Ayatollah Yaqubi Demands Khalilzad's Expulsion
Maliki: "US Will Destroy Iraq"

Mortar shells, bombings and assassinations killed 9 in Iraq on Friday, in Baghdad and Kirkuk. A US soldier was killed in Anbar Province.

Some prominent Shiite clerics used their Friday sermons to call for the expulsion from Iraq [Ar.] of US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad. They have begun to see Khalilzad, a Sunni Pushtun, as too close to Sunni Iraqis and as anti-Shiite. I'm told they have started calling him "Abu Umar," a reference to the second Sunni Caliph, whom Shiites deride as a usurper of the office that rightfully belonged to Imam Ali, the Prophet's cousin and son-in-law.

Ayatollah Muhammad Ya`qubi is the spiritual guide for the Virtue (Fadhila) Party, which has 15 seats in the federal parliament and controls the provincial council of Basra. He described Khalilzad as "a sectarian who favors the Sunnis" and said that his statements "lack veracity and objectivity." He called on the Bush administration not to submit to the terrorists nor to fall into the snares of the sectarians and haters. He said that if the administration "wants to protect itself from failure and collapse, it must change its ambassador in Iraq."


Ayatollah Muhammad Yaqubi (courtesy KarbalaNews.net)

KarbalaNews.net reports that Ya`qubi accused Washington of underestimating the seriousness of the bloody struggle between the Shiite majority and the Sunni Arab minority who have been deposed from their sovereignty over the country.

In a communique from his offices in Najaf, Yaqubi said, "American administration figures have denied the existence of a sectarian war in Iraq. They are either misguided by statements lacking in objectivity and truthfulness sent back by the sectarian American ambassador in Iraq and his like, or they are deliberately denying this reality for more than one reason."

Ya`qubi said that the American ambassador and "the tyrants" of the Arab states are giving political support to those quarters that offer political cover. He warned Washington not to fall for the misrepresentations of the terrorists.

When Ya`qubi's follower, a preacher at the Rahman mosque in Baghdad, read out these phrases, the congregation erupted with shouts of "God is Most Great!"

He said there were several possible reasons for which the Bush administration might want to deny the obvious outbreak of sectarian warfare in Iraq:

1. They don't want to admit their failure in Iraq for fear of damaging the reputation of the United States, and want to convince themselves and others that they have succeeded in protecting Iraqi citizens from tyranny, oppression, killing and expropriation, and have founded a true democracy in Iraq.

2. They are buying time in hopes of implementing their plans for sidelining the Shiite majority

3. Recognizing the true situation would force them to attempt to resolve it, which they do not want to do or are unable to do.

He said he could not understand how the Americans explain the dozens of innocents that show up dead every day in the streets and markets and elsewhere, for no other reason than that they are Shiites, if they are not victims of a sectarian war. How else to explain the destruction of holy shrines and the killing of pilgrims? How else to explain the mass expulsions of populations, affecting thousands of families, who have been threatened with death. If this massive displacement of people was going on anywhere else in the world, he said, it would be widely decried. But Shiites in Iraq getting kicked out of their homes in the thousands? Silence. He claimed that the number of persons killed in Iraq exceeds all the deaths in the Lebanese Civil War 1975-1989 (if he is taking the 100,000 figure suggested in Lancet, he is correct). If this is not a civil war, he asked, what is?

Ya`qubi said that most Sunnis and Shiites don't want to fight, but are being coerced into it by threats of violence from Saddmists and excommunicators. He lamented that the general Sunni Arab community does bear some responsibility here, since it gives refuge to these terrorists rather than turning them in. Where is the Arab solidarity of which they boast? In contrast, Sunni Arabs live safely in Shiite districts, he alleged.

He said that some (Sunni Arab) elements with ties to the terrorists have been unwisely admitted to the political process, under American pressure.

It has now ended, he said, with the so-called "national security council," which is unconstitutional and a revolution against the democratic process, taking away the prerogatives of the elected majority.

Al-Hayat: Ya`qubi's Virtue Party again urged Friday that if the political prcess did not produce a clear result soon, the issue of who should be prime minister should be submitted to the whole parliament to decide. Virtue Party leader Nadim al-Jabiri believes he has a shot at the post.

Clerics who follow Muqtada al-Sadr also lambasted the ambassador and branded his condemnation of armed militias a form of instigation against the Shiites, especially the Mahdi Army, and an attempt to escalate the political pressure against the Sadr Bloc.

Jawad al-Maliki, a member of parliament and the number two man in the Dawa Party led by Ibrahim Jaafari, launched a campaign against American policies in Iraq, blaming the US for the deterioration of the security situation and saying that it had "demolished democracy and the elections in Iraq." He warned that the US "will destroy Iraq." He condemned what he characterized as Khalilzad's continued attempts to cast aside Ibrahim Jaafari as the candidate for prime minister of the United Iraqi Alliance, and his "attempt to draw the Sadr movement into bloody confrontations."

On Friday, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq issued a statement denying that Ambassador Khalilzad had asked the UIA to drop Jaafari. His letter had simply, it said, urged the Shiite religious alliance to back "a candidate who will enjoy general national support."
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

The Neocon Imaginary Middle East: Again

Speaking of political frauds, the Web site Newshog has nailed Kenneth R. Timmerman for falsely alleging that Iran has bought nuclear warheads from North Korea. In fact, Jane's Defense Weekly reported that Iran bought some ancient missile from Pyongyang, and there was never any question of a warhead. Timmerman is taken seriously by the White House, Congress, and the US press but in fact has no credibility as an Iran expert (at IC we like our Iran experts to know Persian, the way you'd expect an expert on France to know French; we're funny that way). Even the usually canny Jon Stewart gave Timmerman a respectful hearing.

French philosopher Michel Foucault defined "representation" as a process whereby a culture creates a stereotype of something and then substitutes the stereotype for the reality forever after. Once a "representation" is established, the reality can never challenge it, since any further information is filtered through the representation. The "representation" of Iran as a nuclear power, when it just has a couple hundred centrifuges (you need thousands) and is not proven even to have a weapons program, is becoming powerful and unchallengeable in the US media.

What does the International Atomic Energy Agency say about it all? Mohammaed Elbaradei says that there is no imminent threat from Tehran, and that there is a lot of hype.

Elbaradei has seen it all before, having contested Bush's false allegations about the imaginary Iraqi nuclear weapons program of 2003.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Al-Anizi: The US is Training an Insubordinate Iraqi Army
Sistani Blows off Bush

Guerrillas shot dead 8 oil workers at the Baiji refinery north of Baghdad. The guerrillas have for some time had a strategy of cutting the capital off from fuel and electricity as far as they can, and their sabotage in Baiji is for this purpose. At the same time, they siphon off the fuel and smuggle it out to fund the insurgency.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has blown off the president of the United States. Bush sent Sistani a letter asking him to intervene to help end the gridlock in the formation of a new Iraqi government. Asked about his response, an aide said that Sistani had not opened the letter and had put it aside in his office.

Sistani does not approve of the American presence in Iraq, and certainly disapproves of the Bush administration's attempt to unseat Ibrahim Jaafari as the candidate of the United Iraqi Alliance. Middle Easterners have had Western Powers dictate their politics to them for a couple of centuries and are pretty tired of it.

It is rumored that after the December 15 elections, Bush told Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish President of Iraq, that he would prevent the Shiite coalition from taking power this time, which encouraged Talabani to try to unseat Jaafari. Bush's plan, however, would only work if the neo-Baathists, the Sunni fundamentalists, the Kurds and the secular Shiites can consistently work together, and if a substantial number of Shiites defects from the United Iraqi Alliance to help elect a president by 2/3s majority. Pigs will fly first.

Meanwhile, Bush's tinkering with Iraqi politics has contributed mightily to the gridlock in forming a government. Jaafari's bargaining position has been perhaps fatally undermined. And Washington is blaming the Iraqis! At least Bush is a consistent foul-up.

Reuters points out that Sistani is not only highly influential in Iraq but also in Pakistan.

KarbalaNews.net reports that Dr, Qusay al-Suhail, a member of parliament from the Sadr Bloc, denied Thursday that the Sadrists or the United Iraqi Alliance (Shiite fundamentalist coalition) has any intention of changing their candidate for prime minister. (The current candidate, elected by a party vote, is Ibrahim Jaafari, but the Bush administration and the Kurds and Sunnis have been trying to unseat him.) Al-Suhail said, "The position of the Alliance is clear and frank, and talk of changing its candidate is incorrect. It is possible that the Alliance may discuss the issue of Jaafari's candidacy today, but not for the purpose of chaning it. Rather, it will be to review the new demands put forward by the Iraqi Accord Front [Sunni fundamentalist] and the Kurdistan Alliance about changing Jaafari."

He added, "The Alliance agreed that there will be a committee that will go to the Iraqi National List [headed by Iyad Allawi), the Iraqi Accord Front, and the Kurdistan Alliance to discover the causes of their objections and to clarify their position-- [though] it is clear that a large proportion of them have backed off from their objections with regard to some issues, and that the matter is confused, and the causes are unknown and various. . . there is a clear insistence on the part of the United Iraqi Alliance on retaining its candidate, and America has now denied that it desires to see Jaafari step down; Zalmay Khalilzad has denied that desire."


courtesy KarbalaNews.net

Rumors circulated earlier on Thursday that the Sadr Bloc was reconsidering its commitment to Jaafari. Jaafari won the internal party vote because he was backed by the two branches of the Dawa Party and by the 32 Sadrists. Jaafari's candidacy has been rejected by three of the other major parties representing Kurds, Sunni Arabs and secular Shiites.

Another source within the United Iraqi Alliance told KarbalaNews.net that Jaafari might not be able to win a vote of confidence in the whole parliament,a nd that he might be replaced by Ahmad Chalabi. The source maintained that a clique of parliamentarians had attempted to convince Muqtada al-Sadr to accept this substitution."

[Cole: Chalabi did not win a seat in parliament, so I don't understand how he could be prime minister!]

The Fadhila or Virtue Party, a branch of the Sadrists that follows Shaikh Muhammad Ya`qubi and dislikes Muqtada al-Sadr and Ibrahim Jaafari, is suggesting that Jaafari's candidacy be submitted to the whole parliament. A source told KarbalaNews.net that 75% of the members of the UIA (Shiite religious parties) agree with this proposal.

Jaafari's candidacy is one issue that is holding up the formation of a new government. Another such issue is which parties will get which ministries. The United Iraqi Alliance is trying to keep control of the security ministries, on the grounds that they should be controlled by the prime minister and his party. They are trying to convince the Sunni religious coalition that this is only fair.

Minister of the Interior Bayan Jabr argues that the guerrilla insurgency is led by 16,000 Iraqi ex-Baathists.

Al-Hayat reports on remarks of Abdul Karim al-Anizi [Ar.], leader in parliament of the Dawa Party - Iraqi Organization, which has about 15 seats. He is also minister of national security. He denied that Iran is contributing to instability in Iraq. He also accused the United States of training "an Iraqi military force loyal to it, which does not submit to the authority of the Iraqi government." He said that the recent US and British escalation of military action against the Sadr Bloc is "unjustified." He also criticized the remarks of Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa about the Arab role in Iraq.

Al-Anizi told al-Hayat that "a new army has appeared on the Iraqi scene, recruited by the Coalition forces, which does not receive its orders from the Iraqi government." He affirmed the existence of intelligence documents proving that members of the Iraqi Forces who are primarily loyal to the US have commited crimes, disguising themselves in civilian dress.

He referred to ongoing investigations, which he said might result in prosecutions. He said that US and other Coalition forces has damaged the sovereignty of Iraq and have undertaken a role in Iraq that exceeds their legal charge. He referred to UN resolution 1546, which prescribed coordination and cooperation between the foreign forces and the Iraqi government, and which did not grant the occupying powers absolute freedom of movement. The UN resolution required the Americans to get the permission of the Iraqi prime minister for any military operation in the country.

Al-Anizi warned about "the unexpected consequences of attacks on and arrests of elements of the Sadr Movement by American and British forces, and unjustified attacks on them, assaults on centers belonging to parties who play an important role in the political process, which damages the political process and exceeds the prescribed role of these forces in combatting terrorism."

He revealed the existence of 15,000 detainees in Coalition prisons, many of them innocents who have no connection to terrorism. At the same time, he said, the number of detainees in the prisons of the ministries of interior and defense does note exceed 900 persons.

Al-Anizi complained that some personalities in parliament had deep links with the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement ("the terrorists").

He characterized the reports that spoke of a new political bloc encompassing the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Kurdistan Alliance, and the Iraqi Islamic Party) as a mere "public relations trial balloon")
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Attacks on Businesses Multiply
Political Gridlock Continues

A US soldier was killed in Habbaniyah and another was shot dead south of Baghdad.

Guerrillas tried to kill the head of the Sunni Endowments Board and also an important banker, along with several other bombings and shootings.

Steven Hurst of AP argues that the tactics used in Iraq violence have abruptly changed , and gangs (whether guerrilla or criminal) are now targeting businesses (kidnapping employees, demanding ransom, and robbing payrolls). He writes,

' Also since the start of March, gunmen - mostly masked, many wearing police uniforms - have stormed at least six Baghdad businesses. On Wednesday, eight people were killed at the al-Ibtikar trading company when they were lined up against a wall and shot, and six others were wounded. At least 90 workers have been kidnapped and tens of thousands of dollars stolen in the five other assaults. '

The Daily Star has more on the attack at al-Ibtikar Co. and also reports on the Ministry of Displacement and Migration's announcement that 30,000 Iraqis have been displaced by the guerrilla war since Feb. 22. (I find this number implausibly high, and caution against the ease with which such things are exaggerated).

Ed Wong of the NYT gets the story, interviewing Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari, who objects to the intervention in the Iraqi political process of George W. Bush and defends his inclusion of Muqtada al-Sadr and his supporters in the political process.

Bush spokesman Scott McClellan has denied that Bush pressed Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Shiite religious coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, to drop Jaafari. Or he denied that Bush did it through a letter. You decide.

Mariam Karouny of Reuters interviews Minister of Interior Bayan Jabr, who claims he is cleaning up militia-affiliated elements in his special police commandos. Jabr, a member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, stands accused of allowing members of the Shiite paramilitary, the Badr Corps, to infiltrate the Ministry's national police. It is further alleged that these units have sometimes formed death squads to target Sunni Arabs. Jabr points out that a recent US raid on an Interior Ministry facility turns out to have been an embarrassing mistake. The officials arrested by US troops had to be released with an apology, and all that was found was Sudanese who had been picked up on visa violation charges. Someone alert Lou Dobbs.

Charles Levinson gives us the details and the people behind the numbers. We know from opinion polls that half of Iraqis think it is all right to attack US troops (more like 80 % among Sunni Arabs) and 72% of the US troops in Iraq believe the US military should get out of Iraq within a year. Levinson in Mosul quotes a US soldier: ' "I don't want to stay here too much longer. The Iraqi Army is getting to where they can get a hold of things now," says Clevenger. "The longer we're here and the more times they attack us, the more they're going to figure out how to better their attacks." ' And he quotes an Iraqi father whose house US troops have temporarily taken over: ' "What can I do?" he wonders. "We adapt and we survive and we give tea to our guests. But I would like an option beside the murderer Saddam Hussein or the lawlessness and humiliation of foreign occupation." '

Al-Hayat reports that there are 1,000 new recruits for the Iraqi army in Fallujah,a step toward a planned 4,000, with 400 officers. The pan-Arab London daily notes that all the recruits are from the local population and will serve locally, and charges that we are seeing the further Balkanization of the new Iraqi army. One does have to wonder if this Fallujah battalion will fight other Fallujans on behalf of a Shiite prime minister and a Kurdish president.

Al-Zaman says that the negotiations over a national unity government made little progress on Wednesday because of arguments over who will get the ministries of Interior and Defense.

Amr Moussa, Secretary General of the Arab League, called Wednesday for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, saying that they are part of the problem there. Moussa's call would be more credible if the Arab League was doing anything practical to help the Iraqis.

Riverbend reports at her Weblog that she saw this scroll across her television screen: “The Ministry of Defense requests that civilians do not comply with the orders of the army or police on nightly patrols unless they are accompanied by coalition forces working in that area.”

The message suggests a very serious power struggle behind the scenes between Minister of Defense Saadoun Dulaimi and Minister of the Interior Bayan Jabr, and between Iraqi and American security forces.

The radical Kurdish group Pejak in Iran killed 3 members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards on Wednesday. Iran has a substantial (mostly Sunni) Kurdish population that has long chafed under the rule of the Iranian ayatollahs, and may be taking some inspiration from the emergence of a semi-autonomous Kurdistan in northern Iraq.

Gen. Rahim Safavi of Iran hinted that the Iranians could close the Straits of Hormuz at the Persian Gulf if the US did anything to Tehran's nuclear energy research facilities. The mouth of the Persian Gulf is so narrow that a single sunken supertanker would effectively block it, provoking an oil crisis.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

If you can't do it, Just make it up

Has any conflict since the Spanish American War been so much a fantasy of the yellow press and government hawks as the Iraq War?

The Independent has gotten hold of some of the black psy-ops "newspaper articles" peddled by the Lincoln Group to Iraqi newspapers (it paid $2000 an article to plant them, disguising them as real news). This operation is the ultimate in warfare. Instead of actually winning the war, the Pentagon substitutes itself for the journalists and paints the new Iraqi army as the eighth wonder of the world and declares we are winning.

The illusions are so circular and self-referential that when corporate media went looking for someone to comment on the Lincoln psy-ops operation, they quoted Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute as saying it was all just fine. Turns out that Rubin is a paid consultant of . . . The Lincoln Group (and quite dishonestly didn't let the NYT know it.) So the American Enterprise Institute, which helped manufacture the fantasy of a victorious Iraq War in the first place, now has its staff help manufacture the illusion of success on the ground and then lie about it to the MSM.

Meanwhile, Michael Schwartz at Tomdispatch.com explains why the media gets the Iraq War wrong. HIs message: It's the economy, stupid.

People who want to be in Congress should know the difference between Istanbul and Baghdad. Howard Kaloogian's website tried to prove that everything was just fine in Iraq by posting a picture of Bakirkoy in downtown Istanbul and characterizing it as a Baghdad street scene!

I just remembered this issue. Kaloogian spearheaded the move to cancel a CBS mini-series about Ronald Reagan, and to keep Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 out of the theaters! He not only is creating imaginary Iraqs, he has tried to prevent us from seeing in the media other accounts of reality than his own!

Kudos to the gang at Daily Kos for outing this fraud. Markinsafran kindly posted my comment there,

' Dear Mark:

It is all a false issue, not a matter of forged photographs.

In unconventional or guerrilla wars, ordinary life goes on in most of the country most of the time. You can't tell by looking that there is a war. But then one day you send your child to get ice cream and she gets
blown up by a carbomber.

The violence is not constant or omnipresent. It is here and there, every once in a while. But it is hugely disruptive of the economy and sets people's nerves on edge.

So a photograph of a street scene tells us absolutely nothing. Millions of such photographs from Saigon in 1968 could be put on the Web. It wouldn't look like there was a war.

It is a stupid piece of propaganda for the ignorant and easily led, unworthy of a democratic representative in the Republic of Jefferson and Madison and Franklin.

Cheers Juan

Saigon 1970
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Cole Receives Aronson Award from Hunter College

Blogging as journalism just got a huge lift.

Editors and Publishers carries the announcement that the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism awarded by Hunter College will include for the first time this year a category for bloggers. I'm humbled to say that they are awarding it to me for Informed Comment.

For more on the Aronson Award see this link.

It is really wonderful of Hunter College to expand the purview of the award to bloggers as well, and I think that in this matter as in others, they are functioning as a bellwether.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Kamal Sayid Qadir Jailed for Criticism of Barzani

The proto-fascist mini-state of the Kurdistan Democratic Party in Arbil [Irbil], northern Iraq, has sentenced an Austrian-Kurdish journalist to 18 months in prison for criticizing Massoud Barzani.


Barzani

Barzani last allied with Saddam Hussein against fellow Kurds as late as 1996, only a decade ago. And you can't criticize him?

If Syria or Iran had done this (not that they don't), there would have been a huge squeal of outrage from the American right. I challenge Instapundit, Andrew Sullivan, and Christopher Hitchens to intervene effectively to get Kamal Sayid Qadir out of Barzani's jail. Here is something all of us, left and right, can agree on, and I hope the Left blogs the hell out of it, too. Will someone please start a blog to count the days Qadir is not free?


Qadir

American blood was shed saving the Kurds from Saddam, and this is not right. It is not right.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Dozens Kidnapped, Killed, Wounded

A car bomb wounded 11 in an attack on police in the norther part of the city of Hilla.

Guerrillas killed two US soldiers in separate incidents and wounded 3, at an installation near to Baghdad.

Three guerrilla cells kidnapped 24 Iraqis in Baghdad on Tuesday, from 2 electronics shops and a money changing stall.

Guerrilla violence killed 9 and wounded 29 in separate incidents around the country.

The US military imposed a curfew on the oil city of Beiji north of Baghdad on Tuesday.

Timothy Phelps of Newsday has more on the conflict between the US military and the Shiite politicians over Sunday's raid on the Mustafa Husayniyah in the Ur district of Baghdad. Shiites maintain that innocent worshippers were shot down. The US military says it was raiding a militia center and captured weapons, and that someone rearranged the bodies to make them look like innocents.

Halliburton's KRB division "universally failed to provide adequate cost information as required." according to a US government report, while it racked up billions in no-bid contracts.

Wanting to increase the number of Sunni Arabs in the Iraqi armed forces and being able to do so are not the same thing.

The US tried to get a message to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani on Tuesday, asking him to intervene to resolve the gridlock in the formation of a new Iraqi government.

Eric Haney, a founding member of the Delta Force anti-terrorist unit, has denounced the Iraq War as an "utter debacle," and has blamed widespread US use of torture to the sadism of Dick Cheney, who he says seems to enjoy it. When people like Haney talk like this, it is probably over with.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

As Many as 90 Killed
Badr Demands Khalilzad's Expulsion

A suicide bomber struck an army recruiting station near Tal Afar in northern Iraq, killing 40 and wounding 20. President Bush recently lauded the situation in Tal Afar and environs as a US success story.

About 29 corpses corpses showed up in the streets of Baghdad, most of them strangled and tortured.

A rocket attack on a building resulted in several casualties. The building housed political offices for the Fadhila (Virtue) and Dawa Parties. Both are Shiite religious parties.

A young physician in Kirkuk confessed on Kurdistan television Monday to having been an serial killer on behalf of the guerrillas, giving lethal injections to more than 40 Iraqi soldiers and police or denying them oxygen. At the same time, he was secretly treating wounded members of the guerrilla movement.

Guerrillas abducted 16 employees of an Iraqi trading company on Monday, according to the Iraqi Interior Ministry.

The governor of Baghdad province, Hussein al-Tahan, announced Monday “Today we decided to stop all political and service cooperation with the US forces until a legal committee is formed to investigate this incident.” [i.e. the US/Iraqi attack on the Mustafa Husayniyah in the Ur district on Sunday, which left some 20 persons dead).

Officials of the United Iraqi Alliance of Shiite fundamentalists, the largest single bloc in parliament, demanded Monday that security matters be turned over to Iraqis and taken out of US hands. Reuters says, ' “The Alliance calls for a rapid restoration of (control of) security matters to the Iraqi government,” Jawad Al Maliki, a senior Alliance spokesman and ally of Prime Minister Ibrahim Al Jaafari, told a news conference. '

I have to say that if the US military doesn't even know, as its spokesmen admitted, to which branch of Islam the persons its joint operation killed on Sunday belonged, it really is acting as a bull in a china shop.

The Intrepid Ann Garrels and Joost Hilterman report that some Shiites are speaking now of a second great betrayal by the Americans of the Shiites, as they fear that the US it tilting now toward the Sunni Arabs. In spring of 1991, the US stood by while Saddam's forces massacred rebelling Shiites after the Gulf War.

Some Shiites, according to al-Hayat, are saying that the US is deliberately attempting to provoke a civil war in Iraq. Among their concerns was the US military's announcement that the attack on the Mustafa Husayniyah in Ur was the work of an Iraqi military unit. Which unit? Where? To whom does it report? Is it little more than a death squad? Is it commanded by the Americans? Why didn't the Prime Minister know about this attack, which spilled over on Dawa Party offices? PM Jaafari is a member of the Dawa Party.

The Badr Organization, a political party that represents the paramilitary Badr Corps, the Shiite militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, demanded Monday that Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador to Iraq, be expelled from that country.

This moment is therefore a particularly inauspicious one for Khalilzad to press for the sidelining of Ibrahim Jaafari as candidate for prime minister of the United Iraqi Alliance. Jaafari narrowly won an internal party vote, but was backed by Muqtada al-Sadr and opposes loose federalism and unrestrained capitalism. For all these reasons he is unacceptable to the Kurds and to the US.

Izzat Ibrahim Duri, one of Saddam's key officials, is said to have issued a tape on Monday. It was played on Aljazeera but has not been authenticated. The tape calls on the Arab League to recognize the Iraqi insurgency as the true government of Iraq, and condemns the blowing up of the Askariyah shrine in Samarra, an anti-Shiite strike. Al-Duri led the charge to repress and massacre the Shiites in sping of 1991 when they rose against Saddam, so he is unlikely to get any points for his defense of the Askariyah.

