Deteriorating Security in Diyala

From Reuters: reports on major violence in the ongoing Iraqi Civil War on Tuesday:

' BAGHDAD - A car bomb killed at least 25 people and wounded 65 in the northern Baghdad district of Husa[y]niya, police said.

HILLA - A suicide bomber in a car killed at least 12 people and wounded 36 near a car dealership . . .

BAGHDAD - A bomb killed nine people and wounded 10 others in a bakery in eastern Baghdad . . .

BAGHDAD - Two women employees of the Ministry of Interior were killed and four policemen were wounded by a rocket which landed near the ministry, police said.'

The Ministry of Interior is in charge of domestic security.

It was revealed that a GI had been killed on Monday, Memorial Day.


From the USG Open Source Center:

' Diyala Governor Warns of Deteriorating Security Situation
Report by Samah al-Makhzumi: "Letter Urges Government To Deal With Deteriorating Security Situation in Ba'qubah; Diyala Governor Threatens To Declare State of Emergency and Expose Collaborating Officials"

Al-Zaman

Wednesday, May 31, 2006 T19:22:37Z


Diyala Governor Ra'd al-Mullah Jawad has urged the government to take precautions against the deteriorating security situation in the governorate quickly in order to avoid the situation deteriorating further, as it is getting worse day by day. Jawad has also called on the Advisory Council to suspend its work in order to attract the central government's attention to the grave danger engulfing the governorate. He confirmed that he will declare a state of emergency in the governorate based on a security plan.

At a press conference attended by Al-Zaman yesterday, 28 May, Jawad confirmed that he had sent a letter to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and the parliament warning them of the dangerous security situation in the governorate and urging them to "defy the large-scale sectarian campaign that the governorate, which has become a cradle for terrorism, is currently witnessing."

In his letter, Jawad confirmed: "The situation in Diyala Governorate is very difficult. We lack capabilities and authority." He urged officials, parliament members, clerics, and tribal chiefs "to shoulder responsibility and take into consideration the best interests of the governorate."

Jawad explained that "uncontrolled violence is extending like a crescent from Salah al-Din Governorate towards Al-Jizani, Hibhib, Al-Hadid, and Khan Bani Sa'd Districts and then to Southern Buhriz District towards Baladruz and finally Al-Muqdadiyah District." He confirmed the discovery a few days ago of weapons caches in Al-Muqdadiyah that contained enough weapons to supply a complete army brigade.

Jawad accused administrative officials of involvement in acts of violence and added: "We will speak to them frankly and if they do not stop their involvement, we will not keep silent." Jawad demanded that "the wider and larger authorities confront and expose these officials." He confirmed the displacement of 40 families and the killing of over 70 people in Ba'qubah last week alone.

Jawad revealed that several officials, including Al-Wajihiyah administrator Isma'il Alwan and the director of public relations and complaints, have requested to be transferred from the governorate due to the escalation in violence.

Jawad threatened that he will declare a state of emergency if the government does not take action. He attributed the delay in imposing curfew in the districts witnessing turmoil in the governorate to the final examinations.

Meanwhile, Diyala Advisory Council Chairman Ibrahim Bajilan and Deputy Governor for Technical Affairs Imad Jalil escaped an assassination attempt when a roadside bomb explosion targeted their convoy on its way from Khanaqin to Ba'qubah. An official source in the governorate administration confirmed that a bodyguard was killed and six others were injured in the incident. The source confirmed that unidentified gunmen attacked the convoy after the explosion.

Unidentified gunmen assassinated a peddler selling children's clothing in the middle of Ba'qubah's market. Two civilians were injured in a bomb explosion in Al-Khalis District. Yesterday morning, a police patrol discovered three heads separated from the bodies, including one of an old man, near a highway in Abd-al-Hamid Village in Had Miksir District. Gunmen broke into a house in Al-Gatun District in Ba'qubah yesterday. The tenant and his two boys were killed and his wife was injured in the attack.

In related news, US forces raided a house in Al-Mafraq District in Ba'qubah and arrested five family members, including an eighty year old man, according to the district's inhabitants. They confirmed that US troops destroyed the furniture and other facilities in the house during the raid, in which US helicopters took part.

(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)

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

City/Source: Baghdad
DIALOG Update Date: 20060531; 16:32:21 EST '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Kabul under Curfew after Anti-US, anti-Karzai Riots
14 Dead, over 100 Wounded
50 Killed in US Airstrike

"We have conducted a thorough assessment of our military and reconstruction needs in Iraq, and also in Afghanistan. I will soon submit to Congress a request for $87 billion. The request will cover ongoing military and intelligence operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, which we expect will cost $66 billion over the next year. This budget request will also support our commitment to helping the Iraqi and Afghan people rebuild their own nations, after decades of oppression and mismanagement. We will provide funds to help them improve security. And we will help them to restore basic services, such as electricity and water, and to build new schools, roads, and medical clinics. This effort is essential to the stability of those nations, and therefore, to our own security. Now and in the future, we will support our troops and we will keep our word to the more than 50 million people of Afghanistan and Iraq."
- George W. Bush

The Bush administration is in the midst of "imperial overstretch" on a grand scale. Taking on al-Qaeda and the Taliban, convincing Pakistan to change its policies, and reconstructing Afghanistan would have been a tough enough job. It might not have been possible even with the investment of enormous resources and personnel. Afghanistan is large and rugged and desperately poor. Bad characters are still hiding out in the region, who have proved that they can reach into the United States and hit the Pentagon itself.

Instead of doing the job, Bush ran off to Iraq almost immediately. Even as our brave troops were being killed at Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan in spring of 2002, Centcom commander Tommy Franks was telling a visiting Senator Bob Graham that the US "was no longer engaged in a war in Afghanistan" or words to that effect, and that military and intelligence personnel were being deployed to Iraq. The US troops in Afghanistan would have been shocked and disturbed to discover that in the Centcom commander's mind, they were no longer his priority and no longer even at war! As for money, Iraq has hogged the lion's share. What has been spent on reconstruction in Afghanistan is piddling.

Bush's Iraq imbroglio, or "Bush's Furnace," as history might well call his trillion-dollar purchase, has sucked up money and resources on a vast scale and left US personnel in Central and South Asia to struggle along on the cheap. Afghanistan defeated the British Empire in its heyday twice, and is not an enterprise that can be accomplished without significant resources. Now the chickens are coming home to roost.

Monday's riots in Kabul, in which altogether 14 died and over 100 were wounded and during which thousands thronged the streets chanting "Death to America", also produced violent attacks and gunfire throughout the city, with hotel windows being sprayed with machine gun fire. The protests were sparked by a traffic accident. But they have other roots.

The US military presence in Afghanistan has quietly been pumped up from 19,000 to 23,000 troops.

A fresh US airstrike in Helmand killed some 50 Afghans on Monday Over 400 Afghans have been killed by US bombing and military actions in only the past two weeks. While most of these are Pushtun nativist guerrillas (coded by the US as "Taliban"), some have demonstrably been innocent civilians. (Taliban are, properly speaking, mostly Afghan orphans and displaced youths who got their education in neo-Deobandi seminaries in Pakistan and were backed by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence. It is not clear that those now fighting the US in southern Afghanistan are actually in the main Taliban in this technical sense.)

Whoever they are, the Pushtun guerrillas have been waging a very effective terror campaign in the countryside around Qandahar, and have launched a fierce series of spring offensives. They wounded 5 Canadian troops on Monday, something US mass media anchors somehow have trouble getting past their lips. (Another 5 had been wounded last week, and several Canadian and French troops have been killed, not to mention US troops.)

A recent US airstrike that killed 16 children, women and noncombatant men provoked an enormous outcry in Afghanistan, and sparked President Hamid Karzai to begin a presidential inquiry into it.

While most anti-US actions in Afghanistan come from the Pushtun ethnic group, these Kabul protests, which paralyzed the capital and resulted in the imposition of a curfew, heavily involved Tajiks. Kabul is a largely Tajik city, and the Tajiks mostly hated the Taliban with a passion, and many high officials in the Karzai government have been Tajik. So they haven't been as upset with the US invasion and presence as have been many Pushtuns, especially those Pushtuns who either supported the Taliban or just can't abide foreign troops in their country (who have moreover installed the Tajiks in power . . .) The demonstrators Monday carried posters of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Tajik leader of the Northern Alliance who had played a major role in expelling Soviet troops in the late 1980s and then fought the Taliban tenaciously before being assassinated shortly before September 11, 2001. Significant numbers of Tajiks are clearly now turning against the US, and that is a very bad sign indeed. Al-Hayat's Jamal Ismail in Islamabad suggests that some of the Tajik discontent derives from the way Karzai has eased out Northern Alliance Tajik leaders such as Marshal Muhammad Fahim and former cabinet minister Yunus Qanuni, reducing Tajik dominance of the government in the name of ethnic diversity (and of mitigating Pushtun anger over the imbalance). There have also been attempts to limit the Tajik presence in the new Afghan Army, which is some 60,000 strong (some sources say 80,000). The CIA factbook says that Pushtuns are 42 % of the population and Tajiks 27 %. Pushtuns have usually supplied the top rulers.

Despite Bush administration pledges to reconstruct the country, only six percent of Afghans have access to electricity. Less than 20 percent have access to clean water. Although the gross domestic product has grown by 80 percent since the nadir of 2001, and may be $7 billion next year, most of that increase comes from the drug trade or from foreign assistance. (Some of the increase also comes from the end of a decade-long drought in the late 90s and early 00s, which had reduced the country's arable land by 50 percent. The coming of the rains again is good luck but nothing to do with policy). About half the economy of Afghanistan is generated by the poppy crop, which becomes opium and then heroin in Europe. Afghanistan produces 87 percent of the world's opium and heroin, and no other country comes close in its dedication of agricultural land to drug production (over 200,000 hectares).

The government lives on international welfare. Some 92 percent of Afghan government expenditures come from foreign assistance. The Afghan government is worse at collecting taxes than fourth world countries in subsaharan Africa. Unemployment remains at 35 percent. Unemployment is estimated to have been 25 percent in the US during the Great Depression.

The great danger is renewed Muslim radicalism and the reemergence of al-Qaeda, combined with a narco-terrorism that could make Colombia's FARC look like minor players.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

60 Dead, including US Major, 2 British Soldiers, CBS Crew
Parliamentary Delegation Planned to Basra

The FCC will investigate the placing by the Bush administration of "video news releases" full of "good news" about Iraq on US television channels, passing them off as real news. Having defeated the Soviet Union, the US government seems increasingly intent on emulating its domestic security policies.

Wire services are reporting between 50 and 60 deaths from guerrilla violence in Iraq on Monday. The dead including two British members of a CBS camera crew embedded with the 4th ID in Baghdad along with a US army captain and an interpreter, and two British soldiers in Basra (another two British soldiers were injured).

Three massive bombs shook the area of Adhamiyah and Kadhimiyah [Kazimiyah] in northern Baghdad.

Adhamiyah, still from all accounts a Baath Party stronghold in the capital It was hit by an enormous car bomb, killing 12 and wounding 24. Then just a moment later, guerrillas detonated another car bomb, killing 5 and wounding 7.

Then guerrillas blew up a bus in neighboring Kadhimiyah, across the Tigris, killing 7 and wounding 9. Kadhimiyah has a major Shiite shrine.

The Iraqi parliament is concerned about the rising tensions in Basra. Conflicts among the Badr Corps of SCIRI, the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr, and the Fadhila or Virtue Party, threaten to break apart what is left of the United Iraqi Alliance, the biggest bloc in parliament, consisting of religious Shiite parties. Likewise, Sunnis in Basra, some of whom have received Saudi funding for militant activities, face increased ethnic cleansing at the hands of Shiites. Hundreds have fled to West Baghdad in recent weeks. Prime Minsiter Nuri al-Maliki may lead a delegation to the country's second city, including representatives of major Shiite parties and also of the Sunni Arabs, in hopes of calming the fighting and assassinations.

Some of the fighting seems to me to be between Marsh Arab tribes loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr and the Badr Corps of the Supreme Council. An Iraqi from Basra told me that the rumors were that the Marsh Arabs were fighting "Iranian influence" in Basra. Badr is probably being coded as Iranian agents by the nativist Marsh Arabs.

Al-Zaman reports that the Fadhila or Virtue Party has expressed doubt that the new oil minister, Husain Shahristani, can resolve the fuel and electricity problems in Iraq, given that he is a technocrat with no popular base, and no particular experience in the petroleum sector. The Virtue Party, which is mainly based in Basra, had coveted the ministry of petroleum, and had had it in the previous, Jaafari government. It has withdrawn from the government coalition in disappointment and is conducting a work slow-down in the Basra petroleum industry in protest. Iraqi electricity supply has also faced substantial problems recently because of concerted guerrilla sabotage.

Al-Zaman reports from Riyadh that George W. Bush called Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah on Monday to discuss regional affairs, including The Palestinian question, Iraq, and Iran's nuclear energy program.

Iraqi widows struggle to survive.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that the British military attempted to hold a press conference on Monday, but that the local press refused to come in protest for an earlier incident, in which British troops fired on a Reuters cameraman.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

55 Dead in Civil War
Member of Parliament wounded in Attack

al-Zaman/ DPA: An aide of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani called [Ar.] Sunday for the Iraqi tribesmen to convene a wide conference in order to find aways of stopping the shedding of blood in Iraq.

US firms bidding on contracts to provide foodstuffs to Iraq might have expected to have an edge. But in fact, Vietnam has won a contract to supply rice to Iraq.

Guerrillas placed a bomb on a bus full of laborers near Baquba, killing 11 and wounding 16 on Monday morning. Aljazeera is saying that the workers were constructing something for the Mojahedin-e Khalq anti-Iranian terrorist group based in northeastern Iraq.

On Sunday, 17 persons were killed in various incidents of the ongoing civil war.

In addition a battle between the Iraqi army and guerrillas or tribesmen at Dulu'iyah north of the capital left 20 Iraqi soldiers and 18 guerrillas dead. (I'd say the guerrillas won that one by two corpses). In total, I count that as 55 dead in political violence.

Guerrillas assassinated the head of the a Sunni tribe at Karabila for cooperating with the Americans against them.

The ministers of defense and interior have still not been appointed.

The parliament decided its members all need armored cars. The press seems to be taking an attitude of ridicule toward this measure, but I see it as a good sign. The parliament should spend $50 million on enabling its members to come to work without fear of being shot dead by guerrillas.

Or maybe they missed this Reuters item today:

'BAGHDAD - A Shi'ite woman member of parliament, Gufran al- Saidi, was wounded in a shooting incident near Baghdad's Green Zone, police sources said. They had no further details. Saidi is a supporter of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. ''

Apparently the reporters have forgotten that parliamentarians and candidates for parliament really have been killed by the guerrillas. The sum mentioned is peanuts compared to what private security guards of the sort Westerners in Iraq use would cost. (Maybe only Western lives are important?) And if the parliamentarians wouldn't even act to save their own lives, how could you hope they would ever accomplish anything at all (wouldn't that, at least, presumably be important to them?) So much money has been wasted in Iraq, both American and Iraqi, since the fall of the Baath. The defense minister appointed by Iyad Allawi (who was in turn more or less appointed by the Americans) is thought to have embezzled very big bucks, for which there is nothing to show. Armored cars that really exist and help the Iraqi government function? That would be a bargain.

Shiite and Kurdish politicians are trying to reduce the power of the Sunni Arab speaker of the House. The Sunni Arabs only have a vice president, a vice premier, four cabinet seats, and the speaker of the house among high government posts. They are outraged that one of the few nodes of power they have left should now be removed.

AP discusses the pain of Iraq War widows.

Baghdad is broken, with little electricity, water or garbage collection. This according to the SF Chronicle.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iran Cleans up in Iraq

Iran is perhaps the only unambiguous winner in the new situation in Iraq, and its foreign minister was basking in the glow on Saturday. On Friday, Iraqi foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari defended Iran's right to have a civilian nuclear energy program. That can't be what Washington was going for in backing the new Iraqi government.

Al-Hayat reports that Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki wrapped up his visit to Iraq by meeting in Najaf with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and with the junior cleric and nationalist leader Muqtada al-Sadr, along with numerous other clerics in Najaf and Karbala. He also met in Baghdad with Sunni fundamentalist leader Adnan Dulaimi in an attempt to "reassure" him about Iran's intentions in Iraq. The representative of Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Labid Abawi, said that Mottaki's visit was "extremely positive." He added, "One of our objectives was to underline that Iran is close to Iraq and that it is impossible to bypass it in looking for a resolution of the Iraq question."

Mottaki reaffirmed that Iran had committed $1 billion in aid to Iraq, and would cooperate in the area of energy production. Mottaki also sent a letter to the tribunal judging Saddam Hussein with a list of charges against him.

Issues the Iraqis brought up with the Iranian official included the need for better border control to stop unauthorized entry of Iranians, as well as combatting weapons smuggling and drug smuggling. The Iranians in turn complained about the infiltration of Iran from Iraq of terrorists from the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) guerrilla movement. Saddam had allowed this terrorist group to establish a base in Iraq, in order to use it to harass the Iranian regime. Although the State Department considers the MEK a terrorist organization, the Department of Defense appears to be giving it free rein in Iraq.

Iranian news of the visit concentrated on the new Iranian consulates that will be established in Iraq.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that Mottaki said Sistani emphasized the necessity of Iraqi national unity, and had avoided using the words "Shiite" and "Sunni."

Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder looks at the Shiite militias of the south. His interviewees in the British and US military maintain that Iran is running training camps inside Iran for Iraqi militiamen. (Iran for over two decades had trained the Badr Corps, recruiting from Iraqis who fled Saddam, so such training camps, facilities and expertise are nothing new.) On the other hand, since they have such longstanding and tight relations with Badr, it doesn't really make much sense for them to arm, fund and train Badr's potential rivals, such as splinter groups of the Iraqi nationalist Sadr movement. On that, I would have to see more proof. Badr is a no brainer.

Lasseter says that the Sadr movement dominates the city council of Amarah. Then he says that Amarah police are mostly Badr corps. That I don't understand (I'm not challenging it, I just don't understand). Wouldn't the Sadrist councilmen have packed the police with members of the Mahdi Army? [Answer: The central government's Ministry of Interior has enormous influence over the hiring of local police, and under Bayan Jabr it was in the hands of the Supreme Council, which has Badr as its paramilitary arm.]

Lasseter also reports on suspicions that the governor of Basra is using Shiite militias (of various sorts) for extortion and assassination. The governor is from the Virtue Party but is alleged to be using Badr and the Mahdi Army. (Last I knew, the Mahdi Army is not actually very powerful in Basra, but this may have changed).

The NYT profiles the ways in which Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is drawing power into the traditionally weak office of president.
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3 GIs Dead
So Far, 18,200 US Troops Wounded in Iraq

See Nir Rosen's important article, "Iraq is the Republic of Fear" in WaPo today.

Reuters rounds up the civil war violence in Iraq on Saturday. By my count, at least nineteen were reported dead.

Three GIs were announced dead, two in a helicopter crash on Saturday and one on Friday in clashes in Anbar province.

Up north, guerrillas stopped an army patrol 25 miles south of Kirkuk and shot an Iraqi army major to death, and wounding three soldiers. In Mosul, guerrillas shot two men dead. In Dujail, guerrillas attacked a military checkpoint, killing 2 Iraqi soldiers and wounding 3.

In the northeast near Baquba, guerrillas ambushed a police car, killing a colonel and four of his bodyguards, and wounding other bodyguards. In Baquba itself, guerrillas shot three ironsmiths and then killed two men at a tire repair shop. Sounds like a contract dispute to me.

In Baghdad, guerrillas fired a mortar round into a crowded market to the south of the city, killing 4 and wounding 15.

In the south, in Diwaniyah, guerrillas set off a roadside bomb near the house of a police colonel, seriously wounding him. The previously mentioned incidents were probably carried out by Sunni Arabs, but the hit in Diwaniyah is more likely by local Shiite militiamen.

18,200 GIs have been wounded in Iraq. This article says that half a million Americans bear wounds from warfare, going back to WW II.
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Italians to Pull Out nearly Half of Troops in June
Sectarian struggle among Tribes at Suwayra

Congrats to Mariam Karouny for an excellent story on how the Virtue (Fadhila) Party is staging what she calls a "go-slow" in Basra's oil industry to protest the federal government's refusal to appoint a member of Virtue as Minister of Petroleum. Since Basra controls southern petroleum exports, and Virtue controls much of Basra, there is a real disconnect now between on-the-ground power and bureaucratic authority. The governor of Basra is from the Virtue Party, and it occurs to me that part of his annoyance with the local represtentatives of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is that the latter's great supporter, Husain Shahristani, a nuclear engineer, got the petroleum ministry.

Italy will bring 1100 of its 2600 troops in Iraq out in June according to Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema. Prime Minister Romano Prodi's complex coalition is divided on how fast to bring all the troops home, and his razor thin majority in the senate makes his position delicate.

Reuters rounds up some of the violence in Iraq on Friday. One bomb in Baghdad killed 9 and wounded 31. Another wounded 20, though several of those may have later died. Another wounded 5. Reuters tends to file these reports on security relatively early in the day, so it left out a lot of incidents. Two were killed in Kirkuk. Bodies showed up dead in Kut in the south. Altogether some 19 were killed, though my experience is that if you count up all the persons killed and those discovered dead, the totals are higher than the wire service reports suggest.

RevisedA tennis coach and two of his players was killed on Thursday. Some suspect radical Sunni fundamentalists, who had put about a pamphlet insisting on moderate dress. Al-Zaman blamed the Mahdi Army. Puritanical dress codes may well be behind the incident, though it is still murky.

This item from Reuters is important: "Suwayra - Police said they found on Friday near Suwayra, south of Baghdad, the body of a member of the Mahdi Army militia which had bullet wounds and showed signs of torture." It turns out that the supposed tribal feud "over land" near Suwayra is actually a political struggle, with one of the sub-tribes having joined the Mahdi Army and acting aggressively in the region.

I have the following account from someone there who has been following this:

' The [sectarian conflict near Suwayra] faded out in November of last year.

It suddenly errupted three days ago. There were actually three days of violence in that area. The first day was an attack on Obaid by members of the Ghuran tribe who were members of the Mahdi army (at least they carried Mhdi army id's). 14 people were killed.

The second saw an attack from Suwaira security forces (although the area administratively belongs to Baghdad).

The third day saw a massive assault by Iraqi and US army accompanied by helicopter gunships and fighter planes. The assault lasted for 10 hours . . .

It is absolutely fascinating for me to see that piece of information being propagated on Iraqi news channels, newspapers and websites as a land dispute. It was originally based on a "police source".

It is now almost certain that the US army was misled into taking action against one of the two parties yesterday.

The whole thing was a 'sectarian' assault that failed miserably the first time. It failed again this time . . .

In yesterday’s ‘American’ raid only one man was killed – young Marwan (!!) 6 were injured and about a dozen detained (exact number unconfirmed).

Today, all tribes in the area (Sunni and Shiite) were in uproar against the Ghurraan. Their 3 acts were seen as treacherous. The Ghurraan shaikh, Saad A. A. al-Bassi sent word to Obaid that he was enlisting support from his tribe to disown the sub-clan that was responsible (known as Rattaan). A few hours ago I received word (unconfirmed) that Saad was arrested by the Iraqi National Guard!
'

Americans arrested the brother of one of the Sunni Arab members of parliament, drawing protests from her about parliamentary immunity being violated. MP Taysir Awwad may be under the impression that Bush honors things like parliamentary immunity at home.

In Basra, a Sunni prayer leader was assassinated. Waves of Sunni refugees have been fleeing largely Shiite Basra for Baghdad in recent weeks.

Al-Zaman reports that tension over security returned to Basra on Friday after 10 corpses were discovered in a Basra district. They were said to be innocent Sunni Arabs not involved in lawless violence.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Arguing with Bush and Blair

The news conference of Bush and Blair on Thursday evening was unexpectedly dominated by Iraq.

I'm going to just pull out some passages worthy of comment, not in order.

In fact, the first is from the end:

'Q: Mr. President, you spoke about missteps and mistakes in Iraq. Could I ask both of you which missteps and mistakes of your own you most regret?

PRESIDENT BUSH: It sounds like kind of a familiar refrain here. (Scattered laughter.) Saying "Bring it on." Kind of tough talk, you know, that sent the wrong signal to people. That I learned some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated manner. You know, "Wanted dead or alive," that kind of talk.

I think in certain parts of the world it was misinterpreted. And so I learned -- I learned from that.

And, you know, I think the biggest mistake that's happened so far, at least from our country's involvement in Iraq, is Abu Ghraib. We've been paying for that for a long period of time. And it's -- unlike Iraq, however, under Saddam, the people who committed those acts were brought to justice; they've been given a fair trial and tried and convicted. '

Well, first of all, it should be pointed out that only the very lowest level of perpetrator at Abu Ghraib has been punished. And not very much punished at that. The soldier who set snarling dogs on detainees got six months. As I remember, Iraqis were outraged. What would you get for selling a dime bag of pot? And Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone have not in any way been held accountable. Or General "My god is bigger than yours" Boykin, either.

