Informed Comment

Al-Hakim Sees Baghdad as Federated Province
Sadrists Urge Alliance with Sunni Arabs

Al-Zaman/ AFP [Ar.]: Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the victorious (fundamentalist Shiite) United Iraqi Alliance suggested Friday that Baghdad province join Kurdistan, the Middle Euphrates, and the deep south as a confederacy with special privileges, overseen by a federal government. He said that the constitution had given the Iraqi people this right, adding, “The choice of federalism is the right one, because it has strengthened the unity of Iraq on the one hand, and on the other has ensured justice. It has saved the country forever from the troika of dictatorship, racism and sectarianism.”

Al-Hakim said it was unlikely that the establishment of provincial confederacies in the south would lead to a break-up of Iraq: “The notion of the partition of Iraq is just not plausible, since we have made our choice, and have chosen to remain united in Iraq.” He affirmed, “The Iraqi that everyone wants to realize is an Iraq of rights, participation, equal opportunity, love, peace and liberty.”

He said in defense of the Shiite-Kurdish political alliance, “Our trial and tragedy are one, for the tyranny and persecution we experienced has pushed us to achieve the a partnership among all the elements of the Iraqi people.” He said that his brother, Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim (d. Aug. 29, 2003 in a huge carbombing), who had led the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq for two decades, had always stood by the Kurdish people, and had emphasized the need for a strategic alliance of Iraqi Shiites and Iraqi Kurds. He called on the Kurds to work jointly with him in order to “safeguard the constitution from any attempt to alter it that might erase the gains that have been achieved by the Iraqi people.”

(Cole: The Sunni Arabs had been promised that the new parliament would reopen negotiations on some articles of the constitution that they rejected. Al-Hakim is here correctly pointing out to the Kurds that if they ally with the Shiites, the Sunni Arabs can just be voted down in any attempt to change the constitution. The window for doing so will in any case close four months after the new parliament comes into session.)

Al-Hayat [Ar.] says that its sources tell it that al-Hakim and Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani reached a broad agreement on the outlines of a Shiite-Kurdish alliance in the new parliament. Talabani was keen to see the prerogatives of the president expanded, to which al-Hakim is said to have assented. He also wanted written guarantees as to the referendum to be held in 2007 about whether Kirkuk will acceded to the Kurdistan confederacy. Both agreed to seek a government of national unity, bringing in Sunni Arabs and secularists. They put off dealing the American demands that the secular forces be given a prominent role in the security forces. (The security forces are at the moment dominated by hardline Shiite fundamentalists close to Iran, and the US embassy is pressing hard to dilute them with a ministerial appointment to Interior from the Allawi faction. Allawi, however, is widely considered a Baathist light, and the elected government is a little unlikely to turn security over to him, especially since his list ran poorly in the elections.)

The two did not take up the issue of who the prime minister will be. Talabani deeply dislikes the current PM, Ibrahim Jaafari, whom he accused of overstepping his constitutional authority on numerous occasions. The Dawa Party asserted on Friday that Jaafari was its candidate for PM again. His rival is Adel Abdul Mahdi, of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (al-Hakim’s party). Al-Hakim and Talabani agreed that the majority party should discuss the issue internally first.

Representatives of the Sadr movement said that they had withdrawn from the discussions between the UIA and the Kurds at Sulaimaniyah in protest that the Iraqi Accord Front [Sunni Arab religious] and the National Dialogue Council [Sunni Arab secularist] had not been invited to participate. The Washington Post quotes a Sadr aide as favoring an alliance with the Sunni Arabs rather than with the Kurds.

(Cole: As I noted earlier, many Turkmen in the contested northern oil city of Kirkuk are followers of Muqtada al-Sadr. An alliance with the Kurds would require that the Turkmen Shiites be sacrificed and Kirkuk turned over to the Kurds. This outcome seems to suit the al-Hakim and his Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, but is not palatable to the Sadrists. A national unity government, including both Kurds and the Sunni Arabs, would help resolve this dispute, but that would weaken the Kurds’ hand in Kirkuk.)

Incidentally, the small Sadrist “Risaliyyun” or Upholders of the Mission list, which ran separately from the United Iraqi Alliance, has announced that it will vote with the UIA. It probably only got one or at most a handful of seats, but the UIA only needs to top off its probable 130 seats to about 138 to have a simple majority.

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Iraq Petroleum Crisis
Bahr al-Ulum Forced Out

Drivers in Baghdad are waiting in lines a quarter of a mile long, according to the NYT, as the country faces a fuel crisis. They feared further price increases, and were also stocking gasoline to run their generators, since electricity provision in the capital has been erratic.

