Tsunami toll rises above 125,000

On very early Friday morning, Reuters was reporting that the death toll in Sunday's tsunami had now climbed to 125,000.

I have a feeling that it will mount yet higher. Some are saying that the toll in Indonesia alone may be 80,000 or more. As relief workers reach some coastal and island areas, they are finding nobody at all, with entire villages gone in places like Aceh. Just gone.

Banda Aceh in Indonesia, which had recently seen some improvement in the security situation after a long separatist insurrection, has been devastated.

I put a courtesy advertisement on the right for Oxfam's relief effort and blogads has put up a courtesy ad for UNICEF's effors. On this last day of 2004, let me just ask that anyone who has been grateful for Informed Comment during the past year take a moment to donate to Oxfam's tsunami aid project, or to UNICEF or to one of your choice. The death toll is incredible, but the needs of the living are unimaginable.

Death and Death Threats in Iraq

Some 15 Iraqis were killed in various violent incidents on Thursday, and two Lebanese businessmen were kidnapped.
Dawn reports:

"Three border policemen were gunned down in Baquba, north of Baghdad, while on leave, and the son of local police chief was kidnapped. In the capital, an Iraqi army officer was killed while strolling in the street. Four civilians were killed in an ambush at Shorgat, north of the capital, while further north two civilians were killed and four hurt when a bomb exploded near their car as it followed a national guard convoy. Two more Iraqis died and four were wounded when they tried to break through a national guard roadblock in Syniya, a woman was killed and three people wounded by a roadside bomb on the road between Baghdad and Balad and, in Samarra, a national guard was died and four others were wounded in an ambush."

Ansar al-Sunna and 2 other guerrilla groups in Iraq have threatened to kill anyone participating in what they termed "the farce" of Iraqi elections.

CNN is reporting that all 700 voter registration workers in Mosul have resigned after death threats. The guerrillas are alleging that the secular process of American-sponsored elections will result in un-Islamic laws. I don't see how Mosul can participate in the election under these conditions. It has a population of about a million.

The fighting in Mosul that began Wednesday resulted in the death of one US soldier and 25 guerrillas, after guerrillas blew up a truck bomb near a US facility in a coordinated attack.

Radio Sawa Iraq did an interview with Iyad Allawi on Monday in which the dispute between Allawi and Iraqi Vice-President Ibrahim Jaafari over Syria was highlighted. Allawi has accused Syria of harboring Baath guerrillas and allowing infiltration of Iraq. Jaafari has expressed extreme skepticism about these charges. The dispute between the two is in part ideological. Jaafari is a leader of the al-Dawa Party, which has good relations with Iran, which is in turn allied with Syria. Allawi is an essentially American appointee with longstanding ties to the CIA.

KarbalaNews.net reports that Adnan Pachachi, head of the Independent Democratic Bloc, called again on Thursday for a postponement of the January 30 elections. He, Ghazi al-Yawar and Nasir Chadirchi are among the few Sunni Arab politicians with name recognition still in the race.

Candidate name recognition doesn't appear very important, however. For security reasons, the actual names of most candidates on the 78 party or multiparty lists have so far not been released. This odd situation, in which the candidates are not known amonth before the election, attests to how dire the political and security situation in Iraq really is.

Pipes Favors Concentration Camps

That the Revisionist-Zionist extremist Daniel Pipes has fond visions of rounding up Muslim Americans and putting them in concentration camps isn't a big surprise. That a mainstream American newspaper would publish this David-Dukeian evil is. Of course, this is also a man that President Bush appointed to a temporary vacancy at the United States Institute of Peace, after the Senate understandably balked at a regular appointment for him.

Pipes's little project requires him to attempt to justify the internment of American citizens (of Japanese ancestry) during World War II, a violation on several grounds of the Bill of Rights. I hope Asian-Americans realize that a key wing of the Republican Party, i.e. the Neoconservatives, wishes them ill.

If the American yahoos ever start putting people in concentration camps, I think we may be assured that they won't stop with the Muslims or the Asians, and Mr. Pipes will come to have reason to regret his imprudence and, frankly, his demonic implication.

Platform of the United Iraqi Alliance

The Iraqi newspaper "al-Adalah" published on Dec. 23 the platform of the United Iraqi Alliance, the mainly Shiite coalition sponsored by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. It was translated by BBC World Monitoring. Since this party very likely will dominate parliament, it is worth looking at the platform.

First, the coalition includes the following parties:

1. Supreme Assembly of Islamic Revolution in Iraq SAIRI [Or Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, SCIRI]

2. Islamic Al-Da'wah Party.

3. Centrist Grouping Party.

4. Badr Organization.

5. Islamic Al-Da'wah Party/Iraq's Organization.

6. Justice and Equality Grouping.

7. Iraqi National Congress INC .

8. Islamic Virtue Party.

9. First Democratic National Party.

10. Islamic Union of Iraqi Turcomans.

11. Turcoman Al-Wafa Party.

12. Islamic [Faili] Grouping in Iraq [Shiite Kurds].

13. Islamic Action Organization.

14. Future Iraq Grouping.

15. Hizbullah Movement in Iraq.

16. Islamic Master of Martyrs Movement.

As to the platform itself, it has two parts, basic principles and vision of Iraq's polity, and then specific areas of endeavor. As for basic principles:

First, the Iraq that we want:

1. A united Iraq - land and people - with full national sovereignty.

2. A timetable for the withdrawal of the multinational forces from Iraq.

3. A constitutional, pluralistic, democratic and federally united Iraq.

4. Iraq that respects the Islamic identity of the Iraqi people. The state religion is Islam.

5. Iraq that respects human rights, that does not discriminate on the grounds of sects, religions, or ethnicities, and that preserves the rights of religious and ethnic minorities and protects them against persecution and marginalization.

6. Iraq that provides a climate of peaceful coexistence among Iraqis without preferential treatment for any group.

7. Iraq in which the judiciary is independent and in which justice and equality prevail.

I'm not sure most Americans realize that the biggest and most important party coalition in Iraq, which will almost certainly form the next government, has explicitly stated in its platform that it wants a specific timetable announced for withdrawal of US troops from the country.

The rest of the statement promises security, fighting terrorism, a depoliticized military; a state guarantee of a job to every Iraqi, social security and workmen's compensation, state support for the building of houses for homeowners; providing health services and medicine and health insurance; supporting women's participation in politics, the economy and social life; support for youth and for families; developing industry and agriculture and the provision of basic services; education; etc.

An independent foreign policy is promised, as is membership in the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference. [This plank implies non-recognition of Israel until there is a global peace settlement accepted by these two organizations).

I think we are looking at the policies of the new Iraq. They aren't what Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Wolfowitz imagined.

Christian-Muslim Violence in Egypt

In upper Egypt, a Muslim young man is dead after clashes between Muslims and Christians in a village in Minya province. There are said to be 20,000 Muslims and 500 Coptic Christians in Dimsha Hashim, and the Christians have to travel a couple of miles to the nearest church. Apparently one of the Copts had a plan to turn a private house into a church, provoking the protest by a gang of young Muslim men.

Egypt still has on its books an Ottoman-era law restricting church building to Christian-majority areas and requiring government permission, and generally Copts face a certain amount of discrimination in Egyptian society, though in general their right to life, property and worship is recognized.

Note that restrictions on the building of religious edifices by minorities are common in Eurasia. Muslims in Greece, e.g., need special permission to build mosques, and the plan to build one in Athens has been controversial. Even in the United States, Muslim communities have often faced difficulties in getting permission to build mosques or cemeteries from local municipal or county authorities.

Although about 6% of Egypt's 70 million inhabitants are Coptic Christians, they live disproportionately in the south of the country, called Upper Egypt, and in some places in that region they form substantial populations and are economically and politically powerful. Christian-Muslim conflict is common there, and is intertwined with clan feuds.

The combination of Christian-Muslim conflict and a tradition of clan feuding has also contributed to particular success for radical Muslim groups in recruiting students in Upper Egypt to al-Jihad al-Islami, the organization that later joined with Bin Laden to form al-Qaeda. The jihadis have targeted Coptic Christians, but the government has generally intervened against the radical Muslim fundamentalists.

The Coptic Christian church goes back to the early centuries of the Common Era and is often recognized as "indigenous" in Egyptian nationalism, since the Copts are felt to be the descendants of Pharaonic Egyptians who converted to Christianity, and so are contrasted with the "Arabs." (In reality, of course, all Egyptians are a mixture of Nile Valley, African, Arab and other groups). Copts have a special place in the mythology of Egyptian secular nationalism, therefore. But for Muslim fundamentalists they are problematic and often suspected (wrongly) of being stalking horses for Western imperialism (in fact Copts played a key role in anti-British agitations that led to Egypt's independence of London in 1922).

Egyptians are considering the possibility of constitutional and political change as the Mubarak era begins to draw to a close. On Thursday the left-leaning Tagammu Party called for an end to the government's emergency decrees, a sort of martial law that suspended key elements of the Egyptian constitution, on the grounds that they were blocking economic and social development (-ash-Sharq al-Awsat). Among the needed changes, Egypt needs to reform its laws to grant complete freedom of religion and to stop discrimination against minorities.

Clashes in Mosul, Samarra

The massive bomb in Baghdad that killed 30 persons and wounded 25 the night of Tuesday- Wednesday turns out to have been an ambush. Guerrillas contacted the Iraqi police, told them the house was a safe house, and when the police approached, they blew it up. They also flattened ten houses around it.

The Guardian also says, "In the southern province of Babil, police said 20 members of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Imam al-Madhi Army militia were detained on suspicion of involvement in planting explosives and attacking police stations in the region."

Guerrillas launched a daring truck bomb attack on US troops in Mosul on Wednesday. The US troops replied with small arms fire and then called in jets to bombard the southern part of the city.

Al-Zaman Students in the Colleges of Science, Engineering and Education at Mosul University demonstrated for the first time Wednesday, demanding that general examinations be postponed for a semester, until early February 2006, instead of being held in summer of 2005. They said that the lack of heating oil made it hard for them to study, and the lack of gasoline made it difficult for many students to get to class.

Al-Zaman: Sources in the police announced that they had discovered the bodies of an Iraqi contractor and a female engineer on the road between Mosul and Tuz, and found the body of a Turkish truck driver in Bid'iyyah just south of Samarra. Two policemen were wounded by guerrillas in the district of Yathrib to the east of Balad.

The National Guards said that they had captured 25 suspects in al-Azamiyah along with weaponry, and another 25 in Mahmudiyah, both districts of Baghdad. They alleged that among those captured in Mahmudiyah were some Syrians. An Egyptian was captured in Karradah, along with pamphlets and grenades. They also said that 8 guerrillas mounted an attack on the National Guards in Rustumiyah, but that they were captured after an exchange of fire. The US military announced that three suspected guerrillas were captured in the district of Balad, and clashes broke out between National Guards and guerrillas in Samarra.

It was announced that two Iraqi children recently led the Marines to a site where roadside bombs were concealed, near Baiji.

Around 12 noon on Wednesday, National Guards and guerrillas clashed in Samarra's al-Bubaz district, which had witnessed a roadside bomb explosion recently. The National Guards were searching the area near Samarra General Hospital, when guerrillas opened fire on them.

Reuters reported of the Samarra clash that it involved both Iraqi national guards and US troops. The US military announced that two patrols had come under fire. US helicopter gunships were called in, shops closed, and the area was deserted. The previous night, a roadside bomb had wounded one US soldier and five Iraqi policemen in Samarra.

Reuters adds,

"An Iraqi National Guardsman was killed on Wednesday in the Siniya area west of Samarra, an officer in the US-backed force said. Around 110 Guards also resigned after their Siniya commander was killed in a car bomb explosion along with several Guards two weeks ago. The eight-member Siniya village council resigned yesterday following the assassination of its president."

I have noticed a pattern of assassinations of members of provincial and municipal governing councils in recent weeks. Presumably these actions are aimed at derailing the provincial elections also scheduled for January 30. The guerrillas' success in causing the whole governing council of Siniyah to resign, along with over 100 National Guards, seems ominous. In the wake of all those resignations, presumably the guerrillas that had threatened these people are now in control of the village.

The human side of the poor security situation in Iraq is apparent in Jackie Spinner's article today for the Washington Post on how widespread veiling has been forced on formerly relatively liberated Iraqi women. Spinner's piece belies claims made earlier this year by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz that the US had improved the situation of women in Iraq.

Bush and the Tsunami

The transcript of President George W. Bush's remarks on the Tsunami is now available. After days of silence and invisibility, Bush finally came out on Wednesday to address perhaps the greatest natural disaster of our times.

He said he had called four heads of state to express his condolences and was coordinating with other countries, and was sending some military logistical help, along with the $35 million in aid now promised (initially it was $15).

QUESTION: Mr. President, were you offended by the suggestion that rich nations have been stingy in the aid over the tsunami? Is this a sign of another rift with the U.N.?

BUSH: Well, I felt like the person who made that statement was very misguided and ill-informed.

Take, for example, in the year 2004, our government provided $2.4 billion in food, in cash, in humanitarian relief to cover the disasters for last year. That's $2.4 billion. That's 40 percent of all the relief aid given in the world last year was provided by the United States government. We're a very generous, kind-hearted nation, and, you know, what you're beginning to see is a typical response from America.
First of all, we provide immediate cash relief to the tune of about $35 million. And then there will be an assessment of the damage so that the next tranche of relief will be spent wisely. That's what's happening now.

Just got off the phone with the president of Sri Lanka. She asked for help to assess the damage. In other words, not only did they want immediate help, but they wanted help to assess damage so that we can better direct resources. And so our government is fully prepared to continue to provide assistance and help.

It takes money, by the way, to move an expeditionary force into the region. We're diverting assets, which is part of our overall aid package. We'll continue to provide assets. Plus the American people will be very generous themselves. I mean, the $2.4 billion was public money, of course provided by the taxpayers.

But there is also a lot of individual giving in America . . .

This entire spiel was very well rehearsed and mostly wrong.

As The Guardian notes,

Jan Egeland - the United Nations' emergency relief coordinator and former head of the Norwegian Red Cross . . . question[ed] the generosity of rich nations. ``We were more generous when we were less rich, many of the rich countries,'' Egeland said Monday. ``And it is beyond me, why are we so stingy, really. ... Even Christmas time should remind many Western countries at least how rich we have become.'' Egeland told reporters the next day that his complaint wasn't directed at any one nation.

So Egeland had not in fact singled out the United States. He was talking about the 30 richest countries generally.

Second, Bush is an MBA, so he knows very well the difference between absolute numbers and per capita ones. Let's see, Australia offered US $27 million in aid for victims of the tsunami. Australia's population is about 20 million. Its gross domestic product is about $500 billion per year. Surely anyone can see that Australia's $27 million is far more per person than Bush's $35 million. Australia's works out to $1.35 per person. The US contribution as it now stands is about 9 cents per person. So, yes, the US is giving more in absolute terms. But on a per person basis, it is being far more stingy so far. And Australians are less wealthy than Americans, making on average US $25,000 per year per person, whereas Americans make $38,000 per year per person. So even if Australians and Americans were both giving $1.35 per person, the Australians would be making the bigger sacrifice. But they aren't both giving $1.35; the Bush administration is so far giving an American contribution of nine cents a person.

The apparent inability of the American public to do basic math or to understand the difference between absolute numbers and proportional ones helps account for why Bush's crazy tax cut schemes have been so popular. Americans don't seem to realize that Bush gave ordinary people checks for $300 or $600, but is giving billionnaires checks for millions. A percentage cut across the board results in far higher absolute numbers for the super-wealthy than for the fast food workers. But, well, if people like being screwed over, then that is their democratic right.

Bush's underlining of the $2.5 billion he says the United States gave in emergency humanitarian aid last year annoyed the hell out of me. He said it was 40% of such monies given by the industrialized world. But the US is the world's largest economy, and neither on a per capita basis nor as a percentage of GDP is that very much money. Bush said "billion" as though it were an astronomical sum. But he spends a billion dollars a week in Iraq, without batting an eye. That's right. Two weeks of his post-war war in Iraq costs as much as everything the US spent on emergency humanitarian assistance in 2003 for all the countries in the world.

One reader wrote in,

If the US didn't have 150,000 troops bogged down in Iraq with hundreds of thousands more either winding down from or preparing for deployment, just think of how many lives we could be saving right this instant by putting hundreds of thousands of the most mobile and most efficient airlift, sealift, rapid emergency management, and medical forces in the world to work throughout the Indian Ocean Basin (and for a fraction of the cost of the war). Instead we're barely managing a couple warships and 15,000 or so troops, a fraction of what we might have done if the Administration had their priorities straight. Opportunity cost may seem like an abstract economic principle, but it seems there's nothing quite like the most devastating tidal wave in human history to make it crystal clear. Bush's War is now costing lives in Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, the Maldives, etc, etc, etc.

The US Federal budget in 2004 consists of about $1.8 trillion in receipts and $2.3 trillion in expenditures. The 2003 official development assistance budget was $15 billion (a very large portion of which goes to countries that don't need the assistance, and is given for strategic reasons). That is about 0.14 percent of the US GDP. Norway, in contrast, spends $2 billion a year on humanitarian assistance, which comes to almost a full 1.0 percent of its GDP. This is the sort of thing that drove Egeland to make his remark. He was even complaining about Norway, which is several times more virtuous than the US on a per capita basis in this regard.

Bush fears the tsunami for two big reasons. If the US government really stepped up to the plate, Bush would not be able to argue for making his tax cuts for the rich permanent.

And, the world public has just seen on its television screens the sort of disasters we can expect if Bush's denial of global warming continues as US policy. So he has to fall back on silly arguments from meaningless absolute numbers and on vague hopes for private giving. The tsunami says that government is needed to help people. That's not what Bush wants the US public to believe. But the tsunami is bigger than Bush.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dozens Killed in Iraq

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

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

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

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

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

Bin Laden votes in Iraq and Shoots himself in the Foot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iraqi Islamic Party Withdraws
Dispute over Theocracy among Iraqi Shiites

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arato Guest Editorial: The Iraqi Constitution

The Iraqi Constitution: A Modest Proposal

Andrew Arato

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew Arato
Professor
The New School University

Tsunami a Foretaste of Global Warming

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

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

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

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

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

Giant waves are only one potential problem with global warming.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Save the Iraqi Elections (Reprint Edition)

The following piece appeared in the Detroit News in early December:


Sunday, December 5, 2004

Bush policies set off skirmish on fate of Iraqi elections

Upcoming voting is headed toward train wreck unless U.S. sets aside legislative seats for Sunnis

By Juan Cole / Special to The Detroit News


The extended train wreck that has been American-dominated Iraq is wending its way toward a decisive intersection, the national elections scheduled for Jan. 30. The Bush administration strategy has been to attack and marginalize political forces that protest the American presence in the country, and to set the elections up on a national basis so as to exclude extremes.

But these two strategies have now backfired, creating a perfect storm of political peril. Security is so bad that voters standing in line at polling stations will likely take mortar or grenade fire, and elections may simply not be practical.

Even if voters navigate those dangers, another shoal lurks beneath their bow. Most of the Sunni Arabs deeply resent the U.S. military presence and reacted with outrage to the assault on Fallujah and the shooting by a Marine of a wounded guerrilla in a mosque. They can now take revenge on Bush by staying home on Election Day.

If the resulting parliament under-represents the Sunnis, the new government will lack legitimacy. The dangers were recognized by 15 small Sunni Arab parties, which recently argued that the elections must be postponed so they could have time to win over their constituents. They are said to have been joined in the plea by the two large Kurdish parties, though some other reports contested this allegation.

The United States and the interim government of Prime Minister Allawi rejected this plea for a postponement, as did over 40 Shiite parties and the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.

It is even worse. The new parliament will double as a constitutional convention.

The members of parliament will have to make hard decisions about the fate of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, which is claimed by both Kurds and Arabs, and about the place of religious law in the new state.

To exclude Sunni Arabs from such discussions is a recipe for civil war.

Most Sunni Arabs had been members of or supporters of the Baath Party. The Bush administration fired thousands of Baathists from their jobs, dissolved the Baath army and gave the Sunni Arabs the impression that the Americans intended aggressively to marginalize them. These moves helped stoke the persistent guerrilla war of the past 18 months.

The major post-Baath Sunni parties are religious, and include the Association of Muslim Scholars and the Iraqi Islamic Party. The popular AMS is urging a boycott of the elections.

Assuming the security problems do not prove fatal to the elections, they can now be salvaged politically only in one way. The interim government, which has already declared martial law, must pass a decree ordering a onetime set-aside of a generous 25 percent of seats for predominantly Sunni Muslim parties.

This sort of quota is regrettable, but it is the only solution to the crisis. It should not form a precedent, but rather should be done as an emergency measure just this once. Once the parliament meets to craft a constitution, it is important that it create an upper house that somehow over-represents the Sunni Arabs and Kurds, so as to prevent a tyranny of the Shiite majority.

The American-designed government, with a one-chamber legislature, ensures permanent Shiite dominance, likely by religious parties, which contains the seeds of future disaster for Iraq.

The Bush administration has committed a series of epochal blunders in Iraq.

Taking the risk that the Sunni Arabs will boycott the Jan. 30 elections, and failing to prepare for the possibility, would be another huge error.

-----------
Juan Cole teaches history at the University of Michigan and is the author of "Sacred Space and Holy War" (IB Tauris, 2002).

IraqTheModel

On December 12, just before I went off to Japan on a trip, I drew attention to a web log entry by Joseph Mailander at the Martini Republic, which raised questions about the bona fides of a web site run by three Iraqi brothers called IraqTheModel. Mailander had come to be suspicious of the site for various reasons, some of them now known to be wrong. I had been contacted by Mr. Mailander with some of these suspicions a few days previously, and had responded then that I thought some of them were overdrawn. In particular, I demurred from his attempt to link the site to the CIA. I enclose the relevant comments from that message below.

In my own posting on this issue, I did not actively make any allegations against IraqTheModel myself at all. In my own mind, I was merely drawing attention to Mailander's entry on an informal, "Isn't this interesting?" basis. In particular, I thought that the Martini Republic posting raised some very interesting issues (that was what I meant about it being very important), most notably about the possibility that the blogging world was open to some sorts of manipulation. Since bloggers often pride themselves in being more honest than the corporate media, Mailander had started me wondering whether there weren't ways to pump up a site artificially. Coincidentally, Kevin Drum had just published an expose of the way in which CBS News had used a lobbyist on the issue for a "man in the street" interview on privatizing social security.

The only substantive point I made with regard to IraqTheModel myself was that the authors appeared to me not very representative of Iraqi public opinion. That is all right, of course. They are putting forward their own ideas. It is just that if we want to really understand contemporary Iraq, we should understand that few of their co-citizens think as they do.

And then I went abroad, and all hell broke loose in cyberspace, as a number of bloggers attacked my posting (well, OK, they attacked me; I think the phrase "pond scum" was deployed.) It turned out that Mailander's identification of the ITM web site server as being in Abilene, TX, was innocent and typical of blogspot users.

I was under the gun preparing my lectures, and then was on a whirlwind trip and often did not have good internet access (I blogged only telegraphically for most of the past couple weeks), and it has taken me this amount of time to get back and catch up on the controversy. If I had just been at home in my normal routine I could have responded immediately and no doubt that would have been better. In cyberspace time I am now probably talking about ancient history.

In retrospect, of course, I should have been clearer about my lack of active endorsement for Mr. Mailander's specific allegations, even as I made clear that what interested me was the issue of how the blogging world might be affected by political "marketing." I don't doubt Mailander's good faith, but obviously there were elementary errors in his initial entry. And, if I could take it back, I wouldn't have linked at all. This is a matter in some ways of not knowing my own strength. Blogging is deceptively informal, sort of like a conversation rather than like formal writing. So it is natural to cross-link among friends and say, 'Hey, check this out.' But my weblog has come to be so widely read that this degree of informality is now a luxury I obviously cannot afford, and I will try to be more careful.

The other thing to say, though, is that errors come with this territory. You can't be out here posting daily and not commit some errors from time to time. When kind readers correct them, I try to put the corrections in brackets, even ex post facto. Indeed, errors are the human condition. Many of the more vitriolic critics of Informed Comment alleged 2 years ago that Iraq was 2-5 years away from having a nuclear bomb, that Iraq was floating in biological and chemical weapons, that Saddam was in bed with al-Qaeda, that Iraqis would universally greet US troops with garlands and sweets, that the Iraq war and aftermath would be a "cakewalk," that the road to peace in Palestine/Israel went through Baghdad, etc., etc. The commentators who made these allegations want to be held harmless from these enormous and highly consequential errors that have gotten large numbers of people killed. But I kept getting these annoying messages that my merely cross-linking to a site had endangered my "credibility." One of the more vehement attacks on my site was written by someone who writes for Tech Central Station, which is in turn published by the Republican lobbying firm, DCI Group. And the first time Jeff Jarvis mentioned me it was to complain in summer of 2003 that I seemed to be seeking out bad news on Iraq-- when in fact, I was just ahead of the curve in seeing the growing guerrilla war; he has never apologized.

It is now being alleged in the rightwing press (which really is a paid-for manipulation of public opinion) that I said that the Ali brothers were connected to the CIA. I never said any such thing. My phrase "certain quarters" referred to, at most, the Republican Party or organizations associated with it. As the email below should make clear, I never thought that charge plausible. Some have suggested that the controversy endangers the brothers' lives. But if meeting with high US officials in Washington and blogging about it does not, nothing would.