The US media were saying that Bush apologized for his flip rhetoric. But look again. He did not. He said he had been "misinterpreted" in some parts of the world. (Which?) How do you misinterpret "bring it on?" And, why in the world is he apologizing for saying he wanted Bin Laden dead or alive? What has that got to do with Iraq, anyway?

The people who were angriest at Bush over the "bring it on" remark were the military and the families of the military. George Washington, who actually led his troops, might have been entitled to talk like that. Someone who spends most of his time in the White House gym isn't.

But if Bush was going to express any regrets, why is it over his faux cowboy rhetoric? Wouldn't his biggest regret be over 20,000 Americans killed or wounded in Iraq? Wouldn't it be over the 2400 plus fresh caskets in Arlington and other cemeteries around the country, the earth above them still bulging slightly from the newness of their perch, and the young men in wheel chairs or the ones who will eat with a straw from now on?

Here is another interesting bit:

BUSH: 'All I can report to you is what General Casey, in whom I have got a lot of confidence, tells me, and that is the Iraqis are becoming better and better fighters. And at some point in time, when he feels like the government is, you know, ready to take on more responsibility and the Iraqi forces are able to help them do so, he will get on the telephone with me and say, "Mr. President, I think we can do this with fewer troops."

We've been up to 165,000 at one point. We're at about 135,000 now.

Actually, he moved -- actually moved some additional troops from Kuwait into Baghdad. Conditions on the ground were such that we needed more support in Baghdad to secure Baghdad, so he informed me, through Donald Rumsfeld, that he wanted to move troops out of Kuwait into Baghdad. So these commanders, they need to have flexibility in order to achieve the objective. '

Bush is admitting that things are so bad militarily in Iraq that US control of the capital itself is in doubt, so that reinforcements have had to be brought quickly from Kuwait. He is telling us this as a reason fro which he won't set a timetable. But what it reveals is how bad the situation in Baghdad really is. And he is saying that no timetable under these circumstances would be worth the paper it was printed on. After all, if the US troops started leaving Baghdad and the guerrillas started taking over even more of it than they already have, could Bush afford to just let the capital fall?

BUSH: ' The prime minister met with key leaders of the new Iraqi government that represents the will of the Iraqi people and reflects their nation's diversity.'

The Sunni Arabs are about 20 percent of the population, more or less. The three self-identified Sunni Arab parties-- the Iraqi Accord Front, the National Dialogue Council, and the small Reform and Reconciliation Party, together have 58 seats in parliament, nearly 21 percent. There are 37 cabinet posts. 4 went to the main Sunni parties in parliament. That is about 11 percent of cabinet posts. And even if the Defense minister ends up being ethnically Sunni Arab, he is likely to be an unrepresentative technocrat, and that still only brings the total up to 13.5 percent.

This new government was supposed to be an opportunity to reach out to the Sunni Arabs. But some Sunni Arabs are so upset about being stiffed in their proportion of cabinet posts that 15 walked out when Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki presented his government to parliament. I saw Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi on Aljazeera this week insisting that the "Resistance" has a right to defend Iraq from foreign occupation or words to that effect, and urging that the US talk directly to the guerrilla leadership. Well, I guess that is a sign that the new Iraqi government is more representative. I'm not sure it is what Bush was going for.

Blair was just as bad, and more dangerous for being smoother. He once again tried to justify the invasion of Iraq with reference to a terrorist threat to Europe. But Iraq was not a significant source of terrorism in Europe before it was, like, invaded and occupied by the UK! And, he tried to argue that the UN is unwieldy and unworkable because it is too slow to deal with a fast-moving terror plot. But Blair's problem with the UN is not that it was slow. The UNSC quickly passed a resolution on Iraq when requested. It was that it would not go along with an illegal war of aggression.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraq's My Lai


Friday morning, guerrillas used a car bomb to kill at least 9 persons [later reports say 9] at an East Baghdad market, wounding 31.

AP had reported 13 killings on Thursday, including two US troops. Al-Sharq al-Awsat said 20 were wounded.

The neo-Baath Party (well that is most likely who it is) took revenge for the trial of Saddam over the killing of Shiite Dawa Party members for trying to assassinate him in 1982. The guerrillas kidnapped a judge from Dujail, where the massacre took place. Two Iranian truck drivers were also kidnapped.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat/ AFP say [Ar.] that Kurdish women are protesting how poorly they are represented in the Kurdistan regional government.

At Camp LeJeune, soldiers wounded in the Iraq War heal together, in an innovative program thought up by a wounded soldier.

The Haditha incident, in which US Marines are alleged to have killed between 14 and 24 civilians in cold blood, is becoming the My Lai of the Iraq War. Officers have been relieved of command, and murder charges may be brought. Somehow, though, this time the American public doesn't seem very interested in the story. My guess, is that many still have payback for 9/11 in their minds. The Vietnamese had never done anything to us. Of course, the Iraqis hadn't done much to us, either, aside from fighting back when the United Nations pushed them (quite rightly) out of Kuwait. But Dick Cheney has by innuendo and half-lies managed to convince the American public that in fighting the Iraqis, we are fighting the people behind 9/11, or at least people very like that.

I'm told that some green National Guard units in Iraq have responded to bombs going off in the vicinity by indiscriminately laying down fire all around them, which has been rather hard on any civilians in the vicinity. I fear large numbers of Iraqis have been killed in such ways. But at least in this sort of incident, the guardsmen were nervous and felt they might be under attack. Haditha sounds horrid. I have known military people all my life, and I think they are for the most part decent and honorable, and I am sure that Haditha--i.e. cold blooded murder of civilians--was an aberration.

A report from Tarmiyah doesn't hold out much hope that the guerrilla movement is going away soon. In the article, an Iraqi soldier asks for better arms, like rocket propelled grenades. He isn't thinking big enough. He needs to demand some tanks and helicopter gunships. The guerrillas have lots of RPGs to fire back with, but don't have tanks. US troops can't withdraw until the Iraqi army is better equipped, and I mean equipped.

According to secret documents gotten hold of by The Herald, British troops in the South of Iraq:

"have come under bomb, mortar, rocket and sniper attack almost twice a day since January, losing 12 dead to hostile fire . . . Despite government claims that the security situation has improved on the UK's patch to the point where up to 1000 troops can begin withdrawing from July, about 75 of the 269 attacks and four of the fatalities have occurred in provinces judged to be relatively stable."

In withdrawing from Maysan province in particular, the British are just declaring victory and going home. As if hundreds of thousands of displaced and sullen Marsh Arabs, many of whom have gone over to Muqtada al-Sadr, could be controlled by a thousand or two thousand foreign troops. Muthanna is probably quieter, but only because the Badr Corps Shiite paramilitary is powerful there.

If foreign troops are attacked almost twice a day on average in the relatively calm south, to how many daily attacks are US troops subjected in the turbulent Sunni Arab heartland?

The Iraq War was clearly illegal in international law, and this obvious conclusion seemed evident to then British Attorney General Lord Golsmith earlier on, too. If that is the case, why did Goldsmith suddenly change his mind and authorize the war in March, 2003? British generals would not have been willing to fight without such a finding, since they risked war crimes trials (they may still risk them in the European Union someday). At least the British authorities are investigating this matter. The United States has become so corrupt and monarchical that mere international law, even that signed into US law, is not even an issue, and what is important is how the president or the vice president or the secretary of defense "saw things." We have become a country of men and not laws.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iran Offered Recognition of Israel, Nuclear Cooperation
Bush: "How dare you!"

In 2003, Iran offered to come in from the cold in a proposal to George W. Bush. Recognition of Israel within 1967 borders, pressure on Hizbullah and the Palestinians to moderate, signing the additional protocols of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, full cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, it was all there for Bush's taking.

What did Bush do?

He reprimanded the Swiss embassy, which takes care of US affairs in Iran, for daring to forward this proposal to Crawford on the Potomac.

Why?

Why?

Bush and his various constituencies (the military-industrial complex; the Christian Right; the Likudnik Lobby; and Big Oil) do not want peace with Iran.

How relieved they must have been when they managed to freeze out President Mohammad Khatami, who was trying to bring Iran back into the international community and reduce tensions.

How delighted they must have been when the world class buffoon Mahmoud Ahmadinejad succeeded Khatami and the hard liners strengthened their grasp after the Bush administration had done what it could to sabotage the Iranian reform movement.

Now Bush has Iran right where he wants it, in the sights of an ICBM.

Condi Rice called Iran the "central banker for terrorism" , even though the banks al-Qaeda used were in the UAE and Pakistan and no operational Iranian link to al-Qaeda has ever even been plausibly suggested. Rice hasn't said that again, because everyone pointed out to her that it is not true. Given that so many of the Israeli colonists busy stealing Palestinian land and pushing Palestinian children into thorn bushes are armed and demonstrably violent, and given that the US has designated Kach/ Kahana Chai as a terrorist group, it could as well be argued that the funders of Kach in particular and of the colonists in general are among the central bankers of terrorism in the world.

Then last week the Likudnik Lobby started a black psy-ops campaign to paint Iran as the Fourth Reich. The Khomeinist regime is oppressive and authoritarian, may God hasten its demise. But it hasn't invaded any neighbors, and it hasn't committed genocide (though it has executed dissidents and members of religious minorities who were prisoners of conscience), and you may as well assault Burma or Zimbabwe if you are a Warmongering Wilsonian.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Maliki: Iraqis in Control of Own Security within 18 Months
50 dead in fresh violence

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said Wednesday that Iraq will be able completely to handle security throughout the country within 18 months. He had earlier suggested that Coalition troops could leave by the end of this year.

UpdateNewsday covers the building conflict between al-Maliki and Bush/Blair on this issue. The American and British leaders want to go much slower, fearful of a collapse in Iraq and the Gulf if the withdrawal is too hasty. Newsday says that there are fears that the Mahdi Army would take over the south if the British and US troops leave. But since the British are leaving Maysan Province soon, who do you think will take it over? I suppose the real fear is that The Mahdi Army will take Baghdad. Al-Maliki's Dawa Party has developed a political alliance with Muqtada.

Bush and Blair will do a press conference after 7 pm today, Thursday.

Reuters reports on the ongoing civil war in Iraq. The deadliest incidents:

' YUSUFIYA - Four gunmen and two members of the Iraqi security forces were killed in clashes that erupted during a raid and search operation by army and police . . .

BAGHDAD - Gunmen shot dead General Ahmed Dawod, a deputy chief of Baghdad municipality's protection units . . .

NEAR BAQUBA - Gunmen attacked the convoy of Adil Issa, a member of the provincial council of Diyala province north of Baghdad, killing two of his bodyguards and wounding another, police said.

' BAGHDAD - A U.S. soldier was killed when his patrol was attacked by small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades south of the town of Balad on Tuesday . . .

'

US forces fought several skirmishes with guerrillas, killing a number.

Al-Hayat put the death toll at 50 on Tuesday, including 16 dead in tribal clashes near Suwayra. If so, it knows about more incidents than Reuters did. By the way, the two tribes that fought were settling a land dispute. Unfortunately, one tribe is Shiite, the other Sunni.

The same source said that Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi and Vice Premier Salam al-Zawbai, the two highest ranking Sunni Arabs in the new government, are asking the US and the Sunni Arab guerrillas to speak to one another. They are pressing the Americans and British for a withdrawal timetable, which has been a longstanding Sunni Arab demand. But al-Hashimi also said that the national resistance groups fighting the Americans had no choice but to negotiate with them.

Zawbai announced that he was ready to dialogue with any group, even Baathist, that renounced violence.

Hadi al-Amiri of the Badr Organization denies [Ar.] that his faction has been involved in death squads.

Al-Zaman says that [Ar.] Najaf police launched an attack on Tuesday evening in the Rahmah quarter of the city, most of the inhabitants of which belong to the Sadr Movement. The district only grew up after the fall of Saddam. The police launched a number of operations there, which al-Zaman did not specify, but presumably they were looking for weapons caches or known criminals.

Police also found 6 launching sites for Katyusha missiles in the vast Najaf cemetery.

Muqtada al-Sadr, the young cleric who leads the Sadr movement begun by his father, called Wednesday for Iraqi parties to avoid politicizing the universities.

Al-Zaman reports that the Governing Council of Karbala Province has dissolved the Security Committee that had been formed to address the security problems in the province. The step came after an escalation in assassinations, and the discovery of unidentified corpses. A spokesman for the council said that a new Security Committee has been formed that includes independent members. Also, a regulation has been enacted that no night-time arrests may be made without notifying the mayor of Karbala city and the municipal council.

National police and Interior Ministry special police commandos will patrol the area around the central shrines of the city, among the holiest in Shiite Islam. Volunteers may also join in.

The governor will discuss the security situation with a representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.

It seems pretty obvious that the first Security Committee is suspected of itself having been engaged in the assassinations and production of unidentified corpses! Throughout Iraq, the fox seems to be guarding the henhouse.

Governor Aqil al-Khaz`ali admitted that the security apparatuses are suffering from shortages of equipment and sophisticated weaponry for their struggle against local terrorists, who, he said, were taking aim at the civilizational monuments of Karbala.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Demonstrations on Thursday Face Repression
Egypt's Mubarak Criticizes Washington

HOw will the Mubarak regime deal with the protests planned for today against the lack of judicial independence and the rigging of elections?

My article on the increasing annoyance Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is showing toward Bush administration policies in the Middle East is out in Salon.com

Excerpt:

' Egypt's alliance with the United States, a cornerstone of both countries' foreign policies since 1978, is under the severest strain it has witnessed in its nearly 30 years. This week at the Davos World Economic Forum, President Hosni Mubarak took a number of obvious swipes at U.S. policy. Mubarak's unusual criticisms reflected both his own uneasiness about the growing opposition to his regime -- for which Washington is partly responsible -- and his anger at Bush's disastrous policies in the region, which have produced an Iraq in flames and under the domination of fundamentalist parties, a deadlocked peace process and a Hamas government in Palestine, and a dangerous escalation of tensions with Iran. It is unclear how much impact on U.S. policies Mubarak will have. But that even America's most reliable Middle East pillars appear to be trembling should cause concern in the White House. '

Read the whole thing.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

National Post Retracts Minorities Badge Story on Iran

Antonia Zerbisias follows up on the the bogus National Post story about Iran having passed a law requiring Christians and Jews to wear badges identifying them as such. She notes that The National Post has retracted the story, saying:

' Our mistake: Note to readers

Last Friday, the National Post ran a story prominently on the front page alleging that the Iranian parliament had passed a law that, if enacted, would require Jews and other religious minorities in Iran to wear badges that would identify them as such in public. It is now clear the story is not true. Given the seriousness of the error, I felt it necessary to explain to our readers how this happened. '

Ironically, the rest is behind a firewall and does not at the moment seem to show up at google.news!

As for rightwing expatriate Iranian journalist Amir Taheri, the source "> of the story he has declined to retract. He continues to maintain that the law he referred to was "passed,", and says that his sources are "three members of the Iranian Majlis" (parliament). But as many experts, including Israeli-Iranian experts, have pointed out, no such law has been passed. Some have doubted that Taheri is likely to be in close contact with three members of the new hardline parliament.

If Taheri were merely alleging that some hardline members of parliament had discussed among themselves the possibility of marking non-Muslims by badges, that would be one thing. In the 1980s under Khomeini, there actually was a measure requiring non-Muslim shopkeepers to so identify themselves in their shop windows. I understand that this measure backfired and was dropped, when the Muslim Iranians flocked to the minority establishments. (Minorities in Iran are custodians of many of the finer things in life, from liquor cabinets to pepperoni on pizza, and their merchants have often adopted a strategy of being scrupulously honest with customers so as to give a value-added beyond that offered by Muslim establishments.) While the law was something out of 1930s Germany, the reaction of the Iranian public was for the most part definitely not.

And if the allegation was merely that the matter had been discussed by MPs, you could understand him standing by what he says he was told by insiders. But he is alleging that a law has been passed. A law is a public thing. We would know about that. And, Maurice Motamed, the Jewish representative in the Iranian parliament, would certainly know about it. He denies that any such thing was even discussed in parliament.

So here is a case where an embarrassing mistake has been made. The National Post has retracted. So too should Taheri. Or else we have to assume that he is putting something else above journalistic integrity.

Larry Cohler-Esses of The Jewish Week reviews the fiasco.

See also Jan Frel at Alternet.

And Justin Raimondo.

Unqualified Offerings made some intersting points on the affair a couple of days ago.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iran: Revived Persecution of Baha'is
54 Arrested in Shiraz

One unfortunate consequence of the bogus stories about Iran making minorities wear badges is that it could obscure the real human rights violations toward minorities in Ahmadinejad's Iran. There is disturbing evidence that Iranian government institutions are beginning to track and monitor the Baha'i religious minority again, and one doubts that it is with benign intentions.

In the 1980s, Khomeini had some 200 Baha'is executed and thousands were imprisoned for various terms. The violence against them subsided in the 1990s, but they still face disabilities.

Baha'is in Iran are not permitted, for instance to attend university. For more on this issue, see this site.

I recently received the following disturbing news:

' Dear friends,

We just heard the sad news that around twenty odd number of young active believers (male and female) have beem captured and imprisoned in Shiraz yesterday, so their families are asking everyone around the world to hold prayer meetings for them. Please keep them and their families in your thoughts and prayers. '

It turns out it is worse. Actually, some 54 Baha'is have been arrested. It is not clear what the charges are against them. But Khomeinist hard liners hate the Baha'is and refuse to admit that theirs is a legitimate religion.

For more on the history and background of the Iranian Baha'i community of Iran, see my piece in History Today.

The following piece can be ordered on interlibrary loan: Juan Cole, “The Baha’i Minority and Nationalism in Contemporary Iran.” In Maya Shatzmiller, ed., Nationalism and Minority Identities in Islamic Societies. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005. Pp. 127-163. Despite its title, it deals extensively with the human rights situation of the Baha'is in the post-1979 period in Iran.

I do have to enter a caveat that some people will want to use all this for the wrong purposes. The founder of the Baha'i religion advocated an end to warfare and forbade aggressive war. So it just is not right to use the mistreatment of Baha'is as any sort of pretext for military aggression against Iran. It would be like militarily devastating and occupying Pennsylvania to protect the Quakers and Amish.

Protests about the arrests in Shiraz may be addressed to:

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran
c/o H.E. Javad Zarif
Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary
Permanent Mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations
Fax: 212-867-7086

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

Update:

' NEW YORK, 26 May 2006 (BWNS) -- After their arrests on 19 May in Shiraz, Iran, three Baha'is remain in jail while 51 others have been released on bail. No indication has been given as to when the three will be released. None of those who had been released, nor the three who are still being detained, have been formally charged. On the day of the arrests, one Baha'i, under the age of 15, was released
without having to post bail. At that same time, several other young people who are not Baha'is and who had been arrested with the Baha'is, were also released without bail. On Wednesday 24 May, five days after their summary arrests, 14 of the Baha'is were released, each having been required to provide deeds of property to the value of ten million tumans (approximately US$11,000) as collateral for release. The following day, Thursday 25 May, 36 Baha'is were released on the strength of either personal guarantees or the deposit of work licenses with the court as surety that they will appear when summoned to court. '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Iraqi Currency

My comment that I thought Amir Taheri was wrong to praise the stability of the Iraqi dinar, because the dinar is a managed currency and does not float freely, brought a rebuke from someone more knowledgeable about currency issues than I. Collier Lounsbury maintained that the stability was genuine and owing in some part to Iraq's petroleum. (Exporting a pricey primary commodity does wonders to harden your currency). Now I have another reaction from someone who knows something serious about financial matters. Me, I know about ayatollahs. So I'm posting this interesting response for those to whom it may mean something. And also because it supports my deep-seated suspicion that the argument for "good news" on the Iraqi currency front is problematic.

'[The] statement that “The peg (properly a dirty peg, or trading range) is being run with reference to the market, maintained with regular Dinar and Dollar auctions.” is wrong and misleading, see below. Like many others, your correspondent has a “picture” in mind and assumes that it represents the facts. Would the currency have collapsed if there were no peg? Probably in theory, yes. But there would have been and would be under the circumstances no way to implement a “free market” for the Dinar, see below.

There has certainly been a de facto peg, contrary to Bremer’s original intention and applicable laws he “enacted” (although they are superficial and incomplete). The IMF in its recent report acknowledged the fact. The permitted “trading range” has been 1475-1483, with the target 1475. On Sunday, as a greeting to the new government, for the first time in months, the Central Bank bought a significant amount of Dinars to achieve the target rate of 1475 for one day. The exchange rate has been held firm at 1477 since then. Each day, between 15 and 22 banks participate in the Central Bank auctions. At least fifteen of them are state-owned and one, Rashid, when I last saw figures (six or so months ago) held more than 90% of all bank deposits in Iraq. Needless to say, the Embassy is beavering “fanatically” to privatize the banking system, but there is a long way to go even if the new Government were to decide that it should be privatized, which I doubt that they will.

The peg system can be (and is) maintained because its principal function is to convert the accounts of the Government’s Ministries from Dollars to Dinars. The Government receives 90% or more of its revenues from oil exports, priced and paid for in Dollars. The Central Bank accounts and the transition accounts in the Ministry of Finance are maintained in Dollars. The Ministries, for salaries and much else, make expenditures in Dinars. While I cannot prove it with a documentary citation, my belief and assumption (based upon a knowledgeable reading of the text of the KPMG audit reports) is that Dollar deposits are made on a Ministry-by-Ministry basis in the commercial banks and the banks then buy Dinars for the US Dollars deposited on a daily basis (plus or minus $50 million) to provide the Dinars for next day’s government expenditures. The “purchased” Dinars are used to fund the Ministries’ expenses. If the daily amounts are totaled, the annual total is on the order of the size of the Government’s budget, which you and I have been estimating (recall our earlier exchanges on that subject; at his last press conference, Prime Minister Jafari said that, at the end, his budget was $14 billion). As you can see, it is a closed system (although the banks probably also convert some non-government Dollars). They could maintain the peg, within limits, at any level they liked. The banks cooperate because most of them are state-owned.

In administering the peg, “market conditions” may be taken into account, but the data collection and analysis systems are still far from complete. In any event, “market conditions” are only “taken into account” in respect of the insignificant variations within 1475-1483, which has been the range for nearly three years, during which a lot has happened. Is there a black market? I do not know. If it were substantial, one would have thought that at least one reporter would have noted the fact.

The inflation rate provides an indication as to what the level of a “freely-floating Dinar” might be, although care must be taken because there are surely supply problems in parts of Iraq, including Baghdad, resulting from the security conditions. The most recent report (yesterday; reported in VOI) from the Ministry of Planning shows inflation at 48% (down from 53%), but the data are probably not complete and conditions presumably vary among different parts of Iraq.

The system is “good” (stable) because the money supply is calibrated in effect to oil exports, ie. Gross Domestic “Production” (not “Consumption”). The aggregate money supply is firm, because the Central Bank can count (an audit by Ernst & Young is overdue) the physical Dinars it has issued. There are none of the sophisticated money market equivalents that we and most other advanced nations have. The entire system is “primitive.”

The main point is that, so long as the preponderance of aggregate national macroeconomic income is from oil exports, and so long as the oil industry is state-owned (which it will be for some time longer than the four-year term of the current Government), the system in place is the only and best thing that can be done, which is why the IMF has “endorsed it.” The Central Bank cannot “print money” arbitrarily, because the money supply is calibrated to oil export revenues. That eliminates one source of a currency’s collapse. The system is “artificial” (“conservative”) to an extent, because oil export revenues, and the money supply derived there-from, do not represent all productive economic activity. Pax to your correspondent, the system has little (or nothing) to do with currency market supply and demand. I do not know what determines the insignificant variations within the “trading range.” I have attempted to rationalize specific movements, but they make no theoretical sense. It could be a game played by the handful of people who participate in the Central Bank auctions. (As a footnote, at the time the peg target was established, I recommended that they pick a low number so that the situation in Japan with trillions would be avoided. They did not do that, we the 000,000 will abound for a long time.)

While a “currency board peg” is expressly disallowed by the Central Bank Law, the Bank has been holding substantial amounts in US Dollars, $8 billion the last report I saw, which was months ago. See process above which involves receiving Dollars for oil, selling Dinars to the Ministries for Dollars and then holding the Dollars. The amount should be substantially more than that by now and it is being recommended to some that Dollars in excess of the amounts required to maintain the peg (relatively small, given the closed system) be used for major infrastructure projects such as refineries and electric power plants. It would seem to be a better use for Iraq’s “national savings.” We shall see.

Both the Central Bank and the IAMB-supervised Government audits as of 31 December are long overdue. Among other things, that is because no one knows exactly how much oil is being exported in the south (none has been exported from the north for months) and how much of the proceeds actually arrive at the Central Bank DFI account, which was and probably still is held at the New York Fed. They will have to come out with something soon which will give a more current picture. The picture will not be pretty. Iraq, tragically, is a relatively poor country and will continue to be such for some time.'

Collier Lounsbury replies here.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Shiite Mosque Bombed
Weapons from Bosnia flood Iraq
Zarqawi's Emirate of Baghdad

Tribal clashes south of Baghdad at Suwayrah killed 16 on Tuesday.

