Informed Comment

30 Dead in Iraq Violence

AP reports that the one-day total for war-related violence in Iraq, including the police station bombing in Tikrit reported here yesterday morning, came to 30. That is about 11,000 persons a year if the rate were constant and extrapolated out. In fact, the wire services manage to report only a fraction of daily deaths from war-related violence. And, of course there is a sense in which a lot of the murders are an indirect result of the poor security produced by the guerrilla war.

AP also reports that the United Iraqi Alliance has managed to bring into its coalition formally the 3 members of parliament from the Turkman National Front, the 3 from the Cadres and Chosen list, and 1 from the Islamic Action Party, giving the UIA 148 or about 54 percent of seats.

The 30 or so more secular-leaning members of the UIA who were the core of Ahmad Chalabi’s challenge to Ibrahim Jaafari are still agitating and threatening to leave the UIA because of the dominance of the Muslim fundamentalists in it. Since, however, the UIA would still have 43 percent of seats, it could block the formation of a government by any other group. So I don’t see any advantage for the more secular group in leaving the UIA. If, on the other hand, they stick with it, and Jaafari can form an alliance with the Kurds, everyone in the UIA would suddenly have $17 billion to play with every year, more if the Iraqis get their act together.

Reuters reports on the extensive demands the Kurds are making as a price of joining the UIA governing, including the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, the creation of a Kurdistan province, semi-autonomy, and so forth. Reuters notes that these maximalist demands, most of them unwelcome to the Shiites, are slowing the formation of a new government in Iraq.

Well, now that Fallujah is liberated (i.e. wrecked and empty), residents of Ramadi are now beginning to flee in fear that they might get equally liberated. It is not clear how much liberation Iraqi cities (or ex-cities) can stand.

My op-ed, “The Downside of Democracy, appeared Thursday in the LA Times. An exercept:

‘ Pakistan and Iraq are not the only countries where elections have had mixed results. Although the Palestinian elections in January were widely viewed as a success — producing a pragmatic prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas — remember that the radical fundamentalist party, Hamas, boycotted those elections. Then, less than three weeks later, local elections were held — and Hamas won decisively in the Gaza Strip, leaving it more influential than before and poised for even bigger wins in next July’s legislative elections.

And in recent years, democratization has also put Hezbollah in the Lebanese parliament. Serbian nationalists have won seats in Belgrade.

Are such outcomes acceptable to the Bush administration? If not, how will it respond? Given the war on terror, it is unlikely to simply take these electoral setbacks lying down.

But if Washington falls back on its traditional responses — covert operations, attempts to interfere in parliamentary votes with threats or bribes, or dependence on strong men like Musharraf — the people of the Middle East might well explode, because the only thing worse than living under a dictatorship is being promised a democracy and then not really getting it. ‘

AP reports on a network smuggling Saudi youth into Iraq to fight jihad. Oh, great. The last time young Saudis went off to fight a superpower, with the encouragement of the Reagan administration in the 1980s, it turned into al-Qaeda and blew back on New York and Washington. No wonder the CIA is afraid that Iraq is a new breeding ground for future anti-US terrorism.

Bob Harris’s posting “Uncle Bucky and the Rocket-Fueled Breasts” is worth reading just for the title.

Arabic Link: Yusuf Hazim argues in al-Sharq al-Awsat that the relative calm and stability in Basra province is underpinned by a tacit alliance of tribal leaders, political parties, and militias.

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Koufax Complete List

I’ve gotten around to stealing code for the complete list of Koufax Award Winners at Wampum.

Best Blog (Non-Sponsored): Daily Kos

Best Blog (Pro): Talking Points Memo by Josh Marshall

Best Writing: Hullaballoo by Digby

Best Post: “If America Were Iraq…” at Informed Comment by Juan Cole

Best Series (tie): The Rise of Pseudo-Fascism by David Neiwert at Orcinus;

and

Cheers And Jeers by Bill in Portland Maine at Daily Kos

Best Group Blog: MyDD

Most Humorous Blog: Jesus’ General by J.C. Christian

Most Humorous Post: Poker With Dick Cheney by The Poorman

Best Expert Blog: Informed Comment by Juan Cole

Best Single Issue Blog (tie): TalkLeft by Jeralyn Merritt;

and

Grits For Breakfast by Scott Henson

Best New Blog: Mouse Words by Amanda Marcotte

Most Deserving of Wider Recognition: Suburban Guerrilla

Best Commenter: Meteor Blades at Daily Kos

and

Liberal Street Fighter

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Bomb Blasts in Tikrit, Haglaniyah, Mosul Produce Dozens of Casualties

