Informed Comment

Constitution Unfinished as Deadline Looms
17 Dead in Violence Saturday

Sunni Arab members of the constitution drafting committee are still rejecting language that would make Iraq a “federal” republic. In practice, this language would formally acknowledge Kurdistan and perhaps Shiite federations of provinces in the south as having a good deal of autonomy and a claim on petroleum revenues from Kirkuk (the Kurds) and Rumaila (the Shiites). The Sunni Arabs do not have a developed petroleum or natural gas field and so would suffer from a federal arrangement that left some of the petroleum income in the provinces rather than having the central government take it all and redistribute it. It increasingly looks as though the only way the committee can meet its August 1 deadline for informing parliament that it will be done by August 15 would be to simply over-rule the minority Sunnis with an up and down vote. The bitterness this step would leave in Sunni mouths might make it inadvisable.

al-Hayat: Sunni parliamentarian Mishaan Jiburi, on a visit to Damascus, warned that for the Shiites and Kurds to run roughshod over the Sunni Arabs and their concerns would result in civil war. He said they would be driven in even greater numbers into opposition to the government and the foreign occupation. Among the points they most cared about, he said, were that Iranians must not be mentioned as a recognized Iraqi minority in the constitution. He said it was also important to distance the government from religion.

His concerns were echoed by five clan leaders from the Fallujah area meeting with US officers. They said a federal Iraq in which the Kurds got the oil of Kirkuk and the Shiites the oil of Rumaila in the south, would leave the Sunni Arabs with “the desert sands of Anbar.”

Deputy speaker of the house and member of the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance, Hussein Shahristani, told al-Hayat on Saturday that some combination of southern, largely Shiite provinces may form a confederation within the framework of a federal Iraq. He said as many as ten provinces or as few as two could join this confederation (which would be analogous to the “Kurdistan” formed from northern provinces by the Kurds). He said most leading politicians had already agreed to this step, with the exception of a few who thought it might prove too much of a complication in Iraqi politics at the moment.

Shahristani also said that it was absolutely unacceptable for the Peshmerga paramilitary of the Kurdish parties to remain an armed force in Kurdistan. He said that defense would be the prerogative of the central government in Baghdad.

There seems little doubt that the permanent constitution will acknowledge a leading role for Islamic law in legislation. The question is whether it will be the source of legislation or one among several. Also, it will matter if the constitution puts Iraqis under their religious law for matters of personal status like marriage, divorce and so forth, and whether a special status is recognized for the grand ayatollahs in Najaf, as it was in a draft leaked last week to al-Sabah newspaper.

Newsday says, ‘ “Mouafak al-Rubaie, a national security adviser and a Shiite, met al-Sistani on Saturday and said the main concern of the Shiite religious leadership is to “preserve the Islamic identity of Iraq and its people, which means preserving a united Iraq and people as a state.” ‘

Adnan Dulaimi maintains that he has been fired as head of the Sunni Pious Endowments Board by the Jaafari government because he was too outspoken a champion of Sunni causes.

Al-Hayat says that the Association of Muslim Scholars (Sunni) objected strongly to Dulaimi’s firing, and the installation in his place of Shaikh Ahmad Abd al-Ghafur al-Samarra’i. They said the replacement was made by the government without any consultation with the Sunni Arab community.

On Sunday morning, guerrillas detonated a carbomb near Haswah, a half an hour’s drive south of Baghdad, killing 5 civilians and wounding 10.

A roadside bomb targetting a British military convoy southwest of the city of Basra in Iraq’s deep south on Saturday, killing 2 private security guards. A second bomb timed to hit rescuers instead killed two local children.

BAGHDAD – Guerrillas detonated a car bomb at a police checkpoint in the capital. They killed 7, wounded 25.

Reuters reports other casualties of Iraq’s unconventional civil war:

Three employees of Baghdad International Airport, who had been kidnapped, turned up blindfolded and dead.

A roadside bomb aimed at a US military patrol in Dura instead killed an Iraqi civilian.

A member of the Sunni National Dialogue Council that is cooperating with the elected government in crafting a constitution narrowly missed being assassinated Saturday. His bodyguard was wounded.

Reuters adds:

“BAGHDAD – An Iraqi health ministry official, Eman Naji, was kidnapped by gunmen who stormed her home in the capital’s upscale district of Mansour, police said.”

In HIT, west of the capital, a suicide bomber hit a US military patrol, wounding 4 Marines.

