Al-Hakim Sees Baghdad as Federated Province
Sadrists Urge Alliance with Sunni Arabs


Al-Zaman/ AFP [Ar.]: Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the victorious (fundamentalist Shiite) United Iraqi Alliance suggested Friday that Baghdad province join Kurdistan, the Middle Euphrates, and the deep south as a confederacy with special privileges, overseen by a federal government. He said that the constitution had given the Iraqi people this right, adding, "The choice of federalism is the right one, because it has strengthened the unity of Iraq on the one hand, and on the other has ensured justice. It has saved the country forever from the troika of dictatorship, racism and sectarianism."

Al-Hakim said it was unlikely that the establishment of provincial confederacies in the south would lead to a break-up of Iraq: "The notion of the partition of Iraq is just not plausible, since we have made our choice, and have chosen to remain united in Iraq." He affirmed, "The Iraqi that everyone wants to realize is an Iraq of rights, participation, equal opportunity, love, peace and liberty."

He said in defense of the Shiite-Kurdish political alliance, "Our trial and tragedy are one, for the tyranny and persecution we experienced has pushed us to achieve the a partnership among all the elements of the Iraqi people." He said that his brother, Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim (d. Aug. 29, 2003 in a huge carbombing), who had led the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq for two decades, had always stood by the Kurdish people, and had emphasized the need for a strategic alliance of Iraqi Shiites and Iraqi Kurds. He called on the Kurds to work jointly with him in order to "safeguard the constitution from any attempt to alter it that might erase the gains that have been achieved by the Iraqi people."

(Cole: The Sunni Arabs had been promised that the new parliament would reopen negotiations on some articles of the constitution that they rejected. Al-Hakim is here correctly pointing out to the Kurds that if they ally with the Shiites, the Sunni Arabs can just be voted down in any attempt to change the constitution. The window for doing so will in any case close four months after the new parliament comes into session.)

Al-Hayat [Ar.] says that its sources tell it that al-Hakim and Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani reached a broad agreement on the outlines of a Shiite-Kurdish alliance in the new parliament. Talabani was keen to see the prerogatives of the president expanded, to which al-Hakim is said to have assented. He also wanted written guarantees as to the referendum to be held in 2007 about whether Kirkuk will acceded to the Kurdistan confederacy. Both agreed to seek a government of national unity, bringing in Sunni Arabs and secularists. They put off dealing the American demands that the secular forces be given a prominent role in the security forces. (The security forces are at the moment dominated by hardline Shiite fundamentalists close to Iran, and the US embassy is pressing hard to dilute them with a ministerial appointment to Interior from the Allawi faction. Allawi, however, is widely considered a Baathist light, and the elected government is a little unlikely to turn security over to him, especially since his list ran poorly in the elections.)

The two did not take up the issue of who the prime minister will be. Talabani deeply dislikes the current PM, Ibrahim Jaafari, whom he accused of overstepping his constitutional authority on numerous occasions. The Dawa Party asserted on Friday that Jaafari was its candidate for PM again. His rival is Adel Abdul Mahdi, of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (al-Hakim's party). Al-Hakim and Talabani agreed that the majority party should discuss the issue internally first.

Representatives of the Sadr movement said that they had withdrawn from the discussions between the UIA and the Kurds at Sulaimaniyah in protest that the Iraqi Accord Front [Sunni Arab religious] and the National Dialogue Council [Sunni Arab secularist] had not been invited to participate. The Washington Post quotes a Sadr aide as favoring an alliance with the Sunni Arabs rather than with the Kurds.

(Cole: As I noted earlier, many Turkmen in the contested northern oil city of Kirkuk are followers of Muqtada al-Sadr. An alliance with the Kurds would require that the Turkmen Shiites be sacrificed and Kirkuk turned over to the Kurds. This outcome seems to suit the al-Hakim and his Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, but is not palatable to the Sadrists. A national unity government, including both Kurds and the Sunni Arabs, would help resolve this dispute, but that would weaken the Kurds' hand in Kirkuk.)

Incidentally, the small Sadrist "Risaliyyun" or Upholders of the Mission list, which ran separately from the United Iraqi Alliance, has announced that it will vote with the UIA. It probably only got one or at most a handful of seats, but the UIA only needs to top off its probable 130 seats to about 138 to have a simple majority.
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Iraq Petroleum Crisis
Bahr al-Ulum Forced Out

Drivers in Baghdad are waiting in lines a quarter of a mile long, according to the NYT, as the country faces a fuel crisis. They feared further price increases, and were also stocking gasoline to run their generators, since electricity provision in the capital has been erratic.

Al-Zaman/ AFP [Ar.] report that Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum, the minister of petroleum was removed on Friday from his position by Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari after Bahr al-Ulum had protested the tripling of fuel prices. Jaafari handed the running of the ministry over to his deputy premier, Ahmad Chalabi, given that he was already chairman of the Energy Council in Iraq. Chalabi is only expected to serve in this capacity for a month or so.

[That's what the Arabic article says, folks. All this time, Chalabi has been chairman of something called the "Energy Council." Or maybed that should be translated "Energy Taskforce"? :-) Chalabi was convicted in Jordan for complicity in the failure of his Petra Bank, in which some $300 million disappeared. In a country with poor auditing, the last thing you would want was Chalabi in charge of the petroleum ministry. And, if he has done a good job as chair of the Energy Council, why is the energy sector in Iraq in such a huge mess?

Bahr al-Ulum said, according to the BBC, "I object to the decision of putting me on leave and the mechanism by which it was done after I objected to the government's decision to raise fuel prices." He had gone on vacation, and when he got back he was told to go back on vacation for another month while Chalabi took over his job.

Al-Zaman says that its sources in Najaf maintained that Bahr al-Ulum's firing reflected escalating conflicts among the great Shiite religious authorities and their sons. They point out that Jaafari need not have announced the firing, since Bahr al-Ulum had stopped going to his office, and negotiations are under way on who should head the ministry in the next government. Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum belongs to a distinguished clerical family in the holy city, but has a technical Ph.D. from the US. He had left the United Iraqi Alliance and ran for parliament in December at the head of his own, small, independent list. He did not gain a seat in the legislature, so he was unlikely to continue in the cabinet in any case. Ibrahim's father, Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, is considered a leading moderate cleric, and had served in the American-appointed Interim Governing Council.

Al-Zaman's sources seem to be implying that Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum had fallen afoul of the Sistanis. Although Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani declined to endorse the UIA, he and his clerical colleagues did urge Shiites not to split their vote by supporting tiny local parties. It stands to reason that they were therefore annoyed with the Bahr al-Ulums for breaking ranks, leaving the UIA, and starting a small independent party that might waste Shiite votes. It is probably being implied that since Bahr al-Ulum is from a prominent clerical family, Jaafari consulted with the Sistanis before publicly firing and humiliating him.

[Cole: I doubt that clerical politics is the main dynamic here, though it may have been involved at the margins. Chalabi after all also left the UIA and ran at the head of his Iraqi National Congress, but there doesn't seem to be any strong objection in Najaf to his serving as interim petroleum minister. Of course, he is not from a clerical family and so perhaps not considered under the same discipline.]

A government source said that Bahr al-Ulum protested the tripling of fuel prices because no provision had been made to cushion the poor from it, because it was implemented before it should have been, and because the decision directly contradicted an agreement reached by the cabinet on 6 October before the elections.

The Jaafari government's decision was forced by demands of the International Monetary Fund, which made a loan of $140 mn. dependent on it, as well as future debt relief. Although Iraq has extremely inexpensive petroleum, and gasoline is now 40 cents a gallon, it also have a very poor population, with vast unemployment and many families that were already barely making it, so that any big increase in the price of any staple hurt. Many Iraqis feel that the subsidized fuel is a way for them to share in the country's oil wealth. Unlike in Alaska, the general population does not receive a check from the Iraqi government with their share of petroleum income.

Al-Zaman says that the decision to triple prices was met with numerous popular protests, and a number of Shiite provinces in the south have been unable to implement it.

Iraq imports $500 mn. a month in gasoline from neighboring countries, and the amount will probably increase now that terrorist threats have closed the Beiji refinery. (Scroll down).

Al-Zaman/ AFP/Reuters [Ar.]: The stoppage of petroleum exports from the southern port of Umm Qasr continued on Friday owing to poor weather. Only half the normal amount is being exported from Kirkuk through the Turkish port of Ceyhan via pipeline. Pipeline sabotage, the shutting down of the refinery at Beiji, and terrorist acts against electricity plants have contributed to the crisis.

The Iraqi ministry of petroleum on Friday laid the foundation for two new petroleum refineries in the province of Sulaimaniyah in the Kurdistan confederacy, with a capacity of 10,000 barrels a day. The ministry is spending $25 mn. on them. A spokesman from the Kurdistan Patriotic Union said that such projects had been forbidden by the Saddam regime. Two more refineries will be situated in the Kurdish province of Irbil.
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Iraq Petroleum Production "Suffocating": Bahr al-Ulum

An informed observer writes:

' Reuters reports that “average exports in November fell to 1.21 million barrels a day – the lowest level since at least November 2003 – and down from 1.24 million barrels per day last month,” indicating that something may be seriously wrong.

The figures for November were below earlier projections and lower than earlier export levels, indicating that something was seriously wrong. Apparently, in the south, tankers are lined up in the Gulf and waiting for 14 days to be loaded.

The following is being quoted in the early reports of Chalabi taking over from Bar Uloum:

“A ministry spokesman allied to Uloum said the country was facing what he called an impending oil supply crisis. 'Production in the north, centre and south is about to suffocate,' he said.”

There have been no exports to Ceyhan for a long time. If the south were to shut down, the oil export revenue contribution to the budget would be zero. The quote indicates that something is clearly going on.

With respect to the Beiji refinery, as New Orleans demonstrated, once a refinery is shut down, there is more to restarting operations than clicking a switch. So long as it is out of operation, there are only two possibilities: people must drive less or imports from Kuwait and elsewhere must increase, further exacerbating the budget situation.

Note that the 20-30,000 employees of South Oil felt impelled to start a web site and write letters opposing privatization. Three southern Provinces have opposed and apparently have refused to implement the Gasoline Price Program forced on Jaafari by the IMF. As in the case of privatization, the doctrinaire position of the IMF, without regard to the facts and circumstances, could have grave political repercussions. Do they not realize that there is a dirty war going on and also a political revolution? Time enough for all that in a year or two, if then. What is the hurry? There will be no substantial foreign investment until the security conditions improve. There will be no privatization of the oil industry for years in any event. I suspect that there is turmoil and disarray throughout the oil industry bureaucracy and employee rank and file. Chalabi probably will not have the credibility to restore order. He is a fixer, not an administrator. He will be associated with the US/IMF privatization effort. He has no Iraq constituency. Recall that months ago it was reported that he had assumed the leading role in the oil infrastructure security forces. What happened to that? We do not know, but the infrastructure remains insecure.

There is also the following quote:

“An official of the Oil Ministry in Baghdad told ISN Security Watch, on condition of anonymity: “We do not know the exact quantity of oil we are exporting, we do not exactly know the prices we are selling it for, and we do not know where the oil revenue is going to.””

“'Production in the north, centre and south is about to suffocate,' he said.” [repeated for emphasis] '

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The Middle East and America in 2005: How the Region Has Changed

The Bush administration has several major policy goals in the Middle East, which are often self-contradictory. They include:

1. Fighting terrorism emanating from the region, which might menace the US or its major allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

2. Ensuring the security of petroleum production in the Oil Gulf, which contains 2/3s of the world's proven reserves.

3. Reestablishing order in Afghanistan and ensuring that the Taliban and al-Qaeda cannot again use it as a base for Muslim radicalism.

4. Reestablishing order in Iraq and ensuring a government and system there favorable to US interests.

5. Weakening or overthrowing the governments of Syria and Iran, primarily because they are viewed as threats to Israel. As part of weakening Syria, the US applied enormous pressure to get its remaining troops out of Lebanon.

6. Pushing for democratization in the "Greater Middle East," even at the risk of alienating long-time US friends such as Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak.

Some parts of the Bush administration are more committed to some of these goals than to others, and huge foodfights seem to be taking place behind the scenes over what priority to give them each or how useful some of them are to US interests. The Neoconservatives, for instance, are very interested in shaping Iraq, but seem much less interested in Afghanistan. The State Department seems generally very nervous about the Iraq misadventure and not very enthusiastic about democratization.

The major developments in the region of 2005 have been momentous, but what is striking is how little the over-all dynamics have changed.

Afghanistan conducted parliamentary elections, but old-time warlords from the 1990s such as Abdul Rasul Abu Sayyaf (once close to Bin Laden) seem likely to dominate it.

Pakistan's parliament is virtually hung, too paralyzed by disputes between the opposition, often led by the fundamentalist United Action Council, and supporters of military dictator Pervez Musharraf, to accomplish anything of note. The Muslim fundamentalists had seldom done well in Pakistani elections before 2002, but the electorate was angry about the US attack on neighboring Afghanistan and gave them about a fifth of seats in parliament, control of a major northern province, and partial control of another province. The Pakistani military and security forces continue to hunt down al-Qaeda, but few really big fish have been caught recently. Osamah Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, who conspired to have 3,000 Americans murdered, remain free men.

Iran held presidential elections, won by the fundamentalist Shiite hardliner (and horse's ass) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad used many of the same tactics to get into power as Bush supporters did, including smearing his opponents, attracting the common people with false promises, posing as an outsider to the government despite being a consummate insider, benefitting from his party's dominance of the judiciary, and drawing on support from the religious right and the military.

The reformists in Iran under President Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005) had reached out the to US, seeking forms of "ping pong diplomacy" and expressing profound sympathy for America after the 9/11 attacks. The US government studiously ignored these overtures and kept sanctions on Iran, treating even the reformists as pariahs. The reformers were stymied at home by clerical hardliners' control of the judiciary and Khomeinist institutions that could strike down liberalizing laws, close newspapers, and exclude liberals from running in subsequent elections.

Ahmadinejad's victory is the triumph of the hard Iranian right. He has alienated virtually all Western diplomats hoping to work with Iran, pushing his country into renewed isolation in the space of only a few months. He has been particularly stupid in his pronouncements on Israel. He quoted Ayatollah Khomeini as saying that the "Occupation Regime" (i.e. Israel) "must vanish." He views the Holocaust as a "legendary epic," and clearly doubts it. He suggested that if it did occur, then the Jews should have been given part of Europe on which to make a state, rather than displacing the Palestinian people. (This is not a new talking point. King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia said the same thing in the late 1940s.) His statements were morally outrageous and historically ignorant, but he did not actually call for mass murder (Ariel Sharon made the "occupation regime" in Gaza "vanish" last summer) or for the expulsion of the Israeli Jews to Europe. Nor is he, as has been alleged, the head of the Iranian state. The Iranian president is something akin to the pre-Cheney US vice presidents. But Ahmadinejad seems to think that the world is about to end, and is fixated on the Mahdi or Muslim messiah, and is generally a demagogue. He has also banned rock music.

It seems most likely that Bush administration pressure on Iran, naming it as an axis of evil, making clear a desire to overthrow its government, and militarily surrounding it in Afghanistan and Iraq, pushed the Iranian electorate to the right. It is not known if Iran is trying to get a nuclear weapon, but it is certainly trying to get nuclear energy. Likely by committing the US so heavily to Iraq, which did not have a nuclear program, the Bush administration has lost the opportunity to do anything serious about Iran's program, whatever its ultimate aims.

Ironically, the Iranian hardliners have been strengthened by the overthrow of the Taliban and the Baath Party. In Afghanistan, the warlords who are so prominent in the parliament and the executive often had strong ties to Iran, and Afghan Shiites did disproportionately well in the elections; they are often tied through the Vahdat Party to the ayatollahs in Iran. Afghanistan is friendlier to Iran now than at any time since the 1960s, when both were monarchies.

In Iraq, both the Jan. 30 election and that of Dec. 15 cemented Shiite fundamentalist political control of the country. The United Iraqi Alliance, now a coalition of all three major religious and political currents among Iraqi Shiites, had 140 seats (a simple majority) in the Jan. 30 elections, and will likely have 130 seats in the new parliament, such that it can easily form a government that can survive votes of confidence requiring 51 percent support for the prime minister. The fundamentalist Shiites got the constitution they wanted on October 15, enshrining strong elements of Islamic law and ensuring that the southern Shiite provinces will control all future petroleum finds in the oil-rich south.

An Iraq dominated by religious Shiites will certainly be on very friendly terms with iran, as I argued in Salon last summer. Far from causing the pillars of Khomeinist power to tremble in Iran, the Bush administration has larded the region with new and powerful allies of Tehran.

Shiite fundamentalist power in Iraq and Iran will translate into new monetary and diplomatic resources for the Shiites of the region, a prospect that terrifies the Sunnis of Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Likewise, the Shiites of southern Lebanon, supporters of the Hizbullah and Amal parties, will benefit from Iraqi patronage. The Lebanese Hizbullah has historical ties to the Iraqi Dawa Party, which the prime minister of Iraq, Ibrahim Jaafari, leads.

The year 2005 was one of both tragedy and triumph for the Lebanese. Lebanon, a multi-ethnic country of only 3 million persons, is the Rhode Island of the Middle East. In the 1970s and 1980s, Lebanon fell into civil war and prolonged instability. The United States greenlighted a plan to pacify the country with Syrian troops in 1976. Israel invaded and occupied southern Lebanon in 1982, also destroying a good deal of what was left of Beirut with indiscriminate artillery fire and bombing. From 1989, the Saudis intervened to help restore stability, brokering a new political bargain amongst the Christians and the Muslims and their allies. In the south, the Shiites became radicalized, in part by the Israeli occupation and the civil war, and in part through Iranian influence, and Hizbullah came to dominate that region of the country. In 2000, they finally succeeded in forcing the Israelis back out of their country. The post-1989 reconstruction of Lebanon depended heavily on Sunni politician Rafiq al-Hariri, a billionaire protege of Saudi Arabia's King Fahd, on the disarming of the militias everywhere but the Shiite south, and on continued Syrian peacekeeping.

The new stability came at a price, of heavy-handed Syrian interference in Lebanese affairs. Electoral districts were gerrymandered in 1999 to favor pro-Syrian parties and candidates. The anti-Syrian rightwing Phalangist Party popular among some Maronite Catholics, had collapsed in the 1990s. Bashar al-Asad, Syria's young president, especially promoted president Emile Lahoud, a pro-Syrian Maronite general, both to repress anti-Syrian forces and to marginalize even pro-Syrian politicians close to the old guard in Damascus against whom Bashar was trying to assert himself. Lahoud seemed indispensable to Bashar, but the Lebanese president serves only a 6-year term according to the constitution. Bashar intervened to have the constitution amended to give Lahoud three extra years. Most Lebanese were appalled and outraged. Even the pro-Syrian prime minister, Rafiq al-Hariri, resigned in protest.

In February of 2005, a truck bomber pulled up beside al-Hariri's motorcade and detonated his payload. Although he was himself a Muslim radical with ties to al-Qaeda in Iraq (he had lived in Saudi Arabia and had fought the Americans in Iraq), the bomber appears to have been put up to the assassination by Syria or some of its Lebanese allies. [I initially wondered if Hariri was hit by al-Qaeda, and it was plausible at the time, but subsequent events have established, let us say, a pattern.] The assassination of the widely admired Hariri provoked mass popular mobilization. Lebanese Christians, a large section of the Sunnis, and the Druze minority formed an alliance to force Syrian troops out of the country. Demonstrations hundreds of thousands strong were mounted in downtown Beirut. The sentiment was not universal. Demonstrations by Hizbullah and the Shiites, implicitly pro-Syrian, were almost as large. The Saudis, afraid of instability, intervened with the Syrians, and in the end Syria withdrew its troops that spring. The parliamentary elections in Lebanon (not a new thing; Lebanon has been having parliamentary elections for many decades) held in May produced a win for the reformist, anti-Syrian coalition, though the Shiite Hizbullah and Amal parties also did very well. Once the issue of Syrian presence was settled, the various parties proved perfectly willing to ally with one another despite their duelling demonstrations and counter-demonstrations of the spring. Still, the reformists secured from the international community an investigation of Hariri's killing, which finally elicited a damning report by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, implicating not only the Syrian regime but even Bashar al-Asad's own brother.

In the aftermath, there has been an uneasy relationship between President Lahoud and the cabinet, full of seething reformists convinced that Lahoud might have had a hand in Hariri's assassination. Anti-Syrian figures went on being blown up for the rest of 2005. Old-time communist thinker Georges Hawi was killed. Then popular current affairs interviewer May Shidyaq (Chidiac) was nearly killed by a bomb last fall. In mid-December, Jibran Tueni, the editor in chief of the respected al-Nahar newspaper, was killed by a huge bomb blast. Tueni had been severely critical of Damascus. Tueni's killing seems likely to inspire the reformists in parliament and on the cabinet to redouble their efforts to force the resignation of President Lahoud. It appears that elements of the Syrian Baath or its Lebanese allies are afraid that the new government in Beirut is attempting to drive them from power altogether, pursuing them to Damascus through the United Nations and the United States. The bombings carried out against media figures are a Mafia-like warning: Lay off, or else.

The rhetoric of Lebanese politicians toward Syria has become blunt and acerbic. The Hizbullah, Shiite fundamentalists who benefit from the Syrian-Iranian alliance, rejected the idea of blaming or punishing Syria for Tueni's death, and pulled out of the government, creating a national crisis that remains unresolved. Lebanon is polarized and tense in a menacing way that bodes ill for stability or national unity. The withdrawal of Syrian troops was a great national achievement, but so far this story is a fraught one. One worries about the stability of the country. Lebanon needs stability. Tourism was down 11 percent this year. Per capita income is still below that of 1975, by a third. Economic growth has slowed from the 6 percent achieved in the mid-1990s to 2 or 3 percent.

Then there were big demonstrations by the Shiites of Bahrain, demanding that the king give them a truly democratic constitution (he appoints the prime minister and the upper house, which can over-rule the lower house.) Bahrain has a Shiite majority but a Sunni king and political establishment.

And, in Egypt, which deserves more space, the Muslim Brotherhood went from having 17 representatives in parliament to over 70 and became the de facto opposition party in the country. In the old days, the government of Hosni Mubarak would not have allowed so many from the MB to be seated. Is this development a good thing? Having a slightly more representative government is always to the good, but the Muslim Brotherhood is not exactly a force for progressivism in the region.

Ariel Sharon went through with his poorly conceived unilateral withdrawal of colonists and Israeli troops from Gaza. He rejected the idea of having a negotiating partner, having no real consultation with Gazans. Predictably, in the aftermath there has been continued fighting between the Gazans and the Israelis. If this goes on, Israeli troops will be drawn right back in. In the meantime, Israelis continue aggressively to colonize the West Bank and the area around Jerusalem, in ways guaranteed to generate violence for years to come.

Washington's interventions in the Middle East have created a failed state in Iraq that has no military power to speak of, has threatened the Oil Gulf with destabilization, and has in various ways contributed to the ascension of political Islam. Shiite fundamentalist parties rule Iraq. The Islamist warlords are back in the Afghan parliament. Hardliners have been strengthened in Iran, and are creating a Tehran-Baghdad alliance. Sunni Arab Iraqis are turning to fundamentalist Islam in large numbers, forsaking secular Arab nationalism. Some are growing close to al-Qaeda-type organizations. The Lebanese Hizbullah has rich and powerful new allies. Lebanon is free of foreign military forces, but is threatened with renewed sectarian conflict. And the Muslim Brotherhood is emerging as a possible successor to the long-lived secular military regime in Egypt.

Are Americans safer because of the political developments in the Middle East of 2005? The widespread instability introduced into the region by aggressive US policies seems more portent of menace than harbinger of peace. The one development that might have made us safer was the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, but it was done in a hamfisted way that likely guarantees continued conflict and continued bad press for the US, the coddler of the Israeli hardliners. Otherwise, the US may have started some political tsunamis in the region, but the waves have not yet come ashore.

As for Bush's goals:

1. Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri are still at large, so the war on terror is not won.

2. Security in the Gulf is endangered by the Iraqi guerrilla war, and oil prices are very high, benefitting Iran and Saudi Arabia. Oil security is in doubt.

3. Resources to do Afghanistan right were diverted to Iraq. Afghanistan has a very weak government that might well not survive on its own. Suicide bombings are on the uptick. Oldtime warlords are back, as members of parliament.

4. Order has not been reestablished in Iraq.

5. The Syrian and Iranian governments have not been noticeably weakened. Iran is flush with extra petroleum income this year. The US may yet decide that it needs Damascus and Tehran, if it is to have a soft landing in Iraq.

6. Lebanon is more democratic at the end of 2005 than at its beginning, but also much less stable. These changes had little to do with the US. Egypt's elections were not free enough to accomplish much, and there is a question as to whether the US really wants a Muslim Brotherhood take-over of Cairo. The MB hates the Camp David accords and would immediately abrogate them. The Bush administration has said nothing publicly about the demand of Bahraini Shiites that a more democratic constitution be enacted in that country. Iraq has had two elections, but they have been deeply flawed, such that basic security could not be guaranteed candidates or voters, most candidates could not campaign, the electorate did not know the personalities for whom it was voting (but rather voted for ethnic lists), and some candidates were killed. The elections have exacerbated sectarian tensions of a sort that could pull the country apart, and they brought fundamentalist Shiites to power. Whatever is going on in Iraq, it is not a model that most Middle Eastern states would want to emulate.

I'd give the Bush administration a "D" (60 out of 100) on the Middle East this year. Support for the end of two military occupations, in Gaza and Lebanon, pull up the averages. But much of the policy is self-contradictory, in disarray, or likely to cause some wars. None of that makes us safer.
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International Team to Assess Elections
Al-Hakim meets Talabani

In Baghdad, , AP reports that the International Mission for Iraqi Elections will send a team of assessors to look into charges by Sunni Arabs and secularists that there was significant ballot stuffing in the Dec. 15 elections. UN observer Craig Jenness had earlier defended the over-all fairness of the election.

The Iraqi Accord Front, a fundamentalist coalition, expressed pleasure that the team would be sent. It has rejected the election results as fatally flawed.

In fact, it is highly unlikely that the basic outcome of the elections will be altered by any of these procedural steps, and the Sunni Arab conviction that they are a majority of Iraqis, which drives much of their ire over the outcome, is simply incorrect.

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the Shiite cleric who heads the victorious United Iraqi Alliance list in parliament, met Thursday with Kurdish leader (and current Iraqi president) Jalal Talabani. Al-Hakim repeated his willingness to join in the formation of a government of national unity.

AP also says that a GI was killed Thursday in East Baghdad by a roadside bomb. It was one of dozens of deaths in guerrilla violence in Iraq.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat [Ar.]: Unknown gunmen killed 14 Shiites in a minibus near Latifiyah south of Baghdad. They belonged to a single extended family had set out early on Thursday from their home in Mahmudiyah.

Elsewhere in Baghdad, a suicide bomber dressed as a policeman detonated his payload, and killed 4 policemen and wounded 5 others.

The US military announced that it had launched an air attack on the town of Hawija, north of Baghdad, to which planters of roadside bombs had fled. Ten persons were killed in the air attack, which used 500-pound bombs. The US military found caches of weapons in a subsequent search.

Al-Quds al-Arabi : argues that the Kurds are conducting a campaign of subtle ethnic cleansing against the Arabs of Kirkuk and its surroundings, creating facts on the ground with settlements and forcing Arab farmers off their land. It says that tensions in the city between Kurds and Turkmen are running high and that it has been the site of 30 assassinations, making it one of Iraq's bloodiest cities. It says that they will use their leverage as a swing vote in parliament to ensure that Kurds continue to be able to move into the province. Baghdad-based Kurdish officials of the federal government also exercise their influence to deliver important provincial and police positions in Kirkuk into Kurdish hands. They wish to alter its demographic character decisively before the 2007 referendum, when Kirkuk (Ta'mim) province will decide whether to join the existing 3-province Kurdistan confederacy. The Kirkuk fields hold a 10-20% of Iraq's proven petroleum reserves and would be essential to the formation of any independent or semi-independent Kurdistan state. (If the Kurds lacked Kirkuk, and Baghdad continued to get the petroleum income, it could bribe the Kurds into remaining in Iraq. Kurdistan without petroleum would be rather like eastern Anatolia in neighboring Turkey: poor.

Borzou Daragahi and Louise Roug of the LA Times explore the fading of Iraqi national identity and the building danger of a partition of the country. I am quoted, arguing that Iraq is no more artificial than most nations, and Iraqi nationalism should not be completely discounted.

