85 Shiites Dead at Balad in Carbombings
5 US Troops Killed at Ramadi

Friday morning, al-Jazeerah is reporting at least 10 dead and more wounded in a market in the Shiite city of Hilla south of Baghdad, as a result of a car bombing. This incident probably involved Sunni Arab guerrillas from the mixed Babil province targeting Shiites.

Three car bombs in the city of Balad, just north of Baghdad in the Sunni Arab heartland, killed at least 85 on Thursday and wounded 115 persons. The bombs targetted districts with a concentration of Shiite Muslims. Balad is near the Shiite city of Dujjail, the prospective site for the trial of Saddam Hussein.

Anthony Loyd, reporting from Baghdad for the London Times, argues that a sectarian war is already underway in Iraq. The attacks in Balad certainly seem to be part of this phenomenon.

In addition, guerrilla violence elsewhere killed 5 American GIs and 12 Iraqis.

US military forces raided the homes of two Sunni Arab politicians who had been willing to advise the interim government, infuriating them.

Patrick Cockburn reports that at a meeting in Baghdad of nearly 1,000 former Iraqi army officers and an adviser to the Iraqi president, the officers expressed disgust at the lack of security, clean water, electricity and other essentials in Iraq, which they said lacked any sign of a government.

CBS News reports that:

"a roadside bomb killed five American soldiers Wednesday during combat in the western town of Ramadi, the military said. It was the deadliest single attack on U.S. troops since a roadside bomb killed 14 Marines near Haditha in western Iraq on Aug. 3. The five dead Americans were assigned to the 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force and were hit Wednesday while "conducting combat operations" in the insurgent hotbed, a statement by the Marines said. The deaths brought to 13 the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq in the past four days. According to an Associated Press count, 1,934 U.S. troops have died since the war started in 2003."

The bomb blast in Najaf on Wednesday evening turns out probably to be a case of the bomb-makers actually blowing themselves up. But then Muqtada al-Sadr's movement had said that the house that was blown up belonged to one of Muqtada's bodyguards. Were they mistaken or is the Mahdi Army busy making bombs for a future showdown with the rival Shiite Badr Corps?

Al-Sharq al-Awsat: Jawad al-Maliki, a parliamentarian and member of the Dawa Party, complained bitterly on Thursday that Iraqi diplomatic missions abroad were plagued with corruption and still staffed by supporters of Saddam Hussein.

Speaking of corruption, the Ministry of Electricity was a hotbed of corruption under former minister Ayham al-Samarrai, according to his successor, who claims that "hundreds of millions of dollars" have gone missing. Samarrai has recently represented himself as being the target for death squads from the new government, but maybe he is just a target for auditors.

The Sunni Arabs are still agitating for changes in Iraq's constitution at this late date. It has already been reported out of committee to parliament and sent to the UN for printing, though nobody outside government seems to have seen it. It cannot be changed now. It ought to be, of course. As Fred Kaplan recognizes, the constitution is a guarantee of long-term guerrilla violence in Iraq, since it cuts the Sunni Arabs out of a fair share of the country's resources. On the other hand, since it is backed by the Kurdistan Alliance and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the two biggest and most influenntial political blocs in the country, it is likely to pass. It is also not clear that its rejection would lead to peace, either, since the Kurds and Shiites would be perhaps fatally disillusioned with the democratic process if all their work and aspirations were now torpedoed.

Fallujah does not sound to me as though it is really subdued, from this Slate article (it is a series, and worth following).

South Korea on Thursday thanked Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf for advising Seoul not to send combat troops to Iraq. What? Pakistan in summer of 2003 was close to sending troops itself, but insisted they be under a United Nations command, which was unacceptable to Bush, so the deal fell through. So now it turns out Musharraf was warning other American allies not to get centrally involved, as well. Washington will be furious, but I fear that they haven't got a leg to stand on. Whichever way you look at it, Musharraf was perfectly correct.

Evan Lehmann writes,

"Retired Army Lt. Gen. William Odom, a Vietnam veteran, said the invasion of Iraq alienated America's Middle East allies, making it harder to prosecute a war against terrorists. The U.S. should withdraw from Iraq, he said, and reposition its military forces along the Afghan-Pakistani border to capture Osama bin Laden and crush al Qaeda cells. “The invasion of Iraq I believe will turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history,” said Odom, now a scholar with the Hudson Institute."

With the Hudson Institute? That is Neocon Central. Now they're supporting Odom to say this?

But his evaluation is correct. The greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history.
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Fayyad in Baghdad: It is no Longer Baghdad

Al-Sharq al-Awsat carries a long, anguished and meditative piece by Maad Fayyad, an Arab journalist normally based in London, on the occasion of his return to Baghdad for the third time since the US invasion.

I don't have time to translate the entire thing, but perhaps he will publish it in English.

He says from Baghdad, "Here is Baghdad . . . But which Baghdad is here? The Baghdad that we do not know and which we do not want to be like this. I wonder-- did the Mongols descend on it only yesterday, led by the captain of catastrophe and devotee of death, Hulagu Khan, such that it was transformed into debris?"

He says he is looking out of a helicopter window. He sees buildings below that look like the peaks of a historical city, except that circulation in the streets is lazy and mournful. But then the rubble stretches into the distance, punctuated by mountains of garbage clearly visible from the air. Even the formerly upper class districts were mired in fetid lakes of rancid water, swirling around once proud mansions. In the 1980s, Baghdad had once received an international award as the world's cleanest city.

He says, "I search for Baghdad in Baghdad, and do not find it." Once the snooty capital had given birth to a verb, "to baghdad it up" [tabaghdada], meaning to put on insufferable airs and act superior. Today the only persons bagdading it up in Baghdad are those breaking civil, religious and tribal law with impunity.

"As for the law, it does not exist here. Most of the persons I've met in Baghdad say frankly, 'Iraq is living without a state . . . without a rule of law . . . with power going to the strongest . . ."

He says that the last time he was in Baghdad, during the election season at the end of January, he only heard about bombings when he read about them in the newspaper. Now things are different.

"When some friends heard that I had arrived, they warned me not to go out into the streets: "We don't want to know your location, and you must not tell anyone where you are residing. There is more than one group that kidnaps and kills nowadays."

An official of the Iraqi government tells him, "I am a prisoner in my office and my house, which lies in a secure district, but I canot visit the house where my family lives for fear that I will be abducted."

The government is nowhere to be seen, he says. The government does not control the streets, the militias do. You cannot tell the guerrillas from the police and the army, since all of them wear the same uniform.

Cole: The piece is a shocking indictment of American misrule. Bush has turned one of the world's greatest cities into a cesspool with no order, little athority and few services.
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You will be Democratic, Or Else!

Nearly 3/4s of Americans are now skeptical about the use of force to spread democracy. The idea that the US should simply invade countries, overthrow their governments and impose "democracy" on them was championed by a coalition of American nationalists and rightwing Zionists in Washington in 2001-2003, was promoted by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (the think tank for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute, the Project for a New American Century, and other rightwing think tanks and journals. The targets of this social engineering on a vast scale were never, however, authoritarian regimes friendly to Washington, but rather a handful of governments that had bad relations with the US and/or Israel. As Ret. Col. Pat Lang points out, however, armies are good for killing people and destroying things, and not very much else. Lang lived a decade in the Middle East doing military and intelligence work, and knows whereof he speaks. The American public is coming around to the same view.

The Neocon notion of aggressive war as productive of Jeffersonian democracy reminds me of the joke about the difference between Christianity and Soviet communism. The surprised commisar, on being challenged as to what communism stood for, explained that it was just Jesus's Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." The only difference, he allowed, was that "othervise ve vill shoot you."
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The American Street Speaks

My article is out in Salon.com, The "American street" speaks: Will the Democratic Party listen? The lede is:

"As more and more Americans turn against Bush's Iraq war, Democratic politicians remain silent. Their play-it-safe strategy isn't just cowardly, it also won't work."

Excerpt:

' In a mid-September CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, about a third of respondents wanted to bring at least some troops home, and another third wanted a complete withdrawal. Only 26 percent wanted to just keep the same number of soldiers there, while a gung-ho 8 percent were in favor of sending yet more troops. Many of the protesters on Saturday were similarly divided between those who wanted immediate withdrawal and those, like MoveOn.org, that advocate beginning a phased withdrawal next year.

The American movement to withdraw from Iraq is being called "the American street" on the Arabic satellite news networks. Although many Shiite and Kurdish Iraqis have mixed feelings about it, other Iraqis have taken heart. Khalida Khalaf, 52, told the Los Angeles Times of Cindy Sheehan, "Of course she's a mother, and just like our people are hurting, she's hurting too ... Just as she wants America out of Iraq, so do we." Khalaf, a Shiite of Sadr City in Baghdad, lost her Iraqi son, Majid, to the same clashes between the U.S. military and the Mahdi Army that took the life of Casey Sheehan. About 120 members (out of 275) of the elected Iraqi parliament have called for a short timetable for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. The Sunni Arab political elite wants the U.S. to get out of Iraq yesterday, as does the puritanical Shiite Sadr movement. There may be an increasing convergence of opinion on the prospect of the U.S. troops staying in Iraq, between the Iraqi public and the American.

As her supporters chanted, "Not one more," Ms. Sheehan thundered, "We're going to Congress, and we're going to ask them, 'How many more of other people's children are you going to sacrifice?' We're going to say, 'Shame on you.'" The necessity of going to Congress was underlined by the virtual absence of sitting legislators at the protest. Only Rep. Cynthia McKinney among Democratic representatives addressed the rally, though Rep. John Conyers of Michigan attended. '

The rest is at Salon.com.
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Bombings in Tal Afar, Baghdad, Najaf
Iraq is not World War II

Someone detonated a bomb outside the house of Muqtada al-Sadr in Najaf around 7 pm Wednesday Iraq time. The blast killed six, including a security guard.

Among the bombings and shootings on Wednesday was a bombing in Dora, a district of Baghdad, that killed 2. Dora from all accounts appears to be virtually guerrilla-held territory. Sweeps of Sunni Arab districts, called Operation Lightning, were attempted in June, but to little long-term effect.

Reuters adds:

" TAL AFAR - At least seven people were killed and 37 wounded when a female suicide bomber attacked a large crowd of people outside an army recruiting centre in the town of Tal Afar west of Mosul, 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.

TAJI - Seven bodies of people who had been shot dead were found in Taji, 20 km north of Baghdad. Police said they were bound and blindfolded.

*SAFWAN - A U.S. soldier and an airman were killed and another soldier wounded when their convoy was struck by a roadside bomb near Safwan, in southeast Iraq near the Kuwait border."

There were other attacks in Baghdad, including the kidnapping and murder of six person in the Huriyah District.

The US military withdrew from the city of Karbala on Wednesday. This is the second city from which Coaltion troops have withdrawn in favor of local police and militia. The US left Najaf in August. Both are holy cities, with substantial numbers of pilgrims and local seminaries.

Al-Hayat reports that a major set of military campaigns is being jointly planned by the US military and Iraqi Minister of Defense Saadoun al-Dulaimi against guerrilla strongholds in Anbar Province.

Al-Zaman reports that large numbers of rockets were discovered Wednesday in Nasiriyah. It is believed that guerrillas planned to use them to disrupt the referendum on the constitution now scheduled for October 15.

Nancy Youssef of Knight Ridder is on the ground in Baghdad and gets the scoop that Muqtada al-Sadr has probably decided to remain neutral toward the new constitution. If al-Sadr had called on his followers to reject it, he might have helped the Sunni opposition defeat it. He is said to fear opposing the religious establishment in Najaf, which generally favors the constitution, lest he lose the contest and end up looking weak. As reported here, Grand Ayatollah Ishaq Fayyad, the number 2 Shiite cleric in the country, has issued a fatwa urging adoption the the constitution. Grand Ayatollah Sistani, the chief clerical authority for the Shiites, is variously said to support the constitution or to want to avoid ordering Shiites to vote for it lest he impose his views on them at a time when they should be exercising individual choice and popular sovereignty.

Al-Zaman says that professional drivers of trucks and other vehicles, large and small, in Kirkuk went on strike on Wednesday to protest the lack of gasoline. Iraq is one of the world's major petroleum producers under ordinary circumstances. But it seems wherever George W. Bush goes, the gas gets expensive or even hard to get hold of.

Marine Sgt. Alisha Harding gives an eyewitness account of the June 23 attack on her convoy by a suicide bomber near Fallujah, in which five marines and a sailor were killed.

Reuters news agency has formally complained that the behavior of US troops toward independent journalists has become a serious impediment to getting out the story of what is happening there. (It is worse. Reuters typically lists 5 or 6 deadline "security incidents" in its daily roundup, but we know that there are more like 60 or 70, about which the US military knows but of which the rest of us are kept in the dark).

Heritage Petroleum of Canada has signed a memorandum of agreement with the Iraqi Kurds to do exploration and development. Hey, I thought the Canadians sat this one out. You mean, they get the contracts anyway? Quick, someone alert Wolfowitz (didn't he promise to punish all French-speaking countries?) Ooops, I guess he isn't in the Pentagon any more.

Gen. Richard Myers, outgoing chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, warned Wednesday that winning in Iraq was as important to the US as winning WW II had been, and that a withdrawal would lead to another 9/11- style attack.

With all due respect, Gen. Myers is wrong on both counts. For the US to stay massively in Iraq, occupying a major Arab Muslim country, for very much longer is what will provoke another attack on the US mainland. Gen. John Abizaid, who actually knows the Middle East, warned against a large, long-term occupation of Iraq in spring of 2003 and he was right. As for the WW II analogy, puh-lease. National Socialist Germany and its allies had large, well-equipped armies and occupied all of continental Europe, West and North Africa save Egypt, and (via Japan) Korea, much of China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Burma, and Indonesia among other territories. The German military was 20 million strong, the Japanese nearly 10 million. Italy's military was 3 million.

The guerrilla movement in Iraq is typically estimated at around 30,000 strong, though I suspect it is twice that. The total number of persons in the jihadi movement outside Iraq who could and would commit violence such as bombings against the mainland United States is probably in the hundreds, and is at most a couple thousand. They can't even seem to muster more than a couple thousand volunteers to fight the biggest Western incursion into the Muslim world since the Soviet invasion of Aghanistan, which is pretty pitiful if you think about it. I teach World War II in the Middle East, Gen. Myers. This is no World War II.

Jim Lobe covers the debate on a US exit strategy for Iraq. Kudos to Jim for getting my position exactly right and stating it succinctly and clearly.

Ron Kampeas explores the dilemmas of American Zionists who oppose the Iraq war, given an atmosphere in the antiwar movement that tends to see the Israeli occupation of the West Bank as just as objectionable as the US occupation of Iraq. The article is good in recognizing the antiwar attitudes of a majority in the general American Jewish community, which contrasts with the generally hawkish views of the major Jewish lobbies and organizations influential in Washington. Kampeas does not, however, make any distinction between Jews and Zionists, or between those who support Israel and those who support the colonization and annexation of the West Bank.
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Iran and Iraq
Muhsin al-Hakim "Horrified" at British Assault in Basra

Muhsin al-Hakim, the son of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, spoke out in Tehran about the British attack on a Basra jail. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim is widely underestimated, but he is the leader of the majority party coalition in parliament as well as of one of its constituents, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. His party controls 9 of the 18 Iraqi provincial governments as well as key cabinet posts. He is among the more important leaders in Iraq. His son Muhsin is probably expressing views more frankly than his father could afford to. The Financial Times reports Muhsin as "horrified" at the British military demolition of the central Basra jail to free two undercover SAS officers. Muhsin says that the two shouldn't have been out of uniform in a sovereign Iraq, and that they forfeited their legal immunity when they put on civilian clothes. He also called on the Blair government to stop thinking in the old Sunni Arab way about Iraq, that Kurdish and Shiite rights equal a break-up of the country.

His last point would be more convincing if his father hadn't insisted on a provision in the constitution allowing the southern Shiite provinces to form a confederacy that would own a hundred percent of all future petroleum finds in that area.

Meanwhile, Iran says it supports a free and fair referendum on the new Iraqi constitution on October 15. Major Iranian figures have said that they hope the constitution, which privileges Islamic law, is adopted.

And the Iraqi ambassador in Tehran, Muhammad Shaikh, praised Iran's positive role with regard to Iraq and called for even greater cooperation between the two countries.
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Guest Editorial: Achcar on "Iraq Developments"

"Iraq developments"

by Gilbert Achcar

' 1) The Saudi Kingdom and Iraq

The last weeks and days have seen intensive campaigning by the Saudi Kingdom on the issue of Iraq, preceding US decisions on cooperation with the Kingdom. The campaign’s highlight has been the Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faysal’s visit to the US and his statements blaming the US for failing in Iraq and giving the upper hand in that country to Iran, the arch-enemy of the US and its Saudi protectorate.

The campaign also included the release of a Saudi-sponsored (and co-written) study by the CSIS, an unofficial think-tank in Washington, titled “Saudi Militants in Iraq: Assessment and Kingdom’s Response.” (Much case was made of this study because it said that foreign fighters were only a minority of the “insurgents,” as if it were a scoop.) It “estimated” (more a guessing-game than anything else) the proportion of foreign fighters in Iraq at 4-6% of a total of “insurgents” put at 30 000, of whom 12% from the Saudi Kingdom (1-2% of the total).

Al-Hayat for 9/28 reports figures given by Iraqi officials on the foreigners detained in Iraq: according to the officials quoted, US forces in Iraq hold in detention over 10,000 persons, of whom only 210 are foreigners. Of those, the largest group by far is made up of Saudis (35%). Syrians, Tunisians and Libyans together amount to 15%, Palestinians and Jordanians are 10%, and Egyptians and Sudanese 5%.

Al-Hayat also announces that G. W. Bush sent a memo to C. Rice on Monday 26 saying (I am translating from Arabic, because I couldn’t find the original; Al-Hayat probably got the news from its Saudi sponsors): “I assert that Saudi Arabia does cooperate with the efforts to fight global terrorism and that the proposed aid will help facilitate these efforts.” In the meantime, Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes, on a visit to the Kingdom, has “questioned,” in breathtaking boldness, the Saudi ban on… driving by women!

2) Muqtada al-Sadr’s consults Sistani on sectarian violence

Some days ago, followers of Muqtada al-Sadr from the Iraqi city of Al-Kufa had addressed a letter to him asking his advice to the “followers of the Sadrist line in particular and the Shiites in general” regarding the recent declaration of war against the Shiites by Zarqawi. (This chilling declaration — a voice message broadcast through the Internet — was announced in retaliation for the US-Iraqi onslaught on Tal Afar and accompanied with new massacres of Shiites).

Al-Sadr — who is the most popular Shiite figure among Arab Sunnis and is accused by some forces in the Shiite community, especially in SCIRI circles, of cozying up to the enemies of the Shiites — did not want to take it upon himself to call for Shiites to refrain from launching reprisals. His reply came in three points: 1) “Refer in this regard to your noble references, who naturally, as is well-known, are Sayyed Sistani (may his shadow last) and Sayyed Ha’eri (may his shadow last), they must be referred to first, and if they do not intervene, please get back to me with a new request.” 2) Print books and other educational material against “each of the occupation and its suite, the brigands [designating anti-Shiite Wahhabi forces, like Zarqawi’s group] and the Ba’athists.” 3) Call on the Imams at Friday’s prayers to stigmatize them. In conclusion, al-Sadr asked his followers to remember that “the unity within Islam and the [Shiite] sect is the major weapon” against the “brigands and their masters,” as well as the Ba’athists.

The Sadrists of Al-Kufa wrote accordingly to al-Sistani, asking his advice. The latter replied with a long official communiqué, now posted in Arabic on his website, with the following main points: Those who try to divide the Iraqis and push them toward civil war want to prevent Iraq from “recovering its sovereignty and security.” Iraqis should not and will not fall into this trap whatever horrors occur to them. Shiites should keep restraining themselves and cooperate with the competent services to protect their areas. All Iraqis should call, in words and deeds, to repel the deviants (an indirect call on Sunni religious leaders to issue condemnations of sectarian attacks). The Iraqi government should provide security to all Iraqis and “prevent them from being hurt, to whatever ethnical group or religious sect or thought they belong.”

3) US military campaigns and the forthcoming vote in Iraq

Commenting on the November 2004 assault on Fallujah prior to the January 30 election, I had written: “The US occupation could not have any illusion -- at this point in time -- about its ability to stop the violence in the country by resorting to such violent means. Instead, there is serious reason to believe that the real purpose was precisely to aggravate the chaotic conditions in Iraq in order to diminish the legitimacy of the outcome of the January 30 elections.”

I had written this because of the fact that the very brutal assault on Fallujah had led to such a deterioration of the conditions in Iraq and to such an outcry among Arab Sunnis, that it compelled most major political forces belonging to this community to revert their stand and boycott the election. (The Islamic Party, the Iraqi branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, had even registered its electoral slate, before withdrawing from the race.)

This scenario seems likely to be repeted. Up until recently, the ranks of the Arab Sunnis were divided on the issue of the October 15 referendum. Not that any major force among them is calling to approve the draft constitution: as is well known, there is a large consensus among Arab Sunni representatives on rejecting the draft. (The sectarian polarization in Iraq is such that the majority of Arab Shiites support the draft and the vast majority of Arab Sunnis oppose it, while the Kurdish forces try to arbitrate preserving their interests.) However, the majority of Arab Sunni forces had called their constituencies to register on the electoral lists (which they did massively) to try to defeat the draft constitution by gathering two-thirds of No votes in the three main Arab Sunni provinces. Only two forces had adopted a long-standing call for a boycott of the referendum: the Ba’ath Party (very officially by a formal statement published on its website) and Al-Qaeda followers (they forbid any vote on a constitution anyhow, since there should be no constitution but the Koran in their view).

Today’s Al-Hayat reports that two main figures of the Arab Sunni community in Iraq, Saleh al-Mutlak, the man leading the campaign against the draft constitution, and Issam al-Rawi, a member of the influential Association of Muslim Scholars, have accused US occupation forces and Iraqi governmental forces of trying — by the full-fledged offensive they launched in the Arab Sunni province of Al-Anbar, starting with the assault on Tal Afar — to prevent the participation of Arab Sunnis in the referendum, thus pushing them to call for a boycott. Al-Mutlak said that a call for boycott could be announced after consultations among the opponents of the draft.

If the referendum were to be held with a massive participation of all Iraqis, the result would be, whether the draft passes or fails, that this first all-encompassing electoral test would likely be followed by all-encompassing elections for a new National Assembly (with the possibility of getting there a majority in favor of the withdrawal of occupation forces). If the referendum were boycotted massively by Arab Sunnis, as were the January elections, then it is highly likely that the same would occur for the parliamentary elections scheduled to take place before the end of this year. The present tragic situation would be prolonged indefinitely, if not very much worsened actually.
'

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Car Bomber Penetrates Green Zone
33 Deaths in Guerrilla Violence

The Washington Post reports that "A car bomber penetrated the heavily fortified Green Zone in the center of the capital on Tuesday but was stopped by U.S. Marines at a checkpoint before he was able to detonate the vehicle, the military said."

He got all the way into the Green Zone. That is where the US Embassy is, where the parliament meets. This car bomb could have done enormous damage. And it got past the outer gates! The Green Zone is not safe-- it has received mortar shells, and there have even been circulars warning of the danger of insurgents kidnapping people from it (!). But to get a whole car bomb in there . . .

Now the guerrillas are just shooting down school teachers. Earlier their main target had been Iraqi soldiers & police and recruits. Guerrillas did kill 9 police recruits on Tuesday and wound 21 in the eastern city of Baqubah. But now simple school teachers are apparently considered "collaborators." Or maybe they were killed for being Shiites.

Speaking of Shiites, Iraqi authorities on Tuesday discovered the bodies of 22 persons, probably Shiites, over near the Iranian border. They were probably pilgrims from Baghdad on their way to the Iraqi holy city of Karbala, who had tried to avoid the ambushes that frequently befell such pilgrims by Sunni Arab guerrillas based in places such as Latifiyah.

A member of the Baqubah council was assassinated.

In the Shiite holy city of Najaf, guerrillas bombed the HQ of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, wounding three guards. The KDP is led by Massoud Barzani, and doesn't have a significant presence in the Shiite south, so it is sort of odd that they have a party office in Najaf or that Sunni Arab guerrillas would target it there.

Congress is giving Bush another $40 billion for the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, taking the total for both to $400 billion.

By the way, in Afghanistan the old warlords appear to have won big time. This is not good.

The United Nations is urging member states not to send Iraqi asylum seekers back to Iraq, since it is too dangerous.

Saudi Arabia has spent $1 billion to secure its borders with Iraq so far this year.
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Conyers on Arrest of Antiwar Protesters

Congressman John Conyers writes:

' September 27, 2005

Office of the Chief

United States Park Police

Dwight E. Pettiford

1100 Ohio Drive S.W.

Washington, D. C. 20242

Dear Chief Pettiford:

I am writing to request information regarding the treatment of individuals arrested on September 26, 2005 in front of the White House and processed at the United States Park Police Anacostia Station.

Yesterday 384 protestors, including peace activist Cindy Sheehan, were arrested outside the White House and were brought to United States Park Police Anacostia Station. I was very surprised to learn that many of those arrested were kept handcuffed in vans and buses for up to 12 hours before they were charged and released. Some of those were released at 4:30 in the morning after being arrested at 4:00 the previous afternoon. Many of those held captive the longest were grandmothers and senior citizens. Those released after midnight were unfamiliar with Washington, DC and had no means to travel back to their hotels once the metro had closed. Anacostia is not frequented by taxicabs after midnight.

