Napoleon Defeats Knights of St. John, Takes Malta

At the Napoleon in Egypt blog, Bourrienne's brief account of the conquest of the Knights of St. John at Malta.
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Iraqi Parliament Adjourns
ASEAN Calls for US Withdrawal from Iraq

Iraq's parliament went on a one-month hiatus Tuesday afternoon, having not passed any significant legislation. Bush had outlined 4 'benchmarks' last January that the Iraqi government needed to meet by June. These were passage of a petroleum law, passage of a law specifying distribution of the petroleum revenues, revisions of debaathification rules [which harm Sunni Arabs], and progress on Sunni-Shiite reconciliation. Nothing has been accomplished on any of these fronts.

Corruption is rife in Iraqi ministries, including Health and Petroleum, according to Aram Roston and Lisa Myers of NBC news. Enormous numbers of medicines, and great amounts of gasoline and kerosene, are embezzled by ministry employees. Crony and ethnic favoritism sends Sunnis to jail while equally guilty Shiites walk free. And there have been ghost units of police that only existed on paper.

Ned Parker of the LA Times reports that the Ministry of Interior is a whole set of institutions that are not united among themselves.

US allies in Southeast Asia, ASEAN, have called for a "calibrated" draw-down of foreign troops from Iraq on the grounds that it would contribute to stability. Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, etc., as Asian nations with a history of resisting Western dominance, are sure that the US occupation of the country is a big part of the problem. US Secretary of State Condi Rice skipped the ASEAN security conference for the second year in a row, since she is heavily preoccupied with the Iraq crisis. Meanwhile, China is moving into the ASEAN economies.

Amid all the other health care crises in Iraq, there is the problem of large numbers of amputees because of the bombings, according to The Guardian. Even in Mosul, the large northern city that is by no means the most violent place in Iraq, there is a need for 3,000 replacement replacement limbs a year!

Police found 25 bodies in the streets on Monday, victims of sectarian death squads.

Reuters summarizes political violence on Monday:

' BAGHDAD - A car bomb killed six people and wounded 31 in al-Tayaran Square in a mainly Shi'ite area of central Baghdad, police said.

FALLUJA - Three U.S. soldiers were killed in combat operations in western Anbar province on Thursday, the U.S. military said.

NEAR BALAD - A suicide fuel truck bomb targeting an Iraqi army and police checkpoint killed four people and wounded six near the town of Balad, 80 km (50 miles) north of Baghdad, on Sunday, police said.

BALAD - A car bomb targeting a police patrol killed one policeman and wounded six others in Balad on Sunday, police said. . .

ISKANDARIYA - Three people were killed and two wounded in a fight between two Shi'ite and Sunni tribes on Sunday in Iskandariya, 40 km (25 miles) south of Baghdad, police said.

At our group blog on global affairs, see Howard Eissenstat's essay on the meaning of the victory of the AK Party in Turkey's recent elections.
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Sick on the New Cold War with Iran

at our group blog, Columbia U. Political Scientist and former National Security Adviser Gary Sick lays out what he sees as a coherent Bush administration policy of pursuing a new Cold War in the Middle East, with Iran.

Sick's analysis explains everything from the new arms deal being offered Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel to the odd and consistent focus of US military spokesmen in Baghdad on the tiny part of the problems in Iraq that derive from Iran.

Iran replied to the arms deal proposal by observing that US policy in the Middle East was to create bogeymen, make everyone afraid, and then offer to sell them billions in shiny new weapons.
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A third of Iraqi Children Malnourished
Baghdad Neighborhoods Emptied by Snipers
Skepticism on Gates-Rice Mission

The aid organization Oxfam estimates that a third of Iraqis, about 8 million persons, are in urgent need of aid, lacking potable water and in many instances even food to eat. The BBC summarizes:

' Nearly 30% of children are malnourished, a sharp increase on the situation four years ago. Some 15% of Iraqis regularly cannot afford to eat.

The report also said 92% of Iraq's children suffered from learning problems. . .

t suggests that 70% of Iraq's 26.5m population are without adequate water supplies, compared to 50% percent prior to the invasion. Only 20% have access to effective sanitation.
'

These statistics strike as similar to the ones for Palestinians in Gaza, which was under Israeli military occupation for decades, and which is still in a kind of Israeli penitentiary. The Iraqi statistics are worse, and were achieved more quickly. But foreign military occupation clearly isn't good for a people, and one of its by-products can be large numbers of malnourished children.

McClatchy reports that the visit to Egypt and Saudi Arabia of Secretary of State Condi Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates faces severe hurdles to its success. They are said to want to drum up support among these Sunni US allies for the Shiite government of PM Nuri al-Maliki in Iraq; to want to mobilize the region against Iran, and to kickstart the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. They face an atmosophere poisoned by a recent public US leak of US dissatisfaction with Saudi Arabia's role in supporting Sunni Arab dissidents in Iraq (a leak that became less anonymous when the criticism of Riyad was endorsed Sunday by ambassador to the UN Zalmay Khalilzad.) The Saudis and others in the region are reluctant to sign on to a Bush iniative, McClatchy says, a) because Bush has had few successes and a lot of disasters and b) because Bush is a lame duck and who wants to stick out his neck for him?

Gen. David Petraeus vigorously contested on Sunday the allegations of some Shiite politicians around PM Nuri al-Maliki that al-Maliki wants him gone because he is arming Sunni Arab forces to fight "al-Qaeda" in Iraq. These Sunni Arab forces have sometimes been implicated in killing Shiites. The Arabic press has reported al-Maliki's opposition to the policy, out of fear that when the US departs, his government will have to face well-armed Sunnis with blood in their eyes.

A warm congratulations to Iraq on the victory of its soccer (football) team in the Asia Cup finals!

Liz Sly of the Trib reports on the tense Iraqi-Turkish border, made perilous by the safe harbor offered the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) guerrillas by the leaders of Iraqi Kurdistan. At the last checkpoint under Iraqi control, she is told, "There could be bombing, and there are terrorists everywhere."

This delicate problem, which could blow up the northern reaches of the Middle East, requires delicate diplomacy, right? Nope. Bush thinks all problems can be resolved with violence. Dark Prince Bob Novak says that Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman has briefed Congress on a covert US operation to help Turkey suppress the PKK. The quid pro quo would be that Turkey would not invade northern Iraq.

The problem? The Kurds are the only firm ally the US had in Iraq, and US special ops troops getting directly involved against the PKK might well alienate the Kurds in general. You can hear W.'s fingernails squeak as they dig into the face of the high cliff down which he is gradually sliding.

The cost of the American presence in Iraq during August when the Iraqi parliament is on vacation? Bob Schieffer says that key members of Congress have been told $200,000 a minute.

Reuters reports that "Gunmen killed eight people and wounded two others on Saturday in a drive-by shooting in a Turkman village near the town of Tuz Khurmato, about 180 km (110 miles) north of Baghdad . . " Also, among many other incidents:

' BAGHDAD - One U.S. soldier was killed by small arms fire north of Baghdad, the U.S. military said. . .

BAGHDAD - A roadside bomb targeting an Iraqi army patrol wounded four people, including a soldier, in Baghdad's Zayouna area, police said. . .

BAGHDAD - Three people were wounded by a mortar round which fell near the former residence of the French ambassador near al-Mesbah intersection in central Baghdad, police said. . .

KIRKUK - A mortar bomb wounded five people in a residential area of Kirkuk, 250 km (155 miles) north of Baghdad, police and hospital sources said. . .

McClatchy reports, in addition, that in Diyala province on Sunday:

' Early morning , terrorists bombed The Prophet Daniel shrine near Wajihiya town (north of Baquba) and it is fully destroyed.

- Early morning, terrorists attacked Bihbisa village , which is close to Daniel shrine , firing some houses , killing 3 men , kidnapping five and destroying 11 houses which forced some family to displace the area.

- Around 10 am, a roadside bomb exploded in front of a shop whose owner was supplying people for food ration which had months of delay killing one man and injuring 25 other[s] at Belad Rouz ( 40 km east of Baquba).Most of the injured are women and children.

- Around 10 am, three policemen were killed and three others injured when a roadside bomb targeted their patrol near Deli Abass ( east Baquba) . '

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that many Baghdadis have fled their neighborhoods because of persistent sniping, rendering some districts of the capital like ghost towns. (There are an estimated 2 million internally displaced Iraqis, and a similar number abroad, primarily in Jordan and Syria). One of these semi-deserted areas is al-Shurta in West Baghdad. As the people moved out, the Mahdi Army militia moved in, turning empty apartments into "offices" of their militia and recruiting local young men into it. They are being prepared to fight Sunni Arab militiamen from the nearby Ridwaniya neighborhood, said to be dominated by "al-Qaeda." Haytham Khalid, 36, a resident of the Shurta neighborhood, told al-Hayat that the "al-Qaeda" marksmen subjected his [Shiite] district to intense and continual sniping, as a means of emptying it out so that Sunni Arabs could take it over. In the first task, of emptying it out, they had begun to succeed. Markets are deserted. The local Mahdi Army militia has for some months forbidden vehicular traffic in the neighborhood, as a way of keeping out car bombs.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports in Arabic that PM Nuri al-Maliki's office clarified that it had simply confirmed the decision of the Basra governing council with regard to the dismissal of the governor, Muhammad Misbah al-Wa'ili. The federal prime minist, an aide said, does not have the authority independently to dismiss an elected governor. (This communication ignores that al-Wa'ili had appealed to al-Maliki to intervene against the dismissal, and al-Maliki refused to do so, essentially upholding the campaign of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council to unseat the governor). Meanwhile, al-Wa'ili and his Islamic Virtue Party (Fadhila) are defiant and say that the governor will remain in office until a constitutional court to which he has appealed rules against him.

In Washington, DC, if you don't specify the precise budget for something you are doing, you can deny you are doing it, apparently. Walter Pincus reports that US base-building in Iraq seems to be an enormous endeavor, but it is hard to find out exactly how much is being spent on it."

At our group blog, Manan Ahmed explains which portions of the new 'Improving America's Security' Act of 2007 are sticking in the craws of our Pakistani allies.
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Bonaparte Betrayed at Cairo

At the Napoleon in Egypt blog, the story of how Gen. Bonaparte discovered during his march on Cairo that his wife was cheating on him, and what he wrote his brother in response.


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Basra Governor Dismissed
Fadhila Brands al-Maliki Gov. "the New Baath"
Sunnis Complain about "Threats"

The Sunni Arab bloc in parliament, the Iraqi Accord Front, traded insults on Saturday with the al-Maliki government. In the wake of its suspension of participation in the government on Wednesday, al-Maliki's spokesman, Ali Dabbagh made a statement that the Sunnis are interpreting as threatening and coercive, according to al-Hayat writing in Arabic. He say that political adventurism might lead into dangers that would be fruitless for everyone.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports in Arabic that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has fired Basra governor Muhammad Misbah al-Wa'ili of the Islamic Virtue Party (Fadhila). I had summarized Arabic newspaper reports on April 30 about the vote of no-confidence brought against the governor by the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council. There are 41 seats on the Basra governing council, which was elected in January, 2005. SIIC has 20 seats. Fadhila or Virtue had about 15, but was able to convince 6 independents to vote with it, thus creating a Virtue-dominated provincial administration.

In March, the Islamic Virtue Party pulled out of the [Shiite] United Iraqi Alliance coalition in the federal government, in which it had been allotted 15 seats. In part they were protesting their loss of the petroleum ministry portfolio, which had gone to the Supreme Council. They had had that ministry under the previous prime minister, Ibrahim Jaafari, and since Basra is the big oil refining city, their control of both allowed for downward integration (their critics accused Fadhila of embezzling gasoline to support their party and militia). In reaction against the defection of the Islamic Virtue Party from the UIA, the Supreme Council appears to have decided to attract the loyalty of a few of the independents and to unseat al-Wa'ili. In this goal they succceeded. Al-Wa'ili then appealed to al-Maliki to adjudicate the dispute. The decision announced late Saturday appears to have been al-Maliki's response to the appeal. He seems to have put off the decision until parliament was on the cusp of its August recess, perhaps as a way of limiting the political response and fall-out.

The Islamic Virtue Party in Basra rejected the prime minister's decision, calling it part of a campaign of defamation against the party in the wake of its break with the ruling United Iraqi Alliance. Party leaders said that the al-Maliki government "has lost its legimitacy" and branded it "the New Baath."

Al-Maliki's letter noted that the Basra governing council conducted a vote of no confidence against al-Wa'ili, and that it had the right to do so under the Bremer Laws. The letter said that it was incumbent on the council now to elect a new governor.

The Islamic Virtue Party is appealing to the constitutional court. Its deputy leader warned that demonstrations could roil the city and that they could turn bloody.

Basra appears to have been without a functioning government since the beginning of May, and now may be paralyzed by faction fighting over al-Wa'ili's dismissal.

All this is inconvenient to the British, who would like to turn security duties in the province over to the local government by the end of 2007.

Basra is Iraq's major export port, and it is from there that the country exports 1.8 million barrels a day of petroleum. If social order there collapses, it could make it difficult for the federal government in Baghdad to function either, since it depends on the proceeds from petroleum sales.

Some 20 bodies were found dead in the streets of Baghdad on Saturday. Guerrillas dressed as women attacked a Kurdish police checkpoint and killed 3 policemen. There were bombings and mortar attacks in Baghdad.
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Mayberry Testimony on Kidnapping of Workers for US Embassy Baghdad

I mentioned story the other day briefly about allegations that the Kuwaiti contracting firm building the US embassy in Baghdad has Shanghaied workers, bringing them to the Middle East under false pretences and depriving them of their passports-- In essence, of kidnapping them. The video testimony below by medic Rory Mayberry is much more powerful than a newspaper report could be. He talks about a gun being used to silence protesting workers just told they are really going to Baghdad!

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Al-Maliki Tensions Said Severe with Petraeus;
US Raid in Karbala

Steven R. Hurst and Qassim Abdul-Zahra of the Associated Press get the scoop that relations between Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and US Gen. David Petraeus are so tense that aides to al-Maliki say he has considered asking Washington to pull the general out of Baghdad. The two major sources of tension appear to be al-Maliki's continued lack of control over all Iraqi military units and operations, and Petraeus's policy of arming Iraqi Sunni Arab tribesmen willing to fight the foreign Salafi Jihadis. Al-Maliki fears that once the Sunni tribesmen have dispatched "al-Qaeda," they will turn on the largely Shiite government with their new American weapons.

Ironically, al-Maliki himself got called a collaborator with Sunni Arab 'terrorists' on Friday, himself. Sawt al-Iraq, writing in Arabic, says that after Friday prayers the Shiites of Khalis (a city in Diyala Province) demonstrated against the prime minister. Al-Maliki had just met in Diyala's capital, Baqubah, with the Sunni Arab leadership of the city, which the Shiites believe is full of al-Qaeda supporters (they mean Salafi Jihadis) who are implicated in the killing of Shiites.

The US military raided a rogue Mahdi Army cell in the Shiite holy city of Karbala on Friday. US troops captured the cell leader but then took small arms fire from his supporters, leading to a vigorous clash. Iraqi sources claimed that 9 militiamen and a civilian woman were killed and 25 persons were wounded, including women and children. The US maintained that the death toll was 6, all militiamen. Any foreigners fighting in Karbala are likely to raise tensions, but this action was almost certainly requested by the city's power elite, which sides with the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council and its Badr Corps paramilitary against the Sadrists and the Mahdi Army. US troops no longer routinely patrol downtown Karbala, but come in to the city from a base outside it when requested by Iraqi security forces.

US officials say that they are upset with Saudi Arabia for undermining the government of PM Nuri al-Maliki by charging him with being an Iranian secret agent and distributing faked documents to that effect.

On the other hand, I gather that the Bush administration is not too upset with Saudi Arabia, to which it is planning to sell billions of dollars of fancy new military equipment.

Tom Englehardt on how the idea of a US military withdrawal from Iraq became mainstream.

Shaikh Abdul Mahdi al-Karbala'i, in his Friday sermon at the mosque attached to the shrine of Imam Husayn in Karbala, warned of a "humanitarian catastrophe" in Diyala province. Al-Karbala'i is the representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and his sermons are thought to reflect Sistani's thinking. He said Friday that numerous Diyala residents had contacted him urgently for aid, saying that they lacked services, even water, and that thousands faced death or displacement from their homes. He asked the government to help them. He said he was amazed that the prime minister and the Iraqi officer corps seemed afraid of launching a military campaign against the terrorists to rescue them. He interpreted their timidity as a fear on their parts of being seen as Shiite officials attacking Sunnis on behalf of Shiites, i.e. of acting out of merely sectarian concerns. He suggested in response that a joint Diyala military command be formed with nationalist officers drawn from the Shiite, Sunni, Kurdish, and Turkmen communities, which would not feel similar compunctions.

Sadr al-Din al-Qubanchi, preaching at the mosque of the shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf, showered praise on the US-Iranian talks held this week in Baghdad. Al-Qubanchi is a member of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, headed by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, which is the closest of all Iraqi parties to Tehran but also among the closest allies of the Bush administration in Iraq. He also praised Syria for having cancelled a planned meeting in Damascus of the Iraqi Baath Party in exile.

Al-Hayat, writing in Arabic, reports that the bombings in the once upscale, Shiite district of Karrada in central Baghdad have left the inhabitants shivering with fear. The neighborhood is a sort of second 'Green Zone,' with major politicians and parties based there, along with newspaper offices. Some residents are warning that it could become an arena for clashes among warring militias, especially after armed groups threw up checkpoints on the grounds of checking cars for bombs.

In funeral processions for those killed in the bombings and mortar attacks on Thursday, which killed 60 and wounded 94, mourners attacked US troops and threw stones at Iraqi troops in the district [i.e. blaming them for not forestalling the bombings.] Karrada has been hit by bombings 10 times in July. These were not for the most part suicide bombings but were rather coordinated detonations. In the aftermath, armed Shiite militiamen have come in and set up checkpoints, and there is a danger they will clash with Sunni Arab guerrillas. Big party "offices" have proliferated, actualy HQs for militias. Most merchants have left Karrada and other nice neighborhoods, given the rise in harassment and kidnappings for ransom. Hundreds of residential buildings now sit empty, their residents having fled.

Oil Minister Hussein Shahristani says that Iraq's oil unions are not legitimate.
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EPIC News Release: Responsibility to Iraqi Refugees Act

The Education for Peace in Iraq Center sent this news release on an important bill that is in danger of languishing in Congress:

"On June 14th, when we began building support for Congressman Blumenauer's Responsibility to Iraqi Refugees Act of 2007 (H.R. 2265), only 14 representatives had signed on. EPIC hand-delivered more than 2,300 constituent letters to Congress, and now the bill has 49 cosponsors -- an increase of 35 as of July 25th.

Iraqis are the third largest displaced population in the world, after Palestinians and Sudanese. Yet despite a rapidly deteriorating humanitarian and protection situation for many of the 4 million displaced Iraqis, the U.S. has only resettled 133 since October 2006. H.R. 2265 would provide support for Iraq and its neighbors to handle the crisis, and special visas for the most at-risk refugees -- particularly those in danger for working closely with American soldiers and NGOs in Iraq.

EPIC's actions are making a difference in Congress, and your help will strengthen our impact. You can check the list of cosponsors for H.R. 2265 here, and if your Representative has not signed on, please visit our Action Center and personalize your letter to Congress today.

Together, we have real power to help millions of innocent Iraqi civilians displaced by violence. But we all must work together to keep the pressure up. For more information about taking the next steps, click here.

Sincerely,

Emily Stivers
Education for Peace in Iraq Center



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The Education for Peace in Iraq Center works to build peace through the advancement of human rights, humanitarian relief and sustainable development that benefits all Iraqis.

Support EPIC online or send your contribution to:

Education for Peace in Iraq Center (EPIC)
1101 Pennsylvania Ave, SE
Washington, DC 20003
202-543-6176
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8 US Troops Killed
100 Casualties in Karrada Bombing
KRG MP: US oil Interests driving Iraqi Legislation

It was announced Thursday that Iraqi guerrillas had killed 7 US soldiers. The Daily Times say 8 died from Tuesday to Thursday. Among other violence against Iraqis, guerrillas detonated a massive car bomb in Central Baghdad that killed 25, wounded 75, and left rows of shops destroyed. Some 20 bodies were found in the streets of Baghdad on Thursday. South of Baghdad in Babil, a guerrillas used a roadside bomb to kill 5 policemen and wound two civilians. Al-Hayat writing in Arabic put the Iraqi death toll from direct civil war violence for Thursday at 65.

Sawt al-Iraq reports that member of the Kurdistan parliament, Nuri Talabani, insists that US economic interests are driving its heavy-handed push to make sure the Iraqi parliament signs a petroleum law in short order. He said that the US government wants special deals for US petroleum corporations in developing, producing and distributing Iraqi petroleum, and that is why it is in such a hurry. Since the US and its Iraqi allies have been involved in heavy negotiations with the Kurdistan Regional Government over the exact provisions of a petroleum law, it is plausible that Talabani has special knowledge of US goals.

Allegations are being made that the foreign workers building the massive US embassy in Baghdad have in some cases been Shanghaied (told they were going to Dubai but then taken to Baghdad instead) and, once in Iraq, have been abused. The charges are against the Kuwaiti contractor supplying the workers to the US government. It has been alleged before that forms of corporate slavery have underpinned some of the private contract work done in Iraq.

The Sunni Arab party, the National Accord Front carried through Thursday with its threat to suspend membership in the al-Maliki government again. The party leaders gave Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki one week to meet their demands, or they said the six cabinet members from the party would resign, and that Front would pull out of the so-called national unity government for good. (The National Accord Front has made these threats before and then withdrawn them, so it is hard to know how seriously to take them this time.) Sheikh Khalaf al-Ulyan of the Front explained its demands:

' Al-Elyan said the front's demands included a pardon for security detainees not charged with specific crimes, a firm commitment by the government to human rights, the disbanding of militias and the inclusion of all parties as the government deals with Iraq's chaotic security environment. '

As the AP article points out, one likely outcome of the NAI's suspension of governmental activities is that the al-Maliki government will be able to make no further progress on passing the petroleum bill, the bill specifying how revenues are to be shared, the bill on revsion of debaathification measures, or on the process of Sunni-Shiite national reconciliation (Bush's 4 benchmarks of last January, which were due in June. None has been met).

The LA Times reports that Baghdadis are down to one or two hours of electricity a day, but that the Bush administration will no longer be measuring or reporting on that sort of local data. It will give Congress only the general statistic for the entire country. But obviously whether the capital has electricity would help you know whether the current policies are working.

We had just learned from Reuters last week that the number of guerrilla attacks in Iraq in June reached an all-time high, suggesting that the surge isn't actually going very well. CNN appears to have been one of the few news organizations, then, to pay much attention to Gen. Odierno's allegation that the surge is obviously working because US combat deaths have fallen so far in July. I know it is the general's job to spin things this way, but it is my job to call a spade a spade. In fact the secular trend of US combat deaths for April, May and June was significantly up:

' The previous three months were the deadliest three-month stretch in the war, with 104 deaths in April, 126 in May and 101 in June. '

This is up from 81 in February and March. So the quarterly average is still higher than in winter. Three weeks tells you nothing. (It is 130 degrees in Baghdad; what guerrilla in his right mind rolls out a big offensive in July or August?) Second, what kind of improvement is that, where over-all attacks rise but fewer US combat troops are affected by them? That sounds like US troops are having less contact with the enemy, which is hitting out more frequently than ever before at Iraqi security and civilian targets. That outcome does not point to "success" for the "surge"!

