31 Dead, 108 Wounded in Hillah Blasts
Basra Insecure

Suicide bombers in the Shiite city of Hillah about an hour's drive south of Baghdad killed at least 31 persons and wounded 108 on Monday. Al-Zaman says one bomber targeted recruits to the Iraqi security forces standing in line for a medical examination. Another hit recently fired security men who had been let go and who were demonstrating because they said they were still owed back pay. It should be remembered that these bombs inevitably kill a lot of civilian by-standers.

On Sunday night, one Iraqi soldier was killed and 4 were wounded in Baiji north of Baghdad in a bombing directed at a joint US/ Iraqi patrol in the west of the city. In the eastern part of the city of Balad, another Iraqi soldier was killed by a mortar strike. Two bodies of drivers were discovered at Sahliyah, who had been kidnapped by guerrillas last week. Guerrillas killed Col. Ahmad Salih al-Barzinji Sunday night after he had been kidnapped in Kirkuk.

In Irbil, guerrillas subjected the South Korean contingent to mortar fire for the first time, but did not appear to hit anything of value. On Sunday, the US military sweep of Hadithah in western Iraq came to an end.

An Iraqi army force detained (al-Zaman says "kidnapped") the Sunni cleric Shaikh Nawfal Kadhim al-Juburi, the prayer leader at the al-Salam mosque in Nahrawan in southeast Baghdad along with 35 worshippers in a dawn raid on the mosque. The raid was forcefully condemned by the Sunni Pious Endowments Board.

Al-Hayat Muhsin Abdul Hamid, a former president of Iraq under the American Coalition Provisional Authority and the leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party who was mistakenly arrested by the US military and then released, said late Monday that he considered the arrest to have been "deliberate." Party spokesmen said that the arrest was a piece of American "stupidity" aimed at alienating the Sunni Arabs from political participation. Meanwhile, the other major religious group among the Sunnis, the Association of Muslim Scholars, condemned the arrest as proof that the elected Iraqi government "is not sovereign over the country" and said that Abdul Hamid's detention "underlined the power of the Occupier." They added, "no Iraqi is safe under the shadow of presence" of the occupying forces. An AMS spokesman said that the government's acceptance of this situation had multiplied the opportunities for the occupiers to intervene in Iraqi affairs. The AMS called for a united Iraqi front that would stop the occupying forces in their tracks. Adnan al-Dulaimi, another Sunni spokesman, said that there is a hidden hand plotting to marginalize the Sunni Arabs.

Abdul Hamid said he still did not know why he had been taken into custody along with his sons. He said, "American troops invaded my home at 4 am. They handcuffed me and led me to an unknown place, then transported me by helicopter to yet another location, where I was interrogated all day long about various matters." The US military apologized to Abdul Hamid for the inconvenience.

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the victorious United Iraqi Alliance list that dominates parliament, complained recently that the guerrillas blowing up things in Iraq are just prolonging the US military presence in Iraq. He also complained that the US is stopping Iraq from buying heavy weaponry (I had been wondering where the new Iraqi tank corps was. There is a small one, but it is rudimentary). I conclude that al-Hakim is eager to get rid of the Americans, and feels frustrated that he cannot proceed with it until the Sunni Arab rejectionists stop their war and until he can find a way to get tanks and heavy artillery for his own forces so as to reduce dependence on the US.

Al-Hakim also leads the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which was formed in 1982 in Tehran under the sponsorship of Ayatollah Khomeini and which had its HQ in Iran until 2003. It is therefore no surprise that Iran and Iraq are now moving steadily toward better and better relations, including plans for a rail link from Khorramshahr to Basra and another from Kermanshah to Diyalah province. Iran and Iraq will do a billion dollars worth of trade this year, but the number is likely to mushroom in coming years, especially if the security situation allows Shiite pilgrims to come to Najaf and Karbala. Iran expects trade barriers to be removed, and has expressed willingness to sell Iraq electricity.

Rory Carroll of the Guardian reports from Basra on the views of its police chief, who had been appointed by Iyad Allawi:

General Hassan al-Sade said half of his 13,750-strong force was secretly working for political parties in Iraq's second city and that some officers were involved in ambushes. Other officers were politically neutral but had no interest in policing and did not follow his orders, he told the Guardian. "I trust 25% of my force, no more." The claim jarred with Basra's reputation as an oasis of stability and security and underlined the burgeoning influence of Shia militias in southern Iraq. "The militias are the real power in Basra and they are made up of criminals and bad people," said the general.

It gradually becomes apparent, though, that al-Sade's jaundiced view of the situation in Basra is that of an ex-Baathist nervous about the rising influence of the Sadrists and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, who are replacing Allawi's ex-Baathists with their own men in the police force.

Carroll would have done his readers a favor to have mentioned who won the provincial elections in Basra on January 30. Of 41 seats, 20 went to the Shiite Islamists of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). Another 16 or so went to the Virtue Party or Fadilah, which follows the late ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr. Carroll, it seems to me, is likely confusing Fadilah with the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr. In fact, they follow Muhammad al-Yaqubi, a more low-key rival of Muqtada's who studied with Muqtada's father. Fadilah controls Basra city hall because it put together a coalition that gave it 21 seats, so it can outvote SCIRI. The two victors of the democratic elections, in any case, are now appointing the police, which are obviously loyal to the parties rather than to an ex-Baathist police chief installed by the widely disliked ex-Baathist and old time CIA asset Iyad Allawi.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat reports Tuesday that the Ministry of Interior has established a fifth branch of its special forces, called the Panther Brigade, in Basra. The ministry is now controlled by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and some Sunni leaders have claimed that its special forces are tools of Shiite dominance over Sunnis. Al-Sade may also worry about being outflanked by this Federal force, which has a special charge of fighting terrorism and protecting Federal property.

So I come away not knowing if al-Sade is accurately reporting a crime problem in Basra or is just expressing the sour grapes of an ex-Baathist whose prime minister lost the election in a crushing defeat, and who seems a little unlikely to survive in his post because of the current Iraqi spoils system.

"Yoshihiko Motoyama: Lawless private militaries milking Iraq conflict" explains the private paramilitaries operating in Iraq.

Now the senior Iraqi physicians are fleeing the country. More good news.

This article on unmanned aerial vehicles or UAV's and their military usefulness in Iraq begs the question of why, if they are so great, there are still all those bombings.

Reuters profiles the neighborhood watch program in the northern Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah. It is a great idea and has had some success there, but it probably cannot be done in the Sunni Arab areas where it is most needed, for two reasons. 1) People are too afraid and intimidated to call in, for fear of reprisals and 2) a large number of people approve of the Iraqi guerrillas, to whom they refer as the "resistance."
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Iraqi Islamic Party Leader Released

The US military has released Muhsin Abd al-Hamid, the leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party. The IIP runs the provincial council in Anbar and is the only major Sunni Arab religious party that has generally been willing to cooperate with the Americans. Abd al-Hamid served on the American-appointed Interim Governing Council.

His arrest had provoked major protests.

Reader Sally Quinn kindly sends a translation of a French report from Le Monde via Reuters/AFP:

"The Islamic Party, in a communiqué, demanded an explanation for the raid on the Baghdad residence of its leader as well as an official apology. "They must also release two of this three sons, Mokdad and Assayed, who are still beikng held along with several houseguests and bodyguards, said the party without indicating their numbers . . . Although critical of the current Shi'a-dominated government, the Islamic Party has not excluded its participation in the drafting of the permanent Constitution . . . recently the party has taken a position against the blind violence
targeting the populace and the security forces while criticizing the arrest of Sunni
clerics, the warhorses of the powerful Committee of Iraqi Ulema, which refuses to
participate in negotiations surrounding the drafting of the Constitution . . . Following his release, Mr. Abdel Hamid underscored the humiliation to which he was subjected by US soldiers, saying that they handcuffed him and interrogated him for hours."

Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari and President Jalal Talabani complained bitterly about the US action and apparently were not consulted about the arrest. They pointed out that the US keeps saying it wants to involve the Sunni leadership, but that arrests like this one just drive away even the moderates. The initial reports also talked about US troops confiscating money. Basically they kicked down his door, rifled through his things, hooded him, and dragged him away. There was no arrest warrant, no consultation with the supposedly sovereign Iraqi government, and apparently no knowledge of who Abd al-Hamid really is.

Susan Hu is leading a good discussion of the SNAFU over at Daily Kos. I've been watching CNN for hours and there is nothing about this.

A keen observer of Iraq's legal and economic scene writes in with regard to whether the US military was legally justified in arresting Abd al-Hamid in the first place.

"Discretion may be the better part of valour, but it is quite clear:

For starters, there is this:

'Article 15.

(B) Police, investigators, or other governmental authorities may not violate the sanctity of private residences, whether these authorities belong to the federal or regional governments, governorates, municipalities, or local administrations, unless a judge or investigating magistrate has issued a search warrant in accordance with applicable law on the basis of information provided by a sworn individual who knew that bearing false witness would render him liable to punishment. Extreme exigent circumstances, as determined by a court of competent jurisdiction, may justify a warrantless search, but such exigencies shall be narrowly construed. In the event that a warrantless search is carried out in the absence of an extreme exigent circumstance, the evidence so seized, and any other evidence found derivatively from such search, shall be inadmissible in connection with a criminal charge, unless the court determines that the person who carried out the warrantless search believed reasonably and in good faith that the search was in accordance with the law.'

The National Emergency Law makes clear that only “government officials” may arrest people. (Even if that were not clear, the requirement of a “court order” would seem unambiguous. Could there possibly be a constitution-type law that says that a court order is required for “government officials,” but anyone else, willy-nilly, who has colorable authority from somewhere else can “arrest” people?)

As far as Iraqi law is concerned, there is no question, and any question there might be could be resolved by an act of the National Assembly.

The authority of the MNF derives from SCR 1546 and an alleged “partnership,” with respect to which there is no partnership agreement (normally legally fatal), which authorizes “all necessary measures,” but one would have to ask the members of the Security Council what that would mean in the current context.

As to whether a Security Council resolution is superior to a national interim “constitution,” I leave for another day. Strict constructionists like Senator Coleman might think not."

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

30 Dead, Dozens Wounded by Guerrillas
In Response to Operation Lightning

Guerrillas in Baghdad fought determinedly against the 40,000 Iraqi soldiers fielded to crack down on violence in Baghdad. AFP writes,

"Four car bombs in and around the capital killed 16 people, most of them security personnel, Sunday, in a swift response to Iraq's widest homegrown clampdown since the fall of Saddam Hussein over two years ago. Nine soldiers taking part in Operation Lightning died in a suicide car bombing at their roadblock just south of the capital, while two policemen were killed when a suicide car bomber targeted their patrol in southwestern Baghdad. In western Baghdad, a car bomb targeting police commandos killed three people and wounded 20, an interior ministry source said, adding that police had then fought a firefight with men in the area. An earlier suicide bombing near the oil ministry left two dead, while violence elsewhere claimed the lives of a British soldier and seven Iraqis."

John Burns of the NYT says that the guerrillas are putting up a vigorous fight against government troops and that 14 died in a pitched battle between the two that lasted for hours.

US troops arrested Muhsin Abd al-Hamid Monday morning. He is the head of the (Sunni) Iraqi Islamic Party and had served on the Interim Governing Council appointed by Bremer. The IIP initially announced that they would take part in the parliamentary elections, then declared neutrality because of the November, 2004, Fallujah campaign.

Forbes reports, "Hamid, leader of the Iraq Islamic Party, was hooded and taken away after US troops broke windows in his home and allegedly mistreated him and his sons, the party official said. "

Actually it is not clear under the provisional Iraqi constitution that it is legal for US troops just to go arrest people.

The arrest of a major Sunni leader will cerainly have an impact on the guerrilla movement. Journalists are already talking about a new potential civil war among the sects.

Will write more on Monday afternoon.
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No God But God

Max Rodenbeck makes odd statements and basic errors in his review of Reza Aslan's "No God but God" on the struggle between moderates and extremists in the Muslim world.

Rodenbeck writes:

"Aslan's wish to emphasize the tolerant, merciful side of Islam can lead to pitfalls. It is not particularly comforting to learn that when the prophet triumphantly returned to Mecca, the city of his birth that had rejected him, there were no forced conversions and ''only'' six men and four women were put to the sword."

First of all, we don't know that Muhammad had anyone at all killed when he took Mecca in 630. The sources reporting this are late, 200 years after the fact, and the authors use terms like "dhukira anna" ("it was mentioned that") instead of giving tight citations as they usually do. My teacher, the great historian of early Islamic sources, Marsden Jones, flatly disbelieved the few execution stories based on the wording of the sources.

Muhammad was a merchant of Mecca from a noble family, who began receiving what he interpreted as revelations from God around 610 A.D. (C.E. or Common Era). He began preaching the one God, but was persecuted by the pagan Meccan elite. In 622 he emigrated to the nearby Yathrib, which later became known as Medina, just ahead of an attempt to assassinate him. Even in Medina, the Meccan elite came after him, intending to kill him and wipe out his religion. He and the Muslims fought back, and

they ultimately won.

It is certainly the case that Muhammad did not have his primary enemies killed, and did not visit vengeance on the city that had tried to murder him and wipe out his religion through active warfare over more than a decade. Aslan's praise for Muhammad in this regard is a commonplace and completely appropriate.

Here are some instances of prophets not behaving with Muhammad's magnanimity:

Exod.17

1. [9] And Moses said to Joshua, "Choose for us men, and go out, fight with Am'alek; tomorrow I will stand on the top of the hill with the rod of God in my hand."
2. [10] So Joshua did as Moses told him, and fought with Am'alek; and Moses, Aaron, and Hur went up to the top of the hill.
3. [13] And Joshua mowed down Am'alek and his people with the edge of the sword.
4. [14] And the LORD said to Moses, "Write this as a memorial in a book and recite it in the ears of Joshua, that I will utterly blot out the remembrance of Am'alek from under heaven."

Or how about this from Chapter 8 of the Book of Joshua?

"# [18] Then the LORD said to Joshua, "Stretch out the javelin that is in your hand toward Ai; for I will give it into your hand." And Joshua stretched out the javelin that was in his hand toward the city.
# [21] And when Joshua and all Israel saw that the ambush had taken the city, and that the smoke of the city went up, then they turned back and smote the men of Ai.
# [23] But the king of Ai they took alive, and brought him to Joshua.
# [26] For Joshua did not draw back his hand, with which he stretched out the javelin, until he had utterly destroyed all the inhabitants of Ai.
# [27] Only the cattle and the spoil of that city Israel took as their booty, according to the word of the LORD which he commanded Joshua.
# [28] So Joshua burned Ai, and made it for ever a heap of ruins, as it is to this day.
# [29] And he hanged the king of Ai on a tree until evening; and at the going down of the sun Joshua commanded, and they took his body down from the tree, and cast it at the entrance of the gate of the city, and raised over it a great heap of stones, which stands there to this day."

So actually, yes, Muhammad's treatment of Mecca was remarkably gracious, and it is weird that Rodenback should have so much trouble acknowledging it. Muhammad did not have his opponents among the Meccan elite hanged, did not kill all the Meccans, did not raze the city. The scribes that wrote the Joshua story many centuries later depicted him as a bloodthirsty mass murderer egged on by Moses, his mentor in wiping people out. All those Westerners who go on about how much better the Bible is than the Koran apparently haven't actually read much of the Bible.

Then Rodenbeck writes:

"The killing and enslavement of Jewish tribes at Medina receives a similarly light gloss, although Aslan may be right to point out that their ''Jewishness'' may have been rather vaguely defined."

Rodenbeck is mixing up several distinct narratives here. And, again, we don't have early sources. The late sources we do have from a couple of centuries later do not agree with one another on key details and may well reflect Muslim-Jewish relations in post-conquest Iraq. But the narratives we do have suggest that their authors thought that the Jewish tribes in Medina (who are depicted as joining in pagan rituals) initially pledged neutrality in the Muslim/Meccan struggle, but later many of them sided against Muhammad. Personally, I think such narratives are very suspect (see, e.g., Rizwi S. Faizer, "Muhammad and the Medinan Jews," International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Nov., 1996), pp. 463-489 ).

Then Rodenbeck writes:

"Even archconservative Saudi Arabia is slowly evolving. In April, its top religious authority declared that forcing a woman to marry against her will was an imprisonable offense."

Rodenbeck seems not to know that in traditional Islamic law women were full persons under the law, with the sort of property rights that Western women lacked until about 1850. Indeed, I suspect that Muslim women were the wealthiest and most powerful women in the world between 632 and 1850 or so. It has been the general stance of Muslim jurists through the centuries that a girl cannot be married off to someone without her consent. Ibn Abbas says that when a girl came to the Prophet and said that her father forced her to marry without her consent, Muhammad gave her the choice of annuling the marriage or keeping it. (Ibn Hanbal No. 2469). It wasn't just an ideal, either. Judith Tucker found a Hanafi jurist of 18th century Palestine maintaining that it was wrong to marry a girl off to someone against her will. Obviously, some fathers have married daughters off against their will, but that is a matter of patriarchal custom, not Islamic principle.

You can't treat Muhammad as a historical figure in a vacuum or by reading the sources naively. And you can't write knowledgably on modern Islamic reform if you don't know what Muslim authorities have written on issues in the medieval and early modern period.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

43 Iraqis Dead in 2 Days
Shiite Pilgrims Massacred
Killings in Sinjar, Hilla


Wire services report that the unconventional sectarian civil war in Iraq continued on Saturday. Guerrillas in Qaim executed 10 Shiite pilgrims originally from Diwaniyah returning from Syria. The shrine of Sayyidah Zaynab, the granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad and the sister of martyred Imam Husain, is located near Damascus and likely the pilgrims had been up to visit it. If there is anything calculated to provoke Sunni-Shiite civil war, it is the murder of people who just came back from a religious pilgrimage to a sacred Shiite site.

In addition, two suicide bombers killed at least five Iraqis and wounded dozens more when they set off their payloads at a join US/Iraqi army base near the northern town of Sinjar close to the Syrian border.

Guerrillas killed four Iraqi soldiers and wounded a fifth when they shot up the car carrying them near Hilla, a Shiite city south of Baghdad.

It was announced by Iraqi authorities only on Saturday that there had been bombings in Tikrit and killings in Babil province south of Baghdad on Sunday that left a dozen or so dead.

The Scotsman reports that "A roadside bomb blast targeting a US convoy in Mosul killed three Iraqi civilians, including a 10-year-old boy."

It also reports that the Association of Muslim Scholars (Sunni) and the Badr Corps paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI, Shiite) have reached an initial agreement to back off their earlier confrontation witon one another and to "serve the nation." The agreement came about through the mediateion of Muqtada al-Sadr and his aides, Shiite nationalists who are probably on friendlier terms with the hard line Sunnis than they are with the Badr Corps, their rival. Another meeting of the two sides is planned.

About 1,000 US and Iraqi troops continued their find and destroy operation against guerrillas in Haditha in western Iraq.

Tidbits from the Iraqi press via BBC World Monitoring for May 28:

"Dar al-Salam on 26 May publishes on page 2 a 250-word report on the statement issued by the University Professors Association condemning the US "occupation" forces for violating the Al-Anbar University campus. . .

Al-Zaman publishes on the front page a 220-word report citing the newspaper's reporter as saying yesterday, 27 May, that Iraqi security forces backed by multinational forces are imposing a tight siege around Buhriz district in the Diyala Governorate, in a search for specific individuals. Al-Zaman publishes on page 3 a 150-word report citing police sources in Al-Diwaniyah confirming the arrest of a gang involved in forging official documents . . .

Al-Ufuq carries on page 4 a 200-word report stating that the Education Ministry has reinstated 88 teachers in the Karbala Education Directorate. [These were Shiites fired by Saddam for not being loyal Baathists.] . . .

Al-Mashriq publishes on page 6 a 600-word article commenting on the fatwas being issued by religious authorities in Iraq and urging the Iraqi public to listen to their conscience and not only to these fatwas."

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Military Analysts Who Lived in Aluminum Fairy Land Rewarded

Two Army analysts who mistakenly claimed that aluminum tubing bought by Iraq was for centrifuges to enrich uranium received job performance awards during the past 3 years. When the specifications of the tubing were finally shown to the International Atomic Energy Commission in March of 2003, Mohammed ElBaradei was able to falsify the allegation within 24 hours, issuing a statement that tubing with those specifications could not be used for uranium enrichment. If Elbaradei could see the falsehood of the claims almost immediately, it is not plausible that US analysts could not.

Every American should go back and read thoroughly the transcripts of the reports to the UN of Mohamed Elbaradei in February and March of 2003.

On March 7, 2003, he said:

"Based on available evidence, the IAEA team has concluded that Iraq efforts to import these aluminum tubes were not likely to have been related to the manufacture of centrifuge, and moreover that it was highly unlikely that Iraq could have achieved the considerable redesign needed to use them in a revived centrifuge program . . .

The IAEA was able to review correspondence coming from various bodies of the government of Niger and to compare the form, format, contents and signature of that correspondence with those of the alleged procurement-related documentation.

Based on thorough analysis, the IAEA has concluded with the concurrence of outside experts that these documents which formed the basis for the report of recent uranium transaction between Iraq and Niger are in fact not authentic. We have therefore concluded that these specific allegations are unfounded. However, we will continue to follow up any additional evidence if it emerges relevant to efforts by Iraq to illicitly import nuclear materials."

Compare that to what the Bush administration was telling people in the same period, and it is clear. Elbaradei was living in the real world. The US government and the US press and the US punditocracy was living in a fantasy land.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Muqtada: All Factions Must Participate in Constitution-Making

The Herald Sun reports that late on Friday, ' "A suicide bomber blew up his vehicle near a police patrol, killing seven people, including three policemen and wounding 24 civilians," Lieutenant Mahmud al-Azzawi said. '

Guerrillas assassinated a major Sunni Arab tribal leader, Shaikh Sabhan Khalaf al-Juburi (al-Jibouri), 52, on Friday in Kirkuk, according to AP. Al-Juburi, though he was a Sunni Arab, had good relations with the Kurds, unlike many Sunni Arabs in the northern, disputed oil city of Kirkuk.

Al-Hayat: In Baghdad, the Sunni cleric Shaikh Mahmud al-Sumayd`i, member of the Association of Muslim Scholars, stressed that Iraqis should give their loyalty to the country, not to their sect.

In Najaf, Sadr al-Din al-Qubanji of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) said in his Friday prayers sermon that the same (Sunni) groups that had blown up Shiite mosques and Christian churches and Shiite crowds was now making wild accusations against the Badr Corps, the paramilitary of SCIRI. Such false accusations, he said, were one new technique of terrorism. The other new form of terrorism that he saw had occurred recently in the northern city of Telafar, where individuals were butchered by Sunni jihadis for having identification on them showing that they were Shiites. Telafar, a city of 200,000 in the north not far from the Syrian border, is largely Turkmen, and most of its Turkmen are Shiites.

Al-Qubanji was essentially accusing the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars of being in league with terrorists, and branding its leader, Hareth al-Dhari, a terrorist.

Al-Zaman:

Attacks continued in several Iraq cities.

Muqtada al-Sadr called Friday for the participation of all Iraqis in the drafting of a constitution, and asked that no faction be excluded. His aide, Shaikh Hazim al-A`raji, read out Muqtada's sermon at the Kufa mosque: "We want the permanent constitution to be drafted in a way that guarantees justice to all sections of the people , so that no segment is wronged . . . We demand that all be included in the writing of the constitution." Earlier Muqtada had been quoted as saying that his group would not participate in the drafting of the new constitution as long as there was a US military occupation, and that anyway the Koran was his constitution.

Oil Minister Ibrahim Bahru'l-Ulum said that the constitution drafting committee would meet within the next 24 hours. He spoke after he had met with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. (The Bahru'l-`Ulum family is traditionally a clerical one with close ties to the grand ayatollahs in Najaf). Informed sources said that the Sunni representation on the 55-person committee in parliament would be raised beyond the present 2 delegates.

Armed guerrillas fled the city of Telafar in the north after they had been surrounded by Iraqi police and the noose was tightening. They scattered in nearby villages.

Iraq said it needed $10 billion immediately from donor nations in the international community for urgent reconstruction projects and fighting unemployment.

Three Iraqi policemen were killed Friday in Mosul in one incident. In another, a policeman was killed and four were wounded by a roadside bomb that was followed by the spraying of machine gun fire, in Mosul's Basinjar quarter.

In Dulu'iyyah a truck driver working for the Americans was killed by a roadside bomb.

The corpse of a policeman was discovered in the Qadisiyah quarter of Samarra.

Iraq was forced to halt petroleum exports through the northern Ceyhan pipeline because of sabotage.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

US Helicopter Shot Down, 2 Soldiers Dead
PM Jaafari launches a Campaign around Baghdad

Guerrillas shot down a US helicopter near Baqubah on Thursday, killing two US soldiers.

Stephen Kamarow explains the reservations many Iraqis have about what strikes them as an indecisive leadership style in Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari.

His Minister of Defense, Saadoun Dulaimi, and his Interior Minister, Bayan Jabr, announced Thursday that they intended to deploy 40,000 troops and police around Baghdad in what they called "Operation Lightning" in a bid to stop the deadly campaign of suicide bombings launched so effectively by the guerrillas since the naming of the new government.