I have the following questions regarding the treatment of those arrested yesterday:

1. Why was the Anacostia Station chosen as the sole location to process all 384 arrestees when there were several other Park Police stations in the greater Washington, DC area?

2. In what other circumstances have arrestees been detained by U.S. Park Police for periods exceeding twelve hours before being charged with a crime?

3. In what other circumstances have arrestees been detained by U.S. Park Police, and kept handcuffed on buses for periods exceeding ten hours?

4. What is the established U.S. Park Police procedure for processing large numbers of arrestees in the Washington, DC area?

Please respond to the Judiciary Committee Minority Office at 2142 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC 20515, telephone number 202-225-6504, fax number 202-225-4423.

Sincerely,




John Conyers, Jr.
Ranking Member
House Committee on the Judiciary '


Via Jonathan Godfrey [jonathan.godfrey a_t_ mail d o t house.gov, Conyers's Internet Communications Director

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Sunnis Seek Last-Minute changes in Constitution

Shiite teachers in Baghdad and Iraqi police and 10 passengers on a government bus were killed in violence on Monday

The Sunni National Dialogue Council and other Iraqi politicians meeting in Amman have complained that Iraqi Sunni Arabis are facing genocide and said they are mulling a campaign of civil disobedience. (Since the Sunni Arab areas are in flames, a campaign of civil disobedience would be a big improvement). The same group, along with the Iraqi Islamic Party, expressed approval of Saudi Foreign Minsiter Saud al-Faisal recent cautions about Iranian influence in Iraq. Al-Hayat says that the National Dialogue Council (Sunni) asserted that it had been in contact with the Americans about the possibility of making last-minute changes in the constitution that might mollify the Sunni Arabs.

The International Crisis Group [Word doc.] argues that the process by which the Iraqi constitution was crafted, and several provisions whether vague or specific, have exacerbated sectarian and ethnic tensions in Iraq and bode poorly for the future.

Cindy Sheehan and several other antiwar protesters courted arrest Monday with a sit-in near the White House, and succeeded in being arrested.

Al Franken at Air America covers this weekend's protests, including the mock trial.
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Kos Diaries

Daily Kos Diaries on US troop withdrawals from Iraq:

"Quit Your Bellyachin'".

and

"Juan Cole says now is the time to leave Iraq"

Stirling Newberry at BOP also has a good discussion.

I should clarify that as several diarists noted, I do believe that the US has a duty to manage the withdrawal so as not to provoke a massive civil war. I suspect that can be done with a combination of continued training and arming of the new Iraqi army and air power. For those who say there is no way to prevent massive civil war and a million dead, I'd just suggest that that level of fatalism is not helpful or necessary or even perhaps moral. American liberals tend to believe that no form of military force is ever useful, which is rather an odd belief for non-pacifists and in light of the obvious usefulness it has had on a number of occasions in dealing with fascists, thugs and other people who use force and need to be opposed with force.
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De-Baathification Statistics

Gilbert Achcar kindly shares his translation of the following from Al-Hayat:

' Ali al-Lami, member of the De-Ba’athification Commission, told Al-Hayat that the number of Ba’athists that were affected by De-Ba’athification “does not exceed 100,000 leading members out of 1 million Ba’athist in Iraq, of whom 80% were members of the first echelon [firqa] and are entitled to get back to their positions as ordinary civil servants without holding leading positions.”

Al-Lami added that “5,000 Ba’athists of those who were members of the 2nd echelon [shu’ba] and above are wanted because of crimes they have committed against the Iraqi people, including high-ranking members of the previous regime, some of whom fled the country after the regime fell while others have joined armed groups active within Iraq.”

He also said that “over 80% of those affected by the De-Ba’athification decree are instructors, teachers and other salaried from the Ministry of Education, where 18,000 Ba’athists were affected, 11,000 of whom were later exempted from the law.”

The Ministry of Industry and Mining comes second with 13,000 affected by De-Ba’athification, followed by the Ministry of Higher Education and the Interior Ministry, other Ministries having much lower proportions. He pointed to the fact that the De-Ba’athification Commission brought 50 actions in criminal courts against Ba’athists accused of crimes. '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

British Spies in Basra Fighting Weapons Smugglers
27 Killed, 62 Wounded in Violence

Those two SAS special operations troops captured by the Basra police last Monday were one of 8 such teams charged with disrupting weapons smuggling from Iran into southern Iraq. The Iranian weapons smugglers are organized and powerful throughout the world.

Among the more powerful Iranian arms merchants is Manucher Ghorbanifar, this one with friends in high places in Washington, who is trying to pull the United States into a war against Iran. War is good for arms merchants.

Guerrilla violence left at least 27 dead and 62 wounded on Sunday. One bomber killed 9 persons including police commandos on a highway in Baghdad; 9 commandos were wounded. Shiites were targeted in Musayyib. In Hilla someone blew up a music store.

Iraqi guerrillas robbed an armored convoy carrying large amounts of cash on Sunday, killing two guards and making off with almost $1 million.

Those wingnuts who circulate the talking points about all the good things happening in Iraq should add, ' Becoming more and more like a bad noire film, resembling in some ways the endlessly diverting "Oceans 11" movies. '

Iraqi bureaucrats concerned to fight embezzlement and corruption related to the oil industry have faced assassination attempts and at least one had a son killed. American observers in Iraq have commented to me that it is now the most corrupt system on earth. Al-Sharq al-Awsat quotes parliamentarian Hadi al-Amiri today saying that literally billions are missing from the Defense Department and with regard to reconstruction contracts. Al-Amiri is from the Badr Organization, the paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

Al-Hayat reports that Muqtada al-Sadr has asked his fighters to stand down and not reply to the US/ Iraqi-government attack on Sadr City, which left ten Mahdi Army militiamen dead. Shaikh Abdul Hadi al-Darraji characterized the incursion as a "direct provocation." US officials maintained that the mission had gone in search of elements that had attacked multinational forces.

It also says that the Kurdish cabinet members have sent a second note to Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari complaining that he is acting too high-handedly in making decisions all on his own that concern their portfolios.

The United Nations has finally managed to get some food and water to thousands of displaced Tal Afar families living in tents in the desert because they were kicked out of their city by a joint US/Iraqi assault. The US military assertion that no innocent civilians were killed in the attack is contradicted by local physicians. (Such blanket denials are not a good rhetorical strategy for the army. Can't they say, "we have no information on . . . "?)

Iraqi physicians are fleeing the country in droves, leaving Iraqis with inferior health care at a time of national crisis and guerrilla war.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Grand Ayatollah Ishaq Fayyad's Fatwa in Favor the Constitution

KarbalaNews.net [Arabic] publishes a copy of the fatwa by Grand Ayatollah Ishaq Fayyad in favor of the Iraqi constitution:

Fayyad, an Afghan Hazara by birth, came to Najaf at the age of 10 and has risen to be among the 4 top ayatollahs in Iraq. He is slightly junior to Sistani, and reputedly more pro-American.

' The Office of His Excellency Grand Ayatollah Shaikh Muhammad Ishaq al-Fayyad (long may his shadow persist).

Q. Peace be upon you, and the mercy and blessings of God. Give us, the abject, your considered opinion on this question:

What is the opinion of your excellency concerining participation in the referendum on the draft constitution?

A. In His Name, May he be Exalted.

The draft of the permanent constitution for Iraq, even though it falls short of being appropriate to the Islamic, civilizational and religious status of Iraq throughout history, nevertheless answers the aspirations of the Iraqi people of all stripes, strata, and religions. In addition, this is the feasible result yielded by the strenuous efforts exerted by the sincere children of Iraq. For this reason, we call upon the iraqi people of all kinds and sects to participate in force in this referendum on the constitution, and to vote "yes" in order to safeguard their rights, liberties and the future of succeeding generations, and in order to close ranks and defeat terror and the terrorists, and to end the Occupation. We ask God, may He be Exalted, to take the hand of all with regard to whatever is good for Iraq and its people. Peace be upon you and the mercy and blessings of God. '

So far I am unaware of such an explicit, written fatwa from Sistani himself. But having the number two or three man issue it may be a way of signalling the desire of the Shiite religious establishment without appearing to tie the hands of democratic citizens in their voting behavior.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Cole on "The Issue"

"The Issue," a web-based interview show at Evolvetv.tv launches today with interviews of Juan Cole on Iraq.

Given the meltdown during the past week of the mainstream television news organizations (apparently hurricanes outdraw Iraq by 30 to 1 in the ratings) with regard to world news, we will increasingly be dependent on organizations like EvolveTV for real news.

The interview is reviewed here by Markinsanran, who had earlier done his own video interview with me.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Rebuttal by Achcar

Gilbert Achcar replies to my response. I think we've reached the point where our positions are clear and I'm disinclined to respond further, despite my respect for the seriousness of the points made.

' Dear Juan,

Many thanks for your friendly and stimulating reply. Here are a few comments on your rejoinder, as a follow-up to our exchange.

1) You wrote: “I think the US peace movement will be more effective, and more useful to the Democratic Party, if it adopts a realistic and nuanced position rather than just chanting "US out Now!"”

Well, I don’t think that the US peace movement, which is a mass movement of citizens of various views and creeds, should be concerned with being “useful to the Democratic Party.” If anything, it is the Democratic Party – if it were ever to live up to its claims – that ought to be concerned with being useful to the mass movement and to the true interests of the US social majority. The US peace movement started chanting “US Out Now” many years ago, as you certainly recall: the Democratic Party was then in power under Lyndon B. Johnson, presiding over one of the most vicious wars in US history. (And, mind you, Johnson and his “Great Society” look quite “progressive” compared to the present Democratic leadership!)

2) You wrote: “The US has very possibly set Iraq on a course to civil war that will run regardless of whether the US is there or not. The question now is not just occupation (which will end sooner or later), but who will rule Iraq and how.”

I surely agree with the first sentence (as long as it states only a possibility, which is alas far too real). It is in itself a strong indictment of the US occupation. As for “who will rule Iraq and how,” I don’t believe that that it is the business of the US. The fact is that US management of Iraq has planted the seeds of civil war in that country and is cultivating it day after day. The demand for immediate US withdrawal from Iraq is but an attempt at limiting the damage.

3) “If the US just up and leaves now, the Sunni Arabs will consolidate their military assets and attempt to take and hold territory. This move will create a condition of dual sovereignty, i.e. a revolutionary situation and possibly large-scale civil war.”

I don’t need to repeat my own arguments regarding the possible scenarios in case of US departure from Iraq. The key difference between us on this issue is not the likelihood of this or that scenario. It is encapsulated in this sentence of my letter: “I believe it is only fair to acknowledge that no one can really tell what would happen after the occupation ends.” No one, including the top brass in the Pentagon, nor, for that matter, any of the Iraqis themselves, is able to predict with any certainty what would happen in case of US evacuation of Iraq. Many scenarios are possible. There are already different predictions regarding the possible consequences of an announcement by the US of a withdrawal timetable. Some people claim that it will embolden the “insurgency” (from which they conclude, like Bush, that no timetable should be announced); others believe it will make true political reconciliation possible, given that even the hard-line Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars has repeatedly stated that, as soon as this condition is fulfilled, it will join wholeheartedly the political process.

Two things are certain on this specific issue: a) no one can be certain about the outcome; b) the situation has not stopped deteriorating in Iraq ever since the occupation began. If one adds to these two certainties the three points I made with regard to the same issue in my previous letter, there is only one sensible conclusion in my view: unless one harbors imperial designs over Iraq, one should call for “Out Now.”

4) “I was in Lebanon 1978-79 and aside from the brief Syrian bombardment of East Beirut in fall of 1978, which did not involve much in the way of casualties, there were no big battles going on then. So in two years the hot civil war had indeed subsided substantially. It is often now forgotten that by 1981-1982 the Lebanese economy was roaring back and the country was moving toward normalcy, when the Likud government in Israel launched a brutal and largely unprovoked attack on the country, throwing [it] into more years of instability.”

First, let me remind you that I myself have written that after “the political accord concluded between the Syrian regime and Yasir Arafat under Saudi sponsorship in October 1976 … Lebanon enter(ed) into a prolonged period of truce with Syrian forces deploying peacefully in the areas that were controlled by the Palestinian-Lebanese alliance.” When you referred to Lebanon, your point was to explain that the “the Syrians came in and stopped the big battles” – not, as you put it in your rejoinder, that “local militias can grow into armies that fight for territory on a national scale.” My reply was to say that the Syrian military intervention did not stop anything by itself: it only made things worse, until a political agreement opened the way to a prolonged lull. As I said already, an agreement of this kind, including acceptance of the presence of US forces, is hardly conceivable in Iraq.

Second, one more time, your record of Lebanese events proves faulty (you can be excused since you were there only in 1978-1979). You write that in 1981-1982, before the Israeli invasion in June 1982, Lebanon “was moving toward normalcy.” The truth is that heavy clashes occurred between Phalangist militias and Syrian troops in the spring of 1981, and the confrontation between these two forces remained on very tense standby until the Israeli invasion. Since the Israelis started a campaign of air raids from April 1981 onward, actually preparing the ground for their invasion, the Phalangists preferred to wait until their powerful allies occupied the country and installed them in power, instead of continuing to get pounded by Syrian missiles. The only real protracted period of peace in the presence of Syrian troops in Lebanon (1990-2005) was made possible, above all, by the October 1989 political agreement, concluded again under Saudi sponsorship.

5) Your last argument is about “the consensus of the elected Iraqi leadership” as being “fairly similar” to your position on the immediate withdrawal of US troops. Well, I believe the issue to be more complex than that. Let’s put aside the Arab Sunni community who has not taken part in the January election and is not properly represented in the elected bodies. (Strangely, you put the Arab Sunnis now at 15 % of the Iraqis — way below the common estimation of 20 %, which they dispute vehemently as underestimating their true proportion of the Iraqi population.) To be sure, the elected officials that you mention, namely Talabani and Jaafari, are supportive of extended US presence in their country. But let’s move, if you please, beyond the surface of things.

I don’t doubt for one second that Talabani’s constituency in Kurdistan backs his position. But even this Talabani looked really pitiful when he had to contradict himself in the US on the issue of the withdrawal of US troops after Bush reprimanded him. This showed that on this issue, the so-called “sovereign” government of Iraq is politically hostage to US forces, as it is physically within the Green Zone. The same fact is demonstrated much more blatantly by Jaafari’s behavior: every honest person in Iraq will tell you — and I am sure you have read enough testimonies to this regard in the Iraqi and Arab press — that the so-called “sovereignty” of the “elected Iraqi leadership” is a very limited one. On many sensitive issues, especially everything related to security and military issues, the Iraqi government is tightly controlled, and often steered by US occupation representatives – who have become great experts at arm-twisting. The recent behavior of British troops in Basra was a clear illustration of how the occupiers respect Iraq’s “sovereignty.”

Since Jaafari’s stand is contrary to the electoral program of the mostly-Shiite United Iraqi Alliance that designated him as the head of the government — a program that included the demand for a timetable for the withdrawal of occupation troops — there is much less certainty that he represents his constituency in this regard than for Talabani. It is the contrary that is certain as a matter of fact: you recalled yourself, Juan, the fact that about 120 Iraqi MPs have called for the withdrawal of US troops. To be more accurate, they signed a petition (put forward by followers of Muqtada al-Sadr in the Parliament) demanding that the official request made by the Iraqi government to the UN Security Council to extend the presence of multinational forces be rescinded, that such issues be deferred to the Parliament and not decided by the government, and that a withdrawal timetable be set immediately.

Now let’s make a very simple calculation. There were 275 MPs elected to the Iraqi national Assembly. Out of those, there are little over 70 members of the Kurdish Alliance and little less than 40 MPs of the pro-US Allawi’s list. As you know, it is highly unlikely that any of those roughly 110 MPs signed the petition. This means that the overwhelming majority of the remaining 165 MPs, most of them UIA members, signed it. In other words, an overwhelming majority of the UIA, to which Jaafari belongs, has disavowed him on this issue. For a democrat (with a small d), no “consensus” involving the likes of Jaafari — i.e. members of an executive betraying the parliamentary majority which has designated them — can be regarded as representative of a people’s will. That’s why invoking this kind of support as an argument for the continued presence of US troops in Iraq — as Bush & Co. do regularly — is not acceptable in my view, and in the view of millions of Iraqi and US citizens.

With my best regards,

Gilbert '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Why we Have to get the Troops Out of Iraq

The hundreds of thousands of protesters who came out throughout the world on Saturday were demanding a US and British withdrawal from Iraq.

The protesters are right that we have to get US ground troops out of Iraq.

The issue is not the rights and wrongs of the war. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There was no nuclear program, and the mushroom clouds with which Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice menaced us were figments of their fevered imaginations, no more substantial than the hateful internal voices that afflict schizophrenics.

But that is not a reason to get the ground troops out now.

The issue is not the lack of operational cooperation between the secular, socialist, Arab nationalist Baath Party of Iraq and the religious fanatics of al-Qaeda. There was no such operational involvement. Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and Abu Zubaydah were captured before the Iraq War, and told their American interrogators that al-Qaeda had refused to cooperate with Saddam Hussein. The Bush administration deliberately hid this crucial information from the American people, and puzzled US intelligence officials who knew about it were astounded to see Cheney and others continually go on television and assert that Saddam and Bin Laden were in cahoots in the build-up to the war.

But that is not a reason to get the ground troops out now.

That US soldiers are dying in Iraq, with the number approaching 2,000, is a tragedy. But it is not in and of itself a reason to get the troops out of Iraq. We lost some 1700 at Guam alone in World War II. The question is whether a war is worth fighting, not its human toll, since a much worse human toll may result from giving up the fight (if the US could have launched D-Day in 1940, the Holocaust might never have happened).

So that is not a reason to get the ground troops out now.

The first reason to get the ground troops out now is that they are being fatally brutalized by their own treatment of Iraqi prisoners. Abu Ghraib was horrific, and we who are not in Congress or the Department of Defense have still only seen a fraction of the photographs of it that exist. Sy Hersh learned of rapes, some of them documented. Human Rights Watch has documented further prisoner abuse by US troops in Iraq. Sometimes the troops just go in and break arms or legs out of frustration. It has long been obvious that the Abu Ghraib scandal was only the tip of the iceberg, and that the abusive practices were allowed and encouraged by Rumsfeld and high officers, and weren't some aberration among a few corporals. (Even Senator Frist may be involved in a cover-up of the torture.) There is also no reason to think that the abuses have ceased. The denials of the US military, based on its own internal investigations (which apparently involve looking at official reports filed and talking to officers in charge) are pretty pitiful. The brutalization of the US military and of its prisoners is a brutalization of the entire American public. It is an undermining of the foundational values of the Republic. We cannot remain Americans and continue to behave this way routinely. The some 15,000 Iraqis in American custody are all by now undying enemies of the United States. Some proportion of them started out that way but perhaps could have been won over. Some of the detainees were probably just in the wrong place at the wrong time. After a time in US prison camps, they will hate us forever. And they know where thousands of tons of hidden munitions are.

The second reason is that the ground troops are not accomplishing the mission given them, and are making things worse rather than better.

When Saddam Hussein first fell, the Sunni Arab elites were mostly quiet, and were waiting to see what their relations with the US would be like. Fallujah was less troublesome than Shiite Najaf in the first weeks of April. But the US insisted on garrisoning troops in a local school, which alarmed parents that their children might be endangered. They mounted a demonstration, and green US troops panicked and shot 17 civilian demonstrators. That began a feud between the clans to which the dead belonged and the US army, which, in the way of feuds, grew over time. By March of 2004, anti-American feeling was so virulent that crowds attacked, killed and mutilated four private security guards, one of them a South African. George W. Bush took the attack personally, and ordered an assault on Fallujah. (Norman Mailer thinks the Iraq War is about white guys making it clear that brown guys are not going to be allowed to lay a glove on them.) The spring attack on Fallujah, however, was extremely unpopular among Iraqis, and members of the US-appointed Interim Governing Council began resigning or threatening to resign. Even the Shiites in Kufa sent aid. The US backed off Fallujah.

In summer of 2003, there had been a growing, low-intensity guerrilla conflict in the Sunni Arab areas. But large areas were relatively quiet, including the city of Mosul (with a population of about a million). A lot of Sunnis were still on the fence.

Then after Bush won reelection, in November of 2004, Bush sent the Marines into Fallujah. He emptied a city of 300,000, turning the residents into refugees and the homeless no less surely than the hurricanes have done to the inhabitants of New Orleans more recently. The American assault damaged 2/3s of the buildings in Fallujah and left it a ghost town. In the past few months, some Fallujans have been allowed to return, and a few neighborhoods are functioning (shown, like the facade in the Jim Carrey vehicle, The Truman Show, to gullible Western journalists as evidence that everything is hunky dory). Other Fallujans are living in tents atop the rubble of their former homes. There are still bombings and daily mortar fire in the area. I noted an Aljazeerah report of a mortar shell falling near a US position not so long ago, and asked here why the US press did not report it. Someone with a relative serving in the US military in that area wrote to say that they take mortar fire all the time and it was unremarkable. The propaganda line was that "Fallujah is the safest city in Iraq." But US troops have been killed there not so long ago, and the slogan is clearly not true.

The reaction among the Sunni Arabs to the Fallujah campaign was immediate and explosive. They mounted large-scale urban revolts and rebellions virtually everywhere. Ramadi, Samarra, Qaim, Heet, you name it. The coup de grace was Mosul. Some 4,000 Iraqi policemen abruptly resigned. Masked men appeared on the streets and set up checkpoints. Mosul went over to the guerrilla movement, and substantial portions of it are still unstable.

Mosul contains about a fifth of the Sunni Arabs! It had been quiet. It was a model, under Gen. Petraeus. Now it had exploded. It became unsafe.

The Great Sunni Arab Revolt of November-December 2004 was a direct result of the Fallujah campaign.

It was a disaster, and not just on security grounds. The Great Revolt made it impossible for the Sunni Arabs to participate in the January 30, 2005 elections. Their areas were too insecure, or too sullen, to vote. The Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni group descended from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, had announced a slate of 275 candidates for parliament. They were withdrawn. The cooperation vanished.

The Sunni Arabs only managed to elect 17 deputies to the Parliament on Jan. 30, out of 275 seats. Three of the 17 were gifts from the major Shiite coalition (which led the more hard line Sunnis to decline to cooperate with those 3). The Sunni Arabs were virtually absent. Who was present? The election was won by the religious Shiite parties, especially the Da`wa and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Even the Sadrists, most of whom were lukewarm about involvement in politics under Occupation, had more deputies than did the Sunnis! The Shiite religious parties despise the ex-Baathists (i.e. most of the Sunnis). The other winners were the Kurds, who wanted to safeguard their semi-autonomy and if anything hated the Sunni Arabs more than did the religious Shiites.

And now the elected parliament drafted the constitution. The Sunni Arabs were included in the negotiations, rather as an eccentric uncle might receive a half-hearted invitation to stay for dinner, but would then be politely ignored, as he twittered on about some conspiracy theory, or sometimes greeted with giggles by the ruder children.

The constitution that was fashioned by the religious Shiites and the Kurds unsurprisingly contains all sorts of goodies for Shiites and Kurds, but cuts the Sunni Arabs permanently out of the deal. Substantial proportions of the oil income will stay in the provinces (i.e. Kurdistan and the Shiite South) rather than going to Baghdad. All future oil fields that are discovered and developed will be the sole property of the provincial confederation in which they are found. Most such likely fields are in the Shiite areas. (There are rumors of a field off Fallujah, but it is not a sure thing).

All the major Sunni Arab organizations and respected political and clerical figures have come out against the constitution.

In the meantime, the US has now attacked another Sunni city, this time the Turkmen stronghold of Tal Afar. In the continued "scorched earth" policy of the US military in the Sunni areas, a joint US/ Iraqi (mostly Kurdish) force appears to have levelled entire neighborhoods in Tal Afar, a northern Turkmen city, making most of its 200,000 inhabitants refugees living in squalid tent camps or with friends and relatives elsewhere. The operation yielded relatively few arrested terrorists. There is a news blackout on Tal Afar imposed by the US and the Iraqi authorities. This move is draconian and anyway unnecessary, since the American cable news channels have already imposed a global news blackout in favor of playing "Weather Channel" 24/7. Members of a Red Crescent delegation reached Tal Afar, but had their cell phones confiscated, were told to distribute aid in a remote and little known part of the city, and ended up mainly giving help to the displaced persons in their tent settlements: ' Hasan Bal, a member of the Red Crescent team that went to Tal Afar, stressed that theirs was a very difficult mission. ''The people and especially the children in Tal Afar are living in miserable conditions. Their conditions are indescribable. It is practically impossible not to cry for them,'' noted Bal. '

Basically, if all the US military in Iraq is capable of is operations like Fallujah and Tal Afar, then they really need to get out of the country quick before they drive the whole country, and the region, into chaos.

Even as they are chasing after shadows in dusty border towns, the US military is allowing much of Baghdad to fall into the hands of the guerrillas.

And that is why we have to get the ground troops out. Counter-insurgency has to have both a military and a political track. Even as the enemy is being pressed, you have to reach out to the civilian leadership and try to draw them into a truce.

