spots." . . .

Bush, in answering the question about the leader of Pakistan, also said: "The new Pakistani general, he's just been elected -- not elected, this guy took over office. It appears this guy is going to bring stability to the country and I think that's good news for the subcontinent."

Gore released a statement Friday taking Bush to task for his comments on Pakistan's recent coup.

"I find it troubling that a candidate for president in our country -- the world's oldest democracy -- would characterize the military takeover as "good news," Gore said. "Further, I find it even more disturbing that he made these comments about a nation that just last year tested nuclear weapons -- shortly after voicing his public opposition to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

A spokesman for President Clinton also criticized Bush's comments.

"It is very dangerous for this country to condone the overthrow of democratically elected governments," said David Leavy, spokesman for the National Security Council.

Not only did Bush not know who General Pervez Musharraf was, he seems to have confused coup-making with "taking office," and moreover went on to suggest that the overthrow of an elected prime minister and the installation in power of the Pakistan military, then the world's strongest supporter of the Taliban, would bring "stability!" Musharraf made his coup in part because of the military's anger over Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's willingness to back down from confronting India over Kashmir, so that he explicitly came to power as a warmonger.

I can't tell you how ominous I found Bush's performance in that interview. I still remember him stuttering about "the General," unable to remember Musharraf's name. He obviously had no idea what he was talking about, though he demonstrated a number of ill-fated instincts. He obviously liked authoritarian rule better than democracy, equating dictatorship with "stability." And, he didn't think he needed to know anything about South Asia, with its nuclear giants and radical religious politics--the latter a dire security threat to the US. He couldn't tell when things were becoming more unstable as opposed to less. Musharraf went on to play nuclear brinkmanship with India in 2002, risking war twice that year. Although Musharraf did turn against the Taliban after September 11, under extreme duress from the US, elements of his military continued to support radical Islamism and have recently been implicated in assassination attempts on Musharraf himself. This was the body that Bush proclaimed was bringing "stability" to the region in fall of 1999.

So, one answer to Bush's charge about Edwards is that if it had any merit, Bush should have declined to run himself.

Another answer is that Edwards certainly knows far more about foreign affairs now than Bush did then. Indeed, given how Bush has rampaged around the world alienating allies and ignoring vital conflicts with the potential to blow back on the US, one might well argue that Edwards knows more now than Bush does.

This is what Edwards' campaign literature said about his positions: "Edwards believes that the U.S. must be an active leader to help resolve conflicts, from reducing tensions between India and Pakistan to the peace process in Northern Ireland. Edwards is a strong supporter of Israel, and believes that the U.S. has a vital role in promoting peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians."

I don't see Bush doing any of this.

7 Killed, including 4 Marines;
Mortars land near Allawi's INA Offices

Wire services report that 7 persons were killed in separate incidents in Iraq on Wednesday, including 4 US Marines and two Iraqi National Guardsmen.

Bombs and mortar fire struck downtown Baghdad near the offices of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's Iraqi National Accord and the American Green Zone on Wednesday, but apparently producing only light casualties. Two mortar shells struck a medical center near the INA HQ, wounding three persons slightly in a nearby residential district.

Guerrillas launched an attack Wednesday morning at Haifa Street in Baghdad on Iraqi national guards and US troops, killing 2 national guardsmen and wounding 10. The US called in helicopter strikes in retaliation.

AFP reports that guerrilla violence in Mosul killed one Iraqi and wounded 11.

In another incident, guerrillas killed 4 US Marines on Tuesday

Guerrillas in Ramadi assassinated Hussein Amir Abdel Jabbar al-Ali, son of a tribal leader of the Dulaim and a member of the al-Anbar governing council, on Tuesday.

Guerrillas took hostage an Egyptian driver who had been delivering gasoline to US troops. Al-Zaman says that Egypt is discouraging its nationals from taking jobs in Iraq. The move follows a similar one by the Philippines, which also has a hostage crisis.

Shin Bet at Abu Ghuraib

The respected journal of military affairs, Jane's, is reporting that Israeli Shin Bet interrogators were used by the Americans at Abu Ghuraib. A twist: the article maintains that the US chose them because they were less likely to use heavy-handed torture techniques than secret police from US allies like Egypt and Jordan. Of course, it all depends on what you mean by torture. Sexual humiliation apparently does not count.

Veterans Protest War as Dishonest

In a move reminiscent of the Vietnam era, some returning Iraq veterans are condemning the Iraq war as basically dishonest. They point out that no weapons of mass destruction have been found, even though that was the major pretext for the war.

[Am traveling; hope to post more Thursday afternoon].

Car Bomb in Khalis kills 13;
3 Marines Die in al-Anbar

On Tuesday, Australian Broadcasting says that guerrillas drove a car bomb into the midst of a funeral in Khalis, 80 km. north of Baghdad, and detonated it. They killed at least 13 persons and wounded 35. It says the funeral was for the brother of the mayor of Khalis, who had been assassinated two days earlier.

In Iskandariyah, al-Zaman says, the police station came under attack. The city lies south of Baghdad. Gunmen jumped out of a private car and sprayed the station with machine gun fire. Police returned fire, killing two attackers before the rest fled. One policeman was wounded.

In Wasit province US and Ukrainian troops foiled a planned attack on them.

AFP reports,, ' "Two marines assigned to First Marine Expeditionary Force were killed in and one marine died of wounds received in action Monday in the (centre-west) Al-Anbar province while conducting security and stability operations," the military said in a statement. The marines have now lost 10 men in just over one week on various operations around Al-Anbar province . . . '

Al-Hayat reports that Prime Minister Iyad Allawi announced on Tuesday the institution of special curfew and other emergency laws aimed at curbing the country's endemic violence. Although Allawi insisted that the law would not detract from civil liberties, it is hard to see how it could fail to curb freedom of association (curfews are like that), and the threat of censorship now looms.

The same newspaper reported that Izz al-Din al-Majid al-Tikriti, the uncle of Saddam Hussein, has threatened to announce an Iraqi government in exile if the security situation in the country does not improve.

Tomdispatch: The Way we Were

Veteran journalist Tom Engelhardt considers the impact of the past three years on the position of the US in the world. Speaking of the Bush-Cheney national security state, he observes:

' They identified an "arc of instability" that stretched east-west from the former Yugoslavia to the borders of China and southward into Africa. (It was sometimes also said to include the Andean parts of Latin America.) This "arc," covering significant parts of what once was called the Third World, took in most of the planet's prime, or prospective, oil lands. Even before 9/11 in this vast region, some of which had dropped out of the former Soviet empire, the Bush administration began to plant, or expand, American military bases. The heart of these oil lands lay in the Middle East, a region with -- in better times -- the world's five leading oil producers.