Al-Hayat reports that many Iraqis simply do not believe that the US congress is serious when it votes against permanent bases in Iraq. Members of parliament say that they see these enormous hardened bases being built, which is practical proof to the contrary. They think the Democratic Congress is just posturing because of its struggle with the Bush White House. Shiite MP Qasim Da'ud said that, however, even in future US troops would not be accepted in Iraq, in part because the country's neighbors are afraid of Washington's intentions. (He is referring to Iran.)
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Bombings Kill dozens in Street Crowds
Sunni Arabs threaten withdrawal from Parliament

Iraqis were unified for a brief period on Wednesday as they came out in the streets from the north of the country to its south, from Irbil to Baghdad to Basra, to celebrate the country's soccer (football) victory in the Asian Cup. People danced in the streets, sang, waved Iraqi flags, and drove with car doors open and passengers celebrating. Iraqis have constructed a powerful nationalism during the 20th century that Western observers now often discount, but those celebrations were a glimmer of the pre-Bush Iraq.

Sunni Arab guerrillas must have been planning for these street celebrations, since they hit them powerfully and effectively in Baghdad, with two car bombs, killing 55 and wounding 135 according to late reports. There were other bombings and mortar attacks in the capital, and 18 bodies were found in the streets. A vehicle with Iranian pilgrims was attacked.

The Sunni Arab Iraqi Accord Front is threatening once again to suspend participation in parliament. This development would be a severe blow to PM Nuri al-Maliki, who is trying to put together a new political bloc of 'moderates'.

The US House of Representatives voted on Wednesday overwhelmingly to bar permanent US military bases in Iraq or any attempt to control Iraqi petroleum. Some Republicans apparently voted for the measure somewhat insincerely, arguing that there are no such things as permanent US military bases abroad, because bases require the consent of the host country. The Republicans may feel that the vote will nevertheless give them some cover in the 2008 elections. House members have to contest elections every 2 years, and the American public is clearly becoming impatient with the war.

Work began on the joint US-Iranian-Iraqi committee on security in the wake of Tuesday's meeting. The Iranians are also considering higher-level talks.

Catch Farideh Farhi's important discussion of the talks between US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker and his Iranian counterpart at our group blog. She argues that Crocker's show of pique with the Iranians was designed to mollify US rightwingers who oppose such talks, while we should keep our eyes on the substantive outcome of the negotiations, i.e. the joint committee on Iraqi security that targets "al-Qaeda in Iraq."

Fred Kaplan reviews the leaked Crocker-Petraeus security plan covering through 2009 and finds it unlikely to succeed. Kaplan is skeptical about the ability of Iraqi security forces to "hold" neighborhoods in Baghdad. And, he cannot see how a temporary alliance of convenience with fractious, Shiite-hating Sunni tribesmen of al-Anbar Province against al-Qaeda in Iraq can produce a stable partnership or end sectarian fighting. He quotes military historian Stephen Biddle giving the plan only a 1 in 10 chance of success.

The military historian Tom Collier here in Ann Arbor wrote me on this plan,

" In its schools, the Army teaches a format for the study of any problem. It starts with "1. Assumptions," and then goes on to facts bearing on the problem, conclusions, and recommendations. Students are taught that if the assumptions are incorrect, then the rest of the study will be invalid.

The "detailed plan" that Michael Gordon reported seems to be based on two shaky assumptions:

1. U.S. troops can use force to create "sustainable security" for the Iraqi government to function, and

2. Given that security, the Iraqi government *will* function and will reach "political reconciliation" among "disparate factions," provide basic services, and stop the violence.

In other words, 1. we hope that we can put wings on a frog and, 2. we hope that the frog will then fly to paradise. And based on those assumptions, the "detailed plan" calls for U.S. troops to fight and die "until at least '09." Wow!!!" --Tom Collier

An audit has shown that only 42% of Bechtel's reconstruction projects in Iraq was completed. Bechtel maintainst that changing priorities of key funder, the US Agency for International Development, caused 10 of 24 projects to be abandoned.

I wrote Wednesday about the disappointing harvests in the southern province of Dhi Qar, which the Arabic press attributed in large part to soil salinization.

Here are expert comments I received on this issue, which profoundly affects Iraqi food security. Not my field, and I did not realize how full of salts fresh water is, such that if it isn't drained properly it salinizes the soil, too. I think I was probably misled by what I had read on Egypt, because its peasants and government appear to have been much more expert in dealing with this problem even after the Nile was dammed. So my correspondent wrote:

"Salinization of the soils in southern Iraq is very severe, perhaps even more severe than the Indus basin in Punjab or Sindh. The reason is the combination of poor drainage in the southern part of Mesopotamia and reduced flow of water due to damming of the rivers upstream. There are huge tracts of land in Dhi Qar, Basra, Missan, Babil, Diwaniyah and even Najaf and Karbala that are white with salt and thus unsuitable for agriculture. The fix, install good drainage and flush the soil of salt, will require large sums of money and a deliberate and thoughtful plan. The money at least theoretically exists but thoughtful planning is no where to be found.

The Ministry of Science and Technology worked with the Ministry of Agriculture and an American group to test a salt tolerant wheat variety in areas south of Baghdad. Farmers who participated were able to reap an economic crop for the first time in many years, some noted that it was magic. What happened to that variety is anybody's guess. The chaos that engulfed the south and which paralyzed the government after 2005 ruined plans for large scale reproduction of the seed. Thus what you report in Dhi Qar is really nothing new. Agriculture in the southern part of Iraq was ruined long ago by poor stewardship of resources and deliberate destruction.

In Egypt, rice production in the delta is promoted to guard against salt water intrusion. The construction of the Aswan High Dam has compelled farmers and authorities to be watchful of creeping salinization all along the Nile basin because the Nile does not act as the ultimate drain it once was. But the issue with respect to salt is minor compared with Iraq and it is under control. "

At the Napoleon blog, Bonaparte's letters to his brother Joseph in spring-summer 1798.
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Trix: Tale of Three Villages: Kosova, 2007

With the status of Kosova uncertain after a Russian veto of a UN Security Council plan for its independence, its leaders are calling for elections this fall anyway. This volatile region in the Balkans is extremely important. We are lucky to have a guest editorial today on it. - Juan

Anthropologist Frances Trix writes:

As we approached Krushe e Vogel, a village in southwestern Kosova, we met a tractor pulling a cart with workers going to the fields. A common enough scene in rural Kosova except that the driver of the tractor and all the workers were women. We entered a typical Albanian compound with high wooden gate and walls. Inside was a garden, chickens pecking around, a rusty tractor, the house, and again, only women. The Kosovar Albanian woman I was with, Marte Prenkpalaj, had a special relationship with these village women. On March 26, 1999, she had looked out her family's window across the Drini River to see women and children running toward the icy river on the other side. "Don't go out," her mother cautioned her, "there are paramilitaries." But Marte, an elementary school principal knew something was wrong. She took the family tractor with its cart and drove down and across the wide riverbed with its shallow river. Four times she made this trip to pick up all the women and children from Krushe e Vogel and bring them to her village on the other side of the Drini. That day the local Serbs, for there were about thirty Serb families living in the village and they were armed, had forced the Albanian men and older boys at gunpoint into a stable. The NATO bombing had begun two nights before, and conditions on the ground were precarious. The Serbs had ordered the women and children to go drown themselves in the river and chased them in that direction. Three days later all the Albanian people of the region, including the women and children of Krushe e Vogel, went on the trek out of Kosova to Albania to wait out the war. Three months later they returned to find that all their menfolk had been killed that day in March, their bodies burned in the stable, and the remains dumped in the river. But the story does not end there. Several years later, in line with its central directive to "build a multi-ethnic society," KFOR (Kosovo International Security Force) troops from the Ukraine escorted a group of local Serbs for a "go and see" trip back to Krushe e Vogel. They could see their former homes and consider whether they wanted to become "returnees." But the Albanian women of Krushe e Vogel, when they understood what was going on, sat down in the road of their village to block their entrance. The KFOR commander ordered them to get up and let them pass. They refused. Tear gas was used on the women and sticks. Someone made a mobile phone call to Iqballe Rogova of Motrat Qiriazi, a women's group that had worked with the women. Iqballe sped to the scene and was able to head off the convoy. Two weeks later an apology was received and the Ukrainian KFOR commander sent back to the Ukraine. This brings us to our second "village" in Kosova, well delineated on a hillside of Prishtina, and known colloquially as Dragodan. I lived here during the early years of Milosevic and my son attended the local school, but Dragodan today is much built up, much changed since then. What were empty fields are now filled with multi-story homes with white UN Toyota jeeps and other more impressive vehicles parked nose to nose along the winding road. For today Dragodan is a mini-green zone, peopled by the internationals who have actually governed Kosova in all matters of consequence since 1999. They work for the UN, UNHCR, EU, and OSCE--collectively known as UNMIK--the UN Mission in Kosovo. They write reports, publish colored brochures, and garner salaries that allow for fine Greek vacations and regular weekend trips to London. Many served earlier in Bosnia before they came to Kosova. One of the main official concerns of this "village" is measuring the extent to which Kosova is meeting "standards." There are eight major "standards," set up by one of the better SRSGs, that is, Special Representative to the Secretary General, Michael Steiner, in 2001. Unfortunately Steiner did not involve Kosovar leaders early in the process of delineating these "standards." In addition, they were set up three years after the war so none of the impressive humanitarian work or the rebuilding done by the Albanians in the early years counted. Instead, only the harder issues, like that of ethnic relations between Albanians and Serbs, remained, and the focus came here. Indeed, one main way to measure progress has been in numbers of Serb returnees. This is deeply frustrating for Albanians, who see the 5% Serb minority as thereby favored by the internationals. Many local Serbs were part of the oppressive Serb regime of the 1990's whose police and local paramilitaries killed 10,000 Kosovar Albanians between 1998 and 1999 and expelled over 800,000 Albanians from Kosova in 1999. A Norwegian church group, in concert with UNHCR, spent eight months after the end of the war in 1999, extracting corpses from wells in Kosovar Albanian villages (Martinsen, Josef. Puset e Vdekjes ne Kosove, "Wells of Death in Kosova," Grafoprint: Prishtina, 2006). But this was done too quickly to figure in the "standards," let alone the knowledge of those implementing them. Steiner also came up with the slogan--"Standards before Status"--that is, the eight major "standards" must be met before talks on political status could begin. "Status" for Albanians has always meant independence from Serbia. This slogan can be seen as a way of motivating people; it was also a delaying tactic at a time when the UN Security Council was in no mood to consider Kosova, and the more common delaying and distracting tactics of municipal and general elections had already been used more than once. In classic bureaucratic mode, the eight "standards" morphed into hundreds of "activities" whose success was color-coded in thick booklets of charts for all municipalities. In my many interviews with people from this "village," I was struck with their singular lack of knowledge of recent history of the region. They tended to know of or to own Noel Malcolm's Short History of Kosovo, but it was clear they hadn't read it. If they were readers, they had read Robert Kaplan's distorted Balkan Ghosts, a journalistic account that plays off Rebecca West's beautifully written but distinctly pro-Serb account of her 1937 trip through former Yugoslavia. They were not familiar with recent books on Kosova and former Yugoslavia. They had little understanding of the 1998-1999 war, let alone the preceding decade of the 1990's during which time Albanian Kosovars had all been fired from their jobs and expelled from high schools, institutions of higher learning, and medical facilities. The earlier period of renewed growth of Serbian nationalism under Milosevic in the 1980's was also foreign terrain, although Milosevic had played off the fears of Serbs in Kosova and staged his major media event in 1989 on the field of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, a short taxi ride south of Prishtina. None of the many official internationals I met had bothered to study Albanian, an Indo-European language spoken by 95% of the people of Kosova. I asked an international high up in media relations who had been in Kosova for eight years whether he had studied Albanian. "I started," he said, "but my employer wouldn't pay for it and it was too expensive." There is 44% official unemployment in Kosova with massive under-employment of educated people, so this is not credible. Another long-term international remarked that if you were going to learn a foreign language, Serbian made more sense since you could count it as three languages on your resume (Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian). These are the people running Kosova. The third village is a Serbian one, Babin Most, that I have never seen mentioned in the news. It is off the road from Mitrovice heading south. It is a farming village and the gardens and fields are well tended. The farming equipment however looks aged; the official who drove me there pointed this out, explaining that Serbs tended to invest in central Serbia rather than in Kosova. Nor was there a teahouse or coffee shop in the village, but there was a video game shed with young people. What was most remarkable however was that none of the homes or barns had been damaged after the war. Rather this village had kept away from Serb military and police, and had kept good relations with its Albanian neighbors who had also protected it. No international cadre would have been capable of promoting or implementing this. Rather, Serb enclaves that international cadres, including the international press, tend to find are places like Lipjan. A recent New York Times article (Craig Smith, June 25, 2007) quoted a Serb from Lipjan, south of Prishtina, who, while sitting under the family grape arbor, acknowledged he had served in the Serb army but said he never took part in the fighting or any war crimes. This reporter must have been escorted around Kosova by internationals like those I too met, internationals who did not know the meaning of Lipjan for Albanians, or he would not have included it in the article. Lipjan prison, just west of town, was the major prison in eastern Kosova used by the Serbs for Albanians. There they were brought, tortured, and sometimes sent on to prisons in central Serbia. During May 1999, there were 34 Albanian prisoners in each 4 by 5 meter cell, totaling well over 3,000 people. Conditions were deplorable. But memory of this, only eight years old, never reached our green zone "villagers." It is like interviewing someone from Dachau about difficulties of being an East Prussian refugee after World War II, and not knowing what Dachau was. Also in Lipjan was a paper mill. Kosovar Albanians remember that over 1,000 Albanian books from the National Library in Prishtina were taken there by Serb officials in the mid-1990's and turned into pulp. But this too appears unknown to the international escorts of our New York Times reporter. Like the Ukrainian KFOR escort to Krushe e Vogel, they did not know where they were taking people or what transpired there, if they cared. Frances Trix

Frances Trix is a professor of linguistics and anthropology at Indiana University. She was an IREX fellow at the University of Prishtina 1987-1988, speaks Albanian, and recently returned from research work in Kosova.
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US-Iran Alliance Against Sunni Guerrillas?
US Security Plan Envisages Troop Presence to 2009

The headlines will probably concentrate on the shouting match between US Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Iranian diplomat Hassan Kazemi Qomi at their meeting in Baghdad. Crocker accused the Iranians of giving training and weapons to Shiite militias, some of which ended up being used against US troops in Iraq. The Iranian diplomat denied the charges. But in my view the money graf in this Telegraph report is this one:

' he two countries did agree to form a security committee, with Iraq, to focus on containing Sunni insurgents. The committee would concentrate on the threat from groups such as al-Qa'eda in Iraq, officials said, but not those[Shiite] militia groups the US accuses Iran of funding and training. '

If the US is allying with Iran against the Sunni insurgents and al-Qaeda, this is a very major development and much more important than some carping over Shiite militias. (My guess is that 98% of American troops killed in Iraq have been killed by Sunni Arab guerrillas). If the report is true and has legs, it will send Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal ballistic. The Sunni Arab states do not like "al-Qaeda" in Iraq, but they are much more afraid of Iran than of the Iraqi Sunni Arabs who are fighting against US military occupation.

A document leaked to the New York Times reveals that US Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Gen. David Petraeus have a two-year plan for security in Iraq, aiming for a pacification of Baghdad by summer of 2008.

My own suspicion is that summer, 2009 is about when most of the troops will be brought out of Iraq. I can't imagine the anti-war forces getting 2/3s of both the House and the Senate and being able to over-ride Bush's vetoes, and he seems determined to keep the US presence in Iraq for the rest of his presidency. There may be a drawdown (to 100,000?) in summer-fall of 2008, both because it will be needed in order not to break the army and because the plan will either have worked or not worked by then. (It would also generate headlines that would not hurt the Republicans, and I think some Iraq policy is made on that partisan basis). It seems likely that anti-war candidates of both parties will capture both houses of congress in '08, and only a dramatic and unexpected development could throw the White House to a pro-war Republican such as Giuliani. So, the leaders on the ground there may as well plan that far out. But so far the surge has not stopped guerrilla attacks from rising to unprecedented levels, has not stopped guerrillas from striking elsewhere when they are blocked in Baghdad, and has not in fact provided space for political progress or reconciliation. So whether things will actually be better in summer of '08 is murky to say the least. Certainly, I hope this horrible daily violence can end, for the sake of the Iraqis themselves. Ironically, if there were an end to violence, it might impel the Iraqi public and politicians, having begun to feel more secure, to ask the US forces to leave. I think fear of the Sunni Arab guerrillas is the only thing that has forestalled Grand Ayatollah Sistani from issuing a fatwa or ruling that the foreign forces must leave Iraq.

Women are increasingly being targeted for violence in Iraq, forcing some women aid workers to stay inside.

In addition to the massive suicide bombing in the southern Shiite city of Hilla, which killed at least 26 and wounded 66, police found 24 bodies in the streets of Baghdad, victims of sectarian death squads. McClatchy reports a much wider range of violence on Tuesday, including several bombings and mortar attacks in Baghdad and this item: "Three mortar shells targeted al Sadr hospital in Basra today. 3 were killed and 14 were injured." If al-Sadr Hospital belongs to the Sadr movement, and if another Shiite militia attacked it, both facts would tell you something important about the situation in the far-southern Shiite port city of Basra (pop. 1.5 mn.)



Support for bombings of enemy civilians as a means of defending Islam has dropped dramatically in most Muslim countries since 2002, often being halved. The dramatic rise in Muslim victims of such tactics, not only in Iraq but also in Saudi Arabia, Morocco and elsewhere, no doubt influenced this change of attitude. The polling demonstrates that essentialist views of Muslims are always wrong. If their views of this matter can fluctuate so wildly, then it has nothing to do with their core identity. The other thing to remember is that if you asked most Americans whether it is legitimate to blow up enemy civilians to defend the United States, you'd likely get a big proportion saying 'yes.'

For the genesis of an earlier Western invasion of a major Muslim Arab country, see today's posting at my Napoleon blog.
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Bush Falsehoods about Al-Qaeda in Iraq

Bush gave a speech on Tuesday in which he made a large number inaccurate statements. Likely the recent Pentagon and White House practice of referring to all "insurgents" in Iraq as "al-Qaeda" was intended to lead up to this speech.

Bush maintained in his speech that the members of "al-Qaeda in Iraq" have pledged fealty (bay'at) to Usama Bin Laden. There is no evidence for this allegation. The foreign fighters who make up "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia" are successors to previously-existing radical Muslim groups such as Ansar al-Islam and Monotheism and Holy War, both of which had distinct identities from al-Qaeda. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi even at one point forbade members of Monotheism and Holy War to give money to al-Qaeda. It is unlikely that they have all swung around behind Bin Laden, though some among the Saudi volunteers may have. As far back as 2005, Ansar al-Sunnah clearly feared the influence of Bin Laden and asked foreign volunteers to stop coming.

Bush made al-Qaeda in Iraq the central group in the insurgency. In fact, Pentagon statistics indicate that the US holds in captivity 19,000 Iraqis suspected of insurgent activities, whereas it has only 135 foreign fighters currently in custody. "Al-Qaeda in Iraq" is mostly foreign fighters. Obviously, it just is not that important, though it gets off some bombs, which is not to be taken lightly.

Bush says that tribal sheikhs in al-Anbar province have now taken on the foreign jihadis. But if that is so, why should we worry about them taking over Iraq? They cannot and the Iraqis would not let them (even the Sunni Iraqis would not let them, much less the Shiites or Kurds!) 1200 foreign volunteers cannot take over a country, and the US does not need 160,000 troops in Iraq to fight this small group. In fact, Bush risks raising the question of why 160,000 US troops have not made better progress against the small cohort of foreign fighters.

Bush alleged that the "al-Qaeda" fighters in Iraq are professional terrorists. He said that if he had not invaded Iraq, they would even so have been busy engaging in violence.

An analysis of persons named as fighters on internet sites 18 months ago vigorously contests Bush's allegation:

'out of 429 fighters only 22 (5.1%) have had fighting experience in other regions, demonstrating that the foreign fighters in Iraq do indeed constitute the third generation of Salafi-jihadists. . . It is worth noting that 17 out of 31 fighters [on which there was education data] quit their education to join the fight against the American occupation. This is also evident in the high percentage of BA degree holders (19.4%), which is different from what typically occurs in Salafi-jihadist movements, whose ideologues are normally the ones with high levels of education while the fighters are mostly young men who have not completed their education. . . Another interesting fact is that 22 of those fighters are married, and among those whose career status is known, 8 out of 18 (44%) work in the private sector, with some even being investors. This lends further credence to the notion that the occupation of Iraq, and all the excesses that surrounds it, is generating new developments in erstwhile socio-economically stable Salafi-jihadi networks.'

The small band of some 1200 foreign fighters in Iraq are not for the most part career terrorists as far as anyone can tell. They are too young, at an average of 27, for that description. They are a new generation. They were college students and financiers who became angry about Bush's military occupation of a Muslim Arab country. In the absence of that invasion, they would still be at ordinary ho-hum jobs.

Bush says that his occupation of Iraq cannot explain the violent tactics of the "al-Qaeda insurgents" there. He says that the US was not in Iraq during the Embassy bombings of 1998, the attack on the US Cole in 2000, or September 11.

This talking point is pure propaganda on many fronts. First of all, Bush has not established that the foreign jihadis in Iraq are "al-Qaeda" in any significant sense. So his attempt to sneak in a continuity here is not legitimate. Second, while it is true that nothing justifies the violence of al-Qaeda (especially against a ship named the Cole!), it is not true that it lacks all context or motive or that US actions in Iraq were irrelevant to it. Muslim activists believed that US sanctions on Iraq were responsible for the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children in the 1990s, and the US continued from time to time to bomb the country.

I wrote this earlier:

' 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 Giuliani 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 Giuliani'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.” '

The final thing to say is that in 2001 you could argue that Bush was not responsible for al-Qaeda, though he did not take it seriously for the first 8 months (and his father had something to do while Vice President in the 1980s with helping create it to fight the Soviets). But in 2007, if al-Qaeda is still there, if Bin Laden is still there to accept oaths of fealty, if it forms a major threat to the US-- as Bush alleges-- then it is his fault for not doing a better job against it in the past 6 years.

Bush's falsehoods are unlikely to get much play or make any converts. The American public already knows the things I am saying (a big difference from 2003!) A few professional pundits who get rich off pandering to warmongers will trumpet the speech.
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Global Warming

CNN/YouTube Debate: Global Warming

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John Edwards - Hair

A particularly well done campaign commercial attempting to blunt the critique of Edwards as all hair, no substance.

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Biden thinks gun owner should have his head examined

A dramatic moment from the Democratic Debate on YouTube/CNN

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Cole in Salon: "Bush's incompetence gives al-Qaida new life"

My column is out in Salon.com on Tuesday, "Bush's incompetence gives al-Qaida new life":

The White House hints at military action as the terror organization regroups in northern Pakistan and the Musharraf government begins to wobble."

