A Tragic Death and other Tragic Deaths

I address a different aspect of this story in my opinion piece at Salon.com, "In gods we trust," today.

Bush's bizarre press conference on Thursday was according to the Washington Post "on Terri Schiavo anhd Weapons of Mass Destruction." That US newspapers report this bewildering juxtaposition without so much as a "Huhn?" tells you to what estate political discourse in this country has fallen.

It should be obvious that Bush was cynically using the Schiavo tragedy to draw attention away from his massive intelligence failures with regard to alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Just as the Right employed the deaths of innocent Americans on 9/11 as a cover to pursue an unrelated war in Iraq, so Bush is using the death of an innocent woman to direct attention away from a supremely embarrassing report on US intelligence. Back when people used to put gold fillings in their teeth, it gave burglars an incentive occasionally to rob graves. This news conference was a sort of Public Relations grave robbery, and among the blackest moments in the history of the presidency.

"BUSH: Thank you all. Please be seated.

Today, millions of Americans are saddened by the death of Terri Schiavo.

Laura and I extend our condolences to Terri Schiavo's families.

I appreciate the example of grace and dignity they have displayed at a difficult time. I urge all those who honor Terri Schiavo to continue to work to build a culture of life where all Americans are welcomed and valued and protected, especially those who live at the mercy of others.

The essence of civilization is that the strong have a duty to protect the weak.

In cases where there are serious doubts and questions, the presumption should be in the favor of life.

The most solemn duty of the American president -- come on up, guys -- is to protect the American people.

Since September 11th, 2001, we've taken bold and vigorous steps to prevent further attacks and overcome emerging threats.

We face a new and different kind of enemy. The threats today are unprecedented. The lives of our citizens are at stake. To protect them, we need the best intelligence possible, and we must stay ahead of constantly changing intelligence challenges. "

The doublespeak of the Christian Right oozes up between his words. Poor Terri Schiavo's body, which had lost sentient brain function years ago, is being equated here to a fetus, and her death to an abortion. It is a monstrous analogy, and 70 percent of Americans think Bush should have stayed out of the whole affair.

What is interesting about the analogy, however, is that it seems to turn on its head the central underlying values of the anti-abortion lobby.

Anti-abortion activism is essentially patriarchal. It insists that the woman's egg, once fertilized, is immediately a person and that the woman loses control over her body by virtue of being impregnated by her husband's sperm. It is men who dictate to the woman that she must carry the fertilized egg to term, must be a mother once impregnated by a man. For extreme anti-abortionists, even a woman who has been raped or is in danger of losing her life if she tries to give birth must be forced to bear the child. A rapist can make a woman be a mother whether she likes it or not, because his maleness gives him prerogatives not withdrawn by his mere criminality.

The Schiavo case, in contrast, appears on the surface to be anti-patriarchal. The activists in this case attempted to deprive Ms. Schiavo's husband of his status as her legal guardian and of his ability to decide, with the physicians, not to make heroic efforts to keep her alive in a vegetative state. The activists sided with his mother-in-law, thus appearing to support matriarchy over patriarchy. Why Tom DeLay thought that would be a way of beating up on the Democratic Party is a great mystery. But an even greater mystery is why his conscience would let him play politics with an issue that had touched him personally, when he let his own brain-damaged father die.

Bush then pitifully segues into the sharply critical report on US intelligence failures, which pointed out that the administration was absolutely and completely wrong about Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction.

Bush's response?

"The work of our intelligence community is extremely difficult work. Every day, dangerous regimes are working to prevent us from uncovering their programs and their possible relationships with terrorists.

BUSH: And the work intelligence men and women do is, by nature, secret, which is why the American people never hear about many of their successes. I'm proud of the efforts of our intelligence workers. I am proud of their commitment to the security of our country. And the American people should be proud too.

And that's why this report is important. It'll enable these fine men and women to do their jobs in better fashion, to be able to more likely accomplish their mission, which is to protect the American people. And that's why I'm grateful to the commission for this hard work."

It is like a parody of himself. He stresses that intelligence work is a) hard and b) secret.

That is supposed to make it all right that we sent a high-tech army into a poor, weak country and turned it into a failed state, killing 40,000 innocent Iraqis and suffering over 1500 coalition troops dead and over 10,000 US troops wounded, many maimed for life, and spending $300 billion on it? For no reason? When the poor weak state did not in fact have the weapons of mass destruction that Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz insisted it had? When they bullied anyone who questioned their evidence for all this, and got their billionnaire buddies who own the media to have their anchors and editorialists also bully any dissidents?

Because intelligence work is hard and secret?

How does Bush square all the violence he has unleashed in the world with his praise of "life?" What is the link between war-mongering and being "pro-life?"

It turns out that anti-abortionism is not about life at all. It is about social control. It helps establish a hierarchical society in which men are at the pinnacle and women kept barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen. Likewise, the Schiavo case was in part about the religious Right dictating to Michael Schiavo how he must lead his private life.

This campaign is not really about life at all, as the examples of the raped woman or the woman whose pregnancy puts her life in danger demonstrate. It is about control, and the imposition of a minority's values on others.

And that is why the Iraq war is the perfect symbol for the anti-abortionists. Colonial conquest is always a kind of rape, but now the conquered country must bear the fetus of Bush-imposed "liberty" to term. The hierarchy is thus established. Washington is superior to Baghdad, and Iraq is feminized and deprived of certain kinds of choices.

And that is also how the Schiavo case makes sense in the end, because the religious Right feminized Michael Schiavo, made him into the pregnant woman seeking an "abortion," and wished to therefore deprive him of choice in the matter. If hierarchy is gendered, then the persons over which control is sought are always in some sense imagined as powerless women. Powerful non-fundamentalist men and uppity Third World countries that won't do as they are told are ultimately no different from feminist women seeking an abortion. All must be subdued, in the view of the Christian Right.

It is about hierarchy, power and control. It is not about life.
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3 US Troops Killed
At Least 11 Iraqis Killed, 16 Wounded
"The Government is Not Even Close to being Formed"

A Rand report done for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld lets him have it over the poor planning at the Pentagon for the aftermath of the war in Iraq, and for poor US military performance on counter-insurgency. The report is so thorough that it even critiques problems I hadn't know we had, such as ineffective deployment of Blackhawk helicopters. I had thought them effective early in the war.

It should be noted that it is impossible to complain so rigorously about lack of planning without suggesting that Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith did not do their jobs (didn't Feith's title have something about "planning" in it?) But those three are going all to be held harmless in this life from messing up an entire country, probably for a decade, and thereby endangering US security. It is the sort of thing that drives people to believe in a life after death where just deserts are meted out; it sure doesn't happen here. Wolfowitz was confirmed Thursday as head of the World Bank. If he does to the economy of the global South what he did to Iraq, we're all in big trouble.

The US government rejected on Thursday charges by a former UN official that malnutrition among Iraqi children has increased significantly since the Americans conquered the country. The US reply strikes me as awfully thin-skinned. Officials pointed out that lots more children have been innoculated (not relevant). Or they complained that the official making the charges hadn't been in Iraq (not relevant). Or they dismissed the studies on which he depended without giving any specifics as to why they should be considered unreliable. The only valid point I saw made was that the baseline for nutrition among Iraqi children in the second half of the 1990s is itself imprecise and several different estimates were put forward. When the baseline is not certain, it is hard to measure how different the situation is now. But I don't know enough about the public health statistics to know whether this objection actually holds water.

Guerrillas killed 11 and wounded over 16 on Thursday. Other attacks killed 3 US troops.

The guerrilla fighters on the Sunni Arab side continued to target Shiites on Thursday, hoping to provoke widespread sectarian turmoil during the ritual processions of mourning for the martyrdom of Imam Husain, the Prophet Muhammad's slain grandson. The Scotsman reports:

A suicide car bomber blew himself up yesterday near an Islamic shrine, killing five Iraqis in the latest attack on Shiite Muslim pilgrims marking a major religious holiday. The blast in Tuz Khormato, 55 miles south of Kirkuk, killed three civilians, including a child, and two soldiers helping guard the shrine Thursday, police reported. Sixteen people were wounded, hospital officials said . . . Late on Wednesday, gunmen ambushed a truck carrying pilgrims near Hillah, 60 miles south of Baghdad, and killed one person, and an attack earlier in the day killed a pilgrim in southern Iraq . . .

There was also a car bombing in Samarra, killing 7, and an attack on a police station there.

AFP reports, "The government is not even close to being formed,” a member of the so-far upbeat Shiite bloc" said.

This obscure wire service alleges that Ibrahim Jaafari,the prospective prime minister of Iraq, is using his British contacts to try to put pressure on the Kurds to compromise and help form a government. Jaafari lived in London 1989-2003 and was involved in anti-Saddam meetings sponsored in part by the British government, so it is plausible that he has those contacts. The Kurdish leaders do, as well. But what leverage would the British have now with the Kurds?

Catherine Philp of the London Times is alarmed about the condition of women in Iraq. The Bush administration has posed as a "liberator" of Iraqi women, but women's rights if anything have been dealt a series of setbacks in the past two years, and more are probably coming if the United Iraqi Alliance has its way.

Excerpts from BBC World Press Monitor, Mar. 29:

Al-Adalah publishes on page 1 a 50-word report saying the Unified Iraqi Alliance proposed Finance Minister Adil Abd-al-Mahdi for the Vice-President post and Husayn al-Shahristani for the National Assembly Deputy-speaker post.

Al-Mu'tamar publishes on page 1 a 1,000-word report citing "Iraqi sources" as saying that the US Administration informed Vice-President Ibrahim al-Ja'fari, Unified Iraqi Alliance nominee for the Prime Minister post, that he is "not free to nominate his ministers," and that the Administration "opposes proposing any religious figure to take a ministerial post." The report also refers to the security procedures in the Karbala Governorate on the pilgrimage to Imam al-Husayn shrine . . .

Al-Zawra publishes on the front page a 300-word report citing Muqtada al-Sadr on Monday, 28 March, criticizing the Kurds for demanding annexing Kirkuk to the Kurdistan region . . .

Al-Zawra publishes on the front page a 250-word report citing United Iraqi Alliance member Shaykh Fawwaz al-Jarbah asserting that the US has not intervened in the formation of the new government but it expressed reservations regarding some candidates for the Interior and Defence Ministries . . .

Al-Manarah dated 27 March carries on page 3 a 75-word report stating that the oil sector employees held a peaceful demonstration rejecting the partitioning of Iraq . . .

Al-Mada publishes on the front page a 50-word report stating that the Al-Hillah Sport Club chairman was seriously wounded by US soldiers while on his way to the airport yesterday 27 March.

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US-Pakistan Relations "Broad-Based"
Four Suspected al-Qaeda Captured in Peshawar

Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence along with, probably, the FBI arrested four foreign Muslims in Peshawar on Thursday. They are: Abdul Aziz of Kunduz,Afghanistan; Mustafa, a Turk; Sulaiman, a Spaniard; and Tulan, a Russian Muslim. The four are suspected of being al-Qaeda.

Pakistani intelligence has tracked down and arrested some 600 such al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan, including big shots like Abu Zubaida and Khalid Shaikh Muhammad. Since the jihadis keep trying to kill President Musharraf, he has every incentive to pursue this quarry. US media cover this story less often than they should, but Reuters and other wire services report it from time to time (I'm linking to another Pakistani raid against al-Qaeda, in early March, which involves two Sudanese, a Qatari, and two others.)

US Ambassador to Pakistan Ryan Crocker emphasized that the United States wants a broad-based and long-term engagement with Pakistan. Honest and straightforward diplomat that he is, Crocker admitted that the US had in the past sometimes allied with Pakistan on a single issue and then just walked away afterwards. Crocker is a career diplomat who knows the Muslim world intimately and has developed a reputation as an effective combatant against al-Qaeda in the field. The US could do with a couple hundred more of him.

On what basis can there be a broad-based US-Pakistani relationship?

1. Pakistani intelligence is on the front lines in the fight against al-Qaeda. If anyone finds Bin Laden, it will likely be them. Al-Qaeda's capacity to strike US targets in South Asia and neighboring regions has been crippled because of the effectiveness of the Pakistanis.

2. Pakistan is a counter-weight to Iran in the region. A nuclear power with twice Iran's population and a professional military some 400,000 strong, Pakistan is in geopolitical competition with Tehran for influence in Afghanistan and Central Asia, as well as in the eastern Arab world. President Musharraf is a Turkish-style secularist and Pakistan has been moving back to parliamentary governance, so that it could develop as among the biggest Muslim democracies.

3. Pakistan is an important back channel to China, with which it has had a longstanding and close alliance.

4. Pakistan's cooperation is key to finding a peaceful and mutually satisfactory solution to the Kashmir issue, which is among the global flashpoints the US government must help resolve for the sake of US and world security.

If anyone is puzzled about why the US has relented and finally allowed Pakistan to have F-16s (after having earlier taken their money for the order, then cancelled it and kept the money), they should just imagine what those four characters in Peshawar were really up to, and what it might have developed into if Musharraf hadn't sent the ISI in after them. Of course, the US military-industrial complex does benefit from such sales, but it would have benefited a decade ago when the US government forbade them. The change is not in profitability, the change is in the mutual long-term strategic interests of the United States and Pakistan.

Critics of the newly warm relations between the United States and Pakistan typically focus on past issues. It is true that the Inter-Services Intelligence used to be dominated by extreme fundamentalists. This orientation was if anything helped, however, by the funneling of billions to it by the Reagan administration for the purpose of inciting radical Muslims against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. These extremists have in large part been purged by Musharraf, in any case.

It is also true that Pakistan's military governments at the very least winked at A.Q. Khan's one-man nuclear proliferation program. But it was probably mainly accomplished in the days of the fundamentalist generals, and Musharraf and the current chiefs of staff are not the ones responsible for it.

The legitimate criticism of Pakistan's current government is that Musharraf did not run for president against an actual rival, and refuses to take off his uniform. Parliament is therefore not really sovereign. Pakistan is not currently exactly a dictatorship, since the elected parliament can and does buck the president, not to mention criticizing him relentlessly. But if the US is to have long-term broad-based relations with it, Musharraf must make a choice between being the equivalent of chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and being civilian president.

Good US relations with Pakistan must not come at the expense of good relations with India. Rather, the US should use its good offices to help the two make peace, which would benefit both of them economically and culturally. Indo-Pakistan peace would help create a huge new Asian commercial market. If Afghanistan could be put on a sound footing, you could have a truck trade from Delhi up through Pakistan to Kabul and Tashkent, and from there to Beijing, through Asia. A 21st century silk road would spread prosperity and promote democracy and peace.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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. '
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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.
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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. "

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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.
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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. "
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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.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

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.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

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.
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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?
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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).
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

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.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

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

11:50

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

------

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.
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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.
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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.
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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. '

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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.
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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.
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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 career in Saudi Arabia and his close ties to the royal family, writing: "During the 1980s, Mr. Hariri acted as a personal emissary to Lebanon for Saudi King Fahd."

Some have pointed out that "al-Qaeda" disclaimed responsibility for the Hariri assassination. But al-Qaeda is not a top-down organization, especially now. Some al-Qaeda-linked web site disclaimed responsibility. Besides, al-Qaeda did not claim responsibility. Abu Adas's small Jihadi group did. Their claim of being an al-Qaeda franchise may be an informal one. Finally, al-Qaeda routinely disclaims credit for its operations, and Bin Laden initially denied involvement in 9/11!

The Syrian secret police had means, motive and opportunity, and must be put on the suspect list.

But from a Gulf perspective, and from the perspective of the recent history of transnational jihadi terrorism, a radical anti-Saudi hit on Hariri is perfectly plausible and also cannot simply be dismissed. It should be remembered that 9/11 initially struck many in Washington as so weird and illogical that they assumed Iraq was the real culprit. Transnational terrorism has its own logic, and its targets can strike outsiders as oddly decontextualized. From within the movement, however, Hariri may have looked like a Saudi cat's paw, and hitting him a way to reduce Saudi influence in Greater Syria. The point is gradually to isolate the Saudi royal family, weaken them, and then finish them off. It is a crackpot plan, and it would be doubly tragic if Hariri was the victim of this kind of thinking. It is too early to know for sure, and better to reserve judgment.
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Wave of Bombings in Middle East

(Revised).

The continued instability in the Middle East yielded on Saturday a harvest of deadly bombings in the region.

Qatar was shaken Saturday by a bombing near a theater where British were playing Shakespeare. One British subject was killed, and several people were wounded. The bombing was done by an Egyptian on the 2nd anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, and investigators are looking for al-Qaeda links. Al-Qaeda is a convenient shorthand, but the likelihood is that the bombing was an expression of a kind of Muslim radical nationalism, resentful of increasing Western dominance in the region.

