Sistani, the UIA and the Elections

Anthony Shadid on Sunday in WaPo captured the edgy reality of life on the ground in Iraq in the build-up to the elections, and the anxieties of the Sunni Arabs before the advance of the Shiite political tsunami.

The death toll in Sunday's guerrilla attacks rose to 44, with about 100 wounded. One attack late in the day in Mosul wounded 7 US troops. It is unclear whether the NYT estimate includes the 10-15 British soldiers lost in an air crash.

The Iraqi election commission backed off its initial estimate of 72% turnout rather quickly. It then suggested that 8 million voted, or 60%. I don't think they really know, and would be careful of using these figures until they can be confirmed as the vote is counted. I saw them on Arab satellite tv estimating the turnout in Irbil in the Kurdish north at 60 percent. The turnout in Irbil should have been very high, since it is Kurdish and security is good. If that figure is true and holds, it would be an argument against the overall voting rate being 60 percent.

Muhammad Bazzi at Newsday discusses Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's role in the recent elections and his likely role in crafting the new constitution. He writes:

' Al-Sistani is especially keen to have a role in shaping the new constitution, which is supposed to be drafted by mid-August and put to a national referendum by Oct. 15. He is concerned about two issues: the role of Islam in Iraqi society and the extent of the political autonomy that would be granted to Kurds in northern Iraq. The ayatollah wants Islam to be declared the country's official faith and Islamic law to infuse civil laws. He is also resistant to giving Kurds a veto power over the constitution, as they currently have under an administrative law put in place by the U.S. occupation. Part of the reason for al-Sistani's backing of the unified Shia slate is to assure him a key role in drafting the constitution. But that is likely to rekindle the debate over the role of clergy in politics. "Al-Sistani wants to have a strong hand in drafting the constitution," Shammari said. "This will renew questions about what role he wants to play in politics." '

Sistani congratulated the Iraqi people on coming out to vote on Sunday. He expressed regret that his Iranian nationality made it impossible for him to vote. (Prominent Shiite Iranians declined to take Iraqi citizenship during the past century because being a foreign national often gave them immunity from harsh treatment by the Iraqi state.)

Three views of the voting in the Shiite shrine city of Najaf, Sistani's adopted city:

Sistani's adopted city, Najaf, witnessed a high turnout of voters, who cast their ballots (from all accounts) heavily in favor of the United Iraqi Alliance, the list cobbled together under Sistani's auspices.

Dan Murphy of CSM reports on the mood in Najaf in more detail.

Rory Carroll of the Guardian reports from Najaf that rubble is everywhere and some think Allawi will survive as Prime Minister. He quotes a Western diplomat: ' "Sistani has played it brilliantly . . . By reining in his radicals and going for elections, power is falling into the Shia lap." '

William Walls of the FT reports on the festive and defiant atmosphere of the far-south city of Basra (pop. 1.3 million). He expects the United Iraqi Alliance to do very well there, also.

Ashraf Khalil at the LA Times covers the questions that have been raised about the durability of the Shiite coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, that Sistani has blessed. It is true that it is a hodgepodge of parties, but it seems to me that there is a good chance it will stay together on the whole. Khalil writes (and at the end quotes me):

' Disunity among the Shiite partners, "is one of the threats facing the list," said Ibrahim Bahr Uloum, a former minister of oil and Alliance candidate whose Iraq of the Future ticket is competing with the Supreme Council and Dawa in the Najaf provincial elections.

"Locally, there is some room for competition," he said, "but at the same time on a national level we have to cooperate."

Uloum predicted that "mutual respect" for the Shiite religious elite of whom Sistani is the most prominent member would help keep the factions in line.

Juan Cole, a University of Michigan history professor and expert on Shiite politics, predicted that enlightened self-interest would serve as "a powerful incentive for [the alliance's] various members to dampen down resentments and rivalries and cooperate."

"Controlling the Iraqi parliament is worth $17 billion a year in patronage," he said. "Pulling out of the ruling coalition and depriving yourself of any part of that would be a strange thing to do. Some immature groups might do it out of anger and annoyance, but they'd be very sorry." '

Sunni Arab turnout in the elections was light. The Sunnis in Samarra, a city of 200,000, only cast 1400 ballots. Ash-Sharq al-Awsat also reported that Tikrit's polling stations were deserted.

In eastern Mosul, where Turkmen and Kurds predominate, there was some turnout, but in the Sunni Arab western part of the city, firefights raged. The Arabs of Kirkuk appear largely to have boycotted the vote, whereas the Kurds came out enthusiastically (-al-Zaman).

Evan Osnos of the Chicago Tribune writes,

' In the Sunni-dominated cities of Latifiyah and Mahmoudiyah south of Baghdad, streets were largely free of violence, but voters said they were fearful of retaliation for voting. Polling centers were largely empty all day in many cities of the Sunni Triangle north and west of the capital, particularly Fallujah, Ramadi and Beiji, The Associated Press reported. In Baghdad's mainly Sunni Arab area of Adhamiyah, the neighborhood's four polling centers did not open, residents said. '

Dexter Filkins of the NYT wrote, ' In the town of Baji in northern Iraq, election officials did not show up. In Ramadi, where Iraqi officials set up a pair of polling places just outside the city, a total of just 300 ballots were cast, many of them by police officers and soldiers. '

The idea, mentioned by Condoleeza Rice on Sunday, that any significant number of Fallujans voted, is absurd and insulting. Most of the 250,000 Fallujans are still in exile, and the city is still occasionally the scene of fighting. There are reports of some voting in refugee camps outside the city. It is almost certainly motivated by a desire to have a legitimate, elected government that could effectively demand a US withdrawal.

Although some observers seem to be optimistic about the Sunni Arab vote, from what I could find out Sunday night, the signs were not actually good.

As for the neighbors, this Turkish author clearly fears both the religiosity of the Shiite party and the possible subnationalism of the Kurds.

In contrast, Iran clearly expects to benefit from the likely Shiite victory in the elections.

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Guest Editorial: Sunni Anxieties and the Rise of Shiite Power by Shahin M. Cole

Sunni Anxieties and the Rise of Shiite Power

Shahin M. Cole

Iraq after its elections is not out of the woods, and some severe dangers loom ahead. Iraq has had the form of elections, but will it have the substance of democracy? Can candidates who were afraid to reveal their identities before the election now be secure in doing so afterwards? Will not the members of the new parliament become immediate targets for kidnapping and assassination?

Moreover, now comes the hard part of drafting a permanent constitution in a way that meets the expectations of all the major groups in the country. Some substantial portion of them is likely to come away disappointed. What if controversial issues cause the negotiations to bog down? Will the third of the candidates who are women accept the likely attempt of the religious parties to impose religious codes in family law? Can a way be found to mollify the Sunni Arabs, who will be highly underrepresented in the parliament, and the legitimacy of which they are unlikely grant?

Far from seeing the elections as a good thing to be emulated, the Sunni Arab neighbors of Iraq are likely to be alarmed at the rise of Shiite dominance. They will also be disturbed at any close Shiite-American alliance. Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and Salafi fundamentalists elsewhere in the Gulf (including Iraq itself), deeply disapprove of Shiite doctrine and practice.

The Sunni Arab Iraqis declined to vote in any numbers not just because of the poor security situation, but out of conviction. Many feel that you cannot have free and fair elections under foreign military occupation. They would also be within their rights to argue that voting procedures were stacked against them. The interim government allowed Iraqi expatriates who have taken citizenship in other countries to vote. Since most expatriates are Shiites, Kurds and Chaldeans, moreover, allowing expatriates to vote in this election might well be viewed as harming Sunni interests. The US has in the past forbidden its nationals (except, after 1967, those with dual citizenship) to vote in elections in other countries, and has threatened to strip them of their citizenship if they did. Were all Iraqi-Americans who voted actually dual citizens? Is this step a permanent change in US procedure?

The Gulf monarchies are afraid of the Khomeini-inspired trend in Shiism to say that “there can be no kings in Islam.” If these Sunni hardliners had an “axis of evil,” the Shiites of Iraq and Iran would be in it. Many Sunnis fear Shiite power more than they ever feared Saddam’s predations. Many of them also view the United States as an imperial power in the region. A Shiite-American alliance is their worst nightmare, and many of them will see the Iraqi Shiites as puppets of the US. The elections, which the Bush administration sees as the solution to a whole host of problems, have upset the sectarian balance of power in the Middle East, and may well bring new kinds of instability in their train.

The differences and conflicts between the Wahhabi branch of Islam (prevalent in Saudi Arabia and Qatar) and Sunnis (who account for ninety percent of the world’s Muslims) are not widely appreciated. Sunnis and Wahhabis have often been at odds. The rise of a Shiite-dominated Iraq supported by American power could well create new alliances between Sunnis and Wahhabis that will radicalize both. The US CIA is already predicting that Iraq is becoming the new training ground for international terrorism.

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A Mixed Story

I'm just appalled by the cheerleading tone of US news coverage of the so-called elections in Iraq on Sunday. I said on television last week that this event is a "political earthquake" and "a historical first step" for Iraq. It is an event of the utmost importance, for Iraq, the Middle East, and the world. All the boosterism has a kernel of truth to it, of course. Iraqis hadn't been able to choose their leaders at all in recent decades, even by some strange process where they chose unknown leaders. But this process is not a model for anything, and would not willingly be imitated by anyone else in the region. The 1997 elections in Iran were much more democratic, as were the 2002 elections in Bahrain and Pakistan.

Moreover, as Swopa rightly reminds us all, the Bush administration opposed one-person, one-vote elections of this sort. First they were going to turn Iraq over to Chalabi within six months. Then Bremer was going to be MacArthur in Baghdad for years. Then on November 15, 2003, Bremer announced a plan to have council-based elections in May of 2004. The US and the UK had somehow massaged into being provincial and municipal governing councils, the members of which were pro-American. Bremer was going to restrict the electorate to this small, elite group.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani immediately gave a fatwa denouncing this plan and demanding free elections mandated by a UN Security Council resolution. Bush was reportedly "extremely offended" at these two demands and opposed Sistani. Bremer got his appointed Interim Governing Council to go along in fighting Sistani. Sistani then brought thousands of protesters into the streets in January of 2004, demanding free elections. Soon thereafter, Bush caved and gave the ayatollah everything he demanded. Except that he was apparently afraid that open, non-manipulated elections in Iraq might become a factor in the US presidential campaign, so he got the elections postponed to January 2005. This enormous delay allowed the country to fall into much worse chaos, and Sistani is still bitter that the Americans didn't hold the elections last May. The US objected that they couldn't use UN food ration cards for registration, as Sistani suggested. But in the end that is exactly what they did.

So if it had been up to Bush, Iraq would have been a soft dictatorship under Chalabi, or would have had stage-managed elections with an electorate consisting of a handful of pro-American notables. It was Sistani and the major Shiite parties that demanded free and open elections and a UNSC resolution. They did their job and got what they wanted. But the Americans have been unable to provide them the requisite security for truly aboveboard democratic elections.

With all the hoopla, it is easy to forget that this was an extremely troubling and flawed "election." Iraq is an armed camp. There were troops and security checkpoints everywhere. Vehicle traffic was banned. The measures were successful in cutting down on car bombings that could have done massive damage. But even these Draconian steps did not prevent widespread attacks, which is not actually good news. There is every reason to think that when the vehicle traffic starts up again, so will the guerrilla insurgency.

The Iraqis did not know the names of the candidates for whom they were supposedly voting. What kind of an election is anonymous! There were even some angry politicians late last week who found out they had been included on lists without their permission. Al-Zaman compared the election process to buying fruit wholesale and sight unseen. (This is the part of the process that I called a "joke," and I stand by that.)

This thing was more like a referendum than an election. It was a referendum on which major party list associated with which major leader would lead parliament.

Many of the voters came out to cast their ballots in the belief that it was the only way to regain enough sovereignty to get American troops back out of their country. The new parliament is unlikely to make such a demand immediately, because its members will be afraid of being killed by the Baath military. One fears a certain amount of resentment among the electorate when this reticence becomes clear.

Iraq now faces many key issues that could tear the country apart, from the issues of Kirkuk and Mosul to that of religious law. James Zogby on Wolf Blitzer wisely warned the US public against another "Mission Accomplished" moment. Things may gradually get better, but this flawed "election" isn't a Mardi Gras for Americans and they'll regret it if that is the way they treat it.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Election Update

At a little after noon EST, Jane Arraf on CNN is reporting about 30 percent turnout in Baqubah, a mixed Sunni-Shiite city to the northeast of Baghdad. It seems clear that the turnout was largely Shiite.

Although the violence and attacks have been extensive and took place all over the country, the security measures put in prevented massive loss of life. Suicide bombers clearly could not get close enough to crowds to take a big toll.

On the other hand, if the turnout is as light in the Sunni Arab areas as it now appears, the parliament/ constitutional assembly is going to be extremely lopsided. It would be sort of like having an election in California where the white Protestants all stayed home and the legislature was mostly Latinos, African-Americans and Asians.

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Dozens Killed in Election Day Guerrilla Campaign

Guerrillas launched mortar and suicide bomb attacks at polling stations throughout Iraq on Sunday as thousands of Iraqis headed to the polls. As many as 27 were dead by 1 pm Iraqi time, with several times that wounded.

Explosions rocked West, South and East Baghdad, as well as many cities throughout the Sunni heartland--Baqubah, Mosul, Balad, and in Salahuddin Province (7 attacks by noon). There was also an attack in the Turkmen north at Talafar, and in the Shiite deep south at Basra. In Basra, Coalition troops raided the al-Hamra Mosque. Four were killed and seven wounded in an attack in Sadr City. These kinds of statistics were common in the election-poll attacks.

Turnout seems extremely light in the Sunni Arab areas, where some polling stations did not even open. It was heavier in the Shiite south and in the Kurdish north.


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Zogby: 9% of Sunnis Will Vote
Stong Majority of Iraqis Wants US Out

Borzou Daragahi of AP reports an Iraqi poll that shows that the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance coalition will do best in Sunday's election, but won't get a majority. The Iraqiya list of interim PM Iyad Allawi comes in second. The united Kurdish list will also do quite well (Kurds will almost certainly be over-represented in the new parliament). The poll says that no other list seems likely to get more than about 3% of the vote. In a 275-member parliament, that would be about 8 or 9 seats. If the poll is borne out by events, Iraqi politics will look an awful lot like Israeli politics in its dynamics, because the parliamentary electoral system works the same way. If the UIA can't form a government on its own, it will need a coalition partner-- either the Allawi list (which would give it a comfortable majority if that one does well) or a set of four or five small parties, each of which might have special demands and which might threaten to leave the majority coalition if they don't get their way.

Daragahi reports that Iraq's atmosphere is fearful and as though it is under siege.

Reuters says 17 persons have been killed in car bombings and other attacks in the lead-up to the elections. Electricity and polling stations are being targeted. Among the dead on Friday were at least 5 US troops, and possibly more as a US helicopter crashed and the fate of its crew remained unknown.

Zogby International did a poll of 805 Iraqis between January from January 19 to 23, 2005 in the cities of Baghdad, Hilla, Karbala and Kirkuk, as well as Diyala and Anbar provinces.

Results:

Sunni Arabs who say they will vote on Sunday: 9%
Sunni Arabs who say they definitely will not vote on Sunday: 76%
Shiites who say they likely or definitely will vote: 80%
Kurds who say they likely or definitely will vote: 56%

Sunni Arabs who want the US out of Iraq now or very soon: 82%
Shiites who want the US out of Iraq now or very soon: 69%

Sunni Arabs who believe US will hurt Iraq over next 5 years: 62%
Shiites who believe US will hurt Iraq over next five years: 49%

Shiites who want to hold elections on Jan. 30: 84%
Kurds who want to hold elections on Jan. 30: 64%

Sunni Arabs who want to postpone elections: 62%

Sunni Arabs who consider guerrilla resistance against the Americans legitimate: 53%

Iraqis who would support a religious government: 33%

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

15 Iraqis Killed in Attacks Focusing on Polling Places

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that guerrillas killed 15 Iraqis on Thursday and blew up six polling sites, continuing their campaign to prevent successfull elections on Sunday. One such attack involved a clash with the new Iraqi army, and when the smoke cleared 11 Iraqis and one US soldier were dead.


Veteran Middle East correspondent Trudy Rubin has done some interviewing recently in Baghdad and came away hopeful about the wisdom of the Shiite political leadership about to come to power. She seems convinced that they are savvy enough to avoid provoking unnecessary ethnic conflict. I agree that the Shiite leadership has been remarkably restrained and responsible. I'm more worried about the Sunni Arab elite, which seems dedicated to a years-long guerrilla war that is probably doomed to eventual failure.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Feith Resigns Under Pressure of Investigations

Douglas Feith, the number three man at the Pentagon who went there from the pro-Likud Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and the Project for a New American Century, will leave the Pentagon as of this summer. Feith's office is the subject of an FBI investigation as well as two Congressional investigations, one by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Feith helped set up an Office of Special Plans in the Near East and South Asia desk of the Pentagon to cherry-pick Iraq intelligence and create a case for Iraq having weapons of mass destruction and having operational links with al-Qaeda. At one point, contrary to Federal law, Feith's people actually briefed officials in the Executive on intelligence. Feith seems to have used David Wurmser a a liason of some sort, employing him at OSP before he later went to other key advisory offices at the State Department and finally in 2003 to Vice President Dic Cheney's office. Wurmser, who has ties to the Likud, is working for a US war against Iran and Syria. [An earlier version of this post got the sequence wrong out of a memory lapse.] The OSP was somehow able to get its analyses and false intelligence conclusions directly to Cheney's national security staff, from which they went directly to Bush, by-passing the CIA and the State Department Intelligence and Research division.

Having a Likudnik as the number three man in the Pentagon is a nightmare for American national security, since Feith could never be trusted to put US interests over those of Ariel Sharon. In the build-up to the Iraq War, Feith had a phalanx of Israeli generals visiting him in the Pentagon and ignored post-9/11 requirements that they sign in. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was a vocal advocate of a US war against Iraq, who "put pressure" on Washington about it. (If Sharon wanted a war against Iraq, why didn't he fight it himself instead of pushing it off on American boys?)

Feith has been questioned by the FBI in relation to the passing by one of his employees of confidential Pentagon documents to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which in turn passed them to the Israeli embassy. The Senate Intelligence Committee is also investigating Feith. There seems little doubt that he operated in the Pentagon in such a way as to produce false and misleading "intelligence," that he created an entirely false impression of Iraqi weapons capabilities and ties to al-Qaeda, and that he is among the chief facilitators of the US war in Iraq.

Feith is clearly resigning ahead of the possible breaking of major scandals concerning his tenure at the Department of Defense, which is among the more disgraceful cases of the misleading of the American people in American history.

There are several downsides to Feith's departure, as welcome as it is for anyone who cares about US security in particular. The first is that now we probably have to see him forever on cable news channels as one of those dreary neocon talking heads flogged by the American Enterprise Institute, a far rightwing "think tank" funded by cranky rich people to obscure the truth. Another is that his departure now may help keep Bush from being blamed for his shady dealings in intelligence "analysis."

It is important to note that what is objectionable about Feith is a) his playing fast and loose with the truth, producing poor intelligence analysis that has been shown to be completely false and b) his doing so on behalf of not only American nationalist aspirations but also on behalf of a non-American political party, the Likud coalition of Israel, which desired to destroy the Oslo peace process initiated by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (and which was therefore on the same side of this issue as the fanatic who assassinated Rabin). There is no objection to Americans having multiple identities or love for more than one country. Someone of Serbian heritage would make a perfectly good Pentagon administrator. But you wouldn't want a vehement supporter of Slobodon Milosevic as the number three man in the Pentagon. It is ideological dual loyalty that is dangerous. Mere sentiment based on multiple ethnic identities is not dual loyalty, and hyphenated Americans mostly have other countries they wish well (and rightly so).

It is also important to underline that only a small minority of American Jews support the Likud Party or its policies, and that a majority of Jewish Americans opposed the Iraq war. In short, the problematic nature of Feith's tenure at the Department of Defense must not be made an excuse for any kind of bigotry.

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37 US Troops Dead, Other Americans Wounded
Large numbers of Iraqis Killed, Wounded by Car Bombs at Polling Stations, Party HQs

AP reports the worst news the US has had in Iraq ever:

A U.S. helicopter crashed in a desert sandstorm in the early morning darkness yesterday, killing the 30 Marines and one Navy sailor aboard . . . Six other troops died in insurgent ambushes in the deadliest day for Americans since the Iraq invasion began nearly two years ago. Only days before Iraq's crucial elections on Sunday, Muslim terrorists set off at least eight car bombs that killed 13 persons and injured almost 40 others, including 11 Americans.

Al-Zaman reports that 13 polling stations and 4 party offices have been attacked since Tuesday evening in Baghdad and to its north. Guerrillas kidnapped 2 election workers in Mosul, and 15 persons were killed and 30 wounded when a car bomb went off in front of the Kurdistan Democratic Party HQ in the city of Sinjar.

In his appearances on Wednesday, President Bush said that it was a positive that Iraqis are even having elections, since three years ago it would have seemed out of the question. You know, if all you have to boast about is that you are better than Saddam Hussein, it isn't actually a good sign. Can you imagine what would have happened to the Republican Party if its reply to Kerry's criticisms of last summer had been, "Well, the American Republican Party is a damn sight more progressive than Hitler was." Saddam was overthrown on April 9, 2003. It is 2005, and the US has been running Iraq for nearly two years. Now the question is, how does the situation in Iraq compare to the Philippines, or India, or Turkey. Answer: It sucks. There is little security, people are killed daily, there is a massive crime wave, and elections are being held in which most of the candidates cannot be identified for fear of their lives. So the conclusion is that the Bush administration has done a worse job in Iraq than the Congress Party does in India, or the AK Party does in Turkey. That's the standard of comparison once Saddam was gone. And, by the way, veteran NYT journalist John Burns, who is nobody's fool, told Tina Brown last Friday that he was taken aback when an Iraqi told him recently that he wished Saddam were back. This was an Iraqi who really had been delighted at the American invasion. So Bush should drop the cute sound bite about being better than Saddam.

Veteran Middle East journalist David Hirst talks about the implications for the Arab world of a Shiite victory in the Iraq elections (and of just having open elections). One thing I think Hirst missses is that Ayatollah Khomeini associated Shiism with a republican, anti-monarchy ethos, which is one reason the Arab monarchies are disturbed at the potential Shiite victory. They look at militant Shiism the way King George III viewed Tom Paine.

There are, of course, lots of elections in the Arab world. Some are more rigged than others. But there are almost no elections where the sitting prime minister and his party would be allowed to be turned out unexpectedly by an unpredictable and uncontrolled electorate. If Iraqi interim Prime Minister Allawi's list does poorly and his political star falls as a result of a popular vote, something democratic will have happened in Iraq, for all the serious problems with the elections.

