Top Ten things Bush won't Tell you About the State of the Nation

1. US economic growth during the last quarter was an anemic 1.1%, the worst in 3 years.

2. The US inflation rate has jumped to 3.4 percent, the highest rate in 5 years.

3. The number of daily attacks in Iraq rose from 52 in December, 2004 to 77 in December, 2005.

4. A third of US veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, some 40,000 persons, exhibit at least some signs of mental health disorders. Some 14,000 were treated for drug dependencies, and 11,000 for depression.

5. Increases in American consumer spending come from borrowing.


6. The $320 - $400 bilion deficits run by the Bush administration may push up the cost of mortgages and loans.


7. 58% of Americans think Bush is painting Iraq as rosier than it is. A majority thinks we should never have invaded the country.

8. The US military is at a breaking point.

9. In fact, The US and Iran are tacit allies in Iraq.

10. Mor e money would be needed to finish the US reconstruction projects begun in Iraq.
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Bombings of Churches
Bush and Blair Plotted to Ignore Security Council

Who woulda thunk it? Bush and Blair plotted to go to war against Iraq even if the UN Security Council declined to authorize it. The Scotsman summarizes findings of Phillipe Sands: "Prof Sands' book, entitled Lawless World, claims that president Bush had earlier displayed open contempt for the UN during the summit, made wild threats against Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein and displayed astounding ignorance of the likely post-war problems." Now Bush will come out on television Tuesday night and lie about the situation in Iraq to his gullible followers.

Guerrillas set off car bombs outside churches in Baghdad and Kirkuk on Sunday, and also targeted a Vatican office. The 8 bombs killed 3 and wounded 17. Many of Iraq's originally 750,000 Christians have already fled, mainly to Syria or Detroit, and some observers fear the community will dwindle to virtually nothing if these attacks continue. Although Iraq's Christians are among the oldest such communities in the world, and are indigenous, radical Muslim guerrillas often code them as "foreign" or allied to the largely Christian American occupiers. There was also other guerrilla violence in Iraq on Sunday, which left altogether at least 25 dead.

Some 1500 Shiites demonstrated in the southern port city of Basra (pop. 1.3 mn.) against the British authorities. They were upset about British arrests of policemen that London believes were connected to puritan militias that sometimes acted as death squads. The elected governor of Basra province last Friday threatened to cease cooperating with the British over the arrests.

Al-Zaman reports that [Ar.] Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani and Shiite leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim began their deliberations, in a meeting characterized by much formal protocol, on Sunday evening. The negotiations, to be continued on Monday, are expected to take weeks to conclude.

Hadi al-Amiri, secretary general of the paramilitary [Shiite fundamentalist] Badr Corps, announced that "The United Iraqi Alliance considers [its possession of] the ministry of the interior a red line that cannot be crossed." [The Iraqi Interior is like the US FBI.] He told al-Zaman that the UIA "Gives the utmost importance to security in Iraq. Prominent personalities in the UIA had been victims during the extinct regime of the former security apparatus. For this reason, we cannot consider stepping down from the ministry of the interior."

Amiri revealed that he had been visited by Sunni Arab secular leader Salih al-Mutlak in connection with discussions on forming the new government, but said that he did not know if al-Mutlak had asked the UIA to join them in a national unity government.

Young Shiite nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's bloc in parliament will give him increased clout in the new government, the CSM points out. Amatzia Baram points out that he will push for puritanism and anti-Americanism, and will also reach out to fundamentalist Sunni Arabs.

Iraq's oil ministry is again leaderless and in turmoil, at a time when the industry can afford neither. Despite engineering feats accomplished by American teams, the Iraqi petroleum industry is a mess.

Number of US military personnel just forced to serve extended duty: 50,000.

Number by which junior enlisted soldiers have declined in the US military since 2001: 19,000.

New cap on interest rate on government student loans, which Republicans are raising in order to pay for the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina: 6.9%.

The US military's practice of taking suspected guerrilla leaders' wives hostage will backfire, according to expert observers.

The complexities of Iraq are underlined by the increasingly flourishing condition of the holy Shiite city of Najaf south of Baghdad, which is fairly secure and peaceful. Its pharmacies have medicines, it has 20 hours of electricity a day, and US troops withdrew last September to a base well away from the city, reducing the chance of provocations. Plans are going forward for an airport. Some 3 million pilgrims a year are already coming, mostly from Iran but also from Lebanon, Kuwait, Pakistan and elsewhere, to visit the shrine of Imam Ali. The combination of resources from Iran and from the wealthy merchants and shopkeepers of the city, the calming influence of Grand Ayatollah Sistani, who resides there, the loyalty of the tribal levies to Sistani, the induction of members of the Badr Corps paramilitary into the provincial police and government military, and the defeat of the radical Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr in August 2004 by the joint efforts of Sistani, the other grand ayatollahs and the US Marines, have all contributed to this current flourishing situation. Ironically, Najaf's success is a rebuke to Paul Bremer, who once cancelled an election there because he feared Iranian influence in the city. In the end, Iran wins this one.

AP explains the long relationship between the Iraqi Shiites and their Iranian co-religionists.

Here's hoping Bob Woodruff and Doug Vogt pull through. We talk about people getting blown up every day in Iraq, but when it is someone you feel you know and admire through television, it is personal.
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Beeman Guest Editorial: US to Blame for Iranian Nuclear Program

United States Instigated Iran's Nuclear Program 30 Years Ago

William O. Beeman
Brown University

' The White House staffers, who are trying to deny Iran the right to develop its own nuclear energy capacity have conveniently forgotten that the United States was the midwife to the Iranian nuclear program 30 years ago. Every aspect of Iran's current nuclear development was approved and encouraged by Washington in the 1970s. President Gerald Ford offered Iran a full nuclear cycle in 1976, and the only reactor currently about to become operative, the reactor in Bushire, was started before the Iranian revolution with U.S. approval.

Kenneth Timmerman, in Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran presents a misleading description of this plant, claiming again and again that the facility might be used to produce nuclear fuel.

As the late Tom Stauffer and I wrote in June, 2003, the Bushire (Bushehr) reactor--a "light water" reactor--does not produce weapons grade Plutonium. It produces Pu 240, Pu241 and Pu242. Although these isotopes could theoretically be weaponized, the process is extremely long and complicated, and also untried. To date no nuclear weapon has ever been produced with plutonium produced with the kind of reactor at Bushire. Moreover, the plant would have to be completely shut down to extract the fuel rods, making the process immediately open to detection and inspection. (The plant IS shut down to change the fuel rods, but only every 30-40 months to provide longer and better energy generation)

By contract, the Dimona reactor in Israel--a "heavy water" reactor--is an example of a reactor that is ideal for producing weapons fuel. It produces Pu239 and the fuel rods can be extracted "on the fly." without any need to shut down the plant or alter its operation. The fuel rods are exchanged every few weeks.

The full original article with much more detailed analysis and reader commentary can be found at this URL.

It is paired with a companion piece explaining why nuclear power makes perfect sense for the Iranian economic situation. This article can be found here.

A number of former officials have questioned the proposition that the United States fostered Iran's nuclear development. Certainly it is inconvenient for their present course of action to have to admit that an American hand was present in the gestation of the program.

Professor Ahmad Sadri, Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Lake Forest College in Illinois was a young man in Iran when the United States was touting nuclear power facilities to the government of the Shah. He reminisces:

The image that came to me was the late sixties' lavish exhibit of the United States in Tehran's annual International Exhibit that was fashioned as a nuclear reactor complete with a white dome. Easily the most popular exhibit in the entire international gala, the American exhibit sported by far the longest snaking lines of eager visitors. It was dedicated to the single theme of extolling the virtues of atomic energy and the feasibility of its transfer to Iran. White clad attendants offered inspiring tours to small flocks of the overawed visitors and encouraged them to emulate atomic researchers by lifting small cubes and pyramids laying behind thick Plexiglas walls with the use of mechanical hands. That image found its companion a few days ago as I soaked in the hot tub of my local gym in one of the northern burbs of Chicago with a gentleman that turned out to be Octave J. Du Temple, executive director emeritus of the American Nuclear Society. He fondly reminisced about half a dozen trips in early seventies to Tehran and Shiraz in order to participate in conferences and summits on "transfer of nuclear technology." For whatever it's worth, this native's account is
awash in images that confirm a fair amount of enthusiasm on behalf of the United States for Iran's nuclear program in the 1970's.

Washington International Lawyer Donald Weadon points out that after 1972, and the oil crisis, the United States was rabidly pursuing investment opportunities in Iran, including selling nuclear power plants. He writes:

' . . . utilizing the good offices of the Hoover Institution and the
self-interest of Bechtel and other U.S. A&E contractors who found
significant profit in Nuclear Power Plants at home and overseas (e.g, Taiwan), the Iranians were wooed hard with the prospect of nuclear power from trusted, U.S.-backed suppliers, with the prospect of the reservation of significant revenues from oil exports for foreign and domestic investment (this was not solely and Iranian pipe dream, as the Kuwaitis had targeted by 1980 to be obtaining half of their GNP from investment income, not sales of wasting assets like oil). Obviously, the principal benefit from the U.S. perspective was the significant absorption of petrodollars, NOT Iran's fiscal and national best interest. '

Despite current White House denials of U.S. instigation of the program, there is absolutely no question that the United States did not oppose Iran's nuclear development in the 1970's--even to the point of facilitating training for Iran's senior engineers at MIT, CalTech and other U.S. institutions. Nor is it in question that the Bushire plant was started before the revolution with the United States' blessing.

American dissimulation on this point reveals some interesting motives on Washington's part. Iran under the Shah was as much of a threat to its neighbors (including Iraq) as it might be said to be today. Its nuclear ambitions then could have been inflated and denigrated in exactly the same way they are being inflated and denigrated today, but the U.S. was blissfully unconcerned. The big, big difference is that Iran is now perceived to be a threat to Israel, and that is why we see retired military as consultants to the news media bandying about plans to bomb multiple sites over an area the size of California, Arizona and Nevada (Good luck!) .

Even those who admit that the United States helped start Iran's current nuclear development claim that two factors make a difference in how Iran should be treated today as opposed to the 1970's: Iran's concealment of nuclear energy development activities in the past and President Ahmadinejad's remarks on Israel.

What White House officials never tell the American public is that President Ahmadinejad's remarks have little or no connection with any probable action on Iran's part regarding Israel (or "the Zionist regime" to be strictly accurate regarding his reference). President Ahmadinejad has no effective power in this area, and his remarks aren't even embraced by Iran's clerical leaders. His remarks are widely understood as a clumsy attempt to pander to his own right-wing base in an attempt to shore up his faltering power within the Iranian government.

However, the second proposition is equally specious. It is fruitful to examine the now conventional wisdom that Iran had "regularly hidden information about its nuclear program" etc. as if this in and of itself was proof of a nuclear weapons program. Of course, it is not, although many breathlessly cite it as the principal smoking gun.

First of all, much of what the United States has called "concealment" was never concealed at all when the reports of the United Nations inspection team are examined. Many of the charges about removing topsoil and bulldozing material at some of the research sites never took place. However, even if one concedes that Iran did conceal some processes, whatever concealment of whatever activity started 18-20 years ago when the Revolution was still young and Ayatollah Khomeini was still alive.

There was, of course, a different Iranian administration than is in power today, or that was in power when the nuclear question became an issue. If George W. Bush were to be held responsible for things that happened 18 years ago, or even 8 years ago, there would be howling in the Capitol. The myth of a monolithic unchanging government in Iran is indeed very powerful, overwhelming all common sense and reason.

Second, whatever Iran did or didn't do in the past, they are in compliance with the NNPT at present. Indeed, there would be no way to accuse them of anything if they were not so compliant.

Third, it is essential to emphasize that there are many countries who have concealed their nuclear activities (Israel, India, Pakistan, Brazil, North Korea), and some who still do--it is an open secret. Mohammad Elbaradei gave a half-dozen plausible reasons why Iran might have felt it prudent to conceal its activities (the U.S. embargo, the ran-Iraq war, the U.S. actions in Gulf War I and II right next door, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, India and Pakistan's possession of nuclear weapons-again right next door, the hidden weapons program in Israel, etc. etc. ). This didn't excuse the concealment, but neither is it proof that Iran has a weapons' program at present. In fact, no one has shown that such a weapons program exists.

The mantra "Iran must not get nuclear weapons" has been repeated so often now that most people have come to believe that Iran has them or is getting them. Has anyone stopped to think that this only became an issue when the neoconservative agenda to "remake" the Middle East--including Iran-became actualized? The Iran nuclear crisis is truly a manufactured crisis, based on the flimsiest of evidence and reasoning. I can only hope that soberer minds rethink this position.

The tragedy would be that in the end, the U.S. may goad Iran in to a real nuclear weapons program. The Iranians may reason that since they are being punished for the crime anyway, they might as well commit it. '

William O. Beeman
Brown University
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Over 30 Killed in Guerrilla Violence
Sadrists Demand any Prime Minister Call for US Troop Withdrawal

AP reports on the ambitions of the Shiite religious parties to retain control of the Ministry of the Interior security forces (analogous to the US FBI and Secret Service.) AP also reports that some 22 died in Iraq as a result of guerrilla violence, including the macabre bombing of a candy store in a Shiite area of Iskandariyah that killed 11 and wounded 5. The only problem is that an earlier report from Reuters detailed 21 deaths even before the candy store bombing. That would take it to over 30 dead, at least.

A third of US veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, some 40,000 persons, exhibit at least some signs of mental health disorders. Some 14,000 were treated for drug dependencies, and 11,000 for depression. Societies that think that aggressive war is some macho game and that the price is well worth it just have a lot of homeless and limbless people after a while.

The LA Times reports cautiously on the stories of conflicts among Sunni Arab guerrilla groups, especially between Iraqis and foreigners. The article notes that guerrilla attacks are averaging 75 a day, as opposed to 52 a day last year this time, so whatever is going on is not impeding the guerrillas' ability and motivation to strike. In fact, I suspect that to the extent there is fighting among Sunni guerrillas, it is for control of the guerrilla movement, i.e. for the right to decide which targets are hit. It isn't a matter of not wanting to hit targets.

The deteriorating security situation in Iraq is driving the country's physicians, lawyers and businessmen out of the country. There's a metric for Mr. Rumsfeld-- when the white collar professionals flee, it isn't a good situation.

Michael Slackman reports for the NYT from Iran that Iran's clerical leaders are cocky about the way the US is bogged down in the Iraq quagmire. Far from moderating the Iranians, the US predicament in Iraq has made them confident it is helpless against them and that they may proceed with their nuclear energy program despite US objections.

Krishna Guha reports from Davos for the FT, with the following points on Iraq:

1. Deputy Sec. of State Robert Zoellick wants the Gulf states to play a positive role in Iraq. (Yes, those experienced democrats can teach the Iraqis a lot about avoiding authoritarianism-- I except Kuwait from the sarcasm.)

2. Amr Moussa of the Arab League is still hoping to have the Baghdad Conference, a successor to the Cairo Conference, in February or March.

3. Barham Salih says that the Kurds will insist on a government of national unity that includes a major Sunni and a secular party.

4. Salih also says that the US must not use Iraq as a springboard to attack Iran.

5. Humam Hammoudi of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, who chaired the committee that wrote the constitution, agreed that the Sunni Arabs must be included in the government.

The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) is still pushing for Adil Abdul Mahdi to be prime minister. The issue will be decided by an internal vote of the United Iraqi Alliance.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat [The Middle East] reports [Ar.] that Abbas al-Ruba'i, a Baghdad representative of young Shiite nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, says that the Sadrist bloc has forwarded its platform to the major internal candidates for prime minister in the United Iraqi Alliance. He said that the Sadrists will swing their support to the candidate who most fully commits to implement their platform.

Two planks of the Sadrist platform are the withdrawal of foreign troops from the country and opposition to loose federalism and provincial confederations that might break up the country. The Sadrists also want more attention to providing Iraqis with services and security. It will be interesting to see if any of the major candidates for PM signs on to these first two principles in order to win the Sadrist vote. Al-Ruba'i said that so far the candidate who is closes to Sadrist principles is Ibrahim Jaafari of the Dawa Party, the current PM.

The same article says that behind the scenes, UIA candidates for prime minister have been seeking the support of Allawi and his National Iraqi list. [Cole: I can't see what sense this makes except if they are using the Iraqiyah Party as a channel to the Americans. Otherwise, the prime minister will be chosen inside the UIA by an up and down vote of party parliamentarians, and I should think that being in contact with Allawi would actually hurt a candidate with the other UIA representatives, who code him as a dusted off Baathist and CIA agent. The Sadrists have said they won't permit Allawi to have a government post.]

Al-Hayat reports [Ar.] that Bayan Jabr, the minister of the interior in the outgoing Iraqi government and a member of SCIRI is saying that the United Iraqi Alliance (Shiite fundamentalists) will seek 19 of the expected 36 cabinet posts, just over half.

Al-Hayat has more on the alliance of the Iraqi Accord Front, the national Dialogue Council, and Allawi's Iraqi National list, which together will have a bloc of 80 members in parliament.

The problem is that 80 members gets you nothing. It isn't a third, and so cannot block anything. And if enough Kurds vote with the Shiites on things like loose federalism, the 80 can just be outvoted every time.

Moreover, the likelihood is that the Sunni/secular alliance will split on issues of Islamic law, with the Iraqi Accord Front voting with the Shiite religious parties for shariah or Islamic law. The United Iraqi Alliance could count on its own 128, then 2 from the Message Party (Sadrists), plus 5 from the Kurdish Islamists, plus 44 from the Sunni IAF for any Islamist law or policy, i.e. 179. Since laws are passed by simple majority, the result is a strong Islamist majority in the new parliament for any measure that is not specifically Sunni or Shiite (there are few of those in Islamic law.)

The only thing that the Sunni/secular bloc can agree on is opposition to loose federalism, and on that they could gain some allies from the United Iraqi Alliance, whose Sadrists and Dawa Party members are nervous about it. But can they gain the 58 Shiite defectors necessary to legislate anything on the issue?
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Achcar on Hamas: Guest Editorial

'First Reflections On The Electoral Victory Of Hamas

by Gilbert Achcar; January 27, 2006

1. The sweeping electoral victory of Hamas is but one of the products of the intensive use made by the United States in the Muslim world, since the 1950's, of Islamic fundamentalism as an ideological weapon against both progressive nationalism and communism. This was done in close collaboration with the Saudi kingdom -- a de facto U.S. protectorate almost from its foundation in 1932. The promotion of the most reactionary interpretation of the Islamic religion, exploiting deeply-rooted popular religious beliefs, led to this ideology filling the vacuum left by the exhaustion by the 1970's of the two ideological currents it served to fight. The road was thus paved in the entire Muslim world for the transformation of Islamic fundamentalism into the dominant expression of mass national and social resentment, to the great dismay of the U.S. and its Saudi protectorate. The story of Washington's relation with Islamic fundamentalism is the most striking modern illustration of the sorcerer's apprenticeship. (I have described this at length in my Clash of Barbarisms.)

2. The Palestinian scene was no exception to this general regional pattern, albeit it followed suit with a time warp. Although the Palestinian guerilla movement came to the fore initially as a result of the exhaustion of more traditional Arab nationalism and as an expression of radicalization, the movement underwent a very rapid bureaucratization, fostered by an impressive influx of petrodollars and reaching levels of corruption that have no equivalent in the history of national liberation movements. Still, as long as it remained -- in the guise of the PLO -- what could be described as a "stateless state apparatus seeking a territory" (see my Eastern Cauldron), the Palestinian national movement could still embody the aspirations of the vast majority of the Palestinian masses, despite the numerous twists, turns, and betrayals of commitments with which its history is littered. However, when a new generation of Palestinians took up the struggle in the late 1980's, with the Intifada that started in December 1987, their radicalization began in turn to take increasingly the path of Islamic fundamentalism. This was facilitated by the fact that the Palestinian left, the leading force within the Intifada in the first months, squandered this last historic opportunity by eventually aligning itself one more time behind the PLO leadership, thus completing its own bankruptcy. On a smaller scale, Israel had played its own version of the sorcerer's apprentice by favoring the Islamic fundamentalist movement as a rival to the PLO prior to the Intifada.

3. The 1993 Oslo agreement inaugurated the final phase of the PLO's degeneration, as its leadership -- or rather the leading nucleus of this leadership, bypassing the official leading bodies -- was granted guardianship over the Palestinian population of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This came in exchange for what amounted to a capitulation: the PLO leadership abandoned the minimal conditions that were demanded by the Palestinian negotiators from the 1967 occupied territories, above all an Israeli pledge to freeze and reverse the construction of settlements which were colonizing their land. The very conditions of this capitulation -- which doomed the Oslo agreements to tragic failure as critics very rightly predicted from the start -- made certain that the shift in the popular political mood would speed up. The Zionist state took advantage of the lull brought to the 1967 territories by the Palestinian Authority's fulfillment of the role of police force by proxy ascribed to it, by drastically intensifying the colonization and building an infrastructure designed to facilitate its military control over these territories. Accordingly, the discredit of the PA increased inexorably. This loss in public support hampered more and more its ability to crack down on the Palestinian Islamic fundamentalist movement -- as was required from it and as it began attempting as early as 1994 -- let alone its ability to marginalize the Islamic movement politically and ideologically. Moreover, the transfer of the PLO bureaucracy from exile into the 1967 territories, as a ruling apparatus entrusted with the task of surveillance over the population that waged the Intifada, quickly led to its corruption reaching abysmal levels -- something that the population of the territories hadn't seen first-hand before. At the same time, Hamas, like most sections of the Islamic fundamentalist mass movement -- in contrast with "substitutionist" strictly terrorist organizations of which al-Qaeda has become the most spectacular example -- was keen on paying attention to popular basic needs, organizing social services, and cultivating a reputation of austerity and incorruptibility.

4. The irresistible rise of Ariel Sharon to the helm of the Israeli state resulted from his September 2000 provocation that ignited the "Second Intifada" -- an uprising that because of its militarization lacked the most positive features of the popular dynamics of the first Intifada. A PA that, by its very nature, could definitely not rely on mass self-organization and chose the only way of struggle it was familiar with, fostered this militarization. Sharon's rise was also a product of the dead-end reached by the Oslo process: the clash between the Zionist interpretation of the Oslo frame -- an updated version of the 1967 "Alon Plan" by which Israel would relinquish the populated areas of the 1967 occupied territories to an Arab administration, while keeping colonized and militarized strategic chunks -- and the PA's minimal requirements of recovering all, or nearly all the territories occupied in 1967, without which it knew it would lose its remaining clout with the Palestinian population. The electoral victory of war criminal Ariel Sharon in February 2001 -- an event as much "shocking" as the electoral victory of Hamas, at the very least -- inevitably reinforced the Islamic fundamentalist movement, his counterpart in terms of radicalization of stance against the backdrop of a still-born historic compromise. All of this was greatly propelled, of course, by the (very resistible, but unresisted) accession to power of George W. Bush, and the unleashing of his wildest imperial ambitions thanks to the attacks on September 11, 2001.

5. Ariel Sharon played skillfully on the dialectics between himself and his Palestinian true opposite number, Hamas. His calculation was simple: in order to be able to carry through unilaterally his own hard-line version of the Zionist interpretation of a "settlement" with the Palestinians, he needed two conditions: a) to minimize international pressure upon him -- or rather U.S. pressure, the only one that really matters to Israel; and b) to demonstrate that there is no Palestinian leadership with which Israel could "do business." For this, he needed to emphasize the weakness and unreliability of the PA by fanning the expansion of the Islamic fundamentalist movement, knowing that the latter was anathema to the Western states. Thus every time there was some kind of truce, negotiated by the PA with the Islamic organizations, Sharon's government would resort to an "extrajudicial execution" -- in plain language, an assassination -- in order to provoke these organizations into retaliation by the means they specialized in: suicide attacks, their "F-16s" as they say. This had the double advantage of stressing the PA inability to control the Palestinian population, and enhancing Sharon's own popularity in Israel. The truth of the matter is that the electoral victory of Hamas is the outcome that Sharon's strategy was very obviously seeking, as many astute observers did not fail to point out.

6. As long as Yasir Arafat was alive, he could still use the remnant of his own historical prestige. Contrary to what many commentators have said, the seclusion of Arafat in his last months by Sharon did not "discredit" the Palestinian leader: as a matter of fact, Arafat's popularity was at an all-time low before his seclusion, and regained in strength after it started. Actually, Arafat's leadership has always been directly nurtured by his demonization by Israel and his popularity rose again when he became Sharon's prisoner. This is why the U.S. and Israel's nominee for Palestinian leadership, Mahmud Abbas, was not able to really take over as long as Arafat was alive. This is also why both the Bush administration and Sharon would not let the Palestinians organize the new elections that Arafat kept demanding as his representativeness was challenged very hypocritically in the name of "democratic reform." The very nature of the "democrats" supported by Washington and Israel under this heading is best epitomized by Muhammad Dahlan, the most corrupt chief of one of the rival repressive "security" apparatuses that Arafat kept under his control on a pattern familiar to autocratic Arab regimes.

7. The electoral victory of Hamas is a resounding slap in the face of the Bush administration. As the latest illustration of the sorcerer's apprenticeship that U.S. policy in the Middle East has so spectacularly displayed, it is the final nail in the coffin of its neocon-inspired, demagogic and deceitful rhetoric about bringing "democracy" to the "Greater Middle East." It is, of course, too early to make any safe prediction at this point regarding what will happen on the ground. It is possible, however, to make a few observations and prognoses:

Hamas does not have a social incentive for collaboration with the Israeli occupation, at least not in any way resembling that of the PLO-originated PA apparatuses: it has actually been thrown into disarray by its own victory, as it would certainly have preferred the much more comfortable posture of being a major parliamentary opposition force to the PA. Therefore, it takes a lot of self-deception and wishful thinking to believe that Hamas will adapt to the conditions laid out by the U.S. and Israel. Collaboration is all the less likely given that the Israeli government, under the leadership of the new Kadima party founded by Sharon, will continue his policy, taking full advantage of the election result that suits its plans so well, and making impossible any accommodation with Hamas. Moreover, Hamas faces an outbidding rival represented by "Islamic Jihad," which boycotted the election.