Excerpt:

' not only has al-Qaida reconstituted itself in the tribal areas of northern Pakistan, and not only did a sort of Pakistani Taliban make a play for control of some of the country's capital, but the Taliban allies of al-Qaida are resurgent in southern Afghanistan. In recent weeks they have pulled off destructive suicide bombings against NATO troops and Afghan civilians. On Monday, Taliban forces killed six NATO troops, four in a roadside bombing. On July 18 and July 19, they had kidnapped two Germans and 23 Koreans. One of the German hostages was found shot on Saturday. The presence of NATO forces and more than 20,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan has not stopped the Taliban from attempting to regain control of the Pashtun regions.

The resurgence of al-Qaida, and the usefulness of Bush's Iraq war as a recruiting tool, were further demonstrated by events in Europe. On July 21, Italian authorities announced the arrest of three Moroccans, whom they charged with running a terror-training program from a mosque and of being linked to al-Qaida. It is believed that their trainees were placed throughout the world, including in Iraq.

In an ideal world the United States could deal with such a threat by close cooperation with Italian counterterrorism officials. But the 2003 kidnapping of an Egyptian terror suspect named Abu Omar in Italy by Central Intelligence Agency operatives without Italian permission has roiled relations between the two countries. "

Read the whole thing.
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Debate Scorecard on Iraq

Here is the debate transcript from last night.

The candidates basically split into a) those who wanted gradual withdrawal with political arrangements and perhaps some troops left in Iraq; and b) those who wanted an immediate and complete military withdrawal, followed by diplomacy.

Biden, Clinton and Obama seemed to be in the gradualist camp, though Obama did not say whether he would keep some troops in Iraq.

Dodd, Edwards, Gravel, Kucinich, and Richardson wanted immediate and complete withdrawal.

There is thus a clear break between 3 of the sitting senators and the other candidates on this issue, which goes to matters of pragmatism, geopolitics, and the future American position in the Middle East. Elsewhere, Clinton has said she'd keep troops in Iraqi Kurdistan. Biden wants a soft partition of the country as a prelude to US gradual withdrawal.

With regard to Iraq, I did a keyword search and tried to pull out the candidates' stances. This time, I'll post them in alphabetical order:


BIDEN: Anderson, you've been there. You know we can't just pull out now. Let's get something straight. It's time to start to tell the truth. The truth of the matter is: If we started today, it would take one year, one year to get 160,000 troops physically out of Iraq, logistically.

That's number one.

Number two, you cannot pull out of Iraq without the follow-on that's been projected here, unless you have a political solution. I'm the only one that's offered a political solution.

And it literally means separate the parties; give them jurisdiction in their own areas; have a decentralized government, a federal system. No central government will work.

And, thirdly, the fact of the matter is, the very thing everybody's quoting is the very legislation I wrote in January. It said: Begin to draw down combat troops now; get the majority of the combat troops out by March of '08.

There's not one person in here that can say we're going to eliminate all troops...

COOPER: OK, time.

BIDEN: ... unless you're going to eliminate every physical person who's an American in Iraq.



CLINTON: American ground troops I don't think belong in Darfur at this time. I think we need to focus on the United Nations peacekeeping troops and the African Union troops.

We've got to figure out what we're doing in Iraq, where our troops are stretched thin, and Afghanistan, where we're losing the fight to al Qaeda and bin Laden. . .

since the election of 2006, the Democrats have tried repeatedly to win Republican support with a simple proposition that we need to set a timeline to begin bringing our troops home now.

I happen to agree that there is no military solution, and the Iraqis refuse to pursue the political solutions. In fact, I asked the Pentagon a simple question: Have you prepared for withdrawing our troops? In response, I got a letter accusing me of being unpatriotic; that I shouldn't be asking questions.

Well, one of the problems is that there are a lot of questions that we're asking but we're not getting answers from the Bush administration.

COOPER: Time.

CLINTON: And it's time for the Republicans to join us in standing up to the president to bring our troops home. . .


CLINTON: You know, I put forth a comprehensive three-point plan to get our troops out of Iraq, and it does start with moving them out as soon as possible.

But Joe is right. You know, I have done extensive work on this. And the best estimate is that we can probably move a brigade a month, if we really accelerate it, maybe a brigade and a half or two a month. That is a lot of months.

My point is: They're not even planning for that in the Pentagon. You know, Mr. Berry, I am so sorry about the loss of your son. And I hope to goodness your youngest son doesn't face anything like that.

But until we get this president and the Pentagon to begin to at least tell us they are planning to withdraw, we are not going to be able to turn this around.

And so, with all due respect to some of my friends here -- yes, we want to begin moving the troops out, but we want to do so safely, and orderly and carefully.

We don't want more loss of American life and Iraqi life as we attempt to withdraw, and it is time for us to admit that it's going to be complicated, so let's start it now. . .



DODD: . . . It has been said from the very beginning: There is no military solution to this civil war in Iraq. . . I think it's incumbent upon the Congress. . .

There is a sense of disappointment. We should set that time certain. I don't normally advocate that here, but I know of no other way we're going to convince the political and religious leaders in Iraq to take seriously their responsibility to decide to form a nation-state or not.

I think by saying with clarity here that we are withdrawing and redeploying our forces out of there, robustly pursuing diplomacy, which we have not done at all here. This administration treats statecraft and diplomacy as if it were a gift to your opponents here.

We need to have a program here that allows us to become much more engaged in the region. . .

DODD: I have advocated, again, that we have our troops out by April of next year. I believe that the timeframe is appropriate to do that. I would urge simultaneously that we do the things we've talked about here, and that is pursue the diplomatic efforts in the region to at least provide Iraq the opportunity to get on its feet. But I believe our military ought to be out before that. . .



EDWARDS: I don't think any of our troops die in vain when they go and do the duty that's been given to them by the commander in chief. No, I don't think they died in vain.

But I think the question is -- the question is: What is going to be done to stop this war?

The other people have raised the question earlier. And in fact, Senator Obama spoke just a minute ago about the White House agreeing that the parliament, the Iraqi parliament could take a month-long vacation because it was too hot, while our men and women are putting their lives on the line every day.

Here's my question. While the Iraqi parliament is on vacation, is George Bush going to be on vacation in Crawford, Texas?

What we need to do is turn up the heat on George Bush and hold him responsible and make this president change course.

(APPLAUSE)

It is the only way he will change course. He will never change course unless he's made to do it. . .




GRAVEL: . . . I'll tell you, John, it's a set up question. Our soldiers died in Vietnam in vain. You can now, John, go to Hanoi and get a Baskin-Robbins ice cream cone. That's what you can do. And now we have most favored nation trade.

What did all these people die for? What are they dying for right now in Iraq every single day? Let me tell you: There's only one thing worse than a soldier dying in vain; it's more soldiers dying in vain. . .



KUCINICH: . . . The answer to your question, ma'am, is: Yes, it is politics. The Democrats have failed the American people. When we took over in January, the American people didn't expect us to give them a Democratic version of the war. They expected us to act quickly to end the war.

And here's how we can do it. It doesn't take legislation. That's a phony excuse to say that you don't have the votes. We appropriated $97 billion a month ago. We should tell President Bush, no more funds for the war, use that money to bring the troops home, use it to bring the troops home. . .

KUCINICH: The underlying assumption here is that we're going to be in Iraq until the next president takes office, and I reject that totally. People can send a message to Congress right now -- and this is in a convention of this appearance -- they can text peace, and text 73223, text peace. Send a message to Congress right now, you want out.

I introduced a plan four years ago, Anderson, that was a full plan to remove our troops. I'm the only one on this stage -- excuse me -- who not only voted against this war, but voted against funding the war.

(APPLAUSE)

It is not credible to say you oppose the war from the start when you voted to fund it 100 percent of the time, 70 percent, 5 percent of the time. Let's get real about this war. Let's get those troops home and let's take a stand and do it now. Send a message to Congress now. . .

KUCINICH: No [MY RIVALS ARE NOT GREEN ENOUGH]. And I think that the reason is that if you support, for example, in Iraq, if you say that Iraq should privatize its oil for the U.S. oil companies, then what you're doing is you're continuing a commitment to use more oil. If you believe that all options should be put on the table with respect to Iran, that's about oil.

So we need to move away from reliance on oil...



OBAMA: . . . At this point, I think we can be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in. But we have to send a clear message to the Iraqi government as well as to the surrounding neighbors that there is no military solution to the problems that we face in Iraq.

We just heard a White House spokesman, Tony Snow, excuse the fact that the Iraqi legislature went on vacation for three weeks because it's hot in Baghdad. Well, let me tell you: It is hot for American troops who are over there with 100 pounds worth of gear. . .

OBAMA: I would [MEET WITH IRAN, SYRIA, OTHER BADDIES]. And the reason is this, that the notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them -- which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration -- is ridiculous.

(APPLAUSE)

Now, Ronald Reagan and Democratic presidents like JFK constantly spoke to Soviet Union at a time when Ronald Reagan called them an evil empire. And the reason is because they understood that we may not trust them and they may pose an extraordinary danger to this country, but we had the obligation to find areas where we can potentially move forward.

And I think that it is a disgrace that we have not spoken to them. We've been talking about Iraq -- one of the first things that I would do in terms of moving a diplomatic effort in the region forward is to send a signal that we need to talk to Iran and Syria because they're going to have responsibilities if Iraq collapses.

They have been acting irresponsibly up until this point. But if we tell them that we are not going to be a permanent occupying force, we are in a position to say that they are going to have to carry some weight, in terms of stabilizing the region. . .



RICHARDSON: There's a big difference on Iraq between me and the senators, and here's where it is.

The lives of our young troops are more important than George Bush's legacy.

This is what I stand for: I believe we should bring all the troops home by the end of this year, in six months, with no residual forces -- no residual forces.

(APPLAUSE)

This is critically important. A hundred American troops are dying every month. And this war is a quagmire. It's endless. . .

RICHARDSON: The diplomatic work cannot begin to heal Iraq, to protect our interests, without troops out. Our troops have become targets. You are going to say six months, because it might provoke a civil war. There is a civil war. There is sectarian conflict.

(APPLAUSE)

The time has come, and I get challenged. I have no troops left. One hundred are dying a month. . .
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Massive Bomb Kills 22, Wounds 60 at Hillah
US Blockades Mahdi Army
New Turkish Government may Decline Military Option

A suicide car bombing of a market in the southern Shiite city of Hillah killed at least 22 persons and wounded 60 on Tuesday morning. The northern reaches of Babil province are heavily Sunni Arab, and these have been waging a dirty war against Shiites. Most of their violence has concentrated on cities such as Iskandariya, but sometimes they have managed to hit as far south into Shiite territory as Hillah. This attack demonstrates that the Sunni Arab guerrillas continue to have the resources to hit Shiites, even in their own southern strongholds.

Also near Hillah, Sawt al-Iraq reports in Arabic that the US military took into custody the local Badr Corps commander. This Shiite paramilitary, a subsidiary of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, was trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps but has generally avoided conflict with the US forces. The reason for the raid was not reported.

Meanwhile, near Baghdad, US forces are blockading the Shiite Husseiniya district, in an attempt to crack down on Shiite Mahdi Army militiamen there. This article implies that so many civilians died after a US bombing of a paramilitary position this weekend because the guerrillas had stored explosives there and the secondary explosions took out surrounding houses.

A US push all at once against Mahdi Army, Badr Corps and the Sunni Arab insurgency could overstretch American forces and cause even more turmoil.

This article from the Independent underscores the new complications for Turkey's government of any cross-border raids into Iraq. It notes that 100 of the ruling AKP party's MPs are of Kurdish origin. In addition 24 Kurdish independents won seats. PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan may need their support to elect his choice of president.

I think the article errs in seeing the military as the main proponent of a hard line stance against the Kurdish Worker Party guerrillas (PKK) who have safe harbor on the Iraqi side of the border and have been attacking Turkish police and soldiers in Anatolia. The AKP politicians have spoken just as vehemently of a strike into Iraqi Kurdistan under certain conditions. And, their Kurdish-heritage MPs may have grudges against the PKK, which was known for hitting Kurds as well as Turkish authorities during its dirty war of the 1980s and 1990s.

Still, the article may be right that the outcome of the parliamentary elections and the new prominence of Kurdish representatives has reduced the likelihood of a hot war on the Iraqi border.

McClatchy depicts the competition between US and Iraqi forces in the wake of a Baghdad bombing.

McClatchy reports that 24 bodies were found in Baghdad on Monday, and bombings killed another two dozen persons in the capital.

In news I hadn't seen elsewhere, McClatchy says that 6 Kurdish troops were recently killed in Mosul. You wonder about the ethnic composition of the Iraqi army in that city.

Sawt al-Iraq writes in Arabic about the disappointing harvest in Dhi Qar Province this summer. The article blames the salinization of the soil and of the Euphrates itself. Peasants seem not to have had sufficient incentives to expand the amount of land cultivated. There were also problems with access to silos. Also, a number of key agricultural development projects have not been implemented. The article is not explicit about whether security is part of the problem. I cannot understand the problem of salinization of soil. In Egypt this has happened in the Delta because of the flow of the Nile slowing (as a result of the Aswan Dam), and the Mediterranean coming in as a result. But the Euphrates has not been dammed except at its headwaters in Turkey. Some observers think there will be water wars in the Middle East during the coming century. Anyway, I hope the shortfall in the harvest does not mean that Iraqis will have difficulty getting food. The four horsemen of the apocalypse seem to be stomping around the place.
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Christian extremists disrupt Hindu Senate invocation

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Napoleon's Invasion of the Middle East

At my book blog for my new publication on Bonaparte's Egypt expedition, I have been putting up some texts related to the misadventure The first close-up Western view of Egypt's Bedouin is posted today; ominously, this bit of colonial anthropology was made possible by some French scientists (savants) being taken hostage for ransom just after Gen. Bonaparte took the port city of Alexandria.



This of PBS documentary on Bonaparte, which covers the Egyptian expedition, is worth looking at if you haven't.

Enjoy!
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NYC Firefighters Critique Giuliani on 9/11

Was traveling and just saw this. The firefighters are critical of the no-bid contracts for communications equipment let by Giuliani, which ended up not working very well. Also other issues.

No bid contracts? Where have I heard that before?. (Scroll down to "Big Success in Iraq".)

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Turkish Muslim Party Wins Landslide
US Raids Umm al-Qura Mosque
Sistani said in Peril

In neighboring Turkey, the Islamically tinged AK Party won nearly 47% of the vote on Sunday, which will allow it, after a multiplier is applied, to rule with a comfortable margin without needing a coalition party. It has been suggested that the recent sabre rattling coming out of Turkey toward the Kurds in Iraq was a matter of posturing for the sake of garnering votes in the election. I suppose we are about to find out. One danger to Turkish stability, as the FT notes, is that if PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan grows too arrogant and rash as a result of his popular victory, he may respond so forcefully to the situation in Kurdistan that he accidentally produces an unnecesary crisis.

The US military raided the Umm al-Qura mosque complex in Baghdad, HQ of the Association of Muslim Scholars, and arrested 18 persons they accused of being in the guerrilla movement, including the son of the mosque's preacher. The AMS condemned the raid, as did, outside Iraq, the Arab League.

US ambassador in Iraq Ryan Crocker is asking that all Iraqi US government employees be given immigrant visas to the United States up front, according to WaPo.

It seems fairly clear that the educated middle classes are fleeing Iraq in droves and that the US government now faces a shortage of qualified translators and other employees necessary to the US enterprise in that country.

This cable from the Baghdad embassy suggests that things are very, very bad.

The NYT profiles Muqtada al-Sadr and the way he has been able to pose both as an insider and an outsider to the government at once (i.e. he knows the same tricks as Karl Rove, Bush's campaign adviser). This report suggests that the Sadr Movement is attracting southern Shiites in droves and is providing services to the poor. (Muqtada al-Sadr's father used to do that, too). The only thing I disagree with is the assertion or implication that Muqtada al-Sadr launched an anti-US military insurgency, simultaneously with or in imitation of the Sunni Arab insurgents. Muqtada did form a militia, the Mahdi Army, in summer, 2003, but it was highly disciplined and he strictly forbade it to attack US troops. It did not. The fighting between the US military and Sadr's military came only after then civil administrator Paul Bremer and Gen. Rick Sanchez suddenly announced that they intended to "kill or capture" Muqtada al-Sadr. Only then did his movement turn violent in any significant way, in self-defense.

Police in the Shiite holy city of Najaf are questioning the safety of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in the wake of the assassination of one of his aides in his compound, just yards away from the grand ayatollah. Radical Sunni groups have vowed several times on the internet to kill Sistani. His death might well throw Iraq into fatal turmoil.


Army Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon is advocating that Ninevah Province hold provincial elections and that then US forces be withdrawn from it, leaving security duties to Iraqi army and police. He maintains that the Iraqi security forces are already operating independently there for the most part. Hear, hear! Give that man a medal and do what he says. Foreign military forces have withdrawn from 6 of Iraq's provinces (3 Kurdish-- Dohuk, Sulaymaniyah, Irbil-- and 3 Shiite--Dhi Qar, Maysan and Muthanna). Iraq has 18 provinces, so there are only 12 to go. Mosul, Najaf and Karbala are good candidates for the next 3. If the Shiite military and police cannot or will not defend security in Najaf and Karbala, they are not any good and never will be. Those provinces contain cities that mean a great deal to them.

Reuters reports that 16 bodies were found in Baghdad on Sunday.

McClatchy adds, "Around 12:30 p.m. A suicide truck bomb targeted a tribal leader house in Al Taji in Jurf Al Milah. 5 were killed and 12 were injured . . ."

Also, "Six men were killed (most of them are Kurds) and 4 other citizens were injured in the last 24 hours in Mosul is separated attacks. . ."

and

"Gunmen attacked three trucks carrying watermelon on the main road from Khanqeen to Buhruz. 6 men were killed in the attack."
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Feingold to Introduce Censure Resolution against Bush

Senator Russ Feingold plans to introduce a censure motion against Bush for misleading the US public into war, he told Meet the Press on Sunday.

Feingold makes the good points that the president has been involved in things that look like criminality; that the votes aren't there to impeach him; but that at the very least his enormities should not be allowed to pass without some statement from the legislature. Feingold suggests that such a censure vote might even attract support from some Republicans. Since the Republicans have stopped so much as mentioning Bush when they want to convince the public of something, Feingold is likely right about this point. It could be a way for some of them to distance themselves from Bush before the next election.

Video from NBC:

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Blumenthal: Young Republican Chicken Hawks

Max Blumenthal via YouTube,on young Republican Chicken Hawks [wouldn't they just be 'chicks'? Or maybe 'peepees'?].

You'd think after what happened to Jonah Goldberg, they'd get together and make up some sort of collective alibi or something.

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Napoleon's Egypt

I am repeating this posting for Monday, since many readers skip the weekends.

I just received an advance copy of my new book, Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East. I'm a proud parent/author and breaking out the virtual cigars. I think Palgrave Macmillan did a stellar job with the editing and production. The actual publication date is August 7.



This episode, all too little known, was the first instance of a modern European country attempting to invade, occupy and "liberate" an Arab, Muslim Middle Eastern region.

I have started a historical blog on the book as a place to put up some materials that might interest readers of the book, as a sort of supplement. If I get time I may do some translating or posting of translated texts.

The first posting was of the relevant portion of a PBS documentary on Bonaparte, which covers the Egyptian expedition.

Enjoy!
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How to Create an Angry American

Repeated from Sunday

A clever montage of Bush administration falsehoods and denials regarding the Iraq War, via YouTube (film-maker's link).

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US Airstrike Kills 15 Children, Women, Men;
Mosul Rocked by Death Squad, Roadside Bomb Killings;
Shiite UIA Rejects Arming Sunni Arabs

The United States military has bombed Iraqi cities quite a lot. But few reporters have asked the question raised by Hannah Allam and Jenan Hussein about who exactly is being killed in such raids. On Saturday, the US said its airstrike killed 6 militants. Iraqi Shiites maintain that two families were killed and that the corpses of 15 parents and children have been pulled out of the rubble in the al-Husseiniya district of northern Baghdad. Associated Press television news showed the bodies of women and children in the rubble. Apparently the US pilots were trying, at least, to kill Mahdi Army militiamen.

Radio Sawa reports that the United Iraqi Alliance bloc in parliament met and rejected the new US policy of arming Sunni Arab groups to fight "al-Qaeda" in Iraq. The UIA, the leading bloc in parliament, is a coalition of Shiite fundamentalist parties. They insisted that arms be only in the hands of state forces.

"Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia" has alienated a lot of Sunni Arab Iraqis, and appears to have assassinated [the nephew of Harith al-Dhari, who bored the same name of his uncle] a leader of the 1920 Revolution Brigades. [The uncle, a leader of the Association of Muslim Scholars, is in hiding in Amman, Jordan]. The Guardian reported recently that 7 Iraqi Sunni guerrilla groups are forming a political party and have turned against "al-Qaeda" (mainly foreign fighters adhering to the Salafi Jihadi ideology). (For the main guerrilla groups See this background piece.

The Shiite parliamentarians are alarmed at the US military's plan to arm Sunni Arab guerrillas to fight "al-Qaeda." Unlike clueless US pundits such as Charles Krauthammer, these UIA MPs know that being against "al-Qaeda" does not mean being for the al-Maliki government. The Sunni Arabs willing to fight the foreign volunteers are just as anti-Shiite and anti-government as ever, and, armed, will pose new problems for the al-Maliki government as the US draws down its troops over the next couple of years.

Another UIA parliamentarian, Abbas al-Bayati, announced Saturday that the negotiations over the petroleum bill now being considered in the Iraqi legislature are too complicated to be concluded before the August recess, so it will be put aside until September. Were parliament to follow through on this plan, it would guarantee that US Ambassador Ryan Crocker would have no good political news to report in his key September testimony before Congress.

Alarmed, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki issued a plea to parliament to cancel or much shorten its planned one-month recess after he met on Saturday with Crocker. Prime ministers who have to plea and wheedle their own parliament aren't worth much.

Sawt al-Iraq reports in Arabic that Shaikh Abdullah Falak, a clerical official in charge of collecting religious taxes for Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistan, was found shot to death in his office in in the Shiite holy city of Najaf late Friday. Usually Sistani's offices are heavily guarded, so the killing is unusual. There is no word on the perpetrator, but Sistani has lots of enemies and so would anyone who collected and distributed large amounts of money on his behalf.

Tim Phelps of Newsday interviews academic Iraq experts and finds that they generally agree that a precipitate US military withdrawal will throw Iraq into catastrophic violence with bad effects for Iraqis and for the world. I am the dissenter among them in this article, but I agree that the risks are substantial if the withdrawal is not done right. I completely disagree, however, with the scenario where "al-Qaeda" takes over anything in Iraq. If by this is meant the few hundred Sunni Arab volunteers of a Salafi Jihadi persuasion, the Iraqis would slit their throats and the country's neighbors would help.

Meanwhile, it looks to me as though security is worsening considerably in Iraq's second largest city, Mosul, in the north. See below.

McClatchy reports major civil war violence on Saturday. Excerpts::

' [Mosul, a northern city of 1.5 million]: 6 policemen were killed and 2 others wounded in an IED explosion targeted their patrol in Wadi Al Hajar neighborhood west Mosul city early morning. . .