The NYT reports that hundreds of US military advisers will be assigned to Iraqi special police commando units that had been set up by the Ministry of the Interior. The ministry is controlled by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and its paramilitary wing, the Badr Organization, both of them close to Tehran and the latter trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Dexter Filkins reports that a US officer criticized the special police resort to secret prisons and torture:

' American commanders here say that such practices, while abhorrent in their own right, tend to provoke consequences almost precisely the opposite of what is desired. Rounding up young Sunni Arab men and killing them will only spur the growth of the insurgency, they say. "You are making new enemies here," the American commander said. "You've got to be more moderate. You must follow the rule of law." '

Ironic, ain't it?
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10-20 Dead in Failed Terrorist Prison Break
Sunni Arabs Demonstrate Against Election Results in Samarra

Prison guards killed between 4 and 16 inmates when some of them attempted a jail break from a special facility for terrorists in Kadhimiyah, northeast Baghdad, on Wednesday, according to AFP. An inmate got hold of a weapon and began shooting indiscriminately, then attracted fire from the guards. Four guards are also said dead, along with a translator. The reports of the number of dead inmates varied, with the US military estimating 4 prisoners dead. High police official Abdul Aziz Muhammad gave the number of dead inmates as 11, while anonymous Iraqi sources in the Ministry of the Interior alleged that 20 prisoners were killed. Al-Zaman/AFP accepted that the number of dead inmates was 16.

Al-Zaman/ AFP/ DPA report other violence. In Baghdad, a former officer in the Iraqi army was assassinated in Baladiyyat, east Baghdad. A roadside bomb set by guerrillas wounded three policemen near Mustansiriyah Mosque. Iraqi police discovered 5 corpses in Baghdad on Wednesday.

US troops killed one civilian and wounded two others at a checkpoint in Khalidiyah. Guerrillas killed two policemen in Tikrit, while guerrilla missiles fell on in a civilian neighborhood in Dhuluiyyah on Tuesday night, killing 3 civilians and wounding 9 others. In Baqubah to the northeast of Baghdad, guerrillas attempted to assassinate the mayor; they failed, but wounded two of his bodyguards. Guerrillas in Samarra killed 3 policemen with a car bomb, according to some reports. Others say that 4 special police died, along with 4 civilians.

The Association of Muslim Scholars condemned the Iraqi police for invading the home in Najaf of Ayatollah Ahmad al-Baghdadi, a Shiite cleric who opposes the US military presence.

Al-Zaman/ AFP: Hundreds of Sunni Arabs demonstrated in Samarra against what they viewed as electoral fraud in the December 15 elections. The demonstrations follow much bigger ones in Baghdad and some other Sunni cities on Tuesday and the previous Friday.

The Iraqi prison population held by US forces is rising toward 15,500. In the absence of a Status of Forces Agreement, and with the passage of the new constitution (which requires warrants for arrests), these prisoners are probably being held illegally.

al-Zaman/ AFP say that the US embassy in Baghdad has advised the incoming government to privatize the hundreds of companies and factories owned by the state (the Baath Party was actually the Baath Socialist Party), selling them to investors. The US administration of Iraq attempted to move toward privatization under Paul Bremer, but the issue was rendered moot by the poor security in the country, which makes investing in it at the moment unattractive.

One of the least attractive aspects of the US government is its fanaticism about privatization. I mean, is this really the time? The good Lord knows how many of those companies or factories are actually operating. And who is going to buy them? Wouldn't it be better at this juncture for the government to use them in a way analogous to FDR public works projects, to put people to work? Al-Zaman estimates that 1/4 of Iraqis live in dire proverty, and the real unemployment rate is still probably 50 percent. Corporations are far less efficient than Washington believes (see: Enron), and some state-owned enterprises have prospered (ask Californians if privatized electricity worked out well for them; and see: Enron). It is no doubt better in the long run to move away from bloated state-owned industries in Iraq, but I just wouldn't have made that a priority.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that the lawyers' guild is protesting the decision of the ministry of justice to dissolve it and place a counsellor over it. Guild spokesman complained that the move contravened a 1965 (pre-Baath) law and damaged the independence of the organization from the government. (It is hard to tell what is going on here, but guilds and unions in Iraq were arms of the Baath Party, now dissolved and despised.
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Kurds Plan to Seize Kirkuk Militarily: Knight Ridder

Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder reports that the Kurds have seeded 10,000 peshmerga militiamen into the Iraqi army units in the north of Iraq, and plan to use them to seize control of oil-rich Kirkuk. (Actually, the Kurds already control Kirkuk militarily, since their forces conquered it from Saddam with US air support, and they dominate the city's police force).

Lasseter says that the Kurdish paramilitary leaders believe Iraq is on the verge of disintegration into three states, and are preparing to take and hold Kirkuk when the civil war breaks out. (Kurdish leaders speaking this way will no doubt hurry along the process). The Sunni Arabs have no developed petroleum fields in their region, and most rich undeveloped fields appear to lie in the Shiite south. If a tripartite partition did take place, and if Kirkuk went to the Kurds, the Sunni Arabs would be reduced to dire poverty. For this reason, they are unlikely to go quietly.

The fix may well be in, on Kirkuk. Al-Zaman/ AFP[Ar.] report that Abdul Aziz al-Hakim is also said to have shown a new flexibility toward the Kurds on the issue of control of oil-rich Kirkuk. When he spoke before the Kurdistan regional parliament, he promised to redraw the boundaries of Kurdistan. Kurds insist that Ta'mim or Kirkuk province had originally been Kurdish but was artificially detached from Kurdistan by Saddam. The Turkmen population of the province maintain that Kirkuk was traditionally Turkmen. The Arabs that Saddam settled up there (or who came as labor immigrants) are often being expelled. Thousands of Kurds are flooding into Kirkuk and clearly are attempting to make it overwhelmingly Kurdish. Kurdish representatives won 6 of the province's 9 parliamentary seats on Dec. 15.

Al-Hakim said the issue of redrawing regional boundaries did not only concern the Kurds, suggesting that he has in mind some gerrymandering in the largely Shiite South, as well. Since a large proportion of Turkmen in Kirkuk are Shiites, if al-Hakim goes forward on this basis, he is showing a willingness to sacrifice their interests to those of the southern, Arab Shiites that are his power base. Many Shiite Turkmen, however, follow Muqtada al-Sadr, currently al-Hakim's coalition partner, and it remains to see if al-Hakim can hold his coalition together if he pleases the Kurds as a quid pro quo for Shiite autonomy in the south, while allowing the Shiite Turkmen to be walked all over in the north.

The CSM suggests that tiny parties in Iraq could end up being important because they may be swing votes for the large Shiite fundamentalist coalition.

Al-Zaman/ AFP report that Jalal Talabani (a Kurdish leader) and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim (leader of the Shiite coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance), were supposed to meet at Sulaimaniyah with US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad on Wednesday concerning the formation of a new government, but the meeting ended up being postponed, according to al-Hayat. Former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi, a secular ex-Baathist, had been invited to the talks but refused to take part, since he is calling for an investigation into irregularities in the Dec. 15 election and regards it as flawed.

Kurdish member of parliament Mahmoud Osman said that there was coordination between the Americans and the Kurds to resolve the crisis.

Massoud Barzani is said to have proposed to Al-Hakim trading Shiite control of the Ministry of the Interior to the Kurds, with the Shiites taking the Ministry of Defense. Al-Hakim is said to have refused. The ministry of the interior, controlled by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq that al-Hakim heads, has been plagued by charges of running Shiite paramilitary death squads and secret prisons where Sunni Arabs have been tortured and starved. The Americans are said to be determined to get Interior (sort of like the US Department of Homeland Security plus FBI) out of the hands of the fundamentalist Shiite Supreme Council. At the moment, a Sunni Arab holds the post of minister of defense, but he is without any strong party backing. Sunni Arabs and secularists had been demanding both Defense and Interior, but they lost the election, and may not get either.
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Over 10,000 Sunnis, Secularists March in Baghdad against Election Results;
Al-Hakim meets Kurdish Leaders

AP reports that in Iraq, over 10,000 mainly Sunni Arab demonstrators rallied in downtown Baghdad on Tuesday, calling for a rerun of the elections on the grounds of massive fraud, and demanding a government of national unity (which would include many Sunni Arab ministers). The United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), the fundamentalist Shiite coalition that won the Dec. 15 election, has indicated a willingness to form such a government of national unity.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports the number of demonstrators as rather larger, at tens of thousands strong, but the size of demonstrations is notoriously hard to estimate and the guesses tend to be larger than the reality. The marchers set out from al-Mansur, shouting their rejection of the outcome of the elections, according to Reuters. They demanded the resignation of members of the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq. One poster read, "No to sectarian relections that seek to partition Iraq!" Others warned Irran to leave Baghdad free. Others chanted, "No Sunni, no Shiite, all Islam-- Unite!" They wanted the election results annulled, and an investigation, as well as new elections.

Hundreds of Sunnis in Tikrit to the north held a similar demonstration.

Last Friday, even larger crowds had thronged the streets of Baghdad protesting that the recent parliamentary elections had been stolen by the Shiite fundamentalists.

In Kirkuk, Sunni Arab and Turkmen politicians rejected the results of the election. AFP says that 75 leaders of these two groups were sending letters to the UN, the Arab League and others affirming that they share the consensus of the "national" parties in rejecting these election results. They pledged to hold demonstrations on Wednesday in Kirkuk. This oil city is a tinderbox full of ethnic rivalries and hatreds, and it is coveted by the Kurds, who now may make up half of the city of Kirkuk.

Al-Hayat[Ar.] : US ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad visited Riyadh on Tuesday for an audience with King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia.

Khalilzad had earlier met in Abu Dhabi with the UAE minister of foreign affairs, Shaikh Hamdan bin Zayid. Shaikh Hamdan has apparently been acting behind the scenes as a mediator in an attempt to resolve the political crisis. Abu Dhabi will host a meeting to be attended by Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, a member of the United Iraqi Alliance, Adnan Pachachi of the secular Iraqiya list, Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, a Shiite cleric, and a Kurdish leader.

Al-Hayat: Political leaders continued their negotiations and meetings in an attempt to exit from the political crisis provoked by the rejection by Sunni Arabs and secularists of the fairness of the Dec. 15 elections. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the Shiite cleric who heads up the fundamentalist UIA, met in Irbil with Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani early on Tuesday. Barzani has publicly expressed frustrations with his Shiite coalition partners. Al-Hakim then went to Sulaimaniyah to meet with Jalal Talabani, to explore a renewal of the Shiite-Kurdish political marriage of convenience, which had allowed the formation of the previous interim government.

Al-Hakim absolutely rejected the notion that the parliamentary elections would be re-staged, and he also rejected the idea of allowing international observers to conduct an investigation into the elecitons. At a news conference with Massoud Barzani, al- Hakim said, "It is impossible to annul the elections. The elections cannot be held over again, and it there is no possibility of any international or regional intervention in them."

As for the next government, al-Hakim evinced a willingness to negotiate "with those who have a clear position on essential national principles." Among the more prominent of these principles is "the struggle against terrorism, uprooting the Baath party, and seriousness about prosecuting Saddam Hussein." (Al-Hakim is probably signalling that he will not entertain an alliance with the National Dialogue Council of Salih Mutlak, which has secular, neo-Baath tendencies, or with the Iraqiya list of Iyad Allawi, which includes many ex-Baathists.)

For his part, Barzani said he would support the establishment of a government with "a broad popular base." Asked if the two leaders had agreed on including Sunni Arabs in the new government, Barzani said, "We are agreed on the principle of including other parties. We have not discussed the details at this time. We shall, later on, hold discussions with all concerned parties."

A member of the National Iraqiya list of Allawi, old-time Sunni Arab nationalist politician Adnan Pachachi, affirmed that his list would seek to participate in the formation of a government "so as to cut down on the possibility of the rise of a sectarian state." In another article, al-Hayat reports that the victory of Muslim fundamentalists in the Dec. 15 elections in Iraq has pushed the secularists to angle for control of the ministries of the interior and of defense. (In the present government, Interior is dominated by the (Shiite) Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and its paramilitary, the Badr Corps, both of them long resident in Iran. Defense is held by Saadoun Dulaimi, a Sunni Arab who has thrown in with the new order. The likelihood that the secularists, who might have only 20 or so seats in the 275-member parliament, will get control of either ministry strikes me as low. It is said that the Americans want to get rid of Bayan Jabr Sulagh, the Turkmen Shiite who now heads Interior, viewing him as complicit in the setting up of secret torture cells. (Some observers snicker and say that the Americans should talk.)

At least 11 Iraqis died in political violence, and 4 US GIs were killed, two of them in a helicopter crash.

The Association of Muslim Scholars condemned the arrest of 50 iraqis in West Baghdad, most of them members of Arab clans, especially the Dulaim. The government also arrest 12 other suspicious characters, one of them of Syrian nationality.

Al-Hayat further reports that the city of Najaf has become a city of gated communities cut off from one another by heavy private security measures aimed at protecting high Shiite clerics and politicians. Checkpoints dot the streets leading to their homes, causing traffic gridlock.

Jalal al-Din Kalidar, from the family that traditionally controlled the shrine of Ali in the city, criticized clerics for inconveniencing their fellow residents with such intense security measures. He complained that many of the clerics had only recently come back from Iran, loaded down with cash, and that they were more politicians than clergymen. Shaikh Abdul Mun'im al-Musalli complained that if these clerics had been real clergymen, they wouldn't have needed to surround themselves with so much security. He said, "Shaik Abdul Fattah al-Dhibhawi was killed the day before yesterday not because he was a man of the cloth but because of his political work with Sayyid Sadr al-Din al-Qubanji in the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq." He said sometimes rival Shiite political parties assassinate one another's activists.

Lt. Adil Fatlawi of the Najaf police said that the police remain impotent to address such problems: "The civil administration of the province and its officials take orders from the religious leaders, and some clergymen have organizations and movements behind them." He alleged, "Najaf is now ruled by militias and their leaders.

A mass grave was discovered in Karbala, probably from spring, 1991, when the Bush senior administration stood by and allowed Saddam to crush a popular Shiite uprising against the Baath Party. Bush senior had called for the Iraqis to rise up and overthrow Saddam, but allowed them to be massacred when they took his advice. Many Shiites are still angry over that betrayal.
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Top Ten Myths about Iraq in 2005

Iraq has unfortunately become a football in the rough and ready, two-party American political arena, generating large numbers of sound bites and so much spin you could clothe all of China in the resulting threads.

Here are what I think are the top ten myths about Iraq, that one sees in print or on television in the United States.

1. The guerrilla war is being waged only in four provinces. This canard is trotted out by everyone from think tank flacks to US generals, and it is shameful. Iraq has 18 provinces, but some of them are lightly populated. The most populous province is Baghdad, which has some 6 million residents, or nearly one-fourth of the entire population of the country. It also contains the capital. It is one of the four being mentioned!. Another of the four, Ninevah province, has a population of some 1.8 million and contains Mosul, a city of over a million and the country's third largest! It is not clear what other two provinces are being referred to, but they are probably Salahuddin and Anbar provinces, other big centers of guerrilla activity, bringing the total for the "only four provinces" to something like 10 million of Iraq's 26 million people.

But the "four provinces" allegation is misleading on another level. It is simply false. Guerrilla attacks occur routinely beyond the confines of Anbar, Salahuddin, Ninevah and Baghdad. Diyala province is a big center of the guerrilla movement and has witnessed thousands of deaths in the ongoing unconventional war. Babil province just south of Baghdad is a major center of back alley warfare between Sunnis and Shiites and attacks on Coalition troops. Attacks, assassinations and bombings are routine in Kirkuk province in the north, a volatile mixture of Kurds, Turkmen and Arabs engaged in a subterranean battle for dominance of the area's oil fields. So that is 7 provinces, and certainly half the population of the country lives in these 7, which are daily affected by the ongoing violence. It is true that violence is rare in the 3 northern provinces of the Kurdistan confederacy. And the Shiite south is much less violent than the 7 provinces of the center-north, on a good day. But some of this calm in the south is an illusion deriving from poor on the ground reporting. It appears to be the case that British troops are engaged in an ongoing struggle with guerrilla forces of the Marsh Arabs in Maysan Province. Even calm is not always a good sign. The southern port city of Basra appears to come by its via a reign of terror by Shiite religious militias.

2. Iraqi Sunnis voting in the December 15 election is a sign that they are being drawn into the political process and might give up the armed insurgency So far Iraqi Sunni parties are rejecting the outcome of the election and threatening to boycott parliament. Some 20,000 of them demonstrated all over the center-north last Friday against what they saw as fraudulent elections. So, they haven't been drawn into the political process in any meaningful sense. And even if they were, it would not prevent them from pursuing a two-track policy of both political representation and guerrilla war. The two-track approach is common among insurgencies, from Northern Ireland's IRA to Palestine's Hamas.

3. The guerrillas are winning the war against US forces. The guerrillas are really no more than mosquitos to US forces. The casualties they have inflicted on the US military, of over 2000 dead and some 15,000 wounded, are deeply regrettable and no one should make light of them. But this level of insurgency could never defeat the US military in the field.

4. Iraqis are grateful for the US presence and want US forces there to help them build their country. Opinion polls show that between 66% and 80% of Iraqis want the US out of Iraq on a short timetable. Already in the last parliament, some 120 parliamentarians out of 275 supported a resolution demanding a timetable for US withdrawal, and that sentiment will be much stronger in the newly elected parliament.

5. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, born in Iran in 1930, is close to the Iranian regime in Tehran Sistani, the spiritual leader of Iraq's majority Shiite community, is an almost lifetime expatriate. He came to Iraq late in 1951, and is far more Iraqi than Arnold Schwarzenegger is Californian. Sistani was a disciple of Grand Ayatollah Burujirdi in Iran, who argued against clerical involvement in day to day politics. Sistani rejects Khomeinism, and would be in jail if he were living in Iran, as a result. He has been implicitly critical of Iran's poor human rights record, and has himself spoken eloquently in favor of democracy and pluralism. Ma'd Fayyad reported in Al-Sharq al-Awsat in August of 2004 that when Sistani had heart problems, an Iranian representative in Najaf visited him. He offered Sistani the best health care Tehran hospitals could provide, and asked if he could do anything for the grand ayatollah. Sistani is said to have responded that what Iran could do for Iraq was to avoid intervening in its internal affairs. And then Sistani flew off to London for his operation, an obvious slap in the face to Iran's Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei.

6. There is a silent majority of middle class, secular-minded Iraqis who reject religious fundamentalism. Two major elections have been held. For all their flaws (lack of security, anonymity of most candidates, constraints on campaigning), they certainly are weather vanes of the political mood of most of the country. While the Kurdistan Alliance is largely secular, the Arab Iraqis have turned decisively toward religious fundamentalist parties. The United Iraqi Alliance (Shiite fundamentalists) and the Iraqi Accord Front (Sunni fundamentalists) are the big winners of the most recent election. Iyad Allawi's secular Iraqiya list got only 14.5 percent of the seats on Jan. 30, and will shrink to half that, most likely, in this most recent election. A clear majority of Iraqis, and the vast majority of the Arab Iraqis, are constructing new, fluid political identities that depend heavily on religious and ethnic sub-nationalisms.

7. The new Iraqi constitution is a victory for Western, liberal values in the Middle East. The constitution made Islam the religion of state. It stipulates that the civil parliament may pass no legislation that contradicts the established laws of Islam. It looks forward to clerics serving on court benches. It allows individuals to opt out of secular, civil personal status laws (for marriage, divorce, alimony, inheritance) and to choose relgious canon law instead. Islamic law gives girls, e.g., only half the amount of inheritance received by their brothers. Instead of a federal government, the constitution establishes a loose supervisory role for Baghdad and devolves most powers, including claims on future oil finds, on provinces and provincial confederacies, such that it is difficult to see how the country will be able to hold together.

8. Iraq is already in a civil war, so it does not matter if the US simply withdraws precipitately, since the situation is as bad as it can get. No, it isn't. During the course of the guerrilla war, the daily number of dead has fluctuated, between about 20 and about 60. But in a real civil war, it could easily be 10 times that. Some estimates of the number of Afghans killed during their long set of civil wars put the number at 2.5 million, along with 5 million displaced abroad and more millions displaced internally. Iraq is Malibu Beach compared to Afghanistan in its darkest hours. The US has a responsibility to get out of Iraq responsibly and to not allow it to fall into that kind of genocidal civil conflict.

9. The US can buy off the Iraqis now supporting guerrilla action against US troops. US military and civilian officials in Iraq have on numerous occasions alleged in the press or privately to me that a vast infusion of billions of dollars from the US would dampen down the guerrilla insurgency. In fact, it seems clear that far more Sunni Arabs support the guerrilla movement today than supported it in September of 2004, and more supported it in September of 2004 than had in September of 2003. AP reports that the US has spent $100 million on reconstruction projects in Diyala Province. These community development and infrastructural improvements, often carried out by US troops in conditions of danger, are most praiseworthy. But Diyala is a mess politically and a major center of guerrilla activity (see below), which simply could not be pursued on this scale without substantial local popular support. The Sunni Arab parties, which demand US withdrawal and reject the results of the Dec. 15 elections, carried the province, winning 6 seats.

The guerrillas are to some important extent driven by local nationalism and rejection of foreign occupation, as well as resentment at the marginalization of the Sunni Arab community in the new Iraq. They have a keen sense of national honor, and there is no evidence that they can be bribed into laying down their arms, or that the general populace can be bribed on any significant scale into turning the guerrillas in to the US. Attributing motives of honor to one's own side and crass economic interests to one's opponent is a common ploy of political propaganda, but we should be careful about believing our own spin.

Even a simple economic calculation would favor the guerrillas fighting on, however. If they could get back in control of Iraq through a coup, they'd have $50 billion a year in oil revenues to play with. The total US reconstruction aid promised to Iraq is only $18 billion, and much of that will be spent on security-- i.e. it won't benefit most Iraqis.

10. The Bush administration wanted free elections in Iraq. This allegation is simply not true, as I and others pointed out last January. I said then, and it is still true:

' Moreover, as Swopa rightly reminds us all, the Bush administration opposed one-person, one-vote elections of this sort. First they were going to turn Iraq over to Chalabi within six months. Then Bremer was going to be MacArthur in Baghdad for years. Then on November 15, 2003, Bremer announced a plan to have council-based elections in May of 2004. The US and the UK had somehow massaged into being provincial and municipal governing councils, the members of which were pro-American. Bremer was going to restrict the electorate to this small, elite group.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani immediately gave a fatwa denouncing this plan and demanding free elections mandated by a UN Security Council resolution. Bush was reportedly "extremely offended" at these two demands and opposed Sistani. Bremer got his appointed Interim Governing Council to go along in fighting Sistani. Sistani then brought thousands of protesters into the streets in January of 2004, demanding free elections. Soon thereafter, Bush caved and gave the ayatollah everything he demanded. Except that he was apparently afraid that open, non-manipulated elections in Iraq might become a factor in the US presidential campaign, so he got the elections postponed to January 2005. This enormous delay allowed the country to fall into much worse chaos, and Sistani is still bitter that the Americans didn't hold the elections last May. The US objected that they couldn't use UN food ration cards for registration, as Sistani suggested. But in the end that is exactly what they did. '

Iraq's situation is extremely complex. It is not a black and white poster for an American political party. Good things and bad things are happening there. The American public cannot help make good policy, however, unless the myths are first dispelled.
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Over 20 Dead, 46 Wounded in Guerrilla War;
Governor of Diyala Wounded in Assassination Attempt
Sunnis Threaten Boycott

A wave of guerrilla bombings and apparently coordinated small arms attacks around north-central Iraq left over 20 dead and over twice as many wounded on Monday. (Actually, it is worse; the average estimated dead in the guerrilla war ranges between 38 and 60 per day, but wire services seldom report more than a fraction of these deaths).

Guerrillas launched a series of 4 car bombings around Baghdad, killing 5 and wounding 15. Later they detonated a motorcycle bomb in a Shiite neighborhood of the capital near a funeral, killing 3 and wounding 23. According to al-Sharq al-Awsat, guerrillas assassinated Nawfal Ahmad, a professor at Baghdad's Institute of Fine Arts when he came out of his house in al-Tubji, in north Baghdad. (Hundreds of Iraqi professors have been assassinated; it is not clear that this death is included in the totals given by the wire services, since none that I saw mention it explicitly). Police in Baghdad also happened upon 3 corpses on Monday, one of them that of a police officer.

In Buhriz near Baqubah northeast of Baghdad, a guerrilla platoon of more than thirty men launched a well-planned attack on local police at a checkpoint, jumping out of a minivan and firing rocket propelled grenades. They then advanced, throwing grenades. Late reports say that they killed 10 of the policemen and wounded others. They claimed on the internet to have killed or wounded all 20 policemen at the checkpoint, which may be near enough the truth. Iraqi police claimed to have killed six of the guerrillas.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that guerrillas at the same time assassinated Su'ad Jaafar, a member of the Diyala governing council along with 3 of her bodyguards while she was returning home. A member of the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance, she was a candidate for parliament in the Dec. 15 elections. They also tried to kill Raad Rashid Jawad, the governor of Diyala province (in which Buhriz is located), with a bomb planted on the route of his motorcade; one of his bodyguards was killed and he and two other bodyguards were wounded. US officials and officers have frequently said that US troops would be withdrawn when Iraqi security forces can handle the guerrillas themselves.

In Dhahab, north of Buhriz, another guerrilla band shot dead 5 Iraqi soldiers, in what may have been a coordinated attack. In Fallujah to the west, a guerrilla wearing a suicide bomb belt killed himself as he waded into a crowd of persons trying to join the police, killing two of them, as well.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that guerrillas set ablaze a gas pipeline carrying gas from Kirkuk to Samarra, via an improvised explosive device that they detonated in southwest Samarra, a city of some 200,000 an hour north of Baghdad. The Washington Post reports that the US military has imprisoned the rebellious Samarra population behind an earthen berm in an attempt to keep guerrilla fighters out, in which they have had some success. US forces have on several occasions declared that they have made substantial progress in Samarra, but violence usually breaks out there again after a time. One suspects that a lot of the violence is not actually coming from the outside.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat[Ar.] : The Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq announced Monday early results of the special voting held for certain groups, such as expatriates, members of the armed forces and security forces, and for prisoners. Among these groups (which total just under 500,000 or less than 5 percent of the electorate), the Kurdistan Alliance received 36.5%, the United Iraqi Alliance (Shiite) received 30.2%, and the National Iraqi list headed by Iyad Allawi received 11.1%. The National Accord Front (Sunni fundamentalist) received 4.8%. These results are incomplete and could change. The majority of these voters were expatriates, helping explain the disproportionately large Kurdish showing and the disproportionately small vote for Shiite fundamentalists. These numbers will not affect very much the overall shape of the election, which the Shiite religious parties appear to have dominated.

The NYT saw separate statistics for the voting patterns of the 200,000 military, police and prison voters, which gave the Sunni parties about 7 percent, and concludes that Sunni Arabs are under-represented in the new military. The Kurdistan Alliance got 45% of the votes from the security forces, while the UIA got 30%. I am not entirely sure that you can read off these totals as the ethnic make-up of the military and security forces, though, since it is possible that Sunni Arabs in the military did not vote as enthusiastically as Shiites and Kurds. But the NYT and its sources are correct that these proportions are suggestive and disturbing.

The National Accord Front denied earlier reports that it had asked the Shiites to give Sunni Arabs ten seats. (Actually, the report I saw said that the request came from some Sunni Arab cabinet ministers).

The Sunni fundamentalist National Accord Front, along with the secular National Dialogue Council and the National Iraqiya list of Allawi, have planned a big demonstration in Baghdad for Tuesday. They, along with 39 other political parties and lists have formed an organization, the Conference for Rejection of the Fraudulent Elections, CRFE (Muram in Arabic). They charge that the Shiite fundamentalist coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, stole the election through electoral fraud. They also accused the IECI of not actually being an independent electoral commission, implying that it was serving Shiite interests.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat has sources who attended meetings of the rejection front in Amman, which included Iyad Allawi, Adnan Dulaimi and Salih Mutlak, and who reported that these politicians will inform the Arab League Secretary General, Amr Moussa, of their demands that the election be held all over again in the provinces where widespread fraud occurred, especially in the northern cities and in Basra and Baghdad. They sources say that the three leaders have decided to boycott parliamentary sessions in an effort to paralyze it if it will not heed their demands. They are also planning to write a letter to Kofi Annan.

