Cole in Salon and Truthdig

In Salon.com today, I ask "Did Bush plan to Bomb al-Jazeera?" And present new evidence that Rumsfeld considered the Arabic satellite station's reporting to be a form of murder.

My article on Rumsfeld's complicity with Saddam Hussein when he was using chemical weapons is at Truthdig.com, a new site, the force behind which is veteran journalist and truth-teller Bob Scheer.


Cole will be travelling the next week or so. Blog entries will be made, but perhaps at unpredictable times. Email contact chancy. I've saved the Achcar & Shalom editorial, for which I'm grateful, for Thursday.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Wilkerson: Cheney May be a War Criminal

Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff of Colin Powell, told the BBC that Vice President Dick Cheney may be guilty of war crimes for arguing that all restrictions on torturing prisoners should be done away with.

The Wilkerson transcript is here. Money grafs:

>BBC: But you're talking about the abuse - the alleged abuse - by American forces aren't you?

I am, and I concluded that we had had an impassioned debate in the statutory process. And in that debate, two sides had participated: one that essentially wanted to do away with all restrictions and the other which said no, Geneva should prevail and the president walked right down the middle.

He made a decision that Geneva would in fact govern all but al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda look-alike detainees. Any other prisoners of course would be governed by traditional methods, international law, Geneva and so forth.

>BBC: Who was calling for doing away with all the normal practices if you like?

Who is right now very publicly lobbying the congress of the United States, advocating the use of terror? The vice-president of the United States . . .

>BBC: And that question of detainee abuse - are you saying that the implicit message allowing it to happen was sanctioned by Dick Cheney - it came from his office?

Well you see two sides of this debate in the statutory process. You see the side represented by Colin Powell, Will Taft, all arguing for Geneva.

You see the other side represented by Yoo, John Yoo from the Department of Justice, Alberto Gonzales - you see the other side being argued by them and you see the president compromising.

Then you see the secretary of defence moving out in his own memorandum to act as if the side that declared everything open, free and anything goes, actually being what's implemented.

And so what I'm saying is, under the vice-president's protection, the secretary of defence moved out to do what they wanted to do in the first place even though the president had made a decision that was clearly a compromise . . .

> BBC: If what you say is correct, in your view, is Dick Cheney then guilty of a war crime?

Well, that's an interesting question - it was certainly a domestic crime to advocate terror and I would suspect that it is - for whatever it's worth - an international crime as well.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Shiite Militiamen Terrorize Sunni Arabs
Khalilzad Agrees to Talk to Sunni Guerrillas

Now terrorists are killing Christian (Chaldo-Assyrian) politicians.

The New York Times seems to have become convinced of the credibility of Sunni Arab charges that Shiite religious militiamen have infiltrated the new Iraqi army and security forces, and are conducting a campaign of murder against Sunni Arabs. Since the Bush administration is heavily depending on the Iraqi army and security forces to make Iraq safe as US troops withdraw, the implication is that the Sunni Arabs don't have much of a future. The same militia-infiltrated forces in Najaf and Karbala have now taken over security details from the Marines, who have departed those cities.

On the other hand, Sunni Arab guerrillas are killing and kidnapping Shiite pilgrims.

US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, in an interview on ABC on Tuesday, said that he was willing to talk to leaders of the Iraqi guerilla movement save for two groups. One was Saddam loyalists and the other was followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Since there are virtually no Saddam loyalists, that exclusion is not important. Since the followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi wouldn't talk to Khalilzad, and are a small group, that doesn't matter much either.

Most of the 36 guerrilla groups in Iraq are Iraqi nationalists, Sunni Arab natioanlists, or local Salafi fundamentalists. If Khalilzad can open lines of communication to them, that would be all to the good. Coming on the heels of his announcement that he has been authorized to talk to Iran, it suggests a new pragmatism by the Bush administration in Iraq. These policies sound more like traditional State Department policies, and not at all like the kind of hard line that the civilian leadership of the Defense Department keeps pushing. Khalilzad is making all the right announcements. Let us see how the actual negotiations go.

As Robert Dreyfus implies, Khalilzad is building on the momentum of the Cairo Conference, which made concessions to the Sunni Arabs.

The US military has been planting stories with a positive spin in Arabic-language Iraqi newspapers, and paying for the placement via the Lincoln Group. The Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmad Chalabi, has a newspaper called al-Mu'tamar, which has run the articles as though they were news. Other editors could tell that they were editorials, but did not know they were coming from the Pentagon.

Of course, some of these "positive" articles in Arabic (which are not inaccurate in detail but simply grossly one-sided) may then get translated by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service of the CIA, the articles from which in turn are often picked up by BBC World Monitoring; or Iraqi bloggers may put out the information and perspective so that it gets into English. The Pentagon is forbidden from planting articles in the US press, but this method gets around the prohibition.

The other thing that can be done is to pass an idea for a psy-ops article over to the British military, which then places it in the US press covertly, not being forbidden by UK law from doing so. The Guardian reported that the British military had placed newspaper articles in the US press in the run-up to the Iraq war. The same arrangement gets around laws barring the USG from spying on Americans; they can just have the British MI6 do it and then share the information back with the US government.

Too bad Jeff Jarvis, who is always insisting on having good news from Iraq, can't read Arabic-- these articles are just what he seems to be looking for. Maybe the Lincoln group would agree to send him the English originals. Oh, but Jarvis has already denied that Iraqi writers might be being manipulated by US psy-ops . . .

By the way, Jarvis now claims he did not support the transitional government of Iyad Allawi, and for proof he offers an NPR item that he quoted. OK, if he says so, I accept it and am sorry if I pegged him wrong.

I take it he now regrets that Bush appointed Allawi transitional prime minister, and is hoping that Allawi's list does poorly in the Dec. 15 election. He hasn't said so.

But he is being typically over-dramatic when he says I had no basis for the inference. I went back and read his blog for summer-fall 2004 when Allawi was in power. There are constant demands that the press do "positive" stories about Iraq then. Wouldn't you conclude that that was a sign he was happy with the transitional government? And then he says thank God for the blogger, Omar.


And Omar publishes this guest opinion in November of 2004:

On November 8, 2004, the Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi rightfully realizing that there could be no political or diplomatic solution with the insurgents in Fallujah, he ordered the Iraqi armed forces to storm Fallujah and he called upon the coalition forces to assist.

Allawi and the majority of Iraqis, including a great number of Fallujan citizens know that the Zarkawis and the Iraqi insurgents must be eliminated in order to pave the way for a successful and democratic election process in January 2005.

. . . In the week leading to the American election, the Secretary General of the U.N., Kofi Annan remarked that Fallujah should not be resolved through military action but through a political process . . . Once again, Kofi Annan is on the wrong side of the Iraqis. The Iraqi-American military operation must continue to the bitter end of ridding Fallujah of the extremists and enemies of Iraq, and thereby sleuth once and for all the anima of Saddam.

Dr. Joseph Ghougassian was US Ambassador to Qatar and Advisor in CPA/DoD. His email is Zena92029@yahoo.com

Posted by Omar @ 19:31

So Jarvis is pushing this site, and this site is publishing praise of Allawi for his complicity in leveling Fallujah. But Jarvis now says he didn't approve of Allawi. But he doesn't mention the Fallujah campaign, that I could see, at his blog. And he has only bile for Iraqi bloggers like Riverbend who were anti-Allawi. But he praised sites that praised Allawi. But he was against Allawi.

In fact his blog is deliberately hard to decipher as to its politics, except that he announces himself in sync with Andrew Sullivan and Bill Safire but then he says he is a Democrat but the Democrats complain to him when he blasts Kerry as indecisive . . .

If I'm accused of not being able to get a clear picture of where he stands, I plead guilty. But it is because he is his own unreliable narrator.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Khalilzad to talk to Iranians

Monday in Iraq was characterized by the usual mayhem, much of it with a dark sectarian character. Two prominent members of the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party and a third politician from the Association of Muslim Scholars (hard line Sunni) were assassinated in Baghdad. South of the capital, two Britons of South Asian heritage who had gone on pilgrimage to the Shiite holy city of Karbala were killed in an ambush. northern Iraq, 6 Iranian pilgrims were kidnapped.

In Baqubah four US troops were wounded by a suicide bombing. In Baiji, US troops opened fire when a bomb went off, and they killed a leader of the Shamar tribe, among the larger and more powerful in Iraq. Vice President Ghazi al-Yawir is from the Shamar. So too was one of the suicide bombers who blew up the Radisson SAS in Amman recently. Killing Shamar shaikh = not good.

US ambassador in Baghdad Zalmay Khalilzad is going to start direct talks with the Iranians.

Say what? Wasn't Scott Ritter saying only last winter that a Bush military attack on Iran was in the offing? What has changed?

Well

1. The security situation in Iraq is deteriorating over time.

2. The Shiite religious parties won the Jan. 30 elections, which was not what Bush had hoped for.

3. The Neocons are going to jail or given sinecures, and their star is falling faster than the Chicxulub meteor that killed off the dinosaurs.

Veteran journalist Jim Lobe has put it all together in a tight analysis I haven't seen elsewhere.

It is the return of Realism in Washington foreign policy. You need the Iranians, as I maintain, for a soft landing in Iraq? So you do business with the Iranians. This opening may help explain why Ahmad Chalabi went to Tehran before he went to Washington, and why he was given such a high-level (if unphotographed) reception in Washington.

Likewise, it helps explain the Cairo Conference sponsored by the Arab League, the results of which were an effort to reach out to the Sunni Arab guerrillas. The Iraqi government even recognized that it was legitimate for the guerrillas to blow up US troops! This is a startling admission for a government under siege with very few allies. But it recategorizes the Sunni Arab leaders from being terrorists to being a national liberation force. You could imagine dealing with, and bringing in from the cold, mere nationalists. Terrorists are poison.

The Neocons began by wanting to destroy the Sunni Arabs of Iraq and their Baath Party, and then going on to overthrow the ayatollahs in Iran. They inducted Bush and Cheney into this over-ambitious and self-contradictory plan, which depended on putting the Shiite Iraqis in power in Baghdad. But wouldn't the Sunni Arabs violently object? Wouldn't the Iraqi Shiites establish warm relations with Tehran.

Of course. The Neocons kept getting their promoters to proclaim how brilliant they are. But Wolfowitz isn't exactly well published as an academic, and Feith is notoriously as thick as two blocks of wood. Their plan was stupid. It is hard to escape the conclusion that they are, as well.

And now the stupid plan has collapsed, as anyone could have foreseen (I did, in 2002). And Realism is reasserting itself.

The two beneficiaries of the 180 degree turn by Bush's ship of state toward the fabled shores of Reality? The Neo-Baath of Sunni Iraq and the ayatollahs in Tehran.
But who cares? If the US dealing with them can get our troops home and prevent a regional war that screws up the whole world, it will be well worth it.

Ambassador Khalilzad has all along been the most pragmatic of the Neocons. There was even a time in the mid-1990s when he was willing to deal with the Talaban to get a gas pipeline built from Turkmenistan. His pragmatism (which the Neocons may well castigate as a lack of principle) will stand him in good stead in his talks with Tehran. The thing you always worry about is that it is already too late.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

US Air Power to Replace Infantry in Iraq;
Distant President Trapped in Utopianism

Veteran journalist Seymour Hersh is reporting in the New Yorker that the Bush administration has decided to draw down ground troops in Iraq. Knowledgeable observers strongly suspect that this step would produce a meltdown and possibly even civil war in Iraq (which could become a regional war). Bush's strategy may be to try to control the situation using air power.

Readers and colleagues often ask me why a Shiite majority and the Kurdish Peshmergas couldn't just take care of the largely Sunni Arab guerrillas. The answer is that the Sunni Arabs were the officer corps and military intelligence, and the more experienced NCOs, and they know how to do things that the Shiites and Kurds don't know how to do. The Sunni Arabs were also the country's elite and have enormous cultural capital and managerial know-how. Sunni Arab advantages will decline over time, but they are there for this generation, and no one should underestimate the guerrilla leadership. If the Americans weren't around, all those 77 Hungarian T-72 tanks that the new Iraqi military now has would be in guerrilla hands so fast it would make your head spin.

Shiite leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim complained to the Washington Post that the US itself was holding back the Iraqi army (which seems to be mostly Kurds and Shiites) from going after the Sunni Arab guerrillas in a concerted way. But this prospect is the other reason that the Shiites and the Kurds can't just take care of the Sunni Arabs. If one isn't careful, it would turn into a hot civil war on ethnic grounds (I don't mean 38 dead a day, I mean it would be ten times that). And if the Shiites and Kurds massacre Sunni Arabs in the course of fighting the guerrillas, the Saudi, Jordanian and Sunni Syrian publics are not going to take that lying down and volunteer fighters would flock to Iraq in real numbers.

This diary over at Daily Kos discusses both Hersh's reporting on this military issue and what his sources are saying about Bush and the White House.

Hersh reports that US Air Force officers are alarmed by the implication that Iraqi targeters may be calling down air strikes using US warplanes. I remember that Iraqi troops (mainly Kurds) were allowed to call down airstrikes in Tal Afar last August, and if my recollection serves, the Tal Afar operation may even have been conceived as an opportunity for Iraqi troops to get practice in doing so. They levelled whole neighborhoods of the Sunni Turkmen (many of whom had thrown in with Saddam in the old days).

The Air Force officers are right to be alarmed. It has been obvious to me for some time that US air power will be used to try to keep the guerrillas from taking over Iraq as the ground troops depart. This is why last August I argued for keeping some US Special Operations forces embedded with the new Iraqi army, since I felt that the US military should remain in control of the use of American air power (i.e. the laser targetting should be done by Navy Seals and others, not by Iraqis).

Likewise, I argued that the US should only make this airstrike capability available for defensive operations. Say that the 1920 Revolution Brigades got up a militia force to march on Hilla from Mahmudiyah, and the brigade made short work of the Iraqi infantry sent against it. In such a situation, the US should use air power to stop the neo-Baathists and Salafis from massacring the Shiites of Hilla. But the US Air Force should not be a toy in the hands of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who will most likely be the most powerful politician in Iraq come Dec. 16. If one keeps some Special Ops forces in Iraq, it would require a continued ability by the US to rescue them if anything went wrong, which is one reason both I and Congressman Murtha envisaged a continued over-the-horizon US presence in the region for a while.

But Hersh's sources in Washington strongly give the impression that George W. Bush is incapable of making coherent policy in Iraq, and is fixated on his legacy there 20 years down the line.

Even Bush allies such as former transitional Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, however, are already bringing his legacy into question. Allawi asserts that governmental abuse of human rights in Iraq today is even worse than in the time of Saddam. If yours truly had said something like that, Jeff Jarvis would have called me pond scum and Andrew Sullivan would have given me a Sontag award. Jarvis and Sullivan were big supporters of Allawi (who is alleged to have been involved in a terrorist attack in Baghdad in the 1990s that blew up a school bus full of children). So what do they have to say now that the bad news is coming from the secular, pro-American politicians and they aren't playing pollyanna any more? By the way, President Jalal Talabani rejected Allawi's charges, but then he heads the government that Allawi is critiquing.

Bush's legacy as a builder of democracy and promoter of rights in Iraq, all he has left going for him, was dealt another black eye by the emergence of a video that appears to show private security guards in Iraq firing at civilian vehicles for sport out on the road to the airport.

Hersh appeared on Wolf Blitzer on Sunday, and Wolf read out this quote from the New Yorker piece by Hersh:

" 'The president is more determined than ever to stay the course,' the former defense official said. 'He doesn't feel any pain. Bush is a believer in the adage, "People may suffer and die, but the Church advances." ' He said that the president had become more detached, leaving more issues to Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney. 'They keep him in the gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway,' the former defense official said."

Hersh goes on to tell Blitzer that Bush disparages any information about Iraq that does not fit his preconceived notions, and that he feels he has a (perhaps divine) mission to bring democracy to the country. Hersh's inside sources paint a president who is detached and in the grip of profound utopian delusions, which Hersh charitably characterizes as "idealistic."

Congress really has to step in here. Senators and representatives should demand that Bush get the ground troops out without turning control of the US air force over to Shiite clerics like Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. Presidents cannot do anything without money, and Congress controls the money. The wiser and more knowledgeable heads on both sides of the aisle have to start telling Bush "No!" when he comes to them asking for another $100 billion so he can level another Sunni Arab city. He is counting on the public punishing "no" votes on military affairs. But the American public would at this point almost certainly be grateful for it. And apart from telling him "No!" they should put strict reporting requirements on how the money is used. For instance, only defensive operations should any longer be funded.

Let me finish with a word to W. As for your legacy two decades from now, George, let me clue you in on something--as a historian. In 20 years no Iraqis will have you on their minds one way or another. Do you think anyone in Egypt or Israel is still grateful to Jimmy Carter for helping bring to an end the cycle of Egyptian-Israeli wars? Jimmy Carter powerfully affected the destinies of all Egyptians and Israelis in that key way. Most people in both countries have probably never heard of him, and certainly no one talks about the first Camp David Accords anymore except as a dry historical subject. The US pro-Israel lobby is so ungrateful that they curse Carter roundly for all the help he gave Israel. Human beings don't have good memories for these things, which is why we have to have professional historians, a handful of people who are obsessed with the subject. And I guarantee you, George, that historians are going to be unkind to you. You went into a major war over a non-existent nuclear weapons program. Presidents' reputations don't survive things like that. Historians are creatures of documents and precision. A wild exaggeration with serious consequences is against everything they stand for as a profession. So forget about history and destiny and the divine will. You are at the helm of the Exxon Valdez and it is headed for the shoals. You can't afford to daydream about future decades.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Rubaie: US will Withdraw Completely from Some Areas
Muqtada offers National Pact

Al-Sharq al-Awsat: Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, national security adviser to the Iraqi government, said Saturday that "The American forces will soon turn over complete and total responsibility for security in a number of areas of the country to Iraqi forces." He said that a joint working committee was formed last summer toward that end. He expressed hope that there would be further turn-overs before the Dec. 15 elections, to deprive the guerrilla movement of its pretext for rejecting the political process, i.e. that it is unfolding under the shadow of foreign military occupation.

It is little noted in the US press that US troops have already withdrawn from the cities of Najaf and Karbala. American forces are also withdrawing from military bases in favor of Iraqis. The somewhat ill-fated US hand-over of Saddam's palace complex in Tikrit to the Iraqi government last week was part of this series of withdrawals (the ceremony took mortar fire).

Coalition forces are likely to withdraw from some 15 other Iraqi cities fairly soon. They appear to initially pull back to a garrison outside the city. But if things stay quiet, it is apparently envisaged by al-Rubaie and other Iraqi government figures that they will depart entire provinces. This process is probably problematic only in about 7 or 8 of Iraq's 18 provinces, where an American withdrawal might well result in a takeover by the neo-Baath and the Salafis, or in a civil war among Sunnis and Shiites. What to do about that in the absence of a well-trained, functioning Iraqi army, none of us really knows.

Al-Hayat: Shaikh Bashir Najafi, one of four Grand Ayatollahs in the Shiite holy city of Najaf south of Baghdad, expressed his support on Saturday for the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite religiious coalition. Najafi, a Pakistani, is slightly junior to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who endorsed the UIA in the elections of last January, but who appears reluctant to do so this time around. Al-Najafi's endorsement is probably a way for the religious leadership in Najaf to make its preference known without having it be binding as a religious duty on the millions of Iraqi Shiites who are pledged blindly to obey (taqlid) Sistani on matters of religious law and comportment.

Ammar al-Hakim, the son of the UIA leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, said that if this list dominates parliament, it will form a government of national unity. He said that it was essential that the Sunni Arabs participate this time to produce a balanced government.

The General Congress of the Iraqi People [Sunni] called on Sunni clerics to support the Iraqi Concord Front, which comprises the most prominent Sunni Arab forces contesting the elections on December 15.

The Washington Post reports that gunmen in Basra kidnapped and killed Shaikh Nadir Karim, a Sunni cleric in the southern port city that is largely Shiite. He is the second Sunni cleric to be killed in a week. There are tens of thousands of Sunnis in Basra, and they have ever since the fall of Saddam felt extremely exposed. Many Shiites see them as having been Baathist supporters of Saddam.

Bombings in Samarra and Baghdad killed and wounded over a dozen persons.

Al-Hayat [Arabic URL]: Young Shiite nationalist Muqtada al-Sadr on Saturday announced his "National Honor Pact" (Newt Gingrich has nothing on this guy). The pact included working to end the foreign military occupation of Iraq, gaining the release of the "sons of the noble Resistance" now in US custody, rejection of normalization of relations with Israel, and implementation of the debaathification law. Other planks are implementation of Islamic law, distribution of Iraq's wealth in accordance with need, and rejection of foreign interference in Iraqi affairs. He said that a Saturday-Sunday weekend off from work should be rejected [in favor of Thursday-Friday, which suits some Muslims better]. The sovereignty and unity of Iraq must be preserved. Judicial and security institutions must be independent. Iraqi loans must be forgiven, and any move to implement a loose federalism must be postponed.

He urged all of Iraq's political parties to adopt the Pact.


Ed Wong of the NYT has a super article on the state of play with regard to Muqtada. Having become part of the Shiite fundamentalist coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, he had become a pivotal political voice. Muqtada wants a swift US withdrawal from Iraq. Although he speaks the language of pan-Islam and Sunni-Shiite ecumenism, his militiamen often kidnap an d/or kill Sunni Arabs they view as having been close to the Saddam regime.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Al-Qaeda Plot Against Tourist Hotels in Morocco Busted Up
2 Suspects had fought in Iraq

Al-Zaman/ AFP: Moroccan security agencies said Saturday that they had foiled a attempt by al-Qaeda to attack buildings belonging to the government as well as hotels frequented by foreign tourists. Two of the plotters had Belgian citizenship but were of Moroccan heritage. They were Khalid Ouzigh and Muhammad Raha, and both of them had fought in Iraq against US forces there! Two others, Ibrahim Bin Shakroun and Muhammad Mazouz, had previously been held in the US detention center at Guantanamo.

One of the 18 was released. Those arrested were between 22 and 25 years of age and have been sent to a prison in Sale.

One security official said, "If it were not for the vigilance of our service and the cooperation with European nations, Morocco would have witnessed a bloody month . . . This is the most dangerous terrorist case in Morocco since the string of attacks that struck Casablanca in May 2003, since elements from abroad attempted to infiltrate the kingdom to prepare the assuaults."

The two Belgian Iraq veterans were apprehended in Casablanca. They had traveled to Morocco "to enlist members for the sake of creating a terrorist structure." The official alleged that Muhammad Raha had fought in Iraq, then lived in Syria, and maintains close relationships with radical Muslims in Morocco and in Europe." They wanted, he said, to create a cell of al-Qaeda in Morocco, then to head toward Algeria to contact the terrorist movements there.

Malikah Azara, the mother of one of the detainees, Umar Takhsawi, expressed surprise at his arrest. She said that there had been nothing in his comportment to provoke suspicion. But she admitted that he had changed recently, had grown a beard and begun buying "religious books."

Police said that the two former inmates at Guantanamo had been arrested when they were observed helping a member of al-Qaeda sneak into Morocco. (One supposes that it was one of the two Belgians. One suspects that former Gitmo prisoners in Morocco pretty much have live-in secret police, and if the jihadis coming from Iraq had one of these former prisoners as their contact, they were doomed the moment they set foot in Casa.)

It is really good news that the arrests were apparently made possible in part because of good cooperation between Morocco and European anti-terror agencies.

Reuters has a few more details.

A Moroccan judge remanded the 17 Muslim radicals arrested earlier in November for further depositions in early December. This is presumably an Agence France Presse report.

At least according to google.news, very few US newspapers picked up this story. I fear that nothing has been learned at all from September 11, and the failures of the US media pointed to by Tom Fenton are continuing on their merry way. The arrest of 17 al-Qaeda-type plotters who may have been going after tourist hotels should have been front page news in the United States. That they got combat experience fighting in Iraq is extremely worrisome and probably is a harbinger of the next generation of terrorist threats to the US and its allies. The sooner the US can get its gound troops out of Iraq, the sooner it will stop unwittingly training terrorists. This is one of those stories about the canary dying as the miner descends into the mine. If the rest of us miners don't hear about it, we're likely to go on down; and not come back up.

La Gazette du Maroc [in French] interviews Abdellatif Amrine, a Salafi arrested in a sweep after the May, 2003, bombings in Casablanca by al-Salafiyah al-Jihadiyah. He has recently been pardoned, and, like everyone in prison, says he was innocent. He is interesting on how it is a mistake to lump the various small radical Muslim groups together or to assume that they are linked. I had assumed that there were links between the Casablanca bombers and the Madrid cell, but he seems to be denying this. I found it interesting that in French Amrine refers to suicide bombers as "kamikazes." It is worth thinking about as a term of art that gets away from any connotation of it having some special link with Islam.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraqi Guerrillas Made Key Demands of CIA at Cairo Conference


Al-Hayat says that [Arabic URL] informed sources maintained to it that the intelligence services of the Arab states, of Iraq, of the guerrilla movement in Iraq, and of the US, conducted discussions on the sidelines of the National Reconciliation Conference for Iraq held recently in Cairo, on how to isolate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his radical Salafi (fundamentalist Sunni) faction in Iraq.

Iraqi guerrilla groups such as "The Islamic Army," "The Bloc of Holy Warriors," and "The Revolution of 1920 Brigades" conveyed their conditions behind the scenes. (Despite the Islamist names of these groups, they are probably mostly neo-Baathist.) Among their demands are 1) working to end the foreign occupation, 2) compensation to the Iraqis for the damages arising from the American invasion; 3) the release of prisoners; and 4) building political and military institutions that are not subservient to American and regional influence.

