Mosul Leaders Threaten to Join Guerrilla Movement
Protest Firing of Police Commissioner

Al-Zaman: Cabinet member Adil Abdul Mahdi's brother was assassinated on Sunday. A government oil company official in Kirkuk was assassinated. There were about a dozen announced deaths in guerrilla violence on Sunday. Guerrillas detonated a bomb in Fallujah, killing two Iraqi soldiers; a woman and a child died when police fired indiscriminately after the bomb went off.

The US air force dropped a 500-pound bomb on guerrillas near Taji who fired on a US helicopter, killing at least six, and later capturing another 5.

Al-Hayat: Northern Iraq is a sectarian tinderbox after Saturday's massive car bombing of a Shiite village near Baqubah in the mixed Diyalah province. The Iraqi Islamic Party (Sunni) called for calm and avoidance of reprisal killings, seeing the bombing of the Shiites and the killing of 25 Mahdi Army militiamen in an ambush in Baghdad on Friday by Sunni Arabs as steps toward sectarian civil war. Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that the Shiite Badr Corps militia is denying any link to the assassination last week of Saadoun al-Janabi, a defense lawyer for one of Saddam's relatives.

Some 51 clan elders from the Sunni Arab and Kurdish families of Mosul agreed with policemen in the city that they will return it to the control of armed guerrillas if the Interior Ministry implemented its decision to fire Ninevah's police chief, Ahmad Muhammad al-Juburi, who is accused of corruption. Hundreds of armed men surrounded the provincial headquarters on Saturday evening to protest al-Juburi's firing. US troops stopped the protesters from storming the building. The armed protesters, including police and civilians, surrounded a number of government buildings. They shouted through megaphones, complaining of Kurdish domination of provincial offices.

The clan leaders complained in a letter to Jaafari that no official investigation of al-Juburi had been carried out. They threatened to turn the city into a hotbed of insurgency.

Al-Juburi himself charged on Saturday that Kurds and Shiite Arabs had connived at his dismissal because they hoped to roil the province and therefore keep its 1.7 million inhabitants, a majority of them Sunni Arabs, from voting in large numbers in the December 15 parliamentary elections. He warned that they would follow the same tactics in Salahuddin and Anbar Provinces (other Sunni Arab strongholds).

Mosul exploded with violence in November of 2004 when 4,000 policemen suddenly resigned and masked gunmen emerged to police the city of over a million (Iraq's third-largest). The current situation seems so tense that there is a danger of the repetition of that scenario, which helped prevent Sunni Arabs from being properly represented in parliament, since it threw Ninevah into chaos.

Reuters reports on Mosul here.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that many Sunni Arabs in Ninevah are convinced that their province actually defeated the constitution by a 2/3s margin in the Oct. 15 referendum, and that the constitution was therefore in reality shot down and is illegitimate.

The Boston Globe reports on the evolution of Marine tactics in turbulent Anbar province.

Shibley Telhami makes the point that the Bush administration's rushed attempts to stabilize Iraq with cosmetic measures like passing a constitution seem in fact to be exacerbating Sunni Arab resentments and destabilizing the country further.

Al-Zaman: Iyad al-Ta'i, a member of the Virtue Party's political office, affirmed Sunday that his party would join the United Iraqi Alliance under the leadership of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. He emphasized that the Virtue Party [a puritanical Shiite fundamentalist party especially popular in the southern port city of Basra that follows the teachings of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr] is dedicated to upholding Iraq's national unity. He said national unity was the best path to security and stability in Iraq. He said there would be no change in the top officers, which include secretary-general Nadim al-Jabiri; his deputy is Muhammad Abd Nasir al-Sa`idi, a member of the Baghdad provincial council; Ammar Tu'mah, member of parliament; and of course Shaikh Muhammad Yaqubi is the group's spiritual guide. He said the Virtue Party sought dialogue with three groups-- 1) [secular] national leaders, 2) Muslim leaders of various denominations, and then 3) specifically with Shiite leaders.

Al-Ta'i's list is a welcome acknowledgment of Iraq's pluralism from a party that is often rather narrow in its program, though the reality of militias in Basra that close video stores and harass unveiled women is hard to reconcile with the call for dialogue.

His emphasis on national unity seems intended to defend the party's choice of allying with al-Hakim, who last summer seemed to back a Shiite autonomous zone in the South.

BBC World Monitoring of the Iraqi Press for October 30, excerpts:

Al-Bayan carries on the front page a 250-word report on the press conference by Unified Iraqi Coalition yesterday, 29 October, during which Abd-al-Aziz al-Hakim predicted the coalition's majority in the next National Assembly . . .

Tariq al-Sha'b publishes on the front page a 600-word report citing Iraqi Communist Party Chairman Hamid Majid Musa as saying that the party's representation in the Iraqi National Bloc's candidate lists [led by Iyad Allawi] for the governorates is satisfactory . . .

Al-Bayyinah publishes on page 1 a 200-word report that former Ba'thists are behind Amr Musa's recent visit to Iraq.

Al-Bayyinah runs on page 2 a 200-word report on the negotiations between Adil Abd-al-Mahdi and Hasan al-Sari, Hezbollah Movement in Iraq's secretary general, to discuss the unfair representation of the movement in the Unified Iraqi Alliance.

Al-Bayyinah publishes on page 3 a 2,500-word report revealing the injustice in the distribution of seats in the Unified Iraqi Alliance, accusing senior members of favouring politicians who either lived abroad or in specific places in Iraq, and excluding members from southern Iraq . . .

Al-Mu'tamar carries on the front page and on page 6 a 600-word article by Muwaffaq al-Rifa'i criticizing the US policy in Iraq and the democracy "imposed by occupation". . .

Al-Mada publishes on the front page a270-word report citing the Iraqi Council for Peace and Solidarity calling on the Iraqi government to join Rome Law for International Criminal Court.

Al-Mada publishes on page 2 a 50-word report on the resignation of the head of Babil Governorate Council . . .

Al-Furat runs on the front page a 100-word report saying that former Iraqi Army General Ahmad al-Musili, who was in charge of the rocket attack on Israel in 1991, his wife, and their daughter, were assassinated in Mosul. No dates were given . . .

Al-Zaman carries on the front page a 230-word report citing a security source saying that three Iraqi soldiers were killed and seven others were injured in an attack by gunmen in Ba'qubah. The report cites an official source at Diyala Police Command saying that unidentified gunmen assassinated a member from Al-Sadr Bureau in Ba'qubah.

Al-Zaman carries on page 2 a 200-word report on a statement by Al-'Ilm University of Imam Al-Khalisi that US forces arrested a companion of Shaykh Jawad al-Khalisi in Al-Kazimiyah yesterday, 29 October. . .

Al-Mu'tamar carries on page 8 a 700-word report on drug addiction and trafficking in Iraq. . .

Al-Manarah carries on the front page a 50-word report citing sources at the Iraqi Police saying that secretary general of Iraqi Islamic Movement in Maysan was assassinated. . .

Al-Mashriq publishes on the front page a 30-word report citing police forces saying that seven bodies were found in Al-Latifiyah.

Al-Mada publishes on page 3 a 1,000-word report on the sit-in announced by lawyers in Mosul to protest against the assassination of Iraqi lawyer Sa'dun al-Janabi. [Al-Janabi was defending a relative of Saddam; Sunni Arabs accused the Shiite Badr Corps in the assassination.]

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Top Five Resignations the American People Should Demand
In the Wake of Libby's Indictment

Apologize? Apologize? Is that all the US Democratic leadership can demand from George W. Bush after it was confirmed that his key aides and those of Vice President Cheney planned a petty campaign of retribution against a distinguished foreign service officer by outing his wife, undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson? I should think not. I should think some high-profile resignations are in order. Although Senator Reid did ask for one resignation, I have a better idea.

1. Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney. Dick Cheney told Irving Lewis Libby about Plame working for the CIA. Although both Cheney and Libby had security clearances, it is not the case that any two persons with such clearances may properly share any information at will. Classified information is disseminated on a need to know basis and for specific security-related purposes. For Cheney to bandy about classified information merely as a form of office gossip or for partisan political purposes, even with other government officials, is unethical and poor tradecraft at the very least, and would get any junior CIA case officer fired. So surely the same should apply to the vice president of the United States at a time of war.

2. Karl Rove. The president's adviser clearly told Matt Cooper of Time Magazine, at the very least, about Valerie Plame Wilson working for the CIA. Since this information was classified, Rove learned it from someone with a clearance. If he did not double check as to whether the information was classified before he released it to the press, then he was criminally irresponsible. If he released it with the knowledge that it was classified, then what he did was highly unethical and possibly illegal. Either way, no one who behaves so cavalierly with national security-related information during a time of war has any place in the White House. Rove must resign. If Bush does not request and accept Rove's resignation, then he becomes an accessory after the fact to a possible crime, and should be impeached as such.

3. John Hannah. Hannah, a key Cheney aide, also mentioned to Libby that Plame worked for the CIA. He should not have been bandying about this information without a serious national security purpose. He should go.

4. John Bolton. Currently Ambassador to the United Nations. He has not been implicated in the outing of Plame yet, but he did visit implicated journalist Judith Miller in prison and is tightly connected to key figures in the crime. He has been a twenty-first century Goebbels of national security disinformation aimed at scaring the American public into pursuing a series of disastrous wars (beyond Iraq, he wants wars against Syria, Iran, and Cuba to start). He was not confirmed by the Senate. He is a serial liar or a serial incompetent. He has expressed himself vehemently against the existence of the United Nations and dismisses US international treaty obligations. He should not be representing the American people at the United Nations.

5. Elliot Abrams. Abrams lied to the Congress assiduously over the Iran-Contra criminal proceedings. During this period, high Reagan administration officials illegally sold off high-poweered weapons like TOWs from Pentagon storehouses to the Ayatollah Khomeini. They then took the Iranian money paid for them and put it in secret bank accounts, using it to fund rightwing death squads in Central America. Abrams was part of this unconstitutional and criminal plot. He should be in jail, but was pardoned. W. appointed him to the National Security Council, where he was in charge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for a while (he is, like Doug Feith, more ideologically so aligned to the far rightwing Israeli Likud Party as to be virtually a card-carrying member; so that was really a signal of US even-handedness!). Now he is said to be in charge of Iran! He should never have been allowed back in high office after lying to Congress and both houses should be ashamed that they did not block his appointment. No wonder there is all this criminality in the White House-- they are allowing criminals to be appointed!
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26 Killed by Car Bomb North of Baquba
3 US GIs Killed

Guerrillas in a Shiite village near Baqubah, northeast of Baghdad, detonated a huge truck bomb on Saturday, killing at least 26 innocent bystanders. In separate violence, 3 US GIs were killed, and US air forces attacked suspected guerrilla strongholds in western Iraq.

The Washington Post profiles the Kurdization of the city of Kirkuk and the villages around it, and tens or hundreds of thousands of Kurds whom Saddam had earlier expelled are brought back and settled, often on private property. Saddam brought Arabs into the city and the area part of an effort to "Arabize" the northern oil-producing region, which he renamed the "nationalized" province (Ta'mim) in commemoration of the nationalization of Iraq's petroleum industry. Kirkuk is a traditionally Turkmen city, but Kurds became a major force there with the rise of the oil industry and labor migration. Because control of Kirkuk province would give the Kurds an enormous petroleum revenue, enabling their quest for an autonomous state, the Turkish government is very worried about all this. Any violence that targeted Kirkuk's Turkmen would produce a strong reaction in Ankara and perhaps drawn Turkey into the conflict.

First the government of Italian Prime Minister and wealthy sleazeball Silvio Berlusconi's got involved in forging the Niger uranium documents that underpinned Bush's rationale for war. Then Berlusconi strongly backed Bush, and sent Italian troops to Nasiriyah (where o26 of them have been killed). Now, in an obvious sign that the Bush administration is a sinking ship, Berlusconi is abandoning it. He maintains that he tried to talk Bush out of going to war in Iraq before the fact. This allegation looks to some observers like a bare-faced attempt to run away from Bush in Italian domestic politics, where Berlusconi will face an election soon.

Al-Hayat: The United Iraqi Alliance, the mainly religious Shiite coalition, will be made up of 17 parties. They include the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Sadr Movement, the Dawa Party, the Islamic Dawa Part (Iraq Organization), the Virtue Party, The Centrist Grouping, the Badr Organization, the Justice Grouping, Hizbullah in Iraq [no, not that Hezbollah], the Prince of Martyrs Movement, the Center Grouping, the Faithfulness Movement of the Turkmen, and the Turkmen, etc.
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Sistani May Call for US Withdrawal
Party Coalitions are Finalized

The intrepid Hamza Hendawi of AP gets the scoop: Aides around Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the chief spiritual leader of Iraqi Shiites, are broadly hinting that after the December 15 elections, he may begin a Gandhi-like campaign to demand a timetable for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. A lot of sentiments are attributed to Sistani that he later has to deny, so we should be cautious about whether the aides have their own axe to grind. But if this report is true, it would suggest that Sistani is confident that the Iraqi police and military are strong enough to protect him and the other members of the current Iraqi political class, and that the Americans are not needed.

If Sistani gives The Fatwa for a US withdrawal, the Bush administration will simply have to acquiesce. The situation would be similar to what happened in the Philippines in 1991, when the Philippines senate declined to authorize the extension of the treaty that permitted US naval bases in that country. Given the ongoing Sunni Arab guerrilla movement (which killed another 5 US GI's in the past couple of days), the US simply cannot keep troops in Iraq if the Shiites also begin vehemently demanding their departure. Any attempt by Bush and Rumsfeld to remain in Iraq in defiance of Sistani would certainly radicalize the Iraqi population and risk pushing it toward anti-American Muslim extremism both on the Shiite and the Sunni Arab fronts. As Hendawi notes, most close observers of Iraq, such as Vali Nasr and Ahmad Hashem (who has experience on the ground as US military officer) believe that any such move by Sistani, should it succeed, risks throwing Iraq into substantial sectarian violence.

A majority of Americans now say that getting the troops out of Iraq as soon as possible is more important than ensuring that the country is a stable democracy.

Sistani seems to be encouraging a new political coalition that is multi-ethnic. Al-Zaman says that some independent Shiite notables close to Sistani have formed the Independent Iraqi Capabilities Bloc. It groups many of the independents who were in the (Shiite religious) United Iraqi Alliance in the January 30 elections, but altogether includes 120 Shiites, Sunni Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen. (If this group was not offered many seats by the UIA this time, it might explain both why it bolted and why Sistani is said not to be as enthusiastic about the UIA this time around.) Husain Shahristani, a former nuclear scientist now close to Sistani, was originally involved in this project but ended up staying in the United Iraqi Alliance (see the NYT) [revised 10/27/05]. Among Western news reports only the Financial Times even alludes to this new list. Unless Sistani directly endorses the new list, something his aides said Friday would not happen, I don't expect it to do very well, unfortunately.

On Friday, the young nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr called for calm after a major engagement between his Mahdi Army and Sunni Arab guerrillas, who killed 25 of the latter. Sadr called for an investigation and forbade individuals from taking the initiative. Also on the sectarian civil war front, the Washington Post reported Saturday that a family of 10 Shiites was found dead earlier this week in Qamishli in Babil province, killed by Sunni Arab guerrillas. Babil is a mixed province where Saddam stole land from Shiites and settled Sunni Arabs on it.

Al-Zaman/ Deutsche Press Agentur are reporting further breakaways from the United Iraqi Alliance. The UIA groups the Dawa Party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Virtue Party, the Sadrists of Muqtada al-Sadr, and the Islamic Action Party based in Karbala. Aside from the last, these are the big, central Shiite religious parties, and the UIA is likely to have a plurality or even majority in the new parliament elected on Dec. 15, unless there is a voter revolt of some sort.

It is probably therefore not very important that there were some last minute defections from the UIA.

Ahmad Chalabi in the end decided to run his Iraqi National Congress as an independent list. The INC mainly represents the secular-leaning expatriate Shiite business class and seems unlikely to do well in open elections inside Iraq. It has been joined by Sharif Ali bin al-Husain, a Sunni Hashimite who has in the past put himself forward as candidate for king of Iraq (not a likely prospect). Kirk Semple of the New York Times lists some other INC candidates, including " Iraq's justice minister, Abdul Hussein Shandal . . . Other members are Salama al-Khafaji, an independent Shiite who also defected from the Shiite coalition." Khafaji, a Shiite traditionalist who is uncomfortable with the idea of a clerically dominated state, has narrowly escaped assassination; as it is, her 17-year-old son was killed in an ambush. It would be interesting to know more about why she split with the UIA and joined Chalabi. Her advocacy for women's issues may have played a role.

Chalabi should never be underestimated, and he is perfectly capable of getting up some vote-buying scheme. But if the election is free and fair, I'd be just stunned if the INC got many seats in parliament.

Semple also reports that Abdul Karim al-Muhammadawi, the Marsh Arab leader from Amara, is running as an independent. Al-Zaman thought he would join Chalabi's list, but that possibility appears to have fallen through. Since most of the Marsh Arabs appear to have gone over to Muqtada al-Sadr since the fall of Saddam, I don't expect al-Muhammadawi to do well on his own, though he might get a seat for himself in parliament.

Hamza Hendawi reports that the secular "Iraqi Nationalism" list of Iyad Allawi groups the Iraqi Communist Party, secular Sunni figures such as Ghazi al-Yawir and Adnan Pachachi, and of course the ex-Baathist Shiites that Allawi has long attempted to organize. Allawi's list only received 14 percent of the vote in the last elections. The communists and al-Yawir could bring him an extra 4 seats or so, but it is also possible that his list will not poll as well this time. He no longer has the advantages of incumbency. He has been critical of Sistani. And several members of his cabinet have been charged with massive embezzlement. Hendawi reports that Allawi is angling to form a government with the Kurds so as to outmaneuver the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance. But I doubt Allawi's list will get more than 40 seats, and the Kurds are unlikely to do much better than 55. Even if they get some of the 40 seats that will be redistributed after the election by some complex formula, I don't see how they can get to the 138 needed to form a government. Only if all three-- Allawi's list, the Kurdistan Alliance, and the Sunni coalition unite could they form a government that left out the United Iraqi Alliance, assuming it does not end up with 138 itself. Such a strange-bedfellows government would be highly unstable and I doubt it would last. It is going to be hard to exclude the religious Shiite parties.

Hazem Shaalan, the former defense minister accused massive fraud committed while in office in 2004 and early 2005, maintained that he was the victim of an attempted assassination in his London flat, but which failed, according to al-Sharq al-Awsat. Shaalan, however, is a notorious liar, and has also charged that there are one million Iranian Shiites surreptitiously in Iraq and that Iran is allowing al-Qaeda operatives to freely roam its territory. Both charges are so laughable that you have to wonder whether Shaalan isn't a good friend of and source of information for Irving Lewis Libby.

The Turks went ballistic when Bush received Massoud Barzani (Mesut in Turkish) at the White House and called him "President Barzani." They wanted to know what Bush thought Barzani was president of. The Turks are afraid of an independent Kurdistan state in northern Iraq, which might create secessionist sentiments in Turkish Kurds. Bush at least did tell Barzani that Iraq had to remain a united country. Secretary of State Condi Rice pressed Barzani on behalf of the Turks to see that the PKK (a Marxist Kurdish revolutionary party in eastern Turkey) not be allowed to operate freely from or take refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Turks were very upset when the US and the Iraqi government attacked the Turkmen city of Tal Afar in August on the grounds that terrorists operated from it, but seemed unconcerned about what the Turks consider Kurdish terrorists of the PKK establishing themselves in the same region.
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New Word: "To libby"

It seems to me that we may have the makings of a new lexical entry, what with the indictment and resignation of Irving Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

It strikes me that "Libby" is close to "fib." So "to libby" would have the connotations of "to tell a falsehood." But it is also close to "lobby." So the sense would be of lying for the purpose of convincing a large number of persons to adopt some policy that was bad for them. Thus, "the pitchman libbied his audience to buy snake oil as a way to treat their gout." Or, "the mole libbied the public on behalf of a foreign power." That could be definition 1 in those numbered entries at Merriam Webster.

The name is also close to "libel." So it would have an overtone of launching a vindictive smear. "To retaliate for the critical review of the film, the director had the newspaper libbied." Again, the sense would be that a persuasive falsehood was told, but here with the connotation of ruining someone's career and reputation. This could be definition 2.

I'm sure there are other dimensions of the verb "to libby" that haven't yet occurred to me.

The Los Angeles Times argues that the ordeal may not be over for Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney. I agree. A trial of Libby could yet throw up information that would spark further indictments. In fact, I take from Fitzgerald's language on Friday that he actively envisages such a possibility. Cheney was one of four individuals who told Libby that Valerie Plame Wilson worked for the CIA. And, as Steve Gilliard picks up from Josh Marshall the canny insight that Cheney told Libby specifically that Plame Wilson was in a division in the Directorate of Operations. That is, any knowledgeable government official would immediately conclude that she was not a mere analyst but an undercover field officer.

For more insights:

Beyond Middle East Studies.

Did Bolton out Plame?

Tomdispatch.
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Sunni-Shiite Warfare breaks out in Southeast Baghdad
Sadr Joins United Shiite Coalition

Al-Hayat: Exhibit A in the case for seeing what is going on in Iraq as a low-intensity civil war: On Thursday, Sunni Arab guerrillas from the Nahrawan district of southeast Baghdad kidnapped a member of the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr . When the rest of the Mahdi Army militiamen in the man's neighborhood heard about this, they traced the kidnappers to a house in Nahrawan and mounted an assault on it, freeing their colleague. They took the two kidnappers captive. But then as they were leaving Nahrawan they fell into an ambush and 25 of them were killed by Sunni Arab guerrillas. Then the Ministry of Interior gendarmes showed up to help the Sadrists (typically they are drawn from the Badr Corps paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq). They engaged the Sunni Arab guerrillas, and lost two of their men in the firefight. Ironically, SCIRI fighters and Mahdi Army militiamen had clashed with each other in Najaf not so long ago. Assuming these gendarmes were originally Badr, they in any case were able to unite with the Sadrists against Sunni guerrillas.

The last time this sort of thing had happened, the "Wrath of God" Shiite militia came up from Basra to Mahmudiyah to defend the Shiites. That was a much smaller conflict. The danger of Thursday's clashes is that they could easily spread.

Three US GIs were killed on Wednesday.

In the political arena, Iraq's political parties finalized their coalition lists for the December 15 elections, for which the deadline is today, Friday.

Secular ex-Baathist and old-time CIA asset Iyad Allawi will head a list called "The Centrist Bloc." The Sunni Arab religious parties will run as the Front for Iraqi Concord. The Kurdistan Alliance retained its unity.

Hazem Shaalan, former minister of defense under Allawi, who stands accused of massive fraud and embezzlement, failed to find a perch in any party list.

The huge United Iraqi Alliance list, which groups the major Shiite religious factions as well as some other parties, managed to stay together. Their strategy is to avoid splitting the Shiite vote.

The followers of Muqtada al-Sadr joined the UIA, and were given 30 places in the United Iraqi Alliance list. They insisted as a prerequesite for joining on two things. The first was that they must have parity with the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. The second is that there must be not normalization of relations with Israel ("the Zionist entity"). They said that this principle was a red line that could not be crossed under any circumstances.

The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq also received 30 places.

The Dawa Party of Ibrahim Jaafari received 15 places.

The Dawa Party - Iraq Organization led by Hashim al-Musawi also received 15 places.

The Fadilah ("Virtue") party of Nadim Isa al-Jabiri was given 15 places.

The Islamic Action Organization was given 5 places.

The Iraqi National Congress of Ahmad Chalabi was given 3 places, but Chalabi continues to attempt to negotiate a slightly higher number. Chalabi had earlier threatened to bolt the list.

It appears that minister of petroleum Ibrahim Bahrululum may leave the list to run as an independent.

As noted yesterday, Grand Ayatollah Sistani has so far declined publicly to back the United Iraqi Alliance this time, as he had before.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

All the Vice President's Men

My article on the Neoconservatives running Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney's foreign policy shop is out today in Salon.com.

An excerpt:

All the vice president's men

The ideologues in Cheney's inner circle drummed up a war. Now their zealotry is blowing up in their faces.

By Juan Cole

Oct. 28, 2005 | As Washington waits on pins and needles to see if special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald hands down indictments, the focus falls on Dick Cheney's inner circle. This group, along with that surrounding Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made up what Colin Powell's top aide, Lawrence Wilkerson, called "a cabal" that "on critical issues ... made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made." Cheney is the first vice president to have had, in effect, his own personal National Security Council. This formidable and unprecedented rump foreign policy team, composed of radical hawks, played a key role in every aspect of the war on Iraq: planning for it, gathering "evidence" to justify it and punishing those who spoke out against it. It is not surprising that members of that team, and Cheney himself, have now also emerged as targets in Fitzgerald's investigation of the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson to the press, along with Bush advisor Karl Rove . . .

"Cheney Assembles Formidable Team," marveled a Page One article in the Feb. 3, 2001, edition of the New York Times. It turns out that Cheney had 15 military and political advisors on foreign affairs, at a time when the president's own National Security Council was being downsized. The number of aides who counseled Cheney on domestic issues was much smaller. In contrast, Al Gore had been advised by a single staffer on security affairs.

The leader of the team was Libby, Cheney's chief of staff. Libby had studied at Yale with Paul Wolfowitz, who brought him to Washington. He co-authored a hawkish policy document with Wolfowitz in the Department of Defense for its head, Dick Cheney, after the Gulf War in 1992. When it was leaked, it embarrassed the first President Bush. Libby was a founding member of the Project for a New American Century in 1997 during the Clinton years, when many neoconservatives were out of office. The PNAC attempted to use the Republican-dominated Congress to pressure Clinton to take a more belligerent stance toward Iraq, and it advocated significantly expanding military spending and using U.S. troops as "gendarmes" in the aftermath of wars to "shape" the international security environment . . .

Read the rest . . .
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Larry Johnson on the Plame Scandal

I think this interview by Wolf Blitzer with Larry Johnson on CNN's Situation Room on Wednesday is extremely important and worry that it may be missed. I'm quoting some excerpts below. I was struck by the information that Plame Wilson has had death threats from al-Qaeda, and that the CIA has declined to offer her any special protection even though she still works there.

So the Bush administration is throwing our own counter-proliferation intelligence operatives to al-Qaeda by outing them, and Porter Goss refuses even to provide any security? Oh, yeah, we're going to recruit a lot of capable, competent people into counter-terrorism after this.

