Shahristani Denounces ex-Baath Sunnis in Parliament

Child malnutrition has soared in Iraq under the Americans, according to a former Official.

Al-Zaman: Hussein Shahristani, a prominent member of the United Iraqi Alliance, affirmed that his bloc in parliament would work to prevent any former members of the Baath Party from filling positions in the new government. He said that former Baaathists and former members of parliament under Saddam Hussein have gotten into the new parliament via the list of Iyad Allawi, and that they are striving to disrupt the political process and find a way to grab the post of speaker of parliament. He added, "If the candidate is not accepted, the UIA will impose a candidate for speaker." He added, "The candidate must be an elected member of the parliament" and "the number of members [from the Sunni Arab minority] is small. They are either former Baathists or former members of the parliaments formed under the shadow of Saddam's regime." He affirmed, "We are not appointing persons at this stage, but all of them are on the Iraqiya list. There are a number of Baathists on that list, which is unacceptable to the UIA."

The Iraqiya list of Iyad Allawi has nominated Adnan Janabi for the speaker post, but he was rejected by the Shiite religious parties because of his family's Baath Party connections. Allawi walked out of the parliament meeting on Tuesday as a result. I think he suddenly realized that his project of rehabilitating selected former Baathists as promoters of secularism was in big trouble. The UIA has some 53 percent of the seats in parliament and Shahristani is now making it clear that the Shiite religious parties are simply not going to accept ex-Baathists in high posts.

Mishaan Juburi, another Sunni in parliament, has now put himself forward for the speaker post, accornding to Ash-Sharq al-Awsat.

I may be over-reacting, but there seems to me a threat implicit in Shahristani's statement that some of the Baathists on Allawi's list might be denied their seats on parliament. If that was his implication, things could get very ugly.

The Secretary-General of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, said Wednesday that Iraq in its current condition "cannot constitute a model for any Arab country" in the field of democracy. He criticized the current negotiations for the formation of a new Iraqi government on the basis of sect and ethnicity.

Guerrillas are still attempting to discrupt the Shiite religious pilgrimage by shooting down the pilgrims in Babil province south of Baghdad.

Provincial Council Gives Najaf Mayor Prerogative to Appoint Police Chief

Al-Zaman: The governing council of Najaf province charged Najaf mayor As`ad Abu Kalal (Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq or SCIRI) with the responsibility for the police force in the city, so as to resolve the disputes about who should be police chief. The federal Interior Ministry had appointed Col. Hilal Abdullah Rasan as police chief, but his predecessor, Col Ghalib al-Jazaeri, refuses to step down.

Mayor Abu Kalal complained bitterly against the Ministry of Interior for having intervened in local affairs with this appointment. The ministry, he said, "does not know the conditions of what is happening in Najaf."

The Interior Minister is Falah al-Naqib, a Sunni from Samarra whose father had served Saddam until he defected in the late 1970s. This slap at the face of the central government by SCIRI in Najaf may be a calculated rebuff to al-Naqib.

As the gridlock at the federal level continues, we probably can expect to see a lot of decisions taken at the local level rather than nationally. This development would help SCIRI, which holds 8 of the 11 southern provinces.

Parliament Fiasco

Mortar shells landed in the green zone near parliament at one point during its meeting on Tuesday, emptying the room briefly of frantic reporters, according to al-Hayat. The wrangling over cabinet posts continued, with the petroleum ministry coveted by both Shiites and Kurds.

The United Iraqi Alliance rejected as candidate for speaker of the house a parliamentarian on Allawi's Iraqiya list, Janabi, on the grounds that his brother had worked closely with Saddam. This blackballing of a politician for links to the old regime infuriated Iyad Allawi, who stalked out of the building. He was followed by the major Sunni politician in the talks, Ghazi al-Yawir. No speaker of the house was chosen.

There are behind the scenes maneuverings to dump Ibrahim Jaafari as prime minister. Ahmad Chalabi seems to be making another push to be prime minister himself, supported by the Kurds and by dissidents in the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance. If the religious Shiites are cheated of their proper role in government, now that they have over 50 percent of seats, there is danger of a popular revolt.

Part of the governing council in Kirkuk walked out of the meeting today in protest at the high-handed way the Kurdish majority was running it.

UPI is rightly anxious at the failure of Iraq's politicians to form a government. The mood in the street is turning ugly. Quotes:

' Iraqi voters aren't happy.They don't care that some of the biggest political changes ever to happen in their lifetime are going on in their country. All they know is that the electricity still is off for hours every day, the water doesn't always flow out of the faucets, there are still long gas queues at the stations, and the situation still seems pretty lawless in the streets. "We're very disappointed," said Hathem Hassan Thani, 31, a political science graduate student at Baghdad University."Some personalities are trying to make the political operation fail, and they don't want to give positions to the Sunni Muslims."

and here is the really alarming one:

The Iraqi people are very itchy.The street is very nervous," said Saad Jawar Qindeel, a spokesman for the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of two dominant religious-based parties that won the United Iraqi Alliance ticket."There's a lot of talk of people ready to protest."

Despite all the talk of draw-downs and tipping points, the guerrillas are in fact inflicting substantial attrition on our Abrams tanks. The guerrillas in Afghanistan had their biggest successes against the Soviets when they learned out to take out the Soviet tanks, so this news is pretty scarey.

Likewise, that the Americans have had to double the number of arrestees in the Iraqi prisons in the past five months is another bad sign. (Prisoners are now 10,400). It looks as thought he guerrillas are growing in sophistication and are succeeding in recruiting increased numbers of Iraqis.

Car Bomb Targeting Shiites Kills 7, Wounds 9

The war in Iraq is the most important problem facing the US in the eyes of the American public, according to a recent poll. Iraq is more important than the economy, terrorism or social security. You'd think the US media and the Democratic Party could take a hint and foreground Iraq. But they are letting it fade . . .

At least 18 persons were wounded by a car bombing in the northern oil city of Kirkuk early on Tuesday.

Shiite pilgrims were targeted by a suicide bomber on Monday. Reuters reports: "Police in Iskandariya, south of Baghdad, said the car bomber struck on a road leading toward Kerbala, a sacred Shi'ite city where this week hundreds of thousands of pilgrims will mark Arbain, an annual mourning ceremony." The bomb killed 7 and wounded 9.

Another suicide bomber on a bicycle blew up a police car and killed two policemen, also on the road from Baghdad to Karbala.

In southwest Baghad, guerrillas killed a police colonel. In Najaf, US troops at a checkpoint accidentally shot down a high police officer.

Some 8 corpses of police officers were found dead in southern Tikrit, according to al-Jazeerah.

The violence on Monday had a dangerous undertone of sectarian strife.

Ghazi al-Yawir withdrew his name from consideration as speaker of the Iraqi parliament, setting off a scramble to find a Sunni Arab alternative.

Negotiations drag on about who gets what cabinet post, but no new government is in sight as the parliament plans a second largely ceremonial meeting on Tuesday.

The parliament's main task is to draft a new Iraqi constitution by an August 15 deadline, wich it very obviously will not meet.

Robert Worth reports that Shaikh Hareth al-Dhari of the Association of Muslim Scholars continues to reject Sunni Arab participation in the government as long as the US does not set a precise timetable for withdrawal from the country.

The Telegraph raises similar issues, but seems to me to answer them more pessimistically: "If Mr Pachachi is right, the development could signal a turning point in Iraq's insurgency, which is dominated by Sunni Arabs. But Sunni scholars were quick to deny a change of heart. "The elections have changed nothing," said Omar Ghalib, a member of the scholars. "It was an American rather than an Iraqi process." He reiterated a demand for a two-year timetable for the withdrawal of American troops as a condition for not calling for a fresh boycott ahead of the December polls. '

Florida Funeral Director Buries Universities

Rep. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, has introduced a Horowitz-inspired so-called Academic Freedom Bill of Rights in the Florida State legislature. In our Orwellian world, this is actually a bill to destroy academic freedom and take away rights of free speech on campus. Baxley is a funeral director, and apparently he wants to bury higher education in this country along with his other clients.

"The bill sets a statewide standard that students cannot be punished for professing beliefs with which their professors disagree. Professors would also be advised to teach alternative “serious academic theories” that may disagree with their personal views.

According to a legislative staff analysis of the bill, the law would give students who think their beliefs are not being respected legal standing to sue professors and universities.

