Naguib Mahfouz, RIP

Nobel prize-winning Arabic novelist and short story writer Naguib Mahfouz is dead at 94.

Do yourself a favor and read him. If you want a window on Arab culture, forget the posturing politicians (who mostly actually work in English and French), and the American pundits who interpret the Arab world to us without knowing Arabic or having lived in the Arab world (sort of as though Aljazeera's correspondent who reported on Washington, DC, government affairs did not know English and had never visited the United States; believe me, it would not happen.)

Read Mahfouz.

I suggest you start with Midaq Alley, set in a fast-changing lower middle class neighborhood of Cairo during the British occupation of World War II. If you ever wondered what the Egyptians were thinking as Montgomery duelled Rommel, here is the most painless way possible to find out. The characters alone, and they are characters, are worth the price of admission.

Bush Maintains ending US Occupation of Iraq will Infuriate Terrorists

Bush says that ending the Iraq occupation will open America to a terrorist attack.

I can't imagine why he says that. If we weren't occupying Iraq, how would that infuriate al-Qaeda and the Muslim radical fringe?

Can you imagine the discussions in the cave in Waziristan?

"They got out of Iraq!"

"Damn them, this is unacceptable."

"How dare they leave a Muslim country alone?"

"They are imperialists,aren't they? Why don't they imperialize? I am confused."

"The Iraqis are rejoicing, saying that they are independent and can practice Islam freely."

"It is horrible, I tell you, horrible."

"It cries out for vengeance! It is not acceptable for them not to colonize us!"

"I say we hit them where it hurts."

For a peak at the real world, try here.

Or you could try here. Robert Pape is a social scientist and has crunched the numbers.

As for the argument that withdrawing from Iraq will encourage the terrorists and make them feel victorious, we can turn Cheney's argument around. What had we withdrawn from in the mid to late 1990s that precipitated 9/11? Bin Laden cited Beirut (two decades earlier!) and Yemen (where we just stopped refueling). This was a pitiful attempt on Bin Laden's part to convince himself that the US is a paper tiger, not a realistic accounting of strategy! Do Bush and Cheney really want to rely on al-Qaeda propaganda in making their own policies?

Diwaniyah Ceasefire in Doubt
Spike in Death toll Continues, with over 50 dead

Dan Murphy of the CSM writes about the increasing fragmentation of Iraqi politics and militias at the local level. He argues that Muqtada al-Sadr and even the powerful Kurdish warlords are losing control to local militant groups that take the law in their own hands. His comparison of the PKK (Kurdish Workers' Party) in Kurdistan, which blows up things in Turkey, to the extremist Sadrists in Diwaniyah and Karbala who are beyond Muqtada al-Sadr's control strikes me as extremely perceptive.

A roadside bomb in the market of Shurjah in Baghdad killed 25 and wounded 25 others. In Hilla to the southwest of the capital, a bicycle bomb killed 12 and wounded 38 at a recruitment station. Altogether at least 50 were killed and 100 wounded, though that is a substantial undercount. Al-Hayat puts the death toll on Wednesday at 80.

Defense Minister Abdul Qadir Jasim Muhammad al-`Ubaidi visited Diwaniyah Wednesday, the scene of fighting between militias, and between a militia and local Iraqi tribal troops. He abruptly denounced the cease-fire that had been negotiated by the elected governor of Qadisiyah province with Muqtada al-Sadr, who roundly condemned the Mahdi Army militiamen that engaged in the firefight. Al-Hayat reports that the rural tribal youth that make up the Iraqi army in Diwaniyah are in the mood for revenge and want to start back up the fighting with the Mahdi Army. For its part, the Sadr Movement in Najaf complained that the governor of Qadisiyah Province had already broken the cease fire agreement, with government troops moving into Sadrist neighborhoods "as though they were Occupation forces," and firing indiscriminately, killing several persons. At the same time, an aide to Muqtada said the young nationalist cleric commanded his followers to stop fighting and to put away their weapons, and to avoid appearing armed in the streets, lest they give a pretext to forces that would like to move against the Sadr Movement and its leadership.

My guess? Prime Minister Maliki will try to rein in Gen. al-`Ubaidi and try to preserve the shakey the cease fire. The Diwaniyah crisis was settled in the Najaf way, with talking it out and face saved for everyone. The Defense Minister wants to settle it in the old Baathi way, with the non-government side crushed. This would be all very well if the government were a) actually strong enough to pull it off and b) not a composite that includes the Sadr Movement!

Al-Zaman says that an assistant secretary (Mudirah `Ammah) in the Ministry of Justice was assassinated on Wednesday.

Al-Zaman/ DPA allege that Marines on patrol in parts of West Baghdad where Sunni Arabs from al-Anbar province have taken refuge used megaphones to tell them that the US troops were leaving Iraq soon. In Ramadi to the west, Sunni Arab guerrillas clashed with US troops.

With Bush and Blair's Iraq War, much of the lying was done through silence or silencing others. In spring of 2004 the [oops of course should have been Australian] foreign minister Alexander Downer suppressed a message from a weapons inspector saying point blank that there was no WMD in Iraq. He was briefed by the scientist. And then a month later the foreign minister said at a news conference that the hunt for WMD was a work in progress and he could draw no conclusions. Over on this side of the Pacific, not only did Rummy, Bush and Cheney stonewall us on the empty well, but Pete Hoekstra and Rick Santorum are still effectively lying about it. People in a democracy get the representatives they deserve.

Israeli War on Lebanese Civilians Continues

A top United Nations humanitarian official, Jan Egeland, said he was shocked on inspecting southern Lebanon to find it littered with deadly unexploded cluster bombs. These were for the most part dropped in the last three days of the conflict, when it was foreseen that there would be a resolution and a ceasefire. He said, “What’s shocking and I would say, to me, completely immoral is that 90 percent of the cluster bomb strikes occurred in the last 72 hours of the conflict, when we knew there would be a resolution."

Egeland was not just harshly condemning a UN member state, which is a breach of protocol. He was also accusing Israel of crimes against humanity. You see, if a rationale could be found at all for using cluster bombs, it would be against a massed, invading enemy infantry corps. But just to scatter them all around a civilian area as a cease fire is imminent is not a legitimate military action. It is a monstrous crime. It is a surefire death sentence on hundreds, perhaps thousands of innocent children, who will find the bomblets and think they are playthings. The government of Ehud Olmert committed this crime as part of its cynical attempt to ethnically cleanse the far south of Lebanon of its Shiite inhabitants. It was a way of discouraging them from returning, just as was the massive demolition of thousands of houses, with bulldozers and aerial bombing, which had no military value whatsoever.

The American people are complicit in these war crimes, insofar as they provided the cluster bombs and supported Olmert to the hilt in his dirty war, which was only occasionally about actually combating Hizbullah fighters (there weren't any, in a lot of the places that were bombed).

Israel continued its across the board blockade of Lebanese ports, which is depriving dialysis patients of needed medicines and continuing to harm the entire Lebanese economy. 40% of the Lebanese electorate is Christian, and they are suffering along with everyone else. Lebanese unemployment is surging to Depression-era levels.

Rumsfeld Accuses Critics of Appeasement of Fascists

The LA Times reports that

' Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Tuesday compared critics of the Bush administration to those who sought to appease the Nazis before World War II, warning that the nation is confronting "a new type of fascism." '

(Click here for explanation of photo.)

The LA Times continued:

' He continued, "Can we truly afford to believe that, somehow or someway, vicious extremists could be appeased?" '

For an alternative view, see The Crock of Appeasement, an IC golden oldie:

'The Crock of Appeasement

The warmongers, imperialists, and just plain greedy who wish to use up US troops to gain their ill-gotten goods love to use the word "appeasement." Anyone who stands against their expansionist ambitions will be tagged with this term. In the lexicology of the Rabid Right, it evokes British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's attempt to negotiate with German Chancellor Adolph Hitler. It is certainly the case that Hitler was a genocidal maniac and not the sort of man with whom one could usefully negotiate. But not all negotiation is equally fruitless. Before that incident, by the way, "appeasement" had a positive connotation, of "seeking peace."

The rightwing use of the term appeasement, however, turns it on its head. Taken seriously, the doctrine of "no appeasement" on the right would mean we are stuck in perpectual war, always doomed to be on the offensive, always dedicated to gobbling up more of other people's territory and wealth even at the expense of living in constant dread of being blown up and being forced to give up the civil liberties which had made American civilization great.

It would never be possible to negotiate a truce with any enemy. That would be appeasement. It would never be possible to compromise. That would be appeasement. It would never be prudent to withdraw troops from a failed war. That would be appeasement. In other words, the rightwing doctrine of "no appeasement, ever" actually turns you into Hitler rather than into Churchill.

But we are anyway not stuck perpetually in the late 1930s, and it is not the only exemplary period in history to which we can resort for our metaphors and our courses of action.

The Iraq crisis, for instance, is clearly an odd sort of neocolonialism, which can only ultimately be resolved by decolonization. Decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s was also denounced as "appeasement," but it was the only right course.

The similarities between British decolonization in Kenya and the Bush administration "war on terror" were pointed out in The Nation last winter.

Britain gave up India (and Pakistan) in 1947. Was that "appeasement?" You may be assured that the British Right saw it that way.

Without this sort of realism, Britain would have tried to keep India and there would have been a bloodbath. Likewise, any attempt by Britain to hold on to Kenya past the early 1960s would have led to even more violence than the Mau Mau and British reprisals (20,000 imprisoned, many tortured) had. And with decolonization, the Mau Mau and violence subsided. Problems do have solutions, and war is not always the best solution. Sometimes the withdrawal of the imperial power itself solves the problem.

You will note that you never hear that Britain "appeased" the Stern Gang, Irgun, Haganah and other Zionist forces that sometimes engaged in terrorism in Palestine, when it departed that territory in 1948.

France "appeased" Lebanon and Syria by granting them independence in 1943. It "appeased" Morocco by giving it up in 1956. It "appeased" Algeria in 1962. Britain likewise "appeased" all of its former colonies. The political Right in each of these imperial countries fought decolonization tooth and nail (I do not admire Albert Camus as much as many Americans of my generation, because of his reactionary stance on Algeria).

Or let us take Cory Aquino's people power movement that challenged-US backed dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the 1980s. The first instinct of Reagan and the rightwingers around him was to help Marcos crush Cory and her movement. Anything else would have been "appeasement." But Senator Dick Lugar went to the Philippines, looked around, and wisely decided that the only feasible course of action for the US was to acquiesce in people power. Lugar managed to persuade Reagan, thus averting disaster. Were Lugar and Reagan guilty of "appeasement"?

All counter-insurgency struggles have to be waged at both the military and the political levels. The political side of the struggle requires that we attempt to understand what is driving the insurgents, that we negotiate with them and attempt to bring them into the system. That is not appeasement. It is counter-insurgency. Counter-insurgency by simple brute military force has never worked, except where its wielder has been willing to commit genocide or soemthing close to it.

Is negotiating with the leadership of the Baath guerrilla movement in Iraq appeasement? I favor it if it would save the lives of US troops. Would declaring an amnesty for Baath Party members who cannot be proved to have committed a crime be appeasement? I favor it. Would internationalizing Iraq and drawing down US troops be appeasement? I favor it.

Rightwingers who want to play Churchill and denounce "appeasement" should please go off to Iraq and put their own lives on the line instead of playing politics with the lives of our brave troops from the safety of Washington DC. What we want for those troops, as soon as humanly feasible, is to come out of Iraq and stay out.

And no, it is not so they can then be sent to die in the sands of Iran. '

Americans bombed Diwaniyah
26 Bodies found in Baghad

On Wednesday morning in Iraq, guerrillas set off a bomb outside a military recruiting center, killing 12 and wounding 38.

Two more US troops were announced dead, one from action in al-Anbar, and one from a humbee accident.

The initial story, conveyed in the press and by US officials and observers about the Diwaniyah clashes of Saturday-Monday is falling apart as new information comes out.

1. The US military represented itself as just a bystander, having sent helicopters to hover above. But Agence France Press reports today from Diwaniyah:

' During yesterday's fighting, an American F-16 jet dropped a 220kg satellite-guided bomb on an "enemy position" while flying in support of Iraqi and coalition troops, the US air force said. '

2. Some reports and observers represented the Iraqi army as having acquitted itself well. But AFP reports:

' Officials said 81 people died in Diwaniyah in yesterday's clashes between security forces and militiamen and that . . . a peace deal was reached . . . "We killed 50 gunmen in the clashes and this incident resulted in the deaths of 23 of our soldiers and injuries to 30 of them," Mr Maliki said. Mr Jaathi said eight civilians were also killed and 61 wounded bystanders were treated after yesterday's 12-hour gun battle. '

My own guess is that it took local Badr Corps (infiltrated into Diwaniyah police and security forces), Badr Corps Special Police Commandos, Iraqi army soldiers, and a US 500 pound bomb to produce an outcome where ragtag militiamen were fought to a standstill.

3. The impression was given of a clear win of the new Iraqi army over the Mahdi Army militia. But AFP reports that the battle was resolved through negotiations, not militarily, and the Iraqi army has been forced to back down on some points:

' The army has agreed not to enter residential areas for three days, while the Mahdi Army will withdraw its fighters and a militia commander who was arrested at the weekend will be brought to court within 24 hours, town councillor Sheikh Ghanim Abid said. '

4. It was implied in some quarters that Muqtada al-Sadr put the militiamen up to causing this trouble. In fact, the local Sadrist leadership in Diwaniyah has for months been far more militant than Muqtada would have liked, and he tried to rein them in. AFP confirms:

' but aides said the battle had been triggered by rogue elements. '

In my appearance on the Lehrer News Hour on Tuesday, I challenged the narrative that the brave new Iraqi army single-handedly took on a Shiite militia and put it in its place. I think the army sided with one militia (the Badr Corps a.k.a Diwaniyah police) over another (the Mahdi Army). And I see the faction-fighting in Diwaniyah, which follows similar such clashes in Karbala and Basra, as further sign that even the Shiite south has entered a new phase of profound instability. Instead of celebrating that the Iraqi army did not run away from this fight, we should be worried that such a fight was necessary in sleepy, Shiite Diwaniyah to begin with. Diwaniyah, with a provincial government run by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, should have been a constituency for the Maliki government, not a challenge to it.

Some sort of deal appears to have been struck between the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds about how petroleum revenues will be collected, federally and provincially, and how the federal government will share them back out. If this deal really is firm, it is a big achievement, since this is one of the issues that could blow Iraq apart down the road.

On the other hand, the deal appears intended to pave the way to the letting of some major Iraqi petroleum bids. I worry that with the country such a mess and the politicians so cash-strapped, they will be tempted to give away too much in bad contracts, just for an immediate infusion of money.

The Iraqi government will gain control of its own army in September.

You mean they didn't have control of their own army?

Of course, this "control" that the troops will obey the commands that they are given.

The Kurds are building a refugee camp for 6,000 Iraqis who have been displaced north by the violence and poor security and bad economy in Arab Iraq. They are said not to be able to afford housing in Sulaymaniyah. It is hard to tell from a distance whether this is philanthropy or a social control mechanism.

Reuters reports political violence on Tuesday. Major incidents included the discovery of 26 dead bodies in Baghdad; other violence:

KIRKUK - A policeman was killed and nine people were wounded when a roadside bomb went off near their patrol in the tense city of Kirkuk, 250 km (155 miles) north of Baghdad, police and hospital sources said. . .

BAQUBA - Fifteen people were gunned down in several attacks in different areas of Baquba, police said. . .

BAQUBA - Gunmen attacked an office of the radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in the religiously mixed city of Baquba on Tuesday, killing two guards and wounding five, police said. . .

NEAR BAQUBA - Four people were found shot dead, handcuffed and blindfolded in a village near Baquba, police said. . .

BAGHDAD - Four mortar rounds landed in two districts in northern Baghdad wounding five people, including two Iraqi soldiers, a source in the Interior Ministry said. . .

BAGHDAD - Clashes between a Sunni tribe and Shi'ite militias wounded 14 people late on Monday in southern Baghdad, the army and an Interior Ministry source said.

Read Leonard Pitts on the Bushies' mania to control information while it is still available. :-)

Mother Jones has a timeline of the lies that led to the last war.

Over 100 Killed in Iraq, 100 Wounded
Mahdi Army Clashes in Diwaniyah
Bombings Rock Turkey

Two more US troops were announced dead on Monday, bringing the total dead among GIs for the weekend to 9.

Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney doesn't get it, as usual. The reason to draw down US ground troops in Iraq is that for the most part their presence in such numbers is counter-productive. Look at the fighting in Diwaniyah. All the US did was send helicopters to circle around. We don't need US or Coalition troops in Diwaniyah. And, why would we care who controls Diwaniyah, anyway? What Americans had even heard of it four years ago? It certainly is not a security threat to the United States.

As for this tag line that the the US was not in Iraq on Sept. 11, so Iraq cannot be generating terror, how stupid does he think we are? September 11 came indirectly out of the Reagan administration's use of Muslim fascists or mujahidin to fight socialism in Afghanistan. The lesson to draw is that unleashing large numbers of unconventional guerrilla forces and giving them billions of dollars and CIA training is a bad idea, and might well produce blowback. Afghanistan generated the last wave of terror. Now Iraq is generating a new generation of terror. Madrid and London came in response to it. Cheney's tag line is misleading and foolish.

The Independent estimates that over 100 Iraqis were killed on Monday in political violence. Dozens died in the fighting in Diwaniyah, along with the other violent deaths reported by Reuters, and the 14 dead bodies that showed up in Baghdad according to the LA Times. Al-Hayat estimated that 100 were wounded, as well.

Guerrillas also targeted the Ministry of the Interior with a car bomb, killing at least 16 and perhaps as many as 26 (-al-Hayat) and wounding dozens. The attack was likely an attempt to kill Interior Minister Jawad al-Bulani, who was to meet with provincial police chiefs on Monday.

Diwaniyah is run politically by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and likely its police and security forces have been heavily infiltrated by the Iran-trained Badr Corps, the paramilitary of SCIRI (as the NYT also suggests.) So a lot of the struggle is probably actually best thought of as Mahdi Army on Badr Corps faction fighting. Although SCIRI and allies won the provincial elections of January, 2005, since then the Sadr movement has been gaining adherents and influence in this and other southern Shiite provinces. New provincial elections were scheduled but have never been held, in part for fear that the Sadrists would sweep to power in provincial statehouses.

The Associated Press explains how the fighting in Diwaniyah began on Saturday, with Shiite militia attacks on Polish troops in the area. AP says that the Mahdi Army controlled wide swathes of the city on Monday evening.

' The clashes in Diwaniyah began Saturday night after a rocket attack on a Polish-run base earlier in the day, and then resumed Sunday night, said Lt. Col. Dariusz Kacperczyk, a Polish military spokesman.

Sheikh Abdul-Razaq al-Nidawi, the manager of Sadr's office in Diwaniyah, told the Associated Press that trouble had been brewing since Saturday night when the army arrested an Sadr supporter from the Jumhouri neighborhood.

On Sunday, the army raided the same place and "a gunfight erupted between them and the Mahdi Army," Nidawi said.

Army Capt. Fatik Aied said gunbattles broke out at about 11 p.m. Sunday south of Diwaniyah, when Iraqi soldiers conducted raids in three neighborhoods to flush out militiamen and seize weapons.

Nidawi said "a big force of the army raided Jumhouri, Sadr and Askouri neighborhoods and clashes broke out (again) between the army and the Mahdi Army." He said the raids took place early Monday. '

Al-Zaman reports that for the past three days, Diwaniyah had turned into an arena for street battles. On Monday, 20 Iraqi soldiers were killed and 50 Mahdi Army militiamen (followers of Shiite nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr), and 70 persons were wounded. The battles evolved quickly after Iraqi security forces imprisoned an official of the Sadr Movement. The government and the Mahdi Army have concluded an unofficial truce. An Iraqi government spokesman said that 20 Iraqi troops and 40 Mahdi Army militiamen were killed in clashes that began Sunday night in Diwaniyah.

A captain who asked to remain anonymous told al-Zaman, "The clashes broke out after the Coalition forces incarcerated a prominent leader of the Sadr movement, who had in his possession quanities of medium weapons and bombs, and was linked to Saturday's assassinations after an attack in the Jumhuri District [downtown Diwaniyah]." The captain said that on Sunday, negotiations took place between the Coalition forces and the Sadr Movement concerning the release of the Sadrist leader, but they failed. That is what led to the clashes between the Mahdi Army and Iraqi security forces." He added, that a number of Mahdi militiamen came to the province from neighboring ones, to participate in the battle.

[The "Coalition" forces were apparently the Poles.]

Sahib al-Amiri, the head of a Sadrist foundation in Najaf, denied that the Mahdi Army had been involved in the fighting, though he said that they played a role in ending it. He maintained that it was others, outside Sadr's circle, who were responsible for the violence. He accused American military forces of "supporting these sorts of actions, for the purpose of extending the period of their presence in Iraq."

Prime Minister Nuri al-Malki had pledged on Aug. 17 that Qadisiyah province, of which Diwaniyah is the capital, would soon witness a handover from Coalition to Iraqi troops such as has already happened in Muthanna.

The governor of Qadisiyah, Khalil Jalil Hamzah, left for Najaf to negotiate with Muqtada al-Sadr after talks with his representatives in Diwaniyah failed.

A security source in Diwaniyah told al-Zaman, "Large numbers of reinforcements from the Iraqi army arrived at the city, and they secured most of its districts aside from the districts of al-Nahdah and that of al-Wahdah, where the militia remains dominant."

An Iraqi government source alleged to al-Zaman that "The Mahdi Army executed a number of Iraqi troops after having captured them." He added that the militia controlled 7 of the city's districts,a nd that they were establishing barricades and checkpoints, and were setting roadside bombs.

Abdul Mun'im Abu Tabikh, a member of Qadisiyah's elected governing council, alleged, "What happened was an attempt by the government to finish off undisciplined elements that are attempting to undermine security in the city and to continue to carry arms openly, on the part of some disreputable members of the Sadr Movement who refused to acknowledge the commands of Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr to turn their energies toward preaching and guidance alone." This behavior led the government, he said to send in the army against them, especially those that were openly carrying arms. He said that there is a curfew in the city, given that the clashes are continuing.

Eyewitnesses reported an exodus from the city of dozens of families, who took refuge in surrounding villages. Shops are closed througout Qadisiyah, and both water and electricity have been cut off since Sunday evening.

The explosion at a leaking oil pipeline near Diwaniyah that killed 16 persons who came to collect petroleum from it would have been bad news enough all on its own. Instead, a mere deadly accident flew under the news radar. The tragedy came because of the severe fuel crisis in Iraq, which drives people to try to collect oil in dangerous ways.

Meanwhile, bombings rocked Turkey on Monday. A radical Kurdish group claimed credit, indicating it was trying to sabotage one of Turkey's major industry's, tourism.

The bombings are encouraging Turkey to step up its shelling of northern Iraq, where US-backed Kurdish politicians are harboring the terrorist PKK or Kurdish Workers' Party.

Bombings stretched from Istanbul to southern Iraq on Monday, in a new arc of crisis. This isn't going very well.

Civil War Violence Explodes Throughout Iraq
At Least 80 Dead, Dozens Wounded
6 US Troops Killed

al-Zaman says that [Ar.] Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has been forced to make alterations in his cabinet only 100 days after its formation by two crises-- the lack of fuel and the lack of loyalty.

Sources told al-Zaman that Petroleum Minister Hussein Shahristani, a nuclear engineer with no petroleum experience, might have to go. He was appointed to keep the position out of the hands of the Fadhila or Virtue Party, which is strong in Basra and is said already to control much of Iraq's petroleum exports there. But as the fuel crisis has worsened this summer, Shahristani has been blamed. The Virtue Party is saying that it will not lead a movement to unseat Shahristani in parliament. (But that is probably because they won't need to.)

The LA Times reports that at least 80 Iraqis were killed in the country's low-intensity civil war on Sunday. This article says that killings are down substantially in Baghdad itself, what with thousands of US and Iraqi troops making security sweeps through the most dangerous neighborhoods. The first question is whether the decline in deaths in Baghdad (which is only relative) has been offset by violence in Mosul, Baqubah and elsewhere. The second question is whether the violence will remain lower when the sweeps end, as inevitably they will. Can the Iraqi troops take over at that point and continue to be effective against the guerrillas? My guess is, "no." In which case the US "Battle for Baghdad" is just a delaying tactic, putting off the day when the west of the capital falls altogether into the hands of the Sunni Arab guerrillas. If that happened, the Green Zone might not be far behind.

Prime Minister Maliki had the misfortune to come on US television noonish on Sunday and pronounce that violence is lessening in Iraq.

The LA Times reported 6 troops killed or announced dead on Sunday.

WaPo probably had an earlier deadline and only counted up to 69. But it largely spared us the recitation of how things are much better in Baghdad now.

Details on the smaller attacks are provided by Reuters

The most costly attacks with regard to loss of life occurred in Khalis northeast of Baghdad. A massive bombing in the morning was followed some 10 hours later by a massacre when a kidnapping almost went wrong and townspeople came to the aid of the victims, but were mown down by machine gun fire. 21 persons died in the two attacks, and 40 were injured. Khalis cannot be that big, so these were enormous events there.

Despite the security sweep of Baghdad by thousands of US and Iraqi troops, a minibus bombing in Shiite Karrada killed 9, the offices of al-Sabah newspaper were car bombed, killing 2 and wounding 18, and 20 bodies showed up in the streets, executed gangland style.

The range of violence was truly nationwide, with 7 killed in a bombing in the far south at Basra, but also 3 shot to death in Mosul.

Two bombings in Kirkuk underlined the collapse of security in that city. Al-Zaman says that the violence in Kirkuk every day during the past 3 days is unprecedented in its severity. Kurdish Peshmerga control the city, and the governing council is being boycotted by its own Arab and Turkoman members. A bombing of the takyah or Sufi center left 9 dead and 53 wounded. The Sufi center belonged to the family of Jalal Talabani, the president of Iraq. (I presume that this center is for the Naqshbandi Sufi order, which predominates among Kurds.) In a separate incident, the offices of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan were attacked. Al-Zaman is speaking of the "collapse" of security "in Kirkuk."

Collier: The "Shaped Charge" Bogey Man

Military historian and former Green Beret Tom Collier writes:

' We have read recently in the press about "sophisticated shaped-charge" mines destroying Coalition vehicles in Iraq. They are described as new, deadly, and coming from Iran.

The truth is the shaped-charge effect was discovered in the 19th Century and first saw combat in the warhead of the U.S. Army's bazooka rocket in 1942. It has been used since by many nations in assorted anti-vehicle weapons. Furthermore, shaped-charge mines are easily made from scratch with #10 cans, dinner plates, and plastic explosive.

U.S. Army Special Forces have routinely made them so since the 1950s. Last year, "Newsweek" ["Unholy Allies," Sept 26, 2005] described Iraqi insurgents showing Hamza Sangari, a visiting Taliban fighter, how to make and use them. Maybe Coalition forces in Iraq have come across some new and "sophisticated" anti-vehicle weapon made in Iran, but until they show it to us I would bet that Iraqis are still making and using improved versions of the old bazooka. '

Tom Collier

Achcar Guest Editorial: The Situation in Iraq

The Situation in Iraq

by Gilbert Achcar

[The following excerpt is from the Epilogue to Perilous Power: The Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy, by Noam Chomsky & Gilbert Achcar, edited with a Preface by Stephen R. Shalom, to be published by Paradigm Publishers September 15, 2006, Hardcover $22.95. To order the book at a 15% individual customer discount please click here.]

Q: The past few months in Iraq have seen widespread sectarian attacks. How do you assess the evolution of the situation? In particular, do you believe that a civil war is going on? Is the sectarian turmoil a reason to extend the stay of U.S. troops?

Gilbert Achcar: In the past six months, the situation in Iraq has deteriorated in a truly frightening manner, proceeding inexorably toward the actualization of the worst-case scenario -- the worst for Iraq, that is, which is not necessarily the worst for Washington, as I shall explain.

The outcome of the December 2005 parliamentary election was quite bad for U.S. plans in Iraq. The official results confirmed that the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) once again secured a major voting bloc in the parliament (128 seats out of 275), although they did not get the majority that they enjoyed in the previous assembly. That was foreseen, however, as the January 2005 election had been boycotted by most Arab Sunnis and its outcome was accordingly quite exceptional. Nevertheless, the loss of 12 seats by the UIA was rather less than the 22–seat loss by the Kurdish Alliance, while the coalition list headed by Washington's henchman, Iyad Allawi, suffered a very serious decline, falling to 25 seats from 40, which had already been a poor showing.

These results meant that, had any of the "Sunni" coalitions -- whether the Iraqi Accord Front (44 seats), which is a coalition between the Islamic Party (i.e., the Iraqi "moderate" branch of the Muslim Brotherhood [the Association of Muslim Scholars being the "hard-liners" originating in the same tradition]) and traditionalist Arab Sunni tribal forces; or the Iraqi National Dialogue Front alone (11 seats), a motley Arab nationalist coalition including present or former Baathists who disavow Saddam Hussein's leadership -- agreed to join an alliance with the UIA, they would have secured together an absolute majority in the parliament. For that, the UIA needed only 10 more votes, or even fewer if one takes into account the 2 seats won by a small Shiite grouping close to the Sadrists, which joined the UIA. Such an extended cross-sectarian bloc would thus have been able to counter political pressure exerted by Washington through its Kurdish allies and Allawi's group and whoever else might have joined with them.

Yet, both "Sunni" coalitions proved more interested in doing business with Washington, believing that getting U.S. support against the Shiite UIA would put them in a better overall position than allying with the latter. They were thus keener on playing a petty sectarian political game than on speeding national liberation from the occupation. On the other hand, many Arab Sunnis consider Iran's hegemony -- of which, they believe, the UIA is but a tool -- to be a greater threat than U.S. hegemony, thus justifying politically that kind of behavior.

The Arab Sunni parliamentary coalitions entered into an alliance with Allawi to dispute the electoral results. Last January, I commented that their objections to the election results were not sincere, but aimed only at exerting political blackmail on the UIA. What happened afterward proved this assessment correct: When they -- and U.S. proconsul Zalmay Khalilzad -- got what they wanted with regard to the government, they just ended all their clamoring about "rigged elections."

In the meantime, intensive tugs-of-war took place in Iraq between several forces. The main contest pitted, on one side, the UIA, backed by Iran, and on the other side, a broad coalition of the Kurdish Alliance, the "Sunni" electoral parties, and Allawi, backed by Khalilzad and by regular statements and high-ranking visitors from Washington insisting hypocritically on the need to give Arab Sunnis an important share of power. As after the January 2005 election, the Bush administration tried to dictate not only its own conditions on the UIA but also Allawi's participation in the government, despite Iran's and the UIA's red line. Washington finally conceded this last point, but only after they managed to get rid of the candidate designated by the UIA to head the first "regular" Iraqi government under the new constitution -- the same man who headed the provisional government based on the Constituent Assembly: Ibrahim al-Jaafari.

The other major contest took place within the UIA itself, pitting against one another the two major blocs: the SCIRI and the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr. The SCIRI wanted the premiership for their own man, Adel Abdel- Mahdi, an ex-Maoist turned fundamentalist in both Islamic and neoliberal religions. Despite the fact that the SCIRI is the closest of all Iraqi groups to Iran and despite its advocacy of a super-federal state in southern Iraq, an idea that is resented by the United States (and rejected by all other Arab Iraqi forces, including Muqtada al-Sadr's followers), Washington backed Abdel-Mahdi, hoping that he would help the United States lay its hands on Iraq's oil in the name of free marketeering. Khalilzad, chiefly obsessed with reducing Muqtada al-Sadr's clout, was also trying in this way to fan the dissension within the UIA. For his part, Sadr strongly backed his friend and leader of the Dawa Party, Jaafari, whom he deemed closer to his political stance (Jaafari had subscribed without reservation to the "Pact of Honor" that Sadr tried to get all major Iraqi forces independent of Washington to sign [1]) and more open to his pressure.

Tension might have arisen between the two factions, but Tehran -- which invited Muqtada al-Sadr for a visit after the December election -- was certainly instrumental in preventing the UIA from splitting and urging the SCIRI to consider the UIA's unity as a priority. The issue of the UIA's candidate for premiership was thus decided democratically by a vote within the alliance, which gave a narrow majority to Jaafari. Washington's "democracy promoters" did their best thereafter to prevent the constitutional mechanism from getting under way: Normally, the Assembly would have convened and elected among others a president who would have been required to designate the candidate put forward by the largest bloc in parliament -- Jaafari, in this case -- to try to form a government. This position would have enabled Jaafari to maneuver between the other blocs and try to win over enough Arab Sunni representatives to secure a parliamentary majority, thus forcing the Kurdish Alliance to join lest they be excluded from the government.

Obviously, such a scenario was out of the question for Washington: The result was a very tense and highly dangerous standoff, until a compromise was reached whereby Jaafari agreed to be replaced with his second-in-command in the Dawa Party, Nouri al-Maliki. The latter was presented as being less sympathetic to Iran and more flexible and amenable than Jaafari. As a matter of fact, Maliki seems more compliant than Jaafari in his relations with the United States. The difference between the two men, leaders of the same party, was nonetheless not such as to warrant Washington's and London's indecent self-congratulation after Maliki's designation, as if Allawi himself had been anointed again prime minister of Iraq.

The whole situation was clearly a setback for Sadr, however. As I mentioned earlier, he had tried hard to convince the Sunni Arab parliamentary and extra-parliamentary groups to join in an anti-occupation alliance. He failed totally in that respect: The Arab Sunni parliamentary groups rejected his advances, and stuck to their alliance with the Kurdish parties and Washington's proconsul. On the other hand, the Association of Muslim Scholars, which is very close to the Arab Sunni insurgency, disappointed Sadr bitterly: He couldn't get them to condemn Zarqawi and his al-Qaeda branch in strong terms (Sadr even wanted them to excommunicate Zarqawi's group), and his radical anti-Baathist attitude was equally a stumbling block in his relations with Sunni Arab nationalists. He has complained that of the Sunni groups he approached before the December election and asked to adhere to his "Pact of Honor," none have signed it.

The next major blow to Sadr's strategy of trying to build an anti-U.S. alliance with anti-occupation Arab Sunni forces was the single event that contributed most to fueling the sectarian tension between Arab Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq -- I mean, of course, the attack against the Al-Askari Mosque in Samarra on February 22, 2006. This sectarian attack unleashed reprisals on a large scale by Shiite militants infuriated by the unending series of murderous sectarian attacks to which their community had been subjected ever since the occupation started. In these reprisals, Sadr's ragtag "Mahdi Army" was apparently very much involved. Not that Sadr gave a green light for this -- on the contrary, like most other Shiite leaders, he tried his best to cool things down -- but since his militias are much less centralized than the quasi-military SCIRI Badr militia, Sadrist militiamen obeyed their impulses before considering any other option and before getting to listen to the voice of political rationality.

At any rate, these unfortunate events were hugely exploited by an odd array of forces -- including U.S. friends, pro-Zarqawi Sunni fundamentalists, and pro-Saddam Baathists -- in order to discredit Muqtada al-Sadr among Arab Sunnis and to destroy any appeal he might have had for both his uncompromising anti-occupation stance and his reputation for being very much independent of Iran. All that Sadr had achieved politically in the previous period, in terms of building his influence on a pan-Arab (Sunnis and Shiites) Iraqi basis, was thus shattered along with the dome of the Al-Askari Mosque. To be sure, he retains formidable clout among the Shiites -- above all, among the downtrodden layers of the Shiite community, a clout that very likely has been enhanced by the role of his "army" in embodying the armed wing of the community more than any other group. But the fact remains that he is further from imposing himself as a leader of both Arab nationalist Shiites and Sunnis than he has ever been since he clashed with occupation troops in 2004.

Despite these developments, Iraq has not yet reached a state of full-fledged civil war. Indeed, what I characterized a year ago as a "low-intensity civil war" [2] had not ceased increasing in intensity throughout 2005 and early 2006, even before the sudden and most serious flare-up provoked by the Samarra attack. Nevertheless, drawing on my own Lebanese experience, I would say that there are two elements that at this moment still stand between the present situation in Iraq and a full-scale civil war. The first is the persistence of a unified Iraqi government and the existence of still-unified Iraqi armed forces: In Lebanon, it was the split-up of the government in early 1976 and the disintegration of the Lebanese army that signaled the shift to a full-fledged civil war. The second element is the existence of foreign armed forces playing the role of deterrent and arbiter, like the role that the Syrian army used to play -- but only intermittently -- in Lebanon from 1976 onward.

