What the Number 3000 Hides

Iraqi guerrillas killed 6 more GIs and AP put the total dead in combat at 2998. The dreadful milestone of 3000 is upon us.

Like all statistics, this one is deceptive. It does not include US troops killed in Afghanistan, that oddly forgotten war where the US still has a division engaging in active combat. Nor is it nice to ignore NATO dead in Afghanistan, including French and Canadians (yes).

The number does not include the Coalition troops killed in Iraq. The sacrifices of the British, Italians, and others should be included.

And why ignore the seriously wounded? These brave warriors have brain damage, or spinal damage, or have lost limbs or been burned and disfigured. There are probably 8000 of them. Their sacrifice should be foregrounded. Life is not going to be easy for them, and they are not goiing to get that much help from Bush.

Indeed, why not count all the wounded? The number must be near 25000 by now.

Then there are all the I raq Vets with post traumatic stress disorder and a myriad of other combat related mental diseases. There is alcoholism, domestic violence, divorce.

The true number of Americans and US allies who are in some sense casualties of war is in the tens of thousands.

3000 is a horrible number. But it is not the only dreadful number. By concentrating on it, Washington politicians and the US press hide from us the true magnitude of the problems we face in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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traveling and posting by treo, so no hyperlinks.

The Murderer's Gibbet
Cole in Salon.com on the Saddam Execution

My article on the execution of Saddam is out in Salon.com. Excerpt:

' The body of Saddam, as it swung from the gallows at 6 a.m. Saturday Baghdad time, cast an ominous shadow over Iraq. The execution provoked intense questions about whether his trial was fair and about what the fallout will be. One thing is certain: The trial and execution of Saddam were about revenge, not justice. Instead of promoting national reconciliation, this act of revenge helped Saddam portray himself one last time as a symbol of Sunni Arab resistance, and became one more incitement to sectarian warfare. '

Read the whole thing.

See also Salon.com's Editor's picks for 2006, ten articles that include my "Israel's Failed-State Policy."

Consider subscribing to Salon.com for the coming year. Much of what I've written there in the past year would not have been published by most other magazines.

See also Paul Richter's article on how Saddam's execution is not actually a turning point for Iraq. I am quoted.

For Whom the Bell Tolls:
Top Ten Ways the US Enabled Saddam Hussein

The old monster swung from the gallows this morning at 6 am Baghdad time. His Shiite executioners danced around his body.

Saddam Hussain was one of the 20th century's most notorious tyrants, though the death toll he racked up is probably exaggerated by his critics. The reality was bad enough.

The tendency to treat Saddam and Iraq in a historical vacuum, and in isolation from the superpowers, however, has hidden from Americans their own culpability in the horror show that has been Iraq for the past few decades. Initially, the US used the Baath Party as a nationalist foil to the Communists. Then Washington used it against Iran. The welfare of Iraqis themselves appears to have been on no one's mind, either in Washington or in Baghdad.

The British-installed monarchy was overthrown by an officer's coup in 1958, led by Abdul Karim Qasim. The US was extremely upset, and worried that the new regime would not be a reliable oil exporter and that it might leave the Baghdad Pact of 1955, which the US had put together against the Soviet Union (grouping Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Britain and the US). (Qasim did leave the pact in 1959, which according to a US official of that time, deeply alarmed Washington.)

Iraq in the 1940s and 1950s had become an extremely unequal society, with a few thousand (mostly Sunni Arab) families owning half of the good land. On their vast haciendas, poor rural Shiites worked for a pittance. In the 1950s, two new mass parties grew like wildfire, the Communist Party of Iraq and the Arab Baath Socialist Party. They attracted first-generation intellectuals, graduates of the rapidly expanding school system, as well as workers and peasants. The crushing inequalities of Iraq under the monarchy produced widespread anger.

Qasim undertook land reform and founded a new section of Baghdad, in the northeast, which he called Revolution Township, where rural Shiites congregated as they came to the capital seeking work as day laborers (it is now Sadr City, where a majority of Baghdadis live). The US power elite of the time wrongly perceived Qasim as a dangerous radical who coddled the Communists.

1) The first time the US enabled Saddam Hussein came in 1959. In that year, a young Saddam, from the boondock town of Tikrit but living with an uncle in Baghdad, tried to assassinate Qasim. He failed and was wounded in the leg. Saddam had, like many in his generation, joined the Baath Party, which combined socialism, Arab nationalism, and the aspiration for a one-party state.

In 1959, Richard Sale of UPI reports,

' According to another former senior State Department official, Saddam, while only in his early 20s, became a part of a U.S. plot to get rid of Qasim. According to this source, Saddam was installed in an apartment in Baghdad on al-Rashid Street directly opposite Qasim's office in Iraq's Ministry of Defense, to observe Qasim's movements.

Adel Darwish, Middle East expert and author of "Unholy Babylon," said the move was done "with full knowledge of the CIA," and that Saddam's CIA handler was an Iraqi dentist working for CIA and Egyptian intelligence. U.S. officials separately confirmed Darwish's account.'

CIA involvement in the 1959 assassination attempt is plausible. Historian David Wise says there is evidence in the US archives that the CIA's "Health Alteration Committee" tried again to have Qasim assassinated in 1960 by "sending the Iraqi leader a poisoned monogrammed handkerchief."

2) After the failed coup attempt, Saddam fled to Cairo, where he attended law school in between bar brawls, and where it is alleged that he retained his CIA connections there, being put on a stipend by the agency via the Egyptian government. He frequently visited US operatives at the Indiana Cafe. Getting him back on his feet in Cairo was the second episode of US aid to Saddam.

3) In February of 1963 the military wing of the Baath Party, which had infiltrated the officer corps and military academy, made a coup against Qasim, whom they killed. There is evidence from Middle Eastern sources, including interviews conducted at the time by historian Hanna Batatu, that the CIA cooperated in this coup and gave the Baathists lists of Iraqi Communists (who were covert, having infiltrated the government or firms). Roger Morris, a former National Security Council staffer of the 1960s, alleged that the US played a significant role in this Baath coup and that it was mostly funded "with American money.". Morris's allegation was confirmed to me by an eyewitness with intimate knowledge of the situation, who said that that the CIA station chief in Baghdad gave support to the Baathists in their coup. One other interviewee, who served as a CIA operative in Baghdad in 1964, denied to me the agency's involvement. But he was at the time junior and he was not an eyewitness to the events of 1963, and may not have been told the straight scoop by his colleagues. Note that some high Baathists appear to have been unaware of the CIA involvement, as well. In the murky world of tradecraft, a lot of people, even on the same team, keep each other in the dark. UPI quotes another, or perhaps the same, official, saying that the coup came as a surprise to Langley. In my view, unlikely.

There really is not any controversy about the US having supplied the names of Communists to the Baath, which rooted them out and killed them. Saddam Hussein was brought back from Cairo as an interrogator and quickly rose to become head of Baath Intelligence. So that was his first partnership with the US.*

The 1963 Baath government only lasted 8 months, and was overthrown by officers who had been around Qasim. The military wing of the Baath, which was heavily Shiite, was relentlessly pursued by the new government, and was virtually wiped out. The largely Sunni civilian party, however, survived underground.

4) In 1968, the civilian wing of the Baath Party came to power in a second coup. David Morgan of Reuters wrote,

' "In 1968, Morris says, the CIA encouraged a palace revolt among Baath party elements led by long-time Saddam mentor Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, who would turn over the reins of power to his ambitious protégé in 1979. "It's a regime that was unquestionably midwived by the United States, and the (CIA's) involvement there was really primary," Morris says. '

As I noted in The Nation, in their book Unholy Babylon, "Darwish and Alexander report assertions of US backing for the 1968 coup, confirmed to me by other journalists who have talked to retired CIA and State Department officials." It was alleged to me by one journalist who had talked to former US government officials with knowledge of this issue that not only did the US support the 1968 Baath coup, but it specifically promoted the Tikritis among the coup-makers, helping them become dominant. These included President Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr and his cousin Saddam Hussein, who quickly became a power behind the throne.

5) The second Baath regime in Iraq disappointed the Nixon and Ford administrations by reaching out to the tiny remnants of the Communist Party and by developing good relations with the Soviet Union. In response, Nixon supported the Shah's Iran in its attempts to use the Iraqi Kurds to stir up trouble for the Baath Party, of which Saddam Hussein was a behind the scenes leader. As supporting the Kurdish struggle became increasingly expensive, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlevi of Iran decided to abandon the Kurds. He made a deal with the Iraqis at Algiers in 1975, and Saddam immediately ordered an invasion of Iraqi Kurdistan. The US acquiesced in this betrayal of the Kurds, and made no effort to help them monetarily. Kissinger maintained that the whole operation had been the shah's, and the shah suddenly terminated it, leaving the US with no alternative but to acquiesce. But that is not entirely plausible. The operation was supported by the CIA, and the US didn't have to act only through an Iranian surrogate. Kissinger no doubt feared he couldn't get Congress to fund help to the Kurds during the beginnings of the Vietnam syndrome. In any case, the 1975 US about-face helped Saddam consolidate control over northern Iraq.

6) When Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980, he again caught the notice of US officials. The US was engaged in an attempt to contain Khomeinism and the new Islamic Republic. Especially after the US faced attacks from radicalized Shiites in Lebanon linked to Iran, and from the Iraqi Da`wa Party, which engaged in terrorism against the US and French embassies in Kuwait, the Reagan administration determined to deal with Saddam from late 1983, giving him important diplomatic encouragement. Historians are deeply indebted to Joyce Battle's Briefing Book at the National Security Archives, GWU, which presents key documents she sprung through FOIA requests, and which she analyzed for the first time.

I wrote on another occasion,

' Reagan sent Rumsfeld to Baghdad in December 1983. The National Security Archive has posted a brief video of his meeting with Hussein and the latter’s vice president and foreign minister, Tariq Aziz. Rumsfeld was to stress his close relationship with the U.S. president. The State Department summary of Rumsfeld’s meeting with Tariq Aziz stated that “the two agreed the U.S. and Iraq shared many common interests: peace in the Gulf, keeping Syria and Iran off balance and less influential, and promoting Egypt’s reintegration into the Arab world.” Aziz asked Rumsfeld to intervene with Washington’s friends to get them to stop selling arms to Iran. Increasing Iraq’s oil exports and a possible pipeline through Saudi Arabia occupied a portion of their conversation.

. . . The State Department, however, issued a press statement on March 5, 1984, condemning Iraqi use of chemical weapons. This statement appears to have been Washington’s way of doing penance for its new alliance.

Unaware of the depths of Reagan administration hypocrisy on the issue, Hussein took the March 5 State Department condemnation extremely seriously, and appears to have suspected that the United States was planning to stab him in the back. Secretary of State George Shultz notes in a briefing for Rumsfeld in spring of 1984 that the Iraqis were extremely confused by concrete U.S. policies . . . "As with our CW statement, their temptation is to give up rational analysis and retreat to the line that US policies are basically anti-Arab and hostage to the desires of Israel.”

Rumsfeld had to be sent back to Baghdad for a second meeting, to smooth ruffled Baath feathers. The above-mentioned State Department briefing notes for this discussion remarked that the atmosphere in Baghdad (for Rumsfeld) had worsened . . . the March 5 scolding of Iraq for its use of poison gas had “sharply set back” relations between the two countries.

The relationship was repaired, but on Hussein’s terms. He continued to use chemical weapons and, indeed, vastly expanded their use as Washington winked at Western pharmaceutical firms providing him materiel. The only conclusion one can draw from available evidence is that Rumsfeld was more or less dispatched to mollify Hussein and assure him that his use of chemical weapons was no bar to developing the relationship with the U.S., whatever the State Department spokesman was sent out to say. '

7) The US gave
practical help to Saddam during the Iran-Iraq War:

' As former National Security Council staffer Howard Teicher affirmed, “Pursuant to the secret NSDD [National Security Directive], the United States actively supported the Iraqi war effort by supplying the Iraqis with billions of dollars of credits, by providing US military intelligence and advice to the Iraqis, and by closely monitoring third country arms sales to Iraq to make sure that Iraq had the military weaponry required.” The requisite weaponry included cluster bombs. . . '

Richard Sale of UPI also reported that military cooperation intensified:

' During the war, the CIA regularly sent a team to Saddam to deliver battlefield intelligence obtained from Saudi AWACS surveillance aircraft to aid the effectiveness of Iraq's armed forces, according to a former DIA official, part of a U.S. interagency intelligence group. . .

According to Darwish, the CIA and DIA provided military assistance to Saddam's ferocious February 1988 assault on Iranian positions in the al-Fao peninsula by blinding Iranian radars for three days. '

8) The Reagan administration worked behind the scenes to foil Iran's motion of censure against Iraq for using chemical weapons. I wrote at Truthdig:

' The new American alliance might have been a public relations debacle if Iran succeeded in its 1984 attempt to have Iraq directly condemned at the United Nations for use of chemical weapons. As far as possible, Shultz wanted to weasel out of joining such a U.N. condemnation of Iraq. He wrote in a cable that the U.S. delegation to the U.N. “should work to develop general Western position in support of a motion to take ‘no decision’ on Iranian draft resolution on use of chemical weapons by Iraq. If such a motion gets reasonable and broad support and sponsorship, USDEL should vote in favor. Failing Western support for ‘no decision,’ USDEL should abstain.” Shultz in the first instance wanted to protect Hussein from condemnation by a motion of “no decision,” and hoped to get U.S. allies aboard. If that ploy failed and Iraq were to be castigated, he ordered that the U.S. just abstain from the vote. Despite its treaty obligations in this regard, the U.S. was not even to so much as vote for a U.N. resolution on the subject!

Shultz also wanted to throw up smokescreens to take the edge off the Iranian motion, arguing that the U.N. Human Rights Commission was “an inappropriate forum” for consideration of chemical weapons, and stressing that loss of life owing to Iraq’s use of chemicals was “only a part” of the carnage that ensued from a deplorable war. A more lukewarm approach to chemical weapons use by a rogue regime (which referred to the weapons as an “insecticide” for enemy “insects") could not be imagined. In the end, the U.N. resolution condemned the use of chemical weapons but did not name Iraq directly as a perpetrator. '

9) The Reagan administration not only gave significant aid to Saddam, it attempted to recruit other friends for him.

' Teicher adds that the CIA had knowledge of, and U.S. officials encouraged, the provisioning of Iraq with high-powered weaponry by U.S. allies. He adds: “For example, in 1984, the Israelis concluded that Iran was more dangerous than Iraq to Israel’s existence due to the growing Iranian influence and presence in Lebanon. The Israelis approached the United States in a meeting in Jerusalem that I attended with Donald Rumsfeld. Israeli Foreign Minister Ytizhak Shamir asked Rumsfeld if the United States would deliver a secret offer of Israeli assistance to Iraq. The United States agreed. I traveled with Rumsfeld to Baghdad and was present at the meeting in which Rumsfeld told Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz about Israel’s offer of assistance. Aziz refused even to accept the Israelis’ letter to Hussein.” It might have been hoped that a country that arose in part in response to Nazi uses of poison gas would have been more sensitive about attempting to ally with a regime then actively deploying such a weapon, even against its own people (some gassing of Kurds had already begun). '

10) After the Gulf War of 1991, when Shiites and Kurds rose up against Saddam Hussein, the Bush senior administration sat back and allowed the Baathists to fly helicopter gunships and to massively repress the uprising. President GHW Bush had called on Iraqis to rise up against their dictator, but when they did so he left them in the lurch. This inaction, deriving from a fear that a Shiite-dominated Iraq would ally with Tehran, allowed Saddam to remain in power until 2003.

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Readers of this column may also enjoy Eric Blumrich's Flash slideshow.

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*The account in 1-3 above was challenged once I put it up by two retired US government officials who had positions of responsibility in the Middle East in this period. The alternative account of one of them is here.

Against this insider account must be put the evidence of a memo by Robert Komer at the National Security Council dated the day of the 1963 coup that clearly demonstrates that he had foreknowledge of it, and in which he commends a US agency (it is blacked out) for good penetration of the Baath Party. Komer's memo does not demonstrate that the US made the coup, but it does challenge the idea put forward by my informant above that it came as a surprise to the US government. Nathan Citino and Bill Zeman have discussed this memo in their academic writing. Roger Morris wrote me to say that he had seen national security documents proving US involvement in the 1963 coup.

Riverbend is Back

Riverbend weighs in on the condition of Iraq and Saddam's impending execution.

I disagree with her about Jalal Talabani (the old-time Kurdish politician who is now Iraq's president), who has opposed the death penalty all his political life, and I think that he genuinely won't sign the death decree for reasons of principle.

I also don't agree that the Bush administration was deliberately trying to break up Iraq. It wants it whole (international corporations like to sign their contracts just once, thank you). It is just that its plan, of putting the Shiites and Kurds in power and making the Sunni Arabs subordinate to them, was never practical and did have the effect of pushing the country toward a break-up.

As always, her comments are canny and give a good sense of what educated, secular Sunni Arabs in Iraq are thinking. It isn't a position you'd hear in an interview in US corporate media.

Alexandrovna Guest Op-Ed:
Saddam's Execution and the Campaign Against Iran

Saddam's Execution is about Iran

Larisa Alexandrovna

'PROLOGUE:

When someone does something obviously egregious, we tend to look past it because it is our nature to believe that people are naturally sane, good, and honest. We cannot imagine that anyone would willfully destroy their own country, violate their own laws, trample on their own people, and do it with such naked bravado while the world looked on.

But people have done it and do it even still, because there is also a darker side to human nature. Those of us who see the good in people look past actions that appear to be willfully evil not only because it is in our nature but it is also a foundation of our culture, as Americans, we believe guilt must be proved.

So we do not see what is going on before our eyes and directly in front of us. We look past it, around it, through it, but not at it. We cannot look directly at it, because if we do, we lose the vision of our beloved America and see something so sinister, that our minds would rather collapse than accept it.

But chess forces us to abandon our preconceptions and emotions. It pushes us to think in terms of cause and effect and it forces us to consider each action and counteraction in terms of the whole game. That is to say, chess forces us to think beyond our own present and fixed position, forcing us to reason every possible outcome of each action and counteraction.

Furthermore, chess teaches us to calculate not against a person, or a group, or a nation, but against a strategy that has no inherent religious, moral, or human characteristics. Master players can suspend their fixated self at will. Sadly, I am no master, and so I continue to struggle in seeing the game despite my human nature as an obstacle.

But sometimes, it just happens, something sets it off and there you are, inside the board, walking each action out in your mind and seeing the whole from beginning to end.

QUESTIONS AND SEEING THE BOARD

Sometime this morning, all the various and truly bizarre events the Bush administration has been engaged in recently with regard to troop levels and surges suddenly crystallized for me, as though I were sitting at a chess board and seeing the entire strategy unfold before my eyes.

This is of course my opinion and I may very well be wrong. In fact, I hope I am wrong. But the news that Saddam Hussein would be executed soon, and then the news that it would be in the next 48 hours, boggled my mind. Why on earth would anyone want to set off an ideological bomb during an already chaotic situation? I do not defend Saddam Hussein, not by any measure. But when Iraq is falling into total chaos and civil war, and as American troops continue to die, why would anyone want to add fuel to that fire, enough fuel to destroy what is left?

Suspend your emotions and think strategically. Now look at the question again and in context.

The administration is stalling as it supposedly weighs its Iraq options, when in fact they have already made their decision. How do I know they have made their decision? One need only look at the slow leaks coming out, not the least of which was Joe Lieberman’s op-ed in the Washington Post, to understand that we are going to be sending more troops to Iraq. So why does the administration wait to tell us this?

In the meantime, naval carriers are deployed to send Iran “a warning,” as though the threats thus far and the passing of sanctions are not warning enough. Add to that the detainment of Iranian diplomats invited to Iraq by the Iraqi leadership. Why is the US arresting diplomats invited to a country that the US claims is a sovereign nation governing itself?

And what about those sanctions, which ultimately mean nothing and sadly mean everything? The sanctions are so watered down as to have no real effect on the Iranian population or economy. Why even bother passing them?

Why censor Dr. Leverett's opinion piece on Iran when the CIA already cleared it?

Now given this entire context, ask yourself again why Saddam Hussein is being executed now, during Hajj even? What is the urgency?

THE UGLY STRATEGY I SEE

This is what I think may be playing out, my opinion of course. And yes, the strategy is so brazenly obvious, arrogant, and antithetical to everything America is supposed to be and stand for that it will be difficult to digest.

What the Bush administration appears to be waiting for, stalling for, while they allegedly mull over the Iraq question, is for the naval carriers and other key assets to fall into position. This will happen in the first week of January. Saddam Hussein is being executed (and I would not be surprised if every major network aired it) to enrage tempers and fuel more violence in Iraq. This violence will justify an immediate need for a troop surge, although I think it will be described as temporary. Remember too that the British press has for the past week done nothing but report that Britain will be attacked by the New Year. Clearly they are preparing themselves for a contingency, and that contingency is the massive violence that will erupt across the Muslim world as they watch (and I really believe it will be televised) Saddam’s hanging just before the New Year.

Why is the rush to execute Saddam Hussein not account for Hajj? Or does it?

The carriers will be in position. I imaging there will be an event of some sort in Iraq, or the violence will spill into friendly (our friends) territory. It will be dramatic, even more so than the immediate violence.

The attacks will be blamed on Iran, with the help of the Saudis and Pakistan. Iran will be blamed for something that happens in Iran. The naval carriers, again, will be in position. The sanctions, as watered down as they are, have given the administration the blank check they needed from the world (and they still have their blank check from Congress) to order aerial strikes. The surge troops will be in position, and I estimate that ground support will begin around late February, early March.

Saddam’s execution and the violence will also be a convenient cover while the administration moves pieces into position.

But what the planners in the administration don’t seem to realize is that the Persians are the most expert of chess players, and they are a patient, strategy minded opponent. They are watching this develop, all of it, and they too are planning their counteraction. They know better than to strike first, because in doing so, they would lose the moral argument in the eyes of the world, as well as the advantage of counteraction. The US has a superior air force, but Iran has a formidable navy, and while the house of Saud will fuel this, the fallout will be fatal. Why?

Here is why: Because the US is too stretched to be able to protect Israel, and Israel cannot sustain a long term attack. They can sustain a few hits, but they will not be able to sustain a full blown attack.

If you have any doubt, go back to the recent war with Lebanon. The British will pull out, despite promises of support. Blair is on his way out, and the British public will not tolerate support for Israel, because of its help in supporting US imperialistic aggression. Whatever terrorist cells lurk in the US, and make no mistake, our administration has done little to address this issue, will be activated.

Also consider that the house of Saud is not prepared to defend itself against an uprising, and that the US cannot protect it while simultaneously operating on three different fronts and covertly in god knows how many. Despite the various sectarian differences in the Muslim world, there are two enemies that they all agree to fight and die fighting against: the US and Israel. This attack will set off a Muslim counterattack so large, that nothing will be able to stop it or contain it.

But our leadership does not see this, because they cannot think strategically and won't think in human terms, so they are left with nothing but arrogance. And we ae left with a world ablaze. '

Larisa Alexandrovna maintains the blog At-Largely and is Managing Editor - of Raw Story.

Guerrillas Kill 5 GIs
Security Alert over Saddam Sentence
Al-Aamiri killing Roils Shiite Politics

The US military announced that Iraqi guerrillas killed 5 GIs on Thursday in separate incidents. All but one attack clearly occurred in Sunni Arab areas. One was in the east of Baghdad, but since there are Sunni Arab districts between the Green Zone and Sadr City, it isn't clear what the sectarian coloration of that area was.

There were unconfirmed reports of a US military helicopter going down near Baquba, as well.

As the death toll for US troops nears 3,000, Reuters says, it is provoking more and more vigils and anti-war protests out in the US heartland. In the past three months, the death toll has been running on average over 100 a month, which suggests that next year this time, it will be 4,000-- and that is assuming that there is not a change for the worse or an outbreak of major combat.

Reuters reports that police found 42 bodies in Baghdad, and three more in Mosul. They mostly showed signs of torture and are evidence of the nocturnal sectarian civil war. In addition, there were major bombings in Baghdad, Mosul and Hawija. Reuters says of Baghdad:

' BAGHDAD - A car bomb exploded at a petrol station near the Shaab stadium in central Baghdad, killing 10 people and wounding 25, police said.

BAGHDAD - Two roadside bombs exploded in Bab al-Sharji in central Baghdad, killing seven people and wounding 35, Interior Ministry and police sources said. '

Reuters reports that Iraqi officials in Najaf are complaining that they were not consulted by the US military before the fatal raid on the home of Sahib al-Aamiri, Muqtada al-Sadr's number 2 man in Najaf. The US maintains that the operation was spearheaded by a unit of the Iraqi 8th Division, which had 8 US troops embedded with it, and was directed by the Iraqi Department of Defense. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has opened an investigation.

The killing of al-Aamiri led to a further postponement of any session of the Iraqi parliament, where Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki had hoped to convince Sadrist deputies to rejoin his coalition.

The judgment against Saddam Hussein has been published, and the Iraqi government has formally requested that the US turn Saddam over to it. These are signs of a fast track to his execution, which may come very soon.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that Iraq is going on a high state of alert for fear of unrest as a result of Saddam's execution. All leave for Iraqi troops has been cancelled.

The London pan-Arab daily says that there is a split in the Iraqi government over how fast to move. One consideration is that the Sadr bloc in parliament has made Saddam's execution a precondition for its rejoining the government.

There are unconfirmed reports that the US has released the two Iranian diplomats it was holding after a raid last week on a compound connected to Iraqi Shiite leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. Although the US military attempted to tie the Iranians to the importation of shaped charges of the sort use against US troops, its spokesmen never explained how that made any sense. Most roadside bombs are set by Sunni Arabs. The Shiite Iranians are not giving Sunni Arab guerrillas weapons. That would be crazy. They would be used against Iranian clients like al-Hakim (who has been targeted for assassination more than once, and whose brother was blown up by the Baathists in late August, 2003).

If the charge is that the Iranians were giving al-Hakim weapons, then it isn't a very serious charge. Al-Hakim is the leader of the major coalition in parliament. Bush hosted al-Hakim in the White House recently, and al-Hakim has never been tied to attacks on US troops. In fact, he has called for them to stay in Iraq. The whole thing makes no sense, and the US military should explain why they think it does if they want us to believe it. Unfortunately, I have a sinking feeling that the US troops that arrested the Iranians wouldn't be able to distinguish between Sunni guerrillas and Shiite militiamen.

The NYT reports on the problems of housing faced by Iraq's 1.6 million internally displaced persons.

Hannah Allam of McClatchy (formerly Knight Ridder) goes back to Baghdad, and doesn't find the changes encouraging. Her old sources are dead or ethnically cleansed, the shops she knew are shuttered, Shiite militias compete as authors of mayhem with the Sunni Arab guerrillas, fuel and electricity are in short supply, and it is now dangerous to so much as snap a photo.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat/ Reuters report that 108,000 Iraqis were forced from their homes in December.

Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government have reached an agreement on federal revenue-sharing, whereby Kurdistan will receive 17% of the national budget, most of it generated by sales of petroleum from the southern Rumayla oil field, in Shiite territory. This agreement, if it is real, is good news as far as it goes. Anything that gives the Kurds an incentive not to formally secede is good for stability in Iraq and in the region.

The bad news is that the Iraqi government was unable to increase oil production in 2006, and 2007 is unlikely to be better, according to UPI's Ben Lando.

Presidential candidate John Edwards wants to get 50,000 US troops out of Iraq, the same number that Fred Kagan wants to put in.

Thousands Demonstrate in Najaf;
Sunnis Clash with Gov't in Baghdad over Saddam Sentence;
Ford blasts W., Cheney on Iraq

Iraqi guerrillas killed three US GIs on Wednesday in two separate bombings.

Thousands of protesters came out into the streets in the holy Shiite city of Najaf on Wednesday, protesting the killing by US troops of Sahib al-Aamiri in a raid on his home. The US military accused him of being involved in setting roadside bombs. Shiites in East Baghdad also protested, but the demonstrations turned into bloody clashes between Mahdi Army militiamen and US troops.


Najaf Demo courtesy KarbalaNews.net.

Al-Aamiri was a leader of the Sadr Movement in Najaf, which follows young nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. KarbalaNews.net in Arabic quotes a leader of the Sadrist bloc in parliament, Nassar al-Ruba'i, expressing condolences for the death of this "martyr" who "was killed by the American forces," after he had performed his dawn prayers, "in front of his wife and children." He added, "This action is considered a clear violation of Iraqi sovereignty, especially coming only days after the security file in Najaf was surrendered last week." He demanded that the Iraqi government open an urgent inquiry into the killing. Family members said that US troops assaulted his home in the wee hours and killed him, accusing him of resisting capture. Al-Ruba'i accused the US of trying to bring down the government of Nuri al-Maliki, whose Da'wa Party is allied politically with the Sadrists.

Another Sadrist MP, Baha' al-A`raji, said, "We demand that political forces take a united stand against the Occupation forces and in favor of a timetable for their withdrawal, because silence will lead to a timetable for the expulsion of Iraqis from their own country by the Occupation, and to the Americans remaining in Iraq."

WaPo reports that the US military is saying that the raid was led by the 8th Iraqi Division. But the article also implies that the political leaders of Najaf were unaware of the planned raid. The Iraqi army still reports to US officers [An informed reader points out that 3 divisions do not, and that the 8th is one of these; regret the error]. And, the 8th Army is largely Shiite and likely linked to the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and its Badr Corps paramilitary, which means that the decision to raid the home of a Sadrist rival might not be purely a matter of law enforcement.

Mark Santora of the NYT explains what is meant by "civil war" in Iraq. There are two sides and they are fighting each other over territory and political power. They kill many more of each other than of the US troops, who willy nilly mainly take the side of the Shiites and Kurds, who dominate the elected government.

By the way, the October 2005 referendum on the new constitution demonstrates conclusively that the Shiites are a majority in Iraq. The Sunni Arabs participated heavily in that voting, and they were universally against the constitution, but they were only able to reject it in three provinces. Sunni Arab Iraqis widely believe that the Sunni Arabs are a majority, or that Sunnis are a majority if you count the Kurds. None of the ways we have of measuring these things (including the Dec. 2005 parliamentary elections) points to this conclusion.

The LAT on Sunni Arab snipers in al-Anbar province that manage to pick off US troops.

Saddam Hussein, condemned to death and with all appeals exhausted, is trying to turn his death into a "sacrifice" for the Iraqi nation. In April 2003 Saddam was universally reviled but the country is now in such a horrible state that some Sunni Arabs do see Saddam as a symbol of the united Iraqi nation. Saddam, however, spoke in his typical racist way of the need to fight the "raiders and the Persians", according to al-Hayat in Arabic (i.e. the Americans and the Shiites). Sadr Movement spokesmen demanded that he be executed on the eve of the Day of Sacrifice (Eid al-Adha)--i.e. this weekend.

Al-Hayat reports that several Sunni Arab districts of Baghdad saw armed men come out into the streets and engage in bloody clashes with Iraqi security forces, apparently in protest against the confirmation of Saddam's death sentence.

Al-Hayat also says that a communique from the Baath Socialist Party of Iraq posted at a web site threatened to hit US interests around the world if Saddam was executed. So like the Baath Socialist Party of Iraq would be nice to the US if only Saddam were kept alive? Really.

Bob Woodward reveals in WaPo that the late President Gerald Ford deeply disagreed with George W. Bush's Iraq War. Excerpts:

' "Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction," Mr. Ford said. "And now, I've never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do . . ."

Mr. Ford took issue with the notion of the U.S. entering a conflict in service of the idea of spreading democracy. "Well, I can understand the theory of wanting to free people," Mr. Ford said, referring to Mr. Bush's assertion that the U.S. has a "duty to free people." But the former president said he was skeptical "whether you can detach that from the obligation No. 1, of what's in our national interest." He added: "And I just don't think we should go hellfire damnation around the globe freeing people, unless it is directly related to our own national security. . ."

"He was an excellent chief of staff. First class," Mr. Ford said of Mr. Cheney. "But I think Cheney has become much more pugnacious" as vice president. He said he agreed with former Secretary of State Colin Powell's assertion that Mr. Cheney developed a "fever" about the threat of terrorism and Iraq. "I think that's probably true."

"I don't think, if I had been president, on the basis of the facts as I saw them publicly," he said, "I don't think I would have ordered the Iraq war. I would have maximized our effort through sanctions, through restrictions, whatever, to find another answer."

Ahem. I wrote yesterday, "The blowback from that Reaganesque era of private armies of the Right helped push the US after 2001 toward an incipient fascism at which Ford, the All-American, the lawyerly gentleman, the great Wolverine, must have wept daily in his twilight years."

Some of Ford's points would have made good additions to my Top Ten Myths about Iraq 2006.

Polk Guest Editorial: Pros and Cons of ISG

The Baker-Hamilton Study: Pluses and Minuses

William R. Polk

'In recent days, as you know, there has been a great deal of publicity on the Baker-Hamilton plan for dealing with the problems the United States faces in Iraq and for restarting the peace process on the Palestine problem. I have found, however, very little analysis of the plan in the press. Clearly, it focuses on issues so important , one is tempted to use that often misused term “vital,” not only for Americans but for the whole world that it deserves the closest possible scrutiny. As you will see in the following comment, I find serious weaknesses in it. The most serious is that it sets out objectives or desires without identifying feasible means to achieve them.

In the last few days, various moves have been made by the Bush administration that call into question its serious evaluation of Baker-Hamilton. One that received a great deal of attention is the announcement of its intent to add another 20,000 troops to the American contingent in Iraq. Those of us who remember Vietnam will hear echoes. There we were told time after time that just a few more thousand troops and a few more months would lead us to “victory. One difference from Vietnam is of critical importance. It is that there we were not seriously considering, as apparently we are, further action in another country. Today, there are signs that we have hovered on the brink of war with Iran for at least the last six months. As you may know, I have written on this danger on my website (www.williampolk .com). I think we are edging closer. Among the signs – and there are many -- that point in this direction is one that I do not find reported in the American press: the Selective Service System announced three days ago that it is preparing its first test since 1998 of the draft.

