Informed Comment

The Consequences of Nuking Iran

Readers have asked me about this discussion at Daily Kos. It notes that former CIA analyst Philip Giraldi wrote in the American Conservative:

The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. . . As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing–that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack–but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections.

With regard to this alleged Cheney/Pentagon plan for nuking Iran whenever another big terror attack occurs in the United States, it seems unlikely to me. But the Pentagon makes all sorts of contingency plans, and we know that Cheney’s chief aide, Scooter Libby, was a liaison to the Office of Special Plans, which specialized in far-fetched schemes and intelligence dirty tricks.

In the real world, there are consequences of such actions, however.

First, the Vice President and the Department of Defense may have by now noticed that Iran is a Shiite Muslim country. There are other important Shiite Muslim communities in the Middle East that would, let us say, mind their coreligionists being turned into shadows on walls.

Among these, even the Vice President and Mr. Rumsfeld may have noticed, is Iraq. Nuking Iran would certainly produce large-scale attacks on US troops in Iraq. I suspect the Iraqi government would fall over it, insofar as it is closely connected to the US. If you think things are bad in Iraq now, you don’t even want to think about this scenario, in which religious Sunni Arabs and religious Shiites would almost certainly unite in an anti-American pan-Islamism.

Some 15 percent of Afghans are also Shiites. In addition, the Tajiks or Persian-speakers in Afghanistan are closely allied to Iran. The same scenario, of attacks on US troops and the dragging of Hamid Karzai’s body through the streets of Kabul, would likely ensue.

Both the Shiites and the Sunni Muslim fundamentalists of Pakistan would rise up over such an action. The government of Pakistan, led by secular Gen. Pervez Musharraf, might not mind the attack on Iran, with which it has a rivalry. But the Musharraf government is not popular and could be overthrown in such a crisis. At that point angry Shiite and Sunni fundamentalists in Pakistan might gain control of that country’s nuclear arsenal.

A US nuclear strike on Iran would be absolutely unacceptable to China. The Chinese could wreak major harm on the US economy by simply disinvesting in it. They hold massive US debt.

A US nuclear strike on Iran would anger many publics in Europe. An economic boycott by Europe would also be devastating.

Although US trade with India is still small, all the attempts to build a stronger relationship with Delhi would be undone. India has a tacit alliance with Iran and would certainly be absolutely outraged, both at the governmental and the public level, by a US nuclear attack on Iran. Pushing both China and India toward postures of enmity toward the United States would greatly weaken it.

The US would suddenly find its influence throughout the world plummeting, its economy badly hurt by boycotts. It would become a pariah nation. And, if it thinks it faces a terrorist threat now, you can only imagine what kind of retribution would be exacted.

For more see Gary Leupp.

Rabid dreams are dreamt along the Potomac by persons who routinely foam at the mouth. Some, like gadfly warmonger Michael Ledeen, or wild-eyed Ghorbanifar dupes like Congressman Congressman (?!) Curt Weldon (what is wrong with Pennsylvania?), are dying to get other Americans’ boys killed in the sands of Iran. For the rest of us, these reveries are nightmares. This nuclear scenario is a fleeting and insubstantial such bad dream, which can no more be implemented as policy than a Hollywood horror film could be.

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On How US Troops Aren’t Coming Home Any Time Soon

al-Hayat reports that 16 Iraqis were killed in guerrilla violence in Baghdad and its environs on Wednesday, and 20 bodies were discovered in Mosul. (Typically such corpses belong to Iraqi police).

The US military imposed a curfew on Samarra, after an attack on one of its convoys that left a soldier dead and five wounded.

Here’s what General George Casey actually said:

“If the political process continues to go positively and if the development of the security forces continues to go as it is going, I do believe that we will be able to make some pretty substantial reductions after these elections in the spring and summer of next year.”

The draw-down of US troops in Iraq is here made conditional on two premises. One is that the “political process” goes “positively.” If by that is meant that the Sunni Arab notables now fighting an unconventional civil war against the Shiite Arabs and the Kurds are drawn into the new government, that hasn’t happened on any significant scale and there is no early prospect of it happening.

