Bombings Kill 54 Downtown Baghdad
Saudi Clerics Mobilize against Shiites
Guerrillas detonated two enormous bombs at Tayaran Square in central Baghdad, killing 54 persons and wounding 106. The bombers targeted day laborers who had gathered looking for work.
Those at the Pentagon who want to tackle unemployment and the bad economy have it backwards. First you need security. Then you can have a growing economy.
Guerrillas killed three more US GIs. A hard landing of a US military helicopter wounded 18, 9 of them lightly.
Reuters reports political violence on Monday. Some 78 deaths were identified by news organizations, out of the probably 500 killed around the country. Major incidents included:
' BAGHDAD - Five people were killed and at least seven wounded when mortar rounds landed on a restaurant in Dora in southern Baghdad . . .
BAGHDAD - Gunmen wearing Iraqi army uniforms ambushed a security vehicle and stole $1 million in cash, police and Interior Ministry sources said. Four private security guards were kidnapped in the daylight robbery. . .
BAGHDAD - A car bomb exploded in a parking lot of Mahmoun University in Baghdad, killing one person and wounding four others, including two policemen. . .
BAGHDAD - A roadside bomb went off in Palestine Street in western Baghdad, killing one person and wounding six, police said. . .
BALAD - Eight farmers were kidnapped on the road between Dujail and Tikrit north of Baghdad . . .
NEAR BAQUBA - Gunmen opened fire at a family, killing three of its members and wounding three others while driving near Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) north of Baghdad, police said. . .
MOSUL - Gunmen killed four brothers driving in their car in Mosul, police said. . . . '
Saudi clerics have called for Sunnis worldwide to mobilize against Iraqi Shiites.
Reuters reports that sectarian violence in Iraq has raised Sunni-Shiite tensions in Lebanon.
Children in Iraq are suffering horribly from the ongoing civil war.
Bush met Monday with Neoconservative Elliot Cohen and a handful of retired generals who oppose any reduction in US troop levels in Iraq. Giving this small random group a high-profile hearing contradicts the basic principle that when someone gets you into a mess, you stop following their advice.
Iraqi political leaders are trying to find a way to isolate Muqtada al-Sadr in parliament, according to NYT.
Mark Danner writing for NYRB reviews the sad story of how it all went wrong in Iraq. He is very clear on the unresolved question of how the Iraqi army got dissolved and deep debaathification was pursued. Then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld denied having made the decision. Danner thinks it came from Paul Wolfowitz or Douglas Feith, the number 2 and 3 men at the Department of Defense at that time. Given the tight links between Feith and the Israeli Likud Party and the Israeli military, one has to wonder whether the Israeli Right had input into these fateful decisions, which have the lives of nearly 3000 GIs and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. The role of the American Enterprise Institute and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, both of them Neocon Central, would also bear looking into. Certainly, the decisions were not in the interest of the United States.
Former British defense secretary Geoffrey Hoon says that he and Tony Blair weighed in against dissolving the Iraqi Army and deep debaathification. He should please be more specific about with whom he was arguing.
posted by Juan Cole @ 12/12/2006 12:34:00 AM
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Danner's article is superb. To his sources we might add the final chapter of "Cobra II," ending a stunning account of military victory with an astonishing account of Bremer's first two decisions. Opposed by our military, to remove all Baath party members from their posts and to send the army home, they made our army's quick victory an inevitable defeat. The authors attribute Bremer's decisions to talks he had with Feith before he left for Iraq. That Bremer could make these decisions buttresses Danner's point: the control of mature, responsible people over decisions had been lost long before to Bush's delusions and immaturity, Cheney's malevolent secrecy, and Rumsfeld's machiavellianism.
Who will write the drama, or comedy of these times? Danner opens with a story reminiscent of Graham Greene, who I once met. He'd be appalled, as he'd already written this story, several times. It doesn't merit Shakespeare. Carl Hiasset, perhaps?
Bruce
"The Calling of our Time"
JC: Bush met Monday with Neoconservative Elliot Cohen and a handful of retired generals who oppose any reduction in US troop levels in Iraq. Giving this small random group a high-profile hearing contradicts the basic principle that when someone gets you into a mess, you stop following their advice.