One of the flashpoints in the elections is Kirkuk. The Kurds have gotten permission for Kurds originally from Kirkuk to vote in provincial and municipal elections as though they were resident in the city. Saddam had kicked a lot of Kurds out of Kirkuk and brought in Arabs, who now fear displacement. About a third of Kirkuk is Turkmens, who used to dominate the city, and they also fear losing it to a Kurdish super-province of Kurdistan. The area around Kirkuk is rich with petroleum. Kirkuk seems to me to be a tinderbox, and if it explodes it will set in motion ethnic conflict between Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen in the north, which could involve Turkey.

AFP discusses the jockeying that is already going on for the post of prime minister. Predicting who will be chosen is very difficult. The parliament will elect a president and two vice presidents, who will form a presidential council. It will then appoint a prime minister. So parliament cannot dictate who the prime minister will be, and it needn't be the leader of the party that forms the government. We can't know what the calculation will be, of the presidential council. People have been asking what I thought of the International Republican Institute poll that 61 percent of Iraqis think Allaw has been "effective" in running the country. I find this result hard to believe. Last September an IRI poll found Allawi's favorability rating was 47 percent and that of Muqtada al-Sadr was 45 percent. IRI did not release the second finding, and my social science friends in Baghdad thought IRI's polling techniques appallingly bad. I flatly disbelieve that Allawi's favorability rating has risen since September. Since IRI is selective in releasing its results and doesn't seem to be running a tight ship in its Baghdad office anyway, it is hard to know what their poll results actually mean and how solidly based they are.

Cihan News Agency examines the issue of whether the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite list that has Grand Ayatollah Sistani's blessing, will implement shariah or Islamic law on the Iranian model. It is the wrong question. Obviously, the Iraqis will go their own way rather than adopting the Iranian system. The question is what the mix will be in a UIA constitution, of civil law versus relgious law (i.e. shariah). Which will be priveleged and in what situation? That the UIA will insist on some shariah, at least over time, seems to me self-evident.


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The Speech Bush Should have Given

This is the speech that I wish President Bush had given in fall, 2002, as he was trying to convince Congress to give him the authority to go to war against Iraq.

My fellow Americans:

I want us to go to war against Iraq. But I want us to have our eyes open and be completely realistic.

A war against Iraq will be expensive. It will cost you, the taxpayer, about $300 billion over five years. I know Wolfowitz is telling you Iraq's oil revenues will pay for it all, but that's ridiculous. Iraq only pumps about $10 billion a year worth of oil, and it's going to need that just to run the new government we're putting in. No, we're going to have to pay for it, ourselves. I'm going to ask you for $25 billion, then $80 billion, then another $80 billion. And so on. I'm going to be back to you for money more often than that unemployed relative that you don't like. The cost of the war is going to drive up my already massive budget deficits from about $370 billion to more like $450 billion a year. Just so you understand, I'm going to cut taxes on rich people at the same time that I fight this war. Then I'm going to borrow the money to fight it, and to pay for much of what the government does. And you and your children will be paying off that debt for decades. In the meantime, your dollar isn't going to go as far when you buy something made overseas, since running those kinds of deficits will weaken our currency. (And I've set things up so that most things you buy will be made overseas.) We'll have to keep interest rates higher than they would otherwise have been and keep the economy in the doldrums, because otherwise my war deficits would cause massive inflation.

So I'm going to put you, your children, and your grandchildren deeply in hock to fight this war. I'm going to make it so there won't be a lot of new jobs created, and I'm going to use the excuse of the Federal red ink to cut way back on government services that you depend on. For the super-rich, or as I call them, "my base," this Iraq war thing is truly inspired. We use it to put up the deficit to the point where the Democrats and the more bleeding heart Republicans in Congress can't dare create any new programs to help the middle classes. We all know that the super-rich--about 3 million people in our country of 295 million-- would have to pay for those programs, since they own 45 percent of the privately held wealth. I'm damn sure going to make sure they aren't inconvenienced that way for a good long time to come.

Then, this Iraq War that I want you to authorize as part of the War on Terror is going to be costly in American lives. By the time of my second inaugural, over 1,300 brave women and men of the US armed forces will be dead as a result of this Iraq war, and 10,371 will have been maimed and wounded, many of them for life. America's streets and homeless shelters will likely be flooded, down the line, with some of these wounded vets. They will have problems finding work, with one or two limbs gone and often significant psychological damage. They will have even more trouble keeping any jobs they find. They will be mentally traumatized the rest of their lives by the horror they are going to see, and sometimes commit, in Iraq. But, well we've got a saying in Texas. I think you've got in over in Arkansas, too. You can't make an omelette without . . . you gotta break some eggs to wrassle up some breakfast.

I know Dick Cheney and Condi Rice have gone around scaring your kids with wild talk of Iraqi nukes. I have to confess to you that my CIA director, George Tenet, tells me that the evidence for that kind of thing just doesn't exist. In fact, I have to be frank and say that the Intelligence and Research Division of the State Department doesn't think Saddam has much of anything left even from his chemical weapons program. Maybe he destroyed the stuff and doesn't want to admit it because he's afraid the Shiites and Kurds will rise up against him without it. Anyway, Iraq just doesn't pose any immediate threat to the United States and probably doesn't have anything useful left of their weapons programs of the 1980s.

There also isn't any operational link between a secular Arab nationalist like Saddam and the religious loonies of al-Qaeda. They're scared of one another and hate each other more than each hates us. In fact, I have to be perfectly honest and admit that if we overthrow Saddam's secular Arab nationalist government, Iraq's Sunni Arabs will be disillusioned and full of despair. They are likely to turn to al-Qaeda as an alternative. So, folks, what I'm about to do could deliver 5 million Iraqis into the hands of people who are insisting they join some al-Qaeda offshoot immediately. Or else.

So why do I want to go to war? Look, folks, I'm just not going to tell you. I don't have to tell you. There is little transparency about these things in the executive, because we're running a kind of rump empire out of the president's office. After 20 or 30 years it will all leak out. Until then, you'll just have to trust me.

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Advice for Candidates: 'Do not Reveal your Identity . . . Stay Home as Much as Possible '

Jack Fairweather reports for the Telegraph from Baghdad on a meeting held by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) that instructs candidates on how to survive the elections. He writes: "The instructions are simple - avoid public places and do not reveal your identity, the cleric advised. Most candidates should stay at home as much as possible, he added."

Security is still so bad in Iraq that guerrillas were able to strike a national guard base near the airport with mortar fire Monday. As a result the air traffic controllers at Baghdad airport turned back both of that day's Royal Jordanian Airlines flights. RJA is the only commercial carrier that flies into Baghdad, aside from Iraqi Airlines themselves. Ironically, the inability of the planes to land stranded Iraqi Minister of Defense Hazem Shaalan in Amman. When the Minister of Defense can't even fly to his own country because the area around the airport is in flames, you know that is a bad sign. There was no more word Monday about the growing feud between Shaalan and his rival, Ahmad Chalabi. Al-Hayat reported that a Lebanese bank was taking steps to return to Iraq $200 million that Shaalan had transferred there, ostensibly to buy tanks and other heavy armaments. Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reported that Jordanian officials would be very happy to get Chalabi in their custody, so they could sentence him for embezzlement.

NPR's interview with me for Monday's Morning Edition about the Iraqi elections is now up on the Web. [link fixed 4:16 pm 1/25]

Eric Black of the Minneapolis Star Tribune argues that for all its somewhat absurd drawbacks, the election must go forward Sunday and may have some silver linings.

In this piece of a few days ago, Nancy Youssef of Knight Ridder considers the current front runners for the post of prime minister in the new government. She reports the buzz around Adil Abdul Mahdi, who is currently Finance Minister and is a member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Abdul Mahdi has begun talking a relatively secular line, and he does have a Marxist past decades ago. Ironically enough, all this may make him acceptable to Washington. On the other hand, the idea that a SCIRI Prime Minister is going to be a determined secularist sounds a little far-fetched to me.

Award-winning journalist Anthony Shadid reports on the political scene in Basra, Iraq's southern port city, with its population of 1.3 million. He says that city politics has come to be dominated by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, but suggests that this dominance for the religious party may backfire in the elections. Many persons in Basra may vote for one of the more secular lists rather than for the United Iraqi Alliance (Which includes SCIRI) because they are dissatisfied with SCIRI's inadequate provision of social services.

Ed Wong of the New York Times writes an important piece about the behind the scenes maneuverings of major Sunni Arab leaders to ensure a role for their community in the drafting of the permanent constitution for Iraq-- even though Sunni Arabs will likely be grossly underrepresented in the parliament to be elected next Sunday. The parliament will double as a constitutional assembly.

The US military is planning to keep 120,000 troops in Iraq for the next two years, according to Lt. Gen. James J. Lovelace, Jr. He admitted that the number could fluctuate depending on the circumstances. I was saying before that I did not think it wise to announce a strict timetable for US military withdrawal from Iraq, lest the appointment of a date certain become, itself, an occasion for instability and violence. I think the troop levels should be drawn down steadily, without an announcement until perhaps the very end. But this announcement of a 24-month-long continued military presence is also unwise. Why would Lt. Gen. Lovelace say this? How can he know what the will of the new parliament will be, once it meets in mid to late February? Once there is an elected government, no matter how flawed the elections, the US will be in Iraq at the pleasure of the representatives of the Iraqi people. I think it is unfortunate that the US is saying anything at all about long-term plans just before the election. If they think they can present the new parliament with a fait accompli this way, I think they are going to be disappointed.

John Yaukey explains the case for handing security off to the Iraqi forces on a short timetable.

The announcement of the arrest of a key associate of the shadowy Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was accompanied by hype that he was behind most of the spectacular car bombings in Iraq for the past 18 months. That seems silly to me, almost an insult to our intelligence. How could one man be behind so many attacks? Isn't it much more likely that they were the work of numerous Baath military and Salafi cells? My guess is that the interim government in Iraq is attempting to convince voters that it will be safe to come out on Sunday. This arrest will make virtually no impact on the guerrilla war, which is likely to go on for at least a decade.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sistani "Blesses" United Iraqi Alliance

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's web site [Arabic Link] has posted an article from the newspaper al-Ra'i al-`Amm which reports Sistani's oral answers to questions its reporter submitted to him. The piece says that although Sistani "blesses" the United Iraqi Alliance (the list grouping most of the major Shiite religious parties), he "at the same time supports all the patriotic lists." He says that he blesses the UIA because he knows the details of it and the personalities on it intimately. He does not insist that it is perfect or exemplary, and admits that some other lists may be better, but he simply does not know their details. (There are about 75 party lists and 6 coalitions, with over 7000 candidates).

[Cole: Sistani is going further in the direction of explicit endorsement of a particular slate than I would have expected from him, despite his use of euphemisms like "blessing" the list as opposed to "supporting" all the patriotic lists.]

Sistani also said that his lieutenants are urging Sunnis to vote as well as Shiites, and had had some success in convincing Sunnis to renounce their boycott of the elections.

He said that if Shiite militias were deployed to provide security to polling stations on Jan. 30, they must be firmly under the direct control of the central government.

Asked if he was satisfied with the pace of the rebuilding of Najaf in the wake of the heavy fighting there last August (between US troops and Mahdi Army militiamen), Sistani said that at this time a resort to violence made no sense. Diploatic and political approaches must be used, he said. He insisted that the spiritual position of Najaf was more important than its infrastructure. He pointed out that during the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911, Najaf was much less well developed as a city than the Iranian seminary center of Qom. But, he said, Najaf had a much bigger impact on the movement for constitutionalism than had Qom, because of its spiritual supremacy.

With regard to debaathification, he said that all Iraqis have equal rights. (I.e. Sunnis, who largely supported the Baath, should not be discriminated against qua Sunnis.) He said, however, that if anyone was wanted for crimes committed while in officer during the Saddam period, they would have to face justice in the civil courts.

He was asked about the Kurdish demand for a loose federalism. Sistani replied that "federalism" as the word was used in contemporary Iraq has a negative rather than a positive content. He said those who insist on it were responding to the lack of checks and balances in Iraqi governance during the previous regime. He said that it would take a long time of democratic practice in Iraq for "federalism" to begin being used in a positive sense.

With regard to Iraq's continued payment of reparations to Kuwait for the 1990-1991 Gulf War, Sistani said that there were two legal ways of looking at it. From the point of view of Islamic law, there are limitations on reparations. From the point of view of positive law, there are not. He implied that if the Kuwaitis really want to be good Muslims, they will follow Islamic law on reparations, which frowns on unbounded and unlimited transactions.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Israeli-Arab News Cycle

I found this Haaretz article too complicated too follow. So the Israeli Army has a psy-ops unit that used to be very active but has been less so recently, and is now being revived. This psy-ops unit plants articles in the Arab press about groups like Lebanon's Hizbullah, painting them as vicious terrorists. Then it comes to Israeli newspaper like Haaretz with translations, and urges that the pieces be written up for Israeli and Western audiences. But of course the pieces are reported as originating in the Arab press:

' The unit's activities have been controversial for years. In October 1999, Aluf Benn revealed in Haaretz that members of the unit used the Israeli media to emphasize reports initiated by the unit that it managed to place in the Arab press. He reported that the news reports focused on Iranian and Hezbollah involvement in terror activity. '

So is MEMRI, which translates articles from the Arabic press into English for thousands of US subscribers, in any way involved in all this? Its director formerly served in . . . Israeli military intelligence. How much of what we "know" from "Arab sources" about "Hizbullah terrorism" was simply made up by this fantasy factory in Tel Aviv?

As someone who reads the Arabic press quite a lot, this sort of revelation is extremely disturbing.

I also saw an allegation that British military intelligence had planted stories in the US press about Saddam's Iraq.

You begin to wonder how much of what you think you know is just propaganda manufactured by some bored colonel. No wonder post-Baath Iraq looks nothing like what we were led to to expect by the press, including the Arab press!

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bombs, Zarqawi, and Sistani's Constitution

On Monday morning, guerrillas set off another car bomb near the headquarters in Baghdad of the Iraqi National Accord, the party headed by interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. Allawi was not in the offices. Early reports say at least ten people were injured.

Reuters also notes that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi issued a tape in which he denounced democracy as un-Islamic and warned of Shiite influence. He complained that the US was just using democracy as a cover for imperialist aggression, and added that democracy makes the people the source of authority, rather than scripture. Al-Hayat says Allawi responded immediately, vowing to wipe out Zaraqawi's group of terrorists.

Al-Hayat also says that Aqil Abdul Karim Saffar, a member of the leadership of the Iraqi National Accord (Allawi's party) said Sunday that if other parties win, it will provoke a civil war. He seemed to be saying that the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite coalition, would be unacceptable to other Iraqis were it to win and form the government.

Well, I guess they already have American-style democracy. This reminds me of Cheney saying that the US would be struck by terrorists if John Kerry were elected.

Likewise, Jalil Nuri, a leader of the Sadr movement that is loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, said that the accusations and threats in which some party slates running in the election had resorted might well cause a civil war. I suppose he is probably talking about Hazem Shaalan and his threats against Chalabi, who is a political (not ideological) ally of Muqtada al-Sadr.

Hamza Hendawi of AP highlights the political role of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. He writes:

' A close al-Sistani aide acknowledged the cleric's concern about the constitution, saying that he would not have played such a prominent role in the vote had it not been for his belief that the assembly's key task was to draw up a constitution. ''This is a very important election,'' Hussain al-Shahristani, a nuclear scientist once jailed by Saddam, told The Associated Press. ''The assembly will write the constitution that will guarantee the future of Iraq. He won't have done this if it was just another election,'' said Shahristani, himself a candidate running on the slate endorsed by al-Sistani. The white-bearded cleric is expected to plunge anew into politics when the assembly begins to draft the constitution which, if adopted in a referendum scheduled to be held by Oct. 15, will be the basis for a second general election before Dec. 15. '

Based on past evidence, my guess is that Sistani will push for personal status law to be religious. It governs marriage, divorce, inheritance, alimony, etc. Sistani will want Shiites to be under Shiite religious law, Chaldean Catholics to be under Catholic canon law, Sunnis to be under Sunni shariah or Islamic codes, etc. This system is also used in Lebanon and Israel. It has disadvantages for women, and it causes an entanglement of the state with religion, since typically the clergy are the arbiters of it.

Sistani will also likely want a fairly strong Federal state, maybe even a centralized state like like France rather than the Swiss-style cantons that the Kurds seem to want, which will bring him into conflict with the Kurds.

If a parliament/ constitutional assembly can be elected January 30, it will then have to open all the cans of worms in Iraq at once as it crafts the permanent constitution.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Al-Yawir on the Chalabi Affair

The LBC Arab satellite channel ran an extended interview Sunday afternoon EST with interim Iraqi President Ghazi al-Yawir. The interviewer asked him at one point if Ahmad Chalabi would be arrested. He adopted a stern visage and said "Why would Chalabi be arrested?" The interviewer recalled for him that interim Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan had said late last week that Chalabi would be turned over to Interpol. She also pointed out that Shaalan is running on Yawir's slate, al-Iraqiyyun.

Yawir replied that in contemporary Iraq, there is a separation of powers. The judiciary is independent, and the executive does not have the authority to have people arrested. He insisted that the bad old days of personal rule in Iraq [exemplified in Saddam] were over.

He said that Hazem Shaalan is an Iraqi patriot, but has a tendency to express sharp opinions in public that do not represent those of the al-Iraqiyyun Party slate, nor even the interim Iraqi government. He pointed out that Prime Minister Iyad Allawi had distanced his government from some of Shaalan's statements.

Shaalan directed his threat against Chalabi after the latter revealed that Shaalan had sent $300 million in cash to a Beirut Bank. Shaalan says it was to buy tanks and other weapons for the Iraqi government. The United States is investigating the transfer of funds.

Yawir also revealed that he had initially hoped to have a joint slate with Iyad Allawi, since the politicians on both lists are dedicated to "civil" (i.e. non-theocratic) governance. He said he did not like the word "secular" (`almani) to describe their stance, but preferred "civil" (madani). He said he believed that religion is too sublime and pure to be mixed into the nitty-gritty of day to day politics. He also expressed doubt that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani had openly endorsed the United Iraqi Alliance, the largely Shiite list, saying that it was incumbent on a religious authority to stand above the fray and wish well to all Iraqis.

He admitted that the reason for which he decided to run a separate list had to do with a dispute over who would occupy the number 1 position. Al-Yawir said he felt that the president could hardly be the number two candidate on the list. He said that Allawi had inisted that the number one position had to be occupied by a Shiite [to appeal to Iraq's Shiite majority.] He expressed confidence that everything had worked out for the best, and speculated that the two parties might attract more Iraqis to vote than if they had been just one.

Actually, the logic of this election would have favored a single list, and al-Yawir was unwise not to compromise with Allawi on this issue. Parties will be seated by their proportion of the national vote, so it is in the interests of a party coalition to put together a list that will attract the biggest percentage of votes. This is why it was such a stroke of genius for Sistani and his people to insist that all the major Shiite parties be part of one coalition slate, the United Iraqi Alliance.

On the issue of postponing the elections, al-Yawir (a Sunni Arab) said he is a realistic man, and that it is not possible to stand against the majority of Iraqis who want the elections to go forward on January 30.

Al-Yawir also complained that although he had good relations with interim PM Allawi, he did not feel that the president was kept informed of all important decisions or that there was a satisfactory division of duties between the president and prime minister.

The anchor suggested that the interim constitution was vague and that this issue could be addressed when parliament took up the permanent constitution after the elections.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Al-Hakim: No to Civil War, Yes to Timetable for US Withdrawal

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the United Iraqi Alliance list, says that Shiites refuse to be tricked into a civil war by the attacks of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Al-Hakim alleges that Sunni Arabs are taking part in great numbers in the electoral process and says that he expects them to come out and vote on January 30. (According to some reports, many of the Sunni Arab slates that al-Hakim cited as proof of Sunni involvement in the elections have actually withdrawn.)

Registration has been extended for Iraqi voters abroad, since so far the number of registrants has been disappointing-- about 90,000. An estimated one million expatriate Iraqis are eligible to vote, but it appears that only a tenth of that actually will. It should be remembered that in many countries it is necessary to travel for hours (even hours by plane) to get to a voter registration office (there are only two in Australia and none in Perth; there are none in the US South below Nashville [corrected 1/23]). In any case, the expatriate vote is largely irrelevant, since the election is being held on a proportional basis. If a list gets 10 percent of the national vote, it can seat its top 27 or 28 candidates, who are on a ranked list, in the 275-member parliament. A hundred thousand expats could only add a percentage point or two to a list's total, especially since they will split their vote among several lists. (Dearborn, near where I live, is Sistani territory).

The Guardian asked a number of Iraqi politicians and observers of Iraq what they thought of the idea of a timetable for the withdrawal of US troops from the country. The idea is obviously growing in popularity. I expressed my anxiety about a repeat of India 1947 or Palestine 1948-- i.e. massive bloodshed, political partition, and subsequently several wars. Interestingly, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim seems to favor it, but underlines that it should be an Iraqi decision.

Helena Cobban, veteran Middle East observer and journalist and a dear friend, argues against my anxieties at her web log. She can't understand why I think things could get worse if the US withdrew precipitously. I can't understand why it would be hard to understand. The Baathists would begin by killing Grand Ayatollah Sistani, then Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, then Ibrahim Jaafari, and so on down the list of the new political class. Then they would make a coup. Once they had control of Iraq's revenues, they could buy tanks and helicopter gunships in the world weapons bazaar and deploy them again against the Shiites. They might not be able to hang on very long, but it is doubtful if the country would survive all this intact. The Badr Corps could not stop this scenario, or it would have stopped all the assassinations lately of Shiite notables in the South, including two of Sistani's aides. Had the US not dissolved the Iraqi army, I'd be out in the streets now demanding an immediate US withdrawal. The failures of the Fallujah campaign made it amply clear that the US armed forces are unlikely to make headway against the guerrilla insurgency, and in the meantime are just making hundreds of thousands of Iraqis more angry. You will note that Sistani, who is not shy about these things, has not demanded an immediate withdrawal of US forces. In fact, I was told by a US observer of the scene in Najaf that a member of the marja'iyyah asked the US to take care of the Mahdi Army for them last summmer.

There is a saying in Arabic, Ahl al-bayt a`lamu bima fi'l-bayt--the people of a house know best what is in the house. When Sistani says the US should set a timetable and go, then I think we should all support that. But the US has made a big enough mess in Iraq without compounding it by hanging the Iraqis out to dry and decamping suddenly. By the way, Iraqis have more than once pleaded with me to argue against precipitous withdrawal by the US.

Helena also argues against my invocation of India 1947 and Palestine 1948, where I suggest that the pre-announced date of a British withdrawal helped throw both into chaos, partition and virtual civil war. She replies that there have been successful instances of decolonization without partition or civil war. Of course there have been. But I would argue that ethnically based politics is so entrenched in Iraq at the moment that it does look more like India in 1947 or Palestine in 1948 than it looks like Kenya, Ghana or even Algeria at the moment they gained their freedom. I thank her for noting that this is not a trivial concern.