As for the training of Iraqi troops to take up security duties, that isn’t going well even now. There are only about 3,000 Iraqi troops ready to actually fight, and I don’t know how you get enough to actually provide security in only a year. Five years would be the minimum, if it can be done at all.

Since Casey’s two conditions can’t be met, his statement only gives the appearance of optimism on this score, with none of the substance.

It is forgotten that Paul Wolfowitz told Congress that the US would be down to only a division (~20,000 men) in October of 2003. Then it is forgotten that the Pentagon announced a draw-down from 135,000 to 110,000 in spring of 2004 (just before the Bush administration decided in its wisdom to “kill or capture” Muqtada al-Sadr). That draw-down didn’t happen. Why? The security situation didn’t allow it.

So the fact is that Rumsfeld and Casey have no idea if the situation will permit the US to withdraw substantial numbers of troops by next summer.

The plan to go down to 90,000 or so in 12 months would depend in part on stationing them on four military bases in Anbar, Salahuddin, Baghdad, and Ninevah provinces (i.e. where the Sunni Arab guerrillas are). They would be withdrawn from most cities, leaving Iraqi police and troops to patrol them. But we all remember what happened after the first Fallujah campaign, when the Baath officers were allowed to come back and try to restore order. The resulting “order” looked like Qandahar under the Taliban.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat / AFP report that Iraqi national security adviser Muwaffaq al-Rubaie suggests that US troops can be withdrawn from 10 important Iraqi cities between now and December, and perhaps from some quarters of Baghdad itself. I suspect it is a priority to get foreign troops out of Najaf and Karbala, which you would imagine a Shiite government could police effectively. But what other 10 cities wouldn’t just become guerrilla strongholds with the US gone? Samarra? Mosul? Ramadi? Tel Afar?

The same source indicates that Rumsfeld is seeking a formal Status of Forces agreement with the interim government, which might allow a long-term US military presence in the country. But I suspect that the moment the Iraqis feel they can stand on their own feet militarily, they will summarily toss the US troops out. A good fifth of parliamentarians want them gone yesterday as it is. SOFAs are only as good as the contemporary bilateral relations between two countries. Look at the Philippines.

Some readers have suggested to me that the Bush administration might just bring tens of thousands of our boys and girls home to create a positive atmosphere for Republicans in the 2006 congressional and senatorial elections. While Karl Rove is clearly not exactly above playing politics with the US military, such a strategy could easily backfire. What if he has the Pentagon go down to 66,000, and then the guerrilla war heats up big time and guerrillas manage to score a big attack on the less numerous contingent left behind? What if they pull off a spectacular assassination that throws the country into turmoil? You’d have to put the troops right back in. And as a campaign tactic, I doubt it would work very well to risk chaos. People like the ruling party not to look like clueless incompetents getting things blown up.

Mind you, I’m all for withdrawing US troops from Iraq as soon as humanly possible. I think they have the wrong rules of engagement and the wrong tactics for waging counter-insurgency in a clannish society like Iraq, and it is a toss-up whether they are keeping some peace or making things worse. (Fallujah last November demonstrably made things much worse). But I think you need some sort of realistic bridge from that withdrawal to the time when the new Iraqi army can stand on its own. I don’t know where you get that bridge, but nature abhors a vacuum. If the US is gone and the Shiite Iraqis are under siege from Sunni guerrillas, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards will certainly come in to help the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Dawa Party. Even a covert Iranian military presence in Iraq would provoke even more Sunni jihadis to go fight there. A regional war could easily break out, with dire consequences for us all.

You wonder if those rightwing radio talk show hosts who went to Iraq to get the good news visited the Baghdad morgue? “Before the war we used to get maybe 250 bodies a month. Now it is 800 or 900 a month from the Baghdad area alone . . . The situation has worsened dramatically. We cannot cope.” And those 800 are only the ones that come in for an autopsy. Where the cause of death is clear, as in a car bombing, they just bury the body. Reuters estimates that suspicious deaths in Iraq are 230 per 100,000, whereas in Colombia at the height of its violence it was 90 per 100,000.

