Informed Comment

Iraqi Vice President Accuses High Official

The Shiite Vice President, Adil Abdul Mahdi of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, has accused a high ministry official of attempting to kill him in a bombing on Monday. The deputy Minister of Labor, Ghazi al-Anbari, died in the blast, along with 10 others.

The Bush administration keeps saying that the US will stand down as the Iraqis stand up. But if the government officials are killing each other, they are more likely to lie down than stand up. This is not a good scene.

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4 US GIs killed
Army of Heaven Cult Arrested

A suicide bomber killed 7 in Mosul and wounded 28 at a police station.

Reuters reports political violence in Iraq on Tuesday. Guerrillas killed 3 US GIs north of Baghdad, and Shiite militiamen killed a fourth down at Diwaniyah. In Baghdad there were several bombings, one in Karrada that killed 5 and wounded 10. McClatchy reports that 17 bodies were found in Baghdad on Tuesday. On Monday 25 bodies had been found.

The Bush administration has suddenly changed course and decided to attend the meeting of the foreign ministries of countries that neighbor Iraq, in hopes of harnessing diplomacy to end the crisis. This step requires that the US be willing to talk to Iran at least informally about outstanding bilateral issues. It is among the few pieces of good news we have had from Washington.

Michael McConnell, the director of national intelligence, said on Tuesday that Iraq violence has become self-sustaining. He denied sure knowledge of any direct link between the EFPs hitting US troops and the Iranian leadership.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that US and Iraqi troops near Diwaniya had arrested 142 members of the Army of Heaven Shiite militia.

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Suicide Bomber Kills 20 at Bagram with Cheney inside

A suicide bomber killed 18-20 persons at the entrance to Bagram Base in Kabul while US Vice President Dick Cheney was on the premises. The vice president was unharmed.

I guess violence in Afghanistan is in its last throes, too.

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Public Works Minister Seriously Wounded
Vice President Abdul Mahdi narrowly Escapes Assassination
New Oil Law Passes Cabinet

Sunni Arab guerrillas attempted on Monday to assassinate Iraq’s Shiite vice president, Adil Abdul Mahdi, 59, as he visited a the offices of the ministry of public works and municipalities in the upscale Mansour district of the capital. Abdul Mahdi was hurt but escaped serious injury; the force of the blast knocked him down. A Shiite cabinet member, Public Works Minister Riyad Gharib, was seriously injured, and 10 others were killed. Wire services estimated the wounded at between 18 and 32. The bomb had been planted in the office, pointing to an inside job– i.e. someone in the Iraqi government who knew the itinerary of the Vice President and leaked it to the assassins. Abdul Mahdi has often been mentioned as a possible successor to current prime minister Nuri al-Maliki. He belongs to the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. The leader of SCIRI, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, had been the target of a bombing over the weekend, and some observers are now saying that the guerrillas are targetting members of that Shiite party.

So as of Monday both Iraq’s president, Jalal Talabani, and one of two vice presidents, are in hospital.

Iraq’s other (Sunni fundamentalist) vice president, Tariq al-Hashimi, in the meantime slammed the current security plan, which has so far mainly involved sweeps in Sunni neighborhoods of the capital. He complained that the plan does not respect residents’ rights and implied that it consisted of a Shiite government cracking down on Sunnis only. He said that the Shiite militias have to be taken on, and that the US needs a plan B in case the surge fails. He also criticized the al-Maliki government for refusing seriously to reach out to the Sunni Arab guerrilla leadership.

In Ramadi, a major Sunni Arab city west of Baghdad, a suicide bomber used ambulance to attack a police station, killing 14 and wounding 10. Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the Sunni imam of the Mu’awiya Mosque in Ramadi was killed on Monday, as part of an ongoing conflict between tribal forces and “al-Qaeda” (Salafi Jihadis) in al-Anbar. Some 15 bodies were found in the streets of Baghdad on Monday. US and Iraqi troops attempted a sweep of a Baquba neighborhood. There were clashes between Shiite militiamen and British troops in Basra.

Also in Basra, al-Hayat reported that Muqtada al-Sadr’s representative in that city, Baha’ al-A’raji, read a statement from him that said, “The decision of the British to withdraw is a sign of the victory of the Resistance there.” He added, “The partial withdrawal of the British forces from the city constitutes a defeat for the forces of Occupation, and is the fruit of the struggle and jihad of the sons of the city.”

Elsewhere in al-Anbar Province, Sunni Arab guerrillas killed a US marine.

There were other scattered bombings and mortar attacks, in Baghdad, Iskandariya, Abbasi, and Mosul.

Pepe Escobar on Iraq’s new oil law, which he sees as a giveaway to US Big Oil.

Reuters reviews the main outlines of the proposed petroleum law, which has been approved by the cabinet but must now get 138 votes in parliament. Since the Kurds have been given the clauses that they want, guaranteeing their ability to act semi-autonomously, and since the Shiites crafted this law, it is likely to sail through.

Note that contrary to US hopes, it does not privatize petroleum, putting it under a government holding company instead. Receipts go to a government account for distribution to the population, a la Alaska. Some critics believe it will make possible deals that are overly generous to the oil companies and which essentially cheat Iraqis, given that the present government is desperate to jump-start new development and foreign companies won’t try to operate in blood-soaked Iraq unless the deal is sweetened enormously. On the other hand, Husayn Shahristani, the oil minister, is an Iraqi nationalist close to Grand Ayatollah Sistani, and had no motivation to see Iraq cheated. I will try to get some readings from oil industry experts and report back.

