Breaking News: Lebanese Government Resigns in Face of VideoClip Revolution

Futur television satellite news is reporting that the Lebanese government has resigned. For the last few days, I was watching the crowds assembled at Martyrs' Square in Beirut (a place significant in the anticolonial struggle against the French), and noted the ineffectual attempt of [now former] Interior Minister Suleiman Frangieh to forbid the protests.

I just saw a speaker at the protests shout that the people are more powerful than the government, with everyone joyous at the fall of the government.

Futur was showing the protests with an overlay of Lebanese music, so that the effect was to mimic the wildly popular Video Clips (a belated Arab version of "I want my MTV").

Futur was partially owned by slain Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri, whose assassination kicked off the crisis.

Update: Al-Jazeerah is reporting that the Lebanese Opposition is now calling for the big demonstrations at Martyrs' Square to continue until all Syrian troops leave Lebanese soil.

You wonder what would happen if the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza tried the same thing re: Ariel Sharon's military occupation that they face. They'd be crushed by the jackboot (with convenient allegations that they were a front for terrorism).

Breaking News: Bloodbath in Hilla with 120 Dead, 200 Wounded

Guerrillas drove a carbomb into the midst of young Shiite men standing in line to get physicals for service in the police or national guards, in the southern city of Hilla, and detonated it. CNN is reporting at least 120 dead and over 200 wounded. This attack is the worst single atrocity in Iraq since the fall of Saddam.

Gen. Richard Myers suggested recently that the guerrilla war would go on for at least 10 years.

8 Dead in Mosul
UIA visits Sistani
Threat of a Deadlock

Guerrillas detonated a bomb in Mosul on Sunday that killed 8 persons and injured at least two more.

The Syrians found Saddam Hussein's half-brother in Beirut and handed him over to the US. (If there is an Arab city where US intelligence ought to have been able to find a high Iraqi official by itself without help from Syria, it should have been Beirut).

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat/ AFP A delegation from the United Iraqi Alliance, the victorious coalition of religious Shiites parties in the Iraqi parliament, visited Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani at his home in Najaf on Sunday. A member of the 20-person delegation, Hussein Shahristani, said afterwards, "The basic advice that Sayyid Sistani gave was that action should be taken to include all Iraqis in the political process."

Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, said, "We emphasized to his excellency that we are clinging to the unity of the Alliance, and to a strengthening of this unity, and action to ensure a quick meeting of the parliament." Chalabi called for a speedy formation of an Iraqi government so that "we can treat the existing serious issues in Iraq, the most important of them being sovereignty, security, administrative corruption, and the provision of services."

For Chalabi, who was convicted in Jordan of embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars, to complain about "administrative corruption", is rich.

Reuters reports that Ghalib al-Jazairy, the police chief of Najaf, is refusing to step down even though the Ministry of the Interior has ordered him to be replaced by A. Abdul Razzak. Some fear that Najaf will again fall into instability if police fight police:

' Police chief Ghalib al-Jazairy insists he is still boss even after Baghdad's Interior Ministry appointed Brigadier Abdel Shaheed Abdel Razzak to take over the post. To add to the confusion, Jazairy's rage is vented not at Razzak, but at Abdel Aal al-Koufi, who he believes has been put in charge of overall security in Najaf by his rival, Najaf Governor Adnan al-Zurfi. '

The Christian Science Monitor points out that the American idea of making Iraqis in parliament come up with a 2/3s majority to form a government may create permanent gridlock. The religious Shiites, who have 54 % of the seats in parliament, must now find a way to compromise with the Kurds.

In the other Shiite holy city, of Karbala, some 2,000 students demonstrated Sunday against the decision of the Iraqi government to make Saturday a national day of weekly rest, along with Friday. The students were responding to a call by Shiite nationalist Muqtada al-Sadr, and they began at a Sadr political office and marched on the governor's office in the center of the city. When they got there they read out statements demanding the rescinding of this decree, calling on the religious authorities to speak out against it, and denouncing it as an attempt to please "the Zionists." (Saturday is the Jewish sabbath, whereas for Muslims the holiest day of the week is Friday.) They wanted the days of rest to be Thursday and Friday, not Friday and Saturday.

Protests had been held on Saturday elsewhere in the country. Having Thursday and Friday off is common in the Muslim world, especially the Gulf, and this is the way things are done in Iran, as well.

The major drawback of the Thursday-Friday weekend is that in most of the world, banks close on Saturdays and Sundays. So for both Thursday and Friday to be days off reduces the country's interface with international banking to only 3 days a week, which is undesirable. The religious fundamentalists in Iraq, such as the Shiite Sadrists and the Sunni Salafis, have focused on Saturday being the Jewish sabbath, and so are trying to rally against a Saturday day of rest as a Zionist plot. It has nothing to do with Zionism, of course, but it is true that a Saturday-Sunday weekend in most Western countries does reflect what is convenient for Christians and Jews. Traditional Islam, by the way, had no day of rest; people worked on Fridays, and just closed up shop to go to noon prayers and then came back and worked afterwards. So there is no tradition that should favor Thursday as a day off rather than Saturday, though the Sadrists seem to be trying to claim that there is.

In a positive development, the Turkish government has accepted the principle of federalism for Iraq. Ankara had earlier been skittish about the principle because they saw a federal Iraq with a Kurdistan state as unstable.

Mubarak and elections,

Egyptian President Husni Mubarak is going to allow multiparty competition for the presidency. But note that only offically recognized parties can field candidates. This step excludes the Muslim Brotherhood, probably the only serious competitor with Mubarak's party. Will blog more on this later . . . I'm really sleepy and it is late. But just to say that while it is a step in the right direction, there is less to it than meets the eye and it is too early to get very excited. In a sense, Egypt's step now makes its presidential elections somewhat analogous to those in Iran, where candidates are vetted beforehand.

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Book Review on Islam and Iraq

Paul William Roberts reviews a number of books about Islam and/or Iraq, and has some kind words about my Sacred Space and Holy War.

Pipeline Sabotage, Baghdad Bombing

Ten people were killed and 11 kidnapped in Iraq on Saturday. The current Marine offensive against guerrillas in Ramadi killed 3 and wounded 15. Al-Hayat reports this as a major US campaign in Anbar province.

Guerrillas blew up a northern pipeline on Saturday. Other guerrillas exploded a bomb in Baghdad, while in Mosul the body of a kidnapped female television presenter showed up.

James Glanz of the NYT discusses separatist or autonomist inclinations in the southern Basra province of Iraq.

Dan Murphy of the Christian Science Monitor reports on the quiet disappearance of most neighborhood "governing councils" in Iraq, the establishment of which had been touted as a Bush administration achievement in Iraq early on. The members no longe meet and many are in hiding, for fear of assassination.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat conducted an interview with Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the victorious United Iraqi Alliance list. It seems to me really odd that no major Western media has conducted an interview with him. He doesn't probably speak English, but surely there are translators. Putin doesn't speak English at news conferences either.

Al-Hakim, who heads the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, emphasized that he will stand vigorously against any state that attempts to interfere in internal Iraqi affairs. Sensitive to accusations that he might be a cat's paw of Iran, he pointed out that the al-Hakims opposed the Baath party for 10 years before the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

He said no Iraqi wanted to see US troops in Iraq, and that when he consulted with the UN Security Council about a withdrawal of US troops, the UNSC told him that was a bilateral issue between the US and Iraq.

Colin Powell was pushed out as secretary of state because he sought to rein in Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, according to the Daily Telegraph. In another part of the interview, Powell criticized Rumsfeld for sending so few troops into Iraq:

' What went wrong for Iraq was not the military campaign, which was "brilliantly fought", but the transition to "nation-building" that followed. In Powell's view, there were "enough troops for war but not for peace, for establishing order. My own preference would have been for more forces after the conflict."

Why did you make the mistake, I ask, of putting so much weight on weapons of mass destruction? Originally, the United States had happily advocated regime change. When it began to contemplate war, was it forced to abandon this line on legal and diplomatic advice, and use WMD as the casus belli?

Not really, says Powell, because the two were linked. President Clinton and Congress had a policy of regime change, but when Clinton's Operation Desert Fox bombed Iraq for four days in December 1998, it was because of WMD. "It was intelligence over those years, including your own secret intelligence service [MI6], which said Saddam had WMD."

So, in Resolution 1441 at the United Nations, "we gave Saddam an entry-level test: give us a declaration that answers all the outstanding questions. He failed the test of the resolution. It became a question that he was hiding something, that he was going to drag this out until the international community lost interest. "There's no doubt in our mind that it would have lost interest. After his false declaration in response to 1441, it seemed likely he could return to his old ways. That was a gamble that the President and Tony Blair were not prepared to take." Hence the attempt at the second resolution and Powell's famous presentation of the WMD evidence to the Security Council.

And now Colin Powell becomes more direct: "I'm very sore. I'm the one who made the television moment. I was mightily disappointed when the sourcing of it all became very suspect and everything started to fall apart. "The problem was stockpiles. None have been found. I don't think any will be found. There may not have been any at the time. It was the best judgment of the intelligence community, not something I made up. Clinton had been told the same thing."

Matter-of-factly, he adds: "I will forever be known as the one who made the case."

With five days' notice from the President, Powell worked it up: "Every single word in that presentation was screened and approved by the intelligence community." He cites the case of the aluminium tubes, which he presented to the world as being, probably, for centrifuges intended for nuclear weapons: "We sat down with a roomful, of analysts. The Director of Central Intelligence [George Tenet] -- he's essentially the referee on these occasions -- sits down and says: 'We have concluded that they're not rocket bodies: it's our judgment that these are for centrifuges'. "So that's what I said, though I mentioned signs of differences of opinion. To this day, the CIA has not said that they aren't for centrifuges."

Another example was the mobile laboratories, supposedly intended for biological weapons. "I did not qualify that because they were very sure of their four sources, but the sources fell like straw men in seven months, including the famous German source [codenamed Curveball]. I don't think the CIA has disposed definitively of that either."

How on earth did it come about that intelligence could be so wrong? Were they guilty of telling President Bush what he wanted to hear? "I can't say that. What I can say is that there was a little too much inferential judgment. Too much resting on assumptions and worst-case scenarios. "With intelligence, sometimes you are talking to people who are perhaps selling you lies."

It seems that Colin Powell, the victim of weak intelligence, was also the victim of other people's politics. He is conscious that the whole business of the aborted second UN resolution, intended to authorise attack, invites derision. "What I'm going to say will sound like spin, but think it through. We didn't think there was a need for a second resolution, and we were quite sure of very serious problems with the French, but the UK needed and very badly wanted a second resolution. "It became clear that we were not going to get it, so we did not take it to a vote. However, a week or two later, Tony Blair was able to get the support he needed in Parliament. So my spin is that the second resolution served its purpose. The UK could say: we've tried but now we have to go forward." '

5 US Troops Die
Sistani Blesses Jaafari

Ibrahim Jaafari, the candidate for prime minister of the religious Shiite coalition, met Friday with Grand Ayatollah Sistani,who "blessed" (i.e. endorsed) his candidacy. This blessing will help Jaafari with the some 30 members of his United Iraqi Alliance coalition who are said to be wavering in their support of him. It may even boost him in the eyes of some of the Shiites in the rival Iraqiya list of Iyad Allawi (some of whom have spoken of leaving that list and joining the UIA), and helps make it more likely that he will emerge as prime minister.

Sistani stressed the need for Jaafari to bring the Sunni Arabs into the new government, given that they largely stayed home on election day and are poorly represented in parliament (6 of 275 seats, even though they are 20 percent of the population).

Jaafari does, however, need the Kurds to form a government. His strategy for dealing with them was telegraphed in his remarks on Friday. He said the issue of the disposition of the city of Kirkuk, which is ethnically mixed, should be postponed until after the approval of a new constitution and the election of a regular parliament (the current body is transitional). The Kurds have said that they will not accept less than redistricting to ensure their states' rights and possession of Kirkuk, so they may reject Jaafari's gambit out of hand.

Meanwhile, the US military had announced that guerrillas have killed 4 US troops and wounded 9. Another US soldier died of non-combat related injuries.

Al-Hayat says that 9 Iraqis were killed in various incidents.

It also reported that the clerics of Ramadi issued a fatwa forbidding the killing of Muslims. This is a reference to the guerrilla attacks on Iraqi policemen.

The clerics in Lebanon used to try to forbid violence during the civil war there, too. I remember that one admitted that it was ineffective, because it wasn't the clerics who were killing people.

Amnesty International reports that the women of Iraq have suffered substantial setbacks in their rights since the US invasion, and live in a condition of dire insecurity.

The suggestion by some that the guarantee of 1/3 of seats in the Iraqi parliament to women might make up for the situation described by Amnesty is of course absurd. Iraq is not the first country to have such a quota. It was put into effect in Pakistan by Gen. Pervez Musharraf. The move was meant to weaken Muslim fundamentalists, on the theory that women members of parliament would object to extreme patriarchy on the Khomeini or Taliban model. In fact, the Jama'at-i Islami, the main fundamentalist party in Pakistan, was perfectly capable of finding women to represent it in parliament. (US readers should remember Phyllis Schlafly!) Moreover, the 1/3 of MPs who are women can fairly easily be outvoted by the men.

If the Republican Party in the US is so proud of putting in such a quota for Iraq, they should think seriously about applying it in the United States Congress.

' . . . there are larger disparities between the Congress and the general citizenry in term of sex and race. In the House, there are currently 372 men and 63 women. In the Senate, there are 14 women and 86 men. '

Might not the US be a better country if there were 33 women senators and more like 120 congresswomen? If your answer is that it wouldn't matter, then you cannot very well insist that it does matter in Iraq. If you think it would be important, then if you support it in Iraq you should support it in the United States.

30 Dead in Iraq Violence

AP reports that the one-day total for war-related violence in Iraq, including the police station bombing in Tikrit reported here yesterday morning, came to 30. That is about 11,000 persons a year if the rate were constant and extrapolated out. In fact, the wire services manage to report only a fraction of daily deaths from war-related violence. And, of course there is a sense in which a lot of the murders are an indirect result of the poor security produced by the guerrilla war.

AP also reports that the United Iraqi Alliance has managed to bring into its coalition formally the 3 members of parliament from the Turkman National Front, the 3 from the Cadres and Chosen list, and 1 from the Islamic Action Party, giving the UIA 148 or about 54 percent of seats.

The 30 or so more secular-leaning members of the UIA who were the core of Ahmad Chalabi's challenge to Ibrahim Jaafari are still agitating and threatening to leave the UIA because of the dominance of the Muslim fundamentalists in it. Since, however, the UIA would still have 43 percent of seats, it could block the formation of a government by any other group. So I don't see any advantage for the more secular group in leaving the UIA. If, on the other hand, they stick with it, and Jaafari can form an alliance with the Kurds, everyone in the UIA would suddenly have $17 billion to play with every year, more if the Iraqis get their act together.

Reuters reports on the extensive demands the Kurds are making as a price of joining the UIA governing, including the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, the creation of a Kurdistan province, semi-autonomy, and so forth. Reuters notes that these maximalist demands, most of them unwelcome to the Shiites, are slowing the formation of a new government in Iraq.

Well, now that Fallujah is liberated (i.e. wrecked and empty), residents of Ramadi are now beginning to flee in fear that they might get equally liberated. It is not clear how much liberation Iraqi cities (or ex-cities) can stand.

My op-ed, "The Downside of Democracy, appeared Thursday in the LA Times. An exercept:

' Pakistan and Iraq are not the only countries where elections have had mixed results. Although the Palestinian elections in January were widely viewed as a success — producing a pragmatic prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas — remember that the radical fundamentalist party, Hamas, boycotted those elections. Then, less than three weeks later, local elections were held — and Hamas won decisively in the Gaza Strip, leaving it more influential than before and poised for even bigger wins in next July's legislative elections.

And in recent years, democratization has also put Hezbollah in the Lebanese parliament. Serbian nationalists have won seats in Belgrade.

Are such outcomes acceptable to the Bush administration? If not, how will it respond? Given the war on terror, it is unlikely to simply take these electoral setbacks lying down.

But if Washington falls back on its traditional responses — covert operations, attempts to interfere in parliamentary votes with threats or bribes, or dependence on strong men like Musharraf — the people of the Middle East might well explode, because the only thing worse than living under a dictatorship is being promised a democracy and then not really getting it. '

AP reports on a network smuggling Saudi youth into Iraq to fight jihad. Oh, great. The last time young Saudis went off to fight a superpower, with the encouragement of the Reagan administration in the 1980s, it turned into al-Qaeda and blew back on New York and Washington. No wonder the CIA is afraid that Iraq is a new breeding ground for future anti-US terrorism.

Bob Harris's posting "Uncle Bucky and the Rocket-Fueled Breasts" is worth reading just for the title.

Arabic Link: Yusuf Hazim argues in al-Sharq al-Awsat that the relative calm and stability in Basra province is underpinned by a tacit alliance of tribal leaders, political parties, and militias.

Koufax Complete List

I've gotten around to stealing code for the complete list of Koufax Award Winners at Wampum.

Best Blog (Non-Sponsored): Daily Kos

Best Blog (Pro): Talking Points Memo by Josh Marshall

Best Writing: Hullaballoo by Digby

Best Post: "If America Were Iraq..." at Informed Comment by Juan Cole

Best Series (tie): The Rise of Pseudo-Fascism by David Neiwert at Orcinus;

and

Cheers And Jeers by Bill in Portland Maine at Daily Kos

Best Group Blog: MyDD

Most Humorous Blog: Jesus' General by J.C. Christian

Most Humorous Post: Poker With Dick Cheney by The Poorman

Best Expert Blog: Informed Comment by Juan Cole

Best Single Issue Blog (tie): TalkLeft by Jeralyn Merritt;

and

Grits For Breakfast by Scott Henson

Best New Blog: Mouse Words by Amanda Marcotte

Most Deserving of Wider Recognition: Suburban Guerrilla

Best Commenter: Meteor Blades at Daily Kos

and

Liberal Street Fighter

Bomb Blasts in Tikrit, Haglaniyah, Mosul Produce Dozens of Casualties

AP reports on violence in Iraq Tuesday:

' A car bomb exploded near police headquarters in the Iraqi city of Tikrit on Thursday, killing at least 10 people, witnesses said. More than a dozen cars were set ablaze after the massive blast . . . Meanwhile, clashes between U.S. troops and insurgents in the so-called Sunni triangle of death killed six Iraqis and left dozens injured in Heet, according to Dr. Mohammed al-Hadithi . . . In Haqlaniyah, 135 miles northwest of the capital, U.S. forces and Iraqi troops fought insurgents throughout the day, the military said. American aircraft fired cannon rounds and dropped bombs to help a Marine patrol that came under small arms and heavy machine-gun fire . . . Elsewhere, a U.S. soldier was killed when assailants set off a bomb near Tuz, 105 miles north of Baghdad. In Baghdad, gunmen assassinated the director of the Iraqi Trade Ministry, Saad Abbas Hassan, as he drove down a road . . . And in the northern city of Mosul, insurgents set off a car bomb, killing two people and wounding 14, the U.S. military said. Also in Mosul, U.S. soldiers shot and killed a civilian in a pickup truck who came too close to their convoy, policeman Ahmed Rashid said . . . '

In addition, guerrillas assassinated Khalil Ali Shukri, a Dawa Party official in Baquba, according to al-Zaman. Prospective prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari is from the Dawa Party. A military officer was assassinated in Baghdad on Haifa Street, and a contractor in Salman Pak.

Were the Shiites Cheated? And What does Allawi Want?

Al-Hayat has a long interview with an "informed Iraqi source" who is close to US officials in Iraq. He maintains that the US officials there were astounded that the United Iraqi Alliance did so well, and that they felt helpless and resigned as the process unfolded. He says that they are now asking privately if the US shed so much blood and treasure in Iraq to help fundamentalist Shiite allies of Iran take over Baghdad.

Al-Hayat also today repeats the allegation that the US or the electoral commission somehow cheated the United Iraqi Alliance of an absolute majority in parliament. (Note that this argument completely contradicts the interview they did, which speaks of US helplessness before the results.) The argument that the Iraqi elections were fixed is, however, implausible. It is sometimes alleged that the Shiites should have done better than they did, given the Sunni Arab absence. But when the smoke cleared, the UIA did have a majority in parliament, so the allegation makes no sense.

The below figures are from this wire service article and from this piece from the New York Times.

The NYT claimed that "the turnout in the three mainly Kurdish provinces in the north averaged 85 percent; in nine mainly Shiite southern provinces, the average was 71 percent."

This is the breakdown for turnout as best I could determine it, with only a couple of missing figures.

Al-Anbar (2%)
Al-Basrah (?)
Al-Muthanna (61%)
Al-Qadisiyah (69%)
An-Najaf (73%)
Arbil (?)
As-Sulaymaniyah (80%)
At-Ta'mim (?)
Babil (71%)
Baghdad (48%)
Dohuk (89%)
Dhi Qar (67%)
Diyala (34%)
Karbala' (73%)
Maysan (59%)
Ninevah (17%)
Salah ad-Din (29%)
Wasit (66%)

Now, the United Iraqi Alliance has 51 percent of the seats, having attacted the religious Shiite vote. The Iraqiya list of Iyad Allawi got the middle class, secular-leaning Shiites, with 14.5 percent. That is 64.5 percent for the two major Shiite lists. Then the small Shiite parties and the Communists (whose supporters are disproportionately Shiites) are another 3.4 percent, for a total of 68%.

If Shiites are, say, 62 percent of the population, and 71 percent turned out to vote, if 100 percent of the other groups had come out, the Shiites should have gotten 46 percent of the seats. But since the 4.5 million Sunni Arabs hardly turned out at all, and since 15 percent of Kurds did not, in the proportional system those percentages were added to the Shiite column, so they got 68% of seats in parliament. That is, it is as if 110 percent of the Shiites voted, because the absence of the Sunni Arabs magnified the Shiite vote. In fact, if the religious and secular Shiites could cooperate (fat chance), they could from a government all by themselves without reference to the Kurds or Sunni Arabs.

Precisely because the United Iraqi Alliance has ended up with 51 percent of the seats, which is enough to confirm the new government once a cabinet is selected, and since with the small Shiite parties it has 54 percent, either the US did not intervene in the ballot counting or it was completely incompetent in doing so. Personally, I don't think the US was in a position to intervene. Grand Ayatollah Sistani would not have put up with it, and the Americans knew it.

The results seem to me entirely plausible. Friends of mine with contacts among middle class Shiites in Baghdad reported that many of them were going to vote for Allawi, so the 14.5 percent showing for the Iraqiya list is not out of line (and is much smaller than most reporters with mainly middle class Baghdad contacts had expected).

If the Daily Telegraph is right that Iyad Allawi hopes to form a government without either the Kurdish Alliance or the United Iraqi Alliance, then this whole bid of his for the prime minister post is a stalking horse for some other purpose. The UIA and the Kurds between them have 78 percent of the seats in parliament! And Allawi would need 66 percent to form a government. He says he will work with small parties, but aside from the Sunni Iraqiyun with 5 seats and the Communists with 2, most of the rest are Shiite and have already formed a coalition with the UIA. Allawi's only hope is to detach delegates from the United Iraqi Alliance in such numbers as to put into question that list's ability to dominate parliament. Even then he has no chance of becoming prime minister. He almost certainly is simply angling for a cabinet position, and using the threat of creating disunity in the UIA ranks by seducing some of its members as leverage.

Show Trials and Phony Confessions Target Syria

AP reports on a televised confession of someone who said he was a Syrian agent in Iraq in charge of terrorist operations. The confession was broadcast on US-backed al-Iraqiyah television, and was produced presumably by the former Baath domestic intelligence officers appointed by Iyad Allawi.

These confessions are phony as a three-dollar bill (or a three-Euro coin). AP reports with a straight face that al-Essa "claimed he infiltrated Iraq in 2001, about two years before the U.S. invasion, because Syrian intelligence was convinced that American military action loomed." That allegation doesn't pass the smell test with me. If this guy was sent in 2001, it was to make trouble for Saddam, not with reference to America. The Syrian Baath mostly did not get on well with the Iraqi Baath. Another confessed terrorist said he was sent to Pakistan for training and then Syria. Oh, now we have a Baath-Islamist axis again. Sure. Shiite secular Arab nationalists are just dying to get up a collaboration with non-Arab Pakistani hyper-Sunnis who paint "Kill the Shiites" on their mini-buses in Lahore.