All the above considerations make a careful consideration of American options on the Middle East a prime civic duty for all Americans. These include the detailed plan which Senator George McGovern and I developed in Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now (New York: Simon and Schuster, October 2006) and the Baker-Hamilton study, The Iraq Study Group Report: The Way Forward - A New Approach (New York: Vintage, December 2006). Mr. Hamilton graciously wrote to say that “The report has helped to spark a renewed debate about the direction of U.S. policy, and he appreciates the substantial contribution that you and Senator McGovern have made to that debate.” Our book speaks for itself; here I want to [analyze] the Baker-Hamilton Plan:

========

The most important positive element in the Baker-Hamilton study is to focus attention on the central predicament of the Middle East – the Arab-Israeli problem. Like a cancer, this issue has infected Middle Eastern affairs for over half a century. No American administration has chosen to attack it head-on. Simply giving Israel a blank check to do anything it decides to do is not an American policy. Indeed, as many thoughtful Israelis have pointed out, it is bound to bring out the worst in Israeli politics. For alerting the government and the public to the need to do something to solve or at least put into remission this problem is important and for doing so Baker-Hamilton deserves praise.

However, there are two minuses on this issue: Baker-Hamilton does not give more than a hint as to what an intelligent American policy would involve. The only concrete step it proposes is indirect – to return the Golan Heights to Syria – in the hope that the Syrians will then help persuade the Palestinians to opt for peace. As in other parts of Baker-Hamilton, this is to replace objectives or desires for means to achieve them. The Palestinians have their own agenda which arise from such issues, which Baker-Hamilton does not address, as illegal settlements, release of the 10,000 or so long-term prisoners in Israeli camps, severe and growing restrictions on the ability of Palestinians to work, move or even remain in their homes. Land for peace is a good slogan, but it is apparently not supported in Israel and probably is no longer regarded as feasible by Palestinians. Moreover, the explicit support for Mahmud Abbas rather than the group that won the last election, Hamas, will be seen by most Palestinians as an attempt to divide them. Finally, here as in the rest of the study, Baker-Hamilton fails to lay out concrete steps much less indicate what such steps would require, how much they would cost, what the likelihood of success for each would be or indicate their cumulative effect. What they have done is merely to indicate a goal, not the means to reach that goal.

The second positive element in Baker-Hamilton is their suggestion that America turn toward diplomacy in its relations with Iran and Syria.

Baker-Hamilton put this suggestion in the context of America’s desire to solve the Iraq dilemma. That is an understandable desire. But it is not a policy. It does not lay out a means to achieve our desire. Moreover, even the desire rests on intelligence appreciations that are weak or even unlikely. Briefly put, they include these:

First, why should Iran or even Syria wish to assist America in solving the Iraq problem? Baker-Hamilton suggests that Syria be “bought” by the return of the Golan Heights which the Syrians believe are legally theirs, but there is little reason to believe that the Syrian government puts so much emphasis on getting back the Golan Heights that it would radically alter its policies. Those policies arise in part at least from considerations that have nothing to do with the Golan Heights. Any Syrian and most outside observers will affirm that the lodestar of the Syrian government is fear of America. Thus, unless or until the United States forswears its often repeated proclamations that point toward invasion of Syria, change of its regime, and ostracizing it for alleged support of terrorism, the Syrians have insufficient reason to help America in any fashion. Moreover, the Syrians observed that in the conflict between Lebanon and Israel, the United States treated Israel as a surrogate military force; so, whether right or wrong, the Syrians would almost certainly require some sort of guarantee that it will not use force itself or allow Israel again do so before even considering helping the United States even if, which is doubtful, it could in any appreciable degree dampen the Iraqi insurgency or put a stop to the Palestinian resistance.

Iran, similarly, must see that a solution to America’s mistakes in Iraq is more likely to be detrimental than beneficial to its national and governmental interests. The Bush administration has repeatedly told Iran that it is an enemy, the third member of the Axis of Evil, a suitable candidate for preemptive attack. Those pronouncements set out what the Bush administration wants. What has held back is that it could not carry out such an attack because it was bogged down in Iraq. Would a rational government wish to help America free up its military force which might then be used to attack it? Baker-Hamilton substantiates the Iranian belief that this is a possibility in its recommendation #18 which points to “resources that might become available as combat forces are moved from Iraq.” (See the March 2006 National Security Strategy of the United States of America for substantiation of this potential threat to Iran.)

Second, even if Iran wished to help the United States solve the Iraqi dilemma, could it do so? Baker-Hamilton not only does not address that question. The probable answer is that it has far less leverage in Iraq than Baker-Hamilton posit. During the Iraq-Iran war, the Iraqi Shiis fought determinedly against Iran. Moreover, the Iraqi Shiis are internally divided with many determined not to allow Iran to determine their agenda. Baker-Hamilton also fails to tell us what specifically it would want Iran to do. Presumably Baker-Hamilton wants the Iranians to tell the Iraqi Shiis to do what America wants them to do, but presumably the Iraqi Shiis do what they are doing from their estimate of what is fundamental to their interests or even to their survival. If this is so, it is unlikely that Iran can lead them to do otherwise. The idea that they are simply the puppets of Iran is based on an ignorance of history and current politics. Even if Baker-Hamilton believe America should make the attempt, it does not lay out a plan specifying what America would be willing to do to get Iran to act as it wishes. Simply to invite Iran to a conference is hardly a sufficient inducement. As with Syria, America would have to forswear in some meaningful way the threat of force. And, more difficult than with Syria, it would have to back off – and get Israel to back off – from its statements and threats on Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear capacity. Baker-Hamilton does not address these issues. My own belief is that the only feasible way they can be addressed now is serious movement toward both general and regional nuclear arms control. Regional nuclear arms control must involve Israel which has a huge nuclear arsenal. Is forcing a reluctant Israel into giving up some or all of its nuclear arsenal feasible for any American government? Baker-Hamilton does not even raise the question.

The third positive element in Baker-Hamilton is the admission that we need to get out of Iraq. The negative aspect of Baker-Hamilton is that it does not realistically face what that means. What it does, understandably given its origin and composition, is to attempt reach a compromise. Such compromises, of which diplomatic history affords many examples, are attractive because they preserve reputations, cover over mistakes and seem statesmanlike.

Baker-Hamilton’s chosen move is reduction of combat forces and their replacement by Iraqis. This is what the administrations of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon tried in Vietnam. In fact the numbers proposed are eerily similar. But is this a practical move in Iraq? Was it in Vietnam? Consider where we are in Iraq, mired down in an unwinnable war and where we were in Vietnam in 1968 when the Tet offensive had shown that we had failed militarily. It was not firepower that defeated us. It was politics. We could not “win” while our being there taints our surrogates. That is the reality to which we must adjust.

In our book, Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now (which was published shortly before Baker-Hamilton), George McGovern and I have urged that this be done cleanly, clearly, definitively and over a six months period. Baker-Hamilton thinks that it should be done piecemeal over a much longer but unspecified period. Why? Their argument is that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war and without the restraining hand of America troops there would be a bloodbath. Their proposal would cut down on combat forces but keep a large American training and advising force in Iraq.

We believe that such a force would inevitably be drawn into the fighting. In evaluating the Baker-Hamilton proposal, bear in mind that in Vietnam force reduction did not stop the war: in fact, in the following years as it was slowly implemented, almost 21,000 Americans were killed and over 50,000 were seriously wounded. Are Iraqi likely to stop fighting while we slowly reduce our combat troops but keep a significant presence of “advisers” to train – or as the insurgents will charge, control -- Iraqi security forces? We find that hope highly unlikely.

Baker-Hamilton appears to recognize the weakness of this hope and so urges that while American combat units are reduced more attention be given to improving the quality of the Iraqi army. We strongly disagree as we said in our plan. Iraqi history shows that building an army is a dangerous strategy. It was, after all, the relative strength of the Iraqi army vis-à-vis such relatively weak institutions as representative government, an independent judiciary, a free press and “grass roots” organizations that caused coup d’état after coup and dictator after dictator. Thus, in the quest for a short-term solution to America’s Iraqi dilemma, Baker-Hamilton may have opted for long-term catastrophe.

A less costly, more acceptable (to the Iraqis) and more likely-to-succeed approach, Senator McGovern and I assert in our book Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now is to introduce into Iraq what we have called a “stabilization force.” That force, we argue, must be made up of non-Americans, drawn from mainly Arab and Muslim countries, working for the Iraq government but under the umbrella of the United Nations, with an American financial subvention. This force would operate in Iraq during the transitional period, when we can expect the current civil war to continue but also to gradually wind down. Is this just a pious hope? We think not. It has happened in all guerrilla wars during the last two centuries. Once the principal aim of the insurgents, usually to get the foreigners to leave, is met, the insurgency abates. Not immediately, to be sure, to meaningfully. During this period, with its sovereignty assured, it needs help: help to create minimal public security for schools, hospitals, government buildings etc. which is the role we propose for the multinational stability force, help in building an effective national police force, and help in getting the economy going so that the unemployed can earn decent livings and a significant portion of the refugees be lured back.

During this period, we advocate that the Iraqi army, on which we are spending $2.2 billion and which Baker-Hamilton finds (rightly) to be dysfunctional, be converted into what Iraq really needs, an organization somewhat like our Corps of Engineers. Such a group could provide the infrastructure on which an Iraqi economy could reconstitute itself.

Overall, we have proposed a series of programs to accomplish our objectives, given estimates of cost, analyzed the chances of success, provided a timetable, and shown how they would save the American tax payers about 97% of what the occupation is now costing. That is, we provide in our book exactly what Baker-Hamilton does not address, a practical plan to get us out of Iraq with the least possible damage to ourselves, to the Iraqis, and to America’s position in world affairs.

A key proposal in Baker-Hamilton is a regional conference. The idea of a regional conference sounds appealing. We all like the idea of sitting down together and thrashing out our differences. It appears sensible, positive, practical and “diplomatic.” But a review of all international gatherings since the 1814 Congress of Vienna shows that a conference is meaningless, or sometimes even counter-productive, unless fundamental issues either have been resolved or at least narrowed beforehand. Merely to meet to discuss an issue which is worrying one party but not the others, us but not them, is hardly a recipe for success. Put bluntly, a conference is not the first step, the means, but the last step, the ratification, of the process.

Baker-Hamilton states that there are four “alternative approaches for moving forward”– “Precipitate Withdrawal,” “Staying the Course,” “More Troops for Iraq” and “Devolution to Three Regions.”

Baker-Hamilton rejects precipitate withdrawal. We do too. The word “preci
pitate,” of course, gives the answer but obscures the question. Everyone agrees that the United States must withdraw. The question is when and under what conditions. In the action plan contained in Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now, we lay out a definite timetable and specify measures, each analyzed in terms of cost, effectiveness and likelihood of success, designed to bring about withdrawal in an orderly fashion with the least possible damage to American soldiers and interests and to Iraqis.

President Bush has repeatedly called for “staying the course” which Baker-Hamilton does not favor and recognizes will simply continue the casualties and huge expenditures without positive result. We agree.

The third alternative is to send in more troops. Baker-Hamilton believes that this will not work and will “hamper our ability to provide adequate resources for our efforts in Afghanistan or respond to crises around the world.” If we cannot control a small country, most of which is uninhabited desert, or contain a guerrilla force estimated at less than 20,000 with 150,000 American troops, it is just wishful thinking to believe we can do it with another 10,000 or so Americans. We agree with Baker-Hamilton on this. We also point to the history of Vietnam where we were told, time after time, that just a few tens of thousands more of American soldiers would bring victory. Victory proved elusive but casualties were ever-present.

The fourth scenario is to break up Iraq which, Baker-Hamilton believes (in our opinion rightly) would be a political, military and humanitarian disaster, which, should it happen, would require that the United States “manage the situation to ameliorate humanitarian consequences, contain the spread of violence, and minimize regional instability,” each of which is a likely result. As Baker-Hamilton rightly points out, the map showing Iraq divided into three areas is misleading: virtually every town and all cities are mixed. Thus, a division of Iraq would literally tear the society apart and would so “balkanize” it as to sow the seeds for future wars. Certainly, an independent Kurdistan would invite intervention from Turkey and possibly also from Iran.

Implicit throughout Baker-Hamilton is that stability must be achieved in Iraq before America can leave. History suggests that the sequence is wrong: only when the central objective of insurgents, usually getting the foreigners to leave, has been realized can “security” be attained. This is the lesson of insurgencies from the American Revolution against the British, the Spanish guerrilla against the French, Tito’s Yugoslav partisan war against the Germans, the Algerian war of national liberation from the French and so on. In each of these wars, to be sure, there was a period of chaos immediately after the foreigners pulled out -- they had been unable to prevent chaos with their massive armies -- but, once they were gone, the fighting died down.

Why did this happen and is it likely in Iraq? The answer was given to us by that great practitioner of guerrilla warfare, Mao Tse-tung: there are two elements in guerrilla wars, he said, the combatants and those who support them. He called the combatants the “fish” and their supporters “the water.” Without water, fish die. What has happened in guerrilla war after war is that the people, Mao’s “water,” get tired of the suffering that is inherent in guerrilla war and when the object for which they have sacrificed has been won, they don’t want to continue to sacrifice. So they stop supporting the “fish.” Then, one of two things happens: either some of the fish take over the government (which is the most common) and then themselves suppress the more radical combatants (as happened in America, Spain, Ireland, Yugoslavia, Algeria, etc.). The second possible outcome is that the combatants become outlaws or “warlords” (as happened in Afghanistan after the Afghans forced the Russians out). This is already happening under the guise of religious strife among Shia and Sunni Muslims in Iraq. Foreigners cannot prevent this; the only way it can be prevented, or at least the only way it has ever been prevented or stopped, is by natives. They can be helped, however, as we have urged in our plan with an international stabilization force during the period when a national police, no longer tainted by appearing to be collaborators with foreigners, become functional. In short, sovereignty is the first, not the last step in the process. Once sovereignty, not just a collaborationist government, is established, the steps lead (and can be helped to move with all deliberate speed) toward security.

That is why the plan we have proposed contains the interlocking elements that together constitute Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now.

William R. Polk

William R. Polk taught at Harvard from 1955 to 1961 when he was appointed the member of the State Department’s Policy Planning Council responsible for the Middle East. In 1965 he became professor of history at the University of Chicago where he founded its Middle Eastern Studies Center. Subsequently, he also became president of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs. Among his books are The United States and the Arab World; the Elusive Peace: The Middle East in the Twentieth Century; Neighbors and Strangers: the Fundamentals of Foreign Affairs; Understanding Iraq; and together with Senator George McGovern, the just published Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now. '

Guerrillas Kill 7 GIs, blow up 52 Iraqis

AFP rounds up the violence in Iraq on Tuesday. 7 more US GIs were killed, and bombings in Baghdad and Kirkuk killed and wounded scores. Fighting broke out between US troops and Mahdi Army militiamen in East Baghdad.

Emily Miller's op-ed on her brother in Iraq is worth reading.

If you didn't see it yesterday, look at my "top ten myths about Iraq in 2006."

Ford and Foreign Policy: Snapshots from the 1970s

Former President Gerald Ford has died at 93. A Wolverine star of the early 1930s at the University of Michigan, Ford passed up an opportunity to play for the Detroit Lions in the new NFL, going instead to law school. He was Richard Nixon's vice president during the Watergate scandal and so became president when Nixon resigned. Ford was well liked as president, but faced seemingly intractable problems. These included the increasing price of petroleum after the 1973 OPEC boycott, the simultaneous economic stagnation and inflation (something many economists had considered impossible), relatively high unemployment, the fall of South Vietnam, the Soviet and Cuban challenge in Angola, the beginnings of the Lebanese Civil War, nuclear proliferation threats in Israel, India, Brazil and Iran, and the Cyprus controversy with Turkey.

Ford did the country the enormous favor of allowing it to transition out of the poisonous Nixon and Vietnam eras, with a gentleman at the helm of state. I can remember the enormous relief I experienced when I saw the picture of him striding confidently once he had become president. Many of us had been afraid Nixon would stage a military coup. Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, I have been told by one interviewee then in government, shared that fear and ordered the senior officers to accept no command directly from Nixon unless they checked with Schlesinger first.

Ford was clearly unwilling to risk further military entanglements in Asia. The one exception was his aggressive response to the Cambodian capture of the Mayaguez, which was enormously popular at the time, though critics argued that the strike was premature since the Cambodians had begun releasing their captives. 41 Americans died in the course of this operation.

Ford pursued "detente" with the Soviet Union (though the Right made him give up the term). He renewed US bases in Franco's Spain, though half of Spaniards opposed them, in part because they objected to them being used to resupply Israel in its battles with the Arabs. He worried about the Communist parties of France, Italy and some other Western European allies. He had Kissinger conduct "step by step" and then "shuttle" diplomacy with the Egyptians and the Israelis, pushing them toward accommodation and peace and setting the stage in important ways for Jimmy Carter's later Camp David negotiations.

One of the things Ford was proudest of in his 1976 presidential campaign was that under his administration, the country was at peace.

Ford did not come in strong on foreign policy, and he had some difficulty reining in Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. He also faced challenges from a triumphal Democratic Congress that frequently over-ruled him on foreign policy. He fired Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, who was too much of a hawk for Ford. Ford believed in negotiating with one's enemies where possible and where fruitful, and in cutting one's losses in the face of overwhelming odds, so as to live to play another day.

Ford faced a powerful challenge from Ronald Reagan and the then-small far-right wing of the Republican Party, which accused him of under-estimating Soviet military strength and the Soviet threat, blamed him for losing Angola and was suspicious of Ford's increasing skittishness about dealing with white supremicist Rhodesia. Although it is often pointed out that many officials in the George W. Bush administration got their start under Ford, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and (in a supporting role) Paul Wolfowitz, in fact these individuals went on to convert to Reaganism and to abandon the moderate Republican principles of Ford.

I thought readers might enjoy some news clippings from that era on foreign policy, skewed because of my interests toward the Middle East.

January 18, 1975. The Economist reports that Ford warned that American support for Israel cannot be taken for granted.

' Asked if there were any limits on America's commitment to Israel, he replied:
It so happens that there is a substantial relationship at the present time between our national security interests and those of Israel. But in the final analysis we have to judge what is in our national interest above any and all other considerations. '

The Economist noted that many Americans felt that Israel could hardly expect to get peace if it continued to sit on land it occupied from Arab states in 1967, and implied that they could not see why they should pay various sorts of price for Israeli expansionism and intransigence.

February 8, 1975: Facts on File reports that the US Congress cut off military aid to Turkey because of lack of progress on the Cyprus issue.

'President Ford immediately called on Congress to restore the aid, warning that the cutoff would "affect adversely not only our Western security but the strategic situation in the Middle East." He stressed that military aid to Turkey was based "on our assumption that the security of Turkey is vital to the security of the eastern Mediterranean and to the U.S. and its allies." '

Turkey's acting prime minister responded angrily and threatened to rethink Turkey's commitments in NATO.

March 1, 1975: Ford approved in principle the proposal by the Shah's Iran that it take a 10% share in the troubled PanAm airline. Iran was flush with petrodollars and Kissinger had worked out with the shah ways of recycling them back into Western economies. Among the major such methods was sophisticated arms sales, a direction criticized by presidential contender Jimmy Carter of Georgia.

April 12, 1975: A Harris poll summarized in the Economist showed that over 60% of Americans supported sending Israel whatever military hardware it needed in its struggle with the Arabs. The poll showed groundless the fear voiced by some pro-Israel advocates that the Arab oil weapon might cause Americans to turn against Zionism. On the other hand, there were some indications in the poll that Americans felt that Israel was taking US support for granted.

April 14, 1975: Newsweek reported on the fall of South Vietnam:

' Misery became a way of life in Indochina long ago, but the tide of human suffering that suddenly engulfed South Vietnam last week swept forward with unprecedented cruelty. Along the coastline of the South China Sea, major cities tumbled like tenpins, and exhausted and terrified refugees died by the hundreds in their desperate forced marches to escape the onrushing troops of North Vietnam. The toughest generals of the army of South Vietnam abandoned their command posts, and ARVN soldiers turned to banditry, shooting their way aboard the few evacuation ships that made the beachheads . . . a mercy flight evacuating war orphans . . . crashed and burned only minutes after leaving Saigon - a capital whose own life expectancy dwindled with every passing hour. '

May 24, 1975: Facts on File reports that 76 US Senators sign a letter to President Ford opposing any attempt to reduce military aid to Israel. (Ford was trying to get the Israelis to make peace with Egypt and was using aid as an incentive. The Israelis used their Lobby on the Hill in an attempt to paralyze Ford and Kissinger on this front.)

June 9, 1975: Newsweek reports on Ford's European tour, where he met with 12 European leaders in Brussels, and had one on one meetings with Helmut Schmidt of Germany, the Pope, the premier of Turkey, Anwar El Sadat and others. Ford

' also conferred privately with no fewer than twelve European leaders during his two days in Brussels - receiving all but Giscard in the rococo reception room of the American ambassador's residence in a manner somewhat reminiscent of an eighteenth-century European monarch. . . . He and West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt spent the opening moments of their meeting discussing the pleasures of pipe smoking, and Ford revealed that the Presidential pipe collection now numbered 50. When Kissinger told Turkish Premier Suleiman Demirel, "I gained 50 pounds in Turkey last week," Ford interrupted with a booming laugh and retorted. "He's using the trip as an alibi. It's an old problem." '

and on the Middle East, Newsweek said,

' there were several signs that virtually all sides wanted a compromise. Both Saudi Arabia's conservative King Khaled and the militant socialist government in Iraq have recently expressed - in terms never heard before - their willingness to accept the existence of the state of Israel if it withdrew from all occupied Arab territories. What's more, Syria, which only two weeks ago extended the mandate of the United Nations peace force on the Golan Heights for six additional months, indicated that it could accept a second-stage Egyptian-Israeli accord before the extent of further Israelis withdrawals on the Golan Heights was settled. Syria's ambassador to Washington predicted "that Sadat will be bringing good signs to Ford." '

August 2, 1975. Facts on File summarizes an interview by Ford with the NYT on his accomplishments. The first was restoration of confidence in the presidency on the domestic front. The second was its restoration internationally. He was also proud of having "kept our cool" in the face of both recession and inflation. He added:

' As his largest disappointments, Ford mentioned the fall of non-Communist governments in South Vietnam and Cambodia and the breakdown of negotiations in the Middle East in March.

The President said there was "no possibility" of re-establishing a U.S. presence in Vietnam or Cambodia under current circumstances. As for the Middle East currently, he felt that an agreement could be reached if both Israel and Egypt were "more flexible."

Ford reaffirmed his policy to go to Helsinki, Finland to sign the international accord on European security, but he was cautious on the strategic arms limitation talks with the Soviet Union. '

October 25, 1975: Egypt and Israel each pressure Ford not to sell the other certain weaponry.

December 20, 1975: Facts on File reports:

' American and Israeli sources said Dec. 15 that President Ford had urged Premier Yitzhak Rabin to consult with Washington on any future Israeli military action against Arab guerrillas in Lebanon. The Ford message, reportedly discussed by the premier in a cabinet meeting Dec. 14, also contained a pledge to oppose any attempt by the U.N. Security Council to impose a peace settlement in the Middle East.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz, reporting on the Ford note, said the President had "expressed his wish . . . that there should be coordination between the two countries or at least Israel should let the United States know ahead of time what its intentions are."

The U.S. was said to have been embarrased by the Israeli air strike on Palestinian camps in Lebanon Dec. 2 at a time when the U.S. was attempting to block anti-Israeli resolutions before the Security Council. '

March 15, 1976: Newsweek reports on Iranian ambassador Ardeshir Zahedi's Washington parties, which it deems the best in the city at that time:

' With an entertainment budget the size of an oil field, the 47-year-old Zahedi is legendary for his kilos of caviar (flown in twice a month from Iran), his seemingly limitless supply of Dom Perignon champagne (dispensed as presents like candy canes at Christmas-time), and his sophomoric sense of partying, which includes impromptu congalines, smooth-tummied belly dancers and drinking and kissing games guaranteed to take the prude out of Washington protocol. In an average month, Zahedi may give three formal dinner dancers for 75, two or three buffet dinners for 300, one or two large receptions for 150, and countless business lunches, late-night suppers or poolside barbecues at his own residence. "It's business and pleasure at the same time," says the debonair Zahedi, who once trickled droplets of champagne into Cristina Ford's cupped hand, then kissed each one away. "If you see your friends at a party, you exchange ideas and views without actually being committed to each other." '

April 17, 1976: Facts on File reports:

' Israeli officials April 9 criticized U.S. Ambassador Malcolm Toon for having accused Israel April 8, of trying to pressure the U.S. Congress to approve more aid [than] requested by President Ford. Toon had spoken at a news briefing and had asked that he be referred to only as "a Western diplomat," but his identity was subsequently disclosed by an Israeli television analyst. . . Toon had said that Israel's alleged pressure was close to interference in the internal affairs of the U.S. and that Israel was "playing dirty pool." He also said it was unwise for Israel's Finance Ministry to budget sums not actually received. '

Toon made his remarks because Ford had threatened to veto a $550 million "transitional" grant to Israel by Congress, on top of the $2.2 billion already approved.

June 19, 1976: Facts on File reports:

' Francis E. Meloy Jr., the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, and Robert O. Waring, his economic counselor, were kidnapped and shot to death by unidentified gunmen in Beirut June 16. Zoheir Moghrabi, their Lebanese driver, also was slain. Palestinian security agents reported June 17 the arrest of three Lebanese in connection with the assassinations. '

This incident foreshadowed the subsequent decades of US involvement in Lebanon, including the taking of hostages and Iran-Contra, the blowing up of the US embassy in Beirut, the assassination of the CIA station chief, the blowing up of the Marine Barracks, and more recent involvement on the side of the anti-Syrian political coalition.

July 31, 1976: The Economist reports on American unhappiness about a German company's willingness to supply the entire nuclear fuel cycle to countries like Brazil and possibly Iran:

For Germany's major nuclear power station company, Kraftwerk Union (KWU), the Brazil deal represented great leap forward . . . Early in July KWU landed a contract from Iran for two nuclear power stations in a deal worth more than DM 7 billion. This did not include a reprocessing plant, but Iran is known to be shopping around for one. Is KWU to be barred from trying for a follow-up contract? After all, Iran, in contrast to Brazil, has adhered to the nonproliferation treaty. But for the Americans the prospect of a national reprocessing plant on the fringe of the Middle East brings nightmares. Americans have suggested to Iran that it should share with an industrialised country control over any reprocessing plant built there. And they have advocated the creation of multinational regional enrichment centres. But Iran is likely to feel insulted at being picked on in this way. . . '

Of course, it had been the Eisenhower Administration's "atoms for peace" program that had encouraged the Iranians to develop nuclear reactors in the first place . . .

August 7, 1976: Facts on File reports that the US will sell Saudi Arabia sophisticated missiles and "laser-guided bombs" previously given only to Israel.

October 30, 1976: As the presidential campaign heats up, the Economist reports that President Ford was constrained to apologize for remarks by the Chairman of his Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. George Brown, to the effect that Israel is a military burden on the United States. Ford called the statement "very ill-advised."

Jimmy Carter attacked Ford for presiding over a situation in which the US was becoming "the arms merchant of the world." But he seemed to contradict himself by demanding that more arms be sent to Israel. Ford responded by loosening some restrictions placed by his bureaucrats and sending more weapons to Israel.

Carter also attacked Ford for not being more confrontational with Arab states about their boycott of Israel, and about the possibility that they might deploy an oil boycott against the West again. He insisted that if he became president, there would be no boycott.

Carter said that under Ford, diplomacy had been conducted with too much secrecy, and that the public needed to be kept fully informed. He accused Ford of being insufficiently awake to changes in southern Africa and of being complacent toward the Soviet Union. But Carter pledged that he would never go to war over a Soviet occupation of Yugoslavia.

Kissinger in response expressed alarm that Carter seemed to be giving the Kremlin a green light in the Balkans. [Tito had pursued an autonomous Communist policy in Yugoslavia, now the independent states of Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Slovenia, Montenegro and . . . I can't keep up.]

When he presided over intelligence reform in the wake of earlier abuses, Ford wrote,

'I believe it essential to have the best possible intelligence about the capabilities, intentions and activities of governments and other entities and individuals abroad. To this end, the foreign intelligence agencies of the United States play a vital role in collecting and analyzing information related to the national defense and foreign policy.

It is equally as important that the methods these agencies employ to collect such information for the legitimate needs of the government conform to the standards set out in the Constitution to preserve and respect the privacy and civil liberties of American citizens.'

He was against just assassinating people, and insisted on warrants for the wiretapping of US citizens.

All presidents make errors, and some abuses occurred on Ford's watch, though they often were initiated by Kissinger. But Ford faced with no illusions the challenges of his era, of detente with the Soviet Union, continued attempts to cultivate China, the collapse of Indochina, the fall-out of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, and the beginnings of the Lebanese Civil War. Ford was right about detente, right about China, right about Arab-Israeli peace, right about avoiding a big entanglement in Angola, right to worry about nuclear proliferation (one of his worries was the increasing evidence that the Middle East had a nuclear power, Israel, and India was moving in that direction).

Ford's challengers on the Reagan Right were wrong about everything. They vastly over-estimated the military and economic strength of the Soviet Union (yes, that's Paul Wolfowitz). They wanted confrontation with China. They dismissed the Arab world as Soviet occupied territory (even though the vast majority of Arab states was US allies at that time) and urged that it be punished till it accepted Israel's territorial gains in 1967. They insisted that the Vietnam War could have been won.

But despite its illusions and Orwellian falsehoods, the Reagan Right prevailed. Ford only momentarily lost to Carter. Both of them were to lose to Reagan, who resorted to Cold War brinkmanship, private militias, death squads, offshore accounts, unconstitutional criminality, and under the table deals with Khomeini, and who created a transition out of the Cold War that left the private militias (one of them al-Qaeda) empowered to wreak destruction in the aftermath. The blowback from that Reaganesque era of private armies of the Right helped push the US after 2001 toward an incipient fascism at which Ford, the All-American, the lawyerly gentleman, the great Wolverine, must have wept daily in his twilight years.

Top Ten Myths about Iraq 2006

1. Myth number one is that the United States "can still win" in Iraq. Of course, the truth of this statement, frequently still made by William Kristol and other Neoconservatives, depends on what "winning" means. But if it means the establishment of a stable, pro-American, anti-Iranian government with an effective and even-handed army and police force in the near or even medium term, then the assertion is frankly ridiculous. The Iraqi "government" is barely functioning. The parliament was not able to meet in December because it could not attain a quorum. Many key Iraqi politicians live most of the time in London, and much of parliament is frequently abroad. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki does not control large swathes of the country, and could give few orders that had any chance of being obeyed. The US military cannot shore up this government, even with an extra division, because the government is divided against itself. Most of the major parties trying to craft legislation are also linked to militias on the streets who are killing one another. It is over with. Iraq is in for years of heavy political violence of a sort that no foreign military force can hope to stop.

The United States cannot "win" in the sense defined above. It cannot. And the blindly arrogant assumption that it can win is calculated to get more tens of thousands of Iraqis killed and more thousands of American soldiers and Marines badly wounded or killed. Moreover, since Iraq is coming apart at the seams under the impact of our presence there, there is a real danger that we will radically destabilize it and the whole oil-producing Gulf if we try to stay longer.


2. "US military sweeps of neighborhoods can drive the guerrillas out." The US put an extra 15,000 men into Baghdad this past summer, aiming to crush the guerrillas and stop the violence in the capital, and the number of attacks actually increased. This result comes about in part because the guerrillas are not outsiders who come in and then are forced out. The Sunni Arabs of Ghazaliya and Dora districts in the capital are the "insurgents." The US military cannot defeat the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement or "insurgency" with less than 500,000 troops, based on what we have seen in the Balkans and other such conflict situations. The US destroyed Falluja, and even it and other cities of al-Anbar province are not now safe! The US military leaders on the ground have spoken of the desirability of just withdrawing from al-Anbar to Baghdad and giving up on it. In 2003, 14 percent of Sunni Arabs thought it legitimate to attack US personnel and facilities. In August, 2006, over 70 percent did. How long before it is 100%? Winning guerrilla wars requires two victories, a military victory over the guerrillas and a winning of the hearts and minds of the general public, thus denying the guerrillas support. The US has not and is unlikely to be able to repress the guerrillas, and it is losing hearts and minds at an increasing and alarming rate. They hate us, folks. They don't want us there.

3. The United States is best off throwing all its support behind the Iraqi Shiites. This is the position adopted fairly consistently by Marc Reuel Gerecht. Gerecht is an informed and acute observer whose views I respect even when I disagree with them. But Washington policy-makers should read Daniel Goleman's work on social intelligence. Goleman points out that a good manager of a team in a corporation sets up a win/win framework for every member of the team. If you set it up on a win/lose basis, so that some are actively punished and others "triumph," you are asking for trouble. Conflict is natural. How you manage conflict is what matters. If you listen to employees' grievances and try to figure out how they can be resolved in such a way that everyone benefits, then you are a good manager.

Gerecht, it seems to me, sets up a win/lose model in Iraq. The Shiites and Kurds win it all, and the Sunni Arabs get screwed over. Practically speaking, the Bush policy has been Gerechtian, which in my view has caused all the problems. We shouldn't have thought of our goal as installing the Shiites in power. Of course, Bush hoped that those so installed would be "secular," and that is what Wolfowitz and Chalabi had promised him. Gerecht came up with the ex post facto justification that even the religious Shiites are moving toward democracy via Sistani. But democracy cannot be about one sectarian identity prevailing over, and marginalizing others.

The Sunni Arabs have demonstrated conclusively that they can act effectively as spoilers in the new Iraq. If they aren't happy, no one is going to be. The US must negotiate with the guerrilla leaders and find a win/win framework for them to come in from the cold and work alongside the Kurds and the religious Shiites. About this, US Ambassador in Baghdad Zalmay Khalilzad has been absolutely right.

4. "Iraq is not in a civil war," as Jurassic conservative Fox commentator Bill O'Reilly insists. There is a well-established social science definition of civil war put forward by Professor J. David Singer and his colleagues: "Sustained military combat, primarily internal, resulting in at least 1,000 battle-deaths per year, pitting central government forces against an insurgent force capable of effective resistance, determined by the latter's ability to inflict upon the government forces at least 5 percent of the fatalities that the insurgents sustain." (Errol A. Henderson and J. David Singer, "Civil War in the Post-Colonial World, 1946-92," Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 37, No. 3, May 2000.)" See my article on this in Salon.com. By Singer's definition, Iraq has been in civil war since the Iraqi government was reestablished in summer of 2004. When I have been around political scientists, as at the ISA conference, I have found that scholars in that field tend to accept Singer's definition.

