Informed Comment

Cheney Conniving at Iran War
Says Bush Cannot be Trusted

Shorter Steve Clemons:

Cheney and his staff are colluding with the Neoconservatives at the American Enterprise Institute and with Israeli hawks to sideline Condi Rice’s negotiations with Iran by getting up an Israeli cruise missile strike on Iranian civilian nuclear research facilities at Natanz, in hopes that this move will push the US into a war posture with Iran.

Clemons is very well connected in Washington and assures me he has multiple-sourced this story. It seems entirely plausible to me.

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Muqtada Renews call for US Departure

Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr, the young Shiite nationalist cleric, preached openly at Kufa before about 1,000 worshippers for the first time in many months on Friday, AFP reports in Arabic at Sawt al-Iraq He preached in his kafan, or burial shroud, a sign of defiance and willingness to be martyred. See the picture, here].

He said, “I renew my demand that the Occupation depart or set a timetable for withdrawal.”

He added, “I demand that the government not extend the Occupation even one day, since it has no authority to do so, especially after the signatures that were gathered from members of parliament and the million-man demonstration that came out to demand that [departure].”

On May 10, a majority of members of the Iraqi parliament signed a petition demanding a timetable for the withdrawal of American troops and presented it to speaker of the house, Mahmud al-Mashhadani.

At the end of his sermon, Muqtada chanted “No, no to evil! No, no to America! No, no to Israel! No, no to Satan! No, no to colonialism!” and his congregation shouted the slogans with him.

Muqtada appears to have reemerged in public on assurances that he would not be arrested (or killed) by the US military if he did so.

He also condemned fighting between his Mahdi Army and Iraqi government security forces, saying that such clashes were deliberately set up as a trap by the United States. This charge is probably his way of trying to rein in the more extreme commanders in the Mahdi Army.

He comes back in public at a pregnant moment in Iraq, with his main rival, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, undergoing chemotherapy in Iran. Muqtada may see an opportunity to have his Sadr Movement displace al-Hakim’s SIIC. Al-Hakim visited the White House on Dec. 4, 2006, and called for US troops to remain in Iraq. Sadr’s demand for a timetable for withdrawal is much closer to Iraqi public opinion (and that of the public in the US, as well).

The al-Maliki government is also very weak and in danger of collapsing, and some think Muqtada is maneuvering to have the Sadrists form the next government.

Greater Sadrist political influence, which is Iraqi nationalist and even nativist, would put pressure on the Bush administration to set a timetable for withdrawal of troops.

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Democratic Party Divided on Iraq Supplemental

Although everyone is syaing that September is now the potential turning point in congressional support for the Iraq War, I don’t see how things will change much then. Supporters of the “surge” will be able to find some evidence of “progress” even if it is “slow.” Unless there are mass defections to the anti-war side among the Republicans, there is no prospect of the Dems overturning a Bush veto. Thursday night’s vote did not put a resolution of the Iraq quagmire off for only a few months. It put it off until a new president is inaugurated in January of 2009. Bush seems unlikely to significantly withdraw while still president, and the Dems can’t make him if the Republicans won’t turn on their own party’s leader.

Iraq will be the central issue of the 2008 presidential campaign.

The congressional vote on the spending supplemental for Iraq tells us how divided the Democratic Party is on the issue of Iraq. I’d say that the Dems voted in three classes: in accordance with the likely reaction in their congressional disctrict if in congress, in their entire state if senators, and in Iowa and New Hampshire if running for president. The major exception here was Joe Biden of Delaware, who is running on his foreign policy experience– a platform where you would not expect him to acquiesce in popular sentiment on issues he knows well.

The positions of the Washington State representatives and senators as described by the Seattle PI blog. Washington’s six Democratic representatives split down the middle, with three for and three against. But the two senators, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, both voted for it. Cantwell in particular was elected with a very thin margin [the first time, which will have affected her view of tightwire politics]. Clearly, a lot of these Democrats feared that their Republican opponents in the next election might effectively paint them as unpatriotic, troop-hating cut-and-runners if they had voted against the funding supplemental.

Those of us not running for office think that they are being way too cautious, and that the Iraq civil war is so unpopular as a pastime that no significant part of the electorate will punish them for demanding an end to US involvement in it. But then we don’t have to run against a well-heeled opponent with lots of money for television spots with which to rip off our faces in only a year.

Of the four sitting senators who are running for president as Democrats, three voted against the measure– Hillary Clinton,Christopher Dodd and Barack Obama. Joe Biden voted for the bill because, he said, although it is flawed, it would be irresponsible to deny our troops support as long as they are there. Outside the senate, Dennis Kucinich also voted against the bill, in the House. And it was vocally opposed by John Edwards and Bill Richardson. In fact, Edwards argued against presenting the bill in this form at all.

Politicians are in some important part about getting reelected. Sometimes they will take a big risk for a matter of principle, but most of the time their principles and the interests of their constituencies overlap a fair degree (which is typically how they got elected in the first place). The Democratic senators who voted for the bill think their constituencies will not punish them for doing so, but might punish them if they had not. In the case of, e.g., Washington state, this calculation may well be correct.