I presume that these casualties were announced late in the day, and are in addition to the 41 killed in sectarian violence on Tuesday, according to AP. If I am right, that is nearly 60 dead. Again.

Guerrillas killed 11 with a bomb in the courtyard of a Shiite mosque. They are trying to provoke all-out Sunni-Shiite civil war, and are getting what they wished for.

See, this is what is wrong with privatizing the Pentagon. The BBC reports that the US gave a contract to a small private firm to import weapons for the Iraqi security forces. It brought in massive amounts of weapons from Bosnia. But the procurement process was complex and involved-- you guessed it-- subcontractors, and the weapons are hard to trace. It is very likely that a lot ended up in the hands of the guerrillas. What irony. A mania for the private sector has helped turn Iraq into Bosnian using Bosnian weapons. In this Iraq scandal, everywhere you dig you find bodies.

Dexter Filkins reports from Baghdad on militias and death squads, including the Sunni 16th Brigade in Dawra, which became a pro-guerrilla death squad. (This was a legacy of the Allawi government appointed by Paul Bremer and the UN, which had some serious neo-Baathist facsists in the security positions).

Al-Hayat reports that [Ar.] the Salafi Jihadis have established a Taliban-like mini-state in West Baghdad, paralleled by a Shiite militia-ruled region of East Baghdad. The Sunni Arab extremists assassinate young men who walk around clean-shaven, and they pass around leaflets declaring that they will enforce Islamic canon law (sharia) in that neighborhood. They have established the Emirate of Baghdad in Dora and Amiriyah districts, and it is alleged that Zarqawi is there and has appointed viceroys over each. Radical Sunnis fleeing other areas of the Sunni Arab heartland have come to those districts of Baghdad in large numbers. An eyewitness told al-Hayat that in one of these Salafi-Jihadi neighborhoods, an unveiled girl was kidnapped on the street, then later returned to her home with her head shaven. A broadsheet then circulating saying that it was necessary to deal with unveiled girls in this way on the first offense, but later on they should be killed. Men have also been shot down for being clean-shaven or wearing the wrong clothing.

Al-Zaman says that [Ar.] guerrilla leaders inside and outside Iraq have decided to cease using telephones, including satellite phones, and to stop using the internet.

Oh, great. Now the only people who get successfully monitored by the NSA will be teenaged girls in the San Fernando Valley.

Mrs. Talabani, Iraq's first lady, says that unemployment makes young Iraqi men vulnerable to being recruited by the guerrillas. This is true of a lot of them. But many young men would be guerrillas anyway, because they feel their country is under foreign occupation.

The UN says that human rights are being severely undermined by the political violence in Iraq.

Dr. Rice called for Iran to play a positive role in Iraq on Tuesday. Now that is talking like a diplomat. More of that, please.

New Petroleum Minister Husain Shahristani is taking on the Kurds about their tendency to deal directly with foreign oil companies about prospecting for oil in Kurdistan, without so much as letting Baghdad know. The Kurdistan confederacy is behaving more and more like a sovereign nation, using Baghdad as a mere fig leaf. It has its own army, won't allow federal troops on its soil, reserves the right to reject federal legislation, issues visas, and by-passes Baghdad in its economic dealings abroad.

The Jordanians caught an Iraqi member of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's Salafi Jihadi organization, who confessed to his terrorist activities in Iraq. There is increasing and alarming evidence that the Zarqawi organization is putting down deep grass roots among Sunni Arab Iraqis themselves, rather than remaining or being coded as foreign.

Another dissection of the failures of the Neocons, this time by Harold Meyerson. He writes that Krisol said, '"There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America," he told National Public Radio listeners in the war's opening weeks, "that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's been almost no evidence of that at all," he continued. "Iraq's always been very secular." ' Oh, yeah, Kristol is a big Iraq expert who can avoid "pop sociology." Bill Kristol should have read my co-edited book of 1986, "Shi'ism and Social Protest," if he thought the Iraqi Shiites were not interested in establishing an Islamic state. Hanna Batatu could have given him some information on the Dawa Party and the Badr Corps, which are now more or less in control of Iraq, thanks to Kristol. Kristol, by the way, once argued that the US should have 1.2 million troops available solely for foreign occupations, and that 400,000 each should be allotted to occupy Iraq, Iran and North Korea. And this looney tunes, smug man has the ear of the wealthy and powerful in our country!

Saudi Arabia is facing the dilemma of whether and how to get involved in the Iraq crisis, according to the intrepid Megan Stack of the LA Times. My advice to them is to find a way to work together with Iran to reduce Sunni-Shiite tensions both in Iraq and in the Gulf. Khomeinism has a strong pan-Islamic streak, and the ayatollahs in Tehran would not slap away an outstretched hand from Riyadh. Make this a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia in Iraq, and everyone loses.
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Bin Laden: Moussawi not a 9/11 Hijacker

Anyone who has actually read a transcript of anything Zacarias Moussaoui has said has immediately recognized that he is not a high-powered al-Qaeda operative on the model of Muhammad Atta. In fact, anyone who has half a brain has been able to see that Moussaoui is just mentally disturbed. I.e. he is one bulb short of a chandelier. That doesn't mean he is insane or could not cope with daily life. Mental disturbance exists on a broad spectrum. Moussaoui, if he had not come under the influence of bad characters in a London mosque, might have gone through life as a ranting, odd bird. (You encounter people like that all the time on the streets of a big city. Also increasingly on the pages of our newspapers, but that is a different story).

No professional and highly competent terrorist organization would ever send a man like Moussaoui to do anything important. So it comes as no surprise that Bin Laden now says that he was not part of 9/11. Bin Laden quite plausibly, for a mass murderer and terrorist mastermind, explains that he would have pulled the hijackers out of the United States if he had heard that one of the team had been captured. Moussaoui was arrested two weeks before 9/11.

On the other hand, the old monster is blowing smoke up our posteriors when he says that there are no al-Qaeda in Guantanamo. The Pakistanis captured over 600 fleeing Arab members, and turned most of them over to the US. This part of what Bin Laden says is just manipulative. He is trying to convince Muslims that the US only has innocents in custody, and that it was unsuccessful in capturing the real al-Qaeda operatives. It did have a handful of innocents in custody. But most of these guys (who should be charged and put on proper trial) were on the battleground trying to kill our guys. The late comedian Richard Pryor once made fun of those silly liberals who thought only innocent people are in prison. He said he had visited a penitentiary, and there were Mofos and father molesters in it, or words to that effect.
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Critique of US Policy in Iraq

Bush Administration policies in Iraq have largely been a failure. It has created a failed state in that country, which is in flames and seething with new religious and ethnic nationalist passions of a sort never before seen on this scale in modern Iraqi history. The severe instability in Iraq threatens the peace and security of the entire region, and could easily ignite a regional guerrilla war that might well affect petroleum exports from the Oil Gulf and hence the health of the world economy.

The relatively small number of US fighting troops that the US has in Iraq, some 60,000 to 70,000, cannot possibly hope to provide security to a country of 26 million under such conditions of ethnic and political civil war. The much smaller British presence in Basra appears not to have been effective in halting that city's spiral down into insecurity, with tribal and militia grudge fights and assassinations having become common.

The inauguration of a new Iraqi government was marred by the enormous amount of time it took to form it (5 months!), by open US imperial intervention in the choice of prime minister and in other negotiations, by the walk-out of over two dozen parliamentarians from both the Shiite (Virtue Party) and Sunni (National Dialogue Front and Iraqi Accord Front) parties, and by the failure of the new prime minister to name three key cabinet ministers central to the country's security-- Defense, Interior, and National Security. The Iraqi government is among the more corrupt in the world, working by bribes and a party spoils system.

The new parliament is virtually hung, and Prime Minister al-Maliki governs as a minority prime minister, being able to count on less than 115 MPs from his own party, in a parliament with 275 members. He is therefore hostage to the Kurds, who want to move Iraq in the direction of having a very weak central government, a degree of provincial autonomy unknown in any other country in the world, and who want to unilaterally annex a fourth province, oil-rich Kirkuk, to their regional confederacy, despite the violent opposition of Kirkuk's Turkmen and Arab populations to being Kurdicized.

The Bush administration reconstruction project in Iraq has largely failed. In part, it was foiled by sophisticated guerrilla sabotage, so that billions have had to be diverted from actual reconstruction to security. And nor has security been achieved. In part, it was foiled by a degree of corruption, cupidity, embezzlement, lawlessness and fraud that is unparalleled in US history since the Gilded Age. And in part is has been foiled by a US insistence on making most often unqualified US corporations the immediate recipient and major beneficiary of funds, so that Iraqi concerns get much less lucrative sub-contracts and relatively little of the money benefitted the Iraqi economy directly.

Military engagements between Sunni Arab guerrillas and US troops of some seriousness have been fought at Ramadi in the past week, though little noticed by the mainstream US press. Fallujah is dangerous again. Neighborhoods of the capital, Baghdad are blown up every day. A nighttime hot civil war produces some number of corpses daily, sometimes dozens, to the extent that morning corpse patrol has become a central duty of Iraqi police. A lot of us suspect that some units of the police themselves are involved in these kidnappings and killings, so that often they know just where to look for the corpses.

The main US military tactic still appears to be search and destroy, a way of proceeding guaranteed to extend the scope and popularity of the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement. The guerrillas appear more well-organized, determined, and effective than ever, and no lasting and effective progress appears to have been made in counter-insurgency anywhere in the Sunni Arab heartland. The human toll of the war has been deeply depressing. The number of Iraqi dead in the war and its aftermath (killed in political violence by any side) cannot be estimated, but certainly is over 100,000 and could easily be more. The 30,000 figure often cited comes from counts of reports of deaths in Western wire services, which are demonstrably a fraction of the true total. None of the nearly 1,000 Iraqis assassinated in Basra during the past month, possibly with police involvement, appears in such statistics.

The US has lost over 2400 troops dead, and the number of wounded in action is over 17,000, some significant proportion of them seriously wounded, with long-term disabilities. Some Iraq War vets are suffering mental problems and were discharged because of them under circumstances that make it difficult for them to get VA care. Some Iraq War vets are showing up homeless in US cities already. Meanwhile, Halliburton is back from the brink of bankruptcy. US troops have fought bravely in unfamiliar terrain, and have often done unheralded community developoment work. Their enemies have included ex-Baathist serial murderers and Salafi Jihadi terrorists. Their sacrifices for the sake of removing Saddam and his regime, and attempting to stabilize Iraq, must be honored. But some of their enemies have been honorable resistance fighters, as recognized by the present Iraqi government itself, and US troops have had the profound misfortune of being ordered into an illegal war and then becoming caught up in a series of guerrilla wars for local autonomy, of a sort that no imperial power has been able to win since about 1960.

There is no evidence of the new Iraqi army and security forces proving themselves effective against the guerrillas. The security forces with the possible exception of the new army are heavily infiltrated by partisan militias. A recent news article quoted an approving US officer as saying that Iraqi troops in Baqubah fought a guerrilla attack right down to the point where the troops ran out of ammunition. These were almost certainly Shiite and/or Kurdish troops fighting Sunni guerrillas, so this was actually another battle in the Civil War. No wonder they fought to the bitter end. But what I take away from this anecdote is that the guerrillas have more ammunition than do the poor s.o.b.'s in the Iraqi army, and I don't see that as a good sign. A unified military is almost impossible to achieve in conditions of civil war, in any case. Lebanon had an army when the civil war broke out there in the mid-1970s, but President Elias Sarkis was unable to commit it, for fear it would split along ethnic lines. The same problems now exist in Iraq, and are unlikely to be resolved for some years, if ever.

Iraq cannot be stabilized without the active help of Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, the neighboring countries. But the Bush administration has actively attempted to alienate Iran and Syria, threatening them with regime change or military attack, and guaranteeing that they would be hostile to US success and continued presence in Iraq. The US has also alienated Turkey by allowing the violent leftist Kurdish guerrilla movement, the PKK, to base itself in northern Iraq and to attack Turkey and Iran from that safe haven. The US has alienated Saudi Arabia in a whole host of ways, from insinuations that the Wahhabi form of Islam is in an unqualified way a source of terrorism, to US insensitivity to Saudi fears of the rise of a Shiite Crescent.

Bush administration ineptitude, ignorance, and often stupidity is matched by some regional players. Saudi Foreign Minister Saud El Faisal came to the US in fall of 2005 and castigated the US for allowing Iraq to fall into the hands of the Iranians (i.e. pro-Iranian Iraqi Shiites), provoking a severe diplomatic tiff between Baghdad and Riyadh. Instead of being helpful to a fellow Arab country, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt alienated the Shiite south of Iraq by saying that Arab Shiites are more loyal to Iran than to their own countries. After these incidents, which enraged the Iraqi Shiites, the prospect for a fruitful role in Iraq for the Arab League have receded substantially, since Shiite Iraqis cannot see it as an honest broker.

The Bush Administration trumpets that a defeat of "al-Qaeda" in Iraq would be decisive for defeating terrorism in the world at large. But Bush and his policies led to there being anything like an effective Islamic radical terrorism in Iraq in the first place. The tiny Ansar al-Islam group that operated in the north before 2003 had been hunted by the Baath security and only survived because of the US no-fly zone that prevented Iraqi armor from being deployed against it. Bush has not shown any particular ability to put this genie, which he unleashed, back in the bottle. His war in Iraq has been an enormous boon to the international Salafi Jihadi movement, encouraging angry youths from all over the world to join it to fight to the US. Bush by his aggressive and inept policies is creating the phenomenon he says he is fighting, and so can never defeat it.

The prospect lies before us of years, perhaps decades of instability in the Gulf and eastern reaches of the Middle East. There is a danger of it doubling and tripling our gasoline prices. There is a danger of it forming a matrix and a school for anti-US terrorism for years to come. Are people in Fallujah, Tal Afar and Ramadi really ever going to forgive us? And there is no guarantee of the Shiites remaining US allies for very long, either. Many, of course, already have conceived a new hatred of America as a result of over-reaction of green National Guardsmen, who often have killed innocent civilians in the south, and as a result of iron fist policies when US troops were fighting the Mahdi Army.

The Bush administration has pushed us all out onto a tightrope in Iraq, 60 feet up and without a net.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Maliki Calls for Most Coalition Troops out by End of Year

Well, there are two versions of Iraq's future. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki suprised visiting UK PM Tony Blair with an announcement: "Mr Maliki said British troops would hand over responsibility in two provinces to Iraqi security forces by next month and that he expected US, British and other foreign troops out of 16 of the country's 18 provinces by the end of the year, a much speedier and more ambitious schedule than the US and Britain have so far admitted to."

In contrast, the British government is under the impression that it will be in Iraq for another four years. The British are being the more realistic here.

Al-Zaman reports on a wave of assassinations in Baghdad and Mosul.

There was more mayhem in Iraq on Monday, leaving at least 20 persons dead and dozens wounded.

Al-Hayat reports that the representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has sent a message to the governor of Basra province and asked him to resign. From all acounts Basra is in chaos.

But Al-Hayat reports in the same story that the spat between Sistani's representative and the governor, al-Wa'ili, have been smoothed over.

Solomon Moore discovers something that Americans on the ground have been telling me for some time. American Iraq is perhaps the most corrupt administration on earth. Though, I wonder if Mr. Moore poked around in Washington just a bit, say around K Street, he might find a degree of corruption that dwarfs Iraq's by an order of magnitude.

Tom Regan at CSM reviews the evidence for middle class flight from Iraq.

US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad has the right idea in seeking talks with Iran about the positive role it can play in Iraq. But his boss, Condi Rice, should please stop rattling sabres while she is seeking those talks.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

The Black Psy-Ops Campaign against Iran

The Iranian regime is despicable in its lack of respect for basic human rights and in its regimentation of its citizens into a rigid theocracy. But it is no more of a threat to the United States than Burma or the Congo, both of which are just as oppressive. Iran has a very weak military and just isn't a serious threat to any other country. Its values are not US values. But if we are going to do things like send Marines into Iran to force Iranian women to wear bikinis at the beach, we are going to have a very busy century and Arlington Cemetery is going to run out of room.

The warmongers are undeterred.

Taylor Marsh has more on the bogus story from the National Post that Iran was about to make Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians wear identifying badges.

Marsh says that Iranian journalist Amir Taheri says he is standing by his column, which set off the furor, and that the law has been passed and is awaiting implementation. The laws passed by the Iranian parliament are available on the web and in Iranian newspapers, and certainly a law like this would have been written about and published. Could Mr. Taheri provide us please with a URL to the Persian text? If he does not, we have no reason ever again to believe anything he says.*

So we have now a non-existent Iranian law. Hmmm. How many more non-existents must we believe before breakfast?

Well, here is another. Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, is reported to have warned that 'Iran was "months rather than years away" from acquiring the capability to make nuclear weapons. "Time is running out. . ." '

Months?

I am typing while rolling around on the floor laughing uncontrollably at this blatant falsehood and hypocrisy. The International Atomic Energy Agency just a little over a week ago said it can find no evidence that Iran even has a nuclear weapons program, as opposed to a civilian energy research program. Supreme Jurisprudent Khamenei gave a fatwa in which he forbade nuclear weapons, and the Iranian government denies that it is seeking a bomb. The US National Intelligence Estimate says that if Iran were trying hard to get a bomb and the international circumstances were favorable to all the needed imports, it would still take ten years. And, neither of those "ifs" is in evidence.

Moreover, it is Mr. Gillerman's government that introduced nuclear weapons into the Middle East and that has actually threatened to use them. The Likud government menaced Baghdad with the Bomb in the run-up to the March 2003 War that they helped get up by supplying unreliable intelligence to Washington. It was their way of warning Saddam against trying to hit them with chemical warheads. But, would that have been a proportionate response. Iran doesn't have a bomb, has signed the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, and hasn't invaded another country since the 19th century. Israel has hudnreds of bombs, had refused to sign the NPT, and has threatened first use of nukes.

This is just demagoguery and lying.

Mr. Gillerman is, however, occasionally capable of telling the truth. Reuters reports,

"Ambassador Dan Gillerman, addressing a New York meeting of B'nai B'rith International, a Jewish humanitarian organization, heaped praise on U.S. Ambassador John Bolton, jokingly describing him at one point as 'a secret member of Israel's own team at the United Nations.' Noting that just five diplomats worked in the busy Israeli UN Mission, he told the group: "Today the secret is out. We really are not just five diplomats. We are at least six including John Bolton."

Bolton was put at the UN by Bush to get up a war against Iran, though for whom is not entirely clear. He is a notorious liar, who tried to peddle a ridiculous story about a supposed Cuban biological weapons program. He may well be the source of a flight of Judy Millerism that the Iranians had sent evil biologists to Havana to help with a supposed Cuban biological weapons program. Ooooooh. Those Marxist Ayatollah molecular biologist evil scientists are the absolute worst!

Imaginary laws. Imaginary bombs. Imaginary germs. Lies, lies intended to make a war.

If the Iranians were smart, they would dump that buffoon Ahmadinejad and get themselves a less inflammatory president. Ahmadinejad's antics are giving the warmongers in the West all kinds of pretexts to talk war on Tehran. They should take a lesson from what has been done to the Iraqis.

----

* This posting originally contained a criticism of Taheri for extolling the stability of the Iraqi dinar, which I said was artificial because it is a managed currency. Collier Lounsbury maintains that despite the managed character of the currency, its stability is a genuine phenomenon.

Mr. Lounsbury confirms, however, that in a roundabout way, it is Iraq's petroleum that keeps the currency strong. Currency stability is therefore not actually an achievement of the Iraqi or American governments, and, as long as the government did not work its currency printing presses overtime, would be a feature of Iraqi currency under any regime.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Responses to Critics: Open Thread

I don't want to give the impression that I am unduly interested in the cottage industry that has grown up on the US Right of, let us say, severely critiquing my work. It comes with the territory that if you become a public figure, you get attacked. In fact, even very, very minor status as a public figure opens you to having virtually anything said about you with impunity, including that you have been impregnated by green Martians. In my world, of academia, people are usually good about going to the source and double-checking assertions, so these National Enquirer type pieces don't have, I think, much purchase there. But some kind readers have suggested that I ought to do a point by point reply to critics just so the record is straight somewhere. But the scribblers for hire are legion and who has time?

I'm going to set this entry up as a place for kind readers who would do me the favor of going through the various Rightwing rap sheets on me, beginning with Frontpagerag, and see if they can refute them point by point from my weblog. It should be almost as entertaining as the puzzles in the DaVinci Code. I don't have time to spend on that sort of thing myself, but I would have time to put the final results up somewhere as a reference page.

Here's one for the books. Michael Rubin charges that I said that the American Jewish community wanted to make US troops gurkhas for Israel. Here is what I actually said:

' Here is my take on the Lawrence Franklin espionage scandal in the Pentagon.

It is an echo of the one-two punch secretly planned by the pro-Likud faction in the Department of Defense. First, Iraq would be taken out by the United States, and then Iran. David Wurmser, a key member of the group, also wanted Syria included. These pro-Likud intellectuals concluded that 9/11 would give them carte blanche to use the Pentagon as Israel's Gurkha regiment, fighting elective wars on behalf of Tel Aviv (not wars that really needed to be fought, but wars that the Likud coalition thought it would be nice to see fought so as to increase Israel's ability to annex land and act aggressively, especially if someone else's boys did the dying). '

One of the sleazy tricks of the Revisionist Zionists is to try to make specific statements about specific persons seem as though they are generalized bigotry. Thus, I was complaining about the small rightwing group that produce "A Clean Break," naming David Wurmser. Rubin transforms this fairly obvious specific analysis, claiming that I generalized it to prominent American Jewish leaders, which is not exactly the same as what I said. David Wurmser is a prominent Jewish leader? In fact, of course, nearly half of American Jews opposed the Iraq War at a time when it had a 75 percent approval rating among the general US public. What looks like a critique of a statement of mine by Rubin turns out to be a complete misquotation and smear.

One of the odd little arrows in the quiver of my critics is that I said that chemical weapons are more properly characterized as battlefield weapons than as "weapons of mass destruction." One of my concerns in saying this is that chemical weapons are in fact difficult to deliver in an attack on another country. I think sweeping them up into "weapons of mass destruction" gives the wrong impression and becomes a blank check for an attack by warmongers on any country that possesses even a small stockpile of them.

My categorization of them as battlefield weapons is not in fact controversial. I've read enough military history and seen enough interviews with generals and experts to know that. Here is just one piece of confirmatory evidence, from an expert in the field in an NPR article.

Kind readers who have other such evidence for this point of view are invited to post it.

National Public Radio (NPR)

SHOW: Talk of the Nation 1500-1600 PM

May 8, 2006 Monday

LENGTH: 5971 words

HEADLINE: A History of Chemical Weapons

ANCHORS: NEAL CONAN

BODY:


NEAL CONAN, host . . .


Mr. TUCKER: Yeah, I think it's important to distinguish between tactical weapons and strategic weapons. Chemical weapons were really designed for battlefield use. They--very large quantities are required to cover these--the size of a city. So they are not really contemplated as strategic weapons the way nuclear weapons would be used against entire cities. So perhaps there is some distinction there. Whether chemical weapons should be called weapons of mass destruction is somewhat debatable. They are really more tactical or battlefield weapons. . . '

Here is the guest's bio:

Mr. JONATHAN TUCKER (Author, War of Nerves; Senior Fellow, Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute)

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

DaVinci Code as Parable of American Modernity

Despite the scowls and titters of the critics, the DaVinci Code did $77 million at the box office in the US, better than Tom Cruise pulled in MI3. And the world-wide gross is already $224 million.

What in the world accounts for the popularity of this complicated and improbable story?

Dan Brown's narrative is about restoring the happy medium to contemporary Western modernity.

The novel has a binary structure. On the one hand you have the Church hierarchy, which is patriarchal, doctrinal, monotheistic, ascetic, and authoritarian. Those attributes are its normal pole, but it is open to corruption when they are over-emphasized. The first step toward over-emphasis is Opus Dei, which stands for a cult-like kind of monotheism in which individualism is much more surpressed than in the Church generally. But even Opus Dei is not so far from churchly normality. The villain of the movie is the man who corrupts the principles of Opus Dei itself, Bishop Manuel Aringarosa and his acolyte, Silas. They take self-denial in the direction of manic masochism, so that Silas routinely inflicts excruciating pain on himself in emulation of the crucifixion. And he has moved so far in the direction of giving up his individualism that he will do anything he is told by his master, including committing murder and torture. Inspector Bezu Fache, a representative of bourgeois order as a policeman, is likewise willing to put aside due process to obey his cultic master, violating individual rights and attempting to railroad a suspect, though he later has an ethical awakening.

Silas is, of course, a religious terrorist. With his monk robes, he inevitably nowadays evokes Bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Corruption of an authoritarian and partiarchal tradition leads in the direction of murder for the faith.