It is embarrassing that Allawi thought he could peddle this horse manure to the Iraqi and American publics.

Association of Muslim Scholars Denies Negotiations with US

Gilbert Achcar kindly supplied the following translation:

The following interesting excerpt from today's (Feb 23) Al-Hayat (my translation from Arabic):


' A member of the Association of Muslim Scholars [believed to be the most popular group among Arab Sunnis in Iraq] has denied that the contacts held by the American delegation wiith armed groups involved the Association.

He declared to Al-Hayat that the practice of equating the "armed resistance" with the Sunnis is "a big mistake, and the contacts do not take place with Sunni groups but with high leaders of the dissolved Baath Party."

He added that the Association is not concerned by these contacts, because it is "a Sunni religious authority opposed to the occupation through peaceful means, and even though it considers the resistance to be a legitimate right of every Iraqi, it rejects terrorism and the killing of innocents."

He revealed that the contacts engaged with the Association in order to integrate it in the new government centered only around the procedure of writing the constitution, and were held with Iraqi political forces and with Ashraf Qadi, the representative of the UN General Secretary, and not with the Bush administration.

He added that "these meetings will remain useless if the Americans keep betraying their promises, like carrying on the military operations and arrests."
"The US administration, which is the occupying force, should have controlled the borders with the neighbouring countries that allow the infiltration of terrorist groups, and made a distinction [in their contacts] between the legitimate resistance and terrorism, unless they are the first beneficiaries of the instability of security conditions to guarantee that they will stay as long as possible." '

Iraq-Blogging

Nick Turse at tomdispatch.com skewers Donald Rumsfeld's various rhetorical strategies of evasion whenever he has been asked hard questions about Abu Ghraib, the situation in Iraq, etc.:

' I was truly curious: Was it a budgetary problem -- the lack of CD burners, or floppy disks, or available computers at the Pentagon? Or was no one technically capable of making copies for Rumsfeld? Or was there some kind of institutional/personal issue at stake? Were Rumsfeld's underlings, for unknown reasons, engaging in a game of diskette keep-away "for days and days and days" (and right before his big Senate grilling too)?

Since then, I've paid closer attention to Rumsfeld's problems and continued to speculate. Just take a look at a few of the numerous incidents thus far in 2005…

On January 8, 2005, Newsweek broke a story about a high-level debate within the Pentagon on implementing the "Salvador Option" -- that is, the use of "death-squads" like those the U.S. funded in El Salvador during the 1980s -- in Iraq . . . Rumsfeld went on to complain that he couldn't find a copy of the story anywhere and could only read articles about the story. Members of the press corps promised to get him a copy and informed him that it was available in the on-line edition of the magazine. In his defense, Rumsfeld claimed that he only buys the hard-copy of Newsweek.

That Rumsfeld is such a cut-up.

Suburban Guerrilla (journalist Susan Madrak) takes an extended look at the way Pentagon reporting procedures on casualties are skewing the public's idea of the cost of the war in US lives and injuries. She wonders what the public reaction would be if it could be proved that the true count of dead and wounded, counting all the troops and contractors and all even tangentially combat-related casualties, was 2 or 3 times what we are being told.

The Middle East Information Center discussion board highlights the excellent article by Nir Rosen on Kirkuk that appeared in the NYT magazine Sunday. Rosen's portrait of a city that is little more than a massive urban roadside bomb ready to go off at any moment is a chilling harbinger for the future.

In the hyperlinked way of the blogging world, Andrew Arato's guest editorial on Monday about the likely struggle between the elected parliament in Iraq and the dead hand of the American-imposed interim constitution provoked y provoked Josh Buermann of Flagrancy to Reason to some acute observations about the severe constraints on Iraqi democracy imposed by the US. He cites Kevin Carson as saying,

' Once again, as has been the case with assorted other velvet and orange revolutions, along with sundry exercises in "people power," what's left after the smoke clears is a neoconservative counterfeit democracy. What the neocons call "democracy" is a Hamiltonian system in which the people exercise formal power to elect the government, but the key directions of policy are determined by a small and relatively stable Power Elite that is insulated from any real public pressure. the "Hamiltonian" nature of the Iraqi government and the continued purchase US policy has on its bureaucracy. '

Carson in turn quotes Milan Rai from Electronic Iraq pointing out that:

' Another device for maintaining control was Paul Bremer's appointment of key officials for five year terms just before leaving office. In June 2004, the US governor ordered that the national security adviser and the national intelligence chief chosen by the US-imposed interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, be given five-year terms, imposing Allawi's choices on the elected government. Bremer also installed inspectors-general for five-year terms in every ministry, and formed and filled commissions to regulate communications, public broadcasting and securities markets. '

Rai also points out that the big fight now looming between Ibrahim Jaafari of the United Iraqi Alliance and Iyad Allawi of the Iraqiyah List is over the extent of debaathification. Jaafari wants to continue to exclude midlevel and high Baath officials from government posts, whereas Allawi had begun bringing them in, even putting one in charge of the secret police:

' Allawi restored former servants of the Saddam regime to important posts, and has filled the security forces with former Ba'athists. Saddam's Special Forces soldiers and former intelligence officials are even being rehired as a police commando strike force. Last summer Allawi's government appointed Rasheed Flayeh to the post of director-general of the secret police force, despite objections from the Supreme Commission for De-Ba'athification that as head of security in the city of Nasiriyah, Flayeh had taken part in the brutal suppression of the 1991 Shia uprising.

Last October, Allawi tried and failed to disband the De-Ba'athification Commission (headed by his old rival Ahmed Chalabi). Allawi wanted to be able to openly readmit former senior Ba'athists to power unless they have been found guilty of serious crimes in court, a policy supported by Washington. The Shia coalition that has 'won' the elections has vowed to reverse re-Ba'athification, and it is likely that Allawi's enthusiasm for this policy will bar him from being a compromise prime minister in the new government. '

Buermann, Carson and Rai have put their fingers on a key set of issues in understanding the contemporary situation in Iraq. How much control can the US keep, and with what tools? What is the future of the ex-Baathists? Can a stable new regime emerge that can claim popular legitimacy under the shadow of Western military occupation? Thank God someone is at least broaching the questions.

Germans Trust Putin More than Bush

Frank Domoney kindly sends his translation of a Die Welt article that reports that over-all, the German public trusts Vladimir Putin more than it trusts George W. Bush. I was struck that it doesn't trust either one very much, and that even in West Germany they are in a virtual tie. It is a sad commentary on the trans-Atlantic relationship, and is almost completely the fault of George W. Bush.

' Die Welt: US President calls Europeans to take part in joint working in spite of the differences over Iraq. The Germans trust Russian President Vladimir Putin more than the American President George W. Bush.

Tasked by the Die Welt the renowned Opinion Polling Institute Dimap asked the opinion of Germans about the USA. The Russian president gets a greater degree of trust particularly in the East of the Republic, according to the results of a representative poll. While the average result across the Federal republic is 29% for Putin and 24% for Bush, in East Germany Putin reaches 37% (Bush 16%) In contrast in West Germany the value for Bush reaches 27%, for Putin 26%.

It is clear from the results of the poll that both presidents are greeted with scepticism in Germany. A majority of 37% trusts neither. Infratest Dimap polled 1000 citizens between 15 and 16 February 2005

In the meantime US President George W Bush yesterday again called the Europeans, during his visit to NATO and EU headquarters, to end the old conflict about the Iraq war, and walk a common path in the future. He understood “that the Iraq war had upset many Europeans” in unusual clarity. “The decision has however been taken, we must get over it, now it is time to work together in peace”. This is in the interest of the European lands as well as the US.

Bush praised the engagement of the alliance partners in the training mission in Iraq. “Every little helps” said the US President.

Although the Bundeskanzler Gerhard Schroeder’s suggestions on the reform of the Atlantic Alliance were not explicitly discussed at the meeting of the 26 heads of state and government, the theme could occupy them further in the coming months. NATO general secretary Jaap de Hoop Scheffer announced that he would put on the table suggestions for a political reform of the alliance. Bush said that everyone had heard “loud and clear what the Bundeskanzler had said”. He alluded to the fact that NATO is the reason why Europe is today “United and Free”. It is vital for the transatlantic relationship; the only grouping that is able to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Schroeder himself said that it had “in fact given a great measure of agreement to strengthen the political dialogue”. The form would require further talks.

After the meeting with NATO seniors, Bush travelled to the centre of Brussels where he was guest in the afternoon of the 25 heads of state and government of the EU. Subsequently a visit to the EU commission lay on the agenda. At the EU the remaining unresolved subjects of conflict of the Transatlantic Relationship were to be discussed: The EU negotiations with Iran about their Atomic program, and the removal of the weapons embargo on China, which is supported by many EU states. '

Koufax Awards

The Koufax Awards have been announced.

Many, many thanks to readers who voted mine the best "Expert Blog" and made my piece, "If America were Iraq, What would it be Like? the best post of 2004. These are humbling awards to win.

A warm congratulations to Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos for winning Best Blog. It was close between Kos and Atrios's Eschaton, which had won twice before. Also congrats to Josh Marshall for winning Best Blog Pro Division.

Well, I had better stop there or just quote the post, to which I've already linked-- but congrats to all fellow winners in all categories.

And a big vote of thanks from me to Dwight, MB, and Eric for running the contest. They are a central element of civil society in the left weblogging world. Please send them money by paypal.

Free Mojtaba and Arash

If Blogdex is any indication the campaign to free Mojtaba and Arash is going well.

The Iranian government is not immune to public opinion, and I hope people will keep trying to get them out.

In fact, assuming someone could plan it out and get a permit, wouldn't a flashmob protest in front of Iran's permanent mission to the UN be an appropriate blogger tool for this campaign?

Iran (Islamic Republic of)
Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations
622 Third Avenue, 34th Floor, New York, NY 10017
Telephone: (212) 687-2020, Telefax: (212) 867-7086

Jaafari slams Hilary

Stephen Farrell reports for the London Times that a minor tiff occurred last week between Senator Hilary Clinton and prime ministerial candidate Ibrahim Jaafari:

' Last week Hillary Clinton, the New York senator, visiting Baghdad, said that there were “grounds both for concern and for . . . vigilance” about Dr al-Jaafari’s Iranian connections. Clearly irritated, the candidate — at present Iraq’s Vice-President — brushed aside the remark yesterday. “We are not at an American traffic light to be given a red or green signal. I am speaking on behalf of a collective decision. I will stop when the Iraqi people say to stop,” he said. “Hillary Clinton, as far as I know, does not represent any political decision or the American Administration and I don’t know why she said this. She knows nothing about the Iraqi situation.” '

I take it that Hilary is laying out a Democratic Party strategy for the 2008 elections, which may well argue that Bush lost Iraq to Iran through his incompetence. The argument probably implies that Jaafari as a Muslim fundamentalist is not only close to Iran but will pursue policies and legislation that hurt women.

These points are not without some validity. But maybe Baghdad just after the elections wasn't the best time and place for her to criticize positive feelings toward Iran on the part of Shiite politicians (which, I have pointed out, is sort of like criticizing the Irish for feeling positively about the Vatican). Jaafari is an Iraqi patriot and he has a right to be offended at the idea that he might be a puppet for Tehran. Still, it does seem inevitable that some canny Democrat will figure out that the US public has severe doubts about the Iraq adventure, and find a way to parlay that into political advantage.

Jaafari for his part was ill-advised to lash out at Hilary. If he becomes prime minister, he will need a good working relationship with the US Congress on both sides of the aisle.

Current Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi told the NYT on Tuesday that he had heard that Iran had lobbied its Iraqi allies against allowing him to continue as prime minister. Allawi professes puzzlement at this stance. Uh, Iyad, it might be because you let your defense minister, Hazem Shaalan, say that Iran is Iraq's number one enemy! You could see how a thing like that might annoy Tehran a little bit. Not that Iran really has a veto-- pretending that it does may be an attempt to smear the United Iraqi Alliance as themselves puppets of Iran. Allawi also admits to the strategy I suggested Tuesday morning, of attempting to become prime minister by allying with the Kurds and then trying to detach 60 or so members of the UIA.

Al-Hayat, however, suggests that two can play that game. It says that of the 40 deputies in Allawi's Iraqiyah list, 9 are thinking of bolting and joining the UIA. They include two persons who tilt toward the Sadr Movement, and 7 other members led by Husain Ali Shaalan.

It should be remembered that Allawi would need two thirds of the parliament, or about 182 MPs, to form a government. The UIA can prevent him from succeeding even if only 94 of its 140 deputies stand firm (and this conclusion assumes that Allawi could attact the allegiance not only of 46 UIA deputies but of all of the small parties such as the Sadrist Cadres and Chosen, the Turkmen National Front, the Islamic Action Council, and the Kurdish Islamic Bloc). I'd say Allawi's task is simply impossible.

Allawi does not count on the moral authority of Grand Ayatollah Sistani, which is what enabled the UIA to be cobbled together. Sistani probably could send envoys to most UIA deputies and argue them out of supporting Allawi. And I suspect that he would do so if he felt it necessary.

Al-Hayat quotes a member of the UIA who says that the delegates who supported Chalabi would not support Allawi, and that the UIA rejects even a cabinet post for him; and that he should just get used to leading a small opposition faction in the parliament.

Persons close to Allawi, in contrast, told the newspaper that the current prime minister remained confident that he could seduce enought UIA members away from their party to form a government.

Gilbert Achcar informs me that the distribution of some of the seats for the religious parties in the United Iraqi Alliance was given in al-Hayat, and kindly provides the figures mentioned:

Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq: 18 seats
Islamic Da'wa Party: 15 seats
Islamic Da'wa Party-Iraq organisation: 9 seats
Islamic Virtue Party: 9 seats
Shia Islamic Council: 13 seats
Faili Kurds: 4 seats
Al-Sadr's Current: 21 seats

This list accounts for only 81 of the 140 seats, though. It demonstrates that the religious parties were seriously shortchanged in the formation of the United Iraqi Alliance list.

What's next? If Jaafari can put together a 2/3s majority in parliament, he can have the president and two vice-presidents elected. They in turn will forma presidency council that will appoint a prime minister. He and they will then jointly appoint the cabinet ministers. The final government will need a 51 percent vote of confidence in parliament. (Some commentators are saying that it needs 2/3s approval the way the initial government did, but this is not true. A simple majority can confirm the government in power). Andrew Arato reminds us of the following passages of the interim constitution.

' Article 36.

(A) The National Assembly shall elect a President of the State and two Deputies. They shall form the Presidency Council, the function of which will be to represent the sovereignty of Iraq and oversee the higher affairs of the country. The election of the Presidency Council shall take place on the basis of a single list and by a two-thirds majority of the members’ votes.

Article 38.

(A) The Presidency Council shall name a Prime Minister unanimously, as well as the members of the Council of Ministers upon the recommendation of the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister and Council of Ministers shall then seek to obtain a vote of confidence by simple majority from the National Assembly prior to commencing their work as a government. The Presidency Council must agree on a candidate for the post of Prime Minister within two weeks. In the event that it fails to do so, the responsibility of naming the Prime Minister reverts to the National Assembly. In that event, the National Assembly must confirm the nomination by a two-thirds majority. '

Chalabi is Prevailed upon to Withdraw

It turns out that the other members of the United Iraqi Alliance prevailed on Ahmad Chalabi to drop his bid to become candidate for prime minister. It is not clear if Jaafari, the winner, promised him anything in return for stepping down. AP suggests he might be a deputy prime minister for security and economic affairs. I'd say, keep that man away from money and security!

Personally, I think all the talk of withdrawing for the sake of unity is bunkum, and that Chalabi toted up his votes and did not have anywhere near 71, so he withdrew in time to save face and also in time to be offered some sort of consolation prize.

Charles Clover of the Financial Times, who has done some excellent reporting from Iraq, points to a cloud on the horizon. He says that Jaafari is committed to a vigorous de-baathification program, despite his commitment to reaching out to Sunni Arabs, and that the prospective prime minister may not understand the contradiction in his stances. I had assumed that Jaafari's opposition to the Fallujah campaign indicated he was less of a wild man on the issue than Chalabi, but maybe not. The Dawa Party certainly has reason for a grudge against Baathists, given all those mass graves the latter filled with Dawa Party members.

The press keeps saying that the crackdown on Dawa came in 1982. It was 1980, with the execution of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, and I believe it is 1980 when Jaafari escaped to Tehran, where he stayed until 1989.

Breaking News: Jaafari PM Candidate for UIA

Well, the United Iraqi Alliance just announced that Ibrahim Jaafari has won out against Ahmad Chalabi. Jaafari's victory is not a surprise, since he was backed by the two core parties in the UIA, the Dawa Party and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. [I had assumed that an internal vote went forward but apparently it was handled by consensus in the end.]

Nic Robertson at CNN is saying that Jaafari was seen as a more unifying figure. You could interpret that statement in a lot of ways, but it is certainly true that Jaafari has a rhetoric of inclusion that stretches even to the people of Fallujah, whereas Chalabi wanted to punish all the Sunni Arabs who had had anything to do with the Baath Party (a lot of them).

The Dawa Party was founded in 1958 or so, with the aim of establishing an Islamic state in Iraq (and as an alternative to Communism, with its atheist workers' paradise). That it is now supplying the prime minister of the country under American auspices is among the more startling developments of our time.

3 US Troops Dead, 8 Wounded
18 Iraqis Killed

Wire services reported that ' Twenty-two people including four US soldiers have died in a series of attacks in Iraq since Sunday evening, while a journalist, her son, and three men working for the US military have been kidnapped, according separate security sources and a statement from a militant group. ' The guerrillas struck all over the center-north of the country, from Baghdad to Mosul.

Guerrillas detonated a bomb in Baghdad Monday near a US medical helicopter, killing 3 US troops and wounding 8.

Iraq, in short, continues to be a godawful mess, with no real security on the major roads. As I suggested in January, the anonymous elections have not had a significant impact on the guerrilla war.

UIA Will Hold Secret Ballot
Chalabi, Allawi Still in Running for PM

The Shiite religious coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, will hold a secret ballot within the list to decide on a prime ministerial candidate, according to AP. This move is a sign that neither Ibrahim Jaafari nor Chalabi could win by consensus. Jaafari should have had enough votes to prevail by consensus, given that he heads up the Dawa Party, one of the two major forces in the UIA, so this development is unexpected.

Then it was announced that Iyad Allawi, the ex-Baathist interim prime minister, will also enter a bid to become prime minister, even though his Iraqiya list only got 14.5 percent of the seats in parliament.

The strength of Chalabi's challenge, and Allawi's sudden hopes, need to be explained, and if readers will bear with me, I'm going to engage in a heuristic exercise (i.e. a thought experiment). I can't get exact enough data to simply say what the situation is, but I think I can lay out a scenario that is at least broadly plausible.

The UIA is a coalition of 11 parties, along with many independents chosen by a committee appointed by the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. The two major parties in it are the Dawa Party and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, both fundamentalist in orientation. I have still not seen a breakdown of the party allegiance of the 140 UIA members that have been seated.

But it is possible that Dawa and SCIRI were shortchanged by the process that Sistani instituted. That is, Dawa and Islamic Dawa were said to have each been given 10 percent of the seats in the UIA, and SCIRI and its offshoot, the Badr Organization, were given 12 percent and 10 percent respectively. That proportion would suggest that the two parties only control about 59 of the 140 seats, or 42 percent.

The other 81 seats are controlled by other small parties or by independents. I suspect at least some of the independents tilt toward Dawa or SCIRI, however. The Iraqi National Congress of Ahmad Chalabi had ten seats according to some press reports, though it is hard to know for sure. Other relatively traditionalist or secular-leaning small parties also have some seats. The Faili Kurds, who are Shiites, have a few, as do the Turkmen (I don't believe we've been told how many). According to some reports, about 30 Sadrists ran on the UIA ticket, though we cannot know how many were seated. These are persons who are devoted to the memory of Sadiq al-Sadr (d. 1999) and may or may not be close to his son, Muqtada al-Sadr. If Sadrists were seated in the same proportion as the rest of the list (60 percent of UIA candidates were seated), that would be 18 Sadrists. Chalabi, it should be noted, has some sort of weird alliance with Muqtada al-Sadr.

Quite apart from party, every third seat went to a woman or about 46 of the UIA seats. Middle class women in Iraq are generally terrified of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, including many Shiite women, since they saw how the Khomeini regime (to which SCIRI was historically close) took away civil rights from women and imposed on them medieval patriarchy in the law. Still, if my estimates above are correct, about 19 of the women's seats belong to female members of SCIRI and Dawa, who presumably will support their own parties. So 25 of the women might be free to support Chalabi against Jaafari.

A lot of the women appear to have supported Chalabi, according to AP. Let's say he picked up even 20 of them. Then the Faili Kurds supported him (2-3?). So, too, did the Sadrists (15-18?). Then he had his 10 INC members (who were probably fairly high up the list and so probably got seated) and a few other secular-leaning or traditionalist independents who preferred him to Dawa and SCIRI. You could see how he could have 60 votes. His people claim he has 80, but that is not plausible because if it were true, he would have won by consensus (a candidate would need 71 votes to win).

If SCIRI and Dawa vote together, Jaafari, who is the candidate of the more fundamentalist parties, would need 29 votes from elsewhere in the list, assuming the women and other members of their contingents held firm. Apparently it is not clear to the UIA members whether he has those 29 or not (otherwise, they would just acquiesce in his bid).

This outcome is in part a result of the compromise suggested by Sistani to Dawa and SCIRI, which certainly shortchanged them. SCIRI won 8 of the 18 provincial council elections for itself, and would therefore almost certainly have dominated the UIA if seats within it had been apportioned according to true electoral strength. Sistani has long been concerned that local politicians who stayed in Iraq have a voice in government, and not just the expatriate parties such as Dawa and SCIRI. But these local forces and independents are often less fundamentalist than the expatriates, which had taken refuge in Iran.

The other wild card here is the women. The interim constitution had specified that at least 25 percent of seats be apportioned to women. Somehow the United Nations committee for assisting the Iraqi elections managed to put that up to 33 percent. If Muqtada al-Sadr (who wants women all covered up and put in their places) and middle class Shiite women joined forces to put into power Ahmad Chalabi (a corrupt financier charged with spying for Iran), that would be about the most bizarre set of bedfellows in the history of parliaments.

So this is where Allawi enters the picture. If Chalabi were to cobble together 71 votes within the 140-strong UIA contingent, he might in the process so anger Dawa and SCIRI that they will refuse to support him when the government is voted on in the full parliament.

To form a government, a prime minister will need 182 seats. If Chalabi only had 71 from the UIA, and could get the support of the Kurds, with 75, he would still need 36 votes from somewhere else. He would need to get them from the Iraqiya list of Allawi.

At that point, Allawi becomes plausible. He thinks he can turn the tables on Chalabi. He has 40 from his list, and the 6 Sunni Arabs will support him. If he can ally with the Kurds and get their 75, he would need 61. He would have to steal those from the UIA. It is not impossible that the same sort of UIA delegate (minus the Sadrists) who would vote for Chalabi would vote for him. Moreover, if it became a choice between Chalabi and Allawi, a lot of MPs might defect to Allawi on non-ideological grounds, just because Chalabi is such a sleazebag and will prolong the Sunni Arab insurgency with his punitive campaign against ex-Baathists.

Personally, I think it is unlikely that Allawi can put together 182, starting from only 40, even if the Kurds swing around to back him, just because so many Shiites in the UIA will have a grudge against him and his ex-Baathists.

There are two other wild cards in all this. Al-Hayat reported over the weekend that even the UIA would want a green light from the US embassy, to which it obviously has a back channel. Whereas Chalabi has allies in the Department of Defense among the Neoconservatives, he is widely disliked by the State Department, and Negroponte might be enough of a State Department man to block Chalabi.

The Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani also has a veto because of his moral authority with the Shiites. He, however, is said to have adopted a stance of neutrality as between Jaafari, Chalabi and Adil Abdul Mahdi (who earlier withdrew but shouldn't be counted out). Sistani said he would be happy with the UIA choice.

In the same way that the US could block Chalabi by simply intimating that he is unacceptable, so Sistani might be able to block Allawi if he so chose.

Several readers have asked for final tallies for the parliamentary elections, which were announced after reapportionment last Thursday.