Mind you, if the elected Iraqi parliament asks for a withdrawal timetable, I think the US has an absolute duty to comply. It is a different issue as to whether such a move is wise or could succeed without the Iraqis paying an even higher price than they have already paid.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Chalabi to be arrested

The political season in Iraq is turning extremely nasty. Not only were over 20 persons killed and dozens injured in bombings of a Shiite mosque and a Shiite wedding by guerrillas, but charges and counter-charges among politicians have now resulted in the prospective arrest of long-time Iraqi expatriate politican Ahmad Chalabi.

Interim Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan announced on al-Jazeerah Friday that Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi would be arrested after the three-day Eid al-Adha celebrations that end Saturday.

[Update 12:35 pm: Interim Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib has denied that there is any warrant outstanding for Chalabi. Al-Naqib had in the past been a fairly close ally of Shaalan, but the two appear to have broken over this initiative of Shaalan's, which may be personal rather than representing an Allawi government stance. Allawi has never seemed able to control Shaalan's outbursts and I have long wondered why he kept him on as Defense Minister.]

Shaalan said that Chalabi would be turned over to Interpol to face justice in the embezzlement of $300 million from his own Petra Bank in the late 1980s, for which he was convicted in absentia in Jordan in 1992. Although Chalabi maintains that the conviction was politically motivated (he claims Jordan had a tacit alliance with his enemy, Saddam), the bank's Switzerland branch was audited and what auditors found was not pretty. Some 14 percent of the bank's loans went to family members and close friends, some $100 million, and most of those were not paid back. When the Jordanian government insisted in 1989 that banks keep 30 percent of funds on hand, Petra was over-extended and unable to comply.

I saw Shaalan on al-Jazeerah. He laid a number of other charges against Chalabi, saying he had engineered the dissolution of the Iraqi military in May of 2003, which threw the country into chaos and harmed its interests. He also tried to blame Chalabi for the Kurdish mini-civil war of the mid-1990s, which briefly brought Saddam's troops back up north.

Shaalan also accused Chalabi of defaming him. CNN expressed puzzlement about the latter, but the reference is in part to charges Chalabi made of financial corruption against Shaalan, involving a shipment last week of $300 million in cash to Beirut for an arms deal that, Chalabi implied, may have involved kickbacks. He was also referring to Chalabi's charges that Shaalan spied for Saddam in 1998 through 2003 and even spied on Chalabi (reported here a couple days ago from Chalabi's web site.) Chalabi was attempting to smear Shaalan as an unreconstructed Baathist and Saddam collaborator, and he was at the same time attempting to smear interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and Allawi's al-Iraqiyah slate in the elections, by association.

Chalabi's latter move was typically sleazy and implausible (the Americans are better at vetting people than to allow a recent Saddam spy to become Minister of Defense), and was extremely troubling. It wasn't just down and dirty campaigning. It was closer to a kind of McCarthyism. I don't like Shaalan or his hardline views, and do think he still has some Baath attitudes (especially his anti-Iranian racism). But I very much doubt he was spying for Saddam in 2002! Whether the arms deal and the cash shipped to Beirut was irregular, I don't know. Chalabi's partisans will argue that Shaalan is just trying to prevent Chalabi from auditing the government books if the UIA comes to power.

On the other hand, for the Allawi government to make this particular response is also troubling. Chalabi is a candidate for parliament on the United Iraqi Alliance list, which groups the major Shiite parties. Shaalan has hinted around that the UIA is a stalking horse for Iran, and choosing the week before the election to announce the arrest of one of the list's top-ranking figures (# 10)--on thirteen-year-old charges-- could be seen as a way of attempting to damage its popularity. That is, getting Chalabi could actually be a way of getting Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the UIA leader who also heads the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (which had been based in Iran for over two decades). We know what Shaalan thinks of Iran and can imagine what he thinks of al-Hakim.

Moreover, it wasn't criminal for Chalabi to advocate dissolving the Iraqi army (though it was highly unwise and possibly sleazy), and it is disturbing that Shaalan is throwing that charge into the mix. Shaalan did not say so, but given his anti-Iran impetus, and given the charges against Chalabi that he has passed sensitive information on to Tehran, it could be that Shaalan thinks Chalabi pressed for the dissolution of the Iraq military because Tehran urged it. A former ambassador told me he that Chalabi was getting money from Iran, so he may have owed the ayatollahs. Of course, most of Iraq's neighbors would have welcomed and perhaps secretly lobbied for the dissolution of the Iraqi military, including Kuwait and Israel.

Chalabi was charged in May of 2004 with having passed sensitive US intelligence (the fact that the US had broken Iranian codes) to Iran, but the charges were ultimately quietly dropped and the prosecuting judge shunted off to desk work. It seems clear that in summer, 2004, Chalabi still had powerful supporters in the Pentagon who shielded him. Either that support has by now collapsed, or Shaalan is attempting to present them with a fait accompli. The State Department and the CIA, which have gained more power in Iraq in the past 8 months, dislike Chalabi and saw him as a corrupt "Gucci revolutionary" who never delivered and could not account for the money they gave him.

Given that the Iraqi government closed down the al-Jazeerah offices in Baghdad, saying that the channel was biased against it, it is odd that Shaalan chose that network to give this interview on. The chic anchor could barely suppress a smirk as she announced the interview.

[In the light of al-Naqib's later denial, it seems possible that Shaalan went to al-Jazeerah for the same reason everyone else does. It isn't controlled and will put on virtually anything except a criticism of the Qatar government. If Shaalan had gone to al-Iraqiyyah or Radio Sawa Iraq, he might have been stopped by Allawi or the Americans. It now seems possible that this affair will profoundly hurt the chances of the Allawi list in the elections (even though Shaalan is running on the Yawir list). The spectacle of the Defense Minister trying to have a political opponent arrested just as a matter of personal fiat, and being contradicted by the chief law enforcement officer, al-Naqib, is wholly unedifying. The news, which Chalabi publicized, that Shaalan recently sent $300 million in cash to Beirut to buy tanks and other weaponry on a covert basis also raises many questions about the probity and intentions of the interim government.]

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Montazeri Warns Iraqis Against Clerical Rule

Ayatollah Husain Ali Montazeri of Qom warned [Persian link] the Iraqi political class on Friday against allowing clerics to dominate the executive in their new government. He spoke through his son to the Persian service of the BBC. He said that clerics were just not trained to or capable of running a state. He said they should stick to oversight (i.e. using their moral authority to safeguard Islamic principles). He also said that the "guardianship of the jurisprudent" should only be exercised within the parameters set by voters. He condemned the Khomeinist system in Iran for having an "absolute" guardianship of the jurisprudent, with no checks on it in the form of a popular franchise.

Montazeri had been close to Khomeini and had at one point in the 1980s been his designated successor. But he broke with Khomeini and other hardliners over the extensive human rights abuses in Iran in the mid to late 1980s. He has openly questioned the doctrine of the guardianship of the jurisprudent (at least in the absolutist form practiced in contemporary Iran). Because challenging this ideological basis of the Iranian state is illegal, Montazeri was under house arrest until two years ago.

Montazeri's son, through whom the ayatollah spoke, was careful to say that Montazeri did not favor a separation of religion and state. Islam, he said, is not limited to acts of worship. But he thought Iraqis should take a lesson from the failures in Iran that had derived from clerics attempting to rule directly, a task for which he said they were unsuited.

Montazeri's position is somewhat similar to that of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Iraq, though Sistani rejects the guardianship of the jurisprudent in the political realm altogether, allowing it only in the realm of social issues. Montazeri's idea that clerical power should be delimited by the popular will is something I haven't seen in Sistani. Rather, I think Sistani thinks civil politics should be run on a civil basis, and religion stay in the seminary except when an occasional fatwa is required to protect the interests of Islam when they were touched upon by civil legislation.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

A Pictorial Commentary on the first Line in Bush's Inaugural Speech

The full transcript is here. Pictures are clickable.

" . . . on this day prescribed by law and marked by ceremony, we celebrate the durable wisdom of our Constitution and recall the deep commitments that unite our country."

Let us consider the durable vision of our Constitution and the commitments that unite us as Americans, viz., the Bill of Rights. And let us ask whether Bush's first term left it intact:

Amendment I: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,



or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;

or abridging the freedom of speech,



or of the press;



or the right of the people peaceably to assemble,



and to petition the government for a redress of grievances . . .

Amendment IV: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.



Amendment V: No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.



Amendment VI: In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense . . .




Amendment VIII: Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Bush has sworn an oath to uphold the US Constitution. He won't. But Congress can. It should insist that the sunset provisions of the so-called "Patriot Act" (which should be called the "Abrogation of the Constitution Act") be allowed to expire in 2005 and that the extremely dangerous "Patriot Act II" be completely rolled back. Republicans who care about the Constitution should join Democrats who care about the Constitution in putting a stake through the heart of this abomination. A noble 200-year-old experiment in civil liberties and democracy, for which US troops are giving their lives, must not be ended by a single act of terrorism and a clique of authoritarians in Washington.

Bush's speech was about bringing liberty to the rest of the world. Let's see if he can first do something to restore to the American public the liberties we enjoyed, as free men and women, until 2001. Let's see if he can bring US government policies back into alignment with the Geneva Conventions and other international law on human rights, to which the US is signatory. Only then would he have earned the right to even think about trying to extend liberty to others. As of now, folks, your library records can be viewed at will by agents of the US government, and the librarian is forbidden to reveal to anyone that the government looked at these documents. Not only is a warrant not required, but even the invasion of your privacy is top secret and you will never know about it. Can anyone even prove that the 19 hijackers of 9/11 ever checked a book out of a US library? The Republic may not be able to withstand four more years of this.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Nine British Troops Wounded in Abuse-Related Blast

Guerrillas targeted British troops at the Shaibah base near Basra with a suicide bombing, wounding nine, along with a number of civilians. It appears that the attack was prompted by the circulation of images showing British troops torturing Iraqi detainees. The images emerged in connection with the trial of some British soldiers on abuse charges.

Arab satellite channels broadcast excerpts Thursday from an internet recording attributed to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian radical Muslim fundamentalist, in which he bitterly attacked Iraqi Shiites for fighting alongside US troops at Fallujah in November. He accused them of looting the city. He also denounced Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani as an atheist and an apostate for declining to denounce the Fallujah campaign. He alleged that 800 Israeli soldiers took part in the fighting there (an absurd charge, of course, but it will be widely believed). The strategy attributed to Zarqawi, of attempting to foment a civil war between Shiite Iraqis and Sunni Iraqis, is a desperate one and so far the Shiites have refused to take the bait. Zarqawi may well be a black psy-ops operation of Baathist military intelligence, which is probably behind most of the violence in Iraq.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat: The two major roads leading south from Baghdad are increasingly dangerous, with travellers being attacked by highwaymen or by guerrillas.

A militantly anti-American preacher in Fallujah, Shaikh Muhammad Saadoun, was helped by his congregation to escape the American dragnet in the city, according to AFP. A preacher at the al-Furqan Mosque in the north of the city, he used to end his sermons with a prayer to God, "Grant us victory over our American enemies and their helpers."

Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan has assured Ash-Sharq al-Awsat that the documents showing him spying for Saddam in 1998-2003, which the Iraqi National Congress alleges it has, are forgeries and baseless. Ahmad Chalabi, who is close to Tehran and a proponent of radical de-Baathification, has recently gone after the virulently anti-Iranian Shaalan, a former Baathist.

Interim Vice President Ibrahim Jaafari said Thursday that fears of a civil war in Iraq were overblown. Jaafari, a head of the Shiite Dawa Party, said that neither Sunnis nor Shiites would accept such a conflict. He said that there was general appreciation in the Shiite community that the guerrillas targetting Shiites, while they might be Sunnis, do not represent the Sunni community.

The British government denied that there was a secret timetable for the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq.

A crisis has roiled the High Commission on Elections in Iraq just 10 days before the first nation-wide parliamentary elections since the party-less elections of 1954. The Commission attempted to dismiss its official spokesman, Farid Ayar. It said that a spokesman was no longer needed, and the Commission would just issue direct communiques. Ayar, however, refused to step down. He accused the president of the Commission, Hussein Hindawi, of resisting proposals that there be a rotating chair, and said the attempt to fire him was motivated by this resistance.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Rice Doublespeak at Senate

The
transcript of the Rice/Boxer exchange is worth reading in full. Rice's performance is breathtakingly bad, and Boxer has all the quotes and facts at her fingertips. The issue is that Condoleeza Rice engaged in demagoguery before the Iraq war. She invoked the image of a mushroom cloud over the United States. But George Tenet had told her the evidence was weak in that regard. The State Department Intelligence and Research division thought the whole nuclear bit was far-fetched. But Rice kept on saying these alarmist things nevertheless.

In the end, Rice falls back on the same brain-dead rhetorical strategy as George W. Bush. Saddam was a threat because he is intrinsically evil. He is so evil that he can be a threat even though all he had in his arsenal were those spitballs toward which Zell Miller showed such derision at the Republican National Convention. Saddam was a threat to the region, she says. She is still saying this now, today. Saddam was not a threat to the region in 2002. That is ridiculous. Iraq was also not a threat to the US. This turns out to be the Achilles Heel of any doctrine of preemptive war. It would require, in order to be justified, much better intelligence than is usually available on the capabilities and intensions of the enemy. Rice still won't admit this, which means she may drag us into further wars with further gross mistakes in judgment.

On Wednesday, Rice testified again. Now aware that Senator Boxer and others were complaining about her rigidity, she finally admitted that the US had made some serious errors in Iraq. But the example she gave, of reconstruction work, was disingenuous. Actually the US companies working in relatively safe places like Basra and Sulaymaniyah have done very good reconstruction work. She seems to be trying to find some mistake she could admit to, which would actually be the mistake of the private sector and not of the Bush adminsitration! For an incoming Secretary of State not to be willing to recognize that Iraq is a mess in part because of US policies is to translate the realm of politics into some sort of fantasyland. And in a way, that is what has been happening in US politics since Reagan was elected and Peggy Noonan began writing those syrupy speeches.

Senators Chafee and Biden urged Rice to try to engage Iran. Biden suggested she
tell Bush that dropping some bombs on Iran's nuclear facilities and then hoping that the young people in blue jeans would toss out the mullas was probably not going to work. Biden has developed this wonderful sardonic sense of what exactly the Bush administration ideologues are thinking, and is able to puncture these insubstantial balloons masterfully, building on decades of experience in foreign affairs.

Rice responded concerning Iran that it was hard to have an engagement with a country that wanted to see Israel destroyed. It is such a simple-minded thing to say. Uh, let me see. In the 1980s wasn't it the Khomeini regime that sold Israel petroleum in exchange for spare parts for its American weaponry? Wasn't it the Israelis who put Reagan up to the Iran-Contra scandal by suggesting that the US ship TOWs to Iran in return for an end to the Lebanese hostage crisis? Even when it was more radical, and despite all the rhetoric, Iran was willing to deal with Israel in ways that helped the latter enormously.

It is true that some Iranian leaders, like Rafsanjani, say frightening things about Israel. But Rafsanjani has no executive power, and when he was president he didn't actually act on such sentiments. The point of engaging the Iranian regime would be to gradually ween it away from such extremism. Iran hasn't launched any aggressive wars in the region, or threatened to use weapons of mass destruction, unlke some other countries (the US had full diplomatic relations with Iraq in the 1980s at a
time when it had done both of these things.) I am very uncomfortable in having US national security policy and diplomacy dictated by how politicians in a country talk about our non-Nato allies (with whom, by the way, we do not even have a mutual defense pact). And I am very suspicious that now that Iraq is a basket case, all of a sudden Ariel Sharon is calling on the US to attack Iran.

If Rice is going to be a successful Secretary of State, she simply has to get back control of US foreign policy from the Likudniks in the Bush administration.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Consensus Growing in Iraq for a Withdrawal Timetable

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leading figure in the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA the largely Shiite party that is likely to form the next Iraqi government), gave a press conference on Wednesday that I saw on LBC satellite television. Al-Hakim said that Iraqis did not want to continue to depend on foreign troops for their security, but would have to become self-sufficient in that regard. Al-Hakim headed for nearly two decades the Badr Corps, the paramilitary wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). His hopes of using it as the corps of a new Iraqi security force have been thwarted by the Americans, who insisted it turn in its heavy weapons and who remain suspicious of it as a stalking horse for Iran. (The Badr Corps was largely trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.) The Badr Corps has now morphed into a political party, the Badr Organization, which is separate from SCIRI and which has seats in the UIA slate. Al-Hakim's comments on Wednesday suggest that he may try to use Badr more aggressively if the UIA wins, against the Sunni Arab insurgency.

The UIA has it in its party platform that if it wins it will demand that the US establish a timetable for withdrawal of its troops from Iraq. This idea is becoming increasingly popular in Iraq.

The idea has now been endorsed behind the scenes by officials in the United Kingdom. A UK government source told the Daily Telegraph, '"The main Iraqi parties are already talking about when coalition forces should be drawn down . . . America knows it will have to deal with the issue soon." ' British eagerness in this regard is driven in part by the recognition by the Blair wing of the Labour Party that the presence of British troops in Iraq is extremely unpopular with the British public. Blair probably won't be dumped by his party the way Thatcher was by hers, but Iraq is just an enormous drag on his government and his popularity. The UK is currently having its own Abu Ghraib moment, as shocking photographs circulated during the trial of three British troops for abusing Iraqi detainees.

Arab satellite television news reported early Thursday morning that Iyad Allawi is also putting forward a plan to regain for Iraq sovereign authority over military decisions in Iraq, and asking for a withdrawal timetable. Such a timetable is also in the platform of Allawi's party.

The FT revealed one reason for which Allawi is making such frantic policy statements two weeks before the elections. Mohammad Tawfiq, an important Kurdish political figure, told the Financial Times that the interim government of Iyad Allawi had never developed a practical strategy for implementing security. He also predicted that Allawi would not get enough support in the forthcomming elections to form the new government, based on his talks with Iraqis from all over the country. He thought the United Iraqi Alliance would do very well, but that it would not nominate a cleric for prime minister. And he is confident that the Shiites will yield to Kurdish desires for a consolidated, ethnically-based province of Kurdistan, to be formed out of 6 of the present 18 provinces.

What are the pros and cons of setting a timetable for withdrawal of coalition troops? The pro is that unless a firm timetable is set, the coalition commanders will have no precise goal toward which to work in wrapping up their tasks in Iraq. They could easily end up being there as long as Israel was in Lebanon (and the Syrians, who came in to Lebanon in 1976 to restore order at the instance of the US and Israel, are still there!) Moreover, some of the hostility toward Coalition troops on the part of Iraqis might subside if there was a known timetable for their withdrawal.

One con is that a precipitous withdrawal of coalition troops could lead to the total breakdown of security and give the guerrilla insurgents the run of Iraq. This sort of factor has stood in the way of previous US bids to begin drawing down the number of troops.

Another con is that in colonial situations setting a firm deadline for withdrawal beforehand can be disastrous. The imperial power becomes a lame duck. Why should anyone care if they are arrested if they know the arresting officers will be gone in 6 months? Plus, such deadlines can encourage massive communal violence as ethnic groups jockey to take over as the imperial power departs. The British in India announced a deadline for August of 1947, and helped provoke the Partition of the country into Indian and Pakistan, an event that led to population displacements and rioting that cost between half a million and a million lives. Likewise, the May, 1948, deadline the British set for withdrawal from Palestine led to the outbreak of the 1948 War and the expulsion of nearly a million Palestinians from their own country.

One solution to this latter problem might be to set a timetable for withdrawal of Coalition land forces, but for the US and its allies to continue to offer the new Iraqi government's army close air support in any battles with the neo-Baathists and jihadis that might try to take advantage of the withdrawal to make a coup and institute a bloodbath.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

4 Bombs Shake Baghdad Wednesday Morning
Condi Assures Senate Everything was Handled Properly
and Everything will be All Right

Guerrillas unleashed a terror campaign
of bombings on the Iraqi capital Wednesday morning, as at least four big explosions shook several sites. Affected were the area near the Australian embassy, a police station, and the Green Zone. Initial reports gave the death toll as 7.

A new Los Angeles Times poll showed that US support for the Iraq war had sunk to new lows, such that only 39% of Americans now believe that the situation in 2002 and 2003 was bad enough to warrant a war with Iraq. The news that there were no weapons of mass destruction appears to be gradually filtering down into even the Red states.
AFP points out
that the majority of the US public has been disaffected with the war in Iraq for some time, putting the lie to Bush's notion that he won a mandate to go on with the same policies there.

In the US, Dr. Condaleeza Rice appeared before the Senate in confirmation hearings on her nomination by Bush to be Secretary of State. I was struck by how much tougher The LA Times was in its coverage than most other news outlets. It notes, e.g., that Dr. Rice seemed unwilling to condemn torture unreservedly (her people back in Birmingham must be proud of that one).

I was alarmed at how doctrinaire all her answers were, and how she consistently refused to take any responsibility for misleading the American public into an unnecessary war. Her notion that the US cannot afford to let failed states fester is something that could be debated. But Iraq was not a failed state in 2002. If anything Condi Rice has helped turn Iraq into a failed state. If it is undesirable for the US to let failed states fester, surely it is even more undesirable for the US to use false pretences to turn countries into failed states. She either doesn't get it, or doesn't have the elemental courage and integrity to admit that she was wrong. Her deputy Stephen Hadley, by the way, was the one who over-ruled the CIA and authorized the phrase about Iraq buying uranium from Niger in the 2003 State of the Union address. Condi is responsible for her subordinates. If you just went through and made a quotation table of everything she said about Iraq in the first term, it would be hilarious to read now.

The one thing I disagree with the LA Times piece about is that they say she might be more effective because she is closer to Bush than Powell was. Not so. Her lack of political and intellectual independence from Bush will turn her into a mere parrot, and all the heavy duty decisions will be taken by Donald Rumsfeld and his Neoconservative phalanx. Her testimony, which sounded as though she had been stuck in a time warp for the past three years and hadn't noticed the disaster in Iraq, was a good sign of her future irrelevance and current inability to deal with reality.
The piece of fear mongering she did about the small weak country of Syria was the most alarming thing I heard. She is in no position to rattle sabers at this point. Those bombs in Baghdad on Wednesday weren't set from Damascus. They were local munitions, local military expertise, local Iraqi guerrillas. And, besides, threatening Syria too vehemently could easily backfire. If they start to fear Condi intends to overthrow them, the Syrian Baath will only have more incentive to support the guerrillas.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Chalabi attacks Shaalan

The rivalry between Iyad Allawi [Arabic link] and Ahmad Chalabi has heated up two weeks before the January 30 elections.

Jon Lee Anderson points out in his New Yorker piece, Allawi was a long-time member of the Baath Party, and is now a secular, tough pragmatist. He organized other ex-Baathists, especially officers and intelligence men, in his Iraqi National Accord, initially for MI6 (British intelligence) and then from the early 1990s in cooperation with the United States. Allawi's secular al-Iraqiyyah list is the most prominent competitor with the United Iraqi Alliance, the slate that groups the major Shiite religious parties.