This pole of the film reflects the authoritarian side of modern institutions and culture. It isn't about Catholicism at all, or about Opus Dei. It is about the unchallengeable doctrines (norms) of society, and about the constant danger that ordinary obedience to the law can turn into a cultic exaltation of the law above principle and spirit. The Silas's of the US are the Ollie Norths and the Irv Lewis Libbys, apparatchiks who are willing to break any law and throw over any constitutional principle in order to serve their masters. (I.e. Cheney gets to play Aringosa in the Plame scandal). As for patriarchy, it is still dominant in much of American life, from the presidency to the CEOs in the boardroom to the US officer corps, and it is linked to the bands of brothers who form gangs and go overboard in imposing conformity. Joe Wilson had to be punished for challenging the orthodoxy that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

The other pole in the Brown narrative is the priory around the female descendants of Jesus through Mary Magdalene. This pole is about paganism, feminism, individualism, scientific rationality and sexual freedom. This pole, likewise, can become corrupt and antinomian. Thus, the pagan orgy or hieros gamos repulses Sophie Neveu and causes an almost fatal break between the Grail (herself) and the priory. Likewise, scientistic society has led her to become an unbeliever, so that the Grail itself is corrupted by doubt. Sir Leah Teabing is the symbol of this pole gone to unethical extremes. In his quest for the Grail, he is willing to deceive and to kill. He is Silas's structural analogue.

The "pagan" (in Brown's sense) temptation is a significant feature of contemporary American life-- which can be lived without much immediate penalty as libertine, selfish, and undisciplined. Untempered by spirituality and ethics, science can be soulles and led to e.g. eugenics experiments.

Neveu, like Fache, is in the police and a symbol of middle class order. But she is willing to put her ethics above her professional discipline. When she sees that Fache has become a cultist and lost his perspective, she defies him and helps the fugitive Professor Langdon. She stands for genuine justice rather than only procedural justice.

By the way, Shiite Islam exhibits many of the features discussed in the film. The Prophet Muhammad did marry, Khadijah. And Muhammad and Khadijah's daughter was Fatimah, the equivalent of Sarah in the film. Fatimah had children by her husband Ali. So exactly the kind of dynasty issuing from the Prophet's daughter existed in Shiism as exists in the film as the sang real. Indeed, there are lots of Muslim women called Sayyida who claim descent from the Prophet, just as Sophie Neveu claims descent from Jesus of Nazareth. By the way, they sometimes have difficulty finding husbands because they are obliged to marry up.

The practice of self-flagellation also exists in popular Shiism, when believers mourn the martyred grandson of the Prophet, Huaayn, by beating themselves, sometimes with chains. Only a few Shiites go anywhere near in their flagellations as far as Silas in the film, though.

The Shiite dynasty centers on the males, although there were femailes as well in each generation. Fatima has been an important symbol of feminine authority in Shiite gnosticism and in Shiite modernity. The Iranian dissident and activist Ali Shariati put forward Fatima as a model for the New Woman in Iran of the 1970s. The same contradictions thus exist in Shiism as in Brown's vision-- between hierarchy and holy dynasty, and between female spirituality and pure patriarchy. (Sunni Islam pays much less attention to Fatima than does Shiism, and, in fact, one of Fatima's big fights was with the Sunni Caliph Abu Bakr, over whether a plot of land owned by the Prophet was private property or a public, Islamic heritage).

Gnostic Shiites like some of the Ismailis at some points became antinomian, giving up Islamic law altogether. I suppose they are the Teabings of history.

The Brown narrative does not advocate replacing the patriarchal,authoritarian, self-denying Church with the feminist, individualistic, pagan, libertine priory.

It is, in fact, only the melding of the two poles that would create the happy medium. That would lie in gender equality, and in moderation in each of the values of authority and individualism, self-denial and self-indulgence, law and ethical principle.

That is the centrist position the public is looking for. It is religious, but for the most part values individualistic spirituality above dry Church discipline. It is willing to sacrifice, but not at the price of giving up self-actualization and individual ethical integrity. It is increasingly challenging patriarchy, though that struggle is lively. It recognizes the need for authority but is suspicious, in the Madisonian tradition, that too much authority will corrupt its holders.

The film is popular because it isn't about Catholicism or France or some odd conspiracy theory centered on Mary Magdalene. It is popular because it is about the dilemmas of secular modernity.

As a film, it has its disappointments. The figure of Langdon does not actually speak like an academic. His talk at the Louvre is a sermon, not an analysis. His arguments with Teabing are jejune and the substance unbelievable. There is too much exposition, too much explaining and dwelling on the details of the whole gnostic conspiracy theory. To be good, the film would have had to be more allusive and less preachy, to show not tell.

Still, it did big box office, and is hitting a nerve. Critics should be interested in what that nerve is.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

50 Dead
Maliki Vows to End Militias, Graft

The civil war in Iraq killed 50 persons on Sunday, according to al-Zaman. Reuters managed to detail the circumstances of 35 of them, including bombings in Baghdad.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says [Ar.] that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki called militias "an abnormal phenomenon" and vowed to end it. He also said he would appoint Interior and Defense ministers within two to three days. He also said that corruption and embezzlement (in government offices) were among the biggest challenges facing Iraq, and that he would strive to end these practices.

The Organization of the Islamic Conference is thinking of getting involved with Iraq. Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi is talking about bringing Iraqi stakeholders together, and is even holding out the possibility of peace-keeping troops! The OIC is a meeting of the foreign ministers of Muslim countries (countries with substantial Muslim populations have observer status; Russia does, and if the US was smart it would seek it). Serious OIC interest in peacekeeping in Iraq would be the most hopeful thing I have heard recently.

The US military hopes to hand over patrolling and battlefield responsibilities to the new Iraqi army by the end of the year. That would be good if it could be done and would be effective. Personally, I don't see it as realistic.

Ben Gilbert reports from Ramadi, and mean streets is right.

Al-Zaman reports that the distribution of cabinet posts among coalitions and parties has produced substantial discontent in the Iraqi parliament. A number of Members of Parliament have withdrawn from their own parties as a result, while in other cases MPs have openly expressed their disappointment at being marginalized in their own party.

The Iraqi Turkmen Front expressed its disappointment that it was largely marginalized in the new government. Turkmen are probably 800,000 strong in Iraq, a little over 3 percent. They have generally poor relations with the Kurds, whose support Maliki needed to pass a vote of confidence. A kind reader points out that they did get one ministry, Youth and Sports, filled by Jasim Muhammad Jaafar, formerly housing and reconstruction minister. An earlier edition of IF erred in saying that they had not gotten a ministry.

Some members of the United Iraqi Alliance complained that they had been passed over for a cabinet post, and that it was given instead to persons less competent or experienced. They said that the criteria for a cabinet appointment clearly had not been objective ones. The appointment of a member of the al-Hakim family, Akram al-Hakim, as minsiter of state for national dialogue provoked charges of nepotism. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim is the leader of the United Iraqi Alliance.

Some members of the United Iraqi Alliance are said to have withdrawn from the coalition over this sort of issue. (Earlier, the Virtue Party with its 15 seats in parliament withdrew from the UIA, leaving it with only 115. If the al-Zaman report is correct, it is even less, now. Al-Maliki is increasingly heading a minority government and heavily dependent on parties outside his own for continued survival.) UIA leaders replied that the MPs were being unreasonable, since not all MPs can become cabinet members. And some of the MPs put forward by the UIA for such posts were rejected by the other parties. They said that the UIA had completely rejected cabinet posts for Wa'il Abdul Latif, Wasfiyah al-Suhail, and Mahdi al-Hafiz. They also pointed out that if they changed off five of the cabinet members, then some other set of MPs would be upset.

A number of MPs also resigned from the Sunni religious coalition, the Iraqi Accord Front, over how its cabinet portfolios were given out by party leaders.

The Turkmen Front leader said he had been assured by all the major actors that the Turkmen needed to be in the government. When none was given a cabinet post, he walked out of Saturday's session.

The National Iraqi List of Iyad Allawi said that they had attempted to redress the practice of giving out cabinet posts on an ethnic quota system. They protested the small number of women (4) on the Maliki cabinet, a decline from the Jaafari cabinet.

The culture of contemporary Iraqi politics, wherein not getting a cabinet post for you or your sub-faction is a source of shame that makes you quit your party, doesn't sound very promising for parliamentary governance.

Since the cabinet ministries are vast sources of patronage, if your group did not get one, it means you have just missed the gravy train. That is why they are resigning. Just being an MP is not lucrative; in fact, it is a death sentence. Only if you get a line into a ministry can you share in the spoils. Maliki promised to end the spoils system, but we shall see.

Megan Stack finds Iraqis mostly underwhelmed with their new government.

Trudy Rubin points out that a complete meltdown in Iraq would pull down both Iran and the US, creating a new axis of uncertainty.

For the strong of heart, photos from Iraq for the month of May. Warning, some are graphic.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Wikipedia Article Hijacked

I fear I have never had the time to get up to full speed with regard to the Wiki world or the procedures of Wikipedia. But I am told by a kind reader that a small group of ideologues has taken over the Wikipedia article on me in a way that is contrary to Wiki ethics and etiquette. Wikis have the virtue that they can be corrected, but somehow these individuals got it locked up, whatever that means. Then that version had an NPOV put on it, and there is a new "sandbox" but it also has flaws.

I don't have the time or inclination to deal with this issue myself, and I am not asking that the piece be slanted in my favor, whatever that might be. It seems to me an encyclopedia article on a historian should have summaries of his or her books and articles by someone who has actually read them, and contain verifiable biographical facts (would be glad to provide these). Anyway, if some knowledgeable readers of Informed Comment could do what they could to set the matter right by Wikipedia standards, I would be grateful. Again, I'm just asking for the facts, Ma'am.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

CanWest and the Lobby



A kind reader alerted me to this item about the present owners of the National Post that tried to float the black psy-ops operation charging Iran with requiring religious minorities to wear "badges". This item is from before they owned the National Post, but there is no reason to think their policies have changed: The CanWest Chill: "We do not run in our newspaper Op Ed pieces that express criticism of Israel". It goes on:

' The 7 December 2001 broadcast of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's As It Happens [Real Audio link] uncovered a disturbing example of corporate and political interference in freedom of the press. The program reported on a new editorial policy directive from CanWest Global, a leading Canadian media conglomerate, that impairs readers' ability to make up their own minds about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, among other issues.

As It Happens reported that over two dozen journalists at the Montreal Gazette have pulled their bylines to protest a new policy imposed by the newspaper's owners, Southam Newspapers Inc, which is owned by CanWest Global.

The new policy requires the company's main local newspapers to run editorials written at headquarters in Winnipeg by Southam Editor-in-Chief Murdoch Davis.

Bill Marsden, an investigative reporter at the Montreal Gazette, noted that up to 156 times a year -- about three times a week -- the editorial would be imposed and that the remainder of locally-written editorials would be required to reflect the viewpoints and stances taken by the paper's corporate headquarters.

Does this influence really matter? Yes, it does. CanWest's 2000 Annual Report states that:

...[O]n July 31, CanWest announced its acquisition of all of the major Canadian newspaper and Internet assets of Hollinger Inc., including the metropolitan daily newspapers in nearly every large city across Canada and a 50% partnership interest in the National Post. We closed that transaction successfully on November 16, 2000, following completion by the Competition Bureau of its three-month review of the transaction.

The magnitude of these deals is unprecedented. Just a few months ago, the $860 million WIC purchase was the largest acquisition in the history of Canadian media. The $3.2 billion transaction to bring the Hollinger newspaper assets to CanWest remains the biggest media convergence deal ever consummated in Canada. The deal transformed CanWest into a $7.5 billion international media company and the largest Canadian publisher of daily newspapers.

Note that CanWest Global has not just limited itself to the Canadian media. It additionally owns media organisations in Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. '

Meanwhile, Michael Massing at the NRYB pulls off one of those suprise endings, where he begins by criticizing aspects of the paper, "The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy," then criticizes its critics, then actually fleshes out some of the mechanics whereby the lobby operates in Washington. Massing is right that the Mearsheimer and Walt paper would have been better if it had included more of these sorts of specifics.

I think around 1,600 academics have by now signed the two petitions I started protesting the smearing of Mearsheimer and Walt by organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League. Since constituent organizations of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations are lobbying Congress to cut off funding to academic programs that are not "balanced" (i.e. do not privilege the Likud Party line), academics are likely to have further things to say on this issue.
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Libyan Blogger on US Relations with Tripoli

A Libyan-American blogger on the US establishment of diplomatic relations with the Qaddafi regime.
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Haaretz on Israeli Settlers: How Mean Can you Be?

Israeli settlers in the West Bank have shot Palestinians, stolen their land, stolen their water, chased them out of their homes, put their own orchards off limits, and generally been about as mean as you could be short of an actual concerted war. They have also lobbied successfully to keep Palestinians stateless, about the closest the modern world comes to large-scale slavery.

And now the big colonies have convinced Prime Minister Olmert just to unilaterally steal the Palestinians' land on which the colonists are squatting!

But when you push little children into thorn bushes, somehow that is more eloquent than all the other things I just said. It reminds me of the jeers and jostling engaged in by American whites when the first southern black students walked on to previously segregated campuses.

'Palestinians: Settlers once more assault schoolchildren

By Michal Greenberg, Haaretz Correspondent

Palestinian schoolchildren from the West Bank village of Umm Tubba were assaulted Sunday morning by settlers who approached them from a community called Ma'on ranch, Palestinians said.

The children who were making their way to school were escorted by Israel Defense Forces soldiers, but the escort did not prevent the assault.

The children said a woman pushed two of them unto thorn bushes at the side of the road.

The IDF [Israeli army] has been escorting the Palestinian children to school daily due to the intensified assaults by settlers.

On Sunday three soldiers and an army jeep escorted the children, but the Palestinians say that the soldiers did nothing to stop the settlers from assaulting the children.'

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Maliki Elected Prime Minister
56 Dead in Civil War Violence

From al-Hayat [Life]: Nuri al-Maliki won a vote of confidence in the Iraqi parliament on Saturday. He thus became the first full-term Shiite prime minister from an elected parliament since Muhammad Fadil al-Jamali in 1953-1954.

Meanwhile, the civil war took the lives of many Iraqis (Reuters discusses the various bombings and bodies found). 56 persons died or were found dead on Saturday, according to al-Sharq al-Awsat.

Maliki presented an incomplete cabinet. He is serving as interim interior minister himself (in Iraq this ministry is involved in domestic security). He asked his Kurdish vice premier, Barham Salih, to double as Minister of National Security. He asked Sunni vice-premier Salam al-Zawba'i to serve as interim minister of defense until a permanent one could be agreed upon. (The wire services keep giving al-Zawba'i the middle name of "Zikam," but that is not an Arabic word and I think it is Dhikr or Zikr and they are misreading the "r" as an "m.")

Some 15 Sunni Arab members of parliament walked out when al-Maliki said his goal would be "fighting terrorism" (i.e. putting down the Sunni Arab guerrillas). These appear mostly to have belonged to the largely ex-Baathist National Dialogue Front of Salih Mutlak, which has 11 seats in parliament, though some of those who walked out belonged to the Sunni religious coalition, the Iraqi Accord Front. Among the latter was Shaikh Khalaf al-Ulyan. Most IAF members, however, stayed and voted for the new government.

Maliki said, "There are three basic files that, because of their primacy, I will fill myself, and they concern security and disorder and services. For, I want to accomplish something for Iraqis." He pledged to battle terrorism and to isolate anyone who wants to do harm to the Iraqi people.

He promised to appoint the Defense and Interior ministers within a week. He also spoke of setting an objective timetable for transferring security duties from US and Coalition forces to Iraqi troops. He did not, however, say how he would accomplish this miracle, except by sheer proclamation.

MP Nur al-Din al-Hayali of the Sunni religious Iraqi Accord Front said at a press conference, "the Front has reservations about the program of the government . . . We have reservatons about the laws related to fighting terror, which do not distinguish between the Resistance, which plays a heroic role for the sake of liberating Iraq, and acts of violence that all reject." He added, "It was obligatory to specify the techniques to be used to dissolve the militias altogether, and to transform them into state institutions and to keep them from infiltrating the security apparatuses."

The ironies here are manifold. Iraq has had to wait over 5 months after the December 15 elections for a government finally to be formed. The US intervened with local Iraqi parties to overturn the democratic vote of the United Iraqi Alliance for Ibrahim Jaafari. It got instead a long-time member of the Damascus politburo of the then-radical Islamic Dawa Party, which helped form Hizbullah in Lebanon. Nuri al-Maliki has finally been elected prime minister, but has not presented ministers for any of the key three cabinet posts having to do with national security.

Wouldn't you think that addressing national security might be the first priority? He has given us a minister of Tourism but not a Minister of Defense or a Minister of the Interior?

It is also worth noting that under US viceroy Paul Bremer, the US tried to establish "red lines" stipulating that no "Islamist" should fill posts like minister of education or minister of culture. This, Bremer says, was to protect the rights of the "secular" Iraqi "majority." Whether it existed then or not, that "majority" has evaporated. And now the Bush administration extolls the turn-over of Higher Education to a Sunni fundamentalist from the equivalent of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the turn-over of Culture and of Education (i.e. K-12) to Shiite fundamentalists. Iraq now has a coalition government dominated by parties with names such as the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Islamic Dawa Party, the Bloc of Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, and the Iraqi Islamic Party (begun as a branch of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood). Bremer's "red lines" are long gone, pushed over the cliff by US policies along with the phantom "secular" majority. No wonder neighbors like Egypt are alarmed and fit to be tied.

Of course, the incomplete character of the new government probably doesn't matter that much. The Sunni Arab guerrilla movement will only redouble its efforts to overthrow this new government. And, there is no evidence that the troops and security forces of the new government can effectively curb the guerrillas, even if they had new leadership.

There are now four distinct wars going on in Iraq simultaneously

1) The Sunni Arab guerrilla war to expel US troops from the Sunni heartland

2) The militant Shiite guerrilla war to expel the British from the south

3) The Sunni-Shiite civil war

4) The Kurdish war against Arabs and Turkmen in Kirkuk province, and the Arab and Turkmen guerrilla struggle against the encroaching Peshmerga (the Kurdish militia).

Moreover, all of these wars involve strongly entrenched militias, which both keep some order and also substantially disrupt it. When Basra security fell apart recently, Vice President Adil Abdul Mahdi was asked to send envoys to consult with major forces. He ignored powerful tribal chieftains but consulted with the Badr Corps commanders! As a member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, he may believe that party's militia, the Badr, is best placed to calm things down. But many in Basra see Badr as unaccountable and as a part of the problem, not the solution. In any case, what else could Abdul Mahdi have done? It is not as if he has a proper army to send south. If he sent the Sunni Arab or Kurdish battalions, it would anyway be regarded as a provocation. And if he sent the Shiite battalions, there is no guarantee that they would be willing to fight the Badr Corps, as opposed to just going over to it.

See also Helena Cobban at Just World News

Here are the 37 ministers according to Al-Sharq al-Awsat and Kuwait News Agency. I presume the ministers for whom no party affiliation was given are from the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance. Unfortunately, neither list broke down the ministers by party within the UIA, e.g. Sadrists, Dawa and SCIRI.

Barham Salih - vice premier and interim minister of national security (Kurdistan Alliance [KA])

Salam al-Zawba'i, vice premier and interim Minister of Defense (Iraqi Accord Front [IAF])

Husain Shahristani - Minister of Petroleum (United Iraqi Alliance, UIA)

Bayan Jabr Sulagh - Minister of Finance (UIA - SCIRI)

Hoshyar Zebari - Minister of Foreign Affairs (KA)

Hashim Shibli - Minister of Justice (National Iraqi List)

Karim Wahid - Electricity (UIA)

Ali al-Shamari - Health (UIA)

khudair al-Khuza'i - Education (UIA)

Abd Ziyab al-Ujaili - Higher Education (Iraqi Accord Front)

Abd al-Falah al-Sudani - Commerce (UIA)

Fawzi al-Hariri - Industry (Kurdistan Alliance)

Karim Mahdi Salih - Transportation

Muhammad Tawfiq Allawi - Communications (National Iraqi List)

Bayan Zarah-'i - Housing (KA)

Wujdan Mikha'il - Human Rights (National Iraqi List)

Abd al-Samad Rahman Sultan - Immigration

Liwa' Sumaysim - Tourism and Antiquities (UIA)

Adil Al-Asadi - Civil Society (UIA - Islamic Action Organization)

Rafi` Jiyad al-Isawi - State Minister for Foreign Affairs (Iraqi Accord Front)

Safa' al-Safi - Minister of State for Parliament

Sa`d Tahir al-Hashimi - State Minister for Provincial Affairs (IAF Sunni)

Fatin Abd al-Rahman Mahmud - Women's Affairs (Iraqi Accord Front)

Akram al-Hakim - Minister of State for National Dialogue (UIA Shiite)

Ali Baban - Planning (Kurdistan Alliance)

Riyad Ghurayyib - Municipalities and Works

Latif Rashid - Water (Kurdistan Alliance)

Mahmud Muhammad Jawad - Labor

Ra'id Fahmi Jahid - Science and Technology (National Iraqi List)

Ya'rib Nadhim al-Abudi - Agriculture

As'ad Kamal al-Hashimi - Culture (UIA Shiite)

Jasim Muhammad Jaafar - Sports and Youth (Turkmen Front)

Nermin Osman - Environment (Kurdistan Alliance)

Muhammad Abbas al-Rubaie - Minister of State (National Iraqi List)

Ali Muhmmad Ahmad - Minister of State

Hasan Radi al-Sari - Minister of State
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Doostdar on Iranian Dress Code

Alireza Doostdar writes:

'Thank you for debunking the lies about Iran requiring religious minorities to be “color-coded.” I just wanted to make a small comment about the actual national dress law being debated in parliament, which is supposed to regulate fashion. True, the law is in large part motivated by the “un-Islamic” slipping of headscarves and tightening of manteaus on the streets, but there is also a large element of cultural nationalism at work here, which might be comparable to Gandhi’s national dress plans. The law calls for slapping tariffs on imports of clothing from abroad to give indigenous producers competitive advantage, and banning imports of “second-hand clothes” from neighboring countries. It also calls for supporting Iranian designers and producers who come up with innovative “modern” forms of dress based on Islamic and Iranian materials and motifs. They want to encourage designers to go out and study ethnic dress styles for example to come up with more “authentic” modern styles for urban people (by which they mean, I believe, primarily women).

All this could be critiqued on many levels, but it is important I think to place it on a nationalistic plane rather than merely on one of religious zealotry. I see many parallels between this move and the U.S. Senate’s decision to make English the official language of the U.S. They’re both based on strong ideas of some sort of “national” culture--which they believe is being diluted by outside influences (in the US case, Mexican immigrants; in the Iranian, Western fashions of dress).

The other thing I wanted to point out was that Ahmadinejad himself, often to the chagrin of people in his own party and other right-wing groups, has been an outspoken critic of moves to regulate hijab, including the recent police moves to station policewomen in Tehran to instruct women with “bad” hijab to fix their scarves. Both before and after his election, he has said repeatedly that he thinks it is misguided to point at women whenever the issue of “corruption” comes up, and additionally that hijab is no where nearly as important an issue in this country as economic corruption and social injustice (I have both video and text references if you’re interested). I am very critical of Ahmadinejad on many issues, but his stance on hijab and regulating dress is not one of them. '

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Another Fraud on Iran: No Legislation on Dress of Religious Minorities

Maurice Motamed, the representative of the Iranian Jewish community in Iran's parliament, has strongly denied the rumors started by Canada's National Post that the Iranian legislature has passed a law requiring members of religious communities to wear identifying badges.

The report was also denied on Montreal radio by Meir Javedanfar, Middle East Analyst and the Director for the Middle East Economic and Political Analysis Company.

The National Post was founded by Conrad Black and has been owned by CanWest since 2003,* is not a repository of expertise about Iran. It is typical of black psychological operations campaigns that they begin with a plant in an out of the way* newspaper that is then picked up by the mainstream press. Once the Jerusalem Post picks it up, then reporters can source it there, even though the Post has done no original reporting and has just depended on the National Post article, which is extremely vague in its own sourcing (to "human rights groups").

The actual legislation passed by the Iranian parliament regulates women's fashion, and urges the establishment of a national fashion house that would make Islamically appropriate clothing. There is a vogue for "Islamic chic" among many middle class Iranian women that involves, for instance, wearing expensive boots that cover the legs and so, it is argued, are permitted under Iranian law. The scruffy, puritanical Ahmadinejad and his backers among the hardliners in parliament are waging a new and probably doomed struggle against the young Iranian fashionistas. (The Khomeinists give the phrase "fashion police" a whole new meaning).

There is nothing in this legislation that prescribes a dress code or badges for Iranian religious minorities, and Maurice Motamed was present during its drafting and says nothing like that was even discussed.

The whole thing is a steaming crock.

In fact, Iranian Jewish expatriates themselves have come out against a bombing campaign by the US or Israel against Iran. There are still tens of thousands of Jews in Iran, and expatriate Iranian Jews most often identify as Iranians and express Iranian patriotism. I was in Los Angeles when tens of thousands of Iranians immigrated, fleeing the Khomeini regime. I still remember Jewish Iranian families who suffered a year or two in what they thought of as the sterile social atmosphere of LA, and who shrugged and moved right back to Iran, where they said they felt more comfortable.

