Franklin Met with Naor Gilon

The Israeli foreign ministry has confirmed that Lawrence Franklin, the Pentagon's top Iran desk officer, met repeatedly in Washington with "Naor Gilon, head of the political department at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, and a specialist on Iran's nuclear weapons program."

Gilon appears already to have been under surveillance by the FBI. At one point Franklin is said to have offered him a document, which he declined to take, but asked what it said and got an oral report. Gilon was unaware that he was being monitored and clearly thought he would be safe as long as he did not have any incriminating paper in his possession (conversations can be denied or spun, as long as they aren't taped).

Franklin did succeed in giving a confidential draft presidential directive on Iran to AIPAC officials, who then passed it to someone at the Israeli Embassy, perhaps Gilon. It is telling that the official took hard copy from AIPAC, presumably because he trusted them implicitly, whereas Gilon had rejected it from Franklin.

That Gilon is a specialist in Iran's nuclear weapons program suggests that Franklin wanted to consult with him about what the US should do about that issue. Gilon was "Director of the Division for Strategic and Military Affairs in the Center for Policy Research in Ministry of Foreign Affairs, from 2000-2002." Franklin harbors feelings of profound hatred for the regime in Tehran and wanted to see it destroyed.

Israeli government officials and people like Dennis Ross at the AIPAC-funded "Washington Institute for Near East Policy" keep saying that this case makes no sense, since if Israel wanted to know something about US policy toward Iran, they could just make a call. This line of defense doesn't really help, though, since it suggests that there are no US government secrets to which Israel would be denied access on a simple request. That is an impossible proposition, and if it were true then it really would be the case that AIPAC runs the US government.

I continue to believe that Franklin was not seeking to give Israel information so much as he was soliciting input on the wording of the presidential directive on Iran. We have seen over and over again in the Bush administration how crucial it is to control key policy documents. Because Bush frankly is not a detail man, and cannot get his head around nuanced policy (he makes fun of the word), the ability of his smarter subordinates to control what paper is put in front of him is key to making things happen. Thus, the Neocons managed to put the false Niger uranium purchase story into the State of the Union address in 2003 despite the opposition of CIA director George Tenet, who knew by then that it was junk. Stephen Hadley, then the Neocon chief mole in the National Security Council, signed off on the insertion.

So, if you could work up a presidential directive on Iran that, e.g., threatened military action against the Iranian nuclear facilities at Bushehr, and could put it about the Pentagon that AIPAC and the Israelis had signed off on it, you might be able to make a US air attack on Bushehr happen. When the final draft was presented to Bush for his signature, Karl Rove (Bush's campaign chief) could be assured that Bush would get brownie points (big money and votes) from AIPAC if he signed. That is, in my view, why Franklin was willing to risk sharing confidential Pentagon policy documents with AIPAC and the Israelis. He was cultivating them as a key constituency for the aggressive policies he was formulating. Having them on board before the directive had been finalized would allow him to argue that it had to be shaped in a particular way in order to please AIPAC and the Israelis. If he could privately assure his superiors that Gilon approved, that would help him get his way in a Neocon-dominated part of the Pentagon.

The Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK or MKO) has a front organization, the "National Council of Resistance" or NCR. The NCR has been a significant source of charges about the Iranian nuclear program, and probably spies on Iran for both the Pentagon and Israel. (I am reasoning back from AIPAC's WINEP-associated "scholars" supporting the MEK, which is very odd unless there is a big quid pro quo). They probably exaggerate, playing a game similar to that of Ahmad Chalabi in Iraq. That would be another reason for which Franklin would try to stop its Iraq commanders being turned over to Iran by the US in return for top al-Qaeda leaders that Tehran holds.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Republican Convention "We did not seek this War"

The Republican National Convention in New York was All 9/11 All the Time. As one would expect, Senator John McCain and former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani gave strong speeches (though Rudi came off as petty toward John Kerry in a way no one but Al Sharpton at the Democratic Convention came off toward George W. Bush). Unfortunately, these moderate Republicans don't run the party. Tom Delay and Dick Cheney and George Bush do.

Just two Middle-East related observations.

The speech-makers kept saying "we did not seek this war," and that it was imposed on us, and by God we were going to keep hitting back. That is, the rhetoric was that of righteous anger, of the avenging victim. While this argument works with regard to Afghanistan (which the US did not invade, only providing air cover to an indigenous group. the Northern Alliance), it is hollow with regard to Iraq. Only by confusing the "war on terror" with the war on Iraq could this rhetoric be even somewhat meaningful, and it is not a valid conflation.

No American president has more desperately sought out a war with any country than George W. Bush sought out this war with Iraq. Only Polk's war on Mexico, also based on false pretexts, even comes close to the degree of crafty manipulation employed by Bush and Cheney to get up the Iraq war. Intelligence about weapons of mass destruction was deliberately and vastly exaggerated, producing a "nuclear threat" where there wasn't even so much as a single gamma ray to be registered. Innuendo and repetition were cleverly used to tie Saddam to Usama Bin Laden operationally, a link that all serious intelligence professionals deny.

So, I agree that the war in Afghanistan was imposed on the US. But the war on Iraq was not. And pretending that the US had no choice but to attack Iraq and reduce it to a pitiful failed state is flatly dishonest.

The Republicans also had an Iraqi woman speak. Apparently they could not find an eloquent Iraqi with good English who still would come and support them. This woman at one point alleged that there have been recent free municipal elections in Iraq. I doubt that very much. Or, if any municipal elections have been held, they wouldn't be considered free or fair if done in the same way in Topeka, Kansas.

I also objected to the use of 9/11 and the US military for partisan purposes. 9/11 happened to all of us, Republican and Democrat. Is it really plausible that all those firefighters from Queens are Republicans? But that was the impression they tried to give. As for singing all the service songs, not all servicemen support Bush. One person with direct knowledge of the incident told me that a US officer in Iraq had had to threaten his tired, dusty, frightened men with being disciplined if they did not stop referring to Bush as "the Deserter."

I am frankly not impressed by the Bush administration response to al-Qaeda. Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri are at large, as are a large number of other high al-Qaeda operatives. The Bush administration missed a chance to get a number of important al-Qaeda figures from Iran, which wanted some Mojahedin-e Khalq terrorists in return, because the Neocons in the Pentagon have some sort of weird alliance with the MEK mad bombers. Most of the really big al-Qaeda fish have been caught by Pakistan, to which the Bush administration has just farmed out some of the most important counter-insurgency work against al-Qaeda. Is this wise?

Bush is characterizing the Iraq war as a "catastrophic success". This is the line that the US military succeeded so well so fast against Saddam's army that chaos naturally ensued.

Democrats are having a lot of fun with the phrase, but the real problem is that that analysis of what went wrong is incorrect. The Bush administration simply mismanaged Iraq. It dissolved the Iraqi army, throwing the country into chaos. That army was not gone and would have gladly showed up at the barracks for a paycheck. It pursued a highly punitive policy of firing and excluding members of the Baath Party, which was not done in so thorough-going a manner even to Nazis in post-war Germany. It canceled planned municipal elections, denying people any stake in their new "government," which was more or less appointed by the US. It put all its efforts into destroying Arab socialism in Iraq and creating a sudden free market, rather than paying attention to the preconditions for entrepreneurial activity, like security and services. It kept changing its policies-- early on it was going to turn the country over to Ahmad Chalabi in 6 months. Then that plan was scotched and Paul Bremer was brought in to play MacArthur in Tokyo for a projected two or three years. Then that didn't work and there would be council-based elections. Then those wouldn't work and there would be a "transfer of sovereignty." All this is not to mention the brutal and punitive sieges of Fallujah and Najaf and the Abu Ghuraib torture scandal, etc., etc.

So it wasn't a catastrophic success that caused the problem. It was that Iraq was being run at the upper levels by a handful of screw-ups who had all sorts of ulterior motives, and at least sometimes did not have the best interests of the country at heart. And Bush is the one who put them in charge.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Muqtada Plans Political Party

AP reports that the young Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr has called on his followers to cease fighting American and Coaltion troops and Iraqi police. He plans, his aides say, to have the Sadr movement contest the forthcoming elections to parliament.

Al-Hayat argues that Muqtada's decision was a compromise between hawks and doves within the Sadr movement. The hawks want continued anti-American action, whereas the doves want to seek political power at the ballot box. Muqtada decided to favor the doves at this juncture, in part, it says, because the Najaf debacle demonstrated to him that other significant Shiite political forces might well attempt to cut him out of political power.

That is, if I understand the argument, the al-Dawa Party and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq could jointly dominate parliament if the Sadrists boycott the elections, and could then use their governmental power to harm the Sadrists (as Allawi had done in Najaf, in alliance with local Najaf notables and with SCIRI). Unlike Fallujah, where the whole town rallied against the Marines, Muqtada's men were largely deserted and despised by the Najafis, and so could be massacred by the US, unlike the Fallujah guerrillas. Muqtada saw that he could be effectively and devastatingly isolated, and decided that participation in parliamentary politics would actually strengthen his position.

On the other hand, he had to appease the hawks, and so is arguing that they should not have to disarm, and should be allowed to keep their weapons.

The NYT's Eric Eckholm is very good on these developments, as well, today. He says that the Sadrists want to keep their guns, arguing that they are private property and that most America families have guns at home. He says that the Allawi government might allow the Mahdi Army men to keep their rifles, but wanted rocket-propelled grenades turned in. Eckholm writes:

' Sheik Bakhabi declined to describe the two sides' positions but said, "If we gave our rocket-propelled grenades to the government, but then they broke their promises, we couldn't get them back again."

In Sadr City on Monday, armed fighters were seldom visible on the streets, but there was little doubt who was in control. When a stranger shows up, a neighborhood captain of the Sadr organization quickly offers a challenge. A signed note from a militia official or a local tribal leader is usually enough to pass muster. Posters everywhere depict Mr. Sadr. '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Brown's "Public Diplomacy Press Review

A really useful compendium of news items related to public diplomacy and Middle East policy is sent out by email by John Brown, a former Foreign Service officer, in conjunction with the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy. It deals with "issues pertaining to foreign public opinion, anti-Americanism, propaganda, cultural diplomacy, U.S. international broadcasting, and the reception of American popular culture abroad." Mr. Brown says, "To receive the PDPR, please request it by e-mail at johnhbrown30 at hotmail d o t com."

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Hollings on AIPAC

I saw this in the press at the time, but a reader reminded me of it. Senator Hollings is retiring and speaking his mind. In my experience, this sentiment is very widespread on Capitol Hill, but politicians who are not retiring soon do not complain in public about it. Hollings said,

' But in any event [the Neocons say,], the better way to do it is go right in and establish our predominance in Iraq and then, as they say, and I have different articles here I could refer to, next is Iran and then Syria. And it is the domino theory, and they genuinely believe it. I differ. I think, frankly, we have caused more terrorism than we have gotten rid of. That is my Israel policy. You can't have an Israel policy other than what AIPAC gives you around here. I have followed them mostly in the main, but I have also resisted signing certain letters from time to time, to give the poor President a chance.

I can tell you no President takes office--I don't care whether it is a Republican or a Democrat--that all of a sudden AIPAC will tell him exactly what the policy is, and Senators and members of Congress ought to sign letters. I read those carefully and I have joined in most of them. On some I have held back. I have my own idea and my own policy. I have stated it categorically.

The way to really get peace is not militarily. You cannot kill an idea militarily. '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Johnson: FBI Furious at Leak

Many thanks to Ken Henderson for the following:

' In a later broadcast on MSNBC, former CIA officer and NBC analyst Larry Johnson
reported that for months he had been aware of an investigation that had led to tonight's revelation, one that had originally focused on the source of a forged document indicating that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger, presumably for making nuclear weapons. Johnson speculated that Israel may have been behind the forgery which was used by the administration to bolster its case for invasion. If so, he said, the espionage case could tie to an ongoing Justice Department criminal investigation into the outing of Valerie Plame as a covert CIA operative by right-wing columnist Robert Novak. Johnson also said the FBI was furious that news of the espionage investigation had leaked. Johnson opined that the investigation could lead from DOD to the National Security Council, and that the timing of the leak just before the start of the Republican convention was not coincidental. In a post on the dailykos weblog, one contributor noted that "when Tom Clancy and [Gen.] Zinni were running around flogging their book, they were on Deborah Norville. [During the show, Norville] asked Clancy of his impression of Wolfowitz. 'Is he working for our side?' [Clancy] replied."

It appears to be the case that someone in the Pentagon got wind that Larry Franklin had been flipped, and was terrified that the investigation might go on up the ladder at the Pentagon, in AIPAC, and with the Israelis. So they leaked news of the investigation to make sure that everybody clammed up and shredded everything.

The NYT piece today reflects continued efforts at the Pentagon to paint Franklin as a low-level desk grunt with little access to Paul Wolfowitz. This last is just a lie. In a conversation with me, Franklin indicated that he was in very close contact with Wolfowitz, and he offered to get me an audience. I said, "You don't read my web log, do you?"

CNN reports that AIPAC, which passed confidential Pentagon documents and information from Franklin to the Israelis, holds 2000 meetings a year with US Senators and Congressmen, leading to the passage of an average of 100 pro-Israel pieces of legislation every year!

Some readers have suggested that I have exaggerated AIPAC's hold on the US Congress. But I have direct knowledge of senators and congressmen being afraid to speak out on Israeli issues because of AIPAC's reputation for targetting representatives for un-election if they dare do so. And, it is easy to check. Look in the Congressional record. Is there ever any speech given on the floor critical of Israeli policy, given by a senator or representative who goes on to win the next election? And look at the debates in every other parliament in the world; there are such criticisms elsewhere. The US Congress is being held hostage by a single-issue lobbying organization that often puts Israeli interests above US interests, as the spying scandal, and the attempts to thwart the prisoner exchange by Iran of high al-Qaeda operatives for Mujahedin-e Khalq terrorists demonstrate.

Indeed, you would expect the revelation of the FBI case to provoke congressional investigations of AIPAC. There won't be any, for obvious reasons.

Again, I underline that the American Jewish community does not support most AIPAC positions (a majority are much closer to Americans for Peace Now), and that this issue has to do with a small fanatical leadership of a specific lobbying organization, nothing more.

Also, the Uggabugga blog has put up a diagram of the Franklin spying affair as far as it is known so far.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Baldauf: Najaf Standoff Helped Muqtada

CSM journalist Scott Baldauf, who has his ear to the ground in Iraq in a way that US officialdom seldom does, believes that Muqtada al-Sadr benefited politically from the recent standoff in Najaf. He writes,

' Six months ago, Sheikh Jawad al-Khalasi was what most would consider an Iraqi Shiite moderate. Critical of the militant ideas of fellow Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, Mr. Khalasi preached a more cooperative approach toward the Americans and the interim Iraqi government.

Then, last Thursday, when Iraqi snipers opened fire on him and thousands of demonstrators converging on Najaf, hoping to end the siege there and protect the shrine, Khalasi changed his mind. Now he's a radical, a troubling sign that Mr. Sadr has grown stronger from a three-week-long standoff that the Iraqi government once hoped might reduce Sadr to irrelevance. '

Meanwhile, fighting continued on Sunday in Iraq. The US bombed Fallujah yet again, and fought Mahdi Army militiamen in East Baghdad, killing 16 Iraqis during the two sets of clashes.

In downtown Baghdad, 250 Iraqis gathered to protest the ongoing US military actions in Iraq.

Another 35 Iraqis were wounded, and two guerrillas killed, in a clash between US forces and nationalists at Tel Afar in northern Iraq.

Dawn reports that

In Najaf Sunday morning, police raided an office of Grand Ayatollah Kadhim al-Husseini al-Hairi's representative and arrested several men, according to his supporters. Al-Husseini al-Hairi is believed to be Al-Sadr's mentor and he spent 25 years in the Iranian city of Kom.

Al-Husseini al-Hairi is more conservative than Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, who managed to persuade Al-Sadr's militia to withdraw from holy sites in Najaf on Friday. Also a spokesman for Al-Sadr in Basra told Arabic broadcaster al- Jazeera that Mahdi Army fighters were not responsible for an explosion at a pipeline near the southern oil fields of Rumeilah.

Actually, al-Haeri broke with Muqtada some time ago, and has denounced his use of an armed militia. So this raid on his offices has to do with something else. Al-Haeri is very anti-American, and it is likely just an attempt to curb any influence he may be building in Iraq, from which he has been exiled for decades, living in Qom, Iran.

In other Iraq news, the British also negotiated with Mahdi militiamen, in Basra, in an effort to end clashes with them there. Guerrillas blew up pipelines near Basra on Sunday, reducing Iraqi exports further.

And caretaker PM Iyad Allawi has signed an order abrogating the firing of Baath Party members in Iraq's ministries. Massive de-Baathification, which left many Iraqis jobless, had been implemented by Allawi's rival and distant cousin, Ahmad Chalabi.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Newsweek: Franklin Confesses
AIPAC Under Separate FBI Investigation

Laura Rozen directs our attention to the new Newsweek article by Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, which has several new details on the Lawrence Franklin espionage scandal in the Pentagon.

First, Franklin's passing of confidential documents to AIPAC was discovered because AIPAC was already under FBI surveillance for possible espionage for Israel.

It was just a Washington lunch-—one that the FBI happened to be monitoring. Nearly a year and a half ago, agents were monitoring a conversation between an Israeli Embassy official and a lobbyist for American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, as part of a probe into possible Israeli spying. Suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, in the description of one intelligence official, another American "walked in" to the lunch out of the blue. Agents at first didn't know who the man was. They were stunned to discover he was Larry Franklin, a desk officer with the Near East and South Asia office at the Pentagon.

So now the question is, what tipped the FBI to possible AIPAC spying efforts for Israel, and what is the substance of that investigation, which is apparently unrelated to the Franklin case?

Second, Franklin was flipped about a month ago, and admitted his Israeli contacts:

Officials say that Franklin began cooperating about a month ago, after he was confronted by the FBI. At the time, these officials say, Franklin acknowledged meetings with the Israeli contact.

A raft of articles appeared on Sunday based on interviews with Franklin's colleagues, which attempted to spin him as spacey and naive. Here is a reserve colonel, a Ph.D., a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, a man who knows several languages, is tough enough to play hardball inside the Pentagon. And he's a woolly-headed idiot? How likely is that? He is clearly a lamb being fattened. Franklin worked for or hung out intensively with Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, William Luti, Abram Shulsky, Harold Rhode, David Wurmser and a host of other officials known for their pro-Likud sentiments. So he takes it into his head all alone to pass confidential information to the Israelis? How likely is that?

Another way of soft-pedalling the story is to claim that he is a low-level desk officer without real influence or power. But Franklin is the Iran desk officer for the Pentagon. If Wolfowitz has a question about Iran, he calls Franklin. That isn't a "low level" position without influence.

Further, we know from UPI and Knight Ridder that the FBI investigation is not limited to Franklin.

I haven't seen any more on the Jerusalem Post's tantalizing assertion that Franklin attempted to block the trading of Mojahedin-e Khalq terrorists to Iran in return for five high-ranking al-Qaeda operatives in Iranian custody. But here is an Agence France Presse report from last December that explains the negotiations.

AFP, Dec. 10, 2003:

' Several Western diplomats have said Iran has been resisting handing over top-ranking Al-Qaeda fugitives, complaining that the United States had failed to deal with the People's Mujahedeen -- which has waged a brutal armed struggle against Iran's clerical rulers -- after its invasion of Iraq.

There have also been reports that Jordan's King Abdullah II was quietly trying to broker a deal between the United States and Iran over the issue.

Diplomats and Arab press reports have said Al-Qaeda detainees here include bin Laden's son, Saad, Al-Qaeda's spokesman, Sulaiman Abu Gaith, and its number three Saif al-Adel.

The People's Mujahedeen, or Mujahedeen-e Khalq Organization (MKO) set up base in Iraq in 1986 and carried out regular cross-border raids in Iran, with which Iraq fought a bloody war between 1980 and 1988.

For many in Iran's leadership the struggle is also a personal one -- supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had his arm paralysed in a 1981 attack blamed on the group.'

By the time this article appeared, the al-Qaeda trade had already fallen through because powerful US politicians, some with Likud Party links, had intervened to protect the MEK.

This summer, 2003 NBC report is also suggestive:

"We have exclusive new details tonight on talks between the US and Iran, a nation the President said was part of an axis of evil. Iran can help the American fight against terrorism, but apparently they have named a price." NBC (Brown) adds, "These three, among the most wanted members of Al Qaeda. The alleged poison expert who got medical treatment in Iraq, [Abu Mussab al Zarqawi]. Bin Laden's third oldest son, [Sa'ad bin Laden], known to be planning new Al Qaeda operations. The Al Qaeda spokesman, [Suleiman abu Gaith], famous for introducing bin Laden in this videotape after 9/11. Many US officials believe that Iran is willing to turn them and other key Al Qaeda operatives over to the US or their home countries -- for a price -- in exchange for members of an Iranian opposition group called the Mujahadeen al-Khalq, or the MEK. The MEK has been attacking Iran's Islamic government from Iraq and is now there under US military control."

Iran is reported to have Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in custody in summer of 2003, and to be entirely willing to hand him over to the US in return for some high-ranking MEK terrorists. But first the neocon network, including Franklin, Harold Rhode and Michael Ledeen, intervenes to stop the trade (see below). Then, mysteriously, everything that goes wrong in Iraq from about January of 2004 begins being blamed on Zarqawi (is it alleged that Iran let him go, to deliberately disrupt Iraq by blowing up Shiites? More likely, when Iran won't accommodate the Neocons because of the latters' ties to MEK, the neocons decide to smear Iran as "harboring" terrorists and "sending" them to Iraq. They know this path might even lead to a US war on Iran, which is what they want. That is one reason they did not want the prisoner exchange to succeed).

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Pentagon/Israel Spying Case Expands:
Fomenting a War on Iran

Here is my take on the Lawrence Franklin espionage scandal in the Pentagon.

It is an echo of the one-two punch secretly planned by the pro-Likud faction in the Department of Defense. First, Iraq would be taken out by the United States, and then Iran. David Wurmser, a key member of the group, also wanted Syria included. These pro-Likud intellectuals concluded that 9/11 would give them carte blanche to use the Pentagon as Israel's Gurkha regiment, fighting elective wars on behalf of Tel Aviv (not wars that really needed to be fought, but wars that the Likud coalition thought it would be nice to see fought so as to increase Israel's ability to annex land and act aggressively, especially if someone else's boys did the dying).

Franklin is a reserve Air Force colonel and former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst. He was an attache at the US embassy in Tel Aviv at one point, which some might now see as suspicious. After the Cold War ended, Franklin became concerned with Iran as a threat to Israel and the US, and learned a little Persian (not very much--I met him once at a conference and he could only manage a few halting phrases of Persian). Franklin has a strong Brooklyn accent and says he is "from the projects." I was told by someone at the Pentagon that he is not Jewish, despite his strong association with the predominantly Jewish neoconservatives. I know that he is very close to Paul Wolfowitz. He seems a canny man and a political operator, and if he gave documents to AIPAC it was not an act of simple stupidity, as some observers have suggested. It was part of some clever scheme that became too clever by half.

Franklin moved over to the Pentagon from DIA, where he became the Iran expert, working for Bill Luti and Undersecretary of Defense for Planning, Douglas Feith. He was the "go to" person on Iran for Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and for Feith. This situation is pretty tragic, since Franklin is not a real Iranist. His main brief appears to have been to find ways to push a policy of overthrowing its government (apparently once Iraq had been taken care of). This project has been pushed by the shadowy eminence grise, Michael Ledeen, for many years, and Franklin coordinated with Ledeen in some way. Franklin was also close to Harold Rhode, a long-time Middle East specialist in the Defense Department who has cultivated far right pro-Likud cronies for many years, more or less establishing a cell within the Department of Defense.

UPI via Dawn reports,

' An UPI report said another under-investigation official Mr Rhode "practically lived out of (Ahmad) Chalabi's office". Intelligence sources said that CIA operatives observed Mr Rhode as being constantly on his cell phone to Israel, discussing US plans, military deployments, political projects and a discussion of Iraq assets. '

Josh Marshall, Laura Rozen and Paul Glastris have just published a piece in the Washington Monthly that details Franklin's meetings with corrupt Iranian arms dealer and con man Manuchehr Ghorbanifar, who had in the 1980s played a key role in the Iran-contra scandal. (For more on the interviews with Ghorbanifar, see Laura Rozen's web log). It is absolutely key that the meetings were attended also by Rhode, Ledeen and the head of Italy's military intelligence agency, SISMI, Nicolo Pollari, as well as Rome's Minister of Defense, Antonio Martino.

The rightwing government of corrupt billionnaire Silvio Berlusconi, including Martino, was a big supporter of an Iraq war. Moreover, we know that the forged documents falsely purporting to show Iraqi uranium purchases from Niger originated with a former SISMI agent. Watch the reporting of Josh Marshall for more on this SISMI/Ledeen/Rhode connection.

