Informed Comment

Iraqi Guerrillas Made Key Demands of CIA at Cairo Conference

Al-Hayat says that [Arabic URL] informed sources maintained to it that the intelligence services of the Arab states, of Iraq, of the guerrilla movement in Iraq, and of the US, conducted discussions on the sidelines of the National Reconciliation Conference for Iraq held recently in Cairo, on how to isolate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his radical Salafi (fundamentalist Sunni) faction in Iraq.

Iraqi guerrilla groups such as “The Islamic Army,” “The Bloc of Holy Warriors,” and “The Revolution of 1920 Brigades” conveyed their conditions behind the scenes. (Despite the Islamist names of these groups, they are probably mostly neo-Baathist.) Among their demands are 1) working to end the foreign occupation, 2) compensation to the Iraqis for the damages arising from the American invasion; 3) the release of prisoners; and 4) building political and military institutions that are not subservient to American and regional influence.

These guerrilla groups said they would never turn al-Zarqawi over to the Americans even if Washington promised to leave Iraq completely. They might, however, turn him over to a legitimate Iraqi government if the Americans were no longer there.

The Iraqi guerrilla groups maintain that al-Zarqawi’s group is fabulously wealthy, and that he uses his wealth to entice other guerrilla groups to share their intelligence with him. He then bankrolls their operations against US troops.

They said that many Iraqi guerrillas are deeply dismayed at the al-Zarqawi group’s tactic of targetting civilians and Shiites, and that significant numbers have deserted him to join the Iraqi group, The Islamic Army. Al-Zarqawi’s “Qaeda in Mesopotamia” is angry about the desertions and refers to such Iraqis as “apostates.” Nevertheless, The Islamic Army provides security to those who have left Zarqawi. Zarqawi is also deterred from killing the “apostates” because it would set the Sunni Arab guerrilla groups to fighting one another and “open the gates of hell.” In fact, there had in the past been a few instances of reprisal killings by Zarqawi’s men of those who switched groups, and the resulting tensions were so severe that Zarqawi concluded an agreement not to pursue and punish those who left his group to join another one.

The sources say that Zarqawi’s ability to provide suicide bombers derives from his missionaries among the Jihadi Salafi groups. It also derives from his vast wealth.

The sources say that the guerrilla movement has not yet taken a stance toward the Cairo Agreements, and is waiting to see if they are implemented.

Cole: It struck many observers as very strange that the government of Ibrahim Jaafari accepted the demand for a timetable for Coalition troop withdrawal, and also acquiesced in the principle that guerrilla attacks on US troops were legitimate as a form of resistance to foreign occupation. Three important developments may explain Jaafari’s flexibility here. First, his list has an election on Dec. 15, and he needs to burnish nationalist credentials. Second, his list now included the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, who wants a quick US withdrawal and whose Mahdi Army has clashed with GIs. Third, we now know that back channel negotiations with the guerrilla movement were taking place in Cairo, and these provisions may have been an attempt to reach out to them and bring them in from the cold. Such a move would be in the interest not only of Jaafari, but also of the United States, and the latter may therefore not have protested very much about what were after all pretty painful agreements. (It seems to me unprecedented for a government fighting a guerrilla movement actually to acknowledge the legitimacy of the guerrilla group’s attacks on it and its allies!) Al-Hayat thought that the timetable leading to US withdrawal in 2007 was actually put forward by Ambassador Khalilzad.

The tensions, over policy toward civilians and Shiites, and over defections from Zarqawi’s group to Iraqi neo-Baathist ones, revealed in the al-Hayat article ring true; there have been some indications of these problems in previous press reporting.

I’m afraid, however, that the neo-Baathists want to take over Iraq, and are ruthless about the means, and that they will continue to want to do this after the US leaves.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Ministry of Interior Moles Busted
Wave of Kidnappings, Killings in Mosul, Tikrit

Al-Zaman: American forces killed Shaikh Abdullah al-Ani, the preacher at the mosque in the town of Qaim, near the Syrian border. [This killing of a respected cleric will be causing us trouble for years to come.]