Reuters reports that Humam Hamoudi, the chair of the constitution drafting committee in parliament, is attempting to find ways of expanding Sunni representation on that body beyond the two current members of parliament (out of 55 total). He says that the Sunnis may hold elections for the positions.

The Christian Science Monitor reports on the situation in Iraq's universities, where as many as 100 professors have been assassinated and the poor security environment has slowed progress in restoring Iraq's higher education establishments.

Syria revealed on Thursday that it had arrested 1200 persons who were trying to pass through its territory on the way to iraq. Syria has been annoyed at US claims it is not doing enought to stop infiltration of radical Muslim militants from Syria into Iraq. Syria has been arresting such persons all along, but is now making the fact public as part of its tiff with Washington. The Bush administration appears to believe that it can get cooperation from the Syrian government at the same time that it is openly dedicated to overthrowing it. That time has passed.

Guerrillas attempted to deploy a dog with a bomb belt against a convoy of Iraq troops, but the only victim was the unfortunate animal.

Kevin Zeese analyzes the Congressional debate on May 25 on setting a timetable for US withdrawal from Iraq, introduced by Representative Lynn Woolsey (D-CA). The motion lost 300 to 128 with 5 not voting.
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Blog-Casting and the Future of Blog Advertising

Carl Bialik of the WSJ has an article on attempts to count various things about web logs, including how many there are, how many Americans read them, how much they are linked to, and what their readership is. Many of these questions are driven by Madison Avenue (i.e. US advertising firms) who are interested in the medium's advertising potential.

As I see it, the problem for advertisers is that blogging appears to be a form of narrow-casting. They like broadcasting. You place an ad on even a low-ranking cable television show like Star Trek Enterprise (while it was still limping along) and about 3 million people see it every week. You place an ad on even a popular weblog like MyDD and Blogads says that it has 146,000 page views a week. (Technorati.com measures its popularity rather by looking at how many other blogs link to it.)

Many of the problems of measurement are probably intractable, but the advertising issue has already been solved by Henry Copeland of Blogads, with the concept of networked ads (which I prefer to call blog-casting). Any group of bloggers can set up a network, as the Liberal blogs have done. Altogether the Liberal Blog Advertising Network can provide an advertiser with a million or so page views a week in one fell swoop. The ads once taken out will appear on all the blogs maintained by members of the network, so they become a form of broadcasting, or blog-casting. Blog readership is demonstrably growing, and pretty soon such networks will be able to compete at least with cable television for ability to reach viewers.

Bialik says some advertisers want to measure unique hits rather than page views, because they don't want to pay for the same person to see the ad more than once in a week. Why? A weekly rate actually benefits advertisers. The ad is there continuously 24/7, rather than once for 30 seconds as in television, and it cannot be bad for readers to see it repeatedly. As for the page view issue, no one can be sure what it is measuring. Page views are counted every time a browser accesses a site (though at my server, my number for "referrals" or browsers coming to the site from elsewhere is higher than that for page views for some odd reason).

Lots of people read weblogs at university computer labs, internet cafes, or at offices with joint computers, so that one internet protocol number may in some cases actually represent several different persons over the day. Moreover, my understanding is that a lot of big service providers, such as Comcast, cache pages the first time they are accessed by a customer and thereafter tend to serve the page from their cache at their server, so that a lot of readers of a weblog may not reach all the way to the bloggers' original server, to be counted as a unique hit. And, it is now possible for readers to copy the entire page/entry and to email it as html, ads and all, to friends. A lot of that is done, and it is impossible to measure. Still, I think that between tools like technorati.com and counting page views, some estimation of advertiser value can be arrived at that will make the business model work.

Do I worry about blog advertising corrupting the medium?

Not very much.

In my view, corporate news media have been harmed by media consolidation (having only a few owners, all of them big wealthy corporations) far more than by advertising. It is an editorial decision whether to insist that the news division make 15 percent profit or whether to keep it as a loss leader. They had advertising in Bill Paley's day, too, but at that time CBS news was a big, relatively independent operation. If you have only 5 CEOs making that decision for virtually all television news, and if they are competitors, then there is a real danger that they will all sacrifice news to profit.

But because the price of entry is so low, you can never have ownership consolidation in weblogging. It will always be a distributed medium and therefore very difficult to control. If professional bloggers emerged who came to be unduly beholden to their advertisers and started not covering certain stories or spinning them for the sake of their sponsors, other non-professional bloggers would just step into the breach. If corporate media bought up a few big bloggers, they would still have to compete against literally millions of independents, and if any of the independents was providing what the audience wanted better, the traffic would shift to them. In the world of weblogging, any form of censorship actually creates opportunities for those immune to it.

Technical limitations and expense make it almost impossible for anyone now to start up a new 24 hour a day news channel. But anyone can start a blog. I expect journalist cooperatives (both professional and amateur) to emerge over time that do podcasting, and eventually webcasting with video, finally breaking the current semi-monopoly in broadcast news.

So it seems to me that blog-casting with regard to advertising, but retaining lots of independent blogs is the best of all possible worlds. And advertising blog-casting may finally begin addressing a key problem in the business model, which is that blog advertising rates are ridiculously low. Bloggers are essentially offering a front-page panel for what a small classified ad would cost in a small town newspaper, and the circulation rates may be similar.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bombings and Assassinations Continue
US Military Sweep in Haditha

Thursday morning's 70 minutes of mayhem began at 7:20 a.m. Baghdad time. Guerrillas detonated two bombs, and carried out two drive-by shootings and a stabbing in a little over an hour. A roadside bomb targeted a US convoy, wounding at least one civilian. A bomb in the Shu'lah quarter of Baghdad killed three Iraqis, including two policemen, and wounded six. A guerrilla stabbed Fakhri Abd al-Amiri, an official of the Dawa Party, to death in al-Qadisiyah, West Baghdad. Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari belongs to the Shiite Dawa Party, which has a cell structure and aims at establishing an Islamic state. Guerrillas sprayed gunfire at Dr. Musa Abbas, professor in the College of Arts of al-Mustansiriya University. The gunmen also killed three of his bodyguards. The attack took place in the Risala district of south Baghdad. Drive-by shooters wounded 4 Iraqi soldiers in the Ghazaliyah quarter of the capital. US soldiers fighting at Telafar shot a child who got caught in the crossfire.

Guerrillas assassinated the police chief of Sharqat Wednesday while he was driving in the nearby city of Mosul, in front of the university. The bullets also wounded 4 university students.

AFP reports that guerrillas detonated two bombs in the northern Kurdish city of Dohuk, killing one policeman and according to al-Zaman wounding 8 others. A bombing in Dura, Baghdad, targetting special troops of the Interior Ministry killed 1 and wounded 8. Violence around the country seems to have killed or wounded dozens on Wednesday, though the death toll was lower than in recent days.

US troops continued their Western offensive on Wednesday, moving into Haditha, a city of 90,000. They said they killed 10 guerrillas and found the local townspeople afraid of the jihadis.

Mahir Dili, the dean of the College of Arts at Anbar University, who lives in Haditha, said that 15 US troops invaded his home at 5 am. They asked him if he owned any weapons or was harboring any guerrillas, then thoroughly searched his home and left when they found nothing (al-Zaman). The report suggests that the Haditha sweep is being done relatively blind, without good intelligence, so that a mild-mannered dean gets treatment that should ideally be reserved for a suspected guerrilla or helper of guerrillas.

Scott Peterson of the Christian Science Monitor reports the good news that Iraqi army soldiers have had some success in restoring security to Haifa Street in Baghdad, which was long a guerrilla stronghold. The report mentions that the Iraqi troops have sometimes called in US tanks. I have long wondered where the new Iraqi tank corps is. Without effective armor, how can they win on their own?

On Tuesday, guerrillas attempted to assassinate Member of Parliament Salamah Khafaji, who was on her way from Baghdad to Najaf to consult with young nationalist Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr. Four of her guards were critically injured. Sadr has been mediating between the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars and the Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. It was the fourth attempt on her life.

AP reported earlier this week that Muqtada al-Sadr refuses to have his people take part in the drafting of the new constitution: "Radical anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, a Shiite with a large following, told an Iraqi television network Monday that ''as long as Iraq is occupied we will not take part in drafting the constitution. We consider the Quran as our constitution." Only 3 parliamentarians ran as loyalists to Muqtada, in any case.

Darrin Mortenson reports on the reactions to the reemergence of Muqtada among Marines at Camp Pendleton, who fought his forces last year. The remarks are judicious.

ash-Sharq al-Awsat/ Reuters: Hundreds of Shiite supporters of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Badr Corps, its paramilitary wing, demonstrated in Najaf on Wednesday against the charges by Hareth al-Dhari of the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars that Badr was behind the assassination of Sunni clerics and worshippers. The demonstrators were joined by some members of local rural clans. Several demonstrators said that al-Dhari's comments were "irresponsible and were aimed at plunging the country into a sectarian war and causing the Iraqi people to break ranks." Another said it was suspicious that al-Dhari issued his charges just after Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi departed Iraq. Several demonstrators demanded that al-Dhari apologize for his remarks and withdraw them.

Al-Zaman said that there were signs that the mediation attempt of Muqtada al-Sadr was failing.

The death penalty is back in Iraq, applied in the southern, largely Shiite, city of Kut to alleged members of the Ansar al-Sunna terrorist group (Sunni radicals). For a while after the fall of Saddam, some Iraqi politicians vowed to end the death penalty in the country to mark a decisive change of course from the policies of the Baath Party, which executed tens of thousands of persons. Joe Stork of Human Rights Watch points out that given the level of insecurity and violence in Iraq, a government policy of executing people could lead to massive numbers of executions.

Amnesty International is not impressed with the human rights situation in the Middle East generally and in Iraq in particular.

Arabs and Turkmen in Kirkuk are charging that the Kurds are trying to take over the city in order to make a claim on its petroleum resources. The Kurds, who hold 26 of 41 provincial council seats, deny the charges.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat/ AFP says that most Kurdish youth know little Arabic, and prefer to learn English as their second language. This trend, the article says, raises questions about national integration. A school principal in Irbil with 1442 students said that they were delighted to be able to study in Kurdish, and no longer know any Arabic. Arabic, he said, is now a third language. The decline in knowledge of Arabic in the north dates from the establishment of the no-fly zone after the Gulf War in the early 1990s.


BBC World Monitoring for 24 May reports:

Al-Da'wah publishes on the front page a 500-word report on the latest developments in Iraq.

"The report focuses on a number of topics including the ongoing efforts by various Iraqi political and religious forces to defuse the current sectarian crisis in the country and to form a fund to compensate the victims of terrorism in Iraq.

The report adds that the cabinet has decided to form a Financial Committee headed by Deputy Prime Minister Dr Ahmad al-Chalabi which will be responsible for reviewing all the contracts signed by various state institutions.

Sawt al-Ahali . . .: The report cites a spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry announcing that Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Ja'fari will visit Iran shortly.

The report cites National Assembly Member Jawad al-Maliki as saying: "The government will seek Interpol's help to arraign the ministers of the former government who have been charged." . . .

Al-Mada publishes on page 2 an 80-word report quoting Basra Governor Muhammad Musbih al-Wa'ili announcing that Thursday will replace Saturday as the week holiday in Basra, adding that government and private banks are excluded from this change.

Al-Mada publishes on page 3 a 2,000-word interview with Minister of Telecommunications Jwan Fu'ad Ma'sum who says that women lack political experience . . .

Al-Zaman publishes on page 4 a 220-word report citing a security source in the Maysan Governorate affirming that security forces have intensified the security measures in the wake of the recent spree of assassinations in the governorate. The report cites police sources confirming the assassination of Shaykh Haydar Abd-al-Zahrah al-Bahadili, a Shi'i cleric, in Al-Amarah yesterday, 23 May.

Al-Ufuq carries on page 6 a 600-word report on the "threats" to Iraqi physicians' lives. Al-Ufuq runs on page 6 a 700-word report on the "assassination fever" in Iraq. The report interviews a number of Iraqis and cites their comments on the increase in the number of assassinations.

Al-Furat publishes on page 1 a 50-word report citing a security source in Al-Muthanna Governorate saying that the governorate's Internal Affairs Office has arrested Al-Muthanna Custom's officer on "charges of corruption". Al-Furat carries on page 2 a 400-word report citing a survey conducted by the Planning Ministry stating that 40% of the Iraqi women feel that "criminals" are "major threat" to their lives . . .

Al-Mada publishes on the front page a 120-word report saying that two Iraqi children were killed in Safwan in separate incidents, one was trampled down by a US convoy and the other by a British patrol. The report adds that Basra intelligence forces have found three missiles hidden at a farm.

Al-Mada publishes on page 2 an 80-word report saying that the chief editor of the Ansar al-Mahdi newspaper has escaped an assassination attempt while he was returning home in Al-Baladiyyat area in Baghdad.

Al-Mada publishes on page 2 a 1,000-word report quoting a high-ranking police official announcing that 14 suspects were arrested in Al-Wahda district north of Al-Kut Governorate.

Al-Mada publishes on page 3 a 700-word report citing the rush created by Iraqi youth to join the security and police forces, despite the risks. Al-Mada publishes on page 6 a 1,000-word report citing tribes in Babil Governorate expressing readiness to secure the area and to reveal terrorist networks . . .

Al-Mada publishes on page 2 a 120-word report saying that the Al-Najaf Governor As'ad abu Kalal has presided over a meeting for the public service departments to discuss the spread of typhoid in Al-Najaf Governorate due to polluted drinking water, adding that the Council has closed a primary school for the same reason. The report also quotes the governor confirming that there is a severe shortage in medical supplies and that the supply is 34% short of demand.

Al-Bayan publishes on page 5 a 1,500-word article by Husayn Allawi discussing the role of politics in the ideology of the Al-Da'wah Islamic Party.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Islamism versus Secularism in Iraq: A Debate

I saw this debate on al-Jazeera (Doha) on Sunday in Arabic at 17:15 GMT, on 22 May 05. It was some of the best television discussion of Iraq I've ever seen, and the BBC World Monitoring has translated it now (May 24, 2005). The al-Jazeera anchor was quite fair, and at one point intervened to ask Tariq al-Hashimi if he really thought all the sectarian violence could be blamed on the Americans.

It is introduced as follows:

"Al-Jazeera Satellite Channel Television at 1715 gmt on 22 May carries a new 45-minute edition of its weekly programme "The Iraqi scene", moderated by Abd-al-Azim Muhammad in the Doha studio. Guests of the programme via satellite from Baghdad are Dr Tariq al-Hashimi, secretary general of the Iraqi Islamic Party; Sa'd Jawad Qandil, member of the Political Bureau of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq [SCIRI] and Dr Ghassan al-Atiyah, director of the Iraqi Institute for Democracy and Development. The main topic of discussion is the conflict between Sunnis and Shi'is in Iraq following the recent abductions and assassinations."

Here, I'll just give one particularly characteristic and important statement from each of the three.

The moderator asks Ghassan al-Atiyah about "sectarian tension" in Iraq and its reasons. He replies:

"We have been dismembered. The parties, which came to rescue us from the hegemony of a dictatorship and the tyranny of the ugliest dictatorship in the region, have turned into a tool to destroy what was left of the Iraqi entity. I do not exempt anyone from this. I am one of the political people who sought change. Let us be frank. Theoretical and complimentary remarks are made on television while in practice killing and slaughtering by the two sides are taking place on the ground. All justify the killing of the other side in the name of religion. The major tragedy is that the US occupation of Iraq and the policies adopted after occupation contributed to consecrating sectarian and ethnic division in our country instead of uniting the Iraqis. The democratic, liberal, leftist, and nationalist forces have been marginalized. The Sunnis were not the only ones who were marginalized but all these forces."

Al-Atiyah called for the establishment of effective liberal and socialist parties in Iraq that could appeal on a secular basis across sectarian lines. (The World Monitor translation drops this crucial point out). Later he said, ' "There is no freedom or democracy in any country where Islam has been politicized. How will the situation then be in a country that is divided on sectarian bases?" He blames the Shi'i parties for refusing to postpone the January elections and the Sunnis for boycotting them. '

Tariq al-Hashimi of the Iraqi Islamic Party (Sunni):

' He denies that the Islamic political parties are responsible for what is taking place in the country. He defends his party and says the Iraqi Islamic Party's programme has no sectarian or ethnic tendencies. He then agrees with Dr Al-Atiyah that the current crisis in Iraq began with the "implementation of the political quota system in the Governing Council." He hopes the next general elections at the end of the year will end this quota system "for which the occupation is responsible in part and parcel." Continuing, he says: "I think the Iraqis are victims rather than initiators of the crisis. The country is still in the hands of the occupier. Sovereignty is incomplete and this must be admitted. Therefore, the occupation is primarily responsible for what is taking place on the ground." He adds that "the security file is still in the hands of the occupier and this is an extremely serious impasse." He then blames the government security services for "failing to uncover the perpetrators of crimes." ' . . . Later he says that

' Incitement campaigns by Al-Iraqiyah television and other suspect channels and news media with the aim of planting the seeds of an abominable sectarianism must immediately stop." He adds that Al-Iraqiyah television "disseminated false claims by persons who claimed to have been involved in killings." '

I presume he is implying that the religious Shiite parties have gotten control of the state media and are using it to blame Sunnis for all the violence.

Saad Jawad Qandil of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI):

'Asked what the Iraqi Government can do to solve the crisis, Qandil says: "I join Dr Tariq al-Hashimi in saying that the solution lies in defusing any sectarian sedition through national unity and the participation of all sectors of the Iraqi society in one national plan with the aim of upholding the supremacy of the law and isolating all sectarian tendencies among the Iraqi people. I also call for preventing and isolating and even suing all those who incite sectarian sedition. The false accusations we heard in the news media last week incite sectarian sedition. This does not help national unity or defuse sectarian strife. We need unity." '

Qandil was complaining about the Sunnis blaming the Badr Corps (the paramilitary of SCIRI) for the killing of Sunni clerics and worshipper recently. Qandil earlier said that the Badr Organization was now an independent service organization not connected to SCIRI. He said he did not view Muqtada al-Sadr as an honest broker between the Association of Muslims Scholars and Badr, because Muqtada had already supported the position of Hareth al-Dhari.

The debate was honest and al-Atiyah pulled no punches. But you knew as you watched that the future lies with Qandil and Hashimi, who came across as defensive and much less open about their real goals.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sometimes You are Just Screwed

Readers occasionally write me complaining that I do not offer any solutions to the problems in Iraq. Let me just step back from the daily train wreck news from the region to complain back that there aren't any short-term, easy solutions to the problems in Iraq.

The US military cannot defeat the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement any time soon for so many reasons that they cannot all be listed.

The guerrillas have widespread popular support in the Sunni Arab areas of Iraq, an area with some 4 million persons. Its cities and deserts offer plenty of cover for an unconventional war. Guerrilla movements can succeed if more than 40 percent of the local population supports them. While the guerrillas are a small proportion of Iraqis, they are very popular in the Sunni Arab areas. If you look at it as a regional war, they probably have 80 percent support in their region.

The guerrillas are mainly Iraqi Sunnis with an intelligence or military background, who know where secret weapons depots are containing some 250,000 tons of missing munitions, and who know how to use military strategy and tactics to good effect. They are well-funded and can easily get further funding from Gulf millionnaires any time they like.

The Iraqi guerrillas are given tactical support by foreign jihadi fighters. There are probably only a few hundred of them, but they are disproportionately willing to undertake very dangerous attacks, and to volunteer as suicide bombers.

There are simply too few US troops to fight the guerrillas. There are only about 70,000 US fighting troops in Iraq, they don't have that much person-power superiority over the guerrillas. There are only 10,000 US troops for all of Anbar province, a center of the guerrilla movement with a population of 820,000. A high Iraqi official estimated that there are 40,000 active guerrillas and another 80,000 close supporters of them. The only real explanation for the successes of the guerrillas is that the US military has been consistently underestimating their numbers and abilities. There is no prospect of increasing the number of US troops in Iraq.

The guerillas have enormous advantages, of knowing the local clans and terrain and urban quarters, of knowing Arabic, and of being local Muslims who are sympathetic figures for other Muslims. American audiences often forget that the US troops in Iraq are mostly clueless about what is going on around them, and do not have the knowledge base or skills to conduct effective counter-insurgency. Moreover, as foreign, largely Christian occupiers of an Arab, Muslim, country, they are widely disliked and mistrusted outside Kurdistan.

US military tactics, of replying to attacks with massive force, have alienated ever more Sunni Arabs as time has gone on. Fallujah was initially quiet, until the US military fired on a local demonstration against the stationing of US troops at a school (parents worried about their children being harmed if there was an attack). Mosul was held up as a model region under Gen. Petraeus, but exploded into long-term instability in reaction to the November Fallujah campaign. The Americans have lost effective control everywhere in the Sunni Arab areas. Even a West Baghdad quarter like Adhamiyah is essentially a Baath republic. Fallujah is a shadow of its former self, with 2/3s of its buildings damaged and half its population still refugeees, and is kept from becoming a guerrilla base again only by draconian methods by US troops that make it "the world's largest gated community." The London Times reports that the city's trade is still paralyzed.

So far the new pro-American Iraqi troops have not distinguished themselves against the guerrillas, and it will probably be at least 3-5 years before they can begin doing so, if ever. Insofar as the new army is disproportionately Shiite and Kurdish, it may simply never have the resources to penetrate the Sunni Arab center-north effectively. There is every reason to believe that the new Iraqi military is heavily infiltrated with sympathizers of the guerrillas.

The guerrilla tactic of fomenting civil war among Iraq's ethnic communities, which met resistance for the first two years, is now bearing fruit. There is increasing evidence of Shiite murders of Sunni clerics and worshippers, and of Sunni attacks on Shiites, beyond the artificial efforts of the guerrillas themselves. Civil war and turbulence benefit the guerrillas, who gain cover for violent attacks, and who can offer themselves to the Iraqis as the only force capable of keeping order. AP reports an Iraqi official saying today that there is a civil war going on in the northern city of Telafar between Sunnis and Shiites. I doubt US television news is even mentioning it.

The political process in Iraq has been a huge disaster for the country. The Americans emphasized ethnicity in their appointments and set a precedent for ethnic politics that has deepened over time. The Shiite religious parties, Dawa and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, won the January 30 elections. These are the parties least acceptable to the Sunni Arab heartland. The Sunni Arabs are largely absent in parliament, only have one important cabinet post, and only have two members in the 55-member constitutional drafting committee. Deep debaathification has led to thousands of Sunnis being fired from their jobs for simply having belonged to the Baath Party, regardless of whether they had ever done anything wrong. They so far have no reason to hope for a fair shake in the new Iraq. Political despair and the rise of Shiite death squads that target Sunnis are driving them into the arms of the guerrillas.

The quality of leadership in Washington is extremely bad. George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and outgoing Department of Defense officials Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, have turned in an astonishingly poor performance in Iraq. Their attempt to demonstrate US military might has turned into a showcase for US weakness in the face of Islamic and nationalist guerrillas, giving heart to al-Qaeda and other unconventional enemies of the United States.

If the US drew down its troop strength in Iraq too rapidly, the guerrillas would simply kill the new political class and stabilizing figures such as Grand Ayatollah Sistani. Although US forces have arguably done more harm than good in many Sunni Arab areas, they have prevented set-piece battles from being staged by ethnic militias, and they have prevented a number of attempted assassinations.

In an ideal world, the United States would relinquish Iraq to a United Nations military command, and the world would pony up the troops needed to establish order in the country in return for Iraqi good will in post-war contract bids. But that is not going to happen for many reasons. George W. Bush is a stubborn man and Iraq is his project, and he is not going to give up on it. And, by now the rest of the world knows what would await its troops in Iraq, and political leaders are not so stupid as to send their troops into a meat grinder.

Therefore, I conclude that the United States is stuck in Iraq for the medium term, and perhaps for the long term. The guerrilla war is likely to go on a decade to 15 years. Given the basic facts, of capable, trained and numerous guerrillas, public support for them from Sunnis, access to funding and munitions, increasing civil turmoil, and a relatively small and culturally poorly equipped US military force opposing them, led by a poorly informed and strategically clueless commander-in-chief who has made himself internationally unpopular, there is no near-term solution.

In the long run, say 15 years, the Iraqi Sunnis will probably do as the Lebanese Maronites did, and finally admit that they just cannot remain in control of the country and will have to compromise. That is, if there is still an Iraq at that point.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

14 US Troops Dead in 3 Days
Civil War in Telafar

The Associated Press reports that a car bomb in Baghdad killed 3 US troops, and a drive-by shooting killed a fourth on Tuesday. The deaths brought the three-day total of US military fatalities to 14.

Guerrillas detonated a bomb near a girls' school in Baghdad, killing 6 persons but apparently no students.

Paul Garwood also reports that

"In the northern city of Tal Afar, there were reports that militants were in control and that Shiites and Sunnis were fighting in the streets, a day after two car bombs killed at least 20 people. Police Capt. Ahmed Hashem Taki said Tal Afar was experiencing "civil war." Journalists were blocked from entering the city of 200,000."

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that a police official in Telafar reported immense loss of life in the violent clashes. The Sunni jihadis are said to have taken over the major hospital. They are being resisted by armed Shiite Turkmen townspeople.