The US military has had no political successes in the Sunni Arab areas. Mosul and some parts of Baghdad could have been pointed to in summer of 2004. In summer of 2005, these earlier successes have evaporated like a desert mirage toward which thirsty soldiers race.

The situation in the Sunni Arab areas was worse in summer of 2004 than it had been in summer of 2003. It is worse in the summer of 2005 than it had been in 2004. Even the Iraqi political groupings that had earlier been willing to cooperate with the US boycotted the Jan. 30 elections and are now assiduously working to defeat the new constitution.

Things in the Sunni Arab areas are getting worse, not better.

I conclude that the presence of the US ground troops is making things worse, not better.

Let's get them out, now, before they destroy any more cities, create any more hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons, provoke any more ethnic hatreds by installing Shiite police in Fallujah or Kurdish troops in Turkmen Tal Afar. They are sowing a vast whirlwind, a desert sandstorm of Martian proportions, which future generations of Americans and Iraqis will reap.

The ground troops must come out. Now. For the good of Iraq. For the good of America.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Tens of Thousands Demonstrate Against Iraq War
Al-Hakim Calls for "Yes" on Constitution
Arrest Warrant in Basra for British

Over 100,000 protesters rallied in Washington, DC, against the Iraq War on Saturday. Protests were also held in London, San Francisco and other cities.

US troops entered Sadr City or Eastern Baghdad on Saturday in search of Mahdi Army elements they suspected of having launched guerrilla attacks. They encountered armed Sadrists and killed 8 of them. Earlier press reports that things were 'quiet" in Sadr City required that we ignore what people there actually believe and say in Arabic in private.

Ian Mather reviews the situation in the Sunni Arab heartland, the Shiite south and the Kurdish north. He finds that only the situation in the last is at all encouraging.

Judge Raghib al-Mudhafar, chief of the Basra Anti-Terrorism Court in Basra, has issued a murder warrant for two British SAS officers who were arrested in that city last Monday and then freed by the British military. British Defense Minister John Reid rejected the move on the grounds that British soldiers in Iraq are not under Iraqi judicial jurisdiction and would have to be tried by British courts-martial instead. Judge al-Mudhafar dismisses this argument, saying he suspects at least one of the SAS undercover operatives of being Canadian and so not covered by extrajudiciality provisions. The British military is denying rumors that the two SAS men were attempting to obstruct Iranian operations in Basra. They rightly point out to the Independent that there are enough munitions in Iraq, and enough organized local militias, that one simply does not need to posit the Iranians as the troublemakers.

I find it difficult to believe that they two were simply gathering information, as suggested by their disguise of ordinary Arab clothing. They obviously could not really pass as Basrans. My suspicion is that they were on a mission of extraordinary rendition, i.e. capturing or killing some local leader they felt was endangering the British mission but who could not be detained through ordinary means. I don't think it makes much sense to suggest that they were planning to blow up British soldiers and blame it on Shiites, so as to allow British troops to stay in Iraq (this is a conspiracy theory that has been alleged).

I'm afraid that the Great Basra Jailbreak looks to be the Dinshaway Incident for 21st century Iraq. It was acting high-handedly that got the British kicked out of Egypt, and acting high-handedly is likely to unite the Iraqi elite and masses against them, too. An unscientific poll [with a small "n" and lacking attention to getting a representative sample] by the Times of London found that 23 out of 40 Basrans polled said that the British troops should stay for the time being. They were afraid that without them the security situation would deteriorate in a major way. Members of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq apparently were delighted to see Muqtada al-Sadr's militiamen taken down a notch. But I'm not confident that the Times of London asked the slum dwellers, and I suspect a majority of Basrans now want the British out. Certainly, that sentiment seems to be growing.

Angry Shiite militiamen fired Katyusha rockets at several British targets in the city, though not to much effect.

The Guardian reports that the British government has quiet plans to begin significantly reducing British troop presence in Iraq next May. The government denies the reports, which had surfaced in leaked Defense Ministry documents earlier in the summer.

This article in the Scotsman is an excellent overview of what has gone wrong in Basra. But the interviewees have several inaccurate impressions. First, the puritanical attitude in Basra does not derive from the influence of Muqtada al-Sadr, who just has a few hundred followers in this city of 1.3 million. Rather, the puritanism has been imposed by the Badr Corps paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a major party in the province; and by the paramilitary of the Fadila Party, an offshoot of the Sadr Movement led by Ayatollah Muhammad Yaqubi. Second, the article neglects to mention that the Shiite religious parties won the Jan. 30 elections in Basra Province. The elected provincial government is responsible for hiring militiamen as policemen. The idea of creating a whole new police force not controlled by the civilian political parties, which some British observers have put forward, fails to reckon with the fact that there is already an elected federal and provincial government whose deputies would have something serious to say about any new gendarmes force.

James Glanz of the NYT explains what is at stake in the Shiite South.

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim the Shiite cleric who leads the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the United Iraqi Alliance (which dominates the federal parliament), has called supporting the new constitution a "spiritual duty." Since the constitution was negotiated by SCIRI, its support is unsurprising. SCIRI controls 9 of Iraq's 18 provinces, so it can play a major role in helping pass the constitution.

Al-Hayat [Arabic] reports that the rumors that Sistani would give a fatwa urging the faithful to vote for the constitution may have been overblown. The interviewees in the article maintain that the four grand ayatollahs in Najaf would not want to rob their followers of the prerogative of deciding for themselves which way to vote. The article does imply that they are encouraging people to vote. The problem here is that Grand Ayatollah Ishaq Fayyad has in fact already said that Shiites should vote for the constitution. It is admittedly not a formal fatwa.

In contrast, 150 Sunni Arab leaders met in Amman to sketch out a strategy for defeating the constitution in the October 15 referendum. They reject it in part because it allots them relatively little of Iraq's oil wealth, which would rather go to the Kurds and the Shiites.

Iran's foreign ministry rejected charges by the Foreign Minister of Saudi Arabia, Saud al-Faisal, that Iran was meddling in Iraq.

Saud al-Faisal had accused Iran of moving substantial numbers of men, as well as goods and materiel, into Iraq. The charges mirror those of hard line Iraqi Sunnis, who have never reconsiled themselves to the Shiite majority in Iraq and so are always positing big Iranian population transfers into the south. This charge is frankly silly. Saud al-Faisal also let it it slip that Saudi Arabia and the United States actively helped Saddam Hussein to put down the Shiite uprising in spring of 1991. He said, "We fought a war together to keep Iran out of Iraq after Iraq was driven out of Kuwait. Now we are handing the whole country over to Iran without reason." ' How else can this statement be interpreted?

Many Iraqi Shiites are still furious at the US for allowing the Baath regime to suppress the Shiite uprising, since some 60,000 lives were lost in the repression.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Reader Response on Cole/Achcar

Billmon carefully considers the pros and cons and finally decides to call for US troops out now because otherwise there is a real danger of the US becoming a progressively more fascist society, and because the only way for the US to prevent an all-out Iraqi civil war is to kill on a massive scale.

Jonny Bakho writes

'I read your column daily and I especially enjoyed your exchange with Gilbert Achcar.

Lost in the Exchange: Your position and Gilbert's position are much closer to each other than to the policy of Mr Bush. I find it troubling that Bush policy in Iraq is undiscussed and unmentionable? by the press.

Apparently (he never discusses details), Mr Bush believes US troops will still be in Iraq 10 years from now in permanent basis we are constructing in Iraq. Mr Bush has NO intention of calling for a "withdrawal on a short timetable of almost all US and Coalition ground troops from Iraq" as you suggest. Unfortunately, most Americans do not realize that Bush has no plan to leave Iraq this because the press rarely/never mentions it.

Even IF Mr Bush were to take the extreme position of "bring them home now", it would take a year to bring about the orderly withdrawal of US troops. In practice, your call for a "short timetable" and Gilbert's call for "get out now" are little different from each other given logistical considerations. Each would require a change in Bush Political Policy. Each would elevate potential Political solutions to Iraq above the military solution Bush is trying to impose.

Both of you are calling for a major reversal of current Bush Iraq policy (which is not working). The failure of the Bush policy and his unwilliness to consider changes needs to be the primary focus, not minor quibbles between "out now" and "short timetable". If you would compare your Policy Proposal to Bush Policy and the Achcar Proposal, this would be more clear to your readers, especially those who prefer to highlight the differences in those opposed to Bush policy than the similarities. Either your Proposal or Gilbert's would require change in direction and move US policy in the same direction. The US really needs to have an open debate about Iraq policy but it is difficult because Mr Bush NEVER reveals the details of his policy. '

Jonny Bakho

Another reader writes:

' Gilbert Achcar is naive as to what it takes to achieve a war of movement, as you insist. In Afghanistan the vehicle of choice of the Taliban were 4x4 pickup trucks, which could hold a few armed men or sometimes had a heavy weapon mounted. These were called "Afghan Panzers," because they were much more useful and ubiquitous than the Soviet armored vehicles left lying around.

Another good example was the Japanese "Sitzkrieg" in Malaya in 1941-2, where they invaded on the cheap by cramming infantry into innocuous-looking cargo ships and dumping them on the beaches. They proceeded to outmaneuver the British infantry and vehicle-riding troops by purloining thousands of bicycles, which like the Afghan Panzers were all-terrain vehicles. On good roads they outran the retreating British in the jungle and were able to bypass many strongpoints instead of waiting for their few tanks to come up.

It's foolish to measure armies of the Third World by Great Power standards. A lot of prognosticators wound up with egg on their faces when the Arab Nations were unable to defeat Israel in 1948, despite the British and French weapons that their militaries had been supplied with. As Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest said, the primary requirement for victory is to, "Get there first with the most men." It doesn't matter how you do it, so long as you're able to do it. '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Cobban Critique of Cole

My good friend Helena Cobban offers her own critique of my position on the need for some way of forestalling massive conventional civil war in Iraq in the aftermath of an Anglo-American withdrawal of ground troops.

She asks where a plan like mine has succeeded. I answer, Kosovo.

I don't want to be thin-skinned, but I have to object to the ad hominem approach of both Cobban and Achcar (below) in asking about my credentials to propose such plans. First of all, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith, who headed the Department of Defense during and after the Iraq War, supposedly have such credentials, but they clearly had no idea whatsoever what they were doing. So security credentials are no guarantee of anything. Second, my thinking on these things generally tracks with that of scholars such as Barry Posen at MIT's Security Studies Program, with which I have an affiliation, by the way. Third, the details of how the US military would accomplish a task would of course be left to the military people, who are experts in their own world; but over-arching goals can usefully be suggested by civilian analysts. Finally, I'm not exactly innocent of military history.

Cobban mischaracterizes my plan insofar as what I propose is giving the new Iraqi army close air support of a sort that would allow it to face down conventional military attacks by armed guerrillas marching on the Green Zone. There are now about 3000 Iraqi army troops that could and would fight in such a battle, and US air support would ensure decisive victories. The point of the US air forces and special ops is simply to support the Iraqi army; the special ops would have to be there to rescue any US crews that were shot down. The air bases could be in Kuwait in the south and in Kurdistan in the north. They would not be permanent. There are no such things as permanent bases. All of the bases I grew up on are gone. Bases are a political artefact, and depend on political agreements. If the Iraqis want them they will be there, if they don't, they won't. Look at the Philippines.

My plan does indeed suggest an abandonment of much of the country for the time being to local forces. The Anglo-American forces aren't able to stop local forces from taking over, anyway, though they can destroy the cities taken over, which is unlikely to make the people there pro-American or happy with the government in Baghdad, to say the least. The Shiite religious parties that control the central government also control much of the Shiite south, which is not therefore problematic. The problem with just letting go of a city like Mosul, with 80 percent Sunni Arab population and over a million inhabitants, is that it can become a base for the guerrillas and ultimately with enough bases they could close in on the government in Baghdad with conventional armies. At that point they look like the Serbian armies in Kosovo and I am saying we know what to do about such a threat and know we can do it.

My plan assumes that the unconventional guerrilla violence, with bombings and assassinations, will go on for some time and that there is nothing anyone can do about it. Withdrawal of Coalition ground troops might put the Shiites and the Kurds in more of a mood to compromise with the neo-Baathists, Salafis and tribal forces now waging the guerrilla war, which could help.

The bottom line is that Iraq is fractured politically and militarily and a precipitate and complete withdrawal of Coalition forces would allow the outbreak of full-blown civil war among armed factions, which in turn would certainly pull in neighbors like Iran and Saudia Arabia. This scenario is not certain, but it is highly likely and the Iraqis I have brought it up with say the same thing. It is a potentiality that must be guarded against, since its consequences would be horrific. Simple withdrawal is not prudent because it does not so guard.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Fadilah Calls for Defeat of Constitution


Ayatollah Muhammad Ya`qubi, the leader in Najaf of the Fadilah (Virtue) Party--which has a big political and social base in the southern port city of Basra--has called on his followers to reject the new constitution because it does not go far enough toward consecrating Islamic law as the law of the land. The Fadilah Party is a branch of the Sadr Movement, founded by Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr (d. 1999), which is known for its puritanism and zealotry. Ya`qubi is a rival of Muqtada al-Sadr, the son of the slain Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, who leads a much bigger branch of the Sadr movement.

Fadilah did well in the Jan. 30 elections in Basra, and at one point, at least, had put together a coalition that gave it 21 seats on the 41-seat provincial council. The Telegraph seems to say that Fadilah was subsequently outmaneuvered and that Ya`qubi has been somewhat marginalized. (His main rival in the city is the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and its paramilitary, the Badr Corps). Ya`qubi has a serious and somewhat bitter rivalry with Sistani and the Telegraph is mistaken to suggest that Sistani might talk him out of his opposition.

The British appear to be viewing Ya`qubi's opposition to the constitution, along with the recent crisis over the captured British military spies, as a sign that Basra could turn into another Fallujah and become a hotbed of anti-Coalition activities. I'm not sure when exactly the Anglo-American forces are going to realize this, but the entirety of Iraq outside Kurdistan is already more or less a "Fallujah" in the sense that they hate us and organize local militias and at most some proportion are putting up with foreign forces only out of Machiavellian calculation. Where any major political grouping finds the Coalition inconvenient, it would turn on them in a split second.

Nancy Youssef and Mohammed al Dulaimy of Knight Ridder report that

' The ethnic cleansing of Baghdad neighborhoods is proceeding at an alarming and potentially destabilizing pace.

Some Shiite Muslim residents in predominantly Sunni Muslim Baghdad neighborhoods are fleeing their homes because they say the country's violence and sectarian tensions have reached their front doors, forcing them to move into more homogenous communities.

Government officials and academic experts agree that the virtual expulsion of some ethnic groups from mixed communities is troubling and threatens the nation's stability, which depends on a degree of ethnic harmony. Some worry the purges are setting the early stages of civil war, saying that homogenous neighborhoods could become future battlegrounds in the capital.

Indeed, some government officials concede that insurgents, mainly Sunnis, are controlling parts of Baghdad.

"Civil war today is closer than any time before," said Hazim Abdel Hamid al Nuaimi, a professor of politics at al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. "All of these explosions, the efforts by police and purging of neighborhoods is a battle to control Baghdad." '

The article, among the few in the mainstream press to recognize how bad things are in Baghdad, confirms the report I received from Baghdad last weekend about Sunni Arab guerrillas taking over entire districts of the capital.

Only between 4 and 10 percent of the fighters in Iraq are foreigners, and they are mostly Algerians, Syrians, Yemenis and Sudanese, not Saudis.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair is shocked at the level of "fanaticism" in Iraq, which he did not expect, says Geoffrey Hoon. In the old days of the British Empire, the "fanaticism" in "natives" meant that they objected to being invaded and ruled by the British.

Reuters surveys guerrilla violence in Iraq on Friday
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Abdul Amir Younes Hussein Not Charged 5 Months Later

Arianna Huffington explores the case of CBS cameraman Abdul Amir Younes Hussein, who was detained by the US military after a car bombing in Mosul over 5 months ago. The US military maintains that he had a connection to the guerrilla movement. That may or may not be, but we cannot know unless he is charged, indicted and tried. The Pentagon is refusing to bring him to any kind of trial or even reveal the charges against him. He was briefly turned over to an Iraqi court, which did not find enough evidence to prosecute him. But then the US military reasserted its jurisdiction over him.

The severe weakening of the Bill of Rights under the Bush administration is a more fateful policy than the Iraq War or dealing with the hurricanes. The Republic can survive those disasters. The Republic cannot survive if its very foundation, the Constitution, is undermined. Bush has been kicking the pillars out from under it assiduously for nearly 5 years now, and soon nothing will be left but the imperial presidency. Even if Hussein is not a US citizen, it is un-American to hold him forever with no formal charges or trial.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Achcar Replies

Gilbert Achcar replies to my posting of 9/23 on the undesirability of an immediate and complete withdrawal of US forces from Iraq:

' Let me begin this second open letter to you by thanking you, first of all, for welcoming my previous one on your blog in a most democratic and friendly spirit. The reason why I am reacting for the second time to your comments is twofold. On the one hand, of course, it is because you are addressing again the issue of the withdrawal of US forces, to which, as a dedicated antiwar activist, I am very sensitive. On the other hand, if I do feel the need to reply to you in particular, while there are so many other articles posted or published every day with stands close to yours, it is because I take your arguments more seriously than most, as do many of your readers.

I have read today your reply to Michael Schwartz’s piece, which I regarded also as an indirect response to my previous rejoinder. To tell you the truth, I am even more surprised than when I read your ten points a month ago. The reason for my surprise relates, of course, to the arguments which you put forward. But it is also due to the fact that you chose the eve of an antiwar demonstration that promises to be extremely large (in light of the change of mood of the US population on the Iraq issue) to make points that – unwillingly, I am sure – echo Bush’s speech at the Pentagon yesterday (Sept. 22) trying to pre-empt the antiwar movement.

You point one more time to your experience in the region – “I lived in Lebanon in the early years of the civil war. … I have seen how these situations go out of control, with my own eyes” – in a way that may sound like an “appeal to (your own) authority.” Let me then reply to you, in my capacity as a Lebanese-born colleague, having a first-hand experience of the war in his country of origin from its very first sparks in 1975, through the Syrian intervention and up to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and siege of Beirut, and their immediate aftermath. I shall start with your arguments about Iraq itself.

You wrote: “Iraq is not now having a conventional civil war, in which you’d have militias fielding 2,000 or 3,000 men against one another and vying over territory. If such a civil war broke out, of course the US military could stop it. A few AC-130s and helicopter gunships could scatter the infantry battalions.”

I am rather baffled at your confidence in asserting opinions on military issues. But let me assume that your expertise on military matters matches your expertise in Middle East history and politics. Even then, since you admitted, in your reply to Hitchens, your “lack of experience in Iraq,” you ought to be more cautious, I believe, in asserting opinions that require, at the very least, some knowledge of the terrain. Any person that has been to Iraq would tell you that, aside from the mountainous Kurdish area, this country is as flat as can be, made of cities and villages separated by vast stretches of desert or semi-desert land. In such terrain, you cannot have “infantry battalions” moving to invade an enemy’s territory unless they are equipped with appropriate military vehicles, especially tanks, and benefit from air cover. None of the Arab Sunni militias seems to have these capacities: only the Kurdish forces and the Iraqi regular army possess them to a certain degree (more the vehicles than air means, since the US purposely refuses to equip the Iraqi army with such weapons in order to remain “indispensable”).

Your scenario whereby “Ramadi and Samarra mount a large militia that marches on Baghdad (and) hooks up with Sunni Arab fighters in West Baghdad” is irrelevant to Iraqi conditions. This kind of “war of movement” is very unlikely in present-day Iraq, precisely because it takes not “militias fielding 2,000 or 3,000 men,” but very regular-like land-air military forces with a centralized command. Arab Sunni forces, which are highly heterogenous, would be crushed if they tried to get into a war of movement, having to fight on two fronts against the Kurds and the Shiites, taking hold of the “regular” army. What is much more likely and already happening in Iraq with respect to “civil war” (putting aside attacks against occupation troops) – either in a low-intensity or in an increasingly intensive form – are two kinds of violence: stealth attacks of the suicide-attack type, already at their utmost; and urban warfare in mixed areas.

Occupation troops have proved completely ineffective in preventing the first type and one can easily argue that their very presence makes suicide-attacks much easier to organize, as Michael Schwartz convincingly argued. And if ever some Sunni militia were planning “to kill the leaders of the elected government or Grand Ayatollah Sistani,” as you put it, it is definitely not the presence of US troops that would prevent it from trying, as suicide-attackers have proved capable of inflicting heavy casualties on US forces themselves within their own military camps!

As for the second type, it has dramatically increased and is still increasing day after day under the occupation: Arab Sunni militias are taking hold of some of the key Sunni-majority areas, and committing exactions against Shiite minorities. Arab Shia militias have also begun – though on a lesser scale due to Sistani’s strict attitude against sectarian retaliations – to commit exactions against Sunnis in Shia-majority areas. US methods for dealing with this second type of violence in Sunni areas, whether applied by US forces alone or along with Iraqi forces acting as their auxiliaries, rank among the clearest examples of counterproductive measures, as the experiences of Falluja and now Tal Afar prove. Both operations were followed by a dramatic increase in the level of daily violence in Iraq.

One could reasonably argue, as many already have, that the overall effect of a withdrawal of occupation forces would not be more violence, but less violence and an incentive for conflicting factions to settle for a compromise. Nevertheless, I believe it is only fair to acknowledge that no one can really tell what would happen after the occupation ends. If we admit that we cannot prophesy the future, we cannot then support a continued occupation on the basis of a purely hypothetical assumption, given that what we do know is that: 1) the worse-case scenario would only be a result brought by the occupation itself, and gets more likely the longer the occupation continues; 2) “divide and rule” is the oldest imperial recipe of them all; and 3) imperial powers have a terrible historical record in “pacifying” other lands.

Anyone aware of the record of imperialism, especially citizens of the occupiers’ countries who ought to know what their governments have been up to, should be demanding the withdrawal of occupation troops from Iraq, and surely not giving credence to the pretexts used to prolong the occupation – under whichever form. This last remark refers, of course, to your assertion that “the US [or somebody, and unfortunately that means the US] has a duty to maintain a couple of air bases in the area along with some Special Ops forces to forestall a Himalayan tragedy in the near to medium term.”

Let me now come to the “lessons of history” part of your arguments. You write that when it seemed like “Phalangists were about to lose” in Lebanon, in 1976 “Syria came in and stopped the big battles and saved the Maronite Christians. … The Syrians used their tanks to stop the fighting.” Your memory is faulty here. When Syrian troops entered Lebanon in June 1976, with a US and Israeli green light, they indeed saved the Phalangists and their allies from defeat in the mountains, but that was at the cost of adding the much heavier war between Syrian forces and the Palestinian-Lebanese coalition to the continued war between the Phalangist forces and that coalition, without stopping the latter.

Instead of your simplistic summary – “the Syrians came in and stopped the big battles” – the truth of the matter is that the Lebanese war saw, from then on, some of its biggest battles – in the mountains, the Beqaa and the South – and some of its worse massacres. For example, the one in the Palestinian camp of Tell Zaatar in August 1976, which Phalangists invaded, thanks to the Syrian intervention (a precedent to Sabra and Shatila, committed under Israeli cover).

Syrian forces were headed into a quagmire in Lebanon, proving unable to suppress the resistance of the Palestinian-Lebanese alliance, had it not been for the political accord concluded between the Syrian regime and Yasir Arafat under Saudi sponsorship in October 1976. Only then did Lebanon enter into a prolonged period of truce with Syrian forces deploying peacefully in the areas that were controlled by the Palestinian-Lebanese alliance. The equivalent for Iraq would be an agreement to be concluded between the contending Iraqi forces, accepting the indefinite presence of US troops in their country (putting aside the huge difference between the perception of fellow Arab Syrians in Lebanon and the utterly alien US troops in Iraq). Such an agreement is very unlikely, to put it mildly!

You then add: “When civil war broke out in Afghanistan in the 1980s, it left a million dead, displaced 5 million persons from the country, and left millions more displaced internally. Iraq is similar in population size and in ethnic and ideological complexity to Afghanistan. A full scale civil war could be equally devastating to Iraq.” There is definitely a problem, here again, with your record of events: it was not the “civil war” that was most devastating to Afghanistan in the 80’s, but the Soviet occupation of that country trying to “pacify” it! This is a most boomeranging argument. In light of the “civil war,” Taliban rule, etc., that continued after Soviet troops were out, should one have argued, in your view, for the continued Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, as preferred by the Kabul government? Or maybe did you want them replaced by US troops already back then? Of course, in Afghanistan as in Iraq, reparations and international assistance under UN supervision might have been helpful, but surely we wouldn’t have called for the Soviet Union to continue its occupation.

Most surprising is your conclusion: “But frankly I think it would be selfish to just bust into Iraq (which 75 percent of Americans supported), turn it upside down, set it on a course toward civil war, and then abruptly pick up our marbles and go home altogether. We did that in Afghanistan after 1989, and it did not turn out well for us.”

Since “we” in your final sentence only makes sense if it refers to Soviet troops, I am wondering, Juan, if you were some kind of hawkish anti-Gorbachev Stalinist in 1989? Joke aside, I find it odd that you worry about being selfish, but yet raise the argument about the dangers of $20 a gallon gasoline in order to justify the continued presence of US forces in Iraq. At no point did you refer to the will of the main people concerned: the Iraqis themselves. On this score, if we assume that the overwhelming majorities of the Kurds and the Arab Sunnis have symmetrically opposed positions on the presence of occupation troops, this would leave us with the Arab Shiites who are clearly divided on the matter, between those who agree on the temporary presence of foreign troops and those who want them out immediately.

