Informed Comment

Saudis Warn against Partition
Day of Rage leaves 83 Dead

Another US GI was reported killed on Monday. That brings the total about 101 in October.

My article in Salon.com on what a bad idea partitioning Iraq would be has been published on the Web.

Saudi Ambassador to the United States Prince Turki al-Faisal warned Monday against partitioning Iraq and against an abrupt US departure:

‘ “To envision that you can divide Iraq into three parts is to envision ethnic cleansing on a massive scale, sectarian killing on a massive scale,” Prince Turki al-Faisal said as he answered questions after a Washington speech. “Since America came into Iraq uninvited, it should not leave Iraq uninvited.” ‘

In contrast, my position that the US should conduct a phased withdrawal from Iraq so as to attmpt to pressure the Iraqi political elite to compromise with one another– turn out to be shared by many in the US officer corps.

The other militias: Concern is growing among human rights activists about the unregulated and unaccountable mercenaries operating in Iraq.

Reuters reports numerous instances of political violence on Monday. Most wire services are putting the day’s toll at at least 83, including the 33 blown up in Sadr City, which I parsed early Monday morning. That one Has raised fears that Shiite reprisals are not far off. That bombing was one of several on Monday. Major incidents:

‘ MAHMUDIYA – Police found six bodies bearing signs of torture, blindfolded and with bullet wounds, in Mahmudiya 30 km (20 miles) south of Baghdad, police said. . .

SUWAYRA – Police retrieved the bodies of six policemen bearing signs of torture and with bullet wounds from a river in Suwayra, 40 km (25 miles) south of Baghdad, police said. . .

BAGHDAD – A car bomb exploded in al-Harthiya district of Baghdad, killing two people and wounding five, Interior Ministry sources said.

BAGHDAD – A car bomb exploded in al-Bayaa district of Baghdad killing seven people and wounding 25, police said. . .

BAGHDAD – A car bomb exploded in Baghdad’s southwestern Amil district, killing three people and wounding six, Interior Ministry sources said.

MOSUL – Police found four bodies, including that of a policeman, in different parts of Mosul, north of Baghdad, police said. . .

KIRKUK – A suicide attacker blew himself up inside a police headquarters in Kirkuk, killing two policemen and a three-year-old girl and wounding 19, including 10 policemen. Police said the attacker was wearing a police officer uniform. . .

IRAQI-SYRIAN BORDER – A suicide car bomber hit an Iraqi army checkpoint at a border pass near Syria, killing four soldiers and wounding one. ‘

Al-Zaman spoke of a “collapse” in the security situation in Baghdad.

Department of Damn Gall: Bush accuses Democrats of not having a plan for Iraq! The dictionary defines “plan” as “a detailed formulation of a program of action.” And Bush’s “plan” is . . ?

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Sadr City Bombing on Monday Kills 29, wounds 60
At Least 83 Killed Sunday
In Basra, Bombers target Police

Sunni Arab guerrillas killed a US Marine on Sunday, bringing to 100 the death toll for US troops in Iraq during the month of October. It is one of the deadliest months since the war began.

An enormous bomb blasted a city square in Sadr City, the Shiite slum of northeast Baghdad on Monday morning, killing 29 and wounding 60. The victims were poor day laborers lining up in search of work.

On Sunday, hundreds (some reports say thousands) of angry residents had demonstrated against the US military siege of Sadr City, threatening to close down the ministries if it is not lifted. Iraqi members of parliament from the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance joined them. They complained that as a result of the US operations, ordinary people cannot circulate and it is difficult to get patients to the hospitals. The situation was therefore already at the boiling point before the bombing, which will have made things worse.

The inhabitants of Sadr City, with a population of perhaps 3 million, maintain that they do not have the captured US soldier, and say they are upset at the 5-day long siege of their district by the US military, which is alleged to have closed off most routes from Sadr City into Baghdad and to have been engaged in invading offices of clerics associated with the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr. Apparently they believe that a unit of the Mahdi Army kidnapped a GI, for whom they are conducting a manhunt. The US is seeking rogue guerrilla commander Abu Deraa, who has broken with Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Baghdad government officials announced Sunday that they had discovered 25 dead bodies in the capital over the previous 24 hours.

Guerrillas kiled 5 policemen in Baquba.

US troops killed 17 guerrillas near Balad on Sunday. The US military said that the guerrillas were planning to attack a US convoy.