This affair is similar to the attribution to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of the statement that "Israel must be wiped off the map." No such idiom exists in Persian, and Ahmadinejad actually just quoted an old speech of Khomeini in which he said "The occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time." Of course Ahamdinejad does wish Israel would disappear, but he is not commander of the armed forces and could not attack it even if he wanted to, which he denies.

I had a very disturbing short email correspondence with a reporter of a major national newspaper who used the inaccurate "wiped off the face of the map" quote. When challenged, he said it was "carried by the news wires and is well known" or words to that effect. I pointed out that the "quote" was attributed to a specific speech and that the statement was inaccurately translated. When challenged further he alleged that his trusted translator in Tehran affirmed that Ahmadinejad had said the phrase. When that was challenged, he reported that the translator said that anyway he had said something like it. When I pointed out that the translator was either lying or lazy, the reporter took offense that I had insulted a trusted colleague! I conclude that this reporter is attached to the phrase. He complained about being challenged by "bloggers" and said he was tempted to stop reading "blogs."

So this is how we got mire in the Iraq morass. Gullible and frankly lazy and very possibly highly biased reporters on the staffs of the newspapers in Washington DC and New York. And they criticize bloggers.

On how Iran is not actually any sort of military threat to Israel, see the op-ed at the Star Ledger by Thomas Lippman and myself. Lippman is a veteran Washington Post correspondent who covered the Iraq War.

Note: I had corrected the para in our op-ed that referred to the "wiped off the map quote" but somehow an earlier draft got sent out accidentally. Since the article instances it as an unlikely hypothetical, no harm done, I think.

Antonia Zerbisias has more on the Benador connections of this story. Same agency as got up the Iraq War.

See also Taylor Marsh.


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*Thanks to readers who corrected this assertion. See comments for more.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Maliki to Present Partial Cabinet
Bombing in East Baghdad Kills 19

Udate: The Iraqi parliament approved the Maliki government. Some Sunni Arab representatives protested and walked out. But the Iraqi Accord Front, the coalition of Sunni religious parties, appears to have voted in favor of the government, however. (A walkout by all the Sunni Arabs would have wounded Maliki's embryonic government pretty badly).
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Guerrillas detonated a massive bomb in a crowd of day laborers gathering to seek work in Shiite East Baghdad on Saturday morning, killing at least 19 and wounding 58.

Reuters reports on the daily dose of bombings, firefights and assassinations in the civil war for Friday.

The fighting has gotten so hot in Ramadi that the US is being forced to send reinforcements to that hot spot in Anbar province west of Baghdad.

Samarra has witnessed ane outbreak of a big tribal feud between Al-Bu Baz and Al-Bu Abbas. An assassination by the Jihadi Salafi Abu Musab al-Zarqawi provoked the feud. Presumably a) the Salafi Jihadis thought the tribal leader was collaborating with the new order in Iraq and b) sone if their members belong to a local tribe, ensuring that the assassination would turn into a feued.

Al-Zaman says that militias in the southern port city of Basra smuggle petroleum from 8 secret docks. Tribal leaders in Basra are expressing annoyance that they were unable to mee with the envoy of Vice President Adil Abdul Mahdi, who instead met with the governor and members of the Badr Corps. (The Badr Corps is the paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic REvolution in Iraq.)

The intrepid Patrick Cockburn risks life and limb to go to Khaniqin near war-torn Diyala Province and interview refugees from the fighting who have fled to the largely Kurdish city well north of Baqubah. He finds a lot of displaced people, who had been given deadlines to move out of their neighborhoods because of their ethnicity (Diyala has a Sunni Arab majority or at least plurality) He compares the neighborhood-level ethnic cleansing now going on in Iraq to the worst days of Bosnia in the early to mid-1990s.

Things are so bad that Iraqis can't even bury their dead properly any more.

Michael Schwartz discusses how Iraqi life has been dismantled.

The British military in the South is out on patrol, but the situation is clearly very tense. The British seem to be hoping that the new government of Nuri al-Maliki will assert itself in the south, and that the newly trained Iraqi army will give the government a tool to intervene effectively in a city--Basra--riven by competition among tribes, militias and parties for smuggling wealth. The idea that the Maliki cabinet can bring order to the country in the short to medium term strikes me as far-fetched. And, the new Iraqi military seems unlikely to be more effective at restoring order and doing counter-insurgency in the south than highly trained and professional British troops. From all accounts, the Iraqi military has relatively few mixed units, and it is unclear that Shiite battalions would fight their brethren in Basra.

The article reveals that there are 80 attacks a day around Iraq, and hundreds die each week.

Al-Zaman reports that prime minister-designate Nuri al-Maliki will announce 34 of 36 cabinet members to parliament on Saturday, seeking a vote of confidence (51%). He met Friday with Abdul Aziz al-Hakim (head of the United Iraqi Alliance of religious Shiites), President Jalal Talabani, Vice President Adil Abdul Mahdi and Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, at al-Hakim's HQ in Karradah in Baghdad.

Maliki will not name the ministers of defense and interior on Saturday because he was unable to get agreement from the other parties on who should be appointed.

The National Iraqi List of Iyad Allawi is demanding that they be given a service ministry rather than the ministry of human rights, and they are making this change a condition for their support of the government. (Service ministries such as water and electricity are opportunities to reward constituencies and build a political base for the party that controls them. Iraq now has a spoils system where the party that gets a ministry is permitted to stack it with employees from that party, and to deploy ministry resources for party interests. The National Iraqi List obviously thinks it will get more mileage from being associated in the public mind with provision of some service bureaucracy, such as the ministry of trade, than with the ministry of human rights. The latter's prospects in Iraq do not anyway look good.)

The two Sunni parties, the religious Iraqi Accord Front and the secularist National Dialogue Front, complained about how few cabinet posts Sunni Arabs were given and demanded the ministry of defense for themselves as a precondition of their support for the new government.

If Maliki can garner the support of the relgiious Shiites and the Kurds, however, he can win a vote of confidence handily without either the Sunni Arab "Fronts" or the secular National Iraqi List. The Iraqi Accord Front has 44 seats, the National Dialogue Front has 11, and te National Iraqi List of Allawi has 24. But the Kurds have 58 if you count the Islamist Kurds, and the UIA has 117 if we subract the recently departed Virtue Party. So if the Kurds sign off, Maliki would have 178, much more than the 138 he needs for a simple majority. Of course, he is then bound to do pretty much anything the Kurds say, since if they pulled out and the other parties remained unhappy with him, his government would immediately fall victim to a vote of no confidence.

Al-Zaman says that some candidates for minister of interior, including Ahmad Chalabi, Qasim Da'ud, and Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, have been rejected because of substantial opposition either from within the United Iraqi Alliance itself or from the other parties. Chalabi was supported by the Sadrists, the Da`wa Party, and UIA independents but was rejected by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. as well as by the two Sunni Arab parties and the Kurdistan Alliance. Da'ud was supported by SCIRI but rejected by the Sadrists and the religious Sunnis. Al-Rubaie was rejected by the two Sunni Arab parties.

Only four women will have cabinet posts, a reduction from the previous government.

Nasr al-`Amiri, discussed yesterday, is still in the running, as is Tawfiq al-Yasiri.
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Two Dozen Dead in Violence
Sistani, Yaqubi Aides Trade Insults

Al-Hayat reports that [Ar.] the Civil War left 20 Iraqis and 5 US troops dead on Thursday. There were clashes between the Marines and guerrillas in Ramadi and Fallujah. An official building in Fallujah for municipal and military affairs took mortar fire. At least two persons died and three were wounded in the firefight between Marines and guerrillas in Ramadi. Other violence is discussed in this CBC article.

Al-Hayat also says that Shiite on Shiite violence in Basra, the second-largest city in Iraq, threatens an end to the phase in which it enjoyed relative calm. The representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Shaikh Muhammad Falak, accused the spiritual leader of the Virtue (Fadhila) Party, Ayatollah Muhammad al-Ya`qubi, of having declined to take any steps toward snuffing out the crisis in the city after the governor became the target of a failed assassination attempt. Falak emphasized that the Virtue Party has created secret prisons where it tortures captives, and has resorted to forcibly expelling others (Sunnis).

Falak blamed Ayatollah al-Ya`qubi for not having "taken any steps in the face of what is happening in the anme of the Virtue Party." He accused the members of the party of "appointing themselves guardians of the people and of expelling others by force, employing regrettable methods against the society and persecuting it in a way that is worse that what the Saddam regime used to do." He affirmed that "many prisons are under the control of the Virtue Party, which employs torture in them and extracts confessions by force."

Vice President Adil Abdul Mahdi of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq said that some of the disputes in Basra are over smuggling (al-Hayat adds, 'everyone knows he means petroleum smuggling'). He praised Sistani for having ordered the temporary closing of mosques and Husayniyahs after a Sunni cleric was killed. [It is clear that a lot of the families being forced to leave Basra for Baghdad are actually Sunni Arabs. When they arrive, they are helped by the Iraqi Accord Front and other Sunni parties. The Sunni Arab population in the deep south is a minority, but it has been historically significant, and if it is ethnically cleansed, that will change the character of southern Iraq and perhaps be another step toward partition of the country.

President Jalal Talabani expressed his hope that the security crisis in Basra will end, "on the formation of a government of national unity." Talabani praised the efforts of his vice president, Abdul Mahdi, to mediate an end to the conflicts. He said that the presidential council had made contact with the Basra governing council, as well as with political, administrative, and tribal forces, as well as the representatives of Shiite spiritual leaders. He said that political forces and religious leaders have a responsiblity to calm the situation and apply the law, and to stop operating on individual whim. He praised the efforts of Sistani, Ya`qubi and Muqtada al-Sadr to restore calm.

Al-Hayat also reports that the new secretary-general of the Islamic Virtue Party, `Abd al-Rahim Ahmad `Ali al-Hasini described the future plans of his party as "stupendous." He especially stressed that the party planned to protect the youth by erecting a barricade against "civilizational assaults" in accordance with correct Islamic thought."

[The "civilizational assaults" he is speaking of are things like American films and ideas. Anyone who thinks another civilization is "assaulting" him is just insecure in his or her own identity.]

Al-Hasini said he thought a sectarian war in Iraq was unlikely, and that the differences could be overcome.

Al-Hayat also says that its sources in Baghdad say that prime minister-designate Nuri al-Maliki has, after 3 weeks of trying and just before the constitutional deadline, succeeded in resolving the dispute over who would head the ministries of defense and the interior.

The new minister of the interior, al-Hayat says, is Nasr Dahham Fahd al-`Amiri, a Shiite. He is a former Major General in the dissolved Baath army who opposed Saddam was was therefore imprisoned for ten years. He is from the Al-Bu `Amir tribe that lives in al-Rashidiyah (northern Baghdad). Al-Bu `Amiri enjoys dense relationships with Sunni tribes in its area. Al-~Amiri is the nephew of Shaikh Dhari al-Fayyadh, who as the oldest man in parliament had briefly served as its speaker before he was assassinated. It is not known if Major Gen. al-`Amiri is related to Hadi al-`Amiri, the head of the Badr Corps, the paramilitary of SCIRI. Some sources did say that the major general has good relations with SCIRI.

Defense will go to Bara' Muhammad Najib al-Rubaie, a Sunni. These appointments remove the obstacles to announcing the new government,which will have 35 members. Four of the ministers are women. He had also been a Major General in the old Baath army, but he retired in 1989. He is the son of Major General Muhammad Najib al-Rubaie, who had been head of the ruling council in the 1958 revolution against the ehen monarchy.

Bayan Jabr Sulagh, the former interior minister, will take over the ministry of finance.

Shaikh Khalaf al-`Ulyan, a member of the Iraqi Accord Front (Sunni religious) said that his party would support these two nominees to the cabinet, as long as the UIA gave up trying to reappoint Bayan Jabr Sulagh as minister of the interior.

Some members of the United Iraqi Alliance (Shiite religious) say that the National Iraqi List of Iyad Allawi, consisting of secularists of various backgrounds, has split. It is said by some observers in parliament that 10 members of the National Iraqi List have resigned from it. Among the ten are Wa'il `Abdul Latif, Mahdi al-Hafidh, Maysun al-Damluji, and Hajim al-Hasani. They are disgusted that Allawi keeps demanding the Interior ministry for the party.

Sabrina Tavernise of the New York Times reports on the flight of the middle class from Baghdad. She has a rare ability to use character and anecdote to tell the story of statistics.
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Maliki said Near to Forming Government
Turks shell Kurdish village

It is being alleged that Prime Minister designate Nuri al-Maliki will present his cabinet to parliament on Saturday. If he fails, according to the constitution, the president will have to ask someone else to form the government. (Though Iraqi politicians are dismissing any need to comply with that clause. Once you are in the Old Boys Club, who needs a mere constitution?)

Al-Zaman/ AFP report that the (Shiite fundamentalist) United Iraqi Alliance has increased its share of cabinet portfolios from 15 to 17, five of them powerful posts. The Kurdistan Alliance has 5 cabinet posts, including one powerful ministry (Foreign Affairs). The (fundamentalist Sunni Arab) Iraqi Accord Front has 4 cabinet posts and no powerful ones. The Iraqi National List of Iyad Allawi received 4 cabinet posts, and the (ex-Baathist Sunni) National Dialogue Front of Salih Mutlak received 3, though Mutlak has rejected them because they are relatively insignificant positions, politically.

Prime Minister designate Nuri al-Maliki is still negotiating with Allawi's list in an effort to satisfy them. [Al-Maliki is actually being quite generous to them. They have 25 seats in parliament, whereas the Iraqi Accord Front has 44, yet they are each being offered 4 cabinet posts. Mutlak's National Dialogue Front only has 11 seats, so doesn't at all deserve 3 ministries, even unimportant ones.]

Maliki is obviously more interested in making the Iraqi National List happy than in making the Sunni fundamentalists happy, and I speculate that this is because he can imagine some of the Iraqi National List voting with his UIA on some key issues (some UIA members are ethnic Shiites, though they are secularists).

Al-Zaman's sources say that a majority of the parties that make up the United Iraqi Alliance rejected corrupt financier Ahmad Chalabi as candidate for minister of the interior on the grounds that he is not actually an independent and also maintains his own militia. Interior had been penetrated by the Badr Corps militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq under Bayan Jabr, and the Iraqi political elite and the Americans are agreed that the next minister of the interior should not have militia ties.

The UIA Shiites will get the ministries of finance, petroleum, interior, electricity, labor, municipalities, youth, education, commerce, national security, health, civil society, agriculture, transportation, immigration, tourism, antiquities, and the state ministry for parliamentary affairs.

They have a Ministry of Civil Society? Quick, someone alert Jurgen Habermas! Former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami wrote a work on civil society in the Habermasian school, which has been influential for some Iraqi Shiites. Khatami had lived many years in Germany and studied the great Frankfurt School sociologist. Habermas wrote of the "public sphere," but that overlaps with the idea of civil society. Someone should add Habermas and Craig Calhoun to the wikipedia article on the subject. (At least one other government has a ministry responsible for "civil society"-- Belize.)

Qasim Da'ud is now among the leading candidates to be minister of the interior. Da'ud had held security positions under the Interim Governing Council and in the interim government of Iyad Allawi, and had advocated the suppression of the Sadr movement, so that he has been opposed by the Sadrist bloc in parliament so far. But Da'ud is backed by US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad.

The Kurdistan Alliance has the foreign ministry and the ministries of water resources, industry, housing and reconstruction, and culture.

The Iraqi Accord Front of religious Sunnis has already named its ministers-- Ali Ghalib Baban for the ministry of planning, Rafi` al-`Isawi for the ministry of state for foreign affairs, Faruq `Abdul Qadir for the ministry of state for civil society, and Dr. Muhammad Mubarak for ministry of higher education.

The secular Iraqi National List will get the ministries of communication, justice, sciences, and human rights. It may also be given a fifth to make it happy (i.e. so it will pledge to support Maliki as prime minister). Likely ministers include Usamah al-Najafi, Wa'il `Abdul Latif, and Mahdi al-Hafidh.

The secular ex-Baathists of the National Dialogue Front are being offered the ministries of the environment, women, and national dialogue, and if it accepts them, one will go to a woman. So far NDC leader Salih Mutlak is rejecting the offered ministries and saying that his party has decided to be in the opposition.

Earlier on, spokesmen Muqtada al-Sadr, whose followers have 32 seats in parliament, had said that it was a "red line" with them that the National Iraqi List of Allawi and the ex-Baath Sunnis of the National Dialogue Front be excluded from the government. Later on the Sadrists backed off that and said that they only objected to Allawi himself having a post. (Allawi will chair the National Security Council, which is not a cabinet position, but you could say he will be in the government.) Sadr's red lines seem to have collapsed, perhaps in part because Nuri al-Maliki feels less beholden to the Sadrists than did Ibrahim Jaafari. But given that the United Iraqi Alliance only had 132 fairly sure votes going in to these negotiations, and needs 138 to survive a vote of no confidence, Maliki is not in a position to turn down support if he wants a government that will not immediately fall. Now he seems to have lost the 15 votes of the Virtue Party, which makes him even more in need of allies from outside his party. The Sadrists have a choice of supporting Maliki's government of national unity and having control of some ministries or of being powerless and penniless in the opposition. Parliamentary logic tells against red lines.

There is speculation that the fifth post given to Allawi's list will be Defense. But Usamah Najafi and Hajim al-Hasani, Sunni Arabs from the Iraqi Accord Front, are still in the running. The religious Sunni Arabs are complaining bitterly that they have been cheated in the allocation of cabinet posts, which is arguably true. On the other hand, it is Maliki's government, and he has to support politicians who are likely to vote with him, and on most issues the Iraqi Accord Front will not.

Meanwhile, the civil war dragged on, with bombings, shootings and kidnappings all around the country, especially Baghdad, Baqubah, Kirkuk, Karbala and Fallujah.

Al-Hayat says that there has been a fresh wave of assassinations in Fallujah, and that five bodies were found there Wednesday morning. They had been volunteering to join the army.

The Iraqi Kurds accused Turkey of shelling a village on the Iraqi side of the border. Turkey denied it. Turkey is worried about leftist PKK fighters holing up in Iraq and then striking into neighboring Turkey.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

42 Iraqis, 3 GIS Dead in Civil War


The Iraqi Civil War took the lives of another 42 persons on Tuesday. The most horrible attack was in the Shaab district of the capital. Drivers of two minibuses attacked a market. The first shot 7 persons down, then when a crowd gathered, a second minibus driver detonated his payload near a petroleum truck. The truck became a fireball, killing another 17 Iraqis and wounding at least 38. (Aljazeera is reporting the death toll from this attack at over 40.)

" At least 17 Iraqis were killed in other attacks in and around the capital and two police officers shot dead in the northern oil hub of Kirkuk.

A US soldier was killed by a bomb in the south of the capital, the US military said, adding that two soldiers were killed in a similar incident in Balad, north of the capital, the previous day."

Al-Zaman says that fighting continues between the US military and guerrillas in Ramadi, with 12 dead and 12 wounded on Tuesday.

Al-Zaman /Reuters report that early on Tuesday morning, shops that sell wine in downtown Baghdad were bombed. The perpetrators were likely adherents of some form of political ISlam, whether Sunni or Shiite.

Gunmen assassinated the coach of Basra's soccer team on Tuesday, according to Megan Stack of the LA Times. She also reports on the continued haggling by the four biggest partlies in parliament for cabinet posts.

Al-Zaman reports that [Ar.] hundreds of Iraqis are fleeing Basra for Baghdad every day because security is even worse in the southern port city than in the capital. The armed gangs that dominate the city are also interfering with oil exports. The paper's sources say that thousands of Iraqis once resident in Basra are living with relatives in Baghdad, waiting for the security situation to improve in the southern port city. Wealthier Basrawis, fearful of being assassinated or kidnapped by the gangs, have come up to Baghdad and rented homes for their families.

Death squads are responsible for the 700 to 800 assassinations during the past month in Basra. President Jalal Talabani has asked Vice President Adil Abdul Mahdi (SCIRI) to take over the security file for Basra. Local police are helpless, the report says, in the face of tribal fueding and the sinister role played by the intelligence services of neighboring countries. Attempts had been made to mediate between the warring parties, by the representatives of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and other great clergymen and merchants, but those have come to nothing and a new framework is needed. The oil port is being guarded by patrols of the mainly British multinational force. The militiamen and armed gaings have begun setting up temporary checkpoints on most streets of Basra to check on the identitity of passers-by and the passengers in automobiles.

The fragmentation of Iraq has already led to a militarization of eastern Anatolia, but it could also lead the Turkish government over-reacting in such a way as to keep Turkey out of the European Union. A new, more hardline general is about to come to power in Ankara, and he will have no patience for Iraqi Kurds' moves toward autonomy. In the worst case scenario, Turkey could be broken up.
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George W. Nixon

George W. Bush's Iraq misadventure has made him among the least-liked presidents in modern history, according to an ABC News/ Washington Post poll. Even Lyndon B. Johnson in the dark days of 1967-1968 was at 43 percent! And he had to decline to seek a second term over it! With regard to public approval of him, Bush is down to 33%. And only 17% say they strongly approve of his performance. (And probably they aren't being entirely honest with us, either.) More important may be that 65 percent disapprove of his handling of the presidency. Aside from Richard Nixon, who would have been impeached if he had not resigned, this is the highest disapproval number for any president since the Great Depression, when 25 percent of the working population was unemployed. That's what they call in the business "high negatives."

ABC says that Bush has not yet fallen to the lows in approval ratings of three modern presidents: "Harry Truman saw 22 percent in 1952, Richard Nixon 23 percent in 1974 and Jimmy Carter 28 percent in 1979 . . ."

But let's think about this. Bush is very nearly as hated as Nixon was in his darkest days. And, let's face it, Bush's crimes-- from manipulating intelligence to get up a war of choice, to authorizing torture, to spying on Americans without a warrant-- dwarf a minor political burglary by an order of magnitude.



And Bush is now within striking distance of being Carterized! In 2002 few could have imagined him falling in approval ratings to the level of Carter, who had the misfortune to be president during the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the taking of US hostages, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, gasoline shortages and high fuel prices, a stagnant economy, high unemployment, and double-digit inflation! Indeed, Bush's disapproval rating is now higher than Carter's!

These are the findings on Bush's handling of issues:

Bush's Handling of
the Issues


Terrorism     Approve: 53%   Disapprove: 43%
Privacy Rights     Approve 52   Disapprove: 45
Taxes      Approve: 42   Disapprove: 54
Ethics      Approve: 39   Disapprove: 54
Economy      Approve: 38   Disapprove: 60
Immigration      Approve: 34   Disapprove:56
Overall job      Approve: 33   Disapprove:65
Iraq       Approve: 32   Disapprove: 66
Deficit       Approve: 27   Disapprove: 67
Gas Prices       Approve: 20   Disapprove: 76

I fear that the ire of the public with Bush is obviously owing more to annoyance with high gasoline prices (76% disapprove) than with his entire lack of ethics (54% disapprove) or his violation of privacy rights (only 45 percent disapprove)! In fact, the high oil prices are even more annoying to them than the quagmire in Iraq (66 percent disapprove)!

The lesson is once again driven home, which should have been learned from the twentieth century presidencies: You can steal from the people and spy on the people, and they don't mind that much. But waste their blood and treasure on an inconclusive Asian land war and allow their gasoline and heating bills to rise significantly, and they will hate you passionately.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Middle East Conflicts on Campus

Scott Jaschik discussed the disputes on college campuses, especially UC-Irvine, over the Middle East. Yours truly makes a cameo appearance, as does the petition I started to defend John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt from scurrilous charges of bigotry.

I don't actually think things are as heated on most campuses over these issues as they appear to be at UC Irvine. Universities are full of people who like to discuss issues civilly, and most of the problems that do occur come from outsiders who are trying to score political points.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

The Nation: Soccer and Punishing Iran

The Nation looks at the global politics of soccer with reference to Iran. Americans don't realize it, but soccer politics is what makes most of the world go round.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

33 Dead in Civil War
7 US Troops Killed over Weekend
Basra in Chaos as Tribes Feud

On Monday, scattered bombings and shootings left at least 33 persons dead by my count. Dozens more died over the weekend in fighting between guerrillas and US troops. Al-Zaman says that security has collapsed in Basra, with fighting between tribesmen and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Reuters reports that on Monday:

MOSUL: Guerrillas detonated a bomb in the northern city, killing one policeman and wounding 2 others.

RAMADI: Heavy fighting between local guerrillas and US troops left 8 dead and 9 wounded.

BALAD RUZ - Guerrillas shot down 4 primary school teachers in Diyala Province an hour's drive from Baquba.

WAJIHIYA: Guerrillas east of Baghdad fired a mortar shell that landed on a civilian home, killing a seven-year-old girl and wounding 7 members of her family.

BAGHDAD: Five members of a family in the capital were shot dead.

MAHAWEEL: Guerrillas detonated a bomb that wounded 3 policemen and left a civilian bystander dead.

