Bombings in Diyala Kill over Two Dozen
Bombings were back on the front page in Iraq on Saturday, with significant attacks carried out on Thursday evening and Friday.
At Muqdadiya in Diyala province, a female suicide bomber blew up a meeting of the local 'Awakening Council' or tribal levies willing to ally with the Americans against the radical Islamic State of Iraq. She killed at least 16 and wounded 27. Leila Fadel at McClatchy says she was aggrieved mother whose son fought on behalf of the Islamic State of Iraq and who had been killed by tribesmen of the Awakening Council (actually this council appears to have been members of the 1920 Revolution Brigade, a Sunni Muslim guerrilla group that has targeted US troops).
At al-Mansuriya, also in Diyala, a bit later on Friday, a car bomber drove into a military checkpoint, killing 10 persons and wounding 8. Among the wounded were soldiers and members of a local Awakening Group.
On Thursday evening guerrillas in Mosul had killed an Awakening leader, Jabir Jarba, and five of his subordinates with gunfire.
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a fundamentalist Shiite, dislikes the Sunni Awakening Councils, which have for the most part not shown themelves willing to ally with the new government. This according to Leila Fadel at McClatchy. She says the PM is actively putting roadblocks before the power and influence of the tribal levies in some areas of west Baghdad.
Among the more important Sunni Arab guerrilla groups still fighting the US is the neo-Baathists around Izzat Ibrahim Duri. The NYT reports,
' Elsewhere, the Iraqi police near Mr. Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit said they raided a hide-out that belonged to Mr. Hussein’s former vice president, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, who has eluded capture for nearly five years. Documents retrieved during the raid indicated that Mr. Douri had been there recently, the police said. The documents detailed ties to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a predominantly Iraqi group that American intelligence says has foreign leadership. They also laid out Iraqi police targets and included the blueprints of Iraqi military bases, the police said. The authorities said they also found the attack plan for a Mosul jailbreak that occurred in May, when five prisoners accused of terrorism escaped and two guards were killed. Weapons, including mortars, were also found. Mr. Douri sits at the top of the Iraqi government’s most-wanted list, and is accused by Washington of heading and financing terrorist operations here.
Duri's organization is one reason it was wrong all along to blame most of the political violence in Iraq on the Salafi Jihadis (or what the Bush administration insists on calling 'al-Qaeda'). Ex-Baathi and Baathi nationalists make up a good deal of the guerrilla movement. They sometimes cooperate with the Salafi Jihadis, but they are a different kettle of fish.
Helena Cobban on developments in the Sadr Movement and its relationship to the US forces and to Sunni Arab neighboring states.
The State Department inspector general
McClatchy also has details on other political violence for Friday.
See Farideh Farhi's further essay on reading the US National Intelligence Estimate in Iran. Philip Cunningham at the same site contemplates contemporary China.
At the Napoleon's Egypt blog, a whole slew of fascinating new letters by officers on the ground there.
The most recent three essays, on Iran and proliferation at Tomdispatch.com. They were very influential for me.
Labels: Iraq
posted by Juan Cole @ 12/08/2007 06:30:00 AM
3 Comments:
In my previous posts regarding Bush's now debunked sensational fear mongering about Iran, I have discussed how a lot of pop propaganda about Iranian leaders, and the possibility of a revolution against the Iranian leadership, is based on false, but popular, American premises... To quote myself from an earlier post:
The Bush administration, and its Neoconservative and Likudnik allies, have been able to create a framework of fear and overconfidence that works on two levels -
1. Hypes the fear that Iran is an apocalyptic nuclear and terrorist threat to Europe, Israel and the U.S. This threat matrix defies reality, especially when one understands that even under the most radical clerical leadership of the Vilayat-e-Fakih, that of Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1980s, while Khomeini promised to "wipe Israel off the map" the Iranians closely collaborated with Israel in the Iran-Contra deals, wherein the American antitank missiles were transported to Iran from Israeli supply depots. The Iranian clerical leadership is not a bunch of madmen, but operate with a rational Realpolitik that most scholars of the 'Kissinger school' would spot easily. This is the same rational thinking that led Iran to collaborate with the US in the 2002 invasion of Afghanistan, and in the political run up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
2. Popularizes the false notion that regime change in Iran is going to be easy and popular. The most common pop-misinformation along these lines is the argument that the vast majority of Iranian youth are pro-US and anti-status-quo-Iran. There is no demographic evidence that points out that the Iranian youth are any different from any other youth demographic - that is, the urban upper-middle-class youth are liberal and yearning for a free society that enables liberal partaking in sex, drugs and rock, while a lower middle class and rural youth population is largely traditional and holds conservative religious values. This demographic trait is obvious in India, and in the U.S. - so what is the evidence that Iran's youth are an exception? I believe that the Iranian youth are split among pro-West and pro-Tradition political blocks along the very same demographics as the rest of Iran's population.
Some of these lies and myths about Iran were exposed by scholar Trita Parsi in an article in The Nation magazine last month...
Well, a new report published by the Christian Science Monitor on Friday, explains in greater details the nuances of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmanidejad's popularity, which are often ignored in the Washington-based views coverage of Iran:
(QUOTE)
Ahmadinejad: rock star in rural Iran
By Scott Peterson / Fri Dec 7, 3:00 AM ET
Shoes off, and packed so tightly in a mosque that they sweat in the chilly night, several thousand men in eastern Iran await their hero. The air is electric.