Some of the implications of the final tallies were analyzed in this article in the Turkish newspaper, Zaman, though from an odd point of view. The author seemed to think there was a chance of the United Iraqi Alliance (140 seats of 275) cooperating with the secular, largely ex-Baathist Shiites of Iyad Allawi's Iraqiya list (40 seats) to form a Shiite 2/3s majority. This outcome strikes me as highly unlikely. I could not find any similar detailed discussion (as opposed to simple reportage) of the final parliamentary outcome in the Western press by keyword search, though I could easily have missed something. If the absence I note is real, it is a sad commentary on our press.

Al-Hayat reported several of the final results last week. I've seen other results in the wire services. This is what I think the final tallies look like:

United Iraqi Alliance 140 seats 51 percent
Kurdish Alliance 75 seats 27 percent
Iraqiya (Allawi) 40 seats 14.5 percent
Iraqiyyun (Ghazi al-Yawir) 5 seats 1.8 percent
Cadres and Chosen (Sadr) 3 seats 1 percent
Turkmen National Front 3 seats 1 percent
Islamic Action Council (Shiite) 2 seats 0.7 percent
Communists 2 seats 0.7 percent
Kurdish Islamic Bloc 2 seats 0.7 percent
National Democratic Alliance 1 seat 0.3 percent
Mesopotamian National (Christian) 1 seat 0.3 percent
Welfare and Liberation (Juburi) 1 seat 0.3 percent

(does not equal 100 because of rounding)

As for the forces that rejected the elections, BBC world monitoring on Feb. 17 says, ' Al-Hawzah carries on page 1 of the Supplement a 2,000-word article by Abd-al-Samad al-Suwaylim, discussing the "legitimacy" of the Islamic political parties in Iraq, saying that these parties are "religiously illegitimate" because they do not believe in Wilayat al-Faqih rule of the legal scholar, according to the Shiite doctrine. ' Al-Hawzah is the newspaper of Muqtada al-Sadr. There has been some controversy about whether the Sadr Movement accepts Khomeini's doctrine of the Guardianship of the Jurisprudent (Wilayat al-Faqih). I'd say the answer is yes, and the Muqtada faction of the Sadrists is even using the doctrine as a litmus test for whether other parties are truly Islamic.

Basra Council Dominated by Fundamenatlists

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat: The results have been announced for Basra province. The city of Basra alone has 1.2 million inhabitants, so this is a major province, and is largely Shiite. Fundamentalist Shiite parties gained 85 percent of the seats. The United Iraqi Alliance won 20 seats, or 49 percent.

The Islamic Fadila Party won 12 seats, or 29 percent. (Fadilah is an offshoot of the Sadr II movement led by Muhammad Yaqubi). Since the UIA is a coalition, this result makes Fadilah the biggest single party on the council.

The Islamic Dawa Party, which ran apart from the UIA in Basra, received 3 seats or 7 percent. The remaining 5 seats were distributed among the Iraqi National Accord (Iyad Allawi), which received 4 seats or 10 percent and the Caucus for Iraq's Future, which received 2 seats.

Women received 29 percent of the seats.

Back Channels

The US military has established back-channel negotiations with some of the leaders of the Sunni Arab guerrilla war, according to Time magazine. Earlier on, the US had refused such negotiations.

Ahmad Chalabi was clearly angered by these talks, and said on US television on Sunday that the new Iraqi government would not be bound by such negotiations conducted by the US. Chalabi, who is running for prime minister, has a history of advocating punitive measures against former members of the Baath Party.

Mark Hosenball of Newsweek reports that Iran is attempting to place its assets in key ministry posts in Iraq. The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Al-Da'wa Party, both old-time revolutionary Shiite organizations, were in exile in Tehran in the 1980s and after, and it is not impossible that some members were recruited by Iranian intelligence.

Sunni Arab leaders met on Sunday to discuss strategies for going forward.

The Association of Muslim Scholars appears determined to stick to a rejectionist stance.

Speaking of which, I saw Muqtada al-Sadr being interviewed on al-Jazeerah Sunday. Muqtada said that the most pressing task was the expulsion of the foreign troops. He denied having participated in the election in any way. He recognized that some Sadrists had gotten elected, either on the Sistani list or as part of the Cadres and Chosen Party (which won 3 seats). Muqtada seemed to say that he would only cooperate with the new government if it set an immediate timetable for the withdrawal of US troops.

Am back in town and will post more regularly from Monday afternoon

Abu Ghraib in Brooklyn

Larry Cohler-Esses of the New York Daily News reveals that Abu Ghraib has been going on in the United States itself. Five Israeli suspects and dozens of Muslim ones apprehended after September 11 were subjected to humiliation, stripped, left in the cold, and generally treated with cruelty. None of the arrestees was ever convicted of any wrongdoing, save visa violations that caused them to be deported, save for one.

The Israeli detainees do not appear to have been treated any better than the Muslim ones:

' Oded Ellner - one of five Israeli Jewish terrorist suspects - said he sought medical help after MDC's allegedly meager, often spoiled meals left him with severe dysentery symptoms. The doctor came with five guards and a camera, he said. She then ordered him to strip and shift his backside into a small space in the cell door so she could conduct a rectal exam from outside the cell. "I'm a human being, not an animal!" Ellner said he shouted. "I have a right to an exam." The guards, he said, "just laughed," and all walked away. '

The man who wrote the advice to President Bush on the permissibility of the use of torture after September 11, Albert Gonzales, is now in charge of the very penitentiary where his sort of thinking went wild.

How Many Methods Are There to Enact a New Constitution in Iraq?

Guest Editorial

by Andrew Arato


Many commentators keep repeating a fundamentally erroneous statement, namely that Sunni part of the population unrepresented in the National Assembly is to an important extent protected in the Iraqi political process because a new constitution can be adopted only if it is not rejected by 2/3 of the voters of three, in this case Sunni provinces. The assumption is based on the provisions of the Transitional Administrative Law, the Interim Constitution currently in effect, that had been imposed by the American Coalition Provisional Authority in the Spring of 2004. Unfortunately or not, this official constitution-making method of the TAL, a document that has been repeatedly denounced by the Grand Ayatollah Sistani (who blocked its approval by the UN Security Council), is not the only one currently available to the new National Assembly where his forces will dominate.

Members of parliament might decide that they are not bound by the interim constitution. Although the TAL contains no provision for democratic decision-making, on these issues the elected government would be within its rights to engage in it. Of course, the members of parliament could simply keep the interim constitution in place. But they could also legally amend it. Or they could replace it through a series of amendments. This diversity of methods is important, because the new National Assembly in Iraq may pursue several of them simultaneously thereby reducing to insignificance broad participation conceded on only one, the official level.

The official method does involve drafting an entirely new constitution in the current National Assembly, and offering it for ratification to the electorate as a whole as well as province by province, where a majority of Iraqi voters must approve and 2/3 of the voters of 3 provinces can subvert ratification. (TAL: Art 61 B and C). It is however quite erroneous to claim as many now do that 2/3 of the National Assembly must according to the TAL approve a draft, although the assembly could (and should) still decide to set up such a rule. There is no veto provided for the Presidency Council either, as in the case of ordinary laws.

While there are no provisions for setting up a constitution drafting committee, the only reason why such a body would be difficult to established according to ethnic and political parity or proportionality different than the distribution of the assembly itself is that relevant Sunni representation in the National Assembly will be zero. Something like a creative use of the extra-parliamentary round table method, pioneered in Central Europe and South Africa may be needed to secure a preliminary constitutional agreement with significant Sunni groupings like the Association of Islamic Scholars, and groups that did well in the elections for local government.

At the other extreme there is the extra-legal but certainly democratic if majoritarian method of repudiating the TAL and its constitution-making rules, and producing new ones. The justification for this would be that the Interim Constitution is a document imposed by a foreign occupying power, never involving Iraqi consent, and thus cannot bind and constrain a freely and democratically elected constituent assembly. More or less, this used to be the position of the Grand Ayatollah Sistani, and was confirmed as a possibility by no less than Lakhdar Brahimi, the representative of the UN Secretary General. Sistani has now achieved his freely elected assembly.

Nevertheless, the elections, with the Sunni boycott, were not themselves fully democratic. The bare majority of seats achieved by the Shi'a list in the National Assembly would now make the classical revolutionary democratic road a very hazardous one to follow, since it would incite Kurdish defection as well as Sunni resistance and probably international condemnation. Because of careless talk of some members of the United Iraqi Alliance, in spite of Sistani’s own protestations, the whole majoritarian democratic path very much at home elsewhere in the world, e.g. the UK, is now indissolubly tainted with the prospect of theocracy, or the tyranny of the majority. Nevertheless, the taint of American imposition of the TAL, and the resentment of the three province veto keep even this option alive as one option of the UIA list.

In between the extremes of the official method and extra-legal democracy lie however methods of perpetuating a constitution that would be still the TAL, formally speaking. Taken far enough this approach could lead to a substantially new constitution, and this is what almost all commentators miss. According to the TAL itself, if the assembly simply fails to agree on a constitution, or if its work is rejected by the electorate of three provinces, and this could happen an indefinite number of times, new elections would be necessary in 12 or 18 months. For an indefinite period the TAL even as it now stands could remain the constitution of Iraq, de facto.

In the meantime however it could be also amended, in part or as a whole. Its amendment rule requires ¾ of the votes of the National Assembly, plus the agreement of all three members of the Presidency Council (who were picked by 2/3 of the assembly). (Art. 3A) A UIA led coalition with the Kurdish Alliance (with obvious allies) would have about 215-220 votes, well over the required ¾, and all they would have to make sure is to elect in advance by 2/3 a friendly three member Presidency Council amenable to such purpose. Such an amendment process may simply improve upon the TAL, currently much too sketchy and even contradictory to be of use for the longer run.

But the approach could go so far as to replace the TAL altogether by an entirely new constitution, along with a new amendment rule, and a new constitution making procedure or no new constitution making procedure at all if the ruling coalition so wishes. This is so in spite of the fact that the TAL has some supposedly unamendable provisions. The careless framers forgot to make Art 3A, the amendment rule itself unamendable, and after it were suitably amended, everything else could be changed as well.

These issues sound technical, but in fact they are of deep political significance. The new coalition accordingly does not really have to fear Sunni rejection of its constitutional product. It is in the position to offer only token representation to the Sunni, or none at all, and amend the TAL while it produces a new constitution. In case of rejection by three provinces, the TAL would stay as the new constitution. Or, alternately, serious participation could be offered to groups like the Association of Islamic Scholars and the Iraqi Islamic Party in the National Assembly committee writing the new constitution, as I once suggested here. Even in that case, amending the TAL could be held as a club over the new committee, its co-opted Sunni members, as well as the voters of Sunni provinces. In principle two constitutional projects could proceed together with the authentic justification that the TAL needs revision
and relegitimation at the very least.

There are answers to the dilemma however, technical and political. A short time period should be set up for the necessary partial revision and relegitimation of the TAL, probably a period of six or eight weeks. One thing that should be changed is the ratification rule, since neither a three province veto nor the possibility of indefinite self-perpetuation of an interim constitution are desirable. Then, a moratorium should be declared on all further amendments to the TAL, while a genuinely pluralistic constitutional committee does its work on the new constitution and is allowed to reach consensus.

Of course the key issue remains setting up a constitution drafting committee where the Sunnis will be adequately represented. The only reason why such a body would be now difficult to establish according to ethnic and political parity or proportionality different than the distribution of the assembly itself is that relevant Sunni representation in the National Assembly may now be actually zero. Something like a creative use of the extra-parliamentary round table negotiations, pioneered in Central Europe and South Africa may be needed to secure a preliminary constitutional agreement with significant Sunni groupings like the Association of Islamic Scholars, and parties like the Iraqi Islamic Party that did well in the elections for local government.

Of course the National Assembly would have to retain the right to to debate and alter any such prior informal agreement. Hopefully, however, the majority forces would adhere to promises and commitments made to the minority. It may be that this is the only way that participation by all major political forces in Iraq could lead to the desirable conclusion: the achievement of a new and legitimate constitution free of either American or Iraqi majoritarian imposition.

The author is Professor at the New School in New York

Chalabi Interviewed by Stephanopoulos

George Stephanopoulos interviewed Ahmad Chalabi on ABC's This Week Sunday morning. Here are some excerpts from the press release issued with the transcript afterwards:

' · When Mr. Stephanopoulos asked why Prime Minister Allawi’s government failed to stop the insurgency and how the new government will deal with the same issues, Dr. Chalabi responded: “…The Iraqi government failed to stop those killers because the security plan that the United States and the coalition put together for Iraq for the period after sovereignty did not work. The government did not take the issue of the sovereignty of Iraq seriously. Iraqis must take control of the Iraqi armed forces from the recruitment, to the training, to the deployment.”

· When Mr. Stephanopoulos asked about a “Time” magazine report on US military officials negotiating with former Saddam regime elements leading the insurgency, Dr. Chalabi responded: “I know nothing about such negotiations. Those negotiations will in no way bind the elected government of Iraq because it's not part of them. And I don't know whether the report is accurate or not. But the issue here is not negotiating with the killers who are killing the Iraqi people and who are murdering tens of Iraqis on their most religious occasions like this, like what happened yesterday and the day before. I believe that the Iraqi government will defend the Iraqi people and will stop the killers and stop the terrorists.”

· When Mr. Stephanopoulos asked if the US military should stop negotiating with these regime elements, Dr. Chalabi replied: “The U.S. military is free to do what they want. But what is binding on the Iraqi people and the Iraqi government is regulated by agreement that exists now and by the fact that Iraqis are a sovereign state and will have an elected government very soon.”

· When Mr. Stephanopoulos asked how the status of US forces will changes under the new government, Dr. Chalabi responded: “I believe that the agreement will deal with the issues of how the Iraqi armed forces work, how the command structure of the forces in Iraq to be organized, where the U.S. forces will be deployed, how they will deal with emergencies in Iraq, and where will they be. All these issues need to be clarified.”

· Dr. Chalabi on the withdrawal of US forces: “As for the time when U.S. forces can begin to withdraw, I would say to you that this is contingent upon the training and the making Iraqis' armed forces effective in fighting the insurgents and identifying the enemy and fighting them, and not negotiating and giving them (inaudible) fighting them. We need to do it politically and militarily. And also, the United States forces can begin to withdraw when the Iraqi security forces are able to assume more and more of the burden in doing this. Iraqis are perfectly willing to fight the killers and the terrorists. And I think that they have not been -- no structures were in place to make them effective so far. So we need to improve on that.”

· Dr. Chalabi on the issue of detainees: “The agreement will deal with the right or how those U.S. forces detainees Iraqis. There are thousands of Iraqis now detained by U.S. forces. We don't know why. We don't know how. And we don't know under what legal structure they are being detained. I believe that this process should be an Iraqi process.”

· When Mr. Stephanopoulos asked if he was in the good graces of the US again, Dr. Chalabi responded: “I hope to be a friend. I'm a friend of the United States, and I continue to be a friend of the United States. And I am grateful, as are most Iraqis, to the American people for helping liberate Iraq and also, young and old men and women of the United States Armed Forces in Iraq who have done a great job in helping us have elections, and also for the leadership of President Bush.”

· When Mr. Stephanopoulos asked if he thought he would be the next Prime Minster of Iraq, Dr. Chalabi responded: “That's up to the United Iraqi Alliance parliamentary bloc, and they will decide on that through a democratic process… I believe I have a majority of the votes on my side right now.”

· Dr. Chalabi on the newly formed government: “We want to change the way Iraq is governed. It's no longer -- it will no longer be the government of a leader with everybody else not counting very much. We want to have a cabinet form of executive authority in Iraq, and I am perfectly willing to cooperate, as indeed are my other friends and colleagues who are competing the job of prime minister.”

· When Mr. Stephanopoulos asked about Iran’s relationship with Iraq, Dr. Chalabi responded: “The Iraqi people will assert themselves as an independent people. They have elected an assembly which ran on this platform, independence, sovereignty. And I believe that the Iraqi people will not accept to be part of Iran. And the Shia of Iraq will not accept to be under the influence of Iran. But that does not mean we have to be enemies of Iran. Iran has a long border with Iraq, and we intend to have the best possible relations with Iran based on non-interference in each other's affairs, and also good neighborly relations, and no terrorism from either side against the other.”

· Dr. Chalabi on Israeli-Palestinian relations: “…I believe myself that the issue of the Palestinian-Israeli dispute will be solved by negotiations. And I'm glad to see the negotiations are progressing between the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government under the new leadership in the Palestinian Authority. And we look forward to the day when there is an independent Palestinian state at peace with all its neighbors so that we can resume -- we can put this problem behind us.” '

What all this tells me is that Ahmad Chalabi still has a highly vindictive, almost violent attitude toward the Sunni Arab community, many of whom were Baath Party members even though most were not guilty of actual crimes. I personally can't imagine a process through which Chalabi emerges as prime minister from the United Iraqi Alliance, or at least not a process that did not involve a lot of bribery. But if such a disaster occurred, it is obvious that he would throw the country into further chaos immediately.

It is absolutely outrageous that Chalabi blames US policies for the guerrilla war. He was the one who pushed for punitive policies toward the ex-Baathists and for dissolving the Iraqi military, and he and his Neoconservative cronies in the Pentagon bear a great deal of the responsibility for the mess in Iraq today.

By the way, it seems pretty obvious that aside from Stephanopoulos, a lot of television news leaders are trying to dump the Iraq story. Despite massive bombings and loss of life on Ashura in Iraq on Saturday, there is so far relatively little about it on the Sunday afternoon talking heads shows.

At Least 55 Dead, Over 100 Wounded In Ashura Bombings

Eight suicide bombers struck at various sites in Iraq on Saturday, killing and wounding dozens during the commemboration of Ashura. This holy day is sort of like Easter Friday for Shiites, when they remember the martyrdom of Husain, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. The guerrillas, who are from a Sunni Arab background, are hoping to provoke the Shiites into attacking Sunnis, so as to throw the country into (even greater) chaos. They hope massive sectarian warfare will force the US out and will allow them to make a coup and come back to power.

Contrary to what Hilary Clinton said in Baghdad on Saturday, this series of huge explosions does not demonstrate that the guerrilla insurgency has failed or is weakening. Rather, the attacks demonstrate that the guerrilla war is still being waged fiercely.

Al-Hayat reports that a decision on the new prime minister will not be announced until at least Wednesday. The decision was postponed in part because of Ashura, and in part because of the difficulty in getting a "green light" from Washington in the wake of Ambassador John Negroponte's appointment as intelligence czar. (US news sources have not spoken as openly of the need for a green light from Washington, but al-Hayat's sources are frank about it. This frankness agrees with the comment made by one embassy official that Iraq cannot select a prime minister who is unacceptable to Washington.

I'll be a guest on Jack Cafferty's "In the Money" on CNN on Sunday at 3 pm EST, 12 pm PST

Present Conflicts, Looming Conflicts

Reuters reports, ' Five U.S. soldiers were killed in separate guerrilla attacks in Iraq, the U.S. military said Friday, three in or near the northern city of Mosul, one north of Baghdad and the fifth south of the capital. '

The Financial Times points out that a conflict is brewing between the Shiite majority in the new parliament and the Kurds over the veto power given any three provinces over the new constitution. The Shiites have never accepted the veto and Grand Ayatollah Sistani threatened Kofi Annan over any attempt to have it endorsed by the UN security council.

Abbas Kadhim analyzes the significance of the Sunni Arab absence in the new parliament, and makes some suggestions as to how to begin repairing this disastrous situation.

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim accused Iraqi police of torturing and killing three members of the Shiite paramilitary, the Badr Corps, under mysterious circumstances, according to Ash-Sharq al-Awsat. Al-Hakim, the leader of the victorious United Iraqi Alliance, said that the deed was done by ex-Baathists who had been re-recruited into the police corps. The rehabilitation of Baathists under the interim Allawi administration is likely to produce many such conflicts now that the religious Shiites are in power.

The same newspaper reports that the bodies of the two sons of Najaf police chief Ghalib al-Jazairi were found Friday in the holy city of Karbala. Guerrillas appear to have used the ritual mourning processions of Muharram among Shiites as a cover to kidnap them.

Al-Hayat reports that Samirah Rajab published an op-ed in the Khalij Times after the recent Iraqi elections in which she refered to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani as "General Sistani" and complained that the Shiite cleric had legitimated the foreign military occupation of Iraq by supporting the elections and by helping pacify the country for the Americans. The article produced vehement protests among the Bahraini Shiite community (the majority of the population), and demands that Bahrain newspapers be censored so as to prevent such comments from appearing in the future.

Shaikh Husain al-Najati, Sistani's representative in Bahrain, complained of the negative and derisive tone toward the grand ayatollah. Rajab had defended Saddam Hussein, and represents a Sunni Arab nationalist point of view that views the rise of Shiite dominance in Iraq as extremely unfortunate. This conflict demonstrates the kinds of tensions between Sunnis and Shiites provoked by the new situation in the Gulf.

Bomb Blasts kill at Least 40

Suicide bombers targeted three Shiite mosques in Baghdad and one near Kirkuk, and other blasts went off elsewhere in the country, wreaking devastation. The guerrillas continue to attempt to provoke Sunni-Shiite civil war, but so far Shiites are continuing to refuse to fall for this gambit. Having come to power, they know that stability will help their cause.

Shiite Iraq

Al-Hayat: Muhammad Husain Adili, the Iranian ambassador to the United Kingdom, said Thursday that his government had leant substantial help to the United States in fostering a "calm atmosphere" for the holding of elections on Jan. 30 in Iraq. He revealed that Iran had contacted Sunni Arab groups with which it had influence and attempted to convince them that the elections were in Iraq's best interest. He offered Iran's help in future, as well, in helping establish security in the Middle East, where Iranian and US interests coincide.

As I predicted, the United Iraqi Alliance not only has 51 percent of seats on its own, but has already made a coalition [Arabic link] with some smaller parties. The three representatives of the Cadres and Chosen Party that is close to Muqtada al-Sadr will join the large coalition, as will the 3 deputies of the Turkmen National Front and a few independents. Only twelve lists were seated in parliament in the end, and most of them have joined the Shiite fundamentalist coalition. If the UIA can come to an agreement with the Kurds, it can easily form a government and then rule parliament.

In a startling development to which the Western press is paying little attention, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq has won the provincial governments in 8 of the 18 provinces in the country, including Baghdad. Over-all Shiite lists won 11 of the 18. Sadrists won Wasit and Maysam, and perhaps one other. Dawa doesn't appear to have run well at the provincial level. The Kurds won several of the northern provinces, including Ta'mim (where Kirkuk is) and Ninevah. The Iraqi Islamic Party won Anbar province, even though it withdrew from the elections. (It couldn't properly withdraw because the ballots had already been printed.) But only 2 percent of the residents of Anbar voted, so the IIP victory doesn't mean much.

The UIA is looking to given Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, former national security adviser, an important post. It will definitely sack interim Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan, who is vehmently anti-Iranian.

Tony Karon of Time profiles Ibrahim Jaafari, who will most likely be the new prime minister of Iraq. He says

' . . . Jaafari is a “Shiite modernist,” according to an AFP profile carried in the Tehran Times. He has signaled a moderate Islamist position on questions of religion and the state, advocating that Islam be constitutionally recognized as Iraq's official religion and a source (but not the sole source) of legislation, and that no laws will be passed that contradict Islamic values. At the same time, he favors protection of minority religious and ethnic groups, and insists that the first priority of a new government is not only to be as inclusive as possible of those who participated in the election, but also to draw in those who stayed away — almost half the eligible population (42 percent), including the vast majority of Sunnis . . . The U.S. is now faced with negotiating a relationship with a new government that reflects limited U.S. influence, and whose leaders enjoy historic ties with Iran.

The AFP profile notes,

' When talks were under way last February over the drafting the fundamental law which serves as Iraq's interim constitution, Jaafari was among those champions who favored Islam as the only source of legislation. But he has distanced himself from a hard line. "Secularism originally meant opposing God and religion. Now it is not the same. Islam has changed too. It is different from country to country," he said earlier this month. "It is true that some countries stop women from attending schools and others do not let women drive. For me that would be a problem . . ." Despite having been one of the first to organize demonstrations opposing the presence of U.S.-led troops on Iraqi soil, earlier this month he admitted their necessity -- for the time being. "Despite their presence here in Iraq, terrorism exists," Jaafari said. "Can you imagine what will happen if we ask them to leave? This could mean the beginning of a civil war." '

Phillip Kennicott of the Washington Post does one of the best Western press profiles of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani yet. It is a judicious exploration of Sistani's thought on matters of religious law and social mores.