Al-Zaman/ AFP [Ar.] report that Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum, the minister of petroleum was removed on Friday from his position by Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari after Bahr al-Ulum had protested the tripling of fuel prices. Jaafari handed the running of the ministry over to his deputy premier, Ahmad Chalabi, given that he was already chairman of the Energy Council in Iraq. Chalabi is only expected to serve in this capacity for a month or so.

[That's what the Arabic article says, folks. All this time, Chalabi has been chairman of something called the "Energy Council." Or maybed that should be translated "Energy Taskforce"? :-) Chalabi was convicted in Jordan for complicity in the failure of his Petra Bank, in which some $300 million disappeared. In a country with poor auditing, the last thing you would want was Chalabi in charge of the petroleum ministry. And, if he has done a good job as chair of the Energy Council, why is the energy sector in Iraq in such a huge mess?

Bahr al-Ulum said, according to the BBC, "I object to the decision of putting me on leave and the mechanism by which it was done after I objected to the government's decision to raise fuel prices." He had gone on vacation, and when he got back he was told to go back on vacation for another month while Chalabi took over his job.

Al-Zaman says that its sources in Najaf maintained that Bahr al-Ulum's firing reflected escalating conflicts among the great Shiite religious authorities and their sons. They point out that Jaafari need not have announced the firing, since Bahr al-Ulum had stopped going to his office, and negotiations are under way on who should head the ministry in the next government. Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum belongs to a distinguished clerical family in the holy city, but has a technical Ph.D. from the US. He had left the United Iraqi Alliance and ran for parliament in December at the head of his own, small, independent list. He did not gain a seat in the legislature, so he was unlikely to continue in the cabinet in any case. Ibrahim's father, Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, is considered a leading moderate cleric, and had served in the American-appointed Interim Governing Council.

Al-Zaman's sources seem to be implying that Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum had fallen afoul of the Sistanis. Although Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani declined to endorse the UIA, he and his clerical colleagues did urge Shiites not to split their vote by supporting tiny local parties. It stands to reason that they were therefore annoyed with the Bahr al-Ulums for breaking ranks, leaving the UIA, and starting a small independent party that might waste Shiite votes. It is probably being implied that since Bahr al-Ulum is from a prominent clerical family, Jaafari consulted with the Sistanis before publicly firing and humiliating him.

[Cole: I doubt that clerical politics is the main dynamic here, though it may have been involved at the margins. Chalabi after all also left the UIA and ran at the head of his Iraqi National Congress, but there doesn't seem to be any strong objection in Najaf to his serving as interim petroleum minister. Of course, he is not from a clerical family and so perhaps not considered under the same discipline.]

A government source said that Bahr al-Ulum protested the tripling of fuel prices because no provision had been made to cushion the poor from it, because it was implemented before it should have been, and because the decision directly contradicted an agreement reached by the cabinet on 6 October before the elections.

The Jaafari government’s decision was forced by demands of the International Monetary Fund, which made a loan of $140 mn. dependent on it, as well as future debt relief. Although Iraq has extremely inexpensive petroleum, and gasoline is now 40 cents a gallon, it also have a very poor population, with vast unemployment and many families that were already barely making it, so that any big increase in the price of any staple hurt. Many Iraqis feel that the subsidized fuel is a way for them to share in the country’s oil wealth. Unlike in Alaska, the general population does not receive a check from the Iraqi government with their share of petroleum income.

Al-Zaman says that the decision to triple prices was met with numerous popular protests, and a number of Shiite provinces in the south have been unable to implement it.

Iraq imports $500 mn. a month in gasoline from neighboring countries, and the amount will probably increase now that terrorist threats have closed the Beiji refinery. (Scroll down).

Al-Zaman/ AFP/Reuters [Ar.]: The stoppage of petroleum exports from the southern port of Umm Qasr continued on Friday owing to poor weather. Only half the normal amount is being exported from Kirkuk through the Turkish port of Ceyhan via pipeline. Pipeline sabotage, the shutting down of the refinery at Beiji, and terrorist acts against electricity plants have contributed to the crisis.

The Iraqi ministry of petroleum on Friday laid the foundation for two new petroleum refineries in the province of Sulaimaniyah in the Kurdistan confederacy, with a capacity of 10,000 barrels a day. The ministry is spending $25 mn. on them. A spokesman from the Kurdistan Patriotic Union said that such projects had been forbidden by the Saddam regime. Two more refineries will be situated in the Kurdish province of Irbil.

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Iraq Petroleum Production “Suffocating”: Bahr al-Ulum

An informed observer writes:

‘ Reuters reports that “average exports in November fell to 1.21 million barrels a day – the lowest level since at least November 2003 – and down from 1.24 million barrels per day last month,” indicating that something may be seriously wrong.

