Informed Comment

30 Dead in Baqubah Battles
Shiites Seek to Keep Interior

A battle between 100 guerrillas and Iraqi army forces in Baqubah (northeast of Baghdad) on Thursday left 30 persons dead, with casualties on both sides. Local Iraqi forces spoke of a guerrilla force as big as 500! It is unusual for guerrillas to field such a comparatively large force. Local Iraqis also said that US forces came in to aid them when called on. You have a sense that if the US troops weren’t around to be called on, Baqubah would pretty quickly fall to the guerrillas altogether. I suspect the guerrillas were mostly Iraqi, not foreign jihadis.

Guerrillas used a roadside bomb to kill a US soldier late Thursday

Guerrillas also killed 3 Italian troops and a Romanian, putting pressure on the new Italian PM to accelerate the withdrawal of Italian troops from Iraq.

Historian Alfred McCoy considers Abu Ghraib and torture as official US policy at the Amnesty International site.

The direct cost of the Iraq War is now $320 billion and rapidly climbing. Some economists think it will reach $1 trillion, i.e. a million million.

Senator Russ Feingold will introduce a bill calling for US troops to be out of Iraq by the end of this year. They should be gotten out sooner if possible.

The Middle East Policy Forum has a discussion up of whether there is a responsible exit from the Iraq quagmire.

Turkey is deploying its military on the Iraqi border, to face down what Ankara sees as the threat of thousands of radical PKK Kurdish separatists taking refuge over the border in Iraq. It is also trying to snuff out renewed PKK activism in eastern Anatolia itself.

AP points out that the formation of a government in spring of 2005 did not spell an end to violence in Iraq. There is no reason to expect that Maliki’s cabinet will halt it, either, though this suggestion is continually made by various officials of both the US and Iraqi governments. The guerrilla movement doesn’t want the new government there, and its formation will simply be an incentive to attack more.

KarbalaNews.net reports that Prime Minister-designate Nouri (“Jawad”) al-Maliki said in an Iraqi television interview that the key ministries of defense and interior will probably go to independents not affiliated with any specific political party. The major blocs themselves support this step. The minister might be from one of the broad blocs, but should not have a record as a specific partisan, and should be unconnected to any militia group. It should be pointed out that the minister of defense in the outgoing government was an independent, Saadoun Dulaimi– a Sunni Arab intellectual. But Interior was dominated by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the minister allowed members of its Badr Corps militia to be recruited into the special police commando units of the ministry.

Al-Maliki said that his predecessor, Ibrahim Jaafari, had suffered from often having ministers who represented their party or ethnicity rather than the interests of the ministry. Ministries in the past three years have been governed on a spoils system, such that the party in control packed them with employees from that party. Al-Maliki said that he would not tolerate the use of a ministry as spoils for a particular party and will fire any minister that tries it.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat of London on the other hand says that Kurdish MP Fuad Masoum revealed that the ministry of the interior had been offered by al-Maliki to the Kurds in return for their giving up the foreign ministry. He said that the Kurds, however, declined, viewing Interior (sort of like the US Dept. of Homeland Security plus FBI) as a headache they did not want. He said the Kurds feared being accused of recruiting into the special police commandos members of the peshmerga militia. He also said that Interior is a mess, such that if the Kurds came in and reformed it, they would meet substantial resistance, but if they did not, they would be roundly criticized. He said they would have nothing to do with it. He said that the United Iraqi Alliance (Shiite religious parties) refused to relinquish the ministry of petroleum.

MP Rida Jawad Taqi, of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, told the paper that SCIRI might retain the ministry of the interior if the Iraqi Accord Front (fundamentalist Sunni) managed to get the ministry of defense, as an offset. He admitted that the ministers of defense and interior would have to be approved by all the major political blocs, as well as by the Americans.

Al-Hayat reports that 93 relatives of prominent Sunni politicians cooperating with the new political order have been assassinated during the past year. The sister of Iraqi Islamic Party leader Tariq al-Hashimi is only the most recent. Of course, relatives of politicians from other ethnic groups have also been killed in some numbers. The Sunnis are darkly hinting that the killing of their relatives is supported by a “regional power” (Iran) that has an interest in spreading ethnic unrest in Iraq. This charge is frankly ridiculous. Sunni Arab member of the Association of Muslim Scholars, Isam al-Rawi, accused al-Qaeda and Baath remnants of being behind the killings of Sunni Arab politicians and their families as punishment for coooperating with the new regime. He said some deaths were the work of rival non-Sunni militias. Al-Rawi is an honest man, far more honest than those who go all the way to Tehran to find a scapegoat. Most Sunni Arab politicians have reverted to depending heavily on kin members as bodyguards, since they trust them.

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Petition to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations

(I’ve set up a new petition site at http://www.thepetitionsite.com/
takeaction/875967959 because the first one was overwhelmed with trolls.) The troll attack will have confused a lot of potential signers. Please circulate the URL of this posting, i.e. http://www.juancole.com/2006/04/
petition-to-conference-of-presidents.html to academic friends and urge them to sign. I can throw off the fake names easily at the new site, and no one can be signed up fraudently because they get an email to the address entered. One troll technique is to invent plausible-sounding false entries that are actually e.g. porn authors. I think I have caught all these but would appreciate some readers vetting the signing list via google for authenticity in case I miss something.