5. "The second Lancet study showing 600,000 excess deaths from political and criminal violence since the US invasion is somehow flawed." Les Roberts replies here to many of the objections that were raised. See also the transcript of the Kucinich-Paul Congressional hearings on the subject. Many critics refer to the numbers of dead reported in the press as counter-arguments to Roberts et al. But "passive reporting" such as news articles never captures more than a fraction of the casualties in any war. I see deaths reported in the Arabic press all the time that never show up in the English language wire services. And, a lot of towns in Iraq don't have local newspapers and many local deaths are not reported in the national newspapers.

6. "Most deaths in Iraq are from bombings." The Lancet study found that the majority of violent deaths are from being shot.

7. "Baghdad and environs are especially violent but the death rate is lower in the rest of the country." The Lancet survey found that levels of violence in the rest of the country are similar to that in Baghdad (remember that the authors included criminal activities such as gang and smuggler turf wars in their statistics). The Shiite south is spared much Sunni-Shiite communal fighting, but criminal gangs, tribal feuds, and militias fight one another over oil and antiquities smuggling, and a lot of people are getting shot down there, too.

8. "Iraq is the central front in the war on terror." From the beginning of history until 2003 there had never been a suicide bombing in Iraq. There was no al-Qaeda in Baath-ruled Iraq. When Baath intelligence heard that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi might have entered Iraq, they grew alarmed at such an "al-Qaeda" presence and put out an APB on him! Zarqawi's so-called "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia" was never "central" in Iraq and was never responsible for more than a fraction of the violent attacks. This assertion is supported by the outcome of a US-Jordanian operation that killed Zarqawi this year. His death had no impact whatsoever on the level of violence. There are probably only about 1,000 foreign fighters even in Iraq, and most of them are first-time volunteers, not old-time terrorists. The 50 major guerrilla cells in Sunni Arab Iraq are mostly made up of Iraqis, and are mainly: 1) Baathist or neo-Baathist, 2) Sunni revivalist or Salafi, 3) tribally-based, or 4) based in city quarters. Al-Qaeda is mainly a boogey man, invoked in Iraq on all sides, but possessing little real power or presence there. This is not to deny that radical Sunni Arab volunteers come to Iraq to blow things (and often themselves) up. They just are not more than an auxiliary to the big movements, which are Iraqi.

9. "The Sunni Arab guerrillas in places like Ramadi will follow the US home to the American mainland and commit terrorism if we leave Iraq." This assertion is just a variation on the invalid domino theory. People in Ramadi only have one beef with the United States. Its troops are going through their wives' underwear in the course of house searches every day. They don't want the US troops in their town or their homes, dictating to them that they must live under a government of Shiite clerics and Kurdish warlords (as they think of them). If the US withdrew and let the Iraqis work out a way to live with one another, people in Ramadi will be happy. They are not going to start taking flight lessons and trying to get visas to the US. This argument about following us, if it were true, would have prevented us from ever withdrawing from anyplace once we entered a war there. We'd be forever stuck in the Philippines for fear that Filipino terrorists would follow us back home. Or Korea (we moved 15,000 US troops out of South Korea not so long ago. Was that unwise? Are the thereby liberated Koreans now gunning for us?) Or how about the Dominican Republic? Haiti? Grenada? France? The argument is a crock.

10. "Setting a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq is a bad idea." Bush and others in his administration have argued that setting such a timetable would give a significant military advantage to the guerrillas fighting US forces and opposed to the new government. That assertion makes sense only if there were a prospect that the US could militarily crush the Sunni Arabs. There is no such prospect. The guerrilla war is hotter now than at any time since the US invasion. It is more widely supported by more Sunni Arabs than ever before. It is producing more violent attacks than ever before. Since we cannot defeat them short of genocide, we have to negotiate with them. And their first and most urgent demand is that the US set a timetable for withdrawal before they will consider coming into the new political system. That is, we should set a timetable in order to turn the Sunni guerrillas from combatants to a political negotiating partner. Even Sunni politicians cooperating with the US make this demand. They are disappointed with the lack of movement on the issue. How long do they remain willing to cooperate? In addition, 131 Iraqi members of parliament signed a demand that the US set a timetable for withdrawal. (138 would be a simple majority.) It is a a major demand of the Sadr Movement. In fact, the 32 Sadrist MPs withdrew from the ruling United Iraqi Alliance coalition temporarily over this issue.

In my view, Shiite leaders such as Abdul Aziz al-Hakim are repeatedly declining to negotiate in good faith with the Sunni Arabs or to take their views seriously. Al-Hakim knows that if the Sunnis give him any trouble, he can sic the Marines on them. The US presence is making it harder for Iraqi to compromise with Iraqi, which is counterproductive.

Think Progress points out that in 1999, Governor George W. Bush criticized then President Clinton for declining to set a withdrawal timetable for Kosovo, saying "Victory means exit strategy, and it’s important for the president to explain to us what the exit strategy is."

Shiite Militias and Iran in Iraq

Another US soldier was killed on Christmas Day, bringing the number of GIs killed in Iraq to one more than the number of persons killed in the 9/11 attacks.

AP reports that the British raided a police HQ and prison in Basra when they heard that the unit was infiltrated by Shiite militiamen and planning to kill their prisoners. Some of the released prisoners showed signs of torture. The British destroyed the prison.

Police found some 47 bodies in Baghdad. Two major bombing operations were conducted in the city, killing 17 and wounding dozens.

The US military conducted raids against the Badr Corps militia of the Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, in the course of which it arrested four Iranian officials. It had to let two of them go when it transpired that they were diplomats invited into Iraq by President Jalal Talabani, a close US ally. SCIRI and Badr were in exile in Iran for over two decades and have close ties to the Iranian regime. Nevertheless, the Bush administration hosted SCIRI leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim recently.

The US military has for the most part characterized the Badr corps as disciplined and not the main security problem in Iraq. US troops have never had an engagement with Badr. The Badr Corps has been accused of infiltrating the special police commandos of the Interior Ministry and of using that unit to engage in ethnic cleansing of Sunni Arabs they suspected of membership in the guerrilla movement.

That Badr had close ties to Iran was well known, so it is a little unclear what new developments could have provoked this raid.

The US has accused Iran of training Badr's Shiite rival, the Mahdi Army, in Lebanon and of providing it with shaped charges. That these officials were with Badr instead does not advance that case, and may weaken it.

Talabani's invitation is yet another wrinkle. I have long argued that Mam Jalal had close back channel relations with Tehran. Do the Peshmerga, the Kurdistan military, benefit from Iranian military advice, as well?

Stay tuned.

Christmas in the Middle East

Silent night,

Al-Zaman reports that "The Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad appeared almost deserted on Christmas Eve. Christian celebrations of Christmas were limited to private homes. Iraqi Christians had announced last week that they would suspend official celebration, out of solidarity with the tragedy of the Iraqi people." Iraqi Christians, who had enjoyed relative freedom under the regime of Saddam Hussein, now face fear of attacks by powerful Islamic groups or Shiite militias. Few are making any use of the Christmas lights and decorations of yesteryear. There were some 600,000 Iraqi Christians in a population of 27 million, but some say the number is now less than 450,000. Thousands have been forced to flee to Syria. The Archbishop of Canterbury has argued that the policies of the British and American governments in Iraq have endangered Middle Eastern Christians and that nothing is being done to protect them.

holy night,

The Archbishop of Canterbury, in Bethlehem, sharply condemned the Israeli government for the Separation Wall it is building on Palestinian, West Bank land, which is having a deleterious effect on Bethlehem:

' "The wall which we walked through a little while ago is a sign not simply of a passing problem in the politics of one region; it is sign of some of the things that are most deeply wrong in the human heart itself," Williams told his fellow church leaders, according to Britain's Press Association. "We are here to say that security for one is security for all. For one to live under threat, whether of occupation, or of terror, is a problem for all, and a pain for all," he was quoted as saying . . .

Bethlehem Mayor Victor Batarseh says the barrier separates residents of this town of 30,000 from jobs, studies, medical facilities and relatives in nearby Jerusalem. He told the visiting clergy the town had been "transformed into an open prison" by the barrier. "Your presence is challenging this ugly wall," Batarseh was quoted as saying. '

All is calm,

It was announced on Christmas Eve that "Six soldiers were killed in bomb attacks in and
around Iraq's capital Baghdad on Dec. 23, bringing this month's death toll to at least 82, the U.S. military said in four statements e-mailed yesterday."

all is bright

McClatchy reports that 29 bodies were found on Christmas Eve around Baghdad.

Two bombings in Baghdad wounded 8 civilians. A mortar attack on Zawra' Soccer Stadium wounded 7 athletes.

Round yon virgin mother and Child.

McClatchy says that in Diyala Province, northeast of Baghdad, a suicide bomber wearing a police uniform detonated his payload inside the police HQ of Muqdadiya, killing 7 policemen and wounding 30 others. Two more policemen were killed at a club west of Baquba, Diyala's capital.

Holy Infant, so tender and mild,

In the far-southern city of Samawa, clashes broke out again on Sunday between Mahdi Army militiamen and local police [the police corps is dominated by the rival Shiite Badr corps militia]. McClatchy says, "This morning clashes broke out again in semawa at about 9 o'clock between MAHDI army and Iraqi forces after one night truce between the Iraqi government and sadr office when the Iraqi government released some sadrist detainees. This morning clashes led to the deaths of 7 civilians and police; 19 others were wounded." Four more persons were killed in similar clashes in nearby Rumetha.

The LA Times reports that the cleric leading a renegade faction of the Mahdi Army in Samawa, Shaikh Ghazi Zarqani, is not under the authority of Muqtada al-Sadr. Tribes have chosen up sides in Samawa between SCIRI and the Sadrists, and the major tribe is even internally divided. The local Sadrist offshoot is demanding the release of 30 of its men from prison. Al-Zaman says that the Mahdi Army in Samawa violated the ceasefire by attacking the government HQ, demanding the prisoner release.

Sleep in heavenly peace,

This Christmas, Lebanon is teetering on the brink of major instability, with Christians divided against Christians and a major fault line running between the March 14 Movement and Hizbullah. The Israeli attack on the country, during the last three days of which it released a million clusterbombs destined to kill civilians and children, appears to have put a nail in the coffin of the national unity government. Israel did not destroy Hizbullah or even seriously degrade its capabilities in the medium term, and Hizbullah was hugely strengthened in Lebanon and throughout the Muslim world. So the war was for nothing. The Daily Star reports that even Christmas has been politicized this year, in the small country of 3.8 million, about a third of whom are Christians.

Sleep in heavenly peace.

Iran will defy the United Nations Security Council and press ahead with its uranium enrichment program. The UNSC demanded that Iran clear up the unresolved question of whether it has a military nuclear weapons program in addition to its announced and fairly transparent civilian energy research program. The International Atomic Energy Agency has been unable to prove a weapons program but has been unable to rule one out, either. Iran is now threatening to withdraw from the IAEA. Iran does not yet have the capability to enrich uranium to the grade necessary to run nuclear energy plants. It would take many times that level of enrichment to make a bomb. The US National Intelligence Estimate is that Iran is 10 years away from that capacity even if it is trying hard and assuming the international atmosphere was permissive. The UNSC resolution is aimed at denying Iran the equipment necessary for a weapons program, assuming it has one.

The Bush administration, now hobbled in pressing for any further formal wars by a Democratic Congress, may take a leaf from Reagan's playbook and engage in illegal, covert activities in Iran aimed at overthrowing the theocratic government.

Sistani Rejects New Sunni-Shiite Coalition
6 Dead in Samawa Clashes
47 Bodies in Baghdad

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has rejected a plan for a new coalition in the Iraqi parliament that would ally the Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq with the Sunni Arab Iraqi Islamic Party and the Kurdistan Alliance. The plan aimed at isolating the 32 Sadrist members of parliament and depriving them of the ability to bring down the prime minister. The Sadrists follow young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose Mahdi Army paramilitary has emerged as a major security threat to Baghdad.

A delegation of mainly Da`wa Party members went to the Grand Ayatollah about the plan, floated by friendly rival SCIRI. Sistani rejected the plan on the grounds that it would split the Shiite majority. A coalition of Sunni Arab fundamentalists and Kurds with SCIRI would reduce the Shiites to junior partners in the government and allow the Kurds (also Sunnis) and the Sunni Arabs to dictate policy to them. Shiites are 60 percent of Iraqis, and Sistani is insistent that their majoritarian position be recognized and they receive the consequent power and influence.

Sistani's rejection of the plan, however, essentially continues to empower the Sadrists, who were let into the Shiite coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, about a year ago and who thereby gained pivotal power within it, going on to help elect the prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki. Sistani seems more worried about Shiite-on-Shiite violence and political rivalry than he is about Shiite conflicts with Sunnis.

Negotiations between the UIA and Sadrist deputies about coming back in to an active role in the alliance and in parliament proved inconclusive on Saturday, according to al-Sharq al-Awsat in Arabic. One stumbling block is that the Sadrists want a timetable to be set for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, whereas the top leaders of the UIA are reluctant to press the US on this front. The Sadrists had suspended their participation because of PM al-Maliki's recent meeting with Bush.

Sistani's veto puts Abdul Aziz al-Hakim in a difficult position. He is a relatively junior cleric and mainly a politician, and does not have the standing openly to repudiate a ruling from Sistani. On the other hand, Sistani depends heavily for his security on the Badr Corps of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which al-Hakim leads. Still and all, it would be a major change in power dynamics in Iraqi religious politics if al-Hakim defied Sistani on this matter. He would risk losing face if a significant number of UIA MPs declined to join him in this defiance.

Update: More on this story in Arabic in al-Sharq al-Awsat for Monday

Al-Hakim seems to be blinking, since on Saturday a SCIRI spokesman said that the allegation that SCIRI wanted to sideline the Sadrists was untrue and a mere rumor.

A propos of the dangers of Shiite-on-Shiite violence, fighting has erupted in Samawa between Sadrists and local police (dominated by the Badr Corps). The clashes left at least 6 dead on Saturday. The NYT says that Sadrists are claiming that 12 of their number have been killed in the clashes, along with 6 others, including police.

Sabrina Tavernise at the NYT chronicles how Shiites are taking over once-mixed districts of Baghdad. They are riposting after a Sunni push to take the city in 2004 and 2005. Some 10 formerly mixed districts are now largely or wholly Shiite.

McClatchy reports that on Saturday, police found 47 bodies in Baghdad, and guerrillas set off 3 bombs in the capital. One of the blasts killed 2 Iraqi soldiers.

In Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, fighting has raged for several days in the town of al-Sa'ida al-Kabira between Sunni Arab guerrillas and local police. McClatchy says, "Police said recent attacks against the city claimed the lives of 5 Iraqi citizens, including one policeman. Residents said the violence has increased today as 14 shops were set to fire and increased numbers of kidnappings in the city and its outskirts."

[Ar.] 450 Iraqi pilgrims trapped at Basra airport have now gone on strike there. They had hoped to fly to Mecca in Saudi Arabia for pilgrimage, but faced constant delays.

It is too soon for the Iraq newspapers to have responses to the UN Security Council's sanctions on Iran. Will report on that on Monday.

5 US GIs Killed
British Raid Rogue Police in Basra
Coeds Raped, Killed in Baghdad

Reuters reports several deadly bombings in Baghdad.

In addition, US military spokesmen said that 5 GIs were killed by guerrillas on Thursday and Friday. On Thursday, "Three U.S. Marines and a sailor were killed in action in the western Anbar province on Thursday, the U.S. military said in a statement on Friday."

In Basra on Friday:

"British troops backed by tanks yesterday seized a leader of a rogue Iraqi police unit suspected of being behind the killing of 17 people in an ambush near the Iraqi city of Basra, the British military said. Some 800 troops launched a pre-dawn raid on a house in a southern district of Basra and captured seven people, including a "significant" member of Basra's police Serious Crimes Unit, spokesman Major Charlie Burbridge said."

Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that on Friday, Baghdad awoke to discover that a horrible crime had been committed. Militiamen kidnapped three coeds from Mustansiriya University, raped them, killed them, and tossed their bodies into a courtyard at al-Adli Medical School in the capital. A woman's organization complained bitterly that the Iraqi government was doing nothing to halt a building crime wave. The organization and the girls' friends among Mustansiriya U. students also blamed the Shiite ayatollahs for lending their support to the Shiite militias. (Mustansiriya University is near to Sadr City and the implication is that the kidnappers were Mahdi Army, attacking Sunni girls).

Likewise, the militias kidnapped a female teacher from Ghazaliya district, raped her, and cast her body in the street in the Shu'la district of Baghdad.

The honor of women is a key value in Iraqi society and the kidnapping and raping and killing of these female students "in the most vile manner" has enormous shock value. Historian of Iran Afsaneh Najmabadi argued that Turkmen kidnappings of Iranian women in 1905 helped weaken the legitimacy of the Iranian state and were an element in the debates of the subsequent constitutional revolution.

A member of the Student Union said that the ability to hold classes at Iraqi universities had been put in doubt and studies might well have to stop.

Al-Zaman also reports that there is a growing split in the ruling Shiite bloc in parliament, the United Iraqi Alliance, between the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and the Sadrists, led by Muqtada al-Sadr.

A number of UIA leaders have headed to Najaf, where they are seeking the intervention of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in the crisis, in a last ditch attempt to avoid a break-up of the alliance. Sadrist MP Nasir al-Ruba'i said that talks between SCIRI and the Sadrists on Friday had failed.

The Archbishop of Canterbury writes that Middle Eastern Christians are being put at risk by the Anglo-American Iraq War.

Statements of Abu Omar Baghdadi, leader of the "Islamic State of Iraq" that 70 percent of Sunni Arab Iraqis support "al-Qaeda" should be taken with a very large grain of salt. That 70 percent support the guerrilla war against the Americans, now that is clear. Secular-leaning ex-Baath nationalists and tribal chieftains still constitute a very large proportion of the guerrillas.

Swearing on the Qur'an
And the Nut on Miami

Florida Governor Jeb Bush called Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo "a nut" for comparing Miami to a "third world" country. Cuban-Americans and other minorities who vote Republican in the fond hope that the American Right will accept them should reconsider. The American Right is about exclusion and hierarchy, not about the acceptance of diversity.

Tancredo is such a Scrooge that he actually voted against aid for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. And, he threatened to nuke Mecca.

Yup, I'd say that's pretty nutty.

The real question is, just how many nuts are there in Congress? At least one more.

Republican Representative Virgil Goode of Virginia wrote his constituents,

"The Muslim representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district and if American citizens don't wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran . . ."

The purpose of statements like that of Goode is to mark Muslim Americans as permanent outsiders and to rally bigotted Christians. (Just as the purpose of Tancredo's remarks is to do the same thing to Latinos). The technique is a fascist technique, of spreading hatred and demanding the 'purification' of the body public as a way of whipping up fervor in a constituency. It is shameful, but more, it is very, very dangerous. The United States of America depends for its survival on tolerance of diversity. Bigotry can easily tear it apart.

Islamophobia or Anti-Muslimism is now among the more pressing social pathologies infecting the US. If it becomes established and acceptable, then lots of other forms of bigotry will also grow in virulence. There could end up being blood in the streets.

Goode is first of all confused. The issue of freedom of religion for American Muslims has nothing to do with immigration. Congressman Keith Ellison is not an immigrant-- his family has been here since the 1700s, perhaps longer than Goode's. Tancredo's remarks on Miami are even nuttier if one realizes that Florida was Spanish for centuries before any Anglos settled there in numbers. It is the "whites" who are "immigrants" in Florida.

Goode's position is not only un-American and bigotted, but it is also actually unconstitutional.

A reader points out, "Virgil Goode should also consider, from the last paragraph of Article VI of the Constitution of the United States: '...no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.'"

Moreover, the First Amendment of the US Constitution (which perhaps Goode doesn't like very much?) says,

'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.'

This amendment forbids Goode and other congressmen from formally supporting one religion or sect over another. The "establishment" of religion in the 18th century meant that the state backed it, collected money from citizens for it, and used police to enforce its beliefs and rituals (Virginia jailed Quakers for refusing baptism).

But the amendment not only forbids the government from supporting a particular religion, it also guarantees that Americans can freely practice any religion they wish. The government cannot "prohibit" the "free exercise" of any religion in the US, including Islam.

If Goode sponsored a bill to limit immigration for the express purpose of excluding Muslim immigrants or preventing the free exercise of Islam, the bill would be unconstitutional.

Nor would the framers of the constitution have agreed with his attitude.

George Washington asked in a March 24, 1784, letter to his aide Tench Tilghman that some craftsmen be hired for him: "If they are good workmen, they may be of Assia, [sic] Africa, or Europe. They may be Mahometans, [Muslims] Jews, or Christian of any Sect - or they may be Atheists ..."

Ben Franklin, the founding father of many important institutions in Philadelphia, a key diplomat and a framer of the US Constitution, wrote in his Autobiography concerning a non-denominational place of public preaching he helped found "so that even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohammedanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service." Here is the whole quote:

'And it being found inconvenient to assemble in the open air, subject to its inclemencies, the building of a house to meet in was no sooner propos'd, and persons appointed to receive contributions, but sufficient sums were soon receiv'd to procure the ground and erect the building, which was one hundred feet long and seventy broad, about the size of Westminster Hall; and the work was carried on with such spirit as to be finished in a much shorter time than could have been expected. Both house and ground were vested in trustees, expressly for the use of any preacher of any religious persuasion who might desire to say something to the people at Philadelphia; the design in building not being to accommodate any particular sect, but the inhabitants in general; so that even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohammedanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service. '

Somehow I don't think one Virgil Goode is likely to go down in history as good enough to shine Ben Franklin's shoes.

Thomas Jefferson wrote in his 1777 Draft of a
Bill for Religious Freedom:

' that our civil rights have no dependance on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry; that therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right . . . '

As I observed on another occasion, it was Jefferson's more bigotted opponents in the Virginia legislature who brought up the specter of Muslims and atheists being elected to it in the world Jefferson was trying to create. He was undeterred by such considerations, which should tell us something.

I also once pointed out that John Locke had already advocated civil rights for non-Christians in his Letter on Toleration:

' Thus if solemn assemblies, observations of festivals, public worship be permitted to any one sort of professors [believers], all these things ought to be permitted to the Presbyterians, Independents, Anabaptists, Arminians, Quakers, and others, with the same liberty. Nay, if we may openly speak the truth, and as becomes one man to another, neither Pagan nor Mahometan, nor Jew, ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the commonwealth because of his religion. The Gospel commands no such thing. '

Here is Jefferson again: "The most sacred of the duties of a government [is] to do equal and impartial justice to all its citizens."
-- Thomas Jefferson, note in Destutt de Tracy, "Political Economy," 1816.

Or: "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
-- Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1781-82

The US Senate, full of founding fathers, and the Adams government, approved the Treaty with Tripoli (now Libya) of 1797, which included this language:

"As the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Musselmen; and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."

The treaty is important for showing the mindset of the fashioners of the American system.

So Virgil Goode should consider emigrating himself, to someplace where his sort of views might be welcome. They certainly aren't in the United States of America. And they never have been part of this country's values and principles.

Iraq Roundup

The US military announced 3 more US GIs killed by guerrillas on Thursday.

The Arab League ambassador in Baghdad, Mukthar Lamani, said Thursday that in the previous week, 250 prominent Iraqi personalities have been assassiated. They included five tribal leaders from Diyala province who participated in the Reconciliation Conference last weekend in Baghdad. Lamani said,

' Sectarian violence is getting worse . . . According to our information, there were 250 political murders last week, including five tribal sheikhs who came to last week's reconciliation conference ... there are 200 armed groups, each with their own agenda," he added. . .'

Reuters reports 33 of the hundreds of deaths from criminal and political violence that likely took place on Thursday. Among the incidents was the car bombing of a police academy that killed 11 and wounded dozens.

AP reports that aides to nationalist Shiite young cleric Muqtada al-Sadr say that he is calling on Sadrist members of parliament to abandon their boycott of that body. He is also announcing a month-long truce between members of his Mahdi Army paramilitary and its enemies, but wants a guarantee that its Shiite rival, the Badr Corps of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, will not take advantage of the lull to usurp Mahdi turf.

76 Bodies found in Baghdad, Dozens More Killed
Attacks on Teachers Roil Education

Raed Jarrar argues that the Bush administration's plans to ally with the Kurds and the Shiites and crush the Sunni Arabs in Iraq won't work. He is right. He also points to the continued political alliances across sectarian lines, which show that sectarianism can't always be taken for granted.

The Sunni Arabs are themselves deeply divided into many different groups. But one thing they have proved is that they can be spoilers, and nobody will get to enjoy the new Iraq unless their minimal demands are met. They can't be crushed without a genocide. They should be negotiated with.

AP says that Muqtada al-Sadr, the young nationalist Shiite cleric, is considering calling a one-month cease-fire in the struggle of his Mahdi Army with Sunni guerrilla groups, and asking MPs loyal to him to resume their participation in parliament.

AP reports of Tuesday that "Two American soldiers were killed and six injured in separate attacks today in Baghdad."

CENTCOM commander Gen. John Abizaid will step down in March. Abizaid has been remarkable among US generals in his knowledge of the region and his conviction that too big a US military footprint is undesirable.

As for Bush's new fascination with "surging" ever more troops into Iraq, Justin Raimondo compares it to Napoleon's Russia campaign. Some readers complained about comparing Bush to Napoleon because the latter was a military genius. I think they are missing the point. Bush is Napoleon without the tactical brilliance-- but the recklessness, sense of divine mission, willingness to use up masses of people, and a sort of authoritarian revolutionism-- they have these in common.

Reuters reports political violence in Iraq's ongoing civil war. Some notable excerpts:

' BAGHDAD - Iraqi police found 76 bodies around Baghdad, all with gunshot wounds and most with signs of torture . . .

MOSUL - Police said they found 11 bodies, all with gunshot wounds, in the northern city of Mosul. . .

BAGHDAD - A car bomb in the parking lot of an Interior Ministry office charged with issuing identity cards killed four people and wounded eight in Adhamiya district in northern Baghdad, police said. . .

BAGHDAD - A suicide car bomber rammed his vehicle into a police checkpoint near Baghdad University in the southwestern Jadriya district, killing 11 people and wounding 31, including some students, an Interior Ministry source said. . .

BAGHDAD - Gunmen killed university professor Muntathar Mohammed Mehdi in his car, along with his brother and cousin, relatives and hospital sources said. Relatives said Mehdi was a member of Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's political movement. . .'

The LA Times adds:

' Gunmen opened fire on a bus terminal about 3:10 p.m., concentrating on buses headed to the mostly Shiite areas of Sadr City, Talibiya, Husseiniya and Shaab, police said. Three people were killed and at least seven injured, police said.

Gunmen also targeted three teachers yesterday.

Palestinian teacher Mahmoud Mohammed Rasheed, brother of Iraqi television star Zuhair Mohammed Rasheed, was killed in an eastern Baghdad neighborhood where he taught middle school, police said. Investigators say Rasheed might have been targeted for being Palestinian, or attackers might have mistaken him for his famous brother, who stars in a popular sketch comedy.

Gunmen also attacked professor Ali Arnoosi, deputy dean of the college of law at the University of Baghdad, and fellow law professor Mohammed Hamdani, police said. The two were slain at 3 p.m. as they were on their way home. Their driver and guard were also killed. '

McClatchy reports that the al-Maliki government is threatening to fire professors at Iraq's beleaguered universities who cancel classes because of poor security. But the government is not offering to provide better security. Nancy Youssef writes:

' Iraq's universities have been a target for insurgents and militias alike almost since the war began in 2003. Professors tell of armed gangs taking over buildings and classrooms and even issuing threats about grades. Thousands of students have requested transfers to campuses where their sects - Sunni Muslim or Shiite Muslim - are in the majority. Thousands of professors and students, seeking to avoid violence and threats, have fled the nation to pursue their studies in neighboring countries.

Around Baghdad, many campuses are desolate. Many families refuse to let their children, particularly women, finish their education for fear of what will happen either en route to class or once they get there.

According to the Iraq Students and Youth League, a university advocacy group, at least 10 violent incidents racked Baghdad's two main universities in the first week of this month, when Maliki issued his order. Among them were attempted kidnappings in front of Iraqi police officers, who didn't try to stop the attacks.

At Baghdad University, only 6 percent of student and professors attended in early December, the group found. The highest attendance level was 59 percent at private universities. '

Given that 4 teachers were announced killed on Tuesday alone, it isn't hard to understand why education is in such a state.

Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that half of Baghdad was without electricity on Tuesday. The report says that some districts, such as Bayya`, have been in the dark for days. The Ministry of Electricity has not given any explanation for the lack of service, and it isn't clear what the cause is (though sabotage by guerrillas is high on the list.) The low in Baghdad today was 42 degrees Fahrenheit (5 C.), and Sunday the low will be 35 (1 C.). Not having electricity in such temperatures is not comfortable, and for some (the young, sick or elderly) could actually be dangerous.

Hashimi: Bush Blackmailed Blair on Timetable
Sistani Said to Back New Coalition

A US Marine died of wounds received in al-Anbar Province on Monday, the US military announced.

Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi of the Iraqi Islamic Party said Tuesday that he thought George W. Bush had "blackmailed" or "brainwashed" British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Al-Hashimi, a Sunni Arab from a fundamentalist party descended from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, believed he had convinced Blair of the need for a specific timetable for withdrawal of Coalition troops from Iraq. Such a timetable has been a consistent demand of most Sunni Arab groups, as well as of many Shiites. After his meeting with Blair, al-Hashimi watched Mr. Blair come on television in a joint news conference with W., at which the PM declared himself in solidarity with the American leader's opposition to a timetable.

Even the prime minister of Turkey, a NATO ally of the US and the UK, is calling for the setting of a withdrawal timetable.

Police found at least 53 bodies in the streets of Baghdad, killed in the course of sectarian violence. Reuters reports another 12 bodies in Baquba and 4 in Mosul. Guerrillas robbed a bank and its customers and may have gotten away with as much as $1.4 million. Reuters reports scattered violence around the country.

The "Istanbul Conference" of Sunni Arab Iraqi politicians and activists, held Dec. 13-14, produced incendiary speeches. Sunni politician Adnan Dulaimi spoke so vehemently about a "Safavid" (Iranian) threat to Iraq and the Sunnis of the Gulf that one Arabic-language Shiite newspaper alleged that the Interior Ministry issued an arrest warrant against him for instigating sectarian violence. A parliamentary committee also demanded that he apologize. Dulaimi had been a leader of the Iraqi Accord Front, but his anti-American stance has increasingly brought him into conflict with the Iraqi Islamic Party, his coalition partner that favors cooperation with the Americans. The IAF seems likely to be splitting.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the Iraqi government is talking to representatives of several important Sunni Arab guerrilla groups and has recently been contacted by Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, a former vice president of Iraq and major Baath leader of the resistance. The guerrillas are demanding that the US Congress call for a withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, and that the "Iraqi Resistance" be "recognized." Well, it may as well be recognized. It is there.

Kirk Semple and Ed Wong of the NYT have a scoop. They report, based on discussions with US officials, that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has approved the formation of a new coalition in parliament that would exclude the Sadr Movement of Muqtada al-Sadr.

The coalition that the Americans hope for would look like this:

Iraqi Accord Front (Sunni Fundamentalist): 44 seats
Kurdistan Alliance and allies: 58 seats
SCIRI [Shiite fundamentalist] and allies: 63 seats
National Iraqi List of Allawi: 25 seats

That would be 190, more than enough to form a government and appoint a prime minister. It would potentially leave the Sadrists (32 seats) and the Da`wa Party of Nuri al-Maliki in the opposition, along with Salih Mutlak of the secular Sunni National Dialogue Front (11 seats).

The problem is that not all of the Iraqi Accord Front may be willing to join the coalition, and perhaps not all of the National Iraqi list will come in. Moreover, the idea that the Iraqi Islamic Party, the Kurds, and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq are going to hold together as a united coalition very long strikes me as daft.
This plan of cutting the Sadrists out of parliamentary power and then launching a military attack on their paramilitary, the Mahdi Army, seems to me unlikely actually to reduce Muqtada's power and influence.

It would also be possible for Muqtada and allies to put together a significant bloc:

Da`wa: 22
Sadrists: 32
Fadila: 15
Salih Mutlak's list: 11
Mishaan Juburi list: 3
Part of the Iraqi Accord Front?: 10?

Sadr could find enough deputies to block the formation of a new government.

The real problem is that Parliament isn't very powerful. Although the NYT blames Sadr's boycott for the failure of parliament to reach a quorum the last couple of times it tried to meet, in fact it is because many of the parliamentarians virtually live abroad (they like London) and just aren't around in Baghdad to take part in a vote.

The idea of the Bush administration is that you cut Sadr loose in parliament, so that the prime minister doesn't depend on him, and then you have him call in the Iraqi Army against the Mahdi Army militiamen and defeat them. The Sunnis would thereby be reassured, the thinking goes, that the Sadrist death squads have been dealt with, and the Sunni Arabs would gradually become more willing to rein in their paramilitary. I don't think it is plausible that the US military can defeat a widespread and entrenched social movement like the Sadrists at this late date, so we are in for a lot of trouble.

The US will turn security duties in Najaf province, site of a major Shiite shrine, over to the Iraqis. I suspect it is the Badr Corps paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq that is actually the backbone of security forces in Najaf, though many may be in the police.

The Iraq War is more unpopular this year than last, and will also be more expensive. Reuters reports that "spending hit an all-time high of $120 billion in fiscal year 2006 that ended on Sept. 30. Some media reports have said the war costs for 2007 could total around $170 billion. But [White House budget official] Portman declined to give a precise figure." Bush has been putting these costs off the regular budget books, and so they haven't been counted in the budget deficit, which is actually closer to half a trillion dollars a year than Bush pretends.

The International Crisis Group criticizes the Baker-Hamilton Commission report for taking the autonomy of the Iraqi government too seriously. It recommends a multilateral approach to resolving the crisis. It also recognizes that Iraq is on the brink of being a failed state a la Somalia.