' Post 9/11, the top strategists of this administration followed their President happily into the "war on terror," the wilder among them imagining it as World War IV, the equivalent of, if not World War II, at least the Cold War, and so engendering dreams of another half-century twilit struggle to victory. Endless years of war would release them to act exactly as they pleased. The President (and his speechwriters), dreaming "Good War" dreams from his movie-made childhood, then elevated a pathetic "Axis of Evil" (Iran, Iraq and North Korea, none of which previously knew of their close relationship) to the role of the Axis powers (Germany, Japan, Italy) in World War II;

and so, with an enemy of nation states in hand, far more worthy of a world at war than Osama bin Laden and small groups of fanatic Islamists, they announced a policy of global supremacy not over terrorists, but over all the other nations of our planet, swearing that no future bloc of powers would be allowed to interfere with our benevolent hegemony over the Earth -- and of preventive war. We would reserve the right to take out anybody we even thought might sooner or later in some way or another challenge us. A list of up to 60 states believed to "harbor" terrorists was also drawn up. This was a list for a lifetime. And finally, declaring weapons of mass destruction evil, they made it our job to decide who exactly shouldn't have them and to bolster our own nuclear forces in order to prepare for a series of what Jonathan Schell has called anti-proliferation wars. With this trio of policies in their foreign policy quiver, they looked around for some action . . . '

I would just add that the pretext of the "weapons of mass destruction" was made more manipulable by the miscategorization of chemical weapons as weapons of mass destruction. They are not. They are battlefield weapons. And, most states have them. Thus, when Iraq fell so easily, the drum beat began on Fox Cable News that Syria has "weapons of mass destruction." I fell off my chair laughing. No one could imagine a more dilapidated and ramshackle military than Syria's. And, it is so transparent, who put Fox up to this warmongering, which doesn't look nearly as funny with over 800 US troops six feet under the ground and thousands severely wounded. It was coming out of Dick Cheney's little national security team, especially David Wurmser. And it was in the service of the Likud Party, for the expansionist plans of which Syria is inconvenient.

I also would add something to the argument about petroleum resources driving the Bush-Cheney imperial project. Petroleum is fungible and cannot be "controlled." The question is who gets the profits from refining and distribution, and to what purpose the profits are put. The major new field in recent years is Tengiz in Kazakhstan, but the US hasn't menaced Astana. Likewise, only the Neocon lunatic fringe has spoken about attacking Saudi Arabia. I think the calculation is more complex. The targets are countries 1) whose regimes are actively hostile to the United States; 2) which practice a form of socialism that limits US corporations' ability to invest and extract profits from the country; 3) which have valuable resources such as petroleum that can generate foreign exchange and buy powerful weapons, including WMD, and 4) which menace or limit close US military allies in their region. Such states cannot be incorporated easily into US global hegemony.

Iraq and Iran fit the profile perfectly, and if one takes into account strategic rent and state capitalist expropriation of the population, so does North Korea. Libya is more ambiguous, especially given Qaddafi's change of policies in the late 1990s and into 2004. But Lebanon and Somalia were on the 7-nation hit list drawn up by the neocons, so in their case factor 4 was reinterpreted and given primacy, so that the goal must be establishing control over a key strategic waterway (Somalia & the Red Sea) and aiding and abetting Likud expansionism (versus Lebanon).

Mylroie as Bush Rasputine

Peter Bergen, veteran journalist and al-Qaeda expert, raises the question of whether the bizarre and crackpot theories of Laurie Mylroie have undue influence high in the US government. Mylroie alleges that Iraq was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, a thesis for which there is no evidence whatsoever. Yet she seems to have convinced Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz of it.

In the academic world, we don't get to publish our books at academic presses without peer review. When Princeton University Press considered my book, written out of the Egyptian National Archives, on the 19th century Urabi Revolt, the editor sent the manuscript to eminent experts in 19th century Egyptian history. Now, I lived in the Arab world for 6 years, have a degree in Arabic studies from Cairo, and had a Fulbright grant for my research. I spent a year working almost daily in the archives in Cairo. I had an academic position in a major department at a major university. But Princeton University Press did not trust me. They still had the book refereed.

In contrast, the American Enterprise Institute publishes anything Mylroie hands into them, no matter how fantastic. Her Arabic is imperfect, she has never been in any Iraqi archive, and has no standing in the Middle East field. Her books don't have to be refereed, apparently. The poor lay reader who finds her book in Borders has no way of distinguishing it from the trade paperbacks of Princeton University Press. And then the mere fact of the book's existence can become a reference-point in political debate. No university press would have published Mylroie's pablum, because academic researchers would have shot it down for poor evidence and bad reasoning.

You'd think that where people are writing about issues that involve life and death, war and peace in the contemporary world, it would be more important to have the books refereed. Nineteenth century history we could get wrong and survive.

The tragedy is that people will go on believing Mylroie's weirdness, and she will keep getting invited on t.v. and to speak to Congress, and AEI will not suffer a loss of credibility because of this fiasco. If an assistant professor in a university wrote such nonsense, the person would never get tenure and would end up unemployed.

I guess if you have the backing of enough incredibly rich people, you can get away with almost anything.

Iraqi Parties

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has worked up a basic guide to Iraqi political parties. It has a Part One and a Part Two. See also their Guide to Armed Groups in Iraq.

John Edwards and the Iraq War

Now that John Kerry has chosen John Edwards as his running mate, I looked around for some Edwards quotes on Iraq. Some good ones are at On the Issues. One thing that hadn't been clear to me before was Edwards' antipathy to Halliburton and his critique of "unbid contracts." Edwards as a trial lawyer who helped consumers get their due from rich corporations that had harmed them would be ideally placed to take on the whole issue of Halliburton and the ways in which the Bush administration has mishandled Iraq by funneling huge amounts of money into expensive contracts that did not even employ many Iraqis. That is to say, Edwards may be the Anti-Cheney in ways that could be important to the campaign. Cheney's use of foul language on the Senate floor and increasing testiness suggest that he feels vulnerable on the Halliburton issue. One of the scandals that has been reported but hasn't really broken yet is the way in which Halliburton gained contracts to provide services to US troops in an emergency but has been unable actually to provide those services. The summer of 2003 was hell on the troops because they had no quonset huts or air conditioning. Their shaving cream cans were exploding in the desert. Why didn't the army just build them quonset huts? Because that task had been contracted out to civilians. And why didn't civilians do the job? Because civilians cannot be ordered into a war zon, and Halliburton and KBR often simply could not put enough civilian personnel into the field to do the jobs contracted for in a timely manner. Who suffered? The US troops. Why? Because the Bush administration gave a soldier's job to wealthy civilian corporations unequipped to handle it. Edwards is well placed to make hay with this sort of thing if he is canny about it.

Here are the Edwards quotes from On the Issues:

' Supporting Iraq war OK, but how war was conducted not OK
Q: You voted for the Iraq resolution, which basically gave the president power to use any means that he deemed necessary and appropriate, including military force, to respond to the perceived threat of Saddam Hussein. How can you criticize the president on his Iraq policy when you handed him a blank check?