The figures for November were below earlier projections and lower than earlier export levels, indicating that something was seriously wrong. Apparently, in the south, tankers are lined up in the Gulf and waiting for 14 days to be loaded.

The following is being quoted in the early reports of Chalabi taking over from Bar Uloum:

“A ministry spokesman allied to Uloum said the country was facing what he called an impending oil supply crisis. ‘Production in the north, centre and south is about to suffocate,’ he said.”

There have been no exports to Ceyhan for a long time. If the south were to shut down, the oil export revenue contribution to the budget would be zero. The quote indicates that something is clearly going on.

With respect to the Beiji refinery, as New Orleans demonstrated, once a refinery is shut down, there is more to restarting operations than clicking a switch. So long as it is out of operation, there are only two possibilities: people must drive less or imports from Kuwait and elsewhere must increase, further exacerbating the budget situation.

Note that the 20-30,000 employees of South Oil felt impelled to start a web site and write letters opposing privatization. Three southern Provinces have opposed and apparently have refused to implement the Gasoline Price Program forced on Jaafari by the IMF. As in the case of privatization, the doctrinaire position of the IMF, without regard to the facts and circumstances, could have grave political repercussions. Do they not realize that there is a dirty war going on and also a political revolution? Time enough for all that in a year or two, if then. What is the hurry? There will be no substantial foreign investment until the security conditions improve. There will be no privatization of the oil industry for years in any event. I suspect that there is turmoil and disarray throughout the oil industry bureaucracy and employee rank and file. Chalabi probably will not have the credibility to restore order. He is a fixer, not an administrator. He will be associated with the US/IMF privatization effort. He has no Iraq constituency. Recall that months ago it was reported that he had assumed the leading role in the oil infrastructure security forces. What happened to that? We do not know, but the infrastructure remains insecure.

There is also the following quote:

“An official of the Oil Ministry in Baghdad told ISN Security Watch, on condition of anonymity: “We do not know the exact quantity of oil we are exporting, we do not exactly know the prices we are selling it for, and we do not know where the oil revenue is going to.””

“’Production in the north, centre and south is about to suffocate,’ he said.” [repeated for emphasis] ‘

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The Middle East and America in 2005: How the Region Has Changed

The Bush administration has several major policy goals in the Middle East, which are often self-contradictory. They include:

1. Fighting terrorism emanating from the region, which might menace the US or its major allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

2. Ensuring the security of petroleum production in the Oil Gulf, which contains 2/3s of the world’s proven reserves.

3. Reestablishing order in Afghanistan and ensuring that the Taliban and al-Qaeda cannot again use it as a base for Muslim radicalism.

4. Reestablishing order in Iraq and ensuring a government and system there favorable to US interests.

5. Weakening or overthrowing the governments of Syria and Iran, primarily because they are viewed as threats to Israel. As part of weakening Syria, the US applied enormous pressure to get its remaining troops out of Lebanon.

6. Pushing for democratization in the “Greater Middle East,” even at the risk of alienating long-time US friends such as Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak.

Some parts of the Bush administration are more committed to some of these goals than to others, and huge foodfights seem to be taking place behind the scenes over what priority to give them each or how useful some of them are to US interests. The Neoconservatives, for instance, are very interested in shaping Iraq, but seem much less interested in Afghanistan. The State Department seems generally very nervous about the Iraq misadventure and not very enthusiastic about democratization.

The major developments in the region of 2005 have been momentous, but what is striking is how little the over-all dynamics have changed.

Afghanistan conducted parliamentary elections, but old-time warlords from the 1990s such as Abdul Rasul Abu Sayyaf (once close to Bin Laden) seem likely to dominate it.

Pakistan’s parliament is virtually hung, too paralyzed by disputes between the opposition, often led by the fundamentalist United Action Council, and supporters of military dictator Pervez Musharraf, to accomplish anything of note. The Muslim fundamentalists had seldom done well in Pakistani elections before 2002, but the electorate was angry about the US attack on neighboring Afghanistan and gave them about a fifth of seats in parliament, control of a major northern province, and partial control of another province. The Pakistani military and security forces continue to hunt down al-Qaeda, but few really big fish have been caught recently. Osamah Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, who conspired to have 3,000 Americans murdered, remain free men.

Iran held presidential elections, won by the fundamentalist Shiite hardliner (and horse’s ass) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad used many of the same tactics to get into power as Bush supporters did, including smearing his opponents, attracting the common people with false promises, posing as an outsider to the government despite being a consummate insider, benefitting from his party’s dominance of the judiciary, and drawing on support from the religious right and the military.