DPA: Iraqi authorities announced that they had busted up 3 terrorist cells operating in Baghdad. Two of them were being run by 2 officials of the Ministry of the Interior! The MoI in Iraq is equivalent to the US FBI, so this would be like having J. Edgar Hoover unwittingly employ at a high level members of the Weathermen bombers back in the 1960s. The third was being run by the head of an investment firm. You wonder if he was manipulating the market with his bombing targets. The cells were operating in the Ghazaliyah and al-Jihad districts of the capital. Although the announcement was probably made to show progress in identifying and breaking up terror cells, I don’t find the news that the Baathists continue to penetrate the Iraqi government very hopeful. It reminds me too much of the ARVN officers who were secretly working for the other side in Vietnam.

Al-Zaman: Guerrillas killed a member of the Kurdistan Democratic Party after kidnapping him in Mosul. The police commander of Ninevah Province announced that bombings had declined 80 percent in Mosul, whereas there had been a big jump in the number of kidnappings. On Wednesday guerrillas had kidnapped a cosmetic surgeon and his wife while they were on their way home.

In Suwayrah, Kut Province, two car bombs were discovered before they could be detonated. (Kut is in southeastern Iraq and has an overwhelmingly Shiite population, who are on the lookout for Baathist saboteurs and willingly turn them in. This willingness is the main difference in the number of bombings in the south as opposed to the center-north of the country.)

In Baghdad Kadhim Talal Husain, assistant dean at the School of Education at Mustansiriyah University, was assassinated with his driver in the Salikh district. Guerrillas killed an engineer, Asi Ali, from Tikrit. They also killed Shaikh Hamid ‘Akkab, a clan elder of a branch of the Dulaim tribe in Tikrit. His mother was also killed in the attack. Two other Dulaim leaders have been killed in the past week and a half.

Guerrillas near Hawijah launched an attack that left 6 dead, including 4 Iraqi soldiers. One of them was from the Jubur tribe and was deputy commander of the Hawijah garrison.

Two hundred members of the Batawi clan of the Dulaim demonstrated in Baghdad on Friday, protesting the killing of their clan elder, Shaikh Kadhim Sarhid and 4 of his sons, by gunmen wearing Iraqi army uniforms. (This is a largely Sunni Arab clan, and some Sunni observers have accused Shiite elements in the government of being behind the assassination; it is more likely the work of Sunni Arab guerrillas punishing the Batawi leaders for cooperating with the Dec. 15 elections.)

Al-Zaman: The Iraqi High Electoral Commission on Friday denied a request of the Debaathification Commission to exclude 51 individuals from running on party lists in the Dec. 15 elections on grounds of having been sufficiently involved in Baath activities to warrant their being excluded from civil office. The Commission said it had no legal grounds for such an exclusion.

This item is a small one and easily missed. But in my view it is highly significant. The Debaathification Commission had been pushed by Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress very hard, and had pushed many Sunni Arabs into the arms of the guerrillas. Chalabi has been increasingly marginalized within Iraq, however, despite his ties of clientelage with Washington and Tehran. He is no longer in the dominant Shiite list, the United Iraqi Alliance, and won’t have many seats in the new parliament. Some 2,000 junior officers of the old Baath army have been recalled to duty in recent months, something Chalabi would have blocked if he could have. Now the Electoral Commission is refusing to punish people for mere past Baath Party membership. The situation in Iraq is only going to get better this way. If someone committed a crime against humanity, prosecute the person. If he or she did not, then they should have all the same rights as other Iraqis.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that a key eyewitness in the trial of Saddam Hussein for a 1982 massacre at Dujail has died. A team from the court managed to take his deposition before he died. The trial begins again Nov.28.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Britain: Israel Breaking Law, Spreading Terrorism by Jerusalem Policies

The British government presented a secret report to the European Union in which it accused Israel of violating international law and its obligations to the Roadmap by its aggressive annexationist policies in Jerusalem. The Guardian got hold of the document and reports:

“A confidential Foreign Office document accuses Israel of rushing to annex the Arab area of Jerusalem, using illegal Jewish settlement construction and the vast West Bank barrier, in a move to prevent it becoming a Palestinian capital.
In an unusually frank insight into British assessments of Israeli intentions, the document says that Ariel Sharon’s government is jeopardising the prospect of a peace agreement by trying to put the future of Arab East Jerusalem beyond negotiation and risks driving Palestinians living in the city into radical groups. The document, obtained by the Guardian, was presented to an EU council of ministers meeting chaired by the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, on Monday with recommendations to counter the Israeli policy, including recognition of Palestinian political activities in East Jerusalem.”

This news item makes it worthwhile for me to repost this oldie but goodie. The British report is if anything too conservative in only considering the effect on the Palestinians of their being ethnically cleansed from Jerusalem. When the last Arab is gone and the city is 100 percent Jewish, there is going to be a howl of outrage from the Muslim world that will make September 11 look like a minor incident.

————————————

Monday, July 11, 2005

Jerusalem and Terrorism

The Ariel Sharon government in Israel has announced that it will build a huge wall on someone else’s land through Jerusalem, cutting off 55,000 Arabs from the city (they’ll have to go through nasty Israeli checkpoints every day to get into their own city!)

This is land theft on a massive scale. Worse, it is theft on a stage of sacred space that affects the sentiments of over a billion people. Whether Westerners like it or not, Jerusalem is considered by Muslims their third holiest city, and Israeli theft of the whole thing drives a lot of them up the wall. A partitioned Jerusalem where the Arab east is connected to the West Bank is the only route to peace. Sharon in his usual aggressive, grabby way, is trying to make that forever an impossibility.

And, folks, this sort of thing, which the Washington Post didn’t even notice, may very well get you and me killed. I think what Sharon is doing is morally and politically wrong to begin with. But I sure as hell resent the possibility that I or my family is going to get blown up because of it.

You want to know what causes terrorism? Well, in part it is caused by deviance, by people so warped that they will take innocent lives in a wicked quest to achieve some political or religious goal. In part, terrorists are like bank robbers. Bank robbers desperatedly want to be rich, but for one reason or another think they are very unlikely to get rich through their ordinary activities. Likewise, terrorists, break the law, both moral and civil, to get what they want. In that sense they are criminals, or, as I say, deviants. But they are not motiveless and do not act out of free-floating generalized hatred for the most part. They have a specific goal in mind.

Terrorism is also caused when one country militarily occupies another country. That is, it is the military occupation that provides a lot of terrorists with their goal (i.e. to free their country from foreign military occupation). Chicago political scientist Robert Pape has shown that the vast majority of suicide bombings in the past 30 years have come in response to foreign military occupation (or what the terorists perceived as such). Back in the late 50s and early 60s, the Algerians and the French were locked in such a struggle. The French killed nearly a million Algerians (in a population of 11 million), and the Algerians blew up a lot of French. When the French recognized Algeria as an independent country in 1962, the struggle quickly subsided and by 1963 Algeria wasn’t even a big subject in French newspapers.

The Israeli military occupation of Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza from 1967 has caused an enormous amount of terrorism in the world. It hasn’t been the only such source by any means. The Tamil Tigers, a group based in Sri Lanka (used to be called Ceylon), blew up Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and engaged in many other terrorist operations in Sri Lanka and India. It is a Marxist group and in some ways pioneered the suicide bombing. Because Sri Lanka and its concerns seeem so remote to most Americans, most people here don’t even know about the Tamil Tigers. But if the US went in and militarily occupied the Tamil parts of Sri Lanka, all of a sudden we’d be seeing bombs go off against US targets. I guarantee it. That is not to say it would be right. But it is to say that that is how reality works (reality cannot be simply manufactured in the White House, contrary to what Scooter Libby thinks).