To say this is to point to what I hinted at already, namely that the slide of Iraq toward the worst-case scenario for its population does not necessarily represent the worst-case scenario for Washington. Actually, most of what has happened in recent months in Iraq, except for the publicity surrounding U.S. troops' criminal behavior, has suited Washington's designs. The sharp increase in sectarian tensions as well as the defeat of Muqtada al-Sadr's project played blatantly into Washington's hands. Along with many others, I have warned for quite a long time that, when all is said and done, Washington's only trump card in Iraq is going to be the sectarian and ethnic divisions among Iraqis, which the Bush administration is exploiting in the most cynical way according to the most classical of all imperial recipes: "Divide and rule." This is what Washington's proconsuls in Baghdad, from L. Paul Bremer to Khalilzad, have tried their best to put in place and take advantage of.

Seen in this light, the present flare-up in sectarian tensions is a godsend for Washington, to the point that many Iraqis suspect that U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies stand behind the worst sectarian attacks. Note how the occupation seems now "legitimized" by the fact that many Arab Sunnis in mixed areas, who feel threatened, request the presence of foreign troops to guarantee their safety as they have no confidence in Iraqi armed forces. [3] What a paradox, when you think of the fact that Arab Sunnis were and are still the main constituency of the anti-occupation armed insurgency -- though surely not the only one: There has been a growing pattern of anti-occupation armed actions in southern Iraq that is hardly reported, if at all, in the Western media, or even in the Arab media for that matter.

However, Washington is playing with fire: The sectarian feud suits its designs, but only provided that it is kept within limits. It is not in the United States' interests for Iraq to be carved up into three separate parts, as has been advocated cynically in the U.S. media by self-proclaimed "experts" and as neocons and friends believe is the second-best outcome, short of safe U.S. control over a unified Iraq. Not only would that actually be a recipe for a protracted civil war, but it would make U.S. control over the bulk of Iraqi oil that is located in the Shiite-majority South even more uncertain. Washington's best interest is therefore to foster the sectarian feud at a controllable level that suits its "divide and rule" policy, without letting it get out of control and turn into a most perilous civil war. A federal Iraq, with a loose central government, could fit neatly with this design, provided it were accepted by all major Iraqi actors (which is quite difficult), but an Iraq torn apart could be a disaster -- all the more so that it could trigger a dangerous regional dynamic. (Think of the Shiite-populated eastern province of the Saudi kingdom where the bulk of oil reserves is concentrated.)

Now, if U.S. forces in Iraq are to be compared to a firefighting force, the truth of the matter is that they are led by highly dangerous arsonists! Ever since the occupation started, the situation in Iraq has steadily and relentlessly deteriorated: This is the undeniable truth, which only blatant liars like those in Washington can deny, insisting that the situation is improving in the face of glaring evidence to the contrary. Iraq is caught in a vicious circle: The occupation fuels the insurgency, which stirs up the sectarian tension that Washington's proconsul strives to fan by political means, which in turn is used to justify the continuing occupation. The latest major way in which U.S. occupation authorities are throwing oil on the Iraqi fire, according to Shiite sources, is by helping the Islamic Party -- the Iraqi Arab Sunni group closest to Washington and to the Saudis -- build an armed wing that is already taking part in the sectarian feud.

There is no way out of this burning circle but one: Only by announcing immediately the total and unconditional withdrawal of U.S. troops can a decisive step be taken toward putting out the fire. This would cool down the Sunni insurgency that the Association of Muslim Scholars has repeatedly pledged to call to a halt as soon as a timetable for the withdrawal of occupation troops is announced. It would dampen as well the sectarian tension, as Iraqis will then look squarely at their future and feel compelled to reach a way to coexist peacefully. And if ever they came to the conclusion that they needed a foreign presence for a while to help them restore order and start real reconstruction, it should definitely not be one composed of troops from countries that harbor hegemonic ambitions over Iraq, but one that is welcomed by all segments of the Iraqi people as friendly and disinterested help.

-- July 20, 2006

Notes

1. See Gilbert Achcar, "A Pan-Iraqi Pact on Muqtada Al-Sadr's Initiative," ZNet, December 9, 2005.

2. "The only hope one could have of avoiding the slide into a full-blown, devastating civil war -- if Sistani were to be assassinated -- is [not the presence of U.S. troops, but] if the forces involved in the political process, i.e. those not already involved in the low-intensity civil war going on in Iraq, were successful in achieving control over their constituencies after an inevitable first outburst of anger, by emphasizing that the perpetrators are either the Baathists or Zarqawi's followers or the like, that their objective is exactly to ignite a civil war, and that the best reply to that is precisely to pay heed to Sistani's insistence on the necessity of avoiding any kind of sectarian war." See "Achcar on Cole Proposals for Withdrawal of US Ground Troops," posted on August 23, 2005, on Juan Cole's blog, Informed Comment, and on ZNet.

3. This analysis was confirmed by Edward Wong and Dexter Filkins's edifying story published in the New York Times on July 17, 2006, under the title "In an About-Face, Sunnis Want U.S. to Remain in Iraq." '

Ahmadinejad: We are Not a Threat to Any Country, Including Israel

Believe it, don't believe it, that's up to you. But at least we should know what exactly he said, which is not something our US newspapers will tell us about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech on Saturday:

Kayhan reports that [Pers.] Ahmadinejad said, "Iran is not a threat to any country, and is not in any way a people of intimidation and aggression." He described Iranians as people of peace and civilization. He said that Iran does not even pose a threat to Israel, and wants to deal with the problem there peacefully, through elections:

"Weapons research is in no way part of Iran's program. Even with regard to the Zionist regime, our path to a solution is elections."

Ahmadinejad seems to be explaining what his calls for the Zionist regime to be effaced actually mean. He says he doesn't want violence against Israel, despite its own acts of enmity against Middle Eastern neighbors. I interpret his statement on Saturday to be an endorsement of the one-state solution, in which a government would be elected that all Palestinians and all Israelis would jointly vote for. The result would be a government about half made up of Israeli ministers and half of Palestinian ones. Whatever one wanted to call such an arrangement, it wouldn't exactly be a "Zionist state," which would thus have been dissolved.

The schlock Western pundits, journalists and politicians who keep maintaining that Ahmadinejad threatened "to wipe Israel off the map" when he never said those words will never, ever manage to choke out the words Ahmadinejad spoke on Saturday, much less repeat them as a tag line forever after.

Supreme Jurisprudent Khamenei's pledge of no first strike against any country by Iran with any kind of weapon, and his condemnation of nuclear bombs as un-Islamic and impossible for Iran to possess or use, was completely ignored by the Western press and is never referred to. Indeed, after all that talk of peace and no first strike and no nukes, Khamenei at the very end said that if Iran were attacked, it would defend itself. Karl Vicks of the Washington Post at the time ignored all the rest of the speech and made the headline, 'Khamenei threatens reprisals against US." In other words, on Iran, the US public is being spoonfed agitprop, not news.

Although Iran's protestations of peaceful intentions are greeted cynically in the US and Israel, in fact Iran has not launched a war of aggression in over a century. The US and Israel have launched several during that period of time.

Ahmadinejad made the remarks in a speech inaugurating work on a heavy water nuclear reactor in Arak. I don't think that work is very advanced. The Iranians maintain that it is for peaceful energy generation.

Much of the electricity produced in France, South Korea and Japan is generated by nuclear plants.

European Force of 7,000 to be Deployed
Israeli Blockade Strangles Lebanon

The illegal Israeli blockade of civilian Lebanese ports continues to inflict massive damage on Lebanon and on ordinary Lebanese from all walks of life. The United States more or less supports this strangling of the little country.

Illegal Israeli cluster bombs go on harming innocent Lebanese. Five were blown up on Saturday, including 4 children.

Israel's illegal air raid on a major oil refinery, which produced the worst environmental disaster in the history of the Eastern Mediterranean, has profoundly harmed Lebanese fishermen.

Italy is now planning to send between 2,000 and 3,000 troops for the peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon. France will send 2000 "within 20 days." Spain will send almost 1,000. Germany may well join in at that level, too.

Israel has vetoed Bangladesh, Indonesia and Malaysia, not in the legal sense. But as the regional superpower it does have a say. The Israelis would prefer Turkey, Egypt and Jordan as contributors. But I can tell you right now that isn't going to happen. Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah II cannot afford to be seen by their publics as cracking down on Hizbullah on behalf of Israel. As for Turkey, it is being rejected by the Armenian members of the Lebanese government and parliament [Ar.].

Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora says he wants to see Hizbullah integrated into the Lebanese army.

Dick Norton and Thomas Milo on the difficulties facing UN peacekeepers in Lebanon. Both have practical experience on the ground in south Lebanon peacekeeping.

Dozens of local Labour Party activists in Derby have defected to the Liberal Democrats. Most of them are Muslims of South Asian ancestry. They were protesting the Labor Party's strong support of Israel in the recent war on Lebanon. The move is especially embarrassing to Labour because Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett is elected from Derby.

Britain has 1.6 million Muslims in a population of 61 million, and most of the politically active in the community have tended to vote Labor. PM Tony Blair, an evangelical close to George W. Bush on foreign policy, may have started a historic realignment whereby UK Muslims identify with Britain's third party, the Lib Dems. As Muslims become more politicized and the second and third generations become more integrated, they could emerge as an important swing vote, causing parties to compete for them. Such a dynamic would likely have a significant effect on Britain's foreign policy.

The Lebanese Bloggers.

Dennis Perrin debates the Arab Israeli conflict. His blog is Red State Son.

91.7% of Iraqis Say "US Troops Out"
30 Dead, Dozens Wounded in Civil War Violence

On Sunday morning in Iraq, guerrillas deployed a car bomb to blow up the offices of the al-Sabah newspaper in the Waziriyah District of Baghdad, killing at least 2 persons and wounding at least 20. Sabah was originally set up by the Americans as a newspaper friendly to the new regime.

Question of the week: Would you rather have $1075 or the war in Iraq?

91.7 percent of Iraqis oppose the presence of US troops in their country--a nearly 20 percent increase since 2004. A big majority thinks the US is in their country for the oil.

7 dead bodies showed up in the streets in various parts of northern Iraq Saturday, including in Tikrit and near Kirkuk.

Reuters reports civil war violence in Iraq for Saturday. Policemen were assassinated in Mosul and in Samarra. Reuters reports 20 dead in the political violence, but does not include the 7 mentioned by the Pakistan Times. Lots of other deaths were also no doubt not reported by either one. Among the major incidents:

' ISKANDARIA - A car bomb outside a Shi'ite mosque in the town of Iskandaria south of Baghdad killed three people and wounded 17, police said. . .

BAQUBA - Gunmen in the town of Baquba 65 km (40 miles) north of Baghdad attacked a Shi'ite family, killing two women and two children and wounding 11. . . [Late reports say 6 were killed and 13 wounded - al-Sharq al-Awsat.]

KIRKUK - Four Kurdish civilians were killed in a drive -by shooting as they were travelling southwest of the ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk, police said. . . .

BASRA - Gunmen killed a woman translator and wounded another as they left a British military base in the southern city of Basra, police said. . . Gunmen killed three civilians in Basra, police said. [Also a military intelligence operative who was working near the Iranian border showed up dead - al-Sharq al-Awsat].

TIKRIT - Gunmen in the predominantly Sunni town of Tikrit stormed a bakery on Friday and killed three Shi'ite workers and wounded two, police said. '

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that [Ar.] the Basra Provincial Governing Council [PGC] has passed a law allowing it to imprison any journalist who reports violence in the province without checking with the PGC first--even if he or she was reporting something they witnessed with their own eyes. The law contravenes the Iraqi national constitution, which guarantees freedom of the press.

Iraqi tribal chieftains met Saturday in a preparatory conference for a planned meet on national reconciliation. The clan leaders mostly have rural constituents and are no longer very powerful in Iraqi society. Although some are mixed Sunni-Shiite, mostly one or the other branch of Islam massively predominates in the tribe. The power has long ago shifted to urban political leaders. The tribal chieftains are not, moreover, very organized, and nor are their followers. My guess is that the Sunni Shaikhs have been invited to informally stand proxy for the Sunni guerrilla leadership.

Shaikh Abd al-Razzaq al-Wiqa` said in a speech to the group, "Abolishing the law of Debaathification, recognizing the Iraqi Resistance, distinguishing between it and terrorism, and building a national army far from being characterized by sectarian quotas-- these are the significant prerequisites for national reconciliation."

This Sunni point of view is not without merit, but hell will freeze over before Massoud Barzani (the Kurdish leader), Abdul Aziz al-Hakim (leader of the Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq) and Muqtada al-Sadr will sign onto it.

Taysir al-Mashhadani, the Sunni female member of parliament from Baquba who was kidnapped by a Shiite militia, has been released. Typically such releases come after a ransom has been paid.

The Kurdistan powder keg.

Turkey continues air raids against PKK positions in northern Iraq. The Turks have invoked the example set by Israel's bombing of Lebanon.

Ed Wong of the NYT also sees Kurdistan as a cautionary tale against the rush to partition Iraq.

The draft constitution for the Kurdistan Regional Confederacy identifies Kirkuk as an integral part of the federal region. A lot of Turkomans and Arabs in Kirkuk are not going to like this, and they have patrons in Turkey and southern Iraq.

California educator gets into trouble for TWT-- Thinking While Teaching.

That Richard Armitage was the first to mention Valerie Plame's status as a CIA operative to Novak is not very interesting. What is interesting is the ay that Traitor Rove and Traitor Libby immediately figured out that such a leak should be spread around for partisan political purposes.

EU to send 7000 Peacekeepers to Lebanon
Israeli Cluster Bombs Menace Lebanese Children

European nations have pledged 7000 troops to a peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon. France will lead the force, and will have 2000 of its own troops on the ground.

The Israelis are saying that they won't end their blockade of Lebanese ports until the UN force is in place. LBC satellite news reports that Lebanon is losing $3 million a day in forfeited agricultural and retail business, since no raw materials can be imported into Lebanon at the moment.

the UN estimates that Israel's war on the little country of Lebanon cost that country all the economic recovery strdes it had taken in the past two decades.

The Israeli military extensively used US-made cluster bombs in civilian areas of Lebanon, which is a war crime. The bombs frequently do not detonate, so now south Lebanon is littered with deadly fist-size bomblets that will inevitably kill and disfigure children and other civilians.

The US State Department will investigate whether Israeli deployment of these weapons in civilian areas violated secret agreements under which Washington supplied them to Israel.

Nothing will come of the investigation, given the clout of the Israel lobby in Washington, but someday the relative of an innocent maimed Lebanese may decide to take revenge on the country that supplied the cluster bombs. And the American public will ask in astonishment why anyone should hate us.

Amara Base Looted as British Withdraw
Qadiri Sufi Order Declared Jihad on Americans, Shiites

Things did not go well in Iraq on Friday according to WaPo.

First, the British withdrew from Camp Abu Naji near Amara. They only gave the Iraqis one day notice. This short notice suggests that the evacuation was done under considerable duress; one suspects that the British position was becoming untenable because of repeated Shiite guerrilla attacks (there were only 1200 British troops there). When they left, they left behind nearly $300,000 in equipment, intending that the Iraqi police should have the use of the base.

Muqtada al-Sadr and his followers on the provincial Governing Council crowed that the Mahdi Army was the first Iraqi group to force a substantial withdrawal of Coalition troops from an Iraqi territory, according to Amit Paley. The LA Times says that the Mahdi Army boasted of having forced the British troops to leave so abruptly.

While a small contingent of Iraqi security forces (mainly recruited from the Badr Corps and the Mahdi Army) was on the base, they professed themselves helpless when some 5000 looters, some armed with AK 47 machine guns, showed up to strip it bare. The poor British officer corps was reduced to maintaining that the camp had been kept in perfectly good order on their departure. God, they must hate Blair.

The day before, the Iraqi troops at the base briefly mutinied when they were told of a plan to transfer them to Baghdad. They were from local families and complained that this was a plan to "get rid of them." The government relented and left them in Amara. It may as well have. If they couldn't stop the looting of their own base on their home turf, what good would they have been in Baghdad?

Then in Ramadi, guerrillas holed up in the Abdul Qadir al-Kailani Mosque attacked US troops. The latter returned fire, and ultimately brought up M1 Abrams tanks and fired at the religious building. It was left with structural damage to its dome and minaret. The guerrillas set the US troops up for a lose/lose situation. By subjecting the mosque to tank fire, they look to Iraqi Muslims like anti-Muslim infidels.

If you thought that attacking a mosque associated with the great Sufi saint Abdul Qadir Gilani (Kailani) might anger members of his Qadiri Sufi order around the world, you'd be right.

Paley also reports:

' In other developments, the head of a major Iraqi sect of Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam that had previously rejected violence against U.S.-led coalition forces, declared holy war on American troops. The leader, Sheik Mohammed al-Qadiri, said his sect would form a new group, the Battalions of Sh[e]ikh Abdul Qadir al-Gaillani, and join the insurgency.

"We will not wait for the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade to enter our houses and kill us," said Ahmed al-Soffi, a Sufi leader in the western city of Fallujah, referring to the country's major Shiite militias. "We will fight the Americans and the Shiites who are against us." '

Al-Zaman reports that [Ar.] two civilians were killed and another wounded in an armed clash between Mahdi Army militiamen and Sunni worshippers who were guarding the Great al-Batha' Mosque in the western side of Nasiriyyah (a southern, largely Shiite city). Local police sources said that the battle between the two has been going on for the past two days. Apparently the Mahdi Army is attempting to seize the 11 Sunni mosques in the south, in Amara, Karbala, Najaf, Basra and Samawah, and turn them into Shiite places of worship. The Sadrists generally maintain that Sunni mosques in the south of the country were planted there by Saddam Hussein with money stolen from the Iraqi people, and that therefore southern Shiites are within their rights to take these mosques over. Police in Dhi Qar province, fearful that the situation will worsen, imposed a curfew beginning last Thursday evening throughout the province.

Abdul Mahdi al-Karbala'i, the representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in the holy city of Karbala, ridiculed secular politicians who are hiding in the fortified Green Zone, calling on them to get out among the people so as to see their suffering.

Rapid rises in the prices of fuel and food have imposed severe hardship on most Iraqis at a time of high unemployment and at most flat wages. A lot of anger is building over the issue.

Security has collapsed in oil-rich Kirkuk. al-Zaman says 3 bodies were found there on Friday.

Reuters reports civil war violence for Friday. The list is incomplete, and al-Zaman reports a number of other deaths. Between the two, I'd say they report over 20 deaths from such causes on Friday, and we know that these two also missed provincial incidents.

The head of Iraqi antiquities has fled, in fear of his life. By the way, he mentions Sadrists taking over the ministry, which is ironic, since they are reputed to fund themselves by antiquities smuggling . . .

Republican Congressional Report on Iran Riddled With Errors

Here is what the professionals are saying about the Republican-dominated Subcommittee on Intelligence Policy report on Iran that slams US intelligence professionals for poor intelligence on Iran: The report demonstrates that these Republicans have poor intelligence . . . on Iran. What follows is summaries of things I've seen from other experts but I can't identify them without permission.

This is the PDF file of the report.

First of all, former CIA professional Larry Johnson and Jim Marcinkowski point out that the Republicans have a lot of damn gall. It was high members of this Republican administration who leaked to the Iranians and the whole world the name of Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA operative who spent her professional career combatting the proliferation of WMD and was, at the time she was betrayed by Traitor Rove and his merry band, working on Iran. Had it not been for these Republican figures, none of whom has yet been punished in any way for endangering US national security, we might know more about Iran.

It is being said that the staffer who headed the report is Frederick Fleitz, who was a special assistant to John Bolton when Bolton was undersecretary of state for proliferation issues. Fleitz was sent to the unemployment line when Condi wisely exiled Bolton to the United Nations, where there is a long history of ill-tempered despots who like to bang their shoes on the podium. So this report is the long arm of Bolton popping up in Congress. It is Neoconservative propaganda.

I repeat what I have said before, which is that John Bolton is just an ill-tempered lawyer who has no special expertise in nuclear issues or in Iran, and aside from an ability to scare the bejesus out of young gophers who bring him coffee and to thunderously denounce on cue any world leader on whom he is sicced, he has no particular qualifications for his job.

Nor do the Republican congressmen know anything special about Iran's nuclear energy program. They certainly know much less than the CIA agents who work on it full time, some of whom know Persian and have actually done, like, you know . . . intelligence work.

We are beset by instant experts on contemporary Iran, like the medievalist Bernard Lewis, who wrongly predicted that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would attack Israel on August 22, based on Lewis's weird interpretation of his alleged millenarian beliefs. Once the Neoconservatives went so far as actually to make fun of reality in the hearing of a reporter, their game was up.

Pete Hoekstra, who is the chair of this committee, has a long history of saying things that are, well, disconnected to reality. Like when he made a big deal about some old shells with mustard gas found in Iraq left over from the 1980s Iran-Iraq War, and claimed that these were the fabled and long-sought Iraqi WMD over which 2600 of our service people are six feet under and another 8000 in wheelchairs. Nope.

Bolton at one point was exercised about an imaginary Cuban biological weapons program, which even his own staffers wouldn't support him on, and I at one point he was alleging that Iranian mullahs were sneaking into Havana to help with it.

This congressional report is full of the same sort of wild fantasies.

On page 9, the report alleges that "Iran is currently enriching uranium to weapons grade using a 164-machine centrifuge cascade at this facility in Natanz."

This is an outright lie. Enriching to weapons grade would require at least 80% enrichment. Iran claims . . . 2.5 per cent. See how that isn't the same thing? See how you can't blow up anything with 2.5 percent?

The claim is not only flat wrong, but it is misleading in another way. You need 16,000 centrifuges, hooked up so that they cascade, to make enough enriched uranium for a bomb in any realistic time fame, even if you know how to get the 80 percent! Iran has . . . 164. See how that isn't the same?

The report cites the International Atomic Energy Agency only when it is critical of Iran. It does not tell us what the IAEA actually has found.

By the way, here is what IAEA head Mohamed Elbaradei said in early March, 2003, about Iraq:

' After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons programme in Iraq. '

At the same time, Republicans like Donald Rumsfeld were saying he knew exactly where Iraq's WMD was!

Elbaradei was right then, and Fleitz was wrong. Can't get fooled again.

And here is what the IAEA said about Iran just last January:

" Iran has continued to facilitate access under its Safeguards Agreement as requested by the Agency, and to act as if the Additional Protocol is in force, including by providing in a timely manner the requisite declarations and access to locations."

Last April Elbaradei complained about the hype around Iran's nuclear research, and said that there is no imminent threat from Iran.

The only thing that the IAEA knows for sure is that Iran has a peaceful nuclear energy research program. Such a program is not the same as a weapons program, and it is perfectly legal under the Nonproliferation Treaty, which Iran, unlike Israel, has actually signed.

The report allegedly vastly exaggerates the range of Iran's missiles and also exaggerates the number of its longer-range ones, and seems to think that Iran already has the Shahab-4, which it does not. It also doesn't seem to realize that Iran can't send missiles on other countries without receiving them back. Israel has more and longer-range missiles than Iran, and can quickly equip them with real nuclear warheads, not the imaginary variety in Fleitz's fevered brain.

Folks, we are being set up again.

Turkey Strikes PKK Bases in North Iraq;
At Least 29 Dead in Civil War Bombings, Shootings

Turkish jets bombed bases in northern Iraq on Thursday of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), which has been responsible for several terrorist strikes in eastern Anatalia in recent months. The US military, which monitors everything that happens in Iraq electronically, somehow could not figure out that the air raids came from Turkey.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has called on Iraqi politicians to please stay in Iraq and take care of business. Ever since the elections of January, 2005, it has often been the case that much of the cabinet and many parliamentarians were actually in London or elsewhere abroad for much of the time. Sistani must fear that this absenteeism is part of the problem with governance in the country, which threatens everything he has worked for.

1000 British troops have been pulled out of Camp Naji near Amara. They were under constant mortar attack there from nationalist Shiite guerrillas and took 17 shells just Wednesday, leaving one soldier wounded. They turned the base over to the local Iraqi security forces of Maysan province, which is dominated by followers of Muqtada al-Sadr. Half of the British troops will be given patrol duties and half sent to Basra. I can only conclude that the British military felt that its position in Maysan was untenable and that its troops ere in danger to no good purpose.

Iraqi professors and teachers are fleeing the country this year in twice the numbers they did last, in fear of insecurity and even assassination.

Reuters reports civil war violence in Iraq. The reported deadly violence occurred in Ninevah, Salahuddin, Diyala, Baghdad, Karbala, and Kut provinces, i.e. from the north through the center and down to the Middle Euphrates. Many deaths and woundings each day are never reported in the Western press, in part because journalists cannot easily circulate any longer. 3 US GIs were killed in the last day and a half. The other major incidents according to Reuters:

'MOSUL - A hospital in Mosul received the bodies of seven people with gunshot wounds, including five from the same family, a hospital source said. . . Two policemen were wounded when a roadside bomb went off near their patrol in Mosul, police said.

BALAD - Gunmen killed three policemen on Wednesday at a checkpoint in Balad, 80 km (60 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.

BAQUBA - Two policemen were killed and three wounded when a roadside bomb went off near their patrol in Baquba, police said . . . A car bomb wounded four policemen and a civilian . . .

BAGHDAD - Two civilians were killed and nine people, including two policemen, wounded when a car driven by a suicide bomber exploded near a police station in eastern Baghdad, a source in the Interior Ministry said. [Eleven persons, mostly policemen, were wounded in 4 other reported bombings in Baghdad] . . .

KERBALA - Gunmen killed four people, three of them from Saddam Hussein's ousted Baath party, in different attacks in Kerbala, 110 km (68 miles) southwest of Baghdad.

[KUT] Police found the bodies of three people, handcuffed and with gunshot wounds, in Kut, 170 km (105 miles) southeast of Baghdad, police said.

Turkmen and Arabs in Kirkuk are protesting next year's referendum that may dragoon them into the Kurdistan Federal Region.

The Kurds don't get it. (Though they actually have managed to develop Turkoman political clients.)

The USG Open Source center report for Aug. 24 paraphrases the Iraqi press:

' Al-Ittijah al-Akhar on 19 August devotes all of page 18 to a report by Dina Hajj Ahmad accusing US companies of trafficking Iraqi women.

Al-Mashriq carries on page 2 a 500-word follow-up report entitled 'Half of Iraqi Children Have Seen Corpses and Torn-off Limbs; Psychiatrists Warn of Generation That Might Turn into Murderers. . .'

Al-Zaman runs on page 13 an 800-word article by Husam-al-Din Abd-al-Aziz al-Ali commenting on the negative influence of increasing oil product prices on the poor in Iraq. . .

Al-Muwatin carries on page 2 a 240-word report citing Parliament Member Samirah al-Musawi confirming that growing numbers of Iraqi families are falling below the poverty line. . .

Ishraqat al-Sadr on 23 August carries on page 3 a 400-word article by Husayn al-Askari commenting on terrorism, poverty, and administrative corruption which are affecting Iraqis. The writer strongly criticizes the US scheme aimed at destroying Iraq in order to satisfy Israel . . .

Al-Bayyinah al-Jadidah carries on page 3 a 1,000-word article by Sayyar al-Jamil strongly criticizing the idea of fragmenting Iraq into three states on sectarian grounds. The writer adds that Iraq is not a new Yugoslavia. . . .

Al-Zaman carries on page 2 an 800-word report on the comments of a number of Iraqis on the use of "unintelligible terms" by Iraqi MPs. . .

Al-Istiqamah carries on page 2 a 70-word report entitled 'Terrorist Group Abducts Priest and Demands Church To Pay Ransom.' . . .

Ishraqat al-Sadr on 23 August carries on the front page a 200-word exclusive report that Nuri al-Maliki has apologized to Al-Sadr City for the attack by multinational forces.

Ishraqat al-Sadr on 23 August carries on the front page a 270-word report that clashes erupted between British forces and Al-Mahdi Army in Maysan Governorate. The report cites eyewitnesses saying that two British tanks were damaged and a number of British soldiers were injured. (OSC plans to process this item)

Ishraqat al-Sadr on 23 August carries on the front page a 400-word exclusive commentary strongly criticizing Iraqi Al-Tawafuq Front member Abd-al-Karim al-Samarra'i for accusing Al-Mahdi Army of attacking mosques in some areas of Baghdad during the death anniversary of Imam Kazim.

Al-Bayyinah al-Jadidah carries on the front page and on page 2 a 1000-word report on documents revealing that one of [Parliament Speaker] Mahmud al-Mashhadani's bodyguards and his brother are involved in terrorism. . . .

Al-Bayyinah al-Jadidah carries on page 4 a 90-word report that Iraqi forces have taken over security responsibility of Rimakin military base in Bayji District from multinational forces. . .

Al-Zaman publishes on page 2 a 200-word report citing a number of Iraqis expressing their dissatisfaction with the increase in concrete blocks on streets as part of the security plan. . .

Al-Ittijah al-Akhar on 19 August devotes all of page 12 to a report on the widespread corruption in Oil Ministry. The report cites parliament members criticizing the ministry for its poor performance and citing citizens demanding the government to resolve the incessant fuel crisis.

Al-Mashriq runs on the front page a 340-word editorial by Dr Hamid Abdallah saying that Iraq is witnessing different kinds of battles on the streets, satellite television screens, and in the parliament. The writer adds that gas stations are witnessing another battle between black market dealers and citizens. . .

Al-Mashriq carries on page 4 a 230-word report entitled 'Strike Paralyses Restaurants and Bakeries in Al-Diwaniyah . . .' [protesting lack of fuel]

Tariq al-Sha'b carries on the front page a 400-word report entitled 'Sit-in in Dhi Qar and Demonstration in Suq al-Shiyukh Protesting Deteriorating Services.' . .

Al-Bayyinah al-Jadidah carries on page 4 a 130-word report citing the director of Dissolved Entities Employees Department saying that the department has reinstated 9,000 employees. . .

Al-Sabah carries on page 8 a 120-word report citing an official source at Dhi Qar Electricity Distribution Directorate saying that US Engineering Corps will hand over 50 electricity generators to the directorate to help solve the electricity crisis. .

Al-Adalah runs on page 2 a 200-word report on a meeting between Abd-al-Aziz al-Hakim and PM Wa'il Abd-al-Latif to discuss the implementation of federalism in Iraq. . . .

Al-Adalah carries on page 4 a 1,000-word report on the comments of a number of Dhi Qar Governorate's inhabitants on the need for adopting federalism in Iraq. . ..

Iraq and Lebanon

Al-Ittijah al-Akhar on 19 August publishes on page 10 a 1,000-word exclusive report entitled 'US Report Admits: Hizballah Achieves Victory and Israel Defeated; 343 Israeli Soldiers Killed and 617 Injured; Marines Participate in Battles.'

Al-Ittijah al-Akhar on 19 August runs on page 15 a 600-word column by Sa'd Mahyu saying that Israel is suffering from a collapse.

Al-Bayyinah al-Jadidah carries on page 13 a 750-word article by Tawfiq al-Haj in which he says that Israel will resume the war against Lebanon soon.

Al-Da'wah carries on page 7 a 450-word unattrib uted article commenting on the Israeli crimes during its attack on Lebanon and calling on the international community to push Israel towards peace.

Al-Da'wah carries on page 7 a 400-word article by Ala Hadi al-Hattab praising Hizballah for succeeding in stopping the Israeli Army 's land attack.

Al-Zaman runs on page 15 a 1,200-word article by Talib Mahdi al-Khafaji commenting on the Israeli attacks against civilians in Qana in 1969 and 2006.

Al-Zaman publishes on page 15 an 800-word article by Ali al-Bahadili discussing the "victory" of Hizballah in the recent war, and criticizing the New Middle East project. . .

[al-Da`wah is the newspaper of the party of the same name, to which Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki belongs]

South Beirut's Divine Victory

Patrick McGreevy writes from Beirut:

"So . . . I went to Bourj Brajneh and Haret Hreik in the southern suburbs today. No need for words; the pictures say it all. The divine victory seems to have caused quite a bit of destruction: a good thing it wasn't a defeat, eh? The first pictures show some street scenes indicating that, in the suburbs, no one knows who owns the land, who pays the electricity, and that--like the rest of Beirut, there is a vibrant mixture of the secular and the religious/modern."

Interior Minister Narrowly avoids bombing;
Bush faces Choice of Withdrawal or Draft

The Bush administration's call-up of 2500 US Marine reservists who have already given 4 years of service shows how desperate it is becoming for military manpower in Iraq. A veterans' organization maintains that this sort of thing is unsustainable, and that Bush will have to move to a draft or else begin a drawdown of US troops soon.

Ellen Knickmeyer updates us on the current status and activities of the Mahdi Army and Sadr Movement of Muqtada al-Sadr in Iraq. The state of the movement is strong.

Iran wants to help southern Iraq with internet technology. Can you say "back door" in Persian?

The US installation of Iran-linked Iraqi religious Shiite parties in power has made Iran the key power in Iraq, according to a British think tank.

As the US Battle for Baghdad has put an extra 3500 US troop in the capital in an attempt to make an long term impact in reducing guerrilla and militia violence there, the guerrillas have been moving their operations elsewhere.

The troops were brought south from Mosul, giving the guerrillas greater freedom of movement in Iraq's second city. So, a suicide bomber with a bomb belt detonated his payload near a police station, killing 2 persons and wounding 8, including policemen.

Reuters reports other incidents of civil war violence:

"BAQUBA - Eight people, including two policemen, were gunned down in different incidents in the religiously mixed city of Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) north of Baghdad, police said." . . .

Iraqi police pulled out six bodies from a small river near Latifiya, 40 km (25 miles) south of Baghdad on Tuesday, police said.

BAGHDAD - A civilian was killed and another wounded when a roadside bomb went off in the southern Saidiya district of Baghdad, a source in the Interior Ministry said. '

A roadside bomb in the Dura neighborhood of Baghdad, a roadside bomb killed 2 persons and injured 5, including traffic policemen.

The bomb narrowly missed the Minister of the Interior, Jawad al-Bulani, whose convoy was passing through. The Interior Ministry is in charge of internal security for Iraq.

The article continues:

' AMARA - One British serviceman was wounded and two others slightly hurt during a prolonged mortar barrage on Tuesday on a British base near Amara, 365 km (230 miles) south of Baghdad, the British military said on Wednesday.

FALLUJA - Three civilians and three traffic policemen were wounded by a roadside bomb near a U.S. patrol in Falluja, 50 km (35 miles) west of Baghdad, police said. '

British troops had made a raid into Amara in hopes of catching a major terrorist figure. They were fired on as they withdrew.

The Pakistan Tribune/ wire services add:

"Police in Amara said two civilians were killed in crossfire between British forces and Mehdi Army militiamen."

Joe Lieberman agrees with a rightwing radio talk show host on Middle East policy.

Beirut War Diary

Rasha Salti's Beirut War Diary.

Syria is threatening to close its borders with Lebanon if UN troops are stationed along the borders of the two countries. Lebanon is extremely vulnerable to this threat, since Syria is key to its hinterland trade routes, to Jordan, Iraq, and the Gulf. Currently its sea trade has been embargoed by the Israelis.

It has emerged that Israel is insisting that the UN police the main Lebanon-Syria border crossings to prevent further weapons shipments from Iran and Syria to Hizbullah.

In my view it would not be possible for UN checkpoints to effectively stop such smuggling, given the long and rugged border between the two countries. I suppose the theory is that you couldn't get a big truck with a big missile across on dirt roads and would have to take that through a border checkpoint with a good paved road. But couldn't you just smuggle the components on the back roads and just assemble them in Lebanon?

And, wouldn't it be easier for the Israelis to give back the land they stole in 1967 to Lebanon and Syria and make peace, and let the Palestinians have their little state, and pay reparations for 1948, so then they wouldn't have to try to police all their neighbors all the time? They are getting worse at the policing over time, anyway.

McGreevy: Beautiful Beirut

Patrick McGreevy writes from Beirut:

' Beautiful Beirut

Is a moment of crisis a time to understand a place? Or only a time to romanticize or demonize because our vision is hopelessly clouded by desire or fear? Are desires and fears ever disseverable from the places we experience and shape?

As a group of mostly US citizens talked on the eve of evacuation, the conversation eventually turned to this: why and how does Beirut get under your skin? It was a conversation no doubt quickened by events, and it has continued among Beirut’s residents and visitors, current and former, by phone, by email and in person: what is the ineffable hold this city has on us?