The reformists in Iran under President Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005) had reached out the to US, seeking forms of “ping pong diplomacy” and expressing profound sympathy for America after the 9/11 attacks. The US government studiously ignored these overtures and kept sanctions on Iran, treating even the reformists as pariahs. The reformers were stymied at home by clerical hardliners’ control of the judiciary and Khomeinist institutions that could strike down liberalizing laws, close newspapers, and exclude liberals from running in subsequent elections.

Ahmadinejad’s victory is the triumph of the hard Iranian right. He has alienated virtually all Western diplomats hoping to work with Iran, pushing his country into renewed isolation in the space of only a few months. He has been particularly stupid in his pronouncements on Israel. He quoted Ayatollah Khomeini as saying that the “Occupation Regime” (i.e. Israel) “must vanish.” He views the Holocaust as a “legendary epic,” and clearly doubts it. He suggested that if it did occur, then the Jews should have been given part of Europe on which to make a state, rather than displacing the Palestinian people. (This is not a new talking point. King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia said the same thing in the late 1940s.) His statements were morally outrageous and historically ignorant, but he did not actually call for mass murder (Ariel Sharon made the “occupation regime” in Gaza “vanish” last summer) or for the expulsion of the Israeli Jews to Europe. Nor is he, as has been alleged, the head of the Iranian state. The Iranian president is something akin to the pre-Cheney US vice presidents. But Ahmadinejad seems to think that the world is about to end, and is fixated on the Mahdi or Muslim messiah, and is generally a demagogue. He has also banned rock music.

It seems most likely that Bush administration pressure on Iran, naming it as an axis of evil, making clear a desire to overthrow its government, and militarily surrounding it in Afghanistan and Iraq, pushed the Iranian electorate to the right. It is not known if Iran is trying to get a nuclear weapon, but it is certainly trying to get nuclear energy. Likely by committing the US so heavily to Iraq, which did not have a nuclear program, the Bush administration has lost the opportunity to do anything serious about Iran’s program, whatever its ultimate aims.

Ironically, the Iranian hardliners have been strengthened by the overthrow of the Taliban and the Baath Party. In Afghanistan, the warlords who are so prominent in the parliament and the executive often had strong ties to Iran, and Afghan Shiites did disproportionately well in the elections; they are often tied through the Vahdat Party to the ayatollahs in Iran. Afghanistan is friendlier to Iran now than at any time since the 1960s, when both were monarchies.

In Iraq, both the Jan. 30 election and that of Dec. 15 cemented Shiite fundamentalist political control of the country. The United Iraqi Alliance, now a coalition of all three major religious and political currents among Iraqi Shiites, had 140 seats (a simple majority) in the Jan. 30 elections, and will likely have 130 seats in the new parliament, such that it can easily form a government that can survive votes of confidence requiring 51 percent support for the prime minister. The fundamentalist Shiites got the constitution they wanted on October 15, enshrining strong elements of Islamic law and ensuring that the southern Shiite provinces will control all future petroleum finds in the oil-rich south.

An Iraq dominated by religious Shiites will certainly be on very friendly terms with iran, as I argued in Salon last summer. Far from causing the pillars of Khomeinist power to tremble in Iran, the Bush administration has larded the region with new and powerful allies of Tehran.

Shiite fundamentalist power in Iraq and Iran will translate into new monetary and diplomatic resources for the Shiites of the region, a prospect that terrifies the Sunnis of Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Likewise, the Shiites of southern Lebanon, supporters of the Hizbullah and Amal parties, will benefit from Iraqi patronage. The Lebanese Hizbullah has historical ties to the Iraqi Dawa Party, which the prime minister of Iraq, Ibrahim Jaafari, leads.

The year 2005 was one of both tragedy and triumph for the Lebanese. Lebanon, a multi-ethnic country of only 3 million persons, is the Rhode Island of the Middle East. In the 1970s and 1980s, Lebanon fell into civil war and prolonged instability. The United States greenlighted a plan to pacify the country with Syrian troops in 1976. Israel invaded and occupied southern Lebanon in 1982, also destroying a good deal of what was left of Beirut with indiscriminate artillery fire and bombing. From 1989, the Saudis intervened to help restore stability, brokering a new political bargain amongst the Christians and the Muslims and their allies. In the south, the Shiites became radicalized, in part by the Israeli occupation and the civil war, and in part through Iranian influence, and Hizbullah came to dominate that region of the country. In 2000, they finally succeeded in forcing the Israelis back out of their country. The post-1989 reconstruction of Lebanon depended heavily on Sunni politician Rafiq al-Hariri, a billionaire protege of Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd, on the disarming of the militias everywhere but the Shiite south, and on continued Syrian peacekeeping.