Students who believe their professor is singling them out for “public ridicule” – for instance, when professors use the Socratic method to force students to explain their theories in class – would also be given the right to sue.

“Some professors say, ‘Evolution is a fact. I don’t want to hear about Intelligent Design (a creationist theory), and if you don’t like it, there’s the door,’” Baxley said, citing one example when he thought a student should sue."

Let me explain some things to Representative Baxley, and to do so I suggest we look at how well he is doing his job.

The per capita income in the United States is $37,800.

Florida's per capita income in 2003 was $27,610.

And what of Ocala, for which Mr. Baxley supposedly is working? "The per capita income for the city is $18,021. 18.1% of the population and 13.2% of families are below the poverty line. Out of the total population, 28.6% of those under the age of 18 and 9.8% of those 65 and older are living below the poverty line."

Hmmm. Ocala isn't doing very well. Its people are making about half what Americans generally do, and quite a few of them are dirt poor. I wonder if Baxley has done anything lately for the 18 percent of his constituents who are doomed to live below the poverty line? Or, indeed, has he provided jobs and income to his hardworking constituents. If I were them, I'd find a state representative who would work hard to lift people out of their difficult circumstances, instead of one who seems to want to keep people mired in ignorance and poverty.

So if Baxley, who desperately needed to take Biology 101 at Florida State (which should consider revoking his BA), succeeded in his little ploy, what will likely ensue?

If I were Baxley I wouldn't stand anywhere near I-95 north of Gainesville, since he's likely to get run over by the rush of professors fleeing the state at 95 miles an hour. Post-secondary teachers already suffer from low salaries and poor working conditions compared to their peers who go into the professions. The only trade-off they get is that academics have more control over their lives and the time to research and teach things they are interested in. Given a choice between being made Baxley's slaves and braving hurricanes in Florida or living in a state that respects its thinkers, Florida's educators will pour out of the state faster than a 'gator chasing a fat, balding funeral director through the swamps.

Baxley may be happier without any of those intell-Ec-tu-al riffraff cluttering up his state. But maybe his constituents won't be. Knowledge workers, you see, are the geese that lay the golden eggs. Post-secondary teachers are the ones who train the people who found computer software, biotechnology and other companies key to the twenty-first century economy. They also train society's managers and middle managers. The more high-powered academics you have in your state, the wealthier your state will be.

Ocala, and Florida more generally, look to me like they would benefit from some biotech companies. But you know what? That requires being good in a little thing called biology. Baxley clearly can't think straight on that subject, being blinded by fanaticism. And he wants to make Florida inhospitable to high-powered biologists. The people of Florida, and more specifically Ocala, should give some thought to whether they really want this loud-mouthed ignoramus to plunge them into poverty and make them mule drivers and ditch diggers by his destruction of education in the state.

In fact, Ocala has a Central Florida Community College where that dangerous subject of science is actually taught. Want to make a bet that Baxley has never done anything in the legislature to try to expand it into a four-year college so that some of his constituents could get their education without having to leave town or going to a private university? Wouldn't such an expansion create a multiplier effect, helping with Marion County's poverty? Instead of expanding education for the people he says he is serving, Baxley is trying to destroy the state's universities.

All this is without regard to the practical effects of this horse manure on our intellectual environment on campuses. If Baxley's bill passes, professors who teach the history of the Holocaust will just have to give A's to students who deny it ever happened, I guess.

Finally, the post-secondary educators in Florida might just form a Political Action Committee similar to the one in Alabama. They might reach out to the faculty in the medical schools, who are mysteriously attached to the academic study of biology, and who are not without resources. Perhaps they will decide to channel large sums to Baxley's opponents in the next election, whether a Republican challenger or a rival from another party. You wonder if educators should let a thing like this be forgotten, or just lie down and let themselves be walked all over by paleontologically-challenged funeral directors.

Dutchess Community College Stands up for Academic Freedom

More on the subject from a different state (this thing is spreading like the Black Plague).

"Professional Staff Organization
Dutchess Community College
24 March 2005

In response to the “Academic Bill of Rights” (ABOR), currently under consideration by SUNY administration, the Professional Staff Organization (PSO) of Dutchess Community College (DCC) hereby ASSERTS:

that DCC has already stated its commitment to academic freedom in clear and unambiguous terms;

that the ABOR, which purports to promote intellectual diversity, actually threatens the tradition of academic freedom at DCC;

that the ABOR’s implication that knowledge is “unsettled” in most academic disciplines except for the sciences is dubious, at best;

that the ABOR distorts the principle of academic freedom by erroneously extending all of its protections to students;

that DCC students are already protected from racial, religious, and sex discrimination under applicable federal and state law;

that in addition to these legal safeguards, DCC students enjoy other rights and privileges pursuant to the policies of the College, including a grade appeal procedure;

that by setting narrow limitations on what teachers may consider when grading student work, the ABOR makes it harder for teachers to maintain academic standards;

that the vagueness of ABOR’s language appears to invite the imposition of outside political pressures on teachers;

that the ABOR would subject many of the College’s activities—including the selection of public speakers, formation of curricula, and hiring and promotion of employees—to external, non-academic standards;

that the intent of the ABOR appears to be to expose faculty and staff to civil action from those who claim to be victims of discrimination because of their “political beliefs”; and finally,

that the combined threat of lawsuits and external political pressure will have a chilling effect on the presentation of controversial topics in DCC classrooms.

Therefore, it is RESOLVED:

that the PSO rejects the proposed “Academic Bill of Rights” and urges SUNY to do the same; and

that the PSO remains unwaveringly committed to the principle of academic freedom, as defined in its public documents. "

Hariri Likely Killed by Truck Bomb

The truck, parts of which the UN had alleged were planted by the Syrian government has been identified in a video broadcast by al-Arabiya.

This discovery bolsters the case for Hariri's death having been the work of a suicide bomber, Abu Adas, a radical Muslim who had travelled in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and may have had links to Ansar al-Islam and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

If Abu Adas did blow up the van and kill Hariri, and if he was connect to Ansar al-Islam, it would be an indication that Bush's Iraq misadventure is destabilizing Iraq's neighbors, and not in a good way.

Syria itself remains a suspect, of course. But the urban legend that there was no truck bombing and that the Syrian secret police set up a bomb in the sewers, seems less likely now.

No Government and 16 Dead

US Generals revealed on Sunday that a) guerrillas in Iraq are able to keep the number of attacks at about 60 a day and b) that the proportion of fighters that is foreign jihadis has increased somewhat in the past few months. (The proportion seems to have been about 5 percent through last fall). The CIA is worried that the jihadis are getting training in Iraq that will allow them to contribute to destabilizing the Middle East and might impel them to attack the United States, as the veterans of the Reagan Afghanistan Jihad did.

By the way, if there are 60 attacks a day, why do I only read about 7 or 8 of them?

A different kind of violence, social violence, broke out on Sunday. About 50 building guards demonstrated outside the ministry of Science and Technology, protesting that they had not been paid their salaries in full. Bodyguards for the minister, Rashad Mandan Omar, shot into the crowd and killed one.

Generally, I'd say you want to avoid killing the people who guard your building if you are a cabinet minister in Iraq (many ministers have had assassination attempts on their lives). In fact, I'd say if you made sure anyone was paid, it should be the guards outside your building. (Does this mean the Iraqi government is broke, having been badly hurt by oil pipeline sabotage?)

This incident shows how horrible and jumpy the atmosphere is in Iraq.

Guerrillas killed 16 persons in Iraq on Sunday, including three members of the Badr Corps in a drive-by shooting at Baquba. The Badr Corps is the paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), a Shiite party that is one of two big winners in the recent parliamentary elections. Badr itself ran on the United Iraqi Alliance slate as a political party, the Badr Organization.

Since SCIRI won the recent elections, it has been talking about integrating Badr into the Iraqi police and military, and about purging the police, army and secret police of Baath sympathizers and ex-Baathists. The US may be getting used to cooperating with Badr (early on they tried to close it down but failed), since it clearly is going to be a factor in the new Iraq. My guess is that Badr is providing some of the good intelligence that has allowed a number of successful operations against Sunni guerrillas, and that this assassination was payback.

There was also significant violence in Basra in the far south, and in Tel Afar in the Turkmen north, Dhuluiyyah and Balad, mostly attacks by guerrillas on police and Iraqi military.