[By the way, five Western governors committed to reducing carbon emissions as a way of fighting global warming, saying that if the Federal government is not going to do anything about it, they will. Good for them! Send messages of support or they won't know we're happy about it!]

Egypt’s Nilesat satellite television company has stopped carrying al-Zawra’, a channel that favored the Iraqi Sunni Arab guerrillas and showed graphic footage of attacks on US troops. Nilesat said that the decision was based on technical considerations, but there is speculation that the Egyptian government intervened after US or Saudi/Jordanian pressure. The Shiite government in Baghdad was furious at Cairo for allowing the channel to be carried.

The Minorities Rights Group has issued a study warning that Iraq’s religious minorities, once perhaps five percent of the population, are in danger of disappearing from the country as they flee abroad because of the bad security. The report, in PDF format is here.

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Al Gore, Global Warming, the Oscars and the Iraq War

That the Al Gore film “An Inconvenient Truth” was legitimized by an Oscar Sunday night for “Best Documentary” has wider implications for the future of the United States than it might seem, though admittedly it is a small step.

We know that Exxon Mobil is a significant funder of the American Enterprise Institute and has used it to attempt to bribe “scientists” to cast doubt on global warming. Lee Raymond, who was CEO of Exxon Mobil until 2005, is the vice-chair of AEI’s board of directors.

We also know that the American Enterprise Institute is the most hawkish of the Washington “think tanks,” and that its staffers were key to thinking up and promoting the Iraq War with lies and propaganda.

A=B, B=C, therefore A=C. Exxon Mobil is a big behind the scenes player in the Iraq War by virtue of its support for AEI. In fact, I think a boycott of its gas stations is in order until the company cuts off AEI and stops promoting the Iraq War and muddying the waters on global warming. (It pledged to do the latter in the past, but obviously was lying).

So the point is that the American Enterprise Institute symbolizes the intersection of Oil and War, which are the two most menacing threats to the future of America.

Only by a Manhattan Project-scale government effort to develop green energy can we hope to avert the worst consequences of global warming, which is likely to raise sea levels at least a foot, and possibly 7 feet over the next century or century and a half. (That would put a lot of cities on both coasts under water). The arctic and antarctic ice shelfs are already falling into the ocean at rates that have astonished climate scientists. The arctic alone lost perennial ice cover the size of Texas in 2004-2005! Warm water takes up more space than cold water* and the loss of white ice cover is bad because it radiates a lot of sunlight back out to space. So it is a double whammy.

But the other problem with petroleum and gas as sources of energy is that they are getting scarcer. No big new fields have been found for some time. And in one recent year China generated 40% of new demand for petroleum. If a billion Chinese and a billion Indians adopt the American lifestyle and all want 1.5 automobiles and superhighways to crawl along on, the existing stocks of oil will become objects of fierce competition. This process has already begun, and there is a sea change from the mid-1990s, when oil was still cheap and competition for it limited.

Iraq is an Oil War in the mind of politicians like Dick Cheney. It was necessary to deny it to China and other rivals thirty to fifty years in the future. It was necessary to open its vast petroleum fields up for exploration and cast aside anti-American Baath socialism.

Likewise, the religious rigidity of the Pushtun peoples of Helmand province is not the real reason for the US insistence on occupying Afghanistan. It is the vast Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan gas fields that Cheney has his eye on. It was the US hope to use a pipeline from Turkmenistan to supply Pakistan and India, and so forestall a deal by those two countries with Iran. The inability of the Bush administration to calm things down in Afghanistan sufficiently for anyone to dream of putting in such a pipeline and having it avoid routine sabotage has made it likely that Iran will break out of the Bush boycott toward the East.

Hunger for future rights to petroleum and positioning the US to remain a superpower in a world of hydrocarbon scarcity is also driving the campaign to get up a war against Iran. Why can Pakistan have a nuclear weapon, and that is all right, but Iran cannot? Pakistan has very little petroleum. Iran has a lot, and maybe 750 trillion cubic feet of gas in the southwest. If it gets a bomb, regime change becomes impossible, and if Iran wants to tie its supplies up in proprietary contracts with China and India, locking out the United States, it will be able to do so.

Continued heavy dependence on gas and oil therefore not only turns the world into a hothouse, with rising seas, ever more destructive hurricanes, and possibly disastrous shifts in the ocean currents, but it also drives the United States to more and more wars.

And, note that the wars are not even successful in allowing a practical oil grab of the sort Cheney and Lee Raymond dreamed of.

Indeed, you could now, in retrospect, turn their whole argument around on them. US militarism cannot secure petroleum and gas supplies from places such as Iraq, because the pipelines are so easily sabotaged and local nationalisms and religious activism make it impossible for people to accept that kind of US hegemony.

Since the Pentagon cannot practically speaking hope to safeguard US petroleum supplies from the Gulf, national security requires a massive and rapid research and development program of green energy. A lot of green technology, especially solar, would come down in price rapidly if enough government money were thrown at it. We need to press Congress on this, and maybe Californians can craft some of their famous referendum items. That would be one way to promote a new generation of electric cars.

Green energy– wind, thermal, solar, maybe ultimately fusion, etc.– is what would allow the US to retain its autonomy and independence into the next century, and what would allow it to avoid losing more cities the way Bush and Cheney lost New Orleans. Oil and War will, in contrast, ruin us all.

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*Sorry, I initially misspoke, mentioning ice instead of cold water. It was late.

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