Informed Comment

Feith Resigns Under Pressure of Investigations

Douglas Feith, the number three man at the Pentagon who went there from the pro-Likud Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and the Project for a New American Century, will leave the Pentagon as of this summer. Feith’s office is the subject of an FBI investigation as well as two Congressional investigations, one by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Feith helped set up an Office of Special Plans in the Near East and South Asia desk of the Pentagon to cherry-pick Iraq intelligence and create a case for Iraq having weapons of mass destruction and having operational links with al-Qaeda. At one point, contrary to Federal law, Feith’s people actually briefed officials in the Executive on intelligence. Feith seems to have used David Wurmser a a liason of some sort, employing him at OSP before he later went to other key advisory offices at the State Department and finally in 2003 to Vice President Dic Cheney’s office. Wurmser, who has ties to the Likud, is working for a US war against Iran and Syria. [An earlier version of this post got the sequence wrong out of a memory lapse.] The OSP was somehow able to get its analyses and false intelligence conclusions directly to Cheney’s national security staff, from which they went directly to Bush, by-passing the CIA and the State Department Intelligence and Research division.

Having a Likudnik as the number three man in the Pentagon is a nightmare for American national security, since Feith could never be trusted to put US interests over those of Ariel Sharon. In the build-up to the Iraq War, Feith had a phalanx of Israeli generals visiting him in the Pentagon and ignored post-9/11 requirements that they sign in. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was a vocal advocate of a US war against Iraq, who “put pressure” on Washington about it. (If Sharon wanted a war against Iraq, why didn’t he fight it himself instead of pushing it off on American boys?)

Feith has been questioned by the FBI in relation to the passing by one of his employees of confidential Pentagon documents to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which in turn passed them to the Israeli embassy. The Senate Intelligence Committee is also investigating Feith. There seems little doubt that he operated in the Pentagon in such a way as to produce false and misleading “intelligence,” that he created an entirely false impression of Iraqi weapons capabilities and ties to al-Qaeda, and that he is among the chief facilitators of the US war in Iraq.

Feith is clearly resigning ahead of the possible breaking of major scandals concerning his tenure at the Department of Defense, which is among the more disgraceful cases of the misleading of the American people in American history.

There are several downsides to Feith’s departure, as welcome as it is for anyone who cares about US security in particular. The first is that now we probably have to see him forever on cable news channels as one of those dreary neocon talking heads flogged by the American Enterprise Institute, a far rightwing “think tank” funded by cranky rich people to obscure the truth. Another is that his departure now may help keep Bush from being blamed for his shady dealings in intelligence “analysis.”

It is important to note that what is objectionable about Feith is a) his playing fast and loose with the truth, producing poor intelligence analysis that has been shown to be completely false and b) his doing so on behalf of not only American nationalist aspirations but also on behalf of a non-American political party, the Likud coalition of Israel, which desired to destroy the Oslo peace process initiated by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (and which was therefore on the same side of this issue as the fanatic who assassinated Rabin). There is no objection to Americans having multiple identities or love for more than one country. Someone of Serbian heritage would make a perfectly good Pentagon administrator. But you wouldn’t want a vehement supporter of Slobodon Milosevic as the number three man in the Pentagon. It is ideological dual loyalty that is dangerous. Mere sentiment based on multiple ethnic identities is not dual loyalty, and hyphenated Americans mostly have other countries they wish well (and rightly so).

It is also important to underline that only a small minority of American Jews support the Likud Party or its policies, and that a majority of Jewish Americans opposed the Iraq war. In short, the problematic nature of Feith’s tenure at the Department of Defense must not be made an excuse for any kind of bigotry.

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37 US Troops Dead, Other Americans Wounded
Large numbers of Iraqis Killed, Wounded by Car Bombs at Polling Stations, Party HQs

AP reports the worst news the US has had in Iraq ever:

A U.S. helicopter crashed in a desert sandstorm in the early morning darkness yesterday, killing the 30 Marines and one Navy sailor aboard . . . Six other troops died in insurgent ambushes in the deadliest day for Americans since the Iraq invasion began nearly two years ago. Only days before Iraq’s crucial elections on Sunday, Muslim terrorists set off at least eight car bombs that killed 13 persons and injured almost 40 others, including 11 Americans.