At one point former CIA officer Larry Johnson slams Clifford May as "not credible." May, a far rightwing Zionist, has been a hatchet man for the Neocons, smearing Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, the husband of Valerie Plame Wilson, with innuendo and half-truths. The principle on American television news (aside from Fox, which gets a pass because Rupert Murdoch is so rich and crazy) is that some sort of partisan balance has to be maintained. So Johnson's going after May required Wolf to step in to defend May's credibility, since he didn't have a guest on to counter Johnson.

Johnson's anger and bitterness, as a US intelligence professional, about the damage done by Rove and Libby in leaking Plame's name to the press for petty political advantage, are well worth considering.

'BLITZER: . . . For more on the damage that may have been done by the leak, I'm joined now by former CIA officer Larry Johnson. He was a classmate of the outed operative Valerie Plame at the CIA's training school way back.

How many years ago was that, Larry?

LARRY JOHNSON, COUNTERTERRORISM EXPERT: Nineteen-eighty-five, September.

BLITZER: So, you were basically with Valerie Plame...

JOHNSON: Right . . .

BLITZER: Now, in order for any charges, an indictment, to really have weight, I think what everyone wants to know is, was there serious damage done to U.S. national security? And I have been trying to find out if the CIA actually did a postmortem, a damage assessment. You have been looking into that as well.

JOHNSON: Now, CIA did a postmortem. There's no way that they could not have. They have not delivered any written report to Congress, to the House or Senate Intelligence Committees.

But what they done with this report, they had to do it internally, because...

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: Is there a piece of paper there that's written?

JOHNSON: Yes. There will be a written -- there's a written document within the CIA. There has to be, because every time that someone like this is outed, it's not just the person. In this case, it's the front company. It's other NOCs who may have been exposed.

BLITZER: Non-official cover is the NOCs.

JOHNSON: Non-official cover officers, also other intelligence officers who were exposed to that company, as well as intelligence assets overseas who were working with Brewster-Jennings who didn't know that it was a CIA front, and some who may have been witting...

BLITZER: Well...

JOHNSON: ... assets.

BLITZER: ... do you know whether or not they concluded that serious damage did occur?

JOHNSON: I have heard that serious damage did occur.

BLITZER: In terms of lives lost, agents, foreign agents...

JOHNSON: To that...

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: ... U.S. allies?

(CROSSTALK)

JOHNSON: To that extent, I don't know.

But what I do know for certain is, we're not just talking about Valerie Plame. We're talking about an intelligence resource, a United States national security resource that was destroyed by these White House officials that went out and started talking to the press about this. Reckless. And they have -- they have harmed the security of this country. They're trying to pretend no harm, no foul, and find lots of excuses.

BLITZER: Let me read to you from a Bob Novak column in "The Chicago Sun-Times" and other newspapers October 1, 2003, a couple of months or so after he revealed her name . . . That doesn't make it sound like she was very covert.

JOHNSON: Not only does -- you know, Bob Novak once again demonstrates he doesn't know what he's talking about. And that is a lie.

I defy anybody. I have got $5,000 that says that you can't find a reference to Valerie Plame and the CIA prior to Robert Novak's column. Can't do it. The fact that she's married...

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: Well, why would Clifford May say that he knew about it?

JOHNSON: Clifford May has been wrong on a whole variety of things.

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: But he's a respected guy, Clifford May.

JOHNSON: Well, he's respected by some people. I don't respect him, because I...

BLITZER: I have known him for many years... JOHNSON: I...

BLITZER: ... going back to when he was a reporter for "The New York Times."

JOHNSON: His information -- his information -- his information on this issue has been repeatedly wrong.

And, again, I'll bet Clifford May $5,000. Find the reference prior to Robert Novak's column in which that information was out there. It wasn't out there. Not only that. When Valerie wrote that check to Al Gore's campaign as a member of Brewster-Jennings, she was living her cover. Not a single neighbor knew that she worked for the CIA.

She protected that cover. She was in the process of moving from non-official cover to official cover, but, under the law, official cover still protected.

BLITZER: Because there is some suggestion that she had been outed by other -- by Aldrich Ames or others...

JOHNSON: Well, my...

BLITZER: ... who were U.S. -- were American spies spying for...

JOHNSON: Sure.

BLITZER: ... the Soviet Union or other countries.

JOHNSON: My understanding is that, as a result of the Aldrich Ames betrayal, the damage assessment there came up with the possibility that she may have been compromised, so she's moved back to the United States, home-based here, but continues to operate from here, traveling overseas as a consultant with Brewster-Jennings. So, she was continuing to work overseas.

BLITZER: What about the argument that she was driving in and out of Langley, CIA headquarters, on a daily basis for her job as an analyst in counter -- nuclear counterproliferation?

JOHNSON: People saying that just demonstrate their further ignorance of the CIA.

At least 40 percent of the people driving through those gates every day are undercover. They are -- sometimes, they are here in the United States for two or three assignment. Then they go back overseas. Their acknowledged relationship with the CIA is unacknowledged. They're presumed to work for some other U.S. government agency. Their covers are backstop.

So, just because they are driving through the gates there doesn't mean that they're not undercover. I was out there for four years driving through the gates. I was undercover until I day I left. And the only one who knew I worked with CIA was my wife . . .

BLITZER: Were you surprised that, after her name was revealed, that she posed for pictures, that famous picture in "Vanity Fair," that she posed for pictures elsewhere with her husband? . . .

JOHNSON: Yes. With the benefit of hindsight, I don't think Joe and Valerie would have done that again.

But they also recognized, at the time when they did it, her career had been completely destroyed. And she had received death threats overseas from al Qaeda. So, as a result of that outing...

BLITZER: How do you know she got death threats from al Qaeda?

JOHNSON: I have heard it directly from people that have been told that there was a threat.

BLITZER: Because she is a...

JOHNSON: Because...

BLITZER: ... a former CIA operative?

(CROSSTALK)

JOHNSON: ... operative and outed by Robert Novak.

There were three people that were identified as having a threat. And she was contacted by the FBI.

BLITZER: Does she get security protection...

(CROSSTALK)

JOHNSON: She did not.

BLITZER: Why didn't she?

JOHNSON: She called...

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: She still works for the CIA.

JOHNSON: She called CIA and was told, you will have to rely upon 911 . . .

BLITZER: Larry Johnson, former CIA officer, worked at counterterrorism at the State Department as well.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Cockburn Misrepresents Cole

Alexander Cockburn says in his piece in The Nation: 'Cole says to The Nation Institute's Tom Engelhardt that for the United States to "up and leave" Iraq would be to become an accomplice to genocide. He counsels the heightened use in Iraq of "special forces and air power." In other words, assassinations and saturation bombing.'

Cockburn is referring to my interview with Tom Engelhardt.

I actually haven't called for any assassinations or saturation bombing, and Mr. Cockburn's "In other words" is just a trite way to open up a mendacious smear.

For the thousandth time, what I have in mind is that in the wake of a substantial drawdown of US troops (which I think advisable), a civil war may well break out in Iraq. It is also likely that Sunni Arab militiamen will attempt to kill the members of the current government. (I mean, they are already trying to kill them, they just aren't usually succeeding.)

I am distressed at the prospect of a Cambodia in Iraq, which strikes me as a real possibility. As it is, there was that nastiness of Shiite and Sunni militiamen killing each other Thursday.

I'd like to see such an outcome prevented. I said earlier that I thought the best outcome would be for Iraq to be internationalized and to have a United Nations military force enforce the peace. However, it does seem increasingly a rather forlorn hope (the UN is made up of member nations whose politicians would like to stay in power, and that might be difficult if they send their constituents' young men into the meat grinder of Anbar province.) The Bushies aren't very likely even to allow it during the next 3 years. I haven't stopped advocating it, I just don't see it happening tomorrow.

So what is left, if I am right that the US ground troops engaged in assaults such as Fallujah, Tal Afar and Qaim are doing more harm than good and there is no cavalry coming to the rescue any time soon?

I'm suggesting that the sort of tactics used in northern Afghanistan be retrofitted. The Northern Alliance fighters (surely not that much better than the current Iraqi army) accepted Special Ops embeds. They told the Special Ops guys where the Taliban positions were, and the GIs put lasers on the targets and called down smart air strikes on warlord HQs, tanks, etc. Once the Taliban positions were disrupted and their armor and machine guns taken out, the Northern Alliance could advance on cities like Mazar and take them, even on horseback. I think the same sorts of synergies can be deployed to protect, e.g., the Green Zone from the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement should it mount an aggressive army to march on parliament.

Many readers have told me that this tactic would not prevent car bombings or other killings. That is correct. Nothing can prevent the low-intensity guerrilla war from continuing, probably for a decade or more. The question is only if it can be kept from escalating into a civil war that kills a million Iraqis and sparks a generalized Middle East war.

I am arguing for a defensive set of tactics, not offensive. I think I am probably the first observer in Iraq to speak out consistently against US bombing raids on civilian neighborhoods in Iraqi cities. I don't know where Cockburn gets his weird misinterpretation of what I said.

If Mr. Cockburn has any realistic ideas for preventing this outcome, I'd be glad to hear them. But, he can't just dismiss the possibility of massive killing-- that would be intellectually dishonest and morally reprehensible. The real possibility exists. How to guard against it?
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sunni Arabs Launch Political Campaign to Kick US Out

Three small Sunni parties formed a coalition list on Wednesday. The Iraqi Islamic Party, the National Dialogue Council and the People's Gathering will join forces to contest the December 15 elections.

Before anyone gets too excited about this development, it should be noted that Reuters goes on to report,

' "Our political program will focus more on getting the Americans out of Iraq," Hussein al-Falluji, a prominent Sunni who took part in talks on the constitution, told Reuters. "Our message to the American administration is clear: get out of Iraq or set a timetable for withdrawal or the resistance will keep slaughtering your soldiers until Judgment Day." '

How this is good news for the Bush administration I do not understand, but that is the way that Rupert Murdoch will spin it on Fox Cable News.

The other thing to remember is that most Sunni Arabs in Iraq are not followers of the Iraqi Islamic Party, which is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood mainly based in Mosul. A lot of Sunni Arabs are still secular Arab nationalists. Al-Hayat pointed out recently that there is a fair Baath constituency in Iraq still, which some parties are angling for. Even among religious Sunnis, opinion polls show that Hareth al-Dhari of the Association of Muslim Scholars is far more popular than Muhsin Abdul Hamid of IIP.

Still, the Sunni Arabs will certainly improve their position in parliament on December 15.

Al-Hayat says that Muqtada al-Sadr is attempting to form a coalition list that will run with Sunni Muslims in Anbar. There has been a pan-Islamic tinge to the cooperation of hardline Shiite nationalist Muqtada with hardline Sunni nationalists such as the Association of Muslim Scholars.

AP is reporting that the Sadrists will largely stay in the United Iraqi Alliance. It also says that Grand Ayatollah Sistani is not endorsing the largely Shiite UIA this time around, having been disappointed by the performance of the Jaafari government. Personally, I think that the control of 9 provinces by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and its allies gives the UIA such a strong party "machine" in the provinces that they no longer need Sistani's endorsement to win.

AP also says that the Iraqi National Congress, which leans more to the secular side (but actually you could say it just leans to any side that benefits it at any time), has split from the UIA. Unless it gets a big infusion of foreign money and buys a lot of votes, I'd be surprised if the INC can win more than a handful of seats running on its own in a free election.

The Iraqi Electoral Commission has released the distribution of seats by province. The distribution seems to me grossly unfair to the Kurds and incredibly generous to the Sunni Arabs, but it is unlikely that the Sunni Arabs will be able to take advantage of this opportunity, because so many of them reject the idea of elections in the shadow of foreign military occupation, while others will be afraid to come out and vote, for fear of guerrilla reprisals. About 45 seats will not be contested by election as I understand it, but will be appointed in some way. That would leave about 230 in play in the elections. [I've been corrected that the 45 seats are not appointed but will be distributed by some complicated formula among parties that did not reach a certain threshold or perhaps also that did.)

How the 230 would be apportioned in the election can only be guessed out. But let me just do a thought experiment to see what is likely to happen. I am not making tight predictions, just thinking heuristically to get the likely lay of the land.

Below, I am going to arrange the seats by likely ethnic outcome:

Sunni Arabs:

Al-Anbar 9
Salahuddin 8
Ninevah 19

I think the Sunni Arab lists will get all the seats in Anbar and Salahuddin, for 17. I think they will pick up about 10 in Ninevah (they would get more, but the turnout may be light among Sunni Arabs, throwing a disproportionate number of seats to the Kurds and perhaps Shiite Turkmen). So that is 27.

Other places the Sunnis could pick up some seats are:

Babil 11
Baghdad 59
Diyalah 10

However, if the constitutional referendum was any guide, the Sunni Arabs seem unlikely actually to compete well in these mixed provinces. Again, in provinces such as Anbar and Salahuddin where they are the vast majority, light turnout will still produce Sunni seats in parliament. But in the mixed provinces, light Sunni turnout would allow Shiites to pick up most of the seats. I think this is what will happen. From the three provinces above, the Sunni Arabs could pick up as few as 15 seats. They could also get a few seats here and there elsewhere.

So, the Sunni representation in the new parliament could increase from the current 17 to more like 45 to 50. But I think this is the upper range. Obviously, this group could easily be outvoted by the Shiites and Kurds.

The Kurds

Duhok 7
Erbil 13
Sulaimaniyah 15
Kirkuk 9

The Kurds will get almost all the seats in the three northern provinces where they predominate, for a total of about 35. I suspect they will get about 5 of the Kirkuk seats, though it could be more if there is light Sunni Arab turnout. Call it 40.

They can also pick up some seats from some mixed provinces, say 7 or so from Ninevah and a few from Diyalah. There are said to be a lot of Kurds in Baghdad province (several hundred thousand), and they could get 5 or so there. Call it 55.

So, I think the Kurds will be cut down from their current 78 seats to only about 50 or 55, and they they will have only a few more seats than the Sunni Arabs or perhaps only be equal to them.

The Shiites:

Basra 16
Karbala 6
Maysan 7
Muthanna 5
Najaf 8
Qadisiyah 8
Dhi Qar 12
Wasit 8

I believe that the Shiite religious parties will dominate all of the Shiite-majority provinces. There are 70 seats above, and all but a handful will go to the United Iraqi Alliance or its successors. (The Basra middle class could vote for Iyad Allawi's secular list or for the INC. But it has been devastated as a constituency by decades of poor economy, with many of its members driven into poverty or abroad. It is easy to be surprised in making these prognostications, but if the secular parties got more than 3-5 seats from Basra, I would be astonished. I doubt anyone in Dhi Qar or Wasit would vote for them, and certainly not in Karbala or Najaf).

Then let's revisit the mixed provinces:

Babil 11
Baghdad 59
Diyalah 10

The religious Shiites could pick up as many as 60 of these 80 seats. Remember that they may also pick up stray seats in mixed provinces such as Ninevah and Kirkuk. So the religious Shiites could have 130 seats easily. They need 138 for a simple majority. They could get it. But in any case they will be close to a simple majority, and would probably only need to find a couple of small lists with which to ally in order to form a government. Moreover, there is the wild card of the 45 or so seats that will be allocated by redistribution afterward. If any of them go to the religious Shiites, it would clench it.

You could also imagine an alliance of the Shiite fundamentalists with the Iraqi Islamic Party on issues such as Islamic law. If that development occurred, I suspect it would hasten Kurdish secession, since the Arabs could consistently outvote the more secular-leaning Kurdish bloc if they united.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

More on Niger-gate

Part One of an article in La Repubblica about the Niger uranium forgeries has been translated and made available. Part two has been made available here. And this is Part 3.

Laura Rozen has been on this story for a couple of years now, and her remarks are important. Scroll down.

The new information is that Nicolo Pollari, head of Italian military intelligence (SISMI), met with deputy director of the national security council, Stephen Hadley. SISMI circles, with their American acolytes on the right, are suspected of having a hand in the creation and distribution of the forgeries alleging Iraqi purchases of Niger yellowcake uranium. Such a meeting is unusual, since foreign officials usually meet their own peers. So Pollari should have been meeting with the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, not with a high national security council staffer. If Hadley gathered intelligence from Pollari, I suspect it may even have been illicit. (See below*).

This meeting could be important, because as I remember the story, Hadley authorized the claims in Bush's State of the Union address about Iraqi purchases of African uranium. Bush kept wanting to put the claim in, and the CIA kept making him take it back out, as the Washington Post reported in 2003. When the CIA wouldn't sign off on the Niger uranium claims, someone in Rice's national security council staff (I remember it as Hadley) suggested that it be sourced instead to "British intelligence." But I suspect "British intelligence" is actually a euphemism for "Italian military intelligence." Anyway, Tenet was forced to go along with the change as long as the CIA did not have to certify it was correct. He later apologized even for that much of a lapse. But of course Hadley should have been made to resign.

If Pollari passed the Niger forgeries over to Hadley, that was a form of intelligence gathering on Hadley's part and should have been reported to the Senate Intelligence committee according to the 1947 National Security Act:

' REPORTING OF INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES OTHER THAN COVERT ACTIONS

SEC. 502. [50 U.S.C. 413a] To the extent consistent with due regard for the protection from unauthorized disclosure of classified information relating to sensitive intelligence sources and methods or other exceptionally sensitive matters, the Director of Central Intelligence and the heads of all departments, agencies, and other entities of the United States Government involved in intelligence activities shall -

(1) keep the congressional intelligence committees fully and currently informed of all intelligence activities, other than a covert action (as defined in section 503(e)), which are the responsibility of, are engaged in by, or are carried out for or on behalf of, any department, agency, or entity of the United States Government, including any significant anticipated intelligence activity and any significant intelligence failure; and

(2) furnish the congressional intelligence committees any information or material concerning intelligence activities, other than covert actions, which is within their custody or control, and which is requested by either of the congressional intelligence committees in order to carry out its authorized responsibilities. '

Not to mention that if Hadley believed those forgeries to be true, he is a fool. Elbaradei of the International Atomic Energy Commission was able to show they were false in an afternoon with some google searches.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

The Amazing Shrinking Donkey

Arianna Huffington nails it: the Democratic leadership is continuing to make a big mistake on the Iraq issue by refusing to provide the alternative voice that the American public truly wants. Ironically, Republicans like Chuck Hagel are taking the more courageous stance. If 2008 came and it were Hilary with her AIPAC speeches versus a veteran like Hagel asking hard questions about the Iraq misadventure, my guess is that Hagel wins hands down.

After Arianna posted, Senator John Kerry called for a drawdown of 20,000 US troops by the end of this year and bringing all of them out by the end of 2006. But this sort of "troops out ASAP" policy is not realistic. If Kerry wants there to be a December 15, election, then he needs to acknowledge the need for 150,000 or so troops to be in Iraq so as to lock the country down and stop vehicular traffic so that suicide bombers don't blow up the voters at polling stations. And, you couldn't get 20,000 out by the end of December if they were still there on December 17. You could physically succeed in getting US troops out by the end of 2006, of course. But 20,000 out this year makes no sense. (Actually there will be a drawdown after the elections anyway; Rumsfeld sent an extra 10,000 for the election season and they'll come back out). I'm glad Kerry addressed Iraq. Now he has to do so with something more practical than applause lines.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

A Shining Beacon on a Hill
Iraq and Israel/Palestine

The Neoconservatives promised us that an American-dominated Iraq would become a model for the rest of the Middle East.

Iraq has been turned, by the mismanagement of Bush and the Neoconservatives at the Department of Defense, into a hellhole of suicide bombings and subterranean campaigns of ethnic cleansing. Another 14 Iraqis were killed in guerrilla violence on Wednesday. And, groups like the Association of Muslim Scholars charge the Shiite Badr Corps with waging a "campaign of extermination" against Sunni Arabs. Hard line Shiites launch the same accusation at Sunni Arab extremists. Suicide bombings planned out from Sunni Arab cities draw retaliation in the form of US air raids.

But you know what? At least the Neocons were right about "Iraq the Model."


Therewas a gruesome suicide bombing in Israel which the Palestinian al-Jihad al-Islami said that it carried out to avenge the Israeli murder of its leader on the West Bank last Monday.

So then the Israelis bombed Gaza in retaliation.

Then on Wednesday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who stole the Iranian election last June, talked about wiping Israel off the face of the earth." His (stupid and monstrous) speech underlined what kind of trouble Ariel Sharon's policies of annexing all of Jerusalem and gradually cleansing it of Muslims is likely to cause in the Middle East. So we have the same language about ethnic groups being wiped out, as in Iraq.

Yup, suicide bombings, retaliatory air strikes, charges and counter-charges of ethnic cleansing, and genocidal threats.

Iraq has become the model for the Middle East.

Or, was it the other way around?
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraq requires more sacrifice: Bush
Constitution Enacted, According to Electoral High Commission

It takes an Aussie newspaper to put the headline so bluntly. As the milestone of 2,000 US military deaths in Iraq since the beginning of the war passed on Tuesday, " Iraq requires more sacrifice: Bush." Now Bush is menacing us with Usamah Bin Laden taking over Iraq. Note that this scenario would have been utterly laughable in 2002. That is, anyone who heard that Bush thought Usamah Bin Ladin could overthrow Saddam and take over Iraq would have just fallen down laughing. Saddam would have had all the al-Qaeda people just taken out and shot. Twice. It was risible. Now, Bush has screwed up things so royally that he can even say this with a straight face. (It still is fairly ridiculous, since 80 percent of Iraqi is Shiites and Kurds who would kill Usamah on sight, and few Iraqi Sunni Arabs would want a fugitive Saudi terrorist as their leader). It is George W. Bush's fault if this outcome is at all plausible. His policies have reduced Iraq to violent chaos, and he is the one who let Usamah escape at Tora Bora. And then he made the US military lie about it during the presidential campaign! Impeachment is too good for this kind of dishonesty and incompetence. Actually I have to just stop writing about this now before my blood pressure goes into the 200s. Usamah in Iraq, indeed.

Al-Hayat: The Iraqi High Electoral Commission announced that 78.4 percent of Iraqis who voted in the constitutional referendum approved the new constitution. But there were enormous differences among the provinces, which observers expected to result in increased violence. The two largely Sunni Arab provinces of Anbar and Salahuddin rejected the constitution by a wide margin. The third province where they might have done so was Ninevah, and if they had succeeded in mustering a two-thirds majority against it there, it would have failed. As it was, the official tally against in Ninevah was 55.08 percent.

The Kurdistan Alliance and the United Iraqi Alliance, the two coalitions that dominated parliament and produced the constitution, hailed its passage as "historic" and said it would help fight terrorism.

Nancy Youssef of Knight Ridder reports on the extreme suspicion with which the results were viewed by Sunni Arabs and by Shiites of the Sadr Movement.

A constitution should be a bargain and a compromise among the major factions in a nation. If a single bloc like the Sunni Arabs of Iraq rejects the constitution, then it isn't really a constitution. And this one guarantees that the guerrilla war goes on for a long time.

Al-Hayat: Sunni figure Salih Mutlak complained that the tallying in Ninevah was carried out by Peshmerga militiamen, who, he alleged, tampered with the ballots. He insisted that the vote in Ninevah was in fact 2/3s against, and that the constitution had really failed, even if the elected Iraqi government would not recognize it. Mutlak intimated that the Sunni Arabs would now boycott the December 15 parliamentary elections.

Three car bombs exploded in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah, resulting in the deaths of 13 Peshmerga militiamen. This city is the power base of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, and the Sunni Arab guerrillas are underlining that they can reach into any corner of the country. No one is safe. In other attacks, guerrilla violence killed 2 US GIs and 11 Iraqis.

Al-Sabah: Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari dedicated $182 million to the southern port city of Basra, much of it to be used to build two new docks. Jaafari and his government will go to the polls on December 15.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Ship of State Springs a Leak

James Ridgeway of the Village Voice recalls the ghost of corrupt vice presidents past in the light of the NYT's revelations Tuesday that Richard Bruce Cheney was the one who revealed the name of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson to his chief of staff, Irving Lewis Libby.

Libby had earlier maintained that he learned the name from a "journalist."

If both things are true, it makes perfect sense of our weird American news reporting. Cheney isn't just "a" journalist, he is The Journalist--who calls up Roger Ailes at Fox Cable News and tells him what to report and how. Why, Jimmy Olson and Clark Kent are pikers compared to super-Dick.

Or it could just be that Libby was lying, in which case he gets Martha Stewart's old cell.

I saw Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison say that she hoped Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald would not bring a charge like perjury, which would be a sign that he could not discover a real crime, or words to that effect. She was speaking off the current Republican Party talking points aimed at spinning this scandal.

So let's get this straight. The Republicans roiled the country for two years and impeached Clinton for lying about sex under oath, but now all of a sudden perjury is a minor crime not worth bothering about. Remember that 1998 was a period when Clinton needed to focus on the threat of al-Qaeda, but he was being distracted by the Republican bulldogs and everything he did about al-Qaeda was dismissed as "wag the dog." Vicious partisan politics was put before the benefit of the nation. (Many of the major Republican figures who impeached Clinton had themselves had affairs and covered them up, and besides, who cared or cares?)

But what Cheney, Libby and Rove did was not just a private impropriety. The leak of Valerie Plame Wilson's identity did enormous harm to US national security, since it blew the cover of the dummy corporation the Company was using to investigate weapons of mass destruction proliferation.

Although it was not illegal for Cheney to share classified information with Libby, since both had clearances, there is a question of whether the idea of leaking Valerie's name originated with Cheney. Even if that were not true, there is a question of propriety. Undercover CIA operatives' names should not be bandied about without some serious purpose. At a time of a War on Terror, when the nation's security is under assault by a sinister and determined terrorist organization, do we want a vice president in the White House who has the kind of loose lips that sink ships?
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

37 Dead as Palestine Hotel is Attacked


A set of 3 powerful bombings in Baghdad, along with other attacks and violence, left 37 dead and dozens wounded on Monday. Among the dead in Baghdad, al-Zaman says, was the director of the biggest of the American security companies in Iraq, which is responsible for safeguarding the big personalities and diplomats.

The full force of the bomb blasts, some of which targeted the Palestine Hotel (frequented by foreigners and journalists), is visible in a CNN Video (sorry, you have to scroll down or search for the video-- I could not find a way to bookmark it past the javascript.) You could see the flash of the first bomb, and the mushroom cloud of the second (all big bombs produce mushroom clouds). These huge bombings occurred around Firdaws Square, where in April of 2003 US troops helped pull down statues of Saddam Hussein. Nearly 2 1/2 years later, the US no more controls Firdaws Square than it controls the surface of Mars.