The Turkmen Bloc issued an appeal to Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari and other major political figures, saying that Telafar is ablaze with the flames of the radical anti-Shiite (takfiri) forces that have infiltrated from beyond the border. They added that the city "is a prisoner in the hands of terror." They complained, "Its citizens are exposed to being slaughtered every day." Member of parliament Muhammad Taqi al-Mawla, who belongs to the Turkmen Bloc, called on the government to intervene quickly to save the city. He said that in the current conditions, no child could go to school and no employee could reach the workplace.

This report sent chills down my spine. Major urban Sunni-Shiite violence is likely to spill over to other parts of the country.

Nancy Yousef of Knight Ridder reports on rapidly advancing plans to unite three of Iraq's southern provinces (Basra, Dhiqar and Maysan) into one super-province with a distinctly Shiite cast. This move comes in part in response to Kurdish plans to create a Kurdish super-province of Kurdistan. In part, it is an attempt to restrain the power of the central government vis a vis the provinces, since a large province is in a better bargaining position with Baghdad than a small one. Reorganizing Iraq into a small number of ethnically based provinces, however, could lay the groundwork for the eventual break-up of the state.

Al-Hayat says that Hussein Shahristani, deputy speaker of parliament, announced that the constitution drafting committee of the Iraqi parliament will be headed by Shiite hard liner Humam Hamoudi, a major proponent of imposing Islamic law on the once-secular country. The Daily Star points out that Hamoudi is a Shiite cleric, a member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and an aide to the party's leader, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim.

Parliamentarians are still seeking ways of increasing the Sunni representation on the constitution-drafting committee, which at the moment stands at a pitiful 2 out of 55. MP Abdul Hadi al-Hakim (United Iraqi Alliance) suggested that each provincial council select some delegates to be added to the committee. (This would not actually help balance things very much).

The speaker of the Iraqi parliament, Hajem al-Hasani, said Tuesday that the Iraqi constitution "will fail in establishing security in the country unless the Sunni rebels and other groups not now participating are granted an effective political role, not just an advisory one." He compared Iraq to an "unstable nuclear reactor" and said, "the upcoming political stages will decide if we are heading toward stability." He added, "The Resistance must form a political wing, as happens everywhere in the world." He said that no one can "wipe out the Sunnis completely."

I had to rub my eyes. The speaker of the Iraqi parliament is calling for inclusion of the guerrillas in the constitution-writing process, and asking them to form a political wing so that they can be so included. The gap between the 17 Sunni parliamentarians and their Shiite and Kurdish colleagues (who make up the rest of the 273) is truly vast.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Zarqawi Wounded?

The news that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi may have been wounded, reported at a jihadi web site, dominated US television news on Tuesday.

I'm not sure why. A report on a web site cannot be verified. Al-Zarqawi's group may be trying to throw the United States off his trail. Or the report could be a black psy-ops operation of Donald Rumsfeld.

Nor is it new news. There have been rumors for some time that the US military surrounded Ramadi and its hospital to get at Zarqawi, who was wounded, but that he managed to slip away.

If Zarqawi did die, what difference would it make? He is responsible for only a fraction of the violence in Iraq, and has lots of jihadi lieutenants who would gladly take his place.

So, we cannot know if it is true. If it is true it is old news. And it wouldn't matter much to the situation in Iraq. I'd file that under "not a story."
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

49 Killed, 130 Wounded in Iraq's Day of Rage

Car bombs and other attacks killed at least 49 Iraqis on Monday and left at least 130 wounded, according to AP. Four American troops have also been killed in the past two days.

Al-Zaman/ AFP :

In Telafar, a largely Turkmen city in the north, two suicide bombers set off their payloads outside the mansion of Hasan Bekdash Al Julagh, a local notable, killing 20 civilians and wounding 10 seriously. That morning, someone had tossed a grenade into Al Julagh's garden, killing his son. Wire services say that Al Dulagh was a Shiite Turkmen with close ties to Massoud Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party. (Most Turkmen do not get along with the Kurds). These clues make for a murder mystery of some complexity. Was he killed because he is a Shiite? Or because he is a Turkmen client of Kurdish leader Barzani?

BBC World Monitoring for May 22 notes, "Al-Mada publishes on the front page a 150-word report saying that three National Assembly Turkoman members have sent an "urgent call" to President Jalal Talabani and Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Ja'fari to quickly solve the "tragic situation" in Tal'far which is the work of the Takfiri [hard line Sunni] forces that have come from beyond the borders." That is, they are saying that largely Turkmen Telafar has nevertheless become a base for jihadi activity on the part of foreign fighters slipping across the border from Syria, which is nearby. This situation may help explain Al Julagh's fate. (Takfir means excommunication, and it is what the Shiites feel the extremist Salafis do to them.)

In Talibiyah, in the poor Shiite Jamilah quarter of northeast Baghdad, guerrillas detonated an enormous bomb in front of the Haba'ibna ["Our Dear Friends"] eating complex, which had a restaurant, a cafe and a sweets shop. The explosion killed 10 and left 113 wounded. Some twenty-two automobiles were destroyed at the smoldering site. Police had for some time frequented the place, but the owners had recently asked them to stop coming, for fear that their presence might provoke such terrorism. I saw the footage on LBC, and it took a strong stomach to watch the wounded carried away. The bomb crater looked gigantic.

In Tuz Khurmatu south of Kirkuk, a suicide bomber killed 7 civilians and wounded 13 outside the governor's mansion. Among the wounded was an official of the Kurdistan Patriotic Union.

In Samarra (an hour north of Baghdad), guerrillas set off two car bombs in front of the main gate to the US base, wounding 4 civilians and four Americans. A third man wearing a bomb belt blew himself up at the same site, but had been shot before he could get close enough to inflict casualties. Mortar shells also fell on the police station, killing 2 and wounding 21.

In Mahmudiyah (half an hour south of Baghdad), on Monday night guerrillas detonated a car bomb near a Shiite worship center, killing 5 and wounding 19, most of them children. The center was a Husainiyah, a building dedicated to mourning Imam Husain and other early Shiite leaders, and it is an institution distinctive to Shiites. An attack on it is clearly sectarian.

In Kirkuk, a house took mortar fire, producing an unspecified number of casualties, both killed and wounded.

AFP says, "Major General Wael Rubaye, the new commander of a special operations room recently set up by the ministry for national security to coordinate the fight against insurgents, and his driver were shot dead by insurgents in the capital early Monday, the cabinet office said in a statement." When your coordinator of the fight against insurgents is shot just after he is appointed, you can conclude two things. 1) You have been heavily infiltrated. 2) Your security is not good.

The US military along with 15,000 Iraqi troops claimed to have made a sweep of some dangerous Baghdad neighborhoods, arresting 285 Iraqis they suspected of being terrorists, and capturing $6 million in cash. The claims could not be independently verified by AFP. The sweep will last several days.

It was announced, according to al-Hayat, that 295 American civilians and security personnel have been killed in Iraq so far this year.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sadr Mediates Sunni-Shiite Dispute

Al-Sharq al-Awsat/ DPA: Young Shiite nationalist leader Muqtada al-Sadr said Monday that the attempts of his aides to mediate between the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars and the Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq's Badr paramilitary had achieved advances.

Deutsche Press Agentur reported that Sadr told them in Najaf, "Our delegation detected a desire on the part of both parties to make an opening and to ensure the triumph of the language of dialogue, rather than that of bigotry and prejudice. I can say that the delegation took the process to the next level." He added, "We called on all to put the welfare of Iraq and of the Muslims above every other consideration, and to strengthen the ties of mercy and love, since the present phase requires all to cease and desist for the sake of a united Iraq."

Hareth al-Dhari of the Association of Muslim Scholars had accused the Badr Corps of kidnapping and killing Sunni clerics and worshippers. A delegation of Sadrists led by Shaikh Hadi al-Daraji met separately with the AMS and with Badr. A joint committee has allegedly been formed as a result to attempt to resolve the dispute.

The Badr Corps has threatened to take Hareth al-Dhari to court for libel.

Meanwhile, BBC world monitoring for May 22 translates:

"Al-Bayyinah carries on the front page a 70-word exclusive report citing reliable sources at the Al-Sadr trend affirming that the leaders of the trend have vowed to confront terrorism. The sources added that the trend has adopted a new policy in this regard after "diagnosing the real enemy of the Iraqi people."

The prospect of faction fights between the Mahdi Army of Sadr and the jihadis around Zarqawi is not actually a pleasant one to contemplate. But it is probably where Iraq is headed if the guerrilla war continues.

Other tidbits from BBC World Monitoring for May 22:

"Al-Bayyinah carries on the front page a 220-word exclusive report citing sources close to the Iraqi government as saying that the positive impact of the Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Karazi's recent visit to Iraq will be reflected not only on the bilateral relations between Iraq and Iran, but also on the security situation in the region. The sources added that Karazi will carry a request letter to Syria to stop terrorist infiltration into the country." . . .

"Al-Furat publishes on page 2 a 100-word report citing eyewitnesses as saying that the Iraqi Army raided five mosques and arrested 150 worshippers during the Friday prayer sermons in Al-Shujayriyah district near the city of Al-Suwayrah on 20 May." . . .

Al-Dustur publishes on the front page a 600-word editorial by Chief Editor Basim al-Shaykh commenting on the closure of the Iraqi newspaper Al-Yawm al-Akhar and the arrest of its chief editor by the authorities. The writer criticizes the "oppressive" measures taken against a "prominent journalist," urging the Iraqi judiciary to consider the current critical stage and act accordingly and to abandon "personal interests."

An Iraqi newspaper was just closed down? Why didn't we hear about it in the English language press?
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$100 Million "Mishandled" in Iraq

An international audit has found that the Allawi government "mishandled" $100 million in petroleum funds that should have been used for development, and that the US Coalition Provisional Authority gave out uncompetitive contracts and misspent development monies.

I don't know what they mean by "mishandled." I think they may be suggesting embezzlement or other corruption on a huge scale, but are being delicate and statesmanlike.

In a related item, BBC world monitoring for May 22 notes, "Al-Bayyinah publishes on page 9 a 400-word article by Zayd Salim al-Juburi strongly criticizing former Prime Minister Allawi for issuing, shortly before the end of his term in office, a number of decrees to lease houses to former ministers and senior officials in his ministry in the Green Zone for 25 years and to pay them high salaries and pensions."

The same source reports,

"Al-Bayyinah carries on the front page a 120-word report citing political sources in Damascus as saying that the goal of former Prime Minister Allawi's recent visit to Syria was to recruit the Ba'thists and former regime followers for a new political party. The report adds that Allawi had taken this step in response to the withdrawal of several political figures such as Husayn al-Sadr, Qasim Dawud, Wa'il Abd-al-Latif, Sawsan al-Sharifi, and Muhammad al-Hakim from the Iraqi Electoral List. The report adds that the new leaders of the Ba'th Party led by Hasan Hadi al-Dulaymi have held a meeting in Al-Anbar Governorate recently. The report adds that Qasim Salam, member of the former Ba'th Party National Command, who is currently residing in Algeria, has allocated $800 million for the new Ba'th Party organization in Iraq."

I hadn't heard about Sayyid Husain Sadr and Wa'il Abdul Latif (prominent Shiites) deserting the Allawi "al-Iraqiyah" list in parliament. Since Allawi has been locked out of any power, his is not a star one would exactly hitch oneself to. If it is true that he still dreams of establishing a "Baath lite" in Iraq, he is doomed permanently among the Shiites and the Kurds.
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8,000 Antiquities Still Missing from Iraq

The Independent summarizes a paper given by John Curtis of the British Museum at an art crime conference in London, concerning Iraq's ancient heritage looted while Americans stood by and watched:

"[H]alf of the 40 iconic items from the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad still had not been retrieved. And of at least 15,000 items looted from its storerooms, about 8,000 have yet to be traced."

Of the recovered items, 4,000 were recovered inside Iraq, about 1,000 in the US, 500 in France, and 200 in Jordan.

Even worse, lots of antiquities have been looted directly from excavation sites, ruining them for history. Once a piece is separated from its context and soil layer, its significance is often impossible to guess. Thousands of years of Iraqi history are being destroyed.

The political Right in the United States has all along attempted to play down the significance of the cultural looting. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asked at one point, "How many antiquities could they have?", exemplifying the pure Philistinism of the Bush administration. Flacks like Charles Krauthammer have even called the looting a "myth" and then used the supposed "myth" as a basis to attack critics of the administration's handling of Iraq!

As the Iraqi National Museum was being looted, US troops were busy guarding the Petroleum Ministry.



The Lady of Uruk (3100 B.C.) Recovered September 2003 north of Baghdad.
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14 Killed
Sadr Tries to Mediate between Sunnis, Shiites

At least 14 persons were killed in Iraq on Sunday in separate incidents. There was a car bomb in Tikrit, which wounded US and Iraqi soldiers. The director general of the Ministry of Trade, Ali Musa Salman, was shot down in Baghdad. There were firefights at Qaim and Mahmudiyah and Yusufiyah.

Muqtada al-Sadr, the young Shiite nationalist, sent a delegation to Shaikh Hareth al-Dhari of the (Sunni) Association of Muslim Scholars on Sunday in an attempt to mediate between them and the Badr paramilitary of the (Shiite) Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. The Sadrist, Abdul Hadi al-Daraji, also met with Sunni cleric Abdul Salam al-Kubaisi.
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Is it George's Fault?
Laura Bush Heckled at Wailing Wall over Pollard Affair
And at Temple Mount by Palestinians

I was alarmed at the tenor of the reporting about First Lady Laura Bush's close brush with both Israeli and Palestinian protesters, at the Wailing Wall and the Dome of the Rock respectively. Suzanne Malveaux, who was with her, clearly sounded shaken from the experience. Things could have been much worse.

I blame her husband George for putting her in this danger. There have been demonstrations and counter-demonstrations at the Jerusalem holy sites for weeks, because of charges by Palestinians that a far rightwing Zionist group planned to demolish the Dome of the Rock. On another level, George W. Bush was the one who said, at his National Security Council meeting on January 30, 2001, that he intended to just "unleash Sharon", to allow all kinds of trouble between Israel and Palestine, and let conflict "clarify" things. His unconcern with the Israel/Palestine issue, which is key to US global security because of the strong feelings in the Muslim World about Israel's colonization of the West Bank, contrasts deeply with the strenuous efforts made by his predecessor, Bill Clinton, to resolve the conflict. By January of 2001, the two sides were extremely close to an agreement. Instead of pressuring incoming rightwing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to continue to negotiate, Bush "unleashed" him. Sharon predictably ran riot, mounting a campaign of murder and assassination against his Palestinian enemies (Sharon was actually once caught on mike planning out such a murder). At one point Sharon had a US-made F-16 fire a missile into a civilian apartment building to get at a Hamas official, killing 15 innocent people, including a little baby. John Bolton, by the way, tampered with the US government memo on the missile strike so as to shield Sharon from criticism.

After Laura Bush visited the Wailing Wall,

' Dozens of protesters stood nearby, shouting, "Free [convicted spy Jonathan] Pollard now" . . . The first lady was mobbed by protesters and local reporters, and Secret Service agents and Israeli police had to physically hold back the crowd as she approached the wall. '

The First Lady simply should not have been put in that kind of situation, where far-right Zionist fanatics had such physical access to her. The outcome could have been much worse-- remember what happened to Israeli Prime Minsiter Yitzhak Rabin.

As for their demand that Jonathan Pollard be freed from US prison, where he is serving a life sentence for delivering mountains of classified information to Israel (and thence to the Soviet Union), it is monstrous. Pollard inflicted incalculable damage on the United States and is one of its most dastardly traitors. High-ranking US officers with an intimate knowledge of the case told Seymour Hersh that there is no doubt that documents he provided to the Israelis ended up in the hands of the Soviets. This happened either because Israeli intelligence peddled them to Moscow or because Israeli intelligence itself was penetrated by the KGB. By sending highly classified material out of the United States (for tens of thousands of dollars in a private account), Pollard initiated its transfer to Moscow as surely as if he had just dropped it off at the Soviet embassy. Pollard should never be released, and anyone who demands his release is no friend of the United States. Giving the signal that it is all right to spy intensively on the United States would be the worst possible move in these parlous times.

This is more especially true since the pro-Israel lobbying organization, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, is under FBI investigation for the passing of classified documents to Israeli embassy official Naor Gilon by two high-level AIPAC officials (recently fired). (Gilon, rumored to be Mossad or Israeli intelligence, is still at his cover post in Washington!) AIPAC should be made to register as an agent of a foreign power, at the very least. Like other unopposed or wealthy and focused single-interest organizations (the Cuban-American community with regard to policy toward Havana e.g., or the oil lobby that has its eyes on Alaska), AIPAC virtually sets policy for Congress in its area of interest. AIPAC is fabled for targeting any US congressmen or women who criticize Israel for un-election, and for generally succeeding. (It may not be as formidable as its reputation, but its reputation makes senators and representatives unwilling to take it on). That its officials are simultaneously spying for Israel is extremely scary. In this context, the demand that Pollard be freed functions as a demand that organizations like AIPAC be held harmless from spying on the United States of America for a foreign government.

It is George W. Bush who has encouraged the Israeli far right, by "unleashing Sharon" and letting the rightwingers know that Washington will support them no matter what. That is how they came to have the chutzpah to try to mob the First Lady. These are people that every US citizen is involuntarily taxed hundreds of dollars a year to support, and this is our thanks? We are spied on and then denounced for jailing the spy? And our First Lady is nearly mobbed?

At the Dome of the Rock, the third holiest shrine in Islam, "40 or 50" angry protesters came toward her, but the US Secret Service whisked her away. CNN says, ' As she left the mosque, one heckler yelled, "How dare you come in here?" and "Why do you hassle our Muslims?" '

Ironically, Laura Bush has been much more sympathetic to hurt feelings on the Muslim world about abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere than has her husband.

Mrs. Bush said the Newsweek report compounded anti-American sentiment stemming from the abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib. She said that abuse was "not any sort of typical thing from the United States." "We've had terrible happenings that have really, really hurt our image of the United States," she said. "And people in the United States are sick about it."

George W. Bush's policies have pushed approval ratings for the United States in the Muslim world on down to practically zero. It wasn't always like this. In 1999, 75 percent of Indonesians (the most populous Muslim country) had a favorable view of the US. On Sunday, 7,000 Indonesians protested at the US embassy against reports of Koran desecration by US military interrogators. The International Committee of the Red Cross says that it repeatedly presented to the US military what it felt were "credible" reports of Koran desecration. Passions were further inflamed Friday by a New York Times report on the way US military interrogators at Bagram in Afghanistan tortured two detainees to death. (The Indonesian protest was in part with reference to Bagram.)

It is George W. Bush who has set up the New Gulags, attempting to create political and legal enclaves which are completely beyond the law, where the "quaint" Geneva Conventions do not apply, where detainees do not get to see a lawyer, where they are not owed a speedy trial or basic human dignity, where they can essentially be tortured with impunity. Only low-ranking military personnel are being prosecuted for the abuses, but they were certainly authorized in at least a general way by the tone set in the White House.

We all now live in one world, on one globe. The Arab-Israeli conflict or the struggle within Islam between progressive and reactionary forces affects us all. Therefore, Bush's policies toward both affect us all. Laura Bush got a small taste of how much they affect us on Sunday.
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Muqtada Tries to Mediate Between Sunnis and Badr

Three Sunni Arab organizations arranged a meeting of 1,000 Sunni notables on Saturday, in an attempt to form an umbrella group with greater political clout.

The LA Time reports that,

' Meanwhile, a tribal leader from Madaen told the gathering that if security conditions didn't improve in his region, "We will raise arms and nothing will stand in the way of jihad." '

The Washington Post says that the convention passed a resolution that condemned terror but did recognize the legitimacy of attacking "the occupier." Adnan Dulaim, head of the Sunni Pious Endowments Board, argued for Sunni participation in the civil political process. He is also the activist behind the 3-day mosque strike that began after Friday prayers.

The convention called for the resignation of Bayan Jabr, the minister of the interior. Jabr has long been a prominent member of the Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), one of two main parties that won the January 30 election. Many Sunnis suspect the Interior Ministry secret police of being behind the kidnapping and killing of Sunni clerics and worshippers. The secret police in turn are suspected of being members of the Badr Corps, the paramilitary of SCIRI.

Jabr angrily refused to step down, saying that only members of parliament had the right to ask for a minister's resignation. He pointed out that many of the Sunni leaders at the convention had boycotted the election, depriving themselves of a voice in the new government. Al-Hayat says that Jabr also said that he would cooperate "with the devil" to end terrorism in Iraq. He said that plans to reinstitute the death penalty are going forward. He said the Ministry cooperates with all sorts of organizations, but only with regard to "information." He said a new plan would be put forward to deal with the deterioration in security.

On Saturday morning, a squadron 20 vehicles of the Interior Ministry's Wolf Brigade secret police was passing by Baiji, north of Baghdad, when guerrillas opened fire on it, killing at least 3 (al-Hayat says 8 died).

al-Hayat: The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) declined to consider an initiative launched by young Shiite nationalist leader Muqatada al-Sadr to promote a reconciliation between the Association of Muslim Scholars (a hard line Sunni group) and the Badr Organization, the Shiite paramilitary of SCIRI. Al-Hayat says that Sadr, along with Sunni leader Hareth al-Dhari of the AMS and the four grand ayatollahs in Najaf (including Sistani) agreed to issue a call for Iraqis to avoid civil strife.

Saad Qandil, the vice president of the political office in SCIRI, said that the Badr Organization has shown no interest in having Muqtada al-Sadr as a mediator, because his position is "not balanced," pointing to Sadr's tilt toward al-Dhari. Sadr had been planning a series of visits to the two organizations in hopes of bringing them together.

At the Sunni convention in Baghdad, the Mosul delegation denounced al-Dhari for seeking a confrontation with the new government. (Al-Dhari's accusations against the Badr Corps and the Ministry of the Interior are explosive and many believe they could lead to an intensification of Iraq's unconventional civil war.
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US Public Confidence on Iraq Plummeting

A new Harris Interactive poll shows that US public confidence in the Iraq venture is falling rapidly.

Question: How confident are you that U.S. policies in Iraq will be successful?

May 2005

Confident: 25%
Not confident: 54%
Not sure: 20%


Mar. 2005

Confident: 30%
Not confident: 49%
Not sure: 21%


Thinking about everything that has happened, do you think that taking military action against Iraq was the right or wrong thing to do?


May 2005

Right thing: 39%
Wrong thing: 48%
Not Sure: 13%


March 2005

Right thing: 41%
Wrong thing: 45%
Not sure: 15%
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Saturday Satire

Not to be outdone.


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Sadrists Clash with Police in Nasiriyah
Baghdad Sunni Mosque Protest
Ramadi Demonstrations against Koran Desecration

Thousands of protesters rallied in Iraq (some reports say 6,000) on Friday denouncing the continued US military presence in the country. Many of the demonstrators in the south were followers of nationalist Shiite young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and they were protesting the desecration of the Koran by the United States military.

Some three thousand demonstrators also came out in Sunni Ramadi to protest reports that US military interrogators had desecrated the Koran, according to Waleed Ibrahim of Reuters. He quotes one of the activists at Ramadi: "‘Political solutions are over and military solutions will start. We will die rather than accept the desecration of our Holy Book and the detention of our women,’’ said Samir al-Dulaimi, head of the Muslim Clerics Association in Anbar province, during the protest."

In Najaf, Kufa and Nasiriyah, followers of Muqtada had painted US and Israeli flags on the ground in the way to mosques, so that worshippers trampled on them as they headed to worship. After prayers at the Kufa mosque, crowds chanted, "Down, down, with Israel; down, down with the USA!" In Najaf, there was a demonstration (either the same one or another, separate rally) against Kuwait for broadcasting last Monday a clip of Lebanese songstress Nancy Ajram singing and dancing before a backdrop that included the image of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.

In Nasiriyah, the demonstrations took an ugly turn when Sadr militiamen clashed with local police, leaving four policemen, four civilians, and nine Sadr supporters wounded. Al-Zaman says that one of their motivations was to protest the US desecration of the Koran. AP neglects this detail, but explains:

In Nasiriyah, about 320km south-east of Baghdad, al-Sadr supporters clashed with guards at the headquarters of Dhi Qar provincial Governor Aziz Abed Alwan. The fighting broke out before noon as about 2 000 members of al-Sadr's al-Mehdi Army marched toward the cleric's local office, which is near the governor's headquarters. Armed men guarding the headquarters shot toward the crowd in an apparent bid to disperse it, prompting retaliatory fire from al-Sadr supporters -- injuring four police officers and four civilians. Another nine al-Sadr supporters were injured, said Sheik al-Khafaji, an official at al-Sadr's Nasiriyah office.

Al-Zaman said that the number of those injured in the Sadrist clash, including 4 policemen, was much higher, putting it at 89. It said the figure of "9" quoted above referred only to Mahdi Army militiamen.

In Baghdad's Kazimiyah quarter, national security adviser Muwaffaq al-Rubaie was the target of assassination by car bomb. He escaped, but the bomb killed two civilians and wounded 3.

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Shiite), called for calm and self-restraint in the face of provocations to sectarian violence. (al-Zaman).