Al-Zaman reports that 13 polling stations and 4 party offices have been attacked since Tuesday evening in Baghdad and to its north. Guerrillas kidnapped 2 election workers in Mosul, and 15 persons were killed and 30 wounded when a car bomb went off in front of the Kurdistan Democratic Party HQ in the city of Sinjar.

In his appearances on Wednesday, President Bush said that it was a positive that Iraqis are even having elections, since three years ago it would have seemed out of the question. You know, if all you have to boast about is that you are better than Saddam Hussein, it isn’t actually a good sign. Can you imagine what would have happened to the Republican Party if its reply to Kerry’s criticisms of last summer had been, “Well, the American Republican Party is a damn sight more progressive than Hitler was.” Saddam was overthrown on April 9, 2003. It is 2005, and the US has been running Iraq for nearly two years. Now the question is, how does the situation in Iraq compare to the Philippines, or India, or Turkey. Answer: It sucks. There is little security, people are killed daily, there is a massive crime wave, and elections are being held in which most of the candidates cannot be identified for fear of their lives. So the conclusion is that the Bush administration has done a worse job in Iraq than the Congress Party does in India, or the AK Party does in Turkey. That’s the standard of comparison once Saddam was gone. And, by the way, veteran NYT journalist John Burns, who is nobody’s fool, told Tina Brown last Friday that he was taken aback when an Iraqi told him recently that he wished Saddam were back. This was an Iraqi who really had been delighted at the American invasion. So Bush should drop the cute sound bite about being better than Saddam.

Veteran Middle East journalist David Hirst talks about the implications for the Arab world of a Shiite victory in the Iraq elections (and of just having open elections). One thing I think Hirst missses is that Ayatollah Khomeini associated Shiism with a republican, anti-monarchy ethos, which is one reason the Arab monarchies are disturbed at the potential Shiite victory. They look at militant Shiism the way King George III viewed Tom Paine.

There are, of course, lots of elections in the Arab world. Some are more rigged than others. But there are almost no elections where the sitting prime minister and his party would be allowed to be turned out unexpectedly by an unpredictable and uncontrolled electorate. If Iraqi interim Prime Minister Allawi’s list does poorly and his political star falls as a result of a popular vote, something democratic will have happened in Iraq, for all the serious problems with the elections.

One of the flashpoints in the elections is Kirkuk. The Kurds have gotten permission for Kurds originally from Kirkuk to vote in provincial and municipal elections as though they were resident in the city. Saddam had kicked a lot of Kurds out of Kirkuk and brought in Arabs, who now fear displacement. About a third of Kirkuk is Turkmens, who used to dominate the city, and they also fear losing it to a Kurdish super-province of Kurdistan. The area around Kirkuk is rich with petroleum. Kirkuk seems to me to be a tinderbox, and if it explodes it will set in motion ethnic conflict between Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen in the north, which could involve Turkey.

AFP discusses the jockeying that is already going on for the post of prime minister. Predicting who will be chosen is very difficult. The parliament will elect a president and two vice presidents, who will form a presidential council. It will then appoint a prime minister. So parliament cannot dictate who the prime minister will be, and it needn’t be the leader of the party that forms the government. We can’t know what the calculation will be, of the presidential council. People have been asking what I thought of the International Republican Institute poll that 61 percent of Iraqis think Allaw has been “effective” in running the country. I find this result hard to believe. Last September an IRI poll found Allawi’s favorability rating was 47 percent and that of Muqtada al-Sadr was 45 percent. IRI did not release the second finding, and my social science friends in Baghdad thought IRI’s polling techniques appallingly bad. I flatly disbelieve that Allawi’s favorability rating has risen since September. Since IRI is selective in releasing its results and doesn’t seem to be running a tight ship in its Baghdad office anyway, it is hard to know what their poll results actually mean and how solidly based they are.