AP reports on violence in Iraq Tuesday:

‘ A car bomb exploded near police headquarters in the Iraqi city of Tikrit on Thursday, killing at least 10 people, witnesses said. More than a dozen cars were set ablaze after the massive blast . . . Meanwhile, clashes between U.S. troops and insurgents in the so-called Sunni triangle of death killed six Iraqis and left dozens injured in Heet, according to Dr. Mohammed al-Hadithi . . . In Haqlaniyah, 135 miles northwest of the capital, U.S. forces and Iraqi troops fought insurgents throughout the day, the military said. American aircraft fired cannon rounds and dropped bombs to help a Marine patrol that came under small arms and heavy machine-gun fire . . . Elsewhere, a U.S. soldier was killed when assailants set off a bomb near Tuz, 105 miles north of Baghdad. In Baghdad, gunmen assassinated the director of the Iraqi Trade Ministry, Saad Abbas Hassan, as he drove down a road . . . And in the northern city of Mosul, insurgents set off a car bomb, killing two people and wounding 14, the U.S. military said. Also in Mosul, U.S. soldiers shot and killed a civilian in a pickup truck who came too close to their convoy, policeman Ahmed Rashid said . . . ‘

In addition, guerrillas assassinated Khalil Ali Shukri, a Dawa Party official in Baquba, according to al-Zaman. Prospective prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari is from the Dawa Party. A military officer was assassinated in Baghdad on Haifa Street, and a contractor in Salman Pak.

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Were the Shiites Cheated? And What does Allawi Want?

Al-Hayat has a long interview with an “informed Iraqi source” who is close to US officials in Iraq. He maintains that the US officials there were astounded that the United Iraqi Alliance did so well, and that they felt helpless and resigned as the process unfolded. He says that they are now asking privately if the US shed so much blood and treasure in Iraq to help fundamentalist Shiite allies of Iran take over Baghdad.

Al-Hayat also today repeats the allegation that the US or the electoral commission somehow cheated the United Iraqi Alliance of an absolute majority in parliament. (Note that this argument completely contradicts the interview they did, which speaks of US helplessness before the results.) The argument that the Iraqi elections were fixed is, however, implausible. It is sometimes alleged that the Shiites should have done better than they did, given the Sunni Arab absence. But when the smoke cleared, the UIA did have a majority in parliament, so the allegation makes no sense.

The below figures are from this wire service article and from this piece from the New York Times.

The NYT claimed that “the turnout in the three mainly Kurdish provinces in the north averaged 85 percent; in nine mainly Shiite southern provinces, the average was 71 percent.”

This is the breakdown for turnout as best I could determine it, with only a couple of missing figures.

Al-Anbar (2%)
Al-Basrah (?)
Al-Muthanna (61%)
Al-Qadisiyah (69%)
An-Najaf (73%)
Arbil (?)
As-Sulaymaniyah (80%)
At-Ta’mim (?)
Babil (71%)
Baghdad (48%)
Dohuk (89%)
Dhi Qar (67%)
Diyala (34%)
Karbala’ (73%)
Maysan (59%)
Ninevah (17%)
Salah ad-Din (29%)
Wasit (66%)

Now, the United Iraqi Alliance has 51 percent of the seats, having attacted the religious Shiite vote. The Iraqiya list of Iyad Allawi got the middle class, secular-leaning Shiites, with 14.5 percent. That is 64.5 percent for the two major Shiite lists. Then the small Shiite parties and the Communists (whose supporters are disproportionately Shiites) are another 3.4 percent, for a total of 68%.

If Shiites are, say, 62 percent of the population, and 71 percent turned out to vote, if 100 percent of the other groups had come out, the Shiites should have gotten 46 percent of the seats. But since the 4.5 million Sunni Arabs hardly turned out at all, and since 15 percent of Kurds did not, in the proportional system those percentages were added to the Shiite column, so they got 68% of seats in parliament. That is, it is as if 110 percent of the Shiites voted, because the absence of the Sunni Arabs magnified the Shiite vote. In fact, if the religious and secular Shiites could cooperate (fat chance), they could from a government all by themselves without reference to the Kurds or Sunni Arabs.

