Muqtada Pledges Defense of Iran from US attack
Iranian FM calls for US Troop Withdrawal from Iraq
AP reports that guerrilla violence left dozens dead or wounded in Iraq over the weekend. The young men who attempted to volunteer for the Iraqi police force, kidnapped last week, turned up as two dozen corpses on Sunday.
Muqtada al-Sadr, visiting Iran, has pledged the support of his militia, the Mahdi Army, to Iran in case that country were attacked by the United States. The forces of the young Shiite nationalist fought US forces in April-May and again in August of 2004.
Wire services note the remarks of the Iranian foreign minister:
' "The American forces are there to dominate Iraqi interests," Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, who met the firebrand cleric, was quoted as saying by the official news agency IRNA. "The crisis existing in Iraq can be resolved with the departure of the occupying forces," the minister said. IRNA quoted Sadr as saying: "We are happy that ties between the Iranian and the Iraqi nations are developing every day and we always support the strengthening of Iraq's relations with all neighbours, especially the Islamic republic of Iran." '
Of course the Mahdi Army would attack the US if Washington falls upon Iran. But it should be noted that of all the major Shiite foces, the Sadrists are the least close to Iran. Al-Sadr's remarks must be seen as an attempt to gain support inside Iraq. He had earlier tended to cede the position of "Iran's best friend" to his coalition partner and sometimes rival, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Indeed, the Sadr movement activists have often complained about Iranian dominance of Shiism.
SCIRI's Badr Corps militia, it was alleged by Newsweek, is still on the Iranian payroll.
Any attack by the US or Israel on Iran's nuclear energy facilities would certainly bring massive crowds into the streets in protest in neihboring Iraq. The resulting violence and the attacks on US troops are not important demographically, but they could cost the Republican Party its majority in Congress, if the American public becomes alarmed that the US is losing (even more) control.
This Iraqi/Congressional factor is among the reasons I believe that the current hard line taken by the US against Tehran is mere saber rattling.
The LA Times reports on US hopes of convincing the Shiite religious parties to give up control of the ministry of the interior, on the grounds that they are too tied to sectarian militias. I am quoted, saying basically, 'and they would do that why, exactly?" They did win the election.
My interview with journalist Sarah Phelan is now online. I talk about the difficulties the US has had in Iraq.
Some of what I've been up to while I've been traveling is apparent in this article from UCLA on Jihadi recruitment and Zawahiri.
posted by Juan Cole @ 1/23/2006 06:30:00 AM
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Juan Cole is very interesting this morning. He rightly emphasizes that an Israeli or American attack on Iran would be disastrous for conditions in Iraq. The single most dreaded turn of events for the Republican strategy would be Shiite revolt. Al Sadr would be only one small part of it --Cole's point. The Bush strategy should be clear to everyone by now: to negotiate with the Kurds and Shiites contracts giving control over oil to American and Brit companies, to have interior (oil) ministers who are Bushes puppets, and to have permanent military bases so to keep control over Iraqi nationalism and any move to full independence. The Kurds and Shiites have tolerated the US presence because they believe they are using the US as a tool to obtain their independence and autonomy. This may work for the Kurds in the short run, but it will not work for the Shiites. The Shiites cannot rule with a strong US presence and they know it. Sooner or latter this conflict must come to a head; an attack on Iran would be explosive. I think Cole is over-estimating Washington's rationality if he thinks that they wont try it. Bush's people are anything but realistic! Why Cole persists in thinking that the US troop presence in Iraq or immediately on its borders prevents chaos is beyond me. As the Shiites say, they can handle their own affairs perfectly well. Coles' position smacks of racism even though Cole personally is as anti-racist as anyone can be.-- Citizen Joe
"This Iraqi/Congressional factor is among the reasons I believe that the current hard line taken by the US against Tehran is mere saber rattling."
The problem though is that this is a matter of political calculus which means that, while I suspect your analysis is right, I have no confidence in the GOPs ability to figure that out. They do seem particularly clueless about how to deal with the middle east, don't they?
I fear that they may have another "we'll be met with flowers" moment.
Sarah Phelan is my sister-in-law! She just told me at dinner Saturday that she had interviewed you. Her husband is my brother. What a small world.
Prof. Cole...did you see this item on Saturday?