Cihan News Agency examines the issue of whether the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite list that has Grand Ayatollah Sistani’s blessing, will implement shariah or Islamic law on the Iranian model. It is the wrong question. Obviously, the Iraqis will go their own way rather than adopting the Iranian system. The question is what the mix will be in a UIA constitution, of civil law versus relgious law (i.e. shariah). Which will be priveleged and in what situation? That the UIA will insist on some shariah, at least over time, seems to me self-evident.

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The Speech Bush Should have Given

This is the speech that I wish President Bush had given in fall, 2002, as he was trying to convince Congress to give him the authority to go to war against Iraq.

My fellow Americans:

I want us to go to war against Iraq. But I want us to have our eyes open and be completely realistic.

A war against Iraq will be expensive. It will cost you, the taxpayer, about $300 billion over five years. I know Wolfowitz is telling you Iraq’s oil revenues will pay for it all, but that’s ridiculous. Iraq only pumps about $10 billion a year worth of oil, and it’s going to need that just to run the new government we’re putting in. No, we’re going to have to pay for it, ourselves. I’m going to ask you for $25 billion, then $80 billion, then another $80 billion. And so on. I’m going to be back to you for money more often than that unemployed relative that you don’t like. The cost of the war is going to drive up my already massive budget deficits from about $370 billion to more like $450 billion a year. Just so you understand, I’m going to cut taxes on rich people at the same time that I fight this war. Then I’m going to borrow the money to fight it, and to pay for much of what the government does. And you and your children will be paying off that debt for decades. In the meantime, your dollar isn’t going to go as far when you buy something made overseas, since running those kinds of deficits will weaken our currency. (And I’ve set things up so that most things you buy will be made overseas.) We’ll have to keep interest rates higher than they would otherwise have been and keep the economy in the doldrums, because otherwise my war deficits would cause massive inflation.

So I’m going to put you, your children, and your grandchildren deeply in hock to fight this war. I’m going to make it so there won’t be a lot of new jobs created, and I’m going to use the excuse of the Federal red ink to cut way back on government services that you depend on. For the super-rich, or as I call them, “my base,” this Iraq war thing is truly inspired. We use it to put up the deficit to the point where the Democrats and the more bleeding heart Republicans in Congress can’t dare create any new programs to help the middle classes. We all know that the super-rich–about 3 million people in our country of 295 million– would have to pay for those programs, since they own 45 percent of the privately held wealth. I’m damn sure going to make sure they aren’t inconvenienced that way for a good long time to come.

Then, this Iraq War that I want you to authorize as part of the War on Terror is going to be costly in American lives. By the time of my second inaugural, over 1,300 brave women and men of the US armed forces will be dead as a result of this Iraq war, and 10,371 will have been maimed and wounded, many of them for life. America’s streets and homeless shelters will likely be flooded, down the line, with some of these wounded vets. They will have problems finding work, with one or two limbs gone and often significant psychological damage. They will have even more trouble keeping any jobs they find. They will be mentally traumatized the rest of their lives by the horror they are going to see, and sometimes commit, in Iraq. But, well we’ve got a saying in Texas. I think you’ve got in over in Arkansas, too. You can’t make an omelette without . . . you gotta break some eggs to wrassle up some breakfast.

I know Dick Cheney and Condi Rice have gone around scaring your kids with wild talk of Iraqi nukes. I have to confess to you that my CIA director, George Tenet, tells me that the evidence for that kind of thing just doesn’t exist. In fact, I have to be frank and say that the Intelligence and Research Division of the State Department doesn’t think Saddam has much of anything left even from his chemical weapons program. Maybe he destroyed the stuff and doesn’t want to admit it because he’s afraid the Shiites and Kurds will rise up against him without it. Anyway, Iraq just doesn’t pose any immediate threat to the United States and probably doesn’t have anything useful left of their weapons programs of the 1980s.