I must require some kind of academic affiliation to leave your name up, even if it is a past or informal one (please state that). Let us redouble our efforts; obviously someone is very afraid that we will demonstrate that most American professors stand against these tactics. I have preserved as many names as possible from the first petition below, and they are already an important witness. If you are listed here, no need to re-sign.

I’m glad to do press interviews about the petition. Note that it has already garnered hundreds of academic supporters from across the US, and I think it is the first time the academic world has petitioned the Conference of PMAJO on such an issue.

I’m starting a petition drive for college and university teachers to defend John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt from baseless charges of anti-Semitism. I apologize for limiting the petition base this way, but others are welcome to create other petitions that anyone can sign. I feel it is time for teachers in higher education to stand up and be counted on this issue of the chilling of academic inquiry through character assassination. At a time when the use of congressional funding to universities to limit and shape curricula and research is openly advocated, all of us academics are on the line. And if scholars so eminent as Mearsheimer and Walt can be cavalierly smeared, then what would happen to others?

To: Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations

We note with dismay that when eminent political scientists John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard published their “The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy” in the London Review of Books, they were subjected to a barrage of ad hominem attacks. In particular, they were smeared as “anti-Semites”. This epithet was hurled at them by the Anti-Defamation League, Eliot A. Cohen, Alan Dershowitz, Representative Eliot Engel, Richard L. Cravatts, and many others.

Merriam-Webster gives the following definition of anti-Semitism:

an•ti-Sem•i•tism
Function: noun
: hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group

We protest the character assassination of eminent American academics, firm supporters of civil rights for all, as racist bigots for their academic analysis of the domestic dimension of US foreign policy. No paper about other ethnic lobbies’ impact on foreign policy (e.g. Cuban-Americans, Irish-Americans or Armenian-Americans) would have elicited such over-heated and patently unfair charges of racism.

We fear that the real motive in the brandishing of the serious charge of “anti-Semitism” so readily at any discussion of the US relationship with Israel is an attempt to chill public debate and to discourage the critical evaluation of American Middle East policy and of Israeli policy in the region. Such a misuse of the word “anti-Semitic” is profoundly anti-democratic. Democracy requires free public debate of all issues affecting the public weal.

We deeply fear that this practice is becoming a form of “crying wolf,” and that the force of the term “anti-Semite” is being rapidly eroded as a matter of moral sensibility. True anti-Semitism does exist and is an evil. Let us vigilantly combat it rather than mischaracterizing academic papers.

We also fear that an impression is being created that elements in the American Jewish community are hostile to academic freedom of speech and inquiry, and are hostile even to the first amendment of the US constitution. As admirers of the historic role the American Jewish community has played in furthering civil liberties in the United States, we are concerned and saddened at this development.

We call upon the Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations forthrightly to condemn the smearing of Professors Mearsheimer and Walt, and of other academics who subject Middle East policy issues to critical inquiry, as “anti-Semites.”

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

Name Affiliation (for Identification Purposes Only) Comments

Andrew J. Zweifler, Professor Emeritus of Internal Medicine, University of Michigan
Robert D. Acland, Professor, University of Louisville School of Medicine
Andrew Arato, New School University
273Philip E. Converse, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of Michigan, Director Emeritus, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford,

Thomas Richardson, Dept. of Mathematics, Western Michigan Univ., 1992-1999
Robert Asher University of Connecticut, Professor of History Emeritus
Barry Wilson University of Northern Iowa
Francis Mlynarczyk Adjunct Assistant Professor, New York University, 1969-1970; Instructor, Purdue Univesity, 1965-1968
John George ERAU,retired.
Richard Needleman Wayne State University School of Medicine
Scott Erb Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Maine Farmington
Andrew Slade Philosophy, University of Dayton
Shelley Baranowski University of Akron
Alex Stein www.falsedichotomies.com
Joanne Aboud McGahagan Instructor, Humanities Division, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown
Carmen Brissette Grayson retired prof. of history, Hampton University, Hampton, Virginia
Thorne Anderson Former Adjunct Professor, American University in Bulgaria
laura camille agoston dept of art and art history trinity university
Daniel Tompkins Temple University
Robert Daniels Professor of Accounting San Francisco State University
Michael Munk retired-last taught at Rutgers
brant hinrichs Drury University
Steven M. Zielke Oregon State University
James Bratt Dept of History Calvin College
Jason Hodin Stanford University
To quote Mearsheimer and Walt: “Silencing sceptics by organising blacklists and boycotts – or by suggesting that critics are anti-semites – violates the principle of open debate on which democracy depends.” Here in the USA we saw a parallel situation in that any criticism of Bush’s belligerence in the wake of 9/11 was labeled “unpatriotic.” We will be dealing with the consequences of such undemocratic responses for years to come. In the meantime, countless innocents suffer.

