Informed Comment

On the False Analogy Between Iraq and South Korea

Bush is now talking about a “South Korea” model for Iraq. He likely got this nonsense from John Gaddis at Yale, who I heard talking it last November at the Chicago Humanities Fair.

So what confuses me is the terms of the comparison. Who is playing the role of the Communists and of North Korea? Is it the Sunni Arabs of Iraq? But they are divided into Iraqi/Arab nationalists and Salafi Sunni revivalists. (The secular Arab nationalists are the vast majority according to recent polling). So they are not a united force. They are fighting with one another in al-Anbar. And, the Arab nationalists and the religious Sunnis cannot both play the role of the Communists. Some Arab nationalists are allied with the United States (Egypt, Tunisia, etc.) Others are not (Syria). Some religious Sunnis are allied with the US (Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan). Others are not. So where is the analogy to International Communism? Who is China and who is the Soviet Union? Is it Syria and Iran? But both are ruled by Shiites, not Sunnis!

But let us say that the Sunni Arabs are North Korea. Who is South Korea? Is it the Shiites of Iraq? But they are allied with Iran (isn’t it playing the role of China?) And the vast majority of them don’t want US troops in Iraq according to polls. There is zero chance that the Shiites of Iraq will put up with a long term presence of US bases in their areas of Iraq. The British base in Basra takes heavy fire all the time.

The only place in Iraq that looks at all like South Korea is maybe Kurdistan. But it is also allied with Iran behind the scenes, and it is in a troubling way giving asylum to Turkish-Kurdish terror groups that are infliction harm on the US’s NATO ally, Turkey.

Even as we speak, in Iraq’s north, Turkish military forces and now 20 tanks are massing on the Iraqi border, apparently poised for “hot pursuit” of Kurdish guerrillas of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), who have safe harbor in Iraqi Kurdistan but go over to Turkey and blow things up. There is some danger that the US will be in the middle of all this, though it is allied with both the Kurds and the Turks. Last week US fighter jets based in Iraq made an unauthorized incursion into Turkish air space that the Turks are protesting.

Do we really want to be in the middle of that?

(But see the next, translated, item, below).

So, no, Iraq isn’t like Korea in any obvious way, and in fact the analogy strikes me as frankly ridiculous.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari suspects that the Mahdi Army was behind the kidnapping of 5 Britons from the Ministry of Finance on Tuesday. British troops have been skirmishing with and capturing Mahdi Army forces in Basra, so this could be payback or an attempt to trade prisoners.

There were mortar attacks, bombings and firefights around Iraq on Wednesday. Ten died in a firefight in Khalis between Iraqi government troops and local Sunni Arab guerrillas (the city is under curfew after these heavy clashes). The US raided Sadr City looking, presumably, for those British security guards, and taking 5 men into custody.

23 bodies were found in Baghdad on Wednesday, according to McClatchy. Four uniformed policemen were kidnapped in Tikrit north of Baghdad.

Iran’s foreign minister says that US-Iranian talks on security in Iraq may continue.

Iraq, Sudan, and Israel/Palestine are the most violent countries in the world, according to a new index.

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Iraqi Kurdistan Officials Deny US Bases to be Opened in Kurdistan Region

The USG Open Source Center translates the following newspaper article from Kurdish:

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Guerrillas Ambush, Kill 10 US GIs
Over 100 Iraqis Killed or Found Dead
Muqtada condemns Iran for Talking to US

As best I can piece it together, Sunni Arab guerrillas in Iraq ran a sophisticated sting on US troops in Diyala province on Memorial Day, killing 8 GIs. First, they shot down a helicopter with small arms fire. Two servicemen died in the crash. The guerrillas knew that a rescue team would come out to the site. So they planted a roadside bomb that killed the rescuers. And, they knew that yet another rescue team would come out to see what happened to the first. So they planted roadside bombs and destroyed the second team, as well. Altogether 6 rescuers were blown up in this way. The guerrillas run this routine on Iraqi police and troops in the capital all the time. As US troops increasingly take on policing duties, they become vulnerable to the same operations that have wrought such mayhem on Iraqi security forces.