In order to try to rescue the very sensitive Palestinian component of overall U.S. Middle East policy that it managed to steer into dire straits, the Bush administration will very likely consider three possibilities. One would be a major shift in the policies of Hamas, bought by and mediated by the Saudis; this is, however, unlikely for the reason stated above and would be long and uncertain. Another would be fomenting tension and political opposition to Hamas in order to provoke new elections in the near future, taking advantage of the vast presidential powers that Arafat had granted himself and that Mahmud Abbas inherited, or just by having the latter resign, thus forcing a presidential election. For such a move to be successful, or meaningful at all, there is a need for a credible figure that could regain a majority for the traditional Palestinian leadership; but the only figure having the minimum of prestige required for this role is presently Marwan Barghouti, who -- from his Israeli jail cell -- made an alliance with Dahlan prior to the election. It is therefore likely that Washington will exert pressure on Israel for his release. A third possibility would be the "Algerian scenario" -- referring to the interruption of the electoral process in Algeria by a military junta in January 1992 -- which is already envisaged, according to reports in the Arab press: the repressive apparatuses of the PA would crack down on Hamas, impose a state of siege and establish a military-police dictatorship. Of course, a combination of the last two scenarios is also possible, postponing the crackdown until political conditions are created, that are more suitable for it.

Any attempt by the U.S. and the European Union to starve the Palestinians into submission by interrupting the economic aid that they grant them would be disastrous for both humanitarian and political reasons and should be opposed most vigorously.

The catastrophic management of U.S. policy in the Middle East by the Bush administration, on top of decades of clumsy and shortsighted U.S. imperial policies in this part of the world, has not yet born all its bitter fruit.


January 27, 2006

Gilbert Achcar is author of Eastern Cauldron (New York : Monthly Review Press, 2004) and The Clash of Barbarisms, new expanded edition coming out soon from Saqi Books (London) and Paradigm Publishers (Boulder, CO). The author thanks Steve Shalom for his editing and very useful suggestions. '

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Iraq Round-Up

Al-Zaman/ AFP report that [Ar.] the fundamentalist Shiite United Iraqi Alliance is awaiting the arrival in Baghdad of Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani at the beginning of the coming week for discussions concerning the formation of a new government. A source within the UIA told al-Zaman [the Baghdad Times] that the party had formed two delegations, which will negotiate simultaneously, one with the Kurdistan Alliance and the other with the Iraqi Accord Front [Sunni fundamentalist] over how to form a national unity government. The source was vague on the likelihood that the UIA might accept members of Iyad Allawi's National Iraqi Party in the government. (Earlier reports said that the Sadrist faction had ruled it out.) Other party members said that Allawi and his faction would not be welcome.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports [Ar.] that US troops have formally turned over security duties to the Iraqi army in Ninevah province, which is dominated demograpically by its capital of Mosul. US troops had 100 bases in Iraq, and have been turning them over to Iraqi troops. They typically continue to be garrisoned near major cities so as to retain the capability of intervening where trouble gets out of hand.

According to documents sprung by the ACLU, the US military in Iraq sometimes kidnaps the wives of suspected guerrillas as a way of pressuring them to turn in their husbands or of getting the husbands to turn themselves in. Informed Comment is one of the few places where Iraqi allegations to this effect, and street demonstrations over the issue, have been covered. The kidnapping of journalist Jill Carroll appears to be an attempt by guerrillas to free wives of key fighters, so as to reduce the likelihood they will be broken and inform on their husbands' whereabouts. The US claims to have only a handful of women in custody, and to have just released 5 of them.

-------

A kind reader writes:

' It may interest you to know that the taking of hostages is a "grave breach" of the Fourth Geveva Convention.

Following are relevant extracts from the ICRC web site.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Convention (IV) relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War. Geneva, 12 August 1949.

Part III : ARTICLE 34
The taking of hostages is prohibited.


ARTICLE 34. -- HOSTAGES (1)
1. ' Definition and historical survey '

The word "hostage" has stood for rather different conceptions. It is not, therefore, easy to give a definition of it valid for every case. Generally speaking, hostages are nationals of a belligerent State who of their own free will or through compulsion are in the hands of the enemy and are answerable with their freedom or their life for the execution of his orders and the security of his armed forces.
In the beginning, the hostage constituted a guarantee by the adversary that a treaty would be carried out; hostages were given [p.230] as a pledge or a safeguard; this practice, which is very ancient, has now disappeared. The modern form, with which this Article is concerned, is the taking of hostages as a means of intimidating the population in order to weaken its spirit of resistance and to prevent breaches of the law and sabotage in order to ensure the security of the Detaining Power.

(a) The most frequent case is that of an Occupying Power taking as hostages persons generally selected from among prominent persons in a city or a district in order to prevent disorders or attacks on occupation troops.

(b) Another form of the taking of hostages which is very close to (a) consists of arresting after an attack a certain number of inhabitants of the occupied territory and announcing that they will be kept captive or executed if the guilty are not given up.
...
ICRC Document.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Part IV : ARTICLE 147
Grave breaches to which the preceding Article relates shall be those involving any of the following acts, if committed against persons or property protected by the present Convention: wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments, wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement of a protected person, compelling a protected person to serve in the forces of a hostile Power, or wilfully depriving a protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed in the present Convention, taking of hostages and extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.

Open Document.


ARTICLE 147. -- GRAVE BREACHES

[p.597] The idea of defining grave breaches in the Convention itself must be laid to the credit of the experts convened in 1948 by the International Committee of the Red Cross. If repression of grave breaches was to be universal, it was necessary to determine what constituted them. However, there are violations of certain detailed provisions of the Geneva Convention which would constitute minor offences or mere disciplinary faults which as such could not be punished to the same degree.
It was also thought advisable to draw up as a warning to possible offenders a clear list of crimes whose authors would be sought for in all countries. The idea had been stated in the draft of Article 40, which defined in a rather general way what was meant by grave breaches. A joint amendment submitted to the Diplomatic Conference by a number of delegations led to the inclusion in each Convention of a list of offences defined more exactly. It was that text which was finally adopted by the Conference with slight alterations (1).
...
The taking of hostages. ' -- Hostages might be considered as persons illegally deprived of their liberty, a crime which most penal codes take cognizance of and punish. However, there is an additional feature, i.e. the threat either to prolong the hostage's detention or to put him to death. The taking of hostages should therefore be treated as a special offence. Certainly, the most serious crime would be to execute hostages which, as we have seen, constitutes wilful killing. However, the fact of taking hostages, by its arbitrary character, especially when accompanied by a threat of death, is in itself [p.601] a very serious crime; it causes in the hostage and among his family a mortal anguish which nothing can justify.

...
The text is here.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sistani Calls on Iraqis to Turn in Terrorists
Sadrists Call for Sunnis to Fight Zarqawi

Al-Zaman/ AFP report that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the Shiite spiritual leader, called Friday on his supporters to aid the authorities in combatting the perpetrators of violence, according to the members of a delegation that met with him. According to their statements, Sistani said, "Most Iraqis, and in particular the Shiites, face great hardships and numerous problems. It is necessary that they consult experts, and especially the learned. They must beware of enemies. Our enemies have multiplied, even though the Shiites, who follow the family of the Prophet, do not attack others. But their enemies, because of their political weakness, wreak murder and destruction." He added, "Here, we bear the responsibility to direct the people to help the state and prevent terrorism, and curb them and eliminate them, even if only by informing on them." He continued, "The Shiites, from the political and social point of view--even in the West--have come to be characterized by an absence of violence and refraining from infringing against the rights of others. The clerics of Najaf play a role in this excellent molding of character."

Sistani said, "It is a shame for Iraqi blood to be shed by other Iraqis." He concluded that ignorant inciters to violence attempt to spread anarchy [by promoting sectarian hatred] "even though it is useless to them and to the Iraqis, given that they believe in a single religious belief, pray toward a single point of adoration [Mecca], and share in common much among them."

Meanwhile, al-Hayat reports [Ar.] that Shaikh Hazim al-A'raji praised the people of Ramadi in his Friday prayers sermon at the mosque attached to the shrine of Imam Musa al-Kadhim . Al-A`raji, a follower of Muqtada al-Sadr, said that "our people" were standing against terrorism and the Zarqawi group. (For a Shiite preacher to refer to Sunni Arabs of Ramadi as "our people" is a deliberate appeal to pan-Islam, similar to that of Sistani.) He said, "The tribes in those regions have formed popular committes to struggle against Zarqawi and al-Qaeda in the area." On 19 January, the US military had announced fighting between Iraqi rebels in Ramadi and foreign fighters. Al-Hayat says that the Iraqi government hopes to make what happened in Ramadi a model for other provinces.

[Cole: Baghdad is surrounded and much of it is in the hands of the guerrillas, and they are starving it effectively of fuel and electricity, which doesn't sound to me like all this amazing progress is being made, as trumpeted by al-Hayat. Guerrillas launched a significat attack at Ramadi only a few days ago,which was repelled with US help.]
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

The Victory of Hamas and the Miseries of Bush's Policies

My article about the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections is out at Salon.com.

Excerpt:

' Hamas, or the Islamic Resistance Movement, a branch of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, has come to power in Palestine. In his press conference on Thursday, Bush portrayed the Palestinian elections in the same way he depicts Republican Party victories over Democrats in the United States: "The people are demanding honest government. The people want services. They want to be able to raise their children in an environment in which they can get a decent education and they can find healthcare." He sounds like a spokesman for Hamas, underlining the irony that Bush and his party have given Americans the least honest government in a generation, have drastically cut services, and have actively opposed extension of healthcare to the uninsured in the United States.

But the president's attempt to dismiss the old ruling Fatah Party as corrupt and inefficient, however true, is also a way of taking the spotlight off his own responsibility for the stagnation in Palestine. Bush allowed then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to sideline the ruling Fatah Party of Yasser Arafat, to fire missiles at its police stations, and to reduce its leader to a besieged nonentity. Sharon arrogantly ordered the murder of civilian Hamas leaders in Gaza, making them martyrs. Meanwhile, Israeli settlements continued to grow, the fatally flawed Oslo agreements delivered nothing to the Palestinians, and Bush and Sharon ignored new peace plans -- whether the so-called Geneva accord put forward by Palestinian and Israeli moderates or the Saudi peace plan -- that could have resolved the underlying issues. The Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, which should have been a big step forward for peace, was marred by the refusal of the Israelis to cooperate with the Palestinians in ensuring that it did not produce a power vacuum and further insecurity. '

The rest is here at Salon.com
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Minister of Industry Almost Killed
US Tilting to Sunni Arabs?

Assassinations in Kirkuk, a near-death of the minister of industry (and actual deaths of his bodyguards), the death of a GI and wounding of another in a roadside bombing, were among the violent incidents in Iraq on Thursday. Guerrillas also attacked a convoy of oil tankers, in their continued quest to starve Baghdad of energy, and they killed two clerics in the capital.

Another important labor union leader has been assassinated.

Iraq the Model: Iraqi journalists face jail time for writing critically about their society. This NYT piece implies that a Kurdish dissident journalist has been released after having been sentenced to 30 years for criticizing Kurdish warlord Massoud Barzani; as I understand it, he is to be retried.

Reuters reports that some Iraqi Shiites and other observers believe that the Bush administration is shifting away from its earlier alliance with the Iraqi Shiites, preferring the Iraqi Sunni Arabs. The rationale is said to be a dawning realization in Washington that the Iraqi Shiites would not react positively to a US attack on Iran. Given the increasing focus on Iran's nuclear energy program by Bush, his allies in the Iraqi South are becoming increasing liabilities, given their own warm relations with Tehran.

Al-Hayat [Ar.] reports that the military adviser to Jalal Talabani reported that there had been contacts with the Iraqi guerrillas for the purpose of increasing Iraqi security in all regions of Iraq. The newspaper alleged that Iraqi clans of Anbar Province for the second day continued a campaign against foreign fighters styling themselves al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, capturing 270 of them. The clans around Ramadi are also said to have helped the Iraqi army capture 200 "terrorists." (See Gilbert Achcar's translation from yesterday, below). The article says that the clan leaders have also been talking to Sunni clerics, preparing the way for talks between the Iraqi government, the US led coalition, and guerrilla leaders as early as next week.

[Cole: I think Talabani's office is vastly exaggerating these developments, and don't trust al-Hayat's editorial line on these alleged conflicts within the guerrilla movement. Their articles on it read to me as though they are attempting to convince themselves, and perhaps the guerrillas, of this story. On the other hand, the story that the US military will meet next week with guerrilla leaders is entirely plausible. Such contacts are not new, and the question is whether they will produce anything of value.]

Gen. Casey has admitted that the US army is stretched in Iraq.

Further pipeline sabotage and bad weather at Basra will keep Iraqi exports to only about 1 million barrels a day for at least the next month.

A new report says that the US will not be able to use the $18 bn voted by Congress to complete water, sanitation and electricy projects related to rebuilding Iraq. Reuters says, "Only 49 of 136 planned water- and sanitation-related projects will be completed and only about 300 of 425 planned electricity-related projects." The article blames Saddam for having run down Iraq but does not mention the role of stringent US-backed international sanctions in degrading Iraqi society in the 1990s.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Split in Sunni Guerrilla Movement

Gilbert Achcar kindly shares this translation of an article from al-Hayat on splits in the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement.

' The AMS: We Are Now Waging Two Battles: Against 'the Occupation' and Against 'the Terrorists'

Sunni Clans Take the Initiative of Launching a Campaign to Expel Zarqawi's Followers and 'Foreigners and Intruders'

From Al-Hayat Newspaper, London; January 26, 2006

Baghdad-London -- There are still more consequences to the wave of assassinations targeting Sunni political and religious figures participating in the political process, and the killing of 42 police recruits in Ramadi by extremist Islamist followers of Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of "al-Qaeda's Organization in the Land of the Two Rivers." A new escalation took the form of additional Arab Sunni tribal clans joining the campaign aimed at liquidating this organization.

The "Popular Clan Committees" launched a large campaign chasing Zarqawi's group in Ramadi "in order to expel them to Syria beyond Iraqi borders." Sheikh Osama al-Jedaan, the head of the al-Karabila clan in Qa'im, on the Syrian border, said that the "Clan Committees" have started a military campaign against the "terrorists," asserting that security formations composed of Ramadi inhabitants are searching for people wanted by the Iraqi government and by their own "government." He emphasized that this operation aims at expelling from Iraqi borders "foreigners and intruders" coming from other states of the region. Six armed groups belonging to "the Iraqi resistance" recently declared war on Zarqawi's "terrorist" organization.

A Sunni religious figure from the province of al-Anbar told Al-Hayat that the groups that destroyed the Sunni provinces belong to the "terrorists and takfiris" [a label attached to the most fanatical Islamic fundamentalists]. He added that the best measure to be taken in order to stabilize the situation is that the inhabitants of the province (the clans) expel these groups. He expressed his regret that some Sunni families gave refuge to "the terrorist elements" although they constitute no more than 50 per cent [certainly a typographic error for a much lesser percentage] of the armed men, attributing this to several reasons among which are "wrong understanding, material need, fear from them, or the desire to take revenge on foreign troops." He asserted that this support and the silence kept with regard to terrorist groups have ended after Sunni families suffered from "the assassinations targeting Sunni figures and the killing of police recruits, the responsibility of which was claimed by al-Qaeda's organization." He said that the resistance fractions acting within the "popular committees" to cleanse Ramadi have ceased their operations against US troops (a truce), but that this does not mean that they trust the Americans or disregard the necessity that they get out of Iraq.

This Sunni sheikh asserted that the mediation of the Ramadi notables between the resistance and US troops "have succeeded in convincing the resistance elements of the necessity of expelling the terrorists, and anyone who excommunicates [takfir] a Muslim Iraqi and kills Shias on the basis of their religious identity, but they did not succeed in increasing their confidence in US authorities."

One of the sheikhs of the Sunni al-Dulaim clan in Ramadi said that the city inhabitants have started to understand the true nature of the armed groups that kill in the name of religion and resistance. He told Al-Hayat that many Ramadi inhabitants have given material and logistical support to the Arab fighters, but understand nowadays the goal of these armed groups, which is to sow the seeds of "a sectarian conflict by killing Shias on the basis of their religious identity and excommunicating the people working in the police or in the government in general."

Moreover, a member of the al-Bubaz Sunni clan, the largest clan in Samarra, stated that his city was quiet and had gotten rid of the terrorists by the action of its seven major clans (Bu-Nisan, Bu-Abbas, Bu-Badr, and others), adding that "the inhabitants of Samarra are ready to support the clan committee in Ramadi, and that they stand by waiting for any sign in order to join them in fighting the terrorists."

In the same context, Issam al-Rawi, a member of the Association of Muslim Scholars, said that Arab Sunnis are now waging two battles, one against government apparatuses and the other against "terrorist gangs." Al-Rawi added that the AMS praises the efforts of the inhabitants of Ramadi to oppose terrorism, especially Zarqawi who "once excommunicates the Shias and their religious authorities, and another time excommunicates the Sunnis and the AMS, allowing Iraqi blood to be spilled." He explained that the AMS believes in resistance, but calls the terrorists to stop attacking Iraqis.

In the same way, a leader of the "Brigades of the 1920 Revolution" in al-Anbar told Al-Hayat that most "fractions of the patriotic Iraqi resistance" disapprove the way Zarqawi's organization deals with Iraqi civilians as well as his overdoing in targeting the police and army "in all regions of Iraq." [This last precision put between quote marks by the reporter hints at the very unfortunate sectarian twist -- now corrected apparently -- of many Iraqi armed groups who supported bloody attacks against gatherings of Iraqi police and army recruits as long as they were in Shia areas and changed their mind when the same turned to Sunni areas as happened recently in Ramadi.]

He said that "these fractions ["of the patriotic Iraqi resistance"] have called to concentrate the resistance efforts on targeting 'occupation' soldiers, instead of wasting time and effort in confrontations with the army, police and national guard, while occupation soldiers are thus enabled to recover." This does not mean that "Iraqi army and police will be immune from our attacks in case they targeted the 'mujahideen' or treated people badly or assaulted them."

He added that "the mujahideen have resorted to a new kind of operation reducing the risk for civilians, such as putting explosive charges on roads outside the cities and practicing sniping inside the cities." He also said that "the rift between the patriotic resistance and the extremists has worsened progressively, but that "the last straw was the extremists' attack on police recruits in Ramadi, at a time when most resistance fractions in al-Anbar had met and agreed unanimously on not hurting them as there is a need for police, especially in the city of Ramadi."

Published in Al-Hayat, Jan. 26, 2006, translated by Gilbert Achcar. '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Pipeline Blasted Again
Sunnis want Federalism postponed until 2009

Guerrillas blew up pipelines again on Wednesday, halting Iraqi petroleum exports through Turkey. There were some other bombings and shootings. Interior Ministry police commandos (usually Shiites) killed a Sunni cleric in Samarra. This looks bad.

A new report says that the Iraq quagmire is causing the US Army to reach the breaking point. The report notes that the army now appears to be meeting its recruiting goals by admitting high school dropouts. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the worst SecDef in the history of the country, wants the military to move in the direction of high tech. I'd say he needs a high school and a university within the army if the dropouts are eventually going to operate that machinery.

Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa said that Arab peace keeping forces for Iraq would require that 1) a sovereign, Iraq, national-unity government ask for them and 2) that US troops withdraw. He said that Arab troops would decline to serve under a US command. An Arab peace keeping force, led by Syria, was deployed in Lebanon during the civil war there.

Iraq needs $60 billion to revive its industries, according to the Iraqi government.

Paul McLeary reports from Baghdad, ' These days, more American reporters are leaving Iraq than arriving. In large part, for the U.S. press, "The party's pretty much over." ' (A tip of the hat to CBS's Public Eye.

A Kurdish writer sentenced to 30 years in prison for "defaming Kurdistan" (a.k.a. warlord Massoud Barzani) will be retried. In civilized countries, journalists are not tried for criticizing governments.

Iraqi journalists constantly face threats, either from guerrillas or from supporters of government officials, for writing critically about either. Reuters reveals that there really is not any freedom of the press in Iraq, and nor could there be given the poor security situation and the unconventional civil war.

Ghali Hassan argues that the US military is another impediment to a free press in Iraq.

Al-Zaman /AFP report [Ar.] that Sunni Arab politicians renewed their opposition to loose federalism and regional confederacies when they met Wednesday with Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the Shiite cleric who leads the largest bloc in parliament. Salih Mutlak of the National Dialogue Council (11 seats) told Agence France Presse that the delegates insisted that loose federalism be abandoned before they would enter the new government. He said that this matter could be taken up by the next parliament, to be elected in 2009.

On another front, Virtue Party leader Nadim al-Jabiri said that the United Iraqi Alliance had broken pledges it had made to coalition partners about the distribution of compensatory seats. Virtue was given only one of these seats, whereas it had joined the United Iraqi Alliance on the promise that it would be given 15 regular seats and 5 compensatory ones. He said that most of the compensatory seats went to the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Badr organization, while a few went to the Sadrist movement. He said that when he complained, the UIA leadership denied they had pledged him 5 compensatory seats.

Researcher Reidar Vissar analyzes the affiliation of the members of the United Iraqi Alliance. He concludes that they broke down as follows before the compensatory seats are figured in:


Sadrists (Muqtada): 23%
Da`wa: 23%
Independents: 22%
Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and Badr: 19%
Virtue Party: 13%

Another 19 seats had yet to be apportioned when Vissar made this chart. Jabiri, above, is claiming that most of the 19 went to SCIRI. My own suspicion is that SCIRI and Badr are also much richer than the other factions inside the UIA, in part because of likely Iranian support. Still, an alliance of Sadrists and the Da`wa Party could form a powerful challenge to SCIRI leadership.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Achcar on Basra & British

Gilbert Achcar kindly writes:

' Dear Friends,

I searched a couple of British newspapers today and could not find any mention of the news item reported in today's Al-Hayat and involving British troops in Basrah.
I decided therefore to translate it for your information.

The behavior of British troops in Southern Iraq, long praised as a model by contrast with the behavior of US troops, is proving as bad from the point of view of colonial-like arrogance.

Juan Cole reported the arrest on "Informed Comment" quoting an AP dispatch, with the following observation:

"The British military raided Iraqi police offices in Basra and arrested a number of police officers whom they suspected of being double agents for sectarian militias. What the Western press seldom notes is that such police were appointed by the elected governing council of Basra, which is dominated by Shiite religious parties that maintain paramilitaries. Actually, since the elected officials had a right to appoint the police under Iraqi law, whereas there is no legal instrument governing the conduct of British troops in Iraq, it is not clear from where the authority comes for the British to arrest Iraqi police officers."

The statement of the Governor of Basrah quoted below is clear enough.

Best,
Gilbert

-----------------

British Forces Arrest 12 Police Officers in Basrah

The Governorate Council Considers Expelling Them from the City

Basrah- Al-Hayat, 2006-01-25


British forces raided yesterday morning the home of Major Jasim Hasan, the deputy director of the Criminal Intelligence Division in Basrah and arrested him with other members of his family, as well as his four guards.

The staff of the Intelligence Directorate, with the support of the Al-Hallaf clan to which the arrested officer belongs, held a demonstration in front of the Governorate offices, demanding the release of the detainees and the firing of General Hasan Sawadi, the commander of Basrah police force. The demonstrators shouted slogans against British troops, threatening anyone who collaborates with them, and affirming that the demonstrations will go on in front of the Governorate offices until their demands are satisfied.

Parents of detainees belonging to the Sadrist Current and held in the jails of the British troops joined the demonstrators, demanding the release of their sons and threatening the occupation forces of more attacks against them.

Mr Abu-Salam al-Khazaali, a member of the Basrah Governorate Council, said that it is high time to put an end to the behavior of the British, who “assaulted officers of the Police directorate and their families,” adding that “these officers are among the best members of the security services.” ... The Governor of Basrah, Muhammad al-Wa’eli, said that the Governorate Council is meeting “to issue important resolutions, including a resolution to expulse British troops from the city, and to refuse to deal with British firms and entrepreneurs operating in the Basrah Governorate.” He added that “British troops arrested 12 intelligence officers of the Ministry of Interior in Basrah yesterday morning without informing the administrative authorities.” He condemned “the irresponsible actions of British troops in the city and the arrest of members of the local authorities, without giving them prior notice and informing them about the measures.”… '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

7 Troops killed in 2 Days
Sunni Arabs warn of Paralysis

Guerrillas used roadside bombs to kill 7 US and coalition troops in the past two days in separate incidents.

Sunni Arab politicians in Iraq are complaining that the US has set up the new political system so as to favor sectarian outcomes and to produce gridlock.

The British military raided Iraqi police offices in Basra and arrested a number of police officers whom they suspected of being double agents for sectarian militias. What the Western press seldom notes is that such police were appointed by the elected governing council of Basra, which is dominated by Shiite religious parties that maintain paramilitaries. Actually, since the elected officials had a right to appoint the police under Iraqi law, whereas there is no legal instrument governing the conduct of British troops in Iraq, it is not clear from where the authority comes for the British to arrest Iraqi police officers.

The problem with Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad threatening the Shiite religious parties with a withdrawal of support for training Iraqi troops is that a) the threat is not plausible and b) the US training effort can easily be replaced -- with that of Iran. The US cannot actually afford to let Iraq go down the drain, and is not going to stop training the new Iraqi military, even if the Shiites do insist on retaining the Ministery of the Interior (which they will).

The NYT reports on the massive fraud and misuse by US government personnel of funds supposedly dedicated to rebuilding in Iraq. What with the charges against DeLay and the "Abramoff and his 30 Republicans" scandal, the Republican Party kleptocracy appears to have practiced its graft on both sides of the Atlantic. Alas, when you steal from Americans, they just have less money for their families and they'll gladly vote you back in. When you steal from Iraqi reconstruction, you get thousands of Iraqis killed.

Iraq's ministry of labor announced Tuesday that 20 percent of Iraqis live in dire poverty. In addition, some 171,000 families live on $30 a month.

[Ar.] Sources in the Sadr Movement announced Tuesday that US forces had released from their prison Shaikh Abd al-Jawad al-Isawi, a Sadrist leader of Kut, after having held him for more than a year. Muqtada al-Sadr, the young Shiite nationalist leader, heads a substantial bloc in the new parliament. Several other Sadrist leaders of Kut are still in US custody.

Iraqi petroleum production fell to only 1.5 million barrels a day in the last quarter of 2005, only about half what it was in the last years of Saddam Hussein. There is no prospect of earlier improvement, the experts say.

A small demonstration was mounted Tuesday in Samarra to protest the targeting by guerrilla fighters in the city of local young men who sought to be recruited by the police.

Patrick Boylan condemns the wanton destruction of Iraq's cultural heritage at the hands of the United States in 2003 and after. He points out that during the Gulf War and its aftermath, the US was careful on this issue, but that some sort of deliberate decision appears to have been taken to disregard it this time. Why the difference? Let me just whisper two words to Professor Boylan: "Donald Rumsfeld." Or just one word: "Philistine." Oops, now I've gone and been redundant.

Current History has a special issue out on Iraq. I have a piece about the Shiite crescent.