In Mahmudiya just south of Baghdad, a roadside bomb killed one Iraqi civilian and wounded 3.

The US military has established a new base in the northwest of Iraq aimed at interdicting infiltration of foreign fighters into Iraq.

You’re not allowed to blog about the Iraq War critically if you are an active duty serviceman over there. This is why we know so little about what is really going on. Few will risk reporting on the reality while Don Rumsfeld wants boosterism and cheerleading.

I reported a few days ago that a US military base near Fallujah had taken mortar fire. Aljazeerah even had film showing damage to a building as US troops standing around. I noted that the wire services and other reporters appeared to have ignored the story. I heard from a relative of someone serving in Fallujah, who said that all the bases around there take mortar fire so frequently that it has become a big yawn for the troops. Now, since march the US military has conducted a vigorous propaganda campaign proclaiming how nice post-invasion Fallujah is, how life has returned to normal, with bustling traffic and trade, and how it is the safest city in Iraq. While some quarters may in fact have gotten back to a semblance of normality, not all the city has, and the area isn’t safe, just as Anbar province in general is not. The reason we don’t know more about the real situation is that the troops are being forbidden to tell us about it. Most of what they could reveal would not in fact endanger the US military. But it would endanger the propaganda and black psy-ops campaigns being run on us by the civilians in the Department of Defense.

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London Bombings: State of Play

After the dramatic arrests on Friday in London and Rome, it appears that the foot soldiers of the July 21 bombing are all in custody. Whether the police have been able to go up the cell structure to find handlers, bomb makers and logisticians is unclear.

This is what we know, except that one of the question marks can be replaced with the name of Somalian-British Osman Hussein, captured in Rome. He was traced using his cell phone!

The use of two distinct ethnic networks for the two operational cells was an excellent way to throw the police off the trail and prepare the way for the July 21 bombings. The police would have been looking at British/Pakistani networks after the first bombing. The question of what ties the two networks together is the real question. It would only be necessary that the two operational cell leaders– say Muhammad Sidique Khan and Yasin Hassan Omar– knew a third person. Or that they each had a handler who knew the third person.

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Sunnis Demonstrate in Baghdad
As Bombings Kill 28, wound 46, with 3 US Soldiers Dead
1 Million Iraqis say “US Out”!

Maher al-Thanoon of Reuters reports that one thousand Sunni Arabs staged a demonstration outside the Green Zone (barricaded government offices) against the elected Iraqi government, which is dominated by Shiites in coalition with Kurds. They accused the Jaafari government of using torture and death squads on a sectarian basis against their community, which they called “the new Iraq of fire and steel.” Al-Thanoon says, “Simulating torture, they dressed up as soldiers and used drills, wooden clubs and electric wires to act out what they said were the techniques used by government forces against them.”

The Muqtada al-Sadr followers say they have collected the signatures of one million Iraqis asking that US and other Coalition troops leave the country immediately. In his sermon at an East Baghdad mosque, Shaikh Abdul Zahra al-Suwaidi told the congregation, “We obtained the Iraqi signatures demanding the withdrawal of the occupation troops as asked for by Sayyed Moqtada Sadr . . . The goal of this petition is to show the world the rejection by Iraqis of foreigners in Iraq . . .”

Then on Friday evening in south Baghdad, guerrillas cut down Faisal al-Khaz’ali, a major leader of an important Shiite clan.

An individual suicide bomber walked up to an Iraqi army recruitment center in the northern town of Rabi`a, an hour’s drive from Mosul near the Syrian border, and detonated his payload. He killed 25 persons and wounded 35. Rabi`a is one of those border towns into which the US alleges volunteer jihadis slip from Syria (though they also slip in from Jordan and Saudi Arabia but the Washington crew never say anything about that, and US journalists never call them on it). It wasn’t clear, in any case, whether the bomber was an Iraqi (there isn’t much difference among the Sunni clans on either side of that border; some belong to the same over-all tribes).

Wire services also report:

*Baghdad: A few hours after the bombing in Rabi`a, guerrillas attacked a police patrol with a car bomb but missed and killed two civilians.

*Mosul: Some eyewitnesses said that guerrillas in Iraq’s third-largest city targeted a US convoy with a car bomb but missed and killed a child and wounded 11 civilians. Another report said that the target was not a US patrol but rather a man selling alcohol from a cart.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that altogether 4 Iraqis were killed and five wounded in separate attacks to the north of Baghdad, including Balad and Samarra, on Friday. Another roadside bomb killed a truck driver 30 km north of the capital.