Twelve workers were found dead in Jurf al-Sakhr south of Baghdad; usually these murders are sectarian in character. Moroccan diplomats appear to have been kidnapped on the road between Iraq and Jordan. A car bomber detonated his payload near a US convoy in Mosul. In Hilla, guerrillas used mortar fire to kill Muhsin Abdul A'imah, a leader of the Badr Corps and three of his guards.

The US military on Monday announced that a GI had been killed at Ramadi.

In Fallujah, about 700 local police took over security duties from the Ministry of Interior gendarmes (the latter mostly Shiites and Badr Corps). (-Al-Zaman & AP).

The Iraqi election commission released some numbers concerning the recent constitutional referendum. Numbers for only 14 of 18 provinces were released, and they revealed that Sunni Arabs were hostile or lukewarm. The numbers for the key Ninevah province have not yet surfaced.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Rupert Murdoch and Judith Miller

The extraordinary exchanges between New York Times editor Bill Keller and reporter Judith Miller over her role in the Plame scandal and reporting on non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq have suggested to me a wider context of the entire matter.

The wider context is that Rupert Murdoch, and Richard Mellon Scaife, and other far rightwing billionaires have deeply corrupted our information environment. They are in part responsible for what happened at the NYT.

Miller attempts to excuse her shoddy reporting on Iraq's imaginary weapons of mass destruction by saying that "everyone" got that story wrong. But the State Department Intelligence and Research Division did not get it wrong. The Department of Energy analysts were correct that the aluminum tubes couldn't be used to construct centrifuges. Elbaradei of the International Atomic Energy Commission was not wrong. Imad Khadduri, former Iraqi nuclear scientist, was not wrong. "Everybody" got it wrong only in the sense that "everybody" had been brainwashed by Rupert Murdoch.

As Rightweb notes:

' His Fox News was singled out for criticism because of its blatantly one-sided coverage of the war in Iraq and for printing unsubstantiated stories about the conflict. When CNN reporter Christian Amanpour blamed Fox for creating "a climate of fear and self-censorship" regarding coverage of Iraq, a Fox spokeswoman shot back, "Given the choice, it's better to be viewed as a foot soldier for Bush than a spokeswoman for al-Qaeda." Said Murdoch of the war, "The greatest thing to come out of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil. That's bigger than any tax cut in any country." '

Gee, we got $60 a barrel oil instead. You wonder how someone so stupid got to be so rich (hint: stabbing people in the back is more lucrative than canny market research).

So here is how Murdoch and Fox and the Right in general tie into the NYT scandal. They stalked the Times. If you lexis Fox "News" transcripts and the NYT in the period between September 11 and the Iraq War, you find a constant stream of attacks. Brit Hume even waxed wrathful that the Times urged Tiger Woods not to play golf on a course at a club that excluded women.

Here's Bill O'Reilly on September 10, 2002:

'In the "Unresolved Problem" segment tonight, according to "The New York Times," some American diplomats are outraged that the USA is denying visas to young Muslims overseas. The "Times" reporter was extremely distraught by this. That's is no surprise since a new study by Center for Media and Public Affairs says that "The Times" and network news, as we mentioned in the "Talking Points" memo, skew against President Bush in his view of Iraq. '

But the big attack on the Times was in summer of 2002, when it was accused of paying no attention to Ahmad Chalabi and others who were alleging Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programs. It was even blamed for for Bush Senior National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft not liking the idea of an Iraq War (Fox News Sunday, Aug. 25, 2002):

' CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR: It's a question here also of timing. I'm not sure the administration really wanted to have the debate heat up in August. This is not the administration directing the pace of this debate. It was the opposition who, after eight months, after all the president launched all this in his State of the Union address when he talked about the axis of evil and emphasized Iraq, it's the opposition that has now seized the day and made its case, starting with the Scowcroft piece and the assist from the New York Times. '

I spoke last year about the attack Andrew Sullivan launched in Murdoch's London Times on NYT editor Howell Raines for not cheerleading Bush's building Iraq War. Sullivan had been especially incensed that the NYT gave no credence to the Iraqi expatriates on the nuclear issue.

So in this polluted information environment, in which Howell Raines's view of reality, which was perfectly correct, was constantly pilloried by powerful rightwing media as nothing short of treason, there was every incentive to give Judith Miller her head. Remember that the NYT is a commercial publication. All major newspapers were seeing their subscription base shrink. After September 11, the country had moved substantially to the right on national security issues. The Times could easily go bankrupt if it loses touch with the sentiments of the American reading public. There is a lot at stake in the Murdoch et al. assault on the NYT. In its absence, the information environment in the US would be even more rightwing. I've even rethought my own rash response to its editorial on the Columbia Middle East studies issue last spring.

The NYT had no sources to speak of inside the Bush administration, a real drawback in covering Washington, because it was a left of center newspaper in a political environment dominated by the Right. Miller had sources among the Neoconservatives, with whom she shared some key concerns (biological weapons, the threat of Muslim radicalism, etc.) So she could get the Washington "scoops." And her perspective skewed Right in ways that could protect the NYT from charges that it was consistently biased against Bush. Of course, in retrospect, Bush's world was a dangerous fantasy, and giving it space on the front page of the NYT just sullied the Grey Lady with malicious prevarications.

I have been told that Miller was also important in hiring decisions, and she probably created her own base of clientelage among new hires over time. It has been alleged to me that senior neo-conservative-leaning reporters at the Times at one point blocked the hiring of an Arab-American reporter. I have this from a single source and cannot be sure it is true, and cannot be sure that Miller was part of it if it was. But that she could affect the careers of her colleagues at the paper does seem clear and helps explain why even those critical of her had to tread lightly.

Raines began the strategy of letting Miller's stories act as responses to the constant attacks from the Right. But then he had to resign when he was caught up in the Jayson Blair scandal (like Miller, Blair made things up, and like Miller, Blair was unsupervised; unlike Miller, he was caught fairly early on).

The Blair scandal was red meat to NYT critics and the whole rightwing Sound Machine. I suspect that for the paper to face the Miller problem at that moment in 2003 might have seemed fatal to its credibility on the parts of Keller and owner Sulzberger. And, there are rumors that Miller had Sulzberger wrapped around her pinky.

So Bill Keller comes on board. And there are these complaints about Miller

So this is the larger context of Keller's recent remarks:

' First, I wish I had dealt with the controversy over our coverage of WMD first thing upon becoming executive editor. At the time, I thought I had compelling reasons for kicking the issue down the road. The paper had just been through a major trauma, the Jason Blair episode, and needed to regain its equilibrium. It felt somehow unsavory to begin my tenure by attacking the previous regime. I was trying to get my arms around a huge new job, appoint my team, get the paper fully back to normal, and I feared the WMD issue could become a crippling distraction. So it was a year before we got around to really dealing with the controversy. At that point we published that long editor's note acknowledging the pre-war journalistic lapses, and -- to my mind at least as important -- launched a body of aggressive reporting aimed at exposing how bad or manipulated intelligence had fed the drive to war. (I'm thinking of our excellent investigation of how those infamous aluminum tubes became a supposed smoking gun, the report on how the Iraqi National Congress recruited exiles to promote the notion of Saddam's WMD threat, our close look at the military's war-planning intelligence, and several other pieces. Critics sometimes overlook the fact that lot of the best reporting on how this intel fiasco transpired appeared in the NYT.) By waiting a year to own up to our mistakes, I allowed the anger inside and outside the paper to fester. Worse, I fear I fostered an impression that The Times put a higher premium on protecting its reporters than on coming clean with its readers. If I had lanced the WMD boil earlier, I suspect our critics -- at least the honest ones -- might have been less inclined to suspect that, THIS time, the paper was putting the defense of a reporter above the duty to its readers.

Second, I wish that when I learned Judy Miller had been subpoenaed as a witness in the leak investigation I had sat her down for a thorough debriefing, and followed up with some reporting of my own. It is a natural and proper instinct to defend reporters when the government seeks to interfere in our work. And under other circumstances it might have been fine to entrust the details -- the substance of the confidential interviews, the notes -- to lawyers who would be handling to case. But in this case I missed what should have been significant alarm bells. Until Fitzgerald came after her, I didn't know that Judy had been one of the reporters on the receiving end of the anti-Wilson whisper campaign. I should have wondered why I was learning this from the special counsel, a year after the fact. (After the initial leak to Robert Novak in 2003, we asked the Washington Bureau to ask our correspondents whether any of them had been offered similar leaks. As we reported last Sunday, Judy seems to have misled Phil Taubman about the extent of her involvement.) This alone should have been enough to make me probe deeper. '

In essence, Murdoch, Scaife and other far rightwing super-rich propagandists succeeded in maligning the NYT and in pushing it off its liberal perch even further to the Right. In trying to defend themselves from the charge of treason, Raines and Keller fell into the trap of using Miller's shoddy reporting as a rampart. In the end, it was revealed to be not a rampart but a Trojan Horse for the Right.

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

I liked the discussion of this posting at the Democratic Underground, and thought several of the posters added importantly to my argument.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Wave of Assassinations, Bombings
Oil Exports Halted

Here's the headline of The Times of Baghdad [al-Zaman] for Monday, October 24, 2005: Wave of Assassinations in Tikrit, Baqubah, Ramadi, and Mahawil; Oil Exports Halted from Basra & Ceyhan; Kidnapping of Director of Resources at Southern Petroleum Co.; A Sudanese Detonates a Car Bomb Near an American Patrol at Kirkuk.

Guerrillas detonated bombs in Baghdad, Kirkuk and Tikrit, killing some 20 Iraqis and wounding even more, along with five US GIs.

Veteran reporter Hamza Hendawi notes that the guerrilla war shows no sign of abating.

The guerrilla forces in Iraq are sharing information on building roadside bombs with one another, and are becoming increasingly sophisticated. In particular, they are now using pressure-sensitive triggers instead of having to detonate the bombs remotely. You wonder how long it will be before all this expertise is used against the US homeland.

Many of the more than 15,000 US military personnel wounded in Iraq have grievous injuries.

Iraq Body Count, Reuters says, estimates that 38 Iraqis die in violence every day. Over thirty-five years, that would amount to nearly 500,000 dead. In fact, it is estimated that the Baath party killed 300,000 Iraqis, so the current rate seems to be greater than the Baath rate. (The number of civilians killed by the Baath is probably in fact exaggerated. Only a few thousand bodies have been recovered from mass graves so far.)

A poll of Iraqis commissioned for the British military came up with the following findings:

'• Forty-five per cent of Iraqis believe attacks against British and American troops are justified - rising to 65 per cent in the British-controlled Maysan province;
• 82 per cent are "strongly opposed" to the presence of coalition troops;
• less than one per cent of the population believes coalition forces are responsible for any improvement in security;
• 67 per cent of Iraqis feel less secure because of the occupation;
• 43 per cent of Iraqis believe conditions for peace and stability have worsened;
• 72 per cent do not have confidence in the multi-national forces. '

The Telegraph also earlier reported that a British plan to draw down its forces in southern Iraq has had to be shelved because of continued poor security. But the Iraqis are saying they'll take their chances with poor security.

The way the Telegraph reports the poll makes me wonder if it is really nationwide. Maysan is dominated by Marsh Arabs who tend to support Muqtada al-Sadr, so it is not urprising that 65 percent of them want coalition troops out now. But even greater numbers of Sunni Arabs want them out immediately, so why mention Maysan as having an unusually large number of anti-coalition residents?

As I noted in a BBC interview on Sunday, A USA Today poll in April, 2004, came up with similar findings. Then, 57 percent of Iraqis wanted coalition troops out immediately, and about half said that there were circumstances in which it was legitimate to attack US troops. Attitudes now are more negative, but the attitudes revealed in the British Ministry of Defense poll have been there for some time on about the same orders of magnitude.

US troops continue to face a special challenge in Ramadi and other cities of Anbar province.

The petroleum exports occurred in part because of sabotage, in part because of weather. Unknown persons kidnapped Khidir Fathullah, the director of resources at the Southern Oil Company in Basra from in front of his home when he set out for work.

Oil exports from Ceyhan in Turkey via pipelines from Kirkuk were halted because of 4 explosions at the oil fields at Kirkuk. (In a recent 60 Minutes interview, Vice Premier and notorious liar Ahmad Chalabi claimed to have perfected a new guard system for the pipelines that had stopped the sabotage.) The bombs that went off on Sunday will probably stop northern exports for a month.

Dust storms and high winds, producing choppy water in the Oil Gulf, have also stopped the loading of petroleum onto ships at Basra since Friday. Iraq has only been able to produce 1.8 million barrels a day this year, down from the past few.

Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa gained the approval of Kurdish leaders Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani (current Iraqi president) for the conference of national reconciliation he plans to host in Cairo. The Iraqi Kurds had earlier been annoyed with the Arab League, but Moussa praised their role in building a new Iraq.

I saw a spokesman for the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq today on Aljazeera saying that SCIRI favors the conference, as well, but had been critical of Moussa for not having held it long before now. (The subtext here is that Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, SCIRI leader, has long been outraged by the generally pro-Saddam sentiments in the Arab League, and its failure to condemn the massacres of Shiites. Modern Arab nationalism is inflected as "Sunni" in the same way that American nationalism tends to be inflected as "white.")

Al-Zaman/ AFP: The recent kidnapping and killing of an attorney involved in the defense of a Saddam associate has provoked a strike on Wednesday by the attorneys in Baghdad. Some are also calling for a boycott of the trial of Saddam by trial lawyers until the killers of Saadoun al-Janabi are apprehended. The man killed was from the Janabi clan, and the clan leader alleged on Sunday that the murder was committed by the Badr Corps, the Iran-trained paramilitary of the fundamentalist Shiite SCIRI party. Such charges are explosive at a time of constant Sunni-Shiite violence, and are harbingers of the kind of raw emotions and perhaps violence that are likely to be stirred up by the trial of Saddam.

Al-Hayat [Arabic] is reporting that Iraqi political parties are scrambling to put together joint lists again. It says that the fundamentalist Shiite Dawa Party has decided to run again with the fundamentalist Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. The Fadilah (Virtue) Party may join that list, as well. But SCIRI is trying to attract some secular and Sunni candidates so as to combat the impression that its United Iraqi Alliance is a Shiite cat's paw of Iran. Al-Hayat says that the Kurdistan Alliance is exploring a coalition with religious Sunni parties. Several groups are negotiating to join the secular list of Iyad Allawi. For a while it seemed that the Iraqi Islamic Party (mildly fundamentalist Sunnis) might join Allawi, but it has decided to run alone. One subtext of the article is that both the Kurds and Allawi are trying to find ways to attract votes from the vast number of voters who used to support the secular Arab nationalist Baath Party.

A British colonel and battalion commander is resigning and leaving Iraq in protest at the failure of the Coalition governments to provide properly armored vehicles to his troops. One was killed by a roadside bomb last week.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Syria and the Fundamentalist Crescent?

Some kind readers have requested that I say something about the report of UN-appointed German diplomat Detlev Mehlis concerning the assassination of Rafiq Hariri, the former prime minister of Lebanon. Mehlis is a careful and determined investigator and his findings, which fingered persons in the direct circle of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Asad, are explosive for the area.

Mark LeVine has commented on this issue at his blog at the History News Network.

And, of course, the go-to blog for Syria is that of Josh Landis, who is burning up the track these days with a series of newsworthy revelations about US/Syria relations. These include that NSC chief Steven Hadley asked the Italians about a possible successor to Bashar al-Asad, and that Syrian cooperation with the US on the terrorism front has been extensive and unrequited (because Bush wants to overthrow the Baath regime.)

I was surprised about Hadley and the Italians, since it is surely the French who would be consulted on this issue. They have been as aggressively anti-Syrian in Lebanon as the US.

Personally, I have been convinced by the series of bombings in Lebanon against anti-Syrian personalities (most recently May Shidyaq, the LBC journalist and interviewer), that high-level Syrian secret police officials are on a rampage. Whereas when Hariri was killed, his was only the second high-profile such assassination, and I found an al-Qaeda hit on him plausible (given his long association with the Saudi royal family), the subsequent string of such killings made that theory less and less likely. Mehlis's report seems to me highly credible. The only question left is whether al-Asad himself is implicated, or whether the Baathist Old Guard (which checked his reformist tendencies) has been operating behind his back. That his brother is implicated, as Mark LeVine says, is pretty damning, though.

The Bush administration wishes to take advantage of the scandal to push the Baath Party out of power. The likely successor in Syria, however, is the Muslim Brotherhood. If you had an MB state in Syria, it would certainly menace the stability of Jordan and very possibly of Saudi Arabia. You'd have a possible Fundamentalist Muslim Axis, stretching from Tehran to Basra to Damascus, then down to Amman and Maan, and over to Gaza. It would have problems of cohesion because of the Sunni-Shiite divide, but on issues like Israel the two can generally agree. Al-Sharaq al-Awsat had a piece not so long ago about how the Israelis had decided that having a weak Bashar al-Asad in power in Syria might be preferable to most likely alternatives. But Bush doesn't have the common sense of the Israeli officer corps, and is better at breaking things than gluing them together.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Galbraith on Iraqi Army, Partition

Former Ambassador Peter Galbraith wrote in response to a posting of last Thursday, and has kindly agreed to allow me to reprint the letter here:

' Dear Professor Cole:

. . . You quoted today the Brattleboro Reformer’s account of my remarks last night to the Windham World Affairs Council. You noted a transcription error in my description of the sorry state of Iraqi military and said you would seek clarification. I am happy to provide it.

I described the Iraqi Army as consisting of nine Kurdish battalions, sixty Shiite battalions, and 45 Sunni Arab battalions. There is exactly one mixed battalion. The Kurdish battalions have no Arab officers, while there are a few Kurdish and Sunni Arab officers with Shiite battalions. Being a Kurdish or Shiite officer of the Sunni Arab battalions is risky, so there are not many at all. This is hardly the picture of a national institution. I also noted that up to half the nominal troop strength consists of ghost soldiers. As there is no direct deposit in Iraq, the battalion command can pocket the salaries of soldiers that don’t exist, so there is an incentive to maintain full strength on paper. More of this can be found in my October 6 article in the New York Review of Books, “Iraq’s Last Chance”, which also analyzes
the new Constitution.

You also describe me as advocating the break up of Iraq. My position is slightly different. I argue that Iraq has already broken up, and that it will be much more costly—in terms of lives and money—to put it back together than to accept the new reality. One reason I like the new Constitution is that I believe it is
realistic.

You argue that partition could lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths, but you ignore the fact that holding Iraq together has already cost well more than
100,000 lives in the various Kurdistan wars.

I also think you draw the wrong lessons from the break-up of Yugoslavia, about which I have a certain experience.* The US and Europeans focused on trying to hold Yugoslavia together when there was no way to do so. Instead, US and European diplomacy should have focused on the issues that caused the war. The war was
preventable; the break up was not.

I do not believe it is possible to keep people in a state they hate, and the Kurds clearly want out of Iraq. I do not think the break up of the rest of Iraq is inevitable, but it is possible.

Saddam murdered over 100,000 Kurds, used poison gas, and destroyed more than 4000 villages in Kurdistan as part of his effort to keep Iraq united. Mismanaged
divorce can be costly, but so is an unwanted marriage. The human cost of holding Iraq together may be much higher than that of a negotiated separation.

All the best.

Peter Galbraith '

When I mentioned to him that I didn't see sentiment for partition among the Arab Iraqis, he kindly replied:

' I agree that the situation of Kurdistan is different from that of the South, and that there are not many Arab Iraqis who want their own independent state. But, I have talked to several prominent Shiite politicians who do say that they might consider separation if Iraq continues to deteriorate and if there is no accomodation with the Sunni Arabs. The "three state soluton" (plus Baghdad as a federal capital) may be the outcome in the context of a federation, but it is not necessarily precursor to the three independent countries. I see two independent states--not three--as the much more likely end result. '

*Galbraith was ambassador to Croatia
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sistani Supports Conference for National Reconciliation
Al-Hakim, Sadr Opposed

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has thrown his weight behind the Arab League initiative for a national reconciliation conference in Iraq. Sistani has all along behind the scenes attempted to reach out to the Sunnis. He managed to convince a few to run on the United Iraqi Alliance list. And he pressed hard for greater Sunni Arab representation on the Iraqi cabinet last spring (though not to much avail, unfortunately). Aljazeerah is reporting that Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani is also supporting the conference. There is some hope that the Arab League can effectively reach out to those Sunni Arabs in Iraq who are still willing to talk to the new political leadership.

Al-Hayat reports that Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and Muqtada al-Sadr, both reject the Arab League initiative. I think it would be fairer to say that Muqtada in particular wants the Arab League to publicly repudiate its past support for Saddam and to apologize for not having protested the massacre of Shiites, so that the organization could have any hope of playing the role of honest broker.

Al-Zaman reported on Friday that Mawla al-Musawi, the head of the politburo of "God's Vengeance Party" [Hizb Tha'r Allah] in Basra, accused the Fadilah Party there of having put the Basra provincial governor (a member of Fadilah) up to sending a police team into the Andalus Quarter to arrest "God's Vengeance" secretary-general Yusuf al-Musawi. The attendant fighting killed one and wounded 14. British forces and Basra police have fanned out through the city. Mawla al-Musawi said that the real issue is that the governor is a partisan of Fadilah (the "Virtue Party," a splinter group of the Sadr movement that recognizes Muhammad Yaqubi rather the Muqtada al-Sadr as their leaders). Rumors are circulating in Basra that the God's Vengeance Party is supported by Iran, and the British forces are said to share this suspicion.

Sameer Yaqoub points out that despite almost universal negative attitudes to the constitution on the part of Sunni Arabs, it is nevertheless likely to become law.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

The Great Iran Crock, Blair and AEI

Mahan Abedin demolishes the Blair government's case for Iran giving bombs to Iran's enemies in Iraq. By the way, this thing about the Lebanese Hezbollah really is just disinformation and lies.

There are two organizations in southern Iraq called Hizbullah. One is a component of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (a coalition of Shiite activists). The other was a vehicle for the organization of the Marsh Arabs by Abdul Karim al-Muhammadawi, the "prince of the marshes" and now a member of parliament. Both of these "Hizbullah" organizations are indigenous Iraqis. Poorly informed and perhaps also not very bright Neocons in Iraq were alarmed to see Hizbullah insignia up alongside that of SCIRI, but it was the Iraqi Hizbullah.

The American Enterprise Institute and the Rockingham Cell in the British Ministry of Defense are hoping that you won't know the difference, and that they can find a way to hang violence in Iraq on Iran and the Lebanese Hizbullah. Anyway, if they were so worried about Lebanon's Hizbullah becoming more powerful, they shouldn't have put the Dawa Party and SCIRI into power in Iraq; they are its allies ideologically, and the Iraqi Dawa helped set up Hizbullah in south Lebanon to begin with back in the 1980s.

Apparently AEI and Blair think of Iraq as a magical, mysterious War Machine. Fight one war, you can create all kinds of pretexts to fight another.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Four GIs Killed
Khamenei Praises Iraq Constitution

Guerrilla violence killed 4 US GIs on Friday, three west of Baghdad and one at Heet (Hit).

Iran's Supreme Jurisprudent, Ali Khamenei, on Friday praised Iraq's constitution as "blessed," praised the constitutional referendum, and looked forward to Iraqis going to the polls again on December 15. The Iranians generally dismiss US threats and posturing, whereas they saw the Taliban and Saddam as genuine enemies. The Iranians are still worried about a revival of the secular Arab nationalist Baath Party.

Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder says that the passage of the constitution may not halt Iraq's slide into civil war and partition. (Since the Sunni Arabs overwhelmingly rejected it, the charter is at the very least not a force for national unity!) He quotes a US official saying, "Maybe they just have to have their civil war" and commenting that it is a "way of life" "over here."

I see. So the US invades Iraq, overthrows the government, dissolves the army, appoints an ethnically determined government, backs fundamentalist Shiite parties and Kurdish parties against the interests of the Sunni Arabs. And now it is the Iraqis' fault that there is communal violence, because they are just like that "over here." Well, you can't say that Orientalist stereotypes aren't at least useful as fig leafs for imperial SNAFUs.

Shahin M. Cole observed today, "Partition is the consequence of failed colonialism."

Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa held with the Association of Muslim Scholars, a hard line Sunni religious party, in an attempt to convince them to attend a national reconciliation conference. They issued the same demands that they have all along, and I don't see much progress, though Moussa suggested there had been some.

Karen Hughes continues to be a world-class embarrassment as W.'s ambassador to the Muslim world. She insisted in Indonesia that Saddam had gassed "hundreds of thousands" of Iraqis. He did gas some Iraqis, which is horrible, but it wasn't to that extent. The figure for 300,000 Iraqi civilians dead during his presidency is one of those political numbers that a) would be almost impossible to prove, b) probably includes deaths caused by the Iran-Iraq War, which isn't exactly the same as Saddam having people taken out and shot, and c) is anyway mainly symbolic of the correct conviction that he caused a lot of death and destruction.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

US Military Desecrates bodies of Afghans to Uproar
Or, what in the World do they Think they are doing there?

The burning and desecration of Taliban bodies as a technique of intimidation in Afghanistan by US troops has backfired big time. Afghanistan clergymen are hopping mad at the US, and opposition to continued US troop presence in Afghanistan is growing.

Just when you hoped that US helicopters helping evacuate earthquake victims from Muzaffarabad might make some friends for the US in that part of the world, something like this emerges.

As at Abu Ghraib, the basic problem is that the US wants to cow and intimidate the Muslim or nationalist forces threatening it and its Muslim allies. But the techniques chosen to accomplish this goal are repugnant to all Muslims, and cut down on the number of allies.

Me, I'm not sure what 20,000 troops in Afghanistan are even doing any longer. They sure aren't capturing Bin Laden or Zawahiri. As for the remnants of the Taliban, you don't need 20,000 US troops to deal with them. NATO is doing a good job in Afghanistan, and the US should bow out in favor of it until the Afghanistan government can stand alone.

As for combatting the Taliban, we should stop pretending that is what the Americans are doing. When the deputy governor under the Taliban who oversaw the blowing up of the Buddhas of Bamiyan is sitting in the new parliament, it is hard to see how the large US troop presence even matters any more.

And keeping a division in Afghanistan may end up turning the country against the US again. Isn't that where we came in? No, maybe that was where Brezhnev came in.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iran Rejects Rice Overture
Arab League Mission in Iraq

How mean do you have to be to fire mortar shells at a school and kill a child? A car bombing killed four Iraqis and wounded 14; there may have been American casualties. A lawyer defending a relative of Saddam was kidnapped. This is further evidence that it is impossible to hold a proper trial of Saddam in Iraq in present circumstances.