Cole: Parliament requires a 2/3s vote to elect a president, who must appoint a prime minister from the coalition with a simple majority. I figure 2/3s as about 184 votes. Allawi and the Sunni Arabs probably won't have more than 50 or 55 seats all told, leaving around 220. The Kurds will have about 50. If we subtract them, we come down to 170. Therefore, an Allawi/Sunni boycott would force the Shiites into another coalition with the Kurds if they are to form a government, and the Kurds can extract promises moderating Shiite fundamentalist policies before they agree. Since the Rejectionist Conference is alleging fraud in "northern cities," probably a euphemism for Kirkuk, it may in fact push the Kurds to ally with the Shiites again, since both have an interest in protecting their electoral victories in their provinces. On the other hand, if the Kurds and the Shiites can do business, then the Allawi/Sunni boycott would become meaningless and would simply deprive them of a vote in parliament.

Once a Shiite-dominated government is formed, the United Iraqi Alliance could simply vote down its rivals by simple majority, though it would risk a presidential veto if it failed to get a consensus. The president (who likely will be a Kurd and likely will be Jalal Talabani) and the two vice presidents (likely a Sunni Arab and a Shiite) each can exercise a separate veto over legislation for the next 4 years. If the Kurds and the Shiites can find a pliable and complaisant Sunni Arab to serve as vice president, though, they could just run roughshod over the Sunni Arab and secularist minority.

Generally speaking, in parliamentary systems boycotts usually backfire and a poor political strategy. If the Sunni Arabs and secularists were smart, they'd make themselves swing votes in parliament and use their economic power to lobby for policies they want, thus leveraging themselves into great influence. The Sunni Arabs and ex-Baathists were used, however, to ruling by the iron fist from above, and so are hardly canny parliamentarians, and don't know how to make themselves indispensable as a minority.
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Shiites, Sunnis, Demonstrate Against one Another over Elections;
Five Percent of Ballots Fraudulent: IECI

According to Sabrina Tavernise of the New York Times, Sunni Arab cabinet ministers requested that the United Iraqi Alliance donate 10 of their seats to Sunni Arab candidates. Apparently they hoped such a gesture would mollify Sunni Arab activists who believe that the Shiites unfairly stole the election. The UIA declined, nor would such a gesture probably have been legal.

Sunnis rallied again on Sunday against the election outcome, crying fraud, at Baqubah in the northeast and Fallujah west of the capital. In Baqubah after the demonstrations, guerrilla groups engaged local Iraqi police, killing 4 of them and wounding 15.

In Fallujah, hundreds of protesters came out. Some rallied against the election results. Others demanded release of detainees held by the US and Iraqi governments, or wanted to be paid compensation for the property damage the city suffered during the November, 2004, assault on the city by US forces, which destroyed 2/3s of the buildings and left most inhabitants refugees. Still others wanted the government to repeal the tripling of fuel costs.

In Sadr City, the vast Shiite slum of East Baghdad, about 1,000 Shiites held a demonstration in support of the electoral victory apparently gained by the United Iraqi Alliance. They supported the government of Ibrahim Jaafari, denounced former prime minister Iyad Allawi (a secular Shiite and oldtime CIA asset), and demanded the execution of Saddam Hussein.

Nancy Youssef of Knight Ridder reports increasingly vehement anti-Iranian sentiment among Iraq's Sunni Arabs. They blame Iran for supporting the fundamentalist Shiite parties, and for a string of assassinations of Sunni figures.

Two US soldiers died in Iraq on Sunday, and some 16 Iraqis were killed in guerrilla violence in Baghdad, Kirkuk, Mosul, Jabala and Baqubah. Guerrillas destroyed an Abrams tank with a roadside bomb, which would have taken a big explosive device, though no US casualties in the event appear yet to have been released. It is not good news that the guerrillas have evolved to the point where they can destroy an Abrams tank.

Iraq's minister of justice, Abdel Hussein Shandal, narrowly avoided being assassinated on Saturday when guerrillas sprayed his car with machine gun fire, killing two.

Al-Hayat [Ar.]: The London pan-Arab daily says that American pressure has increased on the Shiite funamentalist parties to form a government of national unity so as to exit from the current crisis, and that the US is using President Jalal Talabani (a prominent Kurd) as their go-between. US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad is playing a key role in attempting to bring the parties together so that a government can be formed, according to another London daily, al-Sharq al-Awsat

Al-Sharq al-Awsat quotes an official of the Iraqi Accord Front, Zafir al-Ani, as saying that electoral fraud in the parliamentary elections of Dec. 15 was "the closest thing to a mercy killing of the entire political process in Iraq." He added that his Sunni fundamentalist coalition was keeping all options open, including that of completely boycotting that political process. He said that his list is getting enormous popular pressure from Sunni Arab voters who were promised that voting on Dec. 15 would restore ethnic and sectarian balance to parliament.

Al-Hayat: The United Iraqi Alliance, the victorious Shiite coalition, has rejected charges that its victory was engineered through voting fraud, and its prominent leaders have intimated that they might take measures against "instigators of violence" (i.e. Sunni Arabs protesting the election results). The massive Sunni demonstrations last Friday and the belligerant Shiite response have raised profound fears that the Iraq crisis could escalate to a new level of violence and instability.

The Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq admitted on Sunday that voting fraud occurred in approximately 5 percent of the ballots cast, but said that this level of fraud would not affect the over-all outcome. Still, the IECI announcement will certainly fuel Sunni Arab anger and conviction that the election was stolen.

Shiite Iraqi politician Hussein Shahristani maintained that United Nations and European Union observers viewed the December 15 elections as among the more above-board and clean in the third world, and said that there is no doubt that its results reflected the will of the people.
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Iraqi Christians in Peril this Christmas

Because of the poor security, Iraqi Christians had to celebrate midnight mass at sundown instead. Many Christians have fled Iraq for Syria and elsewhere, while others are afraid to go to the churches, which have been targeted in the past by bombers. (Ironically, the secular Arab nationalist regimes like the Syrian Baath have typically been favorable to local Christians, since they downplay religious identity.

The year 2005 has not been kind to Iraqi Christians, who number around 700,000. Like all Iraqis, they face problems of insecurity, violence, and kidnapping. But they are sometimes unfairly targeted as pro-Western. About 80 percent of Iraqi Christians are Uniate Catholics or Chaldeans, who acknowledge the Pope but have their own liturgy. Pope John Paul II, it should be remembered, opposed the Iraq War. The other 20 percent are Assyrians, rooted in a historical legacy of the Nestorian, Aramaic-using church of the Near East, though most of these have moved away from classical Nestorian theology (which emphasized the humanity of Jesus of Nazareth and refused to recognize the Mother Mary as the "mother of God.") These are old, local churches.

The political events of 2005 often harmed the interests of the Chaldean and Assyrian Christians. The ballot boxes they should have received in their region of Ninevah in the north for the Jan. 30 elections often never arrived. They also alleged that they were slighted unfairly in the recent Dec. 15 polls. At some 3 percent of the population, they would ideally have 8 or so seats in the parliament, but do not.

The constitution forged in summer of 2005 and approved in a referendum on Oct. 15 makes Islam the religion of state in Iraq and says that the civil parliament may pass no legislation that contravenes Islamic law. Chaldeans and Assyrians vehemently protested these provisions, to no avail. They were especially concerned that the constitution likely makes it illegal for Muslims to convert to Christianity, and therefore puts Christians in legal peril if they are responsible for such conversions. It may also be that some Christian sentiments about Islam will be regarded as blasphemous, as has happened in nearby Pakistan.

Iraq's Christians have also often been disadvantaged by the movement of Kurds into northern Iraq and Kurdish hopes of annexing much of Kirkuk and Ninevah to Kurdistan. There is often tension between Iraqi Christians and the Kurds because of these territorial issues.

The Chaldeans are deeply worried about their future. They are concerned with the likely impact on their community of emigration (because of the bad security) and of the rise in Iraq of political Islam. They are also profoundly fearful and resentful of evangelical Protestant targeting of their members for conversion. (In modern Middle Eastern history, Presbyterians and Baptists have on a number of occasions launched a big push to convert Muslims, which invariably failed miserably, after which the missionaries turned their attention to local Eastern Orthodox, Catholic and other Middle Eastern Christians).

It seems clear that the new order that Bush has brought to Iraq holds substantial perils for the indigenous Iraqi Christian community.
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Sistani Calls for Government of National Unity

According to AFP, Iraqi national security adviser Muwaffaq al-Rubaie met Saturday with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and then conveyed the latter's hope that a national unity government will be formed. Rubaie (al-Sharq al-Awsat/ AFP, Cole trans.:) quoted Sistani as saying, "I urge you to maintain the unity of the Iraqi people, and urge the parties that won to deal with those issues over which there is dispute, with wisdom and nonviolently." He further conveyed the ayatollah's words, "I also counsel the the United Iraqi Alliance, which won the elections, to work with other components of the people of Iraq to form a government of national unity that will represent all the chief currents in the country." Sistani is said to have stressed the need for calm, so that the country could be rebuilt.

Sistani is in essence supporting the plan of President Jalal Talabani (a Kurd). The grand ayatollah had pressed for much more Sunni representation in the cabinet last spring than the Shiite religious parties and the Kurds were willing to accept, and this sectarian selfishness on their part appears to be one of the things that soured him on the United Iraqi Alliance.

The call comes in the wake of huge demonstrations in Iraq by Sunni Arabs on Friday against what they called election fraud on Dec. 15, and after about 100 prominent Sunni candidates were excluded on the grounds that they had been high officials in the Baath Party-- reinforcing the Sunni Arab conviction that they were targeted for marginalization by the new regime.

The Debaathification Committee is de facto an arm of corrupt financier and current vice premier Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, and it is widely rumored that Chalabi has deployed it to intimidate and blackmail possible opponents. Chalabi and the INC are close to the Pentagon and the Neoconservatives at the American Enterprise Institute. The Committee had forwarded to the High Electoral Commission the 100 or so names of candidates who had been high in the Baath establishment. The High Electoral Commission concluded that the Debaathfication Committee had not presented sufficient proof, and so allowed these 100 candidates to run. This policy reflects the conviction of Iyad Allawi, the CIA and the State Department that incorporating the ex-Baathists into the government would both dampen the guerrilla war and offset the power of the Shiite fundamentalists with close ties to Iran, who had come to power in the Jan. 30 elections. The Chalabi group took the Electoral Commission to court, and the 3-judge Supreme Judicial Court sided with the Chalabi faction (i.e. Rumsfeld and the Neocons won this one, and the CIA and the State Department lost.) It would be interesting to know who appointed the Supreme Judicial Council.

The exclusion of these 90-odd prominent Sunni Arabs from the election, even after many had won seats in parliament, can only exacerbate ethnic tensions in Iraq.
I have repeatedly said that the standard for who is excluded from public life should be whether they could be proven to have committed crimes. Mere membership in a party should not be the criterion. As one canny reader wrote me, moreover, the threat of using former Baath Party membership to remove persons from civic life could easily be used to intimidate and coerce Sunni Arabs, most of whom had those connections.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat [Ar.] reports that the Shiite fundamentalist list, the United Iraqi Alliance, has begun to explore political alliances that will allow it to form the next government. Jawad al-Maliki of the Dawa Party (a component of the UIA) said that a prime ministerial candidate will be chosen by the coalition as soon as the final results of the election are known. He also castigated protesters against the election results, saying that they must accept the will of the people. He added, "Many of them are led by gangs of the remnants for the former regime and by excommunicators (radical Salafi Muslims who declare Shiites and moderate Muslims to actually be "infidels.").

Iran's Interior Minister said that what is happening in Iraq today is an echo of the Khomeinist ideals of the 1979 revolution in Iran.

Meanwhile, Iraq's foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, said that Iraq wants to strengthen relations with Iran along a whole range of dimensions. Zebari is a Sunni Kurd, but many Kurds view Tehran fondly because it supported the Kurds against Saddam.

In Hilla, Kirkuk, Baghdad and Fallujah on Saturday, the guerrillas set off bombs, set afire pipelines, tried to assassinate the minister of justice, killed or wounded Iraqi soldiers and police, murdered civilians, and killed another GI. Fourteen persons were killed in Baghdad alone, and six corpses showed up in the streets of the capital. Hostage crises with regard to Jordanian and Sudanese continued.

A report in the Washington Post suggests that aggressive US use of air power in Anbar province to combat the Sunni Arab guerrillas may be killing twice as many innocent civilians as guerrillas. Air power as an element in aggressive counter-insurgency is an overly blunt instrument, and is certainly producing more enemies for the US than it kills. All along, the US has relentlessly bombed civilian neighborhoods in Iraq, helping to produce the horrible security situation than now obtains. Air power is especially useless insofar as it affords the political wing of the guerrillas no opportunity to negotiate. Successful counter-insurgency must have a political track.

Pepe Escobar has a canny run-down of the political situation in Iraq after the elections.
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Interlibrary Loan/ DHS Story a Hoax

The story of the interlibrary loan request for Mao's Little Red Book that produced an interview by the Department of Homeland Security turns out to be a hoax.

However, it is one of those hoaxes that bespeaks a reality, which is that the level of unwarranted (a pun!) surveillance of Americans and violation of their fourth amendment rights under the Bush administration has skyrocketed to new levels of criminality. And, as I said, I do know of people who have been interviewed when they tried to import Arabic books.
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Achcar Comments on IC 12/24/05

Gilbert Achcar kindly writes:

' Dear Juan

Two remarks:

1) re: to the "informed reader" of your "informed comment" who wonders about the independent Sadrist list, Risaliyun, which you translated as "Messengers" (I am sure they would reject such an English label which would put them on a par with the Prophet: al-Rasul, the Messenger, the plural of which is Rusul, as you know, not Risaliyun). This list whose name could better be translated as the Upholders of the Message is indeed the one that the IECI refers to under the odd translation of "Progressives."

[Cole note: The translation of Risaliyun as "Messengers" was that of a wire service report, not my own.]

This last-minute list of anti-UIA Sadrists was backed by one of al-Sadr's collaborators, sheikh Abdul-Hadi al-Darraji. Its results in Baghdad (Darraji operates in al-Sadr City) where it got 1.8% of the votes compared with 58.5% for the UIA, in Basrah, another stronghold of the Sadrists, 0.5% compared with 77.5%, and in Najaf, 4% compared with 82%, show clearly that the vast majority of al-Sadr followers voted for Shiite unity within the UIA, as recommended indirectly by Sistani, and not for a separate entity. However, since the Sadrists have becomed golden boys in the political equivalent of hedge funds, it is likely that the purpose of this slate was only to attract the votes of the residual number of Sadrists who are vehemently opposed to the alliance with SCIRI. That would explain the relatively good score in Najaf where enmity is highest between Sadrists and SCIRI.

2) re: the story about the tanker full of forged ballots to which you devoted a long comment. What you say is very sensible. What should be added is that this story was printed very prominently by the New York Times on Dec. 14, quoting "an official at the Interior ministry... who spoke on the condition of anonymity" without the newspaper bothering to verify it, a fact which could mean that it was "whispered" to them by a US or Allawi-inspied "informant" as part of the very intensive disinformation and propaganda campaign engaged since several weeks by US authorities and their close allies in Iraq against the UIA and Iran. It was immediately denied by Iraqi official sources -- the border police -- who said they were even astonished to hear of it as nothing at all approaching that story was reported to them at any point of the border. (If I am not wrong, the NYT did not bother either to report the denial.)

The story was so little credible that nobody among the UIA or Iran's opponents in Iraq made a fuss about it, though if it were real you can be sure that it would have become a major international and local news item and the object of strong statements from Khalilzad, the occupation authorities and Washington. The only other sources reporting it actually quoted... the NYT and the story is used in Arabic only by those among the fiercest Shiite haters who have no scruples about facts anyway.

The story about the arrest of a man in relation with the "forged ballots" which you refer to today is to be very much qualified. One should always describe the source that is quoted, especially when the odds that this source is biased are heavy indeed. In this case, this source is an anti-Iranian regime website, "Iran Focus," and the fact that no Iraqi source, including anti-Shiite and anti-Iranian sources reported its story makes it highly suspiscious, as long as it is not confirmed separately (not by quoting Iran Focus, otherwise the whole thing turns farcical!) by reliable sources. The Dec. 23 dated dispatch of "Iran Focus" did not credit any specific source for their "information" but just said "according to Baghdad dailies." You and me happen to read Baghdad dailies, and I haven't seen any trace of that yesterday or today (correct me if you have seen any).

The rest of the Iran Focus dispatch is revealing in the same vein:

"Independent analysts in the Iraqi capital said the incident was not isolated and that Tehran had sent a huge number of fake ballots to Iraq to boost the performance of its protégés in the elections.... Last week, the commander of the Multi-National Force in Iraq, General George Casey, said that there was intelligence indicating that Tehran had “invested heavily” in political parties supportive of Iran in southern Iraq." No further comment is needed.

All the best, Gilbert '

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20,000 Protest Election Fraud in Iraq
Leading Sunnis Scorned as Baathists

The question of whether the December 15 elections might contribute to social peace in Iraq (always a chancy proposition) began to clarify on Friday.

The guerrilla war raged with full fury, as two GIs were killed in Baghdad by a roadside bomb. A suicide bomber on a bicycle killed 10 persons and wounded others at a Shiite mosque in Baladruz northeast of Baghdad. The death toll from an attack on an Iraqi army base in the north rose to 10. A bomber targeted a British convoy in Basra, but missed.

First, Nancy Youssef and Huda Ahmed broke the story that the Iraqi Supreme Court has ordered the high electoral commission to heed the warning that several leading Sunni Arab candidates were high-ranking Baathists and should be disqualified. The affected candidates are largely from the Iraqiya list of Iyad Allawi and the National Dialogue Council of Salih Mutlak, both of them hospitable to secular ex-Baathists. Mutlak predicted turbulence in the streets, with perfect accuracy (of course, he helped arrange for the turbulence).

Then, Al-Zaman/ AFP [Ar.] : and AP report that some 20,000 mainly Sunni protesters (along with some secular Shiites) came out in several cities to protest what they called election fraud. Demonstrations were held in Baghdad, Mosul, Tikrit and Samarra, among other cities. The crowds demanded that new elections be held, given the extent of irregularities they maintained had occurred.

At one of the Baghdad rallies, Adnan Dulaimi of the Iraqi Accord Front (Sunni Islamist) demanded that the results of the election be abrogated in every province where any electoral fraud could be demonstrated. He pledged to "follow all peaceful and legal means to vindicate the truth and defeat falsehood." His coalition partner, Tariq al-Hashimi, the secretary general of the Iraqi Islamic Party, said, "our position of rejecting the results of the elections is reinforced daily, and before us lies the difficult mission of altering the results and achieving justice." He said, "The intention to commit fraud was present even before the ballot boxes were opened." He added, "If we do not receive an answere, we will rethink our participation in politics, for we reject a political process that some desire, based on fraud and lies." The Sunni Arabs, he said, "refuse to be second class citizens."

Shaikh Mahdi al-Sumaidaie, the preacher at the Umm al-Qura Mosque in West Baghdad said in his sermon that "The Iraqi people, which had anticipated the rise of national government that would include all groups, has been shocked by the process of election fraud, and it is something that the Iraqi people absolutely will not abide." Sumaidaie had been among the few hard line members of the Association of Muslim Scholars who had called for Sunnis to participate in the elections.

In Mosul, hundreds of demonstrators marched from the Khidr Mosque toward the governor's mansion at the center of the city, carrying Iraqi flags and placards with phrases like "The Electoral Commission is Subordinating Iraq to its Neighbors" (i.e. Iran), and shouting "No, no!" to the High Electoral Commission, which they called the "High Fraudulent Commission."

The demonstrations were called by the Iraqi Accord Front, the Iraq People's Congress, and the National Dialogue Council one day after 35 coalitions, parties and movements (including some consisting of secular Shiites) rejected the early results being announced concerning the outcome of the elections. In those results, the Shiite fundamentalist coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, won most of the seats in 9 southern provinces and in Baghdad. The demonstrators shouted that Iran had intervened in the elections, and said that even a high American official had complained about Tehran's interference (a reference to Gen. George Casey.)

(The Bush administration's fear of Iran and of its reigning Iraqi allies in Baghdad may be destabilizing Iraq by giving ammunition to disgruntled Sunni Arabs. How many feet does the Bush administration have left to shoot itself in??)

There was a story floating around last week that a "tanker" full of "hundreds of thousands" of forged ballots coming from Iran was discovered and confiscated at the border, with the names but not the rest of the ballots filled in. This story, which has fed Sunni Arab discontent, makes no sense. First of all, you can't get hundreds of thousands of ballots on one truck, even a tanker. Paper is bulky. How would Iran have a list of plausible Iraqi voters? Iranians mostly print in nasta'liq script, not the naskh favored in the Arab world, and mostly use Persian, not Arabic. While Iranian printers could pull off such a thing, you have to ask, why? If you were going to print fake Arabic ballots for Iraq, why not just do it in Basra? It is not as if the United Iraqi Alliance, the presumed beneficiary of the alleged forgeries, does not control Iraqi printing presses in areas secure enough for it to commit fraud if it liked. I don't find the story plausible, but it appears that the US military has actually arrested Fazel "Abu Tayyib" Jasim, a provincial council member of Kut and a member of the Shiite Badr Organization (the paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq), implicating him in the affair. I'd like to see the truck and the ballots on television. One tanker, or even a fleet of them, couldn't affect centrally an election with millions of voters.

In any case, these actions and statements of the US military are unlikely to overturn the election results, which probably give the religious Shiites control of parliament. But they could further destabilize Iraq, if that is possible.

Informed sources told al-Zaman that the new government won't be formed until late February or early March.

SCIRI leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim visited Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani Friday in Najaf. Afterwards, he issued a statement that he would not allow the dissolution of the High Electoral Commission, as critics of the eleciton demanded. He said the criticisms of the election results were unwarranted, and he called the threats issued by some "a bad thing." He said, "We have to honor the will of the people." He said that criticisms of the High Electoral Commission were understandable, but that to target the people itself was bizarre and unprecedented. He insisted, "The United Iraqi Alliance too strong for any blocs to stand before it, since it represents the will of the majority of the Iraqi people."
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Kashmir Earthquake Victims

Tens of thousands of earthquake victims in Pakistani Kashmir are facing winter with inadequate shelter, medicine and food.

John Walbridge of Indiana University writes:

You might want to inform your readers about how to best support earthquake relief. Apart from the obvious major organizations like the Red Cross, your readers might wish to consider the Edhi Foundation. Abd al-Sattar Edhi is a Pakistani counterpart of Mother Theresa who runs a universally respected and trusted network of charities throughout Pakistan, including most of the country's ambulance services. The contact information is

Edhi Foundation Site.

Edhi's offices in the US are at
42-07 National Street
Corona, NY 11368
Tel: (718) 639-5120
Email: edhi@cyber.net.pk

An interesting article on him was published last year.

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Iraqi Elections: Post-Election Coalition Possibilities

An informed reader writes:

' “Moreover, a group of Sadrists, the Messengers, ran separately from the UIA in the south and are getting 3% of the seats.”

There is no such group in the IECI release in English. [Some have suggested that it might be the "Progressive" party listed by IECI, which seems to fit the description.]

A not unimportant point, because I thought there might be some of that going on, and a close look at the Lists in Arabic might be telling.

With a turnout of 11 million, the “national average” threshhold for “compensatory seats” would be 40,000, with respect to which few may qualify. The consequence of that would be that there may be a significant number of “national seats” allotted to the Lists with the largest national totals. The point of the “compensatory seat” exercise was to permit small groups to be represented in the Council of Representatives. To the extent that does not happen, the exercise was a waste of time and a needless (or imperfectly crafted) complexity. Because of the wide margins in some southern Provinces, List 555 may receive a number of “national seats.” That is part of the methodology for the 130 figure being reported.

A complexity which I have not yet figured out is how the out-of-country votes are to be included in the “national seat” allotments.

Chalabi’s INC received fewer than 9,000 votes in Baghdad.

He probably will rise again. Allawi could be finished.

Who will lead a “national unity” opposition to List 555?

Step one is for the Allawi and Sunni groups to reach blocking power of 92 votes, which they probably cannot do without the PUK/KDP. Can there be an ICF (Iraqi Islamic Party plus two) alliance with the PUK/KDP without an understanding with respect to Kirkuk? My hunch is that the Sunnis now leading are only gradually understanding the reality of their position, and that, when they focus on Kirkuk and the Kirkuk field, they may understand the power and wisdom behind an equivalent of SCIRI’s proposed Southern Regional Government. When that happens (if it has not already), it is possible that there will be a real cause for a “civil war,” but it will not be between the Sunni and Shia.

If List 555 ultimately has 130 seats directly, and a few alliances to reach 138, no such “national unity” slate is possible, unless joined or led by List 555. It should be remembered that when President Bush called Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim apparently to ask for flexibility with respect to “federalism,” the answer apparently was the equivalent of “no,” although he may have said with great curtesy something like he would see what could be done. One can only imagine what he thought then and later, given the history of Bush pere in 1991 and the treatment received from the CPA. If there were no concessions with respect to “federalism” despite the valiant effort of Ambassador Khalilzad and even Presidential reinforcement, what would the consideration for such concessions be now? Will the threat of boycotts and even, perhaps, civil war work? It can be argued that that is a problem for the US Government to solve.

Vice President Mahdi has been proposed by press reports for a “national unity” role. SCIRI’s leadership may have other things in mind. Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim said at the Washington Post that the next government would be in “safe hands.” Hadi Ameri said in Najaf, “What have we ever received from the central government but death?” The best way to assure that that will not happen to the Shia again is to control the central government, most especially the Ministry of Interior. If SCIRI and the Badr Organization do not control the Ministry of Interior, second best is a Southern Regional Government and a strong militia.

Of course, List 555 could fragment, but I doubt that it will. This is the main chance for the Iraqi Shia, and everyone from Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani down knows it.

In a democracy there is no right to power except at the will of the majority. If there is to be enforced “affirmative action,” the provisions of the Constitution must be so interpreted by legislation.

I still believe that there is little leverage to be derived from the 2/3 vote required for the Presidency Council. “Inclusiveness” will occur only at the pleasure (and through satisfactory deals) of the List 555 leaderships, and the first three on that List are Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, Prime Minister Jaafari and a representative of the Badr Organization. I am skeptical about the “conventional wisdom” that Jaafari will go quietly into the sunset. Certainly, inclusion of Allawi in the list of candidates for Prime Minister was clearly wrong. It seems likely that, if it is to be Vice President Mahdi, he will not stray to far from the views of the first three, tempered only by those of Moqtada al-Sadr.

There are now two (reported) documents. Moqtada al-Sadr’s Pact of Honor and the statement of the Allawi and Sunni parties made today. Whatever document there may have been between List 169 and the PUK/KDP is, I believe, no longer operative.

It is not overly simplified to argue that the future of Iraq is in the hands of Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim and Moqtada al-Sadr. I do not have the text of the Pact of Honor, but it is reported in effect that a Southern Regional Government is to be “postponed.” Perhaps until Kirkuk is resolved or in connection therewith. '

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Guest Editorial by Fisher: State Dept. Replaces DoD in Iraq

IRAQ RECONSTRUCTION: STATE IN, PENTAGON OUT

By William Fisher

After a thousand days of widely acknowledged failure in the job of rebuilding Iraq, the Department of Defense has quietly been relieved of that responsibility, with the State Department taking over as America’s lead reconstruction agency and coordinating the work of all other government departments.

While supporters of the policies of President George W. Bush dismiss the change as an administrative adjustment, others suggest it is symbolic of a decades-old turf battle between the two departments, and the administration’s increasing frustration with the reconstruction performance of the DOD and its contractors.

They also point to the switch as an example of how the president goes about making policy changes in Iraq: exhorting the public to “stay the course” while changing it without fanfare.

Steven Aftergood, who heads the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, told IPS, "It's a belated recognition that existing policy on reconstruction and stabilization has been woefully inadequate."

The switch was made through a little-noticed December 7 Presidential National Security Directive. Its objective is “to promote the security of the United States through improved coordination, planning, and implementation for reconstruction and stabilization assistance for foreign states and regions at risk of, in, or in transition from conflict or civil strife.”

The Directive says, “The Secretary of State shall coordinate and lead integrated United States Government efforts”, coordinating these efforts with the Secretary of Defense to ensure harmonization with any planned or ongoing U.S. military operations across the spectrum of conflict.”