In Lebanon, guerrillas detonated a bomb in a Christian development of Beirut. The incident raised fears of a renewal of sectarian tensions in that country. The bombing was likely related to demands by minority Christian politicians that the government of Lebanon resign, and the culprits are likely pro-Syrian Sunnis.

Terrorists blew up a Sufi-Shiite shrine in Fatahpur, Baluchistan, about 200 miles from the city of Quetta, killing 30 persons and wounding another 20. Although no one has claimed credit, it seems to me likely that this act was carried out by Sunni radicals with links to al-Qaeda. They have struck at Shiite sites repeatedly, including a Quetta mosque. Some have suggested that Baluch separatists, who want more autonomy from the Pakistan federal government, are behind it. But a separatist movement is unlikely to target a local shrine during a local pilgrimage-- it would hit a symbol of federal power. On the other hand, we know that the Deobandi- and Wahhabi-influenced radical Sunni jihadis in Pakistan absolute hate Sufism (mystical Islam centered on saint's shrines) and Shiism. So what better target for them than a Sufi-Shiite shrine? Such an attack is also an assault on Pakistan's traditional, ecumenical and tolerant mystical traditions, which the radicals would like to replace with fundamentalist intolerance.

The rebellion of the Bugti tribe in Baluchistan against the government of Pervez Musharraf, which involves a demand that more of the revenues from natural gas remain in local hands, seems to me likely unrelated to the Fatahpur bombing.

These bombings were unconnected, and mean something distinctive in each setting. But they add up to evidence of continued instability in the Middle Eastern arc of crisis.
I think two of them are al-Qaeda-related.

The tragedy is that if the Bush administration had made good on its pledges and actually put Afghanistan on a sound footing economically and politically, instead of abandoning it to turn Iraq into a failed state and center of bombings, we might have made real headway against the radical Sunni jihadis. As it is, Bin Laden and Zawahiri are at large, and al-Qaeda has become a franchise to which local groups affiliate. The locals are the ones who tried to blow up Shakespeare and the Sufi Pir on Saturday. Bush's cynical use of Lebanese developments to pressure Syria is also implicated in the increasing sectarian tensions in Lebanon. Bush has all along dropped the ball with regard to al-Qaeda, and has been heavy-handed in the Arab world, a very dangerous combination.
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Jaafari: Iraq headed toward Religious Law

On the second anniversary of the launching of the Iraq War, crowds demonstrated throughout the world. Among the larger rallies were those in London (45,000) and Istanbul (15,000). The crowds were smaller than those that demonstrated in late winter 2003 as the war was gearing up.

Such relatively large anti-American demonstrations in Turkey, which has long had secular governments and been pro-Western, are particularly worrisome.

Prospective Iraqi prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari has given an interview to Der Spiegel, to appear Tuesday, in which he says his government will press for the implementation of religious law in personal status matters:

' "It's understandable in a country where the majority of people are Muslim . . . Iraq should become a Muslim country but without falling under the influence of Iran or Saudi Arabia . . . Everyone will have the same rights, even members of the many minor religious communities," he said, explaining there would be multiple forms of jurisprudence. '

Jaafari is using the techniques of misdirection here. The system he is proposing would put Shiites under their ayatollahs with regard to laws governing marriage, divorce, inheritance, alimony, custody of children, etc. Sunnis would be under their clergy, and Catholics would be under canon law. Since 97 percent of Iraqis are Muslims, 97 percent will be under shariah or Islamic law.

Jaafari hastens to say women will not be made to veil. But in fact, in Basra and some other parts of Iraq, Sadrist and Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq young men are forcing girls to veil in public already. Nor is veiling the main issue in women's status. Jaafari's system will give girls half the amount of inheritance that their brothers receive, and may well make women's testimony worth half that of a man in court. If strict gender segregation is enforced, and coeducation ended, Iraqi women may find it difficult to get post-BA training, since they won't be allowed in the professional schools (now coded as "male"), and mostly won't have professional schools for women, or in any case many fewer than for men.

How far the system goes toward that of Iran or Saudi Arabia remains to be seen. Just having personal status law judged according to religion is the same system that exists in Israel and Lebanon, so it isn't exactly the end of the world or unprecedented (Iraqi personal status law was religious before the 1958 revolution).
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Two Car Bombings of US Troops
Iraqi Politics Still Unsettled

Wire service report that ' Insurgents attacked US troops with two suicide car bombs in the western Iraqi town of Haditha on Friday, local witnesses said. They said a suicide bomber detonated a car next to a US patrol after American troops entered the town looking for insurgents. A second suicide car bomb exploded as US troops were securing the area after the first attack, witnesses said. ' Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that 5 Iraqis were killed in separate guerrilla attacks.

AFP reminds us that Iraq remains highly insecure 2 years after the American invasion. It reports that of the $18 billion appropriated by the US Congress for reconstruction aid, $5 billion has been spent (or earmarked for?) security.

The Financial Times tells the harrowing tale of shooting first and paying later in Iraq, including by private security teams-- not just US military.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that there is a big strike by students and professors at Basra University, protesting the incursions onto the campus of members of the Sadr Movement, who are attempting to establish control over the university and its style of life.

It also says that a technical and architectural team from Iran is visiting Basra, having been invited by the city authorities to come help with reconstruction.

The BBC's Becky Branford has done an article on the controversial character of the Iraqi interim governing council or transitional administrative law (TAL). She quotes my complaint that requiring a 2/3s majority to form a government is a recipe for gridlock, as well as defenders of the TAL who say that it forces the parties to find a consensus. I think there were other and better ways to encourage consensus, including a bicameral legislature where the upper house over-represented the Kurds and Sunni Arabs. Making it extremely difficult to form a government is highly unwise in a parliamentary system, and allowing smaller parties to virtually hold the majority hostage to maximalist demands is a recipe for resentment, not for consensus.

Rod Nordland of Newsweek is also beset by doubts and worries arising from the difficulties the Iraqis are having in forming a government.

Ardeshir Moaveni details the ways in which Iran may benefit from the new political configuration in Iraq. His suggestion that we keep our eye on what the United Iraqi Alliance decides about the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) as a barometer of Iraq/Iran relations is an excellent one.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat: Five elected provincial councils chose governors by secret ballot this week. All are dominated by the parties of the United Iraqi Alliance (primarily the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Dawa Party). Results:

Aziz Kadhim `Alwan - Governor of Nasiriyah
Muhammad al-Wa'ili - " " Basra
Latif Muhammad Tarfah - governor of Kut
Adil Mahudar Hasan - Amara
Muhammad Ali Hassani - Samawah

Earlier reports had suggested that the Sadrists might dominate Kut and Amarah, but that appears not to have panned out.
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Wolfowitz's Plot to Destroy OPEC
And Why it was always Ridiculous

Joe Conason presents some excellent reasons why Paul Wolfowitz should not head the World Bank. But there may be others.

The BBC Newsnight reports the titanic struggle between the Neoconservatives and Big Oil over Iraqi petroleum. If this story is true, it is some of the best reporting to come out of the Iraq scandal for months, and Greg Palast and his colleagues have scooped the Washington Post and the New York Times.

It is a story that also has a bearing on Paul Wolfowitz's bid to become chairman of the World Bank. I have some questions for him. Does he want to reduce the Arabs to poverty? Is he hostile to the very existence of OPEC and of producer cooperatives in primary commodities? Does he favor the use of warfare by states to permit their corporations to take over public energy resources in the Global South? Are his economic policies going to be rooted in a desire to further the interests of the Likud and other rightwing parties in the Global South?

As Palast tells the story, the Neoconservatives (presumably Wolfowitz, Perle and Feith) and the Department of Defense were dedicated to privatizing the Iraqi petroleum industry as a key plank of their Iraq project. They hoped that Iraq's privately-owned (presumably by American petroleum corporations) petroleum industry would secede from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and would pump large amounts of petroleum, refusing to stay within the bounds of the Iraq OPEC quota. By setting quotas for members, OPEC attempts to keep the price of petroleum from falling too far or from oscillating too wildly.

That there was a cult of privatization at the Pentagon has never been in doubt. Iraq has been a socialist country since at least 1968 (and had elements of socialism in the period of military rule 1958-1968). Most major industries were publicly owned. Moreover, the Iraqi population liked it that way. Opinion polls show that 80% of Iraqis think the purpose of a government is to take care of people.

Paul Bremer, the second US civil administrator of Iraq is a fanatical laissez-fairiste. The privatizers would set up private corporations to sell you creek water and oxygen if they could get away with it. In a BBC interview, Jay Garner alleged that the Department of Defense dissolved the Iraqi army and sent it home, causing all of us no end of trouble, because they were afraid that retaining a large Baath institution like that would form an obstacle to radical privatization. Bremer wanted to allow foreign companies to buy any firm in Iraq and to be able to expatriate profits immediately. (The abolition of currency regulations, advocated by Washington Consensus free marketeers, contributed to the meltdown of the East Asian economies in 1997; Malaysia escaped devastation by thumbing its nose at the privatizers and slapping on currency controls. It turns out that if there are no regulations about currency transfers, speculators take advantage of it; Surprise!)

Obviously, the real prize in privatization would be the petroleum industry. No other state-owned Iraqi industries are worth much, and will be difficult to sell to private owners because they are bloated bureaucracies and inefficient.

The prospect of the Iraqi petroleum going into foreign hands, however, impelled many Iraqis to begin sabotaging the pipelines, or to support the saboteurs. Palast reports,

Mr Aljibury, once Ronald Reagan's "back-channel" to Saddam, claims that plans to sell off Iraq's oil, pushed by the US-installed Governing Council in 2003, helped instigate the insurgency and attacks on US and British occupying forces. "Insurgents used this, saying, 'Look, you're losing your country, you're losing your resources to a bunch of wealthy billionaires who want to take you over and make your life miserable,'" said Mr Aljibury from his home near San Francisco. "We saw an increase in the bombing of oil facilities, pipelines, built on the premise that privatisation is coming."

Iraq should be able to produce 3 million barrels a day, but it has often only done a million or a million and a half because of sabotage, reducing the Iraqi government income from petroleum to only $10 billion or so a year, when it could have been $20 billion or more.

According to Palast, it was the Coalition Provisional Authority officials from a Big Oil background, like Philip Carroll, the former CEO of Shell Oil USA, who told Bremer "No!"

The US petroleum companies haven't been interested in owning Middle Eastern petroleum for decades. Most Middle Eastern oil producers nationalized their industries in the 1970s. The US companies moved into refining and distribution, which is plenty profitable. Trying to own the oil fields had long caused them a lot of trouble. The attempt of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossaddegh to nationalize Iranian oil in 1951-1953 had led to a US/UK boycott of Iranian petroleum and ultimately a CIA-backed coup that ended the last democratically elected government in Iran in 1953. Since that time, Middle Eastern peoples had become much more politically and socially mobilized, and popular demands for ownership of national resources became irresistible.

(Max Boot, who thinks Middle Easterners are just Filipino peasant villagers circa 1902--poor, illiterate, unconnected and politically naive--exemplifies the basic Neocon fallacy. The Neocons haven't even caught up to the 1950s or read Karl Deutsch on the social mobilization of the Global South. People can't be occupied so easily once they are urbanized, industrialized, literate, connected by modern communications, and politically aware. This is why Boot and Wolfowitz did not anticipate a long-term guerrilla war in Iraq, or how savvy and effective it would be. They really think they are Lord Curzon dealing with backward WOGs).

So the Neoconservative/ Department of Defense plan to privatize the petroleum industry was swimming against history, and proved impossible to implement because a) the Iraqis wouldn't put up with it and b) even US Big Oil could see that it was a disaster waiting to happen.

The other thing wrong with the Wolfowitz/Perle/Feith plan to destroy OPEC via Iraq is that it cannot be done. If they thought it could be done, they are ignorant of the petroleum industry and also of basic economics. About 80 million barrels of petroleum are produced in the world each day (it fluctuates, so this figure is inexact). The Saudis can produce as much as 11 million of that (they are expanding capacity now to 12 or 13). The Saudis can, however, get along with only producing 7 million barrels a day (maybe even less at today's prices). Most oil producers use a lot of their own petroleum. The US, Russia, China, etc., produce petroleum but then they consume a lot of it themselves. The Gulf producers, in contrast, have small populations and cannot absorb much petroleum use, so they are the ones who can export in large amounts.

The Saudis are now and for the foreseeable future the major swing producer. It takes them three days to gear up production from 7 million barrels a day to 11, or to ratchet things back down. They can put 5 million of the approximately 80 million on the market or take it off, virtually at the stroke of a pen. Between this ability and their influence in OPEC, the Saudis have some ability to influence (but by no means control) petroleum prices.

Iraq can only produce about 2.5 to 3 million barrels a day now if there is no sabotage. With the investment of billions and lots of security and rebuilding, they might get that up to 5 million a day within 5 years. It would take them 15 to 20 years to have a capacity similar to that of Saudi Arabia. In the meantime, OPEC countries will probably increase their capacity by 20 million barrels a day, completely offsetting any Iraq increases. Moreover, Iraq is a real country, with a population of 25 million and many industries, and Iraq will use a lot of its own petroleum. What it has available for export will be only a portion. Iraq will never be the kind of swing producer that Saudi Arabia is.

There are already a lot of countries that are not in OPEC and pay no attention to quotas. They haven't destroyed OPEC, and one more (Iraq) wouldn't, either. The cartel effect of OPEC is simply not that great, and oil prices have fluctuated dramatically every decade since it was formed. OPEC has mostly failed even to dramatically influence, much less control prices. In 2004-5, Bush administration policies in Iraq plus a rise in demand from China and India plus strikes and other problems in places like Nigeria and Venezuela put the petroleum price up to as much as $55 a barrel, whereas OPEC's target for many years was $25 a barrel. The Neocons by their Iraq war have managed to double OPEC's income, beyond even what OPEC wanted!

So Iraqi petroleum cannot destroy OPEC for the foreseeable future, even if whoever was in charge of it wanted too. In fact, there is every reason for any Iraqi government to want to keep petroleum publicly owned, and to cooperate with OPEC in attempting to smoothe out extremes in the price cycle.

Primary commodities suffer from big swings in prices. You see this in coffee and cotton, too. There are booms and then busts and then booms. If you are a producer, this rollercoaster ride is inconvenient and could bankrupt you some years. High prices bring in more money but also bring lots of new competitors who can only compete when the prices are high because of natural disadvantages. Really low prices are devastating. So coffee growers, petroleum producers, and other primary commodity producers often form cartels in an attempt, not so much to keep prices high, as to keep them from jumping all around. With the exception of the DeBeers diamond racket in South Africa, most cartels have only a minor effect on price cycles.

Now the Neocons are all becoming Greens and arguing for solar or other forms of power in order to cut down on US oil dependence. This is code for making sure the Arabs cannot use petroleum to influence the US in the Arab-Israeli dispute. I'm all for getting off the carbon-based treadmill. But petroleum has other uses than providing energy, especially petrochemicals, and Arab producers are going to be rich off such uses for decades or centuries.

The story Palast tells isone of crackpotism run wild, and it would be more than tragic if it is what dragged us into the Iraq quagmire.
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Poll Shows Bush Popularity on Iraq Plummeting

A new ABC/Washington Post poll shows the number of Americans who approve of Bush's handling of Iraq way down.

Gary Langer tells us:

* ' [Bush's] approval specifically on Iraq was 75 percent as the main fighting ended [in 2003]; it's 39 percent now, a career low. '

* 70% of Americans say that the level of US casualties in Iraq is "unacceptable."

* ' 53 percent, on balance, say the war was not worth fighting. '

* 41 percent say the Iraq war has made the US weaker in the world. Only 28 percent say it has made the US stronger. These numbers are a reversal from the year before.

* 2/3s of Americans oppose military action against Iran
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Iraqi Parliament Meets to Sound of Bombs

Al-Zaman: Guerrillas detonated a car bomb near a US facility in southern Baghdad on Tuesday, but only managed to kill an Iraqi and to wound 12 others. Another bomb exploded at the offices of the Mirror, the only English-language newspaper in Baghdad. Police colonel Yusuf Chalabi was assassinated in broad daylight in the Najjar quarter. In Baquba, a car bomb exploded at a checkpoint, killing 5 Iraqi troops and wounding 12.

