Informed Comment

Cole in Salon and Truthdig

In Salon.com today, I ask “Did Bush plan to Bomb al-Jazeera?” And present new evidence that Rumsfeld considered the Arabic satellite station’s reporting to be a form of murder.

My article on Rumsfeld’s complicity with Saddam Hussein when he was using chemical weapons is at Truthdig.com, a new site, the force behind which is veteran journalist and truth-teller Bob Scheer.

Cole will be travelling the next week or so. Blog entries will be made, but perhaps at unpredictable times. Email contact chancy. I’ve saved the Achcar & Shalom editorial, for which I’m grateful, for Thursday.

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Wilkerson: Cheney May be a War Criminal

Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff of Colin Powell, told the BBC that Vice President Dick Cheney may be guilty of war crimes for arguing that all restrictions on torturing prisoners should be done away with.

The Wilkerson transcript is here. Money grafs:

>BBC: But you’re talking about the abuse – the alleged abuse – by American forces aren’t you?

I am, and I concluded that we had had an impassioned debate in the statutory process. And in that debate, two sides had participated: one that essentially wanted to do away with all restrictions and the other which said no, Geneva should prevail and the president walked right down the middle.

He made a decision that Geneva would in fact govern all but al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda look-alike detainees. Any other prisoners of course would be governed by traditional methods, international law, Geneva and so forth.

>BBC: Who was calling for doing away with all the normal practices if you like?

Who is right now very publicly lobbying the congress of the United States, advocating the use of terror? The vice-president of the United States . . .

>BBC: And that question of detainee abuse – are you saying that the implicit message allowing it to happen was sanctioned by Dick Cheney – it came from his office?

Well you see two sides of this debate in the statutory process. You see the side represented by Colin Powell, Will Taft, all arguing for Geneva.

You see the other side represented by Yoo, John Yoo from the Department of Justice, Alberto Gonzales – you see the other side being argued by them and you see the president compromising.

Then you see the secretary of defence moving out in his own memorandum to act as if the side that declared everything open, free and anything goes, actually being what’s implemented.

And so what I’m saying is, under the vice-president’s protection, the secretary of defence moved out to do what they wanted to do in the first place even though the president had made a decision that was clearly a compromise . . .

> BBC: If what you say is correct, in your view, is Dick Cheney then guilty of a war crime?

Well, that’s an interesting question – it was certainly a domestic crime to advocate terror and I would suspect that it is – for whatever it’s worth – an international crime as well.

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Shiite Militiamen Terrorize Sunni Arabs
Khalilzad Agrees to Talk to Sunni Guerrillas

Now terrorists are killing Christian (Chaldo-Assyrian) politicians.

The New York Times seems to have become convinced of the credibility of Sunni Arab charges that Shiite religious militiamen have infiltrated the new Iraqi army and security forces, and are conducting a campaign of murder against Sunni Arabs. Since the Bush administration is heavily depending on the Iraqi army and security forces to make Iraq safe as US troops withdraw, the implication is that the Sunni Arabs don’t have much of a future. The same militia-infiltrated forces in Najaf and Karbala have now taken over security details from the Marines, who have departed those cities.

On the other hand, Sunni Arab guerrillas are killing and kidnapping Shiite pilgrims.

US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, in an interview on ABC on Tuesday, said that he was willing to talk to leaders of the Iraqi guerilla movement save for two groups. One was Saddam loyalists and the other was followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Since there are virtually no Saddam loyalists, that exclusion is not important. Since the followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi wouldn’t talk to Khalilzad, and are a small group, that doesn’t matter much either.

Most of the 36 guerrilla groups in Iraq are Iraqi nationalists, Sunni Arab natioanlists, or local Salafi fundamentalists. If Khalilzad can open lines of communication to them, that would be all to the good. Coming on the heels of his announcement that he has been authorized to talk to Iran, it suggests a new pragmatism by the Bush administration in Iraq. These policies sound more like traditional State Department policies, and not at all like the kind of hard line that the civilian leadership of the Defense Department keeps pushing. Khalilzad is making all the right announcements. Let us see how the actual negotiations go.

As Robert Dreyfus implies, Khalilzad is building on the momentum of the Cairo Conference, which made concessions to the Sunni Arabs.

The US military has been planting stories with a positive spin in Arabic-language Iraqi newspapers, and paying for the placement via the Lincoln Group. The Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmad Chalabi, has a newspaper called al-Mu’tamar, which has run the articles as though they were news. Other editors could tell that they were editorials, but did not know they were coming from the Pentagon.