EDWARDS: I took this responsibility very seriously. I said that it was critical that this not be done by America alone, that it not be an American operation, and now this is not internationalized. For the most part, it's America doing it alone, which I believe is an enormous mistake.

Q: Well, then, why didn't you not vote for it? Why didn't you insist on caveats? It was a blank check. Why?

EDWARDS: The answer is, what we did is we voted on a resolution. It is for the president to determine how to conduct the war. That's his responsibility. This president has failed in his responsibility. Neither [Kerry nor I] would've conducted this operation the way he conducted it.
Source: Democratic 2004 primary debate at USC Feb 26, 2004

Voted for war in Iraq but against $87B-and it's consistent
Q: After voting to authorize the president to go to war in Iraq in 2002, you voted last fall against an $87 billion expenditure to support the troops there and aid the anti-terrorism effort. Why aren't they inconsistent?

EDWARDS: Because I said before the first resolution was ever voted on in the Congress, that in order for this effort to be successful it was absolutely critical that when we reached this stage that it be international, that it not be an American occupation. And so long as it was that, we'd see the problems we've seen right now. Bush needed to change course. We needed to have the UN in charge of the civilian authority.

Q: So was it a protest vote?

EDWARDS: It was not a protest vote. Had I been the deciding vote, I would have voted exactly the same way. Because what would have happened, had that occurred, is the president would have immediately come back to the Congress with a plan, changing course. We came to the point where we had to stand up and take responsibility.
Source: Democratic 2004 Primary Debate at St. Anselm College Jan 22, 2004

Saddam's trial will reveal atrocities, but won't end terror
Q: How do you reconcile Saddam's capture with continued fear of terrorism?

EDWARDS: The trial of Saddam Hussein is going to reveal the atrocities that he's been engaged in and some of the incredible conduct that's occurred in Iraq during the time of his reign. But the reality of protecting the American people is, there's a still great deal of work to be done. Everybody across America knows that we have nuclear and chemical plants that are not adequately protected; that we are extraordinarily vulnerable through our ports. We don't have a comprehensive warning system in place, we don't have a comprehensive response system. And we know is that we know that terrorist cells exist all over this country. We need to do a much more effective job of putting humans inside those terrorist cells so that we can stop them before they do us harm . . .
Source: Democratic 2004 Presidential Primary Debate in Iowa Jan 4, 2004

Leadership means standing up for what you believe in
Q: Please respond to the variety of opinions expressed by your rivals on the Iraq war.

EDWARDS: Leadership is standing up for what you believe in. I believe Saddam was a threat; I voted for the congressional resolution. Then the president says, "I want $87 billion." I am not willing to give a blank check.
Source: Democratic Presidential 2004 Primary Debate in Detroit Oct 27, 2003

Partial yes on $87B-irresponsible to not support troops
Q: [Bush asked for] $87 billion for the ongoing war on terrorism. Your vote, yes or no?

EDWARDS: We have young men & women in a shooting gallery over there. It would be enormously irresponsible for any of us not to do what's necessary to support them. When we went into Iraq, the US assumed a responsibility to share with our allies the effort to reconstruct. That does not mean Bush should get a blank check.

I will vote for what's necessary to support the troops. But we have a lot of questions that have to be answered first. We have to find out how he plans to bring our allies in, how much control he plans to give up, and what is our long-term plan there.

Q: So you might vote for something less than $87 billion and cut off money for reconstruction?

EDWARDS: I will vote for what needs to be there to support our troops who are on the ground. I will not vote for the additional money unless we have an explanation about what we're going to do to share the cost with our allies.
Source: Debate at Pace University in Lower Manhattan Sep 25, 2003

Allies in Iraq would reduce burden on troops & taxpayers
Q: If we cannot get international forces to Iraq, should we increase the US presence or leave?

EDWARDS: I don't accept that premise. We have to have the help of our friends and allies around the world. [First], to help relieve the burden on American troops and be able to bring some of these troops home. Second, to reduce the burden on the American taxpayer. We need to lead in a way that brings others to us and creates respect for America, because at the end of the day [that will make] a safer world.
Source: Congressional Black Caucus Institute debate Sep 9, 2003

Irresponsible to not fund troops; also to fund Halliburton
Q: Will you vote yes or no on the president's request for $87 billion to continue the effort in Iraq?

EDWARDS: Well, I'm going to do what has to be done to make sure our troops get what they need, but not without the president telling us how much this is going to cost over the long term, how long we're going to be there and who is going to share the cost with us.

Q: So if the president says, "I need $87 billion to protect the troops," you're ready to say yes to that?

EDWARDS: It would be irresponsible not to do what needs to be done to protect our troops. But having said that, it would also be irresponsible not to do something to stop this president from giving billions of dollars in American taxpayer money to companies like Halliburton in unbid contracts.
Source: Congressional Black Caucus Institute debate Sep 9, 2003

Problems in Iraq are because Bush has not led
Q: The administration is expected to ask the Congress for $80 billion to continue the mission in Iraq. Will you support that spending?

EDWARDS: The administration needs to say to the Congress and to the American people what this war is going to cost over the long term; how long they think we're going to be there. The reason we are in this situation is because this president has not led. He has not addressed the problem of bringing in others. He has not gone to the UN in the way that he should have.
Source: Democratic Primary Debate, Albuquerque New Mexico Sep 4, 2003

Work with other nations in war on terror
Edwards believes America must lead the world - not by acting alone, but by using our power and influence with other nations to protect our interests. Edwards calls for action to eliminate the threat of weapons of mass destruction, win the war on terrorism, and promote democracy and freedom internationally, particularly in the Middle East. Edwards believes that through a stronger commitment to work together with other nations, the US will better be in position to shape the world in which we live.
Source: Campaign website, johnedwards2004.com, "Key Issues" Jul 17, 2003

Supported Iraq invasion because of WMD threat
Edwards has not hesitated to support decisive American action, alone if necessary, to address imminent threats to our national security. He supports President Bush's efforts to address the looming danger of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. However, he sharply objects to the Bush administration's handling of our broader foreign policy, which he says projects "arrogance without purpose," instead of the "purpose without arrogance" promised in the President's inaugural address.
Source: Campaign website, johnedwards2004.com, "Key Issues" Jul 17, 2003

Bush's preemption doctrine is unnecessary and unwise
Q: Will you repeal Bush's pre-emptive war doctrine?

A: The Bush administration asserted a new doctrine that suggests a uniquely American right to use force wherever and whenever we decide it's appropriate. America must have a foreign policy that leads in a way that brings others to us, not that drives them away. And I say to every American family: your family is safer in a world where America is looked up to and respected, not in a world where America is hated.
Source: MoveOn.org interview Jun 17, 2003

Voted YES on authorizing use of military force against Iraq.
H.J.Res. 114; Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002. The administration would be required to report to Congress that diplomatic options have been exhausted before, or within 48 hours after military action has started. Every 60 days the president would also be required to submit a progress report to Congress.
Bill H.J.RES.114 ; vote number 2002-237 on Oct 11, 2002 . . .