(Personally, by the way, I cut the CIA a lot of slack in the post-9/11 world; I don't like the dirty tricks the Company has sometimes played, but we do need a CIA to fight al-Qaeda, which does want to destroy us. I know some analysts read this site, and I am honored if they feel they learn anything here, and hope it helps the country. So I'm just not the sort of person that would use the CIA rhetorically in a negative fashion.)

So, anyway, I offer this posting as a clarification and also, as a retraction of the comment about the Abilene ISP and any unfounded implication of USG support for the IraqTheModel site. And I apologize to the Ali brothers for the error, and want to stress that I bear them no ill will. I am sorry I was abroad and unable to respond in detail before now.

From: Cole, Juan
Sent: Fri 12/10/2004 4:56 PM
To: Joseph Mailander
Subject: RE: IraqTheModel and Abiline Texas


Dear Joseph:

. . . The CIA ISP is hilarious, but the explanation is certainly correct. A real CIA operation would go out of its way to avoid using that acronym.

The question of how they ended up with an Abilene ISP is a good one

Another issue is artificial visibility. Is the US press being directed to the Iraqi bloggers who are actually popular in the blogosphere, who object to US policy? The US government is one hell of a press agent . . .

cheers Juan

Bombings and Assassinations Mar Christmas Day in Iraq

Douglas Ireland of the LA Weekly has a fine piece on the problems with the coverage of Iraq in the US media, and offers some helpful pointers on how to penetrate the fog of information war.

Guerrillas detonated a car bomb on Saturday at Khan al-Nus, between the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, killing five Iraqi civilians. The guerrillas had apparently been aiming at a US military convoy but missed.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat and wire services report that new bodies were pulled out of rubble near a truck bombing that appears to have targeted the Jordanian embassy in the Mansur District of Baghdad on Friday, bring the total number of deaths in that incident to 9.

Near Taji, Guerillas gunned down Jalil Ibrahim and Ali Muhammad. Ibrahim was a member of a local governing council.

South of Mosul, guerrillas assassinated an Iraqi translator working for the US military, along with his wife, at the village of Abu Hiza'.

Gunmen assassinated Dr. Hasan al-Ruba'i, 45, a professor in the medical school at Baghdad University, as he drove in his car with his wife. She was unharmed. Al-Ruba'i had a reputation for having stood for academic integrity against attempts to make hiring or firing decisions at the medical school on the basis of politics imposed from above.

In a case of mistaken identity, US troops killed Muhammad Nihad Hamudi as he was driving out near the airport. They had thought him a guerrilla, but he was not.

In Mosul, in two separate incidents guerrillas attacked Iraqi police with a hand grenade and with small arms fire. There was no word of casualties.

In Samarra, clashes between guerrillas and Iraqi national guardsmen left two guardsmen and three civilians dead.

The Association of Muslim Scholars claimed that on Friday, US troops had invaded the home of one of its members, Shaikh Muwaffaq Muzaffar Al-Duri, the Friday prayers leader at Abu Bakr al-Siddiq Mosque. The AMS claimed that US troops "executed" Al-Duri, with "the utmost barbarity." The US military denies any knowledge of the incident.

The AMS office in Iskandariyah, Babil province, was also assaulted by a mixed force of US troops and Iraqi national guards. The AMS is often suspected of having at least some links to the guerrilla resistance among Sunni Arabs to the US presence in Iraq. The AMS says that in the past 2 months, some 20 Sunni Friday prayer leaders have been assassinated or disappeared, 80 have been arrested, and several mosques have been invaded and searched.

Militants kidnapped multimillionnaire Turkish businessman Kahraman Sadikoglu along with several other Turks from the port city of Umm Qasr on the Gulf earlier this week, a video showed. Sadikoglu, a shipping magnate, had been helping clear the Gulf of debris from the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s.

US Marines captured two members of the Monotheism and Holy War group that now styles itself the "Mesopotamian al-Qaeda." AP reports, ' A Marines statement identified the men as Saleh Arugayan Kahlil and Bassim Mohammad Hazeem. Their cells kidnapped and executed 11 Iraqi National Guardsmen, carried out car bombings and other attacks in the Ramadi area and "smuggled foreign terrorists into the country," the Marines said. "This group is responsible for intimidating, attacking and murdering innocent Iraqi civilians, Iraqi police and security forces, and business and political leaders throughout the [A]nbar province," the statement said. '

Edmund Sanders of the Los Angeles Times reports that candidates loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr on the various electoral slates running for parliament number altogether about 180. He says Sadr himself, a Shiite fundamentalist and Iraqi nationalist who wants US troops out of the country, is hedging his bets so as to maximize his opportunities to take advantage of the post-election situation. If the elections go well, he will have at least some followers in place in parliament. If they go badly, he can point out that he had public reservations all along.

Study of Arabic in the US

Harry Levins of the St. Louis Post Dispatch has an interesting article on the lack of Arabic speakers in the US. He says that a little over 10,000 students are now studying Arabic. That is a big increase from the 1980s, when it was about 2500, or from the early 1990s, when it was about 4500. It compares poorly to 30,000 studying China, and 400,000 studying Spanish.

The subtext of the article is, of course, US security needs. At one point he quotes someone named Carafano at the so-called American Heritage Foundation suggesting that universities aren't "defense-friendly" and that therefore their students "won't be security-minded." What a load of hogwash. First of all, universities are much more interested in the genuine defense of the United States than hack shops like the AHF (funded by Joe Coors of Coors beer and notorious far rightwing billionnaire gadfly Richard Mellon Scaife). What the university community mostly is not interested in is naked imperial aggression, of the sort the so-called American Heritage Foundation promotes.

Second, almost everyone in the security agencies of the US government-- the CIA, the FBI, the State Department, etc., etc., has at least a BA or BSc. from a US university, so it makes no sense to allege that university-trained students are uninterested in the security field. Why should students who study Arabic be less so?

I'll tell you what the real problems are. In some of what follows, I am influenced by comments of my colleague John Walbridge of Indiana University, but I am responsible for these remarks, and some of them are mine alone:

1) The US education system generally does a horrible job of teaching languages. Schools most often start the kids on a language only in 7th grade (typically age 11 or 12!). And often they only give the children a "sampling" of languages that year (which is useless). So they do not really begin until age 13 or so, about the time that language learning ability atrophies. If you want fluent speakers of other languages, you should be starting them in kindergarten. Not only do younger children learn languages faster and better, but being at least bilingual as a young child keeps the brain malleable for learning languages later in life. If you are monolingual and 14, learning languages is unlikely to come easily to you. This frankly brain dead approach to language teaching in the US is a vast mystery to me, but no doubt it has something to do with financial issues. Since Americans appear to think it is far more important to give tax cuts to billionnaires than actually to pay for needed social and cultural services in society, it is no wonder they don't fork over money to tutor our five-year-olds in French. But US security, and the US image in the world (they are related) would both be much improved if more Americans were fluent in languages.

2) There is almost no scholarship money for studying Arabic. Why should students do something that is exotic, that may or may not produce well-paid employment, and for which there is almost no fellowship incentive?

3) Arabic translation is a relatively poorly paid occupation. The kinds of salaries offered Arabic translators by the FBI after 9/11 were frankly laughable.

4) The recruiters for the US security agencies shy away from hiring Muslim Americans, for fear they might turn out to be double agents. Muslim Americans are more likely to know Arabic well than others, and 99.999% of them are loyal Americans. All the 9/11 hijackers had to be brought in from abroad.

5) The recruiters for the US security agencies don't want Americans who have spent long periods abroad, lest they have developed local sympathies. This foolish approach excludes the most knowledgeable US citizens. (It is a flaw in the philosophy of American journalism as well, and its silliness can easily be shown by pointing to the work in Iraq of Anthony Shadid, an Arabist who had previously covered Egypt; obviously, Shadid has gotten stories that non-Arabic speakers unfamiliar with the culture could not have).

6) The recruiters even advise Americans studying Arabic not to go on summer or semester-long study abroad programs, since apparently even that much living outside the US could permanently injure their loyalty to their country. But such study abroad is essential to gaining fluency!

7) Being involved in Arabic studies and Middle Eastern studies in the United States is extremely controversial and often leads to character assassination, and you just have to have an iron constitution to put up with all the junk that gets thrown your way by the bigotted. David Steinmann's "Campus Watch Program" (he is also head of the far-rightwing Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs that produced Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith), which smears university professors and students that don't toe the Likud Party line, is a case in point. (Ironically, Feith helped make a mess of the American enterprise in Iraq by excluding veteran State Department Arabists from the Coalition Provisional Authority in summer and fall of 2003!)

Not only is being misrepresented and smeared painful to most people, but trying to be even-handed on the Middle East will get a person called "racist" (i.e. insufficiently enthusiastic about Ariel Sharon), Orientalist (insufficiently enthusiastic about radical Muslim fundamentalism), or "terrorist-lover" (i.e. insufficiently enthusiastic about aggressive imperial warfare by the Bush administration). Since such epithets can harm careers, any sensible person would just stay away from Middle Eastern languages, or study something safe like Spanish.

Well, obviously, you just aren't likely to get really fluent Arabists into the security agencies under these circumstances. And nor are you going to get Americans able to communicate with Muslim audiences actually before those audiences if the US government doesn't trust the ablest Americans in this regard, and if David Horowitz is busy libelling them. I don't expect this miserable situation to change anytime soon. And I am sure that this situation puts the United States at risk.

Hiding Christmas in Iraq

The US Christian Right has been loudly complaining about the alleged exclusion of Christmas from the US public sphere. (There isn't really any evidence of it.)

But Iraq's approximately 700,000 Christians actually are having to hide their celebrations for fear of violence from radical Muslim extremists. Borzou Daragahi reports that most Iraqi Christians are declining to put out Christmas lights or symbols, and many are attending daytime masses or none at all for fear of car bombs. Many masses have even been cancelled by the churches. Christians had been relatively safe under the Baath regime. Daragahi writes,

' "It's true that the Americans are Christians and we are Christians. But they should not associate us with them. All the Christians want the Americans to get out and the occupation to end. Nobody is with the Americans," said Father Gabriel Shamami, who leads the St. George's Church in Baghdad. '

There have been some horrific bombings of Christian churches by Muslim radicals in the past year, and some churches were bombed as recently as Monday, Dec. 20, 2004. A wave of kidnappings of Christians has also plagued the community.

Thousands of Christians have fled Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Estimates vary widely, from just 10,000 to as many as 200,000. Most have moved to Jordan, Syria or Lebanon, all of them relatively hospitable to Christians. The Baath regime had been generally tolerant of Christians, since it stressed Arab nationalism rather than Islam as the basis of the state.

A conference on Christian-Muslim dialogue was held recently in Baathist Syria, where major Christian and Muslim figures spoke about harmony between Christians and Muslims. Most Syrian Christians support the Baath government because it provides tolerance to them, and they know that were it to fall, it would likely be replaced by the Muslim Brotherhood. About 10 percent of Syria's 18 million citizens are Christian.

Ironically, the Bush administration wants to overthrow the Syrian government, risking the same kind of destabilization there that has so hurt Iraqis--including Iraqi Christians.

At Least 30 Killed, Dozens Wounded in Iraq Violence

AFP and other wire services report that violence in Iraq on Friday killed at least 30 persons (including 24 guerrillas in Fallujah) and wounded dozens.

Guerrillas blew up a fuel tanker in Baghdad near the Jordanian embassy, killing at least one person and wounding 19.

A campaign of assassination against provincial notables serving on local and provincial governing councils sponsored by the US continued, with the killing of tribal leader Shaikh Zaid Khalifa Muhsin Al-Bin-Uways late on Thursday in Sa'diyah. On Wednesday, guerrillas had gunned down Hazem Daraa, a tribal leader in Tikrit.

In downtown Samarra, US forces battled guerrillas, leaving 4 civilians wounded in the crossfire.

Guerrillas and Iraqi national guardsmen fought one another in Duluiyah, leaving one Iraqi dead and four wounded.

Guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb between Samarra and Tikrit, killing one child and wounding three others.

There was more fighting in Fallujah, in which one radical Muslim web site estimated 24 guerrillas, mostly foreigners, were killed.

Some of the inhabitants returning to Fallujah have left again. Ash-Sharq al-Awsat quoted one as saying that not even animals could live in the ruins the Americans had left behind.

Guerrillas captured Iraqi National Guards Colonel Saadi Aftan Hammoud on Friday, as he travelled to Ramadi from Baghdad (AP).

Three Kurds were kidnapped and a fourth wounded in Kirkuk. They were working for the water and sewerage authority.

Guerrillas dynamited the mayor's mansion in Ramadi.

In Buhriz near Baqubah, guerrillas hit the police station and governor's mansion with mortar and small arms fire, but caused no casualties.

AP reported that US troops opened fire on a family travelling by car in Baghdad, killing a young girl and wounding her mother and brother.

The fundamentalist Association of Muslim Scholars, which has a high standing among Sunni Muslims, called again on Friday for a Sunni Arab boycott of the elections for parliament scheduled for January 30. AP writes:

' "We are not against the elections, but we want fair elections that represent the Iraqi people. Since this is not possible at the time being ... we call for postponing it," senior cleric Sheik Ahmed Abdul-Ghafour al-Samaraie told worshippers at Baghdad's Um al-Qura mosque during Friday prayers. '

Radical Militants on Planet al-Qaeda Wanted Bush to Win US Election

Georges Malbrunot, one of two French journalists recently released by radical Muslim fundamentalists in Iraq, spoke to CNN on Friday:

Malbrunot quoted his captors as saying Bush's re-election "would improve our ability to fight . . . We vote for Bush because Bush help us a lot by intervening in Afghanistan. So, from that point we could spread all over the world and we are now in 60 countries," Malbrunot cited one of the militants as saying on October 15, two weeks before Bush defeated Democrat John Kerry. Malbrunot, 41, quoted the same militant as saying: "Our main targets are Saudi Arabia and Egypt. And because of Bush, if he is re-elected, we are sure that American soldiers will remain in Iraq for years."

Malbrunot said that the group that held him was not Iraqi nationalists but rather internationalist jihadis and that he felt as though he were on Planet Bin Laden while in captivity.

Actually, that the radical Muslim fundamentalists much preferred that Bush win was self-evident, since Bin Laden and his fellow travellers want to sharpen contradictions between the Muslim world and the West. It is in that extreme polarization that they know they will find the best chance to pose as champions of Islam and ultimately to take over. They know very well that Bush has decided to make a long-term US push into the Muslim world, involving probably several wars and more occupations. If Bush had stopped with Afghanistan and rebuilt the country properly, he could have dealt a death blow to al-Qaeda. By occupying Iraq militarily, he has given al-Qaeda unprecedented access to the Sunni Arabs (and some Kurds and Turkmen) of Iraq. They hope to use this new base not only to roil Iraq but ultimately to throw Saudi Arabia into turmoil, as well. It is not that far from Mosul to Jidda, where al-Qaeda recently attacked the US consulate in revenge for the assault on Fallujah. Three years ago, an al-Qaeda attack on a US consulate in Saudi Arabia would have horrified most Saudis. Now? I'm not so sure.

Four US Troops Killed

Guerrillas in al-Anbar province killed 3 Marines on Thursday.

In Baghdad, guerrillas used a roadside bomb to kill one US soldier and wound two others.

Also in Baghdad, guerrillas fired mortar shells that killed a policeman and three civilians.

Some 900 residents of a particular city neighborhood of Fallujah were allowed to return on Thursday, passing through a strict identity check. AFP writes,

' The returnees were entering an apocalyptic backdrop of flattened city blocks and bullet-scarred homes, where wild dogs and cats have feasted on corpses and the sour smell of the dead filled the streets for weeks. '

Guerrillas and Marines clashed in northern Fallujah, however, and the US bombed the city. Some of those hoping to return instead turned around and went back to their temporary shelters elsewhere. The Marines were fingerprinting and doing retinal scans of military-age men who returned, to begin building a data base of potential guerrillas. They turned by 16 men, apparently on suspicion of being connected to the guerrilla resistance.

Veteran security affairs correspondent Walter Pincus of the Washington Post points out that the guerrillas have better informants and intelligence inside US bases than the US has inside the insurgency. This point seems obvious from the outside, by one kind reader in Iraq just told me that the US officers he is talking to are convinced that they are winning and are getting better sources. I fear I think they are just being unrealistic, if so.

Iran's foreign minister Kamal Kharrazi warned Thursday in Damascus against the forces that are trying to provoke civil war in Iraq. (Iran, as a Shiite-majority country, would like to see Iraq stay together under majority Shiite rule; since it has its own Kurdish minority, it has no interest in seeing the Kurds become independent.) In fact, Iran is likely to play a stabilizing role in Iraq, since it does not want massive turmoil on its doorstep.

The Daily Star also notes the charges of Hasan Allawi (why are they all Allawis?), the Iraqi ambassador to Syria, that a captured Baathist guerrilla had photographs on him of high Syrian officials with known Iraqi insurgents. This allegation strikes me as ridiculous. First of all, why would Syrian officials be so stupid as to pose for such a picture? And why would expatriate guerrillas be so stupid as to carry such photos with them when infiltrating into Iraq? Allawi must think we are all gullible fools.

Sistani's Office Calls on Aides to Encourage Voting
Kurdish Troops to Guard Polling Stations?

Al-Hayat: The office of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani called on supporters and aides of the Shiite religious authority in all Iraqi provinces and cities to encourage the people to participate in the elections scheduled for the end of January, and to offer all help and assistance to the voters in casting their ballots in complete freedom. The office also asked, during a large meeting held in Najaf with the aides and supporters mentioned above, that they make citizens aware of the need for "self discipline and avoidance of the sectarian turmoil that the enemy is attempting to foment."

Iraqi minister for national security affairs, Qasim Da'ud, said that it was no longer plausible that the elections might be postponed, since, he said, Iraqis understood that the elections were the "legitimate gate through which the democratic process might be entered." He maintained in an interview with al-Hayat that the security situation was improving, and gave as proof that the guerrillas were now specifically targetting the electoral process.

A Kurdish party official, Faraj al-Haydari, told the newspaper that Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan's recent visit to Salahuddin Province was for the purpose of exploring the possibility that Kurdish forces might be used to guard the oil pipelines and to provide security to polling stations in late January.

The use of Kurdish Peshmerga or paramilitaries to guard polling stations might work in some parts of the country. But in Kirkuk, where Turkmen and Arabs contest Kurdish control of the city, and where calls for postponement of municipal elections are strident, it could actually cause more trouble.

Mosul Paralyzed as House to House Searching Continues
10 Die in Samarra, Mahmudiyah Violence

Az-Zaman: Schools, offices and shops were closed in Mosul, a city of over a million, on Wednesday as US troops conducted house to house searches in the southern and western areas of the city for the guerrillas who planned the bombing of the mess hall at the nearby US base on Tuesday.

It now appears that the explosion was caused by a suicide bomber who got inside the tent rather than by incoming mortar shells or rockets. Credit for the bombing was claimed by the radical Ansar al-Sunnah group, a small, largely Kurdish group based in northern Iraq.

Meanwhile, a large explosion in the Najjar District of Mosul shook the whole city on Wednesday.

Az-Zaman also reported the assassination of another member of the local governing council in Baqubah, Yusuf Abd al-Raziq, along with a police lieutenant.

Over 10 Iraqis were killed on Wednesday in clashes and explosions in Samarra (just north of Baghdad) and in Mahmudiyah (in Babil province south of the capital). The US has been fighting Sunni Arab guerrillas in Babil province to stop their attacks on Shiite locals and pilgrims, an action warmly supported by Iraqi vice president Ibrahim Jaafari and other Shiite leaders.

In Mamoun district, west of Baghdad, guerrillas hit a police station with a rocket, killing one and wounding two.

Ma'd Fayyad of Ash-Sharq al-Awsat interviews interim Iraqi education minister, Dr. Sami al-Muzaffir. Dr. al-Muzaffir frankly expressed his regret at leaving his professorial post at Baghdad University to become minister of education. He said that 80% of Iraqi schools have been damaged in the war, though many had now been repaired, and new ones were being built. There were plans to build 4500 schools, with World Bank, Kuwaiti and other grants, though great obstacles stood in the way of getting to work on them soon. He said there were over 6 million students in Iraq and 370,000 teachers, a very good ratio of 1 to 19, with many of the teachers having MA degrees. He admitted, however, that the distribution of the teachers was highly uneven, with some schools having far too few. He said that thousands of Baathist school teachers have now been rehired, and that many teachers formerly excluded from teaching by the Baath have also been hired. Altogehter 17,000 teachers have been returned to the classroom. In many instances, he made their rehiring dependent on their accepting a posting in a school that needed teachers. With World Bank help, 550 new textbooks have been printed in Iraq, and 50 outside.

Iran has closed its borders with Iraq and has forbidden Iranians from going as pilgrims to the Shiite shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala, because of the poor security situation. (Az-Zaman says there was some sort of firefight in Najaf on Wednesday).

AP reports that the foreign ministers of Jordan and Egypt warned against the erection of a sectarian state in Iraq. Al-Zaman, however, reports the statements of Jordanian foreign minister Hani al-Mulqi differently. He spoke, not against sectarianism, but against "political Islam" (al-Islam as-Siyasi). Obviously, he meant the Khomeinist variety. But it is interesting to see the foreign minister of an important Arab country denouncing "political Islam," all the same. He added, "We must safeguard to Iraq's Arab identity, since its Arabness unites Sunnis and Shiites." He is thus opposing Arab nationalism to political Islam, and opting for Arab nationalism. (One problem with this way of thinking is that the Kurds are sore over attempts to "Arabize" them, and old-style Arab nationalism distinctly lacked any appreciation for multiculturalism). I think al-Mulqi's formulation is naive. Baathism is gone, and whatever comes after it in Iraq will have to recognize the political rights of the Shiites and Kurds. Arab nationalism functioned latently as a vehicle of Sunni Arab superiority, which is just not going to continue. I think a subtext here may also be that he is coding Shiites as somehow Iranian and not truly "Arab," which is a mistake Sunnis often make about Iraqi Shiites.

I don't often agree with Patrick Buchanan, but in this article on Rumsfeld and the Neoconservatives, he largely nails it. The one thing I object to in what he says is that he seems to me to let Rumsfeld completely off the hook, blaming everything on his Neoconservative appointees.

Going to War with the Clothing We Have

The Civil Air Patrol at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany is making a plea for help for wounded US soldiers sent there. I quote the original letter below in full. Note that getting things all the way to Ramstein requires more postage than the APO address might suggest. I know the first reaction of most people when they read this message will be to be angry at political figures. But first send money, then be mad. By the way, this sort of treatment of US troops is common, even though they are all that stand between us and forces such as al-Qaeda. The grunts who do the heavy lifting aren't actually paid anything. The allowance given them to move from one base to another often doesn't cover their expenses. The Bush administration is even trying to back away from commitments made with regard to Vets' health benefits. Tens of thousands of badly wounded US veterans are likely to be produced by the current round of wars, and some proportion of them will end up homeless.

From: Lori Noyes
Sent: Monday, November 22, 2004 12:28 AM
Subject: Request for Help for our wounded troops at LRMC

Dear CAP Friends:

I am writing is to tell you about a project the Ramstein Cadet Squadron at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, is starting. The Landstuhl Regional Medical Center (LRMC) here in Germany got an influx of about 500 wounded troops from Iraq last week and more arrive almost daily. They arrive straight from the battlefield, with only the torn, dirty, bloody clothes on their back. They have no clothes, underwear, or toiletry items. The hospital provides them with only a cotton gown or pajamas, robe, and disposable slippers. Some stay only a few days before being sent to hospitals stateside, while others are here up to several weeks. The military gives them a $250 voucher to buy clothing and toiletries at the BX, but many are not ambulatory, and those who are have to wait for a bus to get down to the BX on Ramstein 7 miles away. The BX runs out of the clothing and it takes weeks for more to come in. Those who can go to the BX still need something to wear to get there!

The cadets are collecting new clothing and toiletries to that they can take to the wounded at LRMC. Below is a list of items the wounded need. It is cold here in Germany and warm items are needed. Items need not be name brands . . .

For males - all sizes, but mostly medium and large


briefs

boxer shorts

undershirts or T-shirts

white crew sox

cotton turtleneck shirts

flannel shirts

sweatshirts (crew or zip-up hooded)

sweat pants

inexpensive athletic shoes

knit caps

knit gloves


For females - all sizes, but mostly medium and large

cotton briefs

cotton T-shirts

cotton turtleneck shirts

flannel shirts

bras - mostly sizes 34, 36, 38 with cup sizes B and C

white crew sox

sweatshirts (crew or zip-up hooded)

sweat pants

inexpensive athletic shoes

knit caps

knit gloves


Toiletry articles -

disposable razors

shaving cream - regular and/or travel size

deodorant - regular and/or travel size

tooth brushes

tooth paste - regular and/or travel size

nail clippers

combs

hair brushes

The hospital could also use new or used video tapes or DVDs of movies for the patients to watch. Comedies or light drama are best. Please avoid movies about war or those with excessive violence.

If your squadron would like to help, we would greatly appreciate it, no matter what the quantity. Every little bit helps.

If you wish to send money, make your check out to the Ramstein Cadet Squadron and put "Help for LRMC" on the memo line. We will use the money to purchase toiletry items and movies. But American-sized clothing listed below is what is mostly needed, which the BX is currently out of.