Sunni clerics in Baghdad called in their Friday prayers sermons for a three-day closure of mosques to protest what they call the targeting of Sunnis for kidnapping and assassination. A leader of the Association of Muslim Scholars, Harith al-Dhari, charged on Wednesday that the Shiite militia, the Badr Corps, was behind the incidents. Badr's leader denied the accusation.

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat: Sunni cleric, Shaykh Abdul Ghafur al-Samarra'i of the Umm al-Qura Mosque in Baghdad said in his sermon that the mosque closings were "a first step" and "a peaceful protest," but warned that further steps would be taken if attacks on Sunnis persisted. He said that it was an especially dangerous situation when persons who represented themselves as belonging to an official government agency commit atrocities. (Sunnis have claimed that the now Shiite-dominated Ministry of the Interior is behind the attacks). He said he was nevertheless calling for calm and self-restraint.

At the Abu Hanifa Mosque, the capital's second largest, in Adhamiyah, Shaikh Mu`ayyad al-Adhami announced in his sermon that his mosque, too, would close for three days. He also said, "Today Iraq has become, after its occupation, a slaughterhouse for freedom, a butcher shop of the innocent, and a catalogue of score-settling."

Yasser Salihee of Knight Ridder reports on the struggle of some Sunnis to keep their mosques in the face of Shiite claims on them. Many Sunni mosques in the south have been usurped by Shiites, especially by Sadrists.

Several US servicemen were killed on Friday, at least 4 in separate incidents, and several more in a military truck that was struck by a car bomb, but no details had been released at the time of this writing.

I was struck Saturday morning by the difference between my summary of events on Friday and those in the major US papers. The Washington Post does not mention the violence at Nasiriyah, does not give a number for the 6,000 Sadrist demonstrators, and makes the Sunni mosque closing the lede.

The New York Times has even less, just a squib at the end of a long article on Saddam Hussein in his underwear. The LA Times is somewhat better but still very summarized.

It seems clear to me from the Arabic reports and the wire services that the demonstrations in the Shiite south and in Ramadi (only mentioned in the wires) were in part about the Guantanamo Koran desecration story, yet this meme is largely absent from mainstream press reporting. Why?

I suppose the Washington Post and the NYT had to put their editions to bed before I did, but this level and focus of coverage strikes me as just inadequate. The US public has no idea how bad things are in Iraq, or what is really going on there, and this is one reason.
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Why Jacoby is Wrong

Jeff Jacoby argues that there is something peculiar about the reaction of Muslims to the allegations that the Koran was disrespected at Guantanamo prison by US military interrogators.

Jacoby's position is pure bigotry. We have to be clear about this. Anti-muslimism is a form of racial prejudice no different from any other. If Jacoby said, "What is wrong with those people of African descent, that they are so violent all the time when nobody else is?" he'd probably be fired. It is not all right for him to do the same thing to Muslims. While Muslims are a religious group, in the contemporary United States they most often are racialized. It comes to the same thing.

Jacoby mentions that 17 persons were killed in disturbances in Afghanistan over this issue. But here's what is wrong with his argument to begin with. There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world. Most Muslims were not upset by the news or took no action about it. Pakistani politician and ex-cricketer Imran Khan couldn't get out more than a couple hundred people in Lahore, Pakistan, for a peaceful demonstration. Nobody much cared. Even in Afghanistan, go back and read the reports. A lot of the people killed were not killed by rioters. They were demonstrators shot by local Afghan police, police who may have been over-reacting in some cases, and who had been installed in power by the United States. For this, you blame the Muslim religion per se and the whole Muslim world?

Jacoby gives several incidents which he said might have provoked Catholic, Jewish or Buddhist crowds to violence but did not.

Jacoby is so wrong that I hardly know where to begin. All religions produce fanatics at the same rate. It is a constant.

The problem is only in the way that the American press writes about religious fanaticism, and in what the journalists notice.

For instance, those gentle Buddhist monks of Mandalay are perfectly capable of rioting, arson, and killing innocent people over a stone thrown into a monastery, as happened in Burma in October of 2002. Poor minority Muslims were beaten up and killed because of alleged disrespect to the sacred monastery:

"Earlier, in mid-October, religious unrest broke out in Kyauk-se, a town in central Burma, which is located not far away from Mandalay. The unrest spread to the city of Mandalay and then to the capital Rangoon. Burma’s junta confirmed that there had been sporadic clashes between people professing different faiths and slapped a dusk-to-dawn curfew in the areas where the religious unrest was rampant.

According to reports, the religious unrest broke out with a minor dispute, as someone threw a stone into a Buddhist monastery compound and it sparked the anger of the Buddhist monks, who mistakenly believed that the occupants of a nearby mosque were responsible for the alleged stone throw.

Subsequently, number of Muslims were attacked and injured in the religious riot that ensued, while others fearing for their lives sought shelter in the homes of the neighbouring Buddhist families.

According to local populace, many Buddhist monks in Mandalay rushed to Kyauk-se, caused tension thus sparking riots and arson, which left a dozen people dead, including a pregnant woman."

As for Judaism, please. Thousands of Palestinians have lost their homes, been harassed, oppressed, and killed by fanatical Jewish extremists in the West Bank and Gaza. When Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin tried to make peace, the Jewish far right killed him. When Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced he would withdraw from Gaza, 80,000 Jewish extremists demonstrated, and some threatened to kill Sharon because he was violating their sacred principles. The former chief rabbi of Israel even blamed the tsunami on world support for the withdrawal from Gaza. When Arab Israelis demonstrated against Israeli policies in the West Bank, there was "Jewish intifada" against them, with riots, demonstrations, and neighborhood invasions. The Jewish right gets a pass in the US press for these crimes. Google Gedud Ha'Ivry or Gush Emunim.

As for Christianity, we've seen the Christian identity movement blow up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, we've seen abortion doctors shot down in cold blood, we've seen decades of religious violence in places like Northern Ireland. Has he ever read Ian Paisely?

What world does Jacoby live in? It is a world where it is all right to generalize about a large group of people. Again, there is a word for that. Bigotry.
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23 Die In Iraq Violence
Shiite Cleric Assassinated

Guerrilla attacks killed 23 persons in Iraq on Thursday, including one US serviceman. One bomb blew up near a Shiite mosque in Baghdad, and an important Shiite cleric was killed.

Al-Sabah says that when Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi met with Grand Ayatollah Sistani in Najaf on Thursday, he insisted that "There is no evidence that Iran is supporting terrorism." He said Iran would be happy to help restore security in Iraq.

Meanwhile, the LA Times reports that the Americans have decided to get more involved in mediating Iraqi decision-making, in an attempt to reverse the deadly drift and political gridlock that has gripped the country. It seems obvious, as well, that left to themselves the Shiites and Kurds who won the Jan. 30 elections are perfectly happy to cut the Sunni Arabs out of the deal, and to risk prolonging and deepening the Sunni guerrilla war.

Taking a cue from Hannah Allam and Muhammad al-Dulaimi of Knight Ridder, Fred Kaplan of Slate considers whether a US military campaign like the recent one at Qaim does more political harm than good. He concludes that the US is alienating the very people eager to cooperate with it by using its massive firepower with too little discrimination. The Project on Defense Alternatives argues that US occupation of Iraq is producing a vicious circle, whereby US military action is actually provoking an ever growing guerrilla war.


The Wahington Post reports that the body of Shaikh Muhammad Allaf, a Shiite cleric, was pulled from a car at the bottom of the Tigris, for all the world like the victim of a Mafia hit. Allaf was a clerical representative of Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Sa'id al-Hakim, a close associate of Ali Sistani. Other sources identified Allaf (not Allaq) as a lieutenant of Sistani himself.] Al-Hakim issued a statement condemning the assassination through his son, Muhammad Husain. The Post adds,

' A statement from the office of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's most influential Shiite cleric, said insurgents were focusing on religious figures because they are easy prey. "The government is capable of protecting itself, so the insurgents are after soft targets," Sistani's statement said. '

Several aides to Sistani himself have been assassinated in the past few months, and a huge bomb was found and dismantled near Sistani's own home recently.

Sistani also condemned the government of Yemen for waging "a kind of war" against the Zaidi Shiites in that country.

Abbas Kadhim argues that what Iraq needs is legal and judicial reform.

Al-Sabah: In Saudi Arabia, prominent cleric Safar al-Hawali, who has supported the "holy war" by Sunnis in Iraq, denied that he had called upon Saudis to participate in it. He issued a statement that such participation by Saudis would be illegitimate.

Mansoor Moaddel reveals in the Daily Star the results of his opinion polling in Iraq last year. A sociologist at Eastern Michigan University who has been working with the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research, Moaddel is highly qualified to do scientific polling.

Some of the findings he reports:

To the question, "Is Iraq better off without Saddam Hussein?" the 'yes' answers broke down this way:

Sunnis: only 23 percent said "yes."
Shiites: 87 percent said "yes."
Kurds: 95 percent said "yes."

On the question of whether a university education is more important for boys than for girls:

Sunnis: 44 percent disagreed, favoring equality for girls.
Shiites: 50 percent disagreed, favoring equality for girls.
Kurds: 78 percent disagreed, insisting the girls be educated equally.

In other words, the Sunni Arabs in Iraq are nearly twice as patriarchal in their attitudes as Kurds.

The third question is the most important: "Is life in Iraq unpredictable and dangerous?"

Sunnis: 77 percent said "yes."
Shiites: 41 percent said "yes."
Kurds: 17 percent said "yes."

Moaddel argues that when people feel that their lives are not in their control, they are more likely to mount violent political campaigns in response:

"This disparity in attitudes toward the future could determine what eventually happens in Iraq. Widespread political violence in both Iran and Latin America in the 1960 and 1970 demonstrated a connection between popular feelings of powerlessness and the growth of urban guerilla movements. Leaders of these groups often defended terrorism by insisting that violence was the only means of bringing hope to demoralized people. This argument, long discredited, resonates in the actions of the Iraqi insurgents and their fanatical allies."

He argues that the Sunni Arabs have to be brought into the political process to forestall this development.
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Best of the Web

Scientists in South Korea, unhampered by the tradition of anti-intellectualism that still bedevils the United States, have made a major breakthrough in stem cell research. They took eggs from volunteers, snipped out the nuclei, and inserted nuclei from the skin of eleven patients sick with various disorders. They then jump-started cell division, and the resulting cells were as though they came from the 11 patients. Ideally this process could be used to grow organs and regenerate brain and nerve cells, so as to cure a variety of diseases, including Alzheimer's.

The US Congress may actually do the right thing and loosen restrictions on Federal stem cell research. But the bill is opposed by rightwing Christian congressmen who have the odd idea that their religion teaches that "life begins at conception."

The problem is that no religious scriptures teach any such thing. No one even knew about conception (i.e. the fertilization of eggs by spermatazoa) until recently. If you think about it, the discovery had to come after the invention of the microscope. When the Bible and the New Testament were written, and for centuries after among church fathers and authorities, life was thought to begin with the "quickening" (i.e. when the mother could feel the baby move). A blastocyte is not a human being and it is not a person. It is a blastocyte. It may or may not develop into a human being. Large numbers of fertilized eggs never get attached to the uterine wall and just get flushed down the toilet. Shall we hold a funeral for each of them? The poor deluded fundamentalists who know about this even think they will meet brothers and sisters in heaven that they never knew about. And on such irrational and frankly stupid bases (who told them they were going to heaven?), they want to forbid us to cure Alzheimers, and want to force raped women to give birth to the babies of their rapists. It makes a person want to tear hair out, thinking about it.

International Criminal Court and Bush? Billmon has photoshopped it. It isn't likely to happen, but his photo is amusing.

Top ten myths about the Senate filibuster.

Galloway vs. Coleman: That's going to leave a mark.
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Oil Official Killed
Jarba's Home Attacked, 8 Dead

Ahmad Seif of Reuters reports that An Oil Ministry official, "Ali Hameed, was shot outside his home as he left for work, police said."

He adds that guerrillas in Mosul attacked the home of Fawwaz al-Jarba, killing 8 persons before US troops backed by helicopters came to his rescue. Al-Jarba is from the same Shamar tribe as Vice President Ghazi al-Yawir, but he ran for parliament on the United Iraqi Alliance list, which is dominated by religious Shiites and was endorsed by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Al-Jarba was rejected by other Sunnis in parliament for any high government post that might be taken to represent Sunni interests. I.e. they now see him as a quisling. The attack on his home is another sign of growing Sunni-Shiite tensions, such that even Sunnis associating closely with the Shiite-dominated government are being targeted.

Seif adds,

"In Baghdad, a university professor was shot dead, an Iraqi soldier was killed in a suicide bombing, and four others were kidnapped. A roadside bomb also killed an American soldier in the capital, the U.S. military said . . . Four bodies were found on Thursday, this time just south of Saddam Hussein's home town of Tikrit. Police said they had been shot."

The bodies near Tikrit were presumably those of Sunnis?
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The Lies that Led to War

My article is online at Salon.com about the Downing Street memo "The lies that led to war": A leaked British memo, and other documents, make it clear that Bush intended all along to invade Iraq -- and lied about it to the American people. The full gravity of his offense has not yet sunk in.

"May 19, 2005 | When Newsweek's source admitted that he had misidentified the government document in which he had seen an account of Quran desecration at Guantánamo prison, Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita exploded, "People are dead because of what this son of a bitch said. How could he be credible now?"

Di Rita could have said the same things about his bosses in the Bush administration.

Tens of thousands of people are dead in Iraq, including more than 1,600 U.S. soldiers and Marines, because of false allegations made by President George W. Bush and Di Rita's more immediate boss, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, about Saddam Hussein's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and equally imaginary active nuclear weapons program. Bush, Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice repeatedly made unfounded allegations that led to the continuing disaster in Iraq, much of which is now an economic and military no man's land beset by bombings, assassinations, kidnappings and political gridlock."

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Dhari, Amiri trade Charges
Sunni-Shiite relations in Iraq at Nadir

Al-Zaman/AFP/Reuters: "The Association of Muslim Scholars called upon Minister of the Interior Bayan Jabr and Defense Minister Saadoun Dulaimi to resign. AMS leader Hareth al-Dhari essentially laid the responsibility for the kidnapping and killing of Sunni clerics at the feet of Mr. Jabr, a member of the Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. The AMS communique said Jabr and Dulaimi bore full responsibility for the iniquitous behavior of employees of their ministries toward Sunni clerics. It is alleged that kidnappers of Shaikh Hasan Hadi al-Nu`aimi and others were wearing Interior Ministry uniforms. The Iraqi government alleges that any uniforms used in such an operation were stolen or counterfeit, and that the deaths are the work of guerrillas attempting to foment civil strife.

The news conference at which Hareth al-Dhari, the strict Sunni cleric, launched his accusations against the Badr Corps as being behind the recent kidnappings and assassinations, was also attended by two other major Sunni leaders. One, Adnan Dulaimi, is the head of the Sunni Pious Endowments Board. The other is the leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party.

Dulaimi said, "We do not want public turmoil, and we emphasize the brotherhood of Islm. But we will not stand by with our arms crossed while prayer leaders at mosques are killed." He called for a three-day closure of Sunni mosques in Iraq beginning after Friday prayers this weekend, to protest the killings.

Later on Wednesday, Hareth al-Dhari went head to head with the leader of the Badr Organization, Hadi al-Amiri. Al-Amiri noted that al-Dhari had promised to ensure that the car bombings ended if the US would set a timetable for withdrawal. Al-Amiri wanted to know how close al-Dhari was to the guerrilla movement, such that he could make such a promise.

On Wednesday, 7 bodies of Turkmen from Kirkuk, working in Amiriyah, were discovered. A car bomb near Baiji killed 2 Irai policemen. In Samarra, US troops surrounded the firehouse and arrested six policemen who were inside it, without giving any reason for the arrests. In Baqubah, a car bomb was detonated in from of the local ministry of education builoding, wounding 18 persons, 14 of them police.

Zaid al-Ali laments "The End of Secularism" in Iraq, which was once perhaps the most secular Arab society.

Howard LaFranchi wonders if Iraq will be more like El Salvador or Colombia. The former went back to parliamentary politics after a nasty episode of reprisal killings, whereas Colombia has settled into a routine of narco-terrorist control of parts of the country.
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Sunni Leader Blames Shiites for Assassinations

Hareth al-Dhari, a leader of the Association of Muslim Scholars and an important hard line Sunni cleric charged Wednesday that the Shiite Badr Corps paramilitary was behind a wave of killings of Sunni mosque preachers and worshippers. Hadi al-Amiri, the head of the Badr Organization (the political wing) denied the charges and denounced al-Dhari for hate speech.

I'm watching al-Dhari on al-Jazeera, and he is angrily attacking the Badr Corps. He is saying that the same forces that are besieging Palestinian villages and ethnically cleansing the Palestinians [on the West Bank] are now attacking Sunni Arabs in Iraq. That is, he is alleging a secret deal between Shiite leaders and the Israelis, both of whom want to repress the Sunni Arabs. [This is of course a ridiculous conspiracy theory, but it is alarming to hear it publicly articulated by an influential leader.]

The press conference of the Sunni clerics was accompanied by a street demonstration by Sunnis, which looks pretty big on television.

In opinion polls, al-Dhari's approval rating Iraq-wide is about 25%. Since Sunni Arabs are about 17%, this statistic suggests that he is wildly popular among Sunnis and admired by a few Iraqis beyond that group, as well.

The Badr Organization ran as a political party in the January 30 elections. It has a bloc of seats in the parliament, and is important on several southern provincial councils. Badr, e.g., supplies the deputy governor of Najaf province, which has 800,000 or so residents. The Badr Corps began as the paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and was trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. It was headed for years by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the Shiite political coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, which now dominates parliament.

Rumors have been flying in the Sunni community that Badr has infiltrated the Interior Ministry (home in Iraq of the secret police) and is using its new governmental muscle to ethnically cleanse Sunnis from mixed Baghdad neighborhoods.

The audio file attributed to Sunni radical Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that was released on Wednesday accused the Shiites of having allied themselves with the Christian crusaders against the Sunni community. The hard line Sunni attempt to configure the Shiites of Iraq as actually foreigners (Iranians, or proto-Zionists, or lackeys of the Christians) aims at re-marginalizing them. Since they are now in political control, and are not giving it up, the contradictions are now sharpening at an alarming rate.
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18 Killed in Violence
Kharrazi in Baghdad

Will blog more later on Wednesday.

For now, Iran's foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi made a historic visit to Baghdad on Tuesday. He pledged help in controlling the borders between the two countries, and made the point that if Iran were actually supporting insurgent infiltration of Iraq (as Washington has alleged), the situation would be much worse than it is. He pledged Iranian non-interference in Iraq, saying that such interference would be "an insult."

In fact, Iran is highly influential in Iraq, having hosted for decades the exiled Shiite activists of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Dawa Party, the two major parties that came to power in the January 30 elections. In some ways, Iran has such a direct line to influence in Baghdad that it does not need covert methods. No one doubts, however, that it does maintain covert agents and does use monetary pay-offs to gain influence in the country.

One US serviceman was killed and another wounded by a bomb near Tikrit. Violence killed at least 17 Iraqis on Tuesday. A major firefight broke out in Mosul between guerrillas and US forces. Three clerics, a Shiite and two Sunnis, were assassinated, among others.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Has Newsweek Retracted?
Update: Riverbend weighs in with an Iraqi nationalist point of view on the allegations of Koran desecration in US military prisons. She points out that many Iraqis will find them plausible, given that we know that the interrogators have not shown respect for basic human dignity. Occasional US mosque invasions likewise lend credence to the charges, especially to Sunni Iraqis.

It is being yet again alleged that Newsweek has formally retracted the Guantanamo Koran desecration story, under enormous pressure from the White House. But here is what exactly the magazine's statement said:

"Based on what we know now, we are retracting our original story that an internal military investigation had uncovered Koran abuse at Guantanamo Bay," Newsweek Editor Mark Whitaker said in a statement issued here.'

So far this is the same "retraction" as Sunday's, which is that they were wrong to source the story of Koran desecration to a forthcoming Southern Command white paper on Guantanamo. It says nothing about whether the Koran desecration occurred, or whether their government source accurately reported seeing a US government text documenting it.

But then there is this:

' As it turned out, Newsweek now says, there was one source. And Whitaker said that because that source had "backed away" from his original account, the magazine could "no longer stand by" it. "I did not want to be in the position of splitting hairs," Whitaker said, "to look like we were being evasive or not fully forthcoming." '

Well, I find this still not fully forthcoming. What account is Whitaker backing away from? That there was Koran desecration? Or that the SouthCom report would mention it?

Jamaat-i Islami leader Qazi Husain Ahmad expressed skepticism Tuesday about the Newsweek clarification issued on Sunday concerning. His skepticism was widely shared. (Even the now generally pro-American al-Arabiya satellite news channel ran a segment in which two analysts both declined to take the Newsweek statements too seriously.

The Political Teen Video Blog links to an interesting overview of the unfolding of the Koran story at MSNBC. Tony Maciulis of Coast to Coast focused on Imran Khan and the blogs that covered the building protests, including this one. He credits Will Femia with much of the research. This was one of the better television reports about an issue in the blogosphere I have seen.

Martin Longman and Susan Hu point out that although it is now often being said in the press that only former detainees at Guantanamo have made the allegation of Koran desecration, there is in fact evidence from interrogators as well. They cite the New York Times for May 17:

"Last month, a former American interrogator confirmed to The New York Times an account given in an interview by a former Kuwaiti detainee, Nasser Nijer Naser al-Mutairi, who said that mishandling of the Koran once led to a major hunger strike. The strike ended only after a senior officer expressed regret over the camp's loudspeaker system, which was simultaneously translated by linguists at the end of each cell block, the former interrogator said. In that case, the accusations were of copies of the Koran being tossed on the floor in a pile and treated roughly, but there was no assertion that any had been put in the toilet."

I don't think the crowds protesting in Afghanistan and Pakistan would be less outraged by US soldiers stomping on the Koran on the floor. That something was at least occasonally done to religiously humiliate Muslim detainees seems now unassailable.

Personally, I don't think the Bush White House approach to this whole issue has been politically useful. The Karl Rove technique of just denying things may work in the Red States, but that is because Republicans don't want to believe their party leader is outright lying to them. When Gen. Richard Myers says that 25,000 pages of reports on US military interrogations have been reviewed and no such Koran desecration incident has been found, he must think Muslims are complete idiots. Why in the world would any interrogator write down, "I desecrated the Koran to break this guy, in direct contravention of US military policy"? Muslim publics begin by assuming that Bush would lie to them, so simple denials won't defuse their anger, especially ones that depend on clumsy sleight-of-hand like assuming US military intelligence documents its own excesses for the perusal of generals.

Wellstoner at Atrios's Eschaton discussion has a useful set of clippings. I hope he won't mind if I mirror it here, since it is hard to find in the original format:

Wellstoner writes

This from a Lexis-Nexis search-

The Denver Post, January 9

HEADLINE: Nightmare of Guantanamo.... U.S. prison camp in Cuba has become legal black hole, reporter says:


"They were punched, slapped, denied sleep, had seen other prisoners sexually humiliated, hooded and forced to watch copies of the Koran being flushed down toilets. Eventually the pressure proved too much - they gave false confessions that the British intelligence service, MI5, later showed to be untrue. Upon their return to the United Kingdom they were released without being charged."


Herald Sun (Melbourne, Australia), January 3, 2005
HEADLINE: Koran prayer torture claim

LONDON -- A British detainee claims he was tortured at Guantanamo Bay for reciting the Koran when talking was banned.

Moazzam Begg told lawyers he was tortured using the strappado, in which a prisoner is suspended from a bar with handcuffs, Britain's Observer newspaper said.

Mr Begg alleged he had been shaven several times against his will and a guard had said on one such occasion: "This is the part that really gets to you Muslims isn't it?""


Financial Times (London, England), Oct 28, 2004
HEADLINE: Four Britons held at Guantanamo sue US government

In August Mr Ahmed, Mr Rasul and Mr Iqbal issued a 115-page dossier accusing the US of abuse, including allegations that they were beaten and had their Korans thrown into toilets.


USA TODAY, October 18, 2004
HEADLINE: Spy case was a 'life-altering experience' for airman

Al Halabi says he did not witness any treatment of prisoners that has now been called into question as abusive. But he says he saw things at Guantanamo that disturbed him. He says guards would purposely mishandle the Koran "just to see the detainees' reaction."


Daily News (New York), August 5, 2004
HEADLINE: ABUSED AT GITMO, FREED BRITS CHARGE

"They would kick the Koran, throw it into the toilet and generally disrespect it," Asif Iqbal wrote.


The Independent (London), August 5, 2004
HEADLINE: FATHER CALLS FOR SON'S RELEASE AFTER CAMP DELTA TORTURE CLAIMS BEGG DEMANDS SON'S RELEASE AFTER TORTURE CLAIMS AT CAMP DELTA TORTURE

In the report, released in New York, Asif Iqbal, Rhuhel Ahmed and Shafiq Rasul - the so-called Tipton Three - said one inmate was threatened after being shown a video in which hooded inmates were forced to sodomise each other. Guards allegedly threw prisoners' Korans into toilets, while others were injected with drugs, it was claimed.