Michael Byron San Diego Mesa College, San Diego, CA
250Ann El Khoury Macquarie Uiversity
Sean Lee l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
frank Belcastro Frank P. Belcastro, retired, University of Dubuque. Reckless charges tend to chill academic inquiry which retards the acquisition of knowledge.
Sandy Polishuk formerly Portland State University
Dominic Holland UCSD Neuroscience
Joshua Cole Department of History, University of Michigan
Dino Feldman engineer
Michael Martini Franklin Pierce College
Faheem Khan Graduate Student. Civil Engineering Wayne State University.MI
L. G. Moses Department of History Oklahoma State University Stillwater, OK
David Shibley – Santa Monica College, CA
Felipe Gómez G., Post-Doctoral Fellow, Spanish Department, The University of Michigan
Chuck Van Wey former instructor New Mexico State University
Edwin Duncan, Towson University
Chuck Blackledge, Department of Physics, Oklahoma State University
Alan Balboni, Ph.D., Professor , Community College of Southern Nevada.
Gregory B. Stone, Louisiana State University
Mark D. Higbee, History, Eastern Michigan University
Geoffrey Wong ICP
Shawn Oakley Columbia Law School
David Jonah Mathematics Department, Wayne State University
James Goldfarb Devine Loyola Marymount University
Josh Buermann Chicago, IL
Jeffrey Rudolph Marianopolis College The issue isn’t whether the authors are right or wrong, pro- or anti-Israel, etc. The issue is their freedom to express an opinion; especially an unpopular opinion. Perhaps there is a clash of civilizations between those who support liberal freedoms and those who don’t.

Moses Seenarine Former Adjunct Assistant Professor, Hunter College, CUNY
Stacy Haldi US Naval War College, CDE
Stephen Philion St. Cloud State University, Sociology
Kenneth Miller Columbia University
Dr. Sam Noumoff McGill Universiy
Rudi H. & Laureen Nussbaum Portland State University
J B Meilands Prof Emeritus Biochem UCB
Peter Meyer Filardo Tamiment Library, NYU
Merrill Ring California State University, Fullerton
Carolyn Eisenberg Hofstra University
Gary Murrell Grays Harbor College
Douglas Sloan Teachers College, Columbia University
Michael McIntyre DePaul University
Richard C Thomson retired
Brice Harris Occidental College
Joanna Picciotto UC Berkeley English
Martin Love Durham Academy, Durham, NC
Victor Wallis Berklee College of Music
Stephen Fox Emeritus Professor of History, Humboldt State University
Mary C Wilson University of Massachusetts Amherst
Claude Garrod Emeritus Professor of Physics, UC, Davis It’s a very dangerous although tempting tactic to recklessly use charges of anti-semitism

Matthew Kester Brigham Young University Hawaii
Sally Guttmacher New York University
Christopher Turner University of Iowa Its about time that the American People realize who is asking for your children and money to fight in the Middle East to protect Israel!

William T Burke Professor Law Emeritus
200 Beth Cleary Macalester College, Theater Department
Douglas Anderson Southwest Minnesota State University
Mark Crispin Miller New York University
Bertell Ollman Dept of Politics, NYU
Peter Z McKay University of Florida
Wendy Kaufmyn City College of San Francisco
Noor V Gillani University of Alabama in Huntsville
Brian Palenik UCSD
Dr Andrew Strycharski University of Miami
Wythe Holt University of Alabama (emeritus)
John F Ronan Valdosta State University
Michael Nash New York University
Adele Kubein Oregon State University
Olaf Berwald University of Tennessee
Roger Beck University of Toronto
Albert Krauss Dartmouth College, BA; San Francisco State College Language Arts postgraduate studies This preposterous, opportunistic and politicized bugbear is being evoked shamelessly Please help to expose its baselessness

John Melby Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Jack Draper University of Missouri, Columbia Mearsheimer and Walt’s excellent article in the LRB was written precisely to expose this kind of attempt to stifle open debate about Israel’s place in US Middle East policy Let’s rely upon the power of open debate and the exchange of new ideas to reduce violence in that region , rather than the power of fear of being unjustly labeled a bigot to stifle debate and maintain the status quo

F Gregory Gause, III University of Vermont
William W Hansen Professor of International and Comparative Politics, ABTI American University of Nigeria, Yola, Nigeria
Frank Connolly Professor of Mathematics, University of Notre Dame
Peter Rachleff History Department, Macalester College I am an American Jew and these organizations do not speak for me on this issue

Ceasar Albert Retired
Protecting against anti-semitism is of the utmost importance, but it should not result in the suppression of academic investigation.

Hardy Bryan Catholic University, MA student in World Politics I never thought I would defend Stephen Walt or John Mearsheimer. The need for this petition is outrageous.

Christopher A. Fox Newman University, Wichita, KS As an academic and an American who is proud of his Jewish roots, I believe that those who seek the truth must be allowed to do so, wherever it leads and whoever it affronts.

