Attacks on Businesses Multiply
Political Gridlock Continues
A US soldier was killed in Habbaniyah and another was shot dead south of Baghdad.
Guerrillas tried to kill the head of the Sunni Endowments Board and also an important banker, along with several other bombings and shootings.
Steven Hurst of AP argues that the tactics used in Iraq violence have abruptly changed , and gangs (whether guerrilla or criminal) are now targeting businesses (kidnapping employees, demanding ransom, and robbing payrolls). He writes,
' Also since the start of March, gunmen - mostly masked, many wearing police uniforms - have stormed at least six Baghdad businesses. On Wednesday, eight people were killed at the al-Ibtikar trading company when they were lined up against a wall and shot, and six others were wounded. At least 90 workers have been kidnapped and tens of thousands of dollars stolen in the five other assaults. '
The Daily Star has more on the attack at al-Ibtikar Co. and also reports on the Ministry of Displacement and Migration's announcement that 30,000 Iraqis have been displaced by the guerrilla war since Feb. 22. (I find this number implausibly high, and caution against the ease with which such things are exaggerated).
Ed Wong of the NYT gets the story, interviewing Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari, who objects to the intervention in the Iraqi political process of George W. Bush and defends his inclusion of Muqtada al-Sadr and his supporters in the political process.
Bush spokesman Scott McClellan has denied that Bush pressed Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Shiite religious coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, to drop Jaafari. Or he denied that Bush did it through a letter. You decide.
Mariam Karouny of Reuters interviews Minister of Interior Bayan Jabr, who claims he is cleaning up militia-affiliated elements in his special police commandos. Jabr, a member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, stands accused of allowing members of the Shiite paramilitary, the Badr Corps, to infiltrate the Ministry's national police. It is further alleged that these units have sometimes formed death squads to target Sunni Arabs. Jabr points out that a recent US raid on an Interior Ministry facility turns out to have been an embarrassing mistake. The officials arrested by US troops had to be released with an apology, and all that was found was Sudanese who had been picked up on visa violation charges. Someone alert Lou Dobbs.
Charles Levinson gives us the details and the people behind the numbers. We know from opinion polls that half of Iraqis think it is all right to attack US troops (more like 80 % among Sunni Arabs) and 72% of the US troops in Iraq believe the US military should get out of Iraq within a year. Levinson in Mosul quotes a US soldier: ' "I don't want to stay here too much longer. The Iraqi Army is getting to where they can get a hold of things now," says Clevenger. "The longer we're here and the more times they attack us, the more they're going to figure out how to better their attacks." ' And he quotes an Iraqi father whose house US troops have temporarily taken over: ' "What can I do?" he wonders. "We adapt and we survive and we give tea to our guests. But I would like an option beside the murderer Saddam Hussein or the lawlessness and humiliation of foreign occupation." '
Al-Hayat reports that there are 1,000 new recruits for the Iraqi army in Fallujah,a step toward a planned 4,000, with 400 officers. The pan-Arab London daily notes that all the recruits are from the local population and will serve locally, and charges that we are seeing the further Balkanization of the new Iraqi army. One does have to wonder if this Fallujah battalion will fight other Fallujans on behalf of a Shiite prime minister and a Kurdish president.
Al-Zaman says that the negotiations over a national unity government made little progress on Wednesday because of arguments over who will get the ministries of Interior and Defense.
Amr Moussa, Secretary General of the Arab League, called Wednesday for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, saying that they are part of the problem there. Moussa's call would be more credible if the Arab League was doing anything practical to help the Iraqis.
Riverbend reports at her Weblog that she saw this scroll across her television screen: “The Ministry of Defense requests that civilians do not comply with the orders of the army or police on nightly patrols unless they are accompanied by coalition forces working in that area.”
The message suggests a very serious power struggle behind the scenes between Minister of Defense Saadoun Dulaimi and Minister of the Interior Bayan Jabr, and between Iraqi and American security forces.
The radical Kurdish group Pejak in Iran killed 3 members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards on Wednesday. Iran has a substantial (mostly Sunni) Kurdish population that has long chafed under the rule of the Iranian ayatollahs, and may be taking some inspiration from the emergence of a semi-autonomous Kurdistan in northern Iraq.
Gen. Rahim Safavi of Iran hinted that the Iranians could close the Straits of Hormuz at the Persian Gulf if the US did anything to Tehran's nuclear energy research facilities. The mouth of the Persian Gulf is so narrow that a single sunken supertanker would effectively block it, provoking an oil crisis.
posted by Juan Cole @ 3/29/2006 11:30:00 PM
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9 Comments:
Quartering of US soldiers in Iraqi's homes? Didn't we throw a fit when the British did that in the 1700's? Sheesh, we already did our version of the Boston massacre on the Iraqis, what next?
Look at the US Bill of Rights, and see how it's been applied to Iraqis (This is off the top of my head):
First Amendment:
The US went after Muqtada Al-Sadr after he announced he supported Hamas
The US shut down newspapers like Al Hawza for not supporting the US occupation
The US hired and fired Iraqis based on religion, staffing the CPA and Interim governing council with affirmative action policies based on religion and ethnicity.
Second Amendment:
The US has arbitrarily limited the number of weapons Iraqi families may have, even though many Iraqis see a need for more weapons as self defense against guerilla attacks and kidnappings and robberies
Third:
The US has quartered soldiers in Iraqi people’s homes.
Fourth:
The US has arrested and detained people without warrants or judicial oversight
Eighth:
Abu Ghraib and current allegations of abuse by US and UK forces in Iraq.
“The Ministry of Defense requests that civilians do not comply with the orders of the army or police on nightly patrols unless they are accompanied by coalition forces working in that area.”