There seems little likelihood of a government being formed before the beginning of April. Two sticking points in the negotiations are the role of Islam in the new government and who gets the ministry of petroleum. The Kurds want it, as a way of getting hold of the city of Kirkuk, which they covet. The Shiites want it, because they have the huge Rumaila oil field in the south. In fact, there have been several demonstrations in Basra recently by the Rumaila oil rig workers demanding that the post go to a Shiite from the deep south. The director of the South Oil Co., which is theoretically government-owned, appears to just be doing as he pleases down in Basra without much consulting the "government" in Baghdad.

CBC reports that, "Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, who heads the Alliance, recently told an Iraqi TV station that "we will continue to work according to the directions and the advice of the religious authority," a transcript shows."

CBC adds, "Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the spiritual leader of the Shias and organizer of the Alliance, told a UN official on Sunday that he was not going to become involved in politics – except in crises."

So Abdul Aziz will be consulting Sistani regularly, but Sistani will only directly intervene if he feels a crisi has developed. As I have mentioned before, this role for Sistani sounds somewhat like that of a king in a contemporary Western constitutional monarchy.

Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post profiles SCIRI preacher Jalal al-Din Saghir of the Baratha Mosque in Baghdad. Shadid finds him full of a rhetoric of excess, a black and white view of the world, and a Shiite triumphalism that scares the Sunnis.

It was Saghir's election to parliament, as part of the United Iraqi Alliance slate, that Americans got all happy and excited about last January 30.

Richard Ingram on the current role of the British Army in the south of Iraq::
"According to Ms Philp, the town of Basra is today controlled by fanatical religious militias which disapprove of things like picnics. So what has happened to the British army which, we thought, was in charge? When one of the students appealed for help at the British military base he was told to 'go to the Iraqi authorities'. From this account, it appears that our army is confined to barracks waiting to be told what to do by a government that doesn't exist. That probably suits Mr Blair, as the last thing he wants is more British casualties hitting the headlines. But one wonders what the army thinks about it. "

The GoogleSmear as Political Tactic

The Google search has become so popular that prospective couples planning a date will google one another. Mark Levine, a historian at the University of California Irvine, tells the story of how a radio talk show host called him a liar because he referred to an incident that the host could not find on google. That is, if it isn't in google, it didn't happen. (Levine was able to retrieve the incident from Lexis Nexis, a restricted database).

It seems to me that David Horowitz and some far rightwing friends of his have hit upon a new way of discrediting a political opponent, which is the GoogleSmear. It is an easy maneuver for someone like Horowitz, who has extremely wealthy backers, to set up a web magazine that has a high profile and is indexed in google news. Then he just commissions persons to write up lies about people like me (leavened with innuendo and out-of-context quotes). Anyone googling me will likely come upon the smear profiles, and they can be passed around to journalists and politicians as though they were actual information.

Recently Steven Plaut of the University of Haifa, an Israeli defender of the terrorist groups around the late extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane, was commissioned by Horowitz (and probably others of that circle) to do yet another hatchet job on me, the second in just a few months. I replied to the earlier smear at my blog.

Plaut cited the earlier hatchet jobs and rightwing bloggers as authorities. (One defamation now becomes a "citation" for the next one!)

The GoogleSmear references a body of falsehoods. It creates a nexus of links that increase the chance that the calumny will come to the top of a google search.

Many thanks to Matthew Barganier for pointing out that Plaut just made up allegations against me, of having published an op-ed in the New York Times in which I am supposed to have praised the Syrian elections (?) and spoken against democracy. He must have been imbibing something illegal when he came up with that complete fantasy. Although Plaut at length removed the falsehoods from the page when repeatedly challenged, he did not apologize or issue a formal correction. Moreover, he posted the false allegation to a bulletin board under an assumed name (just to be sure that future GoogleSmears can reference the now-missing paragraph, elsewhere on the Web).

Thanks also to Justin Raimundo for his acerbic dissection of Plaut's tripe.

The GoogleSmear depends on subtle changes of wording that make the individual sound like an idiot. For instance, in one column, I wrote that "much of the Arab world has a formal peace treaty with Israel." Egyptians constitute about a third of the Arabs, and with Jordan account for some 75 million persons. Over a third of the Arab population would be "much", and the statement is perfectly correct. Moreover, the whole Arab League offered Israel a comprehensive peace only 2 years ago, which doesn't sound like they want to destroy Israel, as the Zionist Right keeps alleging. Anyway, in the GoogleSmear version, it is implied that I said that a "majority" of Arab "states" have a peace treaty with Israel, which is not true (though the way things are going, it may soon be. Oman, Qatar and others are threatening to break from the Arab League consensus, as Egypt and Jordan have already done).

The Zionist far right is also upset that I pointed out that Palestinian and Hizbullah terrorism had its roots in Israeli military occupation of other people's land. They argue that this thesis is invalidated by the military occupations that have not produced terrorism, as with Tibet in China.

But in fact the Chinese occupation of Xinjiang has produced some small terrorist movements. And the Chinese government certainly saw the Kampa revolt of 1959 to be a terrorist action. There are intervening variables in these matters, in any case. For instance, the Tibetan population was not socially mobilized (had low levels of literacy, urbanization, industrialization, modern communications, etc.), which reduced its organizational capacity.

Another stupid thing in Plaut's GoogleSmear (there are so many) is a typical 189 Fallacy argument. The Zionist Right maintains that you can't criticize Israeli violations of basic human rights and international law until you first criticize all the other 188 countries in the world. Plaut's variation is to bring up the Sudan. (There are lots of massacres, deaths and tragedies in the world that I don't have time to cover in my little blog; indeed, Iraq most often exhausts my time and energies all by itself.) As with the Zionist Right generally, he makes the mistake of racializing the Sudan problems, using anti-Semitic language accusing "Arabs" of killing thousands of "black Africans."

But the "Arabs" of the Sudan are black (some are brown or lighter shades of black, but not by any means all, and anyway so are e.g. Eritreans just to the south). The Sudanese "Arabs" just speak Arabic or identify with the Arabs. It isn't a matter of US-style race, which is based on color. Moreover, the people of Darfur are Muslims and many know Arabic. So the massacres in Darfur are not about "Arabs" versus "black Africans." They are between two groups of Muslim black Africans.





I defy anyone to tell me which is the "black African" and which the "Arab" Janjawid in these pictures.

The rightwing Zionists want to racialize the Sudan conflict in American terms, as "Arab" versus "black African" because they want to use it to play American domestic politics, and create a rift among African-Americans and Arab-Americans. Both of the latter face massive discrimination in contemporary society, and they should find ways of cooperating to counter it. What is happening in Darfur is horrible with regard to the loss of life and the displacement of persons, but the dispute is not about race. It is about political separatism and regionalism.

I am well aware that the GoogleSmear and other techniques of propaganda may well succeed. Horowitz and his minions are funded to the tune of millions, and I am just one lone individual. And, maybe it is even dangerous to tangle with someone who admires Kahane and his followers.

But as of September 11, I'm not going to stand by and let extremists of any stripe drag my country into danger, as the Likud Party is doing. Silence is not an option.

3 US Troops Killed
Ansar al-Islam Rounded Up

A car bomber managed to kill two US troops in Baghdad on Saturday. A Marine died fighting in Anbar province.

Iraqi security forces backed by the Americans also busted some cells of Ansar al-Sunna, a small terrorist group, in Baghdad, which had been planning bombings during an upcoming Shiite religious procession. Over 100 were arrested. Ansar al-Sunna has a background in the Ansar al-Islam terrorist group based in Mosul, which consisted of Kurdish and Arab returnees from the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan. The US deliberately avoided targetting this group in the spring of 2003, even though their coordinates were known. Some think the US left them alone because these terrorists were the closest obvious tie between Iraq and al-Qaeda and were symbolically important to the case for invading Iraq. If so, as the Ansar al-Sunna has morphed in the past two years, attracting many new recruits among Sunni Arabs, the chickens are coming home to roost.