Send your donations to:

Lt Col Lori Noyes
PSC 2 Box 6037
APO AE 09012

or

Ramstein Cadet Squadron NHQ-OS-119
Unit 3395
APO AE 09094


We can get items to the hospital faster if they come to my mailing address, but feel free to send them to the squadron address.

Feel free to pass the word along to other CAP units in your wing. Thank you for your support of our troops.


In service,


Lori L. Noyes, Lt Col, CAP

Deputy Commander

Ramstein Cadet Squadron

For those who want to help the victims of bombings such as those at Najaf and Karbala recently, contributions can be sent to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (click on "Iraq Humanitarian Crisis" at "I would like my contribution to go to . . .).

Iraq Digital Photo Archive at Washington Post

The Washington Post online is setting up what is essentially a digital photograph archive for the US soldiers in Iraq, called "Duty in Iraq." This archive could end up being of great historical importance, and I hope readers will be generous with their photos.

Another interesting use of photographs for commentary on the various Middle East crises is Doublequotes, which does something interesting today with the Saudi and Israeli flags, issues of sacredness, and the torture techniques at Gitmo.

Racism and Orientalism in the Israeli Academy

I can't see anything but racism in the discourse of either side in this court case in Haifa, which is considering whether a Palestinian group in the city has affinities to Hamas.

"The Arab mentality is made of "a sense of being a victim," "pathological anti-Semitism," and "a tendency to live in a world of illusions," said Prof. Rafi Israeli, a lecturer in Middle Eastern studies at Hebrew University, on the witness stand Wednesday, adding that the Arabs neglect sanitation in their communities. "Most of the Arab villages are dirtier, physically - it's a fact," he said . . . During cross-examination Wednesday, Israeli was asked to respond to questions on a number of issues concerning his viewpoint on the Arabs in Israel, Islam in general, and the sketch he offered of the nature of "the Arab mentality." The cross-examination, handled by attorneys Avigdor Feldman and Riad Anis, focused on the opinion Israeli wrote for the prosecution and, primarily, on quotes from a book he published in 2002 in which he describes Israel's Arabs as a fifth column "that sucks on the udders of the country." . . . Wednesday in the witness box, Israeli reiterated that the Arabs were "a burden on the state."

The leader of the group against which Israeli was testifying called him a "worm of his people" and a "Nazi."

I was just trying to imagine a US court case against a member of an American racial minority, in which the witness for the prosecution was a professor from Harvard. Let's say he alleged that:

*The mentality of X is characterized by the "sense of being a victim"
*and "pathological dislike of outsiders"
*and "a tendency to live in a world of illusions,"
*and who then alleged that X are unsanitary
*and "their neighborhoods are dirtier, that's a fact" than WASP neighborhoods.
*And then the good professor alleges that they are parasites on America

I can't imagine a US court judge allowing this sort of testimony, not against an individual but against an entire ethnic group (and allowing it to be termed "expert testimoney"!) Well, of course such things happened in the Jim Crow South, but is that really the sort of society Israelis want for their future?

You can see why the Likudniks have been after me lately, since most of them privately share Professor Israeli's views of the Arabs, and what better way to forestall the charge of racism on their part than to attempt to create the impression that their critic is the racist for daring to question them on this?

The far rightwing militant settlers in Gaza and the West Bank are engaging in all sorts of theatrics to keep their stolen land. That they would have the bad taste to wear orange stars of David so as to compare themselves to the victims of the Holocaust is not surprising. Mordechai Kedar, a brave man, dared actually say it: ' "But Mordechai Kedar, a senior research associate at Bar-Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, said “there are lunatics in the settlements who would act with no restrictions. … Lunatics don’t always obey orders and act even against their own interests.” He said that many of the settlers “serve in the army and have access to weapons, and I’m afraid that some people will not hesitate to use them against the police and army that come to evacuate them.” ' It should be remembered that most of the settlers also believe it is all right to expropriate land from those fantasizing, dirty, xenophobic, paranoid Arabs of whom Dr. Israeli spoke. And that the extremist Israeli colonialists are supported at least indirectly by US taxpayer dollars to make enemies for the US in the Muslim world.

Press Roundup for Wednesday 12/22

Josh White of the Washington Post reports that US soldiers at a base near Samarra routinely take mortar and machine gun fire, and that an incident similar to the luncheon massacre in Mosul could easily happen at other bases in the country.

Skyrocketing security costs have forced Contrack International, a major US contractor in Iraq, to pull out of that country. It had a $325 million contract to rebuild Iraq's transportation system. This news is the best indicator yet that the insurgents are winning the Iraqi Guerrilla War of 2003- . The US military can theoretically go on taking its current level of casualties for some time to come, though it probably cannot maintain its current troops strength in Iraq. But if all the civilian companies doing reconstruction pull out, along with most of the NGO's (non-governmental organizations), then it will be extremely difficult for the US to achieve the sort of reconstruction that might help Iraq turn a corner.

Az-Zaman: A cold wave has gripped Baghdad, leaving 16 children dead from exposure. Electricity has been unreliable recently because of sabotage, and there are heating fuel shortages for the same reason.

Vanessa Gezari has some further reflections on Sunni-Shiite relations in Iraq after the Najaf and Karbala bombings of this weekend. She is to be congratulated for seeking comment from experts like Abdulaziz Sachedina of the University of Virginia and Stephen Humphreys of the University of California, Santa Barbara. They know whereof they speak. The only dissent I would offer is that I don't think the shrine city bombing were done by "Wahhabis." I think they were the work of Baathists, and I think most of the violence in Iraq has all along been by the Baathists, along with a few radical Sunni Arab groups.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that the bombings in the shrine cities were condemned by President Ghazi al-Yawir and by the conservative Association of Muslim Scholars. The latter, Sunni clerics who are sometimes close to the guerrillas, expressed their profound pain at the injury dealt to the body of Iraq by these bombings at noble Najaf and Karbala. (That is, the Sunnis resorted to a nationalist language of soil and the national "body" to express their disapproval of the attacks on Shiite shrines).

Talib Ibrahim Dhahir, a member of the municipal governing council of Baqubah and a former nuclear scientist, was gunned down by unknown assailants on Tuesday.

Justin Raimondo has some interestng thoughts on the rift between the Neoconservatives and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. But I would just add that the disgruntlement with Rumsfeld is broad and deep among Republican senators, as well.

Raimondo also has an update on the IraqTheModel website, and the persistent questions about who is backing it and why, with information about the resignation of one of the brothers from the blog, writing, "the act of some Americans that made me feel I'm on the wrong side here. I will expose these people in public very soon and I won't lack the mean to do this, but I won't do it here as this is not my blog."

The Guardian notes that the American Civil Liberties Union acquired documents about the treatment of Guantanamo Bay prisoners that suggest that torture was used, and that it was actually authorized by President Bush. The documents also reveal that one torture technique was to wrap a prisoner in an Israeli flag. I'm puzzled by that one (my readers, incidentally, allege that the New York Times omitted to mention this particular technique, which was reported by the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post). My guess is that the prisoners' pictures were taken while wrapped in the Israeli flag, as a way of humiliating and possibly blackmailing them. You just have to scratch your head and wonder if the Bush administration is determined gradually to give supporting evidence for every single one of the anti-American stereotypes current in the Muslim world.

I suppose it doesn't occur to the US interrogators that the Israeli flag has the Star of David on it, which is at least to some degree a religious symbol, and that they were desecrating a Jewish icon. If I were the Israelis, I'd complain loudly about this blasphemy.

Brooks on Moment of Hope

David Brooks has a glib op-ed today in the New York Times in which he celebrates a moment of hope in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. He suggests that all the factors analysts have been complaining about-- the hegemony of the Likud in Israel, Ariel Sharon as PM, the re-election of George W. Bush, and the Iraq war, have ironically enough contributed to what he claims is an opening in the process. He gets a dig in at me, characterizing me as having said that the Iraq campaign was an elective war on behalf of Tel Aviv.

Brooks's column makes no sense to me. First of all, the resumption of some sort of negotiations was made possible only by Yasser Arafat's death, because Ariel Sharon hated Arafat, wanted to kill him, and refused to negotiate with him. Arafat was the elected president of the Palestinian Authority, however, and there was no one else to negotiate with. It seems to a lot of us that in the wasted past few years, Sharon has permanently spiked the possibility of there ever being a viable Palestinian state, and the Israeli colonization of the West Bank continues apace. Sharon's so-called withdrawal from Gaza will mean nothing without a strong Palestinian Authority in the region-- otherwise the military occupation will continue de facto.

As for my views on the causation of the Iraq war, sure I think there were strong elements in the Bush administration who wanted the war for reasons mainly connected to what they thought of as Israel's security interests. Anyone who has been reading me knows very well, however, that I think the war had many causes, not just one. That Brooks seems to want to say I was wrong is odd. Would he like to deny the allegation altogether?

Likewise, his assertion is illogical because there is no evidence that Iraq has had the slightest impact on the Israel/Palestine situation whatsoever. Brooks and others were wrong to think it would. So now he is just declaring that he was right all along without offering any causal argument, and blaming me for stating something that is pretty obvious.

Brooks at one point tried to deny that there were any Neoconservatives. Next he will be denying there was any Iraq war.

Mosul Attack leaves 22 Dead, 51 Wounded

The Guardian reports that a rocket and mortar attack on a US military base has left nearly two dozen dead and over 50 wounded. The shells landed on a tented mess hall, wreaking havoc among US troops, Iraqi national guards, and civilians. The Guardian notes that US bases in Iraq regularly take mortar and rocket fire, but because it seldom hits anything or causes much damage. Here the guerrillas managed to hit a tent during mealtime. It seems likely to me that they had some inside information from some Iraqi employee at the base, such that they knew exactly when and where to strike for maximum effect.

This sort of incident underlines what I have been saying about the difficulty of holding elections on January 30. It is not that I endorse postponing them, since I do not believe the security situation will improve any time soon and I think the US has to make the majority Shiite community happy. But I can only imagine that if the guerrillas can do this sort of thing to a US military base, they can do it to polling stations. If that happens, turnout could be low, bringing into question the legitimacy of the process. And since the elected parliament is actually a constitutional assembly, if it is elected on a low turnout, the constitution it drafts may not be seen as legitimate, either.

Meanwhile, Iran's Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei blamed the United States and Israel for the bombings in Karbala and Najaf. This outrageous charge is extremely dangerous and is a form of hate speech. Khamenei said he feared the US was trying to manipulate the forthcoming elections by keeping Iraqi Shiites off balance. As is often the case with Khamenei, his reasoning makes no sense at all. It is sad that a major country like Iran has such a demagogue as virtual clerical dictator. The good news is that he is not respected by most Shiites, either in Iran or in Iraq, and the Iraqis are unlikely to pay any attention at all to his bizarre outburst. Israel isn't blowing up things in Iraq, and has no motive to do so. Baathists and Sunni fundamentalists are.

Poll Shows American Public Wising Up

A new CNN poll shows that the views expressed here at Informed Comment on most issues related to Iraq and Donald Rumsfeld have become mainstream in the American public. A majority of Americans thinks Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld should resign. I called for his resignation after the Abu Ghraib torture scandal broke last spring. Although some senators are saying he should remain in office because a change of leadership at the Pentagon now would be disruptive, I would argue that Rumsfeld has so consistently made the worst possible decision in Iraq that getting him out of the Department of Defense may well be a prerequisite for beginning to fix the problems. Rumsfeld appointed Douglas Feith his undersecretary for policy, and allowed Feith to set up the Office of Special Plans, which cherry-picked intelligence and forged a false case for war in Iraq. Rumsfeld over-ruled his officer corps by sending a tiny force of only 100,000 troops to Iraq, ensuring that they could not keep order in the aftermath. Rumsfeld was the one who tried to hand Iraq over to corrupt financier Ahmad Chalabi. Rumsfeld allowed the looting that began the deterioration of security after the war. Rumsfeld dissolved the Iraqi army, putting US troops on the front lines of the guerrilla war. Rumsfeld didn't order as much armor for US troop vehicles as he could have, exposing thousands to serious injury from roadside bombs. Rumsfeld didn't even bother to personally sign the letters of condolence to the families of deceased troops killed in Iraq, in some large part as a result of his own flawed policies. The majority of the American people is right that Rumsfeld must go (and his deputies with him).

The poll found that nearly half of Americans understood that things have gotten worse in Iraq in the past year, and the fools who think the situation has improved have been reduced to a mere fifth of the public (these are apparently the same persons who tend to be picked to answer questions on American comedian Jay Leno's "Jay-walking" segment, and who also do not know who Dwight Eisenhower was). That 37 percent think things are no worse now than a year ago is disturbing, since they are in fact much, much worse in most ways, but at least they understand the lack of progress.

Some 41% understand that the forthcoming election in and of itself will not lead to a stable government. The vast majority realize that the Bush administration has left us stuck in Iraq, with no early prospect of an exit for US troops.

(I know it isn't Tuesday for most of my readers, but it is for me. Be back soon).

Funerals for 67 Dead Draw Thousands
Fears of Instability Spreading

Thousands of mourners came out in Najaf Monday to attend funerals for the 54 dead in that city from a massive bombing on Sunday. Emotions ran high, but key Shiite leaders seemed aware that the terrorism was intended to derail the upcoming elections, by producing large-scale Shiite-Sunni violence. AP reported, ' ``These operations aim at driving the Shiites away from the political process and toward acts of revenge to undermine the national unity,'' said Jalal Eddin al-Sagheer, an official with the leading Shiite political party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution. ``The whole issue has to do with elections.'' '

Barrie McKenna of the Toronto Globe and Mail makes the same point, writing, "One of the remarkable features of the spiral of violence in the lead-up to the Jan. 30 vote is that the powerful and well armed Shia militias have not struck back . . ." The most likely explanation is that the militias' leadership is ordering this restraint, obeying the instructions of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. The Shiites know that the elections are the surest way to win political power commensurate with their majority in the population, power they have been denied throughout the history of modern Iraq.

But Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post signals the clear danger that Sunni Arab and Shiite views of the guerrilla war are so diverging as to raise the specter of substantial communal turmoil in the future. The Sunni clerics fully support the Fallujans in their sermons, for instance. (Al-Zaman reports that on Saturday night into Sunday morning, clashes broke out again in the eastern Askari, Sina'i and Shuhada' districts of Fallujah between US troops and guerrillas, and that the US forces called in air strikes on those quarters; I couldn't find any mention of this report, coming from Iraqi eyewitnesses, in the US press.)

The Financial Times correspondents William Wallis and Mark Huband draw attention to yet another worrying possibility. The Saudis are concerned that volunteers who went to fight in Iraq are getting serious training and becoming battle-hardened, and that they may in future turn their new-found skills against the kingdom itself. They write, ' "The big trend for the coming 20 years will be the Iraqi jihad veterans. They are being seen as the extreme threat for the coming period. One key challenge is to establish who they are and where they are going, in order to make sure that the same mistake is not made as was made with the Arab Afghan veterans who fought against the Soviet Union," the senior European intelligence official said. '

Given al-Qaeda's increasing emphasis within Saudi Arabia on attacking US targets, and given Usama Bin Laden's recent call for targetting oil facilities, the prospect of several hundred Saudi jihadis returning battle hardened from Iraq is indeed scarey. The FT does not note a parallel threat, which is that the Saudi Shiites of al-Hasa (that is where your petroleum is coming from, folks, so you should know the name) could become radicalized by increased contact with groups like the Sadr movement in Iraq. Saudi Arabia's oil pipelines are extremely vulnerable to attack, and right now the kingdom is probably pumping some 13% of the petroleum produced in the world every day (11 million barrels a day out of a little over 80 million a day pumped). Drastic reductions in Saudi production because of persistent sabotage could throw the world into economic recession.

OFAC Reverses Censorship Policy

Further to William Fisher's guest editorial here on last Friday, good news! OFAC has reversed itself on several of its provisions for censoring manuscripts from Iran, Cuba Sudan.

The issue, however, has not gone away. The Scientist notes, "But Edward Davis, one of the publishers' attorneys, said yesterday that the publishers are not yet ready to drop their lawsuit, filed September 27, because the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), by granting a general license, continues to assert that it can regulate informational materials. The plaintiffs argue that OFAC has no such authority."

So the key points made by Fisher continue to be salient in principle.

[Just by way of explanation, Mr. Fisher had submitted that piece as a guest editorial the previous weekend, and I scheduled it to appear while I was abroad and out of much email contact. Thanks to readers for drawing my attention to the new developments. Now let us hope that the publishers win their lawsuit and stop this attack on the first amendment altogether.]

43 Dead, More than 95 Wounded in Najaf, Karbala
Ambush in Baghdad

Guerrillas detonated a huge bomb near the bus station in Karbala on Sunday, destroying several minibuses and leaving dead and wounded. Then an hour later, guerrillas set off another big explosion, this time in downtown Najaf, at a funeral procession. The bomb exploded just yards away from where the American-appointed governor, Adnan Zurfi, and his police chief, Ghalib al-Jazairi, were standing. In Najaf, 30 persons were killed and about 45 wounded.

In Baghdad, guerrillas ambushed a car carrying election workers, spraying it with machine gun fire and killing 3.

Najaf and Karbala are the two holiest cities in Iraq for Shiite Muslims. Najaf is the site of the shrine of the Imam Ali, the Prophet Muhammad's son-in-law and cousin, whom Shiites hold to be the rightful vicar of the Prophet. Karbala hosts the tomb of Imam Husain, the son of Ali, whom Shiites honor and ritually mourn as a martyr.

The geography of the attacks continues to suggest that the guerrillas are attempting to provoke Shiite on Sunni violence as a way of disrupting stability. Likewise, they are attempting to demonstrate that they can effectively torpedo any attempt to hold elections. If they can bomb so brazenly in the holy cities, where locals are watchful and where US troops had fought so recently to clear out the Mahdi Army, then they can bomb at will anywhere. The 9000 polling stations planned for January 30 cannot possibly be guarded from such attacks.

On Friday and Saturday, , guerrillas had demonstrated their ability to disrupt Iraq's petroleum pipelines with a series of bombs.

Also on Saturday, guerrillas claimed credit for the killing of two American contractors in Iraq.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that the daughter of former Iraqi president (back in the 1960s), Abdul Salam Arif, was killed by gunmen, along with her husband, and their son was kidnapped.

In contrast to the violence in West Baghdad and in the shrine cities, in Sadr City or the slums of Shiite East Baghdad, relative calm has prevailed for weeks, allowing the US to do some community development work, including clearing trash from the streets. The Sadr movement is strong in East Baghdad, but Sadr has declared neutrality toward the upcoming elections, while many Shiites are hopeful that they will produce a Shiite-dominated government that will pave the way for the end of the US occupation. As a result of these hopes, along with a past campaign of US bombing that made it clear it would not put up with armed militiamen patrolling the streets, the situation has been quiet in the vast slum.

I don't want to take anything away from these necessary development projects, but merely collecting the trash is not that big an accomplishment, and shouldn't be seen as a triumph this late in the day.

Voter Registration Stations Attacked
Ayatollahs: Shaalan Must Go

According to Reuters, guerrillas in Dujail, 30 miles north of Baghdad, subjected the local voter registration site to mortar fire on Saturday morning, killing 2 and wounding 8. Six of the wounded were Iraqi national guards who were trying to provide security there. Late Friday night, mortar shells had landed at a mostly deserted voter registration site in Kirkuk, wounding the guard. Another attack was launched in a small town west of Kirkuk, but national guardsmen repelled it. There were also violent incidents at Dakuk near Kirkuk, and at Mosul, which produced a number of casualties.

In a continuing attempt to disrupt Iraq's foreign trade, guerrillas killed four Turkish embassy guards (apparently actually Turkish policemen) in cold blood.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat, which had to close its Baghdad offices because of threats, still manages to gather news in Iraq. It is reporting that the leading clerics in the Shiite holy city of Najaf issued a communique condemning Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan for attacking the United Iraqi Alliance list as a cat's paw of Iran. The ayatollahs said that they did not see how Shaalan could continue as minister of defense given his irresponsible statements.

Iran's Ayatollah Jannati, a hardliner, called on the Shiites of Iraq to turn out to vote in large numbers if they wanted to guarantee their future in Iraq. Talk like that is what Shaalan uses to scare other Iraqis about the Iraqi Shiites. It isn't fair, since Iraqi Shiites are Arabs and guard their independence of Tehran.

It also reports that the Communist Party is the first to have had a big election rally in Baghdad, with 2000 persons attending (the party was virtually destroyed by Saddam Hussein but had once been a substantial force in Iraqi politics).

Fisher Guest Editorial: US Squelches Shirin Ebadi

RIGHT HAND, LEFT HAND


By William Fisher

Ellen Goodman of the Boston Globe performs a genuine public service by calling our attention to yet another screw-up in America’s war against the Axis of Evil.

This one can only make us wonder if the government’s right hand knows what its left hand is doing.

Ms. Goodman points out that Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian dissident who is the first Muslim woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, “is being prevented from publishing her memoirs in the United States because of regulations that prohibit ‘trading with the enemy’." Her book is an effort to "help correct Western stereotypes of Islam, especially the image of Muslim women as docile, forlorn creatures."

But at the same time, the US State Department – which is allegedly in charge of ‘winning the hearts and minds’ of people who live under repressive, authoritarian regimes -- posts on its website a Fact Sheet entitled, “Iran: Voices Struggling To Be Heard.”

And prominent among these ‘Voices’ is – you guessed it -- Shirin Ebadi, who is described as one of Iran’s ‘Voices of Hope’.

It says of her: Shirin Ebadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for her life-long campaign to protect vulnerable and persecuted groups within Iranian society.” And it quotes the citation from the Norwegian Nobel Committee: “As a lawyer, judge, lecturer, writer and activist, she has spoken out clearly and strongly in her country, Iran and far beyond.”

The State Department goes on to explain, “Since being forced from her position as the president of the city court of Tehran, she has used her legal expertise to promote and protect some of the most basic and necessary human rights…. she has provided legal representation to many activists who are the targets of government harassment because of dissident opinions and democracy promotion. She has courageously fought for equitable and just treatment for women in Iranian society, and she has also helped to organize efforts to publicize and alleviate the harsh conditions of ‘street children’ in Iran.”

The State Department then reminds us that in 2000 Ms. Ebadi “was arrested and accused of distributing a videotape that implicated prominent hard-line leaders of instigating attacks against advocates of reform. She received a suspended sentence and a professional ban. She was then detained after attending a conference in Berlin on the Iranian reform movement.”

It says she also provided legal representation for “highly politicized and sensitive cases” such as the students killed during the 1999 Tehran University protests by vigilante groups operating under the influence of hard-line clerics, and two prominent political activists who were stabbed to death in 1998 by “rogue” elements within the Intelligence Ministry.

Even President Bush lauds Ms. Ebadi. In Iran, he says, “the demand for democracy is strong and broad as we saw when thousands gathered to welcome home Shirin Ebadi, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. The regime in Tehran must heed the democratic demands of the Iranian people, or lose its last claim to legitimacy."

Ms. Ebadi herself says, “Any person who pursues human rights in Iran must live with fear from birth to death, but I have learned to overcome my fear.”

But can she overcome US government bureaucracy? The problem with publishing her book in the US, Ms. Goodman writes, is a 1917 law that “allows the president to bar transactions during times of war or national emergency.” The law has been amended to exempt publishers, but the Treasury Department has ruled it illegal “to enhance the value of anything created in Iran without permission” -- including books.

Moreover, as Ms. Goodman points out, if Ms. Ebadi's literary agent were to help prepare the manuscript for an American audience, she too would be subject to punishment -- 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine for an individual or $1 million for a publishing house.

The Treasury Department suggests that Ms. Ebadi apply for a special license. But, as Ellen Goodman points out, “no American needs a license to publish a book. Neither this free-speech lawyer nor her supporters are going to ask the government for permission.”

Instead, Ms. Ebadi and her agent are suing the Treasury Department. Which obviously hasn’t yet told the State Department.

Publication of the Ebadi book in the US would be perfectly OK with Treasury if the book were already published in Iran. But the Catch-22 here is that the ayatollahs have already foreclosed this option.

And now an anachronistic US law is having the same effect.

When Ms. Ebadi received her Nobel Prize, Kenneth Roth, the Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, said, “The Nobel Committee has sent a powerful message to the Iranian Government that serious human rights violations must end. We hope they hear that message."

We hope the US government hears it first.

--------------------

About the writer: William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the Middle East for the US State Department and the US Agency for International Development, and served in the international affairs area in the Kennedy administration.

Secular Majority in Iraq? Unlikely

Stephen Farrell argues at the London Times online that opinion polling suggest that "secularists" will get about 60% of the vote in the upcoming Iraqi elections and the "religious parties" will get 40%.

This statement is incorrect. Opinion polling consistently shows that 70% of Iraqis support a religious state (IRI Sept. 2004), and even larger numbers think that clerics should have a central role in politics and constitution-making (Gallup, April 2004). Moreover, Iraqis are not going to have a choice of secular or religious parties, since they are voting on a list system and the lists are mixed. Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, e.g., is running on the same list with Dawa and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. But the upshot is that the INC will be swamped by the religious parties and by pro-Sistani notables.