The San Francisco Chronicle, JUNE 20, 2004
HEADLINE: THE FILE: PRISON ABUSE;

Prisoners have been forced to strip naked -- nudity is a violation of Muslim principles; forced to commit actual or simulated sex acts; prevented from sleeping; threatened with dogs; hooded; given electric shocks; beaten with fists, chains, boots and other objects; forced to maintain painful positions for hours; kept in frigid isolation rooms; subjected to loud music, strobe lights and diets of bread and water; urinated on and prevented from praying or reading the Koran.


The Observer, May 16, 2004
HEADLINE: Inside Guantanamo Bay

'THEY HAD already searched me and my cell twice that day, gone through my stuff, touched my Koran, felt my body around my private parts. And now they wanted to do it again, just to provoke me, but I said no, because if you submit to everything you turn into a zombie.


The Guardian (London) - Final Edition, May 14, 2004
HEADLINE: Guantanamo abuse same as Abu Ghraib, say Britons

According to a source, who has interviewed them in secret since their release, they were initially too ashamed to talk about it, and are only now starting to give details. The source said: "They are embarrassed about talking about it because they feel humiliated. We have had an account that their religion was used against them, that a copy of the Koran was brought in front of them and pages torn out."


The Observer, March 14, 2004
HEADLINE: World Exclusive: Inside Guantanamo: How we survived jail hell

As Muslims, they were shocked when in repeated 'shakedown' searches of the sleeping tents, copies of the Koran would be trampled on by soldiers and, on one occasion, thrown into a toilet bucket. Throughout their stay at Kandahar the guards carried out head-counts every hour at night to keep the prisoners awake.


The Washington Post, March 26, 2003
HEADLINE: Returning Afghans Talk of Guantanamo; Out of Legal Limbo, Some Tell of Mistreatment

The men, the largest single group of Afghans to be released after months of detainment at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, gave varying accounts of how American forces treated them during interrogation and detainment. Some displayed medical records showing extensive care by American military doctors, while others complained that American soldiers insulted Islam by sitting on the Koran or dumping their sacred text into a toilet to taunt them.
Wellstoner | Email | Homepage | 05.17.05 - 11:04 am | #

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Guest Editorial: Fisher, "Iraq: Real News from the Battlefield"
An Eyewitness Account from Iraq


IRAQ: REAL NEWS FROM THE BATTLEFIELD

By William Fisher

I long ago stopped believing anything our government told us about Iraq. Now, like millions of other Americans, I have stopped believing what our mainstream media tells us about Iraq. What has become a substitute for a credible and holistic picture of what is really happening in this tortured country is a pair of bookends: at one end, endless images of car bombs exploding, with commentary from journalists who are mostly unable to leave their Baghdad hotels; at the other end, the feelgood press releases from the White House and the Pentagon.

So now I get my news from a few knowledgeable Iraqi and other bloggers and from the emails I receive from trusted friends who work there.

Below is the email I received this week (names and locations have been deleted to protect their safety):

"This new government has proven nothing thus far except its own incompetence. From my exile in (Iraqi city deleted), a distant but well-connected vantage point, two things about this government are noteworthy.

First it is unable to control security. The bickering and backstabbing that went into cabinet selection gave new life to the insurgency, demoralizing the population at large and the security forces in particular. Al-Jaafari, the Prime Minister and the head of the more moderate portion of the Sistani group, promoted for Defense Minister Sunni politicians and former military people who had legitimacy amongst large sections of the Sunni Arab population.

All his nominations were vetoed by the more hard-line Shiites of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. The real power in Iraq right now lies with Abdel Aziz Al-Hakim, the turbaned head of SCIRI and Sistani.

Some Iraqis disagree with me. They would say that SCIRI's power derives from Iran, and it is that country that is really controlling (or not controlling) the country.

But the important final question is, if the security forces fight, who are they fighting for? A united Iraq, or a derivative of Iran? This is an important point, and it could be one reason that Iraqi forces' performance has deteriorated in recent weeks.

Second, if you cannot keep the country safe, you may as well have a witch-hunt. With Ahmed Chalabi in the lead, that oh so honest and pure politician from Nasariya, the new government has decided to prevent all former ministers from traveling pending investigations into corruption.

All of us know who was corrupt in Allawi's government -Transport, Defense, Electricity, Interior and others.

But this new government is determined to intimidate and harass all who were associated with Allawi. For example, on Wednesday, eight armored vehicles filled with armed police officers drove up to the home of a former minister (name withheld), with the intent of making an arrest.

The former minister told them emphatically, "get out, you will have to kill me to take me from my home". They backed down, the former minister made some phone calls and the episode ended.

The allegation was that the former minister did not properly nominate ministry staff for international delegations. The allegation could very well be true, but what is all the fuss? I have met the former minister several times and doubt that this person would be capable of deliberate malicious intent, but as a bureaucrat with little experience, I do not doubt that things could have gone awry.

The Baathist purge office has been reactivated, again under the guidance of Chalabi, and this cannot accomplish anything except make the insurgency worse. The average Iraqi does not care about mid-level Baathists, they care about peace, and if peace is contingent upon keeping or hiring a few Baathists with ties to Saddam, that is an acceptable contingency.

The two elements to the witch-hunt, the first against Allawi and the second against Baathists, make for palatable unease on the street (we have to remember that in general people liked Allawi, but they could not vote for him over Sistani). Combine the witch-hunt with suicide bombers and the optimism of the last months is gone.

I am now at my most pessimistic. Never did I think it would get this bad.

Below is yet another desperate email message (in broken English) from one of the NGOs we work with. (Name withheld) was suppose to meet with us yesterday, but there was a bomb in his neighborhood, yet again at a recruitment center, the day before.

hi (recipient withheld).

I want to inform you that an distortion and pumb explosion happent in Hawija today cause to kill many young men from my region and my village and some of them were from my cosion that was made by terrors and I was closer from the event. I want to say you that I am so sad for 100 young men from hawija city whom came to produce themself to thier country by our device. Finally, all (Arabain, Kurdish, Turkmen amd other) cry for this work and declare our sadness in this dark day. our greeting for (name withheld) and other staff in your org.

accept my regards
(name withheld)
Boss of (organization deleted)

I receive these types of messages every two or three days. By now one would think that I could read them with dispassion, that I would not react with tears in my eyes. I cannot. You can read about this bomb in Hawija on CNN, but read these few humble sentences, understand it, and weep.

And yet, we keep going. This week I had my teams from (locations deleted) come for a work planning session. Their commitment to improving the lives of Iraqis is beyond my expectations. We will involve 500 farmers in maize wok this summer and several hundred in Najaf and Diwaniyah in rice. And that is just the start. We have plans for livestock, tomato, cucumber, apples, dates, extension, integrated pest management, and tractor repair (I hope to sign a $9 million contract with the local distributor of (manufacturer’s name deleted) this week). My guys are thrilled that we have plenty of resources for them to use to do just about anything that helps agriculture. Their smiles and optimism in the face of undeniable risks is almost incomprehensible to me, and it helps to restore somewhat my faith in the future of Iraq.

If we could get the politicians to be as committed to development and progress as my guys the country would be in much better shape. But alas, we have Chalabi, the crook, and Al-Jaafari, the weak, a recipe for nothing good.

It would be a good idea to remember this message next time Mssrs. Bush and Rumsfeld tell us how we’re winning this war."

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

24 Dead, Dozens Wounded
Sunnis Charge Ethnic Cleansing
Dulaimi Pledges end to Mosque Invasions

AP reports that guerrillas killed at least 24 persons in Iraq on Monday, and wounded dozens. In addition, more corpses were discovered. Alexandra Zavis writes, "Underscoring the threat, two car bombs exploded within minutes at a mostly Shiite Baghdad market, killing at least nine soldiers and a civilian . . . The second blast targeted soldiers who rushed to help the victims of the first explosion."

Al-Zaman/AFP report that two students from the Engineering School were killed and 11 wounded when a mortar shell fell on the School's building in the Bab al-Muazzam quarter of Baghdad, according to Col. Adnan Abdul Rahmand, a spokesman for the Iraqi Interior Minister. Three Iraqis working for Kuwaiti television were killed in south Baghdad. They were returning from having filmed in Karbala (presumably the anti-Kuwaiti demonstration there on Sunday) and were ambused on their way back near Mahmudiyah. Two separate attacks in Baqubah left 4 killed and 4 wounded.

Al-Zaman/ AFP: On Monday, 14 corpses were found in Baghdad, among them 8 in the Shaab quarter, and 6 in the Kisra and Atash quarters.

The hardline Sunni fundamentalist Association of Muslim Scholars alleged that two Sunni Arab survivors of the mass killings are saying that they were kidnapped from a mosque by Iraqi security forces. (I think they were implying that these forces were Shiites).

Defense Minister Saadoun Dulaimi rejected the charges but announced a new pledge that Iraqi forces would not enter mosques or the grounds of universities. Al-Zaman says that he forbade the Iraqi army from assaulting Sunni mosques, Shiite Husainiyahs, or Christian churches. Such attacks on places of worship and arrests of clerics, he said, "contravene the principles of our pure religion and our civilizational values and the principles of humanity, upon the foundations of which it is hoped that the new democratic Iraq will be built." He noted that henceforth the term "national guards" would be dropped, and all forces would be referred to as "the Iraqi Army."

This announcement is the first time that the newly elected Iraqi government has interfered in the area of battle tactics. The US military has routinely raided mosques where it was suspected guerrillas were hiding out or stockpiling weaponry (and often these suspicions turned out to be justified). US freedom of movement in Iraq is likely to be increasingly constrained by the elected government, and there seems little the US could do about it in the short term. This result is a natural development of Sistani's successful campaign to have free, one-person, one-vote elections in Iraq, which produced a government not firmly under the US thumb. Unless Iyad Allawi can make a comeback in the next elections, the US military in Iraq is likely increasingly to serve at the pleasure of the Iraqi government.

Al-Zaman/AFP continue: In an attempt to respond quickly to the atmosphere of sectarian crisis, Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari conveyed a message from Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, after he had met with him in Najaf yesterday. In the meeting, Sistani called for the preservation of brotherhood between Sunnis and Shiites, and expressed his eagerness that Sunni Arabs participate fully in the drafting of a constitution. The dramatic background to the Prime Minister's speech was the kidnapping and killing of 46 Sunni Iraqis who lived in Shiite regions in recent days.

On Monday, new evidence surfaced in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities that Shiite and Sunni rivals had conducted assassination campaigns against one another.

Shaikh Abd al-Salam al-Kubaisi of the Association of Muslim Scholars asserted that forces from the Ministry of the Interior assassinated 14 Sunni Arabs. He told the Deutsche Press Agentur that 14 bodies belong to Sunnis who lived in the Shaab quarter. They disappeared, he claimed, after forces of the Wolf Brigades arrested them in the Sunni mosques where they were praying. None of those arrested was carrying arms, he insisted. He also said that early in the morning, Monday, the Wolf Brigade forces of Interior staged a raid on the home of Shaikh Hamid Mukhlaf al-Dulaimi, the Friday prayers leader of the al-Arqam Mosque in the Shaab quarter of Baghdad, and killed him as he lay sleeping on the roof of his house. (Middle Easterners often sleep on the flat roofs of their homes in the hot summer months). He said the same forces had arrested Shaikh Hasan al-Nu`aimi, a member of the AMS and a Friday prayers leader at the Shahid Yusuf Mosque in the Shaab quarter. He maintained that these attacks and arrests were deliberate and aimed at driving Sunni Arabs from the Shaab quarter.

Muqtada al-Sadr reemerged to call upon both Sunnis and Shiites to practice self-control. In his first public appearance in a year, he said at a press conference in Najaf that he condemned all attacks on civilians, whether committed by the Occupation forces or by others.

AP quotes him as saying, "I demand several things, including punishing Saddam and calling on the Iraqi government, religious movements and political factions to work hard to kick out the occupier."

Muhammad Abdullah, acting Industry Minister said Monday that Iraq would pursue plans to "partially" privatize state-owned industries. It goes without saying that privatization requires more security than now exists in Iraq, and this plan is unlikely to proceed any time soon. Also, wanting to privatize inefficient and bloated state-owned industries is not the same as doing it. The government is typically reluctant to part with the money-makers, and the entrepreneurs are not interested in buying the dinosaurs. Privatization in Egypt and Turkey has proceeded very slowly, and in Iraq it will be worse. Moreover, the US occupation has brought to the fore nationalistic feelings, and if major industries are sold to foreign corporations, there could well be a popular backlash.
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Revenge of the Stiff
Or, He Asked for It

CNN reports that Star Wars director George Lucas said his movies could apply to the Iraq war:

''In terms of evil, one of the original concepts was how does a democracy turn itself into a dictatorship,'' Lucas told a news conference at Cannes, where his final episode had its world premiere. ''The parallels between what we did in Vietnam and what we're doing in Iraq now are unbelievable. ''On the personal level it was how does a good person turn into a bad person, and part of the observation of that is that most bad people think they are good people, they are doing it for the right reasons,'' he added.

These remarks inspired the little satire, below. Note: Anyone can play. Just copy the the script treatment for Star Wars III from this site, paste it into a text file, and perform a quick series of "find-and-replace" maneuvers. I advise "George W." for Anakin, "Frist" for Palpatine, "Obi-Colin" for Obi-wan Kenobe and Obi-wan, "Laura" for Padme, "Saddam" for Count Dooku and Dooku, "Tariq Aziz" for General Grievous,and "Yo-Brentscocrow" for Yoda. You can also accomplish the same thing at Get Me a Rewrite.

The problem with myths is that they can only remain meaningful if they aren't applied to anything concrete. Once you do that, they just seem ridiculous.

Star Wars Episode 3
Revenge of the Stiff
Plot Summary Script Synopsis Story

A Satire

War! The Republic is crumbling under attacks by the ruthless Stiff Lord, Count Saddam. There are fools on both sides. Jello is everywhere.

In a super-astounding gigantic Saturday move, the fiendish droid leader, General Tariq Aziz, has swept into the Republic capital and captured Chancellor Frist, leader of the Galactic Senate.

As the Insurgent Droid Army attempts to flee the besieged capital with their worthless hostage, two Jedi Knights lead a misguided mission to rescue the kidnapped Chancellor.

EXT. ATMOSPHERE OF CORUSCANT - DAY
PAN DOWN:

We see a huge space battle unfolding over the city planet of Coruscant. Republic venator class star destroyers trade fire with Insurgent war ships, in the distance we see the Invisible hand flag ship of the Trade federation and current location of COUNT Saddam the former Jedi master turned Stiff apprentice, as well as their prisoner SUPREME CHANCELLOR FRIST whose alter ego is the hard to find mastermind DARTH SIDIOUS.

As the space battle rages on two Jedi star fighters are deployed from one of the republic cruisers. They are piloted by our stalwart heroes George W. Skywalker and Obi-Colin. We see a long tracking shot where both fighters weave between enemy and friendly ships alike evading laser fire and engaging the many droid fighters which attack them. Clone ARC star fighters join the fray and the pilots trade battle chatter with the two jedi as they engage the tri-fighter's of the federation.

INT. BRIDGE OF THE INVISIBLE HAND - DAY

Saddam commands a bridge full of Nemoidian pilots as they watch the battle on a large view screen.

EXT. SPACE - DAY

Obi-Colin’s star fighter is attacked by enemy droids which attach themselves to his hull and use lasers to cutaway at it. Sadly R4 Grossberg, his trusted astromech droid, is destroyed.

George W., proving why he is known as the worst pilot in the galaxy executes a Rube Goldberg maneuver, in which he uses the wing of his star fighter to scrape the enemy droids off of Obi-Colin’s ship. Obi-Colin's ship is knocked perilously into the open hanger of the Invisible hand with George W. not far behind, as Obi-Colin curses him roundly.

INT. BRIDGE OF THE INVISIBLE HAND- DAY

Meanwhile, Saddam consults his fellow insurgents via hologram With him we see General Tariq Aziz for the first time, a menacing skeletal cyborg, who has killed many Jedi.

INT. BRIDGE OF THE INVISIBLE HAND – DAY

Saddam concludes the discussion with his co-conspirators as one of the Nemoidian Bridge officers makes him aware of the Jedi's presence on the ship he tells General Tariq Aziz to take care of them as the wily Count Saddam ascends to the 'general's quarters' to check on the captured Chancellor whom he may or may not be aware is also Darth Sidious.

INT. ELEVATOR LOBBY - DAY

Entering a new corridor, which leads to the bridge, Obi-Colin warns George W. to take Saddam alive, as he has information that might be valuable to the war effort.

INT. THE GENERAL'S QUARTERS - DAY

Frist is shackled to a large chair in the huge room. The two Jedi enter and engage Count Saddam in a rematch from their last encounter. At some point during the battle Obi-Colin is separated from George W., most likely he is engaged by General Tariq Aziz and battles the evil cyborg as George W. confronts Saddam alone.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Guantanamo Controversies
The Bible and the Koran

The report in Newsweek that the US military desecrated the Koran as part of an attempt to break the Muslim prisoners there with humiliation techniques has provoked demonstrations, angry sermons, riots, and over a dozen deaths in Afghanistan, with demonstrations also in Gaza, Pakistan, Indonesia, and now Yemen. Both the chief Sunni Muslim cleric in Lebanon and its Shiite Grand Ayatollah, Muhammad Husain Fadlallah have now condemned it. The former threatened jihad or holy war. The latter said, "The desecration of the holy Koran in the terrifying Guantanamo detention center that America created under the title of fighting terrorism against the Muslims who have been arbitrarily rounded up there, is one of the American methods of torture . . . This is not an isolated act carried out by an American soldier but is part of an American program...of contempt for Islam, to disfigure its image in the minds of American." Shaikh Muhammad Sayyid al-Tantawi, the rector of al-Azhar seminary and the chief Sunni authority in Egypt, called the desecration of the Koran "a great crime." But he dismissed it as the work of "a bunch of kids, criminals . . ."

The Pentagon has claimed that the incident did not occur. Although the corporate media are now reporting that Newsweek had "backed off" the report, that isn't true.

Newsweek explains that in response to Pentagon queries,

"On Saturday, Isikoff spoke to his original source, the senior government official, who said that he clearly recalled reading investigative reports about mishandling the Qur'an, including a toilet incident. But the official, still speaking anonymously, could no longer be sure that these concerns had surfaced in the SouthCom report."

Isikoff's source, in other words, stands by his report of the incident, but is merely tracing it to other paperwork. What difference does that make? Although Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita angrily denounced the source as no longer credible, in the real world you can't just get rid of a witness because the person made a minor mistake with regard to a text citation. It is like saying that we can't be sure someone has really read the Gospels because he said he read about Caiaphas in the Gospel of Mark rather than in the Gospel of John.

Newsweek has, in other words, confirmed that the source did read a US government account of the desecration of the Koran.

Nor is this the first such indication of this sort of incident. On August 18, 2004, ANSA, the Italian news agency, wrote of the families of detainees from Bahrain at Guantanamo:

"The families' anxiety grew after the publication of a report by the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights (BCHR), which contained information about tortures and maltreatment of prisoners. The report, based on testimony by three former Guantanamo prisoners,
Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmad, defines as brutal the methods of the U.S. jailers. According to the report, prisoners were brutally beaten and compelled to watch other prisoners sodomising each other by force. The 150-page document says reptiles were taken to the cells in an attempt to force prisoner confessions, while the Koran was thrown into the toilets before the eyes of the detained."

This diary and discussion at Daily Kos gives a number of other newspaper and other citations for the practice of Koran desecration.

Of course, one can hardly take the word of jihadis reporting on the United States, which they hate and would be happy to defame. But Newsweek had an independent source for the incident, a US government official, who continues to maintain that he saw documentation of it.

Moreover, Guantanamo translator Erik Saar, in his co-authored Inside the Wire indicates that techniques of religious humiliation were used at Guantanamo. The Christian Science Monitor reports:

'In his book, Saar describes a tumultuous atmosphere made more intense than usual because of religious tensions. US personnel, he wrote, routinely tempted detainees to look at pornographic magazines and videos, which Islam forbids. Female interrogators, sometimes dressed provocatively, violated Islamic strictures by rubbing against detainees and even leading one to believe he was being wiped with menstrual blood. "Had someone come to me before I left for Gitmo and told me we would use women to sexually torment detainees to try to sever their relationships with God, I probably would have thought that sounded fine," writes Saar. "But I hated myself when I walked out of that room.... We lost the high road.... There wasn't enough hot water in all of Cuba to make me feel clean." The Army, which cleared Saar's book for publication, says the policy is to treat detainees humanely, and an investigation into his allegations is under way. '

As a professional historian, I would say we still do not have enough to be sure that the Koran desecration incident took place. We have enough to consider it plausible. Anyway, the important thing politically is that some Muslims have found it plausible, and their outrage cannot be effectively dealt with by simple denial. That is why I say that Bush should just come out and say we can't be sure that it happened, but if it did it was an excess, and he apologizes if it did happen, and will make sure it doesn't happen again (if it did).

The controversy, however, seems to me to have focused on all the wrong things. The question is why all those prisoners are still being held at Guantanamo. Saar makes clear that the majority of them just had the misfortune to be dragooned onto the battlefield by the Taliban, and aren't dangerous terrorists. There are very bad characters among them, who should be tried and kept behind bars.

A reader with military experience in this area wrote me his own experience, with the Bible being trashed in a similar way. I was able to google this reader in such a way as to compare autobiographical statements and dates (stripped from the below) to the Web record, and they all check out. Even the history of attitudes, as revealed in letters to the editor, are confirmatory. So I'm sure of the authenticity of these comments.

"I'm a former US [military officer], and had the 'pleasure' of attending SERE school--Search, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape.

The course I attended . . . [had] a mock POW camp, where we had a chance to be prisoners for 2-3 days. The camp is also used as a training tool for CI [counter-intelligence], interrogators, etc for those running the camp.

One of the most memorable parts of the camp experience was when one of the camp leaders trashed a Bible on the ground, kicking it around, etc. It was a crushing blow, even though this was just a school.

I have no doubt the stories about trashing the Koran are true.

I'm sure you must also realize that Gitmo must be being used as a "laboratory" for all these psychological manipulation techniques by the CI guys. Absolutely sickening . . .

1. My gut feeling tells me that the SERE camps were 'laboratories' and part of the training program for military counter-intelligence and interrogator personnel. I heard this anecdotally as far as the training goes, but have not dug into it. This is pretty much common sense.

2. Looking at Gitmo in the 'big picture', you have to wonder why it is still in operation though they know so many are innocent of major charges. A look through history at the various 'experimentation' programs of the DOD gives a ready answer. The camp provides a major opportunity to expose a population to various psychological control techniques. Look at some of the stuff that has become public, and this becomes even more apparent. Especially the sensory deprivation--not only sleep, but there are the photos of inmates in gas masks or sight/hearing/smell deprivation setups. There has already been voluminous research into sensory deprivation, and it seems this is another good opportunity for more. One note is that sensory deprivation is used to some degree in military basic training and to a greater sense in the advanced training courses--Rangers, SEALS, etc. All part of the 'breakdown' process before recruits are 'remade'.

3. This incident with the bible trashing. Camp was [in the late 1990s]. It was towards the end of the camp experience, which was 2-3 days of captivity. We were penned in concrete cell blocks about 4' x 4' x 4'--told to kneel, but allowed to squat or sit. There was no door, just a flap that could be let down if it was too cold outside (which it was--actually light snow fell). Each trainee was interrogated to some extent, all experienced some physical interrogation such as pushing, shoving, getting slammed against a wall (usually a large metal sheet set up so that it would not seriously injure trainees) with some actually water-boarded (not me).

The bible trashing was done by one of the top-ranked leaders of the camp, who was always giving us speeches--sort of 'making it real' so to speak, because it is a pretty contrived environment. But by the end it almost seemed real. Guards spoke English with a Russian accent, wore Russian-looking uniforms. So the bible trashing happened when this guy had us all in the courtyard sitting for one of his speeches. They were tempting us with a big pot of soup that was boiling--we were all starving from a few days of chow deprivation. He brought out the bible and started going off on it verbally--how it was worthless, we were forsaken by this God, etc. Then he threw it on the ground and kicked it around. It was definitely the climax of his speech. Then he kicked over the soup pot, and threw us back in the cells. Big climax. And psychologically it was crushing and heartbreaking, and then we were left isolated to contemplate this.

And all of these moods and thoughts were created in this fake camp--just imagine how it is for these guys at Gitmo.

So many have tried to commit suicide....by now they all must have some serious psychological problems. This is without a doubt torture. Premeditated, planned....a fine lot of criminals we have in charge of the USA these days. Gitmo is so Orwellian--so Room 101. They are playing on the deepest feelings and fears."

This informed former officer has suggested the real reason for which some in the Pentagon are so angry about the Newsweek story. It may well so focus international outrage on Guantanamo that Rumsfeld will lose his little psych lab.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Over 30 Bodies Found

USA Today/ AP report that on Sunday, more than 30 bodies were found in three separate sites. The bodies of thirteen men were found in a shallow grave near the Shiite slum of Sadr City. Another eleven were found at a farm at Huqul, a town 25 miles south of Baghdad. In Ramadi, a center of the Sunni Arab resistance to US presence, 10 Iraqi soldiers were discovered dead.

