5 US Troops Killed, 18 Wounded

I take today's New York Times/ AP report on Iraq as a very bad sign.

For one thing, it says

"On Monday, the military reported five new U.S. deaths: Two American soldiers from Task Force Baghdad were killed and three wounded in a roadside bomb explosion in northwestern Baghdad. One American soldier died and two were injured in a vehicle accident 30 miles northwest of the town of Kut in eastern Iraq, the military said. In addition, two U.S. Marines were killed in a weekend bombing south of the capital. The military also reported 13 Marines were wounded Monday in a mortar attack south of Baghdad."

That is a large one-day toll. 16 injured from direct guerrilla attack, another two in a vehicle accident that may or may not have been produced by the war. And 5 deaths, though two of those were from the weekend, and one from a vehicle collision. It doesn't look like things are miraculously settling down in the aftermath of Fallujah.

Indeed, November was the second-deadliest month for US troops since the invasion itself. That isn't the kind of trend line you would like to see for a successful venture.

Then the rest of the article talks about how inadequate has been the performance of the Iraqi police and national guards, who face intimidation, threats, and even murder at the hands of the guerrillas.

Guerrillas used a car bomb to kill 7 or 8 national guards in Baghdadi, a small town west of the capital.


Worse and worse.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

The Fallujah Report and the Liberal/Conservative Divide

The "Fallujah Report" prepared by the Marines concerning their enemies in the most recent big campaign is now up on the Web in HTML rather than powerpoint, and so easier to download. One thing that leaped out at me was the small number of foreign fighters it reports. The guerrillas in the city were mostly Iraqi.

I was provoked to the following observations by a journalist's question.

The big divide between liberals and conservatives in regard to Fallujah is that most liberals do not believe that force can be used to solve problems. They may believe that force is sometimes necessary. But they think it most often just causes new problems. They tend to see the world as complex, not in black and white terms, so that an unalloyed "bad guy" is rare (Bin Laden managed to make himself an exception). Liberals also see military force in the context of the whole society, so that they worry about what happens to children and grandmothers when it is deployed. It is liberals who remember that the Vietnam war killed 2 million Vietnamese peasants. And, they find US military deaths unacceptable.

So from a liberal point of view, Fallujah was terrible. It involved displacing hundreds of thousands of people, subjecting civilians to bombardment and crossfire, and resulted in over 2000 deaths, including over 50 US troops. The icon of Fallujah for the liberals was the little boy with the shard of grenade shrapnel lodged near his liver, or the old woman bewailing her dead relatives.

Conservatives do believe that force can be used to solve problems. They think in terms of good guys and bad guys, and it seems obvious to them that if you kill the bad guys, then you have solved the problem. Getting at the bad guys may be disruptive to civilian populations, and may cause some collateral damage, and may incur some troop casualties, and all that is bad, but it is necessary and worth it. You can't make omelettes without breaking eggs.

Many bloggers are complaining from a liberal point of view about the downsides of the use of force. They are completely uninterested in the activities of the Baathist and radical Sunni guerrillas holed up in Fallujah. They are uninterested in whether these guerrillas terrorized the local population. All they can see is the vast destruction caused by the US assault, and the innocent lives damaged. From their point of view, the whole operation against the city is a form of collective punishment.

The US military powerpoint slides are classical conservatism. They identify the bad guys, who are the problem. They lay out their crimes. And they document the way the good guys went in to kill or capture them and so solve the problem.

The US military seems strangely unaware of the realities of insurgencies. It seems to think there are a limited number of "bad guys," who can all be killed or captured. The possibility that virtually all able-bodied men in Fallujah supported the insurgency, and that many are weekend warriors, does not seem to occur to them. In fact, as Mao noted, guerrillas swim in a sea of supportive civilians. The US military slides suggest that now that the bad guys have been taken care of, the civilians can be won over. That this outcome is highly unlikely does not seem to occur to them.

The thing that strikes me about the military powerpoint slides is that they don't make the argument to the general public. Because they just assume the conservative view of the use of military force, they concentrate on the crimes of the guerrillas but do not successfully defend the need to deal with them by assaulting the whole city.

Whatever the military rights or wrongs, the political judgment on the Fallujah campaign is easy. It was supposed to make holding elections possible in the Sunni Arab heartland. Instead, it has certainly further alienated the Sunni Arabs and made it more likely that they will boycott the elections en masse. If the Sunni Arabs remain angry and sullen in this way, Fallujah will have been a political failure.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Kurdish Nationalism

Kurdish writer Sabah Salih has an interesting piece on the way the image of the Kurds has changed among European leftists from that of victim to that of collaborator with American imperialism. He suggests that European sympathy for Kurdish nationalism has correspondingly declined.

He says that I oppose the creation of a Kurdistan and advocate keeping the current 18 provinces, which is a position that obviously angers him deeply.

Actually, I don't feel so strongly about the issue to deserve such a passionate response, and I'm not sure where I wrote something that Dr. Salih took to be so dogmatic.

It is true that I think multi-ethnic states with large numbers of provinces are more likely to remain stable than those with small numbers of provinces. A five-province state where each province is organized by a different ethnic group is open to being torn apart by subnationalist feeling. So for a stable Iraq, I suspect the 18 provinces are a better solution.

The old pre 1971 Pakistan is a case in point-- East Bengal seceded to form Bangladesh. And India faced a separatist movement among the Sikhs of its east Punjab.

Plus, the creation of a Kurdistan province would involve a good deal of ethnic cleansing. The Turkmen and Chaldeans won't live under it, and would flee. Substantial turmoil could wrack Kirkuk. Ethnic hatreds can rise suddenly and spin out of control, as we saw in Serbia and Bosnia.

All that said, it is not as if I have a big stake in the issue. If the Iraqi parliament can be elected, and if it creates a Kurdistan and perhaps some other large provinces for Sunni Arabs and Shiites, so that the country had 5 or 6, it would be fine with me. (This plan was put forward by Muwaffaq al-Rubaie). I suspect the Turkmen will demand an Iraqi Turkmenistan, as well, for their 700,000 or so members. And maybe, like post-1971 Pakistan, an Iraq with 5 or 6 ethnic provinces could hold together. But it could also collapse, as Lebanon did, or as Nigeria did in the late 1960s.

I was at a Kurdish panel in San Francisco at the Middle East Studies Association, and came away really frightened. The attitudes of extreme grievance and nationalist demands typical of the Salih piece were much in evidence in the statements of participants. One lady seemed to me to be looking for big revenge on the Arabs for Halabja. There was absolute rage in the room. Some of it was coming from non-Kurdish ethnic groups who share the Iraqi north with them.

Lakhdar Brahimi's wise warning of last winter should be heeded. No one starts out to create a civil war; countries fall into them through inattention to key flashpoints. The Iraqi Kurds will not be well served by a large-scale outbreak of communal violence.

As for the subtext here, which is that many expatriate Iraqi Kurds want an independent country of Kurdistan, I think that attempting to create such a thing will provoke big bloodbaths and heavy intervention by Turkey and Iran.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Fresh Wave of Violence in Iraq
5 US troops Killed

The relentless guerrilla war continued apace in Iraq on Sunday. AFP reported that guerrillas killed two Marines in clashes on Sunday. Also, in Anbar province, guerrillas killed three US servicemen on Sunday, and two had died there on Friday. A bomb exploded on the road to the airport. Al-Zaman says that the US campaign in Babil province faces difficulties. This is a broad area in which a million persons live, and had been a prime recruiting ground for Saddam’s Republican Guards. At least a hundred very wealthy families are supporting the guerrilla war there.

The interim Iraqi National Council added its voice on Sunday to the chorus demanding that elections be held on January 30. One of four deputy speakers, Jawad Maliki, a Shiite activist, said that the Temporary Administrative Law does not allow any space for postponing the elections, and it must govern the process. He also said that recent security developments were a reason for optimism. (-al-Hayat). The unrealistic hopes that the Shiite parties are placing in operations like Fallujah and Babil shines through in his words, which took me aback. I had listened to angry Sunni Iraqis calling into al-Jazeerah all afternoon to complain bitterly about "our brethren, the Shiites" and about the American military actions in the Sunni Arab areas.

For those who weren't reading the site over the weekend, I laid out the reasons for which commentators like Charles Krauthammer are wrong, and the elections are heading for a potential train wreck if the Sunni Arabs boycott them. (Click on the link or just scroll down).


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Henry Siegman in the New York Review of Books

Amid the unwarranted outbreak of optimism about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the wake of Yasser Arafat's death, Henry Siegman's essay in the New York Review of Books on Ariel Sharon's true plans comes as a breath of fresh air.

Sharon is giving lip service to things like the road map and the eventual goal of a Palestinian state, but his real goal is to permanently forestall such a state. The end game for him is the division of the West Bank Palestinians into three Bantustans completely surrounded by Israeli forces or settlements, and the maintainance of Gaza as a permanent slum that advertises Palestinians as wretched and dangerous. Sharon is dedicated to annexing probably 45% of the West Bank, which would not leave enough territory for a viable Palestinian state, anyway.

The horrible implications for the state of Israel is its descent into a permanent Apartheid state. If the Palestinians don't have a state, they will remain stateless. The rump "Palestinian Authority" will not be able to keep internal order any better in the future than it has recently. The Israeli army will inevitably keep being drawn into re-occupying Palestinians.

A temporary and de facto Apartheid state, such as the Likud Party is now running, is bad enough. But a permanent one will spell the end of Israel in the long term. No European country is going to want to continue to cooperate with it under those circumstances, nor most countries in the global south. Most Israelis themselves do not want to keep another people in the slave-like condition of statelessness, or to interact with them only through brutal military raids. And, an ever-growing Palestinian population in Gaza and the West Bank without any nationality of their own may eventually successfully claim Israeli identity (opinion polling shows about a third of them are already open to this possibility).

The Palestinian uprising has had a profound impact on Israel. Retention of immigrants is down to only 50%, a historic low. Over a million Israelis are below the poverty line. If Russia's economy begins improving substantially, substantial back-migration of many of the Soviet immigrants (about half of them not actually Jews) could take place. Despite Ariel Sharon's dreams of ingathering the French Jews, that seems a highly unlikely scenario.

So, when we hear that Sharon is willing to meet with the new Palestinian leader, Mahmud Abbas, we have to ask, "for what purpose?" Most likely, it is to take his measure and see if he capable of policing the Bantustans for the Likud.

For a troubling discussion of the kind of self-examination being forced on Israelis by Sharon's tactics, see The Guardian on Monday. It notes that the image of an Israeli checkpoint guard making a Palestinian play the violin has repulsed the Israeli public in a way that few other recent events have.

Omar Barghouti makes a shrewd suggestion as to why this image was so objectionable-- it parallels the scene in the film, The Pianist, where German soldiers forced Jewish musicians to play for them.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Shock of the Week: Liberals in Liberal Arts

George Will's column this week is unusually unreflective. I don't often agree with Will, but he is usually a bright and well-informed columnist on the Reaganaut Right. He knows enough to castigate Justice Scalia for saying that Darwinian evolution is "only a theory" (a theory is a robust explanation well grounded in the evidence); and he knows that the Iraq war has been a disaster from beginning to end.

So it is surprising to see him parroting the ridiculous and pernicious line about major universities having few political conservatives in them.

There are all sorts of social-science problems with this allegation. First, what is the population that is being studied? Is it all tenure-track teachers in all universities in all schools and departments? Are we including two-year colleges? Four-year ones? Are we including Economics Departments, Business Schools, Medical Schools, Engineering schools?

If that were the pool, then academics probably mirror the general American society pretty closely. There are about 1.1 million post-secondary teachers in the United States. A lot of the ones in the Red States are conservatives, and a lot of the ones in the engineering schools everywhere are. So it simply is not true that "universities" are bastions of the political left. Moreover, there are almost no leftists in any major economics department in the United States, in contrast to Europe.

If what is being alleged is that the professors of History, English, Sociology, Anthropology, etc. at the top 25 universities in the US are disproportionately liberals, then that also raises questions. What is a "liberal?" If he means they vote Democrat, then so did, until recently, Zell Miller. And, what does it even mean to be a "liberal" in your study of Milton or of the French Revolution?

Then comes the question of "why"? If that is the question, it should be studied. The rightwing "think tanks" have not studied the question, and have only polemicized about these poorly constructed "studies." (These are the same people who assured us that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and was 2-5 years from having a nuclear bomb.) In this instance, George Will jumps to conclusions about why.

I have been in a major history department for 20 years, and have served on innumerable search committees, in my own department and in other units on campus. I have never, ever, even once, heard any search committee member broach the political party affiliation of a candidate for a position, and there has never been any way to even know such a thing from the materials submitted. Hiring is done at the grass roots level in academic departments. The department appoints a search committee. The committee solicits manuscripts, reads widely, and decides on 10. Then it narrows those to 2-3 for a campus visit. Those finalists come and give a talk. If they seem less coherent or less able to engage with hard questions than their writing had suggested, then they are dropped. The question is always, "is this an interesting mind?" "Is this person's methodology sound?" "Has this person mastered the relevant literature (i.e. has read the other articles and books on the subject)?" The manuscripts are read by the search committee, by the Department executive committee, by the faculty at large, by the School's executive committee and deans, by the divisional committee (e.g. social sciences or humanities).

There would be no way to stack this process politically. The school executive committee is elected at large from all school departments; ours often has economists or biologists on it. The divisional committee often has political scientists. A substandard historian being hired only because he was a leftist would never get through this gauntlet. Each search committee is ad hoc, staffed according to field, and each differs in composition from the others. All the other committees are constantly rotating personnel, by election. There is no possibility of a centralized cabal that could appoint people of only one political coloration. In fact, David Horowitz wants to find a way to use state legislatures and congress to corrupt this grassroots and professional process by politicizing it and focusing on political outcome rather than academic achievement.

So if it were true that we don't have many conservatives in the department, which I could not verify because it is a department of over 70 persons and I don't know the politics of most of them, then how could that be explained?

That certain professions at certain points in time, skew politically, is demonstrable. For instance, back in the Eisenhower era, the US officer corps was about evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. Now, only 10 percent of US officers identify themselves as Democrats (a really worrying development). Yet the salaries of the officer corps is probably disproportionately provided by the blue states. Why should this have happened to the officer corps? Should Congress legislate political balance in the upper ranks of the US armed forces?

In immigration studies, there are "push" and "pull" factors. Some people emigrate because of war or poor economies. Some people are perfectly well off but emigrate for even greater opportunities. The former is a push factor. The latter is a pull factor.

The most logical explanation for any political bias in some parts of the professoriate in my view is that the sort of persons with the skills to be in a major academic liberal arts department could also be successful in business, lobbying, law, advertising and other well-paying professions. And it is the corporate world and its lobbying appendages that have the marked bias, to the Right. Someone who has academic skills but is a Republican would just have enormous opportunities and could easily become a multi-millionnaire. In contrast, academics on the Left would not be welcome in corporate boardrooms or at a think tank funded by Richard Mellon Scaife, and wouldn't be comfortable in such a position. (All think tanks hire explicitly by ideology, and 17 of the 19 most influential ones in Washington are deliberately staffed by conservatives, but that doesn't bother Will.)

Exhibit A is William J. Bennet. Bennett has a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Texas. If he had been a man of the left, he would be teaching that subject at some small liberal arts college for $70,000 a year. Because he was on the Right, he had an entree to the Reagan administration, and rose to become Secretary of Education and then drug czar.

The vast opportunities open to an intellectual on the Right can be seen in Bennett's career. It is often forgotten that he deserted public service as drug czar after only about a year, leaving all of his commitments unfulfilled. He was able to land at Joe Coors's and Richard Mellon Scaife's so-called American Heritage Foundation. Bennett's opportunities were so many and so lucrative that the hard work of public service, and the ethics rules requiring careful reporting of income, seemed increasingly unappealing. The opportunities are so enormous, if one is willing to oppose affirmative action and support increasing inequality of wealth and bash unions, that it is even hard to keep such persons in high-profile, remunerative public service positions on the Right. They are sucked out of them by the corporate vacuum cleaner.

The next time we meet Bennett, he has somehow made so much money that he can drop $6 million in Las Vegas casinos in a single year (he says he won as much as he lost, which, if true, means he probably cheats). This level of gambling makes him a "whale" in casino terms, given all sorts of perquisites. That is a very different life than teaching in a small liberal arts college, having spent one's youth making in the $20,000s and $30,000s a year (that would have been true of Bennett's generation of academics). And the price of admission to all those riches? Say things like that "homosexuals" have an average lifespan of 42 years, or public education should be privatized, and blame poor people for being poor because they are lazy and immoral and gamble too much.

So, Mr. Will, it is the "pull" factor that explains your conundrum. Liberal academics aren't viciously excluding conservative intellectuals who apply to teach hundreds of students a week for $45,000 a year (nowaday's entry-level salary at a good liberal arts college), after they paid $100,000 for a Ph.D. in English literature from a top-rate university and spent 8 or 9 years beyond the BA toiling away as graduate students on tiny stipends. Conservative intellectuals don't have to put up with that kind of thing (that is how they think of the privilege of teaching). They have other opportunities. They can be whales, and can pontificate on morality to the great unwashed.

As for Will's argument that academia "has marginalized itself, partly by political shrillness and silliness that have something to do with the parochialism produced by what George Orwell called "smelly little orthodoxies." Many campuses are intellectual versions of one-party nations -- except such nations usually have the merit, such as it is, of candor about their ideological monopolies. " -- it is another instance of blaming the victim.

Academia has not marginalized itself. It has been marginalized. Perfectly reasonable beliefs such as that workers should have a right to explore unionizing without fear of being fired have been redefined by Joe Coors and Richard Mellon Scaife as "out of the mainstream." Thinking that it was a bad idea to invade Iraq (as I said repeatedly in 2002 and early in 2003, even as I admitted Saddam's atrocities) was defined as out of the mainstream and unpatriotic. Corporate media bring in a parade of so-called "experts" (often lacking credentials and saying ridiculous things) from "think tanks," in Washington and New York instead of letting academics speak. (There are some exceptions, obviously, but I am talking about over-all numbers). Wouldn't you like to hear about Ayman al-Zawahiri from someone who actually had read him in Arabic? The universities have such experts. The think tanks mostly just have smelly little orthodoxies of the Right.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Elections in Iraq will be Held on Schedule, But with What Result?
Or, how Khatami and Krauthammer are Both Wrong

At least 12 persons died violently in the guerrilla war on Saturday in Iraq. There was a major battle over control of police stations in Khalis, and Marines found more bodies in Mosul. The US military said that guerrillas had launched a major campaign of intimidation aimed at frightening Sunni Arabs into boycotting the forthcoming elections.

Seventeen parties, mostly small Sunni Arab groupings along with the two major Kurdish parties, made a plea Saturday that elections be postponed. Some major Sunni Arab groups, such as the Association of Muslim Scholars, had already called for a Sunni Arab boycott.

Al-Jazeera interviewed Sunni cleric Abdul Salam al-Kubaisi on Saturday. He said that the Allawi government had not been elected and that Sunnis would not participate in illegitimate elections. The al-Jazeera anchor, a canny woman, asked al-Kubaisi how a legitimate government could be established without elections. Al-Kubaisi angrily retorted that there can be no legitimate elections under the shadow of foreign occupation. (This exchange belies the reputation in the US of al-Jazeera as the Fox Cable News of the Arab world. Would a Fox anchor have been that aggressive with, e.g., Jerry Falwell?)

Anyway, the plea for a postponement was roundly rejected on Saturday by all the most important actors. George W. Bush, US Ambassador to Baghdad John Negroponte, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, Election Commissioner Abdul Hussein Hendawi, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and his 3 colleagues in Najaf, and 43 major political parties, all voiced a resounding "No!" The first 3 would probably have been enough.

Even Iran's President Mohammad Khatami, who was meeting with Iraqi Vice President Ibrahim Jaafari, came out for holding the elections "as soon as possible." Jaafari is leader of the Shiite Dawa Party, the most popular in Iraq. Khatami portrayed the issue as one of restoring security, suggesting that an elected government would have a better chance of calming the country. He said Iran had more of a stake in a stable Iraq than anyone else.

Khatami would probably have been better advised to keep his mouth shut. The struggle over postponing elections has already taken on a strong tinge of Sunni-Shiite struggle, especially since the Kurdish parties appear to have given at least lukewarm support to the plea of the Sunni Arabs for a delay (most Kurds are Sunnis; some Kurdish officials hedged their bets). Most of the major Iraqi players insisting on the election being held on time are Shiites, whether Arabs or Turkmen. To have Iraq's Shiite neighbor also press for elections to be held makes it look as though the Shiites are ganging up on the Sunnis. That perception contributes to the guerrilla war in the first place.

Charles Krauthammer, after 18 months of blithe optimism on Iraq, has now suddenly decided that the country is embroiled in a Civil War and that the forthcoming elections will resemble those of 1864 in the United States, when the Confederate states did not vote for Lincoln.

As usual, Krauthammer is wrong. Historical analogies are always tricky, but this one is simply inaccurate. The problem is that Iraqis are not electing a president, even a war president. They are in effect electing a constitutional assembly. The main business of the new parliament is to craft a permanent constitution.

So, the analogy would be to 1789. What would the new American Republic's chances have been if the Southern states had not been able to send delegates to the constitutional convention, and so had been excluded from having an input into it? All sorts of compromises had to be hammered out in 1789, concerning southern slavery and how to count a slave for census purposes, etc. If the South hadn't been able to show up, the northern states would simply have ignored those issues, and the secession of those states might have come 70 years early. Would the North have been able to resist it so successfully at that point?

Likewise, Sunni Arabs have a big stake in the permanent constitution. Will it give Kirkuk and its oil to the Kurds, depriving Arabs of any share in those revenues? Will it ensconce Shiite law as the law of the land? Will it keep a unicameral parliament, in which Shiites would have a permanent majority, or will it create an upper chamber where Sunnis might be better represented, on the model of the US senate? If all those issues go against the Sunnis because they aren't there to argue their positions, it would set Iraq up for guerrilla war into the foreseeable future.

And that is why Khatami's hopes that an elected government will be more stable are unrealistic. It isn't that the government is elected that lends stability, but rather widespread acceptance of the government's legitimacy. The Sunnis are unlikely to grant that if they end up being woefully underrepresented. And then you will just have to reconquer Fallujah again next year. How long before you are just conquering rubble and snipers?

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat conducted a random poll of 100 Iraqis on Saturday, in person or by telephone, and found that about 60% wanted the elections to go forward, 35% wanted a postponement, and 6% refused to answer. It is not clear if "random" means "scientifically weighted." If they just contacted 100 random persons, their poll probably isn't worth much. If they tried to vary locale, social class, ethnicity and sex according to proportion in the population, then it would be more telling. They don't say if the respondents were from different cities, e.g., or all in Baghdad.

Quentin Langley is wrong for much the same reasons that Krauthammer is. He gives 10 reasons for which he thinks the Iraq elections will be a "success." Most of his points are made in apparent ignorance of the most basic facts about contemporary Iraq.

Langley's ten reasons and my response:

"10. Despite the overwhelming media focus on trouble spots, these are all in the so-called Sunni Triangle, where just 20 percent of the population live."

This allegation is simply incorrect. First of all, there is no "Sunni triangle." The Sunni Arab heartland is more like a rectangle, and it is vast, encompassing much of the capital, Baghdad. Even if it were the only problem, it wouldn't be a small one. In fact, "trouble spots," if by that is meant things like carbombings, grenade and mortar attacks on coalition troops and Iraqi national guards, and machine gun fire, are all over the country. Tel Afar, Kirkuk, Hilla, Amarah, Majar al-Kabir, Samawah, Sadr City, etc., etc., routinely see "trouble spots." While most of the guerrillas are Sunni Arabs, they have demonstrated an ability to strike all over the country. And, some of the problems come from other groups, whether Shiite Turkmen in the north or disgruntled Shiite Mahdi Army militiamen in the south.