It explains that to maximize the effectiveness of U.S. rebuilding efforts, “a focal point is needed (i) to coordinate and strengthen efforts of the United States Government to prepare, plan for, and conduct reconstruction and stabilization assistance and related activities in a range of situations that require the response capabilities of multiple United States Government entities and (ii) to harmonize such efforts with U.S. military plans and operations.”

To achieve the objectives of the Directive, the Secretary of State will appoint a Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization with wide-ranging responsibilities.

These include “developing and approving strategies…for reconstruction and stabilization activities directed towards foreign states at risk of, in, or in transition from conflict or civil strife: develop guiding precepts and implementation procedures for reconstruction and stabilization which, where appropriate, may be integrated with military contingency plans and doctrine; and coordinate reconstruction and stabilization activities and preventative strategies with foreign countries, international and regional organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and private sector entities…(and) identify lessons learned and integrate them into operations.”

While reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan have been made far more difficult by security concerns, they have also been plagued by massive corruption, overcharging by many American contractors, lack of transparency and accountability in the contracting process, and confusion about lines of responsibility among U.S. Government agencies, and between the U.S. and Iraqi governments.

The State Department has now been tasked to “resolve relevant policy, program, and funding disputes among United States Government Departments and Agencies with respect to U.S. foreign assistance and foreign economic cooperation, related to reconstruction and stabilization….”

The Bush Directive, which is global in scope and not limited to Iraq and Afghanistan, also established a Policy Coordination Committee (PCC) for Reconstruction and Stabilization Operations. The PCC will be chaired by the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization and a member of the National Security Council (NSC) staff.

The State Department will lead U.S. Government efforts to prevent countries at risk “from being used as a base of operations or safe haven for extremists, terrorists, organized crime groups, or others who pose a threat to U.S. foreign policy, security, or economic interests.”

Problems with contractors and with financial management in general have dogged the DOD for many years. The agency’s contracting procedures have been widely condemned and, in one much-publicized case, the department’s most senior contracting official received a prison term for conflicts of interest and other offenses involving the Boeing Corporation, one of the largest military contractors. Other DOD contractors have also proved problematic; in particular, the Halliburton Company has been accused of substantial over-charges on many of its no-bid contracts and has become the poster child for a broken system.

Government accountants have never been able complete a satisfactory audit of DOD expenditures.

Most recently, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) revealed that DOD contractors have received $8 billion over five years in bonuses on weapons programs that were often plagued by significant cost overruns, performance problems and delays.

The GAO, an independent auditor for Congress, reviewed 93 of 597 military contracts in force between 1999 and 2004 that included the possibility of a bonus. Contractors on average were awarded about 90 percent of the bonus money available, the agency said.

For example, Lockheed Martin and Boeing received $1.7 billion, or about 91 percent of $1.847 billion available on four major programs, including the Joint Strike Fighter, even as these programs "experienced significant cost increases, technical problems and development delays," the GAO said.

The GAO report also cited the Boeing-United Technologies RAH-66 Comanche helicopter, canceled in April 2004, and two other Lockheed programs: the F/A-22 fighter and a satellite system to detect enemy missile launches.

Bonuses paid on these troubled programs ranged from 74 percent to 100 percent of the potential award, the agency said. "These practices undermine the effectiveness of fees as a motivational tool and marginalize their use in holding contractors accountable," the audit agency said. "They also serve to waste taxpayer funds."

About the writer: William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the Middle East for the US State Department and the US Agency for International Development, and served in the international affairs area in the Kennedy administration.
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Sunnis Seek Negotiations with Shiite Parties
Saddam says Americans Lied

Saddam Hussein took advantage of being before the cameras again on Thursday to engage in some grandstanding. He reiterated charges that he had been beaten and tortured by the Americans, allegations that Washington had denied. He called the Bush administration congenital liars, pointing to their false claims that Iraq had had weapons of mass destruction or was linked to al-Qaeda terrorism. He said the denials that he had been mistreated were equally untrue. Saddam will be believed by a lot of Muslims, pointing to the disadvantage of this amateurish trial for the US.

The dominance of the Shiite fundamentalist United Iraqi Alliance in the new parliament seems more and more clear as early election results are leaked. Although the UIA did not get every seat in the 9 predominantly Shiite provinces of the south, the other small lists that got seats would almost certainly ally with it.

The two main Sunni parties and the Allawi list have rejected the election results in Iraq and demanded new elections. They are also threatening to boycott parliament if election irregularities are not addressed. But since no one thinks that the election results were actually out of line with political reality or that there will be a rerun, the Sunni parties in particular are negotiating behind the scenes for a place in the new order.

Washington is apparently encouraging the idea of a government of national unity (called for earlier this week by Jalal Talabani) as a way of reining in the Shiite fundamentalist parties, who may well be able to form a government in their own right with the help of a few small parties. Washington fears that they are too close to Iran, and also that for them to present the Sunni Arabs with a tyranny of the Shiite majority will deepen and prolong the guerrilla war.


A Norwegian petroleum company exploring for oil near Zakho in the Kurdistan confederacy of Iraq has found a field, which could be a substantial one.

The Kurdistan confederacy invited the bid from DNO without consulting the federal government in Baghdad, and the new constitution implies that the provincial government will be allowed to make a hundred percent claim on these new resources. In the past, petroleum had been owned by the Iraqi government petroleum company, and Baghdad had shared (or declined to share) the revenues with the provinces. Now the shoe is on the other foot, and many Sunni Arabs in particular are afraid that this sort of deal is the first step to the break-up of the country (or to starving them of resources).

A new Iraqi blogger, Pray4iraq has debuted.
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Iraq Update

Bulgaria and the Ukraine began their pull-out of troops from Iraq.

For real news, go to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Robert Scheer points out that Iran yet again won the Iraqi elections. (It should be remembered that Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish leader, is also a close ally of Tehran.)

Private militias continue to threaten stability in Iraq.
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A Republic, If you Can Keep It

Congress has banned harsh treatment of terrorism suspects in US custody and demanded a quarterly report on such activities.

People like Dick Cheney who favor an imperial presidency should remember that Congress funds the government, and they don't have to fund unconstitutional measures. that Dick had to interrupt his travels lately to pull a budget bill out by his teeth should send a chill through him in this regard. Congress should just cut off money for the Guantanamo Bay prisons.

The Senate agreed Wednesday to extend some provisions of the so-called USA PATRIOT Act for six months, as a compromise measure.

Supporters of American liberties in the Senate are declining to go quietly as Bush urges the retention of Draconian measures in the [anti] PATRIOT bill that contradict the Constitution. The Financial Times notes:

' Those fears were underscored by the revelation last week that Mr Bush had established a secret programme to allow the National Security Agency to monitor outgoing telephone calls and emails from the US without any court authorisation.

US media reported on Wednesday that one of the 11 judges on the US court that authorises government surveillance in intelligence cases resigned in protest over the programme. '

Note that

One thing that is increasingly clear is that the Bush administration is stuck in the Cold War. It is using illegal spying on US citizens to monitor the Catholic Workers . . .

[Tthe following incident turns out to be a hoax and is retracted, 12/25/05:

and interlibrary loan requests for Mao's Little Red Book. (This library incident cannot be dismissed as a hoax on present evidence. It turns out that the student ordered the book over the phone. University authorities are looking into it.

The obsession with Catholic Workers is *so* 1950s, and demonstrates that the administration doesn't really care about al-Qaeda and isn't even mainly using the act to combat that sort of terrorism. In fact, with all its powers, it is hard for the Federal government to point to any successful domestic investigation and prosecution of al-Qaeda-type terrorists in the US.
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Shiite Religious Parties dominate 10 of 18 Provinces
Talabani calls for Government of National Unity

The Los Angeles Times reports that the secular Iraqiya list of Iyad Allawi so far seems only to have 8% of the seats in the new parliament, though that tally may increase slightly when the 230,000 or so votes of expatriates are counted. (I doubt it will increase much). Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress did not get enough votes even to win a single seat, so far.

The Kurds so far have about 45 seats of the 230 being voted for, and the Sunnis have 35. The latter are split between the neo-Baathist National Dialogue Council of Salih Mutlak and the fundamentalist Sunni National Accord Front of Adnan Dulaimi. These totals will probably increase when the unallocated seats are reapportioned. The Sunni Arabs are upset that they are trailing the Kurds, being convinced that they are a much larger group. But since the seats have been allocated to provinces on the basis of voting registration in Jan. 2005, that consideration is irrelevant. Besides, the Sunni Arabs vastly overestimate their own proportion of the Iraqi population; a lot of them really think they are a majority!

Al-Hayat [Ar.] reports that the National Accord Front is leading in 4 provinces (presumably Anbar, Salahuddin, and Ninevah, but what is the fourth? Diyala?). The United Iraqi Alliance (Shiite) is leading in 9 southern provinces and in Baghdad. And the Kurdistan Alliance is leading in four provinces (Dohuk, Sulaimaniyah, Irbil and Kirkuk).

Al-Hayat says that Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish leader and current president, is calling for a government of national unity that will include Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis. Al-Sharq al-Awsat is franker about Talabani's rationale here, since he said that the Shiite-Kurdish alliance between him and prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari had not been successful. Talabani never got along with Jaafari, and was uncomfortable with being merely a ceremonial president, as is called for in the Iraqi constitution. Whatever its rationale, the national unity government is a very good idea. It does have the drawback that such a government would seldom be able actually to take a decision, since the three groups disagree with one another vehemently on most issues. On the other hand, since the government has almost no power or authority, and is mainly symbolic, it probably doesn't matter if it can't take many decisions. On the other hand, it is hard to see why the Shiite majority should give away all the advantages of its majority.

The LA Times estimates that the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite fundamentalist party, has 110 seats so far. To form a government, it will need 138. But its totals may increase. AP says that Husain Shahristani of the UIA (someone very close to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani) is predicting that the Shiite religious coalition will end up with 130 seats, ten less than its current total. Moreover, a group of Sadrists, the Messengers, ran separately from the UIA in the south and are getting 3% of the seats. If that holds, they will have about 7 or 8 seats, and they will certainly ally with the United Iraqi Alliance, which is therefore in striking distance of forming a government. The Guardian explains the reapportionment formula for the 45 seats that were not initially in play:

' The other 45 are split, partly on the "best loser" principle, whereby small parties that did not win enough votes for a seat in any province have their votes totalled nationally. If this figure surpasses a certain threshold, they get a seat. After this is done, the remaining seats are split among the big winners in proportion to their national tallies. This will give the Shi'ite alliance even more. '

Adnan Dulaimi of the National Accord Front, a Sunni group, angrily charged extensive voting fraud in Baghdad, where Sunnis got only about 20 percent of the vote, and demanded a re-vote. Not likely. Actually, this result is plausible. Dulaimi's list is Islamist, and the Sunni Baghadis are not mostly Islamists. A lot of secular middle class Sunnis probably voted for Allawi's secular list, which got 14% in early returns in Baghdad. Allawi's list would have appealed to secular ex-Baathists. Moreover, Sunni Arabs were not completely free to vote. Security is very bad in Amiriyah, Ghazaliyah, Adhamiyah and other districts of the capital, and a lot of people would have been afraid to come out. In contrast, the Shiites of East Baghdad, who are probably at least half the population, have fair security, and since the United Iraqi Alliance includes Muqtada al-Sadr's bloc as well as Dawa and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, there was something for everyone there; the vote turnout would have been high. [By the way, could journalists please stop calling it the National Accordance Front? That is not English, no matter what Dulaimi thinks.]

Allawi is the skunk at the party from the point of view of most of the other parties. The Guardian reports, ' "We've started talks with the Sunnis and Kurds. Not many of us are eager to take Allawi on board. I don't think he stands a chance," said Haider Abadi, spokesperson for the [Shiite fundamentalist] Dawa party of the Prime Minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari. '

Cole: I think I pretty much nailed this election last October in this post (scroll down a bit). Note that I was often contradicted by observers on the ground in Iraq, who kept saying they perceived a groundswell for the secular party of Allawi, even in the Shiite-dominated provinces. This allegation never made any sense to me. Michael Rubin of the AEI was predicting 5 percent for Chalabi (the neocon favorite) and 20 percent for Allawi, a prediction that demonstrates that after 2 1/2 years the neocons still just can't understand anything about contemporary Iraq.

R.J. Eskow shreds the Neocon vision of what Iraq would become to pieces. Iraq is going to be pro-Iran, and will not recognize Israel (Muqtada al-Sadr will be part of the ruling coalition!) The 38 Sadrist parliamentarians and the 50 or so Sunni ones will form a powerful bloc calling for immediate US withdrawal from Iraq.

Iranian pilgrims to the Shiite shrine cities in Iraq began coming to Iraq again on Tuesday, as the border crossings opened.

The US military is using more air power to fight Sunni Arab guerrillas in Western Iraq.
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Fundamentalist Shiites Will Dominate New Parliament
Secularists Lose Badly
Bush Poll Numbers on Iraq Fall

The American public is not in a mood to be swayed by mere speeches or yet more "milestones" like the election in Iraq. All the recent brouhaha has not improved Bush's poll numbers.

As always, it is best to click on the link to poll results, which give a comparison between early December and more recently. A solid majority of 61 percent disapprove of his handling of the war in Iraq, and his rating on this matter has actually fallen two percentage points since early December. Likewise, more Americans (52%) think going to war in Iraq now was a mistake than thought so two weeks ago (48%).

Half of Americans think neither side is winning, and 9 percent think that the guerrillas are winning. Together, that makes 59% who think that the US is not winning. That is the key point. Bush had to convince them that the US is winning, or has the early prospect of winning. He failed. They don't buy it.

The great publicity blitz and attempt to re-cast the Iraq problem as a resolvable one has fallen flat on its face.

The reason for this failure is the grim reality of ongoing guerrilla war in Iraq, with bombs going off all over the country and assassinations and attempted assassinations. Reuters summarizes for Monday, and I have rearranged and categorized:

"RAMADI - A U.S. Marine was killed by gunfire in Ramadi on Sunday, the U.S. military said on Monday." ATTACK ON US MILITARY.

KIRKUK - Gunmen attacked offices of the Turkmen Front on Sunday in the northern city of Kirkuk. A guard was killed and three others wounded . . . ETHNIC UNCONVENTIONAL CIVIL WAR, PROBABLY BETWEEN TURKMEN (SUPPORTED BY TURKEY) AND THE KURDS, WHO WANT TO DOMINATE KIRKUK-- AN OIL CITY. THIS CONFLICT COULD EASILY SPIN OUT OF CONTROL AND BECOME INTERNATIONAL.

"BAGHDAD - Gunmen opened fire on the convoy of Baghdad deputy governor Ziyad al-Zawbai in the southern Amil district of the city, police said. Three of his bodyguards were killed, al- Zawbai and his secretary were wounded." ATTACK ON HIGH BAGHDAD OFFICIAL, DESPITE HIS BODYGUARDS. RELATIVELY SUCCESSFUL.

"BAGHDAD - An Iraqi police colonel escaped assassination when a suicide car bomber detonated his explosives as the colonel's convoy was passing in the Iskan district. Two civilians were killed. The colonel, two of his bodyguards and five civilians were wounded." ATTACK ON NEW IRAQI POLICE-- RELATIVELY SUCCESSFUL.

"BAGHDAD - Two children were wounded when gunmen opened fire on a minibus they were travelling in in the Mansour district . . ." PROBABLY A CASE OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY.

"BALAD - Gunmen killed two Iraqi contractors who were travelling to a U.S military base near Balad . . ." ATTACK ON THOSE IRAQIS CODED BY THE GUERRILLAS AS COLLABORATORS. SUCCESSFUL.

"MIQDADIYA - A car bomb exploded in Miqdadiya, a town 90 km northeast of Baghdad. Four civilians were wounded, one of them seriously. . ."

"BASRA - An adviser to the defence minister said he escaped assassination when a makeshift bomb went off near his convoy in the southern city of Basra. Three of his bodyguards were wounded." ATTACK ON THE MINISTRY OF DEFENSE, HEADED BY SUNNI SAADOUN DULAIMI. FAILED.

If these things were happening daily in Washington, Virginia and Maryland, Americans would freak out. Even just a little sniping paralyzed that area not so long ago. Americans know a war zone when they see one.

Al-Zaman reports continued popular anger over increases in fuel prices ordered by the outgoing government, from Basra to Mosul. Although fuel is still cheap in world terms, Iraqis are very poor and have no visible means of support, so a tripling of this basic cost hurts many of them very badly--especially in the winter. They also view it as a violation of a moral economy they thought they had with the government.

Al-Zaman is reporting early returns for Baghdad. The United Iraqi Alliance is reputed to have 58 percent there, with the Iraqi Concord Front (Sunni) getting 19 percent. Allawi brings up the rear with 14 percent, a disastrous performance given that his list seems to have done nothing anywhere else. The list will likely see its strength in parliament halved.

These results suggest a very strong position for the United Iraqi Alliance. There were [59]* seats at issue in Baghdad province, the largest single lot. If the UIA got 35-40 of them, that is a huge victory. Add those 35 to the likely 70 or so the UIA got in the solidly Shiite provinces, and you have 105. Another 8 in Babil and it is 113. A similar number in Diyala and you'd have 121. Then they may get some of the reserved seats when the reapportionment is done. They will be very close to having the 138 it needs to form a government. They can certainly pick up a few small allies and do it, perhaps without needing either the Sunnis or the Kurds (though they will need an initial coalition to gain the 2/3s needed to elect a president to appoint the prime minister).

In other words, the Shiite fundamentalist parties have won again. The secularists lost badly. Allawi and Chalabi are out of the game. The question is only whether the Shiites align with the Sunnis or the Kurds, or both. See Andrew Arato's guest editorial if you want the details.

---
*corrected from 69, a slip of the memory
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Arato Guest Editorial on the Election

Election, Government Formation and the Question of Historic Compromise in Iraq

Andrew Arato

"In the midst of the great noise of December 15, 2005 the electoral outcome is rather predictable, within a small range. Not so government formation where even small differences in electoral results could make a huge difference, and where mistakes in the drafting of the supposedly permanent constitution may present very unusual new difficulties. As a result, the chances of a tri-partite historical compromise, for which a small window was opened in the last days before the constitutional referendum of October 15, 2005 remain rather remote, though not impossible.

i.

The electoral outcome is largely, but not completely, predictable on the bases of the referendum of October 15 which exhibited remarkably disciplined voting on the part of the three main constituencies: Shi’ite Arab, Kurd, and Sunni Arab. (For the results see the website of the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq). Now of course there are more choices than a mere yes/no, and there is a very different electoral mechanism. Going into the election, the main unknown was how many Shi’ite and Sunni voters would vote for the Allawi party, The Iraqi National List (No. 731). To a lesser extent the votes of the Chalabi group, the Iraqi National Congress List (No. 569) and the Saleh al-Mutlah Sunni group, the Iraqi Front for National Dialogue List (No. 667) were also unknown, but these would have mattered paradoxically only if they were so small as to take away votes from their natural allies without earning seats on their own.

As to the electoral system, it is on the whole a passive one that will increase the seat:vote ratio of the bigger parties but only slightly. What is not obvious about this system of mainly but not exclusively provincial lists is that it remains in small part turnout dependent and this adds an element of uncertainty. The system is not turnout dependent in homogeneous provinces, but only in ethnically mixed ones in the sense that if one group turns out more heavily than an other, it will get a larger proportion of that provincial list than its demographic weight would indicate. And the national compensational list of 45 votes is explicitly turnout dependent, seeking first to compensate those who get no provincial seats, and secondly to bring provincial ratios of parties closer to the national vote of the parties, a figure that is based on the turnout.

With this said, turnout seems to have been high also in the Sunni areas. This was so not because the Sunnis are choosing ballots over bullets as widely said, but because the insurrection itself has chosen to use both ballots and bullets, as Patrick Cockburn recently remarked in a fine interview in New Left Review. Thus there was both high political encouragement for Sunni voters and little violence to deter them. In other words, turn out dependence can after all be discounted as a factor this time around. Accordingly, keeping in mind the possibility that the secular Allawi list can indeed take Sunni votes, the main Sunni coalition grouping, the Iraqi Accordance Front (List. No. 618) and the Mutlak list together could get as many as 20% of the seats (55 seats), but certainly 45-50 seats. Support for the latter would be an interesting indication of the strength of more radical Sunnis, but even if relatively high it would not effect the overall-all result . . .

With respect to the election of last January, the Kurds will go down most dramatically. Their numbers are very easy to estimate on the bases of the referendum results: the Kurdistan Coalition List (730) will get all of the seats of three provinces, plus the majority of Kirkuk (Ta'mim) and big minority of Nineveh, altogether 20% of the seats which is a 7 % drop with respect to last January. The biggest party, the Shi’ite United Iraqi Alliance (No.555) may have dropped seats, too, because of the Sunni share: 40-45% seems plausible . . . All these percentages should not add up to a hundred because smaller parties will get some seats, mainly through the national list, the provincial thresholds for a seat being too high. How many no one can predict, and the combined effect could be important, under some circumstances.

ii.

The range of this prediction is small but the possible differences are significant, because of the issue of government formation. The makers of the new constitution wished to avoid the highly consensual requirements for government formation of the TAL, and this time around decreed that the president of the republic must assign government formation to the largest parliamentary grouping (art. 75; old art.73 ) The president to be sure was to be elected by 2/3 as was the Presidential Council of the TAL, but it was provided that if this fails, in a second round there is a run-off between two candidates decided by plurality only. (art. 69; old art. 67)

The problem is, however, that for reasons having to do ultimately with the unresolved federalism problem, at the last minute the 3 person Presidential Council of the TAL was revived for just the 4 years of this parliamentary period, to be elected on a single slate by 2/3. (art. 137; old art.134) And here, the drafters forgot or deliberately omitted to include the fail-safe mechanism in case this high threshold cannot be met. What happens then nobody knows; there are no provisions for the eventuality. Thus, a great deal will depend on who, i.e. what possible coalitions have 2/3 after the seats are distributed, and conversely, whether there is a grouping with over 1/3 of the seats that wishes to block government formation by stopping the formation of a Presidency Council, since there is no other way of naming a prime minister than by that Council. The issue is all the more important, because, in contrast to the old Transitional Administrative Law, each member of the Presidential Council, rather than only the council as a whole, will have a veto over all legislation except issues of federalism. (art. 137 5th clause a)

iii.

There are then two major possible electoral outcomes, one that gives a potentially narrow coalition that excludes some major political forces the ability to elect a Presidency Council, and one in which there is no such a grouping and where there are only important veto blocks capable of stopping the formation of different types of narrow based government. No narrowly based government is possible without the participation of the Shi’ite religious list the UIA. Its most likely partners would be the Kurdistan Coalition list once again, in spite of increasing irritation between their leaders.

While there are different combinations possible that would produce a blocking minority, the most likely candidate for that role is an Allawi-Sunni combination. These options are worth examining from the double point of view of government formation, and the chances of a historical compromise among the three major groups. Constitutionally the latter would require negotiating a package of amendments in the spirit of the last minute agreement with the Iraqi Islamic Party, just before the referendum of October 15. It is of course absurd to assume that such a package could be negotiated merely by a new constitutional committee, in the face of opposition by the government that is to be formed. The government itself has to want the agreement before it is negotiated, and then passed by the National Assembly (by absolute majority, not 2/3, pace Dexter Filkins and John Burns of the NY Times!) which it will control.

Not all possible governments that may emerge are equally good candidates for this role, even given the intense American pressure supporting a better deal for the Sunni. If the current coalition of the Kurdistan List and the UIA receives over 2/3 of the seats, there are two possibilities: either they will again form government together or the Kurds will insist on a national, broad based coalition. Coalition theory tells us that the former is much more likely, because partners do not like to divide important patronage and powers among any more members than necessary. The specifically Iraqi reasons why the re-emergence of a Shi’ite Kurd coalition is likely if they have the votes converge with the ones that indicate that under such a government the likelihood of a generous deal for the Sunni or for secular forces will be small.

While the U.S. Government now pushes in one direction (for a big change the right one, one of compromise), Iran evidently pushes in the other. The economic advantages of ethnically based regionalism must seem very enticing for the two partners. The highly influential American advisers of the Kurds also seem to consistently push in the direction of Iraq’s break-up, and they are not sufficiently balanced by remarkable Kurdish leaders like Mahmoud Othman. The latter seems to realize the importance of a fair deal for the Sunni, and may already see the dangers for the Kurds of a Shi’ite mega-state in the South that would control Baghdad as well. But the traditional fears of Sunni authoritarianism acting through a centralized state may outweigh these, and it is this idea that the American advisers reinforce, as Peter Galbraiths writings repeatedly indicate. As to the matter of secularism, the Kurds will fight only if secular rights in Kurdistan could be endangered, and there is no question of this.

Matters would be different if an Allawi-Sunni combination, assuming that the two lists could act together, could block government formation unless they received significant guarantees. Then there would be a strong rationale for the building of a National Unity Government, and the Kurds may wind up loosening their links to allies who appear too intransigent. During the formation of such a government of national unity, the basic outline of a constitutional amendment package could be negotiated and the Sunni would be well situated to push provincial federalism, while the Allawi group could concentrate on secular issues. The changes pushed by either would still be limited by the potential veto of 2/3 of the voters of three provinces in a referendum required to pass the package of amendments. But some changes could very well pass, since there is new openness on the side of the Shi’ites too to renegotiate at least some features of the constitutional framework as indicated by Moqtada al Sadr’s so-called “Pact of Honor” (Gilbert Achkar in Informed Comment December 9) as well as Kanan Makiya’s recent op ed in the NY Times (“Present at the Disintegration” December 11) both of which are willing to suspend the plans for ethnically based regional “federalism.”

Much depends therefore on how the vote turns out, and whether or not a result that puts an end to the current coalition is allowed to emerge at all. Under that best case scenario pointing to the option of a Government of National Unity there would also be admittedly the possibility of total paralysis, because there would beat least two veto blocks capable of interfering with government formation by not allowing the creation of a Presidency Council except on their own terms. The problem is an artifact of bringing a part of the TAL into the new constitution, by careless and hurried drafting, without providing for a failsafe mechanism. If the Allawi-Sunni combination had the veto power in other words to force the formation of a National Unity Government supported by the Americans, so would the UIA led by SCIRI and supported by Iran to block it. At the very least this would mean that in difficult negotiations the offer of the prime minister’s position to SCIRI is unavoidable if there is to be a National Unity Government. The constitution in any case indicates that the largest party must get the first offer from whoever is in the Presidency Council. What SCIRI and the Badr Organization must not have is the Ministry of Interior for obvious reasons.

Thus, assuming even the right numbers, negotiating a historical compromise will involve passing the thresholds of choosing a consensual Presidency Council, building a broad based government, agreeing on a serious package of constitutional amendments where each side gives up something important, and passing these in a parliamentary vote (this time they must actually vote!) and finally a new referendum. Can all this happen if the occupation is not gradually (i.e within a 6 month period) dismantled as part of the process, as the moderate Sunni demand, and, correspondingly, if the insurrection is not sufficiently diminished to make a deal with the Sunni worthwhile for their earlier antagonists?

Probably not. And these two desiderata are highly interdependent. In fact the continuation of an occupation without limits may very well be a reason why the Allawi and Sunni lists that have very different relations to the Americans could not act together, the assumption here for a positive scenario, even if they had a good enough electoral result (and the electoral results were not falsified, the Sunni elected representatives were not debaathified and so on.) The American occupiers are thus in a contradictory position. It is in their interest to produce a Sunni –Allawi combination capable of forcing the creation of a National Unity Government. But by their refusal to consider the dismantling of the occupation, they may be the main reason why such a combination will not emerge. But in that case, the insurrection will not be split, and Iran will get the prize.

Andrew Arato
New York
December 16, 2005"

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Demonstrations over Fuel Price Increases in Iraq

Al-Zaman: Now that the elections are safely over, the government of Ibrahim Jaafari has tripled the price of gasoline and made substantial increases in the price of gas and heating oil, in contravention of its campaign promises. Hundreds of demonstrators came out in Kut and Karbala to protest the increases, which hit the poor especially hard in the winter. Many Iraqis consider the subsidized prices a way of sharing in the country's oil wealth, which may generate as much as $50 billion this year, and which goes directly into government coffers. The cheap fuel also does, however, allow a lot of smuggling and it is expensive for the state, and Jaafari's move seems designed to ensure that no government has to take responsibility for it. He is a lame duck prime minister and a new government will be formed in the coming months. This move may also be a sign that Jaafari will not continue as prime minister. It is the sort of policy that would have been pushed by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq's Adil Abdul Mahdi, a former Marxist who has become a free marketeer, and who is a leading candidate for prime minister.* [see below for Achcar comment on this entry]

Al-Zaman estimates that the Kurdistan Alliance will have about 50 seats in the new parliament. This is down from the 75 they had gained on Jan. 30, when the Sunni Arabs had not voted.

