90 Killed in Wave of Bombings, Violence
Two US troops were announced killed on Saturday.
AP reporter Kim Gamel details a wave of bombings and mayhem across Iraq on Saturday. The deadliest attack was a suicide truck bombing at a police station in Baghad, which killed 20 and wounded 28, many of them police. Guerrillas bombed a pastry shop in the northern Turkmen city of Tal Afar, killing 10 and wounded 3. A truck bomber killed 11 and wounded 45 in Haswah, south of Baghdad. Suicide car bombers killed 20 and wounded 30 in attacks on police at Qaim near the Syrian border.
Reuters gives other incidents and estimates that 25 bodies were found in Baghdad on Friday, 8 in Fallujah, and another 4 in Mosul. The found-body count, of nearly 40, is much higher than in the AP story. Al-Hayat estimated the day's death toll from political violence at 90.
Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports in Arabic that the British made a security sweep in the southern, largely Shiite port city of Basra on Friday, killing one Iraqi and arresting 28. The fighting was with Shiite militiamen, presumably.
As'ad Abu Khalil points out that the graffiti on a wall in a photo published by the New York Times is not by a native Arabic speaker, since it is full of spelling and vocabulary errors (in just four words!) The word "dam," blood, which has a short "a" or fathah, is spelled with an alif, making it long. And the word for infidels is spelled incorrectly. Some of his readers pointed out that there are non-Arab guerrillas in Iraq. Others seemed convinced that the graffiti had an American origin. I don't think the latter is likely, since most American troops in Iraq don't know Arabic at all, and the ones who do know it know it better than this.
Veteran AP journalist and long time bureau chief in Baghdad, Steven R. Hurst, reviews the tenure of outgoing US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad. It is a keen examination of the issues, though I'd have added Khalilzad's roll in the crafting of the constitution, in pulling the Sunni Arabs into the electoral system with unfulfilled promises they could then tinker with the constitution, and in unseated Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafar in favor of Nuri al-Maliki (both of them from the Shiite fundamentalist Da'wa Party). Khalilzad to his credit tried to reach out to the Sunni Arabs, but seemed ultimately unable to convince the Shiites and Kurds to make significant concessions to them. What he did not realize was that American military and diplomatic might, having been put largely at the service of the Shiites and Kurds, made it unnecessary for the latter ever to compromise with the Sunni Arabs. He was interfering with his own efforts just by being there.
Even the intrepid Patrick Cockburn of the Independent can't go most places in center-north Iraq. Where he can go, he finds the notion that things are just fine outside Baghdad and al-Anbar Province to be a tragic myth.
Hacking the IED network in Iraq.
Kanaan Makiya, an intellectual architect of the Iraq War, admits it is a disaster but insists he has nothing to apologize for. Makiya is still peddling the Neoconservative myth (as an ex-Trotskyite, he is a genuine Neoconservative) that everything would have been all right if the US hadn't occupied Iraq after conquering it. How likely was that? Makiya, after having tried to convince us all that Ahmad Chalabi is a really great guy and not a fraud, now wants to convince us of other things. Why should we agree to be convinced by someone so wrong about so much? Couldn't he please work out his intellectual theories in ways that don't get more US troops killed?
Labels: Iraq War
posted by Juan Cole @ 3/25/2007 12:33:00 AM
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Having worked with US military Arabic linguists first hand, I can state first had that many of them DO NOT know Arabic better than this.
Agree with abu sinan. I've known American kids of Italian parentage who "speak Italian," but it's not adult Italian, it's like babytalk. They can barely write it. Let's imagine a member of the military whose parents were native Arabic speakers but who talks only Arab babytalk. Is that what the graffiti looks like?
Today's LAT features an article on a subject dear to Dr. Cole - the plight of the intellectual in the new Iraq
Artist Jabbar Muhaybis stood amid the ashes of Baghdad's storied literary bazaar. Bloodstained pages were scattered at his feet. A wooden crate, eerily reminiscent of a coffin, covered his head.
Muhaybis spread his arms wide and, in a symbolic gesture, sadly intoned from the darkness of his crate: "The light will not shine here again."