I won’t try to assert that an increasing majority of the Shiites are for the latter position, not due to a lack of arguments, but because it amounts again to a vain guessing game. It should be sufficient that there is definitely no consensus on the occupation among Iraqis, and that a very substantial portion of the Iraqi population, at the very least, wants occupation forces out – including the overwhelming majority of those in whose territory occupation forces are most active militarily – to induce every democratic-minded person to join the marchers in demanding that occupation troops be brought home now.

With my best regards,

Gilbert '

Cole Responds

Dear Gilbert:

I am deeply in your debt for all your kindnesses, sharing of important translations, and critique of my own work. As Proverbs 27:17 says, "Iron sharpens iron; so a man sharpens his friend's countenance." As with cutting oneself shaving, having one's countenance sharpened isn't always painless, but one has to be grateful for anything that ends up making one sharper. Certainly, your experience, knowledge and acumen make you a pleasure to debate on these crucial issues.

I suppose I do want to underline that what I have called for is the withdrawal on a short timetable of almost all US and Coalition ground troops from Iraq. The difference between that and calling for all US military presence to leave is not insignficant, but it is also not perhaps the most important gulf that could be imagined. As for my having reiterated my position on the eve (now the day) of a major peace rally in Washington, I am not sure what it has to do with anything. I am speaking to everyone at my web log, not just the peace movement. I am not a pacifist. I believe in collective security, which involves the judicious use of force where there is UNSC consensus on the need for it. And I think the US peace movement will be more effective, and more useful to the Democratic Party, if it adopts a realistic and nuanced position rather than just chanting "US out Now!"

As with all major disputes, our disagreement has to do with premises rather than the details of historical analogies. Basically, I do not accept that the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq would suddenly result in peace. This is because of my own analysis of what the fighting is about. Whatever its past as a hotbed of Arab nationalism, Iraqi political identity has now become increasingly fractured and based on sectarian and linguistic markers. The Sunni Arab elites believe that they have been unjustly demoted to the lowest of the low in Iraqi society. They believe that they are the majority, and that a lot of the supposed Shiite Iraqis are really just Iranians who flooded across the border. They believe that the new constitution will leave them with 5 percent of the country's oil and other natural resources, which is completely unacceptable to them.

The United States precipitated the demotion of the Sunni Arabs with its invasion. Mr. Bremer abetted it by dissolving the Iraqi army and acquiescing in the firing of some 17,000 former Baath Party members from government positions (including simple school teachers). Having precipitated a Shiite-Kurdish ascendancy in Iraqi politics, the US has very possibly set Iraq on a course to civil war that will run regardless of whether the US is there or not. The question now is not just occupation (which will end sooner or later), but who will rule Iraq and how. The current answer is that the Shiite religious parties will do so, with the Kurds as junior partners and their own semi-autonomy, and that virtually all Iraqi petroleum proceeds will be in the hands of the Da'wa Party, SCIRI, and the two Kurdish parties.

This answer is unacceptable to the Sunni Arabs, whether they are neo-Baathists or Salafis or just local tribesmen. The Shiite religious parties and the Kurds have shown no ability or willingness to reach out to and reassure any significant group among the Sunni Arabs. The Sunni Arabs include the former Baath officer corps. They have access to plenty of money and they know where 250,000 tons of missing munitions are stashed. They can fight for a decade or more, and have every reason to do so.

If the US just up and leaves now, the Sunni Arabs will consolidate their military assets and attempt to take and hold territory. This move will create a condition of dual sovereignty, i.e. a revolutionary situation and possibly large-scale civil war. I don't believe, by the way, that they will seek or accept partition. They want a significant role in Iraq as a whole. They may settle for something less than dominance, but they are simply not going to accept being reduced to a poor, powerless and despised minority.

I disagree with you entirely that Sunni Arab militias cannot or will not move out from the Sunni cities in the west and the north to hook up with those in Baghdad because they lack armored vehicles and air cover. In the absence of the US, the Sunni Arab militias would not need air cover because the Iraqi government has no functioning air force. Moreover, they do not need armored vehicles because the new Iraqi military has only a rudimentary set of armored units. They could easily descend on the capital (in used cars!), and the flatness of the terrain would aid them to do so. There would certainly be a "war of movement" as you put it, and it would be happening even as we speak if the US military did not forestall it. Neighborhood-based militias in conditions of civil war attempt to take over more districts of their city and also expand to take territory outside it. As you know better than I, the Palestinians in West Beirut went down to Damour, a Christian town south of the capital, and conducted a massacre there in January of 1976. Sunni Arab militias in Iraq would behave in exactly the same way if the Americans were not there to stop them. As it is, the ones in Latifiyah have targetted Shiites in the area.

Without the US, I fear I believe that Ibrahim Jaafari, his cabinet, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, and other elected Iraqi officials would be simply taken out and shot by the Sunni Arab militiamen. I have not heard any convincing arguments as to how the Shiites could prevent that development (they cannot even assert control over Baghdad districts near the Green Zone!) or as to why the Sunni Arab fighters would not or could not accomplish it.

As for our disagreements about Lebanon and Afghanistan, they have to do with the exact timeline of which one speaks. The Syrians invaded in 1976, and they prevented a Palestinian/Sunni/Druze victory over the Phalangists. It is true that they did not stop the fighting overnight. Indeed, they never did stop all the fighting (I am quite bitter toward Hafez al-Asad because I believe he deliberately kept the Lebanese pot boiling). But I was in Lebanon 1978-79 and aside from the brief Syrian bombardment of East Beirut in fall of 1978, which did not involve much in the way of casualties, there were no big battles going on then. So in two years the hot civil war had indeed subsided substantially. It is often now forgotten that by 1981-1982 the Lebanese economy was roaring back and the country was moving toward normalcy, when the Likud government in Israel launched a brutal and largely unprovoked attack on the country, throwing into more years of instability.

Anyway, the point of the analogy to Lebanon is precisely the one that you refuse to admit, which is that local militias can grow into armies that fight for territory on a national scale. There is enough sectarian will, enough militia organization, and enough munitions and money in Iraq for these purposes. That the terrain is flat is irrelevant or even enabling.

As for Afghanistan, I see it differently from you. The problems began not with the Soviet Occupation (which was horrible) but with the Communist coup. It began a decade-long struggle among Afghans over whether their political identity would be based on Marxism or on Islamism. These ideologies intersected linguistic, regional and class divisions, with Marxism appealing mainly to Uzbeks and Tajiks and especially in urban areas, and Islamism organizing Pushtuns and especially rural populations in the south. The Soviets supported the former, the Americans the latter. The Americans put at least $5 billion into Islamist coffers and ensured that the civil war would be prolonged. That is why I say that "we" were a party to the Afghan civil war, and that "our" walking away from the country in the late Bush senior period was irresponsible and (as it turned out) dangerous. The US should certainly have worked with the UN to at least try to see that Afghanistan was rebuilt and stabilized, rather than surrendering it to the tender mercies of Gulbuddin Hikmatyar and the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence and Usamah Bin Laden. To be fair, one reason for which the Bush administration walked away was that it was a quid pro quo in the agreement they reached with the Soviets, who only consented to leave if the US would stop funding the Mujahidin.

As for the Iraqis' desires with regard to a continued US military presence, they clearly have mixed opinions, as you say. But the elected leaders have not called for a precipitate withdrawal. I have no reason to believe that Massoud Barzani, Jalal Talabani, Ibrahim Jaafari, and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim came to power through fraud in the January 30 elections. The Iraqi political elite more surely represents is public than any other government in the Arab world. Talabani speaks of a two-year timetable for US presence in the country. Jaafari has repeatedly said that it is not time for the US to leave, but one of his advisers has proposed a gradual withdrawal of Coalition forces from the cities. If Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani wanted the US out, he would give a fatwa, and I believe that the US would not be able to stay if that happened. So far, the Sunni Arabs (15? percent of the population) and the Sadrists (hard to know what percentage they represent) want the US out immediately and completely. As you yourself have kindly pointed out, about 120 parliamentarians have called for it out of 275 last I heard.

So my position, that it would be irresponsible of the US to simply abandon Iraq altogether and immediately, is actually fairly similar to the consensus of the elected Iraqi leadership. If anything, I am more eager to see US ground troops out on a short timetable than they seem to be.

cheers

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

Iraq - A Conversation with Juan Cole

My video interview on Iraq with Markinsanfran is up at Daily Kos. I also talk about the Middle East Forum campaign against rational analysis of the Middle East.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sistani urges Support for Constitution
And for Iran

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani called Thursday for Iraqis to vote "yes" on the new Iraqi constitution in the referendum on October 15, according to Reuters. (The announcement does not yet appear at sistani.org). For him, the key paragraph is 2A, which insists that no law can be passed by the civil legislature that contravenes "the established laws of Islam." The constitution also foresees at least some clerics being appointed as civil judges and justices of the supreme court. He was less enthusiastic about the document's vision of a loose federalism that would allow provinces to form confederacies on ethnic grounds and keep some oil income at home rather than sending it to the central government. But he seems to have been won over by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which sees benefits for the Shiites of the south in a loose federalism.

Sistani has vast moral authority among Iraqi Shiites, and his support for the constitution may well assure its passage. It can be defeated if 3 provinces vote against it by a 2/3s majority in each. The two provinces with substantial Shiite populations that might show significant opposition to the constitution are Baghdad and Maysan. Sistani's support will make it harder, however, for nationalist Shiites to swing the population against it.

Sistani had earlier urged Iraqis to register to vote in the referendum on the constitution.

An envoy of Sistani recently met with Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, head of Iran's clerical Expediency Council and a candidate in last June's presidential election. Rafsanjani praised the new Iraqi constitution.

Assuming that IRNA got it right, the following quote is breathtaking: ' Concerning the western countries trouble making for Iran in its peaceful nuclear energy program, Ayatollah Sistani's envoy said, " the arrogant powers do not want a powerful and free Iran to emerge as a pattern for the whole Islamic world." '

The Americans have for some time claimed Sistani as a "moderate" and even though he would not meet with them, have assumed that his vision of the future of Iraq is broadly complementary to their own. If Sistani is openly supporting Iran's nuclear program and denouncing the US as 'arrogant", this is a new development that will be most unwelcome to Washington.

Anthony Shadid says that when he was in Najaf in August there were rumors that Sistani was not happy with the United Iraqi Alliance. KarbalaNews.net reports that Sistani is declining to support any party list in the December 15 elections to come. My own guess is that Sistani feels that the UIA government has failed to establish security, and he blames it in part for incidents like the thousand dead at the bridge in Kazimiyah. He wanted them to give more cabinet positions to Sunnis than they did, and he may feel they are too partisan and not dedicated enough to national interests. These two observations are based on evidence; he did call on the government to accept responsibility for the stampede and do a better job at crowd control; and he did call for more cabinet posts for Sunnis than were awarded.

Support for the constitution was earlier voiced by Sistani's slightly junior colleague, Grand Ayatollah Ishaq Fayyad, who is an Afghan and known to be pro-American.

Sunni Arab leaders are vowing to defeat the constitution. They would need to organize a 2/3s vote against it in Anbar, Salah al-Din and Ninevah provinces, assuming that they get no help from Shiite militants like Muqtada al-Sadr.
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Schwartz: US out Now

The violence continued to percolate along on Thursday in Iraq, with up to 12 persons dead in guerrilla actions.

Michael Schwartz argues that the US military cannot play any positive role in preventing an all-out Iraqi civil war and should therefore get out of Iraq.

I just cannot understand this sort of argument. Iraq is not now having a conventional civil war, in which you'd have militias fielding 2,000 or 3,000 men against one another and vying over territory. If such a civil war broke out, of course the US military could stop it. A few AC-130s and helicopter gunships could scatter the infantry battalions.

I lived in Lebanon in the early years of the civil war. There, the Druze, Sunnis and Palestinians were fighting the Phalangists (largely Maronite Catholics, but 10 percent of their foot soldiers were Shiite mercenaries). It looked by early 1976 as though the Phalangists were about to lose. At that point, Syria came in and stopped the big battles and saved the Maronite Christians. The Syrians were afraid that a Palestinian-dominated Lebanon would be unpredictable and would pull them into unwanted direct conflicts with Israel. The Syrians used their tanks to stop the fighting.

When civil war broke out in Afghanistan in the 1980s, it left a million dead, displaced 5 million persons from the country, and left millions more displaced internally. Iraq is similar in population size and in ethnic and ideological complexity to Afghanistan. A full scale civil war could be equally devastating to Iraq. Moreover, if an Iraqi civil war pulled in Iran, Saudi Arabia and other regional powers, it could destabilize the entire Middle East and could lead to $20 a gallon gasoline.

So I simply disagree with Schwartz's main points:

'1. The U.S. military is already killing more civilian Iraqis than would likely die in any threatened civil war;

2. The U.S. presence is actually aggravating terrorist (Iraqi-on-Iraqi) violence, not suppressing it;

3. Much of the current terrorist violence would be likely to subside if the U.S. left;

4. The longer the U.S. stays, the more likely that scenarios involving an authentic civil war will prove accurate. '

The US military is killing a lot of Iraqis, but whether it is killing more than would die in a civil war would depend on how many died in a civil war. A million or two could die in a civil war, and that's if the war stays limited to Iraq, which is unlikely. The US presence is not aggravating Iraqi on Iraqi violence in itself, rather it is the new political situation in which Sunni Arabs are the low man on the totem pole, a situation that will not change. That sort of violence would increase exponentially without a US military presence. The terrorist violence might or might not subside if the US were to leave, but the conventional violence could well escalate enormously. Again, it is not the US presence that increases the likelihood of civil war but rather the inability of Shiites and Sunnis to compromise in the new situation. A US withdrawal would not cause the Sunnis suddenly to want to give up their major demands; indeed, they might well be emboldened to hit the Shiites harder.

What could be done? I think the British may as well leave the south, because the local Shiite militias, however problematic, are preventing large-scale guerrilla violence and don't need the British. The Basra police don't even want the British there, after the British were preceived to have violated Iraqi sovereignty by freeing two captured British intelligence operatives.

If the British leave, the militias will be strengthened. But it is going to happen one day, anyway, so it might as well be now. The nine southern, largely Shiite provinces are not a likely site of a civil war, so why garrison them with foreigners? The US troops have now left Najaf, and the British should leave Basra.

But what if Ramadi and Samarra mount a large militia that marches on Baghdad? What if it hooks up with Sunni Arab fighters in West Baghdad? What if it tries to kill the leaders of the elected government or Grand Ayatollah Sistani?

Can anyone guarantee me that this scenario won't occur? Or that it won't lead to an enormous bloodbath, with a million dead, if it does? I have seen how these situations go out of control, with my own eyes.

I'd get most of the US ground troops out, and just cede Tal Afar to whoever is in Tal Afar. But I think the US [or somebody, and unfortunately that means the US] has a duty to maintain a couple of air bases in the area along with some Special Ops forces to forestall a Himalayan tragedy in the near to medium term. Over time the US will be able (and will be forced) to leave altogether.

Of course, I'd be much happier if we could get US ground troops out on a short timetable and have the peace-enforcing done by the United Nations or even NATO. But that isn't going to happen, so the use of air power to stop a full-fledged civil war falls to the US.

So I can associate myself with a call for US ground troops out now. But frankly I think it would be selfish to just bust into Iraq (which 75 percent of Americans supported), turn it upside down, set it on a course toward civil war, and then abruptly pick up our marbles and go home altogether. We did that in Afghanistan after 1989, and it did not turn out well for us.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Cole on Evolve TV

Steve Garfield has up a trailer for "The Issue", an interview program at the web-based Evolve TV, on which I am Mark Moulitsas's guest on September 25. "Reality-based broadcasting" strikes me as a promising slogan.
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Cole Web Interview I

A web video interview with me on Iraq by Diogenes ("Mark In Sanfrancisco") will be aired Friday. This is the preview.
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US Bombs Dhulu'iyyah
Basra declares Noncooperation

US warplanes bombed the small Sunni Arab city of Dhulu'iyyah (Thuluiya) on Wednesday. The bombing is unlikely to be an effective counter-insurgency measure. In fact, it appears to be a simple sort of tribal revenge, where the US military is punishing the city for the killing in the general area of 4 US private security guards the day before. I think it would have been better to do nothing rather than to reply to the incident with a bombing campaign, which will likely harm innocents and just drive more people into the arms of the guerrillas.

You really have to wonder if this Reuters reporter and whoever wrote the headline are on the same page. The report is about how returnees to the city of Tal Afar find it still so insecure that they are leaving again, while many other former residents are afraid to return. The International Committee of the Red Cross is complaining about being excluded from inspections; apparently they are expecting to find substantial damage to buildings in the city. The Tal Afar campaign netted very few captives, and most guerrillas appear to have escaped. It involved setting Kurdish peshmerga fighters on Turkmen; given the severe tension between the two groups, this strategy may be sowing the seed of violence far into the future.

Speaking of seeds of violence,

wire services report that "500 civilians and policemen held a protest in downtown Basra denouncing “British ggression.” The demonstrators, waving pistols and AK-47s, shouted “No to occupation!” and carried banners condemning “British aggression” and demanding the freed soldiers be tried in an Iraqi court as “terrorists.” "

The governor, and then the governing council of Basra are declaring non-cooperation with the British as the result of the destruction of a centrally located prison on Wednesday night. Noncooperation by the local government would make you wonder whether the guys with guns are a little crazy.

Some kind readers have been asking me if it is possible that the British SAS operatives captured by the Iraqi police on Monday were agents provocateurs planning to blow things up and blame some Iraqi group. My answer is that while it cannot be absolutely ruled out, the theory has almost no facts behind it. It is not even clear if the British agents had a bomb in their car, and they may not after all have killed Iraqi police who came to grab them. I'd need way more evidence than now exists to charge the British military with such a dastardly policy.
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Huffington on Bolton and Plame

Someone in the Bush White House blew the cover of a CIA operative, Valerie Plame, to punish her husband, Joe Wilson. Wilson had gone to Niger to investigate the phony story pushed by Dick Cheney that Iraq had bought yellowcake uranium from that country. (The charge was in fact meaningless since insiders knew that Iraq had no capability to do anything with yellowcake. For this reason, the US military did not even bother to secure the yellowcake at Tuwaitha after Saddam's fall). When the Bush administration kept lying about the "African uranium" case, Wilson went public. That was why the Bushies believed he "had to be punished."' They would no doubt have preferred to "punish France," but not all of us get the primo revenge gigs.

Arianna Huffington thinks that the "someone" might well be John Bolton, Bush's current envoy to the United Nations. That's what we need at the UN-- someone who will betray US national security for petty personal spite.
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9 Americans Dead
Sadr's Popularity Grows versus British in Basra

Guerrillas have used bombings to kill nine Americans since Monday. Four US GIs were killed at Ramadi on Tuesday. The bombings come in the wake of a major US/ Iraqi government operation against Sunnis in Tal Afar, amidst US threats to de-urbanize Ramadi and other Sunni Arab population centers.

A spokesman for Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari criticized the British tank attack on an Iraqi jail in Basra where two British covert operations agents were being held. Jaafari represents the Shiite fundamentalist Da'wa Party, and has to play to his constituency, the Shiites of the south-- who are furious at what they see as high-handed British interference in their region. On the other hand, al-Hayat said his office had denied that there was any crisis between Baghdad and London over the incident.

Some reports say that the jail was being run by a local Shiite religious militia, not the Basra provincial government. These reports seem not to take into account the fact that the Basra provincial government consists of 41 seats, 20 of them held by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and 21 by a coalition led by the fundamentalist Shiite Fadila (Virtue) Party. SCIRI has a paramilitary, the Badr Corps, which ran candidates in the Jan. 30 elections. So distinguishing between the Basra provincial government and the religious parties and their militias is like distinguishing the Bush administration's stand on abortion from that of US evangelicals. The latter is responsible for the former.

The British seem to be facing increasing risks of danger from Shiite militias in Basra. In particular, the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr, a small group in Basra though more popular in East Baghdad, is suspected of setting roadside bombs to hit British patrols. The British attack on the jail, however, may well have played into Sadr's hands, making him a heroic figure to nationalist Shiites in Basra who previously had taken little interest in his puritanical movement.

An internet posting that represented itself as coming from the organization supposedly led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, variously called Monotheism and Holy War and "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia", said Tuesday that its war on the Shiites made an exception for those Shiite groups that opposed US and British occupation of Iraq. These included the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, Shaikh Jawad al-Khalisi, and Shaikh Mahmud al-Hassani.

Al-Hayat: The Sadr movement responded to the announcement, saying that it was an attempt to divide the Shiites.

Meanwhile, rumors circulated of severe tensions between Monotheism and Holy War and other guerrilla organizations in Iraq, including other Sunni religious ones, and suggesting that the latter had asked Zarqawi and his group to leave Iraq. The sources suggested that Tuesday's backing off of total war on the Shiites came in response to these tensions. [Cole: I don't find these reports of dissension over this issue among the guerrillas particularly credible. They are unsourced. And why would Baathists or Salafis be upset if "Zarqawi" (or whoever) targets the Da'wa Party or the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq?) Along these lines, the neo-Baathist "Army of Muhammad" released a statement Tuesday that Zarqawi's group claimed credit for a lot of attacks on US troops and other targets that were actually carried out by the Army of Muhammad. [To any close observer, this charge seems self-evident.]

Riyadh al-Nuri, a spokesman for Muqtada al-Sadr, said that Zarqawi's exemption of the Sadrists from attack was an attempt to sow dissension in the ranks of the Shiites. Al-Nuri said that the Sadrists consider al-Qaeda and Zarqawi "their most diehard enemies" and that "were he to fall into the hands of the Sadrists they would tear him limb from limb."
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British Storm Basra Jail with Tanks

Sabrina Tavernise of the New York Times gives the only account of alarming events in Basra I have yet seen that makes sense.

The Guardian seems to me to have left out some key information.

Anyway, here's my timeline for what happened.

September 5:

The BBC reports that "Fusilier Donal Anthony Meade, 20, from Plumstead in south east London, and Fusilier Stephen Robert Manning, 22, from Erith in Kent, were killed by a roadside bomb on 5 September 2005 . . . They had been travelling in a convoy which was hit about five miles east of Shaibah airbase, in Basra province."

The British appear to have believed that this attack was the work of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army.

September 11:

The BBC reports, "Major Matthew Bacon was killed in an attack in Basra, in southern Iraq, on 11 September 2005 when a roadside bomb struck the armoured vehicle he was travelling."

So the British are facing increased casualties and concerted attacks in early September. Convinced that the attacks are coming from Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, they finally move against that group on Sunday.

September 18:

BBC World Monitoring
September 18, 2005

FURTHER ON AL-SADR AIDE'S ARREST IN BASRA

Text of report from Iraqi Al-Sharqiyah TV on 18 September

An Iraqi-British force at dawn arrested a prominent close associate of Al-Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr in Basra City, southern Iraq. A spokesman for the British Army confirmed what Al-Sadr's Office in Basra announced, saying that Shaykh Ahmad al-Fartusi was arrested in his house along with his brother and a third man. The British spokesman said that the arrest took place following an investigation by the multinational forces regarding individuals who carried out terrorist attacks against the multinational forces.

Source: Al-Sharqiyah, Baghdad, in Arabic 1210 gmt 18 Sep 05"

This is the Multinational Forces announcement:

IRAQ: MULIT-NATIONAL DIVISION SOUTHEAST NAMES TERROR SUSPECTS:

In the early hours of Sept. 18, an operation was conducted by Multi National Division - South East in the districts of Al Jameat and Tuninah in Basra. This operation was the result of an ongoing Multi-National Force investigation that identified individuals believed to be responsible for organizing terrorist attacks against Coalition forces, resulting in the deaths of nine members of Coalition forces in the past two months in Basra. The operation resulted in three individuals being detained.

Among those arrested are Sheik Ahmed Majid Farttusi and Sayyid Sajjad, known leaders of the Mahdi Militia in Basra.

“I am well aware that the people that we have arrested are prominent individuals in Basra,” commented Brigadier John Lorrimer, British Army commander of the 12th Mechanized Brigade in Basra. “But let me make it absolutely clear: we have acted against them as individuals, not as members of any particular organization. As the people of Basra you are entitled to your own religious beliefs and political opinions. Those are not matters for MNF. We will not, however, tolerate terrorism and will act against it whenever we can.”

There were immediate protests by Sadrists in Basra, who barricaded the streets in the center of the city. AP reported that "200 militiamen with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades set fire to tires as they barricaded main streets". But then Muqtada's envoys dispersed them, asking them to stand down.

September 19:

On Monday there were further protests by Sadrists about the detainment of Shaikh Ahmad Fartusi and other Sadrist leaders.

The Washington Post reported, "Earlier Monday, gunmen loyal to Sadr attacked the house of Basra's governor to press demands for the release of two prominent members of the cleric's militia whom British forces arrested Sunday."

Two British undercover men seem to have seen something suspicious and intervened. But somehow they got involved in a firefight with Iraqi government police. The two Britons were slightly wounded and were captured by Iraqi police (which seems to be penetrated by the Badr Corps, the Sadrists and other Shiite paramilitaries.)