The LA Times plays up the sectarian angle to the murders much more than does USA Today:

' "If the marjaiyah will give us one sign, we will exterminate the Sunnis from Hilla to Mosul," said Muayad Kadhim Abady, a driver from the hardscrabble southern village of Ghamas, home to 19 fishermen slain in the Sunni Arab city of Haditha earlier this month. No one is sure how long Sistani can hold back the Shiite masses from exacting wholesale retribution -- a process that many Sunni Arabs fear has already begun. Newly emboldened police commando squads, whom Sunni leaders depict as Shiite avengers, have raided Sunni mosques and arrested Sunni religious leaders . . . "The definition of civil war is when the Shiites on the ground start to hit back," said Hussein Shahristani, a top Sistani deputy and deputy speaker of the National Assembly. "People are hurt very deeply and feel they should be allowed to defend themselves. Of course they feel they are capable of defending themselves. There is hardly an Iraqi household without weapons of all sorts." '

But USA Today quotes Iraqi army Brig. Hussein Muhsen al-Fariji giving a different explanation, focusing on the Sunni nationalist guerrillas: "The criminals want to spread panic among the people and give the impression that the new government must be changed." (That is, the guerrillas are ex-Baathists aiming ultimately to make a coup, and they are destabilizing the country because they think the public will be so hungry for law and order that they will accept the coup when it eventually comes.)

Thanassis Cambanis of the Boston Globe absolutely nails it:

' Sadiq al-Mossawi -- a secular politician not tied to the Ba'athists who tried unsuccessfully to persuade resistance groups to band together under a restored monarchy -- said that Ba'athists who are committed to the old party ideology now dominate the insurgency. Ba'athists have money they sequestered before Hussein fled and can draw on legions of former intelligence and military officers with tactical expertise, as well as immense weapons caches . . . Five US Embassy officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, have expressed doubt that any single political group such as the former Ba'athists has widespread influence over an insurgency they describe as fractious. But the Iraqi politicians and officials who have met with Ba'athists and have seen captured documents said that such a view misses the mark. These people say that although the Ba'athists aren't united, they share fundamental political goals and beliefs and have decades of experience working together, despite internal disputes. Rival branches of the Ba'ath Party have met to elect clandestine command structures. The political group met in Baqubah in June 2004, according to Mossawi. A more militant, pro-Syrian group met in October 2004 in the Syrian town of Hasaka, according to a Kurdish official who cited informant reports. Thataccount was confirmed by a senior US official . . . Fighters and documents captured in Fallujah last November showed that Ba'athists and former officers with Hussein's intelligence agency, the Mukhabarat, ran many insurgent cells . . . '

Give that man a prize. This is what is really going on in Iraq. The neo-Baath is setting things up for a comeback and the Third Coup. That is why the recent operation at Qaim and Ubaidi will have very little effect on the guerrilla war. The foreign jihadis are just being used as the equivalent of canon fodder (see the report on the Saudi volunteers, below.)

By the way, Baathists can be suicide bombers, too. The technique of suicide bombing was pioneered by the secular, Marxist Tamil Tigers, who used it to assassinate Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. It just is not true that one has to be religious to use it. Secular people give their lives for causes dear to them all the time. Hell, the entire Soviet Army was full of atheists and they died in large numbers in World War II.

USA Today adds,

"A suicide attacker detonated his car near a convoy carrying Diyala provincial Gov. Raed Rashid Hamid al-Mullah Jawad, al-Nuami said. No one was killed in the initial explosion, he said. Minutes later, as police rushed to the blast scene, a second suicide attacker detonated a bomb belt, killing three policemen and two civilians and wounding 28 people, al-Nuami said."

Al-Zaman reports many more explosions and assassinations, including a bombing in Mosul, which are not covered by the Western wire services.

Patrick Cockburn reports that "Iraq is a bloody no-man's land," and that only the paucity of reporters on the ground allows the Bush administration to maintain anything different.

Scott Peterson of the Christian Science Monitor reports on the maneuvering around the Iraqi constitution. A drafting committee of 55 parliamentarians has been appointed, with only 2 Sunni Arabs among them. Women and Sunnis are both worried about curtailment of their rights. Nancy Youssef of Knight Ridder argues that if Humam Hamudi of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq is appointed chairman of the drafting committee, it will signal that the proponents of political Islam intend to shape the document so as to support their program.

Al-Zaman reports that the Bush administration is terrified that the new Iraqi government is sliding toward a narrowly ethnic program (i.e. Shiite religious dominance), and implies that it was one reason for US Secretary of State Condi Rice's sudden visit to Irbil and Baghdad. She urge PM Ibrahim Jaafari to work harder to incorporate Sunni Arabs into the constitution-drafting process. She also gave such powerful assurances to Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani in Irbil, according to al-Zaman, that the US supports a loose federalism in Iraq that the province was said to be experiencing an "unprecedented sense of comfort" with the political process.

Mark Danner has an analysis of the secret British memo revealing that Bush fixed the Iraq intelligence. It will be published in the New York Review of Books but is appearing early on the Web at Tomdispatch.com.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sistani Aide Killed
Shiites Demonstrate Against Kuwait, Nancy Ajram in Karbala

Two clerics, one Sunni and one Shiite, were assassinated over the weekend. Guerrillas shot down Shaikh Qasim al-Gharawi, and his nephew, Hazim Rubai, in East Baghdad as they left the shaikh's home. Al-Gharawi was a major emissary of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, and was sent all over the Iraqi south with messages from Sistani to other Shiite clerics.

KarbalaNews.net reports that the Shiite Badr Organization (the paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq [SCIRI]) has identified 40 officers who served in Saddam Hussein's repressive security apparatus in various provinces, and who are now serving in the Ministry of the Interior. The new Interior Minister, Bayan Jabr, is from SCIRI. Shiite members of parliament have repeatedly complained about Baathist officers serving in Interior, and have demanded that they be purged. The article names all forty. The ex-Baath officers were brought into the government by the interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi. He was a long-time CIA asset who recruited Iraqi military officers into his Iraqi National Accord in hopes of overthrowing Saddam, and presumably these officers had served as covert US agents. The religious Shiites, however, have a deep hatred of anyone who was high in the Baath Party, and seem determined to purge the Allawi appointees, even though US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has ordered them not to do so.

Al-Zaman reports that on Saturday evening about one thousand Iraqis mounted a demonstration in the holy city of Karbala demanding that diplomatic relations with Kuwait be severed because of a slight against Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. The demonstrators included major clerics and members of the provincial governing council. They were protesting that a photograph of Sistani was used as the backdrop to a stage on which the Lebanese pop singer Nancy Ajram performed.

Since religious Shiites used Sistani's picture relentlessly to get the United Iraqi Alliance list elected, and it was posted in all kinds of places where people do all kinds of things, I don't actually think they have much cause for outrage here. I suspect that part of the reason for the demonstration is that religious Shiites in Iraq are appalled by the images now invading the country via satellite, of pop music video clips and modern women and couples. In contrast, they are having a puritanical moment. But hard as I try to understand it, I can't help feeling that there are more important issues in Iraq today.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Saudi Jihadis Return Disappointed

From al-Hayat of May 14 via BBC World Monitoring:

' Al-Hayat has learnt that two Saudi brothers who went to Iraq across the Syrian border for "jihad" against the occupation returned without taking part in any fighting after a bitter experience.

Sources told Al-Hayat that the two young men followed news of the resistance against the occupation since the former Iraqi regime's downfall and the Al-Fallujah confrontation inflamed their zeal and they decided to go to Iraq. Their relatives intervened to persuade them not to carry out what they intended until everyone became convinced they would not go. But, according to the sources, the two brothers sneaked into Iraq and were able to contact a network which receives the fighters on the Iraqi-Syrian border. The two met a few days later the fighters' "emir" [commander] at the border and asked him to take them to Al-Fallujah. But he refused, claiming that the road was difficult and full of dangers.

The sources added: "The group's emir then confronted them with the truth, which the two young men considered very bitter because it came as a surprise. He told them: We have a number of booby-trapped cars ready for suicide bombings. The brothers were almost thunderstruck by the shock and told him: You want us to end our life in a suicide operation as soon as we set foot in Iraq! He answered indifferently: This is what we have now if you like it; if not, look for somebody else! They decided at that moment to return to their country and totally dismissed the idea of taking part in what they thought to be resistance in Iraq." '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

British Question US terms of Engagement with the Enemy

A Baghdad car bomb killed 4 on Saturday.


The British officer corps is continuing in its efforts to convince the US military that its current rules of engagement are over-kill and result in the loss of many civlian lives (thus driving Iraqis to join or support the guerrillas). The British commanders feel that they learned lessons from Northern Ireland relevant to the US in Iraq. Sean Rayment quotes a British officer, ' "I explained that their tactics were alienating the civil population and could lengthen the insurgency by a decade. Unfortunately, when we ex-plained our rules of engagement which are based around the principle of minimum force, the US troops just laughed." ' The British are concerned that the US will eventually so alienate Iraqis as to endanger British troops, as well.

Iraq is emerging as a key transit point for the internatonal drug trade, especially that from Afghanistan. Some of the smuggling could be bankrolling the guerrillas.

The Washington Post argues that a disproportionate number of suicide bombings in Iraq is carried out by foreign jihadis, and that Saudis constitute 50 percent or more of the bombers. But if you look more closely, the article admits that there are only about 1,000 foreign jihadis fighting in Iraq. I'd figure the number of Iraqi guerrillas at 25,000 hardcore, and nearly twice that if we count weekend warriors, so this group is a relatively minor part of the whole.

What is the proof that they make up more of the suicide bombers? The names gleaned from radical Muslim fundamentalist websites, where "martyrdoms" are announced. Personally, I don't think you can trust those web sites. I think they are being manipulated by Iraqi Baath military intelligence, which benefits from being able to blame bombings of, e.g., Shiites on foreigners. The foreign jihadis in Iraq are not the major actors. The Baath and the remnants of the Iraq military are.

The attraction of the "foreigners thesis" for Washington is obvious. It allows the Bush administration to sidestep the implication that a substantial proportion of the Iraqi public violently rejects the US presence. And it implicitly ties Iraq to al-Qaeda, which accords with a long-term black psy-ops operation of the administration aimed at making a connection between Iraq and September 11 in the minds of Americans (actually, there is none).
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Did the Elections Make things Worse?

Hannah Allam of Knight Ridder raises the question of whether the January 30 elections made the situation in Iraq worse. Allam writes,

"Two weeks of intense insurgent violence have made it crystal clear that Iraq's parliamentary elections, hailed in late January as a triumph for democracy, haven't helped to heal the country's deep divisions. They may have made them worse. The historic election sheared off a thin facade of wartime national unity and reinforced ethnic and sectarian tensions that have plagued Iraq for centuries. Iraqis immediately began playing the roles the election results delivered to them: victorious Shiite Muslim, assertive Kurd, disaffected Sunni Arab. Within those groups lies a mosaic of other splits, especially between secularists and Islamists vying for Iraq's soul."

I told you at the time that the elections were not a Mardi Gras for Americans and they would be sorry if they took them that way.

The main pumping station for the oil pipeline in the north to Turkey was bombed on Friday, halting Iraqi attempts to resume exports via that route.

Wire services report, "In other violence, a suicide bomber drove his explosives-laden car into a truck transporting 40 Iraqi soldiers in Baquba, killing two soldiers and a civilian and wounding six others, said security officials."

PM Ibrahim Jaafari extended the state of emergency in the country in the face of a massive bombing campaign.

Shaikh Sadruddin al-Qubanji, Friday prayer leader in Najaf for the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, called Friday for a purge of former Baathist high officials in the Iraqi government, of whom he said there were 100,000. The leading Shiites are determined to fire all ex-Baathists, many of whom are Sunni Arab.

The Washington Post finally took the plunge and did a story on the leaked British intelligence memo that shows that President Bush had decided to go to war in Iraq by summer of 2002, and that the "intelligence" would be "fixed" around the "policy." It is a mystery as to why, however, it has taken so long for the editors to break the story in the US. Knight Ridder did a report late last week, and the bloggers have blogged the hell out of it. My own post on the matter last week rose high on the Daypop.com index. Kudos to Walter Pincus for laying out the story in D.C.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Afghan Newspaper: US Must Apologize for Koran Desecration
More Deaths in Demonstrations on Friday

An Afghan newspaper has said that the US must apologize for the desecration of the Koran alleged to have happened at Guantanamo prison. This is correct. President Bush should just come out and say that this allegation appeared in Newsweek; that the US military cannot yet confirm whether or not it happened; that if it did happen it is unacceptable and the US sincerely apologizes for the excesses of the interrogators, but we hope it never happened. And if Bush just did that (what would it cost him?), the whole thing would go away and the neo-Taliban would lose it as an issue. Bush is unwise to have let this thing feste for so long, and he can't let Condi be the one who speaks on it, because that is not where the buck stops and everyone in the Muslim world knows it.

The News International (Pakistan) reports of Friday's demonstrations against the alleged US military desecration of the Koran, partially depending on AP:

"In the southeastern city of Ghazni, witnesses said shooting broke out after protesters swarmed toward a police station and the governor’s residence after Friday prayers chanting "Death to America" and pelting the buildings with rocks . . ." (Two civilians and a policeman were killed and 21 persons were wounded; among the latter was the provincial police chief) . . . "In northeastern Badakhshan, three men were killed when police fired to control hundreds of protesters in Baharak district, Governor Abdul Majid told AP. Another 22 people were reported hurt, including three police officers. Another man was killed in the northwest when police opened fire during a protest after prayers in Qala-e-Naw, capital of Badghis province, provincial police chief Amir Shah Naibzada told AP. Four demonstrators suffered bullet wounds in a clash with police and government troops in Gardez, near the Pakistani border, and one died later in hospital, provincial police chief Hay Gul Suleyman Khel said. A protest in Kabul ended peacefully."

There was also a fair demonstration in Gaza:

"Meanwhile, at the Jabaliya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, around 2,000 Palestinian demonstrators held aloft copies of the Koran and Hamas flags as they marched through the streets in a protest organised by the radical Islamist group."

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Koran Protests Spread, Reach Indonesia
Backed by Afghan Clerics

Afghan clerics supported demonstrations against the alleged US military desecration of the Koran as a way of breaking radical Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo. They asked demonstrators, however, to avoid violence.

Hundreds of Muslims protested in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta. There were also rallies in other parts of Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country.

The US military is denying the incident. But enough has come out about the techniques of humiliation used at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib to make the charges plausible to Muslim leaders. Moreover, by now the charge is mainly a vehicle for dissident political parties to get out crowds, in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Indonesia. The Karzai government's attempt to blame the Taliban and Gulbuddin Hikmatyar (an old US asset in the 1980s) for the problems in Afghanistan isn't remarkable, but isn't compelling either. Hikmatyar isn't in Indonesia, and all believing Muslims would be appalled and upset at the allegation.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

7 US Troops Dead
Thursday Bombing Toll 21 Dead, 70 Wounded

ON Thursday near Qaim, a US armored vehicle was hit by a bomb, which killed 4 and wounded 10. The Washington Post's Knickmeyer gives a sense of what the deaths mean to a Marine squad, which has been devastated. Three other US troops were killed in the past two days in Iraq.

The Guardian reports that "At least 21 Iraqis were killed and more than 70 wounded yesterday in another wave of attacks. Four car bombs exploded in Baghdad, with the worst killing 17 people in the east of the city." Another report said that the casualties from the fourth bombing haven't even been reported yet. ArabNews reports that bombs hit the northern oil city of Kirkuk, as well: "Two more car bombs exploded in the northern city of Kirkuk, 290 km from Baghdad. One blast happened near a police station in a central residential area, killing two people and wounding two, said police Capt. Sarhad Talabani. The other car bomb detonated at a site where experts were dismantling an improvised explosive devise. Two of the explosives experts were wounded in the blast." Tragic as all this violence and bloodletting is, even I am starting to have trouble distinguishing these reports from one another, day after day.

US troops continued to comb villages around Qaim on Thursday, but many were "ghost towns" as most able bodied men had fled. In Baghdad, crowds pelted US troops and Iraqi army responders to suicide bombings with stone, furious that these forces have proved unable to stop the bombing campaign.

US Troops will be in Iraq for at least two years (i.e. until May 2007), according to Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, in Brazil for a joint Arab world/ Latin America summit. And that is the wildly optimistic timetable, folks.

AP reports that a major new survey shows a poor quality of life in Iraq.

"85 percent of Iraqis complain of frequent power outages, only 54 percent have access to clean water and almost a quarter of Iraqi children suffer from chronic malnutrition, a U.N.-Iraqi survey revealed Thursday."

The literacy rate is only 65 percent. Iraq's social statistics have deteriorated dramatically since the early 1980s.

Iraqi health ministry employees say that the situation in Iraq is not better, with regard to health care, than it was under Saddam, despite the large sums invested in health services during the past two years.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Afghanistan, Pakistan Protests against US Koran Blasphemy Spread

The NYT reports that protests in Afghanistan against the alleged US desecration of the Koran spread on Thursday. One student was killed and 4 were wounded in Chak, in Wardak, as police fired on protesters. There were other village demonstrations. A large group of Logiani tribespeople was blocked from marching on Jalalabad.

More demonstrations are expected in both Afghanistan and Pakistan on Friday, the day on which Muslims go to communal prayers. Hundreds of students demonstrated in the capital, Kabul.

IN Pakistan, thousands rallied. About 1000 protesters came out in Quetta. Smaller crowds assembled in Peshawar and Lahore. The Lahore crowds were followers of former cricketer Imran Khan, now a major figure in politics. Some of the agitation in Pakistan is being instigated by the Jama`at-i Islami, Pakistan's fundamentalist party.

A friend of mine with Pentagon contacts tells a tragicomic story. The Pakistani government complained to the US Department of Defense about the desecration of the Koran. The Pentagon passed the protest to the Southeast Asia division. It looked into the matter in East Asia and responded that it could find no evidence that the US military had flushed a Korean down the toilet.
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Brigadier Assassinated, Another Bomb in Baghdad

The London Times Online reports that guerrillas detonated another bomb in a market in East Baghdad, killing 17 and wounding 80, catching up 8 cars and a bus in the huge blast.

The explosion at a fertilizer plant in Basra, which also set an oil pipeline on fire, is now being blamed on a guerrilla's bomb.

Another bomb in West Baghdad wounded at least 5 civilians some three ours later, and may have hurt some US troops.

The Times adds:

"Brigadier Ayad Imad Mehdi [of the Ministry of Defense] died when three insurgents stopped his car and shot him dead before fleeing. Gunmen also killed an Interior Ministry official, Colonel Muhammad al-Taie, in a separate attack."

Defense and Interior at the two main Iraqi security bureaucracies, and targeting capable persons at their top is a way for the guerrillas to cripple attempts to combat them.

Tim Phelps of Newsday reports that some experts think the guerrillas are attempting to cut Baghdad off from the rest of the country, encircling it so as to strengthen the Sunni position.

Pat Lang argues that this is a civil war. It may be, of an odd guerrilla sort.

Sunni politicians are complaining bitterly about the demands for ideological conformity coming from the Shiite religious parties that dominate the new government.

Iraq expert Phebe Marr thinks the Sunni Arab problem is not going away and that the American public will have to get more realistic about the situation.
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American Blasphemy Against Koran Sparks Riot, Protests in Afghanistan, Pakistan

The Guardian reports that news (from Newsweek) that US soldiers desecrated the Koran--and at one point flushed pages of it down the toilet as a technique for humiliating and breaking detainees at Guantanamo--has provoked a second day of protests and then rioting in Jalalabad, this time with loss of life. On Tuesday, 2000 students had demonstrated. On Wednesday, 5,000 to 10,000 university, medical and K-12 students came out, and then they went on the attack, including against US troops. Four died and 70 were injured

"At least four people were killed and dozens injured in a riot in eastern Afghanistan yesterday after police fired on demonstrators protesting about reports that the Qur'an had been desecrated by US soldiers in Guantanamo Bay. Offices in Jalalabad were set on fire, shops sacked and consulates and UN buildings attacked by rioters, according to witnesses. Police fired to disperse crowds several times and army helicopters were said to have "buzzed" the crowds. Doctors in the city confirmed that four people had died."

Pakistan's Dawn is more explicit about the "offices" attacked:

Police in Jalalabad opened fire earlier on Wednesday to break up an enraged mob of several thousand people that torched the governor’s house, the Pakistani consulate and several foreign aid agencies, witnesses said. Workers in the Pakistani consulate were forced to take refuge in a nearby house as protesters torched the building. “Uncountable people attacked the consulate, we took refuge in the neighbour’s house,” a Pakistani diplomat said on condition of anonymity. In a second day of protests, the crowd went on the rampage chanting slogans including “Death to America” as well as burning the Stars and Stripes and effigies of US President George Bush, witnesses said. Afghan President Hamid Karzai said the riots showed the “inability” of the war-shattered country’s institutions to deal with such situations, but added the demonstrations at least meant democracy was flourishing.

Uh, Hamid, this incident does not show a flourishing democracy. In democracies people achieve change through the ballot box and political discourse, not by burning buildings down.

Jalalabad is an eastern Pushtun city in the main, and the attack on Pakistan's consulate presumably means that the Taliban and their cousins now view Pakistan as a proxy for the United States.

The Koran desecration has also stirred Pakistani politicians to protest. Opposition politician and former world-class cricketer Imran Khan called for an end to Pakistan's military cooperation with Washington unless President Bush apologizes for what was done to the Muslim holy book. The lower house of parliament suspended business on Monday to discuss the issue. ' "We are fighting for them as a frontline state in the war on terrorism and they are desecrating our holy book. This is too humiliating,” said the leader of the opposition, Maulana Fazlur Rehman. '' Fazlur Rahman is actually pro-Taliban and pro-al-Qaeda, and he is seizing on this incident to argue that Gen. Pervez Musharraf is a US lackey and isn't not even getting basic respect in return.

Pious Sunni Muslims consider the Koran to be the very word of God, which pre-existed the material world and was inscribed on a celestial "Tablet." The Koran itself says,

"That is indeed a noble Qur'an
In a Book kept hidden
Which none toucheth save the purified,
A Revelation from the Lord of the Worlds."
-Surat Al-Waq`ia

Muslims are not to touch a copy of the Koran when they have not performed their purifying ritual ablutions (washing in a special way with water), called wudu`.

In secular American society, I suppose the shock value here could only be hinted at if we imagined someone flushing a small American flag down the toilet. But probably we can't imagine it at all.

The technique of humiliating Muslims as a way of "breaking" them for interrogation has often veered toward torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and it wasn't effective as a technique. The Israeli flag was also used at one point, apparently. The US military has a tradition of such humiliations, going back to treatment of the Filipino Muslim rebels in the early 20th century. But there is a difference between humiliating Muslim prisoners and humiliating Islam.

Whatever goddam military genius came up with the bright idea of flushing the Koran down the toilet at Guantanamo should be court-martialed, and Bush had better get out there apologizing before this thing spirals further out of control.
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76 Killed on Wednesday Alone in Iraq
Huge Basra Blast

The final death toll for victims of bombings in Iraq on Wednesday alone was 76, according to AFP. It adds: "In another incident, 45 people were hurt in a blast at a fertilizer plant near the southern town of Basra though it was not clear if this was caused by sabotage or simply an accident."
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50 Dead, 90 Wounded in Iraq Bombings on Wednesday Morning
Qaim Campaign Continues

On Wednesday morning, a suicide bomber in a car detonated his payload near a market in Tikrit, killing 27 persons and wounding 70. Reuters adds that guerrillas struck two further times early on Wednesday: "In the town of Hawija, southwest of the strategic oil city of Kirkuk, a man strapped with explosives walked into an army recruitment center and blew himself up, killing 19 people and wounding 25, police said. A suicide car bomb also exploded outside a police station in the southern Baghdad suburb of Dora, killing at least four people and wounding dozens, police said."

In Baghdad on Tuesday, two suicide bombers killed 8 and wounded 20. Three US soldiers were among the wounded.

The Scotsman also notes that "Governor Raja Nawaf Farhan al-Mahalawi was seized [by guerrillas] as he drove from Qaim to the provincial capital of Ramadi yesterday morning, his brother, Hammad, said." The continued US inability to protect members of the new governing elite has been an important roadblock to stability in the country.

Some US military commanders believe that there are too few American troops in Anbar province to deal effectively with the guerrillas there, who simply flow around the US and establish pockets in areas the US is not able to patrol. This article says there are now 145,000 US troops in Iraq. When did that happen? But it also says that only half of those, or 72,500, are combat troops that might encounter the enemy. And there are only 10,000 US troops in Anbar Province (presumably only 5,000 of them actually fighting troops). If the US is attempting to clean out Anbar with only 5,000 troops, no wonder not much progress is being made. Presumably, however, it needs the other 67,500 fighting troops elsewhere, especially in Baghdad itself, and in the other trouble spots such as Babil, Diyala, Salahuddin, etc. The article says Rumsfeld is tired of hearing about the argument of Gen. Shinseki that several hundred thousand US troops would be needed to secure Iraq. He may be tired of it, but we're not forgetting that his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz said that he "couldn't imagine" that it would take more troops to secure the country than to defeat Saddam's army. He either did not know much about colonial history or he did not have a good imagination. Oh, and Donald? Just one word for you: Shinseki.