The new stability came at a price, of heavy-handed Syrian interference in Lebanese affairs. Electoral districts were gerrymandered in 1999 to favor pro-Syrian parties and candidates. The anti-Syrian rightwing Phalangist Party popular among some Maronite Catholics, had collapsed in the 1990s. Bashar al-Asad, Syria’s young president, especially promoted president Emile Lahoud, a pro-Syrian Maronite general, both to repress anti-Syrian forces and to marginalize even pro-Syrian politicians close to the old guard in Damascus against whom Bashar was trying to assert himself. Lahoud seemed indispensable to Bashar, but the Lebanese president serves only a 6-year term according to the constitution. Bashar intervened to have the constitution amended to give Lahoud three extra years. Most Lebanese were appalled and outraged. Even the pro-Syrian prime minister, Rafiq al-Hariri, resigned in protest.

In February of 2005, a truck bomber pulled up beside al-Hariri’s motorcade and detonated his payload. Although he was himself a Muslim radical with ties to al-Qaeda in Iraq (he had lived in Saudi Arabia and had fought the Americans in Iraq), the bomber appears to have been put up to the assassination by Syria or some of its Lebanese allies. [I initially wondered if Hariri was hit by al-Qaeda, and it was plausible at the time, but subsequent events have established, let us say, a pattern.] The assassination of the widely admired Hariri provoked mass popular mobilization. Lebanese Christians, a large section of the Sunnis, and the Druze minority formed an alliance to force Syrian troops out of the country. Demonstrations hundreds of thousands strong were mounted in downtown Beirut. The sentiment was not universal. Demonstrations by Hizbullah and the Shiites, implicitly pro-Syrian, were almost as large. The Saudis, afraid of instability, intervened with the Syrians, and in the end Syria withdrew its troops that spring. The parliamentary elections in Lebanon (not a new thing; Lebanon has been having parliamentary elections for many decades) held in May produced a win for the reformist, anti-Syrian coalition, though the Shiite Hizbullah and Amal parties also did very well. Once the issue of Syrian presence was settled, the various parties proved perfectly willing to ally with one another despite their duelling demonstrations and counter-demonstrations of the spring. Still, the reformists secured from the international community an investigation of Hariri’s killing, which finally elicited a damning report by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, implicating not only the Syrian regime but even Bashar al-Asad’s own brother.

In the aftermath, there has been an uneasy relationship between President Lahoud and the cabinet, full of seething reformists convinced that Lahoud might have had a hand in Hariri’s assassination. Anti-Syrian figures went on being blown up for the rest of 2005. Old-time communist thinker Georges Hawi was killed. Then popular current affairs interviewer May Shidyaq (Chidiac) was nearly killed by a bomb last fall. In mid-December, Jibran Tueni, the editor in chief of the respected al-Nahar newspaper, was killed by a huge bomb blast. Tueni had been severely critical of Damascus. Tueni’s killing seems likely to inspire the reformists in parliament and on the cabinet to redouble their efforts to force the resignation of President Lahoud. It appears that elements of the Syrian Baath or its Lebanese allies are afraid that the new government in Beirut is attempting to drive them from power altogether, pursuing them to Damascus through the United Nations and the United States. The bombings carried out against media figures are a Mafia-like warning: Lay off, or else.

The rhetoric of Lebanese politicians toward Syria has become blunt and acerbic. The Hizbullah, Shiite fundamentalists who benefit from the Syrian-Iranian alliance, rejected the idea of blaming or punishing Syria for Tueni’s death, and pulled out of the government, creating a national crisis that remains unresolved. Lebanon is polarized and tense in a menacing way that bodes ill for stability or national unity. The withdrawal of Syrian troops was a great national achievement, but so far this story is a fraught one. One worries about the stability of the country. Lebanon needs stability. Tourism was down 11 percent this year. Per capita income is still below that of 1975, by a third. Economic growth has slowed from the 6 percent achieved in the mid-1990s to 2 or 3 percent.

Then there were big demonstrations by the Shiites of Bahrain, demanding that the king give them a truly democratic constitution (he appoints the prime minister and the upper house, which can over-rule the lower house.) Bahrain has a Shiite majority but a Sunni king and political establishment.

And, in Egypt, which deserves more space, the Muslim Brotherhood went from having 17 representatives in parliament to over 70 and became the de facto opposition party in the country. In the old days, the government of Hosni Mubarak would not have allowed so many from the MB to be seated. Is this development a good thing? Having a slightly more representative government is always to the good, but the Muslim Brotherhood is not exactly a force for progressivism in the region.

Ariel Sharon went through with his poorly conceived unilateral withdrawal of colonists and Israeli troops from Gaza. He rejected the idea of having a negotiating partner, having no real consultation with Gazans. Predictably, in the aftermath there has been continued fighting between the Gazans and the Israelis. If this goes on, Israeli troops will be drawn right back in. In the meantime, Israelis continue aggressively to colonize the West Bank and the area around Jerusalem, in ways guaranteed to generate violence for years to come.