Ben Piggot University of Washington
Deborah A. Gordon Women’s Studies, Wichita State University
Yoram Gelman Lehman College, City University of New York
Richard A Shook FCCOL
Herman DE LEY Ghent University (Belgium)
Matthew Abraham University of Tennessee at Knoxville In the Name of Academic Freedom

Nabil Al-Tikriti University of Mary Washington
Benjamin Mini History instructor, Waynflete School, Portland, Maine
Cynthia L Meredith University of Texas at San Antonio
Stephen Day independent researcher
Dr Sadu Nanjundiah Central Connecticut State University It is time to challenge the McCarthyite type tactics of the Israeli lobby which tries to smear every critic of Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people with the taint of “anti-Semitism”, thereby squelching discussion on the appalling treatment of Palestinians by Israel and denying them their just aspirations to freedom with justice

Kristin Kopp University of Missouri, Columbia
Victor L Tomseth Retired foreign service officer and former ambassadorIn -plus years working on US national security and foreign policy I saw at close range the power of the Lobby to stifle honest debate of the relationship of Israel to US policy interests A public discussion of the this important issue is long overdue

Andrew McLennan University of Sydney Economics
John S Williams Professor Emeritus, U of the Pacific
Rosemary Sayigh (dr) visiting professor, Birzeit University
Lynne Knight Contra Costa College
Grace Said Washington Interfaith Alliance for Middle East Peace
Richard DiMatteo Retired-Phi Beta Alpha The very need for this petition speaks volumes about the validity of the issue
Jane H Hill University of Arizona Department of Anthropology
Terry Walz Council for the National Interest Foundation
Steve Cormier PhD Albuquerque Technical-Vocational Institute
Helmy Y Mostafa Boston University
Karol M Morphew Arapahoe Community College (Ret)
William T Lynch Wayne State University
150George Bisharat Hastings College of the Law
Richard Mulliken, PhD Fordham University (ret)
John Mineka Lehman College, CUNY
Denis A White University of Toledo
Kevin Fulton University of Texas at Austin Go back home!
Irene Padavic Florida State University
Stewart Grant University of Alaska Anchorage, Anchorage, Alaska The local jewish community was especially vicious in shutting down a performance of a local author’s play about Corrie Rachel

Naseer Aruri Professor Emeritus, Unversity of Massachusetts Dartmouth Terri Ney Reading Area Community College
Stephan Cohen Assistant Professor, Lesley University I support an open dialogue and I state this as an American Jew

Vicente Sanchez East Los Angeles College
Kathryn Vestal retired attorney Public discussion of Israel’s influence on American foreign policy, for good or ill, is *not* anti-semitism

Scott Erb University of Maine at Farmington
Brian Ulrich Beloit College, University of Wisconsin
Robert Olson University of Kentucky
Helen Fox University of Michigan
Gary Mort Lane Community College
Dr Charles S Young Southern Arkansas University More open debate occurs in Israel than the US It is irresponsible and dishonest to stigmatize these academics

Arnold J Oliver Emeritus Professor of Political Science, Heidelberg College
John E Adkins University of Charleston
Seth Wigderson Professor of History University of Maine at Augusta
Ena Lorant ADAIPP Freedom of speech is a right which we cherish and must work to protect

Noel Maurer Harvard Business School
Claudio Gallo Journalist
Nathan Leon Pace, MD, MStat University of Utah
Erhard Kock ACLU
Friderike Heuer Lewis&Clark College
John J Geyer Rutgers University (retired)
L Michael Lewis Professor Emeritus, History, Eastern Kentucky University
Robert Emmett Curran Georgetown University
Charles Postel california state university, sacramento
jack schaller & Joan de la Cova Retired
Steven R Heidemann Michigan State University Having read the article, I found nothing anti-semitic about it Rather, it was a plausible discussion of the issue

Lance Segars, PhD San Diego State University
Donald M Reid Georgia State University (Emeritus)
Joseph Martinelli Retired
Arthur S Keene University of Massachusetts
Dr Terri Ginsberg formerly Dartmouth College, Jewish Studies
john w livingston assoc prof middle east hist and Islamic civilization
Frank Thompson University of Michigan
John Bass University of British Columbia
James Bieri University of Texas at Austin, retired
Phyllis Mansfield Penn State University
Julia Stein Santa Monica College, Santa Monica, CA
Stephen Twing Frostburg State University
Bill Bush UNLV
Herbert P Bix Binghamton University
Ranjit Singh University of Mary Washington
Jerise Fogel Marshall University
Richard Shekelle University of Texas School of Public Health (retired)
Natraj Sitaram MD Professor, Wayne State University School of Medicine
100. David Kolb Charles A Dana Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Bates College
Eliana Moya-Raggio University of Michigan, Lecturer Emerita
Elaine C Hagopian Prof Emerita of Sociology, Simmons College, Boston Thanks to Juan Cole for confronting this wretched smear campaign of respected academics
Eliana Moya-Raggio University of Michigan, Lecturer Emerita
Alan Macdonald Luther College
Richard B Barnett University of Virginia
leo stolbach, MD Reformed Jewish I certainly have concerns about AIPAC’S actions At some point we have to recognize that what is good for the Palestinians is not necessarily bad for Israel The only hope for Israel as a Jewish state is to have a state solution that is fair and equitable for both peoples