These guerrilla groups said they would never turn al-Zarqawi over to the Americans even if Washington promised to leave Iraq completely. They might, however, turn him over to a legitimate Iraqi government if the Americans were no longer there.

The Iraqi guerrilla groups maintain that al-Zarqawi's group is fabulously wealthy, and that he uses his wealth to entice other guerrilla groups to share their intelligence with him. He then bankrolls their operations against US troops.

They said that many Iraqi guerrillas are deeply dismayed at the al-Zarqawi group's tactic of targetting civilians and Shiites, and that significant numbers have deserted him to join the Iraqi group, The Islamic Army. Al-Zarqawi's "Qaeda in Mesopotamia" is angry about the desertions and refers to such Iraqis as "apostates." Nevertheless, The Islamic Army provides security to those who have left Zarqawi. Zarqawi is also deterred from killing the "apostates" because it would set the Sunni Arab guerrilla groups to fighting one another and "open the gates of hell." In fact, there had in the past been a few instances of reprisal killings by Zarqawi's men of those who switched groups, and the resulting tensions were so severe that Zarqawi concluded an agreement not to pursue and punish those who left his group to join another one.

The sources say that Zarqawi's ability to provide suicide bombers derives from his missionaries among the Jihadi Salafi groups. It also derives from his vast wealth.

The sources say that the guerrilla movement has not yet taken a stance toward the Cairo Agreements, and is waiting to see if they are implemented.

Cole: It struck many observers as very strange that the government of Ibrahim Jaafari accepted the demand for a timetable for Coalition troop withdrawal, and also acquiesced in the principle that guerrilla attacks on US troops were legitimate as a form of resistance to foreign occupation. Three important developments may explain Jaafari's flexibility here. First, his list has an election on Dec. 15, and he needs to burnish nationalist credentials. Second, his list now included the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, who wants a quick US withdrawal and whose Mahdi Army has clashed with GIs. Third, we now know that back channel negotiations with the guerrilla movement were taking place in Cairo, and these provisions may have been an attempt to reach out to them and bring them in from the cold. Such a move would be in the interest not only of Jaafari, but also of the United States, and the latter may therefore not have protested very much about what were after all pretty painful agreements. (It seems to me unprecedented for a government fighting a guerrilla movement actually to acknowledge the legitimacy of the guerrilla group's attacks on it and its allies!) Al-Hayat thought that the timetable leading to US withdrawal in 2007 was actually put forward by Ambassador Khalilzad.

The tensions, over policy toward civilians and Shiites, and over defections from Zarqawi's group to Iraqi neo-Baathist ones, revealed in the al-Hayat article ring true; there have been some indications of these problems in previous press reporting.

I'm afraid, however, that the neo-Baathists want to take over Iraq, and are ruthless about the means, and that they will continue to want to do this after the US leaves.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Ministry of Interior Moles Busted
Wave of Kidnappings, Killings in Mosul, Tikrit

Al-Zaman: American forces killed Shaikh Abdullah al-Ani, the preacher at the mosque in the town of Qaim, near the Syrian border. [This killing of a respected cleric will be causing us trouble for years to come.]

DPA: Iraqi authorities announced that they had busted up 3 terrorist cells operating in Baghdad. Two of them were being run by 2 officials of the Ministry of the Interior! The MoI in Iraq is equivalent to the US FBI, so this would be like having J. Edgar Hoover unwittingly employ at a high level members of the Weathermen bombers back in the 1960s. The third was being run by the head of an investment firm. You wonder if he was manipulating the market with his bombing targets. The cells were operating in the Ghazaliyah and al-Jihad districts of the capital. Although the announcement was probably made to show progress in identifying and breaking up terror cells, I don't find the news that the Baathists continue to penetrate the Iraqi government very hopeful. It reminds me too much of the ARVN officers who were secretly working for the other side in Vietnam.

Al-Zaman: Guerrillas killed a member of the Kurdistan Democratic Party after kidnapping him in Mosul. The police commander of Ninevah Province announced that bombings had declined 80 percent in Mosul, whereas there had been a big jump in the number of kidnappings. On Wednesday guerrillas had kidnapped a cosmetic surgeon and his wife while they were on their way home.

In Suwayrah, Kut Province, two car bombs were discovered before they could be detonated. (Kut is in southeastern Iraq and has an overwhelmingly Shiite population, who are on the lookout for Baathist saboteurs and willingly turn them in. This willingness is the main difference in the number of bombings in the south as opposed to the center-north of the country.)

In Baghdad Kadhim Talal Husain, assistant dean at the School of Education at Mustansiriyah University, was assassinated with his driver in the Salikh district. Guerrillas killed an engineer, Asi Ali, from Tikrit. They also killed Shaikh Hamid 'Akkab, a clan elder of a branch of the Dulaim tribe in Tikrit. His mother was also killed in the attack. Two other Dulaim leaders have been killed in the past week and a half.

Guerrillas near Hawijah launched an attack that left 6 dead, including 4 Iraqi soldiers. One of them was from the Jubur tribe and was deputy commander of the Hawijah garrison.

Two hundred members of the Batawi clan of the Dulaim demonstrated in Baghdad on Friday, protesting the killing of their clan elder, Shaikh Kadhim Sarhid and 4 of his sons, by gunmen wearing Iraqi army uniforms. (This is a largely Sunni Arab clan, and some Sunni observers have accused Shiite elements in the government of being behind the assassination; it is more likely the work of Sunni Arab guerrillas punishing the Batawi leaders for cooperating with the Dec. 15 elections.)

Al-Zaman: The Iraqi High Electoral Commission on Friday denied a request of the Debaathification Commission to exclude 51 individuals from running on party lists in the Dec. 15 elections on grounds of having been sufficiently involved in Baath activities to warrant their being excluded from civil office. The Commission said it had no legal grounds for such an exclusion.

This item is a small one and easily missed. But in my view it is highly significant. The Debaathification Commission had been pushed by Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress very hard, and had pushed many Sunni Arabs into the arms of the guerrillas. Chalabi has been increasingly marginalized within Iraq, however, despite his ties of clientelage with Washington and Tehran. He is no longer in the dominant Shiite list, the United Iraqi Alliance, and won't have many seats in the new parliament. Some 2,000 junior officers of the old Baath army have been recalled to duty in recent months, something Chalabi would have blocked if he could have. Now the Electoral Commission is refusing to punish people for mere past Baath Party membership. The situation in Iraq is only going to get better this way. If someone committed a crime against humanity, prosecute the person. If he or she did not, then they should have all the same rights as other Iraqis.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that a key eyewitness in the trial of Saddam Hussein for a 1982 massacre at Dujail has died. A team from the court managed to take his deposition before he died. The trial begins again Nov.28.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Britain: Israel Breaking Law, Spreading Terrorism by Jerusalem Policies

The British government presented a secret report to the European Union in which it accused Israel of violating international law and its obligations to the Roadmap by its aggressive annexationist policies in Jerusalem. The Guardian got hold of the document and reports:

"A confidential Foreign Office document accuses Israel of rushing to annex the Arab area of Jerusalem, using illegal Jewish settlement construction and the vast West Bank barrier, in a move to prevent it becoming a Palestinian capital.
In an unusually frank insight into British assessments of Israeli intentions, the document says that Ariel Sharon's government is jeopardising the prospect of a peace agreement by trying to put the future of Arab East Jerusalem beyond negotiation and risks driving Palestinians living in the city into radical groups. The document, obtained by the Guardian, was presented to an EU council of ministers meeting chaired by the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, on Monday with recommendations to counter the Israeli policy, including recognition of Palestinian political activities in East Jerusalem."

This news item makes it worthwhile for me to repost this oldie but goodie. The British report is if anything too conservative in only considering the effect on the Palestinians of their being ethnically cleansed from Jerusalem. When the last Arab is gone and the city is 100 percent Jewish, there is going to be a howl of outrage from the Muslim world that will make September 11 look like a minor incident.

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

Monday, July 11, 2005

Jerusalem and Terrorism

The Ariel Sharon government in Israel has announced that it will build a huge wall on someone else's land through Jerusalem, cutting off 55,000 Arabs from the city (they'll have to go through nasty Israeli checkpoints every day to get into their own city!)

This is land theft on a massive scale. Worse, it is theft on a stage of sacred space that affects the sentiments of over a billion people. Whether Westerners like it or not, Jerusalem is considered by Muslims their third holiest city, and Israeli theft of the whole thing drives a lot of them up the wall. A partitioned Jerusalem where the Arab east is connected to the West Bank is the only route to peace. Sharon in his usual aggressive, grabby way, is trying to make that forever an impossibility.

And, folks, this sort of thing, which the Washington Post didn't even notice, may very well get you and me killed. I think what Sharon is doing is morally and politically wrong to begin with. But I sure as hell resent the possibility that I or my family is going to get blown up because of it.

You want to know what causes terrorism? Well, in part it is caused by deviance, by people so warped that they will take innocent lives in a wicked quest to achieve some political or religious goal. In part, terrorists are like bank robbers. Bank robbers desperatedly want to be rich, but for one reason or another think they are very unlikely to get rich through their ordinary activities. Likewise, terrorists, break the law, both moral and civil, to get what they want. In that sense they are criminals, or, as I say, deviants. But they are not motiveless and do not act out of free-floating generalized hatred for the most part. They have a specific goal in mind.

Terrorism is also caused when one country militarily occupies another country. That is, it is the military occupation that provides a lot of terrorists with their goal (i.e. to free their country from foreign military occupation). Chicago political scientist Robert Pape has shown that the vast majority of suicide bombings in the past 30 years have come in response to foreign military occupation (or what the terorists perceived as such). Back in the late 50s and early 60s, the Algerians and the French were locked in such a struggle. The French killed nearly a million Algerians (in a population of 11 million), and the Algerians blew up a lot of French. When the French recognized Algeria as an independent country in 1962, the struggle quickly subsided and by 1963 Algeria wasn't even a big subject in French newspapers.

The Israeli military occupation of Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza from 1967 has caused an enormous amount of terrorism in the world. It hasn't been the only such source by any means. The Tamil Tigers, a group based in Sri Lanka (used to be called Ceylon), blew up Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and engaged in many other terrorist operations in Sri Lanka and India. It is a Marxist group and in some ways pioneered the suicide bombing. Because Sri Lanka and its concerns seeem so remote to most Americans, most people here don't even know about the Tamil Tigers. But if the US went in and militarily occupied the Tamil parts of Sri Lanka, all of a sudden we'd be seeing bombs go off against US targets. I guarantee it. That is not to say it would be right. But it is to say that that is how reality works (reality cannot be simply manufactured in the White House, contrary to what Scooter Libby thinks).

The Israeli Jerusalem Barrier project will have similar effects. It keeps inside itself a major Israeli settlement on Palestinian land that Sharon has recently announced he will greatly expand (probably using American money at least in part).

Because al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers do not speak in the language of Palestinian nationalism, it has been possible for certain quarters to obscure to the US public that they are absolutely manically fixated on the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem. This is what Bin Laden meant way back in the 1990s when he denounced the foreign military occupation of "the three holy cities." Here is what Bin Laden wrote in 1998 when he declared war on the US:



' Third, if the Americans' aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel's survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula. '



If this is a big part of what is driving the radical Muslim fundamentalists' violence, then Sharon's announcement on Sunday is guaranteed to produce a terrorist strike. If what Sharon is doing were the right thing, morally and politically, then he should do it anyway and we'll just soldier on against the terrorists. But it is wrong in the first place, wrong morally, and wrong in international law and an insult to the United States in completely departing from the roadmap.

How obsessed Bin Laden & company are with what goes on in Palestine is obvious, as I said last week, in the 9/11 commission report:



' According to KSM [Khalid Shaikh Muhammad], Bin Ladin had been urging him to advance the date of the attacks. In 2000, for instance, KSM remembers Bin Ladin pushing him to launch the attacks amid the controversy after then-Israeli opposition party leader Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. KSM claims Bin Ladin told him it would be enough for the hijackers simply to down planes rather than crash them into specific targets. KSM says he resisted the pressure.

KSM claims to have faced similar pressure twice more in 2001.According to him, Bin Ladin wanted the operation carried out on May 12, 2001, seven months to the day after the Cole bombing. KSM adds that the 9/11 attacks had originally been envisioned for May 2001. The second time he was urged to launch the attacks early was in June or July 2001, supposedly after Bin Ladin learned from the media that Sharon would be visiting the White House. On both occasions KSM resisted, asserting that the hijacking teams were not ready. Bin Ladin pressed particularly strongly for the latter date in two letters stressing the need to attack early.The second letter reportedly was delivered by Bin Ladin's son-in-law,Aws al Madani. '



That is why our press and politicians do us an enormous disservice by not putting the Israeli announcement about the Jerusalem Barrier on the front page. This sort of action is a big part of what is driving the terrorists (and of course Sharon himself is a sort of state-backed terrorist anyway). The newspapers and television news departments should be telling us when we are about to be in the cross-fire between the aggressive, expansionist, proto-fascist Likud Coalition and the paranoid, murderous, violent al-Qaeda and its offshoots.

Eisenhower called up DeGaulle and told him to get the hell out of Algeria, on a short timetable, or else. I wish Bush had Eisenhower's spine when it came to dealing with Ariel Sharon.

posted by Juan @ 7/11/2005 11:06:00 AM
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Cruel Thanksgiving in Iraq
Over 50 Dead

Over 50 Iraqis were killed and 47 wounded in separate attacks on Thursday.

In Mahmudiyah just south of Baghdad, a bomber detonated his payload outside a hospital, killing some 30 persons and wounding 27. Among the wounded were 4 US GIs.

AFP reports, "Also, the US military reported the deaths of two servicemen in a roadside bombing southwest of Baghdad, while four American soldiers were killed in a series of incidents on Wednesday."

Shootings and bombings in Hilla, Baghdad, Baiji and Hawijah accounted for the rest of the day's death toll.

Former National Security Council staffer Daniel Benjamin, among the more knowledgeable observers of al-Qaeda in the US, argues that VP Richard Bruce Cheney's nightmare of an al-Qaeda-dominated Sunni Arab heartland in Iraq is just not plausible. All I would add is that the longer US ground troops occupy Sunni Arab territory, the slightly more likely Cheney's scenario becomes. That is, Cheney is making the argument as a reason to keep ground troops in Iraq. It is the other way around, Dick.

Cheney's hard line speeches are no longer playing well in the hustings, in any case. His approval numbers in polls are even lower than Bush's, and Bush's are very low for a president at this stage of his second term.

The Guardian explains more of the background of Bush's plot to bomb the Aljazeera offices in Doha. It was at the height of the fighting in Iraq, both in Fallujah and the Shiite south, in April of 2004, and the Pentagon and Bush were probably afraid of losing Iraq altogether. Aljazeera was getting out the word of high civilian casualties in Fallujah, creating an outcry and prompting threats to resign among the US-appointed Interim Governing Council politicians. The plot is, of course, odious, if the evidence for it stands up, and I would argue that it was criminal. The FBI has busted mafiosi for plotting out murders over spaghetti in restaurants in Queens. How is this different?

Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV has charged that UK PM Tony Blair was duped by the war party in Washington. They promised him a push to disarm Iraq via the United Nations, he argues, but all along intended to have a war into which they would drag the UK, UNSC resolution or no. Wilson is a Washington insider, and his account undoubtedly reflects conversations with officials or former officials in the know.

With kidnappings and killings of foreign workers in Afghanistan on the rise, some observers are worried about it going the way of Iraq.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

White Phosphorus Round-up

George Monbiot of the Guardian weighs in on the current state of the debate on the US military's use of white phosphorus at Fallujah.

I think he is too categorical about many ambiguous issues. Long-time readers know that I am from a military family, and I want to be very careful about charges made against US troops, especially of behaving in ways they knew to have been illegal. Monbiot argues for the latter. I don't think he has proved his case.

By the way, Scott Peterson of CSM went back to Fallujah fairly recently and concluded that "the battle of Fallujah has yet to be won," and that the security situation there is still very chancy.

My own discussion of the white phosphorus issue when it first broke is here. I generally stand by it, though as usual, the US military shot itself in the foot by the way in which it initially denied and then had to acknowledge the story. I should be clear that I think the US ought to sign the protocol banning the use of incendiary bombs, and I oppose their use. The charge that is being made, however, is that WP use is already forbidden in US law and US military regulations by virtue of the chemical weapons ban, and that the US military knew this and employed it anyway.

I said last Friday:

"The US military is puzzled about the outcry over the use of white phosphorus at Fallujah. After all, a 500-pound bomb is also destructive. My guess? You can't go to war against Saddam on the grounds that he has stockpiles of chemical weapons, and then turn around and use incendiary bombs of a sort that much of the world regards as a form of chemical weapon. It is the hypocrisy factor. Not to mention that the international community is trying to get such weapons banned."

This analysis is borne out by the condemnation on Thursday of WP use in Iraq by the Russian Parliament. The parliamentarians said that they “consider the use, under cover of the noble aims of the fight against terrorism, of any type of weapon banned by international conventions, particularly phosphorus bombs, as absolutely unacceptable.”

This is a public relations issue, not an issue of war crimes, as Monbiot and many others apparently want to have it.

On to the article:

*Monbiot maintains that the the Battle Book, published by the US Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, says that use of white phosphorus "against personnel targets" is against the law of war. [Cole: We'd need to see the text, and know more about military procedures, here. Use of incendiary weapons against *civilian* personnel is forbidden. I do not know if the Battle Book really widened it from there, or why, or what its legal standing is to do so.]

*Monbiot argues that although white phosphorus as an incendiary weapon is covered by a protocol that the US has not signed, it does have toxic lung effects that very possibly justify its categorization as a chemical weapon. [Cole: I'm not qualified to pronounce on this subject, but I do not believe any international forum has actually held that white phosphorus is forbidden on grounds of being a chemical weapon. See my posting above for the precise protocols involved. Note that the British have also used WP in Iraq, and Col. Tim Collins defended it on Friday.]

*Monbiot says that there may have been tens of thousands of civilians left in Fallujah when the US launched its assault, which damaged 2/3s of the buildings in the city. Use of thermobaric weapons in such a context is certainly questionable and very possibly illegal. [Cole: I don't think there were as many as 60,000 civilians left in the city at the time the US launched its assault. Most observers thought it was closer to 5,000. Given the immense fire power deployed, civilian casualties would have been much higher if there had been so many civilians left. Moreover, as long as US forces did not actively target civilians with white phosphorus in the assault, they were not acting criminally in the light of US law or military regulations. White phosphorus cannot burn through concrete and wouldn't have been very useful as an assault weapon against guerrillas holed up in such places. It seems to have been used in part to spook them and get them on the run.]

*The evidence given by Italian television channel RAI as to the effects of white phosphorus in Fallujah, of photographs of decomposing bodies, is not dispositive. The bodies pictured are simply what dead bodies look like after a while. [I agree with Monbiot about this.]

*Monbiot accepts journalist and film maker Gabriele Zamparini's characterization of a US Defense Department document he discovered recording a conversation between Kurdish fighters that spoke of Saddam's own use of white phosphorus as "a chemical weapon." [Cole: As many web commentators have pointed out, this document is not a Pentagon-generated report, but simply a Pentagon record of a third-party conversation. No known Pentagon-generated document issuing from the US military characterizes white phosphorus as a chemical weapon.

A big irony: Kurdish troops took part in the Fallujah assault. If the Kurds do want to continue to charge that Saddam was deploying WP as a chemical weapon, then they made themselves open to the same charge from Sunni Arabs in 2004. This irony is also an argument against too much self-righteousness when it comes to Iraq.]

*Monbiot: All this occurs in a context of illegal warfare in general, since the US and Britain had no casus belli for their war on Iraq and it was not authorized by the UN Security Council.

[Cole: I agree that the invasion in 2003 was illegal. However, the assault on the guerrillas in Fallujah was not illegal. It had a UN Security Council resolution behind it authorizing Coalition troops to carry out such operations, and recognizing the transitional government of Iyad Allawi, which also backed the operation. What was done to Fallujah was so horrible that it is now often forgotten that there was every reason to think that the city was a base for the worst kinds of terrorism against innocent civilians in Baghdad and Karbala; there were very bad characters there. Black and white depictions of the Marines as villains and the guerrillas as good guys are silly and morally poisonous. If I had known the full extent of the damage that would be done to the city, I would have been against the Fallujah campaign; it is just terrible counter-insurgency tactics for one thing, and was a humanitarian disaster. But to say that the US military wilfully contravened its own regulations and knowingly broke US and international law on chemical weapons by deploying white phosphorus there would have to be proven from better evidence than has been presented.]

Since exactly what I am arguing seems to be hard for some readers to understand, I just have to repeat that I am challenging the narrative that the US government recognizes white phosphorus as a chemical weapon; that it is so categorized in the convention banning chemical weapons; or that US military commanders deployed it in contravention of US law despite knowing or believing that it was illegal. That is, if you actually put the officers in charge of the operation in the docket, I am saying that no conviction could be obtained. It is worth saying, because allegations to the contrary are being seriously made by serious persons.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Dulaim Chief's Murder Splits Iraqis

Guerrillas detonated another bomb in Baghdad on Tuesday, killing 2 and wounding another 2.

The murder of Khadim Sarhid al-Hamaiyim, leader of a branch of the Dulaim tribe, on the outskirts of Baghdad, has been interpreted in different ways by Iraq's ethnic groups. The hard line Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars pointed out that the attackers had been wearing Iraqi army uniforms, and said that the attack was the work of fanatical Shiites who had infiltrated the Iraqi military. A police major named Falah al-Muhammadawi replied that uniforms are easily bought in today's Iraq, and even official army vehicles are often stolen. Al-Muhammadawi was trying to convince us that the Iraqi army was not behind the killing, but I fear he has only convinced us that the security situation in Baghdad is truly awful.

You could easily construct a narrative wherein al-Hamaiyim was killed by Sunni Arab guerrillas to punish his brother for being willing to run for parliament. The guerrillas have forbidden Sunni Arabs from participating in politics under the shadow of foreign occupation. But it is also possible that Shiite militiamen who had joined the army were extracting revenge for the alliance with Saddam in which some tribal leaders had acquiesced.

Al-Sharq al-Awasat/ AFP is reporting that young Shiite nationalist Muqtada al-Sadr has given blanket permission to his own followers to participate in the elections. He said he hoped that they would hasten the departure of the "Occupying forces."
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bush as Press Assassin?
Baathist in a Mirror

The Mirror broke the story on Tuesday that a secret British memo demonstrates that George W. Bush wanted to bomb Aljazeera's offices in Doha, Qatar, in spring of 2004. The subject came up with Prime Minister Tony Blair of the UK, and Blair is said to have argued Bush out of it.

Despite attempts of British officials to muddy the waters by suggesting that Bush was joking, another official who had seen the memo insisted, "Bush was deadly serious, as was Blair. That much is absolutely clear from the language used by both men."

The US military bombed the Kabul offices of Aljazeera in mid-November, 2001.

The US military hit the Aljazeerah offices in Baghdad on the 9th of April, 2003, a year Bush's conversation with Blair.* That attack killed journalist Tarek Ayoub, who had a 3 year old daughter. He had said earlier, "We've told the Pentagon where all our offices are in Iraq and hung giant banners outside them saying `TV.''' Given what we now know about Bush's intentions, that may have been a mistake.

When the US and the UN shoe-horned old-time CIA asset Iyad Allawi into power as transitional prime minister, he promptly banned Aljazeera in Iraq. The channel still did fair reporting on Iraq, finding ways of buying video film and doing enlightening telephone interviews.

There have long been rumors that the Bush administration has pressured the government of Qatar to close the channel down.

One of the misdeeds attributed to Syria or pro-Syrian forces is the attempt to assassinate the Lebanese journalist and fixture on LBC, the Lebanese satellite channel, May Shidyaq (Chidiac). If the British report is true, Bush really is just a Baathist in the mirror.

Aljazeera is a widely misunderstood Arabic television channel that is mainly characterized by a quaint 1950s-style pan-Arab nationalism. It is not a fundamentalist religious channel, though it does host one old-time Muslim Brother, Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Its main peculiarity in local terms is that it will air all sides of a political issue and allow frank criticism of Middle Eastern politicians as well as of Western ones. It is the only place in the Arab media where one routinely hears Israeli spokesmen (speaking very good Arabic, typically) addressing their concerns and point of view to Arab audiences.

Most of Aljazeera's programming is presented by natty men in business suits or good-looking, chic Arab women in fashionable Western clothes. (I see the anchors every day and am stricken at the idea of them being blown to smithereens by an American "accidental" bombing!) A lot of the programming is Discovery Channel-style documentaries.

The news is often criticial of the United States, though the journalists like controversy and are perfectly capable of asking fundamentalists and nationalists from the region very hard questions. The channel is one of the few places where you can sometimes see frank debate among Sunni Arab, Shiite and Kurdish Iraqis (the Lord knows we don't see it on US news!) Some Aljazeera journalists may have been sympathetic to radical Muslim groups, but mainly on nationalist and anti-imperialist grounds. These people don't look like adherents of political Islam for the most part.

Ironically, after one of the early-morning Aljazeera news broadcasts EST on Wednesday that discussed the Bush plot against the channel, the next show was about recently released American movies, including "Jarhead" (about a Marine during the Gulf War), which showcased the films enthusiastically and may as well have been an infomercial. It was jarring, the effusiveness about American soft power after the admission of the dark side of US military power.

Plotting to assassinate civilian journalists in a friendly country is certainly against the law, and if Bush is ever impeached, this charge will certainly figure in the trial. Who knows, maybe the murder of Tarek Ayoub will be added to the charges. His daughter must be 5, now.