If hundreds of people show up to a school to vote in Hilla and suddenly take mortar fire, with dozens killed, then will that really have no effect on turnout? What if such incidents occur all over the country? Maybe voters will be brave and refuse to be dissuaded from voting. Maybe they won't. To pretend the problem does not exist or is limited to only a small part of the country, however, is to live in a fantasy-land.

"9. There are as many people in the Kurdish regions in the north, as there are in the Sunni Triangle. The Kurdish regions have had successful multi-party democracies for 12 years."

This datum does not guarantee a successful outcome to the elections. The two major Kurdish parties have now developed cold feet about them because of fear of Shiite dominance. Moreover, the maximalist demands of the Kurds, for a consolidated Kurdish superprovince, for Kirkuk, for petroleum revenues to remain local, for permanent exclusion of Federal troops from their soil, are more likely to cause trouble themselves than to offset the troublesome Sunni Arabs.

"8. The majority Shias (60 percent of the population) are keen to participate. Spiritual leaders, including Ayatollah Sistani, have urged people to vote and even calling it a religious duty. Under this doctrine, people who don't vote can go to hell."

This point is true, but does not guarantee successful elections. In fact, if Shiite turnout is very big and Sunni Arab turnout low, it will create a tyranny of the Shiite majority, a special problem when parliament turns to constitution-making.

"7. The electoral system chosen (national lists) is not particularly vulnerable to intimidation. Votes are counted locally but the totals are calculated nationally, and seats in parliament are awarded in proportion to votes. A gang that intimidates voters locally will have almost no impact on the national vote."

What an absurd thing to say. By the author's own admission, intimidation is likely to be greater in the Sunni Arab heartland than in the Shiite south or Kurdish north. Therefore, the differential rate of intimidation could keep Sunni Arabs away from the polls in greater numbers than the other major ethnic groups, producing that tyranny of the Shiite majority of which I warned.

"6. A boycott by Sunnis would be counterproductive. In the U.S., representation is allocated to each state according to population. Under national lists, the weight of any region or strand of opinion is determined by turnout. If Sunnis stay at home, Sunni candidates don't get elected."

In history, peoples have done many things that are unproductive. The Shiites of Bahrain boycotted the first free elections in that country recently, allowing Sunni fundamentalists to dominate parliament in a country with a national Shiite majority. This point assumes that the author's idea of what is rational is shared by the people he is analyzing, the classic "mirror" problem.

"5. The coalition has trained a new Iraqi army, which is taking on more and more of the security role."

Among the more ridiculous claims this author has made. The "new Iraqi army" was largely useless in Fallujah, except for a handful of the braver Kurds and Shiites.

"4. The turnout is going to be huge. Liberal journalists will report on the day that turnout is disappointing, because they will only be counting in Baghdad. When votes come in from Kurdish and Shia areas it will prove to be even bigger than the American turnout, which itself was up by a fifth from 2000."

Big Kurdish and Shiite turnouts and a low Sunni Arab turnout would not in fact be good news.

"3. People in Iraq are fed up with war."

The tens of thousands of Iraqis determinedly fighting a guerrilla war are not fed up with war. They are prosecuting it.

"2. More and more people in Iraq have access to the Internet and other free information sources. They no longer have to trust government propaganda. Al Jazeera, and a growing network of Iraqi bloggers - most of whom regard Americans as allies - give Iraqis access to freedom of speech."

These same media are being used by the guerrillas and by the boycotting parties. Many Sunni Arabs would not know that the Association of Muslim Scholars had called for a boycott if it were not for al-Jazeera's interviews with its leaders.

"But the biggest reason the Iraqi elections will be a success is ...
1. Western liberals who claim that Arabs don't want or aren't ready for democracy are just wrong. What liberals call "Western" values are human values. Arabs want to be free and to govern themselves just as much as people in Europe and America do."

"Western liberals" for the most part haven't said any such thing. It was the British and American Right that overthrew the last freely elected, democratic government of Iran, in 1953. The French encouraged the Algerian military to cancel the election results in 1991. Democracy in the Middle East has often been sought by its peoples, and has had no bigger enemy than the rightwing parties of Europe and the United States.

A statement such as "Arabs want to be free" is anyway mere propaganda. Which Arabs? When? Under what circumstances? The millions of Shiites who support Muqtada al-Sadr don't appear to me to want to be free of puritanical restrictions or of charismatic authoritarianism. The millions of Sunni Arabs who are supporting the guerrilla war, actively or passively, don't seem to want the kind of "freedom" Langley is imposing on them. A majority of Iraqis clearly want a new, parliamentary government to succeed, but significant minorities and maybe even a plurality do not. Glib statements by Westerners about what "Arabs" want are the New Orientalism, since the Western observers put themselves in the position of ventriloquists for their pliant Arab lap puppets. We don't get to hear some of the real Arabs, like Abdul Salam al-Kubaisi, in American media. Langley gets to substitute himself for them.

The success or failure of the political process in Iraq anyway has nothing to do with yearning for democracy. It has to do with the frankly stupid policies implemented by the Bush administration in Iraq. If the whole enterprise goes bad, it won't be because the Iraqis couldn't live up to Mr. Langley's ideals. It will be because the Americans, especially the Neoconservatives, crafted a ridiculous electoral system based on that of Israel.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Supporting Nawal Saadawi

Al-Hayat on Saturday ran an attack from a Muslim fundamentalist point of view on Egyptian novelist Nawal Saadawi. She recently argued that children should all receive hyphenated last names, from both the mother's and the father's side, instead of only the last name of the father. She said that this method would allow families to acknowledge the equal contribution of each parent to the child.

The Al-Hayat article ridiculed and attacked Saadawi. It quoted Shaikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi at length on how here suggestion is contrary to Islamic law (though al-Qaradawi did not actually demonstrate this allegation, and most of his points were just the ramblings of a male chauvinist. Al-Qaradawi is an elderly, old-time Muslim Brotherhood activist now settled in Qatar. He can sometimes be unconventional, but not on issues like this.

The the article quoted Camillia Hilmi, a woman Muslim fundamentalist who is Phyllis Schlafly's Arab twin. She went on at length about how there is a wicked feminist cabal in the West that hates men and wants to exterminate them so that women can rule the world. She also accused them of tampering with the New Testament, so as to make God a woman in their text. She said that unfortunately, this feminist cabal dominated the committees of the United Nations. She then complained that Saadawi has fallen under their malevolent influence.

Saadawi has long been a target of Egyptian Muslim fundamentalists, and even made the secular government of Anwar El Sadat nervous enough to arrest her. She wrote a novel about Sadat, The Fall of the Imam. It enraged the religious right in Egypt. The Al-Azhar Seminary has recently started a campaign to have it formally banned by the Egyptian government. Please sign the letter of solidarity for Nawal Saadawi on the Web.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Things are Not What they Seem Department

On Thursday night on the David Letterman Late Night show on CBS, actress Natalie Portman announced that she was studying Arabic.

On Friday night on the LBC Arabic satellite network the main attraction was a karaoke contest that involved a fair number of old American disco songs from Gloria Estefan and Donna Summer.

More evidence that Samuel Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilizations, doesn't have the slightest idea what he is talking about.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Election Plans Roiled
Sunni Extremist Death Threats against Sistani

Hamza Hendawi of AP reports that the Shiite vote may get split. He says that Prime Minister Iyad Allawi is declining to join the mega-Shiite party list toward which Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is working. Likewise, it is not clear that Muqtada al-Sadr and his followers will join the big list, since they are dissatisfied with the offer of only 10 percent of the list's seats in parliament.

It seems to me that the Shiites needn't any longer worry too much about a split list. I can't imagine that Allawi's list is going to do all that well, since his Iraqi National Accord, consisting of ex-Baathists, isn't very popular and he is potentially a lame duck. Why would southern Shiites vote for ex-Baathists who ordered Marines into Najaf last August? Only if Allawi has enormous advantages of incumbency could his list overcome all his negatives.

President Ghazi Yawir seems to me unlikely to get many Shiite votes. Since he took Iraqi cabinet minister and Kurdish activist Nasrin Barwari as a second wife, he might pick up some Kurdish votes. (To underline the complexities of Iraq, Barwari is something of a feminist.) The Shamar tribe, which Yawir does not head but from whose chiefly family he comes, does have a small Shiite section, but it isn't big and many Iraqi tribes are religiously split like that. I can't see how Yawir can translate that fact into any significant number of Shiite votes. My guess is that most Shiites will vote as they think Sistani wants them to.

If the Sadrists run their own list, they might not do so badly, and if they mobilize poor Shiites to vote who otherwise might stay home, they might well actually increase the proportion of the national vote that goes to the Shiites.

So I now think the Shiites will manage to get their parliamentary majority. The real danger is that the Sunni Arabs will stay home, and the Shiites get 85% of the seats. If that happens, the religious Shiite parties are likely to dominate parliament, perhaps even holding 51% of seats (138 of 275).

A rear-guard Sunni Arab (and other) effort to postpone the elections grew in force on Friday, with 17 small parties now agitating for a 6-month delay. So far, however, the leading Shiite figures and parties are insisting on going ahead in January, and both Allawi and Bush seem to be committed.

It could be argued that the elections may as well be held in January, since 1) the security situation is not actually likely to be better in six months and 2) postponement might try the patience of Sistani, who insisted on early elections and can bring hundreds of thousands of protesters into the street with a single word. A Shiite agitation for elections at a time when most Sunnis want a delay could produce communal rioting.

An argument for delay is that security is so bad in the country that elections can easily be disrupted. Already, 90 out of 540 voter registration sites are closed. The guerrillas can strike at will into the heavily fortified Green Zone. On Friday they killed four British employees and wounded at least 14 with mortar fire. The kind of mortar they used has a range of many miles, so all they had to do was bring it in close enough on a flatbed truck with a cover, uncover, fire, and then disappear. The point is that if a hard target like the Green Zone (government offices, US embassy) can still be struck at will, then soft targets like hundreds of polling stations are sitting ducks. January 30 could be a bloodbath. Iraqis, aware of this, are already complaining about plans to use schools as polling places, since they don't want their children bombed.

Already, Al-Zaman reports that guerrillas in Mosul targeted voter registration offices in Mosul this week, setting at least one on fire, and directing death threats at election workers.

Of course, the other problem with holding the elections on Jan. 30 is that many Sunni Arabs are angry and sullen and are likely to boycott. There is no point in holding elections that have no legitimate outcome.

Sunni radicals are aware that the Shiite grand ayatollah, Sistani, is a key obstacle to their own dreams of a Taliban state in Iraq, and some think they know what to do about that. KarbalaNews.net reports in Arabic that Salafi (Sunni fundamentalist) websites in Saudi Arabia-- which have a direct and indirect impact on the situation in Iraq-- have issued a call for the assassination of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani of Najaf. One Salafi cleric, writing at Muntadiyat al-Qimmah, rejected all Shiite pleas for Muslim unity because, he said, Shiites are "more deserving of being killed than the Crusaders."

KarbalaNews complains that such sites present doctored "sayings" falsely attributed to the Prophet Muhammad commanding jihad against the Shiites. (The Sunni-Shiite split did not exist at the time of Muhammad, d. 632).

Aside from the report of the content of this Salafi site, which the author says has the support of Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia, this article demonstrates the great fear Iraqi Shiites have of Saudi Wahhabism, which has through the past two and a half centuries been fiercely anti-Shiite.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraq and Damned Statistics

The Red Crescent has finally been allowed into Fallujah (its earlier exclusion was probably a violation of international law). Its spokesman is saying that less than 200 civilian families appear to still be there. If this estimate is true, it suggests that by the time of the US assault, only about 5,000 persons were left in the city. At least 2000 were killed, some 1400 captured, some escaped, and a handful of civilian families remained. If Fallujah was a ghost town before the assault, that would help explain the repeated US military assertion of virtually no civilian casualties (which is still not entirely plausible). But it would also raise a question as to the effectiveness of the assault. Fallujah's population was estimated at between 250,000 and 300,000. If only 5,000 or so were left, then obviously a great many guerrilla fighters, whether full- or part-time, escaped. The few remaining civilian families suffered from lack of food, contrary to earlier assertions of US military spokespersons.

Al-Hayat plays anti-al-Jazeera on Saturday, running an article about how the Fallujans are furious at the "mujahidin" who fought the Americans using their city as a base. One Interviewee among the survivors said that if a holy warrior proffered his hand, he'd rip it to pieces with his teeth. The Fallujans complain that the radical Muslim fundamentalists established themselves in the poorest city quarters, paying exorbitant rents, even though residents pleaded with them to fight the Americans outside the city. One said that anyone who made such arguments was tagged by the militants as an American sympathizer and received death threats.

Do I detect sarcasm toward the US military in the column of Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough? They ridicule Centcom for claiming that the Fallujah operation had broken the back of the guerrilla effort and for suggesting that Fallujah was the greatest battle since the fall of Baghdad. They have also drawn up "talking points" for those wishing to defend the operation, which underline how many explosives were in Fallujah; charge that every one of the city's 77 mosques had been used as a weapons storage facility or fortress for attack; and added that "In one sector alone, a Marine unit found 91 caches and 432 IEDs. As a comparison, in October in all of Iraq, the coalition found 130 arms caches and 348 IEDs."

Since there are an estimated 250,000 tons of explosives and munitions missing from the prewar Baath stockpiles, I fear that whatever was found in Fallujah was a drop in the bucket. And, a lot of Iraqi cities must be full of such materiel. And, contrary to the "broken back" imagery, a confidential Marine report suggested that the guerrilla war would grow in intensity and breadth in the build-up to the January 30 elections.

Alas, even Fallujah itself is still a problem. Guerrillas staged a shootout on Friday that killed two marines (3 guerrillas died as well).

Not only were many Iraqis disturbed at the way the Fallujah campaign was conducted, but they were upset about the assault by Iraqi national guards and US troops on the Abu Hanifa mosque in Baghdad last Friday. Mosque preachers, both Sunni and Shiite, universally condemned the raid yesterday in the Friday sermons. Al-Zaman says that Shaikh Adnan Dulaimi, the head of the Sunni Pious Endowments Board, called on the United Nations, the Arab League and other international organizations to intervene to ensure that no further such attacks on mosques are conducted by the Allawi government or the American and coalition forces. Iraqi Muslims were especially appalled that the attack took place during Friday prayers, and resulted in 2 deaths of worshippers. The US maintains that the mosque was a center for the guerrilla war.

Daily Outrage, at The Nation's website, lists some statistics that were not in the New York Times op-ed piece on Friday. For instance, 90 of 540 voter registration stations in Iraq are closed owing to poor security. And here is the coup de grace:

Iraqi Public Opinion
** Only 33 percent of Iraqis think they're better off now than before the war, as a Gallup poll discovered.
** Just 36 percent believe the interim government shares their values.
** 94 percent say Baghdad is more dangerous than it was before the war.
** 66.6 believe the US occupation could start a civil war.
** 80 percent want the US to leave directly after the January elections.

[Note added 11/28/04. I got a long email message disputing these polling numbers, some of which seem drawn from IRI rather than from Gallup (as advertised), and which, my correspondent argued, cherry-picked the results in an unfair way. I don't have time to double-check all this, so note here: caveat emptor.]

The London Times reports that nearly 700 persons die under suspicious circumstances (most of them from bullet wounds) every month in Baghdad. These are not, at least mainly, victims of the guerrilla war. They are mostly victims of crime or revenge. I figure that as 8400 murders a year in a city of 5 million, or 168 per 100,000 per annum. The highest murder rate in the US for 2003 was 45.8 per 100,000, in Washington, DC, with Detroit coming in second. That is, Baghdad is nearly four times as dangerous as the most dangerous American cities, more than a year and a half after the fall of Saddam. The US has by its stupid mistakes deprived Baghdad's residents of the basic right to personal security. It is true that Saddam's secret police used to dump bodies at the morgue, of course. But all the polls show that Baghdadis feel themselves substantially worse off in personal security now, and no wonder.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Guest Editorial: Levine: "Iraq's Lose-Lose Scenario"

Note: This version of the text is slightly revised from the one posted earlier on Friday November 26.

Iraq's Lose-Lose Scenario

By Mark LeVine

Dept. of History, UC Irvine, author of Why They Don’t Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the ‘Axis of Evil’.

Since November 2 I have often heard it said that in an environment where the majority of Americans are divided, cynical and distrustful of their fellow citizens and government, it was natural for them to choose a strong, conservatively religious President with a narrow political vision to lead them. If true, this dynamic does not augur well for the Iraq that will emerge after January 30.

Underlying the decision to confirm Iraqi elections for the end of January are two important calculations: first, that the US military can manage the ongoing violence well enough to permit elections to take place across broad swaths of the country; second, that they will produce an outcome favorable both to the Bush and Allawi Administrations. Only time will tell if such optimism is warranted; the plea issued today by seventeen Iraqi parties to delay elections because of the "threats facing national unity" and "strong political polarization because of sectarian roots" do not augur well for a positive outcome. But even if they are held on or close to schedule, it is almost certain is that the elections will symbolize a frustration rather than fulfillment of the freedom, democracy and prosperity the US and its Coalition allies pledged to bring to Iraq twenty some months ago.

In this context, the ostensible "victory" of US forces in Falluja marks a strategic turning point for the United States; not because it has come close to enabling truly democratic elections by destroying the insurgency, but rather because it revealed a deepening erosion of solidarity between Shi‘i and Sunni Iraqis that is the United States’ only hope for maintaining a long-term presence in the country. Such lack of solidarity is in contrast to the mutual aid and support displayed during the Falluja and Najaf invasions of last spring. Had it been translated into coordinated Sunni-Shi‘i resistance--Sadr City exploding along with Falluja-- the occupation would have quickly become untenable.

Indeed, as the human, moral and material toll of the occupation skyrocketed, most Arab Iraqis, Shi‘a and Sunnis alike, have come to abhor the American presence along with an Allawi government viewed as little more than an American puppet. We don’t have to look far to figure out why they: 100,000 deaths and counting, untold billions of dollars of property and infrastructure damage, a barely-functioning health system, massive unemployment, and official corruption that is so pervasive that one of Prime Minister Allawi's senior advisors described the Government to me as “Saddam with new faces”--all are better recruiting tools for an insurgency than a dozen bin Laden and Zarqawi videos.

In this context sustained Iraqi Arab unity would have meant the defeat of the occupation and an ignoble American retreat from Iraq. But its opposite, intercommunal hostility and even violence, will just as surely mean the defeat of democracy, peace and prosperity. This is the stark choice facing Iraq in the coming weeks, and the US management of the occupation has encouraged both trends since March, 2003: by creating both a weak state open to US influence and a weakened society too torn by internal strife to unite against the occupation.

There are many reasons why the solidarity between Sunnis and Shi‘a, which has historically been tenuous, dissipated in the last six months. To begin with, while leaders of the two communities have exerted great efforts to promoting sectarian harmony (made easier by the fact that so many Iraqi families are a mix of both sects, and even Kurds as well), numerous interviews I conducted while in Iraq earlier this year, seconded by the often insulting and sometimes incendiary language of sectarian media, reveal significant suspicion and even hostility between the two groups after the toppling of the Hussein regime. This was heightened by acts of extreme violence, including suicide bombings that killed more than 150 Shi‘a in Karbala and Baghdad, and the murders of many religious figures on both sides.

But the historical staying power of an “Iraqi” rather than sectarian identity, coupled with the grind of an occupation beset by failed promises and worsening violence, made common cause a logical option among many Sunnis and Shi‘a (especially the poorer Shi‘a who are attracted to Moqtada al-Sadr). Such sentiments remained strong even as the Shi‘i establishment has by and large supported--or at least tolerated--the American presence as a way to secure power based on their position as the country’s largest ethniic or religious group.

This calculus has clearly changed in the last few months. Of the many reasons for this, perhaps the most important is that so many victims of the revolt have been Shi‘a, especially the police and army recruits and officers killed in large numbers at least once every week or two. Such attacks, along with the presence of many (perhaps thousands) of foreign and often anti-Shi‘i Sunni fighters in Iraq, have resurrected the Shi‘i anger at the suffering they endured under Saddam’ rule, when Sunnis were generally accorded better treatment communally than their Shi‘i neighbors.

In this situation, as one former high ranking Governing Council official explained to me, “This time around in Falluja the Shi‘i view was, "‘Good, let the Sunnis feel what we felt all those years under Hussein’.”" Indeed, if a figure whose ear is as close to the proverbial Shi‘i street as Moqtada al-Sadr remained largely silent as Falluja burned, it seems clear that most Shi‘a have decided that however much they dislike the occupation or Allawi, both are needed to cement Shi‘i political power and defeat an increasingly Sunni insurgency that would be very costly and nearly impossible for the Shi‘a to combat on their own.

Such a sentiment has enabled the US and Iraqi authorities to transform an Arab into a Sunni revolt, with Shi‘a and Kurds predominating among the forces fighting alongside the Americans and leaders in both communities stressing the political and religious duty to vote. Of course, Ayatollah Sistani and the Shi‘i establishment might well be playing the United States: using the elections to solidify political power, after which it the Americans will be asked--or forced--to leave‘’. The worse the violence, however, the less the chance of this happening anytime soon. But also the lesss the chance of peace, reconstruction or a functioning democracy, so far the still-born birthright of post-Saddam Iraq.

Mark Levine
Department of History
University of California Irvine
mlevine
@
uci
.edu

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

25,000 US Casualties in Iraq; 9% of Troops Put in Hospital or Killed
Over 2000 Iraqis Killed in Fallujah

CBS has elicited from the Pentagon the real figure of US casualties in Iraq, which is more like 25,000. That number includes the 1230 or so killed and the 9300 classified as "wounded in battle," but also 17,000 classified as non-combat sick or injured, of whom 80 percent do not return to their units in Iraq. Although some of the 17,000 are victims of disease, some unspecified number have actually been injured as a result of being in a theater of war. If you have an "accident" while guns and bombs are going off all around you, is it really an "accident"?

The Editor and Publisher piece blames the "US press" for under-reporting these figures. But obviously it is the Department of Defense that constructed the categories that allowed some war heroes to be shunted off as victims of "accidents." So it isn't the press's fault. It is Donald Rumsfeld's fault (and, sure, Karl Rove and George W. Bush, the Teflon Twins).

The Iraqi Defense Ministry has admitted that 2085 Iraqis were killed in the course of the US assault on Fallujah. The same ministry, along with US military spokesmen, keep denying that any civilians were killed.

Personally, I would take all these statistics with a big grain of salt. The US has bombed so many buildings in Fallujah in recent weeks that there must be bodies still in the rubble. Will the rubble be combed for dead bodies? And, even if, as some US military personnel have suggested, 95% of civilians had fled, that would be on the order of 15,000 persons. How likely is it that a massive military assault on residential neighborhoods killed none of them?

Some un-embedded wire service reports suggest a different picture, saying that Fallujah survivors :

"charged, in interviews, that as well as deaths from bombs and artillery shells, a large number of people, including children, were killed by American snipers. Some of the killings took place in the build-up to the assault on the rebel stronghold, and at least in one case, that of the death of a family of seven, including a 3-month-old baby, American authorities have admitted responsibility and offered compensation. Men of military age were particularly vulnerable. But there are also accounts of young children, women and old men being killed.

Mere common sense, it seems to me, makes these reports more credible than blithe claims of no "collateral damage" at all. On the other hand, Iraqi guerrillas are perfectly capable of manufacturing US war crimes where none existed, as part of their own propaganda war. That there were almost certainly civilian casualties does not in and of itself tell us whether the military assault was necessary, or whether it was conducted as it should have been.

The fog of information war thrown up by the Allawi government, the US military, and the guerrilla sympathizers, however, does make the episode difficult to judge morally and ethically. In a democracy, such judgments are necessary, so that there is something radically wrong with the system, when we ordinary Americans don't have a realistic idea of how many US troops have been harmed in the prosecution of this war, and likewise have no clear idea of the human cost of an operation like Fallujah II.