Precisely because the United Iraqi Alliance has ended up with 51 percent of the seats, which is enough to confirm the new government once a cabinet is selected, and since with the small Shiite parties it has 54 percent, either the US did not intervene in the ballot counting or it was completely incompetent in doing so. Personally, I don’t think the US was in a position to intervene. Grand Ayatollah Sistani would not have put up with it, and the Americans knew it.

The results seem to me entirely plausible. Friends of mine with contacts among middle class Shiites in Baghdad reported that many of them were going to vote for Allawi, so the 14.5 percent showing for the Iraqiya list is not out of line (and is much smaller than most reporters with mainly middle class Baghdad contacts had expected).

If the Daily Telegraph is right that Iyad Allawi hopes to form a government without either the Kurdish Alliance or the United Iraqi Alliance, then this whole bid of his for the prime minister post is a stalking horse for some other purpose. The UIA and the Kurds between them have 78 percent of the seats in parliament! And Allawi would need 66 percent to form a government. He says he will work with small parties, but aside from the Sunni Iraqiyun with 5 seats and the Communists with 2, most of the rest are Shiite and have already formed a coalition with the UIA. Allawi’s only hope is to detach delegates from the United Iraqi Alliance in such numbers as to put into question that list’s ability to dominate parliament. Even then he has no chance of becoming prime minister. He almost certainly is simply angling for a cabinet position, and using the threat of creating disunity in the UIA ranks by seducing some of its members as leverage.

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Show Trials and Phony Confessions Target Syria

AP reports on a televised confession of someone who said he was a Syrian agent in Iraq in charge of terrorist operations. The confession was broadcast on US-backed al-Iraqiyah television, and was produced presumably by the former Baath domestic intelligence officers appointed by Iyad Allawi.

These confessions are phony as a three-dollar bill (or a three-Euro coin). AP reports with a straight face that al-Essa “claimed he infiltrated Iraq in 2001, about two years before the U.S. invasion, because Syrian intelligence was convinced that American military action loomed.” That allegation doesn’t pass the smell test with me. If this guy was sent in 2001, it was to make trouble for Saddam, not with reference to America. The Syrian Baath mostly did not get on well with the Iraqi Baath. Another confessed terrorist said he was sent to Pakistan for training and then Syria. Oh, now we have a Baath-Islamist axis again. Sure. Shiite secular Arab nationalists are just dying to get up a collaboration with non-Arab Pakistani hyper-Sunnis who paint “Kill the Shiites” on their mini-buses in Lahore.

It is embarrassing that Allawi thought he could peddle this horse manure to the Iraqi and American publics.

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Association of Muslim Scholars Denies Negotiations with US

Gilbert Achcar kindly supplied the following translation:

The following interesting excerpt from today’s (Feb 23) Al-Hayat (my translation from Arabic):

‘ A member of the Association of Muslim Scholars [believed to be the most popular group among Arab Sunnis in Iraq] has denied that the contacts held by the American delegation wiith armed groups involved the Association.

He declared to Al-Hayat that the practice of equating the “armed resistance” with the Sunnis is “a big mistake, and the contacts do not take place with Sunni groups but with high leaders of the dissolved Baath Party.”

He added that the Association is not concerned by these contacts, because it is “a Sunni religious authority opposed to the occupation through peaceful means, and even though it considers the resistance to be a legitimate right of every Iraqi, it rejects terrorism and the killing of innocents.”

He revealed that the contacts engaged with the Association in order to integrate it in the new government centered only around the procedure of writing the constitution, and were held with Iraqi political forces and with Ashraf Qadi, the representative of the UN General Secretary, and not with the Bush administration.

He added that “these meetings will remain useless if the Americans keep betraying their promises, like carrying on the military operations and arrests.”
“The US administration, which is the occupying force, should have controlled the borders with the neighbouring countries that allow the infiltration of terrorist groups, and made a distinction [in their contacts] between the legitimate resistance and terrorism, unless they are the first beneficiaries of the instability of security conditions to guarantee that they will stay as long as possible.” ‘

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Iraq-Blogging

Nick Turse at tomdispatch.com skewers Donald Rumsfeld’s various rhetorical strategies of evasion whenever he has been asked hard questions about Abu Ghraib, the situation in Iraq, etc.:

‘ I was truly curious: Was it a budgetary problem — the lack of CD burners, or floppy disks, or available computers at the Pentagon? Or was no one technically capable of making copies for Rumsfeld? Or was there some kind of institutional/personal issue at stake? Were Rumsfeld’s underlings, for unknown reasons, engaging in a game of diskette keep-away “for days and days and days” (and right before his big Senate grilling too)?