Guest Comment on Fallujah and Kaplan: Nir Rosen

Journalist Nir Rosen, who has spent most of the past year in Iraq and has fluent Arabic, recently reported on Fallujah for the New Yorker. He objects to many details and arguments in the reporting of of Robert Kaplan on Fallujah for The Atlantic Monthly. We print here by permission his recent letter to the editor at The Atlantic Monthly

' Letter to the Editor

Having spent a great deal of time in Falluja since the occupation of Iraq began, and most recently the entire month of May for my article on Falluja for the New Yorker Magazine, I was disappointed by some errors I noted in Robert Kaplan’s piece entitled “Five Days in Falluja,” as well as by Kaplan’s unambiguous identification with the Marines he wrote about.

Kaplan describes Falluja as “the classic terrain of radicalism,” distinguishing radicalism from conservatism. Kaplan views the authoritarian royal courts of Morroco, Jordan and the Gulf States as venerable for their traditions, traditions that in the case of Jordan and the Gulf are artificial and not more than a century old. Unlike these royal courts that represent in fact the “break in tradition” in “the House of Islam” of which Kaplan writes, Falluja is in fact the most traditional city in Iraq. Unlike Tikrit, for example, where the tribes are urbanized, based inside the city, the tribes of Falluja are concentrated in the rural areas surrounding the city, and thus have not modernized and abandoned tribal customs as much as other parts of the country. The tight tribal bonds of Falluja helped preserve the city’s stability following the fall of Saddam’s regime. The religious and tribal leaders appointed their own civil management council even before American troops entered the city. Tribes assumed control of the city’s institutions and protected government buildings. Religious leaders, whose authority was respected, exhorted the people to respect the law and maintain order. Thus there was a continuity of authority and tradition in Falluja lacking in other parts of Iraq.

Known in Iraq as “Medinat al Masajid,” or the City of Mosques, for the over 80 mosques that dominate the city’s cultural life, Falluja is in fact famous for its Islamic traditions, including various orders of Sufi Islam and the very conservative Salafi brand of Sunni Islam. One does not find the “break in tradition” of which Kaplan speaks, nor the reinvented abstract and ideological form of Islam he blames for radicalism. Instead one finds numerous centers for religious study that produce many of Iraq’s most important theologians. The vast majority of the armed fighters in Falluja were not motivated by radical Islamic beliefs, but were fighting to defend their families, homes, city and way of life from the brutal American onslaught and were motivated by nationalism and pride.

The fighters were not, as Kaplan has us believe by quoting Lieutenant Colonel Byrne, men who fought in Chechnya or Afghanistan. The vast majority of the fighters were local men who had prior military experience in the Iraqi military. A few dozen foreign fighters were also present, though most were too young to have fought anywhere else. Kaplan also fails to explain how Byrne’s orders to grow mustaches and subsequently to shave them had anything to do with cultural sensitivity. The Marines would have been more culturally sensitive had they not offended Falluja’s residents by humiliating their fierce pride through violent searches that terrified women and children and involved placing boots in the heads of men.

Nor were the fighters of Falluja known as Ali Babas, a common Iraqi term for thieves, and what he claims the one Iraq he met called them. They were known as Mujahedin or Muqatilin, which both mean “fighters,” though Mujahedin has a more religious connotation. Kaplan repeatedly refers to the several thousand men of Falluja who fought fiercely in self defense as Ali Babas. They were in fact, organized efficiently thanks to military officers in their ranks, and obeyed the commands of officers in alliance with religious and tribal leaders who often had their own virtual armies. Loud speakers on the mosque towers were used for communication, alerting the fighters to where the Marines were approaching and instructing them to move to various fronts.

Kaplan comments on the dominance of southern Christian fundamentalism among the Marines without judgment and reports that their chaplain compares their entry to Falluja with Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, describing their impending destruction of much of the city as “a spiritual battle and you Marines are the tools of mercy.” Kaplan admires the Marines’ “matter-of-fact willingness to die.” Though he mistakenly insists that the defenders of Falluja were cowards who used the cover of women and children to attack the Marines, both the attackers and defenders had much more in common than he would have us believe. Falluja’s defenders believed they were defending their religion and many bravely sacrificed their lives in defense of their neighborhoods against a terrible and mighty foe. They displayed the same solidarity and brotherhood Kaplan admires so much in his Marines. Kaplan’s glorification of military values is also disturbing. Perhaps some Marines should have questioned orders to invade a city of three hundred thousand, pulverizing neighborhoods and killing at least 800 people, most of them women and children. I smelled the death in the city’s air from corpses hastily buried in backyards and the five hundred bodies in the soccer fields, I saw the hospitals riddled with bullets and shells, I met the ambulance drivers who were wounded by snipers, I saw children missing limbs from Marine bullets and shells, but Kaplan either conceals or is unaware of the indiscriminate violence the Marines he identifies with so much unleashed upon the city, causing thousands of refugees and then preventing families from returning home unless the fighters surrendered. Kaplan’s comfort with the word imperialism is also worrisome, but most alarming is his repeated use of the word “us” to describe the Marines. Should he not strive for a certain amount of objectivity? Kaplan is maddened by the “enemy’s” successful intelligence and it seems also disappointed by the “bad news” that “politics in the form of ceasefires” was intruding to prevent he and his Marines from “taking down the city,” a city of three hundred thousand people, hundreds of whom he and his marines killed, along with hundreds of homes they destroyed. Did Kaplan assimilate the urge to fight to the end that no doubt the young Marines he was with felt? Though I recognize the difficulty involved in remaining impartial when living with the affable young men of the American military who risk their lives for the whims of politicians back in Washington, having been embedded myself, I believe it is no less, and perhaps more, important to identify with the receiving end of American Imperialism and military might and to question the assertions of both military and political leaders. '

Nir Rosen

2 US Pilots Wounded; Strike on Fallujah
Mortar Strike in Basra

US jets dropped 500-pound bombs on Fallujah again on Monday, targetting an alleged safe house of the al-Tawhid terrorist network. The Iraqi caretaker government announced that it had supported the move. A dozen or more persons were killed, according to local Iraqi observers.

Guerrillas in the southern port city of Basra fired mortar rounds at the local government headquarters, but missed and hit local houses instead, killing one Iraqi civilian and wounding four others. Largely Shiite Basra has been quieter than some other parts of Iraq, but has witnessed some spectacular bombings and violence from time to time.

Near the Shiite holy city of Karbala, guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb as a US troop convoy passed. They missed the US troops, but the latter returned fire. Apparently they mistakenly killed two Iraqi civilians and wounded four others.