Of course, some of these “positive” articles in Arabic (which are not inaccurate in detail but simply grossly one-sided) may then get translated by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service of the CIA, the articles from which in turn are often picked up by BBC World Monitoring; or Iraqi bloggers may put out the information and perspective so that it gets into English. The Pentagon is forbidden from planting articles in the US press, but this method gets around the prohibition.

The other thing that can be done is to pass an idea for a psy-ops article over to the British military, which then places it in the US press covertly, not being forbidden by UK law from doing so. The Guardian reported that the British military had placed newspaper articles in the US press in the run-up to the Iraq war. The same arrangement gets around laws barring the USG from spying on Americans; they can just have the British MI6 do it and then share the information back with the US government.

Too bad Jeff Jarvis, who is always insisting on having good news from Iraq, can’t read Arabic– these articles are just what he seems to be looking for. Maybe the Lincoln group would agree to send him the English originals. Oh, but Jarvis has already denied that Iraqi writers might be being manipulated by US psy-ops . . .

By the way, Jarvis now claims he did not support the transitional government of Iyad Allawi, and for proof he offers an NPR item that he quoted. OK, if he says so, I accept it and am sorry if I pegged him wrong.

I take it he now regrets that Bush appointed Allawi transitional prime minister, and is hoping that Allawi’s list does poorly in the Dec. 15 election. He hasn’t said so.

But he is being typically over-dramatic when he says I had no basis for the inference. I went back and read his blog for summer-fall 2004 when Allawi was in power. There are constant demands that the press do “positive” stories about Iraq then. Wouldn’t you conclude that that was a sign he was happy with the transitional government? And then he says thank God for the blogger, Omar.

And Omar publishes this guest opinion in November of 2004:

On November 8, 2004, the Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi rightfully realizing that there could be no political or diplomatic solution with the insurgents in Fallujah, he ordered the Iraqi armed forces to storm Fallujah and he called upon the coalition forces to assist.

Allawi and the majority of Iraqis, including a great number of Fallujan citizens know that the Zarkawis and the Iraqi insurgents must be eliminated in order to pave the way for a successful and democratic election process in January 2005.

. . . In the week leading to the American election, the Secretary General of the U.N., Kofi Annan remarked that Fallujah should not be resolved through military action but through a political process . . . Once again, Kofi Annan is on the wrong side of the Iraqis. The Iraqi-American military operation must continue to the bitter end of ridding Fallujah of the extremists and enemies of Iraq, and thereby sleuth once and for all the anima of Saddam.

Dr. Joseph Ghougassian was US Ambassador to Qatar and Advisor in CPA/DoD. His email is Zena92029@yahoo.com

Posted by Omar @ 19:31

So Jarvis is pushing this site, and this site is publishing praise of Allawi for his complicity in leveling Fallujah. But Jarvis now says he didn’t approve of Allawi. But he doesn’t mention the Fallujah campaign, that I could see, at his blog. And he has only bile for Iraqi bloggers like Riverbend who were anti-Allawi. But he praised sites that praised Allawi. But he was against Allawi.

In fact his blog is deliberately hard to decipher as to its politics, except that he announces himself in sync with Andrew Sullivan and Bill Safire but then he says he is a Democrat but the Democrats complain to him when he blasts Kerry as indecisive . . .

If I’m accused of not being able to get a clear picture of where he stands, I plead guilty. But it is because he is his own unreliable narrator.

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Khalilzad to talk to Iranians

Monday in Iraq was characterized by the usual mayhem, much of it with a dark sectarian character. Two prominent members of the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party and a third politician from the Association of Muslim Scholars (hard line Sunni) were assassinated in Baghdad. South of the capital, two Britons of South Asian heritage who had gone on pilgrimage to the Shiite holy city of Karbala were killed in an ambush. northern Iraq, 6 Iranian pilgrims were kidnapped.

In Baqubah four US troops were wounded by a suicide bombing. In Baiji, US troops opened fire when a bomb went off, and they killed a leader of the Shamar tribe, among the larger and more powerful in Iraq. Vice President Ghazi al-Yawir is from the Shamar. So too was one of the suicide bombers who blew up the Radisson SAS in Amman recently. Killing Shamar shaikh = not good.

US ambassador in Baghdad Zalmay Khalilzad is going to start direct talks with the Iranians.

Say what? Wasn’t Scott Ritter saying only last winter that a Bush military attack on Iran was in the offing? What has changed?

Well

1. The security situation in Iraq is deteriorating over time.

2. The Shiite religious parties won the Jan. 30 elections, which was not what Bush had hoped for.

3. The Neocons are going to jail or given sinecures, and their star is falling faster than the Chicxulub meteor that killed off the dinosaurs.