Also in Diyala, 21 bodies were found in the streets of Baquba, the capital of the province, according to Reuters.

Reuters reports that 2 other GIs were killed in a Baghdad roadside bombing. Two other, much bigger blasts then shook the downtown and the southwest, killing 44 persons between them:

‘ BAGHDAD – At least 23 people were killed and 68 others wounded when a powerful bomb in a parked bus exploded in central Baghdad, police said.

BAGHDAD – At least 18 people were killed and 41 wounded when a car bomb exploded in a busy market of a mainly Shi’ite neighbourhood in southwestern Baghdad, police said. ‘

Al-Zaman says that the bombs in the Shiite neighborhood actually targeted a Shiite religious edifice (Husayniya) (in the Amil district) and so was less random than it seems on the surface.

This is the second religious building to be hit in the past two days, with the Sufi shrine of Abdul Qadir Gilani suffering damage on Monday. Every day, Iraq’s landmarks are more pockmarked and less whole, as if a leprosy were eating away at its features.

Al-Zaman also sniffs that this surge business doesn’t seem to be working very well if you can get all this mayhem in a single day still.

Police found thirty bodies in the streets of Baghdad on Tuesday.

Then some other shadowy group ran a sophisticated sting on some high-powered British security guards at the Ministry of Finance (that kind of kidnapping is always in part an inside job– someone at the ministry tipped the 40 gunmen to the presence of Britons in the ministry). I guess I just can’t entirely understand how 40 guerrillas drive around downtown Baghdad, surround government ministries, and kidnap people from them. The Ministry had government police and guards. It just seems to me that this kind of thing cannot happen unless the Iraqi government security forces are in on it or wink at it.

I just want to express my admiration for the thoroughness and even-handedness of this Times of London (via Australian News) article on the kidnapping of the 5 Britons from the Finance Ministry on Tuesday. It is incredible that reporters in Baghdad can still gather news at all, much less this comprehensively.

Over two hundred civilian foreigners have been kidapped in the past 4 years, and over 60 of them were killed. It is my impression that most of those who survived were often secretly ransomed by family members (something the USG discourages because the ransom is essentially a contribution to the guerrilla war effort).

Al-Hayat reports that young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr held a meeting with the governors of the southern, Shiite provinces. He agreed with them to form joint committees made up of Mahdi Army militiamen and police and army troops to prevent clashes between them. Muqtada also rejected the talks held on Monday between the US and Iran, criticizing Tehran for this “Iranian acceptance of an American-British-Jewish Mandate” over Iraq. (He used the word ‘intidab,’ a reference to the colonies or Mandates established by European Powers in the Middle East after they had defeated the Ottoman Empire in WW I. The League of Nations philosophy was that the Europeans should use this opportunity to grow the Middle Easterners up so that they could establish their own governments. The Middle Easterners mostly felt that they didn’t need the help.)

Muqtada said, “It is most regrettable that generally they [the Iranians] are inadvertently or deliberately forgetting, in such negotiations, to demand that the Occupier depart.” He said implicit Iranian acceptance of the Anglo-American-Jewish “mandate” is “completely rejected, and there is no excuse for it at all.” He said that the lack of an official Iraqi government partner in the Iran-US talks denied them “the cover of legitimacy and of Law.” He said that both the people and the religious authority were unhappy with the talks.

The respected editor of the weekly “Hawadith” in Kirkuk was assassinated in that city.

Tom Engelhardt on the mammoth US embassy in Baghdad and its significance.

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Cole on “Heroes” and the Culture Wars

My column at Salon.com this week is on the television phenomenon “Heroes”. [Spoiler alert: for anyone who hasn't seen the season finale, its details are discussed.] Excerpts:

Dick Cheney’s least favorite TV show?

Why the worldview of “Heroes” clashes with the vice president’s “1 percent doctrine” on terrorism.