BBC World Monitoring (Mar. 22) translates an account of the maneuvering over forming a government:

"Al-Mashriq publishes on the front page a 750-word follow-up report citing Salam al-Maliki, chairman of the Independent National Parliamentary Grouping, warning that unless the United Iraqi Alliance and the Kurdistan Coalition List conclude an agreement regarding the formation of the transitional government by the end of this week, his grouping will publicly announce to the Iraqi people the details and secrets of the ongoing negotiations between the various electoral lists. He indicates that "the US and some neighbouring countries are inciting the electoral lists against each other in order to foil the political process in Iraq." The report cites Asad al-Fayli, member of the Shi'i Political Council, holding Prime Minister Allawi responsible for "obstructing any agreement among the lists." The report cites Arif Tifur, member of the Central Committee of the Kurdistan Democratic Party KDP led by Mas'ud Barzani, accusing the United Iraqi Alliance of trying to monopolize power.

As for the United Iraqi Alliance's number of seats in parliament, they might be bolstered from an unexpected quarter. BBC World Monitoring (Mar. 22) translates: "Al-Nahdah publishes on the front page a 250-word report quoting Hamid Majid Sa'id, head of the Iraqi Communist Party, as saying that the party can ally with the Islamic forces, even if we have ideological disagreements with them, if they believe in democracy and the end of occupation to build a united federal Iraq. "Resistance is a legal right of all people and cannot be denied," he confirmed."

Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder reports skepticism that the Sunni Arabs can be successfully incorporated into the new government, given their increasing resistance to cooperating with it.

The Boston Globe even worries that Sunni clan leaders are beginning to call for violent reprisals against Shiites and Kurds. Earlier they had tended to counsel patience.

Muqtada al-Sadr has called for a million-person march to demand a timetable for US withdrawal from Iraq, via a sermon read by an aide on Friday. The march would also demand religious law. Muqtada has never before been able to mobilize large street crowds, and many Shiites are more afraid of the Sunni guerrillas than they are annoyed by the US presence. So I doubt this call turns into much in the near future.

The sentiments Muqtada is voicing however, are by all accounts (including polls) more popular than the line being peddled by interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, that clerics should stay out of politics. This issue has been settled. The religious Shiite parties have won their majority, and they are close to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who in many ways is responsible for both the holding of the elections and the creation of a strong Shiite bloc. Allawi lost the election. His list only got 14 percent. Moreover, he is personally unpopular because he failed to distance himself from his American patrons. It is over with, for better or worse.

That wave of violent crime in Iraq has just never gone away and the murder rate is if anything getting worse.

Likewise, Ed Wong of the NYT tells us about the smuggling that underpins so much of Iraq's economy right now.

Some of the smuggling may be of deadly weapons, including missiles and bacteriogical warfare petrie dishes.

Rory Stewart considers Iraq today and finds a troubling vista.

Robert Worth of the NYT managed to get out to Fallujah and reports that a third of the population of 250,000 has now returned and many are living normal lives. This picture of about 80,000 persons back in the city is more positive than the picture reported in al-Zaman a couple of weeks ago. But even if the numbers given Worth by the US miltiary are correct, it means that there are still 170,000 or so displaced persons from Fallujah living in tent camps or with relatives, which is not a trivial number. Worth's report also reveals that many buildings are ruined and that the compensation being paid is inadequate to repairs. As readers can tell, I am skeptical about the allegation that a third of the population has returned.

Nor is the city that safe. AFP writes of Fallujah, "But violence carried on Thursday as bullets flew in the former rebel stronghold of Fallujah, a Sunni town west of the Iraqi capital, a defense ministry official said, without giving a toll. An AFP reporter said that shots were heard from the city's northwestern Jolan district and Iraqi police sealed off the sector around 1:30 pm (1030 GMT). At the Jolan district's medical centre, hospital clerk Abbas Ahmed said four dead Iraqi soldiers were brought to the facility, but the defense ministry could not confirm the toll."

Huibin Amee Chew considers whether George W. Bush has really liberated Iraqi women.

Rozen on Ghorbanifar

Am behind on my reading and just getting to Laura Rozen and Jeet Heer's article on the Paris Iranian exiles and their influence on how Washington sees Tehran. Rozen has been doing excellent work on the continued role of Ghorbanifar, who had been involved in the Iran/Contra scandal and is sort of an even sleazier Ahmad Chalabi figure with less personal political ambition.

Laura Rozen's War and Piece Web site is always worth checking out.

One comment on Pakistan and its contribution to getting al-Qaeda. In fact, Musharraf is virtually the only one who has delivered any goods on that front. Abu Zubayda, Khalid Shaikh Muhammad and some 600 others have been caught by Pakistani security forces in cooperation with the FBI and CIA (the other unsung heroes in this effort). Musharraf hasn't found the big two, but then they may not be in Pakistan. The US, with 20,000 troops in Afghanistan, hasn't captured nearly as many straight al-Qaeda, nor nearly as many important operatives, since April of 2002 as the Pakistanis have.

Massive Protest in Bahrain

Reuters is estimating that 80,000 demonstrators came out in Bahrain on Friday to demand a new constitution. The demonstration, which was peaceful, had been forbidden by Minister of Interior Sheikh Rashed bin Abdullah Al Khalifa, but he was ignored. He is now talking about trying to prosecute the leaders of the demonstration.

(His predecessor was dismissed last May for cracking down on a much smaller demonstration of Shiites against US military action in the Iraqi holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, so he should be careful.)

The ruler of Bahrain, Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, who came to power in 1999, declared himself a king in February of 2002 and high-handedly amended the constitution. He held elections for parliament in fall of 2002, but they were deeply flawed as an exercise in any real democracy.

1. The parliament has two chambers. Only the lower chamber was elected.

2. The king appoints the upper chamber.

3. The majority Shiite population boycotted the election and was poorly represented in the lower house. They were enraged about points number one and two above.

4. Sunni fundamentalists did remarkably well, and with allies probably have 21 of the 40 seats in the lower house, i.e. a majority. Bahrain is a Shiite-majority country (65% are Shiites), so having a parliament dominated by Sunni fundamentalists is highly unrepresentative.

5. The (Sunni) king appoints the prime minister rather than allowing him to be elected from the parliament.

6. The fundamentalist members of parliament have no respect for freedom of speech, and many of their deliberations have been about how to stop Bahrain newspapers from carrying criticism of the government and of the parliament. The fundamentalists led a campaign in parliament to stop a concert in Manama planned for the Lebanese singer Nancy Ajram, on the grounds that she wriggles when she sings. Bahraini Bloggers have been jailed, but subsequently released. (An outspoken Bahrain blog is Mahmood's Den, by a Shiite who is critical of Shaikh Salman; other Bahrain blogs are listed here).

If democracy has anything to do with popular sovereignty and majority rule, then this situation is not very much like democracy.

Some of the background to the current problems is explained in this article from last year in MEI.

Shaikh Ali Salman, the clerical leader fo the rally, addressed the crowd and demanded that parliament be permitted to legislate on its own account and that there be a genuine separation of powers.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat says that the demonstrators only carried Bahraini flags and placards politely asking for reform. Usually in Bahrain pictures of Iran's supreme jurisprudent Ali Khamenei, and recently of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani of Najaf, are raised. Apparently these protesters wanted to make the point that their political context and demands were completely local and that they could not be dismissed as cat's paws of Iran. (In fact, a majority of Bahrain's Shiites don't even follow a school of the religion that allows laypeople to give absolute allegiance to clerics like Khamenei).

Salman emphasized that the reform movement is peaceful and has the best interests of the nation at heart. He said it wants Bahrain to go ahead with hosting the Formula 1 race early in April, and will refrain from demonstrating during it.

The US has a naval base in Bahrain and its king has been a helpful ally. Will George W. Bush support Shaikh Salman or King Hamad? Bush spoke out forcefully against the Syrian presence in Lebanon and in favor of Lebanese democracy. Will he speak out in favor of majority rule and popular sovereignty in Bahrain?

And if he doesn't, won't the rest of the Middle East assume he is just hypocritically hiding behind catch phrases like "democracy" to make trouble for the countries in the region like Syria and Iran, which Bush does not like, and which are seen as threats by his expansionist friends in Israel's Likud party?

23 Dead in 4 Car Bombings, Other Violence

The guerrilla war in Iraq marched on, on Friday, with four big carbombs and other attacks that left a total of some 23 persons dead, including at least one US soldier in Anbar province. (This conclusion is reached on the basis of the report linked here as well as late news in the Arab press). Two of the car bombs were detonated by suicide bombers in Iskandariyah in Babil province south of Baghdad, and two more in the western city of Ramadi. At a checkpoint in Ramadi, a car bomb killed 11 Iraqi gendarmes. Another convoy was attacked just south of Baghdad with rocket fire.