In Samarra an Iraqi soldier was wounded and another injured by a roadside bomb.

In Baquba guerrillas attempted to assassinate the police commissioner for Diyala province, but failed, leaving two policemen wounded (one of them of high rank).

Reuters adds:

‘CYKLA – Two U.S. soldiers were killed on Thursday when their unit came under attack by small arms fire and rocket propelled grenades in Cykla, about 200 km (120 miles) west of Baghdad, a U.S. military statement said.

* BAGHDAD – One U.S. soldier died on Thursday when the vehicle he was driving was involved in a single-vehicle accident off base in central Baghdad around 11:30 p.m.’

Kyodo News reports, regarding the southern Shiite city of Samawah, pop. 124,000, the capital of oil-rich al-Muthanna Province:

“Two explosions took place at a job training center for women in the southern Iraqi city of Samawah Friday morning, but no one was injured, local police said. The Japanese government provided sewing machines and computers through the United Nations Development Program to the facility, operated by a local women’s group. The Japanese Self-Defense Forces have been involved in reconstruction activities in the city.”

There have been a number of demonstrations in Samawa during the past week. Last Sunday, the Sadrists there demonstrated against the lack of electricity. There was also a bombing of a jewelry shop belonging to the Iraqi head of an Iraqi-Japanese frienship association.

On last Monday, they demonstrated again, mentioning the high price of ice and the lack of potable water, according to AP: “Hundreds of Iraqis burned a Japanese flag Tuesday and called for Tokyo to remove its troops from the country in a protest that seemed motivated by the poor state of water and electricity supplies here more than two years after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The peaceful protest in this city 240 kilometers (150 miles) south of Baghdad appeared to have been organized by followers of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.” They burned the Japanese flag.

Note that the Japanese contingent in Samawah is helping with local health and community development projects, so the demonstration seems particularly misplaced. Ironically, the Japanese contingent is suffering from the spillover of anti-American sentiment.

Al-Hayat reports that sectarian wrangling continues concerning key clauses of the draft constitution. Kurdish Minister of Planning said that you cannot have democracy if shariah or Islamic canon law is imposed on the constitution, which would create Taliban-like morals police in parts of Iraq.

Sunni Arab leader of the National Dialogue Council, Salih al-Mutallik, said that the Sunnis cannot “accept that Iranians will be Iraqi citizens.” A disputed article in the constitution recognizes Iranian-Iraqis or Persians as an Iraqi minority alongside groups such as Turkmen and Yazidis. Iraqis of Iranian heritage are numerous in the Shiite south, and many such families have been in Iraq for centuries. They have family names such as Qazwini, Shirazi, Astarabadi, etc. (cities in Iran). They were targeted for deportation by Saddam (along with many Iraqi Arab Shiites wrongly categorized as “Iranians”), and the purpose of the article is to redress that injustice and forestall any repeat of it. Sunni Arabs on the other hand are afraid of being overwhelmed by Iranian Shiite immigrants, which would further weaken their position.

A draft given Associated Press says that it will be forbidden to pass laws that contravene the ordinances of Islam. It also specifies that provinces will keep no more than 10 percent of the receipts for petroleum exports from their territory, with the central government getting 90 percent. The Kurds had early demanded about 1/4 of petroleum income from Kirkuk, and the Shiite governor of Basra in the deep south has recently agitated for a similar deal for the southern provinces with regard to the Rumaila oil field, in al-Muthanna province near Kuwait.

A Kurdish member of the constitution drafting committee, Mundhir al-Fadl, said that the coming Tuesday is the deadline for certifying that the constitution will be finished and presented to parliament for a vote by Aug. 15, and he doubted the deadline could be met. Apparently there is still a dispute about whether Kurdish will be co-equal to Arabic as one of the two official languages of the country, as the Kurds demand.

Al-Mutallik of the Sunni National Dialogue Council was even more pessimistic, saying that the constitution can’t be finished by next Tuesday, and probably cannot be finished even if the parliament takes another 6 months. Nor, he insisted, would the Sunnis accept simply being run over roughshod and having the constitution voted in even if they (a minority on the committee) object. He said Sunnis object to the Shiite plan to mention the Najaf Grand Ayatollahs as sources of authority in the constitution. “The other groups don’t have a grand ayatollah,” he said.