There also isn’t any operational link between a secular Arab nationalist like Saddam and the religious loonies of al-Qaeda. They’re scared of one another and hate each other more than each hates us. In fact, I have to be perfectly honest and admit that if we overthrow Saddam’s secular Arab nationalist government, Iraq’s Sunni Arabs will be disillusioned and full of despair. They are likely to turn to al-Qaeda as an alternative. So, folks, what I’m about to do could deliver 5 million Iraqis into the hands of people who are insisting they join some al-Qaeda offshoot immediately. Or else.

So why do I want to go to war? Look, folks, I’m just not going to tell you. I don’t have to tell you. There is little transparency about these things in the executive, because we’re running a kind of rump empire out of the president’s office. After 20 or 30 years it will all leak out. Until then, you’ll just have to trust me.

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Advice for Candidates: ‘Do not Reveal your Identity . . . Stay Home as Much as Possible ‘

Jack Fairweather reports for the Telegraph from Baghdad on a meeting held by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) that instructs candidates on how to survive the elections. He writes: “The instructions are simple – avoid public places and do not reveal your identity, the cleric advised. Most candidates should stay at home as much as possible, he added.”

Security is still so bad in Iraq that guerrillas were able to strike a national guard base near the airport with mortar fire Monday. As a result the air traffic controllers at Baghdad airport turned back both of that day’s Royal Jordanian Airlines flights. RJA is the only commercial carrier that flies into Baghdad, aside from Iraqi Airlines themselves. Ironically, the inability of the planes to land stranded Iraqi Minister of Defense Hazem Shaalan in Amman. When the Minister of Defense can’t even fly to his own country because the area around the airport is in flames, you know that is a bad sign. There was no more word Monday about the growing feud between Shaalan and his rival, Ahmad Chalabi. Al-Hayat reported that a Lebanese bank was taking steps to return to Iraq $200 million that Shaalan had transferred there, ostensibly to buy tanks and other heavy armaments. Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reported that Jordanian officials would be very happy to get Chalabi in their custody, so they could sentence him for embezzlement.

NPR’s interview with me for Monday’s Morning Edition about the Iraqi elections is now up on the Web. [link fixed 4:16 pm 1/25]

Eric Black of the Minneapolis Star Tribune argues that for all its somewhat absurd drawbacks, the election must go forward Sunday and may have some silver linings.

In this piece of a few days ago, Nancy Youssef of Knight Ridder considers the current front runners for the post of prime minister in the new government. She reports the buzz around Adil Abdul Mahdi, who is currently Finance Minister and is a member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Abdul Mahdi has begun talking a relatively secular line, and he does have a Marxist past decades ago. Ironically enough, all this may make him acceptable to Washington. On the other hand, the idea that a SCIRI Prime Minister is going to be a determined secularist sounds a little far-fetched to me.

Award-winning journalist Anthony Shadid reports on the political scene in Basra, Iraq’s southern port city, with its population of 1.3 million. He says that city politics has come to be dominated by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, but suggests that this dominance for the religious party may backfire in the elections. Many persons in Basra may vote for one of the more secular lists rather than for the United Iraqi Alliance (Which includes SCIRI) because they are dissatisfied with SCIRI’s inadequate provision of social services.

Ed Wong of the New York Times writes an important piece about the behind the scenes maneuverings of major Sunni Arab leaders to ensure a role for their community in the drafting of the permanent constitution for Iraq– even though Sunni Arabs will likely be grossly underrepresented in the parliament to be elected next Sunday. The parliament will double as a constitutional assembly.