The irony of the twenty-first century Information Age is that the American public is uninformed as never before about the most crucial information in our lives. The new Age of Ignorance amidst information riches is made possible precisely because modern means of communication lend themselves to manipulation by wealthy, powerful forces that understand how to make an emotional impact that will obscure the real issues. This observation is as true of the Baath Party as it is of the Republican Party, as true of al-Jazeerah as it is of Fox Cable News.

The difficulties of political interpretation are, it seems to me, underscored by the interview that Majid Musa, deputy speaker of the Iraqi National Council and leader of the Iraqi Communist Party, gave to Egyptian Radio (BBC World Monitoring, Nov. 23).

The Egyptian interview asked what the participants at the Sharm El Sheikh conference could be expected to agree on.

"Majid: I believe that there is a common ground and that a consensus is possible. The continuation of the unstable conditions, the deteriorating security situation in Iraq and the activities of terrorists and saboteurs will not be restricted within Iraqi borders. The impact of those crimes and this terrorism will spread throughout the region, unless we take timely measures and cooperate to ward off such dangers." He added that the issue of the exact shape of Iraqi federalism was an internal affair.

The Cairo interviewer asked him about a deadline for withdrawal of US troops. (France had pressed for a deadline of Dec. 31, 2005, for this withdrawal, but the other Sharm El Sheikh participants, including Egypt, rejected it).

"Majid: As for the other issue, which is the withdrawal of foreign forces, it is an objective that all Iraqis without exception seek to achieve. Nobody could claim that they are keener than the Iraqi people to see a quick end to the presence of foreign troops. However, the problem is deciding when those troops could depart. We have not yet built sufficient military, police or security forces to protect the security of Iraq."

It appears to me that the stance of the Iraqi Communist Party, at least for now, is not so far from that of the US government-- curb terrorists and saboteurs, decide on federalism in the Iraqi parliament, and be patient about foreign troops until an Iraqi military can be trained. That is, the ICP seems somewhat to the right of the Gaullists here!

What seems indisputable to me is that Spencer Ackerman at Iraq'd is correct to be skeptical of the Bush administration arguments, reported by David Ignatius of the Washington Post, that the Sunni Arabs can be so beaten down and terrified that they will fall in line behind Iyad Allawi! See the comments, above, of Mark Levine.

Rather, the political wages of Fallujah are ethnic division, anger and sullenness that could cripple Iraq well into the future.

If this observation is true, then the current operation in Babil province, which continued on Thursday, is also unlikely to yield the political fruits sought.

In addition, AFP writes, "On the ground, four people were killed and 16 wounded in two bomb attacks in Samarra, one of them a suicide attack, and another south of the main northern oil capital of Kirkuk."

Radio Sawa Iraq is reporting, via Reuters, a huge explosion at the Green Zone (government offices and US embassy) in Baghdad, resulting in a big column of smoke. How you have elections when the most politically important parts of the capital are in this condition, I have no idea.

According to AFP, the story being trumpeted all day on Fox Cable News about the discovery of chemical and anthrax weapons labs in Fallujah by Iraqi troops is questionable to say the least. The US military denies it and Hans Blix is skeptical. I smell the troika of Iyad Allawi, Naqib al-Falah, and Hazem Shaalan behind this announcement, which will be remembered even if it is discredited.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bloggers Respond

The weblogging community responds to Colonel Yigal Carmon's outrageous threat to sue me over my characterization of MEMRI as a well-funded organization dedicated to cherry-picking Arab news reports to make them look bad:

Brad DeLong says "MEMRI Needs to Be Moved to "Unreliable": Ah. Clearly it's time to stop reading (and citing) MEMRI."

Henry Farrell says,

"MEMRI’s threat seems to me to be more about trying to create difficulties for Cole with the University of Michigan than the nugatory possibility of an adverse judgement in court against him. There’s no remotely plausible theory under which the University of Michigan can be held responsible for Cole’s private activities or statements, even if they were libellous. However, a state-funded university would presumably prefer, all things considered, not to be embroiled in an action of this sort, however frivolous. Thus, the inclusion of University of Michigan in the complaint seems to me to be an inept class of an indirect threat to embarrass the university and thus perhaps put Cole in a tricky position. I’m glad to see that he’s treating it with the contempt that it deserves."

[Cole says: Thanks, Henry. The University Counsel and I spoke, and he underlined that the University of Michigan would never take a position on faculty speech and I can assure readers that there isn't the remotest possibility that the hallowed Home of the Wolverines would take such a clumsy feint seriously.]

Abu Aardvark says,

"To be blunt, Professor Cole is right. MEMRI routinely selects articles which show the worst of Arab discourse, even where this represents only a minority of actually expressed opinion, while almost never acknowledging the actual distribution of opinion. As for the Reform Project, it tends to select statements by pro-American reformers who concentrate on criticizing other Arabs, again with little regard for the real debates going on among Arabs. Your selective translations therefore offer a doubly warped perspective on the Arab debates: first, over-emphasizing the presence of radical and noxious voices; and second, over-emphasizing the importance of a small and marginal group of Arabs who share your own prejudices. What you leave out is almost the entire Arab political debate which really matters to Arabs: a lively debate on satellite stations such as al Jazeera and al Arabiya and in the elite Arab press about reform, international relations, political Islam, democracy, and Arab culture which English-speaking readers would greatly benefit from knowing about."

Further evidence for this point of view is available in the form of Brian Whitaker's debate with Yigal Carmon at the Guardian website. Whitaker's points suggest that the widespread impression that MEMRI is accurate but selective may be too generous. Serious lapses in accuracy are also apparent, and so far unexplained.

Matthew Yglesias writes: "Cole seems to be in the right on the key point of factual dispute, though I'm willing to believe he's gone too far in intimating that MEMRI is some kind of front for the Israeli government. More to the point, MEMRI is clearly seeking to use the legal system to silence people who disagree with its politics." [Cole says: Matthew, I don't think I actually intimated that before now, though it is beginning to occur to me and others now that the heavy-handedness has been underlined.]

Maxspeak says "MEMRI's game is to troll for objectionable statements in Arabic-language publications -- not a daunting task, to be sure -- and foist them on the non-Arabic speaking publics in the West as an endless object lesson in Islamic backwardness and intolerance."

Kurt Nimmo appears convinced that MEMRI is a black psy-ops project of Israeli military intelligence aimed at shaping Western public opinion in anti-Arab and anti-Muslim directions.

Begging to Differ points out that MEMRI is probably a "public figure" for US legal purposes. This is the standard for such actions in such instances: "If a plaintiff alleging defamation is considered a 'public figure,' or a person or entity whose views and actions on public issues and events are of concern to other citizens, that plaintiff must prove the alleged defamation was made with 'actual malice'--that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not." [Cole says: "Actually, everything I said was true, as far as I know, and none of my points has been seriously contested with solid information."]

American Amnesia says,

"MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Organization, hasn't received attention here at American Amnesia for one simple reason: it's a compost of specious translations of worst-of-the-worst opinion pieces coming out of the Arabic press. Think of an organization dedicated to translating into Arabic the Jerry Falwells, Bob Jones, and other scraps of ideological detritus bobbing around in our local papers, and you've got MEMRI's mission and net worth."

(Cole notes: Until I see figures for all the MEMRI offices, and we have an idea of how much of their work exactly is done in those offices and perhaps elsewhere, in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, I deny that I have misstated their funding. It is silly to think that the nearly $2 mn. that underwrites their Washington office is anything but the tip of their financial iceberg.)

The blogging world has been enormously supportive, and hundreds if not thousands of emails have been sent in protest to MEMRI. I have by no means listed all the interesting reactions on the Web to this issue. I am very grateful. It seems to me that if we don't make a stand here, freedom of speech on the internet is endangered.

P.S. The Boris and Natasha of Arab-Israeli politics, are saying that I brandished a lawsuit against them for putting up a dossier on me and encouraging people to spy on me for them, in 2002. Damn straight I did. And nor are these two incidents comparable. I did not threaten to sue them for libel, but for personal harassment. I didn't cyberstalk Yigal Carmon. In fact, I don't think I ever even mentioned his name until he threatened me. As a private person, he should be left alone. The rhetorical strategy of alleging that if you ever threatened to sue someone on solid grounds, you may not complain about someone else frivolously threatening you with a SLAPP, is typical of these polemicists. Move on. Nothing of interest to see here.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Fall-Out of Fallujah Keeps Falling

Sunni Arabs in Iraq are blaming Shiites for conspicuously failing to come to the defense of Fallujah during the recent American assault. Dhiya Rasan and Steve Negus of the Financial Times write, "Those of the black turbans” Iraq's Shia clergy “are but traitors and agents of America. It is they who have provoked the Americans to attack the Sunni, whom they call extremists and terrorists,” Sheikh Ahmed al-Kubaisi told his congregation last Friday."

On the other hand, the Marines have concluded that with all the powerful munitions they have found in Fallujah, the Sunni guerrillas could have taken over all of Iraq.

On the other hand, Fallujans are afraid that the mere presence of US troops in the city virtually guarantees a long-term guerrilla war that will disrupt their lives into the distant future. Explosions still wrack the city, and many Fallujans vow to fight the US presence.

Reuters reports that the Iraqi Islamic Party of Muhsin Abdul Hamid and several other small Sunni Arab parties are still agitating for the postponement of the elections scheduled for January 30. They argue that time is needed for "national reconciliation" and that the national party lists disadvantage the Sunnis. The Reuters piece notes that a high official in the party was arrested last week.

Az-Zaman reports that tribal leaders in four north-central provinces have threatened to have members of their (largely Sunni Arab) tribes boycott the elections if they are held on the basis of national lists rather than local district representation. Shaikh Naji Jabbarah, the representative of Salahuddin Province, said that a conference would soon be held in Tikrit to make a final decision.

The same source reports that Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has called upon 250 notables and party leaders to join him in a joint list, which he would head. Allawi would be the first name on the list, and how many members of parliament from it were actually seated would depend on how many votes the list got nationally. Allawi is betting that the list can get at least the 40,000 or so necessary to seat the number one candidate (himself).

Once elected, the parliament will then elect a president and two vice-presidents. They in turn will appoint a prime minister. Allawi is almost certainly trying to make deals behind the scenes with the persons and parties most likely to capture the presidency and vice-presidencies, in hopes that they will reappoint him to his present position.

The US continued its new offensive, against guerrillas in Babil province south of Baghdad. It has been a center of the Sunni Arab guerrilla war. It had earlier been a Shiite area, but many Sunni Arabs were settled there by Saddam and given expropriated land. A Basra group of activist Shiites had recruited volunteers to go up there and protect Shiites from Sunni attacks.

The CNN anchor in the US during the daytime on Wednesday said that the US troops were fighting "thugs and terrorists" in the "triangle of death".

This sort of language is really inexcusable in a news organization. There are of course thugs and terrorists among those fighting US troops, but a lot of the guerrillas are just Sunni Arab nationalists who reject the US presence and fear that they will lose everything if the Shiites take back their land and homes. I don't know at what point US electronic journalism became a propaganda arm of the White House and the Pentagon, but it is not a healthy development. And, of course, CNN is hardly the worst offender in this regard!


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

More on MEMRI
On Torture: "Everyone Experiences Pain"

Further to the frivolous threat of a lawsuit directed at me by Colonel Yigal Carmon, director of MEMRI and formerly of Israeli Military Intelligence , an informed reader writes:

You asked a few questions about MEMRI in your most recent posting including why Brian Whitaker found that three of their staff in Washington were ex-military intelligence. The answer to that one is quite easy: they used to post it openly on their website until they decided to get more coy about their identity, but thanks to the magic of the web you can still find the old page here.

I could swear I remember going through their website a long time ago as well and finding info on their other offices, this site says they have offices in London, Jerusalem, and Berlin. The Berlin office info can be found here.

This posting on MEMRI's site describes Carmon recently as the head of their Jerusalem office:

You might try scanning through old versions of the website on archive.org to see if you can find more info . . .

Actually, the Disinfopedia entry on MEMRI has a fair amount of information about the "Jerusalem Branch," which is apparently no longer listed at the American web site. Of course, there is a real question as to whether the Washington DC office isn't actually a "branch" of the Jerusalem operation. A reader writes, "MEMRI has a Jerusalem web-site in Hebrew: www. memri. org. il. The Domain registration is:
Amutat Yesodot Shalom
7 Hamaalot St.
Jerusalem Israel 78542
Phone: +972 2 6244730
Fax: +972 2 6255779."


For other criticisms of MEMRI see The Forward.

I wrote another inquirer:

I think it would be possible for there to be a MEMRI USA incorporated here, and to show only US income [on Form 990].

Think about all the labor that has to go into scanning hundreds of Arabic newspapers, deciding which articles to translate, and then translating and disseminating them. Most of them aren't on the Web. Who buys them and warehouses them? Where? How do they get to Washington, DC the next day?

I think you have to figure . . . [lots] for each office and big . . . money for the Jerusalem office.

Then Norbert Mattes wrote me from Germany:

Dear Mr. Cole,

I followed your dispute with Yigal Carmon/MEMRI with interest. I´m the editor of a small German quaterly called Inamo. Our project, which is called The Information Project for the Near and Middle East (a bit like MERIP), has no real funding. We can pay the expenses of the journal by selling it but receive no compensation for our work on it.

In the Fall, 2002, issue we printed a translation of the article by Brian Whitaker (Guardian) about MEMRI and its selective approach to translating articles from the Arab press. Nine days later Yigal Carmon reacted to Whitaker's article, and his reply was published at the website of the Guardian.

In Inamo, we then we brought out three articles concerning MEMRI (No. 32, winter 2002) . . . these included a reply of MEMRI-BERLIN to Whitaker's article as well as an article by Christopher Hayes, an Inamo editor, concerning the work of MEMRI-Berlin, along with a portrait of Yigal Carmon . . .

In response to this further material, an article appeared in "Die Wochenzeitung" (Zurich, Switzerland) of 6.2.2003, entitled "An enemy of Peace: The German academic periodical Inamo profiles MEMRI founder Yigal Carmon in their latest Issue, NR. 32, winter, 2002."

In January 2003 we got a letter from Carmon's attorney in Berlin regarding this article. He threatened legal action and demanded a retraction of 12 points in the article. Otherwise, he said, he would take us to court. The amount of damages he threatened to ask for was 50 000 Euros [$60,000], in addition to attorney and court fees. The lawyer appended a counter-statement by Carmon himself. He alleged that, in accordance with German media laws, we had to print it. I initially cut out about forty percent of his response because it had nothing to do with our article.

We disputed six of his original points. For instance, he had threatened us with legal action for asserting that he supported torture. We stood our ground, pointing out that in an interview in the Washington Post, Yigal Carmon had said he accepted the application of "pain." The Washington Post asked him about if he could cause pain to a Palestinian prisoner to get information. Carmon said words to the effect that 'pain does not take your life; pain comes, pain goes; pain disappears ... everybody has had this expierience.' [see exact quote below]. With regard to two points, we did commit errors in our research.

But we had to print his response, because we had to reach a settlement with his attorney, not having the money to go to court. They accepted the 6/6 offer, but we had to print his reply in full. Carmon or MEMRI did take care of the lawyer fees.

Later on I spoke with Yossi Melman from Haaretz. He had written an article about Carmon, the one man secret service and said, "I will be your witness." It was too late . . .

All the best,


Norbert Mattes
editor of INAMO

P.S. By the way. Carmon of course replied in the Guardian to the article by Brian Whitaker. At the beginning of October, 2002, an e-mail chat began between Whitaker and Carmon. But suddenly Carmon stopped. I spoke with Brian at the beginning of November, he said "I´m still waiting for an answer from Carmon." If he doesn´t answer within three weeks we will print the chat in the Guardian." So they did middle of January 2003.

*Washington Post May 4, 1995: "Yigal Carmon, a former terrorism adviser to Rabin and former prime minister Yitzhak Shamir . . . [,] Asked whether he would justify the infliction of pain to extract information, Carmon replied: "Pain is not taking life. Pain comes and goes. Pain disappears. You know, everyone experiences that. Unwillingly, of course."

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Boycott Statement of Iraqi National Constituent Assembly

The intrepid Alissa Rubin of the LA Times reported last week on the meeting of political organizations in Iraq calling for a boycott of the forthcoming election. Their formal statement has just become available to me in English, and I'm reprinting below.

"In the name of God, the merciful,

The Iraqi Constituent Conference statement on its stance regarding elections

In accordance with the Iraqi National Constituent Conference statement dated 27 October 2004 regarding the "elections" to be held next year, which included the essential requirements to hold free and fair elections, and given the fact that the competent authorities did not meet these objective requirements, we announce that we will boycott these elections.

We are boycotting these elections because they will not represent the will of our people and their just demands for sovereignty and independence given that such elections will be held under imposed bases stipulated in the interim State Administration Law. This law was rejected by independent political and religious figures because it represents a grave threat to Iraq's future, sovereignty and territorial integrity.

The attack on Iraqi cities, especially the savage annihilation crime in Al-Fallujah, represents a definite obstacle for Iraqis to adequately take part in the political process under the control of the occupation and in the absence of sovereignty. How can it be possible to hold national dialogue and engage in the political process while criminal conduct is targeting the people?

We, in the Iraqi National Constituent Conference, declare our commitment to free and fair elections when their full requirements are met. Therefore, we call on our people to boycott [the elections] and not to be fooled by the misleading media which want the process to slip through and falsify the will of our people in Iraq through legitimizing the schemes of the occupation and the non-elected government.


General Secretariat Members:

1. Secretary-general of the congress, Shaykh Muhammad Jawad al-Khalisi

2. Official spokesman, Dr Wamid Jamal Nazmi

3. Association of Muslim Scholars

4. Arab Nationalist Movement

5. Imam Al-Khalisi University

6. Democratic Reform Party

7. Unified People's Party

8. Iraqi Turkoman Front

9. Iraqi Christian Democratic Party

10. Islamic Bloc in Iraq

11. The Office of Ayatollah Ahmad al-Husayni al-Baghdadi

12. The Office of Ayatollah Qasim al-Ta'i

13. Union of Iraqi Jurists [Huquqiyun]

14. Higher Committee for Human Rights

15. Iraqi Women's Association



The Iraqi National Constituent Conference

2 Shawwal 1425 [AH], corresponding to 15 November 2004"

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

MEMRI Funding

I have received several emails from people who looked up the funding for MEMRI in the internet guide to charitable organizations, and found that it reported income of a little less than $2 million a year.

But that is only the United States. MEMRI is an international organization. It has, for instance, a Berlin branch, which has also brandished lawsuit threats.

Does it have an Israel office? If so, housed where? How much of its work is done offshore? Why did Brian Whitaker find that three of its Washington staff was ex-Israeli military intelligence?

When the Council of American Ambassadors visited Israel in 2002 and met with Israeli public figures, why did the roster look like this: "During our visit, we met with the following officials and non-officials: Prime Minister Ariel Sharon; Foreign Minister Shimon Peres; Defense Minister “Fouad” Ben Eliezer; Housing Minister Natan Sharansky; Bank of Israel Governor David Klein; Foreign Ministry Director General Avi Gil; Jewish Agency Chair Sallai Meridor; Envoy for the PM, Omri Sharon; former Ambassador Dore Gold; United States (US) Ambassador Dan Kurtzer; Jerusalem Report editor, David Horovitz; Haifa University Professor Dan Scheuftan; and Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) Director, Yigal Carmon."?

I'd be glad to print Colonel Carmon's responses to these inquiries, as well. Am waiting to hear from him.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Another campaign against Sunnis

A major military campaign was launched by US and British troops in Iraq on Tuesday, targetting Babil province or what is called "the triangle of death." This is the area south of Baghdad where cities such as Mahmudiyah, Latifiyah and Iskandariyah lie.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

MEMRI and Bias

Many thanks to all the readers who have written in response to my posting about the attempt of the Israel-linked MEMRI "translation service" to intimidate me with the threat of a lawsuit.

Many of the letters have been eye-opening, and I give an example, which seems to me especially instructive, below.

Dear Mr Carmon,

I regularly read Dr Cole's weblog, Informed Comment. This is an excellent service that summarizes reports from published in the Arabic press about events about that part of the world. I was dismayed to learn that you and your organization, MEMRI, have threatened to sue Dr Cole over some comments he made regarding your selection of material from the Arabic press. In your letter to him, you indicate that his suggestion that your organization "cherry-picks the vast Arabic press" is "patently false".

Curious, I had a look at your website and found my way to "Cartoons from the Middle East Media". This area contained about 750 cartoons, divided into four categories essentially based on whether their targets were Israel, the USA, or both countries. After reading through a sample of these, I came to two plausible conclusions: either 1) Arabic cartoonists are a singularly unimaginative lot, and are essentially incapable of publishing anything that pokes fun at anybody in the world other than Americans, Israelis and Jews or 2) that your claims to be presenting "representative" material from the Arabic press may not be entirely based in reality.

Again, I decided to see for myself and looked at cartoons in a few Arabic papers online. What I found was a wide variety of political cartoons about people and politicians from the Arab world, Europe, the UN, and, admittedly, Israel and the USA, although the latter were in proportions far, far smaller than your website would appear to suggest. Frankly, I find your claim to being objective in selecting items for your website to be woefully at odds with what is actually presented there. In all seriousness, I don't understand how you could expect any intelligent person to perceive it as such. Clearly Dr Cole does not, and I respectfully request that you withdraw your threat to sue him for publishing a perfectly valid viewpoint regarding MEMRI's choice of material on its website.

Respectfully yours . . .

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Persian Gulf Flap

As if we did not have enough life and death issues to deal with, the Iranian state is now keeping National Geographic out because it identifies the Persian Gulf as also the Arab Gulf.

As with most disputes about what to call something, this argument is silly. The Persian Gulf was called that in English after Greek and Latin writers of the ancient world. The ancient Iranians who moved into Elam around the ninth or eighth century BC were called Parsumash in the ancient Assyrian tablets, and appear to have called themselves Pars as well as Iran (=Aryan). They gradually took over Elam in southwestern Iran and it became known as Pars. To this day, it is called the province of Fars (Arabic does not have a "p" so when Iranians became Muslim and started using the Arabic alphabet, they tended to replace the "p" with an "f").

Since the Iranians had the most extensive navigation system in the Gulf at that time, the Greeks and Romans tended to call it the Persian Gulf or the equivalent in those languages.

There is a neat symmetry here. The Europeans called Iran "Persia," using the part (Pars) to describe the whole. The Muslims called Greece "Yunan" or Ionia, using this coastal region of Anatolia, once populated by Greeks, to name the whole.

The rise of nationalism has complicated this naming system. First, Reza Shah insisted from 1933 that all Western newspapers call the country Iran, not Persia. But then shouldn't it become the "Iranian Gulf?" Why keep "Persian" only for this purpose? Then the rise of Arab nationalism led some Arab intellectuals to insist that it is the "Arab Gulf," properly speaking. OK, but Westerners have been calling it "Persian" since at least Herodotus.

I say we just call it "The Gulf" and be done with it. Other possibilities exist, but all of them are contentious.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Deliberate Murder of 10-year-old Girl by Israeli Military

A tape recording has surfaced showing that Israeli soldiers deliberately killed a frightened 10-year-old little girl in Gaza, who had been identified to them as such.

If the tape is as described, this seems a clear case of a crime against humanity.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Intimidation by Israeli-Linked Organization Aimed at US Academic
MEMRI tries a SLAPP

I just checked my campus mail and found a letter in it from Colonel Yigal Carmon, late of Israeli military intelligence, now an official at the Middle East Media Research Organization, or MEMRI. He threatened me with a lawsuit over blog comments I made here at Informed Comment, reprinted at anti-war.com. This technique of the SLAPP or Strategic Lawsuits against Public Participation had already been pioneered by polluting industries against environmental activists, and now the pro-Likud lobby in the US has apparently decided to try it out against people like me.