But the presidential hopefuls do not have their eyes on local districts or state-wide races. They are focused on the primaries. Primaries are dominated by the most committed of the party’s base. Democratic primaries are skewed to the left of the Democratic Party, and Republican primaries are way to the right of that party.

Traditionally, doing well in the first two is key to surviving long enough to win. That means making the Democratic base in Iowa and New Hampshire happy. Hillary’s staff is already, notoriously, not happy with her place in the polls in Iowa, where voters have apparently not forgiven her for having voted for the Iraq War in the first place. A vote for the Iraq supplemental might well have sunk her in both of the first two primaries.

On the other hand, that South Carolina and Florida will come so closely on the heels of the two northern primaries this time may alter the dynamics. A more centrist or conservative Democrat who can hold on until South Carolina and Florida might get a second wind. Both Clinton and Biden must be banking on this sort of thing.

Meanwhile, the Senate select committee on intelligence will share with the public on Monday passages from secret CIA intelligence analysis warning of sectarian violence and guerrilla resistance if the US went to war in Iraq.

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Sadr and Shiite Politics

Sawt al-Iraq carries a report that Muqtada al-Sadr is back in Najaf after travels in Lebanon and Iran.

The US military is cautiously reporting the same information, though with less certainty. It is thought possible that Muqtada will preach in Kufa on Friday.

Meanwhile, the US military announced on Friday morning that Iraqi guerrillas had killed 6 US GIs.

Reuters reports civil war violence in Iraq for Thursday. Major incidents:

FALLUJA – A suicide car bomb targeting mourners at a funeral killed at least 27 people and wounded more than 30 others in Falluja, 50 km (35 miles) west of Baghdad. . .

HDAD – Gunmen stopped a minibus at a fake checkpoint in a Shi’ite district on Baghdad’s northern outskirts on Thursday and killed all 11 passengers, police said. A bomb hidden among the bodies then exploded, killing two civilians and wounding four people, including two policemen. . .

McClatchy details other attacks and notes that police found 22 bodies in the streets of Baghdad on Thursday.

A leader in the Sadr Movement, Sheikh Adnan al-Silawi, called on Britain Thursday to withdraw its troops from Basra.

Some analysts warn that if the British withdraw from the southern, largely Shiite port city of Basra, “The Mehdi Army and rival Shiite militias will attempt a coup to seize control of the entire official military and security establishments in Basra and other southern Iraqi cities.”

A more proximate threat to Basra stability is the prospect of a strike by the Petroleum Workers’ Union. They are threatening a work stoppage if the Petroleum Bill is not revised to be less of a give-away to Western oil majors. Almost all of the 1.6 million barrels a day of that Iraq exports goes through Basra.

Al-Khalij reports in Arabic that the head of the Council for the Salvation of al-Anbar, Hamid al-Hayyis said that a delegation from the Council met with the leadership of the Sadr Movement. They then ment with two cabinet members, the minister of state for national security affairs and the minister for national dialogue affairs. The Council delivered to the government a letter asking that it hasten national reconciliation and stop making sectarian speeches. Al-Hayyis said that this was the first major meeting of the two principal sects in Iraq, where national essentials were agreed upon and shedding Iraqi blood was prohibited.

al-Sharq al-Awsat reports in Arabic that MP Rida Jawad Taqi of the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance is saying that his bloc, the largest in parliament, realizes that it is being targeted. He said that the UIA (which groups the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, the Da’wa Party and several other religious Shiite parties) is negotiating with the Islamic Virtue Party (Fadhila) in an attempt to bring it back into the coalition. Virtue left with its 15 members of parliament some months ago. He said that for the first time there are reports that Virtue wants to come back in. Jawad insisted that despite their withdrawal from the cabinet of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, the Sadrists had not altogether left the United Iraqi Alliance inside parliament.

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Guerrillas Kill 9 US GIs
Over 100 Dead in New Wave of Violence
Sectarian Killings at forefront Again

Sunni Arab guerrillas killed 9 US GIs in five separate attacks on Wednesday, bringing the death toll for May so far to 80. A tenth soldier was found floating in the Euphrates on Wednesday. He was one of three who had been captured the previous week.

Remember the Bush administration briefings in Iraq that touted a fall in “one type” of violence in Baghdad, sectarian killings? Alas, the bad news is that sectarian death squad attacks, which produce bodies in the street every morning, have crept back up. Sudarsan Raghavan of WaPo discovered that more people have been killed that way so far in May than had been in all of January, before the new security plan (the “surge”) was implemented.

As if to underline Raghavan’s point,
Reuters reports that on Wednesday, police found 30 bodies in Baghdad. Other major violence:

‘ MANDALI – A bomber wearing a suicide vest killed 20 people and wounded 30 in a cafe in Mandali, a predominantly Kurdish Shi’ite town about 100 km (60 miles) northeast of Baghdad, police said.

SAMARRA – A roadside bomb killed five policemen on patrol in central Samarra, 100 km (60 miles) north of Baghdad, police said. . .

BAGHDAD – Mortar bombs killed three people and wounded 14 in Karrada district in central Baghdad, police said. . .