' While American leaders emphasize that Sistani isn't like the clerics of Iran, others point out that the Shiite tradition leaves Sistani little wiggle room on fundamental topics, including women's rights. "It is important to keep in mind that there are certain issues in the Shiite community about which no ayatollah, however progressive, can afford to deviate in his deliberations and final ruling," Abdulaziz A. Sachedina writes in an e-mail from Iran. A professor of Islamic studies at the University of Virginia, Sachedina met with Sistani several times in the 1990s, and on one occasion Sistani criticized his writings and issued a ruling against Sachedina's public comments on matters of faith. Sachedina was undaunted and says he carries "no grudge" against Sistani. Nonetheless, Sachedina's inside view of Sistani and Sistani's organization lead him to consider the ayatollah more conservative than do other observers. Sistani's views on women "are restrictive and in his personal communication to me in 1998 he made it very clear that he abides by the age-old opinions regarding women's inequality with men, and that he regards their testimony, as extrapolated from the Qu'ran, half of a man's testimony in value," the scholar writes. '

The only thing I would add is that this profile of Sistani seems to me insufficiently appreciative of the ways in which he has incorporated notions of popular sovereignty and parliamentary elections as a means for the people to express their will into Shiite law.

Shiites Have Majority

The Iraqi Electoral Commission confirmed on Thursday the projection I reported here last Monday, that the United Iraqi Alliance or the Shiite religious parties have a 51 percent majority of seats in the new Iraqi parliament. They have 140 seats out of 275. The wire services have been confused about this matter all week. Some were reporting the 140 seat total but then saying it was 48 percent. ??? Others did not seem to know about the second-round process where the votes that went to small parties that did not get seats would be reapportioned to the parties that did win. This is called the reapportionment variation on the "Hare" method, and was apparently the suggestion of the United Nations official Carina Perelli. Some observers are convinced that this method makes room for a lot of mischief.

Ibrahim Jaafari of the Dawa Party seems almost certain to win the prime minister slot. In my view the persistent reports that Ahmad Chalabi is still in the running are baseless propaganda coming out of Chalabi's formidable but empty PR apparatus. I take it he wants an important cabinet post, and this is his way of staking claim to it.

Note that if there is a disagreement among the Shiite religious parties on who should be prime minister, they say they will take it to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who will resolve it. Sistani would certainly choose Jaafari, an old-time Dawa operative from Karbala close to the ayatollah.

Interestingly, Sistani would informally be playing a role here similar to that played by the monarch in the UK. Sistani as Elizabeth II. It certainly wasn't what Bush had been going for with this Iraq adventure.

Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder is reporting that Jaafari's aide, Jawad Talib, says,
' “Can Islam be applied now? No. We cannot do it now because the situation is not right for applying Islam,” Talib said. “But that does not mean we do not prefer an Islamic state.” '

Gilbert Achcar kindly shares his translation of a recent article in al-Hayat:

' The "High Commission" will proclaim the official final results of the Iraqi elections today

Al-Hayat 17 Feb 2005

Excerpt:

Al-Sadr Supports Al-Jaafari

Amer al-Husseini, a leader of al-Sadr's Current in Baghdad, told Al-Hayat that the Current "supports the designation of Ibrahim al-Jaafari to the post of Prime minister of the Iraqi government resulting from the elected National Assembly." He added that al-Jaafari's presence at the head of the new cabinet would be "a positive beginning for a better stage in Iraq." Al-Husseini revealed that contacts were being held between the Coalition [the Unified Iraqi Coalition, backed by al-Sistani and the winner of the majority of seats in the Assembly] and the leadership of al-Sadr's Current in al-Najaf. He did not exclude the participation of the Current in the new government.

Al-Hayat has also learned that the Bureau of the Highest Shia Authority Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and the leader of the Iraqi National Council Ahmad al-Chalabi try to normalize relations between "Al-Badr Organization" which is lead by the "Supreme Council" [of Islamic revolution in Iraq, al-Hakim's movement] and the leadership of "Al-Mahdi Army," the military wing of al-Sadr's Current, in light of the tensions that dominated the relation between the two groups during the bloody events at al-Najaf some months ago.

The New Army

Al-Hayat has also learned that a security plan, which was mentioned earlier for the case where the Coalition would lead the new government, foresees the integration of large numbers of "Al-Badr" and "Al-Mahdi Army," as well as the militias of Hizbullah and Al-Dawa, in the ranks of the new Iraqi army.

"Al-Badr Organization" published a communique denouncing the killing under torture of two of its members in one of the headquarters of Iraqi police in Baghdad. It demanded an immediate investigation of the event as well as measures to prevent such "crimes" to occur again.

In the meantime several forces opposed to the US occupation met in Um al-Qura Mosque on Tuesday and issued a joint statement renewing their demand for the withdrawal of multinational forces from Iraq, the abolition of the principle of sectarian distribution of power and the adoption of the principle of equal rights and duties. One of the participants, Abdul-Salam al-Kubaisi [prominent member of the Association of Muslim Scholars -- see my previous translation from the same journal], said that the statement "does not mean that the signatories accept to take part in the drafting of the permanent constitution, but sets patriotic conditions for starting a general process enabling a broader participation of Iraqi communities in the drafting of the constitution despite their reservations on the elected government."

Al-Kubaisi stressed that the elected Parliament should demonstrate its good intention toward those who boycotted the elections, and that the insistence of its members on the importance of the broad participation of political and religious forces in the constitutional process and in the government, notwithstanding their position on the occupation or the elections, is important for the new Iraq. '

[Am on the road and postings may be irregular for a couple of days]

Engelhardt and Hiro on Iraq's Fault Lines

Tom Engelhardt is a national treasure and always worth reading. Whenever I think that Russell Jacoby might have been right about the passing of the "last intellectuals," I think of Tom and conclude "not yet." This week he introduces veteran journalist Dilip Hiro's essay on the way that the recent Iraqi elections exacerbated ethnic fault lines.

Engelhardt:

' After all, one can wonder how much we really know about the nature of the carnage in Iraq given that the insurgents, according to Patrick Cockburn of the British Independent, now control to one degree or another all the major routes into or out of Baghdad, where most Western reporters are posted; kidnappings are again on the rise; and, as Roger Cohen of the New York Times wrote last Sunday, "Today, no Westerner with any vestige of sanity would contemplate making… trips [by vehicle out of Baghdad], even in the aftermath of an election that was a remarkable success." Rory McCarthy, Baghdad correspondent for the British Guardian, draws the necessary conclusion (no less applicable to our media), "Too often we have sat and listened to officials tell us what is happening in an Iraq that they themselves are barely able to visit." '

Then Dilip Hiro weighs in:

' Overall, the poll has exposed and sharpened the sectarian and ethnic fault lines in Iraqi society. At the same time, bolstered by a popular mandate, the new government seems set on a collision course with the American occupiers regarding the presence of foreign troops in Iraq. Each of the three major communities has come to nurture a different scenario for the post-Saddam era. Shorn of their long-held power and yet not reconciled to powerlessness, Sunni leaders are still in disarray, focusing merely on expelling the Americans from their country. For minority Kurds, ethnically and linguistically set apart from Arabs, post-Saddam Iraq holds the promise of a sovereign state of Kurdistan with the oil-rich city of Kirkuk as its capital. '

The whole piece should be contemplated by anyone concerned with the Middle East.

Jaafari: "Islam to be Source of Legislation"

Against the backdrop of political horse trading, the violence continued in Iraq on Tuesday. AFP reports:

' Two soldiers were killed and another wounded when a bomb exploded near the restive Sunni town of Dhuluiyah, north of Baghdad . . . Near the town of Balad, further north, the body of an executed soldier was pulled out of the Tigris river, a police source said . . . Five Iraqis, including a child and a soldier, were also wounded Tuesday in a blast in Abu Farraj, near . . . Tikrit, police said. In Baghdad, a policeman and a member of the civil aviation administration were shot dead late Monday, police said. Three other policemen were also wounded in a mortar attack in the capital. '

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that Adil Abdul Mahdi, the interim finance minister and representative of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, has withdrawn his name for consideration as prime minister, "for the sake of the unity of the alliance." SCIRI and the al-Dawa Party are the two leading parties in the United Iraqi Alliance, a coalition of 11 largely Shiite fundamentalist groups.

Al-Dawa campaigned vigorously for the presidency to go to Ibrahim Jaafari, but that so far largely ceremonial post seems likely to go instead to Jalal Talabani of the Kurdish Alliance. Since al-Dawa was denied the presidency, they really wanted the prime ministership. Abdul Mahdi's candidacy, moreover, may have been damaged by his close working relationship with the Americans and his advocacy of privatizing the petroleum industry. For most of the SCIRI and Dawa politicians, getting control of the state-owned petroleum industry would be an important part of their victory, and they would hardly want a PM who wanted to just give it away to some new economic mafia.

If this speculation turns out to be correct, Jaafari's victory over Abdul Mahdi may be the second largest Bush defeat after that of interim PM Allawi.

USA Today called Jaafari a "secularist," by which it apparently means that he wears Western business suits and is married to a physician. He is not a secularist. He is the leader of an old-time revolutionary Shiite party that has for 48 years worked toward an Islamic republic in Iraq. In an AP interview he said,

' “Islam should be the official religion of the country, and one of the main sources for legislation, along with other sources that do not harm Muslim sensibilities . . . '

Although he also says he is for women's rights and the right of a woman to be a professional and to hold high political office, many in his party want women's testimony to be worth half that of a man's and want girls to inherit half what their brothers do. Islamic law is a dynamic tradition and Jaafari is perfectly entitled to have his own, modernized, version of it. But it is not clear that he can carry his party along with him in this regard. In Iran after the 1979 revolution, Mehdi Bazargan was something of an Islamic modernist, but Khomeini and his hardliners quickly outmaneuvered him. Jaafari isn't even the leader of the entire Dawa Party, which is divided into factions. Abdul Karim al-Anizi, who is a somewhat shadowy figure, leads the Islamic Dawa Party, which was reputed to have as many seats in the UIA as Jaafari's branch.

Jaafari is on record opposing the establishment of a specifid timetable for a US military withdrawal from Iraq.

On the other hand, Jaafari wants to bring Muqtada al-Sadr into the new government.

What follows is in part from my own research, and in part from a sketch by an anonymous Iraqi scholar in ash-Sharq al-Awsat

Ibrahim Jaafari was born Ibrahim al-Ushayqir in the Shiite holy city of Karbala in 1947. He joined the Dawa Party in the 1960s as a young man. He went to Mosul for medical school and graduated in 1974, where he pursued Dawa politics. The 1968 Baath coup had made Dawa membership more dangerous. As the 70s went on, the danger increased. In 1979 Khomeini made his Islamic revolution in Iran, which terrified the secular Arab nationalist Baath in Iraq. Khomeini called on Iraq's Shiites to rise up and ovethrow Saddam. In 1980 Saddam made Dawa party membership a capital crime.

Jaafari fled to Iran in 1980. There he tried to keep the Dawa Party from becoming captive to Iranian political currents, as happened to some other expatriate Iraq parties in Tehran. He also worked with the umbrella group, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, serving on its executive committee. Kadhim al-Haeri and some other clerical leaders of the Dawa Party wanted to dissolve it into Khomeini's Hizbullah. Jaafari opposed this move.

In the early 1980s, Dawa spun off terrorist "al-Jihad al-Islami" groups in Lebanon and Kuwait, which engaged in terrorism against France and the United States. It is not clear how involved the central Dawa Party leadership was in these shadowy groups, or what Jaafari's stance was at that time.

In 1989 Jaafari left Tehran for London. Because of London's open political atmosphere, and the restrictions placed on the Dawa by Tehran, the UK increasingly became the leading site for expatriate Dawa Party political activity and thought. Jaafari emerged as among the more important leaders of the London branch. Whereas the Tehran branch of the Dawa declined to be involved with the Americans in overthrowing Saddam, the London branch of the party enthusiastically joined in. There were, however, several Dawa-derived groups operating in Iraq in the 1990s, whose members risked death every day, and there may be tensions between them and the expatriates.

Jaafari is being challenged by the corrupt expatriate financier and Iranian asset Ahmad Chalabi. One of his supporters alleged that he has the support of 80 of the 140 United Iraqi Alliance members of parliament. This allegation strikes me as completely ridiculous. Chalabi's INC was rumored only to have 10 seats in the alliance. Chalabi is supposedly the candidate of the more secular-leaning MPs within the alliance, but quite apart from ideology, who would trust Chalabi (who embezzled $300 million from his own bank according to a Jordanian court) with a country, especially an oil state?

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that Massoud Barzani, a major Kurdish leader, is insisting that the oil city of Kirkuk be given to Kurdistan. He also says that Iraq must be a secular state. Jaafari's UIA must negotiate with the Kurds to form a government, and it seems likely the negotiations will be difficult ones.

The Association of Muslim Scholars, a hardline Sunni group, held a meeting Tuesday at the Umm al-Qura Mosque in Baghdad, where they demanded a timetable for the withdrawal of US troops. They were joined by an ex-Baathist and a representative of the nationalist Shiite leader, Muqtada al-Sadr. The groups that boycotted or were excluded from the elections have said that such a timetable is a precondition for their participation in the political process.

Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi welcomed the outcome of the Iraqi elections, which Iran considers legitimate. Kharrazi was clearly pleased that the Shiites of Iraq, denied their rights as the majority for the past 83 years, had finally come to power. He also praised the democratic aspect of the elections. Kharrazi is close to mildly reformist President Muhammad Khatami, and the praise of Iraqi democracy is a dig at the clerical hardliners who hijacked the Iranian electoral process in February 2003 by excluding thousands of reformist candidates from running by wielding an ideological litmus test.

Hariri Murder Provokes Political Split

The family of slain former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri refused to allow members of the government of President Lahoud to attend his massive funeral in Beirut on Wednesday. The family was flanked by Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader, and Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir. In the meantime, angry Sunni Arab residents of Sidon came out to protest his assassination, directing their ire at the Syrian government.

That is, the Maronite, Druze and Sunni Muslim leadership has largely decided to blame President Lahoud and his Syrian backers for the assassination. In a sense, it does not any longer matter who precisely was behind the blast. The political opposition in Lebanon has made up its mind whom to blame. It is not that they are necessarily wrong. On any list of suspects in the killing of Hariri, the Syrians would have to rank high. They had means, motive and opportunity-- which does not, however, establish that they murdered Hariri.

The other angle, of al-Qaeda-like groups hitting out at Saudi-related targets (Hariri had Saudi citizenship), cannot in my view be dismissed. (If, as is now being reported, the blast was in part the work of a suicide bomber, that would rule out a mafia-type business dispute). Given the 250,000 tons of missing munitions in Iraq, there are lots of very high-powered explosives on the market in the Middle East. This proliferation of explosives may be among the major ways in which the Iraq war ends up destabilizing the Middle East, since the explosions are unlikely to remain only in Iraq. Already, some Iraq-related violence has spread to Saudi Arabia.

But the Lebanese opposition and most of the outside world have decided that Syria is guilty because it is guilty.

The US and Israel would like to see Syria withdraw its remaining troops from Lebanon. Especially the Maronite Christians (who are a kind of Catholic) largely want the Syrians out (they are probably now only about 20 percent of the population). Ironically, the Syrians came in to Lebanon with a US green light to stop the Palestinians and their allies from taking over Lebanon. At first, the Syrians actually protected the Maronites. But now that the Palestinians have long since been militarily defeated, the same groups and countries that were happy to see a Syrian intervention in Lebanon in 1976 are now the most ardent advocates of Syrian withdrawal.

The joining together of the Druze, Sunni Arabs (Hariri's group) and the Maronites in opposition to the government and in blaming it for Hariri's death, marks a new phase of Lebanese nationalism in modern history.

The big question, of course, is whether the crisis will draw in the United States and (less likely) Israel. Many in the Arab world are blaming Israel for the blast. While this possibility cannot be simply dismissed, since the Israeli Mossad has played dirty tricks in the past, it seems to me highly unlikely. But then, I personally doubt that Bashar al-Asad ordered the hit, either. The Neoconservatives in the Bush administration, like David Wurmser, have been trying to get up a US war against Syria for some time, and the death of Hariri may offer them an opening.

Jaafari Takes lead

Reuters is reporting that Ibrahim Jaafari is emerging as the frontrunner in the negotiations for prime minister.

Jaafari opposed the US military assault on Fallujah, telling UPI:

' I believe that it is necessary to deal politically with what is happening in Fallujah because it is the best solution to end military confrontation and avoid its dangerous consequences. If we fail in the first attempt, we should try a second and a third time until we achieve the aspired results based on our keenness to establish a new Iraq free of violence and which confronts violence with political solutions. '

Jaafari also slammed the interim Defense Minister, Hazem Shaalan, for trying to roil relations between Iraq and Iran by calling Iran Baghdad's number one enemy. Jaafari said,

' I personally look at Iran as part of the geographical entourage of Iraq and a friendly state which stood by Iraq's side in time of crisis: It harbored Iraqis when Saddam Hussein killed, displaced and harmed many of them. It is a state like all Iraq's other neighbors, which has common interests with us. I look forward to seeing Iraq's relations with Iran and all its other neighboring countries rise to the level of advanced countries. But in return, I expect all neighboring countries to refrain from interfering in our sovereignty like we do not interfere in theirs.

Some are trying to disturb such relations with Iran, although there is a consensus within the Iraqi interim government on the need to improve ties with Iran and all other neighboring countries and to set up a common strategy with them. In case of any interference, we should address that neighbor openly and start a dialogue instead of resorting to a media war. '

My suspicion is that Jaafari is not the free-marketeer that his rival, Adil Abdul Mahdi is. The Dawa has a tradition of thinking about "Islamic economics" that assume a certain amount of state interference in the economy.

Jaafari, given his policies, is probably closer to public opinion in Iraq than Abdul Mahdi, and in that sense, may have more chance of success. Some have complained, however, that he hasn't so far been a very decisive politician.

Guerrillas Kill US Soldier

The CBC reports that

" Roadside bombs killed a U.S. soldier and three Iraqi National Guard troops Monday and officials said insurgents blew up an oil pipeline near Kirkuk and killed two senior police officers in Baghdad. Political leaders, meanwhile, sized up their positions in a new government. "

[Was swamped Monday by television and readio interviews, and so fell behind. Will blog more later Tuesday.]

Hariri Killed in Huge Car Bombing in Beirut

Echoes of the bad old days reverberated through Beirut Monday when a powerful car bomb was detonated in front of the St. Georges Hotel, killing former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri and several others, and wounding dozens. Surrounding buildings took significant damage.

A shadowy and previously unknown group called "Aid and Jihad in the Lands of Syria" claimed responsibility in a videotape that I saw on al-Jazeerah. The spokesman reading the message was dressed as a Muslim fundamentalist big posters were behind him with Muslim fundamentalist slogans.

If this group really was behind the assassination, it appears to be because of Hariri's Saudi Arabian context. Hariri had lived many years in Saudi Arabia, and was a big contractor in private business. He retained both the Saudi citizenship and the contracting business while prime minister in the 1990s and again 2000-2003. This assassination may be a spill-over into the Levant of the recent al-Qaeda-linked terrorism in Saudi Arabia

On the other hand, al-Hariri resigned as prime minister last fall in a bitter dispute with President Emile Lahoud. Both had been clients of Syria, but Syria wanted to keep Lahoud on for an extra three years beyond what was allowed by the Lebanese constitution, and al-Hariri, like many Lebanese, strongly objected to tinkering with the constitution by an outside power. Personally, I find the likelihood of the Saudi connection generating al-Qaeda-type violence against him somewhat more plausible than that it came out of local politics, since local politics had been fairly civil in Lebanon.

It is also possible, since al-Hariri was worth $4 billion and had all sorts of shady deals going on even when he was PM, that this assassination had an economic/ mafia-type background that we are not aware of.

Shiites Take Absolute Majority in Parliament
Iran Scores Victory in the Iraqi Elections

Lebanese Broadcasting Co.'s satellite television news is reporting that the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), comprising Shiite religious parties, has won an absolute majority (141 seats) after adjustments were made in accordance with electoral procedure. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the list leader, expressed his pleasure at this 51 percent outcome for his coalition. The UIA still needs a 2/3s majority, and therefore a coalition partner or partners, to form a government (which involves electing a president and two vice-presidents, who will appoint a prime minister). But it can now win votes on procedure and legislation without needing any other partner.

Robin Wright of the Washington Post points out that an electoral victory of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Dawa Party, both of them close to Tehran, is not what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Neoconservatives had been going for with this Iraq adventure. The United Iraqi Alliance is led by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, a Shiite cleric who lived over 2 decades in exile in Iran. I point out that the likely coalition partner of the United Iraqi Alliance is the Kurdistan Alliance, led by Jalal Talabani, who is himself very close to Tehran. So there are likely to be warm Baghdad-Tehran relations.

Likewise, it is worth pointing out that the new Shiite government in Baghdad will support the Lebanese Shiites, including Hezbollah.

One of the Neoconservatives' goals had been the installation of a pro-Israel government in Baghdad. But at Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution rallies and Friday prayers services, crowds have been known to chant "Death to Israel!"

Stanley Reed of Business Week points out that a UIA-dominated Iraq is likely to move toward implementation of Islamic law, even if not toward clerical rule. One question is whether the Dawa Party tradition of thinking about economics, exemplified in the Our Economy of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr (d. 1980), will be implemented versus Washington's laissez-faire dreams. In any case, most movements of political Islam have been interested in implementing Islamic law, not in clerical rule. That was the program in the Sudan, for instance, and is what the United Action Council (mainly the Jama'at-i Islami) is going for in the Northwest Frontier Province in Pakistan. This direction seems to be the one Iraq is now taking.

The chorus from people like Senator Frisk that the failure of the United Iraqi Alliance (the Shiite religious parties) to gain 51 percent would require them to compromise and may benefit Iyad Allawi was nonsensical even on Sunday, and is now shown to be entirely untrue.

The UIA has in the end received 51 percent of seats in parliament, because of the electoral method being used, which added percentages from parties that did not quite pass the threshold for being seated to the parties that did, in a sort of second round. Second, the UIA may still be able to pick up some allies from small Shiite parties that ran separately but have similar goals (they are more theocratic than the UIA)-- which suggests that they may actually have 52 or 53 percent.

Allawi is irrelevant, since it is easier and more of a sure thing for the UIA to ally with the Kurds, who bring another 24 percent (more, now) into the coalition. They do not need to throw Allawi a bone to get the Kurds, they need to throw the Kurds some bones.

So Allawi is out of the running, at least if parliamentary politics is the game being played here. Were the Kurds to prove too intransigent, I suppose the UIA could try to cobble together 66 percent with Allawi and several tiny parties like the Communists. But they would still be unlikely to give away the prime minister post.

The election system is one with which I was unfamiliar, and helpful readers have been sending me resources that I will share here. The UN explains that

How many votes are needed to win a seat?

* The number of votes required to gain a seat (the natural threshold) will be determined by the number of total valid votes cast . A maximum estimation of 14,270,000 valid votes would create an initial threshold of 51,891 votes to gain a seat; 10 million votes would require 36,363 votes; and, 5 million votes would require 18,181 votes.
* The chosen electoral formula (the Hare formula) proceeds after the natural threshold calculation based on the “largest remainder”. In effect, this means that subsequent seats (for lists that pass the natural threshold) cost fewer votes.

Reader Dan Keshet recommends the following sites for understanding the system:

* Hare Quota

* Remainder Method

I understand that the threshold here was about 33,000 votes in the first round.

Andrew Arato writes, "sec 3 art 6 of the electoral law defines a natural Threshold for parties to get seats, which is the total vote divided by 275. This means that not only small parties lose their votes, but the remainders of larger parties too are thrown into a pot that is then redivided according to the adjusted original percentages. Some of this is not in the original law, but probably in subsequent regulations . . "

AMS on its Role in Forcing Elections

Thanks to Gilbert Ashcar for kindly sharing and permitting the reprinting of his translation of this recent article from al-Hayat, which is revealing of attitudes in the Sunni fundamentalist group, the Association of Muslim Scholars.