Amr Moussa, secretary general of the Arab League is on a mission to Iraq to explore ways of negotiating an end to the violence. The Arab League has a chance of reaching out to Iraq's Sunni Arabs, since most of its member states are Sunni Arab and the ideology of the organization tracks with the kind of Arab nationalism common among them. The Arab League has had difficult relations with Iraqi Shiites and Kurds. On his arrival, his organization was criticized by Shiite leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim for not clearly having condemned terrorism in Iraq. (Shiites suspect that the League has a soft spot for the guerrilla movement).

Secretary of State Condi Rice suggested Thursday that the United States talk directly to Iran about Iraq. I know about partisan politics and all, but Rice should really be congratulated and praised for daring to say this, and to buck the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for the New American Century and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee on the issue. Alas, the Iranian response was not forthcoming. I have a suggestion for Rice: you can't start at this high level. Start with a track two meeting in a neutral country, among academics from both countries who are well connected politically. Things might develop from there.

Ambassador Peter Galbraith, who spent two months in Baghdad this past summer, paints a bleak picture of the situation there. This information caught my eye:

' Galbraith warned about placing too much faith in the Iraqi army. He said of the 115 battalions that exist, nine are Kurdish, 60 are Shiite and the remaining ones are Shiite and none have any loyalty to anyone but their own religious ethnic groups. On top of that, he said at least 40,000 of the stated 80,000 soldiers in the Iraqi army do not exist except as names on a payroll sheet. "You can't build a national army when there's no loyalty to the nation," he said. '

There appears to be an error in the transcription, since "60 are Shiite and the remaining ones are Shiite" makes no sense. Did he say that the "remaining ones are Sunni?" Or did he make a distinction between Badr Corps Shiites and other, unaffiliated Shiites? I'll try to find out. [Up date: It should have been, "and the rest are Sunni Arab units." Galbraith says there is only one mixed battalion!]

Galbraith wants to break up Iraq, which I think is a very bad idea. There would just be endless wars among the resulting small, weak states. The Sunni Arabs wouldn't get any petroleum, and they would not accept that situation. As for Yugoslavia, it should be remembered that its partition involved the killing of 200,000 persons and lots of mass graves and displaced persons. The three main provinces involved in the fighting there had a population of perhaps 16 million at that time, so an equivalent struggle in Iraq might produce closer to half a million dead and literally millions wounded or left homeless. Moreover, there are still foreign troops there. And, it should be remembered that despite the partitioning of India and Pakistan, they have fought 3 major wars, a long-term guerrilla war in Kashmir, and came close to a nuclear exchange in 2002 that could have killed 10 million persons. Partition as a problem-solving strategy doesn't always produce less trouble rather than more.

Rory Carroll, Baghdad correspondent of The Guardian, has been released unharmed. Yaaay! One thing this episode demonstrates is that even hard line Iraqi factions can sometimes be negotiated with, which is at least a somewhat hopeful sign.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Ninevah and the Constitutional Referendum

A kind reader in Iraq writes:

' I was in Iraq during the recent elections . . . It is possible - probable - that the Kurdish authorities stuffed ballot boxes. The irony is that if they did this, it was probably unnecessary. The demographics of Ninevah governorate would make it virtually impossible to get a 2/3 no vote.

Mosul city itself is probably 2/3 Sunni Arab, with a significant Kurdish minority in the safer, eastern districts. The Kurds would have voted (twice?) in favor of the constitution. The Christians, a significant minority in Mosul, would mostly also have voted yes if they voted at all. If Ninevah governorate consisted only of Mosul, the vote against the constitution may well have been close to 2/3 against . . .

[The Christians in the north are complicated - I think their vote on the constitution may be split. They are suspicious of Kurdish autonomy but concede that autonomy also means no Sharia' law in the north. The Christians . . . in Dohuk and Erbil were in favor, but without much enthusiasm. In Baghdad or Mosul, they might be much more opposed.]

However, Ninevah Governorate was drawn in such a way that it includes a wide swath of territory in the eastern part of the governorate, currently militarily and politically controlled by the Kurds. There are a number of major towns and small cities in this region: Aqrah, Bardarash, Shaykhan ('Ain Sifni), and Kalak to name the largest four. (Aqrah is the hometown of Latif Zebari, the "bad" uncle of Iraq's current foreign minister, who had a blood feud with Mustafa Barzani since the 60's. That's another reason why this area was included in Ninevah. Latif has an interesting story - his family and followers still live in Mosul, but no longer can count on Arab support. The KDP has elected not to finish him off, as they did with Omar Surchi, another powerful agha who sided with the government against Barzani.)

The towns of al-Qosh, Ba'ashiqah and Tel Kayf to the immediate north and northeast of Mosul are majority Christian. They are likely to have voted more or less for the constitution, if the Kurds trusted them enough to have their votes counted. (There were credible allegations of disenfranchisement of Christians in these communities during the last election. They mostly supported Allawi as the secular, non-Kurdish alternative.)

The towns of ar-Rabi'ah and Zimar are currently at least half Kurdish. Sinjar is now nearly all Kurdish (after the expulsion of Arabs in 2003) and the large collective town near the Syrian border is populated by Arabs of the Shammar tribe, who have historically opposed the Ba'athists and are the most likely of all Sunni Arabs to have voted at least in part for the constitution. (Ghazi al-Yawar is a Shammar)

That leaves the following population centers outside of Mosul as likely sources of nearly 100% "no" votes for the constitution: Tel Afar, Hammam al-Alil, Hadra, Ba'aj, and smaller communities along the Tigris south of Mosul . . . I suspect that the total population of these Sunni communities is roughly equal to or maybe a little less than the total population of the qadhas and nahiyas under Kurdish administration control. The Arab areas of Ninevah have not fared well over the last two years. Many Arabs in Zimar, Sinjar and Shaykhan were forced to leave, and although many of them are now unemployed, landless, and pissed off residents of Mosul and Ba'aj, others have migrated out of Ninevah governorate completely to Baghdad or Salahaddin governorate. The Sunni towns and cities outside of Mosul are matched one-for-one with equivalent Kurdish towns, with the exception of Tel Afar, which is about 150% the size of Aqrah, the largest Kurdish city in the governorate.

So I would estimate that a fair vote in Ninevah Governorate probably would be about 55% against the constitution, but probably not more - depending of course on equivalent turnout for the different ethnic groups. '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

29 Dead
Questions about Referendum Fraud

Guerrilla violence killed 29 in Iraq on Wednesday. Attacks included guerrillas raining mortar fire on civilian homes in Samarra, and guerrillas in Iskandariyah going into a factory, separating out 6 Shiite workers, and executing them. 4 US GIs and a British soldier were among those killed. Three of the US servicemen killed died in a roadside bomb attack near Balad north of Baghdad.

One in four returning US veterans complains of physical or mental injuries.

Iraqis engaged in dueling demonstrations on Wednesday over Saddam's trial. In Dujayl, Shiites demonstrated against Saddam, who is accused of conducting a massacre there in 1982. Al-Zaman reports that counter-demonstrations in favor of Saddam were held in Tikrit, Baiji, and al-Dur. I really fear that a televised trial will produce further polarization and violence, with Sunni Arabs on the receiving end of reprisals by Shiites and Kurds.

Rory Carroll, a reporter in Baghdad for The Guardian, has been kidnapped. He has done excellent work there during the last 9 months and I have depended heavily on his reporting. He was taken in Sadr City after having interviewed a victim of Saddam. If he was taken by Mahdi Army militiamen, there is some hope he will be released, and I appeal to anyone who can contact Muqtada al-Sadr on his behalf to do so. If he was taken by Baathists or foreign jihadis, then I am petrified as to what might happen to him.

Gareth Porter has written what I consider to be an extremely perceptive analysis of the numbers coming out of Ninevah province in the recent referendum on the constitution. He recalls for us that Kurdish and Shiite parties in the province garnered only 130,000 votes in the Jan. 30 elections, despite high turnout in both groups. For there now to be over 300,000 "yes" votes just strikes me as highly unlikely. And, the release of an early statistic on Sunday that there were over 300,000 yes votes, with only 90,000 no votes and 90 percent of polling stations counted, was clear disinformation.

It should be remembered that the Sunni Turkmen of Ninevah would have voted against the constitution, and I suspect most Chaldean and Assyrian Christians did, as well. They are the other major minorities besides the Sunni Arabs (the majority), the Shiite Turkmen and the Kurds.

One of the world's foremost fighters against terrorism, French judge Jean Louis Bruguiere, says that Iraq has become virtual manufacturing plant for Muslim terrorists in Europe. Young Muslims go off to fight there, and return with the skills to do damage in Europe itself. Seems like the flypaper has lost its stickum.

Newly available historical primary sources on Saddam's reign, sprung from the USG with Freedom of Information Act requests by the National Security Archive, have just been posted.
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Italian Parliamentary Report

Justin Raimondo has developed a source in Washington who has named for him three US citizens who were involved in cooking up the forged documents that alleged recent Iraqi purchases of Niger yellowcake uranium. (In fact, the Iraqis had never had the capacity to do anything serious with yellowcake.)

The mystery is still how the forged documents got into the hands of Rocco Martini, a former operative of Italian military intelligence. But after all that wouldn't have been so hard.

Also, a chief of staff to former US Secretary of State Colin Powell, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, has spoken publicly about the way Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney hijacked US foreign policy and instituted a secret policy-making cabal that cut the State Department out of the deal. The fact of it has long been obvious. It is interesting to have an insider testify to it publicly. But., Col. Wilkerson apparently can now expect his wife to be smeared by Richard Bruce Cheney and Irving Lewis Libby.

The Los Angeles Times details the soap opera of Cheney's and Libby's long vendetta against the CIA, especially their fury that Wilson was undermining their [phony] case for the Iraq War.
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Cheney, Resignation and Frege

US News and World Report says that rumors are flying in Washington that Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney may resign because he was closely involved in the discussions with his chief of staff Irving Lewis Libby and with Bush adviser Karl Rove on the decision to out covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson to the press.

It seems increasingly clear that Rove, Libby and perhaps Cheney decided that they could get around a 1982 law making it illegal for a US government official to reveal the name of a covert intelligence operative, by not actually using her name, but rather referring to her as "Joe Wilson's wife." Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV had outed to the public in May of 2003 the fact that the administration was given reasons to doubt the WMD stories about Iraq before the war. Cheney's circle saw Wilson's op-ed as treason and also appear to have believed that the CIA was out to make them the fall guys for the bad intel. So if they decided to send a signal to the CIA that its field officers were vulnerable and could be outed at will, that would make sense as a riposte.

The strategy of calling Valerie Plame Wilson "Joe Wilson's wife" rather than naming her is a lawyer's strategy. It allowed Karl Rove to tell White House spokesman Scott McClellan that no one in the White House had revealed VPW's name to the press. As late as last week it seems clear that Irving Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, was still hoping to get New York Times reporter Judith Miller to tell special council Patrick Fitzgerald that Libby had not revealed Plame Wilson's actual name.

The problem with the strategy is that the philosopher Gottlob Frege had already in 1891 demonstrated that even though there might be a difference between the sense or connotation of two phrases, their referent could be the same. His famous example is "the morning star" and "the evening star." Both of these phrases have the same referent, which is the planet Venus.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy tells us that when he first started working on the problem of sense and reference, he considered the possibility that two terms that refer ultimately to the same object might not actually be equivalent. But as he worked through the problem, he began to see that they were.

'In his mature period, however, Frege was an ardent opponent of this view, and argued in favor of understanding "=" as identity proper, accusing rival views of confusing form and content. He argues instead that expressions such as "4 x 2" and "11 - 3" can be understood as standing for one and the same thing, the number eight, but that this single entity is determined or presented differently by the two expressions. Thus, he makes a distinction between the actual number a mathematical expression such as "4 x 2" stands for, and the way in which that number is determined or picked out. The former he called the reference (Bedeutung) of the expression, and the latter was called the sense (Sinn) of the expression. In Fregean terminology, an expression is said to express its sense, and denote or refer to its reference.

The distinction between reference and sense was expanded, primarily in "Über Sinn und Bedeutung" as holding not only for mathematical expressions, but for all linguistic expressions (whether the language in question is natural language or a formal language). One of his primary examples therein involves the expressions "the morning star" and "the evening star". Both of these expressions refer to the planet Venus, yet they obviously denote Venus in virtue of different properties that it has. Thus, Frege claims that these two expressions have the same reference but different senses. The reference of an expression is the actual thing corresponding to it, in the case of "the morning star", the reference is the planet Venus itself. The sense of an expression, however, is the "mode of presentation" or cognitive content associated with the expression in virtue of which the reference is picked out.

Frege puts the distinction to work in solving a puzzle concerning identity claims. If we consider the two claims:

(1) the morning star = the morning star

(2) the morning star = the evening star

The first appears to be a trivial case of the law of self-identity, knowable a priori, while the second seems to be something that was discovered a posteriori by astronomers. However, if "the morning star" means the same thing as "the evening star", then the two statements themselves would also seem to have the same meaning, both involving a thing's relation of identity to itself. However, it then becomes to difficult to explain why (2) seems informative while (1) does not. Frege's response to this puzzle, given the distinction between sense and reference, should be apparent. Because the reference of "the evening star" and "the morning star" is the same, both statements are true in virtue of the same object's relation of identity to itself. However, because the senses of these expressions are different--in (1) the object is presented the same way twice, and in (2) it is presented in two different ways--it is informative to learn of (2). While the truth of an identity statement involves only the references of the component expressions, the informativity of such statements involves additionally the way in which those references are determined, i.e. the senses of the component expressions. '

You wonder whether, if Rove, Libby and Cheney are indicted, it will be because of the work of a nineteenth-century German logician.
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US Soldier Killed
Constitution vote count Delayed

Early Wednesday a roadside bomb had already taken the life of one GI and wounded several others.

Final results from the Iraqi constitution will be delayed until at least Friday, after questions were raised about the provinces' tallies.

"A dramatic increase in security spending in Iraq and a shift in reconstruction priorities have created a "reconstruction gap" that will leave many projects planned by the US "on the drawing board", a US government watchdog warned yesterday", says the Financial Times.

Part 2 of my interview with Tom Engelhardt is at Tomdispatch.com.

The Lenin's Tomb Blog points out that recent opinion polling in Iraq shows that a majority of Iraqis reject the kind of loose federalism now enshrined in the Iraqi constitution! This is true of both Shiites and Sunnis.

Will blog more on Wednesday.
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Voting Tallies Provoke Investigation
As US Jets Kill 70

The US military launched air strikes around Ramadi on Monday, killing 70 persons. Iraqi police maintained that 20 of them were innocent civilians, including some children. The US military said it had received no such reports. Five US GIs were killed at Ramadi this weekend, and the city largely refused to have anything to do with the constitutional referendum. Whatever the reality, Sunni Arabs, whose nerves are raw from losing in their attempt to stop the constitution, will likely believe the story about the US bombing children. The guerrilla war is set to go on a long time.

Suspicions of irregularities in the voting tallies being reported in some provinces in Iraq have provoked the Higher Electoral Commission to conduct an investigation. In six Shiite-majority provinces in the South, 95 percent or more of voters are reported as having cast votes favoring the constitution. The proportion of those voting "yes" was not in and of itself suspicious in those provinces, but the commission felt that anything over 90 percent should be looked at again.

The provinces affected seem largely to be in the hands of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and it seems to me possible that SCIRI ballot counters may have been overly enthusiastic about the constitution. Personally, I think this phenomenon is a harbinger of things to come in the Dec. 15 parliamentary elections.

Sunni Arab leaders warned of serious consequences if fraud were proved with regard to the vote in Ninevah. Aljazeera is reporting that there are contradictory reports for Ninevah, the third possible province in which Sunni Arabs might hope to defeat the constitution by a 2/3s margin. One report said that the "no" vote there was 55 percent, not enough to cause the 3-province veto to kick in (Sunni Arabs in Anbar and Salahuddin had already rejected it by a 2/3s majority). But Abd al-Razzaq al-Juburi, the secretary general of the Independent Iraqi Front, told the correspondent for al-Zaman that the "no" vote in Ninevah exceeded 75 percent, according to his conversations with election workers. He said that they were under enormous pressure not to speak about this issue from unidentified higher-ups. (My guess is that al-Juburi is himself exaggerating-- a 75 percent rejection is too high for Ninevah.) Another official said that out of 778,000 votes cast in Ninevah, 442,000 were "no" votes, and 353,000 were "yes" votes.

It does seem likely that all three Sunni Arab-majority provinces have rejected the constitution, even if not by the margin required to defeat it, and that this outcome is the worst possible one. For the rejection to be consistent within a single bloc is a very bad sign for the future of the country.

The Washington spinmeisters who are trying to say that the mere fact of the Sunnis voting is a good thing, even if they voted against the constitution, do no know what they are talking about. Political participation is not always a positive thing. The Nazis after all were elected to the Reichstag. And Serbs consistently voted for Milosevic and other ultra-nationalists. Nobody in Washington thought it positive that Iranian hardliners came out in some numbers to vote for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Some elections are tragedies for a nation. This constitutional referendum was one of them.

Even without a hint of fraud, the new constitution is provocation enough. It probably reduces the Sunni Arab share of national petroleum resources to 5 or 10 percent. The Association of Muslim Scholars was hopping mad. AP says, ' "If the constitution was passed, the attacks will definitely rise against the occupation forces and the security situation is going to get worse," said Sheik Abdul-Salam al-Kubaisi, a prominent cleric. '

In contrast, Iran is jumping up and down for joy that the constitution appears to have passed and that there will be elections Dec. 15 for a 5-year parliament, predicting a "bright future" for Iraq. Fox Cable News might consider booking more Iranian officials; they seem to be entirely with the program.

Al-Zaman says that in Babil province, with its capital at Hilla, there was 65 percent turnout and 70 percent voted in favor of the constitution. This result is plausible, since Babil is a mixed province with Sunnis as well (in the so-called "Triangle of Death.")
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Engelhardt Interview of Cole

Tom Engelhardt's interview of me is at Tomdispatch.com. Part two will be up Tuesday.
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Peace in Iraq Still Elusive after Constitutional Referendum

Al-Hayat reports that 643,000 votes were cast in Ninevah Province (capital: Mosul). At the time it filed, 419,000 had been preliminarily counted, and the vote was running 75 percent in favor. Ninevah Province was the most likely place that Sunni Arabs opposing the constitution might be able to get a 2/3s "no" vote.

Several of my knowledgeable readers are convinced that the Ninevah voting results as reported so far look like fraud. One suspected that the Iraqi government so feared a defeat there that they over-did the ballot stuffing and ended up with an implausible result.

One of my Iraqi-American correspondents compared the turnout statistics from Ninevah and Diyala provinces last Jan. 30 to those coming out now, and found the current numbers completely unbelievable. He pointed out that the Iraqi Islamic Party had not garnered many votes in Ninevah last January, and its support of the constitution could not hope to explain the hundreds of thousands of "yes" votes the constitution appeared to receive on Saturday.

AFP reports that

'In the Sunni-dominated province of Salaheddin, which includes Tikrit, election official Saleh Khalil Farraj told AFP that turnout was 80 per cent, but added that the percentage of ‘no’ votes was 71 per cent. '

I am quoted: ' The constitution is in fact likely to be quickly amended once a new round of general elections is held, and US Middle East expert Juan Cole from the University of Michigan told AFP the document was “fluid and changing”. “It is not even necessarily parliament that changes it ... It is the clan and community leaders,” he noted, since a last-minute deal on the draft had been spearheaded by Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani and approved by leaders of Shia and Sunni groups before it was rubber-stamped by parliament. “This vote is sort of a national vote of confidence for that leadership,” Cole said. '

Glen Kessler of the Washington Post concludes that there is still a hard road ahead for the US in Iraq, even after the passage of the constitution.

Massoud Derhally quotes an unusually wide range of expert opinion in coming to the conclusion that peace in Iraq is still elusive after the constitutional referendum.

Ashraf al-Taie explains how the webite of 'al-Qaeda in Iraq' used to work before the webmaster was nabbed by US troops.

Nick Turse reviews the casualties of the Bush administration.

Col. Pat Lang, a former Defense Intelligence Agency official, weighs in on the Miller scandal. See also a CBS reporter's is deep criticism of the New York Times for having allowed Judith Miller to acquire a security clearance and to sign away her ability to share what she learned under it with readers.

The Beyond Middle East Studies Blog comments further on the Judith Miller Plamegate case.
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Achchar Guest Editorial: On the Sunni Vote in the October 15 Constitutional Referendum

Gilbert Achcar writes:

' The major difference between the October 15 vote and the January 30 election as is now confirmed has been the—uneven but nevertheless important—Sunni participation. It is interesting to have a close look at this development.

A summary of the official positions:

*Islamic Party: As is well-known, the only major Sunni political force to have called for casting a YES vote in the referendum is the Islamic Party. This is the Iraqi branch of the Muslim Brotherhood (though the Association of Muslim Scholars is also close to the international MB). Among Iraqi Sunni groups, the IP is one of the most susceptible to pressure from the Saudi Kingdom and Jordan, and has for long collaborated with the US along with the bulk of Iraqi opposition in exile before the fall of Saddam Hussein. They reversed their position on the constitution after an agreement with the Shiite and Kurdish coalitions, brokered by US Ambassador Khalilzad, according to which there will be a procedure to amend the constitution after the election of a new Parliament in December (by majority vote in the new Assembly, which, if secured, is to be followed by a popular referendum with the same rule as in the October 15 referendum: two-thirds voting NO in three provinces would defeat the amendments). The reversal in the IP’s attitude led to splits within its ranks, and even violent attacks on some of its offices and members, but the attacks were condemned by most other Sunni forces.

*Boycotters: The first Sunni-based forces that have defined an attitude toward the constitutional referendum were, of course, for its boycott as a matter of “principle.” They were two: 1) the Ba’ath Party (communiqué of the pan-Arab leadership dated September 9 and communiqué of the Iraqi leadership the same month) calling for a boycott of the referendum to deprive it from any legitimacy (political groups serving as legal facades for the Ba’ath, like the “Supreme Committee of Patriotic Forces-Wahj al-Iraq,” followed suit); and 2) Zarqawi’s al-Qaida branch in Iraq, which did not only warn against any participation in the referendum—from both a “principled” ultra-fundamentalist attitude against any human-made constitution and an anti-occupation stance—but also accompanied its threats with violent actions against those calling for the participation.

*“NO” Voters: Four major armed groups called on their followers to cast a NO vote in the referendum in order to defeat the draft by gathering the required two-thirds majority in three provinces: these are The Islamic Army in Iraq, The Army of Mujahideen, The Movement of Islamic Resistance (Hamas-Brigades of the 1920 Revolution) and The Islamic Front of the Islamic Resistance. These groups, which initially were calling for a boycott, explained the reversal in their position in a communiqué released on the day of the referendum with the following basic arguments: they do not want to be accused one more time of preventing fellow Sunnis from acting politically; the recently defined rule that made the rejection pending on two-thirds of actual voters in three provinces instead of registered voters; they got guarantees that the Sunnis would supervise their voting areas so that no falsification of the results would be possible; there is a big part of the Iraqi people, Sunnis and Shiites, opposed to the draft, and therefore there is a great hope to defeat it. The groups added accusations to the US of trying to prevent the Sunni regions from taking part in the vote for fear of a defeat of the draft, referring to the recent onslaught by US forces that started in Tal Afar and extended to Samara, Ramadi, etc. The only remaining major Sunni armed group is the Army of Ansar al-Sunna. They simply did not issue a position, probably torn between their inclination to boycott and the desire not to stand against what has become the dominant trend among Sunnis.

Coalition of Sunni Political Groups

Several Sunni political groups called similarly for casting a NO vote in the referendum. However the official statement of the coalition gathered around the Association of Muslim Scholars, the Council of Iraqi National Dialogue, acting as a the political counterpart of the armed groups, both Fundamentalists and Ba’athists, left the matter open between boycott and NO vote, just calling for a rejection of the draft by all “legal” means, i.e. avoiding violence.

Explaining that they were not convinced of reversing their rejection of the draft after the last-minute agreement between the Islamic Party and the Shiite and Kurdish coalitions, their spokesperson, Saleh al-Mutlak (or Mutlaq: there are different spellings of his name in Arabic sources), used the following argument to reject the agreement, which is a striking and amazing illustration of the double standard applied by Iraqi factions in their political reasoning: he said that the rule of two-thirds in three provinces (that would be enough to defeat future amendments) is unfair because it would allow majorities in three provinces to defeat what 80% of the Iraqi people would have adopted!

Here are excerpts from an analysis of the referendum in the Sunni provinces by an insider Sunni source, published on the evening of Saturday October 15 after the end of the vote. It sheds an interesting light on the dissensions among Sunni forces and their motivations. '

[I append:]

' The Votes of Sunnis were lost between the Islamic Party’s Conspiracy and Zarqawi’s Fanatism. (Mufakkirat al-Islam, Oct. 15)

"Although four of the major and most influent resistance groups on the Iraqi scene called Sunni Iraqis yesterday to go to the polling centers and cast a NO vote on the constitution, reality was contrary to what was expected from all Sunni circles, as our correspondents have reported that the regions falling under the control of al-Qaida’s organization in Iraq have seen almost nil or insignificant rates of votes in the referendum.

This has incited Sunni Iraqis against the position of al-Qaida’s organization because it contradicted the rest of jihadist combatant groups in Iraq that requested from the Sunnis to vote in order to abort the constitution.

Mufakkirat al-Islam’s correspondent in Ramadi reported that four Sunni citizens were killed this morning in the early hours of the referendum by elements of al-Qaida’s organization, as they were coming out of one of the polling stations after voting NO, according to their relatives. This has created a state of fear among city residents and prevented them from taking part in the vote although the number of registered voters in Ramadi reached 347 000 …

Sheikh Abdul-Sattar Muhammad, one of the imams and preachers of Fallujah, said that al-Qaida’s organization made a huge error in preventing the people by threats and intimidations to take part in the vote, adding that al-Qaida contributed with other groups to the marginalization of the Sunnis and their impotence in the face of Shiites, Kurds and secular parties… He said also that if al-Qaida’s elements had let the people vote, the constitution would have been rejected by 100% of Sunnis and would have been aborted, while it would have been proved that Sunnis are not a minority in Iraq…

Whereas the Islamic Party has deliberately contributed in splitting the votes of the Sunnis in calling for a “yes” vote, Zarqawi has also given a gift to the occupation and the Safawi [a pejorative formula used in Sunni circles to designate the Shiites deemed to be “Iranian agents”] followers of Sistani by contributing unknowingly, through their threats to the voters, to the neutralization of the Sunni votes opposed to this constitution, under which the Iraqis may have to live miserably for a long period. It would have been better if it had behaved like the Army of Ansar al-Sunna, as said one of the mosque imams in Mosul…

The question now in Iraq is when will al-Qaida’s organization stop allowing the assassination of Muslims under various pretexts, after the murder of some Sunnis in Ramadi today because they took part in the vote, and, before that, the authorization to kill members of the Islamic Party. Before that also al-Qaida’s followers turned their weapons against members of other armed groups during the second siege of Fallujah under the pretext that they ought to accept Zarqawi’s leadership after Usama bin Laden’s appeal to this end. This attitude weakened the ranks of the resistance and allowed US occupation forces to execute their well-known offensive in the southern part of Fallujah…

Through their political facades and their jihadist groups, the Sunnis wanted by voting to impede the Safawi dream, supported by the occupation and Iran, and this by harassing the occupation and its agents politically, while the resistance is carrying on its steadfast action in combating the occupier."