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Draft Constitution Enshrines Islamic Law
At Least 27 Dead in Guerrilla Violence

Humam al-Hamoudi, the head of the constitution drafting committee in the Iraqi parliament, has called a leadership summit for Thursday and Friday to discuss the current draft. I interpret this move as a sign that the committee itself is deadlocked. The hope appears to be that the big party and clan leaders will be able to use their authority to settle otherwise intractable issues among themselves. One big stumbling block has been the rejection of federalism by the Sunni Arab delegates, want a French-style centralized government.

The Iraqi newspaper al-Sabah has published a draft of the Iraqi constitution, the language of which is very closely modelled on the Transitional Administrative Law, but which departs from it in key respects.

The draft’s first paragraph is: “The [Islamic, united] Iraqi Republic is an independent state enjoying sovereignty, the form of government of which is republican, democratic, united (and federal).”

The parentheses are in the original and mark controversial phrases not yet decided upon. The religious Shiites want to call it “the Islamic Republic of Iraq.” The Kurds want to call it “the Federal Republic of Iraq.” But the Sunni Arabs reject the term “federal.”

The second paragraph says: “Islam is the official religion of state, and is the fundamental source of legislation. It is impermissible to pass legislation that contradicts its essential verities or its laws (its essential verities about which there is consensus). This constitution safeguards the Islamic identity of the majority of the Iraqi people (in its Shiite majority and its Sunnis) and respects all the rights of the other religions.

This language, making it unconstitutional to legislate in contravention of the “laws” of Islam, is much stronger and closer to fundamentalism than the original language of the TAL. I remember debating with Faisal Istrabadi on the Lehrer Newshour in spring of 2004 about whether the TAL itself could be put to theocratic purposes, since it said that you could not legislate in contravention of Islam’s essential verities. Faisal was proud of what was presumably his (and Larry Diamond’s) language, contrasting essential verities with concrete laws. I pointed out that you could have judges who took those essential verities to include the laws as medieval jurists understood them. But in this draft you would not need a fundamentalist judge for that purpose– the text of the constitution specifies that parliamentary legislation cannot contradict the shariah or Islamic canon law. This language really does make it an Islamic republic, if it is retained.

Paragraph 11 says, “Thought and practice, under whatever rubric, is forbidden that adopts racism, or declaring a Muslim to be an infidel, or terrorism . . . especially the Saddami Baath. It is not permitted for it to be part of political pluralism in the state.”

The ellipses cut out language that seems to be proposed to make praising or instigating any of these things illegal. This paragraph probably is influenced by post-war German law making Nazi extremism illegal.

Racism is a horrible thing, but it may not be wise to try to make it illegal in general (as opposed to making it illegal in hiring practices and other sectors of life that materially affect people. You can only imagine the special section of police departments that would have to be devoted to keeping Iraqis politically correct. It sounds like a bad television pilot– PC Blue. On a serious note, the stigmatization of the Baath Party is understandable. But if it spills over to a stigmatization of all ex-Baathists, it will only prolong the guerrilla war.

Paragraph 15 says “The [Shiite] religious leadership [i.e. Grand Ayatollah Sistani and his successors] has an independent character and a function of giving guidance insofar as it is an exalted national and religious symbol. (Some have reservations about this one.)”

This paragraph enshrines in the Iraqi constitution a position of giving “guidance” on the part of the highest Shiite clerical authority. The word used, “marja`iyyah”, is a Shiite technical term for the grand ayatollahs. Although Sunnis have picked it up, it is not originally a Sunni term and the meaning here is certainly Sistani and his successors. In a worst case scenario, Shiite judges could use this paragraph to allow the Grand Ayatollah’s fatwas to over-rule secular legislation. This move would be facilitated by the earlier paragraph that made it unconstitutional to legislate in contravention of Islamic law.

Paragraph 16 binds the government to safeguard the sanctity of the Shiite holy cities of Najaf, Karbala, and Kadhimiyah (perhaps Samarra as well) and to guarantee Shiites the freedom to engage in the rituals of visitation of holy mausoleums there.

The word used, `atabat, specifically refers to the Shiite shrines.