The US commanders expressed their happiness that the guerrillas at Ubaydi are standing and fighting, on the grounds that if they do that, they will be finished faster. I wouldn't be so happy if I were them. The jihadis are making themselves martyrs in order to give other young men a reason to fight. It is a recruitment drive. Since guerrillas have managed to kill about 14 US troops in recent days, moreover, it is a way of signalling that the US is not 10 feet tall, but is rather vulnerable. If the US has this much trouble with about 2500 foreign fighters in Iraq (and over 20,000 Iraqi ones), imagine the problems if the jihadi recruitment drive succeeds, and the foreign contingent doubles or triples.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that French authorities have apprehended an Algerian in France who was in charge of making false papers for European Muslim jihadis who wanted to go fight the Americans in Iraq.

A propos of my caution yesterday against the figures of enemy dead being given out by the US military in Baghdad, James Janega of the Chicago Tribune, embedded at the front, writes, "Though military commanders in Baghdad announced that 100 insurgent fighters were killed in the early fighting, along with three Marines, [Col.] Davis' figures were lower. He said "a couple of dozen" insurgents had been killed in Ubaydi, about 10 at another river crossing near Al Qaim, and several who were killed by air strikes north of the river. Other commanders said they had recovered few bodies but had seen blood trails that suggested insurgents were dragging away wounded or dead fighters." In other words, the claim of 100 guerrillas dead may or may not be true, but probably wasn't at the time it was given out.

Fred Kaplan at Slate explains why the troops won't be coming home from Iraq any time soon. His pessimism about the rate of reconstruction is shared by Reuters.

Saboteurs hit the northern oil pipeline again on Tuesday.

Reuters tells us about the scourge of child labor in Iraq.
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Constitution-Drafting Subcommittee Excludes Sunnis
Chalabi to be Pardoned

Hamza Hendawi reports that the new government will attempt to use high Sunni officials such as Defense Minister Saadoun Dulaimi and Vice Premier Abid Mutlak al-Juburi (Jiburi) to reach out to Sunni Arab moderates. Few expect this effort to have an effect on the guerrillas. But it might draw away some fence-sitters among the Sunni Arab notables. Hendawi notes, " Key members of the Shiite Alliance, the largest parliamentary bloc with 140 seats, say the government plans to amend a 2003 ''de-Baathification'' law to give judges the final say on dismissing suspected Baathists. They hope that will make the process fairer in the eyes of Sunni Arabs." Meanwhile, al-Hayat quotes Dulaimi as saying that he has no intention of purging the Defense Ministry of ex-Baathists. In contrast, the Interior Minister, Bayan Jabr, from the Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, says he will purge his ministry of suspect elements. AP maintains that as a practical matter, the purge of ex-Baathists has started up again in the Baghdad bureaucracy, now that Allawi is out of power.

The 55-member committee appointed Tuesday to draft Iraq's permanent constitution has been set up with proportional representation from the party lists that dominate parliament. Thus, the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance has 28 seats on the committee, but the Sunni Arabs at the moment have only one! It appears that there are plans to expand the committee so as to add more Sunnis, and I should hope so. A constitution written by this committee is highly unlikely to be acceptable to the Sunni Arabs. Any three of their provinces can veto the constitution if they don't like it.

Jordan's King Abdullah II is set to pardon Ahmad Chalabi, who has emerged as vice-premier in the new government. Chalabi was indicted in Jordan in 1992 for embezzling over $200 million from his Petra Bank in the 1980s in that country. A lot of his bank's stated collateral was fraudulent, and a lot of the missing money appears to have gone to Chalabi relatives in the form of loans never collected on. Chalabi was investigated by the US military for allegedly passing sensitive information from the US to Iran. He was close to the Neoconservatives in the Pentagon, whom he provided with false reports about Iraq's weapons capabilities, and apparently one of the Neocons told him that the US had broken the codes used by the Iranian government. Chalabi let the Iranians know, and they changed their code. One result of this espionage on behalf of Iran by Chalabi is that the US now cannot so easily monitor the Iranian nuclear program. Chalabi survived his tiff with the US government, however, by allying with the hard line Shiite Muqtada al-Sadr faction, as well as maintaining his links with Shiite moderates, so that he emerged as a power broker in the new government (he was number 10 on the United Iraqi Alliance cobbled together by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.) The US military turned over to Chalabi surviving records from the Iraqi ministry of the interior, which he has apparently used to blackmail politicians who, the documents show, were on Saddam's payroll.

Just so readers don't put their necks out doing a double take, I just want to repeat that Chalabi is a vice premier of Iraq and the Jordanian government is going to pardon him for embezzling over $200 million. In an unrelated story, two burglars from Dubuque, Iowa, face life in prison under a 'three strikes and you're out' law for their robbery of the West Locust Mart (their third offense), in 2000.
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Al-Qaeda on Trial in Yemen
Planned Attacks on Americans

Reuters reports on the ongoing trial of 8 alleged al-Qaeda members in Yemen. In a dramatic new develeopment, the prosecutor said information had arisen that the group was planning to kill Americans in Saudi Arabia, and were working on plans for attacks in Gulf countries. It says,

The group, on trial since March, were initially accused of having links to al Qaeda and planning to blow up the British and Italian embassies and a French cultural centre in Yemen. The suspects -- two Syrians, a Kuwaiti of Iraqi origin and five Yemenis -- have pleaded guilty to planning the attacks in Yemen but denied they had formed an armed group. The prosecutor said new information showed the group had planned to attack military bases in neighbouring Saudi Arabia, as well as American civilians, Western companies, restaurants and schools. He said they also plotted attacks in Kuwait, Bahrain, Europe and the United States but did not give any details.

The US government says that "Al-Qaeda’s operational structure in Yemen has been weakened and dispersed. However, concerns remain about the organization’s attempts to reconstitute operational cells in Yemen." It is worrying that the Yemeni government's ability to stop terrorist financing is estimated as "limited."

Yemen's judges have pioneered apparently effective ways of "deprogramming" al-Qaeda sympathizers by arguing them out of their warped view of the world.

AFP reports on Mauritanian government claims that al-Qaeda is attempting to infiltrate the poor, North African country. AFP quotes suspicions of some, however, that the Mauritanian government is over-dramatizing the problem in hopes of receiving more Western aid.
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US Releases Enemy Casualty Estimate of 100

The US military is conducting a major operation around Ubaidi, near Qaim on the border with Syria. The operation near the Euphrates was aimed at foreign jihadi bases.

The Marines are reportedly surprised by the degree of preparation the guerrillas are showing. They also seem to have specialized knowledge of how best to fight the Americans. (This datum suggests that someone in the Iraqi army or government let them know the US was coming. Everyone knows that the police, national guards and security apparatuses are extensively infiltrated by the guerrilla resistance).

The remarkable thing about the operation was the claim by the US to have killed 100 guerrillas, a new move in the propaganda wars. The US military had been deliberately avoiding announcements of numbers of guerrillas killed. But this strategy, which comes from the scandals about over-estimates of Viet Cong killed in the Vietnam War, had left the guerrillas free to generate headlines such as "300 killed in bombings during the past week." Nothing the US had done could compete with that sort of number, which I believe explains why we now get a number. The problem with giving out such numbers, however, is that sooner or later there will be another scandal.

For instance, are all 100 (a suspiciously round number) really guerrillas? Or are some innocent civilians who got caught in the crossfire? How would you tell, if all you have is a dead 16-year-old male body?

The other problem with this operation is that it may raise false hopes. Probably less than ten percent of the guerrillas are foreign fighters, so even if the US could weaken their Qaim-area bases substantially, it would not stop most of the attacks. And, the Syrian-Iraqi border is so long and rugged that the foreign infiltrators will just develop new routes. One remembers the conviction that if only Fallujah could be reduced, the bombings would stop. It didn't happen then, it won't happen now.
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Bomb found at Sistani's Home
Shiite Tensions Rise over Killings

AP writes,

At least four car bombs exploded in Baghdad on Monday, Iraqi police and the U.S. military said. They included a morning suicide attack in southern Baghdad that killed two Iraqi policemen and a civilian at a checkpoint at a busy intersection, police said. Six other policemen and three civilians were wounded in the attack. Another suicide attacker exploded a car bomb at an army checkpoint in eastern Baghdad, wounding five Iraqis, the Interior Ministry said. When police approached a suspicious car in south Baghdad, the booby-trapped vehicle exploded, killing one officer and a civilian bystander, the Interior Ministry said. Another policeman lost an arm in the attack.

AP also reports that a huge bomb was found near the house of Grand Ayatollah Sistani and defused.

Al-Zaman/AFP/DPA: Shiite followers of Sistani in Karbala demonstrated on Monday, demanding that Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari distribute to the people their flour rations (the rations had been established under the oil for food program of the United Nations). They complained that this key foodstuff had not reached them for four months. They also demanded an end to corruption and bribe-taking by the police. They further insisted that a timetable be set for the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq.

Al-Zaman/ AFP: Sistani recently pressed the new Interior Minister, Baqir Jabr, to investigate the murder of 6 members of the powerful Sunni Dulaim tribe in the Kisra district of Baghdad. The new Minister of Defense, Saadoun Dulaimi, is from that tribe. At a press conference at the governor's mansion in Najaf, after his visit with Sistani, Jabr said that on Sunday 40 terrorists were apprehended. He also said he had been assured by the police chief in Baghdad that no police were involved in killing the Dulaim tribesmen. (Baghdad has been taken over by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Shiite party to which Jabr himself belongs, so it is likely that the police is increasingly being recruited from that party. Likewise, SCIRI controls the Interior Ministry secret police now). Jabr said he had come to Najaf to consult with the high Shiite authorities, especially Sistani. Jabr said he had also established a commission to look into the wounding of 5 members of the Sadr movement after Friday prayers as they demonstrated in Kufa for the release of incarcerated members of their movement. He said that the governor of Najaf (a SCIRI politician) would be part of the commission. SCIRI and the Sadrists do not get along.

The Association of Muslim Scholars announced that altogether 14 Sunnis were found dead Monday in north Baghdad, but that they had originally been taken from Mada'in to the south of the capital. The AMS claimed that the men had been arrested by Interior Ministry agents at the Wholesale Market in south Baghdad, and that they had been taken away to parts unknown.

Jabr's control of the Interior Ministry is seen by the US Central Intelligence Agency as a problem, according to Knight Ridder. They fear that if they relinquish control of the new Iraqi intelligence service to the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which was among the winners of the recent elections, its members will immediately pass the information over to Iran. Yet there is some question of how much control of Iraqi intelligence the CIA can retain in the face of demands for sovereignty by the elected government. Hadi al-Amiri, the leader of the Badr Corps that serves as SCIRI's paramilitary, is threatening to form a new intelligence service that would be under the control of the government, if the CIA won't give up control of the current one (which is dominated by ex-Baathist Sunnis).

The bodies of six Shiites from a single family killed at Yusufiya in Babil Province were returned to their home in Sadr City (the Shiites slums of East Baghdad) for burial on Monday. Ominously, the coffins were sent first to the offices of a local representative of Muqtada al-Sadr. Hundreds of angry Sadrists gathered to demonstrate and shout "Revenge!"

The battle of the corpses seems to be heating up, with Sunnis demanding retribution for the dead Dulaim, and Shiites calling for revenge over the Yusufiyah Six.

Al-Zaman/AFP/DPA: Ibrahim Jaafari and his cabinet re-took the oath of office as Prime Minister on Monday, being careful to affirm the democratic and federal character of the new Iraq, words that had dropped out when he first took the oath. The Kurds have complained bitterly about the omissions, especially Massoud Barzani, who said that the dropped phrase could threaten the Shiite-Kurdish coalition in parliament. Jaafari swore on the Koran, but Basima Yusuf Butrus, the Christian minister of science and technology, swore on her Bible.

Diya al-Din Muhammad al-Fayyadh, a Shiite member of parliament, gave a speech in which he demanded that all Arabs and other foreigners resident in Iraq be rounded up within 15 days, put in camps, and deported to their home countries. He said that Iraq's security situation warranted emergency measures.

Zaidi militants at odds with the Sunni-dominated Yemeni government have appealed to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani for his support. Zaidis are a branch of Shiism rather different from the Twelver Shiism that predominates in Iraq and Iran, and the establishment of ties between them and Najaf has been made possible by the emergence of Shiite power in the Gulf region with the US defeat of Saddam. (I predicted some time ago that the Zaidis and the Iraqi Shiites might establish new links, to general disbelief among the Yemen experts.) I suspect the Alawis in Syria are likely also to be drawn somewhat toward Najaf, despite their sectarian differences with the Twelvers.
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Al-Qaeda in Kuwait

A Kuwaiti court sentenced 25 radical Muslim fundamentalists for plotting to go to Iraq to fight US troops, or to fund the effort. They were also accused of belonging to an illegal organization. Only as you read down the Reuters report does it gradually become apparent that the "forbidden organization" is . . . al-Qaeda! Diplomats in Kuwait City told Reuters that "sympathy for Saudi-born al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is on the rise among Kuwaiti youth."

This statement requires some sort of comment. Why? The US rescued little Kuwait from Saddam in 1991. If Kuwaitis don't like the US, who in the Arab world would? But even many of them are turning against us. From a fundamentalist Sunni Kuwaiti point of view, the US occupation of Iraq is the ultimate insult to Islam and Muslims, and has empowered the Shiites and their Iranian allies.

I repeat. If Kuwaitis are turning against the US and joining al-Qaeda and going to Iraq to fight US troops, then the "War on Terror" isn't going very well.
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The Price of Failure in Iraq

Bob Dreyfuss writes in Rolling Stone:

If it comes to civil war, the disintegration of Iraq will be extremely bloody. "The breakup of Iraq would be nearly as bad as the breakup of India in 1947," says David Mack, a former U.S. assistant secretary of state with wide experience in the Arab world. "The Kurds can't count on us to come in and save their bacon. Do they think we are going to mount an air bridge on their behalf?" Israel might support the Kurds, but Iran would intervene heavily in support of the Shiites with men, arms and money, while Arab countries would back their fellow Sunnis. "You'd see Jordan, Saudi Arabia, even Egypt intervening with everything they've got -- tanks, heavy weapons, lots of money, even troops," says White, the former State Department official. "If they see the Sunnis getting beaten up by the Shiites, there will be extensive Arab support," agrees a U.S. Army officer. "There will be no holds barred."

The full horror of it has been expertly laid out here by Dreyfuss, with an acumen and imagination one doesn't see often in the MSM.

We live in a bizarro America where Jon Stewart's Daily Show and Rolling Stone are the venues for the real news, while the major cable news networks have confused themselves with the sort of thing the local tv stations out in places like Peoria do at 5:17 pm for their human interest segments.
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8 US Servicemen Killed Over Weekend

The NYT reports that guerrillas killed 8 US servicemen in separate incidents over the weekend. On Sunday, bombings in Samarra and Khalidiya killed 3 US servicemen. In Haditha on Saturday, guerrillas attacked and captured a hospital, killing 3 US Marines and a sailor when the US attempted to take it back.

What is going on in Sunni Iraqi cities, which might account for this violence (which is typically reported curtly and in a shadowy fashion by the US military and American press)? Al-Zaman has a report today (it gives joint credit to Reuters and AFP) that might shed some light on it. Al-Zaman says Ramadi and some of the towns around it were gripped by a civil rebellion on the part of virtually all the townspeople on Saturday and Sunday. It comes in response to the Friday prayers sermons in the city's mosques and appeals by the city's clergy, who called for a strike to protest against the US encirclement of the city and against what they called random arrests, which have resulted in the imprisonment of many young men of Ramadi. Everyday life has ground to a standstill. The streets are empty of passers-by, shops are shuttered, and bazaars are closed. Schools, universities and government offices are likewise closed. The US military has addressed the population with loudspeakers mounted on cars, calling on them to end the civil strike and to refuse to obey the armed militias in their midst.

The council of Sunni clergy in the city spread around a pamphlet that complained that ever since the US occupied the city, virtue and honor no longer had any value. The practices of the illegal Occupation were aimed at achieving its illegitimate aims, from daily killings to attacks and round-ups to the imprisonment of free persons in a forest of jails. The latest outrage was the encirclement of the city, cutting it off and isolating it from its environment through barricades, such that all have been grievously harmed. It called on townspeople to protest these practices with a two-day strike over the weekend

If the Al-Zaman report is at all accurate, it suggests that the counter-insurgency campaign in Ramadi to date is a political failure, whatever its tactical successes.

[Someone just told me that the US military thinks Zarqaw is in Ramadi, accounting for the encirclement and isolation of the city and the arrest campaign inside.]

The Washington Post says that US military commanders are putting more emphasis now on combating the foreign jihadis. Seems to me like they should begin with making friends of Ramadi and Mosul, instead.

AP reports that in addition,

"Four Iraqis were killed in two roadside bombings and gunfire in Mosul, 225 miles northwest of Baghdad, the U.S. military said. One insurgent was also killed and another wounded in a clash with a U.S.-Iraqi patrol . . . Gunmen shot and killed Zoba Yass, a senior official in Iraq's Transportation Ministry, and his driver in southern Baghdad, police and transportation officials said."

Al-Zaman says that in Baiji, a car bomb that targetted the US base killed two Iraqi troops and wounded four civilians, including a child. Five mortar shells struck a joint US/ Iraqi base in Dawr north of Baghdad, killing one Iraqi and wounding another. In Dulu'iyah, likewise, mortar shells fell on a joint US/Iraqi military site at the airport, wounding an Iraqi soldier.

The US military announced the killing of 6 guerrillas and 54 others near Qaim in the vicinity of the Syrian border.

Al-Zaman says that Baghdad University has reopened after the sectarian riots and demonstrations there last week. Notably, al-Zaman is reticent is saying what exactly they were about (a Shiite student was killed for celebrating Jaafari's installment as prime minister, causing reprisals for the murder by angry Shiites). Some things are too hot for print, apparently.

Some ministers of the outgoing Allawi government are fleeing Iraq in anticipation that they will be investigated. Charges of irregularities swirled around former defense minister Hazem Shaalan in particular.

PM Ibrahim Jaafari presented several Sunni Arab ministers to parliament Sunday. Less than half of the parliamentarians bothered to show up. The man nominated at Human Rights Minister, Hashim Shibli, declined the post on the grounds that he is a generic democrat and does not want an appointment as a token Sunni as part of a "sectarian quota." He said he wasn't consulted before he was nominated.

Edmund Sanders of the LA Times gives us a fascinating glimpse of the film scene in contemporary Iraq.
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Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven

I saw Kingdom of Heaven Sunday. The film has many virtues, with its attention to costume and scene. I could quibble. Medieval European swords of the 1100s could not be wielded in the way they were shown here; they were very heavy. And I doubt that whatever the catapults were throwing in the way of fiery material would explode like bombshells on impact. Even bombshells didn't explode until the 18th century, as I recall. The history is not entirely wrong, though predictably liberties are taken.

I'll have something to say with regard to history in a moment. Here let me complain about the lack of character development. There is no reason why, in an epic, character has to be kept constant. Characters can learn and change even in the midst of large scale change. Nobody in this film seems to. Everyone ends the film as they began it. Instead, we are given a medieval morality play where each character is a virtue or vice and stays that way throughout.

The highly unlikely Balian of Ebilin presented here, as a bastard ironsmith belatedly recognized by his noble father, the previous lord of Ebilin, is used to represent Humanism. (That is, the loss of faith without a concomitant loss of ethical values). Tiberias represents loyalty. Baldwin IV represents resignation in the face of tragic fate (his leprosy). Saladin, as in most of the medieval chronicles, represents chivalry. Etc.

Some historians have complained that cynicism about religion and humanism of the sort Balian professed did not exist in the 1100s in Europe. I disagree. You see it in the young Abelard, I think. And in Muslim figures such as Omar Khayyam and Hafez the poet.

With regard to history, I thought that Scott and his screen writer, William Monahan, seem to me to have missed a great opportunity. The fact is that Saladin, no less than his Christian rivals in Jerusalem, was less interested in fighting for a faith than in consolidating power. So, he spent a lot of time and energy taking (Muslim-ruled) Aleppo and subduing (Muslim-ruled) Mosul when he could have put the energy into defeating the Crusaders.

Although the divisions among the Christians are shown, they remain somewhat vague. Raymond III of Tripoli was not a complacent courtier of Guy de Lusignan, but a major rival who had his own power base. Moreover, Raymond III of Tripoli made an alliance with Saladin against his Christian enemies in Jerusalem.

If the film had shown Saladin giving the Christians breathing space while he attacked the Muslim ruler of Aleppo, and had been clearer about Raymond III's alliance with Saladin, it could have cut across the Islam/Christianity binary division and showed the warriors as human beings rather than as members of a particular religion.

Indeed, the really big opportunity missed here was of making Saladin the protagonist. He comes across as the most admirable figure in the film, as it is.

Come to think of it, that last is a real accomplishment given the atmosphere in the US nowadays, and makes up for a lot of the film's flaws.
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Mistaken Identity?

Christina Lamb and Mohammad Shehzad in Islamabad suggest in the London Times that Abu al-Faraj al-Libi, arrested recently in Pakistan, is being confused with Anas al-Libi, a mastermind of the 1998 US embassy bombings in East Africa. Abu al-Faraj the Libyan, some observers suggest, is a third-tier al-Qaeda member largely known for involvement in recent plots to assassinate Pakistani Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Lamb and Shehzad go so far as to speculate that the US and the Pakistani governments are deliberately hyping the significance of the arrest to give the impression of great progress in the "war on terror."
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2-Day Bombing total of 100 Dead, Hundreds Wounded
Zarqawi Threatens to Hit American Homeland

On Saturday, Guerrillas in Baghdad targeted a convoy of vehicles of the sort used by notables with a massive bomb that tossed armored SUVs about like toys, and left 29 dead and 54 wounded, as a small mushroom cloud billowed into the sky. Two American security guards were among the dead. A school bus also appears to have suffered damage, but the casualties among the school children had not been reported when this Tribune story was filed.

Few commentators, when they mention such news, point out the obvious. The United States military does not control Baghdad. It doesn't control the major roads leading out of the capital. It does not control the downtown area except possibly the heavily barricaded "green zone." It does not control the capital. The guerrillas strike at will, even at Iraqi notables who can afford American security guards (many of them e.g. ex-Navy Seals). If the US military does not control the capital of a country it conquered, then it controls nothing of importance. Ipso facto, Iraq is a failed state.

Responsibility for the attack was claimed by Mesopotamian al-Qaeda, led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. [As readers know, I think the Baathists and old Iraqi military are behind most of these attacks, not Zarqawi.] A pamphlet attributed to Zarqawi is circulating in Baghdad, according to al-Hayat, that threatens an attack on the American homeland. The pamphlet was distributed at Friday prayers at several mosques in Baghdad. The pamphlets called for a jihad or holy war against the Americans and the new Iraqi security forces. One said, "The infidels can expect nothing from us save the sounds of weapons and explosions, until they depart from our land and leave us to live in accordance with our Holy Law. And we shall chase them to their land, so that they will pay the poll tax as a subject population."

President Jalal Talabani, meeting in Amman with King Abdullah II of Jordan, said that the two had agreed on joint security measures targeting Zarqawi's group (actually named Monotheism and Holy War), which threatens both countries. This also according to al-Hayat. There was severe tension between Iraqi Shiites and Jordanian Sunnis earlier this year when it was alleged that a Jordanian suicide bomber targeted Hilla. Fear of radical Salafis (Sunni fundamentalists), it was being alleged, was a platform for good governmental relations between Jordan and the new Iraq.

Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari announced Saturday that he would present the Sunni Arab ministers on his cabinet to parliament on Sunday. Advance speculation had Gen. Saadoun Dulaimi as the new Defense Minister. He had served in the Iraqi officer corps but broke with Saddam Hussein.

Already in late April of 2003, Dulaimi was quoted on the need for security: "Former exile politician Saadoun Dulaimi said: "The lack of security threatens our new born democracy. Security must be restored for this experience to survive."

Al-Hayat says that Ibrahim Bahru'l-Ulum will be oil minister, Muhsin Shalash will be minister of electricity, and Hashim Shibli will be minister of human rights.

Kurdish leaders such as Massoud Barzani are continuing to complain that Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari and others did not pledge a "federal" Iraqi state when they took their oaths of office last Tuesday, as the oath required. The Kurds are suspicious that the Shiites want a strong central government, don't like the idea of loose federalism, and omitted the phrase on purpose.

Michael Jansen reports that the hope of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani that 10 cabinet posts would be given to the Sunni Arabs was blocked by a group of pro-Iranian Shiite leaders in the new government, called the "Safawis," and led by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim (the head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, long based in Tehran). The Safavids were an Iranian Shiite dynasty that ruled roughly 1501 to 1722, and who ruled what is now Iraq in the late 1500s and early 1600s during a time they had conquered it away from the Ottoman Empire. I presume this is the referent of the term "Safawi" (the Arabic pronunciation).

On Friday, suicide bombers had killed 67 Iraqis. The most horrible of the attacks occured when a suicide bomber detonated his payload in the southern town of Suwayra, killing 58 and wounding 44. In Tikrit, a bomber targeted a bus with police, killing 9 and wounding many others.

Robert Worth of the New York Times reports on the increasingly anti-Shiite feelings of alienation on the part of Sunni Arabs in Iraq.