Veteran journalist Jim Lobe has put it all together in a tight analysis I haven’t seen elsewhere.

It is the return of Realism in Washington foreign policy. You need the Iranians, as I maintain, for a soft landing in Iraq? So you do business with the Iranians. This opening may help explain why Ahmad Chalabi went to Tehran before he went to Washington, and why he was given such a high-level (if unphotographed) reception in Washington.

Likewise, it helps explain the Cairo Conference sponsored by the Arab League, the results of which were an effort to reach out to the Sunni Arab guerrillas. The Iraqi government even recognized that it was legitimate for the guerrillas to blow up US troops! This is a startling admission for a government under siege with very few allies. But it recategorizes the Sunni Arab leaders from being terrorists to being a national liberation force. You could imagine dealing with, and bringing in from the cold, mere nationalists. Terrorists are poison.

The Neocons began by wanting to destroy the Sunni Arabs of Iraq and their Baath Party, and then going on to overthrow the ayatollahs in Iran. They inducted Bush and Cheney into this over-ambitious and self-contradictory plan, which depended on putting the Shiite Iraqis in power in Baghdad. But wouldn’t the Sunni Arabs violently object? Wouldn’t the Iraqi Shiites establish warm relations with Tehran.

Of course. The Neocons kept getting their promoters to proclaim how brilliant they are. But Wolfowitz isn’t exactly well published as an academic, and Feith is notoriously as thick as two blocks of wood. Their plan was stupid. It is hard to escape the conclusion that they are, as well.

And now the stupid plan has collapsed, as anyone could have foreseen (I did, in 2002). And Realism is reasserting itself.

The two beneficiaries of the 180 degree turn by Bush’s ship of state toward the fabled shores of Reality? The Neo-Baath of Sunni Iraq and the ayatollahs in Tehran.
But who cares? If the US dealing with them can get our troops home and prevent a regional war that screws up the whole world, it will be well worth it.

Ambassador Khalilzad has all along been the most pragmatic of the Neocons. There was even a time in the mid-1990s when he was willing to deal with the Talaban to get a gas pipeline built from Turkmenistan. His pragmatism (which the Neocons may well castigate as a lack of principle) will stand him in good stead in his talks with Tehran. The thing you always worry about is that it is already too late.

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US Air Power to Replace Infantry in Iraq;
Distant President Trapped in Utopianism

Veteran journalist Seymour Hersh is reporting in the New Yorker that the Bush administration has decided to draw down ground troops in Iraq. Knowledgeable observers strongly suspect that this step would produce a meltdown and possibly even civil war in Iraq (which could become a regional war). Bush’s strategy may be to try to control the situation using air power.

Readers and colleagues often ask me why a Shiite majority and the Kurdish Peshmergas couldn’t just take care of the largely Sunni Arab guerrillas. The answer is that the Sunni Arabs were the officer corps and military intelligence, and the more experienced NCOs, and they know how to do things that the Shiites and Kurds don’t know how to do. The Sunni Arabs were also the country’s elite and have enormous cultural capital and managerial know-how. Sunni Arab advantages will decline over time, but they are there for this generation, and no one should underestimate the guerrilla leadership. If the Americans weren’t around, all those 77 Hungarian T-72 tanks that the new Iraqi military now has would be in guerrilla hands so fast it would make your head spin.

Shiite leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim complained to the Washington Post that the US itself was holding back the Iraqi army (which seems to be mostly Kurds and Shiites) from going after the Sunni Arab guerrillas in a concerted way. But this prospect is the other reason that the Shiites and the Kurds can’t just take care of the Sunni Arabs. If one isn’t careful, it would turn into a hot civil war on ethnic grounds (I don’t mean 38 dead a day, I mean it would be ten times that). And if the Shiites and Kurds massacre Sunni Arabs in the course of fighting the guerrillas, the Saudi, Jordanian and Sunni Syrian publics are not going to take that lying down and volunteer fighters would flock to Iraq in real numbers.

This diary over at Daily Kos discusses both Hersh’s reporting on this military issue and what his sources are saying about Bush and the White House.

Hersh reports that US Air Force officers are alarmed by the implication that Iraqi targeters may be calling down air strikes using US warplanes. I remember that Iraqi troops (mainly Kurds) were allowed to call down airstrikes in Tal Afar last August, and if my recollection serves, the Tal Afar operation may even have been conceived as an opportunity for Iraqi troops to get practice in doing so. They levelled whole neighborhoods of the Sunni Turkmen (many of whom had thrown in with Saddam in the old days).