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LeVine Guest Editorial: Iraq's Oslo Moment

Mark LeVine writes:

' Iraq's Oslo Moment

With the approval of the revised Constitution on Saturday by a strong majority of its citizens, Iraq would seem to be poised to enter a new and peaceful phase of the post-Saddam era. But viewed from the perspective of the Middle East's recent history, particularly the failed negotiating strategies behind the collapse of the Oslo peace process, Saturday's vote will likely neither end the insurgency nor bring the country closer to significant democratic development.

The original draft of the Constitution did set important benchmarks for democracy and personal freedom for Iraqis. It even concludes with a statement on environmental protection that Americans should envy. But these advances are overshadowed by what the Constitution left out. Specifically, there are no references to three issues that of primary concern to most Arab, and especially Sunni, Iraqis: A prohibition on the long-term presence of foreign--read American--troops in the country, a firm statement emphasizing Iraqi control of production and distribution of the country's oil resources, and a commitment to rebuilding the social infrastructure that was devastated by the invasion and subsequent wholesale privatization of the country's economy under US auspices.

For most every Arab Iraqi the withdrawal of all American and other foreign troops is the sine qua non for ending the insurgency. That the constitutional negotiators couldn't include any prohibition of foreign troops, or deal straightforwardly with the other two core issues, demonstrates the continuing and largely deleterious power of the US in the country's internal affairs.

In this framework, three out of the four amendments passed last week to assuage Sunni voters will not achieve their aim. The first amendment, adding the phrase "The Constitution is the guarantee of the unity of the country," might have important symbolic value, but is meaningless if the violence and insurgency continue. The second, mandating Arabic as an official language in Kurdistan, will also make little difference for Arabs living in Kurdistan if, as is case with Arabic in Israel, official recognition is not translated into acceptance by the Kurdish majority of Arabic as a language of public discourse.

The third amendment, slowing down the de-Baathification program and ending the purge of former party members who weren't directly involved in the former regime's crimes, is the one positive step of the four, as it will go a long way to ameliorating the concerns of Sunni politicians, and even ordinary workers, who were part of the Baath party during the previous regime.

But the final and most important amendment, setting up a Parliamentary committee to suggest a one-time set of changes or amendments to the Constitution after the elections in December, will likely not bring any of the changes to the Constitution Sunnis are demanding. Even if every eligible Sunni voter had voted on Saturday and in the parliamentary elections scheduled for December, they will remain too small a minority to change the Constitution in a manner that would shift significant resources, revenues or political power away from Kurds and Shiites and to their communities.

Because of this, the statement by President Talibani that the Constitution has addressed all Sunni concerns is simply not true. More accurate is the statement made by Shiite legislator Saad Jawad that the last minute amendments were "an added bonus" to convince Sunnis to vote for the Constitution without making any substantive changes to the balance of power enshrined therein.

Given this situation it is unlikely that most Sunni leaders will change their view of the insurgency as the only true bargaining chip they have to force Kurds and Shiites to sacrifice some of their power, or to achieve a full withdrawal of Coalition forces from Iraq.

And so it appears that the constitutional process being celebrated in Iraq and Washington is setting up Iraq to repeat the mistakes of the Oslo peace process, where negotiations over the hard issues were continually postponed on the assumption the process would move forward with enough momentum to force compromises at the end stage.

But as in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, without significant improvements on the ground in peoples' lives, and strong confidence that their country will be free of foreign troops and have a functioning economy in the near future, even significant progress at the political level progress will be no match for the anger of millions of Arab Iraqis, Sunni and Shiite alike, at a new order in which they can reasonably claim to have little stake. '

Mark LeVine
History
University of California Irvine

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Arato Guest Editorial: The Constitution and a Pot of Porridge

Andrew Arato of the New School writes:

' We can now assume that in Saturday’s referendum the 2/3 negative votes will not be attained in a third, Sunni majority province, and that the Constitutional Proposal submitted to the Iraqi people has passed. It is now going to be Iraq’s Constitution, with international recognition. But what has passed, and what does it mean?

There is great confusion in the English language, and I must assume in the Arabic press as well concerning the text added to already patched up document just three days before the referendum. In a version released by the UN Office for Constitutional Support, and the NY Times Bureau, both in Baghdad, there are only relatively minor changes, that regarding the fundamental issue of “federalism” establish only “a committee from its members… representative of the main components of Iraqi society…to make recommendations in a periods not to exceed four months for necessary amendments that can be made to the Constitution”. Otherwise this addition leaves the existing complicated amendment rule in place, which in spite of numerous misreadings in the press banned all amendments for two parliamentary cycles only for fundamental righs, and for state principles that do not involve “federalism”.

As to rights of regions, while these could not be amended at all without a regions consent, this provision applies only to regions already formed, presently Kurdistan. In this version it would seem that the Iraqi Islamic Party sold its support for a pot of porridge, i.e. a mere committee, since the regulations concerning regions all remain in place, and require, as before the so-called compromise, a 2/3 parliamentary vote to change them, which a nationalist side led by the Sunnis or anyone else is not going to have against Kurdish and Shi’ite opposition under any conceivable electoral and coalition building scenarios.

There is however a second, according to my friend Nathan Brown, better authenticated version of the text, that was actually read in parliament, available at the Nigash website.

This text also involves the formation of the relevant committee, but suspends the operation of all sections of the normal amendment rule (previous art. 122, now art. 125) for the relevant period of four months after the election of the National Assembly. That body under this rule would approve a full package of amendments, as a whole, by absolute majority (i.e. of all members). When I first heard of this provision among the contradictory press reports, I foolishly thought that now the Kurds would have to vote against the draft, because everything could be renegotiated, and changed by a majority decision, including their rights, and the referendum spoken about under the new constitution would be simply a majoritarian one.

But the architects of the compromise thought of this problem: For whatever amendments would emerge from the four month process they have reinstated the ratification rule of the TAL used in the present referendum: simple majority in the country plus the three province veto. Still only a pot of porridge, then? Very possibly, because the veto that may have been given up on the level of parliament is still retained by both the Shi’ites and the Kurds on the level of provinces.

Yet, in my eternal optimism, I see a chance of something else happening. What was in effect done is to both vote for a constitution now in a highly accelerated way as the Americans and others insisted, and to get the additional six months for the process many thoughtful observers believed was necessary if there was to be a chance for a historic compromise among the three major groups as now defined, or among more and different ones if there is a political re-orientation and re-alignment. In effect the new committee will be, with better and electorally secured Sunni participation, the same type of committee that was supposed to draft the constitution in the TAL regulated process.

The product this time will have to be actually voted on, because they specify the voting rule, absolute majority. And the ratification rule of the TAL is going to be in effect. So we are in effect back to an improved version of the TAL process, with the possibility of a better form of Sunni representation now legitimated by elections. It was then not a pot of porridge after all?

Well, not so fast. With the TAL the fall back position was the TAL, which after all had some minority protections even if poorly designed, and was less likely to be given an Islamist interpretation. The TAL had a three province limit for the formation of regions. Most importantly, if a process of constitution making under the TAL failed, the TAL remained in effect. Now under similar procedural rules, if the process of amending the new constitution were to fail, Iraqis would be back with a new constitution that is strongly biased in favor of a regionalist break-up of the country with the possibility for example of mega regions, and the resolution of disputed constitutional questions concerning social status and formation of regions by simple majorities.

Thus, if either the Shi’ite or Kurdish partners, or both, did not act in good faith when making the concession to the Sunnis, then in fact they were engaging in nothing but an effort to get a few more Sunni votes in the referendum, and to split the Sunni parties.

We cannot know right now if there is a real chance still for some kind of historic compromise. For the moment, the parties of the government got their very poor constitution passed despite all the gaps and illegalities. The Sunni moderates however, and not only the Iraqi Islamic Party gained time. And that is not nothing. '

Andrew Arato
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The Threads of Scandal: Iraq, Niger, Plamegate and Franklin

Norman Dombey asks acute questions about the various scandals in Washington concerning the false documents alleging Iraqi purchase of Niger uranium. These forgeries tie together the fraudulent basis for the Iraq War, the scandal that caught up Judith Miller of the New York Times about the revelation by Irving Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff) that Ambassador Joe Wilson's wife was an undercover CIA operative; and Larry Franklin, who recently confessed to spying for Israel (and trying to get up a war against Iran), and who met with Italian military intelligence, Michael Ledeen, Manucher Ghorbanifar (Iran-Contra scandal figure) and Harold Rhode in Europe.

Dombey asks good questions. Would that we had the answers.

Gene Goldenfeld writes:

' This is an FYI:

In response to Arianna Huffington's 10-15 post under "TimesSelective..," a reader asks about Stephen Hayes' Weekly Standard article dated 10-25-05, "The White House, the CIA, and the Wilsons." Hayes' article is a substantial and slick piece of disinformation. I'd suggest taking a close look at it because it is undoubtedly going to be widely circulated and cited by Administration backers against Wilson and the whole Special Prosecutor's investigation. The Hayes' piece is at The Weekly Standard.


This is what I wrote in the Huffington Comments in response:

Hayes' piece in the Weekly Standard claming that Wilson is the only liar in this business is an important piece of disinformation that will undoubtedly be picked up by Brooks and others for their columns in defense of the Bush Administration. I don't know what Wilson claimed privately to reporters about the forged documents and other matters, but in the speech passage Hayes quotes (pg 2) Wilson says he called "the government" *after* the British report came out to suggest fact checking, i.e., to check the authenticity of the documents it was based on. Contrary to Hayes, there is nothing in Wilson's account to suggest he was making claims about the forgeries before they were known about publicly. Hayes has pulled a sophisticated version of a common liar's trick: fill your story with a long detailed chronology to make it look
like you know what you're talking about, in the hope that listeners/readers won't notice how you finesse your central claim.

Gene Goldenfeld '

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Constitution Likely to Pass
6 US Marines Killed

Six US GI's were killed by roadside bombs Saturday and Sunday, according to wire services, five of them in Ramadi.

The early returns from the Iraqi referendum on the new constitution suggest that it will pass, avoiding a Sunni Arab 3-province veto. Anbar and Salahuddin appear to have rejected the constitution by a 2/3s majority.

AP is reporting:

' According to a vote count from 260 of Ninevah's 300 polling stations, about 300,000 people supported the constitution and 80,000 opposed it, said Samira Mohammed, spokeswoman for the election commission in the province's capital, Mosul. Ballots from the remaining 40 stations still had to be counted, but it would be virtually impossible to get the two-thirds "no" that Sunni opponents would need. '

These results from Ninevah make no sense to me. Mosul is a city of over a million, and is 80 percent Sunni Arab. There are certainly more than 80,000 Sunni "no" votes there! I suppose it is possible that tens of thousands of Sunni Arab supporters of the Iraqi Islamic Party, which is based in Mosul, voted "yes," in accordance with the instructions of their party leaders. But I wouldn't have thought there were that many IIP loyalists in Ninevah, where there are many ex-Baathists and Sunni Arab nationalists.

Update: It just occurred to me that one explanation for the results in Ninevah would be that the Sunni Arabs just did not show up to vote in very many numbers, essentially boycotting the referendum, whereas the 20 percent who are Kurds, and the Shiite Turkmen etc., might have come out in high proportions.

Likewise, the emptying and disruption of Tal Afar by the attack on it in August could have taken a good 50,000 Sunni Turkmen "no" votes out of consideration, since Tal Afar residents are often still refugees and probably not in a position to vote. But I'd love to see a better breakdown.

I am not saying that the results are fixed, just that they strike me as counter-intuitive and a puzzle that needs to be resolved.

' In Diyala, 70 percent supported the referendum, 20 percent opposed it and 10 percent of ballots were rejected as irregular, said Adil Abdel-Latif, the head of the election commission in Diyala. The result came from a first count of the approximately 400,000 votes cast. '

I was not expecting Diyala, where Sunni Arabs are probably only a little over half of the population, to reject the constitution, because the Shiites and Kurds are a substantial part of the population and would have relatively high turnout, whereas Sunni Arabs clearly mostly stayed home, either because they rejected the legitimacy of the process or because they were afraid of reprisals by the guerrilla movement, which threatened to kill Sunni Arabs who participated in the referendum.

Sunnis in Adhamiyah District of Baghdad voted heavily against the constitution. The picture elsewhere among Sunni Arabs in the capital is still unclear, but appears to have been more mixed, according to Aljazeera.

AP estimates that there was a 60 percent turnout in Karbala province, a center for religious Shiites, and that 95 percent voted "yes."

On the other hand, in Qadisiyah the turnout was only 30 percent, so the Shiites there seem to be pretty apathetic.

Many Shiites are disgusted with the Jaafari government, which they see as do-nothing and which has not made progress against political violence.
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Sunni Arabs Reject Constitution

Anbar province to the west of Baghdad has about 1.2 million residents, almost all of them Sunni Arabs. It had the lightest turnout in the referendum Saturday on the new constitution, but what turnout there was appears to have been solidly negative. Of 209 polling stations in the province, the home of anti-American cities such as Fallujah and Ramadi, 60 to 70 stations did not open-- largely for security reasons. That is, about a third of the population was deprived of the opportunity to vote there. Others, as in most of Ramadi, rejected the whole process as illegitimate insofar as it occurred under foreign military occupation. (There was also violence at Ramadi). It probably does not matter, though, since the vote with regard to the 3-province veto is by province. Anbar said "no" to the constitution.

Then there is Salahuddin Province, just north of Baghdad, with about one million inhabitants. Its major cities include Tikrit and Samarra. AP thought late Saturday evening that Sunni Arabs there might well muster a 2/3s majority against the constitution.

The other possible province in which Sunni Arabs had some hope of defeating the constitution by 2/3s is Ninevah, the home of Mosul city. Ninevah has some 2 million inhabitants. Ninevah has a substantial Sunni Turkmen minority, principally at Tal Afar, and they are militantly against the constitution, still smarting under the assault on that city by Iraqi government and US forces, which emptied it and leveled whole neighborhoods.

Ninevah is 2.5 million, including the city of Mosul, which has over a million residents. The majority is Sunni Arab and it could be province number 3 to reject the constitution. If that happened, the constitution would fail.

It seems clear that most Iraqi Sunnis paid no attention to the Iraqi Islamic Party of Muhsin Abdul Hamid, which had called for a "yes" vote after it helped wring last minute concessions from the Shiites and Kurds. A very important concession was that former members of the Baath Party would be allowed to reenter Iraqi society.

It seems unlikely that the constitution will be rejected, though it is now more of a question mark than it might have been.

If the Sunni Arabs reject the constitution virtually en masse in this referendum, it will severely bring into question the legitimacy of this national charter. Its passage, under these conditions, seems a guarantee of ongoing guerrilla warfare against the new order, and possibly a partition of the country.

The Kurds and the Shiites were enthusiastic about the constitution, though Shiite turnout in some provinces was very light.
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Zawahiri Letter

The other thing that struck me as odd about the Zawahiri letter was that at the end he raises the question of whether a non Iraqi should be leading the insurgency. This is odd for several reasons. Al Qaeda does not think in terms of nationality but of the umma or Muslim community. It reads to me like an attempt to undermine Zarqawi. And it is an insult.
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Referendum on Constitution

The Iraqis are voting Saturday in a referendum on the new constitution. It was again endorsed by Shiite preachers and clerics on Friday. Sunni preacher were more divided.

Sunni Arabs in the west of Iraq are complaining about a lack of polling stations in their areas. Many wish to vote against the constitution today.

Guerrillas fought a firefight with American forces at Ramadi on Friday, among other instances of violence. Since the US military is now preventing most people from driving, though, there will be fewer car bombings until the driving ban is lifted.

There were other acts of violence on Friday, as Reuter reports.

This is what I said on the Lehrer News Hour on Friday:

' Trapdoors in the constitution?

RAY SUAREZ: Well, Professor Cole, you've heard three colleagues talk about how important politics working is at this juncture. What's your view?

Juan ColeJUAN COLE: Well, I think it's important that politics is working and I think it's also important toward what goal it is working. I'm a pessimist on this process, and I'm a severe critic of this constitution. Professor Dawisha was polite in the way he put it, but it's full of trapdoors.

RAY SUAREZ: The constitution?

JUAN COLE: The constitution is full of trapdoors. There will be a provision that says revenues will be shared between the provinces and the federal government. In what way will they be shared? Well, there will be a law passed by subsequent parliament that will determine that.

So in many instances the people who are voting for this constitution have no idea what exactly it is, the substance that they're voting for. The constitution allows provincial confederations which have claims on resources and perhaps on enormous resources.

It would be as though Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico could form a confederacy, and then they could tell Washington, well, you're not going to be getting as much tax money from our oil as you used to, and moreover, if you want to talk to Austin, you have to go through our confederal parliament and our prime minister.

The last time we had a confederacy in this continent it caused a lot of trouble. And I'm very concerned that these provisions in the constitution could lead to such a weak central government and to such strong provinces that there will be centrifugal forces breaking the country apart.

And then 20 percent of the population, the Sunni-Arab population, seems to be pretty diehard against this constitution; that's going to weaken its legitimacy. '

Voter participation in a democracy

RAY SUAREZ: But à propos of what's been said earlier, is Iraq better off with passing a flawed constitution rather than having to go back to the drawing board and start from the beginning at a very, very fractious time in the country's life?

JUAN COLE: Well, certainly it's better off because if 80 percent of the population were supporting this process and this constitution, and they were disappointed, then the disappointment in the democratic process might be fateful for Iraq.

Certainly it's much better that it pass than it not pass, but it is an extremely troubling document, and it should be remembered that the failure of the United States framers of the Constitution to deal with the slavery issue did hold within it ultimately the seeds of the civil war in this country, and putting off difficult issues, having open-ended compromises that don't come to a decisive end can cause future trouble. It's much better if things are settled. '

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Zawahiri Letter to Zarqawi: A Shiite Forgery?

The Arabic text of the recently released letter alleged to be by Zawahiri (al-Qaeda's number two man) to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq raises questions for me as to its authenticity.

Update A lot of Muslim and Arabist readers have written to say that my argument below (now at bottom in italics) is incorrect and that I have confused the ritual of saying blessings on the Prophet when Muhammad's name is mentioned (during which Sunnis typically do not mention the family of the Prophet) and the ritual salutation at the beginning of a letter, in which the mention of the family and companions of the Prophet by Sunnis is not unheard of.

On the other hand, a number of knowledgeable observers have agreed that it is strange for al-Zawahiri and his circle to call the Prophet's grandson, Husayn, an "Imam." There are other odd things about the letter that I will discuss on Saturday.

Later he refers to Husain, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, as al-Imam al-sibt, "the Imam, the grandson". I do not believe that a hard line Sunni such as Zawahiri would call Husain an Imam. That is Shiite terminology.

The letter then says how much Zawahiri misses meeting with Zarqawi. Zarqawi was not part of al-Qaeda when he was in Afghanistan. He had a rivalry with it. And when he went back to Jordan he did not allow the Jordanian and German chapters of his Tawhid wa Jihad group to send money to Bin Laden. If Zawahiri was going to bring up old times, he would have had to find a way to get past this troubled history, not just pretend that the two used to pal around.

My gut tells me that the letter is a forgery. Most likely it is a black psy-ops operation of the US. But it could also come from Iran, since the mistakes are those a Shiite might make when pretending to be a Sunni. Or it could come from an Iraqi Shiite group attempting to manipulate the United States. Hmmm.

The authenticity of the letter has also been questioned by al-Qaeda in Iraq.

*

[I had written but now retract: "The very first element of the letter is the blessing on the Prophet. It says:

al-salah wa al-salam `ala rasuli'llahi wa a-lihi wa sahbihi . . .

(peace and blessings be upon the Messenger of God and his family and his companions . . .)

the phrase "salla Allahu `alayhi wa alihi wa sallam" (the blessings and peace of God be upon him and his family) is a Shiite form of the salutation, because of the emphasis of the Shiites on the House or descendants of the Prophet. Because of the cultural influence of Shiism in South Asia, one does find that form of the salutation in Pakistan and India among Sunni Muslims.

But before I went to Pakistan I had never, ever heard a Sunni Muslim add "wa alihi" (and his family) to the salutation. I associated it strongly with Iran and Shiism, and was taken aback to hear Sunnis say it on Pakistani television. Certainly, I never heard that form of it all the time I lived in Egypt.

I just put "salla Allahu `alayhi wa alihi wa sallam" into google in English transliteration and *all* the sites that came up on the first page were either Shiite or Pakistani Sunni (Chishti, Barelvi, etc.) I tried adding Misr (Egypt) to the phrase and got a Shiite attack on the medieval Sunni hardline thinker, Ibn Taymiya. I tried adding Qaida and got a Shiite attack on Sunni extremism.

I do not believe that an Egyptian like al-Zawahiri would use this phraseology at all. But he certainly would not use it to open a letter to a Salafi. Sunni hardliners deeply object to what they see as Shiite idolatry of the imams or descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, for whom they made shrines such as Ali's at Najaf and Husayn's at Karbala. In fact, hard line Wahhabis from Saudi Arabia attacked and sacked Karbala in 1803.

Adding to the salutation "the peace and blessings of God be upon him [Muhammad]" the phrase "and his family" would be an insult to Zarqawi and to the hardline Sunnis in Iraq. ]
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Grand Ayatollahs urge "Yes" Vote
Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party attacked Over its acceptance of Constitution

Guerrillas managed to launch a few attacks on Wednesday and Thursday as the country began being locked down and cut off from the outside world in preparation for the referendum on Saturday. Mortar fire wounded 8 policemen in Sunni Adhamiyah in Baghdad. There was a car bombing in Mosul. Two Turkmen party officials were abducted in the north (there is danger of Kurdish/ Turkmen violence, which could bring in Turkey).

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that gunmen killed Shaikh Muhammad Husain al-Asadi, a key aide of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, in southern Baghdad late Wednesday. There have been assassinations or attempted assassinations of a number of Sistani's lieutenants.

Al-Hayat: The four grand ayatollahs in Najaf are said to have issued a joint fatwa or legal ruling instructing all their Shiite followers to vote "yes" on the constitution, which they consider "an important step that prepares the way for the stability of the country and the protection of its children from violence and terrorism."

Maverick Ayatollah Muhammad Mahdi al-Khalisi urged a no vote on the constitution, saying to approve it would be to bow to foreign pressure concerning a charter that would lead to the partition of the country.

The young Shiite nationalist, Muqtada al-Sadr, advised his followers to consult the ruling of Ayatollah Kadhim al-Haeri (resident in Qom, Iran) concerning how to deal with the constitution. He said that this was an issue that required independent juridical reasoning (ijtihad). [Such issues have to be decided by a trained religious jurisprudent, or mujtahid, and the more eminent mujtahids are ayatollahs or grand ayatollahs. Muqtada has not reached that level.]

Muhsin Abdul Hamid of the Iraqi Islamic Party was slammed for urging a "yes" vote among Sunnis on the constitution. The hardline Association of Muslim Scholars accused him of condoning the foreign military occupation of Iraq. IIP party workers were attack in Mosul on Thursday.

Among the changes in the constitution was an article that held former Baath Party members harmless for merely having joined the party. They will have full rights under the law as long as they did not commit any crime. There will also be parliamentary monitoring of the de-baathification commission. That this sort of change was persuasive for the Iraqi Islamic Party, which has special roots in Mosul, may suggest that it has the support of ex-Baathists in that city and that this constitutency might be in part mollified by this rule.

The amendments also provide for parliament to be able to amend the constitution by a simple majority, though the emendment would have to be approved in a popular referencdum.

It is very bad for a simple majority to be able to amend the constitution. I hate to think what bonehead laws we would have in this country if such a law existed.

These "amendments" were not formally voted in by the parliament, so it is hard to see who authorized these last-minute changes to the constitution.

Former secretary of defense Melvin Laird argues that US troops can be drawn dawn even while Iraq troops are being trained.
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More WMD Pie in the Sky

According to Douglas Jehl of the New York Times, , in a January, 2003 conversation with Tony Blair, George W. Bush said that he "wanted to go beyond Iraq in dealing with WMD proliferation, mentioning in particular Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea and Pakistan."

What is odd about this list is that Pakistan is a US ally and rolling back its nuclear program would be impossible unless India gave up its, as well (unlikely); Saudi Arabia is not known to have any "weapons of mass destruction; " and Iran's capability in that area is presently very limited (no nukes, maybe some old mustard gas from the 1980s, and unproved allegations of some experimentation with biological weapons).

How to explain Bush's strange agenda? Well, when someone doesn't read the newspapers and doesn't know anything about the wider world, and just accepts whatever close aides tell him, then he might easily believe 10 impossible things before breakfast. The real question is who his aides are really working for, who wants Bush to believe these dangerous fantasies.
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Miller and the Neocons

My article on Judith Miller and the neocons is out in Salon.com.

Excerpt:

' Miller began to uncritically parrot even some of the neocons' loonier claims. On CNN's "American Morning With Paula Zahn" for May 14, 2002, Miller explained the controversy that had broken out about allegations that Cuba had a biological weapons program. She told Zahn, "And there are a lot of very unsavory contacts, as the administration regards them, between Cuba and especially Iranians who are involved in biological weapons." Such frankly weird assertions raise questions about where in the world Miller got her so-called information. No serious intelligence professional believes that either Iran or Cuba has a significant biological weapons program, much less that a communist Latin American dictatorship was being helped by a Shiite Muslim fundamentalist state with deadly microbes.