Iyad Allawi has announced his own list, but I personally doubt it will do very well. His favorability numbers had fallen to only 47% in September, down from the 60s when he first came in, and my guess is that his standing has continued to fall because he has not done what he said he would do-- bring security. Farrell may have been depending on the July numbers, but the International Republican Institute poll of September 2004 showed a substantial fall in popularity for Allawi.

Abbas Kadhim suggests a solution for the problem of the likely under-representation of the Sunnis in parliament. He says that delegations should be sent by each province rather than having nation-wide lists.

I think the national list system was introduced in Iraq to avoid the problem that province- or district-based elections might throw up localized extremists. I think we all know who would get elected from al-Anbar Province and from Amara (neo-Baathists and Sadrists, respectively).

Anyway, it seems to me that the terms of the election are by now set pretty much in stone, and while they are likely to produce a good deal of trouble, it does seem likely they will be held on the bases thus far advertized.

Karbala Bomb Blast

A bomb blast outside the holy shrine of Imam Husain in Karbala left Shaikh Abdul Mahdi al-Karbala'i wounded with shrapnel in his legs and killed two of his bodyguards along with six other persons. Altogether 32 were wounded. Al-Karbala'i is a prominent spokesperson for Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani of Najaf. Sistani recently threw his moral authority behind the project of creating a unified Shiite list to run in the upcoming elections, called the United Iraqi Alliance.

Neo-Baathist forces are clearly extremely concerned that this list, which includes major Shiite parties such as Dawa and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, will end up dominating parliament. Shiites are enthusiastic about voting and are aware of the role of Sistani in the creation of this list, and they will vote for it even if he does not explicitly endorse it.

The Karbala bombing was aimed at enraging Shiites and encouraging Shiite-Sunni communal violence, at eliminating an important Sistani aide (and warning the ayatollahs that they are vulnerable), and at creating a sense of instability that might help derail the elections. The remaining Baath officers in the guerrilla insurgency are the most likely culprits, though the Jordan-based Tawhid wa Jihad group is also a possibility. Same strategy, in either case.

Interim Iraqi Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan attacked the United Iraqi Alliance as a mere stalking horse for Iran. Shaalan is one of three ex-Baathists who dominate the interim government, and he caused a stir some months ago by calling Iran the "number one enemy of Iraq," a sentiment in which even his prime minister, Iyad Allawi, would not join him.

The Iraqi Shiites are Arabs and maintain their independence, even if they do have significant ties with the Iranian Shiites. From the moment that George W. Bush decided to overthrow Saddam and hold democratic elections, he ensured that Shiites would dominate Baghdad, and that Baghdad and Tehran would enjoy relatively warm relations. The only way to stop that from happening now would be to have Allawi and his neo-Baathist clique make a coup, and then be willing to back them militarily against the subsequent Shiite uprising. I doubt it could succeed, and it would be politically impossible even for the Bush administration.

I think if elections come off on Jan. 30, Shaalan is history, anyway.

Meanwhile, Al-Jazeera is reporting that guerrillas in Samarra took over a police station and seized weapons. A US assault was supposed to have cleaned out Samarra earlier this fall, as a training exercise for Fallujah. But clearly the guerrillas are still operating there.

Fassihi on Muslim-Jewish Relations in Prerevolutionary Iran

Dr. Michael Fassihi writes concerning his own family's experience of Muslim-Jewish relations in Iran:

Today I came across the comment made via email to you by one of your readers, regarding the Muslims and Jews in the Middle East, that I think I should respond citing my personal experience, and let the readers make their own judgments.

I am 68 years old , and came to the US at the age of 25 from Iran, and am not a very political individual.

My father was a civil engineer working for government and we moved around the country from town to town and city to city quite frequently.

When I was 11 years old ( 1948?) we moved to a small city called Golpayegan. An old city with a Minaret at the center of it, probably centuries old. The city is only a few kilometers from Khomein, the birth place of the Ayatollah.

The family rented a house next door to the city's Rabbi, and we became neighbors. I used to go to their house and light their little lantern every Saturday ( there was no electricity in the town ). I would be treated with candies and cookies. They would treat me as they would their own child. They became the closest friends we had in this town. My father and the rabbi became very close friends for the two years that we lived there. My greatest memories, and those of my family from Golpagegan, were our neighbors, the Jewish family and the wonderful time we had together

By the way, my family was a very strict Muslim family. There was a small Jewish community in Golayegan, and you might want to research this, Golpayegan in one of the oldest Iranian towns located centrally.

So much for the comment from your reader who said: " Muslims have always hated Jews in the Middle East!?".

What an ignorance!

Michael M. Fassihi, M.D.

Iraqi Jews before 1948

Adam Ovadia Mansoor writes, with regard to the position of the substantial Iraqi Jewish population before 1948:

' I have one minor quibble with your assessment of Iraqi Jews and the cause for their expulsion. I can only relay what my father, who was 16 at the time, told me about this recently. It is true that many Jews maintained a place of high prominence, my family had varied governmental connections extending to the Prime Minister and we lived a life of relative luxury. That didn't mask the existence of quotas prohibitng Jews from attending medical school or other institutions of higher learning that were not of their own, as well as other restrictions placed on us. But some, like my family who owned the Shamash School, taught non-Jews alike, particularly "blanjou" (accounting), during the evening classes, in programs supported by the Ministry of Finance. But all that came to end not simply because of the Palestinian expulsion; it was illegal for [Iraqi] Jews to own land anywhere in Israel, as it was considered treasonous. Many, like my family, adhered to the law, but some, like family friends, did buy land, and the Jews were victims of collective punishment. The government had no definitive proof of ownership, so therefore everyone was guilty.

' My great-uncle Dr. Murad Michael, despite his connections, could not salvage our possessions, and gangs of Shiite from the slums of Baghdad roamed Jewish neighborhoods, taunting Jews by going up to their front doors and asking them when they were leaving and telling them how much they look forward to moving into their homes (this happened to my aunt as well as others my family knew). This followed various previous attacks on my two older uncles during the progroms in the early 40's, when as you know, the Kurds were brought in to restore order.

' I do agree with you that there is no "eternal Arab/Muslim mind" that maintains hatred for Jews. In fact, many of our neighbors in Kushla and Kirrada (I'm guessing on the spelling, forgive me) were Sunni and close friends of my grandmother. To me, it seems as if much of the animosity was as a result of the economic disparity between the oppressed majority Shiite, and the wealthy Jewish/Sunni minority, whom the Shiites distrusted equally. This, coupled with the Israel/Palestine situation, instigated the backlash against the Jews post-1948. I could be way off base, but I just thought I'd throw my two cents in. To me the real shame is that the generation of Iraqi Jews old enough to remember what life was like pre-1948 is slowly dying out, and untrue myths about their lives are replacing the accurate history. Your work has helped me better understand my heritage and I'm grateful to you for it. Please, never let those who seek to silence you win.

Sincerely,

Adam Ovadia Mansoor '

Election News

The Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni group, appears finally to have gotten off the fence and decided definitively to contest the elections in January.

Iyad Allawi's decision to start trials against high Baath officials, however, may further roil ethnic relations in Iraq, since a recital of Baath atrocities just before the elections may help provoke Shiite-Sunni or Kurdish-Shiite violence.

As it was, another mass grave was discovered near the Kurdish city of Sulaymaniyah on Tuesday.

Muqtada al-Sadr's group is saying that they are neutral on the elections and will neither support them nor oppose them. Shaikh Bahadili, al-Sadr's spokesman in Basra, had earlier argued for a boycott, according to al-Zaman.

Pentagon Threatens Germany over Rumsfeld Suit

The New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and Berlin's Republican Lawyers' Association has filed suit in Germany against Donald Rumsfeld on behalf of 4 Iraqis who allege they were mistreated by American troops. A number of other high-ranking US officials are also named. AFP writes:

' The groups that filed the complaint said they had chosen Germany because of its Code of Crimes Against International Law, introduced in 2002, which grants German courts universal jurisdiction in cases involving war crimes or crimes against humanity. It also makes military or civilian commanders who fail to prevent their subordinates from committing such acts liable. '

What is interesting about the Pentagon reaction to this suit is how frantic the Department of Defense seems. Although spokesman Larry DiRita dismissed it as "frivolous," he threatened Germany with dire consequences if the suit goes forward.
DiRita said,

'"Generally speaking, as is true anywhere, if these kinds of lawsuits take place with American servicemen in the cross-hairs, you bet it's something we take seriously . . . I think every government in the world, particularly a NATO ally, understands the potential effect on relations with the United States if these kinds of frivolous lawsuits were ever to see the light of day." '

These remarks raise several questions. Why is DiRita hiding behind the fact that American servicemen are "in the cross-hairs? What have Rumsfeld's policies or legal problems got to do with grunts on the front line? You think they like Rumsfeld? Look what happened when he let them ask him questions.

Then, if the lawsuit is frivolous, why should it produce grave consequences for Germany? It should produce frivolity and hilarity if it is frivolous. It seems actually to be taken very seriously.

Is the real threat the damage to Rumsfeld's public image, or the danger that the lawsuit may prompt a discovery process?

Finally, surely DiRita is not suggesting that the Federal government actively interfere with a legal process? Wouldn't that be the Executive squelching the Judiciary? Isn't that contrary to the separation of Powers? Or is the new monarchism to be imposed on Germany as well, now that it is the model in Washington?

Opinion Polls in Iraq

My allegation that the IraqTheModel website is far outside the norm of Iraqi public opinion as measured by polling has caused a stir in the weblogging world among, apparently, dittoheads who can't read polls.

Here are the results of an April, 2004, Gallup poll, which was scientifically weighted and involved over 3000 face-to-face interviews all over the country.


On Balance, do you think of the Americans mostly as Occupiers or liberators?

Occupiers: 71 %
Liberators 19%

(43% reported that in April 2003, they had thought of the Americans as liberators).

How have the US Forces Conducted themselves?

58% said "fairly badly" or "very badly."

Asked if the US was serious about establishing democracy in Iraq:

50% said "no."
12% said "don't know."

Asked if attacks on US troops could be justified,

52% said "sometimes," "somewhat," or "completely."


The United States had an unfavorability rating of

54%

(and there wasn't a significant difference between the Shiites and the Sunni Arabs).

Only 31% favored a separation of mosque and state! (But 66% of Kurds did).

Only 30% of the Arab population favored a multiparty parliamentary democracy!


I drew attention to Martini Republic's questions about the independence of IraqTheModel without actually expressing any opinion myself one way or another, except to say that they are out of the Iraqi mainstream. The dittoheads who read them and can look at the above polling figures and come to a different conclusion are just innumerate (if only they were also so illiterate as to be unable to figure out my email address).

One of them complained that this poll was done last April. Does anybody really think US favorability numbers are up since then?

An IRI poll in September found that Muqtada al-Sadr was just about as popular as Iyad Allawi (45% and 47% favorability respectively). And Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the clerical leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, trumped them all.

By the way, Sunni Arabs have been celebrating the (limited) resistance against the British in Fallujah during the 1920 revolt for decades. IraqTheModel thought it all came from a Saddam-era film.

Here is what The New Yorker says (INVASIONS by JON LEE ANDERSON, "Nervous Iraqis remember earlier conflicts." Issue of 2003-03-24:

"Colonel Leachman was a contemporary of T. E. Lawrence, and, like Lawrence,
he became famous for his exploits in the desert, living among the Arabs
and accomplishing great feats of endurance and daring. Lawrence was more
celebrated than Leachman, largely because of Lowell Thomass razzmatazz
presentation of his story, and because Lawrence lived to write his
memoirs, but Leachman was a heroic figure, and news of his murder both
inspired the Arab tribes to revolt and horrified the British public, which
was already having second thoughts about the occupation of the Middle
East. Leachman had come to Mesopotamia in 1907, after serving in the Boer
War and then in India. He spent a short time in the cosmopolitan society
of Westerners in the cities of Basra and Baghdad, but he made his
reputation moving among the tribes of the Euphrates. He wore traditional
Arab garments and rode horses and camels on long trips across desolate,
unmapped landscapes, reporting back on the intrigues among tribal
chieftains during the last days of the Ottoman Empire.

Leachman was a severe man, and by the time of the armistice, in 1918, he
had survived many savage battles and many attempts on his life. After the
war, he was ruthless in putting down Arab uprisings. The British used
aerial bombardments as a cost-efficient method of controlling the
resentful tribes, and Leachman was especially feared for his ideas about
quelling disorder. In August, 1920, he drove west from Baghdad toward the
town of Al Fallujah, about forty miles away, to meet with Sheikh Dhari,
perhaps to negotiate the waiver of a loan to the Sheikh, who had thus far
not participated in the Arab rebellion. Exactly what happened that day is
unclear, but the British tended to believe that Leachman was shot in the
back at a police post, and that he had been set up."

Abroad

I'm going to be out of town for a few days. I think I will be able to do some posting, but just a head's up that it may not be as regular as usual. As luck would have it, I'm getting an error message at Blogger, so am doing this manually. It should clear up, but maybe not before I leave.

Carbomb targets Green Zone Again
Electricity Outage in All Iraqi Cities for Second Straight Day

A car bomber struck the same Green Zone checkpoint again Tuesday morning as had been targeted on Monday. LBC satellite television is reporting one Iraqi National Guardsman killed and twelver persons seriously wounded.

Two Marines were killed by guerrilla action in or near Baghdad on Monday.

LBC says a convoy of fuel trucks was attacked near Fallujah.

Al-Zaman: As the cold of winter approaches, all the major Iraqi cities were without electricity on Monday for the second straight day. The massive outage was caused by sabotage of a station at Baiji that caused a fire at the key relay.

The US bombed the al-Askari quarter of Fallujah, apparently in revenge for the killing of 7 Marines near Haditha on Sunday. In Iskandariyah in Babil province south of Baghdad, guerrillas killed a national guardsman and wounded two others. In Kirkuk, guerrillas assassinated an Iraqi translator working at the local American base. In Dajil, a national guardsman was killed along with two guerrillas, and 7 civilians were injured in clashes. Corniche Avenue in Mosul took mortar fire.

Access Problems

For mysterious reasons, some readers in the past week have been experiencing difficulty in accessing Informed Comment. For others, the problem has cleared up. I checked with my server provider and with Blogger, but haven't had any report of a denial of service attack or any other obvious explanation.

For those who can see the site, it is worthwhile bookmarking the RSS livejournal feed, which can be accessed even when you can't get through here.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/juancole/ is the address, and the hyperlink is:

livejournal.com/users.juancole/

Have Arabs or Muslims always Hated Jews?

I said a couple of days ago that I regretted that the actions of Israeli hawks in the West Bank, Gaza and South Lebanon had produced an anti-Israeli and anti-American backlash in the Middle East and the Muslim world. I pointed out that that anger appears to have been part of the motive for the assassination of a US serviceman in Iraq. These rather obvious observations produced some interesting mail. In part this is because the posting was awarded Andrew Sullivan's "Sontag Award" or whatever.

But this phenomenon is not new. In fall of 2002, a US serviceman on a training exercise at Failaka in Kuwait was shot dead by two angry Kuwaitis. Time Magazine referred to the fall, 2002, Israeli attack on Palestinians at Khan Yunis, when the Israelis fired missiles from a helicopter gunship into a crowd of unarmed civilians, killing some children along with whomever they had targeted.:

' Abdullah Kandari described how his brother, just before he headed to Falaika Island to launch his attack, had become angry watching the 9pm news on Kuwait TV, which had broadcast footage of Palestinians killed by an Israeli missile strike in the Gaza refugee camp of Khan Yunis. According to Abdullah, Anas had jumped to his feet and cried, "God is generous, O Americans! We shall come and slaughter you like you have been slaughtering us!" Abdullah Kandari said that his brother blamed the U.S. more than Israel, and questioned how the U.S. could protect Kuwait while causing problems for Arabs. '

Israel is a close ally and friend of the United States, and we should defend it from its enemies. But when Ariel Sharon sends American-made helicopter gunships and F-16s to fire missiles into civilian residences or crowds in steets, as he has done more than once, then he makes the United States complicit in his war crimes and makes the United States hated among friends of the Palestinians. And this aggression and disregard of Arab life on the part of the proto-fascist Israeli Right has gotten more than one American killed, including American soldiers.

The negative mail I got on this issue goes like this:

' Oh really, all the times they hated and killed Jews before 1948, what was the excuse then? They collaborated with the Nazis, was Israel to blame for that? They have always hated and oppressed the Jews . . . '

or this:

'Current Israeli policy calls for withdrawal from Gaza and a
small number of West Bank settlements. How is that expasionist? If you want to
discuss 35 years of policy, well it would be amazing that an Iraqi who lived in
a virtual news-free zone under Sadaam would really have the ups and downs of
Israel-Palestinian history. '

These are the Orientalist premises of the Zionist Right and its American fellow travelers. The reason my comment was so challenging is that it didn't partake of these premises. The premise is that there is an "eternal Arab" or "eternal Muslim" that is defined as essentially fanatical and intolerant and full of hatred toward Jews. These are universal characteristics of this race, and unvarying over time.

Of course, if it were true that "Arabs" or "Muslims" partook of this eternal character, then it just wouldn't matter what Israeli hawks do to them. Kill civilian Arab children with helicopter gunship fire? So what if that upsets the Arabs? They are already fanatical and hate-filled, so it just doesn't matter. You can't throw a glass of water into the ocean and thereby cause the tides to rise.

But what if Arabs and Muslims were human beings like everybody else? Wouldn't it be the case that if you punched one in the nose, he would try to punch you back? And if you didn't punch him out, he'd be more likely to greet you politely? And if you tossed his distant cousin out of his house, wouldn't he mind that? Actions have consequences.

What are the facts?

Living as a minority in any society is seldom a picnic, but in fact Jews before the Napoleonic emancipation were substantially better off living in Muslim societies than in Europe.

Medieval Christianity had no category for non-Christians in society. They completely kept Muslims out of Christian-ruled domains for the most part. Whereas perhaps a third of Egyptians in Egypt in 1400 were Christians, no British, French, Germans, etc. were Muslims. The Muslim trading diaspora threw up communities in Hindu Indonesia and Confucian China, and they were perfectly capable of pursuing opportunities in Europe had they been allowed to. They were not allowed to, in some important part because of the Inquisition. (Valencia in medieval Spain; Russia from Catherine the Great; and some post-Ottoman Balkan principalities are exceptions here, in allowing more tolerance for, or at least having to put up with the presence of, Muslims.)

Likewise, for entire centuries in the late medieval period, Jews were completely excluded from Britain, France, Spain, etc. In contrast, Jews had thriving mercantile communities in places like Cairo in the same period. To paraphrase our SecDef: Was it paradise? No. Was it better than being kicked out altogether or forcibly converted to Catholicism? You bet.

So it just isn't true that all Muslims have always hated Jews. In Islam, Jews were considered a "protected minority." They were not equal citizens with Muslims, but then there was no idea of citizenship or of equality in the modern political sense in any medieval society. Jews were in normal times assured of life and property. There were episodes of intolerance and even persecution, but they were not the norm. There was no blood libel in the Muslim Middle East (some Christian episodes of the libel started occurring under European influence in the 19th century). References in Arabic by Muslims to the blood libel as anything but a Western curiosity are as far as I can tell a very recent phenomenon. The protocols of the elders of Zion, a Tsarist forgery that posited a Jewish political conspiracy to rule the world, had no particular resonances in the Muslim world (outside a few radical Muslim cliques) until the past couple of decades.

With the rise of modern nation-states in the Middle East, new bases for identity were found that made Jews co-citizens with Christians and Muslims. Jews in pre-1948 Iraq were numerous (about a third of Baghdad) and relatively well off. They played an active social and political role that would have been impossible if there had been widespread hatred toward them of the sort many rightwing Zionists apparently now assume. The expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948 (it was probably mostly expulsion) created a backlash against Jews throughout the region that caused them to flee to Israel. This was a tragedy and a great wrong. In my view, the Israelis should pay compensation to all the Palestinians, and the Arab states should pay compensation to the Sephardi Jews who lost their property, and the Palestinians should get to form their state, and then everyone would be square.

It was, by the way, quite clear that many powerful forces in North African society were extremely disturbed by the European-style anti-Jewish bigotry imported into the region by the Vichy French. The Bey of Tunisia resisted imposition of harsh measures on Tunisian Jews. The Tunisian nationalist leader Habib Bourguiba eschewed any cooperation with the Germans. Although the sultan of Morocco was not in a strong enough position to keep the French from imposing anti-Jewish legislation, he privately met with Moroccan Jews and assured them of his support. Many brave Arab Muslims, including some of the Muslim clerics of Algeria, defied the European colonial powers under Nazi influence to protect or to offer succor to Arab Jews.

Israel Gershoni of Tel Aviv University has shown through his scholarship that the liberal mainstream of Egyptian society roundly condemned fascism. It simply isn't true that Arabs were Nazis or Nazi sympathizers in any numbers. Those who did support Germany mostly did so in ignorance of what Nazism stood for, and mainly as a counterweight to British imperial power in the Middle East.

Another reader wrote:

' Obviously you are aware that Arabs have been attacking Israel since the very day it was founded. Israel's responses may not be perfect, but they are no more harsh than America's response to 9/11, Russia's actions against Chechnya, France's action in the Ivory Coast, etc. '

Well, actually, the largest Arab country, Egypt, where a third of all Arabs live, has had a peace treaty with Israel since 1978. As far as I can tell, neither Morocco nor Qatar has ever attacked Israel, anyway [Morocco sent 2500 troops to Syria in 1973 but I don't know enough about the incident to know if they were intended to "attack Israel" as opposed to defending Syrian territory; they did not set foot on Israeli soil; and, since the Camp David accords, the Moroccan-Israeli relationship has been good]. So all "Arabs" are not "attacking Israel."

For the rest, I replied:

Actually, the Israelis are doing things that the US, Russia and France are not doing. They are stealing other people’s land and making that people homeless.

The French haven’t put 400,000 French settlers into the Ivory Coast, thrown farmers off their land, dug deep wells that deprive Cote D’Ivoirians of water, and declared that the capital of Yamoussoukru is off-limits to Ivoirians in the rest of the country and is now a completely French city forever. Nor have they built roads through the Ivory Coast that make it impossible for villagers to get to their markets with their goods, or to get to a hospital in time during an emergency. They haven’t aimed at creating Ivoirian Bantustans that prevent the Ivory Coast ever from being a sovereign country.

If the French had acted this way in the Ivory Coast during the past 30 years, France would have been isolated and pilloried by the world community, and it would have faced substantial violent resistance from Africans. And I would have condemned France for it.

Look, all the opinion polling and all the social science research shows without any doubt that knee-jerk US support for Israeli expansionism is at the root of anti-Americanism in the Arab world. Maybe everyone is lying to all the pollsters all the time, but how likely is that? What Camp David showed was that there was by the late 1970s an increased willingness by the Arabs to recognize Israel. The price was giving up Egyptian territory captured in 1967. The main obstacle to a comprehensive peace has been Israel's refusal to give the Palestinians and the Syrians the same deal they gave Egypt. David Ben Gurion, by the way, agreed with my position on the undesirability of Israel trying to keep the West Bank if it were to survive.

As for the supposed promising policies of Ariel Sharon in the Occupied Territories, everyone should take a reality check. Uri Avnery nails it when he points out that Sharon is the bottleneck in any move toward genuine peace.

In fact, the land grab is accelerating. The Israelis promised to make peace in 1993, and over the next decade they doubled the number of settlers in the West Bank! And the expansion of settlements continues as we speak. How can Palestinians make peace with people who are stealing from them? The Guardian writes,

' Sharif Omar has been waiting two years for the bulldozers, ever since Israel's steel and barbed wire "security fence" carved its way between his village and its land. Last week the excavators and diggers finally arrived on the outskirts of Jayyous to lay the foundations for an expansion of the nearby Jewish settlement of Zufim, fulfilling the fears and warnings of its Palestinian neighbours.

The bulldozers were preparing the ground for hundreds of new homes, despite the Israeli government's claim that it is not expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Like other building work along the route of the barrier, it seems to be an attempt to ensure that the land between the fence and the 1967 border remains in Israeli hands in any final agreement with the Palestinians.

"When they built the fence, we said they would use it to build a much bigger settlement, and they would take our land to do it," said Omar, whose olive and citrus groves are now encircled. "It is very clear to us, they are planning to confiscate all of our land and drive us from here. They came and told us to finish harvesting because they were going to begin building 80 houses. They are beginning with my neighbour's land but if they do it there they will do it on mine." . . .

Zufim, where about 200 families live, is built on 136ha of land confiscated from Jayyous in 1986. An Israeli rights group, Bimkom, says that developers in Zufim plan to build about 1 200 new homes. Yehezkel Lein, a researcher for another Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem, said the military government in the occupied territories had issued permits for the work.

He added: "In the plan for Zufim there is an extension to the north of the settlement that was already approved. There is also another expansion to the east. But there is no territorial contiguity between Zufim and the new construction, so it is really a new settlement."

Tel Aviv is worth American lives to protect it. The United Nations Security Council awarded Tel Aviv to Israel, and Camp David and other international instruments recognize Israel in its pre-1967 borders.

The Zufim extension is just grand larceny, and not worth any lives at all, much less those of brave American soldiers.

7 Marines Killed in Anbar
Huge Explosion in Baghdad Leaves Dozens Dead, Wounded

Sunni Arab guerrillas killed 7 US troops on Sunday in separate incidents in al-Anbar province.