Guerrillas fired on a US military medical helicopter above Fallujah, wounding the pilot and the co-pilot, who were nevertheless able to land safely.

In the northern Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah, local Kurdish police killed two men driving a car loaded with explosives, foiling an attempted suicide bombing in the city.

AP reports that Muqtada al-Sadr's spokesman clarified his recent militant statements. Mahmud al-Sudani said that Muqtada is still committed to a truce and would only work against the caretaker government non-violently. Muqtada has in the past offered to distinguish between the Allawi government and the US troops, offer to support Allawi if he would set a timetable for a US withdrawal. His recent sabre-rattling appears to have primarily been aimed at shoring up his base of support, which vehemently opposes the US presence in Iraq. The Allawi government had considered offering an amnesty to Sadr and his lieutenants, but postponed it Monday until it could clarify whether Muqtada is still committed to violence. Sudani said he wasn't.

Knight Ridder's Tom Lasseter has done a fine report on the way in which the guerrilla insurgency has continued to boil along during the past week, making the "turn-over of sovereignty" an irrelevancy to US troops on the ground. Attacks are back up to the 35 a day range, and informed military observers don't expect an improvement soon.

Al-Hayat says that Syrian sources are categorically denying a New York Times report that Saddam Hussein's cousins from the al-Majid clan are directing the insurgency from Syria and Europe. Likewise, the Jordanians say they have no such information. The cousins named also denied the charges to al-Sharq al-Awsat. The Syrians are speculating that the story is a plant by US and Israeli intelligence aimed at preventing good relations from developing between the Allawi government and Damascus. Actually, it seems to me indisputable that the al-Majid clan is involved in the insurgency, it is just that it doesn't need to be abroad to do so. And as the Jehl article acknowledges, the insurgency comes from circles well beyond Saddam loyalists.

US observers keep expressing puzzlement as to why the killing of hundreds or thousands of insurgents has not had an impact in repressing the guerrillas. They don't seem to get it that Iraqi clans still matter and that when they kill an Iraqi, they anger the man's brothers, uncles, and first and second cousins, some of whom step forward to take his place. In the US a lot of people don't even know their cousins and certainly would not sacrifice their lives to avenge one. Iraq is not like that. So, it isn't really even a matter of ideologies, necessarily. The US military has incurred enough clan feuds to keep the insurgencies going. And, of course, Iraqi and Arab nationalisms are powerful enough that people hate seeing Western troops in their country. The line between being angry about it and being angry enough to pick up a gun is a thin one.

Meanwhile, PM Allawi reaffirmed Monday that Iraq did not want troops from direct neighbors like Jordan, and the Jordanians themselves alo seemed to back off their earlier offer, saying it would not be appropriate.

Samarra in Chaos

Az-Zaman reports that informed sources tell it that the city of Samarra is still in a state of complete chaos, after an armed group established domination there when the American forces withdrew at the end of June. The sources maintain that gunmen blew up the headquarters of the political party of Interior Minister Fallah al-Naqib, the Independent Iraqi Bloc. They also blew up the offices of the "National Salvation" newspaper, the organ of the National Salvation Party of General Wafiq al-Samarra'i, along with the house of Col. Adnan Thabit, an adviser in the Interior Ministry, the house of the city's mayor, the central police station, the former Baath party HQ, and the house of the commander of the civil defense forces. Gen. Samarra'i confirmed that the city was in complete turmoil and that the police had retreated.. He said American forces have not intervened, despite being positioned only 2 km. outside the city. Samarra'i had been head of Iraqi intelligence until his defection in 1994 with Kurdish help, when he learned that Saddam had plotted his demise. Samarra'i said that criminal gangs numbering 300 gunmen had taken over the city and were involved in a rampage of arson, demolition and murder. He said no one in Samarra could understand why the US forces had let the city fall into chaos this way, and called upon Prime Minister Iyad Allawi to intervene.

One reason American troops may be skittish about intervening is that four American soldiers are charged with tossing two detainees off a bridge, causing one to drown, last January in Samarra. The incident has not made the US troops popular there.

I do not find it plausible that the trouble is being caused by mere criminal gangs. The targets seem eminently political, and the gunmen are probably a political militia of some sort. Gen. Samarra'i phrased the conflict in class terms, saying that the city's shurafa' or elite were being targetted. The targets seem to be ex-Baath institutions. I wonder if this is a lower-class uprising, or whether it has Islamist overtones.

There were pro-Saddam demonstrations in Samarra over the weekend, but the chaos and gang rule have not been reported in the Western press to my knowledge. It is an important city and a strategic one. If the az-Zaman story is true, it is a bad sign for the Allawi government. If his minister of the interior can't protect his own party HQ in his own home town, what will happen to the rest of Iraq?

The Crisis in Yemen: Guest Comment by Willis

John M. Willis, who has taught Middle East at New York University's Dept. of Education, writes in about Yemen:

' I just wanted to add a few notes to your reading of the recent violence in Haydan outside of Sa'dah in northern Yemen. The recent violence instigated by [Zaidi Shiite leader] Husayn Badr al-Din al-Huthi has little to do with any direct inspiration from Muqtada al-Sadr's movement, and certainly no theological/interpretive inspiration, at least as I see it.

Al-Huthi most recently drew the attention of the authorities with a series of inflammatory khutbas [sermons] criticizing the Israeli occupation and of course the American occupation. Since 9/11 imams [prayer leaders] have been instructed not to directly criticize America for fear of "incitement." The Yemeni government has been on edge ever since, especially with the blatant presence of U.S. special forces in Yemen, the imperious behavior of Ambassador Edmund Hull (also referred as "al-Mandub al-Sami" ["The Exalted Envoy"]), the assassination of Sinan al-Harithi, et al, by CIA drone, the assassination of Garalla Umar by fringe Islah [Sunni fundamentalist] members, and of course their forced near-silence on the Iraq invasion.

In light of the extreme unpopularity of these actions (and compounded by the implementation of severe economic shock-therapy this--including civil service reform, the application of a 10% sales tax, and the lifting of subsidies on basic foodstuffs) the Yemeni government is especially keen to delegitimize any local opposition.

In the case of al-Huthi, this opposition is serious because he has declared himself the "Imam" in very strict Zaydi terms--although few take him seriously. [The Imam had been a Zaidi political and religious leader who dominated Yemen until the Republican revolution of the 1960s]. Despite the fact that the moderate Zaydi party, the Hizb al-Haqq, has urged him to surrender to government forces, his actions have still resurrected the latent post-revolutionary fear of a return to the Imamate. It is still not rhetorically possible, for example, to talk about Imam Yahya Hamid al-Din (r. 1904-1948) in anything but derisive terms. The fear, of course, is that the regime of [current Arab nationalist leader] Ali Abdallah Salih will himself be compared to the Imam (and in many ways, the current style of government is different from the late Imamate only be degree).