Washington’s interventions in the Middle East have created a failed state in Iraq that has no military power to speak of, has threatened the Oil Gulf with destabilization, and has in various ways contributed to the ascension of political Islam. Shiite fundamentalist parties rule Iraq. The Islamist warlords are back in the Afghan parliament. Hardliners have been strengthened in Iran, and are creating a Tehran-Baghdad alliance. Sunni Arab Iraqis are turning to fundamentalist Islam in large numbers, forsaking secular Arab nationalism. Some are growing close to al-Qaeda-type organizations. The Lebanese Hizbullah has rich and powerful new allies. Lebanon is free of foreign military forces, but is threatened with renewed sectarian conflict. And the Muslim Brotherhood is emerging as a possible successor to the long-lived secular military regime in Egypt.

Are Americans safer because of the political developments in the Middle East of 2005? The widespread instability introduced into the region by aggressive US policies seems more portent of menace than harbinger of peace. The one development that might have made us safer was the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, but it was done in a hamfisted way that likely guarantees continued conflict and continued bad press for the US, the coddler of the Israeli hardliners. Otherwise, the US may have started some political tsunamis in the region, but the waves have not yet come ashore.

As for Bush’s goals:

1. Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri are still at large, so the war on terror is not won.

2. Security in the Gulf is endangered by the Iraqi guerrilla war, and oil prices are very high, benefitting Iran and Saudi Arabia. Oil security is in doubt.

3. Resources to do Afghanistan right were diverted to Iraq. Afghanistan has a very weak government that might well not survive on its own. Suicide bombings are on the uptick. Oldtime warlords are back, as members of parliament.

4. Order has not been reestablished in Iraq.

5. The Syrian and Iranian governments have not been noticeably weakened. Iran is flush with extra petroleum income this year. The US may yet decide that it needs Damascus and Tehran, if it is to have a soft landing in Iraq.

6. Lebanon is more democratic at the end of 2005 than at its beginning, but also much less stable. These changes had little to do with the US. Egypt’s elections were not free enough to accomplish much, and there is a question as to whether the US really wants a Muslim Brotherhood take-over of Cairo. The MB hates the Camp David accords and would immediately abrogate them. The Bush administration has said nothing publicly about the demand of Bahraini Shiites that a more democratic constitution be enacted in that country. Iraq has had two elections, but they have been deeply flawed, such that basic security could not be guaranteed candidates or voters, most candidates could not campaign, the electorate did not know the personalities for whom it was voting (but rather voted for ethnic lists), and some candidates were killed. The elections have exacerbated sectarian tensions of a sort that could pull the country apart, and they brought fundamentalist Shiites to power. Whatever is going on in Iraq, it is not a model that most Middle Eastern states would want to emulate.

I’d give the Bush administration a “D” (60 out of 100) on the Middle East this year. Support for the end of two military occupations, in Gaza and Lebanon, pull up the averages. But much of the policy is self-contradictory, in disarray, or likely to cause some wars. None of that makes us safer.

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International Team to Assess Elections
Al-Hakim meets Talabani

In Baghdad, , AP reports that the International Mission for Iraqi Elections will send a team of assessors to look into charges by Sunni Arabs and secularists that there was significant ballot stuffing in the Dec. 15 elections. UN observer Craig Jenness had earlier defended the over-all fairness of the election.

The Iraqi Accord Front, a fundamentalist coalition, expressed pleasure that the team would be sent. It has rejected the election results as fatally flawed.

In fact, it is highly unlikely that the basic outcome of the elections will be altered by any of these procedural steps, and the Sunni Arab conviction that they are a majority of Iraqis, which drives much of their ire over the outcome, is simply incorrect.

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the Shiite cleric who heads the victorious United Iraqi Alliance list in parliament, met Thursday with Kurdish leader (and current Iraqi president) Jalal Talabani. Al-Hakim repeated his willingness to join in the formation of a government of national unity.

AP also says that a GI was killed Thursday in East Baghdad by a roadside bomb. It was one of dozens of deaths in guerrilla violence in Iraq.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat [Ar.]: Unknown gunmen killed 14 Shiites in a minibus near Latifiyah south of Baghdad. They belonged to a single extended family had set out early on Thursday from their home in Mahmudiyah.

Elsewhere in Baghdad, a suicide bomber dressed as a policeman detonated his payload, and killed 4 policemen and wounded 5 others.

The US military announced that it had launched an air attack on the town of Hawija, north of Baghdad, to which planters of roadside bombs had fled. Ten persons were killed in the air attack, which used 500-pound bombs. The US military found caches of weapons in a subsequent search.