Is it simply the beauty of the place: the sun, the sea, the mountains, the people themselves?

Is it the sensuousness: the fruit, the sweets, the arak, the bodies?

Is it the easy hospitality: the people on the street and the Cornishe who smile and say “Ahlan! Welcome!” Or the fact that you can get by quite well in English or French, even if you just dropped in from Dubuque, Altoona, or Trois Riviere (you may be teased about the Quebecois accent). Or is it that, once you invest some time to learn about Lebanon and its language, you are presented with an intriguing and sometimes dark complexity?

Is it the vitality? The same air one breathes in Tehran, Istanbul, Montreal. The noise, the dust, the taxis, the sound of human voices mixing three languages in a single sentence? To understand the city, Walter Benjamin suggested, you must just walk until you are completely lost. In Beirut, a few steps will do.

Is it the history: the coast where the Nile and Mesopotamia first encountered each other? Where East still meets West? But interaction has often been violent and ugly: could it be the very danger, the friction that makes the sparks?

Is it the stories? Of Elizar sailing to found Carthage, of Aphrodite meeting Adonis for a fateful incestuous kiss, of Alexander laying siege to Tyre, of Sabra, Chitilla, Qana? Stories of brutality and tenderness—the full range of human opinion and emotion? On his first flight to Beirut, my brother Marty met an Arab man who had named his daughter Golda in reverence for a woman most Arabs considered a fabled enemy. In Beirut, you can still buy swastika patches to sew on your shoulder.

Is it, then, the anarchy itself? Driving in Beirut, at first, can seem completely out of control, like being washed down a tube. If you let yourself flow, it eventually seems absolutely normal. After months of Beirut driving, I had to ask myself why I was so much more relaxed than when driving in the States? Then it occurred to me: there are no police, no one in your rear-view mirror, no one to give you a ticket: all responsibility was yours. Then I began to notice the nature of the anarchy all around me; without an imposed order, some things worked better. It all depended on us.

Beirut is a city of relentless surprise. As my friend Susanne told me, the city constantly confronts your assumptions about stability, shocking you out of complacency. When proclaiming “you shall not go down twice to the same river,” Heraclitus could have been talking about the streets of Beirut. We easily accept the first meaning—“The River is different,” Jorge Luis Borges suggests, but the second one sneaks up on us: “I am different.”

The foreign resident must guard against the oriental dream of the traveler seeking transcendence rather than encounter. In the former “I am different” because I have found the secret heart of the Orient that its own residents miss. In the latter, “I am different” because I have unlearned a great deal. Because the dream of Beirut is a dream of encounter, foreigners are not foreign: they are close to its heart. Though it is a city on the periphery of power—a patient on the operating table, with Dr. Syria, Dr. Israel, and Dr. America attending—one nevertheless feels close to a possibility being born, a feint hope.

Despite the clutter, the noise, the dust and the blood, Beirut has a kind of beauty. The American writer Joyce Carol Oates once described her own hometown as a thing of “utter ineffable beauty,” but she added that beauty is not “mere prettiness but something more brutal, possessed of the power to rend one's heart.”

Patrick McGreevy '

Oil Workers Strike in Iraq
Inflation Rate hits 70% amid stagflation

Reuters reports on civil war violence in Iraq. Among the worst incidents:

' *MOSUL - Gunmen killed a family of five, including two children, after entering their home in the al-Zanjeeli district of Mosul 390 km north of Baghdad . . .

MADAEN - The bodies of eight fruit traders were found with their throats slit by a road in Madaen, 40 km (25 miles) south of Baghdad . . .The men, who were from Najaf, died on Monday . . .

RAMADI - Gunmen killed one of the bodyguards of the governor of Anbar in a drive-by shooting in the restive Sunni stronghold, west of Baghdad . . .

MUQDADIYA - Fifteen people were wounded in a mortar attack on a market in Muqdadiya, 100 km (60 miles) northeast of Baghdad . . . '

Al-Zaman says that the US military has concluded that there are 20 militias openly operating in Iraq, and that dealing with them is the business of the Iraqi government. (Typically "militias" refers to armed Shiite groups, most of whom are at least nominally allied with parties that support the government. Sunni such groups are typically instead referred to as "insurgents," and the US is actively fighting those.)

The same report says that Shaikh Mahmud al-Hasani, the stridently anti-Iranian and anti-American Shiite cleric, has accused unnamed parties of being behind the arrest of his followers among seminary students at the Imam Sadiq Seminary in Karbala last week. He called on the Iraqi government and parliament to open an investigation into the incident. (Karbala authorities maintain that they raided an arms depot being maintained by al-Hasani's followers).

Several hundred Iraqi oil workers in Basra have gone on strike for better salaries.


The annual inflation rate in Iraq jumped from 52% in the year ending in June to an estimated 70% in July, according to the national bank. This report in al-Zaman is very bad news. It means that if a loaf of bread costs $1.00 this summer, it will by $1.70 next summer. Inflation especially hurts the poor and those on fixed incomes. Surely those two groups represent a large majority of Iraqis, who therefore are at grave threat from inflation. In fact, the linked article speaks of stagflation, where you have high inflation and high unemployment at the same time.

UpdateThere was some sort of error, mine or theirs, in an initial report at al-Zaman on changes in personnel in the Baath Party. I had mistakenly reported that they had dropped Saddam Hussein as leader. The article now just says that they changed the spokesmen.

The Iraqi government will establish its own commission to investigate the rape-murder of a 14-year-old girl, Abeer al-Janabi, by a US serviceman, who is alleged with several buddies to have then killed other members of her family as well.

In colonial history, the unequal power of Europe in the Middle East and elsewhere has frequently produced what is called "extraterritoriality." This fearsome word just means that local governments and courts lose jurisdiction over the citizens of the imperial power. Egyptians could not try Britishers in British Egypt, 1882-1922. Extraterritoriality has provoked protests and often becomes central to anti-colonial movements. American immunity from prosecution in Iran was one of Khomeini's complaints against the government of the shah in the 1960s and 1970s.

The announcement of an Iraqi commission in this case may be the beginning of the end of US extraterritoriality in that country. It seems likely that such a step, about which PM Nuri al-Maliki has spoken, would also be the beginning of the end of the US presence. Soldiers are often in ambiguous situations with regard to the law and no GI is going to want to risk being tried in an Iraqi court for a judgment call. From the other side, Iraqis have complained loudly at the lack of prosecutions of US servicemen for crimes such as torture, as at Abu Ghraib, and the light prison sentences meted out even where there was a successful prosecution and conviction.

A British base near Amara took incoming mortar fire on Tuesday.

Helman Guest Editorial: Peril in Lebanon

Ambassador Gerald B. Helman writes:

' The momentum that was imparted by the Security Council's cease fire resolution (1701) on August 11, is in danger of dissipating. The initial deployment of Lebanese troops to the south seems stalled at an inadequate 3,000 men. Potential European troop contributors to a strengthened UNIFIL act reluctant to step forward. Israel has voiced objection to potential contributors from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia. (While Israel has no veto, it would be unusual for the UN to include such contingents over the objections of one of the subjects of the ceasefire.) Israel has attacked Hezbollah on several occasions, claiming they were acting in violation of the ceasefire.

While neither of the principal parties have the stomach now to resume all-out hostilities, a failure to act on the part of those that sought UN intervention will most certainly lead over time to a rearming of Hezbollah, a commensurate response by Israel, and an undermining of any coherent governance in Lebanon.

The way forward does not lie in revising or strengthening the latest Security Council resolution. True, it does not incorporate forceful action under the Charter's Chapter 7 and represents political compromise. But it's overall design addresses the crisis in a more useful way: it says to the Lebanese government that it has the responsibility to act as a sovereign over its own territory (para 8) and orders the strengthening of UNIFIL to help Lebanon in that task (para 11).

That said, the problem remains of how to restore momentum to the enterprise. It can't be done by trying to forcefully disarm Hezbullah. Neither the Lebanese army nor UNIFIL will be willing or able to do what Israel couldn't. Steps that could be taken in the near term are:

--If Lebanon is to be treated as a sovereign and leader in its own territory, it must act like one by getting on with the deployment of 15,000 soldiers to southern Lebanon.

--There is now a reinforced UNIFIL presence in the south that could be augmented in the next 3-4 weeks if Lebanon and other moderate Arab states press the Europeans to step-up to the challenge. They should not wait for the US to take the lead. It is not clear what is holding the Europeans back. Rules of engagement that permit vigorous self defense are not hard to draft, and would in any event be manifested in the quality of equipment and aggressiveness with which UNIFIL patrols and asserts it's authority to observe and report. Challenging the Lebanese army to operate in tandem would be an excellent training and policing device.

What is most important is that steps be taken to turn Hezbullah increasingly into a political and social movement at the expense of its military capabilities. Within the immediate context, the international community can assist in that process by helping the Lebanese Government to shut off the flow of sophisticated weapons and training to Hezbullah. Doing so will require action on two fronts:

--strong police work and border patrol. The US should help here with communications, mobile equipment (helicopters, all-terrain vehicles) and intelligence (satellites and communications intercepts). The Europeans can provide maritime interdiction and border guard contingents.

--strong diplomacy. A club consisting of Lebanon, the UN, the EU and moderate Arabs should press a dialogue separately with Syria and Iran to shut off the arms pipeline to Hezbullah.

All of the foregoing is doable, though none of it will be easy. The essential ingredient if for the Lebanese Government to assert itself and show direction now that it has the world's attention. Otherwise, Syria and Iran will resupply and upgrade Hezbullah, resumed warfare will result, with the Lebanese state its principal victim.'

Ambassador Helman "was United States Ambassador to the European Office of the United Nations from 1979 through 1981."

Bush's Arab Dream Palace
Is it Narcissism?

Bush said again on Monday that he would keep US troops in Iraq until 2009 and argued that for the US to withdraw would send a bad message to reformers in the region. He said he is concerned about that talk of civil war in Iraq and seemed to admit that he isn't very happy most of the time about the way things are going, but added that he doesn't expect to be joyous in wartime. He admitted again that Saddam Hussein did not "order" 9/11, but went on to again link Baathist Iraq to the threat of terrorism against the US, an unproven charge.

I am not a psychiatrist and don't play one on t.v., so treat what follows as political satire please, and nothing more.

But what strikes me about Bush's Monday appearance is how consistent it is with what I understand of the symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder. Let's look at it this way:

'1. An exaggerated sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements).'

Bush is not content to be the most powerful man in the world. He thinks he is on a mission from God, and has decided that he is going to "reform" the Middle East, and turn Middle Easterners into something else. He is the Great Transformer of these other peoples' lives. The reason he has to stay in Iraq until the end of his presidency (it is all about him) is that he cannot admit that he did not succeed in being the great Transformer of the Middle East, that in fact he screwed up the Middle East royally. Because such an admission of any slightest mistake, much less a major series of failures, would fatally threaten his sense of grandiosity. Thus, he can't pull troops out of Iraq not because of practical military considerations, but because it would send the wrong signal to regional "reformers," i.e. Bush's mini-me's, the people fulfilling his sense of grandiosity.

Nobody else is in the picture here, just Bush. He doesn't ask any sacrifice from the US public for the war, as Bill Maher and others have noted. The heroics are his alone. The rest of us should go shopping (so as not to interfere with his self-image as Atlas of the Middle East.)

' 2. Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love. '

Bush suffers from T. E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia") syndrome. Lawrence, despite polite denials, clearly thought that he led the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire during World War I and wrote:

' All men dream: but not equally, Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did. I meant to make a new nation, to restore a lost influence, to give twenty millions of Semites the foundations on which to build an inspired dream-palace of their national thoughts. So high an aim called out the inherent nobility of their minds, and made them play a generous part in events: but when we won, it was charged against me that the British petrol royalties in Mesopotamia were become dubious, and French Colonial policy ruined in the Levant. '

Bush, like Lawrence before him, imagines that he is inspiring a people to accomplish things they couldn't do without him. (That is why he can't admit that the Lebanese have been having elections for decades, and has to pretend it all started with him.) And all he gets for his inspired Transformation of others' lives is carping about the expected oil contracts in Iraq not being there. There is even prickliness from the French. Lawrence might have sympathized.

3. Believes he is "special" and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions) 4. Requires excessive admiration 5. Has a sense of entitlement.

He is the Decider. He doesn't need Security Council resolutions to start wars. He doesn't need warrants for wire taps. He is entitled. He is the War President (never mind that he chose to go to war in Iraq and so made himself into the war president, and that the war presidency would be over with by now if he were any good at it.)

' 6. Selfishly takes advantage of others to achieve his own ends. 7. Lacks empathy'

Bush only "worries" that eventually there may be a civil war in Iraq. He doesn't admit that he made a whole country of 25 million people into guinea pigs, and that as a result 3,000 are dying a month in civil war violence of the most brutal kind. '

8. Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him 9. Shows arrogant, haughty, patronizing, or contemptuous behaviors or attitudes. '

Saying that he can understand that having over 2600 of our troops come home in body bags and over 8,000 come home seriously wounded, with limbs gone or brain or spinal damage, is a cause of "anxiety" to the American "psyche" is patronizing. He knows better about why this has to be. The inferior people are a little upset, but that is because they don't understand that he is the Transformer. What they're upset about is just the side effect of the Transformation. They don't believe. They can't see the Transformation before their eyes. They are inferior.

JonBenet Ramsey and Abeer al-Janabi

Overseas readers who don't watch US-based cable news may not know that there is a news blackout on the 24 hours news stations, which have shown endless hours of useless speculation on a ten year old small town murder case. Why the cable news channels in the US behave in this stupid and lemming-like fashion no doubt has to do with the severe discipline of the advertising market and its dependence on ratings. I.e., news has to generate 20 percent profits, which it cannot do, and so lurid infotainment is substituted. It is also possible that they are deliberately attempting to turn American gray matter into mush so as to ensure that nobody on this continent notices what is really going on around them.

But although I mind this pollution of the air waves with something that is not, whatever it is, news, the main thing I mind is the racism.

The case of Abeer al-Janabi, the little fourteen-year old Iraqi girl who was allegedly raped and killed after being stalked by a US serviceman would never be given the wall to wall coverage treatment.

That is frankly because the victim was not a blonde, blue-eyed American, but a black-eyed, brunette Iraqi. Both victims were pretty little girls. Both were killed by sick predators. But whereas endless speculation about the Ramsey case, to the exclusion of important real news stories, is thought incumbent in cabalnewsland, Abeer al-Janabi's death is not treated obsessively in the same way. In the hyperlinked story above, CNN even calls the little girl a "woman" at first mention, because the US military indictment did so. Only later in the article is it revealed that she was a little girl. The very pedophiliac nature of the crime is more or less overed up in the case of al-Janabi, even as looped video of Ramsay as too grown up is endlessly inflicted on us.

The message US cable news is sending by this privileging of some such stories over others of a similar nature is that some lives are worth more than others, and some people are "us" whereas other people are "Other" and therefore lesser. Indeed, it is precisely this subtle message sent by American media that authorized so much taking of innocent Iraqi life in the first place. British officers have repeatedly complained that too many of those serving in the US military in Iraq view Iraqis as subhuman (one used the term Untermeschen). Where did they get that idea?

Sunni-Shiite Conflict takes New Turn

CNN reports the civil war violence in the Baghdad-Diyala corridor.

Al-Zaman/ DPA report that two members of Iraqi military intelligence were shot dead in the southern port city of Basra. [Al-Zaman says it is the third largest city in the country after Baghdad and Mosul, but I thought Basra was bigger than Mosul.] Gunmen also assassinated a high-ranking officer involved in guarding the (oil) facilities in that city.

[Possible propaganda alert] The Association of Muslim Scholars (hardline Sunni) accused the US military of having committed yet another atrocity last Thursday, maintaining that US troops killed a baby in its mother's womb, shot the father, dragged the pregnant woman into the street, arresting several of her relatives and looting their home of valuables. Al-Zaman was unable to obtain verification of any such incident from the US military. Given the various crimes that have been committed, the article implies that Iraqis don't need a lot of proof anymore that such things can happen.

Al-Zaman/ Reuters report that violent clashes broke out on Monday in the Adhamiyah district of Baghdad between guerrillas who came in from other areas by Muhammad Qasim Street, along with local citizans, aiming at take over a fuel station. The al-Zaman correspondent said that eyewitnesses told him that the guerrillas drove private automobiles and trucks bearing the logo of petroleum companies.

The Association of Muslim Scholars reported that the college of Abu Hanifa al-Nu'man was hit by three rockets, and three employees were wounded.

Al-Zaman reports that Diyala University was on complete strike the past couple of days to protest the assassination of instructors.

The US military announced that it arrested two Shiites who had been based in religious edifices and were responsible for kidnapping, torture and murder.

Adnan Dulaim, a leader of the Iraqi Accord Front (Sunni Arab fundamentalist) of 44 seats in parliament, said Monday that the Shiite pilgrims were victims of friendly fire. He said that terrorist militia members had infiltrated the ranks of the pilgrims and were using them as a cover to shoot out at Sunni targets as they walked. Dailami said that the UIA willingness to form a government of national unity with Maliki did not imply that he would remain quiet on an issue such as this.

Dulaimi's charge is not supported by any evidence and it seems to me despicable, essentially trying to blame Shiites for Shiite deaths in such a way as to at the same time turn the Shiite pilgrims from victims into aggressors against Sunnis.

Also, [Sunni] politicians and human rights organizations asked PM Nuri al-Maliki to undertake a just and spotless investigation of the attacks that took place on Sunday. Eyewitnesses reported that[Shiite] militias wearing black attacked [Sunni] homes in Waziriyah, Salikh, and the outskirts of Adhamiyah, which led to the deaths of 19 civilians and left 33 injured. That is, the charges are coming from Sunni Arabs, who say that this is a test of al-Maliki's independence of the Shiite militias. Al-Maliki was elected Prime Minister by the United Iraqi Alliance in parliament, which includes the Badr Corps and the Sadr Movement with its Mahdi Army, both of them formidable militias.

As I discussed yesterday, the Sunni Arab counter-charges come in the wake of the shooting deaths of 20 and with wounding of 300 Shiite pilgrims as they moved through Sunni neighborhoods Sunday. Sunni Arab political forces are implying that the attacks on these Shiites were provoked by Shiite militia death squad activity against Sunnis. The Sunni deaths, however, are not attested by independent sources.

McGreevy Guest Editorial: Lebanon: The Transnation

Patrick McGreevy writes from Beirut:

' Some Western leaders are profoundly disturbed that Hezbollah, a non-state entity, should have such autonomy to act within and even beyond the borders of Lebanon. It seems an affront to Lebanon's sovereignty and to the presumed foundations of a world in which citizens' rights and security are embedded in states with their constitutions, legal institutions, and police powers. Ironically, Hezbollah was born in resistance to Israel's 18-year occupation--a breach of that same sovereignty. The only solution international observers can imagine is for the Lebanese state, the entity theoretically subject to the democratic will of the people, to fully extend its sovereignty throughout the country. Many observers then add a corollary: that real stability requires the Shiites to transfer their primary loyalty to Lebanon and invest their identity in the nation rather than in any other community, sub-national or transnational. National identity and national loyalty should trump all rivals.

Most people take for granted that the world should be divided into discrete countries, each with a national anthem, a flag, an Olympic team, and a monopoly on the use of violence within its borders. What nearly everyone takes for granted begins to seem like a fact of nature. Yet countries are not bodies: they are products of human artifice, and in the Middle East, most are of recent and arbitrary origin. Britain and France, the occupying powers after World War I, created the boundaries of Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, an--in conjunction with the UN--the original borders of Israel.

The area that became Lebanon had long been characterized by extreme cultural and religious diversity. The shelter of its mountain valleys had attracted many of the region's non-Sunni minorities: Druze, Shiite, Orthodox, and Maronite Catholic. Later, refugees from Armenia and Palestine joined this mix. Today there are 18 officially recognized sects. Yet, during centuries of Ottoman rule, Lebanon had been integrated, economically and culturally, into the entire Mashreq region, with particularly close ties to Syria. France decided to separate it from greater Syria, some believe, to form a state that Christians could dominate.

For complex reasons, people began to emigrate from Lebanon during the late Ottoman period, and this process accelerated, especially during the long Civil War (1975-1990). As a result, Lebanese form the majority of Arab Americans and are a significant presence in Canada, Australia, France, West Africa, Latin America, and the oil-rich countries of the Gulf. Every summer, hundreds of thousands of these emigrants return to Lebanon to renew their ties to their ancestral homeland and their extended families. This summer, many found themselves trapped in a war zone. Connections with this global diaspora have enhanced the cosmopolitan and multilingual nature of Lebanon, yet these characteristics are not entirely new: for millennia, East and West have interacted in the coastal cities of Tripoli, Biblos, Beirut, Saidon and Tyre. The Lebanese, at home and abroad, have developed complex identities and loyalties--to their new nations and their old one, to their religious groups, to the Arab World, to their clans and families. Each of these connections pulls in different directions, and many of them transcend national borders. We cannot define and confine this multiplicity into the commonly understood notion of a nation. Lebanon has become a transnation. And it is not the only one.

The rap on Lebanon is that it is hopelessly factional, as if its eternal destiny were to live out some Western fantasy about the essential oriental dilemma. Although Lebanon's origin is indeed arbitrary, a sense of nationalism is emerging, but it is one that hardly erases other loyalties or connections. The Lebanese have survived to create a dynamic, diverse, free society partly because no one group could completely dominate; instead the Lebanese have slowly learned to negotiate and accommodate, to allow differences. In this sense, it is their very differences that make them distinct. Must they now sacrifice these on the altar of the country? The Lebanese, in fact, demonstrate that it is possible to manage multiple levels of identity and attachment. The problem in Lebanon is not that some people identify more with their sect than with their nation, any more than that people elsewhere identify more with their nation than with those outside it. It is not the level but the nature of the community that is crucial. Such loyalties are only poisonous if they blind people to the humanity of those beyond.

It is a peculiar assumption of our age that the state should command a loyalty as exclusive as its monopoly on violence, and that people should identify primarily with the state, rather than with communities smaller or larger, older or newer. We call it nationalism: Lebanon calls it into question. '

Patrick McGreevy

Shiite reaction to Massacre: Blame on Sunni Mosques
Sunnis Allege Reprisals on Mosques, Civilians

Narratives of what happened on Sunday, when snipers targeted Shiite pilgrims as they passed through Sunni Arab neighborhoods of Baghdad, killing 20 and wounding nearly 300, are confused. What is clear is that there were two follow-ups to this violence. One came from US helicopters. The other from Shiite militiamen, who attacked Sunni mosques.

al-Hayat reports [Ar.] that Lt. Gen. Rashid Fulaih, commander of the 1st Division of the Iraqi army, told al-Iraqiyah television, "The most serious attacks were registered in al-Rusafah, when some armed elements issued from some of the buildings on Jumhuriyah St. and Fadl district, and opened fire indiscriminately with light weapons on pilgrim processions." He said 14 policemen had been wounded in pitched battles with the guerrillas.

Al-Hayat adds that some of the Shiite pilgrims were killed by mortar fire. The Iraqi security forces intervened late in the day. They were followed by American helicopters, which targeted the sources of (Sunni Arab guerrilla) fire and destroyed a number of buildings on Waziriyah Street and in Fadl district.

Now comes the story of reprisal attacks on Sunni mosques. Al-Hayat says that Adnan Dulaimi (a Sunni fundamentalist leader of the National Accord Front) condemned "militia attacks on Sunni mosques." He said that they had used medium weaponry to attack mosques in Salikh, Fadl, Filistin St., Hurriyah and Shaab. He accused elements in the official Iraq security services of "being behind" these attacks. He said it was impossible for Shiite militias to conduct such a wideranging and coordinated attack on mosques unless the police and army turned a blind eye and allowed it. He said some eyewitnesses spoke of the militiamen wearing police uniforms. Others spoke of armed clashes between Shiite militiamen and Sunni defenders in these neighborhoods.

(I have to say that I am confused about the Sunni Arab charges of Shiite militia attacks on Sunni mosques on Sunday. Western wire services are not reporting this story, and none of the Arabic sources gives any casualty counts. I think it is possible that it is an urban myth or at least very overblown. The rumor is being spread by pro-guerrilla newspapers such as Mafkarat al-Islam and it is possible that it is just a species of Sunni Arab war propaganda, like most of these highly unreliable "resistance reports".)

Al-Hayat reported the reaction of the leader of the Sadrist bloc in parliament, Fallah Shunaishal, who blamed "Baathists" and "Inquisitors" (literally, excommunicators) as being behind the attacks. He said that some of the attacks occurred in the Karkh and Rusafa districts. He said that 13 guerrillas who had been captured admitted to belonging to the "Monotheism and Holy War" organization that has pledge fealty to al-Qaeda. He also said that some of the sniper received marching orders "from mosques in Sallikh."

Al-Hayat also says that Tariq al-Hashimi of the Iraqi Islamic Party maintained that armed Shiite militiamen went on a rampage, attacking Sunni mosques in districts such as al-Waziriyah, Salikh, al-Dawla`i, al-Sarrafiyah, and al-Shaab.

The stridently pro-Shiite KarbalaNews.net [Ar.] turns the table on the Sunnis, or perhaps just explains the reprisals, when it blames Sunni mosques for the shootings of Shiite pilgrims on Sunday. (This article said that 8 of the wounded later died on the operating table).

The article maintains that some of the snipers were in mosques or on minarets as the Shiite pilgrims came through Sunni neighborhoods in the west and center of Baghdad. It says that these mosques were planted in Baghdad by Saddam as a means of controlling major thoroughfares and intersections. It even maintains that the call to prayer is unusually long from these Saddamist mosques to give cover to snipers mounting the minarets. This inflammatory article is clearly intended to excuse the attacks on Sunni mosques and to encourage further Shiite reprisals against them for Sunday's massacre. It refers to the Sunni Arab guerrillas as "the New Umayyads," a reference to the Umayyad dynasty in early Islamic history, which Shiites believe persecuted the Imams or holy descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. An Umayyad ruler had Imam Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet, killed for leading an uprising against him.

The article also condemns by name Adnan Dulaimi, the leader of the Sunni religious bloc in parliament, alleging that he maintained that the real story in Iraq is the persecution and killing of Sunni Arabs (i.e. the reprisals by militias), not the original massacre of Shiite pilgrims. If the attacks on Sunni mosques did not in fact occur or were very minor affairs, that would help explain why this Shiite newspaper is so outraged. Dulaimi's speech is looked upon as a mere diversionary tactic by the Sunni Arab side. If so, how enraging-- to have your people shot down in reality but to people attempt to offset that with rumors of imaginary injuries to the other side.

When Sunni Arabs and Shiites in Iraq cannot even agree on what exactly happened on Sunday and what its significance is, then the country is already mentally partitioned.

In what should be a worrisome turn for Americans, the article explicitly blames US military helicopters for bothering Shiites in Sadr City while circling around uselessly allowing Sunni guerrillas to shoot down Shiite pilgrims at will. (This latter characterization is not, as we have seen, correct, but a lot of Shiites will believe it.)

Senator Chuck Hagel admitted that US influence is slipping in Iraq. I fear it is worse than that. The level of popular vitriol against the US is frightening. 90% of Iraqis would not want an American even to live next to them!. I think of that statistic every time I hear Bush come out and talk about the new Iraq. 76 percent think he invaded them to control their petroleum.

Sociologist Michael Schwartz lays out the 7 reasons for which the US is helpless in Iraq and for which its presence is probably counterproductive.

Nor are the self-serving comments of US and Iraqi officials in Iraq downplaying the significance of the Sunday massacre and allowing as how it could have been much worse, likely to endear any Shiites to us.

Reuters gives further civil war violence on Sunday.

The Ancient of Days has some thoughts on what is wrong with the Neoconservatives' vision of a "new Middle East."

Lebanon War an Environtmental Disaster

So says Fouad Hamdan writes in the Daily Star:

' An environmental catastrophe unfolded on July 12 when war broke out between Israel and Hizbullah. Around 1,000 people were killed in the course of the fighting and thousands more injured on both sides of the border. But in addition to the human tragedy, the environment took a number of deadly blows. The coastlines of Lebanon and Syria were polluted by oil spills, Turkey and Cyprus may be hit by the slicks in the coming weeks, and forest fires raged in Lebanon and Israel.

In Lebanon, Israeli warplanes bombed the oil-fueled power plant of Jiyyeh, located directly on the coastline, about 30 kilometers south of Beirut. Storage tanks caught fire and burned for a long time. At least 15,000 tons of heavy fuel oil were spilled into the Mediterranean. Due to the south-north currents and winds, the whole Lebanese coastline north of Jiyyeh has been polluted. Beautiful beaches all along the coast are now black and foul-smelling. Fishing boats in the scenic Phoenician port of Byblos are immobilized as the filthy oil congeals around them.

The Syrian coastline around the port city of Tartous has also been hit. Huge oil carpets are moving slowly toward Turkey. They may also hit Cyprus if winds and currents are unfavorable. The ecological and economic consequences for the region's tourist industry could be disastrous.

The fuel oil along the coast is currently taking the form of a thick and soft mass similar to fluid asphalt. It is highly toxic and has the potential to kill all marine life. Hydrocarbons concentrate in all organisms exposed to it. They are carcinogenic and damage hormone systems in all living beings. On beaches in Jiyyeh, Beirut and near Tripoli, already endangered green turtles have buried their eggs. Baby turtles start to hatch now, but they have little hope of completing their first fateful journey across the beach to the water. Coastal fisheries will be affected for years to come and the livelihood of fishermen destroyed. Lebanon's tourism industry, which had seen a revival in recent years, has been struck at its heart. '

Then there is this: "Scientists suspect Israeli arms used in South contain radioactive matter" . . .

Shiite Pilgrims Slaughtered
US losing Battle of Baghdad

Guerrillas on rooftops let loose barrages of machine gun fire at Shiite pilgrims on foot as the moved through northern Baghdad to the shrine of Imam Musa al-Kazim in Kadhimiyah on a pilgrimage to commemorate his martyrdom. They killed at least 20 and wounded an astonishing 300. Mind you that this happened when there are an extra 3500 US troops in the Sunni Arab areas of Baghdad conducting sweeps against guerrilla groups, and when everyone in Baghdad new full well that the Sunni Arab guerrillas would target the pilgrims. Vehicular traffic was just banned, so as to stop car bombings.

If this incident, which will inspire rage and reprisals by Shiites, can occur in the midst of an enormous crackdown in the battle for Baghdad, I fear the evidence is that that battle is already lost. What Shiites will willingly disarm after today? And if they don't neither will the Sunni Arabs. The armed faction fighting will go on. The US appears powerless.

Fallout of Failed Israeli Raid

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that the Israeli raid into the Biqa' was aimed at kidnapping a prominent Hizbullah leader, or possibly recovering captured Israeli soldiers. The official Israeli cover story is that they were preventing the supply of arms to Hizbullah by Syria. But that makes no sense. Why would you send a special ops team into a village near Baalbak to stop truck shipments? You would just mount an air raid on the truck. You send in a team of men to capture someone.

Going in, the Israeli helicopters flew over Qana, again traumatizing the town where residents only recently were able decently to bury 16 children killed by an Israeli air raid during the war.

Lebanese Shiites in the raided village of Buday are convinced that the Israelis were trying to capture Shaikh Muhammad Yazbek, a senior Hizbullah leader with close ties to Iran's Supreme Jurisprudent, Ali Khamenei. Yazbek, who is originally from Buday, is said to be a conduit for Iranian money into Lebanon. Hizbullah has spread around thousands of dollars per family to begin rebuilding and to pay rent for the displaced and to recompense Lebanese Shiites for their losses during the war. Since about a million Shiites were affected, if Hizbullah gave each person $1000 (which would be $7000 for a family of seven), that would come to $1 bn. Iran's oil income this year is projected at $45 bn., up from a little over $30 bn. in the year ending last March 21. In other words, Khamenei can afford to buy some loyalty from Lebanese Shiites.

There is some danger that Hizbullah will retaliate for the raid, which could start the war back up.

Kofi Annan agreed with the Lebanese government point of view on the operation, that it was a violation of the UN ceasefire resolution. The Lebanese government is threatening to delay its positioning of troops in the south if the Israelis are going to ignore the cease fire.

Why would the Israelis risk reopening the war? The Olmert government at the moment looks like a loser, especially to the Israeli public, and needs to pull off a big win. What if they could capture a leader like Yazbek? Or free the 2 captured Israeli soldiers? All of a sudden they would be heroes, not losers. So the impetus is there for further adventurism. And imagine that the Israelis have some paid agents inside Hizbullah, who are glad to take their money to tell them tall tales. "Your soldiers-- yeah, they're in this village near Baalbak . . ." "Yazbek? Yeah, I know just where you can find him. That will be another $10,000 in my bank acount first, though."

The raid, instead of rehabilitating Olmert, was another fiasco. Hizbullah appears effectively to have fought it off, killing an Israeli officer and inflicting injuries on others in the party. Shaikh Yazbek remains at large, and Hizbullah is passing out crisp $100 bills to Lebanese Shiites, getting credit for being more well organized than the government. Kofi Annan condemned it. Siniora threatened to suddenly become less cooperative. It did not exactly help Bush recruit more troops from France for the south. France wants a peace keeping mission, not a hot war that might engulf its soldiers, and Olmert just confirmed Paris's suspicions that the French are being suckered into a combat situation. Olmert wants to be Yitzhak Rabin, who presided over the Entebbe operation. But he instead keeps coming up with Operation Eagle Claw and more of a Jimmy Carter image (circa 1979) inside Israel.

Speaking of kidnapping people, the Israelis on Saturday abducted the elected deputy prime minister of the Palestine Authority. Bush keeps saying that Lebanon and Iraq are fragile democracies. I guess all the democracies in the Arab world are fragile, in some large part because international or regional superpowers keep intervening in them with massive force.

Did the US share satellite surveillance of Iran and Syria with the Israelis during the recent war?

Bush said Friday that it would take some time for "people" to see that Hizbullah had lost the recent war. I'm not sure which people he is talking about, but if he means Middle Easterners, he may have a fair wait. Al-Quds al-Arabi reports that [Ar.] the Ibn Khaldun Center in Egypt just released the results of a poll of the Egyptian public. It found that Hasan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbullah, is the most popular politician in Egypt. In second place comes Khalid Mashal, the radical Hamas leader who operates from Damascus and has been implicated in terror attacks inside Israel. In third place? Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

On Saturday, demonstrators had a rally at al-Azhar seminary, at which they raised placards with Nasrallah's picture on them. Egyptian security forces surrounded the premises to prevent the demonstrators from coming out on the steet. Among the political parties represented were the Muslim Brotherhood, Tomorrow and Kifayah, i.e. both religious and secular dissidents opposed to the authoritarian government of Hosni Mubarak. Demonstrations in Egypt are generally small affairs because they are technically illegal and the government intervenes to make sure they don't go too far. It would therefore be difficult to gauge how popular this demonstration was, if we didn't have the opinion poll to substantiate its signficance. (The Ibn Khaldun Center, by the way, is generally pro-Western and knows how to do a professional poll).

Tom Friedman and other Western observers sometimes maintain that the Arab-Israeli conflict is not actually very important to most people in the region, but local governments make a big deal out of it in the media so as to take the focus off their own corruption and authoritarian government. But in Egypt, Hosni Mubarak usually tries to calm things down with regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict, and it is the Egyptian street that keeps raising the issue. The US has essentially bribed the Egyptian government with $2 bn. a year in aid to make nice with Israel. The Egyptian bureaucrats take the money and grumpily put up with the Israelis. But the Egyptian person in the street sees little benefit from the $2 bn. and some proportion of them is upset about the passivity of the Egyptian government on this score. On the other hand, a long-term Arabophone Western resident of Cairo wrote me recently that she did not find a lot of Egyptians willing to risk anything for the Lebanese.

56% of Americans: Iraq War not Worth it
Lockdown Continues amid Shiite Pilgrimage
and more Violence


US troops found weaponry in an office affiliated with Shiite nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The US sweep of Baghdad is aimed at reducing militia and guerrilla activity in the city. Of course, this can be accomplished while there is heavy US presence, the question is whether, once the US troops withdraw, it just pops up again.

Reuters gives the details of civil war violence in Iraq on Saturday. The deadliest incident occurred in Baqubah, where nine persons were shot down, including two university lecturers and a human rights worker.