This actually signals the end of the US-style wholesale police raids on every house in large sections of the city.
The Americans have recently changed their strategy from killing all the baddies and using terror as a deterrent, which has failed miserably, to more brains and less violence.
The Iraqi security forces have similarly been the biggest cause of insecurity, and whether the criminals are wearing police uniforms or that the police are the criminals the result is the same.
In early 2005 the Baghdadis asked permission to have vigilantes and road blocks, which can work very well. The Bush-like moron who was made the Interior Minister told them to give him few week: he had a cunning plan involving 40,000 police. They quadrupled the violence since then.
There are some good signs now. Some areas are being allowed to have joint vigilante/army patrols and the latest announcement means that any unaccompanied police convoy will be reported and possibly attacked by the Army or the Americans.
The Interior Minister, who is an embarassing hooligan as well as an Iranian tool and a moron is virtually gone. And the Iraqi Army is taking over Baghdad bit by bit.
This is reassuring the Sunnis and bringing them round to supporting Jaafari. The Kurds will have to be left out, but they have their own government; army (4 different peshmergas!) budget; and police.
W thinks he can order even the laws of physics. The reality is that he is loosing everything he ask for, whether it is his sitting up and standing down or whatever is his latest word game is, or choosing the Iraqi or the Palestenian governemnts.
Here is a tip for James Baker: when you have a six year-old high on drugs driving a busload of people to their death, you do not give the little shit a strategy, you get him of the driving seat.
Hope everyone remembers Sy Hersh's reports on Israeli intelligence working with Kurds to penetrate Iran. If not, see for example
http://tinyurl.com/3ezfl
Isn't there casus belli floating around here somewhere?
Again, this morning, I heard NPR reporting on the problem of Iran's nuclear program, with no mention of the problem of Israel's nuclear program. The American media should frame this as building a nuclear-free middle east, not just a nuclear-free Iran.
Re: your doubt about the number of internally displaced Iraqis:
BBC is backing up the Ministry (excerpt from BBC Online )
'True figure higher'
Iraq's Ministry for Displacement and Migration estimates that almost 33,000 people have left their homes and the Swiss-based International Organisation for Migration (IOM) counts about 30,000.
However, the IOM said the true figure could be much higher because most people have moved in with relatives or friends.
"Iraq is at a very precarious point now and security is continuously deteriorating," said Dana Graber, an IOM officer in Amman.
"Until security is stabilised people will continue to be displaced due to sectarian violence."
Steven Hurst may be onto something. It sounds to me like the people at al-Ibtikar declined to pay somebody protection money. This is very worrisome as a govenrment security apparatus who really work for such criminal gangs will be worthless in fighting insurgents or building democracy or doing anything else that advances the situtation of the Iraqi citizens.
The broad shift in insurgent tactics detailed by your A.P. link (and how quickly this shift occured) indicates a subatantial degree of coordination and information sharing among cells and organizations.
Is Deterrence or Retaliation US Doctrine?
In all the kerfuffle over whether W., Zal, and the Senate Boyos really want Jafaari to step down as prime candidate for Prime Minister (a somewhat dubious proposition, as W. and the US installed J. as PM of the interim government, and what may he really have done to disappoint the US in the interim, pray tell?), is the question of what the current Iraqi government (or significant chunks thereof)has actually done or not.
One step someone is taking is retaliation--striking back at Sunnis on the same random basis as the US threatened the Soviet citizenry with for all those years so successfully. (Remember, "massive and immediate retaliation at times and places of our own choosing?") This threat to retaliate in kind was a key element in deterrence.
Sure, the Sunnis getting killed the past several weeks were not the Sunnis placing car bombs (assuming it was Sunnis doing that to begin with, a still moot point), but the Shiites going down to car bombs were just innocent bystanders as well. Just like all the "collateral damage" bodies buried every day pursuant to US attacks on "insurgents." Just like all the bystanders hit by bombers, aerial and surface, over the past seven decades.
So conceptually, why should the US be so disturbed if the Interior Ministry or the Sadr militias are suddenly striking back at Sunnis? In fact, their failure/reluctance/refusal to do so earlier was surely puzzling to many Americans. This same American attitude--that of course retaliation is both natural and on some level proper--is behind some of the US belief that "civil war" (which we inevitably code with correlations to our own late unpleasantness of 1861-65) is incipient in Iraq.
One could take things a step forward and ask -- hypothetically, of course -- whether the US-trained sections of the Ministry of the Interior, or other elements trained and clothed by elements of the USG, may not have been the mysterious MOI troops supposedly involved in attacks in recent weeks on Sunnis? Wouldn't this be moving history along its natural course?
One puzzling element of all these bodies piling up every morning around Iraq is that the bodies seem to be able to elude the myriad checkpoints that are otherwise so lethal to Iraqi citizenry. Somehow huge holes get dug and filled with bloody bodies, people get abducted, hideously tortured in what must be a noisy process, but nobody gets caught, nobody stops a pick-up truck or semi filled with fresh bodies. What are all those hundreds of thousand of trained men, aerial observers, sensor nets, observation posts, etc., etc. doing all night while the bodies are moving? Chugging beers after a long hard day?
Jes' wondering.
I don't see why everybody is acting so surprised about the "shift" - that's what you do when you want to fund a campaign. How do you think the IRA did it?
See here:
Horgan, John & Taylor, Max. "Playing the Green Card - Financing the Provisional IRA : Part 1" Terrorism and Political Violence Vol.11. No.2 (Summer 1999) pp 1-38. That's link to a PDF btw so you may prefer to do as "save target as."
With reference to the scroll on Riverbend's tv, doesn't it suggest much more than a power struggle? Isn't that warning saying "don't take orders" because the individuals could well be death-squads?
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