[Mosul]: 11 anonymous bodies including 4 bodies of women had been found early morning today in Noor neighborhood and Bakir neighborhood east Mosul city . . .

[Baghdad]: 5 were killed and 8 others wounded in an IED explosion targeted a bus in Baladiyat east Baghdad around 12,00.am. . .


- 17 anonymous bodies had been found in Baghdad today. . .

Diyala: A medical source in Baquba public hospital said that 8 civilians including 2 children and 3 women had been injured when mortar shells hit Buhruz town south Baquba around 10,30 am. . .

Kirkuk [Province]: 2 policemen were killed near Al Kuba village west of Kirkuk today morning. The police sources said that a police patrol found a body of a man near the main road and when two policemen tried to carry the body, it exploded killing them both. . . '

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The Last Neocon Attacks Hillary

You might gather from a cursory examination of the wire services that "the Pentagon" has attacked Senator Hillary Clinton for requesting a briefing for her committee from the Department of Defense on contingency plans for withdrawal from Iraq.

But as Fred Kaplan of Slate pointed out, it was a specific bureaucrat who criticized her, undersecretary of defense for planning Eric Edelman. Edelman wrote to Senator Clinton (text at Talkingpointsmemo):

' Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia. … Such talk understandably unnerves the very same Iraqi allies we are asking to assume enormous personal risk in order to achieve compromises of national reconciliation. '

Edelman moved into government in the Reagan era, as RightWeb explains. He was close to Richard Perle, among the inventors of the warmongering Neoconservative ideology. In 1992 he was part of the Neoconservative team (which included Paul Wolfowitz) that co-authored a security doctrine for the United States that aimed at perpetual hegemony and implied perpetual aggression to prevent the emergence of "peer" powers.

He served as Dick Cheney's national security adviser in the early zeroes and, along with convicted felon Irv Lewis Libby, was heavily involved in getting up the fraudulent and illegal Iraq War.

He was then sent as ambassador to Turkey to shore up that front in the war effort, after the Turkish parliament denied the US military permission to march through Anatolia into neighboring Iraq. He was denounced by Turkish commentators for behaving in Ankara like a colonial viceroy rather than like an ambassador. And then when arch-Neocon and then deputy secretary of defense Doug Feith was forced out under a cloud after one of his subordinates was caught spying for Israel, Edelman was installed as his successor. In other words, Cheney arranged for one Neoconservative to replace another.

Lest anyone doubt Edelman's conversion to the Neoconservative cause, it should be remembered that when the Government Accounting Office lambasted Feith's open interference in intelligence analysis and his practice of actually briefing his superiors on intelligence (which is forbidden to and probably illegal for defense department bureaucrats), Edelman wrote a long defense of Feith's corrupt practices and forced the GAO to drop actual policy recommendations for ensuring they did not recur.

In my view, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates should have fired Edelman on the spot, since his subordinate was basically announcing his commitment to the kind of shady and illegitimate practices that Feith (whom then Secretary of State Colin Powell called 'a card-carrying member of the [Israeli] Likud [Party]') and his allies such as Cheney used to drag the United States into an Iraq War.

So, Hillary was not criticized by a military officer. No evidence Edelman knows one end of an M-16 from another. She was not criticized by a Defense Department veteran. Edelman is just a recently installed understudy to Feith.

Who was she criticized by? Just one of the last Neoconservatives who hasn't yet been forced out of office because he abused the public trust or who hasn't yet slid into a criminality fostered by sublime arrogance.

By implying that Clinton is a traitor, Edelman inserted himself into a presidential campaign on the Republican side. That is not a legitimate role for the third man in charge of the Pentagon.

Edelman knows the score and knew exactly what he was doing. Gates now has a second opportunity to do the right thing and fire Edelman. Otherwise, his already difficult task of restoring morale to the Pentagon will be complicated by the realization on the part of many DoD employees and military personnel that the Pentagon is once again being deployed for petty partisan purposes that leech out the meaning and morale of their institution.

As a civil servant, Edelman is supposed to be working for you and me. We pay his salary. Instead, he is working for some narrow partisan interest. He has forfeited his right to his taxpayer-supported office.
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June Attacks in Iraq at All-Time High
Da'wa Party Protests Saudi Jihadis

Reuters obtained from the US Department of Defense statistics that show there were an average of 177.8 attacks on Iraqi military and civilian and US targets per day in June-- an all-time record for Iraq. The only other month during the past 4 years with such a high rate of attacks was October, 2006, with 176.5 per day. Somehow I don't think these statistics bear out the sunny talk by the Bush administration and US military spokesmen about how much better things are in Iraq now that we have had the surge. If you listen to the American Right, the surge is working, things are "improving," and the US is fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq.

But where the Department of Defense gives us actual statistics, we find that they only have like 135 foreign detainees out of 19,000 suspected insurgents in their custody (with the rest being mostly just Iraqi Sunni Arabs who don't want foreign troops in their country). So al-Qaeda is a tiny part of the insurgency and the US is mostly fighting Iraqi nationalists, whether religious or secular. And now instead of a substantial improvement of the security situation because of the "surge," we discover that there were more attacks in June than ever before during the Iraq War (and probably more than ever before, except during hot conventional wars, in the whole history of Iraq. And that is saying something, since you're going back past Hammurabi).

The prescriptions of the Right for Iraq also make no sense in the light of these numbers. The US doesn't have to worry about "al-Qaeda" taking over, since 135 guys can't take over a country. (See Josh Marshall, below). And, the US military presence is not reducing the number of daily attacks.

Nearly half of the 135 are Saudis. Al-Zaman reports that on Friday the offices of the Islamic Call (Da'wa) Party staged a protest outside the Saudi embassy in London. Da'wa, a Shiite Iraqi party dedicated to erecting an Islamic state, is led by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. Da'wa activists in London were protesting the failure of the Saudi government to stop Saudi jihadis from sneaking into Iraq and blowing up Shiites. For its part, the Saudi government has been refusing to meet with al-Maliki, on the grounds that he heads a "sectarian" (i.e. Shiite) government. Al-Zaman suggests that the Da'wa Party demonstration, which is unprecedented for this covert group in recent years, may be a prelude to the breaking off of relations between Iraq and some of its Sunni Arab neighbors. (Note that while US figures keep blaming Iran for instability in Iraq, Iraqi politicians typically do not, but rather blame close US allies such as Saudi Arabia).

Al-Zaman also reports that the National Dialogue Bloc (secular Sunni Arab), with 11 seats in parliament, is vowing to continue to boycott parliamentary sessions as a way of pressuring the government to change its procedures.

Sheikh Ahmad al-Safi of Karbala, the representative in that city of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, in his Friday sermon lambasted Iraqi government ministries for failing to provide services. He said he knew for a fact that the Iraqi government had only expended 1% of its allotted budget this year. (The Iraqi government is said to have over $20 bn in reserves, supporting al-Safi's charge). He warned of the rise in Iraq of new dictatorships that resemble the former one (i.e. that of Saddam Hussein).

Turkish Prime Minister Rejep Tayyip Erdogan, facing an election and opposition from secularists, is talking tough again. He threatened to invade Iraqi Kurdistan in hot pursuit of Kurdish separatist terrorists given safe harbor there by Massoud Barzani. (For more on the elections, see our our group blog, Global Affairs.)

Manan Ahmed explains the significance of the reinstatement of Supreme Court Justice Iftikhar Chaudhri in Pakistan, and wonders if Gen. Musharraf can survive.
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Josh Marshall on the Iraq Al-Qaeda Bamboozle

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Plame Case Thrown Out;
National Security Imperilled

A federal judge has thrown out the lawsuit of Valerie Plame Wilson against Bush administration figures Irv Lewis Libby, Karl Rove, Richard Bruce Cheney, and Richard Armitage. She sued them for conducting a campaign to out her in the press as an undercover operative and so ruining her career.

The judge interpreted Cheney Inc.'s outing of Plame as just politics and something to be expected of political office-holders. That is, he believed their story that they were just defending themselves politically from what they saw as a Central Intelligence Agency attempt to smear them and their Iraq War. He admitted that their methods were "unsavory."

It is a ruling about the jurisdiction of the court and so something technical in the law about which I don't feel qualified to comment. Just as a citizen, I cannot understand how committing what was essentially an act of treason (or trying very hard to) can be seen as part of the ordinary political duties of incumbents.

The judgment will be appealed to the Supreme Court, but given the coloration of that court, one hardly expects the justices to rule against Bush-Cheney.

But the world has a kind of karma, and the United States will be punished for what Cheney Inc. did to Plame Wilson.

Think about it. She worked against nuclear proliferation, including with regard to Iran,with a "non-official cover" (NOC). She was an undercover operative with extremely sensitive duties.

So what are the big security challenges facing the United States in the next decade? They include the regrouping of al-Qaeda and the threat of nuclear proliferation.

What the United States therefore needs most to secure our country is smart, knowledgeable, skilled and dedicated counter-terrorism and counter- proliferation professionals. Without such persons, we are in danger of being hit hard by smart, knowledgeable, skilled terrorists.

But here is the problem. If you are a NOC, you are living a lie. Your very identity as CIA would potentially put everyone around you in danger, especially your friends, contacts and the agents you are running in foreign countries. You yourself could easily be assassinated on a trip abroad if your identity became known.

So you would depend for your survival and for the survival of your friends and contacts on the US government's willingness and ability to keep your identity secret. If you thought that the vice president might casually betray your identity if he thought it politically convenient to do so, you'd be crazy to put yourself in that position.

So, we've had the Plame Wilson affair, the profound hostility of Cheney Inc. to the reality-based CIA (for not going along with its fantasy machine), the Cheney project of blaming CIA director George Tenet for his own mistakes with regard to Iraq, and the changes and rotations in top personnel. Competent Middle East analysts like former Deputy Director of Intelligence Jami Miscik have been forced out.

So ask yourself, how many really smart competent people are going to volunteer to follow in Valerie Plame Wilson's footsteps and take all those risks for a job that does not pay all that well, knowing that the Cheney sorts might at any moment ruin their lives for petty political reasons?

So Bush and Cheney have deeply damaged recruitment, morale and efforts among our counter-terrorism agencies at the same time that their greedy and duplicitous occupation of a major Arab Muslim country, Iraq, is generating a new terrorist threat against the American homeland. They are creating the perfect storm.

So the judge threw out the lawsuit. But we will all be paying the damages.

Bush-Cheney have disarmed us and galvanized the enemy. They are traitors, and if something happens to America, it will be in some important part their fault.
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4 Multinational Force troops Killed
Turks Shell northern Iraq

Turkey intensively shelled Kurdish PKK positions inside Iraq, drawing a sharp rebuke from the Iraqi side. Turkey views the PKK as a terrorist organization, and blames it for a roadside bomb that recently killed several Turkish troops.

One of the heartening things about the current US team in Iraq is that they are straight shooters. US Ambassador in Baghdad Ryan Crocker was frank with the US senate about the lack of political progress toward reconciliation by the Iraqi government. Crocker told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, ""If there is one word, I would use to sum up the atmosphere in Iraq on the streets, in the countryside, in the neighborhoods and at the national level that word would be 'fear. . .'" Gen. David Petraeus was clear that the current force level in Iraq is unsustainable. (We may conclude that he is using the extra troops he now has to attempt to shape the environment [away from pervasive fear] in expectation of a substantial drawdown next year).

Although the death toll in Baghdad has fallen, the violence is such that political compromise among factions is still very difficult. And, Diyala, Kirkuk and other provinces still see potentially crippling violence that resonates in the rest of the country because it involves Sunni on Shiite or Sunni on Kurd, or vice versa. It is hard for me to gauge the supposed turnaround in al-Anbar Province, where some tribal forces have grouped against the small foreign Salafi Jihadi forces ("al-Qaeda in Iraq"). But my question is, are the Iraq Sunni Arabs of al-Anbar willing to accept and work with the al-Maliki government. I can't see good evidence of that development, and therefore remain pessimistic. The decline of Salafi Jihadi bombings there is good, but beyond that there must active national integration if there is to be social peace. That, we don't seem to see.

This item says that the Iraqi parliament is trying to abolish a decree of the Saddam Hussein government mandating the "Arabization" of other ethnic groups. It says that Sunni Arab vice president Tariq al-Hashimi opposes the revoking of the decree. The Kurds, who suffered from forced Arabization, insist on the repeal. I confess I do not understand the premises of this debate. Wouldn't the Iraqi constitution have automatically rendered such Saddam-era decrees invalid? And, surely al-Hashimi could easily be over-ruled by a vote in parliament? And, why would a Sunni fundamentalist like al-Hashimi care so much about Arabization (a racial, nationalist concept)? But, whatever is going on here, it bodes ill for national reconciliation.

The "New Labour" Party of former PM Tony Blair appears actually to be just an acquiescence in government being a managing committee for the super-rich. Blair appears to have taken few important steps on Iraq and other such issues without consulting media mogul and far-right billionaire Rupert Murdoch. I would complain about him taking over the Wall Street Journal, but its editorial line is already so wacky that Mr. Murdoch's may actually be an improvement.

17 bodies were found in Baghdad on Thursday, according to Reuters. 3 British airmen and 1 American soldier were killed. A bomb killed 2 at the Shiite shrine area of Baghdad, Kazimiya. And the police chief and five bodyguards of Iskandariya were killed.

For developments in Afghanistan and Pakistan, see our group blog, IC Global Affairs.
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Sunni Bloc Returns to Parliament
ABC News Raw Footage

The LAT is reporting that the Sunni Arab Iraqi Accord Front is ending its suspension of participation in parliament. It had demanded that deposed speaker of the house be returned to his post, and the Shiites and Kurds have given in and allowed it (with the "understanding" that al-Mashhadani would resign before too long-- a face-saving measure). Al-Mashhadani had been accused of threatening members of parliament with bodily harm, and even of striking some.

Meanwhile, ABC's broadcast of raw footage from Iraq shot by the intrepid Sean Smith of The Guardian has been seen 250,000 times online. US television has tended to show a sanitized war compared to what is on the Arab satellite stations every day. One seldom even sees blood or victims in the hospital bandaged up. If Americans saw how the sausage was made, they would find it even less appetizing.

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Two Deadlocked Parliaments

The Democratic senators held an all night session Tuesday night, to underline that they are unable to get through their plan on an Iraq withdrawal plan because of Republican threats of filibuster. Despite what some commentators are saying, the Democrats (unlike the Republicans when they had a majority) are not trying to get rid of the consensus rule in the Senate, whereby you need at least 60 votes for important issues. They are simply insisting that Republicans who reject withdrawal stand and be counted. The rest is up to the American people in 2008.

If the US parliament (i.e. Congress) is deadlocked over how to go forward, so is the Iraqi. Azhar al-Samarra`i, a member of parliament from the [Sunni fundamentalist] Iraqi Accord Front, told the Sawt al-Iraq wire service Wednesday that her coalition will only enter a new political bloc in parliament if it is given constitutional changes up front. The US behind the scenes has been urging the formation of a "Moderate Bloc" in parliament that would support Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and free him of dependence on the Sadr Bloc. He needs 138 for a simple majority and to avoid a vote of no confidence. The Moderates so far include the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, the Da`wa Party [both Shiite fundamentalist] and the Kurdistan Alliance. These three want the Iraqi Accord Front to join, thus grouping Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis willing to cooperate with the Americans [apparently the meaning of "moderate."] The Iraqi Accord Front, however, has not only not rushed to embrace the new alliance, but has threatened to call a vote of no confidence on al-Maliki itself. The Sunni Arab members of parliament generally feel betrayed that they entered the political process in December 2005 on promises that they would have the opportunity to revise the constitution (which they largely rejected). But no such opportunity seems forthcoming. Among their major objections is to the provision of the constitution allowing for the formation of new regional confederacies (i.e. a Shiite one in addition to the present Kurdish one.) The main proponent of this plan is the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, so that getting a stable alliance between it and the Sunni Arabs strikes me as a stretch.

One of the bills before parliament that the Moderates would like to pass is the petroleum bill. But 100 technocrats have written the Iraqi parliament objecting to provisions of the current draft and urging caution rather than haste.

McClatchy reports that 24 bodies were found in Baghdad on Tuesday. Also, " 20 people including 4 soldiers were killed and 20 people wounded including two Iraqi soldiers in a parked car explosion targeted an Iraqi army patrol in Zayuna neighborhood east Baghdad around 2,00 pm."

Reuters reports civil war violence in Iraq on Tuesday. Major incidents:

`BAGHDAD - At least four people were killed and five others wounded by a car bomb inside a parking lot near the Iranian Embassy in central Baghdad, police said. . . .

BAGHDAD - Three people were killed and five wounded in a drive-by shooting as people queued for petrol in the central Baghdad district of Mansour, police said. . .

SUWAYRA - Police recovered five bodies from Tigris river in the town of Suwayra, south of Baghdad, police said. . . .

JURF AL-SAKHIR - Five people were killed in clashes between suspected al Qaeda militants and Islamic Army insurgents linked with former Saddam Hussein loyalists near Jurf al-Sakhar, 85 km (60 miles) south of Baghdad, police said. `

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

NIE: Iraq Fueling al-Qaeda Threat to US

Fred Kaplan at Slate points out that it does not take much reading between the lines to conclude that the new National Intelligence Estimate indicates that Bush`s Iraq War has generated a new and deadly threat against the US. In other words, the US had al-Qaeda on the run and would be safer now if it hadn`t invaded Iraq.

By the way, I had this argument two years ago with a US counter-terrorism official. He was skeptical of prognostications that the Iraq War would generate anti-US terrorism. I told him, you can`t have a massive US military occupation of a major Arab Muslim country for years on end that does not come back to bite you on the ass.

"Al-Qaeda in Iraq" is of course just a bogeyman phrase to describe Salafi Jihadis there. But they obviously feel some kinship to the real al-Qaeda (you never want to see that) and they are threatening to get up an attack on the United States. There was no al-Qaeda in Saddam`s Iraq, so it is Bush who has created this current threat, which did not have to be there.

Of course, the US Right will conveniently use the small "al-Qaeda in Iraq" organization, which it more or less created by its militarism, to justify more militarism. But I don`t think the American public is that stupid.

Meanwhile, the Voice of America reports that the Bush administration will freeze the assets of persons or organizations that attempt to destabilize Iraq. VOA says:

"President Bush has signed an order that allows the U.S. government to block the assets of any person or group that threatens the stability of Iraq.

The order exempts the United States."

Either the VOA copy writer is a little clueless or this person has a wicked, dry sense of humor.

PS For excellent entries on Iran and Pakistan, see recent postings of Farideh Farhi and Manan Ahmed at our group blog on global affairs. Dr. Farhi weighs in on recent developments in the Iranian detention of Iranian-American scholar Haleh Esfandiari, as well as in the arrest of student activists ahead of Iranian elections. For those hungry for Iran analysis, this is a real treat.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Dozens Massacred in Diyala
80 Dead in Kirkuk Bombings

Sunni Arab gunmen massacred dozens of Shiite villagers near Muqdadiya in Diyala province the night of Monday into Tuesday morning, according to a police source. Also on Tuesday, "In Baghdad, the deadliest bombing occurred when a suicide driver detonated his vehicle near an Iraqi army patrol in Zayouna, a mostly Shiite area of eastern Baghdad, killing 10 people, including six civilians, police said. Police said 11 people, including seven civilians, were wounded."


The LAT reports on the three bombings that roiled the northern city of Kirkuk on Monday and which its interviewees blamed on "al-Qaeda."

I am horrified at the loss of innocent life, and hate to see the incident used for politics. I would be very suspicious of assigning blame to "al-Qaeda" for this one. The bombs hit the party offices of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in Kirkuk as well as (Kurdish) policemen. The Kurds are trying to annex oil-rich Kirkuk province to their Kurdistan provincial confederacy. Turkmen and Arabs do not want to be annexed. Turkey does not want to see it annexed.

There are lots of social forces that would like to hit the PUK over this issue, not just "al-Qaeda." The Kurds know that blaming the bombing on that organization (does anyone in Iraq really have Bin Laden`s phone number?) will gain them the sympathy of clueless Americans for their planned annexation. Everyone in the US now complains about the way we were spun by corrupt financier Ahmad Chalabi. But it is seldom appreciated how much Kurdish leaders like Jalal Talabani and Hoshyar Zebari were involved in feeding the US loads of bull about Iraq. Their ultimate goal is partition of the country, and they are manipulating Washington toward that end.

Kirkuk has been growing in instability for some time. It will be even hotter later this year when there is a referendum on its future, which the Kurds will win. This bombing is the writing on the wall.

Altogether on Monday alone some 96 were killed and 205 wounded the bombings and mortar attacks in Kirkuk and Baghdad.

The Sadr Bloc, with 32 seats in the 275 seat parliament will end its boycott of parliamentary sessions, a spokesman said. But since the Sadrists oppose most of Bush`s "benchmark" legislation, their return does not materially enhance the prospect of parliament getting something done soon. And, anyway, I understood that the MPs will go on recess for August.

The Sunni Arab bloc is still boycotting parliament over the dismissal of Mahmud al-Mashhadani (a Sunni) as speaker of the house.

KBR, formerly a division of Halliburton, has received $20 bn. in mostly no-bid US government contracts for work in Iraq. Dick Cheney is the former head of Halliburton. Recently KBR tried to charge $110 mn for work on bases that no longer exist.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Egyptian, Sudanese Jihadi Volunteers Suspected by Iraq?

This wire service compilation done by the Daily Star adds more information on foreign detainees in Iraq. As I read it, in addition to the over 160 suspected foreign fighters held by the US, the Iraqi Ministry of Interior is holding another 560 such foreigners. They had arrested 4 times that number in recent months but appear to have cleared the others. Although they briefly detained some 461 Iranians, they let all of them go. Presumably these were pilgrims to the Shiite shrines who for one reason or another fell under suspicion. The LA Times reported yesterday that nearly half of the detainees in US military custody are Saudis. Not so for the suspected jihadis held by the Iraqis. They have only 9 Saudis. About half of their detainees are Egyptian, and a fifth are Sudanese. The Iraqi security services clearly think their biggest problem is jihadi volunteers from the Nile Valley. But the picture emerging from the two sets of detainees is that the publics of the two main US allies in the Middle East, Saudia and Egypt, are the most likely to fall under suspicion of supporting the insurgency. While suspicion falls on some Iranians, they appear to be cleared quickly and released. The Daily Star writes:

"He reports that among those still being questioned, "11 were Jordanians; 64 Syrians; nine Saudis; two Algerians; six Moroccans; six Yemenis; two Libyans; 57 Palestinians; 284 Egyptians; 113 Sudanese, two Emiratis; three Lebanese and one Somali."

All these statistics that are coming out completely undermine the discourse in Washington, DC, about the war. The Iranian and Syrian governments are not the problem. Osama Bin Laden is not the problem. Sunni Arabs, mainly Iraqis, objecting to American and Shiite and Kurdish dominance is the problem. The foreign detainees are a miniscule group compared to the 19,000 detainees in Multinational Force prisons.

McClatchy reports political violence on Sunday. At least 22 dead bodies were found in the capital, victims of sectarian death squad killings (mostly Sunnis killed by Mahdi Army elements, probably).