When the US and the UN appointed Iyad Allawi interim prime minister last June, they knew that he would rehabilitate many Baathists and bring him into the government. They hoped he would correct for the excesses of de-Baathification, a policy of simply firing thousands of middle and low-ranking members of the party, most of the Sunni Arabs, from their jobs. De-Baathification was the brainchild of corrupt financier and political gadfly Ahmad Chalabi, at one time the favorite of the Department of Defense civilians. Chalabi had gradually lost favor, in part because of his close contacts with Tehran and allegations that he had passed the mullas sensitive information.

Allawi appointed ex-Baathists to key cabinet posts. Falah al-Naqib, the son of a prominent Baath official who ultimately became Iraq's ambassador to Sweden and defected in the late 1970s, became minister of the interior (in Iraq, this is sort of like being director of the FBI). For Defense, Allawi tapped an obscure man named Hazem al-Shaalan. Al-Shaalan was known as a former Baathist from al-Hillah (and therefore probably a secular Shiite).

Shaalan is even more of a hardliner than Allawi. On getting into office, he declared Iran to be Iraq's number one enemy, a sort of discourse that hearkened back to Baath propaganda of the 1980s. He took the lead in demanding military action against the Mahdi Army in Najaf, and was enthusiastic about the US campaign against Fallujah and its Sunni fundamentalist guerrillas.

Now Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress has posted a dossier on Shaalan accusing him of spying for Saddam's intelligence apparatus (the mukhabarat) beginning in 1998 and up until the spring of 2003. Indeed, the web site claims that Shaalan personally spied on Ahmad Chalabi for Saddam. It says he operated in Europe under the code name 5H until early 2003, when he became Haydar Ahmad. He is said to have met with a high Saddamist intelligence official in Morocco in 2000. He also is accused of giving Saddam reports on Chalabi's own meetings with British and Iranian officials.

Since Chalabi is a world-class liar and has never produced most of the documents he says prove his various allegations over the years, his attack on Shaalan cannot be taken too seriously until he releases the documents he says he has. Even then, the only logical explanation for Shaalan's sudden rise from obscurity to the Iraqi cabinet is that he was a double agent, actually working for the CIA against Baath intelligence while pretending to gather intelligence for them. (If the most he told them was that Ahmad Chalabi was meeting with the British and Iranians, he was taking Saddam for a ride. I could have told them that.)

The INC is demanding that Shaalan be disallowed from running as a candidate for parliament list by the electoral commission, as a recent Baathist spy.

One implication of the article is that the lists running against the UIA, such as those of Yawir (on which Shaalan is running) and Allawi (with whom Shaalan is associated) are full of persons who had been close to Saddam until fairly recently, an association deeply resented by Shiite Iraqis. So, this campaign against Shaalan must be seen as a species of negative campaigning, Iraqi style.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

IraqTheMOdel

Sarah Boxer writing in the NYThas more on the saga of the Fadhil brothers and their pro-Bush website, which is idolized on the American Right.

She notes that Ali Fadhil, one of the three brothers, has begun his own website, "Free Iraqi where he expresses some doubts about Bush administration policy, unlike his two brothers.

I became suspicious of the original site when they mysteriously attacked Rashid Khalidi and me for simply pointing out that Fallujah had had a long history of anti-British political agitation during the 1920s and the monarchy, something which is well known in Iraqi history and about which there is famous nationalist poetry. They depended on a secondary source by a sociologist to question something that shows up in numerous historical sources. Being dentists, of course, they don't know their way around the British archives and don't realize that secondary works aren't exhaustive. So it was strange that they were questioning something that every informed Iraqi knows, and which is attested in British sources. And it was strange that they went after Khalidi, a Palestinian-American and an eminent historian who opposed the Iraq war.

What really seems to bother the Right bloggers is that the defection of Ali Fadhil introduced doubt and ambiguity into their closed little world in which American Iraq is a virtual paradise and real Iraqis are all tickled pink to have been occupied by a Western army. There has been excellent professional opinion polling in Iraq by Gallup and the State Department that demonstrates that the original IraqTheModel site's views were far out of the Iraqi mainstream.

For American observers concerned with Iraq not to realize how truly awful the situation is, and to fail to understand that the US faces a grave crisis if key policies are not changed, makes them poor Americans. The United States is a democracy and a democracy only works if the citizens are informed and exercise their faculties of critical reason. Looking for token pro-American Iraqis to say nice things while ignoring all the evidence of US failure is pitiful. I sometimes get
messages from readers who are excited by all the rebuilding work the US has done in Iraq and think it is unfair for it to be overlooked. This way of thinking is just wrong. The British in India built railroads and lots of infrastructure. By the 1940s, no Indians were grateful, and they just wanted the British out so that they could have their independent country. The railroads, they said, were after all mainly built to transport British troops and merchandise. When you mess with a people's independence, they stop being grateful for infrastructure. Ask King George III.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Pace of Attacks picks up in Iraq, with Explosion Tuesday Morning in Baghdad, 24 Dead on Monday

A big car bomb exploded outside the headquarters in Baghdad of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq on Tuesday morning. The number of casualties is unclear as I write. SCIRI is a leading Shiite party and part of the United Iraqi Alliance list that is expected to do very well in the January 30 elections. SCIRI was based in Tehran from its formation in 1982, and hit the Baathists in Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war and all through the 1990s. The Baathists hate it as a party of quislings, and were probably behind the murder by car bomb of its leader, Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, on August 29, 2003, as well as the recent car bombing that targeted his brother and successor, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim.

Two US troops assigned to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force died in action in Anbar Province on Monday.

Guerrillas targeted police officers in Baiji with a car bomb on Monday, killing 10 and wounding 28. In the eastern city of Baqubah, guerrillas fired rpg's at an Iraqi military vehicle, killing 8
soldiers and wounding 4.

Reuters adds,

' "In other pre-election violence, clashes erupted in the southern town of Musayib after guerrillas fired on a polling station. One guard was killed and two wounded." '

This incident is further evidence that the guerrillas can strike deep in the south of the country, and are not limited to operations in the Sunni Arab heartland. They can be expected to strike there on Election Day.

Guerrillas in Mosul kidnapped Archbishop Basile Georges Casmoussa, 66, of the Syrian Catholic Church an arm of the Roman Catholic church on Monday, prompting a protest from the Vatican.

A poll published in the al-Mada newspaper suggested that 2/3s of registered voters in Baghdad intended to vote on January 30. I would not make too much of this finding. Baghdad has a population of 5 million, with about 2 million Shiites and nearly a million Kurds, the populations most enthusiastic to vote. The poll is skewed toward likely voters, since it is reporting the attitudes of those who have already bothered to register. The poll would only be counter-intuitive if it told us that most Sunni Arabs in the capital planned to vote, something Reuters is not alleging. So I don't think the poll tells us anything we didn't already know. We expect big Shiite and Kurdish turnouts. It is the one-third of registered voters who do not plan to vote who worry me, since they are probably mostly Sunni Arabs, and are being joined by some rejectionist Shiites.

The All India Ulema [Clerical] Council has submitted a demand to the US government that they be allowed to send election observers to Iraq. They note the suspicion in which the US is held in the Muslim world, and the importance of Iraq in Islamic history for Muslims. Bush said Sunday that he hoped Muslims who wanted peace could be persuaded that the US did as well. Here is an opening. The Indian Muslim community is about 130 million strong.

Al-Hayat is reporting that a compromise has been reach over Kirkuk, whereby Kurds from that city who were deported by Saddam will be allowed to vote in local and provincial elections as residents of Kirkuk. The city is contested by Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen, and is an armed camp. The Kurds had earlier threatened to boycott the elections if Kirkuk residents were allowed to vote (the implication being that the 1/3 of the city that is Arab is actually interlopers given Kurdish property by Saddam).


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

The Accountability Moment and Hersh on Iran

Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh threw Washington, Islamabad and Tehran into consternation Monday with his report
in the New Yorker on the activities of Bush's Pentagon with regard to Iran. He said that the Pentagon had alread sent some special ops teams into Iran to look for evidence of a nuclear weapons program, with Pakistani help. Bush used the Pentagon instead of the CIA, Hersh alleged, because Bush maintains that there are no reporting requirements with regard to Congress this way. Using the CIA would have required informing the Senate Intelligence Committee, by law. Probably Pentagon intelligence gathering falls under the same statute, but that is an untested theory and for the moment Rumsfeld is acting as though the Pentagon is unconstrained.

I don't think there is any doubt that Bush and his appointees at the head of the Department of Defense intend to do something to Iran. If Iraq had gone well, they probably would already have attacked it. Since their land army is tied down in Iraq, they have to use special operations forces for aggressive action against Iran.

The Pentagon and also Pakistan are denying the report heatedly. But it makes sense.
Iran has formed a close military alliance with India, Pakistan's chief rival in South Asia, and Iran has come out on top in the new Afghanistan, with Tajik and Hazarah allies displacing the largely Pushtun, Pakistan-oriented Taliban. And Pakistan has
reason not to want Iran to get nukes, thus surrounding Pakistan with nuclear powers on both the east and the south. So Pakistan has every reason to cooperate with the US against Iran.

As for Bush and his DoD hawks, they have been quite clear about their intentions. They announced that Iraq and Iran were part of an axis of evil, and we have already seen what happens to regimes so categorized.

The potential for trouble for the United States if the Bush administration acts aggressively toward Iran is enormous. It could turn the Iraqi Shiites and the Afghan Hazarahs decisively against Washington. An Iran in chaos similar to that in Iraq would be three or four times the problem for the US and the world that Iraq is.

Ironically, Bush revealed the day before Hersh's article that he has learned nothing from his mistakes in Iraq.

Bush's comments in the Washington Post on Sunday that he did not need to fire anybody over his Iraq policy because the US electorate had endorsed that policy cause a political uproar.

' "We had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 election," he was reported as saying. "The American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates and chose me, for which I'm grateful." '

Bush doesn't seem to know the difference between getting a mandate to lead and getting a mandate to continue failed policies. Those Americans who voted for Bush often did so, according to polls, despite worries that Iraq wasn't going well. They didn't put him back in to just keep on making the same stupid mistakes. They put him back in in hopes that he had been seasoned by the errors and was committed enough to the project to see it through properly.

That is why he should have fired the top three officials at the Department of Defense, to signal that he was going to make a course correction.

Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith don't know how to fix the Iraq mess, and don't even seem to pay much attention to the problems. In testimony before Congress last spring, Wolfowitz grossly underestimated the number of US troops that had been killed in the guerrilla war.

Rumsfeld either was involved in the decision to put the US into the torture business, or didn't keep watch on subordinates who did make that decision. Either way, he goes down in history as the Marquis de Sade of Abu Ghraib. He didn't know that it would only have taken a phone call to increase the number of armored vehicles sent to our troops in Iraq. And, when he was asked about the difficulties of holding elections in Iraq, he said it would be all right if the polls couldn't be held in some areas of the country. He did not know that his subordinate, Paul Bremer, had set the elections up as national and proportional, so that if one region with a major ethnic group did not vote, it would end up not being represented in parliament. (Rumsfeld seems to have though it was like the US, where if you have a light turnout in a district, you still get a congressman, he or she just doesn't represent much of the electorate). He should be fired.

Feith is so much of a security risk because of his long ties to the Likud Party in Israel that for a while the Pentagon brass was refusing to share classified documents with his office. One of his subordinates is under investigation by the FBI for turning confidential Pentagon policy documents over to an official in the Israeli embassy via the pro-Israeli lobbying group, AIPAC. Feith had signed on to a 1996 policy paper for Likud party politician Benyamin Netanyahu that called for a war against Iraq for Israeli security purposes and openly opposed the Oslo peace process, which could have resolved the festering Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Feith's Office of Special Plans, its personnel drawn in part from the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, cherry-picked intelligence on Saddam's Iraq to make an exaggerated and unfounded case for Iraq having weapons of mass destruction programs and an operational link to al-Qaeda.

Bush should have been elected, as a war president, with a big margin. He wasn't. He barely got back in. The American public is just not going to put up with this World War IV nonsense that the Neocons keep putting out. If Bush doesn't find a way to resolve the Iraq mess, and if he is so foolhardy as to pursue direct confrontation with Syria and Iran that proves just as disastrous, he may well turn the US public decisively against the Republican Party for decades, as the party of adventure, war and ruin.

Benjamin Franklin said in the 1758 edn. of Poor Richard's that "Experience keeps a dear School, but Fools will learn in no other, and scarce in that." What he didn't envisage was a pupil at the helm of state who would scarcely even learn in the hard school (or perhaps not even that). When your helmsman won't correct course, you as passenger are in big trouble. That is where the US now stands.

When the constitutional convention was over in 1787, “A lady asked Dr. Franklin Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy. A republic replied the Doctor if you can keep it.” In that case he knew exactly where the threat would come from. Overly ambitious politicians.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Al-Abbudi: Sistani Endorses the United Iraqi Alliance

Al-Zaman reports via AFP that Shaikh Naji al-Abbudi, a representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, spoke at a conference on the upcoming elections in the southern Shiite city of Diwaniyah on Sunday, and said something that is explosive if it is true. He alleged that Sistani is throwing his support to the slate of the United Iraqi Alliance, which is led by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim (the party head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq). [See also al-Sharq al-Awsat.] At the close of the conference, al-Abbudi said in an address to 1500 clerics and clan heads that Sistani wants the elections held on schedule and that he affirms his support of Slate 169, the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA). He explained that Sistani supports this slate because of its Islamic coloration and the ability of its leaders to move the country toward a better future. Al-Abbudi said that Sistani wanted to safeguard the name of Islam.

He continued that this slate had confronted a virtual war on it only because it contains all the major tendencies and groups in Iraqi society. When Sistani discovered that the other slates were using television, newspapers, and international media to do election campaigning, he therefore called clearly for support for the UIA. [Implied is that Sistani hopes his moral authority will outweigh the slick advertising and media press conferences of rival politicians such as interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.]

I am suspicious of this report. It is not like Sistani to endorse a particular party, though he certainly hasn't objected it it using his name and likeness in campaign posters. If al-Abbud is correct, it means that Sistani is really worried that Shiites won't get the message to vote for the UIA by any more subtle means, and felt he had to actively endorse it. Sistani's prestige is enormous, and if Shiites in the South think he wants them to vote for the UIA, most of them will.

The UIA candidates continue to face severe danger. Al-Hakim narrowly missed being assassinated recently.

Sally Buzbee of AP reports that guerrillas wearing police uniforms staged an ambush Sunday in downtown Baghdad on Salama al-Khafaji. She escaped injury thanks to quick action by her bodyguards. Al-Khafaji, a highly conservative Shiite female politician from Karbala, had served on the US-appointed Interim Governing Council and is now running for parliament on the United Iraqi Alliance slate put together under the auspices of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. This is the second attempt on her life this year.

Guerrillas targeted schools scheduled to be used as polling places, hitting one with mortar fire at Mosul, and for others in the far south at Basra. Even in central Iraq south of Baghdad, much of which is Shiite, election workers are receiving death threats, according to AP, which quoted a US embassy official in Hillah.

Sistani's prominence also puts his aides at risk. Ali al-Khatib, son of Sheikh Habib al-Khatib (the representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Wasit) was shot down in an internet cafe in Naaman on Sunday. His father had survived an assassination attempt two months ago.

Al-Zaman reports that the nephew of Ayatollah Hussein al-Sadr of Kadhimayn was wounded and one of his chiefs of security--Jasim Muhammad al-Saadi-- was killed on Saturday. Ayatollah Hussein al-Sadr is the uncle of Muqtada al-Sadr but is pro-American and relatively liberal, unlike the populist, radical Muqtada. Hussein al-Sadr is supporting the list of interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, and his bodyguards and nephew were out putting up posters for his "Iraqiyyah" slate (Allawi's party was the Iraqi National Accord, but not all the Iraqiyyah candidates are INA). Then they were attacked.

Hussein al-Sadr's spokesman implied that the incident occured because they strayed into the turf of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. They came near the house of Bayan Jabr, a leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) who had earlier served as Minister of Housing. The nephew and the bodyguards appear to have realized that they were in hostile territory, and tried to withdraw, but the effort was met with a hail of bullets. (It is implied but not explicitly said in the piece that Badr Corps fighters fired the shots; the Badr Corps is the paramilitary arm of SCIRI). Hussein al-Sadr is among those who have complained lately that the United Iraqi Alliance is using Sistani's name and likeness in its campaigning.

Although it is not clear that radical young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr supports the UIA, it is clear that he deeply dislikes Iyad Allawi, and it seems to me that he is trying to make trouble for Allawi's slate. Long lines for Iraqi motorists wanting to buy gasoline have become routine. The Sadr movement tried to make it a political issue on Sunday. Hundreds of followers of Muqtada al-Sadr began a 3-day sit-in at the Minister of Petroleum in Baghdad to protest gasoline shortages. AP says that "About a dozen entered the ministry and complained to Minister Thamir Ghadbhan, asking why U.S. troops have fuel for their vehicles and Iraqis do not." AFP reports that "thousands" of Sadrists staged similar protests in the Shiite areas on Sunday.

Al-Hayat says that the protesters carried posters saying that "The government of Allawi is a continuation of the dictatorial government of Saddam" and demanded a return of normal electricity service and an end to the fuel crisis.

The protesters also alleged that the shortages of water, electricity and fuel were a deliberate policy of the US, the UK and Israel to keep Iraqis down.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Major Fighting in Ramadi, Mosul, Kut

al-Zaman says that a US soldier was killed Saturday at Babil, the site of ancient Babylon, where the US military has come under criticism for having damaged ancient artifacts while basing itself there.

Guerrillas killed a member of the governing council of Ninevah.

Sally Buzbee of AP reports that In Buhriz, near Baqubah, guerrillas attacked an Iraqi National Guard checkpoint, killing seven guardsmen.

In downtown Baghdad, guerrillas staged an attack on Iraqi National Guards, then disappeared. Fighting ensued on Haifa street.

There was more fighting in Mosul and Ramadi on Sunday between US troops and Sunni Arab guerrillas.

The guerrillas attacked the US base at Ramadi, which was shaken by five big explosions. There were clashes in the city center of Ramadi, and according to al-Zaman guerrillas killed a police lieutenant there, Salah al-Dulaimi. In Ramadi as well, the body of an Egyptian was found, who was killed for cooperating with the US, according to AP.

US troops also fired on a car that sped toward them in Samarra, which had ignored their warning shots, killing two.

In Irbil, a katyusha rocket struck a house near the regional Kurdistan parliament building, where high Kurdish officials were scheduled to meet.

South of Baghdad, guerillas attacked an Iraqi national guard patrol, injuring two guardsmen, one critically.

Near Kut in the south, gunmen shot down three Iraqi policemen in one attack. In another, they tossed a hand grendade at Iraqi National Guards, killing three officers. Then when people gathered for the funeral of one of the policemen, a suicide bomber waded into the crowd of mourners and blew himself up, killing seven others as well. Gunmen also shot dead an Iraqi translator working for a foreign company helping with water projects.

I cannot imagine what exactly is going on in Kut, and none of the Arabic newspapers has explained it. This is a heavily Shiite area, so the gunmen are not Sunni Baathists or Salafis. Disgruntled Marsh Arabs? Sadrists?

Many Iraqis responded angrily to the 10-year sentence meted out to US Army reservist Charles Graner for his role in torturing detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison, saying that it was too light given the gravity of the crime.

Some compared US military interrogation techniques at Abu Ghraib to those of Saddam Hussein.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Curfew Measures on Election Day

Events conspired to undermine the Iraqi government's attempts to reassure the public that procedures for voting would be secure. Judge Wael Abdul Latif, a Basra notable of Shiite heritage who serves as Federal minister for provincial affairs, announced that severe restrictions would be placed on automobile traffic near polling stations and even within provinces altogether on Election Day. The hope is to prevent Baathist and Salafi fundamentalist guerrillas from using car bombs to kill the voters standing in line at polling places and so wreck turnout.

Unfortunately, car bombs are only one way the guerrillas could attack the thousands of polling sites, which are the ultimate soft target. Guerrillas have successfully used mortar and rocket fire, and machine gun attacks, against guarded facilities, and have even managed to ram car bombs into areas where automobiles had been prohibited.

As if to mock Judge Abdul Latif, Iraqis discovered a raft of dead bodies at various places in the country. Thirteen corpses were discovered in Latifiyah in Babil province, shot at close range. They were said, according to al-Sharq al-Awsat, to have received death threats for working with the foreigners. At al-Suweira in the Shiite south, Western wire services said that four Iraqis turned up dead who had been working for a foreign company. In nearby Kut, al-Sharq al-Awsat says that four civilians were caught in the crossfire in a battle in northwest Kut between Coalition troops and local gunmen. The four were wounded and taken to the hospital. They consisted of a driver, two women and a little girl. The most likely fighters in northwest Kut are Mahdi Army, but the report did not identify the insurgents. The idea that the Shiite areas are quiet is challenged by such reports. Even Basra in the deep south, far from Baath centers of power, still is a place where machine gun fire rings out in the distance from time to tiem.

North of Baghdad, authorities dragged yet another victim from the water. Security this bad, the incidents seemed to scream, can't be addressed with some restrictions on traffic. An Iraqi employee of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Baghdad also recently disappeared and his body was found Saturday.

Guerrillas in Samarra launched two separate attacks, killing 4 Iraqi soldiers in one and a fifth in another. In Kirkuk, guerillas attacked a police checkpoint near the US base, killing a policeman and wounding four others. In Hit, in troubled Anbar province to the West, guerrillas abducted 15 Iraqi national guardsmen the day before yesterday.

In another cycle of violence, guerrillas fired three mortar shells into the Green Zone, which houses government offices and the US Embassy at downtown Baghdad. Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that one mortar fell near a police outpost, wounding two. It was the third straight day that the Green Zone took mortar fire. Guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb as a US convoy passed in the Abu Ghraib area west of Baghdad, destroying a truck. No word as of this writing on casualties. Guerrillas in Mosul launched an attack on a US convoy, which fought back. The fighting damaged nearby shops and homes.

Guerrillas in Ramadi fired a rocket at a government building, then roamed in bands in the downtown area. In Qaim near the Syrian border, guerrillas kidnapped Lt. Col. Abdul Razzaq al-Salmani. In the same city, two national guardsmen were found dead with bullet wounds.

Friday night the daughter of the assistant to the secretary-general of the Iraqi Council of Ministers was kidnapped. There was also a jailbreak Friday of 28 prisoners from Abu Ghraib.

AFP reports on the hardships faced by people in Mosul, who are shivering through a cold winter with insufficient fuel, cut off from key facilities by the US military's closing of a bridge, and suffer from death threats and lack of working telephone lines.

Dexter Filkin of the NYT reports on the so-called election campaign in Iraq. He does not himself come out and say it, but the whole process is obviously absurd, with candidates afraid to identify themselves as such meeting secretly with prospective voters equally afraid to admit their plans in public. Some of the few candidates so foolhardy as to announce themselves have turned up dead. I don't think an election conducted like this can possibly have much legitimacy, and it certainly will not contribute to resolving the guerrilla war.

Al-Hayat Says that interim Finance Minister Adil Abdul Mahdi (from the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq) said Saturday that a 40 percent to 50 percent turnout among Sunni Arabs would be sufficient to endow the elections with legitimacy.