The USG Open Source Center paraphrases the Iraqi press for December 19:

' Dar al-Salam carries on page 2 a 230-word report entitled "Conference for Clerics in Basra Confirms Iraq's Unity, Forbids Bloodshed in Iraq, Demands Departure of Foreign Forces.". .

Al-Bayyinah carries on page 2 a 200-word report noting that Shiite and Sunni religious clerics and tribal shaykhs in Basra held a conference in which they called for Iraqi unity. . .

Ishraqat al-Sadr carries on the front page a 430-word editorial by Fattah al-Shaykh severely criticizing Adnan al-Dulaymi for his speech at the Istanbul Conference in which he attacked Iraqi Shiites, calling on parliament to lift immunity from him. . .

Al-Bayan carries on the front page a 230-word report citing Karbala Police Chief General Abu al-Walid confirming the arrest of two police officers responsible for lootings and killings on the Iraq- Jordan highway. . .

Al-Bayyinah carries on page 2 a 330-word article by Hasan Karim appreciating the formation of a new political bloc comprising the SCIRI, the Iraqi Islamic Party, and the Kurdistan Coalition. . . '

3 More US Troops Killed
Violence in Iraq at 'All Time High'

The deaths of three more US troops at the hands of Sunni Arab guerrillas were announced on Monday.

Iraq violence is at an all-time high since the US "turned over sovereignty" to an Iraqi government June 28, 2004. USA Today writes, "The Pentagon says injuries and deaths among U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq rose 32% during the period from mid-August to mid-October over the previous three months. Both the average number of attacks each week and the average number of people killed or wounded in those attacks were at their highest levels since the United States handed over power to the Iraqi government in June 2004."

What the report does not say is that this period coincides with a major US military operation, "Together Forward" intended to restore security in the capital, involving sweeps of Sunni Arab and some Shiite neighborhoods. That is to say, the operation not only did not make things better, things got worse during it. The military beefed up the US troop contingent in Baghdad significantly for the operation, including moving 3,700 troops down from Mosul. It is this sort of thing that convinces me that an extra 20,000 troops for Iraq is not going to make a difference.

The American public doesn't need any convincing. Only 11 percent believe it is a good idea to send more troops to Iraq.

Oil Minister Hussein Shahristani says that Iraq will let bids to develop 60 oil fields to foreign companies.

Reuters reports political violence in Iraq on Monday. Among the more important items:

' * BAGHDAD - Police found 44 bodies in various parts of Baghdad over the past 24 hours, an Interior Ministry source said. . .

BAGHDAD - A car bomb at the entrance of a wholesale vegetable market killed five people and wounded 19 in the southern Saidiya district of Baghdad, police said. A car bomb at a wholesale vegetable market in southern Doura district wounded seven people, police said. . . .

BAGHDAD - Gunmen killed a woman and wounded two when they attacked a group of female staff at the Ministry of Education in Amil district in southwestern Baghdad, police said. . .

BAGHDAD - Gunmen who kidnapped about 30 people at a Red Crescent office in Baghdad on Sunday have freed
17 hostages, Mazen Abdullah, secretary general of the Iraqi Red Crescent, said on Monday. The group suspended operations in Baghdad. . .

MOSUL - Gunmen killed Khaireddine al-Dabagh, a member of the city council in Mosul, 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad, police said. . .

SAMARRA - Gunmen kidnapped police Captain Nihad Khalid, head of emergency police in Samarra, 100 km (60 miles) north of Baghdad, after storming his house, police said. A curfew was imposed afterwards in the city. . . '

There have been battles between US forces and local guerrillas in Ramadi and Tikrit in the past week, which were generally not reported at the time.

The NYT says that the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement's tactic of cutting Baghdad off from electricity and fuel is working.

Aiham Samaraie, former electricity minister accused of massive embezzlement, escaped from jail in Iraq on Monday.

Jonathan Steele points out that it is unfair to blame Iraqis for the chaos unleashed by the Anglo-American invasion.

Saudi accusations that Iran has created a Shiite state within a state in Iraq are not plausible. If fair numbers of Iranian Revolutionary Guards were active in Iraq, they would be being captured by the US and Britain, which have 10,000 or so prisoners at any one time. As I understand it, the number of Iranians in custody is minimal. Also, Iraqi Shiites are often Iraqi and Arab nationalists, and won't put up with Iranian dominance as opposed to Iranian friendship. The Sadrists are now the major political orientation in the Shiite South, according to my sources, and the Sadrist tradition is hostile to Iranian dominance.

Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that Shaikh Abdul Aziz, the guide of the Islamic Movement in Kurdistan is in Tehran for consultations. He asked his Iranian hosts to intervene with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani to have him issue a legal ruling or fatwa condemning sectarian violence against Sunni Arabs in Baghdad. The shaikh reported that the Iranians asked him to help them open channels of communication with the hardline Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars and other Sunni groups, so as to foster a dialogue between them and Iran. Asked what his position was on this Iranian request, he replied that he and his group are unconvinced of its sincerity as along as Iran is funding Shiite death squads against the Sunni Arabs.


Nicole Stracke considers ways of reviving the Iraqi Army.

Newsweek misleadingly reports 'a booming economy' in Iraq. Iraq's is a war economy, and some sectors have benefitted from the end of the old regime and of international sanctions. So there is construction, sure. And a lot of used cars and consumer goods have been imported (that is not actually necessarily a good thing). People talk on cell phones. But no new factories have been founded. There is no evidence of increased productivity. Inflation is up to 53 percent. The professional middle class is fleeing in droves, so that soon there won't be any physicians left. Electricity and fuel are scarce. Unemployment is probably 50 to 60 percent. Saying that this economy is "flourishing" (outside Kurdistan) is like saying that the US economy was "flourishing" during the Great Depression of the 1930s. There was construction going on then, too, quite a lot of it. Iraq's economy is different insofar as it functions in the midst of a civil war. War economies create pockets of wealth and activity. When a fourth to a half of your workers are unemployed, no one cares.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports in Arabic that middle class Iraqis are quitting their jobs, selling their houses and furniture, and lining up at travel agents to get tickets out of the "inferno of violence" that is Iraq. It tells the story of an Iraqi government employee who paid $100 for a tourist visa to Egypt, where he hopes eventually to get a work permit and to acquire Egyptian nationality. He has given up on Iraq altogether. Hundreds of Iraqis fly to Cairo every week. Thousands leave the country for Jordan and Syria every month.

British Conservative Party leader David Cameron is making more sense on Iraq and the Middle East than I've heard in a long time. He admits that the Iraq situation has become such a mess that it endangers Britain's security. He admits that it is fomenting terrorism against the UK. He admits that Britain should be less obsequious toward Bush. And he urges a new diplomatic push where Britain engages with and listens to the countries of the region in formulating policy. From *our* supposed conservatives we get idiotic and un-conservative ideas like "controlled chaos" and "surges". Cameron still hasn't come out against the war per se, but his comments are canny. He is clearly someone to watch.

King Abdullah II of Jordan looks at Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq and fears that 'we could be facing 3 civil wars'.

Tensions are running high in eastern Turkey where the Kurds predominate, given renewed militancy by the Kurdish Workers Party, PKK. The PKK is being given safe haven by Iraqi Kurds, and if Iraq breaks up it could throw the whole region into war.

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan warned that a break-up of Iraq "would increase the level of civil war."

This petition started by prominent leftists demands an immediate US military withdrawal from Iraq.

Larisa Alexandrova has started AtLargely.com, a web site for investigative journalism.

US officials and American Muslims attempt to define 'Islamophobia.'

More on Elliot Abrams' Censorship of Leverett

The Last Hurrah has imagined the content of Flynt Leverett's squashed opinion piece on Iran, based on his past pronouncements on the matter.

Thanks to Daily Kos for taking up the issue of the quashed Leverett memo/petition and my call for people to write their representatives and senators demanding that Elliot Abrams leave the National Security Council.

Steve Clemons points out that White House spokesman Tony Snow replied first that he knew nothing about the issue and then that the White House had not intervened. Clemons also gives a link to Flynt's remarks on Monday.

The Financial Times says that Flynt is not the only former official forbidden by the CIA/ White House from saying things already in the public record.

Bush White House Censors Op-Ed on Iran
Elliot Abrams Must Go

Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation carries the story of how Elliot Abrams and others at the National Security Council in Bush's White House have intervened to stop the publication of an op-ed in the New York Times by Flynt Leverett. Leverett himself served in the National Security Council until not so long ago.

For Leverett's criticism of Bush administration Middle East policy and its mishandling of Iran since January of 2002, see this interview at Eurasia.net. He advocates US talks with Iran.

Ironically, the White House attempt to stop high-level discussion of talking to Iran comes just as the Iranian public dealt a slap in the face to extremist President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, who stole the presidential elections in summer of 2005. Former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani appears to have trounced Ahmadinejad's own favorite cleric, Mohammad Taqi Misbah Yazdi, an authoritarian anti-democrat.

Back to Washington. The remaining Neoconservatives in the Bush administration, like David Wurmser in Cheney's office and Abrams at the NSC have been agitating behind the scenes for war on Syria and Iran. These people hate peace the way the devil hates holy water. They confess themselves actively disappointed when a war doesn't happen. They helped send US troops into Iraq where 24,000 have been wounded or killed, and they'd just love to expend some more lives on other pet projects.

That does it. Elliot Abrams must go. Elliot Abrams is a felon. He was involved in stealing Pentagon weapons from US stockpiles, selling them to the Ayatollah Khomeini, and then stealing the Iranian funds so garnered to give to far-right Central American death squads, and then lying about all this to Congress. The Congress in the Constitution controls the budget. The Congress had cut off money to the rightwing death squads supported by Reagan and henchmen like Abrams. This elaborate criminal conspiracy inside the White House was the Right's response. They shredded the Constitution (and ever since have been calling their critics "unpatriotic.")

In 1991, Abrams pled guilty to two misdemeanor counts of lying to Congress under oath. Without the plea deal, he was facing felony charges, since what he did was in fact a felony.

Congress pledged that Abrams would never work at a high level in government again. But by the time the Neoconservative cabal in the Bush administration got Bush to appoint him to the National Security Council, there had been so much turn-over in Congress that, one member told me, "no one remembered who Abrams was."

I'm serious about this, everyone. The bloggers are touted as influential, but their influence is hard to measure or prove. Let's make this a test case.

Can Kos help? Eschaton? Talkingpointsmemo? And, it needn't be only one side of the aisle. A lot of principled persons on the right are deeply troubled by the criminality of this administration.

Please write your congressional representative and your senators and demand that they hold hearings on why Elliot Abrams is in charge of Middle East policy in the Bush White House.

Enough of being ruled by criminals and liars and warmongers. Enough of censorship and attacks on our Constitution. Elliot Abrams must go.

Here is an excerpt of Leverett's statement on the affair.

' Until last week, the Publication Review Board had never sought to remove or change a single word in any of my drafts, including in all of my publications about the Bush administration's handling of Iran policy. However, last week, the White House inserted itself into the prepublication review process for an op-ed on the administration's bungling of the Iran portfolio that I had prepared for the New York Times, blocking publication of the piece on the grounds that it would reveal classified information.

This claim is false and, I have come to believe, fabricated by White House officials to silence an established critic of the administration's foreign policy incompetence at a moment when the White House is working hard to fend off political pressure to take a different approach to Iran and the Middle East more generally.

The op-ed is based on the longer paper I just published with The Century Foundation -- which was cleared by the CIA without modifying a single word of the draft. Officials with the CIA's Publication Review Board have told me that, in their judgment, the draft op-ed does not contain classified material, but that they must bow to the preferences of the White House.

The White House is demanding, before it will consider clearing the op-ed for publication, that I excise entire paragraphs dealing with matters that I have written about (and received clearance from the CIA to do so) in several other pieces, that have been publicly acknowledged by Secretary Rice, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, and that have been extensively covered in the media.

These matters include Iran's dialogue and cooperation with the United States concerning Afghanistan in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and Iran's offer to negotiate a comprehensive "grand bargain" with the United States in the spring of 2003.

There is no basis for claiming that these issues are classified and not already in the public domain.

For the White House to make this claim, with regard to my op-ed and at this particular moment, is nothing more than a crass effort to politicize a prepublication review process -- a process that is supposed to be about the protection of classified information, and nothing else -- to limit the dissemination of views critical of administration policy.

Within the last two week, the CIA found the wherewithal to approve an op-ed -- published in the New York Times on December 8, 2006 -- by Kenneth Pollack, another former CIA employee. This op-ed includes the statement that “Iran provided us with extensive assistance on intelligence, logistics, diplomacy, and Afghan internal politics."

Similar statements by me have been deleted from my draft op-ed by the White House. But Kenneth Pollack is someone who presented unfounded assessments of the Iraqi WMD threat -- the same assessments expounded by the Bush White House -- to make a high-profile public case for going to war in Iraq.

Mr. Pollack also supports the administration's reluctance to engage with Iran, in contrast to my consistent and sharp criticism of that position. It would seem that, if one is expounding views congenial to the White House, it does not intervene in prepublication censorship, but, if one is a critic, White House officials will use fraudulent charges of revealing classified information to keep critical views from being heard.

My understanding is that the White House staffers who have injected themselves into this process are working for Elliott Abrams and Megan O'Sullivan, both politically appointed deputies to President Bush's National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley.

Their conduct in this matter is despicable and un-American in the profoundest sense of that term. '

Dozens of Red Crescent Workers Kidnapped

The horror show in Iraq continued on Sunday, when men dressed as special police commandos invaded the offices of the Red Crescent Society [which is allied with the Red Cross] in Karrada in central Baghdad and kidnapped "dozens" (the local Adhamiyah police say they don't know how many) of employees. The kidnappers invaded the building, says al-Zaman, and separated the men from the women, then took all the men captive, including employees, guards, and visitors who happened to be in the lobby.

Al-Zaman said in Arabic that "militias belonging to religious parties yesterday" attacked "a number of Baghdad districts and buildings of civil society organizations in the center of the capital under the eyes of the police, which did not stir to stop them." One group of commandos attacked the Dental School of Baghdad University. Others conducted operations in Adhamiyah, which actually have been going on since the day before yesterday. A militia invasion of the largely Sunni Arab district of West Baghdad was beaten off by inhabitants. On Sunday, a member of the district council of Adhamiyah was killed and 3 others were kidnapped.

Reuters reports other violence, including the killing of two Sunni clerics in Iskandariyah.

Hannah Allam on the Sadr movement and the social services it provides in a country beset by poverty, unemployment and insecurity.

Colin Powell thinks Iraq is in a civil war and that victory for the US is unattainable.

PS I see a lot of pundits and politicians saying that Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq have been fighting for a millennium. We need better history than that. The Shiite tribes of the south probably only converted to Shiism in the past 200 years. And, Sunni-Shiite riots per se were rare in 20th century Iraq. Sunnis and Shiites cooperated in the 1920 rebellion against the British. If you read the newspapers in the 1950s and 1960s, you don't see anything about Sunni-Shiite riots. There were peasant/landlord struggles or communists versus Baathists. The kind of sectarian fighting we're seeing now in Iraq is new in its scale and ferocity, and it was the Americans who unleashed it.

See Brian Uhlrich's comments on this, linking to Issandr El Amrani re the New York Times op-ed by Lee Smith. Contrast to this better overview in NYT recently.

I remember a Peanuts cartoon in which Charlie Brown observed Lucy filling Schroeder's head with a bunch of nonsense. He observed that it would take the poor guy 12 years just to unlearn all the silly things Lucy had taught him. It is the same with Americans and the Neocons on the Middle East.

3 GIs killed, 53 Bodies found
Sunnis, Sadr Boycott 'Reconciliation' Conference

Sunni Arab guerrillas killed 3 GIs north of Baghdad on Saturday with a roadside bomb.

Police found 53 bodies in the streets of Baghdad on Saturday, some of them in the tense Sunni Arab district of Ghazaliya. A bombing in Kirkuk killed an Iraqi officer and wounded some soldiers. Other political violence on Saturday:

' BAQUBA - Clashes between Iraqi soldiers and insurgents killed two civilians, including a woman, and wounded five in Baquba's Ameen neighbourhood, police said . . . Gunmen killed two policemen when they attacked a checkpoint they were manning near a cemetery in Baquba on Friday night . . . Police in Baquba sent the bodies of 10 unidentified people, including a woman, to the city's morgue on Friday . . . Gunmen assassinated tribal sheikh Sattar al-Khadran, the leader of the Bayati tribe in Zuhra village, along with a companion just north of Baquba . . .'

The long-awaited "reconciliation conference" was finally held in the Green Zone on Saturday, with 200 Iraqis of various persuasions present. But the Sunni guerrillas were not represented, and even most Sunni Arab parties were not there. Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the Baathist guerrilla leaders, who were not invited, are saying that al-Maliki has gone back on his earlier promises to them. Al-Hayat says that the Association of Muslim Scholars (hardline Sunnis), the Congress of the Iraqi People of Adnan Dulaimi (fundamentalist Sunnis), and Salih Mutlak's Dialogue Front (ex-Baath secularists) all boycotted. Moreover, opposition figures living abroad, who had been invited, mostly declined to come. And Muqtada al-Sadr, the young Shiite clerical leader, turned down an invitation. So it doesn't sound to me as though this conference will amount to anything.

The Baathists were miffed and said that the conference "does not concern them." Guerrilla leader Abu Wisam al-Jash'ami told al-Hayat that he thought he had an agreement with al-Maliki, that the PM would ask parliament to debate the question of debaathification. Instead, al-Maliki foreclosed the debate by just asking parliament to consider abolishing the debaathification law. (Most Sunni Arabs had a connection to the Baath Party, which has been used by triumphant Shiites and Kurds to throw them out of government and military service.)

Al-Hayat also says that Secretary of State Condi Rice has sent envoys to the major Arab countries informing them that Washington will not talk with Syria about Iraq (with the quid pro quo that Damascus gets a free hand in Lebanon), and will not talk to Iran (with the quid pro quo that they get a pass on the nuclear research program).

Neith Bush nor Maliki knows what any successful diplomat knows, which is that you have to talk to your enemies if you are to succeed. Well, you could theoretically crush them, but that isn't what is happening. In fact, I think crushing them is impossible short of use of WMD. Even Bush won't do that.

People around Bush are said to have severe questions about Maliki, but don't see a viable alternative. What they tend to mean by such questions is that they want him to turn on his political base, the Sadr Movement, and crush the Mahdi Army. It is not clear that he could do that with the Shiite 5th Division if he wanted to-- they might defect rather than fight fellow Shiites. And, they don't have much in the way of armored vehicles or high tech fire power. But given that the Sadrists elected him, why would he want to do that in the first place? When they say there are no plausible alternatives, it means they've decided that Vice President Adil Abdul Mahdi of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, al-Maliki's main rival, is for some reason (his closeness to Iran?) unacceptable.

Solomon Moore of the LA Times describes how the Iraqi school system has been caught in the crossfire in Iraq's increasingly vicious civil war.

Dahr Jamail and Ali al-Fadhily report on the violence, rape, and abduction to which women are exposed. The article also has some interesting comments by women members of parliament (85 of 275 are women) about how their voices go unheard inside and outside of the legislature.

Michael Moss of the NYT examines the deficiencies in the Iraqi court system, which appear to be manifold.

Laura Bush wants the 'good news' from Iraq to be reported, especially about the "schools opening." Actually, Laura, the schools in Iraq were open every day until March 19, 2003. Iraqis at one point had 95 percent literacy, before the US/UN sanctions of the 1990s. They didn't need the Bush administration to open schools for them, they needed the Americans to stop strangling them on the pretext that Saddam hadn't destroyed his WMD, which the professionals knew he had.

The US military has a new manual on counter-insurgency, which sounds like the opposite of most of what we've been doing. Why didn't they have one of those left over from 'Nam? Why keep having to reinvent the wheel?

Lando on Oil Insecurity in Basra

Ben Lando of UPI gives us a 2-part report on oil security [part 1 here] in Iraq, or rather the lack thereof. This problem is often ignored in the press, but it is at the center of the inability of the new government to establish itself. You don't need 20,000 troops in Iraq, you need 20,000 accountants.

In part 2, Lando looks specifically at the paramilitary factions and Marsh Arab tribes that are contending for a slice of the lucrative petroleum smuggling trade in Iraq's southern port city. Hmmm. 100,000 barrels a day are smuggled, worth $62 a barrel on the open market. Aren't we talking about $6.2 million a day? Isn't that $2.26 billion a year? Imagine what criminals and militiamen can do with that kind of money. And, don't kid yourself that it stays in Basra. Also note the sectarian implications-- these resources are going in the main to Shiite paramilitaries and clans. Note that the Shiites also dominate the government, which gets the revenues from petroleum not embezzled or smuggled.

Note also that the petroleum smuggling is a double-edged sword. It weakens the central government by bleeding it of resources. And it strengthens paramilitaries and criminal elements against the central government. Iraq will never amount to anything unless this hemorrhaging of national resources can be halted.

3 Marines Killed
Dozens of Bodies found

3 US troops were announced killed by Sunni Arab guerrillas on Friday. At least 22 bodies were found in Baghdad. A prominent Iraqi politician and clan leader, Muhsin al-Kanan, an elected member of the Basra provincial council, was shot down on Friday.

On Thursday, dozens of people were kidnapped in Baghdad by persons dressed as police, then 25 or 30 were released, mainly Shiites. There was nothing more about this story on Friday and Saturday. Some 45 bodies were reported found on Thursday, including some in Wasit province, a Shiite area south of Baghdad. The Vice President of Iraq, Adil Abdul Mahdi, was almost assassinated.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that Iraqi PM Nuri al-Maliki will launch a new initiative during the inauguration of the Reconciliation conference, aimed at bringing ex-Baathist Sunnis in from the cold. He will rehabilitate ex-Baathists against whom no civil cases have been filed.

Carne Ross, who was the UK point man on Iraq at the UN 1998-2002 says that the Blair government's and the Bush administration's sudden charges against Iraq concerning weapons of mass destruction were trumped up and came as a surprise to him.

' "During my posting, at no time did HMG [her majesty's government] assess that Iraq's WMD (or any other capability) posed a threat to the UK or its interests," Mr Ross wrote in evidence submitted to the Butler inquiry in June 2004.

"It was the commonly held view among the officials dealing with Iraq that any threat had been effectively contained." Mr Ross said when the United States raised the topic of regime change.

He and others would argue against such a move, "primarily on the grounds that Iraq would collapse into chaos", he said in written testimony given to an inquiry into the run-up to the March 2003 conflict.

"With the exception of some unaccounted-for Scud missiles, there was no intelligence evidence of significant holdings of CW [chemical weapons], BW [biological weapons] or nuclear material," the official said. '

Ross's testimony was secret until recently, under Britain's Official Secrets Act, but a parliamentary committee has now released it with the acquiescence of the foreign office.

Oregon has a better way of replacing senators who quit or become incapacitated in the middle of their 6-year terms. They hold a snap bi-election, so that the public rather than the governor gets to decide on the successor.

How the Republicans are Stealing the November Elections
Or, Bushes and Bonapartes

On November 7, the American people delivered a stiff rebuke to the Bush Administration and the Republican Party over its far-right policies. They were especially worried about the Iraq fiasco, and upset over the mounting US and Iraqi casualties. But they also worried about Bush's coddling of the Religious Right and the erosion of the separation of religion and state, along with the assault on civil liberties.

Washington has been gripped by speculation that the brain surgery undergone by Senator Tim Johnson, D-South Dakota, might lead to his seat falling open, allowing South Dakota governor Michael Rounds, a Republican, to appoint a Republican replacement until 2008. That would throw the senate into the hands of the Republicans, since Richard Bruce Cheney is president of the senate and can cast tie-breaking votes. This scenario is undemocratic in so many ways it is hard to count them. The idea that a Republican governor elected by a few thousand shivering voters (South Dakota's population is 754,844) could overturn the results of an overwhelming national popular vote by fiat should make the blood boil of everyone who cares about equity in the Republic.

(It is a matter for regret that poor Senator Johnson's health problems should provoke anything but concern for his well-being, and I wish him a speedy recovery and sympathize with his family's ordeal.)

The Michael Rounds Coup may or may not take place; if it does, I think the blogosphere should mobilize to see that he never wins another election, and to work to see that both senators from S.D. are Democrats in 08. How many Paypal clicks could it take to affect a South Dakota election? Egregious behavior on the level of national politics should be punished. And, I think a Minnekota, which combined the two Dakotas with Minnesota to form a single state, would make a lot more sense than the current arrangement.

But the Michael Rounds Coup would be a small thing compared to the Iraq War Coup now being conducted by W. You thought that the American people had spoken? They want the troops out? They want to be extracted from the quagmire? Too bad.

You see, we do not have a democracy, with the Bush administration in power. We have an elective dictatorship. The elections are like lotteries. Many of them don't even reflect the popular vote or the general will. The Rehnquist Coup of 2000 was not intrinsically different from the Rounds Coup (if it happens) of 2006. Nor would the techniques whereby elections are "won" bear much scrutiny. Ask Tom Delay, through the penitentiary window. And the incumbents feel they owe nothing to the electorate, nothing whatsoever. They have the Power. They act as they please. The rest of us are just onlookers.

So Bush's response to the clear public demand for a change of course and a disengagement? It is to run to Henry Kissinger's apron strings. And what does the Butcher of Chile and Indonesia urge? That Bush should put another 40,000 US troops into Iraq!

The problem is that Iraq is a 500,000 troop problem. Another 40,000 are just going to anger locals. And, apparently, they would be sicced on the Shiite Mahdi Army in hopes of permanently crippling the Sadr Movement headed (in part) by Muqtada al-Sadr. And maybe they'd be used in a new offensive against the Sunni Arab guerrillas.

Let me explain why it won't work. It won't work because Iraqis are now politically and socially mobilized. This means that they have the social preconditions for effective political and paramilitary action (they are largely urban, literate, connected by media, etc.) And they are politically savvy and well-connected. They are well armed, gaining in military experience, and well financed through petroleum and antiquities smuggling and through cash infusions from supporters abroad. The Mahdi Army fighters can be defeated by the US military, as happened twice in 2004. But they cannot be made to disappear, as they were not in 2004. That is because they are an organic movement springing from the Shiite poor, and are the paramilitary arm of a large social movement with a national network and ideology.

Attempts to crush popular movements once they have mobilized have most often failed. No attempts at counter-revolution in France in the 1790s were successful. Even powerful empires like Austria were helpless before the mobilized French infantry (who for the first time used large numbers of conscripts).

In 1905-1907, the Iranian public mobilized to demand a constitution and parliament from the autocratic Qajar monarchy, which the then shah granted shortly before his death. His son and successor, Mohammad Ali Shah, hated the whole idea of constraints on his absolute power, and he tried to get rid of the parliament and the constitution. He simply provoked a national revolution against himself in 1908-1909, with major crowd and paramilitary action in Azerbaijan in particular, and ended up having to flee the country.

To give another Iran example, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi tried to crack down militarily on the mobilized urban crowds demonstrating against him in 1978, and even formed a military cabinet. But hundreds of thousands were coming out for well-organized demonstrations. When the military fired on peaceful protesters in Tehran, it simply enraged the whole country further. By January of 1979 the shah, despite his powerful army, had had to flee to Egypt.

I am not saying that popular protests cannot be crushed. They can and have been. I am saying that when you have a whole country that is politically mobilized and has substantial resources, a crack-down is likely doomed unless it is almost genocidal (Saddam's use of chemical weapons in 1988 and of helicopter gunships against civilians in 1991 are examples, as is Truman's use of the atomic bomb against Japan).

The US is not going to commit the half a million troops it would take to have a chance of winning in Iraq. Nor is it going to use genocidal methods to strike absolute terror into the hearts of the Iraqi people.

The Iraq situation has gone beyond the point where 40,000 troops can retrieve it. And that is if we even had 40,000 troops to put into Iraq and keep them there any length of time, which we do not.

In fact, since most of the "coalition of the willing" troops have now left (Italy, Spain, etc.), one of the two US divisions would only be putting the number of Coalition soldiers back up to what it was earlier in the Occupation, when things were also not going well.

The fact is that if provincial elections were held today, the Sadr Movement would sweep to power in all the Shiite provinces (with the possible exception of Najaf itself). It is increasingly the most popular political party among Iraq's Shiite majority. For the US to cut the Sadrists out of power in parliament and then fall on them militarily would just throw Iraq into turmoil. It would increase the popularity of the Sadrists, and ensure that they gain nationalist credentials that will ensconce them for perhaps decades.

The "surge" tactic is being generated by Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard and by Frederick W. Kagan and Bill Kristol, i.e. by the same plutocratic American Enterprise Institute (Likudnik Central) that brought you the Iraq War with champagne toasts in the first place.

Kagan has a recent book on Napoleon. Napoleon's most prominent characteristic was his willingness to waste his troops' lives lightly. On his return from Palestine in 1799, he even had some poisoned because they were ill with plague and he did not want to risk transporting them back to his HQ in Cairo. He took 54,000 men to Egypt in 1798; about half came back. His Russia campaign saw a similar dynamic, on a much larger scale.

Bush is the Napoleon of our age, trampling on whole peoples, a Jacobin Emperor mouthing the slogans of liberty and popular sovereignty while crushing and looting those he "liberated." And Kagan and Kristol (playing Talleyrand 1798) and Emperor Bush are readying a further slaughter of our US troops, 24,000 of whom have been killed or wounded, and of innocent Iraqis, 600,000 of whom have been killed by criminal and political violence since spring of 2003.

And you thought a mere election would make a difference. No one had to elect the American Enterprise Institute. No one needs to crown the emperor, he can do it himself. Welcome to Year 1 of the Empire.

Bush Hints that he Will send More Troops
Dozens Killed in Continued Violence

Bush seems likely to try the "surge" tactic in Iraq of putting in substantially more troops, perhaps 20,000, in an attempt to take Baghdad and clear it of 'terrorists.'

Hope springs eternal in the human breast, which is the only explanation for adopting this stupid idea. The Iraqi masses are now politically mobilized, and they are well armed. There are 27 million Iraqis, and some 6 million of them in the Sunni Arab areas. 20,000 US troops is a drop in the bucket. Some are saying the US should try to destroy the (Shiite) Mahdi Army. The Mahdi Army is an urban social movement, and cannot be destroyed by conventional military forces. Bush is about to take us on another destructive wild goose chase.

Bush will come to Congress for another $100 bn. for Iraq and Afghanistan (it mostly goes to Iraq). Bush puts this money "off budget" and then reporters don't count it as part of the budget deficit!

Iraqi national security adviser Muwaffaq al-Rubaie suggested a new security plan for Baghdad, involving turning over patrols of more neighborhods to Iraqi troops. This has been tried before and it does not work.

Former appointed PM Iyad Allawi is calling for martial law in Iraq. Martial law is something you do when you have a strong army, and politics has broken down and threatens security. It isn't something you do when you have a green and ineffective army and the political negotiations are ongoing.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that Iraqi Shiite cleric and politician, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim said Wednesday that Iraq has become a base for terror and that no one is happy with the state of security in the country.

Al-Hakim recently called for US troops to remain in Iraq.

Ben Lando of UPI reports that negotiations between the Iraqi central government and the Kurdistan Regional Government over who is in control of petroleum found in Kurdistan and what the terms will be for its development are stalled. Qubad Talabani, the KRG spokesman, said that the Kurds would no longer be held hostage by Baghdad. The idea, seemingly enshrined in the Iraqi constitution, that regional governments can claim 100% control of all new gas and petroleum reserves is a way of guaranteeing the break-up of Iraq. Lando writes:

' News reports over the weekend claimed a deal on the oil law was close, though Talabany explained each glossed over major remaining issues.

He said while the Kurds have compromised on oil revenue sharing and allowing the central government to be responsible for this collecting and redistributing it, "the mechanisms for distribution of revenues have not been agreed upon yet."

He said oversight, technical and constitutional details "to ensure regions get their share of revenues" have not been finalized. This comes from the fear a central government, be it fueled by greed or a sectarian agenda, will not deliver on the money a region may be due. '

Jordan and Iraq may sign a protocol on security cooperation. Something like 15% of Jordan's population is now made up of expatriate Iraqis, and its own security is wrought up with that of Iraq (which is to say that that little kingdom is in big danger as we speak).

Some say there are as many as a million Iraqis in Syria, or around 5% of the some 19 million population. The UN High Commission on Refugees has run out of money to help them.

A kind reader sent along a link to this article from the SF Chronicle on Prince Turki al-Faisal, who recently resigned as Saudi Ambassador to the US. Excerpt:

' On the future of Iraq, Turki is encouraging direct negotiations with Iran and Syria, and is cautioning Washington not to consider partitioning Iraq into separate states of Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites. '

That doesn't sound very much like Riyadh's foreign policy, and may be among the reasons Prince Turki is outgoing. If so, a shame.

Reuters reports political violence in Iraq on Wednesday. Dozens died from car bombings and assassinatons.

Be sure to catch the new Engelhardt and Schwarz pieces at Tomdispatch.com.

Check out this new Iraq news site, Iraqslogger.

Peter Bergen and Michael Lind argue that terrorism is fueled not by poverty but by humiliation.

The New Middle East Cold War: Saudi/Israel/Lebanon versus Iran/Syria/Iraq/Hizbullah

Helene Cooper with Hassan Fattah of the NYT has the scoop that Saudi King Abdullah told US VP Dick Cheney two weeks ago that if the US withdrew precipitately from Iraq, the kingdom would have little choice but to support the Sunni Arab guerrillas. The Saudi government had pledged to the US not to do so as long as US troops were in Iraq. But it is alleged that Saudi oil millionaires privately already send money to the guerrillas. Saudis, as Wahhabi Muslims, belong to a sect that is to the right of Sunnism. But the Wahhabi tradition dislikes Shiites and in any Sunni-Shiite struggle, the Wahhabis will come in on the Sunni side.

This item is no surprise, of course, and I have brought up this likelihood a number of times myself. What is remarkable is that it is being stated by the Saudi leadership and published in the press. The Saudis are usually circumspect. If they are leaking this sort of thing, their hair must be on fire with anxiety.