The Israeli Jerusalem Barrier project will have similar effects. It keeps inside itself a major Israeli settlement on Palestinian land that Sharon has recently announced he will greatly expand (probably using American money at least in part).

Because al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers do not speak in the language of Palestinian nationalism, it has been possible for certain quarters to obscure to the US public that they are absolutely manically fixated on the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem. This is what Bin Laden meant way back in the 1990s when he denounced the foreign military occupation of “the three holy cities.” Here is what Bin Laden wrote in 1998 when he declared war on the US:

‘ Third, if the Americans’ aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews’ petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel’s survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula. ‘

If this is a big part of what is driving the radical Muslim fundamentalists’ violence, then Sharon’s announcement on Sunday is guaranteed to produce a terrorist strike. If what Sharon is doing were the right thing, morally and politically, then he should do it anyway and we’ll just soldier on against the terrorists. But it is wrong in the first place, wrong morally, and wrong in international law and an insult to the United States in completely departing from the roadmap.

How obsessed Bin Laden & company are with what goes on in Palestine is obvious, as I said last week, in the 9/11 commission report:

‘ According to KSM [Khalid Shaikh Muhammad], Bin Ladin had been urging him to advance the date of the attacks. In 2000, for instance, KSM remembers Bin Ladin pushing him to launch the attacks amid the controversy after then-Israeli opposition party leader Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. KSM claims Bin Ladin told him it would be enough for the hijackers simply to down planes rather than crash them into specific targets. KSM says he resisted the pressure.

KSM claims to have faced similar pressure twice more in 2001.According to him, Bin Ladin wanted the operation carried out on May 12, 2001, seven months to the day after the Cole bombing. KSM adds that the 9/11 attacks had originally been envisioned for May 2001. The second time he was urged to launch the attacks early was in June or July 2001, supposedly after Bin Ladin learned from the media that Sharon would be visiting the White House. On both occasions KSM resisted, asserting that the hijacking teams were not ready. Bin Ladin pressed particularly strongly for the latter date in two letters stressing the need to attack early.The second letter reportedly was delivered by Bin Ladin’s son-in-law,Aws al Madani. ‘

That is why our press and politicians do us an enormous disservice by not putting the Israeli announcement about the Jerusalem Barrier on the front page. This sort of action is a big part of what is driving the terrorists (and of course Sharon himself is a sort of state-backed terrorist anyway). The newspapers and television news departments should be telling us when we are about to be in the cross-fire between the aggressive, expansionist, proto-fascist Likud Coalition and the paranoid, murderous, violent al-Qaeda and its offshoots.

Eisenhower called up DeGaulle and told him to get the hell out of Algeria, on a short timetable, or else. I wish Bush had Eisenhower’s spine when it came to dealing with Ariel Sharon.

posted by Juan @ 7/11/2005 11:06:00 AM

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Cruel Thanksgiving in Iraq
Over 50 Dead

Over 50 Iraqis were killed and 47 wounded in separate attacks on Thursday.

In Mahmudiyah just south of Baghdad, a bomber detonated his payload outside a hospital, killing some 30 persons and wounding 27. Among the wounded were 4 US GIs.

AFP reports, “Also, the US military reported the deaths of two servicemen in a roadside bombing southwest of Baghdad, while four American soldiers were killed in a series of incidents on Wednesday.”

Shootings and bombings in Hilla, Baghdad, Baiji and Hawijah accounted for the rest of the day’s death toll.

Former National Security Council staffer Daniel Benjamin, among the more knowledgeable observers of al-Qaeda in the US, argues that VP Richard Bruce Cheney’s nightmare of an al-Qaeda-dominated Sunni Arab heartland in Iraq is just not plausible. All I would add is that the longer US ground troops occupy Sunni Arab territory, the slightly more likely Cheney’s scenario becomes. That is, Cheney is making the argument as a reason to keep ground troops in Iraq. It is the other way around, Dick.

Cheney’s hard line speeches are no longer playing well in the hustings, in any case. His approval numbers in polls are even lower than Bush’s, and Bush’s are very low for a president at this stage of his second term.