May 30, 2007 | NBC’s hit series “Heroes” was the most-watched new show on network television this year despite its demanding plot lines and stretches of subtitled Japanese. Its season finale, which aired May 21, dominated the 9 p.m. time slot. What explains the show’s popularity, especially with younger viewers? I think it is that, like the Fox thriller “24,” “Heroes” is a response to Sept. 11 and the rise of international terrorism. But while “24″ skews to the right politically, “Heroes” seems like a left-wing response to those events. In fact, it functions as a thoughtful critique of Vice President Dick Cheney’s doctrine on counterterrorism.

In Bush and Cheney’s “war on terror,” the evildoers are external and are clearly discernible. In “Heroes,” each person agonizes over the evil within, a point of view more common on the political left than on the right. Each of the flawed characters is capable of both nobility and iniquity. In Bush’s vision, the main threat remains rival states (Saddam’s Iraq, Ahmadinejad’s Iran). States are absent from “Heroes,” as though irrelevant. “Heroes” makes terrorism a universal and psychological issue rather than one attached to a clash of civilizations or to a particular race.

In its commentary on terror, “Heroes” thus avoids the caffeinated Islamophobia of “24.” And at a time when “24,” a favorite of older Republicans, is fading in the ratings, “Heroes” may also be a better guide to where the thinking of the young, post-Bush generation is heading when it comes to terror. It’s certainly where their eyes are going. NBC’s “Heroes” runs opposite Fox’s “24″ on Monday nights and snags a higher total of younger viewers, while the median age of “24″ viewers keeps rising. . .

The plot that drives the first season has to do with a prophetic painting . . . that shows New York City being blown up. The bomb is not mechanical but is a human being, a mutant, who cannot control his powers and will ultimately explode in the midst of the city if not stopped. . .

a . . . camp of wealthy and powerful figures, clearly on the political right, decide that the explosion cannot be avoided and must therefore be exploited to instill new spine and discipline into the soft American public. This clique, led by a Las Vegas mobster named Linderman (Malcolm McDowell), includes Angela Petrelli, the mother of Nathan and Peter Petrelli, both mutants. The Linderman faction strives to put Nathan Petrelli into office as a New York congressman by rigging the election, convinced that he will be in a position to lead America as a strong man after Gotham’s immolation.

Some bloggers have detected overtones of Sept. 11 conspiracy theorizing in this plot element. . .

Part of my argument is that the Cheney Right (or what Anatol Lieven has called the “American nationalists”) sees the war on terror as ‘white hats vs. black turbans,’ as a heroic, free, unblemished America facing off against Islamic fanatics and fascists. I argue that by making the “Heroes” morally ambiguous (Ali Larter’s character Niki, when taken over by “Jessica,” is a mass murderer), the vision of “Heroes” implies that terror derives from Self as well as from Other, that each human and each culture is capable of it.

I think this dispute, over a black-and-white American nationalism of the Cheney sort and a more nuanced recognition of our own flaws along with those of our enemies, underlies the culture wars now being fought in the US. The latter is exemplified by Mahmoud Mamdani’s thesis about Washington’s strategic use of ‘good Muslims, bad Muslims’.

That continental rift is the reason for the great interest in Republican Presidential Candidate Ron Paul’s argument with his rival Rudi Guiliani. Paul said in the recent debate that the US was attacked on 9/11 in part because of its prior involvement in Iraq.

Rudi Guiliani interrupted him, claimed he had never heard of that, and misrepresented Paul as justifying the attack.

But Paul was factually correct. In his 1996 fatwa declaring war on the United States, Bin Laden had said ” . . .the civil and the military infrastructures of Iraq were savagely destroyed showing the depth of the Zionist-Crusaders’ hatred to the Muslims and their children . . .”

Paul was saying that terror has a context, that the post-Gulf War US sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s that allegedly caused the deaths of 500,000 children helped produce hatred for this country in the Middle East.