He reports that veteran Arab nationalist Adnan Pachachi is trying to form a Sunni bloc on religious grounds to rival that of the Shiite religious coalition. But Pachachi is not plausible in that role for two reasons. First, he converted on a pro forma basis to Shiism a few years ago so his daughters would have firm claim to his estate (Shiite law favors daughters in this regard more than Sunni law does, where the deceased has only daughters and no sons). Second, his years as a secular Arab nationalist won't suddenly be forgiven by Sunni Salafis or fundamentalists (who also won't forgive his conversion).

On Friday afternoon in Kufa, al-Zaman reports, Aws al-Khafaji read the Friday prayers sermon on behalf of Shiite radical Muqtada al-Sadr. Sadr threatened to re-activate the Mahdi Army militia if the government of Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari did not immediately arrange the release of all imprisoned members of the Sadr movement. After the prayers, hundreds from the congregation spilled into the street and mounted a demonstration. Police clashed with the demonstrators and wounded 5 of them.

Muqtada said in his sermon, "If they do not leave us to live in peace, we shall not leave them to live in peace. For the Mahdi Army is still there, and our finger is still on the trigger."

Al-Zaman reports that Sunni cleric Abdul Salam al-Qubaisi, a member of the Association of Muslim Scholars, said that his group was writing up general principles for a new Iraqi constitution. He said his group did not believe the new constitution should be submitted to a popular referendum, as is now planned. He insisted, 'Islam will be the basic foundation of this constitution."

Alissa Rubin of the Los Angeles Times describes the Shiite revival in contemporary Iraq, and has some of the few comments on Shiite womens' meetings to be found in American journalism on the issue. She is sensitive to the historical context of Sunni-Shiite rivalry, the importance of the commemorations of the martyrdom of Imam Husain (the Prophet's grandson) at Karbala in 681, and the political Shiism of the past 25 years, including the Dawa Party. The only quibble I have is that most Muslims would not like to have their sacred chanting called "singing." Some strict Muslims disapprove of singing, and the words used in Arabic (e.g. tajwid for chanting the Qur'an) are technical terms that do not mean "singing."

The BBC's Dan Cruikshank's thoughtful and careful recounting of how difficult it is to know exactly what happened to the artifacts in the Baghdad Museum is extremely suggestive as to how difficult it is to know what is happening in the country in general. The conclusion that something on the order of 15,000 non-major artifacts are missing is pretty depressing, and the indications that some of the most beautiful and important of the major items were damaged or destroyed, if not permanently stolen, is also depressing.

As a modern historian, I have to say that I am also very worried about the apparent loss (through looting or fires) of much of Iraq's 20th century history, i.e. the state papers from the constitutional monarchy and from the Baath period. One of the things the US Iraq debacle appears to have bestowed on that country is a massive destruction of cultural and historical documents key to its national identity.
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Will Iran get the Bomb?

It seems pretty obvious that Iran will get the nuclear bomb and there is not much anyone can do about it. I'm not saying it is a good thing. I'm just saying that I can't imagine what would stop it.

One thing that might have stopped it was direct military action. But not all sorts of military action would likely be effective. A US or Israeli air strike on the centrifuges thought to be at Natanz is unlikely to be decisive. Centrifuges don't have to be kept all in the same place, and if Iran has 200 of them, they have almost certainly been spread around so that they could not be taken out with a single strike.

If an airstrike by the Americans or the Israelis would not likely entirely succeed, what are the options? The Israelis cannot easily mount a land war against Iran. It would be difficult to airlift armor and men to Iran across Jordan, Syria and Iraq, two of which would not give their permission for such a thing. Iran has a significant manpower advantage over Israel (70 million to 6.4 million), and showed in the 1980s that it could repulse an attack by a strong enemy.

The US can no longer mount a land campaign against Iran. It is bogged down in Iraq fighting a guerrilla war. The Iraqi Shiites would never put up with a US campaign against Shiite Iran. US stockpiles of smart weaponry are seriously depleted.

The US could not make up any slack from allies such as the UK. Tony Blair's parliamentary majority has been whittled down to only 66. About 40 Labour MPs routinely vote against his bills and intitiatives anyway. So his real majority may be razor-thin. He certainly could not convince this parliament to go to war in Iran, e.g.

So the military options are not apparent.

What are the covert options? It seems highly unlikely that the Iranian officer corps would cooperate in a coup. The clerics would be very difficult to overthrow in any popular movement as long as the police, intelligence services and army are loyal to the state and anti-American. Iranian nationalism is fierce and the population would support the government against a foreign invasion.

Some have suggested that Iran's ethnic diversity might prove an opening for mischief by Washington. Iran is only 51 percent Persian-speaking. There are substantial minorities of Azeri Turks, Turkmen, Qashqa'i Turks, Kurds, Lurs, Baluch, and Arabs in Iran. In oil-rich Khuzistan, about half the population is Arab Iranians. The Arabs are evenly divided into Shiites and Sunnis. The recent unrest in Khuzistan, where the Arab Iranians rioted in protest, was blamed by some on Washington. But I don't see how you stop a nuclear program with ethnic unrest.

In essence, by concentrating on Iraq during the past two and a half decades, Israel and the US have foregone the practical opportunity to stop Iran. The Israeli air strike on the Osirak light water nuclear reactor in Iraq in the early 1980s signaled to countries like Iran that they should not put everything in one place. (The Israeli strike was in any case unnecessary-- light water reactors don't produce nuclear by-products for bomb making, in and of themselves.) Then by invading Iraq, the US made it impossible to use the military option against Iran. It is bogged down in a quagmire, and its credibility has been undermined internationally.

Fred Kaplan at Slate quotes a "nighmare scenario" from a rightwing magazine:

"In short, if Iran goes through with its plans, all hell could break loose. Last fall, the American Conservative published a nightmare scenario: Israel strikes the Iranian facilities; huge protests erupt; embassies are ransacked worldwide; Iran instructs Hezbollah forces in Lebanon to cross the Israeli border; fundamentalists demand that Saudi Arabia declare war on Israel; al-Qaida sympathizers in Pakistan overthrow Musharraf, place nuclear weapons onboard passenger planes, and order suicide-bombers to crash them into cities in Israel, the United States, or both. Is it possible to slam on the brakes and stop this wreck from happening? Do any brakes exist?"

This scenario makes no sense to me. Israel cannot easily strike the Iranian nuclear facilities. Syria and Iraq are not going to give the Israelis overflight rights for such a thing. Moreover, bombing the centrifuge warehouse in Natanz would only be a minor annoyance to the Iranians, since the centrifuges have been spread all around.

Iran would certainly use Hizbullah to take revenge on Irael and the US if there were a strike. But Hizbullah cannot "cross the border." The Israeli army could easily stop a few thousand motley militiamen from doing that. Musharraf is not going to be so easy to overthrow. Nor is Saudi Arabia. Nor would Pakistan and Saudi Arabia necessarily be unhappy about their rival, Iran, being deprived of a nuclear capability. The Pakistani military is alleged by Sy Hersh to have been cooperating with the US in monitoring Iran for progress toward a nuclear capability. The Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia are terrified of a Shiite, republican Iran with a bomb.

The rightwing scenario just amalgamates all Muslims and has highly unlikely premises.
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Salon Article on Iraq Strife

My article on the bombing campaign and increased ethnic strife in Iraq is at Melting pot of blood, is at Salon.com
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Secret British Memo Shows Bush Tampered with Iraq Intelligence

A top secret British memorandum dated 23 July 2002 was leaked in the run-up to yesterday's parliamentary elections in the UK (which Blair won, though his Labour Party was much weakened by public disgust with such shenanigans as the below). I mirror the memo below, from the Times Online site. It summarizes a report to Blair and others in the British government by Sir Richard Dearlove (This is the press release when he was appointed in 1999). The head of MI6, or the foreign intelligence service of the UK, is known as "C."

Here is the smoking gun:

"C [Dearlove] reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.

It is not surprising on the face of it that Bush had decided on the Iraq war by summer of 2002. It it is notable that Dearlove noticed a change in views on the subject from earlier visits. By summer of 2002, the Afghanistan war had wound down and al-Qaeda was on the run, so Bush no longer felt vulnerable and was ready to go forward with his long-cherished project of an Iraq War. What is notable is that all this was not what Bush was telling us.

Bush was lying to the American people at the time and saying that no final decision had been made on the war.

Godfrey Sperling of the Christian Science Monitor could write on August 27, 2002, "Indeed, Bush has said he welcomes a 'debate' on Iraq from those in Congress and from the public. But he has made it clear that he will make his decision based on what his intelligence people are telling him."

But Dearlove's report makes it clear that Bush had already decided absolutely on a war already the previous month, and that he had managed to give British intelligence the firm impression that he intended to shape the intelligence to support such a war. So poor Sperling was lied to twice. Any "debate" was meaningless if the president had already decided. And he wasn't waiting to make his decision in the light of the intelligence. He was going to tell the intelligence professionals to what conclusion they had to come. "But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

Why would it even be necessary to turn the intelligence analysts into "weasels" who would have to tell Bush what he wanted to hear?

It was necessary because the "justification" of the "conjunction" of Weapons of Mass Destruction and terrorism was virtually non-existent.

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw admitted it at the meeting: "It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."

So the "justification" would have to be provided by "fixing" the intelligence around the policy. Bush was just going to make things up, since the realities did not actually justify his planned war! The British cabinet sat around and admitted to themselves that a) there was no justification for the war into which they were allowing themselves to be dragged and b) that the war would be gotten up through Goebbels-like techniques!

It is even worse. British Attorney-General Lord Goldsmith was at the meeting. He had to think up a justification for the war in international law. Britain is in Europe, and Europe takes international law seriously. You could have war crimes trials. (Remember that Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet almost got tried in Spain for killing 5000 people in the 1970s).

Goldsmith was as nervous as a cat in a roomful of rocking chairs: "The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change."

The dryness of the wit is unbearable. "The desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action"! Naked aggression is illegal, he could have said. Then he reviews the three possible grounds for a war. You could have a war if Iraq attacked you. Iraq had not attacked the US. Or you could have a war if it was a humanitarian intervention (e.g. under the genocide convention). But Saddam's major campaigns of death had been a decade before. Or you could get a United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing the war, in accordance with the UN charter. But Goldsmith makes it clear he thought you would need a new resolution, that the old ones wouldn't work for this purpose.

The Attorney General of the United Kingdom thought the reports Dearlove and Straw were bringing back from Washington reeked of an illegal war. People who plan out illegal wars are war criminals. He knew this. He was stuck, however. They were all stuck.

The man from Connecticut with the Crawford ranch had decided to cut down some trees. And they were all hostages in his guest house and he was going to put chain saws in their hands and make them help, whether they liked it or not. Goldsmith's hands trembled as he reached out for the chainsaw rig. He saw himself and the others sitting in the Hague, one day, facing the same judges that Milosevic harangued. Charged.

But it is a long way from Crawford to the Hague. The man from Connecticut with the cowboy boots and the fake twang would get away with it. They would all get away with it.

But people would know they had lied.



Other commentary:

Ray McGovern.

Warren Strobel and John Walcott.

The Memo:

SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL - UK EYES ONLY

DAVID MANNING
From: Matthew Rycroft
Date: 23 July 2002
S 195 /02

cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell

IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER'S MEETING, 23 JULY

Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq.

This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.

John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC assessment. Saddam's regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action. Saddam was worried and expected an attack, probably by air and land, but he was not convinced that it would be immediate or overwhelming. His regime expected their neighbours to line up with the US. Saddam knew that regular army morale was poor. Real support for Saddam among the public was probably narrowly based.

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

CDS said that military planners would brief CENTCOM on 1-2 August, Rumsfeld on 3 August and Bush on 4 August.

The two broad US options were:

(a) Generated Start. A slow build-up of 250,000 US troops, a short (72 hour) air campaign, then a move up to Baghdad from the south. Lead time of 90 days (30 days preparation plus 60 days deployment to Kuwait).

(b) Running Start. Use forces already in theatre (3 x 6,000), continuous air campaign, initiated by an Iraqi casus belli. Total lead time of 60 days with the air campaign beginning even earlier. A hazardous option.

The US saw the UK (and Kuwait) as essential, with basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus critical for either option. Turkey and other Gulf states were also important, but less vital. The three main options for UK involvement were:

(i) Basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus, plus three SF squadrons.

(ii) As above, with maritime and air assets in addition.

(iii) As above, plus a land contribution of up to 40,000, perhaps with a discrete role in Northern Iraq entering from Turkey, tying down two Iraqi divisions.

The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun "spikes of activity" to put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections.

The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.

The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change.

The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD. There were different strategies for dealing with Libya and Iran. If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work.

On the first, CDS said that we did not know yet if the US battleplan was workable. The military were continuing to ask lots of questions.

For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one, or if Baghdad did not collapse and urban warfighting began? You said that Saddam could also use his WMD on Kuwait. Or on Israel, added the Defence Secretary.

The Foreign Secretary thought the US would not go ahead with a military plan unless convinced that it was a winning strategy. On this, US and UK interests converged. But on the political strategy, there could be US/UK differences. Despite US resistance, we should explore discreetly the ultimatum. Saddam would continue to play hard-ball with the UN.

John Scarlett assessed that Saddam would allow the inspectors back in only when he thought the threat of military action was real.

The Defence Secretary said that if the Prime Minister wanted UK military involvement, he would need to decide this early. He cautioned that many in the US did not think it worth going down the ultimatum route. It would be important for the Prime Minister to set out the political context to Bush.

Conclusions:

(a) We should work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military action. But we needed a fuller picture of US planning before we could take any firm decisions. CDS should tell the US military that we were considering a range of options.

(b) The Prime Minister would revert on the question of whether funds could be spent in preparation for this operation.

(c) CDS would send the Prime Minister full details of the proposed military campaign and possible UK contributions by the end of the week.

(d) The Foreign Secretary would send the Prime Minister the background on the UN inspectors, and discreetly work up the ultimatum to Saddam.

He would also send the Prime Minister advice on the positions of countries in the region especially Turkey, and of the key EU member states.

(e) John Scarlett would send the Prime Minister a full intelligence update.

(f) We must not ignore the legal issues: the Attorney-General would consider legal advice with FCO/MOD legal advisers.

(I have written separately to commission this follow-up work.)

MATTHEW RYCROFT

(Rycroft was a Downing Street foreign policy aide)

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30 Killed in Bombings in Iraq, Dozens Wounded

Ash-Sharq al-Awsat estimates the number of dead in Iraq from bombings and attacks in Iraq on Thursday at 30. AFP, apparently filing a bit earlier, put the toll at 26. A string of bombings targeted police and military targets in Baghdad.

In the 5 days from 30 April through 4 May, the toll looks like this:

Civilians: 88 killed, 344 wounded
Multi-National Forces: 9 Killed, 14 wounded
Iraqi Security Froces: 27 Killed, 64 wounded
Misc. 4 killed, 2 wounded
Armed Opposition Groups: 25 killed, 2 wounded
Foreign Workers: 1 killed

I suspect a lot of civilian deaths are not getting into such statistics. One pretty frightening conclusion is that the guerrillas are killing and wounding more Iraqi police and army troops than vice versa, and if we count in Multinational Forces casualties, the guerrillas are clear winners during these five days.

A US military commander suggests that more car bombs in Iraq appear to be being detonated remotely. This technique suggests that the masterminds of the bombings either do no trust the drivers to commit suicide, or are not telling them that they are on a suicide mission in the first place. It could also suggest that the drivers are themselves coerced or hostages (or have loved ones who are).

Patrick Cockburn worries about renewed ethnic tensions in Iraq. (Most of the recent attacks have been by Sunni Arabs on Shiites or Kurds).

The AFP report cited above goes on to say:

"Illustrating the uphill task in training new Iraqi security forces, U.S. officers said they had pulled another battalion of Iraqi commandos from the rebel bastion of Samarra 125 kilometers north of Baghdad last month after repeated incidents of misconduct. In a March incident that sealed the unit's fate, the commandos set a home near Samarra on fire after searching it and finding no incriminating evidence."

You read something like that last sentence and do a double take and say whaat?
See also Helena Cobban's "Caudillo of Samarra".
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Irbil toll Rises to 60 dead, 100 Wounded

The death toll in Wednesday morning's Irbil bombing has risen to 60, with 150 wounded, according to the New York Times. The Ansar al-Sunna, an offshoot of the old Ansar al-Islam terrorist group, claimed responsibility. But I am suspicious that all the major incidents in Iraq are claimed by shadowy Muslim fundamentalist groups. I continue to believe that Baath military intelligence is behind most of them. It turns out that the perpetrator was wearing a bomb jacket or belt, but the type of explosive used must have been very powerful. This BBC backgrounder points out that Irbil is the political base of Massoud Barzani, leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party.

Al-Zaman reports a car bombing in Mosul on Wednesday against an American military position in Hayy al-Hadba', which left two Iraqis dead. Likewise, a car bomb in Dura, Baghdad, killed 9 national guardsmen and wounded 20. Two US troops were killed Tuesday evening. The US military conducted a raid against the Ramadi hospital for the second time in a week. One of Saddam Hussein's wanted nephews was arrested on Wednesday.

A new RAND report is highly critical of US military missteps in Iraq, many of them the result of policies pushed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

AP reports suspicions of fraud in the American civilian administration of reconstruction in south-central Iraq. Of some $100 million, $7 million may have just gone missing, and the rest of the nearly $100 million can't be accounted for either, because of non-existent book keeping. Actually, I thought I read that $9 billion couldn't be accounted for from Coalition Provisional Authority days, so $100 million seems small change. Indeed, if the subject was wasted money as opposed to unaccounted-for money, the sum might be edging toward $300 billion.

Reuters maintains that the US military in Iraq has no accountability with regard to civilian deaths, and that the procedures for family members to claim compensation are "Kafkaesque." Quote: ' "There is no reason to think that when a nameless Iraqi without international connections is the victim, the U.S. military would take it even remotely seriously," said Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies . . .'

Japanese Self Defense Forces, who have been helping with water purification and reconstruction in Samawah in southern Iraq, are going home in December. The UN Security Council resolution authorizing the multi-national forces in Iraq expires in December, and many Bush administration allies are taking advantage of that expiry to announce they will pull troops out then. Hmm. Maybe, contrary to what John Bolton says, the United Nations does exist after all. Maybe a lot of countries even pay more attention to it than they do to Washington.

One of the few good things about the Iraq War, I used to think, was that the sanctions regime would end and medicine shortages for children would cease. Wrong again. Reuters says that medicine for some conditions, such as epilepsy, is difficult to get still.

David Ignatius's comparison of post-War Iraq to the American South in the decades after the Civil War seems to me positively inspired.
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Sunni-Shiite Rioting at Baghdad University
Sunni, Kurdish Recriminations on Cabinet

A riot broke out at Baghdad University on Tuesday and continued Wednesday, pitting furious Shiite students against Sunni Arab students and professors, over the killing of a Shiite student.

Al-Zaman reports that the Kurdistan Alliance in the Iraqi parliament is furious that a phrase was dropped from the oath of office sworn by the new cabinet on Tuesday. They were supposed to commit to a "democratic, federal" government, but the two words were not in the actual oath. Communications Minister Javan Fuad Masum (a Kurd) demanded to know who was responsible for the omission. He said that dropping the two words was unconstitutional.

The actual oath read, "I swear by God, the Exalted, the Mighty, that I shall fulfill my duties and responsibilities with humility and sincerity; shall safeguard the independence and sovereignty of Iraq, and attend to the welfare of its people and the purity of its land, air, water and natural wealth; and shall implement the law faithfully and impartially. God bears witness to what I say."

Kurds are suspicious of the devotees of Shiite political Islam who hold the majority in parliament. Their insistence on an acknowledgment of the "democratic" and "federal" character of Iraq reflects their anxiety about whether the United Iraqi Alliance is really committed to either principle.

Al-Zaman/ AFP: Meanwhile, a Sunni Arab source reacted to the failure again Wednesday to appoint a Sunni Arab minister of defense. He said the new Prime Minister, Ibrahim Jaafari, has been inflexible and high-handed. He said that the Sunni Arabs presented lists of potential candidates for cabinet ministers to him, and that he rejected them out of hand. Jaafari denied rejecting the candidates upon which Sunnis agreed, blaming the Sunni Arabs for not being able to agree among themselves.

Trudy Rubin's first-hand impressions of the tensions between Sunni Arab and Shiite political elites in Iraq give few grounds for optimism about sectarian relations.
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Al-Libi Captured

The capture of Abu Faraj al-Libi, a high al-Qaeda operative, in Pakistan is further proof that if you are interested in a "war" on terrorism, your best tools are counter-terrrorism and counter-insurgency agents. Al-Libi was captured through human intelligence, i.e., he was turned in by someone who knew who he was and where he was, presumably for the reward money. Sooner or later it seems likely that Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri will also be captured.

The shame is that the intrepid FBI, CIA and other US field officers who undoubtedly played a major role in making this happen must for the moment remain anonymous and unsung. But they are my heroes.
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Franklin Arrested

Pentagon official Lawrence Franklin has been arrested and charged by the FBI with having shown classified documents to two officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Steven Rosen, AIPAC director of foreign policy issues, and Keith Weissman, high-level Middle East analyst--both of them only recently fired). Rosen is alleged once to have written in an internal AIPAC memo, "A lobby is like a night flower. It thrives in the dark and dies in the sun."

Franklin was implicated last summer, but it has taken nearly a year to arrest him. In the meantime, he was, amazingly enough, still working at the Department of Defense on Persian Gulf security issues. (I know this for a fact).

Franklin was on the Iran desk of the Near East and South Asia department of the Pentagon, and was the "go-to" man for Iran issues for Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. His tight connection to the Neoconservatives has been played down in subsequent reporting, depicting him as a low-level employee and a rogue operating on his own.

He apparently was concerned that Iran would fund anti-American militias in Iraq to attack US troops, but could not get his ideas taken seriously, and was seeking support from AIPAC and Israel. In fact, the only major fighting between US troops and Iraqi Shiites has been with the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr. Sadr is notoriously anti-Iranian and his militiamen are rooted in Iraqi ghettos and are very Iraqi nativist. Some Iranian money may have come to them in Basra, but Iranians spread money around to lots of groups in Iraq. Without further details, it is hard to know what Franklin was up to, but he was probably trying to provoke hostilities with Iran by blaming Tehran for Iraqi Shiite militancy.

I commented on this story at my blog last August. Apparently the FBI has decided not to, or been ordered not to, follow up on Franklin's attempt to give classified information directly to Naor Gilon, the Israeli embassy political officer in charge of Iran and nuclear issues in Washington until recently (he's been sent home). Gilon was too savvy to accept an actual document from Franklin, but accepted an oral briefing. Franklin gave the document to AIPAC operatives, who then allegedly passed it to Gilon. The entire Israel angle to this case has been dropped. Now it is just Larry Franklin, rogue Pentagon employee, passsing classified documents to a couple of guys who used to work for AIPAC. (They were pretty central to AIPAC, but were fired when the scandal broke).

The absence of espionage charges is weird, because Franklin was not the original object of FBI surveillance. They were watching AIPAC meetings with Israeli embassy officials, on suspicion of systematic espionage. They were surprised when Pentagon employee Franklin showed up in the videotapes.

So, what was the FBI originally investigating, exactly, and will that case ever break?

And, when will AIPAC be made to register as an agent of a foreign power?
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Breaking News: 50 Dead in Irbil Bombing, 100 Wounded

A man with high explosives on his person detonated his payload in the midst of a crowd of civilians lined up to apply for jobs as policemen in the northern, Kurdish city of Irbil. (Or it might have been a car bomb-- reports are confused) Casualty counts are confused, but something close to 50 seem to be dead and around 100 wounded, overstretching the capability of local hospitals.

This attack is typical in targeting police recruits, in hopes of making it more difficult for the new government to establish law and order.

Its location is significant, however. The guerrillas are also attempting to foment ethnic violence, and among the aims of the attack today was surely to promote Kurdish-Arab hatred. (The Kurds do not need much pushing before they just secede, a move that would throw the country into new kinds of violence).

The other significance of the bombing is that the guerrillas clearly have access to a store of extremely powerful explosives. Many of the car bombs down south have only managed to kill one or two persons. Whatever the guerrilla in this operation was using was pretty sophisticated.
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Sunni VP Boycotts Swearing-In Ceremony
8 US Troops Wounded at Qaim and Ramadi, Dozens of Iraqis Killed

Iraq's government was sworn in on Tuesday. But the key ministries of Defense (which will go to a Sunni Arab) and Petroleum (which will go to a Shiite) are still unfilled, as are several others promised to the Sunni Arabs. Vice President Ghazi al-Yawir boycotted the swearing in ceremony, a sign that the Sunni Arabs are not amused.

AP quoted Sunni parliamentarian Mishaan Juburi as saying ' "If al-Yawer attended the ceremony, it would have been the end of him politically," said Mishaan al-Jubouri, head of a disgruntled Sunni coalition that had hoped for more seats in Cabinet. "I entered the hall and went out again on purpose, just to show them that I am not agreeing with what is happening." '

I don't know whether it is more alarming that the interim petroleum minister is Ahmad Chalabi (who has, to say the least, not shown himself good at accounting for large sums of money) or that there is still talk of giving the post to a member of the Fadila Party, a faction loyal to the memory of the puritan militant Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr. The sort of patronage that would be available to Fadila Party members from control of the Petro