Cooper also reports the abrupt and mysterious resignation of Saudi Ambassador to the US Turki al-Faisal after only 22 months in Washington. Prince Turki has been an effective diplomat and has done a lot of outreach work, addressing ordinary American audiences (a style very unlike that of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, his long-serving predecessor). Prince Turki is the only Saudi official I know of publicly to espouse Gandhian principles of non-violence for the Palestinian cause. I met him more than once and was impressed by his humanity and acumen. I'm sorry to see him leave Washington. There are rumors that he is leaving to become foreign minister of the kingdom. If that were the case, I should have thought the promotion would be announced along with his resignation, which he called a "retirement." The way this is being handled looks more to me as though he lost some big policy fight with the establishment in Riyadh. But we shall see.

The Saudis are usually important to the formulation of US policy in the Middle East. W. is now rudderless, with Rumsfeld gone and Cheney neutered by the November elections. Prince Turki's departure in addition to hysteria about a regional guerrilla war in Iraq on the part of the Saudi King are an element of instability in White House policy-making that we could have done without.

Meanwhile, a de facto Israeli-Saudi alliance appears to be building against Iran and the Shiites. Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz is now saying that the 2002 Beirut peace plan put forward by then crown prince--now King--Abdullah of Saudi Arabia must be the basis for going forward with an Arab-Israeli peace process. Abdullah got the Arab League to offer Israel full recognition and political and economic relations if only they'd go back to the 1967 borders and recognize a Palestinian state.

At the time, then prime minister Ariel Sharon dismissed Abdullah's plan rather rudely. But now Israel has been bloodied by a Lebanon war that it lost on points to Hizbullah despite its clear military superiority. Bashar al-Asad of Syria pointed out that every generation of Arabs hates the Israelis more than its predecessors. Iran is emerging as a new hegemon in the eastern stretches of the Middle East.

Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Olmert hoped that the Lebanon War of last August would finish off Hizbullah. Instead, Hizbullah put up a respectable resistance to the Israeli military. Now, Hizbullah and its Christian allies loyal to Michel Aoun have staged enormous daily protests aimed at bringing down the reform government of Fuad Seniora, and they may even succeed. Hizbullah is allied with Syria, which is allied with Iran.



While Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel are unified states in this new alliance, their de facto allies in Lebanon and Iraq include the bloc of Saad al-Hariri in the Lebanese parliament and the Kurds and Sunni Arabs in Iraq.

Iran gets support from Syria and Shiite Iraq and from Hizbullah in Lebanon.

Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh went to Tehran recently and got pledges of $120 mn. in aid. Haniyeh while there pledged never to recognize Israel. Iran has Shiite clients in Iraq now, and is reaching into the Levant with its patronage for Hizbullah and Hamas.

Iran's farce of a "conference" on the Holocaust is a way of underlining its government's complete rejection of a two state solution and of a Zionist state in the Middle East. Iran's leaders support a maximalist Hamas vision of a fundamentalist Muslim Palestinian state in all of historical Palestine, which requires the dissolution of the Israeli state. Since Israelis tend to justify their state project with reference to the Holocaust, the Ahmadinejad faction in Iran is replying with Holocaust denial as a counter to this argument. Note that other prominent Iranians, such as former President Mohammad Khatami, accept the Holocaust and have lambasted Ahmadinejad for questioning it.

So Israel is up against determined enemies on its borders, which it has not been able to crush militarily, and which are political clients of Iran. Iran does not pose a conventional military threat to Israel, but Tehran is able to put pressure on it through support of asymmetrical operations, which it hopes can make the Israeli state collapse in the same way that the Soviet state collapsed. The Israeli leadership believes that Iran is trying to get a nuclear weapon, even though there is no good evidence for an Iranian nuclear weapon program (as opposed to a civilian nuclear research program).

I have been told that the Israeli leadership is extremely anxious about Iran becoming a nuclear power, and sullen about the outcome of the Lebanon war. They are further demoralized by the Baker-Hamilton Commission report, which calls for US talks with Iran. The Israeli leaders interpret this passage as a surrender by Washington to Iran's nuclear ambitions, and are preparing for the possibility that they might have to take on Iran themselves. This extreme anxiety about a nuclear Iran (which is at least 10 years away even if it is trying, according to the US National Intelligence Estimate) may have driven Olmert to make his gaffe of openly admitting that Israel has weapons of mass destruction. That gaffe has resulted in calls for his resignation. For one thing, in strict US law, it should result in sanctions by Congress. Olmert, battered by the outcome of the Lebanon War, and now accused of having loose lips of the sort that got Mordechai Vanunu an 18-year prison sentence, is desperate for a political breakthrough of the sort that might come from a realignment of Middle East politics.

Saudi Arabia is equally frantic about the possibility of a nuclear Iran, and is moreover apoplectic that the US delivered Baghdad into the hands of Iraqi Shiite fundamentalists allied with Iran. Saudi Arabia fears Hizbullah in Lebanon as an Iranian cat's paw in the Arab world. The Khomeinists of Iran and south Lebanon believe that Islam is incompatible with monarchy (Khomeini said, "there are no kings in Islam.")

Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and (de facto) the 14 March Bloc in Lebanon are ranged against Iran, Shiite Iraq, Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas. Neither Israel nor Saudi Arabia can openly admit to the tacit alliance for fear of anger from their own publics because of objectionable parties to it. But this is how things are shaking out.

Now the Saudis are openly saying that this new Cold War in the region could turn hot. If you don't own a bicycle, I'd buy one, because a regional war of the sort Saudi Arabia said it feared would potentially cut off 20 percent of the world's petroleum.

Kucinich-Paul Congressional Hearing on Civilian Casualties in Iraq

Here is the transcript of Monday's hearing on Capitol Hill on the Lancet study, at which I spoke along with two co-authors of the study. The video can be seen at the C-Span archive page (scroll down to the bottom). Thanks to Representatives Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul for the kind invitation to speak at the hearing..

December 11, 2006 Monday

NEWS CONFERENCE WITH REPRESENTATIVE DENNIS KUCINICH (D-OH) AND REPRESENTATIVE RON PAUL (R-TX); TOPIC: CIVILIAN CASUALTIES IN IRAQ OTHER; PARTICIPANTS: DR. GILBERT BURNHAM, M.D., CO-DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR REFUGEE AND DISASTER RESPONSE, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY JUAN COLE, PROFESSOR OF MODERN MIDDLE EAST HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN LES ROBERTS, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, CLINICAL PUBLIC HEALTH, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY; LOCATION: 2247 RAYBURN HOUSE OFFICE BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D.C.

BODY:

NEWS CONFERENCE WITH REPRESENTATIVE DENNIS KUCINICH (D-OH) AND REPRESENTATIVE RON PAUL (R-TX) TOPIC: CIVILIAN CASUALTIES IN IRAQ OTHER PARTICIPANTS: DR. GILBERT BURNHAM, M.D., CO-DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR REFUGEE AND DISASTER RESPONSE, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY JUAN COLE, PROFESSOR OF MODERN MIDDLE EAST HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN LES ROBERTS, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, CLINICAL PUBLIC HEALTH, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LOCATION: 2247

RAYBURN HOUSE OFFICE BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D.C. TIME: 10:06 A.M. EST DATE: MONDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2006

REP. KUCINICH: (Without microphone.) Okay. Thank you very much for being here this morning for this congressional oversight briefing on Iraq, in particular -- we'll start over. Thank you. Thank you very much for being here this morning for this congressional oversight briefing on Iraq -- in particular, the impact of 650,000 excess deaths in Iraq. And we're going to do an overview of the Lancet mortality study in Iraq.

I want to begin by thanking Congressman Ron Paul for being willing to cosponsor this briefing. Mr. Paul and I have worked very closely together on a wide range of issues relating to the conduct of war in Iraq and now to the issue that relates to the civilian casualties. Ron Paul has been an essential part of a bipartisan coalition that aimed at bringing our troops home as quickly as possible. So I want to publicly express my appreciation for the partnership with Mr. Paul, and I look forward to continuing to work with him in the next Congress.

Today we have a number of authors who have been active on this issue of the civilian casualties and who are going to be making presentations with respect to their own studies. I want to briefly make the introductions. I'll then make a statement. And then we will proceed to their statements, and then we're going to have a discussion among all the panelists, with me leading the way with questions.

First of all, to my left is Juan Cole.

Dr. Cole is a Ph.D. and has a background in modern Middle East and South Asian history. He is from the University of Michigan, and he is the person who runs a blog called Informed Comment. To my right is Dr. Gilbert Burnham. Dr. Burnham is a Ph.D. and an M.D. He is a co- director of the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. And finally, concluding the panel is Les Roberts, also a Ph.D. He's an associate professor of Clinical Public Health at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University.

This is a distinguished panel, and I'm very grateful, as is Mr. Paul, that we have the chance to bring these men forward to have the opportunity of discussing this. And I'm also reminded that Drs. Burnham and Roberts are the authors of the Lancet study, and we're going to be discussing the Lancet study in great detail.

Of the many tragedies in Iraq, the massive rise in Iraqi deaths -- there's not good enough attention in the United States. We are rapidly approaching the grave number of 3,000 dead U.S. service members. But as painful as that is -- and it's very painful -- the estimated 650,000 deaths attributed to hostilities in Iraq is an overwhelming number to comprehend. While it is natural and appropriate for Americans to first focus upon the deaths of American service members in Iraq, it's astounding to consider that for every service member killed, 200 Iraq civilians have been killed.

According to the United Nations, the population of Iraq was 25 million in 2003, and we have now learned that since then, an estimated 650,000 have perished to violence. Now, if such a rate of violence were to be inflicted against the U.S., we would have lost about 7.8 million Americans. Such a level of violence is unimaginable, but this is the level of violence that the civilians in Iraq are subjected to.

Consider the massive psychological impact the 9/11 attacks and resulting deaths have had on our nation. Imagine the impact we'd feel as a nation if, over a period of three years, 7.8 million of our citizens died in ongoing, uncontrollable violence. Consider the political impact of violence at that scale. Are we closer to a stable transition in Iraq, or are we closer to collapse? How would we react if this was happening here?

With the help of Congressman Paul, I've assembled a panel of experts to help us grasp the civilian situation in Iraq and its impact on Iraq's society. I hope to explore many vexing questions by leading a discussion with the experts who are here with us today. What confidence do we have in the U.S. administration responses on the number of Iraqi fatalities? Who is getting killed by whom, and why? What does this violence do to the prospects of peace in Iraq? What are the short-term and long-term implications of this massive number of deaths to Iraqi civil society? Will the millions of Iraqi children who have lost a parent ever forgive our country for igniting this violence? How do we make peace with the generations of Iraqis severely harmed by this unnecessary war of choice?

We have to ask these questions. We have to understand what the Iraqi citizenry thinks and feels to understand why this violence has escalated far beyond our control.

Now, I have no doubt that the best course of action for our nation is to extract ourselves from Iraq as fast as possible, while enabling the United Nations to establish a peacekeeping force. Such action would remove our troops from harm's way, remove the largest impetus for the violence, and begin the healing process, which will take decades to complete.

Our president does not seem to understand the necessity to get out of Iraq. Thus, it is imperative that Congress do the one thing the Constitution of the United States provides for: Congress must cut off future war funds, and demand that the president use the current funds in the pipeline from the October 1st $70 billion appropriation to bring the troops home.

This war was unnecessary. We went to war based on false information. Meanwhile, the number of casualties keeps growing -- not only with U.S. troops, but today we're going to discuss the number of casualties inflicted upon innocent Iraqi civilians.

This is why we have the authors who are present here, and these are authors of the best study that has yet to come forward on the issue of civilian casualties in Iraq.

Now with that, I would like to turn to -- Dr. Cole, would you like to go first -- or let's do this. Let's go to Mr. Burnham first. Yeah, let's have the authors go first. Let's go to -- begin with Dr. Gilbert Burnham, who is, along with Dr. Les Roberts, co-author of the Lancet study on the number of civilian casualties in Iraq. So I want to welcome you, Dr. Burnham, and thank you very much for being here to inform the American people as to the dimensions of this tragedy.

DR. BURNHAM: Thank you very much, Representative Kucinich, because I appreciate you and Representative Paul making this forum possible to discuss our findings, and I'd like to start off by just giving an overview of the study itself and then I'll pass onto Dr. Roberts to talk about some of the implications from the findings that we had.

First off, I'd like to say that sampling is pretty much a standard way of getting information for health, and what we read about numbers on health by in large comes from samples. So this is an established process, and we should also say that if we're looking at figures that affect the nation, this requires a national survey. This is not something that can be done from a collection of information here and there, particularly in conflict-affected populations.

The first question that we have to ask when we're thinking about a survey is how many people do we have to have in a survey to have valid results from this. And that very much depends upon -- the question is: What do you want to show? And our intent was to look at a survey that would measure with confidence at least a doubling in the death rate that occurred before the time of invasion.

Now, we could also say how much precision is necessary, how exact do we need to have this answer, or are we willing to accept an answer that is in a nearby neighborhood, but not exactly right on. And that depends upon the numbers that we can acquire in a particular country. But I would say in this survey we collected more than enough data to measure a doubling of the death rates that occurred before the time of invasion.

Now, there are some considerations about how do we find people to interview. And one of the basic premises of sampling is everyone has to have an equal opportunity to be included in the survey, and the survey must be as free of biases as is possible. So one spends a lot of time trying to think about how to minimize the biases.

So our intent in the survey -- people often ask us why did you do the survey -- our intent was to look at how populations that are caught up in conflict, how they are affected by this war. And the method that we wanted to use was to compare the death rates that occurred in the households before the invasion as to the time after the invasion. So this is comparing people with their own households before and after the invasion.

Now, in a survey, there's a couple of ways to do things. One is if you have a list of everybody in the country, then you can randomly select out of that list. And that's a very good way to do it, but there are very few countries where you have a listing of everybody in the country. So an alternative is what's known as a cluster survey. And this is a standard method that's used throughout the world. And in this type of survey, one collects samples from a certain number of clusters. Commonly this is 30 -- that's been found to be the most satisfactory number -- but in certain circumstances you may want to increase it. And we did 47 surveys -- clusters. And in each of these clusters, then, we would look at a certain number of households. This is a standard way to do things. And we also had the intent in the survey to compare the results with the results of the 2004 survey, which we did measuring the same period of time, but up until September of 2004.

So we how carried out the survey was to do 47 clusters equally distributed across the country.

So Baghdad, which had about a fifth of the population of the country, had a fifth of the clusters in it and so on. And once we identified a cluster, then we would select at random an administrative unit within that cluster, and then once we had that, we would select a neighborhood at random in that administrative area, and once we selected that neighborhood, then we would find a household at random in that neighborhood. And starting at that household, we would interview that household and then the 39 nearest households. And we would ask them about movement into the household, out of the household, birth and death, and where there were deaths reported, then we would ask them details about these deaths, and these had to be deaths of people that were in that household for three months. So this was not just people passing through. They had to be part of that household.

And then at the end of that survey where there was a death in the household, we asked, "By the way, do you have a death certificate?" And in 91 percent of households where this was asked, the households had death certificates. So we're confident that people were not making up deaths that didn't occur.

So in the process of this survey, we found 629 deaths over the period of time from January of 2002 until July of 2006, and these were converted to rates, so that meant number of deaths per thousand people per year. And then those rates were in turn applied to the population of the study area. And there were two of the governorates, or two of the provinces, that were not included in the survey, so we did not include those in the estimation. So we took those rates and applied to them a population of 26.1 million people. And from that, we could calculate the number of deaths that occurred above what would be expected if the population was in a normal situation without any violence going on, and in those circumstances there would have been a large number of deaths occurring every year anyway from heart attacks, from old age, from malignancies, from automobile accidents and so forth.

So what we came up with is what we considered to be a(n) excess mortality or number of extra deaths that would not have occurred if the conflict had not happened. And from this, we came up with an estimate of 650,000 excess deaths over the 40 months post-invasion. Now, around that, we have what the statisticians call a confidence interval, and that is an interval in which we are 95 percent sure that the correct or true answer lies.

So in the handout, I have a little graph here, and it shows that our best estimate is 650,000 excess deaths.

But if we were to say what happens if the true number were only 500,000, we would say that the chance of that number being 500,000 is about 10 percent. So it's a one out of 10 chance of being that.

The lowest end of the confidence interval is 390,000, and the chance of that being the correct answer is less than 2-1/2 percent.

So we're confident this is a large number, and we're confident that 650,000 represents the best estimate for the number of excess deaths.

Now, if we took that number apart, and we looked at what proportion of those are due to violent causes, then we've come up with a number of 601,000 due to violent causes. So these excess deaths that we saw in Iraq during this period of time were by and large due to violent causes, by the vast majority of these.

Now, as I mentioned earlier on, we did a survey in the year 2004, a smaller survey. But it gave us an opportunity to compare the results from this survey with the results from the survey in 2004, which covered that same period of time from the invasion up until 2004. And we found almost exactly the same results. These were different households, different communities, different neighborhoods, different cities, and we had virtually exactly the same results. So we're very confident in this.

So if we could summarize what the numbers are saying that we collected, we're saying that the vast majority of deaths are due to violent causes, and we could say this -- these violent deaths are spread across the country.

Now, most of the information we see on television and in the print comes from Baghdad. That's the most accessible area. We found that Baghdad was not by any means the most violent area. So we found also that, as I say, violence has spread right across the country.

The vast majority of these deaths were in males, although there was an interesting look at deaths among pre- -- children under age 15. And that was increased perhaps out of proportion to what I might have expected. And one could suppose th
at this represented schoolchildren -- school -- children out playing, not so much as with the older female population that could stay in the house most of the time.

We found that gunfire remains the major cause of death. About half of deaths are due to gunfire.

Then we asked households: Who do you think is responsible for the death of this household member? Now, in the earlier years after the invasion, households were a bit more confident or a bit more willing to say who they felt was responsible.

But in the last year, it's become a much more confused situation. People are not able to identify who is responsible for deaths of their family member or for some reason they're unwilling to discuss this. But overall, households attributed about 20 percent of the deaths to coalition forces, and if there were circumstances where the households were not sure whether the coalition were responsible or not, we left those out of the calculation. And I remind you, this is just what households told us about things, but at that level, about a fifth of deaths were attributed to the coalition as far as percentages.

Now, we've also seen an escalation in the number of deaths. So if we looked at the total number of deaths that were perhaps attributed to the coalition, that number would be rising as years went along.

And finally, I'd like to say, like any kind of research study, this has limitations. There are potentials for bias and there are potentials for sampling problems. We spent months and months and months thinking about these potential biases and limitations before hand and designed a study to minimize these limitations in every way possible, and now looking at the data afterwards, I think we've done a good job at minimizing those kinds of limitations. It's possible that households concealed deaths, and if they concealed deaths, that would have been -- underestimated the number of deaths. So perhaps the number might even be higher if there were concealed deaths.

And finally, there's migration going on in the country that upsets the estimate on the number of people in the country, although we use the 2004 U.N. and Ministry of Planning estimate. Now with mass migration that is changing a bit. That could have some affect on things as well.

However, Congressman Kucinich, I believe that these data represent, as you say, the best estimate that is possible under the circumstances. After the study had been published, we spent a lot of time reviewing the results and the scrutiny that this got both in the scientific literature and in the popular press, and I think we are as confident as we ever were on the results, and we're willing to stand firmly behind the results that we published in October.

REP. KUCINICH: Thank you very much, Dr. Burnham. And I'll wait until each member of the panel makes his presentation, and then, we'll go to questions.

At this point, I would like to introduce Dr. Roberts, who is co- author of the Lancet study. Thank you, Dr. Roberts, for your presence here.

MR. ROBERTS: Well, I'd like to start by thanking Congressmen Paul and Kucinich very much for creating this forum to discuss the increasing mortality among Iraqis, and I'd like to start out with a question. What if what Gil Burnham just described is correct; that is, what if 600,000 Iraqis have died because of this preemptive venture? Would Congress have approved this had they known in advance?

Can the press pretend they've done even a credible job of reporting in Iraq, if they have consistently downplayed the number of deaths by a factor of 10? Can we in academia and in those think tanks around Washington pretend that we add value to discourse in society if something almost identical in magnitude to the Rwandan genocide could go more or less unnoticed by our society?

Unfortunately, I'm here today to tell you that there is a lot of evidence from Iraq that our estimate is correct. For example, if Iraq was one of the healthiest countries in the world, had a mortality rate like we measured -- like the U.S. Census estimates to be, there'd have to be 140,000 deaths from natural causes a year -- people dying of old age, birth defects. That means about half a million deaths since the occupation began. Our report is saying that over this period, actually a slight majority of all deaths have been from violence. If the most commonly cited source in the media, the Iraqi body count estimate, or if the Brookings Institution, or of the U.N. is correct, there would only be about 10 percent of all deaths in Iraq from violence. And every newspaper report I see, the data from the Baghdad morgue, a couple of Iraqi physicians I've spoken to from a village near Abu Ghraib and from Basra, all tell me in their areas the vast majority of deaths are from violence. This alone means the number must be more than half a million since the occupation began.

If our Lancet report is correct, we're saying that right now there's maybe three times as many bodies coming into graveyards and morgues across Iraq as there were back in 2002. And if Iraqi body count and Brookings are correct, it would only be about 10 percent more than there were back in 2002. Again, every report, including an article last Wednesday in The New York Times talking about how over- stressed ambulance drives are, sort of confirms that it's not just 10 percent more deaths than used to occur in 2002.

Interestingly, the Iraqi minister of Health had been supporting this 40,000 to 50,000 death estimate until our study came out, and he changed it to perhaps 100,000 to 150,000 the week our study came out.

And since then, he's been quoted by AP as saying more like 150,000, not the 600,000 reported in the Lancet. He tripled his estimate as a result of our study coming out. Can anyone pretend the Iraqi minister of health really knows?

According to the United Nations, the Iraqi government surveillance network reported exactly zero violent deaths from Anbar province in the month of July, in spite of all the contradictory evidence we saw if we watched CNN. The most widely cited sources -- IBC, the United Nations, Brookings -- report about 80 percent of all violent deaths coming from Baghdad. And as Dr. Burnham mentioned, Baghdad actually is only about as violent as the nation on average.

So here it is -- one-fifth of the country reporting four-fifths of all violent deaths, and we know their rate of violent deaths isn't any higher than the rest. Something is wrong with those sources.

Similar incompleteness has been noted by the coalition surveillance activities. The Baker-Hamilton report of last week on page 95 said, and I quote, "For example, on one day of July in 2006, there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported, yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 violent acts."

We feel our estimate is by far the best available, in spite of considerable imprecision. We also feel that in terms of understanding the situation in Iraq, in terms of moving forward, it's important to know, has one in seven houses in Iraq lost a loved one, or one in a hundred, as Iraqi body counts would suggest.

You know, we're the society that eradicated smallpox from the face of the earth primarily by setting up surveillance networks, including during really violent conflicts in East Pakistan and Somalia and Biafra. We're the society that produced most of the medical developments that are taught in medical schools around the world. We gave the world the Internet. As a nation of information excellence it is, I think, beneath our dignity and, I hope, not in keeping with the compassion of the American people to have U.S. government officials consistently downplaying the number of dead in Iraq by a factor of 10 and 15.

And we look forward to assisting you in further exploring this important issue. Thank you.

REP. KUCINICH: Thank you very much, Dr. Roberts, for that presentation.

I'd now like to introduce Dr. Cole and -- of the University of Michigan. Thank you for being here, Dr. Cole.

MR. COLE: Well, I'm very grateful to Representatives Kucinich and Paul for this opportunity to address this important issue.

Ladies and gentlemen, I speak here today about the social and political context of the violence in Iraq. Based on my daily and extensive reading of the Iraqi press and Western reporting, I believe that the seemingly high numbers for excess Iraqi deaths owing to political violence and criminal violence since 2003, reported in the 2006 Lancet study, are nevertheless plausible.

Let me just give you some case studies to show what I'm talking about, because it's often -- the report has been criticized with regard to statistics to reported deaths that appear in the press. I want to emphasize to you that the press just isn't reporting very many of the actual deaths in Iraq.

For instance, security clearly collapsed in the southern Shi'ite city of Basra, population 1.3 million, in spring of 2006. Iraqi officials maintained in April that for the previous month, one Iraqi had been assassinated each hour. This is in the city of Basra, one city.

These -- some 750 deaths had gone completely unreported in both the Iraqi and the Western press. If you go back and do a Lexis search for Basra in March and April of 2006, you won't see any deaths reported at all there.

It is not clear that the al-Maliki government's deployment to Basra of the 10th Army Division this past summer made much of a difference in the violence, which is committed by militias and tribal mafias fighting turf wars over petroleum smuggling and other sources of wealth. It is entirely possible that the 750 a month are still dying in Basra, but that these deaths are going unreported. Again, if you just look at the daily wire service reports coming out of Iraq, these kinds of deaths for Basra are not being mentioned.

Families are often afraid to draw attention to themselves by publicly reporting deaths in guerrilla violence, and sometimes they're even afraid to retrieve the body of a loved one from the morgue, lest morgue officials report them to the guerrillas for a bribe.

The estimate given by the Iraqi Health Ministry on November 9th, 2006, of 150,000 Iraqis killed since the war began by -- actually, according to what the Health minister said, was with regard to deaths caused by Sunni Arab insurgents.

He was very specific in the cause of the death of that he was announcing. So it wasn't a global estimate of 150,000. As I understood it, it was from that particular source.

So we add in the number of deaths from criminal activity -- and there's quite a lot in Iraq -- from Shi'ite militias, which the Ministry of Health didn't refer to, and from U.S. military action. Actually, the Health Ministry is probably pretty close to the Lancet estimate, if you extrapolate it out.

Let's just consider the humanitarian disaster in a place like Diyala province northeast of Baghdad. This is a mixed region near to Iran with a population of 1.3 million. It has a Sunni Arab preponderance, but it has Shi'ites and Kurds. In the provincial elections of January 2005, the Sunnis boycotted the polls. As a result, the provincial council consists of 20 Shi'ites, 14 Sunnis and seven Kurds. The Shi'ites have the predominance on the council, and they therefore have brought in their guys in the police, in the army and so forth. So the governor and the police chief of Baqubah, the capital of the province, are Shi'ites. The Shi'ites dominated local police, have been supported in recent weeks by the 5th Army Division, which is Shi'ite and commanded by a Shi'ite officer.

Sunni Arabs have organized local militias in their districts to keep the police and army out. This is being coded as lawlessness by the U.S. press and military, but it is actually a rejection of dominance by the new elected Shi'ite political elite. And the U.S. military is careful to say that it is not supporting one side or another in the sectarian violence in Diyala; it says we're just supporting the elected government. Well, as it happens, the elected government is mainly Shi'ite, so the U.S. military actually is supporting one side.

The reports coming out from Baqubah and Diyala generally through November are -- show a steady drumbeat of violence.

On Sunday, November 5th, in response to the announcement of the death sentence for Saddam Hussein, hundreds or perhaps thousands of unarmed Sunni Arab protestors gathered in Baqubah carrying posters of Saddam. They also raised banners criticizing the al-Maliki government. It's often alleged by the Shi'ites that Baqubah is a hotbed for al Qaeda, but here we have the Sunni Arabs showing support for the secular Saddam. Local police fired into the crowd, allegedly killing 20 and wounding 23. These are largely Shi'ite police firing on Sunni Arab protesters. The Times of Baghdad, al-Zaman, branded the repression "a massacre."

And most days through November, you find reports like that on November 13th. CBS News reported 50 bodies were found, discarded like trash in Baqubah. On the same day, 40 bodies that had accumulated in the morgue had not been claimed were buried. On November 15th, AP reported that Iraqi police, backed by U.S. forces, discovered the bodies of 10 kidnap victims found blindfolded with gunshots in a house in Baqubah.

And then major violence broke out in mid-November. On Saturday, November 18th, Sunni Arab guerrillas in Baqubah attacked a police checkpoint, killing two policemen and wounding two others, and then opened fire on residents -- these are Shi'ite residents -- after pulling them from their homes or automobiles. They shot at Shi'ite seasonal workers returning to Baghdad from orchards in the east of Baqubah, killing eight; in response, U.S. and Iraqi Army forces fought the guerrillas for many hours in the street. And again, the Iraq army that's been deployed to Baqubah is the 5th Division, which is largely Shi'ite.

Rocket-propelled grenades and light-arms fire caromed through the city, leaving 18 persons dead and 19 wounded. It was unclear how many of the casualties were guerrillas. On Sunday, the curfew was lifted, but the main street was closed off. The guerrillas still had control over four districts in Baqubah. They attacked another police checkpoint. The police said that in a separate incident, guerrillas loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr set fire to numerous shops in the market in revenge for attacks on their own offices in the city. Al-Zaman's correspondent in Baqubah -- this a major Iraqi newspaper -- wrote on Monday, November 20th that the city, he said, "is living through a powerless security situation. Police patrols disappear from the principal streets early in the day and various armed groups thereafter have enormous sway." Reuters reported the same day that a senior police officer who declined to be named said, quote, "There is not a day that passes without dozens of people being killed either from bombs, shootings or assassinations. This has been going for months."

And I want to underline that no newspaper or wire service is reporting dozens of daily deaths in Baqubah that so many are being missed lends credence to the higher estimates for the deaths in the Lancet study.

Many days no deaths at all are reported, sometimes only one or two make the news. But this senior police officer, an eyewitness, maintains
that dozens are dying every day.

And this story that I'm telling goes on through November into December. And reports are coming in from little towns around Baqubah; it's not just the capital. On November 26th, it was reported that police found 21 bodies of Shi'ites in Balad Ruz, a mainly Sunni city. On November 26th, AFP reported that guerrillas in the small town of Kanan (ph) in Diyala, 12 miles south of Baqubah, kidnapped at least 20 Iraqis of mixed tribe and sect. Usually the kidnapped don't show back up alive. On November 27th, it was reported in the Arabic press that Sunni Arab guerrillas fought a pitched battle with police in the city of Buhriz near Baqubah, defeated them, chased them out of their headquarters, and set it on fire and completely took over the city. So the guerrillas pushed the police out.

Now, the story that I'm telling you could be told for other areas of Iraq, not just Diyala. The so-called "Triangle of Death" in Babil province, just south of Baghdad, which includes towns like Yusufiya, Mahmudiyah, Iskandariyah, Latifiyah, see similar kinds of daily grind of violence. A lot of the killing seems to be just people shooting people down. The press tends to favor reports of car-bombings, but car-bombings produce a relatively small percentage of the deaths. It's mostly just sniping and gunfire at one another.

News-gathering in contemporary Iraq is extremely dangerous and difficult. The collection and publication of social statistics has been affected by the violence and the anxieties that it spawns. Scientifically weighted household surveys are one instrument to supplement the desultory and staccato news reports about casualties in Iraq. It is clear that the level of sectarian violence and reprisals has increased substantially since February of 2006, when Sunni Arab guerrillas blew up the Askariya shrine in Samarra, among the holiest of the sites for the Shi'ites.

The violence is now being pursued at the neighborhood and clan level, often at night or in dense urban tenements, such that the U.S. military appears unable to stop it. Indeed, the presence of so many U.S. troops in Iraq and the way in which they're often dragged willy- nilly into sectarian fights, such as Diyala, is probably impeding the natural process whereby Iraqis would be forced to compromise with one another.

Thank you.

REP. KUCINICH: You have just heard from Dr. Juan Cole, who is an expert in Modern Middle East and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. And he is the author of the blog, Informed Comment.

This is a congressional oversight briefing on the impact of 650,000 excess deaths in Iraq.

And we are conducting an overview of the Lancet mortality study in Iraq. I'm Congressman Dennis Kucinich. Joining us on this panel, the co-authors of the Lancet study: Gilbert Burnham, Ph.D. and M.D., who was co-director of the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response at John's Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; and Les Roberts, Ph.D. Dr. Roberts is an associate professor of clinical public health, the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University. I also want to mention that the Lancet study, which is the subject of today's briefing, can be downloaded at the Lancet website, and that website is www.lancet --

MR.

: The Lancet.

REP. KUCINICH: Okay. Try that again. The website is www.thelancet -- that's thelancet -- L-A-N-C-E-T -- .com, www.thelancet.com.

At this point, we're going to go to questions of the panelists. I'm going to be asking the questions, and I would ask each member of the panel if they would like to respond to the question or engage in extrapolation of discussion to please do so. At the conclusion of this, a series of questions of the panelists. Members of the press who are here who want to ask questions of any of us can feel free to participate.

To Doctors Burnham and Roberts, the Lancet study indicates that the number of Iraqis who have died since the U.S. invasion in 2003 is far more than those numbers from the Pentagon, the numbers from news accounts or even from Iraqi morgue statistics. As such, I'd like to ask you about the methodology for the Lancet study. For example, there have been concerns raised about how houses within a cluster were selected, as well as concerns that the statistics reflect a so-called main street bias. However, the study methods have been praised by many others.

Shortly after the Lancet study published -- was published 27 epidemiologists and health professionals wrote a letter to the (Age ?) publication supporting the methods of the study stating that -- and I quote -- "cross-sectional household cluster samples survey method used is a standard, robust, well-established method for gathering health data," unquote. Additionally, John Zogby of Zogby International, a well reputed international polling agency, has stated, quote, "The sampling is solid. The methodology is as good as it gets," unquote.

First question: Are these methods standard for use in war zones and conflict situations?

DR. BURNHAM: What I'd like to say first is that these have been developed with U.S. government assistance, and they have been widely used. They were used in Eastern Congo to assess mortality there, in Bosnia. They were used in Kosovo. They've been used in Darfur. And with each of these uses, we learn a little bit more about the methodologies and potential limitations in conflict situations, and so each one builds on the previous one.

So I could say for the 2006 survey we have incorporated many of the findings in the previous surveys, and we're convinced about the robustness of the data.

You've mentioned this issue of the main street bias. This came about by a group of physicists who did not have a complete understanding of the survey methods. And we considered this right from the beginning. One of the things in sampling is you want to be sure that all areas have an equal chance of being involved. And so we went out of our way to be sure that even the more remote areas away from the main streets were included. So I'm satisfied in the quality of the sampling.

REP. KUCINICH: Before we get a response from Dr. Roberts, you said that they were developed with U.S. government assistance, these sampling methods. Do you want to elaborate on that?

DR. BURNHAM: Yes. The Center for Disease Control in Atlanta was one of the first groups to start using this method, initially to look at immunization coverage. Subsequently, there is a group that has received U.S. government support, as well as U.N. and Canadian support, looking at developing these for -- specifically for conflict situation. And they have a website called www.smartindicators.org, I believe. Yes. And so there's a lot of details on how this has been further refined on that.