In his reply to Guiliani’s demand for a retraction, Paul said,

‘ “I believe the CIA is correct when it warns us about blowback. We overthrew the Iranian government in 1953 and their taking the hostages was the reaction. This dynamic persists and we ignore it at our risk. They’re not attacking us because we’re rich and free, they’re attacking us because we’re over there.” ‘

Likewise, comedian Rosie O’Donnell engaged in a shouting match with conservative View co-host Elizabeth Hasselback when the latter declined to defend O’Donnell from rightwing charges of treason. The previous week the two had discussed the meaning of terrorism and O’Donnell observed, “655,000 Iraqi civilians are dead. Who are the terrorists?” (O’Donnell was accused by the Right of calling US troops ‘terrorists’, which is not what she said, and she was upset with co-host Elizabeth Hasselback for not being willing to admit that the charge was propagandistic).

Both Paul and O’Donnell (a Libertarian and a liberal, respectively) were pushing back against the uncomplicated nationalism of the militaristic right in the US, maintaining that the menace of terrorism comes both from self and from other, both from small groups and from large states.

It seems to me that this is the continental rift in the contemporary culture wars, between those with a nationalist, black and white view of geopolitics, and those who can see past US actions as sometimes unfortunate (backing Islamic fanatics against the Soviets in Afghanistan) and as producing “blowback” [in Ron Paul's term] or boomeranging on us.

I am not saying that “Heroes” takes sides on such political issues, but I am saying that its moral vision would give little aid and comfort to the American nationalists. In “Heroes,” a lot of characters are driven to do things they regret and to harm the people around them without fully intending to. Terror is not something produced by other people, with brown skins and different rituals, but is a danger within each human being, even within WASPs.

Thanks to Dennis Perrin for getting it!

Read the whole essay (which doesn’t bring up Paul or O’Donnell) in Salon.

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First Formal US-Iran Talks since 1980

The US has dealt differently with Iran than with any other of its major enemies. Then President Ronald Reagan spoke directly with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev even though the USSR had thousands of nuclear missiles aimed at the US. The US talks to North Korea. It talks to Venezuela. It doesn’t talk to Cuba, but then Cuba is a small weak country of 11 million. Iran is an oil state with a population of some 70 million.

Do the United States and Iran have things to talk about? Yes. They have several common interests, which could be stressed and developed fruitfully.

1. Shiite Iran is a deadly enemy of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, which the US is also fighting. Instead of making up silly charges against Iran, the US could explore avenues of cooperation against these enemies.

2. Shiite Iran is a deadly enemy of the Iraqi Baath Party and of the radical Salafi Jihadis who are responsible for most of the violence in Iraq and for most of the killings of US troops. There are ways in which the US and Iran could cooperate in defeating these forces, which are inimical to both Washington and Tehran.

3. Shiite Iran is happy with the Shiite led government of Iraq and wants to see Iraq’s territorial integrity maintained. Supporting the al-Maliki government and keeping Iraq together are also goals of the United States.

It is not true, as Robert Kagan once alleged to me on the radio, that if something is in Iran’s interest, it will do it anyway, so that talks are useless. It is often the case that countries, like individuals, cut off their noses to spite their faces. Effective diplomacy can often lead a country to see the advantages of cooperation on some issues, so that its leaders stop sulking and actually turn to accomplishing something.

The way in which fighting the Salafi Jihadis and al-Qaeda can unite otherwise contentious forces is visible in Lebanon, where Nasrallah’s [Shiite] Hizbullah supported the Seniora government’s fight against [the radical Sunni] Fatah al-Islam. The leader of the latter had been close to the notorious Shiite-killer, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Iran is not foredoomed to be a rejectionist state. It offered to initiate talks that could have led to a comprehensive peace with the US and Israel in early 2003. The US tossed away that opportunity, which won’t come back as long as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is president (at least until 2009).

So let us hope it won’t toss away more opportunities, and that Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani can reign in the hardliners around Ahmadinejad enough to reduce tensions.

Howard LaFranchi at the Christian Science Monitor reports on Monday’s historic talks between the US and Iran in Baghdad.