But journalist Matthew Yglesias has already tipped us to a key piece of information. The Niger forgeries also try to implicate Iran. Indeed, the idea of a joint Iraq/Iran nuclear plot was so far-fetched that it is what initially made the Intelligence and Research division of the US State Department suspicious of the forgeries, even before the discrepancies of dates and officials in Niger were noticed. Yglesisas quotes from the Senate report on the alleged Iraqi attempt to buy uranium from Niger:

' The INR [that's State Department intelligence] nuclear analyst told the Committee staff that the thing that stood out immediately about the [forged] documents was that a companion document -- a document included with the Niger documents that did not relate to uranium -- mentioned some type of military campaign against major world powers. The members of the alleged military campaign included both Iraq and Iran and was, according to the documents, being orchestrated through the Nigerien [note: that's not the same as Nigerian] Embassy in Rome, which all struck the analyst as "completely implausible." Because the stamp on this document matched the stamp on the uranium document [the stamp was supposed to establish the documents bona fides], the analyst thought that all of the documents were likely suspect. The analyst was unaware at the time of any formatting problems with the documents or inconsistencies with the names or dates. '

Journalist Eric Margolis notes of SISMI:

SISMI has long been notorious for far right, even neo-fascist, leanings. According to Italian judicial investigators, SISMI was deeply involved in numerous plots against Italy’s democratic government, including the 1980 Bologna train station terrorist bombing that left 85 dead and 200 injured. Senior SISMI officers were in cahoots with celebrated swindler Roberto Calvi, the neo-fascist P2 Masonic Lodge, other extreme rightist groups trying to destabilize Italy, the Washington neocon operative, Michael Ledeen, and the Iran-Contra conspirators. SISMI works hand in glove with US, British and Israeli intelligence. In the 1960’s and 70’s, SISMI reportedly carried out numerous operations for CIA, including bugging the Vatican, the Italian president’s palace, and foreign embassies. Italy’s civilian intelligence service, SISDE, associated with Italy’s political center-left, has long been a bitter rival of SISMI. After CIA rejected the Niger file, it was eagerly snapped up by VP Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, Lewis Libby, who were urgently seeking any reason, no matter how specious, to invade Iraq. Cheney passed the phony data to Bush, who used it in his January, 2003 address to the nation in spite of warnings from CIA . . .

So Franklin, Ledeen, and Rhode, all of them pro-Likud operatives, just happen to be meeting with SISMI (the proto-fascist purveyor of the false Niger uranium story about Iraq and the alleged Iran-Iraq plot against the rest of the world) and corrupt Iranian businessman and would-be revolutionary, Ghorbanifar, in Europe. The most reasonable conclusion is that they were conspiring together about the Next Campaign after Iraq, which they had already begun setting in train, which is to get Iran.

But now The Jerusalem Post reveals that at least one of the meetings was quite specific with regard to an attempt to torpedo better US/Iran relations:

The purpose of the meeting with Ghorbanifar was to undermine a pending deal that the White House had been negotiating with the Iranian government. At the time, Iran had considered turning over five al-Qaida operatives in exchange for Washington dropping its support for Mujahadeen Khalq, an Iraq-based rebel Iranian group listed as a terrorist organization by the State Department.

The Neoconservatives have some sort of shadowy relationship with the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization or MEK. Presumably its leaders have secretly promised to recognize Israel if they ever succeed in overthrowing the ayatollahs in Iran. When the US recently categorized the MEK as a terrorist organization, there were howls of outrage from "scholars" associated with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (a wing of AIPAC), such as ex-Trotskyite Patrick Clawson and Daniel Pipes. MEK is a terrorist organization by any definition of the term, having blown up innocent people in the course of its struggle against the Khomeini government. (MEK is a cult-like mixture of Marx and Islam). The MEK had allied with Saddam, who gave them bases in Iraq from which to hit Iran. When the US overthrew Saddam, it raised the question of what to do with the MEK. The pro-Likud faction in the Pentagon wanted to go on developing their relationship with the MEK and using it against Tehran.

So it transpires that the Iranians were willing to give up 5 key al-Qaeda operatives, whom they had captured, in return for MEK members.

Franklin, Rhode and Ledeen conspired with Ghorbanifar and SISMI to stop that trade. It would have led to better US-Iran relations, which they wanted to forestall, and it would have damaged their proteges, the MEK.

Since high al-Qaeda operatives like Saif al-Adil and possibly even Saad Bin Laden might know about future operations, or the whereabouts of Bin Laden, for Franklin and Rhode to stop the trade grossly endangered the United States.

The FBI has evidence that Franklin passed a draft presidential directive on Iran to AIPAC, which then passed it to the Israelis. The FBI is construing these actions as espionage or something close to it. But that is like getting Al Capone on tax evasion. Franklin was not giving the directive to AIPAC in order to provide them with information. He was almost certainly seeking feedback from them on elements of it. He was asking, "Do you like this? Should it be changed in any way?" And, he might also have been prepping AIPAC for the lobbying campaign scheduled for early in 2005, when Congress will have to be convinced to authorize military action, or at least covert special operations, against Iran. AIPAC probably passed the directive over to Israel for the same reason--not to inform, but to seek input. That is, AIPAC and Israel were helping write US policy toward Iran, just as they had played a key role in fomenting the Iraq war.

With both Iraq and Iran in flames, the Likud Party could do as it pleased in the Middle East without fear of reprisal. This means it could expel the Palestinians from the West Bank to Jordan, and perhaps just give Gaza back to Egypt to keep Cairo quiet. Annexing southern Lebanon up to the Litani River, the waters of which Israel has long coveted, could also be undertaken with no consequences, they probably think, once Hizbullah in Lebanon could no longer count on Iranian support. The closed character of the economies of Iraq and Iran, moreover, would end, allowing American, Italian and British companies to make a killing after the wars (so they thought).

Franklin's movements reveal the contours of a rightwing conspiracy of warmongering and aggression, an orgy of destruction, for the benefit of the Likud Party, of Silvio Berlusconi's business in the Middle East, and of the Neoconservative Right in the United States. It isn't about spying. It is about conspiring to conscript the US government on behalf of a foreign power or powers.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Israeli Spy in Pentagon Linked to AIPAC

CBS is reporting that a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst detailed to Undersecretary of Defense for Planning Douglas Feith's Office of Special Plans is under FBI investigation for spying for Israel. The person passed to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee confidential documents, including those detailing Bush administration policy toward Iran, and AIPAC then passed them to Israel. There are wiretaps and photographs backing up the FBI case (the FBI agents involved are extremely brave to take this on).

But this espionage case is too narrow. Consider what journalist Jim Lobe wrote about Feith's Office of Special Plans and the Pentagon Near East and South Asia office:

' key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003. The heads of NESA and OSP were Deputy Undersecretary William Luti and Abram Shulsky, respectively. Other appointees who worked with them in both offices included Michael Rubin, a Middle East specialist previously with the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI); David Schenker, previously with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); and Michael Makovsky; an expert on neo-con icon Winston Churchill and the younger brother of David Makovsky, a senior WINEP fellow and former executive editor of pro-Likud Jerusalem Post. Along with Feith, all of the political appointees have in common a close identification with the views of the right-wing Likud Party in Israel. '

Karen Kwiatkowski was an eyewitness in NESA, and Lobe reports:

' she recounts one incident in which she helped escort a group of half a dozen Israelis, including several generals, from the first floor reception area to Feith's office. "We just followed them, because they knew exactly where they were going and moving fast." When the group arrived, she noted the book which all visitors are required to sign under special regulations that took effect after the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks. "I asked his secretary, 'Do you want these guys to sign in?' She said, 'No, these guys don't have to sign in.'" It occurred to her, she said, that the office may have deliberately not wanted to maintain a record of the meeting. '

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is a lobbying group that used to support whatever government was in power in Israel, and used to give money even-handedly inside the US. My perception is that during the past decade AIPAC has increasingly tilted to the Likud in Israel, and to the political Right in the United States. In the 1980s, AIPAC set up the Washington Institute for Near East Policy as a pro-Israeli alternative to the Brookings Institution, which it perceived to be insufficiently supportive of Israel. WINEP has largely followed AIPAC into pro-Likud positions, even though its director, Dennis Ross, is more moderate. He is a figurehead, however, serving to disguise the far right character of most of the position papers produced by long-term WINEP staff and by extremist visitors and "associates" (Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer are among the latter).

WINEP, being a wing of AIPAC, is enormously influential in Washington. State Department and military personnel are actually detailed there to "learn" about "the Middle East"! They would get a far more balanced "education" about the region in any Israeli university, since most Israeli academics are professionals, whereas WINEP is a "think tank" that hires by ideology.

I did some consulting with one US company that had a government contract, and they asked me about WINEP position papers (many of them are just propaganda). When I said I would take them with a grain of salt, the guy said his company had "received direction" to pay a lot of attention to the WINEP material! So Discipline is being imposed even on the private sector.

Note that over 80% of American Jews vote Democrat, that the majority of American Jews opposed the Iraq war (more were against it than in the general population), and that American Jews have been enormously important in securing civil liberties for all Americans. Moreover, Israel has been a faithful ally of the US and deserves our support in ensuring its security. The Likudniks like to pretend that they represent American Jewry, but they do not. And they like to suggest that objecting to their policies is tantamount to anti-Semitism, which is sort of like suggesting that if you don't like Chile's former dictator Pinochet, you are bigotted against Latinos.

As can be seen by Lobe's list, WINEP supplies rightwing intellectuals to Republican administrations, who employ their positions to support Likud policies from within the US government. They have the advantage over long-time civil servants in units like the State Department's Intelligence and Research division, insofar as they are politically connected and so have the ear of the top officials.

So, passing a few confidential documents over is a minor affair. Pro-Likud intellectuals established networks linking Defense and the national security advisers of Vice President Dick Cheney, gaining enormous influence over policy by cherry-picking and distorting intelligence so as to make a case for war on Saddam Hussein. And their ulterior motive was to remove the most powerful Arab military from the scene, not because it was an active threat to Israel (it wasn't) but because it was a possible deterrent to Likud plans for aggressive expansion (at the least, they want half of the West Bank, permanently).

It should be admitted that the American Likud could not make US policy on its own. Its members had to make convincing arguments to Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush himself. But they were able to make those arguments, by distorting intelligence, channeling Ahmad Chalabi junk, and presenting Big Ideas to men above them that signally lacked such ideas. (Like the idea that the road to peace in Jerusalem ran through Baghdad. Ha!)

It was these WINEP and AIPAC-linked US Likud backers in the Defense Department who had the Iraqi army dissolved as soon as Saddam was overthrown. This step threw Iraq into chaos and led to the deaths of nearly a thousand US servicemen so far, since an Iraq without an army would inevitably depend on the US military. But with the Iraqi army gone, and with Egypt and Jordan neutralized, Syria was left the only country anywhere near Israel that could make active trouble for Sharon if he completely screwed over the Palestinians. And Syria was now weak and isolated. So Sharon has had a free hand in his expansionist aggression. And, because the US public has been preoccupied with Iraq, the Likud could pursue its annexation of West Bank land and its expropriation of even more Palestinians without anyone over here even noticing. It is the best of all possible worlds for the heirs of Ze'ev Jabotinsky.

The Likud policies of reversing Oslo and stealing people's land and making their lives hell has produced enormous amounts of terrorism against Israel, and the Likudniks have cleverly turned that to their political advantage. Aggression and annexation is necessary, they argue, because there is terrorism. Some of them now openly speak of ethnically cleansing the Palestinians, using the same argument. But when the Oslo peace process looked like it would go somewhere, terrorism tapered off (it did not end, but then peace had not been achieved).

The drawback for the US in all this is that US government backing for Sharon's odious policies makes it hated in the Muslim world. (Note that Muslims who oppose Israeli aggression are often tagged as "terrorists" by the US government, but rightwing Jews who go to Palestine to colonize it, walking around with Uzi machine guns and sometimes shooting down civilians, are not "terrorists.") This lack of balance is one big reason that Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri hit the US on September 11. In fact, Bin Laden wanted to move up the operation to punish the US for supporting Sharon's crackdown on the Second Intifada.

Likud apologists have carefully planted the false story that al-Qaeda did not care about Palestine, but that is absurd. Bin Laden always complained about the occupation of the three holy cities (Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem, the first two because of US troops in Saudi Arabia, and the third under Israeli occupation). When Bin Laden came back from Afghanistan to Jidda in 1989 his first sermon at the local mosque was about the Israeli repression of Palestinians during the first Infifada.

Now US occupation of Iraq is making it even more hated in the Muslim world. It is a policy hatched in part by AIPAC, WINEP, and their associated "thinkers." The cynical might suggest that they actively want the US involved in a violent struggle with Muslims, to make sure that the US remains anti-Palestinian and so will permit Israeli expansion.

All this can happen because there is a vacuum in US political discourse. A handful of special interests in the United States virtually dictate congressional policy on some issues. With regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and a few allies have succeeded in imposing complete censorship on both houses of Congress. No senator or congress member dares make a speech on the floor of his or her institution critical of Israeli policy, even though the Israeli government often violates international law and UN Security Council resolutions (it would violate more such resolutions, except that the resolutions never got passed because only one NSC member, the US, routinely vetoes them on behalf of Tel Aviv.) As the Labor Party in Israel has been eclipsed by the Likud coalition, which includes many proto-fascist groups, this subservience has yoked Washington to foreign politicians who privately favor ethnic cleansing and/or agressive warfare for the purpose of annexing the territory of neighbors.

On the rare occasion when a brave member of congress dares stand up to this unrelenting AIPAC tyranny, that person is targeted for unelection in the next congressional campaign, with big money directed by AIPAC and/or its analogues into the coffers of the senator or congressman's opponent. Over and over again, AIPAC has shaped the US congress in this way, so successfully that no one even dares speak out any more.

AIPAC is not all that rich or powerful, but politics in the US is often evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. Because many races are very close, any little extra support can help change the outcome. AIPAC can provide that little bit. Moreover, most Americans couldn't care less about the Middle East or its intractable problems, whereas the staffers at AIPAC are fanatics. If some congressman from southern Indiana knows he can pick up even a few thousand dollars and some good will from AIPAC, he may as well, since his constituents don't care anyway. That there is no countervailing force to AIPAC allows it to be effective. (That is one reason that pro-Likud American activists often express concern about the rise of the Muslim-American community and the possibility that it may develop an effective lobby.) Moreover, AIPAC leverages its power by an alliance with the Christian Right, which has adopted a bizarre ideology of "Christian Zionism." It holds that the sooner the Palestinians are ethnically cleansed, the sooner Christ will come back. Without millions of these Christian Zionist allies, AIPAC would be much less influential and effective.

The Founding Fathers of the United States deeply feared that a foreign government might gain this level of control over a branch United States government, and their fears have been vindicated.

The situation has reached comedic proportions. Congress is always drafting letters to the president, based on AIPAC templates, demanding that lopsided US policy in favor of Israel be revised to be even more in favor of Israel. US policy recently changed to endorse the expansion of Israeli colonies in Palestinian, West Bank territory.

Where Israel is in the right, this situation obviously is innocuous. The United States should protect Israel from aggressive attack, if necessary. United Nations members are pledged to collective security, i.e. to protecting any member nation from aggression at the hands of another. But given that Israel is a nuclear power with a vast arsenal of weapons of mass destruction; given that Egypt and Jordan have long-lived peace treaties with Israel; and given that Syria and Lebanon are small weak powers, there is not in fact any serious military threat to Israel in its immediate neighborhood. In contrast, Israel launched wars against neighbors in 1956, 1967, and 1982 (all of which it won so easily as to bring into question the necessity for the wars in the first place if they were defensive), and has since 1967 been assiduously colonizing Palestinian land that it militarily occupied--all the while attempting to avoid becoming responsible for the Palestinian populations on that land. This latter policy has poisoned the entire world.

AIPAC currently has a project to shut up academics such as myself, the same way it has shut up Congress, through congressional legislation mandating "balance" (i.e. pro-Likud stances) in Middle East programs at American Universities. How long the US public will allow itself to be spied on and pushed around like this is a big question. And, with the rise of international terrorism targeting the US in part over these issues, the fate of the country hangs in the balance.

If al-Qaeda succeeds in another big attack, it could well tip the country over into military rule, as Gen. Tommy Franks has suggested. That is, the fate of the Republic is in danger. And the danger comes from two directions, not just one. It comes from radical extremists in the Muslim world, who must be fought. But it also comes from radical extremists in Israel, who have key allies in the US and whom the US government actively supports and against whom influential Americans are afraid to speak out.

If I had been in power on September 11, I'd have called up Sharon and told him he was just going to have to withdraw to 1967 borders, or face the full fury of the United States. Israel would be much better off inside those borders, anyway. It can't absorb 3 million Palestinians and retain its character, and it can't continue to hold 3 million Palestinians as stateless hostages without making itself inhumane and therefore un-Jewish. And then I'd have thrown everything the US had at al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and frog-marched Bin Laden off to justice, and rebuilt Afghanistan to ensure that al-Qaeda was permanently denied a base there. Iraq, well, Iraq was contained.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Thousands Stream into Shrine of Ali
Muqtada orders Followers to Disarm

CNN's Kianne Sadeq continues her excellent reportage from Najaf. She and her team report that supporters of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani streamed into the shrine of Ali in Najaf. After reaching an agreement with Sistani, Muqtada pledged to ask his men to leave the shrine. Sistani wants Najaf and Kufa to be demilitarized. Muqtada al-Sadr's men used the microphones ordinarily employed for the call to prayer to relay his message that the Mahdi Army should lay down its arms. Wire reports suggest that some were obeying the order. With all those pilgrims now in the shrine, it will be easy for the Mahdi Army fighters to slip away if they so choose.

Sadeq also says that Qasim Dawoud, the Minister of State for Military Affairs, has pledged that Muqtada al-Sadr would be a free man as a result of the agreement he reached with Sistani. Dawoud said,

"Muqtada al-Sadr is free to go anywhere he likes. ... He is as free as any Iraqi citizen."

Meanwhile, the full extent of the destruction inflicted on Najaf by the US military may never be fully appreciated in the U.S. itself. How many civilians did our troops kill in their campaign in a densely populated urban area against the Sadrist street gangs--especially in the first days of the conflict before most city residents fled the old city? I find chilling the words of John Burns and Dexter Filkin of the New York Times

' One of the last American actions before the cease-fire went into effect involved the use of a 2,000-pound, laser-guided bomb to strike a hotel about 130 yards from the shrine's southwest wall, in an area known to American commanders as "motel row." '

Chris Allbritton, an eyewitness writes to remind me that by this time, the area was completely deserted by civilians, so this strike did not kill any. My point was only that especially in the first week of the three-week battle, there seem to have been civilian casualties, and we don't know anything about them-- how many, how bad, etc., despite sporadic reports and statistics from the Iraqi Health Ministry.

Al-Hayat reports that while he was in London, a delegation of Iranians came to see Sistani and to request that he support a bigger role for Iran in Iraq. He is said to have rejected this overture vehemently, and to have decided in the aftermath to return to Iraq without coordinating that step with the British, American or Iraqi governments. [This claim of non-coordination is coming from Sistani circles in London and is not plausible-- the British had to be in this up to their eyeballs.]

Winners and losers:

I think the big losers from the Najaf episode (part deux) are the Americans. They have become, if it is possible, even more unpopular in Iraq than they were last spring after Abu Ghuraib, Fallujah and Najaf Part 1. The US is perceived as culturally insensitive for its actions in the holy city of Najaf.

The Allawi government is also a big loser. Instead of looking decisive, as they had hoped, they ended up looking like the lackeys of neo-imperialists.

The big winner is Sistani, whose religious charisma has now been enhanced by solid nationalist credentials. He is a national hero for saving Najaf.

For Muqtada, it is a wash. He did not have Najaf until April, anyway, and can easily survive not having it. His movement in the slums of the southern cities is intact, even if its paramilitary has been weakened.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Cole on Lehrer, CNN

I will be on the Lehrer News Hour tonight talking about Sistani and the settlement he has reached with Muqtada al-Sadr.

Also on CNN Headline News either at 7-7:30 or 7:30-8:00 EST
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sistani Arrives in Najaf
Dozens Dead in Kufa Mosque Mortar attack

Abdul Hussein al-Obeidi of AP reports that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has arrived in Najaf and gone to a house about a mile from the besieged shrine of Ali. He has asked the thousands of marchers with him to wait outside the city.

Caretaker Prime Minister announced a 24-hour truce in Najaf. American-appointed Najaf Governor Adnan al-Zurfi threatened that if the mosque crisis is not resolved in 24 hours, he will begin military operations again (the clip was shown on al-Jazeerah).

Iraqis in Kufa who went to a mosque to pray before walking to Najaf came under mortar fire, which killed dozens and wounded a large number. The Sadrists blamed the US military, which denied having mortar emplacements anywhere near the shrine. The US military suggested that the Mahdi Army has engaged in wild, undisciplined mortar fire. (This is true, but unless a clear target is identified near the mosque that they might have actually been aiming at, it seems a little unlikely that they would hit their own mosque with hundreds of worshippers inside.) The main source of violence in Kufa in the past 24 hours has been Iraqi police or national guards, who have fired on unarmed demonstrators.

Before Sistani's arrival, protesters from Diwaniyyah to Najaf's east who arrived at that side of the holy city had received fire from Iraqi police, and there were an unknown number of casualties.

Iraqi police also fired on peaceful demonstrators in Hilla who were heading for Najaf, killing at least two and wounding 23, according to Australian Broadcasting.

Al-Jazeerah is quoting ccasualties during the previous 24 hours from Iraqi health officials as 74 dead, 300 wounded.

Tony Karon at the Time Magazine weblog, has a fine overview of the situation which does an excellent job of explaining Sistani's political dilemma and the way he is trying to resolve it.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Cole as Issue in Oklahoma Senate Campaign

In this month's Wired magazine, an article entitled "The Dean Machine Marches On" looks at the internet, blogging, and political campaigns. In the profile on p. 141 of Brad Carson, a Native American and Blue Dog Democrat running for an Oklahoma senate seat, it is written:

"But the new tactics can be risky. The National Republican Senatorial Committee issued a press release titled "Brad Carson: A-Blogging He Will Go," which attacked Carson for linking to "the Web sites of radicals," including DailyKos and Juan Cole.

This all happened a while ago, of course, but what is exciting to me is where it is reported. Many, many thanks to Carson and to the National Republican Senatorial Committee for getting me a mention in Wired, one of my favorite magazines.

Carson's Web Log is very much worthwhile checking out.

And, please send him a hefty campaign contribution. :-)

Carson is behind in the polls in Oklahoma, but some think he has a chance of pulling ahead.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sistani in Najaf Today

As I write very early Thursday morning, Sistani 's convoy had left Basra on its way to Najaf several hours to the north. Al-Jazeerah says his convoy is being accompanied by Iraqi police.

The Guardian's Michael Howard scored a coup with an interview with Ayatollah Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, who is close to Sistani and laid out his plan of action for Thursday.

' Mr Bahr Ul Uloum said the grand ayatollah would spend the night in Basra, before travelling to Najaf today, gathering supporters in the southern cities of Nassiriya, Samawa and Diwaniya. He said he and a delegation of tribal and religious leaders from Najaf and the surrounding region would meet the ayatollah and his supporters on the edge of the holy city and march with them to the shrine. "If the fighting is still going on, the ayatollah will call on everyone to put down their guns," Mr Bahr Ul Uloum said. "Then he will go the holy shrine, pray, and receive the keys to the holy shrine." After that the political process would take over to resolve "outstanding issues" between Mr Sadr and the interim government, he said. '

Al-Hayat reports that Sistani will put forward a 4-point plan: 1) An immediate ceasefire will be called; the Mahdi Army will leave Najaf and so will the American military, turning security over to the Iraqi police. 2) The shrine of Ali will be returned to the supervision of the Pious Endowments Board headed by Husain al-Shami. 3) Najaf will be declared a security (i.e. non-combat) zone. The source to whom the newspaper's journalists spoke declined to reveal the fourth point.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat says that Sayyid Muhammad Musawi, one of Sistani's more important aides, warned the Americans against damaging or raiding the shrine of Ali (where Mahdi Army militiamen are holed up). He said that if the Americans behaved this way, it would provoke "general" (i.e. nation-wide) protests and result in a "very bad" situation. This is a threat that Sistani will bring out large urban crowds against the Americans if they do not back off. He can do it, so it is not an empty boast. And those panglossian American military planners who think they have 10 years to get things right in Iraq will find themselves tossed out summarily from the country.

Al-Zaman reports that a procession toward Najaf has already begun from the other Shiite holy city of Karbala, to the northwest of Najaf.