Altogether guerrillas killed 33 policemen on Sunday. In Basra, armed men pulled 17 police trainees and 2 translators out of a van and their dead bodies were later found around the city. In Basra, such actions are frequently taken by Shiite militias or Marsh Arab tribsemen, though there have been allegations that Sunni Arab death squads operate there, funded by fundamentalist Sunnis in the Gulf.

Iraq’s Sunni Arab vice president is threatening to resign if Prime Minister al-Maliki does not confront head on the problem of dissolving the Badr Corps and the Mahdi Army, Shiite militias. Such a move by Tariq al-Hashimi could well signal the end of the Maliki “national unity” government.

Constant mortar attacks have forced the British to abandon their consulate in downtown Basra.

The US military has lost track of hundreds of thousands of weapons the US purchased for the Iraqi military and security forces. The only good news in the article is that many of the weapons are useless to Iraqis because of lack of spare parts or difficulty of upkeep. At least those won’t do the guerrillas any good if they fall into their hands.

Trudy Rubin of the Philadelphia Inquirer asks some good questions about how the Bush administration squandered most of the $18 billion that Congress ear-marked for Iraq reconstruction and whether there will be any accountability.

And speaking of accountability, here is a site that tracks what Congress has been doing to our Constitutional right of habeas corpus.

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Goldberg and Jarvis Fold;
And, The Real Meaning of ‘Fools Rush In’

I don’t take any pleasure in having been right about Iraq when they were wrong, or that they are they now are admitting it. I wish we could have avoided so much bloodshed and horror in Iraq, for our own troops and for the Iraqis. But I knew they weren’t right, three years ago. I wish the Bush administration had paid more attention to the costs of the war it planned in 2002, costs that I foresaw.

Jonah Goldberg now thinks the Iraq War was a mistake, even if a worthy one. He suggests that the Iraqis hold a referendum on whether they want US troops to stay or not. This suggestion displays a complete lack of confidence in the elected Iraqi parliament, which one would have thought was the appropriate body to represent their voters in making this call.

Ironically, Goldberg once insisted that he did not need to know anything about Iraq to judge whether the election of the Iraqi parliament was a success. Now he wants to bypass it with a referendum. Since there is no security in Iraq, of course, no fair referendum can be held. There could be no canvassing pro or con and no public meetings (they would be bombed). No political party or civic group could raise grass roots contributions for advertisements. The final vote could not even be held without the US military locking down the country for days and forbidding all vehicular traffic, and then standing with guns over the voters going to the polls. The fatwas of religious leaders would drown out civil debate.

In short, Iraq is such a mess that you could not even hold the sort of referendum Goldberg suggests as the way of determining what future policy should be. His proposal shows that he still does not understand the situation in Iraq, just as he did not when he could not grasp what I was saying about the Iraqi parliamentary elections being a “joke” given that candidates could not campaign and voters blindly voted for unknown candidates on the say-so of religious leaders’ fatwas. The parliament he so praised went on to fashion a constitution that stipulates that no legislation it passes may contravene Islamic law. And it allowed for provincial confederations that may well break up the country and plunge the oil-rich Persian Gulf region into decades of turbulence and war.

Goldberg wrote as a way of bringing to a close our debate nearly two years ago:

‘ Anyway, I do think my judgment is superior to his when it comes to the big picture. So, I have an idea: Since he doesn’t want to debate anything except his own brilliance, let’s make a bet. I predict that Iraq won’t have a civil war, that it will have a viable constitution, and that a majority of Iraqis and Americans will, in two years time, agree that the war was worth it. I’ll bet $1,000 (which I can hardly spare right now). This way neither of us can hide behind clever word play or CV reading.’

What was wrong with this is that you cannot, contrary to the canons of American punditry, actually separate out “judgment” and “knowledge.” Judgment comes out of knowledge and experience. Goldberg was sounding off on matters about which he just didn’t have much of either.

But note, too, that Goldberg has, since our debate, been hired by the Los Angeles Times to purvey his opinions regularly to the nation’s second largest city, while veteran reporter and Iraq War critic Bob Scheer was fired and is no longer at the Times. It doesn’t matter that Scheer was right and Goldberg was wrong. The important thing for the corporate media is that a pundit supports the status quo (whatever that is), not whether he or she makes epochal mistakes. The ability to produce and reproduce a narrow rhetoric in support of the projects of our plutocracy is what counts. No matter if those projects kill hundreds of thousands of people in the course of failing.