The Guardian explains more of the background of Bush’s plot to bomb the Aljazeera offices in Doha. It was at the height of the fighting in Iraq, both in Fallujah and the Shiite south, in April of 2004, and the Pentagon and Bush were probably afraid of losing Iraq altogether. Aljazeera was getting out the word of high civilian casualties in Fallujah, creating an outcry and prompting threats to resign among the US-appointed Interim Governing Council politicians. The plot is, of course, odious, if the evidence for it stands up, and I would argue that it was criminal. The FBI has busted mafiosi for plotting out murders over spaghetti in restaurants in Queens. How is this different?

Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV has charged that UK PM Tony Blair was duped by the war party in Washington. They promised him a push to disarm Iraq via the United Nations, he argues, but all along intended to have a war into which they would drag the UK, UNSC resolution or no. Wilson is a Washington insider, and his account undoubtedly reflects conversations with officials or former officials in the know.

With kidnappings and killings of foreign workers in Afghanistan on the rise, some observers are worried about it going the way of Iraq.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

White Phosphorus Round-up

George Monbiot of the Guardian weighs in on the current state of the debate on the US military’s use of white phosphorus at Fallujah.

I think he is too categorical about many ambiguous issues. Long-time readers know that I am from a military family, and I want to be very careful about charges made against US troops, especially of behaving in ways they knew to have been illegal. Monbiot argues for the latter. I don’t think he has proved his case.

By the way, Scott Peterson of CSM went back to Fallujah fairly recently and concluded that “the battle of Fallujah has yet to be won,” and that the security situation there is still very chancy.

My own discussion of the white phosphorus issue when it first broke is here. I generally stand by it, though as usual, the US military shot itself in the foot by the way in which it initially denied and then had to acknowledge the story. I should be clear that I think the US ought to sign the protocol banning the use of incendiary bombs, and I oppose their use. The charge that is being made, however, is that WP use is already forbidden in US law and US military regulations by virtue of the chemical weapons ban, and that the US military knew this and employed it anyway.

I said last Friday:

“The US military is puzzled about the outcry over the use of white phosphorus at Fallujah. After all, a 500-pound bomb is also destructive. My guess? You can’t go to war against Saddam on the grounds that he has stockpiles of chemical weapons, and then turn around and use incendiary bombs of a sort that much of the world regards as a form of chemical weapon. It is the hypocrisy factor. Not to mention that the international community is trying to get such weapons banned.”

This analysis is borne out by the condemnation on Thursday of WP use in Iraq by the Russian Parliament. The parliamentarians said that they “consider the use, under cover of the noble aims of the fight against terrorism, of any type of weapon banned by international conventions, particularly phosphorus bombs, as absolutely unacceptable.”

This is a public relations issue, not an issue of war crimes, as Monbiot and many others apparently want to have it.

On to the article:

*Monbiot maintains that the the Battle Book, published by the US Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, says that use of white phosphorus “against personnel targets” is against the law of war. [Cole: We'd need to see the text, and know more about military procedures, here. Use of incendiary weapons against *civilian* personnel is forbidden. I do not know if the Battle Book really widened it from there, or why, or what its legal standing is to do so.]

*Monbiot argues that although white phosphorus as an incendiary weapon is covered by a protocol that the US has not signed, it does have toxic lung effects that very possibly justify its categorization as a chemical weapon. [Cole: I'm not qualified to pronounce on this subject, but I do not believe any international forum has actually held that white phosphorus is forbidden on grounds of being a chemical weapon. See my posting above for the precise protocols involved. Note that the British have also used WP in Iraq, and Col. Tim Collins defended it on Friday.]