Section II, 6/M says, “The state guarantees basic rights for women and their equality with men in all fields, in accordance with the ordinances of Islamic canon law. The state will aid them to harmonize her duties to family with her work in society.”

Since the ordinances of Islamic canon law do not actually bestow equality on women in every field, this paragraph is extremely ambiguous and could be used for patriarchal purposes.

Alissa Rubin of the LA Times notes that the new US ambassador in Baghdad Zalmay Khalilzad has expressed reservations about some of these provisions.

I fear she has been somewhat misled about the two paragraphs concerning the place of the religious leadership and the holy cities. The word used in the former is the “marja`iyyah,” which is a clear reference to the Grand Ayatollah of Najaf. The word used for the latter is `atabat, literally “thresholds” i.e. of the Shiite Imams. This can only refer to Najaf, Karbala and a few other sites. There is a different word for, e.g., Sufi shrines. Both of these paragraphs enshrine specifically Shiite leaders and sites in the Iraqi constitution.

Nathan Brown’s analysis of the constitution drafting process (pdf) is available online.

Meanwhile, Reuters reports deaths in the guerrilla war:

In Baghdad, guerrillas shot up a minibus transporting factory workers near Abu Ghraib to the west of Baghdad, killing as many as 18 and wounding 9.

Also in the capital, guerrillas assassinated 3 employees of the Ministry of Health.

In a third incident in Baghdad, guerrillas injured a policeman when they attacked the Major Crimes Unit in the Karkh quarter. Two of the guerrillas were captured.

In Baquba, guerrillas assassinated Saad Yunus al-Difa`i, head of the Sadr office and a follower of Muqtada al-Sadr.

In southern Mosul, Iraqi army troops and guerrillas fought a running street battle in the mostly Arab quarter of Risala, leaving 2 noncombatants dead and 6 civilians injured.

In Tikrit, guerrillas killed a Pakistani truck driver.

In Basra in the deep south, armed men assassinated a police officer as he was driving in his car. A child was also killed, and 3 civilians were wounded.

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Sunni Arabs Rejoin Constitution Committee

The Sunni Arab members of the constitution drafting committee ended their boycott on Monday, and say they will attend Tuesday’s meeting. Parliament agreed to provide them bodyguards and conduct an investigation into the killing of two of their number last week.

Reuters reports deaths in the ongoing guerrilla war:

A suicide car bomber killed 12 Iraqi civilians when he detonated his payload in front of a hotel in downtown Baghdad. The hotel suffered heavy damage.

Another suicide car bomber attacked an Iraqi military compound at Nisour Square in western Baghdad, killing 3 Iraqi commandos and injuring 6 others.

In Dura, south Baghdad, armed guerrillas invaded a home, killing four persons including 2 women, and leaving 3 wounded, including a child.

Guerrillas assassinated the head of Samarra’s local council, Taha Ahmad.

Alissa Rubin of the Los Angeles Times adds:

‘
A U.S. soldier also was killed near Samarra when an explosive device detonated under his vehicle, the military said Monday. His name was being withheld until his family had been notified.

There were new efforts to end the violence.

Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi said tribal leaders from the turbulent northern city of Tall Afar and government officials had reached an agreement under which tribal leaders would stop siding with insurgents and all armed men would leave the streets. In exchange, the government will release innocent residents from prison and provide much-needed resources such as electricity and water. ‘

It was announced that guerrillas combatting US troops managed to kill four members of the Georgia National Guard on Sunday.

The religious Shiites who have a majority in parliament and therefore a majority in the constitution drafting committee, are again pressing to have the country called “The Islamic Republic of Iraq.” They argue that Iraqis are “Islamic” and so it is just a recognition of reality. This argument hinges on not making a distinction between “Muslim” (belonging to the religion of Islam) and “Islamic” (exemplifying the ideals and culture of Islam). The majority of Iraqis is Muslim, but the Iraqi state is not necessarily Islamic. Those who don’t fall into the category of orthodox Muslims (Sunni or Shiite) probably amount to 5 percent of the population. There are 750,000 or so Christians, and smaller numbers of Mandaeans (Gnostics), Yezidis (you don’t want to know), and heterodox Turkmen Shiites. And, probably 15 percent or so are secularists of one sort or another; this group includes the Communists. That is, 20 percent of the country isn’t very “Islamic.” It is a significant group, bigger proportionally than African-Americans or Latinos in the United States. A constitution should not lightly disregard the views of 20 percent of the population. The Kurds and the Sunni Arabs are not thrilled about this Khomeinizing language among the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