11:06 Ankara. Foreign Trade Minister Kursad Tuzmen has announced that thirty-four Turkish suppliers have suspended deliveries of fuel to Iraq because an unpaid $1 billion bill.
Sophie Shihab of Le Monde has written two excellent analyses of the Kurdish game.
Ian Bremmer has written an analysis, "The Iraqi Government: A Potemkin Village" in Beirut's L'Orient-Le Jour. The flawed Iraqi Constitution pits the clay-footed central government against the regions, guaranteeing break-up and instability. [Links chez moi].
Really, you know that Bush is grasping at straws when he invites in the Arab League. They are desperate, desperate, desperate and are merely agressively raising the ante. The bluff will be called. And Cheney's bellicosity suggests he is not getting enough oxygen to the brain.
First, you say US posturing against Iran is mere saber rattling. That’s what I thought about invading Iraq chat. In the late 60’s and having studied SE Asia under an expert I thought no President would be dumb enough to invade Cambodia. Second, from a book review of Therborn’s history of the modern family, “Islam…may be less to blame for the resilience of Arab patriarchy than the corruption of the secular forces once opposed to it, abetted by America and Israel”. Seems this remark could cover more. The reaction to corruption and cruelty strengthens the worst elements. Keep up the good work sir.
Iraq? Don't Think Salvador in the ‘80s, Think Nicaragua -- With the U.S. Role Reversed
Bill Barnes
BarnesWAB@aol.com
May 2005
With the caveat that it makes little or no sense to talk about the intersection of elections and insurgency in the abstract or across widely disparate cases, because of the complexity of the historical sociology and political science involved, let me suggest that if there is an instructive parallel between contemporary Iraq and the Central America of the 1980s, it's not El Salvador but Nicaragua.
There are some parallels between the Iraqi and Salvadoran cases. It is interesting to note that the constant refrain of the Salvadoran right during the 1980s was that the FMLN was nothing more than "5000 terrorists" with no popular base, depending entirely on outside support from Nicaragua and Cuba. During the first eight months or so of the Iraq insurgency, the official Bush administration line was that the insurgency consisted of only "5000 terrorists" without a popular base, sustained by outside support from international Jihadist networks. While such depictions were wildly wrong in both cases, equally or more important is the fact that the two insurgencies, and the historical and structural contexts, are completely incommensurate. The only thing that is similar between the two situations is the ideology and practice of the two U.S. administrations involved, the disagreement of most of the rest of the world with that ideology and practice, and the fact that in the El Salvador of the 1980s, as in Iraq today, the most powerful institution in the country was the U.S. embassy.
Comparing the current Bush administration policy in Iraq with the application of the Reagan Doctrine in Central America circa 1982-87 is an excellent topic, but nobody is getting it right. The Bush administration and its apologists are flat wrong, but left critics aren't really getting it right either (and many on the "hard" or sectarian left are getting it very wrong), and they are wrong to dismiss out of hand everything that the "liberal hawks" say. This debate is a good vehicle for trying to get critique of the Bush/Neocon Middle East policy right, why the liberal hawk alternative is still wrong, and what a real center-left alternative might look like.
The idea that the Salvadoran experience showed that "elections suck the oxygen out of insurgency," and that might be a model for Iraq, put forward by Pentagon officials and NYT columnist David Brooks last September (focusing on the Salvadoran elections of 1982 and 1984), was and is simply wrong. More recently the Pentagon and some military commentators have claimed that U.S.-trained, advised, and equipped Salvadoran counter-insurgency brigades and commando teams effectively defeated the FMLN and "neutralized" much of its underground infrastructure during the mid-to-late 1980s, and, again, this could be a model for Iraq. I haven't seen anybody put these two discussions together, but in fact, the idea of combining elections and such counter-insurgency tactics, as two sides of the same coin, has been a mainstay of strategies of Third World interventionism for 40 years. What tends to be ignored by those who have advocated such strategy is the strict limits to the "democracy" achieved by such elections, the human costs and limited strategic success of such counter-insurgency tactics, and the major role in any broader and lasting peace-making and democratic success of factors that go unmentioned.