Whose basic principle would that be? 'Tis hardly Dubya's! Anyway, Prof. Cohen was not, as I recall, very prominent in getting Mr. Bush and his Party into their present mess, and neither were retired generals. The "small random group" that really matters is more likely to be today's than yesterday's:
Yesterday's meetings are to be followed today by a videoconference with military commanders before Bush receives Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi at the White House.
The generals in the Green Zone, as opposed to those at the Pentagon or retired, seem the most likely candidates in the running for the position of Bush's Iraq Brain, a post that appears to have been recently vacated by Proconsul Z. Khalilzad. Probably the wheeler-dealers of Sa‘údiyya and Jordan and Kuwait and Egypt come fairly close behind. Although obviously of very different backgrounds and interests, these two crews might even patch up a temporary joint platform, of which the first plank would presumably read "Surge And Terminate Muqtadá Now!" M. al-Háshimí is not just a White House guest, he's also more or less where exotic Sunnis and domestic West Pointers out in the boondocks converge. That coincidence could be purely random, but it also could be "choreographed," as Messrs. Fletcher and Ricks say at loc. cit.:
The carefully choreographed meetings are coming on the heels of the release last week of the Iraq Study Group's report, which pronounced the situation in Iraq "grave" and recommended fundamental shifts in how the Bush administration handles the war.
Certainly the parade of meetings as a whole is as choreographed and non-random as anything political ever was. Does Mr. Bush propose to take any significant fresh advice at all? Is the whole purpose of the choreography to distract as many citizens and pundits as possible from noticing clearly when he eventually keeps on behaving exactly the same as he did before the set-backs of 7 November and 6 December? We'll see.
Meanwhile yesterday's visit to the State Department in ostensible quest of advice produced some interesting and characteristic verbiage:
I appreciate the advice I got from those [diplomatic] folks in the field. And that advice is an important part, an important component of putting together a new way forward in Iraq. Like most Americans, this administration wants to succeed in Iraq, because we understand success in Iraq would help protect the United States in the long run. We also talked about the neighborhood, the countries that surround Iraq and the responsibilities that they have to help this young Iraqi democracy survive. We believe that most of the countries understand that a mainstream society, a society that is a functioning democracy, is in their interests. And it's up to us to help focus their attentions and focus their efforts on helping the Iraqis succeed. I appreciate so very much the Iraqi leadership taking the lead in its neighborhood. After all, one of the things we're trying to do is help this government get on its feet so it can govern and it can conduct its own foreign policy. But the role of America is to help this young democracy survive.
I'm looking forward to continuing my deliberations with the military.
Later on in the same speech we get some hint of a new Party line, or at least some new Party Chinese, when Mr. Bush is emboldened to proclaim This is really the calling of our time, that is, to defeat these extremists and radicals.
Not "terrorists," only "extremists and radicals"! What's going on here? Have all or some of the former global terrorists been demoted, or are "extremists and radicals" a different group altogether -- even possibly the Mahdí Army specifically?
Crawfordology is not an easy science, but who can deny that it is a fascinating one? Stay tuned everybody.
Happy days.
I am beginning to feel like Diogenes, only I am searching for intelligent comment in the media and find that the blathering class really cares nothing that they are disseminating misinformation, at the very best.
At this point, it appears GWB is wandering about again, from group to group within the Administration, trying to find someone who will agree with what he thinks so he can give a new name to the Iraq mess (probably steal the slogan from Baker) and continue with things as they are. When all the pundits are talking about GWB's efforts to find "consensus", they really mean he wants affirmation and even the most seasoned courtiers blanche at the blatant lies they are forced to mouth. (Your Highness, the peasants are not really storming the palace; the cook dropped a plate)
The only question is if the GOP wise men will be able to get GWB off the "dime" and out of Iraq by 08 or will they let JR hand the Democrats a veto proof Congress and the White House?
I will reiterate my statement for the past 5 years. It is not that the emperor has no clothes; the crisis facing our nation is that the clothes have no emperor.