I urge all readers to send messages of protest to memri@memri.org. Please be polite, and simply urge MEMRI, which has a major Web presence, to withdraw the lawsuit threat and to respect the spirit of the free sharing of ideas that makes the internet possible.

Here is the letter:

' November 8, 2004

Professor Juan Cole
University of Michigan History Department
1029 Tisch Hall
435 S. State Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1003

Dear Professor Cole,

I write in response to your article "Osama Threatening Red States?" published on November 3, 2004 on antiwar.com. The article included several statements about MEMRI which go beyond what could be considered legitimate criticism, and which in fact qualify as slander and libel. While we respect your right to argue the veracity of our translations, you certainly may not fabricate information about our organization. You make several claims that are patently false:

Trying to paint MEMRI in a conspiratorial manner by portraying us as a rich, sinister group, you write that "MEMRI is funded to the tune of $60 million a year." This is completely false.

You also write that MEMRI is an "anti-Arab propaganda machine" that "cherry-picks the vast Arabic press." If you have any level of familiarity with MEMRI, you should be aware of our Reform Project, which is one of the most important of MEMRI's projects, and which receives much of our energy and resources. The Reform Project (www.memri.org/reform.html) is devoted solely to finding and amplifying the progressive voices in the Arab world. It is especially disappointing that these charges do not come from an overzealous journalist, but from a member of the academic community, from whom one should be able to expect at least the minimum amount of research and corroboration.

In addition, you write that "MEMRI is one of a number of public relations campaigns essentially on behalf of the far right-wing Likud Party in Israel." This, too, is completely false. MEMRI is totally unaffiliated with any government, and receives no government funding. While I was formerly an Israeli official (and retired more than a decade ago), I have never been affiliated with the Likud Party, or any other party.

As such, we demand that you retract the false statements you have made about MEMRI. If you will not do so, we will be forced to pursue legal action against you personally and against the University of Michigan, which the article identifies you as an employee of. We hope this will not be necessary.

Sincerely,

[signed]
Yigal Carmon

Colonel Carmon's letter makes three charges: 1) that I alleged that MEMRI receives $60 million a year for its operations. 2) That I alleged that MEMRI cherry-picks the vast Arab press for articles that make the Arabs look bad. 3) That I said that MEMRI was affiliated with the Likud Party.

This is how I would reply:

1) I am glad to publish the annual funding of MEMRI, and its sources, as provided by Colonel Carmon, if he will tell us what the figure is, which he has not. As a historian, I have no desire to have anything but the facts in evidence. MEMRI obviously a well-funded operation, as any familiarity with its scope and activities would make clear. In the meantime, I am glad to acknowledge that the figure I gave has been disputed by Colonel Carmon. I think he would find that in democratic countries, in any case, a dispute over an organization's level of funding would be laughed out of court as a basis for a libel action. In fact, I am giggling as I write this.

2) I continue to maintain that MEMRI is selective and biased against the Arab press, and that it highlights pieces that cast Arabs, especially committed Muslims, in a negative light. That it also rewards secular Arabs for being secularists is entirely beside the point (and this is the function of the "reform" site). On more than one occasion I have seen, say, a bigotted Arabic article translated by MEMRI and when I went to the source on the Web, found that it was on the same op-ed page with other, moderate articles arguing for tolerance. These latter were not translated.

3) I did not allege that MEMRI or Colonel Carmon are "affiliated" with the Likud Party. What I said was that MEMRI functions as a PR campaign for Likud Party goals. Colonel Carmon and Meyrav Wurmser, who run MEMRI, were both die-hard opponents of the Oslo peace process, and so ipso facto were identified with the Likud rejectionists on that central issue.

Colonel Carmon was not a formal member of the Likud party while serving in Israeli military intelligence because active-duty military are not usually involved in civilian political parties. Since he retired to the US, he did not have the occasion to join the Likud, but there seems little question that if he were living in Israel he would vote for Likud rather than Labor, given his public stances.

So, the charge, that I claimed an "affiliation" of MEMRI with Likud, isn't true in the first place, and there is nothing to retract. That issue almost certainly generated the entire letter. MEMRI is a 501 (c) 3 organization, which is tax exempt in US law, and therefore cannot engage in (much) directly political activity without endangering its exemption. I don't think MEMRI does so directly intervene in politics as to make its 501 (c) 3 status questionable. But it is obvious that 501 (c) 3 is widely abused by rightwing think tanks.

More discussion on MEMRI on the Web can be found here.

I've said all I am going to say to Colonel Carmon just now. Israeli military intelligence is used to being able to censor the Israeli press and to intimidate journalists, and it is a bit shocking that Carmon should imagine that such intimidation would work in a free society.

I will add another criticism of MEMRI, which is that it systematically violates the intellectual property of Arab writers by appropriating their content without paying for it and storing them on its servers, and then claiming copyright in their work as translated. This is a shameful way of proceeding. Where the source articles are published in a country that is signatory to the major international copyright agreements, it may be illegal. All sites dealing in other languages do quote or translate from time to time, which falls under fair use. But MEMRI has a much more systematic set of appropriations going.

MEMRI has begun taking out blog ads. Since it can hardly go about threatening bloggers with lawsuits without violating the essential spirit of open discourse on the Web, it has forfeited any claim on our eyeballs. I urge all bloggers to decline advertisements from MEMRI until such time as Colonel Carmon withdraws his outrageous threat.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Massing on Iraq Press Coverage

The way in which so much of the US press neglected to exercise their faculties of critical reasoning in the face of Bush administration claims about Iraq has generated remarkably little writing or self-reflection. It is in fact quite striking that talking heads and journalists who were completely wrong about Iraq, such as Judith Miller, appear to have more or less gotten away with it.

Michael Massing's incisive review of the issue, forthcoming in the New York Review of Books, is available online at the indispensable Tomdispatch.com. Massing begins with the Fassihi incident and the Wall Street Journal:

' Toward the end of September, Farnaz Fassihi, a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Baghdad, sent an e-mail to forty friends describing her working conditions in Iraq. Fassihi had been sending out such messages on a regular basis, but this one seethed with anger and frustration. "Being a foreign correspondent in Baghdad these days," she wrote, "is like being under virtual house arrest.... I avoid going to people's homes and never walk in the streets. I can't go grocery shopping any more, can't eat in restaurants, can't strike a conversation with strangers, can't look for stories, can't drive in any thing but a full armored car, can't go to scenes of breaking news, can't be stuck in traffic, can't speak English outside, can't take a road trip, can't say I'm an American, can't linger at checkpoints, can't be curious about what people are saying, doing, feeling. And can't and can't." . . .

Interestingly, no such account appeared in the Wall Street Journal. For Fassihi's criticism of Bush administration policy outraged some readers, who insisted that she could no longer write about Iraq with the necessary objectivity. In response, the Journal announced that Fassihi was going to take a previously scheduled vacation from Iraq and that this would keep her from writing anything more about it until after the US election . . . '

I remember the WSJ actually saying that Fassihi wouldn't be allowed to report on Iraq again until after the Nov. 2 elections, once this memo leaked. It was as though she were now viewed as biased against Bush because she simply reported the reality.

I talk to journalists in Baghdad by phone, and they really are stuck in their hotel rooms. One told me of fears of being kidnapped, because shady characters follow the journalists if they try to go out.

Massing is right about the massive politicization of media coverage of the war and the ways in which editors' desperate search for "even-handedness" favors Bush. If you have a mix of nine persons from across the mainstream US political spectrum, the addition of a 10th who is an extremist of some sort (say a fascist) would skew the average of the whole group substantially. Since Bush administration positions are often extreme and even fantastic, counting them as "one side" of a two-sided story ensures that the line demarcating the "sides" is drawn very substantially to the right of where mainstream US political opinion tends to come down.

Speaking of press coverage, The Independent has a piece on VanityFair.com, the magazine's lively Web offering. The Independent quotes contributing editor James Wolcott as saying that bloggers are "the best thing to hit journalism since the political pamphlet." It seems to me that this characterization of weblogs as a form of "political pamphlet" is historically suggestive. Robert Darnton's work on the 18th century Grub Street as a context for the Enlightenment has shown the importance of pamphleteering. May we be so luck as to get a major intellectual movement out of all this blogging!

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Turkish Role

Neighboring Turks take a dim view of the "Iraqi resistance" in the Sunni Arab heartland of Iraq, given that it has slaughtered 64 Turkish truck drivers.

The Turkish Foreign Minister, Abdullah Gul, is clearly petrified with fear that US tensions with Iran will spin out of control. The region, he says, cannot bear another crisis. Gul is meeting with other Iraq neighbors at Sharm el Sheikh in Egypt Monday.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Vote Set for January 30

The interim government of Iyad Allawi set the elections for Jan. 30, on Sunday. Even as the announcement was made, major violence broke out in Ramadi and Latifiyah, strong Sunni Arab areas, leaving some 22 persons dead on Sunday.

The next stage is the meeting of the neighboring states plus Egypt at Sharm al-Sheikh, where the Bush administration is finally seeking to internationalize the Iraq crisis instead of keeping it for Washington. The conference will be expanded on Tuesday. Iran says it will attend, but will insist on calling for a US withdrawal from Iraq. In contrast, Egypt is afraid that a sudden US withdrawal would leave Iraq in chaos.

Alissa Rubin of the Los Angeles Times has a good summary of issues around Grand Ayatollah Sistani's formation of a Shiite super-party and his relations with the Sunnis. (This internet source misattributes the piece).

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Large Protests Against Fallujah Campaign, Mosque Killing
US Hated From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli

In Baghdad itself, AP's Hamza Hendawi writes, tensions rose to a fever pitch over the US assault on Fallujah, the marine mosque shooting filmed by Kevin Sites (on which he has now commented), and the Friday raid on the Abu Hanifa mosque, where between 2 and 4 worshippers were killed and 9 wounded by Iraqi national guards backed by US troops in seach of armaments and bomb-making equipment. It is not clear why the raid had to be conducted while worship ceremonies were ongoing. Abu Hanifa is one of four revered founders of the major Sunni schools of Islamic legal interpretation.

Hendawi writes that as a result, on Saturday heavy fighting broke out between guerrilas in Azamiyah and the US and Iraqi troops, in which guerrillas deployed mortars, rpg's, and roadside bombs, leaving several stores ablaze. He adds: "Almost simultaneously, clashes broke out in at least five other Baghdad neighborhoods. In all, at least 10 people, including one American soldier, were killed throughout the capital Saturday."

Asharq al-Awsat writes that the Najaf spokesman of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani denounced the US on Sunday for the Abu Hanifa raid. He said, "It is unacceptable. We condemn all desecrations of holy sites." He also condemned all arbitrary arrests, including of aides of Muqtada al-Sadr, saying that the rule of law had to be upheld.

World revulsion against the US attack on Fallujah reached a crescendo during the past five days, with significant street protests breaking out in the Middle East and Latin America. Turkey, Palestine and Libya in the region, and Chile in the New World saw thousands of angry protesters come out against the US.

The brutal way the US conducted the assault, and the continual aerial bombardment of civilian neighborhoods in the weeks leading up to the attack, suggested to many observers that the operation was intended as a form of collective punishment against the people of Fallujah, and a warning to the residents of other Iraqi cities not to let the guerrillas operate freely in their urban areas. Collective punishment is forbidden by the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 governing militarily occupied territories.

Thousands of Palestinians protested the US war in Iraq Sunday. AP says, "Some burned the effigy of a U.S. Marine and American and British flags. About two thousand people gathered outside a mosque in Nablus, waving placards calling Iraq "a Christian war against Muslims." A senior Islamic cleric says it reminds him of the Crusades. In a Gaza refugee camp, some 4500 people chanted "no to occupation in Palestine, no to occupation in Iraq." Many were waving green Hamas banners. A local Hamas leader says American forces are committing "savage crimes" in Iraq."

Az-Zaman reports that Egyptian Council on Foreign Affairs condemned the Fallujah campaign and asked that the international community put pressure on the US to observe international law in that city.

Thousands of Libyans protested the US war in Iraq on Saturday. Since Libya is a police state, such a protest indicates that Qadhafi decided to allow it. (Government lack of permission for protests is the only thing that keeps the crowds from exploding into the streets of Amman and Cairo, as well).

Some 5,000 Turks demonstrated against the US in southeastern Turkey on Sunday. This rally follows a march by members of the Teachers' Union in Ankara last Wednesday. The Fallujah campaign was openly denounced late last week by Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul as involving "unacceptable violations of international norms."

In the Pakistani port city of Karachi, protesters rallied after the Friday prayer sermon of clerics loyal to the fundamentalist coalition, MMA or the United Action Council.

Meanwhile, about 30,000 Chileans came out on Sunday to protest the Fallujah campaign and US presence in Iraq, as Bush prepared to visit Santiago. Bush was boycotted by 200 Chilean parliamentarians because they refused to pass through US metal detectors in order to meet with him.

Last Wednesday, some 13,000 Greeks had marched against the military actions of the US in Iraq.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Fallujah Operation Does not Bring Peace

Wire services report dozens of violent deaths in Iraq on Saturday.

Guerrillas attacked a police station in Baghdad, killing one American serviceman and wounded 9. Guerrilla attacks elsehwere took some 50 lives altogether.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Engagement of the Rules

Rod Nordland and Babak Dehghanpisheh of Newsweek believe that the US military simply cannot win hearts and minds in Iraq. That's a pretty safe conclusion by now. Quite the opposite, it seems clear that more and more Iraqis simply hate the Americans, and especially American troops.

I personally agree that there may have been extenuating circumstances regarding the shooting of a wounded Iraqi guerrilla in a mosque by a marine (wounded guerrillas often lure US troops close and then blow them up). But most people aren't good at seeing both sides of the story. If guerrillas had stacked four wounded American Marines up somewhere, and then a second set of guerrillas came in, and a guerrilla shot one of the unarmed, wounded Marines in the head on camera, I guarantee you no one in the American media would be talking about extenuating circumstances. This act would be seen as cowardly and perfidious, with no need for further investigation.

For a disturbing reflection on the impact of being embedded on journalists like Kevin Sites, see Peter Beaumont in The Guardian.

The authors dismiss the Lancet study finding 100,000 deaths caused by the Americans in Iraq, mainly by aerial bombardment of civilian city districts. They suggest that only 4000 Iraqis have been killed since May 1, 2003. But this estimate is based on counting all Iraqi deaths reported in the Western press, which I can tell you for sure is only a fraction of those reported in the Arabic press. Nor is the Lancet study as flawed as these authors suggest.

Meanwhile, the Red Cross has issued a blistering critique of the US for human rights violations in Iraq, while equally blaming the guerrillas.

And, acute malnutrition among young children in Iraq has doubled since the Americans invaded
So, no, they're not winning any hearts or minds, and are unlikely to.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraqi National Guards, US, Raid Mosque of Abu Hanifa, Kill 2

Iraqi security forces backed up by US troops raided the famed mosque of Abu Hanifa on Friday and arrested its prayer leader, Shaikh Muayyad Adhami. They set off stun grenades and appear to have killed two of the worshippers. Abu Hanifa founded the Hanafi school of Islamic law, one of 4 major Sunni schools, which is particularly popular in Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Central Asia.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Will Osamah Bin Laden Benefit from Arafat's Death?

My opinion piece on the implications of Arafat's passing for al-Qaeda has appeared at Newsday. Excerpt:

"Arafat's secular nationalism was supple enough to compromise with Israel and to imagine a two-state solution, even if the road of negotiations remained rocky. The continued Israeli colonization of the occupied Palestinian territories during the 1990s helped, along with terrorist attacks by radical groups such as Hamas, to derail the peace process, which Sharon had always opposed.

Arafat's death creates a vacuum in Palestinian leadership that will not soon be filled. Sharon's assassination of major Hamas leaders has also weakened authority structures in that party. If the Israelis and the Palestinian leadership cannot find a way to reinvigorate the peace process, cells of radical young Palestinians may grow up that look to bin Laden for their cues.

Even if local Palestinian leaders remain strong enough to keep al-Qaida out, the festering Israeli-Palestinian struggle remains among the best recruiting posters for al-Qaida with young Muslim men. Resolving this conflict would be the most effective weapon the United States could deploy in its war on terror."

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Reagan, First Bush Administrations Cynically winked at Saddam's use of Chemical Weapons: Salon.com

Barry Lando, writing in Salon.com, surveys the ways in which Reagan and Bush senior winked at Saddam's use of chemical weapons.

Excerpt:

Lando: "More than a decade earlier, the United States performed the same sleight of hand -- now we condemn civilian casualties, now we don't -- with regard to Saddam's actions in the aftermath of the Gulf War, even when it involved Saddam's use of weapons of mass destruction. There is strong evidence that the administration of George H.W. Bush covered up the Iraqi dictator's use of chemical weapons to put down a Shiite uprising in 1991. That uprising, and its ruthless repression, which the current Bush administration prefers not to acknowledge, set the stage for the current turmoil in Iraq."

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Did Fallujah Sink the Elections?

Among the justifications given by the US for its campaign against guerrillas in Fallujah was that it would prepare the way for elections in January. It was said that elections could not be held as long as major cities were not even in government control.

It seems likely, however, that the Fallujah offensive has so deeply alienated the Sunni Arab populace of Iraq, which is probably 4 million to 4.5 million strong, that it has ensured that they will boycott the polls as American-sponsored. The political goals of the Fallujah campaign, in other words, were foredoomed to failure, even if military objectives were met, with the capture and destruction of thousands of pounds of explosives intended for other cities. (Most of the military goals probably weren't met either, however, since the guerrillas could easily reestablish themselves and the guerrilla war seems likely to go on at much the same pace as before for the foreseeable future. There are after all 250,000 tons of explosives and ammunitions unaccounted for in Iraq, which the US allowed the guerrillas to raid and store).

Al-Hayat says the radical Jaish Ansar al-Sunnah group announced Thursday that it would blow up polling stations on election day, and called on Muslims to boycott the American-sponsored elections. The Association of Muslim Scholars, which has also urged a boycott, issued a call Thursday for those who captured some 60 recently-trained police near the Jordan border to realease them, so as to avoid the heightening of sectarian tensions. This call was an allusion to the Shiite ethnicity of the captured police cadets, who, al-Hayat says, appear not to have escaped after all, contrary to earlier wire service reports.

The heightening of sectarian tensions was underlined recently when Shiites in Basra formed the Fury Brigade, aimed at using paramilitary means to protect Shiites from Sunni Arab attacks in the Latifiyah / Mahmudiyah area south of Baghdad. The Furty Brigade insisted that the Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq, and the al-Azhar Seminary/ University in Cairo, issue formal legal findings (fatwas) that it is wrong for a Sunni to kill a Shiite (-Adil Awadh, al-`Alam al-An, Radio Sawa Iraq in Arabic). Readers will note that there have been no sympathy demonstrations against the Fallujah campaign in major Shiite cities such as Basra. This is because Iraqi Shiites suffered mightily under the Baath and they are afraid of foreign and homegrown Sunni fundamentalists, whom they term "Wahhabis" and "takfiris"--i.e. those who declare some Muslims to be actually infidels-- and they are afraid both forces are strong in Fallujah and intent on targetting them. In contrast, many Sunni Arabs are furious at the Shiites for refusing to protest the US assault on Fallujah, as Abbas Kadhim argues.

The Guardian speculates that pressure is now building to postpone the elections. This move is supported by the Iraqi Islamic Party, the main Sunni fundamentalist group still more or less committed to encouraging Sunni participation. Its leader, Muhsin Abdul Hamid, predicts a near-complete Sunni Arab boycott if the elections are held in January. The IIP is supported in this talk of postponement by elements in the Allawi government (which gets to stay in power longer and shore up its advantages of incumbency if the elections are postponed).

In contrast, the major Shiite parties insist that the electoral timetable be adhered to. They are following the line of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, that elections must be held as early as possible at all costs, to produce a legitimate Iraqi government. They say that if the elections are not held in some places of the Sunni Arab heartland, that is not important.

But they are wrong. The Americans crafted the election as a national one, in order to make it more difficult for strongly local and sectarian political forces to do well. The party lists that fare best will be those with strongest national support. The down side of this plan is that if a major constituency, such as the Sunni Arabs, boycotts, then they will get virtually no seats and the legitimacy of the resulting parliament would be weakened.

If elections are held in January, I see only one way to avoid disaster. This would be some sort of emergency decree by the current government that sets aside, say, 20% of seats in parliament for the Sunni Arabs. This procedure would seat Sunni Arab candidates in order of the popularity of their lists and in order of their rank within the lists on which they run. But the results would essentially be "graded on a curve." In a way, this procedure is already being followed for women, who are guaranteed 30% of seats. This solution is Lebanon-like and is not optimal, but it might be the best course if long-term sectarian and ethnic conflict is to be avoided. Remember, the first thing the new parliament will do is craft a permanent constitution. You want Sunni Arabs sitting at that table, or else.

Al-Hayat reports that the Allawi government threatened some mosque preachers with arrest if they continued to agitate against participation in the elections and to instigate violence against the multinational troops. A number, it says, were in fact arrested, including an aide to the young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. He is Sheikh Hashim Abu Ghuraif, head of the Najaf office of the Sadr movement.

Meanwhile, another wave of violence washed over Iraq on Thursday, leaving 19 dead, including a US serviceman and an Iraqi national guardsman, along with Iraqi civilians killed by a car bomb in Baghdad and by roadside explosives north of the capital.



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

27 Killed in Iraq Violence, 3 US Soldiers Wounded

Wire services report that some 27 persons were known to be killed in violent incidents in Iraq on Wednesday, though this number seems likely to be a fraction of the true total.

The Bahrain Daily News says, "A suicide attacker drove his bomb-laden car into a US convoy during fierce fighting in the town of Beiji, 250km north of Baghdad, killing 10 people and wounding 12, including three American soldiers." Fighting between the US and local guerrillas in Ramadi caused the deaths of 7 persons and wounded 13.

US warplanes continued to strike targets in Fallujah, though the US maintained that most of the city was now under their control.

In a chilling incident, over 60 police trainees were kidnapped from their hotel near the Jordanian border (they were returning from training in Amman) and were held by guerrillas for a few hours before being released. Dozens of police trainees had been ambushed and brutally killed on October 24. A lot of these young men appear to be Shiites, and that was true in the earlier incident, so that there is an element of Sunni-Shiite sectarian violence here.

In response, according to al-Hayat, a militant group has been formed in mainly Shiite Basra, called the Fury Brigades, which aims at protecting Shiites moving about in the area south of Baghdad, including Latifiyah, Mahmudiyah and Iskandariyah, which they term the "Triangle of Death." This region had been largely Shiite, but Saddam had brought in a lot of Sunnis and given them the Shiites' land, so that now it is the region with perhaps the highest incidence of Sunni-Shiite violence. Having Shiite militiamen come up to the region from Basra to settle scores is a bad idea and could lead to lots of sectarian strife.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

More on Marine Mosque Killing

Iraqis continued to be furious Wednesday over the shooting by a US marine of a wounded Iraqi fighter in a mosque in Fallujah. Indeed, the Arab press in general expressed horror and outrage. Unlike US news outlets, al-Jazeera and other Arab satellite news stations actually showed the prisoner being shot, which made the footage more powerful. Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that both the Iraqi interim government and the Arab League have condemned the mosque shooting and demanded the perpetrator be tried.

US veterans and military justice experts were less willing to jump to judgment. They point out that the full context is not apparent from the snippet of film. This second team of Marines had not known that a previous team had left these wounded guerrillas in the mosque for subsequent medical pick-up, and appear to have assumed that they were active combatants and that one of them was a suicide bomber only pretending to be dead. Such contextualization and nuance were not part of the debate in the Arab press.

Readers have written me on all sides of this issue. Some have insisted that the wounded guerrillas were not technically prisoners of war, as I had termed them, and that the US marine's action cannot be judged until we have all the facts.