George W. Bush has managed to cut the Christian population of Iraq in half. The insecurity has led some 600,000 to flee to Syria and Lebanon. As for the ones who fled to Lebanon, they recently faced a further disaster . . .

Some 56 percent of Americans think that Iraq has not been worth the loss of our US GIs' lives.

The Muslim world would just as soon we didn't intrevene so much in their affairs, either. Esposito: It's the Policy Stupid. On the US and the Muslim world in polling.

Is a serious diplomatic engagement with Iran Washington's next step. Well, I shouldn't have thought so. But the aftermath of wars is a time when the unexpected happens.

Israeli Commando Raid foiled: Hizbullah

Lebanon says that the Israelis made a commando raid into the Biqa' valley, attacking a village near Baalbak. The Lebanese maintain that they foiled the raid.

The Lebanese army increased the territory within which it functions in the South.

WaPo on Hizbullah: The best guerrilla group in the world.

Milt Bearden, who used to run a Hizbullah-like group in Afghanistan against the Soviets in the 1980s, is not impressed with Israel's war on Lebanon's Hizbullah.

Helena Cobban and Scott Harrop on Cordesman's analysis of the Israeli war on Lebanon.

Tension between Iran and Shiites In Iraq
Iraqi Shiite Attacks on Iran

Amit Paley and Saad al-Izzi at WaPo explore anti-Iranian feelings among Shiite sectarian groups in southern Iraq.

Louise Roug of the LA Times profiles Sheikh Mahmud Sarkhi al-Hasani of Karbala.

Too dangerous in Iraq to go to mosque, many Muslims in the center of the country told NYT.

Kurds charged that Iranian forces on the border with northern Iraq fired mortar shells repeatedly at a camp of Kurdish guerrillas (presumably PEJAK, an Iran-oriented offshoot of the PKK or Kurdish Worker's Party.) It was alleged that the Iranians killed two civilians in the barrage. Iran and Turkey both maintain that Iraqi Kurdistan is allowing guerrilla groups to operate freely, and to blow up things in Turkey and Iran then return to Kurdistan.

The only way to stop carbombings in Iraq is to ban vehicular traffic. So that's what the authorities have done in Baghdad for the next couple days, during which Shiite pilgrims will come in the thousands to commemorate the death of Imam Musa al-Kadhim, the 7th Imam for the Twelver Shiites, whose shrine is in the northern suburb of Kadhimiyah. Such a gathering is an ideal place for Sunni Arab guerrillas to strike, in their continued quest to jump start a conventional civil war, but Baghdad authorities hope to foil them.

More on Shiite and Kurdish politicians' efforts to dismiss (the Sunni Arab] Mahmoud al-Mashhadani as speaker or president of the Iraqi parliament.

Reider Vissar reviews Peter Galbraith's new book and takes the author to task for the thesis that Iraq is an artificially cobbled together country.

Scroll down for a podcast interview with yours truly.


I seriously doubt that there are Sunni Arab guerrillas freely operating down at Amara, deep in the Shiite South. It therefore seems likely that if the British military base there came under concerted mortar fire on Friday, the shells were being fired by Shiite militiamen.

Iraq is projecting a budget of $39 bn. in the coming year. Most of the income is from oil, but it appears to be the case that a lot of the oil income is siphoned off by party-militias and mafias, through smuggling.

Jumblatt Blasts Syria
Hizbullah revs up Aid to Victims
Majority in US wants Even-Handed Policy

Anthony Cordesman surveys the military pros and cons of the way the war was waged. (PDF). This study provides important statistics and details I haven't seen elsewhere.

A majority of Americans wanted the US to be neutral in the Israeli-Lebanon War. Only a third wanted to support Israel to the hilt. But the US Congress and executive acted as part of that third and ignored the majority.

A majority of Israelis in one poll wanted Defense Minister Amir Peretz to resign as a result of the inconclusive war on Lebanon. Some 41 percent wanted Prime Minister Ehud Olmert gone. I saw on cable television that Olmert's approval rating is only 40 percent now, and Peretz stands at 28 percent. The danger is that hardliner Bibi Netanyahu of the Likud Party (who recently openly celebrated the anniversary of the terrorist attack by Zionists in the 40s on civilians in the King David Hotel) has risen in popularity as a result of the debacle. The war could leave us with a strengthened Likud and a politically strengthened Hizbullah-Syria-Iran bloc, a recipe for further disaster.

Anyway, that's how you tell who won. The Lebanese are not demanding a commission to investigate the conduct of the war. In fact, Bashar al-Asad of Syria and Saad Hariri of Lebanon's reformist bloc are arguing over who gets to take credit for Lebanon's ability to weather the Israeli attack. (Neither is mentioning the Hizbullah footsoldiers who did so much damage to Israeli tanks and soldiers). Al-Asad is implying that Hizbullah could stand up to the Israelis mainly because of Syria's support, and that the 14 March reform movement had been wrong to kick Syrian troops out of Lebanon (their presence might have deterred such a massive Israeli attack). The Lebanese reformers are claiming credit for "steadfastness" (sumud) and are ridiculing Syria for cautiously staying out of the fight.

Hizbullah has taken the lead in providing aid relief to victims of the Israeli war on Lebanon. This is an important step in the rivalry between Hizbullah and the central government for the allegiance of the average person.

Russia is also helping.

The BBC provides pictures of Lebanese returning to the rubble of their homes in the south, as a result of massive Israeli bombing of the civilian infrastructure. The stench of dead family members, women and children often greets the returnees as they sift through the ruins of their homes.

Returning families and children face severe danger from unexploded ordnance, including cluster bombs. It is estimated that 10 percent of the tens of thousands of bombs dropped on Lebanon by Israel did not explode immediately.

NaharNet/ wire services report:

France and Italy are declining to send big contingents of troops as part of the United Nations peacekeeping force in South Lebanon until the UN Security Council clarifies their mission. Neither country wants to be responsible for trying to disarm Hizbullah, and both would like their troops to be able to engage in hot combat if necessary. In protest at the vagueness of the charge, Italy has so far declined to commit any troops at all, and France is just putting in another 200. The UN was disappointed.

The UNSC resolution was vague because US ambassador to the UN John Bolton wanted it vague or wanted the language about disarming Hizbullah in there. The Bush administration still has not learned the rule that you can throw your weight around at the UN and can do as you please, but if the results don't suit other countries, they take revenge on you by simply refusing to save your bacon. It happened in Iraq. Now it is being repeated in Lebanon.

Druze leader Walid Jumblatt lashed out Thursday at Syrian President Bashar al-Asad for not opening a second front at the occupied Golan Heights while Israel was attacking Lebanon. He also demanded that Hizbullah be integrated into the Lebanese military such that it couldn't just take it into its head to attack Israel without so much as a by your leave from the Lebanese government.

Lebanese troops arrived south of the Litani River for the first time since 1968. They were bringing in tanks. They denied that there would be any clashes between the Lebanese Army and Hizbullah.

European nations are rushing to give aid and help with regard to the vast oil spill cause in Lebanon by the Israeli air raid on the Jiyyeh refinery.

48 Killed, Dozens Wounded
Basra Tribal Leader Threatens More Violence
2 US GIs Killed

Two more US GIs were announced killed in Iraq on Thursday. Roadside bombings against US and multinational forces spiked during the last month. Some pro-guerrilla web sites have said that they wanted to punish the US for supporting Israel against Hizbullah.

Combining various wire service and Arabic press accounts, I came up with about over 50 killed in Iraq on Thursday. This is probably only about half of the actual number, since about 110 civilians have been being killed each day. Not everything shows up in our wire services, at least all on the same calendar day. For instance, al-Sharq al-Awsat is reporting five bodies fished out of the Tigris River in Baghdad, which I don't think most Western wire services caught.

Civil War violence killed dozens again on Thursday in Iraq. The most deadly incident:

' At least 12 Iraqis were killed and 25 wounded in a remote- controlled car bombing in a busy marketplace in eastern Baghdad's predominantly Shiite district of Sadr City, witnesses said. '

Reuters reviews other civil war violence in Iraq on Thursday. Major incidents include:

' SINJAR - Nine people were wounded, including four civilians, when a suicide car bomber targeting Kurdish security forces blew himself up on a road in Sinjar, northwest of Mosul . . .

DAQUQ - A roadside bomb exploded in the town of Daquq, 45 km (25 miles) south of Kirkuk, killing two civilians and wounding a third . . .

BAQUBA - Nine civilians, including three brothers, were assassinated in separate attacks in Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) north of Baghdad . . .

MUQDADIYA - Several mortars landed on a market near a Shi'ite mosque in the town of Muqdadiya, 90 km (55 miles) northeast of Baghdad, wounding 21 people . . .

BAGHDAD - Three policemen were wounded when a car bomb exploded in Mansour district, west-central Baghdad . . .

NEAR FALLUJA - The bodies of two men with gunshot wounds, bearing signs of torture, were found dead just north of Falluja, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad, police said. . .

SUWAYRA - The bodies of six blindfolded civilians with their hands bound and with multiple gunshot wounds were retrieved from the Tigris river in Suwayra, a town 45 km (25 miles) south of Baghdad . . .

The Melbourne Herald Sun reports that authorities in the Shiite holy city of Karbala have reached an agreement with radical clergyman Mahmud Sarkhi al-Hasani. He is to cease supporting groups openly carrying around weapons and attacking government buildings. Karbala security forces had cracked down on his movement on Tuesday, invading a safe house to look for weapons stockpiles. Although this article says he didn't until recently have a militia, I believe that is incorrect. In fact, I suspect that Hasani's militia is responsible for some of the violence against British troops in the south.

Hasani leads a cult that views the current Iraqi central and provincial governments as puppets of Iran, which he thinks is persecuting him. He also is vehement in calls for withdrawal of foreign troops, and his followers have clashed with US and British military forces.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports [Ar.] that Faruq al-Khuyun, the son of Faisal al-Khuyun (sheikh of the Bani Asad tribe who was assassinated the day before yesterday in a market in Basra) has accused the governor of Basra of having targetted his father and their tribe. He said Basra security forces had also assassinated his brother, Ghazwan al-Khuyun, just three months ago. Faruq said that his tribe's attack on the governor's offices was a minor thing, and that they would, tomorrow or thereafter, occupy those offices altogether.

I don't think the security situation in Basra looks too bright.

Iraq has had to double the amount of money it spends on importing petroleum products in August and September. The country is undergoing a severe fuel crisis.

Matthew Rothschild reads the NYT tea leaves and concludes that Bush may be contemplating bringing in a strong man to rule Iraq and giving up on this democracy business.

One quibble. The strong man wouldn't be Chalabi, who is afraid to scuff his Gucci shoes. It would be a Shiite ex-Baathist officer in the old Iraqi army who knew how to make people an offer they couldn't refuse.

As for the merits of the plan, it would not work. The general Iraqi population is politically mobilized and well armed, and the Iraqi state is weak, as are its armed forces. You'd need an army with 6,000 tanks and lots of helicopter gunships, loyal to its leader and willing to kill thousands of innocent oridary Iraqis. None of these prerequisites exist, and probably won't for a while, if ever.

Hizbullah Rejects Syrian Position
Lebanese Army Begins reaching South

DPA/ al-Zaman report that [Ar.] in Beirut, Hizbullah declined to adopt the position of Syrian President Bashar al-Asad in accusing the reformist politicians of standing against Hizbullah and the resistance in Lebanon. (Bashar has a feud with the 14 March group, but Hizbullah joined it in a national unity government.) Husayn al-Hajj Hasan, a Hizbullah member of parliament said, "we reject the idea of considering the 14 March group to be agents of Israel and America."

In an emotional speech in Beirut Thursday morning, shown on LBC, Saad Hariri said that the 33-day long Israeli campaign against Lebanon had inflicted profound damage on the country. He went on to say that it was painful to find a sibling Arab leader adding insult to injury by instigating division and infighting among Lebanese. Hariri was referring to Tuesday's speech by Bashar al-Asad of Syria in which he accused Hariri and other members of his coalition of being agents of foreign powers and urged Hizbullah to stand up to them. Hariri said that Lebanon had seen nothing from Syria but hatred, hypocrisy and lies. He accused Syria of trading for its own advantage on the blood of Arab children at Qana, in Gaza and in Baghdad. He said he sympathized with the suffering masses of Syria who labored under a tyrannical regime that denied them the possibility of free elections. He reminded Damascus that steadfastness in the face of Israeli attacks was a famed Lebanese product, stemming from Lebanese national unity. (Asad had said that the 14 March group was a product of Israel.)

Pretty much all the major Lebanese politicians of all sects and tendencies condemned Asad's remarks [Ar.], characterizing them as an attempt by an external power to take advantage of Lebanon's successful weathering of the Israeli attack to achieve Syrian goals in Lebanon.

Some 2000 Lebanese troops began deploying on Wednesday and Thursday in the Lebanese South. Altogether 15,000 would be sent.

According to LBC satellite news, most Israeli troops have withdrawn from Lebanon, except for some villages right on the border between the two countries.

The deployment of Lebanese troops to the south for the first time in decades is a matter of national pride to the Lebanese, who are unbowed by a month of savage Israeli bombardment of their national infrastructure and destruction of entire villages.

The main Lebanese players, both the reform government and Hizbullah spokesmen, appear convinced that a conflict between the state and the party-militia in the south can be avoided. Lebanese suffered through civil war 1975-1989 (and beyond a bit) and are determined not to risk a return to that horrible era. The Daily Star suggests that this is because a compromise is in the works, whereby Hizbullah won't actually be disarmed, but will have to keep its arms out of sight south of the Litani River near Israel.

Armageddon in Khiam: Shiite Lebanese returning to towns and villages in the south are finding them completely flattened.

The Israeli pilots engaged in massive collective punishment and the deliberate targetting of civilian populations for displacement, which is a war crime in international law.

The Blue Jinn:
Cole in Salon on Iraqi Speaker

My article in Salon.com on the controversy surrounding the Speaker or President of the Iraqi parliament, Dr. Mahmoud Mashhadani. By the way, a jinn or djinn is a genie as in genie in a bottle. I don't actually think they are blue in the Thousand and One Nights, and suspect Mashhadani has been watching Disney movies, where they are blue and have Robin Williams's manic attention deficit disorder.

Excerpt:

' When George Bush met the speaker of the Iraqi parliament, he liked him. During his June trip to Baghdad, Bush sang the praises of Dr. Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, who had been elected speaker in late April. "I was impressed by him," said Bush during a press conference. "He's a fellow that had been put in prison by Saddam and, interestingly enough, put in prison by us. And he made a decision to participate in the government ... It was interesting to see a person that could have been really bitter talk about the skills he's going to need to bring people together to run the parliament."

But when the Iraqi parliament reconvenes next month, the first item on the agenda will be firing Mashhadani. He has put his foot in his mouth too many times. Considering what he's been saying about the United States since his moment with the president, the end of his tenure should come as a relief to the Bush administration. "Who destroyed Iraq? Who plundered Iraq?" exploded Mashhadani in a recent interview. "It is none other than the blue jinn whose name is the American Occupation." Mashhadani's imminent removal, however, is an ominous sign for the future of inclusive electoral politics in Iraq. . .

Read the whole thing.

Marsh Arabs Attack Basra Governor
22 Killed, 93 Wounded in Baghdad Bombings
Security Collapses in Mosul

The Gulf Daily News writes that bombs killed 22 and wounded 93 in the center of Baghdad on Wednesday. Later reports put the deaths at 25.

' BAGHDAD: Three car bombs hit commercial districts of downtown Baghdad yesterday, killing at least 22 people and wounding 93 . . . A bomb blast near the city's main bus station killed at least eight people and wounded 28, hitting a street market popular with Iraqi Shiites travelling by road to southern cities. . . Later, two more bombs went off in rapid succession, killing 14 more people and wounding 65, according to an interior ministry official. A thick column of smoke poured into the air above Sadun Street in the heart of Baghdad after the explosions, which damaged a row of shops and a popular coffee shop. '

Saadun street is a popular place of residence for Christians and Kurds.

Reuters reports on other civil war violence in Iraq, including bombings and killings in provincial cities like Muqdadiyah and Baqubah.

The security situation in southern Iraq continues on its worrisome downward spiral.

In Basra, one policeman was killed and 4 wounded when armed men staged an attack on the HQ of the governor of Basra province. An official source told al-Zaman "Gunmen in about 15 vehicles surrounded the governor's offices and directed gunfire at it. The guards replied with fire at the source of the attacks." Government reinforcements reached the building after about an hour.

Another source said that the attackers were tribesmen of the Marsh Arab Bani Asad tribe, who had two days ago cut the road between Basra and Baghdad after one of their chieftains, Shaikh Ghazi al-Khuyun, was killed by armed men in the industrial quarter of Khamsah Mil (5 Mile). A military spokesman played down the extent of the violence and said that a partial curfew had been imposed in Basra.

Marsh Arabs had been forbidden to enter Basra under the old Baath regime, but the British allowed them in after April 2003. They were displaced by the decline of their marshes, in which they had farmed, fished, and smuggled. Some of these Marsh Arab tribes now function as urban mafias and are involved in extortion rackets. They also conduct feuds and turf wars with one another and with party-militias such as the Virtue Party (Fadhila). The Basra governor belongs to the Virtue Party, and his dispute with the Bani Asad almost certainly has the character of a turf war over some economic resource in Basra.

The atmosphere in Karbala, a Shiite holy city, remained tense and a curfew remained in effect on Wednesday. Tuesday had witnessed an armed conflict between Iraqi security forces and Hasani's militiamen, in which 10 of his followers were killed and 281 were arrested. A police officer was also killed, and another wounded, in that clash. Shops remained closed and the streets were largely deserted, with street peddlars staying at home. The night before yesterday gunfire could be heard and there were reports of further clashes. Karbala has been closed to people from other provinces for the next 3 days as a security measure. (Ordinarily there is a constant flow of pilgrims to the shrine of Imam Husayn, the martyred grandson of the prophet).

The arrested followers of Shaikh Hasani were sent to Najaf, a stronghold of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the enemy of Hasani and his disciples. Security forces in Najaf are conducting a search for followers of Hasani.

A wave of small demonstrations swept several cities, including Hilla and Kut, staged by followers of Shaikh Mahmud al-Sarkhi al-Hasani, a maverick follower of the late Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr (d. 1999). The demonstrators protested the arrest of nearly 300 of Hasani's followers in Karbala on Tuesday. They also said that Iran was instigating political instability in Iraq. Abd al-Zahrah al-Ma'muri, a rally organizer who was wounded in the hand, told al-Zaman, "There is an atmosphere of terror . . . they want to make us disappear using Iranian intelligence agents, who dominate everything and muzzle everyone, even the grand ayatollahs. But we will not be silent because we follow the pure, Arab, Iraqi Speaking Religious Authority." Presumably he is referring to shaikh Hasani. He said the protestors' only demand was the release of the persons imprisoned, whom they characterized as simply having wanted to reaffirm Iraqi national identity. He called on the police to be even-handed and not to submit to the political centers that are openly linked to Iran. (He appears to mean the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Badr Corps, both of which have strong links to Iran).

In Kut the day before yesterday, fighting broke out between Hasani's militiamen and Iraqi police, leaving two policemen dead and three wounded.

In Mosul, al-Zaman reports [Ar.], several districts on the right side of the city witnessed the outbreak of clashes between armed men and Iraqi police patrols that continued for two hours. Among the districts where this violence occurred were Yarmuk, Amil, New Mosul, Suq al-Ghanam, Suq al-Ma'ash, and others. Five guerrillas were killed and 6 captured, Iraqi police said.

The guerrillas were said by Iraqi authorities to belong to the Majlis Shura al-Mujahidin (Council of Freedom Fighters), though some were thought to actually be from the former Iraqi army. Security has been poor in Mosul for the past two weeks, and when the guerrillas are attacked in one district they switch to another. The withdrawal of 3000 US troops, who were sent to pacify Sunni Arab districts of Baghdad, appears to have allowed this downward spiral of security in Mosul, Iraq's third largest city. The day before yesterday, guerrillas attacked the party HQ of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. Kurds are a small minority in Mosul, but Kurdish Peshmerga soldiers have often been given security tasks by the US in the largely Sunni Arab city. In June, 25 Kurds were assassinated in Mosul.

The Washington Post has more details.

Syria will share fuel with Iraq. Well, I guess Mr. Bush will be happy with Damascus now that it is helping Iraq out, right? This report notes: "Before the U.S. invasion Iraq used to produce up to 20 million liters of gasoline a day. Current production is estimated to be 3 million liters." George W. Bush managed to produce a gasoline crisis . . . in Iraq.

Battle of the Speeches Breaks out in Wake of Lebanon War

Israel shot 5 Hizbullah fighters on Tuesday and Hizbullah fired ten rockets inside Lebanon at Israel troops. Emergency workers dug 38 bodies of civilians out of the rubble in Lebanon. But despite these provocations, the ceasefire more or less held. The Israelis were towing damaged armored vehicles out of Lebanon.

I suppose it is better for them to wage a war of words than one of bombs, though one tends to lead to the other. Since the United Nations resolution calling for a halt to hostilities, Prime Minister Olmert, President Bush, Secretary-General Nasrallah, President al-Asad and President Ahmadinejad have all been procliaming the war a personal victory.

I don't know why they would want to claim it.

It was such a stupid war. It was thick-as-two-blocks-of-wood strategy on all sides. It was moronic for the Israelis to plan it out last year. It was idiotic for Hizbullah to cross over into Israel, kill soldiers, and take two captive. It was brain dead for the Israeli officer corps and politicians to think they could get anything positive out of bombing Lebanon back to the stone age and making a million people homeless. It was dim-witted for Hasan Nasrallah to threaten Israelis with releasing poison gases from Haifa chemical plants on them. It was obtuse for the Israelis to confront a dug-in guerrilla movement with green conventional troops marching in straight lines. It was dull of Hizbullah to fire thousands of katyushas into open fields where they mainly damaged wild grass. The few times when the rockets managed to kill someone, it was often an Arab Israeli civilian. Stupid.

Israeli's armed forces chief, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, unwisely sold off $27,000 in stock when he heard that Hizbullah had captured 2 Israeli soldiers. That wasn't unwise economically, since when Israel went to war, its stock market fell 12% It is further proof that the war was planned well in advance, and that Halutz knew that the capture would trigger it. But what could he have saved or made from this transaction? A few thousand dollars? It was stupid for him to risk the public perception of impropriety for such a small sum. Unprofessional.

There have been professionally-fought wars in the Middle East. I mean, in 1973 both sides at least seemed to know what they were doing. The Egyptians used sophisticated technology to cross over to Sinai. They had the sense to stop and not actually invade Israel, so as to stay within the umbrella of their anti-aircraft batteries. The Israelis got caught flat-footed when the Egyptians crossed the canal, but they soon were able to riposte. The big powers came in and settled it. The Soviet Union insisted on a cease fire and the US decided it didn't want a confrontation over it. So Ariel Sharon did not get to take Cairo. In turn, that the Egyptians acquitted themselves decently allowed them to make peace with heads held high. War is horrible, but you came away feeling that everyone involved at a high level in that one was competent and rational (except for that moment of early panic when Golda Meir thought that it was the fall of the Third Kingdom and Wild and Crazy Guy Moshe Dayan wanted to nuke Cairo).

But this war was a keystone cops war. It was horribly destructive for Lebanon, but not to any purpose for anyone, including the Israelis. The Americans and Israelis seem to have thought that the small farmers and small shopkeepers of south Lebanon were a sinister wraith army of the ghost of Ayatollah Khomeini. In fact, they were . . . small farmers and shopkeepers. One of the reasons they are rushing back down south is to see to their small farms, even if the small farmhouse isn't there any more.

But there you have it. Everyone wants credit for this cornucopia of foolishness.

Bush came out and said that Hizbullah had been defeated, and tried to link Hizbullah to the Sunni Arab guerrillas who make his life hell in Iraq. But, George, Hizbullah is Shiite. It was your Shiite allies in Iraq who supported it. Bush underscored his permanent deer-in-the-headlights cluelessness when at a press conference he said this:

' QUESTION: How can the international force, or the United States if necessary, prevent Iran from resupplying Hezbollah?

BUSH: The first step is -- and part of the mandate in the U.N. resolution was to secure Syria's borders. Iran is able to ship weapons to Hezbollah through Syria.

Secondly is to deal -- is to help seal off the ports around Lebanon.

BUSH: In other words, part of the mandate and part of the mission of the troops, the UNIFIL troops, will be to seal off the Syrian border. '

Note that I can't even understand what he means by "the ports around Lebanon" being sealed. Does he mean Lebanon's ports? Note that you wouldn't want to seal off Lebanon's ports, since Lebanon will need to import things through them. That you could have such good port security in Lebanon that you could altogether screen out missile shipments is unlikely. Does he mean that Turkish, Syrian, and Israeli ports around Lebanon should be sealed. Just Syrian? Impractical.

Note also that the little blue strip at the bottom of Lebanon is generally where the UN peacekeeping troops will be. They aren't in a position to "seal off" the Syrian border, which stretches far to their northeast, and can't be "sealed off" by anyone at all, being rugged and long. The blue helmets of the UN, being a land force, are not in a position to seal off Lebanon's ports, such as Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, Jounieh or Tripoli. Nor could they seal off the Syrian port of Latakiya, if that is what Bush meant.

In other words, Bush doesn't have the slightest idea what he is talking about and nothing he said on this subject makes any sense at all. Why does the US press always let him get away with this?

Now today Bashar al-Asad came out and made a fool of himself. Josh Landis discusses Bashar's speech. Robert Fisk is enthusiastic about Bashar's frank words on Bush as proponent of preemptive war and on Israel's land-grab in the Golan and the West Bank as key to the outbreak of violence. OK, but his comments on internal Lebanese politics were so unhelpful as to qualify as sinister.

Bashar just more or less openly declared war on the elected Lebanese government. It came to power in last year's elections in the wake of a popular movement that condemned the assassination of former prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri, which a majority of Lebanese blamed on Syria.

The Baath ruling elite in Damascus has been worried that the new Lebanese ruling group, including Saad al-Hariri and Walid Jumblatt, will try to use the UN, the US and Israel to unseat them. A string of assassinations or attempts against outspoken critics of Syria in Lebanon probably reflects that anxiety.

But Hariri and others had consistently denied that they wanted to overthrow al-Asad. And the reformers let Hizbullah into their government, determined to find a framework for a national unity government, despite Hizbullah's close alliance with Damascus.

The leading Lebanese politicians have in the past year been a class act, demonstrating a good deal of political maturity in how they dealt with the assassinations, with Hizbullah, with Bush, and with Syria. It hasn't been easy.

First, Olmert went on a rampage, destroying the infrastructure that made their little country run.

Now, al-Asad has decided to try to reinforce Hizbullah's power in the wake of its success in standing up to the Israelis, and seems to want to pit Hizbullah against the reformers. But that is exactly what the Israeli hardliners were hoping for, as well. Al-Asad is playing into Israel's hands. Syria can't regain its commanding position in Lebanon at this point, and trying to do so will just tear Lebanon apart. Syria would have been best served by a reinforcement of the government of national unity, such that Hizbullah could continue to represent a pro-Syrian point of view within the government. Asad recognizes this much. But a national unity government is no good if it is radically divided against itself, a division he seems to be promoting. Now, Asad has made it look as though when Hizbullah supports Syria, it is acting as nothing more than an agent of Damascus. Agent (`amil) is not a nice word in Arabic.

Syria under Asad is acting as though it is a regional power entitled to press its claims on Lebanon as a sphere of influence. In fact, the Lebanese public mobilized in the hundreds of thousands, and you simply cannot have an imperial role in a country if enough people refuse to cooperate. And, all of Asad's military equipment could be destroyed in about two or three days by Israeli warplanes. Israel could not hope to occupy Syria, but it could leave the country in shambles and defenseless. Syria is not a regional power any more. It is a second-tier power that had best avoid frontal confrontations. Bashar doesn't seem to appreciate this.

Ahmadinejad, a figure with relatively little power in the Iranian system, also weighed in.

I'm not saying that all these people are stupid, personally. I am saying that the politics of exclusion has made them act stupidly. And no end in sight.

Civil War Violence Reaches New Heights in Iraq
Religious Group Clashes with Police in Karbala
Bush Opposes Partition

Faith-based civil war violence killed 110 civilians each day in July, a new report shows, which is a new one-month record. The deaths come in the midst of a new security program and extra checkpoints pushed by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. It hasn't worked.

A car bomb in Mosul killed 9 and wounded 36 at the HQ of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan headed by Jalal Talabani. Mosul is a largely Arab city with a Kurdish minority, but Kurdish troops and security personnel have been used in the city by the United States, and many of its inhabitants are afraid that the Kurds will try to annex it to their Kurdistan regional federation.

Other civil war violence on Tuesday, including bombings in Samarra and Baquba.

In another worrisome sign of collapsing security in Iraq, Al-Zaman/ AFP report that all hell has broken loose in the Shiite shrine city of Karbala. The city has been closed to visiting pilgrims for three days and a curfew is in effect after a battle between municipal police and a Shiite sectarian movement.

The Iraqi security forces, probably dominated in Karbala by members of the Badr Corps (originally trained in Iran) came into conflict with with followers of Shaikh Mahmud al-Hasani al-Sarkhi. Al-Hasani is strongly opposed to the continued US presence in Iraq, but is also fanatically anti-Iranian. The violent clashes killed at least 6 persons, including 3 from the Iraqi security forces. Al-Hasani's office claimed that 25 of his followers were killed and 20 wounded. Some 200 of his men were arrested. (The local hospital reported receiving 6 corpses, but eyewitnesses said that bodies littered the streets and that the atmosphere was full of dread).

Al-Hasani also accused the Shiite religious authorities in the Iranian seminary city of Qom of cooperating with Iranian intelligence and some Iraqi parties now in power in Baghdad to get rid of him because he rejects a Shiite provincial confederacy in the south and insists on a united Iraq and opposes sectarian and ethnic politics. His office said that the attack on his followers was in furtherance of an Iranian plan to put the Iraqi Shiites under the authority of an Iranian ayatollah with big plans for the Middle East. (He is saying that his people were attacked by Badr Corpsmen infiltrated into local police and other state security arms. In turn, he is coding Badr as Iranian puppets. Badr is the paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a leading party in the Iraqi parliament and in provincial governments.)

An Iraqi official who chose to remain anonymous said that Iraqi security forces assaulted the main HQ of al-Hasani in Bab Turij in the center of Karbala and fought with his followers, taking about 200 into custody.

President Bush met with a handful of Middle East experts and expressed opposition to seeing Iraq break up. He also said that the US would be in Iraq as long as he was president.

Long time readers know that I am also opposed to seeing Iraq partitioned, and think it would only cause more problems. But wanting Iraq to stay together and arranging for it to do so are not the same things.

You have to ask yourself, what are the policies that would split it up and what are the policies that would keep it together? I maintain that Bush's policies have set in motion enormous pressures for partition, which did not exist in April, 2003. He has to change those policies if he is to maintain the country's integrity. Making the Marines an adjunct to Shiite sectarian policies of debaathification and suppression of the Sunnis is maybe not a winning strategy and should be rethought. Using the Kurdish Peshmergas to police Kirkuk and Ninevah provinces or to attack Turkmen in Tal Afar is also not wise from the point of view of ethnic politics. Kirkuk has Arabs and Turkmen who fear Kurdish dominance, and Ninevah is majority-Arab and knows that the Kurds covet Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city. If Bush hasn't been using ethnic divisions to divide and rule, then he has just been unwise about them.

I personally think that a huge 9-province regional confederacy of the sort Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the clerical Shiite leader, wants to create, will break up Iraq. I also think that the Kirkuk issue should be settled now by negotiation rather than waiting a year and a half for the referendum to produce massive ethnic violence. Avoiding the break-up of Iraq now requires pro-active intervention and specific policy-making, not just mouthing pious hopes.

As for staying there until 2009 at least, that is also an aspiration on his part. It isn't clear he can pull it off. The Iraqis are more and more angry at us, most recently for actively encouraging the Israelis to turn the Shiite parts of Lebanon into debris and mass graves. Imperial powers have been forced out of countries in the past when they just could no longer get the cooperation of local elites. Likewise, Congress pays for the US to be in Iraq, and the new Congress after the November elections may not be willing to do so.

Personally, I think the US should draw down most of its ground troops. It isn't useful for our GIs to try to ride herd on Ramadi, and I think Ramadi will more likely turn out well in the medium term if they aren't there. As Gen. John Abizaid pointed out in spring of 2003, we are a pathogen in the Iraqi body politic, constantly attracting antibodies. (He got the biology backwards but this is what he meant and he was right.) Our press doesn't say much about it, but there is a a hot war going on in Ramadi; guerrillas hit a US base there with RPG fire on Tuesday and US troops engaged them. This fighting has been going on in Ramadi forever and whatever we are doing there is not causing it to subside.

The really worrisome thing is that Bush must recognize that he is in deep, deep trouble if he is meeting with bona fide academic Middle East experts like Vali Nasr and Eric Davis. I don't think he likes academics very much, nor used, at least, to value academic ways of analysis.

Close: The Building War on Iran

Ray Close, a retired CIA analyst of Arab affairs, writes:

' Despite vehement official assertions to the contrary, indications are increasing every day that the Bush Administration has already decided that conventional diplomacy will fail as a way to manage its confrontation with Iran, and that military action against the Teheran regime has therefore already reached the point of final countdown. This message is not an attempt to analyze all aspects of that highly complex and controversial question, all the pros and all the cons, which are numerous on both sides, but merely to toss a few small but perhaps significant considerations into the balance. Make your own judgments.

1. First, some military realities that have not yet been fully appreciated by the American public:

A. The Lebanon conflict substantiates pre-crisis intelligence that Iran has apparently provided sophisticated “strategic” rockets to Hizballah, such as the Fajr-5 (range: 75 km) and probably also the Zelzal (range: 150 km).

Possession of the Zelzal (or even the Fajr-5) would effectively negate much of the strategic value of attempting to protect Israel’s northern regions from attack simply by making the area south of the Litani River into a buffer zone without fully disarming Hizballah and ensuring that it cannot be resupplied --- a goal almost certainly beyond the capabilities of forces presently available. Because the competence of the Lebanese Army is greatly in doubt, and the military and political mandate of a U.N. peacekeeping force is likely to be both tenuous and impermanent, the long-term value of the recent Israeli action against Hizballah is very much in question.

(COMMENT: The tactical and strategic threat to Israel's security demonstrated by Hizballah's use of Iranian-supplied missiles is being underrated. The fact that after a full month of furious Israeli bombardment and infantry assault Hizballah was capable of launching 250 rockets into northern Israel in the last hours before the ceasefire proves that defense of Israel based on narrow buffer zones, multi-national peacekeepers and separation walls is an illiusion. We must remember that it was only the absence of a reliable guidance system that prevented massive killing of Israeli civilians by thousands of Katyusha rockets --- a technological gap that can and will be filled in a very short time, no doubt. This frightening reality, when it sinks in, will redouble the already heavy public pressure on the Bush Administration, strongly supported and encouraged by Israel and the pro-Israel lobby, to “do something decisive about Iran”. )

The only real defense against this new kind of threat available to Israel today is the total cessation of Iran's support for organizations like Hizballah and Hamas, and the denial to them of operational bases in Palestine, Lebanon or Syria. Only the long reach of American military power has any chance of achieving that objective on Israel's behalf. Undertaking that effort would be a strategic commitment that went very far beyond traditional American policy of sympathy and support. We are talking here about an historic new departure in American foreign and defense policy, the costs and risks of which the American people have not yet even begun to understand, much less aceept.

B. Hizballah’s successful use of the C-802/SACCADE anti-ship cruise missile against an Israeli corvette caught both the U.S. and Israel by surprise. The general consensus among defense intelligence analysts is that Iran’s small cadre of IRGC operatives attached to Hizballah (estimated to be about 100 men) helped arm this weapon and guide it to its target. Hizballah’s successful use of the C-802 also raises questions about the safety of U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf in the event of Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz in reaction to U.S. military action against the Teheran regime. Iran reportedly has “hundreds” of these missiles (C-802s) lining its shore of the Strait.

(COMMENT: Contrary to some press reports, the C-802 is not an adaptation of the Chinese Silkworm, but rather a Chinese improvement on the [originally French] Exocet that was used effectively by the Argentine navy in the Falklands war in 1982, and by Iraq against a U.S. Navy ship in the Gulf in 1987. This might be viewed as a deterrent to U.S. military action against Iran; on the contrary, however, it has become an added incentive to take urgent action to eliminate Iran’s capacity to interfere with the free movement of oil supplies in the Gulf --- a factor that the Bush Administration regards as a potential blackmail threat and an unacceptable limitation on its own capacity to control the actions of a regime that supports terrorism.)