There is a detailed and very valuable timeline of Bush administration- Aljazeera relations at Booman Tribune.

---

*oops, I had misread the date as 2004 in an earlier version
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Massacre in Kirkuk
Bush Suppressed CIA Report exonerating Saddam of al-Qaeda Ties

On Wednesday morning, a shaikh of the Dulaim tribe and 3 sons and a son-in-law were shot dead in West Baghdad. The Dulaim are mostly strong Sunnis and many Dulaim in Anbar province are part of the guerrilla movement.

AP reports that in the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, guerrillas lured police to their deaths on Tuesday. One assassinated a police officer on a busy commercial thoroughfare. When other police rushed to the site, a suicide bomber detonated his payload, killing 21 persons and wounding 24. Half of the dead were police.

Deaths of three more GIs were announced, with two killed by small arms fire in Mosul while on patrol, and another killed on Monday in Habaniyah.

The ceremony held in Tikrit by American officials to turn a palace of Saddam back over to the Iraqi government was ruined by incoming rocket fire. The shells were duds, otherwise the lives of US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and Gen. Casey might have been placed in danger. As it was, they briefly had to take cover in the palace. When the enemy can strike at will this way at the highest representatives of the United States in Iraq, it is just further proof of how out of control the situation is.

Guerrilla violence also broke out in Karbala and Ramadi.

President Jalal Talabani is trying to reach out to Sunni Arab guerrilla forces and may have gotten one leader to come in from the cold. Al-Hayat reports that the other big Kurdish leader, Masoud Barzani, is not happy with this outreach. Hard line Kurds and Shiites see the guerrillas as war criminals and Baathists or radical Salafis who should be fought to the death. Al-Hayat also says that its sources in Baghdad maintain that the United States officials in Iraq are not wild about Talabani's overtures, either.

Big Oil is attempting to lock in highly favorable contracts on the development of new Iraqi fields that would have the effect of robbing the Iraqi public of billions.


Remember how National Security Council adviser Stephen Hadley lamented the inadequacy of US intelligence on Iraq before the war? Well it turns out that the CIA briefed Bush on September 21, 2001, that there was no operational cooperation between Saddam and al-Qaeda. Then Bush refused to give the brief to the Senate Intelligence Committee! And then Hadley blames the CIA for bad intelligence on Iraq before the war? This information was revealed by the National Journal. If I were the National Journal, I'd look into whether the CIA official who told Bush that is still in government employ. The Bush administration has been extremely vindictive toward any government official who bucked its pet projects.

Dr. Amal Kashif al-Ghita, a parliamentarian from Iraq, argues that the big problem facing the country is not sectarian splits but the growing divide between the wealthy and the poor. Although the American tradition of social analysis is often allergic to class analysis, it seems obvious that social class is driving some of the country's conflicts. The battles in Najaf in spring of 2004 were between the urban poor ("the Mahdi Army") and the shopkeeper and entrepreneur class of the pilgrimage city. The Najaf bourgeoisie was happy to have the Marines fight for its interests. They won the struggle for control of the pilgrimage trade, and are now engineering closer relations to Iran, among their primary clients (i.e. pilgrims). This struggle, however, is unlikely actually to be over, which is why you don't see the Najaf wealthy clamoring for a US withdrawal. If Iraq falls further into poverty, social conflicts could well grow.

Iran will export power to Iraq.

Here is a profile of Kristina Borjesson's "Feet to the Fire,", a profile of journalists and bloggers on the failures of the corporate media in the run-up to the Iraq War.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraqis ask for Withdrawal Timetable

AP reports on the results of the Cairo national reconciliation conference, attended by the major Iraqi political factions, including Sunni Arabs.

Al-Hayat gives the orginal Arabic wording of some articles of the agreement. One provision says, "We demand the withdrawal of foreign forces in accordance with a timetable, and the establishment of a national and immediate program for rebuilding the armed forces through drills, preparation and being armed, on a sound basis that will allow it to guard Iraq's borders and to get control of the security situation . . ."

Sources at the conference told al-Hayat that they envisaged the withdrawal of foreign military forces from the cities within 6 months (i.e. mid-May?). They said that the withdrawal would be completed over a period of two years (i.e. November 2007). This timetable, al-Hayat says, appears actually to have been put forward by the Americans themselves. If that is true, we finally know exactly what George W. Bush means by "staying the course." It is a course that takes us to withdrawal.

The Shiite United Iraqi Alliance list had originally called for an American troop withdrawal as part of its party platform, but that plank was opposed by Ibrahim Jaafari, and was dropped even before the January 30 elections, presumably because of American pressure.

The other surprise of the Cairo conference is that the negotiators accepted the right for Iraqi groups to mount an armed resistance against the foreign troops. The participants were careful to condemn universally the killing of innocent non-combatants. They decried "takfir" or declaring a Muslim to be an unbeliever.

The Sunni Arabs appear to have gotten some of the things that they wanted.

At the end of the conference, Shiite leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim said that he would go forward with creating a provincial confederation in the south. (Such a body would have special claims on the petroleum resources of the South.) Sunni leader Harith al-Dhari dissociated himself in the end from that scenario.

Reuters continues to report on the horrific security incidents in Iraq.

The Daou Report covers ten pro-war fallacies.

My only dissent is that I do believe that if the Americans aren't very careful about how they do it, when they withdraw there will be a civil war and possibly a regional war. What Lebanon should have taught us is that when sectarian conflicts develop into guerrilla war, and when the central government and its army are for any reason paralyzed, a conventional war can easily ensue. As for a statute of limitations on "you broke it, you own it," whatever it is it is surely longer than 2 years.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sharon's Critique of the Authoritarian Likud Party

Ariel Sharon's resignation from the Likud Party is a more forceful critique of that party than any I have offered.

Likudniks are notoriously unable to deal with being criticized, so my simple and accurate characterization of the party as having colonialist and fascistic tendencies has driven its acolytes on this side of the Atlantic into a piranha-like frenzy. Being cultists of a sort, they play all sorts of dishonest political games, such as equating criticism of their party with racism (?), or equating their party with Israel itself and then saying that I called Israel a fascist state because I had so characterized the Likud. (I did not, of course, but then the surrogate American Likud has millions of dollars with which to smear me and an easy in with the major media, whereas I just have this little web site; so their megaphone is rather louder than mine.)

It would be rather as though American Latinos should take vehement exception to any criticism of Argentina's colonels and their authoritarian and murderous state in the 1980s. No one ever complains about people "maligning" Argentina, but the Likudniks have an obsession that their party be completely above criticism (or as they would call it, "slander.")

So how delicious it is that Sharon has left the Likud because it is too fascistic even for him! The party's highly authoritarian politburo was an albatross around Sharon's neck. Its strident insistence on continuing to steal Palestinian land and never trading land for peace would have accelerated the engorgement of the West Bank by Israel and the consequent transformation of Israel into a binational state. You can't annex the West Bank without getting a couple of million Palestinians into the bargain. The very hard line Likudniks would deal with that prospect by just ethnically cleansing the Palestinians, but Sharon is enough a man of the world to know that the US (and especially Condi), the European Union, and the Muslim world would never put up with that Milosevic-like war crime.

If Israelis really care about their future, they will swing behind the new Labor leader, Amir Peretz. In fact, a new coalition of those seeking a negotiated settlement with security hawks like Sharon could allow Labor and Sharon's new party to marginalize the "Greater Israel" (i.e. expansionist, colonizing and fascistic) tendency in Israeli politics, which is mainly sited in the Likud.

The lack of a strong Palestinian leader, and Sharon's refusal to deal with the Palestinian leadership that now exists, make it unlikely that there will be real progress on Arab-Israeli peace any time soon. You can't declare peace unilaterally, the way you can war. But if the Likud can be gotten out of office, at least the ruling party in Israel won't be actively attempting to destroy any peace process.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Guest Editorial on Murtha: Achcar & Shalom

"On John Murtha's Position"

by Gilbert Achcar and Stephen R. Shalom

There is much of which to approve in the recent speech of Rep. John P. Murtha, Democrat of Pennsylvania, on Iraq. The hawkish Murtha had been critical of the Bush administration's handling of the war for some time, but until now his solution had been to call for more troops. On November 17, however, he recognized courageously that U.S. troops "can not accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily. IT IS TIME TO BRING THEM HOME."

Murtha pointed out, as the anti-war movement has been pointing out all along, that the U.S. troops in Iraq, rather than adding to stability, "have become a catalyst for violence." He referred to the acknowledgement made by General George W. Casey, commander of the "multinational force" in Iraq, during a hearing before the Armed Services Committee of the U.S. Senate in September 2005, that the presence of "the coalition forces as an occupying force" is "one of the elements that fuels the insurgency."

Murtha pointed out that a recent poll indicated that 80% of Iraqis want the U.S. out. This poll, a secret British defense ministry survey conducted in August 2005, is consistent with earlier polls and several facts: the fact that most slates in the January 2005 election -- including the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), which won the election -- had in their platform the demand for a timetable for the withdrawal of occupation forces from Iraq; a U.S. military poll in February that found only 23% of urban residents supported the presence of coalition troops, compared to 71% opposed; the statement of 126 members of the Iraqi National Assembly, including a majority of the 140 MPs of the majority UIA, demanding "the departure of the occupation force"; and the request made repeatedly by the National Sovereignty Committee of the Iraq National Assembly for a withdrawal timetable for "occupation troops."

There is no guarantee of what would happen in the event of a U.S. withdrawal, but Murtha noted -- as the anti-war movement has argued since the beginning of the occupation -- that the U.S. presence makes an agreement between contending Iraqi forces and the peaceful unfolding of the political process more difficult. For example, the Association of Muslim Scholars, the most prominent Sunni organization with ties to the armed resistance, has repeatedly declared that it would call for a cessation of all armed action if the U.S. and its allies set a timetable for their withdrawal.

Murtha has submitted a resolution to the House calling for the redeployment of U.S. troops from Iraq. That Murtha, a decorated Vietnam combat veteran and one of the most prominent boosters of the military in the Congress, has had it with the war is a telling sign of how badly things are going for the warmongers, and the more representatives who join the 13 co-sponsors of his resolution, the better. Furthermore, one has to sympathize with Murtha, of course, for the abuse that has been heaped upon him by the Bush administration and rightwing ideologues in Congress and the media.

Nevertheless, the anti-war movement needs to be careful not to confuse Murtha's position with its own.

When Murtha says "redeploy" -- instead of withdraw -- the troops from Iraq, he makes clear that -- despite his rhetoric -- he doesn't want to really bring them home, but to station them in the Middle East. As he told Anderson Cooper of CNN:

"We ... have united the Iraqis against us. And so I'm convinced, once we redeploy to Kuwait or to the surrounding area, that it will be much safer. They won't be able to unify against the United States. And then, if we have to go back in, we can go back in."

Moreover, Murtha's resolution calls for the U.S. to create "a quick-reaction U.S. force and an over-the-horizon presence of U.S. Marines" to be "deployed to the region."

We strongly disagree. The anti-war movement cannot endorse U.S. military intervention in the Middle East, whether over or under the horizon. We don't want U.S. troops remaining in the region and poised to go back into Iraq. They don't belong there, period. Some -- though not Murtha -- suggest keeping U.S. bases within Iraq, close to the oil fields or in Kurdistan, in order to intervene more or less on the pattern of what U.S. forces are doing in Afghanistan. But this is a recipe for disaster, since the Iraqi view that the United States intends a permanent occupation is one of the main causes inciting the insurgency.

Moreover, stationing U.S. forces in Kurdistan could only deepen the already dangerous ethnic animosities among Iraqis. In any event, if U.S. troops continue to be used in Iraq -- whether deployed from bases inside the country or from outside -- they will inevitably continue to cause civilian casualties, further provoking violence. Having a U.S. interventionary force stationed in Kuwait or in a similar location will continue to inflame the opposition of Iraqis who will know their sovereignty is still subject to U.S. control. As for the impact of keeping U.S. forces anywhere else in the larger region, it should be recalled that their presence was the decisive factor leading to 9-11 and fuels "global terrorism" in the same way that the U.S. military presence in Iraq "fuels the insurgency" there.

Murtha, we need to keep in mind, is not opposed to U.S. imperial designs or U.S. militarism. He criticizes the Bush administration because its Iraq policies have led to cuts in the (non-Iraq) defense budget, threatening the U.S. ability to maintain "military dominance."

Murtha's resolution calls for redeploying U.S. troops from Iraq "at the earliest practicable date" -- which is reasonable only if it means that the withdrawal should be started immediately and completed shortly after the December elections, with the exact details to be worked out with the elected Iraqi government. In his press conference, however, Murtha estimated it would take six months to carry out the "redeployment," which seems far longer than the "earliest practicable date." (Recall that U.S. troops were withdrawn from Vietnam in 90 days from the signing of the Paris Peace Treaty.) To set such a long time period for the evacuation of Iraq is all the more worrying given that the decision to withdraw the troops is not even being considered yet by the Bush administration or the bipartisan majority of the U.S. Congress.

Congressional Republicans, in a transparent ploy, offered a one-sentence resolution stating that the deployment of U.S. troops in Iraq be terminated immediately. Murtha called this "a ridiculous resolution" that no Democrat would support (Hardball with Chris Matthews, Nov. 18). In point of fact, the resolution was opposed by all of the pro-war Democrats and most of the anti-war Democrats, who (as the Republicans hoped) didn't want to be accused of "cutting and running." But actually the resolution wasn't ridiculous at all understood in the sense we have just explained.

The anti-war movement should and no doubt will relentlessly continue its fight for the immediate, total, and unconditional withdrawal of U.S. troops and their allies from Iraq and the whole region. Its central slogan "Troops Out Now" is more warranted each day and will keep gaining in urgency until victory over the warmongers is achieved.

Gilbert Achcar is the author of The Clash of Barbarisms and Eastern Cauldron, both published by Monthly Review Press. Stephen R. Shalom is the author of Imperial Alibis (South End Press) and Which Side Are You On? An Introduction to Politics (Longman).
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Link Exchange

Courtesy Link Exchange for Informed Comment

Acid Test. Politics and science.

Against the War on Terror.

Amicus For Peace. Christian, Jewish and Muslim Dialogue.

Ansonia Ventures. Political images.

Baker Muckraker. Political comment.

The Blue State: The Daily State of Democracy in America.

The Brand New Bag. Political comment.

Bustard Blog. A Place to Rant.

Clark Schpiell Productions. Hip online magazine with both humorous and serious writing.

Dilby.com. News feeds.

Down With the Man. Up with the people.

Elmer Street Conspiracy: America in Denial.

Future Bureaucrat. Rational Policy for a New Generation.

Kahsoon.com. Addicting Games Funny Junk Video Clips

Empires Fall. Liberal critique of imperialism.

Famous Poets and Poetry

Legends of America.

Letters from Mad Plato.

Mano Singham's Web Journal: Thoughts on science, history and philosophy of science, religion, politics, the media, education, learning, books, and films.

Newsback. A news discussion site.

Nonprofit Blog. News about the nonprofit sector.

Politinotions. Raphie Frank. Left centrist.

The Reaction. Liberal to moderate political blog.

Ring of Fire: Weblog directory.

Search and Go. Special features portal with useful Web tools.

The Skeptical Observer: Political commentary.

Spiderweb. Liberal political commentary.

Straight not Narrow. GLBT equality in church and politics.

Tibetan Aid Project.

Top Ten Sources for Middle East News

Virtual Citizens.

Watchingpolitics.com.


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Blogroll

Political Journalism

Talking Points Memo - Joshua Micah Marshall (Progressive politics, elegantly argued.)

Air America (Progressive Web Site with Radio Stream)

Huffington Post.

Helena Cobban - Just World News (Veteran journalist, Middle East)

The Global Beat: Resources for the Global Journalist

TomDispatch.com (Tom Engelhardt, The Nation Institute)

Majority Report Sam Seder and Janeane Garofalo on the Radio.

Los Angeles Free Press.

Cursor.org Media Patrol

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Salon.com.

The Nation.

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James Wolcott (Progressive Journalism, Media)

One Thousand Reasons. Political journalism from the left.

Weblogs

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Baghdad Burning (Iraqi woman, computer programmer; nationalist)

Best Guess. Middle East coverage.

Calling it Like it Is (Abbas Kadhim, Iraqi Shiite philosopher)

Future of Iraq (portal by Justin Alexander)

Iraq'd (Spencer Ackerman of the New Republic)

Iraq Page.

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Barry Lando. Iraq, Middle East.

Middle East Briefing Book

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Brian Ulrich (Middle East, liberal politics)

Save America: Support our Troops, Bring them Home Now: Speaker's Forum on the Iraq War.

CENTCOM. OK it isn't a weblog, but it is a primary source.

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Future Bureaucrat. Geopolitics.

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International Leadership Forum. Foreign Affairs.

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Pharyngula PZ Myers' Science blog.

Political Site of the Day

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WhirledView. Three women with long foreign affairs experience.

Why Conservatives Can't do Foreign Policy. Jim Bond.

Matthew Yglesias (Philosophy and politics)

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DemocraticUnderground.com (Progressive Discussion, chat)

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Iraqi Army Not Ready for at Least Two Years
Zarqawi's group rejects Talabani Parlay Offer

Violence in Iraq on Sunday left 2 American and one British soldier dead, along with some 12 Iraqis, bringing the weekend death toll to around 120.

An Iraqi poll suggests that a great many Iraqis want Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari to continue in office after the December 15 elections. Jaafari is widely reviled in the street by journalists and cab drivers, but if this poll is right he may be more popular than was earlier believed.

The Washington Post does an overview of the reconstitution of the junior officer corps of the Iraqi military since August, when the government advertised for former officers at or below the rank of major to rejoin the Iraqi army.

Ellen Knickmeyer reports that "The Defense Ministry's call for junior officers from the old army has drawn applications from 3,769 officers, with 2,662 of them accepted . . ." This development of the past 3 months had been little reported. Most of these junior officers presumably fought against the US invasion of Iraq, and they will probably be disproportionately Sunni Arab. (Some 20 percent of Iraqis are Sunni Arab, so if, say, 50 percent of these officers are, that would be disproportionate. There were Shiite officers, though they would have been vetted to make sure they were not from religious families or even provinces.)

One problem this article notes is that a lot of the infantrymen are Kurds, often so young that they mainly grew up under the no-fly zone and the Kurdistan regional government, which did not make schoolchildren learn Arabic. So whether the officers can actually give an order that would be understood is in doubt. And, former ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith, who spent part of the summer in Baghdad observing such things, maintained here not so long ago that there are only really 40,000 Iraqi troops that would amount to much, and we know that most of them could not fight effectively on their own. (The article reports the US estimate of over 100,000 Iraqi troops, which is certainly an exaggeration if one meens by "troops" persons who can and would fight in military encounters.)

Another mystery is why Gen. David Petraeus was transferred back to the US in September. He was the great hope for rebuilding the Iraqi military. Calling back up the junior officers was his idea. But then somehow he was reassigned to the US. This development is strange and has never been explained that I have seen.

And, surely vice premier Ahmad Chalabi and his US neocon allies deeply disliked Petraeus's plan. They were the ones who favored thorough-going de-Baathification. How did the plan nevertheless get implemented? Who is backing it in Iraq? Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari?

The Washington Post ends with a quote from the Sunni Arab captain who had fought against the US in 2003:

"In Taji, Alwan, the Sunni army captain, was ready to set a timeline for significant U.S. withdrawal. "Two years," Alwan said. If the Americans pull out before that -- before the government is steady, the constitution set and the army trained -- it "means we would go to civil conflict," he said."

Meanwhile, President Jalal Talabani said at the Cairo reconciliation conference that he would be willing to meet with leaders of the armed resistance in Iraq, most of them Sunni Arabs.

Al-Quds al-Arabi says that the Sunni fundamentalist fighters immediately denounced Talabani and refused to engage him in a dialogue.

Half of GIs who are medically evacuated from Iraq are suffering from bad backs, according to USA Today. The army has begun deploying chiropractors with the troops.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Zarqawi RIP?

It just does not matter if Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is dead. US troops searched a house in Mosul where guerrillas took their own lives rather than be captured for signs that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi might be among the dead.

A later US press release said that it doubted that al-Zarqawi had been killed.

Meanwhile, Some 57 members of the al-Khalaylah family (al-Zarqawi's real last name) took out a half-page ad in a Jordanian newspaper to denounce their relative, to say that they had cut him off forever, and to declare their allegiance to the Hashemite monarchy.

Thousands of Jordanians protested the hotel bombings, attributed to al-Zarqawi, last last week.

If al-Zarqawi really exists and really does head up a terrorist organization in Iraq, it just probably does not matter so much if he is killed. Talent is a precious commodity, and it could be that he has some, so the death would not be trivial. But Bayan Jabr Sulagh, the Minister of the Interior, put the number of foreign fighters in Iraq at only 900 recently. Even if that is an under-estimation, it is not a huge one. They are mainly cannon fodder. When the volunteers come in, the local ex-Baathist guerrilla leadership gives them a car bomb to drive. It isn't as if the car bombs are being imported from Jordan.

If al-Zarqawi died or were captured, there would be many increasinlgy experienced guerrilla fighters to take his place.

People kept saying that when Saddam was captured, that was the end of the "insurgency." Guerrilla movements, though, are social movements, and do not typically depend on one man.

The US government is still stuck in the "Great Man" mode of historiography, and does not seem to recognize the achievements of the social group.

Nothing much would change if al-Zarqawi were killed, in my view.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

More than 50 Dead in Saturday Bombings

Guerrillas killed 5 GIs and wounded 5 others in Baiji on Saturday with roadside bombs.

They also blew up a market in southern Baghdad near the Diyalah Bridge, killing 13 and wounding 20.

At a funeral in a town northeast of Baghdad for a man killed by suicide bombings on Friday, suicide bombers struck again, killing 35. The Scotsman reports: "Ambulances streamed into the main hospital in Baqouba ferrying the wounded. But the facilities were so crowded that dazed and bloodied survivors lay in agony in the hallways because of the backlog. Doctors and nurses rushed from stretcher to stretcher trying to determine who needed surgery first."

At the Iraqi national reconciliation summit, the Shiite delegation of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq walked out when a Christian Iraqi implied that they were traitors and puppets of the US and alleged that the new Iraqi consitution was written by the Americs. The delegation only returned to the table when it received an apology from their hosts and a pledge that the Christian delegate would be prevented from "abusing the platform."

Another issue that roiled the conference during its first day was the question of withdrawal of US and coalition troops. The Sunni Arabs demanded a timetable for withdrawal. The Shiites did not want to discuss the issue.

On the other hand, Sunni cleric Harith al-Dhari reached an agreement with a leader of the Badr corps (Shiite paramilitary) to investigate the torture and near-starving of nearly 200 mostly Sunni Arab prisoners.

The Iranian foreign ministry said in Cairo Saturday that the problems in Iraq are political, not religious. (There was a time when the Khomeinists refused to make that distinction).\
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Conversation between a Sunni Muslim and a SCIRI Leader

Gilbert Achcar kindly writes:

"AN EXCHANGE BETWEEN SUNNI MUSLIMS AND A SCIRI LEADER

On the occasion of the Iraqi conference to be held in Cairo under the auspices of the League of Arab states, IslamOnline—a website related to the pan-Islamic (Sunni) Muslim Brotherhood—invited Dr. Ali al-Adad, a prominent member of the [Shiite] Central Council of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), to a live exchange with its readers in one of the online discussions that the website organizes regularly on very diverse issues. The exchange took place on November 17, and is posted in Arabic on IslamOnline.net.

It is an interesting document since it is rare to find the record of such a frank and direct exchange. It gives a view (rare in the Western media) of the discourse addressed by the SCIRI, the most prominent Iraqi Shiite organization closely linked to Iran, to Muslim audiences, including its own Iraqi constituency. It is, of course, quite different from the discourse held by those SCIRI members who are appointed to the task of dealing with the US, like Iraqi Vice-President Adel Abdul-Mahdi who visited Washington recently.

I have excerpted and translated what follows.

Gilbert Achcar"

….
Q: It is said that the [Cairo] conference is backed by the US in order to control the situation in Iraq and overcome the valiant Iraqi resistance in the name of opposing terrorism. How do you assess this view? Is the national entente [between Iraqis] going to allow the resistance to act against the occupiers only, or will it contribute to make the situation in Iraq comfortable for the Americans and exclude the prospect of a timetable for the withdrawal [of occupation troops]?

A: It is true that the Americans need the Arab governments to take a positive stand toward the situation in Iraq, but the Iraqis and the Iraqi government and patriotic Iraqi forces need to be integrated in the Arab League and in the Arab nation and Arab people so that they join the Iraqi people and support it in building Iraqi unity.
There is no disagreement on the stance toward American soldiers. All Iraqi forces, Shiite, Sunni and Kurds, want a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign troops. There is no disagreement on this issue, but there are major reservations on the military operations of the so-called armed resistance since they are not only targeting the Americans, but have undertaken operations of mass murder and ugly crimes against women and children under criminal sectarian slogans, while declaring the overwhelming majority of the Iraqi people to be unbelievers [takfir].

This is why we cannot accept this insane criminal resistance to participate in the talks. We want these criminal forces to be definitively isolated by the unity of Arabs, Shiites and Sunnis, and Kurds, and all other minorities, in building a democratic Iraq that refuses sectarianism and rejects the attribution of posts on a sectarian basis instead of attributing them on a positive basis of competence for the building of a unified Iraq for all.
…

Q: Mr. Ali al-Adad, do you have a timetable for the withdrawal of occupation forces from Iraq? What is your position on the Iraqi resistance? Do you put it in the category of terrorism?