John Exdell Kansas State University, Department of Philosophy
Susan Crowell University of Michigan
Yakov M Rabkin University of Montreal
90. Aram Harrow Univ of Bristol
David Ray, PhD University of Oklahoma Associate Professor of Political Science
Gerhart Maas Webster University
Henry Farrell Dept of Political Science, the George Washington University
Peter Morris Penn State Emeritus
Jennifer Wicke Professor of English, University of Virginia
Robert Carlsen University of Colorado at Denver
Henry Greenspan University of Michigan There is no shortage of antisemitism in the world Although hedgy in places–the words don’t entirely match the music–I do not believe the article in question is one of its expressions

Thomas E Weisskopf University of Michigan
David Ede Western Michigan University
80. Anne Mac Gregor Retired
Robert S Knapp Reed College
Thorne Anderson former Adjunct Professor, American University in Bulgaria Stephen Broadbridge University of Sheffield
Philip Leitner Saint Mary’s College of California
Leonard Koscianski Anne Arundel Community College
Lelon Oliver University of Alabama Huntsville
Donnelly, Denis Siena College
David Waldner Department of Politics, University of Virginia
Max Heirich University of Michigan Professor and Research Scientist Emeritus
Debra Hill University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
70. Mike Tharp Part-time instructor, California State University Fullerton
Kerby Miller University of Missouri
John F Robertson Central Michigan University
Ira Glunts Half Moon Books
David Mazel Associate Professor of English, Adams State College
Brian Johnston Carnegie Mellon University
Rao Nagisetty University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio
eleanor roffman Lesley university
Regan Boychuk University of Calgary
M Shahid Alam Northeastern University
60. G Sam Sloss Indiana University Southeast
George Grantham McGill University
Erik Lichtenberg University of Maryland
David R Applebaum Rowan University
John Spritzler Harvard School of Public Health
Evan Haefeli Columbia University
Richard W Todd Adj Professor, West Texas A&M University
J David Velleman New York University My comments are at http://leftrighttypepadcom/main///the_a_wordhtml

Darrell K Fennell attorney
Barry Wilson University of Northern Iowa Academic freedom is at stake here as well as providing an atmosphere for reasoned debate rather than the polarized polemics that seem to characterize too much of what is printed today

50. Gregory Nagy Harvard University
Elizabeth Seymour Penn State Altoona
David Galezo Tompkins Cortland Community College
Paul Lyons Stockton College
will rickenbach retiered
Bill Matthews Bates College
Alan Singer University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Peter Pape Retired chemist I feel that when anyone criticizes the actions of Israel, that person is branded an anti-semite I am not an anti-semite, but I feel that Israel is as much to blame for the continuing problems in the Middle East as are the Arabs and Palestinians via the Israeli’s terrorist-like responses to any incident
Ahab Bdaiwi University of Exeter wwwbdaiwiblogspotcom
Mary Ellen Lundsten retired, Augsburg College
40. Harry Ungar Cabrillo College Good work, Juan
Jonathan House MD Columbia University Ctr for Psychoanalytic Training and Research
Lydia Howell Independent journalist,host of “Catalyst” on KFAI Radio
Alan Marwine Green Mountain College
William Burns Howard University
Mark Weinstein None
Robert Davis Laboratory Manager Univ of Missouri
Costa Sakellariou Binghamton University study history!
Thomas Dickson Cabrillo College Instructor of Chemistry emeritus
Willard Hardman Adjunct, Catholic University of America also US Army, Retired
30. Olga Davidson Wellesley College
Jan Meier American citizen/voter Suppression of the truth must stop
Jefferson Gray The University of Chicago
Joanne Aboud McGahagan University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown
Alastair Northedge Université de Paris I
Mark D Higbee Eastern Michigan University
William Van der Kloot SUNY @ Stony Brook
Richard A Rand University of Alabama
John W Farley UNLV
Michael Martini Franklin Pierce College
20. Bruce Tyberg Independent
Steven Pierce History, University of Manchester
Campbell Craig University of Southampton
FM Ratliff, II Researcher
Da’ud X Mohammed Oregon Coast News Signal
Roger V Stevenson Southern Oregon University
daniel cassidy New College of California Irish Studies Program Beannacht, a chara
Harold Johnson University of Virginia
John Hartman Western International University
Dr Anthony Crow Yakima Public Schools
10. Dave McLane
Joel Andreas Johns Hopkins University
John K Fabiani
Roger Whitney San Diego State University
Calvin Schrotenboer Foothill College
Kevin Monahan Hokuriku University, Kanazawa, Japan
Karin Jaeger CECE / Euromed-Marseille
Stephen Roddy University of San Francisco
Hugh J Lester None
Juan Cole University of Michigan

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31 Killed in Guerrilla Violence
Kurdish Situation Angers Turkey

AP reports Iraq violence Tues-Weds. There were major car bombings in Baghdad, and some 15 bodies showed up dead there and in Karbala. There were also deaths near Baqubah and in Kirkuk. AP counted 31 dead altogether.

Al-Zaman also reports a bombing in Fallujah.

The sister of new Iraqi vice president Tariq al-Hashimi, Maysoon, has been killed in a drive-by shooting. His brother, Mahmoud, was killed two seeks ago. Al-Hashimi is a Sunni Arab from the fundamentalist Iraqi Accord Front, and one of two vice-presidents. The Sunni Arab guerrilla movement is notorious for viciously punishing what it sees as “collaborators” with the new regime. Since al-Hashimi is in the protected “Green Zone,” they had to try to get at him through his familiy.