The dissolution of the Iraqi army was a "damned if you do or don't" situation. Both choices had major contingencies and downsides. Preservation of the army might have preserved unity, but at a cost of bloody and controversial suppression of Shiite militias and civilians. There is no basis to attribute liquidation of the old army to a Likudian conspiracy. Perle, it should be remembered, wanted to enthrone Chalabi as head of a "liberating army" and get the US military out of the picture rather fast. Wolfowitz probably wanted to destroy Saddam's army, but mainly to free a new democracy from a legion of ghouls and Saddam wannabes. Both men were wrong or ill-informed, but it does not follow that preserving the old army was a safe bet either.
Question: should people who bomb job-seekers be labeled "guerrillas"? Why not goons or terrorists? The perpetrators probably include some folks cut loose by the dissolution of the army in 2003. But can there be any confidence they would not be doing the same thing from within, against Shiites, had the army remained intact. It is fully possible for official security bodies to stage "dirty wars" via deatch squade and bombings against enemies. The militias of Iraq's Interior Ministry and Facilities Protection do this every day. It is also the modus operandi of many other armed forces elsewhere when dealiing with insurrections or uprisings.
Please write a little more about the machinations against Sadr. Seems like the biggest news item of the day.
re the "Isolate Moqtada" item:
The famous Hadley memo said: "Consider monetary support to moderate groups..."
Hakim said yesterday: "Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent trying to split the Shiite alliance..."
There is some historical background here
Yes, Danner seemed on the mark to me.
In a nutshell, after 9/11, Bush was able to appear to be so decisive precisely because he did not concern himself with details, complexities, dissenting opinions or the possibility of Plan A not working. Rumsfeld believed in Plan A: victory (toppling Sadaam) would be swift, U.S. troops would be welcome, Ahmad Chalabi would become the head of the new government, and "by the end of August we're going to have 25,000 to 30,000 troops left in Iraq." He had no plan B.
But Bush himself vetoed Chalabi:
"So there would be no President Chalabi. Unfortunately, the President, who thought of himself, Woodward says, "as the calcium in the backbone" of the US government, having banned Chalabi's ascension, neither offered an alternative plan nor forced the government he led to agree on one. Nor did Secretary Rumsfeld, who knew only that he wanted a quick victory and a quick departure. To underline the point, soon after the US invasion the secretary sent his special assistant, Larry DiRita, to the Kuwait City Hilton to brief the tiny, miserable, understaffed, and underfunded team led by the retired General Garner which was preparing to fly to a chaotic Baghdad to "take control of the transition." Here is DiRita's "Hilton Speech" as quoted to Woodward by an army colonel, Paul Hughes:
"We went into the Balkans and Bosnia and Kosovo and we're still in them.... We're probably going to wind up in Afghanistan for a long time because the Department of State can't do its job right. Because they keep screwing things up, the Department of Defense winds up being stuck at these places. We're not going to let this happen in Iraq."
The reaction was generally, Whoa! Does this guy even realize that half the people in the room are from the State Department?
DiRita went on, as Hughes recalled: "By the end of August we're going to have 25,000 to 30,000 troops left in Iraq."
DiRita spoke these words as, a few hundred miles away, Baghdad and the other major cities of Iraq were taken up in a thoroughgoing riot of looting and pillage—of government ministries, universities and hospitals, power stations and factories—that would virtually destroy the country's infrastructure, and with it much of the respect Iraqis might have had for American competence. The uncontrolled violence engulfed Iraq's capital and major cities for weeks as American troops—140,000 or more—mainly sat on their tanks, looking on. If attaining true political authority depends on securing a monopoly on legitimate violence, then the Americans would never achieve it in Iraq. There were precious few troops to impose order, and hardly any military police. No one gave the order to arrest or shoot looters or otherwise take control of the streets. Official Pentagon intentions at this time seem to have been precisely what the secretary of defense's special assistant said they were: to have all but 25,000 or so of those troops out of Iraq in five months or less.