Then a Sadrist crowd tried to storm the jail where the two British special forces operatives were being held by the provincial government. The Shiite crowds appear to have intended to hold them as hostages to be traded for Fartusi et al.

It was at that point that the British tanks rolled against the jail.

In freeing the two Britons, they inadvertently let 150 other prisoners escape, presumably some of them involved in the guerrilla movement. Two Iraqis were killed in related violence.

Then crowds attacked British military vehicles, setting 2 afire with Molotov cocktails.

The entire episode reeks of "dual sovereignty," in which there are two distinct sources of government authority. Social historian Charles Tilly says that dual sovereignty signals a revolutionary situation.

Note that in Basra, a city of about 1.3 million, largely Shiite, the Muqtada al-Sadr group is not very big. Most Sadrists belong to the rival al-Fadila party, led by Muhammad Yaqubi. But small groups can cause a lot of trouble.

In other news, there were bombings outside Karbala and at Mahmudiyah targetting Shiite pilgrims to the holy city of Karbala to commemorate Muhammad al-Mahdi, the Shiite promised one. Several pilgrims were killed.
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Muqtada Al-Sadr's Response to Basra Events - Achcar Translation

Gilbert Achcar writes:

"The office of Muqtada al-Sadr published tonight (Sept 19) the following press release that I have translated from Arabic FYI. It is -- of course, one might say -- in full contradiction with the official version of the British Ministry of Defence."

Statement of the Office of Muqtada al-Sadr

"Two soldiers from the British occupation forces opened fire on passers-by in the vicinity of a religious center where the people of Basra use to go, after which police patrols have a white car and arrested two persons riding it. It was found that they are British, and British occupation forces intervened to try to set them free. The people of Basra demonstrated to prevent this from occurring, and occupation forces reacted by opening fire on the demonstrators killing and wounding many of them. In retaliation the inhabitants burned two British tanks. The two Britons that were arrested had in their possession explosives and remote-control devices, as well as light and medium weapons and other accessories.

Late this night, British forces raided the police headquarters of the Basra province, set free the two Britons as well as close to 150 terrorists, and burned the police vehicles."

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Iranian Television on Basra Tensions

BBC World Monitoring translated this report on Al-Alam, the Iranian Arabic-language satellite program, on Sept. 14:

September 14, 2005, Wednesday

Basra residents blame UK troop "violations" for increase in militant attacks

SOURCE: Al-Alam TV, Tehran, in Arabic 17:13 GMT, 14 Sep 05

BODY:
Text of report by Iranian Arabic language television news channel Al-Alam on 14 September

[Presenter] In Basra, popular and official opinion has attributed the escalation in militant attacks against British forces in southern Iraq to their continuing violation of the rights of the residents, in addition to the lack of justification for theses forces to remain in the region.

[Correspondent N'amah Abd-al-Razzaq] Eight US and three British dead, and a further ten wounded. This is the toll of the militant attacks that have targeted the US and British forces in southern Iraq in the last week. This follows a clear escalation in the militant attacks targeting the foreign forces specifically in Basra.

These statistics are based on the reports published by the British forces in southern Iraq. However, some eye witnesses have indicated a larger toll, especially in the rocket attack that targeted the British and US consulates in the presidential complex. Because the site is completely fortified, it was impossible to confirm the final toll of the attack and everyone had to make do with the British story which denied that there had been any casualties.

Popular and official opinion in Basra says that this noticeable escalation in the level of militant operations is the result of the occupation troops overstepping the mark and continuing to violate the dominant values of Iraqi society.

[Amr Thamir Ali, traffic policeman] This is the result of the conduct of the British towards the people. [Words indistinct]

[Ramadan al-Yasiri, Islamic Vanguards Party] Many citizens do not accept how they are being treated [changes thought] the problems with these troops. As a result the citizens are feeling a mixture of anger and dissatisfaction with these forces.

[Correspondent Abd-al-Razzaq] However, some people think that the increase in the number of armed attacks in Basra is linked to the emerging political process and is an attempt by some sides to obstruct it through escalating the violence . . . '

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Evolve TV

Evolve TV's "The Issue" will be a web-based hard-hitting interview program on public and foreign affairs. Now that PBS is being increasingly politicized, and given the dreadful state of corporate media, who often baby sit us with small town murder mysteries instead of giving us real news, this web-based model of journalism may be a way out. Truth in advertising: I'm a guest on Sunday, interviewed by Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos.
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One to Two Billion Dollars Missing at Ministry of Defense

Hannah Allam of Knight Ridder broke the story this past summer that a billion dollars was missing at the ministry of defense, according to a government audit.

Patrick Cockburn of the Independent now confirms that report based on his own sources, saying that actually between one and two billion dollars were embezzled from the Iraqi ministry of defense under Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan.

It was always mysterious where Shaalan came from. He is said to have been a former member of the Baath Party from Hillah in the Shiite south. Ahmad Chalabi alleged that he was a double agent for Saddam in the late 1990s, spying on the dissidents. He then went to the UK. When the US and the UN installed Iyad Allawi as interim "prime minister" on June 28, 2004, Shaalan became minister of defense. Larry Diamond in his book, Squandered Victory reports a story that Shaalan led "his tribesman" in firefights against Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army in spring of 2004. Let's just say that I suspect that it is a cock and bull story and very much doubt Shaalan saw action. My deep suspicion is that he was, like Allawi, an asset of US intelligence and was rewarded with Defense for past services. Shaalan immediately began beating the drums of war against Iran, calling it Iraq's "number one enemy." Given that the majority of Iraqis has warm feelings toward Iran, this posturing never made any sense in Iraqi terms and one suspects that the Americans put him up to it.

Ahmad Chalabi, who knows a fraud when he sees one, warned about an operation in which Shaalan sent $300 or $500 million in cash in a private plane to Beirut, ostensibly for military purchases. But the purchases had not been approved by the cabinet and certainly not in this irregular way. Shaalan, a true thug, threatened to have Chalabi arrested. Chalabi is now vice premier, and Shaalan is a private citizen in Jordan.

There is also the unsolved case of two US contractors who warned last fall of massive fraud in the ministry of defense. One wrote to Senator Rick Santorum about it, who in turn went to US SecDef Donald Rumsfeld. The contractors were driving near Taji when their car was rammed and then they were shot multiple times. Their personal effects were photographed and put up at a radical Salafi website. But then anyone can post to a website.

Now it transpires that Shaalan, who is in exile in Jordan, presided over a process whereby at least a billion dollars of money intended to help build the Iraqi military disappeared into thin air.

Americans should be outraged at this news, which has now been reported twice by fine journalists in Iraq, but which has not become an issue in American politics. The embezzlement at the ministry of defense left the Iraqi military poorly equipped, and greatly delayed the moment at which it could take over from the US in providing security to the country. The embezzlement is directly tied to the Iraqi government losing control over its own capital, as reported here yesterday. The scale of it matches Saddam's kickbacks in the oil for food scandal, but the US journalists who were so outraged at the former don't seem to have the time of day for the embezzlement story.
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Member of Parliament killed
24 Bodies Found

The deputy speaker of the Iraqi parliament, Husain Shahristani, had the final text of the constitution "read" in parliament so as to meet a criterion for the validity of the process in the eyes of the United Nations. The parliament did not vote on the draft, contrary to what you will read in the US press.

Al-Zaman/ AFP: Guerrillas killed a member of parliament Sunday near Dujjail north of Baghdad. Faris Nasir Husain had been a member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the party led by Iraqi president Jalal Talabani. When a member of parliament from the party of the president cannot even get to Baghdad safely, you know that the country is in a parlous state.

Authorities discovered 20 bodies floating in the river near Balad north of Baghdad, presumably those of Shiites targeted by the guerrilla movement. Another four bodies were found east of Baghdad.

In Mosul, guerrillas destroyed communications towers belonging to a mobile cell phone company in several quarters on Sunday. Pamphlets had been distributed earlier calling for the attacks on the grounds that the company is Kuwaiti.

In Basra, 200 Mahdi Army militiament demonstrated against the imprisonment by the Basra mayor of Shaikh Ahmad Fartusi, a prominent member of the Sadrists in that city. A Sadr emissary from Najaf came down and defused some of the tensions. The British appear convinced that Fartusi played a role in attacks on British troops.

In Baghdad, guerrillas detonated a bomb near some train cars, setting the train afire, in the Baghdad quarter of Durah.

A bomb in Kirkuk killed 5 Iraqi military personnel and wounded 2.

In the Shiite holy city of Karbala, Iraqi authorities took the lead in detailing 5,000 policemen to the city to help with the forthcoming season of dommemoration.

Reuters reports other guerrilla violence.
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The Egyptian Elections and Bush's War

My article, "Bush's war and the Egyptian elections", which argues that "Mubarak's rigged victory shows that right-wing predictions of an "Arab spring" were wishful thinking." - is out at Salon.com.

'The groundhog did not see its shadow in Egypt last week.

Hosni Mubarak's victory in the Egyptian presidential election of Sept. 7 was about as surprising as a Las Vegas casino fleecing its customers at the roulette tables. Egyptians joked that the only requirement for winning the presidency was 24 years of prior experience. What was surprising was that only 23 percent of the eligible voters bothered to come out for the country's first multiparty elections for the executive since 1952. Despite the conviction of supporters of the Bush administration that Bush's invasion and bloody occupation of Iraq would somehow suddenly make Middle Easterners yearn to join the American Republican Party, the "Arab spring" of political liberalization discerned by the Wall Street Journal has yet to materialize.

In the seven months running up to the presidential elections on Sept. 7, the burly old general Mubarak suppressed popular demonstrations by the Kifayah ("Enough!") reform movement, which demanded an end to emergency powers that the government uses to suppress civil liberties. He also ordered the police to bust up protests by the Muslim Brotherhood and imprisoned hundreds of its members and leaders. By May 2005, he had thrown 754 members in prison for participating in peaceful protests. He excluded the party, among the more popular in the country, from running for office. '

The rest is at Salon.com.
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Security Situation in Baghdad Sinking like the Titanic

An observer in Iraq writes to me:

"The situation has deteriorated in Baghdad dramatically today. Five neighborhoods (hay) in Baghdad are controlled by insurgents, and they are Amiraya, Ghazilya, Shurta, Yarmouk and Doura. It is very bad. My guys there report that cars have come into these neighborhoods and blocked off the streets. Masked gunmen with AKs and other weapons are roaming these areas, announcing that people should stay home. One of my drivers in Amiraya reports that his neighborhood is shut down totally, and even those who need food or provisions are warned not to go out.

The government will respond feebly. It will go into a contested neighborhood, and then just like Fallujah, Ramadi, Tel Afar, the insurgents will flee to take over another area on another day. Bit by bit they are taking over the main parts of Baghdad. The only place we are sure they cannot control is Sadr City, unless of course they want to take on Jaish Mahdy [Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army], and that would be bloody.

A few minutes ago Jaafari came on television to tell everyone in Baghdad to stay home. Can't wait for his next bold move.

There are flyers in public areas of Baghdad warning people not to gather in large numbers because they will thereby become targets. I am trying to get a copy of the flyer.

Notwithstanding Al-Hayat's claim that Zarqawi and the Sunni resistance are not together, my street listeners claim otherwise. My folks are convinced that the two groups, broadly defined, are together, "100 percent" is the claim of certainty. It is hard to get a handle on this because people in Baghdad tend to lump all resistance groups, except for Zarqawi, into one large category.

More and more of even the most patriotic intelligentsia are departing. The situation is dire, and those with escape valves are using them. [Some organizations are]sending more of [their] staff to Arbil and Sulamaniyah and out of Baghdad. Until about March this year, [some] thought that there was a chance of returning to Baghdad. It is remarkable how incapable this government is. Its only success is that it exists at all.

In the meantime, the embassy people act as if nothing in Baghdad is wrong (except that they cannot walk in the Green Zone without body armor and they have to take precautions against kidnapping). Recently, a group from State and the military parachuted in from Washington [with fatuous advice] . . . It is a fantasy world."

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52 Dead, Dozens Wounded

Guerrilla violence, including a massive car bomb, killed 52 Iraqis on Saturday. The biggest incident occurred at a market at Nahrawan, a town just east of Baghdad that is largely Shiite, where a car bomber killed 30 persons and wounded another 38. Another bombing took place at Baqubah, killing at least one and wounding 17. Another batch of bodies was found, probably killed by the guerrillas for being Shiite.

Al-Hayat [This means I am paraphrasing an Arabic article in the London daily, "al-Hayat"]: The intelligence chief at the ministry of the interior, Husain Ali Kamal, said Saturday that the recent announcement of a "war" by alleged Salafi leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was in part also an announcement of strategy by the remnants of the Baath. "The supporters of the former regime have clothed themselves in white turbans and allied with Zarqawi, depite the intellectual and political disagreements between the two."
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More on Hitchens and Cole

I've now seen a transcript showing that Christopher Hitchens in his debate with George Galloway said that I "claimed" to know "farsi" but had "never stepped foot in the region." As I noted on Friday, these are bizarre things for him to say. To say that someone "claims" something, according to the Fowler usage manual, is to suggest that the assertion is open to question. And why is my knowledge of Persian (that is what it is called in English, Mr. Hitchens) an issue? I am seized with panic at the thought that Hitchens thinks they speak "farsi" in Iraq! Hitchens makes the remark with regard to Grand Ayatollah Sistani being the spiritual leader of the Iraqi Shiites. Aside from the scholarly writing of the late Linda Walbridge before the war, I happen to have been the first American observer to explain Sistani's significance, at this weblog in April-July of 2003; go to the archives and do a keyword search. I was also one of the few American scholars publishing on the institution of the marja`-i taqlid or source for emulation among the Shiites, in the 1980s and 1990s. See my Sacred Space and Holy War. I guarantee you Hitchens did not know Sistani existed in February, 2003. As for Mr. Bremer, Hitchens's hero, his response to Sistani's fatwa was to ask, "can't we get a fatwa from some other mulla?"

As'ad Abukhalil, a real Middle East expert, comments on Hitchens's ridiculous comments about yours truly.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

25 Dead, Dozens Wounded
Sadrists in Tuz Khurmato Targeted

At least 25 Iraqis were killed in guerilla violence on Friday and dozens wounded. The biggest incident was a huge bomb at a Turkmen Shiite mosque in the town of Tuz Khurmato south of Kirkuk, which killed 14 worshippers and wounded 28. The mosque is affiliated with Muqtada al-Sadr. Some reports say a young Saudi was arrested with a second bomb, heading for another Shiite mosque. In Baghdad, Shaikh Fadil Lami, a preacher of the Sadr movement, was gunned down, as were several Shiite laborers. Iraqi Sunni clerics continued to condemn the strategy announced by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi of targeting Shiites.

Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, head of the powerful Guardian Council in Iran, on Friday blamed the United States for the ongoing bombings and violence in Iraq. He insisted that the new Iraqi government could handle itself and that US troops should just leave. (Jannati must know that the new Iraqi government cannot in fact handle itself, and that the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement would eat the elected politicians for lunch; but perhaps he hopes the new government will be forced to rely on Iran more if the US is not around . . .).

An Iraqi parliamentary committee is demanding more sovereignty from the US.

Gary Kamiya reviews Anthony Shadid's new book on what went wrong with the American enterprise in Iraq. As Kamiya notes, Shadid is remarkable for his knowledge of Arabic and consequent ability to get the non-obvious stories.
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Union Opposition to Petroleum Industry Privatization

The General Union of Oil Employees in Basra has issued a strong statement against privatization of the Iraqi petroleum industry.:

GUOE Position on Privatisation

August 2005 - Statement by Union President Hassan Jum'a Awwad Al-Assadi, translated from Arabic by Dr Kamil Mahdi, University of Exeter

In The Name of God the Merciful and Beneficient

Subject: The Stance of the GUOE in the southern region on privatisation

Greetings (Assalamu Alikum wa rahmatu-allhi wa barakatuhu)

Friends, I wish to convey to you the greetings of your friends the members of the Executive Board of the Union, and we wish to clarify to you our view on privatisation, an issue of major concern for us as workers' movement leaders in this most important of work venues, i.e. oil. Our stance on this intricate issue is clear and explicit.

The privatisation of the oil and industrial sectors is the objective of all in the Iraqi state [Government], and we must state that we will stand firm against this imperialist plan that would hand over Iraq's wealth to international capitalism such that the deprived Iraqi people would not benefit from it.

We reaffirm our unshakeable position on this basic issue for the future of the new Iraq, for we cannot build our country unless its wealth is in its own possession, and we need your assistance and support as we are fighting our enemies on the inside and you are our support outside.

The GUOE is the only union which has taken this courageous stance of fighting privatisation, and we are taking this path for the sake of Iraq's glory even if it costs us our lives. The reason for this is that we feel that the Iraqis are capable of managing the their companies and their investments by themselves, because they have huge capabilities and technical knowledge.

We want you to know that we transformed the Iraqi Drilling Company from a non-existent entity into a company that is akin to international one, and it now owns 13 Drilling Towers which is a pride to all of us. For that and for all the achievements in the Oil Sector, we stand firm against privatisation, and I trust you confidence in the Union will not be shaken, for we have charted our steady and clear path from which we cannot ever never deviate.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

32 Dead in Guerrilla Violence

Al-Hayat: Some 30 policemen were killed in 3 suicide bombings Thursday, and 60 were wounded. Also killed was a Shiite religious leader. The body was discovered of a leader of the Dawa Party (the same fundamentalist Shiite party to which Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari belongs). The body of Shaikh Mahdi al-Attar was one of 8 that were discovered in Mosul. He had been kidnapped in Latifiyah about 3 weeks ago.

Al-Hayat says that its sources in the Iraqi resistance deny the rumor that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has made a breakthrough in uniting the various guerrilla groups in Iraq under his leadership. They said that the guerrilla groups are too ideologically different from one another and too factious to permit Zarqawi to subsume them under his leadership. Many of the Iraqi guerrilla factions are led by officers in the former Baath military. Despite the danger to them signalled by the Tal Afar operation and the threats made recently by the minister of defense that Ramadi is next, these faction leaders rejected Zarqawi's plea that they unite to establish an Islamic Emirate in Iraq on the model of the Taliban in Afghanistan. In statements on the internet, the guerrilla groups also reject Zarqawi's tactic of targetting innocent civilians and especially Iraqi Shiites. The source says that the 12 bombings in Baghdad on Wednesday did involve coordination, but that the others rejected Zarqawi's plan to attack the Shiites.

The Shiite religious parties affirmed their determination to deploy their paramilitaries in Shiite neighborhoods, in coordination with Iraqi security forces, to protect them from Zarqawi, who announced a "total war on the Shiites wherever they are found." Sadrist leader `Aamir al-Hasani told al-Hayat that the Mahdi Army will begin spreading out in the Shiite neighborhoods.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Hitchens, Galloway and Cole

I just haven't had time to watch the Hitchens/ Galloway debate, and won't have time to do it until this weekend. Kind readers are messaging me to say that they thought they heard my name come up. In response to Galloway's citation of my article critiquing Hitchens's defense of the ongoing Iraq war, I am told that Hitchens said words to the effect that I "claimed" to know Arabic and Persian but that I had never been in the region to his knowledge, and that I changed my mind every two seconds. I haven't been able to find a transcript so I can't check if this is what he said or even if it is the purport of what he said. If he spoke as reported, or anything near, his argument was a mere ad hominem, having nothing to do with the issues, and it was moreover incorrect on the facts.

I have gotten a number of emails in recent weeks from readers who said they encountered people in cyberspace who alleged that I do not know Middle Eastern languages. So regardless of what Hitchens may or may not have said, it seems fairly obvious that there is some sort of Karl Rove-type campaign of disinformation out there in which I am being attacked on my strengths. You will remember that the Bushies arranged for doubt to be cast on John Kerry's distinguished war record, while conveniently papering over Bush's own dodging of the Vietnam war and his failure to continue to report for duty even on the homefront.

So next no doubt it will be bruited about that Bush is fluent in several dialects of Iraqi Arabic and can curse out Ahmadinejad in the patois used by Iranian sailors in Bushehr, whereas Cole bought his degree from from a notorious California diploma mill located near Hollywood (aha!) and still can't parse hollow verbs to save his soul.

It is sort of silly for me to have to do so, but I don't mind telling Mr. Hitchens about my experience in "the region." With regard to extended stays, here is the itinerary: in Eritrea (at that time part of Ethiopia) 1967-1968; Lebanon Sept. 1974- Mar. 1975, then Sept. 1975-November 1975, then summer 1977, then June 1978-April 1979; Jordan Dec. 1975-May 1976; Egypt in 1976-1978, 1985-1986, summer 1988; Pakistan Sept. 1981-Jan. 1982, March-April 1983, Jan. 1986, May, 1988; summer 1990; India (mainly hanging around with Muslims in Lucknow and Delhi) Jan. 1982-Mar. 1983. In addition, I have visited for periods between a few days and a month some of the same countries plus the following countries: Iran, Syria, Turkey, Yemen, Bahrain, Qatar, Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, Gambia, Bangladesh, Uzbekistan,and Israel. I have never attempted to hide my lack of experience in Iraq. But I've lived all around it and hung out with expatriates in Dearborn, and have done a lot of work on its history. It is sort of like an English-speaking German academic--who lived years in Kentucky, returned to Munich, and wrote a book about Tennessee--being criticized by a French journalist who knows no English and little American history but once spent two weeks in Memphis.

I studied Arabic at Northwestern University beginning in 1972, and went on to do a Master of Arts degree in Arabic Studies at the American University in Cairo; Arabic literature was a field for my interdisciplinary Ph.D. from UCLA. Most of my books have involved extensive reading in manuscripts, archival documents and printed works in Arabic. Perhaps Mr. Hitchens believes that Princeton University Press and its referees are in on the vast fraud that has been perpetrated to make a monolingual buffoon like me appear expert in Arab history. I have published translations and analyses of Persian texts. I speak Urdu at home every day, and use it for research, as well. I studied Turkish and Ottoman when I first came to Ann Arbor and can use some Ottoman texts for research.

Because of my interest in Shiite Islam from the 1970s, I have been reading and researching Iraqi Shiite history for 30 years. Two chapters of my dissertation were set in Iraq. I found primary documents for Iraq in South Asia. I was one of a handful of US historians publishing on Iraq before 2003. I was in Jordan not so long ago to meet with Iraqi intellectuals who came over for a conference. I spoke Arabic with them, and one was kind enough to listen to me for a while and to say of my Arabic, "it is not broken" (ma fi kasr). I gave a paper on Grand Ayatollah Sistani. One academic from that city came to me and congratulated me, saying "Ka'annak Najafi!" (it is as though you were from Najaf).

Of course my spoken Arabic isn't perfect (I lived in both the Levant and Egypt, so had to try to learn two colloquial dialects plus Modern Standard plus Classical). But for my enemies to suggest that I haven't had experience with "the region" or only "claim" to know Middle Eastern languages is kind of monstrous. But then you expect that sort of thing nowadays if you are involved in any sort of politics in the US. It is one of the reasons that we are stuck with the Bushes and the Hitchenses, because they are so nasty and dishonest that no competent person in his or her right mind would want to be in the same "room" with them.

Now my enemies will turn around and say that I am pompous and self-important for providing this information in the way of self-defense. Whatever.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

A Necklace of Bombs for Baghdad
US Troops Attacked
Sistani: No Civil War even if Half of Shiites are Killed

Al-Hayat: After the 12 explosions that rocked Baghdad on Wednesday and left an estimated 160 dead and 200 wounded, religious leaders hastened to dampen the religious passions they threatened to provoke. In several cases Shiite neighborhoods had been targeted. A taped tirade ascribed to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist and leader of Monotheism and Holy War (sometimes called "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia") surfaced on Aljazeera. Whoever was speaking announced a "total war" on "the Shiites, who reject [the caliphs], wherever they are found!" He urged the Sunnis to wake up and realize that the war on them will never stop, and said the bombings were part of a "blood feud" in revenge for the assault on the largely Sunni city of Tal Afar in northern Iraq by Kurdish and US troops.

Sunni Iraqi religious leaders condemned the attacks, though often in ways that struck me as a little self-indulgent. The head of the Sunni Pious Endowments Board, Ahmad Abd al-Ghafur al-Samarra'i, said that it was horrible what happened to the Shiites, but said that Sunnis were also being killed, by persons in police uniforms, and he hoped it wouldn't be Sunni mosques that suffered for it. The Association of Muslim Scholars blamed the bombings on the presence of US troops in Iraq.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani strictly forbade reprisals by Shiites, saying, "If half of Iraq's Shiites were killed, it would not lead to a sectarian war." Sistani is keenly aware that the guerrilla strategy is to sucker the Shiites into attacking Sunni Arabs on a large scale, producing a civil war that would destabilize Iraq and give the Sunni guerrillas an open for making a coup and taking over.

The biggest explosion came in the Shiite quarter of Kadhimiyah. Eyewitnesses told al-Hayat that the bomber, who enticed workers to his mini-van with promises of jobs, spoke with an Iraqi accent, seemed very nice and was no more than 40.

Three of the bombings targeted US military convoys. Eyewitnesses suggested that there were US casualties, and the US military confirmed that in one of the bombings US military personnel received non-lethal injuries.

Five mortar shells landed in the Green Zone (government offices and foreign embassies). Then a carbomb targeted one of its entrances.