The new US ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, came out against shariah or Muslim canon law on Monday. The Shiite majority wants to put personal status matters under religious courts, as in Israel and Lebanon. Khalilzad said that the US would oppose this move. (How many votes does the US have in the Iraqi parliament?)

A Kurdish member of the drafting committee objected to language that offered Iraqi citizenship to anyone who was stripped of it after 1963. The passage seemed drafted to exclude Iraqi Jews who fled to Israel in the 1950s. (-al-Hayat)

A joint study by the US Departments of Defense and State concludes that the Iraqi police are infiltrated by members of the guerrilla movement because of poor vetting by the US. It also criticizes a tendency for the US to quickly “train” large numbers of police as “cannon fodder” rather than focusing on quality.

Billmon reads the New York Times cannily and points out that some reporters in Baghdad have waited a year to tell us how discouraged last year’s military and civilian American officials in Iraq were. They referred to Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority neocons as “the Illusionists” for their announced faith that Iraq could be turned into a Jeffersonian democracy with a little elbow grease.

What should be noted is that Bremer’s successor of sorts, John Negroponte was no less an illusionist. He appears to have thought last August that American Marines could make themselves popular with Iraqi Shiites by threatening to raze the shrine of Imam Ali. And he and the new crew at the American embassy in Baghdad seemed to think that they could shoehorn the ex-Baathist CIA asset Iyad Alawi into power by giving him the advantages of incumbency and some money and some old retired CIA guys as campaign managers. That is, their illusion was not Jeffersonian democracy but elected lite authoritarianism.

They didn’t seem to notice that Allawi’s Defense Minister’s constant denunciations of Iran were unpopular in the Shiite south. They did not notice that Allawi’s calls for ever more US bombing of Sunni cities such as Fallujah made him sound to most Iraqis like an Uncle Ahmad, not to mention a bit of a maniac. They didn’t notice that his high-handed lecturing of Grand Ayatollah Sistani on the separation of religion and state made him sound to Iraqi Shiites like an atheist puppet of the US. The Illusionism around Allawi and his twin doberman pinschers, Hazem Shaalan and Naqib al-Falah, was so persuasive that many in the US embassy in Baghdad still hoped in January of 2005 that Allawi could form (perhaps a minority) government and remain prime minister after Jan. 30. In actuality, Allawi’s list got 14 percent of the seats in the Federal parliament and almost nothing in the provincial elections.

It is too soon to know if the illusion well in Baghdad has run dry. No doubt we will be told about a year from now.

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Former British PM John Major Ties Iraq to Bomb Attacks

Former British PM John Major said Monday to the BBC,

‘ “I think what has happened is not that the Iraq war and other policies created that threat, I think it was there and growing, though it was not in full bloom.

“I think it is possibly true that it has made it more potent and more immediate, but having said that, there is absolutely no doubt that we were going to have to confront terrorism at some time.

“And what I suppose you might say about the events of the Middle East is that they have brought it forward and brought it into focus.”

One of the ways that political elites deal with bad news is to develop a joint response to it that seems at least plausible, especially if it is repeated again and again by high officials on television, and which has the effect of deflecting the issue. The Bush administration adopted this tactic to deal with the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after the fall of Saddam. Their talking point was that it was too early to say that the WMD wasn’t there. It might still be found (as if you could hide a centrifuge or a chemical weapons depot). Bush administration officials said this ad nauseum. Sometimes you still hear them say it. The spell of this talking point was first broken in August, 2003, when former National Security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski told Wolf Blitzer that it was “increasingly ludicrous.”