Al-Quds al-Arabi : argues that the Kurds are conducting a campaign of subtle ethnic cleansing against the Arabs of Kirkuk and its surroundings, creating facts on the ground with settlements and forcing Arab farmers off their land. It says that tensions in the city between Kurds and Turkmen are running high and that it has been the site of 30 assassinations, making it one of Iraq’s bloodiest cities. It says that they will use their leverage as a swing vote in parliament to ensure that Kurds continue to be able to move into the province. Baghdad-based Kurdish officials of the federal government also exercise their influence to deliver important provincial and police positions in Kirkuk into Kurdish hands. They wish to alter its demographic character decisively before the 2007 referendum, when Kirkuk (Ta’mim) province will decide whether to join the existing 3-province Kurdistan confederacy. The Kirkuk fields hold a 10-20% of Iraq’s proven petroleum reserves and would be essential to the formation of any independent or semi-independent Kurdistan state. (If the Kurds lacked Kirkuk, and Baghdad continued to get the petroleum income, it could bribe the Kurds into remaining in Iraq. Kurdistan without petroleum would be rather like eastern Anatolia in neighboring Turkey: poor.

Borzou Daragahi and Louise Roug of the LA Times explore the fading of Iraqi national identity and the building danger of a partition of the country. I am quoted, arguing that Iraq is no more artificial than most nations, and Iraqi nationalism should not be completely discounted.

The NYT reports that hundreds of US military advisers will be assigned to Iraqi special police commando units that had been set up by the Ministry of the Interior. The ministry is controlled by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and its paramilitary wing, the Badr Organization, both of them close to Tehran and the latter trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Dexter Filkins reports that a US officer criticized the special police resort to secret prisons and torture:

‘ American commanders here say that such practices, while abhorrent in their own right, tend to provoke consequences almost precisely the opposite of what is desired. Rounding up young Sunni Arab men and killing them will only spur the growth of the insurgency, they say. “You are making new enemies here,” the American commander said. “You’ve got to be more moderate. You must follow the rule of law.” ‘

Ironic, ain’t it?

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10-20 Dead in Failed Terrorist Prison Break
Sunni Arabs Demonstrate Against Election Results in Samarra

Prison guards killed between 4 and 16 inmates when some of them attempted a jail break from a special facility for terrorists in Kadhimiyah, northeast Baghdad, on Wednesday, according to AFP. An inmate got hold of a weapon and began shooting indiscriminately, then attracted fire from the guards. Four guards are also said dead, along with a translator. The reports of the number of dead inmates varied, with the US military estimating 4 prisoners dead. High police official Abdul Aziz Muhammad gave the number of dead inmates as 11, while anonymous Iraqi sources in the Ministry of the Interior alleged that 20 prisoners were killed. Al-Zaman/AFP accepted that the number of dead inmates was 16.

Al-Zaman/ AFP/ DPA report other violence. In Baghdad, a former officer in the Iraqi army was assassinated in Baladiyyat, east Baghdad. A roadside bomb set by guerrillas wounded three policemen near Mustansiriyah Mosque. Iraqi police discovered 5 corpses in Baghdad on Wednesday.

US troops killed one civilian and wounded two others at a checkpoint in Khalidiyah. Guerrillas killed two policemen in Tikrit, while guerrilla missiles fell on in a civilian neighborhood in Dhuluiyyah on Tuesday night, killing 3 civilians and wounding 9 others. In Baqubah to the northeast of Baghdad, guerrillas attempted to assassinate the mayor; they failed, but wounded two of his bodyguards. Guerrillas in Samarra killed 3 policemen with a car bomb, according to some reports. Others say that 4 special police died, along with 4 civilians.

The Association of Muslim Scholars condemned the Iraqi police for invading the home in Najaf of Ayatollah Ahmad al-Baghdadi, a Shiite cleric who opposes the US military presence.

Al-Zaman/ AFP: Hundreds of Sunni Arabs demonstrated in Samarra against what they viewed as electoral fraud in the December 15 elections. The demonstrations follow much bigger ones in Baghdad and some other Sunni cities on Tuesday and the previous Friday.

The Iraqi prison population held by US forces is rising toward 15,500. In the absence of a Status of Forces Agreement, and with the passage of the new constitution (which requires warrants for arrests), these prisoners are probably being held illegally.

al-Zaman/ AFP say that the US embassy in Baghdad has advised the incoming government to privatize the hundreds of companies and factories owned by the state (the Baath Party was actually the Baath Socialist Party), selling them to investors. The US administration of Iraq attempted to move toward privatization under Paul Bremer, but the issue was rendered moot by the poor security in the country, which makes investing in it at the moment unattractive.