The US military is planning to keep 120,000 troops in Iraq for the next two years, according to Lt. Gen. James J. Lovelace, Jr. He admitted that the number could fluctuate depending on the circumstances. I was saying before that I did not think it wise to announce a strict timetable for US military withdrawal from Iraq, lest the appointment of a date certain become, itself, an occasion for instability and violence. I think the troop levels should be drawn down steadily, without an announcement until perhaps the very end. But this announcement of a 24-month-long continued military presence is also unwise. Why would Lt. Gen. Lovelace say this? How can he know what the will of the new parliament will be, once it meets in mid to late February? Once there is an elected government, no matter how flawed the elections, the US will be in Iraq at the pleasure of the representatives of the Iraqi people. I think it is unfortunate that the US is saying anything at all about long-term plans just before the election. If they think they can present the new parliament with a fait accompli this way, I think they are going to be disappointed.

John Yaukey explains the case for handing security off to the Iraqi forces on a short timetable.

The announcement of the arrest of a key associate of the shadowy Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was accompanied by hype that he was behind most of the spectacular car bombings in Iraq for the past 18 months. That seems silly to me, almost an insult to our intelligence. How could one man be behind so many attacks? Isn’t it much more likely that they were the work of numerous Baath military and Salafi cells? My guess is that the interim government in Iraq is attempting to convince voters that it will be safe to come out on Sunday. This arrest will make virtually no impact on the guerrilla war, which is likely to go on for at least a decade.

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Sistani “Blesses” United Iraqi Alliance

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani’s web site [Arabic Link] has posted an article from the newspaper al-Ra’i al-`Amm which reports Sistani’s oral answers to questions its reporter submitted to him. The piece says that although Sistani “blesses” the United Iraqi Alliance (the list grouping most of the major Shiite religious parties), he “at the same time supports all the patriotic lists.” He says that he blesses the UIA because he knows the details of it and the personalities on it intimately. He does not insist that it is perfect or exemplary, and admits that some other lists may be better, but he simply does not know their details. (There are about 75 party lists and 6 coalitions, with over 7000 candidates).

[Cole: Sistani is going further in the direction of explicit endorsement of a particular slate than I would have expected from him, despite his use of euphemisms like "blessing" the list as opposed to "supporting" all the patriotic lists.]

Sistani also said that his lieutenants are urging Sunnis to vote as well as Shiites, and had had some success in convincing Sunnis to renounce their boycott of the elections.

He said that if Shiite militias were deployed to provide security to polling stations on Jan. 30, they must be firmly under the direct control of the central government.

Asked if he was satisfied with the pace of the rebuilding of Najaf in the wake of the heavy fighting there last August (between US troops and Mahdi Army militiamen), Sistani said that at this time a resort to violence made no sense. Diploatic and political approaches must be used, he said. He insisted that the spiritual position of Najaf was more important than its infrastructure. He pointed out that during the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911, Najaf was much less well developed as a city than the Iranian seminary center of Qom. But, he said, Najaf had a much bigger impact on the movement for constitutionalism than had Qom, because of its spiritual supremacy.

With regard to debaathification, he said that all Iraqis have equal rights. (I.e. Sunnis, who largely supported the Baath, should not be discriminated against qua Sunnis.) He said, however, that if anyone was wanted for crimes committed while in officer during the Saddam period, they would have to face justice in the civil courts.

He was asked about the Kurdish demand for a loose federalism. Sistani replied that “federalism” as the word was used in contemporary Iraq has a negative rather than a positive content. He said those who insist on it were responding to the lack of checks and balances in Iraqi governance during the previous regime. He said that it would take a long time of democratic practice in Iraq for “federalism” to begin being used in a positive sense.

With regard to Iraq’s continued payment of reparations to Kuwait for the 1990-1991 Gulf War, Sistani said that there were two legal ways of looking at it. From the point of view of Islamic law, there are limitations on reparations. From the point of view of positive law, there are not. He implied that if the Kuwaitis really want to be good Muslims, they will follow Islamic law on reparations, which frowns on unbounded and unlimited transactions.