Dan Murphy of the CSM reports on how all the roads out of Baghdad are extremely dangerous. He reports a conversation with an Iraqi truck driver:

The road north through Baquba? "Pretty dangerous,'' he says. Due south through Mahmudiyah? "It's bad, but I haven't heard of any drivers being killed there in a few weeks." How about west through Abu Ghraib and on to Fallujah? "Very, very dangerous. We try not to go past Abu Ghraib."

The volley of mortar fire that dropped a few hundred yards short of where the opening session of Iraq's new parliament was held Wednesday rattled the ceremonial gathering and was a reminder that the city remains under siege.

US Embassy employees are forbidden to travel by land the ten miles to Baghdad airport because it is so dangerous, and have to be helicoptered in and out of the capital.

The London Times's Catherine Philp in Baghdad reports the opening of the Iraqi parliament with perhaps the least enthusiasm and most acuteness of anyone in the mainstream media. The parliament did not really open, as in, open for business, because it is not able to form a government by electing a presidential council that would choose a prime minister. It just met for two hours.

Despite calls for the meeting to be held outside the heavily fortified "Little America" compound of the Green Zone, it was of course far too dangerous to meet anywhere else. The capital was locked down for security,a nd three major bridges were closed by the US military. As it was, mortar shells exploded only a few yards from the building where they were meeting.

There was a minor controversy over whether the oaths should be administered bilingually, in both Arabic and Kurdish, but even Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani thought such a requirement too much. Although the Times implied that it was farcical, I have to say that the very outbreak of such a controversy in a country so long dominated by a frankly racist form of Arab nationalism is a welcome change. Maybe eventually Berber will be an official language alongside Arabic in some North African countries.

As for the rest, Philpin writes:

' Because the rival political factions had failed even to agree on a candidate for Speaker, the proceedings were chaired by the oldest member present, Sheikh Dhari al-Fayidh, 82. He paid tribute to all “the martyrs who died for this country”, including what he called “the victims of the north”. “Kurdistan, Kurdistan,” came an angry cry from the floor. “Sorry,” the Sheikh muttered. “Kurdistan.” The meeting was encouraging at least in its nods to free speech. A glance across the assembly floor revealed the diversity of Iraq. There were 79 women, 11 with heads uncovered, the rest split between headscarves and black flowing abayas; 11 Shia turbans, 22 yashmaks, one Kurdish tribal headwrap and a sea of Western suits. '

The conservative dress of most of the women came about because they are religious Shiites on the United Iraqi Alliance list. A third of each list had to be women, but the UIA found many Shiite fundamentalist women to run.

Al-Zaman: Ibrahim Jaafari, the likely new prime minister, said in his speech that he thought the UIA could make a deal with the Kurdish Alliance within two weeks. It looks as though Iraq will lack a new executive well into April. It is worrisome that if the government is not formed soon, political pressures could mount and social turmoil ensue.

In contrast, the secular female physician Raja' al-Khuzai, a member of parliament on Allawi's Iraqiya list, thought that parliament would meet again in as little as a week to elect a speaker of the house and a presidential council.

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the UIA and of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, in his speech called for the crafting of a new constitution that "respects human rights and the Iraqi, Islamic identity of the people, and grants everyeone equal rights before the law, and will please the Iraqi people." The phrase "Islamic identity" is a code phrase for the implementation of shariah or Islamic law in the place of civil law.

Al-Hakim also attacked Jordan for not doing enough to stop attacks on Iraqis by radical Muslim Jordanians, and for "instigating" terrorism against Iraqis by Jordanian extremists.

There are only six Sunni Arab members of parliament from Sunni parties and independents (there is also one from the United Iraqi Alliance). Ghazi al-Yawir, the outgoing president and a Sunni from the Shamar tribe, along with several other Sunni Arab parliamentarians, threatened to resign from parliament if the Shiites imposed their Sunni UIA member, Fawaz al-Jarba, as one of the two vice-presidents. Mashaan al-Juburi said that other party lists cannot represent the Sunni Arabs in government post set aside for Sunnis.

UN envoy Ashraf Jahangir Qazi said that only after a permanent constitution is achieved will Iraq come together politically. Drafting this document is the chief business of the new parliament. I know Iraqis, though, who think that the parliament is incapable of forging a new constitution. If they are right, Qazi's prediction actually becomes pretty discouraging.

Among the concerns of the Kurds is the likelihood that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani might play key role in constitution-making, as Hamza Hendawi points out. Sistani's position is complex and hard to convey to a Western audience. It should be noted that he does speak about the need for the "guardianship of the jurisprudent," but confines the top cleric's authority to "the social order" (Nizam al-mujtama`). That is, Sistani believes that clerics have the obligation to intervene in matters affecting Muslim society, but makes a distinction between that and intervening in government or politics. I don't think he wants to run the government, but I do think he wants to shape the social order through his influence on Shiite politicians and decision-makers.

Al-Zaman reports that the Kirkuk provincial assembly finally met, but only 15 members out of the total of 40 actually showed up. The Sunni Muslims and the Turkmen are mostly refusing to cooperate because they mistrust the Kurds, who have come to dominate the security apparatus of Kirkuk.

Iraq is on the verge of being the most corrupt environment in the world, according to a new report. Actually, people on the ground in Iraq dealing with economic reconstruction tell me that it was the most corrupt situation on earth a long time ago.
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Democracy by George?

My essay, "Democracy -- by George? President Bush and his supporters are taking credit for spreading freedom across the Middle East. Here's why they're wrong" - is out today at Salon.com's opinion section.

My op-ed, "US Caught in the Cross-Fire," which takes stock of what is likely to happen in Iraq during the next year based on current and past trends, has appeared at the National Public Radio "Taking Issue" website.
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Women bloggers (and other quiet people)

Jeanne at Body and Soul has some thoughtful and right-on observations on the Levy/ Jarvis debate I discussed below, on whether the white male dominance of the more popular parts of the blogosphere is a good thing.
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The Blogging Phenomenon

Steven Levy at Newsweek asks why blogging is dominated by white males, and what the implications of this configuration are if blogging replaces traditional media. He quotes presenters at a recent Harvard conference who worried that the newsrooms of the major print media have only recently begun to be diversified with regard to gender and race, and that the white male bloggers could crowd out the voices of these professional journalists.

Jeff Jarvis, the Republican in Democrat Clothing, replies that there is nothing wrong with being a white male.

Of course not. But white male Americans, at least, disproportionately voted for Bush, supported the Iraq war, favor racial profiling, favor tax cuts for the wealthy, favor capital punishment, oppose gay marriage, etc. Of course they are diverse, too, but their statistical center of gravity skews right in American terms, which means Pretty Far Right in the terms of the rest of the world. If they dominate a medium of news and information, it won't give a balanced view of the world.

In his typical ad hominem fashion, Jarvis attacks Levy for being a white male. But Levy's point is precisely that the Newsweek newsroom doesn't just consist of people like him, whereas the blogs with the largest number of hits in the world consist of bloggers an awful lot like Jarvis.

Jarvis then makes the breathtaking observation that anyone can blog. But that isn't the point either. Levy isn't saying anyone is prevented from blogging. He is saying that we may find that the top five hundred blogs with regard to hits have a particular racial and gender configuration, which may not be healthy for the medium.

Jarvis argues that the bottom 7,999,999 blogs in hits get much more circulation than the top 100 blogs. This statement is true but contains a genuine fallacy of reasoning. Most blogs get only a few hits, and are seen by only a few people, and they are not the same people as see the other small blogs. So to aggregate all these readers is illegitimate. Andrew Sullivan or Jeff Jarvis or Right Wing News, on the other hand, get tens of thousands of hits a day, especially from other opinion leaders, and circulate widely. So that a million other blogs each get 3 hits a day is completely beside the point.

Jarvis then recommends some Middle Eastern bloggers as though he is thereby providing diverse opinions. But let's stop and think about this. Jarvis doesn't know anything serious about the Middle East, and is innocent of the languages. So he is recommending English-language blogs from the region or by expatriates, without any real metric for where they fall on their own country's spectrum. Who knows English in the Middle East? Usually young men from wealthy or at least middle class families. They are disproportionately likely to favor capitalist, unregulated markets, to be secular in their outlook, and to be pro-Western. I.e., the views of many (not all) Western-educated Middle-Easterners are almost the complete opposite of most other Middle Easterners. You have to know something about the Middle East to know something about Middle Eastern bloggers in their own context.

Here is some support for Levy's argument. Henry Copeland summarizes the recent results of a non-scientific blog advertisements poll. He finds that a fifth of blog readers are themselves bloggers, and that they engage in the activities typical of opinion leaders. The blogosphere is the sphere of the innovators, volunteers, networkers and entrepreneurs. In Henry's poll, it is 3/4s male, and disproportionately upper middle class.

Jarvis is right that the problem is in what readers choose as daily fair rather than in what is available. If Mr. Jarvis wants some real diversity, he might try the blog of al-Muhajabah, "Veiled 4 Allah: The occasional thoughts of a Muslim woman. Islam, current events, my life, and whatever else interests me."

Then there is the refreshing Iranians for Peace, with postings by Mana Kia, Sima Shakhsari, and others.

If you want something as unlike Jeff Jarvis as possible, try Genia Stevens' Sisters Talk.

Ammar Abdul Hamid blogs Syria from Damascus in Amarji.

A Shiite Iraqi philosopher is Abbas Kadhim.

Or how about the staunchly anti-war pacifist journalist of the Middle East, Helena Cobban of Just World News?

The Iraqi Sunni Arab woman blogger, Riverbend, reflects the views of many in the Baghdad Sunni middle classes, and must gall Jarvis by being almost as popular as he is.

Progressive women include Melanie Mattsoon's Just a Bump in the Beltway

and Susan Madrak's Suburban Guerrilla

I'm not trying to be exhaustive, just attempting to make the point. There's real diversity out there, and really important opinions being generated by it, which we ignore at our peril. Steven Levy is right that there is a danger of it being ignored, because blog readers too often look for mirrors of their own views. The mean-spiritedness of Jarvis toward those with whom he disagrees, and his celebration of often unrepresentative Middle Eastern bloggers, typifies this danger.

By the way, I regularly disagree with many of the sites I just listed, and they often disagree with one another.

The danger is all the greater because Jarvis has used his old TV Guide rollodex to convince the journalists that he speaks for the bloggers in general as the expert on the medium. He has also managed to scare them with his silly assertion that all bloggers are journalists. He should speak for himself. Me, I'm a news consolidator, translator, op-ed writer, and historian. I'm not doing journalism (i.e. news gathering on the scene and ensuring that stories are at least sourced to two or three different persons) 95 percent of the time. Most of what I do could not be accomplished without the efforts of the real journalists in the field, my heroes. And I even worked for a newspaper in Beirut for nearly a year once (mostly as a translator), so I know what real journalism looks like. I also did it with a civil war going on around me, so I know what the personal cost of journalism at the front is. People watching Fox and then bloviating at Little Green Martians or whatever are not doing journalism. Most of the people working in the studio at Fox Cable News are not even doing journalism as opposed to oral opinion columns, though there are real reporters in the field, who no doubt wish they could find some other boss than Rupert Murdoch.

News is becoming more interactive, which is all to the good. I would say that the most important feature of the blogosphere is the enabling of narrow-casting. Ten years ago who would have believed that an obscure professor of Middle East studies at a midwestern university could generate as many as a million page views a month by talking about Iraqi Shiite politics? Ten years ago I couldn't even have gotten past the gatekeepers and slush piles to get an op-ed piece published. This is certainly some sort of revolution, but it is not a revolution in the production of journalism. It is a revolution in the interpretation, reception, and feedback-looping of journalism.

The phenomenon is not becoming less important. David Sifry reports some results of statistics gathered through Technorati.com, a web page link tracking service. He finds that up to 40,000 web logs are being created each day. Technorati now tracks nearly 8 million blogs, double the number from 5 months ago. The nearly 8 million blogs account for nearly one billion links.

As many bloggers have pointed out, the negative spin that many journalists put on a recent Gallup poll about the impact of blogging is undeserved. In fact, nearly a quarter of respondents said that they were familiar or somewhat familiar with blogs, and only 48 percent said they never read them. Obviously, it is a new medium, and what is remarkable about it is that it requires people to read. Americans are frankly not great readers, on the whole. Some 59 percent of Americans say they get their news from their local television stations. Only 42 percent even claim to have read the newspaper yesterday. But over a quarter now say they get news online. If they are reading, e.g., google.news, there is little in the way of distinction between formal journalistic news and blogs there. A lot of people may be reading blogs and not knowing it. I actually find it quite scarey that a keyword search at google.com turns up Reuters alongside American Patriot News and some bloggers. If I were google, I'd disaggregate those.
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Parliament Meets with No Government

Guerrillas detonated at least five car bombs in Iraq on Tuesday. They detonated another at Baqubah early on Wednesday, killing 3 Iraqi soldiers and wounding several others.

The Iraqi parliament meets for the first time Wednesday, but it is mainly a ceremonial event. The natural function of such a meeting, to elect a government, is absent. Ideally the parliament would elect a president and two vice presidents, who would appoint a prime minister and with him or her then approve a cabinet.

The parliament has to meet in the heavily fortified Green Zone, and one wonders whether the MPs and their families won't just have to move there permanently if they are to avoid being killed or kidnapped. As yet, I have seen no published list of the names of the elected members of parliament, which is quite extraordinary. What other election in modern history has been this anonymous?

Al-Hayat: Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani is said to be particularly vehement that any agreement with the Shiites would require that they cede to the Kurds Kirkuk and grant the Kurds the right to keep their paramilitary, the peshmerga, as a proxy in their areas for the Iraqi army. He rejected the idea of postponing the Kirkuk issue. (It would be a little as though the governor of Alabama insisted that Atlanta be joined to his state and that the Alabama national guard substitute for the US army in that state, so that the US army should never step foot on Alabaman soil). Barzani complained that some Shiite politicians were already speaking as though they were the Iraqi state, and the Kurds were an opposition party.

Demonstrations against Jordan by Shiite crowds continued in Najaf on Tuesday, with demands that all Jordanians be expelled from Iraq. Sistani's office denied that the Grand Ayatollah had issued a fatwa on the celebration held by the Jordanian family, whose son had detonated a bomb in Hilla last week. Sistani warned his aides against speaking about the issue of sectarian friction.

The father of the alleged bomber of Hilla denied Tuesday that his son had died in Hilla, specifying Mosul as the site of his death, and denied that the family held a celebration of his alleged "martyrdom." The family is said by ash-Sharq al-Awsat to have sent a letter to Ayatollah Sistani to this effect.

Ominously, Najaf police chief Ghalib al-Jaza'iri (who from all accounts is a little unbalanced) announced that they had finally apprehended the man who assassinated Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, the Shiite clerical leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, on Aug. 29, 2003. They allege that the man, Ramzi Hashim, is a Kurd from Mosul, and that he intended to assassinate Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani as well, and to detonate bombs in the vicinity of the shrine of Imam Ali. This news will further inflame Kurdish-Shiite tensions. Is al-Jaza'iri, whom the government has tried without success to dismiss, attempting to influence the political negotiations with the Kurds by making this (somewhat implausible) charge public at this time?

In Kirkuk, a small crowd of 500 Turkmen and Arabs gathered to demand that the interim constitution be amended (Ash-Sharq al-Awsat) with regard to how the Kirkuk issue would be settled. (Currently, it specifies a referendum, which the Kurds are numerous enough to win.)

Ciao, baby: Italian troops will begin leaving Iraq in September. There are some 3000 Italian troops in Iraq. The US may have to replace the Italians with Australian troops.
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Citizenship Requested for Sistani
Kurdish-Shiite-Sunni Negotiations

Al-Zaman The provincial council of Najaf, now dominated by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, requested that the first act of the Iraqi parliament once it is seated on March 16 be to grant Iraqi citizenship to Grand Ayatollah Alis Sistani. Sistani's family immigrated to Iraq from Iran and settled in Najaf about a century ago, the paper claims, but could never acquire citizenship. The vice-chairman of the Najaf body, Shaikh Khalid al-Nu`mani, requested that the parliament also give citizenship to Bashir Najafi (a Pakistani) and Ishaq Fayyad (an Afghan).

Thousands demonstrated in Najaf on Monday, and hundreds in Baghdad, against the celebratory funeral held in Jordan for the suicide bomber responsible for the Hilla atrocity about a week ago. The crowd in Baghdad invaded the Jordan embassy

Al-Zaman cites Kurdish sources as saying that the key obstacle to a Kurdish/Shiite coalition government is the issue of Kirkuk, and says that a mood of pessimism has settled over the Kurdish negotiators. The Kurds want an up-front admission that Kirkuk belongs to Kurdistan, which the United Iraqi Alliance is unwilling to give.
Jalal Talabani is said to have indicated that the Kurdish paramilitary, the Peshmerga, is also an obstacle to agreement. The Kurds want to incorporate it into the Iraqi army but to have it be the only troops on Kurdistan soil.