Guerrillas detonated a powerful car bomb at a checkpoint at the Green Zone in downtown Baghdad, where government offices and the US embassy are barricaded in. Early reports spoke of 13 dead and 15 injured, but the Arabic satellite television network from Lebanon, LBC, estimated the wounded at at least 45.

The US continued to drop bombs on Fallujah on Sunday, according to AP.

According to the NYT, on Sunday bombs went off in Baghdad, Samarra, and Irbil, causing a small number of civilian wounded. Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reported that the car bomb in Irbil had targeted an official of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, but missed. It wounded two persons according to AFP, but Kurdish spokesmen later denied this report of deaths.

Al-Jazeerah's crawl is reporting that the British embassy in Basra came under mortar attack late Sunday or early Monday.

A fire at a power plant knocked out electricity to much of Iraq on Sunday, including in the capital, Baghdad.

Al-Hayat reports that the Association of Muslim Scholars and some other parties met again on Sunday to demand that elections be postponed. Among the delegates to this "foundational conference" was Adnan Pachachi, the old-time Arab nationalist figure, who continues to agitate for a delay despite having joined in the election process. Ash-Sharq al-Awsat and The Gulf Daily News say that the Iraqi Islamic Party headed by Muhsin Abdul Hamid continues to be of two minds about whether to participate in the elections or not.

Likewise it says that the deputy governor of Basra Province, Salam al-Maliki, warned of separatist "religious and liberal" parties in the Shiite south that had an agenda of "revenge" and wished to break Iraq up under the guise of a loose federalism.

In an interview in Ash-Sharqa al-Awsat, interim President Ghazi al-Yawir agained warned Iraq's neighbors that his country's instability could spread to theirs if they did not cease their negative interference, and did not instead intervene positively to foster Iraqi political stability. Yawir said he understood the patriotic motives of those Iraqis who wanted to postpone the elections, but that he felt they must be held on time. He also said they would be the most expensive of all time, given the money he alleged Iraq's neighbors were pouring into the coffers of Iraq's political parties.

He blamed that decrepit state of Iraq on the overweening ambition of Saddam Hussein, saying that "Superman only exists in the movies," a reference to Saddam's megalomania.

He also said he had asked the Americans not to conduct any more operations like the assault on Fallujah. (That action has deeply angered and alienated most of the Sunni Arabs in Iraq.)

Assassination by Poisoning a Chancy Matter

The confirmation that Ukraine presidential candidate Victor Yushchenko has been the victim of a poisoning by dioxyn shows that he was the victim of an assassination attempt. Former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, speaking on Wolf Blitzer's Sunday show, suggested that the likely suspects included Ukrainian intelligence or the Ukraine or Russian mafia.

Political assassination has an old pedigree, of course. But the annals of modern history are replete with failed poisoning attempts that backfired.

The United States set afoot a plot to poison Fidel Castro, headed by CIA operative William Harvery, in November of 1961. Eerily mirroring the situation in the Ukraine now, the US CIA cooperated in this plot with gangsters like Meyer Lansky and Sam Giancana. The plot was put aside after the Cuban missile crisis, which had led President John F. Kennedy to promise Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev that he would leave Castro alone. The stories that later leaked of the plot against Castro, which included an exploding cigar, made Kennedy-era cloak and dagger operations look faintly ridiculous.

Sometimes it works and is done professionally. In 1978, there was the famous poisoning of Bulgarian dissident Georgy Markov on the Waterloo Bridge in London. An operative of the Bulgarian secret police stabbed him with an umbrella, the point of which had been poisoned with ricin. KGB double agent Oleg Kordievsky alleged in a 1990 memoir that the KGB, the Soviet intelligence agency, had supplied the ricin and advised their Bulgarian counterparts on how to administer it.

Salon's Jonathan Broder recounts the story of Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu's botched attempt to assassinate Hamas leader Khaled Mashal in Amman in the late 1990s. Mashal was suspected of being behind bombings that killed Israelis, and given Hamas's murderous tactics of terrorism against civilians, it wasn't an unreasonable suspicion. But then it should have been brought up with King Hussein, who by that time had a peace treaty with his neighbor. As it was, the two Mossad agents bungled the attempt and were captured by Jordanian security. They had used Canadian passports, which caused a diplomatic row between Tel Aviv and Ottawa. King Hussein of Jordan used his Washington contacts to put pressure on Netanyahu to reveal the antidote, which succeeded, saving Mashal's life. In order to gain the release of the two Mossad agents, cooling their heels in a Jordanian prison, Netanyahu was forced to release Hamas clerical leader, the wheel-chair bound Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, from an Israeli jail cell. So the whole thing was a fiasco from beginning to end. The incident cast a severe chill on relations between Jordan and Israel; Jordan was among the few Arab countries to have signed a formal peace treaty with Israel. (This whole story may contain a clue to why the vaunted Mossad was not able to alert the US to the threat of 9/11, despite the tens of billions the US has invested in Israel's security apparatus precisely for the purpose of US security in the region-- Mossad just isn't that competent. Or maybe they were too busy spying on the US to bother with al-Qaeda.)

Philippines Senator Claro M. Recto, who campaigned for an end to US naval bases in his country, allegedly incurred the wrath of the US ambassador and the CIA station chief, who discussed having him poisoned. Whether that happened or not, Recto won his fight, and the US in the end had to relinquish its bases in the Philippines.

Yushchenko's poisoners clearly made an epochal mistake, increasing sympathy for him and probably assuring his election in the rescheduled polls. It happens seldom enough that miscreants get their just deserts.

Manipulation of the Blogging World on Iraq?

[Addendum 12/27/2004: This posting contains errors and is superceded by this later statement.

Joseph Mailander of the Martini Republic weblog has an extremely important posting on Sunday about the dangers of "blog trolling." To "troll" in the world of the internet is to lurk on a discussion board and make deliberately false and inflammatory comments, to which all the other posters feel they must reply, so that it roils the list. There is also a connotation of dishonesty about the troll's real identity.

A related practice has been called by Josh Marshall "astroturfing," where a "grass roots" campaign turns out actually to be sponsored by a think tank or corporation. Astroturf is fake grass used in US football arenas. What Mailander is talking about is not really astroturfing, but rather the granting of some individuals a big megaphone.

The MR posting brings up questions about the Iraqi brothers who run the IraqTheModel site. It points out that the views of the brothers are celebrated in the right-leaning weblogging world of the US, even though opinion polling shows that their views are far out of the mainstream of Iraqi opinion. It notes that their choice of internet service provider, in Abilene, Texas, is rather suspicious, and wonders whether they are getting some extra support from certain quarters.

Contrast all this to the young woman computer systems analyst in Baghdad, Riverbend, who is in her views closer to the Iraqi opinion polls, especially with regard to Sunni Arabs, but who is not being feted in Washington, DC.

The phenomenon of blog trolling, and frankly of blog agents provocateurs secretly working for a particular group or goal and deliberately attempting to spread disinformation, is likely to grow in importance. It is a technique made for the well-funded Neoconservatives, for instance, and I have my suspicions about one or two sites out there already.

The manipulation of public information by rightwing think tanks in collusion with corporate media is already well advanced. Kevin Drum points out that supposedly "liberal" CBS News interviewed a think tank author on the need to "privatize" (in other words, get rid of) Social Security, portraying him as an ordinary 28 year old citizen who "doesn't expect the program to be there" when he retires. I guess not, since he is working so hard to destroy it. Journalistic ethics should have required CBS to identify the interviewee as a principal with an axe to grind.

Will the blogging world go the same way? So far, if you look at the top hundred sites at technorati.com with regard to incoming links, what is striking is how above-board they are. Is the collective wisdom of the blogging world such as to reduce the dangers here? Is the blogging world actually less open to manipulation than corporate media? Stay tuned.

Press Roundup for Sunday

Guerrillas in al-Anbar province killed a US serviceman on Saturday. Anthony Shadid reports that Abdullah al-Janabi, fundamentalist Sunni leader of the Muslim mini-theocracy in pre-assault Fallujah, claims that the US military action has attracted hundreds of new fighters to the anti-American struggle in the Sunni Arab heartland. Shadid reports fighting in Mosul, where guerrillas used a car bomb to wound 8 US soldiers. The US targeted a guerrilla position with a 500-pound bomb,in return. In the northern city of Kirkuk, guerrillas used a car bomb to injure two US servicemen and a translator, and in nearby Hawija, two other US troops were wounded by a roadside bomb. A car bomber wounded two US troops in Baiji. In the city of Hit, west of Baghdad, guerrillas ambushed Iraqi National Guards, killing 7. The Marines announced that there had been clashes between guerrillas and Marines on Friday in Ramadi. On Saturday, as well, there were high-profile assassinations of Shiite clerics and a high Iraqi official.

Al-Hayat says that one of the leaders of the Asociation for Muslim Scholars, Abdul Salam al-Kubaisi, said that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had been present at Fallujah until shortly before the recent military campaign in the city, when he escaped.

Other incidents, including the assassination of three high-ranking Iraqi police officials, and the killing of four Kirkuk city employees, are reported by Reuters.

The Iraqi killer of Reserve Navy Lt. Kylan Jones-Huffman has been brought to justice in an Iraqi court. Although he has since changed his story, he at one point admitted to killing Jones-Huffman with a bullet through the back of the neck while the latter was stuck in traffic in downtown Hilla. The assassin said that he felt that Jones-Huffman "looked Jewish." The fruits of hatred sowed in the Middle East by aggressive and expansionist Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza against the Palestinians and in south Lebanon against Shiites continue to be harvested by Americans.

(Some readers have written to say that the Iraqi assassin's association of all Jews with the misdeeds of the rightwing hawks in the Occupied Territories is outrageous. I, of course, entirely agree. It is the essence of bigotry to blame all members of a group for the actions of a few.)

70 Parties Register to Contest the Elections

Al-Hayat reports that the Iraqi Islamic Party has registered a full party list of 275 candidates. The party, led by Muhsin Abdul Hamid, has long pushed for vigorous Sunni participation in the elections. Abdul Hamid is convinced that Sunni Arabs are a majority in Iraq (they are 20% at most), which may help explain his optimism. IIP toyed with a boycott of the elections during the recent Fallujah campaign, but has decided to contest them. My sources tell me that Abdul Hamid is convinced that the Shiite parties have a secret deal to recognize Israel, and that only the Sunni Arabs can stop Iraq's economy and society from being penetrated by Tel Aviv.

The Iraqi Turkmen Front has presented a list of 63 candidates, and even one small group of Kurdish Shiites (called Failis) has presented a complete list. Other Failis are cooperating with Grand Ayatollah Sistani's unified Shiite list, the United Iraqi Alliance. The small Sunni Arab National Democratic Party of Nasir Chadirchi will field 12 candidates. (For a small party to go it alone in this election is probably a fatally flawed strategy, and I doubt if the NDP will get seated).

The Iraqi Communist Party, founded in 1930, has announced an independent electoral list of 257 candidates. The size of the party in its heyday of the 1950s and 1960s is disputed, with estimates ranging from 60,000 to half a million. In the 1930s and 1940s it attracted a lot of Jews, Shiites and Christians seeking a non-ethnic basis for national political identity. The CPI was, in any case, a highly significant party. The colonel's regime of Abdul Karim Qasim allied with the Communists because the officers lacked much other grassroots political support. This alliance alarmed Washington, which is widely rumored to have therefore thrown its support to the Baath Party, a nationalist/socialist party that despised the Communists. It is said that in the first Baath coup of 1963, the US passed over to the regime the names of several hundred Communist moles, whom the Baath had tortured and killed (Saddam Hussein was working as an interrogator in this period). The 1968 Baath coup stuck, and although the Baath kept around some tame house Communists, the new one-party state led to a virtual atrophy of the CPI.

There is some possibility that Iraqi secularists from various backgrounds and communities will vote Communist to protest the inexorable movement of Iraq toward being an Islamic republic. The likelihood is, however, that the Communists will not get many seats in parliament and will not be an important voting bloc.

So far, 70 party lists have registered, 6 of them coalitions and the other 64 consisting of single parties.

Muhammad al-Bazzi of Newsday explains the mechanics of the Iraqi elections. Basically, voters will get to vote just once, for a party list. The list is in ranked order, beginning with the top candidate and descending. Let's say the party list has 200 members, and it gets 10 percent of the national vote. That outcome will allow it to seat its top 27 members in the 275-member parliament. The other 173 members of the list (number 28 on down) will be out of luck.

AIPAC Spying Case Heats up

Richard Sales, veteran UPI terrorism correspondent, reveals the explosive information that

' In 2001, the FBI discovered new, "massive" Israeli spying operations in the East Coast, including New York and New Jersey, said one former senior U.S. government official. '

It was the uncovering of these spy rings that led the FBI to put Naor Gilon, the chief of political affairs at the Israeli embassy in Washington, under videotape surveillance. They were "floored" when Larry Franklin walked in and sat down and began offering Gilon a confidential document. Franklin was one of two Iran desk officers for the Near East and South Asia bureau at the Pentagon.

Franklin reported to Bill Luti, who in turn reported to Douglas Feith, the number three man at the Department of Defense. Feith is a long-time activist in the Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs, which mobilized throughout the 1990s to destroy the Oslo peace process and ensure continued Israeli land grabs in the West Bank. Karen Kwiatkowski reported that a phalanx of Israeli generals marched into Feith's office before the Iraq war, without signing in as regulations required. Feith organized the "Office of Special Plans," also staffed largely with JINSA and other rightwing Zionist activists, which cherry-picked intelligence so as to make a (false) case for the Iraq war.

Sale reports more on what exactly suspected Pentagon spy Lawrence Franklin was passing to the Israeli embassy concerning US plans for Iran:

' Larry Franklin, a Pentagon analyst in the Near East and South Asia office who worked for the Defense Department's Office of Special Plans confessed last August to federal agents he had held meetings with a contact from the Israeli government during which he passed a highly classified document on U.S. policy toward Iran, these sources said. The document advocated support for Iranian dissidents, covert actions to destabilize the Iranian government, arming opponents of the Islamic regime, propaganda broadcasts into Iran, and other programs, these sources said. The FBI was also interested in finding out if Franklin was involved or could name any Pentagon colleagues who were involved in passing to Israel certain data about National Security Agency intercepts, these sources said. '

The FBI is looking hard at a number of high-ranking officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a high-powered coordinator of donations to congressional races by pro-Israel lobbies. AIPAC is so successful that virtually no speeches critical of Israeli policy are ever given Congress, even though such speeches are given in most democratic parliaments in the world, and representatives and congressmen are afraid to sign letters in support of the Palestinians or even of a genuine peace process.

In fact, AIPAC can arrange for representatives and senators to sign the most outrageous and one-sided letters to the president demanding support for virtually all Israeli military and foreign policy goals. That is how a boycott of Syria, a country that had been extremely valuable to the US in the war on terror, was passed. The congress was induced to give up Syrian help and expertise in fighting radical Muslim terrorists for the sake of a minor gesture to make Israel's ruling Likud Party happy. This level of the control of congress by what is essentially the agent of a foreign government has deeply distorted US foreign policy and made the US a dishonest broker. US knee-jerk support of Israel's crackdown on Palestinians was cited by Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, the top al-Qaeda planner of 9/11, as his prime motivation for hitting the United States.

Sale summarizes recent actions in the case, which involve the FBI looking very hard at some top AIPAC officials:

' On Dec. 1, FBI agents visited the AIPAC offices in Washington and seized the hard drives and files of Steven Rosen, director of research, and Keith Weissman, deputy director of foreign policy issues. The FBI also served subpoenas on AIPAC Executive Director Howard Kohr, Managing Director Richard Fishman, Communications Director Renee Rothstein, and Research Director Raphael Danziger. All are suspected of having acted as "cut outs" or intermediaries who passed highly sensitive U.S. data from high-level Pentagon and administration officials to Israel, said one former federal law enforcement official. One current FBI consultant said Rosen's name had first been given to the FBI in 1986, along with 70 possible incidents of Israeli espionage against the United States. No action was taken against him, this source said. Rosen's attorney did not return phone calls. '

Reporter Laura Rozen interprets a recent article in The Forward to indicate that indictments are likely in the case.

AIPAC denies any wrongdoing, and Lawrence Franklin has mysteriously been provided with a high-powered attorney with long experience defending spies, as a result of which he has ceased cooperating with the FBI.

Many past alleged cases of spying for the Israelis on the part of AIPAC and similar organizations have been dropped because of political pressure from their American patrons (/clients?)

Press Roundup

Reuters reports on a growing Iraq fuel crisis that could lead to civil turmoil and harm the prospects for elections. How ironic, if lack of fuel should roil Iraq of all places.

According to the Guardian, a former CIA agent is suing the agency because he said he was pressured to conform to the official estimates on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. This analyst entertained severe doubts about the common wisdom, and was punished for expressing them, he said.

Only 47% of Americans now think that a stable, democratic Iraq is a likely outcome. This percentage is down from 55% in April. That is, American confidence in the Bush misadventure in Iraq has fallen below the half-way point. How fifty percent of the American people can possibly still think Bush is doing a good job in Iraq is a great mystery. The AP-Ipsos poll found:

' Those most likely to have lost faith in the chances of a stable, democratic Iraq are those with college degrees, Southerners, homeowners, city-dwellers, Catholics, independents and Democrats. '

Hmm. Who could be left?

Muqtada: Elections will Divide Iraqis
Sistani Rep: Beware of Voter Fraud

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat: Shaikh Abd al-Mahdi al-Karbala'i, representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Karbala, said in his Friday sermon, "We affirm the necessity of holding elections on time, since they are a guarantee of unconstrained sovereignty, and so as to elect a leadership that represents the will of the people, and so as to end the Occupation. At the same time, we insist on the need to hold the elections in a fair and just manner, otherwise they will be fruitless. Indeed, they may backfire on the Iraqi people if there is any cheating or fraud." He added, "We warn against such a consequence, since it will drag the country into a cycle of public disorder and disturbance worse than the present situation, and the people will even lose their confidence in the present leadership." He emphasized that "all must participate, to make the elections a success."

I take away from all this that Sistani is worried that Iyad Allawi and his American sponsors will attempt to hijack the election through some sort of voter fraud.

Az-Zaman further notes that the grand ayatollahs in Najaf issued a demand that King Abdullah II of Jordan apologize for his comments to the Washington Post, which painted the Iraqi Shiites as mere cat's paws of the Iranian state. They complained that the king's remarks constituted "naked interference in Iraqi internal affairs" and could have the effect of provoking communal tensions. They pointed out that the Iraqi Shiites are Arabs, and intimated that foreign influence in Iraq is coming instead from its Sunni Arab neighbors. (This last is a reference to the widespread Shiite belief that Saudi Wahhabis are supporting Sunni fundamentalists in Iraq.)

The article also reported comments of Muqtada al-Sadr: "Over here you have America shelling cities for the sake of security and the elections, and over there you have the parties that are alleging that elections will help establish security and stability, forgetting the existence of the Occupation."

He said the Sadrists were not participating in the elections because their officials kept being arrested, they were not given permission to open an office in Najaf or to hold Friday prayers in the Kufa Mosque, or to recover the mosques that they used to manage, as well as because of the lack of security in several Iraqi cities.

Az-Zaman: Muqtada al-Sadr warned that the elections scheduled for January 30 will lead to the ethnic partition of Iraq. He wrote in a sermon delivered for him by Shaikh Abd al-Zuhrah al-Suway'idi at the Muhsin Mosque in Sadr City, "They allege that the elections advance security, and security advances the elections. This is false and wrong." Announcing his boycott of the elections, he said, "Beware, beware lest ethnic divisions have a place in the elections. I want only a noble Iraqi election, neither Shiite nor Sunni. However, Iraq can protect for me my religion, my honor, my unity."

Muqtada also offered to protect Iraq's churches, some of which have been attacked in Baghdad and Mosul. "I am entirely prepared to provide protection to the churches if our Christian brethren want it." He assured them he would not interfere in their affairs: "Rather, the guards would be solely in their service."

The Financial Times gives some more of Muqtada's sermon:

' "The elections aim to separate the Iraqi from his religion. When people vote for politicians, secularists, those who co-operate with the occupation - they will not think of God," said Mr Sadr in a letter read out by one of his deputies in north Baghdad's al-Muhsin mosque. "Do not make politics your way, and do not let the marjaiya [Shia clerical establishment] support the elections," the leader's message said. However, in a sign of tensions in his movement some of his followers said that they would cast their votes anyway. '

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat: Gunmen attempted to kill Yahya Hashim al-Husaini, an official of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, in the northern district of al-Hilla at around 10 am on Friday. They only succeeded in wounding him with gunfire and putting him in the hospital.

On Thursday, unknown assailants had killed Sattar Jabbar, a candidate on the 228-member United Iraqi Alliance list (largely Shiite). Jabbar was a leader of the Hizbullah Party of Iraq (not related to the Lebanese party of the same name), a close ally of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. (Correction: this Hizbullah Party of Iraq is not connected, either, to the party of the same name that groups the Marsh Arabs.)

On Friday, wire services reported that gunmen shot down three more members of the Hizbullah Party of Iraq. This violence came on top of attacks in Baqubah and Tikrit on Iraqi National Guards, which left 9 of them dead in addition to 4 civilians. US troops suffered two dead and other casualties as a result of a helicopter crash in Mosul.

One fears that the attacks on SCIRI and Iraqi Hizbullah officials may result from internal Shiite disputes rather than necessarily having been perpetrated by Baathist Sunni guerrillas.

Al-Dhari Explains Sunni Arab Boycott

Hareth al-Dhari spoke out Thursday about the reasons for which his Association of Muslim Scholars urges a boycott of the Iraqi elections planned for January 30. According to opinion polls, al-Dhari is among the most popular Sunni Arab politicians in the country, and his AMS has emerged as certainly the most important political grouping. Excerpts:

' “The independent election commission in Iraq considered Iraq a single constituency, despite its huge space (438,000km). Also, the UN has pledged to send 25 observers, only seven of whom have arrived, to monitor the ballots.” Al-Dari drew comparison with the UN-supervised 2001 elections in Eastern Timor , where the UN divided the tiny country into 12 constituencies and sent around 300-400 observers to monitor the ballots. “This, in a nutshell, means the United Nations could not be monitoring the elections in Iraq." '

This is a fair point. There are amazingly few UN election workers in Iraq.

' Al-Dari added that it was impossible for fair or free elections to be held under the US occupation as it would create unhealthy reality that leads to marginalizing any Iraqi force opposed to the occupation . . . “Taking part in elections like these means nothing but to grant legitimacy to a completely illegal situation.” '

This way of thinking is completely self-defeating and also historically inaccurate. Nehru would not have been prime minister of an independent India if the Congress Party had not fought elections under British colonial domination. Sistani has the right idea here.

Al-Dhari has too high opinion of what has been accomplished by the Sunni Arab guerrilla war, and seems to have a completely unrealistic notion of what the situation will be like if Sunni Arabs have little representation in parliament. They could then only be spoilers, but could not get much positive that they want.

' “The range of those opposed to the elections is getting wider and wider, further feeding indications that the polls could be put off,” Muthanna Harith Al-Dari said. He said more than 69 Iraqi groups of various Iraqi sects and a list of 106 dignitaries living abroad have already signed a petition calling for boycotting the polls. “A quarter of the Iraqi dignitaries who signed the petition are Shiites,” Al-Dari said, a few hours before representatives of the Shiite community announced a broad-based coalition of 22 political parties to run in national elections. '

The point is that all these groups are tiny, whereas the really big important parties are revving up to win the elections.

In short, Al-Dhari is wrong that the guerrilla fighters have achieved much positive; he is wrong that cooperating with elections cannot result in independence; he is wrong that the boycott movement is significant outside the Sunni Arabs. The only thing he is right about is that the technical preparations for the elections are problematic.

I was at a public event on Thursday night and someone asked me why the Sunni Arabs didn't just take the best deal they could get. I replied that they think they are the real majority of the country, or that is the public pose (requiring them to invent a million Iranian Shiite infiltrators to explain all those extra Shiites). They think they can push the Americans around and maybe even push them out of the country. They think once the US is gone, they will have a better, not worse chance, at regaining something like their former political ascendence.

In other words, they seem to be living in a dangerous fantasy land.

Shiite List Announced for January Elections

Sameer Yacoub of AP gives an overview of the unified Shiite list announced Thursday, The United Iraqi Alliance. It groups a large number of Shiite and other parties, including the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Abdul Aziz al-Hakim); the Badr Organization (former Badr Corps); The Dawa Party (Ibrahim Jaafari); the Islamic Dawa (Abdul Karim al-Anizi); the Iraqi National Congress (Ahmad Chalabi); and a large number of independents, about half the list (who are leaders in their localities) in the national elections. There are some Sunni candidates, as well as a handful of Kurdish ones, but it appears that Shiites are the vast majority of the list.

The big surprise was that the Sadr movement did not join in. Muqtada al-Sadr had neglected to register his movement as a political party. His aides are also being arrested and harassed by the Allawi government's national guards, and his withdrawal from the list is related to this targetting of his men.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that Muqtada has nevertheles promised to support the list.

Another surprise is that the Badr Corps, the paramilitary of the Supreme Council, was included as a party alongside the others.

Will blog more later Friday.

Mark LeVine Replies to Robert Spencer

Mark LeVine, Middle East historian at UC Irvine, writes

AN OPEN REPLY TO ROBERT SPENCER.