Al-Kubaisi to “Al-Hayat”: The Resistance Forced the Americans to Form the Governing Council and Organize the Elections


Al-Hayat, 9 February 2005


Excerpts:

[Speaking of Abdul-Salam al-Kubaisi, the most prominent member of the Council of Muslim Ulamas, believed to be the most popular institution among Iraqi Arab Sunnis and a key advocate of boycott in the January 30 elections]

He said it was very unlikely that the members of the Shia-majority “Coalition” [i.e. the “Unified Iraqi Coalition,” the most popular Shia slate in the elections and the likely winner of a majority of seats] exert power in a sectarian manner “if they secure an overwhelming majority in the elected National Assembly.” He also said: “At least, the Al-Dawa party rejects any exercice of power on a sectarian basis and is committed to the patriotic basics.”

He added: “If the Shias secure a majority of seats in the Parliament, they must consider the sacrifices of Arab Sunnis against the Americans,” pointing to the fact that “the resistance was behind the pressure on the Americans to create a Governing Council, then an Iraqi Government, and finally to organize the elections.” Kubaisi asserted that if it were not for the Sunni resistance, US position would have been different in dealing with all issues and forces.

He said that Council of Muslim Ulamas was engaged in intensive contacts and meetings with Shia forces opposed to the occupation, first among them Muqtada al-Sadr’s current, Jawad al-Khalisi’s group, and the current of Ahmad al-Baghdadi and Mahmud al-Huseini in Najaf. He said that the aim of those meetings is “to constitute a political camp in favor of a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign troops from Iraq in the coming period,” adding: “If the final result of the last elections confirms the victory of the ‘Coalition,’ the Council shares some common views with parts of this slate.”

[About the project of organizing a “conference for reconciliation” in Iraq:]

He made the point that the Council “puts as conditions setting a timetable for the withdrawal of the multinational forces, recognizing the resistance against the occupier, making a distinction between the resistance and terrorism, ceasing all pursuits against opponents and releasing all detainees arrested on suspicion.” Al-Kubaisi considered that “to convene a conference for national reconciliation without a promise of withdrawal of the multinational forces would serve the American project,” and he said that the continuous meetings with al-Sadr’s current “to define the needs of the present period did not yet lead to precise mechanisms to translate the orientations of both parties.”

On his part, sheikh Abdul-Hadi al-Darraji, the spokesperson for al-Sadr’s current, told “Al-Hayat” that “the Current welcomes reconciliation, even though it would have preferred that it took place before the elections,” adding that “the call for a reconciliation conference should be in the hands of the political and religious forces that opposed the political process and boycotted the elections, in order to open the doors for the participation of all opposition forces.”

He said that “the Current linked the call for a reconciliation conference with the setting of a timetable for the withdrawal.” He mentioned that the Current refused to take part in the elections but did not oblige its supporters to boycott them, abiding by the call of the supreme religious authorities in Najaf, and out of its belief that the elections were the peaceful means available to kick out the occupier. He added that the insistence of some Iraqi officials in recent statements that the call for the withdrawal of the multinational forces from Iraq, in this period, is very dangerous due to the weakness of security apparatuses, does not serve Iraq. He asserted that “al-Sadr’s current is ready, if asked, to protect all governmental institutions and deter terrorism coming from abroad.”



Sadr reaches out to Iraqi Sunni clerics for coordination: "BAGHDAD, Feb. 7 (Xinhuanet) -- Iraq's firebrand Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr, who had called for a nationwide rebellion against US-led forces last year, reached out to Sunni clerics for coordination, spokesman for a Sunni association said on Monday . . ."

Committee to Protect Bloggers

The Committee to Protect Bloggers is proposing a special campaign for imprisoned Iranian bloggers on Tuesday, February 22. This is a great idea.

Platform of the Al-Hakims

The leader of the United Iraqi Alliance, which is likely to have a majority of seats in parliament when the smoke clears, is Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. He is the successor and younger brother of Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim (assassinated August 29, 2003). This is the program announced by the latter on his return to Iraq from Tehran in May, 2003.

Ayatollah Hakim returns from exile to put Islam back into Iraq

(AFP BASRA, Iraq, May 10, 2003) Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer al-Hakim, the head of the Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SAIRI) [SCIRI], says he wants to put Islam and Sharia law at the top of the political agenda of the new Iraq.

One of Iraq's most prominent Shiite clerics, Hakim ended more than two decades of exile in Iran Saturday after a farewell speech during weekly prayers in Tehran telling the faithful that Iraq's future belongs to Islam.

"There is no time now for me to talk to you in detail about the future of Iraq, but I tell you the future of Iraq belongs to Islam," he said, committing himself to the struggle.

"Independence is our greatest priority ... Iraqis must be able to decide on their future, something they have not been able to do up to now," he said . . . Hakim called in a recent statement for "the rules of Sharia (Islamic laws) to be put in place and integrated into the social and political life of a future Iraq."

In an interview with Iranian state radio broacast Saturday, he said "all of the people of Iraq" can realize their aspirations for "reconstructing and creating a developed and independent country under the banner of Islam."

. . . When the US-led invasion began, Hakim declared the war to be "against the interests of the Iraqi people" and called on Iraqis to remain neutral.

He even threatened armed resistance against the coalition, if it evolved into a force of occupation and stayed too long. Hakim also faces a delicate task handling the Badr Brigade, the several thousand-strong armed wing of SAIRI [SCIRI]. The disciplined and well-equipped militia was recently accused by US Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld of being "trained, equipped and commanded by the Revolutionary Guards" -- Iran's ideological army.

Distribution of Seats in Iraqi Parliament

Al-Hayat [Arabic link] has printed the number of seats won by all the small parties in the Iraqi elections. The total number of seats is 275. What it shows is that the religious Shiites easily have a majority if they pull in a few small parties. I count 6 obvious Shiite seats that could be picked up by the UIA for most votes important to religious Shiites. That would give them 50.5 percent of the vote. They'd just need one or two other independents to win most votes.

AFP is convinced that the UIA may all by itself be given 140 seats, not 133, because of a "complex counting system" to be employed in seating delegates. Andrew Arato writes, "This would be so, because wasted votes for very small parties . . . would have to redivided. Say it is 8%. 48% of that is 4%. Even of 5 half is 2.5% that would put them over." If this procedure yields an extra percentage to the UIA, and if we add in the religious Shiite tiny parties, the UIA could well have a comfortable majority in the parliament.

United Iraqi Alliance (Shiite): 133 seats
Kurdish Alliance: 71
Iraqiya (Allawi = Secular Shiites) 38
Iraqiyyun (al-Yawir= Sunni Arabs) 5
Turkmen Front of Iraq 3
Cadres and the Chosen (Sadrist Shiites) 3
People's Union (Communist) 3
Kurdish Islamic Coalition 2
Organization of Islamic Action (Shiite) 2
Democratic National Alliance (Abd Faisal Ahmad) 1
National Mesopotamian List (Christian) 1
Welfare and Liberation Bloc (Mash'an al-Juburi, Sunni) 1
Caucus for Iraqi National Unity (Nahru Muhammad Abdul Karim, Sunni) 1
Independent Democrats (Adnan Pachachi, Sunni) 1
Iraqi Islamic Party (Muhsin Abdul Hamid, Sunni; had withdrawn) 1
Islamic Dawa Movement (splinter of Dawa, headed by Adil Majid) 1
Iraqi National Caucus (Husain Muhammad Abdullah) 1
Constitutional Monarchy Movement (Sharif Ali b. Husain) 1
Royal Iraqi Hashimi Caucus (Sharif Ma'mul al-Naysan) 1
National Democratic Alliance (Malik Duhan al-Hasan) 1
Democratic Iraqi Caucus (Ahmad Jabir Abdullah) 1
National Front for Iraqi Unity 1

Shiites, Kurds, win Big
Bush Loses Election in Iraq

Some key election results are now being reported for Iraq. The statistics available point to about 8.5 million voters out of an eligible 14 million. The electoral commission said that the turnout was 58 percent.

The Sunni Arabs (20 percent of the population and the former ruling group) mostly did not come out to vote. Only 2 percent voted in Anbar province, where Fallujah and Ramadi are. (Remember Condoleeza Rice talking about people voting in Fallujah? That was propaganda pure and simple.) In Ninevah province about 17 percent of the population voted, but a lot of those were Kurds and Turkmen. The list of old-time Sunni Arab nationalist Adnan Pachachi, the Independent Democrats, only received 17,000 votes, not enough to seat him or any of his other party members in parliament. Interim President Ghazi al-Yawir's Iraqiyun list got less than 2 percent and probably will only get 4 or 5 seats in the 275-member parliament. Al-Yawir is from the largely Sunni Shamar tribe.

The Association of Muslim Scholars (Sunni fundamentalists) disputed the fairness of the election and the accuracy of the returns. Nearly half of the electorate did not vote (AMS said a majority but this is wrong), and security was so bad that candidates had to remain anonymous, casting doubt on the democratic nature of the process.

The three big winners were the United Iraqi Alliance (about 48 percent), the Kurdistan alliance (26 percent) and the Iraqiyah list of interim prime minister Iyad Allawi (about 13 percent). These three account for 88 percent of the seats in parliament, or so. The other eleven percent go to tiny parties like that of al-Yawir, the Sadrists (Cadres and Chosen List) and the Communists.

Although Allawi's list is among the three with more than two digits, in fact he lost big. Allawi had all the advantages of incumbency. He dominated the air waves in December and January. He went to Baghdad University and made all sorts of promises to the students there and it was dutifully broadcast, and there were lots of photo ops like that. Allawi's list also spent an enormous amount on campaign advertising. The source of these millions is unknown, since Paul Bremer passed a law making disclosure of campaign contributions unnecessary (the Bush administration's further little contribution to "democracy" in the Middle East). Despite these enormous advantages, clear American backing, money, etc., Allawi's list came in a poor third and clearly lacks any substantial grass roots in most of the country. It seems to have been the refuge of what is left of the secular middle class.

Allawi's defeat (he will not be prime minister in the new government) is a huge defeat for the Bush administration, though it will not be reported that way in the corporate media.

The system is set up so that a two-thirds majority is necessary to form a government. The United Iraqi Alliance needs to pick up 18 percent or about 50 seats to go forward. The easy place to get those 50 seats is from the Kurds, who have 70 or so. This step will require that substantial concessions be made to the Kurds, who want the presidency, a redrawing of the provincial map of Iraq to creat a united Kurdistan province, and substantial provincial autonomy or "states rights."

The US now hopes to use the Kurds to blunt the push for Islamic law from the UIA. This is the significance of Allawi's visit to Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and his support for Talabani as president. The Kurds and Allawi together control nearly 40 percent of seats in parliament. They can be outvoted on many issues, but they can't be ignored. Allawi is trying to ensure that Talabani's position is unassailable and to pressure the UIA to give up its own candidates for president, so as to block any rush to Islamic law.

Ironically, Talabani is extremely close to Tehran and has been a client of the Iranians for many years. His alliance with the UIA will ensure warm relations between the new Iraq and Iran. The US, in pushing for Talabani for Iraqi domestic reasons, is creating a Baghdad-Tehran axis in regional politics.

Although a two-thirds majority is required to form the government, it is not clear that it is required for anything else in ordinary parliamentary life. Most measures can probably be passed with 51 percent. The only other situations for which the interim constitution specifies that more than a majority is needed are in over-ruling a presidential veto and in removing and replacing the president. This stipulation would mean that on some laws and other measures, the United Iraqi Alliance could have its way in parliament by just picking up 3 percent of the seats via an alliance with smaller parties such as the Sadrists. So although they need the Kurds at first, they may not always need them subsequently.

The United Iraqi Alliance will press hard for implementation of Islamic law. Although this move will be a hard sell in the national parliament because the Kurds don't want it, one possible compromise would be to let individual provinces make the decision, as in Nigeria.

The Boston Globe cannily points out that the new assembly is open to criticism by Iraqi nationalist groups such as the Sadrists. It writes of Sadr spokesman Ali Sumaysim:

' Smesim also has started taking broadsides at SCIRI and the Da'wa Party, the two mainstream Shi'ite parties that form the cornerstone of the United Iraqi Alliance. ''SCIRI has one foot in Iran and one in America. The Da'wa has one foot in Iran and one in Britain," he said. ''Both are like old men creeping toward their graves." There are also leading clerics not affiliated with Sadr, such as Ayatollah Mohammed Yacoubi, who are pressuring Shi'ite parties to take a more religious position. Yacoubi's top aide, Sheik Abbas Khalifa, explained at the cleric's headquarters in Najaf that nothing in the new constitution should contradict Islamic law -- including inheritance laws, which he said must grant sons twice as much as daughters. ''We don't want to see equality between men and women," he said. ''This is from the Koran, from God." '

The Sadrists are important in several provincial governments and will represent a small swing vote in parliament. To the extent that they vote with the UIA, they could well help give the latter a majority in parliament on some votes. But their center of power remains the festering slums of the south, representing a well of bio-power that could yet be deployed for extra-parliamentary political purposes if the new government continues to disappoint Iraqi expectations on security and economic issues. The Sadrists are divided on how closely to support the son of the founder of their movement, Muqtada al-Sadr, but they are united in wanting an Islamic government.

I just saw Ahmad Chalabi on CNN declaring his candidacy for prime minister. It is hard for me to see how he could get the post, since the big winners in the election are the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Dawa Party, and they would have prior claim on the post. Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress only has ten seats in parliament. The only way Chalabi could become PM is if all the members of parliament were heavily bribed (by Iran?). Even then, it is hard to see how SCIRI and Dawa could be mollified over the loss of a post they believe to be rightfully theirs. Chalabi is an operator, and may get a cabinet post or a committee chairmanship. I doubt he will get more than that.

Meanwhile, as anonymous MPs begin to make deals about a country they don't control, Rory McCarthy reminds us what the real Iraq is like as he prepares to leave Baghdad after two years. The humiliation of foreign military occupation and the reality of massive guerrilla violence seem to him foremost in the minds of most Iraqis.

SCIRI Sweeps Provincial Elections in South

There is a rumor going around that interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has formed a parliamentary coaltion with the Kurds in a bid to create a government, which requires a 2/3s majority in parliament.

If the United Iraqi Alliance gets more than about 36 percent of the seats, however, no government can be formed without this Shiite list being included. You need 66 percent. If UIA has 50 percent of seats, e.g., there is no way they could be sidelined while someone else formed a government. Allawi's list may get as few as 12 or thirteen percent, and even the Kurds can't hope for more than 23 percent or so of the vote.

Guerrillas detonated a car bomb Sunday at a checkpoint between Hilla and the holy city of Karbala. The annual commemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Husain, the Prophet's grandson," will begin soon. Ashura is a major event on the religious calendar for Shiites, and many pilgrims will come south to Karbala for it.

The Financial Times reports that the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq had pulled ahead of its rivals in the provincial elections:

' The People of Baghdad list, Sciri's slate for the capital's municipal council, took 694,800 votes out of the 1,772,372 ballots cast in the provincial race, almost three times as many as its nearest rival, Baghdad Peace, associated with its main Shia rival, the Dawa party, and several other Islamist groups. Sciri affiliates also won the largest number of votes in at least five out of eight other Shia majority governorates - underlining that their success was not just a Baghdad phenomenon. Other Islamist groups affiliated with various factions of the Dawa party, the Virtue party, and the followers of the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr were also making strong showings. '

Lists that support the puritanical al-Sadr tendency appear to have won in Wasit and Maysan provinces, though in Maysan the Sadrists were split among two parties, so only if they vote as a bloc in the 40-member council will they have a joint 21 seat majority there. Their relationship to Muqtada al-Sadr himself is controversital.

31 Killed Friday, 17 early Saturday

On Saturday, guerrillas set off a car bomb in the mixed Sunni-Shiite city of Musayyib. The bomb killed 17 and wounded 16, including 3 policemen.


The explosion at the Shiite mosque was at Balad Ruz, northeast of Baghdad. The bomb was in a vegetable truck. In East Baghdad, guerrillas opened fire at a bakery. Altoghether the two incidents killed about 23 persons.

Guerrillas blew up car bombs or engaged in shootouts in Salahuddin province (where they injured three US soldiers), "west of Baghdad", where they killed a US solder, and in Talafar, Mosul and Husaybah along the Syrian border.

Over 50 Dead in Iraq Carnage as Rumsfeld Visits

Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post reports carnage in Iraq on Thursday. A huge car bomb ripped through Liberation Square in Baghdad, killing four. A US convoy had just passed through.

Guerrillas at Salman Pak attacked a police station, killing between 6 and 14 Iraqi policemen and wounding over 20. At one point fighting was so heavy that reinforcements could not get to the area and bodies were left in the road. In the aftermath, 20 cars were burning. Salman Pak has been a constant area of guerrilla action, especially against Shiites moving between Baghdad and the shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala to its south.

The bodies of 20 missing truck drivers were discovered dumped in the road, Thursday.

Mariam Fam of AP reports in addition several other incidents:

Guerrillas in Baquba attacked a police patrol, sparking a gun battle that leve a civilian dead and two police officers wounded. In a separate incident, guerrillas killed a police lieutenant in the same city.

In Ramadi, the bodies of 5 National Guardsmen still uniform were discovered on Thursday, victims of the guerrillas. North of Ramadi US forces killed two guerrillas.

In the Rahmaniyah district of Baghdad, an explosion went off near a Shiite mosque. Casualties were reported. Guerrillas shot a hospital receptionist to death in Baghdad, as well.

In Kirkuk, guerrillas set off a bomb just after a US convoy passed by, killing one Iraqi.

In Mosul, a bullet-riddled body was discovered.

Early returns from the recent election show that the Kurds have won a clear majority in Tamim Province, the capital of which is Kirkuk. This victory positions them to make a strong claim that the city should be joined to the Kurdistan province for which Kurds are pressing.

Forbes explains:

The Kurdish position, which also includes a demand that Iraq must be a secular state, ran into opposition from parties associated with the Shia religious establishment. Objections concerned the levels of autonomy demanded by the Kurds; whether Iraq should be federal or unitary in structure; the concession of the Kurdish veto; and the role of Islam in the state. There is also perennial concern about the status of the city of Kirkuk. Keenly aware that control of the oil city would give the Kurds the wherewithal to secede from the state, the Shia (and Sunni Arab) parties have continued to oppose the attempts of the Kurds to include Kirkuk within their region's boundary. This opposition is particularly strong since a considerable proportion of the Arab population settled in Kirkuk during Saddam Hussein's Arabization policy were Shia, and the other ethnic group present in numbers in the city--the Turkmen--is also, predominantly, Shia.

The disposition of Kirkuk, and of the petroleum wells around the city, is among the more difficult decisions faced by the new parliament once it is seated.

Masoud Barzani of the Kurdistan Democratic Party warned Thursday against any one party dominating parliament, and implicitly urged the religious Shiite parties that hold half the seats in parliament not to veer away from what he called "the [national] consensus." The Shiites will want to implement Islamic law, whereas the Kurds are committed to civil law.

In other news, Iranian president Muhammad Khatami threatened that Iran would turn into "a scorching hell" to fight off any intervention by Americans. Khatami began in 1997 by being a liberal who called for a "diaologue of civilizations". Many observers were taken aback by the vehemence of the moderate's language. The Bush administration may well be driving the reformers into the arms of the hardliners.

Post-Election Violence and Maneuvering

AP reports that

' An American soldier was killed Wednesday and another wounded in an ambush north of the capital, the U.S. military said . . . Gunmen ambushed a convoy of Kurdish party officials in Baghdad, killing one and wounding four. And in the southern city of Basra, gunmen killed an Iraqi journalist working for a U.S.-funded TV station and his 3-year-old son as they left their home. On Thursday, a car bomb exploded in central Baghdad, killing at least four people, police and witnesses said. '

A roadside bomb in Samarra killed four policemen.

Az-Zaman: Abdul Husain al-Basri, the al-Hurra correspondent, actually wore a lot of hats. He was a member of the Dawa Party and a member of the Basra local council and its public relations officer, as well as being on the editorial board of Basra newspaper. A group called the Brigades of Hasan al-Basri claimed to have carried out the assassination on the grounds of al-Basri's alleged Iran connection (i.e. the assassins appear to be Sunni Baathists in the south). Hasan al-Basri was one of the earliest Sufis and was a Sunni figure.

Al-Zaman says that Ghazi Ali Ismail, the manager of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad was also assassinated, Wednesday evening. A high Interior Minister official was kidnapped, and an official in the Ministry of Housing was assassinated.

It makes you wonder what the point of electing a new government was if the Americans can't keep alive the officials of the old one.

The same AP article reports that the Iraqi electoral commission has announced a recount of thousands of ballots to clear up discrepancies and has disqualified larger numbers of ballots for procedural irregularities (not using official ballot boxes, appearance of stuffed ballots, etc.) The recount will delay the announcement of the election results, but it seems pretty clear that the new parliament will have only two really big parties, the religious Shiites and the Kurds.

A highly placed US official in Baghdad told the Chicago Tribune's Liz Sly that he thought the guerrilla war would go on for many years. As regular readers know, I concur. The old Sunni Arab power elite, mainly Baathists or the officer class, has not reconciled itself to the political ascendancy of the Shiites and Kurds. They still think they can destabilize the country and take back over. I would compare them to the Phalangists, the fascist Maronite Christians in Lebanon, who fought tooth and nail 1975-1989 against recognizing that Christians were no longer a dominant majority in Lebanon. Eventually they had to accept a 50/50 split of seats in parliament (which is generous to the Christians, given that Muslims are now a clear majority). That the Sunni Arab elite might be quicker studies than the Phalangists is possible but a little unlikely.

Likewise, the guerrillas in Iraq have many advantages. They were the managerial class and the officer class, so they have a great deal of organizational know-how. They clearly still have some of the loot the Baathists stole from the Iraqi people, and they know where the missing 250,000 tons of munitions are. If either ran out, there are plenty of Gulf millionnaires who would surreptitiously support a Sunni insurgency against American domination in Iraq. Money is fungible and I don't think their support could be effectively interfered with (do you know how many nouveau riche millionnaires there are in the Gulf?)

Maneuvering is already beginning in the coming struggle between the Kurdish leadership and the Shiite leadership in the new parliament over the issue of religious law. The Shiite parties that have come to power desperately want it. The Kurds don't. They will have to compromise with one another if they are jointly to form a government. One solution might be federalism. In the US, the Federal government does not marry people. So Iraqis could let personal status law be a provincial matter, and if the southern Shiites want it they could implement it, whereas if the Kurds in the north don't, they don't have to.

The Lebanese Hizbullah is denying that 18 of its members were arrested on charges of terrorism in Iraq. The arrests had been announced by the fanatically anti-Iran interim minister of defense in Iraq, Hazem Shaalan.

Some 30 Killed in Iraq Violence

[Updated early Weds. Morning]

A guerrilla strapped on a bomb belt and blew up a police recruiting station in west Baghdad Tuesday, killing at least 21 persons [a late report in al-Hayat put the death toll at 30].

In a separate incident, 3 policemen were killed in a firefight in the dangerous Baghdad district of Ghazaliyah.

Guerrillas attacked the head of the Nation Party, and a candidate in the recent elections, Mithal Alusi and his family. They sprayed their car with machine gun fire, killing Alusi's two sons. He escaped physical harm. This incident is important because, among other things, it points to a looming danger for elected parliamentarians. They can't remain anonymous while serving in parliament, and the guerrillas will target all 275 for assassination.

Ex-Baathist Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan announced Tuesday that 18 members of the Lebanese Hizbullah had been arrested in Iraq on charges of terrorism. He said Iraq's biggest problem was with Iranian infiltrators but that the Syrian issue could be handled through negotiation. I don't know who exactly Shaalan represents, but I have concluded the man is a mole for someone. Nothing he says makes sense or tracks with reality. He is always shooting his mouth off and then being repudiated by his supposed boss, Iyad Allawi, but Allawi doesn't fire him. The terrorism in Iraq is being carried out by Baathists with a very small number of foreign fighters from the Salafi trend in Sunni Islam. The Lebanese Hizbullah is fanatic Shiites, and they are not allied with Baathists and Salafis, I guarantee you. There isn't any Shiite terrorism right now. So what exactly were the operations that Hizbullah planned to carry out? In the past, Iranian pilgrims and other innocents have been caught up in dragoons, and most likely these were just Lebanese Shiite pilgrims. Hizbullah is disciplined enough not to step on Sistani's toes in this way. Shaalan should enjoy his grandstanding and Iran-bashing while he can-- I'd be very surprised if he is still in office a month from now.