The Kurds and Shiites have agreed to open parliament on March 16 even if they have not reached an agreement by then.

The Sunni Arabs who ran for parliament, including Ghazi al-Yawir, have formed a committee to push for Sunni Arab representation in the new cabinet and on the constituent assembly that drafts the new constitution.

Iyad Allawi indicated that he would not serve in the new government, but was preparing to form a bloc of oppositional MPs in the new parliament.
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Halliburton Over Charges US

Halliburton appears to have charged the US government $27 million to deliver $84,000 worth of fuel to Iraq. Everywhere you dig there are bodies.

The NYT says that Halliburton over-charged the US government $108 million.
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Dueling Demonstrations in Lebanon

In the duel of the demonstrations in Lebanon, the political opposition (a coalition of Christians, Druze and some Sunni Arabs), brought out hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in downtown Beirut on Monday, the one-month anniversary of the assassination of former Lebanese PM Rafiq al-Hariri.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat says there had been a demonstration of 200,000 to 300,000 called by Hizbullah at the southern city of Nabatiyeh Sunday, this one made up largely of pro-Syrian Shiites. Reuters reported on this rally, but it was not widely covered in the US. At the Nabatiyeh demonstration, protesters held up placards saying "US Out!", mocking the Lebanese opposition slogan of "Syria Out!"

Lebanon isn't that big a country-- the total population is a little less than 4 million. So by now most everybody must have been involved in a demonstration.

The country appears deeply divided over how much presence Syria should have in Lebanon, and on where to place the blame for the death of former PM Hariri. a recent scientific poll by Zogby International, half of Maronites and Druze blame Syria for Hariri's death. Only 14% of Shiites do, while 70% of Shiites blame the US and Israel. Shiites are probably over 40 percent of the Lebanese population, while Maronites are probably only about 20 percent (Lebanon may now be as much as 70 percent Muslim if Druze are counted in that group).

The spectacle of over half a million protesters coming out in Beirut while 200,000 to 300,000 came out on the other side in Nabatiya in the South the day before is worrisome, given Lebanon's recent history of sectarian violence.
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Shiite-Kurdish Deal Collapses

Al-Hayat: The Shiite/Kurdish negotiations to form a government before parliament is seated on March 16 have fallen apart, apparently because the Kurds reneged on the deal they had worked out with the United Iraqi Alliance.

Al-Zaman reports that a high Kurdish official said that the process has never been closer to gridlock than now.

AFP said that Kurdish leaders insisted that the agreement reached recently between the Kurds and Shiites "needs reformulation and amendment." A Kurdish delegation will return to Baghdad soon to resume negotiations with the UIA.

Al-Hayat: The issues over which the deal collapsed include the disposition of the oil rich city of Kirkuk, demands that the Kurds have a bigger share of cabinet posts, the retention of the Kurdish paramilitary or peshmergas in the Kurdish regions, retention of a greater share of the petroleum revenues of the north, and the fears of the Kurds that the UIA will attempt to establish a theocracy. The Kurds insist on resolving all these issues in writing before the formation of a government.

BBC World Monitoring notes, "Al-Mashriq publishes on page 2 a 100-word report saying that Kirkuk Council failed to choose its chairman due to the absence of the Arab bloc at the meeting held yesterday, 11 March." It is not clear to me whether this is the Kirkuk city council or the Ta'mim provincial council, but either way it seems clear that the sullen Sunni Arabs are holding up the political process by continuing their boycott. The Arabs of Kirkuk were outraged that Kurdish former residents of the city, expelled by Saddam, were allowed to vote as though they were still residents.

Ed Wong of the New York Times describes the ethnic tensions now burning in Kirkuk.

Meanwhile, maneuvering for cabinet positions continues.

BBC World Monitoring says: "Al-Furat publishes on the front page a 100-word report citing Jawad al-Maliki, deputy speaker of the interim National Assembly and member of the United Iraqi Alliance, informing the newspaper that as is the case with other files, the security file has become an Iraqi national file following the elections. He added that there is no veto, whether by the US or others, regarding any candidate for any post in the government, including the security posts. Al-Maliki asserted that he has not been officially nominated for the post of state minister for security affairs."

BBC monitoring also reports, "Al-Adalah carries on page 4 a 1,000-word text of a letter delivered by Abd-al-Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, SCIRI, giving advice and instructions to the Governorates' Councils." SCIRI won 8 of the 18 provinces in Iraq, so al-Hakim, as the SCIRI leader, has a good deal of extraparliamentary power at the local level, which he is exercising in the South.

The artificial requirement of a 2/3s majority is producing this roadblock, which could derail democracy altogether. Countries sometimes don't get second chances, or at least not for a century.

Here are some rules for forming a government after a parliamentary election:

' After a general election, in general, the party with the most MPs become the government, and the party with the next lowest number of MPs forms the official opposition. This always happens if one party has a majority of MPs. The leader of the government party will become the Prime Minister. The government in the House of Commons sits on the government benches, and the opposition and all other MPs sit on the opposition benches on the other side of the House.

It is usually necessary for a government to have the majority of the MPs in the country. If no party has an overall majority, the party with the most MPs has the first chance to form a coalition. In a coalition government, the government consists of two parties rather than one, and there will need to be some compromise on issues where the parties disagree, although the coalition will almost certainly be between parties with similar views. It is usually advantageous to both parties, who have more power together than they would otherwise. '

Do you note how if a party has 51% in this parliamentary system, it automatically gets to form a government?

So why is the United Iraqi Alliance, the coalition of Shiite parties that can count on about 53% of the members of the Iraqi parliament to vote for it in the wake of the Jan. 30 elections, not able to form a government? If it were the Labor Party in the UK, which is the parliament described above, Ibrahim Jaafari would already be Prime Minister.

The US spiked the Iraqi parliamentary process by putting in a provision that a government has to be formed with a 2/3s majority. This provision is a neo-colonial imposition on Iraq. The Iraqi public was never asked about it. And, it is predictably producing gridlock, as the UIA is forced to try to accommodate a party that should be in the opposition in the British system, the Kurdistan Alliance.

Likewise, in France, a simple majority of the National Assembly can dismiss the cabinet. Likewise in India. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the 2/3s super-majority is characteristic of only one nation on earth, i.e. American Iraq. I fear it is functioning in an anti-democratic manner to thwart the will of the majority of Iraqis, who braved great danger to come out and vote.

It is all to the good if the Shiites and Kurds are forced to come to a set of hard compromises. But not everything can be decided at the beginning of the process. Some issues (Kirkuk is a good example) must be decided by a long-term negotiation. I perceive this latest Kurdish demarche to consist in a power play where they grab all sorts of concessions on a short-term basis, just because they are needed to form a government, even though no national consensus has emerged on these issues.

I think there is also a real chance that Iraqis will turn against the idea of democracy if it only produces insecurity, violence, and gridlock.
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Mosul Bombing Leaves Legacy of Sectarian Bitterness

Al-Hayat: On the security front, 16 Iraqis were killed on Sunday, along with 3 US troops, in separate attacks to the north and south of Baghdad.

The Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ahmad al-Hasani al-Baghdadi, head of the Fatwa Office of Baghdad, accused US ambassador John Negroponte of being involved in the Mosul funeral bombing behind the scenes, with the intent of breaking up Iraq for the benefit of foreigners. He warned that unseen forces were setting up Iraqi Sunnis to be the fall guys.

The Association of Muslim Scholars and the Iraqi Islamic Party, both fundamentalist Sunni groups, condemned the bombing of a Shiite funeral last week as the work of a foreign hand. Credit for the bombing was claimed by a previously unknown group, "Army of the Companions of the Prophet", a title that points to Sunni anti-Shiite feelings. (Radical Sunnis uphold the claims to succession to the Prophet of his "Companions"-- Abu Bakr, Umar and Uthman-- over those of the Prophet's lineage, which is honored by Shiites). The Army of the Companions said that it had targeted Rafida, a Sunni hard line term for Shiites, who reject (rafada) the first three caliphs.

BBC World Monitoring notes: ' Dar al-Salam on 10 March publishes on the front page a 130-word report on the reaction of the Iraqi Islamic Party to the confessions that are being broadcast by Al-Iraqiyah television channel, in which a number of terrorists claimed that they were members of the party. The report cites Muhsin Abd-al-Hamid, chairman of the Iraqi Islamic Party, strongly denying his party's involvement in any acts of violence against the Iraqi Army, police, or people. Abd-al-Hamid urged the government to eliminate those who infiltrated the security agencies to settle "sectarian accounts." '

The Association of Muslim Scholars condemned the US for raiding the home of its secretary-general, Hareth Suleiman al-Dhari, for a second time in a week on Sunday.

A reader points out that the interim Constitution requires a warrant for a house search, and wonders if the US military applied to an Iraqi judge for such a warrant in the case of al-Dhari.

A sense of being under siege is palpable in the Iraqi Islamic Party of Muhsin Abdul Hamid.

BBC Monitoring notes:

'Dar al-Salam on 10 March publishes on page 2 a 100-word report stating that the US "occupation" forces and Iraqi police raided the Iraqi Islamic Party's headquarters in Al-Iskandariyah District and arrested two party members. No dates were given. Dar al-Salam on 10 March publishes on page 2 a 150-word report stating that the US "occupation" forces killed Hamid Ali Husayn Rumayid, member of the Iraqi Islamic Party, in Al-Durah District in Baghdad. No dates were given. Dar al-Salam on 10 March publishes on page 2 a 70-word report stating that the US forces arrested Mahdi Salih Abd-al-Aziz, member of the Iraqi Islamic Party, and his four sons in Anah District. No dates were given. Dar al-Salam on 10 March publishes on page 2 a 100-word report stating that unidentified gunmen killed Salih Sulayman al-Janabi, member of the Iraqi Islamic Party. No dates were given. Dar al-Salam on 10 March publishes on page 2 a 240-word report on the escalation of sectarianism and hostility against the Sunni people in the Al-Mada'in District in southern Baghdad. '

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Lebanon Counter-Demonstration

One thing the Bush Administration hadn't counted upon when it pushed for withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon was that the vacuum might well be filled by the paramilitary of the Hizbullah Party, especially in the Biqaa Valley.

The opposition in Lebanon has set demonstrations for Monday in honor of the one-month anniversary of the assassination of former PM Rafiq al-Hariri.

Those of you interested in following the Lebanon situation should consult Helena Cobban's web log. Cobban is a veteran reporter who has spent substantial time in Beirut and was there last fall.

She points to this 3/12 al-Hayat article:

Salama Ni`mat writes from Washington: "As the White House and the State Department deny any change in American policy toward Hizbullah, an American official expressed his anxiety at the possibility that Hizbullah will exploit the curtailment of Syrian influence in Lebanon to reinforce its own military and political position in Lebanon, in cooperation with Iran and at the expense of the Lebanese Opposition. The official, who requested anonymity, said that Hizbullah "Might prove able to sweep the Lebanese elections, if they are held without foreign interference, and to fill the vaccuum that the Syrian withdrawal will leave behind." He clarified that Hizbullah, which was yesterday a Syrian ally, might tomorrow be its successor, whether by resort to weapons or by dominance at the ballot box.

Paraphrase: He pointed to Israeli anxieties about the rise of Hizbullah, saying it was among the best-armed and best-trained terrorist organizations in the world, with strong connections to several similar organizations, including Iran's Revolutionary Guards.

He maintained that Hizbullah had played an important role in recruiting fighters to go fight the Americans and the Iraqi government in Iraq. [Cole: This is a vast exaggeration; there is no evidence of any significant number of Shiite Lebanese fighters being captured in Iraq, and the guerrillas are almost all Sunnis.]

etc.

This official seems to me not well informed, and just full of typical Washington propaganda. Hizbullah cannot sweep the elections, because the Taef Conference set a 50/50 split of seats in parliament between Christians and Muslims. And the tradition has been for the president to be a Maronite Christian, and the prime minister a Sunni Arab. The most that could happen would be that Hizbullah defeats the other Shiite party, AMAL, and takes over the Speaker of the House position.

With regard to Hizbullah's paramilitary, last I knew it was only 5000 men or so. Contrary to these assertions, I know of no good evidence that Hizbullah has been involved in international terrorism for many years-- since about 1997 I think (though I'm glad to be corrected). Its main activity was getting the Israeli occupiers back out of Lebanon, in which it succeeded.

Hizbullah is a party of the poor, is puritanical and often frankly fanatical. I wouldn't want to live under it. But it probably represents a good 1/3 of Lebanese politically and is a force to be reckoned with. It cannot simply be ignored or dismissed as a terrorist organization.

Hizbullah isn't that different from the Dawa Party or the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which the US just helped to power in Iraq. The three will almost certainly become fast friends in the new Shiite crescent that Washington is creating.

It used to be said that the British Empire was acquired in a fit of absent-mindedness. It might equally be said that the Bush administration is Shiitizing the politics of the Arab East (mashriq), whether it means to or not.
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Plan for Southern Confederation Advances

Al-Hayat: Twenty-five political, social and religious personalities met to create the "Project for the Southern Confederation," that would unite Basra, Amara and Nasiriyya provinces in accordance with the loose federalism prescribed by the Temporary Administrative Law. Baqir Yasin of Basra was named the secretary-general of the Confederation.

The scheme will be presented to parliament, and if accepted there, will be put to a referendum. The officials insisted that the plan forms no danger to Iraqi national unity. ONe said, "We are clinging to a united, pluralistic Iraq."

The three provinces appear to be proposing that they be merged into a super-province, similar to the demands the Kurds are making for a Kurdistan province.
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Democracy Now on Ann Arbor/ Ypsilanti Radio

This page suggests ways to campaign for Democracy Now to be heard in our area. I suggest that we work with WUOM and WEMU to see if it isn't possible to add it to the schedule of one or the other. It is apparently a huge help in fundraising for public radio, since fans are very loyal, so that is a plus. Apparently the U-M student radio, WCBN, is planning to carry it, but why stop there?
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On Ending Military Occupations in the Middle East

Some Iraqis find it ironic that President Bush called for a withdrawal of foreign troops from Lebanon before the elections, but that elections were held in Iraq under conditions of foreign military occupation. Some quotes from the Knight Ridder story:

"He must have forgotten that his army is occupying Iraq," said Sa'ad Abdul Aziz, 21, an engineering student at Baghdad University. "What about the Republican Palace that they are using as a U.S. embassy?" . . .

"America should get out of Iraq immediately and without conditions, just like it is asking neighboring Syria to withdraw from the Lebanese Republic," said Sheikh Nasir Al-Saidi, imam of a mosque in the restive Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City, in a front-page article Saturday in the newspaper Azzaman. . .

"Everyone in Iraq would like to see foreign troops leave," said Walid al Hilli, of the DAWA Party, which is part of a Shiite coalition that won a majority in the January elections. "But we would like to see the foreign troops leave Iraq when there is enough security inside Iraq, which does not exist now. We're working hard to get Iraqi troops and Iraqi policemen ready to keep security inside Iraq. We don't exactly know the situation in Lebanon. Can the police secure Lebanese cities?"

Although the US military was supposed to have gone to Iraq to protect us all from weapons of mass destruction, Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, actually allowed the most sophisticated weapons sites to be systematically looted, doing nothing about it. It is almost as though he did not actually care about WMD and went to Iraq for other reasons. The NYT writes Sunday

In the weeks after Baghdad fell in April 2003, looters systematically dismantled and removed tons of machinery from Saddam Hussein's most important weapons installations, including some with high-precision equipment capable of making parts for nuclear arms, a senior Iraqi official said this week in the government's first extensive comments on the looting.

The Iraqi official, Sami al-Araji, the deputy minister of industry, said . . . "They came in with the cranes and the lorries, and they depleted the whole sites," Dr. Araji said. "They knew what they were doing; they knew what they want. This was sophisticated looting." . . .

Dr. Araji said equipment capable of making parts for missiles as well as chemical, biological and nuclear arms was missing from 8 or 10 sites that were the heart of Iraq's dormant program on unconventional weapons. After the invasion, occupation forces found no unconventional arms, and C.I.A. inspectors concluded that the effort had been largely abandoned after the Persian Gulf war in 1991.

. . . his account raises the possibility that the specialized machinery from the arms establishment that the war was aimed at neutralizing had made its way to the black market or was in the hands of foreign governments.