Dear Mr. Spencer

First of all, thanks so much for titling a piece you did about me "Noam Chomsky as Rock Star":
(http://www.frontpagemag.com/
Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID= 16220)

This is the best blurb I've gotten yet for my forthcoming book!

For the record, while at one time I would have liked to have been a rock star, that sad truth is that marriage and children have made constant touring out of the question for the foreseeable future. And while I admire Noam Chomsky, I have never to my knowledge wanted to be Noam Chomsky. Linguistics is just way beyond me; just knowing a few languages is hard enough. Also, I have heard he drinks a lot of coffee. My stomach tolerate take more than a cup a day.

More seriously, however, it seems that you did not read most of what I have written before writing your critique of my work. I say this because I have discussed in detail most every thing you have accused me of not discussing--the origins of Hamas, the immorality and futility of suicide bombings, hatred for Israel and the like. It would be nice to be accused of something that I didn't do, instead of being accused of not doing something I have in fact done. Then at least I could learn from the criticism, which is always a good thing. Perhaps you just googled a few recent articles of mine and made your judgements from those? It wouldn't be the first time a conservative has done that. Once the right-wing talk show host Dennis Prager called me a liar on national radio when I told him on his show that I'd witnessed Palestinian marches against suicide bombings. He did so after doing a google search during a commercial break. Unfortunately, the evidence was not googlable because the articles were too old, but was findable on Lexus-Nexus, as I explained to him after the show. He promised to have me on his show again to apologize but has yet to make good on this offer (I have written about the dangers of Google history in war time, if you're interested:
http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/
03/28/news-levine.php).

You could also have checked my CV, which is online, and found articles in Le Monde, the Christian Science Monitor and Tikkun magazine dealing with these issues. May I suggest that it might be time for you to hire a new research assistant?

Your main issue with me, beside my taste in music and linguists, seems to be that I naively argue for a "hudna" or truce between Americans and Muslims, especially radical Muslims. This is certainly debatable advice on my part. In fact, I offered it precisely so it would be debated. However you, your criticism sadly does not contribute to a much-needed debate; instead it falls into the orientalist trap of trying to use Islamic legal compendiums dating back well over 600 years (Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri, the author of the source you cite for your analysis of "hudna," 'Umdat as-Salik, died in 1386) to define for all times what Muslims think about a particular issue. This is probably not the best way to understand what Muslims think about various issues today; just as basing the opinions of Jews solely on the writings of Maimonedes or even Americans based solely on the views of the authors of the Declaration of Independence (or better, the Magna Carta) would likely produce a distorted understanding of contemporary views. But such thinking is among the primary ideological moves in Orientalism and the larger discourse of imperialism (if saying this makes me a "Saidist"--a term I've never encountered before. Shouldn't it be "Saidian"?--then so be it), as evidenced so well in James Mill's 1817 primer for British imperial rule of India, the History of India, which argued with great fanfare, and just as great error, that the thousands year old "Laws of Manu" were a primary basis for understanding, and so governing, Hindu society.

This doesn't mean that some, or many Muslims, might want to use a truce to regroup or grow stronger in order to better attack "us" later. Nor does it mean that some extremist Muslims use medieval texts to justify terrorism or violating agreements (what the US Government uses to justify these things is an equally interesting matter, but it seems not to interest you). But if I were you I'd be a lot more worried about a billion plus Chinese with the fastest growing economy in the world, a huge percentage of America's debt, burgeoning high-tech sector and a lot of nuclear weapons, than a billion plus Muslims, if you're looking for the main strategic threat to whoever it is you think the "West" is in the near future.

Moreover, you seem to think that all you need to do to understand Muslims is read religious texts and look at extremists. The 99.9% of Muslims who don't engage in violence against the West, the vast majority of whom don't base their life of the 'Umdat as-Salik (however important it might be for religious scholars), whose lives are incredibly diverse, complex and conflicted, and whose dreams for their futures and those of their children and their societies are in fact quite close to ours, just don't seem to count much to you. That's too bad--and if you don't believe me, believe the report by the Defense Science Board released last week
(http://www.truthout.org/
docs_04/120104V.shtml)
that warns President Bush that Muslims don't hate our freedom and ideology but rather our support for all those supposedly "moderate" regimes which are in fact incredibly repressive and corrupt governments whose continued existence is owed to US backing.

But let's get back to your arguments about the untrustworthiness of Muslims when it comes to honoring any hudna "they" might "sign" with "us." Let's leave aside the fact that Muslims might have some pretty good reasons not to trust us--in fact, a lot more reasons than we have not to trust them. Let's just take the example of Hamas, since you seem so knowledgeable, or at least interested, in this group. I have interviewed Hamas people who've discussed the truce issue and I have called them on it too. In fact, last time I met with a senior leader in Gaza I asked him whether the death of Oslo meant Hamas would join the calls for a one or binational solution being increasingly advocated by Palestinian and Israeli academics, or even push harder for an explicit Islamic state solution, as mentioned in various core documents of the movement. He looked at me like I was crazy, and actually said, "Are you crazy? We want a divorce, not to live closer to Jews." You can interpret it however you want. His interpretation, offered in his next sentence with a lot of exasperation, was "Just give us a state and leave us alone already."

However you want to interpret it, though, the reality is that Muslims have as little ability to "destroy the west" as Hamas has to destroy Israel. In fact, the Asian avian flu that Sec. of Health and Human Services Thompson is suddenly worried about after resigning could easily kill exponentially more people in the next year than Muslims could kill westerners in a hundred years of jihad. Sorry, i know that the threat of jihad to what you call "the West" is your big thing... If you're worried about loss of life, though, better to change your group's name from "Jihad Watch" to "Asia Avian Flu Watch". You'd save a lot more lives that way.

On a few other notes, who exactly do you mean by "aging rock glitteratti" that I supposedly hang "hobnob" with? And what exactly is "hobnobbing"? And since when has Noam Chomsky's star "faded." Please correct me if I'm wrong, but last I saw he had lot more bestsellers in the last three years than you and all your friends put together have had in your entire careers. As for Edward Said, didn't your mother tell you not to speak ill of the dead? And while I would love to take credit for making Chomsky and Said "cool again," can you show me when they went out of style? You also accuse me of making "no mention of the fact that Chomskyites and Saidists have placed Middle East Studies departments in American universities into an ideological straitjacket that would have made Stalin blush." That's because they have done more to open the field from the "ideological straitjacket" of the first three decades of its life as a Cold War invention than almost anyone else. Your argument that they've put it in a straitjacket is one made by someone who never has actually read them in any detail and in fact knows absolutely nothing about the field of Middle Eastern studies, most of whose practitioners predicted exactly the terrorism that happened with 9/11 when our Government and spy agencies were busy elsewhere, and who rightly predicted exactly what would happen when the US invaded Iraq (so far that makes it Middle East Studies 2, Bush/Neocons 0 by my count).

In the same way you clearly haven't read my work in any detail. In fact, this may come as news to you, but Opeds do not the sum total of a scholar's intellectual production make. We also write articles in journals and even edit and write books, of which mine deal with the very issues you accuse me of not dealing with. How can I accuse you of this? Well, you write "LeVine owes his status [as wunderkind] to his willingness to place the responsibility for the strife between the West and the Islamic world squarely on the shoulders of the West." And where exactly did I write that I "place responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the West"? Can you please show me where I've written that? I'm not saying I haven't, but I sure don't remember doing so (perhaps all those years on the road have taken their toll). If I did write that somewhere, then that was not very smart of me and I appreciate your calling it to my attention.

But one think I do know is that almost everything I write I make sure to discuss exactly how and why blame has to be shared, and Muslims like Americans (or Israelis and Palestinians) need to take responsibility for their actions. In my chapter in the book Twilight of Empire: Responses to Occupation
(http://percevalpress.com/
twilight.html)
that I co-edited, I specifically argue this. But now that I think about it, I say that in the very "Truce with the Muslim World" article that clearly got you upset enough to spend 10 minutes or so writing your article about me!

Perhaps you should have read it to the end. Here's the link: http://www.tomdispatch.com/
index.mhtml?pid=1663.
What I did write was, among other things, "Clearly, a different kind of truce is needed; one that signals the first step in a genuine reappraisal of US (and to a lesser extent European) core positions and interests as well as those of Muslims, so that genuine peace and reconciliation become conceivable." More to the point, I wrote, "Beyond the criminal minority, the 9-11 report was right to demand that Muslims worldwide confront the violent and intolerant version of their religion that is poisoning their societies and threatening the world at large. Religious leaders and ordinary citizens alike must engage in soul-searching about the toxic tendencies within their own cultures similar to the one they demand of Americans and the West more broadly... Muslim political leaders should begin a process of rapid development of participatory civil societies and hold internationally monitored elections within specified (short) time periods or their regimes will face censure and sanctions by the international community. This is the surest way to build a foundation for defeating terrorism. "

I dunno, but I think that this is pretty much what you accused me of not writing, isn't it? And you didn't have to look any farther than the very article you read. Is it inappropriate for me to suggest that you get some tutoring in effective reading strategies before your next expose?

And while we're at it, you quoted but never answered or rebutted the following argument of mine: "Not just Palestinian activists, but foreign peace activists and even Israelis are routinely beaten, arrested, deported, or 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…. 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.” I think it's a good argument, so thanks for publicizing it. But can you rebut it? I don't think so...

It's getting late and my wife is kicking me to stop typing and go to sleep already--I wonder if rock stars and Noam Chomsky have to worry about this when they want to work late. Let me close, Mr. Spencer, by saying that I would be happy to debate you publicly if you'll take the time actually to read what I write rather than going off about what you wish I'd have written. You have a standing invitation to come to UC Irvine anytime. I'll get a nice big room and some bottled water. You make arrangements with C-SPAN, as I assume you have better connections there than do I. Not being a rock star, and considering the budget cuts at the University of California, I can't offer you a free dinner, sorry. However, since you seem to need help thinking straight how about inviting Daniel Pipes and Bernard Lewis along to help you? I'd love to get the three of you on a stage. For that, I'll spring for dinner.

I assume you know how to reach me, although I'm not sure why you didn't bother to do so before writing your wonderfully titled expose.

Best and peace,

Mark LeVine -- That's LeVine with a capital V, not Levine.
History
University of California, Irvine

mlevine
@
uci
.edu

Rumsfeld, the Military Irrelevance of Fallujah, and Retina Scans

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was called on the carpet at a meeting with troops in Kuwait, as Reuters reports.

"Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to armour our vehicles ... (scrap) that has already been shot up, dropped, busted, picking the best out of this scrap to put on our vehicles to take into combat?, the soldier said. "We do not have proper armourment for our vehicles to carry us north (into Iraq)."

Rumsfeld's response was deeply dishonest, and typical of his theory of psychological manipulation in politics.

He conceded that "not every vehicle has the degree of armour that it would be desirable for it to have," but said the army was hurrying to plate more vehicles. "I think it is something like 400 a month are being done," he said. "As you know, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time... if you think about it, you can have all the armour in the world on a tank and a tank can be blown up. And you can have an up-armoured Humvee and it can be blown up."

Rumsfeld basically told this serviceman, "screw you!" Obviously "400 a month" is not going to resolve the problem to which the soldier pointed. And it simply is not true, as Rumsfeld implied, that soldiers in a tank are as much at risk as they are in an un-armored truck or other vehicle. There have been a number of reports of rocket-propelled grenades just bouncing off Abrams tanks. The soldiers know when they are being made fools of.

Rumsfeld's dictum that "you go to war with the army you have" begs so many questions it would take days to list them all. But just for starters, let's point out that the officer corps wanted to send more like 300,000 troops to Iraq in March of 2003, not the 100,000 that Rumsfeld insisted on. Rumsfeld's mania for turning the entire US military into special operations forces ignores the need to keep order in the aftermath of a war. Paul Bremer admitted that "we never had enough troops on the ground" and that the lack led to the orgy of looting, which the US was not in a position to stop and which there was not even much will to stop. The looting in turn paid for the incipient guerrilla war (and a good deal of the looting was from weapons depots like al-Qaqaa, despite the Bush administration's denials).

So Rumsfeld didn't go to war with the army he had. He went to war with a much reduced military force, to make some sort of weird point.

And then Rumsfeld ordered the Iraqi army itself dissolved. And he ordered that thousands of former Baath members be fired from their jobs, even as school teachers. These steps created a huge recruitment pool for the Sunni guerrilla movement, which began blowing up US troops. Why would you dump 400,000 trained soldiers into unemployment lines just after invading a country? And the dissolution of the Iraqi military ensured that the US troops would have to try to keep order in the country, a task for which they were not trained.

So from the beginning to the end, Rumsfeld put the troops in this position. All the disastrous decisions were Rumsfeld's (and Bush's and Cheney's). These decisions weren't made by the soldier who asked in Kuwait why he had to rummage around in scrap metal to armor his vehicle. And the decisions weren't necessary or wise. They were arbitrary, and were made by civilians over the objections of the uniformed military.

This open dishonesty of Rumsfeld and Bush is becoming so brazen now that they have their second term that it is breathtaking. A few brave souls in the press are beginning to dare call the administration on the lies.

Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder calls a spade a spade in his article today. He writes:

"There is no comprehensive way to quantify how rebel activity has been affected nationwide by the Fallujah assault."

That is, many claims were made by the US military and by the Bush administration that an assault on Fallujah would make a significant dent in the guerrilla war. Lasseter is telling us that there is no way, two weeks later, systematically to evaluate these claims. Why?

"American officials no longer make available to reporters a daily tally of the number of incidents reported around the country."

Because we, the American public are simply not being told the truth by the Bush administration. This cover-up is absolutely outrageous. We, the American people, are paying for this war. We, the American people, are providing the troops for this war. We, the American people, are engaged in a national debate. We, the American people, will be going to the polls to vote for candidates who take a position on this war. We, the American people, deserve to have the full truth about how many attacks are launched by guerrillas every day in Iraq. We deserve to know how many Iraqis are being killed. We deserve to know what in hell is going on over there.

I urge everyone to write your senator and congressional representative asking them to act to ensure that this information is released to the public. There is no security issue here. The guerrillas know very well how many attacks they are launching daily. I am not asking for operational details, just for the basic numbers.

Lasseter was able to find at least one officer who would be frank about the situation:

' "We haven't seen any recent difference in insurgent organization or tactics in our (area)," said 1st Lt. Wayne Adkins, a spokesman for the 1st Infantry Division, who said violence was down in the area the division oversees, stretching from north of Baghdad to north of Tikrit. "They are using the same intimidation tactics against Iraqis you see elsewhere in Iraq." '

In other words, no, Fallujah hasn't made a difference militarily.

In that case, was it really worth it? Fallujah probably was the nail in the coffin of the electoral process, since in the aftermath most Sunni Arabs determined to boycott the elections, which will sink their legitimacy.

And, US military plans for social control in Fallujah seem genuinely Orwellian and clear violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949. Plans, it is alleged, are being made for forced work details by men in the city, and for use of high tech social engineering tools like retina scans for identification.

How fantastic these dreams of social control really are was underlined by an article in al-Zaman on Thursday morning that reported renewed US aerial bombardment of the Jubail and Julan districts of Fallujah, in hopes of killing the remaining guerrillas. Eyewitnesses reported firefights and the sound of explosions, suggesting some fighting on the ground, as well. One may conclude the Fallujah, despite being a ghost town where 2000 persons were killed and 1400 captured, is still not conquered weeks later.

How little a difference Fallujah made could be easily witnessed on Wednesday when AP reports that guerrillas launched a highly coordinated and professional set of attacks in Samarra. (Yes, the same Samarra that had been supposedly cleared of guerrillas by US military action this fall). Guerrillas raided the police station for munitions and then blew it up. They killed a policeman and a child. Then they attacked US troops at various points in the city, detonating a car bomb near a US base and using machine gun fire on troops at an intersection. No word of US casualties. The Samarra police chief resigned earlier in the day because his house was attacked and his family feared for his safety (read: his wife made him stop working with the Americans.) Many police in Samarra were refusing to patrol, lest they be killed by the guerrillas as collaborators. The Samarra violence left at least 5 dead.

Guerrillas in Mosul attacked a checkpoint manned by Iraqi national guards. The clash left two guardsmen and four guerrillas dead, and there may have been civilian casualties. In Ramadi, guerrillas fought US troops. Three civilians were caught in the crossfire and killed, and one was wounded. A carbomber in Baghdad targetted a passing US convoy but missed it, and killed Iraqi civilians instead (-az-Zaman).

Stories are now coming out about the 2003 war itself, which was presented as almost antiseptic in the US electronic media. Chris Hedges reviews a new book by embedded reporter Evan Wright in the NYRB, writing

"the anecdotal evidence, including the obliteration of villages where there was no serious resistance, along with isolated incidents where the unit had to stop and tend the children and civilians they wounded or killed, mounts by the end of the book to present a withering indictment of the needless brutality of the invasion. He writes toward the conclusion of his narrative:

' In the past six weeks, I have been on hand while this comparatively small unit of Marines has killed quite a few people. I personally saw three civilians shot, one of them fatally with a bullet in the eye. These were just the tip of the iceberg. The Marines killed dozens, if not hundreds, in combat through direct fire and through repeated, at times almost indiscriminate, artillery strikes. And no one will probably ever know how many died from the approximately 30,000 pounds of bombs First Recon ordered dropped from aircraft.' "

These observations by an eyewitness lend some credence to
former Marine staff sergeant Jimmy Massey, who testified in favor of Army Pfc. Jeremy Hinzman, 26, who deserted just before the war and is seeking asylum in Canada. AP's Beth Duff-Brown reports that

"Massey . . . said his 7th Marines weapons company killed more than 30 civilians during a 48-hour period in April while stationed at a checkpoint in the southern Baghdad district of Rashid. The victims included unarmed demonstrators and a man who drove up in a car and raised his hands above his head in the universal symbol of surrender. "I know in my heart that these vehicles that came up, that they were civilians,'' he said. ''But I had to act on my orders. It's a struggle within my heart.'' The orders, he said, were to shoot at anyone who drove into what is known as the ''red zone'' surrounding the checkpoint because they could be suicide bombers. . . . I saw plenty of Marines become psychopaths. They enjoyed the killing.''

A Marine spokesman said that he did not want to suggest that Massey was lying, but insisted that Massey's interpretation of the situation was different from that of the corps.

Massey is being a little unfair. If you are in a guerrilla war zone and a car comes speeding at you and doesn't stop when so ordered, if you don't shoot the driver then you risk it being a car bomber who will kill you and your men. Of course civilians got killed that way, but it isn't clear that that is criminal as opposed to regrettable. But that some of the troops had a sadistic streak or thought all Arabs responsible for 9/11, etc., is also quite plausible. Those sadists aren't typical of the troops, but we know they exist. Timothy McVeigh took delight in blowing Iraqis away, during the Gulf War.

Rather than issuing a blanket denial, the US military would be better served by simply admitting that war is hell and civilians get killed in prosecuting it. The American public is adults. They should know the score, and they should know that if a country goes to war, it will kill a lot of innocent people.

Knight Ridder's Joseph Galloway goes beyond Lasseter's complaint about lack of information. He points out that the US military appears in some instances to be outright lying to us. He instanced the false report given to CNN in mid-October that the US was about to attack Fallujah, done so as to see how the guerrillas in the city would respond and where they would hole up. He also instanced the US military's willingness to let the US public believe that former NFL football player and Army Ranger Pat Tillman was killed in Afghanistan by al-Qaeda, when in fact he was killed by friendly fire from fellow US soldiers. Tillman didn't believe in God, so he could handle the bleakness of life and death. The American public apparently had to be provided with some comforting myths by the Pentagon.

I was struck by how impossible it has been to know how many civilians were killed by the assault on Fallujah a few weeks ago, because the US military illegally targeted the hospitals to prevent word getting out. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld is creating a new fog, not of war, but of the manipulation of information.

In the medium run, it is the uniformed military that will suffer from Rumsfeld's policies of dishonesty and psychological manipulation of the public, which are also being pushed by undersecretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith. Once that trust is decisively undermined, we are going to see a backlash that will make the Vietnam syndrome look tame.

King Abdullah II and President Yawir Worry about Iran and Shiism

Robin Wright and Peter Baker of the Washington Post got King Abdullah II to say the most amazing things about alleged Iranian influence in Iraq. [By this I only meant to say that they were excellent interviewers who elicited very frank comment, not that they induced him to say anything he did not want to; he later spoke just as forcefully on Chris Matthews' Hardball show. My phraseology was perhaps too colloquial and informal-- I was trying to pay them a compliment for getting the story.]

It is simply not the case that hundreds of thousands of Iranians are piling into Iraq to vote in the upcoming elections. The Iranian government has discouraged pilgrimage because of the poor security situation, and the Coalition troops would be able to notice that level of infiltration. It isn't happening.

Why is Abdullah so nervous? Look at it from his point of view. Three years ago, you had a Sunni-dominated, secular Iraq; a Sunni Jordan; a Sunni-majority Syria with a Baath government that is dominated by the Allawi Shiite minority; a Sunni Palestine; a joint Maronite Christian-Sunni Muslim dominated Lebanon; a Sunni Saudi Arabia and Gulf. Sunni-dominated Iraq had served as a bulwark against the influence of Iranian Shiism and of Khomeinist ideas. Khomeini believed in Islamic governance and maintained that Islam is incompatible with monarchy.

Since the Americans overthrew Saddam, the Iraqi Shiites seem likely to form the next government. I would guess that about a third of Iraqi Shiites are sympathetic to Khomeinist ideas. That means those ideas are now on Jordan's doorstep, with no Baath buffer.

Worse, what if Shiite Baghdad and Shiite Tehran form a new axis? What if they spread the idea of Islamic government and the need to get rid of kings? If those ideas jump over into Sunni fundamentalist movements in Jordan, the head that wears the crown could rest uneasy indeed. Likewise, the new Shiite axis of Baghdad and Tehran would have a natural ally in Allawi-dominated Syria and in the Shiite Hizbullah Party of southern Lebanon. Shiites may now be 40% of the Lebanese population, and they could eventually be the majority of the country. Hizbullah and Iran have friendly relations with Hamas in Gaza. Shiite Iraq would inevitably hook up with the Shiite majority in Bahrain and the Shiite plurality in al-Hasa or the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia (where the oil is).

Suddenly Abdullah II could be surrounded by a sea of Shiite influence, and it could be anti-monarchical and theocratic. If such ideas (shorn of their Shiite tinge and naturalized in fundamentalist Sunnism) became dominant among Jordan's substantial opposition movements, and perhaps these groups got money and support from Baghdad and Tehran, Abdullah II could end up being overthrown.

The king's worries about a million Iranian infiltrators into Iraq are merely his own unfounded nightmares. His perception of a new Shiite order in the Mashriq or eastern reaches of the Arab world is entirely correct.

Controversies over Middle East Studies at Princeton

The Daily Princetonian has a fascinating overview of controversies about Middle East Studies at Princeton University.

Churches Bombed in Mosul

Reuters reports that guerrillas in Mosul cleared two churches and then blew them up. There were no injuries, but extensive damage was done to an Armenian and an old Chaldean church. Mosul, a city of 1.2 million, has a substantial Christian population (Christians form about 3 percent of the Iraqi population).

Christian leaders in Iraq have threatened to form a militia for self-protection. The guerrillas have targeted Iraqi Christians on more than one occasion, associating them with the Christian foreigners now occupying Iraq. (This association is unfair, since the Chaldean Christians represent a culture that is older than Islam in Iraq; but such links are made).

The church bombings underscore the way in which images from Iraq are competing with the images favored by the Bush administration.

A US soldier was killed by guerrilla rifle fire in Baghdad.

Four Iraqi National Guardsmen were killed in separate incidents.

Elections face Logistical Obstacles

Mohamad Bazzi of Newsday reports that quite aside from major security problems, the January 30 elections could be derailed by poor preparations. In contrast to the 600 UN election workers in Afghanistan for the recent presidential elections, there are only 35 in Iraq, and security concerns are delaying the sending of more. Even the rules of the election haven't been completely spelled out yet.

Responding to similar skepticism voiced by President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, Iyad Allawi suggested that the elections might be staggered and held over 3 weeks instead of in a single day. His thinking appears to be that the US troops will better be able to keep order if they are concentrated in a few provinces at a time.

The problems Bazzi reports, however, are so extensive that it seems unlikely that Allawi's suggestion could resolve them. And US troops haven't shown an ability to keep order even in the heavily fortified Green Zone, so how can they guard even a fraction of the 9000 polling sites successfully?

In Kuwait, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, gave an interview in which he described the security situation as "not good." He expressed optimism, however, that the guerrillas were gradually being isolated and losing their bases among the people, so that they are weaker each day than the last.

Al-Hakim said that elections had to be held Jan. 30, since otherwise the present Iraqi interim government would become illegitimate. Its term was set to run out by the end of January, 2005, at the latest. He implied that after fighting Saddam for decades, the Iraqis would not accept such a descent into arbitrary rule. (-ash-Sharq al-Awsat).

Character Assassination

Yes, I'm aware that Daniel Pipes of the so-called Middle East Forum sent some puppy out to slime me over at David Horowitz's Frontpagerag. So this is the way it goes with the Likudniks. First they harass you and try to have you spied on. Then they threaten, bully and try to intimidate you. And if that fails and you show some spine, then they simply lie about you. (In this case the lies are produced by quoting half a passage, or denuding it of its context, or adopting a tone of pained indignation when quoting a perfectly obvious observation).