Then the surveys that are done for health status in developing countries, called demographic and health surveys, which are our main source of information on many parts of the world, all use this same type of methodology.

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REP. KUCINICH: Oh, I thank you, because if we're going to validate these numbers, we really have to make sure that we understand the methodology, and you're saying that the U.S. government has provided assistance for the development of such methodology with respect to other public health issues.

Now, Dr. Roberts, do you want to respond to questions relating to the methodology, you know, as a standard for use in war zones and conflict situations?

MR. ROBERTS: Yeah, I just want to make two quick comments.

And the first is this is how the U.S. government estimated the death toll after the war in Kosovo. This is how the U.S. government measured mortality in Afghanistan after our 2001 invasion. This is the standard way. This was done -- the first time I ever did this was as an officer in the U.S. Public Health Service. So this is, yes, the standard way.

And in terms of this main street bias, I need to point out that the first time we did this survey, we used those little GPS units to find a random point in a village and visit the 30 houses closest to it. This time, the interviewers were terrified to go out with a GPS unit because they felt at checkpoints they would look like bomb detonators, and so they wouldn't go out with one of these. And we repeated it with this method. We used the picking a house, counting the houses and picking one at random, and we found identical results from two separate surveys, picking the houses two separate ways, so we're very confident that this main street bias is sort of the imagination of a few academics.

REP. KUCINICH: Well, let's go over this, then.

So this methodology has been used by the U.S. government, the Canadian government and U.N. agencies, and it has supported similar methodology in Kosovo, Darfur?

MR. ROBERTS: A similar method was used in Darfur, but not by the U.S. government -- although the president has cited results from Darfur from a similar method, yes.

REP. KUCINICH: What about Angola?

MR. ROBERTS: No. Afghanistan was the other place the U.S. government used this sort of cluster mortality survey to estimate the death rate.

REP. KUCINICH: Okay. So you're saying used the same methods in Kosovo and Afghanistan?

MR. ROBERTS: Correct.

REP. KUCINICH: Okay. And do you have anything you want to add, Dr. Cole, on this one?

MR. COLE: No. The survey methods are their area of expertise. I really would talk to the situation in Iraq.

REP. KUCINICH: Okay. We've got a series of questions for you. I just wanted to see if you had anything to add. And if you do have something you'd like to interject while I'm asking the questions, please participate.

I want to go back to some information that the staff produced, and that is that USAID has established this method, cluster sampling, as an acceptable method of -- in regions of conflict. Is that true? Do you know whether that's true or not?

MR. ROBERTS: Beyond that, the U.S. government, through USAID, spends millions of dollars every year training U.N. workers and NGO workers how to do cluster surveys like this to measure mortality during conflicts. And that smartindicators.org website Gil Burnham mentioned is largely funded by the U.S. government.

REP. KUCINICH: Now, just for the sake of those who might just be joining us, do you want to define cluster surveys?

MR. ROBERTS: Sure. There's essentially two ways we do surveys. There's the political poll way, where you randomly pick some folks, maybe by their telephone number. Turns out in the tropics, that's pretty tough in most of our war-encumbered zones. So the way we tend to sample there is rather than randomly picking a few houses, we go and we very carefully pick a few clusters, typically 30 or 50, and those clusters are picked so that the big villages have a lot of chance we go there, and the little village have proportionally less chance we'll go there. And when you go to the village, instead of interviewing one person, you interview, in our case, 40. Sometimes it's 30, sometimes it's 50. So you end up with 50 houses here and 50 houses there and 50 houses there and 50 houses there, and a picture that's made up of clusters of interviewed households rather than individuals. This is --

REP. KUCINICH: So you do a whole neighborhood, in other words.

MR. ROBERTS: You do a whole neighborhood when you go somewhere. This is the standard way this is done. There are thousands of cluster surveys done throughout the world's poorest countries every year to measure nutritional levels, immunization coverage levels, mortality rates, birth rates. It's the standard way we get information when a government isn't very functional and doesn't have a complete reporting system of births and deaths.

DR. BURNHAM: I might add to that that this is a method that is widely espoused by USA and others. When you're not sure about the quality of government data in a particular area, this is a method that non-government organizations and others are encouraged to use to check on the quality of official government data.

REP. KUCINICH: Now again, we're focusing on the methodology of the Lancet study in order to determine the validity of the numbers. We have a staggering amount of civilian casualties that are asserted by the Lancet study. 650,000 excess deaths, a full -- according to Dr. Burnham -- 600,000 of which can be attributed to violent causes. These are deaths that are over and beyond the amount of mortality you would expect within a given population by nature.

Now, one of the -- as we go along here, I want to make sure we agree on terminology.

What do you mean by surveillance methods with respect to your methodology? Would you explain that or put it in layman terms?

MR. ROBERTS: Sure. Surveillance methods are ongoing measurements of things, so you can tell if there's a trend upward and downward. The Dow Jones index is a surveillance method. It surveys the big companies in this country. The disease reports we get in this country of how many cases of diabetes are there now, compared to 20 years ago, are surveillance methods.

And in most countries, a top priority is to be able to detect episodes of disease, episodes of deaths, as they occur. When a country starts breaking down and becomes socially dysfunctional, this ongoing monitoring becomes impossible.

Interestingly, the first Iraqi minister of Health, an American surgeon from Hawaii -- his name is Frederick Burkle -- this was his highest priority when he became minister of Health in Iraq. And he was, he feels, prevented from doing this by the coalition.

REP. KUCINICH: Well, do you want to elaborate on that?

MR. ROBERTS: Well, just when he arrived there, he was with Jay Garner's team, and his highest priority was to get the system for detecting deaths, for detecting illness episodes up and running. And he said that a colleague named Haveman, who -- I don't know who that is -- strongly dissuaded that from occurring, and so it never took place till --

REP. KUCINICH: Strongly dissuaded --

MR. ROBERTS: Strongly dissuaded the first Iraqi minister of Health, Frederick Burkle, from establishing a surveillance network.

REP. KUCINICH: So then by doing that, immediately downplayed or negated any collection of data with respect to civilian casualties?

MR. ROBERTS: That's correct.

REP. KUCINICH: Why are passive surveillance methods, such as the use of media reports, problematic in providing accurate mortality estimates?

DR. BURNHAM: One thing we've learned in public health over the years is, even in a fairly well-functioning system, it's hard to take information from various hospitals and clinics and doctors' offices and make an overall picture out of that, because many of the cases that you would want to have the surveillance system get missed. So it's an incomplete picture.

And that's one of the reasons why every country also has a census bureau -- to go out periodically and ask people to find out, at the household level, what's actually happening in households.

And in conflict situations, one of the first things that breaks down, as Les has mentioned, is the information system. So even if it's working fairly well in a peacetime situation, it's
going to be the first casualty in a conflict situation. And in a surveillance system, of course, we want to find more things than just death. We want to find patterns of illnesses, types of injuries that people have, and so a surveillance system is really the backbone of a public health infrastructure for a country. And we've been very much involved in working in Afghanistan, and one of our tasks is to help build up this backbone because you can't function without it. And just information taken from clinics here and there that happened to report this month but not next month or last month, that gives you some trends and some basic ideas, but you can't move from those numbers to a national figure.

REP. KUCINICH: You can?

DR. BURNHAM: Cannot.

REP. KUCINICH: The Lancet article states -- and I quote -- "Rules were established about how to randomly choose another area if the first one chosen was unsafe on the day of the survey visit." Can you please describe these rules as well as how you ensured they were followed? And what's the likely effect on the finalists and of avoiding the most -- you know, if you're avoiding the most dangerous areas?

MR. ROBERTS: Yeah, that's a great question. It was decided in advance that if we were going to go to a village or a part of the city and either we were stopped on the way and felt intimidated from going on or if it just seemed too insecure because there was fighting there at the moment, that we would attempt to pick the next more geographically close village. That only happened once, and by chance, the next geographically closest village was in a different governorate so we threw that one out. And that's why we only have 47 instead of 50.

So in this case, we never actually substituted because of insecurity' we only threw out because of insecurity. And the effect is our number is probably too low. It means, when you've avoided a place because it was the scariest or the most intimidating, if you assume high mortality goes with being scared, then you probably have a slight bias downward, making our number too low.

DR. BURNHAM: And to add just a bit to that, the team decided that before it any substitution it would make several attempts to go back to a specific area and Basra's an example. The team had to make three attempts to get to Basra for some of the reasons that Juan Cole has already outlined before they could actually go there and have a sense of security enough to complete the survey.

So there was some cases where surveying was delayed because of conflict and hostilities, but as Les has mentioned, only once did there actually have to be a substitution.

MR. COLE: Could I just say something about passive data collection in the press?

In Iraq, I think it should be remembered that places like Latifiyah and Buhriz don't have newspapers. In America, very commonly -- I'm from Ann Arbor; it has a population of 109,000; we have an Ann Arbor newspaper -- but a lot of these little towns of similar size in Iraq do not, so that the violence that's being reported there is not being reported by the national Iraqi press, especially if it's criminal violence or if it's random or appears to be so; in addition to which, because a lot of the violence is committed by criminal gangs or by militias, it is dangerous to talk about it. So if you're a stringer for a newspaper and you're in Balad Ruz or you're in Latifiyah and your name is associated with accusations that such-and- such militia has offed somebody, so -- then you're in danger.

So the premises that we often bring to our image of what newsgathering is like in Iraq are drawn from a society that's at peace. But Iraq is not like that. It's dangerous to be a journalist in Iraq, and, of course, it's the place where I think the largest number of journalists has been killed of any conflict situation.

REP. KUCINICH: Which goes back to the question of methodology and what Dr. Roberts and Burnham were talking about and the difficulty of doing sampling or getting clusters in areas which are percolating with violence.

You earlier, Dr. Burnham, talked about how you established 650,000 excess deaths, 600,000 of one are due to violent causes. Then you began to give us a range of probabilities of the accuracy of that number of those numbers. You said that the chance of it being lower, let's say, 500,000, was 10 percent.

You said that the chance of it being a little bit lower than that, the lowest probability of 390,000, would be about 2.5 percent, correct? Now let's -- we're going from the number that Lancet has reported as the likely number of civilian casualties, or excess civilian deaths, 650,000, and we've looked at the lowest -- towards a lower scale and what the probabilities are for a moment, because you've stated that there are some difficulties in the sampling when you can't go in a certain neighborhood where there's a great amount of violence.

Take us, just for the sake of discussion, to the other end of the scale. What's the possibility that it could be more than 650,000 excess deaths, and what would that number be?

MR. ROBERTS: So there's two separate notions. One is, what's the possibility our sample has errors in it that make it too low, as you asked. The probability of that is very high. The probability of that is high for two main reasons: people might have hidden deaths when we knocked on their door and not told us about them; and secondly, because, for example, there was that the one place that we excluded because it was so dangerous, that probably implies we have a little bit of a bias downward as well.

The separate question is, given those places we actually made it to, knocked on the doors, how high could it be? Well, there's only about a 2.5 percent chance it's over 950,000.

So we think our best estimate is 650,000. The further you get away from that point, the probability that that number is the truth would go down, down down. But it could be significantly higher.

REP. KUCINICH: So again, because of the difficulty in being able to assess clusters where the violence is the highest, there is a possibility it's higher?

MR. ROBERTS: Absolutely. In fact, it's more likely it's higher than lower, in fact.

REP. KUCINICH: You know, one of the -- you mentioned a moment ago, Dr. Roberts, about how a minister of health was discouraged from being able to count casualties. Let's take that a step further. Do you have any evidence of intentional undercounting of deaths?

MR. ROBERTS: Aside from that, yes. Three occasions, by chance, in the last two weeks, three different people -- two of them doctors from this country, one of them a doctor I was speaking with by e-mail from Iraq -- have all said exactly the same thing, that there are several times more bodies going into the Baghdad morgue every day over the last couple of months than is being reported by the government and into the U.N.

REP. KUCINICH: Why would this be? Let's speculate for a moment. Why would somebody deliberately undercount the deaths?

MR. ROBERTS: I can think of a lot of reasons. I think there could be, A, political incentives to not make things look very violent and bad.

And in past wars where I have dealt, there has been the hiding of deaths to try to make it not look as grim as it really is. I encountered that in Bosnia when I was a U.S. government officer in 1993, and I saw that in Congo in 2001.

And separately, it could be that if, for example, bodies aren't being picked up, if bodies are never identified, if death certificates are never issued, that somehow those aren't getting in the system.

So I think there is the possibility of nefarious and non- infarious (sic) reasons for that occurring.

DR. BURNHAM: And I think also we can look at this historically, that governments that are under siege, involved in conflict, that have multiple parties in a government, that are parties also to the conflict -- this manipulation of data is a very characteristic finding. And right now, for instance, we're trying to relook at data from deaths in the Soviet era, and we're finding that there are many greater deaths in the Second World War than we ever had reported.

So there's lots of reasons why these things happen. And I don't know if it's possible to really put your finger on one, but there are a big variety of them.

REP. KUCINICH: Now, Dr. Burnham, earlier you said the bulk of excess deaths were due to violence. You used the figure of 601,000 civilian deaths due to violence. Can any one of the panelists shed any light on the number of deaths due to the collapse of the public health infrastructure, the loss of health care facilities and personnel, the loss of water and sewage treatment, and loss or reduction in collection of garbage, for that matter?

DR. BURNHAM: That's actually a very good question, and that was one of the big surprises that we had when we started with the analysis of these data, because that's what we really expected, that the excess death was going to come from health-related issues, the collapse of public health measures, collapse of water, inadequate electricity, flight of physicians, shortage of medicine, the kind of things that we've seen in other kinds of conflict. And it was surprising we didn't see that. And in fact the number of deaths remained -- from nonviolent causes remained fairly stable until the last year. And in the last year, we've seen a rise in the number of deaths due to nonviolent causes, excess deaths. And we estimated about 45,000 due to nonviolent causes.

However, this number is fairly small, and when one starts looking at this statistically, we can't see that this is clearly a change from the past. However, this may well be the beginning of a trend, and there are many, many things going on in Iraq right now, such as the flight of health workers, the collapse of security in hospitals and so forth, that may mean that if we looked at this again in a year or so, we would find that there was a major rise in the number of nonviolent deaths.

REP. KUCINICH: Now, since all of you have had to look at wars or conflicts and the toll they've taken on other regions, how has this rapid increase in mortalities in Iraq compared to other regions in the world, where wars or conflicts are taking their toll? Have you seen such a rapid escalation of mortality in other regions? You know, how bad is this compared to what's going on in the rest of the world?

DR. BURNHAM: I think there are several points here.

One is that we're not very good at measuring deaths in conflict using scientific measurement methods. A lot of the numbers of deaths are estimated from -- retrospectively by historians, by military strategists and so forth, so there are very few where this solid data on death is actually present.

If we look at our data, which so far estimates that 2.5 percent of the Iraqi population in the study areas that we did have died as a consequence, we can compare this with more historical estimates of 10 or 15 percent in Vietnam. In Eastern Europe during the Second World War, there were estimates that 10 percent of the Polish population died as conflict. We look at some of the information from the former Soviet Union -- eventually when it becomes reanalyzed and looked at with current information, I think we'll see very large numbers there as well.

REP. KUCINICH: I'd like to turn for a moment to Dr. Cole.

Dr. Cole, do you believe the results of this Lancet study are further evidence of a civil war?

MR. COLE: Yes, there isn't any doubt that there is a civil war in Iraq. My colleague at the University of Michigan, David Singer, ran a project on the statistics and correlates of war and developed the most widely used measurement of what a civil war is. And his team specified that if you have multiple -- at least two parties contending for power -- and in Iraq, you have the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement and you have the Shi'ite militias -- and if they produce a least a thousand casualties of war a year and if in battles between the insurgents and the central government, the insurgents equip themselves relatively well -- and this happens in Iraq -- then you have a civil war.

MORE So Iraq is a civil war magnified many times over; by these criteria, much smaller conflicts have been called civil war by social scientists.

In Iraq, I think we have something that goes beyond civil war. This is one of the great civil conflicts of the past few years. I mean, one really has to go to Cambodia and Afghanistan to find similar sorts of proportional numbers of deaths.

REP. KUCINICH: Let's go to a moment with your background and history in the region. You've seen the high mortality rates that Doctors Burnham and Roberts talked about with respect to young men. Let's talk for a moment about the implications of the high mortality rate for young men.

MR. COLE: Well, the high mortality rate for young men is probably being produced by their having joined these guerrilla groups and militia movements, and they have joined these movements for a number of reasons. First of all, there's very high rates of unemployment in Iraq. It's difficult to know exactly what the figure is; anything from 30 to 60 percent is reported. But certainly, there are very large numbers of families that simply have no real source of income. And these militias get funding in various ways -- through petroleum smuggling, through antiquities smuggling, through monies coming in from neighboring countries from donors. And so getting a job as a militia man for a young man is actually a source of income, and many young men who might not otherwise prefer this way of life are forced into it by unemployment and poverty.

REP. KUCINICH: Well -- but you have so many young males lost in a society. How does the loss the young males affect Iraqi society in terms of long-term impact?

MR. COLE: Well, obviously, this is the cohort that will be the backbone of the society in the future ordinarily. These are the young people that would go on to lead productive lives, to be workers, to be professionals, and their lives are being lost. In Iraq, which is a relatively traditional society, it is a patriarchal society, women haven't traditionally been in the workforce very much, so a lot of these young men would have been the bread winners for their family. There's not a strong social security mechanism from the government, so as the head of the household ages, retires, it would be his sons who would be supporting the family. So many families are losing those precise younger men who would bring in an income.

So the implications for throwing large numbers of Iraqis into poverty are very high. Of course, many of the young men who are being killed are already married, so it's producing widows with children without means of support. Prostitution and various forms of coercion for women have increased as a result. Very large numbers of women have been forced to flee to Jordan or Syria, where they end up working as dancing girls or as prostitutes.

So the situation is really quite horrible for those families that are losing their breadwinners.

REP. KUCINICH: I have a follow-up question on that, but something just occurs to me that I don't think has been discussed that much. Based on the figures that -- in the Lancet report and perhaps based on your own study, do w
e have any idea of how many orphans there may be in Iraq, how many children who have lost their parents? Has anybody studied that at all?

DR. BURNHAM: I've just seen comments that there are large numbers and the numbers are increasing, but I don't think anybody has quantified that, and I think that is, obviously, another area for a serious look.

And we also see increasing amount of internal migration going on now. The U.N. has issued figures on this. However, it's difficult to disentangle some of the people who were displaced in previous situations under Saddam with people who have been displaced now. But in any event, we know that these numbers are increasing by hundreds of thousands probably every month.

REP. KUCINICH: All right.

Dr. Cole, you spoke briefly to the effects on the economy of having a large number of young males on the violent deaths in Iraq. What would be the effect, carrying it further, on plans for reconstruction of Iraq? Talking about a workforce here, potential workforce.

MR. COLE: Well, there is an impact on the workforce of these deaths, and it's -- you know, it's sort of like Europe in the '20s when you had the lost generation, the young men who just weren't there because so many had been killed. And it does distort the economy.

Traditionally, in the 20th century in such situations it has been common for women to come into the workforce in greater numbers to make up for the lack of the men. But in Iraq, this is difficult at the moment because of the poor security. It's reinforced traditional patterns of gender segregation. So that I don't believe it's the case that, you know, there are a lot of new factory jobs opening up and that the women are taking them instead of the young men who have been killed.

REP. KUCINICH: So this would affect Iraq's ability to maintain security and rebuild itself down the road, would it not?

MR. COLE: I don't think the -- the loss of so many young men is a great tragedy, and it is a deficit for the development of the country. But were security to be reestablished, then I think that the society would find ways of going forward. The problem is that the insecurity makes development impossible.

It makes it impossible for, say, the women to take up the slack. It makes it impossible for new economic ventures to be established. And the very instability itself creates situations for men to go into militia work as a line of work. But also, people are afraid for the safety of their neighborhood. A lot of the militia activity is on a neighborhood basis, and people just become very concerned that there are people in their neighborhood planning to blow up their children. And so the young men gather and conduct a kind of neighborhood watch; they get guns, and then there are firefights, and there are more deaths.

REP. KUCINICH: That helps frame this discussion in a powerful way, and that is that as the levels of violence keep increasing, the social fabric is torn and there's -- people are basically frozen, correct? Unless they're going out and joining the fighting. I mean, what's happening in the society, as this violence keeps cycling?

DR. BURNHAM: I think we can speak to maybe a subset, and that's in the health professions. And we find, as you may have seen in the news, that university people are being specifically targeted for assassinations as a morale-destroying activity. We find more and more academics hiding out in their households, seeing what kind of work they can do in their households without having to go to the university.

At some of the hospitals in Baghdad, the work is being carried out by medical students, the type of work that was previously carried out by specialist physicians. In one particular hospital, the account is that prior to the invasion, there were 120 fully qualified surgeons, and now there are two remaining on the site. And there's large numbers of doctors that have left for Jordan, for Syria, for Egypt; that are driving taxis or doing other things to try to make a living.

REP. KUCINICH: Did you want to add anything, Dr. Roberts?

MR. ROBERTS: Could I add one thing?

REP. KUCINICH: Please.

MR. ROBERTS: And that is, you know, aside from that, there's just the scars of having lost a family member, of having a bad chapter in your family.

So, in the 2004 study, I went and I led the study, and I paid a guy $200 to smuggle me into Iraq. So I flew to Jordan, and gave him 200 bucks, and he smuggled me in. He had really dark tinted windows. And so he smuggled me across the border -- even though they searched the car, somehow we made it -- and we went through a checkpoint in Fallujah as we were coming in.

This guy who smuggled me in -- he's a professional smuggler. He's a tough guy. He'd been in the military 21 years, the U.S. had come, and now he was suddenly unemployed and driving a car. As we drove past Abu Ghraib prison -- I'm lying on the floor in the back, and he goes, "Abu Ghraib! Abu Ghraib!" And I sort of looked up, and my driver was up front, and I said, "Do you mean the prison?" And he looked back over his shoulder, and he was weeping.

You know, there are consequences to every American family that's lost a loved one that dwarf the economic concerns. And the notion that there might be hundreds of thousands of Iraqi families with scars that deep should scare us profoundly, I think.

REP. KUCINICH: You've done this study twice, once in 2004 and again this year. What possible follow-up research could be done to provide more information about the state of Iraq?

DR. BURNHAM: Well, I think if you're a scientist, you haven't finished one study before you think: "Okay, what would I like to do if I had that chance to do it again?"

And so I think that there's a number of things that we would like to do. Foremost in our wish list is to have a secure situation in which we could do it. And we would like to do a larger sample, obviously. And when we did this sample, we had to balance off what do we need from a scientific basis to give us the data we need, but what would we possibly be doing to put our surveyors at risk. And interviewers have been killed in Iraq doing surveys. So we didn't want to make things unnecessarily big so we put people at risk.

So one of the things we'd like to do in a peaceful situation is do a much larger sample. And what that would do would not improve necessarily the accuracy, but it would narrow those confidence intervals, so we'd get them a bit closer together. And that would make everybody happy, because we'd like confidence intervals to be as small as we can.

And then there's lots of things we'd like to (know ?) at the household level: to find how households coped with these situations, how the responsibilities in the household changed when various people in the household were killed, what were the migratory patterns of things, how did people move from one place to another place.

And then some of these under-reported deaths -- in a more peaceful situation, it may well be that people would have an opportunity to talk about things in more detail.

And then finally, from a health system standpoint, which is my major interest, I'd like to know how did the health system cope with things and what can we learn that in other conflicts we can use to intentionally strengthen health services to cope with what's going to be a consequence of the civil war or internal disturbance.

MR. ROBERTS: I actually have a radically different answer. I'm profoundly concerned that the main thing we're missing in our society at this moment in time is the tone of contrition that should go along with having inadvertently -- perhaps no one could have envisioned it; I don't care -- but done great harm to another people.

And so in my mind, the most important thing would be that a reasonable estimate be generated, believed, quoted and become the common dialogue of the U.S. government. And I think there's probably a couple of ways by which that could happen.

Every time the Pentagon drops a bomb, they do an estimate of how many collateral deaths there will be. I have never heard a summary of all those bombs. We dropped 50,000 by the end of 2004, if I believe a weapons analyst I once heard speaking; I'd like to see that summary. I think that would keep us from having our president or others cite absurdly low numbers.

Secondly, I think that somehow -- and maybe the Congress can do this separately -- there needs to be another body, someone other than us that goes out and either refutes and confirms these findings. I think that would be extremely useful in terms of a consensus of opinion and us having one hopefully appropriate voice on the subject.

REP. KUCINICH: One of the things that is obvious, Dr. Roberts, when you talk about this is the -- you know, you feel this. And, you know, statistics can be pretty dry. Even talking about 600,000 deaths due to violence -- excess deaths due to violence of civilians -- 650,000 excess deaths -- you know, we can go through these numbers, and they can -- it can be a pretty dry discussion.

But then when you get to the human dimension behind this -- how families are destroyed, how people's lives are changed forever, the feelings they may have about the United States as a result -- you come to an understanding if you have a heart and a soul, which we all do, that we are looking here at a colossal tragedy, at a people who have been visited with a level of violence that is unimaginable to those of us here in this country.

We suffered greatly on 9/11, and we still suffer from the trauma of 9/11. I mean, just yesterday I was in a video store, and I saw they're coming out on a DVD with a movie about the World Trade Center. And just seeing for a second -- just a second a flash of policemen and firemen who are confronted with these collapsing buildings, it was chilling. Imagine Iraq, where not 3,000 deaths of loved ones, which is a serious, grave matter, but 650,000.

So Dr. Roberts spoke of a tone of contrition. We -- you know, as a result of this study, we are at the threshold of a whole new understanding of the harm that's been done to the people of Iraq; a whole -- another discussion needs to, as a result of this data and the implications of it, needs to occur with respect to truth and reconciliation, both between ourselves and the Iraqi people and between ourselves within our own American community.

We are at a decisive moment here as to whether we can prevent the truth of what's happened in Iraq -- and apparently, people have not even wanted to confront the truth as it relates to civilian casualties -- and whether we have learned and want to take a new direction. This study, therefore, has enormous implications not only in and of itself with respect to civilian casualties in a war which our government chose to prosecute without adequate information and certainly contrary to information they had.

We are having a congressional oversight briefing. It's been co- sponsored by my friend and colleague, Congressman Ron Paul. The title of this briefing has been the impact of 650,000 excess deaths in Iraq, and we've been doing an overview of the Lancet mortality study in Iraq. Joining us, Dr. Burnham and Dr. Roberts, who are the co-authors of the Lancet study, and also Dr. Cole, who's a modern Middle East and South Asian history expert at the University of Michigan.

I'm Congressman Dennis Kucinich.

As we move towards the last 25 minutes of this congressional briefing, I would now invite any questions from members of the press who are here. And would ask you to just give your name and identify the news organization that you work for. And I would ask members of the panel to be available in this session to answer the questions.

Proceed. Anyone have any questions? Anybody?

Q

(Name off mike) -- Executive Intelligence Review news service. Two questions. One, I may have missed. But did you discuss the -- what's happened in terms of birth rates? That was my first question. And the second question -- since I assume they've collapsed, but I would like to know. And then the second question is, given that your report ended -- is it July of 2006?

MR.

: Right.

Q

And given that most of us know that the last few months, in particular, have been -- it would seem to me to be orders and orders and orders of magnitude more violent than before July 2006, is there any way to extrapolate from the numbers that you have come up with that that may be an undercount because the situation has gone so much dramatically worse in the last six months?

DR. BURNHAM: Maybe I'll speak to the easy one first, which is the birth rates. And there is still a lot of discussion about demographers, what happens to birth rates in conflict situations. Birth rates that we've measured have been -- have remained fairly similar to what they were before. This was not a study specifically designed to look at birth rates, or we would have structured things somewhat differently. But I think they're broadly what they are in the region and also what they've been previously. So saying that, there's no agreement on it, but -- on what this actually means, but I think they are fairly consistent with what one would expect.

Do you want to --

MR. ROBERTS: In answer to your second question, certainly watching the media reports you would think it has gotten worse over the last couple of months. But what we're seeing is that the media is only capturing the top of the iceberg. And I think a lot has changed in the last while.

MORE I think that the press is pretty disgusted and tired of this war, and, you know, I can't tell you how much of that is an artifact of what was very incomplete surveillance and how much of it is increased violence. We'd have to go out on the ground and get a population-based estimate to answer your question fairly and accurately, I'm afraid.

REP. KUCINICH: I would like at this point to ask the panelists to make a closing statement. And maybe we can begin with Dr. Cole.

MR. COLE: I've been dismayed as someone who's followed these events on a daily basis from the Arabic and Persian press, from Western wire services, from talking to Iraqis on the ground. I've been dismayed for the past three and a half years at the way in which the seriousness of this problem was downplayed by politicians in Washington and by the U.S. media, both the print and the television and radio press.

This was a situation that was clearly out of control and very dangerous already in the summer of and fall of 2003 at a time when we were being told by Washington that there was no guerrilla war in Iraq, and it is still being disputed in Washington -- in the face of these enormous numbers -- that there is no civil war in Iraq. I can't tell you exactly why the state of constant denial should be with us. I am glad to see that NBC News is now using the words "civil war" and dismayed to see that it's controversial at this point. I don't know what else you would call a conflict producing these kinds of casualties, where you have militias attacking one another every day.

And the sheer horror of this war is something that we miss. When it's reported in the news that 50 bodies were found in Baghdad -- do you realize that there's actually a corpse patro
l in the Iraqi police, that this is one of the duties if you're a policeman, that you get up in the morning and you go around looking for the bodies that are showing up in the streets that day? And the U.N. reports that these bodies show signs of drilling, of chemical exposure, of torture of various sorts, and then typically they have a bullet behind the ear, Mafia style.

And 50, 60 of them every day are showing up in Baghdad, and then more are showing up in places like Baqubah and elsewhere. In -- even in Mosul now you begin to see some of these statistics emerging.

And this is the tip of the iceberg. It was thrown up against the Lancet report that, well, it implies that there are 500 deaths around the country a day from political and criminal violence. How could that be?

Well, I mean, the news reports that we're getting, if you consider them to be the tip of the iceberg, if you just think about, well, what are the forces that are producing these results on a daily basis, it's obvious that only a small number of the deaths that actually occur are being reported in the wire services. I see deaths reported in the Arabic press all the time that never surface in the English language wire services.

So I agree with Professor Roberts that, you know, a sense of contrition, a recognition of the reality here, of what the actions of the United States have done to an entire country, to -- really to a civilization, is in order. And we cannot debate what should be done in Iraq unless we have a clear-eyed vision of what has been done in Iraq.

One of the implications of my talk here today is that the U.S. military, the cavalry division that's fighting in Baqubah, is taking sides without necessarily meaning to, but taking sides in a civil war. They are killing Sunni Arabs in Baqubah on behalf of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which dominates the political apparatus of that place. Is that really what we want to be doing? Is -- do we want to kill Sunni Arabs for the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shi'ite organization which was founded at the instance of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran?

And when we hear that, well, we can't leave Iraq, because al Qaeda is there, and they would come after us -- those people in Baqubah are not al Qaeda. Most of them are demonstrating against the execution of Saddam Hussein, whom al Qaeda excoriates.

Then it's said that they'll come after us here, to the American mainland, if we leave. People in Baqubah are not coming after us to the American mainland if we leave. That's just paranoia. I mean, people in Baqubah had nothing to do with us, anyway, before we sent our troops there.

And then we have destroyed their history. Do you know that all of the cabinet papers, all of the records of government meetings, all the policy decisions taken in Iraq during the entire 20th century are gone? There is no historical record of 20th century Iraq left. It's been burned. It's been looted.

The United States government has committed [cliocide]. We wiped a country off the map. And then we have presided over the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis. We haven't killed all of them, but we have created the situation in which they are being killed.

And when I hear the tone of American political debate, that "Well, we have to stay there and finish the job, and we need victory," -- what would victory look like?

Would we have to kill all the Sunni Arabs in Baqubah? Is that what victory would be? That we're afraid that they'll come back after us here if we leave. They don't have a beef with the United States, they have a beef with our troops being in their neighborhoods.

So I would just make a plea that these numbers be taken very seriously and that the implications of the numbers be taken very seriously as we think our way forward out of this quagmire.

REP. KUCINICH: Thank you very much, Dr. Cole.

I would now like to read a statement from Congressman Ron Paul for this hearing. Congressman Paul and I have helped to organize bipartisan challenges to the administration with respect to Iraq. Congressman Paul is a medical doctor. And here's what Congressman Paul had to say:

"I'd like to thank my colleague and friend, Representative Dennis Kucinich, and his staff for their hard work in organizing this important oversight hearing, and I appreciate the opportunity to have sponsored this event along with Representative Kucinich.

"As a medical doctor, I've spent a good part of my professional life trying to reduce pain and suffering. It is something I feel very strongly about. Various reports, including the very important Lancet study, suggest that the level of pain, and suffering, and worse, among the non-combatant population in Iraq is on a scale almost unimaginable. While the administration has shown little interest in the extent of civilian deaths in Iraq, it is important that we in Congress treat this matter with the seriousness it deserves. We need to have a better understanding of the unintended consequences of this war, not the least in the hope that in the future, Congress will take its constitutional responsibilities regarding war and declaration of war more seriously.

"It is also clear we have failed to consider carefully enough our own dead and wounded in this Iraq war. Recent reports suggest that some 100,000 U.S. soldiers have been permanently disabled fighting in Iraq. We need to think of their terrible pain and suffering, and that of their families. This pain and suffering will not end when this terrible war finally ends, it will continue for the rest of their lives. This is the tragedy of the unnecessary war -- both sides suffer needlessly.

"I hope this hearing, and others that hopefully will follow, mark the beginning of congressional oversight of this misguided war in Iraq that has sorely been lacking in the three-and-a-half years since the war started."

Thank you, Congressman Ron Paul.

Now we'll turn to Dr. Burnham for a closing statement.

DR. BURNHAM: Thank you very much. As noted, much of the tone of coverage and concern about the war has focused on American troops and the consequences of the conflict. And there's no question that the quality of health care that people have gotten after injury has been the finest that's ever been provided to people in conflict situations.