A: The political forces that will participate in the forthcoming [December 15 parliamentary] election, and in particular the [United Iraqi] Alliance’s slate that includes 17 movements and parties, the majority of whom are Shiites, agreed that the first demand on their political program is getting foreign troops out of Iraq, by setting a timetable for the evacuation of these troops. The second demand on their political program is the rapid and strong building of interior security forces so that they assume the defense of the country and take hold of all the territory including the borders, so that there remains no justification for the presence of foreign troops . . .

[The reply to the second part of the above question reiterates what was said already.]
…

Q: As-Salam alaikum, the head of the previous regime was a “Sunni,” and the Sunnis, and I am one of them, used to like the Shiites, and I have never felt that there was a discrimination against them or acceptance of an injustice that hurts them whether from the head of the regime or from his ministers.

Today the head of the ruling regime is very much Shiite, a Jaafari [the last name of the Iraqi Prime Minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, is also the name of the majority doctrine of Shiism]. Now that a little part has been uncovered of the hidden savage repressive practices denounced for long by the Sunni representatives and freely practiced by the Ministry of Interior, which is headed by a member of your [Supreme] Council, and by the apparatuses of the [SCIRI’s] Badr militia against the Sunnis:

1-Do you believe that an entente is possible without a clear position and sanction on this?

2-Will the actions undertaken by the resistance against the apparatuses and members of the Ministry [of Interior] continue to be characterized as terrorist—as all Iraqi Shiites like to call them today, and they even call the resistance against the occupation terrorism—especially that the little uncovered of what is hidden has been uncovered by your American ally itself? Please reply without beating around the bush.

A: This is a [false] allegation made by the dear brother. The previous regime—actually the Iraqi state since its foundation in 1923 has been built on a basis of sectarian discrimination—only three percent of cadets admitted to the military academy were Shiites, whereas 97% of the officers are Sunnis.

On the other hand, there was no law or legislation in the previous governments giving their rights to the absolute majority of Iraqis, [the Shiites] who are 65% of the population; there were not even official holidays on their religious celebration days.

Security and intelligence [mukhabarat] services in Iraq under Saddam were monopolized by Sunni only officers; Shiites were only a tiny minority among Ambassadors and high-ranking officials in the state.

Nevertheless, the Shiites and Kurds, despite their tragic situation, did not protest against the sectarian practices of the regime. They rebelled against oppression and mass extermination affecting all Iraqis, including Arab Sunnis. On one single day in 1998, the [previous] regime executed 83 [Sunni] scholars in the Western region of Iraq: no one escaped from the previous regime, whether Sunni, Shiite or Kurd.
The present regime in Iraq, when it was constituted, started to build its national institutions representing all Iraqis. Thus we find in the National Assembly Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs and Kurds and minorities, and all are part of the Iraqi government without sectarian discrimination. One of the main ministries in the Iraqi government, the Ministry of Defense, a power ministry of course, is headed by brother Saadun al-Dulaimi, an Arab Sunni.

On the other hand, we must also point to the fact that the Kurds who head other power ministries, like Foreign Affairs, Commerce and Plan, are Sunni Kurds, and not Shiite Kurds.

The recent incident in al-Jaderiya [the intervention by US troops in a location under Ministry of Interior control, where tortured prisoners were held] is a pretext used to question the legitimacy of the noblest and most honorable regime freely and democratically chosen by the Iraqis. The truth on what is said about al-Jaderiyya will be revealed after the investigation.

What is important is that all should know that there are daily operations of extermination and mass murder using bomb cars perpetrated by criminal Ba’athists and Takfeeris [Sunni Islamic fanatics] in Iraq, and we have not heard a condemnation of these acts from some Arab brothers abroad who know quite well what Saddam’s regime used to do and what criminals belonging to Saddam’s bunch are doing today.

Q: As-Salam alaikum, what if the uncovering of the cave controlled by the Ministry of Interior was the beginning of an American about-face against the Shiites in Iraq—will armed action become resistance [in your view] and one of your options?

A: From the start of the military operations of foreign troops, the Supreme Commander of the Islamic Revolution, the martyr Sayyid Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim [assassinated in an mass-murderous attack in Najaf in August 2003; he was succeeded by his brother, an Ayatollah like him, at the head of SCIRI] proclaimed his refusal that foreign troops enter Iraq. When this became an accomplished fact, and foreign troops entered, we proclaimed Jihad against these troops.

But when the American and British governments announced their intention of starting a political dialogue about the new Iraq on the basis of a timetable for the political process, to be followed by a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign troops, all under the auspices of UN Security Council resolutions, it became our duty [to act] in light of the Sharia rule that says oblige them by what they committed themselves to do, and we started peaceful resistance. Dialogue started and we began to create national institutions until we got our right to establish an elected national government, whose sovereignty has been recognized by the UN and Security Council resolutions. We will pursue that in the next government after the forthcoming elections by fixing a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign troops making sure that our armed forces have achieved full ability to defend our country and keep it secure.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

What to Do if this Page is Old

Readers sometimes have difficulty seeing recent postings. There are always recent postings. If your browser is showing a posting from several days ago, that is an error.

The first and best thing to do in this situation is to push the "refresh" or "reload" button on your browser. Sometimes browsers cache an earlier version of the site and somehow get stuck.

If that does not work, try going in Internet Explorer to tools/internet options and delete cookies, delete files and clear history. In Mozilla/ Firefox go to Edit/ preferences and clear history.

Then save, close and try again, and try the refresh or reload button again.

If all this effort does not bear fruit, scroll down the right banner and find "Feed Burner RSS". It should show all recent postings via RSS syndication regardless of cache problems.

I have put commands in the template forbidding browsers to cache the page, which appears to have helped, but the commands apparently do not always work. I am reluctant to put in an auto-refresh command because it is a hassle for people with slow connections to have the page reload from time to time.


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Straw Man Resolution in Congress:
Joking around with the Lives of the Troops

Brad Blog gives the text of Democratic congressman and retired Marine Colonel John Murtha's resolution on Iraq:

Therefore be it Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of American in Congress assembled, That:

Section 1. The deployment of United States Forces in Iraq, by direction of Congress, is hereby terminated and forces involved are to be redeployed at the earliest practicable date.

Section 2. A quick-reaction U.S. force and an over-the-horizon presence of U.S. Marines shall be deployed in the region.

Section 3. The United States of America shall pursue security and stability in Iraq through diplomacy.

By the way, Murtha's plan resembles in some ways the one I myself had put forward last last August. I am pleased to see that someone with substantial military experience is thinking along similar lines. Murtha called for an end to US military "action" in Iraq, as in, presumably, the counter-productive destruction of cities such as Fallujah, Tal Afar and Husaybah.

Note that Murtha calls for a withdrawal ("redeployment") of US ground troops from Iraq at the earliest date that would be practical. That is, he is not saying that you could get them out tomorrow. "Practicality" would involve considerations such as not having Iraq collapse altogether.

This is what I had said:

' 1) US ground troops should be withdrawn ASAP from urban areas as a first step. Iraqi police will just have to do the policing . . . 2) In the second phase of withdrawal, most US ground troops would steadily be brought out of Iraq.'

Note further that Murtha foresees a US quick-reaction force being left in theater. You could imagine it being based in two places: Kurdistan in the north and Kuwait in the south. I have argued for a similar force, which could intervene if set-piece battles broke out and Iraq looked as though it was falling into large-scale civil war. (Indeed, this is just the sort of light, mobile special ops force that SecDef Donald Rumsfeld says is the future of the US military).

I had suggested,

'3) For as long as the elected Iraqi government wanted it, the US would offer the new Iraqi military and security forces close air support in any firefight they have with guerrilla or other rebellious forces . . . 4) With the agreement of the elected Iraqi government, the US would prevent any guerrilla force from fielding any large number of fighters for set piece battles.'

Murtha is not giving up on Iraq, just urging diplomacy rather than white phosphorus and prison torture as the way forward.

I had written,

'The US should demand as a quid pro quo for further help that the Iraqi government announce an amnesty for all former Baath Party members who cannot be proven to have committed serious crimes, including crimes against humanity . . . The US should join the regular meetings of the foreign ministers of Iraq's neighbors, with Condi Rice in attendance, along with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, employing a 6 + 2 diplomatic track to help put Iraq back on its feet through diplomacy and multilateral aid. '

Murtha was viciously attacked for his judicious resolution, and this courageous and honorable man was smeared as some sort of coward by persons who wouldn't know an M-16 from a 5 iron.

Ironically enough, General Casey was at the same time giving Rumsfeld a plan for US troop withdrawal! Its terms?

' The plan, which would withdraw a limited amount of troops during 2006, requires that a host of milestones be reached before troops are withdrawn. Top Pentagon officials have repeatedly discussed some of those milestones: Iraqi troops must demonstrate that they can handle security without U.S. help; the country's political process must be strong; and reconstruction and economic conditions must show signs of stability. '

In other words, the troops would be withdrawn as soon as practicable, and practicality is spelled out in these ways.

All Murtha is saying is that Casey's plan should be speeded up, and that dependence on a big infantry force on the ground should be replaced by quick reaction forces based nearby. The argument, in short, is not about the preconditions for withdrawal but about its exact shape and rate.

Republicans in Congress responded to Murtha's considered plan by introducing a phony resolution the bore little resemblance to Murtha's, and then helping defeat it overwhelmingly. The intent was apparently to force the Democrats either to look as though they were in favor of "cutting and running" or to vote against immediately withdrawing US troops and so associating themselves with Bush's 'stay the course' policy. The Republican straw man resolution was:

' Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the deployment of United States forces in Iraq be terminated immediately.

1 Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that the deployment of United States forces in Iraq be terminated immediately. '

Well, this stupid resolution is not what Murtha was saying, and the vote on it is meaningless. It is worse than meaningless. It is political clowning.

Indeed, given the GIs being blown up on a daily basis, the Republican phony resolution was the equivalent of trying to do a stand-up comedy routine at the funeral of someone's beloved son who had died at age 20.

I don't think the American people will find it amusing. We'll see in 2006 whether they did.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Dozens Dead in another Black Friday
Shiite Worshippers Massacred


Suicide bombers went into two Shiite religious centers [Husayniyyahs] in Khaniqin northeast of Baghdad on Friday at the time of noon Friday prayers in congregation, and detonated their bombs. The death toll as of late Friday was being reported as 82 in the Western wire services. Al-Zaman says 100 were killed and 85 wounded. Relatives were combing through the rubble looking for loved ones. The religious centers belonged to Faili Kurds, a Shiite minority among the Kurds. Many Failis had fled from Diyala province to Iran during the time of Saddam, but tens of thousands are said to have returned since 2003. (The AP story giving the name of one of the wounded as "Omar" is a mistake; perhaps it was `Amr. Omar is a Sunni name and not one that typically would be carried by a Shiite).

The head of the municipal council in Diyalah province, Ibrahim Hasan al-Bajilan, announced that a curfew had been imposed on the city of Khaniqin [before the attacks] because information had been received warning of car bombings.

Elsewhere in Diyalah, a car bomb aimed at a passing military convoy wounded 4 Iraqis.

In a separate incident, guerrillas targeted the Hamra hotel, where numerous Western news crews are based. One minibus was detonated outside a security wall, blowing a hole in it that allowed another vehicle to enter. The second vehicle still could not get very near the Hamra Hotel, though the huge explosion that ensued did blow out windows, do damage, and knock back NBC and Boston Globe reporters. The main damage was done to surrounding civilian Iraqi residences, including an apartment complex.

In Ramadi, guerrillas launched a coordinated series of armed attacks on military targets, eliciting a counter-attack by US and Iraqi forces that killed 32 of the guerrillas.

Guerrillas kidnapped Tawfiq al-Yasiri, the head of the Sun of Iraq political list, which is running for parliament in the Dec. 15 elections.

In Dur, just north of Samarra, a funeral was held for Muzahim Abdul Latif, who was killed by American forces while he was walking in the streets of the city.

Some 70 Iraqis are attending a conference on national dialogue and reconciliation in Cairo, which begins its work on Saturday. President Hosni Mubarak opened the conference with a speech on Friday. The president of Algeria, Abdul Aziz Boutefliqah attended in his capacity as head of the Arab summit, along with the foreign ministers of 8 Arab nations (Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Algeria, Egypt). European and United Nations officials were also there. It was unclear whether the Americans and multinational forces would be represented, or how.

Some officials who would only speak off the record to al-Zaman pointed out that other national reconciliation conferences have included both sides in the conflict and sought compromise. This conference, they said, would be more procedural than substantive (since the Baathists and fundamentalist Sunni Salafis are not well represented--though Harith al-Dhari, head of the Association of Muslim Scholars, is in attendance.) The consensus was that one should not expect too much from the conference.

Ali Larijani, the head of Iran's National Security Council, met with Muwwafaq al-Rubaie, Iraq's national security advisor, and the two countries signed an agreement that would ease conditions for Shiite pilgrims to holy sites in Iraq and would provide for closer cooperation in fighting terrorism.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Blowing in the Wind

In the background of today's entries, Bob Dylan's "blowing in the wind" is playing.

How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man?

In response to the call for a withdrawal of US troops from Iraq by a retired marine colonel, decorated Vietnam War veteran and Democratic Congressman, John Murtha, White House Spokesman Scott McClellan implied that Murtha was advocating a "surrender to the terrorists." McClellan is not a veteran of any war, and nor are his bosses, George W. Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney (the latter actively sought 5 deferrals from serving in Vietnam).

Yes, 'n' how many seas must a white dove sail
Before she sleeps in the sand?

Peace activist and mother of a GI killed in action in Iraq, Cindy Sheehan, was fined $75 for demonstrating without a permit outside the White House.

Yes, 'n' how many times must the cannon balls fly
Before they're forever banned?

The US military is puzzled about the outcry over the use of white phosphorus at Fallujah. After all, a 500-pound bomb is also destructive. My guess? You can't go to war against Saddam on the grounds that he has stockpiles of chemical weapons, and then turn around and use incendiary bombs of a sort that much of the world regards as a form of chemical weapon. It is the hypocrisy factor. Not to mention that the international community is trying to get such weapons banned.

. . . Yes, 'n' how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?

Over two hundred years after the Founding Fathers banned "cruel and unusual punishment," the Congress is considering banning the use of torture on detainees of the US. A no-brainer? Sure. But George W. Bush is threatening to veto the measure.

Yes, 'n' how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?

Some 62 percent of Americans think Bush is doing a poor job in Iraq. In another poll, A majority of Americans gives Bush a "D" or an "F" for his handling of Iraq, and only a third thinks he is doing an above-average job there. (What would establish the "average" for the US running other countries? The Philippines? Vietnam? Central America? In which of them has US imperialism not been a disaster?) A majority of Americans now wants a timetable for US withdrawal (this is the stance of the Sunni Arabs in Iraq!), while 41 percent are willing to stay "for as long as it takes." That number will shrink.

Revulsion at the quagmire in Iraq is producing a new isolationism in the American public rivalling the mood in the post-Vietnam period, according to a Pew poll. A good sign: Two-thirds of the respondents felt comfortable with the US acting in concert with international partners.

How many years can a mountain exist
Before it's washed to the sea?

Bush's approval ratings are in free-fall! He is down to a 34 percent approval rating. Only Nixon in the last days of Watergate was doing worse. Seriously, I am worried about these numbers. At some point, the executive will stop being able to govern. Bush has been a disastrous president, but a country without any executive at all can be in real trouble (ask the Iraqis). It raises the question of whether the Dems can pull off a miracle and take the House of Representatives in 2006 (not at all likely, but not impossible), and whether if that happened there would be an impeachment.

Yes, 'n' how many years can some people exist
Before they're allowed to be free? . . .

The US has detained around 83,000 persons during the four years of the "war on terror," most of them in Iraq. Some 14,500 remain in detention there. Many detainees are not actually guilty of anything, but have difficulty obtaining their release once taken into custody. There have been many instances of torture or at least of cruel and unusual punishment while these persons were in US custody.

The US is probing Iraqi-run detention sites, including Ministry of Interior secret jails where mainly Sunni Arab detainees have been tortured by Shiite special police, some of them from the Badr Corps, a Shiite paramilitary trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind . . .
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

The Skin is Peeling off the New Iraq: White Phosphorus and Torture

Al-Quds al-Arabi: First, the Pentagon was forced to admit that it had in fact used white phosphorus as a weapon (and not just as a smokescreen) in Fallujah, though it insisted that it was used only against combatants, not civilians. (When you attack a civilian city, how could you be sure who was who?)

Then there was more bad news when 8 GIs were killed within 24 hours. They included 5 Marines killed while fighting in al-Ubaidi in western Iraq near the Syrian border. The Marines killed 16 guerrillas in the battle. Also on Wednesday, the US Department of Defense announced that 3 GIs were killed in a roadside bombing in Baghdad.

In a third wave of bad news, the scandal of the tortured Iraqi prisoners has continued to grow. The Iraqi Islamic Party demanded an international investigation, and also called on Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the spiritual guide of the Shiites, to condemn the torture. Most of the men who were mistreated and half-starved were Sunni Arabs, and they were in the custody of the Ministry of the Interior, which is dominated by the Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Although some Sunni Arabs have some influnce in the ministry, efforts are being made by the Badr Corps Shiite paramilitary of SCIRI to infiltrate the special police brigades run by the ministry of the interior.

A UN torture investigator concurred on Wednesday that an independent, international investigation into Iraqi torture was necessary.

A man who had been tortured gave an interview in which he alleged having been painfully suspended from the ceiling while blindfolded, and having been taunted by Ministry of Interior forces, themselves Shiites, as a "Sunni dog". Other prisoners alleged that they had suffered from extreme hunger and had been beaten.

(The case will inevitably remind readers of the American Abu Ghraib scandal, about which there is now a new CBC documentary being diaried at Kos, which will be available online.)

Sunni Arab families flocked to the Ministry of Interior in hopes of finding their missing relatives among the 170 mistreated prisoners, whose whereabouts were secret until a US military unit discovered them after Iraqis complained about the notorious bunker. The US in Iraq also often makes Iraqi prisoners disappear for extended periods without notifying next of kin.

The Sunni-Shiite dimension of the torture scandal will be bad for relations that are already strained. The Times of London further reports that Shiite court clerks attacked and punched Saddam Hussein last summer when he spoke disparagingly of Imam Husain and his sibling Abu al-Fadl Abbas. Shiites honor Husain--the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad who led a failed revolt against the Umayyad caliph Yazid--as a martyr. Most Sunnis also honor Husain, but some Wahhabis and secularists have criticized him (he was after all the leader of a revolt that seemed to fail in the outward world). Since Husain died fighting for his cause, he is a standing rebuke to the cowardly Saddam, and this unfavorable comparison may lie behind Saddam's blasphemy.

As Newsday reports, many Sunni Arabs entertain the suspicion that the Ministry of Interior special police units are American-backed death squads.

Al-Quds al-Arabi did not mention it, but there actually was a fourth blow against the Bush administration's Iraq misadventure on Wednesday. A major contracting scandal is breaking that involves enormous graft on the part of officials of the Coalition Provisional Administration, the American government of Iraq in 2003-2004:

' The complaint accuses an American-Romanian businessman, Philip H. Bloom, of paying officials from the coalition’s south-central region "bribes, kickbacks and gratuities, amounting to at least $200,000 per month," in order to obtain reconstruction contracts through a bid-rigging scam . . . A government affidavit alleges that in one instance, the officials rigged bids for contracts in Hillah and Karbala, two cities 50 to 60 miles south of Baghdad. In some cases, Bloom’s companies performed no work . . . Bloom or companies he controls made bank deposits of $353,000 on behalf of at least two CPA officials and bought them real estate in North Carolina as well as vehicles and jewelry worth more than $280,000 in 2004 and 2005 '

This case is unlikely to be the last concerning the scandal-ridden and unbelievably corrupt and inept CPA. By the way, it never had any legal authorization in US law. The imperial presidency has reached the point where the White House can just informally and by fiat create the government of another country, for all the world like George III. That other George, Washington, is spinning in his grave. The offer of a crown was harder for yet another George, more like the III than the first, to resist.

Vice President Dick Cheney, who dishonestly manipulated the intelligence about Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction," attacked his critics for saying that he had dishonestly manipulated the intelligence about Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction." He accused the Democrats of "losing their backbone" for criticizing him. Cheney is increasingly confused. Dick, when the opposing party criticizes the sitting government, that is a sign of backbone. When they went along with your fantasies about a torrid three-way between Bin Laden, Saddam and Zarqawi on top of an Iraqi nuke in an underground bunker, that was when they were choosing the better part of valor.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Woodward and Insider Trading

Bob Woodward, who as a young man exposed the Watergate burglaries has now become wrapped up in a scandal himself. He did not tell his employers at the Washington Post that he had been leaked to in the Plame affair. It turns out that a high White House official told Woodward that Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, worked for the CIA, in June of 2003. Woodward made a deposition to this effect before Fitzgerald on Monday, having been released from his vow of confidentiality by the source for that purpose, even though he was not given permission to discuss the source publicly. Fitzgerald sought the deposition after the high official him- or herself told the special prosecutor of the conversation.

The source was not Irving Lewis Libby, who has been charged with perjury and obstruction of justice in the case, or Karl Rove, who leaked to other reporters. Woodward says he did not disclose the conversation to his employer because he was afraid of compromising the confidentiality of his source.

But it is at least plausible that for a high White House official to tell Woodward that Valerie Plame Wilson was a CIA operative was a crime. It does not matter if Woodward knew she was undercover. It matters whether the leaker knew it, or could reasonably be expected to have inferred it from her employment in the directorate of operations. For Woodward to cover this leak up is no different from a reporter witnessing a burglary and covering that up. ("Burglary": get it?)

Larry Johnson pointed out a couple of weeks ago at tpmcafe that Woodward has increasingly become lost in cronyism, and has been an apologist for the dirty tricks of the White House Iraq Group, which appears to have deliberately outed Plame Wilson in order to punish her husband, Wilson, for blowing the whistle on the Bush administration's hyping of Iraq WMD intelligence.

The defense lawyers for Libby immediately claimed that the new information helped their client. In order to grasp this absurdity, you have to understand that for some attorneys, any proposition may be put forward as long as it has not been explicitly rejected by the relevant court. That is, some lawyers would be perfectly happy to argue that water is dry, and has not been ruled wet by any court of law, and that moreover anyone who criticizes them for so alleging is guilty of copyright infringement and very possibly also of sodomy, until those allegations are ruled on in court.

I remember when I translated Kahlil Gibran's early Arabic works, which had been published in 1905-1915, I had first checked that they were out of copyright (they were). But nevertheless I got a letter from some lawyer representing a member of the Gibran family alleging that these works "might be in copyright." He knew very well this was untrue. But if the letter could scare me into giving up the project, it would have accomplished its goal. It does not matter to those less principled folks that their assertions are false; they are speaking instrumentally, for the accomplishment of some purpose, not to express the truth. (Likewise with the recent assertions in certain quarters that I don't know Arabic, which would have made it difficult for me to pull off those translations, much less all the other books I've written out of difficult Arabic archival and manuscript sources; look into it and you'll find some lawyer put them up to saying it. I'd have to find a judge who knew Arabic even to challenge the stupid libel.)

In fact, the rather bizarre world of political discourse in Washington, DC, in which all sorts of untrue and faintly ridiculous allegations are routinely made, grows directly out of the unreal discourse of the less principled trial lawyers. So politicians (mostly lawyers) alleged to us that Iraq was on the verge of having a nuclear bomb, while in fact Iraq was not even on the verge of having one of those old Mickey Mouse watches that glowed in the dark because they were painted with radium.

Libby has been charged with perjury and obstruction of justice among other charges. He lied to the grand jury on more than one occasion. He said that a journalist told him that Plame Wilson worked for the CIA. This allegation was not true, and nothing Woodward said on Wednesday changes its falsity. Fitzgerald did not charge Libby with speaking to Woodward, or with being the first to leak Plame Wilson's name, or anything else affected by Woodward's minor revelation.

As for Woodward's trivialization of the outing of an undercover CIA operative, it is vileness itself. Arthur Silber is eloquent on the ironies of liberals defending the CIA and conservatives dismissing the significance of Plame Wilson's outing. He cites Steve Weissman's fine article on CIA turncoat Philip Agee and other outers, including, Norman Mailer (who later wrote a novel, Harlot's Ghost, about the agency). All of Plame Wilson's close contacts came under scrutiny by their Third World governments, and for all we know some are no longer with us. (One of Woodward's most abject lies is that the CIA looked into this matter and was reassured; it did not and it isn't, and neither should we be.)

I don't think that the real scandal here is the outing of an undercover operative, however despicable that was. It is the purpose for which she was outed, and the likely consequences. The purpose was petty political revenge. The likely consequence is to make it harder to recruit high-powered people into the agency, so as to improve its ability to take on the hard challenges that the US now faces in the age of asymmetrical warfare.

What Libby, Rove and others did was the equivalent of stock brokers engaging in insider trading. If very many stock brokers did that very often (or if investors became convinced that this was the case), the whole system would collapse. It is an architectonic crime, having to do with the holistic architecture of an entire industry. Likewise, if very many politicians misuse their security clearances to play politics with the lives of covert operatives, it would pulverize the intelligence business. You don't have to be a fan of all the agency's activities to want it to capture Bin Laden and Zawahiri before they blow us up. Libby, Rove and others impeded that effort by harming morale and hurting the ability of the agency to assure its own contacts and clients of confidentiality.

----

PS The original version of this posting was insufficiently careful to distinguish between attorneys of principle and those that lack it. I apologize to the former.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraqi Prisoner Abuse
Preparations for Cairo Conference

Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari revealed Tuesday that nearly 200 prisoners detained by the Ministry of the Interior had been discovered to have been tortured and half-starved.