Iraqi officials are concerned about a big spike in drug smuggling and use in Iraq.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Afghan Convert Released

The Afghan authorities have released Abdul Rahman, a convert from Islam to Christianity who was facing a death sentence for apostacy. Apparently the grounds for the release were procedural-- questions linger about the man's mental health, and there are gaps in the prosecution's evidence.

That this travesty is being ended is a great good thing. But it is unfortunate that it is being ended on these narrow grounds. The next convert will face the same charges.

The episode underlines the falsehood of the Bush administration's empty boast that it is spreading democracy in the Middle East and that "50 million" persons have been liberated. In fact, Bush has been spreading Muslim fundamentalism. In Afghanistan, he just replaced the Taliban with the Jami`at al-Islam, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was the major element in what the American called the "Northern Alliance." Karzaid did not even bother to change the Taliban chief justice when he came in; no doubt the chief justice was strict enough for the Northern Alliance, which contained this strong fundamentalist tendency. Everywhere Bush has intervened - Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Egypt, etc., it has helped the fundamentalists.

The doctrine that apostacy deserves the death penalty comes out of medieval Islamic canon law rather than from the Quran itself. If Islam is to survive into the next century, its adherents need to rethink all those medieval legal doctrines to which modern fundamentalists are so attached. It is monstrous, and is the height of hypocrisy for Saudis and others to fund the conversion of Americans to Islam while threatening Saudi converts to Christianity with death.

Some modern Pakistani jurists have written reformist books that dispute the legitimacy of executing people for apostasy in Islamic law. But their books are in English and although they might have been members of the Pakistan supreme court, they are laypersons rather than clerics.

As for the Quran itself, it says "la ikraha fi'd-din"-- there is no compulsion in religion.

[2:256] There is no compulsion in religion: the right way has been distinguished from the wrong way. Anyone who denounces the idol Taghut and believes in God has grasped the strongest handle; one that never breaks. God is the Hearing, the Knowing.

The Quran is forthright that the wages of unbelief and idolatry in this life are damnation in the next. But it does not permit coercion of the conscience in this life.

There is also Chapter 109, with its implication that the Prophet left the choice of religion, even unbelieving religion, to the individual:

109

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.

Say, "O unbelievers.
I do not worship what you worship.
Nor do you worship what I worship.
Nor will I ever worship what you worship.
Nor will you ever worship what I worship.
To you, your religion; and to me, my religion."

Since the Quran recognizes the God of the Bible, these verses refer to the Meccan polytheists. And even they are being offered their own free will. To you yours, to me mine. Nothing about killing anyone about these matters of conscience.

Unfortunately, Abdul Rahman was not going to be judged by the Quran, but by the cruelty of the medieval jurists.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Cole on Television

I'll be interviewed in the ABC Evening News Monday evening.

Also I'll be a guest on the Lehrer Show, PBS.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

69 Killed in Separate Outbreaks of Violence

All hell broke loose in Iraq on Sunday, but I'm darned if I can figure out most of what happened or why. It seems possible that the US committed two major military blunders that will worsen its relationship with Iraqi political forces.

So they found 30 decapitated bodies near Buhriz, an old Baath stronghold in Diyala northeast of Baghdad. Those killed were a mix of Shiites and Sunnis.

Then a mortar shell landed near the house in Najaf of Muqtada al-Sadr, the nationalist Shiite cleric whose followers are already upset with Sunnis over the blowing up of the Askariyah Shrine in Samarra. There were casualties, but Muqtada wasn't harmed. Everyone just dodged a bullet along with Muqtada, since if the mortar had killed him, Iraq would have been thrown into even greater chaos.

As it is, Muqtada implied that the US was responsible. He called on his followers, according to al-Hayat, to "exercise self-restraint and to remain calm, so as to foil the plots of the Occupation authorities to provoke armed conflict, and rather to practice political resistance in order to expel the foreigners from Iraq."

Then the US and Iraqi forces say they raided a terror cell in Adhamiyah. Adhamiyah is a Sunni district of Baghdad and is still Baath territory.

But somehow the joint US-Iraqi force ended up north, at the Shiite Shaab district. They say that they took fire from Mahdi Army militiamen. But there aren't any such Mahdi Army men in Adhamiyah. I have a sinking feeling that instead of raiding a Sunni Arab building in Adhamiyah, they got disoriented and attacked a Shiite religious center in nearby Shaab instead. Iraqi television angrily showed twenty unarmed corpses on the floor of the religious center, denouncing the US for killing innocent worshippers. The US military is now saying it did not enter any mosques and that anyone killed was killed by Iraqi special ops.

The Mustafa Husayniyah, however, is not a mosque and may not have been distinguishable as a religious edifice to non-Shiites. Shiites mourn their martyred Imams, the descendants of the Prophet, in centers called Husayniyahs after the Imam Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. As for the killing being done by Iraqi troops, if it was a joint mission, then the US forces are going to take some of the blame.

At least one of the dead was a member of the Dawa Party, the party headed by Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari. Official Iraqi television coverage was also uncharacteristically anti-American.

Since the US has been trying to unseat Jaafari, in concert with the Kurds and Sunni Arabs, he responded to the attack testily.

The incident has yet again postponed negotiations on the formation of a new government, since the Iraqi Shiites are universally extremely angry over it. Member of parliament and aide ot Prime Minister Jaafari, Jawad al-Maliki, demanded a full investigation of "this crime," according to al-Hayat.

If the US/Iraq force actually did accidentally hit a Shiite Husayniyah instead of a Sunni Arab terrorist cell, it was a horrible mistake.

Then US forces raided a secret prison of the Ministry of the Interior.

They captured 17 Sudanese inmates. After an investigation, the US finally acknowledged that the assault had made a mistake. The 17 Sudanese really were guerrillas or in any case legitimately held.

In other words, the jail raid was based on poor information and false premises. It is possible that our troops also messed up indirectly.

Al-Hayat reports that Hazim al-Araji, a Sadrist leader of nearby Kadhimiyah, said [Ar.]: "American forces attacked the Mustafa Husayniyah, which belongs to the Sadr Movement, and killed approximately 20 persons inside it . . . An American force surrounded the Mustafa Husayniyah in the Ur district and opened fire on more than 20 persons, killing them."

Jalal Talabani, president of Iraq, and other high politicians have succeeded in putting on hold direct US-Iran talks on Iraq. The Iraqi politicians complained about two foreign countries discussing Iraq with no Iraqi government representative present. But the problem is that there is no Iraqi government, since the haggling elected politicians haven't formed one. So, upshot: US-Iran talks are postponed until after there is a new Iraqi government.

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the Iraqi Shiite cleric who heads the largest bloc in the elected parliament, denied Sunday that Iran is directly intervening in Iraq. He said that no proof has ever been presented of these allegations. It doesn't help Condi Rice to make her case when a close US ally like al-Hakim directly contradicts her.

Some 20% of Iraqis are living below the poverty line and their access to food has declined in the past 3 years, according to the Iraqi government.
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40 Casualties in Mahdi Army clash with Sunni Arab guerrillas

AP reports that major clashes were fought Saturday at Mahmudiyah south of Baghdad between Mahdi Army militiamen (puritanical Shiites) and local Sunni Arab guerrillas killed or wounded about 50 persons late on Saturday. AP writes, ' Some 40 persons reportedly were killed or injured — no breakdown was immediately available — in the clash between forces of the Shia Mehdi Army militia and Sunni militants near Mahmoudiya, 30 km south of the capital, police reported. '

Six other Iraqis were killed in separate incidents, and the deaths of two US marines were announced. Police found 10 more corpses in Iraq on Saturday. These are typically young men targetted for reprisal killings because of their religious sect.

The poorly named Islamic Army of Iraq, a neo-Baathist guerrilla group, announced Saturday that it is watching journalists in that country and will act against those it [arbitrarily] deems spies.

Knight Ridder reports that even Iraqi politicians are admitting that their inability so far to form a government after the December 15 elections is making the situation in the country worse and giving an opening to the guerrillas.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports [Ar.] that Member of Parliament and Sadrist leader Shaikh Nasir al-Saaedi [al-Sa`idi] said Saturday that two knotty issues confront the attempt to form a government in Iraq. The first is the position of the blocs in parliament on the constitution, and respect for the electoral achievement of the political blocs that make up parliament. He said that the attempt to curb the prerogatives of those parties that actually won the election constitutes a voiding of the election outcomes and an insult to the Iraqi people who risked all to come out and vote. (Fears are being raised that the proposed "national security council" will form an unconstitutional brake on the powers of the elected government.)

He said that he and the other Sadrists are committed to Dawa Party leader Ibrahim Jaafar as the United Iraqi Alliance candidate for prime minister. He said that setting aside Jaafari risked breaking up the UIA and betraying the trust of the Iraqi people.

The Kurdistan Alliance has led a charge, supported by the Sunni Arab parties and by the Kurds to unseat Jaafari.

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Saturday that US-Iran talks on Iraq will be conditional and limited. He told IRNA, "We essentially do not trust the Americans but we will conditionally negotiate with them about Iraq while taking into account the interests of Iraqis and the world of Islam."

I hear behind the scenes from people on the ground in Iraq. Little mainstream reporting gives a sense of the grittiness, grimness, death and destruction that they discern behind the traffic jams and the frantic shopping/ hoarding of everyday life. Kudos to Jeffrey Gettleman for telling it like it is. One remembers what a controversy it caused when Farnaz Fassihi of the Wall Street Journal let it be known in October of 2004 via an email how bad things were in Baghdad, how shocking her first-hand account seemed to many Americans who were not being given the full story by their government or their press (sometimes the latter is stenographer for the former). Gettleman's thoughtful and hard-hitting piece is sort of like Fassihi 2, except that the NYT published it and the Wall Street Journal never published Fassihi's backgrounder.

Jeffrey Gettleman also explains the practical difference between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq.
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Year Four of Iraq Civil War: 51 Killed

AP reports that guerrilla violence in Iraq killed 51 on Friday. In addition to bombings and drive-by shootings, police discovered 25 bodies, killed execution-style, in Kadhimiyah and Binok districts. (Kadhimiyah is largely Shiite). AP adds, "The rising death toll among Iraqis on Friday included five worshippers killed in a bombing outside a Sunni Muslim mosque after Friday prayers. At least 15 were wounded in the blast in Khalis, northeast of Baghdad."

The bomb blast outside a Sunni mosque is especially disturbing, since it fits a pattern of recent escalation in Sunni-Shiite sectarian violence. This week, over a dozen Shiite pilgrims were killed in Sunni areas of the capital, on their way to and from the holy city of Karbala.

A Danish soldier was killed in the south, and two US troops were killed by guerrillas in Anbar province.

AFP/ Al-Zaman report that the Iraq political blocs in parliament failed in their Friday discussions to agree on the powers and constitutionality of a "national security council." The mechanism of such a national security council has been used in Pakistan and Turkey to circumscribe the power of elected politicians in parliament. But in both of those countries there is a strong military, unlike Iraq. Why elected members of parliament would agree to such an institution is obscure, and, indeed, they may not in the end.
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Police Strike in Fallujah
Tal Afar Success Questioned

Alzaman/Reuters report that the police in Fallujah went on strike. They are protesting excesses committed by the largely Shiite Iraqi army troops installed in Sunni Fallujah by the Americans.

A military spokesman in Baghdad maintained that any excesses were isolated incidents.

It seems that even after the US emptied and destroyed the city, the problems are not resolved. Now even the police hand picked by the US are on strike because of sectarianism. Meanwhile, some violence is back, too.

Meanwhile, an intreped Reuters reporter actually visited Tal Afar, the northern Turkmen city that the US emptied and assaulted last August. Bush has been pointing to it as a success story. But Reuters finds that locals feel insecure, even the Shiites among them, and wouldn't exactly call the whole thing a success.

Money quote: " 'I say that Bush is 100 percent a liar because the city of Tal Afar has become a ghost town rather than the example Bush spoke about,' said Ali Ibrahim, a Shi'ite Turkmen laborer. "
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Guerrilla Violence Kills 58
Khalilzad Accuses Iranians

A suicide bomber detonated his payload outside the major crime unit of the Ministry of the Interior on Thursday, killing 15 policemen and 10 civilians and wounding 35 others.

Then guerrillas blew up a market outside a Shiite mosque, killing 6 and wounding 20, with women and children among the victims.

Six bodies were found in Baghdad, and 8 were found in Fallujah, victims of night-time raids, kidnappings and killings.

There were other bombings of and firefights with Iraqi police in Baghdad that killed several people.

Interior Minister Bayan Jabr announced on Thursday that only a few hundred foreign jihadis (he called them "al-Qaeda") are left in Iraq, down from as many as 2000 in late 2005. The foreign element in the Iraqi guerrilla movement has long been over-estimated. Most of the violence is committed by Iraqi insurgents.

Thousands of Iraqi families have been internally displaced by sectarian violence or the threat of it.

Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari called on Thursday for the US and Iran to expedite the holding of joint talks on Iraq. He clearly believes that these bilateral negotiations on the limited subject of Iraq might lead to better US-Iranian relations on other issues, including the nuclear one. He said, ' "I hope the US and Iran will start their meetings and talks as soon as possible and the knot in relations between the two countries would be untied through the negotiations." '

US Ambassador in Baghdad Zalmay Khalilzad accused Iran on Thursday of training and supplying both the Mahdi Army militia of Muqtada al-Sadr and elements of the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement. Neither allegation is plausible in context. Muqtada's men are mostly nativist Iraqi ghetto youth who often do not like Persians. The major force in Iraq trained by the Iranians is the Badr Corps of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a relative American ally. It is bizarre that Khalilzad should tie Iran to the Mahdi militia but not bring up Badr. Then to turn around and say that Iran is helping the Sunni Arab guerrillas who are blowing up Shiite Iraqis is just self-contradictory and wholly implausible.

Worse, I can't see why Khalilzad thinks the Iranians will talk with him while he is badmouthing them.

Al-Hayat reports that [Ar.] Adnan Dulaimi of the (Sunni fundamentalist) Iraqi Accord Front has pushed the dissolution of Shiite militias as a key issue in his negotiations with the (Shiite fundamentalist) United Iraqi Alliance on the formation of a national unity government. He says that American information suggests that entire units of the Interior Ministry are composed of militias. He said that the Americans have a responsibility to shut down the militias.

In response, Sadrist leader Amir al-Husayni said that the existence of the Mahdi Army militia is tied to the issue of the terrorist groups."

Abdul Karim Muhammadawi, an old-time fighter against Saddam, warned that the existence of such organized militias is paving the way to civil war.
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Civil War? What Civil War? Cole in Salon

Readers have repeatedly asked me for a criterion by which we might fairly objectively decide if Iraq is in a Civil War (contrary to Bush's and Rumsfeld's denials). I have attempted such an argument at Salon.com. Excerpt:

' That there should be a political controversy over whether there is a civil war in Iraq is a tribute to the Bush administration's Orwellian attention to political rhetoric. By the most widely accepted social science measure, Iraq is incontestably in a civil war.

J. David Singer and his collaborators at the University of Michigan (where I also teach) have studied dozens of such conflicts and have offered a thorough and widely adopted definition of civil war. It is:

"Sustained military combat, primarily internal, resulting in at least 1,000 battle-deaths per year, pitting central government forces against an insurgent force capable of effective resistance, determined by the latter's ability to inflict upon the government forces at least 5 percent of the fatalities that the insurgents sustain." (Errol A. Henderson and J. David Singer, "Civil War in the Post-Colonial World, 1946-92," Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 37, No. 3, May 2000.) '

Read the rest.
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At Least 35 Killed
Lebanon Shiite Leaders Criticize American Meeting

Roadside bombs targetting police in Baghdad and Iskandariyah killed five and wounded a dozen on Wednesday.

Guerrillas in Baghdad killed 15 Shiite pilgrims in separate attacks, and wounded scores others, as they returnted from the 40th day commemoration of the anniversary of the martyrdom of Imam Husain, the grandson of the Prophet, at Karbala.

Thousands of enraged and grief-stricken Shiites marched with the bodies of 17 slain pilgrims to the shrine at Kadhimiyah in the capital. Sectarian tensions have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Iraqis since Febrary 22.

11 bodies showed up dead and with marks of torture in the streets of Baghdad on Wednesday morning.

Emboldened by their success in aiding a prison break on Tuesday, on Wednesday guerrillas attempted a similar operation at Mada'in. This attack was foiled when US soldiers arrived and intervened. Later on, the US took over 70 suspects into custody. The guerrillas had killed 4 policemen and wounded 5.

The United Nations is expressing concern that since the Askariyah Shrine bombing of Feb. 22, the security situation has been in a downward spiral and wants the Iraqi government to do something about it.

' The United Nations today called on Iraq’s Government to urgently assert control over the security forces and all armed groups in the war-torn country, saying February’s attack on a shrine in Samarra had led to a worsening situation, resulting in hundreds of cases of killings, torture, illegal detention and displacement. '

KarbalaNews.net reports that the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance may put forward a plan to end the stalemate over forming a new government. The UAI now intends to put forward a total of 3 candidates for prime minister, and to have the decision among them made by votes of the full parliament.

Adnan Dulaimi, a leader of the fundamentalist Sunni parties, the Iraqi Accord Front on Wednesday condemned the proposal by Shiite cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the UIA, to establish two new regional confederacies in the south, on the model of Kurdistan.

Since Ibrahim Jaafari is also opposed to this loose federalism and regional confederacies, it is very odd that Dulaimi's group is trying to sideline him in favor of a PM from al-Hakim's party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. It would be more logical for Dulaimi and his party to ally with Jaafari. Go figure.

Al-Zaman reports [Ar.] that there are divisions in the Shiite world about the decision of the Iranians to meet with Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador in Baghdad, to discuss security for Iraq. The Lebanese Hizbullah and the influential cleric Muhammad Husain Fadlullah have condemned it. Lebanon, Qom and Najaf seem to have very different views of these talks. Ibrahim Jaafari also seems skittish about them.

Meanwhile, after having sought the talks with Iran about Iraq for months, the Bush adminsitration reacted churlishly to Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei's agreement to them, with Scott McClellan raising doubts about his timing. Scott should ask Zal Khalilzad if his remarks were helpful to actual real diplomacy, about which this White House knows absolutely nothing. (Hint: You don't have to negotiate with your friends; you have to negotiate with your enemies. And, the alternative to negotiation can often be a military quagmire.)

Al-Hayat reports that over 3,000 families have been victims of ethnic cleansing in Iraq, most of them Shiites.
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Daring Jailbreak Suggests Guerrillas' Power
Sistani, Senators press Jaafari on new Government

Up to 200 Iraqi guerrillas in the Sunni Arab city of Miqdadiyah north of Baghdad mounted a sophisticated military operation to 32 free prisoners in the local jail, some of them guerrillas. They succeeded. In the fierce firefight, guerrillas killed 18 policemen while losing 10 of their own. The kill ratio and the success of the operation suggest that the guerrilla insurgency is gaining in capability and boldness as never before. The guerrillas have seldom dared to field more than a platoon (say 28 men) for fear of attracting fire from American helicopter gunships. Here, they fielded an entire company or perhaps two companies. The provincial authorities in Diyala seem convinced that the Miqdadiyah police chief was a double agent working for the guerrillas.

It doesn't do any good for US forces to fight and capture guerrillas if they can be freed so easily.

US troops faced mortar fire and roadside bombs in Anbar province on Tuesday. There were casualties.

Bush let slip that he thinks US troops will be in Iraq through 2008.

Bush also tried to deny that he had persistently attempted to link Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda and 9/11 before the war. The brave Keith Olbermann is among the few journalists who called Bush on this lie. Bush and Cheney made the connection by constantly hinting around and using phrases close to one another.

Iraq reconstruction has stalled, and quality of life indicators are below pre-war levels.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani met Tuesday with representatives of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq:

' Talking to reporters in the holy city of Najaf, Abdul Mahdi said Grand Ayatollah Sistani recommended all political groups to work based on the Constitution.

The Iraqi vice-president added Ayatollah Sistani also stressed speedy establishment of the new government and reinforcement of unity and solidarity to promote Iraq's political trend in cooperation with political partners. '

US Senators agree with Sistani, and warned Ibrahim Jaafari that the patience of the American people is not infinite.

Tomdispatch.com has Chalmers Johnson on our military empire.
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39 Killed
Sunni Arabs demand War Reparations from US

At least 39 Iraqis were killed in guerrilla violence on Monday, the third anniversary of the US invasion. Guerrillas killed 10 policemen in separate bomb attacks, as well as hitting a cafe, killing 3 and wounding 23. There was also an attack on officials of the oil refinery at Beiji. A minibus carrying Shiite pilgrims was bombed, killing 4. But the massive gathering of devotees at Karbala went off safely.

Some 18 bodies were found, victims of night-time sectarian reprisals. One of the victims was a 13-year-old girl. It looks and smells like a civil war, folks.

Wire services report fighting between US forces and guerrillas in Ramadi.

Al-Zaman says that the Association of Muslim Scholars (hard line Sunni clerics) issued a communique on the third anniversary of the war, saying, "The American plan has failed" and warning Iraqi forces that they "should not fool themselves that they are battling terrorists who have arrived from abroad."

The text says, "Everyone must realize that the American plan has failed in Iraq. We demand not just the withdrawal of Occupation troops in accordance with a timetable agrred upon with the United Nations but also that reparations be paid for the losses attendant on this attack."

Al-Zaman/ AFP reports that Kurds celebrating Now-Ruz on the new year's day of the vernal equinox, and the Shiites in Karbala, both seemed uninterested in commemorating the anniversary.

The negotiations about the new government have been postponed for one week because of the Kurdish Now-Ruz (New Year's Day) and the Shiite Arba'in, the fortieth day commemoration of the death of Imam Husayn, the grandson of the prophet.

Al-Zaman reports that Shiite clerical leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim is agitating again for provincial confederacies in the Shiite south. He instisted it wouldn't break up the country. He also advocates unleashing the Badr Corps (the Iran-trained paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq) against the Sunni Islami radicals.

Those who see the Kurdish regions of Iraq as havens of relative peace and prosperity seldom reckon with its less savory characteristics. The regional government often functions as a police state.

Pretty much everyone agrees by now that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld must go, that he has been incompetent and egoistic and callous. But no one ever brings up the question of whether the situation in Iraq can get any better as long as Rumsfeld is in office. He makes Pentagon policy. He makes bad, even catastrophic policy. Ergo, Rumsfeld in office equals looming disaster.

The Sunni Arab guerrillas, according to ABC, are media savvy and fighting a "mosaic war."

Chris Allbritton explores whether the Iraqi police are infiltrated with death squads and making things worse, not better.
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Top Ten Catastrophes of the Third Year of American Iraq

The American war against Iraq began on March 20, 2003, so today is the third anniversary. The Himalyan mistakes of the American administration of the country in its first two years have by now been much analyzed -- the punitive steps against even low-level Baath Party members, the firing of tens of thousands of Sunni Arabs, the dissolution of the army, the permitting of looting on a vast scale, the failure to understand tribal honor, the failure to get a handle on the early guerrilla war, the failure to understand Shiite Islam, the torture at Abu Ghraib, the failure to get services on line, the destruction of Fallujah, the ill-timed and ill-advised attempt to "kill or capture" Muqtada al-Sadr, the adoption of an election system that allowed the almost complete exclusion of the Sunni Arabs, etc., etc.

Here, let us examine the top disasters of the third year in American Iraq.

1. The Shiite religious parties, having won a majority in parliament, took over the Ministry of the Interior and drew, for its special police commandos, on members of the Badr Corps. Badr is the paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and it was trained by Iran's Revolutionary Guards. These special commandos set up secret prisons and tortured Sunni Arabs they suspected of being in the guerrilla resistance to the new order.

2. The constitution drafted by the elected parliament enshrines Islam as the religion of state and stipulates that the civil parliament may pass no legislation that contravenes the established laws of Islam. It hints that clerics and ayatollahs will be appointed to court benches. The constitution has brought Iraq to the brink of being an Islamic Republic, with potentially harmful effects on the rights of women, gays, Christians and others. Since the Shiite religious parties had won the January 30, 2005 elections, this outcome was predictable.

3. The constitution allows provinces to establish provincial confederacies. This provision reflections the model adopted by the Kurds in the north, which is now attractive to Shiite parties in the south. These confederacies can claim 100 percent of the revenues from all future petroleum, natural gas and other natural resource finds. The loose, weak federal government, like the early American state under the Articles of Confederation will be robbed of sovereignty (and income) by ambitious provincial elites. It is possible that these provincial confederacies may break up the country.