2. Then there is what I must admit is basically an intuitive indicator of Bush Administration intentions to take aggressive action against Iran:

A. It is now indisputably true that during the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, the Bush Administration aggressively searched for, and then selectively highlighted, any intelligence that they believed would support and justify their already-firm determination to destroy the Saddam Hussein regime by military force. An important part of the rationale for attacking Iraq was to demonstrate, as an object lesson for the whole world to note, that America will “maintain the offensive against terrorism”, and will attack and destroy all who support or encourage terrorism anywhere in the world. President Bush deeply believes what he has said publicly on this subject, and nothing he has said or done recently has portrayed the slightest uncertainty on his part about the correctness of the underlying national strategy that made the invasion of Iraq such an urgent necessity in 2003.

B. If the Bush Administration has carefully weighed the risks and costs of launching a military attack against Iran, and decided (after three-plus years of absorbing the hard lessons of Iraq) that making war on seventy million angry Persians is not a sensible thing to do at this moment in history, (as most military experts would argue), then prudence and common sense would dictate that it serves no useful purpose for President Bush and his representatives to emphasize continually and bombastically, at every opportunity, that Iran (and to a lesser extent Syria) are guilty of acting in flagrant violation of the “red lines” clearly defined in U.S. national strategy. As we have repeatedly reminded ourselves, the first rule of diplomacy or war is never to declare objectives that one does not have the means or the will to achieve, and never issue threats that one has no intention of enforcing. At the moment, we seem to be doing both these things at the same time.

Today, the Washington Post reports:

As a U.N.-imposed truce seemed to be holding yesterday, Bush made clear that he blames Hizballah and its patrons, Iran and Syria, for igniting the conflict. “We recognize that the responsibility for this lies with Hizballah,” Bush said. “Responsibility lies also with Hizbollah's state sponsors, Iran and Syria.” Bush warned Tehran to stop backing militias in Lebanon and in Iraq, where U.S. officials have long accused Iran of feeding the sectarian violence that is threatening to erupt into a full-scale civil war. “In both these countries, Iran is backing armed groups in the hope of stopping democracy from taking hold,” Bush said. “The message of this administration is clear. America will stay on the offensive against al-Qaeda. Iran must stop its support for terror, and the leaders of these armed groups must make a choice. If they want to participate in the political life of their countries, they must disarm.”

(Note President Bush's familiar technique of implying a direct operational relationship between Iran and Hizballah, on the one hand, and Osama bin Ladin's al-Qaeda organization on the other --- a deliberate distortion of fact similar to the canards associating Saddam Hussein directly with al-Qaeda and hence with the 9-11 events. These subtle but very significant deceptions fly right over the heads of the vast majority of Americans, but they undermine the credibility of our president and hence our confidence in his decisions about matters like war and peace.)

And in today’s New York Times we read a dispatch from Baghdad::

“The American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, said that Iran had been encouraging Shiite militias to attack American-led forces (in Iraq) in retaliation for American backing of Israel’s military campaign against Hizballah in Lebanon”

This gratuitous remark makes sense only if one is seeking some sort of legal license from the international community to take unilateral punitive action against Iran. However, at a time when the popularity of Hizballah, and corresponding hatred of Israel, are both at their zenith among the populations of Iraq and the rest of the Arab and Muslim worlds, it is nothing short of foolhardy and irresponsible for the American ambassador in Baghdad to be advertising Iran’s contribution to what that critically important constituency regards (correctly or not) as a humiliating failure of mighty Israel and its superpower ally America to defeat and disarm the valiant little "Party of God" in Lebanon.

Unless, of course, Bush and his advisers seriously expect that Iran will be intimidated into reversing its own policies. (Not bloody likely.)

Otherwise, Khalilzad is merely feeding the fears of Iraq's majority Shi'a population that the United States, probably in coordination with Israel, is moving purposefully toward war with Iran, and needs only to pump up its legal justification for taking that action. Not a good way to win the confidence and cooperation of the parties upon whom the success of our enterprise in Iraq critically depends.

This bombastic and posturing style of “diplomacy” is going to lead inescapably to one or the other of the following results:

1. War with Iran (with negative consequences beyond anyone's ability to imagine); or 2. Another humiliating demonstration of impotence. '

Ray Close

Fragile Ceasefire in Lebanon

Naharnet/ AFP report

' A ceasefire aimed at silencing the guns in Lebanon remained fragile as thousands of Lebanese streamed back home to the devastated south and Hizbullah claimed it had emerged victorious.

A day after the U.N.-brokered truce went into effect, a dozen rockets targeted Israeli positions in south Lebanon in the early hours of Tuesday, an Israeli army spokesman said.

No one was injured by the rocket attacks -- the first since the ceasefire went into effect -- and Israeli soldiers did not return fire. But the attack underscored the volatile conditions on the ground as the tenuous truce entered its second day.'

Al-Zaman said that Iran offered to establish a new alliance with Egypt, such that both of them would support the Lebanese resistance to Israel and would work to stop Hezbollah from being disarmed. Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, who does not like Shiites very much and long ago decided that there is no percentage in fighting the Israelis and Americans, told the Iranians "No!"

Hizbullah leader Hasan Nasrallah said his organization had won a historic and unprecedented victory against Israel. (This is the sort of victory where a nerd goes up against a heavey weight champion in the ring and comes out of it alive, even if stomped on pretty badly. But it is closer to the truth than Olmert and Bush's pronouncements that Hizbullah's state within a state was just gone, now.) Nasrallah said that his organization would not be forcibly disarmed, nor by threats and intimidation.

I saw satellite television images of roads packed with vehicles heading back down south, as the displaced population resolves to return home.

The UNIFIL officers are worried that if the Lebanese and UN troops do not come soon, though, Hezbollah and Israeli troops could easily fall to fighting again.

I saw television footage of the destruction of downtown Nabatiyah, with dress shops and delis in ruins. There were no rocket emplacements there. No one can understand why the Israelis just destroyed the downtown.

Likewise, Aljazeera did a street interview from south Beirut, which looked like the surface of the moon. Apartment buildings were collapsed for what looked like blocks, concrete hanging down like confetti. One woman said that she was brought up there but now lived in a town to the south, where her home had been destroyed. She said that the dust, the water, everything in Dahiya was precious to her as part of the Lebanese homeland, and that the Shiites of that region had not earlier all supported Hizbullah, but now they did. She said that they were going to insist on living there and supporting Nasrallah, would show forth steadfastness in the face of Israeli bombs. Others in the crowd were shouting angry slogans.

I don't think Olmert wiped out Hizbullah.

Guest Comment: On the Occasion of Uri Grossman's Death

Todd Hasak-Lowy

On the Occasion of Uri Grossman's Death

' About five years ago I had the good fortune of hearing David Grossman, the Israeli writer, speak at an event in San Francisco. Grossman related the following anecdote: he was traveling on a bus in Israel and heard an excerpt from his novel See Under: Love being read aloud on a radio program that playing over the bus' speakers. In this excerpt the mother of the protagonist is briefly described as having a block of wood tied to one of her feet. Grossman himself claimed he couldn't recall what this block of wood was doing tied to her foot, so when he got home he opened a copy of the novel he had written some years earlier to find the answer. What he discovered was that this woman, his creation, was quite short and that in order to reach the pedal of her sewing machine she needed this block of wood tied to the end of her leg. Grossman ended the anecdote by recalling how pleased he was with himself as a writer and a person in that moment. He saw this minor detail in his novel as little more than a sign of a certain empathetic generosity on his part. Somehow, in a manner that was neither preachy nor sanctimonious, Grossman ended the talk by encouraging us, as writers and thinkers and above all human beings, to be aware of those who need these blocks so that we might find a way to provide them.

I'm reminded of this anecdote often when I read and teach Grossman's work. Though this isn't the type of thing that one can easily say when writing scholarship, or even when working with a group of undergrads, I think Grossman is simply the most empathetic writer I've ever read. There is an acute sensitivity in his writing, a sensitivity for characters that clearly are not stand-ins for himself, which amazes and invigorates and even overwhelms me as a reader. This empathy runs across Grossman's work in an astounding range of genres. It is painfully evident in his 1991 novel, The Book of Intimate Grammar, where he carefully explores the tormented inner world of a similarly sensitive young adolescent who ultimately cannot survive in the aggressive and almost brutal world of 1960s Israel. In his numerous books for children, a more optimistic Grossman again and again demonstrates his profound awareness of what it means to live as a child with a limited understanding of the adult world.

And, of course, there are Grossman's important, almost heroic, works of non-fiction, in which he unapologetically puts before his often reluctant Jewish-Israeli audience nuanced portraits of the Palestinian and Arab other that see them and demand they be seen as nothing less than fully human. The last paragraph of Grossman's 1987 The Yellow Wind, which, not long before the outbreak of the first Palestinian Intifada, implored Israelis to address the inequities and injustices inherent in their occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, in many ways sums up what I see as motivating Grossman's writing in general:

Albert Camus said that this passage from speech to moral action has a name. "To become human." During the last weeks, and seeing what I saw, I wondered more than once how many times during the last twenty years I had been worthy of being called human, and how many people among the millions participating in this drama are worthy of it.

And so the news comes yesterday that one of Grossman's sons, Uri, was killed in Lebanon, just two days after Grossman, along with the Israeli writers Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, held a press conference urging the Prime Minister to reach a cease-fire agreement rather than expand Israeli military operations in Lebanon. In a long conflict with too many ironic, poignant, and purely tragic stories, this is the first one I can't get past. Few if any in this conflict deserve what they've gotten, but how is one to come to terms with a father burying his son, when this father has so courageously articulated the price of this conflict, who has done so in a manner far exceeding simple progressive liberal clichés, who has turned this pursuit into a sort of devastating poetry, who has managed to remind us again and again the need to be human in this conflict that obliterates both humanity and human beings?

With everything ongoing-the weary diplomacy conducted in the absence of any trust, the inevitable talk over possible early elections in Israel, the dizzyingly complicated analysis of who gained and who lost and where things stand now, the bitter accusations of who is to blame and who must be called to account, and, finally, the isolated and not so isolated lethal shots that will be fired from both directions despite the cease fire-it will be at once tempting and convenient to merely open tomorrow's newspaper to survey the latest bewildering developments of this nearly hundred year-old conflict. But maybe now's the time to stop, to really stop and think about how each death on every side draws a ring around itself to include another dozen or so people, family members and life-long friends, who never fully recover from their mourning. Maybe now's the time to realize, if you're willing to do the horribly simple math, that for some time now every Palestinian and every Israeli has likely found him or herself, and in many cases more than once, drawn reluctantly into someone's now obliterated circle, leaving a conflict between two nations of mourners. I don't know what exactly thinking and feeling these things will accomplish, perhaps such an exercise is just another instance of futile idealism. All I know is yesterday the person who least needed to have that ring drawn around him to know and feel what it must be like to live in desolate space of someone's permanent absence now finds himself on the inside, his wondrously humane empathy suddenly beside the point. '

Todd Hasak-Lowy

This is Juan Cole. Just to let readers know that Todd Hasak-Lowy is author of the impressive recent short story collection The Task of This Translator. I am grateful to him for permission to print this meditation here.

VL Day?

Patrick McGreevy writes from Beirut:

' VL Day?

It’s 11 pm in Beirut, and honking cars and motorbikes are cruising the Corniche while their occupants discharge Kalashnikovs into the black air shouting “Allahu Akbar.” If only we had electricity and lights, the triumph might be more believable.

This seems like a time warp: we heard similar but more full-throated demonstrations in support of Germany and Brazil during the weeks of World Cup matches that preceding the rude interruption of the war. Surely people here feel released, as from a bad dream, but “victory” is too good a word. It is as if our war, like this summer’s World Cup, ended with penalty kicks—each side pounding away at the other side’s innocent goal tender. Hezbollah’s noisy supporters say they won, but what a tainted triumph!

In American baseball, such an anticlimactic conclusion is impossible. The teams simply slog on indefinitely until one vanquishes the other. The reason the World Cup final cannot do the same, we are told, is that it is a global TV event that must conclude within the purchased time slot. Having the eyes of the world focused on an event changes it. The Battle of Lebanon was a rude little war that played like a blockbuster summer film. This, perhaps, was the fundamental mistake that Israel and its US backers made: they underestimated the articulateness of Lebanon—a multilingual country, connected to a global diaspora, with a history so compelling that novice and seasoned journalists are drawn to its stories by instinct.

Hezbollah’s tactics countered Israel’s brilliantly before the world’s gaze. As the vastly more powerful force, the IDF could have crushed Hezbollah, but only by conducting a genocide on the Shiite people of southern Lebanon who support its resistance. And genocide, on global TV, is the one sin Israel cannot survive. Hezbollah is a designer resistance force, shaped by repeated Israeli blows against Arabs—designed not simply to counter its powerful adversary’s field techniques, but to infiltrate its soul and seek its deepest pain. It finds this pain like a heat-seeking missile finds its warm target because Hezbollah’s resistance, too, is born of pain. This is the madness we confront.

Patrick McGreevy '

Cole on Majority Report

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Israel Kills 38 Civilians on Eve of Ceasefire
Hersh: Israeli Campaign Dress Rehearsal for War on Iran
250 Hizbullah Rockets Slam into northern Israel, Kill 1

Seymour Hersh says that sources knowledgeable about Israeli and Bush administration planning maintain that the Israelis laid out last spring in Washington and gained administration support for a plan for a bombing campaign against Hizbullah in Lebanon based on the Kosovo campaign. Moreover, the exercise was intended as a demonstration project and a preparation for a Bush administration war on Iran. The campaign against Hezbollah would have two major benefits. It would remove Hezbollah's rocket capability, which was a form of deterrence against Israeli or American bombing of Iran. And, what Israel learned from attacking Hezbollah would be useful in formulating tactics in the American assault on Iran.

Let me say this loud and clear, drawing on Pat Lang. Any US attack on Iran could well lead to the US and British troops in Iraq being cut off from fuel and massacred by enraged Shiites. Shiite irregulars could easily engage in pipeline and fuel convoy sabotage of the sort deployed by the Sunni guerrillas in the north. Without fuel, US troops would be sitting ducks for rocket and mortar attacks that US air power could not hope completely to stop (as the experience of Israel with Hizbullah in Lebanon demonstrates). A pan-Islamic alliance of furious Shiites and Sunni guerrillas might well be the result, spelling the decisive end of Americastan in Iraq. Shiite Iraqis are already at the boiling point over Israel's assault on their coreligionists in Lebanon. An attack on Iran could well push them over the edge. People like Cheney and Bush don't understand people's movements or how they can win. They don't understand the Islamic revolution in Iran of 1978-79. They don't understand that they are playing George III in the eyes of most Middle Eastern Muslims, and that lots of people want to play George Washington.

By the way, Hersh maintains that US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has at least some inkling of all this, which is one reason he hasn't been enthusiastically cheering on the Lebanon war.

I had this second hand, from someone who knows someone in the know. It confirms Hersh's account:

' Rumsfeld is very uneasy with the unquestioning support for the Israeli offensive because of the impact it will have on American troops in Iraq. His point to Bush and Rice is that Iraq's Shias will not stand by while their Lebanese Shia brothers are destroyed. He has pointed out to them -- to Rice and Bush -- that there are close family and political ties between the Moqtada al-Sadr family and the Musa al-Sadr and the close friendship between Maliki and Nawaf Moussawi, the foreign minister of Hezbollah. That Hezbollah worked to free the Dawa 17 at one point in its history was a surprise to Rice, as well as to Bush. With American casualties mounting in Iraq Rumsfeld does not believe we need to make enemies of the Shia. The demonstration of last week shook him -- and American commanders. '

If Hersh and my correspondent are correct, we are beginning to see an "India Office" effect in the US government. When Britain ruled India, the British Government of India often developed its own foreign policy and priorities that were not the same as London's Foreign Office. Rumsfeld does have Iraq interests for which he has to speak, however much he hates Hizbullah and Iran.

As for the Israelis, the Kosovo analogy is plausible, since Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has instanced Kosovo as justification for his actions. The irony is that the Israelis misunderstood Kosovo. Hizbullah is like the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), not like Milosevic's Serbs. If Wesley Clarke had bombed the KLA, the Kosovo war would have failed completely. More ironically, in its decision to expel the Shiite population from the area of Lebanon south of the Litani river, and to make nearly 1 million Lebanese homeless, the Israelis acted more like Milosevic himself than like NATO.

Hersh reports that Bush and the Israelis expected the rest of the Lebanese to turn on Hezbollah and police them for Tel Aviv and Washington, and they expected Sunni Arab powers like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan to help with curbing Hizbullah. Although Saudia condemned Hizbullah adventurism early on, the Saudis and others soon began calling for an immediate ceasefire once they saw the damage the Israelis were doing to the Lebanese infrastructure.

The Israeli attacks on the Lebanese infrastructure, and the disregard for civilian life in the urban bombing campaigns, were the biggest miscalculations of the war, in my view. They clearly would have the effect of weakening the Siniora government and of strengthening Hizbullah politically. They also had the effect of uniting Lebanese public opinion against Israel. In short, they were stupid strategy from a political point of view, and weren't of much use militarily, either, as Sunday's barrage of 250 rockets against Israeli cities by a still-defiant Hizbullah demonstrated.

In the end, Hizbullah is unbowed, and there is no early prospect of its being weakened. Although the Lebanese government is demanding that it disarm, no one can understand how they think they could make it, given the weakness of their army (can they do something Israel cannot?)

Israel is launching an immediate diplomatic blitz aimed at ensuring[Ar.] that Hizbullah is not allowed to re-arm. Since the re-arming would be done by Iran and Syria, who are not open to Israeli blandishments, it is hard to see how this will work very well. Nor is it clear that Hizbullah's armaments have been exhausted to begin with.

Al-Hayat draws on Defense News and other sources to conclude that Israel's carefully nurtured image of military invulnerability has been badly tarnished, with perhaps important downstream effects. This article suggests that the key lesson of the Lebanon War was that anti-tank weapons are back after two decades of innefectuality. The Russian RPG-29, in use by the Russian army since 1989, and the Iranian Tufan and Ra'd- T, all in Hizbullah's arsenal, succeeded in destroying a fair number of Merkava tanks and Israeli armored troop transports. (RPG = rocket propelled grenade). In contrast, Iraqi guerrillas fighting US Abrams tanks only had RPG-7s, and their shells just bounced off the tanks. The RPG-7s were largely useless when wielded by Palestinians against Israeli Merkava tanks, as well.

Hizbullah's successful use of a Chinese-designed guided missile to hit an Israeli ship must also give pause to anyone thinking of deploying the Fifth Fleet against Iran in the Persian Gulf (al-Hayat also says that there are problems with US minesweeping capability in the Gulf.)

Anthony D'Amato, a law professor at Northwestern U. analyzes the UN Security Council ceasefire resolution.

Naharnet/ AFP write:

' A U.N.-brokered ceasefire to end the month-old conflict in Lebanon came into force on Monday but intense fighting continued right up to the deadline for the guns to fall silent. In the first reaction to the truce, Israel Army Radio said the Jewish state's naval and air blockade will remain in effect for the present, Haaretz reported.

Israel launched an 11th-hour wave of air strikes on Lebanon and Hizbullah fighters unleashed a barrage of rockets just hours before the agreed "cessation of hostilities" took effect at 8 a.m. Beirut time (0500 GMT).

Israeli forces shelled areas around Tyre and Khiam in the war-battered south of the country, while combat jets flew over Beirut, dropping warning leaflets, and bombarded the ancient eastern city of Baalbek.

At least 38 Lebanese civilians and four soldiers were killed by Israeli fire Sunday as fighter jets kept up their deadly bombing in Beirut and across the country. Five Israeli soldiers were also killed in action. '

In one of the villages hit, Brital near Baalbak, Israeli planes collapsed 3 buildings and it is feared a lot of civilians were in them. Naharnet continues:

'
In one of the deadliest raids Sunday, at least 15 people were killed, including three children, by Israeli air strikes that hit eight buildings and a mosque in Beirut's southern suburbs, emergency services said . . .

At least eight people were also killed near Baalbek in eastern Lebanon, security officials said. '

The Lebanese state led by Prime Minister Fouad Siniora is using the $800 mn. in aid given it by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to help Shiite refugees from the south who are living in schools and makeshift shelters in Beirut and elsewhere. There is a race, al-Nahar suggests, between the government and Hizbullah for the loyalty and affection of this large displaced population, amounting to hundreds of thousands of persons.

Hizbullah rained 250 rockets down on Israel on Sunday, mostly without hitting much of anything. But they did kill one man (a Palestinian Israeli) and injured 52.

I'm a grizzled old bird by now, having lived through wars and riots and having lost friends to everything from revolution to AIDS. But this story about David Grossman's son being killed in the Lebanon war brought tears to my eyes. Grossman, a writer with a conscience, is a noble man. As a father with a son, I cannot imagine or understand, only share the horror.

Thousands of Americans protested the Lebanon War in Washington over the weekend.

63 Dead, 140 Wounded at Zafaraniyah
US Raids Ministry of Health

The Associated Press reports that after 7 pm on Sunday, Sunni Arab guerrillas suddenly attacked the Shiite Zaafaraniyah district of Baghdad. First they set off two car bombs in the neighborhood. Then another team, in the Dora district, fired up to nine rockets at Zafaraniyah. Among other things, the rockets hit three buildings, including a multi-story apartment building that collapsed as a result. The attack left at least 63 dead and 140 wounded, though one suspects those numbers will mount.

US troops have been engaged in a sweep of Dora, so it is possible that this attack was intended as a reprisal, hitting Shiite supporters of the Shiite government that unleashed the Marines on the Sunnis of Dora.

AP says,

' Muhanna Yassin, who lives in Zafraniyah, said the attack left the neighborhood "a total mess" with "bodies of the dead and injured scattered around in the streets — old, young, women and children."

"The ground shook underneath us and there was chaos everywhere," he said in a telephone interview. "Everyone was dazed and confused, looking for their families. Some children and grown-ups were crying. I can't even begin describing their state." '

Other violence, in Baquba, Mosul and elsewhere, is reported by Reuters.

Under threat of Turkish attack in the north, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki closed the Baghdad offices of the Kurdish guerrilla group, the PKK. Since the PKK doesn't have much of a presence in Baghdad, the gesture was a symbolic one. Turkish officials have cited Israel's attack on Hizbullah as a precedent for their coming after the PKK inside Iraqi Kurdistan. They accuse the PKK of striking at targets inside Turkey from their safe haven in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Iran-Iraq oil deal.

US troops swept into the ministry of health, a portfolio held by supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr, and made 7 arrests. The ministry is denying that the captured men are Mahdi Army fighters or are involved in kidnapping other Iraqis for ransom.

McGreevy: The War's Deathbed

Patrick McGreevy writes from Beirut:

The War’s Deathbed

' It is 3 am in Beirut. The war is scheduled to keel over and give up the ghost in five hours. Those of us attending the deathbed scene are full of questions and doubts. Might we finally grasp the purpose of this war in its concluding moments the way we find, in 19th-century novels, the meaning of a character’s life in the death-bed scene? Or might we learn that the war is as meaningless as it seems?

A few hours ago, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni announced that Israel will negotiate for the release of the two prisoners captured on July 12, something Hezbollah was ready to do 33 days ago. Was the capture of these soldiers the equivalent of George Bush’s weapons of mass destruction, a mere pretext for an operation to create a “new Middle East”? Both initiatives produced disasters for civilians, but did they achieve some hidden strategic objective too subtle for average people to grasp? Or are both of these wars of choice the purposeless catastrophes they appear to be? At least the battle of Lebanon has the possibility of passing away. The death watch continues.

At 2:45 pm on Sunday, Beirut endured twenty bombing attacks in the space of two minutes. Facing south from our balcony on the American University of Beirut Campus, the incessant explosions reminded me of a Fourth of July fireworks finale on steroids. I almost expected to see a glittering Star-Spangled Banner on the southern horizon. Of course, this was an experience brought to us by US-made ordnance. As the bombs strike the residential neighborhoods of southern Beirut again and again, it is strange that no UN resolution demands that the supplier of these weapons cease to deliver them to Israel. On Saturday, thousands of leaflets fell from the sky, littering West Beirut; they depicted Nasrallah poking his head out of a cedar tree and urged us to get “the destroyer of Lebanon” off of our backs.

When, a day later, Beirut experienced the most intense bombing of the war, did the Israeli psych-ops people expect us not to notice that the same country dropped the leaflets and the bombs? For all but the most subtle, that country seemed the obvious candidate for “destroyer of Lebanon.” During the deafening two minutes, children were screaming and we could see hundreds of birds, shaken from their roosts, taking flight simultaneously, in a completely random pattern that resembled a colossal swarm of bees. I suppose we hope that was the finale, and that the old war, now sated, can simply expire.

As we wait around the war’s deathbed, there are disturbing signs of life. Reports that Hezbollah may not accept what its cabinet ministers recently voted to accept. And then, in a CNN interview Sunday evening, Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak suggested that Israel should not be accused of breaking the cease-fire if it attacks vehicles that it suspects of transporting weapons to Hezbollah. If this is true, it means that Israel reserves the right to control Lebanon from the air, to treat it like the Gaza Strip. And we thought the patient was dying.

Israeli leaders seem desperate to claim some measure of victory. Shimon Peres predicted Sunday that Hezbollah will end the war “with its tail between its legs.” But this macho posturing was soon betrayed when he admitted “It’s not easy to handle this type of situation, as proven by what is happening in Iraq with the Americans with their 150,000 soldiers and a billion dollars a day of spending . . . “ Now, there is a damning comparison! Will Israeli leaders learn from it and come to the table ready to deal with Arab concerns, or will they pour good money after bad, continue their “defensive” operations, and watch the Levant go the way of Mesopotamia?

And if the war is indeed dead by the morning, can we bury it? My impression is that Lebanon, though defiant, is washed over by a sea of sadness, a feeling of emptiness, shocked again to see that people can cause such endless hurt. How can there be any sense of triumph? Killing Israeli civilians provided no protection for Lebanon. And what about the dead children of Qana and the roadways of the South? Can we bury them? Will they remain covered? Or will their grey hands and blank faces come to the surface, not to stare at us, but to prevent any possibility of forgetting? There are crests and troughs; but in plunging over some crests, it seems the very abyss opens, and you wonder if the ship will ever emerge. Into the plunge Lebanon goes, to test once more its buoyancy. '

Patrick McGreevy

Saving Baghdad Like We Saved Fallujah: Guest Comment

A reader who was in Iraq recently writes:

'[Baghdad:] . . . The city is virtually shut down, and the population suffers from collective trauma. The good people of Iraq did not deserve this. Bush Team paved the way for monsters to take over, and still they call it progress.

The security plan for Baghdad . . . was supposed to be a coordinated effort between Iraqi forces and the Americans. The two would join forces and secure the city neighborhood by neighborhood, and Casey said that Sadr City would be last. But, as so often happens in this place bereft of leadership, the Americans decided to go into Sadr City early without informing the Iraqis. Thus, the anger of Malliki to the attack. [Someone who] lives in Sadr City noted that the attack of the other day began at about 1:00 am, and was ferocious. The suspicion of many is that the Americans will save Baghdad like it saved Fallujah and Tel Afar.

But the real news is in Kurdistan. The people of that region are angry, very angry. Gas (benzene) is purchased on the side of the road in jerry cans, but the stations are empty. Gas in Irbil is more than $1.00/liter. In Chamchamal, angry young men rioted over the price of gas and burned a gas station. More protests are planned. Massoud [Barzani] announced on television that he is doing his best and if someone thought he could do better he should volunteer to try. In the meantime, any type of demonstration is now considered illegal in Kurdistan . . .

The grumbling is not confined to gasoline. Poor water and sewerage, especially in the Barzani governorates, is a source of frustration in Kurdistan. Also, still there is no electricity, and with temperatures hovering at 50 degrees C, people are naturally unhappy. But, most important, it's the economy. In Kurdistan the rich, mainly the families, get richer and the poor get stiffed with high prices of everything, food, gas, real estate, clothes, everything.

. . . The talk on the street is not demonstrations or protests. The talk is about revolution! No one takes it seriously . . . '

Jill Carroll on Her Captivity

The Christian Science Monitor is carrying a serial account by journalist Jill Carroll of her captivity in the hands of Iraqi guerrillas.

CSM is one of our best sources of world news, and everyone should consider subscribing, to make sure it stays around and we aren't left only with the newspapers of Rupert Murdoch and the Reverend Moon.

Excerpt:

"We drove to the second house, which appeared to be the home of one of the kidnappers.

They took me upstairs to the master bedroom. Within a few minutes an interpreter arrived, and an interrogation began.

They wanted to know my name, the name of my newspaper, my religion, how much my computer was worth, did it have a device to signal the government or military, if I or anyone in my family drank alcohol, how many American reporters were in Baghdad, did I know reporters from other countries, and myriad other questions.

Then, in a slightly gravelly voice, the interpreter explained the situation.

“You are our sister. We have no problem with you. Our problem is with your government. We just need to keep you for some time. We want women freed from Abu Ghraib prison. Maybe four or five women. We want to ask your government for this,” the interpreter said. (At the time, it was reported that 10 Iraqi women were among 14,000 Iraqis being held by coalition forces on suspicion of insurgent activity.)

“You are to stay in this room. And this window, don’t put one hand on this window,” he continued. “I have a place underground. It is very dark and small, and cold, and if you put one hand on this window, we will put you there. Some of my friends said we should put you there, but I said, ‘No she is a woman.’ Women are very important in Islam.”

Interviews with Jill, her family and colleagues (videos)

Jill answers questions from readers (video)

Khalilzad and Iran: Guest Comments

An informed observer writes:

' Ambassador Khalilzad made statements in Baghdad regarding Iran, perhaps for US and Western consumption and seemingly timed in relation to events in Lebanon, based upon this reported context:

“Privately, some senior U.S. officials are skeptical the Iranian government is doing more than providing money to select Shiite groups. Others insist Iran is providing weapons and training to some Shiite factions.” (AP)

The theories adduced as purposes for the alleged actions of Iran’s Government – “pressure,” “distraction” – do not make entire sense. The claims are inflammatory in the context of a tragically dangerous situation in Iraq.

The regime in Iran, or one or more parts thereof, is either doing something or they are not.

[Iran denied Khalilzad's charge and said unrest in Iraq is the fault of poor US policy-making.]

It is reported to be generally believed that the regime is providing funds for one or more of the Shia parties. Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim recently spent ten days in Tehran and Qom meeting with the senior leadership of the Iran government. Oil Minister Shahristani is in Tehran now meeting with counter-parts. Muqtada al-Sadr has been there, but not recently, as have others in the Iraqi leadership. There are clear personal and other relationships between the Iraqi Shia leaderships and those in high positions in the Iran Government, many resulting from years of residence in exile. There are clear identifications relating to shared religious doctrine. There is also a clear difference of political-philosophical views with respect to the participation of the clergy in government affairs.

At the moment, most intensely in Basra, there are disputes within the UIA involving SCIRI and the Sadr Movement, and the Sadr spin-off Fadhila, sometimes resulting in violent confrontations, relating to control of Provincial governments.

The remarks of the Ambassador are most clearly consistent with the position and supporting rhetoric of the Bush Administration with respect to the involvement of the regime in Iran in the war in Lebanon. As far as press and media reports show, there is little or no direct evidence of the involvement of the Iran Government in that war, except for a conventional wisdom belief that Hezbollah has been provided financial support of $100 million per year, and weapons which are transported to southern Lebanon through Syria. It is obvious that the advanced weapons deployed by Hezbollah have been purchased from, or provided by, someone. It is publicly known that the US Government provides the State of Israel with approximately $2 billion per annum of military assistance and weaponry. The Israel Air Force consists of US-made fighter aircraft. If Hezbollah were an instrumentality of the Lebanese Government, which it is by intention and demonstrable practice in the case of this war, there would be no legal difference under international law between the weapons contributions of the US Government to the State of Israel and any contributions made by the regime in Iran in Lebanon.

The President of Iran has clearly stated his and his Government’s position on the State of Israel and the nuclear fuel enrichment affair. Other than periodic expressed hopes that the situation in Iraq would become stabilized in the context of the Constitutional institutions that have been established, no public positions have been taken with respect to Iraq politics.

Unless there is more evidence, or a clearer, legitimate purpose, the Ambassador’s remarks in Baghdad regarding Iran appear to be irresponsible. The result of the remarks cannot possibly be positive for the US Government’s position in Iraq, which is probably declining from an already uncertain base.

One would have thought that, by now, it would have been determined that the way to deal with Muqtada al-Sadr and the Sadr Movement is not to attempt to “capture or kill” him and his followers. One would think, now that there has been a clear military defeat of the Israel IDF in Lebanon, that alternative strategies might be considered for dealing with Shaikh Nasrullah and Hezbollah.

Iraq is not proximate to Israel’s borders. From Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani to substantially all of those in the Iraqi government and the leaderships of the major parties, there is clear identification with the position of Shaikh Nasrullah and Hezbollah regarding the State of Israel, but no evidence that any of them intend to do anything serious about that situation.

In the case of Iraq, leave it alone would appear to be the obvious best policy.

It would seem especially odd for the US Government in Iraq to take the side of the loser in Lebanon.

If there is no evidence one way or the other, it is obvious that, notwithstanding the expenditure of more than $2 billion, the CIA and the DIA are not doing effective work in Iraq. '

Lebanon Accepts UN Ceasefire
Hizbullah Kills 24 Israeli Soldiers

Despite significant reservations, the Lebanese government on Sunday morning accepted the UN security council resolution.

Hizbullah leader Shaikh Hasan Nasrallah also indicated that his party would obey it if the Lebanese government accepted it.

I saw Michael Hudson on CNN saying that he thought the fighting would nevertheless continue for some time. He said that the government of Ehud Olmert would be under pressure to bring some sort of victory home, to burnish what was otherwise from the Israeli side an undistinguished and inconclusive war. Likewise, he said, as long as Israeli troops were occupying Lebanese soil, it is hard to imagine that Hizbullah would just give up its weaponry. Rather, Hezbollah will hit them.

So, the war will likely continue.

On Saturday, heavy fighting continued in the Shiite South, with Hizbullah responsible for the deaths of 24 Israeli soldiers. 5 died when Hizbullah hit a helicopter gunship.

Naharnet/ AFP write:

' The area around Khiam, along the eastern part of the border, came under intense artillery bombardment by Israeli forces to cover the advance of tanks, security officials said.

Israeli warplanes bombed five petrol stations in the southern port city of Tyre on Sunday, sparking a huge fire that threatened to engulf a nearby hospital, the hospital director told AFP.

Vehicles belonging to the civil defense service, the army and the fire brigade tried without success to reach the hospital to bring help but new air raids forced them to flee for cover.

Of the five petrol stations on fire in Tyre, two were in the immediate vicinity of the hospital, threatening the health of its patients, while the others were in the city's commercial centre.

"The flames are lashing the building, our ill and wounded patients are threatened with smoke inhalation," hospital director Jawad Najm told AFP by telephone. '

Fuel Crisis in Baghdad
Dozens of Bodies Found

The Sunni Arab guerrillas have long sought to cut Baghdad off from fuel. Al-Sharq al-Awsat/ AFP say that the strategy may be working. The current fuel crisis in Baghdad is virtually unprecedented. This report suggests that if it goes on, it could bring down Maliki's government.

Iraq's underground civil war continued on Saturday, with bodies showing up dead at Suwayra (12 in a crate) and Baghdad (15), plus scattered bombings and assassinations that brought the total number of dead to 50, according to AP. My experience is that such wire service counts tend to be low and more deaths are mentioned in the Iraqi press.

Reuters reviews some of the violence. Among the important events:

' MOSUL - A sniper attacked a police patrol, killing one officer and wounding another in Mosul, police said.

DIWANIYA - Gunmen assassinated a member of Iraqi intelligence in front of his home in Diwaniya, 180 km (112 miles) south of Baghdad, police said.

BAGHDAD - Two civilians killed and three wounded in a roadside bomb attack aimed at a police patrol in central Baghdad, police said. The attack took place on one of the city's main highways. . .