In addition to the car bombs, there were several other attacks. Guerrillas assassinated Col. Salman Muhammad Hasan, who commanded an Iraqi army unit in Basra, while he was in Baghdad for a funeral. Near Kirkuk, guerrillas kidnapped a Col. Siraj al-Din, an officer in the Ministry of Defense.

In Baghdad, guerrillas shot down five women translators who worked for the US military.

Guerrillas blew up an oil pipeline near Abu Ghuraib, which links a refinery near Baghdad with the northern oil fields.

Al-Zaman says that Iyad Allawi is reconsidering his refusal to join a government of national unity. His demand is that the new government not change security arrangements. Allawi brought in ex-Baathists to the Ministry of Interior and the secret police, a move that the religious Shiite parties and the Kurds who are now on top have bitterly criticized. It may be he is angling for the job of Minister of the Interior (which is analogous to Homeland Security plus the FBI in the US).

News roundup

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee spy case is heating up again. The FBI clearly believes that AIPAC is at the center of an important political conspiracy, but may not be able to make the whole case in the legal system.

Whatever the outcome of the case, AIPAC should have to register as a foreign agent. It is shameful that a small and fanatical group of rightwing devotees of colonial settlerism in the West Bank should be virtually controlling the foreign policy of the US Congress toward the Middle East-- especially since colonial settlerism in the West Bank causes so many people in the Middle East to hate the United States for supporting it-- and to lash out at us.

Related links:

Gee, I wonder who is funding those illegal colonies in Palestinian territory? Alas, it is I. The Israeli government funds them, while orally distancing itself from them, and the Israeli government gets $10 a year from each American, including me. A family of five in America since 1980 has conservatively been made to donate $1250 to the Israeli government, so that it can thumb its nose at our peace plans. Nor has it bought us security; the Israeli security agencies didn't do squat to prevent 9/11 (they're supposed to be protecting our flank in the Middle East for all that money), and Israeli intelligence told us Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. So I'm funding the illegal colonies. I don't like funding them. You know why I have to? Because all my representatives in Washington are deathly afraid of being targeted for un-election by AIPAC. It is not a completely irrational fear, though AIPAC is not nearly as powerful as Capitol Hill seems to think.

The Israeli Far Right is so virulent that it already killed one prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, for daring make peace with the Palestinians, and is threatening to kill Ariel Sharon for planning a withdrawal of settlers from the vast and desperately poor slum of Gaza. (People commiserate with me for being constantly attacked, smeared and harassed by far rightwing Zionists in the US press, but it is minor compared to what they are saying about Sharon himself! Some people, you're not allowed to disagree with, Or Else.

Of course, it is not as if Sharon is himself a peace-maker. He stole more land on a vast scale this week, with a plan to put 3500 new settlers into the West Bank, , which is euphemistically called "settlement expansion" in the Western press, and which will draw no more than a rap on the knuckles from Condi Rice.

No Government any Time Soon in Iraq

The formation of a government in Iraq has been put off yet again, possibly until April 1 or beyond, according to AFP. The Shiites and the Kurds say they are close to agreement. But they could remain only close to an agreement for a long time. Parliament may meet again in the meantime.

AFP also says:

Violence carried on Thursday as bullets flew in the former rebel stronghold of Fallujah . . . a defense ministry official said, without giving a toll. An AFP reporter said shots were heard from the city’s northwestern Jolan district. At the Jolan district’s medical center, hospital clerk Abbas Ahmed said four dead Iraqi soldiers were brought to the facility, but the defense ministry could not confirm the toll.

Elsewhere, a friendly-fire incident near the Syrian border . . . Iraqi police and army traded fire [with each other] in Rabia, 130 kilometers (80 miles) northwest of Mosul, leaving three soldiers and two police dead, Major General Mohamed al-Jaburi told AFP.

AP gives further details on thee friendly fire incident.

Sunni Arabs Struggle with New Realities

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that Sunni Arabs are unhappy with the small number of ministries being offered them in the new government. They want at least 6, with at least one being a major executive post (e.g. Defense, Interior, etc.) Adnan Pachachi reveals that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani attempted to convince the United Iraqi Alliance to drop its attempt to appoint its own Sunni candidate, Fawaz Jarbah. The few Sunni Arab parliamentarians are insisting that appointments for high office be drawn from the ranks, rather than being inside the United Iraqi Alliance.

A little-noticed conference was held in Baghdad on Tuesday on Fallujah, at which participants presented evidence of US heavy-handedness in that city. Some called for a trial of George W. Bush and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair for war crimes.

This hardline conference contrasts with a meeting of Sunni Arabs eager to participate in Iraqi politics, and who believe that boycotting the election had been a mistake. It is difficult to know, however, how representative each of these groups is.

A plan was put forward by the governor of Anbar Province, Faisal al-Qu'ud, to join the largely Sunni Arab provinces of Salahuddin, Ninevah and Anbar so as to create a large ethnic unit that might have leverage with the Baghdad federal government. The main religious parties of the region, however, have spoken against such a step, arguing that it reinforces ethnic divisions. Iraq may nevertheless end up with something like 6 provinces rather than the current 18, and these provinces may be ethnically gerrymandered.

Major Battle North of Samarra Leaves Dozens Dead
Or Does It?

Al-Zaman: Rockets fell on schools in Amiriyah district, West Baghdad, Wednesday, killing 4 students.

Gunmen wounded the director of the Imam Hasan B. Ali School and killed a teacher. Al-Zaman says the school is under the Sunni Pious Endowments Board, but the name of the school is Shiite, so I don't know what is going on here.

The US military arrested 70 persons in Mosul suspected of being active guerrillas.

Iraqi police arrested 6 suspicious Arabs in Karbala, suspecting them of planning an attack on pilgrims during next week's commemoration of the 40th day after the anniversary of the martyrdom of Imam Husayn, the Prophet's grandson.

Twelve suspicious persons, including an Egyptian, were arrested in Baqubah.

Iraqi gendarmes of the Interior Ministry, supported by American troops, discovered a guerrilla training camp on the shores of Lake Tharthar in central Iraq. In the subsequent engagement, they claim to have killed 85 guerrillas. Al-Zaman says that 12 Iraqi policemen were killed in the encounter, in return. This area, the district of Hilwah, lies between Samarra, Tikrit and Ramadi, and the lake area-- populated by fishermen-- has been used by guerrillas as a base and to transport weapons. It is a marshy area difficult of access for outsiders.

Agence France Presse, on the other hand, managed to get some independent journalists up to the lake, north of Samarra, and they found 40 guerrillas still there. The guerrillas denied that 85 of their fellows had been killed by the Iraqi army, but admitted that 11 had been killed by US aerial bombardment. (American news organizations such as CNN refuse to report news that is only carried by AFP, because they consider it to have inadequate journalistic quality-control. But reports like this one are not being done by US wire services in Iraq, and if we don't take AFP seriously, we essentially may as well just believe whatever Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib and the Pentagon claim.

Unfortunately, the US military is filtering our news from Iraq, and we only hear about a fraction of the violence that actually takes place there. What we do hear is often imbued by a kind of US boosterism (such as the recent faintly ridiculous claim that Fallujah is the safest city in Iraq-- as though it were still an inhabited city). Even if it were not exaggerated, this report about the Tharthar Camp would mean more in the context of all the violent incidents that occurred on Wednesday, but we don't have access to most of those. That such battles signal a "tipping point" in the counter-insurgency struggle strikes me as highly unlikely. Another question: Are these gung-ho gendarmes killing Sunni jihadis from a Shiite background? Are they getting intelligence via the Badr Corps?

UPI reports that the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior (similar to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation) has begun expelling non-Iraqi Arabs from the country in a bid to weaken the guerrilla movement. Some 250 persons have been ordered out of the country. [Cole: This report sounds merely cosmetic to me, and a drop in the bucket. Some journalists estimate that 400 Saudi volunteers alone have been killed in Iraq. Moreover, most of the guerrilla actions are not taken by foreigners.)

UPI points out that struggles over oil lie at the center of the dispute between the Shiites and the Kurds, which has delayed the formation of a new government. The Kurds are accused of wanting the ministry of petroleum so as to be able to control the Kirkuk oil industry. Ownership of Kirkuk is contested by the Turkmen and the Arabs. There is also a dispute about how much of the petroleum profits would stay in the Kurdish provinces. The Shiites have offered 17 percent, whereas the Kurds are said to want closer to a fourth.