4. The US military used Kurdish and Shiite troops to attack the northern Turkmen city of Talafar in August. Kurdish troops, drawn from the Peshmerga militia, were allowed to paint lasers on targets in the city, which were then destroyed by the US air force. Entire neighborhoods were destroyed, and much of the population was displaced for some time. Shiite troops and local Shiite Turkmen informants were used to identify and interrogate alleged Sunni insurgents. Turkey was furious at the attack on ethnically related Turkmen and threatened to halt its cooperation with the US. Although the attack was allegedly undertaken to capture foreign forces allegedly based in the city, only 50 were announced apprehended. The entire operation ended up looking like a joint Kurdish-Shiite attack on Sunni Turkmen, backed by the US military. Turkmen and Kurds do not generally get along, and Turkmen accuse Kurds of wanting to ethnically clense them from Kirkuk. The entire operation was politically the worst possible public relations for the US in northern Iraq, and seems unlikely to have put a signficant dent in the guerrillas' capabilities.

5. All three Sunni Arab-majority provinces rejected the new constitution by a sound margin, two of them by a two-thirds majority. The Kurdish and Shiite provinces overwhelmingly approved the charter. Iraq thus has a permanent constitution that is absolutely unacceptable to the country's most powerful minority.

6. British government leakers revealed that George W. Bush told British PM Tony Blair in April, 2002, that he was seriously considering bombing the HQ of the Aljazeera satellite news channel. Bush's reputation, already low in the Arab world, took another hit.

7. Iraqi petroleum exports fell to an average of only 1.8 million barrels a day during the past year, down from 2.8 million barrels per day before the war. In recent months the exports have been as low as 1.1 million barrels a day.

8. Guerrillas have managed to surround and cut off Baghdad, the capital and a population center with 1/4 of the country's inhabitants, from much fuel and electricity.

9. Widespread hopes, fanned by the Bush administration, that Sunni Arab participation in the parliamentary elections would lead to a reduction in guerrilla violence proved completely untrue. The various Sunni Arab lists garnered 58 seats of 275. The Sunni Arabs have now adopted a two-track strategy, working in parliament to play the Kurds and the Shiites off against one another while its paramilitary wing continued to blow things up with unrelenting ferocity.

10. Guerrillas in Samarra on February 22 blew up the Askari Shrine, holy to Shiites because of its association with the hidden Twelfth Imam, whose Second Coming many await. The Sunni Arab guerrilla movement has been trying to provoke popular attacks and sectarian reprisals, but this is the first time it met with a measure of success. Enraged Shiites attacked 100 mosques, damaging between two and four dozen, killing some Sunni clerics, and murdering hundreds of Sunnis. Iraqi clerics, both Shiite and Sunni, helped bring Iraq back from the brink of hot civil war. The US troops in the country proved generally unuseful in this crisis.
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Allawi: This is Civil War
35 Killed in Sectarian Violence

Iyad Allawi, the former interim prime minister of Iraq, said Sunday that Iraq is in a civil war.

' "It is unfortunate that we are in civil war. We are losing each day as an average 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more.

"If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is." . . .

Iraq is moving towards the "point of no return", he said, when the country would fragment.

"It will not only fall apart but sectarianism will spread throughout the region, and even Europe and the US will not be spared the violence that results...," he said.

Makes it kind of hard for Rumsfeld and Bush to spin Iraq as a veritable Palm Springs Resort, when even old CIA assets like Allawi are speaking bluntly about the actual situation.

35 Iraqis were killed in the low-intensity civil war on Sunday. 14 bodies were discovered in Baghdad, some of them at the water treatment plant. Ugh.

Sunni fundamentalist leader Harith al-Dhari, according to al-Zaman, also said that the thought Iraq is on the precipice of a civil war.

Of course, all this begs the question of what a civil war is. There have been lots of conflict that we call a civil war in history that were not as bad as what is going on in Iraq now. Indeed, some conflicts that bulked large in our consciousnesses here in the US, such as the troubles in Northern Ireland, were in comparison minor affairs. Altogether some 3,000 people were killed over the three decades of that conflict. That would be two months in Iraq.

For Bush administration officials like Rumsfeld to say that the new Iraqi military is responsible now for much of the country is highly misleading. There isn't much going on in a solidly Shiite province such as Diwaniyah, so so what if it is patrolled by the new Iraqi army (consisting mostly of Shiite and Kurdish troops)? The seven "hot" provinces where much of the violence takes place are not controlled by the new army, and won't be for years if ever. The Kurds won't even let the federal troops step foot on their soil. And as Congressman Murtha pointed out on Sunday's Meet the Press, Operation swarmer is obviously mainly an American operation.


Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was roundly criticized Sunday for saying that to withdraw from Iraq would be as though the US had turned Germany back over to the Nazis after WW II. If Rumsfeld considers Saddam to be the analogue of the Nazis here, then his statement is odd. It is completely incredible that Saddam could ever come back to power. Nor can the Baath. Nor can the few hundred foreign fighters take over Iraq in the name of Zarqawi. For the Americans to get out of Iraq would be like any other hand-over by a colonial power of governance to local people. It would be like the French handing Algeria to the National Liberation Front, or like the British handing India to the Congress Party (it could be very much like that, since in the course of the hand-over, India and Pakistan split). For the US to try to keep its ground troops in Iraq will just create a long-term guerrilla insurgency of the sort the Portuguese fought in Angola and Mozambique. Those are non winnable in an age of the political and social mobilization of the people.

The political factions in Iraq have agreed on the formation of a "national security council" drawn from the leading parties in parliament. It will oversee security policy, but will have a Shiite majority and can be over-ruled by the prime minister or president if it is felt that the NSC has encroached on constitutionally granted executive powers. The Shiite United Iraqi Alliance signed off on the plan, which is extra-constitutional and intended to reassure Sunni Arabs and Kurds that the prime minister, who will likely generally be a Shiite, will not walk all over them. The UIA candidate for post of prime minister, Ibrahim Jaafari, did not attend the meeting at the house of president Jalal Talabani that signed off on the plan, This absence is a very bad sign if it indicates that the Dawa Party opposes this NSC.

Al-Zaman says that Iyad Allawi warned that despite this political development, we should have no illusions about the dangers that continue to face Iraq. He said he had been against the dissolution of the army in 2003.

It has been proven over and over again that the political process is not relevant to the guerrilla war, and it does not matter if they form a government or not-- the guerrillas will go on blowing things up.

The massive Shiite pilgrimage to Karbala is a big security problem, since the guerrillas would love to engage in some mayhem there.

Meanwhile, it turns out that when we weren't looking, the American Republic was ended by a small clique of power-hungry men, who unilaterally abrogated the fourth amendment of the US Constitution and authorized warrantless black bag searches.
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Bush's Greater Middle East


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Sunnis Reject US-Iran Talks
Propose Oversight of Prime Minister

Small protests were held by peace activists throughout the US and the world on Saturday. Some 7,000 came out in Chicago, e.g. In London, AP estimates 15,000. (There have been bigger anti-war protests in London). NYT says 6,000 came out in San Francisco, but few of them were young people.

The New York Times reveals that Rumsfeld's torture team, Task Force 6-26, was so notorious that even the CIA wanted nothing to do with it! Current Attorney General Albert Gonzales helped authorize this torture.

Baghdad police announced Saturday that they had found another 18 bodies in the streets. There were some bombings, including an attack on pilgrims heading to Karbala. It turns out that the head of the Iraqi army was almost killed in Kirkuk on Thursday. It was announced on Saturday that on Thursday guerrillas north of Tikrit killed 2 US soldiers and wounded another. It grinds on.

Al-Hayat reports [Ar.] that the (Sunni hardline) Association of Muslim Scholars said that it "deeply resents and takes offense" at the idea that the 'forces of Occupation' (the United States) and Iran would hold talks about Iraqi internal affairs. Its communique said, "Iranian intervention in Iraqi affairs is not new, and has reached an apex of harmfulness. But what is new is the attempt to legitimize this interference and to provide it with an international cover, while completely ignoring the sovereignty and the governmental administration of Iraq itself." Sunni Arab Iraqis have long been distrustful of Shiite Iran.

The US-Iran dialogue on Iraq comes after the Iraqi Shiite cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, called last Wednesday for Tehran to talk to Washington. Al-Hakim was a guest of Iran's ayatollahs for nearly a quarter century, but also has an alliance of convenience with the Bush administration.

The Iraqi Accord Front, a fundamentalist Sunni Arab list with 44 members in parliament, also expressed its "strong rejection" of the negotiations, which it called unwarranted interference in Iraqi affairs and unjustified by any conceivable result the negotiations might produce. Its statement added, "Who is responsible for the Iraq file is the people of Iraq . . . this is a legal and national responsibility, and no other party may intervene in it."

The National Iraqi list of former appointed PM Iyad Allawi also rejected the negotiations. When Allawi was in power briefly, he sought to increase tension with Iran, appointing a minister of defense who called Iran the number one enemy of Iraq. Allawi has strong CIA connections.

In contrast, al-Hayat says it was told by Arab diplomats in Washington that the negotiations between the US and Iran might lead to cooperation in containing the terrorist groups in Iraq and to the imposition of great isolation on the Syrian regime, which views continued troubles in Iraq as its guarantee that the US won't try to overthrow it.

The Sunni Iraqi Accord Front put forward a plan to constrain the prerogatives of the prime minister. Iyad al-Samarra'i told al-Hayat that it was proposing that big departures in strategy be confirmed by a two-thirds vote in parliament, and that internal security policy be confirmed by an absolute majority (i.e. counting abstentions and absentees), and ordinary policy by a simple majority (a majority of those MPs actually voting). These Sunnis are also suggesting that the government be divided into 3 portfolios, security, the economy, and services, and that these be handled by the 3 vice premiers on a consensus basis. (This system would allow the Kurdish and Sunni Arab vice premiers to outvote the one Shiite vice premier, thus undoing the results of the Dec. 15 elections, which gave the religiou Shiites a near-majority).

The Turkish envoy to Baghdad says that Iraq has never been so close to civil war as it is today. He reports that the Iraqi political figures with whom he is in touch are extremely worried about the outcome.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sistani on Homosexuality

[Andrew Sullivan has linked to this post, but makes three errors in as many sentences.

1) This is not a defense of anything. It is an explanation. Since I condemn Sistani's stance as "sick," I don't understand how it can be viewed as a "defense."

2) Sistani is not Islam. Sistani is a cleric. Islam as a culture/ civilization has made a place for homosociality in history that is far greater than anything in premodern Christendom, and there is nothing in the Quran about gays at all (the Lot story is repeated from the Bible, but so telegraphically it cannot be used for these purposes.)

3) I haven't said anything at all about Saddam Hussein, and it is odd if Sullivan doesn't know of my hatred for the man, which extends further back in time and is far more detailed than his own. I said the secular Baath regime. Removing Saddam is not the same as destroying secular nationalism, and the Americans have done the latter, in some large part on Neocon advice, and if you destroy secular nationalism in the Middle East then you get Islamism. ]

Readers have been asking me about the stance of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani regarding homosexuality. I take it they are inquiring about this entry at my colleagues' great Pandagon site.

Let me begin by saying that the charge leveled by some, and mentioned at Pandagon, that Sistani has called for the killing of Sunnis, is completely untrue. The implication given by exiled gay Iraqi, Ali Hili, of the London-based gay human rights group OutRage, that Sistani has called for vigilante killings of gays, is untrue, though it is accurate that Sistani advises that the state make homosexual activity a capital crime; it is also accurate to call this "sick."

In traditional Islam there was no conception of the "homosexual" as a permanent identity or social role. As in ancient Greece, the real distinction in sexuality (as Michel Foucault showed) was between the penetrator and the penetrated. Medieval and early modern Islamdom were like the Greece of Plato. Adult males were the penetrators. In premodern Muslim society, women could be penetrated if they were legally married to the man or if they were his slaves. Likewise, slave-boys (catamites) could be penetrated, although it was typically disapproved of by the Muslim clerics. Exclusive adult male-male sexual relationships are not recorded, and a taste for a slave-boy did not stop a wealthy man from being married or from having liasons with his female slaves, as well. About half the famous love-poems of the medieval Baghdad literary figure, Abu Nuwas, appear to have been addressed to boys.

As slavery was forbidden in the Ottoman Empire in the course of the mid- to late-nineteenth century, obviously the keeping of slave-boys by wealthy men ceased. As society modernized, notions of sexuality moved away from the penetrator/penetrated model similar to that of the ancient Greeks, and toward a modern male-female binary. Many Muslim societies in the course of the twentieth century also moved away from polygamy toward a model of one man, one woman as the family unit.

Modern homosexual identity has only slowly emerged in the Middle East, and has sometimes faced great hostility. I say sometimes because real-life Muslim societies are not as puritanical as outsiders or local elites imagine. It is obvious that American writer Paul Bowles liked living in Tangiers precisely because anything went as long as it stayed fairly private. In cosmopolitan Muslim cultures like Egypt, at best the modern gay subculture is winked at, but sometimes there are crackdowns. The situation resembles the US in, say, the 1930s and 1940s, when the police would arrest gays. In a radical Muslim regime like Taliban Afghanistan, gays were executed. This was in part an attempt to keep discipline in the Taliban military ranks, which were notorious for gay liaisons. So there is a spectrum. It should be underlined that Taliban Afghanistan was weird and not like most of the Muslim world.

So on to Sistani, who upholds a slightly modernized version of medieval Muslim canon law. The first two fatwas he gave on the subject have to do with adult men penetrating boys. That is, Sistani appears to take as the connotation of lawat that it is an adult man penetrating an under-age boy. Unsurprisingly, he deeply disapproves. The first two fatwas, however, come in response to questions about what this sexual relationship means for later marital relations between the two families. Say a 21-year-old man from Khazraj had relations with a 17-year-old boy from Ruba'i? Then, say the first man's family wanted to marry him off to a girl from the Ruba'i family. Can they? And to what degree of relatedness? Can he be the husband of his former lover's sister? The answer is "no." In contrast, Sistani would allow a man who had an affair with a girl to later on marry her sister. Personally, I think the gay guy is getting the better advice here; having a brother-in-law or sister-in-law who is your former lover would be awkward at family reunions. Sistani does say that if a man has an affair with a married woman, and fathers her child, and she later gets divorced, he cannot in good conscience marry her, as a punishment for the earlier sin.

The first two fatwas assume that the gay affair had been discovered and punished, but also assumes that the two men were not only at liberty but that their families were in the sort of social relationship where intermarriage was still a possibility.

A later fatwa insists that homosexual relations should be punished with the utmost severity, and urges the death penalty. Again, his assumption appears to be that the penetrated partner would likely be under-age, which may help explain his severity. His first two fatwas, however, assume that the punishment will actually be much less severe, even when one of the partners was under-age!

It should be noted that Sistani does not have or even claim the right to impose a death penalty on individuals for their activities. In contemporary Iraq, the legality of homosexuality would be determined by statute passed by parliament (or by provincial assemblies), and if it were illegal, sentencing would be carried out by civil judges. Sistani is here acting as a jurisconsult, saying what he thinks Islamic canon law requires. But Iraq is not governed, or not solely governed, by shariah or Islamic canon law.

The Iraqi constitution adopted on October 15 contains a provision that no law be passed directly contradicting the established laws of Islam, but another article says that no law may be passed that is contrary to human rights standards. Given that homosexuality has never been such a big an issue in the Middle East (and for long stretches some sort of homosociality was accepted elite practice) that its prohibition would rise to the level of an "established" Islamic law (thawabit ahkam al-Islam), one wonders if Iraqi law will really take this direction. Certainly, it would not be in accord with the other provision, concerning basic human rights.

But there isn't any doubt that Sistani does advocate making gay relations a capital crime. If Iraq took a strong turn toward implementation of religious law, which is entirely possible given that the December 15 election mainly put religious fundamentalist parties in parliament, then such severe penalties for homosexual relations could be imposed, despite the human rights language in the constitution.

I personally concemn Sistani's stance here, of course. He is a conservative Shiite cleric, however, so I don't know what people were expecting to happen if the secular Baath was overthrown and replaced by primordial ethnic identities.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Right Blogosphere Scammed by Bogus Document Dump

Maha at Daily Kos has it right. It is falling down funny. The Right blogosphere is going crazy about this document [ pdf] in the Iraqi documents made available by the US government this week.

See also Sadly No.

The notorious liar, Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard led the charge. This is just an old Western document posted to the internet in 1997.

What does the Arabic say?

"The Institutions of the Apparatus of the Intelligence Service on the Internet:

You will find enclosed information on the Apparatus that has been published on the internet. It has information on our organization, but it is clear that the information is relatively old. Otherwise, it does not do more than mention some correct and important matters . . ."

It then goes on to list the names of some agents. As an intelligence service, its main concern was with cover, apparently.

In other words, Iraqi intelligence notes the appearance of the document on the internet in 1997, and laments that it is very basic ['does not do more than'] and then notes with some amusement how out of date it is (with the implication that Western intelligence on Iraq must be pretty bad). The "out of date" comment probably refers to the Western document's preoccupation with WMD, which Iraqi Intelligence would have known was gone by then. It may also refer to personnel having been switched around. Note that the Iraqi comment does not endorse the internet document. It not only says it is "old" intelligence, which is very damning in intelligence work, but it also uses the word "some" when referring to what is accurate and important in it. "Some correct and important matters." There will be those who read this as a blanket endorsement; it obviously is not.

Yeah, that's a find, all right. Kind of makes the whole last three years worthwhile, all by itself.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

AIPAC Impact on US foreign policy


Political scientists John Mearsheimer (U of Chicago) and Stephen Walt (Harvard) bravely take on the issue of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington and the way it distorts US foreign policy in the Middle East. Most American Jews deeply disagree with the policies advocated by the American Enterprise Institute, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, etc., But a sliver of the political spectrum, falsely insisting that it represents all American Jews, manages to skew US politics and reporting on the issue of Palestine.

A longer version of the report is here.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Several US Soldiers Killed
Pilgrims Targetted

AP reports several incidents of sectarian violence on Friday, including concerted attacks on Shiite pilgrims heading to the holy city of Karbala. Al-Zaman says that by next Tuesday there will be 3 million Shiite pilgrims in Karbala for the 40th day mourning rites after the anniversary of the martyrdom of the Prophet's grandson, Husayn. Protecting 3 million people will be no easy task, though the original Ashura rites themselves went off without major incident 40 days ago. Some past such processions have been bombed by guerrillas.

The violence included the killing of a US soldier at Samarra and a bombing at Miqdadiyah that may have killed several US troops and wounded more.

It turns out that "Operation Swarmer" was just a routine search and destroy mission. It doesn't in fact appear to have involved massive bombings, and has met no significant resistance, with a few guerrillas apprehended in villages around Samarra.

Al-Zaman reports that Nadim al-Jabiri and his Virtue (Fadila) Party oppose Abdul Aziz al-Hakim's attempt to bring Iranians into dialogue with the US over Iraqi affairs.

You will see a lot of propaganda about the situation in Iraq, some of it put out by English-speaking Republican journalists or bloggers who visit the country (mainly safe Kurdistan). But Nir Rosen, an Arabic-speaking journalist who goes about unembedded in Iraq, has given us the real deal-- firsthand reporting on the sectarian violence and tensions in Iraq, based on Arabic-language conversations with real Iraqis.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bush Affirms Policy of "Preemptive" Attack

Bush reaffirmed Thursday his policy of willingness to strike first against states he considers enemies.

There is a real problem of definition here. If Bush means that he will strike at terrorists whom he has good reason to suspect of imminently carrying out an attack on the US, then that is in accord with the United Nations Charter. States can always engage in self-defense from imminent threat.

But if he means he can go around invading other countries because he doesn't like the looks of them--which is what he actually does seem to mean-- then that is a war crime both in US law and in international law.

You wonder if the Bushes will be able to vacation in Europe when he goes out of office, or if Pinochet's fate awaits George.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

US/Iraqi Attack on Samarra Region
Parliament Sworn In

Saddam Hussein's call at his trial for Iraqis to unite, stop killing each other on sectarian grounds, and attack US troops instead is likely to be very popular in the Sunni Arab region. The ineptitude of this tribunal is astonishing-- the US and its Iraqi allies have basically given Saddam a platform on which to make himself a martyr to Iraqi unity and independence. Given that he ran the country into the ground and engaged in large-scale ethnic cleansing, this call is the height of hypocrisy. But you wonder if Bush will remain more popular than Saddam in Iraq if things go on as they have been.

US military aircraft delivered a mixed US and Iraqi force to four villages north of Samarra which, the US military says, are suspected guerrilla bases. Actually, Samarra and its environs have long been dominated by the guerrillas, and repeated US attempts to subdue Samarra have all failed. Some sources reported massive bombing, which the Pentagon denied. Local Iraqis said they heard big explosions, however.

The US military command in Iraq, perhaps despairing of inaction in Washington, does not seem to have sought the authorization of President Bush for this operation. It does make you wonder what Bush thinks he is doing. After the Samarra shrine bombing, which many Iraqis blamed on the US one way or another, Bush should have been going on Iraqi television and addressing them directly as to what would be done about it. Instead, he kept trying to tell the Americans that things were actually just wonderful in Iraq.

This Samarra operation is probably mainly a political act. The US generals are attempting to demonstrate to their Shiite allies that they take seriously the terror attack on the Askari Shrine on Feb. 22. Presumably they are also attempting to ensure that if the shrine is rebuilt, it won't just be blown up again. Short of pulling a Fallujah on Samarra, however-- which would involve emptying the city and then destroying it-- it is difficult to see how the US/ Iraqi government forces can prevail. Even then, they would just face sullen suicide bombers thereafter, as has happened in Fallujah, where 2/3s of the buildings were damaged and a large part of the population permanently dispossessed.

Frankly, the Samarra "Operation Swarm" is probably also meant to give the impression of progress or at least of activity in Iraq, where the political process is stalled and the guerrillas seem to strike at will, with increasing political success.

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and Jalal Talabani, prominent Iraqi politicians who are also close to Tehran, have convinced the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to open direct talks with the United States on Iraqi security concerns. Such talks have been sought by US ambassador in Baghdad Zalmay Khalilzad, who is the first Bush administration official in Iraq who seems to know what he is doing, and some important part of whose activities are likely to bear positive results. Note that the Neocons would never have agreed to talk to the Iranian government, which they just want to bomb (e.g. Richard Perle and Michael Ledeen). I disagree with some of what Khalilzad is doing, of course. I personally think Ibrahim Jaafari's commitment a strong Iraqi central government and national unity is more promising than the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq's adoption of the loose federalism model of Kurdistan for the Shiite south. On the other hand, if Jaafari is so unpopular that Iraq comes apart at the seams now, it doesn't do us much good that his policy vision is probably better for the country in the long run.

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq renewed his pledge Thursday to create two new provincial confederations in Iraq, in the Shiite far south and in the middle Euphrates [on the Kurdistan model]. Ibrahim Jaafari is opposed to such provincial confederations, which may lead to the break-up of Iraq or at least to an extremely weak central government. If you had in the United States the system that al-Hakim proposes, then Oklahoma, Texas and Louisiana could form a regional confederacy, elect a parliament and prime minister, and keep 100% of the revenue from all future oil finds, refusing to pay taxes to the federal government on it. And if Bush wanted to talk to Austin, he'd be directed to the Prime Minister of the Regional Confederacy. It would cause a lot of trouble.

The Iraqi parliament opened on Thursday, and the 275 members took their oath of office, administered in the absence of an elected speaker of the house (on whom parliament could not decide) by senior statesman Adnan Pachachi (on the grounds that he is the oldest MP). Some of the members objected to the form of the oath administered by the chief justice, on the grounds that it differed from the text that had been distributed beforehand, and some said it the way it had been written (-Al-Sharq al-Awsat). The autnorities decided to let that pass.

Pachachi attempted to make a speech from the floor, lamenting the recent sectarian violence, but was interrupted by Shiite cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who said it was inappropriate for Pachachi to do more than swear in the members of parliament.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that the MPs universally expressed a desire for a national unity government as a way to end the crisis. A Sunni politician, Khalaf al-Ulyan, said that it would also allow the government to avoid the problems that beset the previous, Jaafari, government. Mahmoud Osman, an independent Kurd, predicted that it would be difficult for Jaafari, leader of the Shiite Dawa Party, to form a new government given the opposition to him among other blocs.

Outgoing Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari, nominated by the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance for a second term, said Thursday that he would step down if his people asked him to. He clarified that he was referring to the parliament. Jaafari's political foes believe they can deny him the simple majority he needs to form a government, since the UIA only has 132 deputies willing to vote for it including allies, and needs 138. Moreover, there is opposition to Jaafari within the UIA, so he might not even get 132. The Virtue Party, lead by Nadim al-Jabiri, is diehard opposed to him. It has 15 seats.

Reuters argues that Washington views Jaafari as Iran's candidate, explaining US hostility to his nomination. But the idea that Jaafari is closer to Iran than the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim is frankly absurd. Whatever is going on, this isn't it. My suspicion? The Bush administration also sees that the establishment of several more provincial confederacies on the Kurdistan model, to which al-Hakim is committed (see above) will guarantee a very weak central government in Iraq and will also guarantee US oil firms weak, naive local governments on whom unfair contracts can be imposed. But the possibility that these confederacies will pull Iraq apart and reconfigure the Middle East and the Gulf in a way such as to provoke massive wars and pipeline sabotage must be taken into consideration.