A Turkish source reports that, as well, 6 of the 9 seats allotted from Kirkuk province will go to the Kurdistan Alliance. This result has provoked consternation among Turkmen and Arabs, who also live in Kirkuk province in great numbers and fear that they will be joined against their will to the Kurdistan region confederacy.

Guerrillas detonated roadside bombs and conducted assassinations all over Iraq late Saturday and through Sunday, leaving two dozen dead. A GI was killed at Fallujah. One of the suicide bombers killed a woman and injured 11 persons at the Shiite shrine neighborhood of Kadhimiyah in northeast Baghdad, in a further attempt to stir sectarian passions. Many of the targets in this spree of violence were the Iraqi police and military.

There are a lot of credible complaints coming in about fraud in the recent Iraqi elections. A lot of the complaints concern the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite fundamentalist list, which had won the Jan. 30 elections in many provinces and was therefore able to erect a Chicago-style party machine. As in the old days in Chicago, the election was so democratic that even some of the dead got to vote.

"US Firm Paid $20 million for Iraq Propaganda". The headline says it all.

------

* Gilbert Achcar writes:

' Re: your comment dated Monday 19 on the increase of fuel price. The az-Zaman article that you quoted is biased, as are generally this newspaper's anti-UIA comments. I don't need to tell you that all news comments made on the Iraqi situation should be considered with a pinch -- or a handful -- of salt, as they involve all kinds of political or sectarian biases.

I think that, for the sake of fairness, one should take into account the following information given by Jaafari himself at a Press conference of the UIA on December 3:
1) the very date of the Press conference I am quoting [original excerpt attached] shows that this is not a decision proclaimed suddenly "now that the elections are safely over." It has been proclaimed long before the elections, and was intensively (and very hypocritically when coming from the likes of Allawi) used against the UIA; the only new element, as one can gather from the news agencies, is that the government had decided that the increase would not be implemented before January 2006.

2) it was imposed by the Paris Club of governmental creditors as a condition to grant the Iraqi government a 30 billion dollar loan that it needs badly. This is one more instance of the rich countries clubs, whether they are called IMF, World Bank, Paris Club, or whatever, imposing social cutbacks on a Third World government; it is certainly not the last for such governments in general, and for the Iraqi one in particular. The issue is to what extent is the Iraqi government in a position, economically and in the presence of US occupation, to stand against such pressures.

3) the Jaafari government decided to allocate the extra budgetary income resulting from the increase to a social security fund for poor families. If this were truly implemented, it would be -- by all standards of justice -- much fairer than a very low price of gasoline, which feeds smuggling to the detriment of the Iraqi public and the benefit of smugglers. The difference is the classical one between a benefit given equally to everyone, rich or poor, and a redistributive benefit incurring to the poor only: the latter is much fairer. What remains to be seen, of course, is whether this last pledge was only one more of those "electoral promises" soon forgotten after the elections -- as has already been the case for some of the UIA's promises after the January 30 elections -- or a real commitment determined by the fact that the UIA's constituency includes mainly impoverished layers of the Iraqi population. Moreover, the increase in gasoline price should have been accompanied with an intensive explanatory campaign and specific measures guaranteeing cheap or free public transportation for low-income families . . .

The incumbent Iraqi Minister of Oil, Ibrahim Bahr-ul-Ulum, gave a press conference today (12/19) in which he stated his disagreement with the way the Jaafari government implemented the increase in fuel prices, which he said was done against his opinion. According to the report of the National Iraqi News Agency, the minister called for the postponement of the increase, saying: "We should make sure that we allocate the monthly subvention to poor families and the unemployed before starting to increase the price of oil products, because otherwise citizens in general and poor and unemployed people in particular will bear the brunt." The minister's position sounds correct to me. To be accurate, one should also add that the 3-fold increase brought the price of gasoline to 150 dinars (10 US cents) per liter, which remains quite below its cost to the government.

All the best,
Gilbert

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

The Bushist Police State and Interlibrary Loan

"Alice: While you talk, he's gone!
More: And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law!
Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you - where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast - man's laws, not God's - and if you cut them down - and you're just the man to do it - d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake."
-Robert Bolt, "A Man for All Seasons"

Cole: I hate al-Qaeda. Its "values" are the diametric opposite of virtually everything I stand for. I would like to see al-Qaeda and all the little al-Qaeda wannabes planning out the killing of innocent civilians broken up, their members arrested and put away for a very long time. I consider our FBI and CIA officials and case officers working on this problem to be great heroes in a noble struggle and I only hope my own work on understanding religious extremism is of any use to them in it.

But you can't get at al-Qaeda by having an auto-da-fe for the US Constitution, and even if you could, it would be a hollow victory, because it is the values of the Bill of Rights that al-Qaeda would like to see subverted.

There is a vicious playfulness in Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri in this regard. They consider the US to have been a bulwark of heavy-handed authoritarian regimes in the Muslim world that have summarily arrested Muslim activists, tossed them in jail without proper trials (or via courts-martial), tortured them, and executed them with no due process. They knew very well that an event like September 11 would provoke the US government to close off civil liberties for Americans, because they had seen similar things happen in the Middle Eastern countries they had tried to subvert. Bin Laden said after 9/11, "We have caused them to taste a little bit of the calamities that have been befalling the Muslims for the past 80 years" or words to that effect. Part of what he was referring to was the authoritarian states, like those of Attaturk and Abdul Nasser, that were founded after the abolition of the Islamic Caliphate in 1924. (Fundamentalist Muslims often consider the caliphate, a sort of equivalent of a Sunni Muslim papacy, to be a guarantor of social justice).

Their point of view on this matter is ahistorical and bizarre. The caliphate had lapsed with the Mongol invasion in 1258 and the Ottoman sultans only seriously began claiming also to be caliphs around 1880, and most Muslims did not even accept the claim, though it was popular among Muslims in colonized British India. Nor was the late Ottoman empire exactly a fount of social justice, though it had "liberal" moments of constitutionalism and parliamentarism in 1876-78 and in 1908-1912, which the Ottoman sultan-caliph Abdul Hamid II actually opposed!

But it may well be that Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, whom Bush doesn't seem very interested in capturing, have had the last laugh. Their monstrous "theatrical" terrorism on a large scale has paralyzed the US political and judicial elite in the face of Cheney's and Bush's New American Empire, an Empire in which the US Constitution has been turned into a dead letter.

Those same FBI and DHS agents who are heroes when they take on al-Qaeda directly are in danger of becoming double agents for Bin Laden when they are tempted by all the new prerogatives offered them by King George III (isn't he our third George?) to sidestep the Bill of Rights, due process and the rule of law.

The below turns out to be based on a hoax. But it is one of those hoaxes that actually bespeaks an all too vivid reality, which is that the so-called PATRIOT act does allow US security agencies to secretly examine the library requests of patrons, and the Bush administration has vastly expanded its surveillance of Americans without a court warrant.

Cole: I have personal knowledge of DHS folks visiting intellectuals over books. I know an Arab-American professor who was doing development work in the Middle East who shipped back some Arabic books, some of them on water and sewage systems. These were intercepted at customs and he received a visit from two agents who questioned him about the books. They were, of course, innocuous, and he had been working on a USG contract!

The below is retracted.

My colleague Andras Riedlmayer writes:

"It's not just the NSA engaging in wholesale monitoring of phonecalls. Now we find out that Bush's Department of Homeland Security also monitors interlibrary loan requests from college libraries, and checks them against a "watch list" of supposedly dangerous books. And if there's a match, they take action -- as in the case of a student at U. of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, taking a class on fascism and totalitarianism, who'd requested a book for a research paper.

The Homeland Security found the title sufficiently worrisome to send two agents to pay a visit to the student at his parents' home and question him. They did not let him have the book.

The two professors involved in this case are Brian Glyn Williams, associate professor of Islamic history at UMass Dartmouth, and his colleague Robert Pontbriand, who teaches modern European history.

It makes the 1950s look like halcyon days. Consider -- an American citizen who has committed no crime is flagged for (a.) having travelled abroad, and (b.) for having checked out a book on the Department of Homeland Security's "watch list" of forbidden or dangerous titles, as revealed by the government's secret monitoring of library circulation transactions. All this without probable cause, a search warrant or any semblance of due process.

Now I'll tell you something (even though I'm sure the Homeland Security aparatchiks are probably reading your e-mails and mine, stupid un-American bastards that they are): I not only own a copy of Mao's Little Red Book, I happen to own one that's in Arabic. And I also own several copies of the Qur'an (the same book read by Osama and a billion other "potential terrorists"). And I've traveled abroad, too (Egypt, Macedonia, Kosovo, Bosnia, The Hague, to name just some of the more suspicious places...).

And why would our government care to know about any of this? Because they hate our freedoms!

Yrs.,
feeling more than a bit alarmed about what this country is turning into

------

The Standard Times (New Bedford, MA)
December 17, 2005

Agents' visit chills UMass Dartmouth senior
By AARON NICODEMUS, Standard-Times staff writer

NEW BEDFORD -- A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung's tome on Communism called "The Little Red Book."

Two history professors at UMass Dartmouth, Brian Glyn Williams and Robert Pontbriand, said the student told them he requested the book through the UMass Dartmouth library's interlibrary loan program.

The student, who was completing a research paper on Communism for Professor Pontbriand's class on fascism and totalitarianism, filled out a form for the request, leaving his name, address, phone number and Social Security number. He was later visited at his parents' home in New Bedford by two agents of the Department of Homeland Security, the professors said.

The professors said the student was told by the agents that the book is on a "watch list," and that his background, which included significant time abroad, triggered them to investigate the student further.

"I tell my students to go to the direct source, and so he asked for the official Peking version of the book," Professor Pontbriand said.

"Apparently, the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring inter-library loans, because that's what triggered the visit, as I understand it."

Although The Standard-Times knows the name of the student, he is not coming forward because he fears repercussions should his name become public. He has not spoken to The Standard-Times.

The professors had been asked to comment on a report that President Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to spy on as many as 500 people at any given time since 2002 in this country.

The eavesdropping was apparently done without warrants . . .

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

Parties Jockey for Power in Wake of Elections;
Dulaimi willing to Ally with Shiites

Since Bush is going to say Sunday that the Sunni Arab participation in the elections suggests a near end of major guerrilla violence, let me just repeat what I said Thursday: the history of guerrilla insurgencies is replete with groups that simulaneously fought on both the political and paramilitary fronts. Listen to how angry the Sunni politicians are, as they speak out in the wake of the elections, both at Bush and at the Shiites, and you get a sense of how detached the Bush administration remains from reality.

A major Sunni leader whose list (the National Dialogue Council) seems to be doing well, Salih Mutlak, just came on Arabic satellite television and gave a strident anti-American speech. He addressed Bush, warning him not to believe that a fair election had just occurred in Iraq, and denounced the continued US military occupation of his country. He also lashed out at Shiite politicians. Mutlak is a secular Arab nationalist who still praises the Baath Party. Mutlak's emergence as a likely power broker in the Iraqi parliament is good news for Bush?

By the way, the assertion Bush keeps making that the political developments in Iraq will influence the rest of the Middle East is ridiculous to anyone who actually talks to anyone from the region. Arabs mostly believe that Iraq is laboring under an oppressive foreign military occupation. You can't bring up Iraq without them saying, "The Americans are doing such horrible things there." They think of Abu Ghraib and Fallujah, and of the Ministry of Interior's secret torture cells, not of parliamentary debates. Few think the Iraqi elections are aboveboard, and few are very interested in them. In Beirut, the newspapers have been putting a short article on the elections below the fold every day since Wednesday, and that is about it. It isn't even really positioned as important news; the New York Times puts it higher on the page than most Arab newspapers.

An American living in Egypt who was teaching out in the provinces in a major city told me about recently witnessing a student demonstration that included a skit. Thousands of students had come out, and some grade schoolers were there in the front row. On the steps of an academic hall, Islamist students enacted a play about an Iraqi suicide bomber blowing up US troops, to enormous glee and applause. That's what most Arabs think about Iraq, on the outside. They don't want to emulate an American-occupied country. Bush's naive conviction that his project is exemplary reminds me of the way the Communists in Russia initially thought that all the factory workers in the West would want immediately to imitate their worker's paradise. Of course, few wanted to give up their unions and consumer lifestyle so as to become the wards of a one-party state. Likewise, American Imperial "democracy" strikes most Arabs as paternalistic and hypocritical, masking a police state of a sort they are all too familiar with.

The guerrilla war started back up in Iraq on Saturday and Sunday, with a number of bombings and shootings. On Saturday, 13 Iraqis were killed in separate guerrilla attacks. They included an official of the Badr Corps, the paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the leading party in the outgoing parliament.

Al-Hayat [Ar.] : The London-based Saudi daily says that most signs suggest that the bloc of young Shiite nationalist Muqtada al-Sadr will form a major element in the new Iraqi parliament, and that other parties will seek an alliance with it. Among the first to broach such an alliance is outgoing prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari, who spoke in Najaf on Saturday.

As for the Sunni Arabs, they celebrated their return as a power in political life, forming processions in various cities. The leader of the Concord Front thanked the armed resistance for refraining from attacks on Sunnis who came out to vote.

[AP says that Adnan Dulaimi, leader of an important Sunni bloc, expressed a willingness to ally either with the Kurds and the Allawi list, or with the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance. He is quoted as saying, "For the sake of Iraq, there is nothing impossible. We have to forget the past and we extend our hands to everybody. . ." Dulaimi is a Sunni fundamentalist, and obviously differs with his secular colleague, Salih Mutlak.

[A parliament jointly dominated by Muqtada Al-Sadr's people and Sunnis like Dulaimi would certainly demand an early departure of US troops. To Mickey Kaus, who asked why I thought parliament might make such a demand even though it is clear that the parliament could not keep order in the country if the US troops suddenly left, I would just reply: have you been listening to what the Sunni parties and the Sadrists have been saying for the past 2 1/2 years? Asking why politicians might do something that causes chaos is sort of naive, isn't it? Surely George W. Bush wouldn't have risked destabilizing Iraq and the Middle East with a rushed invasion based on faulty intelligence? He thinks Muqtada al-Sadr and Salih Mutlak are better than Bush?]

Al-Hayat: Observers said that the expectation is that the Kurdistan Alliance will retain the presidency and that the Sunni Arabs will be given the post of speaker of the house, but that if they want to switch places, the negotiations would be up to them.

One close observer, al-Rubaie, said that the initial returns suggested that the Shiite fundamentalist coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, would gain 133 seats. If the small Shiite lists join it, and if negotiations with the Kurdistan Islamic Union succeed, it would be able to form a government. The KIU is said to have gained 18 seats. He said that the Sadr bloc would play an important role in taking decisions within the Alliance, since its candidates within the United Iraqi Alliance gained more seats than any other coalition partner. It is said that the candidates of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq did poorly.

(Since the elections were held on a province basis, and the United Iraq Alliance ran a list in each province, on which the Sadrists and SCIRI were apportioned equal numbers of candidates, there are only two ways I can understand such an outcome--if it is being accurately reported. One is that the Sadrists are a social movement, not a party. If a lot of Sadrist-leaning candidates ran on other lists than the UIA, and did well, they would add to the 30 seats apportioned within the UIA to Muqtada's people. The other possibility is that the UIA wanted the Sadrists so badly that they front-loaded Muqtada's people, putting them at the top of the list. In this case they would have been seated before the SCIRI candidates, and in provinces where the UIA did not gain all the seats, SCIRI would have been disadvantaged. I'm just speculating; it isn't clear what is going on here--and it could just be spin by Muqtada's people.)

Ed Wong of the NYT reports that the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq is confident enough of its own position in the new parliament to push for Adel Abdul Mahdi as prime minister. The outgoing prime minister, Ibrahim Jaafari, is from the Dawa Party, a coalition partner of SCIRI in the UIA. Abdul Mahdi is known to be a free marketeer who is close to the Americans, and is the most acceptable figure in SCIRI to Washington.

Jaafari held a joint press conference on Saturday with Muqtada after he met with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. He seemed to assume that the UIA had won again. Jaafari said, "I am addressing our people in Mosul and Ramadi and Tikrit. I say to them that your people in Najaf, Karbala and Hillah have long waited to work with you under the dome of parliament to build a new Iraq." He continued before a large rally that had come out to greet him, "I address my words to our brethren, the clergy in Mosul and Anbar and Tikrit, and I say to them that this is the time to employ the pulpit to spread the ideas of unity and liberty, and to affirm our principles, with which we have been inspired by the revelation of the Quran and the practice [Sunnah] of the Prophet." He also called on "the Baathists" "to return to the right path in participating with their brethren in building Iraq," saying, "the Iraqi people are looking at them with the eyes of compassion."

The LA Times reports that every indication is that the Allawi list has done very poorly. Iyad Allawi has left Iraq in disappointment, and his supporters are crying election fraud. Allawi is an ex-Baathist who cooperated with the CIA in organizing Baath officers who broke with Saddam in the 1990s for a coup against the dictator. His blunt secularism, authoritarian style, rumors of bloodthirstiness, and CIA associations make him unpopular in most of Iraq, but the Bush administration and neoconservative think tanks kept touting him as a possible prime minister as a result of these elections! Western reporters talking mainly to the urban middle class also got a false sense that his list might be gaining in popularity.

Al-Hayat [Ar.] also reports on the participation and non-participation of women in the Iraqi elections. Shiite women came out in large numbers in the middle and south of the country when the polls first opened. A majority of women in Kurdistan came out to vote, coming with whole families, spouses and children to the polling stations.

But in Sunni Arab Anbar and Tikrit, women tended to stay home, and if they voted it was by sending their proxy with their husbands or fathers so that they could vote for them.

In the Shiite south, early tabulations suggest that the participation of eligible women voters was between 71 and 84 percent in Karbala, Najaf, Nasiriyah, Kut, Basra, and the Shiite districts of Baghdad. Fewer women came out in heavily tribal and rural Maysan and Samawa provinces. Most women came to the polls early, though some waited until they had finished their housework and cooked the family meal.

Iraqi women interviewed stressed the important role that their spouses and fathers played in pushing them to participate in the elections, and in encouraging them to vote for a particular party list. The majority of women voted for religious parties, but a few broke ranks and voted for secular ones.

Al-Hayat interviewed Um Ghufran, an employee in the municipal government of the Shiite shrine city of Karbala, who said that she had voted for a secular party because she liked its platform, as well as because she wanted to get away from the influence of religion, which had led many other women to vote for parties that did not stand for things they believe in.

Kurdish women have more freedoms than Arab Iraqi women, but they nevertheless tended to vote the same way their men did.

There were a number of women on the ballot in the Sunni Arab provinces of Salahuddin and Anbar, but women were not visible at the polling stations in either place-- though they are 54 percent of the electorate in both. In both places, the patriarch tended to go and vote on behalf of the entire family. Women did not go out both because of poor security and because of local traditions of female seclusion.

Al-Hayat talked to Samiyah Khudair, a candidate in a Sunni province, who said "The absence of the female element from the polling stations is a sick phenomenon that has afflicted Iraqi society after the Occupation, as a result of the collapse of confidence among citizens of both sexes in the security situation, which can deteriorate badly at any moment despite the most stringent measures."
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bush Spying on Americans

Wire tapping the telephones of American citizens without a court order is illegal.

They impeached Clinton for a minor dalliance in which he didn't even get to third base. But taking the Constitution and pushing it through the shredder, why that is just fine and dandy.

He really does believe that it is only a piece of paper, and he is the Prince of the Realm who may do as he pleases, isn't he?

The answer to Ben Franklin's comment about what sort of government the constitution enshrined--"A republic, if you can keep it"-- has been answered. We've lost it, folks. We've got George III in the White House. And, it is now often forgotten, that George was looney as the day is long, too.

' Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. '

That Bush was doing this wasn't even known. How much more is not known?

It was a good run, this United States of America with its Constitution and its Bill of Rights. How sad that a gang of unscrupulous criminals has been allowed to subvert its basic values altogether.

Is there even a single one of the guarantees in the Bill of Rights that Bush and his henchmen have not by now abrogated by royal fiat?

And why? Because of a single attack by a few hijackers from a small terrorist organization? The thousands lost in the Revolutionary War did not deter the Founding Fathers from enshrining these rights in the Constitution! The fledgling American Republic was far more unstable and facing far more dangers when this document was passed into law than the unchallengeable hyperpower that now bestrides the globe as a behemoth.

Have we lost our minds?
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Religious Shiite Coalition Sweeping South;
Allawi's Showing Weak


[If you're in the giving mood this season, The History News Network" is a worthy cause.]

Al-Zaman [Ar.]/ AFP: 10-11 million of Iraq's 15 million potential voters came out on Thursday, according to al-Zaman. Of Iraqis abroad, 320,000 voted (a relatively small proportion of those eligible).

The Kurdistan Islamic Union is said to have gotten 140,000 votes in three Kurdish cities. This party's workers had been being physically attacked in Dohuk before the elections by activists from Massoud Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party, but they seem likely to get some seats. Presumably Kurdish Islamists will tend to vote with the Sunni Arab religious coalition, and both of them may find some common ground with the fundamentalist Shiite United Iraqi Alliance.

In Mosul (Ninevah Province), the National Dialogue Front of Salih al-Mutlak and the Islamic Iraqi Accord are leading, with the Kurdistan Alliance and the secular National Iraqiyah list of Iyad Allawi trailing in most districts reporting early returns.

AFP says that in Najaf, its sources say 80 percent of the vote went to the United Iraqi Alliance (religious Shiite coalition), and that the turnout was 85 percent. Some early returns suggest some seats going to tribal leaders in the Middle Euphrates. It doesn't much matter, since they will certainly vote with the UIA on anything important-- they are close to Grand Ayatollah Sistani. For all practical purposes, the UIA will be able to depend on all 8 parliamentarians elected from Najaf.

The same source says that early returns showed the UIA getting 70 percent of the votes in the mixed Babil province. (If this result holds, it is a sign that the UIA may do very well indeed, since it means that the Sunni vote in the mixed provinces was disproportionately small. If the UIA takes most seats in Babil, Diyala and Baghdad, all mixed, then it will certainly dominate parliament). In Babil, Allawi's National Iraqiyah list was getting 17 percent and the Sunni Iraqi Concord Front was getting 10 percent. There are 11 seats at stake in Babil, and the apportionment is roughly proportional, so that would give the UIA 8, Allawi 2 and the Sunnis 1.

In Karbala the UIA was getting 85 percent of the votes in early returns. Bringing up the rear were the Allawi list and the Mithal Alusi's Iraqi Nation Party. The Kifa'ah Party of Ali Dabbagh came in fourth. The UIA will get at least 5 of the 6 seats in Karbala, and could get all 6 if the proportions break right for it.

The UIA was polling at 85 percent in Qadisiyah and 86 percent in Maysan. In other words, it was making a sweep of these 5 overwhelmingly Shiite provinces, as I expected.

These leaked results were not confirmed by the High Electoral Commission, which maintained that reliable results could not be reported for 2 weeks.

One thing seems pretty clear at this point: Iyad Allawi is highly unlikely to be prime minister. His people were putting around rumors that a lot of Sunnis would vote for him, or that the Shiites of the south had turned against the fundamentalist Shiite UIA. The early returns aren't showing either allegation to have been true. As for Ahmad Chalabi, his Iraqi National Accord seems to have sunk without a trace as far as early leaked returns are showing. These "secular" candidates with close ties to the US CIA and Pentagon just are not very popular in Iraq, except among a thin sliver of the urban middle classes to whom US officials and journalists are most likely to talk.

Eric Black reports on the view of the elections among US-based political scientists and other academics. The AEI estimate he reports, that Allawi's list will get 20% and Chalabi's 5% seems to me highly unlikely.

Al-Hayat [AR.]: says that the big party coalitions are already celebrating their victory, even as the guerrilla leaders announced an end to their 3-day truce. And, Bulgarian troops are leaving Iraq, to be followed by the Ukrainians.

Al-Hayat says that the "secular" guerrillas say that they had declared a 3-day truce so that Sunni Arabs could put representatives in parliament, but that they would now return to attacking US and coalition troops. It is suggestive that the two Sunni politicians doing best in this round are Adnan Dulaimi and Salih Mutlak, who may well be the Gerry Adams of Iraq.

It quotes Abu Maysar (age 52), a former member of the Baath Party and a militia leader in Fallujah as saying, "We will continue our armed struggle as long as the Occupation and the agents it brought with it continue in power." The secular guerrillas adopted a deliberate policy of encouraging a Sunni vote, and they pledged to protect the voters from reprisals by the Muslim extremists who opposed the electoral process. Abu Maysar maintained that the current Iraqi government is determined to wipe out the former Baath Party members. He said that if they just tried to play parliamentary politics, they would be like lambs to slaughter.

A local leader in the Army of Muhammad (made up of former Baath intelligence operatives) said, "This does not mean we are giving up our jihad. We consider that we will be, in the coming days, committing violence against the Americans and their supporters in the Iraqi army."

A Baath communique quoted by al-Hayat depicted the elections as an American plot to divide Iraq along religious and ethnic lines, and pledged to fight until Iraq was liberated.

Al-Hayat says that the UIA is reputed to have swept Diwaniyah, Amara, Nasiriyah and Samawa, along with the provinces mentioned by al-Zaman, with a typical result of 70 to 90 percent. Even Allawi's list admitted they had lost badly in Najaf, Karbala and Nasiriyah. Al-Hayat quotes a member of Allawi's list trying to maintain that it did well in places like Mosul and Kut. But early returns don't support this allegation for Mosul, and it would be bizarre if the UIA did not sweep heavily Shiite Kut.

Al-Hayat also says that the Iraqi Accord of Adnan Dulaimi and the National Iraqi Dialogue of Salih al-Mutlak are leading in Mosul. Dulaimi's Iraqi Accord is also leading in early returns in Anbar and Tikrit.

It is alleged that Allawi's list did very well in the center of Baghdad (around the Green Zone where government offices and the US embassy are located). Yawn.

AP reports that analysts familiar with the broad outlines of the voting in Iraq now believe that the Shiite religious coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, will be the biggest party in parliament, but that it may need to find a coalition partner to form a government with 51%. By the terms of the new constitution, if the UIA has 51%, the president elected by parliament by a 2/3s vote must ask it to form a government. Likewise, if the UIA makes a coalition with a smaller party or set of parties, and reaches 51%, it must be asked to form the government.

Turkmen in Kirkuk are raising questions about the fairness of the voting in that contested city, maintaining that thousands of "suspicious" Kurdish votes were allowed (presumably they are unconvinced that those Kurds were bona fide residents; Kirkuk has been flooded by Kurds claiming to have lost property there in the time of Saddam, and it may be that no all such claims are justified).

David Wallace-Wells rounds up bloggers' reactions to the Iraq elections.

Iraqi activist Nermeen Mufti takes a dim view of the probity of the elections.

Igancio Ramonet looks at the torture issue in US politics.

Harold Bloom considers that "democracy" as a word has been ruined by the Bush administration.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

The One that Got Away

CNN is reporting that Iraqi authorities had arrested Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist, in Ramadi, but mistakenly released him. Nic Roberts reported that Zarqawi had put on weight, grown a beard, removed a tattoo, and was using a Kurdish passport, making him unrecognizable to Iraqi security forces.

What I take away from this report is that if the Iraqis cannot recognize a Jordanian master terrorist, the American military has zero chance of fighting the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement in Iraq, because most of them don't even know enough Arabic to distinguish an Iraqi from a Jordanian accent. And if all it takes is putting on weight and growing a beard to disguise oneself, then we're in deep trouble.

Zarqawi dropped out of high school and went off to Afghanistan in 1989. He is not educated, though he has learned terror tactics and maybe at one point got some training in chemicals. I can't see that he is irreplaceable if he were killed or captured. Al-Tawhid wa al-Jihad, his organization, is a social movement among Jordanian and Iraqi Salafi (revivalist) Sunnis, and can recruit other leaders. Zarqawi is a shadowy figure, and some maintain that he was killed in Afghanistan and is no more than a symbol, used to refer collectively to the Salafi Jihadi leadership. Many bombings and other operations attributed to Zarqawi cannot possibly have been his work, since his organization is small, and it seems likely that when the Neo-Baath does something particularly heinous, they attribute it to him on the internet.