Dilip Hiro looks at the victory of Muslim fundamentalist parties in the various elections recently held in the Middle East.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Rafsanjani Warns against US Policy in Iraq
Muqtada Demands Islamic Rule

Former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said Monday as he met with young Iraqi Shiite nationalist, Muqtada al-Sadr, that the US sought to divide and rule in Iraq. Iran Focus says, ' “The goals of the occupiers are in contradiction to the wishes of the Iraqi people. By influencing the political events in that country they will try to force their imperialist goals on the future government”, Rafsanjani said, adding that Iraqi groups had a responsibility to work together to thwart the U.S.’s aims.'

It reports of Muqtada, ' He went on to say that the U.S.-led forces in Iraq were attempting to decrease the influence of religion in Iraqi society. “The Iraqi people want a country run under Islamic rule”, Sadr said. '

Bombings and a sectarian kidnapping of two dozen Sunni Arabs in north Baghdad, along with the deaths of 4 GIs, marked events on Monday in Iraq. A head of the Sunni pious endowments board was assassinated.

Under Iraqi law, the new parliament must meet to choose a president within 15 days of the certification of the election results, e.g. around Feb. 18. The parliamentarians are, however, putting aside this provision of the law and are making no promises as to when they will be able to form a government.

Iraqi guerrilla groups attacked US and other targets 34,000 times in 2005, up 30% from the year before. The number of roadside bombs deployed nearly doubled to over 10,000, and the number of casualties was up. Any way you measure it, these statistics indicate that the US has failed miserably in counter-insurgency efforts in Iraq.

Iraqi professionals are fleeing the country, which makes the prospect of rebuilding even dimmer.

A preliminary inspector general report on the US reconstruction effort in Iraq finds it plagued by poor planning and poor implementation, according to the NYT.

US contractors are pulling out of Iraq, as the funds for reconstruction dry up.

Iraq is paying Turkish firms $1 billion in arrears for fuel. They had ceased supplying it in protest against the Iraqi failure to pay. In other news, two Turkish banks are planning to open branches in Iraqi Kurdistan.

These recent photos from Iraq, several of them disturbing (be forewarned), are on the web but never picked up by major newspapers or television in the US.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Top Ten Mistakes of the Bush Administration in Reacting to Al-Qaeda

Usamah Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri murdered 3,000 Americans, and they both issued tapes in the past week, blustering and threatening us with more of the same. Most of us aren't wild about paying for the Bush administration with our taxes, but one thing we have a right to expect is that our government would protect us from mass murderers and would chase them down and arrest them. It has not done that. When asked why he hasn't caught Bin Laden, Bush replies, "Because he's hidin'." Is Bush laughing at us?

On September 11, 2001, the question was whether we had underestimated al-Qaeda. It appeared to be a Muslim version of the radical seventies groups like the Baader Meinhoff gang or the Japanese Red Army. It was small, only a few hundred really committed members who had sworn fealty to Bin Laden and would actually kill themselves in suicide attacks. There were a few thousand close sympathizers, who had passed through the Afghanistan training camps or otherwise been inducted into the world view. But could a small terrorist group commit mayhem on that scale? Might there be something more to it? Was this the beginning of a new political force in the Middle East that could hope to roll in and take over, the way the Taliban had taken over Afghanistan in the 1990s? People asked such questions.

Over four years later, there is no doubt. Al-Qaeda is a small terrorist network that has spawned a few copy-cats and wannabes. Its breakthrough was to recruit some high-powered engineers in Hamburg, which it immediately used up. Most al-Qaeda recruits are marginal people, people like Zacarias Moussawi and Richard Reid, who would be mere cranks if they hadn't been manipulated into trying something dangerous. Muhammad al-Amir (a.k.a Atta) and Ziad Jarrah were highly competent scientists, who could figure the kinetic energy of a jet plane loaded with fuel. There don't seem to be significant numbers of such people in the organization. They are left mostly with cranks, petty thieves, drug smugglers, bored bank tellers, shopkeepers, and so forth, persons who could pull off a bombing of trains in Madrid or London, but who could not for the life of them do a really big operation.

The Bush administration and the American Right generally has refused to acknowledge what we now know. Al-Qaeda is dangerous. All small terrorist groups can do damage. But it is not an epochal threat to the United States or its allies of the sort the Soviet Union was (and that threat was consistently exaggerated, as well).

In fact, the United States invaded a major Muslim country, occupied it militarily, tortured its citizens, killed tens of thousands, tinkered with the economy-- did all those things that Muslim nationalists had feared and warned against, and there hasn't even been much of a reaction from the Muslim world. Only a few thousand volunteers went to fight. Most people just seem worried that the US will destabilize their region and leave a lot of trouble behind them. People are used to seeing Great Powers do as they will. A Syrian official before the war told a journalist friend of mine that people in the Middle East had been seeing these sorts of invasions since Napoleon took Egypt in 1798. "Well," he shrugged, "usually they leave behind a few good things when they finally leave."

Because they exaggerate the scale of the conflict, and because they use it cynically, Bush and Cheney have grossly mismanaged the struggle against al-Qaeda and Muslim radicalism after September 11. Here are their chief errors:

1. Bush vastly exaggerates al-Qaeda's size, sweep and importance, while failing to invest in genuine counterterrorist measures such as port security or security for US nuclear plants.

2. Bush could have eradicated the core al-Qaeda group by putting resources into the effort in 2002. He did not, leaving al-Zawahiri and Bin Laden to taunt us, inspire our enemies and organize for years after the Taliban were defeated. It would be as though Truman had allowed Hitler to broadcast calls for terrorism against the US from some hiding place as late as 1949.

3. Bush opened a second front against Iraq before he had put Afghanistan on a sound footing.

4. Bush gutted the US constitution, tossing out the Fourth Amendment, by assiduously spying on Americans without warrants. None of those spying efforts has been shown to have resulted in any security benefits for the United States. Bush says that he wants to watch anyone who calls the phone numbers associated with al-Qaeda. But some of those phone numbers were for food delivery or laundry. We want a judge to sign off on a wire tap so that innocent Americans are not spied on by the government.

5. Bush attempted to associate the threat from al-Qaeda with Iran and Syria. Iran is a fundamentalist Shiite country that hates al-Qaeda. Syria is a secular Arab nationalist country that hates al-Qaeda. Indeed, Syria tortured al-Qaeda operatives for Bush, until Bush decided to get Syria itself. Bush and Cheney have cynically used a national tragedy to further their aggressive policies of Great Power domination.

6. Bush by invading Iraq pushed the Iraqi Sunni Arabs to desert secular Arab nationalism. Four fifths of the Sunni Arab vote in the recent election went to hard line Sunni fundamentalist parties. This development is unprecedented in Iraqi history. Iraqi Sunni Arabs are nationalists, whether secular or religious, and there is no real danger of most of them joining al-Qaeda. But Bush has spread political Islam and has strengthened its influence.

7. Bush diverted at least one trillion dollars in US security spending from the counter-terrorism struggle against al-Qaeda to the Iraq debacle, at the same time that he has run up half a trillion dollar annual deficits, contributing to a spike in inflation, harming the US economy, and making the US less effective in counterterrorism.

8. Counterterrorism requires friendly allies and close cooperation. The Bush administration alienated France, Germany and Spain, along with many Middle Eastern nations that had long waged struggles of their own against terrorist groups. Bush is widely despised and has left America isolated in the world. Virtually all the publics of all major nations hate US policy. One poll showed that in secular Turkey where Muslim extremism is widely reviled and Bin Laden is generally disliked, the public preferred Bin Laden to Bush. Bush is widely seen as more dangerous than al-Qaeda. This image is bad for US counterterrorism efforts.

9. Bush transported detainees to torture sites in Eastern Europe. Under European Union laws, both torture and involvement in torture are illegal,and European officials can be tried for these crimes. HOw many European counterterrorism officials will want to work closely with the Americans if, for all they know, this association could end in jail time? Indeed, in Washington it is said that a lot of our best CIA officers are leaving, afraid that they are being ordered to do things that are illegal, and for which they could be tried once another administration comes to power in Washington.

10. Bush's failure to capture Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri allows them to continue to grandstand, to continue to frighten the public, to continue to affect financial markets, and to continue to plot. Al-Zawahiri almost certainly plotted the 7/7 London subway bombings himself, and gloated about it when he issued Muhammad Siddique Khan's suicide statement. Misplaced Bush priorities are getting our allies hit. The CIA is reduced to firing predators at villages because our counterterrorism efforts have been starved for funds by the Iraq quagmire. If al-Qaeda does pull off another American operation, it may well give Bush and Cheney an opportunity to destroy the US constitution altogether, finally giving Bin Laden his long-sought revenge on Americans for the way he believes they have forced Palestinians and other Muslims to live under lawless foreign domination or local tyranny.
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Muqtada Pledges Defense of Iran from US attack
Iranian FM calls for US Troop Withdrawal from Iraq

AP reports that guerrilla violence left dozens dead or wounded in Iraq over the weekend. The young men who attempted to volunteer for the Iraqi police force, kidnapped last week, turned up as two dozen corpses on Sunday.

Muqtada al-Sadr, visiting Iran, has pledged the support of his militia, the Mahdi Army, to Iran in case that country were attacked by the United States. The forces of the young Shiite nationalist fought US forces in April-May and again in August of 2004.

Wire services note the remarks of the Iranian foreign minister:

' "The American forces are there to dominate Iraqi interests," Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, who met the firebrand cleric, was quoted as saying by the official news agency IRNA. "The crisis existing in Iraq can be resolved with the departure of the occupying forces," the minister said. IRNA quoted Sadr as saying: "We are happy that ties between the Iranian and the Iraqi nations are developing every day and we always support the strengthening of Iraq's relations with all neighbours, especially the Islamic republic of Iran." '

Of course the Mahdi Army would attack the US if Washington falls upon Iran. But it should be noted that of all the major Shiite foces, the Sadrists are the least close to Iran. Al-Sadr's remarks must be seen as an attempt to gain support inside Iraq. He had earlier tended to cede the position of "Iran's best friend" to his coalition partner and sometimes rival, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Indeed, the Sadr movement activists have often complained about Iranian dominance of Shiism.

SCIRI's Badr Corps militia, it was alleged by Newsweek, is still on the Iranian payroll.

Any attack by the US or Israel on Iran's nuclear energy facilities would certainly bring massive crowds into the streets in protest in neihboring Iraq. The resulting violence and the attacks on US troops are not important demographically, but they could cost the Republican Party its majority in Congress, if the American public becomes alarmed that the US is losing (even more) control.

This Iraqi/Congressional factor is among the reasons I believe that the current hard line taken by the US against Tehran is mere saber rattling.

The LA Times reports on US hopes of convincing the Shiite religious parties to give up control of the ministry of the interior, on the grounds that they are too tied to sectarian militias. I am quoted, saying basically, 'and they would do that why, exactly?" They did win the election.

My interview with journalist Sarah Phelan is now online. I talk about the difficulties the US has had in Iraq.

Some of what I've been up to while I've been traveling is apparent in this article from UCLA on Jihadi recruitment and Zawahiri.
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2 Marines Killed
UIA picks up some smaller parties

Two US Marines were reported having been killed on Friday.

Newsweek details how the guerrilla movement has denied Iraq the oil income that the Bush administration had depended on for reconstruction. There have been 20 big attacks on the most important parts of the Baiji refinery complex in the past year.

Al-Hayat reports that [Ar.] the fundamentalist Shiite United Iraqi Alliance, with 128 seats in parliament, has picked up several allies. The Risaliyun or Message Party, a Sadrist group with 2 seats, had already announced that it will vote with the UIA. In addition, the Iraqi Nation Party of Mithal Al-Alusi (1 seat) will vote with the UIA, as will the Christian Mesopotamia Party of Yonadim Kana (1 seat). These allies bring the UIA to 132. It needs 138 for a simple majority, so it just needs 6 more allies to have a stable government.

Inside the UIA, al-Hayat says, the fierce competition for the post of next prime minister has led to a smear campaign against Nadim al-Jabiri of the fundamentalist Shiite Virtue Party, whom some are accusing of having been a Baathist. They alleged that he is disqualified by the debaathifcation laws from holding high political office. The Virtue Party denies the accusation and condemned the "coarse game" some in the UIA are playing.

UIA sources said that rather than reviving the Shiite-Kurdish alliance of the last government, they would seek a government of national unity and would attempt to bring in the Sunni Arabs, so as to avoid giving the Kurds a golden opportunity to increase their demands.

He also said that it would be risky for the UIA to depend on an alliance with the small parties, since that would produce an unstable government always in danger of falling.

Abu Musab al-Zaraqawi, the notorious terrorist leader, is seeking new allies in Iraq.

Some 9 persons were killed in guerrilla violence on Saturday. Some were bodyguards of president Jalal Talabani.
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Iraqi Election Results: Shiites Near Majority in Parliament

Shiite clerical leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim narrowly avoided being assassinated as the election results were announced in Iraq on Friday.

The Shiite fundamentalist coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, won 128 of 275 seats in parliament. It needs 138 for a simple majority. The Risaliyun or Message Party won 2 seats; it represents the Sadr movement of young Shiite clerical nationalist Muqtada al-Sadr, and has announced that it will vote with the UIA. So for all practical purposes, the UIA has 130 seats, 8 short of a simple majority.

[Revised]: The Kurdistan Alliance has 53 seats. I am informed by Peter Galbraith that the Kurdish Islamists, who gained 5 seats, will vote with the Kurdistan Alliance. Together the religious Shiites and the Kurds therefore have 188. A 2/3s majority of 275 would be 184. By that calculation, the two have the votes to choose a president, who will certainly ask the UIA to form a government and provide the prime minister.

I'm not sure that the UIA can pick up the 8 from the small parties that would give it a semi-permanent majority across issues. The Yazidis, a heterodox religious group, have one seat, and they are afraid of Muslim fundamentalism. The Christians have a seat and they deeply dislike the Shiite religious parties, as well as the Kurds. The Turkmen have one seat. These are presumably Sunni Turkmen and if so they deeply dislike the Kurds and Shiites. Mithal al-Alusi, a Western-style liberal has a seat, and he will avoid the UIA. A small liberal Sunni party of ex-Baathist Mishaan Juburi has three seats and will not ally with the Shiites. The Kurdish Islamists have 5 seats and, being Sunnis, may or may not vote with the Shiite fundamentalists, depending on the specific issue. These 12 seats are the only "independents" in parliament and would only vote with the UIA if they were heavily bribed with enormous perquisites. The only argument for 8 of these to join the Shiites would be that by doing so they would gain some enormous influence far beyond their small numbers in society.

Still, as the largest cohesive bloc, the Shiite religious coalition will certainly form the government for the next 4 years and will provide the prime minister. Their victory is a major setback for the Bush administration, which had backed the secular list of Iyad Allawi, al-Iraqiyah. The Iraqiyah's representation was substantially cut back, to only 25 seats. The Shiite religious parties have warm relations with Tehran and form a new arena for Iranian influence in the Middle East. The Bush administration hope that Allawi or his list members can be shoe-horned into important posts in the new government strikes me as forlorn unless there is American coercion of some sort. They lost, and the spoils go to winners.

The UIA can govern, as Ariel Sharon used to in Israel, however, by putting together an ad hoc parliamentary coalition on each individual issue. Where implementation of Islamic law is the issue, probably the Sunni fundamentalists of the Iraqi Accord Front (44 seats) will vote with the UIA. Where SCIRI supports loose federalism, it can depend on the Kurds' 58 seats to offset possible defections from the Sadr faction, which favors strong central government.

Al-Hayat [Ar.] argues that this result leads not so much to a national unity government as to a hung parliament or an extremely weak and fragile ruling coalition where the prime minister is always in danger of losing a vote of no confidence.

The same source reports that Ammar al-Hakim, son of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, objected strongly to the formula used by the electoral commission in the distribution of seats. He said that some small parties which had not actually reached the cut-off for a seat (some 40,000 votes) had been awarded a seat nevertheless, contrary to the practice of the previous election. The UIA clearly feels that its actual majority was stolen from it by the new procedure.

Likewise, the Turkmen argued that they are 11 percent of Kirkuk and have substantial populations in Ninevah province, and it is not possible that they should only have received one seat. (Note that the major Turkmen city of Tal Afar was emptied in the run-up to the elections by an American assault, deeply disadvantaging the Turkmen in this election vis a vis the Kurds). Likewise, the (Sunni) National Accord Front insisted that it had half the votes in Baghdad but that there was election fraud. - al-Zaman.

One question is whether the 58 Sunni Arabs, the 5 Kurdish Islamists and the Sadr faction will combine to pass an early resolution by simple majority demanding an immediate US withdrawal of troops.

Significant Sunni participation in the parliament, with 58 seats altogether, will not affect the guerrilla movement, which rejects the new style of politics. Guerrillas have unleashed grisly bombing campaigns that show no sign of letting up.

(Still traveling. Will try to comment on al-Qaeda developments soon.)
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Iraq Minorities Among most Threatened
Al-Hakim Warns on Sunni Arab Violence

Iraqi minorities are among the more endangered in the world, according to Minority Rights Group International.

The group's web site is here.

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim is warning that mere political arrangements will not end the Sunni Arab guerrilla war. While al-Hakim is correct, the reason he is likely saying this is to combat pressure on him from the US government to accommodate the Sunnis in parliament more.

In fact, two big Baghdad bombs killed 23 on Thursday.

And the thirty-odd police recruits kidnapped earlier in the week are feared dead.

UPI reports that it was another grim week in Iraq. Martin Sieff also suggests that the figures on successes against the guerrillas are way too optimistic, in view of its continued obvious vigor.

am traveling. will try to blog more on Friday.
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50 Dead in Wave of Violence
Petroleum Industry, Electricity Generation Paralyzed

The Washington Post reports that guerrillas killed 50 Iraqis on Wednesday. In Salahuddin, they kidnapped and executed 25 persons they suspected of being police (or perhaps police informants?) In the Wahdah district of Baghdad, seven Shiites showed up dead. They detonated car bombs in Basra in the south and in Saadiyah east of Baghdad. They attacked police in Iskandariyah with small arms fire. Each of these actions produced deaths.

It was announced that on Monday, 35 police academy applicants were kidnapped north of Baghdad. The guerrilla movement targets police and police recruits as a way of weakening the current government.

The Italians have reduced their contingent at Nasiriyah in Iraq from 3,200 to 2,600. They expect to have only 1300 troops there by May, and to be out altogether at the end of 2006. Security in the southern Shiite city of Nasiriyah is now being provided by local police and security forces that are heavily drawn from the Shiite militia, the Badr Corps of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

the guerrilla movement has used terrorist tactics to bring Iraqi oil production to a standstill, according to Oil Ministry public relations manager Mohammed Ali Mustafa. He admitted,' "There is no doubt that the US toppled the former regime for its own interests, but we are in need of foreign expertise and investment as well, so the benefits are reciprocal," he said. ' Mr. Mustafa, who just admitted that his industry is paralyzed and that his government's patron invaded for its own interests, seems to me to have a refreshing concept of "public relations."

Guerrilla threats and sabotage have denied electricity to Baghdad for all but about 6 hours a day in recent weeks. These reports on poor living conditions in Iraq most often neglect to mention that you can't run factories or workshops without electricity, so the shortages are holding back the economy and producing unemployment and economic hardship.

The key oil refining city of Baiji, according to the Washington Post, is virtually under the control of the guerrilla movement. Guerrillas have threatened truck drivers as a way of preventing the regular transport of refined petroleum from the area. But then they smuggle out petroleum to bankroll their own activities.

It may cost $20 billion to fix the electricity problem, even if enough security could be established to allow the work to be done and maintained.

Al-Hayat [Life] reports [Ar.]: The young Shiite nationalist cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, said that his Sadrists would not accept a "powerful" cabinet post in the future government since that would necessitate their dealing directly with the Americans. He said they preferred those cabinet posts that dealt with social services and the welfare of the people.

Sadr parliamentarian Hasan al-Rubaie said that the implementation of loose federalism (which allows provincial confederacies) cannot be decided by only "one faction." He said that the UIA had pledged to work by the consensus of its constituent lists, failing which there should be an up and down vote at a general party congress. He said loose federalism contradicts Muqtada al-Sadr's principles. But he said that if it were to ba adopted by a vote of the party congress, it is unlikely that the Sadrists would bolt from the coalition.

Baha' al-Din A'raji said that the Sadr bloc supports Ibrahim Jaafari of the Dawa Party for prime minister.

The Supreme council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) emphasized that the United Iraqi Alliance [Shiite fundamentalist] must retain control of the Ministry of the Interior (which is in charge of police and security).

Sources told al-Hayat that there is an attempt to form a broad-based Sunni Arab bloc in parliament, uniting the Iraqi Accord Front (religious fundamentalists) with the National Dialogue Council of Salih al-Mutlak (post-Baathist secularists).



The VOA has a piece on Shiites and politics in Iraq and the Gulf that quotes me among others.
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Guerrillas Kill 18
Sunnis offered only 6 Cabinet Posts

The newly elected Iraqi government is planning to offer Iraqi Sunni Arabs only 6 cabinet posts. They had 17 MPs in the last parliament, and also 6 cabinet posts. They have 51 MPs in the new parliament. The Sunni Arabs are going to greet this announcement with howls of rage. In the last government, a Sunni Arab independent, Saadoun Dulaimi, who appears to have been pliable toward Shiite and Kurdish demands, was Minister of Defense. This time the Sunni Arabs want the same position, and want it to go to a prominent member of a Sunni Arab party. The Shiites and Kurds are unlikely to offer them any such thing.

The London-based al-Sharq al-Awsat [The Middle East] reports that Husain al-Falluji, a candidate for parliament on the Iraqi Accord Front list [Sunni fundamentalist] objected strenuously to Abdul Aziz al-Hakim's comments a few days ago. He said al-Hakim had backed away from an earlier commitment to have a government of national unity, proposing instead an inclusive government that would recognize the victory of the Shiite fundamentalist United Iraqi Alliance in the election. He said al-Hakim's remarks were an "ominous sign."

CNN reports that on Wednesday morning in Iraq

"vehicles belong[ing] to a firm in charge of protecting employees of the Iraqna telecommunications company . . . were driving in the al-Jamia neighborhood [of Baghdad] when the ambush occurred about 9:45 a.m. (1:45 a.m. ET) Seven bodyguards and three drivers were killed, and the engineer, who is from Malawi, was kidnapped, police said. About 30 minutes earlier, three Iraqi police and one civilian were killed in a roadside bomb attack on a police patrol in al-Sa'diya, about 45 miles (70 km) east of Baquba. Four police were also wounded."

On Tuesday night, CNN says, "Gunmen killed seven Iraqi men working at a Baghdad company that provides food for Iraqi soldiers, police said Tuesday night. About eight to 10 gunmen opened fire on the building about 9 p.m. then fled in two vehicles."

A story like this from the Scotsman still has the ability to make me shake my head and mutter that this is not a good sign:

' Col Hussein Shiaa, commander of the 2nd Battalion of the Iraqi Army's 4th Brigade, and his brother were abducted on Sunday when leaving their base in Mahmoudiya, about 20 miles south of Baghdad, said army intelligence officer Capt Ibrahim Abdullah. They were found dead in western Baghdad's dangerous al-Baiyaa district riddled with bullet wounds. '

If the commander of the 2nd Battalion o fhte 4th Army Brigade can be kidnapped and killed, anyone can be.

London-based Al-Hayat [Life] reports [Ar.] that Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari has worked out a deal with Dulaim tribal leaders in Ramadi. American troops will be withdrawn and replaced by Iraqi troops who are from Anbar province. The deal was brokered by Jaafari, US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, and Gen. George Casey at a Sunday summit in Ramadi. In return, the tribal leaders pledged to put pressure on foreign jihadis and to isolate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's terrorist group. The agreement opens the way to substantial recruitment of soldiers from Ramadi, in return for local forces expelling guerrilla bands from the area.

Guerrillas blew up Ramadi residents standing in line for military and police recruitment in early January, perhaps in an atempt to forestall this agreement.

Also party to the agreement were clan chieftains of the al-Fallahat in Khalidiyah and leaders of al-Karamah south of Fallujah. They formed committees on which Sunni clerics serve.

A similar plan was tried in Fallujah in spring-summer of 2004, but the guerrillas managed to take over the city once US forces had withdrawn. Al-Hayat, which has Saudi funding, has been pushing this story of a rift between the Iraqi resistance forces and the Zarqawi group in recent weeks, and I'm worried that they are exaggerating the severity of the dispute and the willingness of the Iraqi guerrillas to give up the fight against US military occupation.

Jalal Talabani, Kurdish leader and president of Iraq, suggested Tuesday that Saddam's trial be moved from Baghdad, where the judges and lawyers face assassination, to Sulaymaniyah, which is more secure. This suggestion is another indication that Mam Jalal just doesn't have any appreciation for Arab nationalism. For Saddam to be tried in Kurdistan would inflame Sunni Arab feelings. Talabani is not wrong that Baghdad is the wrong venue. In fact, Iraq is the wrong venue. The Iraqi political and legal system is simply not ready to do a proper job of such a tribunal.

UPI has now picked up the story that Cheney discussed an Arab peacekeeping force for Iraq with Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. Mubarak is said to have urged greater Sunni Arab representation in the government. (Egyptians are mostly Sunni Arabs and tend to sympathize with the guerrilla movement.)

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that an official spokesman for Mubarak tried to throw cold water on the speculations about sending Egyptian troops to Iraq, denying it had been discussed. He said Egypt was willing to train Iraqi soldiers in Egypt.

James Ridgeway of the Village Voice also picked up the story about possible Cheney negotiations with Egypt over a military role for the latter in Iraq, and is kind in citing IF.

Nick Wadham of AP paints a plausible picture of the situation in Mosul, where, he says, neighborhood leaders called mukhtars are being assassinated and people are afraid to inform on the guerrillas.

It was nice of Ferry Biederman to go to Tal Afar and report on the situation there. But I'm damned if I know anything more now than I knew before. Tal Afar was emptied in August and it was reported that neighborhoods were destroyed by air strikes on Sunni Turkmen called down by Kurdish troops. Shiite Turkmen were used to identify guerrilla supporters among the majority Sunni Turkmen. So, how many of Tal Afar's buildings were damaged? What is the current population of the city? Are Sunnis actually being ethnically cleansed? The quotes from gonzo US officers need to be there, but theirs is virtually the only sustained voice in the piece. Sounds like "embedded" journalism with all the flaws of same. I'd want to know what a Turkmen speaking journalist would find if he or she went out and talked to local people.

Raw Story has more on the tangled story of the forged documents alleging that Saddam had bought yellowcake uranium from Niger.
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Taliban Kamikazes Kill 26

A motorscooter suicide bomber in Spin Baldak and a car bomber in Qandahar killed 26 persons and wounded dozens in twin attacks on Monday in Afghanistan.