Others expressed surprise that I declined to accept any comparison between the US Marine Corps and the guerrillas who beheaded aid worker Margaret Hassan. (!) I kid you not. They actually wanted to put them on the same plane.

Let me just clarify my comments. First of all, I did not say that the Iraq war was a legitimate war. It was not. It violated the charter of the United Nations.

What I said was that the role of the US military and other multinational forces in Iraq is now legitimate because it was explicitly sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council. This is true. Many readers appear to have forgotten all about UN SC Resolution 1546 (2004), which was adopted unanimously. Here is what the Security Council said about the issue at hand:

“9. Notes that the presence of the multinational force in Iraq is at the request of the incoming Interim Government of Iraq and therefore reaffirms the authorization for the multinational force under unified command established under resolution 1511 (2003), having regard to the letters annexed to this resolution;

“10. Decides that the multinational force shall have the authority to take all necessary measures to contribute to the maintenance of security and stability in Iraq in accordance with the letters annexed to this resolution expressing, inter alia, the Iraqi request for the continued presence of the multinational force and setting out its tasks, including by preventing and deterring terrorism, so that, inter alia, the United Nations can fulfil its role in assisting the Iraqi people as outlined in paragraph seven above and the Iraqi people can implement freely and without intimidation the timetable and program for the political process and benefit from reconstruction and rehabilitation activities;

“11. Welcomes, in this regard, the letters annexed to this resolution stating, inter alia, that arrangements are being put in place to establish a security partnership between the sovereign Government of Iraq and the multinational force and to ensure coordination between the two, and notes also in this regard that Iraqi security forces are responsible to appropriate Iraqi ministers, that the Government of Iraq has authority to commit Iraqi security forces to the multinational force to engage in operations with it, and that the security structures described in the letters will serve as the fora for the Government of Iraq and the multinational force to reach agreement on the full range of fundamental security and policy issues, including policy on sensitive offensive operations, and will ensure full partnership between Iraqi security forces and the multinational force, through close coordination and consultation;

So, the Marines at Fallujah are operating in accordance with a UNSC Resolution and have all the legitimacy in international law that flows from that. The Allawi government asked them to undertake this Fallujah mission.

To compare them to the murderous thugs who kidnapped CARE worker Margaret Hassan, held her hostage, terrified her, and then killed her is frankly monstrous. The multinational forces are soldiers fighting a war in which they are targetting combatants and sometimes accidentally killing innocents. The hostage-takers are terrorists deliberately killing innocents. It is simply not the same thing.

Now, I don't like the timing of the Fallujah mission. I don't like all the mistakes made along the way, which produced this operation. I don't like its tactics. I don't like the way it put so many civilians in harm's way. I don't like the violations of international law (targetting the hospital, turning away the Red Crescent, killing wounded and disarmed combatants), etc. I protest the latter. I don't know enough about military affairs to offer an alternative on the former issues, and don't mind admitting my technical ignorance. You can't do everything.

But the basic idea of attacking the guerrillas holding up in that city is not in and of itself criminal or irresponsible. A significant proportion of the absolutely horrible car bombings that have killed hundreds and thousands of innocent Iraqis, especially Shiites, were planned and executed from Fallujah. There were serious and heavily armed forces in Fallujah planning out ways of killing hundreds to prevent elections from being held in January. These are mass murderers, serial murderers. If they were fighting only to defend Fallujah, that would be one thing; even the Marines would respect them for that. They aren't, or at least, a significant proportion of them aren't. They are killing civilians elsewhere in order to throw Iraq into chaos and avoid the enfranchisement of the Kurds and Shiites.

Some of my readers still want good guys and bad guys, white hats and black hats. That's not the way the world is. It is often grey, and very bleak.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Election Boycott Announced

Forty-seven Iraqi political parties, including many with a religious base, have announced that they will boycott the planned January elections. They met at the Umm al-Qura mosque in Baghdad under the auspices of the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars and its allies among Sunni fundamentalists, but they were joined by 8 Shiite parties and one Christian one. The Iraqi Turkmen Front and the People's Union Party (Communist) also joined in the boycott. Mazen Ghazi writes:

' The communiqué . . . said the January election does not speak for the Iraqi people as long as it is “imposed” by the US-backed interim government and rejected by a clear majority of political and religious powers.

' The participants warned that the current wave of massive US raids across Iraq threatened the territorial integrity of the country and would virtually prove as futile the outcome of the upcoming election.

“The US raids against An-Najaf, Karbala, Samarra, Mosul, Baghdad and more recently Fallujah represent an obstacle to the political participation in the occupied country,” read the final statement. The conference further called the US offensive into Fallujah a “genocide”. '

The minor Shiite cleric Mahmud al-Hasani in Karbala, a leader of the Sadr tendency, had been agitating for a boycott, a movement that ended in violence with followers of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and the arrest of seven of al-Hasani's aides. Several leading members of the Association of Muslim Scholars have also been arrested by the Americans. Is there an unwritten law that calling for an election boycott in Iraq is illegal?

Even with all the massive violence going on in the country, some 3,000 angry Iraqis demonstrated in front of the Green Zone on Wednesday, demanding the release of al-Hasani's followers. AP said, that Hassani's ' spokesman Maath al-Zargawi told The Associated Press . . . [that] the seven had been arrested from Ayatollah al-Hassani's offices in Karbala, Amarah, Shamiya, and Diwaniya . . . "We call on the coalition forces to free them," Zargawi said. He said the office did not know the reason for their arrests. '

Al-Hasani is a minor leader of a splinter group of the Sadr movement. What of the Sadrists as a whole? BBC Monitoring picked up from Iraqi Al-Diyar television on Nov. 16 the following: "Hashim al-Musawi, one of aides to Al-Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr, has stressed that the Al-Sadr current will suspend its support for and participation in the forthcoming elections in protest of the incursion into Al-Fallujah city. In front of hundreds of worshippers outside Al-Kufah Mosque . . . he said that the US forces had violated all human values and concepts agreed upon by the Geneva Convention. Al-Musawi appealed to the international community and the Arab League to intervene in halting these practices, which exceeded all limits."

Muqtada is reportedly in fact negotiating with Sistani over how many seats his movement will get if it joins a united Shiite list, so it strikes me that this statement is more likely piece of bargaining with Sistani than a genuine boycott threat.

Adil Awadh of the American Sawa radio service for Iraq, interviewed Hussein Shahristani a politician very close to Grand Ayatollah Sistani, in Arabic. Shahristani warned against any delay in holding the elections in January, saying that it would lead to a rapid further deterioration in the security situation. He admitted that if the Sunnis did boycott and ended up being unrepresented in the parliament, that development would call for redress. (He did not specify any concrete way of addressing the problem). But he said that the redress had to come after the elections, and that the mere prospect of such an unrepresentative outcome should not preven the elections from taking place.

Ordinarily, election boycotts just backfire on the boycotters and are not a cause for concern. But if the Sunni Arabs boycott in large numbers, they can derail the entire electoral process and spike the writing of a new constitution, so this campaign is significant and even fateful. I am not as sanguine as Dr. Shahristani that a massive Sunni boycott could be compensated for after the event. Even legally, how could that work? The temporary constitution makes no such provision.

That the boycott move has some Shiite participation is interesting but not very relevant, since most Shiites will come out to vote if Sistani tells them to, and a rejectionist minority will just leave itself voiceless. That would not in itself sink the process. It is the Sunnis who can ruin the elections by not showing up.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraqi Press Reaction to Fallujah Mosque Killing

Al-Hayat: (trans. J. Cole): "The killing of a wounded Iraqi in a Fallujah mosque by an American Marine and the killing of the Iraqi-British hostage Margaret Hassan epitomize the battle taking place in Iraq. As the American military began its investigation of the marine's motives, an Islamic group broadcast a cassette of the slaughter of the female hostage."

"The American forces announced that they had established control over "all of Fallujah," affording the opportunity to Iraqis to gather up the bodies of the dead from the streets. At the same time, the battle shifted to Mosul, in hopes of taking it back from the gunmen who had taken control of its police stations. Gen. George Casey, commander of the US military in Iraq, said that his troops had come upon 15 foreign fighters in Fallujah among 1000 fighters who were all Iraqi. This statement contradicted American and Iraqi official pronouncements that had insisted that it was foreign fighters who had plunged into battle in the city."

I was initially a little surprised that al-Hayat (a Saudi-funded daily published from London, which is generally moderate with regard to attitudes to the US) paired the killing of Margaret Hassan with the killing of a wounded prisoner in Fallujah in this way. It seemed to take the edge off the rawness of the murder of the prisoner, to say that there are bad characters on the Iraqi side, as well.

But as I thought about it, it became clear to me that the author had put the marines and the Sunni Arab guerrillas who murder their hostages on the same level. Since I am after all an American, this equation seemed to me eminently unfair. The guerrillas in Fallujah were responsible for a lot of bombings and killings of innocent civilians in Iraq, which involved deliberately targetting and killing, e.g. Shiites. The Marines are, in contrast, a legitimate miliary force that is operating in Iraq with UN sanction. I personally think that the assault on Fallujah was problematic, ethically and politically. But it doesn't put the Marines in Zarqawi's camp!

The announcement by Iraqi state minister Qasim Daoud that the number of captured fighters stands at 1052 (with 1600 killed) underlines the point I made yesterday, that the murdering of prisoners is not a generalized practice.

Jim Crane of AP expresses healthy skepticism about the US military's hopes of making friends in Fallujah after they had flattened parts of the city. He also predicts that information about the true extent of civilian casualties will start coming out soon, when the Marines' grip on the city lightens.

The Boston Globe reports that the Baath Party had reconstituted itself in Mosul and was behind that city's recent insurrection. The US troops fought on Tuesday to retake police stations in the city of over a million. It appears that most Mosul police defected to the guerrillas.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sistani urges Iraqis to put aside Narrow Interests

Al-Hayat, Ja`far al-Ahmar: The battle of Fallujah uncovered some of the fissures, contradictions, and crticisms that had not been admitted by any local, Arab or regional party. The reaction to the American assault on Fallujah has been muted among Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and other major Shiite clerics, leading to angry editorials in the Arabic press decrying "silence" and "collaboration with the Americans in implementing their crimes in Fallujah."

A source close to Sistani says that "Those who criticize Sistani and others among the grand ayatollahs, for what they allege is silence concerning the events in Fallujah, are only attempting to accomplish ulterior motives by their allegations, which bear no relation to what is happening in Fallujah."

Later he defended Sistani himself, saying that such comments smelled of partisanship (i.e. were driven by the hate of Sunnis toward Shiites).

Hamza Hendawi gives us an excellent overview of Sistani's attempts to create a single Shiite list to contest elections, which includes all the major Shiite parties. Hendawi's report makes it seem as though Sistani may well succeed, though he may have to accept fewer slots for independents than he had envisaged, and Muqtada al-Sadr is demanding a larger share of the pie for his party.

He notes that Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, head of the Iraqi National Accord, a mixed Sunni-Shiite group of ex-Baathists, is insisting on running alone rather than as part of the Sistani list. (This strategy will probably ensure that Allawi either isn't elected to parliament or is isolated there, since his little party will do poorly compared to Sistani's multi-party list).


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Powell's Resignation

Colin Powell's resignation as secretary of state may be a more important development than meets the eye.

It could be argued that he has been so marginalized and ineffective that he might as well resign, and that it makes no difference whether he is in office or not. Powell wanted to devote great energy to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after September 11, and for a brief moment seemed to have Bush's ear, but then Bush capitulated to hard line Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Powell was never able to make any headway. At one point Bush even sent Condi out to meet with Middle East leaders, which one would have thought would be the job of the secretary of state, not of national security adviser.

Powell was not enthusiastic about a war on Iraq, and his own doctrine called for the US to go in with massive force if it did go in. Instead, Rumsfeld sent in only 100,000 troops, laying the ground for the subsequent disaster. But you get no credit in Washington for having been right. You only get credit if you win the policy battle, regardless of how it turns out. Powell almost never did.

Powell was sent to the UN Security Council to read a lot of shaky charges against the Saddam regime. Indeed, Powell is said to have thrown out the charge of attempted uranium purchases from Niger, saying "I'm not reading this garbage." But he read enough garbage to sink his reputation for probity and solidness. The UN security council was openly derisive of his speech, to the extent that one UN official bet me there couldn't be a war after that disastrous performance. I told him the war had been decided long ago. He should give the money to charity if he ever remembers the bet. I don't want it.

But insiders in Washington have told me enough stories about Powell victories behind the scenes that I am not sure the marginalization argument is decisive. Powell had an alliance with UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, and the two of them could sometimes derail the wilder plans of the Department of Defense. Blair, and probably Powell, convinced Bush to fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan before going on to an Iraq war. Imagine how dangerous the situation would be if the US were bogged down in Iraq as it is now, but Bin Laden's 40 training camps were still going full steam!

Likewise, I have it on good authority that Powell and Blair derailed a Department of Defense plan to install Ahmad Chalabi as a soft dictator in Iraq within 6 months of the fall of Saddam. Jay Garner had been given this charge, and Powell was able to get Paul Bremer in, instead, with a charge to keep the country out of Chalabi's corrupt hands.

So at some crucial junctures, Powell has played an essential role in ensuring the implementation of a more sensible policy. Without him in the administration, hotter heads may well prevail.

I saw Lawrence Eagleburger on CNN Monday evening say that he thought Condi Rice was not right for Secretary of State because she had been in the White House for four years and, he implied, would be incapable of offering George W. Bush independent advice. Eagleburger was secretary of state very briefly at the end of the Bush senior administration, succeeding James Baker, with whom he continued to have an association. Eagleburger has been critical of the Neoconservatives, and I suspect he feels that Dr. Rice will be no counterweight to them whatsoever.

Rice seems to me to have two major drawbacks as Secretary of State beyond her inability to challenge Bush's pet projects. One is that she is an old Soviet hand who still thinks in Cold War terms. She focuses on states and does not understand the threat of al-Qaeda, nor does she understand or empathize with Middle Easterners, about whom she appears to know nothing after all this time. The other drawback is that she is virtually a cheerleader for Ariel Sharon and will not be an honest broker between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Powell was much more fair on such issues, though he wasn't exactly pro-Palestinian either. Of course, with Elliot Abrams as the national security council staffer in charge of Arab-Israeli things, you might as well have Sharon just run US Middle East policy himself.

If the second Bush term is going to be mainly full of Fallujahs, though, I suppose Colin is well out of it. Seeing the iron fist lowered over and over again to little political advantage would be the more depressing the closer you were to the decision-making process.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sunni Arab Regions in Flames

Heavy fighting continued in Fallujah on Monday, according to Reuters, as some guerrillas there demonstrated that they would fight to the death.

Meanwhile, police stations were attacked in Baqubah and Buhriz in the east, and in Suwairah south of Baghdad. The fighting in Baqubah was so heavy that the US at one point dropped two 500 pound bombs on the guerrillas. Hundreds of people gathered in northeast Baqubah to protest the continued US presence in Iraq, demanding that the foreign troops go home.

Fighting broke out in Baiji, Ramadi and parts of Baghdad, as well. A Mosul oil installation was also attacked, and so was a US convoy near the city, and there appears to have been some fighting inside Mosul on Monday (a US general insisted that the situation there wasn't "desperate." OK.) In general the Sunni Arab regions of the country appear to be in virtual chaos.

Propaganda reared its ugly head on several occasions. US-installed CIA asset Iyad Allawi, the "prime minister," said he was sure there had been no civilian casualties in Fallujah. Allawi is gradually revealing himself as the pro-American twin of Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, "Baghdad Bob," who used to deny that US troops were in Baghdad even though journalists could see the tanks over his shoulder. Now Allawi wants to deny that residents of a city that has been invaded and crushed managed to escape without a scratch unless they were active guerrillas. Col. Mike Shupp joined in this vaudeville act, denying that there was a humanitarian crisis in Fallujah or that there was a need for Red Crescent aid.

Let's say there were only 30,000 civilians left in Fallujah, out of 250,000 or so residents as of last year. Given the kind of aerial bombardment, tank and artillery fire the city has taken, it is impossible that there aren't civilian casualties, and probably quite substantial ones. In addition, some reports speak of Marines using heat detectors and shooting at any buildings they think inhabited. Eyewitnesses speak of bodies lying in the street everywhere.

The generally pro-American Saudi daily, Asharq al-Awsat, has a long piece on the sufferings of civilians in Fallujah, based on telephone interviews and eyewitness accounts by Iraqis. The article is extremely suspicious of American motives in having taken the Fallujah hospitals and in having kept the Red Crescent and other aid agencies away from the city. Do they want to get rid of all the bodies lying in the streets before anyone sees them, the article asks.

As for the apparent murder of a wounded guerrilla by a Marine, it was horrible. I fear that the attitude of the other troops, which wasn't exactly shock, suggests that these sorts of murders of prisoners are not uncommon. (But they are not universal, or else there wouldn't be 400 prisoners. There would be no prisoners.) It does concern me that the wounded and bleeding guerrillas were just stacked up in that mosque awaiting medical attention, apparently for days. If there are many prisoners treated that way, then there really is an issue here with regard to US military policy. And, what is the difference between letting them bleed to death and putting a bullet in their heads? Col. Shupp might want to reconsider his position that the Red Crescent is unneeded.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat writes of Fallujah, and I paraphrase: Whatever the number of families that stayed in Fallujah, they are suffering now from lack of food, water, and aid. Although the US and Iraqi military authorities insist they have taken the city with the exception of some pockets of resistance, they refuse to allow Red Crescent aid trucks even into the areas they say they control. It is not known if the reason for this refusal is to prevent the "pockets of resistance" from getting hold of some food, or if it is because they want to get the bodies off the streets before the Red Crescent comes in, so as to avoid shocking the aid workers.

One man said in a telephone interview, from the Dubat Quarter, "Our situation is very bad . . . We have no food or water. My seven children al have bad diarrhea." He added, "there are corpses lying in the street." He said he knew of 6 families in a similar situation nearby, and broke into tears. "We are still fasting, even though the Eid came on Sunday. God is Great, God is Great." (This phrase pulls at the heartstrings among Muslims, given that the fasting month of Ramadan has a holy aura.)

The article describes a family that buried its 9-year-old son in a garden after he was shot and killed (implying that a lot of the dead cannot even be accounted for easily).

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Fallujah and the Aftermath

In Baiji on Sunday, clashes between US troops and guerrillas left 12 Iraqis dead and 25 wounded.

Most Americans do not realize that Fallujah is celebrated in Iraqi history and poetry for its defiance of the British in the Great Rebellion of 1920. The 1920 revolution against the British is key to modern Iraqi history. One of the guerrilla groups taking hostages named itself the "1920 Revolution Brigades." Western journalists who don't know Iraqi history have routinely mistranslated the name of this group.

For the history of Fallujah in anti-colonialism, see Rashid Khalidi's article in In These Times.

Meanwhile, The Guardian hints around that the number of civilian casualties in the US assault on the city is enormous and will only come out as hospital authorities begin counting the dead and wounded.

Karl Vicks reports concerning the outbreaks of violence in several Sunni Arab cities that:

"The most immediate concern for the interim government is manpower. Iraq has no more than eight battalions of the newly trained troops, whose main job is to occupy cities after U.S. forces defeat insurgents. Duty in Samarra and Fallujah, which have about a half million people between them, already was stretching that force thin. Adding duty in Mosul "means you're operating right out on the edge of what forces you have -- Iraqi forces," the U.S. official said.

American forces may be stretched thin as well. A battalion deployed outside Fallujah raced back to its Mosul base when insurgents struck, attacking in groups as large as 50 at a time, numbers not previously seen in the city, said Lt. Col. Paul Hastings of Task Force Olympia, the brigade that in February replaced a much larger unit, the 101st Airborne Division."

Mr. Vicks seems unaccountably elated at the news of Shiite tribal warriors attacking Sunni guerrillas in the Latifiyah area. There has already been some Sunni-Shiite violence in that region, a phenomenon thankfully somewhat rare so far, and it isn't a good sign if it escalates.

One of two Iraqi vice presidents, Kurdish politician Barham Salih, has admitted that elections might be postponed because of the poor security situation. In my view, his statement should be taken as a sign of nervousness on the part of the Kurds at the outcome. If the Sunni Arabs boycott, you could well see most of the 275 seats going to Shiites, with perhaps 35 or so for the Kurds. They would be a small, Sunni minority and could not depend on Sunni Arab allies to slow the Shiite legislative juggernaut. It may well be this prospect of a tyranny of the Shiite majority that frightened Salih into his statement (which is not supported by any major policy makers, and which is opposed by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.

I was talking to an Iraqi government official and I complained that if the Sunni Arabs boycott the January elections, it would be a disaster. He said that UN officials believe a boycott is unlikely, based on experience in Peru and elsewhere.

But actually, the Bahrain Shiites boycotted the first free elections to be held in years, as a result of which the parliament is dominated by Sunni fundamentalists. The same thing could happen in Iraq in reverse. And, if it does happen, it will be the nail in the coffin for any legitimacy for the next Iraqi government.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Member of Parliament Assassinated
Bombs go off in Baghdad

AP rounds up Saturday's events in Iraq. Explosions went off in Baghdad and at the Green Zone, apparently not far from caretaker Prime Miniter Iyad Allawi.

Guerrillas at Mosul detonated a car bomb as an Iraqi national guard unit from Kirkuk went by, injuring seven of them.

Guerrillas at largely Turkmen Tel Afar also clashed with US troops.

The US arrested 4 Sunni clerics from the Association of Muslim Scholars.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that a Communist representative in the 100-member National Council in Iraq, which serves as a sort of interim parliament, was assassinated while traveling in the north near Kirkuk on Saturday. This would be like a senator being assassinated in the United States.
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Regionalist Model for Iraq

Fred Kaplan at Slate discusses the proposal of former Iraqi national security adviser Muwaffaq al-Rubaie for consolidating the 18 Iraqi provinces into 5-- one Kurdish, two Sunni Arab, and two Shiite.

As Kaplan notes, I myself dislike this idea. It has the advantage of possibly mollifying the Kurds, who really want a "Kurdistan." But it has many disadvantages. First of all, "Kurdistan" will either include Turkmen and Christian areas, and the city of Kirkuk, or it will not. If it does, that will cause a lot of trouble with the Turkmen and Christians (both of whom generally fear and despise the Kurds). If it doesn't, that could cause trouble from the Kurdish side. Better to leave the provinces like they are.

Another consideration is that multi-ethnic countries with just a few, largely ethnic, provinces, are at greater risk for civil war and breaking up than are countries that have large numbers of mixed-ethnic provinces. Creating Rubaie's 5 provinces now may contain the seeds of Iraqi civil war and partition in the future.

Examples of such instability include the original Pakistan, which included 5 provinces (Baluchistan, Sindh, NWFP, Pujab and East Bengal), and which broke up in 1971, with East Bengal peeling off to form Bangladesh. Or look at Nigeria and Biafra. Or Yugoslavia.

Eighteen multi-ethnic provinces would be more stable in the long run. Provinces like Diyala (with Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites), Ninevah (Christians, Turkmen, Kurds) and Baghdad (everything) are a bulwark against ethnic cleansing and the simplification of Iraq's ethnic map. Remember that if Iraq ever gets its act together, it will be a rich, industrializing country, factors that will promote high rates of mobility, mixing up the country further. So then what is the point of Rubaie's regional provinces in that case?

I am at the Chicago Humanities Fair and heard Iraq's new United Nations ambassador, Feisal Istrabadi, speak on a panel. He made the same point, saying that no Iraqi political party has come out for any sort of partition, and speaking of how consolidated ethnic provinces could only be produced through a sort of ethnic cleansing.

There is some ethnic tension in some places (Sunni/Shiite around Yusufiyah, Kurdish/Turkmen in Kirkuk), but mostly Iraqis haven't been fighting each other. They have been fighting the Americans. This common foe is what gives Muqtada al-Sadr's movement something in common with the Association of Muslim Scholars.