It also reports that Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, has fully endorsed Sistani's call for a march on Najaf. SCIRI is represented on the caretaker government by Finance Minister Adil Abdul Mahdi.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat says that Muqtada al-Sadr has issued a communique also calling on Shiites to come to Najaf. The Sadrists will inevitably attempt to piggy-back on Sistani's new activism. But since he is insisting that they leave the shrine, they are playing a weak hand.

The interim Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, dispatched two cabinet ministers to consult with Sistani. They are Minister of State Qassim Dawoud and Minister of Provincial Affairs, Judge Wael Abdul Latif.

The stakes here are enormous. If Iraqi police fire on the peaceful demonstrators again, or if US troops refuse to make way for Sistani, there could be a big social explosion in Iraq. If Sistani is successful in his plan, on the other hand, it will further increase his authority in the Shiite South and perhaps even transform him into a nationalist hero.

All this is important because Sistani is insisting on the January elections being held on time. If they are postponed he will almost certainly send his followers into the streets to protest, and could well bring down Allawi.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraqi Police fire on Kufa Demonstrators

Peaceful, civilian Shiite demonstrators in Kufa heeding Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's call for a march on Najaf (which is just next door to Kufa) were fired on Wednesday afternoon, suffering two killed and five wounded. Apparently the firing came from the Iraqi police. The Australian Herald Sun reports:

' Abbas Hamid, 32, told AFP from his hospital bed that the demonstration in support of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr began at 4pm outside the Kufa mosque. "We were heading towards Najaf but when we reached the Al-Abassiya bridge, Iraqi police opened fire," he said. He said the demonstrators had not passed a multinational force position, where witnesses had said the gunfire broke out. '

Al-Jazeerah was rather dramatically reporting that the Kufa crowd was fired on by American troops, which appears not to be the case, and the Sadr spokesman they interviewed by telephone gave the impression of rather more casualties and chaos than AFP reports. CNN had footage of the firing, and to be fair it did also look to me like a bigger incident than the print wire services describe.

The motivation for the Iraqi police to fire on the peaceful protesters appears to have been that they believed them actually to be members of the Mahdi Army militia, even if temporararily going about unarmed. (There does not appear to be any reason to believe this charge other than simple prejudice--the footage from AP television clearly shows a peaceful crowd.) Christopher Allbritton is in Najaf and reports an unsuccessful foray to the shrine of Ali, frustrated by heavy American fire and sniping all around it. On his return to the hotel, he and the other journalists were rounded up at gunpoint and taken to see the police chief of Najaf, Ghalib al-Jazairi. He reports what he heard at this weird ("can't miss it-- no, I mean really, you won't be allowed to miss it") press conference:

" The Shrine would be stormed tonight, he said, and we would be allowed to get on a bus and go visit it tomorrow to see the damage the Mahdi Army had done to it. The Sistani protesters in Kufa were really Mahdi guys and they had to be killed. Oh, and thank you for coming. A few of us put up a fight, demanding why they couldn’t just invite us down for a presser instead of kidnapping us. Oh, no, the commander said, that must have been a mistake. I just asked them to bring you to me… There was no order to brandish weapons, push journalists around and fire into the air. One cop, a lieutenant, just smiled at us when we pointed our fingers at him and said he was the one leading the raid, yelling and pointing his side arm at us. These are Najaf’s finest. They’re like the old regime, only less disciplined."

Abdul Hussein al-Obeidi has more on this incident and others in Najaf on Wednesday. He reports that Jazairi "advised" Iraqis not to come to Najaf because it might be dangerous. If Sistani ever gets any practical power in Najaf, I can only imagine that Jazairi's days in that position are numbered.

The Kufa incident underlines the potential for police/crowd violence (and perhaps US military/ crowd violence) as Sistani's supporters converge on Najaf.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sistani Returns, Launches March
Sadrist Ceasefire Announced

Al-Hayat is reporting that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani defied his physicians' advice and insisted on returning to Iraq midday on Wednesday. He landed in Kuwait and went overland to Basra, where he is staying at the home of prominent Shiite Ali Abdul Hakim.

Reuters says that Sistani's aide Hayder al-Safi read out a statement by the grand ayatollah saying ' "We ask all believers to volunteer to go with us to Najaf . . . I have come for the sake of Najaf and I will stay in Najaf until the crisis ends." '

The Scotsman writes that
Sistani crossed into Iraq in a convoy of sport utility vehicles. He had an escort of Iraqi police and national guardsmen, who had their sirens blaring. It says,

' After meeting with al-Sistani, Basra Governor Hassan al-Rashid told reporters that the cleric would lead a march to Najaf tomorrow . . . “The masses will gather at the outskirts of Najaf and they will not enter the city until all armed men, except the Iraqi policemen, withdraw from the city,” he said. '

If I read this aright, the Basra governor is talking like this.

Sistani will leave Basra for Najaf at 7 am Thursday morning Iraq time.

Sistani's offices in London, Karbala and Beirut also announced that he was calling on Shiite civilians to mount a peace march to Najaf to save the shrine of Imam Ali. He also called on both Mahdi Army militiamen and American military forces to vacate the city. The Karbala communique, acquired by a German wire service, spoke of the need to "expel the Americans from Najaf."

Al-Jazeerah is reporting that Sadr spokesman Aws Khafaji has announced a ceasefire by the Mahdi Army in honor of Sistani's return, and to ensure his safe passage through the south to Najaf. The Mahdi Army has been fighting British troops fiercely in Basra, Kut, Amarah and elsewhere in the south.

Sadr spokesman Ahmad Shaibani announced that the Sadrists were entirely willing to obey any command of Sistani's and would cooperate with him completely.

I am told that some middle class Shiites in Najaf are complaining that Sistani's intervention may prevent the finishing off of the Mahdi militia, and that the idea of a march and a convergence on the city may in fact bring more Sadrists in. The Sadrists are not popular in largely middle class Najaf, being from the shantytowns of the southern cities in the main.

ABC is reporting that American-appointed Najaf governor Adnan al-Zurfi ' said Iraqi security forces had "taken all needed measures to prevent any crowds from entering the province," calling it a "military area." ' Al-Zurfi is probably bluffing, since it he doesn't have that many men loyal to him, and none of them would fire on a peaceful crowd of Shiites led by Sistani. But if he does try to fire on the crowds, it could cause a lot of trouble. The Shah tried that sort of thing on Black September and it contributed to his overthrow.

Meanwhile, Australian Broadcasting is reporting that

' Tens of thousands from Baghdad and southern Iraq pledged to answer the Iranian-born ayatollah's call to march on the besieged city of Najaf in a mission to resolve the crisis peacefully.

He was determined to "save Najaf," the head of his London office Hamad al-Khaffaf told Al-Arabiya television, calling on all Iraqis to join the march . . .

Sadr supporters barricaded in the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf also greeted Sistani's call with joy. "The situation is getting worse day by day and only God's intervention can save us. And I think this march is a gift from God," Mohammed al-Batat said.

A senior Shiite official said Sistani wanted all foreign troops and weapons out of the city and for Sadr's Mehdi Army to leave the shrine and the city.

The Allawi government arrested Sadr aide Sheikh Ali Sumaisim, along with three other persons, charging him with possession of a Koranic antiquity and a large amount of dollars in cash (the implication is that he may have been involved in antiquities theft and trafficking from the Imam Ali shrine).

The US military continued to use tanks and warplanes to pound Mahdi Army positions near the shrine of Imam Ali, shattering its windows. Some damage has already been inflicted by the Americans on one of the compound walls. It is this sort of scene that horrifies Sistani.

US tanks had the shrine tightly surrounded.

A physician at the clinic of the shrine announced that at least 30 persons within had serious injuries that required their evacuation, and that he feared many more wounded were caught in nearby areas. In the last 24 hours, 6 bodies and 20 wounded had been brought to the clinic, he said.

Sistani's return raises many questions. Note that he did not fly into American-controlled Baghdad but rather to Kuwait, traveling overland to Basra. Since Basra is in British hands, with a Shiite governor that seems pro-Sistani, it seems possible that Sistani's people coordinated his return with the British and with the Basra authorities rather than with the United States and the Allawi government. Indeed, America's most militant asset in Najaf, governor Ali al-Zurfi, seems dead set against Sistani returning with crowds this way. You have to wonder if the British MI6 and military are showing some insubordination toward the Americans by allowing all this, as a mark of their disapproval of the gung-ho Marine attacks in Najaf, which have caused trouble in the British-held South and endangered the British garrisons. Likewise, one wonders if Basra governor Hassan al-Rashid is entirely loyal to Allawi. A lot of southern Shiites would be pretty upset with the way Allawi and his two main henchmen, Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib and Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan have been reviving old Baathist stereotypes about the Shiites and pursuing iron fist policies in the Shiite holy city of Najaf.

If Sistani does lead a popular march of the sort the press is describing, it might be the most significant act of civil disobedience by an Asian religious leader since Gandhi's salt march in British India. And it might kick off the beginning of the end of American Iraq, just as the salt march knelled the end of the British Indian empire.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Metro Times Profile

Curt Guyette's profile of me at the Detroit Metro Times is now available on the internet.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Attempted Assassinations of Ministers Fail
Iraqi Troops Move into Najaf: "We are in the Last Hours"

Reuters and AFP report via Dawn that the assassination attempt on the Minister of Education, reported here yesterday, was followed by another such attempt against the Minister of the Environment, Mishkat Moumin. Dawn quotes her:

' "Serving the Iraqi people is not a crime that deserves this," an outraged Moumin said after the blast.

The attack shocked local residents. "I opened the door to leave for work and the blast knocked me over," said Ali al Tai, standing in front of his home only metres from the blast site where Moumin was targeted, blood from victims splattered on his shirt. '

The Jordanian-led terrorist group, al-Tawhid, claimed credit for the attempt.

Meanwhile, the US continued to bombard Mahdi Army positions in Najaf, and to tighten their "squeeze" of the militiamen. Dawn writes,

'The advance was carried out by 50 Iraqi servicemen and came after US helicopters fired missiles and strafed militants dug in at a cemetery near the mosque, where most of the fighters have holed up since the uprising in the city began three weeks ago.

A US soldier guided the men in. They were shot at by Mehdi militiamen and returned fire. "We are in the last hours. This evening, Iraqi forces will reach the doors of the shrine and control it and appeal to the Mehdi Army to throw down their weapons," Defence Minister Hazim al Shalaan said at a US army base outside Najaf. "If they do not, we will wipe them out." '

I saw Shaalan speaking in Arabic on al-Jazeerah, and he said, "If Muqtada al-Sadr will surrender himself, that would be superb. He will be given safe passage and treated with perfect respect. But if he refuses, he will face either death or prison." or words to that effect. Obviously, the al-Hayat report that PM Iyad Allawi was trying to rein in Shaalan was incorrect; either that, or Shaalan has more pull with the Americans than Allawi does.

Some Sadr spokesmen rejected Shaalan's offer, with one calling it "garbage." Others seemed more conciliatory.

The Mahdi Army fighters appeared to be thinning out at the Shrine of Ali. Al-Jazeerah also had footage of the Iraqi army moving into position in the Old City of Najaf. Interestingly, the anchors were saying that the coming confrontation would be between two sets of Iraqis. I would have expected them to insist that the Iraqi forces were just American proxies, but at least on Wednesday evening EST that wasn't their line.

Muslim political and religious figures continued to denounce the US actions in Najaf on Tuesday, as a form of desecration of a holy place. The speaker of Iran's parliament said the actions were spreading hatred for the US in the region. Pakistani satellite tv said that the Pakistani senate had passed a resolution demanding that all foreign troops leave the holy city of Najaf. The Pakistani senate is a generally conservative body, dominated by landlords and by supporters of the pro-American "president," Pervez Musharraf. Musharraf met Tuesday with Bosnian President Sulejman Tihic, who delivered a speech praising the United States for saving the Bosnian Muslims from certain genocide. So these aren't reflexively anti-American political circles there in Islamabad, but the senators are disturbed by the American role in the Najaf events.

Muqtada and his main aides have disappeared from the shrine, as I had predicted they would. As I suggested, there are probably underground tunnels. Muqtada has plenty of safe houses in Iraq, since he eluded Saddam for four years, and he won't be easy to find if he doesn't want to be found.

My guess is that the Sadr Movement will now go into an active, long term guerrilla resistance. They will hope that bombings and assassinations will give heart to the public and provide a model for resisting what they see as the occupation. They will hope for an Algeria-style end game, in which the Americans and British are tossed out of Iraq. The drawback for the Mahdi Army is that they are just untrained Shiite ghetto youth, with perhaps a few older vets among them, and their ability to wage an effective guerrilla struggle is untested. So far they have fought far more stupidly than the resistance fighters in the Sunni Arab areas, attempting to take and hold territory and behaving like a mainstream army but without the necessary skill set.

If they move in this direction, they will at least have moral support of a wide range of Sunni and Shiite clerics, who jointly called for all Muslims to support the resistance to what they call the US occupation of Iraq. The signatories include prominent figures in the Sunni Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, in Lebanon's Shiite Hizbullah, and in Yemen's Sunni fundamentalist movement. Most of the clerics signing the call want an Islamic state in their country, with Islamic law the law of the land, and so can be called fundamentalists. But most of them are not radicals in the sense of wanting a violent and immediate revolution. Some, like Yusuf Qaradawi, explicitly permitted Muslims to fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan in the US military or alongside it. But Qaradawi and the others see Iraq in a different light, as an Arab, Muslim society that has been colonized by an outside force, the US.

The low intensity guerrilla fighting in Amara against the British base, which left at least 12 dead and 54 wounded there, may be a sign of things to come. There were also clashes in the southern oil port of Basra.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

George H.W. Bush on Why Invading Iraq was a Bad Idea

George Gedda of AP reminds us of the opposition to an American invasion of Iraq expressed after the Gulf War by George Bush senior and his secretary of state, James Baker. Bush wrote in his memoirs:

' Incalculable human and political costs" would have been the result, the senior Bush has said, if his administration had pushed all the way to Baghdad and sought to overthrow Saddam Hussein after the U.S.-led coalition ousted the Iraqi army from Kuwait during the Persian Gulf war in 1991.

"We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect rule Iraq," Bush wrote. "The coalition would have instantly collapsed. ... Going in and thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations mandate would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish.

"Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different - and perhaps barren - outcome." '

Baker wrote an op-ed in 1996 that said,

"Iraqi soldiers and civilians could be expected to resist an enemy seizure of their own country with a ferocity not previously demonstrated on the battlefield in Kuwait.

"Even if Hussein were captured and his regime toppled, U.S. forces would still have been confronted with the specter of a military occupation of indefinite duration to pacify the country and sustain a new government in power.

"Removing him from power might well have plunged Iraq into civil war, sucking U.S. forces in to preserve order. Had we elected to march on Baghdad, our forces might still be there."

One thing Gedda neglects in his account is the enormous pressure the first Bush administration received from Middle East allies not to go in. The Saudis were afraid the Shiites would take over, strengthening Iran and perhaps becoming influential in the oil-rich al-Hasa province of Saudi Arabia, which traditionally had a Shiite majority. The Turks were afraid of Kurdish nationalism being unleashed, such that it might spread back to Turkey. The Jordanians were also afraid of chaos, which might blow back on them. The Egyptians objected to a Western army invading a Muslim country.

Even more recently, in 2002 - 2003, King Abdullah II would have much preferred that the war had never been fought. He warned Bush that it might cast the entire region into flames. Egypt's Hosni Mubarak warned that it would produce a thousand Bin Ladens. Was he wrong?

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

The Fighting in Iraq

Reuters is reporting that guerrillas detonated a car bomb early on Tuesday, killing 2 persons and wounding 3 others. They were trying to assassinate Education Minister Sami al-Mudhaffar, but he escaped unscathed.

Knight Ridder's Hannah Allam was trapped in the Imam Ali Shrine on Monday when fighting suddenly intensified, and she filed via her satellite phone. She reports numerous strikes against the Mahdi Army in the sacred cemetery of the Valley of Peace, and elsewhere in the city. The US military "squeeze" of the militia continued, with what look like increasing success (from a purely military point of view). She writes:

'At nightfall, U.S. attacks increased. The buzz of an AC130 gunship could be heard. Nine or 10 times by midnight, aircraft could be heard circling overhead, then a whistling sound and the explosion of a bomb. Shrapnel flew into the shrine's courtyard.

Members of the Madhi's Army -- as al-Sadr's militia is known -- kept their spirits up with chants of "We're with you, Muqtada. We'll die for you, Muqtada." They staged an impromptu rally at midnight, marching through the courtyard.

Wounded militia members were brought in throughout the evening to a makeshift trauma center in the shrine. A little girl hit by shrapnel was carried in.

Outside the shrine, militiamen and U.S. troops continued their mutual hunt for the enemy throughout the day. '

Meanwhile, the violence in Najaf provoked a demonstrationof about 200 persons in Multan, Pakistan (where the Shiites have some demographic weight. The Malaysian government condemned the fighting in Najaf.

Al-Hayat reports that PM Iyad Allawi has forbidden Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan and Interior Minister Falah al-Naquib from speaking publicly about the Sadr movement.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bush and Iraqi Soccer

From Bush press conference on Tuesday

' QUESTION: You’re not going to Athens this week, are you?

BUSH: Athens, Texas?

(LAUGHTER)

QUESTION: The Olympics in Greece.

BUSH: Oh, the Olympics. No, I’m not.

QUESTION: Have you been watching?

BUSH: Yes. It’s been exciting.

QUESTION: Did a particular moment stand out?

BUSH: A particular moment?

I liked the -- let’s see -- Iraqi soccer. I liked seeing the Afghan woman carrying the flag coming in.

I loved our gymnasts. I have been watching the swimming. I have seen a lot. '

He had earlier said,

BUSH: . . . You know, we’ve got a great record when you think about it. Led the world in the war on terror. The world is safer as a result of the actions we’ve taken. Afghanistan is no longer run by the Taliban. Saddam Hussein sits in a prison cell. Moammar Gadhafi has gotten rid of his weapons. Pakistan is an ally in the war on terror.

There’s more work to be done in fighting off these terrorists. I clearly see that. I understand that we’ve got to use all resources at our disposal to find and bring these people to justice.

Bush in these remarks continued to try to exploit the presence of Afghanistan and Iraq at the Olympics for his presidential campaign. The problem is, he has a different definition of "freedom" than do the people of whom he is speaking.

The Bush campaign is defining freedom as the absence of indigenous tyranny. Thus, they claim to have liberated 50 million persons (25 each in Afghanistan and Iraq) since September 11, insofar as they overthrew the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.

But to date, no one in either country has been freely and openly elected by the popular electorate. The US has more or less appointed the governments of both countries (in consultation with other international actors). Even one Iraqi cabinet minister admitted last spring that the then Interim Governing Council was no more representative than had been the Baath government.

The Western press often confuses a government that reflects the composition of the country with a "representative" one. Thus, the Interim Governing Council had and the new national advisory council has representatives from all over Iraq, and some journalists have said the council is the most representative body Iraq has had since 1958. But this allegation ignores the undemocratic way in which it was chosen.

As for Afghanistan, the Bush administration simply turned it back over to the pre-Taliban warlords who had fought the Soviets in alliance with the US and then had fallen to squabbling when the US walked away, reducing much of the country to rubble. Herat province is ruled by Ismail Khan, Mazar by Abdul Rashid Dostam, etc., etc. Even really bad guys like Abu Sayyaf have their fiefdoms in the Pushtun areas (although he broke with the Taliban, it would be hard to distinguish his ideas and style of ruling from theirs). This is not to mention the revival of the poppy trade, which fuels heroin smuggling to the tune of $2 billion a year, nearly half Afghanistan's gross national product.

The parliamentary elections scheduled for summer, 2004, in Afghanistan have been postponed until at least spring, 2005. Presidential elections are to be held this fall, but American-installed Hamid Karzai has enormous advantages of incumbency. These advantages recently spurred his 23 rivals to call for his resignation, threatening a boycott of the elections if he declines. There is widespread voter registration fraud.

The human rights situation is infinitely better now than under the Taliban, but the Bush administration has reneged on its pledge of a new Marshall Plan and massive reconstruction in Afghanistan. What little economic progress there has been has mostly derived from individual entrepreneurs, and some of it derives from smuggling and drugs (which have a way of backfiring as economic engines of growth because they cause so many other problems.) Getting rid of the Taliban is not the same as bringing democracy to Afghanistan. We have yet to see if that is even feasible.

Most Iraqis would define liberation as the end of the American military occupation and their ability to choose a government of their liking. It seems highly likely that the Iraqi elections scheduled for January 2005 will be postponed for a good long time, allowing caretaker Prime Minister Iyad Allawi to consolidate his power (though whether the ongoing resistance to the occupation will allow him to do so is in doubt).

Liberation as self-determination is not in evidence in either Afghanistan or Iraq. That is why the Iraqi soccer team spoke out against Bush. Samples:

' Talking to Sports Illustrated, Iraqi midfielder Salih Sadir expressed dismay at being used in Bush's re-election propaganda: "Iraq as a team does not want Mr. Bush to use us for the presidential campaign. He can find another way to advertise for himself."

"My problems are not with the American people; they are with what America has done in Iraq: destroy everything," Coach Adnan Hamad added. "The American Army has killed so many people in Iraq. What is freedom when I go to the [national] stadium and there are shootings on the road?"

Ahmed Manajid, whose cousin was an insurgent killed by US soldiers, went even further, saying he would "for sure" be fighting the occupation as a member of the Iraqi resistance were he not playing soccer. '

and

' One of the team's midfield players, Ahmad Manajid, accused Mr Bush of "slaughtering" Iraqi men and women. "How will he meet his God having slaughtered so many? I want to defend my home. If a stranger invades America and the people resist, does that make them a terrorist?" he said. '

and

' Hamad said: "One cannot separate politics and sport because of the situation in the country right now."

He said the violence which continues to afflict Iraq, more than a year after Bush declared major combat there was over, meant the team could not fully enjoy its success.

"To be honest with you, even our happiness at winning is not happiness because we are worried about the problems in Iraq, all the daily problems that our people face back home, so to tell you the truth, we are not really happy," he said. '

So, the Bush definition of "liberated" and the Iraqi definition are two entirely different things.

Given that the Bush administration has turned Iraq into a failed state and a country in flames, the condition of which is far worse than the US public is allowed to know, it is quite outrageous that Bush should be trumpeting Iraq as an achievement. That he is doing so in connection with the Olympics is just tacky and probably illegal.

Will any of the Iraqi soccer players get interviewed on US television?
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

5 US Soldiers Killed in 24 Hours, 1 Wounded

Australian Broadcasting reports that guerrillas killed one US soldier in Mosul on Sunday with a roadside bomb. Guerrillas on Saturday killed three US Marines in separate attacks in al-Anbar province (the home of Fallujah and Ramadi). If George Will is right that the Baath is planning a big October offensive, it is being planned in al-Anbar Province and may be launched from there. Likewise, a fifth troop died in al-Anbar in a vehicle collision.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Egyptian Mufti: Volcano of Anger over Najaf

The claim by Mahdi Army fighters that US bombing damaged part of a wall of the Ali shrine complex could be explosive. Wire services report:

Explosions and gunfire shook Najaf’s Old City in a fierce battle between US forces and Shiite militants, who remained in control of a revered shrine here as negotiations dragged on for its handover to religious authorities.

Late yesterday, US warplanes and helicopters attacked positions in the Old City for the second night, witnesses said. Militant leaders said the Imam Ali Shrine compound’s outer walls were damaged in the attacks.

But the US military said it had fired on sites south of the shrine, from which militants were shooting, and did not hit the compound wall.

These sorts of incidents speak to morale issues in Iraq and elsewhere. Hannah Allam of Knight Ridder explores the reluctance of Iraqi police to fight the Mahdi Army. Often they have cousins in it, and besides, they don't like killing Iraqis on behalf of the Americans (that is how they see it).

Just how explosive the news of damage to the shrine could be is demonstrated by the reaction in Egypt to the fighting so far.

Shaikh Ali Gumaa (Jum`ah), the Mufti of Egypt, has warned of a "volcano" erupting in the Muslim world as a result of the U.S. military action in Najaf. Al-Jazeera.Net quotes him as saying,

"After the attack on the shrines of the Prophet's noble companions, after the humiliations and the terrorizing and killing of civilians, the world cannot expect… that a volcano of anger and indignation will not explode," Gumaa said . . . Gumaa said since occupation forces claimed to have saved Iraq from dictatorship, "the Dar al-Ifta cannot accept any justification… that enables them to play this ugly role, rejected by the world's reasonable people and lovers of peace".

Sunni Islam most resembles, it seems to me, Protestant Christianity in its authority structures. Sunni ulama or clerics are more like pastors than like priests. As in Protestantism, there is no over-arching authority. (The caliphate lapsed in 1258, and, despite occasional attempts to revive it-- most recently by the Ottoman sultans from 1880 until 1924-- Sunnism remains decentralized).