Zarqawi had organized earlier in Jordan and Germany. Apparently his group has now spread to France, where authorities have found explosives and broken up a ring affiliated with Zarqawi.

This incident is further evidence that the Iraq War of the Bush administration is having a destabilizing effect in the Greater Mediterranean, with Iraq-related violence spreading to Jordan and Europe.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

What the Sunni Arab Vote Really Means


According to wire services, Sunnis in Fallujah came out to vote:

' not only get rid of the Americans but to also get rid of the Shiite-dominated government.

"It's an extremist government [and] we would like an end to the occupation," said Ahmed Majid, 31. "Really the only true solution is through politics. But there is the occupation and the only way that will end is with weapons."

Even in insurgent bastions such as Ramadi and Haqlaniyah, Sunnis were turning out in large numbers.

"I came here and voted in order to prove that Sunnis are not a minority in this country," said lawyer Yahya Abdul-Jalil in Ramadi. "We lost a lot during the last elections, but this time we will take our normal and key role in leading this country." '

It is not actually a positive sign for the Americans that Sunni Arabs came out to vote in order to get rid of them, to see if they couldn't get rid of the current pro-American government, to underline that the armed struggle will continue, and to prove that Sunni Arabs (20% of so of the population) are a majority of the country! The American faith that if people go to the polls it means they won't also be blowing things up is badly misplaced.

Consider this news item from Northern Ireland in 1982:

' Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Provisional IRA, has won its first seats in the elections to the new Ulster Assembly.

Gerry Adams, vice president of Sinn Fein, took the Belfast West seat. It is the first time his party has stood for election since the Troubles began.

Mr Adams, 34, made clear that being elected would not stop the IRA's campaign of violence.

"The IRA have said that while the British army is in Ireland they will be there fighting" he said. '

Now let us consider this item from three years later, 1985:

' Thirteen people have been arrested in connection with a suspected IRA mainland bombing campaign uncovered by police two days ago.

The men - who are being held under the Prevention of Terrorism Act - include a 33-year-old from Belfast, suspected of carrying out the attack on the Conservative Cabinet in the Brighton Grand Hotel last year.

It is feared the IRA may have planted devices in a dozen seaside resorts around the UK - timed to go off at the height of the summer season - and a massive police hunt has been launched. '

Could the presence of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the militant Irish Republican Army, in the North Ireland assembly have had an effect on the peace negotiations in the mid-1990s? Sure. But my point is that these campaigns, the political and the bombing, can go on simultaneously for over a decade.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

High Turnout Expected as Iraqis go to Polls

The guerrillas got off some mortars as voting began Thursday in Iraq, one striking the Green Zone in downtown Baghdad where the government offices are. A mortar was also fired in Mosul at a polling station but appears to have missed. A huge bomb was found and disarmed in Fallujah. On the Jan. 30 elections there were numerous attacks that left dozens wounded or dead, but they did not deter a big turnout.

From all accounts,the voter turnout is likely to be good, given that more Sunni Arabs are going to the polls this time than last. Still, a lot of polling stations could not open in Anbar Province, a severe problem for the legitimacy of the voting outcome. (Aboveboard elections of a sort that can be internationally certified require that security permit people throughout the country to vote if they want to.)

The LA Times probably reflects the thinking of a lot of Americans in hoping that these elections are a milestone on the way to withdrawing US troops from Iraq. I cannot imagine why anyone thinks that. The Iraqi "government" is a failed state. Virtually no order it gives has any likelihood of being implemented. It has no army to speak of and cannot control the country. Its parliamentarians are attacked and sometimes killed with impunity. Its oil pipelines are routinely bombed, depriving it of desperately needed income. It faces a powerful guerrilla movement that is wholly uninterested in the results of elections and just wants to overthrow the new order. Elections are unlikely to change any of this.

The only way in which these elections may lead to a US withdrawal is that they will ensconce parliamentarians who want the US out on a short timetable. Virtually all the Sunnis who come in will push for that result (which is why the US Right is silly to be all agog about Fallujans voting), and so with the members of the Sadr Movement, now a key component of the Shiite religious United Iraqi Alliance. That is, these elections lead to a US withdrawal on terms unfavorable to the Bush administration. Nor is there much hope that a parliament that kicked the US out could turn around and restore order in the country.

William Rivers Pitt is good on the contradictory desires in the Iraqi public with regard to the future, as revealed by the recent ABC/Time poll.

ABC News is shocked, shocked to discover that the Pentagon is doing propaganda in Iraq via the Lincoln Group.

The Bush administration has finally turned reconstruction projects in Iraq over to the State Department, taking them from the Department of Defense. Defense had had little experience in this area, and much of the money given it for this purpose has been wasted or, frankly, embezzled. Putting State in charge was something I called for in my April, 2004, testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. This MSNBC article quotes Republican strategist Vin Weber as saying that the change "a logical move and is part of a long term decision about eventually withdrawing from Iraq." I see. So when Bush was not planning to withdraw, he gave reconstruction to the Pentagon. It really was a reassertion of colonialism, wasn't it?

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that Jalal Talabani says he won't accept a second term as president if the office remains, as it is now, largely ceremonial.

Iyad Allawi, the ex-Baathist secularist, warned the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance (which controls 11 of Iraq's 18 provincial governments) against vote tampering.

Massoud Barzani, the Kurdish leader, admits that the Kurds have all along been very uncomfortable with their parliamentary alliance with the Shiite UIA.

Many observers are hoping that in the new parliament, a coalition of Kurds, Sunni Arabs, and ex-Baathist secularists can outmaneuver the religious Shiites and gain 51% of the seats.

I keep pointing out that it is also possible for the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance to align with the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party on many issues, producing a pan-Islamist coalition. We'll see.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Helman on Rice and the New Truman Doctrine

Ambassador Gerald B. Helman writes:

" In an op-ed piece published in the December 11 Washington Post, Secretary of State Rice provides an important statement of the Administration's global strategic posture. She underscores its importance by comparing the international environment the Administration confronted when it took office to that faced by Truman/Acheson following World War 2 and the rise of the Soviet Union. In short, as Acheson felt that he was "present at the creation" of a new international system, Rice observes that "centuries of international practice and precedent have been overturned in the past 15 years" and thus she, as well, is at the point of a fundamental genesis. In effect, the Administration's policies are intended to change the terms by which states conduct their relations.

While Rice does not describe the international system Truman/Marshall/Acheson/Dulles put in place, it is important to state their elements in order to better understaand the Administration's. America's post-World War 2 leadership faced a world that had been through almost seven years of massive warfare (some would take the starting date back to 1914) on a global scale, with civilian and military death, destruction and atrocity beyond imagination. The enemies of the victorious allies lay in ruins and occupied, Germany by four powers, Japan by the United States alone. Within months of the end of the war, the ambitions of the Soviet Union became increasingly manifest, first in political and conventional military terms, but soon in its strategic nuclear posture. The USSR rapidly developed into a power that, for the first time in history, had the capability to obliterate the US. Geographically, the area of contention was Europe but in a few short years it became global.

What the Truman generation created was an international system that combined economic development (the Marshall Plan), institution building (the United Nations, NATO) and the rules of conduct embodied in their charters, and the strategic posture of containment and deterrence backed by the real military forces of the US and its allies, and the US nuclear deterrent.

The Bush/Rice new world is one in which conflict among major powers is now unthinkable, which in turn allows the building of a lasting global stability that will amount to a balance of power "that favors freedom." Further, the 350 year-old international state system based on the sovereignty of individual actors no longer holds. There are some states, those weak and failing, that can no longer contain the threats emerging from their territories. These, rather than strong and competitive states, are the greatest threats to our security. Thus, the fundamental character of regimes matters more than the international distribution of power. Creating democracies, particularly in the Middle East (the source of radical Islamic terrorism), is not idealism, but the only realistic response to present challenges--"stability without democracy will prove to be false stability."

While not mentioned by Secretary Rice, it should be fair to conclude that to her new international system would be added at least two elements of the "Bush Doctrine" published in 2002, that the US retained the right to preemptive war (the basis for the invasion of Iraq) and would not allow any other power(s) to challenge the US in military strength.

The Bush Rice international system thus would consist of one in which the U.S. is accepted by all others as being the perminent dominent military actor. Whether for this or additional reasons, conflict among major states would be unlikely; these states (which would include Russia and China) would be increasingly available, under US leadership, to establish durable global stability that would amount to a balance of power favoring freedom. Those states that are weak or failing, principally in the Middle East, would forfeit the traditional protections of sovereignty so that outside powers can guide them to democracy. By thus abolishing their "freedom deficit," the swamps of terrorism would be drained and the world's security enhance. Within this world, the US would be able to operate largely unconstrained, employing shifting, ad hoc coalitions, monitoring and correcting as necessary national political systems and as a result preserve US security.

The Bush/Rice international system certainly is subject to criticism:

--It is unrealistic to consider Russia and China as willing actors today in establishing a balance of power "favoring freedom."

--It is even less credible that China and Russia (and others) will be willing to concede to the US a permanent role as military and political hegemon. To the extent that the US considers itself relieved of institutional and treaty constraints, others will insist on the same freedoms. In such circumstances, bloody conflict could be as likely as cooperation.

--Weak and failed states exist, largely in Africa and recently in Afghanistan. They typically are the byproducts of failed colonialism. They do represent a danger to others because they cannot exercise the responsibilities of a sovereign to control its own territory and meet its international obligations. They are poor, sources of disease and crime and too often generate massive refugee flows. Their problems can be addressed politically, socially and economically by the an international community that organizes itself to do so through existing institutions. But Iraq was not a failed state and neither are most of the others in the Middle East. Iraq was bad and so is Iran and Syria. It is unlikely that the US will get early support for the invasion of the latter two.

--It also is seriously open to question whether democracy, in the Middle East or elsewhere, is best advanced by other states asserting the right to do so because of the diminished sovereignty of the beneficiary. The existing NGO's that historically have promoted democracy, such as the German political foundations and those groups associated with the US National Endowment for Democracy, have over the past decades established admirable records of achievment, initially in Eastern Europe (pre-liberation) and elsewhere around the world. It's a slow process and unlikely to be easily advanced through state intervention.

--Thus while more representative institutions may in time deny terrorism of a breeding ground, its growth will be slow. In the meantime, much more will be needed in terms of police work, public information, covert action, acquisition of intelligence and military action. This will require strong, continuing international cooperation. Insisting on the Bush/Rice international order as the framework could well get in the way.

And, finally, Secretary Rice confides that she has hung Dean Acheson's portrait in her office, the same office that he occupied as Secretary of State. Wrong. Acheson's office (much more impressive than Rice's) was in what is now called "Old State." "New State," now called the Truman Building, was not opened until about 1960. Acheson's office was also occupied by George Marshall and John Foster Dulles. All would certainly have been astonished at this Administration's policies and pretensions. I can only imagine the language Acheson would have used.

That aside, the Bush/Rice world vision seems intended seriously. They owe the Congress, public and America's allies a clearer exposition of it so that it might be properly and vigorously debated. "


Helman "was United States Ambassador to the European Office of the United Nations from 1979 through 1981."

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Thousands of Shiites Demonstrate against Aljazeera;


Four US troops were killed and a Sunni politician (Mizhar Dulaimi of Ramadi) was assassinated on Tuesday in the run-up to the Iraqi elections (scheduled for Dec. 15). Two days ago, another Sunni parliamentary candidate had been killed in Mosul. On Monday, Jalal al-Din al-Saghir, a Shiite candidate from the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, was subjected to a failed assassination attempt in Taifiyah on his return from campaigning.

On Wednesday, guerrillas managed to launch two attacks in Mosul and one in Baiji, despite the lockdown of the country by the US military.

Thousands of Shiite demonstrated in Najaf, Baghdad and other cities against comments made on Aljazeera satellite television by a guest, saying the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani (the spiritual leader of the Shiites) should stay out of politics. Similar statements have been made in the past by former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi. In the southern Shiite city of Nasiriyah, a mob headed toward Allawi's campaign offices, but they were turned back by the police. [Later reports say that the mob did indeed set fire to Allawi's offices in Nasiriyyah.]

Al-Zaman: Sistani's office issued another communique making it obligatory on believers to vote, but declining to back any particular list. A similar statement was issued the by Shiite nationalist young cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, which underscored his neutrality on the elections. The United Iraqi Alliance nevertheless widely uses Sistani's picture in its campaigning, as well as photos of Muqtada's father, Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr (d. 1999).

US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad announced that 120 largely Sunni Arab prisoners had been found in Ministry of Interior jails, who had been tortured.

Shiite candidate Adel Abdul Mahdi warned against the reemergence of the Baath party. He was referring to the Iraqiya list of former transitional prime minister, Iyad Allawi, an ex-Baathist who is attempting to appeal to the secular, Arab-nationalist remnants of the Baath Party.

Al-Hayat [Arabic] reports that 1,000 Sunni clerics issued a joint ruling calling on Sunni Arabs in Iraq to vote in Thursday's elections. Sunni Arabs mostly did not vote in the Jan. 30 elections, and feel marginalized in the new Iraq. Also, a neo-Baathist guerrilla group, the Army of Islam, issued instructions to its fighters not to target polling stations, so as to avoid indiscriminate attacks on civlians.

Al-Hayat also reports on the building grip of the Shiite militias on the southern port city of Basra. Its reporter says that militiamen who have infiltrated the police used unmarked police cars to kidnap and kill a Sunni cleric a few weeks ago. Militiamen impose veiling on women (even Christian women!) and forbid alcohol sales,

Anthony Cordesman argues that the US must learn to fight limited conflcicts instead of going for total victory. In insurgencies, victory cannot come from US firepower alone, but must involve political arrangements with local and international allies.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Street Battles, Bombings in Baghdad;
Less Wealthy Candidates Cannot Campaign

Baghdad was wracked with violence on Monday, witnessing a major carbombing at a police station, another carbombing in a southwest suburb, the discovery of four bodies of kidnapping victims, and two running street battles in Amiriyah and Ghazaliyah districts--with at least 43 persons wounded or killed in the fighting. Guerrillas killed another US GI, in Baghdad, as well, and another in Ramadi.

According to a recent poll, 58% of Americans want President Bush to set a timetable for bringing home US troops.

Paul Starobin of the National Journal explores at length and with analytical rigor the question of civil war in Iraq.

The CSM points out that since the security situation is so bad in Iraq, most campaigning is being done via television. In turn, that guarantees that only the rich parties have the opportunity to campaign. As with the Jan. 30 elections, the Dec. 15 elections are not being held in accordance with international standards of fairness, and cannot be. Proper elections would require that security be provided to voters and candidates. But there is no security. Several candidates have already been assassinated or attacked, and most of the 7000 or so cannot come out in public or they would be killed, too. In many parts of the center-north, voters will have no guarantee of coming home alive. The only way the vote will happen at all is that the US military has forbidden all vehicular traffic, so everyone has to walk for the next few days. This tactic prevents carbombings from disrupting the elections, but it is a desperate measure and not a sign of an election that could be certified as free and fair.

Radical Muslim groups have denounced the elections as "satanic". They pledge to continue to fight their jihad against the Western forces in the country. (It is too bad that mostly these groups are not in fact fighting like men, but instead are blowing up little children at ice cream shops.)

Bush's strategy of Iraqizing the military tasks in that country is being undercut by religious and ethnic militias, according to the Bloomberg news service's interviews with knowledgeable observers like Pat Lang.

I am going to be traveling again for the next week or so. Postings will get made, but perhaps at different times than usual, and there will be delays in posting comments.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

ABC/Time Poll on Iraq

The full tabulation of the new ABC News/Time, et al., poll on Iraq is in pdf format on the web. Although a lot of Iraqis are optimistic about the future, and a lot say things aren't going so badly for them personally, their view of where the country is at presently is quite dark. In fact, these attitudes are almost the opposite of the impression we are given of Iraqi attitudes in most of the US mainstream press.

Let's look at some key findings:

Things are going badly in Iraq today: 52% (30% say "very badly").

There has been no improvement since Saddam fell or things are worse: 60%

It was wrong for the US to invade Iraq: 50%

(Only 19% say it was "absolutely right" for the US to invade)

Oppose presence of Coalition troops in Iraq: 65%

Iraq needs a government made up mainly of religious leaders: 48%

Iraq needs a government made up mainly of military leaders: 49%

Iraq needs a strong single leader: 91%

Iraq needs an Iraqi democracy: 90%

40% of Iraqis want a dictatorship and/or an Islamic State ((down from 49% in Feb.)
58% of Iraqis want "democracy" (up from 49% in Feb.)

The problem with an item like this is that we don't know what they mean by "democracy." Over 80% of Egyptians said in one poll that democracy is the best form of government, and then 64% of them turned around and said they were satisfied with the Mubarak regime (a soft military dictatorship). So Egyptians didn't mean by "democracy" what Americans would have.

Actually, for most Middle Easterners, "democracy" implies self-determination. By that measure, Iraq is not very democratic at the moment.

The poll seems to define democracy as the principle that leaders are replaced from time to time. If that is all that the 90% want, it doesn't tell us much.

The other problem is that I find it a little difficult to believe that basic ideologies like these have shifted so massively in only a few months, and I suspect we'd be better off averaging the two for 2005 results than in assuming we are seing trends here.

Finally, there are some obvious contradictions. 48% want rule by mulla, but only 13% want an Islamic state. How does that make sense?

In any case, given the February findings, it seems likely to me that a good half of Iraqis still do not want Western-style democracy, which is not very heartening. Moreover, half of Iraqis don't believe that the US should have come there, 60% think it made no difference or actually made things worse, and 2/3s want US troops out.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Kashmir Crisis Enters Critical Phase

The news from Kashmir, where 80,000 survivors of the earthquake now face severe winter weather and problems of food and shelter, is not good. The UN High Commissioner on Refugees is complaining about lack of resources. Let's make a last push with the US Congress.

A Hill staffer writes:

"After an impressive donor conference where more than $5.8 billion was pledged little has been given so far. Furthermore, only 25% of the $550 million the UN has asked for in immediate humanitarian needs have been appropriated. Liberal Members of Congress who would normally speak out on this matter are bogged down with domestic issues such as alternative minimum tax, Iraq War, Katrina, and scandals in the WH and the Hill.

The one disturbing fact here is the Pakistani governments muted response to this impending disaster since the donor conference. Not one government official is actively asking for immediate needs funding,
even though three million are homeless and hundreds of thousands live in the snow line (which is 10 feet of snow!)

It appears that the US and Pakistan governments have conspired not to give immediate needs funding. Insiders close to the Pakistani government say relief money will not be used for earthquake victims but rather for political pet projects similar to Senator Steven’s highway to nowhere. The US is happy to give all monies to reconstruction; where US contractors can get rich (sounds familiar).
Some have speculated that the US will give Pakistan a carrot in a free trade area (in ’06) to quiet them.

Moreover, the Republicans in Congress will not divert any defense appropriations to humanitarian aid. They do not want to hurt the feelings of DOD contractors (who give them campaign cash hand over fist). The plan is to wait for the next Iraq supplemental, which has been postponed to sometime in February 2005.

Therefore, our only hope is that the Administration will realize that tens of thousands of Kashmir’s dying will not help the US’s image in the Muslim world. They will need to divert some economic or military aid. The President Bush has the lone power to do this.


Oxfam has written a good article on what we can ask President Bush to do.

We need to act now. The Congress is only open for one more week. We will come back to DC in February after the State of the Union. It would be quite helpful if your readers can contact their Congressman, Senator, or the President and let them know we are outraged at the lack of financial response. The Congress switch board is 202.224.3121 and the WH switch board is 202-456-1111. (Unfortunately, many prominent Pakistani-Americans are currently in Kashmir trying to save lives instead of lobbying their Member of Congress to do the right thing). We need to tell them to fully fund the immediate needs of the Kashmiris.

In the 21st century there is no excuse to let anyone to freeze to death, especially in a strategic ally such as Pakistan.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Anti-Muslim Race Riots in Australia

The government of John Howard has belatedly called for religious tolerance in Australia after a race riot broke out there, wherein Australian surfers and rowdies directed violence against Lebanese and others.

This sort of riot against the Muslim minority is the dream of Muslim radicals, who can add the footage into their recruitment videos.

Some have suggested that the Howard government's own rhetoric has contributed to violence against Muslims, but the government denies it.

[Some readers have written to say that these may have been race riots, but that they were anti-Lebanese in general, since there are more Christians than Muslims in the Australian Lebanese community. This is a valuable corrective. However, I saw press reports of gangs yanking off women's headscarves, and my guess is that those were Muslim women and that the yanking was indicative of specifically anti-Muslim feelings. Moreover, although you and I know that most Lebanese in Australi are Christians, it is not clear that the surfer dudes did.]
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Sistani Counsels Shiites Against Wasted Votes
Sunni Arabs Plead for Talks


Knight Ridder reports on dirty campaign tricks and over-heated rhetoric in the Iraq political campaign.

Robert Collier of the San Francisco Chronicle has an extremely important piece based on interviews with Sunni Arab politicians in Iraq. Their general consensus is that if the US leaves Iraq without negotiating a settlement with the Sunni Arab leadership, a vicious civil war will break out, as the Shiite religious parties come to dominate the country.

Reuters reports that US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad says he is in fact in negotiations with Sunni Arab guerrilla leaders. He also maintains that the Kurdish political leadership is committed to staying in Iraq.

Al-Zaman [Arabic]/ DPA: The highest spiritual authority for Iraqi Shiites, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani of Najaf, urged Iraqs on Sunday to participate in the elections scheduled for the coming Thursday. He refrained from encouraging them to vote for the United Iraqi Alliance (he had done so in the Jan. 30 elections earlier this year). In a communique issued by his office, Sistani added, "These elections are just as important as the preceding ones, and citizens--both male and female-- must participate in them on a wide scale in order to guarantee a big and powerful presence for those who will safeguard their verities and work energetically for their higher interests in the next parliament." He did warn them about splitting or wasting their vote. [Cole: This last phrase might be taken as a de facto endorsement of the United Iraqi Alliance, which groups most of the religious Shiite candidates.]

Shaikh Abdul Mahdi al-Karbala'i, Sistani's representative in the holy city of Karbala, had said on Oct. 28 that Sistani would decline to endorse any political party in these elections. He strongly implied in a later sermon that Sistani was unhappy over the UIA government's inability to provide basic services to Iraqis. Al-Karbala'i had predicted that the UIA would lose a great many seats if it went on like this.

Ammar al-Hakim, son of UIA leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, disputed al-Karbala'i's allegations. He pointed out that the UIA had been formed under Sistani's auspices, and said that the grand ayatollah had never withdrawn his support.

A letter attributed to Sistani had emerged from Najaf over a week ago that appeared to endorse the UIA, but it was later disavowed by Sistani's office. Still, the present communique, which counsels against splitting or wasting the Shiite vote, has some of the same language. My suspicion is that a draft letter was leaked before Sistani was finished with it, and the draft was more explicit than he wanted to be.

The Boston Globe has more on Sistani and the elections.

The poor security in Iraq has hurt women's rights and women's political participation, according to CSM.

Al-Zaman/DPA say that US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad on Sunday was in Sulaimaniyah laying the foundation stone for the American University there. They say that he expressed the hope that the newly elected parliament would make Jalal Talabani president for a 4-year term. (Sulaimaniyah, a northern Kurdish city, is Talabani territory).

[Cole: I am delighted about the formation of an American University in Sulaimaniyah, and I admire a lot of what Ambassador Khalilzad has been accomplishing in Iraq. I also like Mam Jalal a great deal. But I don't think it is appropriate for the US ambassador to weigh in on the issue of who parliament should elect president. By the way, the constitution requires a 2/3s majority for the election of the president. Since there were severe tensions between Talabani and the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance prime minister (Ibrahim Jaafari), I would be a little surprised if they put him in again--and he could not get in without them.]

Al-Zaman/ AFP: Muntadhar al-Samarra'i, the former commander of the Iraqi special forces, said Sunday that the Minister of Interior, Bayan Jabr Sulagh, appointed 17,000 fighters from the Badr Militia as police officers in his ministry at a time when they still receive their salaries from Iran. Al-Samarra'i accused the Badr Corps [the paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq] of employing torture on detainees in prison. He showed AFP a film he himself had shot of torture in Iraqi prisons. He said all of the high officials in the Ministry of the Interior are from the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and Dawa (Shiite parties), whereas the detainees are Sunni Arabs. Al-Samarra'i also said that the special police speak Persian with one another (the Badr Corps fighters had been expatriates in Iran). He spoke of several secret prisons, some with as many as 600 inmates, and said there were also jails for women.

The Washington Post says that a second secret jail has been uncovered in Iraq where detainees were being abused.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

4 US Troops Killed
Election Violence in Najaf, Mosul

Guerrillas killed four GIs in separate incidents, some with small arms fire. A suicide bomber targeted an Iraqi army unit in Balad and killed one soldier and wounded 11 others.

Aljazeera on early Sunday morning was reporting 6 US troops dead, but the wire services were still saying 4.

I have been noticing reports of deaths by small arms fire more frequently of late, and am wondering if they indicate increased capacity among the guerrillas. After all, it cannot be easy to get close enough to a US patrol or checkpoint with machine guns to open fire effectively.

Al-Zaman/ AFP: Minister of Defense Saadoun Dulaimi* attempted but failed to dismiss 13 Kurdish officers from the new Iraqi army, including the Army chief of staff, Babakr Zibari. Although himself a Sunni Arab, Dulaimi was acting on behalf of the ruling United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite coalition that dominates parliament. The Kurdish leadership beat off what some are calling an attempted coup. They threatened to pull out of the current government and to refuse further alliances with the UIA if Dulaim's plan went through. It did not.

The move was an attempted blow by the Shiite coalition against the Kurdistan coalition.

Iran will open a consulate on Sunday in the Shiite holy city of Karbala.

The nine southern Shiite provinces are developing a joint security plan, and thinking of making Najaf their regional HQ.

The NYT reports on big money, death and dirty tricks in the Iraqi political campaign.

An assassination attempt by roadside bomb in Najaf against the former governor of that province, Adnan Zurfi, failed on Saturday but left 3 of his bodyguards wounded. Zurfi is running for parliament. Meanwhile, mortar shells slammed into the party HQ of Iyad Allawi in Najaf, as well.

In other election violence, two members of the Iraqi Islamic Party putting up campaign posters in Mosul were killed.

Steven Spiegel argues in the LA Times that the Iraq War has boomeranged and made the US significantly less safe.

The Washington Post draws back the curtain on the disputes inside the Bush administration about the wisdom of having adhered to the strict timetable laid out initially by US civil administrator Paul Bremer.

The milestones were:

The January 30, 2005 parliamentary elections
The August 15 deadline for completing the constitution
The October 15 deadline for a national referendum on the constitution, and
The Dec. 15 deadline for yet another parliamentary election

The article neglects to mention a key factor in holding the Jan. 30 elections on time, which was that they had been demanded by no later than that date by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. He would not have accepted a delay, and would have brought the Shiites out into the street to protest if one were attempted. Bush could not afford to alienate Sistani at a time when the Sunni Arabs were already in revolt. The WaPo article is written as though Bush would have had the luxury of postponing those elections. He did not.

Of course, the elections were dogged by the non-participation of the Sunni Arabs, and since Sistani had insisted that an elected body craft the constitution, this task was given to a legislature that virtually lacked a Sunni Arab voice. All this alienation flowed from the way the Jan. 30 elections were conducted. But there were other ways of ensuring a Sunni Arab representation in parliament, including a one-time temporary quota. Or, a separate constituent assembly could have been elected on a provincial basis to write the constitution. But I don't think it was realistic to delay the date of those first elections.

In my view, though, it was crazy to attempt to write a permanent constitution in only a couple of months, and the Aug. 15 deadline should have been extended for 6 months. As it was, the drafting process became very messy toward the end; people barely knew which language they were voting for in the referendum; and the Sunni Arabs rejected the constitution almost to a person. It was a very bad outcome, and if Iraq breaks up we will almost certainly trace the break-up to the rush to get the constitution drafted and the way in which the Kurds and Shiites stacked it with goodies for themselves at the expense of the Sunni Arabs.

Personally, I don't see any signs at all that this political process has had an impact on the Sunni Arab guerrilla war. And in the Shiite provinces, it has so far ensconced the Shiite religious parties and their paramilitaries (leading to a certain amount of torture and assassination by the security agencies, which are infiltrated by militiamen.)