When he arrives, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is greeted like a rock star: with a collective inhale the crowd jumps up to catch a glimpse of the firebrand populist. "Sit down! Sit down!" a cleric implores, as laudatory whistling intensifies. "The friend of the Imam [Mahdi] has come!"
While Mr. Ahmadinejad is under attack across Iran's political spectrum for his economic policies and unyielding nuclear rhetoric, even his detractors say these frequent visits to Iran's provinces are shrewd politics that give him a serious shot at reelection in 2009.
The president now also gloats – over Iranian rivals who say he brought the country close to war, as much as over American hawks championing attacks – about a new US National Intelligence Estimate that said this week Iran halted a nuclear weapons program in 2003.
The report is "a victory for the Iranian nation in the nuclear issue against all international powers," Ahmadinejad told rallying supporters Wednesday in the western city of Ilam. He warned: "If you want to start up a new game, the Iranian people will resist and will not step back one inch."
Reaching out to the pious and poor
A rare journey by a Western reporter, concurrent with one of Ahmadinejad's visits last month to South Khorasan Province where he handed out toys, cash, and executive support for big-ticket development projects, shows how the president is building his political base outside the capital, Tehran.
An unannounced visit to an experimental irrigation project, among many being touted by the president's aides, also found that a large infusion of cash, received the day before this reporter's visit, will enable operations to expand 20-fold, creating more than 1,100 new jobs with credit going to Ahmadinejad.
As the president began a second round of 30 provincial visits in the city of Birjand, his entourage of aides and ministers spread out to villages to check on development projects, cut red tape, and receive 130,000 personal letters full of requests for money and jobs, as well as complaints – adding them to the 9 million letters the president has already accumulated over 2-1/2 years in office.
Iranians have as many problems as ever, from corruption to soaring prices and unemployment. But during this trip, the president spent millions in this province alone – from new petrochemical factories to shantytown improvement. He promised that next fiscal year, 40 percent of Iran's budget would go to rural areas.
All of this adds to a perception here of Ahmadinejad as a pious populist, a man searching for solutions, and not part of the problem. Some even link him to the Shiite Muslim savior, the Mahdi, whom they expect will one day return to bring universal justice.
(END QUOTE)
As long as the majority of the press coverage of Iran is sourced out of Washington, and as long as the Western press refuses to take a grass roots approach to understanding Iranian democracy, the portrayal of Iran in the American media will continue to be, in the least, inaccurate, if not outright dishonest.
Links to related material are available on my blog.
Juan, thanks for the link and, as always, for you dedicated contributions here to the public discourse. Just one small point: the guy who resigned was the State Dept's overall inspector general. The persistent Special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction, Stuart Bowen, Jr., remains steadfastly on the job.
I am convinced that the Iran War is more a certainty now than it was before. I think we need to remember that as the administration built up to the Iraq War, there were several reports from inspectors that seriously undermined the administrations already absurdly cartoony case. But not only did those reports not matter, in terms of obstructing the momentum towards war, they actually helped push the momentum towards war. See, the administration never cared whether they had a case or not, really. What they cared about was linking those two words: Iraq/terror (or, alternatively, Saddam/Al Queda). People just needed to hear and see those words and images in proximity. That's how propaganda works. Most folks don't parse what they see in the media the way we media critics do. They get the basic gist. It's not because they are unintelligent or anything like that. It's that they are paying attention in a critical way. And as the administration led up to the Iraq attack, the linking of Iraq and terror, even if just through proximity, was incessant.
And that's exactly what we have going on now. Iran/nuclear. It doesn't matter that the content of the story is that Iran is NOT working on a weapon. The gist of the ongoing media narrative is the linking of Iran/Nuclear (as well as Ahmadinejad/genocide and so on) and that gist is what creates the momentum towards war.
I think the approach the administration will take and is probabaly already taking towards war is the same they took with Iraq. Remember, long before Bush invaded Iraq, he tried to bait Saddam into atttacking a US airplane by increasing US flights into Iraq's airspace. That tactic didn't work on Iraq, because Iraq had nothing to gain and everything to lose if it bit. It's only hope was to not respond to the US provocations.
The case with Iran is different, as I understand it. Iran has better air defenses than Iraq ever had, but these seem to be trumped by improved US and Israeli technology for defeating air defenses. What Iran DOES have is lots of missles and pretty good ones. If Hirsh and others are right, the US plan is to take out those missles and all of Iran's military capability in a matter of hours or days, and it surely has the ability to do this, especially if Israel helps. Thus, Iran is put into a "use 'em or lose 'em" position, as far as its missles are concerned, it seems to me. The more Iran hears and sees the war talk ratcheted up (eg, talks between the US Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the IDF). the more I think it HAS to develope a hair trigger. All the US has to do is play the provocation game it did with Iraq, running airplanes at Iran and hoping that Iran's hair trigger goes off.
If I were Iran, and I saw the US doing this, I would do everything in my power to document it and to make a stink at the UN about it. That, it seems to me, is perhaps the only remaining hope for peace, because otherwise, the rush to war seems awfully, horribly familiar - especially if the US succeeds in making side deals with Russia and China, to keep them from interfering. Iran is an ally for both, and niether nation can be happy about the idea of the US becoming so dominant in their backyards, but if the Administration can work out some kind of quid pro quo with them...
It all seems horribly, almost unbelievably machiavellian at this point. But at least it will make great tv. I'm sure CNN and Fox and MSNBC all have fabulous war graphics set to go.
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