How then to secure the country, which was already in a state of escalating chaos? Most of the ministries had been looted and burned and what government there was consisted of the handful of Iraqi officials who Garner's small team had managed to coax into returning to work. In keeping with the general approach of quick victory, quick departure, Garner had briefed the President and his advisers before leaving Washington, emphasizing his plan to dismiss only the most senior and personally culpable Baathists from the government and also to make use of the Iraqi army to rebuild and, eventually, keep order."
But then Rumsfeld replaced Garner with Jerry Bremer. Bremer's first move was to dismiss all Baathists from government and his second move was to dismiss the Iraqi army. Bremer got his marching orders from Neocon Dougie Feith. Immediately the US "had at least 350,000 more enemies than it had the day before—the 50,000 Baathists [and] the 300,000 officially unemployed soldiers."
Iraq quickly spiraled out of control.
And who paid the price? The soldiers killed in Iraq. The warriors but not the pitiful architects of the failed war.
There is just a disconnect with bureaucracy and the reality on the ground. This is nothing-new in the annals of Western civilization, but the corruption of language should have been an indicator to everyone, early-on. The General Thucyides notes this in his chronicles on the military-adventurism of the Delian League, and the war-aims of the elite of Athens. Nothing-new here.
The Saudi chameleon's position--Wahhabiyyah--is now revealed, apparantly with Saudi Gov't. sanction: the insurgency against the "crusaders" [as we are called in the AP/IHT report] and shia is to be aided through all means, although jihad wasn't specifically called for.
I find it interesting that Wahhabi clerics would call Sunnis "brothers"; as I understand it, to be Wahhabi means you must agree 100% with its clerics' tenets and Koranic interpretations, which is to say that being a "usual" Sunni you are considered a heretic, although not as sinister a heretic as a Shia. It's the same as Bush's "with us, or against us" dogma--either you're Wahhabi, and a proper muslim, or you aren't, and a heretic. [Personally, I find Wahhabiyyah unIslamic and the major force for destabilizing the Ummah.]
It is also instructive that the Saudi government has said nothing about this direct, overt call to arms against its US ally. Taken together with its recent words regarding Iran, it would seem that Saudi foreign policy is out from under the US thumb.
The Frontline documentary The Lost Year in Iraq sheds some interesting light on the decision to disband the military and institute deep debaathification. Frontline implies that the initiative came from Paul Bremer himself, taking the establishment in Washington by surprise. I'd recommend everyone watch it for a good primer on the early stages of the American occupation, as well as providing candid interviews and comprehensive reporting.
From PBS:
Bremer surprised many in the Bush administration and the American military with far-reaching decrees that disbanded the Iraqi military and purged former Baathists from government employment. But as the insurgency grew, the administration lost confidence in Bremer and his plan for democratizing the country. Bremer was instructed to abandon his multi-year plan and transfer sovereignty as quickly as possible.
RE: De-Baathification and the de-mobilization of the Iraqi army.
It hasn't received a lot of attention but the American Enterprise Institute hosted a series of conferences on what post-Saddam Iraq would look like in October, 2002. Most of the conferences had your hardcore neocon-types in attendance, the usual cast of characters: Perle, WINEP, Gerecht, Danielle Pletka, even the Pentagon's Harold Rhode on one occasion. Plus, there were plenty of representatives of the Iraqi National Congress there too, from Chalabi on down (for e.g. Kanan Makiya, Entifadh Qanbar).
Drawing a comparison between post-war Japan and Iraq, here's what the American Enterprise Institute had to say about de-baathification:
"Where I think it was not heavy-handed enough is in that one of main problems in Japan and what made it such an authoritarian society in the '30s is that it was a nation really led by bureaucrats, including the military, of course, and the parliamentary system had been steadily undermined since the beginning of the 20th Century, since the end of the 19th Century, really, by more and more bureaucratic control."
Then this:
"But those at the top who are full members of the party--there are today about 50,000 of those--should never be allowed even to approach, because they are career Ba'ath party operatiques--to even approach an educational institution, or a media institution, or a miliary institution, or a domestic security institution, in the same way that it would be unwise in 1945 to take somebody very high up in the Nazi party and make him the minister of education or the director general of the ministry of education. Same thing."