Al-Hayat also reports that some campaigning is being done by politicians who are already well known as such. Iyad Allawi campaigned in Tikrit on Saturday. The largely Shiite coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), held a big news conference in Baghdad, where Abdul Aziz al-Hakim (Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq), Ibrahim Jaafari (Dawa Party), and Ahmad Chalabi (Iraqi National Congress) spoke under a big picture of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.

Chalabi said he was sure that Sunni Arab Iraqis would not allow themselves to be dissuaded from voting by a handful of terrorists. Chalabi also denied that there was any formal channel for direct consultation with Sistani by the UIA leaders. He said that Sistani, as a spiritual leader, did not involve himself directly in day to day politics.

Chalabi also replied to interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's complaint that the United Iraqi Alliance was illegitimately using Sistani's picture in its campaign posters, giving the false impression that Sistani had explicitly endorsed this list. Chalabi replied with an attack of his own, complaining that Allawi was using the apparatus of state to publicize his own position and that of his party, the Iraqi National Accord.

Isam al-Rawi, the head of the Iraqi League of Seminary Teachers and a member of the Association of Muslim Scholars, explained his organization's boycott of the elections. He said that AMS was not a political organization but a religious leadership (he actually used the Shiite term, marja'iyyah, showing how Sunnis in Iraq are responding to Sistani's power by trying to copy some aspects of Shiite clerical hierachalism). He said that they had simply given their view of the best course in the light of Islamic law and national interests. (Again, it is interesting that he invoked both shari'ah or Islamic law and "what is appropriate for the Nation." Salafis-- Sunni fundamentalists-- have often been hostile to the idea of nationalism as a European import). He said AMS is not intrinsically opposed to elections as a means of achieving a just governing system, but that they objected to holding them under the shadow of Occupation.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates called Saturday for all Iraqis to participate in the elections. This call follows on that of Egypt and the Rector of al-Azhar University. The US has appealed to Iraq's Sunni Arab neighbors to use their good offices to try to convince Iraq's Sunni Arabs to vote.

In another blow to the US image in Iraq, archeologists have made an initial assessment that the US military damaged the site of ancient Babylon while using it as a military base. The genius that put US and Polish troops on top of such sites should be fired, but won't be. Al-Jazeerah was making hay all day Saturday with reports of the damage to Babylon by the US, and with interviews with Arab archeologists about the site's importance to Iraqi history and the history of civilization. Bush keeps talking about how he intends to get through to the Arabs as to the real US role in the world of promoting democracy and prosperity. But he either doesn't mean it or hasn't the slightest idea how to go about making a good impression.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Muqtada: "Outside Powers Should Not Interfere in Elections"
Pachachi: Expatriate Iraqis must Vote

Al-Sharq al-Awsat: Shaikh Nasir al-Sa`idi, the Friday prayers leader of al-Muhsin Mosque in Sadr City, read out a sermon written by radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr that called on "neighbors and non-neighbors of Iraq" to refrain from interfering the in the internal affairs of Iraq, especially in the elections." He called on Iraqis not to remain silent in the face of the theft of their petroleum, leaving them, he said, with no electricity, with no clean air because of the constant rounds of the tanks and armored vehicles, and no security because of the Occupying Power. He called on George W. Bush by name to avoid interfering in Iraqi affairs. He said, "That is not your specialty. Your specialty is wars and terrorism." Sa`idi denied that any Sadrists were running for parliament.

I presume that Muqtada thinks there is a danger of Iraq's Sunni Arab neighbors interfering in the election, or that the US will stage-manage it. His worries are the opposite of those expressed forcefully and voluntarily to the Washington Post last month by King Abdullah II, that Iran might interfere in the elections.

In Najaf, Shaikh Sadr al-Din al-Qubanji (a representative of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq) reiterated that the elections had to be held on schedule, and expressed his confidence that Sunni Arabs in Iraq would come out to vote, despite the efforts of "what they call Zarqawi" to ensure otherwise. [It actually seems highly unlikely that many Sunni Arabs will vote, outside perhaps West Baghdad.]

At the Sunni Umm al-Qura mosque in Baghdad, Shaikh Mahmud al-Sumayd'i demanded a postponement of the elections. He said, "Everyone looks forward to the day when all Iraqis come out to vote, for elections are an Iraqi matter." He added, "But the elections cannot be held on the basis of the marginalization of one community."

Adnan Pachachi, the elderly leader of the Independent Democrats, was in Amman to address the Iraqi expatriate community. Some 200 came to hear him urge them to vote. He told them that a massive voter turnout was the only way to put an end to the foreign presence in Iraq. He said Iraq needed the vote, since it was passing through the most dangerous phase in its history, and urged them all to go to the polls. He warned that the guerrilla insurgency in Iraq aimed at establishing a Taliban-like state.

Pachachi had earlier urged postponement of the elections, but he now seems behind them. His campaign trip to Jordan was aimed at getting as many as possible of the some 200,000 Iraqis in that country to come out and vote (preferably for the Independent Democratic Coalition that Pachachi heads). I was in Amman recently and posters are plastered everywhere calling on Iraqi expatriates to vote on January 30.
Most Iraqi expatriates in the US and the West are Shiites, but Jordan may have substantial numbers of Sunni Arabs since it is close to Anbar, Salahuddin and other provinces that are in turmoil, where Sunnis predominate. Jordanians are 90% Sunni and the other 10% is largely Christian.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Polling Sites, Soldiers, Electoral Workers Targeted

Guerrillas bombed a polling site in Sharqat north of Baghdad, destroying it but causing no casualties.

In Baghdad, a policemen, two Iraqi soldiers and a civilian were killed in separate incidents.

In Mosul, guerrillas detonated a car bomb as a US convoy went by, but no word on whether they did any damage. Other Sunni Arab guerrillas killed 5 Kurdish fighters or Peshmerga and wounded three others. The guerrillas in Mosul resent the Kurds for being willing to fight alongside the US in Fallujah and elsewhere against other Iraqis.

West of Baghdad, guerrillas shot another election official, the eighth to have been murdered in recent weeks.

Meanwhile, in the US soldier Charles Graner was found guilty of torturing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. The conviction afforded al-Jazeera the opportunity to do a retrospective of the torture scandal.

Graner is small potatoes, and it seems clear that the torture policies came from much higher up, but this is probably as far as the investigation will go. If Congress had been in the hands of the Democrats, you might have had serious hearings on all this (not that everyone in Congress wasn't appalled). But we in the US now live in what is virtually a one-party state, and such states don't investigate themselves.

The most disturbing aspect of the Graner trial was his defense attorney's attempt to compare the torture techniques used on the prisoners with the pyramids that US cheerleaders form for their routines. It was a callous thing to say, and the Arab world knew it.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

7 Dead, 38 Wounded in Shiite Mosque Bombing
Two Aides of Sistani Killed

Guerrillas parked a car bomb outside a Shiite mosque in the eastern village of Khan Bani Saad on Thursday evening. Then, as Shiites exited the mosque after evening prayers, they detonated it, killing at least 7 and wounding 38. Nine shops nearby were set afire.

Two aides to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani were killed in separate incidents in Iraq on this week. Sunni guerrillas appear to be behind the attack, the day before yesterday, on Shaikh Mahmud al-Mada'ini in Salman Pak, as he drove home from evening prayers at his mosque in south of Baghdad with his son and four bodyguards. They came up alongside his car and directed machine gun fire at it, killing all 6. Al-Sharaq al-Awsat says al-Mada'ini had earlier faced other attempts on his life.

In Najaf, Shaikh Halim al-Afghani was killed by criminals who had earlier kidnapped his son. This sort of random crime strikes at Iraqis daily in many cities, including the capital, but is seldom reported in the US press.

Guerrillas in Ramadi mounted a spectacular bank robbery, taking advantage of the poor security situation, and carrying off billions of Iraqi dinars ($14 million). Two days before, guerrillas had robbed bank trucks of coin shipments, killing the drivers and setting them on fire.

In Baghdad, guerrillas shot up a minivan of the employees of a Turkish construction company in Baghdad, killing all six, and kidnapping their boss, Abdulkader Tam.

Guerrillas killed two Marines in Anbar Province on Thursday.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Election News: No Ayatollahs, no Israelis

Al-Hayat:

The Iraqi National Accord has lodged a formal complaint with the Iraqi electoral commission against the use by the United Iraqi Alliance of the name and images of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in their campaign posters. Sistani sponsored the negotiations that led to the establishment of the coalition list by 11 Shiite parties and numbers of independents. He has not, however, specifically endorsed this list, and as a spiritual leader would attempt to stay above the political fray. He almost certainly would not, himself, approve of the party using his name and image to get elected.

The basis for the complaint from Allawi's party is that the electoral law crafted by the Americans disallows the use of religious symbols. Imad Shabib, the party leader of the Iraqi National Accord, also alleged that the United Iraqi Alliance had employed policemen drawn from paramilitary troops of the Shiite Badr Corps to put pressure on voters from the South. Hadi al-Amiri, head of the Badr Corps, denied the allegation. He also defended the UIA's right to use Sistani's image, according to al-Sharq al-Awsat. UIA pamphlets distributed to Shiite voters maintain that a vote for any other ticket would scatter Shiite influence and limit the number of seats Shiites hope to take in the new parliament.

Al-Hayat also says that the Iraqi electoral commission announced Thursday that Israelis of Iraqi heritage would not be allowed to vote in the January 30 elections "because we do not recognize Israel." It had been speculated that Israeli Iraqis might be able to vote at expatriate polling stations, presumably in nearby Jordan. The head of the Israeli association of Iraqi Jews, Mordechai Ben Porat, had anyway expressed doubt that any of the 240,000 Iraqi-Israelis--only 29% of which were born in Iraq-- were planning to go to Jordan to vote.

Farid Ayar said, "We welcome any Jews of Iraqi origin in the polling both, no matter what current nationality, on condition that they not be Israelis. The issue is absolutely not one of origin or religion, but simply that we do not maintain relations with Israel."

Ella Shohat's comments on being Jewish, Arab and Iraqi all at once (and how bewildering Americans find this intersection of multiple identities), are highly enlightening.

Only about half of Iraq's 15 million eligible voters will likely cast their ballots on election day, according to Farid Ayar of Iraq’s Independent Electoral Commission. Ayar says that such a turnout would not be so bad for Iraq.

Problem: The turnout will be higher in Shiite and Kurdish areas, producing an ethnically lopsided parliament/ constitutional assembly that excludes Sunni Arabs. Ayar's statement is disingenuous.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Absolutely?

Sometimes you have to go to the regional newspapers for the punchy editorials. The Pentagon's announcement that the search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction officially ended quietly in late December provokes the Virginia Pilot to observe, "And America is left with a seemingly endless war in Iraq, but without a rationale for it."

Well, not the main rationale. But Bush is still spinning the old fool's gold with his privileged lips:

Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post quotes this exchange from the 20/20 to be aired Friday night:

"Barbara Walters: This was our main reason for going in. So now when we read, 'Okay, the search is over,' what do you feel?

"President Bush: Well, like you, I felt like we'd find weapons of mass destruction. Or like many, many here in the United States, many around the world, the United Nations thought he had weapons of mass destruction, and so therefore, one, we need to find out what went wrong in the intelligence gathering. Saddam was dangerous. And . . . the world was safer without him in power.

"Walters: But was it worth it if there were no weapons of mass destruction? Now that we know that that was wrong? Was it worth it?

"Bush: Oh, absolutely."

Bush's response contains three elements.

1) The US was not alone in being wrong about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction. All the other nations did, too.

2) Saddam was dangerous.

3) Absolutely.

When is someone going to call him on this inanity? The Belgians didn't have intelligence assets inside Iraq that could have given them an independent view of the question. Whatever the world believed, it mostly believed because the United States disseminated the information.

Moreover, it is not true that there were no dissenters. The State Department's own Intelligence and Research Division dissented. French military intelligence dissented. What Bush is saying is either untrue or meaningless.

As I have pointed out before, Saddam without weapons of mass destruction could not have been "dangerous" to the United States. Just parroting "dangerous" doesn't create real danger. Danger has to come from an intent and ability to strike the US. Saddam had neither. He wasn't dangerous to the US. It is absurd that this poor, weak, ramshackle 3rd world state should have been seen as "dangerous" to a superpower. That is just propaganda.

Calling Saddam "dangerous" as an existential element without regard to the evidence falls under the propaganda techniques of name-calling and stirring irrational fear.

As for "Absolutely," it is a weasel word. It is not an argument. It is a species of hand waving. It is cheap.

Bush has figured out, apparently, that some in the American public respond, rather like the apes to which they deny they are related, to posture, grunting and body language rather than to reason and evidence. When I see him smirking and gesturing, I can't help thinking of the ape General Thade (Tim Roth) in Tim Burton's remake of the Planet of the Apes, which used scientific findings about primate behavior and hierarchy to inform the acting.

"Absolutely" used in this way is a vocalization that actually functions as an intimidating agonistic display meant to close off further dialogue by the silverback.

What would happen if we turned away from the world of political theater to the real world? We would find a study by the National Intelligence Council which is quite alarming about Iraq and the future.

The National Intelligence Council, the think tank of the CIA, has concluded that Iraq has now succeeded Afghanistan as the training ground for professionalized terrorists.

Much of the terrorism in the Middle East in the 1990s and early zeroes has been carried out by fighters who had assembled to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, got training and became ideologically committed, and then returned to their home countries. The "Afghans" on the streets of Algiers actually wore Afghan clothing (sort of like an American coming back from Scotland and insisting on wearing a kilt), and they joined the vigorous stream of Islamic politics in Algeria. When the generals cancelled the election results of the 1991 parliamentary polls, which the Islamic Salvation Front had won, many Muslim fundamentalists turned radical and got training from the "Afghans." The more radical of them formed the Armed Islamic Group, which joined al-Qaeda in the late 1990s and to which belonged Ahmad Rassam, who tried to blow up Los Angeles Airport for the Millennium Plot. Similar stories could be told about the Afghanistan returnees in Yemen, Indonesia, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and so forth.

So, the likelihood is that Bush's Iraq misadventure will be responsible for terrorism that is blowing up our grandchildren down the line.

Absolutely.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Falling like Flies
53 Iraqi Parties Withdraw from Elections

Xinhuanet reports that:

' According to the Al Furat newspaper, 53 political parties and organizations as well as 30 individuals have asked their names to be dropped from the election lists in a bid to show their rejection of elections under US occupation. '

There had been 105 parties and individuals, and 6 coalitions, participating in the elections. There were only about 30 individuals running as independents, and it appears that they have all now withdrawn. And half of the registered parties have also withdrawn, if al-Furat is correct. The individuals mostly never had a chance, since voters only get one vote, and few would have wasted it on a single individual when they could vote for an entire party list. So their withdrawal may in part simply reflect a realistic assessment of their chances. But parties at least had the potential of gaining a seat or a few seats, and their withdrawals are serious.

The same news service says that among those withdrawing is The Patriotic Front for Iraqi Tribes, a Sunni Arab party. The party, which groups 40 major tribes, said that the security situation had to improve before elections could be held. Xinhuanet said that it was also protesting the arrest of Shaikh Hasan Zaidan Khalaf al-Lahibi last week. He plays a role in uniting the tribes, and has his own party.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that, as well, Shaikh Hasan's own party, the National Front for Iraqi Unity, has withdrawn from the election to protest his recent arrest. (This party is no. 101 on the list given here Wednesday of slates). At the Babil Hotel in Baghdad, a party official announcing the withdrawal complained that the Americans seemed uninterested in protecting candidates, and complained that the security situation made elections difficult at this time.

Al-Zaman reports that the large and powerful Dulaim tribe of Western Iraq has issued a statement condemning the killing by US troops of one of its chiefs, Shaikh Abd al-Razzaq Inad Mu'jal al-Ka'ud, last week, as well as the extensive destruction of life and property that has accompanied the US occupation in their areas. The Dulaim say that they want the United Nations to establish a fund to recompense them for their massive losses. They called for an immediate restoration of the pre-invasion Iraqi army and other security agencies. They complained that lack of security in Sunni Arab areas made voting out of the question, and said that anyway many parties were counterfeiting ballots. Of all the enemies you could have in Iraq, I would have advised the Americans not to make one of the Dulaim.

As Trudy Rubin reports from Amman, some of the Sunni Arab parties' reluctance to participate may come from foreboding of Shiite victory, something to which many Sunni Arabs have not reconciled themselves.

Minister of State Adnan Janabi, a key aide of interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, has resigned to protest being detained and handcuffed by US troops at a checkpoint outside the Green Zone, where government offices and the US embassy are barricaded. It was revealed last week that Janabi was giving envelopes with $100 in them to journalists who covered the press conferences of the Iraqi National Accord, a party mainly made up of ex-Baathists that probably has little popularity in Iraq.

Wire services report 11 dead in Iraq violence, including two car bombings and a gun battle in Mosul, the assassination of the deputy police chief of Baquba, the burning of four bank guards and the shooting of a policeman in Baghdad.

Al-Hayat reports that the Shaikh al-Azhar, Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, issued a call for Sunnis and Shiites both to participate actively in the January 30 elections. Al-Azhar University it the most prestigious Sunni seminary in the world, and its rector is widely respected. He is sometimes accused, however, of bending to government pressure, and his ruling of this week must be seen in this light.

Even as the NYT's Christine Hauser praised the courage of Iraqi electoral workers, the newspaper's editors published an editorial on Wednesday calling for the postponement of the elections.

Every path forward has costs. Postponing the elections leaves in place the increasingly unpopular Allawi interim government, populated by old CIA assets, which destroyed its credibility by acting as a cheering section for the US destruction of Fallujah. It could be argued that the Sunni Arab guerrilla war benefits from the perceived illegitimacy of the Allawi government, which has disappointed those who hoped it might restore order.

Postponement would risk radicalizing Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the most respected leader in Iraq, who has already once demonstrated his willingness to call the faithful into the streets in the hundreds of thousands if he did not get his way on one person, one vote elections on a fast timetable. A postponement without his acquiescence would be dangerous in the extreme.

On the other hand, the credibility of elections in which the candidates have to remain anonymous to avoid being killed, and in which Sunni Arab candidates are increasingly unavailable, and in which half the lists have rushed to withdraw, is also very low. The credibility of the elections is not improved by the US killing or detaining and humiliating the party and clan leaders among the Sunnis who had still been willing to contest them, helping to drive them out of the race.

As usual in Bush's Iraq, there are no good options here because the administration's prior bad decisions have poisoned the most promising wells for the future.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Pressman: Implications of Abu Mazen

Jeremy Pressman of the University of Connecticut Political Science Department shares his thoughts in a guest editorial on the victory of Mahmud Abbas in the Palestinian elections last Sunday

Implications for the Middle East of Mahmud Abbas's Victory

Jeremy Pressman


With Mahmud Abbas’s clear victory in Sunday’s Palestinian presidential elections, attention has started to shift to the implications of Abbas’s election for Palestinian society and for Israeli-Palestinian relations. If Abbas plays his cards right, a tremendous opportunity is at hand.

The presidential election campaign, coming just weeks after partial municipal Palestinian elections, is a healthy development for Palestinian society. Long caught between Yasser Arafat’s autocratic governance and Israel’s military occupation, Palestinian political development has been stifled and free elections have been all too infrequent; the first, and only, presidential elections were held in 1996. Not only did Abbas campaign vigorously but his nearest rival, Mustafa Barghouti, admirably fought for votes in the face of Abbas’s organizational advantages. This bodes well for future elections.

Abbas faced a political dilemma coming into the elections. On the one hand, he has been outspoken for several years about the failure of the militarization of the second Palestinian intifada. Abbas, a member of Arafat’s older generation, has implicitly criticized the younger generation of militants who engage in daily confrontations with Israeli forces and attacks on Israeli civilians.

On the other hand, Abbas did not have a traditional base of political power. For years, he was a close advisor of Arafat without backing from either a powerful clan or a militant or security organization; he had no genuine popular following. Like many other Palestinian politicians, his institutional titles were always of less meaning than might have appeared given Arafat’s tight control of Fatah, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Palestinian National Authority. His brief tenure as Palestinian prime minister in mid-2003 ended in failure and resignation in the face of both Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s intransigence.

During the campaign, however, Abbas has appeared to forge close ties with Palestinian militants, the very people who it would seem would be most opposed to the de-militarization of the intifada. Marwan Barghouti, the most popular Fatah leader of the younger generation, opted out, in, and then out of the presidential race. His last exit may have turned on a deal with Abbas. Several regional leaders of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, a nationalist militia loosely affiliated with Fatah, have also campaigned with Abbas. Abbas has even been in talks with Hamas, the Islamist opposition that chose not to field a presidential candidate.

The key question about Abbas, then, is whether he will use or be used by Palestinian militants. Can Abbas bring them along, promising to hold fast to core Palestinian political objectives on land, Jerusalem, and refugees even as he dramatically shifts the tactics of the second intifada? His clear victory in a free and fair election should provide an initial boost to Abbas’s legitimacy among Palestinians.

Like so much in Palestinian politics, though, much of what Abbas needs to win this post-election argument is out of his hands. He can initiate a public debate in Palestinian politics, but if Israel’s Sharon is not interested in engagement, Abbas is much more likely to be stymied. In a December 30-31, 2004 poll, Palestinians were exactly split on whether they support Abbas’s call for the cessation of the use of arms. An easing of the Israeli occupation and a return to high-level negotiations over a two-state solution – steps that can only take place with Israeli acquiescence – would convince more Palestinians to accept the end of military attacks on Israelis.

Sharon’s recent track record does not offer much hope. In 2002, when the Arab League, at Saudi Arabia’s initiative, approved a pathbreaking call for acceptance of and normalization with Israel, Israel largely ignored the measure. When Abbas was prime minister in 2003, Sharon hardly lifted a finger to help Abbas reform Palestinian society and slowly reduce Arafat’s grip on power. Sharon’s plan to disengage from the Gaza Strip in 2005 is helpful, but his close advisor Dov Weisglas declared the Gaza withdrawal was meant to prevent any Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, not test the waters for further shifts. Absent an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, the two-state solution will not get off the ground.

For decades, the United States has pushed for a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. With the election of Abbas, the United States will face a new leader who, if willing to take on Palestinian militant tactics, could make a compelling call for a two-state solution. President George Bush’s initial response has been positive, but he needs to turn rhetoric into concrete US action. By encouraging both Abbas to move in this direction and Sharon to respond in positive ways, Washington could go along way toward jump-starting a much-needed push for peace.



Jeremy Pressman, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut, is co-author of Point of No Return: the Deadly Struggle for Middle East Peace and author of “Visions in Collision: What Happened at Camp David and Taba?”

jeremy.pressman
@uconn.edu

Pressman Website

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

The Third Baath Coup?

If, as I have argued, the Baathists along with some Salafi (Sunni fundamentalist) allies are behind the guerrilla war, what do they want? They want to drive the Americans out of Iraq and make a third Baath coup, putting the Shiite genie back in its bottle and restoring Sunni Arab primacy.

A third Baath coup is no more inherently implausible than the first two. The Baathists probably have access to some 250,000 tons of munitions which are still missing. They know how to use them, and have been the managerial class, and many are Iran-Iraq War and Gulf War veterans with substantial military experience.