BASRA - Three die in a bomb blast in the southern city of Basra, 550 km (340 miles) south of Baghdad, police sources said. Iraqiya state television said the bomb was inside an electronics shop in the mainly Shi'ite city.

BALAD - Police said they had found the bodies of two civilians shot in the head and chest in Balad, 80 km (50 miles) north of Baghdad.

BAQUBA - Gunmen killed police captain Nuri Juad in Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.

BAQUBA - Seven policemen were wounded in a roadside bomb targeting their patrol in Baquba, police said. '

24 Iraqis were killed during a US military operation in Ramadi. On Friday, guerrillas fired a lot of mortar shells at US positions from buildings in Ramadi, including private homes and mosques, according to a military spokesman. Saturday's fighting represented the attempt of the US military to return precision fire.

Mayhem in Basra, from The Economist.

More on the Shia Crescent: Hashemi reviews Nasr.

Personal Message on Marjayoun

Dr. Khalil Mouchantaf writes from the US Northeast:

'Dear Mr. Cole,

Today I received very sad and shocking news. Three of the civilians who died out of the seven in the convoy escaping Southern Lebanon were from my mother's town of Marjeoun, a town that has been in the news recently.

I cannot find a way to express my grief but to write, write in a journal or maybe to someone who might understand.

The Israelis stormed violently into the town, destroying what is left of the fallen place. They were supposedly looking for Hezbollah operatives in my uncles' house, where my aunt and three young children live (he lives in St. Lucia earning a living). I have come to the realization that Israel looks at all of Lebanon and the Lebansese cvilians as Hezbollah operatives, without any disregard for children, women, men, human life or human dignity. I ask if these actions are not war crimes, then what is??

They have not only killed a thousand civilans, but they are killing people I know, people my family knows. Is this what America supports and sees as the "birth prangs" of the new Middle East Have Israel and the US really lost their moral compass? How can I ever be sympathetic to Israel's cause and right to exist and defend itself if it means systematically murdering civilians? And I ask all for what, two soldiers who were kidnapped Yes, I have lost the objectivity to see that what Hizbollah did is wrong, but so have millions of people inside and outside the Arab world. And can you blame them?

This war has claimed too many lives, including people who matter to me. Israel's actions are nothing short of war crimes, crimes against humanity. The Lebanese people will survive. '

Qaeda Operative in London Bomb Plot Escapes

' Senator Mark Pryor of Arkansas said the administration's "poor management" in Iraq "has created a rallying cry for international terrorists" and "diverted our focus, our military and more than $US300 billion . . . from the war on terrorism." Pryor said US ports, borders and chemical plants remain unsecured, emergency personnel lack critical resources and the military, including the National Guard, was stretched. "It's time for Washington to be tough and smart about the threats we face," he said. "Americans deserve real security, not just leaders who talk tough but fail to deliver." '[Quote from The Age but the URL seems to have changed so I referenced the original]

Not to mention poor management in Afghanistan. Is it really a good idea to allow $2.5 bn a year in opium and heroin production there? Why haven't Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri be caught? What is this about a "resurgence" of the Taliban? Would that have been possible if Bush hadn't run off to Iraq? And, why are the big threats to the US there people like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Usama Bin Laden, allies of the Reagan administration in fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s? The ways in which harebrained US schemes and use of rogue Muslim radical proxies back in the Cold War contributed to the current crisis are constantly forgotten. So too is Bush's virtual abandonment of Afhganistan as soon as he conquered it, in favor of his pet project of regime change in Iraq. Bush managed to establish al-Qaeda in Iraq,as a popular political party when back in the 1990s Baathist secular Arab nationalism had checked it in that country.

Dawn reports although Pakistan provided a clue that was important to putting the group in the UK under surveillance a year ago, recent UK-Pakistan cooperation was key as well. Britain alerted Pakistani authorities to the importance of Rashid Rauf, who holds both British and Pakistani citizenship but has recently been resident in Pakistan and is the father of one of the 23 plotters arrested by the British.

Pakistani sources say that when, fairly recently, Pakistan took Rauf into custody, he confessed to the details of the plot, especially the plan to mix liquid explosives on board.

But the British official narrative that is emerging says that the Pakistani arrest of Rauf was carried out by mistake or on unrelated grounds, and that it forced Scotland Yard to go ahead and arrest 24 members of the cell in London lest Rashid's arrest cause them to scatter.

Rauf was arrested briefly last summer in the UK under suspicion of being linked to the 7/7 subway bombings. When he moved back to Pakistan, MI5 alerted Pakistani authorities, who kept him under surveillance. Dawn adds:

' The links of the arrested suspect could not be confirmed, but the sources said intelligence agencies had put four Islamic organisations on the watch list, they included two UK-based outfits Al Mahajroon and Hizbul Tehrir, and two Pakistani organisations Lashkar-i-Taiba and Lashkar-i-Jhangvi. '

The News (Pakistan) says that Rauf himself traveled to Afghanistan and had links there. It also provides further details about arrests in Pakistan.

The LA Times reports that the head of al-Qaeda in Pakistan, Muti'ur Rahman (wanted for trying to assassinate the Pakistani president and prime minister) was linked to the cells that were planning to use liquid bombs to bring down 10 US passenger planes.

Muti'ur Rahman is one of 5 plotters who escaped the UK police dragnet, and is now a very wanted man.

The 40 persons arrested in Italy presumably had been in email or telephone contact with the plotters, or had affiliations to banned terror groups such at Lashkar-i Tayyibah.

Israeli Response to UN Ceasefire Call:
Invades with 30,000 more Troops, Races for Litani

The United Nations Security Council finally called for a cessation of hostilities between Israel and Lebanon late Friday.

A "cessation of hostilities" means that Hizbullah has to stop its attacks, but Israel doesn't have to stop its attacks or withdraw from Lebanon.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert responded to the resolution by promising to take it up (late) on Sunday but in the meantime to invade Lebanon with 30,000 more troops and to rush to the Litani river.

Olmert also decided to destroy the power plant providing electricity to the city of Tyre, depriving ordinary people of potable water, medical care, the ability to preserve food from spoiling. This move at this point in the conflict seems especially petty. Since the reports are that Hizbullah safe houses and caves have their own power generators, it is hard to see how hitting this plant helps the Israeli war effort, and I think it is a war crime.

The Israeli officer corps is apparently furious that the UN is now calling for a ceasefire of sorts, before they could accomplish their military goals. Gee, that is the problem with ceasefires, isn't it? Get in the way of further warmaking, if you pay attention to them.

The Israeli public, especially in the north where they have been taking daily rocket fire, is on the other hand rather less gung ho now. Approval among the public for how Olmert is handling the war has plummeted from 80 percent early on to 48 percent in a recent poll. Some 40 percent of Israelis disapprove of the war now. While hawks are saying that if he stops now, he is finished politically, the trend line of the polling suggests the opposite. If he doesn't find a way to stop the war soon, it looks as though his support will go on down to zero.

The Globe and Mail describes some other Israeli activities on the eve of "peace":

' Meanwhile, Israeli warplanes bombed southern Beirut and the south of the country again in the 31st day of violence.

In the far north, one of the last remaining bridges to Syria was destroyed in a strike that killed at least 12 people;

in the south, heavy fighting continued around the Christian town of Marjayoun, a key point overlooking the Litani River for Israeli artillery positions.

A convoy of hundreds of civilians and about 350 Lebanese soldiers and police, escorted by UN peacekeepers out of Marjayoun, was hit by several Israeli missiles when part of the convoy detoured from the approved route, apparently to avoid traffic jams. At least four people were reported killed and 40 others wounded.

Aid agencies tried again in vain to get supplies to cut-off towns south of the Litani River, and the mayor of Tyre warned the city would run out of food in two days. '

That's right. The Israelis bombed a civilian convoy attempting to obey their instructions, the departure of which had been coordinated with them through UNIFIL.

'In one of the most dramatic development in the fighting Friday, an Israeli unmanned plane fired at the convoy, which included a 350 joint Lebanese army and police force as well as 500 civilian cars. They left Marjayoun after hours of U.N. mediated negotiations which succeeding in receiving Israeli assurances for the convoy's safety.

The attack came as the convoy was en route from Jib Jannin to Kefraya in the south of the Bekaa valley, security officials said. They said most of the casualties were civilians.

"The Israeli forces had been told in advance of the convoy's passage, and had given it the green light," UNIFIL spokesman Milos Strugar said. '

The famed Israeli intelligence can't be much good if they don't know hundreds of civilians are heading out of the south at their orders, especially after UNIFIL told them about it. I'm afraid this further attack on civilians is more proof that the Israelis just don't care if they kill Arab civilians.

The Israelis launched 10 air raids on Baalbak, and hit south Beirut again.

As with every day, Hizbullah fired over a hundred rockets into northern Israel. They wounded some civilians with shrapnel. On Friday, they killed two Palestinian-Israelis with their rockets. It cannot be said too often that deliberately targeting civilians in war is a war crime.

Peace activists attacked the UNSC resolution as weak and favoring Israel, and criticized Olmert's decision to keep fighting for two more days.

Hizbullah is formidable. Some of the formidability comes from current National Security Council adviser Elliot Abrams, who gave the Iranians US TOWs in the 1980s, which Hizbullah has now inherited. Abrams perjured himself before Congress and shredded the constitution, and should be in jail.

Mark Joyner cartoon: Deterrence.

AIPAC says "Beirut is largely unscathed"!

Iraq: Kurdish-Shiite Struggle for Kirkuk Provokes Violence in Shiite South

Even though most sermons on Friday in Iraq, both Shiite and Sunni, denounced faith-based violence, tensions over religion continued to run high. In the wake of a massive bomb in the holy city of Najaf on Thursday, young Shiite nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr demanded that the Iraqi government dissociate itself from the United States. (Sadr tends to blame the US for such incidents. He not only says that US forces fail to stop such atrocities against Shiites, but often hints around that somehow the US is behind them.)

Angry Shiite crowds ransacked political offices of Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in several southern Shiite cities on Friday. Al-Ittihad, the PUK newspaper, carried an attack on Ayatollah Mustafa Yaqubi recently, blaming him for stirring up tensions between Shiite Arabs and Kurds in the northern oil city of Kirkuk. In Kut, 50 armed men attacked the HQ and burned some of its furniture. There was a demonstration by hundreds of Virtue Party members in Basra.

Al-Zaman reports that angry members of the Virtue Party attacked the party offices of bothe major Kurdish parties in Baghdad and other provincial capitals of the south on Friday. A demonstration was being planned for Hilla. Since the article appeared on Wednesday, excited crowds have attacked Kurdish political offices in Karbala, Nasiriyah and Kut. In Nasiriyah an armed group attacked the PUK HQ and burned the Kurdish flag it was flying. The local party there distributed leaflets demanding that the offending newspaper be permanently closed down.

Talabani expressed his regret for the newspaper article and called for a calming of the situation. A Virtue Party spokesman, Shaikh Sabah al-Sa`idi warned about the consequences on the street of such a defamation of Shiite religious leaders. He met with Talabani, who is also the president of Iraq, on Friday. Talabani denied that he or his political offices had had any prior notice that the al-Ittihad newspaper was going to attack Ayatollah Yaqubi that way "and this despite the bitterness that every Kurd felt about some of the phrases employed in the communique attributed to" the ayatollah.

Reuters says that Talabani's statement was enough to convince the demonstrators in Basra to go home.

The oil fields of Kirkuk can produce half a million barrels a day under good circumstances, a pretty sum at today's prices. Kirkuk is a city of roughly 600,000. About half the population is Kurdish, about a third is Turkmen, and the rest is Arab. (The Kurdish proportion is growing rapidly as Kurds flood into the city, many as returnees but some as new immigrants). Kurds hope that the growing Kurdish majority in the province will allow them to win a December, 2007, referendum on whether Kirkuk should join the Kurdistan Regional Confederacy (the united administration of Irbil, Dohuk and Sulaymaniyah provinces). Some Arabs are locals, but many were brought to Kirkuk by Saddam Hussein as part of an "Arabization" project. Many of the immigrants were from the Shiite south and are followers of the teachings of Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr (d. 1999). The Sadrist movement he began has two major branches, that of Muqtada al-Sadr (his son) and the Fadhila Party (Virtue Party) of Ayatollah Muhammad Yaqubi. Many of the Turkmen in Kirkuk are also Shiites, and many of them are also Sadrists.

The Arabs and the Turkmen mostly oppose the annexation of Kirkuk by the Kurds. Kurdish anxiety about whether they will be able to pull off this important addition to their semi-autonomous confederacy probably lay behind the attack on Yaqubi, who rejects the idea.

As the December, 2007 date approaches for the Kirkuk referendum, such ethnic and sectarian violence over the isssue is likely to increase. As the events of Thursday and Friday showed, the Kirkuk controvery will not stay local.

More Shiite unrest in Basra involving Fadhila:

Al-Zaman reports that informed sources told it yesterday that an Iraqi army patrol discovered hundreds of katyusha rockets and mortars and firearms manufactured in Iran buried in three places in the Hurra district of the Umm Qasr quarter, Basra.

Friday, Basra was the scene of firefights between followers of the Shiite leader Sayyid Mahmud al-Hasani al-Sarkhi of Karbala and followers of Ayatollah Muhammad Yaqubi of Najaf. An American official once said in the press of al-Hasani al-Sarkhi, ' "He is a mixture of a criminal and a lunatic who believes he has a hotline to God ... He had set up checkpoints in Karbala to fleece money out of people.' When he was criticized in the Iranian press recently, his followers burned down the Iranian consulate in Basra.

Al-Hasani al-Sarkhi and Yaqubi have been having a shouting match over who, between the two of them, is most learned. Al-Zaman says its sources tell it that followers of al-Sarkhi attacked offices of the Fadhila Party (which regards Yaqubi as its spiritual guide). There were deaths and injuries among activists on both sides as a result of these clashes. The security atmosphere in the city had already become tense because the local governing council had rejected the attempt of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to deprive it of security responsibilities in favor of the federal troops. On Friday, al-Maliki refused to meet a delegation of members of the Basra provincial governing council who came up to Baghadad in hopes of dialoguing with him.

Shapiro Guest Editorial: ' What will Israel Do?

What Will Israel Do?

by Adam Shapiro

' Each day and night of the week I have been here, I have heard and felt the impact of Israel’s advanced weaponry as it crashes into buildings, roads, bridges and other infrastructure of Beirut. But it is not only concrete and steel that is hit; it is also Lebanese men, women and children, such as the dozens who were killed in the Cheyyah neighborhood a few days ago.

This week, Lebanese, Palestinian and international activists here in Beirut have been meeting and planning a response to Israel’s aggression against Lebanon. Not that we have military technology, or a huge force field to repel the missiles, at our disposal. What we who are unarmed, who believe in strategic nonviolence as a strategy to overcome brute military force, have at our disposal is determination, moral ground to stand on, and a fundamental belief that our human and political rights must be claimed and asserted. This is particularly so in the face of an aggressive force that destroys life and limb and shows no mercy for human rights, human dignity and the ability of people to live on their land.

In order to act, we have come together to bring a civilian convoy of relief aid to villages in the southern part of Lebanon. Some of the villages there have been virtually erased from the map, as Israeli planes and artillery bombard people’s homes, fields and crops. There are still civilians hiding from the daily pounding and remaining in their villages. They stay because they are old, or infirm, or poor, or because they refuse to leave their land. And Israel has prevented aid from reaching these people – international agencies that coordinate their aid relief with Israel have been told they will not be safe if they try to move. The whole area south of the Litani River has been declared a no-driving zone.

Our convoy, and other actions to follow, will challenge Israel’s dictates to the Lebanese people as to what they can and cannot do on their own land. This challenge will be made by those who have nothing with them but food and medicine and by people who will say to the advancing and bombing Israeli army, “Leave our country and stop killing our children.”

The choice is up to Israel. Will it bomb this convoy like it bombed convoys of civilians fleeing their homes in the south just a couple of weeks ago? Will it bomb the hundreds of civilians like it did those who were hiding in a building in Qana? Will it attack this aid effort the way that it has hit international and Lebanese aid agencies? Will it aim its fire at international citizens here to help as it did when it killed foreign UNIFIL observers despite knowing full well who they were?

This will be just the first of many such challenges to Israel. The choice of action is Israel’s, but the world must watch. Because Israel cannot say it did not know, and the world cannot pretend this is not happening in Lebanon.

-----

Adam Shapiro is a co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement and is currently in Beirut, Lebanon.
'

The Pakistan Connection

Pakistani police on Thursday arrested a number of UK Muslims within Pakistan who were also suspected of involvement in the "Liquid Bomb Threat."

British authorities say that they have been investigating the group behind the airplane bombing plot for "about a year." The Scotsman says that the investigation began in 2005.

US authorities were only told about some details two weeks ago, apparently. It may be that the British counter-terrorism community learned its lesson from the loose lips of the Bushies in summer of 2004. I argued then that from what we could tell from open sources, it seemed likely that the Bush administration played politics with information about a double agent in Pakistan who was helping monitor a London al-Qaeda cell. It seems likely that the election-year leak allowed budding terrorists like Mohammad Sadique Khan to escape closer scrutiny, and so permitted the 7/7/05 London subway bombings to go forward.

This time, the MI5 and MI6 and the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) may not have told Washington everything.

The Financial Times has an interesting observation I haven't seen elsewhere:

' British security officials suspected the innovative use of liquid explosives smuggled on board could have evaded airport detection devices. They said the method of attack, if used to blow up an aircraft over the ocean on a flight from the US to the UK, could potentially have been used repeatedly because its detection would have been all but impossible after the event.

One official said: “We were very lucky to have acquired the intelligence about the modus operandi of the attacks. If we hadn’t got the intelligence, they probably would have succeeded and there would have been little or no forensic evidence showing how they had done it. The modus operandi could have made waves of attacks feasible.”

British police had liaised closely with US law enforcement agencies for some time, although US officials said they learnt the intelligence pointed to threats against specific US airlines only in the past two weeks. '

So how did we find out about this plot, and the deadly mode of operation, which might otherwise have been so hard to detect? The investigation was kicked off by an arrest in Pakistan "last year." (AP says the arrest in Waziristan was "a few weeks ago", but I think AP is confusing the contribution of some recent arrests to the case with the initial capture of the key informant a year ago).

Most of the investigation was carried out in the UK, but the Pakistanis are said to have provided "an important clue."

AP says:

' A Pakistani intelligence official said an Islamic militant arrested near the Afghan-Pakistan border . . . provided a lead that played a role in ``unearthing the plot.''

So this capture takes place roughly June, 2005.

Amjed Jaaved explained at The Nation on June 28 this year that:

' Pakistan has deployed over 80,000 troops in the "no-go tribal areas" (ilaqa ghair) along the border with Afghanistan to forestall inward and outward movement of Al-Qaeda's or other organisations' fighters.

Pakistan lost about 600 soldiers in operations against the militants - Pakistan's loss is more than the total casualties suffered by the coalition and Afghan forces in Afghanistan. Pakistan has handed over 700 Al-Qaeda fugitives to US authorities.

Pakistan's sincere cooperation with the US intelligence agencies is proving more fruitful. Suspected satellite telephone transmissions, e-mails and other internet traffic are being tracked. '

AP reports that ' "two or three local people'' suspected in the plot were arrested a few days ago in Lahore and Karachi. '

So I figure the guy they catch up in Waziristan or Quetta in summer 2005 rolls over on small cells in Karachi and Lahore. The Interservices Intelligence puts these two cells under email and telephone surveillance, and lo and behold they hare having very interesting conversations with some friends in London and Birmingham. The ISI alerts the UK, and there you have it.

Then a few days ago, the Pakistani police pick up two or three cell members in Karachi and Lahore. Why? There are some reports that the arrests in Pakistan precipitated (or were coordinated with) the British arrests, since the officials in the UK were afraid that the UK cell members would go underground once they knew their colleagues in Pakistan were compromised.

The only circumstance that I can imagine that would cause the Pakistani authorities to move in that way is that the Lahore and Karachi cells were planning to do something very violent in the very near future.

Dawn, cited at the beginning of this entry, says:

' Officials said intelligence agencies had lately arrested a number of Central Asian militants who had provided information on planned attacks on the US and British interests. A pre-dawn raid in June had led to the arrest of Balochistan chapter chief of Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, Usman Kurd.

The officials said clues from these suspects led the authorities to the militants arrested on Thursday. '

The Scotsman is also saying that the UK plotters were "days" from swinging into action.

If this operation is as advertised, then it underlines again the importance of plain old fashioned counter-terrorism and police work. An army of 136,000 men in the field can't stop bombs from going off in Iraq every day. What stopped the liquid bomb plot was something superior, a tool fitted to the task.

John Tirman draws six lessons from the affair.

Billmon.

Israeli Jets Kill 11, Wound 11 in Sunni North

Naharnet roundup for early Friday morning (summarizes original sources plus AP & AFP):

' Israeli jets pounded Beirut's southern suburbs and two border crossings in north and east Lebanon early Friday, killing at least 11 people and wounding 11 others . . . The casualties were near the Abboudiyeh border crossing into Syria where Israeli jets struck twice at a busy bridge, security officials said.

At least 20 explosions also reverberated in central Beirut as thick black smoke rose from the suburb of Dahieh . . .

At U.N. headquarters in New York -- amid talk a deal was imminent on a permanent halt to hostilities -- Russia lost patience and presented its own draft resolution calling for a 72-hour humanitarian truce. However, Israel quickly rejected it.

In the south, Israeli forces which took over the border town of Marjayoun Thursday, agreed to release 350 members of a joint army and police force who were being held at the army barracks there.

Israeli fighter bombers shot missiles at the Haita bridge leading to the Abboudiyeh crossing in the Akkar plain, near the border with Syria, and returned for a second strike when residents had gone onto the bridge to inspect the damage. . .

There is now only one road into Syria from Lebanon still open for foreigners and locals wishing to flee the violence.

Thursday evening, Naharnet had reported:

' missiles from Israeli helicopter gunships blasted the top of a historic lighthouse in central Beirut in an apparent attempt to knock out a broadcast antenna for Lebanese state television. . . '

[Update & corr.]This was the first Israeli strike on West Beirut. Hizbullah leader Hasan Nasrallah had earlier threatened that any attack on downtown would bring retribution on Tel Aviv. The lighthouse wasn't downtown, but was well beyond the 'security perimeter' of Hizbullah in south Beirut and Arabic cable television speculated whether this attack would set Nasrallah off.

More from Naharnet on Thursday's events::

' In Ibl el-Saqi, a village about 3 km east of Marjayoun, the mayor said nearly all residents had fled to the north. "They all left this morning. There was very intense shelling last night," said Riad Abou Samra. But it seemed fewer and fewer areas of Lebanon were safe from the threat of Israeli attacks, including the relatively untouched heart of Beirut. Hundreds of families were leaving the 3 areas in Beirut's southern suburbs, after the warning, some in cars and others on state-owned buses to the Armenian quarter of Bourj Hammoud further north. . .'

Former DIA head for the Middle East Pat Lang makes fascinating and experienced observations on the military side in the deep south:

' I hear that the Israelis have been engaged so far with "village reserves," and that they have not yet met the standing forces of HA. This echeloning of categories of forces sounds a lot like the Viet Minh/NVA/VC politico-military set up. Other revolutionary armies?

This is not guerrilla war. Forget that. This is positional warfare waged using field fortifications as the base and pivot so that a heavier force advancing into the "grid" of the defense can be engaged and defeated by attrition. So far, they are doing quite a job. A force in the process of evolution is what I would call HA [Hizbullah]. '

Then there is this with further analysis of points made by Zeev Schiff on Hizbullah's hidden bunkers (with electricity) and resiliency and professional comportment (in a way trained by the Israeli army (conflict) as much as by Iran (friendship).



Did Bush overrule Condi on support of continued Israeli bombing? Was she "furious" with the Israelis when the Qana massacred torpedoed her diplomatic mission to the region?

Did Cheney, Rumsfeld, Elliot Abrams and other neocons pressure Israel to open another front against Syria as part of the war on Hizbullah? Did the Israeli political and military elite tell the neocons they were nuts?

Larisa Alexandrovna asks if the Lebanon War is a prelude to action against Iran.

The Right blogosphere is all agog about the news that a Reuters photographer photoshopped a picture of the Israelis bombing Beirut to put in some more smoke or something. That was dishonest and condemnable. But do the rightwingers really think that the Israelis haven't inflicted massive damage on Lebanon with bombing? Here are large numbers of undoctored pictures for them (warning: graphic!) since they want the unadorned truth.

Hizbullah's rocket strategy.

Why Israel is losing.

Najaf Bombing Kills 34, Wounds 122

A radical Sunni Arab group claimed responsibility Thursday for a horrific bombing in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, near the shrine of Ali. The bombing came during a holy day pilgrimage, and succeeded in deeply angering the inhabitants of Najaf.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says the the Najaf police chief has revealed that the bomber's aim was to blow up the shrine of Ali, the son-in-law and cousin of the Prophet Muhammad.

Look for expressions of Shiite anger over this incident, combining with anger over Israel's war on the Shiites of Lebanon.

Shiite cleric and prominent political leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim called Friday morning for Shiite local militias to guard against terror attacks like this one:

' Shiite leader Abdelaziz Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the pillars of the coalition government, demanded the right to form neighbourhood defence committees.

"The recurrence of such criminal acts confirms the perpetrators are takfiris (Sunni extremists), Baathists and the Saddamists who are aiming their dirty sectarian war against the descendants of the Prophet Mohammed," he said. '

Al-Hakim's plan is the opposite of the one urged by the United States, which is trying to clean out militias from key neighborhoods in Baghdad.

Meanwhile, a constitutional crisis. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki had announced that he was stripping the provincial governing council of Basra of its security portfolio. Security is collapsing in the southern port city, oil exports through which account for the only income the Iraqi government has. The governing council has declared that it will not relinquish the security portfolio.

The stage is set for a contest between the central government's armed forces, including the 10th Division of the army, and the Shiite militias that support the provincial government.

"A String of attacks that will continue and become stronger"

The failure of the Bush administration to take the threat of Bin Laden and Zawahiri seriously and to capture them continues to leave Americans and others at risk.

British authorities have arrested 21 members of a terror cell, apparently British-born or British-bred persons of Pakistani or South Asian origin. They were planning to hijack 6 to 10 American planes at Heathrow Airport in London, and to bring on board liquid-based explosives that they would mix while sitting in their seats.

Regular readers know that I believe that Ayman al-Zawahiri has been recruiting terrorists in Britain, using al-Qaeda-affiliated radical Pakistani groups such as Lashkar-e Tayyiba or Jaish Muhammad. Al-Zawahiri had in his possession the suicide statement tapes of Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer. Many UK Muslims of South Asian origin are from Mirpur in Kashmir, so these Kashmir-oriented affiliates of al-Qaeda have special appeal to them. (South Asian Muslims tend to feel that Kashmir was illegitimately grabbed by India and is being oppressed by a Hindu state.) Why did al-Zawahiri have these tapes in his possession, and why was he commenting on them?

On 7/7, 2006, Zawahiri released the final tape of Shehzad Tanweer: Tanweer said,

"What you have witnessed now is only the beginning of a string of attacks that will continue and become stronger." . . . Tanweer says in a Yorkshire accent on the film that attacks will continue "until you pull your forces out of Afghanistan and Iraq".

Even if this cell is not directly connected to Zawahiri, that he and Bin Laden can come on television and the internet and continue to encourage copycate al-Qaeda-style attacks is a huge security problem that needs to be solved much more urgently than the problem of which clans rule the small city of Ramadi in Iraq.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have contributed to the radicalization of second-generation UK Muslims. They oppose those wars by a large margin. Some 80 percent of UK Muslims oppose the Iraq War, and only 10 percent approve of it. The Israeli treatment of the Palestinians is also a matter of great concern to them, and a radicalizing factor for young people.

Only 1 percent of UK Muslims believe that the 7/7 bombings were "right." But 13 percent of UK Muslims (who are about 1.6 million persons in a population of 60 million) believe that the 7/7 bombers are martyrs. Another 16 percent believe that while their action was wrong, their cause was just.

On the other hand, 56 percent of UK Muslims think that their government is not doing enough to combat extremism, and nearly half want surveillance of mosques. About a third say they would be proud if a family member joined the British police. The community is clearly deeply divided, with a minority attracted by extremism and a majority that is very worried about it and wants something done.

More Bodies Found in Shiyah Rubble
Hizbullah Kills 15 Israeli Troops
Hizbullah Accepts Leb. Gov. Plan

Shaikh Hasan Nasrallah, Secretary General of the Hizbullah Party, made a long videotaped statement released on Wednesday.

Nasrallah said he approved of the plan passed by the Lebanese cabinet headed by PM Fouad Siniora, to send 15,000 Lebanese troops down south to secure the border region for Lebanon. Nasrallah threatened to make Lebanon a graveyard for Israeli soldiers on Lebanese soil. And he called on the Palestinian-Israelis of Haifa to leave the city (presumably in preparation for Hizbullah intensively bombing it).

French President Jacques Chirac is threatening to present an independent French draft proposal for arriving at a ceasefire between Israel and Hizbullah, if the US continues to obstruct this effort. Chirac says that Lebanese and Arab concerns that the initial US-French draft proposal gave away the store to the Israelis should be taken seriously.

Events of Wednesday in the Israeli war on Lebanon:
NaharNet morning roundup:

' An Israeli strike on the Ain al Hilweh camp in the port city of Sidon early Wednesday killed at least two people and wounded 15, including five children, medics said. . . '

About one third of the deaths in this war have been children under 12 years of age. [One Israeli shell hit the amusement park at Sidon, an obvious hotbed of terrorism.]

' Another strike targeted the house of Hizbullah political member Hassan Sader in the Bekaa Valley town of Mashghara, security officials said. Sader, his wife and his five children died under the rubble when their four-story building collapsed in the bombing, they said.

Fighter-bombers also made three raids in the Akkar highlands bordering Syria in north Lebanon, pounding roads and the Arqa bridge which had already been destroyed in air raids last week . . .

So many bodies have been being pulled out of buildings collapsed by Israeli air raids that the civilian death toll is rising alarmingly. In retrospect it is now clear that over 70 persons were killed on Monday, among the highest one-day tolls.

The midday roundup for Wednesday from NaharNet:

' Meanwhile, additional bodies were pulled out from under the rubble of a building in Beirut's southern district of Shiah, destroyed Monday by an Israeli airstrike, raising the death toll to 41, security officials said. The number of wounded in that attack are 61, they added. . .

Also in the Bekaa, an airstrike cut the main Baalbeck-Homs road where it runs near the village of Qaa, severing one of the few remaining links connecting the country with the outside world. . . '

AFP says that Israel launched a new land offensive:

' Ground troops backed by armoured cars moved into south Lebanon late Wednesday from Israel's northeastern panhandle, the privately run Channel 10 television said. . . "Our forces are currently carrying out a limited operation against Hezbollah positions in Khiam from which they fired more than 60 Katyusha rockets against the town of Kiryat Shmona and the panhandle," the [Israeli] spokesman said. . .

Lebanese police said around a thousand shells struck the Khiam area. . .

Further west, fierce clashes were raging between Israeli ground troops and Hezbollah for control of a strategic hilltop overlooking the southern port of Tyre, Lebanese police said. Troops backed by tanks were advancing on the hilltop known as Al-Hardan, near the village of Jibbain, some five kilometres (three miles) from the border, the police said. '

In these clashes, Hizbullah killed 15 Israeli soldiers and wounded 38. It is the highest one-day total of the war.

Hizbullah fired another 100 or so small katyusha rockets at northern Israeli towns Wednesday. But they don't appear to have injured or killed anyone or even to have done significant property damage. These rockets cannot be targeted with any precision, and most lack the firepower of a single Israeli artillery shell. Some katyushas fell on the Palestinian West Bank. Evacuation of Israeli populations in the north continued, according to satellite television. The Israelis fired 1,000 shells at Khiam alone on Wednesday.

The other casualties of war are businesses and the economy, the Daily Star says:

' The Israeli offensive against Lebanon, now in its fourth week, has destroyed more than 900 small- and medium-size enterprises, officials say, with an estimated $200 million in material damage. In Beirut's southern suburbs, which have borne the brunt of the Israeli air strikes, traders said that over 300 shops and establishments have been razed. "Nearly all shops and establishments in all the villages in the South that are close to the Israeli border received direct hits from the artillery and planes," one merchant said. The Council for Development and Reconstruction (CDR) said in its second report on the subject that the total cost of material damages were close to $2.5 billion, including bridges, roads, public utilities, industrial plants and private establishments. '

Arab satellite television showed workers pulling crushed and bloody bodies, including children, from the rubble of the building collapsed by an Israeli air raid on Monday:

' They were together at the time of the Israeli strike. Their bodies now lie next to each other at the same cemetery, all covered in white cloth, placed in plastic bags and wrapped in Lebanese flags. "The martyr child Hussein Ali Wehbi," reads the writing in black over the bag wrapping a small dead body. Next to him were 15 corpses from the Remaiti family which owned the residential building levelled by Monday's attack on the Shi'ite Muslim Shiyah district in Beirut's southern suburb. . . Behind him, dozens of mourners, chanting "Death to America" and "Death to Israel", marched to lay the dead at their final resting place. '

Shiyah is not a Hizbullah stronghold. Most people there vote for the more middle class, moderate Amal Party. Or did.





Ahmad Samih Khalidi on the Israeli war as a threat to the existence of Lebanon.

Susie Madrak rules.

A negotiator with Hizbullah.

Please support the Majority Report at Air America. It is in danger of being cancelled.

Najaf Bombed
60 Percent of Voters Oppose War.

Dozens of police were wounded and some may have been killed by a suicide bombing in the holy city of Najaf. Najaf has the shrine of Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, and if anything ever happened to it, all hell would break loose.

3 US soldiers were killed in the turbulent al-Anbar province.

60 percent of Americans are against the Iraq War, and 48 percent believe that the US cannot win.

One man was killed and others injured at a northern demonstration against fuel shortages and generally being neglected by the Iraqi government with regard to services.

Cheney for Lieberman
With Apologies to John Donne

Lieberman's selfishness in risking splitting the Democratic vote by running as an independent is breathtaking. He has proved that he is not a Democrat. He thinks he is an island, but no one is.

And, when your most prominent defender is Dick Cheney, you're not only not a Democrat, you're not even a moderate Republican. Cheney is afraid that Lieberman is a clod washed into the sea, which will start an avalanche that will diminish a whole continent-- the continent of war.

The Republican Right is so cocky from being in power all these years, they think that the Connecticut vote represents an opportunity for them to tag the Democrats as weak on defense. They have no idea what a tidal wave is about to hit them. The American public is tired of being taxed, both in Washington and at the pump, for Bush's failed policies. Lieberman's loss isn't a photo opportunity for them.

The Republican senators and congressional representatives are all diminished by Lieberman's defeat.

We say to Karl Rove:

Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

Ghaziyah, Shiyah, Bombed, with civilian Casualities
Israeli Civilians Shelled, Evacuated from North

The Israeli air force hit civilians at Ghaziyah in the south on Monday, killing 14. When the victims' families and friends held a funeral procession on Tuesday, the Israelis hit them again, killing 6 more innocent civilians. (This terror tactic, where you kill people and then kill their funeral party later, as well, is commonly used by the Baathist insurgency in Iraq).

The Israelis killed another five innocents, these being fruit packers and truckers near the border with Syria.

In the south, the Israeli invaders fought hard battles as they moved as much as 7 miles into Lebanon, losing two reservists in firefights with the formidable Hizbullah.

So the Israelis warned the southern Shiites that they should flee north, otherwise these ordinary civilians would be considered fair game. So thousands flee north to Beirut and go to schools and other shelters in Shiite districts like Shiyah. So then the Israelis bomb Shiyah. If they were going to be bombed anyway, they may as well have stayed home.

Israel has effectively cut South Lebanon off from the rest of the country, having destroyed roads and bridges, etc. Aid workers have been forced to leave the area. The Israelis have declared southern Lebanon a "no-drive" zone, promising to kill anyone who drives around a vehicle. This policy would make it difficult for aid workers to truck in grain and other foodstuffs and medicine. So, they have just left.

The Israelis also bombed a Palestinian refugee camp. The nascent Israeli military ethnically cleansed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948, expelling some 100,000 from their ancestral homeland north into southern Lebanon, where they were reduced to living penniless and in squalor in camps in someone else's country. They have grown to 400,000, though some demographers suspect that half that number has gone off to Europe, where they cannot get work visas and so spend their days visiting parks and riding the subway.