Here's what the American Enterprise Institute had to say about de-mobilizing the Iraqi army:
"Now, with regard to de-Saddamizing the security and armed forces, basically there are three components to this: Scrap, Purge, and Professionalize them. If you look at the total number of security forces, there are more than a dozen. Most of these, if not all of them, will have to be scrapped. And when you look at the total number of people in these forces, we're talking about probably between 100- and 200,000 people. Now, not all of them--some of them will be probably tried for crimes against humanity, or war crimes, but I think the majority of them will probably be sent home--sent to pasture, so to speak.
Now, this kind of purging poses both political and security problems. A lot of these people have skills that they could put to use for purposes of organized crime or trying to subvert a new government. So they'll have to be gainfully employed and they'll have to be watched."
Absolutely amazing. Here's the link to the AEI conference series. http://www.aei.org/events/filter.all,serieID.6/events_list.asp
Here's an even better quote from the Iraqi National Congress' Kanan Makiya. He's speaking about the de-militarization of Iraq at the AEI's October 2002 conference "The Day After: Planning for Post-War Iraq."
"Now, I have left what is perhaps the most important question of all, given the history of Iraq's wars of aggression and build up of weapons of mass destruction until the end. And perhaps that's because my views on this have not changed since 1991, when I joined up with more than 400 other people to put my name--and by the way, 400 other Iraqis, of course, from every ethnic and religious domination, and from all walks of life, to put our names on to a document called then Charter 91. And the relevant passages of that document in relation to this question of demilitarization read as follows:
Quote: "The notion that strength resides in large-standing armies and up-to-date weapons of destruction has proved bankrupt. Real strength is always internal, in the creative, cultural, and wealth producing capabilities of a people. It is found in civil society, not in the army or in the state. Armies often threaten democracy. The larger they grow, the more they weaken civil society.
"This is what has happened in Iraq. Therefore"--the document calls--"conditional upon international and regional guarantees which secure the territorial integrity of Iraq, preferably within a framework of the overall reduction in the levels of militarization in the Middle East, a new Iraqi constitution should:"
(a)"Abolish conscription and reorganize the army into a professional, small and purely defensive force which will never be used for internal purposes."
(b)"Set an absolute upper limit on expenditure on this new force equal to say two percent of Iraqi National Income."
(c)"Have as its first article the following, quote: "Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Iraqi people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes. The right of the belligerency of the Iraqi state will not be recognized."
Now, this last paragraph, no doubt many of you will recognize is an adaptation of the Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, and it's highly significant, I think, that so many people put their names to that idea.
I am convinced that if the territorial integrity of the country were to be guaranteed by treaties and by an outside power, the overwhelming majority of Iraqis, certainly its Kurdish and Shiite populations, will vote for such a far-reaching completely transforming program of demilitarization."
Here's the link.
I would like to add to FMJ's comment above that many groups were involved and they were acting in cahoot: INC, Kurdish warlords, neo-cons, Big Oil, the Jewish Lobby, Hakim's SCIRI, naive intellectuals ..etc.
Incestuous relationships also developed over time. Example: Zell, a notorious West Bank settler and life long partner of Fieth (operating in both Israel and the US) partnered with Salem al-Chalabi and openly advertized their access to the top people in both Washington and Baghdad (to the big US companies who were going to get the giant reconstion contracts.) Zell moved to Baghdad even before the hapless pro-council.
I caught the program that Kucinich ran on the Lancet Study, and it was well done. How come no one pays attention to stuff like this? I remember the Iraqi women going to talk to congress last spring, it went unnoticed by our press.
It seems in order to have a voice on the Middle East that is heard in DC and in the US press, you have to be consistently wrong for a decade or two.
still not sure that lebanon will descend into sunni-shia violence. the recent demonstrations are shia sunnis and christians united against a gangster mafia corrupted government.
Hezbullah have grown in stature with all aspect of lebanese society and the recent killing of a shia protestor was the fault of goons working for the kafir hariri.
Sectarian violence wont spill over to lebanon that easily, no matter how hard reuters wishes it to.
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