Huthi's actions have raised the spectre of the Zaydi "khuruj" or rising against the unjust ruler--a doctrine that has no place in a system of one-party rule. Nor does it sit well with the Islah party (the coalition of the Hashid tribe and its Shaykh, Abdallah al-Ahmar and the salafis inspired by Shaykh Abd al-Majid al-Zindani). That is to say, that by clamping down on local salafi institutions (such as Zindani's "madaris 'ilmiyya")he cannot possibly but treat a "zaydi" uprising harshly. When he risks the ire of Islah and even Saudi Arabia, pounding the Zaydis is an easy way to prove the "Islamic" and "revolutionary" nature of his troubled regime. (See the Islah view of the events at the followin link: http://www.alsahwa-yemen.net/view_sub1.asp?s_no=2300).

Also, I should add that there is a sizeable group of Shiite refugees from Iraq who were taken in after the iraq war. Many of them have founded Twelver schools with Iranian funding, but I never seen that they have had any influence outside of the Iraqi community.

My feeling then, is that the offer of Yemeni troops is both meant to mollify the Americans and the Yemeni population, where you were correct to note that Arabism still carries rhetorical weight. Salih is in an extremely difficult position at the moment, so I am sure he is looking for anything that ease him through this year.

best,
John M. Willis '

2 US Pilots Wounded; Mortar Strike in Basra

Guerrillas in the southern port city of Basra fired mortar rounds at the local government headquarters, but missed and hit local houses instead, killing one Iraqi civilian and wounding four others. Largely Shiite Basra has been quieter than some other parts of Iraq, but has witnessed some spectacular bombings and violence from time to time.

Near the Shiite holy city of Karbala, guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb as a US troop convoy passed. They missed the US troops, but the latter returned fire. Apparently they mistakenly killed two Iraqi civilians and wounded four others.

Guerrillas fired on a US military medical helicopter, wounding the pilot and the co-pilot, who were nevertheless able to land safely.

In the northern Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah, local Kurdish police killed two men driving a car loaded with explosives, foiling an attempted suicide bombing in the city.

Knight Ridder's Tom Lasseter has done a fine report on the way in which the guerrilla insurgency has continued to boil along during the past week, making the "turn-over of sovereignty" an irrelevancy to US troops on the ground. Attacks are back up to the 35 a day range, and informed military observers don't expect an improvement soon.

US observers keep expressing puzzlement as to why the killing of hundreds or thousands of insurgents has not had an impact in repressing the guerrillas. They don't seem to get it that Iraqi clans still matter and that when they kill an Iraqi, they anger the man's brothers, uncles, and first and second cousins, some of whom step forward to take his place. In the US a lot of people don't even know their cousins and certainly would not sacrifice their lives to avenge one. Iraq is not like that. So, it isn't really even a matter of ideologies, necessarily. The US military has incurred enough clan feuds to keep the insurgencies going. And, of course, Iraqi and Arab nationalisms are powerful enough that people hate seeing Western troops in their country. The line between being angry about it and being angry enough to pick up a gun is a thin one.

Pipeline Blast Further Limits Iraqi Exports

For the second day in a row on Sunday, guerrillas attacked a key north-south pipeline in Iraq. The damage further limited Iraqi exports, which had been halved by the Saturday sabotage.

Allawi: Considering Arab Troops

George Stephanopoulos interviewed Iyad Allawi on Sunday and did what I thought was an excellent job. He pressed Allawi on the issue of Muqtada al-Sadr, and received the response that al-Sadr and the Mahdi Army might well be amnestied if they cooperate with the caretaker government and seek to join the system. Since trying to exclude the Sadrists from Iraqi politics would be a recipe for disaster down the road, Allawi's response seemed measured and promising. (Of course, Muqtada may decline the offer, but then the responsibility will lie with him).

Allawi startled me by not ruling out the use of Jordanian troops in Iraq. Jordan and Yemen both recently offered troops to Iraq. Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari had replied with the standard position of the old Interim Governing Council, which was that Iraq declined troops from neighboring countries (Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia). But Allawi in his interview did not reject Jordanian forces. He also seemed especially warm toward Syria and Egypt, and in other words was talking like an old-style Arab nationalist in regional terms.

The security disaster in Iraq, which was created by the ineptitude and overweening ambition of the United States, is extremely worrying to other countries in the region. Fallujah and other Iraqi centers of radical Islamism and radical Arab nationalism could easily spill over into Jordan and Palestine. In short, you could have a Fallujah axis that stretched from Iraq's Sunni heartland to Zarqa, Irbid and Maan in Jordan, and thence to the West Bank and Gaza. Jordan's King Abdullah II sits on a shakey throne allied with the United States and Israel. Over half his population is Palestinian as opposed to East Bank Arabs (often of Bedouin ancestry). If the Fallujan insurgents managed to set up cells in predominantly Palestinian cities like Irbid or in Salafi centers like Maan in Jordan and coordinate, it could destabilize the kingdom. Jordan's most vigorous dissident politics wells up from the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis, the same kind of ideology predominating in Fallujah.

So, King Abdullah II would presumably like nothing better than to have Jordan troops interposing themselves between Fallujah and Jordan, and in a position to prevent radical Islamists from extending their reach from Iraq west. (Some of the radicals operating in Iraq, like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his al-Tawhid, of course, originate in Jordan to begin with). The Americans have allowed Fallujah and Ramadi to develop in this direction, and appear to be impotent in stopping it.

Likewise Yemen must be terrified of blowback from Iraq. Some of its traditionally moderate Shiites, the Zaidis, have taken a radical turn lately. A virulently anti-American Zaidi preacher, Sheikh al-Houti, has created a clandestine militia and political network in his area, 200 miles north of Sanaa. I suppose the Yemeni governing fears that there is a danger of the ideas of Muqtada al-Sadr becoming influential among Zaidis. Whereas Khomeinism in the 1980s tended not to exercise much influence among sects of Shiism other than the Twelvers that predominate in Iran and Iraq, in the past ten years the Sadr movement has become influential with the heterodox Turkmen in northern Iraq, and it is not impossible that radical Iraqi Shiism will have an effect on other sects of Shiism, including the Zaids, the Syrian Alawis, and the Turkish Alevis. Likewise, Yemen has suffered from al-Qaeda's brand of terrorism, and radical Sunni Islamism is influential among some tribes and in some cities. Yemen's government is committed to old-style secular Sunni Arab nationalism of the sort that was discredited by Abdel Nasser's defeat in 1967 at the hands of the Israelis and by the US swift destruction of the Baath regime in Iraq. Yemenis are clearly looking around for some radical alternative, and the ones now based in Iraq are not so far away. That Iraqi radicals oppose the US also gives them anti-imperial credentials, making them popular in many quarters.