The Israelis seem to have a list of old scores to settle, and are taking advantage of the war to settle some vendettas. Had anyone charged that Israel was attacked from refugee camp in Lebanon? This is just opportunism (like the whole war).

Hizbullah rained over a hundred katyusha rockets on northern Israel again on Tuesday, forcing the evacuation of Israeli towns in the north near the border. The Israeli army is frustrated at not having been able to stop the rocket attacks, the number and force of which seem undimmed despite Israel's massive air raids and its invasion of south Lebanon. The Israelis also suspect that Iran and Syria are finding ways of re-arming the guerrilla movement. I don't find this plausible. I think it is more likely that Hizbullah just had made excellent preparations for this war, and had a lot of munitions hidden away.

Dennis Perrin on Lebanon.

Another Beirut Blog

Chomsky at Finkelstein.

A Lebanon diary by an Augustinian friar.

What is wrong with American news.

Justin Raimondo endorses Daniel Levy's warning against "creative destruction."

Maliki/US Military Rift over Bombing Sadr City
33 Dead in Iraq bombings, Assassinations

Al-Hayat writes: A series of bombings shook Baghdad on Tuesday, killing at least 24 Iraqis. AP is reporting Iraq-wide deaths at 33, with twice that number wounded. Reuters has details of the violence, which including bombings at Shurja Market and a bank robbery netting $4000.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki criticized the American military for its bombing of Sadr City, saying that this attack on the Mahdi Army could endanger the reconciliation process.

Wire services reported that al-Maliki said,

' "It was conducted without the agreement of the government and it does not match the current national reconciliation environment in the country."

The raid on Monday left three people dead, including a child. The US insisted it had backed up Iraqi forces to detain "individuals involved in torture cell activities". '

His statement specifically deplored the killing of civilians in the operation. Al-Hayat gives more of al-Maliki's speech: "I had ordered that no operation should be implemented in Sadr City because we in the government are preparing for a national reconciliation effort, as a way of strengthening the political process, especially since all the diverse political parties will have the opportunity to reply."

Maliki was elected prime minister with support from members of parliament loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr and the Mahdi Army.

7,000 US troops have been deployed in Baghdad in a new effort to impose security on the turbulent city and to put an end to the militias that rule much of it. Thus the attack on the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr in East Baghdad. The US will also attempt to curb the Badr Corps paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Washington sees both militias as tied to Iran. (Cole: Badr yes, Mahdi Army, not so much.)

US Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad expressed his belief that Iran will exploit the war in Lebanon to spread more turmoil in Iraq, and charging that there are Iranian forces in Iraq. (Cole: Neither allegation makes any sense. Iran wants a stable, Shiite-majority Iraq with the Shiites in charge. It is the Sunni Arabs who are trying to destabilize the situation. And, I'll believe there are Iranian forces in Iraq when Iranian military men are captured there. If Badr Corps is so pro-Iranian, why would Tehran need to risk putting Persian speakers into Iraq. Makes no sense.)

Two companies of guerrillas attempted recently to cut off Baghdad from its southern, Shiite hinterland by cutting the road between the southern Shiite city of Kut and Baghdad. The guerrillas were tracked down and 45 of them killed by Iraqi police. Two survived to be captured.

Borzou Daragahi of the LA Times argues that the plan of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim for a 9-province provincial confederacy in the Shiite south of Iraq is tantamount to a partition plan. He reports that Shiite politicians are increasingly talking about the need for such a partition, and are thinking of the Tigris as a border that could demarcate Sunni Arab West Baghdad from Shiite East Baghdad. (Shiites should be careful, since this plan implies that they would lose Kadhimiyah). Al-Hakim clearly envisages deploying the Badr Corps along the resulting Sunni-Shiite border to stop the infiltration of bombers, just as the Kurdish Peshmerga functions as the army of the Kurdistan Regional Government. Daragahi is correct that the Shiites of the south envy the Kurds' regional unity and semi-autonomy.

The Sunni Arabs will never, ever accept being reduced to a minority with no access to Iraq's oil resources (which are mainly in the Shiite south and the Kurdish north), and any such partition is a recipe for a long drawn out civil war.

I have a sinking feeling that Iraq is over with, and that we're just standing around watching the train wreck unfold.

Basra municipal government has collapsed to the point where the garbage is not being collected, and diseases are spreading. Al-Zaman says that Prime Minister Maliki formally withdrew from the Basra governing council the security portfolio.

The August GQ carries a very important piece by Jeffrey Gettleman of the NYT on how security in Baghdad has collapsed in the past year and a half.

Lieberman's Defeat

It is very important that Joe Lieberman was defeated in the Democratic primary in Connecticut on Tuesday, for the following reasons.

First of all, the man was brain dead on the Iraq issue. He seems seriously to have believed that the violence in Iraq only affected a third of the country (he appears not to have heard of Maysan or Basra provinces), and kept saying the most wildly optimistic things about the near future in the face of masses of evidence that Iraq was sinking faster than a two-ton truck in a quicksand patch. This Panglossian narrative about Iraq gave enormous aid and comfort to Bush and the Republican Party.

Second and more important, Lieberman had aimed a poisoned arrow at the heart of every Democratic candidate when he said,

' "While dissent about the war is critically important and American, partisan dissent has no place when it comes to our national security, particularly when we have 130,000 Americans over there in uniform," he said. "So I refuse to take partisan shots at the president or anybody else about the war." '

Lieberman's stance would have been quoted ad nauseam in Republican Party advertisements. They would have used a leading Democrat to swiftboat the rest of the Party.

Lieberman had bought into the Rove Master Narrative. Bush went to war electively, thus very conveniently making himself a war president and therefore above criticism. He got a second term that way despite having been among the worst presidents in history. Lieberman ceded to Bush a kind of invulnerability on the most important Republican Party SNAFU since its policies contributed to the onset of the Great Depression. Why would a Democrat do that?

The answer is that on foreign policy issues, Lieberman is a Neoconservative, and supports the Iraq project for the same reasons that Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz (then number 3 and 2 respectively at the Pentagon) did. He tried to put himself in the tradition of Hubert Humphrey, but he was more honest when he also listed Scoop Jackson. Perle and the rest started on Jackson's staff.

In keeping with his foreign policy neoconservatism, Lieberman has McCarthyite tendencies and actually joined forces with Lynne Cheney to attack academics for being "un-American" if they questioned the central narrative of the Bush administration, which is that terrorism springs from intrinsic evil and that it is so powerful a threat that we Americans must now give up our traditions of free speech and dissent. Lieberman's McCarthyism is shameful, and all thinking Americans must rejoice to see Lynne's partner in auto-da-fe go down in flames.

Lieberman had been allied with Christian fundamentalists in making an assault on the separation of religion and state.

Finally, it is important because whether or not the liberal blogosphere played a significant role in dumping him, many will say that it did. Being perceived as powerful is almost as good as being powerful.

Lieberman may run as an independent, and we cannot know what will happen in that case. But for the reasons given above, it is important that he has been repudiated by Democratic voters. The rest of the party now has a shot at taking the House, without risking having their colleague's pro-Bush sanctimonies on Iraq constantly thrown in their faces. And the menace of senatorial McCarthyism and a further assault on the liberties of all Americans may have been forestalled.

An Open Country for Civil Resistance

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

August 8, 2006 Lebanon: An Open Country for Civil Resistance www.lebanonsolidarity.org

This is the first press release for the Campaign of Resistance, a coalition of over 200 Lebanese NGOs andcivic organizations. We, the people of Lebanon, call upon the local and international community to join a campaign of civil resistance to Israel's war against our country and our people. We declare Lebanon an open country for civil resistance. The aim of this campaign is to provide relief for civilians in South Lebanon, live in solidarity with them, and work for the immediate return of internally displaced citizens to their homes in the South. If their homes are no longer standing, then the Lebanese government, United Nations, Red Cross, and others, should provide assistance to our citizens on their own land - not scattered across the entire country.

It is our hope that this campaign will not only provide a measure of justice to displaced and distressed Lebanese citizens, but will also contribute to an immediate ceasefire, and an end to the continuing destruction of Lebanon. The first Citizen's Convoy will leave for South Lebanon on Saturday, August 12.

For interviews and more information, please contact:

Rasha Salti convois.citoyens.sud.liban _a t_ gmail.com

Huwaida Arraf huwaidaa _a t_ riseup.net

BEIRUT--On August 12, at 7 am, Lebanese from throughout the country and international supporters who have come to Lebanon to express solidarity will gather in Martyr's Square in Beirut to form a civilian convoy to the south of Lebanon. Hundreds of Lebanese and international civilians will express their solidarity with the inhabitants of the heavily destroyed south who have been bravely withstanding the assault of the Israeli military. This campaign is endorsed by more than 200 Lebanese and international organizations. This growing coalition of national and international non-governmental organizations hereby launches a campaign of civil resistance for the purpose of challenging the cruel and ruthless use of massive military force by Israel, the regional superpower, upon the people of Lebanon.

August 12 marks the start of this Campaign of Resistance, declaring Lebanon an Open Country for Civil Resistance. August 12 also marks both the international day of protest against the Israeli aggression.

"In the face of Israel's systematic killing of our people, the indiscriminate bombing of our towns, the scorching of our villages, and the attempted destruction of our civil infrastructure, we say No! In the face of the forced expulsion of a quarter of our population from their homes throughout Lebanon, and the complicity of governments and international bodies, we re-affirm the acts of civil resistance that began from the first day of the Israeli assault, and we stress and add the urgent need to act!," said Rasha Salti, one of the organizers of this national event.

After August 12, the campaign will continue with a series of civil actions, leading to an August 19 civilian march to reclaim the South. "Working together, in solidarity, we will overcome the complacency, inaction, and complicity of the international community and we will deny Israel its goal of removing Lebanese from their land and destroying the fabric of our country," explained Samah Idriss, writer and co-organizer of this campaign.

"An international civilian presence in Lebanon is not only an act of solidarity with the Lebanese people in the face of unparalleled Israeli aggression, it is an act of moral courage to defy the will of those who would seek to alienate the West from the rest and create a new Middle East out of the rubble and blood of the region," said Huwaida Arraf, co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement and campaign co-organizer. "After having witnessed the wholesale destruction of villages by Israel's air force and navy and having visited the victims (so-called displaced) of Israel's policy of cleansing Lebanese civilians from their homes," continued Arraf, "it is imperative to go south and reach those who have stayed behind to resist by steadfastly remaining on their land."

If you are in Lebanon and want to sign up and join the convoy, contact either: Rasha Salti email: convois.citoyens.sud.liban _a t_gmail.com

Rania Masri: rania.masri _a t_ balamand.edu.lb

Lebanon Solidarity

This campaign is thus far endorsed by more than 200 organizations, including: The Arab NGOs Network for Development (ANND), International Solidarity Movement (ISM), Cultural Center for Southern Lebanon, Norwegian People’s Aid, Lebanese Center for Policy Studies, Lebanese Association for Democratic Elections, Frontiers, Kafa, Nahwa al-Muwatiniya, Spring Hints, Hayya Bina, Lebanese Transparency Association, Amam05, Lebanese Center for Civic Education, Let’s Build Trust, CRTD-A, Solida, National Association for Vocational Training and Social Services, Lebanese Development Pioneers, Nadi Li Koul Alnas, and Lecorvaw.

Bush, Islamic Fascism and the Christians of Jounieh

Bush is on vacation, his favorite place to be during a major crisis. The August retreat is the only open admission he makes that Cheney and Rumsfeld are actually running the country, and he just doesn't need to be in his office. The only difference between his stonewalling of Lebanon and the way he let New Orleans drown is that he has put away the banjo this summer, at least in public view. He had someone tie a necktie on him and stopped manically clearing brush for long enough to come out with Condi and hold a press conference. He lied, saying that no one wants to see the violence continue. He wants to see the violence continue. Otherwise he would insist on a ceasefire. You see, if you don't have a ceasefire, the violence continues. If you oppose a ceasefire, you are saying you want the violence to continue. He does.

Then he tried to explain the war in Lebanon by saying this,

'They try to spread their jihadist message -- a message I call, it's totalitarian in nature -- Islamic radicalism, Islamic fascism, they try to spread it as well by taking the attack to those of us who love freedom. '

There are many problems with this passage.

The first is that the Israelis are not confining themselves to bombing Muslim radicals. They dropped 3000 bombs on Aitaroun in a single day. They are leveling the towns of the south altogether. They are hitting people who are not Muslim fascists.

In fact, they are hitting Christian areas such as Jounieh.






(I don't think this bridge is there any more.)

Jounieh is the sort of place that had "Oriental Dance" festivals.



It is the kind of place where they play the pop music of Lebanese singer Nancy Ajram in the nightclubs.



A videoclip is at YouTube.

Not only have the Israelis bombed out the bridges at Jounieh, destroying the local economy and harming the Christians there, but their air raid on the Jiyye oil refinery has caused an enormous ecological disaster and the ruining of the beach resorts along the coast. So much for Jounieh and its "Islamic fascists."



I guess that will show them. (The oil spill also threatens Cyprus and Turkey).

The Israelis have also bombed Ashrafiyah, a Christian area of Beirut. They have ruined Christian businesses-- restaurants, nightclubs, retail shops, by destroying bridges, roads and ports and by killing tourism for years to come.



The Syrians, about whom the Bush administration complained so bitterly for their role in Lebanon, had actually protected the Lebanese Christians from the PLO back in the 1970s and never did to them a hundredth of the damage that Israel has now done.

I don't mean to suggest that one should only worry about Lebanon's Christians, who form 40 percent of the electorate.

The Shiite Muslims of the south have been subjected to collective punishment on a mass scale. Whole towns and villages have been destroyed. Nearly a million people are displaced and homeless. The deliberate deportation or forcible transfer of a civilian population during war time is a crime against humanity, as is unnecessary expulsion of civilians from their homes.

Lebanon is a small country, with a population of only 3.8 million. A fourth of the country is homeless! That would be like a disaster that left 70 million Americans wandering around with just the shirts on their backs, living in shelters and schools, wondering where their next bite of food would come from, their homes in rubble, their lives destroyed.

In other times and places, the authorities in Jerusalem have complained about this sort of thing.

Relatively few Shiite Muslims of Lebanon are fascists of any sort. There are all kinds of Shiites. The father of the renowned entertainer Haifa Wahbi is Shiite.



A video clip is at YouTube.

Her paternal relatives now live in a place that looks like this, thanks to the Israeli air force:

Courtesy this site

Look closely at this AP photo from Monday, captioned "FLIGHT FROM TERROR: A woman runs past a destroyed building, still in flames, after it had been attacked by Israeli warplane missiles, in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon yesterday." Look at the woman. This is the Shiite "Islamic fascist" that BushMert is making war on?

Then there are other problems with what Bush said. He contrasted "Islamic fascism" to "democracy," presumably a reference to the Lebanese Hizbullah.

This point is incorrect and offensive for many reasons.

It is a misuse of the word "Islamic." "Islamic" has to do with the ideals and achievements of the Muslims and the Muslim religion. Thus, we speak of Islamic art. We speak of Islamic ethics.

There can be Muslim fascists, just as there can be Christian fascists (and were, in Spain, Italy and Germany, and parts of Central and South America; the Spanish fascists and the Argentinian ones, e.g., were adopted by the United States government as close allies.)

But there cannot be "Islamic" fascists, because the Islamic religion enshrines values that are incompatible with fascism.

Fascism is not even a very good description of the ideology of most Muslim fundamentalists. Most fascism in the Middle East has been secular in character, as with Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. Fascism involves extreme nationalism and most often racism. Muslim fundamentalist movements reject the nation-state as their primary loyalty and reject race as a basis for political action or social discrimination. Fascists exalt the state above individual rights or the rule of law. Muslim fundamentalists exalt Islamic law above the utilitarian interests of the state. Fascism exalts youth and a master race above the old and the "inferior" races. Muslim fundamentalists would never speak this way. Fascism glorifies "war as an end in itself and victory as the determinant of truth and worthiness." Muslim fundamentalists view holy war as a ritual with precise conditions and laws governing its conduct. It is not considered an end in itself.

The lazy conflation of Muslim fundamentalist movements with fascism cannot account for their increasing willingness to participate in elections and serve in parliamentary government. Hizbullah, for example, ran in the 2005 elections and had 12 members elected to parliament. Altogether, the Shiite parties of Hizbullah and Amal, who have a parliamentary alliance, have 29 members in the Lebanese parliament of 128 seats. Hizbullah and Amal both joined the national unity government, receiving cabinet posts. This is not the behavior of a fascist movement tout court.

Indeed, Hizbullah has made political alliances with Christian parties, most recently with that of Michel Aoun. Opinion polls have shown that a significant proportion of Lebanese Shiites who voted for Hizbullah are more secular-minded than the party is. Hizbullah has authoritarian tendencies, but has shown itself willing to compromise and act pragmatically within the Lebanese system, and has demonstrated an ability to gain support from voters that do not share its fundamentalist ideology.

Hizbullah is a poor people's movement. It could have been moderated over time, and its adherents could have been pulled into more moderate, mainstream politics if the world had devoted itself to seeing that the Lebanese economy flourished and its government was gradually strengthened. That was the achievement of the Lebanese and regional political elite in the 1990s. If the Israelis had not aggressively occupied the Lebanese South, there would have been no Hizbullah. If the Israelis had left ten years earlier, Hizbullah would have disarmed when all the other militias did. Hizbullah could have been nurtured out of existence if Lebanon had been helped.

Now, extremism has been strengthened. Lebanon is abject, on its knees, stricken with a plague inflicted on it by Bush and Olmert. The abject, the humiliated, the impoverished do not, as Bush and Olmert fondly imagine to themselves, lie down and let the mighty walk over them. They blow up skyscrapers.

The idea that the whole Eastern Mediterranean had to be polluted, that the Christian Lebanese economy had to be destroyed for the next decade or two, that 900,000 persons had to be rendered homeless, that a whole country had to be pounded into rubble because some Lebanese Shiites voted for Hizbullah in the last election, putting 12 in parliament, is obscene. Bush's glib ignorance is destroying our world. Our children will suffer for it, and perhaps our grandchildren after them.

Lebanon Headlines

Massive Israeli air raids on Lebanon killed 33, mostly if not all civilians, on Monday.

The Lebanese government said it would send 15,000 Lebanese troops south to secure the border with Israel if Israeli troops withdrew. Prime Minister Fouad Siniora broke down and wept while addressing Arab foreign ministers in Beirut. He defiantly responded to Israeli threats to completely destroy the Lebanese infrastructure, saying that "Lebanon will not kneel."

Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal warned the Israelis that their future in the Middle East was becoming less secure by the moment:

' Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal said Israeli "aggression and attacks on Lebanon must stop," adding in comments to Turkey's Milliyet daily that Riyadh's patience was wearing thin. "We have been patient for a long time, but our patience is running out ... If Israel wants to live in this region it has to learn to stay in peace with the people of the region ... They are destroying the whole country because two soldiers were captured. It is a tragedy." '

I think that was a threat from among the wealthiest oil states in the world.

A big, vitriolic demonstration in Kuwait City on Monday against Israel and the United States over the war on Lebanon. This Arab Times report is tame compared to what I saw on Arab satellite television. Despite Bush senior's having delivered them from Saddam's occupation, I don't think they like his son very much.

There was also an anti-Israel demonstration in Irbil, Iraqi Kurdistan.

The Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee on what you can do.

Gilbert Achcar on the sinking of US imperial designs.

McGreevy: Facing West from Arab Country

Patrick McGreevy Writes from Beirut:

'8 August 2006

Facing West from Arab Country

US leaders often assert that their policies and actions in the Middle East are intended to influence the perceptions and actions of Arabs. Do they have any idea how things look from here? Daniel Richter’s book, Facing East from Indian Country (2001), attempts to tell the story of early America from the point of view of the Native people who saw their lands invaded from the east. The newcomers, for the most part, did not want to live among the people who were already there: they simply wanted to remove them. It is a revealing thought experiment for most US Americans to imagine their national story from the vantage of those for whom that story was their own doom. Perhaps a similar thought experiment is in order to consider how US attempts to create “a new Middle East” look from the vantage point of the region’s Arab inhabitants.

Gazing westward upon the North American continent, many European colonizers saw a land that seemed essentially empty, a zone for the fulfillment of their dreams and schemes. The North American Natives, if noticed at all, could be seen as part of the emptiness itself: they simply didn’t count as equally human. Richter believes, nonetheless, that a world in which natives and newcomers could live together remained possible until the 1760s when, in the wake of ruthless violence on the frontier, Natives and non-Natives each began to see themselves as essentially different and incompatible. After the revolution against imperial Britain, US Americans appropriated for themselves the appellation “American,” and continued to gaze westward with the colonizers’ vision of a land that was essentially empty. The US became a settler society. The conquest is pretty much over now, if largely unexamined, yet the perspective of facing west remains. We still talk of going “out west” and “back east”.

Gazing eastward toward Jerusalem, Westerners invented the term “Middle East,” a designation that defined the region by reference to their own view point. Edward Said used the word “orientalism” to describe how Western “knowledge” about the region was interwoven with attempts to control it. The “knowledge,” for example, that Arabs were backward, lazy, violent, and fanatical, meant that their world needed rearranging, and that Western powers such as France and Britain must take up the challenge. More recently, some have suggested a more complex picture. Not all westerners have reduced Arabs to sub-human status. In the years following World War II, many Arabs appreciated the US for its anti-colonial stance, and African-Americans, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, identified with Arab resistance movements.

For those facing west from Arab country today, however, the US appears as the latest in a long list of Western adversaries and colonizers. Operation Iraqi Freedom was supposed to destroy terrorism at its heart, but it was based on faulty “knowledge,” and has instead created an open wound, a maelstrom of blood. Operation Just Reward, the Israeli-led and US-backed attack on Lebanon, was supposed to create a “New Middle East” by crushing Hezbollah, but faulty “knowledge” again has led to a situation of great danger. The Arab World is not a blank slate awaiting the schemes of Westerners. And it must be said: the creation of the State of Israel was another scheme for remapping the region based on the view that the people already here mattered less than those arriving from the west, and that their lands could be treated as if they were empty. For those facing west from Arab country, this was an injustice, an original sin. All talk of resolution, of Arab hospitality, must begin with this recognition. I hope the time when it is possible for Arabs, Christians and Jews to live together here has not passed. But if Israelis hope to become a settler society like the US that seeks, not to live with the region’s native people, but remove them, they will discover that their “knowledge” is faulty because the eastern Mediterranean is not North America. Instead of melting away from European diseases, these native people are increasing.

I spoke today with a Sunni Arab friend about last night’s horrible rocket attack on Haifa. I mentioned that it may have been an Arab neighborhood that was hit. My friend said: “That is not the point: they are human beings.” I mention this to underline that there is a basis for conversation, although some in Lebanon now doubt that there is a serious partner for peace in Israel.

The Bush Administration encourages Israel to crush Hezbollah, perhaps because many in the US think Israel is a settler society facing exactly the situation their own country once faced. But haven’t Israelis been here long enough to recognize that simplistic example of the eastward gaze called the war on terror? Lashing out will not make Israel safe; such a strategy is based on faulty “knowledge”: it is like plowing the sea. If crushing people will make them capitulate, the people of Gaza would long ago have become docile rather than defiant. There is only one way: the Israelis must talk to their adversaries and negotiate a just settlement that addresses Arab concerns on an equal footing with their own.

Patrick McGreevy'

Mashhadani on Americastan in Iraq

Gilbert Achcar kindly translates a recent article from al-Hayat, interviewing the Speaker of the House of the Iraqi Parliament. I repeat, this is the elected speaker of the House of the Iraqi government elected under Bush's auspices.

' The president of the Iraqi Parliament, Dr. Mahmoud] Al-Mash’hadani spoke to Al-Hayat yesterday, at the end of an official visit to Damascus, where he met with president Bashar al-Assad… On the accusations directed at Syria and Iran of interfering in Iraq’s affairs, al-Mash’hadani said vehemently: “America installs itself between two countries like Syria and Iran that it considers as enemies and you want them to stay passive! That is not realistic at all, and if ever they intervene, it is to protect their national security. And we do not object to that, the national security of Syria and Iran is threatened by the American presence … Let’s suppose that they (the Syrians) interfere in Iraq’s affairs, why don’t you object to America’s rule over Iraq before objecting to Syria’s interference in order to protect its security? In this respect, Iraq has opened its doors to all countries, even to an Israeli presence, so has Syrian interference now become a threat to Iraq’s security? Who destroyed Iraq? Who plundered Iraq? Who stole from Iraq? Who humiliated Iraq? Who desecrated Iraq’s holy sites? Who damaged the honor of Iraqi women? It is none other than the blue jinn whose name is: the occupation.”

Al-Mash’hadani accused the American forces of standing behind terrorist attacks in Iraq, saying: “The occupation is the first and last cause of the problem, it has overthrown the [former] regime without a plan, it has suppressed the state with no reason, it has led to the resistance and it has infiltrated it, it has brought Al-Qaeda to Iraq…” After approving the statement that “American occupation troops stand behind some of the terrorist attacks,” he described today’s Iraq as “Americastan.” '

Israeli Air Raids Kill 12
Hizbullah Rockets kill 15

If we start in the north and work south, here is what the Israel-Lebanon War looked like on Sunday. Israeli air raids on Lebanon killed 14 civilians, including a family of 6 in their house in a village near Sidon.

Israeli warplanes conducted air raids on Akkar in the far north of Lebanon, a Sunni area, hitting bridges.

Israeli warplanes repeatedly bombed South Beirut, a slum inhabited mainly by poor Lebanese Shiites, which has been largely emptied of population. Some diehards refuse to leave, however, and some elderly, disabled, or very poor cannot.

Some of the bombing raids took place as Arab leaders landed by helicopter at Beirut Airport, which was specially opened for this purpose. Some thought that Israel was expressing its disapproval of the Arab League and its secretary general, Amr Moussa. Moussa and others, including the Syrian foreign minister, said that the draft French-US proposal for a cessation of hostilities was fatally biased toward Israel.

Then there were the air raids around Sidon, one of which killed the family of 6.

Down south along the border, 10,000 invading Israeli troops fought fierce battles with Hizbullah fighters. Israeli gunship fired artillery rounds at this area.

Then at Kfar Giladi across the border in Israel, a Hizbullah rocket killed 12 Israeli military reservists and wounded others, two of them critically.

And a rocket strike on Haifa killed 3 and wounded some 30. One rocket hit an apartemnt building where Palestinian-Israelis lived. Hizbullah continues to kill non-combatants, including Palestinian-Israelis, in its indiscriminate rocket attacks, mainly aimed at innocent civilians.

Hotheaded generals in Israel, embarrassed by their failure to stop rocket attacks, threatened to destroy even more key Lebanese infrastructure in revenge, including power plants. There are mixed reports about whether or not the angrier generals were reined in. Their stated plan was just mean-spirited revenge on Lebanese in general, and would not help the war effort.

Speaker of the Lebanese Parliament, Nabih Berri, condemned the UN draft resolution as giving the Israelis everything they could want if they had been clear victors in the war. Berri clearly believes that despite the pounding Lebanon has taken, Israel has not met its war aims. Berri is a Shiite and leader of the Amal Party, a Shiite party.

The Pope called again for an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon on Sunday, and complained that no one had paid any attention to the identical call he had made the previous Sunday.

Pope Benedict didn't realize that the US Right, including Fox Cable News, is only interested in the Catholic Church to the extent that they can use it for reactionary purposes. Start talking about peace, and you'll find yourself in a news blackout even if you are a pope. What puzzles me is why he doesn't send in the Catholic Lobby.

If it is any consolation to Pope Benedict, no one seems to have paid attention to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's fatwa demanding a ceasefire yet, either.

A Beirut blog.

Don't forget Candide.

Dick Norton asks about the status of Americans serving in the Israeli military.

More on the historical context of the Israel-Lebanon War.

The Oil Drum is a good site for discussion of energy issues.

Save Lebanese Civilians

Faleh A. Jabar, an Iraqi intellectual resident in Beirut who has been a leading force in promoting a democratic intellectual culture in Iraq, writes from Lebanon:

Dear All:

This situation in Lebanon is going from bad to worst. Innocent lives are being shattered and threatened in mass.

I need to ask you and other colleagues in the academia to launch a campaign to pressure the US to stop Israeli destruction of bridges, power stations, and end the Israeli blockade to Lebanon. Fuel is running short, and hospitals will come to a stand still, water supplies will be cut short, a total human disastor. Israel's official target is to secure Hizbollah-free south, not to starve four millions and randoumly threaten the lives of all civilians.

I am sixty years old this year, and my life does not matter that much; but I look at the young and shudder: I have young neighbours who need kidney-wash every 48 hours, and there are children with cancer, lot with heart diseases. Cutting power supply means a death sentence to them.

May I add that doctors in Beirut advised that the fate of more than 20,000 patients is at stake. Pregnant women will most certainly suffer. Their numbers are anybody's guess. There are two tankers waiting offshore for Israeli guarantees to no avail. They carry fuel supplies to power plants and vehicles, some 20 odd days.

This is horrible and unbearable. Please do something. Send letters to the UN, EU, the White House, the International Red Cross. This is urgent.

Faleh A. Jabar '

See here for how to send money to the American University in Beirut Hospital for relief efforts.

You can write your political representatives at Congress.org

Battle for Baghdad

US troops clashed with the Mahdi Army of clerical nationalist Muqtada al-Sadr in Sadr City Monday morning.

A car bombing of a large hall being used for a mourning gathering killed at least 15 and wounded at least 30 in Tikrit, a Sunni Arab city north of Baghdad. Saddam Hussein and his clan hail from this city.

In the capital, the US military and Iraqi soldiers of the elected government launched a big security operation. Some 3500 US troops had been brought down from Mosul (where security promptly collapsed, according to al-Zaman).

It turns out that the Sunni Arab guerrilla strategy had been gradually to ethnically cleanse southern districts of the capital [Ar.], so as to cut it off from the Shiite south. One observer in Baghdad told a friend of mine that this operation is make or break. If the US cannot stop the deterioration of security in Baghdad at this point, then the capital is lost, and with it the country.

Ironically, after intensively covering Iraq for over three years, the US mass media are largely missing this story, the pivotal one for the endgame.

Despite the big military operation, guerrillas ambushed an Iraqi checkpoint on Sunday, killing 5 Iraqi policemen. And there were two bombings (details not known). And 20 bodies were found in the streets, victims of faith-based hatred. Four bodies were found in the Tigris near Suwayra.

Some 10,000 ex-Baathists who had been fired from government jobs after the war have now been reinstated.

Wiping off the Face of the Map (Reprint)

This bothered enough of the right people that I thought I'd reprint from Saturday. Note for the humorless: it is an editorial photo-cartoon, not news analysis.


Beirut before and after courtesy This site.

The difference between Ahmadinejad and Olmert is that the Iranian president is a blowhard. The one who had practical plans to wipe a country off the map was Olmert.

One Ring to Rule Them

The wholesale destruction of all of Lebanon by Israel and the US Pentagon does not make any sense. Why bomb roads, bridges, ports, fuel depots in Sunni and Christian areas that have nothing to do with Shiite Hizbullah in the deep south? And, why was Hizbullah's rocket capability so crucial that it provoked Israel to this orgy of destruction? Most of the rockets were small katyushas with limited range and were highly inaccurate. They were an annoyance in the Occupied Golan Heights, especially the Lebanese-owned Shebaa Farms area. Hizbullah had killed 6 Israeli civilians since 2000. For this you would destroy a whole country?

It doesn't make any sense.

Moreover, the Lebanese government elected last year was pro-American! Why risk causing it to fall by hitting the whole country so hard?

And, why was Condi Rice's reaction to the capture of two Israeli soldiers and Israel's wholesale destruction of little Lebanon that these were the "birth pangs" of the "New Middle East"? How did she know so early on that this war would be so wideranging? And, how could a little border dispute in the Levant signal such an elephantine baby's advent? Isn't it because she had, like Tony Blair, been briefed about the likelihood of a war by the Israelis, or maybe collaborated with them in the plans, and also conceived of it in much larger strategic terms?

I've had a message from a European reader that leads me to consider a Peak Oil Theory of the US-Israeli war on Lebanon (and by proxy on Iran). I say, "consider" the "theory" because this is a thought experiment. I put it on the table to see if it can be knocked down, the way you would preliminary hypotheses in a science experiment.



The European reader writes:

'When I was in Portugal I also watched a presentation by a guy who works for the ministry of energy in that country, a certain [JFR].

He started his presentation with the growing need for oil in China and India. He stressed that China wants to become the 'workshop' of the world and India the 'office' of the world. both economies contributed combined some 44% to world economy growth during 2001-2004. He compared the USA, Japan, India and China to giant whales constantly eating fish. They had no fish near them so they started to move. He explained that the Persian Gulf is the 'fish ground', the 'gas station' of the world.

Later on he explained the . . . hypothesis . . . that says demand for oil will continue to grow. also for natural gas, which is even better than oil. Sadly the existing production is getting smaller, these fields are getting emptied. [One oil major] seems to believe that the gap between demand and existing production will become so large by 2015 that economic growth cannot continue. Yet there is hope on the horizon.

JFR strongly denied that there is going to be an oil peak. He says, and the oil multis seem to agree with him [- my link, JRC], that there is more than enough untouched oil and natural gas. The stupid thing: it is further to the east. Partly in Russia, but most of all, in Iran.

JFR explained to the astonished audience that Iran was the most valuable country on the planet. They have one of the biggest holdings of gas and oil reserves in the world. second in gas, second in oil. On top of that they have direct access to the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea and the Caspian Sea what makes them a potential platform for the distribution of oil and gas to South Asia, Europe and East Asia. JRF called Iran 'the prize' . . .

The disaster in Lebanon actually was also part of JFR's presentation. He explained that the US government is 100% convinced, fanatically and completely convinced, that both, Hamas and Hizballah are creatures of Iran and that Iran uses them to undermine US goals in the region . . .

The presentation got kind of freaky then. He said the US government wanted to stop state-controlled Iranian or Chinese (or Indian) companies from controlling the oil. JFR says the US Government is convinced that this battle will decide the future of the world. It sounded like he was talking about 'the one ring' in lord of the rings. he who controls Iran controls them all. '

It is very important that some EU analysts see things this way. They are in contact with their American counterparts, and may be reflecting a wider North Atlantic view and speaking more openly than is common in Washington.



It is true that Iran's regime is hostile to US corporate and investment interests. Iran itself has substantial energy resources, many of them undeveloped, but they are locked up by state-owned Iranian companies.

Iran is astride the Oil Gulf, which has the majority of the world's proven gas and petroleum reserves. Iran has a silkworm missile capability that could interfere with oil tankers in the Straits of Hormuz. It also has emerged as the most influential country in oil-rich South Iraq, which is, like Iran, Shiite Muslim.

Iran is no credible military threat to the United States, though US warmongers are always depicting it as such, rather as they manufactured ramshackle 4th-world Iraq into a dire military menace to the US, allowing for a war of choice to be fought against it.

The regime in Iran has not gone away despite decades of hostility toward it by Washington, and despite the latter's policy of "containment." As a result, US petroleum corporations are denied significant opportunities for investment in the Iranian petroleum sector. Worse, Iran has made a big energy deal with China and is negotiating with India. As those two countries emerge as the superpowers of the 21st century, they will attempt to lock up Gulf petroleum and gas in proprietary contracts.

(Since it is already coming up in the comments, I should note that the "fungibility" (easy exchange) of oil is less important in the new environment than it used to be. US petroleum companies would like to go back to actually owning fields in the Middle East, since there are big profits to be made if you get to decide when you take it out of the ground. As Chinese and Indian competition for the increasingly scarce resource heats up, exclusive contracts will be struck. When I floated the fungibility of petroleum as a reason for which the Iraq War could not be only about oil, at a talk at Columbia's Earth Institute last year, Jeffrey Sachs surprised me by disagreeing with me. In our new environment, oil is becoming a commodity over which it really does make sense to fight for control. See below.*)

In a worst case scenario, Washington would like to retain the option of military action against Iran, so as to gain access to its resources and deny them to rivals. If Iran gets a nuclear weapon, however, that option will be foreclosed. Iran may not be trying for a weapon, and if it is, it could not get one before about 2016. But if it had a nuclear weapon, it would be off limits to US attack, and its anti-American regime could not only lock up Iranian gas and oil for the rest of the century by making sweetheart deals with China. It also might begin to exercise a sway over the small energy-producing countries of the Middle East. (The oil interest would explain the mystery of why Washington just does not care that Pakistan has the Bomb; Pakistan has nothing Washington wants and so there was no need to preserve the military option in its regard.)