The Daily Star reported, "10 people were killed by a car bomb in central Baghdad, Iraqi police said. Twenty-five people were wounded by the blast which ripped through shops and restaurants near Hussein Square in Baghdad's mainly Shiite Jadriyya district. Two women were among the dead. In other violence, seven Kurdish guards were killed near the Iranian border in normally calm northern Iraq, in an attack police and a local official blamed on Al-Qaeda-linked militants."

PS.?for an important new development in Pakistan, see IC Global Affairs.

Traveling through Thursday without much internet access; postings may be limited or timed oddly. Check back from time to time.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Few Foreign Fighters in Iraq;
Many are Saudi
Al-Maliki Says Iraqi Troops ready

Manan Ahmed gives further insights into the motivations of the Glasgow bombers.

Ned Parker of the LA Times reports that of 19,000 "insurgents" held by the US military in Iraq, only 135 are foreigners.

Think about that when you hear Bush say that the US is fighting "al-Qaeda" in Iraq or that "al-Qaeda" would take over Iraq if the US left. The foreigners just are not that important to the guerrilla war. Only .7% of detainees are foreigners, and unless they run faster than Iraqis, that is likely their percentage share in the "insurgency," too.

The US is fighting Iraqis in Iraq, who are nationalists of various stripes, whether religious or secular. They are Sunni. They haven't given fealty to Bin Laden and are not "al-Qaeda."

So you'd think after all the ink spilled on Iranian and Hizbullah contributions to the troubles in Iraq, that they'd be prominent among the foreign fighters, right? Wrong. It is not clear that the US has any Iranians at all in custody. There was a big deal made at the NYT about one Lebanese Hizbullah guy who may have been a freelancer.

So if they aren't from Iran, where are they from? Saudi Arabia--- 45%! Only 15% are from "Syria and Lebanon," and I'll bet you that all but one of those are Sunni. 10% are from North Africa, which is only about 14 guys. North Africa is Sunni.

That is, the numbers Parker pulled out of a US officer in Iraq demolish the entire image that the Bush administration and the Washington press corps has been presenting of the war.

Foreign "al-Qaeda" is almost irrelevant to it. Iran is entirely trivial to it. The Baathist, Allawi-dominated Syrian government is trivial to it. The Lebanese Hizbullah may not be involved at all, as an organization. Certainly it is not involved in any significant way.

Which country is providing a lot of foreign suicide bombers? US ally Saudi Arabia. Has any general or Bush administration official called a press conference to denounce Saudi Arabia? No. Has Joe Lieberman threatened it with a war? No. Everything is being blamed on Iran because powerful American special interests want to get Iran, regardless of the facts.

There isn't any significant cadre of foreign "al-Qaeda" fighters in Iraq if this is all we could capture. They can't take over the country because they are such a tiny group. Everything Bush and Cheney have said about the nature of the war and the supposed dangers of a US withdrawal is transparent falsehood.

Nuri al-Maliki contradicted his Kurdish foreign minister on Saturday, insisting that if US troops withdrew from Iraq, the new Iraqi army and police could keep order. He did admit the desirability of further training and equipment. Al-Maliki has all along differed from his political allies on this point. When he became prime minister in late spring of 2006 he immediately said that Iraq's army would be able to take over all security duties within 18 months. If he still believes that, as seems likely given his comments, that means he thinks they'll be ready by January.

What gives a person pause is that al-Maliki's Da'wa Party has no militia. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, has a paramilitary of some 15,000 or more Badr Corps militiamen. Al-Hakim, who is the one who should be confident of his troops, has repeatedly called for US soldiers to remain in Iraq. If the Badr Corps, the most disciplined and well trained Arab force in Iraq, cannot do the job in al-Hakim's view, then the green and feckless Iraqi military certainly cannot. So it makes you think al-Maliki is engaging in wishful thinking.

The State Department is requiring personnel to wear body armor when going out to a restaurant inside the Green Zone, e.g. But our brave foreign service officers have to sleep in un-hardened structures that afford them no protection from incoming rockets. It is disgraceful and Congress should challenge Condi and Bush about this. Let's write our congressional representatives demanding that our professional diplomats be afforded the basic decency of safe housing immediately.

McClatchy reports that 21 dead bodies were found in Baghdad on Saturday. It also reports violence in Basra and Diyala province I did not see elsewhere.

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

' BAGHDAD - Seven people killed and 15 others wounded by a car bomb near a petrol station in the busy Shi'ite district of Karrada in central Baghdad, police said.

BAGHDAD - Gunmen shot dead an Iraqi who worked as a translator for Reuters in Baghdad this week, his family said on Saturday. They asked for his name not to be reported out of fear of reprisals. . .

DIWANIYA - Five suspected insurgents killed by a U.S. air strike after they were spotted burying a roadside bomb near the southern city of Diwaniya, the military said.

SUWAYRA - Six bodies recovered from the Tigris river near Suwayra, 45 km (28 miles) south of Baghdad, including one that had been decapitated, police said. . .

BAQUBA - At least six suspected insurgents killed by a U.S. air strike on Saturday in a raid near Baquba, north of Baghdad, the military said. It said the fighters initially used several women and children as shields, but then released them.

JBELA - Eight Shi'ite men from the same extended family were shot dead in a pre-dawn attack in the mainly Sunni town of Jbela, 65 km south of the capital, police said.'

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Are we Already at War?
Have US-enabled Kurds killed 200 Iranian Troops?

I got the below by anonymous email regarding a German news program last month. Am passing it on not because I buy it or its details but because there is at the least an issue in the Kurdish terrorist groups that are operating from US-occupied Iraq against Iraq's neighbors. The US is not able to stop the PKK from operating against an ally, Turkey, so I don't think it could stop the Iranian Kurdish terrorists, PEJAK, from operating against Iran. But it is also probably true that there are elements in the US military, in the intelligence services, and in the Washington power elite that are connected to PEJAK and are either happy about its activities or subtly enabling them.

Since the US Senate has in its wisdom laid the groundwork for a war on Iran on the extremely thin grounds of an unbalanced and gullible NYT story, it is worth pondering the degree to which we are being spun once again by shadowy forces whose salaries we are paying!

"Transcript of TV program on German ARD television, "The Monitor, no. 564, June 21, 2007: Sertan (a PJAK terrorist): "Three months ago, by using radio-controlled mines (IEDs) we killed 13 to 14 Iranian soldiers". Kurdish terrorists hide in the U.S. protected areas of North-Eastern Iraq. From there, they send fighters over the border into Iran and attack Iranians. In the past two years, they have killed over 200 Iranians." See the transcript of the program in German. . . . [*Update: A perceptive reader kindly translated the transcript into English at the Comments; I am appending it to the main message below.]* *** NOTE: You can use Google to translate these German Web Pages into English. [Then there is this from other press sources]: Pejak enjoying western support (PressTv, Iran, July 11, 2007): Head of Pejak (PJAK) terrorist group says he has good relations with the U.S. and German governments and they know everything about the group. Abdul Rahman Haji-Ahmadi who lives in Cologne, Germany told German ARD television network that he directs Pejak from Germany. "Big powers help our military stations and American army generals completely overlook our activities", he added. Haji-Ahmadi pointed out that some U.S. generals even visit Pejak's military camps and have good ties with Pejak. He noted that the presence of Pejak in Iraq is even useful for the U.S. because "if Pejak does not rule, Islam will rule". Haji-Ahmadi in a similar interview with the Kurdish newspaper Media had acknowledged that some U.S. senators and generals had met with Pejak leaders in Iraq's Qandil region. . . [Journalist Reese Erlich has also reported on all this for "Democracy Now" and "Mother Jones":] * Report: U.S. sponsoring Kurdish guerilla attacks inside Iran * Kurdish & American sources say the U.S. has been supporting guerrilla raids against Iran, channeling the money through organizations in Iraqi Kurdistan."

---

A reader writes:

(ARD report on The Monitor translated as a public service to prevent other family tragedies) Terrorism: How the Turkish Workers Party attracts recruits under the noses of the BND and Interior Police (Rough and Ready Translation) Sonia Mikich: Recruiting for the war. How a young man from a nice family was led astray – and to the battle in far way Iran. Incidentally as a consequence , we asked ourselves who practices these terrorist attacks on Iran from the ostensibly peaceful Northern Iraq. There is a secret war there unnoticed by the world and tolerated by the Americans. The clues led to Germany, to Cologne as Stephan Buchen and John Goetz found out. They met extremists who proselytize young people under the noses of our secret services, completely in the shadows. Langenfeld North Rhine- Westphalia The K family has lived here for 34 years. The parents feel happy and safe in Germany. However the major conflicts in the Middle East have intruded into their everyday life. Their son Sertan has been missing for the last eight months. Photographs from happy times. His mobile [phone] doesn’t answer anymore. He was a student at the higher vocational school in Leverkusen-Opladen. Today Sertan is 21 years old. The parents haven’t heard from their son for 8 months. We found the son in north eastern Iraq, near the Iranian border, in one of the most dangerous crisis zones in the world. In this mountain zone he is learning the trade of the Guerrilla. Sertan: We call the weapon Karnas. It is a sniper rifle for assassinations. I was specially trained for assassinations of great generals. Sertan belongs to an organization called PJAK, the party of a New Life in Kurdistan. Unnoticed by the rest of the world a war is happening here. The young recruits push into Iran and carry out attacks. Sertan: Especially with explosives, with mines. The mines are prepared …. So that we can detonate them from a distance by radio. They are being developed. We have trained specialists Bomb Experts. Three months ago the friends attacked and killed 13-14 soldiers of the Iranian Army. Your son a Terrorist. Ready to die for the Kurdish cause? The family learns form us where Sertan is. They are speechless. Mother (translation) I feel very bad I want my son to come back. I am upset. Sister of Sertan: He promised mother that he would stay here. He hasn’t kept his promise. Ideological indoctrination: We observe how Sertan and other recruits are made enthusiastic for the battle. The Commander preaches about the bullets of the guerrilla which will light up the darkness. He demands from the young men and women self-sacrifice, praises the picture of martyrs. Sertan the boy from Langenfeld takes copious notes. This is how he is brought on line so quickly. The high ideals of PJAK can be reached: Overthrow of the Iranian Government, Installation of democracy, and freedom for the Kurds in Iran The Kurdish guerrillas control a small strip in the north of the US Occupied Iraq. They send fighters across the border from here. They are believed to have killed at least 200 people in the last two years in attacks. PJAK a pseudonym, as the organization owes allegiance to Abdulla Ocalan the boss of the Kurdish Workers party PKK. It is proscribed in Europe and the US as a terrorist organization. Food rations is all Sertan gets for his work. His rise to fighter started in NRW. He was recruited there by PKK members he told us. He spent three months in a PKK camp in Belgium. Eventually he landed here with two young Kurds of German nationality. Sertan: More and more are coming from Germany. From Germany, from Norway, from Sweden we already had two or three new members. But especially from Germany and France Formal Parade of the recruits in front of the Boss of PJAk Address of Haji Ahmadi Boss of PJAK: I am very happy that you are ready for this holy battle says Haji Ahmadi. The Kurds provide an example of what it means to fight to the last man. Haji Ahmadi sees great times coming for his organization. It receives protection from the highest levels. American generals in Iraq look not unfavorably on his activities. They have visited his camp and walked together with respect. We have positive effects for the Americans. We have the whole mountain chain from Armenia and Azerbaijan under our control. If we weren’t here then the Islamists would take over. Reporter: You mean to say that essentially you are supported by the Americans. Haji: 100% Is that is why the flow of new fighters from Europe works so smoothly? Haji: Many Kurdish youths and girls are joining the fight from Europe. Many go to Northern Kurdistan and also to turkey Haji Ahmadi is always temporarily visiting his people in North Iraq. His main residence is Cologne NRW. He has a German passport he says. He makes contact from here with western politicians and intelligence services. Even the BND have visited him. Haji Ahmadi: He was a young man and said he was from the BND. He asked the same questions you are asking. Reporter: But that means that the German authorities know what you are doing, who you are and what your objectives are. Haji: They know exactly what I am doing I have been in Europe for 43 years mostly in Germany …… BND and Interior Police confirmed that they know PJAK and are watching them. Are young people being recruited for the war against Iran in Germany? We asked Representative Hans Christian Stroeble a member of the parliamentary intelligence oversight committee. He suspects that severe consequences might befall the authorities. Stroeble: If the suspicion exists of illegal activities and especially such extremely illegal activities as terrorist links to overseas or the recruiting of for a foreign power then the German Justice authorities are obliged to report and investigate the matter and see if enough evidence exists for charges. So far no sign of action by the Federal authorities. Setan’s family want their son back, but they are afraid that the PKK will do something to their son Seltan’s father: The PKK told me shouldn’t call the police. Sertan is well. We haven’t called the police because we thought that could put our son’s life in danger. The German authorities offer no help. To get his son back they have to trust the PKK. So far without result.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Rubin: Will Bin Laden Win?

See Barnett Rubin's essential piece at our group blog, "The Pessoptimist in Istanbul: Will Bin Laden Win?" With amazing concision, he explains everything from why Bin Laden was angry about the abolition of the Caliphate by Ataturk and the Treaty of Lausanne, to why Pushtuns in the tribal regions of northern Pakistan think they are actually in Afghanistan. Along the way, he highlights how non-state actors are challenging the Lausanne world order.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Pace: Independent Iraqi Battalions in Decline

Gen. Peter Pace says that the number of Iraqi battalions (about 500 men) who can operate wholly independently of the US forces has fallen in the past year from 10 to only 6. He also says we should not worry about that statistic.

He points out that the number of battalions who can be 'in the lead' on military operations has risen from 88 to 100. But presumably it has only really risen to 96, with 4 of the new 'in the lead' battalions having formerly been able to operate independently.

In fact, the important figure is how many can operate independently. That means that they will go to the front when ordered, will actually fight, won't run away, and might actually accomplish something, even if there are no US troops anywhere nearby. Iraq apparently has about 3,000 troops of that description. My guess is that they are mostly Kurdish Peshmerga on loan from Kurdistan. I.e., Iraq probably has almost no Arab troops who would and could fight independently for the al-Maliki government, as opposed to cannon fodder pushed before US battalions and afraid of being shot as deserters if they turn tail.

And this is the situation after 4 years!

Some have asked me whether the most direct route to a US withdrawal is not to spend more money and effort training an Iraqi army that could operate on its own and would stand and fight.

In my view, this ideal is unlikely to be attained. Most Iraqi troops are actually the equivalent of a local national guard. They will defend their neighborhoods, but most will not deploy to other parts of the country when ordered to do so. There is little evidence of them being willing to stand and fight on their own, except on a neighborhood level (i.e. Badr Corps Shiite militiamen in the police or army will fight Mahdi Army militiamen for control of a Diwaniya neighborhood, especially if they have US air support. But they have not shown that they are willing and able to fight Sunni Arab guerrillas effectively).

Moreover, a lot of the reason for this problem is simply that most Iraqis don't much care for their new government and certainly are not willing to die for it. I saw this in Lebanon in the late 1970s. An army has to believe in its government in order to be reliably deployed. Lack of political will is fatal to military discipline. Iraq is fractured and so is its political will, so effective military intervention is very difficult. The population in the military is not different from the general population in this regard (except, in Iraq, in the case of the Kurdish Peshmerga).

The political resolution has to precede the military resolution. That is why the Lebanon Civil War ended in 1989 with an act of political will, the Taif agreement. After that it was possible to rebuild the Lebanese military.

McClatchy reports civil war violence in Iraq on Friday:

' Baghdad: 5 policemen were killed and 9 others wounded in clashes between the guards of the ministry of interior affairs and gunmen hiding behind Al Gailani fuel station downtown Baghdad around 2:00am.

- Gunmen killed an Iraqi journalist working for New York Times newspaper near Al Saidiyah fuel station south Baghdad around 9:00 am.

- 3 civilians were killed and 5 others were injured when the US troops opened fire after an IED explosion targeted the US army convoy in Al Fadhiliyah neighborhood north east Baghdad around 11:00 am. A car and a house were burnt in the incident.

Note that US troops laying down fire around them appears to have killed more people than did the roadside bomb. You wonder how typical this is, and whether it isn't one reason for the roadside bombs. The relatives of those killed by the US, even if it was inadvertent, are unlikely to forgive and forget.

(For more on this kind of thing, see this Nation piece by Chris Hedges and Laila al-Arian.

McClatchy also reports lots of violence in Diyala province.

I doubt things have changed since this ITV 4 report based on the photography of Sean Smith, last October, in which troops on the ground express the severest doubts about Iraqi troops taking over, and in which the Iraqi commander says that the country was better off under Saddam. One commander told his men not to shoot at insurgents. The unreliability of many Iraqi police is also underlined. In the end the US unit has to raid the offices of their ally, the Iraqi army, some of whose troops are doubling as insurgents!

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

House rebuffs Bush on Iraq
Iraq Minorities in Extreme Peril

The House of Representatives again rebuffed Bush on Iraq, voting by a comfortable majority to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq but to keep some there to fight 'al-Qaeda terrorists' in Iraq.

This plan of keeping troops in Iraq to fight "al-Qaeda" seems to me naive. Who is al-Qaeda? If you mean Iraqi Sunnis who have become Salafi Jihadis, then it seems unlikely that the US military can fight them successfully with a smaller force. It is just wishful thinking. If 160,000 US troops cannot do it, a smaller force cannot do it. And, the smaller you make the force, the more the US military becomes a sitting duck for militias and others. Likewise it is no good saying you'll keep troops in Kurdistan. Kurdistan is landlocked, and depends heavily for investment, trade and a route to the rest of the world on Turkey. No way to provision a US base unless the Turks give in and say they will permit its provisioning.

If you leave small expeditionary forces inside Iraq to fight "al-Qaeda," they will likely get massacred at some point, and then you'll be pulled right back into the maelstrom.

Make as many prudent political and military arrangements for Iraq as you still have the ability to make, and then . . . get out.

If you're going to get out, get out.

Patrick Cockburn points out that only 6 of the 18 benchmarks set by Congress are really important to Iraq's security and political development, and that it is on those 6 that absolutely no progress has been made. The 'progress' has been on trivial things.

The al-Maliki government is in as much denial as Bush, bristling and suggestions it hasn't accomplished anything (it hasn't) and pledging to pass pending legislation addressing some of the benchmarks. We'll believe it when we see it.

Kurdish officials are rejecting the new draft petroleum bill, one of the key benchmarks.

(The CIA had already concluded that nothing was likely to be accomplished politically in Iraq any time soon last fall when it briefed the Iraq Study Group.

The BBC reports that Iraq's minorities are facing extreme difficulties, and some a close to extinction.

Reuters reports political violence in Iraq on Thursday. Police found 28 bodies in the streets of Baghdad. The reports include this touching sentence: "SAMAWA - Two children were killed and six wounded by a roadside bomb near a bus station in the southern city of Samawa, police said. . ."

Children. No wonder McClatchy reports that even babies in Iraq are learning to dodge bullets.

Reuters' list of other major incidents:

' BAGHDAD - U.S. soldiers killed at least six Iraqi policemen and seven suspected militants during a dawn raid in east Baghdad on Friday to arrest an Iraqi police lieutenant accused of militant links, the U.S. military said. . .

BAGHDAD - Gunmen killed five Iraqi guards near a gate to the ministry of the interior in central Baghdad, police said.

BAGHDAD - An Iraqi soldier was killed and two others wounded by a roadside bomb targeting their patrol in the east Baghdad neighbourhood of Dora, police said. . .

DOUR - Four Iraqi policemen and two soldiers were killed when gunmen attacked their checkpoint in Dour, a small town near the northern city of Tikrit, police said. . .

MOSUL - One policeman was killed and eight other officers plus a civilian were wounded by a roadside bomb in the restive northern city of Mosul, police said. . .

SAWAYRA - Three bodies bearing signs of torture were recovered from a river near Sawayra. '

McClatchy provides further details, including this one: "From 10 am in the morning till the time of having this report ( 4 pm ) , clashes are taking place at Al-Ameen neighborhood ( east Baghdad) after raids done by the American troops to the area . Eight people killed ( including two local cameramen from Reuters) and 22 others injured ."

PS

Pakistan update at our group blog.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

30 Bodies found in Baghdad
Death Squad killings Spike

For a Daily Kos diary on our panel at Yearly Kos in Chicago, Aug. 3-6, this link. Many thanks to Markinsanfran.

Reuters reports civil war violence in Iraq on Wednesday. Some 30 bodies were found in the streets of the capital, victims of death squad violence. About 26 had been found on Tuesday. The numbers of bodies found daily has gone up since the bombing of the Samarra shrine and the recent bombing of Shiites at Ermeli. Speaking of which, someone shot the mayor of Samarra dead on Wednesday. Not likely that municipal government is going to provide security to a mere shrine if the mayor's life is taken so lightly. In the incidents reported by Reuters, I see a pattern of the Sunni Arab guerrillas relying more on katyusha rockets and mortar attacks, which however strike me as causing more casualties than in the past.

McClatchy reports some grisly incidents on Wednesday, including that of a man who killed his sister on discovering that she had been setting roadside bombs for US troops near their village in Salahuddin province. This incident speaks volumes about the contradictions in the current politics of resistance in the Sunni Arab areas-- gender politics, taking sides between Salafis and US troops, etc.

A new poll shows that 70% of Americans want US troops back home by spring of 2008, and only 20% think the surge is working.

Sawt al-Iraq reports in Arabic on a speech by MP Aliya Naseef, a female member of the Iraqi National List led by Iyad Allawi. She said that some of the list's 25 members of parliament never actually attend the sessions, and that Allawi is contemplating dropping them from his list. The article maintains that parliament has adopted new rules that allow for a party list to replace a sitting MP who is chronically absent. (This idea seems bad to me; voters vote on a ranked list, so replacing an MP detracts from the value of their vote.) Naseef also implied that the Iraqi National List, despite being a coalition, began with a relatively unified ideology (i.e. secular Iraq nationalism), and that there are also problems on that front. If Allawi is really expelling MPs from parliament for ideological reasons and not just for absenteeism, that would be really troubling.

Somebody posted this to YouTube, juxtaposing Bush on the 'surge' and Johnson on his Vietnam strategy. It certainly is eerily similar.

Michael Moore's argument with Wolf Blitzer:

CNN report on the true cost of Bush's 'War on Terror'- must see.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sadrists Furious with al-Maliki over "Baathist" Charge

The USG Open Source Center reports on the tiff between the Sadrists in parliament and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki occasioned by the latter's charge that some Mahdi Army commanders are "Baathist" thugs.