The US military is estimating the number of guerrilla fighters in Iraq at 13,000 to 17,000. It admits that most of these are Baathists.

I don't think this way of categorizing the resistance is useful. It seems obvious to me that the number of guerrillas fluctuates a great deal. There wasn't so much going on in Mosul before the disastrous Fallujah campaign, then the city experienced very significant guerrilla activity. I suspect that ex-Baath soldiers who had been fence-sitters joined up because of Fallujah and agreed to carry out operations on a weekend or at night, then went back to being unmarked civilians.

An earlier Iraqi estimate put the number at 40,000 fighters and 200,000 supporters. I personally suspect that estimate is closer to the truth. Except that I think the difference between a fighter and a supporter is fluid. Iraq has large numbers of battle-hardened veterans from the 8 years of the Iran-Iraq War and from the Gulf War. The Baath remnants can pick them back up when the Americans anger them and put them to work in guerrilla operations. The Baath remnants also know where the 250,000 tons of missing munitions are, and can supply these to downstream cells.

So I fear I think the US military is just being highly optimistic with these figures. The evidence from the recent Zogby poll is that 52 percent of Sunni Arabs say that attacking US personnel and facilities is justified. I'd say that comes to over 2.5 million supporters, and those are the ones who will openly admit it to a pollster.

Al-HayatAdnan Pachachi called Tuesday for a conference of national reconciliation, a call supported by radical young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Pachachi said he would reject any article in the permanent constitution to be crafted by the new parliament that injured the rights of Sunnis. He said he supported a separation of religion and state. The problem for Pachachi is that he has no leverage. His party won't have many seats in parliament, and therefore he can be ignored. One might argue that the Sunni Arab guerrilla war is an incentive to compromise with him. But they are trying to kill Pachachi, so I'm not sure dealing with him is a really great incentive.

The same newspaper reports that Abdul Salam al-Kubaisi, a prominent leader of the Association of Muslim Scholars, claimed on Tuesday that the Americans would never have agreed to one-person, one-vote elections so soon if it had not been for the pressure put on the US by the Sunni Arabs. He thus takes credit for the fact that Iraqi is holding elections at all. That allegation strikes me as unlikely.

He also said that anti-America forces were talking behind the scenes, and that he is in touch with the Sadr Movement, e.g.

Playing with Human Lives

Goldberg's descent into pathetic lack of humanity has been a pitiful thing to watch. I am so sorry to bother readers here with this one last posting on the whole Goldberg fiasco. And, note, that when pressed he was unable to name any books actually about modern Iraqi history that he has read (Republic of Fear is a dated political polemic, the others are not about Iraq). I was right.

But the ignorance was already apparent. The really sad thing is this paragraph:

' Anyway, I do think my judgment is superior to his when it comes to the big picture. So, I have an idea: Since he doesn't want to debate anything except his own brilliance, let's make a bet. I predict that Iraq won't have a civil war, that it will have a viable constitution, and that a majority of Iraqis and Americans will, in two years time, agree that the war was worth it. I'll bet $1,000 (which I can hardly spare right now). This way neither of us can hide behind clever word play or CV reading. If there's another reasonable wager Cole wants to offer which would measure our judgment, I'm all ears. Money where your mouth is, doc. One caveat: Because I don't think it's right to bet on such serious matters for personal gain, if I win, I'll donate the money to the USO. He can give it to the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade or whatever his favorite charity is. '

I cannot tell you how this paragraph hit me in the gut. I was nearly immobilized by disgust and grief. This man really does see Iraqis as playthings. He is proposing a wager on the backs of Iraqis. Millions of Iraqis are going through winter with insufficient heating oil. They are jobless. The innocent 250,000 Fallujans are homeless. Imagine what $1000 means to them. And here we have an prominent American media star, a man who sets opinion on the Sunday afternoon talking heads shows, betting on them as though they are greyhounds in a race. They are not human beings to him, but political playthings on which to be wagered.

This entire paragraph is an excellent symbol for the entire project of the neo-imperial American Right. They are making their own fortunes with a wager on the fates of others, whom they are treating like ants. Get in their way and they stomp on you. Make an anthill the wrong place and they blow it up.

A UN official offered to bet me in February of 2003 on whether the Bush administration would go to war. I knew that it would. I am still ashamed that I took the bet (though I never sought settlement of the wager). In retrospect it was wrong. But that was an easy one. A bet on what Bush would do. Not a bet on the Iraqi people. I hope they will be all right. I don't have anything riding on their suffering more than they already have, and am shocked at the implication that I do.

A wager on the backs of human beings. Perhaps Mr. Goldberg would like to bring back slavery, as well.

I think we may let the matter rest there, at this nadir.

Guerrillas Kill over 30, wound Dozens, In Continued Iraq Violence
Sadr Movement Coming in Third in South

Mariam Fam of AP gives us the details of the continued guerrilla war in Iraq.

*Baquba: Guerrillas set off a car bomb outside a police HQ, killing 15, wounding 17.

*Mosul:

1. A suicide bomber detonated his payload outside Jumhuri Teaching Hospital, killing 12 policemen and injuring 4 others.

2. Guerrillas fired a dozen mortar rounds at a police station, killing 3 civilians.

Az-Zaman reports that the "Cadres and Chosen Party" of 180 members of the Sadr Movement is coming in third in the early election returns, after the mainstream Shiite United Iraqi Alliance and the Iraqiyah list of interim Prime Minister Allawi. So far the Cadres are guaranteed 8 seats in the 275-member parliament, according to its leader. Since about 20 Sadrists ran on the UIA, they could make up 6 or 7 percent of the members of parliament. Had their leader not sat out the election, the Sadrists could have done much better. They note that Muqtada al-Sadr did not forbid them to run. One of the prominent list members was a Mahdi Army guerrilla fighter in Sadr City only a few months ago.

The Cadres say that they will demand an immediate timetable for US withdrawal from Iraq.

If the UIA cannot form an alliance with the Kurds, or if that alliance fails once formed, the UIA might be forced to woo the Cadres and several other small parties to form a government, giving the small groups enormous leverage (as happens in the Israeli Knesset, which has the same system.)

Muqtada consulted Monday with rejectionist Sunni fundamentalist forces. He wants an early US withdrawal from the country, and so do they. A Sadr/ Sunni-fundamentalist alliance in parliament and without on this issue is not out of the question.

The turnout in the largely Sunni Arab Salahuddin Province was so bad that the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance was the number one vote-getter there. That is like saying Kerry took Alabama! It could only happen if most Alabamans stayed home on election day.

Al-Hayat reports [Arabic link] that a Sistani representative in Beirut has clarified comments made Monday. He said that no Sistani representative was at the press conference at which the spokesman for Grand Ayatollah al-Fayyad denounced any attempt to separate religion and state in Iraq. The statement attributed to Sistani was therefore not his. On the other hand, the source denied that there was any difference of opinion among the grand ayatollahs on this matter, and said that all were agreed that Islam should be the principle source of legislation, and that no laws should be passed that contravened Islam. Sistani's representative did reaffirm, however, the grand ayatollah's commitment to equality of rights under the law and to pluralism and minority rights. It is just, he said, that since most Iraqis are Muslims, it is inevitable that their law and institutions, which derive from the will of the people, will reflect Islamic culture.

Regardless of this clarification, Tom Lasseter and Nancy Youssef make it clear that Sistani will play a major role in the selection of the new prime minister and in the drafting of the permanent constitution. Doesn't sound like separation of mosque and state to me.

Al-Hayat also reports that Ibrahim Jafari, a Dawa Party leader and contender for president or vice-president, rejected the setting of a timetable for American troop withdrawal, saying that a premature departure of the US troops could lead to a "bloodbath." Earlier the UIA platform called for such a timetable, but its leaders have backed off the demand recently. (I think they are afraid that the Baath remnants will just kill them if the Americans leave, and the new Iraqi army is small and ineffective so far.

Goldberg v. Cole Redux

Goldberg seems to like embarrassing himself, so he won't let go.

Let us see what has been established. First, I alleged that Goldberg has never read a book about Iraq, about which he keeps fulminating. I expected him at least to lie in response, the way W. did when similarly challenged on his book-reading. I expected Goldberg to say, "That is not true! I have read Phebe Marr's book on modern Iraq from cover to cover and know all about the 1963 failed Baathist coup!" But Goldberg did not respond in this way. I conclude that I was correct, and he has never read a book on this subject.

I am saying I do not understand why CNN or NPR would hire someone to talk about Iraq policy who has not read a book on the subject under discussion. Actually, of course, it would be desirable that he had read more than one book. Books are nice. They are rectangular and soft and have information in them. They can even be consumed on airplanes. Goldberg should try one.

Goldberg is now saying that he did not challenge my knowledge of the Middle East, but my judgment. I take it he is saying that his judgment is superior to mine. But how would you tell whose judgment is superior? Of course, all this talk of "judgement" is code for "political agreement." Progressives think that other progressives have good judgment, conservatives think that other conservatives have good judgment. This is a tautology in reality. Goldberg believes that I am wrong because I disagree with him about X, and anyone who disagrees with him is wrong, and ipso facto lacks good judgment.

An argument that judgment matters but knowledge does not is profoundly anti-intellectual. It implies that we do not need ever to learn anything in order make mature decisions. We can just proceed off some simple ideological template and apply it to everything. This sort of thinking is part of what is wrong with this country. We wouldn't call a man in to fix our plumbing who knew nothing about plumbing, but we call pundits to address millions of people on subjects about which they know nothing of substance.

But I did not say that Goldberg's judgment is always faulty. I said he doesn't at the moment know what he is talking about when it comes to Iraq and the Middle East, and there is no reason anyone should pay attention to what he thinks about those subjects, as a result. If judgment means anything, it has to be grounded in at least a minimum amount of knowledge. Part of the implication of my assertion is that Goldberg could actually improve his knowledge of the Middle East and consequently could improve his judgment about it (although increased knowledge would only help judgment if it were used honestly and analytically). I don't think he is intrinsically ignorant, I think he is being wilfully ignorant. He'd be welcome to get a sabbatical and come study with me for a year some time.

Poor Jonah can't get anything right when it comes to me. He tries to imply that I don't speak Arabic, citing a comment by As'ad Abukhalil on my recent al-Jazeerah appearance. As`ad praises me for apologizing to al-Jazeerah readers for not speaking Arabic in the bulk of the interview. What he didn't say was that I began by speaking in Arabic and I apologized in Arabic. I said I preferred to speak English because the subject required exactitude. I have given more than one interview in Arabic, including on Radio Sawa Iraq. In this instance I felt it was important to have absolute control of nuance, which can only be had in one's mother tongue. When we were bantering before the show in Arabic, and I explained how I felt to Fuad Ajami and the others, Fuad quipped that my Arabic was better than some (highly westernized) Arab rulers. I know three kinds of Arabic-- Modern Standard, Lebanese dialect and Egyptian dialect. My Arabic is not free of solecisms because I didn't start it until I was an adult, and sometimes something from one of the three slips into the other. But I did live in the Arab world nearly 6 years altogether, and do speak the language. Sorry, Jonah, the problem with not knowing what you are talking about is that you get things wrong.

Jonah notes that I found it difficult to oppose the 2003 war against Iraq because I also did not want to help keep Saddam in power, to continue to oppress the Iraqi population. But that is different from saying that I advocated the war. In fact, I said more than once that I thought it was a very bad idea, that it was not justified by any threat to the US from Iraq, that there was no Iraq-al-Qaeda link, and that no war would be legitimate without the full support of the international community (as suggested in the Genocide Convention). I also said that I felt that the US military lives lost in the March-April 2003 war were not for naught, because they did overthrow a genocidal dictator. It would be horrible to think that those lives were wasted. They weren't. But lives lost after about May of 2003 were often lost unnecessarily and as the result of bad Bush administration policy. Goldberg is hoping to Kerryize me because my position on the war can't be reduced to a sound bite. I don't really care. I'm not running for office and I'm not making any money to speak of from this punditry gig. If people can't imagine that you can hate Saddam and also think a unilateral war and long-term occupation of an Arab country are bad ideas, that is their problem.

I challenged Goldberg to a public debate on the Middle East, since that was the subject on which he attacked me. His response was not, quite frankly, the response of a man to a challenge. He wanted to put on all kinds of pissant conditions on the subject of the debate. It is sort of as though Wyatt Earp challenged a bad guy to a shootout after the outlaw burped rotgut whiskey in his face and called him a wimp. And when Earp challenges the black hat, the guy turns to jelly and says, "O.K., but you can't use that Colt, it has to be little bitty derringers like the one I use to shoot people in the back at night."

Let's see, Goldberg's remarks were about the relative virtues of the elections in Iran and Iraq. He declined my challenge, saying he would only debate me on US politics or US foreign policy. In other words, he thinks it is all right to sit up on a perch and snipe at me through his privileged access to the media (given to him why?) on Middle East issues. But he is afraid to debate me publicly on those same issues. I don't understand. If he thinks he knows what he is talking about in print, why wouldn't he risk talking about the same things verbally and in person? I'll tell you why. It is because when writing an op-ed, he can get away with only seeming to grasp the facts, whereas in person he can be busted and shown to be only a poseur. I'm not interested in a debate on why Steve Hadley overruled George Tenet to authorize the passage in Bush's 2003 State of the Union address falsely alleging that Iraq had attempted to buy Niger uranium.

I should be clear that I am not interested in wasting any more time on Goldberg's illogicality in print. If he will not agree to a debate this spring without any conditions or restrictions on subject matter, then I wash my hands of him.

Then I alleged that Goldberg didn't know what he was talking about when he disparaged my comparison of the Iraqi elections (anonymous candidates, 53 withdrawals by lists on the ballot, poor security, etc.) to Iranian ones. He actually admitted his ignorance when challenged, saying he would have to check up on it. His current response is that once Khatami was elected, he was unable to make substantial changes in Iran. But that was not the issue at debate. The issue was a narrow one. It had to do with the democratic character of the elections themselves, not with the aftermath. We can't compare the aftermath of the two elections because we don't know how the situation will evolve in Iraq.

Goldberg also makes an elementary error in arguing that the fact that people in Iran are disillusioned with Khatami now, in 2005, has any bearing on their attitudes in 1997 when they first elected him. As a historian, Jonah, let me explain to you about this mistake. It is called "anachronism." It occurs when people argue that present conditions explain past ones. It doesn't work that way. Mostly because time's arrow goes forward, not backwards. I should explain that one too. It is called "the second law of thermodynamics." Apparently this law does not exist in Punditland, where the grand pooh-bahs are all permitted 3 anachronisms before breakfast.

Goldberg also cites Michael Ledeen saying that the Jan. 30 elections were, too, a model for other Middle Eastern countries, because so many lists were allowed to participate. But there were limiting factors in Iraq, too. One US embassy official said that it wouldn't be possible for Iraq to have a prime minister of whom the US disapproved. Judith Miller just last week on Hardball let slip that the US is offering people cabinet posts in the new Iraqi government. And where exactly did all that money come from for Iyad Allawi's (an old-time Baathist and then CIA asset) campaign? Goldberg waxes indignant that I associated him with the sabre rattling toward Iran, but then cites Ledeen, the 21st century's most strident warmonger! Goldberg may as well have just cut out the middleman and cited Italian military intelligence on Iran. Ledeen has been involved in defending the terrorist organization, the Mojahedin-e Khalq, from being so branded by the State Department, and is deeply involved with Larry Franklin, now under investigation by the FBI for alleged espionage.

Goldberg alleges that I said the Iraqi elections would be a disaster. What he doesn't say is that I gave a reason for my position. It was that this sort of election on January 30 would produce a parliament in which Sunni Arabs were grossly under-represented and the Shiite religious parties would be over-represented. My prediction was exactly on target.

In the end, I am saying that Goldberg's punditry is empty. All he has to offer us is a party line and a strongly held opinion. Not all pundits are in this category. Goldberg is particularly unsubstantive.

Then one of my readers suggested that if he was so in favor of killing people abroad, he might want to make the sacrifice to go do it himself instead of sending others. He replied that his family needs the money he gets from his work and that he has a daughter! This response made me embarrassed for him.

Although I do not believe that everyone who advocates a war must go and fight it, I do believe that young men who advocate a war must go and fight it. Goldberg was in his early 30s in 2002, and the army would have taken him. An older colleague who was at Harvard in 1941 told me about how the freshman class rushed to enlist. That was the characteristic of the Greatest Generation-- they put their money where their mouths were. Goldberg's response was insulting to all the soldiers fighting in Iraq who have suffered economically and who are remote from their families.

I don't think there is anything at all unpatriotic about a young man opposing a war and declining to enlist. But a young man (and this applies to W. and Cheney too) who mouths off strongly about the desirability of a war is a coward and a hypocrite if he does not go to fight it.

But Goldberg is just a dime a dozen pundit. Cranky rich people hire sharp-tongued and relatively uninformed young people all the time and put them on the mass media to badmouth the poor, spread bigotry, exalt mindless militarism, promote anti-intellectualism, and ensure generally that rightwing views come to predominate even among people who are harmed by such policies. One of their jobs is to marginalize progressives by smearing them as unreliable.

The thing that really annoyed me about Goldberg's sniping was it reminded me of how our country got into this mess in Iraq. It was because a lot of ignorant but very powerful and visible people told the American people things that were not true. In some instances I believe that they lied. In other instances, they were simply too ignorant of the facts to know when an argument put forward about, say, Iraq, was ridiculous. For instance, it was constantly said that Iraqis were "secular." This allegation ignored four decades of radical Shiite organizing and revolutionary activity by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the al-Dawa Party, and others, as well as the influence on Iraqis of the Khomeini revolution and of the 1991 Saddam crackdown on Shiites. They were never contradicted when they said this on television, though.

And, of course, there was all that hype about Iraq being 2-4 years from having a nuclear weapon, which was either a Big Lie or a Dr. Strangelove fantasy. Khidir Hamza appears to have been paid by someone (and got big royalties from the American Enterprise Institute) to spin a web of complete lies about the Iraqi (non-existent by then) nuclear program. Goldberg in particular pushed that line, with his North Korea comparison, on a number of occasions. His current excuse is that other people were wrong, too. D'oh.

Contrary to Goldberg's assertion, the UN weapons inspectors did not substantiate the Bush administration's rationale for war. By early March of 2003, the weapons inspectors had visited 100 of the 600 sites specified by the CIA and found bupkes. Bush pulled them out and went to war anyway, over their objections. Goldberg ridiculed the Europeans for asking for the inspectors (who had just gone in) to have more time to complete their task. But if they had been allowed to do so, as the French suggested, we might have avoided this war. Even before they went back in, Scott Ritter was saying the vast majority of the stuff had been destroyed. And Imad Khadduri, who is, like, a real Iraqi nuclear scientist, was saying there was nothing there, which I cited in February 2003 before the war. Where was Jonah's judgment then?

Goldberg says his judgment is superior to mine. But I said Iraq was not a danger to the US. I ridiculed Colin Powell's UN performance. Goldberg said Iraq was near to having nukes. Whose judgment was superior?

The corporate media failed the United States in 2002-2003. The US government failed the American people in 2002-2003. That empty, and often empty-headed punditry, which Jon Stewart destroyed so skilfully, played a big role in dragooning the American people into a wasteful and destructive elective war that threatens to warp American society and very possibly to end the free Republic we have managed to maintain for over 200 years. Already severe challenges to our sacred Constitution have been launched by the Right. Goldberg is a big proponent of "profiling," which is to say, spying on people because of their ethnicity rather than because of anything they as individuals have done wrong. That is only the beginning, if such persons maintain their influence on public discourse.

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

Addendum:

I am reprinting the message below by permission:

Subject: asses and killing zones
Date: Sun, 06 Feb 2005 02:15:03 -0500
From: James Finkelstein
To: JonahNRO@aol.com


Dear Mr. Goldberg,

Here's a compromise to your dilemma as to whether to get your ass into the killing zone (more accurately, the be killed, be shot, or be blown up zone). Go to the nearest Veterans Hospital you can find, go up to some soldier or Marine who lost a limb in Iraq because his reserve or National Guard unit wasn't equipped with body armor or armored vehicles, and explain to him why we had to go to war in Iraq on March 20, 2003, and why we couldn't (a) wait to see if actual evidence of WMD's ever surfaced, and (b) wait until our military was properly equipped for the war.

By the way, I'm one of those parents who had to go shopping at home to send essential items to my son's Marine Corps Reserve Unit. And I, like most intelligent people with more than an ounce of common sense, knew without a shadow of a doubt that there was no military threat to the U.S. from Iraq, imminent or otherwise, when this war was launched.

Jim Finkelstein

The Republicans' Iraq and the Islamic Republic of Iraq

A guerrilla attack on a police station at Mahawil south of Baghdad left 22 police and soldiers, and 14 attackers, dead on Sunday. Some reports suggested that the US military denied this report, but it was carried by major wire services.

The Republican Party spin machine was bouncing around the airwaves like an overloaded washing machine on Sunday attempting to obscure from the American public that they had by their actions managed to install a Shiite religious ruling class in Iraq. The New York Times even lead with a headline, "U.S. Officials Say a Theocratic Iraq Is Unlikely." This headline is probably wrong, but in any case it begs the question of what a "theocracy" is.

If it means a clerically-ruled state, then I agree with Vice President Dick Cheney that a) you have to look at what Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani wants, and b) that Sistani does not want clerics to rule the country as in Iran. But the main goal of political Islam in the past few decades hasn't been clerical rule. It has been the replacement of civil law with shariah or Islamic canon law. This was done by the non-clerical government of Sudan, e.g. And that is where Iraq is headed. The only question is how wideranging the substitution will be. Will it just be personal status law (marriage, divorce, inheritance, alimony, etc.), or will it be in commercial law and other spheres of society?

Even as Cheney was pooh-poohing the notion of Iraqi theocracy, Sistani's close colleague Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Ishaq al-Fayyad said, "We warn officials against a separation of the state and religion." Then Sistani's spokesman came out and said that the Grand Ayatollah Sistani "wants the source of legislation to be Islam."

A lot of Americans believe whatever Cheney says, though I cannot for the life of me understand why, since he lies to them relentlessly. He is the one who tried to link Saddam and al-Qaeda operationally. He even once said he knew exactly where Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were. Most people will only remember that Cheney said there wouldn't be an Iraqi theocracy, but won't bother to actually read the newspapers on Monday to see the news I'm reporting below.

Although George Orwell/ Eric Blair wrote 1984 as an anarcho-syndicalist socialist critique of Stalinism, it is becoming increasingly clear that it was also prophetic about the direction of Late Capitalist societies characterized by corporate media consolidation. In such a society, Cheney can substitute himself for Sistani and speak for Sistani, erasing the real Sistani just as the Republican pundits have erased the real Iraq. "Ignorance is strength."

Another little-noticed development is how well followers of Muqtada al-Sadr are doing in some provincial elections. They seem likely to dominate Maysan Province in the south and to have a strong influence in several others. The Sadrists are all about puritanism and implementing Islamic law. A senior British official conceded, "We will have to live with it."

At the national level, the Shiite religious parties have begun making it clear that implementing Islamic law is among their highest priorities.

The four grand ayatollahs in Najaf are jointly called "the Source" (al-marja`iyyah), i.e. the source of authority that must be blindly obeyed (taqlid) on religious issues. Shaikh Ibrahim Ibrahimi, a representative of Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Ishaq al-Fayyad, issued a suprise communique, according to AFP. Al-Fayyad is originally from Afghanistan, but came to Najaf at the age of ten many decades ago.

I was originally going to quote the AFP translation of the statement, but found it wrong in a couple of places and have made my own:

"All the clerics and the sources of authority, and most of the Muslim Iraqi people, emphatically request the state and the national parliament that Islam be, in the permanent Iraqi constitution, the sole source of legislation in Iraq, and that any article or law be struck from the permanent constitution if it contravenes Islam . . . [this matter] is non-negotiable . . . [we warn against] changing the face of Iraq or separating religion and state, for therein lie dangers that will bring unfortunate results, which is rejected by all the clerics and high religious authorities . . . [We warn against] the dangers of undertaking derisory actions that hurt the feelings of Muslims, such as conscripting Muslim girls and publishing their pictures with foreign military trainers in magazines and daily newspapers . . . That has a negative influence on the government, which stands, today, in the most urgent need of popular support."