KARBALA: A policeman who had earlier been abducted showed up dead in the Shiite shrine city on Monday. (Two ex-Baathists were also assassinated.)

AMARA: A mortar attack on a British base wounded one soldier seriously in the leg and inflicted minor injuries on three others.

BASRA: Tribesmen of the Marsh Arab Karamisha [Gramsha] tribe killed 11 policemen in and around Basra. They may have been taking revenge for the killing of one of their clan chiefs by persons dressed as special police commandos, a unit heavily infiltrated by the Badr Corps of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

Al-Zaman/ AFP report that the security situation in Basra has collapsed in the wake of the killing by persons dressed as Iraqi policemen of Shaikh Hasan Jarih al-Karamishi, the head of the al-Karamisha tribe in Basra. Firefights subsquently broke out in several districts of the city at a time of political vacuum in the central government. Majid al-Sari, adviser to the Minister of Defense, said that individuals from this tribe came out into the streets of the city heavily armed and killed 11 policemen in the course of an attack on a police station in the Dair quarter to the south of the city. They also burned down two buildings used as party headquarters in the Intisar district of the Dair quarter by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

(In the time of Saddam, the Marsh Arab tribes--who typically had dwelled in the marshes of the south as fishermen and smugglers, were most often forbidden from entering urban Basra, but this prohibition has broken down).

Al-Sari said that for the last month, Basra has been afflicted by a mass of assassinations, equalling one each hour of the day. (That would be 24 a day, and 720 for the month). Sources in the city allege that the police are helpless to intervene, and indeed refuse to go out to the crime scene to attempt to capture the assassins, since they would take fire from tribesmen supporting the assassins, who belong to their tribe.

Two organizations, Rebels of the Uprising and the Revenge of God (Tha'r Allah, a branch of the Badr Corps) staged demonstrations Sunday and Monday against Governor Muhammad Misbah al-Wa'ili in protest against the collapse of security in the city.

Al-Zaman's sources told it that Basra is in chaos and dominated by militias and lawless gangs. Automobiles with darkened windows cruise the streets, armed militiamen within, who impose their law on the city. These sources blamed Kuwait and Iran for the situation, alleging that their intelligence services are funding and arming the Iraqi militias for their own purposes. Tribal firefights between the Marsh Arab Al-Bait Sa'idah tribe and the Bani Mansur are common-- as is fighting between Bani Ammar and Al-`Ashur. The sources say that Basra is without authority save that of the militiamen. The major political parties are unable to dampen down the violence because they are so divided against one another.

Basra is boiling these days and tempers run hot, with highs of 106 degrees Fahrenheit (41 C.). It gets no electricity for most of the day, especially in the al-Hayaniyah and Abu al-Khasib districts, where there are demonstrations every evening against the lack of services.

President Jalal Talabani is so alarmed by the situation that he and his vice-presidents, Adil Abdul Mahdi (SCIRI) and Tariq al-Hashimi (Sunni religious) have opened a hotline to government security forces in Basra. Al-Sari requested that the central government withdraw the security file from the local authorities and turn it over to the new Iraqi army.

The governor of Basra, al-Wa'ili, is trying to fire the police chief. He complains that the Basra police have not undertaken a single investigation of the hundreds of recent assassinations. He further charges that some in the Iraqi border patrol and the army have suspicious ties to the assassins. Al-Wa'ili also charges that two clerical representatives of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani are involved in the collapse of security. [This charge is not plausible, and may reflect al-Wa'ili's allegiance to Ayatollah Muhammad Ya`qubi, the spiritual leader of the Fadila Party, a rival of Sistani.)

For those with the stomach to see what the aftermath of Iraq's daily violence actually looks like, Afterdowningstreet.org has posted dozens of never-before-seen photographs of the violence. Those of us who have seen war know that it involves blood. This one has not for the most part, if one were to judge by US television and the US print press, an editorial decision that I find cowardly and inexcusable. Warning: One of the photos is reproduced below.

Over the weekend, the US military fought engagements against Sunni Arab guerrillas in the area south of Baghdad, killing 41 suspected insurgents. On Sunday during the fighting, a guerrilla shot down a US helicopter. Guerrillas also killed other GIs over the weekend, bringing the US death toll for the last 3 days to 7.

The US military admits that the guerrilla fighters in the area south of Baghdad are "bold and getting bolder" in their attacks on Iraqi and US forces.

Sunni Arab religious leaders of the Association of Muslim Scholars rejected the US characterization of the fighting south of Baghdad, saying that many civilians had fled their homes at the US advance and had been killed. The US military maintained that the dead were guerrillas.

President Jalal Talabani shot down a suggestion that Prime Minister-designate form most of a cabinet but leave Defense and Interior for later. Talabani has a keen interest in who has these two security-related posts, since the Kurds want to keep the central government in Baghdad weak and toothless. If he let al-Maliki become prime minister before filling these cabinet positions, he would lose his leverage over who is appointed to them down the road.

Sunni vice president Tariq al-Hashimi yielded to pressure from Iyad Allawi, who insists that Defense be filled by a Sunni Arab from his list. The religious Sunni Arab party had wanted the position for itself. The unspoken objection there was that the religious Sunni Arab politicians are suspected of having links with the guerrillas fighting the insurgency, and no one thinks it is a good idea to give them the ministry of defense. On the other hand, the Allawi list has ex-Baathists who might pack Defense with other ex-Baathists, which would not please the Shiites or Kurds.

Some in the British press are openly saying that Basra is lost and that Prime Minister Tony Blair's assurances show he is living in an alternative dimension. Whether it is true or not, saying it shows some spunk that is mostly lacking over here.

Warning: What follows is a graphic image:















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Monday Afternoon Scandals

David Swanson says that angry veterans surrounded and berated Richard Perle, a major architect of the Iraq War, when he showed up at one of their events for a PBS photo op.

Raw Story says that the Bush administration is tracing the telephone calls of ABC and other reporters in an attempt to find the source of leaks. The leaks are of things like the fact that the Bush administration is tracing people's phone calls.

Yet another attempt is being made to institute an academic boycott in Europe of Israeli professors. Academics, please sign this petition and stand up. Israeli academics as a class have not done anything wrong and it is not right to subject them to a blanket ban.

See the Committee for Academic Freedom letter from the Middle East Studies Association on this matter last year this time. See also my Chronicle of Higher Education piece on this issue.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Guerrilla Violence Kills 48
Al-Maliki May announce Government without Interior, Defence

On Monday morning, guerrillas in the south launched a mortar barrage of 40 shells against the British Abu Naji base near Amara, wounding 4 British soldiers. Two had been killed by a roadside bomb on Saturday. This sort of operation strikes me as likely to have been carried out by ex-Baathist former Iraqi military rather than by a ragtag Shiite militia like that of Shaikh Ahmad al-Fartusi.

In one of the worst days of the Iraqi civil war this year, bombings, shootings and firefights had left around 48 dead on Sunday in Iraq, and some 70 wounded (-al-Sharq al-Awsat). Guerrillas set off two car bombs on the road to the airport, killing 14 persons and wounding 6 others. Other carbombs in the capital killed 12. The convoy of Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari was bombed, killing five of his bodyguards, but he was not in the motorcade.

Six small Shiite shrines around Baqubah were targeted for bombing. There was also fighting in the northern city of Mosul. Violence in the Shiite shrine cities is always very dangerous, so this item is alarming: "Suspected insurgents wearing police uniforms kidnapped five Iraqis from two homes in Karbala. Police also found the bodies of five Iraqis who apparently had been kidnapped and killed by death squads . . ."

The Hartford Courant reveals that the US military has deployed soldiers to Iraq that it knew to have mental problems.

Iraq's prime minister-designate, Nuri al-Maliki, is coming up against a deadline to form his government. (Monday is the five-month [sorry for the earlier typo] anniversary of the December 15 elections, and there is still no government!) Al-Hayat is reporting that [Ar.] he may handle this problem by announcing a government that is mostly formed, but keeping the Defense and Interior portfolios for himself until he can appoint incumbents that are free of ties to militias and are also backed by parties he wants in his coalition. Al-Zaman says that Kurdish MP Mahmud Osman calls this step a clear sign of failure, since the security issue should have been settled and is the number one problem facing Iraqis.

The Fadhila Party reaffirmed its decision to leave the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite coalition. Fadilah has 15 seats in parliament. The party had insisted on the ministry of petroleum but that seems likely to go to Husain Shahristani, a confidant of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, or possibly to technocrat and experienced oil man Thamir Ghadban. [Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that the oil industry favors Ghadban for his experience, but admits that Shahristani is decisive and might end smuggling]. This desertion leaves the UIA unable to form a government unless it makes a permanent alliance with some other bloc and always pleases it. The Kurds are available, but will exact a heavy price.

The commercial-supported media in the United States have given us a sanitized war. We almost never see images of the wounded on television, or even just blood. HBO is about to do a special on the military Emergency Room in Iraq. For those who have HBO, it may not be pleasant, but it will be closer to reality.

The ancient Iraqi Christian community is shrinking with alarming rapidity, given Iraq's insecurity and the targetting of Christians by guerrilla fighters. Many evangelicals in the US had hoped to use the Iraq War as leverage to convert large numbers of Iraqis to Protestant Christianity. Ironically, what they may have accomplished is instead a massive drop in the number of Iraqi Christians resident in the country.

Of course, most US evangelicals have never given a fig for indigenous Middle Eastern Christians, except as a mission target, because these locals are not evangelicals. [strikethrough: Calvinists].

Fawaz Gerges asks, "What does History Bring to the Study of Jihadism?" He demonstrates how important it is. Gerges is among our best authors on this subject, using the Arabic primary sources with agility and subtlety. His books are essential reading.

Tariq al-Hashimi of the Iraqi Accord Front (Sunni religious) called Sunday on the guerrilla resistance in Iraq to talk directly to the Americans. I saw him on Aljazeera. He said that they did not have to give up their resistance, which is a sacred right of Iraqis, in order to talk. Something is going on, since Harith al-Dhari of the hard line Association of Muslims Scholars was pushing for recognition of the guerrillas on Saturday, as well. See the translation below.

The following article from al-Sharq al-Awsat was translated by the USG Open Resource Center. Note that al-Dari is another way of transliterating al-Dhari:

' Head of Association of Muslim Scholars Denies Group is 'Voice of Resistance'

Report by Muhammad al-Shayadimi in Casablanca: "Al-Dari says we do not speak on behalf of the resistance but we seek to get its official recognition; the head of the Association of Muslim Scholars tells Al-Sharq al-Awsat we have no connections with the leaders of the former Ba'thist regime"
Al-Sharq al-Awsat (Internet Version-WWW)
Sunday, May 14, 2006 T01:02:34Z

(Sunni) Shaykh Harith al-Dari, secretary general of the Association of Muslim Scholars in Iraq, has denied that the Association is the "spokesman" of the so-called "resistance". He also denied that there a sectarian war is raging in Iraq between the Sunnis and the Shias. He said that the Sunnis are being targeted by quarters that seek to muddy the climate between them and the Shias. In an interview with Al-Sharq al-Awsat in Casablanca where he recently attended the Pan-Arab Conference, Al-Dari said, "The voice of the Association (of Muslim Scholars) is not a voice that speaks on behalf of the resistance. It is the voice that speaks on behalf of all of Iraq and on behalf of all those that reject the occupation. Since rejection of the occupation is expressed by mouth, hand, and heart, we express these above-mentioned voices". Shaykh Al-Dari emphasized that they seek "the official recognition of the resistance because it has become a reality. These days the occupation is expanding its contacts to meet and speak with its leaders. Therefore, this resistance should not be disregarded. It should be recognized as an effective party that has its weight in Iraq. The problems of Iraq cannot be resolved without listening to the resistance and involving it in the affairs of the country".

On whether the "resistance" operates on the basis of clear fatwas issued by the religious scholars or whether on the basis of its own individual opinions, Shaykh Al-Dari said, "The resistance consists of various factions and trends. Some - that constitute the majority - consult the religious scholars and some do not and operate on the basis of a trend that they believe in and that they apply in their deeds. We ask God to unify them". On the accusations against this "resistance" that it targets innocent civilians in its car bombs and explosion in the markets and the streets, Al-Dari said, "This is not correct; it intends to distort the image of the resistance. This started since the resistance emerged against the occupiers that did not think that there is a tax to be paid for their occupation. We the Association of Muslim Scholars view the resistance as an honorable movement that is doing its national and jihadist role in a correct manner. It targets only the occupation and those that are 100% agents. As for talking about terrorism against the innocent, I say that there are several sources for this terrorism. The primary source of this terrorism is the occupation. There are also the governments that were formed by this occupation and that are in charge of the security policy. These governments serve these policies and their forces and resources are used to hunt down those that oppose the occupation either in collaboration with the occupation or on their own. Therefore, we consider them as part of the terrorism that exists in Iraq. Other sources of this terrorism also are the militias of the parties that participate in forming the government and the foreign US, British, and Israeli intelligence services and the intelligence services of other countries in the region that are wreaking corruption in the Iraqi arena. These are the ones that are committing these wicked deeds".

Answering the charges that some are making that he has connections with some leaders of the former Ba'th Party, Al-Dari said, "Those who say such things know very well our position on the former regime and our relationship with it. The correct thing to say is that these people who accuse us have close relations with the former regime and they are in contact with this regime overtly and covertly. But, as the common saying goes, "They accuse us of what they are guilty of". On what is being said about a covert war between the Sunnis and Shias, Al-Dari said, "Many people wonder whether there is indeed a covert war between the Shias and Sunnis in Iraq. I say there is no war between between the Sunnis and the Shias but there is a different kind of war that is being launched by forces that have an interest in fragmenting Iraq's unity by fomenting sedition among its people. These are political forces that have their own interests and agendas. Some of these interests are purely selfish while others are influenced by external forces on them. Therefore, they seek to foment sedition and incite one side against the other in order to create a sort of conflict and hatred. This is obvious in several Iraqi towns, especially in Baghdad, Basra, and other towns".

Asked about what the Sunnis in Iraq are being subjected to by other elements that are considered to be followers of Shiite groups, Al-Dari said, "Terrorism does not differentiate between Shias and Sunnis although what the Sunnis have been exposed to for some time is dominant in the Iraqi scene. When the occupation failed to hit the resistance it resorted to inciting one side against another. It attacked this or that sect to incite reactions that they think would lead to sedition and to clashes among the sons of the same homeland and thus achieve their desired end, namely, the fragmentation of Iraq on one hand and giving the occupation the upper hand on the other".

(Description of Source: London Al-Sharq al-Awsat (Internet Version-WWW) in Arabic -- Influential Saudi-owned London daily providing independent coverage of Arab and international issues; editorials reflect official Saudi views on foreign policy) '

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Iranian Paramilitaries Pledge to Defend Iran

Since the US military has most trouble with asymmetrical forces and paramilitaries, it is worthwhile noting that Iran's paramilitary forces, the Basij and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, are threatening a Long War of attrition against any foreigners who try to come into the oil-rich Khuzistan province. An American attack on Iran will ignite yet another guerrilla war in the region.

Translation courtesy of the USG Open Source Center:

'Iran: Khuzestan Basij Forces Vow 'To Defend Islamic Land Against Any Enemy'

Unattributed report: "With attendance of the Guards Corps Commander-in-Chief: The Grand Assembly of the Khuzestan Province Basijis Titled 'The Followers of the Noble Prophet' Was Held in Ahvaz"

Jomhuri-ye Eslami (Internet Version-WWW)
Sunday, May 14, 2006 T20:03:22Z

Seven thousand Basij forces from various regions, bases, and Ashura and Al-Zahra brigades, representing 750,000 of their fellow Khuzestan Province Basiji brothers, assembled at the Ahvaz Imam Khomeyni Mahdieh Mosalla along with the attendance of Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Commander Major General Rahim-Safavi and various province officials to renew the vow to adhere to the cause of Imam Khomeyni and the Supreme Leader.

The IRGC commander addressed the assembly explaining the late Imam Khomeyni's reasons for forming the Basij and said, "During my visit to our borderlines I saw that the forces of Islam are fully prepared to defend the Islamic homeland." He said if we had this capability in 1359 (1980) neither Saddam nor his masters would have dared attack Islamic Iran and added, "The IRGC has full knowledge of all regional developments and border movements. But as a measure to maintain security in Khuzestan Province, IRGC ground forces will launch the Hazrat-e Abolfazl security base with approval of the National Security Council."

The IRGC commander said, "Every race and tribe in the Islamic Republic lives under the banner of Islam and guardianship and would never allow foreign forces to invade the Islamic nation." He noted, "Khuzestan Province has always been a target for foreign greed. The British were utterly defeated by the people here, especially in Bostan heights." General Rahim-Safavi stressed the need to improve the scientific capacity and political knowledge of Basij forces and said they are fully prepared for defense, security, cultural, and especially construction missions.

Ayatollah Musavi-Jazayeri, the Supreme Jurisconsult's representative to Khuzestan Province then spoke on various issues, especially the role of Khuzestan Province Basij forces during the Holy Defense (Iran-Iraq War).

The Khuzestan Province governor-general also addressed the assembly where he called on all officials to put in efforts to develop and strengthen the Basij saying, "A Basij Development HQ is set to be launched in Khuzestan Province." He said, "With the special attention of the Supreme Leader and determination of the government, the province will soon improve in many regards and reach its deserved level of development."

The Khuzestan Province governor-general noted, "The people of Khuzestan have the highest standing in jihad and love for the guardianship. We need to improve job opportunities to an equal standing."

Also, Khuzestan Basij Commander General Sa'adati reported readiness of 750,000 Khuzestan Basij forces and said that number would increase to 1,100,000 by the end of the fourth development program.

The assembly closed with a six-article resolution which, in addition to supporting Iran's access to peaceful nuclear energy, read "We expectants of Imam Mahdi and allies of the Nobel Prophet announce here at our 7,000-strong assembly to the world that we hold to our vow to stand against the coercions of the enemy stronger than ever and will never allow any power to invade our land and shall selflessly guard our rightful position." Every article of the resolution was approved with "God is great" chants from the forces.

(Description of Source: Tehran Jomhuri-ye Eslami (Internet Version-WWW) in Persian -- Tehran daily insisting on strict adherence to Khomeyni's ideals. Claims to be factionally independent but takes extremely conservative positions) '

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Lying and Ordering others to Lie

Bush not only continued to lie about mobile biological weapons labs in Iraq even after weapons inspectors discovered that the story was false. Now it comes out that he also ordered the information itself to be suppressed:

' A year after Bush administration claims about Iraqi ''bioweapons trailers'' were discredited by American experts, U.S. officials were still suppressing the findings, according to a senior member of the CIA-led inspection team.

At one point, former U.N. arms inspector Rod Barton says, a CIA officer told him it was ''politically not possible'' to report that the White House claims were untrue.

This president makes Richard M. Nixon look good in comparison.
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Mearsheimer and Walt Again

Mearsheimer and Walt on the "Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy" stay in the news. The Forward's Ori Nir did an excellent piece on anxieties in the American Jewish community about Bush's attempts to tie his aggressive comments on Iran to the protection of Israel.

This is also interesting:

' more than 1,000 Americans, most of them university professors, have signed an online petition challenging the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, an umbrella body of 52 groups that serves as Jewish community's main united voice on Middle East issues, to "condemn" the "smearing" of Mearsheimer and Walt by several fellow scholars and pundits as "antisemites."

The executive vice chairman of the Presidents Conference, Malcolm Hoenlein, said that none of the Jewish organizations in the umbrella group had accused the two scholars of being antisemitic. But Juan Cole, the University of Michigan professor who initiated the petition, pointed out that the Anti-Defamation League has. In a comment on the study posted on its Web site in March, the ADL expressed the hope that "mainstream individuals and institutions will see it for what it is ññ a classical conspiratorial anti-Semitic analysis invoking the canards of Jewish power and Jewish control." '

Eve Fairbanks of The New Republic writes an anti-intellectual, and, I think, actually dishonest opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times about the Mearsheimer and Walt paper. Fairbanks works for The New Republic, which has some excellent reporters but the editorial line of which is set by the quirky, rightwing warmonger Martin Peretz, and apparently Fairbanks is part of his gang.

I'm calling out Fairbanks on an issue of journalistic integrity. She contacted me and numerous other academics on the pretext that she was writing a free-lance article on the controversy over Mearsheimer and Walt's paper on the impact of the Israel lobby on American foreign policy. Writing a freelance news article is a different proposition than writing an editorial. She did not say she was writing an editorial. A lot of the persons she contacted might have refused to speak to her if she had admitted that she was writing an opinion piece. Apparently, the way American journalism is practiced nowadays, there are no standards of ethics or accuracy for opinion pieces. Fairbanks misrepresented herself to her subjects. (It may be a pattern. See this sad tale of an earlier encounter with her.)

As for the substance of her flimsy and error-riddled "article," she says she found professors reluctant to speak to her about the "Israel Lobby" piece. Hmm. I wonder why.

Aside from problems of what we might call research design, her whole opinion piece suffers from illogic and a basic misunderstanding of what academia as an enterprise is about.

The illogic comes in from several contradictions. She admits that over 1,000 (actually over 1,500) academics have signed my petition asking the Conference of the Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations to condemn the playing of the race card against the authors for simply writing an academic analysis. But she goes on depicting academics as moral cowards afraid to speak out. Doesn't she recognize what courage it takes to sign that petition after the Washington Post itself shamefully invoked David Duke's praise of the LRB paper? She dismisses the petition as an example of my being "publicity-hungry." She then goes on to talk about Alan Dershowitz with no adjectives about him! If academics speak out in defense of the authors from being smeared, they are mere publicity hounds. If they decline to talk to her, they are cowards.

My reading of Mearsheimer's and Walt's reticence about appearing in public to debate the paper is that they are aware that the Likudniks will attempt to take the focus off the theses of their paper by personalizing the debate and demonizing them. I think their insistence that the paper be debated, not themselves, is absolutely right, and obviously the Right, including Fairbanks herself, is very frustrated that it can't get hold of them and "strip the bark off" them in the venerable tradition of Lee Atwater. Of course, the attempt has been made even with them keeping a low profile, but it is harder when the target declines actually to have the moustache painted on in person.

The lack of understanding of academia is apparent in that Fairbanks believes that academics are mainly about opinion and gossip, as, it seems, the Peretz Mafia at the once-great TNR are.

Academic writing is not about personal opinion, though personal opinion does play a role in the genesis of theses and arguments. It is about rigorous research and analysis, subjected to extensive revision, and refereed by editors and expert peers. An academic reaction to the Mearsheimer and Walt paper would involve original further research into the subject, consideration of the theses they advanced and the weight they give them, and a submission to a scholarly journal for (probably) at least two rounds of heavy revision in the light of reactions from 4 or 5 heavy-hitting anonymous referees.

It is this process, of deep research over years, searching analysis, reaction from colleagues, and rigorous refereeing, that produces academic writing. At the end of it, a lot of personal opinions have not survived the research process, since when one researches one encounters new information that changes one's preconceptions. Other opinions have had to be jettisoned because they could not be proved to the satisfaction of the referees or the editor. (And remember that the referees are typically anonymous and chosen by the editor to represent a range of perspectives).

In the absence of a lot of research and analysis, professors are reluctant to come out strongly publicly on an issue. Within the academy mere personal opinion is not considered important and is even made fun of as mere punditry. Because everyone in the university knows that first-level, common-sense personal opinion is worth little, and no more frequently survives an encounter with serious research than does a war plan survive an encounter on the battleground with the enemy.

The academic reaction to the Mearsheimer and Walt paper will appear in places like the journal of the International Studies Association or Political Science Quarterly, literally years from now. Academia exists in a different time-dimension than journalism. John Mearsheimer is like the theoretical physicist doing basic research on quarks, and Fairbanks' sort of op-ed writer is like the jingle-writer for Walmart who retails some invention that came out of the basic research.

And, the Mearsheimer-Walt paper would require lots of research to address. A good research project in this regard would be to do in-depth interviews with former congressional staffers on Capitol Hill who are now in other fields of endeavor and might speak freely about how exactly lobbying works on this issue. Talking to former Israeli and Arab ambassadors in Washington might also be enlightening. The Mearsheimer and Walt paper is so wide-ranging in its impact that it might require team work, what the French Annales school called an equipe, to address. That is, an American political scientist might usefully pair with an area-studies expert in the Arab world and an expert on Israel. The three kinds of political scientist get completely different methodological and linguistic training, and each would be necessary to this project.

So, yes, Ms. Fairbanks, academics aren't volunteering you a lot of personal opinions about the paper. And where they have, they don't think their personal opinions are what is important. They haven't had time to research it and many of them won't know what they think beyond banal basics until they do. And, since the rightwing press has been trying to ruin academics' reputations for speaking well of the paper, or even just for defending the authors' right to publish it, you could imagine their nervousness when one of Marty's gang calls. Just for the record, I apologize to any colleagues I encouraged to talk to Ms. Fairbanks.

-------

Eve Fairbanks' reply is in the comments section.
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Basra Police Chief Dismissed
8 Bodies found in Najaf

The political violence in Iraq continues apace.

11 bodies were found dead in Najaf. One of them was an Iranian. This according to al-Hayat.