The State Department spokesman alleged that the US does not practice torture! And said it did not expect others to do so. But surely Abu Ghraib was a signal to the Iraqi secret police as to what was permissible.

Jaafari's revelations may be part of an internal power struggle in the Iraqi government. The Ministry of the Interior is dominated by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a fundamentalist Shiite party. It is a coalition partner but also a rival of Jaafari's Dawa Party. SCIRI is alleged to have packed the secret police with members of its paramilitary, the Badr Corps, who were trained by the Revolutionary Guards in Iran. Sunni Arabs are accusing Badr of being behind the torture of the prisoners.

The incident (surely one of many) is a further indication that just holding elections does not create democracies.

Even Republican senators are becoming impatient for Bush to present them with regular reports on the situation in Iraq and his plans to extricate the US from the morass. A Democratic push for a timetable for withdrawal of US troops was sidestepped, but the Senate's new reporting requirements are the first direct intervention in Iraq War policy from Capitol Hill, which has consistently deferred to the imperial presidency since 9/11.

A majority of Americans believes that Vice President Dick Cheney manipulated the intelligence on Iraq before the war. Hmmm. They noticed, at last.

There were further bombings and attacks in Kirkuk and Baghdad on Tuesday, killing Iraqi police in each case. The US continued its operations near Syria, killing and capturing more Sunni Arabs accused of forming part of the guerrilla movement. But the US asserttion that these sweeps will increase Sunni Arab participation in the December 15 elections is not plausible.

A roadside bomb killed 3 GIs in the north of Baghdad on Tuesday. Another three US troops have been killed in the previous two days.

The Baathist regional commander in Diyala Province was captured on Nov. 9, it was revealed on Tuesday. Now that is progress. I have been unimpressed by the alleged killings of dozens of "key aides to Zarqawi" over the past few months. But a real Baathist commander, that is a catch. And taking him will have a positive effect on the counter-insurgency effort.

Al-Hayat: Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari on Tuesday withdrew his envoy to Damascus in protest against Syrian President Bashar al-Asad's allegation that Iraqi officials "are not the final authorities" in their own country (implying that they are American puppets.)

Jaafari also announced that he would attend the conference for national reconciliation in Cairo after he had been reassured by the Arab League as to the identities of the participants. Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmad Abu al-Ghait did not think it unlikely that Baathists might attend, though they will have had no blood on their hands. He said that a minister of petroleum or a former ambassador or an artist might be among them.

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, will send a "hawk" from his organization to the conference to combat any accusations launched against the Shiites. (The paramilitary of SCIRI, the Badr Corps, has been accused by Sunni Arabs of being involved in massacres and ethnic cleansing against them.)

In addition to personalities such as President Jalal Talabani, Vice President Ghazi al-Yawir, and vice premier Ahmad Chalabi, the Cairo conference will be attended by SCIRI and Dawa representatives (the religious Shiite parties) and the Association of Muslim Scholars. The AMS delegation will probably be led by Harith al-Dhari, a hard line cleric who is among the more popular Sunni Arab leaders.

The Shiite coalition is refusing to be the object of accusations, whether as a group or individually, at the conference, and it has given representations that it will ensure the safeguarding of Iraqi national unity.

The US military has admitted at last to having used white phosphorus as a weapon against guerrillas in Fallujah. But it denies using it against civilians and denies that it is a chemical weapon.

Senator Chuck Hagel (R-Nebraska) has had the courage to raise the question of whether the Middle East is actually worse off now than in 2002, as a result of the missteps of the Bush administration in Iraq.

Well, certainly if you were planning to live in Baghdad, it was better in 2002, as long as you were willing to stay out of politics and avoid criticizing the regime. But when you sent your child to school, you could be certain of the child coming home safe. That is worth a lot, and it is gone.

Hagel is suggesting a Middle East regional ministerial meeting to deal with Iraqi security. Since Iraqi leaders refuse to accept troops from neighboring countries, however, and since they have no army, and since the more distant countries with good armies such as Egypt and Morocco and Pakistan are unlikely to want to send troops to Iraq, it is not clear what the ministers could do in a practical way.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Woman Bomber Unrepentant

Al-Hayat: Sajidah Mubarak Atrus al-Rishawi, who attempted to detonate a belt bomb at the Radisson SAS hotel in Amman last Wednesday night is still unrepentant. She insists that she is fighting "the infidels and apostates from among the Muslims."

(Mainstream Sunni Muslim authorities frown on viewing other Sunnis as non-Muslims for lack of strict practice or belief, preferring to see them as simply bad Muslims. Militants who "excommunicate" [takfir] other Muslims set the stage thereby for committing violence against these persons, who are seen by the takfiris to have abandoned Islam and to have given up any right to be treated as human beings.)

Jordanian authorities report that her husband, Ali Husain al-Shamari (who did set off his bomb), had married her only very recently and that the two were childless. They thought it likely that al-Shamari's purpose in marrying Sajidah was to make it legitimate for her to accompany him on the mission. (In the largely gender-segregated Middle East, for an unmarried woman to travel in close company with an unrelated male would be raise eyebrows and draw unwanted attention.)

The Jordanian officials maintained that Sajidah, who was born in 1970, knows virtually nothing about religion and that she never got beyond sixth grade in school. They say that when she was asked about the turmoil (fitnah) her action would have caused, she asked "what does this word "fitnah" mean?"

All the members of her family were members of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. She uses terminology that suggests that she is a professional terrorist. In addition to her brother, Tamir Atrus, who was killed at Fallujah, she has a surviving brother, who is still active in the organization around Ramadi.

Western reporting is saying that she had two brothers beyond Tamir, and that both of them had been killed by US forces. On this one, I'd trust al-Hayat until we see further evidence.

Her sister was married to Nidal Arabiyat, a Jordanian explosives expert who was killed in Iraq last year. Nidal had been in Afghanistan in 1999 for explosives training and then came back to join Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq in 2003.

The AP report says that she fled to the couple's rented apartment in a taxi and arrived with blood on her clothes, and stayed there until she was arrested.

Al-Hayat says that when her belt failed to detonate, Sajidah fled the scene and drove alone in a rental car to Salt, where she tried to find the father of Nidal Arabiyat (her late brother-in-law) in that city. Some reports suggest that the senior Arabiyat promptly turned her over to the Jordanian security. Others contradict this assertion and say that she was caught before she could find the Arabiyat home.

AP agrees that she tried to contact Arabiyat but has her do it from her apartment in Amman near the University.

Sajidah is an Iraqi from the Al-Bu-Rishiyyah clan that lives in the region of al-Tawa near Ramadi. Al-Hayat's Iraqi sources said that Iraqi Defense Minister Saadoun al-Dulaimi belongs to the same clan. It is a sept of the Al-Bu-Kulayb tribe, which is famous for its smuggling activities during the past decade. Some of them settled agricultural land. Some were accused of looting Kuwaiti palaces during the Iraqi occupation of that country.

The four received their belt bombs only once they were in Jordan, though this information does not imply that they received the bombs from Jordanians. Ali Husain al-Shamari and Sajidah rented an apartment behind the University of Jordan in Talal al-Ali.

Al-Hayat says that many activists in the Jordanian Jihadi Salafi (militant Sunni fundamentalist) groups have left their homes for mountainous regions, for fear of the reaction from the Jordanian secret police. Others surrendered themselves to the local police station.

Jordanian security officials said that they more than once discovered information suggesting that al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia was striving to spread its activities beyond Iraq. This alert set off extra surveillance of the jihadis in Jordan, but then Iraqi agents were used.

There is a push in Jordan to outlaw the takfiri groups that believe in "excommunicating" other Muslims who do not agree with their militancy. A new anti-terrorism law would be modeled on British legislation, with the intent of confronting "ideas of excommunication."
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Muslims and the 5 Questions

Somebody named Dennis Prager wrote a frankly bigotted op-ed for the LA Times asking "Muslims" 5 questions. The questions are fairly easy to answer in themselves, but the stupidity of the whole framework is what is objectionable. Why is it that our media personalities cannot think their way out of a paper bag? Why don't high school civics courses alert them that there might be a problem with stereotyping everyone that you categorize as belonging to a particular group?

Prager begins his "questions" directed, apparently at all 1.3 billion Muslims in the world, by referring to the recent riots in France. He is thus framing his questions with the implication that those Muslims are all trouble-makers and have something to answer for. But the alienated in-between young African- and North African-French are mostly not very involved in religion and a lot of them couldn't tell you how to pray to save their lives.

Prager's first question is why "Muslims" are so "quiet" (implied is: "about terrorism emanating from other Muslims"). Of course, Muslims have been anything but quiet about terrorism and all sorts of Muslim leaders and groups have repeatedly condemned it. Muslims haven't been "quiet." Prager hasn't been listening.

Moreover, the mere assertion that an act was done in the "name of Islam" would not necessarily connect it to Islam in the eyes of other Muslims. All kinds of crazy things are done in the name of Judaism and Christianity and Buddhism. Why didn't the American Buddhists demonstrate when Aum Shinrikyo let Sarin gas loose in the Tokyo subway? Did American Catholics demonstrate against Franco's policies in Spain? Why should American Catholics even feel responsible for those things? Why should Indonesian or Bangladeshi Muslims demonstrate about something that happened in distant Jordan, which had some local context they don't even understand? People who are actually Muslims don't take seriously small groups of cranks who do bizarre things in the name of Islam.

And let's turn the tables on Prager. Let's ask why he is so quiet.

Let's take the following item:

' Jewish settlers began attacking Palestinians as they returned home yesterday from the funeral of an Israeli soldier, shooting dead a 14-year-old girl and wounding several others in the West Bank city of Hebron, Palestinians said.

They said the settlers began attacking shortly after the funeral in Hebron's Old City, throwing stones at houses and cars, and breaking windows.

Nizin Jamjoum, 14, was standing on the balcony of her home when she was shot in the head and died, said her brother Marwan, 26, who was injured.

At least six Palestinians were hurt, including one who was stabbed, Palestinians said.'

Has Prager ever joined a demonstration against the fascist actions of the far rightwing Israeli settlers who are stealing Palestinian land every day and from time to time killing them? Does he care about Nizin Jamjoum or her family? Nizin was a little girl. Her parents doted on her. They fed her and raised her. She played with brothers and sisters. She said cute things that made everyone's dimples come out. And then an armed colonist shot her dead, in the head. Her cranium was crushed, her brain oozed out the back of her little head. Does Prager care?

Then he asks, Why are none of the Palestinian terrorists Christian?

Prager is not only stereotyping an ethnic group, he is profoundly ignorant. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a much more violent group than Arafat's Fateh, was led by Christian George Habash. In fact, the PFLP had to hire Eastern Orthodox priests to minister to its fighers. Christians in the Middle East, whether Palestinian Christians, or Maronite Christians in Lebanon, have been just as much parties to the violence in the region as Muslims. And, of course, Israeli Jews haven't exactly been pacifists.

Then he asks, Why is only one of the 47 Muslim-majority countries a free country?

Well, gee, Dennis. Let's see.

There is the legacy of European colonialism, which ruled most of the Muslim world with an iron fist and established modern bureaucratic practices that were authoritarian, which the post-colonial states inherited. (If you want to understand the Pakistani military, you have to understand the colonial British Army of India).

And, the Russians invaded Muslim Central Asia in the 19th century. They first subjected those peoples to Tsarist absolute monarchy, and then to Stalinism. Vladimir Putin and Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan both have authoritarian tendencies, and it is because they both come out of the old Soviet system. You want to blame Islam for this?

It wasn't just colonialism. Neo-colonialism has played a key part. Iran was a parliamentary democracy in the early 1950s. Then its prime minister asserted Iranian ownership of Iran's own oil. And the UK and the US objected to this step, and sent in the CIA to overthrow the elected government of Iran, and install an absolute monarchy for all the world like Louis XIV! Courtesy of Dwight Eisenhower and Winston Churchill.

The political scientists now think that democracy is best sustained where the per capita income is at least $8000 a year. It isn't an absolute requirement, but it seems to help. There are a lot of poor Muslim countries because they are in resource-poor regions (arid parts of Africa and the Middle East).

Why bring ethnicity into it? Is that really the likely explanation? Prager could ask the same question about the Chinese. Why is only one Chinese-majority society (Taiwan) moving toward democracy? Does he think it really has something to do with being Chinese? Authoritarianism in East Asia used to be attributed to Confucianism, but then Japan and South Korea (and lately Taiwan) challenged that thesis. Things change. If we were in the 1930s Prager could ask what was with those Fascist Catholics.

Whatever the answer is to Prager's question, it has little or nothing to do with the religion of Islam per se.

Prager's number 4 is Why are so many atrocities committed and threatened by Muslims in the name of Islam?

Prager's list is skewed to begin with. He lumps together localistic national liberation movements (Chechnya) and individual crimes of passion with the guerrilla movement in Iraq, and attributes them all to "Islam." In Prager's weird world, everything Muslims do is in the name of Islam.

I append below a list of the number of murders per year in a fair number of the world's countries, and have put the Muslim-majority countries in bold. They cluster at the bottom, not the top. If we wanted to think in Prager's warped way, we'd have to ask what is with those Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians, that they are so murderous.

Prager's number 5 is Why do countries governed by religious Muslims persecute other religions?

Countries governed by religious anythings have persecuted other religions. This is true not only for religious ideologies but also for secular ideologies like Communism and Fascism. Make an idea into an "-ism" and boom, you get gulags. Religion or no religion. You think Muslims were tolerated in Franco's Spain? And, by the way, why can't a Muslim guy marry a Jewish girl in Israel if the two love each other? Hmmm. Could it be that the rabbis are unsympathetic to young love? Prager doesn't seem to know that Terry Nichols of the Oklahoma City bombing was in fact part of the Christian Identity Movement, or that fanatical Christians have killed abortion doctors in the name of Christianity.

There is something seriously wrong with the questions themselves. They come out of a weird mindset that lumps Malaysians with Moroccans, Kyrgyz with Sudanese, and Uigurs with Moro Filipinos, all just because they have a common heritage in one of the great world religions; it isn't as if their actual local practices and beliefs are all exactly the same.

The questions are symptomatic of prejudice and sloppy thinking. They demean Americans by the posing of them. Muslims as individuals haven't done anything wrong, and don't have to answer Prager's silly questions.

Postcript:

Now let us turn international murder rates. Obviously if we look at absolute numbers, the big countries will have the most murders. But even so, there are some surprises. Despite being relatively small countries, Colombia, South Africa, Mexico, Venezuela and Thailand seem particularly murderous societies. You will note that none is Muslim. Only Indonesia gets into the top ten, among Muslim countries, and at some 200 million, its rate of murder is far less than any of the countries above it. The good people of genteel Washington, DC kill more people every year than do the Yemenis!

In fact, the US is approximately 5 times larger in population than Britain. The British rubbed out 850 people last year, so you'd expect the US to have whacked a little over 4,000. In fact, we polished off three times that many. Why are we three times as violent as the people in the UK? Shouldn't the gentle Yemenis be asking Americans what is wrong with them?

We don't appear to have good UNO statistics on crime for very many Muslim countries. The ones we do have cluster toward the bottom, both with regard to absolute numbers and with regard to rates per 1000 population. Prager's lurid imagination of Muslims as unusually violent isn't borne out by these statistics.

Of course, murder rates are only one index of violence. But if you totalled up how many people the US has killed in war in the past 100 years and compared it to those killed by Muslims, the result would not reflect well on the US, I promise you. It is widely thought that we killed some 2 million Vietnamese, and a similar number of Koreans, in those two wars alone. The biggest toll taken by Muslims was the Iran-Iraq War, which probably involved nearly a million deaths. It is not that the Muslims are better than Americans. It is that the Americans have been deeply involved in industrialized warfare as a sovereign state for much longer than Muslim states.

Murders per Year by Country

1. India 37,170
2. Russia 28,904
3. Colombia 26,539
4. South Africa 21,995
5. Mexico 13,829
6. United States 12,658
7. Venezuela 8,022
8. Thailand 5,140
9. Ukraine 4,418
10. Indonesia 2,204
11. Poland 2,170
12. France 1,051
13. Belarus 1,013
14. Germany 960
15. Korea, South 955
16. Zimbabwe 912
17. Jamaica 887
18. United Kingdom 850
19. Zambia 797
20. Italy 746
21. Yemen 697
22. Japan 637
23. Romania 560
24. Malaysia 551
25. Spain 494
26. Canada 489
27. Papua New Guinea 465
28. Kyrgyzstan 413
29. Lithuania 370
30. Moldova 348
31. Bulgaria 332
32. Australia 302
33. Portugal 247
34. Costa Rica 245
35. Georgia 239
36. Latvia 238
37. Chile 235
38. Azerbaijan 226
39. Hungary 205
40. Netherlands 183
41. Czech Republic 174
42. Uruguay 154
43. Finland 148
44. Slovakia 143
45. Estonia 143
46. Armenia 127
47. Tunisia 113
48. Saudi Arabia 105
49. Greece 81
50. Switzerland 69
51. Denmark 58
52. Norway 49
53. Macedonia, The Former Yugoslav Republic of 47
54. New Zealand 45
55. Hong Kong 38
56. Ireland 38
57. Slovenia 36
58. Mauritius 26
59. Seychelles 6
60. Iceland 5
61. Dominica 2
62. Qatar 1
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

The Strange Death of Moustapha Akkad;
Zarqawi and "Halloween"

The ironies and dangers of globalization are tragically epitomized in the death last week of Hollywood director Moustapha Akkad at the Radisson SAS in Amman at the hands of an Iraqi suicide bomber. Akkad was there with his daughter to attend a wedding.




Akkad was born in Aleppo, Syria, in 1930. Syria was at that time under French rule, and so he was a child of empire, with all the ambivalences of identity such experiences inspire. At the age of 19, in 1949, he came to the United States, and studied theater arts at UCLA. He later also did a Master of Arts degree at the University of Southern California. He got his start in Hollywood as a production assistant for Sam Peckinpah on a Western, "Ride the High Country," in 1962. Peckinpah's fascination with violence and ambiguity would work itself out in Akkad's own oeuvre in unexpected ways.

Akkad produced the 1976 film, "The Message," starring Anthony Quinn, an attempt to tell the story of early Islam to a Western audience. He faced enormous problems as a cinematographer, given that the Arab Muslim tradition is iconoclastic (condemnatory of images), especially with regard to the Prophet Muhammad. Akkad therefore had to find ways of suggesting the Prophet Muhammad's presence without actually showing him, such as the shadow he cast. But even showing the Prophet's shadow was denounced by some Muslim groups. The film caused a sensation when its screening provoked the taking of hostages by members of the Nation of Islam, a small African-American sectarian group that is heterodox and had little connection to mainstream Islam. Akkad was confused as to how the Muslim world could not recognize the act of communication he was attempting to perform. As an in-between man, he faced the hostility both of bigotted non-Muslims and of hidebound fundamentalists from his own community. His artistic career played out in the arena of globalizing alienation.

He found it difficult to get funding for the religious films he dreamed of, and in 1978 turned to producing the first of the "Halloween" horror flics. (In this he resembles Richard Gere, who suffers through those romantic comedies so that he can make his serious, Buddhist-inspired ethical films.) The plot of the first Halloween movie had to do with Michael Myers, who as a child of 6 murdered his sister with a butcher knife after she had had sex with her boyfriend. This murder occurred on Halloween. He was institutionalized for 15 years, but then escaped from the sanatarium. He then began to stalk three teenaged girls, even as his psychiatrist and the sheriff attempt to track him down and prevent him from committing further murders.

The anxieties around the Halloween films are, whether it is by coincidence or deliberate, very Middle Eastern. Michael Myers's killing of his sister echoed the problem of honor killings in the Arab world, where lack of chastity in teenaged girls so dishonors the men of the family that they are sometimes driven to restore their honor by doing away with the girl. (The practice is coded as rural and hotheaded in Arab culture, but its insanity is underlined in the American context.) Myers's stalking of teenaged girls reproduces that free-floating anxiety about their sexuality and freedom of movement, and the dangers these hold for the masculinity of men. Myers the horror monster is produced through an exaggeration of these anxieties to the point of homicidal rage. Of course, even without any Middle Eastern context, the films are about alienation and the isolation of the individual, a distillation of the neuroses of American suburbia.

Even as he was scaring teenaged couples into hugging tight in American theaters, Akkad was continuing to pursue his dramatic vision. In 1981 he released "The Lion of the Desert," which centers on the heroic character of the Libyan anti-colonial activist Omar Mukhtar, who fought the Italian empire in his country during the 1920s. Akkad attempted to appeal to Western audiences who might not ordinarily identify with a Muslim populist by configuring him as a rugged individualist fighting Mussolini's fascist troops. Akkad's timing was, however, execrable. Only two years after the Iranian Revolution, American audiences just could not establish a connection with Mukhtar's character. One reviewer (was it in the New York Times?) dismissed the film as "ayatollahs on horseback." One has the scary apprehension that the Americans actually identified more with the goose-stepping fascists than with the oppressed Libyans.

At the end of his life, Akkad was gathering his energies to do an epic film about Saladin (Salahu'd-Din al-Ayyubi), the medieval Muslim warrior who expelled the European Crusaders from the Middle East. (American audiences were recently reminded of Saladin in the film "Kingdom of Heaven," which tells the story of the fall of the Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem before Saladin's armies.) Whether Akkad could have induced Westerners to identify with Saladin remains an open question.

The postmodern two-track film career of Akkad, wherein he attempted to give American audiences horror films about a serial murderer on the one hand, and serious dramas about the Middle Eastern fight against European domination on the other, came to an end in an Amman hotel where both themes melded.

The "Monotheism and Holy War" organization of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, recently renamed "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia," is dedicated to serial murder on a scale that dwarfs Michael Myers's wildest dreams. The playbook of insurgency requires grisly acts of terror that help to provoke a guerrilla war, which in turn can be transformed into a civil war, destabilizing the old order and paving the way to a coup by the terrorists, who represent themselves as the only force able to restore order. They represent themselves as fighting against American occupation, but the vast majority of their victims are innocent civilians. This horrific form of anti-imperialism targets the innocent relentlessly. Little children are blown to bits, with tiny fingers and feet hurled across public squares from furiously burning ice cream shops.

The guerrilla war in Iraq has claimed a unique cinematic voice of transnational modernity, who had explored the terror of psychopathology and the angst of alienation, as well as the history of anti-colonial movements.

The Iraq conflict has become a bad horror film. It has killed the grandfather of the "Halloween" movies. And it has snuffed out the man who wanted to bring real Muslim heroes such as the Prophet Muhammad, Omar Mukhtar and Saladin to American film-going audiences. Now, his last project will remain unachieved. Saladin was a Kurd from what is now northern Iraq, and he defeated the Crusaders with a legendary chivalry that inspired their respect.

Zarqawi's henchmen inspire only horror, not respect. They have no chivalry, only bloodthirstiness. They are Michael Myers, not Saladin.

Moustapha Akkad was an American voice as well as a Muslim one. We needed his ability to communicate one culture to the other. His death diminishes us all, and signals the nightfall of a decade-long "Halloween" of the horrific sort for Iraq and for the United States.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bombing at Green Zone;
Exodus of Physicians from Capital

Guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb outside an entrance to the Green Zone in downtown Baghdad, striking at a convoy of 3 vehicles and killing 2 South African security guards. Three other persons were wounded. In Ramadi, a bomb aimed at a US convoy instead killed 5 civilians and wounded 2 others. The US conducted a sweep of Dur, looking for Ibrahim Izzat al-Duri, a top Baathist official who has been among the masterminds of the Iraqi guerrilla war against the Americans and their Iraqi allies. Duri was reported dead by one Baathist internet site recently, but another, based in Jordan, denied the report. If al-Duri were really dead, it would have big implications for the guerrilla movement, but there is no good evidence of it (that is what the US is looking for).

62 percent of Americans believe that Bush is handling Iraq poorly, and 57 percent of Americans say that the Bush administration does not have high ethical standards.

It makes you wonder what it would take to convince the other 37 percent that Iraq was going badly. Some 6 or 7 provinces, including that of the capital, are the scenes of frequent violence, the economy is in shambles, militias have infiltrated the police and army, looting and sabotage have undercut services and oil production, thousands of people have died, and now the violence is spreading to neighboring countries like Jordan. Is it that they do not know what is going on, or that they are waiting for a civil war or genocide before they entertain doubts?

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports a wave of assassinations against prominent physicians in Baghdad. Five of the most well known physicians in the capital have been killed in the past few days. The campaign aims at forcing medical personnel to emigrate. Nearly 3000 physicians have left the country, with 150 killed by unidentified guerrillas. The Iraqi government has been powerless to stop it.

For example, in the al-Salikh al-Jadid district of the capital, 3 young men killed Dr. Haikal al-Musawi with pistols equipped with silencers. They then fled the scene and jumped in a getaway car.

Sabah al-Husaini, an official in the Ministry of Health, said that his ministry has lost is most expert physicians during the past two days, and 5 of the best specialists have been killed, including Mustafa al-Hiti (pediatrician), Haikal al-Musawi (internal), Muhammad al-Jaza'iri (surgeon), and Aamer al-Khazraji, who worked in one of the larger hospitals in Baghdad. Mr. al-Husaini seems to be under the impression that the problem of Baghdad's new brain drain, provoked by assassinations of scientists and physicians, could be dealt with by legislation.

The situation in the southern port city of Basra, in contrast, is much better, according to Reuters. Despite the worries about corruption and militia rule in the south, apparently there is a modicum of security that has allowed hospitals to restock their stores of medicine. Seasonal diseases such as cholera and hepatitis have declined, suggesting that water treatment plants are working there.