Analysts suggested that the Taliban were learning lessons from the guerrilla movement in Iraq. Despite killing many civilians, the attacks targeted Afghan military officers supporting the regime of Hamid Karzai.

That would be all we needed, for Afghanistan to spiral into an Iraq. (That the Bush administration has set up a situation in which Iraq is worse off than Afghanistan with regard to security is just breathtaking.)
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Cheney will Ask Mubarak for Egyptian Troops for Iraq: al-Zaman
Will Cairo counter Tehran?

Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney will meet Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak on Wednesday. Al-Zaman ("The Times of Baghdad") says that its sources in Cairo tell it that Cheney will ask that Egypt be ready to send troops to Iraq if the situation there calls for it.

There has been no official acknowledgment of any such talks on either side, so it is a little speculative. But I think the reports are at least plausible, and are worth thinking about seriously.

Iraqi politicians have repeatedly said that they might accept troops from other Muslim countries, but not from any direct neighbors. Egypt might therefore in principle be acceptable to them. The problem is that the government of Iraq is dominated by Shiites and Kurds, who are fighting Sunni Arabs. The Egyptians are Sunni Arabs, and will be suspected in Baghdad of sympathizing with the guerrilla movement. Still, if it were a matter of avoiding civil war or being taken out and shot by Zarqawi, perhaps the Shiite and Kurdish leaders could accept Egyptian troops out of desperation.

Mubarak would certainly be happy to crack down on Muslim radicals such as the Zarqawi group, just as he has virtually destroyed the al-Jihad al-Islami and the al-Gama'ah al-Islamiyah in Egypt itself.

The wording of the Al-Zaman article suggests that Cheney is angling with Mubarak for a contingency plan, in case things go very badly indeed when the US withdraws its troops. In other words, the Bush administration is going on hands and knees to Cairo because it is very, very desperate and very, very worried.

Al-Zaman says that Cheney will also talk to Saudi Arabia about the issue. Since Saudi Arabia is a neighbor, and anyway doesn't have much of an army, presumably Cheney would be asking Riyadh to fund the Egyptian/ Arab peacekeeping force in Iraq. Saudi Arabia had played a similar role in funding the Syrian peacekeepers in Lebanon in the 1970s and after.

Cheney will also seek greater support in the Arab world for the new Iraqi government, which will begin being formed as soon as the final results of the December 15 elections are announced. The previous Iraqi government had sometimes tense relations with the Arab League. Arab nationalist governments had tilted toward Saddam Hussein's Baath regime and had viewed the rise of a Shiite-Kurdish government in Baghdad, established by an American military intervention and with implicit Iranian support, with sullen suspicion.

Mubarak may say "no." If he did show a willingness to get involved, what would impel it?

1. The Egyptian regime has been afraid of Iranian-inspired Muslim radicalism ever since the 1979 revolution. The opportunity to attempt to counter Iranian influence in Arab Iraq could seem attractive to the Egyptian military, and also could strike them as a form of self-defense. It is often forgotten that Muqtada al-Sadr's Kufa is not that far from Egypt's Asyut, and although Shiites are viewed as heretics by most Egyptians, Muslim radical ideas can jump across the sectarian divide.

2. Egypt receives $2 billion a year in US aid. Although that aid helps US corporations more than Egyptians, since it must be spent in the US, it is a prop for the regime. The opportunity to receive further aid from the US and Saudi Arabia for a role in Iraq could seem to the military regime in Cairo too good to pass up. Significantly, al-Hayat reports that Cheney is in charge of negotiating a free trade deal between Egypt and the United States, which would open the US market unrestrictedly to Egyptian exports and vice versa. Bahrain, Jordan and Morocco already have such an arrangement.

3. If the US dumps the Iraq mess on the United Nations, and the Egyptian troops could serve under a UN command, the enterprise might be made palatable and legitimate to the Egyptian movers and shakers. That is, establishing order in the Arab nation in the wake of an imperial withdrawal (coded as a defeat) is a task that might appeal to the Egyptian political elite.

4. The Egyptian military has many contacts with the old Baathist elite that is a key player in the guerrilla movement, and might be able to broker an end to the unconventional civil war.

5. The Arab League member states don't want Iran going nuclear, and the Saudis have spoken publicly on this. An Egyptian military and intelligence presence in Iraq might strengthen Cairo's ability to monitor the Iranian program and would be a way for the Arabs to pressure Iran over it. The Egyptians want as a quid pro quo for the Americans to pressure Israel to give up its nukes, so as to make the Middle East a nuclear-free zone and stop the arms race in the region (which the Israeli Bomb impels).

AP reported on Monday, Jan. 16 from Cairo: 'Egypt on Monday said it supported using nuclear technology for peaceful purposes but rejected the emergence of a nuclear military power in the region, in its first official reaction to the standoff over Iran's nuclear program. "All countries should adhere to their commitments in a way to allow the international community to be sure of the peaceful nature of the Iranian nuclear program, as we do not accept the emergence of a nuclear military power," Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said in a statement.'

If the Kurds and the Shiites could be talked into it, a US withdrawal from Iraq in favor of an Arab League peace-keeping force might be the least bad end game for a terrifyingly unstable situation.
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Only 1% of Dec. 15 Votes Thrown Out by Commission
Iraq Results Unchanged by Investigation


The rash of helicopter downings, with another Apache shot out of the skies on Monday, may, worrisomely, suggest that guerrillas in Iraq have managed to buy more shoulder-held missiles. Reuters reports the blowing up of some police at Musaib and the assassination of a tribal leader in Ramadi, plus the arrest by Iraqi police of guerrillas in Iskandariyah.

The Independent Iraqi Electoral Commission announced Monday that only 1 percent of ballot boxes "did not meet international standards." Of 31,000, only a couple hundred are being discarded, the majority of them in Baghdad province. The commission said that tossing out those ballot boxes would not affect the over-all distribution of seats in parliament.

Veteran investigative reporter Walter Pincus of the Washington Post reports on a recent frank assessment of the horrible security situation in Iraq by the US Agency for International Development, which contradicts the comforting noises made by Bush administration officials when they are asked about it. Pincus summarizes:

"It describes Iraq as being in the midst of an insurgency whose tactics "include creating chaos in Iraq society as a whole and fomenting civil war." Many of the attacks are against coalition and Iraqi security forces, the annex says, and they "significantly damage the country's infrastructure and cause a tide of adverse economic and social effects that ripple across Iraq." . . .

The breakdown of Iraqi society and "the absence of state control and an effective police force" have let "criminal elements within Iraqi society have almost free rein," the paper states. Iraqi criminals in some cases "have aligned themselves with most of the combating groups and factions to further their aims" and Baghdad "is reportedly divided into zones controlled by organized criminal groups-clans," it states. . .

The only thing I would correct is that Sunni-Shiite conflicts in Iraq were not in fact a big feature of its 20th century history. Iraqis were pretty united against Western dominance and in favor of the development of Arab, Iraqi nationalism. I can't think of any big Sunni-Shiite riots in, say, the 1930s or 1950s.

The United Iraqi Alliance [Shiite fundamentalist] is deadlocked over which politician to put forward as prime minister. As the largest bloc, with 129 seats and at least one ally that has two seats, it has the constitutional prerogative of forming the government. The rivalry is between Ibrahim Jaafari of the Dawa Party, the current PM, and Adel Abdul Mahdi of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

Al-Zaman says that [Ar.] Shiite cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the United Iraqi Alliance, is not inclined to put pressure on Jaafari or another candidate, Nadim al-Jabiri of the Virtue [Fadhila] Party. Another source told the Baghdad paper that Ibrahim Jaafari is determined ot fight to the bitter end to keep his position.

The powerful Sadr bloc in the UIA is said to be supporting Jaafari. BBC World Monitoring of Iraqi press for Jan. 15 paraphrases these items:

' Al-Sabah al-Jadid publishes on page 1 a 400-word report citing Unified Iraqi Coalition member Baha al-A'raji, Al-Sadr Bloc member, commenting on the negotiations to form the government, and saying that the Al-Sadr Bloc has demanded delay in the implementation of federalism in southern Iraq.

Al-Hawzah carries on page 1 a 300-word report on meetings by Muqtada al-Sadr with a number of Arab religious and political authorities in Mecca to discuss the political situation and the formation of the next Iraqi government. '

A fight over UIA policy between al-Sadr and al-Hakim clearly looms. (Al-Hakim wants the Shiite southern provincial confederacies). If al-Sadr wins, he could mollify the Sunni Arabs and forestall a downward spiral of the country into sectarian warfare.

In a recent interview, Kurdish leader and current president, Jalal Talabani, said that both Jaafari and Abdul Mahdi were acceptable to him, but that everyone knew he had a preference for Abdul Mahdi. Talabani and Jaafari feuded this fall over Jaafari's tendency to treat the presidency as purely ceremonial. If analysts are correct that the UIA's lack of a simple majority makes it more open to being influenced by other players, Talabani's preference for Abdul Mahdi could become important. Talabani's remarks were translated from a Jan. 11 appearance at al-Arabiya satellite televisiion and carried by BBC World Monitoring:

' Al-Mahdi and Al-Ja'fari

Asked who the Kurds will choose as head of the next government, Adil Abd-al-Mahdi or Al-Ja'fari, Talabani says: "We left this to the UIA to decide and see who they will nominate, and so that nobody would say that the Kurds are imposing their opinion on the UIA. We did not give our frank opinion and we adopted our open stand; namely, that the choice is left to the UIA. As far as our choices are concerned, we believe that a clear and specific programme should be drawn up. Then there should be an agreement on a collective administration in Iraq." He adds that this must be based on "consensus."

He says that he has personal relations with Dr Adil Abd-al-Mahdi going back 30 years, and he also has 20 years of relations with Dr al-Ja'fari. He adds: "These are personal issues but the basic issue will be decided when the UIA makes its decision and present its programme. If we find that the programme of Abd-al-Mahdi closer to us, we will back him and if Al-Ja'fari's programme is closer we will accept it."

Pressed further on this issue, Talabani says: "In fact brother Adil is close to us. We do not deny this but this is not a matter of personal relations. The fate of the country and the future of the people are at stake. The basic issue is the programme that we will agree on, the type of commitment to genuine participation in the government, and commitment to consensus.

"The Kurds belong to various parties and trends. There are some who prefer Abd-al-Mahdi but some others have sensitivities concerning Brother Al-Ja'fari. However, our official decision, which we have all reached, was that we would leave it to the UIA and we would agree on clear principles. If we reach these principles and this clear programme, then we will agree on the proposed prime minister, otherwise we will declare our objection.

"However, I would like to assure you that we have no personal differences or enmities with Dr al-Ja'fari. Our personal ties are good. The issue is connected with how the state will be administered, the implementation of decisions, and the implementation of Articles 24 and 25 of the State Administration Law for the transitional phase." '
Source: Al-Arabiya TV, Dubai, in Arabic 2010 gmt 9 Jan 06

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is said to have refused an Iraqi government offer of citizenship. He says he was born an Iranian and will die an Iranian. The grand ayatollahs of Najaf in Iraq have great authority for Shiites, but, like the officials in the Vatican, are from many nationalities.

Charles Levinson of the CSM discusses the way in which the United States is now throwing some of its weight behind the Sunni Arab parties in Iraq, hoping to curb the dominance of the Shiites. I think it is a very good sign that the US is dialoguing with the Sunni Arabs and pressing the Shiites to do so, as well. But frankly the time is past when the US calls the shot in Iraq, and US ambassador Khalilzad's ability to effect compromises will depend on his negotiating and diplomatic skills. He does not have a strong hand, and the Shiite politicians know it.

The article quotes persons who underestimate the United Iraqi Alliance, which has been reinvigorated by adding into itself the Sadrist bloc, which has a great deal of street credibility. All along, the Americans underestimated the Shiite political parties and movements.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

10 Things Martin Luther King Would have Done about Iraq

Every year we honor Martin, and we hear again his stirring speech, "I have a Dream." But in many ways, that speech is among the least challenging of his charges to us, however hard and unfulfilled it remains. He dreamed other dreams, of the end of exploitative materialism and relentless militarism, of an America devoted to social justice and creative non-violence, which our mainstream media do not dare repeat over and over again.

We do not have Martin among us to guide us with his wisdom. But it is not hard to extrapolate from his "Beyond Vietnam" address of 1967 to what he would think about the Iraq morass.

He would say we have to treat with the Sunni Arabs and the Shiite Sadrists. We have to treat with the enemy. Not only for their sakes, for the sake of ruined cities like Fallujah and Tal Afar, and those to come-- but for our own sakes.

1. Martin urged the end of the offensive bombing raids.

' Number one: End all bombing in North and South Vietnam. '

The US has increased the number of its bombing raids in Iraq from 25 a month last summer to 150 in December. Bombing raids are very bad counter-insurgency tactics and should be rethought.

2. Martin suggested that the US begin, on its own account, a cease fire.

' Number two: Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation. '

3. He urged that the widening of the war be stopped:

' Three: Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos. '

If we applied that to Iraq, I think it implies that the US should seek better relations with Syria and Iran and cease menacing the latter with an air attack.

4. He insisted that the US recognize the widespread political support for the NLF:

' Four: Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and any future Vietnam government. '

With regard to Iraq, this principle would imply that the US should recognize that the Neo-Baath Arab nationalist leaders, the Salafi Sunni revivalists, and local guerrilla chiefs have genuine popular support among Sunni Arabs, and cannot be shut out of the new order. (Note that some 150 candidates who ran in the Dec. 15 elections were excluded after the fact by the debaathification committee controlled by Ahmad Chalabi.) The Cairo Conference held last fall was a step toward this recognition, and acknowledged the right to mount a resistance to foreign military occupation. The work of the conference must be continued.

5. Martin supported a timetable for withdrawing US troops.

Five: Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement. [sustained applause]

Iraqi Sunni parties, as well as the Shiite fundamentalist bloc of Muqtada al-Sadr, have demanded that the US set a timetable for withdrawal. Some 120 Iraqi parliamentarians out of 275 called for it last year. The new parliament may well have a majority that supports it.

These five principles are not the only ones that can be extrapolated from Martin's sermon. They concern more tactics than over-arching strategy. Here are some principles of strategy that he mentioned:

6. It is necessary to understand the common people among the "enemy" if anything is to be accomplished:

' And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the ideologies of the Liberation Front, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

They must see Americans as strange liberators. '

7. Concern to save US troops from creeping cynicism must be paramount:

' I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor. '

In Iraq, too, virtually "none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved." Not weapons of mass destruction, not international terrorism, not Swedish style democracy, not social justice, are actually on the agenda of the present administration.

8. The initiative belongs to the US:

' Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and dealt death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours. '

Likewise, in the Sunni Arab heartland, homes are being destroyed and culture subverted.

9. A revolution in American values away from consumer materialism and militarism is needed if we are not to go on having one Vietnam after another:

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality [applause], and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing "clergy and laymen concerned" committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy . . .

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin [applause], we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered . . .

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just . . ."

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. [sustained applause]

10. Love and justice, not aggression and exploitation, hold the real hope for a peaceful and prosperous future:

' This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I'm not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: "Let us love one another (Yes), for love is God. (Yes) And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love. . . . If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us." Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. '

Note that Martin recognized love as the principle that all the great religions saw as the "supreme unifying principle of life," including Islam. His religious universalism might be a starting point for Americans to rethink the Islamophobia that has become so widespread.

We cannot in any simplistic way extract a template from Martin's sermon that we can apply to Iraq today. We can, however, explore his wisdom for inspiration in how to go foward, end the quagmire, and make amends for the horrors of the way we have waged this illegal war of choice.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

5,000 Protest in Karachi

"That was worse than a crime; it was a mistake."
--Talleyrand on Napoleon's execution of the Duc D'Enghien

Dawn reports that 5000 protesters rallied in the Pakistani port city of Karachi on Sunday to protest the US missile strike that killed 18 Pakistani villagers (including women and children) in a failed attempt to kill al-Qaeda's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

(courtesy of Dawn)

The crowds carried anti-American placards and chanted anti-US slogans.

Although demonstrations were held in some other cities, they were very small, only a few hundred in each case, in the Punjab, according to Dawn. Most Punjabis in places like Lahore don't have the time of day for al-Qaeda or its supporters.

The Nation maintains that "thousands" demonstrated in the northern Pushtun (Pathan) city of Peshawar, but Dawn put the demonstration there at only 500. Dawn's figure makes little sense, since the organizers of the protest control the Northwest Frontier Province, and if they could get out a fair crowd anywhere, it would be in their own capital. The photograph provided by the Frontier Mail, based in Peshawar, shows a bigger crowd than that.

The protest in Karachi was significant, but still small by the standards of that city (it has a population of some 9 million). Up to 80,000 protested the onset of the Afghanistan war in 2001, and 100,000 came out in spring of 2003 against the Iraq War.

The protest was called by the leader of the fundamentalist Jama'at-i Islami, Qazi Husain Ahmad, who also heads up a religious political coalition, the United Action Council. Even some rivals of that party, such as the secular MQM, threw their support behind the protest.

Within the context of Pakistani politics, the opposition is trying to use the missile strike to turn the population against Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who has worked closely with the Americans in attempting to destroy al-Qaeda and its allies in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He was condemned for continuing to rule as military dictator, despite the parliamentary elections of 2002. The religious parties, some of which have ties to the old Afghan Taliban, have about a fifth of the seats in parliament, and have allied with other opposition parties to virtually paralyze that body. The Jama'at-i Islami seldom got more than 2 or 3 percent in Pakistani elections, since most Pakistanis are not fundamentalists but rather traditionalists. Its popularity has been enhanced, especially among Pushtuns and in Karachi, by US interventions in the region since September 11, which are unpopular on nationalist grounds.

The Frontier Mail said that a member of the Pakistani parliament, Shabir Ahmed, addressed a crowd in Peshawar saying that the jihad against the United States must continue, and that just as the Soviet Union had been broken up into 12 countries as a result of its defeat in Afghanistan at the hands of jihadis, so the United States would be broken up into "52" separate countries. This is a member of the Pakistani parliament?

Protesters said that decisions should be taken in Islamabad rather than Washington.

It is impossible to tell how stable the situation in Pakistan is, or when an incident like this one will tip it over into substantial popular unrest. That uncertainty should inspire caution.

There are lots of things wrong with firing a missile at a private home at the time of the Feast of Sacrifice and killing 12 women and children. It was wrong, and was a form of state terror. But in addition, it was guaranteed to reinvigorate the Pakistani fundamentalists, who otherwise have not delivered politically for their constituents.

Can't the US be more careful about this sort of thing? I mean, I'm all for getting Zawahiri, one of the most despicable mass serial killers in history. But we also have to win the war for hearts and minds, and this isn't the way to do that.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Wave of Attacks on Police

Iraq the Model: Guerrillas shot or blew up Iraqi policemen and soldiers all over the country on Sunday. At least 17 were killed or wounded if we include police officers' body guards, in cities and towns from Baquba to Tuz Khurmato.

Iraq the Model: The implementation of the new Iraqi constitution will likely lead to an even more thorough impact of Islamic law. James Palmer of the Religion News Service interviews Iraqi women who fear or welcome this development.

Iraq the Model: A new Zogby telephone poll shows that Bush's approval rating has dipped back down to 39 percent. Only 34 percent think he is doing a good job on Iraq.

Iraq the Model: The US military released two Reuters correspondents whom it held for months without charge. It is still holding other journalists. The military said it had to ascertain whether the men were really journalists. Couldn't they have, like, just asked Reuters? The intimidation of journalists is one of many propaganda tools the Pentagon has deployed to keep the full story of how bad things are in Iraq from getting out.

Iraq the Model: I am afraid that a lot of fruitless "search and seizure" such as is described by Nick Wadham of AP, is going on in Iraq, and that it is alienating more people than it is worth. The worst thing of all is that in the absence of a Status of Forces agreement, and in light of the Iraqi constitution, for US troops to invade Iraqi homes and make arrests without without warrants from judges is illegal.

Iraq the Model: William Fisher argues that Bush turned Iraq over to the State Department because even he finally realized that Rumsfeld's administration of the country was corrupt and error-prone.

Iraq The Model: The traditional Shiite practice of "temporary marriage" or mut'ah, is increasing in popularity in Iraq, according to UPI. Marriage in Islam is in part a contract, and Shiite law allows the contract to specify how long the marriage will last. It can be a short period, such as two weeks. Critics of the practice decry it as a form of legalized prostitution, since the groom is responsible for taking care of his temporary bride economically for the period of time they are married. But US couples do one-night stands and move in together for short and longer periods, and living together is often considered a form of common law marriage. So it mystifies me why Americans get so self-righteous about a formalized, religiously sanctioned equivalent of American style shacking up.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraq's Economic Doldrums

With reference to my comment on Sunday about Iraq's economy being a mess, and my link to a Guardian article on the anxieties in the Amec Corp. about whether the repairs done in Iraq will last in the face of guerrilla sabotage. An informed reader wrote:

'Note that The Guardian paraphrases an Amec representative to the effect that much of their infrastructure work (electricity, water treatment and distribution, waste disposal) has been repair. The equipment is a mixture from French, Russian and other sources, and is old. What the Amec person was referring to was maintenance and spare parts, even apart from insurgent efforts. There is one plant where spare parts had to be custom-fabricated in Germany, because the machinery was no longer produced. Because of the time limits on the USG financing, there are no contracts or no funds, for maintenance and repair. There was a battle at the CPA early on, which the good guys lost: repair or build and install only new and state of the art . . . A subtle point was that, in addition to better providing services to the Iraqis, the installation of good new equipment would be an example for the future as to how things should be done.

Among the issues next up is how, and with what policies and personnel, the UIA majority will administer the economy. I have concern that, in terms of personnel, they have a limited talent pool of “scientists.” Saudi Arabia is as successful as it is in substantial part because, even now, there are on the order of 10,000 Americans, gradually over time being replaced by Saudis, working for Aramco. A byproduct of the insurgency is that foreigners will be difficult to employ. It is not only technology, which, in theory, can be transferred by contract, but know-how, which cannot.

And, again, where is the $7 billion of 2006 “sustainment costs” (SIGIR Bowen) for the Army and police going to come from?

To a significant extent, the $18.4 billion was wasted. To give only one example, when Bremer lifted tariffs in the interest of “free trade,” 1 million cars came in, but not a liter was added to Iraq’s refining capacity. The amount already sent to Kuwait for gasoline could have financed the cost of two major new refineries plus.

In short, they are either going to have to borrow money or make do and muddle through. Even with the Paris Club debt-reduction, and now the private creditor settlement, which will involve the issuance of $3 billion in bonds this Thursday, at present oil export levels, they will have too much debt. The pressures to enter into less-than-optimum oil-field deals will be substantial.

As you say, it is to weep. '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Arab League Troops for Iraq?
Al-Hakim Rejects Tyranny of the Minority

Rumors are flying in Cairo that the US is asking Arab countries to send troops to Iraq to prepare the way for a US withdrawal. This quest is said to underlie the mission of Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney to Egypt and other Arab states beginning Sunday.

Khalid Mahmud of al-Sharq al-Awsat reports from Cairo [Ar.] that the Arab League denied that US ambassador to Egypt Francis Ricciardone broached, during his meeting on Saturday with Secretary-General Amr Moussa, the possibility that it might send troops to Iraq to help achieve order and stability. Moussa's chief of staff, Hisham Yusuf, said that although Iraq and the Lebanon-Syria crisis had been discussed, the issue of troops for Iraq was not raised.

He said that it seemed unlikely that Arab League members would seriously consider sending peacekeeping troops to Iraq. A precondition would be a formal invitation from the Iraqi government backed by a consensus of the political forces in Iraq. There would also have to be a United Nations Security Council resolution specifying the nature of the mission of these troops, their rules of engagement, and how long they were to remain in Iraq. He pointed out that similar plans were floated last summer but had never amounted to anything, and reminded us that Arab League members would not be willing to have their troops under US command.

An American source told SA that Washington wants to encourage the evolution of Arab plans for peace keeping in Iraq, and noted that Yemen had at one point floated such a plan. SA writes, "The veil was drawn back on American efforts to encourage some Arab states to form an Arab intervention force in Iraq on the model of the Arab peace enforcing units that were formed from several Arab countries under the leadership of Syira during the civil war in Lebanon.

Some observers said that Arab publics would angrily reject this prospect.

[Cole: Egypt and Yemen are appropriate for this,whether they follow through or not. But it seems a little unlikely to me that the Shiite government will want them.)

Guerrillas in Ramadi killed a US Marine.

Reuters reports security incidents on Saturday:

" BAGHDAD - A roadside bomb killed two policemen and injured four other people when it blew up next to a police patrol in eastern Baghdad, police said.

BAGHDAD - Gunmen assassinated Hadi al-Wa'ili, a Shi'ite cleric who led prayers at the Mehdi mosque in the mixed Baghdad neighbourhood of Hurriya, police said."

Here is what Shaikh al-Waeli said in April, 2003, after the fall of Saddam and the killing of returned Shiite cleric Abdul Majid al-Khoei:

' "We do not want an opposition coming from abroad or a proxy American government with Iraqi puppets," said Hadi al-Waeli, the imam of Al Mahdi Mosque in Baghdad's Kadhemah district. "The Iraqis who lived and suffered in Iraq have more rights to power than those who came from abroad and do not enjoy any leverage," he said. '

Al-Waeli lost that argument, since it is the long-time expatriate politicians who dominate the new government, and though it is not exactly a puppet of the US, it is close to Washington. Now he has lost his life altogether, in the violence and chaos that the invasion brought to his country.

Shiite clerical leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, whose party is only a little short of an absolute majority in the new parliament, is objecting to the sort of national unity government that might reduce the prerogatives of the majority. Al-Hakim will have to ally with the Kurds to get a president elected, which requires a 2/3s vote in the first round. But his Shiite fundamentalist coalition increasingly looks as though it can find small partners to achieve a slim 51% majority of 138 seats in the 275-member parliament. The Risaliyun or the Mission Party, appears to have gained two seats. It is a Sadrist group and will vote with the United Iraqi Alliance of al-Hakim, which is said to have 129. Some 15 seats have gone to small parties that might be wooed by the UIA to make a majority. It would only need 7 MPs to form a simple majority.

Huda Jasim of al-Sharq al-Awsat reports [Ar.]: Lively political jockeying is going on in Baghdad in the expectation that the final tallies in the Dec. 15 elctions will be announced in the near future. A source in the United Iraqi Alliance [Shiite fundamentalist] says he expects his coalition to provide the prime minister, and that the president will be a Kurd-- though the Sunni Arabs will compete for that post. He said that virtually the only issue over which negotiations will be held is the distribution of cabinet posts among the parties. The official spokesman for the Iraqi Islamic Party, Alaa Makki, said, "The issue of altering some articles of the constitution, on which political blocs and parties have agreed, is a duty from which there is no escape." He said that there could be "no going back on" the undertaking enshrined in article 140 of the constitution, providing for its amendment.