RAMADI – The bodies of five people were found shot and tortured in different districts of the city of Ramadi, 110 km (70 miles) west of Baghdad, police said. . .

McClatchy adds, “This morning gunmen wearing the ministry of interior forces uniforms raided the famous Sinak market (not far away from the Green Zone) and tried to kidnap the shops owners. The gunmen clashed with the gunmen and later with U.S. and Iraqi troops, eye witnesses said helicopters attacked the attackers and burned two cars. The gunmen fled and 5 citizens were killed and 17 were injured, ministry of interior officers said.”

This newspaper estimates that over 100 Iraqis were killed on Wednesday in a new wave of violence.

MoveOn.org is urging US voters to pressure Congress with regard to withdrawing troops from Iraq.

Iraqi rice farmers in the south are beginning to plant opium poppies as a cash crop. The Bush administration is turning Iraq into Afghanistan.

One of the problems for the Bush administration with regard to the history of their fiasco in Iraq is that they invited in so many eyewitnesses from among “the willing.” Gradually they will start to talk. Col. Mike Kelly of Australia, for instance, has started spilling the beans about former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. He says that he urged Rummy to stop the looting in April of 2003, and that Donald over-ruled him. He calls Rumsfeld “criminally negligent.”

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The Bushies Just Make it Up: Iraq & al-Qaeda

Bush was out there again on Wednesday trying to link Iraq to al-Qaeda and maintaining that the US was mainly fighting it in that country. In fact, No Mahdi Army Shiites are al-Qaeda. Almost all Sunni Arab guerrilla cells are Baathist or Salafi rather than al-Qaeda. Probably of 100,000 guerrillas fighting in Iraq, perhaps 2% could be categorized in some vague way as “al-Qaeda” if you take that term as referring to a franchise. They are mainly foreign fighters and if the US left Iraq, the local Sunni Arabs would slit their throats. Some slitting is going on even now, and the Bushies celebrate that while not seeming to recognize the implication that “al-Qaeda” doesn’t amount to anything as an Iraqi political force.

But this making up things out of thin air is typical of W.’s Propaganda Presidency, or what Chris Floyd calls the “powerful odor of mendacity.”

And all along the Bushies have invoked al-Qaeda with regard to Iraq. It doesn’t matter what the real situation in Iraq is. Is it ruled by secular Sunni Arab nationalist Baathists who are afraid of al-Qaeda according to documents Bush himself captured and released? Nevertheless, Bushies find al-Qaeda in Iraq. Is Iraq dominated by Shiites allied to Iran? Bushies find an alliance with al-Qaeda. Like tax cuts, it is the answer to every problem.

On 25 July 2002, Doug Feith’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (OUSDP) issued a statement linking al-Qaeda to Saddam Hussein through a Dutch company named Vlemmo NV.

This sort of allegation was typical of Feith, who had been asked in January of 2002 to come up with material on the [imaginary] relationship of Bin Laden and Iraq by his superior (who had hired him apparently for this sort of purpose), Paul Wolfowitz.

Feith had been investigated by the FBI earlier in his career as a possible Israeli intelligence asset and was raised in a fringe, far-rightwing Zionist family. His father was a member of Betar, the organization devoted to teachings of fascist Zionist thinker Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky and to “Greater Israel” expansionism. Persons in this tradition often believe that Israel extends into Iraq itself.

Now it turns out that Feith just made up the Netherlands firm. According to the Netherlands Foreign Minister, it does not exist. . Just like virtually none of the things Feith peddled to us has has any reality. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz put Feith in a position to lie our troops into harm’s way, as the number three man in the Pentagon. Feith bears responsibility for his lies and fabrications. His superiors are even more culpable.

See Think Progress for more of the context here.

Update: Bob Harris discovers that Vlemmo existed, but was Belgian. That it was an operational link between Saddam and Bin Laden and that it was Netherlands were the two big fantasies.

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Starving the Americans Out

Someone in the Green Zone leaked the following memo, which shows that US personnel are now actually facing difficulties in getting food by convoy up from Kuwait. They avoid local food in the Baghdad region because of the danger guerrillas will poison it.

‘Due to a theater-wide delay in food delivery, menu selections will be limited for the near future. While every effort will be made to provide balanced meals, it may not be possible to offer the dishes you are used to seeing at each meal. Fresh fruits and salad bar items will also be severely limited or unavailable.’

The informant adds his own comment:

The bottom line is that our troops depend on a ground supply line that runs from Kuwait to the various bases in Iraq. When I was in Iraq last year at the U.S. base in Balad I had the chance to eat four meals a day–breakfast, lunch, dinner, and midnight rations (midrats). If you like late nights the midrats were great–steak, eggs, pancakes. Pretty good food. Well, based on this memo, it looks like those were the good old days. We don’t have enough convoys to give our troops three hot meals a day. ‘

See also Pat Lang’s comments.

The veracity of the memo has been challenged at some rightwing sites, but whatever the justice of their complaints about the logo (which may not be original and may have been in fact put there to disguise the source of the leak), the US Embassy memo has been confirmed in the Washington Post.

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