"Targeted looting of this kind of equipment has to be seen as a proliferation threat," said Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control . . . '

And the American people actually gave these people a second term!

Meanwhile, Ukraine really did begin its phased withdrawal from Iraq. Likewise, Poland is beginning its disengagement. Its departure would leave only the UK and Italy with any significant number of combat troops among the coalition. Spain, Norway, Thailand, Holland, and several Latin American countries have pulled out as well. The US is becoming increasingly isolated in facing the Iraq quagmire, as former allies (pulled in by false promises that they would only be doing light peace keeping) peel off.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports that the clan members of the victims of the Mosul bombing, most of them Shiites, want to take revenge for the deaths of loved ones. Their clan elders, however, are attempting to calm them down, fearing the outbreak of civil war.

It also reports that the family of Ra'id Mansur al-Banna in Salt, Jordan, held a funeral for him at which they celebrated his "martyrdom." Al-Banna was the suicide bomber who killed dozens of persons at a clinic in largely Shiite al-Hilla last week. The news of this celebration has enraged Iraqi Shiites. The depth of feeling on both sides is a good reminder that if violence should break out between Sunni and Shiite Iraqis, it would almost certainly involve neighboring countries.

Patrick Quinn of AP tells the truth about Baghdad, perhaps the world's most dangerous city.

' By day or night, Baghdad has become a cacophony of automatic weapons fire, explosions and sudden death, its citizens living in constant fear of being shot by insurgents or the security forces meant to protect them. Streets are crammed with passenger cars fighting for space with armored vehicles and pickups loaded with hooded and heavily armed Iraqi soldiers. Hundreds of bombs in recent months have made mosques, public squares, sidewalks and even some central streets extremely dangerous places in Baghdad. On Haifa Street, rocket-propelled grenades sometimes fly through traffic. Rashid Street is a favorite for roadside bombers near the Tigris River. '

When Farnaz Fassihi of the Wall Street Journal admitted as much in a private email last October, she was forbidden to report from Iraq for two weeks. I guess Paul Gigot can't dictate the news to the Associated Press. I'd wager most Americans have no idea how bad it is in Baghdad.
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Fallujah, Tent City, Awaits Compensation

Al-Zaman/ AFP: The Iraqi government has yet to pay out any compensation to the inhabitants of Fallujah from the funds dedicated to the rebuilding of the city, which was assaulted by the US Marines and Iraqi forces beginning last November 8 in order to root out guerrillas who were thought to dominate it. Most of its buildings and homes were damaged, such that most of its former residents still live in the hills southwest of the city in tents erected hastily in the wilderness. The Iraqi government had established committees to identify damaged buildings and to survey the damage in preparation for the payment of monetary compensation that would allow rebuilding.

Basil Mahmud Hamid, the engineer who heads the local committee for rebuilding the city said that the survey committee will finalize its identification of damaged buildings on Sunday. He said the payments will be made as soon as the survey is completed. Informed sources told al-Zaman that mines and unexploded ordinance are slowing down the survey work.

Liqa' Fahd (25), cradling her two-month-old as she gazed at what was left of her home, said, "I lost my husband, my house, and everything beautiful in my life. I have nothing left but this little plot of land and this humble tent." She explained that her husband had not escaped with her because he was the treasurer of an Islamic endowment in the city and responsible for its funds. "Since that time I have lost contact with him, and have not found his name either on the list of the dead or on that of the missing."

Muhammad Fahd al-Hitawi, 38, has erected a tent above the ruins of his house, and lives there with his ten children. He said he was waiting for compensation so that he could rebuild. His house, which had measured 671 square meters (yards), was mere rubble.

Almost all the 300,000 inhabitants of the city fled during the attack. On 11 January, the UN High Commission for Refugees said, as summarized by AFSC:

' Approximately 85,000 residents have passed through Fallujah’s checkpoints as of January 9. However, only 3,000 to 8,000 people remain in the city overnight, due to the harsh conditions that include a lack of adequate shelter, electricity, water, and health care, as well as curfews and restrictions on movement. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reports that only 40 percent of the population in the city is receiving assistance.

Returning residents find a city that has been ravaged. Massive destruction to infrastructure and housing has been reported. It is estimated that 40 percent of the buildings were completely destroyed, 20 percent had major damage, and 40 percent had significant damage. The International Committee of the Red Cross reported on December 23 that three of the city’s water purification plants had been destroyed and the fourth was badly damaged. The water distribution network was destroyed. It will take a long time to restore basic services. '

Hamid Fahd Su'ud, 40, the father of 7 daughters, said, "We now live off charity, since most of the shops and factories in the city are closed." Su'ud lost his son, Omar, while attempting to flee the battles, but has never recovered a body. "I praise God that we have this tent, and all I want is for my son Omar to be alive and being fed."

Iraqi authorities have increased security measures and patrols of the city to prevent the return of the guerrillas and a repeat of what happened in Fallujah.

Cole: Readers often write in for an update on Fallujah. I am sorry to say that there is no Fallujah to update. The city appears to be in ruins and perhaps uninhabitable in the near future. Of 300,000 residents, only about 9,000 seem to have returned, and apparently some of those are living in tents above the ruins of their homes. The rest of the Fallujans are scattered in refugee camps of hastily erected tents at several sites, including one near Habbaniyyah, or are staying with relatives in other cities, including Baghdad.

The scale of this human tragedy-- the dispossession and displacement of 300,000 persons-- is hard to imagine. Unlike the victims of the tsunami who were left homeless, moreover, the Fallujans have witnessed no outpouring of world sympathy. While there were undeniably bad characters in the city, most residents had done nothing wrong and did not deserve to be made object lessons--which was the point Rumsfeld was making with this assault. He hoped to convince Ramadi and Mosul to fall quiet lest the same thing happen to them. He failed, since the second Fallujah campaign threw the Sunni Arab heartland into much more chaos than ever before. People forget how quiet Mosul had been. And, the campaign was the death knell for proper Sunni participation in the Jan. 30 elections (Sunnis, with 20 percent of the population, have only 6 seats in the 275 member parliament).

However much a cliche it might be to say it, the US military really did destroy Fallujah to save it.
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Discover Yo Mama's Network

Turning the tables on Horowitzism, just for fun.
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Sistani Calls for Unity

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani called Friday "unity and solidarity among all Iraqis despite the attacks targeting the innocent." He was referring to the horrific bombing of a Shiite funeral in Mosul. Weeping relatives held small family wakes for the dead, avoiding a large mass funeral that might again be targeted by a suicide bomber. The Shiite mosque, near which the original attack occured, took mortar fire on Friday, according to al-Hayat. The same source says that Sistani's statement called on the security apparatus in Iraq "to shoulder their responsibilities with regard to safeguarding the innocent in all Iraq's cities."

The Sunni preacher at the Abu Hanifa Mosque in Baghdad, Shaikh Ahmad Hasan Taha, condemned the suicide bombing. He said, "Last week, we were deploring the massacre in the city of Hilla of our Iraqi brethren, and today terrorists undertook this attack, which is even a worse crime and a more awful scandal." He blamed the attacks in part on a hidden foreign hand.

Likewise, the Association of Muslim Scholars denounced the bombing, but tried to use it to discredit the Americans and interim prime minister Iyad Allawi, whom the AMS considers responsible for the lack of security in the country: ' "We strongly denounce the bombings and assassinations that killed innocent people,” Sheik Mahmoud al-Sumaidei, a member of the influential Association of Muslim Scholars, told worshippers. “Both the occupation and the Iraqi government shoulder the responsibility of this blood." ' Al-Hayat says that al-Sumaidei said the Mosul bombing was part of a conspiracy that began with the American occupation to marginalize one religious community at the expense of another." He condemned the suicide bombing, along with the practice of some Muslims declaring the others infidels, or purging other Muslims, or assassinating them."

Al-Hayat reports that two Friday prayers preachers from the Sadr movement called for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq "immediately and unconditionally," just as American calls for Syria to depart Lebanon.

Michael Schwartz's analysis of the guerrilla resistance in Iraq is well worth reading. He concludes that by now it is primarily made up of loose cells consisting of local Arab nationalists who object to the US military presence, and that the Baath and foreign jihadi elements are less important than the local irregulars. I think he underestimates the continued role of Baath military intelligence, but his picture is generally plausible, and certainly closer to reality than the things we hear from the Department of Defense.
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What do you Do if Democracies Defy You?

The US and British support for democratization in the Middle East is a deeply contradictory policy, since Washington and London also want friendly regimes that agree with their policies and crack down on radicals.

The contradiction was pitched ironically by Lebanese Speaker of the House Nabih Berri, a Shiite leader of the Amal Party, on Friday. UK Foreign Minister Jack Straw expressed dismay that the president of Lebanon, Emile Lahoud, had reappointed Omar Karami as prime minister. Berri sent a telegram to Straw informing him that the president cannot unilaterally appoint a prime minister in Lebanon, but must consult with parliament (to ensure that the PM has enough votes to survive a vote of no confindence).

Berri ironically suggested that since Straw disliked parliament's choice, he should please appoint a prime minister for Lebanon.

Berri went on to make other suggestions, saying he spoke out because "the appointment of the prime minister in Lebanon is in the hands of Parliament, not the president, and second because we hope we would be able to express our opinion in naming the British prime minister."

The Daily Star notes, ' Berri concluded his telegram by expressing his "thanks for the planned democracy for our region," in reference to U.S., British and European efforts to establish democracy throughout the Middle East. ' I suppose we now know what some experienced parliamentarians in the region think of Bush's 'democratization.'

Newshounds report that democracy is only allowed in Lebanon if it comes to the right decisions. Otherwise, can you spell J-DAM-ocracy?
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Democracy Now Transcript

Here is a transcript of my interview this morning with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now.

For Southeast Michigan readers: What would have to happen for WUOM or WEMU here in the Ann Arbor/ Ypsilanti area to carry the program regularly? Isn't it odd that it is in 300 markets but not here?
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Sadrist Funeral Targeted

The funeral targeted by a bombing that killed 47 and wounded 84 in Mosul was for "Hisham al-Araji, the Mosul representative for radical Shiite leader Moqtada Sadr." The bombing might have just been targeting Shiites, or it might specifically have aimed at the Sadr movement, which has some support in northern Iraq among transplanted Arabs and Shiite Turkmen.

The Shiite religious parties and the Kurds reaffirmed that they had reached an accord on forming a new government, and that both were committed to the Transitional Administrative Law.

AFP reports a number of political assassinations:

In Baghdad a police chief, Lieutenant Colonel Ahmed Obaiss, was gunned down along with two of his companions as they drove through Darwish Square in the Al-Saidiyah neighbourhood according to hospital sources . . . Another police chief was killed south of Baghdad, said security sources. North of the capital, gunmen shot down the son of a tribal chief as he left a US base in Balad, said police Major Adel Abdullah. The man was identified as Hamad Suhail, the son of Sheikh Suhail Ahmed, the head of the Al-Makadima tribe around the town of Al-Dujail. A contractor was killed near Tuz as he drove to Tikrit and roadside bombs killed an Iraqi soldier and a civilian near Duluiyah and Baiji, security sources said. '

Tom Engelhardt considers the proposition that we are in World War IV, first put forward by former CIA director James Woolsey (who has since renounced that way of speaking).

Will be on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now 8 am Friday.
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Breaking News: Government to Be Formed
Bombing at Shiite Mosque in Mosul Kills 36

It has been announced that the Shiites and the Kurds have reached sufficient agreement to elect a government when the parliament meets on March 16. If true, this is very big news. It wasn't, however, a headline anywhere I looked on the Web. When I tried to check it at CNN I was informed for about an hour straight that Michael Jackson was late to court. I mean, it is outrageous that our supposed 24 hours a day cable news services baby-sit us this way with pablum.

In other news, a suicide bomber detonated a payload at a Shiite mosque in northeastern Mosul during a funeral, killing at least 36 persons. Elements in the guerrilla movement have been attempting to provoke a civil war between Sunnis and Shiites, but the increasingly powerful Shiites have consistently refused to be provoked in this way.
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30 US contractors Wounded, 26 More Corpses Found

Guerrillas detonated another bomb near the al-Sadeer Hotel in downtown Baghdad on Wednesday, wounding 30 American contractors. Most of the wounds were reported to be relatively slight, but that the guerrillas can strike at will this way, twice in as many days, underscores how out of control the situation is.

Speaking of striking at will, guerrillas strafed the convoy of Minister of Planning Mahdi al-Hafidh with gunfire on Wednesday. He survived the attack unscathed.

Some 26 more corpses were discovered in Iraq Wednesday near the Syria border in the northwest of the country, in addition to the bodies uncovered at Latifiyah in Babil province south of Baghdad. AP writes, "Twenty-six of the dead were discovered in a field near Rumana, a village 12 miles east of the western city of Qaim, near the Syrian border. Each body was riddled with bullets. The dead were found wearing civilian clothes and one was a woman, police Captain Muzahim al-Karbouli said." The bodies found near Qaim were probably Iraqi national guardsmen.

Guerrillas killed a US soldier at Habbaniyah.

Al-Zaman says that the Shiite-Kurdish negotiations on forming a new government will continue past the March 16 seating of parliament. The two sides have come a little closer but still have substantial disagreements. The Kurds want a written guarantee that they will get at least two major cabinet ministries, along with the presidency. The Shiites are unwilling to put the pledges in writing. On the other hand, the Shiites appear to have convinced the Kurds that since they are so enthusiastic about the Transitional Administrative Law or interim constitution, they should about by its provisions for settling certain issues. In particular, the Shiites hold that a decision on the disposition of Kirkuk should be postponed until after there is a constitution and there can be a proper referendum.


Rick Schenkman at the History News Network draws attention to a sequence in a recent Frontline documentary, concerning shootings at US military checkpoints in Iraq. The subtext is that the rules of engagement are stacked against innocent civilians, which helps explain what happened to Nicola Calipari and Giuliana Sgrena.

Those quaint British are still arguing over whether the Iraq war was legal in international law, and whether Lord Goldsmith misled the British cabinet and parliament over its legality. We know he actually entertained the severest doubts himself.

In Washington, Bush just says that the important thing is to make a decision and carry it through no matter what, then present the rest of the world with a fait accompli with which they will have to cooperate. Why, there is no talk in Washington at all of the Hague Regulations of 1907 or the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, governing the treatment of the inhabitants of militarily occupied territories, or of the United Nations Charter and that pesky prohibition on unilateral aggressive war. Occupiers are not supposed to make major alterations in the character of the occupied society, but Paul Bremer undertook major social engineering experiments, with the poor Iraqis as the guinea pigs. An illegal war? An illegal Occupation? Imagine asking either of the last two attorneys general about such an issue, and what sort of answer you would get.

AFP argues that corruption is holding up Iraqi reconstruction. The thing wrong with their article is that they focus only on Iraqi corruption, whereas from all accounts, the civilian Westerners in Iraq have often been carpetbaggers. AFP writes:

Die-hard old habits hamper reconstruction in Iraq

AFP (KHALIS, Iraq) March 10

'Insurgent attacks on infrastructure are hampering reconstruction, but corrupt contractors and local officials unused to Western transparency are also slowing efforts to get Iraq back on its feet, US civil affairs officers say.

Major Sean Hood, a reservist who in civilian life is a corrections officer in a maximum security prison on Long Island, New York, works on reconstruction projects in Diyala province, which takes in part of the restive Sunni triangle.

"Dealing with inmates prepared me for talking to contractors. Inmates lie to you 24 hours a day, its sort of what the contractors are doing. Theyre trying to blow sunshine up my ass," he told AFP after a meeting with an Iraqi contractor in the town of Khalis. Hoods area of responsibility has a population of just about 250,000 people, so he has just a small role in the wider reconstruction drive for which the United States has budgeted some 20 billion dollars. But the challenges he faces are typical of what is going on across Iraq, a country where electricity and water supplies are still erratic two years after the US-led invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein. Hood on Tuesday drove north in a heavily-armed six-vehicle convoy, from his base at the provincial capital Baquba, to Khalis to see how various projects were advancing. '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Huge Truck Bomb Kills at least 3, wounds Dozens
Officials Assassinated

A guerrilla detonated a huge truck bomb in downtown Baghdad early Wednesday morning, between the al-Sadeer Hotel and the Ministry of Agriculture, killing himself and at least three others, and wounding dozens.

On Tuesday, guerrillas gunned down a high-ranking Interior Ministry official.