Kurdish sources alleged that young Shiite nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has set up a virtual mini-state in slummy, Shiite East Baghdad, his power base. This allegation seems an exaggeration. The Sadrists in what is now called Sadr City have long run organizations that parallel those of the state, and it is hard to see what is new here.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Halabja Riot against America

Kurds in Halabja went on a rampage on Thursday, protesting the Kurdistan Regional Government's inattention to social services. They assaulted the monument to the victims of Saddam's 1988 gas attack, an attack they said that the local government always used to excuse its ineptitude.

Security sources told al-Hayat that a boy was killed and six other persons were wounded by the bullets of the Peshmerga paramilitary, who opened fire to disperse the demonstrators. The source says that the situation got out of hand and that supplementary forces have now reached the city to restore order.

Al-Hayat said that he demonstrators carried placards blaming America and its agents. These slogans raised suspicions in official Kurdish circles that the Kurdish Islamist were behind the incident.

[Update 3/18: I've now heard from 2 sources in Kurdistan, both of whom deny anti-American feeling. One considered Islamist involvement plausible, and one denied it altogether.]

Kurds accuse Saddam Hussein and Ali Hasan al-Majid--"Chemical Ali-- for killing 5,000 Kurds in a 1988 gas attack.

Al-Hayat says that in 1998, radical Kurdish Muslim groups such as the Army of Islam, the Army of the Ansar al-Sunnah, and the Islamic Group imposed on the people of Halabja and Taliban-like local municipal regime. Alcohol was forbidden, veiling imposed on women, religion education was substituted for secular schooling, and the shaving of the beard forbidden.

President Jalal Talabani, himself a Kurd, responded by insisting on the "need to continue the struggle against the criminal excommunicator (takfiri) gangs that have launched a war of extermination on all Iraqis."

[It now seems likely that the Islamists were cleared out of Halabja long ago, and that this demonstration was against the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan's poor government, and that Talabani is just scapegoating the Islamists to cover up popular discontent with his party's regional government.]

Even if the riot was the work of local Muslim fundamentalist groups, it is not good news that even some of the people in Halabja are not "grateful" for being liberated by the US from Hussein, and even blame the US, apparently for collusion with the Baath regime in the gas attacks.

The Reagan and then Bush senior administrations allied with Saddam 1984-1990, until he invaded Kuwait. During the 1980s, as I showed in this Truthdig.com piece, the Reagan administration winked at Saddam's use of chemical weapons, and at his efforts to acquire more. Donald Rumsfeld met Saddam twice, the second time to mollify him over State Department condemnation of the chemical weapons. The Reagan administration also permitted private US companies to supply to Saddam chemicals and anthrax precursors. No senior Reagan administration official protested the Halabja gassings. So the Halabja demonstrations against Reagan administration complicity contain a kernel of hideous truth.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Saddam Was Trying to Capture Zarqawi

The Bush administration repeatedly made the presence in Iraq of Abu Musab Zarqawi a pretext for invading the country and overthrowing Saddam Hussein. They implied that he was a client of Saddam and that Saddam had arranged for hospital care for him.

Newly released documents from the captured Iraqi archives show that Saddam had put out an APB for Zarqawi and was trying to have him arrested as a danger to the Baath regime!

' However, one of the documents, a letter from an Iraqi intelligence official, dated August 17, 2002, asked agents in the country to be on the lookout for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and another unnamed man whose picture was attached. '

Update: This is the original pdf document as released by the USG. It is at Blackvault.com but does not appear to be listed any longer at the original Ft. Leavenworth site. (Update 9/9/06).

The September 29, 2002 Denver Post paraphrased Cheney, "He said the evidence presented against Iraq will be long and persuasive, including more details of a relationship between Hussein's forces and the al-Qaeda terrorist network."
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Shiite Pilgrims, US Troops Killed
Parliament Meets to no End

Two Shiite pilgrims were shot dead in Baghdad on Wednesday, among other killings and bombings in the capital, in Baqubah and in Anbar province, which include the killing of two US soldiers.

It is the season of Arba'in in Iraq, the 40th day commemoration of the anniversary of the martyrdom of Imam Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. Pilgrims are walking to the holy city of Karbala, seat of Husayn's tomb. They are in danger of being killed by Sunni Arab guerrillas seeking to provoke Sunni-Shiite violence. In order to deal with this threat, the US military is sending nearly 1,000 extra troops, with armor and tanks, up to Iraq from Kuwait. A Sunni politician told al-Hayat that because the United Iraqi Alliance [Shiite fundamentalist coalition] is not completely united behind Jaafari, it might be possible to have the matter settled in a meeting of the whole parliament. He said that if the UIA stickes with Jaafari, "He will fail . . .'

He said that the Sunni Arabs are not holdin things up in Iraq, but that they feel that the Shiites have decided instead to support their co-religionsts in Iran.

Al-Hayat quotes Fadil Mirani, the secretary general of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Massoud Barzani, as saying that the crisis over the nomination of Ibrahim Jaafari as prime minister has not ended. He maintained that the Americans do not want Jaafari to be put forward, "because he has misbehaved." He said that the Americans are applying enormous pressure to form a national unity government.

The Iraqi parliament will meet on Thursday, but it won't actually do anything. It will literally just meet. It won't even choose a speaker of the house, as it is required to do by the constitution during its first session. How will it get away with this lapse? It will declare that the first session lasts . . . until a speaker is chosen.

Veteran journalist Bob Scheer looks at Bush's fantasies about Iraq. Scheer, among the most clear-sighted of our journalists, was an early critic of the Vietnam War. His criticisms of the Iraq War and of the Bush administration appear to have gotten him fired from the Los Angeles Times, possibly because the owner wanted an exemption from the FCC allowing to own a newspaper and a television station in the same market, and did not want to anger te administration. He now edits Truthdig.com, for which I write.

Sidney Blumenthal is less charitable, dissecting what he calls the Big Lie of George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld on Iraq and the "war on terror," contrasting their somewhat strange allegations with the more sober positions of their actual ambassadors and generals on the ground.

Question: Why aren't more Democratic politicians talking about Bush's Iraq fantasies and his big lie?

The Open Source Center translates a Kurdish article from Hawlati alleging that the Iranian government pressured the Kurdish leaders to accept Ibrahim Jaafari as prime minister. Jalal Talabani has long been a close client of Iran, and this report seems to me plausible.

If the report is true, the implication is that Iran was able to over-rule the United States. Reportedly, the Bush administration did not want Jaafari as PM.

' Iraqi Paper Says Iran Pressured Kurdish Leadership To Accept Al-Ja'fari
Unattributed report: "Iran pressurizes Talabani and Barzani to accept Al-Ja'fari, Al-Sadr militias threatens Kurds in Baghdad"; p 1
Hawlati
Wednesday, March 15, 2006 T19:57:29Z
Journal Code: 8278 Language: ENGLISH Record Type: FULLTEXT
Document Type: OSC Translated Excerpt
Word Count: 221

As a new round of talks began between the political factions in Iraq, Iran started to pressurize the Kurdish leadership to support the re-election of Al-Ja'fari.

The Iranian Ambassador Kazimi Qumi held closed door sessions with Barzani and Talabani in the recent few weeks. He asked them to re-elect Al-Ja'fari for the post of prime minister.

A well informed source told Hawlati: "Iran dedicated all its resources (for re-election of Al-Ja'fari), and so they have been able to cool off Talabani and Barzani." (Passage omitted) "The effect of Iran's pressure was apparent, as all participants were calm regarding Al-Ja'fari's re-election" in yesterday's meeting at the home of the United Iraqi Alliance leader Abd-al-Aziz al-Hakim.

In the context of forcing Kurds to change their stance on the re-election of Al-Ja'fari, many Kurds living in Baghdad received threats from Shiite militias. The threats said: "If the Kurdish leadership insists on their stance, you must leave your homes." Moreover, Hawlati phoned many Kurdish families in Baghdad and they all confirmed these reports. They said: "A number of black dressed young armed men threatened to evict them if the Kurdish leadership insists on going up against Al-Ja'fari's re-election."
(Description of Source: Al-Sulaymaniyah Hawlati in Sorani Kurdish -- weekly independent newspaper) '

Other Open Source center paraphrases of Iraqi news, for March 14:

' Al-Bayyinah [Shiite religious] carries on the front page a 100-word report citing special sources saying that Iraqi Al-Tawafuq Front is conducting a campaign to stop the political process. The report cites Adnan al-Dulaymi saying that Al-Sadr City's and Al-Shu'lah's inhabitants are the origin of evil . . .

Al-Bayyinah carries on page 7 a 1,300-word article by Salman al-Shammari commenting on the attempts of political forces to "deny" the majority's electoral representation. . .

Al-Dustur publishes on the front page a 500-word report citing Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr calling on Arab Sunnis to stay away from Zarqawis and takfiris following the bombing in Al-Sadr City which claimed the lives of 50 persons and injured over 200 others. . .

Al-Mashriq publishes on the front page a 340-word report citing member of Unified Iraqi Coalition Ali al-Adib informing the newspaper that the sectarian war is underway but it is not widespread, adding that he has lost confidence in the security forces. . .

Al-Da'wah runs on the front page a 220-word report on Mujahidin-e-Khalq organization's reaction to the recent deployment of Bulgarian forces in Ashraf Camp . . .

Al-Da'wah publishes on the front page a 200-word report citing SCIRI confirming that it will sue Iraqi newspapers for publishing false news about the SCIRI leader. . .

Al-Furat runs on the front page a 120-word report citing sources in Baghdad confirming that two of Ahmad Chalabi's bodyguards were killed during accidental clashes with staff members of a security company in Al-Mansur district in Baghdad yesterday, 13 March. . .

Al-Mu'tamar publishes on the front page a 600-word report entitled "Al-Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr: Iraqis Do Not Want Civil War; Al-Mahdi Army Arrests Terrorist Trying To Attack Blood Donors." . . .

Al-Ittijah al-Akhar on 11 March carries on page 3 a 70-word report on a statement by Ba'th Party warning of federalism aimed at fragmenting Iraq.

Al-Ittijah al-Akhar on 11 March carries on page 4 a 600-word report on the agreement between Al-Sadr trend and Association of Muslim Scholars to unify Shiite and Sunni Waqfs [pious endowments].

Al-Mada publishes on page 2 a 500-word report citing the minister at the British Foreign Office saying that the goal of his visit to Iraq is to find investment opportunities in oil and gas sectors. . .

Tariq al-Sha'b publishes on the front page 750-word report entitled "Large Number of British Tanks on Streets in Basra; Armed Attacks on Civilians; Defense Ministry Arrests 108 Insurgents." The report outlines the recent security developments in Baghdad and other governorates. . .

Al-Zaman carries on page 5 a 300-word report citing Health Minister Undersecretary Sabah al-Husayni saying that he will file a lawsuit against IRAQNA Mobile Company for stopping all communication following the [Sadr City] bombings. . .

Tariq al-Sha'b publishes on page 2 a 100-word report citing Hasanyan al-Safi, member of Basra Advisory Council and chairman of Council's Investigation Committee, confirming human rights violations in Al-Ma'qal Prison. . .

Al-Mada publishes on page 7 a half page report that 20 percent of Iraqi families are under the poverty line. . .

Al-Sabah al-Jadid publishes on page 4 a 300-word report on the cooperation between Iraqi and Iranian investors to build brick factori es and two plastic factories in Al-Nasiriyah Governorate. . .

Al-Zaman carries on the front page a 300-word report citing British state minister for foreign affairs saying: "We could not convince British companies to invest in Iraq due to the security situation", during a press conference in Basra. (OSC plans to process this item) . . .

Al-Mashriq publishes on page 5 a 400-word report that Mosul has refused to supply Arbil with gas. . .

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Harith al-Dhari on Sectarian Conflict in Iraq

The Open Source Center translates an interview from al-Zaman with hard line Sunni Arab fundamentalist leader Harith al-Dhari.

' Al-Zaman: AMS Spokesman on Latest Political, Security Developments in Iraq
Interview with Association of Muslim Scholars Spokesman Dr Muthanna Harith al-Dari by Mustafa Amarah in Cairo "Recently": "Association of Muslim Scholars Spokesman Tells Al-Zaman: Political Parties Favor Personal Interests, Plot To Divide Iraq Continues"
Al-Zaman
Tuesday, March 14, 2006


While Iraq was witnessing bloody events due to the Samarra bombings and the violence that followed, which raised fear of the eruption of a civil war, Association of Muslim Scholars Spokesman Dr Muthanna Harith al-Dari visited Cairo. During the visit, Al-Zaman interview Al-Dari. Following is the full text of the interview:

(Amarah) What are the goals of your current visit to Egypt?

(Al-Dari) It comes within the framework of visits by the Association of Muslim Scholars' representatives to a number of Arab countries to explain the actual facts in Iraq to Arab media outlets, non-governmental organizations, and religious institutions. This is because the picture of the Iraqi situation has not been made clear yet, and the influence of Arabs is still below the required level. We have met with Al-Azhar Shaykh, Ambassador Bin Hili and others.

(Amarah) The (details) of the bombing of the Holy Shrine of Imam Hasan al-Askari are still vague. In your opinion, who was responsible for the bombing?

(Al-Dari) Certainly, the true Iraqis were not responsible for the bombing. From the very beginning, all indications suggested that some local and foreign parties, who do not wish any good for Iraq, planned and executed the attack. The timing of the bombing was very sensitive, hence a civil war could have been erupted in the country. In addition, we hold the Iraqi government responsible for what happened because it is responsible for the protection of the holy shrine. There was a curfew and soon after the withdrawal of security forces, the bombing took place. This was from a security point of view. However, from a political point of view, the interests of several parties lay in the deterioration of the political situation in the Iraqi arena, especially following the emergence of a tendency toward a national consensus. Moreover, the occupation is directly responsible for the decline in the Iraqi situation that paved the way before the bombings.

(Amarah) Why did the Shiite parties not adhere to the calls by Al-Sistani and Al-Sadr not to attack Sunni mosques?

(Al-Dari) The masses, who attacked and sabotaged Sunni mosques on the second and third days, did not adhere to the calls by Shiite religious authorities because they were driven by their emotions. In addition, they were directed by some parties who took advantages of the masses' outrage. Stemming from this base, we did not support the idea of calling on people to demonstrate, because some parties might penetrate the demonstrations and turn them to its personal interests. I believe that the current political parties in the Iraqi arena are trying to exploit the religious authorities to achieve their own personal interests rather than the national interests.

(Amarah) Are the Iraqi Shiite parties loyal to Iran?

(Al-Dari) The current political parties in the Iraqi arena favor their own personal interests over Iraq's national interests. I cannot comment on whether or not they are loyal to Iran.

(Amarah) Why did the Association of Muslim Scholars make bilateral agreements with Muqtada al-Sadr but not with the other parties?

(Al-Dari) It is not a matter of choice. A very dangerous problem occurred, thus it is the duty of regional parties to contain it. Hence, the Al-Kalisi trend and Al-Sadr trend met with other national forces participating in the anti-occupation Iraqi National Constituent Conference to act quickly to contain the problem. This is because these parties feel that it is their particular duty and responsibility to contain the situation in the country.

(Amarah) The reports from Baghdad indicate that Al-Sadr's forces are currently attacking the Sunni mosques and properties in Iraq, how do you comment?

(Al-Dari) The Iraqi arena is witnessing a large variety of uncontrolled acts now that cannot be attributed to a particular party.

(Amarah) What measures have been taken to calm the situation?

(Al-Dari) Several measures were taken, including holding unified prayer sermons on the public level and the reconstruction of Sunni mosques. Moreover, the parties participating in the Iraqi National Constituent Conference have agreed to keep close contact in order to contain any small problem that may arise. In addition to the agreement on the importance of setting a timetable for the withdrawal of occupation forces from Iraq.

(Amarah) Do you expect the reemergence of this incident in the future? What measures are being taken to confront it?

(Al-Dari) We do not expect that these operation will come to an end. However, we anticipate that this understanding prevents their expansion. With regard to the measures taken to confront such incidents, we have issued our instructions to all mosque imams and clerics to be cautious. We vow to be the guardian and will protect our mosques with our souls.

(Amarah) Do you fear of that these incidents may lead to a civil war?

(Al-Dari) Civil war has not begun in Iraq yet. Civil wars have their elements and features, among which all parties assemble behind their leaders. So far, this has not happened in Iraq. I believe that the efforts that have been invested and will be invested in the next few days will prevent the danger of civil war. However, as long as fear of the reemergence of such incidents exists, we must be prepared to confront them.

(Amarah) Do you believe that the United States seeks to instigate a civil war in Iraq in the current stage?

(Al-Dari) The US is really determined to get out of Iraq due to the growing internal pressure as well as the huge casualties incurred by US forces as a result of the Iraqi resistance operations. The US Administration is divided into two groups over the Iraqi issue. The first emphasizes the importance of organizing the situation in Iraq in one way or another to show the achievement of some degree of understanding to facilitate the withdrawal of US forces from the country. The second group tends to favor the interests of Israel rather than the interests of the US by trying to instigate a civil war in order to occupy Iraqis with ethnic and sectarian war away from Israel.

(Amarah) Are the recent reports about Iranian plots to divide Iraq true? What are the dimensions of the Iranian role in Iraq?

(Al-Dari) Iraq's neighbors, who wish good for Iraq, should realize and appreciate Iraq's national demands. It is true that neighboring countries have their own interests that they want to maintain in Iraq, but we do not accept that they attain their interests at the expense of Iraqis. Although, they may not appear explicitly on the surface, serious and well-engineered attempts are certainly underway to divide Iraq by some parties, especially occupation forces. The occupation is trying to implement Iraq's division quietly and gradually, so that the Iraqi people remains unaware of what is being cooked for them. The Wednesday incident was an attempt to probe the reaction of Iraqis.

(Amarah) How do you assess the Egyptian and Arab role towards Iraq?

(Al-Dari) The Egyptian and Arab role towards Iraq has not reached the required level. We blame Egypt in particular for its distinguished position in the Arab world.

(Amarah) What is the projected role that Egypt should play in your opinion?

(Al-Dari) Egypt has considerable weight in the Arab arena. I believe that Egypt can mediate between all Iraqi parties at such a time, in light of its previous role in the Cairo National Conciliation Conference. The conference was a step that must be followed by other steps. Egypt should try to have a real picture about the Iraqi situation because the picture is still not clear to many Egyptian officials. In addition, the Egyptian contacts with the Iraqi parties and their stances have not reached the desired level yet. This is because Egyptian officials are receiving incorrect information, a matter that I sensed clearly during the Cairo Conference.

(Amarah) How do you evaluate the Al-Azhar shaykh's initiative to visit Iraq? Will this visit help resolve the problem?

(Al-Dari) The initiative of Al-Azhar shaykh is a noble gesture and is appreciated. Also his visit to the Iraqi Embassy in Cairo was very well received and appreciated by Iraqis. However, the problem in Iraq is too big to be resolved by a certain visit. It is a complicated political problem rather than a matter of preaching and guidance.

(Amarah) What is your stance regarding the projected National Dialogue Conference scheduled for next June?

(Al-Dari) The conference faces several obstacles. I do not understand why it was postponed until that time. It is strange that the Iraqi security forces did not allow Arab League Envoy Mustafa Uthman Isma'il to visit the Association of Muslim Scholars' headquarters, during his last visit to Baghdad. With regard to our stance, it depends on the implementation of the recommendations adopted by the Cairo National Conciliation Conference.

(Amarah) What is your stance regarding the deployment of Arab forces or the appointment of Arab diplomatic missions in Iraq?

(Al-Dari) We will not be happy with the deployment of Arab peace-keeping forces before the withdrawal of occupation forces from Iraq. With regard to the appointment of Arab diplomatic missions in Iraq, we see that it is difficult to ensure their safety under the current circumstances.

(Amarah) How do you see the future of Iraq in the next stage?

(Al-Dari) Iraq has no future under the occupation and the control of some political forces who favor their personal interests over Iraq's national interests. However, the withdrawal of occupation forces will lead to the disappearance of such political forces and emergence of other national forces who will work to achieve Iraq's interests.

(Description of Source: Baghdad Al-Zaman in Arabic -- Baghdad-based independent Iraqi daily providing coverage of Iraqi, Arab, and international issues, headed by Iraqi journalist Sa'd al-Bazzaz; Internet version available at: http://www.azzaman.com) '

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Darfur Petition

Human Rights First has put up an important petition on the Darfur genocide.

You can see short film about the issue here.

Here is the Wikipedia article on the Darfur conflict.
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80 Bodies Found
Massive Attack on Green Zone Foiled

Al-Hayat reports fighting in Ramadi between guerrillas and US forces. I guess that isn't news anymore, since I didn't see it elsewhere.


Courtesy KarbalaNews.net

Some 80 bodies have been found in Baghdad and environs since Monday. On Tuesday alone, police discovered 46 bodies around the capital. They appear mostly to have been Sunni Arabs targeted by enraged Shiites attacked by the guerrillas during the past three weeks. Some were in the back of a minibus. Some were in a mass grave in Shiite East Baghdad. The latter were discovered when passers-by saw blood oozing out of the earth. Blood oozing out of the earth is a good metaphor for Iraq nowadays. As one of my readers noted, if the US military isn't in Iraq to prevent a civil war, then they must be there to guard the oil. I feel an editorial photo-cartoon coming on.



Although young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has called for peace and lack of reprisals, clearly a lot of furious Shiites are paying no attention to him. When people are really angry, the clerics lose a lot of their influence. If people in Lebanon had listened to their clerics, there never would have been a civil war there. At some point, political resentments go so far that the sermons themselves become helpless.

US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad attended a meeting with top Iraqi politicians to try to break the deadlock on forming a government.

Minister of Interior Bayan Jabr announced that a plot had been foiled to place hundreds of Sunni Arab troops actually loyal to the insurgency in position at the Green Zone and then to have them rush embassy offices and take diplomatic hostages. The Green Zone is a barricaded area of downtown Baghdad. There have been rumors for weeks that the Sunni Arab guerrillas were preparing to "rise up" and take the capital. This was probably the plan to which the rumor mongers were referring. Or, a more frightening thought: the rumors refer to yet another plot. Anyway, apparently the US and the new government barely dodged this bullet. It would have been horrible. But you do have the sense that with the siege of Baghdad going on, the Green Zone is becoming vulnerable and could ultimately fall.

Al-Zaman says that the Shiite religious coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, has rejected a system of cabinet rule, wherein the prime minister would have to take issues to his cabinet for a vote. From a Shiite point of view, the US and other Iraqi factions are trying to find ways of robbing it of its electoral victory on Dec. 15.

Al-Zaman reports that in the end, the politicians decided to deal with the paralysis by . . . appointing a committee. Oh, yeah. That will move things along.

Victims of Hurricane Katrina and Veterans are staging a peace march to New Orleans, ending on Saturday. They are demanding an end to the Iraq War and a big increase in funding to help those hundreds of thousands of Americans hurt by the hurricane and the Bush administration's wholly inadequate response to it.

Gen. Peter Pace acted bravely and honestly on Tuesday by contradicting Bush's Monday claims that the Iranian government was supplying bombs to the guerrilla insurgency in Iraq. Pace admitted he had no evidence that the Iranian state was doing any such thing. (Of course it is not.)

[Ar.]Iraq Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari denied on Tuesday US charges that there were Iranian Revolutionary Guards on Iraqi soil. Jaafari is right. If there were many revolutionary guards in Iraq, they would be being captured in some numbers by US troops in their sweeps. No such thing has happened. The Bush administration has to make up its mind as to whether Jaafari's election is a great good thing and a model of democracy for the region, or it is an unwelcome sign of Iranian influence in Iraq. You can't have it both ways.

My article, Fishing for a Pretext in Iran, is out at Truthdig.com. Excerpt:

If the Supreme Jurisprudent of theocratic Iran has given a fatwa against nukes, if the president of the country has renounced them and called for others to do so, if the International Atomic Energy Agency has found no evidence of a military nuclear weapons program, and if Iran is at least 10 years from having a bomb even if it is trying to get one, then why is there a diplomatic crisis around this issue between the United States and Iran in 2006?

The trolls are out amid some otherwise insightful discussions of the piece, both at the truthdig site and at Daily Kos, where Steven D. kindly put up a diary on the piece. Some liar attempted to cast aspersions on my Arabic, which I speak with near-native fluency (and why would it matter for this article--isn't my Persian the relevant question there? Maybe the idiot who smeared me thinks Iranians are Arabs or something.) Then there were snarky comments about my treatment of the Neocons in the article; one problem: I don't mention any Neocons. Then someone alleged that Misbah-Yazdi gave a fatwa permitting nukes, contradicting Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei. The problem: Khamenei is the Supreme Jurisprudent and commander in chief of the armed forces, so it doesn't matter if some ayatollah contradicts him. He makes the calls. Etc., etc. Tiresome and predictable attempts to muddy the waters.

By the way, check out the Iran Freedom Concert and the Iranian students' petition against human rights abuses in the Islamic Republic and repression of the student movement.

Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder traces the increased US bombing of Iraq, especially of the Sunni Arab areas. He writes that bombing raids are up 50 percent in 5 months and that 18 cities have been struck this year:

A review of military data shows that daily bombing runs and jet-missile launches have increased by more than 50 percent in the past five months, compared with the same period last year. . . The numbers also show that U.S. forces dropped bombs on more cities during the last five months than they did during the same period a year ago. Air strikes a year ago struck at least nine cities, but were mostly concentrated in and around the western city of Fallujah. This year, U.S. warplanes have struck at least 18 cities.

One of the many drawbacks of contemporary warfare is that we almost never get any actual images of these bombings. I have seen some footage on Aljazeera, but not on US channels. I remember seeing a community center near Karabila taken out altogether. It was obviously the nicest biggest building in the town. I couldn't imagine that bombing made any friends for the US.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that Ayatollah Husain Ismail al-Sadr, a relatively liberal Shiite cleric, is hosting a conference of Sunni, Shiite, Arab, Kurdish and other clerics in Kadhimiyah, which aims at issuing a joint fatwa or legal ruling that inter-sectarian killings are religiously forbidden.

Nearly 200 Iraqi academics have been assassinated during the past 3 years, raising fears of the emigration of large numbers of needed white collar professionals.

Sectarian rivalries and tensions have invaded campus life in Iraq. Universities were once centers of secular Arab and Iraqi nationalism.

Iraq's electricity production has fallen to a 3-year low, in large part because of a successful guerrilla tactic of sabotage. They are besieging Baghdad with regard to fuel and electricity, demoralizing the most politically central portion of the population-- the 6 million inhabitants of the capital, a fourth of the country. The Bush administration may need Iran's help to bail them out this summer . . .

The Future of Iraq Project of the State Department, run by Tom Warrick for 2 years before the invasion, is now up on the Web. Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith tossed it in the trash can because they saw it as a blueprint for the US running Iraq for a while. They, in contrast, wanted just to turn Iraq immediately over to Ahmad Chalabi, whom they flew to the country in US military planes with 570 (unfortunately unarmed) Gucci revolutionaries.

The Future of Iraq suggested it might be necessary to take concrete steps to restore security and prosperity to Iraq. How much better was the Rumsfeld Plan-- imperial puppetry and chaos.
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Quran Quote of the Day on Peace

Speaking of converts to Islam from other religions, the Quran praises them for their faith, charity and good works. Of course, since they come from another community, they still have friends and relatives who might disapprove of the new religion of Islam. They might insult the Muslims. How to deal with this?

28:55, And when they hear vain talk, they turn away from it and say: "To us our deeds, and to you yours; peace be to you: we do not seek out the ignorant."

The response is to wish those who are taunting the new Muslims well, and to express a desire for peaceful co-existence. "To us our deeds, and to you yours." Each group, Muslim and non-Muslim, may practice as they please. "Peace be to you," they say.
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More Bombs Kill 11, Wound 40
Muqtada Damns Rumsfeld

There was more violence on Monday in Baghdad, according to AP:

' Bomb blasts in Baghdad and north of the capital - many of them targeting Iraqi police patrols - killed at least 11 more people Monday and wounded more than 40. They included a U.S. soldier killed in a roadside bombing in east Baghdad, the military said. A U.S. Marine was reported killed Sunday in the western insurgent-plagued province of Anbar. '

Angry Shiites in Sadr City appear to have strung up 4 Sunni Arabs and hung them from lamp posts, after the attacks on Sunday.

The governor of largely Sunni Arab Salahuddin Province barely escaped assassination on Monday.

Young Shiite nationalist leader Muqtada al-Sadr said Monday that Iraq is in a state of civil war. He responded to guerrilla provocations against Sadr City, with bombings and mortars having killed over 50 persons there Sunday, by ordering his Mahdi Militia not to engage in reprisals.

Like many Iraqi and Arab observers, Muqtada was shocked when US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said last week that the US military would not intervene in an Iraqi civil war, leaving that to Iraqi forces.

' "May God damn you," Sadr said of Rumsfeld. "You said in the past that civil war would break out if you were to withdraw, and now you say that in case of civil war you won't interfere." '

Cole: I have to admit, it is hard to see what use it is to have US soldiers in Iraq if they won't be deployed in a genuine national emergency.

Al-Hayat reports [Ar.] that Sunni Arab leaders Adnan Dulaimi and Salih Mutlak have begun speaking of a convergence of interests between them and the United States. Al-Hayat say its sources tell it that the US now feels that aligning with the Sunni Arabs against the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance is a way of offsetting Iranian influence in Iraqi affairs.

Mutlak said he was sure that the Americans are serious this time, and would seek a government of national unity.

The British are withdrawing 800 troops from Iraq. They had about 8,000 there, so this is ten percent. Although the Blair government is being careful not to depict the drawdown as the beginning of a complete British withdrawal, that seems the only possible interpretation. Although it is being implied that Iraqi army troops can pick up the slack, that seems highly unlikely. Iraqi troops stationed in the south where the British are, are probably overwhelmingly Shiites, with local loyalties. The police are even more highly infiltrated.

Given how close Iraq came to civil war in late February, the British are probably eager to get their soldiers out of there. If there were a bloodbath, there is some danger that they would just be massacred. Even a well-armed force of 8000 could not stand against millions.

The memos of John Sawers from April-July of 2003 in Baghdad show the alarm of the British at what seemed to them the chaotic American administration of Iraq.
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80 Killed, over 200 Wounded in Black Sunday


Dawn estimates that mortar attacks and bombings in Iraq killed 80 persons on Sunday. Other sources suggest the number of wounded may exceed 200. Some 52 of the dead were killed by carbombings at markets in Shiite Sadr City, east Baghdad. The violence is aimed at provoking sectarian warfare, in hopes it would force the US out and pave the way for a coup by the guerrillas.


Courtesy KarbalaNews.net.

Al-Hayat interprets the attacks as a setback for Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Militia, which had announced that they would provide security in Sadr City.

Al-Zaman reports that the maneuverings of political blocs in Iraq during the past days did not produce any tangible resolution of the current crisis. Prime Ministerial candidate Ibrahim Jaafari attempted to reduce tensions by announcing that he is committed to the principle of federalism, rather than centralized government control.
The opening of parliament was moved up to Thursday, to avoid an overlap with the commemoration of the 40th day mourning period after the anniversary of the martyrdom of Imam Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad.

After a meeting with Jalal Talabani, Ibrahim Jaafari held a press conference in which he remained committed to his candidacy for the post of prime minister. He said that the United Iraqi Alliance had elected him by party vote, and in parliamentary democracies, that is the way these things are settled. He did however attempt to mollify his Kurdish foes by reaffirming his commitment to all the articles of the constitution, one of which calls for a referendum in 2007 in Kirkuk, which the Kurds hope to win. The Kurdish politicians suspect that Jaafari is trying to figure out a way to keep them from getting oil-rich Kirkuk to join their provincial confederacy.

Adnan Mufti, the speaker of the Kurdistan regional parliament, told al-Hayat that he continued to suspect Jaafari of being unsympathetic to Kurdish states' rights vis-a-vis the federal government.

Three years after the US military conquered Baghdad Airport, it is still not secure. US Embassy personnel have been forbidden to fly civilian airliners in and out of it after explosives were discovered there. And they still do those corkscrew landings, just in case there is a guerrilla around with a shoulder-held missile.

[Ar.] Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that the Iraqi Labor Ministry has announced that unemployment in the capital has reached an unprecedented 132,000. Persistent unemployment is dangerous since it plays into the guerrilla insurgency. The unemployed can be given small stipends to join up, and their economic despair makes them easier to convince. But not that so much of Baghdad's economy must be in the marginal sectors (peddling, smuggling, etc.) that I'm not sure what the statistic above really means.

SA also reports a study that examines the negative effect of the current situation on Iraqi women. They are 62% of the population, and face the practical effects of the unemployment and poverty mentioned above, which contributes to higher rates of divorce and abandonment, as well as of prostitution.

The Bush administration keeps crowing about having liberated Iraqi women. It is to weep.

Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor give a whole host of reasons for which Donald Rumsfeld should be fired and if possible put on trial. They review the horrible mistakes made during the 2003 Iraq War, in which Rumsfeld showed repeated incomprehension that the Fedayee Saddam were getting up a guerrilla war against the US forces, and did bizarre things like cancelling the deployment of 16,000 troops and flying Ahmad Chalabi with 575 unarmed "freedom fighters" into the war theater, to give the latter a Karzai-like leg up in the race to become ruler of Iraq.

Revisionist historians of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but Bush administration good will. Two historians dispute Bush's and Cheney's lies about how the Iraq War began.

For those with strong stomachs, here are the photos from Iraq that the American news organizations mostly decline to print. Warning: graphic and disturbing, just as you would expect from a war.

After spending $40 billion a year on intelligence, the American public discovers that some Chicago reporters with no more than an internet connection can turn up the names of 2600 CIA operatives, many of them supposedly covert, along with internal Agency phone numbers and the names of dummy air charter coporations used by the CIA.
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Quran Verse of the Day on Peace

Chapter 25 of the Quran, "The Criterion" (al-Furqan), came to the Prophet Muhammad when he was still a preacher in Mecca (circa 610-622 AD), before the Meccans became so hostile and bloodthirsty that the Muslims had to leave for the nearby city of Yathrib, which became known as the City of the Prophet (Madinat an-Nabi) or Medina.

The Criterion lays out toward the end of its 77 verses a vision of the pious believer. That has to do first of all with wishing others peace.

25:63:

The worshippers of the All-Merciful are they who tread gently upon the earth, and when the ignorant address them, they reply, "Peace!"

The small Muslim community in Mecca faced much harassment and persecution. The "ignorant" in this verse are the militant polytheists who hate the monotheistic message of Islam. What they "speak" to the Muslims is abuse and taunts. The early Muslims viewed the times of pagan dominance as the Age of Ignorance (al-Jahiliyyah).

One name for God in Islam is al-Rahman, or the All-Merciful. This verse chooses that epithet for the divine, it seems to me quite deliberately in this context. The Muslims are the worshippers of the All-Merciful. It is implied that they are expected to exemplify this divine attribute in their own lives, and to show mercy, compassion and forebearance to others. (The root r*h*m from which al-Rahman derives implies all of these characteristics).

So what do they do when the "ignorant" Meccans curse them, taunt them, and harass them?

They reply, "Peace be upon you." They wish their tormentors peace, and in so doing they pledge their own nonviolence toward them.

In this phase of the development of the Islamic community, in Mecca, the pagans have not yet taken up arms against the Muslims. And the Muslims, in turn, are turning the other cheek, behaving with extreme restraint, and greeting harsh treatment with compassion and wishes of peace.

The subsequent verses go on to sketch out elements of the spiritual life before coming back to issues of peace and violence: The verses describe the ideal Muslims:

25

64. They pass the night in adoration of their Lord, prostrating themselves and then rising.

65. They say, "Our Lord, avert from us the torment of hell. Its torture is ruinous.

66. It is an evil place and abode."

67. When they spend, they are neither spendthrifts nor miserly, but keep to a golden mean.

68. They do not call on any deity other than the one God. They do not kill a person, the taking of whose blood God has forbidden, except for just cause. They do not commit adultery. Those who commit these acts must pay. Their torment on the Judgment Day will be doubled, and they will be consigned to eternal abasement--

69. Unless they repent, have faith, and do righteous works. For such as these, God changes their evil deeds into good works. God is forgiving and compassionate.

These verses recommend nighttime prayer, fear of hellfire, balanced spending habits, and belief in only one God. They forbid murder and adultery. Since both of these are torts, the Quran recognizes that they must be punished. Typically in seventh-century Mecca, the wrongdoer would pay blood money or guilt money to the aggrieved party. But the Quran requires more than just the retirement of a debt to the injured family. It demands repentance, faith, and good works in redemption. These reorientations of the will can have a transformative effect, and lead to divine forgiveness.

These verses from The Criterion define the Muslim community as peaceful, as wishing even enemies peace, and as forbidding bloodshed except in self-defense.
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Breaking News: Massive Bombings in Baghdad

A string of carbombings in Baghdad Sunday killed three or four dozen people and wounded over a hundred. Two of the big blasts targeted the poor Shiites of Sadr City, who have proven in the past especially willing to engage in reprisal killings against Sunni Arabs. It seems likely that this is the guerrillas' further attempt to bait them into sectarian civil war.

More later.
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Khalilzad to Muqtada: 'You Owe Us.'
Sunni Arabs meet Shiites

A director of state-owned al-Iraqiyah television was assassinated on Saturday in Baghdad. There was also a bombing near a mosque in the small northern town of Yathrib that killed 2 and wounded 1. In the wake of this further killing of a journalist, the journalists' guild is asking permission for its members to carry arms, according to al-Sharq al-Awsat.

Al-Hayat carries and interview with [Ar.] US ambassador in Baghdad Zalmay Khalilzad has urged Iraqi politicians to stop worrying so much which cabinet or other post they will get in the new government and come together to form it without delay.

He said

*that he believed that the increase in guerrilla attacks has been timed to disrupt the formation of a new government.

*that Iraqi politicians lack a full awareness of the seriousness of the crisis and are concentrating too much on the exact distribution of posts among blocs and even individuals. Because of the crisis, they should understand that Iraq's welfare must come first.

*The delay in the formation of the government derives from the politicians being busy with distributing government positions among themselves. They should make some key compromises to move things along.

*Asked if there is a relationship between the American promise of a veto on a purely sectarian government, and the subsequent demand by other blocs that the candidate for prime minister (Ibrahim Jaafari) of the United Iraqi Alliance be dropped, he replied that given the sacrifices of treasure and blood by America for Iraq, the success of Iraq is the success of America, and its failure is America's failure. This means that the country requires a non-sectarian government. He does not mean only Shiites, rather all the parties, including the Kurds and the Sunnis. They need a government of national unity and they need to be government officials rather than representatives of their ethnic group. This is what he meant by his remarks; it has nothing to do with Ibrahim Jaafari as a person.

*Asked if Paul Bremer hadn't begun the practice of distributing posts by ethnicity, Khalilzad declined to comment on his predecessor. He said that since he arrived last summer, he had concentrated on including the Sunni Arabs in the political process and urged them to give up violence and to decline to support "al-Qaeda."

*Talks with the guerrilla groups are ongoing, and he is optimistic about their success. The next step is to talk to the "Resistance." He distinguishes between them and the "terrorists."

*He distinguishes between the armed Resistance and other groups, including Saddamis, takfiris [radical Sunnis who excommunicate other Muslims], and followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. These are terrorists. He will talk, however, to the armed Resistance, which wants the welfare of Iraq. They have objections to the Iraqi government and to the American presence, but he wants to assure them that the Americans are not interested in a permanent war.

*He declines to speak specifically on how successful the talks have been, but wants to tell the Resistance that the ground is shifting under their feet, and that in any case they simply need have no fear of a permanent American presence. "We don't want to stay in Iraq." The US just wants a successful, democratic Iraq. After the recent elections, in which all parties took part, there can be no legitimate Resistance.

*Asked about his comment on the US invasion of Iraq having opened a Pandora's box, Khalilzad says that his intent was only to alert the American public to how difficult and important was the mission in Iraq. Iraq has neighbors, who intervene. And it has internal ethnic factions, some of whom are stuck in the past and want revenge.

*Stability is unlikely to come for some time. The US is willing to help speed up its advent. It will come faster with a national unity government and the appointment of competent cabinet ministers. Cabinet posts shouldn't be serving the Kurds or the Shiites or the Sunnis.

*The US has conducted one inquiry into the secret prison of Jadiriyah run by the Ministry of the Interior, where torture was documented, and has handed the report to the prime minister. It is up to the PM to seek indictments.

*Asked about the entry of the Sadr Movement into parliamentary politics, he says, "We believe that participation in the political process is an excellent thing. But it brings with it responsibility, as well--the responsibility to act through the political process and within its conditions and rules. That means you cannot maintain militias, and you must not employ violence as a means to attaining your political objectives. I have heard Muqtada al-Sadr's comments with regard to the Coalition forces, and I want to send him the following message:

1. Coalition forces are present in Iraq at the invitation of the government, of which he is part. He has ministers in this government, and the majority voted to ask for this. You cannot be part of the government and then deliver speeches from the other side demanding that we depart.

2. I want to remind him that the Saddam regime killed his father, and that the United States saved the Iraqi people from Saddam's regime. Without the efforts of the United States, Saddam would be ruling right now, and his sons and grandsons after him would rule Iraq. He is indebted to us, and should thank the American people for what they have done. I believe that without us, his life would have been in danger. That is the message."

[Cole: This is all fine as far as it goes, but it is going to be difficult to get past with Muqtada the fact that Paul Bremer and Gen. Rick Sanchez announced in spring 2004 that they wanted to "kill or capture" him. That makes it harder to convince him that the Americans saved his life. By the way, under what US law are such decrees issued by American officials?]

Muqtada al-Sadr recently attempted to distance himself from Sunni Arab hard liners, in an interview on al-Arabiyah, according to the Washington Post:

' "I have not heard them lately asking for an end to the occupation or asking for a timetable for withdrawal of occupation troops," al-Sadr said, ticking off demands that he has made for nearly three years. "Nor have I heard them demanding the execution of Saddam Hussein or speeding up the trial. I have not heard them very clearly condemning the Sunni extremists." '

Leaders of the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite religious parties, met Saturday with leaders of the Iraqi Accord Front, the Sunni Arab religious parties. They are seeking to break the gridlock in the formation of a new government.

The Sunni religious coalition had suspended its negotiations with other parties in the wake of Shiite attacks on Sunnis and Sunni mosques after the bonbing of the Askari shrine. They are now coming back to the table. But spokesman Zafir al-`Ani said that the IAF still wants the Shiites to dump Ibrahim Jaafari as their candidate for prime minister, according to al-Sharq al-Awsat. Last week, 137 members of parliament said that they would not allow Jaafari to be seated. The problem is that you need 184 to form a government, and you need 138 to have a mjority in parliament, so 137 won't do it.

Dr. Salman al-Jumaili, an Iraqi Accord Front spokesman, said on Aljazeera that the Sunni Arabs back Kurdish President Jalal Talabani for a second term. There had been speculation that the Sunni Arabs might press for the post of president for themselves.

Sometimes if you catch them when they are young and frustrated, soldiers on leave will tell you exactly what they think about the Iraq situation. Words like "pointless," "they hate us," "rubbish," and "another Northern Ireland" trip off the tongue.

Another British soldier says he quit Iraq because the American military kept asking him to do things, in joint operations, that he considered illegal or poor counter-insurgency tactics.

AP concludes that as the Iraq War enters its fourth year (imagine, we really have to write those words), hopes for US withdrawal and the stability that would make it possible are much diminished.

We have two English-language surveys of the sermons on Friday in Iraq, a place where public opinion is shaped.

Ellen Knickmeyer of the Washington Post reports that street crowds and mosque congregations are very thin, despite the lifting of the curfew. Only a few hundred worshippers came to the popular Sunni mosque, Umm al-Qura. She also reports a good deal of sectarian tension in the sermons. A preacher in Tikrit blamed Iran for recent violence. Shiite Jalal al-Din Saghir blamed the Iraqi media for focusing on Sunni Arab deaths during the communal rights in the wake of the Feb. 22 shrine bombing. He said that lots of Shiites were killed, and their deaths went unreported.

The LA Times, in contrast, maintained that sermons on Friday in Iraq tended to urge national unity and the avoidance of sectarian war.

Open Source Center paraphrases of items in the Iraqi Press published March 11 (i.e. covering Mar. 10):

' Al-Mashriq publishes on page 2 a 300-word report citing the governor of Al-Najaf confirming that his visit to Switzerland and Canada was successful. The governor was acquainted with the federal systems in both countries and suggested Al-Najaf as the capital of the central federal region. . .

Al-Zaman carries on the front page a 340-word report citing Mustafa Uthman Isma'il, Amr Musa's envoy to Iraq, confirming efforts to form a fund for the reconstruction of Iraq under the auspices of Arab League. . .

Al-Bayyinah on 9 March carries on page 2 a 600-word report denying the split in Al-Da'wah Party.

Al-Furat carries on the front page a 250-word report citing Al-Sadr trend member Fadil al-Shar' and Iraqi National Bloc member Ibrahim al-Janabi considering Donald Rumsfeld's declarations that US forces will not intervene if a civil war erupts in Iraq as a change in US policy. . .

Al-Furat carries on page 2 a 120-word report that students of Al-Mustansiriyah University conducted a two-day sit-in calling on political forces to quickly form the government. . .

Al-Mashriq publishes on the front page an 80-word report citing Muqtada al-Sadr deciding yesterday to postpone the demonstration which was scheduled for today, for security reasons and to save demonstrators' lives. . .

Al-Bayan publishes on the front page a 400-word report on the cabinet's Banking Committee meeting presided over by Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi yesterday, 10 March, to discuss ways to improve services in Iraqi banks. . .

Al-Mashriq publishes on page 4 a 150-word report citing Baghdad Mayor Sabir al-Isawi saying that drinking water shortage problem in Baghdad will only be solved by implementing huge water projects.

Al-Mashriq publishes on page 5 a 700-word report that markets in Iraq have been affected by the curfew imposed by Interior Ministry.

Al-Mashriq publishes on page 5 a 30-word report citing Ibrahim al-Ja'fari revealing that Turkey will increase Iraq's share of water to 200 cubic meters per second.

Al-Mashriq publishes on page 5 a 500-word report on Iraqis' sufferings due to lack of fuel. . .

Al-Furat carries on page 2 a 550-word article by Hasan Hatim al-Mathkur strongly criticizing Americans and their scheme in Iraq to humiliate and kill Iraqi people. . .

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Quran Quote of the Day on Peace

The Muslims say "hello" with the phrase "as-Salamu `alaykum"-- "peace be upon you." Once the pagan, polytheistic Meccan tribes started attacking the Muslims and trying to wipe them out, the question was raised of how to repond when a pagan not connected to the Meccans greeted a Muslim.

The instinct was to refuse to accept the sincerity of the greeting, "peace be upon you," which was also a pledge of non-violence toward the person greeted. That tendency was reinforced by greed, since if the Muslims fought these pagan strangers and won, they would legitimately be able to demand loot from them. (This was a tribal, often nomadic society, and that was the custom when tribes raided each other).

The Quran settles this dilemma. It says that Muslims are not to taunt pagans who greet them with "peace be upon you" by shouting, "You're not a Muslim!" They are to accept the sincerity of the greeting, and are not to get so greedy for spoils that they let it affect their judgment of others. When you are offered peace, take it.

Quran 4:94:

. . . Do not say to one who offers you peace, "You are not a believer," seeking the spoils of this life. For God has abundant treasure. You used to be like them, after all, and then God blessed you.

Neither 4:94, nor 4:90, quoted on Friday, imply that pagans must give up their paganism in order to be at peace with, and treated well by Muslims. Rather, the Quran takes a two-track approach. As a monotheistic scripture, it condemns idol worship and warns its practitioners of hell-fire in the afterlife. But as a matter of everyday, this-worldly practice, the Quran commands Muslims to live in peace with pagans who do not make war on them and who approach them in peace.

This is the answer to the reader who asked about the Quran's attitude to atheists. The Quran condemns unbelief as spiritually wrong and as leading to perdition in the next life. But the Quran says Muslims should live in peace with nonviolent pagans in this world, if the pagans are inclined to coexistence with the Muslims.

Readers asked me about the long list of militant verses collected by polemicists against Islam. The answer is that those verses refer to the Meccan power elite in the 620s AD, who were waging a determined military, political and economic war to defeat the Muslims holed up in nearby Medina, and wipe them and the new religion out. It is frankly dishonest to take a verse about, say, the battle of Badr against the militant Meccan pagans ("unbelievers") and imply that it refers to contemporary American Christians or American atheists for that matter. What was objectionable to the Quran in practical terms about the Meccan unbelievers was their murderousness toward Muslims, not their attachment to their star goddesses. Muslims are instructed to be nice to unbelievers who don't share that murderousness.

Note that I am explicating the Quran itself. Later Muslim commentators have interpreted it in many ways, and much Muslim law and practice are based on later customs and traditions. I am here deploying the technique of the hermeneutical circle, using texts from the book to illuminate other texts from the book. This strategy makes sense because we don't have any works we can be sure are as early as, and contemporaneous with the Quran. The biographies of the Prophet were produced nearly two centuries later and more.

Much later Quran interpretation was done by persons who lived in militaristic, feudal societies, or who lived in empires where Muslims were a ruling caste, and their interpretations were shaped by these circumstances. They also tended to lack the techniques of contextual and causal thinking typical of contemporary academic writing. The Quran was produced at a time when the Muslims were a small group, and persecuted by the richer and more powerful Meccan pagans, and the Quran is not picky about the beliefs of the friendly tribes willing to be at peace with the Muslims.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Peace and Love in the Quran

A list of postings from Informed Comment on this subject.

Quran 25:63.

Quran 28:55

Quran 5:82.

Quran 4:90

Quran 4:94

qqqq
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

20 Killed in Guerrilla Violence
Al-Enzy Warns US on Interference

Mariam Karouny of Reuters reports that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani of Najaf played a central role in keeping the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance together during the recent Kurdish/Arab/US attempt to fracture its unity and unseat its candidate for prime minister, Ibrahim Jaafari.