As with Protestantism, Sunnism now tends to be organized by country. Each country will have a government-appointed Mufti or jurisconsult, who issues written opinions on issues brought to him. He is not a court judge with practical cases to judge (that would be a qadi). His fatwas or rulings are for the most part advisory, and tend to address more abstract issues.

Egypt is a great center of Sunni learning because it is the seat of the prestigious al-Azhar seminary/ university, to which Muslims from all over the world come to study. The Rector of al-Azhar is probably the highest Sunni official in the country, and his voice resonates throughout the Sunni community. The Mufti of Egypt is the second highest Sunni official in Egypt.

Gumaa sees Ali ibn Abi Talib, who is buried in Najaf, as a "companion" of the Prophet Muhammad. This point of view is different than in Shiite Islam, where Ali is the Imam and wali amri'llah, the vicar of the Prophet both spiritually and temporally.

But note that Gumaa still has a highly reverential attitude toward Ali (considered the fourth Caliph by Sunnis) and toward his shrine city of Najaf. This attitude is common among pious Sunnis.

Note also that Gumaa sees the U.S. as attacking Najaf and its holy sites, not as defending it from the depredations of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. This perception is very widespread in the Muslim world. Indeed, I suspect that it represents 99 percent of Muslims outside Iraq itself. American commentators often feel that they have played a trump card when they point out that it is Muqtada who has desecrated the shrines, not the U.S., which is only trying to rid them of his goons. While this argument may be convincing to some Americans, it just doesn't fly in the Muslim world. Americans don't get to tell Muslims which arguments Muslims find convincing. The U.S., as a foreign, Christian force, is seen as not having any business in Najaf, and as rampaging around there like an enraged elephant.

Al-Jazeerah did "person on the street" interviews on the Najaf issue in Cairo and Beirut. The Egyptians said things like, "this is an American attack on Islam." Not on Najaf, or Shiism, or on Iraq. On Islam. That's what a lot of Muslims think, and they are absolutely furious.

Some of my readers have suggested to me that it doesn't matter what Americans do, since Muslims hate them anyway.

This statement is silly. Most Muslims never hated the United States per se. In 2000, 75 percent of Indonesians rated the US highly favorably. The U.S. was not as popular in the Arab world, because of its backing for Israel against the Palestinians, but it still often had decent favorability ratings in polls. But all those poll numbers for the US are down dramatically since the invasion of Iraq and the mishandling of its administration afterwards. Only 2 percent of Egyptians now has a favorable view of the United States.

It doesn't have to be this way. The US is behaving in profoundly offensive ways in Najaf. U.S. military leaders appear to have no idea what Najaf represents. I saw one retired general on CNN saying that they used to have to be careful of Buddhist temples in Vietnam, too. I almost wept. Islam is not like Buddhism. It is a far tighter civilization. And the shrine of Ali is not like some Buddhist temple in Vietnam that even most Buddhists have never heard of.

I got some predictably angry mail at my earlier statement that the Marines who provoked the current round of fighting in Najaf, apparently all on their own and without orders from Washington, were behaving like ignoramuses. Someone attempted to argue to me that the Marines were protecting me. Protecting me? The ones in Najaf are behaving in ways that are very likely to get us all blown up. The US officials who encouraged the Mujahidin against the Soviets were also trying to protect us, and they ended up inadvertently creating the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Such protection, I don't need.

Radical Islamist terrorism is a form of vigilanteism. Angry young Muslim men see their own governments doing nothing about Israeli dispossession of the Palestinians, and bowing to US adventures like Iraq, and they grow disgusted. They have no hope of getting their governments to do anything about what they see as profound injustices. So they form small groups of engineers or other professionals and take matters into their own hands.

That is exactly the kind of phenomenon Gumaa is warning against. He is right about the volcano of anger.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bush's Superficial Wounds in the Vietnam Era

The debate that a handful of Texas multi-millionnaires close to the Bush family have cleverly manufactured over John Kerry's war record is absurd in every way. The charges that they have put some vets up to making against Kerry are false and can be demonstrated by the historical record to be false. Most of those making the charges have even flip-flopped, contradicting themselves. Or they weren't eyewitnesses and are just lying.

But to address the substance of this Big Lie is to risk falling into its logic. The true absurdity of the entire situation is easily appreciated when we consider that George W. Bush never showed any bravery at all at any point in his life. He has never lived in a war zone. If some of John Kerry's wounds were superficial, Bush received no wounds. (And, a piece of shrapnel in the forearm that caused only a minor wound would have killed had it hit an eye and gone into the brain; the shrapnel being in your body demonstrates you were in mortal danger and didn't absent yourself from it. That is the logic of the medal). Kerry saved a man's life while under fire. Bush did no such thing.

What was Bush doing with his youth? He was drinking. He was drinking like a fish, every night, into the wee hours. For decades. He gave no service to anyone, risked nothing, and did not even slack off efficiently.

The history of alcoholism and possibly other drug use is a key issue because it not only speaks to Bush's character as an addictive personality, but may tell us something about his erratic and alarming actions as president. His explosive temper probably provoked the disastrous siege of Fallujah last spring, killing 600 Iraqis, most of them women and children, in revenge for the deaths of 4 civilian mercenaries, one of them a South African. (Newsweek reported that Bush commanded his cabinet, "Let heads roll!") That temper is only one problem. Bush has a sadistic streak. He clearly enjoyed, as governor, watching executions. His delight in killing people became a campaign issue in 2000 when he seemed, in one debate, to enjoy the prospect of executing wrong-doers a little too much. He has clearly gone on enjoying killing people on a large scale in Iraq. Drug abuse can affect the ability of the person to feel deep emotions like empathy. Two decades of pickling his nervous system in various highly toxic substances have left Bush damaged goods. Even for those who later abstain, "visual-spatial abilities, abstraction, problem solving, and short-term memory, are the slowest to recover." That he managed to get on the wagon (though with that pretzel incident, you wonder how firmly) is laudable. But he suffers the severe effects of the aftermath, and we are all suffering along with him now, since he is the most powerful man in the world.

We all know by now that Bush did not even do his full service with the Texas Air National Guard, absenting himself to work on the Alabama senate campaign of Winton "Red" Blount. Whether he was actually AWOL during this stint is unclear. But it is clear that not only did Bush slack off on his National Guard service, but he also slacked off from his campaign work.

This little-noted interview with Blount's nephew Murph Archibald, which appeared on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered on March 30, 2004, gives a devastating insight into what it was like to have to suffer through Bush in that period.

"All Things Considered (8:00 PM ET) - NPR

March 30, 2004 Tuesday

This campaign season, there have been questions about whether George W. Bush fulfilled his obligations to the National Guard as a young lieutenant in the early 1970s. For weeks, reporters scoured Alabama in search of pilots or anyone who might have remembered seeing Mr. Bush at the time he was serving in the National Guard there. There is one place in Alabama where Mr. Bush was present nearly every day: the headquarters in Montgomery of US Senate candidate Winton "Red" Blount. President Bush has always said that working for Blount was the reason he transferred to the Alabama Air National Guard. NPR's Wade Goodwyn has this report about Mr. Bush's time on that campaign.

WADE GOODWYN reporting:

In 1972, Baba Groom was a smart, funny young woman smack-dab in the middle of an exciting US Senate campaign. Groom was Republican Red Blount's scheduler, and in that job, she was the hub in the campaign wheel. Ask her about the handsome young man from Texas, and she remembers him 32 years later like it was yesterday.

Ms. BABA GROOM (Former Campaign Worker): He would wear khaki trousers and some old jacket. He was always ready to go out on the road. On the phone, you could hear his accent. It was a Texas accent. But he just melded with everybody.

GOODWYN: The candidate Mr. Bush was working for, Red Blount, had gotten rich in Alabama in the construction business. Prominent Southern Republicans were something of a rare breed in those days. Blount's support of the party led him to be appointed Richard Nixon's postmaster general. In Washington, Blount became friends and tennis partners with Mr. Bush's father, then Congressman Bush. That was how 26-year-old Lieutenant Bush came to Montgomery, at his father's urging . . . It was Mr. Bush's job to organize the Republican county chairpersons in the 67 Alabama counties. Back in 1972 in the Deep South, many rural counties didn't have much in the way of official Republican Party apparatus. But throughout Alabama, there were Republicans and Democrats who wanted to help Red Blount. It was the young Texan's job to find out what each county leader needed in the way of campaign supplies and get those supplies to them. Groom says this job helped Mr. Bush understand how even in a statewide Senate campaign, politics are local.

. . . Murph Archibald is Red Blount's nephew by marriage, and in 1972, he was coming off a 15-month tour in Vietnam in the infantry. Archibald says that in a campaign full of dedicated workers, Mr. Bush was not one of them.

Mr. MURPH ARCHIBALD (Nephew of Red Blount): Well, I was coming in early in the morning and leaving in mid-evenings. Ordinarily, George would come in around noon; he would ordinarily leave around 5:30 or 6:00 in the evening.

GOODWYN: Archibald says that two months before the election, in September of '72, Red Blount's campaign manager came to him and asked that he quietly take over Mr. Bush's job because the campaign materials were not getting out to the counties.

Mr. ARCHIBALD: George certainly didn't seem to have any concerns about my taking over this work with the campaign workers there. My overall impression was that he didn't seem as interested in the campaign as the other people who were working at the state headquarters.

GOODWYN: Murph Archibald says that at first, he didn't know that Mr. Bush was serving in the Air National Guard. After he found out from somebody else, Archibald attempted to talk to Mr. Bush about it. The president was a lieutenant and Archibald had been a lieutenant, too; he figured they had something to talk about.

Mr. ARCHIBALD: George didn't have any interest at all in talking about the military. In fact, when I broached the subject with him, he simply changed the subject. He wasn't unpleasant about it, but he just changed the subject and wouldn't talk about it.

GOODWYN: Far from Texas and Washington, DC, Mr. Bush enjoyed his freedom. He dated a beautiful young woman working on the campaign. He went out in the evenings and had a good time. In fact, he left the house he rented in such disrepair--with damage to the walls and a chandelier destroyed--that the Montgomery family who owned it still grumble about the unpaid repair bill. Archibald says Mr. Bush would come into the office and, in a friendly way, offer up stories about the drinking he'd done the night before, kind of as a conversation starter.

Mr. ARCHIBALD: People have different ways of starting the days in any office. They're going to talk about their kids, they're going to talk about football, they're going to talk about the weather. And this was simply his opening gambit; he would start talking about that he had been out late the night before drinking.

GOODWYN: Archibald says the frequency with which Mr. Bush discussed the subject was off-putting to him.

Mr. ARCHIBALD: I mean, at that time, I was 28; George would have been 25 or 26. And I thought it was really unusual that someone in their mid-20s would initiate conversations, particularly in the context of something as serious as a US senatorial campaign, by talking about their drinking the night before. I thought it unusual and, frankly, inappropriate.

GOODWYN: According to Archibald, Mr. Bush would also sometimes tell stories about his days at Yale in New Haven, and how whenever he got pulled over for erratic driving, he was let go after the officers discovered he was the grandson of a Connecticut US senator. Archibald, a middle-class Alabama boy--who, by the way, is now a registered Democrat--didn't like that story.

Mr. ARCHIBALD: He told us whenever he was stopped, as soon as the law enforcement found out that he was the grandson of Prescott Bush, they would let him go. And he would always laugh about that. "

Goodwyn dutifully notes that Baba Groom didn't remember George telling drunk stories. But that means nothing, since they weren't the sort of things guys like Bush told the "girls". He was trying to buddy with Archibald and impress him.

Again, decades of this sort of behavior do not leave a person untouched. Our world is in crisis and our Republic is in danger. It should not be left in the hands of a man who spent his life like this.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Has the Shrine been Looted?

The shrine of Ali was not only a tomb with an attached mosque. It was also a museum. Since being built in its modern form in the seventeenth century, the shrine has been the recipient of bejewelled swords, glittering gems, and other priceless gifts from Muslim monarchs and notables from all over the world. And we all know what has happened to museums in American-ruled Iraq.

The fate of the priceless treasures stored at the Shrine of Ali has proved an intractable sticking point in the negotiations between Muqtada al-Sadr and Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, according to al-Zaman. Since 1845 or so, the shrine keeper has been in a single family. Under the Baath, he was under the authority of the state Board of Pious Endowments. Haydar al-Rufay'i al-Kalidar was viewed by the Sadr movement as a collaborator because he worked with this board. He was killed by a Sadrist mob on April 10, 2003, along with Ayatollah Abdul Majid al-Khoei, who had just flown in from exile in London. His place has been taken by Ridwan al-Rufay'i al-Kalidar, a 23 year old engineer from the U.K. For most of the period after the fall of Saddam until 1 April, 2004, the shrine of Ali came under the control of the Badr Corps, the paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, now headed by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, an ally of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.

Up until April 1, the treasures of the shrine were intact and accounted for. But when the ragtag Mahdi Army militiamen took over the shrine as part of their first anti-American insurgency, which responded to sudden American threats to kill or capture Muqtada al-Sadr.

Sistani appears to fear that in the past five months, the Sadrists may have looted the treasures of the shrine. (If they did, it would have made them enormously wealthy and helped to bankroll the further expansion of the movement.) He fears for his good name if he takes the keys to the shrine from the Sadrists and then later an inventory is done, and treasures are missing. It would be impossible to know at that point whether Sistani's men had stolen them, or Sadr's.

So apparently an inventory would have to be done first, before Sistani will take possession. One of Muqtada's spokesmen suggested that the Shiite Board of Pious Endowments be charged with carrying out a quick inventory, so that the transfer can go forward.

Another Sadr spokesman said that the surrender of the shrine by armed militiamen has been exaggerated. He said there are still Mahdi Army volunteers in the shrine, but that they are armed only with their personal (light) weapons.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Threats to Academic Freedom

This important article on the current assaults on academic freedom is a must read.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Continued Violence in Iraq


Major violence wracked Najaf again on Saturday. Mahdi militiamen launched mortar shells at US military positions, and they fired back, starting a battle that lasted for about 45 minutes. AC-130s fired their cannons at Mahdi Army positions in the sacred Valley of Peace cemetery near the holy shrine of Ali.

There did not actually seem to be much progress in the supposed turning over of the Shrine of Ali to representatives of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. They insisted that the Mahdi Army fighters vacate the shrine first. The latter seem to have no intention of actually leaving in greater numbers than they already have. Al-Jazeerah says that one of Muqtada's spokesmen said that even after the "handover," the Mahdi Army fighters expected to continue to "guard" the shrine.

Comparing the al-Hayat account with the Los Angeles Times article by David Holley and Edmund Sanders (Sanders is embedded in Najaf) shows the difference in information and sensibility between what is reported in the Western press and what appears in Arabic.

Al-Hayat writes that "the fighting extended to Kufa, where American missiles struck the historic Mosque of Maytham al-Tammar, destroying part of it."
"
The LA Times story says:

' Earlier in the morning, several hundred Marines swarmed a complex of buildings in Kufa, about 500 yards west of the main Kufa Mosque, which military officials suspect that al-Sadr's militia is using. After a heavy firefight, AC-130 warplanes bombed the buildings in a series of loud explosions heard for miles.

Later, U.S. troops raided the main Kufa police station and detained about 29 Iraqis found in a basement. Some of the men claimed they were being held prisoner by al-Sadr's forces. '

The American report says nothing about damage to the Maytham Mosque. Najaf and Kufa are key sites of early Islam, and the religious structures in them are deeply meaningful to Shiites.

There was violence again all over Iraq, as there has been most recent days, though it has been overshadowed by the dramatic events in Najaf.

Guerrillas bombed and set afire an oil pipeline southwest of Basra. It had already been shut down because of Mahdi Army threats to target it in revenge for the assault on Muqtada's men in Najaf.

An RPG attack on a US military vehicle killed one American soldier and wounded two others in Bahgdad. That brings the death toll of the US military in Iraq to 949.

Just outside the southern Shiite city of Hillah, guerrillas detonated a car bomb near a Polish military convoy, killing one Polish soldier and wounding six others.

The Gulf Daily lists several further incidents:

In Ramadi, guerrillas shot a senior policeman, Col. Saad Samir al-Dulaimi, to death as he left home.

Guerillas in Baquba detonated a roadside bomb, killing a peddler and wounding five garbagemen.

In Mosul, guerrillas exploded a roadside bomb, killing an Iraqi national guardsman and wounding two others, along with 3 civilians.

In Tall Afar, guerrillas fired on the home of the Mosul deputy governor, killing his nephew. The official and his son were wounded but in stable condition.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Class, Generation and Neo-Khomeinism

Khaled Yacoub Oweis of Reuters has an excellent piece today in which he points out that even if the U.S. can force Muqtada al-Sadr and his men out of the shrine of Ali, they won't have made a dent in his movement. (Muqtada's followers are not from Najaf in the main, and did not control the shrine there until early April).

Oweis also underlines the generational and class divide among Iraqi Shiites that underpins the dispute between Muqtada and the senior clerical establishment. Shiite shopkeepers, entrepreneurs and professionals deeply dislike him and his movement. He is supported especially by the young and the poor.

There is also a strong element of Iraqi nationalism in his movement, such that the grand ayatollahs in Najaf, 3 of whom are not Iraqis, are coded as foreigners. Oweis writes,

' "Sayyed Moqtada (al-Sadr): don't pay attention to the elderly clerics, they are spies," shouted an unemployed youth carrying a rocket-propelled grenade launcher in Sadr City as he celebrated an attack that destroyed a U.S. Humvee on Friday. '

As for the main point of Oweis's piece, he quotes another follower (ominously, a Baghdad policeman!):

' "We will remain behind Moqtada. He is still a holy warrior even if he leaves the shrine and becomes less visible," said Bassem Huleili, a policeman from Baghdad's Sadr City shantytown. '

The debates about Iraqi Shiism seem to me to occur often in a sort of historical vacuum in which everyone ignores the elephant in the living room. That is Ayatollah Khomeini and his movement, the central tenets of which were rejected by Najaf but accepted by the Sadr movement.

That American neo-imperialists like Richard Perle, William Kristol, Douglas Feith, and Paul Wolfowitz thought they could remove Saddam and step in to reshape Iraq without having to grapple with Khomeini's legacy is an index of their ignorance and arrogance. Perle and Feith and David Wurmser even wanted to try to bring back the Hashimite monarchy in Iraq, seeming to think that it might still have influence with Iraq's Shiites. But the central idea of Khomeinism was that Shiite Islam is incompatible with monarchy, and the Sadrists would have made endless trouble about this. (Perle, Feith and Wurmser even thought a revived Hashimite monarchy could be used to "moderate" Hizbullah in Lebanon, which is ridiculous on the face of it, and you wonder in what world do these people live?)

It is true that Khomeinism seemed to have run its course in Iran, where it is now only a governmental ideology but lacks much popular support. But US actions like repeatedly bombing Najaf's sacred cemetery (where a lot of Iranians' loved ones are buried) and generally reducing much of this pilgrimage site to rubble, is strengthening Iran's hardliners and the Bush administration is succeeding in breathing new life into Khomeinism in Iran, as well. Khomeinism was ultimately about trying to construct a nativist cultural and political barricade against American-led globalization. As the chaos in Iraq gives the latter a black eye, it encourages the former.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Explosions in Najaf: Situation Unsettled

Reuters is reporting four loud explosions in Najaf early Saturday morning.

Heavy fighting continued in both the south and the north of the city until Friday afternoon.

Reports Friday that the Mahdi Militia had turned the keys to the shrine of Ali over to aides of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani were from all accounts premature. A Sadr aide came on al-Jazeerah to deny it had happened yet. Others are denying that the police have entered the shrine. Actually a few gunmen appear to have departed or at least stored their weapons and gone inside out of sight.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is saying he would only allow his people to take over the shrine if all the gunmen left first. (Otherwise Muqtada would have cleverly drawn him into sheltering the Mahdi Army!)

Heavy fighting had continued Friday, with US air strikes and tanks firing. In a 24 hour period ending Friday, over 70 Iraqis were killed in Najaf and a similar number wounded.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Breaking News: Mahdi Army Departs Shrine

Al-Jazeerah and the American cable news shows are reporting that Mahdi Army fighters handed over the keys of the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf to a representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and departed it overnight. Iraqi police are said to have entered the shrine.

However, the Mahdi militia has not laid down its arms as demanded by Allawi and the Americans, and heavy fighting is still reported in parts of Najaf. Dozens of persons have been killed both in Najaf and in East Baghdad in the past 24 hours.

It is very good news that no assault will have to be made on the shrine. That could have sparked widespread violence and protests. But even what the US military has done to Najaf in the past two weeks while fighting the militiamen has already deeply hurt the reputation of America in southern Iraq and indeed in much of the Muslim world. Although the American public seems somehow unaware that the US has just been bombing the sacred cemetery and parts of the city, some parts of which have been reduced to rubble, everyone in the Muslim world knows exactly what has been going on. They are not amused.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Could Najaf Cost Bush the Election?

Even though the crisis at the Shrine of Ali seems to have passed, the U.S. military actions in the holy city of Najaf have been deeply unpopular with American Muslims. A politically signficant demonstration was held by Shiite Iraqi-Americans in Dearborn, Michigan, last week. (Despite its size, its leadership in the form of Sheikh Husseini and the very fact of Shiite Iraqis taking this stand, make it worth noticing; not long ago the Iraqi Shiites in Dearborn were eagerly meeting Wolfowitz!) It demanded that US troops get out of Iraq. These expatriate Iraqi Shiites had been the most gung-ho group about the US going to war against the Saddam regime in 2003, and they were big Bush supporters. But now they are filled with second thoughts and regrets. The US military campaign in Najaf has deeply offended their religious sensibilities. They have made an about-face and now want the US out of their country, immediately.

Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans have particular presence in the Midwest, including in swing states like Michigan and Ohio (these two plus Pennsylvania and Florida all have more than 100,000 Arab-Americans. Since many Arab-Americans are Christians, they aren't exactly an overlap with Muslim-Americans). They do not ordinarily swing an election, however, because they were about evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. But when the Iraqi Shiites start demonstrating against the Bush administration, it is a sign that they may well vote for Kerry. A large number of Muslim-Americans is deeply upset by the fighting in Najaf, and by what they see as Bush administration trampling of their civil rights.

In a very close race, the Muslim Americans and Arab Americans in the above states could be a decisive constituency. There are about 300,000 Arab Americans in southeast Michigan, a state with a population of 11 million. All the signs are that they are migrating toward Kerry and Nader in large numbers. In 2000, many of those who voted Republican were afraid that with Joe Lieberman on the ticket, a Gore administration would be very hard on the Palestinians. But what I'm hearing from the community is that they are so upset with Bush that they will vote Democrat this year.

In general, swing voters in the battleground states are closer to Kerry on Iraq than Bush. Robin Wright argues that they think Bush has been too quick to use military force, and a majority feels that the Iraq misadventure hasn't helped the US in the war on terror.

Most Americans are admittedly not transfixed by the Najaf issue (even if they ought to be). But they are transfixed by their gasoline and energy bills. The fighting in Najaf has also inflamed the Iraqi South, which exports a majority of Iraq's oil, and has interfered with exports and also caused the price to rise just out of jitters. $49 a barrel petroleum has a negative effect on the economy, and the effect is delayed. Any organization that uses a lot of gasoline (school districts e.g.) and has a fixed income suddenly has found its costs going up, and will have to cut back someplace, probably in employment. Airline and trucking executives must be apoplectic and thinking of all they people they could fire and still run their businesses.

The Ann Arbor News reports Thursday that Michigan's jobless rate has risen again, to 6.8% in July. Kerry has a lead in Michigan of %46 to %42. Some ten percent are still undecided, and they will determine the outcome. (Michigan voted twice for Clinton and went for Gore in 2000, so it has been trending Democrat.) Between the continued poor economy (which may well worsen given the high oil prices) and the new antipathy of Muslim-Americans and Arab Americans to the Bush administration because of its Iraq policies, Michigan could well be in the bag for Kerry. Kerry is leading by 6% in Pennsylvania and by the same in Florida. He and Bush are dead even in Ohio. So, Bush can't afford to have the Republican Arab Americans of Toledo, OH (many are restaurateurs and businessmen) desert him. But they may well do so.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

US Attacks in Najaf, Sadr City

Al-Hayat: The US military launched a two-pronged attack on the Sadrists on Thursday. They attacked in Najaf, but also in East Baghdad or Sadr City. This newspaper speculates that the US realizes that if Muqtada is forcibly removed from the Shrine of Ali, there will be a social explosion in Sadr City, and are prepositioning themselves for it.

The explosions in Najaf formed a background for a set of indirect exchanges between Muqtada al-Sadr and the caretaker government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. Allawi gave a press conference in which he said he was launching a last appeal to Muqtada to leave Najaf and disarm his militia and join in ordinary parliamentary politics. He guaranteed Muqtada safe passage. But he said he wanted to see Muqtada do a public press conference in which he openly accepted this condition of disarming his Mahdi Army militia. He also rejected direct government talks with Muqtada.

Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan, as usual, played bad cop to Allawi's good cop, saying that he had men ready to go into the shrine and that Muqtada had only hours to make a decision. Shaalan continues in an old Baath tradition of being a blowhard.

Muqtada caused confusion by responding in several different ways to the day's events.

Earlier in the day, his guerrillas sent mortar rounds against a Najaf police station, killing 7 police and injuring 35 other persons.

When he heard of Allawi's ultimatum, Muqtada sent a "telephone text" message, in which he insisted he would seek "victory or martyrdom." CNN got a camera crew into the shrine, finding 2000 joyous human shields chanting and dancing at this message.

But then later on Thursday Muqtada offered to turn the shrine over to the control of the senior Shiite clerics. [I earlier thought this step impractical, but this is the path he actually took. It is not sure, however, that it entirely defuses the crisis, since simply leaving the shrine was only one of the American's/ Allawi's demands]

Worse, The Scotsman reports that Muqtada sent out a letter insisting he would not disband the Mahdi Army, a copy of which was displayed on al-Arabiya, the Arabic satellite station.

By nightfall, Najaf was in flames. The Scotsman reports, "Blasts and gunbattles persisted throughout yesterday in the streets of Najaf and at night, at least 30 explosions shook the Old City as a US plane hit militant targets east of the Imam Ali shrine."

I'd say this thing is moving toward an epochal confrontation.

Clashes between US forces and Mahdi militiamen in Sadr City left 5 Iraqis dead and 5 wounded.

Meanwhile, both Iran and Syria have now called for an extraordinary meeting of the foreign ministers of Iraq's 6 major neighbors to discuss how the crisis might be defused.

Sadrists attacked oil facilities down south near Basra, but apparently did not hit anything that would prevent the petroleum from being exported.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

What does Muqtada al-Sadr Want?

Tom Engelhardt asks hard questions at the indispensable Tomdispatch.com about journalistic language concerning the Iraq crisis. How do we characterize Muqtada al-Sadr? Our military operations in the country? What words to journalists use and how does that affect perceptions?

Meanwhile, the Associated Press expresses confusion, both its own, and that of US government officials, about what Muqtada al-Sadr's goals are.

I don't understand this confusion. Muqtada has given many sermons and interviews in the past 16 months outlining his goals exactly.

1) He wants the US troops out of the country immediately, which is to say, an end to Occuption. If there have to be foreign troops in Iraq, he wants them under a United Nations command.

2) He refuses to cooperate (he would say "collaborate") with the caretaker government of Iyad Allawi, which he sees as a puppet regime installed by the United States. He insists that no legitimate Iraqi governmental process can begin until the US is out.

3) He wants the reestablishment of a strong central Iraqi government with a strong military, but which has cut all ties with the Baathist past.

4) He wants Iraq to stay together rather than being partitioned, and has denounced Kurdish demands for loose federalism.

5) He wants Iraqi Shiism to emerge from Iran's shadow and to establish its independence from Iran. His movement is rooted in the Shiite ghettos of Iraq and is very indigenous. He is not Iran's catspaw in Iraq, quite the opposite. He is strong Iraqi nationalist.

6) He sometimes talks about "democracy" in post-American Iraq, but probably just means populism. Like Peron and Franco, his populism implies his ability to maintain and direct his own militia, who provide "order" (read puritanical morality imposed by force) to Shiite neighborhoods.

7) In the long term, he would like to see a system in Iraq similar to the regime in Iran. He wants Islamic law to be the law of the land, and he wants clerics to rule. His father studied with Ayatollah Khomeini and accepted the notion of clerical rule. So does Muqtada. That is, there may be a place for elections (as in Iran), but true power would rest in the hands of the clerics. He has admitted all this in Arabic press interviews.

So, I don't understand the widespread puzzlement reported by AP. It may not be a simple set of positions, but they aren't hidden from view or hard to understand.

There were several loud explosions Thursday morning near the Shrine of Ali where Muqtada is holed up with about 1000 men.

Although Muqtada agreed Wednesday to disarm his militia and leave the shrine if US troops would withdraw from the city first, few expect this siege to end well or easily. The wire services do not appear to have caught on that Muqtada is demanding the withdrawal of US troops as a necessary precondition, but that is what is being reported by al-Jazeerah.

Interim Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan threatened to teach Muqtada a lesson he would never forget, and promised decisive action against him, if he did not leave the shrine within hours. (-al-Zaman ). (Shaalan has adopted the body language and rhetoric of the old Baath regime, which makes the skin of a lot of Iraqis crawl. To be fair, Muqtada also acts in a thuggish way that alarms many Iraqis who have had enough of thugs.)

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

National Council Process Derailed
Basra Delegates Withdrawn

The national convention of some 1200 delegates to choose an interim national council was beset with several setbacks. It initially had to be postponed two weeks out of concerns that the country's political chaos were unpropitious to success. Some in the UN thought it should be postponed even further. When it met, it was beset with wrangling about how the delegates were chosen, and how to elect the 100-member National Council, not to mention mortar fire that fell nearby. It was also roiled by the crisis in Najaf, in which it attempted to intervene by acting as mediator. It is unclear whether the peace plan some of its delegates came up with will work or not.

On Wednesday, the 43 delegates from Basra angrily withdrew, complaining that they were slighted numerically. Basra has 1.3 million inhabitants, largely Shiite. That's about 5% of the population. So they should have had 60 delegates to a 1200-member body.

The slate of 81 candidates was preselected, which caused complaints and another list was put in competition. But then it was suddenly withdraw, leaving only the original pre-planned list. It was accepted by acclamation--there wasn't even a vote.

The whole performance was very little democratic, despite the media hype. The resulting National Council has authority over the budget and over appointment of cabinet and other high officials of the cartaker government. It cannot pass laws, being constrained by the ones passed by the Americans during the year they ran the country directly.

The caretaker Allawi government will likely ignore the National Council and do as it pleases.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Babylon and the Polish Troops
2 Dead, 5 Wounded in War-Related Accident

Reuters reports that guerillas fired at a Polish convoy late Wednesday or early Thursday, so startling the drivers that an accident ensued, killing 2 soldiers and wounding five.

A Polish-speaking reader shares the following summaries from Polish new sources about fighting in the Shiite south that has caught up the multi-national forces. It is the sort of news Americans almost never hear, and these sorts of incidents appear to be endemic. Journalist Robert Fisk has pointed out that the US Department of Defense is probably the most comprehensive gatherer of information about violence in Iraq, but that it releases very little to the US public.

The Camp Babilon which is under Polish Expeditionary Force command (Multinational Division Center-South) was under mortar fire for 7 minutes today [Wednesday]. 10 or 12 mortar grenades landed in the middle of the camp. One grenade landed on a building occupied by the office of the Ukrainian general. 7 persons were wounded. 3 Poles (2 soldiers and one civilian person), one American, one Hindu, 2 Iraqis. According to Lt.Col. Artur Domanski wounds were not dangerous.

The mortar attack begin at 14.30 Iraqi time. The Camp Babylon was shot at from the area of the road leading from the province Babil to the province Karbala. According to General Andrzej Ekiert (commander of the Multinational Division Center-South), "mortar grenades were shot fast. I was surprised by the time of attack. Until now we were shot at only in the night".

Wednesday's attack was pre-planned and carried out by a group of at least several persons - army sources said.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

The Outing of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan: State of Play

Journalism is often defined as an attempt to "catch history on the run." We historians, when writing history, most often have at hand a range of documents on an issue, and the luxury of being able to weigh them against one another. In trying to track contemporary affairs, the facts are often murky and often only a single source comes forward, who may or may not be reliable.

Here is what we now know. The Pakistani government arrested a 25-year-old computer expert in Lahore on July 13. The arrest was never given to the Pakistani press by the Pakistani government, and no notice appeared in any Pakistani or other newspaper. This absence can only be deliberate, since the Pakistanis could easily have held a press conference to trumpet their new captive. This decision to keep the arrest quiet appears to have been made because Khan had been "flipped," i.e., had become a double agent and continued to have email contact with al-Qaeda members in London, e.g., but now with the Pakistani military intelligence listening in.

There was no reason for any reporter anywhere to inquire about Khan, since nothing had come out in Pakistan about his case. Pakistani intelligence was passing on to British intelligence what it was finding out about the London cell. Khan was still communicating with it on Monday August 2.

In addition, Khan's computer had on it surveillance information about financial institutions in New York and Washington that dated back three years, before the September 11 attacks. The Pakistanis shared this information with both British and American intelligence.

In the week of July 26, the week of the Democratic National Convention, the Bush administration made a decision to announce a heightened security alert for those buildings in Washington, DC and New York City. Tom Ridge made the announcement on Sunday, Aug. 1, and there was then a background briefing for reporters.

The Ridge announcement raised the question of where the information on the surveillance of the buildings had come from. Late Sunday afternoon, August 1, the entire national press corps worked the phones furiously, checking with government officials about where Ridge had gotten his tip. The Boston Globe managed to get through to a CIA analyst, who knew the story of Khan's arrest but refused to give out the specific name.

Earlier on, Reuters had reported, and I had repeated, that the name of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan was given on background to the press by a Bush administration official. The assertion was confirmed by National Security Adviser Condaleeza Rice in an August 8 interview on CNN with Wolf Blitzer, in which she said that US officials gave the name out on background. Both Reuters and Rice appear to have been wrong in this allegation, and I regret having repeated it. The transcript of the briefing, when released, did not contain Khan's name. However, I am not very embarrassed about being wrong, since Rice misled me. Her office later issued a correction, saying that she had just repeated back to Blitzer his own statement, and had misspoken. This performance by her seems to me bizarre and alarming, but there you have it.

The point remains that had Ridge not made his announcement, the press would have had no occasion to go searching for the source of his information. The Bush administration decision to go public put a powerful spotlight on the Pakistani arrests of June and July.

Amy Waldman and Eric Lipton said on Tuesday August 18 that the New York Times managed to get the name of Khan, as the source for the plot against the financial institutions, from a Pakistani official.

David Rohde had co-reported the story for the August 2 edition of the NYT from Karachi, and if Waldman and Lipton are correct (and presumably as NYT reporters they would be in a position to know the inside story), it seems entirely possible that after Ridge's press conference, Rohde worked his contacts in the Pakistani government and managed to get the name. The wording of the August 2 article by Douglas Jehl and David Rohde was ambiguous as to where they got the name, sourcing both American and Pakistani officials.

But Pakistan continues to insist that the leak came from the American side, and they also should be in a position to know. I wish Waldman and Lipton had made clear their source for their claim that the leak came from a Pakistani official. If they know this from Jehl and Rohde, then that is strong evidence. If they are just repeating the Bush administration line, then that hardly settles the issue.

Note that the Pakistani government had never before revealed Khan's name. It had never been mentioned in any Pakistani newspaper or any Pakistani news conference. Since Khan had been turned, he was perhaps the most valuable asset inside al-Qaeda Pakistani intelligence ever had.

Why would this Pakistani official now tell Rohde the name, if that is what happened? We cannot know, of course. It is possible that he believed that Ridge had given the show away anyway. That is, al-Qaeda members on hearing the details Ridge revealed to the American public would know that a real insider had been busted, and would inevitably become so cautious that the Khan sting operation might well have been fatally compromised. We know that after the Ridge announcement, the level of "chatter" among radical Islamists fell off dramatically.

The Bush administration at the very least bears indirect responsibility for the outing of Khan. Without the Ridge announcement, reporters would have had no incentive to seek out the name of the source of the information.

Aristotle thought there were four kinds of causality. The material cause of a baked clay vase is the clay out of which it is made. The formal cause of a baked clay vase is the shape of a vase. The efficient cause of a baked clay vase is the artist who works the clay and then bakes it. The final cause of a baked clay vase is the reason it was made, e.g. to hold water.

Although the efficient cause of the naming of Khan was a Pakistani official speaking to the NYT, I would argue that the final cause of the naming was the Ridge press conference.

The appearance of Khan's name in the New York Times on August 2 caused the British to have to swoop down on the London al-Qaeda cell to which he was speaking. As it was, 5 of them heard about Khan's arrest and immediately fled. The British got 13, but it was early in their investigation and they had to let 5 go or charge them with minor offences (immigration irregularities e.g.). On Tuesday, the British charged 8 of them.

When the British made their arrest, the Bush administration announced that among those captured was Abu Eisa al-Hindi, also known as Abu Musa al-Hindi (both are noms de guerre).

The British, especially MI5 and Home Secretary David Blunkett, had not wanted his name made public, and were furious at all of the detailed information being given out to the public by the Bush administration or in consequence of its revelations. For some reason, the British seem to have feared that the naming of Abu Eisa al-Hindi would complicate the case against him. The Times of India reports that Abu Musa (or Abu Eisa) al-Hindi's real name is Dhiron Barot. He is one of the 8 charged in London on Tuesday. He is from a Hindu family, but converted to Islam at age 20 and got pulled into jihadi activities in Kashmir (about which he published a book). He was the one who cased the financial institutions in the US for al-Qaeda. The story of Barot, like that of Richard Reid, shows that al-Qaeda isn't mainly about Islam per se, it is a political-religious ideology that can attract non-Muslims.

Likewise, Pakistani Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat was livid that Khan's name and other details had turned up in the press.

That seems to be where things stand.

I actually did not begin by being critical of the Ridge announcement. I remember being interviewed by a print reporter on August 3 or so, and declining to dismiss the press conference as pure politics. I didn't say anything negative about it at my weblog at the time. What impelled me to begin following the story and to speak out about it was the Reuter report of August 6, which made the case that the Bush administration had leaked Khan's name as part of its public relations use of terrorism. That allegation seems to have been incorrect in its specifics.

The Reuters story still does seem to me to hold water, however, at a more general level. After understanding that Ridge set in train the events that led to Khan's outing, I think it was a huge mistake. It would have been better to keep quiet and use Khan to get more and more of al-Qaeda, maybe even Bin Laden himself. I do not know if the Bush administration made the announcement to take the spotlight off the Kerry campaign right after the Democratic National Convention, but Paul Krugman and others have persuasively argued that the Bush administration does time such announcements for political purposes. The British security officials have the better instincts here.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Muqtada declines to See Delegation
Marines Launched Attack without Approval

Alex Berenson and John Burns of the New York Times make the explosive allegation that local Marines in Najaf launched the attack on Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Militia on August 12 all on their lonesome, without direction from the Pentagon in Washington. At most, they had authorization from the American-appointed governor, Adnan al-Zurfi, though he won't take responsibility for it all, either.

I studied colonial history with John S. Galbraith of UCLA, who was known for emphasizing the "Man on the Spot." That is, colonial officials and military men out in Malaya or Africa often made policy without reference to London. (Much of India was acquired in this way. It is amusing to go back and read the cautions of the British cabinet to British governors-general of the 18th century not to conquer more territory without permission).

If Berenson and Burns are right, American Men on the Spot are making crucial policy decisions that have the potential to affect the lives of all Americans and all Muslims. The Marines in Najaf were acting like just another militia, engaging in a local turf war with Muqtada and his men, and giving no thought to the consequences of behaving barbarically in the holy city of Najaf.

Helena Cobban subjects the NYT article to a searching analysis that is well worth reading. She argues that the Najaf attack shows a Marine corps out of control and a command structure that is a "tangled mess" and in which US Ambassador John Negroponte played a sinister role, supporting the initial Marine miscalculation in the Najaf attack. [addendum 10:45 am].

Readers sometimes complain to me that Muslims seem to have lots of holy cities and lots of mosques, so is Najaf really all that special? O.K., here are the holy cities in order of holiness: Mecca, Medinah, Jerusalem, Najaf, Karbala. Najaf and Karbala are especially holy to Shiites. There are other holy sites and cities, of course, but they are mostly sacred because of association with later saints. The five I just mentioned are sacred because of their direct association with the Prophet Muhammad, his son-in-law and vicar, Ali, and his grandson, Husain.

The Shrine of Ali is a tomb, and although it has a mosque attached to it, it is not just a mosque. It is a Shrine. Like the shrine of the Prophet Muhammad in Medinah or the shrine of Imam Husain in Karbala, it is a sacred resting place of holy remains. A lot of mosques could be damaged with impunity. These shrines cannot.

The ignoramus Marines in Najaf clearly don't know all this, and since they don't know it they don't have any business making military policy there. They have endangered all Americans profoundly by potentially spurring a whole new wave of Shiite terrorism against us, recalling the bad old days of the early to mid-1980s (when some of our present allies in Iraq, like al-Da`wa and SCIRI were attacking US targets like the embassy in Kuwait or helping take Americans captive in Beirut).

[I have now had the opportunity to discuss the August Najaf fighting with insiders who were on the scene and can positively deny Burns's allegation that the fighting was local and spontaneous. The marine commander went back and forth with Washington several times before the fighting broke out. I apologize to the Marines for my intemperate language above, since it now seems clear they were just following their orders and that the pugnaciously ill-informed persons that ill-advisedly ordered them to carry out this operation were in DC. - 10/2/04).

Meanwhile, the attempt by members of the national conference now meeting in Baghdad to mediate the stand-off in Najaf failed when Muqtada al-Sadr declined to meet with them.

One of those spearheading the negotiations was an elderly distant relative of Muqtada, Sayyid Husain Sadr. Sayyid Husain has been a favorite of the Americans and is a voice of moderation, but does not have a wide following.

Muqtada has a sense that his time has come. He seems to be sure that most Iraqis are siding with him, and that Allawi and the Americans will come after him only at their very great peril.

This estimation is shared by informed observers in Washington, as noted by the LA Times:

Several observers say Allawi and U.S. forces have no viable options other than trying for a negotiated end to the uprising because attempting to crush Sadr militarily would carry too high a political price.

"In all probability, it would take an unacceptable level of force in and around the shrine," noted Cliff Kupchan, a Middle East specialist at the Nixon Center in Washington. "Whether Iraqi troops do this or Americans, it would be a generational setback for U.S. legitimacy in the Arab world." '

Kupchan is talking sense, and I hope he is right that his point is recognized by Washington officialdom. Also, can someone please fax it to the Marine commanding officers in Najaf?

Muqtada is playing chicken with a superpower, and he knows very well that he could easily wind up dead. He seems convinced, however, that the Americans would kill him if they could anyway, and that he may as well go out fighting.

Remember that the Americans (in this case high officials in Washington) abruptly came after Muqtada in early April, saying they wanted to "kill or capture" him. Muqtada spent his life fighting Saddam, and once Saddam said something like that about you, you were a dead man walking. Muqtada sees the Americans and Allawi through that lens of Saddam-like behavior and ruthlessness.

It bears saying again that the Americans did not face any crisis with regard to the Sadr movement that would have necessitated moving against Muqtada in this dramatic way, impelling him to launch an insurgency, and inflaming the Shiite south. If the US had objections to his militia, they could have curbed the militia out in the south. By going after Muqtada personally, they just made him a hero and a symbol of Iraqi opposition to continued US occupation.

Meanwhile, the national congress put off until Wednesday its key vote for 81 members of an advisory council. Many delegates are complaining that the fix was in, and that most of the persons to be elected had been settled on by the major parties some time ago. Independents feel disenfranchised by the process, which is so complicated that I don't entirely understand it. It certainly isn't very democratic.

Thanks to The War in Context for the second cite from AFP.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Readings on Iraq

Readers often ask me to recommend books to read, which are fairly readable, on Iraq. Being an academic, I'm not sure I'm always the best judge of what is readable (specialists like a lot of detail, and get used to dealing with it).

But let me try to step back and make some suggestions.

Anyone at all interested in Iraq who wants a good read should delve into Guests of the Sheik by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea. Although it is by the wife of a then graduate student and written in the 1950s, its engagement with Shiites and women still has resonances today.

For overall Middle Eastern history, I warmly recommend Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples.

For Iraq, there is a general history by Charles Tripp, a history of the modern period by Phebe Marr, and for the more recent history see Iraq Since 1958 by Marion Farouk-Sluglett, Peter Sluglett. Hanna Batatu's magisterial book on Iraq should only be attempted by very serious readers interested in social and political history, and it is massive, but it really has most of the keys to understanding the modern history of the country.

For the Shiites in general, see Moojan Momen's Introduction, in paper from Yale University Press. For the Iraqi Shiites, see Yitzhak Nakash's The Shi'is of Iraq. My Sacred Space and Holy War has a lot in it about Iraqi Shiites, but I admit freely that it is a collection of journal articles and may be hard going for the neophyte. When I sent it in to the publisher in winter of 2002, I was just trying to keep some of the articles from sliding into obscurity, I wasn't trying for a wide popular audience. How could I know that the world's attention would soon be fixated on Najaf? But, some readers have said they found it useful; others say it is tough going. Caveat emptor.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

New Clashes in Najaf
3 US Troops Announced Killed
19 Iraqis Dead, 101 Wounded

Dean Yates of Reuters reports that fighting broke out in Najaf again on Monday between US troops and the Mahdi Army militia.

In the heart of Najaf, U.S. forces backed by tanks exchanged fire with militiamen entrenched around the sacred Imam Ali Mosque and an ancient cemetery. Explosions boomed and the crackle of machinegun fire echoed across the city, 160 km (100 miles) south of Baghdad.

A U.S. military spokesman revealed that Mahdi Army fighters had killed three US troops in fighting on Sunday.

Thousands of civilians have marched to Najaf to surround the shrine of Ali as human shields. Reuters quotes one of them, Fadil Hamed, 30, as saying, "I will lie on the ground in front of the tanks, or I will kill the Americans to defend Sadr and Najaf."

Al-Zaman reports that water and electricity have been cut off in Najaf for a week, leaving the remaining civilians there in dire straits.

Near Amara in the south, the Mahdi Army set fire to an oil well. The main southern pipeline remained closed on Monday because of security concerns, continuing to deny much needed funds to the caretaker government of Iyad Allawi.

Sporadic fighting continued in seven other cities, including Baghdad. The Mahdi Army engaged in fierce clashes in the slums of East Baghdad or Sadr City. In one engagement the militiamen exploded a bomb under a US tank and then set it aflame, but the American crew escaped with minor wounds. "A U.S. helicopter gunship later strafed the street where the tank was hit. Militiamen responded with rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles."

Al-Zaman said that 19 Iraqis were killed and 101 wounded in the various clashes around the county in the previous 24 hours.

In the US bombing of Fallujah with warplanes on Monday evening, 1 Iraqi was killed and 17 wounded, according to AFP.

A group calling itself "the Brigades in Defense of the Holy Sites" took captive an Iraqi intelligence officer in revenge for the fighting in Najaf, according to al-Jazeerah.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Harkin: Cheney is Cowardly

Iowa Senator Tom Harkin has let Dick Cheney have it over Cheney's questioning of John Kerry's ability to understand the war on terrorism--calling the vice president a "coward". CNN quotes him,

"It just outrages me that someone who got five deferments during Vietnam and said he had 'other priorities' at that time would say that," said the Iowa Democrat, a former Navy fighter pilot . . . The issue first arose when Harkin joined with Des Moines police officials protesting the call-up of a police officer who already had completed his eight year military commitment. Harkin said that it angered him to hear tough talk from Cheney. "When I hear this coming from Dick Cheney, who was a coward, who would not serve during the Vietnam War, it makes my blood boil," said Harkin. "He'll be tough, but he'll be tough with someone else's kid's blood," said Harkin.

Actually, I don't think declining to serve in Vietnam is necessarily a sign of cowardice. Those who didn't buy the Domino Theory or just didn't consider the North Vietnamese a threat to the California coast might well have declined to risk their lives in that war. But presumably Cheney did believe that fighting international Communism was a worthy cause. He did ask for and receive five deferments, one after another. It is clear that he had higher priorities, as he said, than fighting in the Vietnam War.

This behavior suggests not necessarily cowardice, but hypocrisy. If he was exercised about a threat, why not go meet it? It could be cowardice, of course. We cannot know for sure. But it was at least hypocrisy.

Now that we are on Cheney, I wanted to respond to his recent sarcastic criticism of John Kerry for saying that we need to fight the war on terror sensitively.

' "America has been in too many wars for any of our wishes, but not a one of them was won by being sensitive," Cheney told an audience of veterans in Dayton, Ohio. '

Many pundits pointed out that George W. Bush had used exactly the same language about a sensitive approach to the war on terror, so that Cheney was implicitly criticizing his own superior.

But as a historian, I have to say that Cheney's statement is bizarre and uninformed. Let me just give one example. The practice round for World War II was fought in North Africa, then controlled by the Vichy French. Dwight Eisenhower developed Project Torch, involving the landing of US troops in Morocco and Algeria.