Salih Mutlak of the National Dialogue Council [Sunni Arab Nationalist] rejected the taking of any political direction that would leave the constitution as it is, without essential changes in it. He warned of the danger of a partition of Iraq if a refusal to amend the charter is the unalterable position [of the non-Sunni Arab parties].

Ali al-Adib of the Dawa Party said that preliminary negotiations of the Shiite UIA with the Kurdistan Alliance had focused on creating a sort of balance in the new parliament. He said it was expected that it would be necessary to make a coalition among virtually all the blocs in parliament, so as to set a new political methodology that might push Iraq toward a new path of stability and security.

Several sources said that the UIA plan to create new provincial confederacies (on the model of the Kurdistan Regional Government) in the deep South and the middle Eurphrates will be an obstacle to the formation of the next government.

They also said that although they want a government of national unity, it may not be possible to form one. The outstanding issue will be distribution of cabinet posts. The United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite fundamentalists who won more or less won the election, wants the portfolios of Interior and Defense. But some leading Sunni Arab personalities have their eyes on those positions, as well.

Salih Mutlak of the secular, largely Sunni Arab National Dialogue Council said Saturday that he had been offered the post of vice premier if he would accept the results of the Dec. 15 elections. (This story sound phony to me; there is not yet a government or prime minister to offer him such a post, and the Sadrists [puritanical Shiites], a major bloc within the UIA, have said that they would not stand for it.

Sources in the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party and the National Accord Front [Sunni fundamentalist] said that the only highly contested issue in the negotiations will be over changes in the new Iraqi constitution.

Iraq's economy is a huge mess and is likely to stay that way for a while, is how I read this piece in the Guardian Observer. One alarming piece of information for which I have independent confirmation is that the hospitals still don't have enough of some medicines, and even keeping some patients hydrated is a problem. If anyone has any idea of who can get medicine or money for medicine reliably to the hospitals, I would appreciate knowing about it. Can the International Red Crescent/ Red Cross help here?

A British firm warns that some 25% of work on Iraqi electicity and other infrastructure has been undone in recent months by attacks by the guerrilla movement. It further warns that all such infrastructural repairs may be undone if the US ceases funding the effort, as it has announced it intends to.

It cannot possibily be a good sign that Iraq is having to import over 120,000 cartons of eggs from Iran. After all the famous "gaps" in history-- the missile gap, the WMD gap, etc., now we have . . . the chicken gap?

This article examines the general hostility Iraqis have shown toward the pet US project of privatizing the economy. (First there needs to be an economy to privatize, folks. See above.)

The chief judge in the Saddam Hussein trial has submitted his resignation. He had been widely criticized for failing to keep the proceedings from becoming a soapbox for Saddam.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Strike in Pakistan Fails
Pakistan Demands Apology

Ooops. The bombing of a village in northern Paksitan, apparently done in hopes of killing al-Qaeda #2 Ayman al-Zawahir, missed its intended target. The idea had been to kill him while he was eating a joint dinner with his hosts in honor of the Feast of Sacrifice (commemorating the story of Abraham and his son).

I presume that the Pakistani government is crying crocodile tears over the strike, which it certainly authorized, and for which it would have held a victory parade if the bombing had succeeded.

As it is, the US has killed at least 18 persons, some of them, it is being alleged, women and children. In this age of global media, we'll no doubt get to see the pictures.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

US Helicopter Shot Down
Sunni Arabs Cannot Block Formation of Government

Guerrillas north of Mosul engaged Iraqi police in a firefight. When a US helicopter came up to support the police, the guerrillas appear to have shot it down, killing two GIs.

I disagree with the conclusions The Scotsman draws in reporting on on the numbers of seats gained by various parties in the recent election in Iraq. An official tally will probably come next week. I'm grateful that they managed to get some advance word on numbers (they are not alone). But I think their analysis put the emphasis on the wrong thing.

They estimate that the Allawi Iraqiyah list will shrink to only 25.

The Sunni fundamentalist National Accord Front will have 42.

The secular Arab nationalist National Dialogue Council will have 11.

These three formed a Rejection Front demanding an investigation into voting fraud. They hoped to block the election of a president by parliament who did not accept some of their key demands. To do so, they would need 93 seats. It appears that they have 78, and so cannot by themselves block the formation of a government.

Assuming these numbers are firm, this is the key point that any article about these numbers should have made: "Rejection Front fails to Secure 1/3 + 1, Cannot Block Selection of President."

Even if some small parties (religious Kurds?) vote with the Rejection Front, they almost certainly cannot pick up another 15 seats.

The Scotsman alleges that the Shiite fundamentalist United Iraqi Alliance (129 seats) and the Kurdistan Alliance (52 seats) won't have the the 183 seats (2/3s of 275) needed to select a president all by themselves. But they do in fact seem to have 181. The news here is that they have done just as well as they predicted, and are in striking distance of being able to form a government.

It is not clear whether the paper is counting the one seat won by the Sadrist Risaliyun or Mission Party, which has announced that it will vote with the Shiite UIA. If not, that would take the Kurds and Shiites to 182, only one vote short of two-thirds. Six seats have still not been apportioned, and only one would have to go to a UIA ally to give them 2/3s. This outcome strikes me as highly likely.

In fact, two or three members of parliament may just have been given a Wish Machine, since if they are the pivotal votes that allow the Kurds and Shiites to avoid being blackmailed by the Rejection front, then they can pretty much make any demand they want and it will be granted. Small religious parties in Israel have benefitted from similar situations in the past.

If the Rejection Front had managed to secure 93 seats, they could have, e.g., demanded that the Ministry of Interior go to Iyad Allawi. Shiite nationalist Muqtada al-Sadr, however, has already said that the participation of the Allawi list in the government is a red line that must not be crossed. Sadr's bloc is central to the United Iraqi Alliance. The resulting standoff could have produced governmental gridlock and given the guerrillas an opening to spread chaos again.

The most likely scenario now is that the Shiite fundamentalists and the Kurds will form a national unity government by wooing the Sunni religious coalition, the Iraqi Accord Front, to join them and to desert Allawi and the National Dialogue Council. If the Shiites and Kurds actually can put together a 2/3s majority, they can present the Sunni fundamentalists with a choice of joining the government and getting cabinet posts, or of being left in the cold as part of an opposition.

Since the ordinary business of parliament will be conducted by a simple majority, the Kurds and the Shiites could simply outvote the Sunni Arabs every time. Indeed, the Shiite fundamentalists only need to pick up 8 or so allies to be able to win every vote all on their own.

A canny German observer sees the recent leak that German intelligence officers in Baghdad supplied intelligence to the Americans before the war as payback by US intelligence agencies. They are said to be settling scores with the Social Democratic Party's holier than thou attitude when it was in power and also to be firing a shot across the bow of conservative PM Angela Merkel in reaction to her call for the Guantanamo detention facility to be closed.

US investigators have confirmed that the Saddam Hussein regime used chemical weapons against the Shiites who rose up against his regime in 1991. Some 60,000 Shiites were killed in April of 1991 when Saddam used helicopter gunships and armor to crush the rebellion. The US could have interdicted the helicopters from firing, but chose not to. Then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney maintained that the Saudis had expressed unhappiness about the prospect of a Shiite take-over of Iraq. .
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Bush and the Caliphate

Karl Vick of the Washington Post does his readers an enormous favor by explaining the idea of the Sunni Muslim caliphate, its history, and why many Sunnis want it revived.

The article also contains a critique of Bush's recent speech in which he warned of the caliphate ideology of al-Qaeda, saying it wished to establish the institution from Spain to Indonesia. The problem is that a caliphate is an ideal for many Muslims who have little sympathy with al-Qaeda, and framing the conflict as America versus a revived caliphate alienates them.

There are different conceptions of the caliphate, sort of a Sunni papacy. At some points in history the caliph was both a temporal and a spiritual leader. But over time there was a separation of religion and state of sorts in medieval Islam, and civil rulers such as the Buyids or Seljuks exercised material rule, reducing the caliphs of the tenth through thirteenth centuries to largely a spiritual function. The Mongols ended the caliphate in 1258. The Ottoman sultans attempted to revive it from 1880, though their claim was not universally accepted. Ataturk abolished this revived caliphate in 1924. There were big debates in places like Egypt about whether Sunni Muslims needed a caliphate, and then then king of Egypt put his hat in the ring as a contender for caliph. But modern nationalism was taking hold, and the nationalist leaders of countries such as Egypt had no desire to see an alternative power center created. So the caliphate lapsed again, to the dismay of Muslim nationalists such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hizb al-Tahrir, who want it recreated.

Vick writes:

' Some experts warn that such a reservoir of feeling illustrates the risk of framing the Iraq war as a contest of ideologies.

"I think the smart thing to do if you're the president of the United States is to sort of de-Islamicize the problem," said Kirstine Sinclair, a University of Southern Denmark researcher who co-wrote a book on Hizb ut-Tahrir. "Talk about security risks instead. When you talk about expanding the war on terror to talk about states with an Islamist agenda or even the caliphate, you stir up emotions and you're actually creating the clash of civilizations."

Numerous polls show the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have sharpened solidarity among Muslims and antipathy toward Americans. "To tell you the truth, I don't see even see them as humans anymore. America is a pig," said Orel, who is in his eighties. The trend appears greatest among the very people whom the radicals aim to mobilize. '

The US government has a policy on al-Qaeda, which is that it must be destroyed as a movement. But it needn't have a policy on the caliphate per se, which is the Sunni Muslims' business.
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US Strike on al-Qaeda Safe House on Afghanistan Border

ABC News is reporting that a US air strike on a village at the Pakistan-Afghanistan border may have killed 5 high-ranking al-Qaeda figures, including the organization's #2, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

On CNN, Wolf Blitzer speculated that since Zawahiri has been releasing video tapes (one just a week ago), the CIA may have found a way to trace the delivery of the cassettes back to the village.

I am going to hold off any comment about the possibility of Zawahiri being dead. There have been other strikes in the Pakistani tribal regions against supposedly big fish of al-Qaeda that have turned out to be no such thing. This time the leaks seem also to come from Washington counter-terrorism sources, so maybe there is something to them. On the other hand, the US intelligence people may have decided that Zawahiri has been making too much noise and that starting a rumor that he may have been killed will hurt his charisma at least in the short term.

This world is murky.
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Sunnis Insist on Trying to Change Constitution
US Military Torture Investigations cut Short

Only Agence France Presse among Western news agencies carries the Sunni Arab response on Thursday to Wednesday's remarks by Shiite cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim rejecting any changes in the constitution. The Sunni Arabs were promised an opportunity to try to change some articles during a four-month window after the new government is formed.

The full version of this piece notes that Adnan Dulaimi, the Sunni Arab leader of the fundamentalist coalition, the National Accord Front, said in response to al-Hakim:

' "There is an article in the constitution concerning the amendment and we are determined to change all articles that risk leading to a division of Iraq . . . We support giving more power to the provinces to reinforce decentralisation, but the creation of regions that are autonomous of Baghdad in the centre and in the south threatens the unity of the country," he said, in comments broadcast on As-Sharqiya, a private television station. "We reject this and we continue to defend the unity of Iraq."

Political activity has largely been put on hold as Iraq marks the Eid Al-Adha vacation, but it is set to resume in earnest from Sunday. '

Al-Hakim had tried to put further discussion of the provision for creating provincial confederacies off limits, but Dulaimi is clearly having none of it. It would be as though Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina could form a confederacy, elect their own president, and run their economy separately from that of the Federal government. Ooops. Didn't we try that once? Dulaimi is right to fear that such a confederal system holds severe dangers for the unity of Iraq.

Arianna Huffington does an excellent job of explaining this issue and of recognizing its importance.

Speaking of which, the already-existing Kurdistan confederacy, which is issuing visas and inviting foreign companies to engage in exploration for petroleum without informing the central government in Baghdad, took another step toward autonomy on Wednesday. Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports [Ar.] that Kurdistan will establish a provincial ministry of foreign affairs, which is being claimed as a "constitutional right." Usually in federal systems, the states or provinces cede the field of foreign affairs to the central government.

The results of the UN investigation into vote fraud will probably be announced Sunday. It is likely that the investigation will not result in significant changes in the composition of parliament, and therefore that the release of the report will provoke further demonstrations and possibly violence.

Despite the hopes being placed by Bush in the new Iraqi army, it is still not reliable. The Washington Post reports that when the US turned over to the Iraqi military a palace complex it had used as a base near Tikrit, the Iraqi soldiers promptly went into an orgy of looting. At the time, the turn-over was hailed as a sign of "progress," Ellen Knickmeyer notes. Actually, as I remember, the ceremony was interrupted by mortar fire that endangered the lives of some of the US brass and of ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat said [Ar.] that Jamal Khidr Abdal, a former high Baath official in the Kurdish city of Dohuk, was hunted down and assassinated on Wednesday in a village north of Mosul. He and his family had been the targets of an attack two days before, which resulted in injuries.

David Hirst of the Guardian concludes that the main beneficiaries of the Iraq mess are Iran and Israel. Should the two victors come into conflict with one another, or should the US take on Iran directly, he warns, the Iranians will launch a response that will make the Sunni Arabs of Iraq look like pikers.

A shadowy US military unit called Task Force 6-26 has been implicated in torture in Iraq. But the records show false names and 3/4s of the computer files somehow got erased, making it impossible for investigators to follow the trail. The ACLU, which got the documents released, thinks the trail goes high into the Department of Defense, since someonw authorized the creation and functioning of the task force.

The NYT reports that Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who set up interrogation techniques at Guantanamo and then at Abu Ghraib, has decided to invoke Article 31 of the military code, which permits him to avoid testifying in a court-martial in such a way as to risk incriminating himself. He will retire from the military after 34 years. The particular questions that Miller is avoiding answering under oath in this way have to do with setting attack dogs on prisoners. It certainly is a form of torture.

The US military is under civilian oversight and Maj. Gen. Miller's bosses were George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Stephen Cambone, none of whom is resigning in the way that Miller is. Indeed, Rumsfeld said that he doesn't want to "inject himself into" the investigations of the torture conducted by his subordinates! Wasn't he injected into it by virtue of running the Department of Defense?

Amnesty International is upset that most of the Guantanamo detainees still have not been charged with any crime four years later. A basic element of law is that no human being is outside the scope of the courts and of the rule of law. Even Nazi war criminals, the profundity of whose beastliness could never be plumbed, were charged and tried.

Laura K. Donohue warns us in the LA Times that we are all being watched and Federal agents are rifling through our credit card receipts and other private records.

Well, we knew we were being watched. We have iTunes!

Riverbend has a moving tribute to the slain interpreter for kidnapped US journalist Jill Carroll. (Jill grew up about 6 blocks from where I now live in Ann Arbor. I hope and pray she will be released. Brian Conley at Alive in Baghdad has been blogging her plight.)
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Iraq Bloggers Souring?

Sheldon Rampton of The Center for Media & Democracy kindly writes:

"In case this hasn't crossed your viewfinder, you might want to check out recent developments with your old pals at Iraq the Model. Apparently they're not very happy with the recent election results. Here's an excerpt from Omar's January 5 blog post:

"I think this is the darkest image we have conveyed from Iraq in more than two years but it is a fact that it hasn’t been this bad in Iraq ever since the 9th of April 2003.

The general sense of the public opinion in Iraq is that our politicians who we trusted proved to be unqualified for the responsibility.

Everyone I meet says he feels betrayed by the politicians who keep frustrating us with their incompetence and internal fighting over power.

Iraqis expressed optimism before the election and you read that on opinion polls and we could feel it here in the streets but I’m sure that if those opinion polls are repeated, we’ll see that a great deal of that optimism is gone now."

And here's an excerpt from Ali's latest posting on the blog that he set up separately from his brothers:

"I wanted to say something about the elections results but things are still confusing to me and I can't see any real light from the various possibilities ahead of us. I think there were huge violations and a fraud especially in the south and the north. This elections will cost Iraq and whoever decides to stand by her side at least 10 more years of suffering. The worst thing is that it could have prevented if some of us at least had paid attention to the real danger."

Here's another twist: Apparently an Ali Fadhil (the same name as the Iraqi dentist-blogger above) was the Iraqi journalist whose home was recently raided by U.S. soldiers:

"According to reports in the Guardian, U.S. troops on Jan. 8 stormed into the Baghdad home of journalist Ali Fadhil, firing bullets into the room where he and his wife and children were sleeping.

Fadhil was hooded and taken away for questioning. Troops also seized videotapes shot for a "Dispatches" program on Channel 4, a U.K. TV station. Fadhil has been released, but the tapes have not been returned.

The intended TV program is reported to involve claims that Iraqi funds held by Americans and British have been "misused or misappropriated."

I came across this item on Jeff Jarvis's website, where he expresses concern but concludes that the Ali Fadhil the dentist is not the same individual as Ali Fadhil the arrested journalist. Incidentally, Jarvis the Model of Civility has been largely silent about Iraq for awhile now, and the obnoxious triumphalism that used to characterize his commentaries seems rather muted. He still manages to be obnoxious on occasion, but the triumphalism is gone.

I've been visiting some Iraqi blogs lately as part of the research for my book, and my impression (based on unscientific sampling and possibly shaded by my own bias) is that a number of pro-occupation Iraqi bloggers have either gone silent or are sounding notes of alarm such as the following:

"The U.S. authorities are being too anxious to ingratiate themselves to the various Sunni groups in a way that I think is going too far. I hope to find the time to say something more detailed about this. They are not going to win over the terrorists, but they run a serious risk of loosing their fundamental base of support in the country . . .

The people are boiling and a general conflagration is just around the corner."

Or:

"Anyway, I completely lost the ambition and hope about a secular Iraq where you can express your feelings and thoughts freely especially the religion, but it seems for the coming three centuries the Islamic acts of beheading in the name of God for fundamentalists in Sunnis, and the sadist whipping as a punishment(till death) for Shia will improve and continue enthusiastically. And might go further to cutting hands and keeping women inside the houses, who knows what is inside the dirty sick minds of the Islamic politicians..God damn them all . . .

We got out of Saddam’s prison and got in a new one with a ‘democratic’ door.. Dreams will never come true as long as Islam is ruling countries and fundamentalists are leading them. Iraq is far away from being free."

And Zeyad at Healing Iraq hasn't posted since October 15, when he wrote a terse note saying that he voted against the constitution:

If this trend continues, pretty soon Jeff Jarvis is going to have to start pretending that he meant "pond scum" as a compliment."

Sheldon Rampton
Research director, Center for Media & Democracy
Author of Weapons of Mass Deception and Banana Republicans
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Sharon as Jailer: Cole at Salon.com

My article on Ariel Sharon's "gated community" approach to Israeli-Palestinian relations is out at Salon.com. Excerpt:

"Even as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon stirs fitfully from his coma, in the aftermath of a massive stroke and several operations, Gazan militants with a bad aim have fired several Qassam rockets into Israel. Israel is now, and is likely to remain for some time, a dark postmodern terrain of wealthy fortress communities besieged by hopeless unemployed militants from isolated ghettos. This archipelago of anxiety, reminiscent of the noir science fiction film "Blade Runner," is in some significant respects the creation and legacy of Sharon.

The conflict between Sharon and the Likud Party, with which he recently broke, was over two distinct far-right-wing visions of Israel. The somewhat messianic Likud is committed to completing the creeping dispossession of the Palestinians by relentlessly colonizing the West Bank and Gaza (at least), and refusing to accept any clear demarcation between Israeli territory and that of its neighbors. This 19th-century-style settler colonialism, reminiscent of the French in Algeria or the Italians in Eritrea, is so blatantly aggressive that it continually threatens to disrupt vital economic and diplomatic relations between Israel and Europe. Sharon saw that, but his rival Benjamin Netanyahu never could."

Journalist Ian Williams has his own take on Ariel Sharon: "A hole where the heart should be."
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British General Blasts US Military on Iraq Counter-Insurgency

Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster has a trenchant critique of the US military's failures at counter-insurgency and doing ordinary politics in Iraq. He says that he found attitudes toward the Iraqis among US officers to border on the racist. (The article is the first listed at the moment, and requires Adobe Acrobat to read it.) The BBC reports that many US officers are upset, dismissing Brig. Gen. Aylwin-Foster as "a snob."

Aylwin-Foster writes (emphasis added),

"My overriding impression was of an Army imbued with an unparalleled sense of patriotism, duty, passion, commitment, and determination, with plenty of talent, and in no way lacking in humanity or compassion. Yet it seemed weighed down by bureaucracy, a stiflingly hierarchical outlook, a pre-disposition to offensive operations, and a sense that duty required all issues to be confronted head-on. Many personnel seemed to struggle to understand the nuances of the OIF Phase 4 environment post-war reconstruction and politics]. Moreover, whilst they were almost unfailingly courteous and considerate, at times their cultural insensitivity, almost certainly inadvertent, arguably amounted to institutional racism. To balance that apparent litany of criticisms, the U.S. Army was instrumental in a string of tactical and operational successes through the second half of 2004; so any blanket verdict would be grossly misleading . . .

Western COIN [counterinsurgency] doctrine generally identifies the ‘hearts and minds campaign’— gaining and maintaining the support of the domestic population in order to isolate the insurgent—as the key to success. It [sees the] population as a potential instrument of advantage. It further recognises that military operations must contribute to the achievement of this effect and be subordinate to the political campaign. This implies that above all a COIN force must have two skills that are not required in conventional warfighting: first, it must be able to see issues and actions from the perspective of the domestic population; second, it must understand the relative value of force and how easily excessive force, even when apparently justified, can undermine popular support . . .

The alternative doctrinal approach concentrates on attrition, through the destruction of the insurgent, and thus sees the population as at best a distraction to this primary aim, and in extremis a target for repression . . .

The most striking feature of the U.S. Army’s approach during this period of OIF Phase 4 is that universally those consulted for this paper who were not from the U.S. considered that the Army was too ‘kinetic’. This is shorthand for saying U.S. Army personnel were too inclined to consider offensive operations and destruction of the insurgent as the key to a given situation, and conversely failed to understand its downside.

Granted, this verdict partly reflects the difference in perspectives of scale between the U.S. and her Coalition allies, arising from different resourcing levels. For example, during preparatory operations in the November 2004 Fallujah clearance operation, on one night over forty 155mm artillery rounds were fired into a small section of the city. Given the intent to maintain a low profile prior to the launch of the main operation, most armies would consider this bombardment a significant event. Yet it did not feature on the next morning’s update to the 4-Star Force Commander: the local commander considered it to be a minor application of combat power . . .

Conversely, some U.S. officers held that their allies were too reluctant to use lethal force. They argued that a reluctance to use force merely bolstered the insurgents’ courage and resilience, whilst demonstrating Coalition lack of resolve to the domestic population, thus prolonging the conflict. It was apparent that many considered that the only effective, and morally acceptable, COIN strategy was to kill or capture all terrorists and insurgents; they saw military destruction of the enemy as a strategic goal in its own right . . .

in an analysis of 127 U.S. pacification operations in Iraq between May 2003 to May 2005, ‘most ops were reactive to insurgent activity—seeking to hunt down insurgents. Only 6% of ops were directed specifically to create a secure environment for the population’. 16 ‘There was a strong focus on raiding, cordon & search and sweep ops throughout: the one day brigade raid is the preferred tactic’ . . ."

Aylwin-Foster instances the US military reaction to the killing of four private security agents in Fallujah, 3 of them Americans, in late March of 2004, as an example of the way the ways in which an angry self-righteousness could sweep the US officer corps and lead them to fall for the guerrilla tactic of baiting them into alienating the population.

Although he is careful to note exceptions and qualifications, the general paints the US military in Iraq as, on the whole, isolated from the Iraqis, unable to understand them and perhaps not very interested in doing so, having a preference for violence as a means of dealing with problems, exhibiting self-righteousness and hotheadedness, being overly optimistic, and largely unwilling to question the orders of high commanders or to pass back up word of failures or problems.

The BBC says that a rebuttal is being prepared.
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Al-Hakim warns Sunni Arabs on Changes to Constitution

Shiite clerical leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim on Wednesday warned Sunni Arabs not to attempt to make substantive changes in the new Iraqi constitution. The charter was narrowly approved in an October 15 referendum, but was rejected by all three Sunni-majority provinces. US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad worked out a promise to the Sunni Arabs that they would have four months to attempt to introduce amendments into the constitution. They oppose its loose federalism and its current implication that Kurdish and Shiite provinces will receive the lion's share of income from newly discovered natural resources.

Al-Hakim said, according to The Scotsman, "The first principle is not to change the essence of the constitution . . . This constitution was endorsed by the Iraqi people." He also said, according to AP, ""It is our responsibility to form Baghdad provinces and southern Iraq provinces."

Al-Hakim hopes to create two largely Shiite provincial confederacies in the South, and to have Baghdad province itself recognized as having the same prerogatives. The model is the Kurdistan Regional Government, which has very great but not complete autonomy from the federal government. Sunni Arab leaders oppose the creation of any more provincial confederacies.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat/ AFP [Ar.]: Shiite cleric Sadr al-Din al-Qubanji, who is close to al-Hakim's Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and preaches at the prestigious mosque attached to the shrine of Imam Ali in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, warned Wednesday of the return of the Baathis to power under the banner of Islam. In his sermon for the Eid al-Adha or Feast of Sacrifice (commemorating the near-sacrifice by Abraham of his son), al-Qubanji called for "monitoring the Neo-Baathists who have put on Islamic dress, who commit terrorism in Baghdad and the provinces, so as to forestall them from achieving their aim, of coming back to power." The widespread Shiite identification of Iraqi Sunnis with Baathism has been an obstacle to improved relations between the two communities.

Leila Fadel of Knight Ridder reports on the big plans Najaf's elite has for making the pilgrimage city into the "pearl of the Middle East." With three million visitors a year, it can hope to generate enormous revenues from religious tourism. Many of the tourists will be from Iran, and Iran is helping fund the building of an airport for the city. So far Najaf is a success of succesful US military disengagement. US troops left the city in September, year after their last battle against the radical Mahdi Militia, which the Najaf commercial elite hates. They are at a base forty miles outside the city, and come in only occasionally to help with a security situation that overwhelms Najaf police. Many Najaf police were recruited from the Badr Corps, an Iran-trained paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. But, the police seem to be keeping order and allowing reconstruction to take place, and Najaf is a pro-Iranian place. So the steps taken there are probably a good model for the other Shiite provinces.