Steve Negus of the Financial Times looks at the role of the disputed oil city of Kirkuk in the recent attempt by Kurdish leaders to unseat Jaafari.

Mariam Karouny of Reuters says that the failure to form a government expeditiously may have a long-term negative impact on the Iraqi petroleum industry. Iraq pumped only 1.3 million barrels a day in February. Before the war it did 2.8 million a day, even with substantial international sanctions and disabilities. She says that there is a danger that the internationl petroleum market will discount Iraq as a regular and reliable major supplier, seeing it instead as a reserve. The disaster of a constitution that was hastily drafted last summer and passed by referendum on Oct. 15 also creates a worrisome provincial claim on new oil finds, potentially unleashing chaos in the industry.

Zalmay Khalilzad is calling for a convocation of top Iraqi leaders to work out their differences, "possibly away from Baghdad."

Abdul Karim al-Enzy [al-`Anizi], leader of one of the two major wings of the Da`wa Party and minister of National Security, has given an interview to the intrepid and courageous Paul McGeough of the Sydney Morning Herald. Al-Enzy called on US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad to stop interfering in Iraq's internal affairs. He defended Minister of the Interior Bayan Jabr, a fellow Shiite, from US criticism. In the aftermath of the bombing of the Askari Shrine in Samarra, Shiites are in no mood to compromise on issues of security, and resent what they see as Khalilzad's attempt to push around the Shiite coalition. They are also suspicious that the US wants to divide and rule Iraq.

Andrew Arato looks at the role of the Iraqi constitution in the current crisis.

The Associated Press reports on the violence in Iraq on Friday:

' A truck bomb ripped through a line of cars at a checkpoint in Fallujah as bombings and shootings across Iraq Friday killed at least 20 people, including a U.S. Marine . . . The U.S. military identified the five killed in the Fallujah attack as a U.S. Marine, three members of an Iraqi family and an Iraqi soldier. [Later reports spoke of 11 dead in this attack.] Car bombs also killed three people in Samarra . . . Authorities in Baghdad and south of the capital discovered the bodies of eight more men - many of them blindfolded, handcuffed and shot in the back of the head. '

Alexandra Zavis with Qassim Abdul Zahra of AP report that the US military has turned over responsibility for Sadr City to units of the new Iraqi Army. There is substantial pessimism, however, that these mostly Shiite troops will supplant or operate independently from the Mahdi Army militia of Muqtada al-Sadr, which is powerful in the 3 million-strong Baghdad city district.

Kudos to Donna Abu-Nasr for taking up one of the more important stories in the region--the question of whether Sunni-Shiite violence in Iraq will spill over into the Oil Gulf. She doesn't find any immediate evidence that it has, but everyone there is clearly nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

Work is going ahead on the Najaf International Airport, which will cater to Shiite pilgrims: ' "Religious tourism could be bigger than oil," says Riyadh Bahr Uloum, a member of the Najaf provincial council, ' Jane's writes.

John Burns of the New York Times, always a clear-eyed and tough analyst, has turned pretty decisively pessimistic about Iraq's prospects.

Robert Cornwell examines the intellectual collapse of the Neoconservative movement and the apostasy of most of its supporters, with regard to the wisdom of the Iraq War.

Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika is now calling for the withdrawal of foreign troops from Iraq. Bouteflika has credibility as an analyst of such situations. The Algerians themselves fought a bloody guerrilla insurgency to get the French out of their country. And they in the 1990s they fell into a civil war between Islamists and secularists. Bouteflika must know the risks, but he appears to have decided that the US and other foreign troops are making things worse rather than better. I'd be interested in seeing his more extended comments on the issue.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Quran Quote of the Day on Peace

Speaking of the revealed scripture, the Quran, that book says:

[5:16] With it, God guides those who follow his good-pleasure to the paths of peace, and he delivers them out of darkness into the light, with his permission. He guides them unto the straight path.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

11 Killed in Blasts
Talabani Forced to Delay Opening of Parliament

Aljazeera reports,

One of the deadly blasts on Thursday targeted an Iraqi army patrol in al-Amariyah, a middle-class neighbourhood in west Baghdad, killing nine civilians and wounding six, according to Major Falah al-Mohammedawi of the Interior Ministry.

At Yarmouk hospital in west Baghdad, a car bomb was detonated, killing at least two people and wounding 13 as they entered the clinic, according to police Lieutenant Thaer Mahmoud.

and adds, "Several other large blasts were heard in the capital on Thursday, but police only had details about one - a roadside bomb aimed at a police patrol in al-Jihad, a mostly Sunni western neighbourhood. Three bystanders were hurt."

It has gotten to the point in Baghdad that you just hear these huge blasts in the distance all the time, and even the Arab press can't always say exactly what happened.

Aljazeera also reports that the US military is now confirming that the 50 security guards of a firm owned by an uncle of Vice President Ghazi al-Yawir were kidnapped by persons unknown, who were wearing stolen uniforms of the special police commandos of the Ministry of the Interior. Most of them were from the mostly Sunni Arab Shamar tribe, to which the al-Yawirs belong. Many Shamar clans in the north form part of the guerrilla movement, but I am told that there was no reason to suspect this firm of being other than it represented itself. Obviously someone--probably hard line Shiites-- had suspicions about it, however.

The United Iraqi Alliance (Shiite religious parties) has forced President Jalal Talabani to postpone calling parliament until March 19. Talabani had planned to call the first session on March 12 and to attempt to force the UIA to change its choice of prime minister, Ibrahim Jaafari. Talabani, a Kurd, resented Jaafari's determination to stop Kurdistan from annexing the oil city of Kirkuk, and Jaafari's diplomacy with Turkey to that end. The UIA says that it will not drop Jaafari and has no intention of calling another party congress to reconsider their choice of prime minister.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that the delay, which is technically unconstitutional, was demanded by the Sadr Movement (30 seats) and the two branches of the Dawa Party (25 seats). Other factions disagreed, including the Virtue Party (15 seats), the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (30 seats) and some independents within the party (26 seats). But apparently the Sadrists and Da`wa prevailed on the UIA to close ranks behind the delay.

Salih Mutlak, a leader of the National Dialogue Council (11 seats; secular Sunni Arab), blamed all the delays in the formation of the new government on the flaws in the new constitution and the haste with which it was drafted. He said the major parties should quickly develop a strategy for ending the political impasse.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat's Ma`d Fayyad reports [Ar.] that a leader of the Da`wa Party insisted that the party would stand behind its leader, Ibrahim Jaafari, as candidate for prime minister.

He reports that an independent member of the United Iraqi Alliance heard Jaafari say that he is "a believer that this is a duty under the law, and that God and the people chose him for this position."*

Dr. Khidhir Abbas Hadi, a Da`wa Party official, said that the UIA had not considered any other candidate than its legal one, Jaafari. He added, "Jaafari respects the will of the masses, and the masses decided that he should be the head of the government. If he stepped aside from his candidacy, he would be disappointing the will of the masses, and he has not proposed any such step."

Asked about the statement attributed to Jaafari, Hadi said he had not heard exactly those phrases from Jaafari, but had heard him affirm his respect for the choice of the people.

Hadi said that the high Shiite religious leadership, including Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, had asked the United Iraqi Alliance to remain steadfast and strong.

Hadi said, "Jaafari has no intention of withdrawing his name-- that is not in the make-up of his personality."

A UIA member of parliament who requested confidentiality told Fayyad of Jaafari, "He said to me, 'God and the people have chosen me for this position.' " He added, "We know Jaafari, and when he insists on a position, he will not be moved from it easily. If right now, 50 Iraqis came out to demand that he maintain his candidacy, he would say, 'Look, all the Iraqis want me.' And if millions came out demanding his resignation, he would say, 'America instigated them against me.' "

Michael Schwartz explores the disintegration of Iraqi sovereignty at Tomdispatch.com, and Tom Englehardt writes an eloquent and acute introduction.

Al-Quds al-Arabi reports that [Ar.] Ninevah governor Duraid Muhammad Kashmula revealed that a 50 year old Iraqi man bought a 15 year old girl for $700, intending to make her his sex slave. Every time you think you've heard the worst possible thing about the new Iraq, some new horror--like the emergence of slavery-- rears its head.

Donald Rumsfeld berated history teachers, according to Arianna Huffington, for neglecting to call attention to the ways in which all war-time presidents have been unpopular, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The only problem is: it is not true. Somehow if you fight against a real threat and win, people maintain a high opinion of you. If you lie them into war and then botch it and drag them into a quagmire, they turn on you.

By the way, the recent Pentagon excuses for the Zogby poll showing 72% of US troops in Iraq want to see a quick withdrawal from that country-- that all soldiers in the field are unhappy about being there-- is also untrue. I'm sure that if you could have polled US troops in WW II after D-Day, they wouldn't have said we should withdraw from France and give up on the idea of making a drive on Berlin! Our guys in Iraq can't understand what their mission is any more, and their conviction that it has something to do with 9/11 is just the result of their listening to too many Cheney speeches full of deliberate falsehoods.

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

*[Cole: Oh, great. First God chose George W. Bush and whispered things in his ear. Then He chose Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and whispered things in his ear. Now we have yet another messianic, divinely appointed leader out to do God's will. If God really were choosing these people, couldn't He come up with better candidates? And if He is giving them advice, why isn't it better advice? I'd just like to caution all these political prophets that it is widely rumored among medieval observers, who were the real experts in things divine, that sometimes Satan manages to misrepresent himself to you as the voice of God. And sometimes the conviction that God is
speaking to and through you is not so much piety as the mortal sin of pride.]
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Quran Quote of the Day on Peace

The fourth chapter of the Quran, "Women," addressed the early Muslim community in Medina during the 620s, at a time when they were being attacked by the powerful pagan Meccans, who were trying to wipe them out. The Quran repeatedly commands the Muslims to defend themselves from these Meccan infidels and polytheists, who worshipped star goddesses (think Venus) and refused to permit the new monotheistic teachings of Muhammad. The Quran objects on spiritual grounds to the Meccans' polytheism, but it was only when the Meccans tried to ethnically cleanse the Muslims that it commanded them to fight back.

But there were non-Muslim, including pagan, tribes with whom the Muslims had reached peace treaties, with whom they were not at war. So the question arises-- what if a new non-Muslim tribe shows up in the area? Are the Muslims to treat them as enemies or not? Remember that they are pagans, or at least non-Muslims, and entering the war zone of Western Arabia. This is what the Quran says about pursuing warfare in these ambiguous circumstances:

[4:90] Exempt those who join a people with whom you have concluded a peace treaty, and those who come to you with hearts unwilling to fight you, nor to fight their relatives. Had God willed, he could have placed them in power over you and they would have made war on you. Therefore, if they leave you alone, refrain from fighting you, and offer you peace, then God gives you no way to go against them.

(Cole translation, influenced by several existing ones, but done from the Arabic text.)

The Quran lays down in 4:90 the rules governing such a situation. Muslims are not to fight tribes under these conditions:

1. If the new tribe joins up with a tribe in the area with which the Muslims are at peace, then the Muslims are to act peacefully toward the new one.

2. If the new tribe shows up in the region and lets the Muslims know that they have no desire to attack Medinah or the Muslims, then the Muslims are to act peacefully toward it. Some of these tribes may be related to the Muslim tribes of Medina, and that may be one reason they are inclined to peace. The inclination must be returned under these circumstances.

The Quran reminds the Muslims that they benefit from peace with the peaceful. If they had to fight all the tribes in Arabia, they might well be conquered. Returning peaceful intentions in kind is a sort of "social intelligence" that allowed Muslims to focus on the real threat, the profound hatred for them of the Meccans, while living at peace with the neutral Arabs.

The default in the Quran is therefore not aggressive warfare, something the book repeatedly condemns. Warfare is permitted in self-defense. But the default is to be at peace with those who are at peace with you.
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Bigotry toward Muslims and Anti-Arab Racism Grow in US;
Dubai and the Quran

The constant drumbeat of hatred toward Muslims and Arabs on the American Right, on television and radio and in the press, has gradually had its effect. This according to a Washington Post poll. Even in the year after September 11, a majority of Americans respected Islam and Muslims, but powerful forces in US society are determined to change that, and are gradually succeeding. As they win, Bin Laden also wins, since his whole enterprise was to "sharpen the contradictions" and provoke a clash of civilizations.

Some 25% of Americans now say they personally are prejudiced against Muslims. And 33% think that Islam as a religion helps incite violence against non-Muslims, up from 14% after September 11.

The Bush administration policy is to continually insinuate that the Muslim world is the new Soviet Union and full of sinister forces that require the US to go to war against them. But at the same time, America has warm relations with Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Senegal, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain, Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, etc., etc. When Saudi Arabia's then crown prince (now king) Abdullah came to the US, Bush brought him to the Crawford ranch, held hands with him and kissed him on each cheek.

This two-faced policy and self-contradictory rhetoric has contributed to growing hatred and bigotry toward Muslims in the US, which is no less worrisome than the hatred Jews faced in Europe in the 1920s. It is dangerous because of what it can become.

The subtext of bigotry and racism is what has blindsided the Bush administration with regard to the port deal for a company based in Dubai. Dubai is like the Fifth Avenue of the Middle East-- the place with the pricey shopping and the tall skyscrapers and the extravagant fashions. Dubai businessmen are no more likely to take over US ports and allow them to come to harm than US businessmen are. They want the deal in order to make money. Bush knows this very well. But since he has spent so much time fulminating against shadowy and sinister forces over there somewhere, he has spooked the American public and members of his own party.

The Big Lie eventually catches up with you.

The hatemongers are well known. Rupert Murdoch's Fox Cable News, Rush Limbaugh's radio program and its many clones, telebimbos like Ann Coulter, Evangelical leaders like Franklin Graham, Congressmen like Tom Tancredo, and a slew of far rightwing Zionists who would vote for Netanyahu (or Kach) if they lived in Israel-- Frank Gaffney, Daniel Pipes, Michael Rubin, David Horowitz, etc., etc. And finally, there are many Muslims who have an interest in whipping up anti-Islamic feeling. Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress helped maneuver the US into a war against Iraq with lies about a Saddam-al-Qaeda connection and illusory WMD. The dissident Islamic Marxist group, the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) is now placing equally false stories about Iran in the Western press and retailing them to Congress and the Pentagon.

The hatemongers think that the American public is sort of like a big stupid dog, and you can fairly easily "sic" it on whoever you like. Just tell them that X people are intrinsically evil and that the US needs to go to war to protect itself from them. Then they turn around and blame those of us who don't want our country reduced to footsoldiers in someone else's greedy crusade for being "unpatriotic."

All human beings are the same. They all have the same emotions. All laugh when happy and weep when sad. There are no broad civilizations that produce radically different behavior in human beings. All are capable of violence. (Christians killed tens of millions in the course of the 20th century, far, far more than did Muslims). Few commit much violence except in war. You can walk around any place in Cairo at 1 am perfectly safely, but cannot do that everywhere safely in many major US cities, including the nation's capital, Washington, DC. Even the idea of Islam as a cultural world or civilization opposed to the Christian West is a false construct. Eastern Mediterranean honor cultures (Greece, Bulgaria, Lebanon, Syria) have more in common with each other across the Christian-Muslim divide than either has in common with Britain or the US. And, Muslim states don't make their alliances by religion. Egypt was allied with the Soviet Union in the 1960s, then switched to the US in the 1970s and until the present. Four of the five non-NATO allies of the US are Muslim countries. Turkey is even a full NATO ally and fought along side the US in the Korean War.

Dangerous falsehoods are being promulgated to the American public. The Quran does not preach violence against Christians.

Quran 5:69 says (Arberry): "Surely they that believe, and those of Jewry, and the Christians, and those Sabeaans, whoso believes in God and the Last Day, and works righteousness--their wage waits them with their Lord, and no fear shall be on them, neither shall they sorrow."

In other words, the Quran promises Christians and Jews along with Muslims that if they have faith and works, they need have no fear in the afterlife. It is not saying that non-Muslims go to hell-- quite the opposite.

When speaking of the 7th-century situation in the Muslim city-state of Medina, which was at war with pagan Mecca, the Quran notes that the polytheists and Arabian Jewish tribes were opposed to Islam, but then goes on to say:

5:82. " . . . and you will find the nearest in love to the believers (Muslims) those who say: 'We are Christians.' That is because amongst them are priests and monks, and they are not proud."

So the Quran not only does not urge Muslims to commit violence against Christians, it calls them "nearest in love" to the Muslims! The reason given is their piety, their ability to produce holy persons dedicated to God, and their lack of overweening pride.

The tendency when reading the Quran is to read a word like "kafir" (infidel) as referring to all non-Muslims. But it is clear from a close study of the way the Quran uses the word that it refers to those who actively oppose and persecute Muslims. The word literally meant "ingrate" in ancient Arabic. So the polytheists ("mushrikun") who tried to wipe out Islam were the main referents of the word "infidel." Christians, as we see above, were mostly in a completely different category. The Christian Ethiopian monarch gave refuge to the Muslims at one point when things got hot in Mecca. The Quran does at one point speak of the "infidels" among the Jews and Christians (2:105: "those who committed kufr/infidelity from among the people of the Book.") But this verse only proves that it did not think they were all infidels, and it is probably referring to specific Jewish and Christian groups who joined with the Meccans in trying to wipe out the early Muslim community. (The Quran calls Jews and Christians "people of the book" because they have a monotheistic scripture).

People often also ask me about this verse:

[5:51] O you who believe, do not take Jews and Christians as friends; these are friends of one another. Those among you who ally themselves with these belong with them.

This is actually not a good translation of the original, which has a very specific context. In the Arabia of Muhammad's time, it was possible for an individual to become an honorary member or "client" of a powerful tribe. But of course, if you did that you would be subordinating yourself politically to that tribe. The word used in Arabic here does not mean "friend." It means "political patron" (wali). What the Quran is trying to do is to discourage stray Muslims from subordinating themselves to Christian or Jewish tribes that might in turn ally with pagan Mecca, or in any case might have interests at odds with those of the general Muslim community.

So the verse actually says:

[5:51] O you who believe, do not take Jews and Christians as tribal patrons; these are tribal patrons of one another. Those among you who become clients of these belong with them.

Since the Quran considers Christians nearest in love to Muslims, it obviously does not have an objection to friendship between the two. But apparently now it is some Christians who have that hateful attitude, of no friendship with "infidels."
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

24 Found Dead
Interior Minister Escapes Assassination

The transcript of my appearance on the Lehrer News Hour is now online.

Police patrols discovered 24 dead bodies in Baghdad on Wednesday, which had been strangled or shot. They were probably victims of sectarian reprisal killings. Another six were killed in bombings and other violence.

Iraqi special police commandos invaded the al-Rawafid security firm in Baghdad and arrested up to 50 workers. Aljazeera is reporting that police view the security firm as "under suspicion."

Interior Minister Bayan Jabr Sulagh barely escaped assassination on Wednesday. (He is in charge of the national police force).

Guerrillas killed two US Marines.

Al-Zaman says that the security situation has gotten so bad in Mosul, with constant kidnappings and violence, that provincial governor Kashmulah has decreed that ordinary citizens may carry around a pistol or even a Kalashnikov machine gun.

The US State Department in its annual Human Rights report noticed these problems with the new Iraqi government's human rights record (remember that the Bush administration presided over the installation of this government):

pervasive climate of violence
misappropriation of official authority by sectarian, criminal, terrorist, and insurgent groups
arbitrary deprivation of life
disappearances
torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment
impunity
poor conditions in pretrial detention facilities
arbitrary arrest and detention
denial of fair public trial
an immature judicial system lacking capacity
limitations on freedoms of speech, press, assembly, and association due to terrorist and militia violence
restrictions on religious freedom
large numbers of internally displaced persons (IDPs)
lack of transparency and widespread corruption at all levels of government
constraints on nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)
discrimination against women, ethnic, and religious minorities
limited exercise of labor rights

The report is detailed and worth reading.

Al-Bayyinah reports [Ar.] that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is encouraging the United Iraqi Alliance [Shiite religious parties] to maintain its unity and to abide by its internal party rules. He also called for national unity and for keeping the door of dialogue open. He was visited in Najaf by representatives of the two branches of the Da`wa Party (Shiite religious plaform).

KarbalaNews.net carries a communique from Sistani's office, saying that the Grand Ayatollah is maintaining his neutrality on the issue of the prime ministerial candidate.

KarbalaNews.net reports that [Ar.] Muqtada al-Sadr, the young Shiite nationalist cleric, held a press conference in which he said that he was confident that the crisis between the United Iraqi Alliance and the Kurdistan Alliance over the candidacy of Ibrahim Jaafari for prime minister could be quickly resolved.

Another member of the UIA, Baha' al-Din Fayyad, said that the first session of parliament might be held next Sunday, but that it would be pro forma and would not take up the issue of who should be prime minister.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat maintains that in a meeting last month between Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and the leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, it came up that Iran was exerting pressure for the United Iraqi Alliance to nominate Ibrahim Jaafari as its candidate for prime minister, and that the Sadr Movement threatened violence if the candidate was Adil Abdul Mahdi of SCIRI.

This report doesn't make sense to me. Baztab, an Iranian newspaper close to the hardliners, was clearly rooting for Abdul Mahdi, and SCIRI is closer to Tehran than Jaafari's London-based branch of the Da`wa Party.


Open Source Center paraphrases of the Iraqi Press for 7 March:

' Al-Bayyinah on 7 March carries on the front page a 170-word report citing Iraqi Al-Tawafuq Front candidate Iyad al-Samarra'i confirming negotiations with Unified Iraqi Coalition and Al-Sadr trend on the next government . . .

Al-Bayyinah on 7 March carries on the front page a 100-word report on the survey conducted by the newspaper which showed that 60 percent of polled Iraqis support Al-Ja'fari. . .

Al-Bayan carries on the front page a 700-word report on the pro-Al-Ja'fari demonstrations in Baghdad and other governorates yesterday, 7 March. . .

Al-Da'wah on 7 March carries on the front page a 75-word report that Karbala's inhabitants staged a demonstration supporting Ibrahim al-Ja'fari.

Al-Da'wah on 7 March carries on the front page a 150-word report citing Unified Iraqi Coalition member Husayn al-Shahristani saying that political forces' attempts to replace Ibrahim al-Ja'fari have nothing to do with democracy. . . [Shahristani is close to Grand Ayatollah Sistani].

Al-Furat carries on the front page a 350-word report citing well-informed political sources saying that disputes continue between political forces with regard to the formation of the next government, which can be solved by an agreement between Unified Iraqi Coalition and Iraqi Al-Tawafuq Front. . . [I.e. Shiite fundamentalists and Sunni Arab fundamentalists . . .]

Al-Zaman carries on page 2 a 100-word report citing Muzaffar Arsalan, chairman of Iraqi Turkoman Autonomy Organization, demanding autonomy for Turkomans. . .

Al-Sabah al-Jadid carries on page 2 a 100-word report citing a source at Maysan Governorate Council saying that the council has decided to suspend its relations with British troops until the troops hand over the names of the soldiers who abused Iraqis. . .

Al-Basa'ir carries on the front page a 120-word report citing chairman of Iraqi Islamic Party accusing Iran of fuelling sectarian sedition and a civil war in Iraq. . .

Al-Basa'ir carries on page 2 a 600-word report that Association of Muslim Scholars took part in the "Solidarity with Iraqi resistance" festival in Amman. . .

Al-Hawzah runs on page 1 a 200-word report on the attacks against Shiites in Kirkuk by takfiris ["excommunicators'].

Al-Furat carries on page 2 a 270-word report citing a security source at Diyala Police saying that US "occupation" forces arrested two persons during a raid on Al-Sadr Bureau in the governorate.

Al-Mu'tamar carries on page 2 a 320-word report citing construction and housing minister saying that construction projects in Al-Anbar have stopped due to deterioration in security in the governorate. . .

Al-Basa'ir carries on the front page a 150-word report that US and Interior Ministry forces launched raids on Zawba' tribes in Al-Fallujah.

Al-Basa'ir carries on the front page an 80-word report citing an authorized media spokesman for Association of Muslim Scholars denouncing the US raid on Al-Dulu'iyah since 3 March.

Al-Basa'ir carries on page 2 a 200-word report citing a source at Interior Ministry saying that Al-Ja'fari's government has decided to arrest all Sunni religious clerics who call on people to "resist occupation".

Al-Bayyinah on 7 March carries on page 4 a 120-word report citing Al-Sadr aide Hazim al-A'raji confirming that Al-Sadr trend has opened two bureaus in Baghdad to send back the Shiite families evicted following the Samarra bombings to their districts.

Al-Bayyinah on 7 March devotes all of page 5 to a report on the sufferings of Shiite refugees who were evicted from Abu-Ghurayb and other Sunni districts following the Samarra bombings. . .

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Kurdistan Islamic Party Will Vote Against Jaafari

The USG-funded Open Source Center (formerly the Foreign Broadcast Information Service or FBIS) translates a Kurdish news article indicating that the Kurdistan Islamic Party will vote against Jaafari and generally will vote with the Kurdistan Alliance. (The latter announcement contradicts an earlier statement from the party.)