El Pais is reporting the disputes between Spanish military commanders in Najaf and US officers. The Spanish officers were appalled that Gen. Rick Sanchez wanted them to call in bombing strikes on civilian targets (a frequent US tactic in urban warfare in Iraq), and refused, sending in commandos to a hospital instead. Likewise, the Spanish declined to move against the Sadr Movement for fear of massive turbulence, so the US sent in special ops forces to arrest an aide to Muqtada al-Sadr anyway. (It is just unimaginable that the US would endanger the 1200 Spanish troops in Najaf in this high-handed way. It has been alleged to me by someone who should know that Dan Senor played a key role in this move). As the Spanish predicted, the sudden and still unexplained US assault on the Sadrists produced a massive uprising that threw the South into turmoil for two months. The Spanish by that time were fed up and the new Zapatero government determined to withdraw the Spanish military. Given how high-handedly the US treated them, you cannot blame Madrid for wanting no further part of the increasing Iraq quagmire. What comes across most strongly in this report is a general European officer-class repugnance at heavy-handed US military tactics, including especially the use of aerial bombing on civilian targets where guerrillas were present.

30 Killed on Tuesday, Including US Soldier

Early on Monday, Iraqi troops supported by US forces fought a firefight in northern Baghdad, killing several guerrillas, according to US military sources as reported by the LBC satellite channel.

UPI reports that at least 30 persons died in violent incidents in Iraq on Tuesday.

The biggest such incident was a firefight in Mosul, sparked by an attempted assassination by guerrillas, to which US forces replied, killing 17 fighters and capturing 11.

Several persons were killed by unexploded ordnance, which is likely to be a long-term problem in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and is one of those seldom-considered costs of war. (Unexploded munitions and mines are a big danger to civilians in the aftermath of wars, and most often clean-up is completely inadequate after the war is over. The poor Tunisians had to beg on bended knee for years for the US and the Germans to do something about all the dangerous materials they had left behind after WW II, which went on injuring unwitting civilians for a long time after the war.)

The US military also stumbled upon a training camp in Iraq for foreign jihadis. I doubt this sort of discovery is very significant for counter-insurgency. Foreign fighters are probably only 5 percent of the guerrillas. The most dangerous ex-Baathists don't need training-- they got it years ago, in the Iran-Iraq or Gulf Wars.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that engineering students at Basra University continued their strikes and demonstrations Tuesday, protesting the violence they experienced from students adhering to the Sadr Movement, the radical Shiite trend, who disrupted a picnic last week and attempted to intimidate students into a puritan style of life. Iraqi national guards arrested students from both factions (liberals and Sadrists). The university administration has called for an end to the strike, and has pledged to ban party politics from university life.

From al-Zaman, March 19, BBC World Monitoring: "Al-Zaman publishes a 100-word front-page report stating that three mortar grenades targeted a school in the city of Al-Fallujah. The report says that the attack caused damage in the building, but no casualties were recorded." Maybe it isn't the safest city in Iraq, after all.

Government to be Formed by Sunday?

Iraqi official sources maintained on Tuesday that negotiations between the United Iraqi Alliance and the Kurdish Alliance to form a government are well advanced, and that the ministries have been apportioned among the two. Iraq nowadays is like the United States was in the early 19th century, during the spoils system. For a party to get a ministry means that it will bring its supporters in to staff the ministry, and will use it to give out patronage. The Kurds will get the foreign ministry and the Ministry of Petroleum, in addition to a few others, as well as the presidency.

The plan is apparently to give as few as 4 cabinet ministries to the Sunni Arabs, who did not vote in any numbers and are poorly represented in parliament. They would also get a vice presidency and the post of speaker of the house. I should think this lack of generosity toward them by the victors will spur further resentments. In early 20th century Lebanon, when the Shiites were the poorest and least powerful group in Lebanon, they were given the post of speaker of the house. It is not even clear that the position is that influential. The interim constitution does not guarantee that the speaker can control the legislative agenda in any way.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat maintains that there has also been a fierce behind-the-scenes struggle over ministries and high positions between the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the al-Dawa Party, the two main constituents of the victorious United Iraqi Alliance. Shaikh Asad al-Faili, leader of the small Kurdish Shiite faction with 2 seats in parliament, bitterly complained that the two main parties had marginalized everyone else, including his group. (He has a vastly exaggerated idea of how many Iraqi Kurds are Shiite, by the way, which may inflate his sense of self-importance. Of the approximately 4 million Kurds, I can't imagine more than 5 percent or 200,000 are Failis).

Three possible days have been bruited about for holding another session of parliament, in hopes of forming the government-- Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. There is, of course, no guarantee that the negotiations will be done within a week.

Most Iraqis are appalled that this process of forming a government is taking so long, and Grand Ayatollah Sistani attempted to hurry it along with sharp criticisms on Monday, as well as by meeting some of the principals, such as Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani. Veteran Middle East journalist and blogger Helena Cobban has been warning for some time about the dangers that Paul Bremer's interim constitution makes forming a government too difficult.

The plan was for the new Iraqi parliament to craft a constitution by August, and then submit it to a national referendum in October. Given that it is almost April and there is still no government, the likelihood that the parliamentarians will be able to resolve all the difficult issues in framing a permanent constitution by August is extremely low. The interim constitution will remain in effect until a new one is drafted and approved by the Iraqi people.

PS

Al-Zaman says that negotiations were slowed by Now-Ruz, the New Year celebrated by the Kurds (rooted in ancient Iranian Zoroastrianism, this holiday commemorates the spring solstice --usually March 21-- as the beginning of a new year). The Kurds tie their celebration to the legends of the Shahnameh, which tells the story of how in ancient times an evil ruler emerged, Dahhak or Zohak, who overthrew the glorious king Jamshid. Dahhak was a wizard who grew serpents on each of his shoulders, which needed to eat human brain every day. So Dahhak had young men rounded up from the subject populations, and two were sacrificed each day. Dahhak was finally overthrown by a young knight, Faridun, aided by the blacksmith Kaveh, who freed the captured young men on Now-Ruz. The Kurds have a legend that they are descended from those freed prisoners, and they celebrate their manumission on March 21. The story of Jamshid, Dahhak and Faridun is a variation on a widespread Indo-European myth cycle. In the ancient Indian sources the three are the king of the underworld, Yama; the world-serpent, Vrta, and Indra, who slays Vrta. The story is also echoed in the Nordic myth of Thor and the Midgaard serpent (Thor is a composite of Faridun the prince and Kaveh the blacksmith). At some point in Iran, the snake figure was historicized as an evil foreign king who brought drought and had serpents growing from his body, and he was also racialized. Dahhak or Zohak is a clearly Semitic word, whereas Jamshid and Faridun are Indo-Europeans. This development reflects the fights that took place when the Iranian peoples from Anatolia immigrated into Elamite and Assyrian territory in the 800s BC. Assyrians and Babylonians spoke Semitic languages related to Arabic and Hebrew. (Some US newspapers last year reported the struggle of Kaveh with Zohak as a historical event of the 7th century BC!)

The casting of the serpent monster as a Semitic ruler made it easy for Kurds to identify Dahhak with Saddam, and perhaps with the virulent strain of Arab nationalism he represented. You could imagine how Now-Ruz in Kurdistan, with its celebration of doomed enslaved youth being freed from the clutches of the Semitic tyrant-monster, would slow down a political negotiation requiring Kurds to accept once again Arab rule from Baghdad.

In my own view, applying ancient myths to current politics, especially where they have been racialized, is unhealthy. Myths have a positive power if they remain on the level of symbol and archetype. Historicize them, and they become perverted and a source of blind hatred.

Wolfowitz Romancing Tunisian World Bank Employee?

I can't vouch for the accuracy of this gossipy story that Paul Wolfowitz is romantically involved with Shaha Ali Riza, a Tunisian woman brought up in Saudi Arabia formerly married to Bulent Riza, a Turk.

I don't think the private lives of people are relevant to their public service (and I would stand up even for those with scandalous private lives as long as they were good at their jobs and hadn't materially harmed anyone). I object to the article's implication that this relationship is any reason for which Wolfowitz should not be president of the World Bank. Obviously, he couldn't be in charge of Ms. Riza's salary or promotions, but there are ways to delegate those things. (In universities, deans sometimes are married to faculty, and they just recuse themselves from oversight over a spouse).