The US personnel in Iraq have occasionally sent me these rosy predictions all along the way. In February of 2004 I got a long message that maintained that Muqtada al-Sadr's movement was dissipating and that the US was about to put $18 billion of reconstruction money into Iraq, which would jump-start the economy, draw off dissidents, and make the place peaceful and flourishing. Two months later the entire South and Baghdad were in flames as Muqtada's Mahdi Army fought the Coalition military for two solid months. The security situation has never allowed the reconstruction aid to be invested in a way that would lead to development and away from guerrilla war. And virtually everything this seasoned US observer on the ground in provincial Iraq had predicted to me turned out to be a pipe dream. The pipe dreams spring eternal, but they are mirages. In the near to medium term, those Americans who rush through the desert sands in the torrid miasma of the Iraqi midday sun, seeking to throw themselves into the shimmering lakes of peace and prosperity just over the horizon, will be found later at the foot of a dune, lips cracked and skin blackened, their eyeballs the food of scorpions and lizards.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraq Round-Up for Saturday

Eric Black's interview with me about the upcoming Iraq elections is at the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Clerics are using the mosque to try to get out the vote for the parties they favor on December 15.

Iraqi Academics are at severe risk.

A recent poll in several Arab countries shows that the region is deeply suspicious of Bush's motives and unimpressed by his alleged promotion of democracy in the region, according to Jim Lobe.

Mahan Abdin explores the possibly sinister role of the Iran-trained Badr Corps in the new Iraq.

Knight Ridder broke the story of the US military paying to place stories in the Iraqi press.

Nir Rosen argues for an immediate US withdrawal from Iraq in the Atlantic. Nir has been on the ground in Iraq a lot, speaks Arabic, and reports accurately on the mindset of Iraqis. I don't agree with him, but I admit to being from the generation that lived through the Lebanese Civil War, the Iranian Revolution, the Afghanistan War, the Iran-Iraq War, the Kashmir Civil War, etc., etc., and the world looks darker to me and I can imagine more catastrophic scenarios than are presented here.

Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter in his Nobel Lecture lets Bush and Blair have it.
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Guest Editorial: Achcar on Sadr Initiative

"A PAN-IRAQI PACT ON MUQTADA AL-SADR'S INITIATIVE

Gilbert Achcar

December 9, 2005

As part of his effort to influence the political forces in Iraq prior to the forthcoming parliamentary election, at the end of November Muqtada al-Sadr had his supporters distribute the draft of a "Pact of Honor," and called on Iraqi parties to discuss and collectively adopt it at a conference to be organized before the election.

This conference was actually held on Thursday, December 8, in al-Kadhimiya (North of Baghdad). Despite extensive search, I found it only reported in a relatively short article in today's Al-Hayat and in dispatches from the National Iraqi News Agency (NINA). There is legitimate ground to suspect that this media blackout has political significance; indeed most initiatives by the Sadrist current are hardly reported by the dominant media, even when they consist of important mass demonstrations (like those organized yesterday in Southern Iraq against British troops).

In the case of the recent conference, the vast array of forces that were represented and that signed the "Pact of Honor" is in itself already worthy of attention. Aside from the Sadrists, chiefly represented by their MPs, those represented and who signed the document included: SCIRI, al-Daawa (al-Jaafari's personal representative even apologized in his name for his absence due to his traveling outside of Iraq), and the Iraqi Concord Front (the major Sunni electoral alliance in the forthcoming election), to name but the most prominent of a long list of organizations, along with several tribal chiefs, unions and other social associations, members of the De-Ba'athification Committee and a few government officials. Ahmad Chalabi -- who definitely deserves to be called "The Transformer" -- attended in person and signed the document in the name of his group. It seems that the Association of Muslim Scholars did not attend, as its name is not mentioned in any of the two sources.

According to the reports, the "Pact of Honor" that was adopted consists of 14 points, among which the following demands and agreements are the most important (the sentences in quotation marks are translated from the document as quoted in the reports):

• "withdrawal of the occupiers and setting of an objective timetable for their withdrawal from Iraq"; "elimination of all the consequences of their presence, including any bases for them in the country, while working seriously for the building of [Iraqi] security institutions and military forces within a defined schedule";

• suppression of the legal immunity of occupation troops, a demand coming with the condemnation of their practices against civilians and their breach of human rights;

• categorical rejection of the establishment of any relations with Israel;

• "resistance is a legitimate right of all peoples, but terrorism does not represent legitimate resistance"; "we condemn terrorism and acts of violence, killing, abducting and expulsion aimed at innocent citizens for sectarian reasons";

• "to activate the de-Ba'athification law and to consider that the Ba'ath party is a terrorist organization for all the tyranny it brought on the oppressed sons of Iraq, and to speed up the trial of overthrown president Saddam Hussein and the pillars of his regime";

• "to postpone the implementation of the disputed principle of federalism and to respect the people's opinion about it."

The conference established a committee that is responsible for following up the implementation of the resolutions and reporting on it after six months.

If anything, the conference was a testimony to the increasing importance of the Sadrist current. As for the actual implementation of its resolutions, it will greatly depend on the pressure that the same current will be able to exert after the forthcoming election, if the United Iraqi Alliance -- of which the Sadrists are a major pillar on a par with SCIRI -- succeeds in getting a commanding position in the next National Assembly."

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

43 Killed, 70 Wounded by Bus Bomber
And Rumsfeld's False Analogy

A suicide bomber jumped on a bus in Baghdad just as it was about to head south for Nasiriyah on Thursday, eluding security. The bus was lifted by gigantic fingers of flame, reaching out to kill and wound bystanders, as well. Some 43 were killed and at least 70 wounded.

The news that Rumsfeld denied rumors on Thursday, that he was planning to step down tipped my memory to having heard him on the radio last week. (Too bad he won't go. He has been a perfect disaster.)

Rumsfeld complained at SAIS a week ago that there are 14,500 murders a year in the United States and 42,000 driving fatalities, and the US press isn't covering that, whereas, he implies, 43 people getting blown up on a bus in Baghdad is front page news.

Rumsfeld is committing a logical fallacy here. He is comparing apples and oranges. Does Rumsfeld think that there is not also a murder rate in Iraq beyond the guerrilla violence? The likelihood from the information that has leaked out from the Baghdad morgue is that Iraq is among the more murderous societies in the world at the moment. (As you would expect, since where there is no law and order, criminal elements act with impunity. Worse, there are regular political assassinations by religiious militias.) These Iraq murders are not usually reported in the press, any more than the murders in the US are. Likewise, one can only imagine the traffic death rate in Iraq. The country has imported more than 100,000 used cars since the fall of the old regime, and there aren't exactly a lot of vigilant traffic police.

So the fact is, Mr. Rumsfeld, that the per capita rates for murder and traffic deaths in Iraq may well be similar to those in the United States. The deaths in the guerrilla war are extra.

The essential fallacy here is comparing political violence, which aims at altering the government, to individual acts of criminality. Human beings are naturally focused on attempts to take over the leadership of a society. The bus bombing in Baghdad was carried out by Sunni Arab guerrillas whom Rumsfeld marginalized, and it was aimed at Shiites on their way to Nasiriyah in the Shiite south. It was a further attempt to provoke Shiite reprisals and ultimately a Sunni-Shiite civil war, in hopes that the resulting instability would allow the Sunni Arabs to make a coup and come back to power. A criminal slitting someone's throat in a back alley of Baghdad won't cause a civil war. Actions like the bus bombing are potentially consequential.

Likewise the US military attacks launched this week around Ramadi are not random acts of violence (and it is shocking that the Secretary of Defense should compare such military operations to a civilian felony!) The US military said, by the way, that the operation had resulted in no Iraqi or US deaths. [Though a guerrilla roadside bomb killed a GI in the Ramadi area on Thursday.) The military sweeps are attempts to weaken the guerrilla movement that is blowing up US troops. It is about shaping the government and polity of Iraq. Human beings are hardwired to be far more interested in attempts to change leadership in society than in individual random crime. Who rules Iraq affects everyone in the world. That the US has a remarkably high annual murder rate is of moment mainly to the victims and to the neighborhoods affected. By the way, the US murder rate is per capita 4 times that of Britain, and the likely explanation for the difference is the easy availability of non-sporting firearms, including especially pistols. Since Rumsfeld wants more coverage of the 14,500 murders a year in the US, would he welcome practical steps to make it more like 3,500? The British are not intrinsically nobler than the Americans-- our highly violent society is a result of specific structural features of our society.

In logic, Rumsfeld's mistake is known as the "false analogy." He incorrectly likens military violence to individual crime, and then expresses astonishment that the two things are not covered the same way by the press. Rumsfeld has a long track record of indulging in this particular form of sloppy thinking. He has also in the past made a false analogy between guerrilla violence in Iraq and race riots in small towns in the United States. In the terms of American racial discourse, that particular meme has overtones of bigotry, since he appears to be attempting to code the Sunni Arab guerrillas as "Black." (Or maybe it is the other way around.) It is all propaganda. It is shameful in a democratic society for the Secretary of Defense to engage in such warped discourse. It is more shameful that almost no one calls him on it.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Talabani to Meet with Resistance Leaders;
Shiite Coalition in Friction

Al-Hayat: President Jalal Talabani [Ar. ULR] is preparing a meeting in Sulaimaniyah to be attended by the Americans and by leaders of the underground Sunni Arab guerrilla movement. US Ambassador Khalilzad has announced that he would be willing to talk to any groups save the Saddamists (direct cronies and strong supporters of the overthrown dictator) and the jihadi terrorists (e.g. the group of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi). Talabani, a Sunni Kurd, has been trying to reach out to elements of the Sunni Arab resistance for the past couple of months, using clan leaders and clerics as intermediaries. An initial agreement of principles is said to have been reached, but of course the guerrilla leaders will want certain guarantees. Earlier contacts between the US Department of Defense and the guerrilla leaders faltered because the guerrillas had demanded an upfront commitment of the US to a withdrawal timetable, which the Bush administration rejected. And then the US began large-scale sweeps in Anbar province against guerrilla positions.

Al-Hayat's sources say that several changes have occurred in the arena of guerrilla action in 2005, which have benefited the Iraqi nationalist groups that reject attacks on civilians and the practice of "excommunicating" (takfir) other Muslims. The method of "national resistance" has instead gained advantages over the bloody tactics of the jihadis, such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Ansar al-Islam. More than 50 guerrilla bands, including "Phalanges of the 1920 Revolution," "the Army of Islam," "The Army of Holy Warriors", "Holy Warriors of the Armed Forces," are actually led, despite their Islamist names, by officers of the former Iraqi military. They have decided to unite their ranks and will soon announce a Front for the Iraqi Resistance, which will comprise all these guerrilla groups. They will adopt joint military and political stances. This front will be led by a "Consultative Council" that includes former officers, clerics and clan elders. It will be charged with working to prevent attacks on civilians and with promoting dialogue for the purpose of "expelling the occupiers."

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that UN envoy Ashraf Qazi visited Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani on Thursday, in the run-up to next Thursday's elections. He said that Sistani had blessed UN work in Iraq and urged that it help the country rebuild and move toward social harmony.

The same source says that there is substantial election-related violence in Iraq, with attacks on political offices and assassinations. (These don't seem to be being reported, pace Mr. Rumsfeld, above). A member of the list of Mithal Alusi was killed on Thursday, and the office of secular ex-Baathist Iyad Allawi was again attacked in the Shiite holy city of Karbala.

The trial of Saddam Hussein is highly polarizing for the Iraqi public, according to Borzou Daragahi of the LA Times. Making Shiites and Sunnis live through his massacre of Shiites at this particular juncture strikes me as a bad idea. And, the trial has been conducted in a completely inept way. The Shiite witnesses have sometimes repeated hearsay, or they were children in 1982, as Riverbend notes.

Now the Baghdad Press Club was founded by the US military. This finding is the result of continued investigation of Pentagon attempts to shape Iraqi press reporting. The Club journalists were actually given monetary rewards.

Ed Wong of the NYT reports on the tensions in the United Iraqi Alliance, the coaltion of Shiite religious parties, which has now included the Sadr movement of Muqtada al-Sadr. Sadrists are keen rivals of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and the militias of the two parties have fought. Wong raises the question of whether the Sadr/SCIRI rivalries are enough to break up the coalition, giving an opening to the secularists and Kurds to outmaneuver them.

Similar speculation about the UIA's ability to stay together was voiced in January, 2005, and those concerns were overblown. It should be remembered that the Iraqi government has on the order of $17 billion a year in petroleum revenue. Being the dominant party means that your deputies and cabinet members get to control the revenue, which turns into political patronage and power. I predicted last January that the UIA would stay together, because the alternative was to allow someone else to monopolize that money. But Wong is right that Muqtada and the Sadrists are a wild card, one could imagine him pursuing a scorched earth policy even against his own former allies.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Cole and Franken

Al Franken is in Ann Arbor and I'll be on with him today, in the studio at 1-2 pm EST. It should also be available in streaming video.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bush praises Mosul, Najaf

Unrest in Kurdistan

President Bush in his speech on Thursday maintained that it was a good thing that about half of Ninevah province voted in the referendum on the new constitution. The Washington Post points out that Ninevah voted overwhelming against the constitution, and came within an hair's breadth of helping defeat it altogether. This was a good thing? WaPo also points out that Bush instanced security progress in Najaf and Mosul as good news. But this is perverse. There was not much a security problem in Najaf until, in early April 2004, the US military suddently declared that it wanted to "kill or capture" Shiite religious nationalist Muqtada al-Sadr. The latter launched an uprising in the course of which the Mahdi Army took over Najaf. Bush provoked that. As for Mosul, it was quiet under Gen. Petraeus, unti Bush launched the Fallujah campaign of November, 2004, at which time security in Mosul collapsed. The local population was furious about the attack on Sunni Arabs. Mosul is still not back to being fairly safe.

Collapse in Kurdistan? From all accounts there is substantial political unrest in Kurdistan, with violence between the Kurdistan Democratic Party and a Kurdish Islamic party. Al-Zaman: The Kurdistan Islamic Union, led by Salah al-Din Muhammad Baha al-din said that on Tuesday 3 of its party workers had been killed in an attack on their party headquarters in the northern Dohuk province. One of the dead had been a candidate running for a seat in parliament. Many others were wounded. Two further party works were killed in Zakhu. Police, loyal to the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Massoud Barzani, looked on without attempting to protect these devotees of political Islam among the Kurds.

KarbalaNews.net is now carrying an article claiming to be from the office of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani saying that the communique urging believers to vote for the United Iraqi Alliance was fraudulent. Sistani had been refusing to endorse the UIA, but seemed suddently to reverse course late last week.

Al-Zaman: Seventy-nine Iranian pilgrims arrived in the Shiite shrine city of Karbala on Wednesday, under the protection of an Iranian government guard that was allowed to accompany them. At a moment when Iraq has closed its borders with the Arab states of Saudia Arabia, Jordan and Syria and refused to give entry permits to Arabs, the Iraqi government is welcoming in the Iranians for Shiite pilgrimage! Forget about all the British charges that Iran is destablizing Iraq. The Iraqi government clearly believes that it is the Arabs, not Iran, that form the danger.

I may blog more Thursday if I get the chance.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Election Violence in Egypt Kills 8
Afghanistan Bombing kills 2

Election violence claimed at least 8 lives in Egypt on Wednesday, and wounded dozens. The Muslim Brotherhood has vastly increased its representation in parliament, giving it them clout to further Islamize the law in Egypt. There will be over 80 members of parliament from the Muslim Brotherhood, from all accounts. (In the last parliament, the MB had only 17). The State Department had warned Bush that this sort of outcome was plausible if he pushed Mubarak to modernize.

Guerrillas in Afghanistan are starting to use Iraq-style tactics. An attack on Wednesday killed two.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Dean v. Bush: "Winning" in Iraq
Or Winning Smart?

Speaking in San Antonio on Monday, Democratic National Committee head Howard Dean said that the US cannot win in Iraq. The link just given, to WOAI, allows you to listen to the interview. He called for bringing the national guards home from Iraq immediately. Excerpts:

' "I've seen this before in my life. This is the same situation we had in Vietnam. Everybody then kept saying, 'just another year, just stay the course, we'll have a victory.' Well, we didn't have a victory, and this policy cost the lives of an additional 25,000 troops because we were too stubborn to recognize what was happening."

Dean says the Democrat position on the war is 'coalescing,' and is likely to include several proposals.

"I think we need a strategic redeployment over a period of two years," Dean said. "Bring the 80,000 National Guard and Reserve troops home immediately. They don't belong in a conflict like this anyway. We ought to have a redeployment to Afghanistan of 20,000 troops, we don't have enough troops to do the job there and its a place where we are welcome. And we need a force in the Middle East, not in Iraq but in a friendly neighboring country to fight (terrorist leader Musab) Zarqawi, who came to Iraq after this invasion. We've got to get the target off the backs of American troops. '

I'm going to blog the interview as I listen to it:

Dean compared the skewing of intelligence on Iraq in the build-up to the war to Watergate, which he pointed out also occurred in Nixon's first term and only hit him in the second.

Dean said neither he nor Murtha wanted a withdrawal from Iraq (i.e. just pick up stakes and come back across the Atlantic), but rather a redeployment. Dean suggested an over-the-horizon US military force be stationed in a nearby friendly Arab country to deal with any problems of terrorism that remained in the wake of the redeployment. Dean said there should be a 2-year timetable for draw-down of troops from Iraq itself.

He said Bush wanted a permanent commitment to a failed policy in Iraq.

Dean said that 80 percent of Iraqis want the US and coalition troops out. (This was a British military poll done in Iraq that got leaked).

Dean criticized "Vietnamization" as a failed policy in Vietnam, and implied that keeping a big US military force on the ground in Iraq while attempts were made to "Iraqize" military operations would likewise fail.

He also accused Bush of deliberately suppressing intelligence reports from the CIA that raised doubts about his allegations concerning Iraq, and of not allowing Congress to see them at the time.

Bush and Cheney insisted on staying their course.

Actually, this debate is not about winning or losing. The maximalist goals of the Bush administration in Iraq have not been achieved and never will be achieved. Despite what Paul Bremer said, the US is not going to "impose its will on the Iraqis," and despite (probably) Irving Lewis Libby's silly allegation, the US is not manufacturing reality in Iraq (or at least not a very nice one--see the next item).

The debate is just about disengagement strategy. Bush wants to keep a large US military force in Iraq for as long as it takes to build up a new Iraqi military and government under US tutelage, so as to avoid the disaster of a collapse of Iraq when the US comes out (when, not if). Bush's plan probably envisions a significant US troop presence for a good five years (how long it will really take to train an Iraqi army, if it can be done at all).

Dean wants to bring home the National Guards in 2006, and in 2007 to redeploy US army fighting divisions to bases in the region (probably Kuwait and Turkey, though he was diplomatic enough not to say so.) He also wants to avoid the disaster of a total collapse in Iraq. He is just convinced that long-term heavy US troop presence actually makes such a collapse more likely, and wants to deal with the problem differently.

So they are really just arguing over 2 years versus 5 years, and over direct US presence in that period versus an over-the-horizon capability to intervene against building threats to the US (i.e. if Zarqawi took over Anbar province and started up training camps for September 11 Part Deux--the Cheney nightmare scenario).

Dean apparently wants to know why you couldn't take out any terrorist training camps that grew up with surgical strikes and special ops, rather than by garrisoning Anbar with 10,000 Marines who keep emptying out its cities and making the inhabitants refugees.

Dean's remarks will, predictably, be twisted so that he is depicted as urging isolationism and complete withdrawal ("surrender", the Right will call it.)

Let me just suggest to him and others who are pushing this sensible plan that we call it "Winning smart in Iraq" rather than "can't win." What can possibly be won is the avoidance of a hot civil war or a regional guerrilla war that plunges the world into economic crisis. Winning that is in the best interests of everyone, Iraqis and Americans alike.

As for Bush's "winning" in Iraq, what did he want?

*He wanted to weaken al-Qaeda, which he said he believed received Iraqi state support. He was completely wrong about that, if he really did believe it and wasn't just lying. In fact, Bush has enormously strengthened al-Qaeda, and he has not captured its top leadership. The London July 7 bombers explicitly were taking revenge for what they saw as US and British atrocities in Iraq. Zawahiri was able to recruit them because Bush's actions in Iraq created such rage.

*He wanted to destroy Arab socialism and make Iraq a free market economy. In fact, Iraq's economy is a basket case and the likelihood is that the petroleum industry, the major source of wealthy, will remain in federal or provincial government hands. A good 50 percent of Iraq's economy will be in the public sector for a long time to come. Sounds like Socialism to me.

*He wanted to open Iraq up to unrestricted US corporate investment (Paul Bremer's 100 laws, which Naomi Klein has written about). US corporations, however, are not interested in failed states, and are giving Iraq a pass. In the meantime, Canadian and Norwegian companies are getting a look-over by the Iraqi provincial authorities.

*He wanted a place to put bases in Iraq at the head of the Oil Gulf so as to be able to withdraw from Saudi Arabia's Prince Sultan airbase. In fact, no elected Iraqi government is going to lease long-term military bases to the United States. 80 percent of Iraqis want the US troops out completely, yesterday. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani will at some point give a fatwa to that effect, and then it will be all over (as it was in the Philippines when its parliament asked the US to leave).

*He wanted to use Iraq as a springboard to undermine the regime of the mullahs in Iran, the other member of the "axis of evil." In fact, the emergence of a politically mobilized Shiite majority in Iraq has given Iran new geopolitical advantages.

*He says he wanted to make Iraq a model of liberal democracy and human rights for the Greater Middle East. In fact, the Iraqi constitution says that Islam is the religion of state, that the civil parliament cannot pass legislation that contradicts the laws of Islam; and it allows ayatollahs to be put on court benches, etc., etc. So is Iraq going to have freedom of speech, or will blasphemy be a hanging offense? I bet on the latter. Bush implied to his evangelical supporters that they would have a free mission field in Iraq (which they wanted to use then to evangelize the rest of the Muslim world). Any evangelical missionary who shows up in Iraq today may as well just go straight to the studio to record his hostage tape.

So, Bush hasn't won and won't win the things he and his officials said they wanted.

We have to win smart. That means giving the Iraqis their independence ASAP while acting responsibly to avert potential crises if necessary.

There are people* attacking me now because I say I think the US does have the responsibility to forestall massive hot civil war in Iraq if it can, of the sort that could leave 2.5 million people dead and 5 million displaced abroad. That is what happened in Afghanistan from 1979. The US helped destabilize it(the Soviets contributed more to the actual destabilzaiont)in the 1980s and then, under Bush senior, just walked away completely. [Many on t]he American far left never complained about what was going on in Afghanistan in the 1990s, because for them the only source of evil in the world is US imperialism, and since the US had largely left Afghanistan, all was well. No matter if hundreds of thousands of Afghans were maimed as the US turned its back. Somehow they don't complain so loudly about US-led NATO intervention in the former Yugoslavia, which certainly saved hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives. They don't actually care about Bosnians or Afghans or Iraqis, just about hating the US. The US has done horrible things. It has also done noble things. I am hoping that it finally does the noble thing in Iraq, and wins smart, for the Iraqis and for the Americans. Dean gets that. Bush doesn't.

---

I used the phrase originally "looney left" for these quarters that wanted to paint me as some sort of war criminal for hoping to forestall genocide. The comments section has convinced me to avoid the phrase, because people who consider themselves on the left and are eager to see the US out of Iraq seem to have developed a free-floating anxiety that I might be referring to them or their position. I assure them that I was not; it is to a looney position that I was referring.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

36 Dead, 72 Wounded in Attack on Police Academy

Two suicide bombers, alleged to be brothers, attacked a police academy in eastern Baghdad on Tuesday, killing 36 cadets and policemen and wounding some 72, according to the Ministry of the Interior. The attack was claimed on the internet for the Zarqawi group and represented it as revenge by radical Sunnis on the largely Shiite ministry of interior and its special police. The ministry denied the charges. It should be remembered that anyone can post anonymous claims on the internet.

In a separate bombing, a kamikaze killed 3 and wounded 20 in a Baghdad cafe.

There was more fighting between the US and guerrillas in Ramadi, though there seems to be something of a press blackout about it.

Several items reported by Reuters are quite disturbing. A bodyguard of Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari was shot dead. Can you imagine the headlines if that had happened with regard to a Western head of state?

And, a fanatical mob of Kurds from the (relatively secular-leaning) Kurdistan Democratic Party of Massoud Barzani killed 4 members of a Kurdish Islamist party in Irbil [actually the problems were apparently actually in Dohuk, not Irbil]. The Kurdish devotees of political Islam, a small set of parties, are running on a separate ticket in the Dec. 15 elections. In the last elections, of Jan. 30, all 5 significant Kurdish parties ran on the same list.

What with prime minister's bodyguards being offed and members of a rival party being torn limb from limb by mobs, it is difficult to see Iraq as a shining beacon of democracy. But I doubt either of these incidents will be reported anywhere on US television.

Reuters says::

' * ARBIL - Four people were killed in northern Iraq on Tuesday when members of a Kurdish Islamic party that is challenging the dominant Kurdish bloc in next week's election was attacked by mobs, party officials said. A senior official of the Kurdistan Islamic Union was among those killed, they said . . .

* AL-RASHAD - Shahla Hasan, the head of Baiji city council, and a finance official from Tikrit were killed by gunmen in the town of al-Rashad, 45km west of Kirkuk . . .

DHULUIYA - Iraqi and U.S. forces killed at least four insurgents who were preparing to fire rockets near the northern town of Dhuluiya on Monday, the U.S. military said . . .

KHWEYLIS - Gunmen shot dead a guard who worked for Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari's office as he left his home in Khweylis, north of Baghdad, Iraqi police said.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

20 Bodies Found
Crowds demonstrate for, against Trial of Saddam

Twenty bodies were discovered in Iraq on Monday at two different sites on the road from Baghdad to Amman. Some nine bodies turned up near Fallujah. Eleven bodies were found early Tuesday, at the small town of Rutba. Travelers on that road have often been robbed or murdered, and some of the murders had an ethnic basis (Sunni Arab guerrillas killing, e.g., Shiite travelers).

An electoral official was killed at Baquba, and there was a separate bombing there. Reuters gives other attacks, including one that left a GI dead on Sunday.

AFP/ Al-Sharq al-Awsat [Arabic URL] report that there were dueling demonstration on Monday over the trial of Saddam Hussein. Sunnis in Tikrit (Saddam's birthplace), came out against the proceedings, as did those in the small town of Dur. In several other provinces, and in Baghdad, crowds demonstrated against Saddam. I saw part of the proceedings on Aljazeera. At one point this really hard line Shiite interrupted the proceedings to read out a lot of ritual pronouncements. He pronounced blessings three times on the Prophet and his Family. There was a strong sectarian overtone to the trial.

Vice President Ghazi al-Yawir has weighed in on the issue of the preparedness of the new Iraqi army. AP reports:

"The training of Iraqi security forces has suffered a big "setback" in the last six months, with the army and other forces being increasingly used to settle scores and make other political gains, Iraqi Vice President Ghazi al-Yawer said Monday.

Al-Yawer disputed contentions by U.S. officials, including President Bush, that the training of security forces was gathering speed, resulting in more professional troops."

Al-Yawir is running for parliament on the secular list of Iyad Allawi.

The FBI is reopening the question of where the forged documents came from, which alleged Iraqi uranium purchases from Niger. They first surfaced in the hands of Italian former spy and gadfly Rocco Martino, but the question is where exactly he got them from. There is also the question of the other letter said to be in the same dossier, which alleged that Iran and Iraq were making a deadly alliance of some sort (Khomeinist Iran and Saddam's Iraq hated each other and this allegation is ridiculous. But the number of state actors that had a strong interest in seeing both Iran and Iraq as allied or an "axis" is relatively small . . .)

The 9/11 Commission is giving the Federal government failing grades in getting up to speed on potential terrorist threats to the United States.

Actually, I don't think that the Federal government is capable, by its nature, of responding rationally and systematically to such asymmetrical threats. Congress controls the money, and much of Congress's money goes for patronage. So I saw this report about how some small towns in places like Wyoming got extra money for enhanced security from the Feds. This grant was clearly a form of political patronage. The temptation to use the 9/11 attacks as a potential windfall is everywhere. Bush and Cheney cynically used them to get up a war against Iraq that they already had wanted badly. Congressional representatives will be tempted to grab some of the pork for their districts. US politics is about partisan agendas, benefitting your friends, and punishing your enemies. All these extraneous considerations make it very difficult for a government agency (answerable to the executive and to the legislature) to just strike out and do the right thing in a political vacuum.