So it is not at all surprising that the countries in Iraq's neighborhood opposed rash US action in that country to begin with, and now fear that the chaos in Iraq will reach out in a wave of destabilization that will bring not democracy by religious radicalism and terrorism. For secular Sunni Arab regimes facing this threat, an obvious response is to commit their own troops in Iraq to shore up the caretaker government and disrupt terrorist networks.

Karpinski Says Israelis Were at Abu Ghraib

Brigadier General Janis Karpinski alleged Sunday that Israeli interrogators were active at Abu Ghuraib prison. She said she even met one who admitted his nationality to her. AP reports her saying,

' “I saw an individual there that I hadn’t had the opportunity to meet before, and I asked him what did he do there, was he an interpreter — he was clearly from the Middle East,” Karpinski told British Broadcasting Corp. radio in an interview broadcast Saturday. “He said, ‘Well I do some of the interrogation here. I speak Arabic, but I’m not an Arab; I’m from Israel.’ “I was really kind of surprised by that ... He didn’t elaborate any more than to say he was working with them and there were people from lots of different places that were involved in the operation.” '

The similarity of techniques used to humiliate and break Arab prisoners at Abu Ghuraib with those employed by the Israelis against the Palestinians has long suggested an Israeli connection to close observers of the Middle East. Karpinski's statement nails it down. Of course, it was all denied by the Israeli government, the Iraqi government, and probably will be by the US government, because the charge is an explosive one in the Middle East.

The US has no standing to promote democracy or liberty in the Middle East from the point of view of most in the Arab world, because the US supports to the hilt the large-scale theft of Palestinian land and the expropriation and impoverishment of the Palestinian people. One can only imagine how 19th century European-Americans would have responded to a claim by Mexico's Santa Ana, who reduced the Alamo, to be spreading liberty in Texas.

That the US employed Israeli expertise in its torture of prisoners at Abu Ghuraib would, for most Arab observers, only underline American illegitimacy in the region and the true nature of its enterprise in Iraq--not bringing democracy and liberty but rather stealing sovereignty and rights, and visiting humiliation on locals.

The complete failure of the United States to act as an honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the ever more rapacious demands of the ruling Likud Party in Israel for Lebensraum in the West Bank (at the least) are major engines of the terrorism directed toward the United States. Recent 9/11 Commission findings reported that Usama Bin Laden wanted to move the attack on the World Trade Towers up to May in order to respond more directly to the Israeli crushing of the Palestinians. (This finding was largely buried by the US press, since the standard--and wholly ridiculous--story in the US is that al-Qaeda doesn't care about the Palestine issue.)

The Likud, with its racist attitudes toward Arabs, has dragged the US into one disaster after another in the Middle East, endangering the US homeland and helping create the long-term disaster at Abu Ghuraib.

Dick Cheney's ape-like breast-beating about strong US action reducing terrorism notwithstanding, terrorism is getting worse and worse. The reason is that you need a two-pronged approach in counter-insurgency. You have to move violently against the violent, but then you have to deny them public support by winning hearts and minds and turning off potential recruits and enablers. Cheney's approach, like that of the Likud, fails miserably on the second count. The Iron Fist can cow people for a while. It cannot stop a powerful movement like al-Qaeda as long as things like the Israeli annexation of half the West Bank and the US torture of prisoners at Abu Ghuraib alienate the wider Muslim public and make them willing to tolerate al-Qaeda in their midst.

Quiet Ethnic Cleansing of Shiites by Sunni Jihadis?

A European reader with good Iraq contacts passes along a very interesting but frightening account of severe Sunni-Shiite tensions in the mixed areas around Baghdad.

I have occasionally seen reports in the Arabic press of Muqtada al-Sadr's followers usurping Sunni mosques and attacking Sunnis. Given the hatred of Shiites characteristic of the Sunni jihadi groups and the Salafis or Sunni fundamentalists, it is entirely plausible that they are engaging in the same kind of activities where they are a majority in mixed areas.

[The brother of a well-placed friend, let's call him "A."] says what's going on in Yusufiyah and other places in the south west of Baghdad, especially mixed Sunna Shia places, is a kind of "confessional cleansing": the Sunni mujahidin [radical Islamist fighters] are attacking Shiites with the intention to drive them out of those areas adjacent to the "Sunni triangle" . . . A. is a very reasonable quiet man, even after his eldest son was killed some three weeks ago. He said also, that in areas where you have a Sunni majority (e.g. Abu Ghraib area) Shiites are already leaving. And: Mujahidin are killing people with every possible pretext, for example persons who were in American custody and were released after some days are killed as "collaborators". With the consequence that nobody in Yusufiyah dares to go to the Americans or to the Iraqi government to report what is going on there. A. thinks that the mujahidin want to make a kind of "Sunni belt" around Bagdad.

In another sign of potential Sunni-Shiite ethnic conflict, ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that there was a pro-Saddam demonstration in the Sunni-majority city of Samarra' on Friday, with supporters of the deposed dictator parading posters of him and flying the Iraqi flag. They chanted "With spirit, with blood, we sacrifice ourselves for you, Saddam!" Some gave AFP interviews saying the court trying Saddam is illegitimate. Samarra' (pop. 214,000), which lies about 100 miles north of Baghdad in the Sunni heartland, also has a significant Shiite quarter, and given that Saddam killed so many Shiites, they must have been quite sullen over Friday's demonstration. They are there because of the Shiite belief that the Twelfth Imam, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, was translated into a supernatural realm from that city. In the 19th century it was briefly the seat of the preeminent Shiite religious authority. But Samarra's Shiites are even more exposed than those of Yusufiyah and probably aren't holding counter-demonstrations.

Al-Hayat also says that the Shiite Shaikh Ra'id al-Kadhimi, preaching in the mosque of Imam Musa al-Kadhim in Kazimiyah in northeast Baghdad, attacked Saddam's lawyers vehemently as mere apes who would not be able to escape the vengeance of the Iraqi people if they came to that country. After prayers, hundreds of worshippers held a demonstration, carrying placards calling for Saddam's execution. The preachers loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr demanded Saddam's execution, as did thousands of poor Shiites in East Baghdad who marched after Friday prayers. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's representative in Karbala, Abdul Mahdi al-Karbala'i, demanded that the trial be used to discover all the crimes of Saddam, especially those still hidden from the people.

The trial of Saddam clearly has the potential for deeply polarizing Iraq.

Meanwhile, Scott Wilson says that in the text of his Friday prayers sermon, Muqtada al-Sadr denounced the government of Iyad Allawi as a mere continuation of the Occupation, and said there has been a change "in name only." He said the Mahdi Army, his militia, was the army of Iraq, and said, "I ask the Iraqis to keep rejecting the occupation and call for independence . . ."