Some details on Salvador. At least (or particularly) with regard to the 1982 constituent assembly election, it was considered to be dangerous to fail to vote. Soldiers and police would frequently ask to see the identity documents on which certification of having voted was to be stamped, in a context in which the FDR- FMLN had called for a boycott of the election, and death squads linked to the army and the police were killing on the order of 800 people every month for suspected links to the FDR-FMLN. Defense Minister Garcia advised the public that failure to vote would constitute treason, while electoral authorities advised that abstention equaled "support for subversion." (Cites available) More generally, the 1982 election was not part of anything positive, rather it was part of the 1974-83 retreat from meaningful elections in the major urban areas (and continuing disallowance of meaningful competitive political activity in the countryside) and part of the right's finishing off the driving out of open politics of the real champions of electoral democracy, the center-left, whose last gasp was the short-lived 1979 Junta. The 1984 election of Napoleon Duarte as president was much closer to a free election, and did feature what was, for El Salvador, massive turnout. And death squad activity and human rights violations in general were well down from their peaks of the early 80s, largely due to U.S. pressure. But the Duarte regime and the Christian Democratic Party became moribund after 1985, ARENA came to the fore, human rights violations increased, the civilian "pacification" arm of the U.S.-designed counter-insurgency, "United to Reconstruct," was a failure, the FMLN adapted to the new counter-insurgency tactics, and a costly military stalemate ensued.
In El Salvador, an electoral regime became meaningful and began to play a positive role only very gradually and against the grain of the policies of the first Reagan administration. Such evolved out of the combination of (1) the work of elements of the Church, and in particular UCA's (the Jesuit-run university) Social Projection, Ignacio Martin-Baro's development of IUDOP (public opinion institute), his and (UCA head) Ignacio Elllacuria's appearances on Canal 12 television, their insistence that there could be no military victory for either side; (2) the impact on U.S. policy of the partnership between Congressional Democrats and the anti-intervention movement in the U.S. and the leverage that gave to the moderate professionals in the State Dept and AID against the Reaganauts (the hardcore Reaganauts, after Duarte's election and Reagan's reelection, took Nicaragua policy entirely for themselves while leaving Salvador largely to the moderates at State); (3) the Reagan administration's need to compete with and try to outshine the 1984 Nicaraguan election; (4) the unraveling of Iran-Contra, leading to some defanging of the Reagan Doctrine vis-a-vis Salvador (the Reagan Doctrine, parallel to current Bush/neocons, stood for the pipedream that military defeat of Third World "Communists" would lead automatically to the emergence and success of "democracy"); (5) Oscar Arias' work; (6) the profound delegitimation of the Salvadoran military by its 1989 murder of the UCA's Jesuit leadership, and the Bush administration's bowing to that delegitimation; (7) the shocking of the right by the strength of the FMLN's 1989 offensive; (8) the gradual revival of the center-left in Salvador at the end of the 80s and the gradual recognition by both ARENA and the FMLN that they should accept a growing role for such, the latter made possible (for both ARENA and the FMLN) by the fall of the Soviet bloc (9) the UN's massive and sustained presence and commitment to peace negotiations and processes, and the courageous service of prominent people in various truth and reconciliation commissions, and the Bush administration's willingness to countenance all that and lend some support, including to the purging and reduction of the Salvadoran military and security apparatus. It is impossible to imagine either the first Reagan administration, or the similarly deluded current Bush administration, behaving in a parallel manner.
There are no functional equivalents to most of these things at the present moment re Iraq. And of course it took a full ten years (1984 to 1994) in Salvador to get to elections that were beginning to be what passes for free and honest, and elections continued to have low participation (35-40% of the voting age population) for another 10 years. Something that is parallel between the two cases is that in both El Salvador and Iraq, a highly centralized and militarized government had profoundly suppressed civil society, except for religious leaders and groups, who were killed if they became too political, but otherwise allowed to survive and maintain their institutions. But in Salvador the Church/the religious were split only along left/center/right lines, and the most powerful institutional presence, UCA and the Archbishop, were superhumanly committed to what amounted to center-left, pro-democracy, anti-militaristic positions. In Iraq, religious leaders and groups are much more highly fragmented in much more sectarian ways (compounded by profound geographical and ethnic splits, non-existent in El Salvador), neither they nor their cadre having experience with elections or democracy; many are pro-insurgency; many are only conditionally anti-insurgency (in Salvador the cadre and leaders of Christian Democracy and Liberation Theology had a good deal of experience with elections from the 1960s and 70s). Is there any potential for Sistani to play a role parallel to Ellacuria and Martin-Baro in Salvador?