Since then, I’ve paid closer attention to Rumsfeld’s problems and continued to speculate. Just take a look at a few of the numerous incidents thus far in 2005…

On January 8, 2005, Newsweek broke a story about a high-level debate within the Pentagon on implementing the “Salvador Option” — that is, the use of “death-squads” like those the U.S. funded in El Salvador during the 1980s — in Iraq . . . Rumsfeld went on to complain that he couldn’t find a copy of the story anywhere and could only read articles about the story. Members of the press corps promised to get him a copy and informed him that it was available in the on-line edition of the magazine. In his defense, Rumsfeld claimed that he only buys the hard-copy of Newsweek.

That Rumsfeld is such a cut-up.

Suburban Guerrilla (journalist Susan Madrak) takes an extended look at the way Pentagon reporting procedures on casualties are skewing the public’s idea of the cost of the war in US lives and injuries. She wonders what the public reaction would be if it could be proved that the true count of dead and wounded, counting all the troops and contractors and all even tangentially combat-related casualties, was 2 or 3 times what we are being told.

The Middle East Information Center discussion board highlights the excellent article by Nir Rosen on Kirkuk that appeared in the NYT magazine Sunday. Rosen’s portrait of a city that is little more than a massive urban roadside bomb ready to go off at any moment is a chilling harbinger for the future.

In the hyperlinked way of the blogging world, Andrew Arato’s guest editorial on Monday about the likely struggle between the elected parliament in Iraq and the dead hand of the American-imposed interim constitution provoked y provoked Josh Buermann of Flagrancy to Reason to some acute observations about the severe constraints on Iraqi democracy imposed by the US. He cites Kevin Carson as saying,

‘ Once again, as has been the case with assorted other velvet and orange revolutions, along with sundry exercises in “people power,” what’s left after the smoke clears is a neoconservative counterfeit democracy. What the neocons call “democracy” is a Hamiltonian system in which the people exercise formal power to elect the government, but the key directions of policy are determined by a small and relatively stable Power Elite that is insulated from any real public pressure. the “Hamiltonian” nature of the Iraqi government and the continued purchase US policy has on its bureaucracy. ‘

Carson in turn quotes Milan Rai from Electronic Iraq pointing out that:

‘ Another device for maintaining control was Paul Bremer’s appointment of key officials for five year terms just before leaving office. In June 2004, the US governor ordered that the national security adviser and the national intelligence chief chosen by the US-imposed interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, be given five-year terms, imposing Allawi’s choices on the elected government. Bremer also installed inspectors-general for five-year terms in every ministry, and formed and filled commissions to regulate communications, public broadcasting and securities markets. ‘

Rai also points out that the big fight now looming between Ibrahim Jaafari of the United Iraqi Alliance and Iyad Allawi of the Iraqiyah List is over the extent of debaathification. Jaafari wants to continue to exclude midlevel and high Baath officials from government posts, whereas Allawi had begun bringing them in, even putting one in charge of the secret police:

‘ Allawi restored former servants of the Saddam regime to important posts, and has filled the security forces with former Ba’athists. Saddam’s Special Forces soldiers and former intelligence officials are even being rehired as a police commando strike force. Last summer Allawi’s government appointed Rasheed Flayeh to the post of director-general of the secret police force, despite objections from the Supreme Commission for De-Ba’athification that as head of security in the city of Nasiriyah, Flayeh had taken part in the brutal suppression of the 1991 Shia uprising.

Last October, Allawi tried and failed to disband the De-Ba’athification Commission (headed by his old rival Ahmed Chalabi). Allawi wanted to be able to openly readmit former senior Ba’athists to power unless they have been found guilty of serious crimes in court, a policy supported by Washington. The Shia coalition that has ‘won’ the elections has vowed to reverse re-Ba’athification, and it is likely that Allawi’s enthusiasm for this policy will bar him from being a compromise prime minister in the new government. ‘

Buermann, Carson and Rai have put their fingers on a key set of issues in understanding the contemporary situation in Iraq. How much control can the US keep, and with what tools? What is the future of the ex-Baathists? Can a stable new regime emerge that can claim popular legitimacy under the shadow of Western military occupation? Thank God someone is at least broaching the questions.

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