In further incidents on Tuesday, UPI reports "Gunmen killed a senior Iraqi police officer and his son in a Baghdad neighborhood Tuesday as they headed to work, security sources said . . . Also Tuesday, armed men assassinated the director of a Baghdad hospital in al-Jihad quarter.In the meantime, witnesses said gun battles erupted in the Sunni city of Ramadi, west of Baghdad, between insurgents and U.S.-backed Iraqi national guards as a result of large-scale raids and searches conducted by police. Initial reports said three people were killed in the clashes, which started overnight and continued until daylight. "

The Iraqi army found 15 beheaded corpses, both male and female, at a former military base near Latifiyah south of Baghdad. These appear to be the remains of Shiite pilgrims who had been on their way to Karbala, who were captured and killed by Sunni guerrillas. AFP also reports, "An oil pipeline feeding Baghdad's Dura oil refinery was blown up in Jorf al-Sakhr, 60 kilometres (46 miles) south of the capital, said state oil official Muayaad al-Shemmari. Five soldiers were killed overnight in Iskandariya when a coffin attached to a car's rooftop exploded near their checkpoint, the Iraqi army said. Four women with suicide belts were also arrested in Iskandariyah and confessed to working for the militant group, the Islamic Army in Iraq, it added."

The Ramadi Madness Video showing abusive behavior by US troops. The ACLU continues to call for a Special Counsel, apparently convinced that the tone of behavior of some US military units in Iraq toward captured Iraqis was set by the civilians who run the Department of Defense. The Palm Beach Post has acquired some of the Ramadi Madness video and posted it to its web site.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Hundreds of Thousands of Shiites Stage Pro-Syrian Demonstration in Beirut

Hizbullah's call for a huge pro-Syrian demonstration in Beirut was answered by hundreds of thousands of protesters on Tuesday. The largely Shiite crowds were huge compared to the smaller anti-Syrian demonstrations held for the past week.

The anti-Syrian protesters had mostly been Christians, with some Druze and Sunnis. But Lebanon is probably only now 20 percent Maronite Christian (the most anti-Syrian group), and may be as much as 40 percent Shiite.

The simplistic master narrative constructed by the partisans of President George W. Bush held that the January 30 elections were a huge success, and signalled a turn to democracy in the Middle East. Then the anti-Syrian demonstrations were interpreted as a yearning for democracy inspired by the Iraqi elections.

This interpretation is a gross misunderstanding of the situation in the Middle East. Bush is not pushing with any real force for democratization of Saudi Arabia (an absolute monarchy) or Pakistan (where the elected parliament demands in vain that General Pervez Musharraf take off his uniform if he wants to be president), or Tunisia (where Zayn Ben Ali has just won his 4th unopposed term as president), etc. Democratization is being pushed only for regimes that Bush dislikes, such as Syria or Iran. The gestures that Mubarak of Egypt made (officially recognized parties may put up candidates to run against him, but not popular political forces like the Muslim Brotherhood) are empty.

In fact the Jan. 30 Iraqi elections were deeply flawed. 42 percent of the electorate did not show up. The elections could only be held by locking down the country for 3 days, forbidding all vehicular traffic to stop car bombings. The electorate had no idea for whom they were voting, since the candidates' names were secret until the last moment. The Sunni Arabs boycotted or were prevented from voting by the ongoing guerrilla war, which started right back up after the ban on traffic lapsed.

The Lebanese have been having often lively parliamentary election campaigns for decades. The idea that the urbane and sophisticated Beirutis had anything to learn from the Jan. 30 process in Iraq is absurd on the face of it. Elections were already scheduled in Lebanon for later this spring.

Moreover, the anti-Syrian protests were not a signal that the Lebanese wanted to be like American-occupied Iraq. They were a signal that the Druze, Maronites and a section of the Sunnis had agreed to try to push Syria out. It was the US who had invited Syria into Lebanon in 1976. And it was a sign that Lebanon is still deeply divided, since the Shiite plurality largely supports Syria. Given the pro-Syrian sentiment in some Sunni cities like Tripoli, it may well be that a majority of Lebanese want Syria to remain in some capacity. If that were true, what would it do to Mr. Bush's master narrative of the march of democracy?

The main exhibit for the relevance of Iraq to Lebanon is Druze warlord Walid Jumblatt's statement to the Washington Post: "It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting, eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world."

It is highly unlikely that Jumblatt is sincere in this statement. He has seen Lebanese vote for parliament several times, and has campaigned, and Iraq was nothing new to his experience (like Lebanon, it is occupied by a foreign military power even during its elections).

It is worth recalling Jumblatt's stance on Iraq and Paul Wolfowitz (for more on whom, see below):

November 19, 2003

US annuls visa for Lebanese politician who regretted Wolfowitz survived

BEIRUT, Nov 19 (AFP)

A leading Lebanese politician said Wednesday his US visa had been annulled after he expressed regret that US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was unhurt in a Baghdad rocket attack.

Walid Jumblatt, an MP who is leader of Lebanon's Druze community, told AFP he had "received from the US embassy in Beirut a letter saying that the visa -- valid until 2007 -- has been cancelled" . . .

According to a letter sent by the US State Department to Jumblatt and published by Al-Mostaqbal newspaper, the visa was withdrawn as it "cannot be given to a foreigner who uses a privileged position to express his support for terrorist activity, tries to convince others of such support or supports a terrorist organisation."

On October 27, Jumblatt described Wolfowitz as a "microbe" in comments that were described as "unacceptable" by the United States but were not condemned by the Lebanese government.

"We hope the firing will be more precise and efficient (next time), so we get rid of this microbe and people like him in Washington who are spreading disorder in Arab lands, Iraq and Palestine," Jumblatt said.

One US soldier was killed and 17 other people were wounded in late October when a volley of rockets was fired at the Rashid hotel in Baghdad that houses US military and other staff and where Wolfowitz had been staying.

But despite the cancellation of his visa, Jumblatt remained defiant on Wednesday.

"I am sticking to my position, I refute ... America's imperialist policy," he told France's RFI radio in an interview.

He also accused the United States of causing "chaos" in Iraq and putting a "puppet government" in place in Baghdad.

"They (the United States) will now continue the repression of the Iraqi people who are rejecting them," he added."

I guess now that Jumblatt sees a way of getting the Syrians out of Lebanon by allying with Bush, all of a sudden America is no longer an imperialist cause of chaos. People who want to believe that remind me of PT Barnum's dictum that one is born every minute.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Awful Crap from Wolfowitz

I was looking at this rreport of Major Isaiah Wilson, official US army historian, which concluded that the US military lost control of Iraq by June, 2003, and has never regained control, and may well lose the guerrilla war. Then someone alerted me to an item about Paul Wolfowitz, who bears significant responsibility for the errors to which Wilson draws attention.

Eric Alterman tells the story of his conversation with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz at a toney book party in New York. Among the tidbits:

7) Hold onto your underpants, Jeff Jarvis: When I asked Wolfowitz who he read outside of official channels that he found particularly profitable, he reeled off the names of a bunch of Iraqi blogs. I asked him if he read Juan Cole. He made a munched up face like his sushi had gone bad. He said that yes, he had read him, but did not do so much, because of all the—I forget his exact words, but I’m thinking “awful crap” –through which he had to slog in order to get the information that Cole presented. I said I thought it would be useful since even if one disagrees, Cole certainly knows what he’s talking about, and his view is closer to the rest of the world’s than are those published in the MSM. He made another bad sushi face.

It is a typical strategy of the Neoconservatives to smear those with whom they disagree as "unreliable" or "purveying crap" or morally inferior ("pond scum"), as a way of sidestepping issues of substance. I have nothing personally against Wolfowitz, whom I've never met. I just disagree profoundly with the man's political philosophy, which appears to hold that the US and Israel should engage in naked military aggression to achieve foreign policy goals, and that it is permissible actively to mislead the public in order to convince them to go along with the aggression. Warmongering and lying have never been virtues in my political vocabulary. With regard to practical policy, I also think that he has all along grossly underestimated the threat from asymmetrical terrorist groups like al-Qaeda. And I think his stewardship of the Iraq debacle is among the more uninformed and incompetent pieces of military policy-making in American history.

So let us just look at a couple of pieces of rancid old sushi from Secretary Wolfowitz, 2001-2003:

Richard Clarke, the former terrorism czar in the first year of the George W. Bush administration, recounted his vain struggle to get administration figures like Wolfowitz interested in Bin Laden. It is clear that Wolfowitz had a fixation on Iraq, and ignored Bin Laden in favor of concentrating on Baghdad in the months before September 11:

' Rice's deputy, Steve Hadley, began the meeting by asking me to brief the group. I turned immediately to the pending decisions needed to deal with al Qaeda. "We need to put pressure on both the Taliban and al Qaeda by arming the Northern Alliance and other groups in Afghanistan. Simultaneously, we need to target bin Laden and his leadership by reinitiating flights of the Predator."

Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld's deputy at Defense, fidgeted and scowled. Hadley asked him if he was all right. "Well, I just don't understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man bin Laden," Wolfowitz responded.

I answered as clearly and forcefully as I could: "We are talking about a network of terrorist organizations called al Qaeda, that happens to be led by bin Laden, and we are talking about that network because it and it alone poses an immediate and serious threat to the United States."

"Well, there are others that do as well, as least as much. Iraqi terrorism, for example," Wolfowitz replied, looking not at me but at Hadley.

"I am unaware of any Iraqi-sponsored terrorism directed at the United States, Paul, since 1993, and I think FBI and CIA concur in that judgment, right, John?" I pointed at CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin, who was obviously not eager to get in the middle of a debate between the White House and the Pentagon but nonetheless replied, "Yes, that is right, Dick. We have no evidence of any active Iraqi terrorist threat against the U.S."

Finally, Wolfowitz turned to me. "You give bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don't exist."

I could hardly believe it, but Wolfowitz was actually spouting the totally discredited Laurie Mylroie theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Center, a theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue. '

Wolfowitz's first reaction to September 11 was to attack Iraq. If we had carried through on this plan, leaving Bin Laden ensconced in Afghanistan as we mired ourselves in an Iraqi quagmire, al-Qaeda would have been excellently placed to continue to hit us, both in the Middle East and in the homeland. Richard Clarke was outraged that Wolfowitz and his Neoconservative circle were willing so cynically to use the tragedy that had befallen the American people to accomplish their pre-existing goals in Iraq.

Wolfowitz told the US Senate that Iraqis would greet the US troops as liberators and that the US would be back down to 20,000 troops or only a division by October of 2003.

When General Shinseki said that it would take several hundred thousand troops to pacify post-War Iraq, Wolfowitz the civilian bureaucrat openly ridiculed the career officer. Wolfowitz's dismissive reply is often quoted in part, but it is worthwhile looking at more extended passages to see how badly he miscalculated. Astonishingly, Wolfowitz did not know about the Shiite Badr Corps militia that operated between Iran and Iraq, run by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. He did not know about the Sadr movement militias, which Saddam had massacred during the 1999 uprising provoked by his assassination of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr. He didn't realize that Baath-on-Shiite and Baath-on-Kurdish violence had a strong ethnic-cleansing dimension, since the Baath was dominated at the upper echelons by Sunni Arabs. He didn't realize that the Sunni Arabs, the managerial and officer class, would not go quietly if dethroned, but would mount a sustained guerrilla resistance. Wolfowitz mistakenly thought that Iraqi oil would pay for reconstruction, and did not foresee the substantial sabotage of the pipelines that has made that impossible. He also thought the oil would attract France to become involved in post-War Iraqi reconstruction. (This is the same man who insisted that France be "punished" for declining to support the war at the UN Security Council).

HOUSE BUDGET COMMITTEE, HEARING ON FY 2004 DEFENSE BUDGET, FEBRUARY 27, 2003

WOLFOWITZ: ' We are, however, doing everything possible in our planning now to make post-war recovery smoother and less expensive should the use of force become necessary. As in Afghanistan, we would seek and expect to get allied contributions, both in cash and in kind, particularly for the reconstruction effort in a post-Saddam Iraq.

If I might digress for a moment, Mr. Chairman, from my prepared testimony, because there's been a good deal of comment, some of it quite outlandish, about what our post-war requirements might be in Iraq.

That great Yankee catcher and occasional philosopher Yogi Berra once observed that it's dangerous to make predictions, especially about the future.

That piece of wise advice certainly applies to predictions about wars and their aftermath. And I am reluctant to try to predict anything about what the cost of a possible conflict in Iraq would be, or what the possible cost of reconstructing and stabilizing that country afterwards might be.

But some of the higher-end predictions that we have been hearing recently, such as the notion that it will take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq, are wildly off the mark.

First, it's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army. Hard to imagine . . .

There are other differences that suggest that peacekeeping requirements in Iraq might be much lower than historical experience in the Balkans suggests.

There's been none of the record in Iraq of ethnic militias fighting one another that produced so much bloodshed and permanent scars in Bosnia, along with a continuing requirement for large peacekeeping forces to separate those militias.

And the horrors of Iraq are very different from the horrific ethnic cleansing of Kosovars by Serbs that took place in Kosovo and left scars that continue to require peacekeeping forces today in Kosovo.

The slaughter in Iraq -- and it's been substantial -- has unfortunately been the slaughter of people of all ethnic and religious groups by the regime. It is equal opportunity terror.

Third, whatever numbers are required -- and I emphasize I'm not trying to make a prediction, but I will say there is no reason -- there is simply no reason to assume that the United States will or should supply all of those forces.

Many countries have already indicated to us -- some of them privately -- a desire to help reconstruction of post-Saddam Iraq, even though they may not want to be associated with Saddam's forcible removal.

Indeed, remember that we're talking about one of the most important countries in the Arab world, with not only enormous natural resources that we keep hearing about, but equally importantly, I would say more importantly, extraordinary human resources.

And I would expect that even countries like France will have a strong interest in assisting Iraq's reconstruction.

Moreover, the Iraqis themselves can provide a good deal of whatever manpower is necessary. We are already training free Iraqi forces to perform functions of that kind, including command of Iraqis units once those units have been purged of their Baathist leadership.

But the fourth and most fundamental point is that we go back to Yogi Berra: We simply cannot predict. We have no idea whether weapons of mass terror will be used. We have no idea what kind of ethnic strife might appear in the future, although, as I've noted, it has not been the history of Iraq's recent past. We do not know what kind of damage Saddam Hussein will wreck on Iraq's oil fields or on its other infrastructure.

On the other side, we can't be sure that the Iraqi people will welcome us as liberators, although based on what Iraqi-Americans told me in Detroit a week ago, many of them -- most of them with families in Iraq -- I am reasonably certain that they will greet us as liberators, and that will help us to keep requirements down. '

Wolfowitz also plotted to turn Iraq over to corrupt expatriate financier Ahmad Chalabi, whom many of his Neoconservative friends still champion.

A California roll of this stuff, anyone? It would be tragicomic if it had not cost so many lives (40,000 Iraqis? Nearly 2000 Coalition. Nearly 12,000 US wounded.) That's some set of mistakes there.

I was with General Anthony Zinni at the Camden Conference a couple of weeks ago, and someone asked him if there would ever have been a relatively successful guerrilla war if his plan, of putting several hundred thousand troops in the field for the war and its aftermath, had been followed. He replied, "Of course not." Now that is someone who knows something serious about military affairs.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Al-Hakim: "US Troops Out!"

Le Monde reported Monday that Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the cleric who leads the United Iraqi Alliance, rejects a long-term presence for US troops in Iraq:

Permanent American bases in Iraq? The question seems so incongruous to His Most Austere "Eminence Abdul Aziz Al-Hakim," (as the leader of the Shiite party which won the January 30 elections identifies himself on his visiting card) that he almost bursts out laughing. "Ha! Ha! No. No one in Iraq desires the establishment of permanent foreign bases on our land. The United Nations Security Council resolutions are clear: it will be up to the elected Iraqi government, when the time comes, to give those forces a specific departure date. As soon as possible."

The article also notes that al-Hakim is an even more vehement proponent of 'rooting out' the ex-Baathists from Iraqi society than is Ahmad Chalabi.

It seems to me that the US military long ago blew any chance of remaining in Iraq for the long haul-- Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, Najaf and other actions have been pretty deadly. The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which al-Hakim heads, certainly wants an early end to the US presence.