The thing that most pains me in all this is the use of the word "antisemite." Pipes already had to settle one lawsuit, by Douglas Card, for throwing the word around about him irresponsibly.

Israel is not being helped by extremists like Pipes and his associates (see below). It is being harmed, and its very survival is being placed in doubt by aggressive annexationist policies, and by brutal murders and repression, which Pipes and his associates support to the hilt.

Moreover, among the real targets of Pipes and Co. is liberal and leftist Jews. Indeed, the article attacking me begins with a vicious attack on Joel Beinin, a past president of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). David Horowitz and Daniel Pipes are encouraging a new kind of antisemitism, which sees it as unacceptable that Jews should be liberals or should crticize Likud Party policies.

Regardless of whether one supports it unreservedly or not, Israel poses a practical problem for American academics studying the Middle East, because it still has bad relations with countries like Syria (part of which Israel still occupies). Obviously, if you want to do field work in Syria and use the Syrian manuscripts, you are better off not going to Israel. I've had friends who admitted to Syrian border police that they had so much as been in the West Bank, and who were refused entrance to the country.

I say this to give a context for the following anecdote. In the 1990s some Israeli academics came to me and wanted to have a joint project on Middle East Studies, partially funded by Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University. I felt that these academics, who are doves, should be supported, and gladly joined in. I was kindly hosted at one point, as well, at Ben Gurion University in Beersheva. I was well aware of the choice I was making, and I felt it was important to stand with my progressive Israeli colleagues.

I remember when in Israel talking to these leftish academics about politics. I had once met Shulamit Aloni here in Ann Arbor, and I said I admired here. My Israeli colleagues were appalled that I should speak so well of what they thought of as a paternalist party like Meretz, and wanted to move me substantially further to the left. That is an aspect of the real Israel, a place where the full range of political views is debated. It is completely unlike the discourse on Israel in the United States, where anyone who departs from the Likud line is punished and pilloried.

Then one of our joint conferences was planned just after Jenin, and some of the Israeli academics didn't feel right about holding it. They were furious at Sharon and wanted to boycott their own government. I felt the conference should be held. The Israeli invasion of Jenin was horrible, and it left 4000 innocent people homeless, but it wasn't a reason to cancel our conference. I pointed out that the US had killed 2 million Vietnamese peasants in the 1960s and 1970s, and if we were going to cancel conferences over such matters, we probably should never have a conference in the US again. I mean, I was making this argument to Israelis for heaven's sake.

When a movement sprang up to boycott Israeli academics in Europe, I wrote against it in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

In the Middle East Studies establishment in the United States, I have stood with Israeli colleagues and against any attempt to marginalize them or boycott them.

But of course, for the pro-Likud forces, all that means nothing. Being fanatics and often even cultists, they will accept nothing less than a toeing of the party line. And they have perverted the word "antisemitic" to simply mean "won't go along with Gush Emunim's plans." I think there is some danger of the word "antisemitic" as a result becoming useless and being discarded altogether. Why not just speak of racism or bigotry? We don't have a special word for anti-Black racism, and the African-Americans suffered their own Holocaust in the centuries of the slave trade. If someone accused me of being a racist because I objected to Israeli colonization of the West Bank, the full absurdity of the accusation would be obvious. "Antisemitism" has become so wrought up with Likud propaganda that it now can be employed in dishonest ways, as a cover for aggression and expropriation.

Here is the information on the "Middle East Forum" (which isn't a "forum" at all, it is just some sugar daddy giving Pipes $20 million a decade, on which he pays no taxes, apparently for the purpose of smearing and bullying people with whom he disagrees).

Revenue: $2,136,592

Expenses: $2,024,412

Assets: $519,519

Liabilities: $185,966


MIDDLE EAST FORUM
1500 Walnut St
Ste 1050
Philadelphia, PA 19102


Board of Directors
DAVID P STEINMANN, CHAIRMAN

Steinmann is also President of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a pro-Likud warmongering organization that seeks "total" war against Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinians, and which helped drag the United States into its current Iraq quagmire. The Pentagon's Douglas Feith is a long-time JINSA activist.

JACK BERSHAD, CHAIRMAN (here identified as legal adviser to Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs).

IRWIN HOCHBERG, CHAIRMAN (Irwin Hochberg, the national campaign chair of Israel Bonds, chairman of the International Commission of the Anti-Defamation League, and former chairman of the Jewish Federation of New York; Board Member of the Zionist Organization of America, which has steadfastly supported Israeli colonization of the West Bank and the dispossession of its Palestinians. Of the recent proposed peace plan worked out by Israeli and Palestinian doves at Geneva, Morton A. Klein, the president of ZOA said: "It is outrageous for individuals acting in opposition to the democratically-elected government of Israel to negotiate an 'accord' that undermines Israel's security by putting pressure on Israel to retreat to indefensible borders and divide its own capital, Jerusalem.")

ALBERT WOOD, CHAIRMAN (Prominent philanthropist connected to the Zionist Organization of America)

STEVEN LEVY, CHAIRMAN

DANIEL PIPES, PRESIDENT

SCOTT ROSENBLUM, CHAIRMAN (Member, "Golden Circle" of far rightwing "U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon" that unites Likud supporters and Phalangist brownshirts)

LAWRENCE GOULD, CHAIRMAN

LAWRENCE GRODMAN, CHAIRMAN

JERRY SORKIN, CHAIRMAN

Is Sorkin really still on? Eyal Preiss writes at the Nation
'During this same period [after 9/11], Sorkin says, the diversity that had once characterized the Middle East Forum's board vanished. "I sat at one board meeting and thought to myself, am I at a ZOA [Zionist Organization of America] meeting?" says Sorkin, whose views on the Arab-Israeli conflict are moderate. Sorkin told me he respects Pipes and always felt welcome at the Middle East Forum. Eventually, however, he decided to move on, and says he was not alone...'

Clearly, what most of the MEF board members want is Israel's further colonization of the West Bank and large-scale theft from and dispossession of the Palestinians living there. The way they deal with anyone who objects to this massive land grab, which creates hatred for Israel and for the United States in the Muslim world, is pretty clear. They have been getting their way in Washington and in the corporate media for so long that they seem shocked that anyone should dare stand up to them.

I don't have $20 million a decade to compete with Pipes. It is just me and my little Web Log, which costs only a few hundred dollars a year. I can't go toe to toe with JINSA (one of whose fiercest members is Douglas Feith, the number 3 man at the Pentagon), or with ZOA, or AIPAC, or any of the other organizations that stand behind the Middle East Forum.

But what I would do is to ask my many Jewish friends to please stop giving these people money. (And I appeal to everybody to stop going on those propaganda tours that JINSA hosts). Liberal Jews are being cynically used by rightwingers who secretly despise them, but know they are a soft touch for any appeals to the welfare of Israel. Liberal Jews need to found more of their own organizations and become more active in lobbying for their humane vision of Israel. Give money to Brit Tzedek v'Shalom or Tikkun, and found more, and more progressive such organizations. Cut the fanatics of the ZOA and JINSA off without a dime. The plan of the leaders of these latter organizatons is to gradually shift the American Jewish community toward Revisionist Zionism and Likudism, so as to make it a permanent pillar of the right wing of the American Republican Party. The right wing of the Republican Party is decisively not "for others." It is about the rich being selfish. And Revisionist Zionism of the Likud is not "for others." It is the supreme selfishness, the erasure of another people. And that is not what the American Jewish community has stood for for hundreds of years. It isn't what the Jewish tradition is about.

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?" - Rabbi Hillel.

Shiite List to be Announced

Hussein Shahristani, the Shiite scientist charged by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani with cobbling together a big comprehensive Shiite list, said Monday that the full listing of candidate names (in ranked order) would be made available on Tuesday. The list is being called the United Iraqi Congress. The list groups the major Shiite parties and factions, including the Sadr Movement of Muqtada al-Sadr, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Dawa Party, the Islamic Dawa, Iraqi Hizbullah (Marsh Arabs), the secular-leaning Iraqi National Congress of corrupt financier Ahmad Chalabi, and many Shiite independents. About half the list will be Shiite tribal chieftains and notables not associated with one of the (largely expatriate) parties. A few Sunni Arabs, Turkmen and Faili Kurds are also on the list, and it was being rumored that the small Sunni Arab nationalist party of Nasiruddin Chadirchi might be on the list as well. Likewise the chieftain of the largely Sunni Shamar tribe may be included on the Sistani list.

The election will be conducted as one national poll, with voters getting only one vote, for a particular list of candidates. If a list has 100 candidates and gets 10 percent of the vote, it will be able to seat its top 27 candidates. The list must be presented in ranked order.

Twelver Shiites of the Usuli school that predominates in Iraq believe that laypersons should defer to religious scholars on issues of religious law. That Sistani backs this list will be a powerful incentive for Shiites to vote for it.

It is still unclear how a disaster will be averted if the Sunni Arabs largely boycott the election or don't come out to vote for their candidates in nearly the same proportions as the Shiites and the Kurds. They could end up substantially under-represented in parliament as it moves to crafting a permanent constitution.

Meanwhile, 600 delegates from the Shiite communities of the Middle Euphrates met in Najaf to consider the creation of a large Shiite province out of several smaller ones. Modern Iraq has 18 provinces. Saddam for some time created and maintained a 19th so as to strength the hand of the Sunni Arabs. Iraq has reverted to 18 provinces, but many Iraqi ethnic groups are dissatisfied with them. The Kurds want to create an ethnic, Kurdish province out of 6 existing provinces. The Shiites of the three far southern provinces have spoken of creating a big Shiite province. Now the Middle Euphrates Shiites appear to be aiming at some gerrymandering of their own. Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, the former national security adviser for Iraq, has suggested dividing Iraq into five ethnic provinces, with one Kurdish, two Sunni Arab and two Shiite. His plan leaves out the Turkmen and Christians, who would demand their own provinces. Countries with small numbers of largely homogeneous ethnically-based provinces tend to be more unstable than countries with large numbers of states or provinces that are each ethnically mixed.

Clash on a Street called Haifa

Guerrillas on Haifa Street in downtown Baghdad fought a running battle Monday with Iraqi police or national guards, and killed one civilian working for the US. The battle took place near the Green Zone, where the US embassy is sited.

There were also attacks on an oil pipeline that supplies Baghdad from the north, and clashes in the west, in Anbar province. From Friday through Sunday guerrillas killed 5 US troops in Anbar.

The CIA station chief in Baghdad has concluded that things are deteriorating in Iraq and may not get better any time soon. This breathtakingly honest evaluation was unacceptable to US Ambassador John Negroponte, who insisted it be hedged about with warnings that it was too pessimistic.

Uh, John, when you have conquered a country and ruled it for 18 months, and when you have 140,000 plus troops on the ground, and when you have to forbid your embassy staff to take the 10-mile-long road from the capital to the airport because their lives cannot be assured on it-- then, John, things are deteriorating and may not get better soon. Get used to it.

Carnage becoming Routine in Iraq: Another Bloody Sunday

ArabNews summarizes the carnage in Iraq on Sunday.

Tikrit: Guerrillas ambushed a bus as it let off Iraqis working for the US military at a weapons dump in Tikrit on Sunday morning around 8:30 am, spraying it with machine-gun fire and then fleeing. They killed 17 Iraqi civilians and wounded another 13. (The incident shows that the guerrillas are perfectly happy to kill Sunni Arabs as well as members of other groups). I wonder if their employment at a weapons dump was a motive for the shooting? Were these Iraqi civilians helping detonate munitions that the guerrillas would prefer to loot?

Baiji Around 8:30 am, a guerrilla drove a car bomb into a checkpoint in Baiji manned by Iraqi National Guardsmen. He detonated his payload, killing three of the Guards and wounding 18. One of those killed was a company commander.

Samarra Guerrillas staged an ambush of National Guards as they patrolled this largely Sunni city an hour's drive north of Baghdad, killing one guardsman and wounding another 4.

LatifiyahGuerrillas ambushed Iraqi National Guards jointly patrolling with US troops in this small city south of Baghdad, killing one Iraqi soldier and wounding 6.

Guerrillas used roadside bombs to kill, altogether, 4 US troops in Baghdad, Baqubah and Mosul over the weekend.

ArabNews writes, "About 40 small, mostly Sunni political parties met yesterday to demand the elections be postponed by six months, but stopped short of calling for a boycott." They warned again that if the Sunni Arabs do not or cannot take part in their proportion to the population, the resulting government will lack legitimacy.

My own suggestion as to how to resolve the problem of a Sunni boycott appeared Sunday in the Detroit News. I suggest a one-time set-aside of 25% of seats in Parliament for the predominantly Sunni parties that do take part in the elections.

The US military on Sunday arrested Muhammad Hasan Al Yahya. He is the coordinator of the six-man committee that is cobbling together a mega-list of Shiite candidates for parliament. KarbalaNews.net reveals that Al Yahya is a blood relative of the Grand Ayatollah, and says that the US forces surrounded the Waziriyyah district of Baghdad where Al Yahya lives, and closed in on him.

A number of Shiite figures immediately demanded his release. KarbalaNews.net maintains that its sources in Najaf say that the US released Al Yahya late Sunday. There is no indication as to why he might have been arrested.

Rumors are flying in Baghdad as to whether Muqtada al-Sadr and his movement will run on Sistani's mega-list or not. Al-Hayat is saying that he has declined. But The Khalij Times says he is joining.

Meanwhile, the Financial Times reports that Shiite clerics in Baghdad are finding their patience tested by continued Sunni attacks, and some are beginning to adopt a militant posture that they had earlier avoided.

Abu Ghuraib Redux

The Arabic satellite television programs showed the new Abu Ghuraib pictures repeatedly late last week, and they provoked a new round of disgust with the United States. Boing Boing tells the story of how these photos were tracked down on a photo sharing site by a reporter using the google search engine. I am mirroring the pictures still available on the web via El Mundo and jonturk.com, linked from Boing Boing.


picture 1.

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A group of US civil rights attorneys has brought suit in Germany against Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld over the torture case.

Although US military spokesmen keep suggesting that the torture practices were confined to a few soldiers in the lower ranks, and that the photos were mere trophies, Seymour Hersh has argued that the soldiers were ordered to humiliate and photograph the prisoners as a way of blackmailing them into becoming informants for the US. The Americans were depending on Orientalist works like Raphael Patai's The Arab Mind in finding ways of controlling Iraqis, and were convinced that threatening males in an honor society with humiliation was the key.

The downside of using humiliation against a man whose life revolves around his honor is that he is thereafter bound to hate you, and to someday take his revenge. I wonder how many of the "insurgents" who have blown up so many US troops had been "controlled" this way in Abu Ghuraib or elsewhere.

Blogging Fallujah, and the US Air War against Iraqi Civilians

Thomas E. Ricks has a characteristically piercing examination of the way in which a single blogger has been able to challenge the public relations efforts of the entire US military with regard to the human cost of the Fallujah campaign. He contrasts the US military's powerpoint slides of the fighting in Fallujah (linked to at Soldiers for Truth) with Fallujah in Pictures, a web site hosted by an anonymous individual in New York, which put up disturbing pictures from the fighting that were not printed in US newspapers or shown on US television, but which were widely seen in the rest of the world. Ricks interviews experts who universally conclude that the blogger's presentation trumped that of the US military.

One part of the war where pictures can't help stir controversy is the aerial bombardment of Iraq, which takes place in the midst of conflict, and often at night, such as to render it invisible to the cameras of journalists. Tom Engelhardt's "Icarus (Armed with Vipers) Over Iraq" is a seminal piece of anti-war journalism, standing alongside the articles of Naomi Klein as among the more thoughtful interventions so far from that side of the aisle. Excerpts:

"The Old City of Najaf that abuts the holy Shrine of Imam Ali was largely destroyed in August, partially from the air in the midst of bitter fighting between American troops and relatively lightly armed, ill-trained but tenacious young Shiite men loyal to the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. ("Few in the shrine could sleep through the ominous rumble of American AC-130 Specter gunships, capable of firing 1,800 bullets per minute. When the bombs fell closer than ever, hundreds rose to march and chant in the courtyard, saying they hoped their voices boosted the morale of the Mahdi Army.") In one of our last acts before a cease fire was declared, according to Dexter Filkins of the New York Times, we used "a 2,000-pound, laser-guided bomb to strike a hotel about 130 yards away from the shrine's southwest wall, in an area known to American commanders as ‘motel row…' [R]eports indicated the hotel was a redoubt for al-Sadr fighters… The official said the strike had been ‘100 per cent successful,' demolishing the hotel."

Filkins later described the post-truce moment this way: "[The rebels] stood in a scene of devastation. Hotels had crumbled into the street. Cars were blackened and twisted where they had been hit. Goats and donkeys lay dead on the sidewalks. Pilgrims from out of town and locals coming from home walked the streets agape, shaking their heads, stunned by the devastation before them."

Similarly, much of the city of Falluja has just been devastated in fighting in which American fire power of every sort was called in. The razing of that city began with weeks of "targeted" air attacks on what were termed insurgent "safe havens." Falluja is now a wasteland and, while fantasies about its reconstruction abound, the fighting only continues. (At least 20 U.S. troops have died there, to almost no press attention, since the city was declared secure and the operation deemed a "success.") Falluja remains cordoned off; up to 250,000 Fallujan refugees are still unable to return; and American military strategists, who over the months since the first failed Marine attempt to take the city in April planned its eventual destruction, are now evidently planning to "ask" the "head of every household" (read: males) "to wear an identification badge" once back in the city."

The use of air power in Iraq has been among the more troubling policies in the post-Saddam period. It appears to be the case, from the Lancet survey, that between 40,000 and 100,000 excess deaths have occurred among Iraqi civlians since the war began, and 85 percent of those deaths were because of US aerial bombardment (these statistics were gathered excluding Fallujah, lest it skew the national averages). That is between 34,000 and 85,000 Iraqis killed by US bombing, most of them civilians. Jeffrey Sachs and Tom Engelhardt are among the few American observers who even seem to be noticing the phenomenon.

Arab/Kurdish, Sunni/Shiite Violence Flares, Killing Dozens

The violence in Iraq on Saturday, which killed at least 40 and wounded many more, was particularly worrying because it was again characterized by a strong element of ethnic warfare.

In Mosul, a car bomber pulled alongside a bus bringing in Kurdish militiamen or peshmerga, who guard the offices of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (led by Jalal Talabani), and detonated his payload. The huge blast killed 17 of the Kurds and wounded more than 40. I saw an interview with a Mosul resident on al-Jazeerah, who was asked why peshmerga are being used to police part of the city. He admitted that the police had collapsed. (The 4000-strong Mosul police force virtually disappeared from the streets when, during the Fallujah operation, guerrillas launched a brief take-over of the city). (-al-Hayat)

Ten bodies were found in Mosul on Saturday, nine of them belonging to Iraqi national guardsmen killed as "collaborators" by the guerrillas. In the Turkmen north, in Talafar, 4 beheaded bodies of national guardsmen were found, and in Sinjar west of Mosul, five bullet-riddled bodies turned up. Nearly sixty such executions of national guardsmen have been discovered in the past 10 days.

In Baiji, the body of Tamadur Shakir al-Sudani was found. She had been shot seven times. She had served on the provincial governing council of Salahuddin province and had been kidnapped last Thursday.

Mosul city (pop. 1.2 mn.) has an Arab majority, but there are important minorities of Kurds, Turkmen and Christians. Mosul province has historically been dominated by Kurds. The US has never deployed enough troops in and around Mosul to establish security there, and the city saw massive looting by Kurdish tribesmen and other groups after the fall of Saddam. (The 2000 US troops in the north were deployed instead to Kirkuk to guard the oil fields there, in spring, 2003). The Arabs in the city had a strong commitment to the Baath Party, and Mosul university students demonstrated in favor of Saddam last winter. The fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood was long strong in Mosul, as well. In 1959, a failed Arab nationalist coup was launched from Mosul, but was put down by the colonels' regime, with the help of Kurdish tribesmen.

Ten other Iraqis were killed in separate incidents in the north, including 3 who worked for the Americans.

Two American troops were killed on Saturday. Late Friday, two US soldiers were killed and 5 wounded by a bomb near the Jordanian border, after which the Jordan-Iraqi border was closed.

The Salahiyah Police Station in Baghdad was hit by a car bomb, which killed 3 policemen and wounded 40.

Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post reports that clashes also broke out in Latifiyah south of Baghdad between Sunni Arab guerrillas and the Shiite Fury Brigade, a group formed in Basra in the south to protect Shiite pilgrims traveling from the north to the Shiite holy cities, whom the Ansar al-Sunna or Helpers of the Sunnis, have been attacking and robbing. Shadid notes that this is the first set-piece battle between Shiite and Sunni militiamen since the fall of Saddam. (There have been urban disturbances, as between Kadhimiyah and Adhamiyah after the capture of Saddam).


Al-Hayat interviewed Ammar al-Hakim, an official of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq privy to the negotiations by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani toward creating a united Shiite list. He said that the list would be announced shortly. He said SCIRI had no dispute with Muqtada al-Sadr and that the only reason its head, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, had not met with Sadr was because the latter had difficulty moving around for security reasons. He said it was very important that Sadr join the group list. But he said that if some groups were not in Sistani's list, it would not be a sign of disapproval from Sistani but rather the result of their own choices.

Mariam Fam of the Associated Press knows better than Max Boot what the Fallujans now think of the Americans, because she has actually talked to the Fallujans. They don't seem to be very happy to have been liberated. They even seem to be muttering about perpetual jihad. Fam's report comes to conclusions similar to those of Shadid, also an Arabic-speaking reporter on the scene in Iraq.

30 Killed in Tsunami of Attacks

Arab satellite stations are reporting mortar attacks on the Green Zone in Baghdad (where the US embassy and government offices are located), and showing thick columns of black smoke rising over the capital.

Guerrillas launched several coordinated attacks on Friday, aimed at disrupting the country as it moves toward the January 30 elections. They demonstrated that the Fallujah operation had not in the least damaged their command and control apparatus.

At dawn, about 60 guerrillas attacked a police station at Amil district in Baghdad, killing at least 16 policemen and wounding others. They also released some 50 inmates. Eyewitnesses said that the guerrillas arrived in the Amil quarter in civilian cars, and took up positions on the roofs of buildings near the police station. They then bombarded it with rocket propelled grenades. The clashes lasted about an hour, with the police fighting back until they ran out of ammunition. (-ash-Sharq al-Awsat).

Guerrillas also attacked a Shiite religious edifice, detonating a car bomb at a Shiite religious symbol, and killing 16 and wounding 14.

Clashes also broke out in Mosul, leaving 12 persons dead, mainly guerrillas.

Guerrillas used roadside bombs to kill one US soldier and wound two others near Kirkuk.

Hollowness of War on Terror: Madrid hit Again

Madrid was thrown into chaos on Friday when the Basque separatist organization ETA set off five bombs at gasoline stations around the capital of Madrid, just as Spaniards were trying to leave the city on a vacation that marks the advent of a new, democratic constitution in 1978. The Basque separatists blame the constitution for reaffirming that their three provinces, totaling 2 million persons are part of Spain (pop. 40 million).

I was struck at how little coverage US news organizations were giving this terrorist strike. If the Bush administration were serious about fighting terrorism, surely the FBI and CIA would be flying off to Madrid and trying to catch the perpetrators? There would be extensive consultations between Bush and Prime Minister Zapatero about cooperation in fighting these groups.

If these bombings had been carried out by al-Qaeda, it would be front-page news and something of concern to Washington.

That it isn't raises the question of anti-Muslimism. Is the difference in the way that the American press responds to ETA from the way it responds to al-Qaeda a form of racism?

Card wins Legal Action against Pipes

Daniel Pipes and Jonathan Schanzer settled a libel suit out of court with University of Oregon instructor Douglas Card. They had accused Card of being anti-semitic (i.e. a racist) and of being a leftwing extremist.

Pipes has a history of levelling wild charges against academics, and of being unreliable (he said in 2002 that Saddam was 2-5 years away from having an atomic bomb). He appears to have become concerned that Card had an excellent case and would win a big settlement, so he backed off and withdrew the charges, settling with Card.

Pipes had also put up a dossier on yours truly in 2002, accusing me of being unpatriotic, and asking that people who knew me (including presumably students and colleagues) to spy on me for him, and send him surveillance reports (he had helpfully included a web form for their submission). As a result of this targetting of me and 7 other academics, Israeli hackers nested illegally in US servers and set up spam robot programs that targetted our email addresses with 1400 offensive messages a day, in an attempt to cripple us on the internet. Like Card, I responded legally, by pointing out to Pipes that his actions could be construed as a form of cyberstalking, which is illegal in Michigan. He took down the dossier, saving me the trouble of initiating a court action. And the FBI got involved in tracking down the mass automated spammers, who felt the heat and disappeared. (There is not any resemblance between automated massive spam and a simple letter-writing campaign, where each message is substantive and comes from a different person.)

Readers know that one of Pipes's fellow travellers recently brandished an outrageous threat to sue me for libel recently, for which he had no grounds. It should be emphasized that all three of these techniques-- untrue charges of antisemitism, intensive spying on private persons, and vague threats of libel suits on shaky grounds, are used by American and Israeli-American sympathizers with the far rightwing Likud Party in an attempt to cast a chill on Americans' freedom to critique Israeli misdeeds in the West Bank and Gaza. Card's lawsuit was obviously well founded, and was not intended to intimidate or to suppress speech, but simply to defend himself from false charges of bigotry.