One of the least attractive aspects of the US government is its fanaticism about privatization. I mean, is this really the time? The good Lord knows how many of those companies or factories are actually operating. And who is going to buy them? Wouldn’t it be better at this juncture for the government to use them in a way analogous to FDR public works projects, to put people to work? Al-Zaman estimates that 1/4 of Iraqis live in dire proverty, and the real unemployment rate is still probably 50 percent. Corporations are far less efficient than Washington believes (see: Enron), and some state-owned enterprises have prospered (ask Californians if privatized electricity worked out well for them; and see: Enron). It is no doubt better in the long run to move away from bloated state-owned industries in Iraq, but I just wouldn’t have made that a priority.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that the lawyers’ guild is protesting the decision of the ministry of justice to dissolve it and place a counsellor over it. Guild spokesman complained that the move contravened a 1965 (pre-Baath) law and damaged the independence of the organization from the government. (It is hard to tell what is going on here, but guilds and unions in Iraq were arms of the Baath Party, now dissolved and despised.

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Kurds Plan to Seize Kirkuk Militarily: Knight Ridder

Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder reports that the Kurds have seeded 10,000 peshmerga militiamen into the Iraqi army units in the north of Iraq, and plan to use them to seize control of oil-rich Kirkuk. (Actually, the Kurds already control Kirkuk militarily, since their forces conquered it from Saddam with US air support, and they dominate the city’s police force).

Lasseter says that the Kurdish paramilitary leaders believe Iraq is on the verge of disintegration into three states, and are preparing to take and hold Kirkuk when the civil war breaks out. (Kurdish leaders speaking this way will no doubt hurry along the process). The Sunni Arabs have no developed petroleum fields in their region, and most rich undeveloped fields appear to lie in the Shiite south. If a tripartite partition did take place, and if Kirkuk went to the Kurds, the Sunni Arabs would be reduced to dire poverty. For this reason, they are unlikely to go quietly.

The fix may well be in, on Kirkuk. Al-Zaman/ AFP[Ar.] report that Abdul Aziz al-Hakim is also said to have shown a new flexibility toward the Kurds on the issue of control of oil-rich Kirkuk. When he spoke before the Kurdistan regional parliament, he promised to redraw the boundaries of Kurdistan. Kurds insist that Ta’mim or Kirkuk province had originally been Kurdish but was artificially detached from Kurdistan by Saddam. The Turkmen population of the province maintain that Kirkuk was traditionally Turkmen. The Arabs that Saddam settled up there (or who came as labor immigrants) are often being expelled. Thousands of Kurds are flooding into Kirkuk and clearly are attempting to make it overwhelmingly Kurdish. Kurdish representatives won 6 of the province’s 9 parliamentary seats on Dec. 15.

Al-Hakim said the issue of redrawing regional boundaries did not only concern the Kurds, suggesting that he has in mind some gerrymandering in the largely Shiite South, as well. Since a large proportion of Turkmen in Kirkuk are Shiites, if al-Hakim goes forward on this basis, he is showing a willingness to sacrifice their interests to those of the southern, Arab Shiites that are his power base. Many Shiite Turkmen, however, follow Muqtada al-Sadr, currently al-Hakim’s coalition partner, and it remains to see if al-Hakim can hold his coalition together if he pleases the Kurds as a quid pro quo for Shiite autonomy in the south, while allowing the Shiite Turkmen to be walked all over in the north.

The CSM suggests that tiny parties in Iraq could end up being important because they may be swing votes for the large Shiite fundamentalist coalition.

Al-Zaman/ AFP report that Jalal Talabani (a Kurdish leader) and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim (leader of the Shiite coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance), were supposed to meet at Sulaimaniyah with US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad on Wednesday concerning the formation of a new government, but the meeting ended up being postponed, according to al-Hayat. Former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi, a secular ex-Baathist, had been invited to the talks but refused to take part, since he is calling for an investigation into irregularities in the Dec. 15 election and regards it as flawed.

Kurdish member of parliament Mahmoud Osman said that there was coordination between the Americans and the Kurds to resolve the crisis.

Massoud Barzani is said to have proposed to Al-Hakim trading Shiite control of the Ministry of the Interior to the Kurds, with the Shiites taking the Ministry of Defense. Al-Hakim is said to have refused. The ministry of the interior, controlled by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq that al-Hakim heads, has been plagued by charges of running Shiite paramilitary death squads and secret prisons where Sunni Arabs have been tortured and starved. The Americans are said to be determined to get Interior (sort of like the US Department of Homeland Security plus FBI) out of the hands of the fundamentalist Shiite Supreme Council. At the moment, a Sunni Arab holds the post of minister of defense, but he is without any strong party backing. Sunni Arabs and secularists had been demanding both Defense and Interior, but they lost the election, and may not get either.

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