Tod Robberson reports from Basra on the increasing restrictions on personal liberties there, deriving from the pressure of Shiite militias.

There were a number of demonstrations in Umm Qasr this past week against the border barrier that Kuwait is building. Kuwait has deployed police at its border in response.

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Nation Forum on Middle East

“Unintended Consequences: A Forum on Iraq and the Mideast,” in The Nation is now available online. Journalists Helena Cobban and Nir Rosen, academic Middle East expert Shibley Telhami, and I all responded to questions about the state of the region.

This is my answer to the first question asked by the editors, “Wars often have unintended consequences. How has the Iraq War affected the political landscape of the region and America’s standing therein?“

Cole: Helena is correct that the Iraq War has propelled negative feelings toward the United States–not just in the immediate region but throughout the Muslim world. Between the summer of 2002 and spring of 2003, the number of Indonesians who viewed the US favorably fell from 61 percent to 15 percent, according to the Pew Research Center. Although Muslims already faulted the United States for lack of evenhandedness on the Arab-Israeli dispute, in recent years their estimation of the US has plummeted. According to Zogby, from summer 2002 to summer 2004, those who viewed the US favorably in Egypt fell from 15 to 2 percent. And respondents generally believed that Iraqis were worse off under American occupation.

Another consequence of the war has been that more Sunnis in Iraq and elsewhere are turning away from Arab nationalism, which has been discredited, to Salafi revivalism, a very conservative form of Islam. Although most Salafis are “quietists,” in that they do not enter into ordinary politics, they are also the recruitment pool for radical groups. It has also strengthened Iran’s position in the region. In 1982 Ayatollah Khomeini created the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq for Shiite expatriate groups, whose members included Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the current SCIRI leader, and Ibrahim al-Jaafari, Iraq’s current Prime Minister. Khomeini dreamed of putting them in power in Baghdad. Bush and Rumsfeld have fulfilled that dream.

The whole forum is worth reading. Nir Rosen is an exciting young journalist who has gone all over Iraq and reported in a clear-eyed way on everything from Fallujah to Najaf. Cobban and Telhami are veteran commentators on the region who know it well. Hearing these voices in a major national publication is sort of a shock because it is an irruption of the real world into the American press, and the result does not sound like the Middle East projected Washington, DC. (Not that this irruption of the truth is unusual in The Nation, which has done among the best reporting on the war).

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Attacks in Baqubah, Mansur
Train, Pipeline bombed

Reuters reports on deaths in the guerrilla war on Thursday:

In Baqubah and Khan Bani Saad northeast of Baghdad, guerrillas fought battles with Iraqi soldiers, killing six of them.

In the tony Mansur district of Baghdad, a suicide car bomber struck at an Iraqi army checkpoint. He killed six civilians and wounded 8 soldiers, and two civilian cars were left in flames.

In the oil city of Kirkuk in the north, guerrillas bombed an oil pipeline that feeds petroleum to Baiji’s refineries. They also damaged a gas pipeline to Baiji’s power station.

In Haditha, guerrillas assassinated the assistant police chief.

The LA Times says, “In other violence, the U.S. military said two American troops had been killed and one wounded in a roadside bombing Wednesday in Baghdad . . . Elsewhere in Baghdad, a train carrying fuel exploded when it was hit by a bomb, killing two people and wounding six, police said . . . U.S. Marine jets, meanwhile, bombed insurgent positions near Haditha, killing nine insurgents, including five Syrians, the U.S. military said.”

Aljazeera reported that US troops at a base north of Fallujah took mortar fire on Thursday, but there was no word of casualties. The Western wire services either disbelieved this report or ignored it, since I can’t find mention of it in English.

David Enders does perhaps the only clear-eyed English-language post-mortem of the Fallujah campaign, which has left 2/3s of the buildings in the city damaged and exiled tens of thousands for over half a year. Aljazeera ran a piece on Fallujah on Wednesday, showing people living in tents on the rubble of their former homes. All this contrasts to a fluff piece in the New York Times last spring that depicted the place as largely restored and bustling, with busy traffic and healthy happy children that were all above average. Well, maybe that quarter the reporter was allowed to see looked like that.

Speaker of the Iraqi parliament Hajem al-Hassani warned the US military against invading the northern Turkmen city of Talafar [Tel Afar] the way it had Fallujah. The existence of a sitting Iraqi parliament, which is supposed to be sovereign, may be an increasing check on the freedom of the US military to operate at will in Iraq.

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