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Mosul Chaos

Al-Hayat reported incidents all over the country. A US Black Hawk helicopter was downed near Taji (20 km northwest of Baghdad), hurting 3 of the 4-man crew. Another US serviceman was killed in Baghdad. 8 Iraqis were killed in Hilla and 5 in Kirkuk. In al-Hawijah near Kirkuk, 5 persons were killed and many others wounded in clashes Friday morning between US troops and armed guerrillas.

Az-Zaman reports that telephone calls with residents of Mosul reveal that the guerrillas who took control of the city's streets the day before yesterday have burned all the police stations in the city and have released from jails all the criminals that had been incarcerated in them. In the center of Mosul, eyewitnesses said, the offices of government service agencies and economic targets had been set ablaze. A number of shops were attacked and/or looted.

Armed men roamed the streets and manned checkpoints between city quarters. Mosque preachers called on Mosul residents to flood into the streets to protect their quarters and government offices and shops. The main streets seemed deserted. American troops had withdrawn from the center of the city, but maintained control of bridges.

All signs of Iraqi national guardsmen and police had disappeared. The police chief of Ninevah province resigned (other reports say he was fired by the Allawi government).

US military spokesmen denied that guerrillas were in control of the city, and maintained that US troops and Iraqi national guardsmen continued to advance into it. US warplanes repeatedly bombed suspected safe houses of the guerrillas. Guerrillas had killed one American serviceman in Mosul on Thursday.

A troubling bit of ethnic politics emerged when it became apparent that the remaining Iraqi troops fighting alongside the Americans against guerrillas in Mosul were mostly Kurds. Mosul, a city of about 1 million, is largely Sunni Arab but is up north near the Kurdish areas. Arab-Kurdish relations hit a new nadir at the news, and AP reported that "Gunmen attacked the headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party in an hourlong battle that a party official said left six assailants dead." This attack on the PUK HQ was probably in revenge for the Kurdish national guardsmen cooperating with US troops.

AP also reports, 'in a telephone interview with Al-Jazeera television, Saif al-Deen al-Baghdadi, an official of the insurgents' political office, urged militants to fight U.S. forces outside Fallujah. "I call upon the scores or hundreds of the brothers from the mujahedeen ... to press the American forces outside . . . We chose the path of armed jihad and say clearly that ridding Iraq of the occupation will not be done by ballots. Ayad Allawi's government ... represents the fundamentalist right-wing of the White House and not the Iraqi people.'' '

That the context for the current fighting is in part the upcoming elections in January is clear from al-Baghdadi's statement. The guerrillas and other forces are rejecting such participation, and the question is whether they can win over the generality of Sunni Arabs to their rejectionist point of view.

On a lighter note, it is hard to avoid observing that al-Baghdadi castigated Bush's administration as "fundamentalist" and "right-wing." When even the Sunni Salafis of Mosul consider you too fundamentalist and right-wing, you have probably gone too far.

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Sistani calls for Peaceful Resolution of Fallujah Crisis

Az-Zaman: Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, th leading Shiite spiritual authority, called Friday for a peaceful resolution of the conflict in Fallujah. His representative in Karabala, Ahmad al-Safi al-Najafi, said that the position of the grand ayatollah toward the bloody events in some regions of Iraq is that a peaceful resolution of the conflict is requird. Speaking before thousands of worshippers at the Mosque of Imam Husain in Karbala, he said that the grand ayatollah had the same attitude to the fighting in Fallujah as he had had to that in Najaf, that is, the implementation of a peaceful solution on the basis of the sovereignty of the regime, law, and the evacuation of foreign forces and of gunmen with unlicensed arms. Sistani also condemned all loss of innocent life.

Sistani has been criticized recently for not speaking out against US attacks on Sunnis in the way he had with regard to Najaf, a Shiite center. Sistani likes to present himself as concerned for the welfare of all Iraqis, not just of his Shiite followers. But he has only called for peace in Fallujah when the fighting is already largely over with. That move will look cynical to a lot of Sunni Arabs.

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Dylan Still Subversive?

It is a good thing that Bob Dylan has US citizenship, otherwise he might be in the same fix as Cat Stevens (a.k.a. Yusuf Islam). The mere singing of a 1963 song, "Masters of War," at a Colorado High School brought in the Secret Police.

Now we know why Usamah Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri haven't been caught. The US security services are busy sifting through old lyrics looking for the real terrorists. I suggest that they take another look at the Buffalo Springfield.

This is not a new activity. You would be shocked at how many FBI hours were logged trying to find obscenities in the slurred lyrics of Richard Berry's "Louie, Louie" once upon a time. I kid you not.

The bad news for Dylan? The (un-)"Patriot Act II" allows the government to strip people of their US citizenship.

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Levine on Arafat: Guest Editorial

The Death of Arafat and the Myth of New Beginnings

Guest editorial by Mark LeVine, Professor of modern Middle Eastern history at UC Irvine, author of Overthrowing Geography: Jaffa, Tel Aviv and the Struggle for Palestine (Berkeley: University of California Press) and Why They Don't Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the Axis of Evil (forthcoming, Oneworld Publications.)

In the weeks leading up to Palestinian President Yassir Arafat’s death American politicians and pundits have repeatedly called on the Palestinian people to use the opportunity of his passing to transform the intifada from a violent uprising into a non-violent, democratic and pragmatic program for achieving independence. This is very good advice, needless to say, except for one small problem: Palestinians have been trying to build such a movement for the last two decades, and the Israeli Government, IDF and American policy-makers have done everything possible to make sure it could not be heeded.

One of the first exponents of Palestinian non-violence the Palestinian-American doctor Mubarak Awad, founded the Palestinian Centre for the Study of Nonviolence in 1985. His innovative ideas and training of Palestinians in the tactics of non-violent resistance to the occupation was considered dangerous enough by Israel that it expelled him from the land of his birth in 1988. During the same period, the government supported the rise to power of militant religious groups such as Hamas as a counterweight to the PLO (which that year recognized Israel’s right to exist).

By the time the first intifada wound down in the early 1990s Jewish/Israeli-Palestinian “dialog” or “people-to-people” groups had become all the rage, most of whom had as an important goal building relationships of trust and solidarity that could help Palestinians build a viable political future. Unfortunately, while liberal Israelis were busy sharing hummus with their new Palestinian friends successive Likud and Labor governments accelerated the pace of land confiscation, settlement construction and economic closure of the Territories, which ultimately left many Palestinians to wonder if all the conversation wasn’t a ruse to keep them occupied while Israel permanently secured its hold on their lands.

But mid-way through the Oslo era hope was still in the air. In January 1996 I sat on the terrace of a friend’s house in Abu Dis as about 100 meters away Yaser Arafat cast his vote in perhaps the greatest day in the history of Palestinian nationalism: the elections for the presidency and Legislative Assembly. Unfortunately, soon after the elections the CIA and Shin Bet began what seemed like weekly meetings with the “security” officials of the Palestinian Authority. The stated reasons were always to “coordinate security;” the real reason was to make sure the new Assembly was still born because newly elected legislators promised to investigate PA corruption and push for a final settlement more in line with the desire of Palestinian society.

Needless to say, the Assembly didn’t make it. In its place, however, Hamas did quite well, precisely because it constituted perhaps the only powerful voice of dissent against the emerging status quo of corruption and continued occupation.

Since the outbreak of the “al-Aksa intifada” in September 2000 most Palestinians I know--and increasingly, their comrades in the Israeli peace movement--have exerted incredible energy trying to build grass roots non violent movements that could somehow check the inexorable advance of the occupation and the slow death of the national dream of an independent state. The response by the Israeli military has often been brutal. Not just Palestinian activists, but foreign peace activists and even Israelis are routinely beaten, arrested, deported, and even killed by the IDF, with little fear that the Government of Israel would pay a political price for crushing non-violent resistance with violent means.

In this environment the very act of going about ones daily life without losing all hope and “joining Hamas” (something former Prime Minister Barak admitted he would have done if he were Palestinian) has become perhaps the supreme, if unheralded, act of non-violence against the occupation. The Israeli Government is quite aware of this, which is why it does its best to make daily life as difficult as possible for Palestinians.

Not surprisingly considering this dynamic, a poll I helped direct earlier this year revealed that Hamas has now surpassed the PLO as the most popular Palestinian political movement. But what of the courageous Palestinians who still believe in non-violence, who are risking their lives working with Israeli peace activists to fulfill the fading Oslo dream of two states living side by side in peace? We could ask this question to Ahmed Awad, founder of the non-violent Committee for the Popular Struggle against the Separation Fence, which has brought Palestinian and Israeli activists together in a relatively successful campaign to redirect the separation wall away from local olive groves. In the process his group has become a model for grass-roots, non-violent struggle.

Unfortunately, we’d have to wait at least three months for an answer, as Awad has just been jailed without charge by a military court on the accusation he constituted a “threat to security.” The judge who handed down the order hoped that his detention would lead him to “turn away from th[is] bad road with its unhappy ending,” although its hard to see whom his stated goal of “letting the world understand that there can be coexistence between us and the Jews” threatened. In the meantime, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports that the army has stepped up violence and aggression against protesters in order to enable the fence to proceed along its original route.

And on it goes. As the Bush Administration and America’s pundocracy search for a new generation of pragmatic and non-violent Palestinian leaders, they should be heartened to know that they won’t have to look very hard to find them. But that’s because so many are either in the hospital, jail or exile. And like Arafat shriveling away in his besieged Muqata’a (which will now be his tomb), the Palestinian peace movement will continue to wither as long as Israel is more comfortable confronting Hamas than Ahmed Awad.

Mark Levine
Associate Professor of History
Department of History
Murray Krieger Hall
Irvine, CA 92697-3275

email: mlevine a_t_ uci d o t edu
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17 Dead in Baghdad Bombing
Fallujah, Mosul and Raids on AMS

The Washington Post reports that the wave of violence in the Sunni Arab heartland continued unrelentingly on Thursday. A bomb at Sadoun Street in Baghdad left 17 dead. There was more fighting (quite sophisticated) in Mosul. Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that guerrillas burned 6 police stations, in response to which US war planes bombed the city.

The Washington Post admitted of Baghdad, the capital, "On Wednesday, U.S. forces were assaulted 66 times by gunfire, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, roadside bombs or car bombs."

Hannah Allam and Yasser Salihi discuss the US military raids on the houses of prominent leaders of the Association of Muslim Scholars, including Hareth al-Dhari, on Thursday. Al-Dhari is among the more popular Sunni Arab leaders, and has called for a boycott of the January elections, as well as vocally denouncing the US assault on Fallujah.

Later on Thursday, the US arrested Sheikh Mahdi al-Sumaidi, a leader of the Salafi (Sunni fundamentalist) movement, who had denounced Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani for declining to intervene in the Fallujah crisis. He had also apparently called for armed resistance against the Americans. The Americans raided the Ibn Taymiyah Mosque to get him (Ibn Taymiyah was a medieval preacher who tried to convince Muslims to be intolerant.)

Sistani's silence has been thunderous, as has that of most other Shiite leaders with the exception of Muqtada al-Sadr. Tellingly, there have been no sympathy demonstrations in cities like Basra or Nasiriyah. The Shiites know that the guerrillas in Fallujah had mostly supported Saddam, and that they are responsible for attacks on Shiites. Only if this fissure were overcome could an Iraqi nationalist movement emerge. Until then, the US can successfully divide and rule.

For more on Fallujah see Mark Levine's op-ed at Tomdispatch.com and Tom Engelhardt's trenchant introduction.


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Wave of Violence in Sunni North Leads at least 28 Dead

US Marines moved into most of Fallujah on Wednesday, though they were still meeting pockets of resistance.

The Fallujah fighting has killed fair numbers of Iraqi noncombatants, including Shaikh Abdul Wahhab al-Janabi of the respected Association of Muslim Scholars.

Armed clashes broke out in several northern Iraqi cities on Wednesday, leaving some 22 persons dead in Mosul, Baiji, and Tuz. Hundreds of persons mounted demonstrations against the Fallujah campaign in Tikrit and Huwaijah, as well, according to az-Zaman. The battles and demonstrations were provoked by the US assault on Fallujah.

Guerrillas threatened to assassinate Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and Minister of Defense Hazem Shaalan in retaliation for the attack. Allawi's aged cousin and the man's wife and daughter-in-law were abducted and guerrillas threaten to behead them if the Fallujah compaign is not stopped. In Iraqi society, PM Allawi is responsible for protecting his clan, including especially his first cousins, so this kidnapping makes him look weak and brings substantial shame on him.

The US Marines took most of Fallujah Wednesday, but still face pockets of resistance. If Samarra and other cities are any guide, those pockets of resistance could go on bedeviling the US for some time to come.

The intrepid Ed Wong of the NYT has more on the Sunni boycott of the elections. He reports that the Iraqi Islamic Party, which had earlier been absolutely committed to getting out the Sunni vote, is now wavering and saying their position will depend on the situation. The outbreak of demonstrations and violence throughout the Sunni Arab regions on Wednesday did not bode well for Sunni participation in the January elections.

Jim Lobe has more on the political implications of the Fallujah assault, both in Iraq and in Washington.

For some black satire on Fallujah, see Unconfirmed Sources which has some fun with my Weblog.

[Am at a conference and can't blog much right now but will try to catch up the next couple of days.]

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23 US Troops Killed in 2 Days
Guerrilla and Civilian Toll Unknown


Associated Press surveys developments on Tuesday, including the deaths of 10 US troops in the fighting at Fallujah along with 2 Iraqi National Guardsmen. 11 troops had been killed on Monday, though the military spokesman did not give details.

The US continued to bombard the city heavily, destroying buildings and the Abbasi Restaurant. A US military spokesman estimated the number of guerrillas dead as a result of the bombing and of artillery fire at 90. Fallujah hospital said that 12 civilians had been killed and 17 wounded.

CNN was reporting on Tuesday afternoon that the US troops had taken about 1/3 of Fallujah, which suggests that they are meeting very heavy resistance. The fighting is much harder here than it was at Baghdad during the war! Al-Hayat Wednesday morning was saying via AFP that US troops had reached the center of the city.

Al-Hayat reports that in Baqubah, guerrillas attacked two police stations, killing 25 policemen, with 4 guerrillas killed; many persons were wounded.

In Mosul, guerrillas fired mortar rounds at a US base, killing two US troops.

A curfew was maintained in Baghdad. In some Sunni Arab cities, government offices closed altogether.

AP says

" A group of Iraqi Sunni clerics called for a boycott of the election. The vote is being held ''over the corpses of those killed in Fallujah,'' said Harith al-Dhari, director of the Association of Muslim Clerics. A major Sunni political party quit the interim Iraqi government in protest over the U.S. assault."

The AMS blamed PM Allawi for what it characterized as the bloodletting in Fallujah: "The interim Government of [Prime Minister] Iyad Allawi bears full legal and historical responsibility for the war of annihilation Fallujah is exposed to today at the hands of the occupation forces and militias of some parties in the interim Government." The Association of Muslim Scholars [or clerics] has been calling for a boycott of the election for some months, but had been opposed by other Sunni parties that felt it was crucial for the Sunni voice to be heard. At this point, the AMS appears to be winning the argument. Harith Al-Dhari, by the way, is quite popular among Sunni Muslims, and had a 25% favorability rating in the September poll by the International Republican Institute. Since Sunni Arabs are only 16-20% of the population, that means all Sunnis like him and so do some Shiites or Kurds.

The Iraqi Islamic Party headed by Muhsin Abdul Hamid, formally pulled out of the Allawi government over the assault on Fallujah on Tuesday. The IIP is less popular than the AMS, but had tended to cooperate with the Americans (Abdul Hamid had served on the Interim Governing Council under Paul Bremer).

Al-Hayat says that the Iraqi Islamic Party had expelled from its ranks Hajim al-Hasani, the Minister of Industry, because he declined to resign from Allawi's cabinet as demanded by the party leadership.

Asahi Shimbun reports that Iraqi President Ghazi al-Yawir is bitterly opposed to the Fallujah operation, and likened it to "shooting horses to kill horseflies."

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Senor Double Agent?

I have it from a source I consider reliable that the order for the arrest of Muqtada al-Sadr in early April, 2004, which came as such a surprise and threw the country into chaos for two months, came from Dan Senor. Senor is said to have acted on instructions from Neoconservatives in the Pentagon, and to have kept Paul Bremer, his putative boss, out of the loop. Bremer was presented with a fait accompli.

I speculated at the time that the Neocons came after Muqtada because he had objected so loudly to Sharon's murder of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the clerical leader of the Hamas Party (the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood). Muqtada had highlighted the assassination in his newspaper, al-Hawzah al-Natiqah, which the Coalition Provisional Authority ordered closed. And then Muqtada had promised to be the right hand of Hamas in Iraq, and to open Hamas offices all around the country.

In other words, his position was completely intolerable to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Likud Party, and their American fellow-travelers among the Neocons.

The CPA had been tempted to go after Muqtada on more than one previous occasion, but it appears that cooler heads, like Gen. John Abizaid, had prevailed.

If this story about Senor's perfidy is correct, it would shed light on a hitherto unknown fissure in the American administration of Iraq. We have long known that it was dominated by Neoconservatives, especially young persons who had applied to be interns at the American Enterprise Institute, which was apparently the recruitment pool. But I hadn't earlier heard that there may have been a difference of opinion between Bremer and his Neocon employees, many of whom had contacts inside the Pentagon that they could use to make an end-run around Bremer.

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Desertions and Church Bombings and Fallujah

The Guardian has a good overview of events on Monday in Iraq. Notable were the 6 killed and 80 wounded as a result of carbombings of churches. The poor Iraqi Chaldeans and Assyrians are as Iraqi as all other citizens, but are being targeted because they share a religion with the Americans. Also notable was the evidence for dramatic rates of desertion among Iraqi forces being committed to Fallujah.

See the important pieces by Dilip Hiro and Chalmers Johnson at Tomdispatch.com.

Am at a conference and can't write at any length today. But see item below.

Heard John Shattuck, CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation, make the argument that serious opinion polling of the American public does not find anything like a mandate for Bush doctrines like preemptive war or unilateralism.

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AMS, Sadrists forbid Fallujah Fighting as "Mortal Sin"

The Iraqi Islamic Party lead by Muhsin Abdul Hamid, has been among the few Sunni Muslim groups willing to cooperate (even if rather lukewarmly) with the Americans. It is now threatening to pull out of the Allawi caretaker government. The IIP had also been the main force urging Sunni Arabs to participate in the elections scheduled for January, and had been opposed in this stance by the Association of Muslim Scholars. That the Iraqi Islamic Party is now contemplating leaving the Allawi government raises the question of whether a mass Sunni Arab boycott of the elections is in the offing, thus fatally weakening the legitimacy of any new government.

Az-Zaman: The Association of Muslim Scholars forbade Iraqis to participate in the attack on Fallujah with the Americans. In a communique, the AMS said that for Iraqis to take part with "raiding forces" in the assault on a city, the population of which is Muslim (such as Fallujah) would be considered the most mortal of mortal sins. The Sunni AMS told Iraqis, "You sinned when you participated with occupation forces in the assault on Najaf, and beware lest you repeat this same sin in Fallujah. Remember that the Occupation is emphemeral."

The radical Shiite Sadr movement issued a statement forbidding the participation of Iraqi troops in the attack on Fallujah, as well. The statement said, "We direct an appeal at the men in the Iraqi forces, whether national guards or others, the majority of whom are Muslim, calling upon them to refrain for commiting this enormous sin under the banner of forces that do not respect our religion or any principles of basic humanity, and we ask them to view this war as illegal." It called a "ploy" the assertaion that the attack was merely on foreign fighters at Fallujah.

The convergence of views among the more militant Sunni Muslim clerics of AMS and the radical Shiites of the Sadr movement has been seen before, last spring during the initial US assault on Fallujah and during the US attack on Mahdi Army militiamen in Najaf. Most Shiites, however, are still reluctant to take major risks to support the Sunnis of Fallujah, many of whom had supported Saddam and his anti-Shiite pogroms.

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35 Killed, Including 2 Americans

The Pakistan Times does among the best jobs of summarizing the horrific news from Iraq on Sunday.

Highlights:

*Allawi declares Martial Law for 2 months. Maybe it is just me, but is it really possible to have democratic elections coming off 2 months of martial law?

*A series of explosions ripped through Baghdad.

*Guerrillas took 3 police stations in Haditha and Haqlaniyah, killing 22 policemen. In some instances they stood them against the wall and just shot them.

*Guerrillas killed the aide to the governor of Diyala Province along with two members of the provincial governing council.

*Guerrillas in the Baghdad area launched 3 attacks on US military convoys, leaving 2 US soldiers dead and injuring 5 others. In Haifa street, locals reported that guerrillas had tossed grenades at police cars, setting them ablaze. Also in Baghdad, guerrillas set off a car bomb near the house of Adil Abdul Mahdi, the minister of finance and a leading member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. He was not harmed, but the blast killed one bystander and wounded another.

*A car bomber detonated his payload near 2 British soldiers, seriously injuring them. A roadside bomb killed a British contractor.

*US forces bombed Fallujah heavily and advanced on the city, taking the hospital. Now that Fallujah is in the news again, it is worthwhile revisiting the acute reportage of Nir Rosen about that city last summer.

In addition, al-Zaman reports that Marines and Iraqi National Guardsmen raided the offices in Karbala of Ayatollah Mahmud al-Hasani, who has been agitating for a Shiite boycott of the forthcoming elections. In a recent knife fight, two of his partisans were badly wounded and a follower of Grand Ayatollah Sistani (who supports the elections) was killed. The Marines arrested several aides to al-Hasani and then blew up his headquarters.

The same source says that Grand Ayatollah Sistani had a meeting with leading Shiite politicians and hammered out a percentage share for them in the unified Shiite party list he has proposed. SCIRI would get 12 percent of the seats generated by this unified list, the Islamic Action Organization of Ayatollah al-Mudarrisi would get 10%; the Sadrists would get 10%; the Ibrahim Jaafari wing of al-Dawa would get 10%; The Islamic Dawa Iraq Organization under Abdul Karim al-Anizi would get 10%; and Ahmad Chalabi, Abdul Karim al-Muhammadawi and Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum would share 10%. The rest of the seats, about half, would go to independents--but the parties would have a role in nominating these independents. (I'd be very surprised if some of these parties actually agreed to such small percentages).

Sistani maintains that successful elections are a vital step on the way to independence (i.e. a means of getting the Americans back out of the country), and also has studied the electoral system set up by the Americans well enough to realize that a unified Shiite list has a better shance of capturing a majority in parliament. For this point, see Ed Wong of the NYT. See also Walter Pincus's important article on the mechanics of the elections in WaPo.
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Polk: American Options in Iraq

American Options in Iraq

Guest Editorial By

William R. Polk

Official inquiries have verified what independent observers have long said: the invasion of Iraq was not justified; a small, remote and poor country, Iraq posed no threat to the United States. As in the Tonkin Gulf issue during the Vietnam war, the Congress and public were misled. Those of us who said so from the beginning are tempted now to say "I told you so" but that indulgence doesn't lead anywhere. When I was the member of the U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning Council responsible for the Middle East, I had the duty not to lament past mistakes but to identify what could be done to pick up the pieces where they then lay. With the elections behind us and the Bush administration in office for the next four years, an intelligent choice among current options in Iraq becomes even more urgent. Now as a private citizen, I ask what can be done with the current reality?

Iraq is in a terrible condition, its society has been torn apart, scores of thousands have been killed and even more wounded, its infrastructure has been shattered, dreadful hatreds have been generated. Today, there are no good options -- only better or worse -- alternatives. Three appear possible:

The first option has been called "staying the course." In practice that means continued fighting. France “stayed the course” in Algeria in the 1950s as America did in Vietnam in the 1960s and as the Israelis are now doing in occupied Palestine. It has never worked anywhere. In Algeria, the French employed over three times as many troops, nearly half a million, to fight roughly the same number of insurgents as America is now fighting in Iraq. They lost. America had half a million soldiers in Vietnam and gave up. After forty years of warfare against the Palestinians, the Israelis have achieved neither peace nor security.