Then there is Jeff Jarvis. I first encountered him when he attacked me in the summer of 2003 for, he said, spending all day looking for bad news about Iraq. I wasn’t. I was just reading the Iraqi newspapers and paraphrasing what was on the front page. A budding guerrilla war was on them, which the US press was largely ignoring, and bloggers like Jarvis were ignoring, because they had swallowed Bush administration propaganda. (Rumsfeld actually denied that there was a guerrilla war. Imagine.) I was taken aback to be savaged by the former editor of TV Guide for my attempts to honestly report the situation in the Middle East. It is not that he was so utterly and laughably wrong (and ignorant) that I mind about Jarvis, but the viciousness with which he attacked the critics of the war and its execution. He marshalled all of his considerable credibility on the Web to act as a bulwark against an early recognition that things were going badly wrong and being “spun” to hide it.

Not Bush, not Rumsfeld, not Wolfowitz, not Goldberg, not Jarvis, knew anything serious about Iraqi history, religion or society. But they were going to “democratize” it with a foreign military occupation. I’ll wager none of them knew anything serious about French Algeria or British Egypt, the sort of experience Arabs had in the 20th century with the “liberty” of being occupied by Westerners.

Neither Jarvis nor Goldberg has any wisdom for us now in how to get out of this quagmire without the world coming down around our ears.

But it was never about Iraq. It was about the all-purpose punditocracy, the vicious jab, the smearing of those with whom one disagrees, in the service of the rich and powerful. It is about the cheapening of our democracy, the termite-like boring at the pillars of our republic. Goldberg began by attacking me for saying that the 1997 elections in Iran were more democratic than the January 2005 election in Iraq. He did not critique my reasoning in saying this. He just attacked me. It turns out that he didn’t even know anything about the 1997 elections in Iran. Likewise, Jarvis did not actually present any arguments about my coverage of Iraq, he just accused me of spinning it negatively. It is easy to make such an accusation, but hard to do the research and engage in the years of study it would require to address the substance of my weblog.

It isn’t about Iraq. It is about the way our discourse was debased by Bush administration triumphalism.

I’ll close with a fuller quotation of Alexander Pope’s famous phrase than is usually given. I apologize for the difficulty of the language, but hope readers will try to work through it and grasp what he is driving at. Because he was not just talking about ignorant fools, but also about learned ones. And what he was saying is that civil society is best served not by polemic but by urbane understanding. It is something we can strive for over here, even if we don’t have any good solutions for the Iraq catastrophe. And if we had more of what Pope recommends, maybe we wouldn’t have so many quagmires.

‘Nay, fly to Altars; there they’ll talk you dead;
For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread.
Distrustful Sense with modest Caution speaks;
It still looks home, and short Excursions makes;
But ratling Nonsense in full Vollies breaks;
And never shock’d, and never turn’d aside,
Bursts out, resistless, with a thundering Tyde!

But where’s the Man, who Counsel can bestow,
Still pleas’d to teach, and not proud to know?
Unbiass’d, or by Favour or by Spite;
Not dully prepossest, nor blindly right;
Tho’ Learn’d well-bred; and tho’ well-bred, sincere;
Modestly bold, and Humanly severe?
Who to a Friend his Faults can freely show,
And gladly praise the Merit of a Foe?
Blest with a Taste exact, yet unconfin’d;
A Knowledge both of Books and Humankind;
Gen’rous Converse; a Soul exempt from Pride;
And Love to Praise, with Reason on his Side? ‘

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Marine Dies of Wounds
11 Iraqi Soldiers Kidnapped,
35 Killed in New Wave of Violence

Reuters reports that a US Marine died Friday from wounds inflicted by guerrillas in al-Anbar Province. At least 2,803 GIs have been killed in Iraq, some 97 of them in October–making it among the costliest in US life since the war began in 2003. Over 21,000 GIs have been wounded, several thousand of them seriously, with brain or spinal damage or loss of limbs that will dictate how they live the rest of their lives.

Another Family Wiped Out” [i.e. by the US] is the headline in the Gulf Daily News. Heavy clashes have been fought daily in Ramadi between US forces trying to ‘take back’ the city from the guerrillas, some of whom have declared an Islamic state. The article goes on, ‘ “Six members of one family were killed when US planes bombed their place, a nursery school they were using as a house in 17th of July Street in the centre of the city,” said Dr Kamal Al Hadithi of Ramadi Hospital. ‘

The implication is that we are serial family-killers. And, the US is relatively popular in the Gulf, so imagine what the other Arab newspapers think of us.