*Monbiot says that there may have been tens of thousands of civilians left in Fallujah when the US launched its assault, which damaged 2/3s of the buildings in the city. Use of thermobaric weapons in such a context is certainly questionable and very possibly illegal. [Cole: I don't think there were as many as 60,000 civilians left in the city at the time the US launched its assault. Most observers thought it was closer to 5,000. Given the immense fire power deployed, civilian casualties would have been much higher if there had been so many civilians left. Moreover, as long as US forces did not actively target civilians with white phosphorus in the assault, they were not acting criminally in the light of US law or military regulations. White phosphorus cannot burn through concrete and wouldn't have been very useful as an assault weapon against guerrillas holed up in such places. It seems to have been used in part to spook them and get them on the run.]

*The evidence given by Italian television channel RAI as to the effects of white phosphorus in Fallujah, of photographs of decomposing bodies, is not dispositive. The bodies pictured are simply what dead bodies look like after a while. [I agree with Monbiot about this.]

*Monbiot accepts journalist and film maker Gabriele Zamparini’s characterization of a US Defense Department document he discovered recording a conversation between Kurdish fighters that spoke of Saddam’s own use of white phosphorus as “a chemical weapon.” [Cole: As many web commentators have pointed out, this document is not a Pentagon-generated report, but simply a Pentagon record of a third-party conversation. No known Pentagon-generated document issuing from the US military characterizes white phosphorus as a chemical weapon.

A big irony: Kurdish troops took part in the Fallujah assault. If the Kurds do want to continue to charge that Saddam was deploying WP as a chemical weapon, then they made themselves open to the same charge from Sunni Arabs in 2004. This irony is also an argument against too much self-righteousness when it comes to Iraq.]

*Monbiot: All this occurs in a context of illegal warfare in general, since the US and Britain had no casus belli for their war on Iraq and it was not authorized by the UN Security Council.

[Cole: I agree that the invasion in 2003 was illegal. However, the assault on the guerrillas in Fallujah was not illegal. It had a UN Security Council resolution behind it authorizing Coalition troops to carry out such operations, and recognizing the transitional government of Iyad Allawi, which also backed the operation. What was done to Fallujah was so horrible that it is now often forgotten that there was every reason to think that the city was a base for the worst kinds of terrorism against innocent civilians in Baghdad and Karbala; there were very bad characters there. Black and white depictions of the Marines as villains and the guerrillas as good guys are silly and morally poisonous. If I had known the full extent of the damage that would be done to the city, I would have been against the Fallujah campaign; it is just terrible counter-insurgency tactics for one thing, and was a humanitarian disaster. But to say that the US military wilfully contravened its own regulations and knowingly broke US and international law on chemical weapons by deploying white phosphorus there would have to be proven from better evidence than has been presented.]

Since exactly what I am arguing seems to be hard for some readers to understand, I just have to repeat that I am challenging the narrative that the US government recognizes white phosphorus as a chemical weapon; that it is so categorized in the convention banning chemical weapons; or that US military commanders deployed it in contravention of US law despite knowing or believing that it was illegal. That is, if you actually put the officers in charge of the operation in the docket, I am saying that no conviction could be obtained. It is worth saying, because allegations to the contrary are being seriously made by serious persons.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Dulaim Chief’s Murder Splits Iraqis

Guerrillas detonated another bomb in Baghdad on Tuesday, killing 2 and wounding another 2.

The murder of Khadim Sarhid al-Hamaiyim, leader of a branch of the Dulaim tribe, on the outskirts of Baghdad, has been interpreted in different ways by Iraq’s ethnic groups. The hard line Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars pointed out that the attackers had been wearing Iraqi army uniforms, and said that the attack was the work of fanatical Shiites who had infiltrated the Iraqi military. A police major named Falah al-Muhammadawi replied that uniforms are easily bought in today’s Iraq, and even official army vehicles are often stolen. Al-Muhammadawi was trying to convince us that the Iraqi army was not behind the killing, but I fear he has only convinced us that the security situation in Baghdad is truly awful.

You could easily construct a narrative wherein al-Hamaiyim was killed by Sunni Arab guerrillas to punish his brother for being willing to run for parliament. The guerrillas have forbidden Sunni Arabs from participating in politics under the shadow of foreign occupation. But it is also possible that Shiite militiamen who had joined the army were extracting revenge for the alliance with Saddam in which some tribal leaders had acquiesced.