Even an Iranian nuke, of course, would not be an immediate threat to the US, in the absence of ICBMs. But the major US ally in the Middle East, Israel, would be vulnerable to a retaliatory Iranian strike if the US took military action against Iran in order to overthrow the regime and gain the proprietary deals for themselves.

In the short term, Iran was protected by another ace in the hole. It had a client in the Levant, Lebanon's Hizbullah, and had given it a few silkworm rockets, which could theoretically hit Israeli nuclear and chemical facilities. Hizbullah increasingly organizes the Lebanese Shiites, and the Lebanese Shiites will in the next ten to twenty years emerge as a majority in Lebanon, giving Iran a commercial hub on the Mediterranean.

China and India could get Iran, and Iran could get Lebanon, and as non-OPEC energy production decreases, the US and Israel could find themselves out in the cold on the energy front.

As for Iran, the DOE says this:

' Iran's largest non-associated natural gas field is South Pars, geologically an extension of Qatar's North Field. Current estimates are that South Pars contains 280 Tcf or more (some estimates go as high as 500 Tcf) of natural gas, of which a large fraction will be recoverable, and over 17 billion barrels of liquids. Development of South Pars is Iran's largest energy project, already having attracted around $15 billion in investment. Natural gas from South Pars largely is slated to be shipped north via the planned 56-inch, 300-mile, $500 million, IGAT-3 pipeline, as well as planned IGAT-4 and IGAT-5 lines. Gas also will be reinjected to boost oil output at the mature Agha Jari oil field, and possibly the Ahwaz and Mansouri fields. Besides condensate production and reinjection/enhanced oil recovery, South Pars natural gas also is intended for export, by pipeline and also possibly by liquefied natural gas (LNG) tanker. Sales from South Pars could earn Iran as much as $11 billion per year over 30 years, according to Iran's Oil Ministry. '

Persian Gulf Fields

and this is why Iran's reserves are even more important:

' The Persian Gulf contains 715 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, representing over half (57%) of the world's oil reserves, and 2,462 Tcf of natural gas reserves (45% of the world total). Also, at the end of 2003, Persian Gulf countries maintained about 22.9 million bbl/d of oil production capacity, or 32% of the world total. Perhaps even more significantly, the Persian Gulf countries normally maintains almost all of the world's excess oil production capacity. As of early September 2004, excess world oil production capacity was only about 0.5-1.0 million bbl/d, all of which was located in Saudi Arabia.'

Non-OPEC production will decline sharply in coming years, increasing the importance of the Persian Gulf region. The point about excess capacity is this: The US in 2005 produced over 7 million barrels of petroleum a day, but consumes all of it, and then imports two times that from abroad (using nearly 22 million barrels a day in 2005). So US petroleum is essentially off the market. But Saudi Arabia produces 9.5 million barrels a day and exports over 7 million of that. It doesn't use it all up at home. Even now, the excess production is in the Gulf, and that excess production will become more important over time.

It may be that that hawks are thinking this way: Destroy Lebanon, and destroy Hizbullah, and you reduce Iran's strategic depth. Destroy the Iranian nuclear program and you leave it helpless and vulnerable to having done to it what the Israelis did to Lebanon. You leave it vulnerable to regime change, and a dragooning of Iran back into the US sphere of influence, denying it to China and assuring its 500 tcf of natural gas to US corporations. You also politically reorient the entire Gulf, with both Saddam and Khamenei gone, toward the United States. Voila, you avoid peak oil problems in the US until a technological fix can be found, and you avoid a situation where China and India have special access to Iran and the Gulf.

The second American Century ensues. The "New Middle East" means the "American Middle East."

And it all starts with the destruction of Lebanon.

More wars to come, in this scenario, since hitting Lebanon was like hitting a politician's bodyguard. You don't kill a bodyguard just to kill the bodyguard. It is phase I of a bigger operation.

If the theory is even remotely correct, then global warming is not the only danger in continuing to rely so heavily on hydrocarbons for energy. Green energy--wind, sun, geothermal-- is all around us and does not require any wars to obtain it. Indeed, if we had spent as much on alternative energy research as we have already spent on the Iraq War, we'd be much closer to affordable solar. A choice lies ahead: hydrocarbons, a 20 foot rise in sea level, and a praetorian state. Or we could go green and maybe keep our republic and tame militarism.


=========

An informed reader writes:

"Jeffrey Sachs is right. Oil is fungible only after its out of the ground. The name of today's game is control of reserves, not markets. Example: china's deals in Latin America, US development of non-Nigerian African resource, etc."

Lebanon War Grinds on Despite UN Diplomacy

On Sunday morning, "Six civilians were killed when an air-to-ground missile hit a house in the village of Ansar, near the port city of Sidon. The aircraft returned as rescue teams in villages throughout the area tried to sift through rubble searching for more victims."

Also, on Sunday morning, the The Israeli airforce attacked non-Hizbullah targets such as bridges in the north and a Palestinian camp in the Biqa'.

The United States and France reached agreement at the United Nations on Saturday on the wording of a resolution calling for an end of hostilities in the Israel-Lebanon war. The resolution does not require Israeli forces to depart Lebanese soil, which Hizbullah says is a deal breaker with regard to any ceasefire.

That this language was agreed upon by John Bolton, among the most velociraptor-like warmongers to hold high office in American history, suggests one of two things: Either the Israeli political elite itself has concluded that it has accomplished all it can against Hizbullah, or the Europeans and US Arab allies, including Iraq, have prevailed on Bush to shorten the leash on Olmert. The war will go on for a while, even so, as the Israelis continue their ethnic cleansing of the Lebanese South.

Rosemary Hollis says that Israel underestimated Hizbullah. If so, it helps explain the turn to UN resolutions. If they thought they were really winning, the Israelis would probably have ordered Bolton to go on stonewalling the French.

The Lebanese government expressed serious reservations about the UN draft language. In particular, Beirut wants an explicit statement that Israel must relinquish the occupied Shebaa Farms. A spokesman was careful to say, however, that the government was not rejecting the draft.

Back in the real world, AFP/NaharNet report that on Saturday:

'In the space of seven hours Saturday, Israel hit Lebanon with around 250 air raids and some 4,000 shells . . .

The single village of Aitaroun near the border endured a barrage of 2,000 rounds.

Israeli artillery was systematically leveling 15 villages within five km of the border after Israeli leaders vowed to create a security zone free of Hizbullah fighters in the area, the police added. '

Or maybe of living things.

Israeli commandos made a raid into Tyre early Saturday morning. They claim it was a success. Hizbullah claims to have thwarted it. No way to know who is right. (Arab satellite stations report the story with the Hizbullah slant on the whole.)

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Saturday rejected European criticism of Israel's massive bombing of Lebanon and its killing of hundreds of innocent civilians. He pointed to Kosovo as precedent for what he was doing.

Olmert also said he thought he might just murder Hasan Nasrallah.

Uh, Ehud, you're supposed to be playing NATO in this interview, remember? Not Milosevic. You're getting your precedents for murder, mass or otherwise, mixed up.

Besides, the whole analogy is wrong. Milosevic's forces were ethnically cleansing the Kosovars. NATO was protecting the latter (and the Israeli government of the time supported this effort, given its alliance with Turkey). Who was Hizbullah ethnically cleansing in early July? In fact, it is the Israelis who have behaved in the past two weeks like Milosevic's Serbian troops, who systematically attempted to displace the Kosovars during the war. And then the NATO estimate is that their campaign killed 5000 Serbian military personnel and at most 1500 civilians. Israel's war has killed nearly 700 (maybe 900) civilians and many fewer Hizbullah fighters. So, the argument fails on all counts.

For the experience of a village in south Lebanon, see the web site of the village of Rashaya al-Fukhar.

The LA Times says, "Lebanese emergency agencies said 11 Lebanese died and 75 others were injured Saturday, bringing the official confirmed death toll in the country to 686, most of them civilians. Siniora claims the actual figure, because of the large number of people still buried under rubble, is more than 900."

In the far south landwar front, Hizbullah said Saturday that its guerrillas had ambushed an Israeli contingent at the border village of Aita al-Shaab. Israel admitted that one of its soldiers was killed by mortar fire near that site, according to the LA Times.

Thousands of Israelis protested the war at a peace rally in Tel Aviv. Among the Israeli politicians who spoke against it was Shulamit Aloni. I met her in Ann Arbor in the mid-1980s and immediately admired her. Bless her, that she is still at it.

Tens of thousands protested in London, Capetown, Cairo and elsewhere on Saturday. In Egypt, 2000 members of the Muslim Brotherhood denounced the US and Israel and demanded the government let them go join the fight as irregulars.

In Israel, Hizbullah rained rockets down again, and killed 3 persons, all Palestinian-Israelis. Although Hizbullah is said to have fired 3000 rockets at Israel since the war began, very few of them (5 percent?) have hit anything of importance. They have however killed over 30 civilians and wounded dozens more, and damaged some buildings. I think about a third of the civilian casualties have been Arab. Israel's Palestinians tend to live in the north, in Haifa, Acre and the Galilee, so they are in the line of fire. Some readers question my repeated condemnation of Hizbullah for targeting civilian populations with its rockets. But the condemnation is much merited. What they are doing would be a war crime if they were a government. Since they aren't even a government, just a party-militia, I think the charge should be even more severe.

The Israeli public is beginning to turn on its political elite for its prosecution of the war and for its inability so far to stop the rockets. The Washington Post reveals that even in territories actually controlled by Israeli troops in Lebanon, the number of rocket launches is still 50% of what it would be were there no Israeli troops there. That admission is quite astonishing. So far the Israeli army can only cut the attacks from 200 to 100, even when it actually occupies the territory from which the attacks are coming! Some 38 percent of Israelis believe "no one" is winning this war. You can say that again.

Bombings in Baqubah, Ambush Near Kirkuk

Reuters details guerrilla violence on Saturday (and late Friday. An army checkpoint sprayed with fire, killing 5 soldiers, near Kirkuk. Three bombs in Baqubah wounded 10. 7 bodies found in Kut. 9 bodies found in Baghdad. Then there was fighting in Ramadi.

Morgue refrigerators made for 5 bodies are holding many more in Iraq today, says al-Hayat. Some hundred persons are being killed a day. The bodies are often hard to identify, and some families actually sniff at them to determine if it is their relative.

Israeli Bombers Hit Christian Areas
Israeli Massacre of Syrian Workers, Other Civilians
Death Toll of 38


Courtesy the Daily Star

The Daily Star reports:

"Israeli warplanes destroyed five bridges along the main North-South coastal highway Friday, killing five people, wounding 19 others and completely isolating the capital from the North of the country.. . .The strikes destroyed the only remaining land outlet via Syria after the bombardment of other border crossing points."

Intrepid Israeli fighter jet pilots tracked down sinister terrorist cucumbers and other vicious vegetables being loaded onto a refrigerated truck by Syrian seasonal laborers. Unfortunatedly the wicked terrorist cucumbers were hiding themselves amidst civilian workers, and it was necessary to kill 26 of the latter to end the threat of pickling. Israeli ambassador to the United Nations Dan Gillerman castigated the cucumbers as "animals." Alan Dershowitz pointed out that vegetables cannot be considered civilians.


Courtesy al-Hayat

NaharNet writes, "Twenty-six of the civilians killed in Friday's air raids died when Israeli aircraft bombed the village of Qaa in the Bekaa Valley near the Syrian border, police and Red Cross officials said. Most of the dead were Syrian farm workers, some of whom had been loading a refrigerated vegetable truck."

The Israeli government has been destroying Lebanese factories in the Biqa' valley that have no obvious military value or particular connection to Hizbullah.

Naharnet writes: "More rockets slammed into Israel from south Lebanon early Friday, killing at least three people. Four were initially reported killed, but officials later revised the toll to three, saying one person was in a serious condition."

Displaced Lebanese in the South are facing several health problems, including lack of potable water and of fuel. Health conditions are so bad that they could generate epidemics.

Israeli bombing raids are interfering with the delivery of humanitarian aid in Lebanon.

Daniel Levy on ending the Neoconservative nightmare.

Amy Goodman's interview of me on Israel's war on Lebanon (transcript).

Thom Hartmann was kind enough to interview me on Friday at Air America.

A shout out to Al Franken with thanks for having had me on the show Thursday. Al does it with style and does it with humor.

I urge readers to support Amy Goodman and Air America-- our political lives would be much poorer without them.

Thousands of Sadrists Rally for Hizbullah in Baghdad
Guerrilla Uprising in Mosul


Some 100,000 Sadrists rallied against Israel's war on Lebanon [Ar.] in Sadr City on Friday, their ranks swelled by an influx of demonstrators from Maysan and Wasit provinces. Al-Zaman notes that this demonstration comes two days after a similar big event for the same purpose held by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. They also noticed a significant phalanx of women demonstrators, which Western reporters seem to have missed. The estimate of 100,000 comes from the LA Times, and strikes me as plausible. The US military attempted to play down the numbers, but frankly I don't trust them on something like this, which has ideological implications.

Al-Hayat [Ar.] says that despite the enormous size of the crowd, there were no untoward incidents. (The Mahdi Army checked the demonstrators carefully as they came into Sadr City, and the Ministry of the Interior, which gave a permit for the rally, also provided security). On leaving, however, some demonstrators were fired upon as they passed through the volatile Dura district of the capital. Two days ago during the SCIRI rally, al-Hayat says, Sunni guerrillas killed 3 of them. US troops intervened toward the end and were responsible for the deaths of two demonstrators.

This time, US troops set up a security perimeter around Sadr City, using tanks and armored vehicles. Demonstrators raised both Lebanese and Iraqi flags and chanted against Israel and in favor of Hizbullah. Some wore white funeral clothing, announcing their willingness to risk martyrdom. They burned US and Israeli flags.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat says that [Ar.] they chanted, "Death to America, Death to Israel!" They carried large posters with images on them of Sheikh Hasan Nasrullah, the leader of the Hizbullah, and Muqtada al-Sadr. Young demonstrators chanted, "We are the troops that Nasrullah is calling for, and we shall burn Haifa!"

Shaikh Hazim al-Ariji, of the Sadr movement, delivered a sermon in which he blamed Israel and in which he announced his solidarity with Hizbullah, which he compared to the Iraqi Mahdi Army. Hizbullah had thrown a fright into the Israelis because they clearly are not afraid of death, he said.

Some 33 persons died or were announced dead in Iraq's civil war violence. A tribal chieftain in Basra was assassinated.

In Mosul, from which the US withdrew most of the 3500 troops that it just sent to Baghdad, local guerrillas staged a virtual uprising against local Iraqi police and soldiers. The US military appears to be playing musical chairs, attempting to pacify Baghdad by bring troops there, but then losing control of the security situation in Mosul!

There were big demonstrations Friday in Cairo, Amman and Pakistan against the Israeli war on Lebanon.

George W. Bush had to be briefed that there are two major branches of Islam before the Iraq War. He did not know what Shiism was. He said, "I thought the Iraqis were Muslims."

Israelis Kill 7 Civilians in Massive Air Raids
on Beirut, South, Baalbak
Hizbullah Rockets Kill 8 Civilians in Israel

Israel resumed a heavy bombardment of South Beirut on Thursday, hitting al-Awza'i 24 times in the space of two hours. There are no Hizbullah facilities in al-Awza'i, according to LBC (a Christian-owned Lebanese satellite channel). AFP says that Israeli war planes fired missiles at "the Rweiss and Haret-Hreik districts in south Beirut, police said. Rweiss, which had initially been spared, was first targeted the previous night after a week's respite in strikes on the capital's suburbs. Haret-Hreik and Bir al-Abed, where Hezbollah's headquarters is located, were pounded for two weeks and are in ruins."

Israel also conducted air raids on Tyre and Nabatiyah in the south and on Baalbak in the Biqa'.

What Baalbak really looks like after the Israeli raid.

Israeli airstrikes on a series of southern villages left 7 civilians dead and provoked further outrage in the Muslim world.

Hasan Nasrallah issued a videotape on Thursday in which he threatened to send rockets on Tel Aviv if the Israelis bombed Beirut again.

I saw the speech on satellite in Arabic Nasrallah also appealed to the Muslim masses over the heads of their rulers. And, he told the Arab leaders that they are not going to be able to keep their positions in America's "New Middle East." They will be overthrown, he said, and their countries will be reduced to chaos and split up into small postage stamp countries. (He appeared to be reasoning on the basis of what the US has done to Iraq).

Excerpts from the Daily Star article:

' "Let my words be clear, any attack on Lebanon's capital, Beirut, will result in Hizbullah bombarding the Zionist entity's capital, Tel Aviv . . . We are ready to keep the whole thing restricted to a military fight with the Israeli Army, on the ground, fighters to fighters . . ."

"Our fight with the Israeli Army is based on the tactic of street fights against an organized army. This means we hit and run without holding our positions," Nasrallah said. "The Israelis claimed they had heavy clashes with our fighters resulting in the taking over of a Hizbullah post in the southern town of al-Abbad. The truth is our fighters had left the post when the aggression first started three weeks ago. I don't know with whom the Israelis had heavy clashes there . . ."

"In an attempt to identify himself with former Israeli leaders such as [Ariel] Sharon and [Yitzhak[ Rabin and [Menachem[ Began, he [Olmert] succeeded in matching their accomplishments in committing massacres and killing civilians, women and children, but failed miserably in proving himself as a political leader . . . [he is] an incompetent moron."

Nasrallah mocked the "stupid, massive and ignorant Israeli military machine . . . [the] "clearest examples are the 300 rockets which we launched on Israel [Wednesday]."

' Nasrallah said the only solution to the crisis "is through a direct cease-fire, an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanese territories and ... a political remedy." '

Israeli television quoted a high Israeli military official saying in response that if Tel Aviv is hit, all of Lebanese infrastructure will be destroyed. AFP doesn't state the man's name, but he needs to read the Geneva Conventions. If he follows through on this threat, having explicitly made it, I hope that some civilized European country finds a way to try him for war crimes. Hitting non-military infrastructure necessary to civilian life is tantamount to murder.

Fuel is running low in Beirut, threatening hospital services.

Israel stopped the delivery of fuel shipments to Lebanon on Thursday.

Even among the Israeli special ops, a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. A fourteen year old tells his terrifying story of being kidnapped by Israeli soldiers because of his last name.

Pay attention to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

Hizbullah again rained rockets down on northern Israel, killing 8 innocent civilians, three of them young Palestinian-Israeli men. Nasrallah fancies himself a statesman and guerrilla fighter, but nothing could be more cowardly than to kill ordinary people on the street or in their cars. The indiscriminate character of his bombardments is demonstrated by his penchant for managing to kill so many Palestinian Israelis. Nasrallah is not the head of a state and has no recognized authority to wage war, and so is just a common serial murderer.

Hizbullah also killed 4 Israeli soldiers on Thursday as the latter continued their ground offensive into southern Lebanon.

It falls to France, Egypt and Jordan to play the grownups and try to get a cessation of military hostilities.

Israeli tanks and bulldozers invaded Gaza, killing 7 Palestinians.

Jim Lobe of Interpress Service surveys the wreckage of Bush's Middle East policy and finds it unedifying.

The death toll in the Qana massacre is now estimated at 28 with 13 missing by HRW. Since the 13 missing are almost certainly dead, the toll is 41 rather than 60. It is still a horrific massacre.

38 Dead, including 2 Sadrists Killed by US
US, UK Officials Admit Slide toward Civil War

: Reuters says that 24 persons were killed or reported dead on Thursday. But 2 of the wounded Sadrists later died, and it doesn't seem to know about the 9 bodies dragged from the Tigris or the shootings in Basra, Amara and Mosul. I'd say that is at least 38. The worst incidents:

' BAGHDAD - Ten people were killed and 32 wounded by a bomb hidden in a rubbish pile on the side of the road in the al-Amin district of eastern Baghdad, an Interior Ministry source said.

* BAGHDAD - U.S. troops opened fire on a convoy carrying supporters of radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr at a checkpoint south of Baghdad, wounding at least 16 people [and killing two Sadrists - JRC], police said. There was no immediate comment from the U.S. military . . .

MUSSAYAB - Three people were killed and 22 wounded on Wednesday night when gunmen attacked a wedding party with hand grenades in Mussayab, 60 km south of Baghdad, police said.

Crowds of Shiites belonging to the Sadr movement were on their way to Baghdad Thursday to stage a demonstration in Baghdad against the Israeli war on Lebanon. Some Sadrists in a mini-van came under fire from US troops near Mahmudiyah, with one or two killed and 16 wounded. The US military says that the Sadrists fired at a US observation tower.

There was an outbreak of candor, deliberate and inadvertent, among UK and US officials on Thursday. In the UK, a dark memo from the outgoing British ambassador in Baghdad to Prime Minister Tony Blair was leaked. William Patey wrote to Whitehall:

' The prospect of a low intensity civil war and a de facto division of Iraq is probably more likely at this stage than a successful and substantial transition to a stable democracy.

"Even the lowered expectation of President Bush for Iraq – a government that can sustain itself, defend itself and govern itself and is an ally in the war on terror – must remain in doubt. '

Anyone who just follows the daily news actually coming out of Iraq rather than the London and Washington press conferences knows that this way of putting things is actually overly optimistic.

Patey was also concerned lest the Mahdi Army turn into an armed state within a state on the model of Hizbullah in Lebanon. I was told by an American official who had been in Baghdad that Iraqi provincial elections had been postponed because there are indications that Muqtada al-Sadr's movement is growing in popularity in the Shiite south and his lists might sweep to power. So Patey's fear is misplaced. The real prospect is that the Sadrists will be the government of Iraq, not just an armed outsider.

The retired British Foreign Office diplomats generally feel that "Mr Blair has done more damage to British interests in the Middle East than Anthony Eden, who led the UK to disaster in Suez 50 years ago."

General John Abizaid, in a victory for plain talking, told the Senate on Thursday that Iraq was as bad as he had seen it and could easily slip into full-scale sectarian civil war. Abizaid was also the first general to admit that the country was in a guerrilla war. However, it is worth noting that by social science standards, Iraq has been in a civil war for years. What would you call a country where there is an armed insurgency that kills thousands each month?

Donald Rumsfeld in his testimony just dusted off Ayman al-Zawahiri's stock speech about a caliphate from Spain to the Philippines (which is ridiculous) and drew the opposite conclusion from that of Zawahiri-- the US must stay militarily in the Muslim world, otherwise the extremists win.

Uh, Donald, there were no Islamist extremists to speak of in Iraq before you invaded and occupied it. Leave, and maybe the Iraqis will find it easier to go back to a moderate secularism. Stay, and create a sea of beards.

The domino theory was false with regard to Communism. It is sure as hell false with regard to Bin Ladenism.

McGreevy: "Justice" Comes to Qana

Patrick McGreevy writes from Beirut:

“Justice” Comes to Qana

' The attacks of 11 September 2001 gave many ordinary Americans a palpable experience of injustice. Addressing both houses of Congress nine days later, President Bush proclaimed: "Our grief has turned to anger and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done." By nearly conflating justice and revenge, the President—and, alas, the vast majority of Americans who applauded him—lost an opportunity to see with new clarity, justice itself, cast into relief by the very experience of injustice. Instead, the United States launched an endless war, the first stage of which was to be called Operation Infinite Justice.

This week “justice” came to the Lebanese Village of Qana. The United States had blocked every attempt to end the violence, and, before the attack, Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon had announced that “everyone who is still in south Lebanon is linked to Hizbullah.” The Anglo-American-Israeli juggernaut had brought “justice” to “our enemies.”

Reacting to the horrors of World War II, the bold thinking Max Horkheimer suggested that we finally make social progress from the experience of the opposite of justice. We learn about the value of the individual life, for instance, from the experience of a world that treads mercilessly on human lives and bodies, treating them as so much soulless stuff. Though a European Jew, Horkheimer was a dialectical materialist, and therefore no kind of theist. Yet he believed that the notion that each human is equally and, in a sense, infinitely valuable, was a religious innovation. “The very concept of the soul as the inner light, the dwelling place of God,” he wrote, “came into being only with Christianity, and all antiquity has an element of emptiness and aloofness by contrast.” To our modern sensibilities, he observed, “some of the Gospel teachings and stories about the simple fishermen and carpenters of Galilee seem to make the Greek masterpieces mute and soulless—lacking that very ‘inner light’—and the leading figures of antiquity roughhewn and barbaric.” For Horkheimer, this insight came from the painful experience of its negation, and any hope of justice lay, paradoxically, in the deep experience of injustice. Hence, “the anonymous martyrs of the concentration camps are the symbols of the humanity that is striving to be born,” and we could expect insight from those “who have gone through the infernos of suffering and degradation in their resistance to conquest and oppression.”

Hassan Nasrallah speaks to the Arab World and the Muslim World about their common experience of injustice. Do not doubt its deep resonance. Its truth. Qana is just the latest, and one of the clearest, and most globally visible, examples. Can those who launched the endless war finally recognize the infinitely valuable “inner light” so callously snuffed out of each of those dusty child corpses? Will Nasrallah, and those now fixated on his voice, see justice, against the background of injustice, any more clearly than did Bush and those fixated on his voice? Can we expect such magnanimity, given the asymmetry of the suffering?

In human affairs, cycles of violence and revenge, cascades of injustice, are not inevitable. Our sole hope is that we have not only an inner light but an ability to choose and act, to consider not only means, but ends, with what Horkheimer called reason—that having lived through hell, we might see not only the injustice done to us, but the horror of injustice no matter who is the victim. A simple thing. We know the alternative.

Patrick McGreevy '

HRW: Israel Guilty of War Crimes

Human Rights Watch, after extensive investigation, has concluded that the Israeli military is guilty of war crimes. HRW says:

Israeli forces have systematically failed to distinguish between combatants and civilians in their military campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Human Rights Watch said in report released today. The pattern of attacks in more than 20 cases investigated by Human Rights Watch researchers in Lebanon indicates that the failures cannot be dismissed as mere accidents and cannot be blamed on wrongful Hezbollah practices. In some cases, these attacks constitute war crimes.

The 50-page report, “Fatal Strikes: Israel’s Indiscriminate Attacks Against Civilians in Lebanon,” analyzes almost two dozen cases of Israeli air and artillery attacks on civilian homes and vehicles. Of the 153 dead civilians named in the report, 63 are children. More than 500 people have been killed in Lebanon by Israeli fire since fighting began on July 12, most of them civilians.

“The pattern of attacks shows the Israeli military’s disturbing disregard for the lives of Lebanese civilians,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “Our research shows that Israel’s claim that Hezbollah fighters are hiding among civilians does not explain, let alone justify, Israel’s indiscriminate warfare.”

HRW's investigations do not bear out the excuse that the high civilian casualty rate is because of Hizbullah hiding among civilians:

' Human Rights Watch researchers found numerous cases in which the IDF launched artillery and air attacks with limited or dubious military objectives but excessive civilian cost. In many cases, Israeli forces struck an area with no apparent military target. In some instances, Israeli forces appear to have deliberately targeted civilians.

In one case, an Israeli air strike on July 13 destroyed the home of a cleric known to have sympathy for Hezbollah but who was not known to have taken any active part in the hostilities. Even if the IDF considered him a legitimate target (and Human Rights Watch has no evidence that he was), the strike killed him, his wife, their 10 children and the family’s Sri Lankan maid.

On July 16, an Israeli aircraft fired on a civilian home in the village of Aitaroun, killing 11 members of the al-Akhrass family, among them seven Canadian-Lebanese dual nationals who were vacationing in the village when the war began. Human Rights Watch independently interviewed three villagers who vigorously denied that the family had any connection to Hezbollah. Among the victims were children aged one, three, five and seven.

The Israeli government has blamed Hezbollah for the high civilian casualty toll in Lebanon, insisting that Hezbollah fighters have hidden themselves and their weapons among the civilian population. However, in none of the cases of civilian deaths documented in the report is there evidence to suggest that Hezbollah was operating in or around the area during or prior to the attack. '

Just from observing eyewitness news accounts from Lebanon, I had come to the same conclusion.

A letter to the editor worth reading, on Israeli war crimes in Lebanon.

The Arab American Institute condemned the Bush administration for its insouciance over the Qana massacre.

The Israelis have done $2 billion worth of damage to Lebanon. I guess that is fair, one billion for each soldier captured by Hizbullah.


Israel resumed its bombing of Shiite civilian neighborhoods in southern Beirut on Wednesday.

The Israelis also bombed the Tyre region, killing 7 civilians. Israeli ground troops advanced into southern Lebanon, saying their goal is to reach the Litani, methodically cleaning out Hizbullah bases as they go. Apparently the Israelis really do hope to (further) empty those 19 square miles of people.

2,000 Saudi Shiites demonstrated against Israel in Qatif on Tuesday. Saudi Shiites are traditionally quite timid and cautious, so this rally is an index of their frustration. The community has boldly criticized its own government for initially blaming Hizbullah for adventurism and declining to call for a cease fire. Since the early days of the war, Saudi policy has swung around to criticizing Israel and demanding a ceasefire.

On why you should never, ever listen to the promises of air force generals about how they can get the job done in fighting guerrilla groups without harming civilians.

No fuel, no energy. No energy, no water and no bread. No water and no bread, no people.

The Daily Star surveys Lebanese blogs that are trying to cover the war experience from that country.

The UN reminds us that the Israeli-imposed crisis in Gaza is as bad as that in Lebanon.

56 Dead in Iraq Violence
Spike in Attacks on US Troops out of Anger over Israel

It's Iraq, Stupid, concludes the Trib on the basis of a new Gallup poll that shows this subject is the number one concern of about a third of voters.

Two more US troops were killed by guerrillas in al-Anbar province, western Iraq, on Wednesday. 12 have been killed in since Thursday a week ago.. Iraqi guerrilla leaders are said to have found it much easier to recruit insurgents and gain support for direct attack on US troops because of Israel's war on Lebanon. They have been able to do far more mortar attacks on US targets.

The US military confirms that attacks on US military personnel in Iraq are way up recently.

Has Ehud Olmert indirectly killed 12 US Marines and soldiers, and wounded many more, this week? I mean, while thousands of US and British troops were essentially hostage to the good will of millions of Iraqi Shiites all around them, was this really the appropriate time to launch a total war on Lebanese Shiites?

The Associated Press reports that guerrillas fighting the Iraqi civil war killed 52 persons around the country on Wednesday. I count 56 dead in this Reuters report. Nearly 15 persons, some of them quite young, were killed in bombings or mortar strikes on soccer fields in Shiite areas of the capital, while others were wounded. Eleven bodies were found in Suwayra, victims of faith-based killings.

President Jalal Talabani seemed to say Wednesday that Iraq would take over security duties by the end of the year. His spokesman had to come out and say he didn't really mean it. The statement caused a flurry in the Washington press corps, which takes Mam Jalal's title too seriously and doesn't seem to realize that he is sort of like Reagan was and you can't take everything that comes out of his mouth very seriously.

In fact, there is no prospect of Iraqi government military and security forces getting a handle on the situation in most of the country unaided, and they aren't even doing very well with massive aid.

A quarter of the leaders of Iraq's national police are suspected of being criminals or of having strong sectarian biases of a sort that mgiht lead them to use their forces to ethnically cleanse neighborhoods of Sunnis.

Thousands of Shiites thronged the streets of Baghdad on Wednesday[Ar.], rallying against the Baathists they say are leading the Sunni Arab insurgency. The Financial Times says that many of the demonstrators were members of the Badr Corps or local protection committees, young men wearing civilian uniforms. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, addressed them, commending neighborhood-based security committees, which he said could defend residents of all religions and ethnicities. (This plan sounds to me suspiciously like the komitehs of revolutionary Iran, and over time they will likely become neighborhood-based militias and death squads).

Al-Hakim also met, through the good offices of Talabani, with Harith al-Dhari, a leader of the hard line Sunni Association for Muslim Scholars. The meeting was preparatory to a national reconciliation conference.

Iraqi shopkeepers face shortages of wholesale goods, a thinning out of their customer base because of lack of security, and attacks on themselves because they are often of the wrong faith or ethnicit for their neighborhood.

Well I guess so department. Cicsco has won a big contract for Petroleum refining in Kurdistan.

190 Hizbullah Rockets Rain down on Israel
21 Wounded

There had been some question about whether Hizbullah's ability to hit Israel with rockets had been degraded, or whether it was just observing the 48 hour air cease fire. On Wednesday it cleared the mystery up. The indiscriminate firing of rockets on civilian targets wounded 21 persons and one hit the Palestinian West Bank. Among the rockets fired was a long-distance Khaybar II. Targeting civilians or unnecessarily endangering them is a war crime.

As for Israeli attacks on civilians and life-sustaining civilian infrastructure in Lebanon, this site has a useful map and frequent updates.

Karen Hughes Denies Israel Has Blank Check
Fierce Fighting at Aita al-Shaab, Baalbak

Karen Hughes, W.'s official in charge of public diplomacy to the Muslim world, must be about the loneliest person in the world right now. The Neocons inside the administration have been trying to undermine her, from what I hear in Washington (since they don't want us to make a good impression on Muslims; they want us to kill them.) And, what with Iraq being a basket case and the Israelis bombing little children every day, her intended audience probably does not much want to hear from her right about now.

So it would not be surprising, though it will of course be denied, if she lost it and really did become startlingly frank in an interview for a Malaysian newspaper:

' Claims that Israel has a green light to fight in Lebanon until it ousts Hezbollah are “outrageous,” a top aide to President Bush said.
In interviews over the weekend with Malaysian media, Karen Hughes, Bush’s envoy for public diplomacy in the Middle East, rejected Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon’s claim of U.S. authorization to wipe out Hezbollah.

“That is an outrageous statement,” Hughes said.

“It is false, and my understanding is the government of Israel has disavowed it.”

She compared Ramon to Hezbollah ministers in the Lebanese government who launched the initial July 12 attack on Israel “without the permission of the government of Lebanon.” '

Oooops. Ms. Hughes has her heart in the right place, and one can only applaud her for being the only member of the Bush administration to dare use the word "outrageous" to describe any action of any Israeli official in the current war. But can even her old friendship with W. protect her from the backlash from these statements that will come in the Israel lobby in Washington?

And, if she said it, it draws the curtain aside as to how frustrated some members of the administration are with Israeli high-handedness in this war.

Update:

Oh, Here is the USG transcript of the interview. My bad-- Even Condi called Ramon's statement outrageous.

Hat tip: See also the USC Public Diplomacy Review.

The Israel military moved into southern Lebanon on Tuesday and fought a fierce battle at the village of Aita al-Shaab. In the course of this struggle, Hizbullah fighters killed three Israeli troops, including an officer, and wounded twenty-five. Some 5 Hizbullah fighters were said to have been killed. Hizbullah also claimed to have killed Israeli tanks. The fighting in the far south has been far more costly in Israeli military lives than the Israeli leaders expected.

Some 10,000 Israeli troops made incursions into the south of Lebanon. The Daily Star says, ' Intense clashes raged for the third consecutive day in the regions of Taibeh, Adaysseh and Kfar Kila, 35 kilometers east of Tyre, Lebanese police told The Daily Star . . . Israeli troops, who entered the area Sunday, had made a small advance of about 1 kilometer, they said. ' There was also stiff fighting at Maroun al-Ra's.

The Daily Star also says of the Israeli air cease fire,

' Six air raids were carried out along the banks of the Litani, three more in the Bekaa region to the east and an additional six strikes on villages near Tyre. A mother and her two daughters were killed in a separate air strike that destroyed their home in the mountain village of Louaize. Three other civilians were wounded in that attack. At least 828 Lebanese, almost all of them civilians, have been killed and 3,200 wounded over the last three weeks, the Higher Relief Committee said on Tuesday. Fifty-one Israelis have also been killed, most of them soldiers. '

Israeli helicopters delivered special ops troops to Baalbak, where they engaged in firefights with Hizbullah fighters.

Apparently they were looking for a senior Hizbullah leader who was being treated at Dar al-Hikmah hospital in Baalbak. Israeli helicopter gunships are said to have destroyed a hospital in the city. However, it appears that they missed their man and satisfied themselves with taking 5 or 6 very junior Hizbullah fighters hostage, returning to Israel. Some eyewitnesses are saying that the Israelis fired a missile at the Dar al-Hikmah hospital, setting it ablaze. Unless the hospital had been turned into a military base, this action (if it occurred) was a war crime.

The Israelis killed 10 civilians in Jamaliyah near Baalbak, apparently as part