Now lets consider the parallels between Iraq and Nicaragua. In earlier times, the U.S. government had supported the regimes of authoritarian, quasi-fascist caudillos in both countries (the Somozas in Nicaragua ans Saddam Hussein in Iraq). The manner in which those regimes were overthrown, and the character and initial strength of the new regimes, were of course very different. But after that, all we have to do is flip the U.S. role and we get some striking parallels. The FSLN regime in Nicaragua, and at least some elements among its foreign partners (the Soviet bloc and Cuba), thought the Sandinista revolution could be a model for the "democratic" overthrow of traditional authoritarian regimes throughout Latin America (the liberal middle class elements of the anti-Somoza coalition thought they were achieving something else --Costa Rica). The Bush administration, sponsor of the new Iraqi government, thinks the Iraqi "democratic revolution" can have a massive demonstration effect leading to the "democratization" of authoritarian regimes throughout the Middle East (Shi'a political parties and clerics think they are achieving something else -- a very different vision, with which liberals are quite uncomfortable, as liberals were uncomfortable with the Leninist version of Sandinismo). In the Nicaraguan case, Argentine, Guatemalan, and U.S. right-wing extremists were determined to prevent any such exemplary success of the Sandinista revolution and started organizing the remnants of the Somoza National Guard and security services, with some help from neighboring Honduras, to launch terrorist attacks in Nicaragua. Elements of the first Reagan administration, in the CIA and the National Security Counsel in particular, increasingly funded and helped organize those anti-Sandinista efforts. All of this bears some comparison to the outside help the Iraqi insurgency is getting from foreign Islamic jihadists and from some Baathist elements in Syria.
In Nicaragua, by 1983, the Contra insurgency was becoming much bigger and obtaining both some broader support among elements of the earlier anti-Somoza coalition, and concentrated bases of support among the traditionalistic middle peasantry of the northern mountains and the indigenous population of the isolated Atlantic coast (unlike El Salvador, Nicaragua has some important geographical and ethnic divisions, though not on the scale of Iraq). This happened, I would argue, largely because the top leadership of the FSLN regime, and of the security services and army in particular, and much of their leading cadre, were unfamiliar with the people of the mountains and the Atlantic Coast, and were ideological in a way that rendered them quite obtuse about distinguishing between opponents who deserved to be treated as "terrorists" and deadly enemies and those who didn't. In Iraq, U.S. commanders, troops, administrators and their Iraqi clients are guilty of exactly the same kind of obtuseness, with exactly the same kind of results (this also was the case in El Salvador - much of the FMLN base and armed fighters were people whose family members had been killed by Salvadoran army and security personnel - though in Salvador, as in Guatemala and Argentina, the security forces, beyond obtuse, added a particularly large dose of fascist blood-thirstiness).
In Nicaragua in 1984, the Sandinistas held an election that they hoped would suck the oxygen out of the Contra insurgency. An important chunk of the anti-Sandinista opposition, at Reagan administration insistence, refused to participate, just like the Sunnis in 2005 Iraq (and like many Sunnis today, they came to regret that abstentionism). For the majority of Nicaraguans, the 1984 election was an inspiring and hopeful exercise in democracy, but for several important minorities, it was a sham. The FSLN leadership made some genuine efforts to draw segments of these minorities, along with the "participating opposition," into their new political system, the new parliamentary politics, and the writing of the new constitution (and the degree to which this was genuine vrs cynical cooptation varied greatly among different elements of the Sandinista leadership and regime). Again parallel to Iraq at the moment. But while part of the FSLN regime was genuinely devoted to developing democratic dialogue and competition with the "participating opposition," the top FSLN leadership and the security services and army remained obtuse in the sense referenced above. From 1985 to the 1988 Sapoa cease-fire, the FSLN increasingly defeated the Contra militarily, while increasingly losing the respect of larger and larger minorities of the population, in large part because of government administrative failures, inability to alleviate the increasing material hardships of on-going war (an impossible task given U.S. policy -- not nearly as destructive as the impact of Iraqi insurgents on Iraqi security and infrastructure, but still somewhat parallel) and the simultaneous corruption of many government ministries, turned into fiefdoms by particular leadership cliques (the same is reported to be happening now in Iraqi ministries). Many Sandinistas knew all this, and fragmented efforts at correction were made, but in their 1989-90 election campaign, they resumed being obtuse in spades.