Journalists in Iraq continue also to be in enormous danger.

Lawyers for Saddam and his co-defendents are on strike because of lack of security. An attorney was recently assassinated. An attorney representing one of Saddam's co-defendants has fled to Qatar after an assassination attempt.

Bulgaria will begin withdrawing its 400 troops after the December 15 parliamentary elections in Iraq. They form part of the Polish command and are at Diwaniyah, a southern Shiite city that seems fairly quiet.

James Fallows critiques Bush's Veteran's Day speech, shredding it to pieces.

Michael Massing at the NYRB asks the question of whether we are seeing "the end of news" and a kind of permanent rightwing hegemony over information (it is not that real information isn't there, it is that it can't get easily heard).
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Death and Revenge In Iraq

Guerrillas killed two US troops on Sunday and a third died in a jeep accident. Mortar shells fell near the Iranian embassy in downtown Baghdad. A guerrilla bombing in Kirkuk wounded 5 Iraqi soldiers on Sunday.

Hannah Allam says that there is some evidence that one of the four suicide bombers who struck Amman had been captured during the Fallujah campaign of November-December 2004, and then released by the US military. This is the money passage:

' The spiritual leader said Ali's anti-U.S. stance was hardened after he was detained by U.S. forces in the same mosque where a Marine shot to death an unarmed Iraqi man in a controversial incident captured on video by an embedded American TV journalist. The military ruled the shooting justified. Ali's co-workers at an Iraqi Ministry of Industry factory in Fallujah described him as a computer specialist who was badly injured while fighting U.S. forces in the offensive last year. They said he disappeared after his release from U.S. custody. '

The Fallujah campaign of 2004 is a gift that keeps on giving. At the time, some groups there said they would find a way to take revenge in the American homeland. It is something to worry about for years to come.

Sunni Arab leaders are pointing out that US military operations in Sunni Arab areas are inevitably interfering with the December 15 elections. Some believe that Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari has asked the US to conduct the sweeps precisely in order to anger the Sunni Arabs and reduce their participation in the elections, making it more likely that religious Shiites can continue to dominate parliament.

Al-Hayat reports [Arabic] that Ayham al-Samarra'i is saying that 7 guerrilla groups within the Iraqi resistance are willing to talk to the Americans "conditionally."
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bush Administration Lie about Iraq

George W. Bush denied on Veteran's Day that he had manipulated intelligence in order to take the country to war against Iraq. He said that the Democrats in Congress had seen the same evidence he had, and that the Clinton administration had also seen Iraq as a threat.

Stephen Hadley, Bush's National Security adviser, underlined the same point on Sunday, denying that there had been any manipulation.

Ironically, Hadley himself was at the center of the scandal about the hyping of intelligence on Iraq's alleged nuclear weapons program. The CIA keep sending him memos that implausible things were being alleged by Bush in his speeches about Saddam's nukes. Hadley's response was to ignore the CIA and try to find some way to keep saying the implausible things, e.g., by sourcing them to British intelligence instead.

By the way, the allegation that some, including Sen. John McCain, keep making that "the whole world" thought that Iraq had WMD is wrong for two reasons. First, most of the world depended on the US for its intelligence on Iraq and did not have a way of making an independent judgment. Second, the French ministry of defense demurred, as did several of the most important and experience arms inspectors, including Scott Ritter and Hans Blix.

This BBC item of 11 February, 2003, doesn't read like the Republicans' supposed international unanimity on the issue before the war:

' France, Germany and Russia have released an unprecedented joint declaration on the Iraq crisis, demanding more weapons inspectors and more technical assistance for them . . . "Nothing today justifies a war," Mr Chirac told a joint news conference with Mr Putin. "This region really does not need another war." He said France did not have "undisputed proof" that Iraq still held weapons of mass destruction. '

The Russians were if anything more skeptical.

It is not true that most of the Democrats in Congress saw the same intelligence that Bush saw. Democrats in Congress have told me that most of what they knew about Iraq before the war came via briefings from Bush administration and Pentagon officials. They say privately that they now feel that they were consistently lied to.

But let us look at just one area where there was clear manipulation by Bush and his high officials, and where he was not saying the same things that Clinton or the Democrats had been saying.

There are different sorts of lies. One way to lie is to have two pieces of information, and to suppress one and play up the other. Here is an example of this sort of falsehood.

The lie of omission:

The top al-Qaeda leaders so far captured are

Khalid Shaykh Muhammad

and

Abu Zubayda.

According to the 9/11 Commission report, they revealed to interrogators that Usamah Bin Laden had prohibited al-Qaeda operatives from cooperating with the secular Arab nationalist, Saddam Hussein.

This crucial information was withheld from Congress and from the American people by the Bush/Cheney administration in the run-up to the Iraq War.

(Although KSM was captured only shortly before the war, surely the connection to Saddam was the first thing they asked him about. His answer was not shared with us, to say the least.)

The Democrats and Bill Clinton could never have cited this information because it was never made available to them by Bush.

In contrast, the Bush/Cheney administration played up the lies of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi that Saddam's Iraq was training al-Qaeda operatives, even though the Defense Intelligence Agency and other high-level intelligence operatives dismissed this information as unreliable. It should be noted that no money traces showed al-Qaeda funds coming from Iraq. No captured al-Qaeda fighters had been trained in Iraq. There was no intelligence that in any way corroborated al-Libi's story. And, it was directly contradicted by two of his superiors.

The information from KSM and Abu Zubaydah circulated widely among intelligence officials.

' The report on Zubaydah's debriefing was circulated among US intelligence officers last year, but his statements were not included in public discussions by Administration officials about the evidence of al-Qaeda ties. "I remember reading the Abu Zubaydah debriefing last year, while the Administration was talking about all of these other reports and thinking that they were only putting out what they wanted," one official said. '

This was a community of intelligence. Those with the clearances saw those confessions. The lower-level analysts were amazed when they saw Bush and Cheney and Rice on television hyping al-Libi's torture-induced "revelations." . . . They were only putting out what they wanted . . ..

It is impossible that Bush, Cheney and Rice saw the intel from al-Libi but not from Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Shaikh Muhammad. The only way to explain these comments is that they suppressed the latter in order to emphasize the former. This tactic was deeply dishonest.

So in September of 2002, as "the new product" was being "rolled out" in the words of Bush adviser Andy Card, this is what we heard:

Thursday, September 26, 2002 Posted: 1:28 PM EDT (1728 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush's national security adviser Wednesday said Saddam Hussein has sheltered al Qaeda terrorists in Baghdad and helped train some in chemical weapons development -- information she said has been gleaned from captives in the ongoing war on terrorism.

The comments by Condoleezza Rice were the strongest and most specific to date on the White House's accusations linking al Qaeda and Iraq.

The accusations followed those made by President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who earlier in the day said the United States has evidence linking Iraq and al Qaeda, but they did not elaborate."

This lie by omission was repeated over and over again by Bush and his cronies:

"Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda."
- Bush in January 2003 State of the Union address.

"Iraq has also provided Al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training."
- Bush in February 2003.

If he had said, "Khalid Shaikh Muhammad and Abu Zubaydah, the top al-Qaeda operatives in custody, deny that there was any operational cooperation between Iraq and al-Qaeda. But Ibn al-Shaikh al-Libi asserts that Saddam Hussein is training al-Qaeda in the use of chemical weapons. I asked our Defense Intelligence Agency about this, and they do not find al-Libi's allegations credible. I as president have tough choices to make. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, I am inclined to believe al-Libi on this."

Then he would not have been lying to the public. But the way he did it was a lie. Some are saying that the evaluation of al-Libi by the DIA did not reach Bush and Cheney. That is not the DIA's fault. That is incompetence on Bush's and Cheney's parts. Why spend $44 billion a year on intelligence and not seek it?

The United States military captured much of the archive of the Baath ministry of the interior, which it turned over to Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress. That is where any document would be that mentioned al-Qaeda. It does not exist, or we would have seen it by now.

It was all a tissue of lies.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sister of Tawhid's Anbar Cell Captured in Jordan Bombings

Jordanian authorities have captured Sajida Mubarak Atrous al-Rishawi, the wife of suicide bomber Ali Hussein Ali al-Shamari, who detonated his belt bomb at the Radisson in Amman. She turns out to be the sister of the Anbar leader of the Monotheism and Holy War (al-Qaeda in Iraq), who was killed at some point in Fallujah. HIs name was Thamir al-Rishawi

So this Amman operation really does seem to have come out of Zarqawi's group, rather than just using that group as a cover, as is so often done inside Iraq.

Ms. al-Rishawi's husband was from the Shamar tribe, the same large and important clan to which vice president Ghazi al-Yawir belongs.

Shamar had benefited from the old Baath order, and was deeply entwined with it, and is a major locus of resistance to the new order imposed by the Americans. Reuters reported back in April of 2003, "Some media reports have said members of Saddam's family fled to Syria during the war and were later sent back to Iraq, where they were being sheltered by the Shamar tribe."

Some Shamar have been displaced by the return of the Kurds that Saddam had expelled from the north, producing bitterness.

Iraqi militant sources maintain that Rishawi is not the first such woman suicide bomber from this milieu: "Mafkarat al-Islam, invoking God’s reward upon the martyrs, commented that the first of the many women martyrs to fall in Iraq was a woman member of the Shamar tribe who put on an explosive belt and blew herself up at a US checkpoint shortly after the US invasion. That attack left dead and wounded Americans."

Of course Shamar is a huge group of people and there are other branches of it who want to join the mainstream of the new Iraq (al-Yawir and his uncle, from the leadership stratum, among them). There is a small Shiite branch of Shamar, which is always played up rhetorically by politicians such as al-Yawir, but they aren't actually that big a part of the clan.

Aljazeera.net [Arabic] says that Rishawi confessed that she entered Jordan on the 5th of November in the company of her husband, traveling by private car. They had forged Iraqi passports. Then they rented an apartment in Amman. On 9 November, her husband put a bomb belt on her and then put one on himsefl, and drilled her in how to use it. Then they both headed for the Radisson SAS where there was a wedding party in one of the halls. She stood in one corner of the hotel and her husband stood in another. She attempted to detonate her bomb but failed, whereas her husband succeeded in setting off his.

According to the Jordanian government, the members of the cell that carried out this operation were Rawad Jasim Muhammd (23), Safa' Muhmmad Ali (23), and then al-Rishawi and al-Shamari, the husband and wife team. All four were Iraqis.

Jordanian authorities are investigating known Jordanian members of the Zarqawi group to see if any were involved in supporting the operation.

A canny observer suggested to me that the Iraqis were used by the Tawhid leadership precisely because the Jordanian jihadis in places like Zarqa are under very heavy surveillance, whereas Jordanian intelligence has not been able to penetrate cells in Iraqi cities such as Ramadi, the city from which Ms. al-Rishawi hails.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

5 Dead in Baghdad Blast
Sistani withdraws from Politics

The 77 refitted T-72 Soviet-era tanks offered to Iraq by Hungary have finally arrived, at Taji base. The tanks were due in September. But in a larger sense the tanks are years overdue. There can be no effective Iraqi military response to the guerrilla movement without a well-trained armor corps. That is how Saddam controlled Iraq. On the other hand, the specific Iraqi military unit that has the tanks will suddenly acquire enormous importance.

The company that refitted the tanks is attempting to sue, since it claims not to have been paid.

A car bomb in a Shiite area of Baghdad killed at least 5 persons and wounded forty on Saturday morning. The area was cleared and patrolled afterwards by the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr, according to the NYT.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat: Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani will decline to meet with politicians and party leaders before the December 15 elections, and is withdrawing from a political role. His spokesmen had earlier said that he would not endorse any party in this election. In January of 2004, he had urged voters to put the United Iraqi Alliance into power.

The FBIS roundup of the Iraqi Press for Nov. 12 says, "Al-Furat runs on the front page a 450-word report citing Al-Sistani's aide Shaykh Abd-al-Mahdi al-Karbala'i criticizing the government for failing to provide public services. The report focuses on the joint press conference held by defence and interior ministers yesterday, 11 November, during which they announced the enforcement of the Counter Terrorism Act."

Will blog more on Sunday.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Omani Embassy Killings
Iraqis Suspected in Jordan Bombings

First, Secretary of State Condi Rice called Friday for more Arab states to open embassies in Iraq. Then, guerrillas staged a drive-by shooting at the Omani embassy in Baghdad, killing 2 and wounding 4 persons. I think we may conclude a) that her visit is being monitored by the guerrillas with frightening closeness and b) her forces are not in control of the capital.

In fact, it would take at least a little time to plan an attack like the one on the Omani embassy. So one plausible scenario is that Rice arrives in Baghdad on Thursday, and mentions to someone in the Iraqi government that she plans to make this appeal, and the Iraqi government is leaky and infiltrated by the guerrillas, who immediately begin planning Friday's attack. Of course it could also be a coincidence. Me, I don't believe it was a coincidence.

There was also lots of other violence in Iraq on Friday.

Claims were made on the internet that the four suicide bombers who attacked tourist hotels in Amman, Jordan on Thursday were Iraqis, including a wife-husband team. Although the four were claimed as members of "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia" by "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi," this allegation makes little sense. Zarqawi's group is alleged to be made up primarily of foreign fighters, including Jordanians, Saudis, Algerians, etc. So where did they get these Iraqi members, and why send them to Jordan, when Jordanians from say Zarqa would have been under less scrutiny than foreigners? Some eyewitnesses heard one of the bombers speaking with an Iraqi accent. This information bolsters the case I made yesterday for the remnants of the Baath Party being behind these bombings. I believe that they blame their worst misdeeds on "al-Qaeda," so as to divert attention from their own sinister role. The Iraqi nationalists and post-Baathists fighting the guerrilla war routinely punish "collaborators" with the Americans. Since those tourist hotels are typically full of "collaborators," and since the Jordanian regime cooperated extensively with the US invasion of Iraq, the Baathists intended the bombings to punish King Abdullah II.

The LA Times is certainly correct, in any case, that this ominous piece of information indicates that the turmoil in Iraq is now spreading in the Middle East. The great danger is that the whole region will go up in flames, taking the world's energy supply with it. Now might be a good time to get that hybrid and put solar panels on the roof.

Some of the terrorist attacks in Iraq have been carried out by Jordanians, so President Jalal Talabani was particularly ungracious in suggesting that the chickens just came home to roost.

Two analysts of US national security have concluded that the present troop levels in Iraq are not sustainable for the US:

' "It has become clear that if we still have 140,000 ground troops in Iraq a year from now, we will destroy the all-volunteer army," said the a report written by the center's Lawrence Korb and Brian Katulis. Korb served as assistant secretary of defense under President Ronald Reagan. '

Hmmm. Bush dissolved the Iraqi military, which paved the way for the present guerrilla war. I guess he wants to deal with the resulting inequality by dissolving the US military, as well. (Black humor alert.)

Al-Zaman reports that Shiite nationalist Muqtada al-Sadr has decided to launch a petition and fundraising in several Shiite regions, including Pakistan and Lebanon, in a drive to build a Shiite shrine at the Jannat al-Baqi` Cemetery in Saudi Arabia. The statement said that surely the Saudis did not have an objection to do so.

The Jannat al-Baqi` cemetry in Medina contains the graves of Shiite holy figures.

As Muqtada knows, the Saudi Wahhabi branch of Islam abhors shrines and has often attacked and defiled them.

Will be traveling Saturday, and may not get to posting comments until the evening.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

67 Dead in Iraq Guerrilla Violence

Oliver Poole of the Telegraph reports that suicide bombers hit a restaurant in Baghdad on Thursday that is a favorite of local police, killing at least 33 persons, mostly civilians. At least as many were wounded.

In Tikrit to the north (the home town of Saddam Hussein), another bombing at a police recruitment center killed 7 and wounded 13.

Near Kut in Iraq's southeast, bordering Iran, 27 bodies were discovered of men who had been kidnapped and murdered. Typically these killings involve sectarian (Sunni-Shiite) strife, though some are driven by criminality and extortion.

Jack Straw, the British foreign minister, visited Baghdad, and said, "This is a very exciting time to visit Iraq." Yes, rather. O.k., that is a dirty trick. He was referring to the upcoming Dec. 15 elections, which he characterized as an opportunity for the "Iraqi people" to choose their own government.

But in a recent interview, when asked if peace would return to Iraq any time within the next 10 years, Straw replied, "I think so . . . [but] you can't be absolutely confident." Well, at least Straw hasn't fallen as low as the impudent and uncategorical falsehoods uttered by American officials. On the other hand, one isn't exactly reassured.

US Secretary of State Condi Rice did not have Straw's gumption, and (probably wisely) she visited Mosul instead, on the grounds, she said, that security was improving there. (Compared to what?)
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq Claims Jordan Bombings

Jordanians held an anti-terrorism demonstration in Amman on Thursday to protest the hotel bombings. The death toll rose to 59.

The Times of London reported that

"Bashir Nafeh, director of military intelligence chief in the West Bank, was named as being among the dead. He had stopped in Amman with Colonel Abed Allun, a high-ranking security official, and Rawhi Futtah, the commercial attache at the Palestinian Embassy in Egypt and brother of the speaker in the Palestinian parliament. All three were staying in the Grand Hyatt."

There is already a big struggle within the Palestinian community over secular nationalsm versus Muslim fundamentalism. One wonders if this tragic incient will affect the terms of the debate.

"Al-Qaeda in Iraq" explained that it hit the hotels because they were used by Iraqi and Western intelligence agencies to fight fundamentalists, and were centers of iniquity. It should be pointed out that on the ground in Iraq, nobody talks of "al-Qaeda in Iraq." And, we have no idea who is posting these messages. It could be the Baath military intelligence.

Tony Karon believes that the Jordan bombings will hasten a split between the remnants of the Baath Party and the Zarqawi faction.

Personally, I'm not so sure the Iraqi Baath is not behind it. I think they often use Zarqawi as a cover for horrible things that they themselves actually do. They have an old feud with the Hashemites, and they are angry about Jordan's alliance with the US. As Amman becomes a forward staging ground for all sorts of US and Iraqi government meetings and planning, it becames a target for the Iraqi guerrilla movement.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

McCain and the Oil Spots


Senator John McCain has now jumped on the "oil-spot" bandwagon, urging that the US forces concentrate on making a handful of key cities safe rather than doing sweep and clear missions like Tal Afar and Husaybah.

Unfortunately, this strategy is impractical, even if the US put 10,000 more troops in, as McCain suggests.

First, the elected Iraqi government doesn't want it. In fact, they have been pushing US and coalition troops out of the cities. They had nice ceremonies when Najaf, Karbala and Baghdad were "turned over" to Iraqi forces. Elected Iraqi politicians simply could not risk putting more foreign troops into a place like Baghdad-- their constituents would rebel. Why does McCain not know this, if I do?

Second, do the math. Mosul is 1.1 million, Baghdad is about 6 million, Kirkuk is about a million. All are highly mixed ethnically, and all are tinderboxes. If you put 50,000 US troops into each of those three cities and just abandoned Anbar province, you still could not control them. The US troops can't tell a guerrilla from an ordinary Iraqi. They cannot penetrate urban extended family networks or neighborhoods. Adhamiyah would be opaque to them. And having a military force in the capital that would be only 1 percent of the population would not be decisive in ending guerrilla actions. The patrols and house invasions and inspections would also turn more and more urban Iraqis against the US presence.

Where have I heard this theory of fighting wars before? Here is what an Afghan general and his coauthor said about Soviet tactics in Afghanistan:

"The Soviet concept for military occupation of Afghanistan was based on the following:

# stabilizing the country by garrisoning the main routes, major cities, airbases and logistics sites;
# relieving the Afghan government forces of garrison duties and pushing them into the countryside to battle the resistance;
# providing logistic, air, artillery and intelligence support to the Afghan forces;
# providing minimum interface between the Soviet occupation forces and the local populace;
# accepting minimal Soviet casualties; and,
# strengthening the Afghan forces, so once the resistance was defeated, the Soviet Army could be withdrawn.

Sound familiar?
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sistani Aide Blasts Jaafari Government


From BBC World Monitoring:

November 11, 2005

AIDE SAYS IRAQ'S AL-SISTANI'S CRITICIZES PM AL-JA'FARI'S GOVERNMENT

Text of report by Iraqi Al-Sharqiyah TV on 11 November

The representative of Grand Ayatollah Al-Sayyid Ali al-Sistani has criticized the performance of Dr Ibrahim al-Ja'fari's government and warned it against a failure in the upcoming round of elections unless it takes action in addressing the basic needs of citizens.

During the Friday sermon, he delivered in Al-Sahn al-Husayni [Imam Husayn's holy shrine, enclosing Imam Husayn's mausoleum], Shaykh Abd-al-Mahdi al-Karbala'i, representative of Al-Sayyid al-Sistani in Karbala, said that the poverty-stricken class of people is still facing difficulties in the living conditions, especially with regard to food and housing. He accused the current government of being unable to provide them with these basic needs.

The representative of Al-Sayyid al-Sistani went on to say that this situation drives the sectors of people to a state of carelessness towards and dissatisfaction with this government. He stressed that if the situation remains as is; the political entities participating in the government will lose large number of their supporters.

Al-Karbala'i stressed that the [religious authority's] position towards these entities will remain as it was during the previous elections. He said that some of them [supporters] began to shift their support for these entities to other parties.

Source: Al-Sharqiyah, Baghdad, in Arabic 1300 gmt 11 Nov 05

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Chalabi Rides Again

My article on Ahmad Chalabi and his revived connections to the Bush administration and the Neocons is at Salon.com.

Excerpt:

On the street in Iraq, people give nicknames to the big longtime-expatriate politicians whom the Americans brought back to Iraq. They call former transitional Prime Minister Iyad Allawi "Iyad the Baathist" because of his background in that party. And they call Ahmad Chalabi "Ahmad the Thief." How appropriate that Chalabi has again made a splash in a Washington, D.C., that looks increasingly like a kleptocracy itself.

On the surface Chalabi ought to be finished in Iraqi politics. But until Dec. 15, he is a deputy prime minister. His meetings in Washington this week with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley acknowledge his high political office -- even though not so long ago the Bush administration tried to destroy him. What accounts for the turnabout in his political fortunes in the United States? Credit the shifting political winds in Iraq -- and perhaps yet more savvy back-channel dealings by Chalabi with the Bush administration. It can't be because of his rap sheet, whole reams of pages long.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Terrorists Strike Hotels in Amman

Suicide bombers struck three tourist hotels in Amman, Jordan on Thursday, killing at least 67 persons and wounding nearly 200. Among the innocent victims was a wedding party. A Syrian film producer and his daughter may be dead, according to Al-Sharq al-Awsat.

This news hits me where I live. I was at a conference on Iraqi identity in Amman at a hotel just like these earlier this year. You could see how Amman had become the new Berlin. It was overflowing with half a million Iraqis, mostly Sunni Arab and well off. A lot of big political and economic deals are struck in those hotels among high-level Iraqi politicians. But it was also packed with Americans and other foreigners who were doing work in Iraq. Some of them wore civvies but had crew cuts and stood ramrod straight.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that a lot of Iraqi politicians stayed at the Grand Hyatt. The Radisson is mainly for rich tourists, including Israelis. The Days Inn is a 3-star, and is not famous except for its night club ("night clubs" in Amman are rather tame affairs).

Haaretz is now saying that the Israeli (probably actually Arab Israeli) tourists were not gotten out before, but rather after the attacks. I had written based on an earlier Haaretz report: [In one of those little mysteries that pops up so frequently in the Middle East, it transpires that Jordanian security operatives came to the Radisson earlier in the day and escorted Israeli tourists from the hotel. The Jordanian secret police are very good about penetrating these Islamist cells, and the logical conclusion is that they got wind of an attack specifically on Israelis, not realizing that the operatives intended to hit the hotels in general.]

An eyewitness wrote me recently:

"I was just in Amman for a week of meetings in the [XXX] Hotel. One night in the . . . restaurant, there was a large group at a table , at least 20 people, including Allawi, Ayham Samaraii, and other people who were said, by Iraqis with us, to be members of the Allawi group, including at least three parliamentarians. No non-Arabs seemed to be in the group. Two nights later, I saw [Abdul Aziz al-] Hakim come in dressed in his robes and turban with a group of men and go upstairs. His son was in the lobby the next day, and that night Hakim came in again and went upstairs. I don't know if the two groups are meeting, but it was an intriguing gathering. Clearly, it is safer to have meeting, even if only of your own faction, in Amman than in Baghdad."

Well, not any more.

King Abdullah II had to cut short a trip to Uzbekistan. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan had to postpone a trip he had planned to the Jordanian capital.

Although at the moment we have no idea who exactly carried out the bombings or why, suspicion naturally falls on two main groups. One is al-Qaeda, the fighters loyal to Usamah Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Hitting tourist hotels in Jordan was part of the Millennium Plot, planned by Abu Zubayda, but that element of the plot was foiled by Jordanian security at the time.

The other possibility is that the guerrilla war in Iraq is now spilling over into Jordan. Although some of the Sunni jihadis in Iraq call themselves "al-Qaeda" on the internet, locally they are known as Monotheism and Holy War or just Salafis, and they are a different group than the Bin Laden al-Qaeda, with different aims. Some of them are Jordanians (the fabled Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is from Zarqa, a small city not far from Amman). Others are Iraqi Baathists or are run by them. Guerrillas have targeted Jordanians more than once, and blew up the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad at one point.

Either way, this is bad news.