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Israeli-Arab News Cycle

I found this Haaretz article too complicated too follow. So the Israeli Army has a psy-ops unit that used to be very active but has been less so recently, and is now being revived. This psy-ops unit plants articles in the Arab press about groups like Lebanon’s Hizbullah, painting them as vicious terrorists. Then it comes to Israeli newspaper like Haaretz with translations, and urges that the pieces be written up for Israeli and Western audiences. But of course the pieces are reported as originating in the Arab press:

‘ The unit’s activities have been controversial for years. In October 1999, Aluf Benn revealed in Haaretz that members of the unit used the Israeli media to emphasize reports initiated by the unit that it managed to place in the Arab press. He reported that the news reports focused on Iranian and Hezbollah involvement in terror activity. ‘

So is MEMRI, which translates articles from the Arabic press into English for thousands of US subscribers, in any way involved in all this? Its director formerly served in . . . Israeli military intelligence. How much of what we “know” from “Arab sources” about “Hizbullah terrorism” was simply made up by this fantasy factory in Tel Aviv?

As someone who reads the Arabic press quite a lot, this sort of revelation is extremely disturbing.

I also saw an allegation that British military intelligence had planted stories in the US press about Saddam’s Iraq.

You begin to wonder how much of what you think you know is just propaganda manufactured by some bored colonel. No wonder post-Baath Iraq looks nothing like what we were led to to expect by the press, including the Arab press!

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Bombs, Zarqawi, and Sistani’s Constitution

On Monday morning, guerrillas set off another car bomb near the headquarters in Baghdad of the Iraqi National Accord, the party headed by interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. Allawi was not in the offices. Early reports say at least ten people were injured.

Reuters also notes that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi issued a tape in which he denounced democracy as un-Islamic and warned of Shiite influence. He complained that the US was just using democracy as a cover for imperialist aggression, and added that democracy makes the people the source of authority, rather than scripture. Al-Hayat says Allawi responded immediately, vowing to wipe out Zaraqawi’s group of terrorists.

Al-Hayat also says that Aqil Abdul Karim Saffar, a member of the leadership of the Iraqi National Accord (Allawi’s party) said Sunday that if other parties win, it will provoke a civil war. He seemed to be saying that the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite coalition, would be unacceptable to other Iraqis were it to win and form the government.

Well, I guess they already have American-style democracy. This reminds me of Cheney saying that the US would be struck by terrorists if John Kerry were elected.

Likewise, Jalil Nuri, a leader of the Sadr movement that is loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, said that the accusations and threats in which some party slates running in the election had resorted might well cause a civil war. I suppose he is probably talking about Hazem Shaalan and his threats against Chalabi, who is a political (not ideological) ally of Muqtada al-Sadr.

Hamza Hendawi of AP highlights the political role of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. He writes:

‘ A close al-Sistani aide acknowledged the cleric’s concern about the constitution, saying that he would not have played such a prominent role in the vote had it not been for his belief that the assembly’s key task was to draw up a constitution. ”This is a very important election,” Hussain al-Shahristani, a nuclear scientist once jailed by Saddam, told The Associated Press. ”The assembly will write the constitution that will guarantee the future of Iraq. He won’t have done this if it was just another election,” said Shahristani, himself a candidate running on the slate endorsed by al-Sistani. The white-bearded cleric is expected to plunge anew into politics when the assembly begins to draft the constitution which, if adopted in a referendum scheduled to be held by Oct. 15, will be the basis for a second general election before Dec. 15. ‘

Based on past evidence, my guess is that Sistani will push for personal status law to be religious. It governs marriage, divorce, inheritance, alimony, etc. Sistani will want Shiites to be under Shiite religious law, Chaldean Catholics to be under Catholic canon law, Sunnis to be under Sunni shariah or Islamic codes, etc. This system is also used in Lebanon and Israel. It has disadvantages for women, and it causes an entanglement of the state with religion, since typically the clergy are the arbiters of it.

Sistani will also likely want a fairly strong Federal state, maybe even a centralized state like like France rather than the Swiss-style cantons that the Kurds seem to want, which will bring him into conflict with the Kurds.

If a parliament/ constitutional assembly can be elected January 30, it will then have to open all the cans of worms in Iraq at once as it crafts the permanent constitution.

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