The best example of a single election sucking the oxygen out of an insurgency would be Nicaragua 1990, sucking the oxygen out of the Contra insurgency — But only because that insurgency was so highly dependent on an outside sponsor, the U.S., and that sponsor had changed its policy during 1987-88 to favor elections and compromise over continuing insurgency, whereas the Reagan administration's policy had previously been the reverse (the 1984 election had no effect on the Contra insurgency because the Reagan Administration didn't want it to). Real elections, establishing real reformist government during the decade before 1979 might have sucked the oxygen out of the Sandinista insurgency, and real elections establishing real reformist government in El Salvador during the 1970s might have forestalled full insurgency there (as might the survival and reformist evolution of Luis Somoza in mid-60s Nicaragua, or the survival of Arbenz in Guatemala). But the U.S. government refused to support such developments in either country, because, in the Cold war context, the U.S. government (Republican Party and right in general) regarded suppressing the left as a higher priority, trumping any local reality. U.S. support for a form of electoral politics constituting a genuine recognition and acceptance of democracy and the center-left was not in the cards as long as the Cold War was in effect. And such is not in the cards now because of the hegemony of the Republican right and the Neocons.
One bottom line: Even when "well-intentioned," rightist U.S. policy-makers, civilian and uniformed Pentagon leadership and their allied think-tank intellectuals, and CIA/Special Forces cadre -- like Leninist leaders and cadre -- can never be trusted to distinguish on their own (i.e. without being embedded in and regulated by a system of broad "multi-partisan" professional deliberation and democratic accountability) between, on one hand, criminals and those who deserve the label "terrorist," who deserve whatever they get, and, on the other hand, other kinds of political opponents. Once you give CIA/Special Forces cadre and their indigenous protegees legitimacy, and relative freedom of action, they end up doing a lot that -- even by the policy- makers' own announced standards -- is both counter-productive and unconscionable, i.e. committing atrocities, killing the wrong people, producing substantial avoidable collateral damage, engaging in or countenancing torture and all kinds of human rights violations, getting diverted into private vendettas, power games, corruption and gangsterism -- alienating the hearts and minds they claim they're trying to win. Prone to obtuse homogenization of opponents, guilt by association, willingness to treat collateral damages cavalierly, obtuse about side-effects and unintended consequences (Vietnam Phoenix program). Counterinsurgency as a form of "seeing like a state" (Jim Scott). The Leninist elements of the FSLN of the 1980s were characterized by a degree of the same kind of thing, but more constrained by their need to maintain leadership over the rest of the Sandinista movement and sustain a good image with foreign allies and public opinion - as the Salvadoran military became constrained during 1983-85 and after its murder of the Jesuits in 1989 (though parts of the Salvadoran military and security apparatus were far more bloodthirsty than anyone among the Sandinistas).
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It seems to me likely that at least over the next few years, the new Iraqi government will duplicate many of the faults of the Sandinista government of the years after the 1984 Nicaraguan election--and probably few of its virtues. This is probably the best we can hope for. Equally likely is either full civil war and the breakup of the country, or a quasi-Leninist Shi'a theocracy. The liberal middle class (and its U.S. sponsors), as in early ‘80s Nicaragua, will be left feeling that once again they've been robbed of their birthright and their country taken off on a pathological detour - except possibly for the Kurds if they are able to move toward viable autonomy.
But the single most impressive datum about Iraq is how little anybody, including the Iraqis, knows for sure about the situation as a whole and its dynamics. The fumbling in the dark goes way beyond two blind men feeling different ends of one elephant, and these blind men are wielding deadly weapons and calling in air strikes. It amazes me that anyone would be making any confident predictions about the future at any point over the last three years, or now. I think it might have made a difference if the U.S. had done things very differently from the very beginning, but we're way past that now.