Iraq: Al-Sadr Trend Criticizes Prime Minister's Charge of 'Ba'thist' Infiltration Iraq -- OSC Report Tuesday, July 10, 2007 Iraq: Al-Sadr Trend Sees US Impatience, Iraqi Political Opportunism Behind Prime Minister's Charge of 'Ba'thist' Infiltration The Al-Sadr Trend expressed resentment at Prime Minister Al-Maliki's recent charge that the movement has been penetrated by criminals whom he described as "Ba'thist" holdovers. Some officials within the movement viewed Al-Maliki's criticism as an insincere effort to placate the US Administration, which is rumored in Iraqi media to be preparing to bring down the current government over its failure to meet US expectations. Other observers in the Al-Sadr Trend explained the charges as a sign that the prime minister's party was feeling free enough to drop its agreement with the Al-Sadr Trend now that it has signed a new bilateral alliance with the leading Shiite party. Officials in the Al-Sadr Trend cast Al-Maliki's charge as a concession to the US intended to stave off the downfall of his faltering government. Iraqi media reports of concern among US officials that the Baghdad government would fall short of attaining its objectives revived predictions that Washington would seek to bring down the Al-Maliki Government in the near future. Al-Sadr Trend spokesman Salih al-Ubaydi said that "the man is carrying out his commitments to the US Administration" and explained that, by offering the US a "green light" to attack the Sadrists, Al-Maliki sought to "save his government from a conspiracy" of "domestic and foreign forces" (Al-Sharqiyah TV, 8 July). Ahmad al-Shaybani, a top aide to Muqtada al-Sadr, reported that Al-Maliki hoped to "extend this government's life," but he cited information from "our private sources" as indicating that Al-Maliki had been told by the "occupation forces" that "the next few days" would see his government fall (Al-Zaman, 8 July). Asma' al-Musawi of the Trend's political bureau ascribed Al-Maliki's charges to the prime minister's "political duality" -- that is, "a change in his rhetoric when he faced the media" -- and reported that, in private meetings, he had told the Trend that "the government would not have endured had it not been for (its) support" (Al-Malaf Press, 8 July). Other observers in the Al-Sadr Trend interpreted the prime minister's charges in the context of the announcement by his Islamic Da'wah Party (IDP) that it had reached an agreement with the Iraqi Islamic Supreme Council (IISC) -- formerly the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) -- with the ultimate aim of forming a new "moderates' front" with the leading Kurdish and Sunni Arab parties. Referring to the old IDP pact with the Al-Sadr Trend -- which enabled Al-Maliki to come to power in the first place and which has evidently been superseded by the new IDP/IISC agreement -- some Sadrist officials commented sardonically that, if Al-Maliki's criticism of the Al-Sadr Trend was valid, it followed that he himself had been brought to power by the hated "Ba'thists" ( Al-Malaf Press, 8 July). Ahmad al-Sharifi reported that the Al-Sadr Trend's "new position on Al-Maliki" reflected the formation "behind the Al-Sadr Trend's back" of an IDP-IISC "coordination committee" to further those parties' special interests (Al-Zaman, 8 July). In a report citing "sources close to the Al-Sadr Trend," a news website sympathetic toward the movement noted that the prime minister's statement marked the IDP's decision to forsake its longstanding alliance with the Sadrists. "Despite the claim that the Al-Maliki Government provided cover for the Al-Sadr Trend, the facts indicate otherwise," commented the report, which after a listing of the Sadrists arrested or killed concluded "there has been no protection for the Al-Sadr Trend or the Jaysh al-Mahdi from Al-Maliki's government" (Nahrain Net, 8 July). This OSC product is based exclusively on the content and behavior of selected media and has not been coordinated with other US Government components.

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20 Rockets, Mortar Shells, Hit Green Zone; Kill 3
Petraeus Meets with Presidency Council

On Tuesday, guerrillas launched some 20 katyusha rockets and mortar shells into the Green Zone in downtown Baghdad, killing 3 persons, including a US soldier, and wounding 25 persons.

The Green Zone was originally supposed to be the safe place in Iraq, with the area outside it (everything else) called the "Red Zone." The US Embassy in Baghdad appears to have forgotten what the phrase "Green Zone" means, since a spokesman there told the LAT, "There's fire into the Green Zone virtually every day, so I can't draw any conclusions about the security situation based on that . . ."

Let me draw the conclusion. If you've got fire into the friggin' Green Zone every day, then we can draw the conclusion that the security situation in Baghdad sucks big time. When you've got people killed and a large number of people wounded in the one place in Iraq that was supposed to have a "permissive" security environment, then security in general is the pits.

Now you might say that we can't draw many conclusions from the events of a single day. And, being able to lob mortar shells over a wall doesn't speak to that much organization. But then what about these two nuggets in the LAT story?

1) "There were about 39 attacks [on the Green Zone] in May, compared with 17 in March, according to a U.N. report."

2) "Tuesday's attack came the same day gunmen kidnapped Iraqi Police Col. Mahmoud Muhyi Hussein, who directs security inside the Green Zone . . .

In other words, the security situation in the Green Zone is spiralling down at an alarming pace, and the guerrillas have such good inside knowledge that they can kidnap the very person responsible for security in it, as he drives in Jadiriya. That, my friends, is an inside job. And such an inside job doesn't bode well for future security in the Green Zone. For one thing, presumably they are "debriefing" Col. Hussein as we speak, looking for weak points.

People I know and respect are in the Green Zone, so I'm pretty distressed by this situation, and not amused by the embassy spokesman's attempt to blow smoke up our posteriors. This looks bad.

I.F. Stone was right, all you have to do is read the newspapers carefully and you'd be surprised what you can find out.

Al-Zaman gives inflated casualty figures for wounded in Tuesday's Green Zone attack, and attributes it to the Mahdi Army (how could they know it wasn't Sunni Arab guerrillas?) Al-Zaman says that one of the mortar shells landed not far from the residence of PM al-Maliki!

Al-Zaman also reports that President Jalal Talabani and his two vice presidents (Adil Abdul Mahdi, a Shiite, and Tariq al-Hashimi, a Sunni) met Tuesday with Gen. David Petraeus on ways out of the political impasse. It is widely felt that PM al-Maliki is just incapable of making progress on Washington's benchmarks, including national reconciliation. Al-Zaman alleges that the American commanders on the ground are increasingly favoring giving greater power to the 'presidency council' comprising the president and 2 vice presidents.

This move, if truly being pursued, strikes me as a "Mahmoud Abbas" strategy for Iraq, involving essentially sidestepping the prime minister in favor of the presidency council. I doubt it can work.

In Diyala Province, Sunni fundamentalist guerrillas took over the town of Shirween a mixed Sunni-Shiite area. Sunni Arab guerrillas who had controlled 40% of the Diyala capital, Baquba, had melted away before the US advance. But now they have popped up in control of a nearby town. This move strikes me as a sort of taunting of US commanders. They must know they cannot keep control of Shirween if the US comes after them. They are making the point that their movement is hydra-headed and therefore invulnerable.

Sawt al-Iraq reports in Arabic that MP Husain al-Falluji is calling for the draft petroleum bill to be submitted to a popular referendum, instead of having parliament vote on it. Many parliamentarians feel that the current draft of the bill gives away too much national sovereignty.

Reuters reports political violence in the country on Tuesday. There is too much of it.
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Al Franken's Successful Fundraising
Minnesota Senate Race at Stake
Iraq an Issue for Coleman

Al Franken is proving himself a formidable political fundraiser as he revs up his campaign to be the Democrat who faces Neoconservative Senator Norm Coleman in the '08 elections.

It is tiresome that some observers dismissed Mr. Franken because he is a humorist. Lots of comedians have served in the US Congress, though few had been professional humorists before being elected.

Norm Coleman himself has said the most hilarious things. His positions on various issues are listed at this page (scroll down and look on the right). He wants to increase the number of people carrying concealed weapons in Minneapolis (after what happened at Virginia Tech, is that a good idea?), wants to fund the Iraq War indefinitely and no questions asked, opposes auditing contractors with Defense Department contracts in Iraq, and wants to see Roe v. Wade overturned. Like Joe Lieberman, he seems to be preparing his constituencies for a brutal aggressive war on Iran. He's just a barrel of monkeys.

Al is positively sober in comparison. He wrote Norm Coleman asking him to bring the troops home.

Coleman was one of the targets of a Democratic Party ad campaign launched Tuesday:

Coleman's official position on Iraq is at his web page.
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Pakistan Aftermath

On the last words of the Pakistani clerical leader at the Red Mosque, see Manan Ahmad's posting at ICGA, as well as my own entry.
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Pakistani Army Invades Red Mosque

The Pakistani military invaded the Red Mosque and seminary complex early on Tuesday morning. As I write, Aljazeera is reporting that the army has 85% of the complex. Some 40 Muslim militants inside the mosque have been killed, as have 3 Pakistani soldiers.

For the background of this crisis, see Manan Ahmad's comments at our group blog.

The Pakistani government has faced protests in the north of the country, in Malakand and Waziristan, over the Red Mosque crisis.
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140,000 Turkish Troops Mass at Iraq Border
Iraq Benchmarks still Waiting for Godot

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari (a Kurd) warned Monday that 140,000 Turkish troops were massed at the border with Iraq. Ankara accuses Iraqi Kurdistan of giving safe harbor to PKK terrorists who are blowing up soldiers and others in Turkey's eastern Anatolia. The Turkish government and military have threatened to engage in hot pursuit and to make border incursions if necessary to deal with the PKK threat. Last Sunday, thousands of Turks demonstrated in Ankara against the PKK, Iraqi Kurdistan and the United States, which they blame for allowing Iraq to become a terrorist base against Turkey.

Al-Zaman reports that the Turkmen community in northern Iraq (roughly 800,000 strong) has demanded that the Iraqi government and American military authorities arm them so that they can defend themselves. The request comes in the wake of the huge car bombing this weekend that killed 152 in the Turkmen village of Ermeli near Tuz Khurmato.

The Iraq and Afghanistan wars are the US costing $12 billion a month of the taxpayers' money. So far $450 billion has been spent on Iraq.

Last January, Bush set out 4 benchmarks he wanted to see the Iraqi government achieve, as a sign of genuine progress in that country. They included 1) passing a petroleum investment law, 2) holding provincial elections, 3) revision of de-Baathification laws (which were overly harsh in punishing Sunni Arabs belonging to the party) and 4) the holding of reconciliation talks between the al-Maliki government and the Sunni opposition (not including guerrilla leaders, branded as 'terrorists.') Congress then expanded the benchmarks to 18, but those 4 remained at the core. But not one of these benchmarks from any quarter has been met in Iraq. Nor are they likely to be any time soon. (See below).

The "surge" or escalation of US troop presence was intended to provide enough social peace in Baghdad at least for the al-Maliki government to make progress on the benchmarks. But the "surge" hasn't made a dent in car bombings. Its main achievement was to cut the number of death squad killings resulting in bodies in the streets of Baghdad from 70-80 to 20-30 most days.

And as Tomdispatch.com points out, there is the problematic dependence on US air power.

Ben Lando reports that the petroleum bill in parliament is facing nearly universal opposition from a wide range of political groups. He says, "The Sadr Movement and the Iraqi Accord Front now say they may end the boycott specifically to challenge the law. The former held mass rallies over the weekend in opposition to Maliki. IAF says it will call for a vote of no confidence in him." So, the Bush administration, in pressing so hard for the petroleum bill, has only managed to stir up a lot of opposition. Even the boycotting parties are willing to suspend their boycott long enough to vote against it!

Reuters reports political violence on Monday. Major incidents included:

' BALAD - A roadside bomb killed nine Iraqi soldiers and wounded 20 others near Balad, 80 km (50 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.

BAGHDAD - Two roadside bombs killed four people and wounded 21 when they exploded minutes apart near Baghdad's main bus terminal in the city centre, police said.

BAGHDAD - Four members from the same family were strangled by militants who kidnapped them from the mainly Sunni district of Ghazaliya on Sunday, police said.

BAGHDAD - Insurgents killed two policemen and two Iraqi soldiers in an ambush as they responded to a bomb tip-off in the Sunni district of Adhamiya, police said.

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Informed Comment: Global Affairs

Our new group blog, Informed Comment: Global Affairs has gotten favorable notice in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Speaking of which, contributors have made some very important entries in the past couple of days.

Barnett Rubin, among the world's foremost experts on Afghanistan explains why he is a "pessoptimist" on the future of that country. He also describes how his commitments to Afghanistan's well-being and his various diplomatic and business involvements make him in-between academia and other worlds on the issue. It is in my view great blogging-- personal, autobiographical, whimsical, and yet deadly serious on subject of great import for the United States. We eagerly await more!

Farideh Farhi weighs in with an important posting on press censorship in Iran. The crackdown on the reformists initiated by President Mahmud Ahmadinejad after his summer, 2005, electoral victory continues apace, with the closure of the reformist Ham-Mihan newspaper, run by the former mayor of Tehran.

See also Dr. Farhi's other recent piece, at Middle East Reports Online, on Iran's security dilemma.

Departing BBC Tehran correspondent Frances Harrison gives her own impressions of the creeping press crackdown in Iran. It is obviously not a good scene.

On the other hand, Fatemeh Keshavarz, writing in the Chronicle, reminds of us how complex a culture Iran has, warning against a the New Orientalism of the Bernard Lewis variety.
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Physicians of Fear

My column at Salon.com this week is "Inside the minds of killer doctors": Some of the accused behind the recent terror plots in Britain were professional healers. What on earth prompts someone to snap from caregiver to killer?

Excerpt:

"the actions of the group in Britain were too erratic and error-prone to be the result of careful political planning. And the self-immolation by some of them raises questions as to their deeper mind-set. Terrorists imagine the world in black and white, as full of demons and angels, and place themselves on the side of the angels. Sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer has called this way of thinking "cosmic war." Small terrorist cells arise in part because their members develop a specific way of looking at the world, which they reinforce for one another in everyday interactions. As the group becomes more and more distinct in its views from the society around it -- and more isolated -- its members can cross boundaries of reason and human sentiment, becoming monstrous.

For caring professions to produce terrorists is hardly unprecedented. Israeli-American Dr. Baruch Goldstein carried out the 1994 massacre of Palestinians in the West Bank city of Hebron, killing 29 persons at the Ibrahimi Mosque and wounding another 150. The No. 2 man in al-Qaida, Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri from the elite Azzam family, trained as a physician in Cairo in the 1970s.

Paul J. Hill, who shot down abortion clinic physician Dr. John Britton in 1994 in Florida, was a formally trained clergyman who started out committed to helping people spiritually, not killing them. He became so overwrought about what he considered genocide inflicted on the unborn, however, that he felt compelled to save innocents by killing Dr. Britton. The reverend reflected, chillingly, afterward, "If I wounded him, just shot him in the leg or shoulder, I knew there was an excellent probability that he would return to killing innocent children. In my thinking it just became: I had to kill him."

Becoming a religious terrorist depends on several steps. The first is conversion to a way of thinking by which the perpetrators identify with a core group that they wish to protect, but which they believe is being subjected to great harm. Typically this group is imagined to be composed of innocents or lonely carriers of divine truth, whose existence is both essential and yet precarious."

Read the whole thing.
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"Al-Qaeda" in Iraq Threatens Iran
Thousands of Sadrists Demonstrate against al-Maliki

The "Islamic State in Iraq" led by Abu Umar al-Bagdadi, has theatened to target Iran unless it ceases its support for Shiite groups in Iraq.

Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, a right hand man of Saddam who still leads a major Baathist cell in the north, isued a videocassette statement maintaining that the guerrilla movement is winning against the Americans; eh also called for more attacks on the latter. The Baathist component has been ignored or downplayed by most observers.

Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that the crisis between the Sadr Movement and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has reached a nadir. It says that thousands of angry Shiites, followers of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, demonstrated against al-Maliki in Baghdad on Sunday. Al-Hayat says that big demonstrations in the Baya' district of the capital by Sadrists protested the US arrest of two Sadrist commanders.

The Sadrists are complaining bitterly that al-Maliki has turned on them after they put him into power. They say that his role has effectively ended. Members of the movement were especially outraged by al-Maliki's charge that Baathists and Saddamists are leading some factions within the Sadr Movement. One pointed out that if this allegation was true, then al-Maliki owes his position to Baathists and Saddamists. Sadrist Ahmad al-Sharifi accused al-Maliki of encouraging the Occupation forces to hit the Sadrists. He said al-Maliki's Islamic Call [Da'wa] Party and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council had been going behind the Sadrists' back to form a new coalition that would ensure political perquisites for the two parties.

Ahmad al-Shaibani, an aide to cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, said that the al-Maliki government was coming to an end, which would become apparent in the next few days.

Shaikh Hamad al-Rikabi, a Sadrist leader in the Karkh district of Baghdad, said that the American forces had detained Shaikh Nasir al-Sa'idi and three of his sons in a raid on the Shu'la District of the capital late on Saturday.

In other news, al-Zaman says, the Iranians shelled positions inside Iraqi Kurdistan. (There are Iranian Kurdish guerrillas from a group called PEJAK, who hit targets in Iran and then seek refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan).

Iraq's Sunni fundamentalist Vice President, Tariq al-Hashimi, on Sunday accused the al-Maliki government of weakness and inability to protect Iraqis, especially after the massive carbombing near Tuz Khurmato on Saturday. (-al-Zaman).

McClatchy reports that 29 bodies were found in Baghdad on Sunday. It adds, "Ten civilians were injured in a parked car bomb explosion near Ali Al Lami restaurant in Jadriyah neighborhood downtown Baghdad around 10:35 a.m."

Reuters reports political violence for Sunday:

' BAGHDAD - One U.S. soldier was killed and three wounded on Sunday by a suicide car bomb near their patrol west of the Iraqi capital, the military said.

HASWA - A suicide truck bomber killed 23 new Iraqi army recruits and wounded 27 others near Haswa, 50 km (30 miles) south of Baghdad, police and army sources said.

BASRA - A British soldier died on Saturday from wounds received during a fierce clash in the southern Iraqi city of Basra the day before, a military spokesman said on Sunday. . .

BAGHDAD - A roadside bomb killed three civilians and wounded five others in a busy market in the Shurja, an important commercial district in central Baghdad, police said. . .

BAGHDAD - Six people were killed and seven wounded by a car bomb in Karrada, a busy Shi'ite area in central Baghdad.

BAGHDAD - Two people were killed by a car bomb in Jadriya, a southern district of Baghdad near the al-Hamra hotel, which is popular with westerners working in the city, police said.'

Pakistan developments covered at the group blog on global affairs.
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Al-Maliki to Face No-Confidence Vote?
As Many as 150 Dead in "Turkmen Massacre"

Readers sometimes ask me if analyzing the news from Iraq every day doesn't get me down.

It got me down today. Sunni Arab guerrillas, unable to operate as effectively in Baghdad because of the US troop surge, had a suicide bomber drive a truck loaded with explosives into a market in a village on the fringes of the northern city of Tuz Khurmato and detonate his payload. As I write, authorities had counted 130 dead bodies, many of them women and children, and relatives reported another 20 dead. Another 250 or so were wounded, some of them badly, according to the Arabic daily al-Hayat. The latter says Iraqis are referring to the bombing as "the Turkmen massacre." Some 40 homes, 20 shops, and a dozen automobiles were also destroyed.

Like the detonation of the minarets at the al-Askariya shrine in Samarra recently, this act of terrorism had a strategic purpose. First, even 160,000 US troops cannot provide security to the whole country. The guerrillas are announcing that if they are prevented from operating in the Karrada neighborhood of Baghdad, they will just shift operations to Samarra (an hour's drive due north of Baghdad) or Tuz Khurmato.

Moreover, they are saying that they are just as capable of waving a read flag in front of the Shiite bull even if they aren't in Baghdad. Thus, they hit a sacred Shiite shrine again at Samarra. And Tuz Khurmato is a largely Shiite Turkmen city of some 63,000, surrounded by villages with a similar composition, like the one that was blown up Saturday. Although Turkmen Shiites had in earlier decades been removed from the formal, clerically-dominated Shiism of Najaf, practicing instead a folk religion, in the 1990s Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr reached out to them and brought many of them into orthodox Twelver Shiism. Arab Shiites now feel solidarity with them, and on occasion young cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has sent Mahdi Army fighters up to protect them. The Badr Corps of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council has also attempted to attract their loyalty. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki denounced the bombing as the work of Sunni extremists who declare that Shiite Muslims are actually infidels.


CBS News is reporting that on July 15, the Sunni Arab Iraqi Accord Front will call a vote of no confidence in the Iraqi parliament against prime minister Nuri al-Maliki. CBS says that Sunni vice president Tariq al-Hashimi, who is spear-heading this move, met with US VP Dick Cheney and that Cheney may have approved the move.

There are three Sunni Arab parties in the 275-member parliament. The largest, with 44 seats, is the Iraqi Accord Front. The National Dialogue Front of Salih al-Mutlak has 11 seats. The small Liberation and Reconciliation Party has 3 seats (its founder, Mishaan al-Jibouri has had to flee the country because a warrant was issued for his arrest last fall). According to the Iraqi constitution, any 50 members of parliament can call a vote of no confidence, so the Sunni Arab parties can certainly initiate the process.

They would need 138 seats to unseat al-Maliki, however, and it is not clear that they would have them. The 58 Kurdish deputies will vote for al-Maliki, and he would only need 80 Shiite votes to win the vote. Even with the defection from his alliance of 32 Sadrist MPs and 15 from the Islamic Virtue Party (Fadhila), al-Maliki probably still has 80 Shiite MPs behind him (before the defections he had about 130 in his United Iraqi Alliance, so the defections should have left him with 88). It is also not clear that the Sadrist and Islamic Virtue MPs will actually vote with Sunni fundamentalist parties to unseat a Shiite prime minister.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that al-Maliki has put together an alliance of 'moderate' parties, including the Da'wa (Islamic Call) Party, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (Shiite, leans toward Iran), and the Kurdistan Alliance. Da'wa has 24 seats in parliament, SIIC has 30, and the Kurds have 58. That gives them 112. For a stable government they need another 26 at least. There are some Shiite independents in the United Iraqi Alliance that still support al-Maliki, and he is hoping to peel off one of the three parties (the Iraqi Islamic Party) that make up the Sunni Arab Iraqi Accord Front, so as to put him over the top. (When he made these plans, I don't think al-Maliki realized that the Iraq Islamic Party's head, VP Tariq al-Hashimi, was planning to try to unseat him). So it is close, but al-Maliki may still have a simple majority behind him.

You have to wonder, though, how long it will last. Another wild card is that a lot of parliamentarians are out of town or out of country for the summer now, and parliament has difficulty raising a quorum. That so many parliamentarians are not attending might allow al-Maliki's enemies to unseat him if his own supporters stay in Amman or London for the vote.

How all this fits with al-Maliki's denunciation of the Mahdi Army or paramilitary of the Sadr Movement is unclear. It may be that al-Maliki hopes the move will help bring the (Sunni) Iraqi Islamic Party into his coalition. If so he may have made a grave calculation, if the Sunnis really are planning on calling a vote of no confidence. Al-Maliki may have failed to get the IIP aboard and may have alienated Sadrist MPs that might otherwise have grudgingly supported him. Just speculation.

The Sadrist Movement denounced al-Maliki's denunciation of them, according to al-Hayat, saying that it was a smokescreen intended to take the public's mind off the government's massive failures in restoring security to Iraq.
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Musharraf Warns Militants of Death

See Manan Ahmed's excellent analysis of the crisis in Pakistan at our group blog. He points out that the militant Red Mosque was an ally of the United States and the Pakistani government in the 1980s, when they were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan.