Al-Hayat reports a telephone conversation with an Iraqi guerrilla leader who complained that the radical groups who claim to speak for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia and Ansar al-Islam are much wealthier than the predominantly Iraqi armed resistance, groups like the Army of Muhammad. He said that the Zarqawi-linked groups receive contributions from wealthy individuals in the Arab and Muslim worlds who are connected to al-Qaeda networks. He reported that they imagine that the money is going to the resistance generally, but in fact is hogged by Zarqawi. He said that Zarqawi remains a shadowy figure in the Sunni Arab regions of Iraq. Al-Hayat also reports that the Army of Muhammad and other Iraqi guerrilla groups are denying reports that they are in secret negotiations with the Americans, and warning that they have not authorized anyone to conduct such talks.

It was a DNA test that allowed Spanish authorities to identify one of the bombers in the attack on Italian troops at Nasiriyyah over two years ago as the brother of an Algerian Muslim radical under surveillance at Barcelona. This finding suggests to me that there may be a fairly structured organization of jihadis in Europe determined to act against Western troops in Iraq, and that this is not just a matter of small groups and a few individuals. But what is the organization? Al-Qaeda? Algerian radicals often belong to the Armed Islamic Group, an extremist offshoot of the Islamic Salvation Front. The GIA (French acronym) has strong al-Qaeda links and was part of the Millennium plot, including a plan to blow up LAX.

US trainers are concentrating on trying to fix the sectarian problems with the Iraqi police and their poor human rights record.

The Iraqi minister of health maintains that the health sector in Iraq will require an investment of $8 billion over the next four years, in order to rebuild it after the deleterious effects of war and the period of sanctions that preceded it. He said that although the US had pledged $786 to rebuild hospitals in 2004, the need to fight the guerrilla movement had siphoned off a considerable amount of those funds. The US had pledged to refurbish 18 hospitals, but only one, in Najaf, has been done. Much such work has been postponed until the end of 2006.

The General Union of Oil Employees in Basra is campaigning against privatization of the Iraqi petroleum industry and demanding immediate withdrawal of US troops from the country.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat/ AFP [Ar.]: The four grand ayatollahs in Najaf have issued denials of rumors that they were receiving stipends from the Iraqi government in Baghdad. Shiite religious leaders receive voluntary religious taxes from believers and the more successful of them oversee very large sums of private money.

The Kurdistan Confederacy in northern Iraq has forbidden the importation of live poultry from Turkey, after two Turks died of deadly bird flu.

The Committee to Defend Journalists has condemned the sentencing of a journalist to 30 years in prison for "defaming" Kurdistan, by a special security court in Irbil. The government of Massoud Barzani should be ashamed of itself. US lives and treasure have been spent to protect the Kurds, and they turn around and act just like Saddam?
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Guest Blogger: Sheridan on Dubai Between Oil and Consumerism

Irish blogger Gavin Sheridan was moved by the recent death of Dubai emir Sheikh Maktoum to comment on the situation of the emirate, which he visits often.

Gavin kindly writes:

" 'History Rising' says the massive billboard as you ride along in a taxi on Sheikh Zayed Road in the small Emirate city of Dubai. It is quite an apt description not just of the building project it describes, but of the entire Emirate itself.

Dubai, more so than any other of the Emirates in the United Arab Emirates, has undergone a dramatic transformation. And the pace of change appears to be increasing - in my visits to Dubai in the last 4 years I have seen the construction and completion of immense building projects – and the biggest have yet to be finished.

If I was to imagine a democratic, wealthy and successful Iraq, I would look at some of what Dubai has achieved and replicate it. Dubai does have issues, most of them related to democratic freedoms and censorship, and in many ways it is a place of contradictions – on the face of it a Western-style economy, tourism, oil exports, Western-style architecture and lifestyle, shopping malls and water-parks. But on the other side a less than free press, a king, a censored Internet, some exceptionally strict laws and punishments and ill-treatment of immigrant workers.

But if Iraq were to replicate some of what Dubai has done, it would be a highly successful and dynamic economy within a few decades – with its oil wealth being used to achieve a vibrant and open economy.

Reading a list of projects currently underway in Dubai is somewhat mind boggling, but it serves to show the appetite there for development and status.

The Burj Dubai (Dubai Tower) is currently under construction and is expected to be completed in 2008. Looking at it in December it seemed to be a good 30 floors up, out of the planned 124 floors. The figure for its exact height will not be released until completion but it is thought to be about 2,300 feet - making it the tallest structure in the world. But the Burj Dubai is not being built in isolation. Surrounding will be a multitude of other developments known as the Business Bay, where half a dozen skyscrapers are already completed. Some others are planned with interesting designs.

The other major developments are the artificial islands being built off the coast of Dubai. These are exceptionally large developments – increasing the length of Dubai's coastline by a number of factors.



There are currently 4 major islands being built, Palm Island Jumeirah is the most advanced in construction, with Palm Island Jebel Ali, Palm Island Deira and 'The World' also under construction. All are shaped like palm trees, while the World is a network of islands designed to look like the world.

All of the property on these islands has sold, or will be up for sale – for premium prices as one might expect.

The iconic Burj al-Arab has become the icon of Dubai, and is often the symbol used on number plates for cars (many expensive ones like this). It is thought to be one of the tallest and most expensive hotels in the world.


Dubai Marina is, to me at least, a prime example of just what happens in Dubai. When I visited Dubai for the first time in December 2001, Dubai Marina was nothing more than a piece of desert. I found it odd to find, along the road to Abu Dhabi, a lone restaurant – a Hard Rock Café - entirely alone in the desert. 4 years later and it is surrounded by up to 25 completed gleaming skyscrapers – housing tens of thousands of people. It is testament to the work regime imposed on the immigrant workers – mostly from the sub-continent.

The average construction worker is either Pakistani or Indian, works 12 hours a day in up to 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit), 6 days a week. He is paid about $150 a month for his effort.

Westerners - usually British, Irish, South African or Australian - work in the skilled sectors: engineers, surveyors, teachers or managers. And there are plenty of Western companies based there, among them Microsoft, Oracle, HP, IBM, Compaq, Dell, Siemens, Canon, Logica, Sony Ericsson and Cisco.

Dubai, as an Emirate in itself, will run out of oil within two decades (the rest of the UAE has an estimated 100 years left), and because of that it is gearing itself for tourism. Last year it made more money from tourism than it did from oil – thanks to it's weather, its liberal attitude to alcohol consumption, fine restaurants, luxury hotels and massive shopping malls. The recently opened Mall of the Emirates boasts what it claims to be the largest mall outside of North America, and the third largest in the world – and includes the only artificial ski resort in the Middle East. These malls include most designer names that one could think of – other shopping malls compete with it, but while smaller remain impressive – City Center, Mercato, Burjuman and more. DubaiLand , a theme park, is also planned, not far from the site of the Burj Dubai.

Dubai is a city that changes at an incredible rate, in one area alone I counted over 100 construction cranes, in 14 months since I last visited there, over a dozen skyscrapers have appeared out of nowhere, while more than further 40 are under construction.

But can it last?"

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20 Arrested in Spain

Spanish police broke up three recruiting cells for Iraq volunteer fighters in Spain, arresting 20 persons. The cells had connections to groups in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Algeria, Morocco, Turkey, Syria and Iraq. AP is saying that one of the Spanish cells may have been behind the attack on Italian troops at Nasiriyah in November, 2003, which killed 19. (That item needs some more explanation.) Nationalities of the detainees are as follows: Moroccans: 15, Spaniards: 3, Turkish: 1, Algerian: 1.

Knight Ridder reviews the increasing use of air power by US forces in Iraq. The question is raised of whether air power is useful in fighting an insurgency. Cole says: No.

Michael Schwartz at Tomodispatch.com writes at greater length about the little-covered US air war in Iraq, and its civilian and political costs.

Iraq's Christians annoyed by Kurdish semi-autonomy may seek an autonomous region of their own.
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Great Justices Installed by Bush

As the Alito confirmation hearings begin, it is worth considering some of the judicial consquences of George W. Bush's various campaigns.

When the US overthrew the Taliban and installed the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, the Bush administration implied that everything had changed.

What few observers seem to have noticed is that Hamid Karzai immediately appointed as Afghanistan's chief justice, Fazal Hadi Shinwari, whose philosophy of life was little different from that of the Taliban!

One can only imagine that Bush, who kept thousands of troops in the country and oversaw the evolution of the Afghanistan government, had no objections to the man's judicial philosophy.

Among Shinwari's rulings:

Amputation of hands and stoning to death will continue to be the punishment for thieves and adulterers in post-Taliban Afghanistan, country’s new Chief Justice Fazal Hadi Shinwari was reported today as saying.

Afghan Chief Justice Bans Cable TV.

Afghan chief justice wants co-ed schools to be shut.

Fatwa for "Blasphemy" Journalists: The supreme court proposes the death penalty for two journalists who criticised Islamic practice.

Was all this to make his own nominees to the Supreme Court, who merely want to install a king-president over Americans, uphold the privileges of rich white males, and work against women's rights and one-person, one-vote rights for racial minorities, good in comparison?
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

29 Dead, 25 Wounded in Interior Ministry Bombing

Two guerrillas with suicide bomb belts attacked the Ministry of the Interior in Baghdad on Monday during a celebration there of National Police Day. They killed 29 and wounded at least 25 (al-Hayat). US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad was on the premises, as were Minister of the Interior Bayan Jabr and Defense Minister Saadoun Dulaimi. The bombers, dressed in police uniforms, were unable to get into the building, but the bombs went off at the threshold. How close this operation came to inflicting massive damage on the new government and its personnel is obvious from the details so far released.

Al-Hayat says that [Ar.]: the Zarqawi group or someone claiming to speak for them posted a message to the internet saying that they were taking revenge for the Sunni Muslims who had been tortured by special police commandos of the (Shiite dominated) Ministry of the Interior. The message also called on the Iraqi Islamic Party to withdraw from civil politics. (The IIP is part of the fundamentalist Sunni National Accord Front, which probably gained around 30 seats in parliament). The message said that they refrained from bombings during the Dec. 15 elections because they were afraid of inadvertently harming Sunnis. It called on young men in neighboring Muslim countries, including Yemen, to come to Iraq to fight the jihad or holy war.

Jordan closed its border with Iraq on Monday at the request of Iraqi authorities.

The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Iran-linked Shiite fundamentalist group, has not only ensconced itself in the Ministry of the Interior but also, according to the CSM, in the Iraqi public television channel. Well, at least Ken Tomlinson doesn't have to monitor it for liberal bias.

Iran is constructing electricity transmission lines into Iraq in preparation for selling the latter country electricity. Those terrible Iranians! How dare they be helpful this way? It will confuse President Bush. Aren't they supposed to be in the Axis?

Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said Monday that any partition of Iraq could bring "unimaginable chaos" to the Middle East.

Historian Gary Leupp says that the Neocons actually considered using the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon to plant false WMD evidence in Iraq once it transpired that Iraq had none.

Everywhere you dig in this administration, you find bodies.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

The Guerrillas who Came in from the Cold

Al-Hayat [Ar.]: Sources close to the guerrilla groups in Iraq told the pan-Arab, Saudi-backed London daily, al-Hayat that new disputes have exploded between it and the organization "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia" led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, after he carried out last Thursday's bombings in Karbala and Ramadi. Dozens of Shiite and Sunni civilians were killed. The Iraqi guerrilla groups told al-Hayat that they would not unite with the Zarqawi group, as a result.

The Iraqi guerrilla groups say that they only attack the Occupation forces and avoid attacks on civilians, whereas Zarqawi deliberately targets the latter, having adopted a policy of launching a war against the Shiites. His group rarely tangles with the Americans, al-Hayat says, whereas the Iraqi guerrillas killed 5 Americans over the weekend and shot down a Blackhawk helicopter near Tal Afar. [This is the first claim I know of by the ex-Baathists to have shot down the helicopter.]

[Cole: Since there are too few foreign fighters under Zarqawi to account for all the attacks on civilians around the country, I conclude that a lot of them are actually carried out by the Neo-Baathists or Iraqi Salafis, who then blame them on Zarqawi. They thus get to pose as national heroes with clean hands. And Zarqawi gets to boast about being ubiquitous. And Dick Cheney gets to threaten us with al-Qaeda in Iraq (there was no al-Qaeda operating in Iraq before Cheney opened up the possibility by invading the country). So everyone is happy with this lie. But it isn't a plausible one. All this is not to say that there aren't tensions between Zarqawi's people and the ex-Baath captains in the provinces.]

Iraqi guerrillas were especially upset about the bombing of potential police recruits in Ramadi, since some of the men belonged to the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement. The guerrillas had given them permission to enlist under a secret agreement they had reached with the Americans via the mediation of tribal chieftains, stipulating that the guerrillas would dominate the security services, the police and army in the Sunni Arab provinces, as an element in an over-all settlement. The guerrillas would be able to place their men in the security services of Anbar, Salahuddin and Ninevah provinces. In return for their accepting this deal, the Sunni Arab guerrillas would also get the release of their commanders from American prisons, along with the release of some Baathist prisoners from the former regime. (Saddam and some of his worst henchmen are excluded from this deal.)

If this agreement shows signs of working out, the two sides will sign a wide-ranging formal political agreement. The conference planned for Baghdad to continue the work of the Cairo conference last fall is part of the negotiating plann.

Meanwhile an internet posting of audio claiming to be the voice of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi called on the Iraqi Islamic Party (Sunni) to reject the political process rather than joining it. Guerrillas have killed IIP workers.

US troops were used to arrest an Iraqi journalist working on a story for a British news organization about corruption in defense contracts in Iraq. This is very troubling on all sorts of levels. US troops do not have a Status of Forces agreement with Iraq and do not have a constitutional right to arrest civilians without a warrant. And, the US military should not be harassing journalists reporting on contract fraud.


Will blog more Monday afternoon
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

17 US Troops Killed in Iraq:
Baghdad Fuel Blockade and Possibility of "All Out Civil War;"
US Troops Storm Sunni Mosque

A US military Blackhawk helicopter went down near Tal Afar in nothern Iraq, killing all 12 persons aboard.

The question is whether they were shot down. The US assaulted the city of Tal Afar in August, emptying the city, leveling neighborhoods with air strikes, and sending in Kurdish and Shiite troops after Sunni Turkmen, their political rivals. A lot of Sunni Turkmen had been Baath Party members and supported the Saddam regime, and enough had serious military experience that they would know how to get hold of a shoulder-fired missile and how to use it (typically they use SA-7s, but on occasion the guerrillas have managed to get more sophisticated SA-14s.) At least one other Blackhawk was shot down this way.

Iraqi guerrillas killed five Marines on Saturday and Sunday with small arms fire and roadside bombs. Guerillas in Fallujah killed three of them.

Sunday morning at 3 am Iraq time, US troops stormed the influential Umm al-Qura mosque in Baghdad, which is affiliated with the hard line Sunni group, the Association of Muslim Scholars. Reuters says that US troops defaced some parts of the mosque, drawing crosses on cupboards.

The AMS is widely suspected of having links to the Sunni guerrilla movement.

But Muslims are touchy about having foreign troops stomping around their mosques painting Christian symbols on things, and this incident won't calm things down in Iraq.

This comment from Baghdad came in and was posted, but I think it is worth moving up here and repeating:

"I am an American currently working in Baghdad for a news organization. I’ve been here numerous times over the past 15 years.

The current security situation here has gotten much worse since the elections. We had a security briefing yesterday right after a fellow journalist was abducted. Besides the usual reminders to keep a low profile and going over our own unique security measures and procedures as to what to do in any given scenario we were told that there’s a high probability of all out civil war.

Iraq has been in a low level civil war since the end of 2003 that has been increasing in intensity ever since, but now our security team is telling us that should all-out war break out most, if not all of us, may have to be evacuated to safety in a nearby country. Instead of the scores of Iraqis dying each day as do now, thousands a day could perish. Most Sunnis have given up hope of getting adequate representation in the new Iraqi government and radical elements in the Shiite parties want to exact revenge on the Sunni for supporting Saddam over the years. Shiite death squads roam the city at night (in police and army uniform no less) dragging all the male members of a Sunni family out into the street and executing them in front of their women folk. Sunni insurgents (not in uniform) do the same to Shiite families in areas claimed as theirs.

The Sunni insurgents, it seems, are now determined to bring the new government to its knees by cutting off fuel supplies to Baghdad. The city’s supply of gasoline nearly dried up last week and local authorities literally shut the city down by banning all privately owned vehicles from the streets. They claimed it was to help hunt down the kidnappers of the Interior Minister’s sister but the real reason seems to be to reduce the demand for gas until supplies could be replenished. Electricity in most Baghdad neighborhoods has now been further reduced to as low as 1 hour per day. The black market rate for fuel for generators has doubled again and in many areas even that has run out. At this rate the city will go dark by the end of the month. Iraqi troops are reluctant to escort fuel trucks into Baghdad and American troops have their hands full escorting their own convoys.

Most US casualties are a result of trying to protect US military supplies. You can forget about the US military escorting civilian fuel convoys. So it all comes down to the Iraq army’s ability to get fuel into Baghdad and I don’t have much confidence they will succeed."

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Kurdistan Government Unifies

The two major Kurdish parties fought a major war with one another 1994-1997, during which Massoud Barzani of the Kurdistan Democratic Party allied with Saddam Hussein and invited Baath tanks up into Irbil and Sulaimaniyah. Later on Barzani and his enemy, Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, buried the hatchet. But as the Kurdistan regional government developed, it had a split personality. Kurdistan unification has been a matter of lively debate for the past year, and the Kurds now say they have achieved it.

An observer writes from Iraq:

"Finally, after more than 11 months of discussion, since the election in January, the PUK and KDP merged their two governments. This is the announcement from KurdistanSAT this morning.

Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani will keep his position as Prime Minister and his deputy will be from PUK, but I do not know who it is. The President remains Massoud.

PUK will run the ministries of Human Rights, Interior, Justice, Education, Health, Social Affairs, Water Resources, Transportation, Reconstruction, Planning and Religious Affairs.

KDP will run the ministries of Peshmerga Affairs, Agriculture, Finance, Municipalities, Higher Educating, Electricity, Youth and Sports, Foreign Affairs and Culture.

My understanding is that there are additional and less important ministries which will be given to minority parties. There is a Christian Party of some sort that may be in government, but it looks like the Islamic Kurdish party will be locked out. Surprise, surprise.

The Prime Minister will have a two year term. This is down from five years as announced in the spring, and even more reduced from the ten or fifteen years that Massoud wanted.

The government will be based in Arbil.

I have been told that this finally went through because there is an understanding around the country that Jalal will continue as President."

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Kurdish, Shiite Parties may lack 2/3s
Iraq War may Cost over $1 Trillion

Revised.

A Western diplomat with knowledge of the unofficial voting returns in the Dec. 15 election told the NYT that the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) that the Kurds together likely do not have 2/3s of seats in the parliament. Since selecting a new president requires this supermajority, they will have to ally with some other faction to go forward, if this information is correct. I figure 183 as the magic number. The UIA was initially said to have 130; the Kurds are thought to have about 55 or 20% (the NYT also gives the 20% figure). A small Sadrist party would add 1. So according to the initial reports, the Shiites and the Kurds should have had 186, well within the margin to form a government. If the report is correct, it implies that the UIA fell short of 130 and got more like 120. it is also possible that fraud charges brought against some UIA-dominated Baghdad polling stations could subtract a few seats from the UIA.

I'm not sure the diplomat is right about the absolute necessity to include the Sunni Arabs, though that is a likely outcome anyway. Some 40 seats will be chosen by a complicated formula that should slightly increase UIA and Kurdish representation, and may produce a few small party blocs that could be cobbled together by the Kurds and Shiites into a majority (the small party blocs would then become swing votes and would get pretty much anything they asked for).

The Shiite leaders of the UIA and the two major Kurdish leaders have already virtually committed to a national unity goverment with the Sunni Muslim religious coalition, the Iraqi Accord Front. The IAF is said to have 40 seats.

But here is the kicker. If the IAF holds firm to an alliance with the Neo-Baathist National Dialogue Council and Iyad Allawi's National Iraqiyah list, the Sadr bloc in parliament will veto any government of national unity. They have already said that giving Allawi or Salih Mutlak of the National Dialogue Council a cabinet post is a red line they will not allow their coalition partners to cross. The United Iraqi Alliance depends very heavily this time around on Sadrist deputies, and would be in danger of splitting apart if its leadership agrees to include Allawi.

This situation is a recipe for gridlock. I wouldn't expect to see a new government in Iraq for many months if the Kurds and the Shiites don't have 2/3s of seats.

And there is another problem. For the next 4 years only, there are 3 members of the presidency council. Each has an independent veto. If a hardline Sunni Arab such as Adnan Dulaimi (Sunni fundamentalist) becomes a vice president, he will veto any legislation that the Kurds and Shiites decide on that involves greater federalism, e.g. You could end up with a completely paralyzed and do-nothing parliament and a weak executive held hostage to the three presidents, (one Kurd, one Shiite, one Sunni Arab), each with a veto.

Instead of a presidency council with three independent vetoes, the Iraqis should have made a two-house legislature and just configured the upper house so that it over-represented the Kurds and Sunni Arabs. That would have forced negotiation and would have prevented a tyranny of the Shiite majority without creating a tyranny of the other minorities!

The Guardian reports on a new paper by prominent US economists that estimates that the Iraq War's real cost will be as much as $2 trillion, if you figure things like the cost of treating a vet with spine damage for the rest of his life.

Karen Kwiatkowsky points out that Gen. Rick Sanchez admitted this week that Iraq is on the verge of civil war, but was immediately contradicted by Gen. Casey.

British Foreign Minister Jack Straw suggested on Saturday that British troops could be withdrawn from Iraq relatively quickly, starting with Nasiriyah, Maysan or Samawah. He seemed to think the British would stay in Basra a while. The problem with this plan is that Nasiriyah and Maysan provinces are a mess with regard to security, with Maysan a hotbed of Shiite militias and Marsh Arab violence, whereas Basra, if religiously somewhat oppressive, is relatively calm.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Shiite Crowds Protest Bombings, US Support for Sunni Arabs;
11 GIs Killed

The US military announced that Thursday was the bloodiest day for US troops since they entered Iraq in March, 2003. The number of GIs killed that day rose to 11. [Readers have written in to say that this assertion is not true and other days have been bloodier. Perhaps a qualifier dropped out when I summarized a summary; sorry for the confusion.]

Friday saw further bombings, in Baghdad and Mosul, targetting police and police commandos.

According to AP, protesters came out in Shiite East Baghdad (Sadr City) and Kadhimiyah on Friday to rally against US support for Sunni Arab politicians, who, they say, have behing the scenes links to the guerrilla groups that were responsible for Thursday's bombing in Karbala, which killed 53 persons and wounded twice that many. The demonstrations were staged by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a leading Shiite party. The number of protesters was given as only 500 by the New York Times, but as 5,000 in the Arabic press. Crowds are hard to count and their size is easy to exaggerate.

In Karbala, further funerals and mourning sessions [Ar.] turned into angry demonstrations.

The crowds chanted slogans against US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and Sunni Arab Neo-Baathist Salih Mutlak of the National Dialogue Council, whom they accused Khalilzad of supporting. Khalilzad is an Afghan Pushtun of Sunni extraction and has urged a pragmatic reconciliation between Shiites and Sunnis. He has also attempted to have the Ministry of the Interior taken away from SCIRI and given to ex-Baathists from the party of Iyad Allawi.

These demonstrations and denunciations of the US by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq constitute the first major anti-US street action by followers of this party. Previous major Shiite anti-US demonstrations had usually been staged by the Sadr movement, while SCIRI had maintained a tacit alliance with the Americans. The demonstrations should be seen, however, not as the end of the marriage of convenience but as a way for SCIRI to pressure the US to back off its criticisms of SCIRI management of the Ministry of the Interior.

The US military admits to being in negotiations with Sunni Arab guerrilla movements, in hopes of splitting the Iraqi fighters from the radical Salafis around Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that [Ar.]Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani supports a government of national unity, which would include the Sunni Arabs and preserve the unity of the country, according to a parliamentarian who visited him on Friday.

Al-Zaman/ AFP/DPA [Ar.]: In the city of Amarah, a government security official announced the assassination of Salam al-Khafaji, the head of the Khafaji tribe in Maysan province while he was traveling to Suwaira.

On Friday, guerrillas fired mortar rounds a the shrine of revered Sunni Sufi shaikh, Abdul Qadir Gilani [al-Kilani] in the Khilani district of Baghdad near the Eastern Gate. Part of the dome of the shrine was damaged. Radical Salafi Sunnis have puritan tendencies and abhor saints' shrines (rather as Protestants felt about Roman Catholic saints and shrines). Some branches of the Qadiri Sufi order, a mystical brotherhood, have declined to join the Sunni guerrilla movement, which has caused the Salafis a la Zarqawi to attack them. It may also be that the guerrillas hope that Sunnis who revere Gilani will blame Shiites for the attack, instigating civil war.

Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari complained while on pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia about the poor quality of Saudi preparations for the event. Some 53 pilgrims died when their hostel collapsed. Tragedies during pilgrimage are so frequent that many observers believe the Saudis are neglecting their duties as hosts of the event.

The Saudi minister of the interior, Prince Naef, angrily rejected Jaafari's criticism, saying that he was just posturing in hopes of salvaging his fading political career. (In fact, Jaafari has a real shot of being the prime minister of Iraq again). The Saudis also said they had be nice enough to let the Iraqi delegation come in numbers greater than their allotted quota, implying that Jaafari was being ungracious.

Tension between the Shiite-dominated government of Iraq and the Wahhabi state in Saudi Arabia have been high since September, when a major Saudi prince castigated the United States for spreading Iranian influence in the region by installing Iraqi Shiites in power.

The Sunni fundamentalist leader of the National Accord Front, Adnan Dulaimi, called Jaafari's comments wrong and oppressive.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bremer: Bush Administration Never saw Iraq Insurgency Coming

Paul Bremer, who ruled Iraq for a year after the fall of Saddam, was asked about his decision to dissolve the Iraqi army in May of 2003. "We really didn't see the insurgency coming," he said.

Gee, Mr. Bremer was spending too much time hanging out with flacks from the American Enterprise Institute and was not reading Cole. Here is what I said in The Journal of the International Institute ( University of Michigan) Winter 2003, vol. 10, no. 2, p. 3, published the January before the March 20, 2003, beginning of the war:

Costs of War

The regional costs of a US war on Iraq are potentially great: The war will inevitably be seen in the Arab world as a neo-colonial war. It will be depicted as a repeat of the French occupation of Algeria or the British in Egypt-or indeed, the British in Iraq. These were highly unpopular and humiliating episodes. The US, even if it has a quick military victory, is unlikely to win the war diplomatically in the Arab world. Pan-Arabism has been more aspiration than reality in the past century, but this US war against Iraq might well promote the formation of a stronger regional political bloc.