The Air Force officers are right to be alarmed. It has been obvious to me for some time that US air power will be used to try to keep the guerrillas from taking over Iraq as the ground troops depart. This is why last August I argued for keeping some US Special Operations forces embedded with the new Iraqi army, since I felt that the US military should remain in control of the use of American air power (i.e. the laser targetting should be done by Navy Seals and others, not by Iraqis).

Likewise, I argued that the US should only make this airstrike capability available for defensive operations. Say that the 1920 Revolution Brigades got up a militia force to march on Hilla from Mahmudiyah, and the brigade made short work of the Iraqi infantry sent against it. In such a situation, the US should use air power to stop the neo-Baathists and Salafis from massacring the Shiites of Hilla. But the US Air Force should not be a toy in the hands of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who will most likely be the most powerful politician in Iraq come Dec. 16. If one keeps some Special Ops forces in Iraq, it would require a continued ability by the US to rescue them if anything went wrong, which is one reason both I and Congressman Murtha envisaged a continued over-the-horizon US presence in the region for a while.

But Hersh’s sources in Washington strongly give the impression that George W. Bush is incapable of making coherent policy in Iraq, and is fixated on his legacy there 20 years down the line.

Even Bush allies such as former transitional Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, however, are already bringing his legacy into question. Allawi asserts that governmental abuse of human rights in Iraq today is even worse than in the time of Saddam. If yours truly had said something like that, Jeff Jarvis would have called me pond scum and Andrew Sullivan would have given me a Sontag award. Jarvis and Sullivan were big supporters of Allawi (who is alleged to have been involved in a terrorist attack in Baghdad in the 1990s that blew up a school bus full of children). So what do they have to say now that the bad news is coming from the secular, pro-American politicians and they aren’t playing pollyanna any more? By the way, President Jalal Talabani rejected Allawi’s charges, but then he heads the government that Allawi is critiquing.

Bush’s legacy as a builder of democracy and promoter of rights in Iraq, all he has left going for him, was dealt another black eye by the emergence of a video that appears to show private security guards in Iraq firing at civilian vehicles for sport out on the road to the airport.

Hersh appeared on Wolf Blitzer on Sunday, and Wolf read out this quote from the New Yorker piece by Hersh:

” ‘The president is more determined than ever to stay the course,’ the former defense official said. ‘He doesn’t feel any pain. Bush is a believer in the adage, “People may suffer and die, but the Church advances.” ‘ He said that the president had become more detached, leaving more issues to Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney. ‘They keep him in the gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway,’ the former defense official said.”

Hersh goes on to tell Blitzer that Bush disparages any information about Iraq that does not fit his preconceived notions, and that he feels he has a (perhaps divine) mission to bring democracy to the country. Hersh’s inside sources paint a president who is detached and in the grip of profound utopian delusions, which Hersh charitably characterizes as “idealistic.”

Congress really has to step in here. Senators and representatives should demand that Bush get the ground troops out without turning control of the US air force over to Shiite clerics like Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. Presidents cannot do anything without money, and Congress controls the money. The wiser and more knowledgeable heads on both sides of the aisle have to start telling Bush “No!” when he comes to them asking for another $100 billion so he can level another Sunni Arab city. He is counting on the public punishing “no” votes on military affairs. But the American public would at this point almost certainly be grateful for it. And apart from telling him “No!” they should put strict reporting requirements on how the money is used. For instance, only defensive operations should any longer be funded.

Let me finish with a word to W. As for your legacy two decades from now, George, let me clue you in on something–as a historian. In 20 years no Iraqis will have you on their minds one way or another. Do you think anyone in Egypt or Israel is still grateful to Jimmy Carter for helping bring to an end the cycle of Egyptian-Israeli wars? Jimmy Carter powerfully affected the destinies of all Egyptians and Israelis in that key way. Most people in both countries have probably never heard of him, and certainly no one talks about the first Camp David Accords anymore except as a dry historical subject. The US pro-Israel lobby is so ungrateful that they curse Carter roundly for all the help he gave Israel. Human beings don’t have good memories for these things, which is why we have to have professional historians, a handful of people who are obsessed with the subject. And I guarantee you, George, that historians are going to be unkind to you. You went into a major war over a non-existent nuclear weapons program. Presidents’ reputations don’t survive things like that. Historians are creatures of documents and precision. A wild exaggeration with serious consequences is against everything they stand for as a profession. So forget about history and destiny and the divine will. You are at the helm of the Exxon Valdez and it is headed for the shoals. You can’t afford to daydream about future decades.

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