Iraq is a complex country, weakly institutionalized above the level of local tribe and mosque, highly fractious and volatile once the lid was blasted off, with strong situational incentives to self-help, anti-social survival strategies, and criminality. There is some strong, generalized ethnic and religious cultural coherence (but with some internal divisions), but no thick, crystallized national political culture; what political culture there is is full of various forms of ambivalence, uncertainty, mixed feelings. There is no hegemony - never has been at the national level, though such may have "momentarily" seemed emergent at a few points in prior history.
At no point in history has it ever been valid to treat the population residing in the geographical area now called Iraq as characterized by a public opinion or a political culture that is "squarely" anything (beyond influenced by Islam) -- there is not now and never has been any such thing as a crystallized, coherent, thick national political culture covering that population -- nor is the emergence of anything like that on the horizon - though a facsimile will undoubtedly be made up via spin-machines (mis)using polling results. And that in itself is by no means insignificant - carried on long enough, it begins to become real. But still society is riven with "hidden transcripts" (and half-hidden and subordinated and marginalized and ...) in Jim Scott's sense.
All of this makes it very difficult for any outsider (or anyone "standing" at the "center" - at any putative "center" - in Edward Shils' sense) to "read" the overall situation, and impossible to predict the future. The U.S. military leadership cadre on the ground in Iraq have a strong vested interest in accurately reading the local reality in their immediate vicinity. But they do not have the kind of political/cultural education necessary to success. They're learning on the job (and then they're rotated out), and the strategic and policy decisions made in the Green Zone and in Washington are constantly making their job more difficult. The Bush administration and its foreign policy/national security intellectuals are particularly unable to provide the necessary political leadership/education, particularly disinterested in and/or incapable of close attention to complex, ambiguous realities, unable to learn from their history of failure. Their "seeing like a state" (Jim Scott) is informed (and deformed) by a "moral clarity" that comes out of a particularly simple-minded reading of modernization theory and American exceptionalism (shaped in part by the political requirements of a Republican party come to be dependent on anti-intellectual Christian fundamentalism — a combination of corrupted Leo Strauss and corrupted Lewis Hartz, about which they would both be embarrassed).
At some point there ought to be a world wide declaration stating who can have nuclear weapons and who cannot.
India and Pakistan are ok since they would only use them against each other.
The UK is ok because they share a common language with the US. Presumably New Zealand, Australia, and Canada would be ok for the same reason.
The US, Russia and China are ok because they are superpowers, and all superpowers are ok.
Israel is ok because none of their enemies have nukes. So they couldn't possibly use them. Besides,Israel is permanently engaged in the peace process.
France is never ok but its too late now.
Iran is not ok because Israel the US would really like to do that country some harm (must be something we picked up from Saddam), but if they had nukes we'd have to leave them alone.
North Korea is not ok because because the US would like to do them some harm, but would hesitate if they had nukes. We haven't fought North Korea for 53 years, not long enough to work out some diplomatic accomodation.
I've read the account of your conference in UCLA with interest. However I think that your explanation of Islamism radicalism/fundamentalism relies too much on the sociology of religion and misses an important part of the problem (if the account given really reflects what you said/think). There is also a political and economic component explaining the development of islam radicalism. It is rooted in the idea that Western capitalism isn't the solution of all problems, that, on the contrary, it results in an undue exploitation of the other developing countries, including ME countries. These movements are also reflecting a quest for their cultural identity. These trends are particularly visible in the Arab movements emerging in the EU; the young men arrested in Italy after the second failed bombings of London were clearly not only pushed by religious motives. Also, reducing these movements to their religious aspect is more or less going in the same direction as Hutington and it's theory of the clash of civilization. Then the only difference you expressed is that these movements aren't dominant in their respective societies, but only represent a very small fraction of activits.
If that is a sign, on Saturday, the biggest bank corporation of Switzerland (UBS) declared that she was stopping all her activities and closing down in both Iran and Syria.
The second biggest one (Credit Suisse) said first that she couldn't stop her activities for the next day, because she still had contracts going on with clients in the import/export business. But to-day (Monday) she declared she was closing down as well, because the situation was getting too risky.
(Mmm what did they fear ? Targetted bombing by US or Israel and military escalation ? or economic retorsion, like the nationalization/confiscation of Western assets by the Iranian government ? )
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