Shiites were not the only victims of violence on Wednesday. At dawn, 17 members of the Sunni Banu Tamim clan had been kidnapped by persons wearing police uniforms and carrying official identification, and the victims were then killed. The previous night, 6 young men had been kidnapped from the Ghazaliyah quarter, and they too turned up dead, according to the Association of Muslim Scholars. The Shiites claim that guerrilla fighters have stolen police uniforms, whereas the AMS has in the past charged that the kidnappers really were police under the control of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shiite party close to Tehran.

Sectarian tensions are at a danger point in Iraq. Sunni leaders have characterized the assault on Tal Afar, authorized by Shiite Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari, as "state terror" and an "ethnic cleansing of the Sunnis" just before the October 15 referendum on the constitution.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani was issuing statements all day Wednesday from Najaf, condemning the "criminal attacks" and saying that they constitute part of an ongoing attempt to provoke a sectarian war.

Dhiya al-Din al-Fayyad, a Shiite parliamentarian and member of the ruling United Iraqi Alliance, told al-Hayat that the patience of the Shiites might run out if this "black terror" against them continued to target innocents. He said that a delegation of Shiite politicians met with Sistani on Wednesday and asked him about where things were going. He is said to have replied that even if half of Iraq's Shiites were killed, it would not result in a sectarian war.

Sistani has a great deal of moral authority, but you really worry whether he might be a level three levee facing a level five hurricane.

The Iraqi constitution was finally sent to the United Nations for printing on Wednesday. Deputy speaker of the house Husain Shahristani said that it had been slightly amended to meet Sunni concerns. But the Sunnis, it seems, reject it anyway. The procedure of the thing seems to most of us highly irregular. It is not clear who exactly amended the constitution (it wasn't parliament) or by what authority. It is not clear by whom it has been adopted (not the whole parliament, which never voted on it, despite a UN demand that it do so). The UN is still demanding that it be "read" in parliament before they agree to print it, lest another version pop up later. Since Iraqi politicians have been getting around such legal issues by being literalists, I suppose they may well just have someone read out the text on the floor of parliament, without actually taking a vote. But on a day when 160 Iraqis were blown up, procedural quibbles seem petty. The national referendum will be enough to legitimate the constitution or reject it, if it is free and fair. After all, the rules about how it was to be drafted and passed were set by an unelected body appointed by a foreign viceroy (Paul Bremer), and a sovereign elected parliament has a great deal of lattitude in such a case.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi Minister of Justice, Abdul Husain Shandal, condemned the US military for arresting Iraqis without a warrant from an Iraqi judge and for holding thousands of them without charges. Because of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act in the United States, and because of the late lamented Sixth Amendment, which used to forbid holding Americans without charge or trial for long periods of time, both of these activities of the US military in Iraq would under most circumstances be illegal in the United States itself.

Shandal said, "No citizen should be arrested without a court order . . . There is abuse (of human rights) due to detentions, which are overseen by the Multinational Force (MNF) and are not in the control of the justice ministry."

He said it was misleading for the US to imply that the Iraqi ministry of justice had an equal say in US military detentions.

He also complained about the legal immunity from Iraqi law under which US and multinational forces operate in Iraq.

European merchants started demanding immunity from local law in the Ottoman Empire hundreds of years ago, and their trade was so lucrative that the Ottoman sultans granted it. Such concessions were part of a treaty, which had "headings" or to use the Latin-derived word, capitulations. Later on the headings were felt to have given away too much, and so "capitulation" came to mean a sort of surrender of rights. In the 19th century, most European powers negotiated treaties with Middle Eastern states that held their citizens harmless from local court proceedings. The immunity of US troops in Iran from prosecution for breaking Iranian law in the 1960s and 1970s was cited as a grievance by Ayatollah Khomeini in his revolution against the Shah. This conflict therefore has a long history. In modern times most Middle Eastern states have come to view immunity from local prosecution for Europeans as a form of national humiliation. Shandal's sentiments are widely shared.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

David Langness Reports on New Orleans

My dear friend David Langness, who has long experience in the field of humanitarian relief work, reports:

'Howdy, folks,

Back from a difficult, gruesome and yet exhilarating week in New Orleans, so here’s the report:

Of all the disasters I’ve delivered medical relief to, Katrina is easily the most widespread and devastating. Certainly it qualifies as the largest disaster in the United States in memory. But when you compare it to the recent Iranian earthquake in Bam (30,000 dead) or the tsunami (probably 200,000 dead) it pales by comparison. Despite early, wild estimates of more than 10,000 dead, the death toll for Hurricane Katrina will most likely not exceed 2,000.

On the other hand, Katrina displaced probably a million people; 144 square miles of New Orleans (the city is about 200 square miles total) are under a toxic brew of foul water, sewage, oil, gas, lead, PCBs, carcasses both human and animal, etc. I saw thousands upon thousands of poor people set adrift; America’s most vibrant city stilled and stinking; alligators feasting on the dead; flooded, evacuated hospitals; the complete destruction of hundreds of thousands of homes. The television and newspaper photos are nowhere near sufficient to convey the scope and magnitude of the destruction -- it is as if you were hovering above downtown Los Angeles looking west and everything within your field of vision were flooded all the way to the beach.

Flying over the area in helicopters all week gave me some remarkable vistas – big 30-foot fishing boats a mile inland, lodged in treetops; a hospital two blocks from the beach in Biloxi, which used to be surrounded by stores, homes and restaurants, standing alone as if a hospital-sparing neutron bomb had gone off, surrounded by rubble; whole forests snapped off; long lines of evacuees waiting in vain for FEMA or someone to come and get them; airports full of relief supplies but thousands going hungry; parish politicians commandeering hospitals for their own purposes and kicking out the patients; a roan horse running free on an island created by the flood; the stars over New Orleans at night shining more brightly than they have for a century.

The older, wiser part of New Orleans is largely untouched -- the Garden District, the French Quarter, downtown. These sections of the city were built in the 1600s and 1700s, on higher ground and by wiser people, apparently. I do not know how they will save the rest of New Orleans. The whole inundated bowl of New Orleans seems beyond repair; the homes are history; the toxics in the floodwaters will be difficult if not impossible to abate; the population has left and will not have anything to return to for a long, long time.

In many areas the cops departed and companies brought in heavily-armed security mercenaries from DynCorp, just back from protecting Hamid Karzai. The whole area seemed lousy with network producers burnt out from all the PTSD and trauma they had seen. And as in all disasters, doctors and nurses gave literally everything they had to save people. The DynCorp guys, all ex-Delta Force soldiers, were kind enough to rescue frightened little dogs from the rubble . . . I noticed that erstwhile snipers wisely refrained from sniping when the ex-Delta Force guys in black tacticals showed up. The media seemed to have a newly reconstituted spine, focusing on the failures of the administration to send help, come back from vacation, fix levees, do any damn thing right. The doctors and nurses ignored their destroyed homes and missing relatives to care for the sick and injured, and showed me a new level of selfless, soul-satisfying sacrifice. Like all disasters, you see the worst and feel great wonder and astonishment at the best in humanity.

Here’s one example from New Orleans: a massive hospital evacuation of more than 500 very ill patients and a few thousand staff and family, with little or no government help. The staff and the patients waited for four days as the waters rose for the repeatedly-promised official evacuation; but it never came. Finally, with no power, medicine, food, water or communication, they decided to hire private helicopters and got everyone out despite darkness, sniper’s bullets, massive explosions, and the extreme difficulties of transporting the very sick, only possible because people pulled together in unity and risked everything.

You tend, when you see disasters of this scale, to reflect on the existence and intentions of a Creator. For me, the subject of these disasters and any Divine intentions is a fascinating one. I tend to believe that these are the times She may be re-thinking the whole free-will deal.

And that’s because these disasters seem mostly self-inflicted, in some larger sense. I noticed that the New York Times and many other media outlets reported several human causes with Katrina’s effects: the building on and subsequent erosion of the Mississippi Delta’s natural hurricane buffer the barrier islands; the increasing temperatures of the Gulf waters and the hotter water’s very significant contribution to more and more powerful hurricanes; the repeated Federal failure to provide budget funds for levee reinforcement that everyone knew we would eventually need; the gradual sinking of New Orleans as the energy industry pumps out more water and oil and natural gas from underneath the city; the federal government’s finally giving in to developers of the outlying areas in the Delta by underwriting insurance policies for new building, which private companies had previously declined to provide; and of course the general, overall greed and stupidity of continuing to build a major coastal city below sea level without requiring elevated foundations and a flood-ready infrastructure.

This leads me to wonder whether all disasters are man-made.

Yes, I know that’s a stretch. But we have come to the point where we know where and where not to site and situate human habitation; and how to build it so that it withstands wind, water, fire and earthquake. We know which acts of commerce and agriculture create risk from weather, and increasingly understand how we make our own weather. We know that we can protect people by doing certain basic things to keep them safe. In other words, we know how to adequately warn and prepare for most “natural” disasters. Natural disasters used to be called Acts of God, didn’t they? Now I think we can begin calling them something else entirely.'

David Langness

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Black Wednesday's Death Toll rises to 150

The death toll in Wednesday's eight bombings in Baghdad rose to 150, with one bomb in Kadhimiyah accounting for about 114. I can only imagine that hundreds were wounded. It is the second biggest one-day toll in guerrilla violence since the fall of Saddam (only March 2, 2004, was worse). Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of Monotheism and Holy War, announced a "war" on Iraq's Shiites by radical Sunni Salafis. The operation was apparently in part revenge for the US/Iraqi government attack on the largely Sunni Turkmen city of Tal Afar in the north.

Although Iraqi government officials tried to put the best face on the disaster, saying that it demonstrated that the Tal Afar operation had in fact deeply threatened the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement, I fear I would draw the opposite conclusion. The guerrillas in Tal Afar cleverly slipped away, and the US troops never even fought a major battle with them. The use of Kurdish troops and Shiite informers leant an ethnic cast to the campaign. Most people in Tal Afar just left the city, for all the world like New Orleans refugees in Texas and Mississippi. So as an operation, it did not amount to much, though it displaced a lot of innocent civilians. And while the US and Kurdish troops were chasing down empty streets in Tal Afar, the guerrillas blew up Baghdad.

If you don't control your capital, you control nothing. If the events of Black Wednesday were not so very tragic (those poor Shiite laborers! and their families), the situation would be absurd in a surrealist sense. The US military off in a small desert town with nothing to do but play fight club amongst themselves, while hundreds of innocent Iraqi Shiites in Kadhimiyah are massacred at will.

And the guerrillas' ability at this late date to mount such a shatteringly effective operation in the capital itself is why the pitiful and arrogant Project for a New American Century fantasy of just crushing the Sunni Arabs of Iraq is a K Street wet dream generated by intellectual adolescents, not a realistic policy. (And of course the same thing could be said of virtually everything the PNAC has ever said).
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At least 90 Dead, 162 Injured in Baghdad Blast
Sunnis Reject Constitution

At 7 am on Wednesday morning, guerrillas detonated a huge suicide car bomb in the midst of Shiite day laborers gathering in search of work in the district of Kadhimiyah. It killed at least 90 and wounded 162, according to Al-Jazeera on Wednesday morning Iraq time..

On Monday night, guerrillas had detonated a bomb at a Baghdad restaurant, killing 5 and injuring 10. A bomber on a bus in the Shiite city of Hillah killed 2 and wounded 10.

The Sunni Arab delegation on the constitution-drafting committee say that they are "frustrated" and determined to try to sink the constitution. Meeting with UN envoy Ashraf Qazi, they asked that the United Nations intervene to assure that the October 15 referendum was conducted fairly.

Husain al-Falluji said of the Sunni Arab delegation, "We want to know if two thirds of people who actually cast votes in three provinces could turn it down, or two thirds of the eligible voters. Because if it's two thirds of actual voters, then this is easy: the constitution will be turned down. But if it's two thirds of eligible voters, then it will be almost impossible to reject it."

Since the Kurds put the veto provision into the interim constitution in order to be able to block the Shiite majority from producing a constitution absolutely unacceptable to them, I am sure they intended that it be rejected if two-thirds of actual voters in 3 provinces voted against, rather than two-thirds of eligible voters. Not even all the eligible voters would be registered! But since the Kurds and most of the Shiites now want the constitution, they could reinterpret the Transitional Administrative Law to require 2/3s of eligible voters for a rejection. As al-Falluji says, this interpretation would make it impossible to reject the constitution, and that is why it cannot be what the Kurds had in mind.

Meanwhile, Iraqi President Jalal Talibani retracted his earlier statement that the US could withdraw a third of its ground forces this fall. He said he refused tos et deadlines.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Guest Editorial: Myerson on Iraqi Constitution

"Federalism and the Iraqi Constitution"

by Roger B. Myerson

The draft Iraqi constitution deserves much more public discussion in America as well as in Iraq. As an economist who analyzes democratic constitutional structures, I'd like to offer a few comments.

In most of the text, the constitution seems to establish a reasonably standard parliamentary system, with a unicameral legislature, a Prime Minister who heads the cabinet, and a weak ceremonial President. But there are two nonstandard provisions in the constitution that deserve much more analysis: the provision for creating regional governments (Articles 113-121), and the amendment in Article 135 that establishes the Presidential Council.

The specific procedures for uniting provinces into larger regions are left to be defined by an act of the legislature in its first session. But the constitution encourages provinces to merge themselves into such regions by offering guarantees of greater constitutional autonomy to merged regional governments. Carried to America, these regional-merger provisions would allow the southern states, or the northern blue states, to combine themselves into a great regional mega-state.

Near the end of the draft constitution, Article 135 abruptly announces that the President previously described will be replaced by a three-person Presidential Council, which must be elected by a 2/3 majority of the legislature. Any legislation that is not unanimously approved by the Presidential Council will be effectively vetoed unless it gets 3/5 approval in the legislature. This extraordinary provision, presented at the end of the constitution almost as an afterthought, seems designed to create deadlock in the central government, perhaps to guarantee that the real business of government will be done only at the regional level.

In 2002, the Iraqi authors of the "Final Report on the Transition to Democracy in Iraq" argued persuasively that a successful establishment of democracy in Iraq would require some form of federalism. But I fear that the regional-government and presidential-council provisions of this draft constitution may be aimed at creating, not a federal balance of power between central and local governments, but a system of effectively unitary governments in the regions of Iraq.

When we evaluate the constitutional provisions for creating regional governments, we should compare them to the alternative of simply offering the same guarantees of constitutional autonomy to the 18 existing provinces of Iraq. Compared to such a provincial federalist system, it is hard to see who would benefit from the creation of these larger regional governments, except for the politicians who hope to lead them.

Merging provinces into larger regions cannot increase the ability of local governments to adapt to local conditions. In the American federal system with its 50 states, the leaders of southern and northern states already have the ability to adapt their local administrative practices to their local variations of our southern and northern subcultures. Merging our state governments into larger regional mega-states could only decrease local adaptability. But such mergers could also seriously increase the possibility of secession. The leader of a regional mega-state that included a large fraction of America's population and resources would perceive more benefits and fewer risks in contemplating secession from the Union than any state governor would today.

In a well-designed federal system, the existence of small autonomous local governments can improve the performance of national democracy, because politicians in a federal democracy can prove their credentials for national leadership by serving successfully as leaders of autonomous local governments. Americans have regularly found strong candidates for president among our state governors. This effect of federalism on national elections may be particularly important for new democracies, where candidates with good reputations for responsible democratic service are likely to be scarce. For example, the PRI's long grip on national power in Mexico was broken by an independent state governor.

From this perspective, an ideal federal system would grant substantial autonomous power to local governments that are relatively small but are just large enough that successful management of a local government can demonstrate strong qualifications for national leadership. Given provinces that have this minimal size, the effects of merging provinces would be to decrease the number of such independent local leaders and to increase the chances of regional secession. So the principal beneficiaries of such mergers would be the politicians who expect to become leaders of the separate regions.

Roger B. Myerson
W.C.Norby Professor of Economics
Department of Economics
University of Chicago
1126 East 59th Street Chicago, IL 60637


N.B. This discussion is based on the Associated Press's English translation of the draft Iraqi constitution, published by the New York Times on August 28, 2005
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Tal Afar as Ethnic Civil War

Much of the American press has reported the Tal Afar campaign as a strike by the new Iraqi Army, supported by US troops, against foreign infiltrators in the largely Turkmen city of 200,000.

As Jonathan Finer makes clear in the Washington Post, however, the operation looks different if we know some details. The "Iraqi Army" leading the assault turns out to be mainly the Peshmerga or Kurdish ethnic militia. Along for the ride are local Turkmen Shiites who are being used as informers and for the purpose of identifying Sunni Turkmen they think are involved in the guerrilla movement (apparently they sometimes make false charges to settle scores). Tal Afar was 70 percent Sunni Turkmen and 30 percent Shiite Turkmen. The Sunni Turkmen had thrown in with Saddam, and some more recently had turned to radical Islam. The Shiite Turkmen lived in fear of their lives.

So Kurds and Shiites are beating up on Sunni Turkmen allies of Sunni Arabs. That is what is really going on. The number of foreign fighters appears to be small, and US troops that had been guarding against infiltration on the Syrian border were actully moved to Tal Afar for this operation. It is mainly about punishing the Sunni Turkmen for allying with the Sunni Arab guerrillas. That the attack came in part in response to the pleas of local Shiite Turkmen helps explain why why Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari (Shiite leader of the fundamentalist Dawa Party) authorized it, and went to Tal Afar on Tuesday for a photo op.

The US will never get stability in Iraq if it is merely an adjunct to a Kurdish-Shiite alliance against the Sunni Arabs and their Turkmen supporters.

Reuters surveys guerrilla violence for Tuesday. The report was put out before a big bombing in Karrada in Baghdad that killed one and injured at least 16, and before the British & American diplomatic compound in the southern city of Basra came under rocket attack.

It was revealed Monday that on Sunday evening guerrillas in Latifiyah killed a bodyguard of Shaikh Ahmad al-Safi, a member of parliament and the foremost representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, during an attack on his convoy.

A Marine lance corporal back in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan has given a succinct impression of his time in Iraq. It was hell, he said. It was extremely hot and "everybody's always trying to kill you."

The British government shouldn't be taking any advice on anything or even talking informally to Ahmad Thomson, a British Muslim who had denied the Holocaust and alleged that a cabal of Freemasons and Jews put Tony Blair up to joining the Iraq War. These are hateful and unacceptable views totally ungrounded in reality, and no one who holds them could give any useful advice at all to Downing Street.
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No Comments: Raed

In a sad sign of the times, Raed Jarrar and friends, the Iraqi bloggers, have closed their comment section. They were alarmed by the recent launching of a lawsuit against a site for reader comments at the web page. They were also alarmed by a more draconian form of the phenomenon. What, they ask, would happen if one of the commenters made deep criticism of the US troop presence. They fear the new Iraqi government might hold them accountable if a commenter supports the guerrilla movement (Raed's brother was already detained for reader comments that appeared at his blog.)

Once upon a time, some of us dreamed that the internet and the blogging revolution could play a positive part in growing civil liberties there. In the end, the repressive apparatus of the state trumped all that.
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No Constitution Yet
Waters of Battle recede in Tal Afar

The final text of the Iraqi constitution has still not been worked out, and so the United Nations cannot begin to print it in several million copies so that Iraqi voters can read it before the October 15 referendum. It is going to be very difficult to get the printing and distribution done with only a month to go.

The ongoing negotiations seem to open a new can of worms every day. The Kurds want a lock on the veto that the presidential council can cast with regard to legislation, by insisting on having two of the vice president posts.An ethnic litmus test for political office ought not be in the constitution, in my view, whatever the actual practice. The Shiites want control of water to be in the hands of the central government in Baghdad, which they control via their majority. The water comes to the southern Shiites via territory held by Sunni Arabs and Kurds.

It is a mess that the constitution is still being negotiated so many weeks after the August 22 deadline. You wonder if they will ever be able even to submit a final text for printing. Apparently the United Nations had to refuse to print the constitution last week because the Shiites and the Kurds gave them different versions! Even the US ambassador in Baghdad has a version that he has been reported to be pushing. United Nations officials have criticized the legitimacy of an outside power having that much impact on constitution-making in a sovereign country. Khalilzad, the ambassador, was the one who suggested that Iraqi politicians could go on tinkering with the text after it was submitted and finalized, which was probably a bad idea.

The latest US/Iraqi offensive in Tal Afar petered out on Sunday, as the invaders discovered that the guerrillas in the city had used tunnels to escape. The Iraqis and the US had been saying that they wanted to prevent the guerrillas from getting away, but now they just have to declare victory and go home. Most of the city has been emptied out. Most of the residents had not been guilty of any thing, but now they are refugees.

These sweep operations such as have been conducted several times at Tal Afar and also at Qaim and even the Sunni parts of Baghdad have never really succeeded. It is like attacking water; it just flows around you and the situation ends up the same as before. Operation Lighting in early June in Baghdad was supposed to put an end to Sunni Arab guerrilla operations in Baghdad. It did seem to impede them for a brief period, but then they roared back. It seems possible, perhaps likely, that Tal Afar will revert again, too, when people come back to the city.

The US/Iraqi government policy now appears to be to de-urbanize the Sunni Arab heartland by destroying Sunni cities one after another. The problem with such a tactic is that it will not actually reduce attacks on the US military or the Iraqi police. It will just seed ethnic hatred for decades to come.
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9/11, 7/7 and 8/30

On the fourth-year anniversary of the al-Qaeda attacks on the US, it is important that we take stock of where we stand. We do not stand in a good place. The US military is bogged down in an intractable guerrilla war in Iraq, which most Muslims view as an aggressive neo-imperialism. Afghanistan is still unstable. The major al-Qaeda leaders are still at large, and recently struck London. Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans on 8/30 have demonstrated that the US government is unprepared to deal with major disasters, and that Bush administration priorities have often been capricious.

There have been no further major acts of terrorism in the United States. There are many theories for why this should be. It is certainly the case that there are al-Qaeda members who would like to hit the US again. But al-Qaeda is only interested in what might be called theatrical terrorism, an attack that takes a big toll of dead and wounded and makes an impact on the enemy's economy. Such attacks are not easy for a tiny organization like al-Qaeda, which lacks the backing of a state, to carry out. Al-Qaeda used up its really capable people on 9/11 and is now left mostly with incompetents and marginal personalities. The US is a long way from the Middle East or Europe, and security measures have made it difficult for al-Qaeda operatives to get here or to do damage without being discovered first. The American Muslim community is on the whole fairly well integrated into American society, and clearly all but a handful are loyal Americans who wish to see the country they live in flourish. It was the American Muslims who turned in the Lackawanee five, Yemeni-American young men who had been in an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. One group of Muslim American associations pledged $10 million for Katrina relief efforts. Still, an al-Qaeda attack on a dam or on a nuclear plant is still plausible, and there is no room for complacency.

Al-Qaeda simply hasn't been a priority for Bush. His first priority, all along, has been cutting taxes on his rich friends. The American public is so innumerate that they cannot seem to figure out that if you exclude from taxes another 5 percent of a man's income who pulls down $10 billion, you are talking about $500 million on which he doesn't have to pay taxes every year. But if you exclude the same percentage from taxes for someone making $20,000 a year (and there are a lot of those), then you are only saving her from paying taxes on $1000 a year. That the government could cut taxes on the low-income earners, and not cut them on the super-rich, doesn't seem to occur to the middle class that is so eager for a few crumbs from Bush that they are willing to sell their birthright to government services. Because Bush cut taxes so deeply, and therefore reduced government income and produced a big chronic deficit, he had to steal money for Iraq from various places. The government he appointed to run Iraq for a year (which never had any legal charter) essentially stole Iraq's petroleum income to use on its projects. Billions of dollars are unaccounted for. It is well documented that Bush stole money from Louisiana ear-marked for improving the levees at New Orleans, and also that he sent Louisiana national guardsmen to Iraq.

The Bush administration has put enormously more resources into its problematic Iraq War than it ever did into the fight against al-Qaeda and its affiliates. That they have not succeeded in capturing Usamah Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri is a sign of extreme negligence or lack of seriousness. Likewise, the US government appears to have had no inkling that the March, 2004, bombings in Madrid or the July, 2005 bombings in London were in the offing. Given that a very large number of CIA personnel are in Iraq, it is no wonder that they hadn't been able to penetrate or monitor the radical Muslim terrorists in Western Europe.

The danger of leaving Zawahiri out there to plot against the West was made crystal clear by the July 7 bombings in London and the July 21 attempted bombings. As I noted at the time, the statement released at the time of the July 7 bombings in London seemed to come from an Egyptian. Little did I realize at the time that it was probably written by Ayman al-Zawahiri himself. In the videotape released in early September and shown on al-Jazeera, Zawahiri uses phraseology similar to what was in the announcement posted on 7/7 to an internet site. The surprise for me was that Zawahiri had managed to use a Pakistani jihadi group, the Jaish-i Muhammad, to recruit 3 British young men of Pakistani heritage plus a Carribean to blow up the London underground. Zawahiri clearly had the copy of Muhammad Sadique Khan's last statement, which he bundled with his own screed. I don't personally believe there is any question whatsoever that 7/7 was an al-Qaeda operation of the old sort, with Zawahiri actually involved in comand-and-control (unlike in Spain, where an independent Moroccan group with no direct al-Qaeda ties was responsible). It is still unclear if the second bombing attempt, on July 21, was an inept copycat operation or if it was also run behind the scenes by Zawahiri. Its perpetrators included 3 East Africans and a Carribean and used the same explosive (which luckily had gone stale).