It was essential to the US effort that the French colonial soldiers be quickly won over and convinced not to put up stiff resistance to the invasion. The original plan would have explicitly used British naval power. But the Free French objected loudly to this plan, since they did not want the British Empire's ships anywhere near their North African possessions. The French and the British had old rivalries in this regard. Moreover, there were still French bad feelings about the British attack on the French fleet at Mers al Kabir in Algeria in 1940.

So Roosevelt and Eisenhower asked Churchill to keep the British navy in the background off Gibraltar and out of sight of the Moroccan coast. Churchill agreed.

That is, Roosevelt and Eisenhower had their successful landing in North Africa precisely because they were entirely willing to bend over backward to be sensitive to French feelings.

And that is the big difference between Cheney and Bush as wartime leaders on the one hand, and on the other Roosevelt and Eisenhower. Cheney and Bush are diplomatically tone deaf, projecting nothing but arrogance and being all too willing to humiliate traditional allies. They have no sensitivity. And it is for that reason that they have the U.S. stuck in Iraq with only one really significant military ally, the U.K. (the Italians only have 3,000 troops there, and most countries just a few hundred, which makes their presence a token one). They have perhaps permanently alienated all the countries that might have lent the U.S. a hand.

And that pattern of arrogant, unilateral war-mongering worries me more than Cheney being a coward.

If the Bush/Cheney team gets back in, there will be further wars and massive disturbances to world peace and security, starting with Iran. Maybe the whole doctrine of pre-emptive war is a form of inferiority complex, impelling Cheney to be a strident war-monger to try to vindicate his uninvolved youth. If he was a coward, he may be endangering us all (and especially our teenagers) in a desperate ploy to regain his own manhood.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Majority Report

Have been doing a lot of radio, which I enjoy because often the discussion can get to the bottom of things. Will be on Majority Report at Air America with Janeane Garofalo & Sam Seder Monday 8/16 around 8-9 pm EST.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Washington Post Online Discussion

My online discussion with readers today is at Washingtonpost.com.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

WaPo and NYT Duel on Sigificance of National Congress

One of the wonderful things about the internet is that it is easier than ever to see lots of news reports on the same event and to get a sense of the different angles that reporters work in reporting them.

There is a night and day difference between how John Burns of the New York Times reports the national congress held Sunday and the version given us of that event by Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post.

Burns's says that the convention was a mess, disrupted by repeated mortar fire and by angry delegates who stormed the stage to denounce the Allawi government and demand it cease military operations in Najaf. One senses that Burns himself, who does not suffer fools gladly, may have almost gotten caught by the incoming mortars and perhaps was not in a good mood as a result. His angle on the story is that the disruptions faced by the convention mirror the other failures of the US in Iraq, including the failure, despite repeated attempts, to root out the Sadr movement.

Chandrasekaran presents an almost panglossian story of the triumph of democracy-- noisy, disruptive, but still triumphant. He reports that the delegates said they had secured from Allawi a promise to suspend military action until further negotiations could take place, and he seems even to believe that Allawi gave such an undertaking and would abide by it! He also reports that the almost 1200 delegates will select 81 representatives, and that 19 seats had been awarded to the Interim Governing Council members originally appointed by Paul Bremer.

He does not note that originally, 20 seats were to be appointive. I take it that Ahmad Chalabi's has fallen vacant because he is under a legal cloud. Why don't we deserve to be told this? And, doesn't anyone but me object to 19 seats being set aside for American appointees who were never elected by anyone?

Al-Jazeerah says that 100 Shiites out of the 1200 angrily resigned because of the US miltiary operations in Najaf. Neither of the American reports mention any resignations. Al-Hayat clears up the mystery, reporting that about 100 delegates walked out of the first session in protest, but came back to attend the second session.

I think Burns's story more accurately reflects the Iraqi reality. I don't think the conference is any significant check on the executive, as Chandrasekaran argues it is. Allawi will do as he pleases and ignore this weak Duma. The conference had to be held almost furtively for fear it would be blown up, and it almost was anyway. Many of Iraq's major cities are being bombed semi-regularly by the US Air Force-- Fallujah, Samarra, Kut, Najaf, etc.

The reports on CNN suggest that Allawi is on the verge of sending Iraqi troops into the Shrine of Ali in Najaf, despite any pledges he gave the delegates.

Note, too, that CNN's headline news reported repeatedly on Sunday afternoon and evening that the Mahdi Army fighters holed up in the shrine of Ali were "foreign fighters." This allegation is Allawi's propaganda, and simply untrue. The Mahdi Army are Iraqi Shiite ghetto youth. They are not foreigners. There may be a sprinkling of Iranian volunteers among them, but the number is tiny.

Likewise, CNN appears to have been the victim of a second-hand psy-ops campaign, insofar as it is referring to the guerrillas as "anti-Iraqi forces." The idea of characterizing them not as anti-American or anti-regime but "anti-Iraq" was, according to journalist Nir Rosen, come up with by a PR company contracting in Iraq. Nir says that they were told that no Iraqis would fall for it. So apparently it has now been retailed to major American news programs, on the theory that the American public is congenitally stupid.

The American public has no idea how bad it is in Iraq because it gets lots of contradictory reports and has no way of wading through or evaluating them. On the evidence of Sunday, I'd advise them to keep their eyes on what John Burns says. He is a veteran war correspondent with his eyes open. If he thinks things in Iraq are bad, they likely are.

Meanwhile, on Monday morning US warplanes and tanks attacked targets in Najaf again, and warplanes bombed Fallujah, causing several deaths. The Allawi government forced all independent journalists to leave Najaf on Sunday, so that the only reporting we will have on operations there will come from journalists embedded with the US forces.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Fadlallah: Americans must be Forced to Withdraw

Just saw an interview on al-Jazeerah with the Shiite leader Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Husain Fadlallah, who has been in Beirut since 1965 but is from Najaf. (Fadlallah, an independent, has strained relations both with the ayatollahs in Iran and with the Hizbullah in Lebanon, though he may have been closer to the latter in the early 1980s).

The subtext of the interview was "why isn't anyone doing anything about what those awful Americans are doing to the holy city of Najaf, which is an Arab as well as a Shiite issue?"

Fadlallah began by being defensive concerning Sistani's absence in London and failure to condemn the American actions in Najaf in a straightforward way. The interviewer pulled him off that. Later on the issue came up of calls for Sistani to resign, and Fadlallah correctly pointed out that high Shiite authorities don't resign, it isn't that kind of position. He said he thought that the Marja`iyyah or highest Shiite leadership needed to become an institution, rather than remaining informal and personalistic. He said that the Muslim (read: Shiite) world faces many complex challenges and needs a means (presumably a bureaucracy and information-gathering) to confront them.

Fadlallah confirmed that he had called for the Iraqis to rise up and use all available means to force the Americans back out of Iraq. (I.e. he had done what a lot of Shiites think Sistani should have done. But note that the Mahdi Army hasn't besieged Fadlallah's house or tried to kill him, since he is safe in Beirut). Fadlallah declined to characterize his fatwa as a call to "jihad," insisting that it was simply "confronting Occupation." (In Shiite Islam, there are fairly strict legal conditions for jihad, and some scholars believe that no offensive holy war may be fought in the absence of an Imam-- the last Imam is held by Twelver Shiites to have gone into a supernatural realm in the ninth century). He said that the United States forms the biggest threat to the Muslim world because it wants to dominate it for its own purposes. He subsumed the Palestinian issue under this general rubric.

He blamed Saddam on the Americans, characterizing him as a CIA employee, and then blamed the current situation on the Americans. (There is something wrong with this way of thinking, which refuses to acknowledge that US relations with the Baath Party had their ups and downs, to say the least).

A caller angrily denounced the high Shiite leadership for allowing Muqtada al-Sadr and his movement to be cast in a negative light, helping justify the American action against them. He cleverly compared this situation to what happened to Ali ibn Abi Talib, the son-in-law of the Prophet who is considered his first vicar by Shiites and his fourth by Sunnis. Ali was in conflict with Mu`awiyah of the Umayyad clan, and submitted to arbitration to avoid further bloodshed. The arbitration went badly for Ali, and a group of Ali's followers (later termed Kharijites) turned against him, assassinating him in 661 A.D. So this caller cast Muqtada as an Ali figure, betrayed not only by outside forces (the Americans play the Umayyads) but also internal ones (thus Sistani and his people are the Kharijites).

Fadlallah rejected the caller's assertions and reaffirmed his own opposition to Iraq's occupation and alliance with all who work for an end to it. (This answer does not deal with the relative silence of Sistani and his colleagues).

Fadlallah has particular sway with the Shiite al-Da`wa Party in Iraq, or at least he was traditionally their favored grand ayatollah. So far, elements of the al-Da`wah are, however, cooperating with the US presence (Ibrahim Jaafari branch of the party, which had long been based in London).

There have been demonstrations in the past few days in Lebanon against US actions in Najaf. Last may 150,000 Shiites rallied in Beirut.

The Daily Star reports of the situation in Lebanon:

As prominent Lebanese religious personalities and local associations condemned the US occupation of the Iraqi city of Najaf on Friday, protestors against the actions of the US Army staged a sit-in near Al-Mansouri al-Kabir Mosque in Tripoli, in northern Lebanon, calling for a boycott of the US.

The representative in Lebanon of Iraqi Shiite leader Moqtada Sadr, Sheikh Hassan Zarqawi, described reports by the international media on Iraq as lies, fraud and deceit by a "media machine that is being controlled by Zionists."

Zarqawi stressed that the attacks on Najaf were aimed at subjecting not only Sadr and his movement but the Iraqis as a whole.

Hundreds of both Sunni and Shiites protesters also demonstrated near the Qods Mosque in Sidon in southern Lebanon.

Religious preachers strongly denounced the Arab world's neglect of the ongoing fighting in Iraq, praising the decision of Committee of Muslim Ulemas in Iraq to forbid any Iraqi from helping occupying forces in actions that led to the deaths of Muslims.

The president of the Islamic Tawhid Movement Council, Sheikh Hashem Menqara, urged leading personalities in the Arab and Islamic world to find a unified solution that would end "US-Israeli attacks on holy shrines."

Shiite cleric Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah called for a joining of forces in support of the Iraqis, stressing that maintaining silence meant "giving the green light to the US."

I wish Sheikh Hassan Zarqawi would change his name quick. Some clueless Americans are inevitably going to confuse him with the violently anti-Shiite Sunni radical, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and then we will hear conspiracy theories in the Weekly Standard about Muqtada and al-Qaeda being in cahoots.

Fadlallah and al-Haeri (see below) may well see a rise in their prestige among Shiites in Iraq and elsewhere if Sistani is politically damaged by his failure to denounce the siege of Najaf.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Al-Haeri Weighs in

Al-Jazeerah's crawl is saying that Grand Ayatollah Kadhim al-Haeri, based in Qom, has issued a fatwa or ruling that no Iraqi Muslim may fight another Muslim on behalf of the current regime in Iraq and its American backers. Al-Haeri is sometimes called the "fifth" grand ayatollah of Najaf, the other four being more politically quietist. Their leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, just had successful angioplasty in London and is removed from the scene. In his absence, al-Haeri is clearly attempting to project his authority. He could do that more effectively, of course, if he returned to Iraq, but he says he will not until the Occupation ends.

But even the more mainstream clerics, such as Ayatollah Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, have turned against the Americans over their hamfisted assault on the holy city of Najaf.

Bahr al-Ulum, who should know, says that the Allawi government and its American backers have lost political control of everything south of Najaf:

' "The government has lost the support of the Middle Euphrates region and the south, even if it manages to calm down these areas temporarily using brute force," he said, referring to clashes in central and southern Iraq. '

It is not impossible that, given this level of disaffection, al-Haeri will pick up support from Sistani. (Shiite religious authority is in some ways a continual popularity contest, and the laity can switch their allegiance over time.) Al-Haeri is close ideologically to the Khomeinists in Iran and highly anti-American.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Thousands Stream to Najaf

Thousands of Shiites are streaming toward Najaf in hopes of forming a human shield around Muqtada al-Sadr, according to al-Hayat. Many have already gathered at the gates to the old city in Najaf and around the shrine of Imam Ali.

In the meantime, the Allawi government says it intends to send an Iraqi military force into the shrine of Ali after Muqtada al-Sadr and his militiamen, according to al-Sharq al-Awsat. Allawi should be careful. A colleague of mine was reminded of a similarity between the current situation and the Indian government raid on the Sikh Golden Temple in 1984. That invasion of holy space arguably led to the assassination of Indira Gandhi and prolonged civil instability in the Punjab.

The Americans launched attacks (many of them by air) on guerrillas in Hilla, Samarra and Ramadi, claiming to have killed over 100 of them. The BBC says:

In Hilla there were fierce clashes involving Sadr supporters and local police - Iraqi officials said that three police and at least 40 militiamen were killed.

In the Sunni stronghold of Samarra, US planes carried out air strikes, killing about 50 insurgents, according to the US military. Local accounts put the number of dead at between five and 12. [For more on Samarra, scroll down.]

In Falluja, US planes bombed several houses on Saturday, killing five civilians and wounding eight others, doctors at the Sunni city's hospital said. The US military has not commented.

Two US troops were killed in al-Anbar province on Saturday.

A big convoy of aid arrived in Najaf from Fallujah, and the Sunni clerics and clan elders who brought it met with Shiite clergymen in Najaf on Saturday, expressing their solidarity with the city in the face of the American assault.

Muqtada and his spokesmen called for a United Nations investigation into the American attack on Najaf, and for a UN force to take control of the Shiite holy city.

Arab newspapers don't usually say so, but the other side of the story is that Muqtada's militiamen are narrow-minded, thug-like puritans who impose their power on civilians by coercion. I don't think it is a decisive datum that the people of Najaf largely despise the "Mahdi Army" and Muqtada and want them out of the city, because Muqtada's social and political base lies elsewhere. It isn't that he doesn't have one.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat does quote a frustrated Iraqi bureaucrat complaining that Muqtada makes contradictory demands and seems to just want his militia to run the coutnry. He said that Muqtada at one point will say that the Iraqi government should resign. Then he will say Iraq needs to build its national army. But how could the government build a national army if it resigned?

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Oil Pipeline Closed, Costing Iraqi Government $30 Million a day

The continued instability in the Shiite areas of southern Iraq, especially threats of sabotage by Mahdi Army fighters, has led Iraqi authorities to shut down oil facilities in Basra again, according to AFP. Excerpts:

' . . . the Southern Oil Company announced the pipeline had been closed for security reasons. "The production has been stopped since the start of the crisis and now we have stopped pumping too through the pipeline," a spokesman said . . .

The company halted production last Monday following the threats from Sadr supporters. Since then, crude exports from Basra's two main offshore terminals, the only outlet for Iraqi oil, have been slashed in half, costing the government at least US$30 million a day in lost revenue.

Shutting the pipeline will only deepen the financial crisis faced by the debt-ridden Iraqi government.

"If the entire pipeline is blocked, Iraq will suffer from a daily US$60 million financial loss," the national security council has said. '

The bad news was slightly offset by developments up north, where exports via the pipeline tht runs through Turkey have resumbed.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

It Takes a Following to Make an Ayatollah

My op-ed on Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and Muqtada al-Sadr is in Sunday's Washington Post.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Why does the Mahdi Army fight?

Mariam Fam of AP talks about the cultural dynamics around the Army of the Mahdi, the militia of Muqtada al-Sadr. She does a good job of providing a balanced view. She quotes one of the militiamen:

' Ayad Ali, a militiaman in Baghdad's Sadr City slum, claimed his brother was run over by a U.S. tank.

''I would fight the Americans until the last drop of my blood,'' he said, echoing a sermon al-Sadr has delivered in a funeral shroud, symbolizing his readiness to die in battle.

Al-Sadr also attracts followers faithful to the memory of his father, a senior Shiite cleric killed by suspected Saddam agents in 1999.

I think the Americans are gradually incurring feuds with all the major clans of Iraq, and this is undesirable. Americans are individualists, and don't understand clan societies. How many Americans are close enough to their cousins even to ask one for a loan? But many Iraqis would risk their lives to protect or avenge a cousin.

Ernest Gellner argued that it is industrialization that breaks up the clans. If you have factories all over the place, going in and out of business, then individuals are pulled away to them by the work opportunities. Clans and clan solidarity depend on people staying put, either on farms in villages, or in close-knit urban neighborhoods. Iraq's industrialization never proceeded far enough to really break up the clans, and many have emigrated jointly to city neighborhoods, keeping their ties even in an urban environment.

If you want a stark visual account of what is going on in Najaf, look at the pictures at Karbala News.net. The pictures of people walking or marching show Shiites hurrying to Najaf in hopes of forming a human shield around Muqtada. Most are self-explanatory. Mostly these kinds of images are absent from US mass media reports.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Muqtada Press Conference: "No Ordinary Politics Under Occupation"

The one-day truce in Najaf has collapsed. And, even the council of tribal chieftains in the Middle Euphrates, a previously pro-American group, has issued a statement condemning the "barbaric massacres perpetrated by the United States in Najaf," according to al-Jazeerah's crawl.

Just saw a long press conference with Muqtada al-Sadr on Saturday on al-Jazeerah (an "exclusive.") Although its Baghdad bureau is closed, al-Jazeerah still gets lots of video from Iraq and apparently can use local stringers to report from the scene. They also do telephone interviews.

Muqtada declared that "Najaf has triumphed over imperialism and imperial hubris" (al-isti`mar wa al-istikbar). Like Bush, Muqtada is extremely clever in using rhetoric that identifies his interests with those of his people. He has represented the stand-off around the shrine of Imam Ali as a "victory" of "Najaf" over the US Marines. In essence, he has made himself stand for Najaf. No one should underestimate the power of a proclamation such as "Najaf has triumphed over imperialism" in the Muslim world. Hndreds of his fighters were summarily blown away by the US military, which has taken most of the city (reducing some of it to rubble and repeatedly bombing a sacred cementery) and surrounded the Mahdi Army in the shrine. You would think that people would laugh at this situation being called "a triumph of Najaf." But no one is laughing, and in fact there are pro-Muqtada demonstrations all over Iraq, including in the hard line Sunni areas (!), and insurgencies. Indeed, there have been big demonstrations in Iran, Bahrain and Pakistan as well as in Iraq.

Muqtada said that there can be no ordinary politics under Occupation. He said Najaf must be free of all Occupation and of the authority of collaborators with the Occupation, and must be purely Shiite territory at the disposition of the leading Shiite authorities. (Actually, probably Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani would agree with him in most of this, but would just argue that it shouldn't be accomplished by military confrontation with the US military, which is doomed to fail).

Muqtada said that calling Iyad Allawi (he didn't mention him by name) a "Shiite" was like calling Saddam Hussein a "Muslim." Muqtada implied that the US Occupation had an ulterior motive of ensuring the hegemony of Secular Humanism in Muslim Iraq. (He should alert Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to this plot, he might pick up allies).

He revealed that he had asked interim Vice President Ibrahim Jaafari, a leader of the Shiite al-Dawa Party, to resign from the government, but that Jaafari had declined. (Jaafari is among the few figures in the caretaker government who represents a substantial political party and has favorability ratings in polls above 50%, and he has been bitterly critical of the American assault on Najaf.)


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

US War Planes Bomb Samarra

Al-Jazeerah also showed footage of the US bombing of the city of Samarra (north of Baghdad) on Friday night or early Saturday morning, and the huge craters it produced, along with residential buildings reduced to rubble and a few corpses. It is annoying that al-Jazeerah (the mirror image of Fox Cable News) likes to tell these simple-minded stories of American perfidy.

It does not tell us, for instance, that the civilian residents of the two buildings hit had left before the raid. Moreover, al-Jazeerah would be in a position to tell us exactly what is going on in Samarra, which has been in rebellion for many months and hasn't seemed to be under government control for a long time. There seem to be radical Sunni Islamists of some description in the city, who control some part of it, and who were thought by the Americans to be based in the apartment buildings they bombed. These radical Islamists are alarmed by the reemergence of ex-Baathists like Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib (who is from Samarra) into prominence and power, locally and nationally, and they attacked his house a while ago. But who exactly are they? How much of the city do they control? What do they say they want? Al-Jazeerah did not tell us any of this.

Likewise, the American journalists have been useless for this Samarra story. (And I don't just mean that the cable news networks have turned themselves into The Hurricane Channel, and make sure to sprinkle some water on all their lenses; why can't they do 1-minute updates on the storms 4 times an hour?) Samarra is a historically important city of 215,000 (though at one point recently 40% of its population is said to have fled). Its dynamics are significant to Iraqi politics. But the US wire services seem to just repeat whatever the US military says, though they will also quote from Iraqi medical officials about casualties.

This kind of report strikes me as fairly useless:

The U.S. military said a series of 230 kilogram bombs were dropped on "known enemy locations" near the city, about 95 kilometres north of Baghdad, in an operation called Cajun Mousetrap III, which began just after midnight Friday.

The military said about 50 militants were killed in the operation. There were no coalition casualties.

Residents said jet fighters targeted and destroyed two houses in separate districts, but the occupants had evacuated before the bombing began.

About nine Iraqis were killed and 40 injured in the fighting, said Jamal al-Qeilani from Samarra General Hospital.

I had to smile a little at the statement that in the course of dropping 250 kg bombs on an Iraqi city, the US military took no casualties (I don't know why they say "Coalition casualties"-- there are only American forces up there at Samarra, and the US air force is the only one dropping bombs on cities).

I don't understand how they expected to inflict any significant damage on the guerrilla resistance if they announced the air raid before hand (which they must have, if the civilians mostly left). Is this symbolic warfare-- the buildings are being punished for having housed insurgents? The US military looks more like the Israeli every day. And, doesn't anyone besides me mind our military bombing a country that we occupy? How is that not a contraventions of the Geneva Conventions?
You can't bomb buildings in a city without wounding or killing innocent civilians. The bombs turn windows and bricks into a kind of shrapnel and send them flying into the eyes of children and the chests of women. The radical Islamists in Samarra (if that is what they are) may be bad guys, who blow up innocent civilians, too. But there has to be a better way.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Muqtada to Allawi: Resign!

In a press conference on Friday, Muqtada al-Sadr called on the caretaker government of Iyad Allawi to resign: "I advise the dictatorial, agent government to resign ... the whole Iraqi people demands the resignation of the government ... they replaced Saddam (Hussein) with a government worse than him."

Muqtada seemed to accept the current de facto truce in Najaf, but warned that his militia would fight to the death rather than leave Najaf. A spokesman conveyed Sadr's sentiments: "I will not leave this holy city . . . We will remain here defending the holy shrines till victory or martyrdom."

The report also notes, "Sadr urged supporters in other cities in central and southern Iraq to continue their uprising, saying the truce was restricted to Najaf."

Obviously, Allawi and the Americans have Muqtada right where he wants them.

Meanwhile, there were large demonstrations in Iraq and throughout the Middle East on Friday protesting the US assault on Najaf.

Protesters at a large rally in Diwaniya occupied and attacked the office of Iyad Allawi's party, the Iraqi Naitonal Accord. There were also big crowds at Baghdad, Kufa and Samawa. Even strongly Sunni Fallujah had a demosntration in favor of him. At Hilla, the Polish troops are surrounded at the police station and may need the Aemricans to come rescue them. The big crowds chanted, ""Long live Sadr. Falluja stands by Najaf against America."

There were also big demonstrations in all the major Iranian cities. In Lebanon's strongly Sunni Tripoli, anti-American protests were held over Najaf.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Kadhim on the Najaf Crisis

Abbas Kadhim, an Iraqi Shiite scholar who knows Najaf intimately, has published an op-ed that questions the common wisdom about the movement of Muqtada al-Sadr.

He points out that, despite the claims of some politicians in the Allawi government, Iran is not in fact implicated in the Sadr movement.

' It is undeniable that Iran monitors the situation in Iraq with great interest, firstly as the country sharing the longest border with Iraq and secondly in its capacity as self- appointed champion of the Shia wherever they might be. It is also naive to expect Iranian intelligence agencies to refrain from conducting business in a country where others have already set up shop. But in doing so, Iran is no different than the rest of Iraq's neighbours, except for the fact that its relations with the US are less than amicable . . . Given the strong Shia identity of many Iranian visitors to Najaf and Karbala, it is not inconceivable that some of them join the ranks of the Mahdi Army, especially when confronted with the attack on the shrine of Ali Ibn Abi Talib and fellow Shia losing their lives. But it does not logically follow that the Iranian government has played a role in this. '

He also says that "others are still clinging to the claim that Moqtada Al-Sadr is a hardliner who is impossible to appease."

His reply to this argument is as follows

' Moqtada Al-Sadr's success in acquiring power is more a result of the failure of others to fill the power vacuum than his own charisma. . . If the only test for legitimacy in Iraq is the withdrawal of the occupation force, then Moqtada Al-Sadr will be the last viable Shia leader standing. This is especially true as long as Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani is not very keen on full engagement with the political process . . . Politically, the government of Allawi is not gaining any popularity for two main reasons: firstly because of heavy-handed policies -- curfews and clampdowns have alienated many people without making a significant difference on the security front. Secondly, the government has not succeeded in distinguishing itself in any practical way from the regime that was in place before it took charge . . . They must also realise that calling on the Americans to bomb holy cities on their behalf is not the way to garner support and cultivate favour ahead of future elections. '

Which raises the question: Have the Americans created Muqtada as a contender by attacking him since last April?