Ironically, King Abdullah II tried to tell Dick Cheney in spring of 2002 that this sort of thing would happen. I wrote at the time, a year before the Iraq War:

In Jordan King Abdullah II was clearly extremely disturbed by the idea of a war. He knew it would throw the Jordanian economy again back down to the level of Chad, as happened in 1991, that it would bring angry crowds into the street (thousands already came out Saturday for demonstrations in Amman over Palestine), and that it had the potential if he stood with the US to provoke a second Jordanian Civil War. His reaction was almost apocalyptic. He said such a war could go (in Robin Wright of the LA Times's report) '"completely awry" and even backfire, producing a civil war in Iraq that could involve neighboring countries--and even have a ripple effect in the United States and Europe.' He added, "It's the potential Armageddon of Iraq that worries all of us, and that's where common sense would say, 'Look, this is a tremendously dangerous road to go down."

The story of the rescue of the Israeli tourists suggests one of the repercussions here. If the Iraq guerrilla war does spill over into Jordan, it won't stop there. Bush, Cheney and the Neocons have managed to endanger Israeli security by destabilizing the Middle East, just as they have endangered us all.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Baghdad Bombs kill 13, wound 34;
Divisions among Jihadis

AFP reports that "13 people, including seven Iraqi policemen and six civilians, were killed and 34 were injured in three car bombs in different parts of Baghdad on Wednesday, medical and military sources said."

Knight Ridder reports that the "Zarqawi" group has broken with other Sunni jihadis in Ramadi and has fought street battles with them. One issue is whether Sunnis should vote in the Dec. 15 elections, with Iraqis increasingly favoring this step.

I would not read too much into this split yet. There are some 36 guerrilla groups in the Sunni Arab areas, and it is natural for them to fight amongst themselves from time to time. It doesn't mean they wouldn't cooperate to hit the US.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Kashmir Victims: 80,000 May Die;
3 Million Homeless

Disasters in South Asia are Himalayan compared to our own. Three million persons have been made homeless in Pakistan. Oxfam and other aid agencies are increasingly afraid that tens of thousands of survivors of the Kashmir earthquake are in danger of perishing, as winter comes. As many could die of want and exposure as perished in the earthquake itself.

Please consider donating something to prevent this looming tragedy at Oxfam or the charity of your choice.

A hill staffer writes:

So far, the US has only given $50 million and pledged another $150 million. USAID has only $10 million left in their budget, after that US assistance will run out of funding. Today, the President instructed five Fortune 500 CEOs to travel to Pakistan. They will be doing fact finding and help with private donations. Unfortunately, with all the hurricanes (Katrina, Rita, Wilma, etc) there is "disaster fatigue" in the US Congress.

The Members of Congress are hesitant to act because they believe their constituents need help at home. Moreover, the Pakistani-American community has been unable to organize any national campaign to lobby Congress (which is btw the world's biggest piggy bank). There is no emergency appropriations bill, just a resolution asking for funding. Next week, on November 17th, there will be "A day on the hill" where Pakistani-Americans will meet their Member and ask them for more funding. After Thanksgiving eleven Members of Congress will be traveling to India and Pakistan on a Congressional Delegation. These activities should help.

There are rumors that in the next Iraq supplemental bill they may add (in committee) relief funding for Kashmir. The problem is that it will happen sometime after Thanksgiving and winter will arrive any day now. There are reports that 80K have died and maybe another 80k will die in the next few weeks.

The mainstream media really isn't covering this (maybe b/c its hard to report in the Mountains and maybe b/c Westerner's were not affected). It would be great for the internet community to take this up. "

The Bush administration is threatening to dump the entire thing on the private sector, by setting up some sort of philanthropic fund. The scale of the disaster makes necessary that government funds be added to those of individuals, however, if a dent is to be made.

I know that many of my readers must have disaster fatigue, what with tsunamis, hurricanes, an entire American city making like Atlantis, and now this enormous earthquake.

But Kashmir is a world flashpoint. Conflict over it was involved in the Pakistani military's support for the Taliban in Afghanistan (they called it "strategic depth.") Conflict over it has given the world 3 wars, and almost produced a nuclear war in 2002. For the implications of the issue for al-Qaeda and the war on terror, see this posting.

The horrific earthquake has nevertheless created an opening for progress on this longstanding conflict. Pakistan and India are cooperating, and on Wednesday they even opened a checkpoint at the Line of Control.

The Bush administration wanted to respond by sending in military helicopters. Some have been allowed to operate. But everyone knows that they will be gathering intelligence on the side. Pakistan's president Pervez Musharraf rejected an Indian offer of military helicopters for this reason.

If the United States is in any way serious about the need for engagement with the Muslim world, it needs to respond to this disaster with civilian aid and in the most visible way possible. Please pass this appeal on to others, and let's blog the hell out of it, and consider writing your congressional representative.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Stevenson on Riots in France

Roger Stevenson kindly writes:

"Thanks so much for your thoughtful and enlightened piece on the riots that are currently besetting France. I, too, am extremely upset over the inflated, sensational and unfactual reporting from the US media outlets.

Steyn's comments make you wonder if he has even ever set foot in the country let alone done any meaningful research on the social conditions in France's HLM housing developments. As a retired American academic who now lives in France and who has also been naturalized as a French citizen, I have not just a passing interest in the causes of and solutions to the current situation.

I have been reminded over the past two weeks of on-going violence of my classes on French civilization and culture in the States. I always made it a point when we discussed immigration and social integration problems in France to emphasize that,
in my opinion, this was one of the most serious problems that France would be faced with in coming years.

I agree for the most part with your analysis of the historical factors and the neglect that French society in general has shown for the problems of minority ethnic groups. The housing problems and discrimination they face in everyday life are truly tragic. France was forced in the 50's and 60's to embark on large scale housing projects to house the increasing numbers of immigrant labor families that the economy needed, with the result that these large high rise apartment buildings are now ghetto-like neighborhoods that are often poorly maintained and very overcrowded.

The remnants of France's colonial empire are now stacked, often 12 stories high, in what the French call "rabbit cages." It is easy to understand how the youth of these
underprivileged projects feel totally disenfranchised from the mainstream of French society. Many have dropped out of a very rigid education system, and the prospects for any kind of meaningful future in terms of a job, career, decent housing, a feeling of self-worth, etc., are very bleak.

And when the Minister of Interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, talks of clearning up these housing projects with a "Kärcher" (a high pressusre steam cleaning machine) and refering to the youth of these projects as "racaille" (I think the best translation is "scum", what does he expect ? Such incendiary language has no place in dealing with the victims of many decades of social neglect and has, in fact, only served as a further catalyst to the present violence.

And yet, from what I read in the French press, there are other factors at play here. Le Monde had a series of articles in the Tuesday, Nov., 8th edition where many of the kids from these projects as well as their parents are interviewed. One mother is quoted as saying that these young men (there are very few young girls involved) have no future ahead of them and yet are the victims themselves of a gang mentality that is in operation in the suburbs. They have no values other than those of money and consumerism, and drug trafficking is one of the few means they have of making money. A group of young girls is quoted as saying that alone these young men would never think of torching a car, but in the group/gang mentality they would be considered a coward if they refused to go along with the group. "They would be nothing in the
neighborhood."

Another factor that is important to realize is that their actions are largely designed to attract attention to them and to their plight. The group of girls interviewed were upset that there were no police helicopters flying over their neighborhood on the particular night they were interviewed. "Seine Saint Denis get the helicopters. We are losers here."

It's a complicated issue and one that will take considerable wisdom on the part of the authorities to quell the disturbances and put into place meaningful strategies and programs to deal with the underlying causes of the unrest. Contrary to what one hears and reads in the US media, this is not at all a Muslim intifada (There is currently an interesting thread on Helena Cobban's Blog), and the frequent comparisons to May '68 are only partially correct. For one thing, I doubt very much that the popoulation at large would ever support their actions. The general strike in '68 was the result of large-scale involvement in the student uprising by many elements of French society. That just won't be the case now. In fact, in a poll released this morning, over 80% of the French, including a majority of those polled from the left, approve the curfew measures decreed by Villepin yesterday."

Cheers,

Roger Stevenson

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Judith Miller fired from New York Times

Lynne Duke examines the issues around the departure of Judith Miller from the NYT. Toward the end, she raises the question of whether Miller is a Neoconservative (something she denies).

I addressed this question in my article for Salon.com, "Judy Miller and the Neocons."
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

The Problem with Frenchness

Readers have asked me for comment about the riots in France that have now provoked emergency laws and a curfew. What I would rather comment on, however, is the myths that have governed many rightwing American comments on the tragic events. Actually, I can only think that the disturbances must produce a huge ice cream headache for the dittoheads. French of European heritage pitted against French of African and North African heritage? How could they ever pick a side?

I should begin by saying how much these events sadden me and fill me with anguish. I grew up in part in France (7 years of my childhood in two different periods) and have long been in love with the place, and the people. We visited this past June for a magical week. And, of course, I've been to Morocco and Tunisia and Senegal, and so have a sense of the other side in all this; I rather like all those places, too. How sad, to see all this violence and rancor. I hope Paris and France more generally can get through these tough times and begin working on the underlying problems soon. At this time of a crisis in globalization in the wake of the Cold War, we need Paris to be a dynamic exemplar of problem-solving on this front.

The French have determinedly avoided multiculturalism or affirmative action. They have insisted that everyone is French together and on a "color-blind" set of policies. "Color-blind" policies based on "merit" always seem to benefit some groups more than others, despite a rhetoric of equality and achievement. In order to resolve the problems they face, the French will have to come to terms with the multi-cultural character of contemporary society. And they will have to find ways of actively sharing jobs with minority populations, who often suffer from an unemployment rate as high as 40 percent (i.e. Iraq).

Mark Steyn of the Chicago Sun-Times commits most of the gross errors, factual and ethical, that characterize the discourse of the Right in the US on such matters.

For instance, Steyn complains that the rioters have been referred to as "French youths."

''French youths,'' huh? You mean Pierre and Jacques and Marcel and Alphonse? Granted that most of the "youths" are technically citizens of the French Republic, it doesn't take much time in les banlieus of Paris to discover that the rioters do not think of their primary identity as ''French'': They're young men from North Africa growing ever more estranged from the broader community with each passing year and wedded ever more intensely to an assertive Muslim identity more implacable than anything you're likely to find in the Middle East. After four somnolent years, it turns out finally that there really is an explosive ''Arab street,'' but it's in Clichy-sous-Bois.

This paragraph is the biggest load of manure to hit the print media since Michael Brown (later of FEMA) and his Arabian Horse Society were profiled in Arabian Horse Times.

The French youth who are burning automobiles are as French as Jennifer Lopez and Christopher Walken are American. Perhaps the Steyns came before the Revolutionary War, but a very large number of us have not. [Actually Steyn is Canadian and if he lives in the US he is either an alien or . . . an immigrant!] The US brings 10 million immigrants every decade and one in 10 Americans is now foreign-born. Their children, born and bred here, have never known another home. All US citizens are Americans, including the present governor of California. "The immigrant" is always a political category. Proud Californio families (think "Zorro") who can trace themselves back to the 18th century Spanish empire in California are often coded as "Mexican immigrants" by "white" Californians whose parents were Okies.

A lot of the persons living in the urban outer cities (a better translation of cite than "suburb") are from subsaharan Africa. And there are lots of Eastern European immigrants. The riots were sparked by the deaths of African youths, not Muslims. Singling out the persons of Muslim heritage is just a form of bigotry. Moreover, French youth of European heritage rioted quite extensively in 1968. As they had in 1789. Rioting in the streets is not a foreign custom. It has a French genealogy and context.

The young people from North African societies such as Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia are mostly only nominal Muslims. They frequently do not speak much Arabic, and don't have "proper" French, either. They frequently do not know much about Islam and most of them certainly don't practice it-- much less being more virulent about it than Middle Easterners.

Aware of their in-between-ness, young persons of North African heritage in France developed a distinctive identity. They took the word Arabe and scrambled it to produce Beur (which sounds in French like the word for "butter"). Beur culture can be compared a bit to hip-hop as a form of urban expression of marginality and self-assertion in a racist society. It is mostly secular.

Another thing that is wrong with Steyn's execrable paragraph is that it assumes an echt "Frenchness" that is startling in a post-Holocaust thinker. There are no pure "nations" folks. I mean, first of all, what is now France had a lot of different populations in it even in the 18th century-- Bretons (speakers of a Celtic language related to Welsh and Gaelic), Basques, Alsatians (German speakers), Provencale people in the south, Jews, etc., etc. "Multi-culturalism" is not something new in Europe. What was new was the Romantic nationalist conviction that there are "pure" "nations" based on "blood." It was among the more monstrous mistakes in history. Of course if, according to this essentially racist way of thinking, there are "pure" nations that have Gypsies, Jews and others living among them, then the others might have to be "cleansed" to restore the "purity."

Yet another problem: France has for some time been a capitalist country with a relatively strong economy. Such economies attract workers. There have been massive labor immigration flows into France all along. In the early 20th century Poles came to work in the coal mines, and then more came in the inter-war period. By the beginning of the Great Depression, there were half a million Polish immigrants in France. Their numbers declined slightly in the next few years. There were even more Italians. There isn't anything peculiar about having large numbers of immigrants who came for work. And, few in France in the early 20th century thought that Poles were susceptible of integration into French society. Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy, who has made himself unpopular by exacerbating tensions with intemperate language, is the son of immigrants (I guess he does not count as "French" according to Steyn's criteria.)

Steyn wants to create a 1300-year struggle between Catholic France and the Muslims going back to Tours. This way of thinking is downright silly. France in the 19th century was a notorious ally of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, and fought alongside Muslims against the Christian Russians in the Crimean War. Among contemporary French, 40 percent do not even believe in God, and less than 20 percent go to mass at all regularly. Many of the French of non-European heritage are also not religious.

The French repaid the compliment of Tours by conquering much of the Middle East. Bonaparte aggressively and viciously invaded Egypt in 1798, but couldn't hold on there. But in 1830 the French invaded Algeria and incorporated it into France. Algeria was "French soil." They reduced the Algerian population (which they brutalized and exploited) to marginal people under the colonial thumb. The French government of Algeria allowed hundreds of thousands to perish of famine in the 1870s. After World War II, given low French birth rates and a dynamic capitalist economy, the French began importing Algerian menial labor. The resulting Beurs are no more incapable of "integrating" into France than the Poles or Jews were.

So it wasn't the Algerians who came and got France. France had come and gotten the Algerians, beginning with Charles X and then the July Monarchy. They settled a million rather rowdy French, Italians and Maltese in Algeria. These persons rioted a lot in the early 1960s as it became apparent that Algeria would get its independence (1962). In fact, European settler colonists or "immigrants" have caused far more trouble in the Middle East than vice versa.

The kind of riots we are seeing in France also have occurred in US cities (they sent Detroit into a tailspin from 1967). They are always produced by racial segregation, racist discrimination, spectacular unemployment, and lack of access to the mainstream economy. The problems were broached by award-winning French author Tahar Ben Jalloun in his French Hospitality decades ago.

(Americans who code themselves as "white" are often surprised to discover that "white people" created the inner cities here by zoning them for settlement by racial "minorities," excluding the minorities from the nicer parts of the cities and from suburbs. As late as the 1960s, many European-Americans were willing to sign a "covenant" not to sell their houses to an African-American, Chinese-American or a Jewish American. In fact, in the US, the suburbs were built, most often with de facto government subsidies in the form of highways and other perquisites, as an explicit means of racial segregation. Spatial segregation protected "white" businesses from competition from minority entrepreneurs, who couldn't open shops outside their ghettos. In France, government inputs were used to create "outer cities," but many of the same forces were at work.) The French do not have Jim Crow laws, but de facto residential segregation is a widespread and intractable problem.

The problem is economic and having to do with economic and residential exclusionism, not with an "unassimilable" "immigrant" minority. (The French authorites deported a lot of Poles in the 1930s for making trouble by trying to unionize and strike, on the grounds that they were an unassimilable Slavic minority.)

On the other hand, would it be possible for the French Muslim youth to be pushed toward religious extremism if the French government does not address the underlying problems. Sure. That was what I was alluding to in my posting last week.

The solution? Recognizing that "Frenchness" is not monochrome, that France is a tapestry of cultures and always has been, and that sometimes some threads of the tapestry need some extra attention if it is not to fray and come apart.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Saddam Attorney Assassinated

Reuters reports that another attorney working for Saddam's defense team was assassinated on Tuesday.

It is obvious that Saddam cannot be properly tried in Iraq under these circumstances.

It is not known who is behind the killings, but Saddam to put it lightly has a lot of enemies. It is also possible that the guerrilla movement sees a trial of him as a threat to their own hopes of taking over, and that the killings are by Saddams' former supporters.

Some 9 Iraqis were killed in various incidents of guerrilla violence.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Chalabi and Abdul Mahdi

An informed reader writes:

' There appears to be some Bush Administration disarray in relation to the candidates for Iraqi Prime Minister, which the “Western press” deem to be Messrs. Allawi, Chalabi and Mahdi, although the incumbent should not be counted out. Obviously, much depends on the votes received by List 555. If they win a majority of the seats, or nearly a majority, the electoral fate of Messrs Allawi and Chalabi could be irrelevant. This time around the USG cannot use Iraqi state television to favor a candidate, although how much good its endorsement did Mr. Allawi is open to question.

Mr. Chalabi is reported to be meeting with Secretary Rice tomorrow; Adel-Abdul Mahdi, to no press acclaim whatever (so far), met with her this morning. Secretary Snow, who Mr. Chalabi was also to meet, is in India and, it appears, will meet with neither of them. As far as has been reported, Mr. Allawi has not been to DC for some time. Prime Minister Jaafari did have meetings at State, but, in relation to President Talabani, did not receive a royal welcome. In terms of protocol, if Mr. Chalabi, but not Vice President Mahdi, meets with Vice President Cheney, there would appear to be either (a) something amiss or (b) a possible indication that Mr. Mahdi did not wish to meet with him.

It would appear that Mr. Mahdi’s approach makes more sense than does Mr. Chalabi’s in terms of Iraqi political considerations. '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Conyers to Chalabi

A press release from the office of Congressman John Conyers:

Today, Congressman John Conyers, Jr., Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, Congressman Maurice Hinchey and other Members will send the attached letter to Mr. Ahmed Chalabi asking for a meeting to discuss his role in manipulating the intelligence that led to war with Iraq. The current list of signers (18 in all) is attached below and will be updated later today.

November 8, 2005


Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi

Iraqi National Congress

c/o The Ritz-Carlton Georgetown

3100 South Street, NW

Washington, DC 20007


Dear Mr. Deputy Prime Minister:

In the months leading up to the present conflict in Iraq, information from your close circle of associates was a key element in the Bush Administration's effort to convince the public of the need to go to war. As one of the leading Members of the Iraqi National Congress, you were responsible for providing a major portion of the information the Bush Administration used to persuade Members of Congress and the American people that a war with Iraq was neccessary.

Most notably, an "Iraqi chemical engineer" designated "Curveball" supplied hundreds of pages "firsthand" descriptions of mobile biological and chemical weapons facilities to the United States Defense Intelligence Agency. Secretary of State Colin Powell later used this information in his February 2003 address to the United Nations detailing the state of Iraq's weapons programs.

Since then, the Congress and the American public have determined that these "firsthand" accounts were entirely fabricated. Moreover, we have learned that "Curveball" is, in fact, the brother of one of your top lieutenants within the Iraqi National Congress. Secretary Powell has since apologized for the use of such "intelligence" in making his case for the invasion of Iraq. However, neither you nor your associatees have ever fully accounted for the role you played in the buildup to this war, or for the $340,000 you and your associates received every month from the United States intelligence community for your efforts in gathering "evidence."

We respectfully request that you make yourself available to us to explain the details and reasons for your involvement in the manipulation of intelligence as the Bush Administration pushed for war. It is vital to the integrity of both our democracies that the truth behind these terribly destructive events be known.

In 2002, you told the New York Times that the Iraqi people "are grateful to President Bush for liberating Iraq, but it is time for the Iraqi people to run their affairs." As members of Congress and concerned citizens, we, too, seek an end to this war and a conclusion to the violence that has plagued both our countries for years. Your cooperation in this investigation will serve as an invaluable aid to the American people as we labor towards a final resolution in Iraq.




Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi

Page Two

November 8, 2005


We therefore encourage you to meet with us during your visit to the United States this week, explain your actions to the public, and help the people of both Iraq and the United States to understand why we are at war today. Please reply through the Judiciary Committee Democratic office, 2142 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC 20515, (tel: 202-225-6504; fax: 202-225-4423).

Sincerely,

John Conyers, Jr.

Maurice Hinchey

George Miller

Raul M. Grijalva

Chris Van Hollen

Susan Davis

Michael McNulty

Grace Napolitano

Lloyd Doggett

Ted Strickland

Ellen Tauscher

Jim McDermott

Jay Inslee

Marci Kaptur

Jan Schakowsky

Donald Payne

Cynthia McKinney

Hilda Solis

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

5 GIs Dead, US Kills 36 in Qaim District;
Guerrillas Kill 16

Guerrillas at a checkpoint south of Baghdad detonated a car bomb that killed 4 US GIs.

In addition, AFP writes:

' A suicide car bomber killed nine people, including six Iraqi policemen, in the southern Dora district of Baghdad on Monday. Ten people were wounded in the attack which targeted a police patrol in an area known as a turbulent district of the city. '

In the fighting in al-Qaim district, US forces said that they killed 36 guerrillas. One Marine was killed on Sunday.

In response to Defense Minister Saadoun Dulaimi's threat that the houses of guerrillas would be destroyed, the guerrilla movement on Monday threatened to destroy the houses of Iraq defense officials.

Reuters reports further deaths in the guerrilla war:

In east Baghdad, mortar fire killed 4 persons and wounded 6.

At Thibban north of Baghdad, a suicide bomber attacked soldiers guarding oil pipelines, killing 2 and wounding 13.

In the large city of Mosul in the north, a suicide car bomber attacked a US patrol. No word on any casualties.

Also in Mosul, guerrillas assassinated an editor of Tal Afar Today newspaper at an internet cafe.

On Sunday, at Dawr near Tikrit, a roadside bomb killed one US soldier and wounded 2 others and an Iraqi translator.

On the issue of whose fault the Iraq quagmire is, Stephen Walt refuses to let Bush and Neocon cheerleaders like Bill Kristol off the hook.

Maryam Fam has done an important follow-up investigation of the violence on October 27 between Mahdi militiamen and Sunni Arabs northeast of Baghdad. Unlike reports of the time, she is able to situate the violence in Diyala province. She says that locals allege that a Sunni Arab town was harboring guerrillas who had taken Shiites hostage, and that the police asked Mahdi Army militiamen to conduct a raid and free them. The operation turned into a sectarian bloodbath when the Shiite fighters were ambushed. The Sunni Arabs deny having held hostages and see the raid as a manifestation of blind sectarian hatred (not a very convincing explanation).

Reuters reports that Muqtada al-Sadr, the young Shiite nationalist, has not yet publicly endorsed the United Iraqi Alliance, in which his followers have a high profile. A meeting between al-Sadr and UIA leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim Sunday night did not produce a joint press conference. [I'm not sure the lack of a joint statement is actually an indication of anything. The Najaf clergy don't behave like ordinary politicians.]

Robert Parry points to the way in which Wilkerson's recent revelations about the marginalization of the State Department by Cheney and Rumsfeld also give evidence for the importance of petroleum in underpinning Iraq policy. The US government keeps entertaining a recurring fantasy of occupying Middle Eastern oil fields. But for what would likely happen if they tried it, see the entry under "Thibban" above.

The US military in Iraq is so strapped for personnel that it is using mechanics for security purposes. Some officers are angry about it.

Reader Roman Kropp points out that Reuters reports that Fakhr al-Qaisi survived the assassination attempt against him.

For more on the disappointment felt at the current situation by middle class and Sunni Arab Iraqis see Aliveinbaghdad and Baghdad Burning.

KarbalaNews.net is excited about the first Iraqi airliner flight to Iran in decades. The passengers, who landed on Monday, were mostly Shiite pilgrims on pilgrimage to the shrine of Imam Reza, the 8th Imam, in Mashhad near the AFghan border. The same source alleged that US troops refused an Iranian helicopter permission to land at Baghdad International Airport. I could not find corroboration and am suspicious of this allegation, but report it to show what sorts of things are in the pro-Iranian Iraqi press.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Italians Release Video of Phosphorous Attack on Fallujah

The Italian television network RAI has released a video that includes an interview with an ex-Marine and footage of the use of phosphorous bombs at Fallujah in November of 2004.

The issue is being discussed at Daily Kos.

White phosphorus is a form of incendiary bomb.

The Italian press is calling the phosphorus bombs "chemical weapons" and alleging that they were used indiscriminately and against civilian populations.

The use of incendiary bombs against civilian targets or concentrations of civilians with no military function is forbidden by Protocol III of the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. Although the US ratified Protocols I and II of the Convention, it does not appear to have adopted Protocol III into US law.

There also exists a Convention on the prohibition of the development, production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons and on their destruction, Paris 13 January 1993, which went into effect in 1997 and which the United States signed.

The 1997 convention, however, does not appear to refer to incendiary bombs:

' ARTICLE II

DEFINITIONS AND CRITERIA

For the purposes of this Convention:

1. "Chemical Weapons" means the following, together or separately:

(a) Toxic chemicals and their precursors, except where intended for purposes not prohibited under this Convention, as long as the types and quantities are consistent with such purposes;

(b) Munitions and devices, specifically designed to cause death or other harm through the toxic properties of those toxic chemicals specified in subparagraph (a), which would be released as a result of the employment of such munitions and devices;

(c) Any equipment specifically designed for use directly in connection with the employment of munitions and devices specified in subparagraph (b).