As a result of resentment against this neocolonialism, the likelihood is that al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations will find it easier to recruit angry young men in the region and in Europe for terrorist operations against the US and its interests. The final defeat of the Baath Party will be seen as a defeat of its ideals, which include secularism, improved rights for women and high modernism. Arabs in despair of these projects are likely to turn to radical Islam as an alternative outlet for their frustrations. The Sunnis of Iraq could well turn to groups like al-Qaida, having lost the ideals of the Baath. Iraqi Shi'ites might become easier to recruit into Khomeinism of the Iranian sort, and become a bulwark for the shaky regime in Shi'ite Iran.

A post-war Iraq may well be riven with factionalism that impedes the development of a well-ensconced new government. We have seen this sort of outcome in Afghanistan. Commentators often note the possibility for Sunni-Shi'ite divisions or Arab Kurdish ones. These are very real. If Islamic law is the basis of the new state, that begs the question of whether its Sunni or Shi'ite version will be implemented. It is seldom realized that the Kurds themselves fought a mini-civil war in 1994-1997 between two major political and tribal factions. Likewise the Shi'ites are deeply divided, by tribe, region and political ideology. Many lower-level Baath Party members are Shi'ite, but tens of thousands of Iraqi Shi'ites are in exile in Iran and want to come back under the banner of ayatollahs.

Internal factionalism is unlikely to reach the level of Yugoslavia after the fall of the communists, since US air power can be invoked to stop mass slaughter. But there could be a good deal of trouble in the country, and as the case of Afghanistan shows, the US cannot always stop faction fighting.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

130 Killed, Over 200 Wounded in Two Huge Bombings, Other Attacks
Al-Hakim Blames Coalition for Holding Shiite Commandos Back

Al-Hayat [Ar.]: Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq [SCIRI] and head of the dominant United Iraqi Alliance in parliament, blamed Coalition forces (including, implicitly, the US) and "local political forces" [i.e. the Sunni Arabs] for the "dirty sectarian crimes" that mostly target Shiite Muslims.

His outburst was prompted by a bombing on Thursday that killed some 60 Shiite devotees near the sacred shrine of Imam Husain [the martyred grandson of the Prophet Muhammad] and left a similar number wounded.

For Shiite Muslims, Karbala is like Golgotha where Christ was crucified for Christians. It is the site of a cosmic, redemptive act of sacrifice by a holy figure, the Imam Husain, scion of the Prophet. They mourn Husain's unjust death ritually for several days each year, especially the 10th of Muharram, called Ashura. Most weep, some strike themselves, and some even cut or whip themselves in grief. The makers of the Islamic Revolution in Iran put forward the slogan, "Every land is Karbala, and every day is Ashura." Emotions run high about Husain and Karbala, including a sense of the truth being persecuted. Just as European Christian mobs sometimes targeted Jews, blaming them for Christ's death, Shiites often blame the Sunni Muslims. Neither sort of blame is rooted in real history (Sunnism in its present form did not yet exist in 681 A.D.) or is justified. But the Karbala bombing was designed by Sunni guerrillas to provoke reprisals against Sunnis, so as to throw Iraq into civil war, force the US out, and allow them to come to power in a coup.

In Ramadi, an equal-opportunity terrorist waded into a crowd of potential police recruits and detonated a belt bomb, killing 50 and wounding 60 local Sunni Arabs.

Guerrillas also set off three car bombs in Baghdad, amid other operations. Altogether they killed 7 GIs.

Al-Hakim said: "We hold responsible Coalition forces, and political elements that have openly announced their support for terrorism, for the pure blood that has flowed."

[Al-Hakim was saying that some of the Sunni Arab parties that ran for political office on Dec. 15 are soft on terrorism and even make excuses for it.]

Al-Hakim asserted that the attacks had escalated after "enormous pressure applied by the Coalition forces," adding, "These crimes came after open statements and the threat of civil war issued by Iraqi political parties which failed to achieve their dream of winning the elections . . . and they bear the responsibility for every drop of blood." Al-Hakim threatened that these parties would not be allowed to serve in the government. He said, "The continued holding of Iraqi lives hostage for the sake of immediate political interests will only increase our willingness to exclude those in the government who promulgate and make excuses for terrorism."

He accused "excommunicators with sin-stained hands and the remnants of the Saddam regime" of having committed these crimes. Takfiris or excommunicators are Salafi radicals who declare other Muslims to be actually non-Muslims and to deserve death.

Al-Hakim is replying to US criticisms of the working of the Ministry of the Interior, which has been infiltrated by the Badr Corps, SCIRI's paramilitary. It is accused by the US of setting up secret prisons and torturing largely Sunni Arab prisoners. Its special police commandos have also been accused of assassinating or kidnapping Sunni Arabs they suspected of a connection to the guerrilla movement. The US military has moved to rein in Interior's police commandos. The US is also pressuring the Shiites to give up control of the Ministry of the Interior altogether, giving it to secular ex-Baathist Iyad Allawi. Allawi is not going to get Interior, and the Shiites, who won the Dec. 15 elections, are highly unlikely to give it up. Al-Hakim is saying, "after the Karbala bombings, no way are we surrendering control of Interior; in fact, the US should back off the constraints so far imposed." [Al-Sharq al-Awsat says Allawi himself is blaming the Shiite parties for creating a sectarian atmosphere and always speaking of "revenge" (i.e. against Sunni Baathists). Everyone is using the Karbala bombings for his own purposes.]

Al-Hakim is saying that the US hasn't let the Ministry of Interior do its job, and that is why Shiite pilgrims are being blown up in Karbala, which is SCIRI territory politically.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat [Ar.] reports that Jawad al-Maliki, the number two man in the Dawa Party that Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari heads, blasted Iraqi Sunni Arab politicians who go on Arab satellite television and defend the guerrillas as "holy warriors." He did not name them.

Al-Hayat: Hadi al-Amiri, head of the Badr Organization revealed that the United Iraqi Alliance (victorious Shiite coalition) had made an agreement with the British and American ambassadors to hold a meeting to be attended by the ministers of the interior and defense and the prime minister, Ibrahim Jaafari "to identify what is to blame for the grave deterioration in the security situation."

The ambassadors denied the allegations that the Coalition forces had interfered with the work of the Iraqi security and military apparatuses in such a way as to paralyze them, in order to give other political forces the opportunity to join in political activity--which is, according to al-Amiri, "what gave the green light to terrorists to implement their filthy operations against civilians." [I.e. al-Amiri was saying that the Americans and British are coddling the Sunni Arabs in hopes of getting them involved in civil politics, but are naive, since the Sunni Arabs will go on blowing things up whether they are involved in parliament or not. The ambassadors are denying all this.]

Al-Amiri said that "Iraqi security forces have affirmed more than once their ability to take responsibility on condition that the [US] advisers be withdrawn."

The Association of Muslim Scholars and the Iraqi Islamic Party, both Sunni fundamentalist groups, condemned the attacks on Shiites. The AMS said in a communique, "Dozens of innocent Iraqi victims fell in the city of Karbala as a result of a suspicious, criminal operation." It added, "The AMS decries these terrorist crimes and condemns the party behind them, whoever it may be."
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Guest Editorial: The end of the Sharon Era

The end of the Sharon Era, Time for a New Beginning?

by Mark LeVine
Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History, University of California, Irvine

' As Ariel Sharon clings to his life after suffering a major stroke, commentators across the globe, including many Arab leaders, are predicting the dire consequences of his removal from the Israeli political scene for the prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace. Sharon wasn't perfect; far from it. In fact, he arguably has more Palestinian blood on his hand than any Israeli Prime Minister and was the prime mover behind the post-1967 settlement project in the Occupied Territories. But for many people, that's all in the past; today Sharon is viewed as perhaps the only Israeli with the clout to reach a deal with Palestinians that would be acceptable to the majority of Israelis, who no longer trust the other side.

Yet while it is true that with Sharon gone his new party Kedima will likely lose out to a Netanyahu led Likud party, no matter who wins the upcoming Israeli or Palestinian elections the end of the Sharon era will in fact have little impact on the peace process.

This is because for all intents and purposes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is over, and Israel has won, decisively. Indeed, since the beginning of the 1990s the whole point of the Oslo peace process, followed by the the low intensity war that began in September 2000, have been to convince and then compel Palestinians to accept that not even their most minimal demands will be met, whether through negotiations or violence. Regardless of who has been prime minister during this period--Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu, Barak or Sharon--Israel's negotiating strategy and final positions have changed little, which is why Palestinians soured on Oslo long before the al-Aqsa intifada erupted in 2000.

In this context, what the renewed violence that began five years ago signified was the growing disconnect between a Palestinian leadership whose very existence and freedom of movement has depended on Israe's good graces, which in turn depended on their gaining Palestinian acquiescence to a deal that few wanted, and a people that refuses to sign despite a decade of largely unkept promises and escalating violence. And no matter who wins either election, no Palestinian leadership will be able to convince their people to accept what Sharon or his successor are willing to offer: a weak and disconnected "state," bisected by settlements and Israeli-only roads, with its resources and economy remaining largely in Israel's hands, Jerusalem out of reach for most citizens, and refugees forced to return cantons that are effectively too small to sustain the existing population.

But from Israel's perspective of "unilateral disengagement" (begun by Barak and cemented by Sharon) the Palestinian position is irrelevant. Israel has succeeded in crushing the al-Aqsa intifada; its withdrawal of settlers and forces from Gaza has freed up personnel, funds and political capital to dig in where it really matters: protecting the red lines regarding settlements, Jerusalem, refugees, and economic control, which have guided Israel's negotiations for decades. As important, they have now been accepted fully by the Bush Administration, which means that no power on earth will be able to force Israel to withdraw from a single settlement, change a single line on a map, or let in a single Palestinian refugee that its government doesn't want to do.

Yet while Israel has crushed the intifada, it has not crushed Palestinian society to the point that it will accept a political agreement based on these red lines. Therefore, we can expect that the conflict will continue to cycle between periods of violence and negotiation while Israel strengthens its "facts on the ground" and Palestinians search for new strategies to prevent Israeli red lines from becoming their realities. As for the US, it will continue to back Israel, thereby ensuring the status quo of the last five years continues, while Palestinian society slides slowly but surely into increasing chaos.

If a Palestinian leadership signs onto an agreement on Israel's terms, its rejection by a strong segment of Palestinian society will likely produce an Iraq-style dynamic, in which a government presides over a newly established state against which a large and popular insurgency will inflict significant violence while remaining incapable of seriously threatening the occupying power. Most Israelis, like most Americans, will remain outside the bubble of violence, and most Palestinians, like most Iraqis, will remain inside without the wherewithall either to resist or transcend their sorry situation.

Perhaps with the passing of Sharon, Arafat and the rest of the Israeli and Palestinian old guard, a new generation of leaders on both sides will emerge that has the courage and foresight to imagine a shared future for the two peoples that today remains unimaginable. The alternative is another generation lost to violence, a future neither Israelis nor Palestinians deserve. '

--

Mark LeVine
Associate Professor
Dept. of History
UC Irvine
453 Krieger Hall
Irvine, CA 92697-3275
Contributing Editor, Tikkun magazine, www.tikkun.org

for press or speaking engagements:
Christine Byrd, (949) 824-9055

Author: Why They Don't Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the Axis of Evil.

Geography: Jaffa, Tel Aviv and the Struggle for Palestine, 1880-1948.
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Massive Campaign of Violence Kills 68, Wounds Dozens;
Bush Says Guerrillas Marginalized

A horrific day unfolded in Iraq on Wednesday, with a massive bomb at a funeral, a daring raid that destroyed fuel tankers, and deadly bombings and shootings all over the center-north of the country, even reaching into the south.

President Bush's and Vice President Cheney's recent pronouncements do not seem to me to fit very well with the Iraqi reality they say they are describing.

"Those who want to stop the progress of freedom are becoming more and more marginalized." -Bush 1/04/06.

Al-Zaman/ AFP/ Reuters [Ar.]: In Miqdadiyah (60 mi. N.E. of the capital), a guerrilla wearing a suicide bomb belt detonated it at a the funeral of a relative of an official from the Shiite fundamentalist Dawa Party. (Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari is from Dawa, a component of the victorious United Iraqi Alliance). He killed 37 mourners and wounded 84. Iraqi police sealed off the city in hopes of capturing the group behind the attack.

Reuters reports:

' NEAR BAGHDAD - Gunmen ambushed a convoy of 60 fuel tankers on a road just north of Baghdad, destroying 20 and killing a driver and three members of the convoy's security team, police and oil officials said. A group called the Islamic Army in Iraq claimed the attack without giving details. The Oil Ministry gave a different account, saying only one tanker was destroyed, by a roadside bomb.'

(Al-Hayat says that the guerrillas had planned out a sophisticated rocket attack on the convoy, and that they destroyed three tankers completely and inflicted substantial damage on 20 others. The convoy had been intended by the government to help alleviate the gasoline crisis in the capital. An internet posting claiming to be from the guerrillas said they had hit it because it was part of the "Occupation.")

""In January 2006, the mission is to continue to hand over more and more territory and more and more responsibility to Iraqi forces . . . - Bush"

Al-Zaman / AFP [Ar.]: Police wounded 11 protesters in the southern city of Nasiriyah on Wednesday, firing live ammunition into a civilian crowd. Hhundreds of unemployed young men mounted a demonstration downtown, protesting the lack of work and the unfulfilled promises of local officials before the Dec. 15 elections to increase slots for recruits into the Iraq army. The officials, from the (Shiite) United Iraqi Alliance, the chief party in parliament, were trying to get reelected. The poor in Iraq are desperate in part because of the recent tripling of the price of fuel (at the insistence of the International Monetary Fund). Nasiriyah is among the poorest provinces in Iraq. No large-scale reconstruction projects were sited there, just a few programs to improve services that generated employment only for a few hundred men. In the past two weeks the price of transportation has doubled, and food and consumer goods have become more expensive. Government-subsidized food supplies have dwindled in quantity and quality, and Iraqis are complaining. When the unemployed men showed up Wednesday demanding the promised jobs, an official came out and said there were none. The crowd turned ugly and began throwing rocks at the governor's headquarters and at the security forces, and the police began firing over their heads. When they did not disperse, the police fired live ammunition into the civilian crowd, wounding 11. Three policemen were injured in the melee.

Al-Zaman: In Baqubah, a roadside bomb targetting an army convoy wounded an Iraqi soldier and a civilian

A car bomb in Kadhimiyah, northeast Baghdad, killed 5 and wounded 15, including both police and civilians. It was placed so as to hurt police at the Najda station.

Reuters reports:

'BAGHDAD - Two police commandos were killed and nine others wounded when mortar rounds landed on their checkpoint in western Baghdad, a hospital source said . . .

[The Arab press says that the casualties derived from a running street battle between the Lightning Brigade of police commandos and guerrillas, not from just a mortar attack.]

LATIFIYA - An Iraqi soldier was killed and two wounded when a bomb went off near their patrol in Latifiya, in an area dubbed the "Triangle of Death" south of Baghdad, an army source said . . .

ISKANDARIYA - Two Iraqi policemen were wounded on Tuesday when a makeshift bomb went off near their patrol in Iskandariya, 40 km (25 miles) south of Baghdad, police said.
'

BAGHDAD - At least eight people were killed and 12 wounded in a car bomb attack in southern Baghdad, police and hospital sources said. The car was parked close to a busy commercial market in the Doura district, they said . . .

[Al-Hayat says that the bombing was targetting police commandos operating near the market.]

MAHAWIL - The bodies of two people, bound, gagged and shot dead, were found in Mahawil, about 75 km west of Baghdad, police said . . .

[Al-Hayat says that these two were Iraqi soldiers.]

"As we see more of these Iraqi forces in the lead, we will be able to continue with our stated strategy that says as Iraqi forces stand up, we will stand down."- Bush

Al-Zaman reports that the police chief of Baghdad, Abdul Razzaq al-Samarra'i, has been removed from office while on pilgrimage to Mecca. Mu'in al-Kadhemi, the elected governor of Baghdad province, accused the police force in the capital of being incompetent and of neglecting their security responsibilities.

"As the Iraqi army gains strength and experience, and as the political process advances, we'll be able to decrease troop levels without losing our capacity to defeat the terrorists." - Cheney 1/2/05.

Al-Hayat reports that [Ar.] the reason the Rejection Front of Sunni and secular parties is agitating to change the results of the elections is that they are hoping to gain at least 6 seats, so as jointly to hold at least one more than 1/3 of the seats in parliament. If they can gain 93 seats, and can maintain their unity, they could prevent the election of a president and so hold up the formation of a government unless the other parties gave them what they wanted. It is in other words an attempt to put themselves in a position to blackmail the Shiites and the Kurds. What they probably want is a Sunni Arab or secular vice president who can be relied on to veto legislation mainly benefitting the religious Shiites or the Kurds. (Each member of the three-person presidential council will have a veto for the next 4 years.) The whole political process in Iraq could grind to a halt under these circumstances. Who knows if a government could ever be formed? Or if it would ever be able to accomplish anything, with each sectarian or ethnic president vetoing anything his group did not like?

Al-Zaman reports that police in Baghdad are stepping up attempts to locate the kidnapped sister of the Minister of the Interior (sort of like the US FBI chief).

Guerrillas in the Baghdad neighborhood of Amiriyah assassinated Rahim Ali al-Sudani, the general director in the Petroleum Ministry, on Wednesday. His son was also killed in the attack.

Reuters reports,

'BAGHDAD - Two guards of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of one of Iraq's most powerful Shi'ite political parties, were shot dead on Tuesday while attending a funeral in southern Baghdad, police said.'

"There'll still be violence," Mr. Bush said, "and there'll still be some who believe that they can affect the political outcome of Iraq through violent means. ... We're going to stay on the offense against these -- 'we' being coalition forces as well as the Iraqi forces."

Reuters reports:

KERBALA - At least three people were wounded when a car bomb exploded in the Shi'ite holy city of Kerbala, police said. The target of the attack was unclear. . .

KIRKUK - Two civilians were killed and two others wounded when a bomb exploded targeting a U.S. patrol, police said . . . "

And "Coalition" and Iraqi forces don't seem to have been able to do anything about it, despite Bush's pledge. In fact, that bombing in Kirkuk is said to have destroyed a humvee, which suggests there may have been US military casualties not yet announced.
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On Removing pro-Baath Books from the Libraries in Iraq

At the news on Wednesday that the Debaathification committee in Iraq will remove from university libraries all books positive toward the Baath party, Middle East expert Keith Watenpaugh writes:

"Functionally this decision to “cleanse Iraqi universities and its libraries from the vestiges of the Baath” could lead to the impounding of some of the best research/writing done in the “golden years” of academic activity in Iraq 1972-1980. Most work in that period was vetted by Baathist officials and panegyrics to the party and officials appear at least on the first page, if not sprinkled throughout the text. Those of us who have worked in similar settings are familiar with this phenomenon.

On the other hand, various academic/party apparatchiks wrote/had written for them books and theses of little value beyond revealing how thoroughly the party had poisoned academic life in the period of the Iran-Iraq war and the later sanctions. The (contemporary) Bayt al-Hikma was an institution created primarily for this purpose. It's unlikely these would be much missed.

It strikes me that this will constitute part of a larger project, and may merely be prelude to a purge of Iraq’s academic community of groups/individuals who may be judged problematic to the current Iraqi leadership or parts thereof. Those deemed “problematic” may merely be non-Muslims/ non-Shiite Muslims or those not inclined towards Iran with sufficient enthusiasm or who oppose/favor the American presence. Flavor of the moment - take your pick."

Keith David Watenpaugh is author of Being Modern in the Middle East (Princeton: 2006).
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Abramoff and al-Arian: Lobbyist's "Charity" a Front for Terrorism

The guilty plea of fabulously wealthy and highly corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff raised the question of whether he would roll over on congressmen involved in illegal fundraising and other crimes with him. Some twenty Republicans on Capitol Hill are said to be in danger.

Abramoff's dense network of illicit finances and phony charities might end some political careers in the United States. But the investigation into his activities by the FBI also shed light on the ways in which rightwing American Jews have often been involved in funding what are essentially terrorist activities by armed land thieves in Palestinian territory.

Indeed, it was this terror funding of Israeli far right militiamen that tripped Abramoff up, since the FBI discovered that he had misled Indian tribes into giving money to the Jabotinskyites, and then began wondering if he had defrauded the tribes in other ways. (You betcha!) The Indian leaders were furious when they discovered they had been used to oppress another dispossessed indigenous people, the Palestinians, calling it "Outer Limits bizarre" and saying that they would never have willingly given money to such a cause.

Newsweek's Mike Issikoff reported last May that Abramoff diverted $140,000 from a charity ostensibly to benefit inner-city youths to militant Israeli colonists who had usurped land in the Palestinian West Bank. Isikoff wrote:

"Among the expenditures: purchases of camouflage suits, sniper scopes, night-vision binoculars, a thermal imager and other material described in foundation records as "security" equipment. The FBI, sources tell NEWSWEEK, is now examining these payments as part of a larger investigation to determine if Abramoff defrauded his Indian tribe clients . . .

Abramoff, a legendary lobbyist particularly close to DeLay, is also a fierce supporter of Israel—"a super-Zionist," one associate says. That may explain why Abramoff's paramilitary gear ended up in the town of Beitar Illit, a sprawling ultra-Orthodox outpost whose residents have occasionally tangled with their Palestinian neighbors. Yitzhak Pindrus, the settlement's mayor, says that several years ago the town was confronting mounting security problems. "They [the Palestinians] were throwing stones, they were throwing Molotov cocktails," Pindrus says. Abramoff's connection to the town was Schmuel Ben-Zvi, an American emigre who, the lobbyist told associates, was an old friend he knew from Los Angeles. Capital Athletic Foundation public tax records make no mention of Ben-Zvi. But they do show payments to "Kollel Ohel Tiferet" in Israel, a group for which there is no public listing and which the town's mayor said he never heard of.

Beitar Illit is a colony that the Israelis plunked down in the northern part of the West Bank, which they conquered militarily in 1967. The partition of Palestine in 1948, tragic as it was, had a United Nations Security Council resolution behind it. And the 1949 armistice lines have been implicitly recognized by Egypt and Jordan in their peace treaties with Israel, as well as by the Arab League in its endorsement of then-Prince Abdullah's peace plan, which offered Israel recognition and peace for a return to 1949 borders. The 1967 Israeli conquest of the West Bank and Gaza is not of the same sort.

Although some of my readers are under the impression that in the civilized world it is all right to take your neighbor's land by winning it in warfare, actually the United Nations Charter (to which Israel is a signatory) and the whole body of post-1945 international law frowns on that sort of thing. Likewise both the Hague Regulations of 1907 and the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 forbid occupying powers to settle their citizens in militarily occupied territories, or, indeed, to make any major alteration in the structure of the conquered societies. Basically, the idea was that as of the late 1940s your nation is stuck with the land it has and you can't take anyone else's by force. And if you try, the United Nations Security Council has an obligation to stop you. The Geneva Conventions were framed to prevent further atrocities of a sort committed by the Nazis. It is not only the Nazis who were capable of atrocities; everyone is, which is why we need a rule of law, including international law.

You will note that even though Iraq invaded both Iran and Kuwait, neither Iran nor Kuwait has made any claim on Iraqi territory (nor are they entitled to do so, given that they are also signatories to the United Nations Charter). That is right. Iran has reacted more properly in the aftermath to the 8-year-long Iraq-Iran War (which Iraq launched) than Israel reacted to the 1967 war (which the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza did not launch). And, after all, the United States conquered Iraq in 2003. Would it be all right to kick the Basrans out of their homes and settle, say, the displaced New Orleans folks in Iraq, just because of this American military victory?

Isikoff is careful to avoid trouble by depicting the weaponry sent by Abramoff as essentially for self-defense. But the colonists are often aggressive, and anyway would not need to defend themselves if they weren't squatting on other people's land. And, Israel does have an army. Private militias are always an ugly thing, and have been used by Israeli colonists ethnically to cleanse nearby Palestinian villages.

The Hill reported on June 23, 2005 that some of the money Abramoff embezzled from the charity contributions of the Indian tribes "paid a monthly stipend and Jeep payments to a high-school friend of Abramoff who conducted sniper workshops . . ." The Hill suggested that the workshops were for Israeli army personnel, but the Israeli army does not need shooting lessons from Yitzhak Pindrus. The sniper lessons were for the colonists, practice for shooting Palestinians.

The Jerusalem Post added on April 24, 2005 of Abramoff's funding for sniping lessons and "security equipment":

"Emily Amrussi, a spokeswoman for the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, known by its acronym, Yesha, said, I have never before heard of this episode." The Yesha Council under increasing financial scrutiny itself now receives its entire budget - in the millions of dollars this year, - from charity she said. "But it is often impossible to know where the funds originated she added. She said that this particular case has no bearing on the Yesha Council because it is specific to a single West Bank community.

The Interior Ministry froze all state funding to the Yesha Council following a petition to the High Court of Justice last month by the settlement watch-dog group Peace Now. The petition accuses the settler leadership of chronic improper use of state funds for allegedly illegal activity such as setting up unrecognized outposts."

Illegal outposts, i.e. establishing foreign colonies on stolen land, is a way of terrorizing the indigenous inhabitants, and it requires a local militia to defend the colonists, along with sniper lessons and night-vision binoculars.

Now here's the thing. If a Palestinian-American had diverted $140,000 from a Muslim charity to "security equipment" and "sniper lessons" for Palestinians on the West Bank, that individual would be in Gitmo so fast that the sonic boom would rattle your windows.

In fact, it seems to me that Sami al-Arian is the mirror image of Abramoff.

But here's a prediction. None of the Jewish extremists, some of them violent, who are invading the West Bank and making the lives of the local Palestinians miserable will ever be branded "terrorists" by the US Government, and Abramoff's foray into providing sniper lessons will be quietly buried.

Terror isn't terror and aggression is not aggression when it has lobbyists in Congress who can provide luxury vacations and illegal campaign funding.

----

Because propaganda of the sort people like Abramoff paid for has substituted itself for rational discourse on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, postings like this always elicit a certain number of responses full of special pleading or simple errors of fact. Readers are directed to the rules for the comment section.
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Human Rights Violations in Iraq
Or, the Clay Feet of the Model

Iraq The Model I: The US military observed guerrillas in Beiji planting a roadside bomb and kept them under surveillance as they went to a house, then called down a bombing raid on the house. Unfortunately there was a civilian family of 14 in the building, including women and children in their pyjamas. Workers had pulled 8 bodies out of the rubble by evening, including small ones. Bombers are combatants and fair game, but, uh, wouldn't it have been better to hit the bomb planters when they were out in the open? As it is, the civilian non-combatants in this family, were executed without trial for a relative's crime. This is one more nail in the coffin of American popularity in Iraq.