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Muqtada Wounded by US Bombing

Muqtada al-Sadr was wounded by US bombardment of Najaf on Friday morning, according to Reuters.

Sadr spokesman Ahmad al-Shinabi told Reuters, "Sayyed Moqtada was wounded in American bombing. He suffered three injuries to his body." The wounds are not considered life threatening, and are being treated at the Imam Ali Mosque.

Sadr is quoted as telling followers, "Act wisely, don't surrender to emotions."

Reuters notes,

' But the news could trigger an eruption of violence from Iraq's majority Shi'ite community, where there is growing anger at the U.S. offensive near the country's holiest Shi'ite sites even from those who scorn Sadr's radical views. '

Note that al-Shinabi called him "Sayyid" Muqtada. A Sayyid is a putative descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. Sayyids have a special status in Muslim societies, and even moreso in Shiite Islam. Tribesman see Sayyids as almost magical purveyors of blessings from God.

Muqtada al-Sadr is not just any Sayyid. He is the son of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, who is almost universally idolized for his strong stance in the mid- to -late 1990s against Saddam Hussein, who had him killed in Najaf in 1999. The Americans and the Allawi government increasingly look to pious Shiites as though they are very little different from Saddam. Muqtada is also the son-in-law of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, the theorist of an Islamic state for Iraq whom Saddam had executed in 1980.

The Americans and Allawi cannot compete with Muqtada's religious authority. They also cannot stop his movement by killing him. Muqtada's favorability rating was 68% according to the CPA's own polling last May. It may well be higher now. (It is often argued that Najaf inhabitants hate Muqtada and his Mahdi Army, which justifies the US assault. It is true that Muqtada and his men are not from Najaf and are resented there, but Muqtada does have substantial support in many other southern Shiite cities, so that weakens the argument that he is not liked.)

Although Muqtada and his men are now under siege, Waco-style, it is not for sure that the Marines can capture or kill him. I suspect Najaf is crisscrossed by underground tunnels, which is how Muqtada and others used to evade Saddam's secret police.

If he is trapped in the shrine, and the siege goes on very long, that in itself could inflame Shiite passions against the US. Remember that Waco was in the back of the mind of Timothy McVeigh, who later blew up a Federal building.

My guess is that if Muqtada is killed, and maybe also if he is captured and imprisoned, that will tip the Sadr movement into conducting a long-term low-intensity guerrilla war, similar to what Sunni radicals and Arab nationalists have done in the Sunni heartland for the past 16 months. The south had been much quieter than the Sunni Arab areas, but I suspect that calm can no longer be taken for granted. The question is what happens to the Iraqi government if it faces two major guerrilla insurgencies going on at the same time.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

223 dead, 500 wounded in clashes across Iraq
US marines launch major assault on Najaf

The headline, which is perfectly serviceable, is ripped off from a Pakistani newspaper mainly based on Agence France Presse reporting. The story was put to bed before a lot of the Arab newspapers came out Friday morning, so it underestimates the number of casualties.

Najaf

US Marines launched a major offensive in Najaf on Thursday. In ensuing clashes, 148 persons were killed and 500 wounded. They took the city center, and blocked the roads leading to the shrine of Ali. The US used war planes and Apache helicopters to bombard the cemetery adjacent to the shrine.

According to AFP, deputy governor of Najaf, Jawdat Kadhim Najam al-Quraishi, resigned in protest against the assault, saying, “I resign from my post denouncing all the US terrorist operations that they are doing against this holy city."

Remember that al-Quraishi had been appointed by the Americans and earlier had been willing to risk assassination by serving in a government perceived by insurgents as an American puppet.

Al-Hayat reports that about half of the provincial council members for Najaf governorate have resigned in protest, as well.

It also says that the representative in Karbala of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has called on US troops to depart Najaf. He wants a peaceful, negotiated settlement. Note that Sistani's people often deeply dislike Muqtada and his thugs. But here uneasiness about a Western desecration of the holy city has trumped such negative feelings toward Muqtada.

Kut

The US Air Force bombed Kut overnight, killing some 84 persons and wounding about 176, according to the Al-Zahra Hospital. Kut is a Shiite city of 420,000 southeast of Baghdad and east of Najaf, which has seen fighting between Mahdi Army militiamen and police. The Kut hospital director, Khidr Fadl Arar, said that many of the dead and wounded were women and children.

According to Police colonel Salam Fakhri, the bombing began at 1:00 am Thursday and continued until 3:00 am. He said,

"The bombing was concentrated in Al Sharkia district as the US military felt there were a lot of Shi'ite militiamen in that area. It also has an office of (radical Shi'ite Muslim cleric and militia chief) Moqtada Al Sadr."

I hadn't heard anything about US warplanes bombing Kut on US television news on Thursday. It is useless, but I would like to point out that bombarding al-Sharqiyyah district because it has Mahdi Army fighters is inhumane and probably illegal. Civilians live there, and they will inevitably be hurt by the bombing. Unfortunately, there are no mechanisms for enforcing international law. Apparently, the American public will not even be told by their mass media that the US is behaving in this way.

Later on Thursday, Mahdi Army fighters attacked and set afire the al-Balda police station. They killed one policeman and wounded nine others. Iraq's interior ministry maintained that police had arrested 100 Mahdi Army militiamen on Thursday. In the past few days, Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan announced, Iraqi police had killed, captured or wounded 400 militiamen.


Basra

James Brandon and Ian Johnston of the Scotsman say that some three thousand supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr marched through the streets to protest the US campaign in Najaf. They write:

' Describing the protest, Sqdn Ldr Wilson said: "It was quite low key in fact. We believe there were about 3,000 people there. They demonstrated in a well-ordered manner and they dispersed around about midday, local time." He said the demonstration and the attack were entirely separate.

The protesters chanted, “Long live Sadr, America and Allawi are infidels.” [A reader writes in, "The chanting at the protest at Basra was [in actuality] "aash aash aash assadir, allawi wa al-majlis kufr" [Long live Sadr, Allawi and the Council are infidelity] -- obviously referring to SCIRI."

The British troops have ceased patrolling Basra regularly. The Mahdi Army has occupied many important buildings throughout the city. They are also fortifying their positions

However, some of those involved in the demonstration tried to rally supporters to resist an expected British counter-attack to recapture the city centre which fell to Sadr’s al-Madhi army on Monday.

Brandon talked to "a militant" in Basra, who said the following:

"If the British try and cross the bridge, we will attack them . . . The latest fighting is not because of us. It is because we are fed up with the occupation," he added. "The thing that changed our minds about the Americans was Abu Ghraib, and when we discovered that America does not care for human rights and their army does not respect the differences between soldiers and civilians . . . A year ago, the British came to Iraq to get rid of Saddam Hussein and we gave them the opportunity to develop Iraq. But in fact nothing has changed. Now there is no electricity, no water and even fewer jobs than before."

Meanwhile, guerrillas employed a roadside bomb to kill one Scottish soldier and injure another while they were on patrol.


Baghdad

Fighting in Baghdad, mostly in the eastern slums of Sadr City, left 44 persons dead and 164 wounded, according to the Iraqi health ministry.

There was a protest march in Baghdad similar to that in Basra.

In west Baghdad, a helicopter crash Wednesday night killed two US Marines and wounded three others. The helicopter had been flying in support of military operations in al-Anbar province.

Mosul

Guerrillas attacked a police car in Mosul late Wednesday with machine gun fire, killing four persons, including a child and two policemen.






For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Endgame in Najaf?

From Arabic and English radio and television broadcasts, including al-Jazeerah:

The Marines have completely surrounded Najaf and cut off all the roads leading into the shrine of Imam Ali (Shiite Islam's St. Peter). US warplanes bombarded positions in the vast Valley of Peace cemetery (2 million graves) again today. At one point Marines entered the house of Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite leader, but of course found him gone. Al-Jazeerah's crawl is talking about continued fighting in the vicinity of the house. The US appears to have decided not to send the Marines into the shrine of Imam Ali, but an Iraqi force instead.

Al-Jazeerah says that the Mahdi Army may have mined the shrine. This information suggests that if any force does attack the Mahdi Army there, it may trigger explosions that could level it. (Read: Very, very bad publicity for the US).

The provincial governors and their deputies in Iraq, and most high government officials, have been "selected" in a fashion more or less stage-managed by the Americans. So it is doubly telling that there have been several resignations as a result of the Najaf campaing. The Deputy Governor of Wasit province announced his resignation. So too did the Director of Tribal Affairs in the Interior Ministry.

There were fair-sized demonstrations against the fighting in Najaf in both Basra and Baghdad, and fighting in some southern cities.

Iraqi Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib, a Sunni ex-Baathist from Samarra, gave a news conference in which he strongly implied that the Mahdi Army was conducting an unprovoked uprising as part of an Iranian conspiracy against Iraq, and that the Allawi government was being enabled to put down the conspiracy and push the Iranians back out of Iraqi affairs because it was receiving support from neighboring Arab states.

Al-Naqib's view of the world is highly warped, and he sounds like he is still living in 1982. The Sadrists are a homegrown Iraqi phenomenon, and there is little Iranian involvement in them.

Najaf governor Ali al-Zurufi has just announced that he sees the harbingers of a settlement of the crisis.

There will be big demonstrations in Iran on Friday against the US siege of Najaf, which is holy to Iran's Shiites. The Iranian government is undoubtedly receiving enormous pressure from the hardliners who support it to intervene against the US. It won't do so directly, but there is likely to be some sort of Iranian response in the medium term.

Some readers have written to ask if I think the Bush administration is deliberately provoking Iran, in hopes of widening the war and getting a pretext to attack Tehran.

I don't know what in the world they are thinking. All I know is that they are acting in a hamfisted manner that is endangering the United States in the medium term for no good reason.

If I were thinking conspiratorially, this is what I would say: The Mahdi Army continued to be a challenge to the caretaker government of Allawi and could possibly have launched violence at any time. The Bush administration may have feared leaving this element of uncertainty out there, with the risk that it might explode in their faces in October just before the election. So they could have thought that there are advantages to just taking care of the problem in August, on the theory that the American electorate can't remember anything that happened more than one month previously. Likewise, if they finish off the Mahdi Army, it sends a signal to other potential challengers to the Allawi government and they may think it will be strengthened. Likewise, the Mahdi Army's control of so many neighborhoods was a problem for the proposed January elections, and might have allowed a Sadrist party "machine" to dominate the returns from them.

The problem is that in actual fact they are undermining the credibility of the Allawi government as an independent actor. They are probably also actually increasing Muqtada's popularity, and the likelihood there will be new recruits to the Mahdi Army. The radical Shiites are reworking the conflict as a defense of Iraq's independence from brutal American Occupation.

On Thursday, the Board of Muslim Clergy, a Sunni fundamentalist organization with substantial support from Sunni Muslims, issued a fatwa or ruling that no Iraqi Muslim may participate in an attack on other Iraqi Muslims in support of the occupying power. That is, even the hard line Sunnis, who mostly don't like Shiites, are siding with Muqtada against Allawi and Rumsfeld on this one.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Fierce Fighting in Amara
Marines Prepare for final Push in Najaf

Fresh explosions and machine gun fire rocked Najaf early Thursday morning.

On Wednesday, fighting in 5 Iraqi cities (excluding Najaf) left 35 dead and 219 wounded.

Amara

British military forces attacked Mahdi Army positions in Amarah, killing 20 persons and wounding 78.

Fighting raged, as well, in Baghdad, Kut, Diwaniyah, and Basra.

Mahmudiyah

Sunni radical Islamists in Mahmudiyah assassinated a local leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Ali Mahmoud al-Saadi.

Baghdad

Guerrillas detonated a bomb in a village market north of Baghdad, Khan Badi Saad. They killed 6 and wounded 11.

Najaf

The US bombed the cemetery at Najaf again on Wednesday. The Marines used megaphones to request that the civilian population of Najaf leave.

' Howver, Sadr urged his militia on Wednesday to keep fighting US forces in Iraq even if he is killed. Heavy artillery fire and explosions were heard near the inner sanctum of Najaf, not far from the revered Imam Ali shrine. '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Kerry and Bush on Iraq War

Bush asked Kerry if he would still have voted for the Iraq War if he had known in fall of 2002 everything he knows now about the non-existence of weapons of mass destruction.

Kerry said "yes," but that he would have handled things differently from Bush, giving the weapons inspectors more time to do their jobs and involving the international community, so that the US did not have to go it alone.

Carl Hulse of the New York Times writes that Bush then immediately gloated on the campaign trail in Pensacola,

"After months of questioning my motives and even my credibility, Senator Kerry now agrees with me that, even though we have not found the stockpile of weapons we all believe were there, knowing all believe were there, knowing everything we know today, he would have voted to go into Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power . . . I want to thank Senator Kerry for clearing that up."

Of course, Kerry had not in fact endorsed Bush's approach to the war. Kerry and his advisers want to make the issue how Bush went to war, and how he mishandled the aftermath. Bush and his are counting on the American public being so simple-minded that they just stop thinking after the phrase "we were right to remove Saddam" and that they think "nuance" is a dirty word.

The Bush camp also believes that Kerry's Democratic base will lose its fervor if Kerry admits to still being in favor of the war, since so many Democrats either opposed it (only 15% of the country did) or have changed their minds and now think it was a bad idea.

Hulse continues,

' Kerry's national security adviser, Rand Beers, said Tuesday that "the issue has never been whether we were right to hold Saddam accountable, the issue is that we went to war without our allies, without properly equipping our troops and without a plan to win the peace." Beers was the No. 2 anti-terror official in Bush's National Security Council until he resigned in March 2003, just after the Iraq invasion. He posed questions for Mr. Bush, among them: "Knowing what you know now, do you still believe that you made no mistakes in how you took this country to war?" '

There's the "how" word. Bush being more politically sly than Kerry, I'll bet he does not answer.

Bush's real question was of the form, "Have you stopped beating your spouse, yes or no?" If you say yes, you admit to the abuse, and if you say no you admit it is ongoing. The question is posed in such a way that it is impossible to negate the premise. Bush got Kerry to say "yes, but . . ." and in a world of media soundbites, it is easy to lop off the "but . . ." Here's how I [Cole] would have handled it:

"Mr. President, the question of whether we should have gone to war is water under the bridge. We are in Iraq now, and are on the way to spending $500 billion on it at a time when many of our own people don't have insurance or cannot afford the drugs they need, or cannot build a needed new school. You have posed a counterfactual question, an imaginary question. There is no way to answer a question about an imaginary situation. Why don't you keep your feet on the ground and your head out of the clouds, and look what is happening to our troops in Iraq? What I can tell you is that the way you fought the war in Iraq has made Americans less safe, not more safe. You have diverted resources from fighting al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and the Pakistani border regions to bombarding Muslim holy sites in Iraq. You have allowed the poppy trade to come back, to the tune of over $2 billion a year, in Afghanistan, creating a powerful threat of narco-terrorism. Do we really want the remanants of the Taliban and al-Qaeda to get hold of that kind of drug money? You have thrown Iraq into political and military chaos, creating an unstable situation that could well breed terrorism against the United States. Your supporters are fond of calling you the "commander in chief" even with reference to your civilian role. But you are the commander in chief of the US armed forces, and you have not served them well by sending in a force too small to provide security to post-war Iraq."

Etc., etc.

Hulse writes, as well:

' Kerry also said Monday that he hoped to begin reducing the number of U.S. forces in Iraq within six months of taking office if he is elected. "It is an appropriate goal to have," he said, but added that achieving it would depend on broader international assistance, better stability within Iraq and other related factors.

Mr. Bush said Tuesday he opposed Kerry's proposal.

"What we don't want is to cut short the mission. We don't want politics to decide the mission," Mr. Bush said at a question-and-answer session with supporters in Niceville, Fla. '

This calls for a challenge from the Kerry camp. How long does Mr. Bush plan on keeping 138,000 US troops in Iraq? What is this project going to cost the American taxpayer? What does Mr. Bush plan to do if the situation remains so unstable that elections are not feasible in January? What are Mr. Bush's real plans for Iraq, such that his "mission" there cannot be completed within one year? What exactly is the mission? Because if it is forcing Western democracy on Iraq and then holding up Iraq as a model to other Middle Easterners, that is not working out very well. Iraq under the Bush administration is the worst advertisement for democracy in the history of the world.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Correction to the NYT re: Sistani

Alex Berenson's otherewise fine article on the situation in Najaf contains an important error. This mistake may well not be Mr. Berenson's fault. We professional writers know that between the time we submit something and it appears in press, it is massaged, edited and copy-edited, and with all the professionalism in the world mistakes sometimes slip in. Moreover, in a place like Iraq often more than one reporter contributes to a piece. Berenson is brave to be in Baghdad at all, and people such as I depend heavily on his reporting, which hasn't pulled any punches in the past few weeks. And, I (not having those helpful fact checkers and often writing when sleepy) sometimes make silly mistakes, too (which my helpful readers generally correct the next morning).

But this is not right:

The fighting this week coincides with the rare absence from Najaf of the most revered Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, who is a mainstream cleric wary of the American role but not in violent opposition to it as Mr. Sadr is.

It is worth correcting both because the NYT is a paper of record and we don't want anyone misled about something important like this, and because it is an opportunity for me to repeat some historical points that readers sometimes ask for.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani does not belong to or head up any political party. He was born in Mashad, Iran, in August 1930, studied in Mashad seminaries and then in Qom with Ayatollah Boroujerdi, and then came to Iraq in 1952. He has always stayed in the seminaries and never entered politics.

He is in London for medical treatment now. Al-Sharq al-Awsat says today that Sistani will not need a heart operation, and that his clogged arteries will be treated by coronary angioplasty (inflating a balloon in them). He is said to be very worried by the situation in Najaf and eager to return to Iraq. He told people around him that he never expected affairs to reach this pass.

The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI or SAIRI) was formed as an umbrella group by Iraqi Shiite exiles in Tehran in 1982, in the wake of Saddam's big crackdown on the Shiite al-Dawa Party and other similar groupings. In 1984 it came to be headed up by Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, and was until his death in Najaf in a huge car bombing on August 29, 2003. During the 1980s SCIRI developed a paramilitary wing, the Badr Corps, headed by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the brother of Muhammad Baqir. Both were sons of Muhsin al-Hakim, who had been the leading authority in Najaf (the equivalent of Sistani today) circa 1960-1970.

Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim came back to Iraq in May of 2003. His SCIRI developed a keen rivalry with the Sadr movement, which was also bucking the authority of Sistani. So Sistani made a behind-the-scenes tacit alliance with Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim and SCIRI, and the Badr Corps helped Sistani keep control of the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf, thwarting the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr. SCIRI and Sadrist missionaries have been competing for the souls of the Shiites in the South, and both have much extended their sweep, from all accounts.

So, Sistani doesn't belong to SCIRI and doesn't head SCIRI. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim does. Despite its relative popularity, SCIRI was only given one position in the caretaker government, the Finance Ministry.

Ideologically, I suspect Sistani is closer to the al-Da'wa Party than to SCIRI. Sistani rejects the notion of clerical rule promulgated by Khomeini, though he accepts it with regard to "social issues." When they were in Tehran, at least, the al-Hakims had accepted this theory from Khomeini, and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim was talking about a future Islamic state in Iraq as recently as last spring.

Western reporters keep saying that Sistani believes in the separation of religion and state, but this is not true. Sistani wants religious law to be the law of the land and when parliament takes up legislation related to moral or social matters on which Sistani has a position, he expects the Shiite members of parliament to do as he says.

I suppose it is the sort of system that the Christian Coalition and the religious wing of the Republican Party would like to implement in the United States. Indeed, it is because the Republicans have elements of this sort of system in place that President Bush limited stem cell research and pushed for a constitutional amendment forbidding gay marriage. Some people warn that because Sistani wants religious law and clerical influence, he is a Trojan Horse for theocracy. If so, then so are Tom Delay and George W. Bush and their allies among the evangelical Protestant ayatollahs.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Mahdi Army Fights on in Najaf, Sadr City

The US military pounded Mahdi Army positions in the vast cemetery of Najaf again on Tuesday, with artillery and aerial bombardment. The Americans also began asking the civilian population (ordinarily nearly half a million strong) to leave the city, spurring fears that the US planned another massive assault. The suqs or traditional markests of downtown Najaf have already been reduced to rubble by US bombings.

The US military actions in the holy city of Najaf are deeply offensive to Muslims throughout the world. Although many might also criticize Sadr and his militia for using the holy sites as cover, the strongest condemnation inevitably is reserved for the foreign troops, seen as imperialists.

Ironic quote of the Day: "We will not allow them to continue to desecrate this sacred site . . . " said Colonel Anthony Haslam, commanding officer of the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit. (This is after the US dropped bombs on the cemetery, which contains the dead relatives of Shiite Muslims from all over the world, but especially Iraq).

One of Iraq's vice presidents, Ibrahim Jaafari, called Tuesday for the US Marines to withdraw from the holy city of Najaf, which, he said, is sacred to all the Muslims of the world in general and to Shiites in particular. Jaafari is a leader of the Shiite al-Da'wa Party, Iraq's oldest and largest surviving party, which is likely to do very well when and if there are parliamentary elections. Jaafari speaks for the Shiite majority in Iraq in these sentiments in a way that hardline Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib (a Sunni ex-Baathist) or PM Iyad Allawi (a secular Shiite ex-Baathist) do not.

Doug Struck of the Washington Post reports that Mahdi Army militiamen took over some Baghdad neighborhoods on Tuesday, especially in Sadr City:

Supporters of the militant Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr challenged authorities in Baghdad on Tuesday by setting up makeshift checkpoints and attacking police stations in a bid to widen a confrontation centered in the southern city of Najaf. An official at the Health Ministry said 10 people were killed here and more than 100 wounded. Gunmen briefly asserted control of some Baghdad neighborhoods and called for a curfew over the entire city . . . Residents of several neighborhoods said streets emptied when members of the Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to Sadr, came through, apparently unchallenged by the police.

Heavy clashes were reported in Baghdad's Mansour district, and there were numerous mortar strikes in Baghdad on Tuesday morning, many of them targeting police stations and government buildings.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraq National Congress Office Closed

Al-Hayat reports via Agence France Presse that the head of the office of Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress in Baghdad has been told by the caretaker Iraqi government that he had 24 hours to close the office.

Ahmad Chalabi and his nephew Salem, previously darlings of the US Department of Defense, now face arrest for money laundering and murder, respectively.

It is one thing for an individual politician to be arrested. It is another for a political party to be targetted. Tuesday's report sounds like the second, and if it is true, it seems to be another indication that Iraq under US auspices is slipping back into dictatorial methods.

Ahmad Chalabi gave an interview on al-Jazeerah Tuesday in which he said that the US came to Iraq as liberators, but within a couple of months had become occupiers. He condemned the massive US military operations in Najaf and said that although he was sure he could play a mediating role to end the crisis, he realized that he would not be allowed to do so.

Al-Jazeerah also reported that Iraqi Minister of Justice, Malik Dohan al-Hasan, has threatened to resign unless the judge who indicted the Chalabis is fired. Al-Hasan has also expressed sympathy for the Mahdi Army members in Najaf.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

POW Mistreatment an Issue between US and Iraq, Denmark and UK
Death Penalty Condemned by Danish Defense Minister

Danish Colonel Henrik Flach said Tuesday, “The British treat their prisoners in a manner which does not, as we think in Denmark, conform with the Geneva Conventions.” The 500-strong Danish contingent was condemned by a Danish army investigation for treating prisoners badly for subjecting "Iraqi prisoners to ill-treatment including verbal humiliation, forcing them to maintain painful postures and restricting access to food, water and toilets . . ." Flach said British practices were significantly worse, including hooding prisoners and shouting in their faces [implied: to frighten them].

The Danish government is disturbed by the reinstitution of the death penalty in Iraq. The Danish used to just hand any prisoners they captured over to the British, but they are now afraid the British will in turn surrender them to the Iraqi government, which may execute them. The countries of the European Union have abolished the death penalty and generally consider it to be a human rights abuse.

Meanwhile, Mike Francis of the Oregonian reports that Senator Ron Wyden is demanding an investigation into a June 29 incident in which Oregon National Guards in Iraq witnessed Iraqi police torturing prisoners, intervened to stop it, and then were ordered by US officers to withdraw.
Francis writes:

The chain of events started when a National Guard scout witnessed Iraqi guards beating bound and blindfolded prisoners on the grounds of Iraq's Interior Ministry. The scout radioed his commanders at Patrol Base Volunteer, and a squad of soldiers led by the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Dan Hendrickson, raced to the detention area.