' Kurdish Islamic Party Says Will Not Vote For Al-Ja'fari in Parliament
Unattributed report: "If the Kurdistan Alliance does not vote for Al-Ja'fari, Yekgirtu will not vote as well"
Hawlati
Wednesday, March 8, 2006 T17:26:39Z


A high-ranking member of the (Kurdistan Islamic) Union (KIU) has said that regardless of their disagreements with the Kurdistan Alliance (KA) list, their list would not vote in favor of Al-Ja'fari for the post of prime minister in Iraqi parliament. He said that they would take the same stance of the KA.

The head of the KIU Political Bureau, Hiwa Sabir, told Hawlati that although they had shown solidarity with the KA over destiny-shaping issues, the two sides failed to reach an agreement to form a joint list after a series of meetings. However, they will cooperate in Iraqi parliament.

Hiwa Sabir added: "We will not join the KA because they rejected all of our requests, especially our main call for changing the KA's name to Kurdistani Bloc."
(Description of Source: Al-Sulaymaniyah Hawlati in Sorani Kurdish -- weekly independent newspaper)

Compiled and distributed by NTIS, US Dept. of Commerce. All rights reserved.

City/Source: Al-Sulaymaniyah
DIALOG Update Date: 20060308; 19:51:11 EST
Original Source Language: Sorani Kurdish '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Khalilzad meets al-Hakim

Reuters reports several bombs and attacks in Baghdad, as well as in Baqubah, Khalis, Kirkuk and elsewhere, leaving over a dozen dead. Significant items include the assassination of 3 members of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Militia in Baqubah; the blowing up of a Sunni shrine in Tikrit; and a mortar attack on the offices in Baghdad of the National Dialogue Council (Sunni Arab neo-Baathists). [NDC leader Salih Mutlak said last summer that you couldn't find a better party for Iraq than the Baath).

US ambassador in Baghdad Zalmay Khalilzad met Tuesday with the Shiite clerical leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim to discuss ways of defusing the current crisis.

Al-Hayat reports [Ar.] that leaders of the Sadr Movement met with President Jalal Talabani and other Kurdish leaders in an attempt to resolve the current crisis over the formation of a new government. Fadil al-Shara` suggested that the Kurds accept Ibrahim Jaafari as prime minister "as long as he is monitored by parliament and by the Sadr bloc."

Faraj al-Haydari of the Kurdistan Democratic Party said that the Kurdistan Alliance position, that Jaafari must go, has not changed.

ABC News quotes retired Army Maj. Gen. William L. Nash, a former military commander in Bosnia-Herzegovina, on how Iraq is already in a low-intensity civil war, and how Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's continued state of denial about this is putting the US in danger:

' "We're in a civil war now; it's just that not everybody's joined in," said retired Army Maj. Gen. William L. Nash, a former military commander in Bosnia-Herzegovina. "The failure to understand that the civil war is already taking place, just not necessarily at the maximum level, means that our counter measures are inadequate and therefore dangerous to our long-term interest.

"It's our failure to understand reality that has caused us to be late throughout this experience of the last three years in Iraq," added Nash, who is an ABC News consultant.

Anthony Cordesman, the Arleigh A. Burke chair in strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told ABC News, "If you talk to U.S. intelligence officers and military people privately, they'd say we've been involved in low level civil war with very slowly increasing intensity since the transfer of power in June 2004."

Ayhan Simsek surveys the whole range of Turkey's concerns in Iraq. They not only include worries that Kurdistan might become independent and draw in Turkish Kurds but also fear of Iranian political Islam having an impact on Turkey itself. Turks who hold this view see Iraq as a buffer between Iran and Turkey, and fear that the buffer is breaking down.

Kofi Annan says that two things are keeping back an expansion of UN activities in Iraq: no nation will transport UN workers inside Iraq by plane, and the general violence that plagues the country. All I can say is that this situation is pretty pitiful.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Over 20 Dead in Guerrilla Violence
Talabani's Bid to call Parliament Fails

The Iraqi general in charge of Baghdad security was killed by a sniper on Monday. I suppose it doesn't need underlining that this is very bad news for Baghdad security. The assassinated commander, himself a Sunni Arab who led men during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, was almost certainly the victim of an inside job. The Iraqi military is deeply infiltrated by guerrilla supporters.

He was among over 20 deaths from guerrilla violence in Iraq on Monday, which saw several car bombs in Baghdad and a major one in Baqubah. The actions in these two cities killed 11 and wounded 30. In downtown Basra, there was a firefight at a police checkpoint that wounded 4. A car bomb in Mahmudiyah killed 3 and wounded 5.

The dean of the engineering school at Mustansiriyah University in the capital, Dr. Ali Hasan al-Mahawish, was kidnapped.

A US soldier was killed by enemy action in the western Anbar province.

Ed Wong reports from Baghdad that those Iraqi security forces on which the Americans are depending are themselves riven with sectarian divisions and often little more than Shiite militias dressed up in American-style uniforms. Reforming these forces "could take years."

US ambassador in Baghdad Zalmay Khalilzad is correct that civil war in Iraq could have a terrifying impact on the Oil Gulf and the United States. But the question remains of what the best way is to avert that outcome. Large numbers of US ground troops in the country may be counter-productive.

Jalal Talabani, Iraq's Kurdish president, attempted to call parliament into session no later than March 12. He was blocked, however, by Vice President Adil Abdul Mahdi, from the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). SCIRI is part of the Shiite religious coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, which has nominated Ibrahim Jaafari as its candidate for prime minister. Jaafari defeated Abdul Mahdi in his bid for the position, and Talabani may have thought that Abdul Mahdi would welcome an opportunity to displace his rival. Party unity held, however, and the Shiite UIA proved that it could block Talabani and his allies from moving forward without it. Talabani was going to call a vote in parliament for prime minister, which Jaafari could only have won if he could put together a 138 seat majority. With two Risaliyun (Sadrist) MPs, Mithal al-Alusi and the Christian MP of Rafidain, Jaafari has 132. He can almost certainly get to 138 by proming important cabinet posts to smaller parties, so it is not clear that Talabani's ploy would have worked anyway. It could easily be defeated if the UIA keeps discipline in its ranks.

As it is, the UIA is positioning itself to extract promises from Talabani that he will support Jaafari for PM before they agree to let parliament meet.

Talabani is delaying the formation of the Iraqi government with all these games, fiddling while Baghdad burns. And his reason for his maneuvering is to protect Kurdish interests, not Iraqi national ones. If that is his position, he has a duty in conscience to resign.

Al-Hayat says that Talabani's plea to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani to get involved in the movement to dump Jaafari has fallen on deaf ears. Sistani's representatives say that he is neutral on the issue of who should be prime minister. He does, however, insist that the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance remain united. If there is a dispute within it, his representative said, it should be settled by an internal party vote. (This statement implies a rebuke to Talabani's notion of resolving it by a vote of the whole parliament, effectively allowing the minority parties to dictate to the largest single bloc.

Minister of Petroleum and Vice Premier Ahmad Chalabi [Ar.]has been negotiating water use with the Turkish government. Al-Zaman says that the Turkish government has offered to build a huge industrial complex in Kirkuk and to open up a second border crossing so as to increase trade between Turkey and Iraq.

(The offers of help with industrializing Kirkuk and of better border access to Turkey are intended by Ankara to offset Kurdish separationism in the region.

FBIS translates an interview with Iraqi politicians on Talabani's failed bid to convene parliament, done by the Iranian Arabic-language satellite television channel, al-`Alam:

' Foreign Broadcast Information Service
Iranian TV's 'Iraq Today' Looks at Talabani's Call To Convene Parliament
Al-Alam Television
Monday, March 6, 2006 T20:50:22Z

Tehran Al-Alam TV in Arabic at 1538 GMT on 6 March broadcast its regular "Iraq Today" program presented by Husayn Murtadha. This edition of the program focused on Iraqi President Jalal Talabani's "sudden" call for the Iraqi parliament to hold its first session within two weeks.

For this purpose, two Iraqi politicians, speaking from Baghdad, and an Iraqi political pundit, speaking from Beirut, were invited. They were respectively Jabir Habib Jabir, member of the Shi'i United Iraqi Alliance, and Muhammad Salih al-Dulaymi, member of Sunni National Dialogue Front; the pundit was Abbas Musawi.

Jabir was first to be invited to comment on the reasons behind Talabani's decision. Jabir says of course not everyone thinks time is right for such a call. However, the president felt it was within his constitutional prerogatives to invite the parliament to meet. In doing so, the president might have felt that with such a call, MPs feel under pressure - as they have to agree on a government within a month of the start of their meetings, to find a way out for the current political debacle in the country - either to accept Al-Ja'fari's nomination or find someone else instead, he says.

In this respect, Jabir believes, the call could be a positive development despite the fact that it was made without prior consultation with the other political forces.

For his part, Al-Dulaymi attacked Talabani's call as "too early". Talabani's decision, he adds, could cause some kind of "embarrassment" for both Al-Ja'fari and the parliament because of its timing. Such a call, he adds, is nothing but "blackmail" for the other political forces. Al-Dulaymi says he could not see how such a call could serve either Iraqi unity or higher interest.

Both politicians discussed the current political situation in the country and Iraq's constitutional provisions. However, whereas Jabir tried to point out the positive points in the convening of the parliament as a way of starting a momentum to end the current crisis, Al-Dulaymi says such a call will only make the situation worse because it is part of a Sunni-Kurdish "conspiracy" to intimidate the Shi'i United Iraqi Alliance and its nominee Al-Ja'fari.

Political pundit Musawi complained about the decision and says he could not see how the convening of the parliament could end the political crisis in the country he could not see how a government could be formed within 30 days as the constitution stipulates.

(Description of Source: Tehran Al-Alam Television in Arabic -- IRIB's 24-hour Arabic news channel, targetting a pan-Arab audience) '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

3 Mosques Attacked
Kurdish Envoy Sees Sistani about Jaafari

Mosque attacks continued in Iraq on Sunday, as sectarian violence refused to die down. There was guerrilla violence in Mosul, Baghdad, Baiji, Samarra and Ramadi.

Amnesty International maintains that tens of thousands of Iraqis have been detained without trial or even formal charges for months and sometimes years by the US military. This practice violated US and international law. The report also says that the US military continues to use torture techniques.

Some 73% of Americans believe that it is very likely or somewhat likely that there will be an ethnic or sectarian civil war in Iraq.

Gary Hart points out to Knight Ridder that if Iraq did erupt into a civil war with blood in the streets and close alleyway fighting, US troops could get caught in the crossfire. "We could lose our army," he said. That is a dark vision-- "A Thousand Mogadishus Now."

The Arab Monitor suspects that the Kurdish attempt to oust Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari is related to their desire to grab Kirkuk, a plan with which Jaafari disagrees.

Al-Zaman reports [Ar.] that Ridha Jawad Taqi of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq said Sunday that although the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance was committed to its candidate, Ibrahim Jaafari, there were possible means of resolving the dispute over him with the other parties. One would be to take the issue of his candidacy for prime minister to the whole Iraqi parliament when it convenes next Sunday. (This step would certainly result in Jaafari being sacked, but it is not usual parliamentary procedure. For an American audience, it would be like having the minority Democrats decide who the Republican speaker of the house would be, when the Republicans were in a majority in the House.)

The envoy of President Jalal Talabani, Barham Salih, visited Najaf Sunday for consultations with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and with the young clerical nationalist Muqtada al-Sadr. He tried to explain to them the reasons for which the Kurds wanted Jaafari dropped. Muqtada al-Sadr stood his ground, insisting that Jaafari had won an internal party vote.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat ["The Middle East"] reports the comments on Ibrahim Jaafari of Tariq al-Hashimi, the secretary-general of the Iraqi Islamic Party [part of the Sunni Arab religious coaltions, the Iraqi Accord Front]. Al-Hashimi spoke at a press conference in Amman, Jordan, on Sunday. Hashimi blamed Prime Minister Jaafari for the sectarian turmoil in Iraq. "His government is stained with political errors about which it is impossible to remain silent," he said.

He added, "The National Accord Front met with oppression and massacres during the period that Jaafari headed the government. We paid the price as a result of our having kept distant from the Iraqi political arena. Now we are working to change the situation in Iraq for the better." He said of Jaafari, "He knew about the security issue in Iraq and what was happening in that regard. Jaafari knew about all the decisions taken about the torture that was practiced in Iraqi prisons. For this reason and others, Jaafari is unsuited to form the next Iraqi government. The Front is considering, in coordination with the other Iraqi political blocs, putting forward an alternative candidate for someone to head the next Iraqi government."

He said that the Iraqi Accord Front [Sunni Arab fundamentalists], the Kurdistan Alliance and the National Iraqi List [Iyad Allawi's secularists] had conducted discussions. There is some thought to forming a "National Salvation Front." He said it shouldn't be read as a political coalition aimed at confronting other political blocs. For that reason, it would be open to allowing other groups to join. [This is probably a reference to hopes of detaching a Shiite bloc from the United Iraqi Alliance.]

Cole: What I cannot understand is why the Iraqi Accord Front thinks that the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) is less implicated in the "oppression" of Sunni Arabs or prison abuse that Ibrahim Jaafari. The likely prime minister if Jaafari steps aside is Adil Abdul Mahdi of SCIRI. It has been suggested that if SCIRI gets the prime minister post, it would be forced as a matter of political bargaining to give up the Ministry of the Interior, which it is accused of packing with members of its Badr Corps paramilitary. The Dawa Party that Jaafari leads does not have as big or important a militia. It is possible that the Sunnis are trying to maneuver SCIRI out of Interior, and Jaafari is just the sacrificial lamb here.

Veteran Iraq analyst Joost Hiltermann prescribes 4 steps to avoid the disintegration of Iraq.

Khalid Jarar discusses the dominance of religious Shiites in the security forces, his own false arrest, and the Sunni Arab brain drain from Iraq. Iraqis are now ten percent of the Jordanian resident population, a little less than the proportion of Latinos in the US . . .
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Kirkuk at the Center of Kurdish-Shiite Struggles

I find most reporting on the struggle between Iraq's Kurdish president, Jalal Talabani and the current Shiite Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari, to be awfully superficial and to allow itself to be led by Talabani's talking points.

What is really going on here has to do with Jaafari's positions on federalism, the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, and Kurdish-Turkish relations.

1) Jaafari has promised Turkey that if the 5,000 or so members of the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) who have taken refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan do not behave themselves, they will be expelled. A lot of Iraqi Kurdish politicians are said to sympathize with these PKK refugees.

2) Jaafari is not happy about letting the Kurds just pour into Kirkuk province and take it over demographically. There are a lot of Turkmen and Arabs in Kirkuk, some proportion of them Shiites and so Jaafari's natural constituency. The interim constitution specified a referendum in Kirkuk on joining the Kurdistan regional confederacy. The Kurds will certainly win it. If they do, they will permanently marginalize the Turkmen and Arabs, and will monopolize the northern oil fields for their nationalist purposes, probably leading to ethnic war in the Iraqi north but in any case setting the stage for Kurdish secession.

3) Jaafari dislikes the "Kurdish model" of very weak central government and powerful regional confederacies for Iraq. The Kurds are fiercely protective of the Kurdish model, and convinced Abdul Aziz al-Hakim of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq to adopt it for the Shiite south. It will almost certainly break up the country.

Jaafari is not being attacked because he is weak, or indecisive, or because he could not keep order in the country. He is being attacked for the opposite reasons-- that he has decisively decided to fight the Kurds on their planned annexation of Kirkuk. The Kurds are powerful, so Jaafari reached out to Ankara for an ally. He was pressed by the Turks to make Kirkuk a city with a "special status" as a way of denying it to the Kurds, and he may have acquiesced. This is the reason that Talabani went ballistic over the prime minister's visit to Turkey.

FBIS paraphrase of the Turkish Press for March 5 (pub. Mar. 6)

' A 400-word article by Nur Batur of Istanbul views the "background" of the disagreement between Talabani and Al-Ja'fari, noting that the Iraqi prime minister's approach on the status of Kirkuk is similar to that of Turkey, which is against the Kurds' inclination to change the status of this province. Describing Iraq as a "chaotic" country, Batur asserts that all the ethnic and religious groups are trying to assume an influential role in the new Iraqi administration and place the country's rich oil reserves under their control. (Istanbul Hurriyet -- centre-right, mass appeal daily, country's top circulation paper, owned by Aydin Dogan, head of the Dogan Media Group . . .

A 300-word report by Senay Yildiz says that speaking to Al-Ja'fari assured the Turkish nation that "a civil war will not break out in Iraq and the future of his country will be in line with the expectations of Turkey." Commenting on the PKK presence in Iraq, the prime minister promised that "they will either leave Iraq or cease arms." (Istanbul Turkiye'de Aksam -- center-right daily owned by Cukurova industrial and financial group, headed by Mehmet Emin Karamehmet, who is a politically-active member of the Association of Turkish Industrialists and Businessmen, TUSIAD, one of the most prestigious business associations in Turkey . . . '

FBIS paraphrases Iraqi newspapers for March 5:

'Al-Furat runs on the front page a 400-word report citing Iraqi sources confirming that Al-Ja'fari's stance towards Article 58 of the State Administration Law and the implementation of federalism are behind the recent calls for his exclusion. The report cites citizens urging Iraqi political forces to favor Iraq's national interests.'

(Article 58 concerns the future of Kirkuk.)

FBIS also reports:

' Al-Bayan carries on the front page a 500-word report that Al-Amarah's inhabitants staged a peaceful demonstration supporting Ibrahim al-Ja'fari. The report cites Salih al-Mutlak, chairman of National Dialogue Front, denying that his front has called on Unified Iraqi Coalition to change Ibrahim al-Ja'fari as prime minister. . . '

' Al-Furat carries on page 2 a 600-word column by Hasan al-Ta'i criticizing Iraqi political forces for holding Al-Ja'fari totally responsible for the deteriorating security, and political situation. The writer says all Iraqi political forces, including the forces that are not part of the government, are equally responsible for Iraq's current situation. . . '

' Al-Furat runs on the front page a 120-word report citing an official source at Kirkuk Advisory Council confirming the dismissal of Kirkuk Police Chief General Shirku Shakir Rahim by Interior Ministry. . . '

Al-Da'wah carries on the front page a 100-word report citing Iraqi sources saying that a number of Iraqi officers affiliated with Iyad Allawi are being trained in Washington without the knowledge of their ministries. . .

Al-Da'wah carries on the front page a 100-word report citing a well-informed source in Basra denying that Unified Iraqi Coalition candidate Qasim Atiyah al-Juburi escaped an assassination attempt.

It is worthwhile looking at the FBIS articles around Jaafari's recent visit to Ankara, which appears to have reinforced the Kurds' determination to get rid of him.
--------

Turkey's Iraqi Envoy Expresses Views on Kirkuk, Violence; Conveys Erdogan Letter
TURKISH PM SENDS LETTER TO HIS IRAQI COUNTERPART" -- AA headline
Anatolia
Friday, February 24, 2006 T13:10:19Z

ANKARA (A.A) - 24.02.2006 - Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan sent a letter to Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafari on Friday, sources said on Friday.

According to the sources, Erdogan's letter was conveyed to al-Jafari by Turkey's Special Representative to Iraq Oguz Celikkol. Celikkol had separate meetings with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and PM al-Jafari yesterday. Today, Celikkol will meet Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim, the head of Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and leaders of several Iraqi groups including Sunni leader Tariq al-Hashimi.

In these meetings, Celikkol expresses Turkey's views about Kirkuk, and stresses that formation of a broad-based government in Iraq and completion of the constitutional process would strengthen Iraq's integrity.

Celikkol also expresses Turkey's concern over recent acts of violence in this region.

(Description of Source: Ankara Anatolia in English -- Semi-official news agency; independent in content)

-----
Erdogan Explains to Al-Ja'fari Turkey's Concerns Over PKK Presence in North Iraq
"PM ERDOGAN MEETS PM AL-JAFARI OF IRAQ" -- AA headline
Anatolia
Tuesday, February 28, 2006 T19:11:53Z

ANKARA (A.A) - 28.02.2006 - Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan met on Tuesday Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafari, who is currently in Ankara on an official visit.

During the meeting, Prime Minister Erdogan explained Turkey's views about recent developments in Iraq, and expressed Turkey's concerns about presence of the terrorist organization PKK in northern part of Iraq.

Prime Minister Erdogan also reiterated that Kirkuk's demographic structure should be preserved.

He highlighted importance of formation of a broad-based government in Iraq that would avert the supremacy of one group over the others. Recent acts of violence were also high on agenda of the meeting.

Prime Minister Erdogan stressed that some circles were trying to drag Iraq into an atmosphere of ethnic turmoil. "It is certain that everyone will suffer unless the flames of ethnic tensions that are being provoked are extinguished," he said.
Meanwhile, talks have been under way for Turkey's meeting 25 percent of Iraq's electricity requirement.

(Description of Source: Ankara Anatolia in English -- Semi-official news agency; independent in content)

---------------
Turkey: AA Reports More on Erdogan-Al-Ja'fari Meeting
"POLITICAL & RELIGIOUS AUTHORITIES SHOULD COMBAT TERRORISM, PM" -- AA headline
Anatolia
Tuesday, February 28, 2006 T15:10:52Z


ANKARA (A.A) - 28.02.2006 - Political and religious authorities should take joint action against terrorism to prevent terrorist groups in Iraq from reaching their goals and intentions, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Tuesday.
After his meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafari, Erdogan told reporters that developments, aiming to overshadow December 2005 general elections, were being seen in Iraq.

Erdogan indicated that this step taken by the terrorist groups was tried to be shown as a sectarian conflict.

"None of Sunnis can attempt to bomb Ahlibayt Tomb. This doesn't seem possible. So, political and religious authorities should take joint action against terrorism to prevent terrorist groups from reaching their goals and intentions," stressed Erdogan.
Erdogan said, "we have a goal in Iraq, comprised of five main aspects. First of these aspects is to ensure Iraq's territorial integrity. Secondly, all resources of Iraq should belong to all Iraqi people. Third, none of ethnic groups should have hegemony over the other. Fourth, none of sectarian groups should dominate others.
Fifthly and lastly, Kirkuk should have a special status."

PM Erdogan emphasized that all those goals could be achieved by a broad-based Iraqi government.

Noting that the process launched by Iraq's neighbors should also be speeded up, Erdogan said that al-Jafari also welcomed this process.

-AL-JAFARI'S SPEECH- Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafari indicated that he would like to thank Turkey for sending special representative to Iraq and showing great interest in his country.

Stating that there have been important developments in Iraq in 2005, al-Jafari recalled that general elections were held, the parliament was formed and the constitution came into force last year.

Al-Jafari said that he hoped that 2006 would be a year when political process would be successful.

Noting that undesired incidents that took place in Iraq over the recent days were intentional terrorist activities, he indicated that enemies of Iraq who could not assimilate the process in Iraq carried out harmful activities to prepare a basis for continuation of lack of security.

Al-Jafari said that on the other hand, these incidents caused Iraqi people to be united, underlining that Iraqi people were aware that these incidents were complot and provocation.

He noted that the government started to exert efforts to prevent these violent acts from spreading over the country, stating that incidents were taken under control.
AL-Jafari stressed that incidents and terrorist activities in Iraq would not make a negative impact on works of the government and efforts for ongoing political process to be successful.

(Description of Source: Ankara Anatolia in English -- Semi-official news agency; independent in content)
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Muqtada Warns Talabani on "interference"

United Iraqi Alliance politicians continued Saturday to insist that the party would continue to back Ibrahim Jaafari as the new prime minister, despite attempts by Kurds (especially President Jalal Talabani) and Sunnis to push him aside. Jaafari has angered Kurds by his attempts to involve Turkey in Iraqi affairs to offset Kurdish power, and by his opposition to ceding the oil-rich Kirkuk province to the Kurdistan Regional Confederacy.

A member of the Sadr Movement told al-Hayat [Ar.] that Muqtada al-Sadr called up Jalal Talabani three days ago and warned him not to try to interfere with the United Iraqi alliance's prerogative of naming cabinet ministers to powerful ministries.

A leader of the Sunni religious party, the Iraqi Islamic Party, said Saturday that he opposed Jaafari's candidacy because of his poor administration

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the Shiite spiritual leader, is also calling for the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance to keep its solidarity, according to MP Jawad al-Maliki of the Da`wa Party.

Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, one of our great senators, is now calling for a withdrawal of ground troops from Iraq on the grounds that it is in a civil war and we should extricate our troops from the quagmire.

The LA Times says that the ongoing violence in Iraq is changing Sunni and Shiite attitudes toward the US. At first the Sunnis wanted the US out immediately, now many insist it stay and restore stability. Shiites initially welcomed US forces, but now increasingly want them out of their areas.

On the other hand, thousands of Indonesians demonstrated Saturday demanding that the US withdraw from Iraq.

Iraq the Model: University teachers in Iraq who speak out are being assassinated. At least in the US we only face character assassination from our radical Salafi neocons.

Iraq the Model: Two Iraqi women hoping to tour the US have been refused visas. The US had killed their husbands and children. Jonathan Schwartz points to the Kafka-esque irony that the grounds for denying them entry was that they did not have enough close family back in Iraq to guarantee that they would want to return there.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bush Greeted in Pakistan by Demonstrations, Nation-wide Strike

Bush arrived in Islamabad to find it eerily quiet. The Islamic Action Council, which includes a group that helped train the Taliban, had called for a nation-wide strike to protest the visit. Streets of many cities were said to be strangely quiet, while in the northern Pushtun city of Peshawar, thousands marched in protest.