Iranian Influence on Iraqi Shiites

Ed Wong of the New York Times has a fine piece Saturday on Iranian influence on Iraqi Shiites. It seems pretty clear that the Iranians are giving money to various Shiite groups, though they are spreading it around so widely that it seems likely they are like some American lobbyists, hoping to have the gratitude of whoever comes out on top. If they were trying to put some particular group in power, they would concentrate their giving on that group. But they seem to have given money to a secularist like Ahmad Chalabi as well as to religious parties like the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Sadrists of Muqtada al-Sadr. I am quoted, saying that the Iranians are buttering both sides of the bread and all four crust edges, and this is the sort of thing I meant.

Wong pulled the following out of a US official, and it seems to me right:

' "They want a failure of America in Iraq, but they hope the country will be stable enough not to destabilize Iran," said a Western diplomat in Baghdad with extensive experience in the region. "The best thing for them would be a stabilized Iraq with a friendly Shia power in Baghdad created in opposition to the occupation forces." '

Also, this outcome seems quite likely.

2 Marines Die Friday

The Washington Post reports:

' The U.S. military reported that a Marine was killed in combat Friday and a second died of wounds sustained a day earlier in a restive province west of Baghdad that contains the city of Fallujah, the target of several U.S. air strikes over the past week. On Thursday, one Marine was killed in combat in the same area. '

Meanwhile, the US discovered a workshop in south Baghdad that was used to produce car bombs, making numerous arrests.

3 Killed or Injured in Hotel Attacks

Reuters reports that guerrillas launched a sophisticated strike Wednesday against the Baghdad Hotel and the Ishtar Sheraton in downtown Baghdad. The hotels were hit with rocket fire, causing three civilian casualties. A bus also exploded outside a mosque across from the Sheraton.

Guerrillas intended to make the point that they are still able to attack with impunity at the heart of the capital. They are also obviously trying to scare away foreign investment and Western businessmen, since the hotels attacked cater to the latter.

Meanwhile, Michael Ware argues that the Sunni Arab nationalists and ex-Baathists leading the resistance to the US and its Iraqi political allies are increasingly committed to seeing an Islamic state in Iraq. This development was predictable. If an imperial Power creates disillusionment with secular Arab nationalism of the Baath variety by handily defeating it, then it is natural for nationalists to seek some other, possibly more effective vehicle of dissent, and Islamism comes readily to hand. Insofar as it allows an appeal for help to the poor and the common people, who also value Islam, it may be more effective as an anti-imperialist tool than simple Arab nationalism.

Saddam Blames Bush

The brief appearance of Saddam Hussein in the courtroom on Wednesday was marked by his arrogance and intimidating style of speech. He ran circles around the 40-year-old prosecuting judge who tried to take his deposition. Saddam said that the whole proceeding was aimed at helping Bush win the elections in November. He also dismissed the Kuwaitis as "dogs" and defended his attempt to annex Kuwait in 1990-1991. He refused to sign papers certifying that he understood the charges against him, on the grounds that his attorney was not present.

Iraqis in Tikrit are said to have admired the performance, but in the Shiite South and in the Kurdish regions apparently some Iraqis were delighted to see Saddam in custody and possibly facing a death sentence. The potential for trouble between the ethnic communities over his trial and execution is significant.

It is also not clear that Saddam's trial would actually cast Bush in a positive light. Saddam can after all accurately report that Donald Rumsfeld came to him in 1984 with a letter from George Schultz saying that the US did not really mean it when it criticized Iraq for using chemical weapons against Iranian troops. (The documents have been published by the National Security Archive). Other damaging information may also come out in a trial.

Iraqi Reaction to "Transfer of Sovereignty"

The Al-Ahram Weekly, the leading Egyptian organ of news and opinion in English, has published a special issue in which it asked Iraqi writers and intellectuals to respond to the events of this past week. The American press almost never gives us canny, informed Iraqi voices like these, and the issue is a must read.

Nermin Mufti writes, e.g.:

' A doctor at Al-Nur hospital pointed out that "the conditions in hospitals did not improve, and are getting worse. The former minister had ordered us not to speak to local and foreign press about what goes on in hospitals with regard to the theft of medicine and equipment, a matter which has led to an increase in fatalities, particularly among those wounded in accidents." "Our hospital was not robbed when Baghdad fell, but our medicine inventory is still empty and we don't know where the aid goes, if there is aid to start with," a pharmaceutical assistant in the same hospital remarked.

Every so often, the papers publish news about the immense robberies that took place in the Ministry of Health between the formation of the Governing Council cabinet and that of the interim government. Documents are published indicating that theft has taken place. A recent report in Al-Sabah, a US- financed paper issued by the Iraqi media network, says that medical equipment worth billions of dinars have been stolen and smuggled abroad. An earlier report claims that the equipment was registered under the "scrap" category, as there is a recent law allowing for the export of scrap. In other words, the smuggling has been disguised as a legal procedure. Millions of tonnes of scrap metal from Iraqi military vehicles and buildings destroyed in bombardment, along with other material, have been sold as junk and scrap. '

11 US Troops Wounded;
Car Bomb in Samawah

The Associated Press reports that guerrillas pounded a U.S. base near Baghdad airport with mortar shells, wounding 11 US soldiers. The shelling started a fire on base that burned for an hour.

In the southern city of Samawah, guerrillas detonated a car bomb outside the police HQ. They wounded two persons and set two cars ablaze.

On Tuesday, police discovered a car bomb packed with 150 pounds of explosives in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, averting a massive explosion. In response, they announced a curfew from 9 pm until 6 am. There was also more trouble in Najaf between the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr and Najaf police. When the police arrested two members of the Mahdi Army militia loyal to Muqtada, the militiamen riposted by taking 25 policemen hostage. They released 16 of them on Wednesday. One Al-Sadr spokesman, Ahmad al-Shibani, asserted that all the police hostages had been released.

Marine Cpl. Wassef Hassoun, taken hostage by guerrillas, continued to be unaccounted for. Stories are surfacing that he had gone AWOL or tried to, making contacts with Iraqis in hopes of getting help in going to Lebanon, where he has relatives. The local Iraqis, however, are alleged to have instead sold him to the guerrillas. The AWOL story has not been confirmed by the Marines, and they seem ill at ease in their statements on the matter.

' "The circumstances surrounding the Marine's absence initially indicated that he was missing," a statement by the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force said. "However, in light of what we have observed on the terrorists' video, we have classified him as captured." '

Meanwhile, Saddam Hussein was legally surrendered to the Iraqis by the Americans. Since the US is no longer in international law the Occupying power, it has little right to continue to hold Saddam. Since the Americans do not, however, trust the Iraqis to guard him properly, their surrender of Saddam is just as much a sham as their surrender of sovereignty. A new opinion poll in Iraq suggested that over forty percent of Iraqis want him executed, while a similar proportion want him just to be let go. This sign of the extreme polarization of the Iraqi public over this issue is a very bad omen. By the way, it seems that Salem Chalabi, nephew of disgraced Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi, is still in charge of trying Saddam, according to the Arabic press. Salem has strong ties to Israeli interests, which may undermine his effectiveness in this role with the Iraqi public.