Al-Sharq al-Awasat/ AFP is reporting that young Shiite nationalist Muqtada al-Sadr has given blanket permission to his own followers to participate in the elections. He said he hoped that they would hasten the departure of the “Occupying forces.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Bush as Press Assassin?
Baathist in a Mirror

The Mirror broke the story on Tuesday that a secret British memo demonstrates that George W. Bush wanted to bomb Aljazeera’s offices in Doha, Qatar, in spring of 2004. The subject came up with Prime Minister Tony Blair of the UK, and Blair is said to have argued Bush out of it.

Despite attempts of British officials to muddy the waters by suggesting that Bush was joking, another official who had seen the memo insisted, “Bush was deadly serious, as was Blair. That much is absolutely clear from the language used by both men.”

The US military bombed the Kabul offices of Aljazeera in mid-November, 2001.

The US military hit the Aljazeerah offices in Baghdad on the 9th of April, 2003, a year Bush’s conversation with Blair.* That attack killed journalist Tarek Ayoub, who had a 3 year old daughter. He had said earlier, “We’ve told the Pentagon where all our offices are in Iraq and hung giant banners outside them saying `TV.”’ Given what we now know about Bush’s intentions, that may have been a mistake.

When the US and the UN shoe-horned old-time CIA asset Iyad Allawi into power as transitional prime minister, he promptly banned Aljazeera in Iraq. The channel still did fair reporting on Iraq, finding ways of buying video film and doing enlightening telephone interviews.

There have long been rumors that the Bush administration has pressured the government of Qatar to close the channel down.

One of the misdeeds attributed to Syria or pro-Syrian forces is the attempt to assassinate the Lebanese journalist and fixture on LBC, the Lebanese satellite channel, May Shidyaq (Chidiac). If the British report is true, Bush really is just a Baathist in the mirror.

Aljazeera is a widely misunderstood Arabic television channel that is mainly characterized by a quaint 1950s-style pan-Arab nationalism. It is not a fundamentalist religious channel, though it does host one old-time Muslim Brother, Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Its main peculiarity in local terms is that it will air all sides of a political issue and allow frank criticism of Middle Eastern politicians as well as of Western ones. It is the only place in the Arab media where one routinely hears Israeli spokesmen (speaking very good Arabic, typically) addressing their concerns and point of view to Arab audiences.

Most of Aljazeera’s programming is presented by natty men in business suits or good-looking, chic Arab women in fashionable Western clothes. (I see the anchors every day and am stricken at the idea of them being blown to smithereens by an American “accidental” bombing!) A lot of the programming is Discovery Channel-style documentaries.

The news is often criticial of the United States, though the journalists like controversy and are perfectly capable of asking fundamentalists and nationalists from the region very hard questions. The channel is one of the few places where you can sometimes see frank debate among Sunni Arab, Shiite and Kurdish Iraqis (the Lord knows we don’t see it on US news!) Some Aljazeera journalists may have been sympathetic to radical Muslim groups, but mainly on nationalist and anti-imperialist grounds. These people don’t look like adherents of political Islam for the most part.

Ironically, after one of the early-morning Aljazeera news broadcasts EST on Wednesday that discussed the Bush plot against the channel, the next show was about recently released American movies, including “Jarhead” (about a Marine during the Gulf War), which showcased the films enthusiastically and may as well have been an infomercial. It was jarring, the effusiveness about American soft power after the admission of the dark side of US military power.

Plotting to assassinate civilian journalists in a friendly country is certainly against the law, and if Bush is ever impeached, this charge will certainly figure in the trial. Who knows, maybe the murder of Tarek Ayoub will be added to the charges. His daughter must be 5, now.

There is a detailed and very valuable timeline of Bush administration- Aljazeera relations at Booman Tribune.

—

*oops, I had misread the date as 2004 in an earlier version

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off