Miller's statement only makes sense in light of the speech given by John Bolton, then undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, in May of 2002, in which he alleged that Cuba had a biological weapons program. Thomas Fingar, head of the State Department's Intelligence bureau, along with a retired national security officer, demurred from the charges in Bolton's speech. When Christian Westermann at the State Department intelligence bureau raised questions about the intelligence on which Bolton was basing his campaign, Bolton called him into his office, chewed him out, and then allegedly tried to have him fired, according to the April 18, 2005, edition of the Washington Post. Miller was channeling Bolton in her comments to Paula Zahn, and very likely was simply repeating whatever Bolton himself had told her. Washington political analyst Steven C. Clemons asserted that Bolton was a regular source for Miller in her reporting on national security and weapons of mass destruction issues. Bolton has a special interest in getting up a U.S. war against Iran, accounting for the bogus charge that it was active in Havana . . . '

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Albin Guest Editorial: From a Japan Model to a Decent Interval

Roger Albin of the University of Michigan Medical School writes:

' Gilbert Achcar gives the Bush administration too much credit. This is not a divide and rule effort. The initial Bush plan (if you can call anything formulated so poorly a plan) was modeled on the occupation of Japan.

Leaving aside the absurdity of this analogy, they intended to govern through an existing centralized state apparatus, just as Japan was governed by MacArthur after WWII. Of course, they forgot that the Kurds, the most reliable supporters of American intervention and whose statelet has flourished under American protection, would never consent to a powerful central state in Baghdad. They forgot that the Shiites, who would play a major role in any situation where open or even semi-open elections occur, have very good reasons to be averse to a strong central state. When the initial efforts predictably failed, they've been left with desperate and largely unsuccessful improvisations to create some kind of viable state. What you have now is not even a divide and rule effort to maintain control. It is partly more desperate efforts to rescue some kind of Iraq nation and partly a Nixonian search for a face saving exit.

Khalilzad is probably sincere in his efforts to obtain a viable Iraqi state (his competence is another matter). His masters are a different story. A major driver in the White House and Republican Party is undoubtedly domestic politics. Far from a divide and rule strategy, the real goal is withdrawal of some American troops prior to the 2006 elections. The goal then will be to withdraw American troops prior to the 2006 elections in a way to obtain what the Nixon administration called a "decent interval" so that the collapse of the Iraqi state is not too temporally close to American withdrawal and can be blamed on the incompetence of whoever is left behind in Baghdad rather than on the reckless American leadership who started this mess.

Roger Albin
University of Michigan '

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Iraq Anarchy Grows
Constitution Deal May attract IIP

Veteran British reporter Robert Fisk, according to the Independent, finds much of Iraq to have significantly deteriorated since his last visit and to be in a "state of anarchy" and found it bizarre for the Western press to focus on procedural matters like the referendum on the constitution.

' He said that the portrayal of Iraq by Western leaders ­ of efforts to introduce democracy, including Saturday's national vote on the country's proposed constitution ­ was "unreal" to most of its citizens. In Baghdad, children and women were kept at home to prevent them from being kidnapped for money or sold into slavery. They faced a desperate struggle to find the money to keep generators running to provide themselves with electricity. "They aren't sitting in their front rooms discussing the referendum on the constitution."

An aide claimed Thursday that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has urged Iraqis to vote "yes" in Saturday's referendum. Earlier reports had suggested that Sistani would not intervene. As it is, he doesn't appear to have issued a formal statement.

It appears to me that a lot of informed Iraqis are afraid that the constitution could be defeated. The parliament tried to pull some funny business by saying that the 3-province veto would require a 2/3s majority of registered voters to vote "no," not just of actual voters (making a veto almost impossible). Then the UN made them repeal that measure. Then US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad went on trying to find a way to please at least some Sunni Arabs, finally making some sort of breakthrough on Tuesday that may have gotten at least some leaders of the Iraqi Islamic Party aboard. (One Arabic news report denied that the IIP had decided to support the constitution.) Now Sistani has reversed himself and asked Shiites to come out to vote for the constitution. I figure that the Sunni Arabs have at least some chance of carrying Anbar, Salah al-Din and Ninevah for a "no" vote, and some keen Iraqi observers appear to be afraid of this, as well.

The drumbeat of violence continued in Iraq on Wednesday.

Parliament met to hear the constitutional "amendments" read on Wednesday in Baghdad, but did not actually vote on them. The speaker of the house, Hajim al-Hasani, said that a vote was "not necessary." Only 157 parliamentarians were present, and parliament had earlier announced a recess of several weeks. Was it that they could not muster a convincing number of votes for the constitution under these circumstances. I just scratch my head at "amendments" to the "constitution" that are "adopted" but never voted on by parliament. Things are being done by powerful party leaders dickering with one another in closed rooms thick with cigarette smoke, and then just announced. No vote is necessary. It has all been taken care of already. Iraq has gone from being a dictatorship to being an oligarchy.

Jonathan Finer of the Washington Post reports on the celebratory mood in the Shiite holy city of Najaf as people prepare to vote for the constitution, which was significantly shaped by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which governs Najaf province, and by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who has his seat in Najaf.

Jackie Spinner of the same newspaper finds the Kurds of Irbil generally uninterested in the constitutional referendum. Some fear that it implies an attempt to integrate the Kurds into Iraq again, when what they want is independence.

Meanwhile, Sunni Arabs in Ramadi, according to Sabrine Tavernise of the NYT are enthusiastic about voting "no" in the referendum.

Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder reports on the new Iraqi Army, which he says is mostly Shiite Muslim and heavily imbued with an negative attitude toward the Sunni Arabs. The danger of the new Iraqi military getting caught up in sectarian vendettas seems real.

The CIA accurately predicted the postwar problems in Iraq, but its predictions were ignored by the Bush administration. The CIA made serious errors in its estimation of Iraq's weapons programs (in part by depending too heavily on satellite photos), but that part of the report was eagerly pounced on by the Bush administration.
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46 Killed in Guerrilla Attacks
Compromise on Constitution accepted by IIP

46 persons were killed by guerrilla bombings and attacks on Tuesday and dozens wounded. A big bombing at Tal Afar killed 30 and another 10 were killed in Baghdad.

The Shiites and Kurds have agreed that the newly elected parliament after December 15 will reopen negotiations with the Sunni Arabs on the constitution. This step was enough to convince the Iraqi Islamic Party to drop its call for a Sunni Arab rejection fo the constitution in the October 15 referendum. This whole episode strikes me as bizarre, since Iraqis are now voting on a constitution that may be subsequently changed at will! As with the Jan. 30 parliamentary elections, in which they had no idea for whom they were voting for the most part, so in the referendum they will have no idea for what they are voting. The Bush administration is just making them jumpt through hoops in hopes that will look good and "democratic" back in Peoria and help Republicans get elected in 06. If the constitution is not ready to be voted on, they should have taken the 6-month extension and worked on it some more. This weird procedure of voting on a document that is riddled with escape hatches such that key issues will be decided later by parliament cannot lead anywhere good.

Al-Sharq Al-Awsat says that a big conference was held by Sunnis in Mosul on Monday aimed at working to defeat the constitution.

Iraq's oil industry is increasingly failing, raising serious concerns among analysts.
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Achcar Guest Editorial: Gulliver in Iraq

Gilbert Achcar writes

'1) Gulliver in Iraq—-for how long?

US Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, best epitomizes the actual status of the US occupation of Iraq, which looks more and more indeed, in its relation to Iraqi Shiites and Sunnis, like Gulliver among Lilliputians and Blefuscudans (Google shows that the reference to Gulliver with regard to Iraq is already very frequent—you know how this episode of Gulliver’s Travels ended).

After having meddled very unsuccessfully in Iraqi haggling over the draft constitution, and proved unable to convince the Shiite parties to water down their own demands in order to get an impossible consensus, the Ambassador is terrified at the result he could not prevent. One more time, the US is proving to be an “apprentice-sorcerer” in the Middle East (after so many decades of failed apprenticeship, it is high time for the US government to quit this ambition).

From the very beginning of its occupation of Iraq, the US administration has sought to apply the classical imperial recipe of “divide and rule.” In order to be successful, such a game needs smart Machiavellian players: definitely not what you’ve got in Washington. The result now is that, whether the draft passes the referendum or not, there will be a largely autonomous Shiite entity in Southern and Central Iraq, in control of the major part of Iraqi oil reserves and allied with Iran. When one bears in mind the fact that the bulk of Saudi oil reserves are located in the Shiite-majority Eastern province of the US-protected Saudi Kingdom, one gets to realize the full extent of what is more and more of a nightmare for Washington.

For those who do not know about the Saudi Eastern province, here are excerpts from a good Wikipedia description:

"Ash Sharqiyah, known as Eastern Province is the largest province of Saudi Arabia, located in the east of the country on the coasts of the Persian Gulf … It has an area of 710,000 km² and a population of 2,886,700 (1999) . . .

The Eastern Province was conquered by the Saudis in 1914 on the Ottoman Empire. It had been known as Al Hasa under Ottoman rule.

The Eastern Province is largely Shi'ite, which makes it a very dangerous place for the ruling Sunni family to visit. Some villages are virtually no-go areas for the security forces. The reason for this is that Shi'ites in the country often live in bad conditions because Wahhabism is the State religion, and shi'ites classification as kuffar [infidels] has led to the denial of certain rights for them.

Saudi Aramco, the oil producing company of the Kingdom, is based in Dhahran, which is located in the Eastern Province, and most decisions on oil policy and production are made there. Saudi Arabia's main oil and gas fields are all located in the Eastern Province, whether onshore or offshore."

Khalilzad is trying desperately and hectically now to negotiate some kind of last-minute compromise, while there are more and more US statements (C. Rice recently) taking their distances from the draft constitution. “Divide and rule” is an astute imperial recipe when it serves as a way to keep control over a territory. But when it messes up and leads to the most important part of this territory threatening to acquire autonomy, free itself from the tutelage of the Empire and ally with the latter’s bitterest regional enemy, the result has only one name: it is a disaster.

Khalilzad is actually trying to “limit the damage” to US interests by seeking some compromise through which key Iraqi Sunni and Shiite forces could be “reconciled” so that some kind of centralized Iraq could be held together, with the US as main broker/mediator—in other words, Khalilzad is trying to rescue “operation divide and rule.” In this endeavor, the US Ambassador, far from looking as a “honest broker,” is acting more and more like a local player in Iraqi politics (which is by itself an indication of the big failure of the Bush administration’s designs). Khalilzad is now working openly hand in hand with Iraqi CIA-buddy and former “Prime Minister,” Iyad Allawi: they are conducting together Washington’s last-minute attempts, meeting together with the Kurdish leadership, etc. On the other hand, Washington has asked the Arab League—which is even more under US domination than the UN is—to mediate on a parallel track. Below are some indications of the bright results of Washington’s work on these two parallel tracks among Iraqi Shiites.

2) Khalilzad’s last-ditch proposals

Excerpted from a report by Su’dad al-Salihi in today’s Al-Hayat:

'Ali al-‘Adad, a member of the Central Committee of SCIRI, told Al-Hayat that “the US Ambassador’s initiative is actually an attempt to reshuffle the cards, with the aim to embarrass Shiite negotiators under the pretext of reinforcing national unity.”
He added that “the initiative included seven proposals the most important being the creation of a Higher Commission for the revision of the constitution, which would include representatives of the parties and discuss the constitution and its objectives, in order to formulate amendments, lift the ban on the participation of Ba’athists in political and governmental instances and stop their prosecution, and limit federalism by a law, including implementation measures and conditions.”
Al-‘Adad stated that the UIA’s position on these proposals is “total rejection of the two proposals regarding the prosecution of Ba’athists and federal provinces.”
He pointed to the fact that “the adoption of a set of measures putting limitations on the creation of federal provinces, as included in the initiative, would make it difficult for the Shiites to set up a province in the Center and South in the future.” As for the proposal to create a Higher Commission for the revision of the constitution, “we are discussing the proposal and have asked for another formulation.”

The SCIRI Central Committee member described the initiative as “an American-Kurdish trick aiming at the creation of a Shiite bloc led by Iyad Allawi, the former Prime Minister and present leader of the “al-Iraqiya” bloc, to divide the ranks of the Shiites.”

He added that “neither the US Ambassador nor the Kurds nor anybody have any guarantee that the Sunnis will support the draft constitution,” and that “the whole story is nothing but a trick to impede the political process and stop the intellectual and political emancipation of the Shiites who are governing the country at last.” '

3) The Arab League’s “mediation”

Arab sources reported Muqtada al-Sadr’s position on the Arab League’s interference purposely downplaying, if not plainly ignoring, the most important part of this position that considered any Arab troops intervening in Iraq as “occupation troops.” Here is my translation of Muqtada al-Sadr’s communiqué:

'In the name of the Almighty,We make two official demands to the Arab League:

First: that it formally condemns the crimes of the occupation, the terrorist crimes against civilians and holy places and the deeds of what is called Zarqawi.
Second: that it formally condemns Saddam’s deeds and calls for his execution or his fair trial by honorable Iraqis [most Shiites hold in high suspicion the judge appointed by the US occupation to try Saddam Hussein].

With these two conditions fulfilled, the Arab League will be able to intervene in Iraqi affairs politically, not by sending troops; the latter will be considered as occupation troops with all the consequences.'

Muqtada al-Sadr

6 Ramadan 1426 [9 October 2005]>

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

18 Killed
Arab League Convoy Attacked
Last Minute Negotiations on Constitution

Guerrilla violence killed 18 persons in Iraq on Monday, including one US GI. Protesters in Ramadi said they had not yet seen the offical text of the constitution and think the government is conspiring to keep it from them, according to the Washington Post. Many in Baghdad also say they have not seen it.

US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad continues to dicker with the big politicians seeking final alterations in the constitution before it is voted on Saturday October 15, in hopes of making a breakthrough that would mollify the Sunni Arabs. The latter, however, according to al-Hayat, are most concerned by provisions allowing the southern Shiite provinces to establish confederacies that would have a special claim on petroleum resources (thus cutting Sunni Arabs out of their fair share, since they currently have none in their area). There is no prospect of this provision being changed, so Khalilzad's negotiations will probably not have a big effect on the referendum. The fact of the talks, however, does discourage many voters, according to Ellen Knickmeyer of the WaPo. They are convinced that if the text can be changed so near the vote, when so few have even seen the original text, it means that the big politicians will do as they please without regard to the country's charter. That is, Khalilzad's last-minute negotiations may be doing more harm than good.

Iraq issued indictments against 27 officials of the government of Iyad Allawi, charging them with over $1 billion worth of fraud. The accused include the Minister of Defense, Hazem Shaalan, and 4 other cabinet ministers. Most of these former officials, installed by old-time CIA asset Iyad Allawi when he was shoe-horned in as prime minister by the US and the UN in late June 2004, have fled the country.

Al-Hayat: The delegation to Iraq of the Arab League was attacked on Monday by guerrillas, leaving 3 persons (some say bodyguards) dead and 4 others wounded. The delegates themselves escaped largely unharmed.

The Arab League has had a difficult relationship with post-Saddam Iraq. Most of its member states are majority-Sunni and opposed the US war against Iraq. They had not distinguished themselves by championing the rights of oppresses Shiites and Kurds under Saddam, and most of them do not seem thrilled with the rise of a Shiite-dominated Iraq. There was even a question at one point about whether it would be a good idea to send a respected Shiite cleric like Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum (Bahrululoum) to an Arab League meeting, with some fearing that to have a Shiite cleric there representing Iraq would be a scandal for the others. On the other hand, if anyone can negotiate with the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement, it is the Arab League.

This delegation is being greeted with a certain amount of suspicion and reserve in many quarters. Muqtada al-Sadr demanded that the delegates denounce Saddam Hussein and his pre-2003 campaigns against the Shiites, as well as the anti-Shiite attacks masterminded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the radical Muslim fundamentalist, according to al-Sharq al-Awsat. President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, expressed skepticism about the delegation's desire to meet with the Sunni Arab leadership, pointing out that it is extremely fragmented. Some of the Sunni Arab guerrillas clearly do not even want the Arab League in Iraq, since the convoy was fired on in West Baghdad near Umm al-Qura Mosque, a Sunni Arab stronghold. (It had been going to the mosque for an evening meal to break the fast with the Association of Muslim Scholars.) The delegation, according to al-Hayat, was forced to deny rumors that Arab League secretary-general Amr Moussa would seek a meeting with Saddam Hussein during his forthcoming trip to the country.

New polls show that 59 percent of Americans now want US troops out of Iraq, even if that country is not entirely stable. That is up from 54 percent just last month.
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30,000 Dead in Pakistan
2.5 Million Homeless

The Pakistani government is now estimating 30,000 dead in the earthquake, and incidents of civil violence are being reported by AP. CNN is suggesting that 2.5 million are homeless, and perhaps as many as 5 million.

The magnitude of the disaster is only gradually becoming apparent. It will put enormous pressure on Pakistan's government to respond effectively. Its ability to do so is not clear.

The geopolitical outcome could be significant. Governments have been shaken by poor response to smaller catastrophes than this one, e.g. Turkey's in the late 1990s. Gen. Musharraf's future may depend in part on how well he can turn his military and government to disaster relief. Likewise, the future of Kashmir, a global flashpoint, may be affected. If Pakistan cannot show it cares and can come to the aid of the Kashmiris it rules, it will very likely forfeit all claim on the region (in opinion polls, few Kashmiris want to join Pakistan, anyway).

The Bush administration response so far seems to me wholly inadequate to the scale of this problem.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Guest Editorial by Gilbert Achcar: The US and Shiite Politics in Iraq

Gilbert Achcar writes:

1) How US and British Forces help Iraqis recover their sovereignty

For any person believing in good faith that occupation troops in Iraq are helping the Iraqis build independent institutions in order to recover their sovereignty, recent events in Basra—the way British troops stormed police headquarters in that city—and their aftermath ought to be enough to prove the contrary.

[Late last week] Reuters ("British troops seize 12 in Basra raids") and other agencies reported how British troops arrested 12 persons, including police officers, in Basra. The account by Reuters correspondent is interesting:

“Sources in Sadr’s office in Basra said those detained included several lieutenants in Basra’s interior affairs department, which is part of the Interior Ministry, and an official with the local electricity authority.

‘They are mostly Sadr people,’ one of the sources said.

He said some of the suspects were seized from the police building which was attacked by British forces last month to free two undercover soldiers who had been detained by Iraqi police. The British military said only that the raids took place in the Hadem district of Basra.

Another source said all 12 men were seized from one house.

The arrests run the risk of increasing tensions between the 8,500 British troops serving in Iraq and the local population.

After the detention of the two British soldiers last month, angry crowds of young men attacked British military vehicles with petrol bombs and rocks, forcing units to pull back.

The sources in Sadr’s office said the arrests took place late on Thursday, shortly after the men had broken fast on the second day of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, in what could be seen as a slight and provoke more anger.”

Karbala—-after Najaf, the second major Shiite holy city in Iraq—-was supposed to have come under full Iraqi sovereignty. In his Radio Address of October 1, Bush boasted that “this week coalition forces were able to turn over security responsibility for one of Iraq’s largest cities, Karbala, to Iraqi soldiers.”

On October 8, Voice of Iraq broadcast the following report, posted by nahrainnet (my translation from Arabic) revealing what US forces have done in Karbala at the same time that their British counterparts in Basra:

"KARBALA’S GOVERNORATE CONDEMNS THE MILITARY OPERATION IN THE MIDDLE OF THE CITY AND CONSIDER IT A VIOLATION OF THE TURNING OVER OF SECURITY RESPONSIBILITY

The information office in the Governorate of Holy Karbala, contacted by the Voice of Iraq correspondent, condemned the military operation executed by special units of US forces Thursday evening in Holy Karbala, in the district of Eastern Abbasiya in the middle of the town.

The representative of the information office of the Governorate said: This military operation constitutes a violation of the agreement concluded between the multinational forces and the Iraqi side, represented by the officials of the Governorate of Karbala, by which security responsibility has been turned over to the Iraqi side two weeks ago.

The representative of the Governorate’s information office added that a communiqué was issued in this regard, and we are waiting for an official reply from the US side on this matter.

The governorate of Karbala had seen, on Thursday evening, US forces supported by helicopters operate an airborne raid in the district of Eastern Abbasiya in the middle of the Governorate, during which, according to eyewitnesses, they targeted three houses in the district. The airborne raid led to the arrest of ten suspected persons, seven of whom were released and the others taken to an unknown destination.

The correspondent of Voice of Iraq visited the district targeted by the airborne raid, one of Karbala’s old popular districts. He saw houses with fallen awnings, shattered window glasses and fallen parts of their roofs, as a result of the sound grenades used before troops landed. One of those arrested and later released said: The raid was rapid and sudden, helicopters filled the sky over the district and made an intensive use of sound grenades, frightening hundreds of families in the district. The Americans did not reveal the causes and motivations of this military raid in which Karbala residents saw a strong indication that the turning over of security responsibility was only a propaganda operation. It proved clearly to them that the Americans dominate entirely the security situation in Karbala and take their decisions without consulting any of the official authorities of the Governorate."

No further comment needed.

2) Muqtada al-Sadr’s official position on the Constitution: Refer (again) to Higher Clerics

Excerpted from the October 8 Al-Sharq al-Awsat (my translation from Arabic):

"Al-Nafaf, AFP: Young Shiite Cleric Muqtada al-Sadr confirmed yesterday that his followers are free to take part in the referendum on the constitution that will take place on October 15. Mustafa al-Ya’qubi, one of al-Sadr’s major aides, said in a communiqué distributed to journalists in the holy Shiite city of Najaf (160 km south of Baghdad):

‘Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr has replied to the question: How to vote on the constitution? by saying: The question of the constitution needs ijtihad and fatwa [Muqtada al-Sadr means: theological expertise for which he is not qualified], and therefore each one should refer to his model (muqallad) and reference (marjaa). Al-Sadr added: We ask God, in general, that He deigns granting us a just State, as comes in the prayer … God, we implore you to grant us a noble State dignifying Islam and its people.’

On the Sadrist official site, there is this single sentence:

“In his reply to a consultation on the issue of the constitution—Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr: Each one refers to his model regarding the constitution, for it is a question requiring ijtihad—-Be up to the responsibility, please.”

Below are excerpts from letters I have written at the end of August on the issue of Muqtada al-Sadr. They shed some light on his recent position:

In his press conference in Najaf on August 25, al-Sadr said the following about the constitution: “There is no problem with federalism as such, it is an Islamic idea, but its timing now is not good.”

Also: “I have heard that they will remove the purging of Baath (de-Baathification) from the constitution. We refuse that categorically.”

This last statement, not surprising from al-Sadr, shows the distance between him and those Sunni opponents of federalism who are pro-Baathists.

On the issue of the constitution, Muqtada al-Sadr has made quite ambiguous or even contradictory statements. One of them is the interview that he gave to the BBC on July 18, where he said (from the report posted on the BBC website):

“I personally shall not interfere. I say that our constitution is the Koran and the Sunnah and I refuse any political role while the occupation is present.” he said, although adding that he would not stop any others participating.”

He vowed in the same way not to take part in the political process as long as the occupation remains, while his followers actually took part in the January 30 elections and are represented not only in the Parliament, but even in the government itself. The pro-Sadr ministers announced, after the August 25 clashes between al-Sadr and SCIRI followers in Najaf, that they suspended their activities in solidarity with al-Sadr, but he called on them in a communiqué to resume them:

“My brothers in the Iraqi government who have suspended their ministerial activities must resume their activities at the service of the people. The interest of Islam and the interest of Iraq are more important and more venerable.”
…
Al-Sadr is opposed, of course, to the federal scheme because he fears it could marginalize him. His main constituency is in Baghdad, a mixed city, and he has built up his image as a hero to hard-line Sunnis by converging with them, so he believes he could build a mixed Shia-Sunni constituency, thus getting an important leverage over his Shia rivals. Actually, this is exactly the same game that Allawi plays, the difference being that Allawi cozies up to “moderate” Baathists whereas al-Sadr cozies up to Sunni fundamentalists (the AMS, etc.).

However, al-Sadr is cautious and quite opportunist, capable of combining contradictory attitudes and statements—talking like a firebrand and participating in the government at the same time, even calling on his ministerial supporters to resume their activities in the government after they had suspended them. Al-Sadr knows that federalism has become very popular among Shiites because of the sectarian polarization in recent weeks, plus the genuine longing of the Shiites, and especially the Southern population—after such a long historical record of oppression—for some kind of autonomy. This longing is sharply increased by the fact that the Sunnis appear more and more as nostalgic of Saddam Hussein. That’s why al-Sadr has made conciliatory statements on federalism.

Gilbert Achcar

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Basra Bombing Targets Badr
Jaafari Rejects Conference of National Reconsiliation

Someone detonated a car bomb in Basra outside an office of the Badr Corps, the paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. One child was killed and six were wounded in the explosion. It was not clear who was behind the blast, but Badr has lots of enemies, including Sunni Arabs in the South and rival Shiite militias (profiled Sunday by the NYT's Richard A. Oppel Jr.. The British narrative of problems with Shiite militias in Basra and the possible link to Iran, reported by Oppel, still makes no sense to me. I think it is very difficult (and perhaps embarrassing) for the US and Britain to admit to themselves that significant numbers of local Iraqis just don't want them there, so they keep seeking an explanation for anti-Coalition violence in foreign influence. If bombings targetting the British were done by a splinter Sadrist group around Shaikh Ahmad Fartusi, this is southern Shiite nativism at work, not foreign influence. The Sadr movement does not get along that well with the Iranians.

The flaw in this UPI article accusing the Badr Corps of rounding up 22 Sunni Arab men and killing them is that the only proof of this charge is that the men were abducted by persons dressed as Iraqi police and Interior Ministry agents. But such uniforms are easily acquired, and for all we know radical Sunni fundamentalists killed some of their own in hopes of blaming it on the Badr corps and fomenting civil war between Sunnis and Shiites.

Timothy Phelps of Newsday reports on the American Enterprise Institute conference on Iraq, which appears to have been more a funeral for liberal imperialism than anything else. The extremely weak federal government that enshrines regional sectarianism has filled close observers of the Iraq scene on the Right with despair (Jackson Diehl covers the same event; but he focuses on the profound disillusionment that has set in among Iraq's expatriate liberal hawks as their dreams for Iraq have turned to dust.

The Financial Times carries an unflattering portrait of Iraq's elected prime minister, Ibrahim Jaafari of the Shiite fundamentalist Dawa Party. The article reflects a widespread impression in Iraq, that Jaafari has been ineffective and rigid all at the same time. I would offer three critiques of this article. First, its critique of Jaafari's devotion to political Islam is misplaced, since the Shiite religious parties won tha January 30 elections and naturally their prime minister reflected that victory. Second, Iyad Allawi was never popular, and his list only got 14 percent of the national vote despite the wall to wall free advertising given him on state-controlled al-Iraqiya television and all the opportunities he had to promise various constituencies the sky. Finally, through a typo at the FT website, this article seems to be co-authored by Neil MacDonald and . . . Ibrahim Jaafari. Not.