But at the same time, we have missed the consequences to other parts of the population. And there's been, it appears, increasingly an effort to play down the fact that others have suffered in this conflict as well. The idea that now we have "smart bombs," we have intelligent, supposedly, weaponry, and so forth, somehow reduces the consequence of war.

Well, it may reduce the consequence of war for our own forces, for our own side, but it does not -- and the evidence is very strong for this -- have reduced the consequences to the local population.

And one of our concerns here is who's keeping track of things for the affected population, who in most cases are being caught up in this against their own will? Who keeps the numbers? Now, it's not really the mandate of American military to keep track of civilian losses in a conflict situation. That has never been the responsibility of military forces. But somebody needs to keep track of it, and it needs to be something rather than academics who are interested in the consequence of conflict in civilian population. It needs to be some international body who keeps track of this, that's not influenced or (buoyed ?) by members of the conflict itself, but can say, "Wait a minute now. People are starting to suffer here in a way that is just not acceptable from humanitarian terms, and we need to do something to ensure that populations are better protected."

So my real concern is that now we look toward the future and say, "In future wars," -- and this is not the last war of the 21st century -- "how do we protect people who are innocents in this situation?" And this is a major -- this is an undertaking that has to be done by many people from many different areas of expertise and experience. But I believe like most public health activities this needs to start with sound data that tell us what is the consequence of war, what are we doing to populations in this situation. And with these data, which we hope that we've been able to contribute to, that now serious consideration can be made to what can we do better not only in this situation -- and hopefully as this situation draws to a close fairly soon -- but in future conflicts as well.

REP. KUCINICH: Dr. Roberts.

MR. ROBERTS: Thank you, Congressman Kucinich.

I guess I'd like to end with two thoughts. The first thought is for the press. Of all the reports -- scientific reports in recent years that have been labeled controversial, this must be the easiest one to discard or to accept compared to Dolly the sheep or whether or not there was cold fusion at the University of Utah. It's tough for a reporter to figure that out.

If what we are saying is true, over the last three years, most deaths in Iraq have been from violence. If what Brookings and the U.N. and the Iraqi body count have been saying is true, only about one in 10 deaths in Iraq over the last three years has been from violence. How many graveyards and morgues would you need to go to in order to figure that out?

And my final thought is in 2004, I went into a house -- the way it worked was the interviewers always went up and interviewed a house. I stayed in the car so no one could see me. But sometimes after the interview, I would go visit in a friendly house and -- I was in this house, and they were giving me tea, and my driver was there, I think. There was a man in the house who spoke English. The children only had one or two words. And there was this little kid who was sitting next to me, and it's 110 degrees. He's fanning me like crazy and fanning me like crazy, and we're talking and talking and talking, and somehow we got on to the topic of the Americans and the war. And the father pulled up the pants on this little child, and his legs were just severely burned. Turns out two children in that house had been outside when an American bomb had dropped. And I'm not sure, as an American taxpayer, there is a more repulsive feeling or sensation than to know that your tax dollars did something like that to this wonderful, happy, little boy.

And so I'd like to close with a thought that there are lots of congressmen who are worried about our troops, and I'm ecstatic about that. There are lots of congressmen who are worried about us as a nation, and I'm ecstatic about that. But there haven't been many congressmen that have been concerned about that little boy, and thank you to Congressmen Paul and Kucinich for at least having this opportunity to think about him and the hundreds of thousands of others.

Thank you.

REP. KUCINICH: Thank you very much, Dr. Roberts.

I'd like to conclude -- studying war is a tough thing. Looking at casualty levels is a tough thing. It's been hard for us to see the amount of casualties that our American men and women, who serve so bravely, have endured. I have seen a figure that says that says that in the 20th century, 100 million people, most of them innocent civilian noncombatants, perished in wars in the 20th century.

We have embarked in the 21st century in another tide of blood. I think that briefings like this should give us an opportunity to pause and reflect on this type of thinking that says that war is inevitable. Presumably, we have evolved as a species; presumably, that evolution has been not only intellectual, but spiritual as well. And if in fact we have evolved, then we need to, at this moment, recognize the imperative of human unity; that we find ways of settling our differences without killing each other. That at this moment, we recognize the imperative of human security; that we recognize that each of us has a right to survive, and we look for mutually reinforcing ways to assist in not just surviving, but thriving.

And as we conclude this discussion on the impact of 650,000 excess deaths in Iraq, this overview of the Lancet Mortality Study in Iraq, it's an appropriate time to also reflect on the imperative of peace. War is not inevitable. Peace is inevitable, if we will call forth what President Franklin Roosevelt called the science of human relations to tap our capacities to be more than we are, and better than we are; to use our spiritual, our intellectual, our emotional talents to be able to create a new era of non-violent conflict resolution.

This is the hope of a Cabinet-level department of peace, a proposal that now has the support of over 70 members of Congress.

We don't have to descend into a version of Dante's Inferno. I think we were made for something much better, but at moments like this, we need to reflect on what our temporary descent into the hell that we've created in Iraq has reached upon the people of that nation.

I want to thank Congressman Paul for being my partner and co- sponsor for this important congressional oversight briefing. I want to thank the co-authors of the Lancet study -- Dr. Gilbert Burnham, Ph.D. and M.D., who's the co-director of the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response at John's Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; Dr. Les Roberts, Ph.D., who's the associate professor of clinical public health for the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University; and Dr. Juan Cole, Ph.D., who's a modern Middle East and South Asian history expert at the University of Michigan and author of the blog, "Informed Comment."

For those of you who are interested in getting more information, you can go to the website of our congressional office, which is www.kucinich.house.gov, and Kucinich is spelled K-U-C-I-N-I-C-H, that's www. kucinich. house.gov. Congressman Ron Paul's website is www.house.gov/paul, and the Lancet study, if you wish to read it, is www.thelancet.com.

Thank you very much for your thoughtful consideration of these findings of the panelists and good day.

Bombings Kill 54 Downtown Baghdad
Saudi Clerics Mobilize against Shiites

Guerrillas detonated two enormous bombs at Tayaran Square in central Baghdad, killing 54 persons and wounding 106. The bombers targeted day laborers who had gathered looking for work.

Those at the Pentagon who want to tackle unemployment and the bad economy have it backwards. First you need security. Then you can have a growing economy.

Guerrillas killed three more US GIs. A hard landing of a US military helicopter wounded 18, 9 of them lightly.

Reuters reports political violence on Monday. Some 78 deaths were identified by news organizations, out of the probably 500 killed around the country. Major incidents included:

' BAGHDAD - Five people were killed and at least seven wounded when mortar rounds landed on a restaurant in Dora in southern Baghdad . . .

BAGHDAD - Gunmen wearing Iraqi army uniforms ambushed a security vehicle and stole $1 million in cash, police and Interior Ministry sources said. Four private security guards were kidnapped in the daylight robbery. . .

BAGHDAD - A car bomb exploded in a parking lot of Mahmoun University in Baghdad, killing one person and wounding four others, including two policemen. . .

BAGHDAD - A roadside bomb went off in Palestine Street in western Baghdad, killing one person and wounding six, police said. . .

BALAD - Eight farmers were kidnapped on the road between Dujail and Tikrit north of Baghdad . . .

NEAR BAQUBA - Gunmen opened fire at a family, killing three of its members and wounding three others while driving near Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) north of Baghdad, police said. . .

MOSUL - Gunmen killed four brothers driving in their car in Mosul, police said. . . . '

Saudi clerics have called for Sunnis worldwide to mobilize against Iraqi Shiites.

Reuters reports that sectarian violence in Iraq has raised Sunni-Shiite tensions in Lebanon.

Children in Iraq are suffering horribly from the ongoing civil war.

Bush met Monday with Neoconservative Elliot Cohen and a handful of retired generals who oppose any reduction in US troop levels in Iraq. Giving this small random group a high-profile hearing contradicts the basic principle that when someone gets you into a mess, you stop following their advice.

Iraqi political leaders are trying to find a way to isolate Muqtada al-Sadr in parliament, according to NYT.

Mark Danner writing for NYRB reviews the sad story of how it all went wrong in Iraq. He is very clear on the unresolved question of how the Iraqi army got dissolved and deep debaathification was pursued. Then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld denied having made the decision. Danner thinks it came from Paul Wolfowitz or Douglas Feith, the number 2 and 3 men at the Department of Defense at that time. Given the tight links between Feith and the Israeli Likud Party and the Israeli military, one has to wonder whether the Israeli Right had input into these fateful decisions, which have the lives of nearly 3000 GIs and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. The role of the American Enterprise Institute and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, both of them Neocon Central, would also bear looking into. Certainly, the decisions were not in the interest of the United States.

Former British defense secretary Geoffrey Hoon says that he and Tony Blair weighed in against dissolving the Iraqi Army and deep debaathification. He should please be more specific about with whom he was arguing.

Congressional Hearing on Civilian Casualties in Iraq

Stephen Soldz blogs the Paul-Kucinich hearings on civilian casualties in Iraq, at which I testified.

Dennis Kucinich has been calling for a US withdrawal from Iraq for some time. His home page is down this morning but should be back up after noon. He is now calling for Congress to cease funding the Iraq War.

Representative Kucinich is preparing to launch a formal bid for the Democratic Party nomination as candidate for president.

Ross Guest Editorial on Pinochet

' Gone But Not Forgotten

by Amy Ross

(The writer is an assistant professor of geography and human rights at the University of Georgia.)

The dictator is dead. At 91, after nearly a decade fighting desperately to avoid prison, Chile's General Augusto Pinochet suffered a heart attack while under house arrest for charges including torture, kidnaping and homicide. He died on December 10th: International Human Rights Day.

During his 17 year reign, more than 3,000 people ‘disappeared’ and more than 20,000 were tortured. In addition to the secrets he takes to the grave ("where are the bodies buried?") and the pain he has caused, ("donde esta mi hijo?”), Pinochet leaves a significant legal legacy.

Indeed, Pinochet's trajectory, from general, to president, to international-human-rights-law precedent, parallels profound developments in law and politics.

While Pinochet is notorious for his brutal dictatorship in Chile, he is also the poster-child for the doctrine of universal jurisdiction, which holds that certain crimes are so heinous as to be of international concern. In its broadest interpretation, universal jurisdiction means that any court, anywhere, can prosecute the perpetrators of crimes such as torture, even if the accused is from a nation other than where the suit is brought.

Universal jurisdiction received little attention until it ensnared Pinochet in October 1998. While he was in London receiving medical treatment, British officials, acting on a warrant issued by a Spanish judge, placed Mr. Pinochet under house arrest.

A major struggle ensued. Powerful players weighed in on all sides. Pinochet could count on support from heavy hitters such as his old ally Margaret Thatcher, who praised the general as a hero in the struggle against communism.

A well-organized community of Chilean exiles in Europe, united with increasingly sophisticated transnational activists, fought just as hard for his prosecution. Stymied from seeing Pinochet held accountable in Chile, these global activists sought out sympathetic jurisdictions elsewhere.

Pinochet argued that as a head of state, he enjoyed diplomatic immunity. The British High Court disagreed. In the ruling supporting the extradition of Pinochet to Spain, Lord Nicolls wrote "International law has made plain that certain types of conduct, including torture and hostage taking, are not acceptable on the part of anyone. This applies as much to heads of state, or even more so, as it does to anyone else. The contrary conclusion would make a mockery out of international law."

Pinochet dodged that bullet. At the eleventh hour, an appeals committee in 1999 found Pinochet "unfit" to stand trial on medical grounds. He was whisked home from England within hours on a Chilean government jet. (Amongst other ailments, Pinochet was reportedly found to suffer from depression. As were, to be sure, many of his victims.)

Who, then, would be "fit" to stand trial for crimes against humanity? By definition, crimes against humanity are conducted in a “wide-spread and systematic fashion;” usually by someone with the means and authority to do so. The observation that a person is more likely to stand trial for the murder of one, than for the murder of one hundred thousand, highlights the paradox of power.

While it is the most powerful that are in a position to commit grave abuses, that same power often protects against prosecution.

Faced with impunity at home, human rights activists have sought out sympathetic jurisdictions abroad. Many high-level state figures, traditionally protected at home, are facing increasing pressure in foreign courts.

Henry Kissinger reported fled Paris in 2001 after being tipped off to an imminent summons by a French judge; he later cancelled a trip to Brazil after being warned by the government there that he might face an international arrest warrant. Lawsuits have already been filed against Donald Rumsfeld in Europe.

One lesson to be learned is that activity in the international arena reverberates at the local level. Having escaped prosecution in Spain, Pinochet returned home to face nearly 200 civil lawsuits brought by a newly invigorated human rights community. Criminal cases also gained momentum. The walls of impunity were cracking.

Although he died before facing a jury, his victims could take some small comfort in his steady demise before the judicial onslaught. In one of his latest maneuvers to avoid incarceration, Pinochet was forced to claim dementia; surely a blow to a man convinced of his own heroism.

The stakes are high regarding the 'Pinochet Precedent.’ For populations subject to the threat of torture, "disappearance" and other human rights abuses, the struggle to hold the most powerful perpetrators accountable might, in theory, bring about a degree of deterrence from future crimes. But for an international order that relies upon guarantees of diplomatic immunity between nations, universal jurisdiction represents a troublesome trend, a disruption in the established system of diplomatic relations.

And for government officials engaged in violence, Pinochet’s legacy is a reminder that the law might some day catch up with the evidence. '

Amy Ross

Congressional Briefing on Iraq Casualties

The authors of the Lancet report on Iraq casualties, along with this ephemeral servant, will be testifying before a bipartisan group in Congress on Monday, December 11 from 10-12 am. My understanding is that it will be carried by C-Span.

Talabani rejects ISG Report
Sunni Gunmen Kill Shiite family in Baghdad

My editorial in Sunday's Mercury News treated the issue of the US talking to Syria and Iran about the crisis in Iraq, as the Iraq Study Group urged.

Excerpt:

' Baker said of Syria, ``There is a strong indication they would be in a position to help us and might want to help us.'' The initial response from Syria was in fact positive. Syria's vice president said Wednesday that both his country and its ally Iran are prepared to help. Referring to his nation and Iran, Syrian Vice President Farouq al-Sharaa said, ``The two countries are Iraq's neighbors, and without getting them involved it will not be easy to find a solution to the predicament in Iraq.'' He added, speaking to a conference in Damascus, ``We are not so arrogant to say that Syria and Iran can solve Iraq's problem . . . The entire international community may not be able to solve it. But let them (the Americans) be a little bit modest and accept whoever has the capability to help.''

Syria has an 800-mile border with Iraq. Some of the estimated 1,300 foreign devotees of anti-American jihad in Iraq have slipped across that border. It is not clear that the secular Baath Arab nationalist regime in Damascus is actively encouraging wild-eyed Sunni fundamentalists. But it likely could do a better job of policing key border crossings if it had an incentive. Syria also is in a position to mediate between the United States and the remnants of the Iraqi Baath high command, who are responsible for much more of Iraq's violence than the newly minted Al-Qaida wannabes of Ramadi and Tikrit.

Washington is at odds with Damascus not only over Iraq, but also on two other fronts. Syria is a major ally of Lebanon's militant Shiite party, Hezbollah, and stands accused of having allowed Iran to provide the latter with missiles and other weaponry for use against Israel. It has also been accused of complicity in a string of assassinations against anti-Syrian politicians in Lebanon, most notably former prime minister Rafiq Hariri. Syria also supports the Palestinians in their dispute with Israel.

Baker, who co-chaired the Iraq Study Group (ISG), argued that such disputes should not forestall ``tough'' negotiations with Syria and Iran, noting that the United States kept talking to the Soviet Union even during the darkest days of the Cold War. Moreover, the group's report is not advocating that the United States capitulate on any of these major outstanding issues. In fact, the Baker-Hamilton commission insists that the investigation of Hariri's assassination must be vigorously pursued.

What would Syria get out of such cooperation? As the ISG report notes, it is not in Syria's interest for Iraq to collapse into warring sectarian and ethnic factions. Syria, a country of 19 million, is itself an ethnic mosaic, with 2 million Kurds, and significant Alawi Shiite and Christian populations, despite a Sunni majority. The secular, Arab nationalist Baath government is run largely by Alawis, who adhere to a form of folk Shiism. The main challengers to the regime have been fundamentalist Sunni organizations of a sort now establishing themselves in western and northern Iraq. A breakup of Iraq would potentially roil Syria's ethnic groups as well.

The commission urges that Israel restore to Syria the disputed Golan Heights, as a way of bringing the Damascus regime in from the cold. Israel captured the territory in 1967, but the United Nations charter forbids the permanent acquisition of a neighbor's territory through warfare. Settling the dispute between Israel and its Arab neighbors, the commission argues, is necessary to the achievement of genuine stability in the region, including Iraq.

The ISG is certainly correct that Syria will never accept the permanent loss of the Golan Heights, and that its return is a necessary condition for a normalization of the situation in the Middle East. The prospect of such a settlement would give Syria further incentive to cooperate on Iraq. It could not hope to get the Golan back, however, without making very substantial concessions to Israel and giving up its sponsorship of violent Palestinian groups. It would also have to agree not to re-arm Hezbollah in Lebanon. '

I also discuss the Iranian dimension.

Jalal Talabani lashed out at the Iraq Study Group report on Sunday. Talabani represented himself as being upset about the plan to embed US troops in Iraqi army units. But I believe that is only a pretext for his real objection. The report supports a relatively strong central government with central control of oil resources, which would be a threat to Kurdish plans for virtual independence from Baghdad.

The Mail and Guardian also says,

' On Sunday, up to 30 armed gunmen killed nine members of two Shi'ite families in the western Jihad neighbourhood, along the route to Baghdad's airport. The daylight attack came a day after claims that Shi'ite militias raided the mixed suburb of Hurriya, forcing dozens of Sunni families to flee into the neighbouring Amil district. '

Reuters reports political violence in Iraq on Sunday:

' BAGHDAD - A total of 40 bodies -- many of them shot and tortured -- were found across Baghdad on Saturday . . .

BAGHDAD - Shi'ite militias attacked Sunni homes in Baghdad's religiously mixed Hurriya district on Saturday, Interior Ministry officials and witnesses said. More than 30 families fled after the militias torched homes and killed at least one person, witnesses and officials said. . .

RABIA - A suicide bomber driving a pick-up truck rammed his vehicle into a parking of fuel trucks, setting four oil trucks on fire, police said.

RAMADI - Gunmen attacked a residential district with mortar rounds, wounding three people in the city of Ramadi, 110 km (68 miles) west of Baghdad, police said. '

Sudarsan Raghavan at WaPo says that Sunni Arab minorities in mixed Sunni-Shiite Baghdad districts are being ethnically cleansed by the Mahdi Army. He says that Shiites are moving into traditionally Sunni West Baghdad.

Moves are afoot to dump Nuri al-Maliki as prime minister in Iraq. Since he does not actually have a majority in parliament, it would be relatively easy to do if enough blocs are willing to ally.

On Sunday, Muqtada al-Sadr lashed out at Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki for ruling in a high-handed fashion. He said that Maliki shouldn't have met with Bush, and that he should have submitted the plan for a UN extension of the Coalition mandate in Iraq to parliament for approval. He called again for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.

8 Killed, 44 wounded in Karbala Bombing
Sunni Guerrillas break off Talks with US

First-rate Iraq historian Sarah Shields argues that Iraq is not having a civil war so much as it is living through the consequences of the US having destroyed its functioning state. I agree with her that the framework for the fighting was set by Rumsfeld/Cheney/Bush policies in Iraq. But you could say that and still admit that they are now fighting a civil war. The latter is a social science question, not a moral judgment. Avoiding the appearance of a moral judgment of a negative sort that might attach also to the US effort is also the reason that the Right won't call it a civil war.


Alissa J. Rubin of the LA Times argues that Iran has won the Iraq War in a big way, and is now feeling invulnerable as a result of the ISG report.

(See my piece on this issue at Salon.com from July, 2005.)

Iran's foreign minister offered to help the US in Iraq, as long as the US leaves Iraq. Well, somebody should see us off when we go.

The London Times says that secret US talks with leaders of the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement, who have inflicted substantial damage on the US military, have been broken off by the guerrillas. That is really too bad. Only successful parleys with the enemy can end a war short of military victory, which seems pretty elusive.

The Iraqi government is putting the final touches on petroleum legislation, which will allow contracts to be signed by the oil majors. Up until now, legal uncertainties kept them away. My guess is that James Baker crafted the Iraq Study Group report so as to have the least possible negative impact on such petroleum negotiations.

The NYT has done another story about how the Iraqi military is selling the weapons given it by the US on the black market, basically helping arm the guerrillas.

On Sunday morning, according to Reuters, sectarian violence got off to a good start:

' BAGHDAD - Shi'ite militias attacked Sunni homes in Baghdad's religiously mixed Hurriya district on Saturday, Interior Ministry officials and witnesses said. More than 30 families fled after the militias torched homes and killed at least one person, witnesses and officials said.

BAGHDAD - A total of 40 bodies -- many of them shot and tortured -- were found across Baghdad on Saturday, an Interior Ministry source said.
'

Read the whole report.

On Saturday, 8 people were killed and 44 wounded when a car bomb was detonated in a market in the Shiite holy city of Karbala.

Reuters reports that on Saturday:

' BAGHDAD - Mortar rounds killed two people and wounded at least three when they landed on Baghdad's Shi'ite district of Kadhimiya, police sources said. '

Karbala is a prime religious symbol for Shiites, and we have already seen what the destruction of the Askariya Shrine in Samarra has done to promote sectarian violence on a vast scale. Bombings in Karbala are very, very scary.

Now we have an Iraq syndrome. These syndromes would not be necessary if US political elites could just remember one simple rule: No long drawn-out Asian land wars, please.

US Air Strike on Thar Thar
British/Danish Raid on Militias in Basra

The US military had a firefight on Friday in Ishaqi in Thar Thar, then troops on the ground called in air strikes on two houses used by the guerrillas. Twenty Iraqis were killed, including two women, according to the US. Local Iraqi police insisted that the houses belonged to civilian families and that children had been killed. The US denied it. At least one AP photograph does appear to show the
corpse of a child.

Aljazeera actually carried the American account* of the incident by Captain Frank Pasqual, along with a report on local assertions that 7 children were killed. I don't know if this coverage resulted from the US military trying harder with the Arabic press or from a change in policy at Aljazeera, which has usually tilted toward sympathy for what it calls the Sunni Arab resistance to occupation in Iraq, such that it seldom gave the American side.

Aljazeera says that local Iraqis in Ishaqi maintain that the US troops had entered the houses and killed people, then called down the air strikes to destroy the evidence.

The LA Times reports that 1,000 British and Danish troops conducted a raid on Friday in Basra on tribal/militia leaders involved in smuggling petroleum. Five houses were raided and weapons caches were found. One of the targets was said to be Sheikh Kadhim Abid Ali Batti, a chief of the Marsh Arab Karamisha (Garamsha) tribe, which is allied with the Mahdi Army of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. This was the largest military ooperation in the city since the 2003 invasion. The Sadr Movement vowed reprisal attacks.

Basra is the key export point for Iraqi petroleum, but has been plagued this year by militia and tribal violence. The militias and Marsh Arabs smuggle petroleum and fight turf wars with one another about it. It is not an exaggeration to say that unless security can be restored to Basra, and unless its militias and feuding clans can be brought under control, Iraq itself has a dim future.

Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani vehemently rejected the Iraq Study Group report on Friday. He especially took umbrage at the Baker-Hamilton positions that the referendum on the future of Kirkuk should be postponed, and that the Kurds should share the revenues from oil fields found in the future with the rest of Iraq.

Al-Hayat reports on Friday sermons in Iraq responding to the ISG report. Sunni cleric Shaikh Mahmud al-Sumaydaie of the Umm al-Qura Mosque in Baghdad said that thereby it is sought to solve the American crisis in Iraq but not to resolve the Iraq problem. He said that the problem is Iraqi on Iraqi, and the solution must be the same. He called on the government to do something about the mortar attacks on civilian (Sunni) neighborhoods in Baghdad.

In Najaf, Shaikh Sadr al-Din al-Qubanji of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq said that "the battle among Iraqis today is not sectarian but rather political." He urged that the small groups who felt themselves harmed by the overthrow of the Baath Party, and who had bet on sectarian warfare, be crushed. If that is done, he said, Iraq will emerge successful from its travails. He said that the solution depended on Iraqi political will and could not come from outside. He called for "political justice for all the sects, such that it is impossible that the majority should dominate the minority, or the minority the majority."

He rejected the ISG report's call for changes in the Iraqi constitution, saying that Iraqis drafted it and 12 million out of 15 million voters voted for it.

He did, however, praise the ISG recommendations as "reasonable" and admitted that they are congruent with Iraqi realities.

In Karbala, Shiite cleric Sayyid Ahmad al-Safi, a representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, said that the complicated problems of Iraq could only be resolved by its people, and that no solution could come from the outslide. He complained that political competition like that in Iraq happens in most of the countries of the world, but other people don't resort to killing and ethnic cleansing to achieve political goals. He called on the government to impose its sovereignty on the country.

In Najaf, one of the 4 Grand Ayatollahs spoke out. Muhammad Sa`id al-Hakim said that neighboring countries must forget the painful past for the sake of living together peacefully. In this way, peace and prosperity would encompass the region. He warned that "The problems will not remain confined within Iraq, but rather will produce a spark that will burn others." He said that the parties to the fighting must accept current reality and must deal with it responsibly.

Sa`id al-Hakim said that there is a sect that forms a tiny minority, but which nevertheless has survived government attempts to wipe it out. If that is so, he said, what is the solution when the Shiites, who are a majority, have been the victims of persecution.

Reuters reports political violence in Iraq on Friday. Major incidents:

' BAGHDAD - Police said they found 18 bodies dumped in different areas of Baghdad, all with gunshot wounds and many with signs of torture . . .

BAGHDAD - Four people were killed and eight wounded in a mortar attack on the religiously mixed Naharwan neighbourhood in southeastern Baghdad . . .

BAGHDAD - One person was killed and three wounded when gunmen attacked a crowd in the religiously mixed area of Amil in southwestern Baghdad . . .

TAL AFAR - A car bomb targeting an Iraqi army checkpoint in the town of Tal Afar . . . killed three civilians and wounded 15 people . . .'

Out of 1000 employees at the US embassy in Baghdad, only 6 are fluent in Arabic and only 33 know the language at all. If Iraq really was the central front in the "war on terror," and if the Bush administration really was fighting extremist "ideologies" (typically expressed in language and culture), then wouldn't you expect US officials there to know the language? I don't mean to take anything away from the foreign service professionals serving our country under dangerous circumstances. I just can't imagine what their superiors are thinking.
----

*The Aljazeera web link originally provided was incorrect, but I did see Pasqual on Aljazeera talking about Ishaqi.

Bush/Shiites vs. Baker/Saudis?

In my article today at Salon.com, "Will Bush choose his new friends over his old? points out that "The president's Shiite allies in Iraq really don't like some of James Baker's Sunni-friendly suggestions."

By the time the Iraq Study Group report was released, everyone seemed to have forgotten about the previous week of diplomacy between Bush and the two leading Shiite politicians in Iraq. I argue that Bush's Shiite clients contribute to his policy-making.

Bush Sets Preconditions for Iran, Syria;
Senators Critique ISG

At a news conference with Tony Blair, George W. Bush basically blew off the Iraq Study Group's recommendation that he talk to Syria and Iran without preconditions. Excerpts:

' "Having an international group is an interesting idea," Bush said.

"We have made it clear to the Iranians that there is a possible change in U.S. policy, a policy that's been in place for 27 years," said Bush. "And that is that, if they would like to engage the United States, that they've got to verifiably suspend their [nuclear] enrichment program."

The Bush administration suspects Iran of using its nuclear program to develop weapons. Tehran insists its program is for peaceful purposes only.

As for Syria, Bush said Damascus should "stop destabilizing" Lebanon's government. "If they want to sit down at the table with the United States, it's easy," Bush said. "Just make some decisions that'll lead to peace, not to conflict." '

In other words, Bush wants compromise before negotiation, and virtual submission to Washington as a prerequisite even for talks. Same old W.

Bush and Blair seemed to agree with the ISG assertion that it is necessary, in order to get the Middle East to settle down, to get the Israeli-Palestinian peace process started again. The main engine driving hatred of the United States in the Arab and Muslim worlds is Washington's knee-jerk support for Israeli crushing of the Palestinians as a people. Under Israeli hegemony, half of Palestinians are now food-insecure (including children), and unemployment is 40 percent in Gaza (in the West Bank it is only Great Depression territory-- 25 percent). Plantation owners in the 19th century treated their slaves better than the Israelis treat the Palestinians under their control in the Occupied Territories. Unlike American television, Arab television daily shows readers what is happening in Palestine, and the anger spreads.

Thomas Ricks reports that some senators were highly critical of the Iraq Study Group report as they took testimony from co-chairs James A. Baker III and Lee Hamilton.

Hamilton at one point let them have it, asking where the senators have been the last three and a half years. The US constitution gives them advise and consent authority over warmaking, which that august body hasn't bothered to exercise for decades.

Shorter Joe Lieberman: Iran is bad.

Shorter John McCain: Whaddaya mean we don't have more troops to put in there?

Shorter Hillary Rodham Clinton: But how can you make W. do it?

Shorter James Baker: 16 years ago I convinced Syria to invade Iraq on our side, what makes you think I can't do it again?

I saw McCain on television the other day uttering some nonsense about Iran seeking hegemony in the region for the last 1,000 years. There hasn't even consistently been an Iran over that kind of timeline. Nation states like Iran always claim ancient patrimonies, but they are actually mostly modern phenomena. In the 800s, the Abbasid Empire, an Arab dynasty based in Baghdad, ruled what is now Iran. In the 900s and 1000s, the Buyid Empire based in Iran invaded what is now Iraq and ruled both the Mesopotamian valley and the Iranian plateau. Then you have a Turkic Central Asian empire like the Seljuks. And what about the Mongol Empire, which included both Baghdad and the Iranian plateau in the 1200s and 1300s? Making up an eternal Iran that is always an aggressor seeking hegemony is just an exercise in historical whimsy. In fact, even modern Iran has not aggressively invaded another country for two centuries.

Senators should please not misuse history for mere politics.

As for McCain's bizarre idea that an extra division would make any difference in Iraq, or that we have an extra army division to send there for any length of time, that is pure politics. He thinks he will get to be president peddling these fantasies.

As for Iran, here is what foreign minister Manucher Mottaki had to say:

' Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki says his country is "in a position" to help end the cycle of violence which he blames on the US. . . Mottaki says Iran is in a position to "finalize" [i.e. "end"] the crisis in Iraq but says the US will have to ask. And he says his government wants to see action, specifically a change of policy, and not just hear words. . .'

Sounds to me a lot like what W. said about Iran.

As for the real Iraq, Reuters reported several major incidents of violence-- including the blowing up by guerrillas of 5 US GIs near Kirkuk in the north on Wednesday. Altogether the US death toll for Wednesday was 11.

10 US Troops Killed, Dozens of Iraqis

While US politicians were mesmerized by the Iraq Study Group report, the Iraqis went on with their bloody civil war. See the next entry for the hyperlink.

AFP reports on responses to Baker-Hamilton by Iraqi politicians. The main concern seems to be a) that the US will pressure them using threats of withdrawal and b) that the US will actually withdraw and leave them embroiled in a civil war.

Iraqi guerrillas killed 10 US troops on Wednesday, among the largest one-day totals in the past three years.

Reuters reports major civil war violence in Iraq on Wednesday. The usual daily harvest of some 60 bodies showed up in the streets of the capital, and there were several deadly mortar attacks and bombings.

Iran is already pledging a lot of help to Iraq, whether it ends up talking to the Americans or not.

Arab Reaction to the ISG Report

The USG Open Source Center translates and analyzes the pan-Arab media on the Baker-Hamilton report:

' FYI -- Pan-Arab Media Treatment of Baker-Hamilton Study Group Report on Iraq
Middle East -- OSC Report
Wednesday, December 6, 2006 T19:38:34Z

Doha Al-Jazirah Satellite Channel Television in Arabic, independent television station financed by the Qatari Government, and Dubai Al-Arabiyah Television, an independent television station financed by Arab businessmen, from 1400 GMT to 2000 GMT on 6 December have been observed to highlight the Baker-Hamilton report and relevant reactions as follows:

Al-Jazirah Television

Al-Jazirah Television at 1602 GMT on 6 December begins a live coverage from Washington of the announcement of the recommendations by Iraq Study Group on the US Administration's policy in Iraq. The live relay shows Lee Hamilton and James Baker, co-chairmen of the committee, and other members of the committee making statements to the press, with A-Jazirah Television providing simultaneous translation into Arabic. The live relay ends at 1639 GMT.

At 1640 GMT, Al-Jazirah Television anchorman Hasan Jammul in Doha studios conducts a live satellite interview with Wajd Waqfi, Al-Jazirah Television correspondent in Washington, who reads part of the committee's findings.

At 1624 GMT, Al-Jazirah anchorman Hasan Jammul conducts a live satellite interview with Dr Imad Fawzi al-Shu'aybi, director of the Center for Strategic Data and Studies, in Damascus.

Asked about the Syrian stand toward the recommendation of the Baker-Hamilton report to hold dialogue with Iran and Syria, Al-Shu'aybi says that based on his experience with and knowledge of the US strategic thinking, "the Americans now know that they should start talking to Syria. They admit, according to what James Baker and Hamilton said in the press conference, that there can be no solution without dialogue with Syria and Iran."

Commenting on Baker's remarks to the effect that Syria will accept dialogue with the United States and might also accept to meet US demands in return for this dialogue, Al-Shu'aybi says: "I agree with you on the first part. Syria will accept dialogue because it calls for dialogue. But definitely, and in my opinion and based on my knowledge of the Syrian policy, I can say that the Syrians will never accept the policy of concessions and demands. Since the fall of Baghdad, Syria has been facing demands and experienced the so-called 2005 adversity. Yet, it did not respond to demands since they were a continuous series of concessions, which never stopped."