Wars of national “self-determination,” to use President Woodrow Wilson’s evocative phrase, can last for generations or even centuries. Britain tried to beat down (or even exterminate) the Irish for nearly 900 years, from shortly after the Eleventh century Norman invasion until 1921; the French fought the Algerians from 1831 until 1962; both Imperial and Communist Russia have been fighting the Chechens since about 1731. Putin’s Russia is still at it. There was no light at the end of those “tunnels.”

At best, “staying the course” in Iraq can be only a temporary measure as eventually America will have to leave. But during the period it stays, say the next five years, my guess is that another 30 or 40 thousand Iraqis will die or be killed while the U.S. armed forces will lose perhaps 5,000 dead and 20,000 seriously wounded. The monetary cost will be hundreds of billions. Consider what the figures mean. Americans were horrified when about 3,300 people were killed in the attack by al-Qaida terrorists on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Iraq has already (at the time of this writing) lost about 100,000 during the American invasion and occupation.* In absolute terms that means that virtually every Iraqi has a parent, child, spouse, cousin, friend, colleague or neighbor – or perhaps all of these -- among the dead. More than half of the dead were women and children. In relative terms, this figure equates in the very much larger American society to a loss of over a million people.

It is not only the actual casualties that count. What wars of “national liberation” have taught us is that they brutalize the participants who survive. Inevitably such wars are vicious. Both sides commit atrocities. In their campaigns to drive away those they regard as their oppressors, terrorists/freedom fighters seek to make their opponents conclude that staying is unacceptably expensive and, since they do not have the means to fight conventional wars, they often pick targets that will produce dramatic and painful results. Irish, Jewish, Vietnamese, Tamil, Chechen, Basque and others blew up hotels, cinemas, bus stations and/or apartment houses. The more spectacular, the better for their campaigns. So, the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946; the IRA a Brighton (England) hotel in 1984; an Iraqi group the UN headquarters in Baghdad in 2003. Chechens blew up an apartment house in Moscow in 2003 while a Palestinian group blew up an Israeli frequented hotel in Taba (in Egypt) in 2004.

Faced with such challenges, the occupying power often reacts with massive attacks aimed at terrorists but inevitably also killing many civilians. To get information from those it manages to capture, it also frequently engages in torture. Torture did not begin at the Abu Ghuraib prison; it is endemic in guerrilla warfare. Two phrases from the Franco-Algerian war of the 1950s-1960s tell it all and ring true today: “torture is to guerrilla war what the machine gun was to trench warfare in the First World War” and “torture is the cancer of democracy.” Guerrilla warfare and counter insurgency inexorably corrupt the very causes for which soldiers and insurgents fight. Almost worse, even in exhausted “defeat” for the one and heady “victory” for the other, they leave behind a chaos that spawns warlords, gangsters and thugs as is today so evident in Chechnya and Afghanistan. After half a century, Algeria has still not recovered from the trauma of its war of liberation against France. The longer the war in Iraq continues the more it will resemble the statement the Roman historian Tacitus attributed to the contemporary guerrilla leader of the Britons. The Romans, he said, “create a desolation and call it peace.”

The second option is "Vietnamization." In Vietnam, America inherited from the French both a government and a large army. What was needed, the Nixon administration proclaimed, was to train the army, equip it and then turn the war over to it. True, the army did not fight well nor did the government rule well, but they existed. In Iraq, America inherited neither a government nor an army. It is trying to create both. Not surprisingly, the results are disappointing. Most Iraqis regard the government as an American puppet. And the idea that America can fashion a local militia to accomplish what its powerful army cannot do is not policy but fantasy. It is true that in the days of their Iraqi empire, the British used such a force – composed of an ethnic minority, the Assyrians. But the British wisely used them only as auxiliaries to their army and air force. The Iraqi “Interim Government” has similarly used Kurds as auxiliaries to American forces. An Iraqi army is unlikely to fight insurgents with whom soldiers sympathize and among whom they have relatives. The best America might gain from this option is a fig leaf to hide defeat; the worst, in a rapid collapse, would be humiliating evacuation, as in Vietnam.

The third option is to choose to get out rather than being forced. Time is a wasting asset; the longer the choice is put off, the harder it will be to make. The steps required to implement this policy need not be dramatic, but the process needs to be affirmed and made unambiguous. The initial steps could be merely verbal. America would have first to declare unequivocally that it will give up its lock on the Iraqi economy, will cease to spend Iraqi revenues as it chooses and will allow Iraqi oil production to be governed by market forces rather than by an American monopoly. If President Bush could be as courageous as General Charles de Gaulle was in Algeria when he admitted that the Algerian insurgency had “won” and called for a “peace of the braves,” fighting would quickly die down in Iraq as it did in Algeria and in all other guerrilla wars. Then, and only then, could elections be meaningful. In this period, Iraq would need a police force but not an army. A UN multinational peacekeeping force would be easier, cheaper and safer than creating an Iraqi army which in the past destroyed moves toward civil society and probably would do so again, probably indeed paving the way for the “ghost” of Saddam Husain.
A variety of "service" functions would then have to be organized. Given a chance, Iraq could do them mostly by itself. It would soon again become a rich country and has a talented, well-educated population. Step by step, health care, clean water, sewage, roads, bridges, pipelines, electric grids, housing, etc. could be mainly provided by the Iraqis themselves, as they were in the past. When I visited Baghdad in February 2003 on the eve of the invasion, the Iraqis with whom I talked were proud that they had rebuilt the Tigris bridge that had been destroyed in the 1991 war. They can surely do so again.

In its own best interest, the Iraq government would empower the Iraq National Iraq Oil Company (NIOC) to award concessions by bid to a variety of international companies, each of which and NIOC would sell oil on the world market. Contracts for reconstruction paid for by Iraqi money would be awarded under bidding, as they traditionally were, but to prevent excessive corruption perhaps initially supervised by the World Bank. Where other countries supplied aid, they could be given preferential treatment in the award of contracts as is common practice elsewhere. The World Bank would follow its regular procedures on its loans. Abrogating current American policies that work against the recovery of Iraqi industry and commerce would spur development since any reasonably intelligent and self-interested government would emphasize getting Iraqi enterprises back into operation and employing Iraqi workers. That process could be speeded up through international loans, commercial agreements and protective measures so that unemployment, now at socially catastrophic levels, would be diminished. Neighborhood participation in running social affairs and providing security are old traditions in Iraqi society and allowing or favoring their reinvigoration would promote the excellent side effect of grass roots political representation. As fighting dies down, reasonable security is achieved and popular institutions revive, the one million Iraqis now living abroad will be encouraged to return home. In the aggregate they are intelligent, highly trained, and well motivated and can make major contributions in all phases of Iraqi life.

In such a program, inevitably, there will be set-backs and shortfalls, but they can be partly filled by international organizations. The steps will not be easy; Iraqis will disagree over timing, personnel and rewards while giving the process a chance will require American political courage. But, and this is the crucial matter, any other course of action would be far worse for both America and Iraq. The safety and health of American society as well as Iraqi society requires that this policy be implemented intelligently, determinedly and soon.

© William R. Polk, November 5, 2004.

A former Member of the U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning Council, responsible for the Middle East, he was Professor of History at the University of Chicago and Founding-Director of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies. His latest book, Understanding Iraq, will be published in March 2005. He is now the Senior Director of the W.P. Carey Foundation.

williamrpolk a_t_ wanadoo d o t fr


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Volcanic Weekend Leaves 30 Dead, 60 wounded
14 US Troops Among Wounded

An explosion of violence on Saturday and early Sunday left 30 dead and some 60 wounded, including 14 wounded Marines at Ramadi.

The Washington Post reports that "Two Marines were injured by a car bomb near a Fallujah checkpoint, and a U.S. soldier was wounded when a roadside bomb exploded south of Fallujah, The Associated Press reported."

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Gang Fight in Karbala over Elections
Al-Karbala'i: Voter Registration Cards Fall Short

Al-Hayat: The first victim of the electoral campaign in Iraq fell on Saturday in Karbala after a shouting match deteriorated into a knife fight between followers of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and the cleric, Mahmud al-Husaini. Al-Husaini, who studied with Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr (father of Muqtada), opposes participating in the elections. Ali al-Arfawi of the Husain Hospital said that the confrontation led to the killing of one of Sistani's supporters. Al-Husaini's followers had put up posters on the walls of Karbala, attacking Sistani and crticizing the elections to be held at the end of January, 2005. Al-Husaini complained of "the lack of any proof drawn from Muslim canon law (the shari'ah) or from reason that indicates a duty to participate in the elections." He warned of becoming mired in a political game. In contrast, Sistani insists that it is a duty for Shiites to vote in the elections at the appointed time.

Al-Zaman: Shaikh Abdul Mahdi al-Karbala'i, the representative of Sistani in Karbala, expressed his concern about the first step taken to prepare the way for the holding of elections early next year. His anxiety was provoked by the voter registration cards. Al-Karbala'i said during his Friday sermon, which he gave at the mosque attached to the shrine of Imam Husain, "We were surprised by the number of voter registration cards that were distributed to citizens in Karbala. We discovered a significant shortfall among them, especially in the villages and the countryside . . . one of our subordinates informed us that he only received 20 cards when it should have been 149, which is to say, there was a shortfall of 129."

According to Karbala'i, more than 5,000 families, or 100,000 citizens, did not receive their cards so far. This result, he said, suggests that a third of the residents of Karbala have been deprived of the ability to vote. He added, "We do not want to hold up the process, and we are not asserting that this matter is deliberate. But we shall wait and see what the relevant authorities, the high commission for the elections, and the United Nations, which have promised to hold free and fair elections without flaws, so that their legitimacy is unassailable." He affirmed, "If this result is the same in the central and southern provinces, it would entail depriving a third of the inhabitants of those areas of their ability to vote, and would withdraw legitimacy from the elections, a matter that would reflect negatively on their representativeness in the world community."

[The voter registration cards are being based on the old UN food rationing cards, which were assigned by household rather than by individual. The charge that the Shiites may be getting too few is plausible, since Saddam clearly favored Sunnis over Shiites. The Allawi government insists that there are mechanisms in place for persons to complain about and appeal any irregularities deriving from the food ration cards.]

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More on Massad Case

There is now another petition site for Professor Joseph Massad of Columbia University.

Darryl Li of Harvard sends in the following:

"Friends and Colleagues,

Many of you are probably aware of the campaign against Joseph Massad, an assistant professor in the Middle East studies department of Columbia University, by a pro-Israel group called the David Project (www.davidproject.org). More specifically, the group has produced a film alleging that Massad has made anti-semitic remarks and intimidated Israeli/Jewish students in his classes.

Normally, I would send a summary or script of the film to help people make up their own minds about the issue, but the David Project has handled the film in a secretive way. They have not posted a script, excerpts, or even a detailed summary on their website. Moreover, they only screened the film publicly a few days ago, after firing up the rumor mill for several weeks with selective press leaks and private screenings to university administrators. That being said, the website posts press writeups on the film that also feature a number of quotes from Jewish students who refuted the allegations of intimidation and anti-semitism.

Massad's response to the allegations is reproduced below. I urge you to take a few minutes to look into this, as it is part of a larger and dangerous trend to control the academic discourse in the United States on the Middle East, as exemplified by Campus Watch and the Title VI restrictions. If you share this impression, please add your name to the petition defending academic freedom at Columbia.

In the aftermath of the U.S. presidential election, now is not the time to despair. Those who want to curtail the spaces for scholarship and activism are feeling vindicated and will undoubtedly seek to press their advantage. Do not let them. Now is the time to push back.

Darryl"

"Intimidating Columbia University

Joseph Massad, assistant professor at Columbia University and Al-Ahram Weekly contributing writer, is the latest target in an ongoing witch-hunt launched by pro-Israel groups within American academia. Below is a statement he issued in response:

The recent controversy elicited by the propaganda film Columbia Unbecoming, a film funded and produced by a Boston-based pro- Israel organisation, is the latest salvo in a campaign of intimidation of Jewish and non-Jewish professors who criticise Israel. This witch-hunt aims to stifle pluralism, academic freedom, and the freedom of expression on university campuses in order to ensure that only one opinion is permitted, that of uncritical support for the State of Israel.

Columbia University, the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures, and I personally, have been the target of this intensified campaign for over three years. Pro-Israel groups are pressuring the university to abandon proper academic procedure in evaluating scholarship, and want to force the university to silence all critical opinions. Such silencing, the university has refused to do so far, despite mounting intimidation tactics by these anti- democratic and anti-academic forces.

The major strategy that these pro-Israel groups use is one that equates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. But the claim that criticism of Israel is an expression of anti-Semitism presupposes that Israeli actions are "Jewish" actions and that all Jews, whether Israelis or non-Israelis (and the majority of world Jews are not Israelis), are responsible for all Israeli actions and that they all have the same
opinion of Israel.

But this is utter anti-Semitic nonsense. Jews, whether in America, Europe, Israel, Russia, or Argentina, are, like all other groups, not uniform in their political or social opinions. There are many Israeli Jews who are critical of Israel just as there are American Jews who criticise Israeli policy. I have always made a distinction between Jews, Israelis, and Zionists in my writings and my lectures. It is those who want to claim that Jews, Israelis, and Zionists are one group (and that they think exactly alike) who are the anti- Semites. Israel in fact has no legal,
moral, or political basis to represent world Jews (ten million strong) who never elected it to that position and who refuse to move to that country.

Unlike the pro-Israel groups, I do not think that Israeli actions are "Jewish" actions or that they reflect the will of the Jewish people worldwide! All those pro-Israeli propagandists who want to reduce the Jewish people to the State of Israel are the anti-Semites who want to eliminate the existing pluralism among Jews. The majority of Israel's supporters in the United States are, in fact, not Jews but Christian fundamentalist anti-Semites who seek to convert Jews. They constitute a
quarter of the American electorate and are the most powerful anti-Semitic group worldwide. The reason why the pro-Israel groups do not fight them is because these anti-Semites are pro-Israel. Therefore, it is not anti-Semitism that offends pro- Israel groups; what offends them is anti-Israel criticism. In fact, Israel and the US groups supporting it have long received financial and political support from numerous
anti-Semites.

This is not to say that some anti-Zionists may not also be anti-Semitic. Some are, and I have denounced them in my writings and lectures. But the test of their anti-Semitism is not whether they like or hate Israel. The test of anti-Semitism is anti-Jewish hatred, not anti-Israel criticism. In my forthcoming book, The Persistence of the Palestinian Question, I link the Jewish Question to the Palestinian Question and conclude that both questions persist because anti-Semitism persists. To resolve the Palestinian and the Jewish questions, our task is to fight
anti-Semitism in any guise, whether in its pro-Israel or anti-Israel guise, and not to defend the reprehensible policies of the racist Israeli government.

I am now being targeted because of my public writings and statements through the charge that I am allegedly intolerant in the classroom, a charge based on statements made by people who were never my students, except in one case which I will address momentarily. Let me first state that I have intimidated no one. In fact, Tomy Schoenfeld, the Israeli soldier who appears in the film and is cited by the New York Sun, has never been my student and has never taken a class with me, as he himself
informed The Jewish Week. I have never met him.

As for Noah Liben, who appears in the film according to newspaper accounts (I have not seen the film), he was indeed a student in my Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Societies course in the spring of 2001. Noah seems to have forgotten the incident he cites. During a lecture about Israeli state racism against Asian and African Jews, Noah defended these practices on the basis that Asian and African Jews were underdeveloped and lacked Jewish culture, which the Ashkenazi State operatives were teaching them. When I explained to him that, as the assigned readings clarified, these were racist policies, he insisted that these Jews needed to be modernised and the Ashkenazim were helping them by civilising them.

Many students gasped. He asked me if I understood his point. I informed him that I did not. Noah seems not to have done his reading during the week on gender and Zionism. One of the assigned readings by Israeli scholar and feminist Simona Sharoni spoke of how in Hebrew the word "zayin" means both penis and weapon in a discussion of Israeli militarised masculinity. Noah, seemingly not having read the assigned
material, mistook the pronunciation of "zayin" as "Zion", pronounced in Hebrew "tziyon". As for his spurious claim that I said that "Jews in Nazi Germany were not physically abused or harassed until Kristallnacht in November 1938", Noah must not have been listening carefully.

During the discussion of Nazi Germany, we addressed the racist ideology of Nazism, the Nuremberg Laws enacted in 1934, and the institutionalised racism and violence against all facets of Jewish life, all of which preceded the extermination of European Jews. This information was also available to Noah in his readings, had he chosen to consult them. Moreover, the lie that the film propagates claiming that I would equate Israel with Nazi Germany is abhorrent. I have never made such a
reprehensible equation.

I remember having a friendly rapport with Noah (as I do with all my students). He would drop off newspaper articles in my mailbox, come to my office hours, and greet me on the street often. He never informed me or acted in a way that showed intimidation. Indeed, he would write me e-mails, even after he stopped being my student, to argue with me about Israel. I have kept our correspondence.

On 10 March, 2002, a year after he took a class with me, Noah wrote me an e-mail chastising me for having invited an Israeli speaker to class the year before when he was in attendance. It turned out that Noah's memory failed him again, as he mistook the speaker I had invited for another Israeli scholar. After a long diatribe, Noah excoriated me: "How can you bring such a phony to speak to your class??"

I am not sure if his misplaced reproach was indicative of an intimidated student or one who felt comfortable enough to rebuke his professor!

I am dedicated to all my students, many of whom are Jewish. Neither Columbia University nor I have ever received a complaint from any student claiming intimidation or any such nonsense. Students at Columbia have many venues of lodging complaints, whether with the student deans and assistant deans, school deans and assistant deans, department chairmen, departmental directors of undergraduate studies, the ombudsman's office, the provost, the president, and the professors themselves. No such complaint was ever filed.

Many of my Jewish and non-Jewish students (including my Arab students) differ with me in all sorts of ways, whether on politics or on philosophy or theory. This is exactly what teaching and learning are about, how to articulate differences and understand other perspectives while acquiring knowledge, how to analyse one's own perspective and those of others, how to interrogate the basis of an opinion.

Columbia University is home to the most prestigious centre for Israel and Jewish studies in the country. Columbia has six endowed chairs in Jewish studies (ranging from religion to Yiddish to Hebrew literature, among others). In addition, a seventh chair in Israel studies is now being established after pro-Israel groups launched a vicious campaign against the only chair in modern Arab studies that Columbia established two years ago, demanding "balance"!

Columbia does not have a centre for Arab studies, let alone a centre for Palestine studies. The Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC) encompasses the study of over one billion South Asians, over 300 million Arabs, tens of millions of Turks, of Iranians, of Kurds, of Armenians, and of six million Israelis, five million of whom are Jewish.

To study these varied populations and cultures, MEALAC has three full time professors who cover Israel and Hebrew, four full time professors to cover the Arab World, and two full-time professors who cover South Asia. One need not do complicated mathematics to see who is overrepresented and who is not, if the question is indeed a demographic one.

Moreover, the class that this propaganda machine is targeting, my "Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Societies" course, is one of a number of courses offered at Columbia that cover the Palestinian/Israel conflict. All the others have an Israel-friendly perspective, including Naomi Weinberger's "Conflict Resolution in the Middle East", Michael Stanislawski's "History of the State of Israel, 1948-Present" and a course offered in my own department by my colleague Dan Miron, "Zionism: A
Cultural Perspective".

My course, which is critical of Zionism and Palestinian nationalism, is in fact an elective course which no student is forced to take.

Let us briefly review these claims of intimidation. Not only have the students (all but Noah have not even taken my courses) not used a single university venue to articulate their alleged grievances, they are now sponsored by a private political organisation with huge funds that produced and funded a film about them, screened it to the major US media and to the top brass of the Columbia administration.

Last Wednesday, the film was screened in Israel to a government minister and to participants at a conference on anti- Semitism. The film has still not been released to the public here and is used as a sort of secret evidence in a military trial.

The film has also been used to trump up a national campaign with the aid of a New York congressman to get me fired. All this power of intimidation is being exercised not by a professor against students, but by political organisations who use students against a junior non-tenured faculty member. A senior departmental colleague of mine, Dan Miron, who votes on my promotion and tenure, has recently expressed open support for this campaign of intimidation based on hearsay.

Indeed with this campaign against me going into its fourth year, I chose under the duress of coercion and intimidation not to teach my course this year. It is my academic freedom that has been circumscribed. But not only mine. The Columbia courses that remain are all taught from an Israel-friendly angle.

The aim of the David Project propaganda film is to undermine our academic freedom, our freedom of speech, and Columbia's tradition of openness and pluralism.

It is in reaction to this witch-hunt that 718 international scholars and students signed a letter defending me against intimidation and sent it to President Bollinger, with hundreds more sending separate letters, while over 1,300 people from all walks of life are signing an online petition supporting me and academic freedom. Academics and students from around the world recognise that the message of this propaganda film is to suppress pluralism at Columbia and at all American universities so that one and
only one opinion be allowed on campuses, the opinion of defending Israel uncritically.

I need not remind anyone that this is a slippery slope, for the same pressures could be applied to faculty who have been critical of US foreign policy, in Iraq for example, on the grounds that such critiques are unpatriotic.

Surely we all agree that while the university can hardly defend any one political position on any current question, it must defend the need for debate and critical consideration of all such questions, whether in public fora or in the classroom. Anything less would be the beginning of the death of academic freedom."

Joseph Massad

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24 Dead in Samarra

Guerrillas in Samarra detonated three car bombs on Friday, killing some 24 persons and wounding dozens. The guerrillas targeted national guards' outposts, policemen, and US troops.

Samarra had been the target of a US military assault similar to that now being undertaken against Fallujah. The US had given assurances that it could wipe the insurgency out in Samarra with these means. That Samarra still is the scene of such violence brings the Fallujah operation into question, as well.

The deaths of 3 British soldiers at the hands of guerrillas, have put enormous pressure on the government of UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Associated Press surveys other developments in Iraq on Friday.

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Annan Condemns US Assault on Fallujah

It seems to me that Kofi Annan's letter attempting to forestall a US levelling of Fallujah puts the Allawi caretaker government, which rejected it, in a potential dilemma.

The caretaker government was appointed by an envoy of Mr. Annan, so if he lacks the standing to speak out on Fallujah and/or is a fool to do so, that raises the question of whether he had the legitimacy to install Mr. Allawi and his colleagues in the first place, or whether he was wise enough to choose the right government for Iraq.

The serial pleas for US soldiers to sacrifice their lives in Iraq, and the preference for them to fight guerrillas by inflicting massive civilian casualties through aerial and tank bombardment of residential neighborhoods, seem to me to rest on thinner and thinner grounds.

First, Iraqi expatriate politicians alleged that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that threatened the US and was linked to al-Qaeda. And he had killed large numbers of Kurds, and of Shiites in East Baghdad and Najaf.

But after he was overthrown and captured, it turned out that there was no WMD or al-Qaeda connecton. Then the Sadrist Shiites proved hard to control, and the United States was called upon to kill thousands of them and to bombard Sadr City, Kut, Najaf and other places, killing rebellious Shiites just as Saddam had done. So in retrospect was Saddam's crushing of the Sadrist uprising in 1999 really different from the US crushing of the same movement in 2004?

Now it is being argued that it is necessary to kill hundreds, perhaps thousands of civilians in Fallujah, in order to "save" them from a handful of foreign guerrillas. But every evidence is that most Fallujans support the uprising against the Americans, and the evidence for any significant number of foreign fighters being in Iraq is thin. Can it really be necessary to destroy a city to get at 200 foreign volunteers? So what is really probably being argued is that it is necessary to kill hundreds or thousands of Fallujans in order to remove a challenge to Mr. Allawi and his colleagues.