Actually, if the article is true, it is the best thing I've ever heard about Wolfowitz.

Now that Germany has supported him, Wolfowitz will almost certainly be confirmed, so the question is anyway moot.

I am afraid he is a fanatical free marketeer whose ideological blinders may lead him to support policies that are not good for poor people. In the struggle in India between environmentalists on the one side, and Enron or the Narmada Dam project on the other, which side would Wolfowitz support? Would he be with Arundhati Roy or with Ken Lay? Is Wolfowitz capable of understanding the need for economic democracy alongside his devotion to parliamentary government?

That's the sort of issue that will matter to the poor of the global South, not whom he dates.

Live-Blogging

11:00 am

Sorry I'm getting to the Brookings event on blogging, which is being webcast here, a little late this morning. One of the disadvantages of being a professor blogger is that other duties sometimes take precedence.

The panelists are discussing whether blogging is journalism, and whether it is an interesting question.

I have already sounded off on this, last week when I was talking about Jeff Jarvis. Journalism involves reporting or newsgathering, and then commentary. Reporting in journalism involves reporting from the scene and making sure you have the story sourced to more than one credible source. There are other techniques. News gathering is not usually something bloggers do. Think of Nir Rosen in Fallujah or Kirkuk or Kabul. If all you are doing is pasting together reporting, you are doing news consolidation, not journalism.

But the part of journalism that is commentary has always been ecumenical, and we professors have all along had a hand in that.

I would argue that what blogging has done has been to allow commentators to make an end-run around the gate-keepers that have grown up in journalism.

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11:15

Sullivan is talking about blogging as taking the public temperature and listening in on the emotional content of hundreds of town hall meetings. That's right, though the Founding Fathers were always worried about localist emotions taking over a political process that they believed should be rational-legal. There is some danger of blogging demagoguery.

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11:37

A questioner ("Renaissance Man") is saying that talk radio is passive, blogging is active. You check the primary sources, see who agrees and disagrees. The interactivity creates more informed, active citizens.

That can happen. But they can also use the blogosphere to reinforce prejudices and "create facts" that "everyone knows."

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11:45

Andrew Sullivan is talking about Iranians using blogging to build a political movement that is anti-dictatorial.

He also thinks that the blogosphere will remain primarily male, because the atmosphere of highly charged argumentation is more appealing to males.

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11:50

Jodie Allen is making the point that podcasting may have a radical impact on how news is gathered.

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11:55

The question of what is a journalist reminded me of Lee Bollinger's attempt to rethink journalism training in hopes of making the profession less a craft and more a liberal art.

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11:59

Let me just end up by commenting on Sullivan's point about Iranian bloggers.

They aren't important politically.

They are wonderful people under a lot of pressure, and some have been jailed. But they are not going to make a revolution. There aren't that many nodes in Iran, and it just isn't that wired a country. Old-style politics is what is going to matter in the near term.

There are occasional reports in the Iranian press about the busting up of nefarious internet dating rings in Iran. That's right. Match.com is seen as a dire threat to the Republic there. Under such circumstances, the medium has difficulty making a really big mark there.

Daniel Drezner, Laura Rozen and several others participated [they're listed at the Brookings page above)-- I have to run to work.

10 Killed in Iraq
Sistani Impatient

Ed Wong does his usual good job of reporting on developments in Iraq. The guerrilla war continued apace, with ten Iraqis killed in separate incidents. Guerrillas in Anbar Province killed a US Marine on Monday, as well.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is expressing impatience with the inability of the elected parliament to form a government. He appears to be pressuring the religious Shiite parties to make the compromises with the Kurdish Alliance that are necessary to form a government.

Khaled Oweis of Reuters points to one reason Sistani is so eager to have a government-- only once one is formed can parliament proceed to the task of implementing Islamic law in at least some spheres of life.

The move to Islamic law has been particularly hard on middle class Iraqi women, as Reuters points out.

The International Crisis Group has issued a report on Iran's interests and activities in Iraq. They conclude:

' Iran . . . is intent on preserving Iraq's territorial integrity, avoiding all-out instability, encouraging a Shiite-dominated, friendly government, and, importantly, keeping the U.S. preoccupied and at bay. This has entailed a complex three-pronged strategy: encouraging electoral democracy (as a means of producing Shiite rule); promoting a degree of chaos but of a manageable kind (in order to generate protracted but controllable disorder); and investing in a wide array of diverse, often competing Iraqi actors (to minimise risks in any conceivable outcome). '

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of two majot victors in the Jan. 30 elections, is demanding that its paramilitary, the Badr Corps, be allowed to play a bigger role in the Shiite south.

The Schiavo Case and the Islamization of the Republican Party

The cynical use by the US Republican Party of the Terri Schiavo case repeats, whether deliberately or accidentally, the tactics of Muslim fundamentalists and theocrats in places like Egypt and Pakistan. These tactics involve a disturbing tendency to make private, intimate decisions matters of public interest and then to bring the courts and the legislature to bear on them. President George W. Bush and Republican congressional leaders like Tom Delay have taken us one step closer to theocracy on the Muslim Brotherhood model.

The Muslim fundamentalists use a provision of Islamic law called "bringing to account" (hisba). As Al-Ahram weekly notes, "Hisba signifies a case filed by an individual on behalf of society when the plaintiff feels that great harm has been done to religion." Hisba is a medieval idea that had all but lapsed when the fundamentalists brought it back in the 1970s and 1980s.

In this practice, any individual can use the courts to intervene in the private lives of others. Among the more famous cases of such interference is that of Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid in Egypt. A respected modern scholar of Koranic studies, Abu Zaid argued that, contrary to medieval interpretations of Islamic law, women and men should receive equal inheritance shares. (Medieval Islamic law granted women only half the inheritance shares of their brothers). Abu Zaid was accused of sacrilege. Then the allegation of sacrilege was used as a basis on which the fundamentalists sought to have the courts forcibly divorce him from his wife.

Abu Zaid's wife loved her husband. She did not want to be divorced. But the fundamentalists went before the court and said, she is a Muslim, and he is an infidel, and no Muslim woman may be married to an infidel. They represented their efforts as being on behalf of the Islamic religion, which had an interest in seeing to it that heretics like Abu Zaid could not remain married to a Muslim woman. In 1995 the hisba court actually found against them. They fled to Europe, and ultimately settled in Holland.

Likewise, a similar tactic was deployed against the Egyptian feminist author, Nawal Saadawi, but it failed and she was able to remain in the country.

One of the most objectionable features of this fundamentalist tactic is that persons without standing can interfere in private affairs. Perfect strangers can file a case about your marriage, because they represent themselves as defending a public interest (the upholding of religion and morality).

Terri Schiavo's husband is her legal guardian. Her parents have not succeeded in challenging this status of his. As long as he is the guardian, the decision on removing the feeding tubes is between him and their physicians. Her parents have not succeeded in having this responsibility moved from him to them. Even under legislation George W. Bush signed in 1999 while governor of Texas, the spouse and the physician can make this decision.

In passing a special law to allow the case to be kicked to a Federal judge after the state courts had all ruled in favor of the husband, Congress probably shot itself in the foot once again. The law is not a respecter of persons, so the Federal judge will likely rule as the state ones did.

But the most frightening thing about the entire affair is that public figures like congressmen inserted themselves into the case in order to uphold religious strictures. The lawyer arguing against the husband let the cat out of the bag, as reported by the NYT: ' The lawyer, David Gibbs, also said Ms. Schiavo's religious beliefs as a Roman Catholic were being infringed because Pope John Paul II has deemed it unacceptable for Catholics to refuse food and water. "We are now in a position where a court has ordered her to disobey her church and even jeopardize her eternal soul," Mr. Gibbs said. '

In other words, the United States Congress acted in part on behalf of the Roman Catholic church. Both of these public bodies interfered in the private affairs of the Schiavos, just as the fundamentalist Egyptian, Nabih El-Wahsh, tried to interfere in the marriage of Nawal El Saadawi.