When they arrived, the soldiers began disarming the guards and giving aid to the prisoners, whose backs, arms and legs were marked with welts and bruises. They moved prisoners into the shade and distributed water bottles.

Inside a guardhouse in the compound, soldiers found more prisoners bound and blindfolded and showing evidence of abuse. They also found rubber hoses, chemicals and exposed electrical wires, which prisoners said had been used in the "interrogations."

The Iraqi guards began arguing with the Americans, and Hendrickson radioed his superior officers to ask for instructions. That's when higher-ups ordered him to take his men and withdraw from the detention yard, leaving the prisoners to their captors.

The Allawi caretaker government has shown a penchant for Baathism Lite, using techniques similar to those of Saddam but much less brutally. It has brought back the death penalty, kicked satellite news service al-Jazeerah out of the country for a month, authorized an American invasion of the shrine of Ali, and may be marginalizing potential rivals via the courts. How the Iraqis run their affairs should ordinarily be their business. But the US more or less put Allawi in power and supports him, so this story is disturbing. Nearly 1000 US troops haven't died in Iraq so that some unelected government could torture people.

The Bush administration had its own prisoner torture scandal, of course, but so far is maintaining that the mistreatment was the work of a small handful of rogue pfc's.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

"No Pakistani Official Made this Intelligence Leak"

AP reports that Pakistani officials continue to insist that the leak of double agent Muhammad Naeem Nur Khan's name to the press on Aug. 1 was done by "Coalition partners," though they are circumspect about directly accusing the US. AP writes,

' The first official described the initial publication of the news of Khan's arrest as "very disturbing."

"We have checked. No Pakistani official made this intelligence leak," he said.

Without naming any country, he said it was the responsibility of "coalition partners" to examine how a foreign journalist was able to have an access to the "classified information" about Khan's arrest. '

On reflection, it now seems clear that the US release of the name of Abu Eisa Hindi, an al-Qaeda operative arrested by the British on August 3rd in the wake of the US naming of Khan (his cousin), was also considered a grave error by the British.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Update on Khan Scandal

We know that the Pakistani government has complained that the Bush administration blew the cover of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan. Not only are the Pakistanis annoyed by the blown cover , they are also furious about the cavalier way the FBI used a fiction about a plot against the life of Pakistan's ambassador in the US to entrap two merchants into what they thought was a money-making scheme that involved providing weapons to terrorists.

Responding to volley of questions about the issue at the weekly press briefing, the Foreign Office Spokesman Masood Khan said, “ At one level this is a bizarre story; at another quite dangerous.”

The standard line about the Pakistanis in Washington is that the Pakistani government is riddled with sympathizers of the Taliban and maybe al-Qaeda and is unreliable. But from Islamabad's point of view, during the past two weeks the Bush administration has behaved like wild men, spreading around the idea of killing the Pakistani ambassador and blowing the cover of a major intelligence asset inside al-Qaeda.

Charlie Savage and Brian Bender of the Boston Globe provide more details about the unfolding story of the Bush administration outing of the double agent Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan. Khan had been an al-Qaeda communications operative until arrested July 13 and turned by Pakistani military intelligence. His name appears to have been revealed by a Bush administration official to the New York Times on Sunday, August 1 in connection with the raising of the terror alert levels in Washington and New York by Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge.

The authors point out that in her interview with Wolf Blitzer on the past Sunday, National Security Adviser Condaleeza Rice denied that the Bush administration had publicly identified Khan. So Wolf Blitzer said, "He was disclosed in Washington on background." Then Condi replied, "On background. And the problem is that when you're trying to strike a balance between giving enough information to the public so they know that you're dealing with a specific, credible, different kind of threat than you've dealt with in the past, you're always weighing that against operational considerations. We've tried to strike a balance."

The authors note,

' Later in the show, Blitzer said this exchange meant Rice had confirmed that the administration released Khan's name to a reporter on background -- an interpretation repeated in later news accounts. But Sean McCormack, a National Security Council spokesman, said yesterday that Rice did not say the leak came from American officials. "She was in the middle of making a point and he interrupted her, and she reflexively repeated 'on background,' but she was not confirming it and went on to complete her thought," McCormack said.

Savage and Bender say that

"Senior intelligence officials gave a background briefing to reporters Aug. 1 after Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge announced an orange alert for sites in New York, Washington, and Newark. Khan's name does not appear in the transcript.

That is worth repeating. "Khan's name does not appear in the transcript." I had been assuming that the name was given out at the Sunday briefing. But maybe not. Though, if the name was given on background, would they have recorded it in the transcript?

Savage and Bender say that the Boston Globe's intelligence contact in the government had declined to name Khan on Sunday Aug. 1, saying only that the information came from a suspect recently arrested in Pakistan. This official confirmed after the name came out that he had been talking about Khan.

There does not seem any doubt that the Bush administration has provided enormous numbers of details about al-Qaeda operations to the public since August 1, and that many intelligence professionals and officials in Pakistan, the United Kingdom and even the US are extremely dismayed at this way of proceeding.

' . . . several senior intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, expressed dismay at the level of information that has been revealed to the media -- particularly the role that Khan's arrest has played. "Most of the people I talk to are most shocked by some of the recent details being revealed about Al Qaeda," said one senior CIA analyst who works on terrorism issues. '

I am not sure that the transcript resolves the issue of whether the name of Khan was revealed after the Ridge press conference. It is, however, possible that after the press conference and the background briefing, the reporters began working their Bush administration contacts. The one to whom the Boston Globe spoke was circumspect. The one to whom the New York Times spoke was less so.

Given the evidence from Pakistani complaints (and strong but implicit such evidence via British government complaints), there is not any doubt that the Bush administration blew Khan's cover and also spread a lot of operational details all over the press that the Pakistanis, the British and even the CIA would have liked to keep secret.

Remaining questions:

Why did Wolf Blitzer think that Khan's name had been provided "on background"?

Why did Condi Rice agree with him? Either she knew this was true and agreed, or was ignorant and just parroted back to him his statement. If the latter, which her office asserts, is actually true, then she should be fired immediately. You can't have public officials who a) don't know key information and b) purvey misinformation "reflexively" to millions of viewers about important issues.

Was the name given on background but not included in the transcript of the Aug. 1 briefing?

Or did Jehl get the information from a Bush Administration source by telephone later, on background (note: not "deep background," which whould have cautioned him against using it)?

What was the motive in releasing all this information right after the Democratic Party Convention? Was the revelation of Khan's name deliberate or a piece of stupidity?

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bush Administration Outing of Double Agent "Made no Sense": Baer

Jim Lobe has a good summary of the state of play in the scandal of the Bush administration outing of double agent Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan. Two important points.

1) Lobe implicitly takes on the argument of the rightwing bloggers that the press is to blame for printing Khan's name. He says,

' Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, confirmed Sunday briefing officials had given Khan's name to the Times but insisted he was identified "on background," an assertion that caused consternation among experienced journalists here, who know that everything said by officials "on background" can be quoted so long as the name of the briefing officials is not disclosed. '

Again, there is no way to shift the blame here from Tom Ridge or one of his aides, who told the press the information came from Khan. You don't tell a big group of journalists something you don't want to see in the newspapers the next day.

Lobe also writes:

' Similarly, the administration announced the arrest in Pakistan of a senior al-Qaeda operative, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, wanted for organizing the 1998 suicide bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, on the third day of the Democratic convention, and three weeks after the The New Republic weekly quoted Pakistani intelligence officials as saying the White House had asked them to announce the arrest or killing of any "high-value [al-Qaeda] target" any time between July 26 and 28, the first three days of the Democratic Convention. At the time, former CIA officer Robert Baer said the announcement made "no sense." "To keep these guys off-balance, a lot of this stuff should be kept in secret. You get no benefit from announcing an arrest like this." '

Meanwhile, kudos to New York Senator Charles Schumer, who has bravely taken up this issue and is pressing the White House to explain why it leaked Khan's name to the press.

The most concerning information so far gleaned from Khan's files is not the operations planned years ago but the evidence that a new, young generation is replenishing al-Qaeda's ranks.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

1 British Soldier Dead, 5 Wounded in Basra Clashes
Najaf in Flames; Oil Production Stopped

Early Tuesday Baghdad time, there was talk of a truce in Najaf, after a fifth day of fierce fighting. Al-Jazeerah reported that Governor Adnan al-Zurufi was saying that Mahdi Army fighters had asked for a truce so as to remove their wounded. Muqtada al-Sadr maintained that the governor had sued for peace.

The Scotsman reports that the Marines continued their advance Monday into Najaf, battling fiercely with the Mahdi Army. Much of the fighting centered on control of the vast al-Salam cemetery near the shrine of Ali.

' Explosions and gunfire echoed from the heart of Najaf and smoke rose from near an ancient cemetery, scene of hand-to-hand combat in recent days, as US aircraft flew overhead. Sadr thundered defiance during a news conference at Najaf’s holiest shrine, the Imam Ali mosque. "The Mahdi army and I will keep resisting. I will stay in holy Najaf and will never leave," Sadr said. "I will stay here until my last drop of blood." '

Al-Zurufi and PM Iyad Allawi appear to have given the US Marines permission to fight in the shrine of Imam Ali if it became necessary in order to flush out the Mahdi Army militiamen holed up there. The outrage among Iraqi Shiites and Shiites throughout the world should the Marines pursue such a plan would likely cost the US the war, even if it won the battle.

The Scotsman also says that heavy fighting continued Monday throughout the Shiite south. In Basra, clashes left one British soldier dead and five injured as followers of Muqtada al-Sadr fired rocket-propelled grenades at two British Army Land Rovers, destroying them. Sixty-two British soldiers have died since the beginning of the Iraq War.

Basrans kept most shops closed and most municipal employees took the day off. Some 150 Mahdi Army militiamen patrolled the streets, taking control of the main intersections and demanding that shops remain closed. They threatened to occupy government offices if the US did not withdraw from the holy city of Najaf. The Mahdi Army had threatened to sabotage Iraq's petroleum facilities, forcing Iraqi authorities to stop pumping oil.

The cessation of Iraqi pumping has caused the price of petroleum to rise to $45 a barrel.

In Baghdad, Mahdi Army fighters lobbed mortar shells at the oil ministry and the State Oil Marketing Organization. There was also heavy fighting in Shiite Sadr City, where the central government vainly attempted to enforce a curfew from 4 pm to 8 am, which was widely ignored.

In Diwaniyah, Mahdi Army militiamen surrounded the mansion of the governor and the police station. The clashes resulted in casualties.

In the southern city of Nasiriyah, guerrillas attacked the party offices of the Iraqi National Accord, the political party of PM Iyad Allawi. They warned INA members to leave the city. The INA groups ex-Baathists, who are often not popular in the Shiite south.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Provincial News: Sunni-Shiite fighting in Yusufiyah

An informed reader writes:

' [Last Friday] there were the first violent clashes, practically a battle, between Sunnis and Shiites in Yusufiyah, with several casualties. The Hakim-people had opened an office in Yusufiyah and Sunni mudjahedin - who are terrorizing Shia in the area - attacked it and burnt it. Badr militias came to Yusufiyah to fight them. But the most disturbing fact is that TRIBAL people on both sides are involved: The jihadis are supportet by tribal fighters from the Falluja area, and the Badr are trying (in some cases with success) to involve Shia tribes on their side. '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bush Administration outing of Khan Enabled 5 al-Qaeda Cell Members to Escape Capture

Neville Dean of PA News reports that a magistrate has given British police only until Tuesday to finish questioning 9 of 13 men arrested August 3 on suspicion of being part of an al-Qaeda cell. The men had been in email correspondence with Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, who since mid-July has been functioning as a double agent for the Pakistani government. He was arrested in Lahore on July 13 and "flipped."

The Bush administration revealed Khan's name to US journalists on Sunday August 1 on background, and it appeared in the US press on Monday. The Bush administration thus effectively outed Khan as a double agent (he sent emails to his London contacts as late as Monday).

The British MI5 was forced to have the London cell of 13 arrested immediately on Tuesday, fearing that they would flee now that they knew Khan had been arrested two weeks earlier. The British do not, however, appear to have finished gathering enough evidence to prosecute the 13 in the courts successfully.

It now turns out, according to Neville, that "Reports last week also claimed that five al Qaida militants were on the run in the UK after escaping capture in last Tuesday’s raids." If this is true, it is likely that the 5 went underground on hearing that Khan was in custody. That is, the loose lips of the Bush administration enabled them to flee arrest.

Of the 13 taken into custody on Aug. 3, two were released for lack of evidence and two others were "no longer being questioned on suspicion of terrorism offences.

Two of the men let go on Sunday are being charged or questioned with regard to irregularities in their identity papers or lapsed visas.

By Tuesday, British police must charge the remaining 9, release them, or ask the magistrate for yet more time for questioning. Terror suspects may be held in the UK for up to two weeks without being charged, in accordance with the Terrorism Act.

One of the 9, Abu Eisa al-Hindi, is a high al-Qaeda official also wanted by the US. Because Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan's identity was prematurely released, however, the British may not have enough evidence to extradite him.

CNN.com noted Monday morning:

" The effort by U.S. officials to justify raising the terror alert level last week may have shut down an important source of information that has already led to a series of al Qaeda arrests, Pakistani intelligence sources have said.

Until U.S. officials leaked the arrest of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan to reporters, Pakistan had been using him in a sting operation to track down al Qaeda operatives around the world, the sources said.

In background briefings with journalists last week, unnamed U.S. government officials said it was the capture of Khan that provided the information that led Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge to announce a higher terror alert level . . .

The unnamed U.S. officials leaked Khan's name along with confirmation that most of the surveillance data was three or four years old, arguing that its age was irrelevant because al Qaeda planned attacks so far in advance . . .

Then on Friday, after Khan's name was revealed, government sources told CNN that counterterrorism officials had seen a drop in intercepted communications among suspected terrorists."

Read between the lines, and CNN is suggesting that the outing of Khan has led to greater caution in al-Qaeda and similar groups about using electronic communications, which may make it more difficult to monitor them.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Fighting Rages on in Iraq


AP gives a good overview.

Baghdad

On Monday morning guerrillas detonated a car bomb outside the house of Diyala provincial deputy Governor Aqil Hamid al-Adili. He escaped with light wounds, but several policemen guarding him were killed and 16 persons, some passers-by, were wounded. The capital of Diyala is the troubled city of Baquba.

On Sunday afternoon in Baghdad, the Iraqi ministry of health announced that 22 persons had been killed and 166 wounded in fighting in the capital during the previous 24 hours.

A series of huge explosions was heard in downtown Baghdad Sunday, wounding at least 8 civilians.

Guerrillas detonated a bomb on a bus in the southern district of Dora on Sunday, killing 4 persons

The New York Times reports that guerrillas hit a US military helicopter with rocket-propelled grenades, bringing it down. The crew escaped unscathed. The NYT adds, "At one point, a car was hit by what appeared to be tank fire. The vehicle caught fire, sending black smoke spiraling into the sky."

In general, al-Zaman says, calm began returning late Sunday to Sadr City, with shops opening and people circulating. Armed militiamen could still be seen in the streets, however.

Samarra

Two persons died and 2 were wounded in Samarra in fighting Saturday morning through Sunday morning.

Baqubah

Guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb on Sunday at Baqubah, killing an Iraqi National Guardsman as he tried to defuse it.

Twenty armed men attempted to rob a bank in Baqubah on Sunday, but were repelled by local police and National Guardsmen. (-al-Zaman)

Najaf

The Iraqi Ministry of Health said Sunday afternoon that the 24 hour death toll in Najaf was 21, with 128 wounded.

AFP reports

' US soldiers advanced on Najaf's Imam Ali shrine, the holiest site in Shi'ite Islam, tightening a noose around insurgent positions, while loudspeakers exhorted the militia to fight back, ordering: "Engage in jihad". '

Australian Broadcasting Corp. reports that US helicopter gunships attacked Mahdi Army positions in Najaf near the cemetery. Al-Hayat says the US also fired artillery shells at the cemetery. The newspaper also says that Mahdi Army elements were laying mines around the cemetery. Angry Iranian politicians denounced the US desecration of the cemetery, which is holy to Shiites, on Sunday.

Caretaker Prime Minister Iyad Allawi visited Najaf briefly Sunday, accompanied by his Minister of the Interior Falah al-Naqib and Minister of Defense Hazem Shaalan. All three are ex-Baathists who have advocated iron fist policies toward internal and external enemies, though Allawi tends to phrase things more diplomatically than his two ministers. Allawi said, according to wire services, "Najaf is a holy city. Unfortunately there are people who have done things against the law who are trying to hurt this city. . . We believe the gunmen should leave the holy sites quickly, lay down their weapons and return to the rule of law. " Asked what would happen if the militiamen did not leave, he replied, "They will leave, God willing." (-al-Zaman). The American-appointed governor of Najaf, Adnan al-Zurufi, accused the militiamen of constantly breaking the terms of the truce earlier reached with them. He said there was no room for negotiation or compromise.

Allawi underscored that Mahdi Army militiamen were eligible for the one-month amnesty announced Saturday for persons who had joined the insurgency, assuming they had not committed any major crime.

Sadr spokesman Abdul Hadi al-Daraji rejected the amnesty offer, saying Allawi is like the deposed dictator Saddam Hussein. (-al-Hayat).

Ghaith Abdul Ahad writes in the Guardian

' But in the main souk the scene was quite different.The wholesale food market, the size of a football pitch, had been reduced to a pile of warped metal. Everything had been incinerated, and each part of the market reeked with its own stench. The smell of burnt potatoes, figs and grapes marked the vegetables section. The cereals were still burning, giving off a faint smell of overcooked rice, and all around was an overwhelming odour of burnt plastic and the crackle of exploding Pepsi cans. Dozens of men, merchants and workers were trying to rescue what they could. From the carnage appeared a militiaman wrapped in the Iraqi flag followed by two of his comrades. The trio were trying to stop looters digging into the incinerated merchandise. '

Karbala

A demonstration of some 600 was held in downtown Karbala by all the major Shiite political parties, calling for the resignations of Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan and Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib, as well as Najaf governor Adnan al-Zurufi. They condemned the military operations being carried out in Najaf.

CNN reports the announcement that Fereydoun Jahani, an Iranian diplomat based in Baghdad who had been visiting Karbala, was kidnapped in that city four days ago by something called "The Islamic Army of Iraq." They have not made any demands as yet.

Iran in response issued a travel warning cautioning its nationals against visiting Iraq.

Hilla

Police foiled a car bombing that had targeted the central security building downtown.

Nasiriyah

8 persons were killed and 18 wounded in fighting from Saturday afternoon through Sunday afternoon.

Amarah

The Mahdi Army fought with police in Amarah, according to AP, from Saturday evening into Sunday at dawn. The fighting left one policeman dead and four wounded. AP says, "Sheikh Majid al-Shami, a leader of one of al-Sadr's militia in the town, said two of his fighters were killed and eight wounded."

Qurnah

In the far southern city of Qurnah, 235 miles southeast of Baghdad, Mahdi Army militiamen attacked a Danish patrol. Danish troops returned fire, killing two guerrillas and injuring 7. There are nearly 500 Danish troops in Iraq as part of the US coalition.

Kirkuk

An explosion in Kirkuk killed a child and wounded 6 persons. Kirkuk police came upon the body of a renowned Kirkuk merchant.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Chalabi Arrest Warrants

A three-judge panel on Sunday issued a warrant for the arrests of Ahmad Chalabi and his nephew Salem Chalabi. Ahmad Chalabi was in Iran as part of an Iraqi trade mission at the time of the announcement, and says he will come back to contest the charges. The timing is suspicious, however, and some might think the Allawi government hoped Chalabi would remain in Iran, in exile. He was charged with counterfeiting old Iraqi dinars (why not counterfeit new dinars if you were going to counterfeit?) and money-laundering. His nephew Salem, who had headed the tribunal in charge of trying Saddam Hussein, has been charged with murder.

The Chalabis are corrupt con men whose lies helped embroil the US in the Iraq quagmire, and the charges are not implausible. But Ahmad Chalabi is also a powerful rival to his distant cousin, Iyad Allawi. Allawi favors rehabilitating the ex-Baathists. Chalabi favors purging them. Allawi deeply distrusts Iran. Chalabi has a strong Iranian connection. Allawi wants to crack down on the militias of the religious Shiite parties. Chalabi has increasingly allied himself with the religious Shiite leadership, despite being a secularist himself.

Iyad Allawi's Iraqi National Accord is not much of a political party, and mainly groups ex-Baath officers who broke with Saddam and decided to try to overthrow him. Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress groups several important expatriate Iraqi political factions. Although Chalabi himself was never popular on the Iraqi street, he has proven himself as a skilfull political broker and might well have found a way to get into parliament and become influential in the forthcoming elections. He manages to have good relations with the Kurds, Sistani, Muqtada al-Sadr, and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim all at once. On the other hand, the Sunni Arabs blame him for his attempts to exclude ex-Baathists from civil and political society.

The arrest warrants may be justified. But their timing, just as Allawi's government, in alliance with the Americans, was attempting to crush the Sadr movement, another rival to Allawi, is unfortunate.

As if all that were not bad enough, the Allawi government chose Sunday to announce that it was re-instituting the death penalty. This move drew condemnations from international human rights organizations. It was not good news for Salem Chalabi.

A few days ago, The Scotsman laid out the case against Salem Chalabi:

" Mr Chalabi, whose uncle is former Governing Council member Ahmad Chalabi, is accused of attempting to intimidate Haitham Fadhil, a finance ministry official who was investigating the Chalabi family’s real estate holdings when he was killed in May. "

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

CNN Transcripts on Khan Case

From CNN Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, Sunday August 8:

' BLITZER: Let's talk about some of the people who have been picked up, mostly in Pakistan, over the last few weeks. In mid-July, Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan. There is some suggestion that by releasing his identity here in the United States, you compromised a Pakistani intelligence sting operation, because he was effectively being used by the Pakistanis to try to find other al Qaeda operatives. Is that true?

RICE: Well, I don't know what might have been going on in Pakistan. I will say this, that we did not, of course, publicly disclose his name. One of them...

BLITZER: He was disclosed in Washington on background.

RICE: On background. And the problem is that when you're trying to strike a balance between giving enough information to the public so that they know that you're dealing with a specific, credible, different kind of threat than you've dealt with in the past, you're always weighing that against kind of operational considerations. We've tried to strike a balance. We think for the most part, we've struck a balance, but it's indeed a very difficult balance to strike.

BLITZER: Had he been flipped, in the vernacular, was he cooperating with Pakistani intelligence after he was arrested?

RICE: I don't know the answer to that question, as to whether or not he was cooperating with them. '

And then the later exchange with Schumer:

' BLITZER: Well, in this particular case, Senator Schumer, there's been some suggestion that the administration was too open in releasing the name of one of the arrested al Qaeda suspects, Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan (ph), because supposedly he was cooperating with the Pakistani government and, by releasing his name, that ended that sting operation...

SCHUMER: Yes.

BLITZER: ... if that was, in fact, what was going on.

SCHUMER: I am troubled by that. Obviously you want openness about danger, but not anything that would jeopardize security.

And the Pakistani interior minister, Faisal Hayat, as well as the British home secretary, David Blunkett, have expressed displeasure in fairly severe terms that Khan's name was released, because they were trying to track down other contacts of his.

And I've actually sent a letter today to Frances Townsend, the president's national security advisor, asking for an explanation here.

You read so much in the newspaper that seems to be contemporaneous with what's happening, and sometimes you scratch your head and wonder, are we giving away information that might compromise our ability to get the terrorists?

Hayat, the Pakistani interior minister, actually said maybe if Khan's name hadn't been released it might have resulted in getting bin Laden himself.

BLITZER: I did speak earlier with Dr. Condolleeza Rice, Senator Allen. She confirmed that on background, not publicly, but off the record, without mentioning any names, they did release the name of this Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, but she didn't know if, in fact, the Pakistanis had been using him as some sort of sting operation. Are you as concerned as Senator Schumer is that the release of his name potentially could have compromised an ongoing effort to round up additional al Qaeda operatives?

SEN. GEORGE ALLEN (R), VIRGINIA: Well, from what I can glean from all of this, they actually were able to get a lot of information to get the different addresses, the methods by which they were communicating over the Internet, and undoubtedly was a very productive and useful sting operation. It was positive, it was good. You're glad to hear we're infiltrating in that regard...

BLITZER: But if the information comes out too quickly, it could up-end a bigger potential round-up of suspects?

ALLEN: They get into a bind. And Senator Schumer's remarks were right. People -- I always like to know. People want to know, all right, what's the information? Why are we shutting down this road, or why is there concerns? You always want to know the evidence.

In this situation, in my view, they should have kept their mouth shut and just said, "We have information, trust us," and I think that would have been good enough for me and, I would hope, for also others who say, gosh, we want to get more openness.

'
For "cont'd" postings, click here.