As Bobby Burns once put it with a brogue, “O wad some power the giftie gie us/ to see oursels as ithers see us!/ It wad frae monie a blunder free us and foolish notion . . .”

The US military said it had no record of launching the air strike. US forces have been fighting guerrillas in Ramadi and have been firing tank and mortar shells. They also point out that the guerrillas are firing RPGs, which could have it the house. Except that what happened to the family sounds to me like big firepower, of a sort I am not sure the guerrillas can muster.

A correction to Colbert I. King’s column on Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in the Washington Post, which alleges that Sistani won’t meet with Bush administration officials because they are non-Muslims. This is untrue. Sistani met with United Nations official Sergio Vieira de Mello. He declines to meet with the Americans because he considers them an illegitimate occupation force. Mr. King suggests he should be grateful to the US for invading and occupying Iraq. He is not. He feels that a unilateral American act of aggression could in the nature of the case not truly help Iraq, and he is extremely distressed at the way the American action has turned his adopted country into the Night of the Living Dead. (See Anthony Shadid’s column on Sunday, which is chilling.

The US military besieged the largely Shiite Sadr City in East Baghdad for a fourth day [Ar.], according to al-Sharq al-Awsat. They sealed off the roads leading into the capital, as they continued to search for a captured US GI of Iraqi descent. They clearly think that a branch of the Mahdi Army has him.

Reuters reports extensive political violence in Iraq on Saturday, with at least 35 killed or announced dead and dozens wounded. Among the major incidents:

‘ISKANDARIYA – At least five people were killed and 20 wounded when a car bomb went off near a residential compound in Iskandariya, south of Baghdad . . .

NEAR KHALIS – Four people were killed on Friday and five wounded when gunmen opened fire on their minibus in the village of Muradiya near the town of Khalis, 80 km (50 miles) north of Baghdad, police said. . .

FALLUJA – Police said at least two soldiers and one civilian were killed in clashes between Iraqi army and insurgents. Another three civilians were wounded.

UDHAIM – Gunmen kidnapped 11 Iraqi soldiers travelling in a minibus at a fake checkpoint in the town of Udhaim 100 km (60 miles) north of Baghdad on Saturday, a joint U.S. and Iraqi policing centre said . . .

BAGHDAD – A roadside bomb hit a minibus, killing one person and wounding eight near a restaurant on Palestine Street in eastern Baghdad, police said.

BAGHDAD – Mortars hit a garage in southern Baghdad, killing one man and wounding 35, police said.

SUWAYRA – Police retrieved five bodies with signs of torture and bullet wounds from the Tigris River in the town of Suwaira, 40 km (25 miles) south of Baghdad, police said. . .

HAWIJA – Gunmen killed the head of a women’s organisation in the town of Hawija and then shot dead a police officer as they fled her home, police said. . . ‘

Before the Iraq War, China and Iraq had signed an oil deal. The new Iraqi government is in talks with the Chinese about renegotiating it.

Ellen Knickmeyer of WaPo follows up with further details on the faith-based violence that racked Balada and Dhulu’iyah recently.

A secret British government memo implicitly accepts that the Iraq War is fueling terror against Britain, and sets forth a wish list for the tamping down of terrorism in the Muslim world in conjunction with foreign policy achievements such as Palestinian-Israeli peace.

Zaid al-Ali reviews Peter Galbraith’s book and discusses the proposal that Iraq be devolved on three regions.

For Arabists: KarbalaNews.net publishes the text of Sistani’s letter endorsing the Meccan Document calling for an end to internecine bloodshed between Sunnis and Shiites.

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At least 56 Killed in Sunni Arab Heartland;
Sadrists and the Problem of Shiite Militias in the South

The Sunnis

Sunni Arab Iraq saw significance violence and tension on Friday, especially in Khan Bani Saad near Baquba and in Mosul and Ramadi.

In Khan Bani Saad, Diyala Province, a guerrilla force attacked a police unit. AP says, “Intense house-to-house fighting between insurgents and Iraqi police north of Baghdad killed 43 people, including 24 officers, the U.S. military said on Friday. U.S. troops later joined the fight, aiding in a counterattack that left 18 insurgents dead, the military said.” A civilian was also killed, so 44 persons died in this intensive warfare. The US not only diverted men to the fight there, but they in turn called in close air support. This battle sounds major for Iraq, where engagements tend to be hit and run and more limited.