The guerrillas also killed 3 other “collaborators.”

I have been complaining for years now about this allegation that US and Iraqi officials make that the problems are “only in 4 provinces.” I say they are in 7 or 8, and they are among the more populous provinces in Iraq. Now the GAO agrees with me.

Turkey denied charges that its troops had made an incursion into Iraq. Turkey charges taht 5,000 Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) activists and guerrillas have taken refuge on the Iraqi side of the border, and they want them turned over.

The US has pledged to be more helpful to the Turks in stopping infiltration. But since the US has hardly any troops up in the northeast, and since Iraqi Kurds are sympathetic to the plight of their Turkish cousins, I’m not sure exactly what the US can do, if it if really wanted to do something.

Der Spiegel warns of a building “intifadah” or uprising among Turkish Kurds in eastern Anatolia.

The continued publicity stunt visits of Rice and Rumsfeld to Iraq (where they have to sneak in and out unanounced because otherwise they would be in severe danger) are not going over very well with Iraqis. LA Times money quotes:

‘ “It would be more appropriate if they would leave us alone,” said Mahmoud Othman, a senior Kurdish legislator. “Let us solve our problems by ourselves.”

“Enough is enough,” said Sheik Mahmoud Sudani, a politician affiliated with radical Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr. “Rice’s trip to Iraq at this critical time is just another desperate move by the Americans to try to impose themselves on our new government. But they have lost their influence.” ‘

Iraqi officials charge that 90 women become widows every day. 15 policemen alone die each day, according to this report. There are some 300,000 widoes in Iraq, and their situation is deteriorating because of the poor economy.

The 90 husbands dying per day presumably includes deaths from natural causes. But the police are mentioned as dying specifically from guerrilla violence. If 15 policemen a day really are being killed, a) we’re not hearing about it in the press and b) that is 5400 a year! By David Singer’s definition, you only need 1000 deaths a year among government forces to qualify for having a civil war.

Brain injuries among Iraq vets are sometimes hard to diagose, Robert Bazell argues. As I mentioned before, such injuries sometimes get the person discharged from the military on terms that preclude access to veteran medical care!

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Zarqawi Makes Recruitment Tape
Crackdown on Mahdi Army in Najaf

Reuters reports 18 deaths during a relatively light day of violence in the Iraqi civil war.

With regard to American casualties, the Pentagon does not even announce the wounded each day unless a soldier is killed. If you had 7 wounded, we’d never hear abour it. And, they are being badly wounded, often. Spinal damage, limbs blown off, and, MSNBC says, brain damage.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi appeared in a videotape on Monday, urging that the fight continue against the American presence in Iraq. The tape was a typical jihadi recruitment video. The foreign fighters such as Zarqawi constitute a small part of the Iraqi guerrilla movement. The Iraqi minister of the interior estimates them as a less than a thousand in the whole country. They can be deadly because of their bombing techniques and willingness to carry out suicide bombing.

I saw part of the tape on Aljazeera. At one point Zarqawi shows two rocket launchers named “al-Qaeda” and “Jerusalem.” Zarqawi clearly believes that the road to the liberation of Jerusalem from Israeli occupation lies through the destabilization of Iraq.

The bad news for Zarqawi: That theory about anything in Jerusalem “going through” Baghdad was tried out by the Washington Isntitute for Near East Policy (the Likud Party offices on the Potomac), the American Enterprise Institute (to the right of the Israeli Likud Party), AIPAC, and other Neocon think tanks, in 2003. It hasn’t worked out for them. It won’t work out for Zarqawi.

Nowawdays, ironically, the neo-conservatives are mainly arguing that there is no relationship between Iraq and the Palestinian issue. But all religious Iraqi Sunnis, and probably most Arab Iraqis, support Hamas to the hilt. The likelihood is that the killing of the four contractors in Fallujah that did so much to sink American Iraq was in revenge for Ariel Sharon’s murder of the old man in a wheel chair, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the chief ideologue of Hamas.

If Megan Stack is right that Sunni-Shiite tensions are rising in Eastern Arabia because of the Iraqi civil war, it could be a big threat to the world economy. Eastern province, where the Shiites live, produces 11 percent of the world’s petroleum every day. If it goes up in smoke the way Kirkuk has, you’d better get used to walking everywhere. The price of gas will be astronomical. I recommend Eco walking shoes.

Al-Zaman [The Times of Baghdad] reports, dateline Najaf [Ar.] that the long-simmering crisis between the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr and Iraqi troops and their American allies, in the Shiite holy city of Najaf south of Baghdad, has come out into the open.

Sahib al-Ameri, the leader of the Sadr Movement in the city, said that the American forces had arrested two brothers from the Movement, and had killed a third brother, Abd Muslim al-Nu`mani, after invading their home. The attack happened hours after an agreement was signed that required the surrender of security missions in the city to Iraqi forces. Al-Ameri said that the attack, killing and capture constituted an escalation and a humiliation by American forces of the Sadr Movement.