The four grand ayatollahs of Najaf may have internal disagreements, but it is unlikely that al-Fayyad had this statement issued without getting a consensus of the other three first.

AFP put in parenthetically:

' A source close to Sistani announced soon after the release of the statement that the spiritual leader backed the demand. "The marja has priorities concerning the formation of the government and the constitution. It wants the source of legislation to be Islam," said the source. '

Rod Nordland and Babak Dehghanpisheh of Newsweek have a fine profile of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani this week. The allegation they quote from Hussein Shahristani, a Sistani spokesman, that the grand ayatollah wants to be uninvolved in picking the new government, however, is probably untrue. His views are being actively sought on who the new prime minister should be.

Another AFP article adds concerning Sistani:

" While Sistani is taking a harder line on the constitution, a source close to him said he does not oppose a secular-led government. “He sees no problem with a prime minister who is secular, because the current phase means that it must be a politician with experience and this is not taught in Koranic schools,” said the source. The source said Sistani “does not want Iraq to be an Islamic republic like Iran because the “velayat e-faqih’ is not an established tradition in this country.” Velayat e-faqih was the ruling principle of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who led Iran’s Islamic revolution, and put clerics at the heart of all decision-making."

The article goes on to speculate that Sistani will stay out of the process of writing the constitution. I very much doubt that!

Let's listen to someone close to Sistani who would actually know about this issue:

‘‘What he [Sistani] wants is influence over the constitution-writing process,’’ said Mowaffak Rubaie, a prominent Shiite politician. ‘‘He wants to be sure it’s done right.’’

So much for Mr. Cheney's fantasy of a non-intrusive Grand Ayatollah unconcerned with politics who wants a separation of religion and state. Cheney was only right that Sistani doesn't want to rule directly. Nothing else he said on the subject is true!

Al-Hayat
reports [Arabic link] that Adnan al-Zurfi, the American-appointed governor of Najaf province, has issued a decree allowing the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr to resume their Friday prayers at Kufa. The people of nearby Najaf are afraid that this move may presage the return to their city of Mahdi Army militiamen. Al-Zurfi's list lost in Najaf provincial elections, and people are afraid that he is creating a poison pill for the next provincial government, which is made up of religious Shiites.

The implementation of religious law could have a deleterious effect on Iraqi women. Bush likes to parade Iraqi women at his official events, trying to imply that he has rescued them from Arab male chauvinism. But Bush is likely to have been responsible for the biggest roll-back of women's rights in the Middle East since the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

A good sense of the differences between Sunnis and Shiites, and the likely implication of the Shiite parties' win for Iraqis at home and abroad, is presented by Steven Magagnini of the Sacramento Bee.

Letter to Jonah Goldberg

A reader cc'd me with this letter to Jonah Goldberg and allowed me to share it here.

Jonah:

In your post to the Corner today ("A NEW DAY"), you leave the impression that the only emails you have received supporting Professor Cole were written by deranged anti-Semites. I sincerely doubt that was the case. However, just to be sure, I wanted to provide you with at least one email that did not fit that description.

In your post titled "EMPIRICISM", you quote a reader who seems to value concepts above experience. In many ways, this may be a good explanation of the root of your feud with Cole. By all appearances, you view the war in Iraq much the way you might treat today's Superbowl. Its something about which you feel free to state strong opinions and something which might provoke a certain amount of emotional argument.
You might win or lose a few dollars and/or the ability to gloat for a few days. But, in the end, its simply entertainment. Certainly, despite the strength of your convictions about aspects of the game, you don't feel yourself qualified to actually take the place of Belichick or Reid. You wouldn't consider for a moment strapping on a helmet and lining up in place of TO.

Cole, on the other hand, knows that war is not a game. He lived in war-torn Beirut and knows the realities of civil strife. While your opinion on whether the Eagles should pass or run will have little affect on today's game, your support of the war from such vantage points as CNN has had a real effect. As a result of policies you have supported, people have died. Those are real people, not "conceptual" people or "theoretical" people. Those are empirical people. Yet, to you they are much like any players that will be injured today. The expected outcome of a game, but nothing about which to be too concerned.

In your post "SOMEBODY DOESN'T LIKE ME", you make much of supposed personal attacks on you by Cole. But, you started this contretemps, by describing him as "the dashboard saint of lefty Middle East experts". That's hardly the best way to open discussion with someone with whom you hope to remain on civil terms. The entire tone of your discussion of Cole was demeaning and condescending. As a result, you have little room to whine about personal attacks (especially when the supposed attacks are simply statements of fact).

You then go on to say that "I don't think I made the allegation that Saddam had nuclear weapons 'over and over again' on CNN or anywhere else." Yet, this was not an allegation that Cole made. What he actually wrote was "[t]he reason he repeatedly gave was that Iraq was close to having a nuclear weapon." This is exactly the position that you go to lengths to restate. In trying to refute Cole, you actually
confirm his allegation. However, you somehow manage to avoid the more central issue. Clearly, Saddam was not on the verge of obtaining a nuclear weapon, despite your claims to the contrary on CNN and elsewhere. What do you have to say about your error? Do you feel any responsibility for the real and empirical deaths that have occurred due to your mistakes of concept and theory?

Finally, I really appreciate your frankness in explaining why you are not currently serving in "the kill zone". It is the best and most honest display of chickenhawk hypocrisy I have yet to come across. It confirms my belief that the war in Iraq is little more than a game to you. Its fun to talk about on CNN and maybe debate with someone in "The Corner", but to expect you to put yourself on the line is out of the question. I have just one thing to ask: do you support the immediate dismissal from military duty of all over 35 fathers who request such a dismissal? If so, would you be willing to use your media pulpits to support such a policy? In theory, Professor Cole would have great praise for your so doing. In reality, its just one more time that you will show that you are simply an unprincipled coward.

Best regards,

JS

Focus on Elections in Iraq

Al-Hayat: An official spokesman for the Da`wa Party said Saturday that its political office had put forward Ibrahim Jafari as a candidate for president of Iraq. At the same time, the United Iraqi Alliance, of which Da`wa is one member, announced that it would insist on having the prime ministership. The UIA will probably dominate the new parliament, and is announcing that UN- and US- appointed interim PM Iyad Allawi will not continue in the post. Jafari points out that it would be undemocratic to have him continue, because his list has only about a fourth the votes that the UIA got.

Another leading contender for president is Jalal Talabani, a Kurdish leader.

Jafari told the Independent that he would try to bring radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr into the government.

Edward Wong of the New York Times illuminates the negotiations on the issue of the role of religion in the New Iraq.

Meanwhile, guerilla actions all over the country left 22 dead, including two US troops.

Wolcott on Goldberg's Language Competencies

James Wolcott of Vanity Fair weighs in on the Goldberg/Cole debate. My favorite line:

"Yes, but Jonah speaks fluent Simpsons, which is why he's so popular with campus conservatives as he goes about entertaining and mentoring the maroons of tomorrow."

By the way, there was some poster at Daily Kos who misinterpreted me as saying that you need to know Arabic to have an opinion on Iraq. I listed 7 or 8 ways you could get to have a valued opinion of Iraq, of which that is only one. Personally, I prefer to get my analysis of French politics from people who speak French, but maybe I'm funny that way. Also if an analyst has a track record of getting things right, you might forgive him some of the desired bits of expertise. That isn't true for Goldberg on the Middle East.

Breaking news: Oh my God! He actually said it!. Goldberg replied to this comment from my reader:

"But if you actually do get an oppurtunity to verbally castrate this weasel, ask him if he truly meant "In the weeks prior to the war to liberate Afghanistan, a good friend of mine would ask me almost every day, "Why aren't we killing people yet?" And I never had a good answer for him. Because one of the most important and vital things the United States could do after 9/11 was to kill people." '

He looks to be of military age. Ask him why his sorry a** isn't in the kill zone."]

Goldberg actually says,

"For the record, I did in fact mean it. I wrote it here. As for why my sorry a** isn't in the kill zone, lots of people think this is a searingly pertinent question. No answer I could give -- I'm 35 years old, my family couldn't afford the lost income, I have a baby daughter, my a** is, er, sorry, are a few -- ever seem to suffice."

Goldberg helped send nearly 1500 brave Americans to their deaths and helped maim over 10,000, not to mention all the innocent Iraqi civilians he helped get killed. He helped dragoon 140,000 US troops in Iraq. And he does not have the courage of his convictions. His excuse is that he couldn't afford to take the pay cut!

What is Goldberg going to say to the tens of thousands of reservists he helped send to Iraq, who are losing their mortgages and small businesses and have been kidnapped for 18 months at a time (not what they thought they were signing up for) by Rumsfeld? "Well guys, thanks for carrying out the policy I wanted to see, and for putting your own little girls into penury. I'd have loved to help out, but my little girl is more important than yours and besides, I like a good meal and I hear you only get MREs."

A reader at Atrios's Eschaton suggested this Salon profile of Goldberg.

The complete list of logical fallacies involved in Goldberg's further comments and those of his fans is at Norbizness.

Shiite Religious Coalition Dominates Parliamentary Voting

With 3.3 million votes counted from about 10 mostly southern provinces, the United Iraqi Alliance of mainly Shiite religious parties is so far garnering an astounding 66% of the seats in parliament (That percentage will fall as the northern, Sunni Arab and Kurdish vote comes in, but it may not fall below 50 percent). The Iraqiyah List of interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has only gotten 18 percent so far, and that percentage may well fall to 10 in the final tally. (Since its numbers are so much lower, and the election results are proportional, its percentage will be hurt much more by a high Kurdish turnout than will the percentage of the UIA).

As the list cobbled together under Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's auspices looks set to rule Iraq, al-Hayat reports that his representative in Karbala tried to issue reassurances. Shaikh Ahmad al-Safi said in his Friday sermon that the members of parliament elected last Sunday will enjoy complete legitimacy to speak for the Iraqi people. He called the Iraqi people to unity. He said that "this is the first time that Iraqis have witnessed this in more than 80 years." [This statement is actually not true, since when Iraq was a constitutional monarchy it did have elections for parliament, the last one being in 1954.] He said that everyone must work to prevent a partition of Iraq, both those who participated in the elections and those who did not. He denied that the Shiite members of parliament would attempt to erect a theocracy ["a religious state."]. He said that Shiites had suffered more than anyone else from Saddam's authoritarianism, and they did not want to oppress their fellow Iraqis. Rather, they would work to save them from oppression.

The northern 8 provinces are mostly Sunni Arab and Kurdish (along with minorities of Turkmen and Chaldean Christians, about 3 percent each of the national population). But the Sunni Arab regions had a very light turnout, so the Kurds may well get 20 percent or more of the seats in parliament, even though they are probably only 15 percent of the population.

If the Shiite coalition gets 50 percent or more, it will only need 16 percent of the seats (or less), to form a government, which requires a 2/3s vote. The easy place to get those seats is from the Kurdish coalition list. So a Shiite/Kurdish alliance would immediately dominate parliament. The Sunni Arabs and the Allawi list would not be needed. They might be asked to join a government of national unity, but they wouldn't be given much in the way of concessions, since their votes are simply not necessary. It would just be a matter of symbology, an attempt to mollify the Sunni Arabs. The Allawi list's emphasis on secularism and support of invasive US military action against large groups of Iraqis probably makes it an outlier.

The resulting government could have Jalal Talabani as president, a Sunni Arab as a vice president, and Ibrahim Jaafari of the al-Dawa Party as the other vice president. Adil Abdul Mahdi of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (and current finance minister) is a leading contender for prime minister.

A Shiite/Kurdish alliance would be a difficult one, since the Shiites want religious law and a robust federal government, whereas the Kurds want civil law and a weak federal government. Moreover, the Kurds want Kirkuk and its petroleum revenues, but are opposed in this by the city's Arabs and Turkmen; both groups contain a significant Shiite population. But it is possible that being in the same government coalition would allow the Shiite and Kurdish leaders to reach key compromises on these issues that would be more difficult if the Kurds were not inside the government.

UIA member Muwaffaq al-Rubaie has suggested that the Kurdish demand for a redrawing of the Iraqi provinces so as to create an ethnic Kurdistan province might be best accommodated by having only 5 provinces in Iraq. There would be two Shiite provinces, two Sunni Arab provinces, and one Kurdish one. (By the way, if the Iraqis created an upper house of the legislature with 5 representatives from each province, this chamber could form a check on any tyranny of the Shiite majority in the lower house).

Personally, I think Allawi and his people may well get frozen out of important posts and patronage. They may have to hunker down and prepare to try to do better in the elections scheduled for December.

There is another possible scenario for the formation of a government. It is that the United Iraqi Alliance makes a coalition with Allawi's list and some other small, Sunni Arab parties (especially those with a religious fundamentalist cast). This outcome seems less likely to me, but could become possible if the Shiites and Kurds can't reach some suitable immediate compromises.

By the way, I don't find the fears that the UIA or the religious Shiite list will fall apart once seated in parliament compelling. The UIA is a winner, and has a chance at vast power and patronage, including $17 billion in government revenue (and more if the sabotage of oil pipelines can be checked), and all those government ministries, which are part of spoils system. I'm not sure why any faction would want to walk away from all that loot. Wouldn't it be better to stay in the circle of winners and stake a claim on it? They might do it if it were possible for them to help form an alternative government. But the UIA is likely to be so powerful in parliament as to make that impossible. (If the UIA has any more than 45 percent of the seats, and remains united, then no other assortment of lists could possibly put together the needed 66 percent to form a government. Moreover, it is unlikely that you could could put together a viable government from a vast array of small parties outside the UIA.)

The young radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr belittled the elections on Friday and called for the setting of a timetable for US withdrawal. Sadr's political stock, however, is at a nadir. The UIA only has about 20 Sadrists, mostly somewhat independent, on its list. Sadr sat out the elections. Unless poor street thugs reemerge as a force in Iraqi politics, Sadr has been as marginalized as Allawi for the moment. However, the poor Shiites of the slums who are attracted to him and his ideology have not gone away, and he should not be counted out as a factor in future elections and political movements. I suspect the advent of genuine prosperity in the slum of Sadr City would permanently blunt his influence, however.

If the economy does not get going soon, if the guerrilla war grinds on, if US forces continue to act in a heavy-handed manner and remain numerous, then the tide could easily turn in Sadr's favor.

Jonah Goldberg Embarrasses Himself Once Again

Jonah Goldberg attacked yours truly in a column recently.

I think it is time to be frank about some things. Jonah Goldberg knows absolutely nothing about Iraq. I wonder if he has even ever read a single book on Iraq, much less written one. He knows no Arabic. He has never lived in an Arab country. He can't read Iraqi newspapers or those of Iraq's neighbors. He knows nothing whatsoever about Shiite Islam, the branch of the religion to which a majority of Iraqis adheres. Why should we pretend that Jonah Goldberg's opinion on the significance and nature of the elections in Iraq last Sunday matters? It does not.

Jonah Goldberg was a cheerleader for the unprovoked, unilateral US attack on Iraq. The reason he repeatedly gave was that Iraq was close to having a nuclear weapon.

Jonah Goldberg: We've just seen this last week what a problem North Korea is once it has a nuclear weapon. Once a county has a nuclear weapon, it becomes almost impossible to deal with it using military force. And then that country can basically blackmail the world for whatever it wants, and that's what North Korea is doing today.

. . . we do not want to take -- to ignore problems in the world before they become insurmountable, and that's why it is a proactive approach to try to keep Saddam Hussein from becoming the North Korea of the Middle East, and he would be extremely dangerous if he did that.

CNN SHOWDOWN: IRAQ 12:00
December 17, 2002 Tuesday

Extremist rightwing hawks like Jonah Goldberg used their privileged position as pundits to terrify the US public that Iraq was a threat to the US. He repeatedly said in the buildup to the war that Iraq was a menace to the US, and he repeatedly brought up North Korea's nuclear weapons as a reason for a preemptive attack on Iraq.

Iraq never has had nuclear weapons. Iraq never has been as close as two decades from having nuclear weapons. Iraq dismantled all vestiges of its rudimentary and exploratory nuclear weapons research in 1991. Iraq did not have a nuclear weapons program in 1992, 1993 and all the way until 2002, when Jonah Goldberg assured us Americans that we absolutely had to invade Iraq to stop it from imminently becoming a nuclear power just like North Korea.

By the way, I am in print in January 2003 saying that I did not believe Iraq posed a danger to the United States. It did not.

If Jonah Goldberg had asserted that he could fly to Mars in his pyjamas and come back in a single day, it would not have been a more fantastic allegation than the one he made about Iraq being a danger to the United States because of the nuclear issue. He made that allegation over and over again to millions of viewers on national television programs, to viewers who trusted his judgment because CNN and others purveyed him to them.

Jonah Goldberg is a fearmonger, a warmonger, and a demagogue. And besides, he was just plain wrong about one of the more important foreign policy issues to face the United States in the past half-century. It is shameful that he dares show his face in public, much less continuing to pontificate about his profound knowledge of just what Iraq is like and what needs to be done about Iraq and the significance of events in Iraq.

Goldberg criticizes me for saying that the 1997 presidential election in Iran was more democratic than the Jan. 30, 2005 election in Iraq. His complaint is that the four candidates for president were vetted and approved by Iran's Guardianship Council.

It is certainly the case that although Iran has elections, they are flawed because many candidates are excluded on ideological grounds. To say that, however, is not to say that the popular will can never unexpectedly make itself known in Iran. In the 1997 election the vetting was lax, and a relative liberal, Muhammad Khatami, was allowed to run. He had earlier been fired as minister of culture for being too liberal. He wrote about Habermas and civil society and democratization in Iran (he had lived in Germany several years and read Habermas in German).

The four presidential candidates in Iran were all known by name, unlike the candidates for Iraq's parliament, most of whom remained anonymous to voters in the weeks leading up to the election. I'd say that is a sign of greater transparency in Iran. The Iranian participants were not in danger if they campaigned or ran, one of the criteria of a successful democratic election according to international watchdog groups. In this respect, too, Iran in that year was superior to Iraq in 2005.

Khatami's victory in 1997 was a big surprise. He was put in by the youth vote and the women's vote, against the wishes of the hardline clerics. If a candidate wins who wasn't expected to, that is a sign of lack of manipulation of the results.

Khatami was elected by 69% of the Iranian electorate, and 76 percent of eligible voters voted. The latter number is higher than will be true for Iraq.

In every way, from the transparency of candidates and platforms, to safe conditions for voters, to unexpected results, to the percentage of eligible voters who voted and the percentage of the electorate that directly chose Mr. Khatami, his election was more democratic than the elections just held in Iraq.

The reason Mr. Goldberg is alarmed that I pointed this obvious fact out is that he wants to kill thousands of Iranians and thousands of US troops in a war of aggression on Iran. If the American public knows that there is a lively struggle between hardliners and conservatives in Iran, and that an American intervention there would be a huge disaster and would forestall the natural evolution of Iran away from Khomeinism, then they might not support Mr. Goldberg's monstrous warmongering.

That is why he attacked me.

So let me propose to him that we debate Middle East issues, anywhere, any time, he and I.

Otherwise he should please shut up and go back to selling Linda Tripp tapes on Ebay.


[In his smarmy reply, Goldberg says he wanted a war with Iraq because it did not have a nuclear weapon. This is just arrant nonsense. The point is that he kept trying to give the impression that Iraq was about to get a nuke, just as North Korea did, and that was why a war had to be fought. Iraq was not just about to get one. And even George Tenet told Bush that. By the way, I Lexis-ed him, so he should be careful about denying that he made this point repeatedly; it can be documented. Goldberg did not name any book he has read on Iraq, and admits he knows nothing about the 1997 election in Iran and will have to "check with someone." Wouldn't the time to do that be before he went into print criticizing me for saying something knowledgeable about it? He is openly admitting that he speaks without having the slightest idea what he is talking about! I have to deal with this maroon, and I have spent a lifetime studying this subject and know Persian. Goldberg also seems very afraid of debating me in person, since he did not respond to my offer.

A reader wrote in complaining about my suggestion that people who speak publicly on a subject try to know something serious about it, as elitist. I replied:

"If you saw an hour-long piece on al-Jazeerah about the reality of the United States, with English subtitles, and the reporter speaking on the U.S. had never been to America, had never read a book about America, did not know a word of English, and moreover said all kinds of things that were complete fantasy and altogether wrong, would that man be someone you would recommend to others as having an important opinion on the matter that millions of people should be exposed to on NPR and CNN every other day?"

A reader wrote in:

' "... let me propose to him that we debate Middle East issues, anywhere, any time, he and I . . .

"I wouldn't rush to pack your bags. But if you actually do get an oppurtunity to verbally castrate this weasel, ask him if he truly meant "In the weeks prior to the war to liberate Afghanistan, a good friend of mine would ask me almost every day, "Why aren't we killing people yet?" And I never had a good answer for him. Because one of the most important and vital things the United States could do after 9/11 was to kill people." '

He looks to be of military age. Ask him why his sorry ass isn't in the kill zone."]

2 US soldiers Killed, 5 wounded
19 Iraqis killed; Mosque Bombed

CNN reports that guerrillas used a roadside bomb to kill two US soldiers and wound five others near Baiji outside Tikrit on Friday afternoon.

Guerrillas kidnapped an Italian journalist in Baghdad. These incidents are so common that it is worth underlining that the US military and the Iraqi interim government do not control most of the capital of the country they claim to be running.

Guerrillas in Baghdad near Abu Ghraib used rocket propelled grenades and small arms fire to ambush a five-vehicle police convoy late Thursday, killing one policeman and wounding three.

Al-Hayat reports that guerrillas blew up a Shiite mosque and a Shiite mourning center in Baghdad, and were responsible for the deaths of 19 Iraqis in various attacks.

Guerrillas Kill 29, Incl. 3 Marines
Sistani List Looks set to Win Big

Late in the Iraqi election season, interim Prime Minister Allawi and his supporters clearly attempted to build a buzz that his list would do better than expected and that he still had a shot at remaining prime minister. I personally thought this scenario extremely unlikely. Allawi's approval rating had steadily declined from the time he was appointed. Some thought that Sunni Arabs might vote for him in some numbers. Maybe in Baghdad a few did. But I always thought that idea a weak reed. First, few Sunni Arabs voted. Second, Allawi kept calling for more US airstrikes against Fallujah. Why would that endear him to Sunni Arabs?

John Burns and Dexter Filkin of the NYT report that initial voting returns now leaking out from Baghdad and some southern, Shiite provinces, suggest that the United Iraqi Alliance, the coalition of Shiite religious parties blessed by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, is getting 72 percent of the vote. It won't get that on a nation-wide basis, since it won't have done well in the areas north and west of the capital. But it certainly will form the next government. Allawi's list is likely to end up with less than 40 seats in the 275-seat parliament.

Even so, the UIA will need a coalition partner, since it needs a 2/3s majority in parliament to form a government. One intriguing possibility, mentioned by Burns and Filkin, is that the Shiites will go into coalition with the Kurds, who think they may get over 20% of the seats in parliament. Such a government would be stable if the coalitions held together, since these two big blocs could certainly deliver more than 66% of the votes in parliament. But the two are ideologically poles apart.

In my view, this outcome would have many advantages. The Kurds are largely Sunnis, so they can represent some of the interests of the Sunni Arabs (religious issues versus ethnic ones.) The Shiites in the Dawa Party want a stong, centralized government, whereas the Kurds want a loose federalism. If they have to compromise over these issues within their ruling parliamentary coalition, that would be all to the good. The UIA will need to satisfy the Kurds in order to keep them in the coalition. The Kurds will have to satisfy the UIA as far as possible, as junior members of the coalition. If the UIA gets over fifty percent of seats, the Kurds would have little alternative to the religious Shiites as partners, since they could not form a government with the Allawi list.

For the constitutional issues Iraq will now face, see Andrew Arato's guest editorial below.

Liz Sly of the Chicago Tribune also talks about the high returns for the UIA, but seems cautious about coming to conclusions on the basis of so few provinces. She also reports that violence spiked in Iraq on Thursday, with guerrillas killing 29 in Iraq, including 3 Marines.