As long-time readers know, I have long held a position similar to that enunciated by former weapons inspector Scott Ritter's assessment that the lion's share of violence in Iraq is the work of Baathist military intelligence and military gone underground, and that the tendency to blame everything on Zarqawi and a handful of foreigners is a propaganda move that suits both the Baath mukhabarat and the Bush administration. AP correspondent in Baghdad, Borzou Daragahi, makes much the same argument.

Only 6 percent of the fighters captured at Fallujah were foreigners, and Fallujah anyway had long had a high foreign-born population, being a frontier and desert port. By Baath I don't necessarily mean committed ideological Baathists, but the party was how they were formed politically, along with networks of clientelage based in the Sunni Arab heartland.

The Baath has been systematically killing members of the new political class. This is visible at the provincial level. The governors of Diyala and Baghdad provinces have recently been killed. The killing and kidnapping of members of the provincial governing councils go virtually unremarked in the US press but are legion. A female member of the Salahuddin GC was kidnapped and killed recently. The police chiefs of many cities have been killed or kidnapped, or members of their family have, such that many more have just resigned, often along with dozens of their men. The US is powerless to stop this campaign of assassination.

And this is my problem with the idea of just having the US suddenly withdraw its military from Iraq. What is to stop the neo-Baath from just killing Grand Ayatollah Sistani, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, Ibrahim Jaafari, Iyad Allawi (who is rumored not to sleep in the same bed twice), etc., all the members of the provincial councils and the new parliament, and then making a military coup that brings the party and its Sunni patronage networks back to power?

I think this coup would look more like the failed 1963 effort than like 1968, and has the potential to roil the country and the region for decades. The tanks and helicopter gunships and chemical weapons that the Sunni Arab minority regime used to put down the other groups are gone, and it is not clear that car bombs, Kalashnikovs and sniping could substitute for them. They can probably take the Green Zone and the television stations if the US abruptly withdraws, but could they really put down the South effectively again?

For this reason, I fear I think the US is stuck in Iraq. Sistani clearly fears a Sunni Arab coup, as well, and this is one reason he has not acted forcefully to end the military occupation, which he deeply dislikes.

Is the Neo-Baath Coup scenario one that the US could live with?


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Allawi: "Pockets" Will not be Able to Vote

Michael Georgy of the Scotsman reports from Baghdad that interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi admitted on Tuesday that "pockets" of Iraq won't be able to vote on January 30 because of poor security. I suspect the pockets amount to about 3 million persons.

Georgy also says that Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari is trying to hold a meeting with the Sunni Arab political leaders who are calling for a boycott of the elections, on January 16, in hopes of opening the sort of national dialogue that might allow more Sunni Arabs to participate.

Jordan's ambassador to the US, Karim Kawar, is among the few officials in the region or in Washington to admit the truth: The January 30 elections in Iraq have no real validity. He estiamtes that 40% of the country won't be able to vote.

An election in which the names of the candidates in the various lists are still not known 18 days before the polls open is a sick joke, not an election. What could it possibly mean, to vote for anonymous politicians? And note that they are anonymous because otherwise the guerrillas would kill them. Again, I think the election has to go forward, but I just don't expect much from it. The resulting government will be of questionable legitimacy, and the guerrilla war will if anything intensify. The elections are like all the other Wizard of Oz spectacles put on by the Bush administration in Iraq since April 9, 2003 -- the appointment of Garner, the appointment of Bremer, the appointment of an Interim Governing Council, the capture of Saddam, the "transition to sovereignty," etc., etc. Each of these was supposed to be some magical turning point and the beginning of sunshine and rainbows, and instead the situation has deteriorated every single month for the past nearly two years.

(For the slates running in the elections, identified only by their heads, see below.)

An unreleased State Department study of last month summarized by AFP last Thursday found that:

Only 32 percent of Sunni Muslims are "very likely" to vote.

Among Shiites, 87 percent said they are "very likely" to vote.

Only 12 percent of Sunni Arabs consider the elections "legitimate."

Only 12 percent of Sunni Arabs think the elections will be completely fair.

52 percent of Shiites think the elections will be completely fair.

61% of Sunni Arabs are very concerned about their family's safety.

24% of Shiites are very concerned about their family's safety.

Among Shiites, 76% would boycott if a figure such as Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani told them to.

Only 32 percent of Sunni Arabs said they would boycott simply because a religious figure asked them to.

88% of Sunnis would stay home if they felt voting would put them in danger.

38% of Shiites say they would stay home if their are threats of violence against polling stations.


AFP notes:

' The poll was conducted in the mixed ethnic cities of Baghdad and Kirkuk; the mainly Sunni cities of Baquba and Tikrit; the Kurdish cities of Arbil and Sulaimaniyah; the mid-Euphrates Shiite cities of Hilla, Najaf, Diwaniyah, Kut and Karbala; and the southern Shiite cities of Basra, Nassiriyah, Ammara and Samawa. '

The Intelligence and Research division of the State Department conducted the poll, and they are highly professional.

This poll should be given much more weight than the findings of a local poll published in the pro-Iraqi government al-Sabah newspaper that indicated:

' Will the security problems cause you to?
Not come out and vote the day of elections = 18.3%
Come out and vote the day of elections = 78.3%
No opinion = 3.4% '

Rightwing pundits like David Brooks have taken up this al-Sabah poll as a cause for optimism. But they ignore the I & R findings. The Baghdad poll is flawed for several reasons. First of all, it was limited to Baghdad. Baghdad is about half Shiite and has a million Kurds, and both Shiites and Kurds are very enthusiastic about the elections. So a poll in Baghdad doesn't reflect the resentments in Baqubah, Tikrit, and other Sunni Arab cities. Second, West Baghdad is more secure and more politically oriented that other Sunni Arab areas. Third, we don't know if scientific weighting was done for the poll published in al-Sabah. Fourth, al-Sabah was set up for propaganda purposes by the Bush administration and its staff at one time resigned in protest over all the propaganda.

Steve Komarow of USA Today compares Shiite Sadr City and Sunni (or at least when it was populated) Fallujah on the eve of Iraq's elections. He finds Sadr City enthusiastic about the elections and Fallujah not.

One difference that he could have made more of is the attitude of the chief religious authorities. Although many Shiites in Sadr City support the radical Sadr tendency, few of them would deny the authority of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who insisted on the elections being held and under whose auspices a Shiite coalition has been put together. And, some proportion of Sadr City follows Sistani implicitly. Sadr himself has given such mixed signals that it would be hard for them to follow him if they wanted to. First he said he was neutral about the elections, then more recently that he opposes them. Some of his chief lieutenants have called for a boycott (Shaikh Bahadili in Basra), while others are actually standing for election. In the face of this confused message, it is easy for Shiites to pay attention instead to the overall spiritual leadership (al-Hawzah) in Najaf, and the message from Najaf is unambiguous. Vote!

Jim McDermott and Richard Rapport, both MDs and the former a sitting Congressman, summarize the violations of international law committed by the US military in its assault on Fallujah in November. They point to capturing the main hospital, destroying a smaller one, depriving residents of water and electricity, turning away the Red Crescent, and other measures specifically forbidden by the Geneva Conventions.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

US Soldier Killed in Samarra,
15 Iraqis Killed

Guerrillas set off a car bomb at the police station in Tikrit Monday, killing 6 policemen and wounding between 8 and 12. Tikrit is Saddam Hussein's home town.

Near Yusufiyah, guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb as a US convoy was passing, followed by a civilian minibus. The bomb missed the Americans and killed 7 Iraqis, wounding one.

A car bomb in Samarra killed a US serviceman and wounded two civilians.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports these along with some other incidents. An Iraqi translator for the Americans was shot down between al-Sharqat and Mosul. Jawad Saadoun was 33.

Two petroleum pipelines, one between Kirkuk and Baiji, were blown up on Monday.

The killing two days ago of an Iraqi National Guardsman in the northern al-Hurriyah district of Baghdad was confirmed.

There were also a large number of other violent attacks that the US military has not released the details about. This is true every day.

There were also dangerous almosts.

Police in the upscale Mahmudiyah district of Baghdad discovered and disarmed a car bomb near the headquarters of the Iraqi Islamic Party, headed by Muhsin Abdul Hamid. He had served in the Interim Governing Council, and has not called for a boycott of the elections, though he cancelled his own party's participation in theme because he said poor security in Sunni Arab areas would not allow a fair election.


Guerrillas detonated a huge explosion near the Japanese base at Samawah in southern Iraq, where 600 members of the Self Defense Forces are stationed. The Japanese contingent was sent to do medical and other aid work, but appears to have mainly been stuck in its barracks because of poor security. The bomb doesn't seem to have gotten close enough to harm anyone. There have been previous attempts to target the SDF, but luckily those also failed. The deployment of the SDF to Iraq is pretty unpopular with the Japanese public, and if any are killed in violence it might force PM Koizumi to withdraw them.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Electoral Lists

A kind person in Baghdad sent me this. It is a translation of an official announcement from last month, which appeared in a Kuwaiti newspaper. It is a complete listing of the parties, coalitions and individuals that are contesting the January 30 elections. (Note that the Iraqi Islamic Party has since withdrawn). Note also that each voter can vote for only one of these lists. Where the list consists of a single individual, the voter would have to really want that person in parliament, and he or she would need on the order of 44,000 votes.

The names of the individual candidates for the most part have still not been publicly revealed. So Iraqis are expected to vote for a list based on the head of the list, who is known, and its general orientation. The United Iraqi Alliance (also translated as Unified Iraqi Coalition), e.g., groups a large number of religious Shiite parties, and is likely to attract a majority of the Shiite vote.

---------------------------------------

The Final Statistics
Of the Candidates’ Lists

[Md. is an abbreviation for Muhammad below; Dem. is Democratic.]
_____________________


The final results of the number of lists of candidates – parties, political entities, and coalitions – to compete in the elections for the National Assembly, the Kurdistan National Council, and the Provincial Councils that will take place on January 30, 2005, were announced [last month].

The official spokesman for the Supreme Commission for the Elections, Dr. Farid Ayyar, said that 73 political entities – organizations, political movements, gatherings, parties, and associations – presented lists of their candidates for the National Assembly, while 25 single-individual political entities presented lists of their candidacies for the National Assembly. Four of the single-individual political entities announced the withdrawal of their candidacy altogether for various reasons, and three of the individual entities changed their status by withdrawing as individual candidates and joining existing coalitions.

The official spokesman declared that the number of entities that will enter into electoral competition has reached 98 political entities.

Concerning the coalitions, Dr. Ayyar said that their number has reached 9 coalitions with a total of 49 political entities.

The official spokesman indicated that the number of lists of candidates for the Kurdistan National Council has reached 14 lists of political entities and only one coalition, while no individual entity presented its candidacy for the afore-mentioned election.


1

List of the Candidates for the National Assembly



Register

Name of Political Entity/ Name of Entity Head/ No. of candidates

1. Free Democratic Homeland Party Haytham al-Hasani 63
2. Kurdistan Conservatives’ Party Zayd `Umar Khudr al-Surchi 12
3. Independent Euphrates Bloc Shakir A.A. Khashan al-Jabasi 143
4. Islamic Tha’r Allah Organization Yusuf Sinadi `Abd al-Wahid 12
5 Yazidi Movement for Reform and Progress Amin Farhan Jiju 12
6 Dem. Gathering of Iraqi Tribes Ghalib Su`ud Shallal al-Rikabi 51
7 Chaldean Democratic Union Party Ablahad Afram Sat 12
8 United Dem. Iraq Congress, Jawdat Kadhim Md. al-`Ubaydi 150
9. Kurdistan Dem. Socialist Party Muhammad Hajj Mahmud Md. 38
10 Kurdistan Democratic Solution Party Fa’iq Muhammad Ahmad 12
11 Islamic 15th of Sha`ban Movement Razzaq Yasir Muzhhir 47
12 New Iraq Renaissance Movement Ahmad Muhammad Faysal 45
13 Islamic Unity Party Muhammad al-Musawi al-Qasimi 19
14 Democratic National(ist) Party Nasir Kamil al-Chadirchi 12
15 Kurdistan Islamic Group Muhammad Najib hasan al-Barzanji 12
16 Democratic Qasimi Gathering Qasim Amin al-Janabi 18
17 Independent Babil Association Salim Kazhim Naji 48
18 Independent Democratic Iraqi Gathering
For Liberation and Construction Jasim Husayn Sakr 117
19 Iraqi Democratic Popular Gathering Khalaf al-Munshidi 24
20 Iraqi Nat'l Unity Gathering Dr. Nihru Muhammad `Abd al-Karim 275
21 Independent `Abd al-Sattar Jabr Kati` al-`Abbudi 1
22 Independent `Ali Musallam Jar Allah al-Baydani 1
23 Independent Muhammad Rashad Khalil al-Fadl 1
24 Independent Ibrahim Khalil Sa`id 1
25 Independent `Abd al-Amir `Ubays al-Sabah 1
26 Independent Dr. Ibrahim Shafiq Khalil Ibrahim al-Basri 1
27 Independent Sa`dun Ghulam `Ali `Abd al-Karim 1
28 Coalesced with another party Hikmat Dawud Hakim (1)
29 Withdrew Salman Nasir Husayn Makutir (1)
30 Coalesced within the Iraqi List Dr. Raja’ Habib al-Khuza`I (1)
31 Independent Muhammad Kazhim Fayruz al-Hindawi 1
32 Independent Muthanna Fadil Muhammad 1
33 Independent Ahmad Taha Ahmad Yasin 1
34 Independent Malik `Abd al-Husayn al-Zubaydi 1
35 Independent Muhammad Muhsin `Ali al-Zubaydi 1
36 Withdrew Rajiha Ahmad Salih al-Baghdadi (Ms.) (1)


2


37 Independent Majid `Abd al-Rahim Wahib al-Jami`i 1
38 Independent Amin Haydar Hamad 1
39 Independent `Abbas `Ali Zaki Hassun 1
40 Independent Muhammad `Abd `Awwad 1
41 Independent `Abd al-Razzaq Jawad Jabir 1
42 Independent `Amir `Ali Husayn `Uwayd al-Murshidi 1
43 Independent Kazhim Jasim `Ali al-Fadili al-Husayni 1
44 Independent Ghalib Muhsin `Abd Husayn al-Sabahi 1
45 Independent Dr. `Abd Jasim al-Sa`idi 1
46 Independent Muhammad Dahham Nazzal 1
47 Independent Engineer Baqir al-Baqir 1
48 Independent Engineer Wadi Muhammad Wadi Hiyal al-Khalifa 1
49 Independent Falah Hasan `Abd al-Amir al-`Aridi 1
50 Independent Ahmad Hasan Mahmud 1
51 Withdrew as an individual and joined
The Unified Iraqi Alliance `Adil `Abd al-Mahdi Shibr (1)
52 Independent Mahmud Taha `Abbud al-Qurna l-Juburi 1
53 Democratic Islamic Party Dr. `Abbas Sahib al-`Askari 111
54 Iraqi Democratic Gathering Husayn Muhammad al-Juburi 124
55 Turkmen National Movement Husam al-Din `Ali Wali 36
56 Iraqi Islamic Party Dr. Muhsin `Abd al-Hamid 275
57 Islamic Da`wa Movement `Adil `Abd al-Rahim Majid 45
58 Unity Party Mubdir Salman Ways 208
59 Democratic Construction Party As`ad Hamid Rabah al-`Ibadi 30
60 National League of Leaders and Shaykhs
Of Iraqi Tribes Thamir Najm Hasan `Abdallah 57
61 Independents’ List Dr. Nizar `Ali Muhsin al-Wa’ili 48
62. Hashimite Iraqi Monarchists, Sharif Ma’mul A.R. Al Nisan 164
63 Democratic Collective Action Front `Abbas Hadi Jabr 111
64 Notables of Iraq Council Nizar Habib al-Khayzaran 70
65 Democratic Islamic Trend Husayn al-`Adili 64
66. Iraqi Council of NGO Humanitarian Orgs. Jabbar Mustaf Hassun `Ali 46
67 Democratic National(ist) Alliance Samir Shakir al-Sumaydi`i 36
68. Democratic Party of the Iraqi Nation, Dr. Mithal al-Alusi, 25
69 Islamic Union of Fayli Kurds of Iraq Tha’ir Ibrahim al-Fayli 22
70 Democratic National(ist) Coalition Malik Duhan al-Hasan 189
71 Democratic Iraq Gathering Farqad Mu`izz al-Din Al-Qazwini 111
72 Iraqi Democratic Liberal Party Muhammad Baqir al-Suhayl 37
73 Unified Arab Front Wasfi `Asi Hasan al-`Ubaydi 24
74 Independent Iraqi Commission of
Civil Society Organizations Basil `Abd al-Wahhab al-`Azzawi 80



3


75. Independent Iraqi Declaration Gathering, Mansur A.M. al-Asadi 96
76 Assyrian National Gathering `Udishu Malku Kurkis 15
77 Islamic Action Organization in Iraq –
Central Command `Ala’ Hamud Salih Al Tu`ma 45
78 1991 Sha`bani Intifada of Iraq Bloc Yahya Kazhim al-`Isami 42
79 Grandsons of the 1920 Revolution
Gathering `Abd al-Husayn `Abd al-`Azhim al-Yasin 42
80 Democratic Islamic Party Dr. `Abbas Sahib al-`Askari 1
81 Independent Nat'list Elites and Cadres Fathallah Ghazi Isma`il 180
82 Iraqi Republican Gathering Sa`d `Asim al-Janabi 275
83 Islamic Accord Movement* Jamal Muhammad Hasan al-Wakil 67
84 Democratic National(ist) Party Nasir al-Chadirchi 45
85 Iraqi National Salvation Party* Sami Zaydan Khalaf 132
86 Independent Iraqi Bloc* Walid `Abd al-Rahman al-`Umar 57
87 Iraqi Gathering for Democracy Rahim Abu Jari’ al-Sa`idi 102
88 Democratic Society Movement* Hamid al-Kifa’i 30
89 General Union of the Youth of Iraq Sajid Hattab 114
90 Democratic Iraqi People’s Party* `Abd al-Rida Jamil Nasir al-Khafaji 75
91 Democratic Iraqi Current* `Aziz al-Yasiri 64
92 National Gathering of the Center Current Muhammad `Abd al-Karim Muhammad 39
93 Independent Gathering of the Citizens
of Baghdad `Ali Fadil `Ali 31
94 Iraqis* Shaykh Gahzi `Ajil al-Yawar 80
95 Reconciliation and Liberation Bloc Mish`an al-Juburi 16
96 Independent List Hadi Jabbar Hamadi al-Shaybani 103
97 Iraqi Nat'l Brotherhood Party Ra`d Salman `Alwan al-`Ubaydi 181
98 National(ist) Gathering Hana’ Idwar Jurj 71
99 Indep. Democrats’ Gathering* `Adnan Muzahim al-Pachachi 63
100 Constitutional Monarchism* Sharif `Ali Bin al-Husayn 275
101 National(ist) Front for the Unity of Iraq Hasan Zaydan Khaf al-Lahibi 216
102 Arab Democratic Front* Fihran Hawwas al-Sadid 50
103 National(ist) Brotherhood Movement* Nadim H.S. al-Tamimi 48
104 Independent Progressive Front* Shaykh `Abd al-Karim S. al-Rubay`i 102
105 National(ist) Message List* Ahmad Ya`kub al-`Ubaydi 60



Office of the Press Spokesman
Of the Supreme Independent Commission for the Elections


4


The Coalitions Presented for the National Assembly


Register Name Constituent Parties No. of candidates

1 Justice and the Future Party 275

1. Democratic Justice and Progress
2. Free Fayli Kurd Organization

2 Turkmen of Iraq Front 63

1. Ibli Turkmen Party
2. Turkmen National(ist) Party
3. Independent Turkmen Movement
4. Iraqi Turkmen Justice Party
5. Islamic Movement of the Turkmen of Iraq

3 Unified Iraqi Coalition [Alliance] 228

1. Supreme Council of the Islamic
Revolution in Iraq
2. Islamic Da`wa Party
3. Gathering of the Center Party
4. Badr Organization
5. Islamic Da`wa Party/Iraq Organization
6. Justice and Equality Gathering
7. Iraqi National Congress Party
8. Islamic Virtue Party
9. First Democratic Nationalist Party
10. Islamic Union of the Turkmen of Iraq
11. Turkmen Fidelity Movement
12. Islamic Fayli Gathering in Iraq
13. Islamic Action Organization
14. Iraq of the Future Gathering
15. Hizballah in Iraq Movement
16. Islamic Sayyid of the Martyrs Movement

4 Democratic Coalition of the Two Rivers 12

1. Nationalist Bith Nahrayn Movement
2. Independent Gathering of Assyrians Movement

5 People’s Union 275

1. Hikmat Dawud Hakim
2. Iraqi Communist Party

6 Nationalist List of the Two Rivers 28

1. Assyrian Democratic Movement
2. Chaldean National Council

7 Iraqi List 233

1. Iraqi National Accord Movement
2. Iraqi Democrats’ Movement
3. Democratic National Renaissance Party
4. Independent Iraqi Corps

5

5. Fidelity to Iraq Gathering

6. Notables of Iraq Council
7. Dr. Raja’ Habib al-Khuza`i

8 Kurdish Alliance List 165

1. Patriotic Union of Kurdistan
2. Kurdistan Democratic Party
3. Kurdistan Islamic Union
4. Kurdistan Communist Party
5. Kurdistan Democratic Socialist Party
6. Kurdistan Democratic National(ist) Party
7. Democratic Bith Nahrayn Party
8. Chaldean Democratic Union Party
9. Assyrian National(ist) Party
10. Kurdistan Peasants and Oppressed Movement
11. Kurdistan Toilers’ Party

9 Iraqi National(ist) Movement and the Independent Coalition of Iraqi Civil Society Organizations 172

1. Iraqi National(ist) Movement
2. Independent Coalition of Iraqi Civil Society Organizations

Office of the Press Spokesman Of the Supreme Independent Commission for the Elections


6

The Lists Presented for the Kurdish National Council


Register Name of Political Entity Name of Entity Head No. of candidates

1 Kurdistan Conservatives’ Party Zayd Khudr al-Surchi 12
2 Kurdistan National Current Yasin Muhammad `Abd al-Qadir 109
3 Kurdistan Democrats’ Movement Shukrallah Hamid Amin Sa`id 9
4 Democratic Movement of the
People of Kurdistan Khudr Qadir Khudr 6
5 Kurdistan Communist Party Kamal Shakir 60
6 Chaldean Democratic Union Party Ablahad Afram Sat 3
7 Kurdistan Democratic Socialist Party Muhammad Hajj Mahmud Muhammad 112
8 Kurdistan Democratic Solution Party Fa’iq Muhammad Ahmad 33
9 Kurdish Independents’ List Farhad Birbal al-Qassab 11
10 Kurdish Islamic Group Muhammad Najib Hasan al-Barzanji 9
11 Kurdistan Democratic Action Party Yusuf Hanna Yusuf 6
12 Iraqi Republican Gathering Sa`d `Asim al-Janabi 7
13 Iraqi National(ist) Brotherhood Party Ra`d Salman al-`Ubaydi 8
14 Kurdistan Labor Party Shawan Siddiq `Uthman 3





Office of the Press Spokesman Of the Supreme Independent Commission for the Elections


7


Coalitions of the Kurdistan National Council


Register Name of Coalition Coalescing Entities No. of candidates

1 Kurdistan Democratic List 111

1. Kurdish Democratic Party
2. Kurdistan Democratic National Union
3. Democratic Bit Nahrayn Party
4. Kurdistan Peasants and Oppressed Movement
5. Assyrian National(ist) Party
6. Conservatives’ Party
7. Chaldean Democratic Union Party

Office of the Press Spokesman Of the Supreme Independent Commission for the Elections

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

US Rejects Sunni Demand for Withdrawal Timetable
2 US troops Killed, along with Baghdad Deputy Police Commissioner and Iraqi Police, Guards

The US rejected on Monday a proposal from the Sunni Association of Muslims Scholars that the US declare a timetable for withdrawal of its troops from Iraq, in return for which the AMS would lift its boycott of the elections and would accept the resulting government as legitimate even if it was Shiite-dominated.

