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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War Support Among Evangelicals Collapses
Bush Incompetence Said to Delay Second Coming

In the past 30 days, support for the Iraq War among white evangelicals has fallen from 70 percent to 58 percent.

These numbers matter because evangelicals are a quarter of the people who actually bother to vote, and 78 percent of them voted Republican 2 years ago. Only 58 percent say they are satisfied with the party now, and Iraq and the Foley scandal are driving the discontent.

Of course, evangelicals like other Americans are seeing articles like this one in which Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki blames the US military for things going wrong in Iraq, denies that he has accepted the benchmarks set by the US ambassador, maintains he could do a better job with his own army if the US would just get out of the way, and downplays the role of Shiite militias in the country’s violence. The tirades came in response to al-Maliki’s perception that Bush is playing politics with Iraq for the election season, and is doing and saying things that could cause Maliki’s government to fall. The tiff is not an edifying spectacle for the American public, which is paying $336 billion to watch it and has seen 24,000 of its troops dead and wounded.

On Wednesday, Sunni Arab guerrillas killed 4 Marines and a sailor.

A more colorful manifestation of the evangelicals disillusionment than the poll is the sermons of Houston-based evangelical preacher K.A. Paul. Here are some of the things he is running around the country saying about Iraq:

‘ The Houston-based preacher said he believes that the Bush administration has delayed the second coming because U.S. foreign policy has blocked Christian missionaries from working in Iraq, Iran and Syria. . . “Somebody needs to say enough is enough,” he said to worshippers who stood, waved and called out in support. . . Paul, who claimed to support conservative political leaders in the past, is launching “a crusade to save America from the wrath of God and Republicans abusing their power,” according to his press materials. . . “God is mad at this country,” Paul told the congregation. He described the war in Iraq as “unnecessary genocide.”

Can you say, “amen!” and “halleluja!”?

The only explanation of which I can think for the general collapse of this pillar of War party is that the political contests in mid-Atlantic and Southern states are generating television ads, candidate appearances and debates that highlight the catastrophe that is Iraq–and it is getting through to the church-goers at long last.

Mostly political discourse in the United States is dictated by the ruling party in Washington, and the mass media and press are most often nervous about getting out in front of the elected officials. But in an election season, the press is suddenly allowed to cover at least a narrow range of dissident views intensively– that is, the views of political opponents of the incumbents. Since the vast majority of incumbents in the mid-Atlantic and Southern states are Republicans, the upshot is that a Democrat point of view is suddenly getting aired and reported on. And the Dems are mostly pretty critical of Bush’s Iraq War.

You have to wonder, as well, if the Foley scandal has, so to speak, opened the evangelicals’ ears to criticisms of the Republican Party status quo more generally, allowing the bad news about Iraq to sink in. I suggest it only because the story broke around the time that their approval for the Iraq War began to plummet.

Even in a relatively safe district for a Republican incumbent, such as southwest Alabama’s 1st Congressional District, where Vivian Beckerle (Democrat) is challenging Rep. Jo Bonner, R-Mobile, at least there is a lively debate. You read this article carefully, and it turns out that this is the white Republican Baptist elite duking it out with . . . itself. Beckerle is a member of the Baptist church, a retired major in the Army reserves, and she was until recently a Republican herself. But now, she is a Democratic challenger to Bonner, and here is what the article says about her stance on Iraq:

‘ But her sharpest attacks were reserved for Iraq, where the 3½-year-old war has so far cost the lives of almost 2,800 American service members, with a financial price tag that has climbed into the hundreds of billions of dollars. Beckerle, a retired major in the U.S. Army Reserve, supports a phased withdrawal of U.S. forces within six months. At the Jackson forum, she accused the Bush administration of lying about the need for war and suggested Bonner should know that “maybe we shouldn’t be there.” ‘

This kind of challenge to Bush’s Iraq War is being mounted in congressional districts and Senate races all over the South. The election is getting this discourse on the local news. Often in southern cities there is just one major newspaper, and it often is owned by a Republican and the headlines about Iraq for the past 3 years have been sunny. I travel a lot, and have seen those local newspapers folded on coffee tables in hotel lobbies, with headlines like “Iraq turning Corner, General Says.” But I think the various kinds of Baptists down there are now hearing someone like Beckerle, who is one of their own and has all the right credentials to be credible on the subject, and some of them are developing doubts as a result.

This political campaigning dovetails with the crticisms of the war now being heard by a minority of preachers, such as K.A. Paul.

Places like Mobile, Alabama, are also seeing news articles that contain language like this one from October 18:

“Nine Americans killed in Iraq . . . Officials said three soldiers died Saturday of injuries after a roadside bomb went off near their vehicle in Baghdad. The victims were 35-year-old Staff Sgt. Joseph M. Kane of Darby, Pa., 25-year-old Spc. Timothy J. Lauer of Saegertown, Pa., and 48-year-old 1st Sgt. Charles M. King of Mobile, Alabama.”

The spike in US casualties in October may be part of the nosedive in support for the war among evangelicals, but I think it is mostly that the usually closed US political information system has been temporarily opened up by election season.

The significance of the enormous decline in approval of the war among white evangelicals is that they are dispirited. A few may even vote Democrat. But generally speaking, the dispirited often simply do not vote at all. White evangelicals go to the polls at higher than average rates, so if they sit this one out because of discontent over Iraq (and the bumbling Bush interfering with Jesus’s Second Coming), then the Dems take both chambers of Congress hands down.

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Maliki Condemns US for Raid

Wednesday’s dramatic events in Iraq began with a US military raid into Sadr City, the vast Shiite slum full of followers of nationalist young cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The soldiers said that they were looking for a suspected death squad leader. The Americans were attacked by Mahdi Army militiamen, and they called in air support. US planes dropped bombs on this area full of civilians. Iraqi police and hospital officials reported that the fighting and bombing left 4 Iraqis dead and 18 wounded. Aljazeera is showing footage of a combination funeral/ anti-American demonstration in Sadr City.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki roundly condemned the US raid, of which he said he had had no foreknowledge, and he complained bitterly about the lack of coordination between the US and his office. Al-Maliki also, however, warned that armed militiamen in the streets would not be tolerated.

Al-Maliki also angrily rejected the timeline suggested by US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad for the performance of the Iraqi government with regard to reducing civil violence and addressing the militia problem. He said that no outside power could set a timeline for the sovereign Iraqi government.

Al-Hayat reports [Ar.] that al-Maliki said at a news conference: “Everyone knows that this government is a government reflecting the will of the people, and no one has a right to assign it a timetable.” He affirmed, “the government was elected by the people . . . and the only one with the right to talk about a timetable is the people that elected it.” He continued, “I am sure that this logic is not that of the American government.”

With regard to the US raid into Sadr City, al-Maliki said he would hold talks with US figures to ensure that the incident was not repeated.

Al-Hayat also reports that the Baghdad neighborhood of al-Dora has been partitioned. The eastern part is dominated by the Mahdi Army, while a Sunni Arab guerrilla group, the Omar Brigades, controls the western half. The de facto partition of the district has led to a slight reduction in violence, since Shiites have been chased from largely Sunni neighborhoods and vice verse.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that 100,000 Iraqis have been forced to leave Iraq and to live in Egypt by the security situation.

There is a likelihood that The Britis will withdraw most of their forces from Iraq during the next year.

Reuters lists political violence in Iraq. The US military in Ramadi killed 12 persons in clashes with local guerrillas.

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