The Blair government’s attempt to simply deny a link between the Iraq War and increased risks of terrorism for London was similarly ludicrous, and the spell has been broken even more quickly, as other members of the political elite refused to play along. Even Blair is said to have winced at the absolute denials of his foreign secretary, Jack Straw.

Only Donald Rumsfeld is now left denying, at least in public, a link between the Iraq War and acts of terrorism.

David Wearing writes from the UK to say that Blair and Straw had earlier acknowledged liberally that the Iraq War raised the risks of terrorism.

‘In the abovementioned post, you say: “I don’t know what was in Straw’s mind, but the connection [between Iraq and the London bombings] is clear as day”

Here’s what we know – with absolute certainty – was at least somewhere in the mind of Jack Straw, and in the mind of Tony Blair, as they categorically denied any connection between Iraq and the recent incidents here in London.

Five weeks before the invasion of Iraq, Britain’s intelligence chiefs warned the government in strong terms that military action would increase the risk of terrorist attacks against Britain by groups such as al-Qaeda. As the UK Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee noted in 2003: “The JIC assessed that al-Qa’eda and associated groups continued to represent by far the greatest terrorist threat to Western interests, and that threat would be heightened by military action against Iraq”.

Later, in 2004, a joint Home Office and Foreign Office dossier, ordered by Tony Blair following the train bombings in Madrid, identified Iraq as a “recruiting sergeant” for extremism. The analysis was that the Iraq war was acting as a key cause of young Britons turning to terrorism.

In 2005, the government was warned yet again, just weeks before the London bombings. The Joint Terrorist Analysis Centre – including officials from MI5, MI6, GCHQ and the police – explicitly linked the Iraq war with an increased risk of terrorist activity in Britain. The report said that “Events in Iraq are continuing to act as motivation and a focus of a range of terrorist-related activity in the UK”.

Ironic that the analysis of MI5, MI6, GCHQ, the police and advisers from the Home and Foreign Offices should now be so forcefully contradicted by Blair’s government. During an interview with the BBC around 18 months ago, when it was becoming obvious that banned WMD would never be found in Iraq, Blair said, “You can only imagine what would have happened if I’d ignored the intelligence and then something terrible had happened”. No comment required.

If Blair really does believe there’s no connection between Iraq and the terror attacks, then he’s changed his mind about that quite recently. In 2003, speaking to the Intelligence and Security Committee, Blair said that, “there was obviously a danger that in attacking Iraq you ended up provoking the very thing you were trying to avoid”. But the risk was worth taking, he went on to say, to deal with the threat posed by WMD. Again, no comment required.

Most of us in Britain never accepted Blair’s current line of argument, and never wanted to take these risks to begin with. On 15 February 2003, hundreds of thousands of us demonstrated in London against the coming war on Iraq. At the time, 79% of Londoners felt that British involvement in the invasion “would make a terrorist attack on London more likely”. In the wake of the London bombings, two-thirds of Britons expressed the view that the invasion of Iraq and the attack on our capital were linked.

Now, after a second attack on London in as many weeks, which might easily have been as bad as the first, I can’t help but notice (as you yourself have done) that my government’s policies are putting me, my fellow Londoners and everyone else in Britain at an increased risk of falling victim to terrorists. What’s worse is that in doing so they’ve been deliberately and repeatedly ignoring the advice of the UK’s intelligence services, departmental advisers and independent experts, as well as strenuously avoiding any honest discussion of the problem, preferring to obscure the issues with self-serving mendacity. As far as I’m concerned, New Labour is clearly failing to uphold its basic duty of care towards us and as such has rendered itself unfit to govern in the most fundamental sense. ‘

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Cole in Bay Area, Mid-October

I’m going to be giving a talk in northern California in mid-October. I often get requests to let organizations know when I’m in the area so they can have me speak. So, I’m letting you know.

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Massive Baghdad Bomb Kills up to 40
Consensus collapsing on Constitution

Al-Zaman/ AFP:

A suicide car bombing killed 40 persons and wounded 25 when the driver detonated his payload near the al-Rashad Police Station in the Mashtal district of southeastern Baghdad, according to sources in the Minsitry of Defense. Among the dead and wounded were a number of policemen. See also Alissa Rubin in the LA Times.