I am quoted:

‘ “The talks would not be taking place unless Bush backed them and … Khamenei backed them,” says Juan Cole, an expert on Iraq and Shiite movements at the University of Michigan. “[President Bush] is to the point where he will try anything,” he adds, but “it also points to the increased influence of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice” and the administration’s new Iraq team: Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and his man in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, and Crocker, who recently arrived from Pakistan. ‘

and here:

‘ “The US-Iran talks are deeply unpopular among some elements in Washington and Tehran,” says Mr. Cole. “The Cheney camp is reported to be opposed to them, and the arrests [in Iran] of Iranian-American academics in recent days may well be an attempt by some in the camp of [President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad to sabotage these talks.” ‘

I wasn’t so much referring to the case of Haleh Esfandiari, which goes back to December, though she was only recently put in Evin Prison, but of sociologist Kian Tajbakhsh. Patrick Seale lays out all the reasons for pessimism about the progress these bilateral US/Iran talks on Iraqi security will make.

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24 Killed,90 wounded;
Qadiriya Shrine Damaged in Blast

Reuters reports that 33 bodies were found in the streets of Baghdad on Monday. Karrada took mortar fire, which left 8 dead and 35 wounded. McClatchy reports that on Sunday night, guerrillas had taken 40 persons hostage in Salahuddin Province, in a bid to counter the operation of a new anti-Salafi tribal council. There were other bombings, shootings and assorted mayhem in Baghdad, Mosul and some other places.

But one above all took the cake. Guerrillas detonated a huge bomb in front of the shrine of Abdul Qadir al-Gilani (Jilani, Kilani) in central Baghdad on Monday, killing (according to Reuters, above) some 24 persons and wounding 90 according to late reports. The bombing damaged the dome and the base of the minaret of the mosque attached to the shrine.

Shaikh Abdul Qadir al-Gilani (d. 1166 A.D.) was a great mystic who founded the vast Qadiriya Sufi order.

An Ottoman mystic, Shaikh Muzaffer Ozak Efendi, later wrote of him,

‘ “The venerable ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani passed on to the Realm of Divine Beauty in A.H. 561/ 1166 C.E., and his blessed mausoleum in Baghdaad is still a place of pious visitation. He is noted for his extraordinary spiritual experiences and exploits, as well as his memorable sayings and wise teachings. It is rightly said of him that ‘he was born in love, grew in perfection, and met his Lord in the perfection of love.’ May the All-Glorious Lord bring us in contact with his lofty spiritual influence!” ‘

The Qadiri Sufi order is very important in Iraq, Nigeria, Senegal, Morocco, Turkey, Pakistan and India, among other places.

The shrine was likely attacked by radical Sunni Salafis, with several objects in mind. First, Salafis hate Sufi shrines (see below). Second, the Salafi Jihadis in Iraq are trying to mobilize all Iraqi Sunnis behind them, and do not want rivals from among the Sufi orders and tribal shaikhs. Third, the Salafi Jihadis want to throw Iraq into ever greater chaos, such that they strike at all national symbols. Fourth, they are probably hoping that at least some Sunni Arabs will blame Shiite militiamen for the attack, or will blame the Shiite government for not preventing it, so that the bombing has the effect of heightening sectarian tensions further. The guerrilla attack on the Shiite Askariya Shrine in Samarra in February, 2006, set off an orgy of sectarian violence, and was the most successful single act of terrorism the guerrillas have ever carried out.

One saving grace is that Sufis are oriented toward symbolic meaning, and physical places are therefore not central to their worship. One famous medieval Sufi, al-Hallaj, famously thought that it was better to visit God in your heart truly than to undertake a perfunctory pilgrimage to Mecca. (The orthodox were outraged.) It is a little unlikely, therefore, that there will be a backlash from this bombing in Nigeria or Senegal or India. For Iraqi Sunnis, likewise, it seems a little unlikely to produce further violence, since the imam himself blamed the radical Salafis (takfiris), themselves Sunni.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that Muhammad al-Isawi, the prayer leader and preacher at the mosque attached to the shrine, said, “I send condolences not only to myself but to all Iraqis for what befell this mosque for everyone, for Sunni and Shiite, for Turkmen and Kurd. Who venefits from blowing it up? We must be patient and resigned and deny any opportunity to the enemies, the Takfiri terrorists.” [Takfiris are radical Salafis who declare Sufis and other non-Salafis to be non-Muslims and deserving of death.] He added, “They have idled the charitable works in the mosque, which provides food to widows, orphans and the needy; it also contains a library, to which seekers after knowledge resort. It was, truly, a cowardly act.”