The US spokesman said that the US was not prepared to announce a timetable for withdrawal, and that it would be premature to do so before the new elected Iraqi government was formed.

An informed US view of the political steps prescribed by the Transitional Administrative Law for after the elections in Iraq are laid out by a legal adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority and the US embassy, Brett McGurk. He also answered questions online at the Washington Post on the process. He is worth reading as an American insider. Personally, I think many of his expectations are wildly optimistic, and he seems unconcerned by basic problems like that the names of the candidates are still unknown in Iraq, the Sunni Arabs are unlikely to show up, election workers and candidates are withdrawing under death threats, and religious Shiite parties will probably dominate the resulting parliament.

Guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb in Baghdad Monday as a Bradley Fighting Vehicle passed, killing two US troops and wounding four. AP suggested that Iraqi guerrillas are using more powerful explosives, able to inflict such damage on the Bradleys.

Guerrillas killed the deputy police commissioner of Baghdad and his son with a drive-by attack on their car with machine gun fire. Al-Qaeda in Iraq claimed credit for the attack, terming Brigadier Amer Ali Nayef a collaborator with the Americans.

In southern Baghdad, a guerrilla detonated his car bomb (disguised as a police vehicle) outside a police station, killing 4 policemen and wounding 10.

In Mosul, guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb as an Iraqi National Guard patrol passed, accompanying US troops. It killed 3 guardsmen and wounded 6.

In the eastern city of Baqubah, US troops said they accidentally killed a 13-year-old girl and wounded a 14-year-old boy.

Wire services report that in Wasit in the Shiite south, an organization calling itself the Secret Republican Army posted threats to mount expert snipers against townspeople who came out to vote on January 30. The warnings appeared in another city, as well.

The Secret Republican Army sounds to me like Baathists (the elite Baath military units were called the "Republican Guards"), and it is chilling that they can still threaten people in Shiite Wasit.

The Ukraine announced that it would withdraw its 1600 troops, the fourth-largest national contingent in Iraq, by summer of 2005. Seven Ukrainian troops were killed in an explosion recently, which now appears to have been an attack rather than an accident.

It is noteworthy that the democratically elected president Viktor Yushchenko vowed to withdraw the troops from Iraq, which had been sent there by the authoritarian previous government against the will of the Ukrainian people, presumably in search of patronage from Washington. Sending troops to support the US occupation of Iraq has been almost universally unpopular with actual publics, and it is unlikely that any of the foreign contingents in Bush's "coalition of the willing" could stay there if it depended on a popular referendum.

The Washington Post also reports that the police chief of Baiji, a city north of Baghdad, barely escaped being assassinated on Monday. When the police fired back at the attackers, they killed at least one innocent bystander. His family vowed revenge. About 142 national guardsmen in Baiji have resigned in the face of death threats from guerrillas.

Ongoing sabotage of Iraq's oil pipelines continued to prevent exports from the northern oil fields, and interrupted for a day exports from the south.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

The New Contours of American Militarism

David Ignatius of the Washington Post has a column on Tuesday concerning US options in Iraq. He reports three scenarios from Washington insiders:

1) reduce the number of US troops in hopes that the Sunni Arabs will accommodate themselves to the new Shiite-dominated government, and vice versa;

2) Go on fighting the insurgency in the Sunni heartland while doing reconstruction work in the calmer Shiite south and Kurdish north;

3) Mount a massive and brutal counter-insurgency campaign against the Sunni Arab guerrillas, rather on the model of what the military government did against its Muslim radicals in the 1990s. Ignatius urges the employment of Iraqi forces in this campaign rather than American ones.

One problem with the "special operations" (some would say "death squad") scenario is that it is most likely that these pro-US units would largely be recruited from among Kurds and Shiites, and if they were deployed mainly against Sunni guerrillas, it would have the effect of raising ethnic tensions. Iraq is not El Salvador. Of course, as Ignatius recognizes, the other problem is that it raises thorny ethical problems and questions about what Americans stand for.

"The Iraq Syndrome", a growing phenomenon and legacy of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, perhaps inclines the American public more toward finding an exit strategy than toward an intensified, brutal 9-year-long counter-insurgency effort.

The increasingly praetorian character of American responses to crises is underlined in an elegiac article by Tom Engelhardt.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

US Kills as many as 12 Innocents; 7 Ukrainians die in Blast

US troops south of Baghdad near Yusufiyah ran into a roadside bomb near a checkpoint the night of Saturday into Sunday, and immediately opened fire. Apparently they did so indiscriminately, however, killing at least 2 Iraqi policemen and three civilians, though some reports suggest 12 dead and 14 wounded. Shooting back at roadside bombs is a problematic tactic, since so often they are detonated by remote control or when a vehicle strikes them, and the bombers are nowhere nearby. And, at a checkpoint, there would be innocent Iraqis to be caught in the crossfire.

Another bomb killed a US serviceman in Baghdad, and a Marine was killed in Anbar province.

Seven Ukrainian soldiers and one from Kazakhstan were killed in the course of attempting to disarm munitions at an arms depot.

AP also reports that ' The entire 13-member electoral commission in Anbar province resigned after being threatened by insurgents, a regional newspaper reported. Saad Abdul-Aziz Rawi, the head of the commission, told the newspaper that it was "impossible to hold elections" in the Sunni-dominated province, where insurgent attacks have prevented voter registration. '

Guerrillas assassinated General Jassim al-Obaidi on Sunday near his home in Baghdad, and wounded his daughter. Al-Obaidi was the head of the Iraqi National Accord, the small political party made up largely of ex-Baathist officers and officials, to which interim PM Iyad Allawi also belongs.

Steven Weisman of the New York Times did an excellent piece on Sunday concerning the train of decision-making that led to the current Iraqi electoral system. Since the system involves a national election in which all party lists compete on a proportional basis, it has raised the specter of a poor Sunni Arab showing. Weisman concludes that Paul Bremer adopted the system late in his tenure as civil administrator of Iraq because his aides, and UN election official Carina Perelli, felt that it solved a number of problems raised by district-based voting, including the difficulties of conducting a voter census in each district. It is about the least democratic system one could imagine. It allows party leaders to make deals in smoke-filled rooms and present voters with a fait accompli. It is mostly even difficult to vote for local politicians people know and respect. If the United Iraqi Alliance, the mainly Shiite coalition, does very well, the system will have functioned rather as Egypt's does, which regularly ensconces the National Democratic Party in power.

A recent poll conducted by the US suggests that most Sunni Arab Iraqis probably will not vote, anyway. Indeed, 88% of Iraqis say that they will stay home on Election Day if there is stubstantial violence. (There is likely to be substantial violence).

The Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS) met on Saturday with 8 officials of the US embassy. Its leader, Harith al-Dhari, offered to end the Sunni Arab organization's call for a boycott of the elections if the US would set a definite timetable for withdrawal of its troops from Iraq.

Al-Hayat says that the AMS now says it will accept a Shiite government if it results from the elections, as long as the latter negotiates a firm deadline for the withdrawal of US troops. AMS said that its disagreements with Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani were "merely differences of opinion."

Abdul Salam al-Kubaisi, the number two man in the Association of Muslim Scholars, said that it would be desirable for his organization's leadership to meet with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani so as to reduce the degree of sectarian tension.

Al-Kubaisi also said that AMS would seek a follow-up meeting with the US officials.

I take all this to suggest that the Sunni Arab Iraqis see the withdrawal of US troops as their first and most important priority, coming even before the reestablishment of Sunni Arab political primacy. I also suspect that a withdrawal timetable is something that all Iraqis would like to see (though it is problematic; such timetables in Palestine and India in the late 1940s arguably contributed to the massive violence and Partition in the two British imperial possessions. When the local people sense that the imperial power is a lame duck, they lose all fear of it; and its very withdrawal creates new political opportunities that some will want to seize violently).

Newsweek reports that the US Pentagon is considering an El Salvador strategy in Iraq, of forming Iraqi Special Forces units to engage the Iraqi guerrillas. In Central America, this sort of policy produced death squads that killed leftists (and sometimes nuns) indiscriminately. If the US is seriously thinking of reintroducing death squads into Iraq (they used to be called Saddam Fedayeen; are they now to be Wolfowitz Fedayeen?), then it really is time to try to get the US Department of Defense back out of Iraq before it completely ruins the country. The Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Feith notion of dealing with some terrorists in Fallujah was to displace and damage the entire city (notably not a tactic the British used against the IRA in Belfast, but then the Irish are at least Europeans). If the DoD now introduces death squads, it is likely the prelude to a military coup (Iraqi Special Operations troops who have a license to kill would have an advantage in plotting a take-over of the country.)

The NYT reports that how to get out of Iraq has become a central topic in Washington.

Christopher Allbritton, who blogs and reports from Iraq, challenges the translation done by Western wire services of an interview in al-Sharq with General Shahwani, in which he is said to have estimated the number of insurgents at 200,000. Allbritton quotes the original Arabic article, showing that Shahwani actually estimated 20,000 to 30,000 fighters and 200,000 or so local supporters. In my own report of the estimate, I was just depending on the Western wire services. I don't think al-Sharq is online so i couldn't look at the Arabic text, and last week was abroad at an Iraq conference and so wouldn't have had the time in any case.

As for the substance of the issue, I personally think that if you totalled up everyone who ever fired a weapon in the direction of Coalition troops, or ever set a bomb etc., it would reach 100,000 persons. It would be no less than 60,000. The US military hasn't traditionally been good at realistically estimating the numbers of its opponents in guerrilla wars.

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Sistani: Sunnis Must have Effective Participation

Al-Hayat: [What follows is a paraphrase:] A source close to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Najaf affirmed Saturday that the new permanent constitution for Iraq must not be sectarian in character, whatever the results of the elections to be held on January 30. He said that "The center of religious authority is eager that all participate in drafting the constitution." He complained that the newspapers had reported that Sistani had ruled that Iraqis must participate in the elections or they would go to hell. He said that Sistani had never said any such thing. [The remark on non-voters going to hell was by Shaikh Ahmad Safi, Sistani's representative in Karbala. - J. Cole]

Indeed, he insisted, the attitude of the religious center toward the elections was conditioned on many factors. If Sistani became convinced that there was a likelihood of widespread fraud in the elections, he would not hesitate to urge that they be boycotted. But for the moment, he said, the alternative to elections seems to be chaos. There is a timetable and a UN security council resolution prescribing the institutions be elected that can then undertake to draft the constitution, as well as having the ability to demand that the Occupying powers depart from Iraq, supporting this stance by their popular legitimacy." [paraphrase corrected 1/10/05 with kind help of Dr. Gilbert Ashcar.]

He said that "The representation of our Sunni brethren in the coming government must be effective, regardless of the results of the elections." He said Sistani opposed an American suggestion that a Sunni bloc of MPs be appointed to the new parliament, a suggestion he said that the Sunnis rejected even before the Shiites did."

He noted that the Shiite center of authority had undertaken "a bitter struggle to derail the original American plan of appointing a committee to draft the constitution, and struggled mightily on behalf of holding direct elections before June [of 2004], when sovereignty was transferred and a cabinet was appointed, in which we had no confidence, to form the new government. We were convince that holding the elections before the transfer of sovereignty was possible with a good chance of transparency and fairness. Wnad we informed [UN envoy] Lakhdar Brahimi] that the voice of moderates was [at that time, spring 2004] strong--but that Iraq was headed in the direction of greater extremism. The experts advising the United Nations decided to hold elections after seven months [i.e. at the end of January 2005]. We concurred,a nd worked to quieten the turmoil in the Shiite popular base.

He continued, "We do not accuse those who asked for a postponement of the elections then, and among them was the [Sunni] Association of Muslim Scholars, of conspiring with the Americans (who also wanted the seven-month delay), but we are now being accused of complicity with the Americans in insisting that the election be held on schedule.

He pointed out that the partisans of postponing the elections had said that they couldn't be held on the basis of the old food rationing cards, and that a delay was necessary so that a census could be taken. But in the end it was decided to use the ration cards [which means that the elections might as well have been held in May, 2004 as Sistani wanted.]

He went on to ask, So why should there now be a delay? Can anyone guarantee that the situation will be better in six months? Is there any guarantee that those now boycotting will participate in six months? What exactly are the goals of a delay? No one is answering this question.

The source also addressed the charges that the United Iraqi Alliance, which was put together under Sistani's auspices, is a stalking horse for Iran. This accusation derives from the prominence in its ranks of members of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq [SCIRI], which was based in Tehran 1982-2003, and the Dawa Party, which had a prominent Tehran branch consisting of Iraqi expatriates during the same period. The spokesman said, "These are Iraqi parties that fought against the former regime. The proportion of SCIRI and Dawa representatives on the list is no more than 22 percent. And those who accuse these two parties today of being "Iranian" were not doing so when they confined all Shiite representation in the temporary national council to these two . . ."

[This is a reference to the Americans, who all along have favored SCIRI and Dawa for high government appointments, but who are now complaining about their Iran links.]

He also rejected charges that the United Iraqi Alliance is a Shiite ticket designed to grab power. He said that the very reason the list only put up 228 candidates for 275 seats was to signal that they did not want to exclude anyone. He contrasted this approach with that of the [Sunni] Iraqi Islamic Party before it withdrew from the elections, which had put up a full 275-member slate. But it, he said, was not termed "the Sunni slate."

As for the charge that a "Shiite arc" was forming in the Middle East, the spokesman said that Sistani had no desire to take Iraq toward sectarianism and that he would not spend time refuting a position he never held in the first place.

He said that the issues concering possible involvement of Syria and Iran in violence in Iraq were matters beyond the purview of Sistani, and were the responsibility of the Iraqi state.


[Arabic URL for this story.]

Meanwhile, the drumbeat of violence continued on Saturday, with the US dropping a 5 hundred pound bomb on the wrong house in a village near Mosul, the kidnapping of an election official, the discovery of the body of the governor of the province of Salahuddin, a car bomb in Mahaweel, the murder of a translator for the US military, etc.

The Washington Post also reports:

' Rebel Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr joined Sunnis in calling for a delay in the vote, saying that elections cannot happen if Sunnis cannot fairly participate. In a statement read by his aides, Sadr also said that elections cannot happen until the foreign coalition troops leave because elections held under occupation are illegitimate. The occupying forces are "trying to lead us to sectarian state and civil war, God forbid. Therefore, be cautious and be careful to reject all that could lead to that, including the election process," Sadr said in his statement. "Know that when our dear Sunnis do not participate, it will give no importance to the elections." '

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Election Woes

Nancy Yousef of Knight Ridder reports from Baghdad that campaigning for the January 30 elections has worsened ethnic tensions. Her interviews with university students reveal that the Shiites she talked to are determined to vote, where the Sunnis are afraid to do so, having received death threats.

Speaking of death threats, she reveals that 2 members of Nasser Chadirchi's 48-person Arab nationalist list have resigned on receiving such threats, and that the others are afraid to reveal their names. He estimates that each candidate needs 8 bodyguards if the person is to actively campaign.

Borzou Daragahi reports for AP that Sadr City, with ten percent of the country's population, has put up its own electoral list. Regionally-based lists should not do as well as national ones, given the way the electoral rules have been set up. But if Sadr City does give its list any significant number of votes, and if some Sadrists elsewhere vote for the list on ideological grounds, it could get 10 or 15 seats in the 227-member parliament. A similar number of at least vaguely pro-Sadr delegates is likely to be seated in the United Iraqi Alliance. So it is not impossible that Sadrist will form five to ten percent of the new parliament. On many religious issues they could form strong alliances with the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and al-Dawa, the other major Shiite groupings, to put through puritanical laws.

On the other hand, initial opinion polling in Baghdad and the Shiite south suggests that the list of secular ex-Baathist Iyad Allawi, the current interim prime minister, may get as much as 22 percent of the vote. The United Iraqi Alliance, the list cobbled together at Grand Ayatollah Sistani's behest, comes in with 27% in the poll.

I very much doubt that when the elections actually come, Allawi's list will do that well, or the UIA that poorly. A lot of Iraqis will make up their minds at the last moment, and get good information only at that time. The Dawa Party alone had 18 percent support in one recent poll, and it is only one element of the United Iraqi Alliance.

The guerrilla insurgency is attempting to derail the elections with bombings and attacks. Air force Brig.-Gen. Erv Lessel, the deputy chief of staff for strategic communications in Iraq, predicted spectacular attacks in the period running up to the elections, but said he had no specific intelligence on that score.

Meanwhile, the big death tolls from single bombing instances in past weeks have lead the Pentagon to send a wideranging investigative team to Iraq with a charge to improve the way things are being done and to find ways of accelerating the training of Iraqi troops.
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Guerrillas Kill 9 US Troops
18 Bodies of Lured Workers Found in Mosul

Guerrillas in northwest Baghdad detonated a roadside bomb on Thursday evening as US Bradley Fighting Vehicle went by, killing 7 American troops. In a separate incident or incidents in Anbar province west of the capital, guerrillas killed two US Marines. It was the highest one-day toll for US troops since the Mosul luncheon bombing in mid-December.

An insurgent posing as a labor contractor lured 18 young Shiite men from the southern Zi Qar province north to Mosul and then slaughtered them. Their bodies were found on Thursday. He told them they would get work at a US military base, according to their distraught families. The guerrillas were attempting yet again to send a signal to Iraqis not to cooperate with the US presence in Iraq.

Many Iraqi policemen are resigning from the force because they have been threatened by guerrillas.

Caretaket PM Iyad Allawi extended the emergency laws earlier passed, which allow the government to declare a curfew in select cities (it is already implemented in Baghdad, Mosul, Baquba and some other cities. Since the caretaker government lacks an effective army or police force, however, the emergency laws have made almost no difference to the actual security situation.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is mobilizing clerical networks to push Shiites to vote on January 30. He wants to ensure that the Shiite majority takes control of parliament, and that the constitution that it drafts defers to Islamic law on key points. Unlike the Khomeinist clerics in Iran, however, Sistani does not want a direct role in govering the state for clerics.

At a meeeting of foreign ministers, Iraq's Sunni-majority neighbors, including Jordan, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, joined Egypt in urging Sunni Arabs in Iraq to take part in the elections scheduled for January 30. Several Sunni-ruled countries in the region, including Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, have significant Shiite populations that have largely been politically marginalized, and the Sunni Arab elites fear they will become more assertive if Iraq has an overwhelmingly Shiite government. The neighbors also fear that an Iraq where Sunni Arabs have no place at the table in government will continue to be a political, economic and security basket case.

For many Jordanians, for instance, Iraq's situation is extremely frustrating. They know that if the country came together and achieved basic stability, its oil revenues would allow it to get rich and it would provide a vast and rich market for Jordanian goods. Jordan would have an advantage over Iraq with regard to the price of labor, and coule act as a major engine of Jordanian economic growth. Jordanians thus see it as essential that their Sunni Arab counterparts (90% of Jordanians are Sunnis) join the new government and make it a success.

According to Ash-Sharq al-Awsat, a US general met with Kurdistan Democratic Party leader Massoud Barzani on Thursday to apologize to him for the US attack on a dormitory at Salahuddin University, which involved close air support. The general termed the operation, aimed at rooting out Ansar al-Islam terrorists, "a mistake."

Barzani in the meantime continued to say that while the Kurdish parties will support the elections if they are held, in his own view it is "fruitless" to attempt to hold them when the security situation is so bad.
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Saudi Tsunami Fundraising Drive Raises over $30 million in First Day

Saudi Arabia Television held a fundraising drive for the victims of the tsunami and raised a little over $30 million on the first day. Saudi Arabia's per capita income is about $8500 per year according to the Atlas method, and there are about 15 million Saudi citizens. The one-day donation total equals $2 per citizen in absolute terms. Given the difference in per capita income and population, it is as though private US donors gave over $2 billion in a single day.

[Update 1/7/2005 6 pm: The Saudi television fundraising total has gone to $82 million on the second day - al-Hayat)
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Mysterious US strike in Irbil Condemned by Kurds

The US military appears to have become convinced that Ansar al-Sunnah, a breakaway group from the largely Kurdish terrorist group Ansar al-Islam, has been operating from dormitories at the Salahuddin University in the Kurdish stronghold of Irbil. US special forces accompanied by Kurdish fighters and helicopter gunships struck at the dormitory on Wednesday evening. There are rumors that the US captured a senior Ansar al-Islam leader. Seven persons were injured in the attack, and a number were captured.

The odd thing is that Irbil is under the control of Masoud Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party, a close ally of the United States. If the US wanted something done in Irbil, why wouldn't it just ask Barzani's peshmerga or paramilitary to do it? Had Ansar al-Islam terrified or bribed local Irbil officials into ignoring the AI cell in the city?

Some reports say the US was accompanied by Kurdish commandoes. But they weren't local peshmerga from Irbil.

Kurdistan Interior Minister Kerim Sinjari condemned the operation. Al-Zaman says he complained that several innocent civilians were killed by US forces in the course of it, including one woman. He said that such actions could jeopardize Kurdistan-US relations.

US news outlets continually blame Saddam for Ansar al-Islam, consisting of a few hundred Kurdish guerrillas, some of whom had fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan. In fact, however, they operated from the de facto no-fly zone that was under US control, not that of Saddam.

South Korea's troops are stationed in the north, which may have contributed to the urgency of the US operation.

In my view, the threat of a serious conflict between the Kurdish paramilitary and the US is imminent. Once a new government is elected, if it can be, it may take decisions that the Kurds don't like. The US will then have a choice of supporting the Kurds or the government it itself had formed.

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Murphy: Sunnis not Registered

Dan Murphy of the Christian Science Monitor reports from Baghdad that many Sunni Arab families in Iraq are not registered to vote. In part, this situation derives from the poor security situation in their areas, and in part from the death threats received by the individuals who would ordinarily carry out the voter registration.