A roadside bomb killed an American soldier Saturday morning.

Basra Governor Muhammad al-Wa'ili suspended his police chief, Major-General Hassan Swadi, for being ineffective against local guerrilla groups. Al-Wa'ili, from the Fadilah Party, also called for the removal of the commander of the 10th Division, Major-General Abdullatif Taaban, on grounds of inefficiency.

Patrick Cockburn does his usual excellent job of penetrating the conflicting accounts of what happened at Dhulu'iyah on Friday. A roadside bomb killed and wounded Kurdish soldiers in a convoy. They headed for the local hospital, firing in the air to clear the streets, and killing a local man. A Shiite battalion then came running, apparently afraid that the Kurdish troops would take revenge for their fallen comrade. The two battalions fought, leaving another soldier dead and one wounded in the firefight. This army is supposed to make it possible for US troops to rotate out?

The NYT reports Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who teaches at West Point, as estimating that the US military should have a big presence in Iraq for 5 to 7 years, while partnering with and building up the Iraqi military. So in 5 years the Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish battalions will like each other more than they do now? Will be more willing to fight against armed groups from their own ethnicities?

My problem with that is that they seem to think that the Tal Afar operation was a success, whereas it is a political disaster, and if they are planning another 5 to 7 years of that sort of thing, then we are doomed. At Tal Afar they used Kurdish and Shiite troops to assault Sunni Turkmen, emptied the city on the grounds that it was full of foreign fighters, killed people and made them refugees, and then only took 50 foreign fighters captive. The Sunni Turkmen, not to mention the Turks in Ankara, will never forgive us. And the press reports show substantial disappointment in the city even among Shiites with the results. The Tal Afar operation is considered a "take and hold" or "oil spot" strategy, as opposed to search and destroy. But you can't just empty out one Sunni city after another, bring in troops of other ethnicities to level neighborhoods, force people into tent cities in the desert or into relatives' homes, and call that a counter-insurgency strategy. Every year the US military has been in the Sunni Arab heartland they have alienated more and more Iraqis.

So I think we should get the US ground troops out of there. As a matter of politics ("hearts and minds"), they aren't making things better and have no early prospect of doing so. If it is a matter of keeping air capability, and some special ops and armor in the neighborhood, that might be necessary to keep things from collapsing. By the way, why does the Iraqi army have only 70 tanks after all this time? (In 1990 I think they had 8,000 tanks!) How can you take and hold territory with no armor? And what about helicopter gunships? My own guess is that the US doesn't build up those capabilities because they can't be sure the Iraqi military won't at one point mutiny against them. But if that is the case, then the US troop presence really is stunting Iraqi capabilities.

I'm so dissapointed in al-Zaman. They carried this completely bogus report of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Salafi radical whose policy it is to blow up Shiites, meeting in Beirut with Hizbullah and Iranian Revolutionary guards and getting weaponry from them. Yeah, and W. secretly buys Ahmadinejad lunch, too. It is completely ridiculous and there is no evidence for it. Can you say, "black psy-ops"? The Badr Corps was trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. They want Zarqawi to blow them up now why, exactly?
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Recommended Blog

Take a look at All of this . . . and Nothing.
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4 Marines Die
Fadila Withdraws from Government

Friday's guerrilla violence was relatively muted, though there were bombings and killings. The most serious incident was a firefight in Dhulu'iyyah between Shiite and Kurdish units in the Iraqi Army, which left 4 Iraqi soldiers and 7 civilians dead. Four Marines died when their tank rolled off a bridge into a canal.

A senior Sunni cleric was assassinated in Basra on Friday.

Al-Zaman says that anxiety has seized the Iraqi street over the continued inability of politicians to form a government.

The Fadila Party says it has withdrawn from the new Iraqi government because it is not being offered the ministry of petroleum. The party appears to believe that US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad is shaping the cabinet behind the scenes, and says it refuses to cooperate with this externally-directed process. This move is likely a piece of bargaining rather than a final disposition. The Fadila or Virtue Party is mainly popular in Basra, Iraq's port city in the south, and follows Ayatollah Muhammad Yaqubi, a student of Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr. Although it stands in the line of Muqtada's father, it does not follow Muqtada al-Sadr. Fadila has 15 seats in parliament, and it is unlikely that prime minister-designate Nuri al-Maliki can form a strong, independent government without it. He might still be able to rule, but only in coalition with the Kurdistan Alliance, giving the Kurds a veto over all government policy.

Joost Hiltermann argues that Kurdistan leaders need to move toward a pluralistic system, not try to construct a one-party state in Kurdistan. I've been hanging out with Joost at a conference the last couple of days and as always have been impressed by his long experience and perceptiveness.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that Association of Muslim Scholars' leader Harith al-D\hari denies that he in close contact with the guerrilla movement. But, he says, he would like to see the guerrillas recognized.
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3 GIs Killed
Government Postponed

Guerrillas set off bombs to kill 3 GIs in Hilla on Thursday.

At least 15 Iraqis were also killed (-al-Sharq al-Awsat).

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani cancelled Friday prayers for Shiites in Zubayr this week to show solidarity with Sunnis mourning the assassination of one of their clerical leaders in the southern city. Most southern Iraqi urban areas are heavily Shiite, but Zubayr is distinctive for its majority Sunni Arab population.

Al-Hayat [Life] reports in Arabic that Iraqi officials admitted Thursday that 150,000 "armed elements" are members of the private security forces, operating outside government uspervision.

A decision was made that Iraqi army and security forces will not invade mosques unless they are accompanied by US forces.

Shiite infighting over who will head up the oil ministry has delayed the announcement of a new government. Interior and other key posts still have also not been settled. The Arabic press is saying that the government will not be announced until the middle of next week.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that Salih Mutlak of the National Dialogue Council, with 11 seats in parliament, has decided not to participate in the national unity government because is is "sectarian."

Bayan Jabr Sulagh, the minister of the interior, maintains that much of the death squad activity attributed to his ministry has actually been carried out by private militias or security forces of other ministries. He is therefore proposing a unified command for all the security forces in the capital. If he is right about the death squads being sited elsewhere, this step would be positive. If he is wrong, then he is putting all the security forces under the command of the . . . death squads.

Former diplomat Ann Wright says that a lot of people in the US Government think Bush's Iraq War is frankly crazy, but are afraid to speak out.

Being stateless is very much like being a slave. In both cases you are denied the ordinary legal standing of a free citizen, and are subject to forms of social death. The plight of Iraq's Palestinian refugees, who do not have citizenship, highlghts this problem. Syria has taken them in.
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Bush: Founding Fathers were Just Kidding About Fourth Amendment

.President Bush apparently thinks that the fourth amendment of the US Constitution (i.e. the US Constitution) doesn't have to be taken seriously, because he is invoking "national security."
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19 Dead in Violence
Walkout in Parliament over Shiite Ringtone

The Iraqi civil war took at least 19 lives on Wednesday, including especially in the Baqubah area of Diyala province.

Five of Iraq's most dangerous guerrillas fled the Susa Prison in Kurdistan yesterday.

that a Sadrist member of parliament had set her cell phone ringer to a Shiite religious tune caused an uproar that led to a walkout of some members of parliament.

Ahmad Hashim, one of our best analysts of the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement, explains that the low-intensity civil war has forced the US into a reactive mode. The ad hoc character of the whole enterprise is one of the things that dooms it. Hashim has a new book on counter-insurgency in Iraq.

Turkeyu and Iran are building up troops on the borders with Iraqi Kurdistan. That raises questions for me of what Iraqi Kurdistan is doing to Iran and Turkey.

Almost 1100 persons were killed in Baghdad alone in April, victims of faith-based ethnic cleansing.

Reuters reviews the significance of the anti-British Shiite mob violence in Basra on Saturday.

Ibon Villelabeitia of Reuters reminds us of the role of Gertrude Bell in creating Iraq and its problems.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation sponsored an anti-war press conference with regard to Iran, based in part on a petition signed by the foremost Iran specialists in the United States.
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Cole in Salon.com

My article, "Saving Iraq: Mission Impossible," is out in Salon.com.

Excerpt:

' Hopes for a breakthrough hinge on the assumption that al-Maliki will be able to act more decisively than his failed predecessor, Ibrahim Jaffari, in crucial areas: putting together a government acceptable to all the parties, restoring a state monopoly on the use of force (i.e., disbanding militias), preventing sectarian killings, restoring basic services, and resolving the explosive question of federalism. Al-Maliki seems more aware than Jaffari of the urgency of these problems. But the painful fact is that they are almost certainly beyond his ability to solve.

Despite the hype that will attend the formation of a new government, whenever it finally comes about, there is little prospect that it will make a decisive difference. Al-Maliki seems doomed to preside over a lot of violence and chaos, and can only hope to make a difference at the margins. And the increasing hostility of the Shiites in the south to the Anglo-American troop presence will put the question of when they are leaving on the new parliament's docket. '

Read the whole thing.
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Europeans offer Iran Deal
Iranians say Program Peaceful

Over Bush's initial objections, the Europeans are going to try offering Iran further incentives to abandon its civilian nuclear energy research program. The attempt comes in part through the mediation of the Russians. Bush's inability to get the Russians and Chinese to agree to condemn Iran has forced the change in strategy.

Iran's top nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani also said that Iran's program is purely civilian. He said that a Russian offer to enrich Iran's uranium for it under controlled conditions has not been rejected and could still be adopted.

Israel's military chief of staff, General Dan Halutz, told Deputy PM Shimon Peres to cool it with the threats against Iran. He appears to be worried that belligerant talk from Israel will harm attempts by the Europeans to get Iran to give up its civilian nuclear research program.

Although Peres says that Ahmadinejad threatened to destroy Israel, he did not in fact menace Israel with a military attack. Ahmadinejad views Israel the way President Gerald Ford viewed the Soviet Union. He wishes it would vanish as a regime, but he is not prepared to launch a military attack to accomplish that goal. Since Iran sits in the United Nations with Israel, Ahmadinejad is in contravention of the UN charter in rejecting Israel's legitimacy. But wishing a regime would fall is not the same thing as militarily attacking it.

It is often said that Ahmadinejad is more dangerous because he is a millenarian, i.e. he believes in the near advent of the messianic Twelfth Imam, the promised one of the Shiites. But in fact, most millenarians are fatalists, and are willing to wait passively for God's will to intervene in history. So, his belief in the near advent of the last days may actually make him less dangerous than a practical, hardnosed secularist might be. Besides, he cannot be dangerous if he is not a commander of the armed forces, which the president in Iran is not.

Iran's Ahmadinejad, in Indonesia, insisted again that Iran's nuclear energy research is purely for peaceful purposes. He said that the Internationl Atomic Energy Agency had spent 2,000 hours doing inspections. He shrugged off the Bush administration's dismissal of his letter to the American president.

Ahmadinejad's letter to Bush sheds some light on his mindset, says the LA Times.
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Tal Afar Bombing Kills 20, Wounds 70
Did Coalition Ship 200,000 Guns to Guerrillas?

Guerrillas killed 11 persons on a busnear Baqubah Wednesday morning.

At least 30 Iraqis died in the civil war on Tuesday. Some 14 corpses showed up on the streets in Baghdad and Kut, according to al-Zaman.

Guerrillas killed at least 20 and wounded 70 with a truck bomb in Tal Afar, the northern Turkoman city that the US reduced in August of 2005.

In southern Baghdad, someone assassinated Sunni cleric Ra'id Muhammad al-Dulaimi.

The Mirror may be a tabloid, but it asks a good question: have 200,000 AK47s been delivered to the guerrilla insurgency by corrupt contractors instead of to the new Iraqi military? It is apparently a distinct possibility.

David Enders in Iraq has more at Salon.com on the attempt of Muqtada al-Sadr's movement to model itself on Lebanon's Hizbullah-- i.e. services, politics and paramilitary all rolled into one.

Prime Minister Designate Nuri al-Maliki has announced some progress in forming a government. This has after 5 years become the sort of thing where we'll believe it when we see it.
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MESA/ISIS Letter on Behalf of Ramin Jahanbegloo

For more on this case see this article and Eurasia.net.

May 8, 2006


Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran
c/o H.E. Javad Zarif
Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary
Permanent Mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations
Fax: 212-867-7086

Your Excellency:

We write to you on behalf of the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) and the Committee on Academic and Intellectual Freedom of the International Society for Iranian Studies (ISIS) to protest in the strongest possible terms the recent arrest of Dr. Ramin Jahanbegloo, a prominent Iranian intellectual and political theorist. We urge you to use your good offices to determine the circumstances of his detention and to secure his immediate release.

The Middle East Studies Association of North America and the International Society for Iranian Studies are the preeminent international organizations in their respective fields. MESA, founded in 1966, and ISIS, founded in 1967, were established to promote scholarship and teaching on Iran, the Middle East, and North Africa. MESA publishes the International Journal of Middle East Studies and has more than 2600 members worldwide; ISIS publishes the international journal of Iranian Studies and has more than 500 members worldwide. Both organizations are committed to ensuring academic freedom, the free exchange of ideas, and freedom of expression in all its forms, both within Iran and the Middle East and in connection with the study of Iran and the Middle East in North America and elsewhere.

According to information we have received Dr. Jahanbegloo was arrested at Tehran’s Mehrabad airport in late April. Officials from your government have stated that Dr. Jahanbegloo is currently undergoing “interrogations” and that he is suspected of crimes related to “security and spying”. Despite these statements, as of this date no official charges have been filed against Dr. Jahanbegloo. Officials have stated that charges against Dr. Jahanbegloo will only be filed after his interrogation. Given these facts we are concerned that officials of your government are in the process of coercing confessions from Dr. Jahanbegloo. We also have reason to believe that he has been allowed only limited access to his family, and as far as we know he has not had any access to legal counsel.

Dr. Jahanbegloo is a highly respected scholar and academic who is currently the head of the department of Contemporary Studies at Tehran’s Cultural Research Bureau, an important institution in your country that has gained international recognition for its important scholarly work in the area of Iranian history, culture, and politics. Dr. Jahanbegloo’s work as part of the Cultural Research Bureau has contributed to the high regard in which it is held by scholars both inside and outside of Iran. He has also studied and taught at major universities in Europe and North America, including the Sorbonne, Harvard University, and the University of Toronto. In his role as a public intellectual Dr. Jahanbegloo has also consistently advocated for the US and Europe to adopt a less confrontational approach in dealing with Iran. His published work includes over twenty books in Persian, French, and English on topics relating to European and Iranian intellectual history and political philosophy. Dr. Jahanbegloo’s writing reflects a thoughtful




Dr. Jahanbegloo Page 2


consideration of Iran’s encounter with modernity and the difficult and complex process by which modern Iranian intellectuals have sought to define universal values such as democracy and human rights in terms that are organic to Iranian tradition. Given the arbitrary and unusual nature of Dr. Jahanbegloo’s detention, we are compelled to conclude that his arrest is connected to his scholarly and intellectual pursuits.

We also feel compelled to remind you, Your Excellency, that the rights of individuals to freedom of thought, opinion, and speech are explicitly protected under the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran (Article 23), as well as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Articles 18, 19, 21), to which the Islamic Republic of Iran is also a state party. The arbitrary arrest of Dr. Jahanbegloo does further harm to the reputation of Iran as a country where scholarly research and inquiry are highly valued. Dr. Jahanbegloo’s arrest and detention can only be conceived as a direct attack on the principles of academic freedom and critical intellectual inquiry.

Your Excellency, we trust that you will appreciate the seriousness of this matter and will take the appropriate measures. We urge you to secure his immediate release.

Yours Respectfully,



Juan R.I. Cole
President
MESA




Janet Afary
President
ISIS
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Ahmadinejad as W.'s Penpal
Ebadi warns of another Iraq

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wrote a letter to W., in which he insisted on Iran's right under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to conduct scientific research on uranium enrichment. The NPT does in fact allow such research, but it is Bush administration policy to abrogate that right and stop even civilian research programs that might lead to the closing of the fuel cycle. It is another big leap from such an ability to making a bomb.

Ahmadinejad is a crank, and some of what he says is either badly translated or makes no sense in the original. Both are possible. Le Monde has a translation (pdf). Persian text here.

In any case, his letter to Bush holds no prospect of reducing tensions. It should be remembered that then Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh angered Washington in the early 1950s by nationalizing Iranian petroleum. Eisenhower slapped sanctions on Iran and destroyed its economy. Washington at that time thought Mosaddegh was a pinko, though in fact he was a relatively conservative aristocrat. At the height of the crisis, Mosaddegh wrote a letter to Eisenhower, which was ignored. Ike had the CIA overthrow the elected, parliamentary government of Iran and install the Shah as a megalomaniacal dictator. So the tradition of letter-writing by Iranian leaders at times of tensions with Washington isn't replete with successes. Of course, the Iranians took revenge for the heavy-handed US interference with their form of government. They made an Islamic Revolution in 1978-79, and more recently elected Ahmadinejad. What Washington wouldn't do to have that nice Mr. Mosaddegh back.

Iranian peace Nobelist Shirin Ebadi spoke in Dearborn, and this is the text of her speech. Excerpt:

' The only beneficiaries of the war are people who sell arms. As a Muslim Iranian, I state here that I do criticize the government of Iran. But this does not mean that America has the right to invade Iran. And if America has not learned its lesson from Iraq and thinks of invading Iran, notwithstanding all of the criticisms we have of our government, we will defend our country to the last drop of our blood. And we will not let an alien soldier set foot on the land of Iran. If American speaks of globalization, this doesn't mean that the whole world is seen as one village and Bush is seen as the only sheriff of that village.'

Shimon Peres says he wants to remind Iran that it, too, can be wiped off the face of the earth, implying that Israel is capable of obliterating it with its nuclear arsenal. Peres also had the gall to blame Iran for provoking a nuclear arms race in the area!

There is no evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, as opposed to a still backward civilian energy research program. But if you were Iran's security establishment, what would you conclude you had to do after Peres's remarks?

The misquotation of Ahmadinejad, who actually quoted Khomeini as saying, "This occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time," now seems all by itself to be producing visions of nuclear war!

Ahmadinejad, however, has condemned mass killing of any sort and was not threatening military action (he is in any case not in command of the Iranian military). He compares his hope for an end to any Zionist regime in geographical Palestine to Khomeini's prediction that the Soviet Union would one day vanish. It wasn't a hope to kill Soviet citizens, but a desire for regime change. Ahmadinejad's hostility to Israel and his Holocaust denial and bigotry are beneath contempt. But he has not threatened military action, and has no unconventional weapons, and his words, however hurtful, do not constitute a legitimate basis for a war of aggression on Iran.
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13 Dead, 33 Wounded; GI killed
Bali Bombers Sought Revenge for Iraq

An armed group raided a prison at Tikrit north of the capital and killed an inmate. (Presumably to keep him from saying what he knew about the other guerrillas.) There were more bombings in Baghdad, with that and other violence leaving a 13 or so persons dead and 33 wounded. Six corpses were found in the streets of the capital, victims of faith-based reprisal killings.

A US soldier was killed in south Baghdad.

One in three Iraqi children is malnourished and underweight.

The British military in the southern port city of Basra, according to Con Coughlin (the Judy Miller of the UK) " . . . now finds itself virtually confined to barracks, fearful that its presence on the streets will provoke further violent assaults."

The Kurdistan regional confederacy has formed a unified government. Somehow, the Turks don't seem to be celebrating.

The terrorists who carried out the Bali bombings say that they were seeking revenge for the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, among other things.

Families displaced by the March-April, 2003, American invasion of Iraq are mostly still homeless, according to Reuters. Their plight has received much less attention than that of the Iraqis displaced in the past two months because of the faith-based civil war.

Residents of Wasit in the Shiite south staged a small demonstration against corruption and the way it creates fuel shortages and high prices.

US troops in the western city of Ramadi mostly cannot tell friend from foe. Since opinion polls in Anbar province show that over 80 percent of the population thinks it is all right to attack US troops, I'd say they could just assume that mostly they are seeing foe.

Iraq, once one of the more progressive Arab countries on women's rights, is becoming among the more repressive.

South Korea will withdraw 1000 troops from Irbil this year, a third of its total force. Since Kurdistan is actually patrolled militarily by the highly competent peshmerga militia, South Korean troops have not actually had much of a military mission, and mostly did peace corps kinds of work (probably the most valuable kind). They are there so that Seoul can please Washington, and perhaps to nail down economic opportunities for S. Korean firms in future, not because they are needed militarily. That even they are being withdrawn shows how unwilling Bush's coalition has become.

Light sweet crude is almost $70 a barrel. Analysts are saying that about 10 percent of that is jitters over the articifical Iran crisis. That is, Americans should know that everytime Bush and Rice make threats against Iran, you pay $3.00 a gallon instead of $2.70 a gallon for your gasoline. Think about that when you're filling up.
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Close: 'Don't Send US Soldiers into Iran to Spy'

The question of US intelligence on Iran is now coming to the fore.

Veteran CIA Middle East analyst Ray Close reacts to rumors that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld may send Special Operations forces into Iran on intelligence missions. (One clarification: in popular parlance we speak of CIA "agents." But in the intelligence world, an "agent" is actually a local person recruited by an intelligence field officer.)

Close writes:

' I do not believe that in today's atmosphere there is any justification whatsoever for infiltrating covert paramilitary agents (especially American service personnel) into Iran.

I am confident that there are enough very intelligent, well-placed, and highly motivated Iranians in key positions within the government and in the intellectual community in Iran who would be excellent candidates for recruitment as clandestine sources. People of that kind can be recruited not as agents of the Great Satan, but as patriotic Iranians who love their country and are willing to risk everything for (dare I use the word?) FREEDOM.

We should therefore be relying on the classic methods of agent recruitment and handling to achieve our objectives inside Iran, not cowboy operations dreamed up in the bowels of the Pentagon by wanabe Rambos. (There is a role, of course, for electronic and other technical forms of stand-off intelligence collection, but those lie outside the scope of this commentary.)

Further, we should emphatically NOT listen to the large fat-cat (and primarily self-interested) Iranian exile community in Beverly Hills, London and Paris, who would be no more reliable than Ahmed Chalabi and his crew were in the case of Iraq. (To be sure, most of these exiled Iranians are fine individuals, and most are now loyal Americans, but ALL political exiles very quickly lose touch with reality and are deluded by memories of their society as it was a whole generation ago. The Iranian-American community and their relatives in Europe are no exception to that rule. )

Nor should we accept at face value the intelligence on Iran that we get from the Israelis. Mossad has a long history of influencing us through the intelligence liaison system by providing "sexed up" intelligence that was warped to benefit Israel's special interests, often at the expense of the United States. (That bias has not always been deliberately injected with malice aforethought, but the practice has been persistent, and must be carefully guarded against if we want to form our own objective judgments.)

But back to my first point: the worst course of all would be reliance on the infiltration of American (or surrogate third-country) military types, whose primary mission, presumably, would be to scout out likely targets for bombing. First of all, we should NOT BOMB Iran at all --- under ANY circumstances. Simply put, even the most successful physical results would be politically disastrous, and would kill whatever healthy opposition movement struggles to stay alive within Iranian society today.

So what possible "intelligence" could Special Forces agents collect that would be worth the downside risks of exposure, capture, show trials, etc? It's frighteningly stupid! '

Ray Close

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Proposal: A Covenant with America

Here are my suggestions for a new covenant with America that could be adopted by politicians running for Congress this fall.

1. The American people do not want their courageous intelligence personnel endangered by politics at a time when international terrorism remains a real threat. If elected we will strengthen the law to make it easier to obtain indictments against those, like White House advisers Irv Lewis Libby and Karl Rove, who play politics with intelligence officers' lives.

2. The American people do not want dirty money in politics. To address misuse of funds such as that of former Republican congressional leader Tom Delay, we pledge to make it easier to prosecute money laundering for the purpose of fixing elections.

3. Five years after Usamah Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri sent their evil minions to attack New York and Washington, DC, they are still at large, and are still encouraging violence against the United States and its allies, as we saw in Madrid and London. The Bush administration has spent over $400 billion on an Iraq War unrelated to 9/11, but comparatively small sums on counter-terrorist efforts against the al-Qaeda leadership. We pledge to invest in genuine counter-terrorism and to strengthen cooperation with allies to disrupt and destroy al-Qaeda's remaining capacity.

4. The American people cannot be expected to pay trillions, and to sacrifice thousands more lives, for a failed land war in Iraq. We pledge to withdraw US ground troops from that country on a short timetable. The necessary political and military arrangements will be made to give the Iraqis a fighting chance of establishing stability on their own, but we believe that the very presence of US ground troops on the present scale provokes anger in some factions and makes others less willing to compromise.

5. The Bush administration misused and misrepresented intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction and repeatedly asserted or implied an operational link between Iraqi intelligence and al-Qaeda. Congress was systematically misled by briefers sent over from the executive branch. We pledge that if elected we will establish by law a panel of lifetime appointees to review intelligence for the president and congress, and to advise when they perceive any branch of the government to be distorting the professional intelligence community's findings for political purposes.