In the UK critics of the Blair government concentrated on the question of whether the bombers were inspired to their hatred for their own country by Western atrocities in Iraq. Of course they were. They talked incessantly of what they saw as massacres at Fallujah, and the torture at Abu Ghraib. Blair had been warned by his own intelligence people in 2004 that the Iraq War could well provoke terrorism against the UK. But that debate missed the key question of why Zawahiri is still at large and able to blow up London, four years after he helped blow up New York and Washington.

The Bush administration has dropped the ball on al-Qaeda, big time. The Iraq War has created a new recruiting ground for al-Qaeda and its soul mates among the Sunni Arabs of Iraq. In Haifa Street in Baghdad and in Samarra, there have actually been crowds wearing al-Qaeda insignia. Contrary to what the Bush administration would have you believe, Iraqis had had virtually nothing to do with al-Qaeda before the American invasion. Iraqi Sunnis had once mostly been secular Arab nationalists. But the American destruction of the Baath Party has made religious fundamentalism attractive to them as an alternative political identity. The US has succeeded in pushing 5 million Middle Easterners away from secular nationalism and toward the arms of al-Qaeda. Operations such as Fallujah and Tal Afar, involving the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, the damaging of a majority of buildings in the city, and the deaths of thousands, will not soon be forgotten by the country's Sunni Arabs. Some have spoken of taking revenge by finding a way to hit the American homeland. Things are not going well.

On top of the failures in the fight against al-Qaeda and the quagmire in Iraq, the US suffered a major blow with Hurricane Katrina and the Great Flood of 2005 in New Orleans (or what used to be New Orleans). The blow was not primarily to the US economy, which is resilient and enormous ($13 trillion?), and which will recoup-- though the economic recovery may slow. The blow was psychological and political. The abysmal job that Bush and Co. did in responding to the disaster, which cost so many lives, will not soon be forgotten. What, many security experts are asking, if this had been a terrorist strike? Unpreparedness of this epochal sort could sink the government.

Bush has given us the worst of all possible worlds-- a half-finished job against al-Qaeda, an Iraqi imbroglio that could still explode into civil or even regional war-- and which serves as an al-Qaeda recruiting tool--, a government starved for funds, an enormous windfall for the rich at the expense of the middle class (which saw average wages actually fall recently), and an inability to respond effectively to a major urban catastrophe.

Four years after September 11, al-Qaeda's leadership should have been behind bars or dead. Four years after September 11, Afghanistan should have been stabilized. Four years after September 11, the government should have been ready to save lives in an urban disaster.

Bush recently started likening his poorly conceived and misnamed "war on terror" to World War II.

What his handlers have forgotten is how long World War II lasted for the United States.

Four years.

In four years, Roosevelt and allies defeated Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. In four years, Bush hasn't managed even to corner Bin Laden and a few hundred scruffy terrorists; or to extract himself from the deserts of Iraq; or to put the government's finances in good order so that it can deal with crises like Katrina.

Four years. I think about the victims of 9/11, and now 7/7. We have let you down.
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Tal Afar Stormed
Threat of Ethnic Cleansing Grows in Iraq

Iraqi troops took the lead in the ground assault in the northern Turkmen city of Tal Afar, in an attempt by the US to showcase newly trained Iraqi army units. The problem is that they are perceived as mostly Shiite, and the Tal Afar campaign is targeting Sunni Turkmen neighborhoods. So the mayor has resigned in protest of a "sectarian" operation. Al-Hayat reports that a local Turkmen leader said that 152 civilians had been killed by "indiscriminate" fire coming from US helicopter gunships. It also said that (Shiite) Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari declare that he had ordered the operation against what he called terrorists, who, he said, had expelled people from their homes. Jaafari should remember what happened to the popularity of Iyad Allawi when he called for more US strikes on Fallujah.

Khalaf Juburi, police chief of Mosul, told al-Hayat that the operation against Tal Afar was aimed at removing a vile disease from Tal Afar.

The Iraqis say that they have closed the border with Syria, but in reality this move just means a couple of regular checkpoints are not longer admitting legal entrants. The long Syrian border with Iraq stretches through desert and other rugged territory and cannot actually be closed by decree. Defense Minister Saadoun Dulaimi turns out to be something of a braggart, since he threatened that after Tal Afar similar operations would be launched against Ramadi, Qaim, and other Sunni Arab cities. In fact, if Dulaimi just openly took a walk in Adhamiyah in West Baghdad, he would be killed on sight. So until he has control of his own capital, he would be advised not to brandish unrealistic threats.

Reuters reports several guerrilla operations on Saturday, including shootings in Baqubah and bombs in Mahawil and Samarra among other places.

Alissa Rubin of the Los Angeles Times draws attention to the pattern of reprisal killings between Sunnis and Shiites in Baghdad. She quotes a US foreign service officer who had been in Bosnia, who says that once minorities begin fleeing territory en masse, a spiral of violence tends to ensue. The implication is that Iraq may not be far from that spiral.

Actually, there are a number of places where there have already been substantial displacements. Thousands of Arabs have left Kirkuk. Shiites have fled Latifiyah. Sunnis Arabs have left the deep, Shiite south.

The Iraqi government agreed to pay the private security firm guarding Baghdad International Airport half the money it is owed, so that the airport has opened again. The spectacle of a private firm holding the Iraqi government ransom with regard to the national airport was not edifying, especially since US troops appear to have intervened in favor of the private company.

It is now often forgotten that colonialism was often spearheaded by private firms. The British East India Company is actually the entity that conquered much of India. The British government only took over directly after the failed 1856-1858 attempted revolution (which the British called a "Mutiny.") Likewise the Netherlands East India Company had a semi-governmental role in what is now Indonesia. The thousands of private security guards in Iraq are not that different from the troops of the old East India Company in India. Many of the latter were also essentially mercenaries.

What is scary is that the privatization of "security" (i.e. the protection of the property of Bush's rich friends at all costs, including substantial loss of human life) is now spreading back to the United States. Blackwater private security men, of the sort who caused so much trouble in Fallujah by acting like cowboys, are now openly toting M16s and other assault weapons in what is left of New Orleans. I'm not aware that the East India Company ever showed up back in London with several platoons to patrol the streets. But then, as the irredentist British neo-imperialists keep reminding us, they did empire better than we do.
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Hitchens and Iraq

History News Network has reprinted my essay responding to Christopher Hitchens on the Iraq War.
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Television Review: The Flight that Fought Back

The Discovery Channel is airing a documentary on United Airlines flight 93, which was hijacked and crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11. It will be on 9 pm on Sunday, September 11, and then repeated at 11 pm and at 1 am. I watched it this morning and can recommend it.

The documentary combines fictional recreations of scenes using actors with interviews with family members, friends and contacts that set the scenes and give some insight into why writer-director Bruce Goodison, co-writer & co-producer Phillip Marlow and producer and commentator writer/director Phil Craig chose to write the dramatic scenes the way he did.

Controversy rages among historians about using the techniques of fiction within a historical narrative. Edmund Morris was slammed for casting his authorized biography of Ronald Reagan as a historical novel. Simon Shama's Dead Certainties : Unwarranted Speculations also mixed historical research with fictional techniques, to not always breathless reviews by other historians.

The writers generally bring off the amalgam of fact and "fiction" (not in the sense that it is not true but in the sense that we cannot know if it actually happened exactly that way in all details, and it is anyway being enacted by actors). I would have been happier if the dramatized scenes had been labeled, though I admit it would have been tedious.

The documentary generally tells the story of what happened in a straightforward chronological way, beginnging with the hijackings. The accident that Flight 93 was delayed on the tarmac for 40 minutes contributed to the failure of this al-Qaeda mission against the U.S., since the delay allowed the passengers to figure out that their hijackers were on a suicide mission, thus giving them every incentive to mount a revolt. The documentary is extremely valuable for the auditory primary sources it uses-- recordings of 911 calls by the hijacked passengers, of calls to the answering machines of relatives, of announcements by the hijackers that went out over the air, of conversations among the air traffic controllers. Craig's team was also able to do intensive interviewing with family members of the passengers, who recounted the substance of telephone conversations with them once the plane had been hijacked. Some family members report the substance of the cockpit flight recording, which has still not been released.

The unfolding tale of the heroism and competence of the passengers and flight attendants is impossible to watch without some tears in one's eyes. These were just ordinary Americans, but they were clearly admirable persons facing a horrifying and mystifying reality. In some ways they were the first responders to al-Qaeda's strike on America, a point some of the relatives make.

Given the combat tasks that ultimately faced the passengers, it would have been possible for Craig, Goodison and Marlow to concentrate on a few of the more formidable men, who included a former quarterback, a judo champion and someone with law enforcement training, to the exclusion of many others. They give full portraits of several of the women and credits the flight attendants with coming up with the idea of boiling water to throw on the al-Qaeda agents.

The film gives a full chronology, splicing in interviews at key junctures, and sets flight 93 in the context of the other hijackings that day. It does not speculate as to the target sought by Lebanese hijacker Ziad Jarrah, though various later captured al-Qaeda leaders identified it as the White House or the Capitol building. The cumulative evidence they present makes it hard to avoid the conclusion that the passengers genuinely did mount a revolt and force a crash about 15 minutes from Washington, DC, over Pennsylvania.

The documentary depicts the hijackers as shouting in Arabic "Inzilha, Inzilha!" (Or possibly "Nazzilha, nazzilha"--in colloquial Arabic vowels are often transposed.)--i.e. "bring it down", as the passengers rammed the cockpit. Unfortunately, Craig and the writers do not tell us if the word "Inzilha!" is their own translation of the 9/11 Commission's report on the cockpit recorder results (it says they shouted "put it down!" which is not exactly the same thing) This question points to one severe drawback of the technique of mixing fiction with fact. We viewers do not necessarily know which is which. I'd have loved to use the documentary as historical evidence, but am nervous about a lot of it.

Craig rightly dismisses the rumors that the plane may have been shot down. Eyewitnesses saw the plane flying upside down toward the earth at a high speed just before it crashed.

The documentary is partially a plea by the family members for recognition of the role of the passengers as troops in the front lines of the war on terror. It includes a plea for the public to help fund a memorial at the site of the plane crash. I have to say that I am mystified as to why this should be necessary. Does not Congress wish to honor the people who may well have preserved the Capitol from destruction? Why is there not already a government-backed memorial? It is bizarre.

Interested viewers may compare the film to the wikipedia treatment of these events. This article notes that the 9/11 Commission concluded that the passengers never managed to break down the door and get into the cockpit, something the film disputes. Apparently the relatives who heard the cockpit recording heard more evidence of the break-in than did the members of the commission.

The documentary completely avoids politics. This gap seems to me unfortunate. We are given no more than sketchy details about Lebanese hijacker Ziad Jarrah. He is the most problematic and ambiguous of the hijackers, and many questions have been raised about him. He doesn't seem to have been much of a Muslim most of the time. He had a live-in Turkish girlfriend and he drank beer with friends at the Florida flight school he attended. Did al-Qaeda just mean to him a vague Arab Muslim nationalism? Had he been traumatized as an 8 year old child by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982? He and the other hijackers are depicted as cyphers. Understanding a criminal or terrorist and justifying him are not the same thing, and Craig, Goodison and Marlow make not the slightest attempt at understanding. Even just a more extended treatment of the "doomsday document" that guided the terrorists' preparation for their slaughter of innocents, to which the document very briefly refers, would have been some context.

They choose to depict the hijackers as wide-eyed and terrified at their last moments, and as having been grabbed from behind by enraged passengers. I'm not sure either conclusion is supported by the cockpit flight recorder. Jarrah was all along on a suicide mission. Why should he have been terrified to realize that he would have to crash early, as opposed to disappointed? Accounts of suicide bombers often reveal them as unusually and creepily calm in their last minutes.

There are only so many persons that a documentary can introduce to the audience at once. But I regret that we were not told more about Toshiya Kuge, a Japanese passenger. The September 11 attacks killed a lot of persons other than Americans, including Muslims, and there is some benefit to considering them as global rather than only American events.

What the family members think about the Bush administration's subsequent "war on terror" and its failure to capture the top ringleaders is not revealed to us by this film. The technique of focusing intensely on the personal has great yields for the purposes of art and emotion. But the absence of politics makes it difficult truly to understand what happened, why it happened, and what conclusions we should draw from its having happened.

The documentary is, as I said, well worth seeing and is suitable for classroom use. In the latter case, it will be most effective if used in conjunction with analytical treatments such as Marc Sageman's "Understanding Terrorist Networks."
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Private Company Shuts down Baghdad International Airport
More violence in Baghdad

The steady drumbeat of mayhem continued again on Friday. One bomb in Baghdad killed 4 persons, including three policemen, and wounded 9. There were other assassinations and guerrilla violence elsewhere in the country.

Al-Zaman: American forces, both infantry and armor moved further into the northern Turkmen city of Tal Afar. The city was completely surrounded. A local source says that 90 percent of the city's residents have fled. Those who remain have received commands by pamphlet to leave. Local health officials are alleging that 170 persons have been sickened by poison. Eyewitnesses speak of heavy US aerial bombardment of suspected guerrilla hideouts in the city.

Apparently northern Mosul is also out of control, and the Iraqi government is pledging to bring it back under government authority. Al-Zaman alleges that there is some connection between that task and coordinating with the local authorities about the October 15 referendum. It is expected that the major Iraqi cities [in the center-north?] will reject the constitution in this referendum. [It is hard to tell, but the implication seems to be that the security measures in Mosul and the US attack on Tal Afar are not just security operations but have to do with Iraqi and US government concerns about the way Ninevah Province might vote in the referendum; it is a swing province that could help reject the new constitution. Personally, I am not sure of a connection here.]

A national guard unit from Minnesota in Iraq speaks out about severe sleep deprivation, 60 men doing the work of 120, sand flies, and bitter disillusionment. Most of them seem likely to get out of the National Guard as soon as the Pentagon lifts the "stop-loss" (a.k.a. kidnapping) order that keeps them in past their sign-up period. The level of discontent must be enormous for them to speak to the press despite severe pressure within the military not to do so.

A private company has shut down Baghdad International Airport because it has not been paid for supplying security there. It maintains that the Iraqis cannot provide security to the required standards. As the Iraqis pointed out in response, surely the Iraqi government is sovereign over the airport!

Nathan Brown Analyzes the new Iraqi Constitution [.pdf].
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Another Winning Formula for Iraq

Distinguished Middle East historian William R. Polk writes:

' If my comments in my last essay on the suggestion of Scott Gerwehr and Nina Hachigian on how to turn around insurgents “with a little tenderness” depressed you, be of good cheer. All is not lost. I have just read about another winning formula: “How to Win in Iraq” by Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr. in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. We have to take it seriously because Foreign Affairs probably is and certainly was the pre-eminent American journal in the field. So we should be grateful to Mr. Krepinevich for offering us a way to win.

“Although withdrawing now would be a mistake,” he writes, “simply ‘staying the course,’ by all current indications, will not improve matters either. Winning in Iraq will require a new approach.”

What went wrong and what should now be done?

Mr. Krepinevich says that since we had no “clear strategy in Iraq,” we have had no way to say whether or not we were winning. This, he points out, has confused the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the U.S. commander on the ground and even Vice President Dick Cheney. Each of them pronounced the war in the “last throes.” But “…according to the most recent polls, nearly two-thirds [of Americans] think the coalition is ‘bogged down.’” Since, also according to surveys, most Americans do not even know where Iraq is, they must have relied on common sense.

Not having a clear strategy certainly makes it hard to keep score. That is reprehensible, but much worse is the opinion of those who think the current policy is a failure. All they “have offered as their alternative ‘strategy’ [is] an accelerated timetable for withdrawal. They see Iraq as another Vietnam and advocate a similar solution: pulling out U.S. troops and hoping for the best. [But] Radical Islamists would see the U.S. departure as a victory, and the ensuing chaos would drive up oil prices.”

Perhaps Mr. Krepinevich has not been reading the press over the last six months or so: Chaos is not “ensuing;” it already exists. To drive from the fortified American enclave, the “Green Zone,” out to Baghdad’s airport can be done only in armored cars, with a military escort and under the cover of helicopters. No westerners go out into the streets without a posse of guards. Journalists who dateline their dispatches “Baghdad” are almost as isolated from Iraq as though they were writing from New York. And the price of oil, even before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, was up at least double over what it was before the invasion. Moreover, Mr. Krepinevich seems to have been confused about the “Radical Islamists.” Until a few months ago, we used that term for the Shiis, the friends of that pivot of the axis of evil, Iran, who want to revert to their particular brand of religious fundamentalism; the people against whom we were fighting were secularists as, indeed, was the Baath government. Now, in fighting against us, we presume, although we have learned so little about them we cannot be sure, that the insurgents too have become religious fundamentalists.

But I do not mean to quibble about what Mr. Krepinevich knows or does not know about Iraq. Let us consider his winning formula:

What we need is what he calls an “oil-spot strategy.” (Aesthetically, I wish he had chosen another term! ) What he means is “Rather than focusing on killing insurgents, they [U.S. and Iraqi forces] should concentrate on providing security and opportunity to the Iraqi people, thereby denying insurgents the popular support they need. Since the U.S. and Iraqi armies cannot guarantee security to all of Iraq simultaneously, they should start by focusing on certain key areas and then, over time, broadening the effort – hence the image of an expanding oil spot.”

Again, I do not mean to quibble and certainly don’t mean to fall into the category of those so deprecated by Mr. Krepinevich for comparing Iraq and Vietnam, but this does rather sound like one of the tactics we tried in Vietnam. There we called it “regroupment.” Indeed, Mr. Krepinevich conjures Vietnam by saying that the “search and destroy” tactics used there still appeal to the U.S. military in Iraq. But, he goes on, “hunting down and killing insurgents [is ineffective because] even when an attack manages to inflict serious insurgent casualties, there is little or no enduring improvement in security once U.S. forces withdraw from the area.” That was certainly true in Vietnam.

Something else seems to be called for. What would the “oil spot” strategy entail? How would it be carried out? What would be the effects? And what are the alternatives?

Mr. Krepinevich answers the first question by saying “it would require a protracted commitment of U.S. resources, a willingness to risk more casualties in the short term, and an enduring U.S. presence in Iraq.” Before we jump into a policy with those rather vague price tags, let us consider the requirements:

First, on the size of the military commitment. Mr. Krepinevich suggests that his proposed policy would require fewer American soldiers -- only 120,000 instead of 140,000 now there. He does not make clear why he is so optimistic. Military experience suggests that a static defense usually requires more troops than a mobile attack. That experience suggests we may be talking about many, many more men on the ground. But, even if he is right, keeping only 120,000 troops in Iraq is a major commitment. He hopes that the force could be reduced over time to a final number of 20,000 as area after area is pacified.

This is a difficult point for the strategy he proposes or any other strategy that requires large numbers of Americans to stay in Iraq. As he writes, “If confidence in the war wanes, veterans will vote with their feet by refusing to re-enlist and prospective new recruits will avoid signing up in the first place. If this occurs, the United States will be unable to sustain anything approaching its current effort in Iraq.” The American troops, he admits, are today “140,000 targets” and the American public is unhappy about this fact.

The policy, Mr. Krepinevich proposes would, he says, “risk” more casualties. “Risk” is not the right word – more casualties would be a certainty. Parenthetically, allow me one comparison with Vietnam. In the first three years of each war, America suffered at least five times as many casualties in Iraq as in Vietnam. Whether or not we adopt Mr. Krepinevich’s strategy, it seems likely that casualties will not diminish. Indeed, if his strategy is adopted, he foresees “longer U.S. casualty rolls.”

And, second, what is the meaning of Mr. Krepinevich’s phrase “enduring presence?” He answers honestly and unequivocally: “Even if successful, this strategy will require at least a decade of commitment…” That is, again to compare, a longer period than the large-scale American involvement in Vietnam. Such a long-term commitment will undoubtedly have profound, unpredictable but pervasive influences on American society; it is difficult to believe that they could be beneficial. Scores of thousands of young men and women will be subjected to the brutalizing effects of guerrilla war and in the almost inevitable periods of disillusionment, anger and disagreement, all Americans will be severely stressed and probably bitterly divided from one another. As I have pointed out, it is precisely the revolutionary aspects of such conditions that appealed to Leon Trotsky in his plan to tear apart Western society and which appeal to the Neoconservatives in their desire to reform America and the rest of the world on their radical new pattern.

And, third, the money cost? Again, Mr. Krepinevich is up-front with the answer, “hundreds of billions of dollars .” As I pointed out in my previous essay, “A Little Tenderness,” former Assistant Secretary of Commerce Linda Bilmes has estimated the cost of five years of the Iraq war at 1 trillion and 372 billion dollars; is the next five years Mr. Krepinevich estimates for his strategy likely to be much cheaper? He does not think so. Neither do I.

Meanwhile, as he points out, not just Arabs or just Muslims but peoples all over the world have come to dislike and fear America and “Indeed, citizens in Canada, France, Germany the Netherlands, Russia, Spain and the United Kingdom now hold more favorable views of China than of the United States.” The trend is toward greater distrust of Americans. This, as I and others have emphasized, is the wasting of a treasure Americans have inherited that is far more valuable than money.

If these costs are realistic, what is to be gained by the “oil spot” policy had better be significant. And creating and sustaining, much less spreading, the spots had better be feasible. So what does Mr. Krepinevich think actually happens in them ?

The idea is conceptually simple. We expand the “Green Zone” population from just Americans and a few approved Iraqis first to neighborhoods, next to towns, then to provinces and finally to the whole country.

The difficulty is implementing it.

In Vietnam we implemented it rather crudely, moving whole populations into “secure” areas, destroying their former homes and torching or poisoning their fields and killing their animals to prevent the Vietcong from benefiting from them. Most important was to be the breaking off of contact between the evacuees and the insurgents. It was a massive, brutal and expensive program. Unfortunately, it did not work. As I pointed out in my last essay, the Vietcong not only moved relatively easily into the “secure” areas – the current saying was “the night belonged to them” as I witnessed even in downtown Saigon -- but even into the presidential palace and into the councils of the South Vietnamese general staff. Presumably, as I believe everyone now admits, such movement could not have happened without at least the acquiescence of a significant portion of the people in the secure areas.
So how could this fatal weakness be rectified in Iraq?

Consider a hypothetical case: we decide to make a suburb of Baghdad an “oil spot.” It has, say, a hundred thousand people living in it. How do we keep it “pure?” To weed out the active insurgents has everywhere proven impossible for us. Nevermind the native insurgents, of whom there are believed to be less than 20,000, we have not even managed to catch more than a few of the several hundred foreign insurgents purported to be in Iraq. The reason is clear: these people are given food, a place to hide, cover , money and perhaps even arms and explosives by large numbers of Iraqis. My guess is that the large number adds up to several hundred thousand. So let us assume that in our model suburb, there are a few score combatants and a few thousand supporters. They, in turn, rely on the complicity of relatives, friends and neighbors. How can such people be identified, “turned,” arrested or killed? To do so would require a secret police organization like the ones that functioned in Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China. Even Saddam’s police force, brutal as it was, was not capable of this task. It is difficult to see how Americans, who are woefully ignorant of the country, the culture, the language and are themselves objects of suspicion or even hatred could improve upon what Saddam was able to do. But, in attempting it, imagine the effect on the inhabitants: at best, as they were turned against one another, they would be rendered less capable to undertake the immense task of rebuilding Iraqi society. More likely, in the process of identifying security risks, the inquisitors will engender further hatred of America and so indirectly help to recruit new insurgents. But, even if the American administration succeeds, what could it do with the arrested security risks? We have somewhat more than 12,000 Iraqis now in prison. The prisons are already bursting, but each “oil spot” would surely add substantially more.

And, unless each neighborhood was walled or fenced off, as we tried but failed to do in Vietnam, people would move in and out so that agitators would “contaminate” even the already cleared “oil spots.” To prevent them would be further to cripple the economy. With an unemployment rate already perhaps as high as 65%, the whole country would become destitute. Then it would be hard to find any Iraqis who would cooperate with the Americans.

Even worse, I have to say, selfishly as an American , would be the degrading of the American character that involvement in such a program would necessarily cause.

Not to belabor the point further, the “oil spot” policy makes no sense at all.

Why, I ask in frustration, are such apparently intelligent people as Mr. Krepinevich, who is described as “Distinguished Visiting Professor of Public Policy” at George Mason University, driven to such fantasy? I think the answer is that they simply cannot deal with the central fact of the Iraqi insurgency: nationalism. The Iraqi people, as I have pointed out in Understanding Iraq and elsewhere are like us in at least one respect. They do not want to be ruled by foreigners. The more of us there are and the longer we stay, the greater will be the opposition to us. Those “experts” who do not wish to see this, or at least to be guided by what is realistic, bring forward the argument, as does Mr. Krepinevich, that “Radical Islamists would see the U.S. departure as a victory” and that our departure would cause chaos.
So we search for gimmicks, as did Scott Gerwehr and Nina Hachigian or a new strategy (or at least a new name for an old strategy) as does Mr. Krepinevich.