On Saturday and early Sunday, Pakistan's military kept blasting away at key points in the seminary-mosque complex, apparently with the intent ultimately of making a frontal assault through the breaches and rescuing any hostages the militants may take. A high-ranking Pakistani officer was killed by a militant sniper during such a blast operation. Gen. Pervez Musharraf has demanded that the radicals surrender, and threatened them with death if they do not.
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Pakistani Army Moves in
Takes Faridia Seminary
Standoff at Red Mosque

Pakistani troops took the Faridia Seminary attached to the Red Mosque on Friday. On Saturday morning, the army continued to move in on the mosque itself, amid sounds of explosions. The clerical leader there, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, has been talking about fighting to the death, and told the seminarians with him during Friday prayers that he had "written their wills." Do they have Kool-aid in Pakistan?

Pakistani troops also removed walls and barriers in front of the women's seminary attached to the mosque, in what could be a preparation for a rescue mission.

Pakistan's exiled civilian politicians, such as former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, appear to view the current turmoil in the capital as an invitation to defy the military government by returning to Pakistan to contest the elections scheduled for this fall. Some high Pakistani officials are now saying that Ms. Bhutto would not be arrested on her arrival in the country, contrary to earlier threats issued by Gen. Musharraf.

The proliferation of madrasahs or Muslim seminaries in Pakistan, which offer K-12 and college-level education, is enabled in part by the government's refusal to spend money on opening and supporting new civil schools throughout the country. Last I knew, half of the Pakistani budget went to the military, and spending on education was something like 2%. For its first few decades of existence, Pakistan spent %50-%60 of its budget on the military. In the 2006-2007 budget, "defense" was $4.2 billion of the $21.7 bn. federal budget. Moreover, the military has tended in recent years to spend beyond its budget allocation. And, expenditures, procurements and programs actually military in character were spread through the rest of the budget, and the true total dedicated to the military is likely actually higher. Both the Pakistani public and the international donor agencies had demanded reduced proportions of military spending in the budget, so, presto, things were reclassified as not military. Sherry Rahman observes:

' When parliamentarians or donors read the allocation for defence over the next fiscal year, it will not include the military pensions, which now run into 35.6 billion rupees. Nor will the defence outlay include Rs 1.4 billion demanded separately for the combatant accounts of the defence division which include the Maritime Security Forces and others with dotted line or direct reports to the military, Rs 40, 723 million in salaries for defence production, Rs 7.2 billion spent on the civil armed forces, Rs 3.7 billion for the Pakistan Rangers, Rs 1.5 billion for the Frontier Constabulary, Rs 359 million for the Pakistan Coast Guards, nor the one billion rupees set aside for military schools, cantonments and other residuals. The Atomic Energy Commission too, which falls under the control of the Strategic Plans Division, has been allotted separate funds, yet the two billion rupees demanded this year is charged to civilian expenses under the cabinet division.

For a developing and relatively poor country, giving the military this enormous proportion of the national budget is criminal (the same is true for India, by the way). With regard to the proportion of Pakistan's GDP devoted to education, at around 2% it was in the bottom 12 of the 187 countries in the world in 2004-2005.

It was alleged that the plane of Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president, came under small-arms fire as it was taking off from Islamabad.

Video from Friday:

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Car Bomb Kills 22
Clashes in Samawah
Parliament vote on Oil Bill Murky

Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that parliament is scheduled to debate the draft petroleum bill on Saturday. It says that the Sadr Movement, loyal to fundamentalist Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, is rumored to be ending its boycott of parliament. The absence of those 32 MPs has helped prevent parliament from reaching a quorum in the past few days. The Sadrist MPs, however, would return die-hard opposed to the petroleum bill, which they consider a give-away to American Big Oil.

The Sunni Arab Iraqi Accord Front is also said to be contemplating an end to its boycott of parliament, though only if deposed speaker of the house, Mahmud al-Mashhadani, is reinstated (unlikely).

A crisis broke out within the Sunni fundamentalist coalition, the Iraqi Accord Front (44 seats in parliament) when a leader of one of its 3 major party components, Khalaf al-Ulyan of the National Dialogue Council, refused to accept Iyad al-Samarra'i as the over-all leader of the IAF, replacing the fiery Adnan al-Dulaimi.

Guerrillas deployed a huge car bomb in a village near the northern Kurdish city of Tuz Khurmato Saturday morning, killing at least 17 and wounded 22.

6 US troops have been killed in Iraq in the past two days.

McClatchy reports political violence in Iraq for Friday.

The LAT reports on clashes between the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr and police in the otherwise sleepy southern city of Samawah, capital of Muthanna Province. The fighting left two policemen dead and 17 other persons wounded. The most recent conflict came when local authorities (themselves typically from the rival Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council) attempted to stop the Sadrists from opening a political office in a nearby town.
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Domenici Calls for Change of Course
Shiite Wedding bombed
Sadrists Reject Oil Law

Republican Senator Pete Domenici has joined the small but expanding ranks of Republicans in Congress who are demanding a change of course in the Iraq War, having lost faith in the surge.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has called for Iraqi security forces to take primary responsibility for the southern Shiite port city of Basra within 3 months, such that thereafter British troops would play only a supporting role. British forces have withdrawn from three of the four provinces where they were the primary providers of security before this year. Iraqi police and army commanders still call on the British to intervene in particularly large or difficult disturbances, even in the provinces they have evacuated.

The Sadr movement in the Iraqi parliament has rejected the current draft of the petroleum law on anti-American grounds:

' Sadr's supporters said they would not support any law that would allow firms "whose governments are occupying Iraq" -- a reference to the United States, Britain and their coalition allies -- to sign Iraqi oil deals . . . We reject this unclear law that contains a number of points which prevent us from accepting it," said Sheikh Salah al-Obaidi, a Sadr office spokesman in the Shiite shrine city of Najaf.

According to Sawt al-Iraq writing in Arabic, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal called Thursday on Iraqi authorities to quickly revise the constitution so as to reduce the salience of sectarian politics. Most Iraqi Sunni Arabs reject the constitution's provisions for further provincial confederacies or regional governments, fearing that they will lead to a break-up of the country. Since the Sunni Arabs reject even soft partition, and are fighting against the idea of further regional governments, you obviously cannot solve Iraq's problems with a soft partition of the country. The prospect of it is among the things fueling the sectarian civil war as it is!

Guerrillas car-bombed a Shiite wedding in Baghdad on Thursday evening, killing 17 and wounding 25. Reuters says that 24 bodies were found in the capital yesterday, and that guerrillas used a roadside bomb to kill 3 Iraqi policemen in the southern Shiite city of Hilla.

Other major incidents according to Reuters:

' BAGHDAD - Two U.S. soldiers were killed and two wounded by a roadside bomb in southern Baghdad on Thursday, the military said. . .

ISHAQI - At least six people were killed, including three police commandos, when gunmen ambushed a police convoy in Ishaqi, 100 km (60 miles) north of Baghdad, police said. . .

BAGHDAD - Two guards were killed when gunmen attacked a bank in the Saidiya district of southern Baghdad, police said. The branch was not robbed but two other guards were kidnapped. . .

YUSUFIYA - Two Iraqi soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb in Yusufiya, 15 km (9 miles) south of Baghdad, police said. Four other soldiers were hurt in the attack.

SAMAWA - At least three people were killed in the southern city of Samawa during clashes between Iraqi police and the Medhi militia of Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, police said. Clashes began after police tried to arrest a Sadr official. Two of the dead were police and there were eight people wounded. '

McClatchy adds of Diyala Province that "A source in the 5th Iraqi army division said that 4 Iraqi soldiers were killed while they were going to give support to another Iraqi army force fighting insurgents from Al Qaida organization in Al Dainiyah village south Baladrooz town east of Baquba city today afternoon. The same source confirmed that another 3 soldiers were injured in an IED explosion targeted their patrol in Imam Mansour area east Baquba today morning."

Authorities are having a 10-foot-deep ditch dug around the Shiite holy city of Karbala, in hopes of keeping criminal elments out fo the city.

Thom Hartmann on the Libby conspiracy in the White House and what James Madison would have thought of it.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Government Troops advance on Red Mosque

Pakistani troops moved in on the Red Mosque complex early Friday morning, engaging in fierce gun battles with the remaining militants within

On Thursday, the standoff between the militants within and the Pakistani government had continued. About 50 of the several hundred remaining hold-outs had surrendered, and the leader, cleric or maulana Abdul Rashid Ghazi seemed to show weakening resolve in interviews. But the Pakistani army seemed to have been making preparations for an assault, at one point using explosives to creat a large breech in one of the seminary's walls.

Video from Thursday:

The USG Open Source Center analyzes the Pakistani press reaction to the operation against the Red Mosque militants. It finds that the press is supportive of the government, despite severe recent government-press tensions over the firing of the Pakistani supreme court chief justice.

OSC Analysis 7 Jul: Pakistan: Media Back Government Restraint, Action at Red Mosque Pakistan -- OSC Analysis Thursday, July 5, 2007 Pakistan: State Media Highlight Government Restraint; Private Media Back Government Action at Red Mosque Pakistani state media underscored remarks by top level Pakistani officials on the government's offers to protect seminary students who surrender amidst clashes between law enforcement agencies and a group of fundamentalist clerics and students at Lal Masjid (Red Mosque), which was taken over by the students approximately six months ago. The private media supported the government's action. In an apparent attempt to garner public support for government actions, state media highlighted Pakistani leaders' expressions of commitment to minimize loss of life and protect seminary students who wish to surrender. In addition, they noted the local clerics' support for the government's operation. According to state-run news agency APP, Pakistani President Musharraf directed security agencies to be patient in carrying out the operation to ensure a safe exit for female students; similarly, Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz stated that the "protection of people and property is the government's top priority" (4, 5 July). APP quoted Federal Minister for Political Affairs Amir Muqam as saying the government has demonstrated "tolerance and patience in a bid to minimize...losses to human lives" (5 July), and according to PTV World, Minister of State for Interior Zafar Iqbal Warriach asserted that no action would be taken against those who surrender (4 July). In addition, APP twice reported on local cleric support for government actions and condemnation of the clerics and students of Lal Masjid (5 July). APP also portrayed leading Lal Masjid cleric Abdul Aziz, in an interview after his arrest, as having "urged the students and clerics of Lal Masjid to surrender, saying they will not be able to resist the operation" (5 July). In the interview broadcast on PTV, Abdul Aziz said that the students "should get away quietly or if they want to they can surrender" (5 July). While the private electronic media were observed to carry only factual reporting of the incident, private print media expressed support for the government. Moderate Daily Times noted that the operation was "right but late," but suggested that President Musharraf's hands "could have been tied" due to disunity in the ruling PML-Q party (5 July). Islamic daily Nawa-e-Waqt called the operation a "logical conclusion," but urged the government to settle the issue "once and for all" (5 July). This OSC product is based exclusively on the content and behavior of selected media and has not been coordinated with other US Government components.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Buyukanit Implies US Soft on Terrorism
Major engagement near Baquba kills Dozens
Iraqi Parliament fails to Reach Quorum

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the Iraqi parliament was unable to reach a quorum on Wednesday. As a result, it postponed discussion of pending legislation, including bills on petroleum, on the distribution of petroleum receipts, and on revisions of the de-Baathification process. The suspension of participation in its deliberations of the Sadr Movement (Shiite fundamentalist, 32 seats), the Iraqi Accord Front (Sunni fundamentalist, 44 seats) and the Dialogue Front (Sunni secular, 11 seats) led to the failure to reach a quorum. (On the other hand, if so many parliamentarians were not out of town, even out of country, a quorum could still have been had, even with these defections).

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the Sunni fundamentalist Association of Muslim Scholars, a major clerical grouping, has issued a fatwa forbidding deputies from voting in favor of the present draft of the petroleum law. Unlike in Shiite Islam, the authority of Sunni clerics is limited, and the AMS fatwa may not be decisive. But given that Sunni fundamentalist deputies already oppose the draft, it adds oil to the fire.

McClatchy reports that Sunni Arab lawmakers in the Iraqi parliament continue to reject the draft bills on petroleum and the sharing of revenues. The more key laws that are passed, as was the constitution itself, in the teeth of opposition from the Sunni Arabs, the more trouble there will be in Iraq.

The US military operation around Baquba continues, with recent battles leaving 35 guerrillas dead, according to US spokesmen.

Honest Aussies: Australian troops are in Iraq for the oil. Hmm. Is it just the Australians for whom this is true? Thanks to Defense Minister Brendan Nelson for being so frank.

Turkey killed five PKK (Kurdish Workers Party) guerrillas in clashes in eastern Anatolia near Iraq on Thursday morning.

Turkey's hard line military chief of staff, Gen. Yasar Büyükanit has been complaining that even NATO allies are supporting the PKK, probably a veiled reference to the United States, which has allowed its allies in Iraqi Kurdistan to give safe harbor to thousands of PKK guerrillas. Prime Minister Erdogan made a similar point on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, the leader of Iraqi Kurdistan, Massoud Barzani, warned that a Turkish incursion would throw the whole region into chaos. His government is downplaying rumors that the Kurdistan paramilitary, the Peshmerga, is being positioned along the Iraq-Turkey border.

On Monday, the US military had warned Turkey against going into Iraq.

Nuri al-Maliki intends to reduce the number of cabinet ministers to 20 or 22 from the present 36, one of his political advisers said Wednesday. He will also seek to get away from the current system whereby (ethno-religious) political parties are apportioned ministries in a sort of spoils system, based on their strength in parliament. They system has not produced effective ministries, and has probably strengthened sectarian divisions rather than healing them. On the other hand, if al-Maliki changes the system, he may lack much support in Parliament. He has already suffered the defections of 12 cabinet ministers tied to the Sadrist and Sunni Arab parties. This Arabic article quotes al-Maliki as saying that first he will fill the 12 holes in his cabinet, then he will proceed to reform the whole system. (But why then bother to fill the 12 holes?) I don't think he imagines steps that will be taken any time soon.

McClatchy reports political violence in Iraq on Wednesday, including the discovery of 16 bodies in the streets of the capital, likely victims of sectarian death squads. Other major incidents:

' Around 1.15 pm, a suicide car bomber targeted an Iraqi army check point [in Baghdad]. . . killing 2 soldiers and injuring 7 others. . .

- Around 1.30 pm, a roadside bomb targeted an Iraqi army patrol near Shurta Tunnel at Ja'amia neighborhood killing one soldier and injuring 3 others.

- Around 3 pm, mortars hit the green zone (IZ) without casualties recorded. . .

- Around 4.30 pm, gunmen with three different cars attacked some shops at Meshtal neighborhood in New Baghdad (east Baghdad) killing two men and kidnapping five others. . .

Salahuddin (157 km north of Baghdad): - Early morning of Wednesday, a roadside bomb exploded at Suleiman Bek (7 km south of Tuz Khurmatu which is km north of Tikrit) targeting an Iraqi patrol killing one soldier and injuring three others while their Humvee is totally destroyed. The soldiers who were in that vehicle are Kurds. . .

Basra (549 km south of Baghdad): - Tuesday night, a joint forces from investigation bureau and private unit had a raid on haunts in Fao area (90 km south of Basra) having 12 suspected in custody who belong Jund Al-Sama (Heaven's soldiers) organization.

- Wednesday morning, police released five girls who were abducted at Al-Hussein neighborhood (west downtown Basra city).

Reuters reports other political violence in Iraq on Wednesday:

' BAIJI - A suicide car bomber killed three policemen and four civilians outside a restaurant in Baiji, 180 km (120 miles) north of Baghdad, police said. Eighteen people were wounded. . .

KIRKUK - Gunmen killed two policemen and wounded two other officers in a drive-by-shooting in the southern part of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk . . .

HILLA - Three Iraqi soldiers were wounded by a mortar attack on their camp near Hilla, 100 km (62 miles) south of Baghdad, police said. . .'

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Red Mosque Leader Arrested in Burqa

Dawn reports,

' Maulana Aziz was caught after a group of 50 burqa-clad women from the mosque started screaming as they were taken to a nearby school for security checks after giving themselves up, saying the procedure was un-Islamic.

“Our officers spotted his (Aziz’s) unusual demeanour. The rest of the girls looked like girls, but he was taller and had a pot-belly,” an official said. '

Dawn says that the cleric, Abdul Aziz Ghazi, had holed up and refused to surrender unconditionally, then attempted to slip out when women caught in the siege were permitted by police to leave:

' “After all the things he has said and all the oaths he took from his students that they should embrace martyrdom with him, look at this man,” Minister of State for Information Tariq Azeem said.

Another 1,000 or seminarians and other persons at the mosque were captured, but several hundred holdouts remained inside Thursday morning, when loud blasts were heard.

Authorities fear that the remaining jihadis, may use the women and children with them as human shields.

Most of the militants appear to be ethnic Pushtuns and from the neo-Deobandi school of South Asian Islam that also produced the Taliban. Islamabad and Rawalpindi are largely Punjabi in ethnicity, and most Muslims there belong to other schools of Islam, including the milder reformist strain of the Barelvis. Last I knew, there were few Deobandi mosques in Punjabi cities such as Rawalpindi and Lahore, and the few that existed were not influential.

Dawn is talking about the government giving many of the seminarians bus fare back up to the Northwest Frontier Province, the largely Pushtun province in the north that has come under heavy neo-Deobandi influence through seminaries such as the Haqqaniya. Most Pushtuns are not fundamentalists, but there is now a higher proportion of fundamentalists among them than is common in other Pakistani ethnic groups, such as the Punjabis, Sindhis, and Urdu speakers.

The major protests against the government's crackdown on the mosque appear mostly to have been held in towns and cities with big Deobandi and/or Pushtun populations, such as the northern town of Mingora, or in Quetta, where there are a lot of Deobandi seminarians and clerics. A protest was held by the Ashrafiya Mosque in Lahore, a southern Punjabi city, but it doesn't seem to have been that significant.

It is said that the image of the pot-bellied mawlana in a burqa has provoked a good deal of mirth among the Pakistani populace as a whole.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Massive Street Battle in Pakistan's Capital
Army versus Muslim Militants

Dawn reports on the fierce fighting in the streets of Islamabad between radical fundamentalists and the army loyal to secular general Pervez Musharraf, which left 21 dead (including one soldier) and 150 injured. The government's Interior Minister had recently warned of the spread of Taliban-type activists through the country. The seminarians at the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) have been accused of bothering local merchants in Islamabad, including video stores. On Tuesday, they were calling for jihadis to rally to their side from nearby madrasahs, brandishing automatic weapons, and threatening suicide bombings against the government.

' ISLAMABAD, July 3: Paramilitary Rangers and riot police fought a daylong running gunbattle with hundreds of heavily armed and well-entrenched militants around their stronghold of Lal Masjid as a six-month-long standoff between mosque’s radicals and the authorities exploded into a major clash on Tuesday, leaving at least 10 people dead and more than 150 injured.

Dozens of the injured suffered multiple bullet wounds, and the condition of some of them being critical, doctors feared the death toll might rise.

It was perhaps the worst, and the bloodiest, incident in Islamabad’s history as never before such a large number of armed militants had taken on the authorities — and that too in the heart of the capital.

The trouble started around 11.30am with some madressah militants trying to occupy a nearby government building, and within no time a fierce clash broke out between the armed seminary students and security troops. Sporadic clashes had continued till past midnight when unconfirmed reports suggested a massive security operation to sweep the Lal Masjid of armed militants, raising the possibility of more armed clashes and larger casualty. '

Zee TV reports that the government is demanding an unconditional surrender of the clerics, and arrested a senator for his efforts to find a negotiated settlement.

Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf has been under pressure from the middle classes and civil society organizations over his dismissal of the country's supreme court head, his crackdown on the press, and his refusal to take off his uniform before seeking another term as president. Some analysts suspect that the dramatic action against the fundamentalists is an effort to distract the public from the other issues. The evidence appears to be, however, that the fundamentalists started the shooting.

Despite their reputation in the West as fundamentalists, most Pakistanis are actually Sufi mystics, or mild traditionalists, or secular, with fundamentalist activists being a minority that is somewhat feared, especially by many urban youth and women.

For those with leisure to watch it, the recent briefing on Pakistan at the New America Foundation by Anatole Lieven and Peter Bergen, who had just visited the country, is very worthwhile.

For the other side, the USG Open Source Center translates an interview conducted on Tuesday with the cleric in charge of the Red Mosque, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, as well as with an independent analyst, Kamran Khan.

Geo News TV Talks to Red Mosque Cleric, Analyst on Today's Events From the "Newsday" program Geo News TV Tuesday, July 3, 2007 At least 10 people are now confirmed dead after a standoff between law enforcers and the Lal Masjid erupted into violence. (passage omitted on details of the report, including dispatches by correspondents on the losses and situation, already covered through various reports filed earlier) Earlier, in the day, we spoke to Maulana Abdul Rashid Ghazi, the head cleric of the Lal Masjid. We asked him what triggered today's events in his opinion and this is what he said. (Begin recording) (Ghazi) We have been asking them that you should not come very close because it can create problems with the students. But today in the morning they came very near and started erecting their pickets with sandbags and then our some students went and they have I mean quarrel with each other and then they started shelling and our students young, small kids (two words indistinct) were wounded and then that is how it started. (Jaffer) (word indistinct) Maulana, how many people according to him were dead or injured inside the seminary? (Ghazi) Now, they have I mean targeted with snipers. They are using the snipers from the buildings just in front of the mosque and they are using sniper and they are targeting our students and they have so far hit about eight persons who have martyred. (Jaffer) Yes, Maulana, lastly, whether any women were among the injured and those who were killed? (Ghazi) One woman, I am hearing but I am not sure. I am on the other side and (word indistinct) sure about it. (Jaffer) Mr Ghazi, now, you have made statements earlier on about the weapons that were possessed by the Lal Masjid students as for being licensed. Now, footage is showing automatic weapons in their possession. Where are these weapons coming inside the seminary from? (Ghazi) We have told it that these are our gun mans and you know that that is the reason we are still on defensive that is why our casualties are on very higher side and the government had mood to do it and they have done it because they have cordoning the... rangers were cordoning the area and we have been asking them and we have been saying that they should not do it. But if they have mood to do it that is they have done it. (Jaffer) Maulana, you also made statements about a suicide attack if there was any operation on the Lal Masjid. Now, what we are seeing looks very much like that. Are you going to follow through on your statements from before about a suicide attack? (Ghazi) So the thing that the government is in a mood to make bloodshed in the capital ? in the mosque and that would be I mean very dangerous for the country. That was the question and answer session we had with Maulana Abdul Rahid Ghazi, the head cleric of the Lal Masjid, earlier today. (end recording) To talks about the implications of the developments in Islamabad in a greater context, we are now being joined by a senior analyst Mr Kamran Khan. (Begin recording) (Anchor Owais Jaffer) Mr Khan what do you think will be the political fallout of this move considering that the elections are just round the corner and the judicial crisis is at its peak? (Khan) Obviously, the timing is very difficult for the government and for Gen Musharraf because only yesterday Supreme Court had passed a very strong ruling against the intelligence agencies and the Supreme Court's observations were a major setback for the government's case and this wouldn't have come at a worse time. It is really difficult time for the government and this development today we don't know whether we can call it an operation or not but this development today has come at a very difficult time and we don't know actually what is going to be political fallout because we don't exactly know what is going to happen in the next few hours and next few days. Initially, people are watching with keen interest and I think country is not much divided. There is a growing consensus in the country that the government should take action. Government should go forward. Government should have a major crackdown on these elements. But I think the cost going to be very heavy for the government if government goes for a direct action or if the security forces launch a massive operation which could lead to major major (repeat the word major) casualties and a lot many people may got killed. So probably it is too early to say whether there will be political fallout or not but I am sure that the government is very very (repeat word very) cautious at this moment. (Jaffer) Mr Khan, we have seen the number of casualties coming into PIMS. Now, keeping everything in context, how real is the threat of a social backlash from seminaries around the country now. (Khan) Actually, if it really turns out to major event in the sense that we see more casualties, if we see more people getting killed and we see a direct action resulting in the death of many students of this seminary and Lal Masjid, obviously, it will have a repel effect and seminaries all over the country would have sympathy for the students who may get killed here or who may get wounded here and if the size is really big, if the number of causalities is lot more than we expect then obviously it will have a major fallout and we may see that it may probably trigger a backlash from the seminaries and students may get out they may confront the law enforcing agencies. There may be a major violent challenge to the government. (Jaffer) Mr Khan, you said that this incident started out because with the shootout from elements inside of the seminary and Ranger's official getting killed. Now, why do you feel in your expert analysis this particular day was chosen by those elements. (Khan) I think the government was tightening the noose around this area. And probably these guys inside the mosque, they were under psychological pressure. They probably thought that the action is coming and they probably thought that the action is coming any moment. Secondly, as I said earlier, that yesterday's Supreme Court ruling has put government on the (word indistinct). These are very embarrassing moments for the government. Probably, they may have this also in mind when they initiated today's shoot out. Probably, they thought that the government is in very week corner and more importantly they wanted to pick their own timing to start this provocation. (Jaffer) Mr Kamran Khan, senior analyst, thank you very much for talking to us on Newsday. (end recording) As expected condemnations of today's clashes between security forces and Jamia Hafsa students have started coming in with Jamia Binoria seminaries criticizing the government and calling the clashes an assault on the Lal Masjid. (Begin recording) (Unidentified correspondent) Jamia Binoria alleges that the government has not kept its promises with the Lal Masjid. Sudents from Jamia Binoria believe that the government should negotiate with the seminary otherwise the situation could worsen. (Unidentified student, in Urdu with simultaneous translation in English) The government was looking for an excuse to eliminate seminaries and once it had made a case, it assaulted Lal Masjid. I appeal to government to be patient otherwise number of people could die. (Unidentified student, in Urdu with simultaneous translation in English) Our training does not allow us to disobey the government and I always pray for peace and for success. (Unidentified student, in Urdu with simultaneous translation in English) The government should not do it this way. They should adopt a sensible method and settle this through negotiations and consensus. (Correspondent) The seminaries of Jamia Binoria are demanding that the government should immediately stop its assault on Lal Masjid because it could further aggravate the situation, while they also asked government to fulfill its promises made with Lal Masjid authorities. This is Farhan Ahmed reporting for Newsday, Geo News. (end recording) Those were the latest developments on the situation unfolding in Islamabad. For the latest developments as they unfold keep on watching Geo News.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Al-Maliki plans Overhaul of his Government
18 Dead in Bombing of Shiite Market

Aljazeera Arabic is showing clips of a speech by PM Nuri al-Maliki of Iraq in which he is promising a radical set of changes in his government, so as to make it less 'sectarian.'