Card's victory is a victory for freedom of speech and for healthy dialogue at a time when the US first amendment is under extreme attack.

Speaking of American supporters of the Likud brand of revisionist Zionism, the FBI investigation of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has started back up. How AIPAC gets away with not being a registered agent of a foreign power beats me. More at Laura Rozen's War and Piece.

A fine overview of rightwing pro-Likud groups and their tactics in the culture wars is given by Andrew Schamess at Semitism.net.

More Violence in Iraq

Associated Press reports that the fortified Green Zone (US offices and Iraqi government buildings) in Baghdad took heavy mortar fire on Thursday. A car bomb wounded two US soldiers in Baiji. There was heavy fighting in Mosul, leaving a dozen people dead. We only hear about a fraction of such violence and attacks from such wire service reports, it turns out, since the US military doesn't release full information about security in the country. In Baladruz northeast of Baghdad, a police colonel was assassinated.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports the kidnapping of a female member of the governing council of Salahuddin and assassination attempts on two members of the municipal council of Khalis north of Baqubah. If provincial governing council members can't be protected, how can you have a stable government? Police in Salahuddin province maintained that guerrillas had established a special operations unit which had a list of 100 personalities they intended to assassinate. There is every reason to think that the guerrrillas do have such hit lists, and also that they have been relatively effective in implementing it.

Psy-Ops and News

The Los Angeles Times's Mark Mazetti writes about a US military psy-ops campaign against the guerrillas in Fallujah in mid-October, in which military spokesmen convinced CNN that an attack on the city was imminent and got this "news" broadcast so as to observe how the guerrillas in the city reacted to it.

I remember getting a lot of messages from readers in mid-October intimating to me that the Fallujah operation was set to go any minute. They were hearing this from their contacts among servicemen in Iraq. I told them that it was impossible, that Karl Rove would never have let Bush launch a major and possibly bloody operation like that just before the election. (Can you imagine? The marine mosque shooting of a wounded guerrilla would have immediately entered into the presidential campaign.)

People in the news business are victims of psychological operations tricks all the time. It has come out that the rogue Rockingham Group in British military intelligence placed false news items about Iraq in US newspapers in an attempt to help provoke the war. Ahmad Chalabi and Iyad Allawi purveyed all sorts of nonsense to US and UK newspapers, who swallowed it hook line and sinker.

Why didn't hardened, professional journalists have more sense about all this? First, reporters are rewarded for scoops, so they have an incentive to get a juicy story into print. Second, for things like a military operation or the situation inside Iraq, they can't double check their sources very easily. If a reporter had called a US officer he knew and asked if a Fallujah operation was imminent in mid-October, the officer would probably have lied to him and said yes. Likewise, how would you double check Chalabi's lies inside Saddam's Iraq? You couldn't.

So there are these peculiar archipelagoes of opaqueness in the world of news, where journalists are at the mercy of single sources that appear solid. It is very dangerous for the US cable news channels to depend so heavily for analysis of things like Iraq and the war on terror, on retired military officers and on well-connected cyphers like Walid Phares. (Hint to cable news personnel departments: if an academic has a spotty publication record and is at some small place or doesn't have a proper university post, but you get a call pushing him from some rightwing think tank in Washington or from the Benador Agency, be suspicious).

Where they cannot get corroboration from insiders, or where corroboration seems suspicious, journalists should reach out to outsiders more often. Independent outsiders like genuine academics have some advantages as sources. They are most often not interested parties. They aren't under any pressure to adopt positions that contradict common sense. And they often have long-term expertise in a country that gives them a bullshit meter that a journalist just parachuted into a story hasn't had time to develop. Depending on the Think Tank talking heads alone will just amplify the psy-ops.

Election News

Al-Hayat says that the Sunni tribal shaikhs with whom Prime Minister Iyad Allawi met in Jordan on Thusday pleaded with him to postpone the elections. The leader of the Sunni clans of the Dulaim, Majid Ali Sulaiman, told al-Hayat that the shaikhs of the Iraqi tribes "meet Allawi during the past two days, and requested him to postpone the elections to a time when the Iraqi leadership feels it is able to carry them out without security problems." He said Allawi told himm that the election date was set by the United Nations Security Council, and that he should apply to it to have the date changed. Shaikh Muhsin al-Shamari confirmed that 90% of the Sunni Arab personalities who met with Allawi expressed their desire for a postponement.

KarbalaNews.net is reporting more on the issues that led 38 small Shiite parties to threaten to withdraw from the mega-Shiite list being cobbled together by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.

It says that some secularists were uncomfortable at the number of seats being given to believers in wilayat al-faqih or Khomeini's theory of the Guardianship of the Jurisprudent. Altogether, 40 percent of seats are being allocated to the religious parties, and it is possible that some of the independents hold similar views.

The article maintains that the secularists were disturbed that all the 50 women on the list veil. Two out of every 6 names on the list, in descending order, must be women. Although this regulation was put in because the UN and Americans thought that women would be progressives in parliament, the religious Shiites have simply put up conservative Shiite women.

The Shiite megalist, according to Badr Corps figure Abdul Husain Abtan, will include some Kurdish figures from the minority Shiite Failis. Although the majority of the 4 million Iraqi Kurds is Sunni, Shiites tend to vastly exaggerate the number of Failis, claiming 1.5 to 2.5 million. It is impossible to know without a proper religious census, but based on general impressions I would hazard a very rough guess Failis constitute about an 1/8 of Kurds, i.e. half a million.

Speaking of the Kurds, Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani held a joint press conference to announce a joint, separate Kurdish list. One third of its candidates will be Kurdish Democratic Party, one third will be Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, and one third will be from other, smaller Kurdish parties. The two major Kurdish figures admitted that the Turkmen had refused to cooperate with this joint list. They said that they hope the Sunni Arabs will participate. (- Kurdish Satellite TV via BBC World Monitoring).

They said that the Kurds had no particular desire for a delay in the elections, but that if they were delayed, the Kurds would have no objection. The Kurdish leaders appeared to back off from earlier demands that Kirkuk residents not vote in the election. Kirkuk, a city of about one million, is about evenly distributed, with one third each Turkmen, Arabs and Kurds. But this result was achieved artificially by Saddam, who expelled many Kurds and imported many Arabs from the South. Many Kurds insist on the return of Kirkuk to Kurdistan, reversing Saddam’s Arabization. This demand is vehemently rejected by the Turkmen and Arabs.

Brown: A Meeting with Yasser Arafat

Middle East expert Kenneth Brown shares the following guest editorial. (Iraq news follows, below.):

A meeting with Yasser Arafat

Kenneth Brown

I first met Yasser Arafat in January of last year in Ramallah at the Muqata’a, the half demolished headquarters of the Palestinian Authority. I was part of a delegation of a dozen intellectuals, mostly Jewish and living in France, which had been invited to visit Israel and the Palestinian occupied territories by the Israeli group, Gush Shalom (Peace Bloc). One of our many meetings was with Arafat, the elected President of the Authority and Chairman of the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization. He had been a virtual prisoner of the Israelis in the ruined buildings of the Muqata’a since 2001.We sat around a large table with the “Old Man”, as he was called.

After some opening remarks in which he spoke nostalgically of his childhood in Jerusalem and of his Jewish playmates---after all, he had been briefed on who we were---he summarized the present repression and the coming war on Iraq. Then we were invited to ask questions. The main thing we wanted to hear from him was his position on the suicide attacks against Israeli citizens. We didn’t receive a straight answer. His ambiguity on the subject could be interpreted as a tacit acceptance. But one of his associates spoke up against those acts of terrorism. Was he speaking for the President or against him? At that moment, someone entered the room and whispered something to Arafat. Then he announced to us that the Israeli army had just entered Hebron in a murderous retaliation for the killing of settlers. It was perhaps his way of telling us that the issue of terrorism and violence was two-sided.

I left that meeting with the conviction that Yasser Arafat was a prisoner not only of the Israelis, but also of a situation that he could not control. I think he genuinely believed that peace with the Israelis was possible and that no other serious solution existed. I do not underestimate his weaknesses. His absolutist authority over the Palestinian leadership and his use of corruption to maintain his power and authority within the PLO undermined the democracy that very many Palestinians want. These legacies have left profound problems for succession to his leadership. Arafat was a kind of latter-day Moses who took his people out of bondage, but was denied the Promised Land of a viable nation-state, Palestine.

I was led to think about my own road to the Promised Land. I had come a long way since my beginnings as ‘a nice Jewish boy’ from Los Angeles, Bar-Mitzvah and Confirmation at Temple Israel of Hollywood, graduation from Hollywood High and UCLA. I first went to Israel as a visiting student at the Hebrew University in 1956. I was in Jerusalem during the Suez War. The victorious Israelis were full of stories about the savagery and cowardice of the Arabs, reveling in the image of boots abandoned in the desert by fleeing Egyptian soldiers, I remember Ben Gurion addressing a massive crowd in Zion Square, swearing that the Israelis would never give up an inch of Sinai and the Gaza Strip. Shortly afterwards, of course, President Eisenhower commanded them to leave, and in those days Israel submitted to American authority, turned tail and went home.

The university finally opened in December 1956. In my courses on the modern Middle East, there was no mention of Palestinians (and hardly any of “Israeli Arabs”) nor, for that matter, much interest in Jewish history in Arab countries. Had it not been for the presence of some Muslim and Christian Arabs from Israel and Jewish immigrants from North Africa, Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Yemen, it would have been hard to imagine that Israel was in the Middle East at all. The Israeli way of life, felafel apart, was Euro-American. The notion of Palestine didn’t exist. Israelis turned their backs on an Arab world that was perceived as the impotent enemy, implacably hostile and bent on the destruction of the Jewish state.

The war of 1967 changed most of that. As we all know, Israel reconquered Sinai, Gaza and, this time, took the West Bank and the Golan Heights, as well. Now, thirty-seven very troubled years later, more than a generation, the Palestinian leader who emerged from the ashes of 1967 has left this world. Yasser Arafat led a movement that put Palestine at least on the conceptual map and imposed on the conscience of the world, even in Israel, recognition of the existence of a Palestinian people. Meanwhile the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza persists. For all his successes and well-publicized failures, Arafat died ingloriously in a French hospital after three and a half years as a virtual prisoner in what was left of his Ramallah headquarters. That is where he was buried in scenes of great pathos last Friday.

I agree with Michael Warschawski, an Israeli Jew and co-president of the Jerusalem Center of Alternative Information, who has written that Arafat belongs in the pantheon of the great leaders of the twentieth century for having brought about the renaissance or even the ‘resurrection’ of a Palestinian nation that had been stamped out, atomized, dispersed, demoralized, and largely exiled by the creation of the state of Israel. A people made up of refugees and the excluded affirmed itself, in a large measure thanks to Arafat’s leadership, as a nation claiming its right to liberty, sovereignty and a return to its homeland.

It will take a long time to draw up the balance-sheet of Arafat’s place in history. But some of his accomplishments are undeniable. First, recognition of the PLO by the Arab states in 1974 as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. Second, global recognition of that legitimacy, crowned by his appearance at the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1975. Third, in the Oslo declaration of 1993, recognition of the Palestinian people and of the PLO as its representative by the Israeli government.

These recognitions were largely achieved thanks to Arafat’s ability to sustain the unity of his people in the face of enormous external and internal pressures. He always refused to submit to the demands of Israel and the U.S. which would have provoked civil war among Palestinians under the guise of the struggle against terrorism. Moreover, he had the merit, questionable to be sure, of refusing to surrender to the capitulations demanded of him by Prime Minister Ehud Barak and President Clinton at Camp David in summer 2000.

The greatest of the risks Arafat took was, of course, Oslo, “the historic compromise” with Israel, when he bet on coexistence and eventual reconciliation with a state that had been constructed on the ruins of Palestine. He paid dearly for losing that bet by being locked up and largely neutralized in the Muqata’a, accused of having fomented the second Intifada and of being personally responsible for Palestinian terrorism.

What then is my reading of Yasser Arafat from that meeting last year in Ramallah and from contradictory second-hand sources? I am convinced that he spoke the truth when he expressed his readiness to sit down to discuss peace with any Israeli leader, including Ariel Sharon. To be sure, he was always a leader of a people at war, but he was ready to become a partner in peace. At the same time and at least partly as a consequence of the endless conflict, he lacked many of the qualities of statesmanship. Like all political leaders, and especially those at war, his ideological statements at times drew upon myths. But the Israelis have no lessons to teach in that regard. They have been much more successful in perpetuating their own myths and, with the support of the U.S., they have always held the high cards. They remain persuaded that the Palestinians will submit to their might.

The historical record is increasingly clear in one respect: Israel was created by means of conquest and the expulsion of another people. Reconciliation between the two peoples will imply a recognition of that fact of historical injustice. The Palestinians continue to be victims of an authentic tragedy. The absence of order and law in the territorities of the Palestinian Authority is mainly a consequence of the ongoing Israeli occupation. Palestinian suicide bombings must be condemned, but their source should also be understood. Yasser Arafat was a prisoner of the Israelis and also prisoner of a lack of political vision. But in failing to make peace with him, the Israelis missed the best opportunity that history has yet offered to them.

Kenneth Brown lives in Paris where he edits the biannual review Mediterraneans. A former professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester (U.K.), Research Associate in the Middle East Center, University of Chicago, Visiting Professor at the Universities of California, Berkeley and Utah, and Fulbright Professor at the University of Dakar, Senegal, he completed his Ph.D. in Islamic Studies at U.C.L.A in 1969. His latest book, Iraq from Crisis to Chaos, was published in French by IBIS Press, Paris 2004.

medit
@
msh-paris
.fr

Shiite-Sunni, Shiite-Shiite
No civil war and Massive Casualties

There were major gun battles in Mosul and Samarra on Wednesday, and bombs went off on the road to Baghdad airport and at Iskandariyah to the south.

They don't hate our freedoms. They hate US policies. This conclusion had been obvious from extensive polling done by Ron Inglehart, Gallup, Zogby and others, but has now also been stressed by the Defense Science Board of the Pentagon.

The two big policies of the US that people in the Muslim world mind most are knee-jerk support for Israeli actions in the Occupied Territories and the US invasion and military occupation of Iraq. Before the Iraq war, it was mainly the Palestine issue that drove poor opinion of the US. A further issue that annoys people is US support for authoritarian governments in the Middle East. Despite paying lip service to democratization, the US is if anything more complaisant toward strong-arm tactics by rulers like Tunisia's Zayn al-Din Bin Ali, since these are deployed against Muslims fundamentalists. Bin Ali just won a fourth term as president [for life]. Apparently Washington's insistence on democratization is reserved for states that take a posture of enmity or defiance toward the United States.

The Pentagon report is critical of calls for better public diplomacy in the absence of policy change. We all remember the commercial about the brokerage firm peddling a loser stock, and the boss says, "Let's put some lipstick on this pig." Well, that is how Muslim audiences would respond to attempts to pretty up US policies.

The one big lesson that George W. Bush may yet learn before going out of office is that having power and having authority are not the same thing, and that power without legitimate authority has severe limitations. There are, by the way, 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, and by the time world population levels off at around 9 billion mid-century, it may be the biggest religion in the world, outstripping Christianity, for reasons of demographic growth. The US can't afford to have that many people angry at it and plotting its demise.

AP reports that 38 small Shiite parties have threatened to pull out of the united Shiite list being constructed by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. They complain that the list is dominated by theocratic politicians. Spencer Ackerman at Iraq'd seems to me to have, uncharacteristically, misunderstood this development. This revolt is not coming from the Sadrists but from the secularists. I suspect Ahmad Chalabi is the one really agitating here. Frankly, the secular Shiites are so little organized and such a small political grouping so far, that they don't matter that much. The big Shiite parties are Dawa, Islamic Dawa, Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and the Sadrists. All of them do want Islamic law as the law of the land, and some may want eventual clerical rule.

I suspect that the secularists are afraid of not being given very many slots at the top of the list, which maeans that they may not actually get seated. If a list has 200 candidates on it, ranked 1 to 200, and the party gets 30 percent of the national vote, it will be able to seat about 90 of its candidates-- i.e. 1 through 90 of its ranked list. So I suspect these tiny parties are just trying to improve their representation at the top, where it counts. It does not seem to me important whether they join the mega-list or not. If they don't, most Shiites will still vote for Sistani's list, which includes Dawa and SCIRI, the biggies.

The important split would occur if Muqtada and the other Sadrists don't join the Sistani list. Even then, such a split might not hurt Shiite representation in parliament. If Sistani's list got 40 percent of the vote, and Muqtada's got 15 percent, the Shiites would still have their majority in parliament.

Meanwhile, Hussein Shahristani, the head of Sistani's effort to create a united list, insisted that secularists would indeed feature among the top candidates. He also stressed that the list would include Sunni Arabs, Turkmen, and Kurds, and said he hoped that the latter two groups would also vote for the list, not just the Shiite voters. He said a number of Sunni tribes had joined the list, which has not yet been named and probably will have a non-sectarian title. In the Sistani list, The al-Dawa Party will likely get 30 seats, as will the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and the Sadrists are being offered 27. (-Reuters/ ash-Sharq al-Awsat).

John Yaukey of Gannett has a good analysis of the Sunni Arab problem in Iraq and how it affects the elections. Read all the way to the end, where he compares American Iraq to French Algeria:

"One sobering lesson from the past, however, is that well-armed insurgents have rarely ever lost. The French fought Islamic insurgents for eight years in an attempt to hold on to Algeria. In 1959, it appeared the French army had suppressed the insurgency. But it flared up again, reinforced by insurgent recruits driven to arms by harsh French measures, and France gave up in 1962 and granted Algeria independence. By then, 15,000 French soldiers had died and Muslim casualties were estimated at between 300,000 and 400,000."

Imperialist, warmonger journalist Max Boot's standard reply to this sort of argument is to point to the early-twentieth century Philippines, where the US killed some 200,000 Filipinos and succeeded in ruling the country until the Japanese invasion during WW II. But contemporary Iraq is highly socially and politically mobilized-- urban, sophisticated, literate, industrialized-- compared to the Philippines of that time, and so is much more formidable. There is for the same reason no analogy to British Malaya; and in any case, as John Mearsheimer has pointed out, the British were unable to keep Malaya (they would have liked to-- the tin and rubber there were a significant part of the British economy after WW II).

I was trying to think of an instance in which a Western occupier has successfully put down a nativist insurgency in the global South since 1970, and could not come up with anything. There are some indirect such victories. The Algerian military, backed strongly by France, appears to have defeated the Islamic Salvation Front and the Armed Islamic Group, after a decade of civil war that killed 100,000. But it isn't clear that this victory could have been attained had Algeria been occupied by 140,000 French troops. Likely, the Islamic Salvation Front would have picked up enormous support from anti-colonialist Algerians.

The only thing the US has going for it in Iraq is that the Shiites and Kurds are still afraid of the Baathists and radical Muslim fundamentalists among the Sunni Arabs. But a lot of Shiites have come to loathe the American troops, and that they may in the future demand that they leave is entirely possible.

James H. Joyner, Managing Editor of Strategic Insights, the journal of the Naval Postgraduate School, uses social science definitions and data to challenge journalist Matthew Yglesias's allegation that Iraq is already embroiled in a civil war. He cites the project initiated by my colleague David Singer of the University of Michigan political science department, Correlates of War, which defines civil war:

' The Correlates of War project . . . offers a very simple definition:

"An internal war is classified as a major civil war if (a) military action was involved, (b) the national government at the time was actively involved, (c) effective resistance (as measured by the ratio of fatalities of the weaker to the stronger forces) occurred on both sides and (d) at least 1,000 battle deaths resulted during the civil war."

By that rudimentary definition, a civil war does indeed exist in Iraq -- and a "major" one at that. The COW definition is rather broad, however, and would include any significant insurgency and could conceivably cover even large terrorist operations or criminal enterprises such as narco-terrorists in Latin America or Al Capone-style gangsterism. Stanford political scientists James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin offer a narrower definition that more closely mirrors the way most of us conceive of civil war:

"(1) They involved fighting between agents of (or claimants to) a state and organized, non-state groups who sought either to take control of a government, take power in a region, or use violence to change government policies. (2) The conflict killed or has killed at least 1000 over its course, with a yearly average of at least 100. (3) At least 100 were killed on both sides (including civilians attacked by rebels). The last condition is intended to rule out massacres where there is no organized or effective opposition."

While very similar to the COW definition, the qualification that the anti-government forces are fighting to gain control of the political apparatus is important. While the Kurds certainly have aspirations to a unified, independent Kurdistan, their actions as described by Yglesias and Galbraith are not aimed at that end but rather at establishing security and defeating an insurgent-terrorist movement that's working against their interests. The insurgents, meanwhile, are fighting primarily to coerce foreign interveners to leave Iraq. So, at present, civil war does not exist in the classic sense. '

Jeffrey Sachs has a brave meditation on the absence of interest in the US mainstream press and media in the issue of Iraqi civilian deaths as a result of the US war and continued aerial bombardment of civilian neighborhoods.

Sachs is among the foremost economists in the world and is eminently qualified to make a judgment on the Lancet study showing at least 40,000 and perhaps 100,000 excess civlian deaths in Iraq as a result of the war. He clearly credits it, suggesting that the resistance to the study by American journalists may derive from their lack of numeracy rather than weaknesses in the methodology.

Sachs's point is ironically underlined by the appearance of his opinion piece in the Beirut Daily Star rather than in a major US metropolitan newspaper.

Baghdad: Car Bomb Wounds 5 US Soldiers
Baiji: Car Bomb Kills 7, Wounds 18

Guerrillas in Baghdad detonated a car bomb near a US convoy on the road to the airport, wounding 5 American soldiers.

Guerrillas in the town of Baiji north of Baghdad detonated a car bomb in a crowded market, killing 7 persons and wounding nearly 20. Elsewhere in Baiji, a guerrilla fired a rocket propelled grenade at a US tank, wounding a soldier and damaging the tank.

On Monday, near Ramadi, a suicide car bomber targeted Iraqi policemen who had gathered to collect their paychecks at a police station, Monday, a suicide car bomber plowed into policemen waiting to collect their salaries at a police station. The attacker killed 12 persons and wounded at least 10.

Iraq Elections: Negroponte Optimistic; Shiites Enthusiastic for Reasons that would not Please Negroponte

The Chicago Tribune's Liz Sly is back in Baghdad and has two important pieces out. One describes the confidence of US Ambassador to Baghdad John Negroponte that the Sunni Arabs will vote in the upcoming elections rather than boycotting them. She reports Negroponte saying,

' "Do they really want to opt out of an electoral process that is going to pick a national assembly that drafts the constitution and shapes the political future of their country?" he asked. "Or do they want to be represented in some way so that they have a seat at the table?" "I think once they realize the elections are going forward as planned, they'll have to deal with that reality," he added. "A number of them are coming round to the view that they should participate." '

The problem here is that Sunni Arabs may only be 18 percent or so of the population. What would be a good turnout? At this point, could Negroponte really hope for more than 50%? That would be 9 percent of seats in parliament, which would not be enough to satisfy Sunnis as the new constitution is hammered out. And,it could be less (I think it will be less.) The proportional voting system put in by the Americans is almost certain to amplify the Shiite and Kurdish votes, and even the best likely outcome for Sunni Arabs is fairly severe marginalization.

The enthusiasm of the Shiites for the elections is the point of her second piece. But that enthusiasm is apparently not actually good news for the Bush administration. She reports a widespread attitude among Shiites:

' "This election, for me, will be the happiest moment in my life, because it means we will end the occupation," said Ahmad al-Asadi, who sells mobile phones from a little store alongside the Kadhimiya mosque, a Shiite shrine. That's how Shiite leaders are pitching the vote: as a chance to end America's military presence in Iraq peacefully, through the ballot box. It also is a chance for Iraq's long-downtrodden Shiites, who account for 60 percent of the population, to throw off centuries of oppression by the Sunni minority and take a commanding role in the country's government. '

It does seem likely that if the US beats down the Baathists enough to permanently defang them, the Shiites are likely simply to toss the Americans out after they take power (assuming that there is a real election, and Allawi is not simply installed as a US puppet [again]).

Rory McCarthy of the Guardian tells us more about the Shiite mega-list being formed by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, which will probably dominate the elections. The negotiations appear to have gone exceedingly well. His report is the first indication I have seen that the Fudhala (Virtuous) Party will join the Sistani coalition. The Fudhala are an offshoot of the Sadr movement, who reject the leadership of Muqtada al-Sadr. I wouldn't have called Fudhala' moderate.

Az-Zaman reports that a communique of dubious soundness was issued by a shadowy organization called the Mujahidin Brigades, claiming to have found and killed the assassin of Shaikh Faidi al-Faidi, who was killed in Mosul last week. Al-Faidi had been a member of the Association of Muslim Scholars, which has called for a boycott of the Iraqi elections. They called the assassin Kamran Abd al-Sattar (a Kurdish name) and accused him of working for Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. That Sunni fundamentalists in Iraq are blaming Kurds for this assassination is a very bad sign.

The same article says that the Association of Muslim Scholars has called for a boycott of the US military, especially of the Iraqi national guards. It says that dozens of Iraqi military are resigning from the national guards, as a result of the AMS call. Since the AMS is also calling for a boycott of the elections, this is another sign that can be characterized as "not good."