Iyad Allawi has rebuffed an offer from the United Iraqi Alliance (Shiite religious parties) to join them and accept a position as a vice-president or deputy. Allawi, currently interim prime minister, refuses to join the executive as anything less than prime minister. The UIA plan of establishing a government of national unity has therefore hit an obstacle.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Guerrillas Kill 33, Wound Dozens

The guerrilla war in Iraq boiled along on Monday. In addition to the operations around Baquba reported yesterday morning, AP describes several further attacks:

' In Balad, southeast of Baqouba, a car bomb killed 12 people. In Baghdad, gunmen killed two police officers and wounded a third. Two civilians also were killed when a roadside bomb targeting a joint U.S.-Iraqi military convoy exploded in the west Baghdad neighborhood of Amiriyah. In Baghdad's southern Dora district, gunmen killed Mahmood Khudier, a former Iraqi army officer, while a man was killed in a mortar attack in Qaim, near the Syrian border, police said. In the latest in a wave of kidnappings, a Jordanian businessman abducted in Iraq was freed after his family paid a $100,000 ransom, his brother said. Ibrahim Al-Maharmeh, a food importer, was kidnapped in Baghdad on Saturday.'

An apparent "friendly fire" incident in which US troops killed a Bulgarian soldier has strained relations between that country and the US. Some analysts believe the involvement in Iraq will become an issue in Bulgaria's next elections. A close association with Bush and the unpopular Iraq war hurt Prime Minister Aznar in Spain, contributing to his defeat in 2004.

Questions continue to swirl around the shooting of freed Italian hostage Giuliana Sregna and an Italian intelligence operative. Some are speculating that the Italian government has been paying ransoms, and had attempted to hide the mission from the US for that reason. Ms. Sregna herself suspects that she discovered things about the Fallujah campaign and perhaps other aspects of US military operations in Iraq that the US did not wish revealed.

The Dutch, who are leaving Iraq, handed security duties in Samawah over to the British on Monday.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Foreign Occupation has Produced Radical Muslim Terrorism

Fareed Zakariya argues that Bush got one thing right. Zakariya writes:

" Bush never accepted the view that Islamic terrorism had its roots in religion or culture or the Arab-Israeli conflict. Instead he veered toward the analysis that the region was breeding terror because it had developed deep dysfunctions caused by decades of repression and an almost total lack of political, economic and social modernization. The Arab world, in this analysis, was almost unique in that over the past three decades it had become increasingly unfree, even as the rest of the world was opening up. His solution, therefore, was to push for reform in these lands."

I don't use the phrase "Islamic terrorism" because "Islamic" refers to the essentials of the religion, and it forbids terrorism (hirabah). But if Bush rejected the idea that radical Muslim terrorism came out of religion or culture, he was right.

I disagree with the rest of the paragraph, though. Let's think about terrorism in the past few decades in a concrete and historical way, and it is obvious that it comes out of a reaction to being occupied militarily by foreigners. The Muslim Brotherhood developed its Secret Apparatus and began committing acts of terror in the 1940s in Egypt, which the British had virtually reoccupied in order to deny it to the Italians and then Germans. The Brotherhood assassinated pro-British judges and pro-British politicians (the British installed the Wafd Party in power). The Brotherhood had grown to some half a million members by 1948. Some Brothers also volunteered to fight in Palestine against the rise of Israel, which they saw as a colonial settler state.

After the Muslim Brotherhood assassinated Prime Minister Nuqrashi in 1948, it was banned and dissolved. It was briefly rehabilitated by Abdul Nasser in 1952-1954, but in 1954 it tried to assassinate him, and he banned it again. There was no major radical Muslim terrorism in Egypt in the period after 1954 and until Sadat again legitimized the Brotherhood in 1971, despite Egypt being a dictatorship in that period.

The intimate connection between foreign military occupation and terrorism can be seen in Palestine in the 1940s, where the Zionist movement threw up a number of terrorist organizations that engaged in bombings and assassinations on a fair scale. That is, frustrated Zionists not getting their way behaved in ways difficult to distinguish from frustrated Muslim nationalists who didn't get their way.

There was what the French would have called radical Muslim terrorism in Algeria 1954-1962, though the Salafis were junior partners of the largely secular FLN. French colonialists were targeted for heartless bombings and assassinations. This campaign of terror aimed at expelling the French, who had colonized Algeria in 1830 and had kept it ever since, declaring it French soil. The French had usurped the best land and crowded the Algerians into dowdy old medinas or haciendas in the countryside. The nationalists succeeded in gaining Algerian independence in 1962.

Once Sadat let the Muslim Brotherhood out of jail and allowed it to operate freely in the 1970s, to offset the power of the Egyptian Left, it threw up fundamentalist splinter groups like Ayman al-Zawahiri's al-Gihad al-Islami and Sheikh Omar's al-Gamaah al-Islamiyah. They were radicalized when Sadat made a separate peace with Israel in 1978-79 that permitted the Israelis to do as they pleased to the Palestinians. In response, the radical Muslims assassinated Sadat and continued to campaign against his successor, Hosni Mubarak. They saw the Egyptian regime as pharaonic and evil because it had allied with the United States and Israel, thus legitimating the occupation of Muslim land (from their point of view).

The south Lebanon Shiite groups, Amal and Hizbullah, turned to radical Muslim terrorism mainly after the 1982 Israeli invasion and subsequent occupation of South Lebanon, which is largely Shiite.

The radical Muslim terrorism of Khomeini's Revolutionary Guards grew in part out of American hegemony over Iran, which was expressed most forcefully by the 1953 CIA coup that overthrew the last freely elected parliament of that country.

Likewise, Hamas (the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood) turned to terrorism in large part out of desperation at the squalid circumstances and economic and political hopelessness of the Israeli military occupation of Gaza.

The Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s was among the biggest generators of radical Muslim terrorism in modern history. The US abetted this phenomenon, giving billions to the radical Muslim ideologues at the top of Pakistani military intelligence (Inter-Services Intelligence), which in turn doled the money out to men like Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, a member of the Afghanistan Muslim Brotherhood (Jami'at-i Islami) who used to throw vials of acid at the faces of unveiled girls in the Kabul of the 1970s. The US also twisted the arm of the Saudi government to match its contributions to the Mujahidin. Saudi Intelligence Minister Turki al-Faisal was in charge of recruiting Arab volunteers to fight alongside the Mujahidin, and he brought in young Usamah bin Laden as a fundraiser. The CIA training camps that imparted specialized tradecraft to the Mujahidin inevitably also ended up training, at least at second hand, the Arab volunteers, who learned about forming covert cells, practicing how to blow things up, etc. The "Afghan Arabs" fanned back to their homelands, to Algeria, Libya, Yemen, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, carrying with them the ethos that Ronald Reagan had inspired them with, which held that they should take up arms against atheist Westerners who attempted to occupy Muslim lands.

To this litany of Occupations that produce radical Muslim terrorism, Chechnya and Kashmir can be added.

In contrast, authoritarian governments like that of Iraq and Syria, while they might use terror for their own purposes from time to time, did not produce large-scale indepdendent terrorist organizations that struck itnernational targets. Authoritarian governments also proved adept at effectively crushing terrorist groups, as can be seen in Algeria and Egypt. It was only in failed states such as Afghanistan that they could flourish, not in authoritarian ones.

So it is the combination of Western occupation and weak states that produced the conditions for radical Muslim terrorism.

Democratic countries have often produced terrorist movements. This was true of Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States in the late 1960s and through the 1970s. There is no guarantee that a more democratic Iraq, Egypt or Lebanon will produce less terrorism. Certainly, the transition from Baathist dictatorship has introduced terrorism on a large scale into Iraqi society, and it may well spill over from there into neighboring states.

Morocco has been liberalizing for some years, and held fairly above-board parliamentary elections in 2002. Yet liberalizing Morocco produced the al-Salafiyyah al-Jihadiyyah group in Tangiers that committed the 2003 Casablanca bombings and the 2004 Madrid train bombings.

Moreover, if democracy means majority rule and the expression of the general will, then it won't always work to the advantage of the US. Bush administration spokesmen keep talking about Syrian withdrawal being the demand of the "Lebanese people." But 40% of the Lebanese are Shiites, and 15% are probably Sunnis, and it may well be that a majority of Lebanese want to keep at least some Syrian troops around. Hizbullah has sided with Syria and Shaikh Nasrallah has called for a big pro-Syrian demonstration by Shiites on Tuesday.

For true democracy to flourish in Lebanon, the artificial division of seats in parliament so that half go to the Christian minority would have to be ended. Religious Shiites would have, as in Iraq, a much bigger voice in national affairs. Will a Lebanon left to its own devices to negotiate a social compact between rightwing Christians and Shiite Hizbullah really be an island of stability?

I'm all for democratization in the Middle East, as a good in its own right. But I don't believe that authoritarian governance produced most episodes of terrorism in the last 60 years in the region. Terrorism was a weapon of the weak wielded against what these radical Muslims saw as a menacing foreign occupation. To erase that fact is to commit a basic error in historical understanding. It is why the US military occupation of Iraq is actually a negative for any "war on terror." Nor do I believe that democratization, even if it is possible, is going to end terrorism in and of itself.

You want to end terrorism? End unjust military occupations. By all means have Syria conduct an orderly withdrawal from Lebanon if that is what the Lebanese public wants. But Israel needs to withdraw from the Golan Heights, which belong to Syria, as well. The Israeli military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank must be ended. The Russian scorched earth policy in Chechnya needs to stop. Some just disposition of the Kashmir issue must be attained, and Indian enormities against Kashmiri Muslims must stop. The US needs to conduct an orderly and complete withdrawal from Iraq. And when all these military occupations end, there is some hope for a vast decrease in terrorism. People need a sense of autonomy and dignity, and occupation produces helplessness and humiliation. Humiliation is what causes terrorism.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

12 Killed, 26 Wounded at Baquba
Roundup: Looting, Kidnapping, and Shortage of Recruits

The Iraqi parliament will meet March 16, whether or not it can form a government at that time, it was announced on Sunday. The hang-up so far has been that the Kurds have insisted on up-front acquiescence in their demands by the religious Shiite parties that want to partner with them in appointing an executive. In contrast, Shiite leaders want to postpone the hard decisions until political life is regularized.

Guerrillas launched coordinated attacks on Baquba early Monday. AP says, " . . . the assaults included a car bomb, three roadside bombs and small arms attacks on one checkpoint in the city and two checkpoints just south of Baqouba in Muradiyah. Baqouba is located about 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. The attacks killed seven soldiers and five police, and wounded 26 others including one civilian caught in the crossfire, said Tariq Ibrahim, a medic at Baqouba's main hospital . . ."

Al-Sharq al-Awsat: One Iraqi soldier was killed and 9 were wounded in two separate attacks on Sunday in northern Baghdad. A police commander was kidnapped in Beiji, 200 km north of Baghdad. The Green Zone in Baghdad took mortar fire.

Al-Zaman: The Iraqi chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Babakr Badarkhan Zibari, announced Sunday that within 6 months the troops of the multinational forces will have withdrawn from the urban areas, leaving security duties to local police and the Iraqi army.

Further demonstrations were held in Hilla against the poor security situation, which allowed last week's horrific bombing.

Residents of the city of Salman Pak demonstrated outside the Green Zone in the capital demanding better security in their city.

In Kirkuk, 200 Kurds demonstrated against the increasing tensions in the city, demanding its normalization.

There were new attacks by guerrillas in Baghdad, Diyala and other regions.

The situation in Samarra continued to be tense. All the city gates were locked and all vehicle traffic was forbidden. The US military and its Iraqi allies are sweeping the area around Samarra for the next week in pursuit of about 250 guerrillas. Ash-Sharq al-Awsat says the measures have been taken because Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is thought to be in the city. It says that an Iraqi officer admitted that the guerrilla movement in Samarra had grown and become more powerful, and now dominated 7 towns around Samarra.

It seems clear that the most important military operation in Iraq since the Fallujah campaign has begun, though it is hard to find out much about it.

The United Nations is worried that 90 of the sites in Iraq it had identified as having dangerous weapons have been looted. The inattention of the US Department of Defense to arms depots since the fall of Saddam has been breathtaking, and helps explain the success of the guerrilla war, which is fueled in part by easy access to Baath arms depots. The UN is afraid that the dangerous materials might show up outside Iraq. Given that some of the explosives were high-powered and could bring in a good price from terrorist organizations, this fear is entirely reasonable.

The crime wave unleashed on Iraq by the failure of the US to secure the country after the fall of Saddam Hussein has worsened, helping to explain why Iraqis continue to rate security their number one concern. Susannah Nesmith of Knight Ridder writes:

Russul's kidnapping did not make news here. Against the backdrop of war, the crime went largely unnoticed outside her family. And hundreds of Iraqi families have quietly suffered through similar ordeals in recent months as kidnapping for ransom has become increasingly popular on the country's lawless streets. "We did not see these kinds of crimes before the war," said Lt. Col. Muayad al-Musawi, a kidnapping investigator. "We would have cases of a husband coming in to say his wife took his kids, but nothing like this." The crime has become so common, the national police recently set up a kidnapping directorate, the first special investigations unit created in Iraq since Saddam Hussein was toppled. Approximately 200 foreigners have been kidnapped across the country since the war began almost two years ago, according to news reports. Meanwhile, police know of 130 Iraqis who have been snatched in the eastern half of Baghdad alone in just the past six months. And they say most families never report the crimes to them, fearing the hostage will be harmed if the police get involved.

Reuters reports that "The regular Army is 6 percent behind its year-to-date recruiting target, the Reserve is 10 percent behind, and the Guard is 26 percent short." A common question from potential recruits is whether they will be deployed. (Almost certainly). Measures such as stop-loss and keeping servicemen and -women in the military 18 months beyond what they signed up for, and recalling discharged soldiers, have proven unpopular with potential recruits, understandably enough. But I think the figures show something more significant, which is that the American public increasingly thinks Mr. Bush's wars are not worth their lives. When, after September 11, he said "Let's roll!", the enthusiasm was palpable. But Bush squandered that enthusiasm on a gotten-up war that the public has increasingly decided is not worth it (see Sunday's entry on recent polling). As the Cato Institute points out (at the end of the Reuters piece above), the likely ending to this story, if the Bush administration continues its praetorian ways, is a national draft. And if it happens, I think it will change the dynamics of domestic politics enormously.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

US Intervention in 1957 Lebanese Elections

A reader writes by email concerning the question of whether the United States engineered the parliamentary elections of 1957 in Lebanon in an attempt to give President Camille Chamoun a second (unconstitutional) term:

In regards to the US role in these elections, the remarks of former Ambassador Richard Parker - which can be found in Warfare in Lebanon, published in 1988 by the National Defense University in Washington DC (pg. 35) -add further credence to the claims of US involvement ( Parker was Iraq Desk Officer at State on 14 July 1958); Parker says:

"We reacted because we thought there had been a "Nasserist" coup in Baghdad. In fact we were reacting to the blank check we had given President Chamoun of Lebanon earlier under the Eisenhower Doctrine, through which we were confronting Nasser. President Chamoun cashed the check on the morning of the 14th. We had given him this check because of UAR subversion coming from Syria, which people kept denying but which was factual. This subversion, however,and we had conviently overlooked this, was in part made possible by the fact that we had been up to our ears in buying the 1957 election for Chamoun. We allegedly bought the election of Charles Malik in the Koura and we allegedly bought the defeat of Saib Saalam in the Basta. That's sort of like getting Tip O'Neill defeated in Massqachusetts. We did this with money, just as the French, British, and the Egyptians had done."

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Asad Pledges 2-Stage Withdrawal

President Bashar al-Asad of Syria gave a major policy speech [Arabic link] to the Syrian parliament on Saturday on Lebanon. He pledged a withdrawal of Syrian troops to the Biqaa Valley (a largely Sunni Arab area near the Syrian border), after which the troops would then be stationed along the Syria-Lebanon border.

Asad foresees no new negotiations soon with Israel over Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Syrian territory, the Golan Heights. Asad said that he was ready to negotiate, but that the Israelis had made it clear that they were not.

Asad warned the Lebanese that they were about to be pressured to make a separate peace with Israel.

In his offer to withdraw, Asad cited Un Security Council resolution 1559, which calls for a withdrawal of all foreign troops from Lebanon.

He also referred to the Ta'if Agreement that ended the Lebanese Civil War.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Kurdish-Shiite Negotiations

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani put pressure Saturday on the United Iraqi Alliance to maintain its unity and to speed up the formation of a new government.

Intrepid PBS reporter Elizabeth Farnsworth of the Lehrer Hour did a piece from Qom this week about the influence of Grand Ayatollah Sistani in Iran, via his Qom HQ (which has adopted a high tech digitalization project).