At 1647 GMT, Hasan Jammul conducts a live satellite interview with Dr Hasan Kuni, a former Turkish national security adviser, in Istanbul. Kuni speaks in English with simultaneous translation into Arabic. Asked about Baker-Hamilton committee's recommendation for a dialogue with Iraq neighbors to arrive at a security solution, Dr Kuni says that this recommendation is "a little bit late." He says that "Turkey, in order to resolve the northern Iraq problem, has already started talking to Syria and Iraq almost one year ago. The Americans and the Israeli circles in Washington were blaming Prime Minister Erdogan for making contacts with the Syrians and the Iranians. Now, a year later, they tell us they want to do the same. Whether it is late or early, this is a good start, if they really want to resolve problems on the regional level. They should start doing that now."

At 1649 GMT, Jammul conducts a live satellite interview with Urayb al-Rantawi, director of Jerusalem Center for Studies, in Amman. Asked about Baker-Hamilton recommendations which say that the Iraqi Government should assume a bigger responsibility to end violence and whether these recommendations constitute some sort of pressure on the Iraqi Government, Al-Rantawi says: "Undoubtedly, there is a message in this report to Al-Maliki Government or any other Iraqi government that may be formed in the future."

"However, to blame the Iraqi governments, which were formed after the occupation, for the deterioration of the conditions in Iraq," Al-Rantawi adds, "is, I believe, another manifestation of the US failure in Iraq. As stated, the report used the expression success instead of victory, but success is a soft diplomatic expression for the US failure in Iraq. The United States is looking for scapegoats to blame for the failure of its scheme in Iraq."

Al-Rantawi says that the Baker-Hamilton report notes that the Shiite Badr and Al-Sadr militias are committing "murder against civilians." He adds: "These militias are represented in this government, and Al-Maliki government continues to be in office with the parliamentary majority of these militias. They are part of the problem, and not part of the solution. It is time to put things right and to clarify matters, and I believe that Baker-Hamilton report has covered a good distance on that road."

At 1652 GMT, Jammul interviews live via satellite from Washington David Newton, a former US ambassador to Iraq. Newton, speaking in English with simultaneous translation into Arabic, says that the "the aim of the report is to arrive at a strategy for the future and not to blame this or that party." Newton says that other US agencies are now conducting other studies on the situation in Iraq.

At 1654 GMT, Al-Jazirah TV interviews via satellite from London Dr Ghassan al-Atiyah, director of the Iraqi Institute for Development and Democracy. He says that "the Baker-Hamilton report has succeeded to a large extent in portraying the crisis in Iraq," adding that the commission should have put forward "practical steps" to tackle the points raised in the report. He notes that national reconciliation in Iraq can be achieved through a dialogue in which all Iraqi sects participate.

At 1658 GMT, Al-Jazirah interviews again Hasan Kuni. Asked if the Baker-Hamilton Commission's recommendations regarding the Iraqi security file will help prevent a civil war in Iraq, Kuni notes that the US forces plan to remain in Iraq until 2008 and "after that they will train the Iraqi forces to fight against other Iraqis. This will not solve any problem in Iraq and there will be more fighting and loss of lives."

At 1701 GMT, Al-Jazirah interviews via satellite from Tehran Muhammad Ali Muhtadi, expert at the Middle East Studies Center. Commenting on the Baker-Hamilton Commission's recommendation that calls on the United States to hold a dialogue with Iran to settle the Iraqi crisis, Muhtadi notes that the Iranian role in the region cannot be ignored, adding that "no one in Iran is against dialogue, in principle. However, there is much skepticism in Tehran regarding the United States' credibility and intentions as it announces something and does something else. I fear that the Baker-Hamilton Commission's report is part of a new US scenario in the region to rid of the Iraqi crisis."
At 1703 GMT, Al-Jazirah interviews again David Newton. Asked if the Democratic members of the Baker-Hamilton Commission showed more enthusiasm for holding dialogue with Iran and Syria than the Republicans, Newton says: "Yes. This is not a strange thing because the Republicans in the commission are more sympathetic with the President's efforts and have no intention to embarrass him." He says that the US training of Iraqi soldiers to assume security command in Iraq will be useless if these soldiers "continue to behave on behalf of one side or another" after they finish their training.
At 1704 GMT, Urayb al-Rantawi is interviewed again. Asked if it possible for the US Administration to adopt a recommendation by the Baker-Hamilton Commission calling for "some sort of punishment" for the Iraqi Government if it fails to control the security situation in Iraq, Al-Rantawi says that the Iraqi Government has already failed in maintaining security in Iraq, wondering if the United State is ready to engage in a serious dialogue with Iran and Syrian in a bid to settle the Iraqi security crisis.
At 1708 GMT, Al-Jazirah conducts a telephone interview with Salih al-Fayyad, member of the Iraqi Council of Representatives for the Unified Iraqi Coalition, from Baghdad.

Asked if the Baker-Hamilton report highlighted real problems facing Iraq, Al-Fayyad says that the Iraqis welcome all efforts that are in line with the Iraqi cause.

Al-Arabiyah Television

Dubai Al-Arabiyah Channel in Arabic leads its 1500 GMT newscast with a report on Bush's meeting with members of the Iraq study group "which handed him its report on means of resolving the Iraqi crisis". The report cites Bush referring to the report as "a tough assessment" and that he will deal with it "very seriously". The video report shows Bush giving statements in reaction to the report. Following this factual report, Al-Arabiyah anchor notes that the Hamilton report "includes 79 non-binding recommendation." The station interviews its correspondent in Washington who says that Bush termed the report as tough because "it includes conditions which he dislikes like" like communicating with Iran and Syria. He adds that this report "included painful points to President Bush and, at the same time, Bush cannot resist all these points, especially since they gained the consensus of the Republicans and democrats." He adds that "the American people are fed-up with this issue (Iraq) and want to see an end to it not to mention that the democrats and Republicans don't want this issue to be a subject of debate in the 2008 election campaigns."

The station interrupts its newscast at 1602 GMT to carry live the news conference by the Baker-Hamilton Committee. As the live relay continues, the station highlights statements made in the news conference as screen captions like the following:

"The cost of the war on Iraq has reached $350 billion."

"Iran and Syria have big influence in the region"

"If we don't talk with the Iranians, then we will not achieve the required success"

"The situation in Iraq is very serious and the mission is very difficult"

Al-Arabiyah ends its live relay of the news conference at 1639.

At 1643 GMT, Al-Arabiyah carries a five-minute telephone interview with Iraqi Deputy Iyad Jamal al-Din, in Damascus; followed by an interview, via satellite, with Al-Arabiyah's adviser on US affairs, Hisham Milhim, in Washington.

Commenting on the Baker-Hamilton report, Jamal al-Din says that "the report reveals an inaccurate understanding of the position of the Iraqi Government. The problem of the Iraqi Government is that it is called a national unity government, but it does not truly express Iraqi national unity which is something tangible." He adds "insisting on achieving security progress by the Iraqi Government means increasing the division in Iraq. The problem in Iraq is a political one. Unless we form a real national unity government, then any support or progress by the government might or will definitely increase the division in Iraq."

Commenting on the report, Milhim argues that " if most or the main parts of these recommendations are adopted, then this will lead to a drastic change in the current US position on Iraq and will make President Bush give up a big part of his current strategy in Iraq."

Milhim maintains that the most important recommendations call on the United States to embark on an "immediate political and diplomatic initiative that involves all of Iraq's neighbors to produce an international formula for holding dialogue with Iran and Syria. He adds that the report also "casts doubts on Iran's readiness for a serious dialogue with the United States on Iraq."

He adds that the Iraqi political process followed "sacred dates" which have now placed the Americans and Iraqis in "a predicament". He argues that the political process is done, but building state institutions has not been completed yet. He maintains that "there is a vacuum in state institutions. Even the army and the police have not been built in a clear form." He concludes by calling for a regional conference "to help Iraqis correct and reinstate balance to the political process which is no longer exists in Iraq." He notes that unless this happen, then " we shall witness very serious days."

Al-Arabiyah leads its 1700 GMT newscast with a factual report on the Hamilton-Baker report followed by a telephone interview wi th Jaw ad al-Hindawi, ambassador at the Iraqi Foreign Ministry. Commenting on the report, he says that "the report included recommendations for the US Administration and not decisions. This administration is till in the stage of studying, analyzing, and meeting in order to set a new strategy in Iraq. The administration has realized at a late stage many basic facts to emerge from the conflict in Iraq and the region. Among these facts is failure of the military option and the need to return to diplomacy, international legitimacy, and international cooperation to solve conflicts." The second fact is the need to support the Iraqi government politically and militarily. The third fact is supporting Iraqi national dialogue on joint interest. The fourth fact is dealing positively with regional conflicts like the Arab-Israeli conflict. '

Reprint Edn.: 10 Things Congress Should Demand on Iraq

In the light of the issuance of the Iraq Study Group report, I thought readers might be interested in comparing it with the 10 suggestions I made in August of 2005 for a course change in Iraq. Alas, I no longer think that the US military can plausibly play the role I suggested for it below, and I had no idea of how vicious the civil war could get with nighttime death squads. They don't need set piece battles to kill 60 a day in the streets of Baghdad. But, it seems to me that these suggestions track pretty well with those of the Baker-Hamilton commission.


"1) US ground troops should be withdrawn ASAP from urban areas as a first step. Iraqi police will just have to do the policing. We are no good at it. If local militias take over, that is the Iraqi government's problem. The prime minister will have to either compromise with the militia leaders or send in other Iraqi militias to take them on. Who runs Iraqi cities can no longer be a primary concern of the US military. Our troops are warriors, not traffic cops.

2) In the second phase of withdrawal, most US ground troops would steadily be brought out of Iraq.

3) For as long as the elected Iraqi government wanted it, the US would offer the new Iraqi military and security forces close air support in any firefight they have with guerrilla or other rebellious forces. (I.e. we would replicate our tactics in Afghanistan of providing the air force for the Northern Alliance infantry and cavalry.) I concede that this tactic will get some US Blackhawks shot down from time to time, and won't be painless. But it could prevent the outbreak of fullscale war. This way of proceeding, which was opened up by the Afghanistan War of 2001-2002, and which depends on smart weapons and having allies on the ground, is the major difference between today and the Vietnam era, when dumb bombs (and even carpet bombing) couldn't have been deployed effectively to ensure the enemy did not take or hold substantial territory. [I am not advocating bombing civilian neighborhoods of cities; I am talking about intervening in set-piece battles of the sort that will become possible in the absence of US ground troops.]

4) With the agreement of the elected Iraqi government, the US would prevent any guerrilla force from fielding any large number of fighters for set piece battles. Such large units of militiamen attempting to march from Anbar on Baghdad, e.g., would be destroyed by AC-130s and other US air weaponry suitable to this purpose. This tactic cannot prevent the current campaign of car bombings, but it can stop a full-scale Lebanon or Afghanistan-style civil war from erupting.

5) In addition to the service of its air forces, the US would offer targeted military aid to ensure the stability of the Iraqi government. It would help protect key political figures from assassination, and it would give the Iraqi government help in preventing pipeline sabotage so as to increase Iraqi petroleum revenues and strengthen the new government.

6) The US would help rapidly build an Iraqi armor corps. The new Iraqi military's lack of tanks is almost certainly because the US is afraid they might be turned on US troops in a crisis. Once US ground troops are out, there is no reason not to let the Iraqi military just import a lot of tanks and train the new Iraqi army in using them.

7) The US should demand as a quid pro quo for further help that elections in Iraq henceforward be held on a district basis so as to ensure proper representation in parliament for the Sunni Arab provinces. This step is necessary if there is to be any hope of drawing the Sunni Arab political elites into the new government.

8) The US should demand as a quid pro quo for further help that the Iraqi government announce an amnesty for all former Baath Party members who cannot be proven to have committed serious crimes, including crimes against humanity. Former Baathists who have been fired from the schools and civil bureaucracy must be reinstated, and no further firings are to take place. (This step is key in convincing the old Sunni Arab elites that they won't be screwed over in the new Iraq.)

9) Congress must rewrite the laws governing US reconstruction aid to Iraq so as to take out provisions that Iraqis must where possible use US companies or materiel. All of the reconstruction money should go directly to Iraqi firms, so as to help jump-start the economy.

10) The US should join the regular meetings of the foreign ministers of Iraq's neighbors, with Condi Rice in attendance, along with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, employing a 6 + 2 diplomatic track to help put Iraq back on its feet through diplomacy and multilateral aid. This step will require that the Bush administration cease threatening regularly to bomb Tehran or to overthrow the governments of Syria and Iran. For the sake of getting out of Iraq without a world-class economic disaster, the US will just have to deal with the real world, which contains Iran and Syria. The US is now a Middle Eastern Power, not just a New World one, and as such it needs to use Iraq's neighbors to calm their clients within Iraq. This goal cannot be achieved through simple intimidation, more especially since, with half of all fighting units bogged down in Iraq, the US is in no position to follow through on its threats and everyone knows it.

I can't guarantee that these steps will resolve the crisis in the short or even medium term. But I do think that, if taken together, they would allow us to get the ground troops out without risking a big civil war or a destabilization of the Middle East. Once Iraq can stand on its own feet, I am quite sure that the Grand Ayatollah in Najaf will just give a fatwa for complete US withdrawal, and the US will have to acquiesce, as it did in similar circumstances in the Philippines."

Regional Conference Prepared
Iraqi Military to Assume control within a year
Gates Confirmed

The US now has a secretary of defense who knows that we are not winning in Iraq, who wants to do something about it, and who doesn't think nuking Iran is just a dandy idea. Although his involvement in Iran-Contra dogged Robert Gates in the build-up to the confirmation hearings, it did not emerge as a big issue. It may be that by now having a SecDef who once was involved in selling US weapons to Khomeini and who therefore has a potential back channel to leaders in Tehran, is not seen as such a bad thing. Let's see if Gates can finally redeem university presidents who enter high federal office, after Woodrow Wilson gave them a bad name.

The Arab League called Tuesday for a regional conference within 4 months to attempt to resolve Iraq's crisis. Its members also called on the Iraqi government to dissolve all militias, and to curb Iranian interference in the country.

In the aftermath, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki climbed down from his previous reticence on the idea of a regional conference. He had recently rejected a similar proposal by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. He sent envoys to neighboring countries to begin preparing for it. He thus appeared to be over-ruling political allies such as Shiite cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and (Kurdish) Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, both of whom have said that Iraq can resolve its own problems.

Western reporting on the new support for the regional conference in Baghdad tended not to link it to the Arab League decisions, though they seem to me to be central to the about-face.

AP reports that the US military in Iraq says that by next fall, Iraqi troops will be responsible for all 18 provinces in the country and control of all 10 Iraqi army divisions will be in the hands of the Iraqi government. This accelerated timetable came as a result of al-Maliki's discussions with Bush in Amman last week.

Reuters reports civil war violence in Iraq on Tuesday. Major incidents:

' BAGHDAD - Three car bombs near a fuel station killed 16 people and wounded 25 in the southwestern Bayaa district of Baghdad, police said.

BAGHDAD - Gunmen ambushed a bus carrying employees for the Shi'ite Endowment, a religious body that oversees Shi'ite mosques, in northern Baghdad, killing 14 people and wounding four, the organisation said. An Interior Ministry source said 15 were killed and seven wounded in the attack in Qahira district.

BAGHDAD - Insurgents attacked a U.S. patrol on Monday, killing one U.S. soldier and wounding five others in northeastern Baghdad, the U.S. military said. '

There were several other attacks in the capital. In Ramadi, dozens are said to have died in clashes between Iraqi security forces and local Sunni Arab guerrillas. The Iraqi police chief claimed that 68 guerrillas were killed but mentioned no casualties among the security forces, which is not plausible.

A spokesman for the Saudi Interior Ministry expressed concern on Tuesday that jihadis who fight in Iraq and recruit Saudi young men for the battle are coming back to Saudi Arabia and becoming a threat to the country's security.

Al-Hayat reports that its sources in Washington are saying that Iraqi Shiite cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim brought with him a letter from the government of Iran for Bush, when he met with the president on Monday.

Al-Hakim: US Troops Should Stay;
Urges harsher Measures against Sunni Guerrillas

Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that Iraqi Shiite cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim for the first time expressed his opposition to the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, after his meeting with US Secretary of State Condi Rice. He said that the Iraqi government wants US troops to stay, and appreciates their sacrifices for Iraqi liberty, but would like more responsibility given to Iraqi officials and the Iraqi military forces.

Al-Hakim urged Bush to hit the Sunni Arab guerrillas harder. Since the US forces in Iraq are mainly fighting Sunni Arab guerrillas, it is hard to imagine what al-Hakim imagines could further be done. Despite his ecumenical speeches in Sunni Jordan last summer, al-Hakim frequently urges a hard line against the "neo-Baathists" and militant Salafi revivalists,i.e., the Sunni Arabs of Iraq.

Al-Hakim is the leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shiite fundamentalist organization founded in Tehran in 1982 when many Iraqi Shiite activists had sought Ayatollah Khomeini's protection from Saddam Hussein. He spent over 20 years in Iran.

Al-Zaman's Cairo sources also say that the Arab League is about to propose a multi-country conference on Iraq. The Arab League members are largely Sunni and have had rocky relations with the Shiite and Kurdis leadership of post-Saddam Iraq.

The LA Times reports that al-Hakim again rejected the notion of talks involving Iraq's neighbors as a way of helping resolve the political violence. Al-Hakim takes this stance because he knows that if the neighbors have a say, it will empower Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other Sunni regimes. At the moment, Iran has a commanding position in Iraq, because of its influence with the ruling Shiite bloc. Al-Hakim sees no reason for Tehran to give up that position to Riyadh.

Al-Hayat's sources in Washington say that al-Hakim's discussions with Bush focused on how to strengthen the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, and what to do about young Shiite firebrand Muqtada al-Sadr.

Reuters reports that Iraqi authorities found 52 bodies in the capital on Monday. Seven bodies showed up in the northern city of Mosul, which also witnessed violence between the Iraqi guerrillas and the new Iraqi military.

I did two radio interviews on al-Hakim's visit to Washington on Monday. One was with Michele Kelemen at NPR's All Things Considered (this page has an audio file);

and with Sam Seder at Air America's "Majority Report".

Talabani, Hakim Reject Int'l Conference
9 GIs Killed

The US military announced that Sunni Arab guerrillas have killed 9 GIs in Baghdad and al-Anbar over the weekend.

AP says that 71 bodies were found in Baghdad and other cities on Sunday.

AP also reports that President Jalal Talabani, Foreign Minister Barham Salih, and leader of the United Iraqi Alliance Abdul Aziz al-Hakim have all rejected United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan's call for an international conference on Iraq. Talabani said, "We are an independent and a sovereign nation and it is we who decide the fate of the nation . . ."

If Talabani can decide the fate of Iraq, he should please go ahead and do it. It looks pretty out of control to the rest of us, and we don't think he's in a position to turn down Annan's offer of help. In fact there is something sinister about the top Kurdish and Shiite leaders rejecting an international conference that might help stop the Night of the Living Dead. Basically, they seem to be saying that they've come out on top and are happy with the status quo, and aren't interested in compromise or negotiation.

Consider the first item in today's entry. It is the lives of those 9 American GI's that give Talabani and al-Hakim the option of rejecting the international conference.

Here is the exchange of the BBC interviewer with Annan::

' BBC: Is it civil war?

Kofi Annan: I think, given the level of violence, the level of killing and bitterness and the way that forces are arranged against each other. A few years ago, when we had the strife in Lebanon and other places, we called that a civil war. This is much worse. '

Annan is right, of course. Historians think that between 80,000 and 100,000 Lebanese were killed in the Civil War of 1975-1989, 20,000 of them during Israel's 1982 invasion. The death toll in Iraq since March, 2003, has likely been at least 420,000. Even the recent figure announced by the Ministry of Health in Iraq, of 150,000 Iraqis killed by Sunni Arab guerrillas or "insurgents," is larger than that for Lebanon (and it does not count those killed by the US military and by the Shiite militias).

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that secular Sunni politician Salih Mutlak, leader of the National Dialogue Front (11 seats in parliament) supports Annan's proposal for an international conference. Al-Zaman reports that Mutlak has formed a new coalition in parliament that will include the Shiite Sadr Movement. It will stand for the unity of Iraq and a withdrawal of US troops. It excludes the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Da`wa Party, the two mainstays of the current government. The bloc will be announced in the coming days. Gunmen had attempted to assassinate Mutlak on Saturday.

Reuters reports political violence in Iraq on Sunday. Major attacks include:

' MOSUL - Six bodies were found in and around Mosul . . . All had gunshot wounds.

MOSUL - A suicide car bomb exploded near a police patrol in Mosul, killing two and wounding four . . .

BAGHDAD - A mortar round landed on a secondary school, wounding 10 students in Bab al-Muadham district in north-central Baghdad . . .

NEAR KIRKUK - A suicide bomber blew up a car near the convoy of a senior police officer, killing three of his guards and wounding two others near the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, police said. The police officer was wounded in the incident. . . '

There were also significant battles in Baquba and Ramadi between US forces and Sunni Arab guerrillas.

Iraq's reconstituted Baath Party, led by Izzat Ibrahim Duri from the Mosul area, is rejecting pressure from Arab states to negotiate with the Americans. The Baath is probably a majority of the effective resistance in Sunni Arab Iraq. The foreign jihadis or "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia," are a relatively minor part of it all, though they can be destructive. That is, the refusal of the Baathis to talk is bad news indeed.

Hamza Hendawi of AP reports on the way that Baghdad's neighborhoods are de facto being ethnically cleansed. Shiites are leaving majority-Sunni districts like Dora in droves. The Tigris, which runs through the capital, is becoming the de facto Sunni-Shiite border. (One big problem is that Shiite Kadhimiya and Sunni Adhamiya are on the wrong sides of the river and so are being left high and dry.)

My NPR interview on Sunni and Shiite Islam in history and in Iraq can be listened to at the Weekend Edition site.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports in Arabic that Iraq has become a major smuggling route for drugs coming from Afghanistan and elsewhere in Asia. They go from there to the Gulf and thence to Europe. Iraqi officials say that they lack the capability of blocking the smuggling or controlling their borders. Being a smuggling route can be a hazard to a population. Pakistan ended up with over a million heroin addicts after it became a favored such route.

Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad pledged to support Iraq's national unity.

Rumsfeld's Shocking Memo;
Over 100 Dead in Sectarian Violence

The NYT has gotten hold of a memo by Donald Rumsfeld detailing options on Iraq.

Several things struck me about it:

1. Rumsfeld doesn't understand the magnitude of the crisis or the tightrope the US is walking in the Gulf. His attitude is almost lackadaisical. Doing an all right job, but it isn't working fast enough or well enough. So maybe make some changes-- apparently any old changes will do because there are infinite lives to play with and infinite monies to spend.

2. Rumsfeld spends more time plotting out how to manipulate the American public than how to win the war. Everything is about spin, about giving the image of progress even in the face of a rapid downward spiral into the abyss. Consider these phrases:

' Publicly announce a set of benchmarks agreed to by the Iraqi Government and the U.S. — political, economic and security goals — to chart a path ahead for the Iraqi government and Iraqi people (to get them moving) and for the U.S. public (to reassure them that progress can and is being made) . . .

Announce that whatever new approach the U.S. decides on, the U.S. is doing so on a trial basis. This will give us the ability to readjust and move to another course, if necessary, and therefore not “lose.”

Recast the U.S. military mission and the U.S. goals (how we talk about them) — go minimalist. . . '

It is about how we talk, how we are perceived to set goals, what is made to look like progress. It isn't actually about getting progress. The point of going minimalist is to reduce expectations among the American public. If you tell them you can only move the ball a yard, you get a lot of points for moving it two yards.

There is nothing in the memo about effectively stopping the daily sectarian massacre in Iraq. Rumsfeld does not even appear to think there is a problem here. He doesn't see the basis on which the fabric of Iraq is coming apart. But God forbid he should be seen by the US public as failing. So let's set some vague "benchmarks" and make it look like progress is being made.

3. Rumsfeld openly admits that he wants to run Iraq just like Saddam did:

' Provide money to key political and religious leaders (as Saddam Hussein did), to get them to help us get through this difficult period. '

I mean, bribing people to be your puppets is bad enough, but citing Saddam's policies as an example for how Iraq should be run is absolutely outrageous. Not only did Rumsfeld want to manipulate the American public with phony "benchmarks" and "minimalist" language, but he wanted to directly manipulate Iraqis by buying off their notables.

The specifically military suggestions in the memo are all over the map. In addition to a lot of contradictory and not obviously effective politicies, he steals ideas from Democratic Senators and Congressmen.

Three major car bombings and mortar attacks in Shiite neighborhoods of the capital left at least 51 dead. In addition,44 bodies were discovered on Saturday. Reuters reports 13 other deaths around the country in political violence and more dozens wounded. One of the dead was a US soldier in al-Anbar Province.

In addition, an assassination attempt was made on secular Sunni politician Salih Mutlak, which he blamed on Shiites.

Bus Stop Massacre Kills 20;
Sistani Aide Warns against Violence, Blames Arab T.V.

On Saturday morning, an empty fuel trucker slammed into people waiting at a bus stop in al-Wahada, 22 miles south of Baghad, killing twenty persons and wounding 15.

In his Friday prayers sermon, Shaikh Abdul Mahdi al-Karbala'i, a key aide to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, warned against "violence and reprisal killings on both sides," saying that both Shiites and Sunnis lose from it. Speaking at a Friday prayers sermon in the holy Shiite city of Karbala south of Baghdad, he said, "If the country falls into Civil War, everyone without exception will lose, and there will be no winners." He affirmed, "Peaceful co-existence between the two branches of Islam will be threatened in a grave manner, and everyone's life will become an unbearable hell."

Al-Karbala'i seems to have been warning against a wider Sunni-Shiite struggle that could start from Iraq.

He blamed "Arabic television channels" for "issuing accusations," saying that they "share with us our Arabness and our Islam, but that do not share with us our anxieties and anguish, but rather want public turmoil to break out."

He said that if mutual hatred increased every day, at some point Shiite and Sunni government employees would simply not be able to work in the same ministry together, and the same would be true in factories and on farms. Life would become impossible and there would not be room on earth for all the graves that would need to be dug. He said that the ignorant among Sunnis and Shiites should not be allowed to call the shots.

Al-Karbala'i's ecumenical sermon, in an almost wholly Shiite city, probably reflects the fears of Sistani and other top clerics. It is interesting that the ecumenicism frayed quite a lot when he spoke of "Arabic channels" (presumably Aljazeera, though maybe others). These channels are often based in the largely Sunni Gulf and are perceived by Shiite Iraqis to be biased in favor of the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement, which the Shiites view as genocidal toward them.

Dozens of Bodies in Sinjar and Baghdad
40% Increase in Violent Deaths in November

AFP says that political violence left nearly 2000 dead in Iraq in November, a 40* percent increase over October. The number of wounded, however, fell substantially. AFP says that these numbers come from the Iraqi government. In fact, survey research has strongly suggested that the number is actually much higher but that many killings are not recorded by the central ministry of health.

McClatchy reports several deadly bombings in Baghdad on Friday, a firefight at Haifa St., the discovery of 20 bodies and the killing of 14 Shiite Kurds in Sinjar west of Mosul.

Reuters reports that fighting continued in the southern Shiite city of Samawa between Mahdi Army militiamen and local security forces dominated by the Badr Corps (also Shiite). There were also mortar attacks in Mahmudiyah, a mixed area south of Baghdad. There was a bombing in nearby Latifiyah, and in the northern city of Kirkuk a roadside bomb aimed at an American patrol killed and wounded Iraqi civilians.

The US may stop trying to reach out to Sunni Arab guerrillas, and just throw whole-hearted support to the Shiites and the Kurds, according to UPI. On the other hand, the US could be threatening the Sunni Arabs with this in order to make them better dialogue partners. Who knows? The Arab press is convinced that the Arab powers have forestalled an American outreach to Iran and Syria.

Iraqi Shiite politician and cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, in Jordan, prayed with a Sunni congregation in a gesture of reconciliation. No high-level Sunni notables were at the mosque. Al-Hakim, who will meet with Bush this coming week, denied a statement attributed to him in the Arab press that in any Iraqi civil war, Sunnis would be the losers. (This assertion was taken as a threat). He now says that all Iraqis would lose in such a war.

UpdateThe AFP article is here in English. Quotes from al-Hakim:

' "The eruption of a sectarian war will not only burn everyone but it will also undermine the security of the entire region and lead to the unknown . . ."

"We are attached to unity for Iraq and its people and we are opposed to any attempt to divide Iraq because our strength is in our unity . . ."

"We do not want a Shiite government that sidelines the Sunnis and we don't want a Sunni government that marginalises the Shiites . . ."

"We want a government in which everyone takes part and that is at the service of all the citizens . . ." '

Al-Hakim, the head of the Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, founded in Tehran in 1982, is viewed with suspicion by many Sunni Arab Iraqis because of his close alliance with Iran's Supreme Jurisprudent, Ali Khamenei. He was for many years head of SCIRI's paramilitary, the Badr Corps, one of the Shiite militias that has been implicated in death squad type killings of Sunnis.

The US will hand over control of another Iraqi army division to the Iraqi government. There are ten divisions. The 10th was deployed by PM Nuri al-Maliki to Basra this past summer. The new one under his control is in the north. "Control" is probably going too far, because I don't think he can commit such a large force without clearing things with the US military even so.

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*An earlier edition of this post had "4%," an error deriving from a typo at al-Zaman.

The Bush-Maliki Summit and the New Middle East Cold War
Over 100 Bodies found in Past 48 Hours

Al-Hayat writing in Arabic sums up the results of the Bush-Maliki Summit:

1. The US and its Arab allies rejected the notion of making any concessions to Iran in return for Tehran's help in calming the situation in Iraq.

2. The al-Maliki government would be given "another chance" to crack down on Shiite militias such as the Mahdi Army and would be given greater freedom of movement in confronting them militarily.

In other words, Bush is trying to set al-Maliki up for a confrontation with the Sadr Movement and is trying to keep the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad from too openly embracing Iran. (That cow is already out of the barn, of course).

Al-Hayat sees the influence of Arab allies of the US on Bush's policy as decisive. It says that informed sources in Amman report that the Arab diplomats warned Bush against giving Iran nuclear privileges and against giving Syria "Lebanese" privileges, in return for their help in Iraq. These Arab countries likely include Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait and Egypt. That is, there is a new Middle Eastern Cold War between the pro-Western Arab states (Riyadh-Amman-Cairo-Kuwait City) and the Tehran-Damascus axis. The pro-Western Arabs fear the Iranian nuclear program, and they generally support Saad Hariri, Fouad Seniora, and the 14 March Movement in Lebanon against Hizbullah, which is backed by Syria and Iran.

This Middle Eastern Cold War is pushing Washington, allied with the Arab conservatives, into a contradictory stance in Iraq, having installed a Shiite, pro-Iranian government there but remaining unable to work with this new reality on a geopolitical level. The Middle Eastern Cold War pitting the Saudis and Egyptians against the Iranians and Syrians is reinforced by Washington's other major ally in the region, Israel, which also wants to contain or roll back Syria and Iran. As is often the case, despite their rhetoric of seeming enmity, the pro-Western Arab regimes and the Israelis have not so dissimilar geopolitical aims in the region, with the disposition of the Palestine Authority really the only major dispute between them. Iraq is caught in the middle of this new Cold War and seems likely to be the major victim of it.

If Bush gets his way, we could see substantial Shiite on Shiite violence in the coming months, of which it is likely the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement will take advantage.

The Sadr Movement representatives in parliament and on the Iraqi cabinet announced that the setting of a timetable for US military withdrawal from Iraq is the minimum condition for their return to al-Maliki's coalition. They also said that they would work toward the creation of a parliamentary front that would demand a US withdrawal. Over 100 out of 275 members of parliament have already voted for the US to set a timetable and leave, but rather than let the whole parliament vote a resolution, the al-Maliki government sent the issue to committee, from which it may never emerge or not for months.

Hassan M. Fattah of the NYT reports that Arab analysts and observers are asking of the Bush-Maliki summit, "is that all?" No new results seemed to come of the meeting. Bush seemed patronizing of al-Maliki. And the US National Security Council appears not to understand the most basic things about contemporary Iraqi politics, as the Boston Globe editorial team points out.

Robert Scheer takes a position opposite of that of al-Hayat, arguing that Bush's policies have put him in a position where he'll probably have to learn to live with and cooperate with the ayatollahs in Iran. Apparently, however, Bush will avoid doing so until the chance for real progress has passed.

Matthew Chavez reports on Bush's inability to face up to the realities of civil war in Iraq and its implications for US policy. (I'm quoted.)

The Emir of Kuwait, Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah, is afraid that a US withdrawal from Iraq will plunge the country into a civil war and warns that the "whole world will pay" if that happens. He also cautioned that the Israel-Palestine dispute must be settled and warned of dire consequences if the US moves militarily against Iran. The Emir would be right about the first point if the question were posed in a vacuum. But what if the US presence is making the situation worse and making it impossible for the Iraqis to compromise with one another?

The Iraqi Interior Ministry is now going to attempt to monitor and "correct" journalists in Iraq. Journalists are already at risk of being kidnapped or killed. Now they are going to have some Iraqi general from the Iran-trained Badr Corps or a dusted off Baathist dictate to them what is and is not the "correct" news.

McClatchy reports that 25 dead bodies were found in Baghdad on Thursday, and that a major Sunni leader was assassinated in Basra.

On Wednesday, Reuters said, 52 bodies had been found in Baghdad, and 6 in Mosul. A "mass grave" with 28 bodies in it was found near Baquba. A US soldier was killed by guerrillas. There was fighting between the Mahdi Army and the Iraqi security forces (dominated by the Badr Corps) in the southern Shiite city of Samawa. This is Shiite on Shiite violence, part of a turf war between followers of young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and those of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

Saudi King Abdullah's visit to Turkey is, as AP says, a possible sign of a slight shift in foreign policy in Ankara toward the Middle East and away from Europe. But the real power in Turkey is in the hands of the strongly secular, pro-Western officer corps, and this article seems to me to give too much weight to the views of the elected prime minister, who can only go so far without risking a military intervention.

The visit is probably more important as a sign that Iraq's Sunni neighbors are now attempting to coordinate some response to the civil war there, the likelihood of an American withdrawal, and the fact of a new, Shiite, pro-Iranian regime in the region centered on Baghdad.