Days after a suicide bomber plowed his explosives-laden truck into the heart of Mutanabi Street, Baghdad's intellectual icons gathered to mourn a place that had been their inspiration and refuge through decades of invasion, war and dictatorship.
Iraq's urban, educated, largely secular middle class had everything to gain from the fall of Saddam Hussein's oppressive and isolating regime. Four years later, it is on the way to being wiped out.
A searing assault on Iraq's intellectuals
The middle class is fleeing the violence and threats, leaving the question: Who will lead?
By Alexandra Zavis
There are many young men (and women) in Iraq who can barely read or write Arabic. Many of the young men in the militias, particularly urban poor in Sadr's Jaysh al-Mahdi, are products of more than a decade of sanctions, deliberate systematic neglect prior to 2003, and nothing but violence since. The sort of environment they grew up in is far worse than any inner-city environment in the US; one would expect equivalent misspellings in graffiti in parts of Philly, Detroit or Chicago. The handprints and words in that NYT photo could have been manufactured to order for the purposes of the article, but on the other hand, it would not surprise me if it actually is real. It is truly frightening to contemplate the circumstances that have produced many of these young militia fighters. The level of anger is unbelievable, as we shall see over the next two to three years.
Rational actors might read below and decide to use $ to foment division betweed tribesmen of waziristan. Muslims have famous hospitality towards guests but Bin Laden might become seen as patron of Uzbeks.
[But this is not a simple battle between pro-Pakistan government forces and al-Qa'ida allies, but an internecine war between different factions in the loose alliance of al-Qa'ida, Taliban and local tribesmen that exists in the lawless areas along the border with Afghanistan. The tribesmen are known locally as Taliban, and although they are not directly linked to the Afghan Taliban, they are believed to have a close relationship, and allow the Afghan insurgents to launch cross-border operations from their territory.
South Waziristan is one of the tribal areas where the writ of Pakistani law has never fully extended, and which are thought to be a likely hiding place for Osama bin Laden.
The foreign militants involved in the fighting are all believed to be from Uzbekistan - the remnants of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) who fought alongside the Taliban and al-Qa'ida in Afghanistan in 2001, and were given shelter in south Waziristan when they fled after the Taliban were overthrown.]
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article2383891.ece
The "best case" proposed by Perle, Makiya, and other early advocates of regime change was to let a brigade of emigrés lead the liberation, quickly enthrone Chalabi, and then pull back US forces to a support function. Skeptics feared this could lead to another Bay of Pigs disaster. Gen. Franks would have blasphemed at the risky theatrics. Rumsfeld did not buy the scheme. Did Wolfowitz ever bother to sketch out serious details?
Given that the Iraqi forces largely melted away, hindsight suggests that maybe the scheme stood a chance, at least in the initial military phase, provided the US still provided ample back-up. However, it is not clear whether Makiya or Chalabi had any real game plan to reconstruct, deBaathify, or reconcile the Sunnis, Kurds, and Shia. Would they have put the clergy under house arrest? Would any "orderly" plan have stood a chance in a country filled with small weapons and explosive materials? I suspect they had no clue and that they presumed a post-dictatorial sequence based on models whose roots are unlike Iraq's. T. Friedman, L. Diamond, B. Lewis, and the whole PNAC shared the same daydream.
Despite its generic flaws, perhaps there was a 15% chance it would have succeeded if Chalabi, anointed, with dictatorial powers, had opted for some judicious balance of Shiite freedoms, deBaathification, and clemency. Makiya can claim, in the celestial hypothetical, that this was precisely the aim. There will never be any way to test or know.
Odds of success might have risen to 35%, if the "Iraqi Face" plan opted for a sterner approach. If Turkey, Mexico, Malaysia, or Spain are any example, they would probably have had to institute a rather firm handed one-party rule for a decade or two. There would have been jails, censorship, and some shooting. Partition might also have been inevitable. Gentle Czechoslovakia could not avoid it.
In any case, might Makiya's far fetched notions seem rock solid next to the "plan" presently in place? Do we pick Quixote or PT Barnum?
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