An official in the municipal government denied that American troops had been involved in the house invasion or the arrests. The source, who insisted on anonymity, said that the assault and the arrest were carried out by Iraqi forces– after the judicial authorities issued an arrest warrant for `Ala’ Abd Muslim, who stands accused of activities damaging to security in the city, including the manufacture of roadside bombs. The source said that the only US participation in the campaign will be the provision of close air cover to Iraqi forces. Iraqi forces received complete control of security in Najaf from the Americans in a ceremony held last Monday.

Al-Zaman also says that Washington has warned against the induction of entire units of sectarian militias into the Iraqi security forces, insisting that they were welcome to join as individuals.

Prime Minister-designate Jawad al-Maliki said that if the militias are not dissolved, they will drag Iraq into civil war. He said all weapons must be under the control of the security apparatuses. He said that there is no conceivable situation in which militias are necessary for security. (Al-Maliki needs to take a walk around Baghdad!)

Jonathan Finer says that Shiite militias are deploying to Kirkuk. The Kurdish militia in Kirkuk has another name: the police.

The FT says that al-Maliki is ready to compromise to form a government.

It is a toss-up as to whether corruption or sabotage is the bigger threat to the Iraqi oil industry.

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Blogger David versus WSJ Goliath

This is day three since John Fund of the Wall Street Journal did a nationally-read hatchet job on me in which he made up quotes and falsely attributed them to me. He has still not retracted, and has not apologized. Neither has The Wall Street Journal. Hint: I wouldn’t want my business news or investment advice from a newspaper that just makes things up. I have complained directly to the Opinion Journal. But still nothing. The lies are still out there, online, damaging my reputation.

Update 4/25/06: Thanks to all who wrote. You had an effect. The WSJ finally rather ungraciously admitted the error. I am told they almost never do so, so it is a big win.

Fund’s lies and smears are typical of the far right, which controls so much of corporate media. Much of corporate-owned “news” is increasingly just bubbly entertainment, put on in a ceaseless search for at least 15% profits (on news!). As Tom Fenton has argued, corporate news dropped the ball in the 1990s on covering al-Qaeda (props to the hardy few like Peter Berger and John Miller, among a handful who did the hard work), and therefore bears significant responsibility for allowing America to be blindsided on September 11.

Now it has largely gone back to business as usual. They almost never report on Afghanistan or the regrouping of the Taliban. Do Americans even know that we have 18,000 troops in that country. Do citizens of the US even know that brave Canadian troops are risking their lives against the neo-Taliban and al-Qaeda in Qandahar, and that some were recently killed? No. Because it mostly isn’t being covered in the mass media inside the US. It would not generate 15% profits. Nothing will, but sensationalism and lies.

The lies have even corrupted our political process. Indeed, Senator John Kerry could never have been swiftboated during his presidential bid unless corporate media jumped aboard and gave all the falsehoods enormous play. They threw the election, folks. Those editors and journalists knew that the swiftboaters had no case. The media caesars put them on anyway, to play lions to Kerry’s Christian. Even Kerry was unable to get his message out. A humble college history teacher has as much chance of winning against the billionaire smear machine as a union organizer has of keeping her job in a Walmart.

(When I complain about Faux “news” often being mere propaganda, Fund accuses me of “intolerance”!) If it weren’t for this little blog, I wouldn’t even have had a way of challenging Fund’s and the WSJ’s falsehoods. (And, if the media corporations can take “net neutrality” away from us, they’ll remove that avenue of reply, too.)

If it were just a matter of ruining my reputation with false quotes, the issue would not be world-shaking, though it is a sad day for America when giant corporations can just crush red-blooded Americans at will. But the paid-for lies of the John Funds of the world have profoundly endangered the security of the United States by plunging it into a quagmire in Iraq.

Iraqi Shiites protest against United States and against Terrorism, March, 2006.

And, the accelerating threat of global warming cannot be addressed because people like Fund shout the evidence down with their cable- and satellite-provided megaphones– provided by Rupert Murdoch and General Electric.

Not only was Fund wrong about the “weapons of mass destruction” threat in Iraq, a mistake that has cost the US nearly 2400 lives and 14,000 severely wounded, but he is wrong about the threat of global warming. I found that on January 25, 2003, he managed to be wrong about both things all at once! Here he is on Hardball in late January, 2003, urging on the Bush administration Titanic toward twin glaciers!

‘ MSNBC
SHOW: HARDBALL 21:00
January 31, 2003 Friday

MATTHEWS: John Fund, do you know what turned him [Colin Powell] around from a man who is perceived by the public to be dovish to a man who is the hard line fellow, very much like his fellow Cabinet members, Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney?

JOHN FUND, “THE WALL STREET JOURNAL”: Complete frustration Chris. He basically decided that Saddam Hussein was never going to come clean, that the process was completely flawed.