Like many of his fundamentalist counterparts in the Middle East, Tom Delay is rather cynically using this issue to divert attention from his own corruption. Like the Muslim fundamentalist manipulators of Hisba, Delay represents himself as acting on behalf of a higher cause. He said of the case over the weekend, ' "This is not a political issue. This is life and death," '

Republican Hisba will have the same effect in the United States that it does in the Middle East. It will reduce the rights of the individual in favor of the rights of religious and political elites to control individuals. Ayatollah Delay isn't different from his counterparts in Iran.

45 Dead in Continued Guerrilla War
Baghdad Pitched Battle Kills 24

AFP reports that violence in Iraq on Sunday left 45 dead in separate incidents.

The biggest incident involved an ambush about 15 miles from Baghdad. Details are sketchy, but it resulted in a firefight between US troops and local guerrillas, with 24 of the latter being killed and 6 US troops wounded. This battle sounds fairly major, but it is unclear exactly where it happened or who the guerrillas were exactly. That they can still field 24 at a time, even if they were killed, is not a good sign.

As for the other violent incidents, some of them are described by AFP:

'In . . . Mosul, a suicide bomber with a fake badge slipped Sunday into a building housing the provincial anti-corruption department and blew himself up inside the office of its chief, General Walid Kachmoula, killing him and two of his guards. Attackers struck again hours later opening fire on the procession bearing Kachmoula’s coffin . . . killing two people and wounding 14 . . . [G]unmen attacked a police station in Baquba killing at least four police and wounding two as a truck bomb rammed into the entrance of an Iraqi army barrack wounding 17 people, a police official said. Four insurgents were killed in an ensuing firefight. '

Iraq and Vietnam

Although Martin van Creveld in the Boston Review is pushing the analogy between Iraq and Vietnam (with Moshe Dayan in Saigon as an interesting plot device), in fact the conflict does not resemble Vietnam.

In Communism, the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong had a universal ideology with a nationalist subtext that could hope to unite all the Vietnamese.

The North was difficult for the US to touch because of its Chinese and Russian patrons, and the North could support the VC.

In contrast, the Sunni Arab guerrillas in Iraq lack a unifying ideology. They are either Baathists (discredited in most of the country) or Salafis (a hard line Sunni ideology with no appeal to Shiites in the south or to most Kurds in the north), or Arab nationalists. Arab nationalism is rejected by the Kurds and is increasingly seen by Shiites as having a subtle Sunni bias.

Indeed, the diplomatic tiff between the new Iraqi government and Jordan, in which both sides have recalled their ambassadors, reflects Shiite Iraqi distrust of Jordan as a hotbed of Sunni fundamentalism and (Sunni) Arab nationalism.

The Sunni Arabs of Iraq do not have a safe haven from the US military. Despite US complaints about Syria, in fact no significant number of fighters moves across the border (and as many probably move from Jordan and Saudi Arabia as from Syria). Syria would be nervous about the Salafi fundamentalists, since it is itself dominated by a Shiite minority with the Baath Party as its cover story. And Syrians never got along with Saddam or his henchmen (it is often forgotten that Syria was part of Bush senior's coalition in the 1990-1991 Gulf War).

Nor do the Sunni Arab guerrillas of Iraq have major patron states. They probably get support from Gulf millionnaires who are fundamentalists. But mostly the guerrilla war is homegrown.

This lack of fit with Vietnam is not necessarily good news, since there are other forms of quagmire.

Many US readers are excited to find polls showing the guerrillas are increasingly unpopular. But they aren't increasingly unpopular among the Sunni Arabs. In the past year, polling shows that the percentage of Sunni Arabs in Iraq who support attacking US targets has gone from 33 percent to 52 percent. That is, strictly in the Sunni Arab areas, support for the guerrilla war has actually grown. (Hamfisted US policies toward Fallujah account for this shift, in my view). Of course the Shiites and Kurds hate the guerrillas. That isn't the issue. The question is, at what point do the Sunni Arabs turn against the guerrillas and start snitching on them? That point appears to be further off today than it was in February, 2004.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reported Monday that 300 Sunni political personalities met in Baghdad to reconsider the Sunni Arab boycott of the political process. The Association fo Muslim Scholars declined to meet with them. Polls show the Sunni Arabs increasingly skewing to the religious right, and AMS is a major force in that tendency. It remains to be seen if any significant number of Sunni Arabs can be convinced to join or give their allegiance to the new government, which many consider an American puppet dominated by Shiite heretics and Kurdish warlords.

The analogy for Iraq is not Vietnam. It is Northern Ireland (with the US playing the UK); Sri Lanka (with the US playing India perhaps); or Lebanon (with the US playing Syria).

Long term, low-intensity ethnically-based conflicts just grind on for a decade or more, and then, if we are lucky, gradually fade at least somewhat away.

Iraq will likely end as Lebanon is ending, with sufficient social peace allowing the population finally to demand a complete withdrawal of the foreign military force. As soon as the Iraqi Shiites believe that the Sunni guerrillas have been sufficiently weakened or coopted that they no longer constitute a dire threat to the new Shiite political class, the Shiites are likely to insist that the US forces leave.

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the United Iraqi Alliance that won the elections, admitted as much to Le Monde last week. He actually laughed at the idea of permanent US bases in Iraq. Ibrahim Jaafari, the likely new prime minister, has said the same thing. In the long run, there will likely be no US bases in Iraq. In the short term, the Shiites and Kurds feel they need the US presence.

Iraq Two Years Later

Tom Engelhardt pulls it all together in his essay on the state of affairs in American Iraq. It is a comprehensive and timely meditation, given that we have just passed the 2-year anniversary of the start of the US invasion. Engelhardt's clear-eyed deconstruction of the boosterist myths of devotees of neo-Empire should be widely considered by those who are "rethinking" Bush's policies after the Lebanese demonstrations.

Hariri and al-Qaeda? Really?

I don't have a dog in the fight about who killed Rafiq Hariri, but I don't find the case for the Syrians being behind it is airtight.

I worked for Monday Morning Co. in the late 1970s in Beirut as a journalist/translator and the Syrian secret police used sometimes to pull my articles in the most heavy-handed manner. Although the Syrians came into Lebanon on the pretext of establishing order, they appear to have mainly played various factions off against one another in a cynical way that harmed the subsequent development of Lebanon. So if I am completely honest about my own biases and life-experiences, I am deeply critical of the Syrian presence in Lebanon.

But the question of who killed Hariri is highly significant and it is important not to let our prejudices affect our judgment. The judgment has been made by the political opposition in Lebanon for local reasons, but it seems likely that a majority of Lebanese thinks someone beside Syria was responsible (not all Sunnis, Maronites and Druze have adopted the Syria theory, and Zogby showed that 70 percent of Shiites-- who are some 40 percent of the population-- have not.)

To the state of the case so far: 1) It seems likely that Hariri was killed by a powerful car bomb that pulled alongside his vehicle. 2) It seems likely that he was assassinated by a Palestinian radical Muslim fundamentalist named Ahmed Tayseer Abu Adas, even if someone else was driving the car. Mixing planners and "muscle" is an al-Qaeda modus operandi. 3) If Abu Adas was behind it, he made his motivation clear. He was striking at what he considered a major agent of Saudi influence in the Middle East.

Saudi Arabia has been a consistent target of radical jihadis for the past three years. Initially they attacked sites associated with the training of bodyguards for the royal family or other Saudi targets. This strategy produced a popular backlash against them. Al-Qaeda has some political support in some regions of Saudi Arabia, and it should be remembered that Islamists did well in the recent municipal elections, so al-Qaeda there is sensitive to public opinion.

Therefore, during the past year the jihadis in Saudia have shifted to attacking Saudi Arabia's conduits to the outside world. The shift in the strategy of Saudi al-Qaeda was noted in the Washington Post.

The US consulate in Jidda was targeted, along with foreign workers in the kingdom. Saleh al-Awfi, the current al-Qaeda leader in Saudia, has stressed internationalization and called for Saudi volunteers to fight in Iraq, e.g.

Moreover, there seems to be a Lebanon element in the latter strategy. Although I am careful about depending on Debka, this report is suggestive in our context.

It links Lebanese radical fundamentalists, their recruits at the Ain Helweh Palestinian refugee camp, and a bombing of the Muhaya Quarter of Riyadh, targeting Lebanese residents there.

Since Saudi targets have hardened up, for such groups to turn to what they consider Saudi clients elsewhere in the region makes perfect sense.

As for Hariri, Greg Lamotte of VOA noted his long car