Al-Sharq al-Awsat writing in Arabic says that the Grand Ayatollahs in Najaf are also arguing for the government to be altered in a radical way.

AP reports that the Iraqi cabinet reported out a draft of the petroleum bill for consideration of the parliament.

But this story turns out to be a non-story. Only 24 of 37 cabinet ministers were present. Although AP says this is in part because of the Sadr Bloc boycott of PM Nuri al-Maliki's government, that seems unlikely, since those 6 ministers have been replaced by technocrats.* At least 6 of the 13 absent ministers, though, were from the Sunni Iraqi Accord Front, which is also boycotting the government these days.

Although the cabinet had a quorum, those voting were hardly representative of the country as a whole. And then a further difficulty arose:

A top Kurdistan oil official is denying that there is a deal on a federal petroleum law. It was reported Monday that a deal had been reached and a draft approved by the cabinet, to be taken up by parliament on Wednesday. But the Kurds are now saying that they haven't seen the draft and might vote against it.

So, a decision may or may not have been made, which is a more accurate way of describing what happened.

AP adds, "in the latest violence, a car bomb exploded late yesterday at an outdoor market in the Shaab area of northeastern Baghdad, killing 18 persons and wounding 35, police said."

Reuters reports other political violence for Tuesday, including the discovery of 18 bodies in the streets of Baghdad. Other major incidents:

' KIRKUK - A car bomb targeting a police patrol killed two civilians and wounded nine others, including four policemen in Kirkuk, police said. . .

SAMARRA - At least two civilians were killed during clashes between police commandos and gunmen in Samarra, 100 km (62 miles) north of Baghdad on Monday, police said. . .

MADAEN - Two people were killed and four wounded when gunmen opened fire on pedestrians in Madean, 40 km (25 miles) south of Baghdad. . .

HAWIJA - Three policemen were seriously wounded when a gunman threw a grenade at their vehicle in Hawija, 70 km (43 miles) southwest of Kirkuk, police said. . .

BAGHDAD - Gunmen assassinated a police intelligence major in central Baghdad, police said. . .

When the guerrillas are able to identify and kill a police intelligence major, it suggests an inside job. And if police intelligence is compromised, it would be difficult to mount an effective counter-insurgency campaign.

Al-Ittihad reports via Sawt al-Iraq that the al-Maliki government it trying to undo the various defections that have plagued it recently. The Sadr Bloc suspended its participation in parliament to protest lack of progress in rebuilding the al-Askariya Shrine in Samarra. So now al-Maliki is pressuring them to end the boycott, given that UNESCO has contracted with a Turkish architectural form to refurbish the shrine. There are rumors that they will stop their suspension of membership any day now.

Attempts are also being made to pull the Sunni Arab MPs of the Iraqi Accord Front back into the national unity government. They are angry in part about the demotion of Mahmud al-Mashhadani from being speaker of the house. Some compromise, like giving him a ceremonial title in parliament, is being proposed.

Walter Posch on the crisis in Turkey and what it means for Turkish EU membership down the road.

My take on Bush's commutation of Irv Lewis Libby's sentence.

BBC journalist Alan Johnston has been released in Gaza.

Yemen is still reeling and putting in extra security after the suicide bomb attack on an SUV carrying Spanish tourists. Al-Qaeda still has some local grass roots in Yemen.

--

An informed reader from the region notes:

*'I believe you are in error when you suggested that the six Sadrist ministers in the Iraqi cabinet were replaced by technocrats. In fact, none of the candidates put forward by Maliki was confirmed, and the reason is they were not technocrats, they were part of the Dawa or SIIC base. I was surprised at the time that Ali Al-Behadily, the candidate for Minister of Agriculture was described as a "technocrat". It is true that he has a Ph.D. in agriculture from the University of California Davis and can thus be thought of as a technocrat, but he is a member of SIIC, and has been for years. He was the transitional minister. When he started as minister in 2005, my staff went to see him and after but a few visits to the ministry we started to get death threats. The former security manager in the ministry asked us not to come because the Badr Brigade was after us.

Those six ministries currently have no ministers. After the national assembly refused to consider the six nominations, Maliki has not put forward another set. I daresay he really cannot find technocrats to do the job. All the technocrats have left the country or they stay at home in the dark, in the heat and in fear. '

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Libby was the Small Fish
Bush really Commuted the Sentences of Rove and Cheney

George H. W. Bush called those who leak the names of CIA operatives "the most insidious of traitors."

In his son's administration, CIA covert operative Valerie Plame's name was leaked to the press to punish her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, for having blown the whistle on how the White House depended on fraudulent information about Iraq buying yellowcake uranium from Niger.

In the wake of the leak, this is how Bush responded:

On Sept. 29, 2003, the White House, through spokesman

Scott McClellan, said:

"If anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration."

We now know that Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney was highly "involved" in the effort to out Plame, as was Bush's political adviser, Karl Rove. By the lights of the 2003 statement, both should have been fired when this came out.

Cheney and Rove were running a vigorous campaign from inside the White House with that aim. Libby was acting at their behest.

So why hasn't Bush fired Cheney and Rove?

He flip-flopped and changed the grounds for firing someone in his administration to their having "committed a crime."

After the revelations of the identities of CIA operativeS by Philip Agee, Congress made outing agents a crime. But the law was vaguely worded, so you had to know the individual was a covert operative to be punished under the statute.

Some analysts have attempted to defend them on the grounds that they did not know that Plame was undercover, or that their repeated attempts to get journalists to out Plame were largely unsuccessful and she was actually inadvertently outed by then undersecretary of state Richard Armitage.

But they were trying to out her. Isn't trying to commit a crime a crime in itself? And, Rove did talk to Bob Novak, who was the reporter willing to leak.

As for claiming they didn't know she was undercover. I don't think that is an excuse, since they were in a position to ask the CIA that question and solve it. Wouldn't a prudent person have double-checked that item before dialing Judy Miller's number?

So Rove and Cheney claim not to have "broken the law." But that doesn't change how heinous their action was. They are, in George H.W. Bush's words, "the most insidious of traitors."

This flip-flopping on the grounds for which high White House officials would be fired allowed Bush to keep Rove and Cheney around even though they were clearly "involved" in the leak. In essence, his flip-flop was itself a way of commuting their own sentences of unemployment.

As for Libby's pardon, he was convicted of lying to a grand jury and obstructing the special counsel's investigation. Since Fitzpatrick could never have gotten to the bottom of whether crimes had been committed as long as key figures like Libby lied to him, Libby's crime was grave. The commutation of his sentence is a great injustice. It is not the first a Bush has committed.

Iran-Contra criminal Elliott Abrams, now a deputy National Security Agency adviser to Bush, essentially committed the same crime as Libby, though he only pled guilty to withholding information from Congress.

Abrams was pardoned by George H. W. Bush, and then his son hired him. Congress, which should have been permanently outraged by having been misled by Abrams, gave him a pass. A far rightwing Likudnik, he has been handling Palestine issues for Bush!

So, like father like son.

Except for that vision thing about the insidious traitors.

Basically, in Bushworld, high government officials are above the law, including all international law and most domestic. America is not nearly as much fun if you aren't rich.

----

Groupnewsblog says things about this matter in a language I could only aspire to..

For suggested action we all can take, see FireDogLake.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

US Air Raid on Diwaniya Allegedly Kills 10 Civilians
6 US Troops Killed
Iran Denies US Charges of Covert Ops in Iraq

6 US soldiers were announced killed on Monday in Iraq. They were all killed in Sunni Arab areas.

Militiamen in the southern Shiite city of Diwaniya, probably tied to the Mahdi Army, launched an intensive mortar barrage at Camp Echo on early Monday morning. The US responded with airstrikes. Iraqi police said that they killed 10 civilians along with the targeted militiamen. A crowd gathered to protest the civilian deaths, sparking a further clash that left a man dead and two policemen wounded.

The Iraqi cabinet approved key changes in a draft of the country's petroleum law on Monday. Parliament is expected to take it up on Wednesday. But some elements of the law are not expected to be settled for months.

Reuters reports other political violence in Iraq on Monday, including the discovery of 17 bodies in the streets of Baghdad.

' BAGHDAD - [11] people were killed and 33 wounded by a car bomb parked near a market in the religiously mixed district of Binoog in northern Baghdad, police said. . .

BAGHDAD - One person was killed and two wounded in a mortar attack in Bayaa, south west Baghdad, police said. . . Gunmen killed two people and wounded three in a drive-by shooting in Bayaa.

BAGHDAD - Gunmen killed three Iraqi soldiers and one civilian when they attacked an Iraqi military checkpoint in eastern Baghdad on Sunday evening, police sources said. They said three people were wounded. . .

DIWANIYA - A man was killed and two police guards were wounded during an exchange of fire between police guarding a government building and dozens of demonstrators protesting what they said was a pre-dawn U.S. air strike in the city of Diwaniya, 180 km (110 miles) south of Baghdad, police said. . .

MOSUL - A roadside bomb killed a policeman and wounded four people, including two policemen, when it struck their patrol car in Mosul, police said.


MOSUL - The Iraqi army killed 12 insurgents, including three al Qaeda members, during overnight raids near the northern city of Mosul, the army said. Troops found lethal roadside bombs called explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs, during the raid. . .

KIRKUK - Gunmen killed the preacher of a Sunni mosque in the northern city of Kirkuk on Sunday, police said.'

McClatchy has more details, especially of violence in Khalis in Diyala province.


The story about the Lebanese Hizbullah and Iran kidnapping US troops in Karbala, Iraq, seemed to me to hang an awful lot on the activities of one person. It is not surprising that a few Lebanese Shiites with a background in Hizbullah and good contacts in Iran have gone to Iraq to fight the US. What is surprising is how few they have been. It is also surprising that the US has lost relatively few men to fights with the Shiites.

The US has 19,000 persons in custody in Iraq, and hundreds of foreigners. Almost all of them are Sunni Arabs. They appear to have exactly one Lebanese Shiite.

Why put all this emphasis on this one guy and ignore the hundreds from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, etc.? It is to build a case against Iran in preparation to bombing it.

Iran is denying the charge.
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Jordanian & Iraqi Physicians behind UK Bombing

A cell made up of 7 medical personnel from Jordan and Iraq appears to have been behind the attempted bombing at Picadilly Circus on Friday and the actual car bombing at the Glasgow airport this weekend. One is a neurologist, Muhammad Asha, from Jordan. Another is an Iraqi physician, Bilal Abdulla. CNN is reporting that Asha's family back in Jordan is stunned. They are middle class, not religious, and intermarried with Christians.

Why would highly educated and relatively well off professionals behave this way? I think this sort of cell suggests that three kinds of sociological theory need to be synthesized in order to understand contemporary social movements-- Social constructivism, resource mobilization theory and European new social movement theory.

Here I'll just concentrate on one, social construction in the Jurgen Habermas (left) and the Peter Berger/ Thomas Luckmann (right) traditions. Groups construct life-worlds within which social action becomes plausible to them. This cell of highly networked professionals had developed a narrative about the world that required they do these horrible things. They weren't motivated by poverty, or class grievances. Their ideas came out of a logic of self and other, such that they likely included Fallujah in "self" and all British foreign policy in "other."

Gradually the shape of that narrative may emerge, though actually there are impediments to our understanding these hothouse terrorist ideologies. The perpetrators often kill themselves, taking most of the details with them. Mainstream media often are little interested in tracking down the details, and government spokesmen are positively eager to downplay or dispute the internal motivations of the criminals. All this is understandable, but it does law enforcement and the public discourse a disservice.

With regard to the 7/7/2005 underground bombings, one of the perpetrators, Shahzad Tanveer clearly was responding to what he saw as a vast Western/Indian conspiracy to massacre Muslims in Kashmir, Afghanistan and Iraq. The conspiracy-theory aspect of his thinking, which brought together disparate political struggles into a single over-arching plot, is typical of these violent ideologies. We know what he thought in part because journalists from local British newspapers in his home area went to Pakistan to seek out his relatives. But the enormous impact on him of the Iraq War was repeatedly denied by the Blair government.

It is too soon to know what exactly was the little lifeworld constructed by these expatriate physicians in Scotland. It could be al-Qaeda, it could just be garden variety Arab nationalism. Note that such extreme points of view thrive when small numbers of persons are in intensive social action within the group and somewhat isolated from their surroundings. They reinforce each other constantly, without encountering skepticism. (Outsiders would say "You believe what?") Medical personnel with odd hours, who hung out socially mainly with one another, and spoke Arabic with one another while not intensively discussing their ideas with Britons, would fit this profile. They may have received reinforcement from internet chat groups.

The kind of thinking they would be engaged in (I don't know details) would typically be, "Britain and the US are conducting a genocide against Arab Muslims in Iraq, are ethnically cleansing Fallujah, Baqubah, and Baghdad, and this must be stopped and cannot be borne. Something must be done, something dramatic, to draw the attention of an apathetic public to the kind of policies they are supporting."

The narrative will be one-sided, exaggerated, black-and-white, with pure heroes and black-hearted villains. Typically they were not upset when Saddam Hussein was massacring 300,000 Iraqis, or when the Talaban were massacring people in Mazar-i Sharif and Bamiyan. (Baathi or Salafi bombings of Shiites in Baghdad also likely do not disturb them). A foreign/indigenous dynamic informs their outrage, so that indigenous atrocities are not (as) objectionable as what are seen as imperial interventions.

And then there will be the leap to irrational and counter-productive violence against innocents. Putting gasoline cannisters in a car and setting it on fire in front of a dance club or an airport isn't likely to actually change policy. It was even amateurish terrorism, since they only managed to set themselves and their car on fire. I suggested yesterday that the Glasgow Airport operation seemed more focused on suicide than on killing others, though they may have hoped to take some passengers with them. Neither homicide nor suicide actually helps their cause. If the group wanted to change British policy, they could have become activists in politics and given money to the Liberal Democrat party. Indeed, terrorism has the effect of reinforcing right-wing policy.

Disrupting these small-network ideologies may not be easy. But it would be important to know which media they typically watched or engaged with (satellite television? Internet?) and to think of strategies for challenging the narratives in those realms. Impressing on British anti-imperialists that there are political avenues in open societies for changing policy, and that violence is counter-productive to their aims, would be important. Public service ads to this effect in Arabic and Urdu might be an idea.

I suspect that, however, a lot of these deviant ideologies are now being driven by the Iraq War and to some extent Afghanistan (see below), and that social peace in Europe may well require Western withdrawal from those countries.
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Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, called Sunday for a formal investigation into reports that a US/NATO air strike on Taliban positions in a village last Friday killed 45 civilians. Karzai and NATO have decried the Taliban tactic of hiding among civilian villagers, but the mounting death toll this year of Afghan civilians being killed in NATO and US military actions has angered the public and forced Karzai to speak out in protest.

An Afghan human rights organization estimates that US and NATO air strikes this year killed more civilians than did the resurgent Taliban.

Video from Aljazeera English service via YouTube.
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Al-Maliki Calls for Provincial Elections
MP Janabi defects to Guerrillas
Sadrists Reject new Parliamentary bloc

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is calling for provincial elections to be held in Iraq by the fall of 2007. This step would be significant because Sunni Arabs boycotted the last round of provincial elections, in late January, 2005. As a result, Sunni Arab provincial officials in al-Anbar and Salahuddin provinces don't represent much of anyone. (In al-Anbar the turnout was 2%), or they are drawn from Shiite parties (as at Diyala). Having politicians in the Sunni Arab provinces that actually represent the population would be a potential first step to national reconciliation.

Here is a sign, though, that getting an agreement between the Shiite goverment and the sullen Sunni Arab population may not be easy. Abdul Nasser al-Janabi, a Sunni Arab parliamentarian from the Iraqi Accord Front (Sunni fundamentalist) announced from Jordan on Sunday that he had resigned from the Iraqi parliament and joined the insurgency! The move comes in the wake of Iraqi government charges against a Sunni Arab cabinet minister that he ordered a hit on the sons of a Sunni parliamentarian. As a result, the Iraqi Accord Front from which the cabinet minister came says that it is pulling out of the 'national unity government' of PM Nuri al-Maliki. All this in turn led to al-Janabi's dramatic turn-around. He is calling for Iraq's Sunni Arab neighbors and the United Nations to intervene directly in the country.

Sawt al-Iraq transmits a piece from al-Ittihad that reports that on Sunday, political violence took 77 Iraqi lives, mostly members of the police force or the military. If so many police are being killed in a single day, it perhaps makes the 30% reduction in civilian deaths during June a little less significant. Details below.

The big military campaign in Baquba seems to have fizzled out. This Arabic source says that 70% of the guerrilla leadership had fled Baquba. Hence, not much of anyone to fight, what with the enemy melting away that way. Despite the US and Iraqi military presence, many Sunni Arab neighborhoods in the city appear to be sullen and just waiting for the opportunity to resume guerrilla activities.

A Kurdish delegation to Najaf proposed that the Peshmerga or Kurdistan paramilitary provide a guard for the al-Askariya Shrine in Samarra, which has been attacked by bombers twice, both times heightening sectarian tensions between Sunnis and Shiites.

The Sadr Movement opposed moves toward a presidential system in Iraq, insisting on a parliamentary one in which the prime minister plays the central role. In addition, the Sadrists rejected a proposed parliamentary coalition consisting of the Kurdistan Alliance, the Da`wa Party, and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, which is designed to strengthen Prime Minsiter Nuri al-Maliki and allow him to dispense with . . . the Sadrists.

Senator Richard Lugar is urging on Bush an orderly withdrawal from Iraq. He clearly thinks that the 'surge' leads to a disorderly withdrawal down the road.


McClatchy reports political violence on Sunday, including the discovery of 14 dead bodies throughout the capital. Other major incidents:

' Baghdad: Around 11 a.m. gunmen attacked police patrol using machine guns at the same time a road side bomb exploded targeting police. 3 policemen were killed and 8 were injured (5 of them are civilians). . .

Two tribes clashed today for two hours in Al Deir, 35 km, north of Basra. Al Sayamir and Al Halaf tribes used different types of weapons; mortars, RBG-7 rockets and machineguns. 9 people were killed and 5 others were injured. . .

Fallujah general hospital received yesterday 40 dead bodies. Police force found them in a mass grave south of Fallujah. The mosques used loud speakers to ask citizens to identify the bodies. 25 families identified the bodies as their missing sons. The bodies were found in Al Biyar area about 30 km south of the city. . .

Reuters adds:

' FALLUJA - A suicide truck bomb blew up at a police checkpoint killing two policemen and wounding four officers in Falluja, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad, police said. . .

RAMADI - A suicide car bomber targeting a police station killed five policemen and wounded 14 others in Ramadi, 110 km (68 miles) west of Baghdad, police said. . .

BAGHDAD - Iraqi soldiers killed eight militants and detained 29 others in operations around Iraq in the last 24 hours, the Defence Ministry said. . .

BAGHDAD - Twelve people were wounded by a mortar round attack on Saturday in Baghdad's southern district of Doura, police said.

BAQUBA - Three Iraqi soldiers were killed and three wounded when they entered a booby trapped house in the city of Baquba on Saturday, police said. . .

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IC Global Affairs

Some of us are launching a group blog, Informed Comment: Global Affairs.

Iran expert Farideh Farhi weighs in today on the gasoline station protests in Iran and their real meaning. Many thanks to her for an incisive posting!

The problem with keeping up a successful blog is that one has to do an entry every day or readers forget to come back to you. I found this out through early experiments at IC, where traffic fell off dramatically if I missed days, even weekends. Most journalists, analysts and academics don't have time to blog daily, and therefore don't blog.

This outcome, of absence from the internet owing to being busy, is undesirable, since we need more informed commentary in the blogosphere, and serious analysts need to interact with the public if our democracy is to be vital.

Some sites, such as Crooked Timber and Wampum, have solved this problem by essentially forming a blogging cooperative. That way something goes up every day, but no one person is always responsible for it.

We'd like to experiment with this form. Readers are always asking for a wider range of coverage at my site-- Afghanistan, Palestine/Israel (as if I'm not in enough trouble), Pakistan, etc.

So I thought we'd test the waters with this form. The site is in its infancy and I hope it will grow over time. I've got some agreements from colleagues and hope to have more. It will also be open to guest submissions, and to already-existing bloggers who want to go outside the framework of their blogs, and to do a link-back.
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