Al-Zaman reports that Jaafari refused Sunday to convene a reconciliation conference for Iraqi political forces and parties to stop the violence and bring back security and stability. At the same time, the envoy of the Arab League, Ahmad Ben Hela, continued his contacts with Iraqi factions in Baghdad, as part of the preparations for the upcoming visit of Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa.

On Monday in Cairo, a tripartite conference on Iraq will be held by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, with King Abdullah II of Jordan and King Hamad bin Eisa Al Khalifah of Bahrain attending.

Poor workers from places like Nepal and the Philippines in Iraq are often exploited and face great danger.

Veteran correspondent Trudy Rubin dissects the gaps in Bush's terrorism speech of last Thursday and points out that the US only has bad options left in Iraq.

This Reuters article on Iraq's purchase of US instead of Australian wheat is written so technically that it is difficult for non-experts in agricultural commodities trading to understand all the issues involved. I take it that the deal went to the Americans because they were willing to take more risks with Iraq's ability to send ships to pick up the wheat. The alarming thing is the central role Ahmad Chalabi has in procurement deals. Chalabi was convicted in Jordan of massive bank fraud, and his practices had also raised questions in Switzerland; later on the US State Department complained that he could not account for funds given him to promote the overthrow of Saddam in the 1990s. Chalabi has played a very sinister role in promoting punitive policies toward all members of the Baath Party, and in promoting conflict with Syria.

A kind reader from Australia explains:

' Re Reuter's report that Iraqi govt will buy US wheat, not Oz: Some clarifying points:

1. Buyers of wheat (etc.) have to pay on delivery. Hence sellers prefer to sell "cif" -- inclusive of cost of insurance & freight. That is, sellers prefer to make all delivery arrangements themselves. If the buyer doesn't take delivery when the ship arrives, he has to pay "demurrage" -- the extra cost of keeping the ships hanging around. So the pressure is on the buyer to pay.

2. If the _buyer_ makes the arrangements to collect the wheat (etc.), it is sold "fob" -- free on board. But the seller still isn't paid until the buyer _actually collects_ the goods. So the seller could be stuck with goods that have not been paid for, & which he can't sell to anyone else -- waiting for the buyer to turn up & collect. No commercial farmer or company can afford this. The Oz farmer gets _no_ (no) subsidies. So the Oz Wheat Board can't afford to sell "fob".

3. US wheat -- thanks to your govt's unconscionable subsidies -- is sold internationally at 40% _below_ its own cost of production (which is well above the Oz cost.) The USDA cannot have any qualms about selling the wheat "fob" in addition: US taxpayers will cover this cost as well. The Iraqi govt will be under no pressure to collect the wheat & pay for it. ***Moreover, "fob" allows all sorts of "backhanders" & who knows what else*in arranging for the shipping & insurance. Hence the preference for US wheat & for "fob" arrangements*Keep an eye out for this! . . . '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

At Least 18,000 Dead in Major Earthquake

The death toll in Saturday's massive earthquake keeps climbing, and will probably be higher yet by Sunday afternoon. Some 17,000 are feared dead in Kashmir, mainly on the Pakistani side of the line of control (Kashmir is mostly with India but a portion of it is under Pakistani rule; the province is contested between the two countries). There have also been deaths in the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan. Kabul, Islamabad and Delhi all felt the shock from a distance.

The Bush administration should move quickly and visibly to get aid to the survivors (40,000 are wounded). This is an opportunity finally to prove to the Pakistani public that the US is not a fair-weather friend. (The US has on several occasions since 1947 taken up an alliance of sorts with Pakistan, only to drop it when Pakistan was no longer needed. A lot of Pakistanis are worried that the US will do the same thing when the "war on terror" fades. Convincing them otherwise is key to defeating radical Muslim fundamentalism.
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2 US Troops Killed
Sistani Sits this one Out
Basra Governor: British troops Destabilizing the South

Two more US troops were killed in Iraq on Saturday. So was a city council member for Hawija. There has been a largely unnoticed but serious attrition rate among Iraqi provincial and municipal officials, as the guerrillas target them.

Basra governor Muhammad al-Wa'ili has accused the British troops there of destabilizing the province with their arrest of local officials, policemen and militiamen. The British arrested, among others, Odai Awad, the director of Basra's state electricity company. The workers are threatening to strike unless the British release him. Although the BBC and other Western news organizations say that those arrested are largely followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, I am not sure this is true. They do appear to belong to the Sadr Movement, but it has splintered, especially in Basra, and it is hard to know to which faction those arrested belong. Shaikh Ahmad al-Fartusi, one of the detainees is a local Basra leader who seems to have broken with Muqtada.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiar Zebari says that if the new constitution is rejected, it will be "catastrophic" for Iraq. I agree that it would be very bad, but I think he is probably exaggerating in order to convince the Kurds (he is a Kurd) to come out to vote in Saturday's referendum in large numbers. Actually, if the constitution is rejected, there will still be parliamentary elections on Dec. 15; the interim constitution would remain the law of the land; and the new parliament would have to take up the constitution again. The terrible thing about this scenario is that the Shiite majority will feel very, very cheated. They feel that since they won the Jan. 30 elections, they have a right to the constitution they want, and there is a danger of them becoming disillusioned altogether with democracy if the will of the majority is thwarted on this issue. Sunni Arabs can defeat the constitution if they can muster a 2/3s vote against it in Anbar, Salah al-Din and Ninevah Provinces. Al-Sharq al-Awsat had a story that everything is ready for the voting in Salah al-Din, by which it meant that voters are registered, polling boths have been set up, etc. All this relative efficiency might allow the Sunni Arabs to reject the constitution more decisively in that province.

The political process is at best unconnected to the guerrilla war in Iraq, US government analysts are now saying. And at worst, the political process, including constitution-making, could be pushing Sunni Arabs who had been on the fence off of it and into the arms of the guerrillas. Long-time readers of Informed Comment will know that I have been saying this for some time.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the spiritual leader of Iraq's Shiites, has strictly told his own representatives in the cities and provinces of Iraq not to run for parliament. He will also decline to endorse any particular political party or coalition. Sistani's theory of religion-state relations requires that the grand ayatollahs not intervene directly in day to day politcs, but rather confine their concern to influencing the "order of society." Now that Iraq has a parliamentary government dominated by Shiites, Sistani is satisfied with the order of society and therefore is drawing back from his earlier leading role in promoting a Shiite coalition party (which won the Jan. 30 elections). Sistani is also disappointed with the do-nothing record of the United Iraqi Alliance.

My guess is that nevertheless, the Dec. 15 elections will be dominated by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which controls 9 of Iraq's 18 provinces. This provincial control may well allow them to dominate the parliamentary delegations from those provinces (the Dec. 15 elections will be be district-based or rather province-based). Think Chicago ward politics (SCIRI has proven itself adept at them, though it could well fail to control the levers in a national election.) Ibrahim Jaafari and his Dawa Party may well be punished by voters for the government's inability to get much done.

Hmmm. Posting pictures of civilians killed in the Iraq War is a form of obscenity, according to the Polk County, Floriday, sheriff's office.

What I want to know is why killing them in the first place doesn't produce at the very least similar charges of obscenity. [It is worse. Kind readers wrote to say I read the article too quickly; the case being brought is an ordinary obscenity case, and the war photos do not apparently even enter into it!]
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Iraq War Generating Threats to New York
6 GIs Killed
22 Bodies Found

So much for the theory of 'fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here.' (which has always struck me as monstrous and immoral). But anyway there is now at least some evidence that the war in Iraq is actually generating plots against the US homeland (i.e. against the New York City subway system). So maybe fighting wars over there is not actually making us safer here (as the London public has already decided).

The NYT recounts the killing of 6 Marines by guerrillas in western Iraq. In Basra, British forces arrested 12 Mahdi Army militiamen suspected of involvement in attacks on British troops, including some who were in the Basra police force. Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army is a small affair in Basra, probably just a few hundred fighters. The Sadr movement in the city has splintered into several groups, at least one of them led by Shaikh Ahmad Fartusi that appears to have broken with Muqtada. The largest, the Fadila (Virtue) Party, does not follow Muqtada, but rather Shaikh Muhammad Yaqubi. The Fadila has a significant presence on the Provincial Governing Council and at one point at least controlled it with some allies.

Wire services are also reporting that bodies of 22 Sunni Arabs who had earlier been abducted have shown up near the Iranian border. Such incidents are part of a sectarian underground civil war.

They are also saying that young Shiite nationalist Muqtada al-Sadr has given the green light to his followers to vote "yes" on the constitution in the upcoming referendum, despite his own misgivings about its loose federalism being bad for the unity of the country.

Guerrillas in Kirkuk detonated a car bomb, killing two policemen and wounding 8 others.

Ellen Knickmeyer of WaPo reports from Samawah in the southern Shiite province of Muthanna that the local population of some 500,000 is much more interested in electricity and clean water than in the constitutional referendum. She focuses on the importance of clans and clan leaders to the forthcoming vote and notes that they view the constitution favorably. I suspect she has missed the degree to which Samawah politics is affected by a modern party structure, of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, that intersects and may sometimes conflict with tribalism. She suggests that the mood in Muthanna is "pre-political". I think the implication of archaism is probably a misreading of the situation. People in Muthanna are politically and socially mobilized as never before, it is just that the mobilization is mediated by clan and religion (this happens in the American South, too, and probably in Switzerland, and is not archaic).

Al-Hayat reports complaints by Iraqis in the "triangle of death" (mainly Babil province) between Hilla and Baghdad that the Ministry of the Interior has pulled back the Scorpion Brigade (police commandos) in the region, allowing the Sunni Arab guerrillas to regroup and begin hitting cities like Hilla again. No reason is given for the ministry's alleged slackening in the area.

Former Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan has been indicted for massive fraud according to Al-Hayat. AFP reports,

Agence France Presse -- English

October 7, 2005 Friday 1:04 PM GMT

HEADLINE: Arrest warrant issued for ex-Iraqi defence minister: report

DATELINE: DUBAI Oct 7

Iraq has issued an arrest warrant for former defence minister Hazem al-Shaalan, who is suspected of involvement in the alleged disappearance of more than one billion dollars from the ministry during his term, a newspaper reported Friday.

According to the Saudi-owned London daily Al-Hayat, Shalaan's name appears on a list of about 20 people accused of administrative corruption in the defence ministry.

He is no longer living in Iraq and is reported to be in Jordan.

"Those (on the list) who are abroad could be brought back to Iraq with the assistance of Interpol," the newspaper said, quoting "legal sources" in Baghdad. . . '

The US is woefully short of Arabic speakers, the Chicago Tribune reports. Only about 10,000 Americans are enrolled in Arabic classes, but the need is for many times that number.
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Iraqi Vice President: Shiite United Iraqi Alliance has not Broken Up: al-Hayat

BBC World Monitoring presents a translation of an interview in al-Hayat with Iraqi Vice President Adil Abdul Mahdi, a member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq who tilts toward free-market secularism. He denied that the Shiite coalition cobbled together by Grand Ayatollah Sistani, the United Iraqi Alliance, has broken up. (But it is worth noting that the Dawa Party and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq have registered to contest the December 15 parliamentary elections under their own rubrics.) Excerpts:

October 6, 2005, Thursday

HEADLINE: Iraqi vice-president denies ruling coalition break-up, says constitution "closed"

SOURCE: Al-Hayat, London, in Arabic 4 Oct 05 . . .

"Some Kurdish objections" to premier "are correct"

[Tu'mah] What is the truth about the disagreement between the government and the Kurdistan Alliance? Is it true that the Kurds have offered to support you in taking over as prime minister instead of [Ibrahim] Al-Ja'fari?

[Abd-al-Mahdi] We will not accept such a role. Two voting events are due soon. In the next 10 weeks two important events will take place: the referendum on the constitution and general elections. Regardless of the arguments put forward by the Kurdistan Alliance about government negligence, we believe there is no interest or importance in confusing the political situation at the present time by carrying out a government reshuffle. There have been attempts to bring about a government change but we did not agree to them.

[Tu'mah] What is the truth about the accusations levelled by the Kurdish list against Al-Ja'fari in the memorandum published by Al-Hayat a few days ago?

[Abd-al-Wahid] Some Kurdish objections are correct but they are not directed at Al-Ja'fari but at the performance of the government itself. The United Iraqi Alliance itself criticizes some of the government's performance. Political issues must not be turned into personal issues. If some political blocs or citizens should make some demands then the officials, be it the government, ministers or the presidency, must respond and clarify.

Constitution is "closed" issue

[Tu'mah] US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad has proposed amendments to the constitution to ensure the participation of the Sunni Arabs in the referendum in favour of the draft. What is your view?

[Abd-al-Wahid] The constitution has been closed and there is no room to introduce amendments. However, additions clarifying the text or reassuring some quarters have been accepted in the past and may be accepted now, as was the case with Article 3 when a clause on the Arab League and commitment to its charter was added, and with the matters that were added regarding water. However, such additions must not be amendments. The constitution in its final form has been closed.

United Iraqi Alliance has not broken up

[Tu'mah] There are those who say that the United Iraqi Alliance has broken up and that some of its parties have entered into alliances with other forces. Where is SCIRI's ship anchored?

[Abd-al-Mahdi] We must wait for 21 October 2005 to know the final decision on alliances and coalitions. Three hot weeks await the political forces. We do not know what alliances they will forge prior to the elections. We also cannot speculate on the alliances that will be forged after the elections.

The United Iraqi Alliance has not broken up. Daily meetings are held among all the coalition parties to agree on the most appropriate formula for the coming stage: whether to have one list or several lists with a contract that brings them together after the elections. As for SCIRI, its ship is sailing with the public interest and wherever that interest can be achieved SCIRI will be there.

Security: Zarqawi, "remnants of former regime", "foreign quarters"

[Tu'mah] How do you see the security challenges facing Iraq, and is [Abu-Mus'ab] Al-Zarqawi fact or fiction?

[Abd-al-Mahdi] Al-Zarqawi is not a myth. He is real. This man is wanted first of all by the Jordanian government. He issues statements. He has a known history and his name was used. He is real, and the actions he commits are not fiction: the killings, death and explosions. The security challenge is really great since it has ramifications and complications, foremost among which are the remnants of the former regime who form the basic infrastructure of terror and sabotage, in an attempt to put the clock back and stop the political process by resorting to the methods of the former authorities, terrorizing people and holding them hostage.

This coupled with the wide-scale entry of foreign quarters into Iraq. The previous stage has paved the way for such an entry through the presence of foreign forces and the occupation, which was a big mistake, for that has encouraged those groups and provided them with a cover to operate.

There are other matters that could be the cause of continuing violence, such as unemployment, poverty, the prolonged blockade, the destruction of the country's infrastructure and the absence of a political process, in addition to the policies of competing regional countries that have their own agendas with regard to Iraq: some of them have a particular stand towards the United States while others have a particular stand on the sectarian and confessional issue in Iraq . . . '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Arguing with Bush and the GWOT

Bush articulated his War on Terror yet again on Thursday. But I think the American public has heard all this over and over again and it is increasingly just not convinced.

It is time for another installment of the ever-popular "Arguing with Bush" series.

Bush, predictably, began with September 11:

"Recently our country observed the fourth anniversary of a great evil, and looked back on a great turning point in our history. We still remember a proud city covered in smoke and ashes, a fire across the Potomac, and passengers who spent their final moments on Earth fighting the enemy. We still remember the men who rejoiced in every death, and Americans in uniform rising to duty. And we remember the calling that came to us on that day, and continues to this hour: We will confront this mortal danger to all humanity. We will not tire, or rest, until the war on terror is won."

September 11 was a horrible moment that traumatized all Americans and killed nearly 3,000 persons. I myself had two cousins in the Pentagon that day. But it had nothing, repeat, nothing whatsoever to do with Iraq.

Bush then mentions some of the other terrorist attacks (most of them after September 11 and therefore theoretically preventable if Bush had put real resources into fighting al-Qaeda instead of running off to tangle with Baathists in Iraq.) He says,

"Some call this evil Islamic radicalism; others, militant Jihadism; still others, Islamo-fascism. Whatever it's called, this ideology is very different from the religion of Islam. This form of radicalism exploits Islam to serve a violent, political vision: the establishment, by terrorism and subversion and insurgency, of a totalitarian empire that denies all political and religious freedom. These extremists distort the idea of jihad into a call for terrorist murder against Christians and Jews and Hindus -- and also against Muslims from other traditions, who they regard as heretics. Many militants are part of global, borderless terrorist organizations like al Qaeda, which spreads propaganda, and provides financing and technical assistance to local extremists, and conducts dramatic and brutal operations like September the 11th. Other militants are found in regional groups, often associated with al Qaeda -- paramilitary insurgencies and separatist movements in places like Somalia, and the Philippines, and Pakistan, and Chechnya, and Kashmir, and Algeria. Still others spring up in local cells, inspired by Islamic radicalism, but not centrally directed. Islamic radicalism is more like a loose network with many branches than an army under a single command. Yet these operatives, fighting on scattered battlefields, share a similar ideology and vision for our world."

All this is true as far as it goes, but it completely lacks any context or nuance. The Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines is just a small mafia gang of 90 persons that lives on extortion. It could no more overthrow the Philippines government than David Koreish could have taken over Texas. I don't actually think that terrorist analyst Marc Sageman found many, if any, persons engaged in international terrorism from Kashmir. There has been a lot of political violence in Kashmir, but there are two sides to it, and heavy-handed Indian military tactics have killed a lot of Kashmiris. The UN had decreed that a referendum would be held in Kashmir on its future, which India has ever since 1948 refused to allow. Likewise, Chechnya is a rugged area of clannish Muslims that the Russians conquered in the 19th century, and where they committed a sort of 19th century genocide in the course of "pacifying" it. Chechen demands for more autonomy after the fall of the Soviet Union were greeted by Yeltsin with enormous brutality, and Putin has not been wiser. Chechnya and Kashmir are sites of local struggles for more autonomy in a post-colonial context, and just reeling their names off as sites of an "ideology" of "hatred" does not tell us anything useful.

The list Bush gave is highly deceptive. Chechnya and Kashmir are trouble spots, but they are crawling with Russian and Indian troops, respectively, and big powerful states have honed in on them like a laser. In the Philippines, you also have a Muslim separatist movement. But the most virulent terrorist organization is just a small handful of people. The Algerian military government won its costly struggle against political Islam during the past decade and more, in which perhaps 150,000 persons perished. The Islamists were roundly and decisively defeated. This victory requires the US to do what, now? As for Pakistan, it is ruled by an elite that has thrown in with the US repeatedly in the past few decades, and did so again after September 11. Pakistani police and military have worked with the FBI and CIA to capture over 600 al-Qaeda operatives, including big fish like Abu Zubayda and Khalid Shaykh Muhammad. This situation requires the US to do what, exactly?

"We know the vision of the radicals because they've openly stated it -- in videos, and audiotapes, and letters, and declarations, and websites. First, these extremists want to end American and Western influence in the broader Middle East, because we stand for democracy and peace, and stand in the way of their ambitions. Al Qaeda's leader, Osama bin Laden, has called on Muslims to dedicate, quote, their "resources, sons and money to driving the infidels out of their lands." Their tactic to meet this goal has been consistent for a quarter-century: They hit us, and expect us to run. They want us to repeat the sad history of Beirut in 1983, and Mogadishu in 1993 -- only this time on a larger scale, with greater consequences.

It is true that Bin Laden taunts the US about withdrawing from Lebanon and Somalia when hit in those places. But Bin Laden's childish taunts do not change the fact that the US was right to withdraw in both places. No amount of Marines in Lebanon would have made a difference in 1983 (the Israelis made the big mistake of trying to stay in southern Lebanon, and just got themselves blown up and driven out). Bush senior was wrong to send US troops to Somalia in the first place; they had no defined military mission there. And, Bin Laden's taunts are slyer than Bush reads them, since they are designed to draw the US into a quagmire in the Muslim world where Muslim radicals can do to US troops what they had earlier done to Soviet ones in Afghanistan. The taunt is a trap. Bush is too thick to avoid the trap being laid for him.

"Second, the militant network wants to use the vacuum created by an American retreat to gain control of a country, a base from which to launch attacks and conduct their war against non-radical Muslim governments. Over the past few decades, radicals have specifically targeted Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, and Jordan for potential takeover."

Yeah, except that at no point have the radical Muslim fundamentalists ever come anywhere near taking over any of those countries. It is like saying that the Weathermen dreamed of a revolution against the US government in the late 1960s. So what? Small fringe groups dream big dreams.

'They achieved their goal, for a time, in Afghanistan.'

Yes, because the United States sent them $5 billion dollars and strong-armed the Saudis to match it, and undermined and overthrew the Socialist government in Afghanistan, which had made women's education and literacy among its prime policy goals and which tried to implement land reform, etc. It was a brutal regime, but less brutal than the Mujahidin or holy warriors bankrolled by Reagan and Bush senior, in whose terror training camps many "Arab Afghans" gained their expertise in bombings, cell formation, and other terror techniques. The Taliban were just second-generation Mujahidin.

' Now they've set their sights on Iraq. Bin Laden has stated: "The whole world is watching this war and the two adversaries. It's either victory and glory, or misery and humiliation." The terrorists regard Iraq as the central front in their war against humanity. And we must recognize Iraq as the central front in our war on terror.'

Bin Laden set his sights on Iraq in 1990, when he offered to gather the Mujahidin and Arab Afghans to get Saddam out of Kuwait and overthrow his godless atheist socialist government. King Fahd told him "no." The only difference between then and now is that then the Baath regime was strong enough to stand against various Muslim fundamentalist challenges, and now Bush has thrown Iraq into chaos, of which the fundamentalists are taking advantage. Bush's overthrow of the Baath also discredited secular Arab nationalism, driving many Iraqi Sunnis into the arms of the radical Salafi Sunni revivalists. The difference is Bush's ineptitude, not any change in Bin Laden. If Bush was worried about al-Qaeda taking over Iraq, he should have left it alone and not destabilized it.

'Third, the militants believe that controlling one country will rally the Muslim masses, enabling them to overthrow all moderate governments in the region, and establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia. With greater economic and military and political power, the terrorists would be able to advance their stated agenda: to develop weapons of mass destruction, to destroy Israel, to intimidate Europe, to assault the American people, and to blackmail our government into isolation.'

Yes, al-Qaeda does want these things. But then the Christian Identity Movement in the United States wants to establish a massive fortified refuge for persecuted white people to escape oppression at the hands of what they in their looney tunes way consider the evil, minority-dominated Federal Government. That crackpot fringe groups have big plans and ideas is not surprising, and we only have to worry about them if it looks like they might actually succeed.

But who thinks this particular crackpot plan is in any way feasible? Look at America's friends in the Middle East-- Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Yemen, Oman, Pakistan, etc., etc. Which one of them is on the verge of being taken over by al-Qaeda? Why, al-Qaeda had to plan out 9/11 from Europe because it could not operate in the Middle East! An al-Qaeda meeting in Cairo would have had more Egyptian government spies in attendance than radical fundamentalists!



(Green above shows governments friendly to the US. Reddish brown is Arab nationalist governments. Yellow is a Shiite theocracy. None of these regimes is friendly to radical al-Qaeda).

"Some might be tempted to dismiss these goals as fanatical or extreme. Well, they are fanatical and extreme -- and they should not be dismissed. Our enemy is utterly committed. As Zarqawi has vowed, "We will either achieve victory over the human race or we will pass to the eternal life." And the civilized world knows very well that other fanatics in history, from Hitler to Stalin to Pol Pot, consumed whole nations in war and genocide before leaving the stage of history. Evil men, obsessed with ambition and unburdened by conscience, must be taken very seriously -- and we must stop them before their crimes can multiply."

A wise leader has to be able to judge the moment, and to see things in proportion to their importance. Bin Laden is simply not a Hitler. There is no country in which he or his minions are about to become Chancellor. It is a joke to think that Zawahiri, who is not even respected by the Egypt-based al-Jihad al-Islami, has any chance of taking over Egypt! Al-Qaeda is not even an organization. It is a loose set of radical ideas that small fringe groups can take up at will. It is not German National Socialism. It is the contemporary Ku Klux Klan.

"Defeating the militant network is difficult, because it thrives, like a parasite, on the suffering and frustration of others . . . "

Yeah, it thrives on the perception of injustice generated by Western imperial military occupation of Muslim countries. Your policies in Iraq, George, are a huge recruitment poster for al-Qaeda.

" The influence of Islamic radicalism is also magnified by helpers and enablers. They have been sheltered by authoritarian regimes, allies of convenience like Syria and Iran that share the goal of hurting America and moderate Muslim governments . . ."

This line is the most lunatic thing in Bush's speech. It is outrageous. It is the Big Lie. Syria has a secular Baath Arab nationalist government. The regime killed 10,000 Muslim activists at Hama in 1982. It tortured al-Qaeda members for the United States after September 11. Syria, a small country of only 18 million, has no ability to harm the United States and it most certainly is not in alliance with radical Muslim fundamentalists!

As for Iran, its brand of fundamentalism is Shiite. Al-Qaeda is made up of Sunnis and Wahhabis, who despise Shiites. Iran supports the new, Shiite-dominated government in Iraq. It supported the Jan. 30 elections. It supports the new constitution and the referendum. Iran hated the Taliban and very nearly went to war against them, backing the Northern Alliance instead. The Shiite Iranians hate the radical Salafis like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who has called for a war of extermination against the Shiites.

Bush's attempt to conflate the regimes he doesn't like with al-Qaeda makes nonsense of his whole vision.

It would be as though someone who disliked the United States and France should posit Southern Baptist American support for the Catholic Irish Republican Army because France is a US ally and is Catholic. To anyone who knows anything at all about the Middle East, Bush has made a mishmash of unrelated things and attempted to construct a bogeyman out of them.

"and use terrorist propaganda to blame their own failures on the West and America, and on the Jews. These radicals depend on front operations, such as corrupted charities, which direct money to terrorist activity. They're strengthened by those who aggressively fund the spread of radical, intolerant versions of Islam in unstable parts of the world. The militants are aided, as well, by elements of the Arab news media that incite hatred and anti-Semitism, that feed conspiracy theories and speak of a so-called American "war on Islam" -- with seldom a word about American action to protect Muslims in Afghanistan, and Bosnia, Somalia, Kosovo, Kuwait, and Iraq."

This is all true. But the question is how to combat these pernicious ideas. It would be easier to knock down the antisemitism if the Israelis were not stealing Palestinian land in the West Bank or gradually taking over all of Jerusalem. It would be easier to highlight US humanitarian interventions that have benefited Muslims if the US government had ever bothered to offer a prize to an Arab author to write a book about this subject and publish it in Cairo (no such book exists and no avenue now exists for the US to encourage such publication projects.)