Hannah Allam of Knight Ridder writes that Najaf expects to become Iraq's second capital if the Shiite parties come to power in parliament as a result of the January 30 elections. Najafis clearly expect their grand ayatollahs to be influential in setting the political agenda, and they expect Shiite politicians to throw a great deal of patronage their way. That patronage (and gobs of money from oil exports) used to go to Tikrit, Ramadi and Fallujah in stead, during the Sunni Arab-based Saddam regime. It is precisely against this shift in the distribution of national resources that the Sunni Arabs are fighting so hard.

US Iran expert Bill Beeman at Brown University argues that the resurrection of Najaf as a great center of Shiite learning and politics will have a moderating influence on Iran.

But the question of more radical influences coming from Sadr City is still unanswered. Although Muqtada al-Sadr is not running for office, he has quietly approved the inclusion of about 20 of his followers in the mega-Shiite list, the United Iraqi Alliance, put together at the behest of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.

Sadr's organization has quietly been campaigning in East Baghdad by doing things like organizing fuel distribution.

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Car Bomb at Hilla Police Academy Kills at Least 20

Guerrillas detonated a car bomb outside a police academy in Hilla, a city of 500,000, largely Shiite, in the mixed Babil province an hour south of Baghdad. Numbers of wounded were not available but must run to the dozens. The Academy was holding a graduation ceremony Wednesday morning.

The guerrillas have been targeting police, especially newly-trained ones, since they are fairly soft targets, ironically enough. Because a lot of the new recruits to the police are poor Shiite young men, and the guerrillas are largely Sunni Arabs, there is an undertone of sectarian violence to these attacks, which sometimes becomes explicit.

Other violence in Iraq killed people in Amiriyah, Baqubah and Ramad early on Wednesday or late Tuesday.

The Umar Ibn al-Khattab Brigade, a subsidiary of the Islamic Anger Brigade, released a video showing the car bombing of an American convoy on Monday. Umar ibn al-Khattab was the second Caliph or vicar of the Prophet, according to Sunni Muslims, but is disliked by Shiite Muslims, who feel he shunted aside the Prophet's son-in-law, Ali. Calling the unit the Umar Ibn al-Khattab Brigade is a way of emphasizing its Sunni character, since some Shiite even ritually curse Umar.


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Baghdad Governor, 6 Bodyguards Assassinated
5 US Troops, 10 Iraqi Commandoes also Killed

The pro-American governor of Baghdad and his convoy were ambushed on Tuesday by gunmen, who managed to cut down the governor and six of his bodyguards in only the latest of a spate of killing of provincial governing officials. The head of the governing council of Baqubah was also killed recently, in a whole series of such assassinations, which included a female member of the governing council of Salahuddin. Where the assassination targeted only a member of the provincial governing council and not its head, these killings have often not even been well reported in the US press. But imagine if a group was systematically killing the secretaries of state of the 50 US states, and sometimes got a governor to boot.

Three of the US dead were from a roadside bomb in Baghdad, which also wounded 2. Two other US troops died in separate incidents.

Guerrillas targeted the Ministry of the Interior commando squad with a huge truck bomb, killing 10.

If things go on like this the real question won't be whether you could hold elections but rather whether the members of the new government could be kept alive.

That is another problem with just having the US summarily pull out. The neo-Baath and Salafi guerrillas could and would just kill the members of the existing government, in preparation for making a Sunni Arab coup. That really would provoke a civil war.

What I can't understand is why the governor of Baghdad did not have better security. You shouldn't just be able to ambush and shoot an official of his stature. That six of his bodyguards were also killed doesn't speak very highly of them, either, though it speaks more highly of them than it does of the bodyguards who survived. Why cannot the US provide security to Iraqi government officials? Isn't that a priority? There are techniques that could be used to save these lives.

In other news , the Iraqi government formally requested that the Egyptian government encourage Iraqi Sunni Arabs to participate in the upcoming elections. Interim Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan is in Cairo for talks on this and other issues.

Since the neo-Baathists and Salafis who are leading the Iraqi Sunni Arab rebellion view the Mubarak government as a pharaonic dictatorship and servant of the United States, I very much doubt that Cairo has much influence with people in Mosul and Ramadi, on the face of it. But Shaalan is said by al-Hayat to also be inviting the Gulf Arab states to make the same appeal. I wonder if what Shaalan is really saying is that Egypt and the Arab Gulf should adopt Sunni Arab parties in Iraq as clients in the same way as Iran has some Shiite parties, to offset Tehran. This would require them to throw money and resources at specific personalities or groups.

Iran will not send full representation to the meeting of the foreign ministers of the six neighboring countries to Iraq scheduled for Thursday in Amman. It is miffed by the interview King Abdullah II gave to the Washington Post, where he forcefully accused Iranians of sending in a million stealth voters and trying to creat a Shiite crescent in the Near East that would stretch from Lebanon through Syria to Iraq and Iran.


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Downsides of Partitioning Iraq

Some readers asked me why I was so against partitioning Iraq.

It is because it would cause a great deal of trouble to us all, not least Iraqis. Iraq is not divided neatly into three ethnic enclaves. It is all mixed up. There are a million Kurds in Baghdad, a million Sunnis in the Shiite deep south, and lots of mixed provinces (Ta'mim, Ninevah, Diyalah, Babil, Baghdad, etc.). There is a lot of intermarriage among various Iraqi groups. Look at President Ghazi Yawir. He is from the Sunni Arab branch of the Shamar tribe. But some Shamar are Shiites. One of his wives is Nasrin Barwari, a Kurdish cabinet minister. What would partition do to the Yawirs?

Then, how do you split up the resources? If the Sunni Arabs don't get Kirkuk, then they will be poorer than Jordan. Don't you think they will fight for it? The Kurds would fight to the last man for the oil-rich city of Kirkuk if it was a matter of determining in which country it ended up.

If the Kurds got Kirkuk and the Sunni Arabs became a poor cousin to Jordan, the Sunni Arabs would almost certainly turn to al-Qaeda in large numbers. Some Iraqi guerrillas are already talking about hitting back at the US mainland. And, Fallujah is not that far from Saudi Arabia, which Bin Laden wants to hit, as well, especially at the oil. Fallujah Salafis would hook up with those in Jordan and Gaza to establish a radical Sunni arc that would destabilize the entire region.

Divorced from the Sunnis, the Shiites of the south would no longer have any counterweight to religious currents like al-Dawa, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and the Sadrists. The rump Shiite state would be rich, with the Rumayla and other fields, and might well declare a Shiite Islamic republic. It is being coupled with the Sunnis that mainly keeps them from going down that road. A Shiite South Iraq might make a claim on Shiite Eastern Arabia in Saudi Arabia, or stir up trouble there. The Eastern Province can pump as much as 11% of the world's petroleum.

So Americans would like this scenario why?

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Carnage continues With 27 Dead

Bombings and assassinations resulted in at least 27 deaths in Iraq on Monday. Not only was a bomb exploded outside the headquarters of interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's Iraqi National Accord party (killing four and wounding 24), but another blast went off outside the Green Zone that houses government offices and the US embassy. In Dujail a car bomber blew up a national guard station, killing 7 and wounding 8. Another such incident targeted national guardsmen at a checkpoint outside a US military base near Balad. In a gruesome incident at Tel Afar in the Turkmen north, a policeman was killed when he approached a decapitated body that had been booby-trapped with a bomb.

General Muhammad Abdullah Shahwani, head of Iraqi intelligence, estimated on Monday that the force strength of the guerrilla insurgency was about 200,000 men. My own estimate had been 100,000. The US military used to say 5,000, then started saying 20,000- 25,000, but frankly I don't think they have any idea. My colleague, military historian Tom Collier, suggested at a panel we were on that you can usually safely triple the US military estimate of the numbers of the enemy in a guerrilla conflict.

But Shahwani's estimate would make a lot of sense. Surely it is obvious that the US is at least evenly matched with the guerrillas for person-power, and maybe outgunned. The US assault on Fallujah may as well not have been mounted for all the dent it has made in the guerrilla war. If you can put 3,000 guerrillas out of commission and capture a major base and that makes no difference, then you are not dealing with a force of 25,000, now are you?

Iraqi Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan has started talking about the possiblity of postponing the elections scheduled for January 30 if a way can be found to convince Sunni Arabs to participate at a slightly later date. This is the first time I can remember a high-up member of the Allawi clique talking like this, and it shows they are afraid of something.


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2 Killed, 14 Wounded at Allawi Party HQ

Wire services and Lebanese Broadcasting Channel were reporting early Monday morning that guerrillas had detonated a car bomb near the headquarters of the Iraqi National Accord party. The party was about to announce its candidate list for the forthcoming elections. LBC reported that Allawi was on the premises but not near where the bomb went off, but this seems to me like Allawi spin. If he was on the premises, he was in danger.

The problematic character of these elections, with their artificial national candidate lists such that people cannot vote for someone from their own city; with almost no announcements of the names of actual candidates so far; with so much of the Sunni Arab population not registered to vote (and often unable to go out of their houses for fear of poor security)-- is underlined by this bombing. When the prime minister's party cannot hold a press conference without getting bombed, this is a walking disaster.

What do do? Probably nothing can be done. The US didn't drive having these elections this way at this time. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani did, though he wanted them earlier. So this is his call. And he can make so much trouble if he doesn't get the elections he wants that it is not worthwhile crossing him.

My guess is that his next call, after the elections, will be for a timetable for US withdrawal. That is one reason I haven't joined Naomi Klein, Pat Buchanan, Christopher Manion and others in saying the US should just get out. I'm watching Sistani. When he says it, it will be time. This is not because I'm abdicating my judgment to him. It is because without his acquiescence, the US presence in Iraq is untenable and really would, globally, do more harm than good.

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Middle Eastern Contributions to Tsunamic Relief in Context

Someone on an email list drew my attention to the following exchange from last week, with Tucker Carlson talking to Leslie Gelb, a fromer president of the Council on Foreign Relations, shown at 10 pm on Weds. Dec. 29 on CNN Newsnight.

Carlson, who doesn't know anything at all about the Middle East, might be excused for not knowing that at the time he was speaking, Saudi Arabia had already pledged $10 million to the tsunami relief effort a day before he made his ignorant remark. Gelb should have known better. I'm beginning to think he seldom does (he is also the one with the bright idea to break up Iraq, which would be a world-class catastrophe, not least for US security).

CARLSON: Well, I got the sense from the remarks from people we'll say in the background from the White House of two things, one that they thought the president really was waiting to figure out what the scope of the aid would be and that when he figured that out he'd say something about it.

And, second, that this is sort of an unfair attack since, for instance, Kuwait, a Muslim country and a very rich one has pledged only $2 million and nobody is criticizing Kuwait or, for that matter, Saudi Arabia, which I don't think is going to come through.

GELB: Well, I'll criticize them. They're cheap.

Somebody named John Farmer has picked up this meme and run with it. Farmer has even less excuse, since he was mouthing off after much more information was available.

As of 1/1, Reuters was reporting these responses to the tsunami from Middle Eastern countries:

--Qatar, $25 million
--Saudi Arabia, $10 million
--Kuwait, $2.1 million
--Algeria, $2 million
--Libya, $2 million
--UAE, $2 million
--Turkey, $1.25 million

I have suggested before that if you want to compare the donations, you can't do it in terms of absolute numbers. You have to look at the population of the country and at its per capita income.

The announced Saudi contribution of $10 million is probably about $0.66 a citizen on a per capita basis (I don't think the Saudi citizen population can possibly be over 15 million no matter what Riyadh says). The second US offer of $35 million was about 12 cents per person. Since US per capita income is approximately 4.5 times that of Saudi Arabia ($8500 Atlas method), however, the Saudi contribution should be seen as about $3.00 per citizen on a US scale, with regard to the real per capita burden. So the Saudi was a generous initial offer in comparison to that of the US.

The USG is now pledging about $1.19 per person ($350 million).

The Qatar offer of $25 million is about $250 per citizen.

The Kuwait offer of $2 million is $2.00 per citizen or $1.00 per person if guest workers are counted. Either way, it is comparable to the US offer on a per capita basis, and Kuwaiti per capita income is about half that of Americans. So any way you cut it, the Kuwaitis are not being chintzy unless you want to say Americans are moreso.

The Libyans are giving about $0.36 per person, and their per capita income (purchasing power parity method) is a little over $6,000. That is about 1/7 of the US per capita income, so their contribution burdens the Libyans the same way a roughly $2.50 per person contribution would burden Americans. Remember, the USG is currently giving a little over a dollar a person.

The current Australian pledge of $60 million is about $3.00 per person.

It is obvious that if we take their populations and actual per capita income into account, the offers made by many of these governments are generally more generous than that of the United States. A lot of Middle Eastern countries have small populations, so even if they gave a lot per capita, it would look small in absolute numbers. Apparently US pundits don't know things like the citizen population of Kuwait or the per capita income of Libya, and can't be bothered to look them up.

The Organization of the Islamic Conference (the foreign ministers of Muslim-majority countries) is offering to coordinate aid from the area, and is calling for Muslim countries to give the utmost.

And, civil society organizations are also swinging into action in places like Qatar.

What explains this misplaced American high dudgeon? Petroleum wealth seems often to be coded by Americans as undeserved and also as automatically making people rich. But this impression is exaggerated. Petroleum probably only accounts for about a fourth of Libya's gross domestic product. And the Saudi per capita income of about $8,500 per person per year (Atlas method) compares poorly to the US average of $38,000 per year per person. (And remember, these are averages and since both countries have a lot of billionnaires, ordinary people actually make much less). Americans don't seem to understand that on an average they are several times richer than the average Saudi.

It is particularly unfair to blame Kuwait, which has a reputation of doing great, professional little development projects in Africa and elsewhere, and which is still recovering from Saddam's brutal occupation and sabotage. Since Tucker Carlson thought the recent Iraq war was so great, isn't he grateful to Kuwait for allowing itself to be used as the launching pad? What does an Arab country have to do to get a break from the US talking heads? Sue to become the 51st state?

I wonder if Gelb or Carlson will ever apologize to the Kuwaitis and Saudis (or whoever "they" are, who are "cheap"), and whether their incorrect statements will ever be retracted.

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Postings

Postings may sometimes be irregular this week, since I'm at a conference.
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Thousands of Fallujans Demonstrate

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat Thousands of Fallujans demonstrated on Saturday in front of the main entrance to the largely abandoned city. They demanded that US military forces leave their city and that basic services be restored so that they could return. One eyewitness reporter called in from the scene an estimate of 30,000 demonstrators. [Cole: I saw footage of the demonstration on Arab satellite television, and agree that it was a big, important demonstration, but I'd say it was only a few thousand strong; I suspect that having 30,000 people out by that gate would be a logistics problem--where did their water come from, e.g.]

Some of the placards announced that Fallujans refused to live under a military occupation. They presented a list of demands, which included the facilitation of their return to the city, speedy return of services, rebuilding of the devastated city, and monetary compensation to its inhabitants. They also protested the US military demand that returnees show identification papers. Many said that such papers got left behind in the city when they fled.

Children marched with placards reading "Where is my Father?" or "Where is my house, you supposed Liberators?"

Several demonstrators said that returnees were instructed by the Marines not to eat any food left behind in the city during their absence.

I suppose the implication is that the US used chemicals in its assault on the city, which may have poisoned foodstuffs. This allegation does not make any sense to me, however. I don't think the US did use chemicals, or that it would have risked the public relations backlash from doing so. I also can't imagine what chemicals are in the US inventory that would render food inedible.

The Fallujah demonstration was big enough to be news, but I couldn't find out anything about it via Western newspapers and wire services.

[1/2 Addendum: Kind readers made several suggestions about why the US might have warned against eating food left behind, assuming they did issue such a warning. One reader suggested that cordite and other chemicals released in the course of a high-powered conventional assault on the city could not be good for a person. Another suggested that it had to do with the use of uranium-tipped shells fired by US tanks. Another suggested that US troops as a tactic of war deliberately poisoned food so as to deny it to the guerrillas.)

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Guerrillas kill 32
Car Bomb Kills 19, Wounds 6

AFP reports that guerillas killed 32 persons in Iraq on Saturday. The most spectacular act of violence was the car bombing of a bus carrying national guardsmen.

"Sixteen Iraqi national guard soldiers and one Iraqi civilian were killed... when anti Iraqi forces detonated a vehicle borne-improvised explosive device next to a bus at 8 am (0500 GMT)," said US spokesman Master Sergeant Robert Powell, adding that two more national guardsmen died later of their wounds. Six national guardsmen were also wounded in the attack, Powell said.

In a continuing series of assassinations of provincial officials, guerrillas assassinated the chairman of the provincial governing council of Baqubah, Nawful Abdul Husain and his brother. A number of police were killed around the country, and guerrillas carried out more attacks on pipelines.

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The End of War?

A highly informed reader with practical Iraq experience wrote me the following, reponding to my statement on New Year's day,

“Now that nukes are becoming so common, humanity has to find a way to move into permanent cooperative and helping mode. War is gradually becoming unthinkable. The massive tsunami's toll has now risen to 150,000, but an Indo-Pak nuclear exchange would have killed 10 million.”

He said:

This is the main, optimistic point. The after-math of the invasion of Iraq, coupled as is often done now with Vietnam, and also the experience of WWII, seems to demonstrate that wars – [even those not] involving MAD [Mutual Assured Destruction nuclear] exchanges – are impractical.

If the largest military power in the world (the PRC [People's Republic of China] apart) cannot conduct a successful occupation of a relatively small and weak country, that seems to suggest QED. No one knows which nations’ companies will receive Iraqi oil field development contracts. Invasion to secure monopoly access to a vital resource seems not to work.

(Evidence is provided by the PRC, actively engaged in securing long-term supply contracts and arrangements all over the world.) As a market for exports Iraq and most countries are immaterial individually, and with the growing trend of free trade, invasion for that purpose is redundant. If occupations do not work, and profit little, there is no point in invasions, except to weaken or destroy a regime, but, in the absence of an occupation, the result of such weakening or destruction might be worse than before.

If wars are either mutually destructive or impractical, they would seem to make no sense. Apart from the US, there seem to be few nations in development who have any current apparent plans to wage a war. (Africa, about which I know little, is excluded from the above.) That is progress beyond measure.

There remains much to fight about, but the battlefield seems to be economics – and social-engineering legislation or not.

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Happy New Year

May 2005 bring us all more peace, good will, prosperity, and spiritual fulfilment than did 2004. Maybe it will be the year that we finally see some of the artificial barriers broken down, that divide Christians and Muslims, Jews and Arabs, Turks and Armenians, Americans and Iraqis. They're all just human beings, after all, with the same basic desires, anxieties and hopes.
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Split among Shiites on Elections
9 Iraqis Killed in Bombings, Shootings

A suicide bomber killed 7 persons at Siniyah near Baiji, five of them national guardsmen. Another national guard was found dead near Fallujah, a warning pinned to his body against cooperating with the US.

Clashes and desultory fighting continued in Samarra north of Baghdad between US forces and Sunni Arab guerrillas.

Al-Hayat:

A clear contradiction has appeared between the positions of key Shiite leaders with regard to the upcoming elections. One of the representatives of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani called the postponement of the elections "an unimaginable catastrophe." Meanwhile, Muqtada al-Sadr said he would not participate in them "even if they were to lead to the withdrawal of the Occupiers."

The Kurds threatened to boycott the elections if the government insisted on its plan to allow "transplanted" Arabs in Kirkuk to vote in that city.

Shaikh Abdul Zahrah al-Suway'di, Friday prayers leader for the al-Muhsin Mosque in Shiite Sadr City (East Baghdad), read a statement from Muqtada al-Sadr saying, "I as an Iraqi will not participate in the elections, and will not enter into this political game at all." He added, "Refusing to participate in in the elections gets you branded an enemy of democracy, and if you participate in them you find that you have been caught in their game in such a way that you cannot escape." He said he would not participate "even if that would lead, as they allege, to the departure of the occupaying forces from Iraq, which is my demand and wherein lies my own security."

In Najaf, Shaikh Sadr al-Din al-Qubanji, the representative of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (led by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim) stressed the necessity of holding the elections, calling upon the Sunni Arab parties to rethink their refusal to participate. In the Great Mosque of Fatimah, he gave a sermon before dozens of worshippers, saying "We hope that our brethren in the Iraqi Islamic Party and the other Sunni parties will study the subject with greater earnestness. It is not right to tie the fate of the entire Muslim community to one person named Bin Laden or to a mythical person named Zarqawi, because those do not wish Iraq well." He wondered, "Why should they allow themselves to be defeated by that terrorist so quickly?"

In Karbala, DPA reported that Shaikh Ahmad Safi, the representative of Sistani there, said that the elections were a "fateful matter" for the Iraqi people, and that there was a consensus that they needed to be held. Their postponement, he said, would mean "the creation of an unimaginable catastrophe." He added, "The Shiite religious leadership shepherds all Iraqis of all stripes without distinction, and this means that, in the final analysis, it takes on the burden of being father, spiritual guide and educator."

Nine Iraqis were killed in violent incidents around the country, including four children. US forces announced the capture of 49 suspected guerrillas in Duluiyah near Balad.

The Zarqawi group claimed credit for two attacks on US troops carried out on Wednesday in Mosul. Videotape surfaced of the guerrillas who implemented the attacks, wearing white (a sign of being suicide bombers). A man in black read a communique from "Mesopotamian al-Qaeda".



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Bush Responds to Criticism on Tsunami

The Bush administration scrambled to repair the diplomatic damage done by the relative insouciance with which it had confronted the massive tsunami of last Sunday. The administration raised the aid now promised to an initial pledge of $350 million, and Bush arranged to send his brother Jeb with Secretary of State Colin Powell on a visit to the region. In Asia I think this gesture will be well received, since the brother of the president, himself a governor, will be seen as an important envoy.

I suspect Colin Powell was the architect of this about-face, and it makes you wonder whether future gaffes will be as swiftly or easily corrected by Condi Rice, Powell's successor who is known to be much less independent of the president.

Meanwhile, a controversy raged about whether Bush's promise of an ad hoc coalition of four nations to deal with the calamity was intended to undercut the United Nations. The UN has long experience in these matters and a standing bureaucracy ready to go; assembling ad hoc coalitions for every purpose may please American multilateralists, but it is highly inefficient.

Al-Jazeerah reports that Qatar has pledged $25 million to the relief efforts, and Saudi Arabia an initial $10 million. Other Middle Eastern countries, such as Iran, have already sent airplanes full of relief aid.

Pakistan sent money to India, its old enemy. Islamabad also sent emergency aid to Indonesia.

India mobilized its navy not only to aid its own citizens, but to help Indonesia as well.

It is very odd that nations cooperate to help each other in the face of natural disasters. But when they become angry over some minor dispute, they are perfectly happy to inflict far more damage on each other than mother nature ever did. Pakistan and India were seriously contemplating using nukes on each other as recently as 2002. Now Islamabad is sending rupees to Delhi, and Delhi is expressing gratitude.

Now that nukes are becoming so common, humanity has to find a way to move into permanent cooperative and helping mode. War is gradually becoming unthinkable. The massive tsunami's toll has now risen to 150,000, but an Indo-Pak nuclear exchange would have killed 10 million.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.