You know the same people who believe that global warming is absolutely proven and they’re not going to listen to anything else are the same people who will accept absolutely no evidence that Saddam Hussein is hiding something and including weapons of mass destruction. Colin Powell basically finally threw up his hands and said we have to act because the alternative is to let Saddam Hussein win the game, set and match, and the world cannot be blackmailed that way. ‘

Actually, Iraq let the UN inspectors in. They inspected 100 of 600 sites designated as suspicious by the CIA. They found nothing. As Fund was talking, Iraq had complied with Bush’s demand. Fund wanted to go to war anyway.

He castigated those, like myself, who refused to believe that Iraq formed a danger to the US, as being like people who believe in global warming!!

Why be wrong once when you can be wrong twice? Or, if you throw his manufactured quotes attributed to me into the kitty, three times. Indeed, you begin to wonder if Fund ever gets anything right.

In fact the melting of the ice caps both at the arctic and the antarctic has accelerated beyond scientists’ expectations.

Mr. Fund should explain to the people of New Orleans about how warming seas are a myth.

A humble college history teacher is like a canary in the mine. If he starts being strangled for air, it is a sign that we all are in grave danger. People like John Fund are taking our country, and our world, down into the deadly methane of propaganda and falsehood.

Here is my complaint on Day 1.

This is my complaint on Day 2.

————

Dennis Perrin has more.

James Wolcott weighs in, too.

Also FAIR.

Justin Raimondo.

BTC News.

Corrente Wire makes the interesting point that my blogging may be part of the issue here.

Jane Hamsher.

Glenn Greenwald on the background to the controversy.

See the comments section for Fund’s replies.

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Nearly 60 Dead, 80 Wounded in Bombings, Assassinations
34,000 Shiites Have Fled

Guerrilla violence killed 25 in Iraq on Monday, 10 of them in a coordinated set of 7 car bombs in the capital that also wounded 80.

Iraqi police discovered 32 bodies of recent recruits to the new security forces at two sites in Baghdad and another in Mosul on Monday. Some 15 of the bodies belonged to recruits from Ramadi. The victims were therefore Sunni Arabs. Guerrillas have focused on recruits from Sunni cities before.

The Washington Post adds, “In a statement Monday, a government agency said more than 5,600 Shiite families comprising nearly 34,000 people have fled their homes in mainly Sunni regions of Baghdad and central Iraq because of violence. “

Al-Hayat [Ar.] reports that MP Ali al-Adib of the United Iraqi Alliance (religious Shiite parties) said Monday that his bloc “supports the Sunni Iraqi Accord Front in its nomination of one of its members for the portfolio of minister of defense, rather than having a Kurd. The reason is that Iraq is a member of the Arab League, and as long as the presidency went to the Kurds, it is necessary to achieve balance through having an Arab figure in Defense, so that Iraq will reach out to the Arab World.”

Sources in the UIA said that US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad is trying to get the defense ministry for Hajim al-Hasani, the former speaker of the house, on the grounds that he is “a moderate Islamist and an independent Sunni personality” after his withdrawal from the Iraqi Islamic Party last year. Moreover, Khalilzad is held to believe, he enjoys the confidence of the Shiites and Kurds.

Actually, Hajim al-Hasani (al-Hassani) was expelled from the Iraqi Islamic Party in November of 2004 because he refused to resign from the government of Iyad Allawi, where he was minister of industry. The IIP had pulled out of the government to protest the US assault on Fallujah, which damaged 2/3s of the buildings in the city and killed hundreds if not thousands of innocent civilians. My guess is that the IIP doesn’t forgive al-Hasani for this, and Khalilzad’s championing of him will actually hurt.

Khalilzad is reported to be pushing Ahmad Chalabi or Qasim Da’ud, secular Shiites, for the post of minister of the interior. Neither has links to the fundamentalist Shiite militias, but both have enormous baggage in Iraqi politics.

Al-Hayat maintains that Chalabi still has the trust of the Sadr Movement and the Dawa Party, as well as a number of independents, and is seen as “the Pentagon’s man” in Iraq.

It says that Qasim Daud faces severe opposition from Sadr, who accuses him of collaborating with Washington. Daud was minister of state during the fighting in 2004 between US forces and Muqtada’s Mahdi Army, and took stances then for which the Sadrists have never forgiven him.

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Dahab Bombings did Not Involve Kamikazes

Al-Sharq Al-Awsat reports that Egyptian police are saying that the Sinai resort bombings on Monday do not appear to be the work of suicide bombers. Rather, the explosives were set off by remote control.

The police also do not think it unlikely that the same cell is behind this attack as carried out the previous two big tourist bombings in the Sinai.

But since this is the third, why didn’t Egyptian security see it coming and have better precautions?

Egypt depends heavily on tourism for its economic survival. Wouldn’t a wise Egyptian government focus in on stopping this sort of thing after the first two?

Euronews wryly gives as its headline,, “Bush and Hamas condemn Attack.” For all Bush’s bluster, he hasn’t caught Ayman al-Zawahiri, who helped plan out the attack on New York and the Pentagon. An Egyptian physician, al-Zawahiri may also have played a role in enouraging the Sinai attacks. So Bush’s threat to get the perpetrators is empty. All these years later, he still hasn’t gotten al-Zawahiri. How is he going to track down some half-urbanized bedouin malcontent in the middle of the Sinai desert? It is all swagger, no delivery.

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