2. "Toxic Chemical" means:

Any chemical which through its chemical action on life processes can cause death, temporary incapacitation or permanent harm to humans or animals. This includes all such chemicals, regardless of their origin or of their method of production, and regardless of whether they are produced in facilities, in munitions or elsewhere. '

As a historian, I feel it important to point out that the use of phosphorus bombs or massive bombing in Iraq is not a new thing. The British used incendiary bombs to control the rebellious Iraqi tribes. (The British also used mustard gas in Iraq, long before Saddam.) Of course, the difference between kinds of munitions can be exaggerated. It is no fun to have "conventional" arms rain down on your family from the sky.

I wrote in a review last year for The Nation:

'The airplane also allowed a close surveillance of the population in a manner that the supposedly despotic predecessors of the British, the Ottomans, could never have dreamed of achieving. This aspect of British rule in Iraq has long been understood by, among others, the eminent historian of Iraq Peter Sluglett. In his 1976 study, Britain in Iraq, Sluglett quotes Member of Parliament Leopold Amery as saying, "If the writ of King Faisal runs effectively through his kingdom, it is entirely due to the British airplanes."

Yet, as [Toby] Dodge points out, the airplane quickly demonstrated its limits, in large part because it depended on raw power and fear rather than on legitimate authority. The British used night bombing and incendiary explosives to destroy villages around Samawah in 1923 as a means of forcing the population to surrender its rifles and submit. While the destruction of six villages and the killing of 100 men, women and children terrified the peasants, they simply dispersed from the area and took their rifles with them. The Royal Air Force high command considered following the fleeing Iraqis, but concluded that further bombing would only be a slaughter. According to Dodge, the high command feared that the British public would discover exactly how they were ruling Iraq. '

Indeed, Sir Arthur Harris, who planned large numbers of British bombing raids in Iraq in the 1920s, went on to become the architect of the fire-bombing of Dresden during World War II, which killed at least 25,000.

The lessons of British Iraq were mostly unknown to the American politicians who planned out and executed the 2003 Iraq War. One of them is that the military occupation of a conquered population is a barbaric business and can easily draw the colonizer into the use of horrific means to control the rebellious occupied. The Americans' moral fibre is being destroyed from within by things like Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, and other atrocities. In the end, America may not any longer be America. The country that began by forbidding cruel and unusual punishment is ending by formally authorizing torture on a grand scale, and by burning small town Iraqis down to the bone with white phosphorus.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Comment Section Rules

The comment section of Informed Comment is intended to allow readers to weigh in on the issues raised in the postings.

The ideal comment would be meaty, with some analysis or information that contributes to the topic, and would be one or two paragraphs in length. Short messages of a sociable nature (greetings, etc.) are discouraged.

Short messages that are mainly sent just to include the author's URL will not be accepted. A substantive message that points to a URL will be entertained.

I apologize about the need to register with blogger.com. I tried allowing anonymous messages, but got annoying junk, some of it in Chinese, and had to stop that.

For reasons of copyright, we cannot reproduce at this site a whole newspaper article or even large portions of one. Please summarize the information that you wish to pass along. Too extensive quotation of a copyright source will cause a message to be rejected.

Readers who want to include URLs should please use a program that produces tiny URLs. Some posters (using I.E.?) seem to be able to post formatted URLs. In other cases, blogger.com does not appear to allow hyperlink code in the comments section. A formatted hyperlink looks like this:
<a href="http://www.yoursite.com/ music/ brahms.html">
Brahms</a>
Huge raw URLs interfere with blogger.com formatting. So if you can't post formatted hyperlinks and want to put a URL, use the tiny URL.

The comments are moderated. The moderator functions similarly to the editor of a letters-to-the-editor page of a major newspaper. The editor has no obligation to post a message simply because it is submitted, and, indeed, fair numbers of messages will inevitably be rejected. The editor does not have time to explain why any particular message was not posted, and those who submit them will simply have to accept that the system is arbitrary and at least occasionally unsatisfactory.

That a message is not posted does not indicate that the editor does not like the poster, or does not like the posting. It could indicate that the moderator was too busy to do webwork that day. Or the editor may feel that the message duplicates a previous comment, or is a little off topic, or is unsubstantiated. Because the editor is often traveling or in committees or classes, there may be substantial delays in posting comments occasionally.

On the other hand, the editor, having few enough prerogatives in life, may in fact persistently reject messages of people whom he simply does not like. :-)

The editor is looking for messages with a certain tone, of civility and a willingness to share ideas and information in a non-dogmatic way. Strident messages, and those that are simply insulting or libellous, will not be posted. Messages that even sound as though they are a form of trolling will not be posted. Rejections are final and non-negotiable, and persistent attempts to argue the editor into posting something will simply result in the author being killfiled.

The comment section does not seek any sort of artificial two-sides-of-a-story "balance" at all, and no critiques of lack of such "balance" on these pages will be entertained. This sort of "balance" would require that the allegation that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer be offset with a denial of this simple and well-established fact. This is not a game played here. A variety of points of view is all to the good, but a mere opinion not backed up by facts, reasoning or analysis is unlikely to get through. Moreover, not all points of view are valuable.

All that said, it is the editor's hope that the discussions will be an asset, and will be gratifying to readers and writers.


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

Comments at Informed Comment

Readers have occasionally asked for a comment feature at this web site.

I of course love the idea, but did not move in that direction for a number of reasons. At first, of course, blogger.com software did not allow it. Then when they did, there was no moderating function and there has been a big problem with spam closing down sites. Moreover, I have a low tolerance for hate mail and bigotry, which you get a certain amount of at any public comment site, and would not have wanted to host it. I have had very bad experiences in the past with un-moderated email discussion lists, and over time revised my initial enthusiasm for them. They allow a small number of cranks to hold everyone else hostage, and the lists are constantly roiled by bad feeling in a completely unnecessary way.

But most of these problems seem to have been resolved by blogger. I believe that there are effective safeguards in their new system against spambots. And they allow the messages to be moderated, as I understand it.

New problems are created by this experiment with comments. Since I do want the comment section to be moderated, it means a time investment for me. I travel a lot or am in committee meetings or classes, and so a fair amount of time could go by before a comment was put up sometimes, no doubt to the annoyance of the commenter. And, of course, rejecting comments inevitably provokes howls about censorship which can be published elsewhere in cyberspace, creating "noise" in the background of the site that may not be productive.

As with any publication by an editor (which is what moderated comments amount to), the editor is all-powerful, and may accept or reject arbitrarily. If I smell trolling, or if I just think a comment sheds no light on anything but the author's prejudices, I will reject.

On the other hand, I often get very good comments from informed readers and have long wished that their insights could be easily shared. Indeed, some expert readers have given me mini-seminars that have gotten me up to speed on an area about which I knew less, and I am extremely grateful to them. So I am going to try this as an experiment and see what happens.

PS- I'm so grateful for the outpouring of support that has greeted this new feature, and want to thank everyone who has written.

I'm hoping that the comments sections will mainly be used for substantive comment (say a para or two with new info or insight) or inquiries. Alas, I couldn't hope to keep up with a series of one or two-sentence messages that mainly have a social function, and apologize to anyone whose message did not get through.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Future of the Book

The Institute for the Future of the Book is having a gathering soon to which I am invited, as an academic blogger.

They thought it would be useful to poll my readers about some issues. The brief poll is at a comments page at their web site. I'd be most grateful if readers with an interest in these issues would take a moment to answer their handful of questions.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Dennis O'Flaherty Reader Comment on Qaim Campaign

Cole: [Al-Zaman: Sunni Arab leaders accused the US of conducting a campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing in their sweep of the Western cities. (This allegation is, needless to say, not correct.]


Dennis O'Flaherty writes:

'... you raise a point that has troubled me -- and I hope other Americans
-- for a while, which is precisely why we **are** blowing the living s*** out of one little border town after another. As an ex-marine (4 years peacetime, thank God) I can easily understand why my jarhead brethren want to work out their fury on just about anything after months of the kind of terror and debilitating general stress that led our people in Viet Nam to the same kind of "kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out" mentality -- despite Rumsfeld's SpecOps daydreams our whole military tradition is still in massed battle won by gigantic firepower, and the constant hitting of our forces by invisible enemies who may be that same 14-year old girl who poured cold water for you in the last village ends up making you crazy. Bad crazy, it goes without saying.

But hey, the government is supposed to have some kind of **reasons** for unleashing that awesome combination of fear and frustration plus 40mm grenade cannons, helicopter gunships, attack jets, etc etc etc Otherwise it's like: Whoa, a fire, let's pour some gas on it.

Why **shouldn't** sunnis of all ranks and backgrounds assume this is ethnic cleansing, when we direct that insane destructive force against miserable little mudbrick towns and handfuls of desperate men armed with AK's and RPG'S? ...

Is there a reason besides the ones I've heard so far for this (apologies to Blake) "...fearful **a -** symmetry"? '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Blair Could have Delayed Beginning of War: Meyer;
Sadrists Will Boycott Cairo Conference

Sir Christopher Meyer, former British ambassador in Washington, blames Prime Minister Tony Blair for not slowing the Bush administration's rush to war in 2003. Meyer implies that he could see that the Bush team was poorly prepared for the aftermath, and says that a delay of a month or several months would have allowed this problem to be addressed.

Tidbits: Irving Lewis Libby, Cheney's then chief of staff, told Meyer that Britain is "the only ally that matters." This is Neocon doctrine, which holds that the US, Britain, and Turkey are the only permanent partners in war, whereas other allies can be brought in or cycled out at will. Berlusconi must feel badly used. (And the Turks rather let Libby down . . . )

Karl Rove, Bush's political adviser, told Meyer that an Iraq War could be delayed until September of 2003, and that the delay would have no impact on the presidential campaign.

Meanwhile in contemporary Iraq, the US military (2500 GIs) and some 1,000 Iraqi troops continued their offensive in Western Iraq out near the Syrian border. This is not the first attack on the small town of Qaim, and there is no reason in my view to believe that this one will be more successful in fighting terrorism than the last.

A marine was killed in an ambush on Sunday and 3 US troops received light wounds, according to the NYT. But far from being a substantial base for the foreign fighters within the guerrilla movement, a town like Husaybah was abandoned starting in September and so it is a ghost town, with just a few hundred people left. The actual numbers of captured or killed jihadis are likely to be low.

What I can't understand is that the US military pays much less attention to Sunni Arab districts of Baghdad such as Azamiyah, which is surely a base for the guerrilla movement and which is far more populous and important than a dinky little district like Qaim.

Al-Zaman: Sunni Arab leaders accused the US of conducting a campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing in their sweep of the Western cities. (This allegation is, needless to say, not correct.)

The same newspaper reports that the Shiites are very nervous about the forthcoming Arab League Conference on national reconciliation. Because of the danger that the Arab League government might invite some Baathist Sunnis, politicians such as the young Shiite nationals Muqtada al-Sadr are already saying that they will not go to the conference. Likewise, the leader of the Badr Corps (the Shiite paramilitary of SCIRI) is saying his organization will boycott the conference.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bush and the 7 Deadly Sins

The Washington Post reports a new poll that shows that the public's approval of Bush in the realms of trust, honesty and values has declined even in his base:

"Bush's approval ratings have been in decline for months, but on issues of personal trust, honesty and values, Bush has suffered some of his most notable declines. Moreover, Bush has always retained majority support on his handling of the U.S. campaign against terrorism -- until now, when 51 percent have registered disapproval.

The CIA leak case has apparently contributed to a withering decline in how Americans view Bush personally. The survey found that 40 percent now view him as honest and trustworthy -- a 13 percentage point drop in the past 18 months. Nearly 6 in 10 -- 58 percent -- said they have doubts about Bush's honesty, the first time in his presidency that more than half the country has questioned his personal integrity."

Bush's presidential campaign in 2000 focused on restoring "values" to Washington, but ironically, with regard to the War on Terror and the Iraq War, the Bush administration has gradually committed all of the seven deadly sins. It had even been argued that Bush himself committed all 7, whereas below I will concentrate on the administration as a whole and on the Iraq issues.

Pride. On May 2, 2003, Bush landed on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit to declare the end of major combat in Iraq. From the staged character of the event (the aircraft carrier was just offshore and there was no need to fly out to it), to the famous codpiece flight suit (which was intended to exude machismo), to the banner "Mission Accomplished," the entire event was suffused with overweening pride.



Major combat was, of course, not then over, and is not over in fall of 2005. Bush compounded his pridefulness with a speech on July 2, 2003, when he addressed the growing guerrilla movement in Iraq and said, "Bring'em on!"



This unfortunate taunting of a deadly and determined enemy was the farthest thing possible from either statesmanship or the gravity with which a commander in chief must view the dangers encompassing his troops.

It was pride that led Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz to believe that they could occupy Iraq with a relatively small military force, and could then transform the country without facing any significant opposition. It was pride that led them to disregard the advice of distinguished military men such as Gen. Eric Shinseki and Gen. Anthony Zinni.

Envy.

The Bush administration envied the old imperial powers such as the British Empire, and wanted to recreate that age. They could not, and the whole idea that they could was far-fetched to begin with.

Anger.

Bush and his team were angry at those who criticized their propaganda about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction.



They investigated their critic, the former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, and discovered that his wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, was an undercover operative in the CIA. Cheney told his then chief of staff, Irving Lewis Libby, about Plame Wilson's identity. Libby shared the information with journalists, including Judith Miller of the New York Times.

It was anger that drove Cheney, Libby, Rove and the others involved in this outing of a serving undercover agent.

Laziness: Bush vacations relentlessly, and especially in August.


It was while on vacation that Bush declined to act early and forcefully in both the tsunami and in the Katrina catastrophe in New Orleans. If laziness or sloth is the absence of appropriate zeal, that absence has deeply marked his presidency.

Bush has still not brought Usamah Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, who killed nearly 3,000 Americans and attacked both New York and the Pentagon, to justice.

Greed. The Bush administration is guilty of imperial overstretch with regard to Iraq.

Naomi Klein wrote that

"The honey theory of Iraqi reconstruction stems from the most cherished belief of the war’s ideological architects: that greed is good. Not good just for them and their friends but good for humanity, and certainly good for Iraqis. Greed creates profit, which creates growth, which creates jobs and products and services and everything else anyone could possibly need or want. The role of good government, then, is to create the optimal conditions for corporations to pursue their bottomless greed, so that they in turn can meet the needs of the society."

Gluttony

Over-consumption of petroleum drives some significant part of the Bush administration''s Middle East policies.


Lust Lust can be for sex but also for power. A person who lusts have power wants more of it than is good for anyone.

Lust for power caused Bush to make many of his most important mistakes.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sunni Constitution Drafter Killed;

Chalabi in Iran

Fakhri al-Qaisi of the National Dialogue Council was assassinated in Baghdad on Saturday. The Sunni politician had helped draft the new Iraqi constitution and was running for parliament. His group is part of a Sunni religious coalition that is running in the December 15 elections, a move opposed by the guerrilla movement, which most likely then took him out.

[The reports of al-Qaisi's death, fortunately, appear to have been greatly exaggerated; he seems in fact to have survived.]

Guerrillas fired on a minibus near Balad Ruz northeast of Baghdad, killing 13 persons. The minibus was carrying a family of Shiite "Faili" Kurds.

The National Dialogue Council [Sunni Arab] called for the resignation Saturday of Iraqi Defense Minister Saadoun Dulaimi, after the latter threatened that houses harboring terrorists would be destroyed. He was referring to US air strikes on suspected terrorist safe houses. Collective punishment is forbidden to occupying powers by the fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, since the Nazis had used it so extensively.

Iraqi deputy premier Ahmad Chalabi met Saturday with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. IRNA writes, '"Iraq territorial integrity and independence and strength are special concerns for Iran." The president also expressed concern on terrorism gripping Iraq and loss of lives of many innocent people saying that "these events are the tragic outcome of the occupation by foreign forces." "Insecurity is an excuse for the continuation of the presence of US forces in the region." Ahmadinejad further welcomed the Iraqi initiative for drawing a timeline for the withdrawal of foreign forces form the country.'

Chalabi admitted, ' One of Iraq's high priorities in charting out its foreign policy is to boost its relations with Iran "which has played a positive role in the composition and formation of the Iraqi government . . . " '

Knight Ridder profiles Muqtada al-Sadr, who by joining the United Iraqi Alliance coalition of religious Shiite parties has raised his political profile.

Mark Engler wonders whether Bush's policies with regard to the 'war on terror' and Iraq will harm US business and turn the corporate sector against him.

Hamza Hendawi does a human interest story on how the mood is darkening among book sellers in Baghdad who were once ecstatic about the fall of Saddam.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Al-Libi Tagged as Liar by US Intelligence
Bush Alleged Saddam-al-Qaeda Tie

Douglas Jehl of the NYT reports that the Defense Intelligence Agency and other intelligence professionals strongly suspected that Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was lying when he alleged, after his capture in Pakistan in 2001, that Iraq was training al-Qaeda in use of chemical weapons for terrorism.

Common sense would have dictated that when a prisoner is in custody and telling you something explosive like this, you would only believe it if it was corroborated by other evidence.

But the fact is that that the US had captured no al-Qaeda operatives who were trained in Iraq. And of all the money flows traced, none led back to Iraq. They all went to Pakistan via the Gulf. There was never any reason to believe al-Libi, whether the DIA found him credible or not. That they thought he was a liar, in addition to the lack of corroborating evidence for what he was saying, made it criminal for Bush to be quoting this "information" in his speeches.

Moreover, other high-level al-Qaeda operatives such as Khalid Shaykh Muhammad and Abu Zubaydah, who were far more important and informed than Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, were telling the same interrogators that Bin Laden had forbidden al-Qaeda operatives from cooperating with the secular Arab nationalist, Saddam Hussein. Their credible information, which tracked with the reality visible in arrests and the money trail, was suppressed by Bush and Cheney, whereas they trumpeted al-Libi's tall tales to the US public in order to build their case for an Iraq War.
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Sunni Cleric Calls for Participation in Elections
NATO Rules out Iraq Role

Al-Sharq al-Awsat/ AFP: The Sunni religious leader in the Association of Muslim Scholars, Shaikh Mahmud Mahdi al-Sumaidaie has called on Sunni Arabs to vote in the December 15 elections. The preacher at the Umm al-Qura Mosque in Baghdad said, "I call on you to participate broadly in the forthcoming elections so that we can safeguard Iraq, its mosques and its clerics, and so that we can end the rule of one sect without the others; and so that we can make a common stand and say to the Occupier, "Leave our country!"

This call is the first I have seen from a major AMS leader that the Sunnis participate in the Dec. 15 elections. It is a significant shift. (But, I still don't think the Sunni Arabs can get much more than 45-50 delegates in the 275-member parliament, if that. So some of Shaikh al-Sumaidaie's expectations are a little unrealistic.

64 percent of Americans now say that the Iraq War was not worth it, the same as in October. A new CBS poll, however, shows that the percentage of Americans who want a precipitate pull-out of troops from Iraq has declined slightly over the last month, from 59 percent to only 50 percent. Likewise, the sentiment for staying "as long as it takes" has risen in the past 30 days from 36 percent to 43 percent. It is hard to explain such a shift, but I suspect that the passage of the constitution has given the US public hope that the political process in Iraq is not hopeless, and they are therefore more willing to accept some sacrifices to get a good outcome.

Michael Schwartz reports on the Marsh Arab guerrilla war against the British in Sadrist-dominated Maysan province. The difference from the center-north is that the Mahdi Army does not attack innocent civilians, only targeting British troops.

Knight Ridder discusses the problem that US forces in Iraq detain a large number of innocent persons for months at a time. The US army and Marines are not policemen, and they are certainly not Iraqi policemen, since most know no local languages. But Mr. Rumsfeld is using them like policemen. The outcome is predictable, if tragic.

Rumsfeld resisted the clause in the Iraqi constitution that forbids the arrest of individuals without an indictment or warrant, and at the least wanted it not to cover US forces. So much for spreading "democracy" in the Middle East. If Rumsfeld wanted to spread arbitrary arrest and torture, well, they already had that. The new Iraqi government after Dec. 15 needs to demand a Status of Forces Agreement with the US and the UK. (Most everyone else in the coalition seems determined to leave soon.)

NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer says that there are no plans for a NATO involvement in Iraq. NATO is training 1,000 Iraqi officers a year at a military academy in Baghdad, but has no plans to do anything more than that, he said. (NATO does have a significant role in Afghanistan. But note that NATO invoked the provision of its charter that 'an attack on one is an attack on all' with regard to Afghanistan, and so felt that was a legitimate war. The NATO charter was not invoked in the case of Iraq, since Iraq had not attacked the United States.
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Former UK Ambassador in Washington:
Iraq War brought Terror to UK

Sir Christopher Meyer, former UK ambassador in Washington, DC, admits that the war he supported increased the risks of terrorism in Britain, according to The Guardian.

' So what, two-and-a-half years after the invasion, do the president and prime minister have to do now? "I think the US and ourselves are on the horns of an absolutely impossible dilemma," he says.

He opposes an early pullout of US and British troops. Abandoning the task of rebuilding the country would leave "the relatives of at least 2,000 American servicemen and 98 British servicemen with a legitimate question about what they died for".

' But he accepts that the task of rebuilding may now be impossible. "There is no doubt that the presence of American and British troops to a degree motivates the insurgency. So this is agonising for Bush and I think it is agonising for Blair, all of us really."

He also dismisses the prime minister's claim that the war has not exposed Britain to terrorist attacks. "There is plenty of evidence around at the moment that home-grown terrorism was partly radicalised and fuelled by what is going on in Iraq," he says. "There is no way we can credibly get up and say it has nothing to do with it. Don't tell me that being in Iraq has got nothing to do with it. Of course, it does. The issue is it is part of the price we have to pay and should be paying for the removal of Saddam Hussein and at the moment the jury is out." '

Sir Christopher, who spent a lot of time with both Bush and Blair, reveals that from his insider's perspective, Blair is woolly-headed and vague and fixated on high concept ideals, whereas Bush is articulate and in command of detail.

Yes, but which details and where did he get them? Details don't prove judgment. Judgment proves judgment.

Sir Christopher has spoken out before about his time in Washington. He has revealed that soon after September 11, Bush and his team were intent on attacking Iraq first. Only Blair's desperate pleading got Bush to agree to do Afghanistan first, to take down al-Qaeda. But then Blair had to promise to support an Iraq War later.
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Sectarianism Dominates Iraq in Run-up to Elections

The December 15 elections are shaping up as a sectarian affair. The United Iraqi Alliance groups four of the five main Shiite religious parties: Dawa, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Muqtada al-Sadr branch of the Sadrists, and the Islamic Action Organization, along with many smaller parties, including those of the Shiite Turkmen. Most of the Shiite provinces seem likely to vote for it, and it could well dominate parliament again. The Kurds will vote for the Kurdistan Alliance, the Sunnis for their list.

KarbalaNews.net [Arabic] notes that the Fadilah or Virtue Party, another branch of the Sadrists led by Shaikh Muhammad Yaqubi, in the end declined to join the UIA coalition. The Virtue Party is in rivalry with the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq in Basra, and competes for support with Muqtada's branch of Sadrism. My guess is that Virtue just wasn't given enough seats in the UIA list, either at the federal or the provincial level, to make them happy. They will contest the election on their own. [PS: I am told that the Electoral High Commission ruled Fadilah's attempt to secede out of order, since it came after the deadline.]

My guess is that the Sadr Movement made it difficult for Ahmad Chalabi to remain in the United Iraqi Alliance. Muqtada demanded that the UIA affirm that it would not recognize Israel, whereas Chalabi has a deal to recognized them if he comes to power. Likewise, with the Sadrists coming into the UIA, there weren't many free seats to bestow on the Iraqi National Congress, which no one thinks would do well on its own. Apparently the INC will run as an independent list, and it seems to be possible that Chalabi will not even get into parliament at all this time. Even if he does get in, he certainly will have little power.

The Bush administration is so unrepentant about the fraud perpetrated on the American people about alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (most of these allegations originating with Chalabi and his cronies) that Chalabi is meeting in Washington with Secretary of State Condi Rice and with National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley! Why not so long ago Bush was mad at him for passing to the Iranians the secret that the US had broken their encryption codes. Have they no shame? At long last?

As for the Sadrists: In his holy day sermon, Hazim al-Araji (a follower of Muqtada al-Sadr) called for national unity as a means of defeating terrorist groups. He preached while holding a machine gun in one hand. He said of the terrorists:

"They kill the people in the name of Islam . . . they use ringing names such as Ansar al-Sunnah (Helpers of the Prophet's Path), Qaedat al-Jihad (the Base for Holy War-- i.e. Bin Laden and Zawahiri), and The Army of Muhammad . . . The Prophet Muhammad [would say] "Ansar al-Sunnah, you are enemies of the Path of the Prophet; Army of Muhammad, I wash my hands of your deeds, you infidels! And you, Qaedat al-Jihad, you are the infidel base; yes, I wash my hands of these names." (-al-Sharq al-Awsat)

Gee, the Sadrists seem to have an interesting critique of Bin Laden.

Iraqis are divided on when to celebrate the Break-Fast Festival (Id al-Fitr) at the end of Ramadan. Sunnis and some Shiites celebrated it Thursday, whereas Sistani loyalists among the Shiites are celebrating it Friday. The custom is that when it falls depends on a reliable eyewitness sighting of the new moon. Given that some areas might be overcast, or just by accident, it is possible for one group to conclude that it has been seen while another waits a day. Under Saddam, the government issued a standardized ruling. But it is common in the Muslim world (and has been, all along, for different groups to celebrate the holy day on different days on occasion.

Eleven bodies were found in southeastern Baghdad on Thursday, some of them beheaded. Typically these incidents are the result of the unconventional sectarian civil war.
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