Is there another possibility? Yes, there is, however desperately we seek to avoid seeing it. It is in the context not in the gimmicks or in the strategy. In the context of an American occupation, any Iraqi government is bound to be seen as a puppet or even as a Quisling. Consequently, enough of the population will support the opponents of the foreigners that the government will be crippled. And, enough of the population will tolerate even horrible and apparently senseless attacks on fellow citizens, as it has been doing, that the combatants will be supported or at least not effectively opposed.

If the context were changed, the effects would become quite different. When the foreigners leave, the target is removed. Then terrorists either become government officials (as happened in Ireland, Israel, Kenya, Algeria, and in incipient United States after our own Revolution which was also mainly a guerrilla war against foreigners) or they become merely outlaws without popular support -- Mao’s fish without their supporting sea -- and quickly are hunted down. History should teach us, if we were willing learn from it, that changing the context is the only feasible way out of the mess we got ourselves into in Iraq.

Of course, there will be a period of confusion, of fighting, of atrocities – as there are now, every day. That is the price that must be paid for our decision to go into Iraq in the first place. A similar time of chaos has followed evacuation in every insurgency. American revolutionaries hounded out of the country, brutally assaulted or even hanged large numbers of the Loyalists who had supported the British. Similar ugly events will happen in Iraq. We might be able to mitigate the worst with a transitional UN peacekeeping force provided its tenure was clearly limited and we were not part of it. In my study of a number of comparable insurgencies, I found that this period of chaos was usually short; roughly, it was in proportion to the degree of brutality of the war and its duration. How long it will take Iraq is anyone’s guess, but the longer we stay there and try to “win,” the longer and more costly the recovery process will take.

Rather than chasing mirages while we waste the lives of more thousands of young Americans, tens of more thousands of Iraqis, more hundreds billions of dollars and the rapidly draining reservoir of goodwill of the rest of the world, would it not be intelligent to try really to understand the war and evolve a sensible way to end it? '


William R. Polk
September 7, 2005


William R. Polk was a member of the Policy Planning Council of the U.S. Department of State from 1961 to 1965. Subsequently, he was Professor of History at the University of Chicago, the founding director of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies and President of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs. His latest book is Understanding Iraq (New York: HarperCollins, 2005). More of his essays can be accessed at his website.

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The Disaster of US Economic Policy in Iraq

An informed observer of the Iraq scene writes:

' For most constructive purposes, it is not worth adding controversy over the Bush Administration’s economic policy in Iraq and early plans to privatize the economy, including the oil industry. Until after there is an elected constitutional government, there can be little structural change in the Iraqi economy. That will not happen until next year at the earliest. This has been the case from the outset. It is the law, which may not be written specifically on one applicable piece of paper, but exists in a powerful and ineluctable way.

There could, and should, have been a variation of the WPA and other similar programs from the beginning. Few in the CPA would have known how to devise and implement programs of that type, even if they could have ideologically kept in mind and implemented them at the same time. Instead, little or nothing was, and has been even now, done to reduce unemployment, except for fewer than 200,000 in the security forces and relatively insignicant, in the context of the whole, USAID-financed small construction projects, however valuable they have been to those who directly benefited. No one knows what the actual level of unemployment is, but it is a good guess or estimate that it was and is in 7 figures.

Free markets require law and order and the rule of law. The US Government has not yet managed to achieve those necessary conditions for free markets or privatization or even, in some places in Iraq, for more than semi-primitive commerce.

The combination of the absence of the establishment of law and order and the illegal (4th Geneva Convention and other applicable law and legal principles) abolition by the CPA, early in its administration, of all import tariffs and controls, according to a recent report in Azzaman - English, has – predictably – resulted in 33,000 non-state-owned businesses being more or less idle, and, again, predictably, has largely destroyed, for the moment, whatever private sector there was in Iraq outside of Kurdistan.

Meanwhile, little was and has been done to professionalize and develop the state-owned enterprises, which is a prerequisite for privatization, for, without that additional necessary condition, they could only be privatized in a distress sale, bringing little or no revenue to the government.

There is now a consensus that the Bush Administration made “mistakes” in its post-invasion administration of Iraq. Principal focus rightly has been on the security front, and also the political process. Yet it would seem obvious that its economic policies have had, and continue to have, effects in both arenas. The effects of the economic policy mix, implemented in varying incomplete ways, will take a long time to fix. And, because the elected constitional government probably, to a significant extent, will be a coalition parliamentary government, it might not be efficient from an economic policy or administration (business) point of view, let alone there being a consensus with respect to economic structural change.

While a few Iraqis (and a few foreigners) have been made rich, which probably continues, there being $ billions at play, at the present time, on the basis of per capita GDP, Iraq is a relatively poor country, notwithstanding the oil in the ground. Roughly put, but concretely indicative, at a now notional $50 per barrel (some of Iraq’s oil is sour, and there is on the order of a $5 per barrel discount), exports of 1.5 million barrels per day, and a population of, say, 25 million, that price represents $3 per Iraqi person per day. While the Dinar goes farther in Iraq than the Dollar in America, that does not represent significant wealth and, among other things, if the savings and investment that will be required even to reconstruct and develop Iraq to where it was a decade ago (adjusted to the present) are taken into account, that roughly-computed amount can be characterized as “peanuts.”

Iraq could remain a relatively poor country for some time. An opportunity was lost. '

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Huge Bomb in Basra Kills 16
14 Bodies Discovered in Mahmudiyah

Guerrillas detonated an enormous bomb outside a restaurant in the southern port city of Basra on Thursday, killing 16 persons and wounding 21. Two children were killed in the attack. Basra has occasionally suffered from such guerrilla violence, which is carried out by Salafi Sunni extremists or by the Baath Party underground, but big bombings there have been comparatively rare. The largely Shiite populace keeps its eyes open for infiltrators, as do the Sadrist and Badr Corps militias.

Iraqi authorities discovered 14 bodies near Mahmudiyah. Such night-time killings, Mafia style, usually involve attacks by Sunni Arabs on Shiites or vice versa.

The US military continued its assault on the Turkmen city of Tal Afar, detaining 200 suspected guerrillas. The city of 200,000 is largely deserted, though some civilians have stayed behind and remain in severe danger. The US military has done things like call down 500 pound bombs on residential districts to get at suspected guerrillas. As we wonder where all the Katrina refugees will go, we should be wondering even harder where all the Tal Afar refugees will go.

There was also deadly violence in Tikrit and in Baghdad.

The United Nations cannot begin printing the Iraqi constitution for distribution to the Iraqi people until it gets a text "certified" by the Iraqi parliament. The parliament has never voted on the draft constitution, presented by its drafting committee on August 22. The text has subsequently been amended, though it is not clear by what legal process. The UN is insisting that if it is going to help print the document, it should be signed off on by more than a handful of politicians at the top.

The UN is also concerned about the dreadful human rights situation in the country.

The Americans will stop doing work on Iraqi water and power facilities because they have run out of money. LA Times money quote on this: ' "We can't seem to get [the Iraq rebuilding] right. We see it in Katrina, the lack of leadership, the lack of coordination," said Rep. Nita M. Lowey of New York, the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee. '

US companies and even officials often operate in Iraq only because their private security guards keep them alive. Now the elected Iraqi government is considering expelling the private armies, or at least reining them in.

Iraq's new constitution, with its approval of loose federalism, may make developing Iraq's petroleum resources more difficult. Oil companies won't like to have to negotiate with each local party, or to risk their investment if a dispute lands in an unsympathetic court.
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Who is the Enemy, Really?

My talk at the New America Foundation conference on Terrorism, Security and America's Purpose is available in streaming video (windows media player).

Thanks again to Steve Clemons of the Washington Note blog for his key role in setting it up.

And a shout out to Irish blogger Gavin, who blogged some of the conference and who is good company at a party.
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Louisiana National Guard coming Home
4 US Security Men Killed

Guerrillas used a roadside bomb to kill 4 US private security men in the southern city of Basra on Wednesday. They had helped guard the US consulate in the southern Shiite city. There are about 20,000 such private security guards in Iraq, and some 200 have been killed.

US warplanes bombed the home of Abu Ali near Husaybah in western Iraq, in an attempt to kill the terrorist. Foreign fighters are said to dominate Qaim and other towns in the area.

The US Pentagon is sending hundreds of members of the Louisiana National Guard home from Iraq. Some of them have lost homes in New Orleans. Internet gossip had earlier suggested substantial discontent in the ranks over being stuck in Iraq while Louisiana faced its biggest crisis in modern history.

The Iraqi Interior ministry said 9 Iraqis were killed, among them a high-ranking official in the ministry of the interior. Another 20, at least, were injured.

US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield maintains that the US government can both take care of New Orleans and pursue the "global war on terror."

Uh, Donald, let's look at this situation. First, much of New Orleans is under water. You stole money that should have been spent on its levees for the Iraq War, and you stole state national guards from Louisiana to fight in Iraq. (The state national guards hadn't signed up to fight foreign wars and were surprised when you kidnapped them, sometimes for a whole year at a time.) So you haven't actually done a good job with the effects of Katrina in New Orleans. In fact, the job has been so bad that some wags are saying they can't believe you personally were not in charge of the recovery effort.

Then let's consider the war against al-Qaeda. You may have noticed that Ayman al-Zawahiri issued a videotape late last week. It was bundled with the farewell suicide tape of Muhammad Siddique Khan, the mastermind of the 7/7 bombers in London. It now appears that your inability to capture al-Zawahiri has allowed him to intrigue with Pakistani jihadi groups to recruit British subjects to bomb their own country. Bin Laden and Zawahiri are at large and free men, which is your failure.

Then there is the war in Iraq. I don't need to tell you that that isn't going very well. In fact, what in hell are you doing in the godforsaken Turkmen city of Tal Afar? Is it really a big threat to the United States? Is it likely to be friendly to us if you drop 500 pound bombs on its residential districts?

You left out the fourth war Bush is fighting, on the US poor. The average wage of the average American worker fell last quarter, amidst rising corporate profits. Bush cut billions in taxes on the rich, and then gave $300 checks to some poor people, who didn't seem to realize that by taking it they were giving up all sorts of government services and maybe even their social security payments.

So, Donald, maybe it is true that someone can save New Orleans, occupy Iraq and fight a global war on terror all at the same time. But you, at least, cannot actually do these things successfully. Which is why you should have resigned a long time ago.
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4 US Troops Dead
Constitutional Talks End

The US military has withdrawn from the Shiite holy city of Najaf, seat of the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Although the Lt. Col. James Oliver maintained that the Iraqi army is operating successfully throughout the region, it is more likely the case that the Badr Corps is providing what security there is. The Badr Corps is the paramilitary of the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the party that rules Najaf Province (population: about 800,000). We see here the beginnings of the Bush administration exit strategy for Iraq, which is that the south will be turned over to SCIRI and Badr. The US military must be convinced that Badr can now handle the Mahdi Army and can protect Grand Ayatollah Sistani from assassination (both are tall orders).

Al-Hayat: A source in the Iraqi parliament said that further negotiations on the issue of the identity of Iraq (as an Arab state) had proved inconclusive, and that the draft would be printed and voted on as is. The Sunni Arabs had wanted an acknowledgment that Iraq is an Arab country, but the draft constitution says only that it forms part of the Muslim world and that its Arabs form part of the Arab world. This issue has also been important to Iraq's Sunni Arab neighbors, including the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Arab League. It may be that the new text identifies Iraq as a founder of the Arab League, but a leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party (Sunni) said that the amendment was not sufficient to mollify Sunni Arab concerns.

On Tuesday, the deaths of 4 US troops were announced and guerrilla violence left 19 Iraqis dead. A big military operation was launched in the northern, Turkmen city of Tal Afar. US warplanes bombed two bridges across the Euphrates near the Syrian border to stop radical Sunni jihadis from infiltrating into Tal Afar.

The US has managed oil-rich Iraq so well during the past 2 1/2 years that the country has instituted gasoline rationing. Not only can you fill up only every other day, but now you can only drive in Baghdad every other day. I guess if you live far from your work in the city, you are out of luck. Of course, given the likely unemployment rate of 50 percent, this problem does not affect that many people.

Response of some US troops in Iraq to Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the US government to deal with it efficiently: "If anything I`m kind of embarrassed,' said an officer. 'We`re supposed to be telling the Iraqis how to act and this is what`s happening at home?" This senior officer in Balad also said that he'd rather be in Iraq than in New Orleans right now!

Bush's disapproval ratings for his handling of Iraq has plummeted further, to 59 percent-- nearly 6 in 10. Some 41 percent would advise him to go ahead and get the troops out.

Niraj Warikoo of the Detroit Free Press explores the disputes among Iraqi-American women over the provision in the new Iraqi constitution that no civil law may contradict Islamic canon law.
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20 Killed in Guerrilla Violence
Talabani Lashes out at the Arab League

In the western city of Hit on Monday guerrillas detonated a suicide car bomb at a US/Iraqi base, killing 3 Iraqi soldiers and 8 civilians. It also wounded 16 other persons.

Guerrillas in Baquba and Khalis, north of Baghdad, struck at civilian neighborhoods with mortar fire, killing 5 civilians.

In Baghdad, a whole platoon of guerrillas, about 30 strong traveling in 10 cars, attacked the Ministry of the Interior, killing two policemen and wounding 5 others. Interior is dominated by the Shiite party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and its Badr Corps paramilitary (originally trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards).

In the southern Sunni Arab town of Zubair, near Basra, a roadside bomb killed two British soldiers.

Other Iraqis died fighting US troops at Tel Afar and Balad, where the US killed 11 suspected guerrillas.

Al-Zaman reports that the Kurdish Alliance seems to be showing some understanding that the constitution will have to acknowledge Iraq's Arab identity more if it is to attact the votes of the Sunni Arabs in the October 15 referendum. It suggests that a breakthrough on this issue is imminent. President Jalal Talabani, himself a Kurdish leader, alluded to the need to acknowledge Iraq's founding role in forming the Arab League. At the same time, Talabani raked the Arab states over the coals for having declined to send ambassadors to Baghdad, and for having neglected to send condolences for the deaths of about 1,000 persons in the stampede at al-A'imah Bridge last week. (They also neglected to send any relief aid for the bereaved families and the over 800 wounded.)

Baha' al-Araji, a member of the constitution drafting committee from the majority Shiite alliance, said that the hope of an imminent breakthrough had led to a postponement in the printing of 5 million copies of the constitution (so that Iraqis will know what they are voting on in the referendum).

Muhsin Abd al-Hamid, leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party (Sunni) expressed hope that amendments will be made to the constitution that would mollify the Sunni Arabs. He said the likelihood of this step occurring had been increased by the broadening of the political coalition opposing the current draft. He denied that current military operations in Qaim and Husaibah would have any impact on the political and constitutional issues. He said that the political and constitutional issues have their own special context that does not track with the struggle aginst "the terrorists".

The Washington Post confirms the report given by al-Zaman yesterday that the Monotheism and Holy War group (what they are called locally) has taken over the city of Qaim. They appear to have taken advantage of the US military's assault on Tal Afar to the north, which has drawn away US troops. (There are only about 10,000 US troops for all of Anbar Province, a huge area with a population of some 800,000.) Monotheism and Holy War also appears to have inflicted a defeat on the Albu Mahal clan that had been supporting the US.

Katha Pollit of The Nation weighs in on the implications of the new Iraqi constitution for women.

Spencer Ackerman of TNR is disturbed at the prospect of a Najaf/ Washington alliance. My information is that that cow is long since out of the barn. Bush has been meeting since February with the representatives in Washington of the Dawa Party and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, having them over to the White House, schmoozing them, etc. He knows the winner of an election when he sees one. As Ackerman says, this alignment of Washington and Najaf has been a long-term project of the Neoconservatives. I think they just want to divide the Arab world between Sunnis and Shiites so as to make trouble and weaken the Arabs, for the benefit of the Likud Party in Israel. Frum and Perle even want to encourage Shiite separatism in the oil-rich Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia so as to split up Saudia and defund the Wahhabis. The Neocons suffer from the Pied Piper syndrome. They are so unprincipled and instrumentalist that they are always creating a cat problem to get rid of rats. As if the Shiites of Qatif and Hufuf would necessarily be pro-American!

Anyway, if Bush wants a constitution to be passed in Iraq, he needs it to be endorsed by Grand Ayatollah Sistani. The provision that no law may be passed contravening Islamic Law (article 2A) is a non-negotiable demand of Sistani. Without it, he might well come out against the constitution, which would certainly sink it. He has bucked Bush quite successfully before. Ackerman's concerns all flow from the Jan. 30 elections, which the fundamentalist Shiites and Iran won, and which Bush lost. It's been over with all this time.

Tom Engelhardt, among our finest essayists and political analysts, outdoes himself with his consideration of New Orleans, Iraq and "the feral city."
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Terrorism, Security, and America's Purpose

The New America Foundation is hosting a conference on "Terrorism, Security and America's Purpose" at the Capitol Hilton on Tuesday and Wednesday.

The Conference Schedule is here.

There will be a live webcast, and several of the speakers would be especially worth catching, especially, on Tuesday, the 11 am panel with Bob Pape and Nir Rosen (Rosen covered Iraq on the ground for the New Yorker and other magazines).

I'll be speaking Wednesday afternoon.
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Hitch's Last Stand


My article at Salon.com is "Christopher Hitchens' last battle."

' The British hawk gives 10 reasons why Americans should be proud of the Iraq war. He goes 0 for 10.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Juan Cole

Sept. 3, 2005 | Bush administration foot-dragging and ineptitude in handling the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans has profoundly demoralized his supporters on the right. The hawkish intellectuals who gathered around George W. Bush to support his "War on Terror" once used language that suggested his machine-like omnicompetence. The Afghanistan War was to be "Operation Infinite Justice" until it was pointed out that Allah was the only one in that part of the world generally permitted to use that kind of language. The images of civilians abandoned to their fates and unchecked looting from New Orleans, however, reminded everyone of Bush's disastrous policies in Iraq, and suggested a pattern of criminal incompetence.

These bellicose intellectuals--a band of Wilsonian idealists, cutthroat imperial capitalists, Trotskyites bereft of a cause, and neo-patriots traumatized by Sept. 11 are now increasingly divided and full of mutual recriminations. Among them all, the combative British essayist Christopher Hitchens continues most forcefully to uphold the case for the war, most recently in a piece for the Weekly Standard. '

The rest is at Salon.

P.S. When you read something like this interview Hitchens did with the Australian Broadcasting Co., you wonder if even he is beginning to have second thoughts . . .
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Guerrillas come Back in Qaim
Heavy Clashes in Tal Afar

Reuters reports that pipeline sabotage has again interrupted exports from the Kirkuk fields to the Ceyhan terminal. The Kirkuk fields under normal circumstances could produce 1.5 million barrels a day, but they have only been averaging 200,000 bbd.

Al-Zaman/DPA: In the holy city of Najaf on Sunday, someone detonated a bomb at a beauty parlor, killing one woman and wounding two others.

Al-Zaman: Guerrillas are once again in control of the western border city of Qaim near Syria, after US and Iraqi troops withdrew from it. They had fought fierce battles in the city, which ended on Sunday. According to press reports, the mayor of Qaim (who is a refugee in Baghdad) is the source for the reports of a renewed guerrilla dominance.

In the northern Turkmen city of Tal Afar, US troops continued their siege. Eyewitnesses said that a guerrilla ambush of a US aonvoy inflicted substantial damage. [US military sources do not acknowledge this report, which may not be well grounded.] US airstrikes on the city killed one resident and a child, and seriously wounded 11 others, including 4 children. All this according to health officias ath the al-Zahrawi Teaching Hospital at Mosul and the Qada' Hospital in Tal Afar. Local eyewitnesses alleged that dozens of persons had actually been wounded by the US airstrikes. They said local and Mosul health teams had not been able to reach the wounded. They also said that Tal Afar remains surrounded and under siege, and that US forces have made many random arrests. Details were difficult to gather given the US security shield around the city.

Radio Ninevah, the local station, broadcast a warning to Tal Afar residents that a curfew had been imposed as of sunset on Sunday and until 7 am Monday. The struggle between local guerrillas and US forces, and the security perimeter established by the US military around the city in recent weeks, have interrupted city services such as electricity and created a good deal of fear. As a result, al-Zaman estimates that 90 percent of the city of 200,000 have departed for nearby villages and surrounding cities. About 70 percent of the city is Sunni Turkmen, who had a history of joining the Baath Party and the Iraqi military. Some are Sunni fundamentalists who have established ties to Sunni Arab fundamentalists. They give cover to jihadi volunteers coming in through Syria. The Turkmen Front says that the Majlis al-Aghawat or Council of Elders has decided that the city is facing a dire crisis and have called an emergency meeting between local clan leaders and notables on the one side and officials of the federal ministries of defense and interior. They are saying that militias must depart the district in some decisive fashion.

In the holy city of Karbala south of Baghdad, police announced a one-day curfew because they had received intelligence of a planned terrorist attack to coincide with a Shiite pilgrimage day.

In Mosul, Iraqi police discovered two big weapons caches. The discovery came as police battled guerrillas who took refuge in the sites of the caches, but were captured. One contained two car bombs ready to go.

Three bodies of civilians were discovered, along with a wounded man, near Mosul. They appear to have been traveling, and were either executed by guerrillas or got caught in the crossfire of a battle.

Al-Zaman/DPA : President Jalal Talabani and the head of the Kurdistan Confederacy, Massoud Barzani held a meeting on Sunday and rejected more explicitly than ever before any amendment of the constitution that would touch upon its provisions for federalism.
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Looting There, Looting Here
Fallujah There, New Orleans Here

In April of 2003 the US military stood by and allowed Baghdad to be looted. Not only were private establishments emptied, but all the major ministries (except the Ministry of Petroleum) were looted and burned. When Iraqis complained to the new occupation authority, the GI's informed them that stopping the looting was "not the mission." The documents from the Baath Foreign Ministry that might have shed light on the dealings of Reagan, Bush senior, Schultz and Rumsfeld with Saddam Hussein before 1990 were helpfully burned. The modern history of Iraq, including cabinet meetings from the 1930s and 1940s, mostly went up in smoke (it would be as though the US National Archives for every administration since Roosevelt was burned, along with all microfilm copies). The Iraq Museum, a key repository for ancient Iraqi civilization and the history of humankind, was looted of dozens of major pieces and thousands of lesser ones.

The widespread looting and the breakdown of order started Iraq on its descent into chaos.



What was the response of the man responsible for one of the most damaging debacles in the history of modern Iraq? Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said,

"Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things," Rumsfeld said . . . Looting, he added, was not uncommon for countries that experience significant social upheaval. "Stuff happens," Rumsfeld said.

In late summer of 2005, as Hurricane Katrina recast New Orleans as a latter-day Atlantis, displacing a million persons and reducing hundreds of thousands to dire poverty, a wave of looting broke out in the city. Some legal scholars argued that where people felt their lives were in danger because of a natural disaster, they actually had the right to take food, medicine and water--and other materials necessary to their survival-- from abandoned stores.



So the Bush administration treated Louisiana's Walmart managers the same way it treated Iraqi property holders, right? After all, "stuff happens," right? Free people are free to make errors and commit crimes in times of crisis, correct?

Nope.

' "Saying he was carrying a message from U.S. President George W. Bush, New Orleans U.S. Attorney Jim Letten said police and prosecutors were ready to hunt down a small group of criminals responsible for "horrendous" crimes in the stricken city. "The streets of New Orleans belong to its citizens, not the violent thugs who have stuck their heads up out of holes in an attempt to exploit a national tragedy," Letten told reporters. "Not one inch of that city is going to be ceded to the criminal element," he said in Baton Rouge. "Not one inch." '

So I guess it just depends on whose property is being destroyed and looted, whether Bush bothers to send in US troops to stop looting.

The Iraqis are noticing the contrast, and remarking on it.

Likewise, there was a city in Iraq just a little smaller than New Orleans (population used to be about half a million), which was Fallujah (population used to be 300,000).

Just as New Orleans has been emptied by a natural disaster made worse by Bush's political decisions, Fallujah was emptied by a wholly man-made one-- the Bush-ordered military assault on this civilian city, which aimed at getting at a small group of deadly guerrillas. Two-thirds of the buildings in the city were damaged, and most of its inhabitants were made refugees for months. It is likely that only about half have returned, since water and electricity service is unreliable and rebuilding has been extremely slow. Some inhabitants who returned had to live in tents atop the rubble of their former homes.



Other Fallujans lived long months in refugee camps. Some children were separated from their parents, others orphaned. The children of Fallujah had taken no political side and engaged in no military action, but they were displaced (and some killed) along with everyone else.



In fact, the reduction of Fallujah did nothing to stop guerrilla violence in Iraq, and rather spread it around. Mosul, a city of over a million that had been quiet, went into rebellion. Some 4,000 policemen resigned (just as many New Orleans policemen disapeared) and this once-quiet city that had been touted as a model under Gen. David Petraeus become unstable for the long term. The Sunni Arabs were so furious about the Fallujah campaign that they refused to vote in an American-sponsored election. The elected parliament therefore was dominated by fundamentalist Shiites and by Kurds, with the Sunni Arabs largely marginalized in the constitution drafting process. The brutal and ill-conceived Fallujah campaign therefore contributed significantly to the current political crisis, in which Sunni Arabs are rejecting the proposed constitution.

So the moral of the story is that Bush also treated the New Orleans refugees far better than he did the Fallujah refugees (which he simply ignored). Right?




Nope. At first he pretty much ignored them too.

Conclusion: Bush cares deeply about the property of rich white people.
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