Iraq The Model II: The Kurdistan authorities have sentenced an Austrian citizen of Kurdish extraction to 30 years in prison for publishing criticism on the internet of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Massoud Barzani, accusing the writer of "defaming" Kurdistan. Kamal Sayid Qadir is appealing the decree of a special security court in Irbil, and has gone on a hunger strike. Ah, the joys of liberty in the new Iraq! This Arabic article explains that the Iraqi Journalists' Guild is complaining about this case, too. Please go here and send the Kurdistan Regional Government a protest email (I guess under the rubric of "administration.")

Iraq The Model III: One of the things the Sunni Arab and secular parties want investigated and cleared up before they drop their objections to the way the elections were conducted is the secret torture jails run by the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior. The latter body has been infiltrated by the Badr Corps, a hardline Shiite paramilitary whose members were often trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards when they were in exile in Iran.

Iraq The Model IV: Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports [Ar.] that the Debaathification Committee in Iraq has begun pulling all works that praise the Baath regime in Iraq, which ruled 1968-2003, from the shelves of university libraries. The newly banned works include theses, research papers, books and other publications. They will be sequestered in a high-security special library and kept away from university students because "they are far from the scientific spirit" and because they glorify "the Baath ideology." The Debaathification Committee is controlled by the Iraqi National Congress of corrupt financier and current vice premier, Ahmad Chalabi. Although apparently only Chalabi's relatives voted for him in the December 15 elections, he continues to have an outsized impact on Iraq, and not for the better, either. What Mr. Chalabi's committee does not understand is that the "scientific spirit" is strong enough to deal with all kinds of books, and is violated by making some forbidden and pulling them off the shelves of the university libraries.
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Cole on Air America


I will be on the Al Franken Show at 1 pm Wednesday.

If you miss that (or are a glutton for punishment) I'll also be on The Majority Report on Wednesday at 8:25.
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Iraqi Military Delegation to Iran Carries US Message
Secular Sunni Arabs cry Political Betrayal

The sister of Interior Minister Bayan Jabr was kidnapped on Tuesday. Three months ago, his brother had been kidnapped.

Al-Hayat [Ar.] reports that Salih Mutlak of the secular Sunni National Dialogue Council accused the (Sunni) National Accord Front of "political betrayal" for having conducted talks with the Kurds. The two Sunni Arab lists had earlier formed a Rejection Bloc to bring into question the legitimacy of the outcome of the Dec. 15 elections. Mutlak also spoke darkly of political "conspiracies."

For their part, the Kurds said that they would leave the choice of prime minister to the largest bloc in parliament, the Shiite fundamentalist United Iraqi Alliance. Despite his past frictions with him, Jalal Talabani said he had no objection to current prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari continuing in the job.

The Shiite Islamic Virtue Party issued a communique on Tuesday announcing the candidacy of its head, Nadim al-Jabiri, for the post of prime minister. Fadilah is a branch of the Sadr movement but is more moderate and does not follow Muqtada al-Sadr. It was only given 15 seats by the UIA coalition and al-Jabiri is a dark horse.

Al-Hayat says tht both Iranian and Iraqi sources have told it that an Iraqi military delegation led by deputy minister of defense Abdul Amir Ubais al-Imarah is visiting Tehran in connection with a security protocol between the two countries. The protocol had been negotiated last July by Minister of Defense Saadoun Dulaimi. The delegation carried with it a letter from US ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad, which proposes to the Iranians direct coordination to control the situation. He charged another defense ministry deputy, Yusuf al-Imarah, with taking the Iranian pulse to see if they might be willing to interact directly with the US on mutual issues of Iraqi security. A member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, he had appointed a military attache to the Iraqi embassy in Tehran.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that the elected governing council of Basra (the southern port city of 1.3 million, largely Shiite, inhabitants) has called on British troops to relinquish to it control of the Basra Airport and the Shatt al-Arab Hotel, both of them key to any future tourist industry in the city. The council is dominated by the Islamic Virtue Party, and by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. The puritan and oppressive political atmosphere of the city, in the grip of Shiite religious militias, doesn't sound to me promising for tourism. But the tiff is a further sign of tension between the local government and the British occupying forces.

British military authorities have backed off their allegations that the Iranian government was behind a series of bombings in southern Iraq. The London Times writes,

After a thorough assessment of the latest intelligence, military and diplomatic officials have stopped pointing the finger at Tehran, merely saying that the new technology matched bomb-making expertise traditionally found in Syria and Lebanon.

The roadside explosive devices at the centre of the allegation have an infra-red triggering system and have killed ten British soldiers since the beginning of May.

It is ackowledged that the devices or the technology to construct them must have been smuggled to Iraq across the Iranian border into Maysan province in the south, but British officials no longer say that there is any intelligence linking the bombs to Tehran or even to elements of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

Media critic Kristina Borjesson, editor of the important new book Feet to the Fire, is interviewed by Laura Barcella on the failures in media coverage of the Iraq War.

I was on Warren Olney's To the Point radio program on Tuesday with Anthony Cordesman and Victor Davis Hanson. This is the audio link if you want to listen. Hanson peddled the Neocon line that everything is hunky dory in Iraq and it is a model for the region and people are free to speak their minds, etc., etc. He at one point said that 9 million Iraqi Kurds lived freely (see the Amnesty International item on Kamal Sayid Qadir, above). I was shocked that he didn't have a better grasp of the country's social statistics (Kurds are about 20 percent of the 26 million Iraqis). He likened the Sunni Arab guerrillas to the Ku Klux Klan in size and effectiveness (!) He did not seem to realize how close the victorious Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq was to Iran, and clearly underestimates the resilience of the Iranian regime.
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Ahmadinejad Clarification on Israel

An informed commentator writes:

Regarding his views of the Holocaust and other issues that have been discussed on this forum, the IRI President has offered some explanations. Part of it reads:

"One must distinguish between Zionism and Judaism. The Jews have always lived in security and prosperity in Islamic lands, and they have always had freedom of religion, and will continue to have, however, Zionism itself is a western concept and a colonialist one that was established by the British in the region with secularist goals and fascist methods. Zionism now with the help and leadership of Americans and part of Europe, is massacring Muslims. The basis upon which they have created Zionism is the issue of the massacre of the Jews by the German army. About the number of the victims of this, there are two official and unofficial views in Europe, however, these views have never been the subject of a scientific debate. ...... Ethnic cleansing in our view is condemned."

The complete report in Persian is availed at the site of Iranian Labor News Agency

Let's get this straight. So Ahmadinejad would condemn the Holocaust as a form of ethnic cleansing if he believed it had occurred? And he believes that no "scientific" (i.e. scholarly or academic) findings have nailed down the course of the Holocaust? I mean, this is wilfull ignorance on a Himalayan scale. But, may one conclude that he doesn't call for Israeli Jewish noncombatants to be killed? Would that not be ethnic cleansing, which he says he is against?
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Sunnis Join Talks on National Unity Government;
Guerrillas kill 19

AP correspondent Sinan Salaheddin reports that the Sunni fundamentalist National Accord Front [Accordance is not an English adjective] broke ranks on Monday with its partners in the Rejection Bloc. The NAF had earlier joined the National Dialogue Council of Salih Mutlak (Neobaathist) and the National Iraqiyah List of Iyad Allawi (ex-Baathist) in rejecting the results of the December 15 elections, which had reaffirmed the dominance of the fundamentalist Shiite parties in Iraqi politics. The three parties had said that they would not enter into negotiations on the formation of a new government until after election fraud had been investigated and redressed. On Monday, Adnan Dulaimi and Tariq Hashimi of the NAF, however, met with Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani and announced their willingness to join a national unity government.

The Sunni Iraqi Accord Front is also looking at a possible parliamentary alliance with the Muqtada al-Sadr bloc in parliament.

The most likely explanation is that the the religious Shiites and the Kurds have managed to detach the National Accord Front from its former partners, who are anyway unacceptable to important Shiite and Kurdish constituencies. It is the religious Sunni parties with which the others feel they can do business, probably especially the Iraqi Islamic Party, which had a history of dissidence in the Baath period. Jalal Talabani is still arguing for including all 4 major parties in the national unity government, according to Al-Hayat-- the Shiite fundamentalist UIA, the Kurdistan Alliance, the National Accord Front, and the secular National Iraqiyah list of Allawi. But Talabani may not be able to convince the Sadrists to let Allawi's people into the cabinet. One follower of the nationalist young Shiite cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, said that the Allawi list's inclusion was a "red line" that must not be crossed.

Dulaimi said, Al-Hayat [Ar.]according to al-Hayat, "We are optimistic about setting up a government that is suited to resolve Iraq's problems and to restore security and stability." He said his Front would talk "with all concerned parties . . . to form a balanced Iraqi government through reaching agreement and staying far away from factional claims on resources." Asked about the continued wave of terrorism, Dulaimi replied, "The terrorism will stop when a strong and balanced Iraqi government is formed in which all sections of Iraq participate."

Tariq al-Hashimi, head of the Iraqi Islamic Party (a coalition element of the NAF), said "The questions about the probity of the election results have priority," despite the participation of the Front in these talks. He expressed some optimism, he said, because it appeared that the political elite had agreed on the desirability of a government of national unity.

Dulaimi made an important statement at this news conference, which I saw on Arabic satellite television but which al-Hayat did not transcribe in detail. He vehemently rejected the principle of loose federalism for Arab Iraq. He accepted that the Kurdistan regional confederacy is legitimate, with understandable historical and ethnic roots. But he ruled out any further provincial confederacies in the Middle Euphrates and the deep south. The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the leading Shiite party in the United Iraqi Alliance, has begun seriously thinking about forming Shiite provincial confederacies on the Kurdish model. At one point there was talk of a nine-province confederacy, but more recently two are referred to, that of the "middle" and that of the "south." The constitution approved on Oct. 15 permits such provincial confederacies to be formed, but the Sunni Arab provinces all rejected this paragraph and it was one of the reasons all three voted down the constitution.

Dulaimi will want to stop this march toward the devolution of power in Iraq on powerful and wealthy "Regions." Part of his reason is principle; the Sunni Arabs of Iraq have a centralized tradition of politics like that of the French. But part is also interest. The Shiite confederacies would own all future petroleum finds in their territories, which are rich with oil, whereas the Sunni Arabs have no petroleum and would be left without a share in the national patrimony.

Dulaimi has Shiite allies in this regard. The Dawa Party, the Sadr movement and Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani all disapprove of SCIRI's fascination with the Kurdistan model for south Iraq.

Ironically (very ironically) a coalition of Dulaimi with Muqtada al-Sadr and Sistani might actually save Arab Iraq from breaking up.

Muqtada al-Sadr and his factions declined to participate in the talks in Kurdistan, saying they were merely "personal" and did not represent the entirety of the United Iraqi Alliance list. Sadrist representative Baha' al-Din al-A`raji said that Abdul Aziz al-Hakim would brief the rest of the party on his consultations at a big meeting that would be convened soon. Al-A`raji said that of the candidates for prime minister within the UIA, "Jaafari is closer to us and we consider his chances better." He said that the Sadr bloc was conducting talks with the (Sunni) Iraqi Islamic Party, "Which do not touch on the formation of a government, but focus chiefly on defining the characteristics of the Republic and of the government." He added, "We have not reached final conclusions. We are still in an early stage, and we will follow up." He again rejected absolutely the participation of Iyad Allawi in the government, though he allowed for consultations with "some members of his list."

Guerrilla attacks in Iraq killed 19 on Monday, including 7 police recruits on a bus near Baqubah headed for a training camp in Kurdistan who were attacked by a car bomb. (This sounds like an inside job-- someone in the Baqubah police had to have tipped off the guerrillas which bus to hit). A lot of police recruits are Shiites, and are a special target of the Sunni Arab guerrillas. Eight corpses turned up in south Baghdad. The Turkish ambassador in Baghdad was also attacked, and some reports say he was slightly wounded. The Sudanese embassy has pulled out its personnel because of the poor security. There are actually about 100 attacks a day in Iraq, but we don't hear about most of them. I was on Chris Lydon's radio show, Open Source, Monday evening with Nir Rosen, and he pointed out that the average of 100 or so attacks a day has not changed during the past year. Only about ten percent produce significant casualties. But it is nervous-making to have that kind of violence going on around one, and disrupts normal life.

Iraq only exported 1.1 million barrels a day during December, the worst performance since the fall of the Baath government in April of 2003. Guerrilla sabotage in the north and bad weather in the south, interfering with exports from the port of Umm Qasr, explained the situation. The crisis continues to produce severe gasoline shortages in Baghdad (I can't believe I am typing these words).

Remember when Ahmad Chalabi came on 60 Minutes for that fluff piece last fall and he made a big deal out of how he had established an effective special guard for the pipelines in the north? No sign of it. It would be a good idea. >Knight Ridder reports that he is likely to remain an important figure in the government despite the possibility that he will not win a seat in parliament.

Bruce Jentleson analyzes an Army Times poll of experienced US military personnel in Iraq. Only 54 percent now say that Bush is doing a good job handling Iraq policy, down 9 points from last year, and a quarter thought he is doing badly (or that many would say so; a lot declined to answer). More than half of the respondents said they had deployed precisely to fight in Afghanistan or Iraq. Some 26 percent think the US should not have gone to war against Iraq, though a majority, 56 percent, think it should have. Only 31 percent think the US "very likely to succeed" in Iraq. Slightly more thought it "somewhat" likely to succeed. A fifth, 20%, thought it doomed to failure. I suspect that the 6 percent who declined to answer also weren't the gung-ho types. The approval ratings for Bush are 20 percent higher than the general population, and the reason is simple. Only 13% of the respondents are Democrats. Quck, someone alert David Horowitz! He wants party "balance" in higher education, but there clearly isn't any in the US military (or in the US business world, or among the professional upper middle classes, or in entire suburbs, probably including Horowitz's own . . .) Remember that US taxpayers pay the salaries of all those Republicans in the military. I say we insist that half of the senior officers are Democrats at all times, and for real balance at least one must be a Socialist. And, I say just to check up on them, we do data-mining of the officers' cable television just to see how much Fox Cable News they are watching. More that 50%? Fire'm and promote Dems.

Alexander Cockburn's uncompromisingly honest contemplation of both Iraq and newspaper op-eds is fun reading for its polished prose and worldly-wise cynicism. If his scenario, a worst-case one, does play out, it isn't going to be pleasant for anyone, Iraqis or Americans.
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Reconstruction Aid to Afghanistan Halved;
Or, "Don't Forget to Write!"

Now that it has been announced that the US won't seek more reconstruction aid for Iraq. it also turns out that the Bush administration has reduced reconstruction aid in Afghanistan from $1 bn. a year to a little ove $600 mn. The US is pulling out 3,000 troops and turning the south over to NATO. The troop pull-out in my view is a good thing-- Afghanistan is not a country that will accept a large foreign military presence, especially that of an imperial power, for very long. NATO has more legitimacy. As for fears of resurgent Taliban, they are reasonable fears. But if they genuinely become resurgent, then presumably that will be the time to deal with them.

But the cut in reconstruction aid is tragic. The US gives $2 billion a year to Egypt and $3 billion a year (actually much more) to Israel. The US budget is something like $2 trillion. Isn't rebuilding Afghanistan to the point where it doesn't fall into chaos again and threaten the world as a result worth as much as helping Egypt and Israel remain at peace? Half of Afghanistan's gross domestic product now comes from poppy sales. Europe is being flooded with its heroin, and the danger of narco-terrorism on a Colombian scale is ever present.

Afghanistan is desperately poor, devastated by a quarter century of war, deeply harmed by a decade of drought that only recently ended, and beset by ethnic and ideological divisions that recently made the place a prime base for al-Qaeda. Bush promised to reconstruct it after the Afghanistan war. How many times will the US get deeply involved there, help throw the country into chaos, and then just walk away?

Rumsfeld said it all. Afghanistan has no good targets (economic or otherwise).
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Guerrillas Target Police all over Iraq
with 13 Car Bombs on New Year's Day
Over 2 Dozen Casualties

Al-Sharq al-Awsat [Ar.]: Baghdad rang in the New Year with a sting of 8 coordinated car bombs that left at least 24 persons injured. A further five car bombs were detonated in Kirkuk, Tikrit and Miqdadiyah. Other violence killed at least 13. Wire services did not report any fatalities in the 8 Baghdad car bombings,, but al-Sharq al-Awsat says that it was told by Iraqi security sources that at least 10 persons were killed. The bombs targeted police patrols in the districts of Baghdad al-Jadidah, al-Mashtal, Adhamiyah, Karradah, and Baladiyyat. A police source told SA that the first bomb went off in Karrada, and that most of the victims were Iraqi police, with great damaged done to cars and buildings in the vicinity. Subsequent explosins followed in the other districts. At least two car bombs were discovered and disarmed before they could go off. One hit a popular restaurant and wounded at least six.

AFP reports other violence:

"The day’s worst bloodshed came in eastern Baghdad, where police said gunmen killed five people at a butcher shop and a bomb killed two police officers at a gas station. Two more Iraqis were slain and five wounded by gunfire at a Sunni mosque in southern Baghdad, while a Shiite sheik was fatally shot at a market in the same part of the city. In the northern city of Mosul, about a dozen gunmen attacked a police checkpoint, killing a bystander and wounding three policemen, police said."

The extensive attacks on the Iraqi police at the beginning of the year are intended by the guerrillas to make the police timid. If you think about it, the Iraqi police are probably the last best hope for any effective counter-insurgency. They know Arabic, they know the families and the neighborhoods, they probably have an idea when something fishy is going on. The guerrillas know that they absolutely must neutralize the police and make them afraid to cooperate with the Americans or to come aggressively after the guerrillas themselves.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that an ongoing electricity crisis has left the Baghdad capital in complete darkness for many hours a day. A protest against a tripling of gasoline prices turned violent in Kirkuk, with police killing 4 protesters (they accused the demonstrators of having turned to arson).

A major refinery went back online, but a pipeline was bombed early Sunday.

Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari,leader of the Shiite Dawa Party,met Sunday with Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani in an attempt to hammer out a coalition government, according to Aljazeera [Ar.]. Jaafari said later at a joint news conference that the two had agreed in principle on the desirability of a government of national unity. Jaafari said that he wished to exclude no one in principle, but the question is what parties would get which ministries, and nothing could be decided until the final election returnes were announced.

Jaafari's statement that no one had been excluded appears to be a demurral from the Muqtada al-Sadr position that Iyad Allawi's list cannot serve in the national unity government. Reidar Vissar argues that the Sadrists are very important within the United Iraqi Alliance this time around (a tip of the hat to Helena Cobban at JustWorldNews-- and thanks for her generous sentiments, which are reciprocated.) I'm not sure, though, that he is right about SCIRI being weaker. The list ran 30 Sadrists, 30 SCIRI candidates, and 30 from both branches of the Dawa Party, among others. Since these big parties would have been top loaded on the lists, and since the coalition probably got around 130 seats, then all three parties should be seated in rough parity. Vissar finds that more Sadrists were returned in the deep south. But my guess is that SCIRI candidates were top loaded in places like Najaf, Karbala and Baghdad.

Barzani also announced that he would meet Monday with a delegation from the Sunni fundamentalist National Accord Front. Adnan Dulaimi and Tariq Hashimi of the NAF arrived in Irbil Sunday. Dulaimi is now saying that he will not boycott parliament if he cannot get the outcome altered (he maintains that the elections were crooked), but would rather work to change the constitution (he opposes loose federalism).

The NYT says that the Lincoln Group, with a big Pentagon propaganda contract in Iraq, paid a few Sunni clerics to give pro-American sermons. This tactic is not a new thing, and the British used to do this sort of thing in their empire (which had a lot of Muslim subjects) all the time. The problem is that Muslims do have pretty good bullshit detectors, and they decry "American Islam." All the Lincoln project did was to make it harder for genuine Sunni reformers to get a hearing; if they don't adopt a hard line, they will be assumed to be on the take.

The NYT article also reveals that Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute did some for-pay consulting with Lincoln on this project. But when Rubin was earlier interviewed by the NYT about Lincoln, he said nice things about Lincoln and did not reveal that he had a working business relationship with them. Rubin served in Douglas Feith's and Bill Luti's "Office of Special Plans" at the Pentagon, the Great Fantasy Workshop in the Sky that manufactured much of the bogus "intelligence" that got us into the Iraq mess. (I've never seen Rubin quote an Arabic source, and wonder if he even knows the language; he is a Persianist by training). Rubin has on more than one occasion attempted to smear me, accusing me of having a conspiratorial mindset because I've tried to unravel the shenannigans of Rubin and his buddies. Well, apparently it would take one to keep up with this squirrel of the militaristic Right. Laura Rozen, who has also been smeared by Rubin, has a little fun with him at her blog.

Question: Why does the New York Times call the American Enterprise Institute for comment on something like the Lincoln Group? Or on Iraq at all? Does anyone besides Harold Rhode (and he's not even on staff!) over there even speak a word of Arabic?

The Washington Post reports that the $18 billion voted by the US Congress for Iraqi reconstruction is mostly committed or spent, with large amounts diverted to security, prisons and trials. The administration does not intend to ask for any more. I'd say this is a good bellwether of administration intentions. If the US were staying in Iraq in a big way, and still hoping to make a significant place for the multinationals there, it would have to bite the bullet and continue to try to do reconstruction. If the Bush administration is throwing in the towel, then whether Iraqis have enough electricity really isn't its problem any more.

The political and propaganda effectiveness of the guerrilla movement is demonstrated in the article. Apparently, the US has been deprived of any credit for any of its good works in Iraq (70% of Iraqis don't even know about them), and has been deprived of the good will that might have come from getting the services functioning and the oil flowing freely.

There is an error in the WaPo article, which quotes Iraqi oil production as 2 billion barrels a day a day. That should be 2 million, and will no doubt be corrected on the web. But that still isn't right. They weren't able to do more than an average of 1.8 million in 2005, last I knew, and in December it was less. 200,000 barrels of petroleum a day is significant enough so that it can't just be rounded up.

Simon Jenkins also thinks it is all over but the shouting. He is a veteran reporter and has his eyes open, and his pessimism is well earned. The only demurral I would enter is that the US military is not actually bottled up on those 100 bases in the way that he implies-- they are out in Baghdad, Ramadi and Mosul, etc. and come back into places they have left, like Najaf, when called by local security forces. But he is right anyway that they don't continuously control much actual territory in the Sunni Arab provinces (and certainly not after sundown).

The LA Times has more on Iraq's mess of an economy. It is a fine, nuanced article.

US air raids in Iraq have gone from 25 a month last summer to 125 in November and perhaps 150 in December. Air strikes are fairly useless as tools of counter-insurgency, and the innocent civilians they kill probably create new guerrillas from among their relatives, so this change seems an ominous sort of flailing about as the US prepares to withdraw the troops it put in before the elections.

More items from al-Sharq al-Awsat: The people of Basra are upset about the conditions for prisoners in British jails. Complaints of relatives have impelled the provincial governing council to begin setting up a meeting of tribal sheikhs and Muslim clergy to discuss what can be done.

The Shiite Pious Endowments Board condemned the murder of a family of 9 Shiites, including women and children, near Latifiyah south of Baghdad late last week, as a form of ethnic cleansing. The family appears to have been warned to leave their neighborhood by Sunni Arab guerrillas. The incident has produced rage throughout the Shiite south.

I linked earlier in this column to Helena Cobban, who has a nice post up about IC, for which many thanks. I am a big admirer of Helena's work and that of her husband, political scientist Bill Quandt, and their friendship means a great deal to me.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Ten Amazing Predictions for 2006

1. Al-Qaeda's Ayman al-Zawahiri, whom the Bush administration has failed to capture after all this time, and who was probably responsible for the July 7 bombings in the London subway and the bombings in the Sinai in Egypt, will strike at US allies again in 2006.

2. Saudi Arabia will use the $160 billion windfall from high petroleum prices to strengthen its military and security forces, and to spread its rigid Wahhabi form of Islam.

3. Iran's clerical elites will use the $36 billion windfall from high petroleum prices to strengthen their military and security forces, and to spread their radical Khomeinist form of Islam. The US, even if it takes some desperate step, will prove unable to shake the regime in 2006.

4. The Iraqi government, on which the US is placing its bet, will limp along with less than $19 billion a year in petroleum income because of sabotage and guerrilla war, along with long-neglected fields and dilapidated plants and equipment. Most of that money will be absorbed by the need for internal security, reconstruction and paying off past reparations and debts, as well as by large-scale corruption and embezzlement (billions of dollars went missing during the government of Iyad Allawi in 2004).

5. The Iraqi parliament will pass fundamentalist Muslim legislation. Sometime in 2006, a majority of Iraqi parliamentarians will call for the withdrawal of US troops. The Iraqi government will have warm relations with Iran, but strained relations with Saudi Arabia and Jordan. The guerrilla war will continue.

6. The Israeli-Palestinian struggle will continue in staccatto fashion, because the Israeli government remains expansionist and land-hungry. Because the Sharon government refused to negotiate with real live Palestinians over the Gaza withdrawal no framework for peace was erected. Israeli troops will go back into Gaza from time to time. Israel will settle thousands of colonists on Palestinian land in the west and will blame Palestinians as irrational and bigotted for objecting. The subtle forms of ethnic cleansing of Arabs from Jerusalem will continue or accelerate. Fifteen percent of Palestinian children will continue to suffer from malnutrition, a result of the poverty that derives from having been put since 1967 in a large Israeli jail.

7. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization composed of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan as members and India, Iran, Mongolia, and Pakistan as observers, will follow up on its success in getting US troops out of Uzbekistan and on strengthening energy cooperation between Kazakhstan and China on the one hand, and Russia and Kazakhstan on the other, as well as security cooperation between Russia and Uzbekistan. The conjuncture of gas, petroleum, Islam, terrorism and great power jockeying will keep the new Great Game going, this time with Russia, China and the United States all playing. The US hand is weak.

8. The US attempt to isolate Iran by putting boycotts on Chinese and other companies that deal with it will only prove effective for those companies that do a lot of business with the US. Moreover, it is easy enough for a company to hive off a de facto subsidiary to deal with Iran (ask Bechtel and Halliburton). And, rising powers like India that have relatively little trade with the US will tempted to choose energy from Iran over good diplomatic relations with the US.

9. New Orleans will for the most part not be rebuilt and will increasingly be eclipsed by Baton Rouge. Louisiana as a result will become a solid Red State. The Republican Party has no particular reason to rebuild a predominantly African-American city that reliably voted Democrat, just as its leader, George W. Bush, apparently had no particular reason to implement relief work there with any urgency or efficiency after the flood. Most of the $25 billion in reconstruction aid promised by the Federal government will never arrive.

10. The United States will continue to lose global political influence because its government is running large deficits and going ever dee