In Iraq, the Shiite religious coalition, which had 140 members and had attracted a further 8 independents, lost two MPs on Friday. Abdul Karim al-Muhammadawi, the "Prince of the Marshes" and leader of the Marsh Arab party, Hizbullah, withdrew, as did a member of the Iraqi National Coalition. Because the UIA has the support of 3 Turkmen, 3 Sadrist and the one Islamic Action Organization members of parliament, the defection of these two MPs does not affect its ability to put together a simple majority in parliamentary votes (see Andrew Arato's posting below). It is also a little unlikely that al-Muhammadawi would actually vote against the religious Shiite parties, so it is unclear what his defection would mean in practice.

Many in the Iraqi public are angry that the parliament they elected has still not held its first meeting, and that no government has yet emerged. The main sticking points have to do with Kurdish demands for semi-autonomy, and for control of the oil city of Kirkuk in the north.

Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, a member of the UIA, said that it had set a March 15 deadline for convening parliament, regardless of whether a government had been formed by then.

A prominent Sadrist preacher was assassinated on Friday, Shaikh Saad Kamil, in Sadr City. Likewise a relief aid official was killed in Baghdad.

Some of the more raw sentiments of Shiites about the Kurdish demands, and attitudes to the secular parties, can be seen in the Iraqi press:

BBC World Monitoring, March 3 2005, Iraqi Press Highlights, reports:

. . . Al-Hawza carries on page 1 a 1,000-word editorial criticizing the Kurds for "extorting" other political parties to get hold of Kirkuk and the presidential post. The author says that the Kurds are "parasites," using Iraq as a "host" to build their own region, with the aid of Israel.

. . . Al-Hawza runs on page 2 a 700-word article to be continued in the upcoming issues by Taha Hamzah al-Wa'ili, who criticizes a number of satellite TV channels, including Al-Jazeera, Al-Hurrah, and Al-Furat, for "attempting to destroy the human character of Iraqis, picturing Islam as unable to establish a successful state, and preparing for sectarian strife in Iraq."

. . . Ansar al-Mahdi runs on page 6 an 800-word article by Ruqayyah Ibrahim criticizing the Iraqi communist feminist Yanar Ahmad for "propagandizing the lewdness and corruption of the West in Iraq.

Other BBC monitoring reports give us a window on the religious-Shiite view of Lebanon and other issues:

Ansar al-Mahdi carries on page 1 a 500-word editorial by Chief Editor Al-Hajj Salam Salih, commenting on the Lebanese "crisis" and the "role" of Hezbollah and the Islamic resistance in "keeping the Lebanese national unity." The writer says that Lebanon is facing a "conspiracy," which aims at making the country a land of "political and sectarian strife, instead of being the leader in the struggle with Israel." . . . Ansar al-Mahdi publishes on page 2 a 1,200-word article by Ruqayyah Ibrahim, commenting on the "colour revolutions" that took place in some countries, like "the orange revolution in the Ukraine, the pink revolution in Georgia, the purple revolution in Iraq, and the white-and-red revolution in Lebanon." The author says that these "sham revolutions" are forged by the US Administration, which "makes use of the silent majority that crave for personal benefit to alienate the loyal and politically active people."

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Samarra Turmoil

AFP reports that Iraqi police in Samarra announced a daytime curfew aimed at preventing the holding of mass demonstrations called for by the Association of Muslim Scholars. This curfew is apparently authorized by the State of Emergency extended through the end of March by interim PM Iyad Allawi. There has been a lot of trouble and fighting in Samarra, a city of perhaps 150,000 north of Baghdad, but it seems to me that it is a poor example of "liberty" and "rights" to forbid a simple demonstration (and the curfew announcement implies that demonstrators will be shot).

AFP says:

Meanwhile, Iraqi police in the city of Samarra, 120 kilometers (70 miles) north of Baghdad, imposed a curfew from 07:00 am (0400 GMT) to 9:00 pm (1800 GMT) as it sought to prevent an anti-American demonstration called for by the local chapter of the Sunni Committee of Muslim Scholars, according to outgoing mayor Taha al-Handira. The mayor had quit in protest against what he saw as restrictive and tough security measures imposed by US and Iraqi forces on the city.

It turns out that the mayor and city council of Samarra had resigned earlier last week in protest against the refusal of the US forces to withdraw from the city as agreed, and in protest against a raid on the mayor's office. Presumably the US military commanders in the region began to suspect that the mayor, who represented himself as a good faith broker between guerrillas and the US forces, might actually be closer to the guerrillas.

BBC World Monitor for March 3 writes:

Al-Zaman publishes a 300-word front-page report on a statement by Saladin Chief of Police General Mizhir Taha Ahmad announcing the strike as a protest against the US forces raid that targeted his headquarters, in which two major officers were arrested. On the other hand, the report says that the Samara local council announces a mass-resignation because the US forces did not withdraw from the city . . .

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Constitutional Issues

Professor Nathan Brown has written an overview of constitutional issues (link is pdf).

Andrew Arato writes by email:

This is the more or less complete picture for what 2/3 votes are needed for, according to the Transitional Administrative Law, in the National Assembly and for what 50% + 1 majorities are enough. [Many journalists seem confused on this issue], since most won't read and try to understand the TAL itself. Almost every one of these provisions is important, and potentially very contentious.

But they do not amount to a consociational or even consensus structure of governing. Setting up government is another matter. But once it is set up, the Prime Minister can (because of his ability to dismiss ministers with the support of a simple majority) convert any coalition extorted through consensus requirements into a minimal coalition as long as it has 50% and is itself cohesive. The assembly under him can freely legislate within the TAL, though it can change the TAL only through the impossible 3/4, or repudiate it only extra-legally, but arguably legitimately--if very dangerously.


According to the TAL

2/3 or higher parliamentary votes are needed:


1. Art 3A: Amending the TAL itself: ¾ of 275, plus unanimous Pres. Council, except for the supposedly unamendable parts, which do not include 3A itself!


2. Art 36A:Election 2/3 and removal ¾ (both fractions are of all members of the National Assembly) of the members of the Presidency Council

3. Art 37: Over-ride of veto of legislation is by 2/3 of those present, but vetoes must be by the consensus of all three members of the Presidency Council (36C).

4. Art 38A: In the event that the Presidency Council fails to nominate a Prime Minister, the National Assembly can do so by 2/3 of those present. (On the assumption that when “all members” are not said, simply majority is implied).

A simple majority however is enough for:

1. Art 33A: Ordinary legislation - “Decisions in the National Assembly shall be taken by simple majority unless this Law (TAL) stipulates otherwise.”

2.. Art 26A and C: The rescinding of laws and regulations in force on June 30, 2004, including the “laws, regulations, orders and directives” of the CPA

3. Art 38 A: Vote of confidence in new government nominated by Presidency Council, explicitly said to be “a simple majority”

4. Art 40A: Withdrawal of confidence in PM, or ministers collectively or individually

5. Art 41: Approval of the PM dismissing any ministers is by “simple majority” explicitly

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Public Support for Iraq War Collapsing
Majority of Americans want to Bring Some Troops Home

Zogby international found that in late February the percentage of Americans who felt that the Iraq War was worth the cost plummeted by 20 percent. Is this because of the further $83 billion Bush requested for Iraq? If so, the support is likely to fall a good deal further, since this thing is not getting any cheaper.

Question: Do you think the war in Iraq is worth its costs?

Feb. 25-27

Worth it 39%

Not worth it 54%


Feb. 14-17

Worth it 52%

Not worth it 46%

Moreover, a majority of Americans now believes that the US should begin withdrawing troops from Iraq, according to a Marist College Institute poll of last week. This poll confirms the Zogby finding that a majority now says that the war was not worth it. A majority of Americans now also questions whether Iraq will be a "stable democracy" any time soon.

This poll also shows that Americans know very well that neither Iran nor Syria constitutes a threat to the US. Interestingly, more Americans think Iraq still poses a threat to the US than think Iran does (10 percent versus 8 percent). Interestingly, the perception of a threat from Syria has fallen to almost nothing from 12 percent two years ago. You have to wonder if the revelations about Iraq's lack of WMD and of the ramshackle state of its government and military have taught us all a lesson about seeing threats realistically. (David Wurmser will be upset at this attitude toward Syria, since he's been trying to get up a US war against Damascus).

On February 25, The Marist College Institute for Public Opinion poll reports:


Bring them home: A majority of Americans think the U.S. should withdraw at least some troops from Iraq.

Question Wording: What do you think the United States should do about its number of troops in Iraq: send more, keep the same number, withdraw some, or withdraw all troops from Iraq?

Americans
February 2005

Send More 12%

Keep Same Number 24%

Withdraw Some 23%

Withdraw All Troops 33%

Unsure 8%


Second thoughts? A majority of Americans think the war in Iraq is not worth it.

Question Wording: All in all, do you think the war in Iraq is worth it or not?

Americans
February 2005

Worth It 43%

Not worth It 53%

Unsure 4%


A long road to democracy ahead: Americans are not optimistic about the realization of a stable democracy in Iraq in the near future. Only about one in three Americans believe a stable democracy in Iraq will emerge in the next two years.

Question Wording: Two years from now, do you think it is very likely, likely, not very likely, or not likely at all that Iraq will be a stable democracy?


Americans
February 2005


Very Likely 6%

Likely 28%

Not Very Likely 39%

Not Likely at All 22%

Unsure 5%


Americans see other imminent threats in the world: Many Americans see North Korea as the biggest foreign threat facing the United States.

Question Wording: Which one of the following do you see as the biggest foreign threat facing the United States today?

Americans


February 2005

North Korea 43%

Al Qaeda 24%

Iraq 10%

Iran 8%

Syria 2%


November 2004

North Korea 22%

Al Qaeda 43%

Iraq 11%

Iran 9%

Syria 1%


May 2003

North Korea 38%

Al Qaeda 22%

Iraq 9%

Iran n.a.

Syria 12%
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

US Wounds Italian Hostage, Kills Intelligence Man
Guerrillas Kill 4 Marines

The US military on Friday fired on the car carrying a just-released Italian journalist who had been taken hostage. AP says that the troops wounded journalist Giuliana Sgrena and killed "the Italian intelligence officer who helped negotiate her release . . ." Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi demanded an explanation. ([Early reports said] The car had been rushing toward a checkpoint and did not slow down. [It is now being denied by Ms. Sgrena that the car was rushing toward a checkpoint, making the behavior of the US troops hard to understand.]

US military forces have killed innocent Iraqi civilians at such checkpoints on a number of occasions, and, indeed, statistics for spring-summer 2004 show that the US was responsible for killing more Iraqi civilians than did the guerrillas. I cannot remember interim PM Iyad Allawi reacting as stiffly to such incidents as Berlusconi just did.

Guerrillas killed four Marines in Anbar Province west of Baghdad on Friday, as the US military continued its operations there.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Chalabi seeks Anti-American Coalition
Kurds Demand Kirkuk

Az-Zaman: In a development that many observers considered a surprise, it was announced Friday that Ahmad Chalabi, Shiite secularist and head of the Iraqi National Congress, met a few days ago with members of the Association of Muslim Scholars, who had boycotted the political process. He discussed with them "The possibility of beginning the stage of dialogue among those who desire to fight the Occupation." Chalabi said, "We had several meetings with the rebels, and there is a real desire to work and coordinate in order to end the foreign presence in Iraq, which will convince them that there is no necessity to fight." (For more on the demands of the hard line Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars for a US withdrawal, see Gilbert Achcar's comments below.)

Chalabi also continued to argue for uprooting of Baathists, and joined in calls by Shiite politicians for a purge of Baathists from the Ministry of the Interior. (Interim PM Iyad Allawi, an ex-Baathist, had appointed Falah al-Naqib, another ex-Baathist, as minister of the interior. Ministries are run on a spoils system, so al-Naqib is accused of bringing into the ministry, which is analogous to Homeland Security in the US, many former associates of Saddam.)

An official from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (headed by Jalal Talabani) told the newspaper that the Kurds will accept nothing less than clear and public commitments with regard to their demands on the implementation of the interim constitiution concerning (loose) federalism, a referendum to determine the political identity of the city of Kirkuk, the melding of the Kurdish paramilitary, the Peshmergas, into the Iraqi army, sharing the Kirkuk petroleum proceeds [between province and center]. At the same time, the Kurds continue to refuse to see Iraq partitioned on a religious basis or an Iraq transformed into a theocracy. He added, "We refuse to postpone the Kirkuk issue until a later stage, and which point promises may be broken." (United Iraqi Alliance prime ministerial candidate has urged that the disposition of Iraq be dealt with by future, more permanent elected governments after a constitution has been drafted.)
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Achcar: Allawi's Offensive

Gilbert Achcar writes by email:

Allawi's offensive which I described in my previous email involved a phone talk yesterday with George W. Bush, described as follows by the WH spokesperson:

----------------------------------------------
Press Briefing by Scott McClellan [excerpt]

The White House March 3, 2005

Q When the President talked with Allawi this morning, you said that they talked about Iran possibly influencing the change of government. Is there new information that Iran is trying to intervene or interfere in the process?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, leaders of the interim government in Iraq have expressed concerns that Iran is trying to influence the shape of the transitional government. We take those concerns very seriously. That's why you're hearing not only us, but leaders in Iraq saying to Iran, stop trying to influence internal politics in Iraq. It's for the Iraqi people to decide who their leaders are. They elected their transitional government; they were the ones who showed the determination and courage to defy the terrorists and go to the polls in large numbers and elect representatives to serve as they transition to democracy. And those representatives are the ones that should be choosing the leadership of that national assembly. And that's the message that we were sending -- this should be an Iraqi process.

Q Scott, can you be more specific on how they're trying to influence?

MR. McCLELLAN: No. These are concerns that have been expressed by the leaders in Iraq. You might want to ask them for some more details, if they can share those with you. But we know that they are continuing to meddle in Iraq's internal political process. And Iran made some commitments not to do that; they made a commitment to play a constructive role in helping the Iraqi people build a free and peaceful and democratic future.

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

Obviously, Allawi's gambit (I'm borrowing here the title that Juan Cole aptly put on his excerpt from my last dispatch) involves primarily an effort to "convince" the Kurdish Alliance to enter into a bloc with him. His phone talk with Bush dealt also very probably with the exercise of Washington's "persuasive" power on the Kurds.

The Kurdish Alliance is enjoying greatly this state of affairs, in which its share of the seats in the National Assembly puts it in a strategic position due to Bremer's rule of 2/3 for key decisions. They are putting forward their own conditions for a deal with either the UIA or Allawi. These are: legalizing their Peshmerga militias to be put on the payroll of the state; including the town and oil-area of Kirkuk in the Kurdish Region (3 provinces) and reverting their Arabization enforced by the Baathist regime; maintaining the Bremer-designed 2/3 rule and veto right for a minimum of 3 provinces. These are quite legitimate conditions from the angle of the right of the Kurdish people to self-determination.

The paradox is that Allawi's line of recuperating the Baathists apparatuses (a spokesperson of his group stated yesterday that they insisted in their talks with the UIA on "carrying on the policy of reinstating the dissolved Iraqi Army in the ranks of the armed forces") is more conflictuous with these Kurdish demands than the Shia parties are. The UIA has some obvious and great difficulty accepting them, but less than Arab Sunnis (there are some people in the UIA, Chalabi one of them, who advocated a federal Iraq with three autonomous regions -- North, Center and South -- whereby Southern Shias could take full advantage of the resources of their region which includes most of Iraqi oil reserves, after having been deprived for so long).

The main problem for the UIA is that they don't want to alienate the Sunnis, having been keen until now on preventing any deterioration of the situation in a sectarian direction -- for instance, by refraining from retaliating to the murderous sectarian attacks they have suffered.

It is probably with regard to this consideration that a delegation of the Kurdish Alliance visited yesterday the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS) -- the most popular religious-political force among Arab Sunnis, believed to have a major influence on the legitimate national armed resistance. The AMS stated at the end of the meeting that they stick to the seven conditions put forward by the February 15 meeting of the "Anti-Occupation Patriotic Forces," involving the AMS with representatives of Moqtada al-Sadr's Current, and other forces (see my comment on the importance of this Front in "Whither Iraq?," my last article posted on ZNet).

I have translated news about the Feb 15 meeting in a previous dispatch, but since the AMS referred to it again, I searched for its statement and found it in Arabic. Since I am not sure it was ever translated into English, I am enclosing below my translation.

Note that this alliance does not only involve Muslim forces, but also ideologically secular and left-wing forces, and even women groups -- a good sign undoubtedly, though one should not fall into some naive enthusiasm, especially in light of the real balance of forces overwhelmingly in favor of the religious-political forces. Moreover, the heavy Arab nationalist (anti-Kurdish) bias of this statement, signed by several Arab nationalist groups including former Baathists, is worrying. Narrow-minded Arab nationalism has been