There are lots of strands of Sunni Islam. Many of them are better thought of as tendencies than as sects in their own right. If we make an analogy to Christianity, so there are scriptural literalists (fundamentalists), and there are mystics seeking union with God, and there is everything in between.

The mystics organized into orders or brotherhoods (tariqa) are called Sufis. (The etymology of ‘Sufi’ is disputed. Some say it refers to the early mystics’ preference for woollen (suf) cloaks. Others say it is derived from the Greek Sophia or wisdom.) The mystics typically get together on a Thursday night (or other occasion) at the mosque and sit in a circle and chant spiritual verses and listen to the teachings of their spiritual master or shaikh (in Persian, pir). Some Sufi meetings, with their chanting and rhythmic dancing, resemble Pentacostal services in Christianity. When the shaikh died, often a shrine grew up around his tomb, which was thought a center of blessings and people would come there to touch it and be cured of infertility and other woes.

Sufism was so successful as an organized movement from about the 1100s that it took over Islam, and there were very few Muslims who were not in some sense Sufis in the period 1200 through about 1850. From the mid-1700s, Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab in Arabia began attacking Sufism. The attacks were taken up and refined by the Salafis (revivalists) of the late 19th and early 20th century. It began being argued, under Wahhabi and Salafi influence, that it was wrong to attend at shrines, wrong to seek the intercession of saints, wrong to chant and to dance for God. Modern Wahhabism (mostly a Saudi Arabian phenomenon) and Salafism (much more widespread) have a “Protestant” character to them, emphasizing puritanism and the casting down of all images (iconoclasm) and saints’ shrines.

Sufism has rapidly declined in much of the Muslim world. The Sufi orders still have a central place in society and even politics in Senegal. The Sufis of Morocco are not inconsiderable. But they no longer are in the mainstream in Egypt and are minor affairs in Palestine, Syria and Jordan. The Sufis of the Hijaz in western Arabia are said to be having a bit of a revival, but Wahhabism has reduced them to a shadow of their former selves. Aside from Morocco, Iraq may have been the Arab country with the biggest Sufi presence, both among Sunni Arabs and among Kurds (a lot of Kurds in Iraq, Iran and Turkey are Sufis and some are Qadiris).

Some of the Sufi orders, including branches of the Qadiriya, have at one time or another joined the Sunni Arab insurgency (a major guerrilla leader at Falluja was a Qadiri shaikh). Other branches of the Qadiriya have, however, been quietists and avoided politics (the shrine keeper is in that category, another reason that the shrine may have been hit).

There is a whole web site on al-Gilani and his order by an adherent.

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Embassy Memo Flap and the Decline of the Right Blogosphere

Glenn Greenwald and Iraqslogger on that memo about food shortages at the US embassy in Baghdad (which have ended for the moment).

The right blogosphere went crazy about this little memo and its authenticity. Uh, guys, I like State Department folks fine (certainly better than you do), but even they would admit that there are bigger issues than what choices they get at the cafeteria. Like for instance the mortar fire landing in the Green Zone or the bombing of the Abdul Qadir al-Jilani Sufi shrine on Monday that might well set off sectarian violence. The memo was not a big deal one way or another.

And as for the invocation of Dan Rather, why don’t they look into Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon if they want to look into fraudulent documents.

There was a guy named Curveball, who was far more important than Dan Rather because he helped get us into this quagmire of a war. Then there was the Niger forgery. So many rightwing forgeries, so little investigation by those with little green feet and balls.

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