Other incidents: A mortar attack killed a policeman on a Baghdad street near the Ministry of the Interior.

Guerrillas assassinated Captain Imad Hatim Khalaf, the police chief of the middle class Shiite neighborhood of Kadhimiyah in Baghdad while he was driving to work.

Likewise, guerrillas in the northern oil city of Kirkuk assassinated Capt. Nur al-Din Muhammad, an officer in the city’s police corps.

Guerrillas killed a US soldier in West Baghdad.

Guerrillas assassinated Khalis al-Hulub, a member of the provincial governing council of Salahuddin (Tikrit).

In Mosul, guerrillas killed two bodyguards of the Minister of Industry, Usamah al-Najafi.

Near Hilla, guerrillas detonated a bomb, killing a young man and wounding 6 other persons.

In Baiji, US troops arrested four Iraqi policemen, including a first lieutenant, after a roadside bomb exploded near a US convoy at the city gates of southern Baiji.

In Musayyib, 300 Iraqis came out to demonstrate and to demand that US troops not enter their city. Musayyib was the scene of a huge blast that killed nearly a hundred persons two weekends ago.

Not only have the Sunni Arabs not actually ended their boycott of the constitution-writing process, but now the secular Shiites around Iyad Allawi are threatening to drop out. As Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari pointed out, the religious Shiite majority and its Kurdish allies on the committee can report out the draft for a vote by parliament without the support of the Sunni Arabs or Allawi’s list. And, they also have the votes to approve it in parliament. But steamrolling over the Sunni Arabs and secular Shiites just guarantees that resentments will blaze for years to come, fueling the guerrilla war. Moreover, any three provinces can veto the constitution, and the Sunni Arabs could just turn it down. Apparently Zebari is convinced that to delay the finalization of the new constitution until January 15, which is permitted by the Transitional Administrative Law, might create an impression that the political process has stalled and provide an opening for increased activity by the guerrillas. (This sort of thing happened during the months it took to form a government after Jan. 30.) Pressure is also coming from Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani to finish the constitution by August 15. And I suspect the Americans want this deadline to be met, as well. But is it really reasonable to expect a deeply divided political class to craft an entire constitution in only a month or two? And what if the Sunni Arabs do reject it in the referendum? Won’t that be even a bigger check on the political process than delaying the finalization of the text for 6 months?

Xinhua reports that

‘ The Sunni Arab deputy head of Iraq’s constitutional committee expressed his astonishment over a draft constitution text on Sunday. “I have received yesterday an initial document of a draft constitution. I am astonished. I don’t know who wrote it,” Adnan al-Janabi said in a statement. Janabi said he had sent a letter to Humam Hamodi, the Shiite head of the committee, asking for clarification. He accused the committee leadership of violating the principle of reaching agreement by consensus. ‘

If the deputy head of the drafting committee had not even seen the present working draft, you know the fix is in and that backroom deals have already produced the final text. The committee, and the charade of including the Sunni Arabs, is just window dressing.

The Algerian Salafis for Missionizing and Warfare, which is connected to al-Qaeda, called upon Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to kill Ali Bi’l-`Arusi, 62, and Izz al-Din Bi’l-Qadi, the two Algerian diplomats abducted on Thursday from a Baghdad restaurant. The authenticity of the communique could not be verified. The Algerian government fought a civil war with the radical Muslim fundamentalists in that country from 1992 until just a few years ago, a struggle in which over 100,000 persons are estimated to have been killed. My suspicion is that in the 1990s the radical fundamentalists and the government shared the killing equally. The secular-leaning military won, and recent elections have installed moderates. Their message suggests that the Salafis are sore losers. The Salafi group mentioned is probably an iteration of the Armed Islamic Group (French acronym GIA), to which Ahmed Rassam belonged; he attempted to come into the US with a powerful car bomb, intending to blow up LAX, in December of 2000 but was caught at the Canadian border).

A high-level Egyptian commission arrived in Baghdad to help look for the body of Egyptian diplomat Ihab el-Sherif, who had been kidnapped and killed earlier.

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