So then 12 bodies (4 of them police) showed up dead in Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, to the far north of Baghdad. A radical Islamic group had already put out pamphlets Thursday night that they intended to kill police. Authorities in Mosul therefore imposed a ban on vehicle traffic on Friday, to cripple the guerrillas from using their favorite weapon, the car bomb.

Reuters then reports of Ramadi: “Gunmen attacked three U.S. military positions in the western city of Ramadi with rocket-propelled grenades, mortar rounds and machinegun fire, police said. A Reuters reporter said U.S. helicopters flew over Ramadi and U.S. forces had sealed off entrances to the city . . .”

So Mosul was under a vehicle ban, Ramadi was sealed off from the world, and Baghdad (which was fairly quiet Friday) is under curfew.

About 300 local Iraqi police and soldiers have been killed in October.

Sunni Arab tribes in the north, many of them still loyal to Saddam Hussein, are bound and determined that the oil-rich city of Kirkuk not become part of the Kurdistan provincial confederacy.

Al-Hayat reports [Ar.] that radical Sunni fundamentalists destroyed the Shiite shrine of Shaikh Ismail south of Kirkuk on Friday.

Some hoped that Iraqi tribes, which often have both Sunni and Shiite members, might be a force for unity in the face of the sectarian violence of the militias and guerrilla groups. But al-Zaman in English is reporting that instead, the tribes themselves are being torn apart by faith-based infighting, and are also fighting other tribes of other ethnicities. Al-Zaman says, “Mixed tribes are present in several areas in Iraq, particularly in the small towns between Baghdad and Tikrit in the north. There are reports that the tribes have divided themselves on sectarian grounds and have began fighting each other, using rocket propelled grenades and mortars.”

The Shiites

AP reported that “Also yesterday, four people were killed and five wounded in an attack on a van carrying Shiites returning from the funeral of a relative in the holy city of Najaf, said a spokesman for the police.”

Baghdad was locked down on Friday as the US military continued its massive manhunt for a kidnapped US soldier. It conducted heavily armed raids into Shiite Sadr City in the northeast of the capital, risking provoking violence with the Mahdi Army militia that dominates that area. Young nationalist Shiite cleric and leader of the Mahdi Army, Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr, warned his followers not to allow themselves to be provoked by the US, and said that they should not engage American soldiers in combat.

Reuters reports that“Iraqi and U.S. forces entered an office of radical Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in Baghdad’s eastern Rusafa district on Friday during a hunt for a kidnapped U.S. soldier, the U.S. military said. Three suspects were detained.”

Shaikh Jaber al-Khafaji, a spokesman for Sayyid Muqtada in Kufa, on Friday denounced Sadrist members who disobeyed Muqtada and engaged in violence.

‘ “This disobedience to the leadership has divided us and earned us multiple enemies” . . . “If you do not obey, you will regret it. Indeed, I declare that you will be cursed. Sayid Muqtada Al Sadr is a blessing from God upon you and is your protector,” Khafaji told the large crowd in this Shiite area.’

Rogue Mahdi Army elements have engaged in violence in Diwaniyah and Amara in recent weeks.

Al-Zaman reports that another leader in the Sadr Movement, Ahmad Sharifi, revealed Friday that a committee set up by the Sadrist leader Sayyid Muqtada has begun the process of purging the Mahdi Army of death squad cells. They are chasing other such cells, which kill innocents. Sharifi charges that these cells are being funded by “factions” in the United Iraqi Alliance, the umbrella coalition in parliament for religious Shiite parties.

I take it that Sharifi is saying that the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and its Badr Corps paramilitary is responsible for infiltrating such cells into the Mahdi Army. Sunni groups such as the Association for Muslim Scholars have in the past accused the Badr Corps, trained originally by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, with being behind death squad killings of Sunnis. If Sharif is making the allegation that Badr has cells inside the Mahdi Army and is using them to carry out death squad activity, it is a serious, though, I think, implausible allegation.

Sharifi went on to say that “There are signs of fighting between the Mahdi Army and the Badr Corps.” He said that the struggle between the Mahdi Army and Badr in Diwaniyah and Amara is not over yet, and that the embers of conflict are still burning beneath the ashes. He added, “There are parties inside the United Iraqi Alliance that wish to separate the Sadr Movement, which dominates the street, from its base.”

Tony Karon’s interview of me on the Shiite militia problem and the Maliki government in Iraq is at Time.com.

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