"Some have also argued that extremism has been strengthened by the actions of our coalition in Iraq, claiming that our presence in that country has somehow caused or triggered the rage of radicals. I would remind them that we were not in Iraq on September the 11th, 2001 -- and al Qaeda attacked us anyway. The hatred of the radicals existed before Iraq was an issue, and it will exist after Iraq is no longer an excuse. The government of Russia did not support Operation Iraqi Freedom, and yet the militants killed more than 180 Russian schoolchildren in Beslan" . . .

This argument is stupid. That Iraq is not the only grievance of the radical Muslim fundamentalists is obvious. The converse is not true, that Iraq does not matter. I agree with Bush that it is not useful to worry about the crackpot reasons for which al-Qaeda says it does things. But what we want to avoid doing is to spread around sympathy for al-Qaeda-like ideas.

The point about the US military occupation of Iraq is that it serves to convince Muslim publics that the al-Qaeda leaders were right to see the US as an imperialist, domineering power that wanted to take their lands, rape their women, humiliate their men, and steal their oil. We needed to avoid doing things that would help al-Qaeda recruit a new generation of trained activists. By going into Iraq in this way, the Bush administration has vindicated Bin Laden in the eyes of many Muslims.

"Over the years these extremists have used a litany of excuses for violence -- the Israeli presence on the West Bank, or the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, or the defeat of the Taliban, or the Crusades of a thousand years ago. In fact, we're not facing a set of grievances that can be soothed and addressed. We're facing a radical ideology with inalterable objectives: to enslave whole nations and intimidate the world. No act of ours invited the rage of the killers -- and no concession, bribe, or act of appeasement would change or limit their plans for murder."

This is true. But remember when you said you worried that this small band of fanatics might be like Hitler's Nazis circa 1926? What you want to do is prevent them from getting to 1933. How would you do that? You have to compete with them for a favorable public opinion with Muslim publics. There will always be fringe groups of fanatics. What we have to do is deny them constituencies. The creeping Israeli annexation of the West Bank and Jerusalem, and the US military occupation of Iraq, provide al-Qaeda with constituents they would not otherwise have. They therefore take us closer to 1933, not farther away from it.

"On the contrary: They target nations whose behavior they believe they can change through violence. Against such an enemy, there is only one effective response: We will never back down, never give in, and never accept anything less than complete victory."

This is stupid again. In any war, you have to back away from battles you aren't winning, otherwise you waste precious resources. It doesn't mean you back away from the war. In some instances, as with a US withdrawal from Iraq, al-Qaeda would be weakened far more by the removal of an irritant to Muslim public opinion than it would be strengthened by any perception of US weakness. Everybody saw what happened to the Taliban and Saddam's army. No one is in any doubt as to the military might of the US. The only question is whether the US is so unwise as to bleed itself into weakness by fighting long-term wars of occupation that it cannot win.

"The murderous ideology of the Islamic radicals is the great challenge of our new century. Yet, in many ways, this fight resembles the struggle against communism in the last century. Like the ideology of communism, Islamic radicalism is elitist, led by a self-appointed vanguard that presumes to speak for the Muslim masses . . ."

It is not important that al-Qaeda ideology is Leninist. What is important is that Lenin and his successors had a state, the Soviet Union, which was a superpower. Bin Laden is a fugitive. Al-Qaeda not only does not have a state, it doesn't have really good places to hide. It is ridiculous to attempt to scare the American people into thinking that there is this huge, Soviet-style challenge out there, when in fact "al-Qaeda" is a few hundred or at most a couple thousand local misfits and fanatics. The enemy is fishermen in Mombasa, Bedouin first-generation intellectuals in the Sinai, British school teachers meeting in a gym in Leeds, part-time seminarians in Indonesia. This asymmetrical enemy is not like Soviet communism. It is like the Baader Meinhoff gang and other small terrorist organizations.

"We didn't ask for this global struggle . . . "

You aren't waging a global struggle. You are spending a billion and a half dollars a week on a war of choice in Iraq. That, you asked for. You told interviewers way back when you were governor of Texas that you wanted to "take out" Saddam one day. You said in another speech that he tried to kill your Daddy. It seems to me that you have some sort of personal vendetta with Iraq. I doubt you even had ever heard of Usamah Bin Laden in 1998 when you were giving that interview about taking out Saddam. As for the struggle against al-Qaeda, I can't see that you are putting any significant resources into it. You neglected Afghanistan. It is back to producing heroin for a living, which may well turn into narco-terrorism. Although you claim to have stopped some al-Qaeda operations, you haven't in fact been able to stop al-Qaeda from hitting a whole string of targets, including London. You are just causing a lot of trouble in Iraq and playing into Bin Laden's hands there.

You say no country in the Middle East should be allowed to have "weapons of mass destruction." The only country that actually has weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East proper is Israel, which is the main thing driving other countries to try to get them. Why not call for a nuclear-free zone, promise Israel a US nuclear umbrella, and get Israel to destroy its? As it is, you just look like a hypocrite to people in the region, winking at Israel's bomb but going ballistic about the possibility of any other country getting nukes.

As for the rest of your speech, it is all made up as you go along, just like your whole administration. You are a fanatic about a few things like Iraq and "weapons of mass destruction" and Syria and Iran, but you don't actually seem to do much governing. When Katrina hit you were asleep at the switch. Your main accomplishment is to throw so much dust in the eyes of Americans that they let you push a million people into poverty last year, while reducing the taxes on the super rich by some enormous factor. Syria is a small weak country and I can't see that it has any power to do anything to the United States at all. The National Intelligence Estimate is that Iran is at least 10 years from having a nuclear weapon, assuming it is working on one, which is not proved (and you lied to us about Iraq being at work on one, so why should we pay any attention to you on this issue?)

Mr. Bush, I don't recognize the world you paint. I find your speech a form of sheer propaganda, having almost no relationship to reality. And I am very, very worried that you will allow to happen to the Oil Gulf what you allowed to happen to New Orleans. After watching you for five years I have become convinced that you don't have the slightest idea what you are doing in Iraq, that you are just reacting and playing it by ear. You can't do that, George. This Iraq thing is extremely complex. It needs serious, concerted thought by high-powered people, not just your cronies and yes-men and ideologues of various stripes (from Right to far-Right). You might just need the help of Iran and Syria to get Iraq right. Did you ever think of that? Iraq is the biggest policy failure in US history so far. You need to get a handle on it, the way you do on tax cuts for the billionaires (you've been very effective in making your rich friends richer). Otherwise all that extra treasure you've thrown to your tuxedoed "base" is going to go right down the tubes, drowned in a world of $20 a gallon gasoline.

You can't "stay the course" because you don't have a course. Get one.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

21 Killed around Baghdad
Jaafari denies Allegations against Iran

Guerrilla violence killed 21 persons, including a US soldier, around Baghdad on Thursday.

Reuters reports the following violence outside Baghdad:

' KIRKUK - Gunmen shot dead five Oil Ministry security guards and wounded another three as they were driving to the northern city of Kirkuk, 250 km (155 miles) north of Baghdad. Lieutenant Jawaad Abdullah said they were shot in the town of Uthaim, south of Kirkuk.

MOSUL - Gunmen killed Salem Ayoub Sillo, a local prison chief, and his driver in the northern Noor district of Mosul, a police source said.

FALLUJA - Police said a suicide car bomb detonated against a U.S. convoy in central Falluja on Wednesday evening, destroying one Humvee . . .

RAMADI - One U.S. Humvee was struck by a roadside bomb south of Ramadi, 110 km (68 miles) west of Baghdad, a police source said . . .

RAMADI - The U.S. military said in a statement that it had killed "six Al Qaeda in Iraq terrorists" and detained at least 110 suspects since operation "River Gate" began on Oct. 4 in the western cities of Haditha, Haqlaniyah and Barwana. '

UPI reports doubts arising in the US officer corps in Iraq about whether the military can in good faith ask its soldiers to die for a conflict that is becoming increasingly politicized in Washington. They complain that everything that happens in Iraq is viewed through the prism of whether it is good or bad for George W. Bush. (I agree that this is the rhetorical game in the US, and also that it is stupid. Bush won't be in office in 2008, but Iraq will still be there, and whether it is in flames will matter to the fate of the United States long after the Bush era is a dim memory.)

A Daily Kos diarist with military experience comments on the US destruction of 7 bridges over the Euphrates, saying, 'Why is this a big deal? Because we are actually destroying infrastructure in a country we occupy. We are saying that the military value of the bridges to the insurgancy is greater than the value to us in either a military or economic/social way. This can be compared to the use of chemicals to destroy the jungle in Vietnam. Not because it caused cancer but because it was the long term destruction of some portion of the country. '

I would just add that the US military has been destroying infrastructure in the Sunni Arab areas for some time. They damaged 2/3s of the buildings in Fallujah last November and December, knocking out electricity, sewage, etc., as well. One officer told me, "we destroyed that city, but we'll rebuild it." They also appear to have flattened entire neighborhoods in Tal Afar more recently. This destruction was just as significant as taking out the bridges, and was the same sort of action. It also does signal that the US military is forced to resort to scorched earth policies, to deny the enemy infrastructure because it is too weak to deny it via conventional warfare.

Then there is Iran. First the US Department of Defense floated an attempt to accuse Iran of supplying shaped charges to Sunni Arab guerrillas in northern Iraq. The idea of the ayatollahs helping radical Salafi Abu Musab Zarqawi to blow up fellow Shiites was so absurd that the US dropped the whole thing for a while. Now the Blair government has retooled the charges slightly more plausibly, claiming that the Iranians were sending shaped charges to radical Sadrist splinter groups in Basra for use against British troops. But Iran has long backed the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and its Badr Corps paramilitary, which was trained by Iran's Revolutionary Guards. The Sadrists have clashed several times with SCIRI, most recently in Najaf. And, Sadrists are ghetto Arab Shiites who openly distrust Persian influence in their affairs. So why would the Iranian government arm the enemies of its proteges, and persons who, moreover, routinely badmouth Iran and work against its influence in Iraq. The whole thing makes no sense.

On Thursday Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari, the elected head of the Iraqi executive who is the putative ally of Blair and Bush, strongly denied Blair's charges against the Iranians. He pointed out that the two countries were developing a very constructive relationship, in which Iran was proving most helpful. He said, according the the BBC Persian site [courtesy a kind reader:] “some people want to harm the friendly relations beween Iran and Iraq, but not only will Iraq not allow them to do so, but it will continue to expand its relations with Iran.”

I'd say Blair has been cut off at the knees in this latest propaganda effort against Iran. My friends with military experience tell me that shaped charges are not so esoteric that Iraqis would have to get them from Lebanon's Hizbullah via Iran, and that, indeed, there were probably lots of shaped charges in Iraqi arms depots, which have been extensively looted.

Meanwhile, in the real world, Iran has opened its borders for the pilgrim trade to Iraq. Up to 1500 Iranians per day will be allowed to visit the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. When that quota begins being reached, it will translate into over half a million Iranian pilgrims in Iraq per year, and be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, probably billions. Najaf and Karbala are eager to get it going. Good luck to Mr. Blair in controlling from London half a million Iranians traipsing through Iraq every year.

Although this AP article has a title saying that the UN is distributing copies of the new constitution in Iraq, in the body of the article what we actually learn is that

' Some 5 million copies arrived in Iraq on Monday, but distribution does not appear to have started in the north and south, where the constitution is expected to pass by a wide margin. In Basra and Hillah, major Shiite towns in the south, no copies have been passed out, nor in Nineveh — a mixed northern province of Sunnis and Kurds that could be crucial to the constitution's passage or rejection. Kurdish-language copies had not yet reached many Kurdish areas. Parts of Baghdad were expected to start seeing their copies in the coming days. '

Parts of Baghdad? It is October 7, and the referendum is in 8 days, and parts of the capital haven't gotten the text yet? And, this article makes it clear that a lot of Sunni Arabs in Baghdad districts like Dora are not even picking it up for fear it is a death warrant. See Andrew Arato's comments on the constitution, below.

Warren Strobel of Knight Ridder looks at the ways that the US government is pressuring Iraq's neighbors to support the referendum on the constitution. From a regional point of view, this constitution threatens to partition Iraq and to create powerful Kurdish and Shiite rump states that could redraw the map of the Middle East if they attract supporters across national borders. Nobody in the region likes this idea except Iran, which is more enthusiastic for the constitution and the referendum than even Washington.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Guest Editorial: Arato on Iraqi Constitution

If I Were an Iraqi…….

Andrew Arato, New School University

' Had I been A French citizen during the referendum on the European Constitutional Treaty in May I would have voted Yes. I admit, the making of that Constitution through the European Convention and the subsequent Inter Governmental Conference had serious democratic procedural deficits. The Convention did not sufficiently break out of from a government controlled process, did not involve the European Parliament enough, and gave no voice to European voters in a coherent and organized manner. And yet, on the level of constitutional substance, the new treaty had important gains, for human rights and for the chances of a unified European policy in the world. That is why I would have voted yes. Those who voted No to strengthen national sovereignty or the welfare state only helped to make both weaker. In the crunch one must vote substance over procedure.

There is no such a dilemma in Iraq. Both the procedure that produced the constitutional draft that will be voted on this October 15, and its constitutional substance were and are disastrous. As to the procedure, the pathetic rules of the pathetic Transitional Administrative Law [TAL] were violated in a pathetic manner. To start from the beginning, a foreign country, the U.S. has played an unseemly, illegitimate and probably illegal (Hague Convention, 1907) role in the constitution-making process of an occupied country.

Next, the TAL’s rules were repeatedly violated: there was no public or parliamentary discussion of the draft, and it was never voted on. The text was repeatedly changed after the only deadline that was (in my view) legally amended. [Then the three-province veto by a two-thirds majority was reinterpreted as a two-thirds majority of registered voters rather than of actual voters.] Only international pressure finally kept the National Assembly from an absurd misinterpretation of the rule of ratification through a mere law, actually a hidden and therefore illegal constitutional amendment.

As to substance, this so-called constitution did not decide the question of how the second parliamentary chamber is to be organized and elected, leaving the question to the third parliament that will be elected under the new rules! While the makers of the draft did decide the structure of the presidency, they immediately replaced this rule for one parliamentary session by that of the supposedly superseded TAL involving a troika, this time with rigid vetoes. And, on the question of the organization of regions, they created the foundations of a loose confederal state, again deferring the decision on the exact mechanism to a simple parliamentary majority later.

The same tactic was used regarding issues of the greatest concern to secular Iraqis and advocates of women’s rights. The exact number and method of appointment of the Supreme (Constitutional) Court with Sharia judges was to be left to a 2/3 parliamentary vote in the future, with excellent chances that such a court cannot be constituted at all. That will leave plenty of room for the parliament to establish-- without any control or revie--the exact meaning and mechanism of the laws governing personal status, which the draft leaves up to the majority.

So there are plenty of reasons for voting against the constitution in general. There are even stronger reasons for particular population groups to do so. If I were a Sunni Arab, of course I would vote against a draft that is being imposed by an exclusionary Shi’ite –Kurdish leadership bargain directed against me and my group, giving us no other choice than accepting either a humiliating subaltern status or supporting the bloody, nihilistic insurrection.

And if I were a liberal, secular Iraqi I would vote against the draft because it will solidify religious oppression in at least a large part of the country, and over most of its women, and because one cannot begin a system of the rule of law by grievously and repeatedly violating the rule of law in the beginning. But if I were an Iraqi patriot of whatever background, I would also vote against the draft because it follows the recipe of some American advisers of the Kurds that the best way to stop the break up of the country is to break it up on the constitutional level, while the best method to stop Iranian domination is to deliver the nine most important provinces with 2/3 of the oil, half the people and all the ports to Iranian influence.

I would also vote against this constitution if I were a Kurd able to look a little bit ahead, beyond positions that are fast becoming obsolete. A Sunni centered Iraqi authoritarian state is now in shambles and cannot be reconstituted. The new autonomous rights of the Kurds have been conceded by the Sunni negotiators, however reluctantly. Who will dominate both the central state, and the most powerful region, the Prussia of Iraq when the Shi’ite nine province region is formed? Would it not be in the interest of the Kurds to start supporting Sunni aspirations, rather than work toward a “federal” arrangement which may lead to a breakup, but could also lead to a constellation where they may be dwarfed by one powerful partner with the strongest regional state as its supporter.

But if I were a Shi’ite not in one of the nine provinces, I would most definitely vote against this constitution. The oil resources monopolized by the Northern and Southern regions will impoverish me the same way as my Sunni neighbors. Worse, to be a member of the Shi’ite majority in the Sunni region thrown together by default is going to be no picnic for either Shi’ite or Kurdish minorities. Nor would the predictable communal violence and ethnic cleansing that would flow from such arrangement.

Finally, if I were a Shi’ite in the South I would also vote against this constitution, and not only because the Grand Ayatollah Sistani has always warned against the breakup of Iraq. Even if I were a better friend of Iran than of Sistani, I would still vote against the document. Simply put, it gives too great a victory to Iran and puts it on collision course with the United States. The Americans insanely enough already gave Iran a very great victory, one that the government in Teheran never could even imagine on the battlefields of the past. To push this victory to the point where Iran openly controls Iraq through its most important part (or only that part with a failed state in the middle) contains the seed of a war with the United States, a war neither side can win. If the Iraqi state stays together, Iran’s interests will be well enough represented through the Shi’ite majority of the country. The Islamic Republic cannot long survive a move for much more than that.

Let me grant that voting against this constitution is no utopia. It merely gives Iraq yet another chance, under the American imposed TAL, at a historical compromise among all groups and factions. This compromise has been repeatedly missed and would be possible only if the United States finally learns to stay out of the Iraqi political process and stops distorting the terms of bargaining, producing for example the absurd illusion that the Sunni representatives are pathetic, unrepresentative, recalcitrant supplicants whereas they are actually the moderate part of a milieu that indeed represents real power in Iraq. Victory in the referendum, and new elections could make just these moderate Sunnis partners in a new constitution making process where the three sides recognize one another as equals.

For the moment, the flag earlier raised by Sistani, the flag of Iraqi integrity in the face of the occupation has passed on to them.


Andrew Arato'

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Iranian Editorial: 'Iraq must heed Al-Sistani to avoid US "conspiracy"'

Editorial of Iranian Newspaper Jomhuri-yi Islami, 4 Oct. 05, via BBC World Monitoring for Oct. 5 05:

Iranian paper says Iraq must heed Al-Sistani to avoid US "conspiracy"

SOURCE: Jomhuri-ye Eslami, Tehran, in Persian 4 Oct 05 p 1

Text of unattributed editorial: "Iraq is in need of patience and judiciousness" by Iranian newspaper Jomhuri-ye Eslami on 4 October

In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.

The news these days coming from Iraq indicates escalated insecurity and aggravated and increased division among the people. Although the turmoil and in-fights in Iraq are ostensibly attributed to religious controversy among the Sunnis and Shi'is, that is not the truth; and behind the curtain a different scenario is being cooked up and masterminded by particular quarters and suspicious hands that seek special evil objectives, and they are neither supporters of Sunnis nor do they sympathize with the Shi'is. . . [Refers to incident of undercover British SAS officers captured in Basra . . .]

In the meantime, the approach that Ayatollah Al-Sistani, the source of emulation of Iraqi Shi'is, has adopted - namely his call on Iraqi Shi'is for control and self-restraint, and desisting from getting involved in a religious war - is a correct and judicious policy. This logical and intelligent approach is in reality the antibody to the conspiracy America is practising through massacre of Shi'is by its own henchmen and secret agents, and then blaming others for it and portraying it as a conflict between Shi'is and Sunnis, and giving it all the looks and colours of religious controversy.

Ayatollah Al-Sistani's policy and approach ought to be followed meticulously and with great patience by the Iraqis, and the fury and rashness of those who declare these days that their patience is coming to an end because of all the massacre of Shi'is must not become a factor and element in revising the policy. Distancing from this policy is tantamount to falling into the trap prepared by Anglo-Americans, and this is what the latter are waiting for expectantly with their fingers crossed. The prime duty of religious and political leaders of Iraq, whether Sunni or Shi'i, is to keep their calm and begin a close and sincere dialogue and keep consulting each other on every issue, and try to overcome the present critical and sensitive days and put the current problems and predicaments behind them via calm, thoughtfulness and discretion. This is the only way that can undermine and thwart the present American conspiracy in Iraq. '

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36 Dead, Nearly 100 Wounded in Hilla Mosque Attack
Cheney: 'Get Used to It'

A guerrilla detonated his bomb amidst a Shiite mosque in Hilla on Wednesday, at the beginning of the fasting month of Ramadan and during a mourning ceremony for a local man killed by guerrillas on Monday. The bomber killed 36 persons and wounded nearly 100.

Hilla has been the site of several major bomb attacks, including one in February that killed 125 persons. That attack was undertaken by a Jordanian terrorist, and it soured relations between Iraqi Shiites and Jordan as a result. Hilla is in the province of Babil, which has a population of about 1.7 million and is mixed, having Sunni Arabs and Shiites (Hilla city, with about 300,000 inhabitants, is largely Shiite).

There was also an oil-related bombing in oil-rich Kirkuk. And a Najaf family was bombed late Tuesday.

British officials charged Iran with supplying shaped charges to Shiite guerrillas in southern Iraq for use against British troops. A radical Sadrist splinter group around Shaik Ahmad Fartusi in Basra has been accused by the British of being behind some of the attacks. It should be noted that earlier on, some British officials and officers have said that the situation is too murky to be sure that Iran is behind the attacks. Personally, I think that if Iran were going to give any Iraqi group weapons, it would be the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. The Iranians distrust the Sadr Movement, which is Iraqi nativist and often anti-Iranian, and would distrust a splinter group from it all the more.

A UN official and some Iraqi observers have said that the American role in fashioning the new Iraqi constitution was excessive and possibly illegal under the Hague Rules of 1907 governing military occupations.

US Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney suggested Wednesday that the American public might like to fight in Iraq for "decades." I suspect that the percentage of Americans who would answer such a question in the affirmative in a scientific opinion poll would hover around 2%. Senator Russ Feingold, in contrast, wants US troops out of Iraq by the end of 2006.

Las t summer the United Arab Emirates tried to buy M113 armored personnel carriers for Iraqi police from Switzerland. The Swiss accepted the deal initially but wanted guarantees that the equipment would be used by the police for peaceful purposes and would not be transferred to the army for attacks against the guerrillas. These questions had been holding up actual delivery by the Swiss. The UAE lost patience this week and cancelled the order. Iraq can't catch a break.

The Dutch Foreign Minister, Bernard Bot, questioned Wednesday whether the invasion of Iraq in 2003 had been sensible. The Netherlands did not help invade, but did send troops to help stabilize Muthanna Province in the aftermath, which were withdrawn earlier this year. Bot wonders whether, given what we now know about Iraq's lack of weapons of mass destruction, diplomacy might not have achieved more.
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Parliament Reverses Referendum Rule

The United Nations has succeeded in convincing the Iraqi parliament to reverse itself. The interim constitution provides that if any three provinces reject the constitution by a 2/3s margin,it fails. (Iraq has 18 provinces). Sunni Arabs have been mobilizing to shoot it down in Anbar, Salah al-Din and Ninevah provinces, where they are the majority. Shiites apparently became concerned that they might actually succeed, and tried to change the rules. They stipulated that the constitution would only fail if 2/3s of registered voters rejected the constitution. Since security is very bad in the Sunni areas and turnout will be low, this measure would have made it impossible for the Sunnis to reject the constitution. The Sunni Arabs cried foul and threatened to boycott the referendum altogether, which would have much weakened the legitimacy of the constitution even if it had passed. The UN stepped in to point out, however, that such a test fails international standards of voting fairness. A result is decided by a majority of actual voters, not of potential voters (if people don't actually cast a ballot, you cannot know how they would have voted).

It is a good sign that the Iraqi parliamentarians were open to being reasoned with on this issue. Now the question is whether the Sunni Arabs can succeed in defeating the constitution.

Meanwhile, for more on the implications of the building Shiite/Kurdish split, see Luke Baker reporting from Baghdad.
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5 US Troops Killed in Sweep of West
Sunnis threaten Boycott on new Constitution

Five US soldiers have been killed by bombings and a sniper since Monday, in the course of a US sweep of western border towns. About 1250 Iraqi troops and 1250 American troops have attacked the towns, which had been bases for the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement.

Most of the fighters, however, had slipped away before the US/Iraqi force could assert itself in the cities. Al-Zaman alleged that most of the inhabitants of Sadah (pop. 2000) had fled over the border to Syria.

Sunni Arab leaders on Tuesday threatened to boycott the October 15 referendum on the constitution if a rule passed by parliament is allowed to stand. The interim constitution states that the constitution will be rejected if three provinces vote against it by a 2/3s margin. Parliament has now said that it must be a "no" vote by 2/3s of eligible voters in each of 3 provinces. The original understanding was that the 2/3s referred to 2/3s of actual voters going to the polls. This second interpretation might have allowed the Sunni Arabs to get a 2/3s majority against the constitution in 3 provinces.

Iraqi and international poll monitors immediately rejected the action of the parliament. They insisted that in international law, a voter is defined as someone who actually goes to the polls and votes.

The Sunni Arabs are fuming at the Shiites and Kurds for having attempted to curtail their soveriegnty.

The FT explains how Bush's Iraq has led to increased Sunni-Shiite tensions throughout the Oil Gulf.

Will blog more later Weds.


BBC World Monitoring of Iraqi Press highlights for Oct. 3:

'Al-Mashriq publishes on the front page a 230-word report citing a prominent member of Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, confirming the cancellation of de-Ba'thification and the return of the former Iraqi Army to bring stability and security to Iraq. . . . [This doesn't sound at all reliable to me- JRIC] . . .

Al-Manarah on 2 October carries on page 4 a 100-word report citing an official source at Al-Najaf Health Directorate as saying that a Korean company will construct a 180-bed hospital at a cost of 50m dollars in the governorate.

Al-Manarah on 2 October carries on page 4 a 120-word report citing Al-Muthanna Health Director Dr Falih Abd-al-Hasan announcing the signing of an 8m dollars contract for the supply of modern medical equipment.

Al-Manarah on 2 October publishes on page 4 a 250-word report on the discovery of a new mass grave containing hundreds of bodies in Al-Samawah. . .'

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Rosh Hashanah and Ramadan

I won't get a chance to say this all together again for a while, so L'Shana Tova and Ramadan Mubarak!
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