As Annan implies, the argument that Fallujah has to be razed in order to prepare the way for elections makes no sense. The US attack on Fallujah may well push most Sunni Arabs, who identify with the Fallujans, into boycotting the January elections, thus profoundly weakening the legitimacy of the new elected government.

Many prominent Iraqi political figures are deeply critical of the US tendency to use massive force in Iraq.

Who will be next? And how many Americans will have to die to accomplish these increasingly brutal and absurd missions? Is it really hoped that the ghetto Shiites of Sadr City can be bombed into accepting Thomas Jefferson? And what exactly did the United States expect to find in Fallujah, if not Baathists and Sunni fundamentalists?

If the Kurds don't get what they want, and start making trouble, will the Allawi government or its successor then argue that dozens of Marines must die fighting the Peshmerga, and must kill hundreds or thousands of Kurds?

Isn't that where we came in?

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Al-Qubanji: Give us Indepencence

AFP/ Ash-Sharq al-Awsat: Sadr al-Din al-Qubanji, a Friday prayers leader in Najaf, called on Persident George W. Bush on Friday to keep the promises he had made to the Iraqis, of "independence and the return of sovereignty." He demanded, at the same time, that Iraq not be turned into an arena of contention between the United States and Iran.

Al-Qubanji said before thousands of worshippers at the Great Fatimah Mosque, most of whom belonged to the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, that "Iraqis expect many things of these [American] elections, and at their head the promises made of independence and the return of sovereignty." He added, "We insist and affirm, rather we resist, on behalf of indepencence and the implementation of these promises. The Iraqis are perfectly capable of administering their own country, and we expect the American administration to be truthful in its promises."

On another subject, al-Qubanji pointed to "the information that has reached us concerning the statements from high officials in the Iraqi state condemning this country or that among our neighbors. We do not want to see disputes among countries extended such that Iraq becomes an arena for settling those disputes." He added, "We do not deny the existence of disputes between the United States and the Islamic Republic in Iran, but it is not right for Iraq to be the arena of contention, just as we do not want to make enemies of other countries through [intemperate] statements . . . Our policy toward neighboring countries is founded upon love, cooperation, and respect for the policies of all countries, and refusal to interfere in their affairs, and safeguarding mutual interests."

He said that the forthcoming Iraqi elections must be fair and aboveboard. He suggested that all Iraqis join together in preserving security and ensuring their uprightness. He included tribespeopole, university students, and mosques, saying they should help guard polling stations. He said that the Interior Ministry could issue a call for such volunteers, since there was a lack of regular police and of arms for them.

The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq is an umbrella group of old-time forces opposed to Saddam Hussein. It allied with the US to overthrow Saddam, and its paramilitary, the Badr Corps, has an estimated 15,000 trained men under arms.

SCIRI is close to Tehran and clearly is disturbed by the rehabilitation of Baathists by the Allawi government, along with Baathist-like hardline rhetoric against Iran, which has been especially characteristic of Minister of Defense Hazem Shaalan. Although Prime Minister Allawi resisted this temptation at the beginning, he also has begun issuing warnings to Iran, as he did again in Europe on Friday.

That a putative ally of the US like SCIRI is essentially warning Bush of dire consequences if the Iraqis don't get true independence soon is a bad sign.

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Levine Guest Editorial: "We're all Israelis Now."

We’re all Israelis Now

By Mark LeVine, History, University of California, Irvine
Author of Why they Don't Hate Us: Globalization in a Post-9/11 World.

Three years ago, as the pungent odor of what was left of the World Trade Center slowly pervaded my neighborhood, I wrote a piece called “We’re all Israelis Now.” I didn’t invent the idea; in the hours since the attacks I had heard several commentators say essentially the same thing, although our meanings were in fact diametrically opposed. For them, the September 11 attacks had constituted a tragic wake up call to America about the mortal threat posed by Muslim terrorism, which Israel had been living through for decades and whose methods the US would now have to copy if it wanted to “win the war on terror.”

For me, however, the attacks suggested a more troubling scenario: That like Israelis, Americans would never face the causes of the extreme violence perpetrated against us by those whose oppression we have supported and even enforced, and engage in the honest introspection of what our role has been in generating the kind of hatred that turns commuter jets into cruise missiles. Instead, my gut told me that we’d acquiesce to President Bush’s use of the war to realize the long-held imperial, even apocalyptic visions of the neoliberal Right, ones that find great sympathy with its Israeli counterpart.

As I watch George W. Bush celebrate his reelection I realize I never could have imagined just how much like Israelis we would become. Think about it: in Israel, the majority of Jewish citizens support the policies of Ariel Sharon despite the large-scale, systematic (and according to international law, criminal) violence his government deploys against Palestinian society, despite the worsening economic situation for the lower middle class religious voters who constitute his main base of support, despite rising international opprobrium and isolation. Sound familiar?

As for the country’s “liberal” opposition, it’s in a shambles, politically and morally bankrupt because in fact it was a willing participant in creating and preserving the system that is now eating away at the heart of Israeli society. Aside from occasional plaintive oped pieces by members of its progressive wing, the Labor Party can and will do nothing fundamentally to challenge Sharon’s policies. Why? Because they reflect an impulse, nurtured by the Labor movement during its decades in power, that is buried deep in the heart of Zionism: to build an exclusively Jewish society on as much of the ancient homeland as possible, with little regard for the fate of the country’s native inhabitants.

As any native American will remind us, America was built on a similar holy quest. So it shouldn’t surprise us that the parallels between Israel’s mini-empire and America’s Iraq adventure are striking.

It’s not just that America’s occupation is faring as terribly as Israel’s. In the last week--with more than enough time to influence the election--doctors from America’s leading research hospitals published a study demonstrating that US forces have killed upwards of 100,000 Iraqis, the majority of them women and children killed by American bombs. Yet before November 2 Americans could at least say they weren’t directly responsible for the disaster that has unfolded there in Iraq, since an unelected President had taken the country to war under false pretenses. No more. As of today, American society has declared its support for the invasion, and as such is morally and politically culpable for every single one of those 100,000 dead, and every single one of the tens of thousands of deaths that are sure to follow.

To put it bluntly, Americans have chosen to return a man to the White House who has supervised the killing of more civilians than Slobodan Milosevic. We have signed onto a President who sanctions torture, who wantonly rejects any international treaty--Kyoto, the ABM and the International Criminal Court--that doesn’t suit his messianic agenda. Who truly believes “God Almighty” is on his side.

America, in short, has become a criminal nation, and it must be stopped. (Yes, there are many other criminal nations, but aside from Israel how many even have the pretense of democracy? Russia? The Sudan? China? India is perhaps one; and given its sordid occupation of Kashmir it shouldn’t surprise that a US-India-Israel axis of occupation and Islamophobia is one of the most prominent features of the world’s geo-strategic post-9/11 landscape.)

In Israel most citizens know full well the realities of their occupation; even right-wing newspapers routinely publish articles that describe its details with enough clarity to make any ignorance willful. This dynamic is in fact why Israelis have responded to the civil war with Palestinians by increasing the dehumanization of the occupation, accompanied by a fervent practice of getting on with life no matter what’s happening ten or fifteen miles away in “the Territories.” The alternative, actually working to stop the insanity of the occupation, would lead to much more hatred and violence within Israel and between Jews than Palestinians could ever hope to inflict on Israeli society from the outside.

The situation is almost identical vis-à-vis the American perspective on Iraq. Abu Ghraib? Mass civilian casualties caused by a war launched on demonstrably false pretenses? The erosion of civil liberties? The transfer of hundreds of billions of dollars of tax payer money (not to mention Iraqi resources and capital) by the US government to its corporate allies? To more than 70% of America’s eligible votes--that is, the approximately thirty percent that voted for Bush and the forty percent that didn’t feel this situation was compelling enough to warrant their taking the time to vote--none of it really matters. America is great and strong and can do what it wants, and to hell with anyone who gets in our way, especially if they fight back.

The numbing acceptance of large scale and systematic violence perpetrated by the state as a normal part of its exercise of power and the willingness of a plurality of the electorate to support parties and policies which are manifestly against their economic and social interests (as demonstrated by the increase in poverty and economic insecurity across the board in Israel and the US produced by the last two decades of neoliberalism) sadly characterize both societies today. This is why I never shared the optimism friends who thought this situation would help elect Kerry. Like Israel’s Barak or Peres, in the context of a post-9/11 militant globalization, John Kerry offered Americans little more than Bush lite on the most crucial issue of the day. In America’s increasingly obese culture, is there any wonder we chose SuperSize over Nutrasweet?

So here we are, three years after the tragic day of 9/11. The smell of charred metal, fuel and flesh no longer pervades the five boroughs of New York; instead it wafts across the major cities of Iraq (where most Americans don’t have to smell it, but I can attest from personal experience that the odor in Baghdad is as pungent as in Queens). The Bush Administration is free to proceed with a violently imperialist foreign policy with little fear of repercussion or political cost at home--who cares about abroad?--the Left is stupefied at its own political and moral incompetence, and the people at large are increasingly split between a fundamentalist religious-nationalist camp, and a yuppie-liberal camp that has no real legs to stand on and has little hope of engaging the millions of poor and working class who have moved to the right because of “social issues.” Indeed, it is clear that they don’t care if the rich are getting richer and the environment is going to Hell, as long as they’re on the road to Heaven--or at least the Second Coming.

This situation reveals something dark, even frightening about America’s collective character. Making the situation worse are the reasons why people voted for President Bush: the belief that he better represents America’s “moral values,” along with the faith that he, not Kerry, will fight a “better and more efficient war on terror.” What kind of moral values the occupation of Iraq represents no one dares say. What kind of terror the US military has wrought in Iraq most American don’t want to know.

Better to “stay the course” and pray for the safe return of the troops. Leave the troubling moral lessons of Iraq to be exorcised by Hollywood’s or Nintendo’s latest version of Rambo, helicoptering across the sands of Iraq blasting away yet more hapless Iraqi soldiers (as if enough weren’t killed in the real war) and rescuing whatever is left of America’s honor once the reality of a determined anti-colonial resistance drives America out of Iraq--the common fate of occupying powers across history.

Until such time, however, unimagined damage will likely be done to the world and America’s standing in it. What are progressives to do about it? Whether in Israel or the US the liberal opposition--the Labor Party in Israel, the Democrats in the US--have proven themselves to be politically and morally bankrupt. They are dying parties and should be abandoned as quickly as possible in favor of the hard work of slowly building truly populist progressive parties that can reach out to, engage and challenge their more conservative and often religions compatriots who today look Right, not Left, to address their most basic needs.

In the meantime, the international community, especially the EU, most assert a defiant tone against US and Israeli militarism and perform the novel but fundamental role acting as a counterweight and alternative to America’s imperial vision (at the same time, however, they must move beyond a narrow anti-American and anti-Zionist anti-imperialism to a broader critique of the larger system of Middle Eastern autocracy and violence, whose victims are no less deserving of our concern than Palestinians or Iraqis). But this will not happen on its own; it’s up to citizens across the continent to ensure that their governments don’t take the easy road of adopting a pragmatic approach of supporting the status quo and “working” with the Bush administration, while waiting for America to bleed itself dry in Iraq and other imperial adventures.

One thing is for sure. Bush and his millenarian policies can’t be defeated by the kind of violence and hatred that guides his worldview. As Antonio Gramsci warned us seventy years ago, a “war of maneuver” or frontal assault on an advanced capitalist state by the Left cannot be won. Instead we need to dust off our copies of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and buy a copy of Subcomandante Marcos’s dispatches from the Lacondan jungle. Then perhaps we can find clues on how to fight a better and more efficient “war of position” against the terrifying prospect of four more years of George W. Bush.

While the Left has often turned to Gramsci for guidance, most commentators have ignored one of his most important insights: that however negative a role religion played in Italian society, it constituted the most important social force in the struggle against capitalism and fascism, without which the Left could never hope to achieve social hegemony against the bourgeoisie. This is because religion contains the kernel of “common sense” of the masses whose natural instinct is to rebel against the domination of the capitalist elite. But because it is largely unformed or articulated, it is easily manipulated by that elite--as Thomas Frank has so eloquently shown in his recent What’s the Matter with Kansas--and needs to be joined to the “good sense” of radically progressive intellectuals in order to shape the kind of ideology and political program that could attract the majority of the poor and middle class. But in this dialog the secular intellectuals would be transformed as much as the religious masses, creating the kind of organic unity that helped propel the religious Right from the margins of their party to the center of power.

It’s sad but telling that a sickly political prisoner in fascist Italy writing from memory on scraps of paper could anticipate the struggle facing America today better than most contemporary leaders of the so-called Left. But never fear, if John Ashcroft has his way many of us will soon have a similar opportunity to learn the benefits of solitary confinement for producing innovative social theory. In the meantime if progressives don’t figure out how to reach working class conservative Christians, before to long we will all be living through Bush’s dreams of apocalypse.

Mark Levine
Associate Professor of History
Department of History
Murray Krieger Hall
Irvine, CA 92697-3275

email: mlevine a_t_ uci d o t edu
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Meet Bubba

Readers argued with me about this during the Democratic primary, but I maintained then that I thought it would be very difficult for a non-Southern Democratic candidate to get any southern state, and that without any of the South it would be difficult to win the election.

Since Jack Kennedy was shot in 1963, all successful Democratic presidential candidates have been southerners: Johnson, Carter, Clinton.

This is because image and marketing matter more in US presidential elections than substance, and white male southerners just mostly are only going to vote for one of their own.

My family has roots in Virginia and I apologize about this, but Virginia is just not going to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2008, unless Bush has so driven the country into the ground that Americans want anything but a Republican.

The Democrats need to find a southern governor with a southern accent who is a Baptist. (I don't mean the Deep South. Its upper stretches are more malleable).

They also need to start defusing deadly cultural and "moral" issues that have been so effective for the Republicans. And they need to be sly about it.

For instance, a lot of Democrats would like to see gay marriage or at least civil gay unions passed into law. This is a matter of equity, since gay partners can't even get into a hospital to see an ill partner because hospitals limit visits to close family.

This issue scares the bejesus out of the red states.

But if Democrats were sly, there is a way out. The Baptist southern presidential candidate should start a campaign to get the goddamn Federal and state governments out of the marriage business. It has to be framed that way. Marriage should be a faith-based institution and we should turn it over to the churches. If someone doesn't want to be married in a church, then the state government can offer them a legal civil contract (this is a better name for it than civil union). That's not a marriage and the candidate could solemnly observe that they are taking their salvation in their own hands if they go that route, but that is their business. But marriage is sacred and the churches should be in charge of it.

If you succeeded in getting the government out of the marriage business, then the whole issue would collapse on the Republicans. You appeal to populist sentiments against the Feds and to the long Baptist tradition of support for the US first amendment enshrining separation of religion and state.

But the final result would be to depoliticize gay marriage, because the Federal government wouldn't be the arena for arguing about it. If states didn't marry people, then there wouldn't be any point in arguing about it in Congress. The states could offer gays the same civil contract status as it offers straight people who want to shack up legally but without the sanction of a church. As for gays who wanted a church marriage, that would be between them and their church (remember, the government is not in the business, but would go on recognizing church-performed marriages as equivalent legally to the civil contract). The Unitarian Universalists could arrange it for them. The red states' populations can be hostile to the UUists all they like, it wouldn't translate into a victory at the polls for a Republican president.

The final outcome would be both more progressive (the government should not in fact be solemnizing a religioius ceremony like marriage) and also advantageous to the Democrats, and it would leave gays actually better off.

There are other such strategies that could be adopted. But it seems clear. In 2008, the Democrats have to find a way to get back a couple of big red states. They can't do that unless they find canny ways to defuse the cultural issues the Republicans have been deploying so effectively.

And actually they don't need to win entire states. In Ohio, it would probably be a matter of a few counties. Why don't the Democrats have county data bases as good as Karl Rove's?


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1 US Soldier Killed

Guerrillas employed a roadside bomb to kill a US soldier near Salman Pak on Wednesday, and wounded one other.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that guerrilas used a car bomb, which exploded on the road, killing or wounding 8 in the southeast corner of Bahgdad.

AP summarizes the two incidents Thursday morning:

' On Wednesday, a soldier was killed and another wounded in a roadside bombing 12 miles south of the capital. A suicide driver detonated his vehicle at a checkpoint near Baghdad airport, injuring nine Iraqis and forcing U.S. troops to close the main route into the city for hours. '

Reuters reports that the Supporters of the Sunnah terrorist group beheaded a high officer in the new Iraqi army, Husain Shunun, after capturing him in Mosul.

Meanwhile, US warplanes struck Fallujah again on Wednesday, after a number of very destructive bombing raids.


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Fallujah and Allawi's Fate

Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder reviews the pros and cons of the coming US attack on Fallujah for caretaker Prime Minister Allawi. If the attack is swift and successful, Allawi will be strengthened. If it is prolonged, the protests within Iraq and in the Arab world could mount and cause a diplomatic disaster.

Lasseter does not say so, but the razing of Fallujah is precisely the sort of action that may provoke an al-Qaeda response and will in any case aid in al-Qaeda's ability to recruit angry young Muslims.

One other question I would ask is whether President Ghazi al-Yawir will resign and run for parliament as Allawi's rival.

Also, one reason given for the Fallujah campaign is to allow elections to proceed. But the campaign itself may reinforce Sunni clerics' calls for a boycott.

If the Sadr movement gives up the idea of a boycott and participates, as some signs indicate it will, then the Shiite turnout should be high. A Sunni Arab boycott would then be disastrous for the legitimacy of the outcome.

Speaking of elections, voter registration drives have begun, based on the old United Nations food rations. Doing it this way was the suggestion of Grand Ayatollah Sistani, but he had wanted elections last May. Since the Americans are having to use his plan anyway, it is unclear what they gained by delaying elections so long.


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More on Lancet

Stephen Soldz has more on why the Lancet article estimating 100,000 excess Iraqi deaths since the beginning of the war cannot lightly be dismissed, even if the headlines tended to take the upper limits of the estimates.
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Mosul Car Bomb
AMS PLedges Civil Disobedience Campaign

Wire services report that guerrillas tried to use a car bomb to assassinate an Iraqi general in Mosul. The explosion killed seven soldiers and 4 civilians, but missed the general.

In Basra, an assassination attempt on the chief of police, Muhammad Kadhim, failed, but left three of his companions wounded. (-ash-Sharq al-Awsat).

A Reuters cameraman was killed in Ramadi while trying to take photographs, by a sniper. It was unclear whether the sniper was a guerrilla or a Marine.

Muhammad Bashar al-Faidi, a spokesman of the Association of Muslim Scholars, warned on Tuesday that if the caretaker government of Iyad Allawi and his American backers mount an assault on Fallujah,

his clerical group would use “mosques, the media and professional associations” to proclaim a civil disobedience campaign and a boycott of the January elections in case of an attack on Fallujah."

Guerrillas blew up four pipelines in the north of the country and stopped exports through Turkey.


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Who Needs Sleep?

CNN is calling Michigan, Minnesota and Hawaii for Kerry. The total is 249 Bush, 242 Kerry at 2:35 am. Kerry may well get Wisconsin, as well, giving him 252. If he gets Nevada, it would be Kerry 257 to Bush's 254. Ohio settles it. The question is whether Ohio settles it sometime Wednesday (with Bush pulling ahead so far that the provisional ballots no longer matter) or on November 13.
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Race Up in Air Early Wednesday Morning

As of this writing, Kerry could still win, but it won't be easy. Bush has a very small lead in Ohio, of about 100,000, at 1:40 am. But the Democrats maintain that there are over 200,000 provisional ballots yet to be counted, and that they could make up the difference. CNN is saying that it is believed that the provisional ballots are largely Democratic.

An Ohio official, Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, is saying on CNN that the provisional ballots won't be counted for 11 days.

Kerry is leading in Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, so if Ohio broke for Kerry he might be able to win. Last I knew, Nevada seemed to be leaning to Kerry, amazingly enough.

It looks to me as though we may be in for another cliff-hanger, if Bush does not pull ahead by a bigger margin (those of you who read this Wednesday morning, be kind; as I'm writing, it just isn't clear). And, if it is true that some late reporting districts are around Cleveland and Cincinnati, Bush's margin may shrink further (it has already shrunk since a couple of hours ago). There appear to be 387,000 regular votes to be counted, along with the provisional ballots. Enough of these may be in rural counties to allow Bush to pull 200,000 votes ahead over night. If he did that, then the provisional ballots couldn't outweigh it.

A Kerry win in the electoral college under these circumstances, where Bush will win the popular vote big time and the Republicans have strong control of both houses of congress, will be extremely problematic.

After what happened to Gore in 2000, when he prematurely conceded the election, the Kerry team is simply not going to allow any concession speeches with 200,000 provisional ballots yet to be counted and Bush ahead in Ohio only by 100,000.

CNN is saying that the only way Bush can win decisively this morning is for him to take 4 of the 6 remaining states, not counting Iowa, including Nevada, Hawaii, etc. It could happen, but right now it looks as though Bush will fall slightly short.

Jeffrey Toobin is saying that even small groups can demand a recount in Ohio. Such a demand is likely to be launched, there and in New Mexico. In Iowa and New Mexico, CNN analysts are saying that the late-counted absentee ballots could make the difference (and did, last time).

CNN is now saying that Iowa is announcing that some of its paper count machines have broken down, which will delay a final count until later on Wednesday. But Iowa is likely going to Bush anyway.

I suppose we should all just go to bed. It may well not be over for a while. Actually, that is the good news at this point. It certainly doesn't look good for Kerry.

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Carville thinks It is Over

James Carville has essentially called the election for Bush. He says his contacts in Ohio are not able to give him any good news.

Carville has been around the block and should be taken seriously. But he isn't infallible and I'd rather wait and see the numbers from Cleveland and Cincinnati.

It seems likely that the final numbers will still be close. But 51% takes home the whole election.

That isn't any consolation. It is now often forgotten that Reagan's 1984 landslide victory over Mondale was close in a lot of states. But you rack up enough 51%'s and you win by a landslide, in the American system.


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Kerry takes Oregon, Maine

CBS is projecting Washington, Oregon and California all for Kerry, and he gets all four electoral votes from Maine. This is excellent news for Kerry, since it makes it less likely Bush can put together an alternative if Kerry takes the upper midwest.

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Bush is on the Verge of Winning?

Dan Rather and Bob Schieffer are pointing out that with Kerry's loss of Florida, he needs to sweep Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, to win. If Bush takes either Michigan or Ohio he will be within spitting distance of winning.

For Kerry to take Ohio and Michigan, however, is not far-fetched. My understanding is that Columbus and Athens aren't reporting yet. And northern Michigan, traditionally Democrat, is also slow to report.
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Can the US System be Reformed?

Given the talk in Washington about whether it is possible to reform the Arab world, I found the discussion this evening on al-Jazeera amusing.

They had an Iraqi analyst on, who said that if there wasn't a clear break for one of the candidates in the next few hours, the whole process was likely to go into the hands of the lawyers and would be decided in the courts.

The al-Jazeera anchor asked, "Do you believe the American electoral system can be reformed?"

The Iraqi analyst said he thought the problem lay in the dependence on an electoral college rather than direct democracy.

This is getting embarrassing folks.



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Legal Stalling in Ohio?

Josh Marshall is reporting that Republicans in Ohio have resorted to the courts to interfere with the election.

NYT has some reporting on the back story from Monday and early Tuesday for Wednesday's edition. Its early take on the way the polling proceeded in Ohio is positive, but its stringers may have reported in before the problems developed, or from places that were unproblematic.
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Pennsylvania for Kerry, Florida for Bush

CNN is calling Pennsylvania for Kerry.

They are still saying Florida is too close to call, but CNN analysts clearly think Bush has it in the bag.

It comes down to Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota. Missouri is still in play.
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