Bush has all along made the mistake of playing to Muslim leaders rather than to Muslim publics. Yet he has at the same time undermined authoritarian leaders with his talk of spreading democracy. So a military dictator like Pervez Musharraf, who intervened to corrupt the 2002 Pakistani parliamentary elections, lacks legitimacy according to Bush's rhetoric even as Bush pals around with him and makes him as an individual the cornerstone of US policy in that part of the world.

Meantime, Bush has had a predator missile fired on a Pakistani village, and has been complaisant toward US torture of Muslim prisoners at Bagram and in Iraq.

The PR disaster of the Pakistan trip is a decisive and sad reflection on the complete failure of Bush at public diplomacy in the Muslim world, at a time when nothing is more important to US security and goals abroad.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Al-Hakim, UIA back Jaafari
Sectarian Killings Raise Tension

The killing, execution-style, of some 25 Shiite workers in a brick-making plant in Nahrawan by Sunni Arab guerrillas caused renewed ethnic tensions on Friday.

Al-Zaman reports that [Ar.] Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the United Iraqi Alliance [Shiite religious parties] informed Iraqi president Jalal Talabani and the Iraqi Accord Front and its allies that the UIA is standing by its choice of Ibrahim Jaafari as candidate for prime minister. The statement came in response to letters sent to al-Hakim by Talabani, Iyad Allawi, the Iraqi Accord Front, and Salih Mutlak of the National Dialogue Council (neo-Baathist). Jointly all of these have 135 seats in parliament, so that they could, if they united, theoretically form a ruling coalition in parliament (which requires 138 seats). In fact, al-Hakim is banking on their inability effectively to stay together as a coalition.

Al-Hakim's response came after the United Iraqi Alliance members of parliament, who number 130, met and decided to retain Jaafari.

Mahmud Osman, an independent Kurdish member of parliament, responded that the the anti-Jaafari coalition of Kurds, Sunni Arabs and secular Shiites was now free to form a coalition and to name its own prime minister. He said he was broaching the possibility theoretically, and it has not yet been studied by the anti-Jaafari forces.

Osman seems to be under the impression that they have the votes to choose a president by a 2/3s majority without needing the Shiite party as a partner. That simply is not true. Dozens of Shiite MPs would have to defect for this to happen.

Moreover, the constitution gives first right to form a government to the list that won the largest number of seats in parliament. Since the Kurds, Sunnis and secular Shiites did not run as a unified list, they cannot now turn around and maintain that they fit that description.

Communist Party of Iraq leader Hamid Majid Musa said that the UIA refusal to reconsider the Jaafari nomination would provoke a political crisis.

Al-Zaman carried a Reuters piece quoting Iraqi observers who claimed that if the new parliament did not meet by March 12, a provision of the Transitional Administrative Law--under which Iraq is still functioning until the new constitution is formally adopted by parliament-- will have been contravened.

Al-Zaman says that Friday prayer preachers called for national unity from their pulpits yesterday.

It carried an AFP article quoting Abdul Salam al-Kubaisi of the Association of Muslim Scholars [hard line Sunni] as saying that if Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr did not turn his Mahdi Army militia into a purely political group, he would lose all the Arab support he had gained during his recent travels abroad.

Bertus Hendriks explains clearly and concisely the current impasse in the formation of an Iraqi government, given American, Kurdish and Sunni Arab opposition to Ibrahim Jaafari as prime minister.

Abbas Kadhim , an Iraqi analyst, reflects on the Samarra atrocity and subsequent events.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Friday Headlines to Make You Laugh and Cry at the Same Time

"Rumsfeld Cautions against too Many Troops in Iraq". I swear to God, that is what it says.

"Iraq now 'Less Safe'. Oh, I'd say so.

"Pentagon Dismisses US Troop Poll". A Pentagon spokesman actually said, "It shouldn't surprise anybody that a deployed soldier would rather be at home than deployed . . ."

Is that what Bush has been saying? "It is also important for every American to understand the consequences of pulling out of Iraq before our work is done. . . We would undermine the morale of our troops by betraying the cause for which they have sacrificed."

Now it turns out the troops think the US should get out within a year.

"Iran to Invest $1 Billion in Iraq"

"Late 30s aren't Too Late to Enlist". Jonah Goldberg, Michael Rubin and Dan Senor alert.

Fox News asks, "Could All-Out Civil War in Iraq be a Good Thing?" You can't make this stuff up.

Followed by: "Iraq Civil War: Made up by the Media?".

"Coalition Commander Says Iraq Crisis has Passed.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

25 Dead in Sectarian Strike at Nahrawan
Curfew in Baghdadd


Sunni Arab guerrillas attacked Shiites in the town of Nahrawan. Some 25 are feared dead, with bodies being pulled out of a factory and some found in a field.

I would say that a communal attack of this scale is symptomatic of civil war.

Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari imposed a daytime curfew on the 6 million people of Baghdad for Friday, to discourage them from going to Friday prayers sermons, where sectarian passions might have run high. It includes a ban on driving vehicles.

In contrast, in Basra followers of Muqtada al-Sadr held a joint prayer service with Sunnis in the largest Sunni mosque, with 3,000 attending. Muqtada has called for Sunni-Shiite unity on a platform of expelling the Americans, but his followers are suspected of some of the worst excesses in the sectarian violence of the past week and a half.

I'd say it is no more than a rumor. but a Turkish newspaper is reporting that Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari asked Turkey to send troops to Iraq to replace the Americans on his recent trip to that country. A Bulgarian news wire says,

"According to the information the proposal was made by Jaafari to the Turkish Prime Minister Reccep Tayip Erdogan during the Iraqi Prime Minister’s visit to Ankara on Tuesday. According to the publication Jaafari has said: “The USA failed. USA cannot establish peace in Iraq. Only Turkey could do this.” '

Turkey might be tempted. Although all sides are now denying a statement attributed to a Czech diplomat that Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul told him that if Coalition troops withdrew, Iraq would fall to the "Iranian model" (i.e. clerical, Islamist government), which then might spread to Turkey. Whether Gul said this out loud is irrelevant. Certainly the Turkish elite is very worried about Iranian hegemony in Iraq and Iranian and Iraqi Shiite influence spreading in Turkey. Turkey has hard line Sunni Islamists who hate Shiism but take some inspiration from Iran. About 20 percent of Turks are Alevis, a Shiite sect that is heterodox, often secular, and not mostly interested in Iranian style clerical Shiism. But similar heterodox groups among Iraqi Turkmen in the north in the past two decades became followers of the Sadr Movement, and the Turks may worry that the Alevis could go in that direction. Turkey offered to station troops in Anbar Province a couple of years ago, but that move was blocked by the Kurds.

If these rumors about the substance of Jaafari's recent visit to Turkey had reached Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi Kurdish leader and current president, it would explain his vehement outburst and attack on Jaafari, and the subsequent Kurdish-Sunni attempt to get Jaafari dumped as candidate for Prime Minister in the new government.




On Thursday, 33 people were killed in guerrilla violence, including in a bomb attack on a Shiite area.

Reuters says:

' In one of the bloodiest attacks on Thursday, at least five people were killed and eight wounded when a car bomb went off in the Shiite-dominated Sadr City district of Baghdad, a security official said.

"A car loaded with explosives was parked not far from a market in Sadr City," the official said.

In another attack in Baghdad, four people were killed and 11 wounded, mostly women, when a bomb exploded in a market in the mixed south-eastern Jaafaraniya district, an Interior Ministry official said. '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Kurds, Sunnis Attempting to Dump Jaafari
Violence Leaves 30 Dead

Guerrilla violence killed 30 in Iraq on Wednesday.

The Financial Times says

"bloodshed in central Iraq continued into its third day on Wednesday, with at least 30 killed in bombings and mortar attacks in Baghdad and neighboring regions. In the worst of Wednesday’s attacks, 23 people were killed in a car bomb in a mostly-Shia district of Baghdad. Tuesday’s death toll meanwhile was at least 76, feeding fears that the February 21 bombing of a Shia shrine and the subsequent wave of reprisals may produce a sustained surge in political and sectarian killings."

The Kurdistan Alliance and the Sunni fundamentalist Iraqi Accord Front are attempting to block Ibrahim Jaafari from becoming prime minister. The United Iraqi Alliance, the largest bloc in parliament, has the right to nominate the PM, and an internal party vote resulted in Jaafari's victory. Jaafari is, however, unacceptable to the United States because of his close ties to Iran and his socialist tendencies (he recently expressed admiration for Noam Chomsky and wondered if Noam would come visit Baghdad). The US appears to be working with the Kurds and the Sunnis behind the scenes to make Jaafari's candidacy collapse. The United Iraqi Alliance has 132 votes in the 275-strong parliament, but 184 are needed to choose a president. It therefore needs partners from either the Kurds or Sunni Arabs or both, and these two can essentially filibuster and prevent the formation of a government unless the UIA goes along with them.

Personally, I think that given the parlous security situation in Iraq, it is absolutely crazy to be playing these political games. In the wake of the destruction of the Askariyah Shrine in Samarra, you want to go to the Shiite community and say, 'you cannot have your choice of prime minister and there is going to be a tyranny of the minorities'? Oh, that will calm things right down.

There is no guarantee that the United Iraqi Alliance will give the Americans, the Kurds and the Sunnis a candidate who they like better. Apparently the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq cannot muster the 66 votes within the 130-strong UIA that it would need to put in its own candidate, Adil Abdul Mahdi. SCIRI has better relations with the Kurds than does Jaafari's Da`wa Party (Jaafari was also backed by Muqtada al-Sadr's faction).

The Kurds and the Americans, who are spear-heading this effort to sideline Jaafari, don't appear to have considered another possible outcome, which is a hung parliament, leading to new elections and extending the period of political gridlock as security deteriorates further.

Al-Zaman also reports on the attempt to dump Jaafari. It says,

'A prominent Sunni political source said that the National Accord Front [Sunni Arab religious parties] will not participate in the government if it is decided that Jaafari will lead it. He said, "It is impossible to work with him," adding, "The Shiites knew this. We had informed them of it. We believe that for them to nominate him again is a sign that they are ignoring us." He said that the Sunni Arabs just could not work with Jaafari. '

The anti-Jaafari forces are still dreaming of a Sunni-Kurd-secular coalition that could outmaneuver the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance. Since it has more than a third of the seats in parliament, however, they could only select a president without the UIA if they managed to get dozens of its members of parliament to desert it and join an assortment of Baathists and Salafis instead. I don't find this outcome plausible. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has, according to al-Zaman, been intervening behind the scenes to keep the UIA united.

Although earlier the Fadhila or Virtue Party was cited as an element within the UIA that might bolt, taking its 15 seats with it, its leaders appear to have reconsidered. Al-Zaman says that Virtue staged a demonstration in Nasiriyah on Wednesday demanding of the Kurdistan Alliance that it not attempt to sideline the will of the nation (which had made the UIA the biggest bloc).

Al-Zaman/ DPA also report that Prime Minister Jaafari is denying the charges made yesterday by Jalal Talabani that his trip to Ankara was unconstitutional. Jaafari said it was perfectly legal.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bomb Blast Near US Consulate in Karachi

Jihadis set off a bomb in Karachi, Pakistan near the US consulate, killing 4 and wounding 49. Two of those killed are Americans, one a foreign service officer according to what I heard on Aljazeerah. The strike was intended to cast a pall over Bush's visit to Pakistan and India.

Things are not looking so great these days in Afghanistan, either.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Blogads Poll

It is time for the annual blogads poll of Informed Comment readers. The information gathered is most useful for the advertisers, who support a lot of the blogosphere, so I'm grateful to all who make time to answer these questions.
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Golden Oldies - IC from before the Iraq War, 2003

No comment. - JC

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

Thursday, February 27, 2003

A poster to one of the lists I am on wrote:


"US policy is to allow no sanctuaries anywhere on the globe for anti-American terror groups. No training camps. No organizations, no fronts. No funding. No meetings. No travel. Identified leaders will be taken out. Operations such as those which existed a year or two ago in Afghanistan and Hamburg will not be allowed. Now that is American policy since 9-11 regardless of Iraq, but a major military victory in the Iraq campaign will, I suggest, drive the point home to everyone concern and provide the US with a major military base in the Middle East to monitor the situation."


I (JC) replied:

I am certainly all for preventing any attacks on the US by terrorist groups anywhere. It just seems to me that the ambition outlined above is a mere abstraction not grounded in the realities of the world situation. For anyone who has actually been to Yemen or Pakistan, or for that matter the not so nice parts of Marseilles, the idea that this level of control could be achieved seems nonsensical. There is also the question of whether, in trying to achieve it, the US will make more new enemies than it is worth. The idea that terrorists willing to commit suicide will be afraid of the US after it invades Iraq is just a misreading of human nature. Terrorism is produced precisely by humiliation and hopelessness and living in fear (which is not a life worth living). It cannot be stopped by inducing more fear and humiliation. You will note that Ariel Sharon has been trying out this tactic for 30 years and it hasn't worked.

The US so far has not even caught Mulla Omar or Osama Bin Ladin or Ayman al-Zawahiri or Shaikh Khalid Bin Muhammad, the people who planned out the first attack! An estimated 1000 al-Qaeda operatives fled Afghanistan to Pakistan a year ago, and only half have been apprehended (and that was largely because of the excellent cooperation the US got from Pakistan, for which Pakistan gets precious little credit over here). And this failure is despite our ostensible control of Afghanistan and close working
alliance with Pakistan!

If we cannot even catch the leaders of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, who already struck us, in areas we *control*, how in the world can we hope to prevent meetings of terrorists about whom we do not even know in places we don't? These are tiny groups, often clan-based, which have only vague affiliations to umbrella organizations like al-Qaeda. You think you can stop a radical set of friends and relatives from meeting in Antwerp? In Hadhramawt? Unlikely. And, it is not as if we have loads of CIA field operatives who speak Arabic and can infiltrate such groups! It will take years to develop that capacity. We don't even have an Arabist at the top echelons of the National Security Council.

Nor is it clear that going about having serial wars with Iraq, Iran, Syria, N. Korea, and apparently ultimately China [these are the ideas thrown out by the Richard Perle/ Paul Wolfowitz circle that controls our Defense Department] is going in any way to help with this task of surveillance and infiltration. Surely serial wars in the region are a distraction from the struggle against terrorism, especially since those
countries are not doing anything to the US.

Moreover, the idea that a US military occupation of Iraq will deter as oppose to provoking more attacks on US interests is awfully optimistic. The main problem an organization like al-Qaeda has is to recruit further members and keep current members from melting away in fear. They recruit best when the young men are angriest. What are they angry about? The Israeli dispossession of the Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza; the almost daily shooting by the Israeli army of innocent noncombatants; the progressive colonization of Palestinian territory by--let us say--idiosyncratic settlers from Brooklyn (all of this is on t.v. every day over there); the harsh Indian police state erected over the Muslims of Kashmir; the economic stagnation and authoritarian policies of many Middle Eastern governments that are backed by the US; and the poverty and prejudice Muslim immigrants to places like France and Germany experience daily.

I don't have any idea how to resolve all these grievances; but the young men are very angry about and humiliated by them, and al-Qaeda plays on that anger to seduce them into attacking US interests. A US occupation of Iraq is not going to address the grievances, and is likely to create new bitterness and so help the recruitment drive. If the US really wanted to stop terrorism, it would invade the West Bank and Gaza and liberate the Palestinians to have their own state and self-respect, instead of heading to Baghdad.

Iraq is rugged; tribal forces are still important; and the majority population is Shiite, as is that of neighboring Iran. What will happen if US bombs damage the Shiite shrines, the holiest places for 100 million Shiite Muslims in Lebanon, Iran, Pakistan, India, Bahrain? What will happen if there is a riot in a shrine city like Karbala and US marines put it down by killing rioters? Do we want 100 million Shiites angry at us again? (Lately they have calmed down and it is the radical Sunnis that have given us the problems).

What happens if the Iraqi Sunni middle classes lose faith in secular Arab nationalism because the Baath is overthrown, and they turn to al-Qaeda-type Islam, in part out of
resentment at American hegemony over their country? What will happen if we give the Turks too much authority to intervene in Kurdistan, and fighting breaks out between the Turks and the Iraqi Kurds, and if the Iraqi Kurds turn against the US?

Colin Powell explained in Qatar last week on an Arabic talk show that the US war will be followed by a period of US military administration of the country by a general, followed by a year or two of US civilian administration of the country. This plan is an abandonment of earlier pledges to Iraqi expatriate dissidents that there would be a direct transition to a new Iraqi government. There has been a howl of outrage and betrayal by Kanan Makiya and other dissidents, once close to the Bush White House. If our friends and supporters among Iraqi dissidents are so unhappy now, will everyone in Iraq be just delighted to still be under US administration a year or two from now?

So, this business about controlling everybody all around the world just sounds to me like pie in the sky, and the same sort of thinking that got us mired in the jungles of Vietnam.

I will be ecstatic to see Saddam go. But I have a bad feeling about this, as Han Solo once said prophetically.

posted by Juan @ 2/27/2003 08:28:00 AM
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Salon: Iraq's worst week -- and Bush's
Cole in the Chronicle

My essay at Salon.com this week is:

Iraq's worst week -- and Bush's

As Americans finally begin to grasp the magnitude of the Iraq catastrophe, Bush's popularity hits a new low.

By Juan Cole

Here is an excerpt:

"The catastrophe in Iraq, the scope of which is now apparent to even the most disengaged observer, and his mishandling of the Dubai port issue have sent President George W. Bush's public approval ratings to the lowest of his presidency. According to a Reuters poll, only 34 percent of Americans believe he is doing a good job overall. Only 30 percent, less than a third, think he is managing the Iraq situation well. A remarkable 72 percent of American troops polled in Iraq think the U.S. should leave Iraq within the next year. Nor is there any hope for Bush on the horizon. The bloody events in Iraq have undermined American authority in that country and in the Middle East more generally. The Shiite clergy of Iran and Iraq have bolstered their own authority at Bush's expense. This development has already severely limited his scope of action in Iran, and will doubtless have many other negative consequences in the months and years ahead.

Tactically, strategically and politically Bush now finds himself in the worst of all possible worlds. With Americans increasingly fed up with the Iraq debacle, he needs to start drawing down troops soon, but he can't do it while the country teeters on the brink of civil war. If civil war does break out, a U.S. withdrawal will look even more like cutting and running -- under these circumstances, not even Karl Rove will be able to figure out a way to get away with simply declaring victory and going home. Yet if American troops stay, they have no good options either. . ."

Read the whole thing.

Also, my review of three books on al-Qaeda and related groups is out in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Sorry, it is behind a firewall for non-subscribers for the moment.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Deadly Sectarian Violence kills 76, Wounds 179
Talabani Condemns Jaafari for Turkey Visit

The Los Angeles Times estimates the dead in various attacks throughout Iraq on Tuesday at 76, with 179 wounded. Details are below.

In the meantime, the glacial political process among top Iraqi politicians was roiled on Tuesday by a confrontation between President Jalal Talabani, a Kurdish leader, and Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari.

Jaafari planed a visit to Ankara without consulting Talabani or his cabinet, according to Talabani, who accused the PM of returning to his old high-handed ways. Talabani thundered that Jaafari's behavior contradicted the clear desire expressed by the major parties that the next government be one of national consensus. He said the prime minister was not at liberty unilaterally to make agreements with foreign states that might bind Iraq in the long term.

Talabani said that Jaafari was supposed to notify the president and also the speaker of the house about any planned trips abroad, according to the Transitional Administrative Law. (Since the largely American-authored TAL has been de facto if not de jure superseded by the Iraqi constitution, which was approved last October 15, and since the religious Shiites who have essentially won two elections in the past year always rejected the TAL, Talabani's attempt to impose it on Jaafari at this late date is unlikely to succeed.)

This dispute may seem minor, but it probably signals that Talabani is determined to unseat Jaafari as the prime ministerial candidate for the United Iraqi Alliance. It also seems likely that Jaafari is seeking to do some sort of deal with Turkey of which Talabani disapproves. (The Iraqi Kurds don't generally get along with Ankara). In fact, one of the few things that could explain Talabani's outburst would be that Jaafari is secretly exploring Turkish military aid of some sort to the new Iraqi government. The Kurds would consider that out of bounds, since they are afraid of the Turkish military. Turkey is dead set against the emergence of an independent Kurdistan, for fear that its own Kurds might try to secede and join it.

Al-Hayat says that Muqtada al-Sadr is heading for Ankara as well, at the invitation of the Turkish government, and bringing some Sunni leaders in his entourage. Something is afoot between the Shiites and the Turks.

Since Jaafari needs the Kurds to form an initial government and get a president who can appoint a prime minister, this outbreak of Kurdish hostility to him could derail his candidacy for prime minister in the new government. They are already saying in Baghdad that it will take 2 months to form a government, but if the Shiite religious parties in the United Iraqi Alliance have to start from scratch in choosing a prime minister, it could take much longer. Meanwhile the country outside the Green Zone is in flames, aside from Kurdistan and maybe a few southern cities.

Lin Noueihed reports that armed militias and gangs rule the streets of Iraq. As for Tuesday's worrisome violence:

Al-Zaman [Ar.] reports that guerrillas detonated 4 carbombs in Karada, New Baghdad, a gas station in southeast Baghdad, and North Baghdad.

Guerrillas killed a US soldier in West Baghdad with small arms fire.

A Sunni mosque in the Hurriyah district of Baghdad was blown up.

Guerrillas attempted to assassinate Dahham Radi al-`Asal, a senior adviser to the Ministry of Defense with a roadside bomb, but only managed to kill 5 and wound 7 of his bodyguards.

In downtown Baghdad, guerrillas used a roadside bomb to wound 3 Iraqi police near al-Nida' mosque.

The Iraqi army found 9 bullet-riddled bodies in Nahrawan. All of them were from that city, near Wasit south of Baqubah. The dead included Shaikh Khital al-Muhammadawi, chief of the Al Muhammad tribe in the city.

In Nasiriyah, a roadside bomb aimed at an Italian convoy instead wounded two Iraqi civilians. The Italian soldiers escaped unscathed.

In Amara, guerrillas deployed a roadside bomb against a British convoy, killing 2 British soldiers and wounding a third.

Hmm. Someone seems to be targetting Coalition troops in the south of the country.

A rash of assassinations of physicians in Mosul continued, with the killing of Dr. Ya`sun Sulayman. [There has been a series of assassinations of doctors in Mosul? Everywhere you look south of Kurdistan, you find new corners of this ongoing horror show in Iraq!]

A roadside bomb in Kirkuk that targetted a high police official instead seriously wounded 4 civilians.

A bomb attack inflicted significant damage on a small mosque in Tikrit where the father of Saddam Hussein is buried.

Mortar shells landed near the television station run by the Iraqi Islamic Party, killing two senior employees at the station. [The Iraqi Islamic Party has a television station in Tikrit? It is a Sunni fundamentalist group descended from the Muslim Brotherhood).

In north Fallujah two bullet-riddled bodies showed up in the street. In the same place, guerrillas used a roadside bomb to kill two Iraqi national guardsman.

The Association of Muslim Scholars (hard line Sunnis) denied on Tuesday the reports that Shiite families had been forced out of Sunni neighborhoods in west and north Baghdad. It also confirmed that there were 26 casualties among worshippers at the Dhat al-Nitaqayn Mosque in New Baghdad when it was shelled during evening prayers on Monday.

Nancy Youssef reports from Baghdad that Sunni Arabs are sending arms to Baghdad and forming militias to match those of the Shiites, which attacked Sunni mosques last week. More good news.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Bush Ignored own National Intelligence Estimate
on Danger, Nature of Iraq Insurgency
Or, Ozymandias and Empire

Knight Ridder reports that US intelligence agencies warned Bush in the summer and fall of 2003 that the guerrilla war was growing in strength, was mostly local, and was fueled in part by the big US military footprint in the country. The report says,

' Among the warnings, Knight Ridder has learned, was a major study, called a National Intelligence Estimate, completed in October 2003 that concluded that the insurgency was fueled by local conditions - not foreign terrorists- and drew strength from deep grievances, including the presence of U.S. troops.

The existence of the top-secret document, which was the subject of a bitter three-month debate among U.S. intelligence agencies, has not been previously disclosed to a wide public audience.

The reports received a cool reception from Bush administration policymakers at the White House and the office of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, according to the former officials, who discussed them publicly for the first time.

President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld and others continued to describe the insurgency as a containable threat, posed mainly by former supporters of Saddam Hussein, criminals and non-Iraqi terrorists - even as the U.S. intelligence community was warning otherwise. '

And they were making fun in the White House around that time of the "reality-based community" that "judiciously" studied the facts on the ground! Because, you know, "we are an empire now."

Let me introduce the "empire" in the White House (or maybe that "thinker" has already been frog-marched out of it?) to Ozymandias.

Ozymandias

By Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said--"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart....Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
For "cont'd" postings, click here.