6. Americans should be secure from warantless invasions of their privacy. The Bush administration's abuses against the fourth amendment of the US constitution must end. If we are elected, we pledge to protect Americans from unreasonable and unauthorized government snooping by bureaucrats. Some of these practices are authorized by the so-called "PATRIOT" act, which we believe to contain provisions that defile our revered constitution and would have shocked and dismayed the founding fathers. Exceptions will be made for clear threats to national security, but those exceptions, too, must be promptly reviewed by a judge.

7. Cruel and unusual punishment was outlawed by our founding fathers. Torture goes against all the principles on which the United States was established. Nevertheless, in the world's eyes, the United States is now associated with disgusting photographs coming out of Abu Ghraib, showing unconcealed torture. If elected, we pledge to stop the executive branch from authorizing practices recognized in international law as torture. Likewise, the US constitution guarantees all the accused a speedy trial. Facilities such as Guantanamo Bay, where prisoners can be held indefinitely without charge and without trial, are as big a threat to the liberties of our Republic as is terrorism itself. If elected, we pledge to close it and to try the accused, convicting the guilty.

8. The failure of Congress to adjust the alternative minimum tax has allowed a measure that was intended to prevent the wealthy from avoiding taxes to become a new, stealth tax on the middle class. If elected, we pledge to significantly raise the threshold for the alternative minimum tax so as to strengthen the middle class, and we pledge to allow Bush's temporary tax cuts on the super-wealthy to lapse so as to keep the budget healthy. The economic recovery makes these temporary measures unnecessary, and letting temporary tax cuts lapse is not the same as raising taxes. The middle class has to choose whether it wants to pick up the bill here; we are saying it does not have to.

9. We pledge to work for green energy and to curtail America's dangerous dependence on foreign oil. Not only is it unwise to depend for our energy on unstable or hostile regimes abroad, carbon-based energy is causing a dangerous warming of the globe, and warming seas helped produce the catastrophe that befell New Orleans. If elected, we pledge a new Manhattan project, this time focused on bringing the weight of government spending to bear on innovative energy technology, resulting in homegrown ways to provide inexpensive transportation, heating and air conditioning for all, and to end the threat of global warming while continuing to grow the economy. Inexpensive, clean energy would increase the standard of living of middle class Americans enormously.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Black Sunday Yields 81 Dead in Iraqi Bloodbaths
Interior Admits Death Squads

The Washington Post reports that four bombs in Iraqi cities killed altogether some 30 persons on Sunday, and left dozens wounded. In addition, in what al-Hayat calls "the war of corpses," 51 bodies were found in the streets, handcuffed and executed, victims of Iraq's ongoing religious civil war.

The most important of the bombings was that in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, the site of the shrine of Imam Husain, the martyred grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. Karbala is more than a city, it is a potent symbol of the righteous suffering of the Shiites and their leaders, which is woven into their ritual life. Shiites chant the name of Karbala while whipping themselves in sympathy with the pain of Husain and his small party of warriors and family members. They go on "visitation," a kind of lesser pilgrimage, to the tomb of Husain. Any big act of violence at Karbala resonates strongly with Shiites, makes their eyes sting with tears, and fills their breasts with righteous anger. The guerrillas set off the bomb near the mansion of the governor of Karbala province, only half a mile from the revered shrine of Husain. Some Shiites will certainly avenge the bombing with nighttime reprisal killings of Sunni Arabs.

Speaking of feelings of sadness and victimization, many Iraqi Shiites have traditionally expressed those feelings in poetry. Banned under the Baath, it is making a comeback.

In Baghdad, a car bomb in Adhamiyah was set off as an Iraqi Army convoy approached. It killed 8 and wounded 15, including some of the targetted troops. Another bomb seems to have targetted the HQ of the Al-Sabah newspaper, a government mouthpiece, killing 1 and wounding 5, all civilians, A bomb in the al-Sina`i district of Mosul killed 3 soldiers on patrol.

A US Marine died of wounds incurred in fighting in Anbar Province in the country's west.
In the aftermath of Saturday's shooting down of a British military helicopter and a subsequent riot against British soldiers who came to get the bodies that left 5 Iraqis dead and 28 wounded, pamphlets are circulating in the southern port city demanding an immediate British withdrawal [Ar.] .

The British were already in the process of withdrawing from Maysan and Muthanna provinces, and plan to reduce their forces by 800 to 7,200. The problem is that smaller forces will depend more heavily on helicopters, and if radical Shiite militiamen are getting hold of SA-14 shoulder held missile launchers, Saturday's incident might be only the beginning. Similar weapons were given by the US to Afghan Mujahidin in Afghanistan and used effectively against Soviet helicopters from 1986.

The Iraqi government says that 100,000 Iraqis have fled their homes since late February because of campaigns of faith-based ethnic cleansing.

Interior Minister Bayan Jabr said Sunday that an officer and 17 other persons had been arrested among the special police commandoes of the ministry and charged with running death squads. This announcement is the first official confirmation that the death squads were being run out of Interior, as many charged. Bayan Jabr would like to keep his job, analogous to head of "Homeland Security" in the United States. He is supported by the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance, but is depised by most of the other parties in parliament and seems likely to be forced out. Sunday's attempt to come clean was probably too limited to save him. Give him credit, though-- he at least implicated an officer. This step is not one that Donald Rumsfeld ever dared take with regard to torture at Abu Ghraib.

Dan Murphy reports from Baghdad that the situation in the capital is rapidly deteriorating. It is down to only 3 hours of electricity a day. 2500 persons have been killed in religious reprisal attacks since late February. And not only are the militias of religious parties powerful, but now each neighborhood is throwing up its own militia.

Meanwhile, Nancy Youssef argues that Muqtada al-Sadr is attempting to transform his militia, the Mahdi Army, into an analogue of the Lebanese Hizbullah, which is a militia, a powerful political party, and a set of social services rolled into one.

An Iraqi author alleges that in the absence of effective government regulation, substandard goods are flooding into Iraq.

Tariq Ali argues that Iraq hasn't been as much of a catastrophe as it could have been for the Bush administration, only because Iran's ayatollahs have tacitly allied with the Americans on key issues. He points out that if Bush's manufactured crisis with Iran goes forward, Iraq could go very bad.

Samuel Berger argues sensibly in the Wall Street Journal that the US should pursue direct talks with the Iranian government as a way of resolving bilateral disputes.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Mearsheimer and Walt Reply

Mearsheimer and Walt reply to criticisms of their paper, "The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy."

We're still accepting signatures of post-secondary teachers on our petition defending Mearsheimer and Walt of ridiculous charges that they are anti-Semites, i.e. racists.

Not an academic? Tell your academic friends!
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Apologizing for Ahmadinejad

"Assume that the Iranians are within measurable distance of nuclear status. Appearances sometimes to the contrary, they are not mad—or not clinically insane in the way that Saddam Hussein was and Kim Jong-il is. The recent fuss about the obliteration of Israel is largely bullshit: Ayatollah Khomeini’s call for this has been intoned pedantically and routinely ever since he first uttered it, and it only got attention this year because of the new phenomenon of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the scrofulous engineer who acts the part of civilian president for his clerical bosses. These people (who once bought weapons from Israel via Oliver North in order to fight Saddam Hussein) are cynical and corrupt. They know as well as you do what would happen if they tried to nuke Israel or the United States. They want the bomb as insurance against invasion and as a weapon of strategic ambiguity to shore up their position in the region."

-Christopher Hitchens

Send Weldon Berger money, and read him on Cole/Hitchens. Nails it.

Money paragraph:

' Cole, on the other hand, has written that “I personally despise everything Ahmadinejad stands for” (April 23, 2006, published May 2); that Ahmadinejad “has been particularly stupid in his pronouncements on Israel” (December 30, 2005); that Ahmadinejad “stole the Iranian election” (October 27, 2005); that Ahmadinejad’s remarks on the Holocaust reflect a “wilfull ignorance on a Himalayan scale” (January 4, 2006); that “Ahmadinejad is a very bad character, with a long history of essentially fascist activity in suppressing points of view other than those of the hardline Khomeinists” (June 18, 2005).

So let’s review our apologist scorecard. Hitchens on Ahmadinejad: “scrofulous.” Cole on Ahmadinejad: “despicable, ignorant, thieving, stupid, fascist.” The one point on which they agree, or did as recently as March of this year when Hitchens indicted Ahmadinejad for lymphatic excess, is that Ahmadinejad and Iran pose no serious threat to Israel or the US, and that a US attack on Iran would be at least stupid and probably disastrous. '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Basra Explodes in Shiite Rage

Unidentified guerrillas shot down a British Lynx helicopter in Basra on Saturday, killing 5 UK servicemen. The helicopter fell on a house. A large, angry crowd of Shiites gathered to jeer, throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at British troops who arrived at the scene to recover the bodies. The British soldiers then opened fire on the Shiites, killing at least 5, including 2 children, and wounding 28. [The British denied having cause all these deaths, or perhaps any of them; I don't find the latter assertion plausible. - revision] One of the British troops also got hit by shrapnel.

While the identity of the group that used a shoulder held missile to shoot down the helicopter is not known, the angry crowd appears to have consisted of Sadrists. Al-Hayat reports that the mob chanted, "All of Us are the Troops of the Sayyid" [actually probably Sayyid Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr- correction]. The Sadrist radicals in Basra follow a break-away sect headed by Shaikh Ahmad al-Fartusi, which is more radical than Muqtada al-Sadr (who has now turned to parliamentary politics).

These were the worst anti-British riots in Basra since August of 2003, though there were also disturbances in late summer, 2005.

Guerrillas launched a number of bombings, mortar attacks and assassinations around the country. Among the incidents reported by Reuters:

' * SAMARRA - Two policemen were killed and another was wounded when a roadside bomb struck their patrol in Samarra, 100 km (60 miles) north of Baghdad, on Saturday, police said . . . BAGHDAD - A U.S. soldier was killed on Friday when his vehicle was struck by a roadside bomb, the U.S. military said on Saturday. TIKRIT - A suicide bomber wearing Iraqi army uniform detonated his explosives vest inside an Iraqi military base in Tikrit on Saturday, killing three Iraqi army officers and wounding one, Interior Ministry sources and police said. BAGHDAD - Two children aged five and six were killed and three adult civilians were wounded when a mortar round landed on Baghdad's western district of Shula on Saturday, police said. BAGHDAD - Police on Saturday found six bodies in different parts of Baghdad with signs of torture and gunshots to the head, police said . . . '

Borzou Daragahi of the LA Times, now the American reporter in Iraq with the best finger on the pulse of the Shiites, presciently reported Saturday on the growing anti-American and anti-Coalition sentiments in the Shiite south.

' "There is an anger," said Jaffar Mohammed Asadi . . . "You can hear it in the slogans at Friday prayers: 'Death to America,' " he said. "They're burning American flags. They're saying, 'The Americans won't leave except by the funerals of their sons.' "

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

10 Troops Killed in Afghanistan Crash

An American helicopter crashed on Saturday in Afghanistan, killing 10.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Guerrillas Kill 3 GIs
15 Iraqis Dead in Violence
Muqtada Emerging as Kingmaker

Guerrillas killed 3 GIs in Babil province south of Baghdad on Friday.

Friday morning, Five bodies were found in Ramadi. Presumably these are either local Shiites or are Sunni Arabs whom the guerrillas considered to be collaborators with the Shiite-dominated Baghdad government.

There were assassinations and firefights elsewhere, including especially Samarra, which has been tense for the past 3 days because of the killing of the commander of the neo-Baathist Army of Muhammad there. Al-Hayat says that altogether 15 Iraqis died in guerrilla violence.

KarbalaNews.net reports that [Ar.] the deputy chief of autopsies in Baghdad says that 35 to 50 corpses come into the morgue every day, most of them Shiites. [Graphic photo.]

Al-Hayat says that [Ar.] the US has found a new Zarqawi video that encourages the ethnic cleansing of Shiites and "spies," and pledges the declaration of an Islamic emirate in some part of Iraq within three months.

Muqtada al-Sadr and his bloc are king-makers in Iraq, argues Sami Moubayed. They want the the ministries of Education, Youth, Commerce, Agriculture and Electricity. Commerce and Agriculture would give them enormous patronage in the economy. Youth and Education give them the opportunity to shape the next generation of Iraqis. And, although electricity generation is not going to improve soon, the ability to decide who gets most of this scarce commodity will buy a lot of clients and voters.

Sadr al-Din al-Qubanji, preacher at the Fatimiyah Husainiyah in Najaf, said in his Friday sermon that militiamen must be recruited into the state security forces, and that no government can be strong in their presence. Al-Qubanji is a member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), whose Badr Corps paramilitary is increasingly being absorbed into local police forces and the national Interior Ministry special police commandos. In Najaf context, he is probably saying that the Mahdi Militia of Muqtada al-Sadr is a problem for the regularized Badr in the local police force.

The Sunni hard line Association of Muslim Scholars had said on Thursday that the cancer of militias has spread in Iraq and that the paramilitaries were responsible for horrendous abuses against the human rights of Iraqis.

The preacher at the (Sunni) mosque attached to the shrine of Abdu'l-Qadir Gilani, Shaikh Mahmud al-Isawi, said that the murderous activities of the militias boggled the mind. (Al-Isawi belongs to the mystical, Sufi form of Islam that opposes hard line militant Salafism and Wahhabism). He detailed bloody attacks and asked "Where is the mercy? Where is Islam?"
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Hekmatyar goes Al-Qaeda
Kabul Bomb Kills Italians

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the radical Islamist guerrilla fighter, has pledged his allegiance to Usamah Bin Laden.

Back in the 1980s, Hekmatyar was a "freedom fighter" supported strongly by the Reagan administration. His radical Islamists received on the order of a billion dollars from the CIA to fight the Soviets, via Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence. In his youth, Hekmatyar is said to have thrown acid in the faces of unveiled girls.

In the 1990s, he became "prime minister" but fell out with "President" Burhan al-Din Rabbani, and the two of them fought a war over Kabul that killed thousands and destroyed much of the city! When warlords rule . . .

When the Taliban took over, Hekmatyar went underground to fight them, and could easily have been part of the "Northern Alliance" of warlords. But he went his own way, and opposed the US invasion of 2001-2002. He's been an underground guerrilla fighter, leading his Hizb-i Islami (Islamic Party) ever since. He pledged to kill US troops, just as Reagan once helped him kill Soviet troops.

But now, he's joined forces with al-Qaeda, as it and the Taliban are regrouping in southern Afghanistan.

On Friday, On Friday, a roadside bomb killed two Italian soldiers and wounded others. There are 1775 Italian troops in that country as part of the NATO force. The neo-Taliban and resurgent al-Qaeda are attempting to force the Europeans out by disheartening their publics.

And, you remember those advertisements during the Olympics about the Bush administration having "liberated" 50 million people. The Afghans are so liberated that millions are going hungry.

' Also Friday, the World Food Program called for an additional $40 million US in financial aid to help feed an estimated 3.5 million Afghans.

"Our lack of funding has left us almost no choice," Charles Vincent, the WFP representative in Afghanistan, told the Associated Press.

"Food rations and activities will have to be cut if we do not receive fresh donations." '

A majority of Canadians has turned against the deployment of troops in Afghanistan, which began this winter. Guerrillas killed 4 of them on April 22 near Qandahar.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Hitchens Affair

A little satire on the Hitchens affair.

and . . .

Sadly no!
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Cole/Weisberg Correspondence on Hitchens

With Mr. Weisberg's permission, I am posting our correspondence on the Hitchens hatchet job on me in Slate earlier this week.

========

From: Jacob Weisberg
Sent: Thu 5/4/2006 6:15 PM
To: Cole, Juan
Subject: RE: Forwarded from Weisberg

Dear Juan Cole,

Thanks for yor message. I certainly know your work and have seen it cited in Slate and elsewhere. I don't want to commission a reponse from you, but you are welcome to write a response which we will post in the Fray and excerpt at the end of the original Hitchens piece. That is how we do letters to the editor here. I'm afraid I don't understand your various accusations, which presume some knowledge I don't have.

I don't know what manuscript or piece you are talking about. And how has Hitchens stolen your email? If someone you sent a message to forwarded it to Hitchens, that is not "theft" by any definition I am familiar with -- it is something that happens all the time on the web. I would suggest that you try to respond calmly on the substantive issues.

If you are making some sort of legal threat against us, I should have our lawyer
respond.


Yours sincerely,

Jacob Weisberg

===========

From: Cole, Juan
Sent: Friday, May 05, 2006 12:31 AM
To: Jacob Weisberg
Subject: RE: Forwarded from Weisberg


Dear Mr. Weisberg:

Thank you so much for your prompt reply.

I will consider doing as you say and writing a response for the Fray and also for the bottom of the original Hitchens piece.

I am sorry that I did not do a better job of explaining the issue of the purloined email. It is not a matter of going to the law, but it is a matter of Slate's reputation, especially in the blogosphere . . .

The email correspondence that Mr. Hitchens published without my permission had not appeared publicly. The emails were sent to a small private list, of scholars and experts, for reaction, and I was aiming to write something journalistic or give a major address on Ahmadinejad. The list to which I sent the emails has a requirement that no material appearing there be forwarded off the list. Obviously, a list member violated his pledge and passed the messages to Hitchens.

For Hitchens then to publish early drafts of something I was working on, and to use them as a basis for a vitriolic attack on me was just wrong as a matter of law. (Again, I do not say this with litigation in mind, only as a matter of principle). It violated my copyright in my manuscript. and scooped me, reducing the value of the material. That the emails had not appeared publicly, and were not intended to be so, removes considerations of fair use. I append below, purely for your information, the reaction I got to all this from a friendly attorney.

But I think that the Hitchens article was much worse as a matter of unethical journalistic practice than it was as an infringement of the law. Hitchens, having come into this material, could have called me and interviewed me. Journalists interview me all the time. I could have been given the opportunity to set them in context and to respond to his points. How could he possibly even understand what I was getting at from a couple of disconnected emails someone handed to him? How could he do his job that way? He could have sought my permission to publish my private email. In essence, he rushed off blind to do a hatchet job on me, one he has clearly been put up to by unsavory individuals. That's not journalism, and I don't have to tell you that.

So I sppose the thing that would most sadden me would be a failure among the Slate editors to understand that what Hitchens did really was wrong and unethical and bad journalism.

cheers



Juan Cole

Appendix:

In a case where the Defendant magazine sought to use the "fair use" defense when they published previously unpublished portions of (you're going to love this) President Ford's memoirs, (you're going to love this) in The Nation magazine in an effort to scoop a sanctioned article about to appear in Time Magazine. Ginsberg wrote for the majority in shooting down fair use. Most cases have moved from the "public figure" viewpoint to "public discourse" but it's the same thing. The case also holds that unpublished material the author never intends to see the light of day is protected and that's still good law. Actually it's great law. The right of first publication looms large against the defense of fair use. The question is whether the unauthorized publication intends to supersede the as yet unpublished material. Cite: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises, 471 U.S. 539, 105 S.Ct. 2218, U.S.N.Y.,1985.

Clearly, Hitchens intended to pre-empt you and supersede your eventual publication when he printed material he expects you to eventually publish and changed its meaning to fit his own goals. There are many other factors, but that one is key. Some other things that I think factor in your favor is that the limited dissemination of this material to peers for their review in order to help you refine your eventual publication is exactly the type of pre publication work the copyright act intended to protect when it incorporated common law protections into the act. Scooping, when getting the material from another's work and not on your own, is never fair use . . .

=========

From: Jacob Weisberg
Sent: Fri 5/5/2006 10:22 AM
To: Cole, Juan
Subject: RE: Forwarded from Weisberg

Dear Mr Cole,

I have read your message and also your blog post today. In my judgment, there is no ethical issue here. Commentators are under no obligation to call people they write about. And Hitchens correctly described the email he quoted from as being from your Gulf discussion group. Your substantive disagreement about the translation and the issues around it are a fit matter for public debate, which appears to be taking place.

Yours sincerely,



Jacob Weisberg
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

28 Dead, over 50 Wounded in Bombings, Assassinations
Shiites Keep Interior?

At least 28 persons were killed in the Iraqi civil war on Thursday. Another big car bomb killed 10 and wounded 50, 15 critically, at a court building in the Shiite slum of Sadr City.
In another Very Bad Sign,

' In other attacks, Brigadier-General Mohammed Raza Abdellatiff, who was in charge of logistics for the Iraqi Army in Baghdad, was shot dead as he was driving to work.

When the general in charge of logistics in the capital can be shot down at will, it is not a good situation.

Guerrillas killed 2 GIs, as well.

AFP is reporting that the Shiite United Iraq Alliance has succeeded in retaining control of the Ministry of the Interior (domestic security). The Sunni religious coalition, the Iraqi Accord Front (IAF), wants the following portfolios: defence, finance, education, services and civil affairs. What is amazing is that the IAF is no different from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood or Hamas. But in Iraq it is all right if they get cabinet posts. If an analogous thing happened in Egypt it would be a political earthquake, and not one welcomed by Washington.

The Turks have massed 40,000 troops in their east near Iraq over the threat of terrorism from Iraq-based Marxist Kurdish guerrillas of the PKK. There have been reports of Turkish shelling of PKK positions. Ironically, it is Uncle Sam who emboldens the Communist Kurds who have taken refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan, since they know the US will not allow Turkey to engage in hot cross-border pursuit of them. A similar conflict has emerged on the Iranian side of the border.


Now it is Congress that may block attempts to secure permanent US bases in Iraq.

"Corporate Freedom Abroad, No Dissent at Home-- it is almost like a reverse Maoist slogan. Can it really be the Bush administration policy behind the slogans about spreading "freedom?"
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Rumsfeld: It Depends on what the Meaning of "Where" Is

Back in the Sixties it would be some activist college student who confronted the Secretary of Defense on an illegal, ill-conceived and unwinnable war. It is an index of the changed times that now it is retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern!

William Dunham writes,

' Mr Rumsfeld waved away his security guards when he was confronted by Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst of 27 years and an outspoken critic of the war.

"Why did you lie to get us into a war that caused these kind of casualties and was not necessary?" Mr McGovern asked him.

Donald Rumsfeld giving his speech at the Southern Center for International Studies in Atlanta . . .

"I did not lie," Mr Rumsfeld replied . . .

McGovern shot back, "You said you knew where they were", referring to the Iraqi weapons.

"I did not," Rumsfeld retorted. "I said I knew where suspect sites were."

"You said you know where they were, near Tikrit, near Baghdad, and north, east, south and west of there. Those are your words," McGovern shot back.

"I'd just like an honest answer," McGovern added. "We're talking about lies," also mentioning the administration's assertions of prewar ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

Here's the transcript from the DoD site from 2003:

' MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally, weapons of mass destruction. Key goal of the military campaign is finding those weapons of mass destruction. None have been found yet. There was a raid on the Answar Al-Islam Camp up in the north last night. A lot of people expected to find ricin there. None was found. How big of a problem is that? And is it curious to you that given how much control U.S. and coalition forces now have in the country, they haven't found any weapons of mass destruction?

SEC. RUMSFELD: Not at all. If you think -- let me take that, both pieces -- the area in the south and the west and the north that coalition forces control is substantial. It happens not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were dispersed. We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat. '

Rumsfeld was asked about the failure already 9 days into the war to find any WMD. His answer was "we know where they are." It is unambiguous, unqualified. And now he is lying about that!

As for an imagined Iraq-al-Qaeda link, there is this from September, 2002:

' JAMIE MCINTYRE, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Well, he did make that suggestion today, in response to a question at a press briefing. Asked specifically, is there a linkage and what is it? He said, well that had been covered in the highly classified briefing that the deputy CIA director gave along with Rumsfeld to NATO ministers here, and he said that the short answer is, yes, there is linkage, but he went into no detail.

Now, all along, the administration has indicated that it does not have any strong evidence linking Saddam Hussein with the Al Qaeda terrorist network. If they had that evidence, presumably we would see it by now, but it is also not inconsistent with some of the things Rumsfeld has said in the past, which is essentially that Al Qaeda elements are in Iraq, and he has also said that given Saddam Hussein's control over most of the country, that it's inconceivable that he wouldn't be in some way aware or permitting that activity. So could be less there or more than that meets the eye -- Wolf. '

The short answer is, yes! It was all lies and propaganda. Rumsfeld knew better.

Ironically, the US government has now released documents that show that when Iraqi intelligence heard rumors that al-Qaeda might be in Iraq, they were alarmed and put out an APB. Rumsfeld's lies were not even plausible lies.

Ray McGovern is a hero for taking on the Rumster face to face, and for not letting him skip away with one of his notorious rhetorical tricks.

The lies about al-Qaeda and Saddam being operationally linked are the worst. This falsehood is the thing that most saddens me about the death of Sgt. Steve Sakoda in Iraq. This Japanese-American hero switched from the reserves to active duty to fight al-Qaeda after 9/11, and then was sent instead to Iraq. It is the cruelest bait and switch any American administration has ever pulled on our brave soldiers.

And as for the badly wounded vets, there are over 10,000 of them. The pictures are here if you have the stomach for it. I hope Mr. Rumsfeld has seen them.

And, I'd also like to ask him about the new problem of homeless Iraq War veterans. Yes.
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