By the way, there must be a better way to guard against shoe bombs than making millions of Americans pad in sock feet through the nation's airports. Isn't that a health hazard in itself? :-) I curse Richard Reid every time I have to sit down and tie my shoes again. The boy genius had thought he'd be allowed to light matches on an airliner! There is nothing worse than being inconvenienced weekly by something done years ago by a stupid murderous f--kup.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

US Abusing its Mandate in Iraq: UN Rights Official
Extraodinary Rendition and the Attack on the US Constitution

Reuters's Paul Tait reports from Baghdad that John Pace, human rights chief for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq (UNAMI), charges the US military with overstepping its mandate from the international body by detaining thousands of Iraqis without due process. The authority to arrest without an warrant has been zealously guarded by the Department of Defense and its officials even sought to influence the interim constitution so as to ensure they would be excepted from any due process requirements. Pace is also scathing on the use of secret jails, and the lack of due process, by the current Iraqi government.

The problems with Bush administration policy in this regard go far beyond Iraq. The use of "extraordinary rendition" (kidnapping suspected terrorists from other countries) has sometimes been done with shocking shodiness, so that innocents are picked up and imprisoned for months. This is the story of Khalid Masri of Germany, as told by the Washington Post.

The Bill of Rights is what the United States is supposed to stand for. It is the basis for the critique of other countries done annually by the State Department in its human rights report. Shouldn't US institutions be bound by it even overseas?
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Allawi Attacked by Mob in Najaf;
In Baghdad, 2 GIs Killed

Former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi and his entourage were attacked by mobs on Sunday. Najaf governor Asad Abu Kalal complained that Allawi had not cleared his visit with the provincial authorities, but had suddenly shown up with a bodyguard of Western security guards. Allawi charged that the attackers were followers of nationalist Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and that they had intended to kill him. Abu Kalal rejected this allegation, and Najaf authorities attributed the incident to spontaneous crowd action rather than deep political conspiracy.

Allawi is a secularist ex-Baathist, who cooperated with the CIA in the 1990s in organizing Baath officers who broke with Saddam and fled to London, in hopes of using them to make a coup against Saddam. The Americans shoe-horned him in as interim prime minister with UN complaisance. While he was in power, in August of 2004, there was major fighting in Najaf, during which important old buildings were destroyed and hundreds if not thousands were killed. At some points there were rumors that Allawi might send in Iraqi troops to storm the shrine of Ali, risking major damage to it. Allawi has also upbraided Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani for intervening in Iraqi politics. In other words, an Allawi visit to the shrine of Najaf was bound to be controversial.

Since Allawi is basically running for prime minister in a majority pious Shiite society, the visit to the shrine in Najaf was intended to be a photo op that might help generate favorable campaign images. His attackers knew this and intended to spoil it.

Some analysts believe that Allawi's list, which got 14 percent in the last elections, will do better this time. But there was also a lot of this kind of speculation before the Jan. 30 elections. Basically it is a secular middle class perspective that journalists are more likely to encounter; but in fact the secular middle classes in Iraq have been devastated. Personally, I think the 14 percent was a fluke created in part by his advantages of incumbency (he was on television all the time in January of 2005, making all kinds of promises to various constituencies). He doesn't have those advantages any more, and may actually not run as well. Certainly, he won't get a big vote in Najaf.

Najaf officials insist that the problem of militia rule in the city has been resolved, and they have big plans for development.

Sheikh Abdul Salam Abdul Hussein, a mosque preacher and follower of Muqtada al-Sadr, was assassinated on Sunday. A range of other killings occurred in various parts of the country. Two US GIs were killed in southeastern Baghdad.

After a showy refusal to talk to the Americans about Iraq by high Iranian officials, lower-level middle managers are now saying that Iran will "think about" such contacts. Stay tuned.

Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey has admitted that many Iraqi officers in the new security services still have loyalties to militias.

US officers have admitted in interviews that most of the guerrillas they are fighting in western Iraq are local Iraqis, not foreign jihadis. The admission contradicts the general thrust of White House commentary on the issue.
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Sistani Endorses Religious Candidates
19 Iraqi Soldiers Killed

Guerrillas near the town of Adhaim, northeast of Baghdad, mounted a coordinated ambush of Iraqi troops on Saturday, killing 19 and wounding 4. The Bush administration ties US troop withdrawals from Iraq to the ability of the new Iraqi army to deal with the guerrillas itself. More details emerged regarding the killing of 10 US Marines at Amiriyat al-Fallujah just before the weekend. An eleventh appears to have died of his wounds and 3 more GIs died in a vehicle accident near Balad. "Accidents" in Iraq are often not unconnected to the guerrilla war. There was a new outbreak of fighting in Samarra, a Sunni Arab city north of Baghdad. Fighting continued in the Ramadi area.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the spiritual leader of the Shiite community in Iraq, has had a statement distributed urging Iraqis to vote in the Dec. 15 elections, and to vote for religious rather than secular ("dangerous") candidates. He also warned against voting for small individual lists and so splitting the Shiite vote.

KarbalaNews.net gives the text of the communique [Arabic], which does not have the form of a formal legal ruling or fatwa. The statement will nevertheless be taken seriously by religious Shiites (the vast majority). It is an indirect endorsement of the United Iraqi Alliance, a coalition of 17 Shiite religious parties that is dominated by the big 3: Dawa, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and the Sadrists.

The statement begins by reminding believers of the role of the religious leadership in Najaf in upholding the honor of Islam and the legacy of the family of the Prophet. The religious authority of Najaf is likened to a kind father for all believers, which seeks their welfare. The communique offers several pieces of guidance for the believers regarding the upcoming elections:

1. It is necessary to participate in the elections.

2. One must not vote for dangerous lists (the lists that do not observe the essential verities of religion and nation).

3. One must not vote for purely local lists (i.e. lists that have no presence in other provinces)

4. One must not vote for individual lists, which do not group various parties and do not call them to unity.

It goes on to say that a heavy duty has been laid on the believers by the religious authority, of investigating the characteristics of the various parties and choosing only those that adhere to the doctrines promulgated by the House of the Prophet. The task is onerous but not impossible.

"It is also of the utmost gravity, for the victorious list will have a large role in founding and strengthening the pillars of the state and of the country, and for 4 full years. It will moreover be concerned with passing 55 legislative projects, which will have a profound implication for the lives and the future of the people of Iraq."

(I take it Sistani is here referring to the 55 passages in the permanent constitution that specify that parliament shall legislate further supporting details through statute. That is, he is saying that precisely because the constitution is so unformed and kicked so many issues down the road, to be dealt with by parliament, the character of the elected parliament will be crucial to the actual shape of the constitution.)

Sistani reminds his readers that they must honor the tragic legacy of all the lives sacrificed in modern Iraq's wars, and the dead in [Saddam's] mass graves, by voting responsibly.

To guarantee the accuracy of the communique, KarbalaNews.net urges readers to call Sistani's offices, and gives the phone numbers!

Ashraf Khalil of the LA Times reports on how the Supreme Council, a leading element in the United Iraqi Alliance, is using Shiite mosques to get the word out to Shiites to vote UIA. Some SCIRI figues, such as Sadruddin Qubanchi [Qubanji], have attacked the Sunni Iraqi Islami Party as indistinguishable from the old Baath Party. (This charge is bizarre-- IIP has roots in the Muslim Brotherhood in Mosul, and was suppressed by the Baath). Qubanchi is openly calling for continued dominance by the Shiite religious parties.

KarbalaNews.net reports a widespread conviction that "regional and international forces" will attempt to fix the December 15 elections so as to throw them to the ex-Baathist secularist and old-time CIA asset, Iyad Allawi. There are also some observers who genuinely believe Allawi has a shot at a come-back. I remain skeptical. That these rumors are circulating in Iraq may help explain why Sistani decided to weigh in.

Ed Wong of the NYT gets the story again. He explores exactly what has happened in Najaf since September when US troops departed the city for a base 40 miles away. He argues that: The local security forces have the province relatively well in hand, and there is only one bombing or serious attack a month there. He says that the local security forces do not seem as massively penetrated by the militias of the religious parties. as is the case in Basra. The Iraqi police and military do have to call the US troops in to handle a particularly challenging situation about once a month.

The one issue about which I'd like more information is probably one on which it cannot be had. How many of the police and Iraqi military in Najaf have a background in the Badr Corps? The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq controls the provincial government and the deputy governor is Badr Organization. My suspicion is that the relative security in Najaf has to do precisely with the Badr Corps members stepping up, in the framework of the Iraqi security forces. Perhaps they do not advertise their former allegiance as much as in Basra. But it would be downright weird if Badr were not deeply involved in Najaf security. And the big difference with Basra is probably that SCIRI/Badr is in political control of Najaf, so that politics and security are in sync, whereas in Basra the governing council is diverse and SCIRI is not in control, while police with a Badr Corps background are a major group.

The Association of Muslim Scholars, a hard line Sunni clerical organization in Iraq suspected of links to the guerrilla movement, has threatened to pull out of the Cairo Agreement reached in November over what they claim is continued Shiite use of death squads against Sunnis. Abdul Salam al-Kubaisi showed a picture of Sunnis killed, he said, by the Scorpion Brigade of the Ministry of Interior. These special police units are thought to be heavily infiltrated by the Badr Corps, a paramilitary force orginally trained by Iran and connected to the (Shiite) Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the leading party in the country.

Trevor Royle of the Sunday Herald in the UK talks great good sense about the drawbacks of Bush's "fight until victory" applause line, in the light of military and political realities on the ground. Some British sources are saying that the situation in Basra is worse (more oppressive?) than it had been under Saddam, and 80 percent of the police in the city of a million and a half are not under the control of the police chief, but rather of local militias.

These photographs from Iraq during the past month, of a sort which typically are deliberately not carried by US newspapers or shown on US television, underline Royle's argument. [Note: I explicitly do not endorse the captions or other text at this site, and am simply pointing to the photographs themselves.]

Gen. Shaikh Muhammad Al Maktoum, the crown prince of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, has called for a gradual withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. The Gulf states are extremely sensitive to what happens in Iraq, and are generally positive in their view of the US. This statement is the first of which I am aware wherein an important Gulf figure has talked about withdrawal. The UAE is not very centralized, consisting of several emirates under an umbrella government, so I don't know to what extent the crown prince is representative of thinking among the emirs. But the speech does seem to be a straw in the wind. The Gulf states, with their oil and gas windfall, would potentially be in a position to offer Iraq a good deal of help with development if the guerrilla war could be tamped down. And they would know that such help was in their own interests.

Gordon Prather has a chilling piece at antiwar.com on the further plans for wars being foisted on the American public by the Neoconservatives (he rightly calls them "Neo-Crazies" at the American Enterprise Institute, which is the main bastion of Likud Party ideology in the United States.
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How Bush Created a Theocracy in Iraq

My article, "How Bush Created a Theocracy in Iraq, is now up at TruthDig.com. It begins, "The Bush administration naively believed that Iraq was a blank slate on which it could inscribe its vision for a remake of the Arab world. Iraq, however, was a witches’ brew of dynamic social and religious movements, a veritable pressure cooker. When George W. Bush invaded, he blew off the lid."
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18 GIs killed in 72 Hours
Anti-Prison Demonstrations in Baghdad

From Wednesday to Friday, guerrillas in Iraq killed 18 US troops. The most tragic single incident came on Friday, when guerrillas used old Baath rocket parts to make an enormous bomb that killed 10 Marines near Fallujah and wounded 11. CNN points out that Marine convoys tend to spread out to limit such casualties, so the death of 10 GIs in one incident suggests just a horrific explosion. There were said to be 600,000 tons of munitions stored in Iraq, one of the more militarized societies in the world, and over 200,000 tons are probably still unaccounted for.

On Wednesday, four GIs had been killed in separate incidents.

Think Progress points out that Bush knew about the bad news of 10 Marines killed near Fallujah before his remarks on the economy, and did not even mention it.

On Friday, as well, over a thousand Shiites and Sunnis held joint Friday prayers services and then mounted demonstrations downtown. The prayers were held at the mosque of Abu Hanifah in Adhamiyah. They demonstrated against the continued US military sweeps [of places like Ramadi].

Al-Zaman says that they were demanding the trial of the official in charge of the Jadiriyah Prison where 150 largely Sunni detainees had been tortured and starved. They said that Abu Karim Alwandi, the head of intelligence for the Badr Corps paramilitary, who presided over Jadiriyah, had to be held to the rule of law. Some placards angrily charged that Iraqis had been tortured on Iranian orders. This allegation comes about because the prison was in the charge of the Ministry of Interior, controlled by Bayan Jabr Sulagh, a prominent member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which had been based in Iran 1982-2003. Some placards accused the minister of being an American puppet. The crowds also demanded the release of detainees held by the US in Iraq.

The Shiites involved were likely followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, who have a rivalry with SCIRI and who have sometimes engaged in a politics of pan-Islam, hooking up with Sunni fundamentalists for anti-imperial purposes.
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Guerrillas Gather at Ramadi
US Riposte

Iraq has banned non-Iraqi Arabs from coming to Iraq in the build-up to the December 15 elections. I think they would have been better off banning all civilians of any nationality from coming in; this way of doing it smacks of racism.

Aljazeera is reporting, based on video released by guerrillas that the latter have taken over Ramadi and attacked US troops there. I saw on CNN International a rebuttal of this claim by Gen. Lynch, who alleged that the Zarqawi group is very good at propaganda and is obscuring what is really going on in Iraq. He said that on the day the videotape claimed there were several attacks on US positions around Ramadi, there was actually just one rocket propelled grenade attack on a US base.

My suspicion is that the truth lies in the middle. Gen. Lynch is correct that the guerrillas are not openly patrolling downtown Ramadi on a regular basis, as the videotape suggested. The Marines would just shoot them. But it is also the case that the US military is not in control of any major city in the Sunni Arab heartland, including Baghdad, and that behind the scenes and under the cover of darkness, guerrillas do plan and carry out attacks and exercise authority. Moreover, most of the guerrillas are not the foreign jihadis of the Zarqawi strike, but rather local ex-Baathists, tribal groups, Salafi fundamentalists, etc.

The US military is beginning a sweep in Ramadi. So much for Anbar's participation in the Dec. 15 elections.

The NYT gives an overview of the multi-headed, diverse groups making up the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement, suggesting that their very lack of a command structure is one of the secrets of their strength.

Given the proliferation of these small guerrilla groups, you wonder, "What would victory in Iraq look like?" I haven't heard Bush or any US general spell this out. But if the US is "staying the course" to achieve "victory," then the precise definition of "victory" has to be the philosophical starting point. Otherwise it is a case of the dog chasing his tail.

The US military said that suicide bombings fell to their lowest level in seven months in November and pointed to this statistic as a sign of progress in the war.

But November saw 87 US troops killed, among the highest death tolls for a 30-day period since the war began, and one wonders about the rate of severely wounded. Moreover, in one two-week period in November, bombers (suiciders or not) killed hundreds of Iraqis, spreading insecurity, fear and anger.

It raises the question of whether the guerrillas are depending more heavily on roadside bombs and remotely detonated bombs rather than on kamikazes. Whatever the case, the mere decline in the latter seems to have little or nothing to do with the level of security in the country, which is generally poor, and, indeed, among the worst of any country in the world.

Reuters reports on the poor equipment that still plagues the Iraqi military and makes it hard for it to establish control even of little villages from which guerrillas operate.

The Ukraine has begun the pull-out of its almost 1,000 troops from Iraq, with its security duties taken over by the Iraqi 3rd Infantry Brigade. The rest of the Ukrainians will be out by the end of 2005. It seems likely that the US will be virtually alone in Iraq as a foreign military power by mid-2006.

The case of Muriel Degauque, the poor Belgian Catholic girl who became a kamikaze in Iraq, has sent a chill through Europe. As I have argued before, the jihadi mindset is a cult-like ideology that is like software and can be installed in any mind. It is a set of plausibility structures, of premises that lead inexorably to killing oneself and others for some vague Cause. It is so insidious precisely because people inside the movement find the premises so compelling. It is not really anything to do with Islam per se, and most of the kamikazes don't know much about formal Islam. It isn't really any different than the Solar Temple Cult or other such self-destructive religious phenomena, except that the jihadis have become politicized and so kill themselves and others on the battlefield.
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Questions about Readiness of Iraqi Army
New US Assault

The strategy of the Bush administration in Iraq depends heavily on standing up battle-ready units of the new Iraqi army. The USA Today quotes experts on how unrealistic that plan is in the short to medium term.

I have heard from contacts in Iraq that the soldiers in the new army often don't get their paychecks, and aren't properly equipped, and sometimes are reduced to selling their bullets on the black market. Guess who buys them?

A further step in the break-up of Iraq: according to the LA Times, the Kurdish regional confederacy is giving a Norwegian oil company the right to develop new oil fields in its area without consulting the federal government in Baghdad. The Kurds and Norwegians maintain that this is legal according to the new Iraqi constitution, which devolves control over natural resources discovered in the future to the provinces or provincial confederacies. Next the Shiites in the South will do the same thing. Baghdad will be starved of these new revenue streams, and the provinces will have their own source of income. I don't see how the country stays together this way, or how the central goverment ever amounts to anything.

Reuters reports on severe Sunni-Shiite tensions deriving from political assassinations, even among Iraqis who are trying to forge electoral alliances across the sectarian divide.

The British government is investigating the trophy video that shows mercenaries in Iraq shooting at civilians on the roadway.

The US military has launched yet another operation in western Iraq, on the eve of the Dec. 15 parliamentary elections. The UN had asked the US to stop these operations, which disrupt Anbar province and make it difficult for people there to vote, until after the polls. Bush and Rumsfeld clearly just don't care about those concerns, and want to create the image that they are accomplishing something in Iraq. They will never pacify those little Sunni Arab towns over near Syria; all they can do is make people run away from them temporarily.
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Guest Editorial: Achcar & Shalom, on US Withdrawal


"Strategic Redeployment" vs. "Out Now"

Gilbert Achcar and Stephen R. Shalom

Whatever the limitations of Rep. Murtha's call to redeploy U.S. troops from Iraq that we have already emphasized ("On John Murtha's Position," ZNet, Nov. 21), he went much too far for most Democrats or for the Bush administration. Nevertheless, there have been others who have urged the redeploying of some of the U.S. forces in Iraq.

In October, Lawrence Korb and Brian Katulis, writing for the Center for American Progress, a liberal organization headed by Clinton's former chief of staff John Podesta, issued a report calling for what they termed "strategic redeployment." (Lawrence J. Korb and Brian Katulis, Strategic Redeployment: A Progressive Plan for Iraq and the Struggle Against Violent Extremists, Washington, DC: Center for American Progress, October 2005.)

Like Murtha, Korb and Katulis (who served in the Reagan and Clinton administrations, respectively) make telling observations. For example, they note that:

"most Iraqis do not want us there and they do not feel our presence makes them safer. One half says they support insurgent attacks on coalition forces and a majority says they feel less safe when foreign troops patrol their neighborhoods, according to polling of Iraqi citizens sponsored by the US government earlier this year."

They conclude, however, that what is needed is a "strategic redeployment," specifically rejecting "calls for an immediate and complete withdrawal." Under their proposal, during 2006, 46,000 national guard and reserves would be returned to the United States, 20,000 troops would be sent to other theaters (18,000 to Afghanistan, 1,000 to Southeast Asia, and 1,000 to Africa), and 14,000 troops would be stationed in Kuwait and off-shore in the Persian Gulf. The 60,000 U.S. troops remaining in Iraq would be redeployed away from urban areas to minimize inflaming Iraqi opinion. By the end of 2007, most of these troops would be withdrawn (to unspecified locations), leaving only "counterterrorist units."

"This presence, along with the forces in Kuwait and at sea in the Persian Gulf area will be sufficient to conduct strikes coordinated with Iraqi forces against any terrorist camps and enclaves that may emerge and deal with any major external threats to Iraq."
Some analysts (for example, Slate's Fred Kaplan) have suggested that Murtha got his plan from Korb and Katulis, though he speeds up their timetable and moves his entire residual force out of Iraq. But the same reasons given in our original essay for why the anti-war movement should avoid confusing Murtha's position with its own apply with even greater force to the Korb-Katulis position. Korb and Katulis wisely point out that to enhance U.S. security President Bush should announce that the United States "will not build permanent military bases in Iraq, counteracting arguments made in recruitment pitches by militants and Iraqi insurgents." But where are the U.S. counterterrorist units in Iraq going to be housed if not at bases? In any event, it's not just designs on military bases that need to be disavowed, but plans to dominate Iraqi oil too, which are proceeding apace. (See Greg Muttitt, Crude Designs: The Rip-Off of Iraq’s Oil Wealth, London: PLATFORM with Global Policy Forum, Institute for Policy Studies [New Internationalism Project], New Economics Foundation, Oil Change International and War on Want, November 2005.) And a two-year timetable is unacceptable. As we noted earlier, two to three months is plenty of time to remove all U.S. troops, if that is one’s genuine interest. Protracted “timetables” only make sense if one is trying to secure a continuing dominance over Iraqi politics and resources before leaving.
In the Washington Post of November 26, Joe Biden of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and an aspiring presidential candidate, wrote an oped column entitled "Time for An Iraq Timetable." Biden declared that in 2006 U.S. troops

"will begin to leave in large numbers. By the end of the year, we will have redeployed about 50,000. In 2007, a significant number of the remaining 100,000 will follow. A small force will stay behind -- in Iraq or across the border -- to strike at any concentration of terrorists."

Biden's language is interesting -- he doesn't quite call for this, but essentially predicts it. His prediction seems to be based on the fact that the Senate by a vote of 79-19 and over the objections of the White House adopted an amendment requiring the President to provide quarterly reports on the progress of U.S. policy and military operations in Iraq. (This vote took place after the Senate defeated a Democratic-sponsored amendment asking the president to prepare an estimated timetable for withdrawal from Iraq.) Given that the successful amendment has no teeth at all, it's hard to see why it presages much of anything.

Nevertheless, Biden's comment is consistent with various hints from the Bush administration itself. Obviously the Republicans don't want to go into the 2006 elections, let alone the 2008 elections with an increasingly unpopular and seemingly endless occupation of Iraq on display. In part this leads them to make optimistic comments about how soon Washington will be able to reduce the number of troops in Iraq (glossing over the fact that several thousand troops were added before the October 15 referendum, so a withdrawal of these would indicate no progress at all). During the Vietnam War there were countless optimistic predictions of when the troops would come home, only to have the president send more troops when the situation deteriorated further. And we've been hearing similar optimistic comments from the Bush administration for more than two years; for example, on October 19, 2003, the Washington Post reported on its front page:

"There are now 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. The plan to cut that number is well advanced.... and has been described in broad outline to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld but has not yet been approved by him. It would begin to draw down forces next spring, cutting the number of troops to fewer than 100,000 by next summer and then to 50,000 by mid-2005, officers involved in the planning said."

True, in 2003 Iraq was nowhere near the political liability for the Bush administration that it is now, so we shouldn't discount the prospect of a real policy shift. Clearly the Bush administration has scaled back its more grandiose goals in Iraq, but it's unlikely that it would choose to withdraw its forces without being confident that it could secure its more basic goal -- domination of the oil resources of the region -- unless, of course, this were made untenable. It is possible that the U.S. will fall back on a strategy of trying to replace its troops with air power, hoping that the reduction in U.S. casualties will make the war more palatable to the American public. In late August, the head of the air force told the New York Times that after any withdrawal of U.S. ground troops, "we will continue with a rotational presence of some type in that area more or less indefinitely," adding "We have interests in that part of the world...." (Eric Schmitt, "U.S. General Says Iraqis Will Need Longtime Support From Air Force," Aug. 30) To support these interests Washington is upgrading 16 different bases in the Middle East and Southwest Asia (New York Times, Sept. 18, 2005). According to Seymour Hersh in the Dec. 5 New Yorker, plans are being drawn up precisely to replace U.S. ground troops in Iraq with warplanes. Hersh reports that some Pentagon officials are worried about what it would mean to have Iraqis calling in bombing targets to the U.S. air force, but no matter who calls in the coordinates, white phosphorus, cluster munitions, and 500-pound bombs are not going to address the problem of the insurgency; indeed, they are going to generate more recruits for both the insurgency and terrorism.

For the anti-war movement, it is critical to insist on the complete withdrawal of U.S. and coalition forces, from Iraq and from the region, because retaining any of them -- whether counterinsurgency units ready to intervene or air power to level further Iraqi cities -- will violate Iraqi sovereignty and continue to fuel insurgency and hatred. And the anti-war movement must insist as well on immediate withdrawal, because the Bush administration itself will soon be talking of future drawdowns -- and indeed it already is.

We should bear in mind that the mere fact that the antiwar movement raises the "Out Now" slogan does not mean that U.S. forces are going to leave Iraq overnight. During the Vietnam War, a much more powerful movement than anything we have seen in the U.S. in the last few decades demanded that U.S. troops get "Out Now." This did not lead -- even when the U.S. power elite reached the conclusion that the war should be terminated -- to a "precipitous" withdrawal, but to a withdrawal that was completed only after the Paris Accords were concluded with the three main Vietnamese parties involved. Nevertheless, the pressure of the antiwar movement in the U.S. was decisive in compelling Washington to opt for this withdrawal.

The issue with "Out Now" is therefore not about the logistical details of withdrawal, but about how to be most effective in countering Washington's imperial aims. "Out Now" is a slogan around which one can build a large coalition of forces, from those who only care about "our boys" to those who care about the Iraqi people’s freedom, whereas any dilution of the "responsible exit strategy" kind -- aside from the fact that it would be extremely difficult even to agree on what the "conditions" for the withdrawal should be -- would only provide the Bush administration, along with pro-war Democrats, an argument for justifying the protracted presence of U.S. troops.

We are not calling for a "cut and run" withdrawal, abandoning Iraq to its fate (like in the "selfish" nationalist rhetoric of the isolationist Right). We are perfectly aware that, given what the United States has been doing in Iraq, tragically disrupting the situation in that country, if the U.S. troops were just to leave Iraq suddenly, say in 48 hours, without prior notice, that would definitely create a dangerous chaotic situation. But this is not what we are demanding. The demand for the immediate withdrawal of the troops is, first of all, a demand for an immediate political decision to withdraw the troops. Once the political decision is taken and proclaimed publicly, it becomes possible, in fact indispensable, to prepare the best conditions for its implementation in the shortest possible timeframe, while starting without delay to bring troops back home. To be sure, the modalities through which this should be completed in a way not to harm the Iraqi people must be worked out with their elected representatives.

If Washington were to make clear that it wants to complete the withdrawal of its troops within a timetable stretching over weeks, or very few months, this would provide a very powerful incentive for the Iraqis to reach an agreement among themselves on a way to run their country together peacefully and start to concentrate their efforts on the huge task of its reconstruction. The consensus reached at the recent Cairo conference is an important step in that direction and proves that it is perfectly possible, and much easier indeed, to reach such agreements when U.S. representatives are not there constantly interfering and calling the shots.

Finally, those who accuse the antiwar movement of wanting to "cut and run" and pretend that they care more for the interests of the Iraqis -- whereas most of them are actually worried about U.S. imperial interests -- would be better advised to demand that the U.S. respect Iraqi sovereignty over Iraqi natural resources and reconstruction. For our part, we believe that there is a moral obligation for the U.S. government to pay reparations to the Iraqi people for all that they have suffered as a consequence of U.S. criminal policies -- from the deliberate destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure in the 1991 war to the devastation brought by the present invasion and occupation, through the green light given to the Ba’athist regime to crush the mass insurrections of March 1991 and, above all, the murderous embargo inflicted on the Iraqi population from 1991 to 2003.

The withdrawal of U.S. and coalition forces, the end of U.S. economic domination, and the payment of reparations: this is the way to truly serve the principles of justice, as well as the best interests of the people of Iraq and the U.S. population.

-- November 28, 2005

Gilbert Achcar is the author of The Clash of Barbarisms and Eastern Cauldron, both published by Monthly Review Press. Stephen R. Shalom is on the editorial board of New Politics, and the author of Imperial Alibis (South End Press) and Which Side Are You On? An Introduction to Politics (Longman). This article was written for the journal New Politics as a postscript to their earlier article, "On John Murtha's Position," ZNet, Nov. 21.
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