In one spectacular operation, guerrillas ambushed 50 Iraqi policemen in Baghdad, killing at least two and wounding 14; 16 were missing. The Sunni Arab insurgency is likely to go on for years. One salient question is whether the general Sunni populace will be so alienated by a Shiite/Kurdish government in which they are little represented that they will give even more support to the guerrillas.

Guest Editorial: Arato on Constitutional Participation in Iraq

Constitutional Participation in Iraq

by
Andrew Arato


The election of January 30, 2005 was Sistani’s victory. It is indisputable that it was he above all who pushed through this election for a constitution making assembly in the face of American resistance and UN paternalism. But as Carl Conetta (The Iraqi Election “Bait and Switch”) has shown, elections under the given circumstances could easily reproduce a government formed by the same exile politicians who controlled the Governing Council and the Interim Executive.

As against Conetta’s prediction I am hoping for two things: First, that the vote for the United Iraqi Alliance will be large enough that they are not forced to resurrect the existing governmental coalition with Ayad Allawi. In order for this to happen, the latter’s governmental list would have to receive, along with allies, well under the 33+% that would allow him to veto all new governmental arrangements, and stay in power as the head of the current Interim Government unless he got the role he desired in a new one. And second, that a victorious UIA sponsor a truly historical compromise with the Kurds and the Sunni parties that boycotted the election. It is this second hope and its modalities that I would like to address.

There are three false formulas to avoid in the process of seeking a historical compromise. One is the ethnic trap. The Americans after all had sponsored many “Sunnis” in the Governing Council and now the Interim Government. The point is not ethnicity or religious practice or origins of a politician, but being part of the political articulation and organization of Iraqi society. Adnan Pachachi is not Sunni and Allawi is not Shi’a. They are exile politicians with few roots in Iraqi society, sponsored by the occupying power. Though exiles al-Jaffari and al-Hakim are however Shi’a because they represent real organizations in the South, and so is of course Moqtada al-Sadr. As to Sunni representation it is precisely the major parties and associations like the Association of Muslim Scholars that boycotted the election that have social and organizational roots and it is they who must be brought into the process. The fact that they may have links to the insurgents (like Gerry Adams to the Irish Republican Army) is a plus rather than a minus if the aim is to achieve social peace and stability. One makes peace with one’s enemies not one’s friends-- as slain Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin so well put the matter.

The second false formula is reliance on the Transitional Admistrative Law or interim constitution. It is now continually repeated in the press that the Sunnis will be represented in the constitution making process almost inevitably, because 2/3 of the voters of three Sunni majority provinces could subvert the ratification of any permanent constitution according to the provisions of the TAL. This type of “downstream” participation however is only negative, and may not produce anything if the drafters do not incorporate the plurality of the society in the first place.

Moreover, the TAL has a mechanism according to which it could become a quasi- permanent constitution. Rien ne dure que le provisoire people said in West Germany when the Basic Law was pronounced merely provisional in 1948. Indeed it survived till today, although in 1990 it lost its provisional status. The Hungarian constitution of 1989-90 was provisional, but it is still the constitution 16 years later. At the time of the overthrow of Saddam, Iraq was under a provisional constitution for 33 years, as little as that may have been worth.

The TAL actually takes specific steps toward its own long term survival. If indeed the voters of three provinces do reject a permanent draft by 2/3 , new elections would be held. All this could occur indefinite number of times with a year, and possibly 18 months between elections. The point is that for the duration of the whole process Iraq remains under the TAL (art. 61e). The reason why the Kurds are protected by this system is because the TAL already gives them strong federal and provincial powers. The Sunnis could remain a disenfranchised and insular minority however if their participation were reduced to a periodic irrelevant vote on a permanent constitutional draft that noone takes seriously.

Finally, Leslie Gelb’s suggestion (“The Lesson of 1787” NY Times February 2) that Sunni representation could be guaranteed by a constitutional convention à l’Americaine overshoots the mark in the opposite direction. He does not seem to realize that a convention that could write the proud words “We the people…” and was able to commit and get away with fundamental illegalities with respect to its convener, the Confederation Congress (writing a new constitution instead of amending the old one, dramatically changing the ratification rule) is a poor model to follow in Iraq after a popular election. It points not to viable compromise but to the conflict of two models of representation, one based on one person one vote, the other on ethnicities. The outcome is more likely to be conflictual dual power rather than historical compromise. No, the parity among groups should be established in a constitution writing expert committee of the new National Assembly, gaining its legitimacy first and foremost from the vote that Sistani was able to achieve in the face of American resistance and world skepticism. The Shi’a should be asked to compromise, but not to surrender all the fruits of their likely victory.

Andrew Arato
Professor
The New School University

Marine General's Idea of Fun

Marine Lt. General James Mattis said Thursday

' "Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot. ... It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you, I like brawling." He added, "You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." '

T.E. Lawrence, "Lawrence of Arabia," was tortured and almost driven mad when he realized he got a thrill from shooting a man dead. His sadistic pleasure in killing Ottoman troops in Syria seems to have been wrought up with his rape by an Ottoman officer who thought him a Circassian Jordanian rather than a British secret agent. At one point he writes in Seven Pillars of Wisdom about how beautiful the dead Ottoman soldiers looked in the moonlight, lined up straight, after a battle.

One of the reasons that the Neoconservatives are wrong that unilateral war can be used for good, for spreading democracy, is that war brings out the worst in human beings, making some of them sadists and racists. Sometimes it is necessary to fight a war to defend oneself. An elective war is always a mistake. It twists one's own society, and someone else's as well.

Just as few priests are pedophiles, few soldiers are sadists. Mattis has brought dishonor on the US Marine Corps with his words. Killing is never appropriately called "fun." I think he should resign.

I'm on the road and haven't seen how the Arab satellite television channels are covering this one. But it isn't hard to imagine. The US military was popular in Iraq in spring of 2003. It isn't any more. Attitudes like those of Mattis are part of the reason for the change.

Karl Rove's Memo to Bush on the Middle East

Note to the humorless: Satire Warning

M E M O

From: Karl Rove
To: W.
Re: State of the Union and the Middle East

Problem: The big steps toward open parliamentary elections in the Arab world have happened in Morocco, Jordan, Yemen and Bahrain. We didn't have much to do with this. And they were actually way more democratic and less problematic elections than the ones we just pulled off in Iraq. What was that? I hear they didn't know the names of the candidates! (I kind of like it. Imagine how much easier it would have been to sell a Republican president in 2000 if we hadn't had to say who he was. No offense.)

Solution: You could mention Morocco, Jordan and Bahrain with some sort of heavy hint that we were behind it all. Taking credit for local developments that we paint as positive is cost-free. It is not as if Abdullah II is exactly going to complain. And we won't mention about how they still have that secret police.

Problem: We depend heavily on the Saudis, who run an absolute monarchy, and on General Musharraf in Pakistan, who refuses to take off his uniform even though he insists he's a president, now. Some people might think that's out of line with our
"democratization" policy. I have to remind you again, W., that policy is only for the regimes we don't like. The others can stay like they are. The scare quotes are there for a reason.

Solution: Praise them for arresting al-Qaeda operatives. It has the advantage of being true. Hell, the Pakistanis have arrested far more of those guys, with FBI help, than Rumsfeld ever did. The Saudis only got down to business when al-Qaeda started trying to kill the princes, but better late than never.

Problem: We really want to take out the mullas in Iran. But we don't have anything on them. They were cooperative in Afghanistan and Iraq. They haven't done anything to us for years. They haven't been involved in terrorism for years, either. The Hezbollah thing in southern Lebanon was mostly just a struggle to get the Israelis back off Lebanese territory. We don't have any proof they have a nuclear weapons program.

Solution: This one is easy. We've already proved with Iraq that you can just hint around or lie about a regime that the public doesn't like, and there are no bad consequences. So just tell them that Iran is the major sponsor of terrorism in the Middle East and that the Iranians are all busy concocting nukes in their basements with their cuisinarts. Nobody will ask "what terrorism, exactly?" or "what proof do you have about a weapons program?" No one will even bring up our own reliance on the terrorist group, Mojahedin-e Khalq, which was hand in glove with Saddam and has killed hundreds of innocents with bombs. MEK is giving us excellent reports on the Iranian nukes. We haven't had a source this good since Ahmad Chalabi. If we don't mention them, nobody else will.

Problem: During the past few years, Sharon gratuitously destroyed a lot of police stations and other security infrastructure in the Occupied territories and now we're going to have to pick up the bill for them. It's like having a hyperactive five-year-old in a crystal shop, and we're liable for everything he breaks. You'd think the Israelis, who have a per capita income of $17,000 a year, could pay for their own sprees of destruction.

Solution: Tell the American public that we are giving $350 million to the Palestinians for democratization and to help out that nice Mahmoud Abbas. Isn't he an Abu Something, too? Forget it, they're all Abus. It will confuse the public if you bring it up. Anyway, we won't mention we're cleaning up Sharon's mess, and nobody else will.

Oh, and remind them about that crisis in Social Security. I'm working on inventing some other crises. I love it. Tell them there's a crisis and they'd let you sell their grandchildren into slavery. A crisis in social security. That's rich. Wait till I tell you about the next one.

Oh, and W. Try to give them the impression you've done something about those CEO cronies of yours that stole the public's investments and retirement accounts to the tune of billions. Everyone knows we put Martha away. Tell her again I'm sorry about that when you talk to her in April. But it was either someone high profile like her or Ken Lay, and Ken plays too good a game of golf to let him disappear for years behind bars.

Guerrillas Kill 11 as Mosul & Ninevah Demonstrate

Security problems are reemerging as traffic gets back to normal. Al-Zaman says that Tuesday and Wednesday 11 persons were killed in Baghdad, including 8 policemen and army troops.

Iraqi officials admitted Wednesday that the election held on Sunday was flawed. Wire services also report an assassination attempt in the holy city of Najaf on Shaikh Khaled Numani, an official of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. SCIRI is part of the United Iraqi Alliance, the largely Shiite list that is likely to dominate parliament. A SCIRI official revealed that its favored candidates for Prime Minister are Adil Abdul Mahdi (currently the pro-free market ex-Maoist Finance Minister), Hussein Shahristani (a nuclear scientist close to Sistani) and Ibrahim Jaafari (leader of the al-Dawa Party that seeks a lay Islamic Republic).

Nancy Youssef reports from Iraq that one motive for the good turnout in places like Najaf was the hope that a new provincial assembly could finally get the electricity turned on.

Az-Zaman reports that there were demonstrations again on Wednesday in Mosul and in the towns and villages of Ninevah province by voters who had been denied the ability to vote becaus the ballot boxes did not arrive in time or polling stations did no open out of security concerns. Where people in Mosul did vote, they seem to have favored the "Iraqis" list of interim president Ghazi al-Yawir, the Democratic Independents, and the Democratic Bloc.

Meanwhile, the police chief in Mosul went on television to deliver a tough warning that people in the city had 15 days to turn in their arms. Mosul's security collapse in the wake of the Fallujah campaign last November, when 4,000 police resigned in the face of a series of guerrilla attacks in the city. US troops had to essentially occupy the city, often with fierce firefights and air strikes. On Tuesday, Iraq troops began replacing American ones in accordance with a plan earlier worked out. These are part of a force of 2500 Iraqi soldiers who have been spread through the city.

An election official has said that only about a third of Iraq's ballot boxes have been sent, after being counted in the provinces, to the electoral commission in Baghdad for a final official count and double-checking. He said that only about 11,000 ballots have been finally certified, mostly from the Shiite Muthanna province in the south.

The Sunni "Association of Muslim Scholars, mostly hardline Sunni clerics, continued their denunciation of the newly elected parliament as illegitimate. They said it did not have the authority to craft a constitution or to make trade and other agreements.
Opinion polls suggest that AMS leaders like Hareth al-Dhari are among the more popular politicians among Sunni Arabs.

The Bombing

I don't always agree with Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist in Iraq. I don't think the US used chemical weapons at Fallujah, and I don't think people were coerced to vote via their food ration cards. But Dahr's report on the US bombing campaign on civilian neighborhoods in Iraqi cities, which the US media completely ignore, is compelling and very much worth reading. Especially since the mainstream media in the US seems to me to be unable to cover more than one Iraq story at once, or to evince more than one mood at once. So when the Abu Ghraib torture scandal broke last spring, or when the thousandth US soldier was killed, we got the gloomy Bad Iraq. This week we get the successful-elections Good Iraq. But for people in Ramadi, the bombs keep falling no matter what the spin is on Iraq in New York and Washington that week.

Religious Shiites claim Victory

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim claimed victory in the Sunday elections for the United Iraqi Alliance, the coalition of religious Shiite parties he leads. And this is what the winners, if they are winners, think of the US:

' "No one welcomes the foreign troops in Iraq. We believe in the ability of Iraqis to run their own issues, including the security issue," Mr Hakim said. "Of course this issue could be brought up by the new government." '

The idea that the revolutionary Shiite al-Dawa Party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Badr Organization (trained by the Iranian revolutionary guards), all of them with close ties to Tehran, would welcome a permanent US military presence in Iraq was always a chimera. Most Shiites who voted on Sunday thought they were voting for an end to US hegemony in their country. This is why it is so bizarre that the US Right is interpreting the elections as a victory for the Bush administration.

Interim President Ghazi al-Yawir expressed hope that a substantial withdrawal of Coalition troops could be effected by the end of 2005, and this hope seems widely shared in Iraq. Al-Yawir cautioned that it would be unwise for US forces to just up and leave immediately, given the chaos in the country, and the Western press often latched on to this part of his statement rather than his call for withdrawal by the end of the year. That is, it might on the surface look as though al-Hakim and al-Yawir are in disagreement, but they probably are not.

Interim Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan also said that it was too soon for US troops to pull out. But Shaalan is unlikely to be powerful in the new government, and it probably isn't important what he says.

Complaints continued Tuesday that substantial numbers of Iraqis had been excluded from voting because of a shortage of ballots. In the north, bitter Chaldean Christians charged that the Kurdish leadership deliberately kept ballots from reaching them.

The UIA spokesmen are saying in some provinces they got 90 percent of the vote, and believe that they will gain about half the seats in the 275-member parliament, or 138. They would have needed two-thirds, or 182 seats, to dispense with any coalition partner inside parliament in forming the next government.

The Kurds believe that they actually did better than did the list of interim prime minister Iyad Allawi, and will garner about 65 seats, or nearly a quarter. Al-Hayat reported that interim Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, a Kurd, even predicted that the Kurds would take as many as 75 seats. "This," he said, "is what we always wanted." The Kurds have long been marginalized in Iraqi politics.

It should be noted that the Kurds will have done unusually well because the Sunni Arab vote was light, Because the election was held on a proportional basis, if the 20 percent of the population that is Sunni Arab stayed home, they actually increased the percentages gained by the Shiites and Kurds.

There is already speculation about what blocs might emerge in the new parliament. One possibility is an alliance between the Kurds and the United Iraqi Alliance. Such an alliance would be difficult, since the relatively secular-minded Kurds won't be enthusiastic about the imposition of religious law, something the UIA will certainly want. On the other hand, if the Kurds can provide the votes to form a government, they would be in a good position to gain most of their demands for a loose federalism and a consolidated Kurdistan province.

Another possibility would be for the Kurds to join the Allawi list, that of al-Yawir, and that of Adnan Pachachi to form a sort of secular/Sunni bloc. If the UIA holds together, however, it would still have the best chance of forming a government, by picking up several small parties. The secular-Sunni bloc would need all the small parties plus the defection of some parties in the 11-party UIA coalition to form a government. At the moment, it seems an unlikely scenario and would probably produce a very unstable government. A UIA/Kurdish alliance would be far more stable and powerful as a government, and might be a good way of moderating the extremes in both groups. But it would further marginalize the previously dominant Sunni Arabs, many of whom are already in violent opposition to the new political order.

One scenario has Iyad Allawi's party getting over a third of the vote, allowing him to block the formation of a presidential council unless he is promised the prime ministership. Initial reporting of the election results, which is admittedly still vague, however, does not suggest that Allawi's list did that well.

3 Marines Killed, 2 Wounded

Violent clashes broke out Tuesday into early Wednesday between guerrillas and US Marines in the vicinity of Fallujah, according to LBC (Lebanese satellite television news).

Al-Jazeerah is reporting US airstrikes on Ramadi, with deaths of civilians.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that two explosions in Samarra killed 5 persons and wounded 6.

LBC also reported that an assassination attempt against Minister of Justice Malik Dohan Hasan left his driver dead, but failed to strike the minister. It was the second attempt on his life in the past two weeks.

Guerrillas in Babil province killed three US Marines and wounded two on Monday. [The source misreads Babil as Irbil, but this is an error.] One can only speculate that these were radical fundamentalists of the Ansar al-Islam sort, still operating in the north.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat says that two Kurdish troops were killed in Irbil on Tuesday as they attempted to defuse a roadside bomb.

Meanwhile, a branch of the National Islamic Resistance claimed responsibility for shooting down a British troop transport on Sunday, which killed 10. The crash is still being investigated.

Election Fallout

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat: The Association of Muslims Scholars, a hardline Sunni clerical group, announced that it rejects the legitimacy of the elections, insofar as they were conducted under the shadow of occupation. AMS spokesman Umar Raghib disputed the reports of a high election turnout, especially in Sunni Arab areas. He said that turnout was low in Ramadi, Mosul and elsewhere. He maintained that "the popular base for the popular rejection of the Occupation is expanding."

Az-Zaman reports that 150,000 angry Iraqi Christians in Ninevah Province came out to protest on Monday. The ballot boxes arrived in their areas too late on Sunday, and they say they were promised that they could vote until 10 am Monday to give them time to cast the ballots. In the end, however, the Electoral Commission declined to make an exception for them, and they just won't get to vote. Iraqi Christians have been the victims of terrorist attacks, many have emigrated, and many fear Kurdish control over their regions.

Turkmen and other groups in Mosul also bitterly complained that often ballot boxes did not arrive in time, or at all, depriving thousands of the franchise.

The Turkish government is clearly very worried about possible Kurdish control of the oil city of Kirkuk.

Whether the Bush administration can take a hint and begin withdrawing its troops from Iraq when a new, sovereign parliament is seated, the coalition of the willing is not willing to overstay its welcome. Hungary has already decamped, and Holland, the Ukraine, Poland and others are drawing down their troops or leaving altogether.

I suggested on the Lehrer News Hour on Monday that now would be a good time for the Coalition forces to simply withdraw from Basra province. There don't seem to me to be the kind of violent incidents in Basra that require the British presence. Surely the Iraqi forces could deal with it, especially since the Shiites of the south are likely to be loyal to an elected government blessed by Grand Ayatollah Sistani. If foreign troops were removed from Basra, it would be an important step toward full resumption of sovereignty by Iraq.

My article on Iraqi politics after the elections, "The Shiite Earthquake", is up at Salon.com.

Radical Islamist violence is spilling over into Kuwait. This is a worrisome development. There are rumors that the guerrillas in Iraq are selling their munitions abroad, and one wonders if the turmoil in the Sunni Arab areas of Iraq is beginning to spill over onto neighbors.

More comments on the election by me in an interview with David Crumm of the Detroit Free Press.

Robin Wright of the Washington Post, among American journalism's canniest observers of the Middle East scene, covers the controversy over Bush's statement on the Iraq elections. She kindly quoted me:

' Analysts also noted that the Bush administration initially resisted the idea of holding elections this soon and only succumbed under pressure from Iraq's most powerful cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. The original plan, designed by then-U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer, was a complicated formula of regional caucuses to select a national government, which would write a constitution, and then hold the elections. "It was Sistani who demanded one-person, one-vote elections. So to the extent it's a victory, it's a victory for Iraqis. The Americans were maneuvered into having to go along with it," said Juan Cole, an Iraq expert at the University of Michigan. '

I'm told Paul Begala quoted the passage on Crossfire. I only bring it up because I think this sort of episode shows the way information is circulating between the blogging world and traditional media.

Speaking of various media, gluttons for punishment can find my recent appearance on C-Span here on the Web.

Apparently I even have views on Squarepants Spongebob, who I am sure is straight.

Guest Editorial: Fisher on Perle and Iran

THE PRINCE OF WONDERLAND

By William Fisher

Good news! The Prince of Darkness has morphed into The Prince of Peace.

Having fixed Iraq, Richard Perle is now ready to advise us on Iran. The former Assistant Defense Secretary in the Reagan Administration, and Neocon darling, appeared on a recent Charlie Rose show on PBS, following his nemesis, Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker magazine.

When Perle appeared, Rose quoted Hersh: “The Neocons believe that if we take out Iranian nuke sites with precision airstrikes, the people will rise up and overthrow the mullahs.”

Perle demurred.

He said: “Before we face war, there are things we can do today. Tens of millions of people are unhappy with Iran’s theocracy. We should be providing material support to the opposition…Broadcasting…helping young Iranians who want to publish…helping students, trade unions…(This could) bring about regime change by Iranians for Iranians…(and it) could well take out the Mullahs…We should spread the demand for good governance.”

Perle seemed eager to assign blame for the Iraqi occupation, which he said is "sadly misguided." The US "should have turned over Iraq to the Iraqis immediately" following Saddam's overthrow. We "should have been working with Iraqis" to expedite a quick and bloodless regime change.” He added, “Failed military actions often can lead to destructive occupations.”

Excuse me, but isn’t “working with” Iraqis how we found Ahmed Chalabi?

Perle believes the US "can't exclude the possibility of military action elsewhere in the Middle East," he said, adding, “The Middle East is producing the vast amount of terrorists in the world. " He focused specifically on Syria, which he said is funding and encouraging the insurgency in Iraq.

Perle suggested that an Iraqi Shia government would be Iran’s rival -- not its ally -- despite their religious, ethnic, and cultural similarities. His reasoning was that the Iraqi government will have been elected legitimately.

The jury on the Iraqi government, some would argue, is still out.

But regardless of how our Iraq adventure turns out, one has to feel a sense of profound loss: The Prince of Darkness has become the Prince of Peace. Gone is the man who gave us “If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war... our children will sing great songs about us years from now.”

Or is he?

A few years ago, many of those who now serve George W Bush launched their “Project for the New American Century (PNAC)”. Its stars included names like Elliott Abrams, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, James Woolsey, John Bolton, Douglas Feith and, of course, Perle. Its ideology was the proactive assertion of American power in the world. It believed that the kind of rhetoric we heard in the President’s inaugural address was for real.

The PNAC said what America needed was "a new Pearl Harbor.” A wake-up call to arms and manifest destiny. They wrote, they spoke, they circulated policy papers, they lobbied the corridors of Washington power. And absent 9/11, they might all just be doing the same old things. But Usama Bin Laden was the greatest gift the neocons ever got.

Then came Iraq.

But Iraq was far from Perle’s first bout with controversy -- though it was probably his biggest. His career has been marked by big ups and big downs. Among them:

He is credited with bringing to the Pentagon a number of staunchly pro-Israel activists who dramatically increased weapons sales to Israel.

In 1996, he simultaneously advised both the Dole campaign in the United States and the Netanyahu campaign in Israel.

He was the principal author of a widely circulated policy paper that advised Netanyahu to cancel the Oslo accords concluded with the Palestinians.

During the Camp David negotiations, Perle advised the Israeli delegation to prepare to leave to keep it from appearing to be a pawn of Vice President Gore's campaign. Perle's statements drew a harsh rebuke from the White House, which criticized him for injecting politics into international diplomacy. The Bush camp quickly disavowed the remarks, claiming that Perle had been 'speaking for himself.'

In an article he wrote while he was a member of Donald Rumsfeld’s Defense Policy Board, he lauded the Pentagon plan to lease tankers from the Boeing Company but failed to disclose that Boeing was a major investor in his venture capital company. "It takes a special government green-eyeshade mentality to miss the urgency of the tanker requirement," Perle and a coauthor wrote in the Aug. 14 article in the Wall Street Journal.

These and other appearances of conflicts of interest resulted in his resigning the chairmanship of the Pentagon advisory group, but he remained a member until he fell off the radar just before the 2004 presidential campaign.

Despite these ups and downs, don’t count Perle out. He’s still with us, looking for another Pearl Harbor. Maybe it will happen in Tehran.

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William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the Middle East for the US State Department and the US Agency for International Development, and served in the international affairs area in the Kennedy administration.